THE CASE FOR PIGEON-HOLES

The gigantic desk at which the Essayist was seated displayed row on row of pigeon-holes, and above them all was a big white card, on which appeared, in distinct black letters:

Saturday, January 31, 1914

7.30 a. m......12.30 p. m..........Pigeon-holes
12.30 p. m......3.00 p. m..........Miscellany
3.00 p. m......

but the rest of the day need not concern us.

The Essayist had been reared in a stronghold of Method—a home where the dishes were never left over and the tools were always returned to their places, where the children always went to Sunday School and never stopped to think that they didn't enjoy it, and their elders always went to prayer-meeting and never missed church—in a word, where everybody was always doing everything never and always, and nobody ever doing anything sometimes.

Thus it came to pass that the Madness of Method followed, or rather pursued, him all his days, and his existence was filled with devices for the facilitation of the business of life. The big desk was one of these devices. It had a hundred and twenty pigeon-holes, and their labelling, especially in the rows that were to receive classified ideas, was a triumph of invention. He had had trouble with ideas. They got wrongly assorted, or lost, got away over night, flew at him in parabolic curves and never came back, or flitted about his head and would not submit to scrutiny, and otherwise flouted him. He would have no more of it.

Just now he was contemplating with a glow of satisfaction not only his own particular pigeon-holes, but Pigeon-holes Universal. Blessings on the soul of that primitive man, the first really deserving to be called ancestor of the human race, who noticed that some things were like other things—that the world about him was not a mere agglomeration of endless individual objects and phenomena! What an impulse to the setting in order of the world's business, for example, and what relief to himself, when the Lucretian father of astronomy and history settled to the satisfaction of himself and his hairy fellows that the same sun they saw sink behind the hills at night would appear again next morning:

And when the sun and light of day had gone,
With wailings loud they did not roam the fields,
Crying for it among the shades of night,
But quiet lay, in slumber sepulchred,
Until the sun, with rosy torch, should come,
And bring his light into the heaven again.

Hence the pigeon-holing of day and night, of moon and stars, of seasons and years, "seed-time and harvest, heat and hoary frost," of all the possibilities of life and achievement. Incomparable benefaction!

And what ineffable relief—his thoughts ran on—when men began to realize that some human beings were like others not only in form, but in feeling; that it was not necessary to scan each individual act of your neighbor in order to form a basis for each of your own acts, but that some details of conduct were semper, ubique, ab omnibus! What a gain to be able to classify men into friends and enemies, to set apart by themselves the common good and the common bane, to be aware of correspondences of action and emotion, to judge of the future by the past! What an advance on the high road leading to stability of expectation and all its fruitful consequences!

And when men began to apply the principle of pigeon-holing to the actual business of life, what economy of time and of energy! Civilization itself, with its multitudinous associations of human beings in common effort, was a big desk with pigeon-holes. Man had noticed, and was fast approaching the peak of perfection, while the races of wild, wide-wandering beasts, ignorant both of the blessings and of the very conception of pigeon-holing, still lived their hard and coarse existence among the acorn-bearing groves,

Of common welfare had no thought, nor knew
The use of law and custom among men.

With all its intelligence, effort, and boldness, what would the human race not achieve! What had it not achieved already! The Essayist's enthusiasm was kindled as he thought of the past and present wonders of classification and organization—of races, nations, parties, unions, communities, families; of the marvels of social, educational, political, industrial, and military coöperation; of the religions and philosophies of history; of classified and recorded knowledge. He thought of the arts, sciences, law, and the crafts, with everything about them all printed in books and deposited in libraries, where anyone might read and learn. What high and rapid building, what numerous and rushing trains, what capacious liners and freighters, what ease and quickness of communication, what mingling of nations, what universalization of ideas! What wise use of means, and what efficiency! In education alone, scores of thousands of children in his own land, large and small, rich and poor, various in blood, quality, and color, were at that moment being instructed by common methods with common money in common ideas and ideals—the homogeneous fine flour of American citizenship ground in one great mill of omnicapacious hopper.

He looked next into the future, and there saw glorious visions. For pigeon-holing was not only progress, but cumulative progress. The greatest of its many virtues was that the more it was perfected, the more time there was to make it still more perfect. Pigeon-holing begat organization; organization begat leisure; leisure begat contemplation; contemplation begat wisdom; wisdom begat action; action begat progress; progress meant advance in civilization; and civilization meant more and better pigeon-holing. The chain was endless.

Yes, pigeon-holing meant cumulative progress, and the cumulative process had never been so rapid, nor given so much promise, as just now. The world had never before possessed so many appliances to facilitate the pigeon-holing of men and things and movements. There had always been enormous losses in efficiency. Now, however, nothing was being lost or wasted, as in the days when System had been a less jealous goddess; now, everything which men found out was being accurately recorded or neatly tied up, or carefully deposited, or put into the general circulation of life universal, or otherwise conserved.

And not only was everything conserved, but production itself, thanks to pigeon-holing, was far more rapid now than ever before. The march of civilization was quickening to double time. Pigeon-holing and Efficiency were the two great features of the age, and walked, or rather rushed, hand in hand. The more pigeon-holing, the more efficiency; the more efficiency, the more time saved; the more time saved, the more pigeon-holes; and so on, with ever increasing momentum, in saecula saeculorum amen. From the labor unions that maintained walking delegates and boycotts, to the great trusts that were responsible for high-priced beef and long-packed eggs and pure-food inspectors, everyone was working with the greatest possible speed and efficiency, and everything was being pigeon-holed to the utmost perfection. It was the age of time-tables and interest-tables, cash registers, and adding machines; steam shovels, steam seeders, harvesters, and threshers; cyclometers, pedometers, and taxicabs; type-writing and linotyping and photography; telephones and automobiles and book reviews; technical schools and teachers' courses, education by correspondence, books on etiquette and how-to-enjoy-the-arts, piano-players and phonographs; library cataloguers, Who's Whos, encyclopedias, and blanks-to-be-filled-out-and-returned-at-once; world languages, one-class steamers, democracy, cosmopolitanism, and peace conferences; tinned foods, department stores, and women's clubs; reference Bibles, dictionaries of handy quotations, hints on diet, menus for the month, short cuts to culture, wireless telegraphy, big guns and big business, joy riding, air-ships, simplified spellings, and a universal A.B. degree.

Let us not be surprised if the Essayist grew a trifle delirious. Progress is a thing of enthusiasm, and its devotees are easily wrought upon by the frenzy of the god.

What was to be the glorious goal of this cumulative progress? The Essayist's thoughts took on aërial daring. In the realm of knowledge, for example—what an inspiring vision! He had often thought of the pity of it—that scholars through the ages had consumed their lives in effort that was largely in vain: laboriously amassing the knowledge possessed by their predecessors, only to die and leave it as scant as when they had received it.

But that was in the olden time. Now, with the art of printing democratized, with specialization firmly established, with all the wonderful book-keeping and card-cataloguing that characterized intellectual activities, with the willingness of scholars to study and record everything, and of libraries to purchase and preserve everything, for fear of losing anything, with all the learning of the past immediately at hand, and with all the means and appliances available for its rapid utilization, why might scholarship not aspire to reach the absolute heights of knowledge? Might it not be possible now for the scholar to receive the torch of learning fully ablaze, and to run the race that was set before him without the necessity of stopping to renew or even trim it—for him to make, so to speak, more effective dashes at the pole of learning—or to build to the very heaven the intellectual Tower of Babel, whose downfall would not be so easily possible now as in an age when men had not been alive to the need of linguistic pigeon-holes?

But intellect was not the greatest thing in the world. Might not the ever increasing skill in pigeon-holing lead before long to a definition of religion, the cessation of doctrinal quarrels, and the sinking of all differences in a common ideal of administration, conduct, and even belief? Yes; might it not lead to the final obliteration of national and racial, and even social, distinctions? Might it not lead, and at no distant date, not only to democracy and social equality, but to universal democracy—when the war-drum throbbed no longer, etc.?

Having thus in imagination surveyed the glories of pigeon-holing, the Essayist seized upon his pen, and rapidly set his thoughts to paper, not omitting to make liberal use of the pigeon-holes before him whenever he adumbrated quotations with which he thought his page might be embellished.

The task finished, he glanced at the clock. The forenoon was only half spent. Looking over his sheets, too, he observed that his essay was only half the length an intelligent and good-natured reader ought to endure.

This was just as he would have it, for he had begun with the definite intention of appearing both for and against pigeon-holes. There was time enough left to make his work symmetrical by presenting the other side, and to append a conveniently stated conclusion. He knew from the editors that readers in general disliked nothing quite so much as being left to make up their own minds.

So he took up the pen again.

What! After all that rhapsodizing, not a believer in pigeon-holes?

Not so bad as that. He was a believer, but not a blind believer. The fact is, he had a lively sense of the limitations of pigeon-holing. He had arrived at familiarity with both its virtues and its defects through personal experience. He had dealt in pigeon-holes himself, had made them, used them, and had been in them, and for years had been growing more and more conscious that the use of them was a difficult and delicate matter.

Earlier in life, it had not been so. He still remembered vividly the time when all men were easily classifiable—into good and bad, Christian and heathen, saved and unsaved, rich and poor, wise and foolish, as easily as into black and white, or fat and lean; when all nations except the United States, and all governments except democracy, were inferior. He remembered the surprise with which he had heard for the first time that there was a difference between prohibition and temperance, that there were many forms of intemperance besides drunkenness, that English government had many points of superiority over American. He had always supposed that with those questions it was as with slavery in the mind of Charles Sumner: "Gentlemen, to this slavery question there can be no other side."

He also recalled the ferment started in his mind by a much respected teacher's remark that all truth was relative, not absolute: whether a man was good depended on what you meant by goodness; whether two and two made four depended on whether one and one made two; grammar and spelling were after all only fashions, and things that appeared in print might not be true; not even the dictionary was absolute, and the Bible was not inspired in every letter and punctuation mark.

All this shook the ground under his feet, and it took some time to recover. That about the Bible and the dictionary was especially confounding. He reeled to and fro, and staggered like a drunken man, and was at his wit's end.

You will call him stupid. He was. Most pigeon-holers are, to tell the truth. He was like them in being so busy with virtuous action that he found but little time for thought. He used the pigeon-holes customary in his neighborhood, without questioning the correctness of content or label.

But in time he came to realize that there was religion outside of sects and that there were many believers who were unconscious unbelievers, that men might be honest and still dishonorable, that a great deal of the most pernicious lying in the world was done without the utterance of a syllable, that the guiltless were often criminal and the criminal guiltless, that many democrats were really aristocrats, many fools really wise, many a rich man poor and many a poor man rich, many a learned man ignorant, many pessimists really optimists, and many optimists really stumbling-blocks to progress.

By the Saturday morning on which we catch sight of him, he had come to have a wholesome distrust of the pigeon-holes of others; and whenever he took a specimen from his own, he submitted it to fresh examination, tolerating pigeon-holes at all only under perpetual protest against men's careless use of them.

For there were multitudinous differences between things to all appearances absolutely alike. It was impossible to classify even the inanimate without some sort of violence. Even the products of the die and the press showed variation, however infinitesimal; and as for Nature, in her realm there were no two things alike. Plants, animals, persons, mountains, valleys, and streams—unending variety was the rule. The two faces most alike in all the world proved widely different on close examination, and the points of difference between the persons who owned them were infinite.

And not only that. Not only were all individual things really different from all other things, but each individual thing seemed different to different persons. Pigeon-holing implied pigeon-holers, and no two pigeon-holers were alike. Like the artists in Plato, they saw the same thing from different angles: "I mean, that you may look at a bed from different points of view, obliquely or directly, or from any other point of view, and the bed will appear different, but there is no difference in reality." The same man appeared better or worse, according to the standards of his judge; the same rain was good or bad, according to the health or the purpose of the person under the umbrella. One man's meat was another man's poison. No two men ever formulated the same definition of a thing, let alone an abstraction; and if definitions agreed in words, the words themselves meant different things to their authors. The Essayist thought of the desperate pass of Philosophy, patiently waiting while her disciples fruitlessly endeavored to define each other's definitions. Lucky for life that living did not hang on wisdom of that sort!

Yes, more than that; no thing—at least, no living thing—had ever been seen twice in exactly the same aspect by the same person. Not only did the object change from second to second, under the outward impulse of sun and wind and rain and the inner impulse of expanding cell, but the beholder himself was absolutely identical at no two moments. He might change his physical position, or be subject to any of the thousand mutations that sweep over the human spirit like waves of shadow over the wheat. Everything was in the state of flux. Becoming, not Being, was the order of all things. And more, each reacted not only upon its fellow, but upon everything else. The shifting of an atom affected every other atom in the universe. Withdraw a drop of water from the ocean, and there was immediate readjustment of all the waters that covered the earth. Withdraw a member from human society, or change him by ever so little—in health, so that he ate more; in stature, so that he wore more; in morals, so that he acted differently—and the whole fabric suffered modification. Nothing could be lost, nothing changed, without impairing in some sort the universal order. Nothing could be duplicated.

And so in the world of ideas. There was no item of truth not connected with and dependent upon all other truth. Let an individual idea in the ocean of a man's ideas suffer modification, and there was instant readjustment of all his other ideas, and of his emotions, and of his actions; and, under their impulse, of the actions, emotions, and ideas of all other individuals. Truth was one great, unified whole, never yet beheld, save in partial vision, by the human mind. To know one item in all its connections was to possess all knowledge. For the botanist who knew completely the flower, the mystery of the universe was solved.

What folly, then, to look for perfect pigeon-holing, when no two atoms could be found alike, to say nothing of the motions of the human spirit,

Swift as a shadow, short as any dream.

And what injustice and cruelty might it be guilty of, did its devotees become too rapt in their enthusiasm!

What injustice had they not been guilty of, in the past! What violence done to nature and to man! What forcings together and what tearings asunder! What attenuations and amputations on Procrustean beds! What heart-burnings they had caused, what hatred and what strife! What wars on sea and land, what slaughter, what laying waste, what famine, disease, and hardship, what bereavement, what languishings in prison, what falling of men from high estates, what oppression, what rackings and twistings and manglings of limbs, what persecutions and executions and excommunications and banishments, what sunderings of nations and communities, what separations of persons really congenial who would have been friends if left to themselves, what disorders—all sprung from men's desire to force their fellows into their own social and religious pigeon-holes! And ideas—what struggling and bleeding and screaming of them at being forced by brutal hands into narrow and stifling cells with other ideas in mutual hot resentment. History was filled with the heartless compulsion of men and things and ideas into groups where they rebelled against going.

Nor were persecutions and strife confined to the past. The injustices of pigeon-holing were rampant in the Essayist's own enlightened time. The old-time sets of pigeon-holes might no longer be used to such deadly purpose, but there were others that bade fair to take their place. The pigeon-holes of religion were less insisted on, but the pigeon-holes of science gave promise of another tyranny hardly less unendurable. The two prime factors in tyranny—arrogant authority and superstitious multitude—were already clearly to be seen. The tyranny of aristocratic pigeon-holing seemed past, but its place was being taken by the hardly less outrageous tyranny of democracy's pigeon-holes. In a world that boasted of producing the greatest equality known to human kind, there were more classifiers and more class feeling than men had ever known before. The pigeon-holes were different, but they were there, and their partitions as impenetrable as ever.

The very consciousness that they were in different compartments kept men from attempting to understand each other, let alone their real differences; more, it made them hostile, and even aggressive. What philosopher, from Thales to the latest enemy of Pragmatism, what dogmatist, from the Stoic to the latest ridiculer of Christian Science, what political critic, from Aristophanes to the anarchist of yesterday, ever tried or was willing to understand his opponent, and did not wilfully misrepresent in order to confute him? Longfellow was right when he said that the South should come to see the North, the North go to see the South, and then the war would be over. Let men forsake their pigeon-holes and meet face to face, and many a problem of religion, philosophy, sociology, industry, and pedagogy would cease to be a problem—and many an official and professorial chair would be vacant.

But for the most part, either from their own impulse or from compulsion, men remained in their pigeon-holes. Many a man who had voluntarily emerged found his fellows unwilling to stir to meet him, or even take note of his having come forth. Many a man could not get out, if he would, and spent his life beating against the partitions, clamoring loudly and unheeded for redistribution on the ground of a thousand facts.

In vain! The malefactor and the magdalen could be rescued from their pigeon-holes only by a miracle, were they ever so repentant and filled with good works. The world had disposed of them, ceased to consider them, forgotten them—even though it was a loser as well as a tyrant. What service had been lost to the State by the pigeon-holing of party—talent and patriotism denied a sphere of usefulness because of being among the minority! What willing hearts lost to religion because of the pigeon-holes of creed and denomination! And there were men who were misjudged and abused all their lives long, living sacrifices to some accident of pigeon-holing, and to the neglect which was its usual consequence. Give a dog a bad name, and hang him.

Away with pigeon-holing then, as violent, tyrannical, and oppressive, a foe to individuality of men and ideas, and an obstacle to real progress! Away with curbs and yardsticks and tapes and molds and stamps and presses and dies, and all manner of interference with nature and her methods of expansion! Let nature, and especially human nature, realize itself, like any plant or flower! Fired by imagination, the Essayist started up, glowering at his desk and thinking of the axe. He had not yet attained, you see, to the full measure of Scientific Calm, and was in a fair way to usurp the functions of judge, jury, and sheriff, as well as attorney.

But he sat back again, and reflected. No pigeon-holes at all? What heresy, thus to fly in the face of his own practice, and of evolution! Imagine it—for men to eat only when hungry, to plan a costume for every dinner out, to have no office hours and no fixed prices, no churches and no schools, no coined money, no uniforms in parades, and no parades, no laws to regulate conduct in the large, no street numbers, no marks by which to detect a book agent or a mine promoter before answering the door-bell, no catalogues, no voting-machines, no diplomas, no marriage-bond, no social and religious ties at all! Why, what was that but anarchy?

Of course it was anarchy, and the Essayist knew it all the time. You must remember that he had set out to present both sides of the case. If he was a bit carried away by his own pleading, that is not a bad fault in the advocate.

And now he was ready to assume also the role of judge, and to charge the jury—by which I mean, of course, the readers of The Unpopular.

Being a Horatian, he summed up in favor of the Golden Mean, and recommended pigeon-holing to the favorable consideration of the jury. It had its proper use, and it had its misuse. There was harmless pigeon-holing, where you reduced to order dead and material things, or classified living entities on the basis of essentials. So long as you did no great violence, and were ready to entertain motions for reconsideration, it was desirable for the sake of economy in time and energy to use pigeon-holes, even at some cost. In other words, if you were to enjoy the benefits of civilization, or, indeed, to possess it at all, you must introduce into the anarchy of perfect individualism a greater or less degree of the artificiality of collectivism.

But there was a limit beyond which neither individual man nor society in the aggregate should go.

A limit, Your Honor? And pray, who was to establish the limit? That was not so easy. Clearly, no man could establish the limit for another man. Each man must determine for himself; and society must determine for its self, by means of that most mysterious of all consciousnesses, the universal consciousness.

In other words, pigeon-holing was the creation of no rule; it was an Art. The masterpiece was an individual product, a resolution of many forces. And civilization, so closely dependent upon pigeon-holing, was an Art, not a science—no, not even a social science. Let those who looked to save society by invention and application of rules alone consider well their ways. No anarchist was farther removed than they from the truth that should make men free.

In still other words, it was the Golden Mean which society, as well as the individual, should strive for. And this was no easy Panacea. The Golden Mean meant struggle—a struggle constant and eternal—to maintain an equilibrium. You had to watch unceasingly your balances, and to shift and reshift your weights—without intermittence, and forever. The devotion called for was so great that it took the inspiration of religious ideals to insure it. Human society was a Gothic cathedral—a unified and beautiful structure, but one whose complex members exerted everlasting pressure each on each, and must not long be left to themselves. To measure, and hew, and build, was not all. The pile could not be finished at once and forever. Let the architect relax his watchfulness, and decaying members soon would spoil the symmetry of the noble lines, or even precipitate the whole in awful ruin.

And here was where lay most of the trouble with pigeon-holing, past and present. Man was lazy. It was not wholly the enlightened desire for progress which had inspired him to pigeon-holing, and was continuing to inspire. Dislike of work, and selfishness, and vanity, all played a part as well, and not a small one.

It was so reposeful to dispose of things in the large—to educate by the hundred thousand, to rest in the arms of creed, to stand at the lever of a great machine, to have your tailor plan your suits and the cook or the newspaper your meals, to have a dozen pigeon-holes into which you conveniently popped new acquaintances and had them off your mind forever. It was so much easier to force men to accept your own beliefs and plans than to take the trouble to acquaint yourself with theirs. It was so much more satisfying and final to follow mere logic and go to the end of the process than always to be engaged in that most laborious of tasks—thinking and forming judgments. To write a volume embodying all the facts was much easier than to write an essay presenting the essentials and their interpretation. A perfectly democratic or a perfectly absolute government was far less difficult to plan than the ideal commonwealth. It was much easier to act on insufficient premises than to travail with thought and find that after all there was no ground for action. It was easier to be an ignoramus or a pedant than a real scholar, a dogmatist or an atheist than a good preacher, a lecturer on education than a teacher, a slouch or a dandy than a well dressed man, a persecutor or a humanitarian than a saver of souls, a despot or an anarchist than a shepherd of the people, a censor or an abettor than a monitor and adviser, a total abstainer or a drunkard than a temperate man, a conservative or a radical than a patriot, a boor or a fop than a gentleman. It was easier to be a beast, or not to be at all, than to be a MAN.

The Essayist looked at the clock. It was twelve-thirty. Once more he had successfully pigeon-holed the hours of his morning.