EPILOGUE
It was long hours afterward that Paul Joseph Weston sat with Ethel alone in the library.
“But yourself, dear—you have not told me yet how you came to be here,” he said.
She laughed softly.
“Rash boy! Was there not need of someone’s preparing your father and mother for so wonderful a home-coming? I found out by judicious inquiry that you had not yet left the city, so I knew, when I took the train, that I had at least a few hours’ start of you.”
“But how—what—how could you, dear? Surely I didn’t tell——”
Again she laughed, but this time she dimpled into a rosy blush.
“When your very disquieting letter came, sir, I remembered something Mr. Martin had once said to me. I went to town, sent for Mr. Martin and insisted upon his telling me all that he knew of—your youth.”
“And that was?”
“That he believed you to be Paul Weston, who had quarreled with his father and run away after apparently killing the poor gentleman. Mr. Martin said that the father did not die, but slowly recovered from his wound and made every possible effort to find his son, even sending Martin himself to seek for him. Once Martin traced the boy to a mining camp, but there he lost the trail and never regained it until he thought he saw Paul Weston’s features in Joseph Westbrook’s face.”
“Ethel, what did Martin first tell you of me that caused you to go to him for aid?”
“He hinted that you were a—ah, don’t make me say it, please!”
The man’s face grew stern.
“And he knew all the time it was false!” he cried.
She put a soft finger on his tense lips.
“We just won’t think of him—and really, I’ve forgiven him long ago, for it was he that helped me in the end, you know. Besides, he acknowledged that he didn’t really suppose you were Paul Weston. I—I fancy he didn’t want me to think too highly of this interesting Mr. Joseph Westbrook!” she added saucily.
The arm that held her tightened its clasp.
“He needn’t have worried,” she continued, with uptilted chin. “I shall never, never marry Mr. Joseph Westbrook!”
“Ethel!”
“But if Hustler Joe or Paul Weston should ask——”
Her lips were silenced by a kiss and a fervent, “You little fraud of a sweetheart!”
Interludes
THE rich man speaks about how he spends his money, while his friends speak about how he made it.
You could tell the old-time hero by his medals; the modern one is known by his collection of loving-cups.
The spendthrift sometimes does more good with his money than the philanthropist.
The fact that figures won’t lie probably accounts for the invention of statistics.
A political job differs from any other kind, inasmuch as you work before you get it, instead of afterward.
The miser holds on to his own money; the millionaire to other people’s.
His Cogitation
“WELL, then, amongst others, there’s the man who habitually talks to himself,” ruminatingly said the Pruntytown Philosopher the other evening. “If he does it in order to listen to himself, he is a fool; if he does it to avoid listening to his friends, he is a sage; and if he does it to save his friends from listening to him, he is a philanthropist.”
The Safe Side
REPORTER—Were you quoted correctly in that interview in the morning papers?
Senator—Come around the day after tomorrow. How can I tell until I see how the interview is going to be taken?
An Inference
“MY wife and I have lived happily together for twenty-five years.”
“Now, tell me, old fellow—in confidence, of course—which one of you has had the other bluffed all this time?”
The Constitution
BY FREDERICK UPHAM ADAMS
Author of “The Kidnapped Millionaires,” “Colonel Monroe’s Doctrine,” “President John Smith,” “Shades of the Fathers,” etc.
THE practical man values a house not by its antiquity, but by its conformability to modern standards of construction and equipment. If he purchases an ancient structure he is not required to pay an added price because of its lack of plumbing, its absence of gas and electric lighting fixtures, and he is not entranced that its roof leaks and that its cellar is damp and moldy.
This same man, if he gives the subject a passing thought, will likely assure you that the Constitution of the United States is a perfect document because it is more than one hundred years old. It also is likely that this is the extent of his information concerning that famous document.
The average lack of knowledge concerning our National Constitution is astounding. Like children who have been drilled to repeat the Lord’s Prayer without the faintest conception of what the petition means, we have mentally drilled ourselves to believe that our Constitution is perfect, that it was inspired by a superhuman wisdom, and that it is treason to criticize or even discuss its infallible precepts.
In this respect we are the most narrow, bigoted and prejudiced people who pretend to keep in alignment with progress. For more than one hundred years we have been proclaiming the perfection of our free governmental institutions, and calling on other nations to admire us and to follow our example.
Within the past few years the truth has been forced home on us that the officialdom of our townships, villages, cities, counties, states and of the nation is maggoty with corruption; that our local, state and national legislatures are openly controlled by mercenary private interests; that the scandals concerning our judiciary can no longer be smothered or concealed; that our citizens are powerless to pass laws demanded by the majority, or to defeat those aimed to despoil the majority; that the burdens of taxation are spurned by those who have amassed wealth by means of unfair and ofttimes purchased legislation, and that the domination of corporations and vested interests is so complete as to be apparent to the dullest of the plundered.
This language is not exaggerated. It is impossible to overstate the enormity of the depth to which we have descended in the scale of political morals. Ten years ago any one of the disclosures which now are made from week to week would have aroused the nation; today the repetition of these horrors dazes those who attempt to keep track of them. Not one crime in a hundred ever sees the light in printer’s ink. The bigger thieves are so buttressed and protected by the fortifications of wealth, and so secure behind the barbed wire entanglements woven by the courts, that their enraged dupes cannot reach them.
Great Britain is a republic in all save name, yet no such conditions prevail under its government. France is a republic, yet its people are not despoiled by official brigands, neither is the free expression of its electorate crushed beneath the massed weight of its moneyed interests.
I count it a disgrace to be an American so long as these degrading conditions prevail. It is a dishonor to live in a city, community, state or nation where thievery is condoned or tolerated, and it is cowardly weakness for the honest majority to assume that the problem of corruption is past their solving.
The most formidable barrier in the way of permanent redress has been erected and is maintained by those who are checked by it. It consists of the absurd assumption that our material prosperity has been the consequence of the perfect provisions of our National Constitution. It is manifested in the senseless worship of the forefathers, and the ignorant deification of the founders of the document, which for more than a hundred years has served as a model for our state, municipal and local governments.
We have come to recognize the hopelessness of honest majorities when pitted against the machinery of our municipal governments; we no longer deny that the cumbersome machinery of our state governments lends itself to the manipulation of corrupt private interests; the suspicion has dawned on us that our National Congress is more concerned with thwarting public sentiment than in conforming to it; and despite all this knowledge we steadfastly refuse to direct our gaze to the prime cause of these abuses.
With a hundred monopolies filching from us that which we have created—and doing it under the guise of law and by sanction of the Constitution; with legislatures, executives and courts scorning to put into operation those remedies for which we have legally voted—and declining to do so under the authority of the Constitution; with a system of taxation which places all the burdens on those who are poor because they are producers of wealth, and releasing from taxation those who have become rich because of their exploitation of labor and through the debauching of its representatives—this system being founded on constitutional decisions—we yet cling to the childish delusion that ours is the only perfect government ever bequeathed to mankind.
Compared with the governments of England and France we have only the semblance of self-rule, while they possess the substance. The people of Germany have more direct influence over legislation than have those of the United States. Despite an autocratic emperor, surrounded as he is by a nobility and protected by the most powerful standing army in the world, the people of Germany have made greater progress along the road of democracy within the last twenty years than we have.
If in England there is valid reason to believe that the majority of the people hold an opinion counter to that of the administration in power, Parliament is dissolved and a direct appeal is made to the voters for a new body of representatives. The new Parliament meets and proceeds to pass the laws demanded by the electorate. There is a House of Lords, but it does not dare reject a measure known to be popular. There is a king, but he has not exercised his veto power for more than a century and a half, and one need not be a prophet to hazard that he never will exercise it again. There is no supreme court in England. In that benighted monarchy when the people pass a law it is a law, and not a guess.
To all intents and purposes the same procedure obtains in France and in a score of other countries which might be named. Ours is the only country on earth where the vote of a citizen has no direct significance.
We are not permitted to vote for a President, but are allowed to help choose electors who represent not us, but the state. There is no such thing as a citizen of the United States, so far as the franchise is concerned. If you have a vote it is by grace of the state in which you reside. The Constitution does not recognize your individual sovereignty in any way. If you doubt this assertion read that document.
The state fixes your qualifications as a voter. It might debar you because of your sex, because of your height, because you were not worth $100,000, and you would have no redress under the Constitution of the United States. Possibly you did not know this.
In practice you are privileged to vote for members of the Lower House of Congress. That is the beginning and the end of your influence so far as your national government is concerned. You have nothing to do with the selection of senators, and I doubt if you are consulted as to the composition of the Supreme Court.
As I have explained, if the Lower House of the Legislature in England passes a law, it at once becomes a law. Under our Constitution the Senate has the power to amend or defeat it. This is supposed by us to be the quintessence of all earthly legislative wisdom. This is Check Number One on the mandate of the foolish people. In passing, I desire to repeat that this is the only alleged republic or constitutional monarchy yet remaining on earth which assumes that its majorities are unfit to influence legislation.
If the measure demanded by the people be so fortunate as to pass the House and Senate, the President may veto it. This is Check Number Two on the mandate of the foolish people. If the President sign the measure the Supreme Court may declare it unconstitutional, and that is the end of it, unless a subsequent infallible Supreme Court should overrule the decision of the first infallible Supreme Court. This is Check Number Three on the mandate of a free and enlightened people. In the event that the Supreme Court should decide that a law is a law, the financial interests adversely affected may and do defeat its enforcement by legal quibbles as to details, or may and do resort to the bribery of the officials charged with the execution of the law. These are Checks Numbers Four and Five on the will of the people in this, the one perfect system of popular government ever designed in all history.
We are the most corrupt nation on earth because of “our peculiar form of Government”; because of the exactions and limitations of a Constitution which was designed to protect and conserve the interests of property rather than of citizenship. Those who are astounded or offended at this statement need only read the record of the convention which drafted the Constitution in order to satisfy themselves as to its moderation. I do not mean to insinuate that the fifty-five delegates who met in Philadelphia in 1787 had any idea of establishing a system which would foster corruption, but the records absolutely prove that they deliberately planned to suppress the rule of the majority in order that popular clamor might not menace property interests. The train of abuses from which we now suffer flow logically from the checks they then provided; checks which place selfish and corrupt wealth beyond the reach of public redress.
Those foolish persons who have been taught in school and in the public prints that the founders of our Constitution were sincerely desirous of establishing a system of government in which the will of the people should find free expression, will be shocked and undeceived when they read its debates and proceedings as recorded by James Madison, one of the delegates from Virginia. When one comes to learn of these fifty-five delegates that not more than ten are on record as voicing the slightest degree of confidence in the wisdom of the people or their fitness to rule, he is likely to take a new view of the Constitution framed by them, and he is able to account for the innumerable ills which we are compelled to suffer.
I will quote a few expressions of opinion from delegates who wielded the greater influence in the construction of the Constitution:
Roger Sherman—“The people should have as little to do as may be about the Government.”
Elbridge Gerry—“The evils we experience flow from an excess of democracy, the worst of all possible evils.”
John Dickinson—“A limited monarchy is one of the best governments in the world.”
Rufus King—“It is immaterial to the people by what government they are possessed, provided they be well employed.”
Alexander Hamilton—“The British monarchy is the best government in the world,” and he doubted if anything short of it would do in America. “Their House of Lords is a most noble institution.”
Alexander Hamilton—He acknowledged himself not to think favorably of republican government. “Inequality in property constitutes the great and fundamental distinction in society.”
Gunning Bedford—“Are we to act with greater purity than the rest of mankind? Our votes are actuated by interest and ambition.”
Gouverneur Morris—“The Senate must have great personal property; it must have the aristocratic spirit; it must love to lord it through pride. To make it independent it should be for life. Property is the main object of society.”
John Rutledge—“Property certainly is the principal object of society.”
Pierce Butler—“Slaves should have an equal representation in a government which is instituted principally for the protection of property, and is of itself to be supported by property.”
Charles C. Pinckney—“Property in slaves should not be exposed to danger in a government instituted for the protection of property.”
George Mason—“It would be as unnatural to refer the choice of a proper character for President to the people as to refer a test of colors to a blind man.”
James Madison—“In future times a great majority of the people will not only be without landed but any sort of property. If they combine, the rights of property will not be safe in their hands.”
James Ellsworth—“As population grows, poor laborers will be so plenty as to render slaves useless.”
The thirteen delegates, from whom I have quoted were the dominating characters in that convention, and it is possible to cite innumerable passages expressing the same distrust and contempt for the people. It should be understood that the great mass of the people had no representation in that secret conclave, and that half a century passed before its proceedings were made public by Act of Congress.
I have touched on these facts for the purpose of indicating clearly that the right to ignore the majority is inherent in the Constitution. The Senate was provided for the special benefit of property interests, and at one time a clause was adopted, decreeing that no one could be elected a Senator of the United States unless he was worth $50,000 or more. This cautious provision was abandoned because there were states which had no men with that amount of property. Having provided a Senate they continued to pile up checks against the people, until such aristocrats as Gerry, Randolph and Mason attempted to call a halt, declaring that the people would be so stripped of power that the last of their rights would disappear. Their warnings were disregarded, and they absolutely refused to sign their names to the document.
With these facts within access of every citizen of the United States, the vast majority of us still adhere to the myths and falsehoods contained in our school books and uttered by ignorant demagogues and editors.
It is likely that the aristocratic delegates who framed the Constitution had just reason to fear the people it was intended to hold in check. The average citizen of 1787 was a savage compared with the average voter of today. He knew of no world beyond the narrow limit of his horizon. He was ignorant, prejudiced, suspicious and envious. The builders of the Constitution regretted that it was necessary to grant him even the shadow of political power and were consumed by the dread that the Lower House of Congress would overawe all other branches of the new government.
In that day wealth had little influence as a mass, but it was strong in its instinct of self-preservation. It trembled lest the poor should combine at the polls in a crusade for the legal despoiling of the rich. Having absolute control of the convention it was free to design a document which would include every possible check against the aggressions of the dreaded masses, and it rightly conjectured that the magic of the name of Washington would induce the people to consent to the provisions aimed against them.
We of today are caught in the trap set for those who lived more than a hundred years ago. Not until after the nation had been plunged into a civil war between two factions—each of which claimed strict allegiance to the Constitution—did conditions arise which afforded a fair test of the restrictive features of that document. So long as the wealth of the nation was so distributed as to prevent the formation of conspiracies in its behalf, the masses were able to conserve their rights, despite all of the checks and restrictions in the Constitution. It was this fairly maintained state of equilibrium which half a century ago gave rise to the worship of our system of government.
When the first unscrupulous man found himself in possession of millions of dollars the Constitution became not his master but his tool. When the officials of our first great corporation found it practical to bribe legislation, the trap set by the forefathers was sprung. I do not mean to hint that the founders of the Constitution foresaw any such outcome. They constructed a device to protect themselves, and their bones had crumbled into dust before wealth was sufficiently armed and equipped to take advantage of their mistakes.
Wealth seized upon the senates, state and national. It found in the judiciary a natural ally, and it did not hesitate to invoke the aid of partisanship and the unblushing use of corrupt influences, direct and indirect, in order to subject the courts to its domination. This is a blunt statement, but the time has arrived when the courts can no longer be covered with a machine-made robe of sanctity. There are good judges and bad judges, but the decisions of the latter are as binding as those of the former. A corporation judge is not a priest; he is a low type of politician.
Our aristocratic forefathers designed a Constitution intended to protect themselves against a majority. Our modern corporations and vested interests have discovered that the same machinery oiled with bribery can be used by the minority for the purpose of plundering the majority. Our forefathers invented checks; our trusts have converted them into bludgeons. Our forefathers constructed constitutional ramparts, behind which they hoped to be safe from the attacks of the majority; our vested interests have bristled them with guns, behind which they demand and receive tribute.
Note—In the May number Mr. Adams will treat of the necessity for the revision of the Constitution, and consider how it may legally be accomplished.
In Absence
BY EUGENE C. DOLSON
WITH miles between us—miles of land and sea, However far my wandering footsteps roam, Still memory ever backward turns to thee— Queen of my heart and home.
In Outline
“MANY a man complains that he lost his health in business, although he was not in business for his health.”
“The quickest way to get to the top in this world is to have someone let you in on the ground floor.”
“Money often fails to bring happiness, on account of the way it has been made.”
“The world may owe you a living, but you have to work hard to collect the debt.”
“One-half the world doesn’t care how the other half lives.”
“The man who courts an investigation has generally been making love to other people’s money.”
Not Guilty
TAVERN LOUNGER—That ’ere smooth-shaved, horse-faced feller jest goin’ into the dinin’-room looks like an actor.
Landlord—Yes; but you bet yer life he ain’t one! He came day before yesterday, paid his bill in advance, and ain’t kicked about anything yet!
A Discovery
“I HAVE looked the matter over with reasonable care,” said the Pruntytown Philosopher, with his usual acridity, “and I have reached the conclusion that it is not absolutely necessary to send boys to college in order to have ’em act the fool.”
A One-Sided Alliance
JUDSON—Do you think capital and labor will ever work together?
Budson—It looks that way. At the present time the landlord and the tenants seem to be both engaged in raising the rent.
At the Zoo
THE PARROT—The eagle says he has been bald ever since he can remember.
The Cockatoo—Gee-whiz! Those eagles marry very young, don’t they?
The Gray Weed
AN EXTRACT FROM THE “LONDON TIMES” OF FEBRUARY 8, 1909
BY OWEN OLIVER
OWING to the lamented death of Professor Newton, to whose wisdom and courage the world owes its deliverance, I have been asked to contribute to the first newspaper issued in the new era some account of the terrible weed which overran the earth, and threatened to stifle out mankind.
The professor had intended dealing with the origin of the weed, its relations to ordinary plants, the nature of its growth, so far as this proceeded, and the forms which it would ultimately have assumed. Unfortunately his notes upon these points are so abbreviated and technical as to be unintelligible to me; and personally I possess no qualifications for dealing with the scientific aspects of the case. So I must confine myself to a plain narrative of the occurrences which I witnessed.
It was nine o’clock in the evening of November 10, 1908, when I left my office in Norfolk Street, letting myself out with a duplicate key which the hall-porter had intrusted to me. I thought at first that it was snowing; but when I put out my hand and caught a few of the particles, I found that they were flimsy white seeds, something like those of melons, only less substantial. Where they lay in heaps—as I thought—in the road, their color appeared to be gray. At the Embankment end of the street the “heaps” were larger; and when I came to them I discovered that they were not seeds, but a growth of gray weed, which fastened round my shoes as I tried to walk over it.
I stooped and took hold of a piece to examine it; but, when I attempted to pluck it, it stretched like elastic, without breaking off. The tendrils were round, and about one-fourth of an inch in diameter when not stretched. They had, at intervals, spherical bulges which, at a distance, bore the appearance of small berries. These appeared to be of the same substance as the tendrils. The latter began twining round my fingers, and I had some difficulty in releasing them. The road and the Embankment were deserted by people, but three or four horses at the cab stand were plunging with fright as the weed wound round their legs. It had grown perceptibly in the few minutes that I had been observing it, and, feeling somewhat alarmed, I made my way back along Norfolk Street.
The weed had spread a good deal there also; and I noticed that wherever a white seed fell a fresh plant sprang up, and grew with marvelous rapidity. In the Strand the weed was nearly a yard high. The ’bus drivers were whipping their frightened horses in a vain attempt to drive over it. The foot-passengers were unable to move, except a big man, who, with a small axe, hacked a passage through the growth for himself, his wife and his daughter—a pretty girl of about nineteen.
They were making their way down to the Embankment, but I warned them that the weed was thick there. The young lady then suggested that they should try to get into one of the houses, and I invited them to come to my offices. The tendrils were seizing people and pulling them down and binding them like flies in a spider’s web. We could hear cries and screams all along the Strand, and a cab was upset by the struggles of the horse. The weed had spread over Norfolk Street, while we were talking, and it clung to our feet as we ran. The lady tripped and fell. The tendrils seized her immediately, and we had great difficulty in freeing her. When we had entered the door of the house we could not close it until we had chopped away the tendrils that followed us.
I turned on the electric light in the halls, and took my new friends to my rooms, which were on the fifth floor. The elder lady was faint, and I gave her some brandy and soda and biscuits. I had a good stock of these fortunately.
The gentleman’s name was George Baker, his wife was Marian Baker, and the girl was Viva. They had been buying curiosities in the Strand, and the axe—a roughly engraved Moorish instrument—was fortunately among their purchases. Some people whom they met in the streets had told them that the weed was growing all over London, and that the Guards had been ordered out to cut it away. A learned old gentleman had conjectured that the seeds were the atoms of some dissipated planet, or the elements of some world that was to be, and that they contained the raw elements of life, which set them growing when they came into contact with suitable matter.
“It’s diabolical!” Mr. Baker said furiously. “The vestries ought to send round water-carts with weed-killer, or—or something. I don’t know what they ought to do; but they ought to do something.” He wiped his face excitedly with his handkerchief. “Diabolical!” he repeated. “It grows through the flagstones, the wood paving, everything. It—it seizes people!”
“Seizes people!” his wife repeated, wringing her hands. “We saw it.”
“It clings to you,” the girl added tremulously. “Clings to you. If it goes on growing——!”
Her mother gave a sharp scream, and her father groaned.
“If it goes on growing—!” they said together.
“It won’t,” I assured them, with an indifferent appearance of confidence. “Those things that grow like—like fungi—never do. It will shrivel up suddenly, and let people go again. I don’t suppose they’re really hurt, only frightened. In an hour or so you’ll be on your way home, and laughing about it; and I shall be thanking the—the fungus—for some pleasant acquaintances. I look upon this as a little surprise party.”
The girl wiped her eyes and forced a smile.
“A little surprise party,” she agreed. “What are you going to do for our entertainment, Mr. Adamson?—I saw the name on the door-plate.”
“Henry Adamson,” I said, “and very much at your service, Miss Viva—I have some cards, but——”
I paused doubtfully. Her mother held up a trembling hand, and her father shook his head.
“We won’t have any fool’s games,” he said. “Let’s talk.”
Viva and I talked in broken sentences, and her mother and father in monosyllables. We kept glancing at the window, but no one had the courage to draw up the blind for nearly an hour. Then we opened the window and looked out. The weed was fully six feet high in the street, and higher in the Strand. It had overrun the ’bus that stood at the opening. If there were people on the ’bus, it had overrun them, too.
“It doesn’t seem to hurt,” I said. “There’s no screaming now.” I shuddered as soon as I had said it.
“There is no screaming now,” Viva repeated. “I suppose they—they are all——”
Her voice broke. Her father shut the window sharply and drew her away.
“It will be gone in the morning,” he asserted, “as—as our friend said. We shall have to impose on your hospitality for the night, I am afraid, Mr. Adamson.”
“There is no question of imposing,” I assured him. “I cannot say how glad I am to have your company.”
We made a couch for the ladies by putting several hearth-rugs on the table in the clerks’ room, and laying two rugs of mine to cover them. Mr. Baker and I dozed in front of the fire in my room in chairs. Toward the morning I fell into a sounder sleep. When I woke he had pulled up the blind.
“It’s fifteen feet high at least,” he told me. “Halfway up the second windows. God help us!”
I joined him and saw the roadway filled with a sea of gray weeds. They looked like india-rubber reeds. The largest were as thick as my little finger, and the bulges were the size of damsons. We opened the window and listened. Presently a caretaker opened a window nearly opposite and called to his wife.
“Here’s a rum go, Mary,” he shouted, with a laugh. “Bulrushes growing to the street! We sha’n’t have any clerks pestering us today.”
The woman joined him, and they laughed together because they would have a holiday. They treated the matter as a joke, and evidently disbelieved us when we told them of the terrible events of the preceding night. So we closed the window and called the ladies. I made some tea on my ring-burner, and we breakfasted on that and biscuits. The ladies avoided the window, and so did I, but Mr. Baker went to it every few minutes. After each visit he whispered to me that it was still growing. Mrs. Baker seemed in a stupor, but Viva tried hard to cheer us. She sang little snatches of song under her breath as she washed the tea-cups; and once she said that it was great “fun.” Her mouth trembled when I looked reproachfully at her.
“Mother is so nervous,” she whispered. “I have to pretend, to cheer her. Do you think it will—grow?”
“Heaven knows!” I said. “But you are very brave.”
After this, she and I sat at the window, watching the tendrils growing and growing, and clutching incessantly at the air. I thought, at first, that they were swaying in the wind, but there was no breeze. Also there was an indescribable air of purpose about their movement. A number of long branches spread themselves over a window opposite. Their swaying ceased, and they pressed on it steadily, till at last it broke with a dull crash. Mrs. Baker fainted, and her husband lifted her on to the sofa. Viva clung to my arm. The malicious tendrils broke down the window-frame, piece by piece, and spread slowly into the room, winding themselves round the tables and chairs.
“If anyone had been there,” Viva cried hoarsely. “If—if—” She looked at me. Her eyes were big with fright.
“They must be doing something to stop it,” I said—“the—the authorities. If we could find out! I’ll try the telephone.”
After several calls I obtained an answer. It was a girl’s voice. Six of them had stayed all night in the exchange, she said. They were in communication with the police and the Government Offices. The soldiers had been out since the previous evening, and had cut their passage from Chelsea Barracks to Victoria Street, and along this almost to Westminster Bridge. They had intended coming on to Whitehall and the Strand; but the stuff grew almost as quickly as it was cut down, and had overpowered many of them. Over a hundred had been crushed to death by it, and they had sent for gun-cotton to try and blow it up, as a last resort. It was known, through the telegraph, that the weed had appeared all over England and on the Continent. It was also growing out of the sea. The English Channel was choked in places, and several vessels had been bound by the weed in sight of the coast. “It’s alive!” she wailed; “alive! Its eyes are watching us through the windows!” (The bulges had the appearance of eyes.)
I was unable to obtain any further answers, although I tried the telephone several times. By one o’clock the third-story windows were covered. The thickest tendrils were then nearly the diameter of a florin, with the bulges the size and shape of exceedingly large plums. The stems and bulges seemed to be of one homogeneous material. There were no leaves or fruit or flowers at this time, but branches were beginning to sprout from the main stems. There did not appear to be any communication between one stem and another; but, according to Professor Newton’s notes, this undoubtedly took place at the roots, which interlaced so as to form a gigantic nervous system or brain.
We made another meal of tea and biscuits. Mrs. Baker seemed stupefied with horror, and her husband was evidently overcome by his anxiety for her, and scarcely spoke. Viva and I tried to talk, but our voices broke off in the middle of words. We listened vainly for any explosions, and concluded that the attempt at rescue had failed. By four o’clock the weed was up to the window-sill. Mrs. Baker was in a prolonged faint. Her husband sat beside her, with his head on his hand. He did not look up when I suggested carrying her out on the roof.
“The cold would rouse her,” he said. “It is best as it is. You’re a good chap, I think. Do what you can for my little girl.”
I put on my overcoat, crammed the pockets with biscuits and a flask, and persuaded Viva to accompany me to the roof to look for a way of escape, for us and for her parents. We never saw them again.
Some people from neighboring houses were on the adjoining roofs already, two old caretakers, a man and a lad. We saw about twenty more on the roofs in other streets. Some of them were raving and singing. The caretakers who had spoken to us in the morning flung their window open. They were laughing as if they had been drinking. They brought two pailfuls of boiling water and emptied it upon the weed. There was a soft hissing sound. Then two—four—six quivering tendrils reached slowly toward them. The man and woman seemed fascinated. They did not attempt to move, only screamed. The tendrils seized them; bound them round and round. Viva buried her head on my shoulder, and I shut my eyes. It was about half a minute, I think, before the screams ceased. Then there was crash after crash as windows were broken in. The weed had its passions, it seemed.
“Take me back to my mother and father,” Viva begged. “We can all die together—if you would rather die with us?”
“Yes. I would rather die with you, Viva,” I said. “I should have liked you very much if we had lived.”
We returned to the trap-door, but the staircase was choked with the weed. As we looked down it seemed to be a pit of twirling gray snakes. We called to her mother and father, but there was no answer. Viva would have flung herself among the weed, but I held her and carried her back to the roof. The weed was beginning to crawl over the gutters. Long rope-like filaments were surrounding the other people who were on the roofs. They huddled together and did not attempt to escape. The tendrils overran them and bound them round and round. I think they had mostly fainted. There was only one cry.
The tendrils lashed one another and fought over their prey. Their struggles made a repulsive, “scrooping” noise—a noise like the sound of stroking silk, only louder. There was also a sound of crunching bones.
I did not notice the weed closing round us till Viva clutched my arm.
“Hold me,” she begged. “Hold me tight! I thought life had only just begun——”
I supported her on one arm, and backed toward the Strand end of the roof, where the weed had encroached less. We stumbled against a skylight. The attic below was empty. I opened the frame, lowered Viva and jumped down after her. We crouched in a corner watching the window. One—two minutes passed. Then the gray weed, with the bulges that simulated eyes, pressed upon it. The glass shivered upon the floor. I lifted Viva in my arms—she was too faint to walk—and carried her out on the landing.
The light was bad, and I saw no weed till we reached the next landing. Then it stretched toward us from the broken window-frame. A dozen gray ropes crept toward us from the stairs when we approached them. The lift was standing open. I pushed Viva in, jumped after her, slid the steel railing to and lowered us. A tendril caught at the lift as we started. I heard it snap.
In my excitement I lowered the lift too fast. We were thrown against the sides and almost stunned when it stopped. There was barely a glimmer of light, and we did not know if we had reached the bottom of the shaft or had been stopped by the weed. We listened for a long while and heard nothing. Then we let ourselves out and advanced a few inches at a time, feeling round us with our hands. We seemed to be in the hall of the basement. We came upon a table and found a tray on it with biscuits and milk. We drank the milk and Viva stuffed the biscuits in her pockets, as mine were full. There was a dim, barely perceptible light from an area window. We peered up through the grating into the forest of huge weeds. The trunks, which had grown to the size of young elms, only swayed a little; but the branches above twisted and twined incessantly. Viva shuddered when she saw them, and I took her away.
“We are safe down here,” I assured her; but she pressed her hand over my mouth.
“Hush!” she whispered. “Hush! It may hear.”
We wandered about in the darkness till we found a caretaker’s room. We sat there on a sofa, holding hands. We never lost touch of each other all the time. I do not know how long it was. It seemed years. The basement was very quiet, but the sound of the india-rubbery motion came down to us. Once or twice we thought we heard a human cry. Once a mouse squeaked, and a spider dropped on the couch beside us with a thud. We were always listening.
After an unknown time we groped our way into the scullery to get water. We had just drunk when we heard the sound of india-rubbery tentacles dragging themselves over the walls. Something clung to my hand. Something held her skirt. It tore as I pulled her from it. Something was in the way when we tried to close the door. It followed us across the room and into the passage. We felt along the walls for the door that we thought led to the cellars—found it—fastened it after us—groped down the stairs. It was darker than the darkness of the basement above—darkness that could be felt. We stumbled over some coals—and a rough, hoarse voice came out of the darkness.
“Give us your hand, guv’nor,” it said, “just a touch of your hand. I’ve been alone here for—for a thousand years!”
Something staggered toward us—stumbled against us; and a huge rough hand gripped my arm.
I put myself between him and Viva and pressed her arm for silence. The voice and grip were not reassuring, and I hoped he did not know she was there.
“Here is my hand,” I said.
“And mine,” said Viva eagerly. “You are a friend—of course you are a friend. God bless you.”
“God bless you, lady.” The rough voice softened strangely. “I—I’m sorry to intrude.”
He drew back a little way from us and sat down. I could not see him, but I could hear him breathe. Another unknown time passed. Then Viva whispered that she was thirsty.
“There’s a pail of water,” the man said, “if I can find it.” He moved about in the darkness till he kicked it. Then he brought it to us. We drank from the pail and ate a few biscuits. I offered him some, but he said that he had a crust left. Viva and I explored the cellar and found a shovel and a pick. I suggested that we should try to break through into the next cellar, on the chance of finding food; but Viva and the man feared that the weed might hear us.
She and I sat on an empty packing-case, and she laid her head on my shoulder and slept. After a time I slept too. The man woke us.
“There’s something moving, guv’nor,” he said hoarsely. “I think it’s growing out of the floor. Strike a match, and give me the shovel.”
We found forty or fifty weed plants growing. He beat some down with the shovel, but others clutched him round the legs. He was a strong, rough-looking man and he fought furiously, but they pulled him down. I gave Viva the matches and went to his rescue with the pick. The weeds seized me too, but he cut us both free with a clasp-knife, and at length we destroyed them all.
We saw by the matchlight that the wall was cracking in one place. So we resolved to try to get through it. The man dislodged a few bricks with the pick, and we pulled others away till our fingers bled and the last match gave out. At length he managed to crawl through.
“You come next, sir,” he proposed. “The lady would be frightened of me.”
“Dear friend,” Viva said, “I am not in the least afraid of you.”
So he helped her through, and I followed. We discovered a passage, and along the passage another doorway—and people. I do not remember our words when we found one another in the dark—only the gladness of it.
There were about twenty of them—men, women and children. They had food and drink which they had collected before they fled to the cellar. Professor Newton was among them. He seemed acknowledged as their leader, and he proposed me as his second. He wanted the aid of an intelligent and educated man, he whispered, in fighting the weed.
“We must fight it,” he declared, tapping me on the arm with his finger, “but I don’t know how. I—don’t—know—how!—I can’t even guess what it is; still less what it is going to be. It may be mere vegetable life—a man-eating plant. It may be brute animal life—a carnivorous animal! It may be intelligent—diabolical intelligence. Whatever it is, it will develop as it grows, develop new organs and new powers, new strength and new weaknesses. We must strike there. What weaknesses? Ah-h! I don’t know! It may outgrow itself and wither. It may perish from the little microbes of the earth, like the Martians in Wells’s romance. We thought that an idle fancy then. It may grow into an intelligent—devil! It may be one now and merely lack the organs to carry out fully its evil will. On the other hand, its malevolence may be purposeless—a blind restlessness that it will outgrow—after we have stifled in the darkness at its feet. We must fight it anyhow. To fight it we must understand it. To understand it we must study it. Will you risk your life with me?”
“Yes,” I said.
Viva cried softly when I told her I must go; but she did not try to keep me from my duty. The professor and I crawled up the stairs into the basement, and finding nothing there went up in the lift in the dark. We heard the weed moving about on the second landing. I jumped out, turned on the electric light, and jumped in again. The tendrils followed me and clutched at the steel curtain, but could not break it. We hacked with our pen-knives at those that crept through. The juice which ran out from them had an oily smell. They beat furiously on the curtain. The professor studied them calmly with a microscope. The bulges were the beginning of eyes, he thought. He pronounced some feathery sprays sprouting from them to be the rudiments of organs like hands. I do not know whether he was right, but he always maintained that they would develop organs of sense. Anyhow the character of the weed was clearly changing. It had grown harder and drier, but without losing its flexibility or strength.
After a time the professor decided that I should return to the others. He went up again in the lift when he had lowered me. Viva was waiting for me in the dark just inside the door.
I had obtained some candles. We lit one and stuck it in a bottle. I shall never forget the group in the low, wide cellar, huddled together on boxes or on the floor. The man we met first was nursing an ailing child. Lady Evelyn Angell had gathered a young flower-girl under her opera cloak. A policeman was binding up a wounded hand with his handkerchief. A shivering old match-seller wore his cape. Viva took a little boy on her lap and told him about Jack and the Beanstalk. Steel—a card sharper, I learned afterward—who had been indefatigable in helping everyone, was chatting to Lady Evelyn. Some ill-clad youths had draped themselves in sacking. A rouged and gaudily dressed woman was mothering some younger ones. She had comforted Viva while I was away, I heard, and had offered to accompany her in a search for me, but the others had persuaded them that they would only be a hindrance to us.
After a couple of hours—I had wound my watch again—the professor reappeared. His clothes were torn and his face and hands were bleeding.
“They broke the steel curtain at last,” he explained, “but I got away. Good heavens, how it grows! I can’t make up my mind about it.”
After a time, when most of us were dozing, a portion of the roof and the wall fell in. The growth of the roots under the street had pressed the earth upon it, the professor conjectured. A faint light streamed down the tall weeds and through the opening. The branches overhead were still moving, but the lower stems seemed inert. The professor decided to venture among them in search of knowledge. I went with him. There was just room enough between the weeds for us to pass.
The houses upon the other side of the street were all down. So were many in the Strand. In Fleet Street we saw the way it was done. The huge weeds leaned upon them, till they fell with a crash. The Law Courts went so. We found the clock among the weeds. Sometimes the branches pushed themselves through the windows and walls of houses which were still standing. Once or twice we heard human cries. We found a woman, with a baby and a dog, walking among the weed-trees, and took them with us.
The light which straggled down through the waving branches overhead was feeble and patchy, and we lost our way for a time. At length we found Norfolk Street; but as we were entering it, some of the tendrils, which seemed to be fighting one another viciously overhead, broke off and dropped at our feet. They writhed upon the ground like huge gray snakes, and wound themselves round the weed-trees and lashed out blindly. One of them caught the woman and dashed her against a trunk. We pulled her away from the tendril as its violence lessened, but she was dead. The baby was not hurt and still slept. I carried it in my arms.
A moment later a broken tendril dropped right upon the dog. He howled loudly, and in his fright bit at an unbroken tendril hanging down among the trees. (There were a good many such, but we had succeeded in avoiding them hitherto.) It shook as if with rage and pain, wrapped its extremity round the dog, and bore him aloft, still howling. Hundreds of tendrils stretched toward it, and fought with it for the dog. They still fought after his cries ceased; and other tendrils began reaching downward, in every direction round us, as if searching for further prey. The professor watched them intently, oblivious of danger.
“They make a different sound now,” he remarked abstractedly. “It is no longer the scroop-scroop of clammy india-rubber—they rustle. It doesn’t seem like decay. They are stronger—stronger. There is always weakness in excess of anything—even strength. Let me think!”
“Quick!” I cried. “Quick! They are falling upon us. Run!”
We dodged rapidly among the weed-trunks. He was slow and I pushed him. Tendril after tendril rustled downward, and the trunks themselves swayed. Two almost fixed the professor between them—he was a stout man—but I dragged him through. The light from above was entirely shut out by the descending tendrils, and we must have been lost but for an electric lamp burning in one of the houses. As it was, the descending tendrils must have caught us but for their struggles among themselves. Broken pieces dropped and wriggled madly all round us, and we had to dodge them. One caught at my foot, and dragged my shoe off as I pulled myself away. Several touched us as we slid down the debris into the cellar. They followed us there.
A few of the people screamed. A few fainted. The rest backed in a huddled, wide-eyed crowd toward the farthest wall. Lady Evelyn stood in front of the children, holding out her arms as if to shelter them. Steel came and stood in front of her.
“Dear lady,” he said, “these have been the best days of my life—since we met. I should have been a better man if I had met you before.” She smiled very sweetly at him.
“I like you greatly, Mr. Steel,” she said.
The rouged woman came and took the baby from me, and I tried to pull the professor back; but he would not come. Viva ran out from the crowd and put her arms round me. The tendrils drew nearer and nearer. Some came along the ceiling, hanging their heads like snakes. Others crawled along the floor, raising themselves as if to dart at us. I do not know whether they saw us, heard us or smelt us, or how they knew where we were; but they knew.
They were within a yard of the professor, and still he did not move; only took the burning candle from the bottle, and railed at them as if they could hear. I thought that he had gone mad.
“Do you think man has learned nothing in his thousand generations?” he shouted. “That you can crush him with the brute strength of a few days? Come and see! Come and see!”
The foremost tentacle wound round him; began to lift him. He felt it carefully with his hands. “It is dry,” he shouted—“dry!”
Then he put the candle to it!
There was a wilderness of white light. Then a purple darkness. I heard the professor fall. When our eyes recovered from their dazed blindness the weed was utterly gone. The daylight was streaming into the hole in the wall, and the professor was picking himself up from the floor. His hair and beard were badly singed, and his eyebrows were gone.
“It dried too fast,” he told us, with a queer angry chuckle. “That was its weakness. It dried—dried——”
He kept on repeating the word in a dull, aimless tone. The rest repeated it vacantly after him. Viva was the first to speak coherently—a faint whisper in my ear.
“My dear!” she said. “My dear!”
Lady Evelyn spoke next—to ex-card sharper Steel.
“The world begins afresh,” she said; “and—you have met me, Mr. Steel.”
The tears rolled down her cheek and his, and they stood smiling at each other.
“The world begins afresh,” the professor called in a loud voice. “Come with me and make it a better world.” He strode toward the light, but some held back.
“The weed!” they cried timorously.
“The weed has gone—burned in an instant, from the end of the world to the end of the world!” he assured them. “Follow me.”
We followed him out of the darkness into the sunlight. It was a mild, bright day for November, and a pleasant air.
The weed had disappeared entirely, as the professor predicted; and, speaking generally, the conflagration had been too sudden to do much harm; but most of the buildings had subsided upon the sudden destruction of the weed-roots which had undermined them. Here and there houses, stones and timber had caught fire; and in many districts the fire spread, and lasted for days.
The statistics, which are being prepared in the New Department for the Service of the People, over which I have the honor to preside, are not yet quite complete; but I may mention that seventeen per cent. of the buildings on the north of the Thames are found to have been destroyed, and ninety-three per cent. on the south—the wind having blown mainly in that direction; and that the destruction of property in Great Britain and Ireland generally is roughly estimated at fifty-five per cent.
The adventures of our little band, after we came out from our hiding-place, scarcely belong to this story; but I must set down a few events which stand out in red letters in our calendar of the world after the Gray Weed.
Upon the first afternoon we learned that there were other survivors—which we had not dared to hope—by finding a man, woman and child nearly dead with hunger and fright, hiding in a basement. We formed ourselves at once into small parties to go round London, wherever houses yet stood, and rang the church bells, and blew trumpets, and beat drums, and shouted to all those who remained to come out. Here and there frightened groups of white-faced, famished, disheveled people answered the call. As our numbers increased we sent parties to search the cellars and other hiding-places, and rescued many at their last gasp. The total number of survivors in London, where the percentage of deaths was highest, amounts to some 35,000.
Upon the second day we obtained several replies to our calls by telegraph to the provinces; and the next day we were in telegraphic communication with most parts of the United Kingdom and even the Continent. In almost all towns at least one or two persons had escaped. In some parts the Gray Weed had left open spaces, or a few houses, to which people could flee, and only a portion of those who reached them had died from starvation. In a few instances it was alleged to have refrained from injuring those with whom it came in contact. Also it failed to crush many of the ships which it seized at sea—the sea-growths generally being less virulent than those on land. So far as our statistics go at present, we hope that nearly one-eighth of the population of Europe has survived.
On the fourth day the first train from the provinces to London was run; and several ships, which the weed had overgrown without injuring, came into port. After this, traffic was rapidly re-established.
A fortnight later our present government was provisionally established. The professor, whom all hailed as their deliverer, refused office himself; but upon his nomination I was appointed to my present position. Several of our little band were assigned important posts, including Steel—now known by another name, and married to Lady Evelyn—and Viva, who is presiding over the London Homes for Orphans, until our marriage. The day after tomorrow a newspaper appears.
We have toiled unremittingly to reconstruct the social and commercial life of the country, and not without success. We have few luxuries, but no wants; fewer workers, but no drones; fewer to love—but we love more—I think the world will go well, now, because we love one another so much.
“The Gray Weed has solved the problems of poverty, envy, crime and strife, which have puzzled mankind for ages,” the professor said, just before he died. “Don’t cry, little Viva. Ah! But I felt a tear on my hand! There is nothing to cry about, my child. They have gone; and I am going; but you have learned to love. It is all for the best!”
“All—for—the—best,” he repeated at the last, and smiled. That is his message to you to whom I write, dear friends.
With Caste Against Him
BY HUGH PENDEXTER
TIBERIUS Smith in love was a spectacle I had never conjured up. Billy Campbell, the strolling actor and his patron’s Boswell, had pictured the old showman to me as being arrested for a spy in Russia, for a madman in France, for a too active Carlist in Spain and for smuggling opium in China, but he had never hinted at sentiment. I had taken it for granted that Smith’s many wanderings over the face of the earth with his various theatrical enterprises and circuses had eliminated any inclination for love-sickness, and it seems it had until he met the lord’s daughter.
That was like Smith. It was impossible to conceive of him as married and settled down, and when he did fall in love it was his characteristic to indulge in a hopeless passion. For all that, the lord’s daughter was forced to see him at his best, sturdy and resourceful, when others failed her, and I doubt not but that this knowledge was sadly sweet to the old showman, and that in after years he enjoyed diagnosing the climax and realizing it was superbly dramatic. If she ignored his existence at first, he had the keen pleasure of knowing she had only him to rely on at a most critical finale and that her world was better, much better, for his having lived.
Possibly the trick could have been turned without him, turned in a prosaic manner with some bloodshed and a great waste of gunpowder. But when a lovely girl is the stake, be she a lord’s daughter or a queen from the masses, it is sometimes advisable to finesse. And Tiberius, if slightly melodramatic, solved the problem as he could only do, and as only he could do—that is, in an unusual manner. Campbell used to style him the “assassin of adversity,” and his peculiar faculty of rescuing the weak from undesirable situations was, perhaps, never better demonstrated than when, with cutter bars down, he restored the English girl to her people and incidentally introduced the uses and abuses of modern farming implements to some unsophisticated savages in a lonely Pacific isle.
I had recurred to the time when Tiberius piloted an Uncle Tom’s Cabin company up and down the land, and Billy, gazing sadly into my open grate, irrelevantly observed:
“Yes; and that was when Tib ought to have won her and settled down. He was clear daffy over that girl, and I’ll admit she was a hummer; one, you know, that would make a man abandon his grandmother in a blinding snowstorm if it pleased her. But I reckon Fate had other work cut out for Tiberius besides spooning, love in a cottage and no money for the iceman and all that sort of stuff. Yes, it was fully ten years ago that the Kalanke broke her propeller.”
“You are speaking of a boat?” I inquired.
“Lord bless you, yes. The Kalanke was one of Lord Blam’s boats; ran from the Coast to Australia. You see, Tib got the bee that an Uncle Thomas show would take in Australia like four squaws in a no-limit game; and once he had outlined the bill of fare, there were plenty of us come-ons pushing out our plates and begging for a helping. I suppose that when it came to the realm of pure “con” there wasn’t a hypnotist doing a mail order business that could lay it on quite so succulent and plausible as he. Lord, we had to believe him. He believed in himself.
“‘Why, Harriet,’ he cried, drawing up his dear, fat old form and looking more honest than any real estate dealer you ever kenned; ‘why, Harriet, don’t linger over the paltry twelve dollars a week I’m supposed to pay you. Don’t even hesitate. Forget that part of it. Imagine you are paying me for the chance to go. Picture, if you please, Opportunity, clean-shaven and bald-headed, gliding by your door in a seventy-eight horse-power gasolene romp-about at the mirk hour of midnight with you chloroformed and locked in your gilded cage. Picture me with a jiu-jitsu strangle hold on Oppo, detaining him until you can come to, slip into your Horse Show gown and come down and relieve me. Then you are feasting your magnetic orbs on truth. Why, the people down there will be so worked up over your “Papa, dear papa, set Uncle Tom free,” that they’ll wreck your hotel with showers of gold.’
“She was a slim, ingrowing woman, who always played the Little Eva parts and was the teariest thing ever between the wings. Clarence, her husband, booked for Legree, balked a little and said he’d stand a blankety, blank, all blanks, nice chance of getting his showers in lead after he’d massacred Thomas. But Tib poured a little balm into his wounds, and that was how we came to hop the Kalanke for Australia.
“The boat was one of Lord Blam’s new line and was fixed up regardless. Besides the passengers, she did quite a freight business and carried our lots of horses and farm implements. Our troupe traveled second class except Tib, who always went the limit—or walked. Besides the company there weren’t many passengers aboard, as it was in the dull season; but we hadn’t cuffed the deep blue for more than two days before Tib met his fate.
“She was the English girl, all blue eyes, and peaches for complexion; and Tib haunted her usual promenade like a mosquito. She was the lord’s only daughter and was making a flying trip to Sydney, where her father lay ill. She had hurried from Washington to ’Frisco and caught the boat with her maid. The Captain was the rest of her bodyguard. But Tib had the Captain solid at the go-in, and through him and his own gall he managed to speak to Miss Mary.
“She was about as approachable as the Eiffel Tower. She was the first bit of peerage I had ever seen traveling alone, and I would prefer trying to get chummy with an iceberg to speaking to her. But a man or a woman had to be armor plate to withstand Tib when he put himself out, and at the end of one day he had made her laugh; then she got a bit interested in him and I knew he was spinning romance.
“When he got to giving his Vermont family an old chateau environment and spoke of the good old days at ‘The Oaks,’ and his father’s pack of hounds, aristocracy wanted to crawl into a safe deposit vault and slam the door or get scalped. He could jam more poetry and pâté de foie gras breeding into his round form and look more dreamy passion from his pleading eyes than any man that ever made a house believe a bum show was a good one. He was all right, I tell you, and if Little Eva hadn’t butted in when we were doing things to the equator, and asked him to come down and play stud-poker in the smoking-room, I reckoned he’d have won a few plighted troths anyway. I shall always believe he had her clinging to the ropes when Eva made the fatal stab.
“‘Do you know those people in the second cabin?’ demanded Her Lordship with an eighty-two degrees north voice.
“Tib groaned and tore his brown hair and admitted he owned us. ‘The vase is broken,’ he cried. ‘I’ve got the bell and it’s back to the barriers.’
“Well, he felt so bad over that girl that he almost wept. It wa’n’t her titled papa, or the coat of arms; it was just a case of She. When he was talking to her he forgot he was merely a showman. He believed all about the old ivy-covered manse and the hounds. Why, I’ve even heard him call the pups by name. And his father never owned anything more blue-blooded than a sheepdog.
“‘Billy,’ he said to me as we smoked down aft, ‘I never met a girl yet I felt so soft over. I know I’m older than she by some years, but I keep my age locked up in the baggage-room and we might have been happy if not for Little Eva.’
“And Miss English was mad. She scolded the Captain for presenting Tib, and told him her father would do things once we’d sighted old earth. And the Captain was on the anxious seat, for her father was his meal ticket and had delegated him to fetch out his daughter O. K. But on the next night we began to forget it, when we steamed into the heart of a flying wedge of terrific winds.
“I decided that if ever we got ashore it would be to have the folks come down to the beach and look at us and say, ‘How natural they look.’ Some of the gingerbread works were carried away the first night of the blow, and whenever the wind let up a bit the live stock would throw in a few ensembles that made one pray for more breeze. Yet the boat behaved well, and if something hadn’t happened to the propeller we’d have come through in rare form. But when the chief engineer began to parade out his kit and try to mend things while standing on his head I knew the game was getting serious. Now we were bumped by every billow, and I heard a petty officer whisper that we were being driven far from our course.
“At last the kick stopped, or else we’d slipped out of the storm zone, and at about three o’clock in the morning we dropped anchor near a dear little island that the Captain couldn’t name with any great degree of exactness.
“The anchorage was so good and the water so smooth that our engineer said it would be easy to take the boat to pieces and put it together without losing even a shingle nail. Well, you can indulge in a small wager that we were all up and happy when we came near enough to smell the land. The sky was clear and peppered over with incandescent lights, and Tib felt so good that he waltzed up to the She Saxon and observed: ‘I regret you have been inconvenienced by the storm.’
“Say, she just turned and dragged her two sapphires up and down his anatomy as if he were a seven-leaf clover. Then she stabbed him four times with as many glances and turned and walked forward to the Captain. Cap wheeled around with his lips pursed up to say something unwholesome, but seeing who it was he swallowed it, and it hurt. Then she asked something in a low voice and he shook his head slowly. Then she stamped her hoof and he seemed to give way. At last he called a man to him and gave some orders. The next thing we knew a boat was dropped and she was being rowed ashore by four sailors.
“‘Isn’t it rather dangerous to let the lady go ashore?’ asked Tib of the Captain.
“This gave the Captain a fine chance to ease his mind, and he did it by pouring out his whole heart to Tib in a comprehensive flow of profanity. He cursed Tib up hill and down, but Tib was so round it all glanced off. Cap told him that Miss Mary had gone ashore to get rid of his presence. Tib shuddered. Then the Cap reminded him that a British skipper takes sass from no one except the owners, and ordered him back with the rest of us. Another gilt braid sneaked up and told Tib the Cap meant nothing, that he was only feeling cross at being delayed. As to Miss Mary, he swore she was as safe when guarded by the four tars as she would be on her father’s deck. Besides, the island was probably vacant, he added, and she would take a short stroll on the beach beneath the stars and then return. But Tib was uneasy. He said no one could ever diagnose the disposition of the average cut-up residing on an oceanian isle. ‘Billy,’ he concluded, ‘I’m cut to the heart. She won’t even look at the same ocean with me.’
“In about an hour’s time, just as the sun was lazily crawling out of his bed of blue—say, old chap, that sounds voluptuous as well as poetic, doesn’t it?—well, as the sun appeared there came to our ears a loud cry from the beach, and we could see some dots bobbing up and down trying to act intelligent. In two jumps the Captain shot off in a boat, and, without seeming to touch land, was back again on the run.
“The lord’s daughter had been carried off by the natives, was the startling intelligence he fed out to his officers. It seems she wanted to walk up a little hill and get a view of the sea, and, although the sailors protested, she had ordered them to remain behind; and, like idiots, they obeyed her. Then they heard a smothered scream and ran to the rescue, only to meet with a shower of spears and clubs and to witness a large band of barefooted taxpayers making off with the skirts. One of the sailors had his arm broken, another had a spear through his shoulder, and all were badly bruised and battered. The Captain was crazy. He ordered his men to arm and rush to the rescue. At first he was going to lead them, but some of his officers soothed him down a bit and made him see his place was with the boat. It was not only necessary to rescue Miss Mary, but the tub must be in condition to carry her away when she was recovered.
“But when Tib asked permission to join the posse the Captain broke loose again and swore he’d have the boss in irons. If it hadn’t been for Tib it never would have happened, he cried. I chipped in then and reminded him Her Lordship was too high and mighty to hunt for an exit just to avoid a mere man, and I closed with the Stars and Stripes and our consul in Australia. This distracted his attention a bit, for he forgot Tib in swearing at our consular service.
“‘Billy,’ groaned Tib, ‘I guess the Cap is right, and I’m to blame for her going ashore. But these volunteers will never get her by hunting the brownies with a brass band.’
“Well, we put in several long hours of waiting, and then two men returned and said reinforcements were needed, as the men had discovered a large village a few miles inland, which they didn’t dare to attack alone.
“‘Guess you’d better let some of the passengers chip into this game now,’ advised Tib.
“The Captain began to rave again, but, seeing that the men left were needed in making repairs, he had to give in. Just then some more of the crew came back to the beach and, once aboard, panted that the colored folk were getting aggressive and wouldn’t even wait to be attacked.
“‘To the boats, men!’ cried the Captain, while the steward served out howitzers.
“Before the order could be obeyed the officers and the rest of the gang rushed down to the beach. Their news was worst of all. They said the heathens had produced Her Lordship in view of all and had threatened to kill her if her friends didn’t beat a retreat.
“‘If we show violence she’s lost,’ sobbed one of the men.
“The Captain was dazed. He was brave enough and would gladly fight to the last gasp; but he didn’t want to recover Miss Mary dead. He tried to mumble something about strategy, and Tib caught it. It was the psychological moment for him.
“‘If you’ll turn the management of this show over to me I’ll go and get her,’ he said simply.
“Some jeered him in wild anger, some eyed him in amazement, and others were ready to grasp at any suggestion.
“‘I mean it,’ he repeated firmly, drawing up his fat form and beginning to radiate heart waves. ‘Force will avail nothing, except to kill the lady. Do as I say and let the galleries back me and a few of my men, and I honestly believe we can turn the riffle.’
“Discipline was lost sight of as all clamored for pointers. ‘Hoist up a few mowing machines from the hold, drop twice as many horses over into the surf, while the carpenters are knocking together a float. Then ferry the grass clippers ashore and have your mechanics put them together. That’s the scenario.’
“Some said he was crazy, but I believed he could fill his hand if they let him alone, and the Captain asked if he intended to palm off the mowers as machine guns.
“‘If they can’t recognize a mowing machine you don’t expect ’em to be conversant with Maxims, do you?’ groaned Tib. ‘No; I’ll play ’em as mowing machines and win out at that. I believe they’ll be big medicine with the natives.’
“Of course the Captain pooh-poohed the scheme. He said the niggers would kill the lass before the paraphernalia could be thrown together.
“‘And while you’re doing nothing and can think of nothing to do, they may kill her,’ cried Tib. ‘And her blood be upon your head! Mine is the only plan that’s been advanced, and it is practical. It’s unusual, but you can’t impress these folks with shotguns. It’s got to be something new in the way of scenic effect. If I had an airship I’d use that. But I haven’t. We can use the mowing machines and stagger the banditti. We can start in three hours if you’ll only give the word. Besides, I shall want the full chorus to follow with their batteries. You lose nothing, unless it be me and some of my friends and the machines.’
“‘Hoist ’em up,’ commanded the Captain, and the gang caught Tib’s enthusiasm.
“‘Now, who’s game for a little romp?’ asked Tib gently of us actors, his brown eyes collecting in two needle points. ‘I want my own men for the leading parts in this deal. Now, who’s game?’
“Of course I said I was, as I owed him poker money. Little Eva’s husband said if he could have one more drink he’d play tag with the devil, and Uncle Tom was on if he didn’t have to black up. Tib wanted one more operator, and a young fellow that was coming out to hold down a stool in his father’s branch house in Sydney agreed to chip in if he could have time to write something sad to his parents. Tib reminded him the postman wouldn’t have time to collect the mail before we returned, and so the five of us made ready. The Captain ached to go, but Tib reminded him he must take command of the rear-guard.
“I was for grabbing up a papaw root and dashing blindly into the weeds, but Tib held us all back as he outlined his scheme more fully. The mowing machines would dazzle the natives, he contended, and while he and his men were trifling with the aborigines’ superstitions the Captain and his bullies were to rush in, surround the captive, or else cover Tib’s retreat, once he had rescued her. And say! You never saw men work as did those boys on the Kalanke. The donkey engine was mounted in a trice and the big crates, containing the mowing machines, intended for peaceful pastoral scenes, were yanked out on deck. By that time the carpenters had put a raft together and the clippers were soon ashore with a bevy of mechanics impatiently waiting to get in their work. When the different parts of the machines had been assembled and joined each to his neighbor, some half-crazed draft horses came through the surf and were promptly caught. Then boxes of harness were ripped open, and there we were, as gay a cluster of charioteers as you would meet with outside a star production of ‘Ben Hur.’
“Tib, as the head Mazeppa, jumped onto the first auto completed and tested the gearing. Then with his hat tipped jauntily over his right ear he reminded the Captain that the crew should loiter not too far in the rear, but always out of sight of the enemy, until we gave the signal to advance, three pistol shots. Then he cried, ‘Cutter bars up!’ and away we clanked around the base of the low hill.
“We had received tips as to the course to take, and it would have done your heart good, sir, could you have seen us in that bringing-in-the-sheaves effect. We only needed wide-brimmed straw hats, with handkerchiefs knotted carelessly about our throats, to be the village heroes in the average rural melodrama.
“The land, lucky for us, lay flat and hard baked by the sun, once we were around the hill. Then Tib’s good sense in picking his own men was demonstrated. Always in the lead as we trundled over the hard ground, he had only to move his hand to cause us to catch the signal and obey. Back of us, scuttling through the occasional brush, was our bodyguard, and the glint of the sun on the gun metal was a wonderful antidote for homesickness. In advance a fringe of woods told where the English girl was held captive. We expected to encounter outposts, but I reckon the foe measured our love for a woman by their own standard and couldn’t conceive of a man risking his life to save a squaw.
“At last we struck the shade and sure enough found a broad avenue between the trees, just as the boatswain had mapped out. Then came another level stretch, only not so long as the first, bounded by a slight rise. It was just beyond this that the village was located. We approached as slyly as we could and cautiously gained the top without being interrupted. Just below us was the encampment, consisting of several scores of low huts. They were arranged like the spokes of a wheel, with broad streets radiating from the centre. The voters were having a big powwow, and they made so much noise that they had failed to catch the sound of our steeds or wheels.
“‘Now, children, list,’ commanded Tib. ‘I’m going to drive straight ahead. Billy will wend his way to the right and pick up the first spoor, followed by Simon Legree, who takes the second trail. Uncle Tom takes the first left aisle, followed by young Add Six and Carry Two. And we’ll form a cluster, God willing, in the centre of the exposition, where there seems to be a commodious green. Attention! Cutter bars down! Forward, trot!’
“And we five chauffeurs dashed into the hippodrome in the most ridiculous fashion. Tib bounced up and down like a rubber ball, and to fall from the seat meant a badly sliced up white man. But the effect was stupendous. I reckon the brunettes never before gazed on such wags as we must have appeared to be. Bang! Smash! we rode through their rotten village, and the machines needed oiling. Of all the rasping, clattering noises you ever heard, sir! Black nightmares rushed to get out of the way as we cleaned out the lanes.
“Snip! snip! and Tib had shaved off the corner of a mud villa. Crunch! and Simon picked up a totem pole. Every tooth in those five cutter bars was working and the collateral we chewed up didn’t do ’em a bit of good. But, as Tib said, it was only a one-night stand and our game was to sell tickets and ramble away. So on we careened, the horses wild with fright, now and then the shears picking up a brown toe as some devotee fell prostrate in his flight and babbled a cast-iron prayer to some burglar-proof god. It simply swept them off their feet, sir. Before they woke up we had entered the middle square.
“And if there wasn’t Her Lordship, trussed up between two poles, white as death!
“‘If you’ll pardon the bucolic style of my turnout, dear lady, I should be felicitated to have you accompany me back to the ship,’ cried Tib cheerily as he slashed her free and held her so she would not fall. And during it all he was apparently oblivious to the frescoes of black faces staring in stupid awe in the background.
“‘Can it be I’m saved!’ she whimpered, brushing back her twenty-two-carat hair with an uncertain gesture.
“‘Tut, tut,’ cried Tib heartily as he took her hand and tripped a merry morris toward his chariot. ‘I guess there’s no danger. These people are simply crude in their deportment and evidently believed you some wandering goddess and would detain you awhile.’
“‘You are a brave and a good man,’ she choked.
“‘I guess your hosts think me the devil. Excuse me, lady,’ salaamed Tib.
“‘Never a man took greater risk,’ she murmured.
“‘An Uncle Tom’s Cabin company, lady, will take any risk, or anything outside a church,’ replied Tib. ‘Whoa, Montezuma. Now hop up here on my knee. These bronze pieces will come to their senses in a second.’
“And when Her Lordship jumped up into his arms the wonder-stricken gang gave a howl and came out of their trance. We countermarched in those rigs so that Tib had the lead when we quit the plaza, but not before one big buck, attired in a war club and a workmanlike spear, gave a grunt of disapproval and raised his trowel behind Tib’s back. I had been expecting one of them would draw to that card, and while his arm was pulled back I pinked him from the hip, and the sunlight was turned off so far as he was concerned. But they didn’t mind crowding into hell so long as they could regain the woman, and my shot took the Japanese out of only one of them. And as we swarmed up the slight rise they came yowling along behind us, disturbing the peace in a variety of ways. But just as Simon Legree fired three shots in quick succession a fringe of strained-faced tars popped over the crest in front, preceded by the busy end of their repeaters. Under cover of their diversion we gained the top and bounced down on the other side with the neighbors renewing their pursuit.
“Just as everything began to look cozy and homelike my pair of Jaspers decided they were afraid of the ocean, and, hang me, if they didn’t turn about and caper back right in the face of the dancing spearmen. I couldn’t hold ’em, and so I just dropped the cutter bar and pulled out my junk, only expecting to muss a few of ’em up before I was registered. My friends began to howl behind me, and I tossed a glance over my shoulder and beheld old Tiberius coming along after me like a madman, his machine jumping and swaying, and he with a big gun in each hand yelling like a fiend. He had tossed Her Lordship to the sailors and was back to play in my drama. Then the heat of it got into my blood, and as Tib drew up beside me I gave a war cry and urged the brutes onward still faster.
“I knew if we tried to turn we were down and out, and that our only show was to put up a bold front and scare the enemy off the ridge. The sailors were now popping away merrily, and just as we had gone the limit the foe threw up the sponge and scampered back down the other side of the rise.
“Maybe we were several hours retreating to the beach! When we got there the whole bunch fell on Tib’s neck and pawed his round form affectionately, the Captain leading in the demonstration. Tib drove them away, but when we got aboard and Her Lordship rushed upon him and throwing both arms about his neck, pressed her red lips with a resounding and most plebeian smack on his chin, you could have heard him blush. It was the first time I had ever known him to lose his nerve. He made a clean break-away and bowing low said something in a murmur and it was all over. Of course she thanked us all, but she realized that Tib was the guiding light.
“To ring off; we left the machines and horses for the natives to get up guessing parties with, and with our machinery repaired steamed out to the open water. Tib never made any advances to Her Lordship after once aboard, although she eyed him with a soft look whenever they met on deck during the run to port.
“‘My old heart got foolish, boy,’ he remarked to me the night we landed, ‘but it’s beating all right now.’ Yet he always kept a handkerchief she dropped.
“And wherever the show played Tib coined money by the barrel, for Her Lordship’s people boomed his game early and late. But Tib got to believing it was because the show was so good. For, you see, he’d explain to me as he counted the receipts, ‘Little Eva is dying better every night.’”
Corrupt Practices in Elections
BY HON. LUCIUS F. C. GARVIN
Ex-Governor of Rhode Island
EFFORTS to expose bribery and other corrupt practices in elections are met with the cry, You are defaming the state! If there are governmental evils, we are told, prove them to the bottom and correct them quietly. Such a course may be feasible if applied to a private business, but in public affairs, in the nature of the case, it cannot be successful. Certainly none of the persons who directly profit by such practices will correct them—not the “respectable” men of means who furnish the funds and who do so with a view to recouping themselves in some way as a result of the election; not the workers who handle the corruption fund, taking good care to see that they themselves are rewarded for the trouble and risk involved; not the individuals who pocket the money disbursed, and in this way become always morally, and often criminally, confederates; nor, finally, the few who secure the offices through fraudulent methods. In fact, nothing has been found effective outside of that strongest of all influences in a free country, the force of public opinion. The many, who are made aware of the iniquity by suffering from it, have every inducement to end it.
Over and over again, in great crises, the American people have shown themselves to be patriotic, honest and wise. This has happened whenever the masses have been aroused by serious threats of danger, either external or internal.
The real danger to our institutions lies, not in great crises, but rather in a gradual, almost insensible, deterioration of the government, due either to a lack of vigilance on the part of the people or to a paralysis of their latent powers.
While it is possible that the immense fund of good will and good sense possessed by the American people may be expended in private pursuits and thus diverted from a control of their own government, the far greater danger is that the mighty influences being put forth at almost every election will rupture completely the natural dependence of public officials upon the electorate.
In order to cure any wrongdoing it is needful, first, to ascertain definitely wherein the wrong consists, and, secondly, to fix with equal definiteness upon an adequate remedy.
The crudest, the most demoralizing and the most common method of withholding the hands of the sovereign people from the control of their government is the direct bribery of voters. This means of thwarting the wishes of the majority dates back to the early history of the country. Our system of so-called majority election by districts, placing, as it often does, the balance of power in a small minority of the electorate, invites the purchase of the votes of individuals. It has proved easy both to estimate the number of votes needed to turn the scale and to find out the particular voters who can be so influenced.
Upon the original plan of buying individual voters at retail, the improvement has been made of purchasing en bloc—the money to be paid over only in case of delivery of the goods. In this modern bribery by wholesale the venal voters organize, choose an agent to conduct negotiations and sell the entire block of votes to the highest bidder. When success is achieved, as shown by the count of the ballots, hundreds of dollars are paid to the agent and by him distributed to the members of the gang.
But, whatever the details of the transaction, a long experience has shown that, in a multitude of small constituencies a few dollars placed in the hand of a voter are sufficient to outweigh every consideration of patriotism or enlightened self-interest. Wherever this habitually occurs, the rule of a few moneyed men has been substituted for a government by the people.
In the elections of large cities, of populous states and of the nation at large, it can seldom happen that bribery of voters, either by retail or wholesale, is sufficient to alter the result. To supply this deficiency other means are more and more being resorted to. To assure success, where the number of voters renders the simpler measure for overcoming the people’s will unreliable, party managers now make use of finesse and fraud.
The finesse consists in “packing” the primary meetings and conventions of the rival party for the purpose of nominating weak opposing candidates. Nearly every local party may be differentiated into two factions, both desirous of success, but the one occupying morally a very much higher plane than the other. The rich party, taking advantage of this division in the ranks of its opponents, furnishes funds and votes to aid the baser faction, upon condition, of course, that, having gained control of the nomination, candidates will be put up of such a character as to drive away the better element from their support.
In consequence of these manipulations, when election day comes around, the poorer party is found with a so-called “yellow dog” ticket in the field—that is to say, a ticket composed of unfit and unknown men, clearly inferior to the pliant respectabilities who have been placed in nomination by the richer party.
It sometimes happens that even this political trick fails to assure success. Either the better faction of the opposing party wins, or, notwithstanding the inferiority of the ticket named, it may promise to receive a majority of the votes cast. In this exigency the managers of the party which is fully supplied with the sinews of war do not hesitate at direct fraud. That is to say, they expend large sums of money in hiring election officials to betray their trusts at the risk of going to jail.
One method adopted, where the law provides an official ballot, is to get from the officials having charge of the ballots one or more to be marked for the voter by heelers outside of the polling-room. This furnishes a sure method of bribery, for the venal voter, after depositing the ballot thus prepared for him, returns an unmarked ballot to the briber, as a guarantee of good faith, to be marked by him for the use of the next person bought. In this way one or more endless chains of purchased votes may be run all day, through the connivance of some election officer. This was done in Pawtucket, R. I., and at other places in that state, on the eighth of last November.
But as the number of venal voters in a polling precinct is limited, so there is a limit to the effect attainable by giving out to heelers the official ballots designed for use in the voting booth only.
What more, then, can be done in the way of modern chicanery and criminality?
Election officers may be bought, and are bought, to defraud their fellow-citizens in a variety of ways. For instance, there is a very considerable percentage of illiterate voters in most states, many of whom desire to give their suffrage to the candidates of one of the poorer parties. But the richest party has paid the election officials, who assist the illiterate voters, to mark all such ballots for its candidates. Evidence exists that this was done systematically at the recent Presidential and state election in the city of Providence, R. I., a sufficient number of voters thus being deceived to turn the scale in the filling of one or more important offices.
Inasmuch as there is a limit to the number of illiterate voters, even that base fraud, added to direct bribery, may not effect the desired reversal of the people’s will. But the moneyed party has other resources.
In order to annul votes already cast for opposing candidates, it may hire the election officers to make additional marks upon the ballots before they are counted. In this way in the city of Providence, R. I., at the last election many votes for Augustus S. Meller, the Democratic candidate for mayor, were rendered void—fortunately, however, not in sufficient numbers to prevent his election.
And not even yet has the corrupted election officer reached the full extent of his ability to defraud. It still is possible for him to miscount votes; or he may announce the result falsely—for example, by revising the total number of votes given to the candidates, when the real majority proves to be adverse to his suborned wishes.
In case there is a Returning Board, whose duty it is to make a second and final count of the votes cast, as is the law in the city of Providence and the state of Rhode Island, that board, too, or its controlling members, may be partisan and corrupt.
At the late election in Rhode Island all the ballots for state officers and for Presidential electors were in possession of a partisan Returning Board, of which the chairman of the Republican State Central Committee was the head, for a period of three full weeks before the counting began. If there were miscounts in certain voting districts on election day, it was easily possible for members of that Returning Board to open the sealed packages of ballots, make such changes as were necessary in order to have the ballots conform roughly to the previously announced figures, and then to reseal without the fraud being detected.
But, it may be asked, where are the courts while such frauds are being perpetrated? Why are not these criminal election officers punished? Unfortunately, the courts, too, are frequently partisan, especially the lower courts, before which the cases are first brought.
After the election of last November in Rhode Island, three cases were brought before the inferior courts—one for bribery, one for posing as an illiterate voter and one against an election officer in charge of a ballot-box for allowing the deposit by voters of sham instead of official ballots. Each of these causes was brought before a different local judge, and all were thrown out of court. Several days before election it was known that immunity had been promised to hesitating and apprehensive election officers. “The Republican Party controls the courts,” they were told, “and would see that no punishment was meted out to them for unlawful acts.”
It is needless to say that, if corrupt practices in elections continue to increase, the end of popular government in this country is in sight. Already there exists a widespread and deep-seated distrust of the result of elections. Instances could be given, occurring within the past ten years, in which a very large proportion of the voters interested, perhaps a majority of those voting, believe that the wrong candidate was inducted into office.
Certainly no duty is more pressing than to see to it that in every election the unbiased and unbought will of the people be recorded.
Is there a remedy? And, if so, what is it? My conviction is, that we only need to carry out the intent of the founders of this government. They blazed the way; we must make a clear and beaten track along that way.
By a republican form of government the Revolutionary statesmen meant two things, which now are not carried out. They meant that every state, and the nation as well, should possess a legislative body, representative of the will of the people. Nowhere does this exist, not even where honest elections assure a free ballot and a fair count. Neither in ability nor in opinion do state legislatures by their acts represent a majority of their constituents, except by accident. Nor will they represent the people until each political party, whether large or small, elects its due proportion of the members. That is to say, a party which casts forty-five per cent. of the total vote for representatives must have forty per cent. of the legislature, and the party which casts five per cent. of the total vote must have five per cent. of the legislature. Then only will statute law be framed in accordance with the will of a majority of the people.
The other part of our republican form of government, as understood and intended by American statesmen of the eighteenth century, was that a majority of the people should directly control the organic law. To this end they had the state constitutions framed by the people, acting through delegates chosen to conventions for that sole purpose, but not in effect until submitted to the electors and adopted by a majority of the votes cast for and against. In like manner the referendum was provided for in case of subsequent amendments.
It was thought, also, that a popular initiative for constitutional changes was created, in the authority given to legislatures to submit amendments; but, alas, time has shown that those legislatures, being unrepresentative of the people, refuse to submit amendments, however extensively demanded by public sentiment.
Hence the necessity of giving the power to propose constitutional amendments, as has lately been done in South Dakota, Utah and Oregon, to a reasonable minority (in those states eight per cent.) of the voters. When the popular initiative shall thus have been added to the referendum already existing for making changes in the organic law of our states, all else will take care of itself.
The amendment pending in the Rhode Island Legislature, and known there as the constitutional initiative, reads in substance as follows:
Eight per cent. of the legal voters of the state may propose specific and particular amendments to this constitution by filing with the Secretary of State, not less than three months nor more than nine months prior to any state election, a petition that the electors may, at such election, cast their ballots for or against such amendments. Any proposition thus made shall be submitted to the electors by the Secretary of State at said election, and, if then approved by a majority of the electors of the state present and voting thereon, it shall, ninety days thereafter, become a part of the Constitution of the state.
To elect a legislature in any state committed to such an amendment calls for not only a widespread but an aggressive public sentiment in its favor. As a rule the organization of the party dominant in the state will strenuously oppose the adoption of the amendment.
A party continuously in power, no matter what its name or avowed principles, is sure to frown upon radical measures. The complete control of the organic law of a state by a majority of its voters means a future political situation hitherto unknown. The effect upon present party leaders and upon partisan organizations cannot be foreseen in full, but that it will be tremendous no one can doubt.
But if the individuals, who are enjoying the state offices, are opposed to a political upheaval of any kind, the parties which are permanently in the minority feel very differently. Their organizations and their members will welcome any reasonable reform which promises to alter materially the existing unsatisfactory situation. Also in sympathy with a reform so meritorious and non-partisan would undoubtedly be found a considerable portion of the adherents of the dominant party.
Yet even with a clear majority of the voters of any state earnestly in favor of a given amendment to the constitution, it does not follow that its adoption would be easy. In every state, with scarcely an exception, it is the party whose membership comprises nine-tenths of the total wealth, which, with few brief and partial interruptions, controls every department of the government. For the past decade this has been the situation more than ever before, and every year finds the power of money to determine the results of elections gaining in strength—notwithstanding a rising public sentiment against abuses which are ignored, if not encouraged, by the authorities.
The situation seems almost hopeless, as is very near being the case, if the reforming elements pursue for the future the same course as in the past.
If the leader of the party in power were permitted to dictate the action of opponents, his command would be: “Divide your forces.” Its boss would say: “Split among yourselves into several separate and distinct parties, attack one another with the same virulence that you attack me. Call yourselves Democrats, Populists, Socialists, Prohibitionists, Labor, and have whatever platforms or principles you please. In fact, the stronger and nobler the men and the issues over which the small parties wave their banners the better I am pleased, for the more minute will be the subdivision and the more attractive and combative each fractional part.”
And these hopelessly minor parties offer few inducements to the dissatisfied members of the major party to change their political affiliations. Such a transfer is altogether too much like removing one’s bed on a bitter cold night from a warm room to a vacant lot. Discomforts, and even hardships, patriotic citizens may be willing to endure, but they can scarcely be blamed for refusing to embrace them merely for the fun of being come-outers.
In order to contend successfully against the party in power, however well known its abuses, there must be a co-operation of the dissatisfied and antagonistic voters. By co-operation it is not meant that an attempt should be made to create a single party with a platform composed of the planks of half a dozen parties. Such a composite is but a rope of sand; and, in fact, the stringing together of a collection of unrelated questions, such as prohibition, socialism and labor, is quite as likely to end in mutual hostilities as in a combined charge upon the common enemy.
The use of money for carrying a state election by corrupt practices can only be offset by the exercise of great wisdom on the part of those who depend upon other agencies. The second party, which in the Northern states generally means the Democratic, must furnish the nucleus about which the third, fourth and fifth parties gather. Indeed, it devolves upon the second party to invite the other minor parties to join forces with it. And, in order to have such invitation accepted, it must fix upon one or two paramount issues so fundamental and important as to attract strongly all who are offended with the doings of the party in power. If two issues are elected, one of them may well be a constitutional amendment such as has been outlined in this article, the other might be a legislative measure—such, for instance, as direct primaries, which serve excellently the purpose of a corrupt practices act.
Each of the minor parties, besides educational work, wishes to preserve its organization and to measure its strength at each succeeding election by the number of votes cast in its support. The wish is natural and proper; but the objects aimed at can be accomplished in a state election without putting full tickets into the field. The nomination and support of a single candidate for a minor state office will fully answer both purposes.
The means of stopping most surely and speedily corrupt practices by the party in power, lies in an open and aboveboard fusion of all its opponents upon a few issues, together with a united support of one set of candidates for all offices whose incumbents can aid or hinder the adoption of the measures agreed upon. This, I believe, offers the best chance of accomplishing the very difficult task of establishing in a state good and pure government.
Pole Baker
BY WILL N. HARBEN
Author of “The Georgians,” “Abner Daniel,” etc.