TOM WATSON’S MAGAZINE
THE MAGAZINE WITH A PURPOSE BACK OF IT
June, 1905
| Editorials | Thomas E. Watson | [385] |
| Our Creed—National Politics and Policies—Is It Paul Jones’s Body?—Is the Black ManSuperior to the White?—Amending the Constitution—“Take the Children”—Paternalism—Planting Corn—Not Parson Brownlow’s Son—Mr. President!—Did You Know It?—Rural Free Delivery to Country People—Random Paragraphs—The Gods We Worship. | ||
| Poverty | John H. Girdner, M.D. | [417] |
| Tuck-of-Drum | Alfred Tressider Sheppard | [420] |
| The Southern Negro as a Property-Owner | Leonora Beck Ellis | [428] |
| A Japanese Populist | Thomas C. Hutten | [434] |
| The King’s Image | Walter E. Grogan | [437] |
| The Story of a Suppressed Populist Newspaper | Thos. H. Tibbles | [446] |
| Pole Baker (Chapters VII-IX) | Will N. Harben | [451] |
| A Phase of the Money Problem Bankers Dare Not Discuss | Albert Griffin | [463] |
| A Leaf from a Protective Tariff Catechism | Joel Benton | [467] |
| Monopoly, The Power Behind The Trust | Joseph Dana Miller | [472] |
| The Heritage of Maxwell Fair (Conclusion) | Vincent Harper | [479] |
| Educational Department | Thomas E. Watson | [497] |
| The Track Walker | Theodore Dreiser | [502] |
| The House of Cards | Ruth Sterry | [503] |
| The Say of Other Editors | [504] | |
| News Record | [508] | |
Application made for entry as Second-Class Matter at
New York (N. Y.) Post Office, March, 1905
Copyright, 1905, in U. S. and Great Britain.
Published by Tom Watson’s Magazine,
121 West 42d Street, N. Y.
TERMS: $1.00 A YEAR; 10 CENTS A NUMBER
TOM WATSON’S MAGAZINE ADVERTISER
How to Overthrow Plutocracy
Several million people in the United States are in substantial accord with the demands of the People’s Party. A majority of all voters would welcome Government Ownership of Railroads and other public utilities. The recent great victory in Chicago for Municipal Ownership demonstrates this fact. What Chicago has done locally can be accomplished in the nation—and WILL be done as soon as the people overcome
Political Inertia
With many the voting habit becomes fixed after one or two elections. The ordinary man keeps on “voting ’er straight” long after he has discovered that his party’s actions are out of joint with his own views. Party “regularity” commands the average man’s support long after he KNOWS his party is headed wrong. Some really great men, even, have placed party “regularity” before principle.
A Great Light
on the correct principle of organization is to be found in that admirable work by George Gordon Hastings,
The First American King
A dashing romance, in which a scientist and a detective of today wake up seventy-five years later to find His Majesty, Imperial and Royal, William I, Emperor of the United States and King of the Empire State of New York, ruling the land, with the real power in the hands of half a dozen huge trusts. Automobiles have been replaced by phaërmobiles; air-ships sail above the surface of the earth; there has been a successful war against Russia; a social revolution is brewing. The book is both an enthralling romance and a serious sociological study, which scourges unmercifully the society and politics of the present time, many of whose brightest stars reappear in the future under thinly disguised names. There are wit and humor and sarcasm galore—a stirring tale of adventure and a charming love story.
Hon. Thomas E. Watson says:
“I read ‘The First American King,’ and found it one of the most interesting books I ever opened. Mr. Hastings has not only presented a profound study of our social and economic conditions, but he has made the story one of fascination. It reminds me at times of Bellamy’s ‘Looking Backward,’ but the story is told with so much more human interest, the situations themselves are so much more dramatic, that it impresses me very much more favorably than any book of that kind I have ever known.”
Interesting as the story is as a romance and as a critical sociological study, one of its vitally important points is
How to Organize
Mr. Hastings says:
“It has been suggested,” continued General Mainwarren, “that a wise course for patriotic leaders of your day would have been to have abandoned the hope of converting and securing the grown voters as a body. It would have been best for them, at a given time, to have said: ‘Beginning from today, we will pay no attention to any male who is more than fifteen years of age and who is now, or within the next six years will be, entitled to a vote. But we will direct all efforts to an entirely new body of suffragists.’ They should then have turned their attention to the women of the land, to the mothers of future generations of voters. It has been said that ‘Every woman is at heart a royalist.’ It could with equal truth be said: ‘Every woman is by nature a politician.’ ... Look at the influence exerted politically by various women of whom history speaks.”
This Is the Key-Note of Success
For fifteen years the People’s Party, in season and out of season, has preached “Equal Rights to All, Special Privileges to None.” It has persistently demanded that government shall attend to public matters, and that private business shall be conducted by individuals with the least possible interference—and absolutely no favoritism—by government. It has continually demanded public ownership and government operation of railroads and other public utilities. It has urged the initiative, referendum and the recall; a scientific money system; the abolition of monopoly in every form. Millions of voters—as the Chicago election clearly indicates—are in accord with the People’s Party; but heretofore the voting habit, the “vote ’er straight” political insanity, has kept them in political slavery.
Educate the Boys
Let us train up a new generation of voters—without diminishing our efforts to break up old party habits—who will have the courage of conviction and correct ideas regarding politics and economics. Let us interest the mothers, so we can have the boys taught to cast their first votes on the side of Justice. Habit will then keep them voting right.
Let Us Begin Now
Mr. Hastings’s book is a thought-provoker. It combines romance with sociology and teaches while entertaining. With “The First American King” and TOM WATSON’S MAGAZINE in another 100,000 homes, our first great step will be taken toward overcoming plutocracy. With this end in view, we have made arrangements whereby we can offer a dollar book, 350 pages, and a dollar magazine one year, 128 pages monthly, both for only $1.50.
Tom Watson’s Magazine and The First American King $1.50
In order to treat all alike, the book will be sent postpaid to any present subscriber of TOM WATSON’S MAGAZINE on receipt of 60 cents. No person not a subscriber can buy “The First American King” of us for a cent less than $1.00. If you have not already subscribed for the magazine, send us $1.50 today for this attractive combination, and expedite the work of building up the People’s Party of the future.
Address all orders to
TOM WATSON’S MAGAZINE, 121 West 42d Street, New York
SOME POPULIST PRINCIPLES
(1) Public Ownership of Public Utilities, including Railroads, Telegraphs, Telephones, etc.
(2) Direct Legislation by the people: the Initiative, Referendum and Recall.
(3) The election of all officers by the people.
(4) Graduated Income Tax and Inheritance Tax.
(5) National Currency created by the Government without the intervention of National Banks; every dollar to be the equal of every other dollar.
(6) Postal Savings Banks; the eight-hour day, regulation of Child Labor in Factories, Sweat-shops and similar avocations.
(7) Opposition to land monopoly.
(8) Removal of Tariff burdens from the necessaries of life which the poor must have to live.
Populism seeks to put political power into the hands of the people and to work out a system of Equal and Exact Justice to all, without special favors to any.
Tom Watson’s Magazine
Vol. I JUNE, 1905 No. 4
Editorials
BY THOMAS E. WATSON
Our Creed
THE People’s Party does not attempt the impossible, or seek the unattainable.
Our young men do not dream dreams; our old men do not see visions. We are wedded to practical reforms which have been tried in civilized communities, and which have vindicated themselves by results.
We do not propose to re-create society, subvert law and order, confiscate property, or substitute a new system of government for the old.
We do not want to tear down the house in order to repair it.
We do not hope to build a perfect state with imperfect human hands, but we do intend to make the government as nearly perfect as possible, to the end that it shall represent that conception of justice which deals with all men alike, and allows to every child of Adam a fair chance in the world which God created as a home for the human race.
We believe that the government should be clothed with all the attributes of sovereignty; that the government should govern, and should not delegate to private citizens or corporations any part of its sovereign power.
The creation of a national currency has always been an attribute of sovereignty—of royalty.
In a system where the people rule the people succeed to the power of the king; and that attribute of sovereignty which the king exercised and did not delegate should be exercised by the people and should not be delegated.
Therefore, the Populists, successors to the old Greenbackers, have always clung to it as an article of faith that the Federal Government should exercise its constitutional right to create a currency, and should not delegate that power to national banks or to private citizens or corporations.
The government should supply the country with a sufficient amount of national money, every dollar of which should be equal to any other; every dollar of which should be a full legal tender for all claims, public and private, and no dollar of which should be made redeemable in any other dollar.
We believe that those things which are essentially public in their nature and their use should belong to the public, and should be equally enjoyed by all.
Just as the navigable rivers are public to the beggar and the millionaire alike, just as the Bay and the Gulf and the Harbor and the navigable Lakes are the common property of the rich and the poor, the high and low, the black and white, so we believe that the roads should be common ground upon which every citizen should be free to pass upon terms of equality, and that the iron highways of today, which were taken from the people by the exercise of the right of Eminent Domain, should be restored to the public by the same law of Eminent Domain, a fair compensation having been paid, and the property operated hereafter for the benefit of all the people.
So with the Telegraph and the Telephone and Express Companies.
In every city and town we believe that the municipality, which is a part of the state’s sovereignty, should take over to itself those public utilities which in their very nature are monopolies, and, just compensation having been paid, that these utilities should be used for the benefit of the people, to whom they belong.
We believe that the government should be supported by a system of taxation in which each citizen will pay taxes in proportion to his ability to pay.
We believe in a Tax on the Franchises enjoyed by private corporations.
We believe that the Income Tax would be the fairest of all taxes, because it would take for the support of the government, not the property of the citizen, but a portion of the income which the citizen derives from that property, or from his individual exertions, and the tax would be proportioned to the income.
That property or that salary could not be enjoyed without the protection and the advantages which flow from government, and it is eminently fair, where the government has protected me, or where it affords me such opportunities, that I can receive a large income from any source whatever, I should pay to the government, in return for its protection and its advantages, a fair share of that which I could not have made without that protection and those advantages.
Under our present system a man like John D. Rockefeller pays no more Tariff tax when he buys a hat than a doctor or lawyer or preacher pays when he buys a hat. So with the shoes, the clothes, the crockery on the table, the furniture in the house. Many a citizen whose income does not amount to ten thousand dollars per year pays fully as much Tariff tax in the purchasing of necessary articles of clothing, furniture and food as John D. Rockefeller pays, whose income is counted monthly by the millions of dollars.
The same thing is true of Carnegie, Morgan, Hill, Harriman, Gould, Cassatt, Vanderbilt. Many a farmer whose income from his farm may not do more than give his family an actual support, after the operating expenses are paid, contributes annually a greater sum in Tariff tax to the Federal Government than is paid by the fabulously wealthy beneficiaries of class legislation.
It has been said that the People’s Party dodges the Tariff issue. This is not true.
One of our earliest platforms, which has been repeatedly reindorsed, declares:
“We demand the removal of the Tariff tax from the necessaries of life which the poor must have to live.”
This is precisely the principle announced by Thomas Jefferson, who declared that the taxes should be so laid that the luxuries of life would bear the burden of government, and that his ideal was a system in which the poor would be entirely relieved from the crushing weight of taxation.
Furthermore, we have said that legislation should not be so framed as to build up one business at the expense of another.
If the People’s Party platform were enacted into law, there could be no such thing as a Trust in the United States.
In order that the people should become the victims of such tyranny as that exercised by the Trusts two things are necessary: Foreign relief must be made impossible, and domestic relief made impracticable.
The Tariff wall keeps the foreigner from interfering; the railroads and the national banks supporting the Trusts make it impossible for domestic dissatisfaction to assert itself effectively.
If the people should put upon the free list those articles which are made the subject of the Trusts, the foreigner could at once invade the market, and destroy the monopoly upon which the Trust is based.
If the Populist principles of finance and of transportation should be carried into effect, the Government abolishing national banks and private ownership of transportation lines, the rebate would be impossible, discriminations would cease, equality would prevail, and there would be no collusion between the national banks and the railroads by which Trusts are made invincible as they are now invincible.
We believe in direct Legislation—putting the power of making laws and choosing rulers back into the hands of those to whom it belongs—and the election of all officers by the people.
The people should not be made to await the pleasure of the Legislature or of Congress. They should not be kept in ignorance of what the law is until legislative acts become known through the newspapers. There should be in every case the right to initiate those laws which they want, and to veto, through the Referendum, any law which they do not like.
When an officer whom they have elected shows by any vote or act that he is not the man they took him to be, they should not have to wait till the expiration of his term to get a better man. They should have the right to recall the officer the moment he betrays his trust.
We believe in the eight-hour day for labor in Government works, in factories, workshops and mines.
We believe in the regulation of child labor in factories, workshops and mines, to the end that children of tender age shall not be made to slave out their lives in order that corporations shall have cheap labor and large dividends.
Saturn, the old fable tells us, devoured his own children: Christian civilization does the same thing.
As long as we permit children of ten and twelve years to labor from eight to fourteen hours per day in our mills and workshops modern civilization is another Saturn. We are devouring our own children.
We believe that the land, the common heritage of all the people, should not be monopolized for speculative purposes, or by alien ownership, but that legislation should be so shaped as to encourage to its full extent the right of every man born into this world to till the soil and make a living out of it.
And one of the principal reasons why we favor a graduated income tax, which increases by geometrical progression as the income increases, is that it automatically keeps the wealth of the country in a constant sort of redistribution, and acts as a check upon that excessive accumulation which is recognized by all intelligent thinkers as one of the most serious perils and intolerable evils of our present era of class legislation.
These are the most important articles of our faith. It is for these principles that we have struggled ever since 1891—with never a doubt that they were sound, that they would constantly gain converts, that they would ultimately win.
When I founded the People’s Party Paper in Atlanta, Ga., in 1891 (which paper lived and toiled for these principles until the fusion movement of 1896 killed it, as it killed twelve hundred other Populist papers), I announced the same purpose which I announced in the prospectus of this magazine.
My faith was as firm in 1891 as it is today, and I had as little doubt then as I have now that Populism is just as sure to triumph as the sun is to continue to warm the world.
The reforms will be effected because the country needs them. It cannot stand much more of the present system. It will not accept Socialism. Occupying the middle ground of radical, but practical reform, Populism is inevitable.
National Politics and Policies
There is a saying that the difference between a wise man and a fool is that the wise man never makes the same mistake twice, while the fool continues to make it without limit.
It is of supreme importance that those who will act as political leaders during the next four years should think clearly in order that they may act wisely.
We have not, as yet, discovered any brighter lamp with which to guide our footsteps than that which Patrick Henry named the Lamp of Experience.
If I felt that our national leaders were about to repeat a disastrous mistake and adopt a policy which seems the continuance of the reign of class legislation and special privilege, I should be false to my own sense of duty if I did not at this early day point out that error and warn the Jeffersonians against it.
I say Jeffersonians because, after all is said and done, there are but two great differences of political thought in the United States—never have been but two; never will be but two.
On the one hand are those who believe that legislation should be dictated by the interest of the few; that the powers and the benefits of good government should be monopolized by the few; that the blessings and the opportunities of life should be the heritage of the few; that wealth and privilege and national initiative should perpetually be the legacy of the few.
On the other hand is the Jeffersonian idea that the human family are all alike the children of God; that the earth and all it contains was created for the benefit of this human family, and that any system of law and government which gathers into the hands of the few an unjust proportion of the common estate, to the exclusion of the vast majority, is an infamous invasion of the natural rights of man.
Now, what is it that endangers the cause of the Jeffersonians?
What is it that seems to me to be so certain to insure the continuance of the rule of the few over the many?
It is the continued existence of the political alignment of the great mass of the people in two political parties, each of which, in its heart of hearts, is wedded to the rule of the few.
Neither one of these parties wants any material change in our present system of legislation or of administration.
Both of them are absolutely dominated by the same interests.
In the ranks of each of these parties are found the powerful railroad kings, the irresistible trusts, the indispensable national banks, the vastly influential insurance companies.
As a matter of fact, nearly every board of management of every predatory corporation against which the people are rising in revolt is made up half and half of Democrats and Republicans, in order that, no matter which party wins at the polls, the corporation will have influence at court.
It is so clear to me that the only possible hope for the people is to drive these two parties together while the people unite under another standard.
In vain does Judge Parker talk about the difference between his Democracy and the Republicanism of Mr. Roosevelt. During the campaign he was unable to state any difference, and there is, in fact, no difference.
Between Belmont’s ideas of government and those of Mark Hanna there is not the slightest difference.
Between the Democratic corporation and the Republican corporation it is absurd to claim that there is any difference.
Between Democratic manufacturers and Republican manufacturers no human being of intelligence will expect any difference or find any.
In other words, the millionaire beneficiaries of class legislation control both of the old parties, and the battle which they wage year after year, decade after decade, is a mere sham battle. The strategy of the corporations consists in keeping the people divided in order that the corporations may rule.
Believing this to be true, I am painfully impressed with the fact that Mr. Bryan is making a huge mistake.
The pity of it is, he has already made that mistake twice, and is now making it for the third time.
What is the mistake?
It consists of the effort to get radical reform out of a party which has always been dominated and always will be dominated by conservatives. When the currency was contracted just after the Civil War and ruin brought upon so many thousands of people in this country, it took the joint action of both the old parties to do it.
When the revenue taxes were taken off railroads, manufactures, insurance companies, bank checks and express companies, soon after the close of the Civil War, it took the joint action of both the old parties to do it.
When the Income Tax was lifted from the burdened shoulders of the rich, it took the joint action of both the old parties to do it.
When Silver was struck down and the Gold Standard forced upon us, it took the joint action of both the old parties to do it.
When our National Bank System was enthroned, and that terribly unjust system was chartered to prey upon the people, it required the joint action of both the old parties to do it.
When Congress, over the protest of Thaddeus Stevens and others, obeyed the command of the Rothschilds (delivered at Washington personally by August Belmont, the father of the present Boss of the Democratic Party), and declared by legislative enactment that the banks should be paid in gold while the soldier at the front should be paid in greenbacks, it required the joint action of both the old parties to do it.
There has never been a necessary act of Congress—necessary to the rule of the few, necessary to carry out the Hamiltonian ideal—that did not rest for support one foot on the Republican Party and the other on the Democratic Party.
The man who does not know this to be true is unfamiliar with official records.
The time has been when Mr. Bryan held the same opinions which I am expressing now. The time has been when he declared, in speech and writing, that there was no hope for reform in the Democratic Party.
In 1896 Mr. Bryan, in the Omaha World-Herald, editorially asked:
“Can a National Convention harmonize the discordant elements of the Democratic Party? Impossible.
“Suppose the advocates of bimetallism control the National Convention and nominate a Free Silver Democrat upon a free coinage platform, will Cleveland, Carlisle, Olney, Morton, et al. support the ticket? Of course not. They say that the free coinage of silver means individual dishonesty, commercial disaster and national dishonor, and if they believe what they say they ought not to support the ticket, because their duty to their country is higher than their duty to their party organization. If, on the other hand, the convention nominates a Gold Standard Democrat on a platform indorsing the gold standard, gold bonds and national bank currency, should the nominee be supported by those who believe the gold standard to be a conspiracy of the capitalistic classes against the producers of wealth—a crime against mankind? Who says they should?
“If to continue Mr. Cleveland’s financial policy is to declare war against the common people, what friend of the common people would be willing to enlist in such a warfare, even at the command of his party?
“The Democratic Party cannot serve God and Mammon; it cannot serve plutocracy and at the same time defend the rights of the masses.
“If it yields to the plutocracy it ought to lose, and it will lose, the support of the masses; if it espouses the cause of the people, it cannot expect either votes or contributions from the capitalistic classes and from the great corporations.”
In pursuance of this very correct line of reasoning, Mr. Bryan resolutely declared that if the Democratic Party adopted the gold standard, “I promise you that I will go out and serve my country and my God under some other name, even if I must go alone.”
Again Mr. Bryan said, in his book called “The First Battle,” Chapter III, page 124, “In that speech I took the position which I have announced since on several occasions, namely, that I would not support for the Presidency an advocate of the gold standard.”
Again Mr. Bryan said: “Does the individual member of a party at all times reserve the right to vote against the nominee of a party, and to abandon his party entirely whenever in his judgment his duty to his country requires it? He may abandon the party temporarily, as, for instance, when an unfit candidate is nominated, or the voter may abandon his party permanently, either when he himself changes his opinion upon a paramount public question or when his party changes its position.”
Now let the reader compare the present attitude of Mr. Bryan with the political ethics expounded by him in his book.
He was then the idol of the radicals; he was then the Tribune of the People.
He was the strong and stalwart foe of every plutocrat, every Wall Street interest, every beneficiary of class legislation.
The people hailed him with an enthusiasm which had not been known since the days of Henry Clay. So great was their faith in him that he swept into his movement in 1896 the Free Silver organization and the great bulk of the Populist Party.
Who is it that cannot see how loftily he held his flag in those days? Who is it that does not realize how sadly it droops today?
From the noble stand of 1893 and 1896, what a falling off is there! Boldly he declared that he would never support for the Presidency an advocate of the gold standard. Yet, when Judge Parker slapped his face in public with the Gold Telegram of 1904, the dauntless Bryan turned the other cheek, like a very meek Christian indeed.
He had said that a Democrat might bolt his party temporarily upon the nomination of an unfit candidate; he had said that Judge Parker was an unfit candidate, but he did not bolt the nomination, even temporarily.
He had said that the voter might abandon his party permanently when that party changed its position upon a paramount public question; yet when the Democratic Party, with extraordinary suddenness, changed its position upon more than one paramount question in 1904, Mr. Bryan did not bolt his party permanently.
He had said that if the Democrats took up the Republican financial policy, which meant the slavery of the debtors of this country and the impoverishment of the people, he would go out and serve his country and his God under some other name, even if he had to go alone. Yet when his party did come over to the Republican financial policy, and came by telegraph at that, Mr. Bryan did not go out to serve either his country or his God under some other name.
He had said to his brother Democrats: “If you are ready to go down on your knees and apologize for what you have said” (abuse of the Republicans and the gold standard), “you will go without me.”
Yet when the Democratic Party, at the St. Louis Convention in 1904, went down on its knees, in effect, to apologize for the abuse which they had heaped upon the Republicans for eight years, they did not go without Mr. Bryan. The knees of Mr. Bryan hit the floor in timely cadence with the knees of all the others, and when he filed out of the convention hall the dust was there to show it just as it was there to show it on the knees of all the others.
Bryan himself asked the question in 1896: “Can a National Convention harmonize the discordant elements of the Democratic Party?” He answered his own question in the comprehensive word, “Impossible.”
The event of the campaign of 1896 showed that he was right, for the Cleveland-Carlisle-Belmont element knifed him.
In the campaign of 1900 they knifed him again. In the campaign of 1904, when the convention nominated a gold standard Democrat on a platform indorsing the gold standard, gold bonds and the gold bank currency, the people refused to support the sell-out of the National Democratic Party to Wall Street, just as Mr. Bryan, in 1896, prophesied that they would, in spite of the fact that the prophet of 1896 had become the gold standard nominee’s most earnest advocate in the campaign of 1904.
In other words, the people had become so inoculated with the true gospel of Bryan, the Tribune of 1893 and 1896, that they refused to follow the change of heart and the change of conduct which came over Bryan, the Parkerite of 1904.
Will not Mr. Bryan reflect upon this and draw a lesson from it? He himself has declared that he is attempting the impossible in trying to harmonize the discordant elements of the Democratic Party.
What is the real statesmanship demanded at this time?
That those who believe in Jeffersonian ideals, whether they are now in the Republican, Democratic, Populist or Socialist parties, should come together without prejudice for party names, and should unite in the common cause of driving from power the beneficiaries of class legislation, no matter whether those beneficiaries are called Democrats or Republicans.
Let the Belmonts and Morgans get together in the same party so that we can fight them both at the same time.
As long as we cling to party differences and party names our efforts will come to naught, as they did in 1896, 1900 and 1904.
Mr. Bryan wants the reform movement to stop and wait for him, while for four years he struggles to get the better of the plutocratic element of his own party. If they were able to wrest control from him when he had so much more advantage than he has now, how can we expect him to take that control from their strong hands?
But, suppose he does succeed in defeating the Belmont-Cleveland element in the convention of 1908, does he not know that they will fulfil his prediction again and knife him as they have done twice already?
On the other hand, suppose they conquer him in 1908 as they did in 1904, will he not submit tamely to kiss the hand that smote him as he did in the last convention? Most assuredly he will.
He lost his opportunity to fly the flag of revolt when he failed to resent the Gold Telegram of 1904. That opportunity passed, never to return.
Absolutely the only hope of radical reform lies in a straight-out, aggressive and fearless fight upon both the old parties, which in turn have had control of the Government, and which have played into each other’s hands in forging the chains of class legislation which now bind and burden the Common People.
Is It Paul Jones’s Body?
Have they found the body of John Paul Jones?
The experts say that they have.
To the legal mind, the fact that experts had to be called in to pass upon the question of identity is sufficient to arouse suspicion and provoke investigation.
As stated in a former number, I was certain they would find Paul Jones—in their minds—for that was what they were looking for.
Whenever, for instance, the medical expert starts out to find arsenic in the human stomach, arsenic generally shows up all right enough.
In like manner French experts were called in to identify a certain corpse as that of Paul Jones, and, after the most elaborate and beautifully regular formalities, they solemnly pronounced the verdict which they knew was expected and which they were predisposed to find.
“This is Paul Jones, isn’t it?” asks General Porter, most suavely, not to say persuasively.
How could the politest experts of the politest people on earth say nay?
The case was pitiful.
The search for Paul Jones’s body had reached a crisis. Only four leaden coffins had been found in the old graveyard, and one of these had to be Paul Jones, because he had been buried in such a coffin, and the other three bore name-plates which showed they could not be his.
The fourth bore no name-plate; therefore it must be Jones’s coffin.
The necessity of the situation required it.
Consequently, polite French experts measure, compare, incubate, decide and bring in the verdict desired.
Looking at the matter as a lawyer, I should say that there is not sufficient legal evidence offered, as yet, to establish the identity of the dead body.
The cemetery in which Commodore Paul Jones was buried was closed by law in 1793.
A canal was afterward cut through it.
The great sea-fighter was buried, as Napoleon was, in uniform.
In the Life of him—“Great Commanders’ Series”—by Cyrus Townsend Brady, the statement is made that Paul Jones was buried in the American uniform, and that a sword and other articles were placed in the coffin.
The body which General Porter has found was not clad in uniform.
There was no sword, or other article, found in the coffin.
Commodore Jones died of dropsy, which had swollen his body to such an extent that he could not button his waistcoat.
Yet the French experts declare that all the measurements tally exactly with those of the living Jones.
Should They Do So?
Awful changes take place after death, and they are greater with some than with others.
Should the measurements of a corpse which had been entombed more than a hundred years correspond exactly with those of the same body when alive?
Most biographers put the height of Admiral Jones at “about five feet and eight inches.”
Won’t you find a greater number of men—in France especially—whose height is “about five feet eight inches” than you’ll find at any other figure?
And will you not find more corpses of about that length?
Yet in these measurements consists the whole of the testimony which has been offered to the American people to convince them that the body of Paul Jones is at last to come home.
Unless the matter of the uniform and the sword be cleared up, it is impossible to accept the conclusion arrived at by the experts.
This corpse may be, as already stated, a good enough Jones for that $35,000, but it has not yet been shown to be John Paul Jones, the naval hero of our War of Independence.
Is the Black Man Superior to the White?
With statistics one can prove many things—the conclusion arrived at depending, in all cases, considerably upon the man behind the figures.
This time the man behind the figures is Doctor Booker Washington—may his shadow never grow less!
In the course of a recent lecture, the learned Doctor laid down the proposition that the black man is superior to the white, and he proved it—proved it by statistics.
He said that there is 85 per cent. of illiteracy among the Spaniards, while there is only 54 per cent. of illiteracy among the negroes; therefore the negroes are clearly more advanced in civilization than the Spaniards.
Poor old Spain!
The learned Doctor further demonstrated that there is 65 per cent. of illiteracy among the Italians; therefore the negroes are far ahead of Italy. Russian illiteracy being 70 per cent. the black man takes precedence of the land of Peter the Great, Skobelef, Gorky, Turgenef and Tolstoy. South America, having an illiteracy of 80 per cent., falls far to the rear of the negro—and Castro must add this additional kick to the many he has already received from North America.
Proud of his statistics, Doctor Booker Washington exclaims: “The negro race has developed more rapidly in the thirty years of its freedom than the Latin race has in one thousand years of freedom.”
That’s a bold statement, Doctor.
To say nothing of its accuracy, may it not have been an unwise thing for you to claim that the black man has risen during thirty years more rapidly in the scale of civilization than the whites have risen in a thousand?
True, you confine yourself to the Italians, the Spaniards, the Russians and the South Americans, but when you say the darkest of all the colored races is superior to that great section of the white race named by you, does it not occur to you that you may create a feeling of resentment among all the whites?
You have thousands of true friends throughout the entire country—white men who have most generously helped you in your work, helped you with money, with moral support and with a certain amount of social recognition. Your admirers refer to you as a great man. They allude to your work as a great work. The South helps you with appropriations, just as the North helps you with donations. We want to see you succeed in building up your race.
But have you a single white friend who will indorse your statement that the black race is so superior to the whites that it can do in one generation what it required the whites a thousand years to do?
Do you imagine that your friends, President Roosevelt, Mr. Carnegie, Dr. Hart, Bishop Potter, and others, will like you better when they hear you putting forth a claim to race superiority? Doctor, you have overshot the mark.
Whenever the North wakes up to the fact that you are teaching the blacks that they are superior to the whites, you are going to feel the east wind.
What do you mean by racial development, Doctor?
Apparently your standard of measurement is illiteracy. That is to say, if a greater number of negroes than of Spaniards can read, then the negro has achieved a higher plane in civilization.
Is that your idea? Does the ability to read constitute race development?
According to that, a million negro children attend school twelve months and become “civilized” because they have learned to spell “Baker” and to read “Mary had a little lamb.”
Does it not strike you, Doctor, that such a measure might be delusive?
In making up your tables of illiteracy, why didn’t you include all the negroes, as you included all the Italians, all the Spaniards, all the Russians?
Why leave out your home folks in Africa, Doctor?
Why omit Santo Domingo and Haiti?
If you will number all the negroes, Doctor, your percentage of illiteracy among the blacks may run up among the nineties, and knock your calculation into a cocked hat.
In the West Indies God poured His blessings with lavish hand upon the island of Haiti. The French went there and built up a civilization. The Revolution of 1789 freed the negroes who were held in slavery by the whites, and civil war soon followed.
The blacks outnumbered the whites and the climate was their ally. Yellow fever did for them what frost did for the Russians when Napoleon struck at their liberties. They achieved freedom, and they have had it, not for thirty years, but for a hundred years.
What have your people done with their freedom in Santo Domingo, Doctor? Back, back into barbarism, voodooism, human sacrifice, social and political anarchy they have plunged; and their history is one long blood-stained record of backsliding from the standard which the French had already established. Even now your black brethren in Santo Domingo are beseeching the white man of the United States to do that which they are unable to do—administer national affairs. In self-defense this Government may have to treat Santo Domingo as Great Britain treats Jamaica, both governments acting upon the demonstrated fact that the blacks, left to themselves, are incapable of self-government and race development.
But before entering into a comparison of racial progress, Doctor, it is in order to note the fact that you accredit the negro with only thirty years of freedom. Why, Doctor, the negro race, as a race, has enjoyed just as long a period of freedom as the Celts, the Latins, the Anglo-Saxons and the Slavs.
The black race in Africa was as free as the Indian race in North America.
During the thousand years in which the whites were painfully creating the civilization which you now enjoy, your race, in its native home, was doing pretty much the same things which the red race was doing in North America. Your people were running about in the woods, naked, eating raw meat, eternally at war—tribe with tribe—steeped in ignorance, vice and superstition, with an occasional lapse into human sacrifice and cannibalism.
Your race, as a race, is free now in Africa, as it has been since the dawn of history:—where is the civilization which it worked out for itself? It does not exist; it never did exist.
The negro has been absolutely unable to develop as a race when left to himself. Nowhere, at any time, has he developed a system of agriculture, or commerce, or manufactures, made headway in mining or engineering, or conceived a system of finance. Never has he produced a system of laws, institutions of state, religious organization, or worked out a political ideal. Never has he created a literature, or developed original capacity for the fine arts. His foot has never even crossed the threshold of the world of creative painting, sculpture, music, architecture Into the realms of science, in the domain of original thought, in the higher reaches of mental power where the human mind grapples with vast problems, material and spiritual, the problems of time and eternity, the negro has never entered. No word has ever fallen from his lips that was not the echo of what some white man had already said. He has sometimes put his foot in the white man’s track, but that is the best he has ever done.
Compare this imitative race with the great Latin stock—a stock from which sprang Rienzi and Garibaldi, Cavour and Napoleon, Da Vinci and Galileo, Savonarola and Leo the Tenth, Titian and Bellini, Raphael and Michelangelo.
The Latin race, whether in Spain, Italy or South America, has developed systems of agriculture, finance, commerce, manufactures, education, religion, government—has created literature, laws and institutions of state, has evidenced capacity in science and art.
The negroes superior to the Latins?
Heavens above!
During the thousand years which Doctor Washington says that the Latins have done less than the negroes have done in thirty, Spain rose into world-power, dominated the European Continent, shook England’s throne to its base, broke the Turkish scimiter in the great sea-fight of Lepanto, evolved a splendid literature, reached the highest development in the Fine Arts, launched Columbus upon his voyage into unknown seas to test the suggestion of another Latin—Toscanelli—and thus took the first daring step in that marvelous chapter of Discovery whose sober facts are grander and stranger than Romance.
Has the learned Doctor ever studied the history of Mexico—the Latin country south of us?
Since a foreign yoke was thrown off and Mexico “found herself,” what country has made nobler progress?
The negro in Santo Domingo has had a hundred years of freedom; Mexico scarce half so many; yet compare the Mexico of today with the Santo Domingo of today. Left to themselves, the Latins of Mexico have built up a magnificent civilization.
Left to themselves, the negroes of Santo Domingo have destroyed what the French had already built.
In Mexico conditions get better, year after year.
In Santo Domingo conditions grow worse, year after year.
If the learned Doctor wants to make a study in contrasts, let him first read “Where Black Rules White,” by Hesketh Prichard, and then read “The Awakening of a Nation,” by Charles F. Lummis, and I venture to say that some of his cocky self-complacency as to the superiority of the negroes over the whites will ooze out of him.
As to Italy—can it be that Italy has done less in a thousand years than the negroes have done in thirty?
The greatest man that ever lived was of Italian extraction. Taine says that Napoleon was a true Italian in character and intellect. If that be true, then the two greatest men the world ever saw were Latins. Wherever the civilized man lives today his environment, his thoughts, his ideals, his achievements are more or less influenced by the life and work of Cæsar and Napoleon.
If any two men may be said to have created the material modern world those two Latins did it.
If modern Europe is any one man, it is Napoleon. His laws, schools—social, political, financial, educational institutions—have wrung from rulers ever since the homage of imitation.
In literature how illustrious is Italy?
It was Petrarch who was “the Columbus of a new spiritual atmosphere, the discoverer of modern culture.”
It was he who broke away from monkish medievalism, created the humanistic impulse, treated “man as a rational being apart from theological determination,” modernizing literature.
The “short story” writers of fiction—Edgar Poe, Guy de Maupassant and Kipling—had their teacher in Boccaccio and his novella.
Modern history traces its methods, its spirit and its form to Villani, Guicciardini, and that wonderful type of Latin genius, Machiavelli.
The whole world goes to school to the Latins!
No painter hopes to excel Correggio, Paul Veronese, Antonio Allegro, Tintoretto, Velasquez, Murillo. No sculptor expects to eclipse Niccola Pisano, Orvieto, Orcagna or Luca della Robbia.
No worker in gold, silver and bronze believes he can surpass Ghiberti, Cellini and Donatello.
Architects the world over despair of rivaling Alberti, Bramante, Giulo Romano, Palladio.
These masters were masters to their own generation, four and five hundred years ago; they have been masters ever since; they are masters still.
Wherever civilization extends its frontiers these deathless Latins are in the van—teaching what Truth and Beauty are, refining the thoughts, elevating the ideals, improving the methods, inspiring the efforts of man.
The negroes have done more than this, and in thirty years?
You had forgotten the Renaissance, hadn’t you, Doctor?
Asia was decaying, Africa was in its normal state of savagery, Europe lay torpid under the weight of ignorance and superstition. Where learning existed at all its spirit was dull, its form heavy, its progress fettered by ancient canons and cumbrous vestments.
Suddenly the Angel of Light—her face a radiance, her presence an inspiration—puts a silver trumpet to her lips and blows, blows, till all the world of white men hears the thrilling notes.
And lo! there is a resurrection! What was best in the learning of the past becomes young again, and ministers to the minds of men.
Literature springs to life, throws off antiquated dress, and takes its graceful modern form. The fine arts flourish as never before; the canvas, the marble, the precious metal, feel the subtle touch of the eager artist, and give birth to beauty which is immortal. The heavy prison-castle of the Frank, the Goth, the Norman, the Anglo-Saxon, retires abashed before the elegant, airy, poetic palace of the Renaissance.
Nor does the revival of learning limit itself to literature, architecture, painting, sculpture. It extends to law, to commerce, to agriculture, to religion, to education.
Whence came the Renaissance, Doctor Washington? Whence came that mighty revival of intellectual splendor which still influences the world? From the Latin race, which you affect to despise. From these Italians whom you say are so inferior in development to the negro.
Italy led the modern world in almost everything which we call civilization—she is today one of the world’s most inspiring teachers, nor will her power for good be gone till the Christian religion is repudiated, the voice of music hushed, the wand of literature broken, the force of law defied, the witchery of art lost to the minds, the hearts and the souls of men.
And yet Doctor Washington asserts, to one audience after another, that those glorious achievements of the Latins, the Italians, these imperishable and ever potent achievements of a thousand years, are exceeded by what the negroes have done in thirty years!
From the Latin England took her religious organization, as Germany and Austria and France had done. Through the Latin the classic literature of Greece and earlier Rome came into the modern world—an eternal debt which we owe mainly to Petrarch.
The Bourbon kings imported from Italy the architects, painters, sculptors, landscape gardeners, who laid upon uncouth feudal France the rich mantle of Italian beauty.
It was the Latin who taught modern Europe how to farm, how to irrigate, how to engrave, how to make paper from rags, how to bridge the rivers, how to pave the streets, how to make canals.
Some of Shakespeare’s plays are elaborations and dramatizations of Italian novellas. Chaucer, the father of English poetry, frankly copied from the Italian model.
Milton had Dante for pioneer, Spenser had Ariosto, and Byron’s best work is in the Italian form.
I presume, Doctor, that at this season of the year you are copying the style of the white man, and that you are wearing a straw hat.
Well, the Latins taught us how to make straw hats.
I presume that you recognize the value of glass—one of whose hundreds of uses is to show you how you look.
Well, the Latin taught us how to make glass.
I presume you realize how much the modern world, during the last thousand years, has been indebted to the modern ship.
Well, the Latin taught the Anglo-Saxon how to build modern ships.
I presume you appreciate good rice, Doctor.
Well, the seed of the heavy upland rice which we have in this country was brought out of Italy in the pockets of Thomas Jefferson—gentleman-smuggler in that instance.
I presume you will wear pink silk undergarments this season as usual, won’t you, Doctor?
Well, the Latin taught modern Europe how to make and use silk.
And remember that the Latin took the clumsy musical instruments of the ancient world and fashioned them into the perfect forms of the present time; and that the Italians, whom you despise, had created the violin while your race was “rattling the bones” and gradually climbing toward the “cakewalk.”
What has the negro in these United States been doing for the last thirty years, Doctor?
Copying the white man. That’s all.
He has simply been imitating, as best he could, the dress, the talk, the manners, the methods, the work of the whites.
The Latin whites originated a civilization; the negroes are copying one. Is there no difference between the higher genius which conceives and the lower talent which copies?
It required the genius of Raphael to conceive and paint “The Transfiguration.” Any ordinary artist can make a fair copy of it. But does anyone compare the copyist with the original artist? It required the genius of Sangallo and Michelangelo to rear St. Peter’s at Rome: any well-educated architect of today might rear its duplicate. But would that make the modern architect equal to the two Italian masters?
Ten thousand negro men and women may be able to sit down at the piano and render Verdi’s “Il Trovatore,” but does that entitle the negroes to class themselves with the Italian composer?
My thought is this—the negro, assisted in every possible way by the whites, is copying the ways and learning the arts of the white man; but the fact that he can learn to read the white man’s book does not make him the equal of the white race which produced the book. The fact that he may learn from us how to practice law or medicine does not make him equal to the white race which created the code of laws and the science of medicine. It may have required a thousand years for us to learn that which we can teach him in one year, but the point is that the negro, in his native home, had just as much time and opportunity to evolve a civilization as we had, and he did not do it.
Let me repeat to you, Doctor, the unvarnished truth—for it may do you good:
The advance made by your race in America is the reflection of the white man’s civilization. Just that and nothing more. The negro lives in the light of the white man’s civilization and reflects a part of that light.
He imitates an example kept before his eyes; copies models never out of his sight; echoes the words the white man utters; patterns after the manners and the methods of the whites around him, and thus reflects our civilization.
He has originated nothing, and if the copy, the pattern, the example were taken away he would fall back as he did in Haiti.
He has never either evolved nor sustained a civilization of his own.
Fortunately for the Afro-American, he finds himself better situated than his brethren elsewhere. In Africa and Haiti they have to scuffle for themselves. Result—barbarism.
In America he swells the ranks of civilization’s advancing army, and he has to go forward. We not only support him with aid of all sorts, we not only give him daily precept and example, but we compel him to live a better life than he would live in Africa and Haiti. This compulsion is of two kinds, the fear of punishment and the hope of reward—thus enlisting two of the most powerful passions of the human being.
It should be significant to Doctor Washington that the only portion of his race which has ever made any development is that which has the vast advantage of being sustained, encouraged, taught, led and coerced by the whites among whom they live.
Not long ago a negro preacher whose self-appreciation was as great as that of Doctor Washington went out to Liberia to subdue the heathen, in the home of the negro race.
The heathen were not subdued, but the preacher was. He threw off his store clothes, gave a whoop, gathered up an armful of wives and broke for the woods; the “Call of the Wild” was too much for his newly soldered civilization.
Now, I don’t mean to say that Doctor Washington would relapse, under similar circumstances; but when I hear him call his new race Afro-Americans and listen while he soberly tells them that they are superior to the whites, I beg that he will remember his kin across the sea, his brethren in Santo Domingo, the decadents of Liberia, and the tens of thousands of his race here in this country who devoutly believe in witch doctors, in ghosts, in the conjure bag, and in the power of one negro to undo another by the mysterious but invincible “Trick.”
Remember this, Doctor, education is a good thing, but it never did, and never will, alter the essential character of a man or a race.
Of course, Doctor, if you think your race the equal of ours, you have the right to say it. It’s a free country, you know.
But, really, you ought not to “crowd the monkey” by putting in a claim for superiority.
Such a claim does your race no good.
It may do them harm. It may cultivate a spirit of truculent self-assertion which even your warmest admirers, North and South, might find it hard to tolerate.
In the “History of Civilization,” Buckle says:
“Above all this, there is a far higher movement; and as the tide rolls on, now advancing, now receding, there is, amid its endless fluctuations, one thing, and one alone, which endures forever. The actions of bad men produce only temporary evil, the actions of good men only temporary good; and eventually the good and the evil altogether subside, are neutralized by subsequent generations, absorbed by the incessant movement of future ages. But the discoveries of great men never leave us; they are immortal, they contain those eternal truths which survive the shock of empires, outlive the struggle of rival creeds and witness the decay of successive religions. All these have their different measures and their different standards; one set of opinions for one age, another set for another. They pass away like a dream; they are as a fabric of a vision, which leaves not a rack behind. The discoveries of genius alone remain: it is to them we owe all that we now have, they are for all ages and for all times; never young, and never old, they bear the seeds of their own life, they flow on in a perennial and undying stream; they are essentially cumulative, and giving birth to the additions which they subsequently receive, they thus influence the most distant posterity, and after the lapse of centuries produce more effect than they were able to do even at the moment of their promulgation.”
Noble lines!
And amid these “discoveries of genius” to which “we owe all that we now have,” bearing the seeds of intellectual life and improvement to “the most distant posterity” what treasures are richer than those which the Latin brings?
Architecture, Agriculture, Manufactures, Commerce, Civil Engineering, Finance, Legislation, Religious Organization, Sculpture, Painting, Music, Literature, Science, the wedding of the Fine Arts to Religion—in each and every one of these fields his genius has been creative and masterful.
Upon our civilization the Latin has imposed, as an everlasting blessing, an imperishable Public Debt.
What does civilization owe to the negro?
Nothing!
Nothing!!
Nothing!!!
Amending the Constitution
I am not one of those who believe that the Constitution of the United States is a flawless piece of workmanship.
It was not so considered by those who made it nor by those who adopted it. It never would have been ratified had it not been that amendments were promised and misrepresentation made as to the character of the instrument.
There has been a great deal of discussion recently about making a new Constitution or amending the old.
When the Constitution was adopted a government was created of which the Constitution is the supreme law, and this cannot be changed except in the manner prescribed in the instrument itself.
If two-thirds of the states composing the Union, acting through their legislatures, shall apply to Congress for “a Constitutional convention for proposing amendments,” and these amendments should be ratified by three-fourths of the states, then a practically new Constitution might be framed; but in no other legal way could the people alter the fundamental law.
Congress can take the initiative by a vote of two-thirds of both Houses, and can propose amendments which, if adopted by three-fourths of the states, would become a part of the Constitution; but it must occur to all that this method of effecting reform is slow and cumbrous to the last degree.
The framers of the Constitution meant that it should be so.
In a very able article in the last number of this magazine Mr. Frederick Upham Adams discusses the necessity for amendments to the Constitution.
He cites four changes that should be made.
First.—The election of President and Vice-President should not be decided by a majority of the states, but by a majority of the people.
Second.—United States Senators should not be elected by legislatures, but by direct vote of the people of the states.
Third.—The states should be represented in the Senate according to population.
Fourth.—The powers and functions of the Federal Judiciary should be enumerated and limited.
I heartily concur with Mr. Adams in his view of the Federal Judiciary. It has usurped functions and powers unprecedented in the history of judicial tribunals.
In order to change the character of the government at Athens from an aristocracy to a democracy Solon gave the people control of the courts, which exercised the supreme power over laws and men. Aristotle says that by this method the people established a democracy where there had previously been an aristocracy. The aristocrat controlled the lawmaking power, but as the people controlled the judiciary a pure democracy resulted.
Alexander Hamilton used the same device for the opposite purpose. He took away from the people and put into the hands of the aristocracy the supreme control over our laws and rulers, and our judiciary, thus controlled, has changed the United States, which under the old Confederation was a democracy, into an aristocracy.
It will require a Constitutional amendment to drive the usurpers from the high place in which they are entrenched, but such an amendment cannot possibly be passed through the Upper House of Congress and through the Upper Houses of three-fourths of the states until a tremendous revolution shall have taken place in public sentiment.
If we should attempt to curtail the powers of the Federal Judges by Constitutional amendment we should surely find “Jordan a hard road to travel.” Most of us would be dead and forgotten before the purpose could be reached by that route.
What, then, can be done?
The swiftest remedy for the evil lies in the election of a President who will assert his Executive Authority.
The very essence of our system of government is the Balance of Power. The Legislative function should not encroach upon the Judicial; the Executive should not invade the Legislative, and the Judicial should not usurp prerogatives belonging to the other two.
Inherent in each of these three departments of government lies the power of self-defense.
Just as the Government, as a whole, has the inherent, inalienable right of self-preservation against external or internal attack, so each of the three separate departments of the Government has the inherent right of self-preservation as against an attack from either one or both of the other two.
When John Marshall made the attempt to encroach upon the Executive, during the administration of Mr. Jefferson, the President treated the Court with contempt, and the Court was powerless to go forward. When the same partisan Judge made a decision against the state of Georgia, which President Andrew Jackson considered unjust, the Executive refused to support the Judiciary, and the decision came to naught.
When Chief-Justice Taney, during President Lincoln’s administration, encroached, as the President thought, upon the Executive, the Judiciary again came to grief.
Had Mr. Cleveland been at heart in favor of the Income tax of 1893, the Supreme Court would never have dared to pronounce against it.
That law was based upon a principle which the Supreme Court had indorsed for a hundred years, and the first deliverance of the Judges upon the act of 1893 was favorable to it.
That act was the outcome of the work of the Legislative department acting within the scope of its authority. The Executive department had sanctioned the act, and it had become LAW.
Had Cleveland boldly announced his purpose to execute that law, by virtue of his inherent power as Chief Executive, the Supreme Court would never have made the second decision, which was a national scandal.
By that decision the accumulated wealth of the millionaires is exempted from taxation—relieved of the duty of contributing to the support of the Government by whose unjust laws those millions were accumulated.
But let the people really get in power; let them really elect a President; let them place in authority another Andrew Jackson, who isn’t afraid to show his friendship for the common man and his animosity to the greedy corporation—then you will see the Supreme Court draw in its horns.
Federal Judges are human like the rest of us, and they know with considerable accuracy which side their bread is buttered on.
Get the right sort of man in the Executive Chair, get the right sort of men in Congress, create the right sort of public opinion, and I venture the prediction that the Federal Judiciary will not attempt the role of Dame Partington without meeting with the same luck.
I agree with Mr. Adams also that Senators should be elected by the direct vote of the people in each state, but he is perhaps in error when he says that the system of electing Senators by state legislatures is “the fountain head of the corruption of American politics.”
On the contrary, there never could have been a corrupt Senate until there was a corrupt Legislature. When New Jersey sent to the Senate a man like Jim Smith the Legislature of New Jersey had already become corrupt. When Pennsylvania sent to the Senate a man like Quay the Legislature of Pennsylvania had already become corrupt. Standard Oil had to buy the Ohio Legislature before Henry B. Payne became United States Senator.
In other words, the corrupt Senator is simply the fruit of the tree of legislative corruption, and the corrupt Legislature has been too often the result of corrupt elections.
We might as well tell the truth, and the whole truth, while we are discussing the question. Every one of us knows that elections of almost every sort, from the highest to the lowest—town, county, state and national—have been influenced by money and whisky, fraudulent practices of all sorts, the stuffed ballot-box, the doctored returns, and the God’s truth about the matter is that the people themselves are, to a large extent, responsible for the kind of men who get into the Legislature, into the House of Representatives and into the Senate.
Too many of our honest men have shirked election duty, as they have shirked jury duty; and just as ignorant or corrupt juries too often decide questions in the court house, so the ignorant or corrupt voters—pliant tools in the hands of unscrupulous politicians—decide questions of legislation which require the best thought and the best energies of our most intelligent and upright citizens.
If direct legislation and the Recall should be put in practice, there could not be such things as corrupt legislatures, and therefore there would be no such thing as corrupt senatorial elections.
The fountain having been purified, the stream would be pure. At present the fountain itself is too often impure, and therefore the stream which flows from it cannot be pure.
On the other two points made by Mr. Adams there will be greater difference of opinion. His objections proceed upon the assumption that the United States is a nation with a government national in all particulars. Here he is at fault.
Our Government is only partially national. It is Federal, also, in part. It is not altogether the one nor altogether the other.
Ours is a peculiar system. To the foreign world we present the aspect of a sovereign nation. Among ourselves we are a collection of sovereign states which, for purposes stated in the preamble of the Constitution, have delegated to the central Government a portion of those powers which once belonged entirely to those sovereign states.
The state government existed before the Federal Government came into being. If the Federal Government were abolished tomorrow, each one of the states would still remain a sovereign state capable of conducting government.
The state of Connecticut, for instance, was an independent republic when there was no such thing as the United States.
Would Connecticut ever have gone into an “indissoluble union” if she had not been assured that this union was to be composed of “indestructible states”? The two propositions are linked together in Constitutional law.
Among sovereigns all are, in law, equal, and each one of these states was sovereign at the time the union of states was formed.
Would either of those independent sovereign states have accepted a place of inferiority in the Government? Assuredly not.
Then how is the indestructibility of the states guaranteed in the Constitution? By giving the state, as a state, its full power in the United States Senate, and, in a smaller degree, in the election of Chief Magistrate.
The Constitution itself was modeled by delegates chosen, not by citizens of the United States, acting as individuals composing the entire nation, but by voters acting as citizens composing distinct and independent states to which they respectively belonged. When the completed Constitution was referred back to the people for adoption, it was not acted upon by them as citizens of the entire nation, but it was ratified by each state, acting as a state, separate and distinct from every other state. Therefore the Constitution itself is the result, not of a national, but of a Federal act.
Mr. Madison himself took this ground in The Federalist. The facts all prove it.
In the exercise of its legislative powers the Federal Government is both national and Federal. The House of Representatives is a national body, because it is composed of members chosen according to population. The Senate is a Federal body, because it is chosen by the states, acting as states.
The executive department of our Government also combines in itself both the national and the Federal features.
The Electoral College is composed of two messengers from each state, and also of messengers equal in number to the members which the state has in the House of Representatives.
The two messengers first mentioned correspond with the two Senators, and therefore represent the state in its Federal capacity. The other messengers correspond with the Representatives of the state in the Lower House, and as the Lower House is national, so those messengers are national.
If the people fail to elect a President, and the election is thrown into the House of Representatives, this House, which in its organization as a legislative body is national, at once becomes Federal, because each state has one vote, and the voice of Ohio or Pennsylvania is not more potent than that of Rhode Island or Delaware.
It is only when our Government comes to put its laws into operation that it is purely national.
It is not strictly correct, politically or legally, to say that the United States is a nation, for a nation does not properly exist when the Government is one of limited power. That our Government is one of limited power, absolute only within the sphere of action granted to it by the states, cannot be denied. While secession has been forever decided as not being among the reserved rights of the states, there are very many other reserved rights which still belong to the states, and which always should be retained.
As the Washington Post remarked some time since: “The United States has not a single voter, and does not hold elections for any office. All elections are state elections.”
Already there has been too much concentration of power in the central Government. To take away from the states their power of selecting Senators would be nothing short of revolution, and would lead to such a consolidation of power as would entirely change the form and spirit of our Government.
If the principles of Populism grow strong enough to carry the large states they will probably be found strong enough to carry the small states. If they be found strong enough to control the state elections, they will control national offices, because, as the Washington Post very aptly points out, the Federal Government holds no elections and has no voters: it is the state that holds the election and furnishes the voters; it is the state that prescribes the limits of the franchise, and says how, when, where and by whom these elections shall be held; and even the Federal Judiciary has not yet ventured to infringe in the slightest degree upon that reserved right of the separate states.
Speaking of the equal representation of the states in the Senate, Mr. Adams says, “This vicious compromise was made in the Constitutional Convention as the price for the perpetuation of slavery.”
This compromise he characterizes further as “cowardly and unfair.” And he adds: “Now that the logic of events has made this a nation, despite the restrictive clauses of the Constitution, the dual participation of the unrepresentative Senate is so grotesque that its continuance is fraught with a danger which at any time is likely to precipitate civil war.”
Is Mr. Adams quite sure that “this vicious compromise was the price of the perpetuation of slavery”?
Of course, I knew in a general way that slavery had been responsible for pretty nearly every mean old thing that has ever happened to this country; and it has always grieved me, with more or less poignancy, that New England could not have foreseen that she couldn’t make slavery pay. We lost much precious time while she was discovering that she couldn’t. When at length she did discover that there was no money in it for her, she thoughtfully sold most of her slaves, and went in for Emancipation.
Then, to be sure, the sacred “Cause of Freedom” advanced at a gallop; but, as I said, we had lost a good deal of time waiting for New England to make her experiment, and a good deal of unhappiness resulted.
But while I knew all this, in a general way, I really was not aware that the slave-owning states in the Constitutional Convention forced Washington, Madison, Franklin and Randolph to act in the cowardly and vicious manner described by Mr. Adams.
The state of Virginia bitterly opposed the equal representation of the states in the Senate. This was strange conduct in Virginia, if the purpose of that compromise was the “perpetuation of slavery.”
The state of New Jersey was the leader of those states in the convention which demanded equal representation in the Senate. If that senatorial equality was intended to perpetuate slavery, New Jersey’s attitude was most peculiar.
This compromise which Mr. Adams calls “vicious, cowardly and unfair” is known to constitutional history as the Connecticut Compromise. The men who championed it most ably were Roger Sherman and Oliver Ellsworth. Were these men actuated by a desire to perpetuate slavery?
All the books which I have read upon the subject state that equal representation in the Senate was a compromise which the smaller states wrung from the larger states, as the price of the union, not the price of the “perpetuation of slavery.”
New Jersey, Connecticut and Delaware were afraid to give up their independent, sovereign existence as states and to go into a union where the large states, like Pennsylvania and Virginia, would have so much greater power than themselves, if that power should be based on population.
When New Jersey refused to consider any plan of union which did not safeguard the interests of the small states, she was not thinking of perpetuating slavery. When Roger Sherman and Oliver Ellsworth made such a determined fight to preserve, in part, the equality which then prevailed among the states, they were not thinking of perpetuating slavery. Their motive was to protect Connecticut, the small state, against Virginia and other large states.
When Benjamin Franklin finally proposed that the Convention adopt the Connecticut idea, that aged philosopher and friend of human liberty was not acting in the interest of the slave-owners.
When Washington gave his consent, he was not guilty of cowardice and unfairness for the purpose of protecting slavery.
These men knew perfectly well that they were exceeding their authority in making a new Constitution. They were sent there to amend the Articles of Confederation; and when New Jersey, Connecticut and Delaware took the resolute position which was voiced by Patterson, Roger Sherman and Oliver Ellsworth, Washington and Franklin both had sense enough to know that it would be utter folly to go before the people, seeking a ratification of a new Constitution, unless the difference between big states and little states had been first adjusted in the Constitutional Convention. Indeed, Rhode Island, another small state, was so jealous of her rights that she refused to send delegates to the Convention.
My authorities are Bancroft’s “History of the United States,” “The Constitutional History” of Landon, McMaster’s “With the Fathers,” Hildreth’s “History of the United States,” Schouler’s “History of the United States.”
The latter historian says expressly that the compromise under discussion “was secured through the determination of the smaller states not to yield entirely the rule of representation which the larger states were bent on invading,” and, he adds, “this compromise admirably preserves the composite character of our system.”
The historian declares that the smaller states expressly committed to the New Jersey plan which sought to retain the sovereignty of the states were New Jersey, Connecticut and Delaware.
Hildreth, in his “History of the United States,” takes the same position, and says: “The party of the smaller states, known also as the State Rights Party, included the delegates from Connecticut, New Jersey, Delaware and a majority of those from Maryland and New York.
“The party of the larger states, or National Party, included not only the delegates from Virginia, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, but also those from the two Carolinas and Georgia, states which anticipated a very rapid increase of population.”
(I could quote Woodrow Wilson to the same effect, only Woodrow isn’t worth while.)
Now it must occur to Mr. Adams that these facts are at war with his theory.
Virginia, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, the two Carolinas and Georgia would never have been found opposing the equality of representation of the states in the Senate if the purpose of that senatorial equality was the perpetuation of the institution of slavery.
There was a compromise which the slave-owners wrung as a concession from the free states, but this compromise benefited them in the lower House, not in the Senate.
When the Constitution gave the slave states representation based upon three-fifths of the slaves, the institution of slavery derived strength from the national idea of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Virginia—not from the State Rights idea of New Jersey, Delaware and Connecticut.
“Take the Children”
In France the Privileged Classes had created a situation which pleased them perfectly.
A fifth of the soil belonged to 30,000 noble families; another fifth belonged to the clergy; another fifth belonged to the king and city governments; the remaining two-fifths belonged to all the other people, middle class and peasants.
To the support of the Government the clergy contributed nothing except as a free gift; the nobility contributed pretty much what they pleased, and they did not please to contribute a great deal.
The king’s family spent $55,000,000 per year. Two brothers of the king spent $2,000,000; and, to pay the debts of one princely bankrupt, King Louis XVI took $3,000,000 out of the public funds.
Two hundred and ninety-five cooks served in the king’s kitchen. Nearly two thousand horses stood in his stables. A squad of soldiers escorted his dinner to the table. A magnificent band furnished music while he ate, and a dozen gallant lords, paid for the service, helped him to undress and get to bed when the arduous do-nothing of the day had been finished.
Some 30,000,000 Frenchmen did not enter into this world of privilege. The merchant, the lawyer, the doctor, the manufacturer, the farmer, the laborer—all these stood outside the pearly gates, catching only a glimpse of the radiance within, hearing only, as from a distance, the music of this Eden, created by class legislation.
The peasant neither owned his land absolutely nor himself absolutely. Over him and his was suspended the heavy sword of class privilege.
The noble hunter of game, who enjoyed the exclusive privilege of killing game, might trample down his grain with the utmost unconcern, at whatever time the pleasure of the noble huntsman dictated. Mr. Peasant was not allowed to protect his fields and crops by putting up any kind of inclosure.
Mr. Peasant must not kill the wild boar or the antlered stag, even though those noble beasts, reserved for noble huntsmen, were destroying the crop upon which he and his family were dependent for a living.
He could not, under any conditions whatsoever, destroy the pigeons which came sweeping down upon his grain, nor must he, during certain seasons, manure his crop or hoe out the grass, lest he injure the flavor of the young partridges, and deprive them of the shelter necessary for their comfort and growth.
He could not press his grapes save at the nobleman’s wine-press, nor grind his wheat save at the nobleman’s mill, nor bake his bread elsewhere than in the nobleman’s oven.
These monopolies were peculiar to the lord, and the peasant must pay toll lest the lord’s revenues decrease.
The peasant could not vote, had really no civic existence, was not considered in the government of the country; could be made to work whether he wished to do so or not for the noble and the king. His horses could be taken from the cart, or from the plow, if his superiors demanded it. Neither for his labor nor his horse was he paid. He could not put salt into his victuals without paying a high price for it, and he was not allowed to eat his victuals unsalted. The law compelled him to buy a certain portion of salt every year at an exorbitant price.
The church took from him one-tenth of all he made, besides which he must pay fees for christenings, marriages, burials and pardons for sins—to say nothing of prayers in behalf of the living, the dying and the dead. The feudal lord took from him annually a certain part of all he made.
The French historian Taine says that in some portions of France the peasant paid in feudal dues, church tithes and royal taxes more than three-fourths of all that he made. In other portions of France the entire net produce of the soil went to the church and state, and so great was the intolerable burden that the peasants quit in despair, left the land to become a desert waste, and flocked to the cities to swell the army of The Wretched.
To throw off the shackles of this frightful system of misgovernment the French Revolutionist roused the people.
At first Great Britain rejoiced in the movement which Lafayette, Mirabeau, Necker, Sieyès and Camille Desmoulins inaugurated. These early revolutionists declared their purpose to set up a constitutional government in France such as Great Britain enjoyed, but when these moderate and constitutional reformers were thrown aside by the radical democrats who were determined to establish a republic—when this democracy had confiscated the lands held by the church, had issued paper money and had taken for national uses the abandoned estates of the immigrant nobles, the ruling powers of church and state in Great Britain became greatly alarmed, and it was resolved that war to the death should be waged against the principles of the French Revolution.
Unless this were done, democracy might assert itself in Great Britain, and those things which had been taken from the people under forms of law might be restored in the same way to the original owners. Therefore William Pitt, Prime Minister and actual ruler of Great Britain, declared war upon France, blockaded her coasts, organized European kings into confederacies against her, and for more than a dozen dreadful years poured armed legions upon her.
During this era of “blood and iron” men were torn from peaceful pursuits throughout Great Britain to supply the navy and the army with food for powder.
As a necessary consequence, the demand for labor was greater than the supply; and as England depends especially upon her manufactures, it was there that the scarcity of labor was most injuriously felt.
It is said that a deputation representing the manufacturers waited upon the Prime Minister and laid their grievances before him, asking the question, “What must we do?”
Mr. Pitt is reported to have answered, “Take the Children.”
This story may not be true, but it is a fact that it represented precisely the emergency, and the manner in which that emergency was met. It also represents correctly the attitude of Mr. Pitt as defined in his speeches in Parliament.
A cruel, unjustifiable war had devoured the laborer who should have been at his task. The laws had dragged him into the army and into the navy whether he wished to go or not. Press-gangs had prowled about the lanes and alleys clutching at every poor man who happened to be sound of limb, and had carried him off by force into a battleship, where he might be kept until the bride whom he had left at the church door had counted him as dead, or until the family which he had left contented and happy had been lost to the knowledge of men.
Having taken the father, the same remorseless class-greed demanded the child, and took it.
Upon the altar of English lust for money has been sacrificed more helpless men, women and children than ever fell before the ruthless hordes of Tamerlane or Attila.
“Within carefully guarded limits, child-labor is no more to be objected to in manufactures than in agriculture, but in the early days of the factory system these limits were utterly discarded.
“In the infancy of the system it became the custom of the master manufacturers to contract with the managers of workhouses throughout England and of the charities of Scotland, to send their young children to the factories of the great towns. Many thousands of children between the ages of six and ten were thus sent, absolutely uncared for and unprotected, and left to the complete disposal of masters who often had not a single thought except speedily to amass a fortune, and who knew that if the first supply of infant labor were used up there was still much more to be obtained.
“Thousands of children at this early age might be found working in the factories of England and Scotland, usually from twelve to fourteen, sometimes even fifteen and sixteen hours a day, not unfrequently during the greater part of the night. Destitute or drunken or unnatural parents made it a regular system to raise money by hiring out their children from six, sometimes from five, years old, by written contracts and for long periods. In one case brought before Parliament a gang of these children was put up for sale among a bankrupt’s effects, and publicly advertised as part of the property. In another an agreement was disclosed between a London parish and a Lancashire manufacturer in which it was stipulated that with every twenty sound children one idiot should be taken.”
“Even as late as 1840, when the most important manufactures had been regulated by law, Lord Ashley was able to show that boys employed in the carpet manufacture at Kidderminster were called up at three and four in the morning, and kept working sixteen or eighteen hours: that children five years old were engaged in the unhealthy trade of pin-making, and were kept at work from six in the morning to eight at night.” (Lecky, “England in Eighteenth Century.”)
In the coal mines and in the salt mines men, women and children were literally beasts of burden—were chattels, and when the mines were sold the human machines passed from one owner to another just as the mechanical apparatus passed.
There were women who in these coal mines, where the tunnels were too narrow to allow them to stand upright, had to crawl back and forward on their hands and knees for fourteen to sixteen hours a day, drawing after them the trucks loaded with coal.
These trucks were securely fastened to the woman by means of a chain which passed between her legs and was attached to a belt strapped round her waist. The woman seldom wore any clothes except an old pair of trousers made of sacking.
“Little children were forced to work underground from year to year. Deep in the gloom of a night which had neither moonlight nor stars; rarely ever seeing the face of nature and of day—lost to God’s glory of sunlight, shady woods, silvery waters—lost to intelligence, happiness, enjoyment, reduced to the helpless condition of beasts of burden.”
What was true of the mines was also true of the factories.
Men, women and children were forced to work for a number of hours absolutely inconsistent with physical and moral development.
In the year 1833 Lord Ashley led in the noble effort to redeem the children from the clutches of unscrupulous commercialism, and to lighten the burden of men and women by regulating the hours of labor and the conditions of service.
After a most stubborn resistance, in which the corporations urged against the reform every reason which we hear urged in our day, England did herself the immense credit of checking the tyranny of those who were grinding the lives out of the poor in order that the rich should become richer.
In this country the cry of commercialism is the same as that which in Great Britain said, “Take the children.”
Corporations want cheap labor. If they can’t get the adult, they take the child.
In the Southern states the tendency to employ children has had alarming development. In 1880 the total number of cotton factory employees was 16,740. Of these, 4,090 were children under sixteen years of age. In the year 1900 the total number of employees had increased to 97,559. Of these, 24,459 were children under sixteen years of age.
In the states outside of the South there were, in 1880, 155,803 employees in cotton factories. Of this number, 24,243 were children under sixteen years of age. In the year 1900 the total number of cotton factory employees in states outside of the South was 205,302. Of these, only 15,796 were children under sixteen years of age.
In other words, within the Southern states the children under sixteen years of age constitute now, as they did twenty years ago, 25 per cent. of all the operatives employed: whereas, in the states outside the South the children under sixteen number less than 8 per cent. of all those employed. Therefore the situation which was justly considered so bad in Great Britain that it was reformed seventy years ago, and which has been reformed in most of the states outside of the South, is three times worse in the South than it is in any other portion of the Union, and is just as bad now as it was twenty years ago.
In The Tradesman, of Chattanooga, Tenn., August 15, 1902, the statement is made that the number of children under sixteen years of age now at work in the Southern mills approximated 50,000.
The 50,000 little ones who troop to the mill every morning, breathe the steam-heated, dust-laden, germ-infected atmosphere of the close rooms throughout the entire day, who light, with lanterns, their way home across the fields when darkness has fallen, are white children. During the same hours that these white boys and girls are finding their way to the factory where their energy and strength is offered up as a sacrifice to mammon, 50,000 black children are singing merrily on their way to school, where they are gaining what the white children are losing.
Glance forward twenty years and ask yourselves what will be the relative positions of the 50,000 white children and the 50,000 black children. It will be a miracle if most of those white children are not either in their graves, or in the hospitals, or in the slums, or in the prisons, while the 50,000 black children will be holding clerkships in some department of the Federal Government.
The kind of civilization which we are going to have in the future is being determined now. Race development and progress cannot be extemporized or bought ready-made. It is a matter of preparing the soil, planting the seed, cultivating the crop.
We shall reap as we shall have sown.
The most profoundly disgusting feature of the Southern political situation today is that the Democratic bosses who control our state legislatures will not allow us to give our white children as good treatment as the negro children are getting.
Almost universally the Southern mills are controlled by Northern capitalists; but it is the Southern politician, officeholder, editor or stockholder who rushes to the legislature saying that child slavery must continue because it is good for the child.
These Northern capitalists who own Southern mills are, to a large extent, Republicans in politics. The unprincipled Southern men who put up a plea in behalf of child slavery are almost exclusively Democratic.
Just as J. P. Morgan, the Republican railroad king, uses the Southern Democratic machine to rob the people through his railroads, so the Northern Republican millowner uses the Southern Democratic politician to rivet upon the Southern white child the chains of commercial serfdom, ruinous to the child and ominous to the future of the white race in the South.
It was class-greed which first raised the cry, “Take the children.” It is class-greed which now says, “Take the Children.”
Paternalism
One of the dreadfulest words that ever scared a mossback is “Paternalism.”
He does not know what it means, and he does not want to know. He flees from it as from something too blood-curdling to look upon. His leaders, his orators, his editors, have all told him that no language could fully describe the horrors of “Paternalism”; and therefore he feels that while poverty, slavery, hunger and starvation are sometimes annoying incidents in life, they bear no comparison to the pitiless rigors of “Paternalism.”
He has got used to unmerciful taxes, to ill-paid labor, to squalid surroundings, to empty pockets, and to the cry of children hungering for bread. All these discomforts he can stand, because they have come to him in the natural course of events under the rule of Democracy and Republicanism. But the very idea of a new party springing up and practicing “Paternalism” unnerves him. He fears he couldn’t stand it.
We had this terror-stricken victim of Democratic bugabooism in mind today when we read the decision of Cleveland’s Attorney-General, to the effect that whisky in a bonded warehouse could not be reached by process from a State Court.
Under a law which has stealthily slipped upon the statute-book while the people were not noticing, the producers of distilled liquors get the privilege of storing their “firewater” in a government warehouse and getting a certificate of deposit.
The Government takes care of the whisky until the owner feels like paying a tax upon it.
Formerly, under an act passed by Republicans and Democrats, this exemption from tax lasted three years. At the last session of Congress the Democrats, out of tender consideration for the poor, downtrodden Whisky Trust, extended this exemption to eight years.
The great and good Government of the United States, therefore, steps forward through its officers, and kindly says to the distiller: “Hand me your whisky bottle: I’ll take care of it for you until you get ready to pay your taxes.”
Not only does our great and good Government say substantially these very words to the distiller, but it guards his whisky bottle so jealously that no writ or execution or other process from a State Court is allowed to touch the liquor which is thus being held by the Government for the benefit of the owner.
Governor Tillman, of South Carolina, tried to bring his power as Chief Magistrate of a sovereign state to bear on some of the whisky which Uncle Sam was taking care of for the Whisky Trust, but the voice of our great and good Government was promptly heard saying, “Keep off the Grass.”
Brave Benjamin had to let the whisky alone.
The certificate of deposit issued on the liquor by the Government to the distiller becomes at once valuable commercial paper upon which he can get any amount of money he wants.
He can go to New York, borrow money on his certificate at 2 per cent., and use it for eight years without difficulty, because the money-lenders have the certificate which shows to them that the Government is taking good care of the whisky all the time.
Is this “Paternalism”?
If so, please don’t mention it to the mossback whom we have described. It might make him run away and tear the buggy up.
Planting Corn
The bluebird was out today; out in his glossiest plumage, his throat gurgling with song.
For the sunlight was warm and radiant in all the South, and the coming spring had laid its benediction on every field and hedge and forest.
The smell of newly plowed ground mingled with the subtle incense of the yellow jasmine; and from every orchard a shower of the blossoms of peach and apple and pear was wafted into the yard and hung lovingly on the eaves and in the piazzas of the old homestead—the old and faded homestead.
Was there a cloud in all the sky? Not one, not one.
“Gee! Mule!!!”
“Dad blast your hide, why don’t you gee-e-EE!!”
Co-whack! goes the plowline on the back of the patient mule—the dignified upholder of mortgages, “time price” accounts, and the family credit generally.
Down the furrow, and up the furrow; down to the woods, and up to the fence—there they go, the sturdy plowman and his much-enduring but indispensable mule.
For the poplar leaves are now as big as squirrel-ears and it’s “time to plant corn.”
On moves the plowman, steady as a clock, silent and reflective.
Right after him comes the corndropper, dropping corn.
The grains faintly chink as the bare feet of the corndropper hurry past; and before the corn has well cuddled itself into the shoe-heel of the plowman’s track, down comes the hoe of the “coverer”—and then the seeds pass into the portals of the great unknown; the unknown of burial, of death and of life renewed.
Peeping from the thicket, near at hand, the royal redbird makes note of what is going on, nor is the thrush blind to the progress of the corndropper. And seated with calm but watchful dignity on the highest pine in the thicket sits the melancholy crow, sharpening his appetite with all the anticipated pleasures of simple larceny.
The mocking-bird circles and swoops from tree to tree, and in her matchless bursts of varied song no cadence is wanting, no melody missed.
The hum of the bees is in the air; white butterflies, like snowflakes, fall down the light and lazily float away.
The robin lingers about the China tree, and the bluejay, lifting his plumed frontlet, picks a quarrel with every feathered acquaintance and noisily asserts his grievances.
The jo-ree has dived deeper into the thicket, and the festive sapsucker, he of the scarlet crest, begins to come to the front, inquisitive as to the location of bugs and worms.
On such a day, such a cloudless, radiant, flower-sweetened day, the horseman slackens the rein as he rides through lanes and quiet fields; and he dares to dream that the children of God once loved each other.
On such a day one may dream that the time might come when they would do so again.
Rein in and stop, here on this high hill! Look north, look east where the sun rises, look south, look west where the sun sets—on all sides the scene is the same. In every field the steady mule, the steady plowman and the children dropping corn.
Close the eye a moment and look at the picture fancy paints. Every field in Georgia is there, every field in the South is there. And in each the figures are the same—the steady mule and the steady man, and the pattering feet of the children dropping corn.
In these furrows lie the food of the republic; on these fields depend life, and health and happiness.
Halt those children—and see how the cheek of the world would blanch at thought of famine!
Paralyze that plowman—and see how national bankruptcy would shatter every city in the Union.
Dropping corn! A simple thing, you say.
And yet, as those white seeds rattle down to the sod and hide away for a season, it needs no peculiar strength of fancy to see a Jacob’s ladder crowded with ascending blessings.
Scornfully the railroad king would glance at these small teams in each small field; yet check those corndroppers and his cars would rot on the road and rust would devour the engines in the roundhouse. The banker would ride through those fields thinking only of his hoarded millions, nor would he ever startle himself with the thought that his millions would melt away in mist were those tiny hands never more to be found dropping corn. The bondholder, proud in all the security of the untaxed receiver of other people’s taxes, would see in these fields merely the industry from which he gathers tribute; it would never dawn on his mind that without the opening of those furrows and the hurrying army of children dropping corn his bond wouldn’t be worth the paper it is written on.
Yet it is literally so.
Feed the world, and it can live, work, produce and march on. Starve it, and what becomes of railroads, banks, mills, mines, notes, mortgages and bonds?
Great is the might of this republic!—great in its schools, churches, courts, legislatures; great in its towns and cities; great in its commerce, great in its manufactures, great in its colossal wealth.
But sweep from under it all these worn and wasted fields, strike into idleness or death the plowman, his wife and his child, and what becomes of the gorgeous structure whose foundation is his field?
Halt the food growers, and what becomes of your gold and its “intrinsic value”?
How much of your gold can you eat?
How many of your diamonds will answer the need of a loaf?
But enough.
It is time to ride down the hill. The tinkle of the cow-bell follows the sinking sun—both on the way home.
So with many an unspoken thought I ride homeward, thinking of those who plant the corn.
And hard indeed would be the heart that, knowing what these people do and bear and suffer, yet would not fashion this prayer to the favored of the republic: “O rulers, lawmakers, soldiers, judges, bankers, merchants, editors, lawyers, doctors, preachers, bondholders! Be not so unmindful of the toil and misery of those who feed you!”
Not Parson Brownlow’s Son
Knoxville, Tenn., April 26, 1905.
Hon. Thomas E. Watson, Thomson, Ga.
Dear Sir: In your article on “Politics and Economics” in Tom Watson’s Magazine for May, you speak of the salary grab of congressmen as follows: “Tennessee will not be shocked to know that ‘Slippery Jim’ Richardson voted for the grab. She may be shocked to know that Brownlow did the same thing—Brownlow, the son of the famous Parson.”
You are entirely mistaken about Walter P. Brownlow, to whom you refer, being a son of the “famous Parson.” Parson Brownlow has only one son living, Colonel John Bell Brownlow, who commanded the regiment in which I was an officer, the Ninth Tennessee Cavalry Volunteers of the Union troops during the Civil War, and who lives in this city and is not a member of Congress now nor has he ever been.
Please publish this in full in your issue for June and greatly oblige me.
Respectfully,
W. R. Murphy.
P.S.—I am a constant reader of your magazine and am enjoying your articles very much; and not only yours, but those of Frederick Upham Adams. Many of the truths which you utter through the medium of your great magazine will prove to be precious seed sown in the rich soil of the national conscience, and the fruitage will be invaluable.—W. R. M.
Mr. President!
Won’t you please quiet down now and get to business? Don’t you think you can give us a rest on speeches and photographs?
Can’t you leave it to the women to do as they think best on the baby question?
If you will just sit still a while and attend to your own business, you have no idea how many people will be thankfully appreciative.
Why don’t you concentrate your efforts and peg away until you accomplish something?
Why start up so much game which you never bag?
You said you were going to compel the Cattle Kings to take their barbed wire fences off the public lands—and you haven’t done it.
Why don’t you give Colonel John Mosby free rein and let him cut the wire?
You said you were going to discipline the Railroads and the Trusts—and you haven’t done it.
Why don’t you have your prosecuting officers take out warrants for such men as Armour, the Rockefellers and Rogers?
You know they are law-breakers; deal with them as law-breakers.
Don’t seine the pond for minnows when you can harpoon such whales as these.
Hit the big criminals—hit them hard—and eighty million people will cheer you on!
You led us to believe that you meant to revise the Tariff; why don’t you follow it up?
You know that the Trust exists because of the Railroad and the Tariff.
The Railroad gives the special favor; the Tariff prevents foreign Competition—and there you are. The Trust is born of these two Special Favors, one given by the Tariff and the other by private contracts violative of law.
To break any and all Trusts remove the Tariff on the articles controlled by the Trusts, and at the same time relentlessly prosecute as common criminals every Railroad Official, however high and rich, who grants to one shipper any sort of favor not granted to all.
There isn’t a Trust in the United States that you can’t bust in twelve months if you go at it with these weapons.
The Free List for trust-controlled articles; Criminal Warrants for the Armours, Swifts, Harrimans, Rockefellers, Morgans, Belmonts—all who are “in the game.”
Here’s a work worthy of you, Mr. Roosevelt.
It needs you!
It wants your pluck, your energy, your honesty, your tenacity; won’t you buckle to the task?
Let the baby question alone. There will always be plenty of babies.
Don’t you fret about that. The women know what’s what.
Turn your head another way. Put your attention on your job.
A great man’s task invites you—demands you.
Rise to it like a great man!
Did You Know It?
Did you know that a private corporation got its clutch upon the Monongahela River generations ago and shut off free navigation?
Did you know that this private monopoly exercised the power of dictating to every dollar’s worth of produce transported upon that highway the terms upon which it should go to market?
Did you know that the people at large, who were robbed by this gigantic and unnatural monopoly, complained vainly during all these long and dreary years of corporation tyranny?
Did you know that as soon as the corporations which are working in coal and iron got tired of said monopoly and began to complain, our great and good Government at once had ears to hear and eyes that could see?
Did you know that patriots of the Carnegie stripe, who had to pay tribute to the Monongahela monopoly, were losing $425,000 per year to said monopoly; and that Carnegie and Company went to our great and good Government and demanded that said Government buy out said Monongahela monopoly?
Did you know that our great and good Government immediately harkened to the wails of Carnegie and his Company and appointed a commission to assess the value of said Monongahela monopoly?
Did you know that said monopoly, being wise in its generation, realized that its hour had come and that its best policy was to sell out at a high price?
Did you know that the Commission appraised the monopoly franchise at more than three and a half million dollars, and that our great and good Government paid the money?
Did you know that your cash was thus lifted out of the Treasury to pay for a free river for Carnegie and his Company; and that nobody thought it worth while to say “Turkey” to you about it?
This buying-off of the private monopoly which throttled the commerce of a great section was a good thing to do. We are glad it was done. The people can now navigate the Monongahela as freely as Carnegie can do it; but is it not mortifying to reflect that the PEOPLE were powerless against the wrong until the coal and iron kings took the case in hand?
And isn’t it amazing to see how easily the doors of the Treasury fly open, and the millions pour out, when the Privileged Corporations want it done?
When it became a matter of self-interest to the Privileged Corporations to buy out the Monongahela monopoly the Constitution was not in the way nor was the money lacking.
Whenever it suits the same Privileged Classes to unload the Railroads on to the Government at fancy prices it will be done. When that day comes the Constitution will not be in the way nor will the means be lacking.
Whenever the Privileged Classes want anything done the Constitution approves and the cash box is full.
It is only when the masses want anything done that our Constitution becomes a fretful porcupine with quills erect and our cash box has a hollow sound.
If you want to have a jolly time with that gay old creature, the United States Constitution, join the Privileged Corporations.
If you want to frolic with the United States Treasury and pay for what you want with public money, join the Privileged Corporations.
Rural Free Delivery to Country People
(Extract from the People’s Party Paper, March, 1893, Mr. Watson’s paper, commenting upon the passage of the first appropriation for the R. F. D.)
The annual appropriations for the free delivery of mails was, until the present administration, confined to cities of over 10,000 inhabitants. At the suggestion of Mr. Wanamaker, an experiment was made in smaller towns enjoying daily mails, but as yet no country neighborhoods had obtained the privilege.
On Friday, February 17, 1893, when the annual appropriation was pending, Mr. Watson proposed an amendment as follows:
For free delivery service, including existing experimental free delivery offices, $11,254,900, of which the sum of $10,000 shall be applied, under the direction of the Postmaster-General, to experimental free delivery in rural communities other than towns and villages.
Mr. Watson urged that the paragraph proposed to be amended “provides for the expenditure of $11,254,943 for free delivery service. The amendment reduced the amount of that expenditure and simply directed that the Postmaster-General should apply $10,000 of the appropriation to experimental free delivery in rural communities.” The following discussion followed:
Mr. Watson—“Mr. Chairman, the present law provides for an experimental free delivery in rural communities; but as I understand it—and the chairman of the committee, the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Henderson), makes the same statement to the House—the law has been construed to mean cities, towns and villages, and there are now in operation experimental free deliveries in certain towns and villages.
“The law expressly provides for ‘rural communities,’ and it seems to me where the general laws make such provision there is no hardship in taking a small amount from this appropriation, only $10,000, and appropriating it for experimental free delivery in absolutely rural communities, that is to say, in the country pure and simple, among the farmers, in those neighborhoods where they do not get their mail more than once in every two weeks, and where these deserving people have settled in communities one hundred years old and do not receive a newspaper that is not two weeks behind the times.
“The amendment proposes not to increase the appropriation; it actually diminishes it by a nominal amount, but takes $10,000 of it to be provided for experimental free delivery in absolutely rural communities, instead of towns and villages, which the authorities construe to mean ‘rural communities.’ In other words, I think that part of the money ought to be spent in the country, where the law provides it shall be spent, and having made this statement, if we can have another division, and the committee is against my amendment, I will yield to its will.”
Mr. Henderson, of North Carolina—“Mr. Chairman, the only law on the subject at all is in the very language used in this appropriation bill:
“‘For free delivery service, including existing experimental free delivery offices.’
“That is all the law now on the statute-books in regard to this question.
“I do not want the statement of the gentleman from Georgia in regard to there being a law on the statutes as to rural free delivery to go without correction.”
Mr. Watson—“Mr. Chairman, this delivery in the small towns and villages is called ‘rural free delivery.’”
Mr. Henderson, of North Carolina—“But as a matter of fact there is no law except that stated here in this appropriation bill.”
The amendment was adopted by the House. This opens up the way for the farmers to secure services on an equal footing with the residents of the towns and the cities. It is one of the first instances in which the Government has put itself in daily touch with the citizen of the rural community. If followed up by successive Congresses, this entering wedge may cleave the way for a system of intercommunication that will remove a great inconvenience and cause for dissatisfaction in country homes. As a first step its importance cannot be overestimated.
Random Paragraphs
You may say what you please about Castro, but I glory in his spunk.
President of Venezuela, he was sitting comfortably in his seat when, one day, another Venezuelan who wanted the job cooked up an Insurrection.
South American revolutions, like all other procedures in civilized communities, have to be financed.
The question with the leader of the Venezuelan insurrection was:
“Who will finance me?”
The Asphalt Trust stepped forward with necessary funds.
No doubt the Trust was assured by Matos, the Insurgent leader, that in the event his revolution succeeded the Trust was to have dominion over Venezuela, like unto that which Standard Oil has over our own Eden of Christian Civilization.
At any rate, the Trust put up its money on Matos, who turned out to be the wrong horse.
Castro won. But the Trust continued to help Matos even after he had lost. Died hard, you see, because death is not the law of Nature with Trusts. Usually they live and the other fellow dies.
The Asphalt Trust is composed, in part, of American experts in Frenzied Finance. These marauders who were seeking new worlds to conquer planned to catch Venezuela in the same net which holds us.
Castro defied them, fought them in the Courts, whipped them, took away the franchise for non-performance of contract, etc.
Then they had the brazen audacity to demand that our Government coerce Castro.
The Trusts rule the United States—shall little Venezuela check their career of conquest?
Away with the feeble Castro!
Said the Trust to Roosevelt:
“Shake your big stick at this South American crank and make him Arbitrate!”
Says Roosevelt to Castro:
“Arbitrate with the Asphalt Trust, or——”
Says Castro to Roosevelt:
“Arbitrate nothing! Hands off, or——”
In other words, our Government, friendly always to Frenzied Finance, put up a bluff on Castro.
Whereupon Castro stood pat and “called” Roosevelt.
And, all at once, Mr. Roosevelt went a-hunting, and left Taft—the portly, handsome, self-complacent Taft—“sitting on the lid.”
Bully for you, Castro!
Evidently you are “some punkins.”
Would to heaven we had a Castro to smash the Beef Trust!
Roosevelt and young Garfield don’t seem to know where to take hold. The legal proceedings do not advance half so rapidly as does the price of beef.
If you have never read Herbert Casson’s “Organized Self-Help,” do so. A brighter, braver, stronger book is not picked up often. No matter how much you may already know, your information will be greater when you shall have mastered this little volume.
The reason why Sir Plausible Voluble, of Nebraska, is so mixed up on the Railroad Question is that his talk-talk-talk commenced, as usual, before he understood his subject. At first he advocated state ownership, which would have given us forty-odd different systems. Now he has reached the point where he wants the Nation to own national lines of transportation while the states are to own “local lines.” Wouldn’t we have a sweet time deciding which roads are national and which are local?
Under the present system every line of transportation has a double character, partly national and partly local, and the traffic on every line is partly state and partly inter-state.
You can no more separate what is national from what is local in the railroads than you can in the Post-Office.
Every postal route is at once local and national. A letter may come five miles, five hundred or five thousand—the system carries it to its destination.
So with freight and passengers. The so-called local railroad will carry freight from the adjoining county, from the adjoining state, from the remotest section of the Union, and from the lands beyond our borders. So with passengers.
Why, then, should anybody be talking tommyrot about “local lines”?
Said Betsy Prig to Sairey Gamp, concerning the alleged existence of a certain Mrs. Harris, “I don’t believe there is no sich a person.”
Says I to W. J. B., concerning the alleged “local lines of transportation,” I don’t believe there is any such thing as a local line of transportation.
The reasoning which sustains government ownership of a part of the railroads inevitably leads to the ownership of all.
At such a cherry, why take two bites?
Why have a system where there is certain to be a clash between state management and national management?
Why leave the gaps down for inequalities in rates?
Why not insure uniformity by unity of ownership and management?
Why not learn a lesson from the German Empire, and avoid state ownership altogether?
However, I am glad to see that our Nebraska friend is making progress. Give him time, and he will arrive.
For a convert who jumped on our platform of Government Ownership so recently as last July, he does fairly well. But if he would use his thinking apparatus a little more, and his organs of speech a little less, he would get on faster.
“Local lines” of transportation—at this time?
He might as well say that the artery in his left hind leg is a “local artery.”
The New York World says:
“If Judge Parker is a Democrat, Mr. Bryan is not. If Mr. Bryan is a Democrat, Judge Parker is not.
“No party-name is wide enough to blanket two such irreconcilable theories of government.”
That’s where the World falls down.
The Democratic party-name is wide enough to blanket anything and everything, anybody and everybody.
I’ve seen it cover the Prohibitionist and the Saloon-Keeper, the Gold-Bug and the Free-Silverite, the corporation lobbyist and the Bible-class expert, the Free Trader and the Protectionist, the Bank men and the Anti-Bank men, the Income Tax men and the Anti-Income Tax men, the Expansionists and the Imperialists, the Inflationists and the Contractionists, strict Constructionists and those who sent the United States Army to quell a local disturbance in Illinois over the protest of a Democratic Governor.
There is no earthly difference, antagonism, variance of creed, or policy, or purpose, or persons that the Democratic party-name is not “wide enough to blanket.”
The Democratic party-name not wide enough to blanket Judge Parker and W. J. B.?
Oh, yes, it is.
It did so in 1904, and it will do so again.
If Bryan whips Parker in the Convention of 1908, Parkerites will knife Bryan as they did in 1896 and 1900.
If Parker beats Bryan in the Convention, Bryan will “come across” in 1908, as he did in 1904.
This play of politics is a very pretty game, and the politicians get a good deal out of it.
The people are kept interested and excited, but the people don’t get anything out of it.
It is not seriously intended that they should.
Primarily, the game is played for the benefit of the players.
Tom Taggart, the gambling-hell man of Indiana, must feel very funny when he looks back and sees the imposing lines of Democratic preachers, Bible-class graduates, Amen-corner grunters and family-prayer brethren who are meekly following him, Taggart, as he, the official Commander-in-Chief of the Democratic Party, bravely leads his loyal hosts upward and onward.
If Tom T. has any sense of humor he must enjoy such a situation with exquisite relish.
The Gods We Worship
The savage African, in the wilds of his native home, takes a few sticks and some cloth and makes an idol which he calls Mumbo Jumbo, and before which he falls prostrate, in devout worship.
Whereat we civilized fools all laugh at said African, and call him a barbarian—as indeed he is.
Nevertheless, it is quite apparent that while we make no gods out of sticks and calico, we worship Mumbo Jumbos of our own just the same.
Take, for instance, the Gold Reserve. Nature did not produce it; it has no life, no motion other than that which we lunatics give it.
One day it occurred to John Sherman to stack up, in the Treasury, a cool hundred million dollars, and keep it there, idle.
He straightway created the Gold Reserve.
Any law for this? No.
Any necessity for it? No.
Any popular demand for it? No.
His excuse was that he wanted a Gold Reserve out of which to pay off the $346,000,000 in Greenbacks “when presented for redemption.”
Was anybody clamoring for the redemption of Greenbacks? No.
Was there any law under which anybody had a right to go to the Treasury and demand gold for Greenbacks? No.
Was there any custom or policy which authorized this setting apart of gold to redeem Greenbacks? No.
But Sherman did it, just the same, and it soon appeared that he had made us a Mumbo Jumbo which we all worshiped and before whose mysterious power we all fell prostrate.
As long as Sherman was Secretary of the Treasury the Gold Reserve was sacred. Congress looked upon it with awe. The President did it reverence. The newspapers bent to it in speechless adoration. The politicians rubbed the skin off their stomachs groveling before it. The people—the great inert mass within which is irresistible might if they but had courage and co-operation—patiently padded their knees and, likewise, knelt in mute submission.
The Gold Reserve was a national institution—like the Washington Monument—not to be desecrated, but recognized, supported, defended.
Senators alluded to it as they would to Plymouth Rock or Mount Vernon. It was a fixed fact which nobody disputed and all respected.
Statutes referred to it, in passing, as they did to West Point or Yellowstone Park—something that was permanent, national, inseparable from the life of the Republic.
There never was a law for the Gold Reserve, there never was a necessity for it, there never was an antecedent discussion in regard to it, and there never was a particle of financial sense in it. Nobody ever presented Greenbacks for redemption until Mr. Carlisle made his infamous ruling, and gold was paid out for paper and bonds issued to get the gold back.
The Gold Reserve was useless until it became, under Carlisle’s ruling, a bait to set the bond trap with.
To show that it has no influence upon the value of Greenbacks we need only to point to the fact that although the size of the Gold Reserve constantly fluctuated for about a year after Carlisle’s ruling, the value of the Greenbacks has not varied at all.
If the Greenbacks depended on the Gold Reserve, their value would have risen and fallen with the Gold Reserve.
The Greenbacks do not, and never did, depend on the Gold Reserve. They depend on the credit of the Government, and the known fact that the credit of the Government is based on $80,000,000,000 of national wealth. Their legal tender quality, their usefulness as money, their receivability for taxes and public dues, make them good in the eyes of the people irrespective of any Gold Reserve.
John Sherman had no more right to make a Gold Reserve than he had to make a Silver Reserve.
Greenbacks were no more redeemable in gold than they were in silver. But why argue the case? The verdict is already made up in the minds of the jury. Both the old parties pay their vows to the Gold Reserve. Mumbo Jumbo is shrined in the hearts of both Democrats and Republicans. Sherman’s god rules.
We quake every time they tell us that anything bad has happened to the Gold Reserve. We used to toss in our sleep, muttering distressfully, when the news would come that the Gold Reserve “is dwindling.”
What good does Mumbo Jumbo do the naked African? None.
But then, you see, the African doesn’t know it. Therein he is a fool.
What good does our Mumbo Jumbo, the Gold Reserve, do us? None.
But then, you see, we do not know it.
Wherein we are bigger fools than the African is.
Poverty
BY JOHN H. GIRDNER, M.D.
I HAVE just read Mr. Robert Hunter’s book entitled “Poverty.” It contains much valuable information, mostly in the form of statistics and references to other publications concerning the poor in different parts of the United States and England. It is a good book of reference; but to my mind its principal virtue is as a thought provoker. The question, “What are you going to do about poverty?” stares the reader in the face from between the lines on every page, and it haunts him after he has laid the book aside.
We of the United States are accustomed to boast of our material wealth and prosperity. When the writer or the orator wishes to wring the hearts of his audience and deceive them into the belief that ours, as conducted at present, is the very best of all governments, he draws a harrowing picture of the dreadful suffering of the poor of London; and then we pull the Stars and Stripes a little more closely about us, and, as that other Pharisee, we thank God that we are not like other men. Before we shed any more tears over the poor of London let us see if we cannot find use for our tears nearer home.
Mr. Charles Booth made a thorough and exhaustive investigation into the conditions of poverty in London in 1891. He found that 1,300,000, or about 30 per cent. of the population of that city were unable to obtain the necessaries of life. This 30 per cent. were “living in conditions, if not of actual misery, at any rate bordering upon it.”
Mr. B. S. Rountree made a similar investigation in the typical provincial town of York, England. He found that about 28 per cent. of the inhabitants of York were living in destitution. Mr. Rountree adds: “We have been accustomed to look upon the poverty of London as exceptional, but when the result of careful investigation shows that the proportion of poverty in London is practically equaled in what may be regarded as a typical provincial town, we are forced to the startling probability that from 25 to 30 per cent. of the town populations of the United Kingdom are living in poverty.”
Let us turn from England to the United States, and see how much poverty there is in our own country, among our own workmen, or producing class.
The report of the State Board of Charities for New York State shows that an average of about 26 per cent. of the population were aided, by both private and public charities, during each of the three years 1897, 1898 and 1899; and according to the report of the official statistician of the city of Boston for 1903 more than 20 per cent. of the entire population of that city were aided by the public authorities alone. This does not include private charities. In fact, all statistics of charitable works are defective, because they can never include the efforts to relieve suffering and poverty made by those who do not let the left hand know what the right hand is doing.
Commenting on the above statistics from Boston and New York State, Mr. Hunter says: “If the figures are correct as published, the persons in New York State in distress in 1897, and in Boston in 1903, would equal proportionately the number of those in poverty in London.”
Here are other facts about poverty worth remembering: “In the face of widespread poverty, there have not been for over half a century in England so few paupers, either actually or proportionately, as there are now. The population of England has increased from 18,000,000 persons in 1851 to 29,000,000 in 1889. During this period the number of paupers actually fell off. London has lost in pauper population fifteen times as fast as she has gained in general population.”
On the other hand, the returns from the almshouses in the United States show that the number of paupers increased almost as fast as population during the decade from 1880 to 1890. In Hartford, Conn., which is said to be the richest per capita city in the United States, the number of paupers increased 50 per cent. during this same decade.
Now, when you hear a Republican spellbinder draw harrowing word-pictures of poverty among the English workmen, and paint glowing pictures of the marvelous wealth and happy condition of the workmen in our own country, and when you read editorials in subsidized protectionist newspapers about the “miseries of the working classes” in free trade England and the great prosperity among the highly protected workmen of the United States, just remember that according to the best information obtainable about twenty-five to thirty persons out of every hundred living in the towns and cities both in England and the United States suffer from poverty. And for the past forty years poverty has steadily decreased in England and steadily and rapidly increased in the United States. And no amount of ranting by the spellbinder or misrepresentation by the editor can alter these facts.
Mr. Hunter is of the opinion that 70,000 New York children go to school underfed. This statement caused astonishment and doubt in some quarters. But I contend that any trained physician who will note the very large percentage of anemic faces among the children as they issue from the public schoolhouses of this city will agree with me that Mr. Hunter’s estimate of 70,000 underfed children is most likely far below the mark.
The Children’s Aid Society and other charitable organizations maintain a number of industrial schools for poor children in this city. The total daily average of children attending these schools is 10,707. Inspector Lecktrecker recently made a thorough investigation into the condition of these children. Mr. Lecktrecker’s report goes into great detail. Summed up, the report shows that of the 10,707 children attending these industrial schools 8,852 are actually underfed by reason of poverty at home. It was found that the best breakfast that any of these 8,852 children had was a piece of bread and a cup of tea or coffee. A diet not only inadequate for nourishment, but actually destructive to a child’s nervous system.
A grown-up person only requires enough nourishment to repair the waste, wear and tear incident to the daily activities of brain and muscle. A child not only requires this, but it requires added nourishment for the growth and development of all the tissues of its body. No wonder we are raising up a class of people in this city which I have called in another place “Newyorkitics.” No wonder there is an ever-increasing procession of broken-down brains and nervous systems heading for the hospitals for insane. No wonder that crime is on the increase. What better can be expected from adults whose brains and nerves have been starved and stunted from birth?
But what exactly is poverty? Destitution of property; indigence; want of convenient means of subsistence; need. That is what the dictionary says poverty is. Want of convenient means of subsistence is the want of some one or all of the five chemical substances called proximate principles, which we take and must have to sustain animal life. The continual absence of these chemical substances from the human stomach, together with lack of clothing sufficient to protect the body against the elements, causes physical pain or suffering with degeneration and final death of the animal body. This is a literal scientific definition of the word poverty as applied to the animal or material man.
The adulteration of food which is carried on to such an alarming extent in the United States is an important factor in this poverty or underfeeding question. Even those who are able to buy a sufficient quantity of food have no assurance that the quality is such as will properly nourish their bodies.
When you satisfy the cravings of hunger by putting into the human stomach watered milk, or cheese which is part wax, or sugar mixed with plaster of Paris, or chocolate which contains only a suggestion of the rich cacao beans, or any of the adulterated articles of food for sale especially in the poorer sections of the city, you not only tax the system to digest and dispose of a quantity of useless and maybe poisonous material, but every tissue in the body is thereby robbed of its proper nourishment.
It is as much, or more, poverty and underfeeding to fill the stomach with material which does not contain the five proximate principles, i.e., nourishment, as not to fill it at all. The laws against substitution and adulteration of human food and drink ought to be more stringent than the laws against horse stealing. Yet, as I am informed, all efforts at such legislation are invariably met with the cry that it will interfere with the business interests of the country. Here, as in so many other instances, when an attempt is made to secure common justice and protection for the lives and property and rights of the plain people, we run up against the business interests. The curse of this country today is that everything, even human life, must be sacrificed when necessary to the business interests.
The industry captains are killing and maiming the people now just as the military captains used to do, and for the same objects—to satisfy greed and selfishness.
The negro slave in the South in slavery days was further removed from poverty and the fear of poverty than any man I have ever known. When his day’s work was finished he came home from the field or the shop and he found a substantial, well-cooked dinner awaiting him. After dinner he went to his comfortable cabin and sat before a blazing log fire, or, in warm weather, he sat out under the stars, fanned by the night winds. His wife and children were nearly always around him, as were his companions, the other slaves belonging to his master and the plantation.
This man did not have a single care or responsibility on earth. He did not have to meet a grinding landlord next day demanding rent. He did not have to cudgel his brains to find a way to meet a note due next week. He did not have to pay for food, clothes, light and heat for himself and his family. That pang of anguish so familiar to us all when we think of the possibility of our loved ones suffering from want and the fear of want when we are gone never wrung the heart of that black man. Child labor as it exists under the present system was unknown to the children of the black slaves. “Over the hills to the poor-house,” when age and decrepitude had made him no longer useful, had no terrors for the black slave. The “system” of slavery made it perfectly certain that his owner would provide food, clothes and shelter for him in his old days, and for his children, no matter what happened. This black man, slave as he was, had a better guarantee against poverty and the fear of poverty for himself and family than any life insurance company can give. Even Mr. Tom Lawson could not find fault with the security of this policy.
Another thing the slave father did not have to worry about was sickness in his family. When one of his children became ill an ambulance from a charity hospital did not back up in front of the negro quarters, cart the child off to become one patient more in Ward No. ——, and serve as “material” for a clinical lecture while it lived, and as “material” for the dissecting-table after it was dead. No, nothing of the kind happened. When the slave became ill the best medical skill and nursing were provided, and, if need be, the patient was taken to the “big house” where the master lived so the mistress could superintend the treatment, and in case of death the body was put in a neat coffin, and a procession composed of all the blacks and whites on the plantation followed the remains to the colored graveyard on the hill, burial services were read, a hymn sung and the body lowered to its final resting-place. This is a glimpse at the condition of the slave in life and death in slavery days. I am not putting in a brief in favor of chattel slavery. I was born an abolitionist. My father was a slave-owner and my early life was spent in the midst of it, yet I abhorred the system as a child, and that abhorrence has grown with years. But I am now writing about poverty, and my point is: that chattel slavery as it existed in the South is the only state of society I know of in which poverty and the fear of poverty among the workers or producing class were absolutely abolished by law.
Under the old system the negro was a slave, you say. So he was. But if I read Mr. Hunter’s book aright, the laborer under the present industrial system is also a slave. The laborer has a vote now and the slave did not. Yes, but the slave had a full dinner-pail all the time and the white voting laborer has not. The comparative value between his vote and a full dinner-pail in the mind of the white laborer under the present system was demonstrated in the election of 1896 and 1900, when he gladly gave his vote to the Republican Party for the mere promise of a full dinner-pail.
Tuck-of-Drum
BY ALFRED TRESIDDER SHEPPARD
(Copyright in Great Britain by A. T. Sheppard.)
AT nine o’clock Josephine beat a vigorous reveille on the drum that had led old troops into action. It was the second of December; the sun of Austerlitz shone on the grass and trees in the little front white garden, and was fast melting the delicate tracery of fern and frond on the oval window of Monsieur Tuck-of-Drum’s bedroom.
A curious name, Tuck-of-Drum; the echo of an ancient story told round camp-fires long burned out; a scrap of wreckage floating, like its owner, when the seas of years held so much that was forgotten. Dominique Laplume was proud of the name; for even the village children, whispering “Monsieur Tuck-of-Drum” behind his back, brought the flicker of a smile to his grizzled face and the ghost of a flash to eyes dim and watery with age.
On Austerlitz day, for many years, the drum had roused him from his slumbers. He had slept heavily, this old warrior; “a thousand thunders!” he said sometimes in self-excuse, “when one has made one’s bed as often on straw or the solid ground——”
His son, growing from childhood to manhood, plied the drumsticks in his time; he fell at Solferino. His son’s son held them in his turn; the earth still lay bare and trampled over him at Gravelotte. They had given much to France, these Laplumes. Now Josephine, with her black sleeves rolled high on her thin white arms, and her dimpled face set into desperate earnestness, took her dead father’s place, and thundered at the parchment until the old man’s husky voice answered the summons.
Her sabots clattered down the stairs. Coughing and grunting, Monsieur Tuck-of-Drum began to dress. The clothes he had worn the day—and many days—before hung from their pegs in a chintz-covered recess. On a rush-bottomed chair near the bed, carefully brushed and pipeclayed, lay coat, and belts, and breeches, and gaiters that had gathered mud, in their time, from half the kingdoms of Europe. On the dressing-table the cross of the Legion of Honor rested in its little leather case.
At last his shaking fingers opened the door. The drum lay outside; the drum, and, on the drum, the gigantic bearskin, bullet-bitten in old fights, moth-marked during long, idle years. He came downstairs in full regimentals. Madame Laplume was talking to the village postmaster at the open door. She ran to meet him. Her eyes were misty, for she remembered last year’s reveille; but there was a ring of gladness in her greeting.
“Good morning, grandfather!” she cried, kissing him on both cheeks; “a happy Austerlitz day. There is news, too——”
“News?” Dying fires flamed up for a second in his old eyes.
“D’Aurelles de Paladines is driving them back,” she said. “We won everywhere yesterday—everywhere. Chanzy has forced the Bavarians back on Orgères. We have taken Guillonville, Terminiers, Monnerville—and—and—where else, Josephine?”
“Goniers, Villepain, Faverolles,” little Josephine chimed in, repeating the names glibly, like a well-conned lesson.
“And they say the brave General Duerot has broken out of Paris, and is marching to join the Army of the Loire!”
“Good!”
Monsieur Tuck-of-Drum sat down stiffly, the joints in his long limbs cracking; he held the coffee-cup to his lips, but the coffee danced and splashed out. He jerked the cup down quickly, and brushed a drop from his mustache with an impatient hand.
“It is just as I have said,” he cried suddenly and fiercely, springing to his feet. “We have them like trapped rats! Did I not say so, Héloïse? Even the little Josephine has heard me. Listen, Josephine. These Germans, these enemies of our dear France, begin to pay for their folly. They hated us because our great Emperor led us once to all their capitals—to Stuttgart, to Dresden, to Munich, to Berlin—because their kings bowed hats-in-hand before the soldiers of France; because we cut up their country with our swords as I—look you!—cut this bread of mine.” And with nervous hands he sliced white, crust-ringed circles from the roll. “But now—ah, the Emperor, our great Emperor, is dead; and the Marshals and the Grande Armée have marched away. They found us asleep, unready; like rats, like locusts, they swarmed into our cornfields and our vineyards. But we are awake at last! We are ready at last! The revenge begins!”
“It begins,” echoed Madame Laplume. “But come, grandfather, your coffee grows cold, and——”
“The punishment begins!” he continued, his voice shrill as the neigh of an old war-horse. “Look you!” He held up a gnarled hand. “Here is Duerot, with the troops of Paris. Here”—he raised the other, its knotted fingers stretched out—“are De Paladines, Chanzy, De Sonis, Jauréguiberry, with the Army of the Loire. Now see; the Germans are between them.” He snatched a morsel of the bread he had been cutting and brought his palms together. “The Germans—the Germans——”
“You have cut your hand, grandfather,” cried Josephine.
He stopped, and looked dumbly at his palm. A splinter of crust had grazed the skin. The bread rolled to the floor.
“They are crushed,” he mumbled, bringing down his heel. “Miscreants! that they should dare to enter France! But they will pay for their folly; ah, they will pay well! I knew; I said it. ‘Wait,’ I said, when they came to us with their long faces and their stories of defeat. ‘France has slept; but she will shake herself and awake.’ Mon Dieu, yes. Why I—I who speak, my little Josephine, put a hundred to flight when I was young, with this little drum alone: that is why they call great-grandfather Monsieur Tuck-of-Drum, my dear. See, it is the sun of Austerlitz that shines on the white trees. Sixty-five long years ago—sixty-five long years ago—the great Emperor pinned this cross on my breast; ‘Ah, this is Monsieur Tuck-of-Drum,’ he said, pinching my ear, ‘who beat the charge in the village, and put a hundred to flight.’ That was nothing; we did those things. And again—today—the sun of Austerlitz——”
He broke off suddenly as the door opened and a fat old man, with a large, hairless, foolish face—the face of a great baby, still eying the world with wonder—entered the room. He, too, wore the uniform of the Emperor’s Guard. The veterans embraced.
“You have heard the news?” cried Laplume. “Ah, it is arranged. Austerlitz day—the day of Austerlitz—sees victory again for France, my dear Hippolyte. Sit down, sit down. Héloïse mixes the salad. Héloïse! Here is Monsieur Bergeret. It has been a struggle, my friend, but we have saved a bottle and a snack for today; we have arranged it, I say.” He sniffed, nudged his comrade and chuckled. A pleasant smell of cooking already pervaded the sitting-room, floating in from the kitchen in the rear.
Madame Laplume, who had vanished while Dominique was telling the child of France and its ancient glories, reappeared, with bare and powdery arms; Sergeant Hippolyte saluted, and passed a wavering hand over his foolish chin. Monsieur Tuck-of-Drum, talking garrulously all the while, patted his old comrade’s accoutrements into shape; fastened a button; untwisted a red shoulder-knot; rearranged an ill-adjusted strap. Age was dulling the Sergeant’s brain a little; “he does not wear as well as I,” thought Tuck-of-Drum, with the pathetic pride of age.
There was a metallic “tap-tap” and a clatter of sabots on the cobbles of the village street. “Jacques Dufour arrives!” cried Dominique Laplume, and flung the door open with a flourish.
It was like the gathering of ghosts from the past. It was a gathering of ghosts from the past. These three, with their wrinkled cheeks, their quavering voices, their scanty white hair, their battered uniforms and weapons—these three were all that were left of that band of young recruits who, in the great days of France, had marched down the village street, shouting the songs of the Empire, blowing kisses to fair faces in the windows and the roadsides, exchanging glances with bright eyes that had grown dim at last and closed on earth and all its color and glitter. Like spars, they floated still, scarred and encrusted by the waves of time that had engulfed a generation so heroic, stupendous.
Dufour, wrinkled, wizened, twisted with rheumatism, limped to his place. His grandson carried his musket and placed it in a corner by Bergeret’s; the old man had lost a limb at Quatre Bras and needed a stout stick to aid the wooden leg.
“I will come again at six, grandfather,” the boy piped shrilly in his ear. “I say I will come again to fetch you at six.”
“No, no; Pierre must stay,” interrupted Monsieur Laplume. “Eh? He must stay, too, and hear the stories of the olden days—the days of the glories of France.” The boy’s eyes lit up. “Come, we are ready. He shall sit by the little Josephine.”
By and bye Madame Laplume brought in the meal, steaming from the oven. Bottles of red wine were ranged on the table.
“There were five of us last year,” Dufour muttered. “Buffet and Deyrolles have dismissed.”
“Eight the year before,” said Bergeret, rubbing his hands and smiling vacuously.
“The ranks grow thin, comrades,” said Laplume. “Well, the first toast!”
They rose, and drank in silence to the memory of that great man whom they had fought and bled and suffered for long since—and still remembered and adored. They drank to the old Marshals, to the Grande Armée, to village comrades whose bones lay in the Peninsula, in Germany, in Belgium, in the churchyards of France, but whose faces, dim and mournful, still looked at them through the mists of years, and whose voices still echoed in their memories. They lit cigars and pipes; but the room was full of the smoke of ancient battles. They talked of Desaix, Bessières, Junot, Murat, Lannes, Masséna, Ney—the old, unforgotten names. If they could come again! Ah, if he could come again—how the scattered remnants of his lost legions would rally round him, and young France hurry to the eagles, and the glorious days return!
“But we are making an end; we are making an end,” cried Tuck-of-Drum fiercely, bringing down his fist and making plates and bottles jump with the vehemence of the blow. “Chanzy and Duerot have them in the trap at last. I said so—did I not? Even the little Josephine remembers. On the day of Austerlitz——”
An ominous booming, distant, sullen, like an echo of old years of strife, sounded in their ears.
“It is thunder!” cried Pierre. Little Josephine clutched her mother’s arm.
The veterans exchanged glances. “What the devil—” began Laplume. They flung open the door and stepped into the village street. Two or three people, white-faced, had stopped to listen.
The distant guns roared again. What were they doing there—then—in that direction? Tuck-of-Drum looked puzzled, doubtful. This day of all the year, this great day of his life, was bound up with all his thoughts; one hope, one conviction, possessed him, and had shone steadily through all the gloom of the last few months. The day of Austerlitz would see the eagle turn upon its foes; the sun of Austerlitz would look down upon the invading army scattered like chaff before the wind—crushed, rather, like grain between the two millstones, the armies of Paris and the Loire. The previous day’s successes confirmed him. But what were the guns doing there? The fighting should be far beyond Orgères by this time. He beat down a flicker of uncertainty.
“Bah, it goes well,” he muttered. “They make their last stand. Come, comrades, let us drink to Chanzy and the Army of the Loire.”
Poor, foolish Bergeret soon fell asleep, huddled in his chair; but the wine put fire into the veins of his comrades. Pierre and Josephine listened round-eyed as they talked of bivouacs and camp-fires; of ancient comrades and conquered cities; of Austerlitz and the heights of Pratzen, and the Menitz Lake.
“Sixty-five years ago at this very hour”—so the talk went on. “Do you remember? Have you forgotten?” They argued, they shouted, in their old voices that broke from gruffness into shrill quavers, ludicrous under other circumstances, but now pathetic. They moved bottles, glasses, salt-cellars, to illustrate the disposition of troops; in the blue smoke-clouds the children, drinking in their words, could almost catch the glint of the Cuirassiers’ breastplates, the glittering gold-lacing of the Hussars, the rise and fall of green epaulets as the voltigeurs moved into line, the yellow facings of Oudinot’s Grenadiers, the clamorous mêlée of horse and foot. They discussed the present fighting, the mistakes of generals; and here Héloïse, eager as they for the success of the cause which had cost her husband’s life, joined in with the names and dates and figures at her tongue’s tip. In the distance the sullen guns were booming.
“If I were with them!” sighed Tuck-of-Drum. “They had no room for the old soldier; yet I can beat a charge as well as ever! I—I who speak, could fire a musket with the best of them!”
“Grandfather volunteered,” piped Josephine.
“Yes,” said Héloïse, eying the old man proudly; “but they wanted him to take care of us. ‘You must look after the women and children for us, Monsieur Laplume,’ said the officer. ‘You have done your share for France in the field. You know what our great Emperor wrote, “It will be sufficient for you to say, ‘I was at the battle of Austerlitz,’ to authorize the reply, ‘Behold, a brave man.’”’”
Dominique Laplume waved a hand in depreciation, as if to brush aside the praise. “A brave man? Every Frenchman is brave. It is in the blood of France. We need not be proud of what we cannot help. We have been unfortunate, yes; badly led, yes; but the men—the men——”
The door opened suddenly. The village postmaster stood again at the entrance, his eyes starting, his face lemon-colored, his lips livid under the straggling beard. “All is lost!” he cried. “We are betrayed, defeated! Chanzy is driven back! The enemy advances!”
The door rattled in the grasp of his shaking hand. He limped off to spread the news of the disaster, which grew with his terror. Laplume, Dufour, Madame Héloïse, started to their feet and looked at each other blankly. The sudden, awe-struck silence woke Bergeret, who looked round with wide, foolish eyes. Josephine’s mouth twitched and tears gathered. Pierre clenched his brown fists.
“Come,” cried Monsieur Tuck-of-Drum suddenly. He donned the great bearskin, the others followed his example, Bergeret fumbling foolishly with its heavy chain. His baby face expressed wonder rather than the alarm, the bitter disappointment, the wrath, written on the faces of Madame Héloïse and Laplume and Dufour. Tuck-of-Drum girded on his sword and slung the straps of his drum over his old bent shoulders. He thrust Bergeret’s musket into the Sergeant’s hand. Dufour motioned to Pierre, and hobbled out; the boy followed him. Madame Héloïse Laplume ran to the door to intercept them. “Where are you going, grandfather? Where are you going?” she gasped.
“Stand back, Héloïse. We go to call the village. Stay here; stay with the little Josephine.”
She paused irresolute. After all, though they could do no good, what harm could they do—these three old men? They were going to call the village. Yet there was a look on the ancient soldier’s face she had not seen since the day of the first great reverse, when he had gone, with his head erect and old fires flashing in his dim blue eyes, to offer his feeble services to France.
Suddenly, loud and distinct above the distant booming of the guns, his drum sounded—beating an assembly in the quiet village street. She put her hand to her breast and ran out. If the Germans were really coming——
She clutched his arm.
“Are you mad, grandfather?” she gasped. “Come in; come in and finish your wine and pipes together. There are only boys and women and old men in the village. They can do nothing——”
He shook her off.
Well, even the enemy, cruel though they were, could never harm men so old, so feeble and defenseless. They would ride through, laughing in their beards, mouthing their uncouth jokes at the faded uniforms from which their sires had once fled in terror; but—no, they would never harm them. Josephine was crying softly within. She turned back to the house.
Up the centre of the village street marched Tuck-of-Drum, drumming, drumming with an energy surprising and pathetic, as though he could call from their weed-grown graves the lads who had once jumped so smartly to the rattle of the parchment.
“Rat-a-plan! rat-a-plan!” sounded the summons; his hands had not lost their cunning, though they ached and grew weary with the unwonted strain. Behind him staggered Bergeret, his great bearskin toppling forward over the fat, smooth, foolish face; Dufour hobbled in the rear, his stick and wooden leg tapping the cobbles; little Pierre, beside him, dragged the heavy musket.
Pale faces, working in terror, peered from the café of the Boule d’Or. Tuck-of-Drum burst open the door. On the little tables glasses of bock, tiny glasses of spirits, stood half emptied. The men had all risen; the tawdry, gilded mirrors, cracked and dusty, distorted their faces, showing them more pallid, more unhealthy even than in life. Three or four old men—not so old as the veterans by many years—three or four washed-out-looking lads, rejected even by the army that had dragged men in from the very highways and hedges to resist the invaders—turned startled looks on the newcomers.
“The enemy is coming!” said Tuck-of-Drum. “Comrades, let us march against them, like the men of Dreux, of Châteauneuf! Look—the sun of Austerlitz is going down! Today, all France must help——”
They exchanged glances; they huddled together like sheep.
“What is the use?” one muttered.
“Aye, what is the use?”
A youth sniggered vacuously. “You are sixty years too late, Monsieur Tuck-of-Drum. If the great Emperor could come back now, if France had a man—” The speaker shrugged his shoulders, spread out his hands with a gesture of helplessness and looked round for assent.
“If—if—if!” cried Dominique Laplume. “We will lead you—we, of the Grand Army! Today all France must rise. All must help. It is the great effort. Today France conquers—or is conquered. ‘If’ never won a battle. Come, I say! Jules Brienne, your grandfather carried an eagle at Marengo. Monsieur Grenier, your uncle fell by our side, fighting bravely, on the field of Austerlitz.”
He argued, ordered, entreated; in vain.
“Bah! Poltroons!” he muttered, and turned on his heel.
Again the drum sounded.
“Yes, go out and play with your toy, Papa Tuck-of-Drum,” cried young Brienne after him. Laplume did not hear. They marched next to the Café de l’Ecu. The village postmaster, shaking still and casting nervous looks round him like a frightened horse, was telling his story to a similar assembly.
“Pah!” muttered old Dufour, twirling his thin mustache, “these villages are the rubbish heaps of France. The men are all away.” Again the appeal was made. A fat man, with fishy eyes and yellow, pendulous cheeks, shrugged his shoulders and raised protesting hands. “What can we do? What can we do?”
“They would finish us all with a volley. We should be killed,” whined another man.
“Killed? And what then?” Laplume snorted with fierce contempt.
“Let us be killed then!” broke in Dufour, crashing his stick down on the sanded floor. “It would be worth it. A thousand times worth it! Let each village in France raise a wall of dead against the invaders!”
Bergeret nodded his foolish head again and again with emphasis. The fat man began to talk fast, volubly, excitedly, pouring torrents of abuse on the Emperor, generals, government, the enemy, waving his fat hands, shrugging his fat shoulders. The curtained door of the café opened. He stopped suddenly and lamely. A countryman burst in.
“They are coming—they are coming!” he shrieked. “I have seen them in the road. I ran through the woods. Hundreds of them! I have seen their lances—the sun on their lances!”
“Come!” cried Dominique Laplume in a voice of thunder. “In the name of France!”
No one stirred. He looked round, scorn in his old eyes. “We will go, then—Bergeret, Dufour—my old comrades.” His voice choked with bewilderment, disappointment, anger.
They went out. The air was sharp with frost. It was very still in the village. The sun, a red ball of fire, still glowed on the frosted trees; on the white and yellow walls of the cottages; on the white fields and white-cowled windmills; on the powdered cobbles of the street. A segment of moon, strangely like a pierrot head, thrust through curtains of cloud, its mouth whimsically awry, peered down sideways at the earth—at the white earth, where legions of tiny men, like ants, hurried to kill or be killed in their bewildering quarrels. The distances were blue—the shimmering steel-blue of winter distances. Here and there a column of black smoke, shot through again and again with tongues of fire, went up to heaven; the smoke of burning villages; little sacrifices France offered for her folly to gods not yet appeased.
“To the bridge,” said Tuck-of-Drum. They marched in silence. The drum was silent. At the end of the long, straggling street a tiny bridge spanned a frozen stream which the enemy must cross. By the side of it was a clump of bushes, so thick that, even leafless, they formed a screen behind which the veterans and the boy crouched down.
“They might have broken down the bridge at least,” grumbled Dufour. “Menitz was frozen, and the Emperor——”
“They are coming!” whispered Pierre.
His sharp ears, close to the ground, had caught the clip-clop of approaching hoofs.
Tuck-of-Drum drew his sword and rested its hilt on the rough wooden parapet of the bridge. “Fix bayonets!” he growled.
Sergeant Bergeret should have given the word, but he carried out the order placidly, drawing the sword from its scabbard and fixing it with his fumbling fingers. “Put it in for me,” muttered Dufour, handing his bayonet to Pierre. “Now give me the musket—so—and run home, good lad. Embrace me and then run home.”
He sat on the ground, his wooden leg stiff and straight in front of him, and clutched the bayonet. Pierre’s lips tightened; he did not move. “Go home, I say!”
“Hush, they come!” whispered Tuck-of-Drum.
Peering through the brushwood, they could see, on the road ahead, the pennoned lances of German Uhlans, rising and falling with the jolting of the horses. The hoofs clicked louder and louder on the frozen road.
Suddenly Tuck-of-Drum sprang up.
“The Guard will advance,” he growled, with a little hoarse laugh, the faint echo of one that men now dead had heard and talked of, long since. Joy, fierce, savage joy of fighting, dormant so long but not extinct, flared up and flashed in his faded eyes. And yet, with the joy, a rage terrible and righteous shook him as he saw the glitter of the steel, the fluttering pennons, the casques and foreign uniforms—the foes of France, violating the sacred soil of which the dust of his race had made.
His trembling hands clutching the drumsticks, he advanced to the centre of the bridge. Bergeret stood on his right, his bayonet extended. Dufour grasped the parapet, dragged himself up, groaning in spite of clenched teeth, planted his wooden leg firmly, and, leaning against the woodwork of the bridge, rested the butt of his weapon on the ground, the tremulous steel pointed toward the enemy. Pierre came to help him. “Go back! go back!” he growled, pushing the boy aside with all his feeble strength. Pierre slipped on the frozen earth and fell, clutching at the bushes. Suddenly Dominique Laplume sounded the pas de charge.
A strange, pitiful defiance this, echoing back through the deserted village street, floating mournfully out to the white, empty fields, sending its arrogant, useless challenge to the ribbon of white road ahead. “Rat-a-plan! rat-a-plan!” The old drum, that had sent a hundred men flocking like sheep before it—the old drum that Jules, who fell at Solferino, that Dominique, who fell at Gravelotte, had beaten on winter mornings of their boyhood—answered nobly to this last great effort, and seemed a living, sentient thing, entering into the brave spirit of the challenge.
There was a startled shout, a clatter of stones, as the Uhlans reined in their horses.
“They fly!” shrieked Tuck-of-Drum; “they—ah!”
Half a dozen carbines shot up and flashed fire. There was a hoarse cry in German; an officer struck aside the stock of a man’s weapon.
Dufour’s bayonet clattered down; he slid into the thicket, his wooden leg scoring a long, jagged line in the frosty road. Bergeret was on his knees, a light of strange intelligence dawning in his smooth, foolish face; quite suddenly he fell sideways on to his fallen bearskin, matted already with his blood.
Tuck-of-Drum still stood in the centre of the bridge. The drumsticks descended on a drum pierced and soundless—then dropped, one after the other, slowly, from his nerveless grasp. The world swung around him. The poplars down the roadway on which his glazing eyes were fixed marched, doubled, moved into echelon and square. “La Grande Armée! La Grande Armée!”
Was it the cry of the Germans, in wonder, in derision, in pity? Or did his quivering lips frame the words? Ghosts formed round him; the ghosts of the old battalions who had marched, long back, into silence. They swayed, they heaved, in countless numbers; file after file, rank after rank, regiment after regiment, formed up, doubled into place, and passed him by. He saw the flash of breastplates, the crimson fronts of the Polish lancers, the red plumes of the line, the bearskins of the Guards, the glittering eagles of France.
“My comrades—O my comrades!” He staggered forward, with stretched-out hands. A confused murmur buzzed in his ears; it swelled into a tumult—“and the shout of a king was among them.”
One hand sought the bearskin. Suddenly he fell face forward.
Under the wide sky, in the uniform of their dead Emperor, the three veterans lay together; a young boy crouched near them, bleeding from an unnoticed wound, and sobbing.
A night wind crept over the frozen fields; a little wind, like a sigh from France for her ruined homes, her smoking villages, her slain children, her lost cause and faded glories.
The sun of Austerlitz sank down behind the poplars.
The Royal Road to Learning
FREDDIE—What’s an honorary degree, dad?
Johnson—That’s a title a college confers on a man who would never be able to get it if he had to pass an examination.
The hardest kind of work is looking for it.
The Southern Negro as a Property-Owner
BY LEONORA BECK ELLIS
BETWEEN the Southern negro as property and the Southern negro as a property-owner worthy of account, American progress has set its milestones thick and strongly marked. Yet, as mere years go, the time has been short indeed for a transition of meanings so vast.
The act of emancipation brought in its train several very serious problems, and more than one of these must be acknowledged to have grown graver with further-reaching complexities and involutions as the decades have passed. But in the present article these are not under consideration.
The point we desire to emphasize is that one of the most difficult questions brought to issue in the emancipation of the negro has already solved itself by what we are accustomed to call natural processes.
When the epochal pen-stroke fell and $3,000,000,000 worth of Southern property was suddenly obliterated as property, yet stood there in plain world’s view, like the metamorphosed dragon’s teeth, as men with the rights of men, there were masters of statecraft everywhere who faced one another blankly, asking how such a situation was to resolve itself. Not even the most sanguine saw any reason to hope that so complex an issue as that involved in the relation of the freedmen to the land could be brought to satisfactory or righteous solution until at least three or four generations had mingled dust with dust.
The relation of the freedmen to the soil! Here was the problem that must have given pause to an older state, a European nation, say, upon the eve of liberating at one stroke four millions of serfs.
But young nations, like young individuals, often let their deep convictions sweep them unprepared into strange conditions and perils, from which only the magnificent vitality of youth rescues them without disaster.
The United States Government has, for half a dozen years past, recognized it as a duty to compile and offer for public reading certain facts and figures relating to the progress of the negro in acquiring education, following different pursuits and trades, and accumulating property. Out of the various reports upon these subjects issued from the Department of Labor since 1897 it is probably the information set forth regarding the property-holdings of the former slaves and slaves’ children in three or four Southern states that will strike the greatest number of people with surprise, even with that form of astonishment which borders on unbelief. Yet this surprise is of the healthful type, and the unbelief passes when a closer investigation is made into the matter.
The closer investigation is undoubtedly worth while, and it will prove profitable for a little while to exchange general statements and sweeping surveys for definite figures, well verified data and typical cases within a limited territory.
Therefore, to illustrate clearly that particular phase of the negro’s progress, the adjustment of his relations to the land and his steadily advancing gains in real estate and other property-holdings, it will serve best to take the state of Georgia and present certain comparative data relating to the situation here.
Our choice of the commonwealth of Georgia for the setting forth of this matter, instead of some sister state, can be easily justified. Although the youngest of the original thirteen states, and the only one whose early constitution barred slavery from its boundaries, yet, when the Civil War came on Georgia had long been a slave state of great importance, and at once took a leading part in the struggle. Her people suffered heavier losses from the war, it is authoritatively claimed, than those of any other state except Virginia, the old order of things being more utterly wrecked and old landmarks more completely effaced here than elsewhere.
There are other reasons for our choice less disputable even than these. Georgia has the largest area of any state east of the Mississippi River, and, in her great sweep of 59,475 square miles, from the Appalachian Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean, exhibits the greatest diversity of soil, climate and physical features, all of which must be conceded to affect negro life and industry. Lying largely in the so-called “Black Belt,” the state still presents quite as marked a diversity of social conditions as of physical, nor have any of the former slave-holding states been more strongly affected than this by the industrial and educational movements which have stirred the South within the last few years. It is only fair to call attention, likewise, to the fact that, while Georgia is recognized as the centre of some of the most radical thought and action upon the negro question, yet this condition is counterbalanced by the existence within its borders of a mass of white voters who seem more than ordinarily swayed by an intense sense of justice to the black. Witness the manner in which all bills tending toward negro disfranchisement meet summary defeat before the Georgia Legislature, and, again, the defeat of the last year’s movement to divide the state’s educational funds in such a way as to allow to colored schools only the pro rata share representing taxes on the property of the negro.
Furthermore, it may be added here, that while the state has no Hampton or Tuskeegee within her borders, still she has most excellent public schools for negroes, and in several cities she is now giving them admirable training in manual and industrial arts along with the academic studies, as, notably, at Columbus; and she also has an important branch of her state university devoted to the industrial, technical and manual training of colored youths—that is, the Industrial College for Negroes at Savannah, a high-grade institution wholly supported by public funds.
If the selection of Georgia for a local study of the negro’s material progress does not yet appear justified, then the last, and in itself wholly adequate, reason may now be assigned, namely, that the state has the largest negro population of any in the Union, her colored people numbering 1,034,998, or a bare trifle under 50 per cent. of the entire population. Observe that in this state are congregated more than one-eighth as many blacks as are scattered throughout the remaining half a hundred states and territories of the Union.
New Year’s Day of 1863 saw 470,000 freedmen in Georgia, these in the main having been ushered into liberty in quite as destitute a condition, regarding land and other worldly possessions, as that in which they were ushered into existence. The exceptions to this generally prevalent destitution were favored slaves here and there whose former masters and mistresses, too often nearly destitute themselves, had deeded them little homesteads, or in some other way given them a start in independence. Or, again, there were exceptions in the case of the few thousands upon whom General Sherman and his associates had bestowed certain donatives in the shape of wages, usually unearned, and bounty money or lands, all distributed with the injudiciousness expected in such a situation.
Today, barely one generation’s space removed from that hour of strange and sorrowful conditions, these freedmen and their children pay taxes on more than a million acres of Georgia land, not to mention houses, household goods, stock, agricultural implements, merchandise and other taxable properties. If the situation speaks well for American life and opportunities, it also speaks well for the black man, and more eloquently still for his chances in the South.
The toilsome processes by which the Georgia negro has climbed from destitution to his present state of comparative prosperity deserve more than a passing glance. Do not think it was the same as if you or your neighbor, or even Mr. Riis’s European, who is to be refashioned into an American, should start today without money or lands, without friends except those destitute as yourselves. We should know where to turn, what work to take up, how to apply whatever of skill or energy or special aptitudes might exist within us. Failing of skill or marked aptitudes of our own, failing even of an ordinarily good education, we should at least have within us inherited instincts to help us out of the difficult situation. Above all, we should know what was in the world, what was worth striving for, where to set our aims.
But what of skill did the negro have, save in the rudimentary forms of agriculture? Whither, save for restraining influences, would his inherited instincts have led him? What did he know of life experientially beyond the log square of a slave’s cabin, or by observation and hearsay beyond the compass of the plantation lord’s domain?
No; set it down that the new freedman was poorer than the poorest, and, except in rare cases, more ignorant than can now be readily conceived of. In such condition, with no higher aims to impel him to work than the bare instinct of self-preservation, his work must of necessity be for many years only a bread-meat-and-shelter matter.
Yet, somehow—who can tell by what strange evolution?—working on blindly, gropingly, toilsomely, he has still contrived to press forward, until today, with a generation scarcely gone, he stands on a plane no one counted on his reaching under a hundred years. And the best of all his gains is that the most intelligent of his race have come to comprehend what true progress means, and to compare the slight space traversed by their people with the vast upward stretch reaching away in front of them.
During one of the large conventions which recently met in a Georgia city, a visitor from New England asked me, with genuine concern: “But where do your better class negroes live? Or are there no blacks decently housed, no places at least approximately clean and comfortable that they can claim as homes? In various cities through your section I have found only swarming and fetid negro quarters, the worst of slums, a menace to municipal health, both physical and moral. Is there nothing more hopeful than this to show for the race?”
Admitting the general truth of his imputation, I was still able to point out to him a few streets, or sections of streets, where the most intelligent and prosperous of the blacks of the city had made themselves real homes. Yet even these, he demurred, bordered too close upon those same slums he had been fretting over. For in Southern cities the people of this race keep together, it will be noted.
But I told my guest to come with me to the country if he would see the negro at his racial best. Agriculture, I assured him, had come very near to spelling out salvation for this people. Instance the state conference of colored farmers convening not so very long ago in Savannah. Nearly two hundred delegates were present, and everyone owned his own home, many being comparatively wealthy. One in particular was pointed out as worth $50,000, made entirely from agriculture.
In the country, then, we must still look for the best average of the negro’s home, his domestic life and virtues, as well as his industry and thrift. A brief investigation of conditions brought our New England friend to the same conclusion, and he went away much better satisfied as to the prospects of the race.
Certain facts and figures which interested this intelligent student of racial conditions will doubtless interest scores of others, and they are, therefore, offered in the present paper.
Georgia has 137 counties, each constituting a small commonwealth in itself. Being settled at irregular periods and under diverse circumstances, varying, moreover, in topography and character of the soil and climate, these counties exhibit each a different ratio of the negroes to the whites.
A glance at the maps may aid in forming a clear idea of the movements and growth of the black population in Georgia. In 1790, it will be observed, the counties near the coast were the only ones settled, and if the black folk were inconsiderable in numbers, so were the white.
But by 1800 the slaves were showing a rapid increase, and were being moved up the Savannah River, while from that time to 1840 the population, both white and black, exhibited a marked tendency to seek the rich lands of the interior, pushing westward and, a little later, southwestward.
At the close of the year 1900 the blacks of the state had increased from the few thousands of slaves of a century back, held chiefly on the coast, to more than a million free people, fairly well dispersed through all but the extreme mountain counties and paying taxes on many million dollars of Georgia property.
From the office of the comptroller-general of the state there is issued annually a full report of the property-holdings of both blacks and whites, set forth with exactness of detail county by county. From the file of these reports it is easy to make a comparative study, in brief or at length, of past changes, progress or retrogression, and the present status in any or all of the Georgia counties. But the general reader will be able to draw his conclusions from a glance at a few of these.
Chatham County, the original seat of settlement, is perhaps the best starting-point. It is located in Southeastern Georgia, washed by the Savannah River and the tides of the Atlantic, has for its county seat Savannah, the second city of the state, and comprises mainly a stretch of marshland, low islands and flat, sandy tracts. In early days a brisk slave trade brought many negroes to this county, and since the war the city of Savannah has attracted the freedmen in great numbers. The relations between whites and blacks have been more uniformly cordial here than elsewhere, the former being in the main of the original slave-holding class, and the latter largely house servants. The situation is thus in direct contrast to that in Atlanta, for instance. By the year 1790 there were already 8,313 blacks in Chatham County, as against 2,456 whites; while the census of a hundred years later shows an increase to 54,757 negroes and 22,966 whites.
Sherman’s celebrated field order, issued immediately after his investment of Savannah, gave hundreds of former slaves temporary possession of valuable lands on the coast and sea islands of this county, as it did to a lesser extent in certain other sections of the state. This tenure was in some cases brief, but in many others became permanent. Hence, even as early as 1875, we find the freedmen owning 1,491 acres of Chatham’s land, valued at upward of $70,000, besides town and city realty worth $152,760. Twenty-five years later they had multiplied these figures by four, approximately. No bad showing, when all things are taken into consideration.
Another coast county, Liberty, is beyond doubt the most interesting in its history of all the so-called “black counties.” This, too, is located in the southeastern portion of Georgia, a neighbor of Chatham’s, with much the same climate and topographical features, and was laid out in 1777. But the history of its first settlers deserves to be traced much further back, for, in 1695, there had come to South Carolina a little colony of New England Puritans, breaking off from the parent church at Dorchester, Mass., and led by Joseph Soul, a Harvard graduate and teacher. Their location in South Carolina having proved unhealthful, they were attracted by Oglethorpe’s little Georgia settlement, and, having secured a grant of 32,000 acres on the present site of Liberty County, they removed thither in 1752, their colony then numbering 280 whites and 536 negro slaves! The county was laid off as Midway, but later changed its name to Liberty. It should be remarked that when secession from the Union became an issue this county voted solidly against it.
After the Civil War the land here was thrown largely on the market, and at several places, notably Woodville, Ogeechee and Belmont, numbers of negroes united themselves into colonies and bought extensive tracts. There are now in the county nearly ten thousand negroes, with half that number of whites; and the former own more than 50,000 acres of land.
Appling is a county also in the southeastern portion of the state, but presenting a very different showing. It is a level county, inland, with poor soil, and the tide of slaves poured around it without touching it. In 1820 there were just eighty-six negroes within its borders. When manumission came there were only about seven hundred Appling County slaves to be set free. At the present time it is estimated that there are 3,000 negroes in the county, with more than twice that number of whites. But from the comptroller-general’s latest report it appears that the former own 17,946 acres of land, such land as it is!
Now run up to Central Georgia. Here is found the flourishing city of Macon, in the county of Bibb. The census of 1890 gave Macon a population of 22,746, of whom one-half were negroes. The land in this section is hilly, with soil mixed, good and bad. Twenty-five years ago there were something over 11,000 negroes in the county, outnumbering the whites by nearly two thousand, and they owned 2,611 acres of land. Now the blacks have a trifle more than doubled in numbers, as well as in property-holdings. Observe, too, the higher value of the negro’s farm lands in this section. His 4,500 acres of Bibb County land is now assessed at $413,300, which amount, added to his town and city realty and other taxable properties, makes an aggregate value of $719,380 in this county alone.
A little to the northeast of Bibb County lies Baldwin, of which Milledgeville, the former state capital, is the chief town. This was a very wealthy ante-bellum section, with large holdings in slaves as well as lands. When the Civil War began Baldwin County could muster 5,000 slaves, although of the whites, rich and poor, there were only 4,000. When the census of 1890 was taken the negroes had increased to 9,343, the whites only to 5,262. Last year the negroes were paying taxes on 6,501 acres of Baldwin County land, valued at $26,599, besides a large amount of city and town property and other possessions, the whole aggregating $104,592.
Take another county in Middle Georgia, a county of good lands but without a town of any size in it, therefore representing more nearly a plain agricultural average. Any one of a score might be selected. Let us say Butts, a small but prosperous county which was laid out in 1825 and at the outbreak of the war had 3,082 slaves and 3,375 whites. A quarter of a century ago its freedmen, numbering approximately 4,000 people, owned but ninety-seven acres of land in the entire county and $350 worth of town property. Have they climbed since 1875? In numbers they are now estimated at 7,000, against a like number of whites, and last year these negroes paid taxes on 1,613 acres of good average farming land, and on other property which ran the total valuation in Butts up to $49,941.
In the mountain counties of Georgia it has been different, the increase in number of negroes as well as their possessions being slow and uncertain, while the whites have maintained a steady progress in such sections. This, however, is clearly accounted for by the lesser ratio the agricultural interests bear to others in mountainous districts, and the dependence of the negroes upon the former. Glance at Gilmer County, with its sixty-nine blacks and almost 10,000 whites, the former paying taxes on a few hundred acres of rocky hillsides, and their whole county property aggregating, by the most recent returns, only $957, while the latter show taxable possessions valued at $728,000. In Rabun, Towns, Flannin and neighboring counties the situation shows much the same.
This brief study of typical counties may be closed with certain comparative data from Fulton, which contains the state’s capital, Atlanta, a progressive and rapidly growing city distinctly of the “New South” type. Fulton was not laid out until 1853, hence is relatively young in the sisterhood of counties. Only about 2,000 slaves were set free in this county. Compare the number with the 16,000 manumitted in Chatham. But today there are more than 50,000 negroes in Fulton, and, although they own but a thousand acres of land in the county, yet the aggregate value of their whole property is a bare trifle below one million dollars!
To extract the most important meanings from such figures is not difficult. In connection with them several facts should be kept in mind, the first of which is that the negro’s land-holdings in Georgia as well as in adjoining states are usually parceled out in very small individual lots. In a canvass of fifty-six typical counties of the state, the following table was established to show the average size of the farm lots among negro proprietors:
| CLASSIFIED SIZE | PER CENT. OF TOTAL OWNERS |
| Under 10 acres | 30.50 |
| 10 or under 40 acres | 27.00 |
| 40 or under 100 acres | 21.85 |
| 100 or under 200 acres | 12.80 |
| 200 or under 500 acres | 6.89 |
| 500 acres or over | .93 |
The fifty-six counties canvassed represent the majority of negro holdings in the state, and the average here established may fairly be taken as that of the state at large, or, indeed, of the agricultural South. The fact that a very large proportion of the farms are so limited in size as to amount only to gardens, or, in negro parlance, “patches,” augurs well rather than ill, for it means many small proprietors instead of merely a few large ones and the rest all renters or day laborers. Since out of 369,265 black people in the state ten years of age or over who are engaged in gainful occupations, almost two-thirds are employed in some line of agricultural work, is it not well that the million acres owned by negroes should be distributed in small holdings? It is easy to deduce from this the manifest decline of the metayer, or tenant system of farming. To be sure, these one-acre, or even ten-acre farms will seldom support the owner, though he may have the smallest family, or none at all. Such farms are largely instances of what may be called, in the German phrase, Parzellenbetriebe—that is, farms not large enough to occupy the labor of a family, but serving as sources of partial support to those with supplementary occupations. Yet, in many cases, these little plots of ground will grow to goodly farms within a few years. The same story has been traced a thousand times in the past quarter of a century.
It will be remarked, also, that the negro’s town and city property is increasing greatly. In 1880 the assessed value of such property was only $1,201,992, or 20 per cent. of their entire state property; while in 1902 it is $4,389,422, which is close to 29 per cent. of the state’s aggregate. Thus, while agriculture gave the freedman his start in self-maintenance, and is still his chief dependence, yet paths of employment and sources of revenue in cities are being discovered by him more and more as the years go by and his education progresses.
Before passing to the close, another point is worthy of especial note, interesting both the economist and the sociologist. In 1875 the assessed value of the household and kitchen furniture owned by all the negroes in the state, then numbering between six and seven million souls, was only $21,186, or something like three cents’ worth to each individual. But in 1902 the assessed value of the same class of property was $1,688,541, or a trifle over the value of a dollar and a half to each colored man, woman and child in the state. Upon this phase of development and progress no comment is needed.
In brief, then, the black people of Georgia paid taxes for 1902 on 1,175,291 acres of land, and upon an entire property aggregating $15,188,069 in assessed value. This means, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that the negroes of Georgia, or, broadly speaking, the South, are accumulating property and acquiring homes. And since the negro with a home is almost sure to stand for law, order and civic faithfulness, it means, moreover, a reaching out toward higher standards of living, not material living alone, but social life, mental and moral striving and achievements.
Comprehending the situation in its fulness, no man can deny that the race is actually started on the road to better things than their past might have indicated that they were capable of attaining.
A Japanese Populist
BY THOMAS C. HUTTEN
Author of “National Characteristics,” “The Farthest East”
TWO years ago a prominent Russian patriot admitted a misgiving that nothing but a miracle could shake the strongholds of Czarish despotism. It does not impeach the correctness of his view that the miracle has been accomplished.
A giant has entered the political arena; a new world power has risen from the dust of a Buddhist serf-kennel, and it is about time to recognize the fact that the marvel of evolution has been effected by progress in the direction of popular democracy.
The memorable vote of the daimios was a renunciation of class privileges. Of the forty amendments in the new constitution of the Japanese Empire, twenty-six tend to reform the abuses of class legislation. The nation controls two-thirds of its mines. Stockholders of a telegraph monopoly have been forced to accept a time limit of their contract. Six hundred and twenty miles of railroads are managed—and successfully managed—by a national board of administration. The Government, in the name of the nation, builds its own warships and welds its own armor-plates, instead of farming out jobs to the highest briber. The Ways and Means Committee of 1901 reduced direct taxation almost on the exact plan of the system recommended by the reformer Bakunin—reserving building lots in new cities and granting tenures from two to ten years at gradually increasing rates of rent.
Populist reforms have rendered the Government popular enough to make the nation invincible.
And the world-wide need of those reforms has been repeatedly urged by Japanese travelers, and with the emphasis of strong personal conviction, especially by a keen observer who visited Europe and North America in the summer of 1903.
Professor Yashinto Korioky, agent of a Tokio reform club, explored the United States without the assistance of the guides trained by our Star-spangled Uncle and with often remarkable results.
“Surprises,” he says, “indeed, began before we had set foot on the soil of the great moral Republic. Above the sea mist and above the gathering clouds a fire gleamed like a meteor on the western horizon, and one of the Chinese steerage passengers, venturing to inquire, ascertained that it was a statue of liberty, furnishing light to the world. The next moment a sailor struck him between the eyes, and he admitted that he saw several starlike, luminous objects.”