THE HOUR AND THE MAN
CONTRARY to popular belief, “the hour” does not always bring “the man.” It did not bring him for France in 1870. In our civil war it brought him for the Confederacy, but a chance bullet took him off. Every defeat of a cause discredits anew the superstition about “the hour and the man.” When the hour strikes, the man may be already present and not hear. The “mute, inglorious Milton,” dying with all his music in him, is no more real a character than the mute, inglorious Cæsar trudging along in the ranks, unsuspected by his comrades and unaware of himself. Even if conscious of his own consummate genius, and impressing a sense of it upon others, it is by no means certain that he will come to the control. An intrigue, the selfish jealousy of some little soul in authority, the caprice of a woman behind the throne, an unfortunate peculiarity of manner in himself, a stumbling horse, a random bullet—any one of ten thousand accidents may deprive his country of the stupendous advantage of his directing hand.
It was once the fashion among the school of thinkers of which that truly great man, John Stuart Mill, was the head almost altogether to ignore the “personal equation” in matters of “great pith and moment.” They recognized the trend of tendencies—great currents of energy which apparently had an existence and control quite independent of, and apart from, human agency. In their view, individual men, so far from guiding the course of events, were borne along by them like leaves by the wind. They taught, by implication if not directly, that the Europe of their day would have been pretty much the same without, for example, the Napoleon of the day before. The conception of a single dominating mind bending other minds to its will and working stupendous changes, even by its caprices, these philosophers considered altogether too primitive and crude for the world’s manhood, and most of us who were young in their day assisted in discrediting their theory by reverently accepting it. We have recovered now; nobody to-day thinks after that fashion of thought, excepting Tolstoi. The importance of the individual will, consciously striving for the attainment of definitive ends, yet subject to all the caprices of chance and accident, is restored in the minds of men to its own reign of reason.
Considering the matter only in the limited view of its relation to military success, we all see, or suppose ourselves to see, that if Marlborough had died of measles when he was John Churchill; if Frederick had burst a blood vessel in one of his blind rages before he became the Great; if Carnot had fallen down a cellar stairway when he was a boy; if Napoleon had been knocked over at the bridge of Arcola, or Von Moltke had deserted to the French and been given command of the column that was headed for Berlin, the historian of to-day would have had a Europe to deal with which it is impossible now even to conceive. Suppose that “the hour” had not brought John Sobieski to confront the victorious Turk a couple of centuries ago. Europe might now be Mohammedan and the word Russia destitute of meaning. Considerations of this character may advantageously be permitted to teach us humility in the matter of prophecy, and particularly with reference to military undertakings, than the result of which nothing is more beset with accident and dependent upon the unknowable and incalculable.
MORTUARY ELECTROPLATING
TO the proposition that electroplating the dead is the best way to dispose of them there is this considerable objection—it does not dispose of them. The plan is not without its advantages, some of which are obvious enough to mention. Nothing, for example, can be more satisfactory to a husband engaged in dying than the reflection that as a nickel-plated statue of himself he may still adorn the conjugal fireside and become an object of peculiar interest and sympathy to his successor. There are few remains, indeed, to whom this would not seem a softer billet than “to lie in cold obstruction” in a cemetery, from which, after all, one is usually routed out in a few years to accommodate a corner grocery or a boarding-house.
The light cost of ornamenting our public buildings with distinguished men themselves, as compared with the present enormous expense of obtaining statues of them, will commend the régime of electroplating to every frugal taxpayer and make him hail its dawn with a peculiar joy. In order to make the most of this advantage it is to be hoped that any public-spirited “prominent citizen” feeling his sands of life about run out, would consent to be posed by an artist in some striking and heroic attitude, ready for the rigor mortis to fix him in it for the plater. It would be but a trifling sacrifice for a great writer to pass the last ten minutes of his life cross-legged in a chair, with a pen in one hand and a thumb and forefinger of the other spanning a space on his dome of thought. A distinguished statesman would not find it so very inconvenient to breathe his last standing in the characteristic attitude of his profession, his left thumb supported in the opening of a waistcoat thoughtfully constructed to button the wrong way, and his right hand holding a scroll. In dying grandly on the acclivity of a rearing horse, a famous warrior could at the same time lay his countrymen under an added obligation and assist them fitly to discharge it.
The process of electroplation (if one may venture to anticipate a word that is inevitable) does not, unluckily, permit us to retain the deceased “in his habit as he lived,” textile fabrics not being susceptible to the magic of its method; but the figures of eminent decedents exposed in public places to fire the ambition of American youth could be provided with real tailor-made suits, either in the fashion of their time and Congressional district or in that of ancient Rome, as might be preferred by the public taste for the time being, and the tailors’ bills would probably, in some instances, be almost as interesting, if not nearly so startling, as that item in an early English Passion-play account, in which the management is charged five shillings and sixpence for “a cote for Godd.”