Children of the Market Place

by Edgar Lee Masters

"Well, now don't you see," I asked, "that Douglas is against all these people and that he has all these influences to fight? For example, these Puritans cannot rule if popular sovereignty is adopted everywhere. They are numerically too inferior. How, for example, can you stop the railroads on Sunday if you let communities, states, control the matter? But if these fanatics get into control of the Federal government, they can do it. Don't you see the point? This is what Douglas is thinking about. He knows that you can have freedom about life only where every man has a say."

Then we began to talk of the religious revival. Periodicals were noting the great turn of the public mind to religion. "Fruits of the spirit" were extolled. Great and glorious works of divine grace were wrought in Maine. A village in Massachusetts had enjoyed "a heavenly refreshing from the presence of the Lord." In Cincinnati there was "an outpouring of the spirit." In the woods of Michigan men rode into a village to obtain mercy, having heard that the Lord was there. In New York City noon prayer meetings were held. A conductor found salvation suddenly while operating his horse car in Sixth Avenue. A sailor saw Christ at the wheel. Christ was met in parlors, in places of worldly gayety. An actor had been rescued from his wicked calling. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote: "We trust since prayer has once entered the counting rooms it will never leave it; and that the ledger, sandbox, the blotting book and the pen and ink will all be consecrated by heavenly presence." Her brother, the pastor of Plymouth church, had converted one hundred and ninety souls. A theater was used for a place of worship. Actors were called upon to repent: You who have portrayed human nature before the footlights, fall on your knees and acknowledge God! Rum had been driven from a saloon near this theater. "Thank God," said Beecher, "let us pray silently for the space of two minutes. What a history has been here. A place of fictitious joys but of real sorrows has been reformed. It is open for God's people to sing and pray in. God be thanked that Heaven's gates have been opened in this place of hell."

Garrison saw the point. Of the revival he wrote that it had "spread like an epidemic in all directions, over a wide extent of country. Prayer meetings, morning, noon and night; prayer meetings in town, village, and hamlet, North and South. The whole thing is an emotional contagion without principle. This revival, judging from the past, will promote meanness, not manliness; delusion, not intelligence; the growth of bigotry, not of humanity; a spurious religion, not genuine piety."

Theodore Parker denounced the mania too, and was attacked for it by Methodists and others. He sew that the North had its rain gods, its prosperity gods, its bread and butter gods, its rituals and devotions for these gods; and that the South had the same number of gods.

What then of the law of God? Douglas was at one with Garrison and Parker in this criticism of the religious mania.

Thus we talked along together. The principal thing about Abigail was that she despised the South, but for the reason that there was nothing there but the political mind and that it was concerned almost entirely with the negro. It had no literature. Longfellow, Emerson, Whittier, Lowell were producing works of merit; and the South was doing nothing. Poe was born in Boston, had lived South, but had written out of nowhere. He had died about a year before, discouraged and broken.

The most silent voice at the table was Dorothy's. She did not really enter into these discussions. Her softer, altogether feminine nature was disturbed by these things. Abigail began to laugh. "Why," she asked, "does every one say here 'how's your health' instead of 'good morning' as they say in England? People look careworn to me in America; they are spare and pallid. Not many ruddy complexions. Why all these sharp-faced, lantern-jawed, lean, sallow, hard-handed people? Why this depression of spirits? Perhaps they really get a thrill out of religion after all. Why all these advertisements of quack remedies, why all this calling on God? This is a place of bright sunshine and exhilarating air. After all, I do not understand it."

"All due to the habits of life," said Aldington. "Look at the fast eating—look at them here. Too much hot bread and sweets—too much pie for breakfast. Too much pork. Too much living at hotels and boarding houses. Too much drinking before meals; not enough wine and beer with meals. Too much tobacco chewing. No exercise. Only the farmer, the laborer works. They go too far. But where do you see outdoor sports? No cricket, no rowing. Nothing but trotting around in buggies. Recreation consists of lounging around on sofas at Saratoga. All the public men ill. I hear that Toombs is indisposed. Sumner is in poor health. Douglas, the little giant, is losing strength. What a curious people, aged and young, corrupt and idealistic, candid and hypocritical, religious and materialistic, hoarders and spenders, self-righteous, licentious, Puritanical." "Like all others," I interjected.

"Like no other," Aldington rejoined. "Go back to your native England and see. You have forgotten some things. There is such a thing as a definite stock. And if you call the English bulldogs, for example, your America is a mixture of the wolf, spaniel, lapdog, shepherd, and about all breeds; and according to the occasion any one of them, with quick changes. Abigail and I have been here for a number of days and we have been entertained by some of her splendacious friends, to use Thackeray's adjective for American fashion; and the impression it all makes on me is beyond description. I want to see a better thing made of Chicago. I really hate it here, all this striving for money—but of course no place can beat Chicago for that—but also the idlers here, the worship of Mammon, the dullness and the gloom of elegant people, the extravagant dressing, the liveried servants, all this imitation. And all this talk here of America being the only religious, free, and enlightened people in the world. Why, they are not free at all. The mind must be free before the man is free, and the mind cannot be free in a despotism. The slavery of the North is just as bad as the slavery of the South. For look at these people; slaves to fear, slaves to stupid customs, slaves to superstition, slaves to foreign ideas of dress, fashion, wealth; slaves to all the vices by which money is made, and all the tricks and hypocrisies by which it is piled up and invested with rulership; slaves to absurd ideas; slaves to every foolish reform. Why, sometimes as I think of it, I see the negro in the South as the freest man in America. He is only a slave as to his labor. Every one must work. Instead of receiving money he gets clothes and a hut. He can't go away from the plantation, but why go away? One must be somewhere. And as to these other things, he is not a slave at all."

"Yes, and that's not all," I said. "A money power is fast growing up in this country which will rule the country so thoroughly that the small dictation of the cotton industry of the South will not be a comparison. Slavocracy is only one of the scales on the tail of the dragon of plutocracy. Gold and silver, tariffs, subsidies, colonies, banks of issue—these are the claws and teeth of the big slavery."