“See poor mama’s shoes. Aren’t you sorry for her? Think how she has to wear such poor torn shoes and how hard she has to work.”
“Yes, poor shoes. Poor mummy.”
“When you grow up are you going to get work and buy poor mother a good pair—like a nice, strong, big man?”
“Yes, work. Yes, I get mummy shoes.”
Suddenly, something in the mother’s voice is too moving. Some mystic thread binding the two operates to convey and enlarge a mood. The child bursts into tears over the old pattens. He is gathered up close, wet eyed, and the mother cries too.
At the same time, this city of my birth was identified with so much struggle on the part of my parents, so many dramas and tragedies in connection with relatives and friends, that by now it seemed quite wonderful as the scene of almost an epic. I might try to indicate the exact character of it as it related to me; but instead, here at any rate, I will only say that from the time the mill burned until after various futile attempts to right ourselves, at Sullivan and Evansville, we finally left this part of the country for good, it was one unbroken stretch of privation and misery.
THE STANDARD BRIDGE OF FIFTY YEARS AGO
Reelsville, Indiana
In that brilliant and yet defective story entitled “The Turn of the Balance,” by Brand Whitlock, there is narrated the career of an unfortunate German family which might almost have been ours, only in order to deal with so many children as there were in our family, the causes would necessarily have been further enlarged, or the data greatly condensed. In addition, there was no such complete collapse involved. The more I think of my father, and the more I consider the religious and fearful type of mind in general, the more certain I am that mere breeding of lives (raising a family without the skill to engineer it through the difficulties of infancy and youth) is one of the most pathetic, albeit humanly essential, blunders which the world contains. Yet, and perhaps wisely so, it is repeated over and over, age in and age out, ad infinitum. Governments love large families. These provide population, recruit large armies and navies, add the necessary percentage to the growth of cities and countries, fill the gaping maws of the factories. The churches love large families, for they bring recruits to them and give proof of that solid morality which requires that sex shall result in more children and that these shall be adequately raised in the fear of God, if not in the comforts of life. Manufacturers and strong men generally like large families. Where else would they get the tools wherewith they work—the cheap labor—and the amazing contrasts between poverty and wealth, the contemplation of which gives them such a satisfaction in their own worth and force? Nature loves large families, apparently, because she makes so many of them. Vice must love large families because from them, and out of their needs and miseries, it is principally recruited. Death must love them too, for it gathers its principal toll there. But if an ordinary working man, or one without a serene and forceful capacity for toil and provision, could see the ramifications and miseries of birth in poverty, he would not reproduce himself so freely.
My father was of that happy religionistic frame of mind which sees in a large family—a very large family indeed, for there were thirteen of us—the be all and the end all of human existence. For him work, the rearing of children, the obligations of his religion and the liberal fulfilling of all his social obligations, imaginary or otherwise, were all that life contained. He took life to be not what it is, but what it is said to be, or written to be, by others. The Catholic volumes containing that inane balderdash, “The Lives of the Saints,” were truer than any true history—if there is such a thing—to him. He believed them absolutely. The pope was infallible. If you didn’t go to confession and communion at least once a year, you were eternally damned. I recall his once telling me that, if a small bird were to come only once every million or trillion years and rub its bill on a rock as big as the earth, the rock would be worn out before a man would see the end of hell—eternal, fiery torture—once he was in it. And then he would not see the end of it, but merely the beginning, as it were. I recall invoking his rather heated contempt, on this occasion, by asking (or suggesting, I forget which) whether God might not change His mind about hell and let somebody out after a time. It seemed to him that I was evidently blasphemously bumptious, and that I was trifling with sacred things!