We confess that such was not always the case. We entered one of the first classes ever taught in this country in what was then called the Science of Society. We listened with amused interest, possibly with profit, to the remarks, interspersed with puns, which the erudite professor allowed himself to make on the subject of marriage as an institution. Later we read ponderous books on this topic and kindred ones, and we even plumed ourselves upon our advocacy of woman suffrage and our practical interest in organized philanthropy. Political economy and history were not neglected by us, and so we rounded out the last century cherishing the delusion that we were somewhat progressive. Alas, we were primitive enough to spell it with a small "p." And now, but a few short years later, we are wailing in or about a Sociological Nightmare! Is it that, in the natural course of things, we have merely become conservative, have been caught up with, and passed, by a more radical generation, and are taking out on them, regardless of justice and of shifting metaphors, a spite caused by our own weakness of mental digestion?
Perhaps so, perhaps not. Thus far we have not flung even the tiniest of stones at the important study known as Sociology, nor have we meant to hit any of its serious students. The banner under which we enlisted as the humblest of privates, we still salute, and as the army of workers marches on, we, droppers-out yet loyal, raise our feeble cheer. But behold! we are caught in a frantic mob of camp-followers, and we struggle in vain to extricate ourselves. And what a mob it is! Men and women who call themselves "Progressives" without being able to read a pedometer; anarchists who, with less sense than bulls, mistake a red flag for a new Gospel; propagandists of peace who have no respect for rest; advocates of nostrums who actually resent being called quacks; women who rejoice in being "hikers;" philanthropists who are doing their foolish best to make the under dog a mad one; lecturers who convert their lungs into cash; fashionable women who open their drawing-rooms to cranks, and their heads to whims;—but why attempt an impossible description? It seems better to fall back upon Matthew Arnold's more decorous expression of his feelings, in Bacchanalia; or, the New Age:—
Thundering and bursting
In torrents, and waves,
Carolling and shouting,
Over tombs, amid graves,
See! on the cumbered plain
Clearing a stage,
Scattering the past about,
Comes the new age.
Bards make new poems,
Thinkers new schools,
Statesmen new systems,
Critics new rules.
All things begin again;
Life is their prize;
Earth with their deeds they fill,
Fill with their cries.
Have we, then, got at the root of the matter? Tired out with "strenuosity," fatigued with American "progress," dinned with lectures, conferences, civic forums, and all the other modes of vociferous self-expression dear to this Age of Talk, are we, like the poet, the poet who, be it remembered, wrote of Sophocles that he "saw life steadily, and saw it whole," are we really longing for an impossible golden reign of universal silence, and, in despair of obtaining it, railing at what happens for the moment to be the most noisy object within our dyspeptic range of hearing—the amateur sociologist?
We are not sure that this is not the case, but why should we undertake to analyze our own feelings? The main point is that we feel them; the next point, almost as important to ourselves, is that we want to express them. And who that is past fifty is not warranted in indulging in mild objurgations when it is possible to overhear at a dinner party, as the dominant note of an eager conversation between a lady and a gentleman, that latest intruder into the limited vocabulary of fashionable life, the ugly word "prostitute"! No one placed in so astounding a situation would stop to reflect that, if he had overheard such a conversation—save the mark!—two centuries ago, the dominant word would have been, most assuredly, both shorter and uglier. Not for us at least such cold philological comfort in the presence of our arch-enemy, the amateur sociologist. Here we have caught him in the innermost recess of civilization, caught him at our very dinner table—a more loathsome and dangerous foe than the Satan-Toad squat at the ear of sleeping Eve!
For where in all Creation's round
Can now a sleeping Eve be found?
They are all awake—God bless them and save them!—awake and listening to the amateur sociologist, or else to the sociological dramatist, which is every whit as bad, or worse. They are awake and forming drama-leagues, attending lectures for political education, giving suffrage teas and balls, flocking to conventions, marching under banners and "hiking" in squads, grabbing at slippery presidents, writing their pretty fingers off, converting the tenets of the New Morality into lullabies, in short, following a modern Pied Piper—into what?
We are brought up with a shock before the blank wall of our own question, and we are out of our nightmare. This world, even if in this particular year of grace it does seem to be overstocked with sociologists, is a pleasanter place to inhabit than a Hades tenanted by gibbering ghosts. It is possible to advocate equal franchise and to help along other causes in which one may believe without mistaking one's heels for one's head, difficult though this may be in these dancing days. We suspect that a suffrage ball in New York is in many ways a less objectionable affair than a London masquerade of the early eighteenth century given under the direction of the long forgotten John James Heidegger. It is fairly certain that in the same city at the same period "Orator Henley" was as convinced of his own omniscience as any sociologist or political economist who discusses the future of the family or white slavery before a woman's club. Every age must cherish its pet variation of the standing illusion of the race—that for our day and generation we are wiser than our ancestors were for theirs. Who would not run after a good thing, and what better things are there to run after than schemes for human regeneration, even if we frequently find that our rainbow has not led us to a pot of gold? Have we not been assured on good authority that out of the clash of opinions truth emerges? Is it not the prime article of our democratic creed that the vox populi is the vox dei, and, even if the vox populi speaks with an unmistakably sociological twang, is it not our duty, at the risk of being labelled "undesirable citizens," to imagine, nay, to believe and aver, that we are listening to the dulcet harmonies of heaven? What if that gruff old person, Dr. Samuel Johnson, would, were he alive, assert in his most stentorian tones that our strenuous democratic optimism is the vulgarest and the shallowest philosophy ever permitted by a too indulgent Providence to flourish under the sun! Is not the grumpy Doctor safely buried, and common sense along with him?
But this is no way to shake off the effects of a nightmare. Let us conclude in an humbler, more supplicatory strain. Will not our gifted reformers, for a while at least, forbear to announce that they have converted ethics into a science, and education into a highway to Paradise? Will not our politicians admit between their speeches, that people who question or censure their latest panaceas are, on the whole, exemplary and fairly intelligent citizens, who in no other respect than their momentary recalcitrancy seem to be fit candidates for a jail or an asylum? Will not exponents of New History, New Philosophy, and New Literature give a slightly larger portion of their time to reading what a not altogether benighted past managed to accomplish in those departments of human knowledge, speculation, and imaginative creation? Will not suffragists and anti-suffragists call a short truce for the purpose of admitting that, if a sense of humor and a spirit of tolerance are totally banished from our devoted country, the lot of future generations—if there are to be any—will be somewhat parlous? Finally, will not the ladies and gentlemen who are tearfully or gleefully forecasting the doom of the monogamous family, occasionally condescend to glance at Homer's description of the parting of Hector from Andromache and Astyanax, or at one of Raphael's Madonnas with the Christ-Child, with the intent of asking themselves whether in human evolution there are not other forces at work than those dubbed economic? Let but these good men and women consider without impatience their petitioner's modest requests, and he will wish them Godspeed in their commendable if arduous and often thankless task of regenerating the human race.