WHAT SHOULD BE DONE?

If it were to be asked what should be done at once to remedy the present exigencies of suffering labour, I will answer what I would do had I the power. I would first abolish legal interest and make it a crime as the Bible does to take usury in any form. I would stop the payment of interest of the public debt and use the money to set the unemployed and starving labourers at work on internal improvements, and should be justified by the people for doing so; because it would be right to prevent widespread suffering and revolution at the expense of such a step; I would build the Pacific railroads north and south for the people and not give them to individuals, as was the case with those already built; I would construct immense workshops in every State in which the skilled labour of both sexes might be utilised when otherwise unemployed, because every day that any labourer is idle is a loss to the prospective wealth of the country; which fact is the condemnation of the policy of throwing men out of employment whenever business is depressed. Every labourer thus made idle adds to the general distress, because from being a producer he becomes a consumer; I would abolish pauperism and crime by giving everybody a chance to work at his chosen occupation; but if he preferred to starve rather than to work I would let him starve; I would purge the country of rascals by removing the inducements to rascality; I would make it impossible for a dishonourable person to live in a community, by placing everybody upon his honour, and in this way abolish jails and penitentiaries, criminals and courts and lawyers; I would remove the protection of the law from debts, and leave them to stand or fall upon the honour or want of it in the contracting parties, the result of which would be that a failure to pay once would discredit one for all future time, and compel honesty as a necessity for existence, making it to the interests of the people to be honourable in all things; and this, in turn, would abolish all civil courts and lawyers with all their attachés and expenses. I would restore to the public the gold, silver, copper, iron, lead, coal, oil and salt lands and mines and work them for its benefit, and I would send everybody who should be found tampering with the public funds to the Dry Tortugus for life. Yes; had I the power, I would make both compulsory and voluntary idleness impossible, and wipe out the stain of millions starving idle in a land of plenty, capable of sustaining a thousand million people; and hush the wail of suffering that floats upon the winds from every section of this God-favoured land, but now reeling under the effects of vicious legislation; I would snatch the people from being pushed headlong into revolution, and restore to them the equal use of God’s free gifts to all His children.

A LAW-GIVER NEEDED.

This country having fallen into the errors to which I have referred; into the hands of mediocre and incompetent legislators, without even a single statesman among them all; into the times of small minds and smaller measures that do not look beyond the day in which they are proposed; into industrial, financial and commercial ruin, with one half the wealth-producing power starving in idleness and no one seeming even to think what the end of this must be; having fallen into all these ills, this country needs that a giant mind shall spring into its councils, or else among its legislators, a captain which shall be able to grasp the helm of the ship of state now floundering hopelessly in the trough of the industrial sea, and put her before the wind again; a mind that shall have the wisdom and the courage to show the puerility of those who occupy the posts of honour, and, by the mere force of will, lift them into the right path; show them that beneath the surface of that which they seem to think is peaceable enough, there is a raging, seething volcano ready at the slightest occasion to burst forth and overwhelm everything in its path; a master mind which shall compel Congress by active measures to guide its powers rather than by inaction to provoke an eruption. This country needs that God shall send a law-giver; one who shall understand what has led to the present situation; what the exigencies of the people demand, and who shall have the ability to propose and the power to enforce the needed remedies—a Lycurgus to give a new code of laws that shall be the incarnation of the principles of the Declaration of Independence, which alone of all principles have any influence to mould the people, and from which they draw the characteristics which distinguish them from the other nations of the earth; and a Bonaparte to sweep out of the way the accumulating débris of years of vicious legislation and in its place inaugurate that code; needs a Lycurgus with his code of laws; a Bonaparte with his genius to command, and, combined with these, the vehement power of a Demosthenes to rouse the people to a sense of the danger in which they stand and, whether they will or not, lead them through a peaceable, rather than permit them to plunge into a bloody, revolution. Let this be done, no matter in what form this power may come, and a change of greater magnitude for good to this people than that proposed by Lycurgus for the Spartans, or that instituted in France by Bonaparte, will be inaugurated here.

But what has been done socially? Much of which I have not the time to speak, but this, as to what I would have for the social condition:—

WORDS TO WOMEN.

If the evils of industry were removed a great many social ills would cease. For instance, if women were independent, industrial members of the community, they would never be forced into distasteful, ill-assorted or convenient marriages, which are the most fruitful of all the sources of vice and crime in children, and consequently in the community. But beyond the industrial and dependent relations of the sexes there are many purely social ills that as much as those of industry require a remedy. Marriage is regarded as a too frivolous matter; is rushed into and out of in a haste that shows utter ignorance or else a total disregard for its responsibilities, and as if it were an institution specially designed for the benefit of the selfish wishes and passions of the sexes. But to look at marriage in this light is to not see it at all in that of the public good, or ultimately, in that of individual happiness. Marriages that are based upon selfishness or passion can never result in anything save misery to all concerned. Men and women who cannot look above these interests, who do not recognize that these interests should be secondary; who, after finding that their personal feelings would lead them to marry, cannot coolly ask themselves, are we prepared to become God’s architects to create His images, and be governed by the truthful reply, are not fit to marry. Many have the idea that I am opposed to marriage, but nothing could be further from the truth. I am opposed to improper marriages only; to marriages that bring unhappiness to the married, and misery to their fruits; and such as do this, had I the power, I would prohibit. I would guard the door by which this state is entered with all the vigilance with which the young mother watches her first-born darling babe; I would have no one enter its precincts save on bended knee and with prayerful heart, as if approaching the throne of God; as if to enter there were to more than in any other way to give one’s self to the service of God. So strictly would I guard it that none who should once enter could ever wish to retrace their steps. I would make divorces an unknown thing by abolishing imprudent and ill-assorted marriages. I would make the stigma so great that woman should find it impossible to confront the world in a marriage for a home, for position, or for any reason save love alone; and I would have her who should sell her person to be degraded in marriage, as culpable, as guilty, as impure at heart, as she is held to be who sells it otherwise. I would put every influence of the community against impure relations and selfish purposes, in whatever form they might exist, and encourage honour, purity, virtue and chastity. I would take away from marriage the idea that it legally conveys the control of the person of the wife to the husband, and I would make her as much its guardian against improper use as she is supposed to be in maidenhood. It should be her own, sacredly, never to be desecrated by an unwelcome touch. I would make enforced commerce as much a crime in marriage as it is now out of it, and unwilling child-bearing a double crime. As the architects of humanity, I would hold mothers responsible for the character and perfection of their works; make them realize that they can make their children what they ought to be, every one of them God’s image in equality. I would have them come to know that their bodies are the temples of God, and that within their inner sanctuaries, within “the holy of holies” God performs his most marvellous creations; that it is there that God Himself dwells, there that He will make Himself manifest to man, and that every act that He does not inspire is sacrilege, is worship of the Evil One, while every other, is an offering of sweet incense to the Heavenly Father. I would have man so honour woman that an impure or improper thought, or a self desire other than a wish to bless her, could never enter in his heart, would have him hold her to be the holy temple to which God has appointed him to be High Priest, as elaborately set forth by St. Paul in Hebrews, as the Garden of Eden into which the Lord God put him, “to dress it and to keep it,” forbidding him to eat of the fruit of the tree that stands in the midst of the garden; would have him awake to the consciousness that, by not so regarding her, he is repeating the sin of Adam, and by not compelling him to so regard her, she is repeating the sin of Eve; and that by these sins they are thrust out of the garden, and prevented from eating of the fruit of the tree of life and living forever; more than this, I would enlarge the sphere of parental responsibility so that they should be held accountable for the instruction of their children in all of the mysteries of sex, so that none could go into marriage in ignorance of the laws and uses of the reproductive functions. I would rob the subject of the mawkish sentimentality in which it is submerged, and make it a common and proper matter for earnest consideration and complete understanding. Indeed, I would make it a crime to enter marriage in ignorance of any of its possible duties and responsibilities; and twice a crime to bear improper children, for they who, to satisfy their own propensities, bring children into the world marked with the brand of Cain or Judas, are the worst kind of criminals. I would frown upon prostitution in every form; and make promiscuousness an abomination in the sight of man as it is in the sight of God; and I would drive out of the race the morbid passions that are consuming it. I would stop marrying until it should be no longer done in ignorance; and child-bearing until it could be done intelligently, so that every child might be a son or else a daughter of the living God. And I would have every woman remember the injunction of St. Paul, “Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husband as it is fit in the Lord,” but in no other way; and men, “Husbands, love your wives and be not bitter against them.” And if there be any other things let St. Paul also speak for me of them. “Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report, if there be any virtue, if there be any praise, think on these things.”

NOTES.

Lycurgus—“considering education to be the most important and the noblest work of a law-giver, he began at the very beginning and regulated marriages and the birth of children.... He strengthened the bodies of the girls by exercise in running, wrestling, and hurling quoits or javelins, in order that their children might spring from a healthy source and so grow up strong, and that they themselves might have strength, so as easily to endure the pains of childbirth. He did away with all affectation of seclusion and retirement among the women, and ordained that the girls, no less than the boys, should go naked in processions, and dance and sing at festivals in the presence of the young men. The jokes which they made upon each man were sometimes of great value as reproofs for ill-conduct; while on the other hand, by reciting verses written in praise of the deserving, they kindled a wonderful emulation and thirst for distinction in the young men: for he who had been praised by the maidens for his valour went away congratulated by his friends; while on the other hand, the raillery which they used in sport or jest had as keen an edge as a serious reproof; because the kings and elders were present at these festivals as well as all the other citizens. This nakedness of the maidens had in it nothing disgraceful, as it was done modestly, not licentiously (as in ballet dances and music halls and ball-rooms of the present day), producing simplicity, and teaching the women to value good health, and to love honour and courage no less than the men. This it was that made them speak and think as we are told Gorgo, the wife of Leonidas, did. Some foreign lady, it seems, said to her, ‘You Laconian women are the only ones that rule men....’ She answered, ‘Yes; for we alone bring forth men....’ They considered that if a child did not start in possession of health and strength, it was better for itself and for the State that it should not live at all.”—Plutarch’s Life of Lycurgus, Bohn’s Standard Library.