(When I speak of your cutting their throats, I speak as a man of my time; for it would be the veriest presumption in a mortal of this benighted day to restrict heroes in the blaze of the twenty-third century to such vulgar and ineffectual methods of destroying their fellow-men. Indeed, I must do myself the justice to say that, when I ventured to dream of you as storming the ranges of Thian-Shan and the Kuen-Lun, into which have fled the deluded remnants of the followers of Confucius (of whom, at the date of this dream, you were not one), I did not take the liberty of picturing you to myself, even in a vision of the night-time, as laboriously toiling up those rugged slopes, convincing, as you go, the unregenerate, by the unanswerable suasion of breech-loading cannon and repeating rifles,—lame contrivances of our less-favored age; but)
Before my closed, yet prophetic eye, you float a beautiful, aerial host of missionary heroes and real-estate agents, flecking the sky with innumerable winged craft. There! I see the line halt! A rock-bound fastness lies just ahead! A captain’s yacht—a kind of mechanical American eagle, an ’twere—darts forward through the limpid air, and poises itself just over the enemy, a mile above the earth. A field telephone drops into the fortress, and a parley is held. Unsatisfactory! for an officer in the uniform of the Flying Chemists, leaning lightly over the starboard gunwale, lets fall into the stronghold, with admirable precision, a homœopathic globule of the triple-refined quintessence of the double extract of dynamite. It is finished! Peace on earth, good will toward men! What was, a moment since, a heaven-piercing peak, is now a hole in the ground,—what were, just now, the adherents of an effete theology, in the twinkling of an eye are converted, if not into Christians, at least into almond-eyed angels,—and the victors can read their title clear to mansions near the skies, and to the rice-fields of the Yang-tsi-Kiang, or the tea-orchards of the Hoang-Ho.
I am persuaded that every fair-minded man will allow this to have been a dream that not even Pharaoh need have blushed to own. I feel that it does me credit. But would it have been prudent in me (as a professional dreamer) to see that one vision, and then, as we lawyers say, rest my case? Perhaps I had gone all astray. Who is this Bishop Berkeley, after all? Have men, in their migrations, always followed the sun? Who destroyed the Mound-Builders? and whence came they? and their destroyers? from the East? or from the West?
To certain insects, which live but a single day, the winds may very well seem to blow always in one direction; and there may be in the affairs of men a tide which ebbs and flows in æons rather than in hours. And what is the meaning of this cloud-speck rising along the Pacific coast? Is the nineteenth century, so remarkable in many respects (for instance, brag), to usher in an era as yet unsuspected? Is the tide trembling at its utmost flood,—and is the reflux upon us? Are the “lower orders” the real prophets, as they have ever been before? And is their animosity against the Chinese but a blind feeling of the truth that in these new-comers the European races have met their masters? Can it be that under the contempt expressed for them as inferiors there lurks a secret, unrealized sense of their real superiority?
For wherein do we surpass the Indian whom we are so rapidly supplanting? In two things: endurance under toil and strength to hoard,—industry and self-denial. By force of these traits we have driven the Red Men from their homes. And now, on the Pacific, we meet a race as superior to us in these qualities as we are to the Indian or the negro.
Obviously, therefore, if I would get at the bottom of the business, it behooved me to see another vision. It was not long in coming. The very next day a party of us jurists had luncheon together, and I ate, of all things in the world—
Well, returning to my office, I threw myself upon my lounge, and took up a law-book, stood it upon the bosom of my shirt, and opened it at the Rule in Shelley’s Case. If a man have nothing on his conscience, this justly celebrated rule will put him to sleep in ten minutes.
19.
Before I lay down, therefore, I locked my door; for the spectacle of a sleeping lawyer must ever be a painful surprise to a client.
Dream II.—[Canned lobster.]