provinces. Sweep from the map the lines that divide the states and we
should huddle like sheep suddenly deprived of the protection of known
walls and flung upon the open prairie. State lines and local pride are
in themselves a pledge of stability. The elasticity of our system makes
possible a variety of governmental experiments by which the whole
country profits. We should all rejoice that the parochial mind is so
open, so eager, so earnest, so tolerant. Even the most buckramed
conservative on the Eastern coastline, scornful of the political
follies of our far-lying provinces, must view with some interest the
dallyings of Oregon with the Referendum, and of Des Moines with the
Commission System. If Milwaukee wishes to try Socialism, the rest of us
need not complain. Democracy will cease to be democracy when all its
problems are solved and everybody votes the same ticket.
States that produce the most cranks are prodigal of the corn that pays
the dividends on the railroads the cranks despise. Indiana's amiable
feeling toward New York is not altered by her sister's rejection or
acceptance of the direct primary, a benevolent device of noblest
intention, under which, not long ago, in my own commonwealth, my fellow
citizens expressed their distrust of me with unmistakable emphasis. It
is no great matter, but in open convention also I have perished by the
sword. Nothing can thwart the chastening hand of a righteous people.
All passes; humor alone is the touchstone of democracy. I search the
newspapers daily for tidings of Kansas, and in the ways of Oklahoma I
find delight. The Emporia _Gazette_ is quite as patriotic as the
Springfield _Republican_ or the New York _Post_, and to my own taste,
far less depressing. I subscribed for a year to the Charleston _News and
Courier_, and was saddened by the tameness of its sentiments; for I
remember (it must have been in 1884) the shrinking horror with which I
saw daily in the Indiana Republican organ a quotation from Wade Hampton
to the effect that 'these are the same principles for which Lee and
Jackson fought four years on Virginia's soil.' Most of us are
entertained when Colonel Watterson rises to speak for Kentucky and
invokes the star-eyed goddess. When we call the roll of the states, if
Malvolio answer for any, let us suffer him in tolerance and rejoice in
his yellow stockings. 'God give them wisdom that have it; and those that
are fools, let them use their talents.'
Every community has its dissenters, protestants, kickers, cranks, the
more the merrier. I early formed a high resolve to strive for membership
in this execrated company. George W. Julian,--one of the noblest of
Hoosiers,--who had been the Free-Soil candidate for Vice-President in
1852, a delegate to the first Republican convention, five times a member
of Congress, a supporter of Greeley's candidacy, and a Democrat in the
consulship of Cleveland, was a familiar figure in our streets. In 1884 I
was dusting law-books in an office where mugwumpery flourished, and
where the iniquities of the tariff, Matthew Arnold's theological
opinions, and the writings of Darwin, Spencer, and Huxley were discussed
at intervals in the day's business.
IV
It is constantly complained that we Americans give too much time to
politics, but there could be no safer way of utilizing that extra drop
of vital fluid which Matthew Arnold found in us. Epithets of opprobrium
pinned to a Nebraskan in 1896 were riveted upon a citizen of New York in
1910, and who, then, was the gentleman? No doubt many voices will cry in
the wilderness before we reach the promised land. A people which has
been fed on the Bible is bound to hear the rumble of Pharaoh's chariots.
It is in the blood to feel the oppressor's wrong, the proud man's
contumely. The winter evenings are long on the prairies, and we must
always be fashioning a crown for Cæsar or rehearsing his funeral rites.
No great danger can ever seriously menace the nation so long as the
remotest citizen clings to his faith that he is a part of the
governmental mechanism and can at any time throw it out of adjustment if
it doesn't run to suit him. He can go into the court-house and see the
men he helped to place in office; or if they were chosen in spite of
him, he pays his taxes just the same and waits for another chance to
turn the rascals out.
Mr. Bryce wrote: 'This tendency to acquiescence and submission; this
sense of the insignificance of individual effort, this belief that the
affairs of men are swayed by large forces whose movement may be studied
but cannot be turned, I have ventured to call the Fatalism of the
Multitude.' It is, I should say, one of the most encouraging phenomena
of the score of years that have elapsed since Mr. Bryce's _American
Commonwealth_ appeared, that we have grown much less conscious of the
crushing weight of the mass. It has been with something of a child's
surprise in his ultimate successful manipulation of a toy whose
mechanism has baffled him that we have begun to realize that, after all,
the individual counts. The pressure of the mass will yet be felt, but in
spite of its persistence there are abundant signs that the individual is
asserting himself more and more, and even the undeniable acceptance of
collectivist ideas in many quarters helps to prove it. With all our
faults and defaults of understanding,--populism, free silver, Coxey's
army, and the rest of it,--we of the West have not done so badly. Be not
impatient with the young man Absalom; the mule knows his way to the oak
tree!
Blaine lost Indiana in 1884; Bryan failed thrice to carry it. The
campaign of 1910 in Indiana was remarkable for the stubbornness of
'silent' voters, who listened respectfully to the orators but left the
managers of both parties in the air as to their intentions. In the
Indiana Democratic State Convention of 1910 a gentleman was furiously
hissed for ten minutes amid a scene of wildest tumult; but the cause he
advocated won, and the ticket nominated in that memorable convention
succeeded in November. Within fifty years Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois
have sent to Washington seven presidents, elected for ten terms. Without
discussing the value of their public services it may be said that it has
been an important demonstration to our Mid-Western people of the
closeness of their ties with the nation, that so many men of their own
soil have been chosen to the seat of the presidents; and it is
creditable to Maine and California that they have cheerfully acquiesced.
In Lincoln the provincial American most nobly asserted himself, and any
discussion of the value of provincial life and character in our politics
may well begin and end in him. We have seen verily that
Fishers and choppers and ploughmen
Shall constitute a state.
Whitman, addressing Grant on his return from his world's tour, declared
that it was not that the hero had walked 'with kings with even pace the
round world's promenade';
But that in foreign lands, in all thy walks with kings,
Those prairie sovereigns of the West, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois,
Ohio's, Indiana's millions, comrades, farmers, soldiers, all to the
front,
Invisibly with thee walking with kings with even pace the round
world's promenade,
Were all so justified.
What we miss and what we lack who live in the provinces seem to me of
little weight in the scale against our compensations. We slouch,--we are
deficient in the graces, we are prone to boast, and we lack in those
fine reticences that mark the cultivated citizen of the metropolis. We
like to talk, and we talk our problems out to a finish. Our
commonwealths rose in the ashes of the hunter's campfires, and we are
all a great neighborhood, united in a common understanding of what
democracy is, and animated by ideals of what we want it to be. That
saving humor which is a philosophy of life flourishes amid the tall
corn. We are old enough now--we of the West--to have built up in
ourselves a species of wisdom, founded upon experience, which is a part
of the continuing unwritten law of democracy. We are less likely these
days to 'wobble right' than we are to stand fast or march forward like
an army with banners.
We provincials are immensely curious. Art, music, literature,
politics--nothing that is of contemporaneous human interest is alien to
us. If these things don't come to us we go to them. We are more truly
representative of the American ideal than our metropolitan cousins,
because (here I lay my head upon the block) we know more about, oh, so
many things! We know vastly more about the United States, for one thing.
We know what New York is thinking before New York herself knows it,
because we visit the metropolis to find out. Sleeping-cars have no
terrors for us, and a man who has never been west of Philadelphia seems
to us a singularly benighted being. Those of our Western school-teachers
who don't see Europe for three hundred dollars every summer get at least
as far east as Concord, to be photographed by the rude bridge that
arched the flood.
That fine austerity, which the voluble Westerner finds so smothering on
the Boston and New York express, is lost utterly at Pittsburg. From
gentlemen cruising in day-coaches--rude wights who advertise their
personal sanitation and literacy by the toothbrush and fountain-pen
planted sturdily in their upper left-hand waistcoat pockets--one may
learn the most prodigious facts and the philosophy thereof. 'Sit over,
brother; there's hell to pay in the Balkans,' remarks the gentleman who
boarded the inter-urban at Peru or Connersville, and who would just as
lief discuss the papacy or child-labor, if revolutions are not to your
liking.
In Boston a lady once expressed her surprise that I should be hastening
home for Thanksgiving Day. This, she thought, was a New England
festival. More recently I was asked by a Bostonian if I had ever heard
of Paul Revere. Nothing is more delightful in us, I think, than our
meekness before instruction. We strive to please; all we ask is 'to be
shown.'
Our greatest gain is in leisure and the opportunity to ponder and brood.
In all these thousands of country towns live alert and shrewd students
of affairs. Where your New Yorker scans headlines as he 'commutes'
homeward, the villager reaches his own fireside without being shot
through a tube, and sits down and reads his newspaper thoroughly. When
he repairs to the drug-store to abuse or praise the powers that be, his
wife reads the paper, too. A United States Senator from a Middle
Western State, making a campaign for renomination preliminary to the
primaries, warned the people in rural communities against the newspaper
and periodical press with its scandals and heresies. 'Wait quietly by
your firesides, undisturbed by these false teachings,' he said in
effect; 'then go to your primaries and vote as you have always voted.'
His opponent won by thirty thousand,--the amiable answer of the little
red schoolhouse.
V
A few days ago I visited again my native town. On the slope where I
played as a child I listened in vain for the mourning bugle; but on the
college campus a bronze tablet commemorative of those sons of Wabash who
had fought in the mighty war quickened the old impressions. The college
buildings wear a look of age in the gathering dusk.
Coldly, sadly descends
The autumn evening. The field
Strewn with its dank yellow drifts
Of withered leaves, and the elms,
Fade into dimness apace,
Silent; hardly a shout
From a few boys late at their play!
Brave airs of cityhood are apparent in the town, with its paved streets,
fine hall and library; and everywhere are wholesome life, comfort, and
peace. The train is soon hurrying through gray fields and dark
woodlands. Farmhouses are disclosed by glowing panes; lanterns flash
fitfully where farmers are making all fast for the night. The city is
reached as great factories are discharging their laborers, and I pass
from the station into a hurrying throng homeward bound. Against the sky
looms the dome of the capitol; the tall shaft of the soldiers' monument
rises ahead of me down the long street and vanishes starward. Here where
forests stood seventy-five years ago, in a state that has not yet
attained its centenary, is realized much that man has sought through all
the ages,--order, justice, and mercy, kindliness and good cheer. What we
lack we seek, and what we strive for we shall gain. And of such is the
kingdom of democracy.
Our Lady Poverty
By Agnes Repplier
I
The last people to read the literature of poverty are the poor, and this
fact may be cited as one of the ameliorations of their lot. If they were
assured day after day that they were degraded and enslaved, it would be
a trifle hard for them to cherish their respectability, and enjoy their
freedom. If their misery were dinned into their ears, they would
naturally cease being cheerful. If they were convinced that tears are
their portion, they would no longer have the temerity to laugh. Indeed
their mirth is frankly repellent to the dolorous writers of to-day.
A burst of hollow laughter from a hopeless heart
is permitted as seemly and in character; even the poet of the slums
grants this outlet for emotion; but the rude sounds which denote
hilarity disturb the sympathetic soul. One agitated lady describes with
shrinking horror the merriment of the scrub-women going to their labor.
All the dignity, all the sacredness of womanhood are defiled by these
poor old creatures tramping through the chill dawn; and yet, and
yet,--oh, mockery of nobler aspirations!--'The scrub-women were going to
work, and they went laughing!'
The dismalness of serious writers, especially if humanity be their
theme, is steeping us in gloom. The obsession of sorrow seems the most
reasonable of all obsessions, because facts can be crowded upon facts
(to the general exclusion of truth) by way of argument and illustration.
And should facts fail, there are bitter generalizations which shroud us
like a pall.
Behind all music we can hear
The insistent note of hunger-fear;
Beyond all beauty we can see
The land's defenseless misery.
Mr. Percy MacKaye in his preface to that treatise on eugenics which he
has christened _To-Morrow_, and humorously designated as a play, makes
this inspiriting statement: 'Our world is hideously unhappy, and the
insufferable sense of that unhappiness is the consecration of modern
leaders in art. Realism is splendidly their incentive.'
This opens up a cheering vista for the public. If the dramatists of the
near future are to have no finer consecration than an insufferable sense
of unhappiness, we must turn for amusement to lectures and organ
recitals. If novelists and poets are to be hallowed by grief, there will
be nothing left for light-hearted readers save the study of political
economy, erstwhile called the dismal science, but now, by comparison,
gay. No artist yet was ever born of an insufferable sense of
unhappiness. No leader and helper of men was ever bedewed with tears.
The world is old, and the world is wide. Of what use are we in its
tumultuous life, if we do not know its joys, its griefs, its high
emotions, its call to courage, and the echo of the laughter of the ages?
Perhaps the only literature of poverty (I use the word 'literature' in a
purely courteous sense) which was ever written for the poor is that
amazing issue of tracts, _Village Politics_, _Tales for the Common
People_, and scores of similar productions, which a hundred years ago
were let loose upon rural England. The moral in all of them is the same,
and is expressed with engaging simplicity: 'Don't give trouble to people
better off than yourself.' The fact that many of these tracts had a
prodigious sale points to their distribution--by the rich--in quarters
where it was thought that they would do most good. They were probably
read in the same spirit as that in which a Sunday-school library was
read by two small and unregenerate boys of my acquaintance, who worked
through whole shelves at a fixed rate, ten cents for a short book,
twenty-five cents for a long one,--the money paid by a pious
grandmother, and a point of honor not to skip.
The smug complacency of Hannah More and her sisterhood was rudely
disturbed by Ebenezer Elliott, who published his _Corn-Law Rhymer_,
with its profound pity and its somewhat impotent wrath, in 1831. England
woke up to the disturbing conviction that men and women were
starving,--always a disagreeable thing to contemplate,--and the Corn
Laws were repealed; but the 'Rhymes' were probably as little known to
the laborer of 1831 as was _Piers Plowman_ to the laborer of 1392.
Langland--to whom partial critics have for five hundred years ascribed
this great poem of discontent--was keenly alive to the value of
husbandry as a theme; and his ploughman came in time to be recognized as
the people's suffering representative; but the poet, after the fashion
of poets, wrote for 'lettered clerks,' of which class he was a shining
example, his praiseworthy purpose in life being to avoid 'common men's
work.' In the last century, _Les Misérables_ was called the 'Epic of the
Poor'; but its readers were, for the most part, as comfortably remote
from poverty as Victor Hugo himself, and as alive to the advantages of
wealth.
In this age of print, the literature of poverty has swollen to an
enormous bulk. Statistical books, explicit and contradictory. Hopeful
books by social workers who see salvation in girls' clubs and refined
dancing. Hopeless books by other social workers who believe--or, at
least, who say--that the employed are enslaved by the employer, and that
women and children are the prey of men. Highly colored books by
adventurous young journalists who have masqueraded (for copy's sake) as
mill and factory hands. Gray books by casual observers who are paralyzed
by the mere sight of a slum. Furious books by rabid socialists who hold
that the poor will never be uplifted while there is left in the world a
man rich enough to pay them wages. Imaginative books by poets and
novelists who deal in realism to the exclusion of reality. All this
profusion and confusion of matter is thrust upon us month after month,
while the working-man reads his newspaper, and the working-girl reads _A
Coronet of Shame_, or _Lost in Fate's Fearful Abyss_.
It was Mr. George Gissing who, in his studies of the poor, first made
popular the invective style; who hurled at London such epithets as
'pest-stricken,' 'city of the damned,' 'intimacies of abomination,'
'utmost limits of dread,'--phrases which have been faithfully copied by
shuddering defamers of New York and Chicago. Mr. John Burns, for
example, after a brief visit to the United States, said that Chicago was
a pocket edition of hell; and subsequently, without, we hope, any
personal experience to back him, said that hell was a pocket edition of
Chicago.
Americans have borrowed these flowers of speech from England, and have
invaded her territory. Was it because he could find no poverty at home
worthy of his strenuous pen, that Mr. Jack London crossed the sea to
write up the streets of Whitechapel and Spitalfields, already so
abundantly exploited by English authors? Was there anything _he_ could
add to the dark pictures of Mr. Gissing, or to the more convincing
studies of Mr. Arthur Morrison, who has lit up the gloom with a grim
humor, not very mirthful, but acutely and unimpeachably human? Mr.
Gissing's poor have money for nothing but beer (it would be a bold
writer who denied his starvelings beer); but Mr. Morrison sees his way
occasionally to bacon, and tea, and tinned beef, and even, at rare
intervals, to a pompous funeral, provided that the money for mutes can
be saved from the sick man's diet. He is the legitimate successor of
Dickens, and Dickens knew his field from experience rather than from
observation. The lighthouse-keeper sees the storm, but the cabin boy
feels it.
In the annals of poverty there are few pages more poignant than the one
which describes the sick child, Charles Dickens, taken home from work by
a kind-hearted lad, and his shame lest this boy should learn that 'home'
for him meant the debtors' prison. In vain he tried to get rid of his
conductor, Bob Fagin by name, protesting that he was well enough to walk
alone. Bob knew he was not, and stuck to his side. Together they pushed
along until little Charles was fainting with weakness and fatigue. Then
in desperation he pretended that he lived in a decent house near
Southwark bridge, and darted up the steps with a joyous air of being at
last in haven, only to creep down again when Bob's back was turned, and
drag his slow steps to the Marshalsea.
Out of this dismal and precocious experience sprang two results,--a
passionate resolve _not_ to be what circumstances were conspiring to
make him, and an insight into the uncalculating habits which deepen and
soften poverty. Dickens--once free of institutions--wrote of the poor,
even of the London poor, with amazing geniality; but it cannot be denied
that his infallible recipe for brightening up the scene is the timely
introduction of a pot of porter, or a pitcher of steaming flip. If we
try to think of him writing in a prohibition state, we shall realize
that he owed as much to beer and punch as ever Horace did to wine.
Imagination fails to grasp either of them in the rôle of a
water-drinker. The poor of Dickens are a sturdy lot, but they are jovial
only in their cups. His wholesome hatred of institutions would have been
intensified could he have lived to hear the Camberwell Board of
Guardians decide--at the instigation, alas! of a woman member--that the
single mug of beer which for years had solaced the inmates of Camberwell
Workhouse on Christmas Day, should hereafter be abolished as an immoral
indulgence. The generous ghost of Dickens must have groaned in Heaven
over that melancholy and mean reform.
II
'To achieve what man may, to bear what man must,'--since the struggle
for life began, this has been the purpose and the pride of humanity. We
Americans were trained from childhood to believe that while, in the
final issue, each of us must answer for himself, the country--our
country--gave to all scope for effort, and chance of victory.
This was not mere Fourth of July oratory, nor the fervent utterances of
presidential campaigns. It was a serious and a sober faith, based upon
some knowledge of the Constitution, some inheritance of experience, some
element of democracy which flavored our early lives. The mere sense of
space carried with it a profound and eager hopefulness. Those of us
whose fathers or whose grandfathers had crossed the sea to escape from
more cramping conditions, felt this atmosphere of independence keenly
and consciously. Those of us whose fathers or whose grandfathers brought
up their families in an alien land with decent industry and thrift, were
aware, even in childhood, that the Republic had fostered our growth.
Therefore am I pardonably bewildered when I hear American workmen called
'slaves' and 'prisoners of starvation,' and American employers called
'base oppressors,' and 'despots on their thrones.' This fantastic
nomenclature seems immeasurably removed from the temperate language in
which were formulated the temperate convictions of my youth.