to heart very seriously. Now do take an old man's advice and do not get
up upon your Quixotic hobby-horse the moment you sniff what it is--for I
suppose you have guessed it already. Yes, it is what you feared: I want to
urge you to follow your mother's ardent wish and add commission business
to your other work. I know very well that young men must dream their
dreams, but the world is what it is, and after all there is nothing so
very dreadful in the commission side of our profession. You do not come
into direct relation with the collectors of curios and church ornaments:
there is always an agent to break the crudeness of the connexion. And
it is a certain and profitable source of income with none of the risks
attached to it that the older branches of the profession unfortunately
show. Moreover, it affords excellent opportunities for foreign travel,
and gives one a special position very difficult to define, but easily
appreciable among one's colleagues.
George Burton made to my knowledge three thousand pounds last year in a
short season; he got this very large commission without the necessity of
breaking into a single public-house; he earned it entirely upon objects
taken out of churches upon the Continent, and in only three cases had he
to pick a pocket. It would have hurt him very much with his knowledge and
tastes to have had to break a stained-glass window.
Do consider this, my dear Ormond, for your mother's sake. Don't think for
a moment that I am advising you to take up any of those forms of work
which we both agree in despising, and which are quite unworthy of your
traditions, as for instance stealing pictures on commission out of the
houses of dealers and then turning detective to recover them again. It is
much too easy work for a man of your talents, much too ill-paid, and much
too dangerous. It is all very well for the picture dealer to leave the
door open, but what if the policeman is not in the know? No, you will
always find me on your side in your steady refusal to have anything to do
with this kind of business.
Ormond, my dear lad, bear me no ill-will. It is true of every profession,
of the Bar and of the City, of homicide, medicine, the Services, even
Politics--everything, that success only comes slowly, and that the
experience of older men is the key to it.
Tomorrow is Ascension Day, and I am at leisure. Come and dine with me at
the Colonial Club at eight for eight-fifteen. I will show you a
magnificent littla tanagra I picked up yesterday, and we will talk about
the new prospectus.
God bless you! (Dress.)
Your affectionate Uncle
THE MONKEY QUESTION: AN APPEAL TO COMMON SENSE
A privileged body slips so easily into regarding its privileges as common
rights that I fear the plea which the SIMIAN LEAGUE repeats in this
pamphlet will still sound strange in the ears of many, though the work of
the League has been increasingly successful and has reached yearly a wider
circle of the educated public since its foundation by Lady Wayne in 1902.
We desire to place before our fellow-citizens the claims of Monkeys, and
we hope once more that nothing we say may seem extreme or violent, for we
know full well what poor weapons violence and passion are in the debate of
a practical political matter.
Perhaps it is best to begin by pointing out how rarely even the best of us
pause in our fevered race for wealth to consider the disabilities of any
of our fellow-creatures: when that truth is grasped it will be easier to
plead the special cause of the Simian.
Were English men and women to realize the wrongs of the Race, or at any
rate the illogical and therefore unjust position in which we have placed
them; were the just and thoughtful men, the refined and golden-hearted
ladies who are ready in this country to support every good cause when it
is properly presented; were _they_ to realize the disabilities of the
Monkey, I do not say as vividly they realize the tragedies and misfortunes
of London life, they could not, I think, avoid an ill-ease, a pricking of
conscience, which would lead at last to some hearty and English effort for
the relief of the cousin and forerunner of man.
The attitude adopted towards Monkeys by the mass of those who, after all,
live in the same world, and have much the same appetites and necessities
and sufferings as they, is an attitude I am persuaded, not of
heartlessness, but of ignorance. To disturb that ignorance, and in some to
awake a consciousness which, perhaps, they fear, is not a grateful task,
but it is our duty, and we will pursue it.
Let the reader consider for one moment the aspect not only of formal law
but of the whole community, and of what is called "public opinion" towards
this section of sentient beings.
As things now are--aye! and have been for centuries in this green England
of ours--a Monkey may not marry; he may not own land; he may not fill any
salaried post under the Crown. The Papists themselves are debarred from
no honour (outside Ireland) save the Lord Chancellorship. Monkeys, who
are responsible for no persecutions in the past, whose religion presents
no insult or outrage to our common reason, and who differ little from
ourselves in their general practice of life and thought, _are debarred
from all_!
A Monkey may not be a Member of Parliament, a Civil Servant, an officer
in either Service, no, not even in the Territorial Army. It is doubtful
whether he may hold a commission for the peace. True, there is no statute
upon the subject, and the rural magistracy is perhaps the freest and most
open of all our offices, and the least restricted by artificial barriers
of examination or test; nevertheless, it is the considered opinion of the
best legal authorities that no Monkey could sit upon the Bench, and in any
case the discussion is purely academic, for it is difficult to believe
that any Lord-Lieutenant, under the ridiculous anachronism of our present
Constitution, would nominate a Monkey to such a position--unless (which is
by law impossible) he should be heir to an owner of an estate in land.
Nor is this all. The mention of unpaid posts recalls the damning truth
that all honorary positions in the Diplomatic Service, including even the
purely formal stage in the Foreign Office, are closed to the Monkey; the
very Court sinecures, which admittedly require no talents, are denied to
our Simian fellow-creatures, if not by law at least by custom and in
practice.
There have been employed by the League in the British Museum the services
of two ladies who feel most keenly upon this subject. They are (to the
honour of their sex) as amply qualified as any person in this kingdom for
the task which they have undertaken, and they report to the Executive
Commission after two months of minute research that (with one doubtful
exception occurring during the reign of Her late Majesty) no Monkey has
held any position whatever at Court.
All judicial positions are equally inaccessible to them; for though,
perhaps, in theory a Monkey could be promoted to the Bench if he had
served his party sufficiently long and faithfully in the House of Commons
(to which body he is admissible--at least I can find no rule or custom,
let alone a statute, against it), yet he is cut off from such an ambition
at the very outset by his inadmissibility to a legal career. The Inns of
Court are monopolist, and, like all monopolists, hopelessly conservative.
They have admitted first one class and then another--though reluctantly--to
their privileges, but it will be twenty or thirty years at least
before they will give way in the matter of Monkeys. To be a physician,
a solicitor, an engineer, or a Commissioner for Oaths is denied them as
effectually as though they did not exist. Indeed, no occupation is left
them save that of manual labour, and on this I would say a word. It is
fashionable to jeer at the Monkey's disinclination to sustained physical
effort and to concentrated toil; but it is remarkable that those who
affect such a contempt for the Monkey's powers are the first to deny him
access to the liberal professions in which they know (though they dare not
confess it) he would be a serious rival to the European. As it is, in the
few places open to Monkeys--the somewhat parasitical domestic occupation
of "companions" and the more manly, but still humiliating, task of acting
as assistants to organ-grinders, the Monkey has won universal if grudging
praise.
Latterly, since progress cannot be indefinitely delayed, the Monkey has
indeed advanced by one poor step towards the civic equality which is his
right, and has appeared as an actor upon the boards of our music-halls. It
should surely be a sufficient rebuke for those who continue to sneer at
the Simian League and such devoted pioneers as Miss Greeley and Lady Wayne
that the Monkey has been honourably admitted and has done first-rate work
in a profession which His late Gracious Majesty and His late Majesty's
late revered mother, Queen Victoria, have seen fit to honour by the
bestowal of knighthoods, and in one case (where the recipient was
childless) of a baronetcy.
The disabilities I have enumerated are by no means exhaustive. A Monkey
may not sign or deliver a deed; he may not serve on a jury; he may be
ill-treated, forsooth, and even killed by some cruel master, and the
law will refuse to protect him or to punish his oppressor. He may be
subjected to all the by-laws of a tyrannical or fanatical administration,
but in preventing such abuses he has no voice. He may not enter our
older Universities, at least as the member of a college; that is, he can
only take a degree at Oxford or Cambridge under the implied and wholly
unmerited stigma applying to the non-collegiate student. And these
iniquities apply not only to the great anthropoids whose strength and
grossness we might legitimately fear, but to the most delicately organized
types--to the Barbary Ape, the Lemur, and the Ring-tailed Baboon.
Finally--and this is the worst feature in the whole matter--a Monkey, by
a legal fiction at least as old as the fourteenth century, is not a person
in the eye of the law.
We call England a free country, yet at the present day and as you read
these lines, _any Monkey found at large may be summarily arrested_.
He has no remedy; no action for assault will lie. He is not even allowed
to call witnesses in his own defence, or to establish an alibi.
It may be pleaded that these disabilities attach also to the Irish, but we
must remember that the Irish are allowed a certain though modified freedom
of the Press, and have extended to them the incalculable advantage of
sending representatives to Westminster. The Monkey has no such remedies.
He may be incarcerated, nay _chained_, yet he cannot sue out a writ
for habeas corpus any more than can a British subject in time of war, and
worst of all, through the connivance or impotence of the police, cases
have been brought forward _and approved_ in which Monkeys have been
openly bought and sold!
We boast our sense of delicacy, and perhaps rightly, in view of our
superiority over other nations in this particular; yet we permit the
Monkey to exhibit revolting nakedness, and we hardly heed the omission!
It is true that some Monkeys are covered from time to time with little
blue coats. A cap is occasionally disdainfully permitted them, and not
infrequently they are permitted a pair of leather breeches, through a hole
in which the tail is permitted to protrude; but no reasonable man will
deny that these garments are regarded in the light of mere ornaments, and
rarely fulfil those functions which every decent Englishman requires of
clothing.
And now we come to the most important section of our appeal. _What can
be done_?
We are a kindly people and we are a just people, but we are also a very
conservative people. The fate of all pioneers besets those who attempt to
move in this matter. They are jeered at, or, what is worse, neglected. One
of the most prominent of the League's workers has been certified a lunatic
by an authority whose bitter prejudice is well known, and against whom we
have as yet had no grant of a _mandamus_, and we have all noticed the
quiet contempt, the sort of organized boycott or conspiracy of silence
with which a company at dinner will receive the subject when it is brought
forward.
There are also to be met the violent prejudices with which the mass of
the population is still filled in this regard. These prejudices are, of
course, more common among the uneducated poor than in the upper classes,
who in various relations come more often in contact with Monkeys, and who
also have a wider and more tolerant, because a better cultivated, spirit.
But the prejudice is discernible in every class of society, even in the
very highest. We have also arrayed against us in our crusade for right and
justice the dying but still formidable power of clericalism. Society is
but half emancipated from its medieval trammels, and the priest, that
Eternal Enemy of Liberty, can still put in his evil word against the
rights of the Simian.
Let us not despair! We can hope for nothing, it is true, until we have
effected a profound change in public opinion, and that change cannot
be effected by laws. It can only be brought about by a slow and almost
imperceptible effort, unsleeping, tireless, and convinced: something of
the same sort as has destroyed the power of militarism upon the Continent
of Europe; something of the same sort as has scotched landlordism at home;
something of the same sort as has freed the unhappy natives of the Congo
from the misrule of depraved foreigners; something of the same sort as has
produced the great wave in favour of temperance through the length and
breadth of this land.
We must not attempt extremes or demand full justice to the exclusion of
excellent half-measures. No one condemns more strongly than do we the
militant pro-Simians who have twice assaulted and once blinded for life a
keeper in the Zoological Gardens. We do not even approve of those ardent
but in our opinion misguided spirits of the Simian Freedom Society who
publish side by side the photographs of Pongo the learned Ape from the
Gaboons and that of a certain Cabinet Minister, accompanied by the legend
"Which is Which?" It is not by actions of this kind that we shall win the
good fight; but rather by a perseverance in reason combined with courtesy
shall we attain our end, until at long last our Brother shall be free! As
for the excellent but somewhat provincial reactionaries who still object
to us that the Monkey differs fundamentally from the human race; that he
is not possessed of human speech, and so forth, we can afford to smile at
their waning authority. Modern science has sufficiently dealt with them;
and if any one bring out against the Monkey the obscurantist insult that
His Hide is Covered with Hair, we can at once point to innumerable human
beings, fully recognized and endowed with civic rights, who, were they
carefully examined, would prove in no better case. As to speech, the
Monkey communicates in his own way as well or better than do we, and for
that matter, if speech is to be the criterion, are we to deny civic rights
to the Dumb?
We have it upon the authority of all our greatest scientific men, that
there is no substantial difference between the Ape and Man. One of the
greatest has said that between himself and his poorer fellow-citizens
there was a wider difference than that which separated them from the
Monkey. Hackel has testified that while there is a _boundary_, there
is no _gulf_ between the corps of professors to which he belongs and
the Chimpanzee. The Gorilla is universally accepted, and if we have won
the battle for the Gorilla, the rest will follow.
Tolstoy is with us, Webb is with us, Gorky is with us, Zola and Ferrer
were with us and fight for us from their graves. The whole current of
modern thought is with us. WE CANNOT FAIL!
_Questions submitted at the last Election by the Simian League_
1. Are you in favour of removing the present disabilities of Monkeys?
2. Are you in favour of a short Statute which should put adult Monkeys
upon the same footing as other subjects of His Majesty as from the 1st of
January, 1912? And _would you, if necessary, vote against your party in
favour of such a measure?_
3. Are you in favour of the inclusion of Monkeys under the Wild Birds Act?
(A plain reply "Yes" or "No" was to be written by the candidate under each
of these questions and forwarded to the Secretary, Mr. Consul, 73 Purbeck
Street, W.. before the 14th January, 1910. No replies received after
that date were admitted. The Simian League, which has agents in every
constituency, acted according to the replies received, and treated
the lack of reply as a negative. Of 1375 circulars sent, 309 remained
unanswered, 264 were answered in the negative, 201 gave a qualified
affirmative, _all the rest (no less than 799) a clear and, in some
cases, an enthusiastic adherence to our principles_. It is a sufficient
proof of the power of the League and the growth of the cause of justice
that in these 799 no less than 515 are members of the present House of
Commons.)
THE EMPIRE BUILDER
We possess in this country a breed of men in whom we feel a pride so
loyal, so strong, and so frank that were I to give further expression to
it here I should justly be accused of insisting upon a hackneyed theme.
These are the Empire Builders, the Men Efficient, the agents whom we
cannot but feel--however reluctantly we admit it--to be less strictly
bound by the common laws of life than are we lesser ones.
But there is something about these men not hackneyed as a theme, which is
their youth. By what process is the great mind developed? Of what sort is
the Empire Builder when he is young?
The fellow commonly rises from below: What was his experience there below?
In what school was he trained? What accident of fortune, how met, or how
surmounted, or how used, produced at last the Man who Can? In _that_
inquiry there is food for very deep reflection. It is here that our
Masters, whose general motives are so open and so plain, touch upon
mystery. That secret power of determining nourishment which is at the base
of all organic life has in its own silent way built up the boyhood and the
adolescence which we only know in their maturity.
I will not pretend to a full knowledge of that strange education of the
mind which has produced so many similar men for the advancement of the
race, but I can point to one example which lately came straight across my
vision--an accident, an illumination, a revealing flash of how our time
breeds the Great Type. I was acquainted for some hours with the actions of
a youth of whose very name I am ignorant, but whose face I am very certain
will reappear twenty years hence in a setting of glory, recognized as yet
one other of those superb spirits who will do all for England.
The occasion was a pageant--no matter what pageant--a great public pageant
which passed through the Strand, and was to be witnessed by hundreds of
thousands. Let us call it "The Function."
Well, I was walking down the Strand three days before this Function was
to take place, when I saw in an empty shop window about twenty-five
wooden chairs, arranged in tiers one above the other upon a sloping
platform, and lettered from A to Y. In the window was a large notice,
very clearly printed, and it was to this effect:
WHY PAY FANCY PRICES WHICH MUST INEVITABLY FALL BEFORE THE FUNCTION?
SEATS IN THIS WINDOW, COMMANDING A FULL VIEW OF THE PROCESSION, 5S.
At a little desk in the gangway by which the chairs were approached sat
a dark, pale child--I can call him by no other name, so frail and young
did he seem--and the delicacy of his complexion led me to wonder perhaps
whether he was not one of those whom the climate of England strikes with
consumption, and who, in the mysterious providence of our race, wander
abroad in search of health and find a Realm. His alertness, however, and
the brilliance of his eye; his winning, almost obsequious address, and the
hooked clutch of his gestures betrayed an energy that no physical weakness
could conquer. He invited me to enter, and begged me to purchase a seat.
I had no need of one, for I had made arrangements to spend the Great
Day itself and the next at a small hotel in the extreme north of
Sutherlandshire, but I was arrested by the evident mental power of my new
acquaintance, and I wasted five shillings in buying the chair marked D.
It was with some difficulty that I could purchase it, so eager was he that
I should have the best place; "seeing," said he, "that they are all one
price, and that you may as well benefit by being an early bird." I noted
the strict rectitude which, for all that men ignorant of modern commerce
may say, is at the basis of commercial success.
Something so attracted me
in the whole business that I was weak enough to take a chair in a tea-shop
opposite and watch all day the actions of the Child of Fate.
In less than an hour twenty different people, mainly gentlefolk, had come
in and bought places at the sensible price at which he offered them. To
each of them he gave a ticket corresponding to the number of the chair. He
was courteous to all, and even expansive. He explained the advantage of
each particular seat.
So far so good; but, what was more astonishing, in the second hour another
twenty came and appeared to purchase; in the third (which was the busiest
time of the day) some forty, first and last, must have done business with
the Favourite of Fortune. I pondered upon these things very deeply, and
went home.
Next morning the attraction which the place had for me drew me as with
a magnet, and I went, somewhat stealthily I fear, to the same tea-shop
and noticed with the greatest astonishment that the chairs were now not
lettered, but numbered, and that the boy was sitting at his little desk
with a series of white cards bearing the figures from one to twenty-five.
It was very early--not ten o'clock--but the Child was as spruce and neat
as he had been in the afternoon of the day before. He bore already that
mark of energy combined with neatness which is the stamp of success.
I crossed the road and entered. He recognized me at once (their memory for
faces is wonderful), and said cheerfully:
"Your D corresponds to the number 4."
I thanked him very much, and asked him why he had changed his system of
notation. He told me it was because several people had explained to him
that they remembered figures more easily than letters. We then talked to
each other, agreeing upon the maxims of simplicity and directness which
are at the root of all mercantile stability. He told me he required
cash from all who bought his chairs; that there was no agreement, no
insurance--no "frills," as he wittily called them.
"It is as simple," he said, "as buying a pound of tea. I am satisfied, and
they are satisfied. As for the risk, it is covered by the low price, and
if you ask me how I can let them at so low a price, I will tell you. It is
because I have found exactly what was needed and have added nothing more.
Moreover, I did not buy the chairs, but hired them."
I went back to my tea-shop with head bent, murmuring to myself those
memorable lines:
We founded many a mighty State,
Pray God that we may never fail
From craven fears of being great
(or words to that effect).
That day no less than 153 people did business with the Youth.
Next day I found among my morning letters a note from a politician of my
acquaintance, telling me that the Function was postponed--indefinitely.
I wasted not a moment. I went at once to my post of observation, my
tea-shop, and I proceeded to watch the Leader.
There was as yet no knowledge of the calamity in London.
My friend seemed to have noticed me; at any rate a new and somewhat
anxious look was apparent on his face. With a firm and decided step I
crossed the road to greet him, and when he saw me he was all at his ease.
He told me that my seat had been especially asked for, and that a higher
price had been offered; but a bargain, he said, was a bargain, and so we
fell to chatting. When I mentioned, among other subjects, the very great
success of his enterprise, he gave a slight start, which did honour to his
heart; but he was of too stern a mould to give way. He was of the temper
of the Pioneers.