A LESSON IN WORLD-REFORM.
When I returned in the evening, I found Priscilla in high spirits, more
radiant and fascinating than ever. Her company were slowly assembling in
her luxuriously, and even elegantly furnished rooms. Among the earlier
arrivals were my friend, Mr. Winslow, and strange enough, my Puritan
acquaintance, Mr. Cotton, who had recently become a resident of
Philadelphia, and pastor of a Presbyterian church in that city. Others
were announced, some whom I knew, but more whom I knew not. The majority
were from the middle and upper classes, although all classes of society
had their male or female representatives. The principle on which they
came together was universal philanthropy, and whoever was a
philanthropist, and had an idea, or the smallest fraction of an idea,
had the _entrée_, unless he had African blood in his veins. All were of
course abolitionists, or friends of the blacks, and therefore excluded
studiously the negroes from their social gatherings. Generally speaking,
all professed universal democracy, and hence were very exclusive in
their feelings, and aristocratic in their tone and bearing; that is, so
far as aristocracy consists in a consciousness, not of one’s own worth,
but of the worthlessness of his brother. The company was too large to
have only one centre, and gradually separated into groups according to
their special tastes and tendencies. In the centre of each group was
some male or female reformer, distinguished from the rest by superior
knowledge, volubility, or impudence, and regarded as the oracle of his
or her own set, for however loud people’s profession of democratic
equality, nature will show itself, and every set of them will have its
chief, honored as my Lord or my Lady.
Mr. Winslow had been dismissed from his parish, and having no other
means of getting his living, he had followed the example of Mr. Sowerby,
and devoted himself to lecturing and experimenting on mesmerism. He was
urging upon Priscilla the importance of forming mesmeric circles in all
the cities, towns, and villages, of the Union. The first thing to be
done was to organize a philanthropic Ladies’ Aid Society, for the
purpose of supporting a mesmeric travelling agent or missionary, whose
business should be to form these circles or associations, instruct some
member of each in the art of mesmerizing, and serve as their common
centre and bond of union. If no one more worthy were found he would
himself consent to accept, for a moderate salary, such agency, or to be
such missionary. These circles formed, and affiliated, visibly and
invisibly to each other, would become a powerful body, and exert a moral
influence which both the church and the state, politicians and
clergymen, would be obliged to respect. In this way he was sure all the
elementary forces of nature herself could be brought to bear on the
great and glorious work of world-reform.
Mr. Edgerton, a New England Transcendentalist, a thin, spare man, with a
large nose, and a cast of Yankee shrewdness in his not unhandsome face,
was not favorable to this plan. “I dislike,” he said, “associations.
They absorb the individual, and establish social despotism. All set
plans of world-reform are bad. Every one must have a theory, a plan, a
Morrison’s pill. No one trusts to nature. None are satisfied with wild
flowers or native forests. All seek an artificial garden. They will not
hear the robin sing unless it is shut up in a cage. The rich undress of
nature is an offence, and she must be decked out in the latest fashion
of Paris or London, and copy the grimaces of a French dancing-master, or
lisp like an Andalusian beauty, before they will open their hearts to
her magic power. Say to all this, Get behind me, Satan. Dare assert
yourselves; plant yourselves on your imperishable instincts; sing your
own song of joy, your own wail of grief; speak your own word; tell what
your own soul seeth, and leave the effect to take care of itself. Eschew
the crowd, eschew self-consciousness, form no plan, propose no end, seek
no moral, but speak out from your own heart; build as builds the bee her
cell, sing as sings the bird, the grasshopper, or the cricket.”
“So,” said Mr. Merton, a young man, with a fine classic head and face,
who seemed to have been drawn hither by mere curiosity, “so you think
the nearer men approach to birds and insects the better it will be for
the world.”
“I never dispute,” replied Mr. Edgerton. “I utter the word given me to
utter, and leave it as the ostrich leaveth her eggs. Men should be
seers, not philosophers; prophets, not reasoners. I never offer proof of
what I say. I could not prove it, if asked. If it is true, genuine, the
fit word, opportunely spoken, it will prove itself. If it approves not
itself to you, it is not for you. You are not prepared to receive it. It
is not true for you. Be it so. It is true for me, and for those like me.
Fash not yourself about it, but leave us to enjoy it in peace.”
“But are we to understand,” replied Mr. Merton, “that truth varies as
vary individual minds?”
“Sir, you will excuse me. I am no logician, and eschew dialectics. Truth
is one, it is the Whole, the All, the universal Being. It is a reality
in, under, and over all, manifesting itself under an infinite variety of
aspects. Every one beholds it under some one of its aspects, no one
beholds it under all. Each mind in that it is real, is itself, is a
manifestation of it, but no one is it in its integrity and universality,
any more than the bubble on its surface is the whole ocean. Under each
particular bubble lies, however, the whole ocean, and if it will speak
not from its diversity, its bubbleosity, in which sense it is only an
apparition, an appearance, a show, an unreality, but from what is real
in it, from its real substantial self, it may truly call itself the
whole ocean. So, under each individual mind lies all truth, all reality,
all being; and hence, in so far as they are real, all minds are one and
the same. Men are weak, are puny, differ from one another because they
seek to live in their diversity, and to find their truth, their reality,
in their individuality. Let them eschew their individuality, which is to
their reality, their real self, only what the bubbleosity of the bubble
is to the ocean, and fall back on their identity, on the universal truth
which underlies them. If they will be men, real men, not make-believes,
strong men, thinking men, let them be themselves, sink back into their
underlying reality, on the One Man, and suffer the universal Over-Soul
to flow into them, and speak through them without let or impediment.”
“We must,” said another Transcendentalist, sometimes called the American
Orpheus, “return to the simplicity of childhood. ‘Except ye be converted
and become as a little child, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom
of heaven.’ The man who thinks, Rousseau has well said, is already a
depraved animal. All learning is a forgetting; science and wisdom are
gathered from babes and sucklings. We are not prepared as yet to talk of
world-reform. We must _be_ before we can _do_; be men before we can do
men’s work. All _being_ is in _doing_; rather all _doing_ is in _being_.
Ideas are the essences, the realities of things. Seek ideas. They will
take to themselves hands, build them a temple, and instaurate their
worship. Seek not ideas from books; they are lies. Seek them not of the
learned and grey-haired; they have lost them. Be docile and childlike;
seat yourself by the cradle, at the feet of awful childhood, and look
into babies’ eyes.”
“What we want to cure the evils of society,” broke in Mr. Kerrison,—a
tinker, I believe,—a small man in a snuff-colored frock coat, with sharp
grey eyes, lank cheeks, a short nose, a pointed chin, and squeaking
voice, “is a Children’s Protection Society; a society that shall protect
children from the indelicacy, the cruelty, and inhumanity of their
brutal parents. There is nothing more shocking to our finer
sensibilities, or more outrageous to true philanthropy, than to see a
full-grown woman, tall and stout, with a red face, fiery eyes, and a
harsh voice,—or a full-grown man, yet taller and stouter, stern and
awful in his look, terrible in his anger tones,—seize a poor helpless
little boy or girl,—yes, or girl,—not more than three or four years old
it may be, and taking him or her across the knee, strike on the very
seat of her or him, blow after blow, till the poor little thing screams
with pain and agony. It is indelicate, cruel, barbarous. How would the
father or mother like to be treated in the same way? It blunts the
delicate sensibility of the child, sours his temper, hardens his heart,
develops and strengthens all his harsh and angry feelings, and prepares
him to be, when he grows up, as bad as was his father or his mother.”
“Our friend,” added Mr. Silliman, an amiable young minister, a
Unitarian, I believe, or, as he said, a Preacher of the religion of
Humanity, “has, I think, gone to the root of the matter. The evils of
individuals and of society have their origin in the harsh, cruel,
unfeeling, and indelicate manner in which parents bring up their
children. Children should never be restrained, should never be crossed;
they should always be caressed by the soft, delicate hand of love, be
surrounded by sweet and smiling faces, by lovely and attractive images,
live in communion with fresh and fragrant nature, and find life all one
fairy day.”
“Young America,” interposed Mr. Merton, “will thank you both, I have no
doubt. The abolition of corporal chastisement will meet the decided
approval of our little folks, and perhaps of our patriots. It is
questionable whether this flogging of children is not an infringement
upon equal rights. I do not see what the father in my town, universal
democrat as he was, had to reply to the question put to him the other
day by Young America. A little rascal, some ten or twelve years old, had
done some mischief, for which his father flogged him. Young America bore
it with heroic fortitude, as if the honor of his country and of the race
was at stake in his person, and when it was over, with the calm and
dignified air of a man and a freeman, folded his arms across his breast,
looked up to his father, and asked,—‘Father, is not this a free
country?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘By what right, then, do you flog me?’”
“Parents,” said a cross-grained old maid, “are wholly incapable of
bringing up their children. They have no judgment, no steadiness; at one
moment whipping them without rhyme or reason, and the next soothing them
with candy, and smothering them with caresses. They impart to them their
own tempers, passions, weaknesses, and prejudices. There should be
established infant schools at the public expense, where all the
children, as soon as twelve months old, should be placed, and brought up
by proper persons trained and prepared in normal schools for that
purpose.”
“You will have to go farther back than that, my good woman,” said Mr.
Long, an English gentleman just arrived in the country and announced as
the Prophet of the Newness. “Children are born with an inclination to
evil, and are hardly born before they manifest vicious tempers and a
fondness for doing precisely what they ought not to do. If suffered to
have their own way, they would never live to grow up. They must, as they
are now born, be restrained and even whipped, for their own good. Here
the sins of the parents are visited upon the children. We must begin
with the parents. We live in a depraved state, and children inherit
vitiated moral and physical constitutions from their fathers and
mothers. We must look to this fact, and sternly prohibit all persons of
obviously vitiated moral or physical constitutions from begetting or
bearing children. After that we must turn our attention to improving the
breed, as our English farmers have done in the case of their horses,
oxen, cows, sheep, swine, dogs, and hens.”
“That may be rather difficult to manage in a free country,” said Dr.
Muzzleton, a professor of Surgery in a Western medical college, “and can
hardly be tried, except by the master with his negroes on our Southern
plantations. The hopes of philanthropists must rest on something more
practical, and less difficult to be accomplished. The philanthropist’s
dependence is on dietetic reform. The vitiated moral and physical
constitution of parents, and which they impart to their children, comes
unquestionably from the use of animal food. It is necessary, therefore,
to abolish the use of animal food, and have people feed only on a
vegetable diet. Nature shows this in the very construction of the human
teeth, which are very different from those of the lion, the tiger, and
other carniverous animals. Carnivorous animals have no grinders, and
their teeth are fitted only for tearing. Man has incisors and molars,
which shows that he was intended to cut and grind his food.”
“But which serve him very well, since he does not usually eat flesh raw,
but cooks it,” remarked Mr. Merton. “But the antediluvians eat no flesh.
They lived on a vegetable diet, were vegetarians, and yet they became so
corrupt that the Almighty sent a flood and destroyed them all, with the
exception of eight persons.”
“Where do you learn that?” asked Dr. Muzzleton.
“From the Bible and tradition,” replied Mr. Merton.
All stared, and many broke out into a loud laugh, at the joke of citing
the Bible and tradition as authority in an assembly of philanthropists
and reformers. Dr. Muzzleton looked round with great blandness, and said
to Mr. Merton, “You see, my young friend, the majority is against you. I
respect the Bible in matters pertaining to another world, but I am
speaking now as a man of science, not as a theologian. I leave theology
to the clergy,” bowing on his right to Mr. Cotton, and on his left to
Mr. Winslow.
“I respect the Bible in theology no more than I do in science,” said
Miss Rose Winter, a strong-minded woman, and a decided reformer, of
Jewish descent. “The first thing for all reformers to do is to destroy
the authority of the Bible and emancipate the Christian world from its
morality. It is the great supporter of all abuses, and it and the church
are almost our only obstacles to overcome. It sanctions the use of wine
and animal food, slavery and the restitution of the fugitive slave, war
and capital punishment. It asserts the divine right of government, and
forbids resistance to power. It is the fountain of superstition, and the
grand bulwark of priestcraft. It calls woman the weaker vessel, forbids
her to speak in meeting, and commands her to be in subjection to her
husband. We are fools and madmen to talk of our reforms as long as we
regard the Bible as any thing more than a last year’s almanac.”
“In that I think you are right, my dear lady,” said Mr. Cotton, dryly.
“I esteem the Bible a good book,” said Mr. Winslow. “It contains more
genuine and sublime poetry than any other book I am acquainted with, not
even excepting Homer. But I do not accept its plenary inspiration, and I
feel bound to believe only the truths I find in it.”
“And these,” remarked Mr. Merton, “I suppose are only what happens to
accord with your own opinions for the time being.”
“The Bible,” interposed Priscilla, “is a genuine book, and faithfully
records the real experience of prophets and seers of old times, and is
of no value to us save as interpreted by the facts of each one’s own
inner life. Much of it is local, temporary, colored by the nation and
age that produced it, and is no longer of any significance for us; but
what there is in it universal, that is the genuine utterance of
universal nature, and true for all persons, times, and places, should be
accepted, as we accept every genuine word, by whomsoever uttered.”
Mr. Merton shrugged his shoulders and said nothing; Mr. Cotton looked
black, was scandalized, and muttered, “Rank infidelity.” “And what
else,” said a very gentlemanly young man, who had been talking nonsense
for an hour to a bevy of young ladies in a corner of the room, and
apparently indifferent to the great matters under discussion, “and what
else did his reverence expect in a company of reformers? Yet we are not
really infidels. We have only thrown off the mask, and ceased to be
hypocrites. Whatever man’s profession, ever since it was said, ‘It is
not good for man to be alone,’ and Eve was brought blushing to his
bower, woman has been the real shrine at which he has worshipped. This
is our ancestral religion, and true to the religion of my fathers, I
make woman my Divinity, and lay my offering at Leila’s feet.”
“Do not believe him,” said a saucy young thing, with a sparkling eye and
pouting lips. “He worships only himself. Here I have been this half hour
trying to convince him that there is something mystic in woman, and that
science and religion, as now organized, are false and mischievous,
because they are the product of man’s genius alone. I have said all the
flattering things I could to make him take up the cause of Woman’s
Rights, and he has only laughed at me.”
“You wrong me, fair and adorable Leila; woman reigns supreme now, and we
are slaves; what more can she ask?”
“She should be elevated to be the equal of man,” said Leila.
“Lowered, my Leila would say,” replied the young gentleman.
“And placed in the possession of the same political franchises, have the
right to vote at all elections, and be declared eligible to any and
every office political, civil, or military,” continued Leila, without
heeding the interruption.
“But that,” said Mr. Merton, “would be hardly fair to us men, and would
moreover be dangerous to republican liberty. Mademoiselle Leila would of
course be a candidate for the Assembly. All the young men would vote for
her, because they would secure her good graces, and all the old men
would do the same, in order to prove that they are not old, and have not
yet lost their sensibility to female loveliness and worth; she would be
elected unanimously. In the Assembly she would rise to propose some
measure, throw aside her veil, beam forth upon us with all her charms,
and for the same reasons all would support her. She would reign as a
despot, which, as a republican, I must protest against.”
“She might have rivals; all men do not see with the same eyes,” sagely
remarked a venerable spinster, with a dried and withered form and face,
puckering up her mouth, and endeavoring to look killing.”
“That is well thought of,” said Mr. Merton.
“Besides,” added Mr. Winslow, “the votes of the women would be as
numerous as those of the men, and might be thrown for a candidate of the
other sex.”
“And you may trust to the women themselves to see that no one of their
own sex has a monopoly of power,” added, caustically, Mr. Cotton.
“You are hard upon us women,” pleaded Priscilla. “Women have their
weaknesses as well as men theirs, but they can love and admire beauty in
their own sex, as much as they do ugliness in men. I do not suppose that
placing them on an equality in all respects with men will increase their
power as women, but it will increase their power as reasonable human
beings. I think woman would lose much of her peculiar power as woman
over man, and this I should by no means regret. I would break down the
tyranny of sex as I would that of caste or class. I would have men and
women so trained, that they could meet, converse, or act together as
simple human beings, without ever recurring, even in thought, to the
difference of sex.”
“That,” said the young worshipper of woman, “would be cruel. It would be
like spreading a pall over the sun, or extinguishing the lamp of life.
Even the garden of Eden
—— was a wild,
And man the hermit sighed, till woman smil’d.”
“As long as I remember my mother or my sister,” said Mr. Merton, “I
would never meet a woman, however high or however humble, without taking
note of the fact that she is a woman.”
“Things are best as God made them,” added Mr. Cotton. “Men and women
have each their peculiar character and sphere. Women would gain nothing
by exchanging the petticoat for the breeches, or men by exchanging the
breeches for the petticoat.”
“But I wish,” said Leila, poutingly, “to be treated as a reasonable
being, and that the young gentlemen who do me the honor to address me
would treat me as if I had common sense. I do not want compliments paid
to my hands and feet, my face, lips, nose, eyes, and eyebrows.”
“And yet,” said I, “my sweet Leila, they are well worth complimenting.”
She smiled, and seemed not displeased.
“I suspect,” remarked Mr. Cotton, with his Puritan slyness, “that the
young lady finds the affluence of such compliments more endurable than
she would their absence.”
“I do not deal much in compliments,” said Mr. Merton, “but I do not much
fancy persons who are always wise, and never open their mouths without
giving utterance to some grave maxim for the conduct of life. There is a
time to be silly as well as a time to be wise. Life is made up of little
things, and he is a sad moralist who has no leniency for trifles. I love
myself to look upon a pretty face, and find no great objection to those
pleasant nothings which are the current coin of well-bred conversation
between the sexes. Even a gallant speech, a happily-turned compliment,
when it brings no blush to the cheek of modesty, is quite endurable.”
“I thought you were a parson, Mr. Merton,” said Priscilla, “and am
surprised to find you so tolerant of what it is said your cloth
generally condemns.”
“The fair Priscilla may have mistaken my cloth. I am a man, and I hope a
gentleman. I love society, and find an exquisite charm in the social
intercourse of cultivated men and women. That charm would vanish were
they to meet and converse, not as men and women, gentlemen and ladies,
but as simple human beings. Could you carry out your doctrine, your sex
would, I fear, be the first to suffer from it.”
“Perhaps they would,” said Priscilla; “but it is woman’s lot to suffer,
and she was born to redeem the race by her private sorrows. She will not
shrink from the sacrifice. You need her at the polls, in the legislative
halls, in the executive chair, on the judge’s bench, as well as in the
saloon, to give purity and elevation to your affections,
disinterestedness and courage to your conduct.”
“Rather let her be present to infuse noble qualities into our hearts in
childhood, and to cherish and invigorate them in our manhood,” added Mr.
Merton. “Let her mission be by a sweet, quiet, and gentle influence to
form us from our infancy for lofty and heroic deeds, and let it be ours
to do them.”
“I do not like this discussion at all,” broke in Thomas Jefferson Andrew
Jackson Hobbs, a thorough-going radical, with an unshaved and unwashen
face, long, lank, uncombed hair, and a gray, patched frock coat, leather
pantaloons, a red waistcoat, and a red bandanna handkerchief tied round
his neck for a cravat. “The world can never be reformed by the
instrumentality of government, whether in the hands of man or woman. The
curse of the world is that it has been governed too much. That is the
best government that governs least, and a better is that which governs
none at all. We want no government, least of all a government made up of
female politicians and intriguers. There never yet was a great crime or
a great iniquity, but a woman had a hand in it. The devil, when he would
ruin mankind, always begins by seducing woman, and making her his
accomplice. We must get rid of all government, break down church and
state, sweep away religion and politics, and exterminate all priests and
politicians, whether in pantaloons or petticoats, in broadcloth or
homespun, and bring back that state of things which was in Judea, ‘when
there was no king in Israel, and every man did what was right in his own
eyes.’”
“Boldly said,” remarked Signor Giovanni Urbini, a leader of young Italy,
“but it is hardly wise. The people are not yet, especially in my
country, prepared for it. They have so long been the slaves of power,
and the tools of superstition, that they would be shocked at its bare
announcement. They must have their Madonnas, their San Carlos, their San
Felippos, and their capucin frati. But a thoroughgoing democratic
revolution is no doubt needed, and such a revolution will necessarily
result in a no less thorough and radical revolution in religion; but
this last we had better leave to come of itself. You cannot work with
purely negative ideas. You must have something positive, and that must
be the positive idea of the age. Kings, princes, nobles, priests,
religions in our times are at a discount, and the secret, silent, but
irresistible tendency is to bring up the people. Assert, then, boldly
everywhere people-king, people-pontiff, people-god. Fling out to the
breeze the virgin banner of the people. Go forth to war in the name of
the people, in the inspiration of the people, and always and everywhere
shout THE PEOPLE, THE PEOPLE. Break the fetters which now bind the
people, emancipate them from their present masters, assert their
supremacy, and establish their power, which of course in the last
analysis will be our power over them. They will then re-organize
society, religion, and politics, and every thing else, after the best
model, and in the way which will best meet our wishes.”
“I am decidedly opposed to my friend Urbini’s doctrine,” frankly
asserted M. Beaubien, from the sunny south of France, “I want no
king-people, and if I must be tyrannized over, I prefer it should be by
one man rather than the many-headed and capricious multitude. The evils
under which society groans is individualism, which now exerts itself in
universal competition, so highly prized by your foolish and stupid
political economists. These evils can be removed by no political or
religious revolution, neither by your Luthers nor your Robespierres.
They can be removed only by the pacific organization of labor, and the
arrangement of laborers in groups and series according to their special
tastes and capacities, on the newly-discovered principle that
‘attractions are proportional to destiny.’”
“A better plan,” suggested M. Icarie, also from la belle France, “is to
abolish all private property, all private households, industry, and
economy, and have the whole community supported, lodged, fed, clothed,
feasted or nursed, and transported from place to place, from house to
house, at the public expense.”
“Admirable,” interposed Mr. Cotton, “but who will support the public,
and whence will the public draw its funds?”
“Singular questions,” replied M. Icarie. “The public will support
itself, and draw the necessary funds from the public treasury, as a
matter of course.”
“And where does the treasury get them?” asked, with a sneer, M. Le
Prohne, a native of the ancient Dauphiny, who towered head and shoulders
above all the rest. “All your schemes are idle and absurd; property is
robbery; abolish it, and all distinction between _thine_ and _mine_, and
establish a grand People’s Bank, and give each one an equal credit on
its books.”
“And who,” sarcastically remarked M. Icarie, “will take care of the
Bank, and be responsible for its managers, or see that the drafts of
individuals are duly honored?”
“Why not,” I asked in my enthusiasm, “make an equal division of property
among all the members of the community?”
“That would do very well for a start,” suggested Mr. Cotton, “but he was
afraid that come Saturday night, a good many would demand, like the
sailor, that the property be divided again, as they no longer retained
their proportion.”
This produced a smile, and as it was late, the company broke up and
departed. Those who had had an opportunity of bringing forward their
views were very much edified; others who had been obliged to listen, or
to keep back their own projects, thought the party exceedingly dull, and
could not help thinking that the evening had been spent very
unprofitably.
There were, indeed, persons there with plans of reform as wise, as deep,
and as practicable as those I have taken notice of, and I owe an apology
to their authors for my omissions. These omissions are the result of no
ill feeling, and of no intentional neglect; and I certainly would repair
them, but as I am pressed for time, and am not writing a history of
reformers and projected reforms in a thousand volumes in-folio, the
thing is absolutely out of the question. Let it suffice for me to say,
that I have by me still some thousand and one of these projects, all of
which their authors did me the honor to send me, with their respects,
and all of which I examined with all the care and diligence they
deserved.
I returned to my lodgings, not so much enlightened or edified by what I
had heard as I might have desired, though not much disappointed or
discouraged. No plan had been suggested that was not unsatisfactory,
and, taken in itself alone, that was not obviously either mischievous or
absurd. But under them all I saw one and the same spirit, the spirit of
the age, and all were striking indications of a great and powerful
movement in the direction of something different from what is now the
established order. No one of them would be realized, but it was well to
encourage this movement, to join with this free and powerful spirit.
Something, as Mr. Micawber was wont to say, “might turn up,” and out of
the seeming darkness light might at length shine, and out of the
apparent chaos order might finally spring forth. I would lend myself to
the spirit working, and trust to future developments. With that I
undressed, went to bed, and dreamed of Leila, no, Priscilla; no, yes,—it
was Priscilla. I was the victorious champion of reform. She was binding
my brow with the crown of laurel, when I awoke, and was sad that it was
only a dream.