Of Liars and Lying—Woman Suffrage and Feminism—The Professional
Female—Parties, Politics, and Politicians in America
I
All is fair in love and war, the saying hath it. “Lord!” cried the most
delightful of liars, “How this world is given to lying.” Yea, and how
exigency quickens invention and promotes deceit.
Just after the war of sections I was riding in a train with Samuel
Bowles, who took a great interest in things Southern. He had been
impressed by a newspaper known as The Chattanooga Rebel and, as I had
been its editor, put innumerable questions to me about it and its
affairs. Among these he asked how great had been its circulation.
Without explaining that often an entire company, in some cases an
entire regiment, subscribed for a few copies, or a single copy, I
answered: “I don’t know precisely, but somewhere near a hundred
thousand, I take it.” Then he said: “Where did you get your press
power?”
This was, of course, a poser, but it did not embarrass me in the least.
I was committed, and without a moment’s thought I proceeded with an
imaginary explanation which he afterward declared had been altogether
satisfying. The story was too good to keep—maybe conscience pricked—and
in a chummy talk later along I laughingly confessed.
“You should tell that in your dinner speech tonight,” he said. “If you
tell it as you have just told it to me, it will make a hit,” and I did.
I give it as the opinion of a long life of experience and observation
that the newspaper press, whatever its delinquencies, is not a common
liar, but the most habitual of truth tellers. It is growing on its
editorial page I fear a little vapid and colorless. But there is a
general and ever-present purpose to print the facts and give the public
the opportunity to reach its own conclusions.
There are liars and liars, lying and lying. It is, with a single
exception, the most universal and venial of human frailties. We have at
least three kinds of lying and species, or types, of liars—first, the
common, ordinary, everyday liar, who lies without rime or reason, rule
or compass, aim, intent or interest, in whose mind the partition
between truth and falsehood has fallen down; then the sensational,
imaginative liar, who has a tale to tell; and, finally, the mean,
malicious liar, who would injure his neighbor.
This last is, indeed, but rare. Human nature is at its base amicable,
because if nothing hinders it wants to please. All of us, however, are
more or less its unconscious victims.
Competition is not alone the life of trade; it is the life of life; for
each of us is in one way, or another, competitive. There is but one
disinterested person in the world, the mother who whether of the human
or animal kingdom, will die for her young. Yet, after all, hers, too,
is a kind of selfishness.
The woman is becoming over much a professional female. It is of
importance that we begin to consider her as a new species, having
enjoyed her beauty long enough. Is the world on the way to organic
revolution? If I were a young man I should not care to be the lover of
a professional female. As an old man I have affectionate relations with
a number of suffragettes, as they dare not deny; that is to say, I long
ago accepted woman suffrage as inevitable, whether for good or evil,
depending upon whether the woman’s movement is going to stop with
suffrage or run into feminism, changing the character of woman and her
relations to men and with man.