We all have our moments of imagining ourselves INDEPENDENT
characters. We take pride in our independence and are never as
foolish as when trying to prove how independent we are.
Every man, to begin with, is born absolutely at the mercy of his
ancestry. You have not a thing in you, and you never will have a
thing in you, that you did not inherit from some one of the
thousands and thousands of ancestors, all of whom are dimly
stored away in your complex make-up.
You may develop marvellously the faculties which they gave you.
But you ARE DEPENDENT on those who brought you into the world,
and upon those back of them.
The Kaffir, sober, industrious, honest, with all the virtues
rolled up within him, has not a fragment of one chance in ten
thousand billions of equalling the achievements of a tenth-rate
white man whose ancestral start was better. ----
After birth you start with dependence on your ancestors, and
after youth you are dependent on your education.
Facts are your tools, and you can't work without them.
If your mind has the right formation, if your brain is provided
with the deep convolutions, and good luck has supplied you with a
good education in youth, the whole thing is dependent on your
health--on your liver, your stomach, or some other part of your
internal machinery.
Very often your success is dependent on your temper and tact.
These depend on your digestion. Digestion, of course, depends on
your cook, and the cook's attention to business may depend on the
politeness of the policeman in front of the house.
You may FEEL absolutely independent and THINK you are
independent, when as a matter of fact you are miserably dependent
on the mood of the policeman who has snubbed the lady who cooks
your food.
WHEN WE BEGIN USING LAND UNDER THE OCEANS
BIG WORK AHEAD FOR MAN, KIND FRIENDS
There is a great deal of water on this earth of ours and a great
deal of land underneath it.
All the treasures of these hidden plains are simply put away for
our future use by bountiful nature, as prudent parents put money
in the savings bank for their young ones. ----
Already in Chili they are mining coal under the bed of the
Pacific Ocean, and the traveler may ride on electric cars through
solid tunnels of coal beneath the waters of the greatest ocean.
The tin mines in Wales extend far out beneath the sea.
Workers in the Calumet and Hecla mines work beneath the waters of
Lake Superior.
Oil wells are worked out beyond the edge of the Pacific Ocean.
You may see the oil derricks just off Santa Barbara's surf.
In the bay of San Francisco artesian wells, going through the
preliminary depths of salt water, bring the water of fresh
submarine springs to the surface.
But these little enterprises are but faint beginnings of the
great work that man has to do in exploiting the wealth beneath
the waters covering two-thirds of the earth's surface.
This earth will be quite a romantic abode when sub-oceanic
exploitation reaches full development, when the great gold mines
beneath the waters are indicated simply by latitude and
longitude.
Mars, with his huge canals distributing a planet's waters
scientifically, will be matched perhaps by our network of tunnels
under the water from here to Asia, and by our boring, with the
aid of cooling mediums, toward the earth's centre and bringing up
metals in a molten state.
Before he finishes with her, man will make old earth know that he
is at work "in her midst." He will make the harnessing of a tiny
Niagara or the boring of a poor little isthmus seem feeble
efforts.
WHERE YOUR BODY CAME FROM
LET IT BE SCATTERED AS IT WAS GATHERED
Did you ever think about the construction of the body which you
inhabit? Did it ever occur to you that your shoulders and hands
and chest and legs and lungs are made of contributions from
widely different parts of the earth?
Your brain, a wonderfully complex machine, the seat of thought
and of the will, is packed away in darkness in the bony skull.
The heart, working ceaselessly, pumps the blood that feeds the
brain and makes possible its work.
The eyes, with the aid of the nerves that perceive light, guide
you. The ears, with the nerves that interpret sound waves, tell
their story.
Like a central operator with a million wires leading to him, your
INDIVIDUALITY, a wonderful mystery without form, matter or name,
sits in your brain guiding the body. ----
Where did the body come from?
Part of it came from potatoes grown on Long Island, and part of
it from spices grown in Ceylon.
In your nerves there is the extract of tea leaves gathered by a
Chinese girl on the other side of the world. Your blood is
purified and made red by the wind that blew across the Rocky
Mountains only a few hours ago. That current of oxygen has
helped build up your strength.
A month ago an ox was eating grass in Texas.
Many millions of years ago the pollen of huge fern trees was
falling to the earth in the carboniferous era and making coal.
To-day, part of the backbone of the ox from Texas with the meat
attached is laid on the fire of coal made by those fern trees,
and the Texas ox and the fern pollen combined help to build up
your body.
That same body is three-quarters water, and of that water part
was once the Pacific Ocean; part, perhaps, was drunk up by a
whale before it reached you; and part floated in clouds over the
Southern Sea. ----
Your imagination can carry the picture as far as it will--to the
fisherman catching your sardines in the North, and the dark man
gathering your oranges in the South or your dates in some oasis.
We want to suggest this idea to you.
Since the body is gathered from all parts of the world, from all
corners of our little speck of the material universe, should it
not be scattered, at death, as it was gathered during life?
Is not the destruction of the body by fire far better than
hideous burial in the earth?
The body that fire destroys goes back to nature, instantly
reduced to its original elements. Is not such disposition of the
body more in accord with nature's laws and with respect for the
dead than our present custom?
Would it not be pleasanter to think that one we cared for had
gone back to the air, with only a handful of ashes remaining,
than to think of the dark, close, lonesome grave far below the
sunlight, clogging and uselessly occupying part of the earth,
which should be devoted to growth and cheerfulness?
HOW MARRIAGE BEGAN
HAPHAZARD REFLECTIONS ON GRAVE TOPICS.
At stated times we mortals have stated visitations.
One day it is the grippe, next day the financial problem.
Just now it is the marriage and divorce question, with much
learned expounding by the good and the pure, such as bishops and
members of Sorosis. ----
What is marriage? How did it begin? Whence does it come?
Why is it a feature of human life wherever that life is found.
You must begin with such questions. Always study beginnings.
Nothing can be learned by taking hold of a thing in the middle
and examining its imperfections.
The first priest to join man and woman together was no benign
being with lawn sleeves and soul-stirring words.
Marriage was brought about on this earth by the will and wisdom
of God Almighty working through primitive babyhood.
In the old days, when the world was cruder, men and women ran
wild through forests and swamps. They fought nature, fought each
other, as savage as other beasts around them. There was no love;
there was no marriage. The instincts of self-preservation and
of reproduction worked alone to keep the race here through its
hard childhood. ----
But in cold stone caves or in rough nests under fallen tree
trunks savage children were born and nursed by their savage
mothers with savage affection.
Through those infants of the stone age, or of ages much earlier,
marriage and pure affection came into the world.
It is not hard to reproduce in our minds the picture of the first
marriage.
A savage woman, half human, half ape, with rough, matted locks
hanging round her face, sits holding her new-born baby,
protecting it from wind and cold.
It is a queer baby, covered perhaps with reddish hair, its brow
no higher than a rat's. Its jaw protrudes; its tiny, grimy hands
clutch with monkey power all things within reach.
Along comes the father, full of plans to kill a mammoth or a cave
bear; interested in his stone-tipped club, but caring nothing for
the mother, who has been for some time only a whining nuisance.
He stops for a second to look at the small creature which he has
added to earth's animal life.
Its misshapen skull, ferret eyes, miniature shoulders--something
about it reminds him of his royal self, as studied in the pool.
He stoops to look closer. His bristly hairs are grabbed, and a
weird, insane, toothless grin lights up the little monkey face.
Then the savage takes a new view of life; there the marriage
institution and the marriage problem are born simultaneously.
Says the mammoth hunter, with whistling words and hoarse throat
sounds half articulated:
"I like this baby. He's like me. Let me hold him. Don't you go
out with him looking for food, and don't leave him alone while
I'm gone. I've got a bear located. No one can beat me killing
bears. I'll bring the bear's heart to you this evening. You can
give this baby some of the blood. It will do him good. Don't
have anything to say to that mammoth hunter in the next swamp. I
want you to stick to me. I'll look after you. I have taken a
fancy to that baby. He looks very much like me."
Off goes the father, and that savage mother, in a primitive way,
is a wife. Hereafter she is to be cared for. Bears will be
killed for her, even while she has children to keep her busy and
unattractive. Society takes a new turn and the red-haired baby
has done it.
To childhood, helpless and beautiful, we owe marriage and all
that growth of morality which is gradually making us really
civilized.
The basis of all real growth is altruism; and altruism, the
inclination to think more of others than of yourself, came into
the world through the cradle.
We owe such civilization as we have acquired to children.
"A softened pressure of an uncouth hand, a human gleam in an
almost animal eye, an endearment in an inarticulate voice--feeble
things enough. Yet in these faint awakenings lay the hope of the
human race." ----
The influence of childhood has transformed mere animal attraction
into unselfish affection. It has substituted family life for
savage life. The interests of childhood demand that marriage and
its responsibilities be held sacred.
Duty to future generations demands that divorce be made difficult
and considered a misfortune.
Marriage, brought into the world through the influence of
children, should be dissolved only with due regard for the
interests of children. ----
An unhappy marriage is earth's worst affliction. Quite true.
But it is not affliction wasted.
Examples are needed to warn the young against the matrimonial
recklessness which underlies most unhappy marriages.
Unhappy wives and husbands are human light-houses--lonely, but
useful.
If a gentle little Alderney calf should marry a sleek young zebra
and afterward get kicked to death for her pains, we should all
sympathize with her. But we should expect other mild-eyed
Alderneys after that to beware of zebras.
As a matter of fact, this present divorce talk, which sets the
good to fluttering, really interests a very unimportant class.
The man who spends his life spending what he didn't earn, feeding
his physical senses, who goes from rum to the races, from the
races to the opera, and from the opera to roulette, wears out his
nervous sensations.
He then thinks that he is unhappily married. He has possibly
driven his wife to being seven kinds of a fool.
But that is not her fault.
A man who marries a woman undertakes to make her happy and keep
her busy. If he keeps his contract, she will keep hers.
If he fails, he has no right to experiment on another
unfortunate. The divorce class is a self-indulgent, malformed
class, not worth notice. ----
Professor Cope, an earnest man and serious thinker, believed that
marriages should be contracted on probation--say for five years,
with the right on both sides to refuse a renewal.
Theoretically, this would be beautiful. It would make courtship
permanent, abolish curl-papered wives in the morning, and tipsy,
bragging husbands at night.
But it wouldn't work. It would be all right for women. They are
only too willing to be faithful and permanent.
But men cannot be trusted. The animal in them, so essential long
ago, when the race was struggling for a foothold, has not been
obliterated. They have got to be MADE responsible and HELD
responsible. ----
As a matter of fact, there really is no marriage or divorce
problem which sensible beings need consider.
At present men are not good enough to be trusted with liberal
marriage or divorce laws. When they are good enough the laws
will not be wanted. For the man fully developed and fully moral
will know what he is doing when he goes into a marriage contract.
His stability of character will insure permanency. There will be
no need of laws.
At one time the English laws regulated the conditions under which
a man might beat his wife. "The stick," said the law, "must not
be thicker than the husband's thumb."
Some Englishmen have very thick thumbs, and the law was doubtless
hard on some thin, worn-out women.
But that law is no longer needed.
Men have outgrown the need of regulations in wife-beating. In
time they will outgrow the need of laws regarding infidelity and
lack of self-respect.