[Colonel Ingersoll was a picturesque figure as he sat in his room
at the Gibson House yesterday, while the balmy May breeze blew
through the open windows, fluttered the lace curtains and tossed
the great Infidel's snowy hair to and fro. The Colonel had come in
from New York during the morning and the keen white sunlight of a
lovely May day filled his heart with gladness. After breakfast,
the man who preaches the doctrine of the Golden Rule and the Gospel
of Humanity and the while chaffs the gentlemen of the clerical
profession, was in a fine humor. He was busy with cards and callers,
but not too busy to admire the vase full of freshly-picked spring
flowers that stood on the mantel, and wrestled with clouds of cigar
smoke, to see which fragrance should dominate the atmosphere.
To a reporter of _The Commercial Gazette_, the Colonel spoke freely
and interestingly upon a variety of subjects, from personal magnetism
in politics to mob rule in Tennessee. He had been interested in
Colonel Weir's statement about the lack of gas in Exposition Hall,
at the 1876 convention, and when asked if he believed there was
any truth in the stories that the gas supply had been manipulated
so as to prevent the taking of a ballot after he had placed James
G. Blaine in nomination, he replied: ]
All I can say is, that I heard such a story the day after the
convention, but I do not know whether or not it is true. I have
always believed, that if a vote had been taken that evening, Blaine
would have been nominated, possibly not as the effect of my speech,
but the night gave time for trafficking, and that is always dangerous
in a convention. I believed then that Blaine ought to have been
nominated, and that it would have been a very wise thing for the
party to have done. That he was not the candidate was due partly
to accident and partly to political traffic, but that is one of
the bygones, and I believe there is an old saying to the effect
that even the gods have no mastery over the past.
_Question_. Do you think that eloquence is potent in a convention
to set aside the practical work of politics and politicians?
_Answer_. I think that all the eloquence in the world cannot affect
a trade if the parties to the contract stand firm, and when people
have made a political trade they are not the kind of people to be
affected by eloquence. The practical work of the world has very
little to do with eloquence. There are a great many thousand stone
masons to one sculptor, and houses and walls are not constructed
by sculptors, but by masons. The daily wants of the world are
supplied by the practical workers, by men of talent, not by men of
genius, although in the world of invention, genius has done more,
it may be, than the workers themselves. I fancy the machinery now
in the world does the work of many hundreds of millions; that there
is machinery enough now to do several times the work that could be
done by all the men, women and children of the earth. The genius
who invented the reaper did more work and will do more work in the
harvest field than thousands of millions of men, and the same may
be said of the great engines that drive the locomotives and the
ships. All these marvelous machines were made by men of genius,
but they are not the men who in fact do the work.
[This led the Colonel to pay a brilliant tribute to the great
orators of ancient and modern times, the peer of all of them being
Cicero. He dissected and defined oratory and eloquence, and
explained with picturesque figures, wherein the difference between
them lay. As he mentioned the magnetism of public speakers, he was
asked as to his opinion of the value of personal magnetism in
political life.]
It may be difficult to define what personal magnetism is, but I
think it may be defined in this way: You don't always feel like
asking a man whom you meet on the street what direction you should
take to reach a certain point. You often allow three or four to
pass, before you meet one who seems to invite the question. So,
too, there are men by whose side you may sit for hours in the cars
without venturing a remark as to the weather, and there are others
to whom you will commence talking the moment you sit down. There
are some men who look as if they would grant a favor, men toward
whom you are unconsciously drawn, men who have a real human look,
men with whom you seem to be acquainted almost before you speak,
and that you really like before you know anything about them. It
may be that we are all electric batteries; that we have our positive
and our negative poles; it may be that we need some influence that
certain others impart, and it may be that certain others have that
which we do not need and which we do not want, and the moment you
think that, you feel annoyed and hesitate, and uncomfortable, and
possibly hateful.
I suppose there is a physical basis for everything. Possibly the
best test of real affection between man and woman, or of real
friendship between man and woman, is that they can sit side by
side, for hours maybe, without speaking, and yet be having a really
social time, each feeling that the other knows exactly what they
are thinking about. Now, the man you meet and whom you would not
hesitate a moment to ask a favor of, is what I call a magnetic man.
This magnetism, or whatever it may be, assists in making friends,
and of course is a great help to any one who deals with the public.
Men like a magnetic man even without knowing him, perhaps simply
having seen him. There are other men, whom the moment you shake
hands with them, you feel you want no more; you have had enough.
A sudden chill runs up the arm the moment your hand touches theirs,
and finally reaches the heart; you feel, if you had held that hand
a moment longer, an icicle would have formed in the brain. Such
people lack personal magnetism. These people now and then thaw
out when you get thoroughly acquainted with them, and you find that
the ice is all on the outside, and then you come to like them very
well, but as a rule first impressions are lasting. Magnetism is
what you might call the climate of a man. Some men, and some women,
look like a perfect June day, and there are others who, while the
look quite smiling, yet you feel that the sky is becoming overcast,
and the signs all point to an early storm. There are people who
are autumnal--that is to say, generous. They have had their harvest,
and have plenty to spare. Others look like the end of an exceedingly
hard winter--between the hay and grass, the hay mostly gone and
the grass not yet come up. So you will see that I think a great
deal of this thing that is called magnetism. As I said, there are
good people who are not magnetic, but I do not care to make an
Arctic expedition for the purpose of discovering the north pole of
their character. I would rather stay with those who make me feel
comfortable at the first.
[From personal magnetism to the lynching Saturday morning down at
Nashville, Tennessee, was a far cry, but when Colonel Ingersoll
was asked what he thought of mob law, whether there was any
extenuation, any propriety and moral effect resultant from it, he
quickly answered: ]
I do not believe in mob law at any time, among any people. I
believe in justice being meted out in accordance with the forms of
law. If a community violates that law, why should not the individual?
The example is bad. Besides all that, no punishment inflicted by
a mob tends to prevent the commission of crime. Horrible punishment
hardens the community, and that in itself produces more crime.
There seems to be a sort of fascination in frightful punishments,
but, to say the least of it, all these things demoralize the
community. In some countries, you know, they whip people for petty
offences. The whipping, however, does no good, and on the other
hand it does harm; it hardens those who administer the punishment
and those who witness it, and it degrades those who receive it.
There will be but little charity in the world, and but little
progress until men see clearly that there is no chance in the world
of conduct any more than in the physical world.
Back of every act and dream and thought and desire and virtue and
crime is the efficient cause. If you wish to change mankind, you
must change the conditions. There should be no such thing as
punishment. We should endeavor to reform men, and those who cannot
be reformed should be placed where they cannot injure their fellows.
The State should never take revenge any more than the community
should form itself into a mob and take revenge. This does harm,
not good. The time will come when the world will no more think of
sending men to the penitentiary for stealing, as a punishment, that
it will for sending a man to the penitentiary because he has
consumption. When that time comes, the object will be to reform
men; to prevent crime instead of punishing it, and the object then
will be to make the conditions such that honest people will be the
result, but as long as hundreds of thousands of human beings live
in tenements, as long as babes are raised in gutters, as long as
competition is so sharp that hundreds of thousands must of necessity
be failures, just so long as society gets down on its knees before
the great and successful thieves, before the millionaire thieves,
just so long will it have to fill the jails and prisons with the
little thieves. When the "good time" comes, men will not be judged
by the money they have accumulated, but by the uses they make of
it. So men will be judged, not according to their intelligence,
but by what they are endeavoring to accomplish with their intelligence.
In other words, the time will come when character will rise above
all. There is a great line in Shakespeare that I have often quoted,
and that cannot be quoted too often: "There is no darkness but
ignorance." Let the world set itself to work to dissipate this
darkness; let us flood the world with intellectual light. This
cannot be accomplished by mobs or lynchers. It must be done by
the noblest, by the greatest, and by the best.
[The conversation shifting around to the Sunday question; the
opening of the World's Fair on Sunday, the attacks of the pulpit
upon the Sunday newspapers, the opening of parks and museums and
libraries on Sunday, Colonel Ingersoll waxed eloquent, and in answer
to many questions uttered these paragraphs: ]
Of course, people will think that I have some prejudice against
the parsons, but really I think the newspaper press is of far more
importance in the world than the pulpit. If I should admit in a
kind of burst of generosity, and simply for the sake of making a
point, that the pulpit can do some good, how much can it do without
the aid of the press? Here is a parson preaching to a few ladies
and enough men, it may be, to pass the contribution box, and all
he says dies within the four walls of that church. How many
ministers would it take to reform the world, provided I again admit
in a burst of generosity, that there is any reforming power in what
they preach, working along that line?
The Sunday newspaper, I think, is the best of any day in the week.
That paper keeps hundreds and thousands at home. You can find in
it information about almost everything in the world. One of the
great Sunday papers will keep a family busy reading almost all day.
Now, I do not wonder that the ministers are so opposed to the Sunday
newspaper, and so they are opposed to anything calculated to decrease
the attendance at church. Why, they want all the parks, all the
museums, all the libraries closed on Sunday, and they want the
World's Fair closed on Sunday.
Now, I am in favor of Sunday; in fact, I am perfectly willing to
have two of them a week, but I want Sunday as a day of recreation
and pleasure. The fact is we ought not to work hard enough during
the week to require a day of rest. Every day ought to be so arranged
that there would be time for rest from the labor of that day.
Sunday is a good day to get business out of your mind, to forget
the ledger and the docket and the ticker, to forget profits and
losses, and enjoy yourself. It is a good day to go to the art
museums, to look at pictures and statues and beautiful things, so
that you may feel that there is something in this world besides
money and mud. It is a good day, is Sunday, to go to the libraries
and spend a little time with the great and splendid dead, and to
go to the cemetery and think of those who are sleeping there, and
to give a little thought to the time when you, too, like them, will
fall asleep. I think it is a good day for almost anything except
going to church. There is no need of that; everybody knows the
story, and if a man has worked hard all the week, you can hardly
call it recreation if he goes to church Sunday and hears that his
chances are ninety-nine in a hundred in favor of being eternally
damned.
So it is I am in favor of having the World's Fair open on Sunday.
It will be a good day to look at the best the world has produced;
a good day to leave the saloons and commune for a little while with
the mighty spirits that have glorified this world. Sunday is a
good day to leave the churches, where they teach that man has become
totally depraved, and look at the glorious things that have been
wrought by these depraved beings. Besides all this, it is the day
of days for the working man and working woman, for those who have
to work all the week. In New York an attempt was made to open the
Metropolitan Museum of Art on Sunday, and the pious people opposed
it. They thought it would interfere with the joy of heaven if
people were seen in the park enjoying themselves on Sunday, and
they also held that nobody would visit the Museum if it were opened
on Sunday; that the "common people" had no love for pictures and
statues and cared nothing about art. The doors were opened, and
it was demonstrated that the poor people, the toilers and workers,
did want to see such things on Sunday, and now more people visit
the Museum on Sunday than on all the other days of the week put
together. The same is true of the public libraries. There is
something to me infinitely pharisaical, hypocritical and farcical
in this Sunday nonsense. The rich people who favor keeping Sunday
"holy," have their coachman drive them to church and wait outside
until the services end. What do they care about the coachman's
soul? While they are at church their cooks are busy at home getting
dinner ready. What do they care for the souls of cooks? The whole
thing is pretence, and nothing but pretence. It is the instinct
of business. It is the competition of the gospel shop with other
shops and places of resort.
The ministers, of course, are opposed to all shows except their
own, for they know that very few will come to see or hear them and
the choice must be the church or nothing.
I do not believe that one day can be more holy than another unless
more joyous than another. The holiest day is the happiest day--
the day on which wives and children and men are happiest. In that
sense a day can be holy.
Our idea of the Sabbath is from the Puritans, and they imagined
that a man has to be miserable in order to excite the love of God.
We have outgrown the old New England Sabbath--the old Scotch horror.
The Germans have helped us and have set a splendid example. I do
not see how a poor workingman can go to church for recreation--I
mean an orthodox church. A man who has hell here cannot be benefitted
by being assured that he is likely to have hell hereafter. The
whole business I hold in perfect abhorrence.
They tell us that God will not prosper us unless we observe the
Sabbath. The Jews kept the Sabbath and yet Jehovah deserted them,
and they are a people without a nation. The Scotch kept Sunday;
they are not independent. The French never kept Sunday, and yet
they are the most prosperous nation in Europe.
--_Commercial Gazette_, Cincinnati, Ohio, May 2, 1892.