place had seemed to sink into his being and become part of himself. The
voice of the minister bestowing his blessing, the voices of the choir
floating up to the vaulted roof, stirred him to a remote pleasure. He
liked it, or he knew he would like it when he knew what to do. The
filing out of the choristers, the silent final prayer, the soft rustle
of people rising from their knees, somehow moved him by its suggestion
of something before unknown. He was a heathen, but a heathen vaguely
stirred.
He was very quiet as he walked home across the park with Miss Alicia.
“How did you enjoy the sermon?” she asked with much sweetness.
“I’m not used to sermons, but it seemed all right to me,” he answered.
“What I’ve got to get on to is knowing when to stand up and when to sit
down. I wasn’t much of a winner at it this morning. I guess you noticed
that.”
But his outward bearing had been much more composed than his inward
anxiety had allowed him to believe. His hesitations had not produced
the noticeable effect he had feared.
“Do you mean you are not quite familiar with the service?” she said.
Poor dear boy! he had perhaps not been able to go to church regularly
at all.
“I’m not familiar with any service,” he answered without prejudice. “I
never went to church before.”
She slightly started and then smiled.
“Oh, you mean you have never been to the Church of England,” she said.
Then he saw that, if he told her the exact truth, she would be
frightened and shocked. She would not know what to say or what to
think. To her unsophisticated mind only murderers and thieves and
criminals _never_ went to church. She just didn’t know. Why should she?
So he smiled also.
“No, I’ve never been to the Church of England,” he said.
(To be continued)
[Illustration]
INVULNERABLE
BY WILLIAM ROSE BENÉT
The armorers met me at the marge of life,
The weapon-bearers, calling each his ware,
Praising sword or spear or sinuous knife
Fashioned for the strife
In the forest depths that lay before,
To ward off malice or to pierce despair;
Shields that could affright
All the hissing snakes in Envy’s hair;
Or, when Peril’s sudden arrow sped,
Crying how bucklers, stern of proof and bright,
Glanced the shaft, the rancor overbore;
Or iron helms, securely vizarded,
Turned the thrusts of mockery and spite.
Loudly “Arm you! Arm you!” rose their cry;
And I chose a shield, Indifference,
And a blade, Sharp Wit, for my defense.
Close-meshed mail beneath my gaberdine
Glittered all unseen.
Proud I strode and whirled my sword on high.
Then my friend went by,
Passing in his shining joy unarmed,
With not even an amulet that charmed;
Singing for the innocence confessed
In his sparkling eyes, his buoyant breast;
Swiftly, gaily thrusting through the trees
To his deep and darkling forest doom,
As I thought. But still before me goes,
Blithe and wonderful, his candid smile
Every ambushed shadow to illume,
And the quickening sympathy that glows
Sudden on his cheek when friends seem foes,
And his utter radiance without guile,
Merry ignorance where I am--_wise_?
Where they lurk and snarl and close with me,
All unscathed of foemen passeth he,
Seeing no strife, unarmed eternally,
And e’en the Terrors turn away their eyes!
[Illustration: TOPICS OF THE TIME]
UNDER WHICH FLAG, LADIES, ORDER OR ANARCHY?
THE PENNSYLVANIA ASSOCIATION FOR WOMAN SUFFRAGE DISAVOWS VIOLENCE
In the April ~Century~, in an editorial article, “The Silent
Suffragists of America,” we called upon the official organizations in
the United States advocating woman suffrage to abandon their passive
and tolerant attitude toward the methods of the English militants, a
plea which we had also made in the number for November last.[23] We
have received letters of approval of this article from representative
women on each side of the suffrage question. It is a matter of sincere
gratification to us to publish at the first opportunity the letter
which follows from Miss Eleanor Cuyler Patterson of Chestnut Hill
(Philadelphia):
I have read with interest the temperate and wise opinion printed
in “Topics of the Time” in the April number of ~The Century
Magazine~. It gives me great pleasure to send you the
resolution on this subject passed by the executive committee of the
Pennsylvania Association for Woman Suffrage on March 7, 1913.
“Although we do not pass judgment on the methods of other
organizations, _we disclaim all connection with militant
organizations, and do not indorse or intend to use militant
methods_, but shall continue to employ educational methods as in
the past.”
Here at last we have from an official suffrage organization in America
a sober-minded expression of opinion on this burning subject. It ought
to be the beginning of a sincere effort to rescue the whole woman
movement from the shallow thinking and super-emotionalism that are
likely to wreck it.
That this sort of protest is much needed is shown from the following
passage from a letter to “The New York Times” from a leading advocate
of the suffrage, Mrs. Eunice Dana Brannan, which is the first public
expression of what we must regard as a very unfortunate, not to say
shocking, frame of mind on the part of many refined and well-educated
American women:
The suffragists in America are agreed in their belief that militant
action is _not called for_. Injustice to women is not so evident
nor so general as in England, and the attitude of the majority of
American men is certainly fairer and more honestly chivalrous.
_But, in spite of these amiable differences, it is quite possible
that if the Eastern States continue to deny enfranchisement to
their women, while the Western States continue to grant it, the
women thus discriminated against would find the political anomaly
of their position so impossible to bear that even militancy would
seem to them justifiable._
The words we have italicized are deplorably significant. They mean, for
instance, that the immunity of New York City from similar outrages is
to be dependent only upon the granting of the suffrage by the State.
“Militant action is not called for”--yet, but will be called for if the
voters of the East, however conscientiously, shall deny the suffrage to
women!
In striking contrast is this extract from an open letter, printed in
“The New York Times” of April 14, from Mrs. Helen Magill White (Mrs.
Andrew D. White) of Ithaca, New York, addressed “To the Treasurer of
the National American Woman Suffrage Association.” After recording her
friendly attitude toward the movement, Mrs. White closes her letter
with these downright words:
I never until lately admitted to myself the possibility of our
_essential_ inferiority--such that, in matters of government, we
could without outrage be classed with children, with idiots and
insane, and with criminals.
But now that I see our own kinswomen across the sea sowing the wind
to reap the whirlwind--sowing seeds of lawlessness which we may see
in our own day, I greatly fear, blossoming in an anarchism more
terrible than anything yet known to history--and when I see our own
women protesting feebly or not at all, and even, to some extent,
encouraging, I have not a cent to contribute nor a word of sympathy
for any association of women which does not publicly and earnestly
protest against such a line of procedure. It resembles the kicking
and biting of spoiled children, the raving and gibbering of insane
and idiots--and the unbridled license of the most abandoned
criminals. All these classes think solely of what they want, and
self-constitute themselves arbiters of what they should have. What
it may cost other human beings, innocent though they be, for them
to grasp at the objects of their desire by whatever means may come
to hand, does not touch their minds; and so it would seem to be
with those women of England; and so, also, with those of our own
women who condone their offenses--who would condone such action _in
any cause_.
Mrs. White here indicates both the responsibility of sincere, educated,
and thoughtful suffragists and an effective method whereby they may
hold the official organizations to their duty. Not a dollar should
be subscribed to their work until they have pledged themselves that
no part of their funds shall go to the support of lawlessness, and
have made as definite a disclaimer of sympathy and intention as the
Pennsylvania society, the action of which, at this time, is a patriotic
public service of the highest order.
We have nothing but respect for the women of America who are earnestly
convinced that the extension of the suffrage gives promise of a
brighter day for humanity, and we take this opportunity to record our
abhorrence not only of violence by women but of such interference with
peaceable parades as disgraced the city of Washington on the third of
March. In these days of turbulence of action and of thought, there is
no securer anchorage to the mind than Chatham’s saying, “Where law
ends, tyranny begins.”
NEWSPAPER INVASION OF PRIVACY
IS THE PAUL PRY AND PEEPING TOM TYPE OF REPORTING ON THE INCREASE?
The newspapers printed the initial paragraph of Mr. Pierpont Morgan’s
will, and some of them made it the theme of very respectful and
profitable comment. It was as intimate a statement as can well be
imagined, a solemn committal of the soul of the maker of the will into
the hands of his Saviour, and a charge to his children to maintain and
defend “the blessed doctrine of the complete atonement for sin through
the blood of Jesus Christ.”
But Mr. Morgan was a public person. All of us, in that sense, became
members of his family. We had made our way to his bedside as he lay
dying in Rome, and we expected to be given his will to read as soon as
his wife and son and daughters had read it. They were obliged to give
it to us: what could they do? Mr. Morgan, by reason of his great wealth
and his distinguished public service had lost the privilege of privacy.
At the same time, there were those who read the will, and especially
the beginning of it, with a certain sense of embarrassment, as if they
had been found reading a neighbor’s private letters. The situation
is one which arises in connection with some modern biographies and
autobiographies, but the newspapers present it to our conscience
every day. Now is abundantly fulfilled the prediction of an old book
which said, “There is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed;
and hid, that shall not be known.” When the book promises further
that that which is spoken in the ear in closets shall be proclaimed
upon the housetops, we seem to see the reporter in the midst of his
characteristic activities. All the closet doors are now wide open; or,
if they are shut and locked against us, there are dictagraphs inside.
The other day at a great college a student was found dead in bed.
The reporter who put the fact in the paper reported also that the
president and the dean, and other persons much older and perhaps wiser
than himself, had done their best to keep the matter private. Their
endeavors appear to have been entirely for the sake of the student’s
family and friends. There was no suspicion of anything wrong except
such as the reporter himself conveyed to heighten the interest. These
kindly endeavors the reporter, according to his own frank and impudent
confession, had frustrated. No purpose seems to have been served by the
publication except that the reporter got his money for it.
The other day, in the midst of a suit for divorce, the wife was
stricken with a mortal disease, and the husband was sent for. She was
unconscious when he arrived, and he knelt by her bedside, praying.
Then she opened her eyes and saw him, and told him that she loved him
still. Behind the door was a reporter, with his paper in one hand and
his pencil in the other, putting down what he saw and heard through the
crack, and going out to shout it through a megaphone in the street.
Two lads in a high school fought a duel over the attentions which one
was paying to the other’s sister. The local newspapers gave it nearly
as much space as they gave to the floods in Ohio. The little girls who
looked on were all interviewed, and we were told what the sister said
when she went to see her wounded lover in the hospital. Of course the
perspective was absurd, but the performance was by no means absurd.
So with the divorce-suits that are tried in the court-rooms, which
have no walls, where the busy reporters prepare themselves to tell
us a hundred things that we have no right to know. A brutal husband
forces his wife to sue him for divorce as her only defense against
his cruelty, and the newspapers coöperate with him in exposing to the
common gaze all the tender privacies of the woman’s soul.
We read such revelations, at first ashamed, as if we were looking
through a keyhole, then somewhat brutalized ourselves by the
experience. Thus the line is blurred between the publicity which is
for the good of the people and for the terror of offenders, and the
publicity which is only gossip and scandal printed for no other purpose
than to sell the papers and make money. Whatever the remedy, the fact
is plain that our sense of the honest rights of privacy is dulled. If
Lady Godiva were to ride through the streets of Coventry to-day, there
would be Peeping Toms in groups at every window with cameras and
machines for taking moving pictures.
It is not improbable that one of the next important movements in this
country will be for a greater sense of responsibility to wholesome
public opinion on the part of the press. There is so much that is good
and helpful and truly progressive in the better newspapers, and they
are so sound on the larger questions of national policy, that it is
to be hoped that the reformation of the grosser faults of journalism
will be initiated by them. And in saying this we must not forget the
offenses against good taste and good morals which are continually being
perpetrated by certain periodicals that appear but once a month.
THE CHANGING VIEW OF GOVERNMENT
A GROWING SENSE OF ITS DUTIES TO THE PEOPLE
A member of Congress summed up the strongest impression from his latest
electoral campaign as being that the people in this country are coming
to have a much more vivid sense of the Government as “a political
entity” which “owes duties.” He obviously means something more than
Secretary Hay’s famous phrase about the “administrative entity” of
China. This is no mere quibble about Pope’s “forms of government.”
It implies a wide departure from the old view that government is a
necessary evil, to be kept as limited as possible. However we explain
or interpret the new conception, its existence and increasing sway over
the minds of men will not be questioned by any one who keeps his eyes
open to the facts. He may call the tendency socialistic or simply an
extension of the democratic principle, but that it has now become a
part of American political thinking he cannot well deny.
Equally undeniable is it that the idea that people have of the
nature and function of their Government is more important than any
mere question of governmental machinery. We hear much of a movement
to “restore the government to the people.” All manner of political
devices are commended, or else condemned, to bring about a more direct
participation by the citizen in the work of government. Be these
proposals wise or foolish, it is plain that the chief question lies
behind them. It is what the people wish their Government to be; what
they would now have done by those responsible for its conduct; what
they themselves would undertake by means of governmental agencies in
case those agencies were somehow made more quickly responsive to the
popular will. Show a political philosopher what the driving forces of
a republic really desire it to be or to become, and he will be able to
get much more instruction out of that, much more material on which to
base prophecies respecting future development, than he possibly can
from endless talk about primaries and conventions, ballot-laws and
corrupt-practices acts. Those are only means and machinery; the end
aimed at is the main thing.
Looking back at the recent enlargement of governmental activities,
and endeavoring to read in them the new sense of duties owed, we are
able to detect at least a few general indications and even certain
principles. For example, it is clear that the people are demanding, and
will more and more demand, that their governments, local and national,
do a great deal more than was formerly expected to conserve the
physical health of the nation. Here is the origin of pure-food laws,
of meat-inspection, of statutes against the adulteration of drugs. In
this feeling of the vital relation that ought to exist between the
Government and the bodily well-being of its subjects we have also the
explanation of official campaigns against disease, of the movement
for a national quarantine, and of the great broadening of the work
everywhere laid upon health officers.
All this has not come about through a deliberate or reasoned change in
the point of view. It is, rather, the result of quiet pressure from the
practical side. Large problems of public health have pushed themselves
to the front; and in seeking to solve them, the people have merely laid
hold of the powers of government as ready and efficient instruments.
It is now tacitly assumed that the Government is under a continuing
obligation to guard the people against epidemic disease and exposure to
impure food and deleterious drugs. This is now distinctly one of the
duties owed.
But life is more than meat, liberty and equality of opportunity are
more precious than health. And in seeking to preserve these, the
work of our Government during the last few years has made of official
activity something very different from the conceptions and standards of
1787 or 1850--something which is no doubt open to abuse, but which, we
are persuaded, has thus far been largely beneficial in its practical
manifestations.
When the Government takes hold of the evil of railway rebating with a
strong hand, it is not alone a question of enforcement of the law, but
of striking down an insidious and dangerous form of special privilege.
The real offense in the old rebate system, now happily so nearly a
thing of the past, was not alone its secret favors to a secret few,
but its gross discrimination against the unprotected many. It was the
denial of the right to compete on equal terms. This is the intolerable
thing in a free democracy. It can endure the sight of great wealth,
of vast fortunes honestly gained, but it cannot submit to a method of
accumulating property which destroys the opportunities of thousands in
order to give unfair advantages to one. It is the determination to keep
the career open to talent, not to shut it up to favoritism, which has
been the animating spirit in the long struggle to prevent the railroads
from virtually creating private fortunes at their own sweet will, and
bringing whom they please to penury by means of rebates.
A like attitude and animus are seen in the other forms of legislative
restriction upon great corporations. All the anti-monopoly laws and
anti-trust suits, all the regulating statutes and the public-utilities
commissions, have one principle at bottom, and it is to make all men
stand equal before the law. On the one hand to strike down oppression,
on the other to equalize opportunity, has been the intent of these new
activities of government which, whatever else they show, leave no doubt
of an altogether changed view of what governments owe.
In all these matters, the greatest peril that lurks in our path is that
of being misled by abstractions. If we talk overmuch of “government,”
we are in danger of forgetting the human beings who make it up. If we
are afflicted by bad rulers, it is no help to us to fall back upon an
ideal conception of “the state.” The state is simply men acting. Much
amusement was created in Paris by an innocent peasant who passed from
one public building to another demanding that he be allowed to see
_l’état_. He had heard of it all his life; he thought it was something
at the capital; being there, he wanted to inspect it at close range. He
was an unsophisticated rustic, but was he not right in his instinct?
We are not, after all, governed by an “entity.” Government is the most
concrete of human affairs. It is vested in mortal men. And in all the
agitations and the hopes and fears of our day respecting the extension
of governmental functions, and the quickening of the whole idea of what
the state owes to citizens, it would be fatal to forget that government
cannot be made better except by putting better men in charge of it.
THE TWO-BILLION-DOLLAR CONGRESS
A NATIONAL BUDGET THE REMEDY FOR EXTRAVAGANCE IN APPROPRIATIONS
The time is overripe for a fundamental change in our method of making
annual appropriations for the cost of the National Government. A glance
at the result of the work done by the various congressional committees
charged with the duty of preparing appropriation bills is enough to
bring conviction that order and system must be substituted for the
present chaotic methods; while, if we could penetrate the secrets of
the committee-rooms, the country would stand appalled at the ignoble
tricks and devices by which the “pork-barrel” is filled and the money
of the taxpayers wantonly and wickedly wasted.
The Democrats in their platform of 1912 “denounce the profligate
waste of money wrung from the people by oppressive taxation through
the lavish appropriations of recent Republican Congresses,” and
they demand “a return to that simplicity and economy which befits a
democratic Government.” How did they keep faith with the people under
this self-denying ordinance? In the session of Congress immediately
following, the second regular session of the Sixty-second Congress,
which adjourned on March 4, they passed appropriation bills aggregating
$1,098,647,960, and authorized contracts on public works committing
the Government to a further expenditure of $76,956,174, making a
total demand upon the treasury for the year ending June 30, 1914,
of $1,175,604,134, a sum that surpasses all previous congressional
achievements in extravagance. Not only that, but the grand total of
the appropriations and contracts authorized in the two years of the
Sixty-second Congress was $2,238,470,990, which is to be compared with
$2,151,610,940 of the Sixty-first Congress. This is democratic economy
and simplicity with a vengeance. The Democrats surpassed by more than
$86,000,000 the exploits of the previous Republican Congress, which
they had denounced as profligate.
But the Republican pot cannot call the Democratic kettle black. The
blame falls upon both parties, for both have been profligate. Not only
is the method of drawing up the appropriation schedules indefensible,
but many of the senators and congressmen of both parties exhibit a
degree of greed and rapacity in grabbing for the people’s money that
is fairly comparable with the behavior of a drunken army looting a
captive city. The river-and-harbor appropriation of $41,000,000, and
the public-buildings appropriation amounting to $45,000,000 more, cover
multitudes of log-rolling sins, of costly improvements of streams never
navigable, of imposing buildings for small towns, veritable “grabs” of
money to foster local pride, put district constituents in a good humor,
and lay the foundation for safe majorities in the next congressional
elections. The sin here is not alone that of profligate wastefulness;
it is a pretty direct form of bribery of the voter. The staggering
appropriation for pensions belongs in this category. The Service
Pension Act added $25,000,000 to this item of expenditure, which in
this fiscal year is raised to the great sum of $180,300,000. And we are
now observing the fiftieth anniversaries of events of the war!
The national balance-sheet for the year which this “return to that
simplicity and economy which befits a democratic Government” presents
for the scrutiny of the voter and the taxpayer stands thus: estimated
revenue of the Government under existing laws, $991,791,508; direct
appropriations, $1,098,647,960; deficit, $106,856,452. But there must
be added to the appropriations $76,976,174 of contract commitments
authorized, raising the deficit to the colossal total of $183,812,626.