man that I am now. The kind of a man that I shall be next month depends
upon the kind of a man that I have been this month.
If I am miserable to-day, it is not within the round of probabilities
that I shall be supremely happy to-morrow. Heaven is a habit. And if we
are going to Heaven we would better be getting used to it.
Life is a preparation for the future; and the best preparation for the
future is to live as if there were none.
We are preparing all the time for old age. The two things that make old
age beautiful are resignation and a just consideration for the rights
of others.
In the play of _Ivan the Terrible_, the interest centers around one man,
the Czar Ivan. If anybody but Richard Mansfield played the part, there
would be nothing in it. We simply get a glimpse into the life of a
tyrant who has run the full gamut of goosedom, grumpiness, selfishness
and grouch. Incidentally this man had the power to put other men to
death, and this he does and has done as his whim and temper might
dictate. He has been vindictive, cruel, quarrelsome, tyrannical and
terrible. Now that he feels the approach of death, he would make his
peace with God. But he has delayed that matter too long. He didn't
realize in youth and middle life that he was then preparing for old age.
Man is the result of cause and effect, and the causes are to a degree in
our hands. Life is a fluid, and well has it been called the stream of
life--we are going, flowing somewhere. Strip _Ivan_ of his robes and
crown, and he might be an old farmer and live in Ebenezer. Every town
and village has its Ivan. To be an Ivan, just turn your temper loose
and practise cruelty on any person or thing within your reach, and the
result will be a sure preparation for a querulous, quarrelsome, pickety,
snipity, fussy and foolish old age, accented with many outbursts of
wrath that are terrible in their futility and ineffectiveness.
Babyhood has no monopoly on the tantrum. The characters of _King Lear_
and _Ivan the Terrible_ have much in common. One might almost believe
that the writer of _Ivan_ had felt the incompleteness of _Lear_, and had
seen the absurdity of making a melodramatic bid for sympathy in behalf
of this old man thrust out by his daughters.
Lear, the troublesome, Lear to whose limber tongue there was constantly
leaping words unprintable and names of tar, deserves no soft pity at our
hands. All his life he had been training his three daughters for exactly
the treatment he was to receive. All his life Lear had been lubricating
the chute that was to give him a quick ride out into that black
midnight storm.
"Oh, how sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless
child," he cries.
There is something quite as bad as a thankless child, and that is a
thankless parent--an irate, irascible parent who possesses an
underground vocabulary and a disposition to use it.
The false note in _Lear_ lies in giving to him a daughter like
_Cordelia_. Tolstoy and Mansfield ring true, and _Ivan the Terrible_ is
what he is without apology, excuse or explanation. Take it or leave
it--if you do not like plays of this kind, go to see Vaudeville.
Mansfield's _Ivan_ is terrible. The Czar is not old in years--not over
seventy--but you can see that Death is sniffing close upon his track.
_Ivan_ has lost the power of repose. He cannot listen, weigh and
decide--he has no thought or consideration for any man or thing--this is
his habit of life. His bony hands are never still--the fingers open and
shut, and pick at things eternally. He fumbles the cross on his breast,
adjusts his jewels, scratches his cosmos, plays the devil's tattoo, gets
up nervously and looks behind the throne, holds his breath to listen.
When people address him, he damns them savagely if they kneel, and if
they stand upright he accuses them of lack of respect. He asks that he
be relieved from the cares of state, and then trembles for fear his
people will take him at his word. When asked to remain ruler of Russia
he proceeds to curse his councilors and accuses them of loading him with
burdens that they themselves would not endeavor to bear.
He is a victim of amor senilis, and right here if Mansfield took one
step more his realism would be appalling, but he stops in time and
suggests what he dares not express. This tottering, doddering,
slobbering, sniffling old man is in love--he is about to wed a young,
beautiful girl. He selects jewels for her--he makes remarks about what
would become her beauty, jeers and laughs in cracked falsetto. In the
animality of youth there is something pleasing--it is natural--but the
vices of an old man, when they have become only mental, are most
revolting.
The people about _Ivan_ are in mortal terror of him, for he is still the
absolute monarch--he has the power to promote or disgrace, to take their
lives or let them go free. They laugh when he laughs, cry when he does,
and watch his fleeting moods with thumping hearts.
He is intensely religious and affects the robe and cowl of a priest.
Around his neck hangs the crucifix. His fear is that he will die with no
opportunity of confession and absolution. He prays to High Heaven every
moment, kisses the cross, and his toothless old mouth interjects prayers
to God and curses on man in the same breath.
If any one is talking to him he looks the other way, slips down until
his shoulders occupy the throne, scratches his leg, and keeps up a
running comment of insult--"Aye," "Oh," "Of course," "Certainly," "Ugh,"
"Listen to him now!" There is a comedy side to all this which relieves
the tragedy and keeps the play from becoming disgusting.
Glimpses of _Ivan's_ past are given in his jerky confessions--he is the
most miserable and unhappy of men, and you behold that he is reaping as
he has sown.
All his life he has been preparing for this. Each day has been a
preparation for the next. _Ivan_ dies in a fit of wrath, hurling curses
on his family and court--dies in a fit of wrath into which he has been
purposely taunted by a man who knows that the outburst is certain to
kill the weakened monarch.
Where does _Ivan the Terrible_ go when Death closes his eyes?
I know not. But this I believe: No confessional can absolve him--no
priest benefit him--no God forgive him. He has damned himself, and he
began the work in youth. He was getting ready all his life for this old
age, and this old age was getting ready for the fifth act.
The playwright does not say so, Mansfield does not say so, but this is
the lesson: Hate is a poison--wrath is a toxin--sensuality leads to
death--clutching selfishness is a lighting of the fires of hell. It is
all a preparation--cause and effect.
If you are ever absolved, you must absolve yourself, for no one else
can. And the sooner you begin, the better.
We often hear of the beauties of old age, but the only old age that is
beautiful is the one the man has long been preparing for by living a
beautiful life. Every one of us are right now preparing for old age.
There may be a substitute somewhere in the world for Good Nature, but I
do not know where it can be found.
The secret of salvation is this: Keep Sweet.
An Alliance with Nature
My father is a doctor who has practised medicine for sixty-five years,
and is still practising.
I am a doctor myself.
I am fifty years old; my father is eighty-five. We live in the same
house, and daily we ride horseback together or tramp thru the fields and
woods. To-day we did our little jaunt of five miles and back
'cross country.
I have never been ill a day--never consulted a physician in a
professional way, and in fact, never missed a meal through inability to
eat. As for the author of the author of _A Message to Garcia_, he holds,
esoterically, to the idea that the hot pedaluvia and small doses of hop
tea will cure most ailments that are curable, and so far all of his own
ails have been curable--a point he can prove.
The value of the pedaluvia lies in the fact that it tends to equalize
circulation, not to mention the little matter of sanitation; and the
efficacy of the hops lies largely in the fact that they are bitter and
disagreeable to take.
Both of these prescriptions give the patient the soothing thought that
something is being done for him, and at the very worst can never do him
serious harm.
My father and I are not fully agreed on all of life's themes, so
existence for us never resolves itself into a dull, neutral gray. He is
a Baptist and I am a Vegetarian. Occasionally he refers to me as
"callow," and we have daily resorts to logic to prove prejudices, and
history is searched to bolster the preconceived, but on the following
important points we stand together, solid as one man:
First. Ninety-nine people out of a hundred who go to a physician have no
organic disease, but are merely suffering from some symptom of their own
indiscretion.
Second. Individuals who have diseases, nine times out of ten, are
suffering only from the accumulated evil effects of medication.
Third. Hence we get the proposition: Most diseases are the result of
medication which has been prescribed to relieve and take away a
beneficent and warning symptom on the part of wise Nature.
Most of the work of doctors in the past has been to prescribe for
symptoms; the difference between actual disease and a symptom being
something that the average man does not even yet know.
And the curious part is that on these points all physicians, among
themselves, are fully agreed. What I say here being merely truism,
triteness and commonplace.
Last week, in talking with an eminent surgeon in Buffalo, he said, "I
have performed over a thousand operations of laparotomy, and my records
show that in every instance, excepting in cases of accident, the
individual was given to what you call the 'Beecham Habit.'"
The people you see waiting in the lobbies of doctors' offices are, in a
vast majority of cases, suffering thru poisoning caused by an excess of
food. Coupled with this goes the bad results of imperfect breathing,
irregular sleep, lack of exercise, and improper use of stimulants, or
holding the thought of fear, jealousy and hate. All of these things, or
any one of them, will, in very many persons, cause fever, chills, cold
feet, congestion and faulty elimination.
To administer drugs to a man suffering from malnutrition caused by a
desire to "get even," and a lack of fresh air, is simply to compound
his troubles, shuffle his maladies, and get him ripe for the ether-cone
and scalpel.
Nature is forever trying to keep people well, and most so-called
"disease," which word means merely lack of ease, is self-limiting, and
tends to cure itself. If you have appetite, do not eat too much. If you
have no appetite, do not eat at all. Be moderate in the use of all
things, save fresh air and sunshine.
The one theme of _Ecclesiastes_ is moderation. Buddha wrote it down that
the greatest word in any language is Equanimity. William Morris said
that the finest blessing of life was systematic, useful work. Saint Paul
declared that the greatest thing in the world was love. Moderation,
Equanimity, Work and Love--you need no other physician.
In so stating I lay down a proposition agreed to by all physicians;
which was expressed by Hippocrates, the father of medicine, and then
repeated in better phrase by Epictetus, the slave, to his pupil, the
great Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius, and which has been known to every
thinking man and woman since: Moderation, Equanimity, Work and Love!
The Ex. Question
Words sometimes become tainted and fall into bad repute, and are
discarded. Until the day of Elizabeth Fry, on the official records in
England appeared the word "mad-house." Then it was wiped out and the
word "asylum" substituted. Within twenty years' time in several states
in America we have discarded the word "asylum" and have substituted the
word "hospital."
In Jeffersonville, Indiana, there is located a "Reformatory" which some
years ago was known as a penitentiary. The word "prison" had a
depressing effect, and "penitentiary" throws a theological shadow, and
so the words will have to go. As our ideas of the criminal change, we
change our vocabulary.
A few years ago we talked about asylums for the deaf and dumb--the word
"dumb" has now been stricken from every official document in every state
in the Union, because we have discovered, with the assistance of Gardner
G. Hubbard, that deaf people are not dumb, and not being defectives,
they certainly do not need an asylum. They need schools, however, and so
everywhere we have established schools for the deaf.
Deaf people are just as capable, are just as competent, just as well
able to earn an honest living as is the average man who can hear.
The "indeterminate sentence" is one of the wisest expedients ever
brought to bear in penology. And it is to this generation alone that the
honor of first using it must be given. The offender is sentenced for,
say from one to eight years. This means that if the prisoner behaves
himself, obeying the rules, showing a desire to be useful, he will be
paroled and given his freedom at the end of one year.
If he misbehaves and does not prove his fitness for freedom he will be
kept two or three years, and he may possibly have to serve the whole
eight years. "How long are you in for?" I asked a convict at
Jeffersonville, who was caring for the flowers in front of the walls.
"Me? Oh, I'm in for two years, with the privilege of fourteen," was the
man's answer, given with a grin.
The old plan of "short time," allowing two or three months off from
every year for good behavior was a move in the right direction, but the
indeterminate sentence will soon be the rule everywhere for first
offenders.
The indeterminate sentence throws upon the man himself the
responsibility for the length of his confinement and tends to relieve
prison life of its horror, by holding out hope. The man has the short
time constantly in mind, and usually is very careful not to do anything
to imperil it. Insurrection and an attempt to escape may mean that every
day of the whole long sentence will have to be served.
So even the dullest of minds and the most calloused realize that it pays
to do what is right--the lesson being pressed home upon them in a way it
has never been before.
The old-time prejudice of business men against the man who had "done
time" was chiefly on account of his incompetence, and not his record.
The prison methods that turned out a hateful, depressed and frightened
man who had been suppressed by the silent system and deformed by the
lock-step, calloused by brutal treatment and the constant thought held
over him that he was a criminal, was a bad thing for the prisoner, for
the keeper and for society. Even an upright man would be undone by such
treatment, and in a year be transformed into a sly, secretive and
morally sick man. The men just out of prison were unable to do
anything--they needed constant supervision and attention, and so of
course we did not care to hire them.
The Ex. now is a totally different man from the Ex. just out of his
striped suit in the seventies, thanks to that much defamed man,
Brockway, and a few others.
We may have to restrain men for the good of themselves and the good of
society, but we do not punish. The restraint is punishment enough; we
believe men are punished by their sins, not for them.
When men are sent to reform schools now, the endeavor and the hope is to
give back to society a better man than we took.
Judge Lindsey sends boys to the reform school without officer or guard.
The boys go of their own accord, carrying their own commitment papers.
They pound on the gate demanding admittance in the name of the law. The
boy believes that Judge Lindsey is his friend, and that the reason he
is sent to the reform school is that he may reap a betterment which his
full freedom cannot possibly offer. When he takes his commitment papers
he is no longer at war with society and the keepers of the law. He
believes that what is being done for him is done for the best, and so he
goes to prison, which is really not a prison at the last, for it is a
school where the lad is taught to economize both time and money and to
make himself useful.
Other people work for us, and we must work for them. This is the supreme
lesson that the boy learns. You can only help yourself by
helping others.
Now here is a proposition: If a boy or a man takes his commitment
papers, goes to prison alone and unattended, is it necessary that he
should be there locked up, enclosed in a corral and be looked after by
guards armed with death-dealing implements?
Superintendent Whittaker, of the institution at Jeffersonville, Indiana,
says, "No." He believes that within ten years' time we will do away with
the high wall, and will keep our loaded guns out of sight; to a great
degree also we will take the bars from the windows of the prisons, just
as we have taken them away from the windows of the hospitals for
the insane.
At the reform school it may be necessary to have a guard-house for some
years to come, but the high wall must go, just as we have sent the
lock-step and the silent system and the striped suit of disgrace into
the ragbag of time--lost in the memory of things that were.
Four men out of five in the reformatory at Jeffersonville need no
coercion, they would not run away if the walls were razed and the doors
left unlocked. One young man I saw there refused the offered parole--he
wanted to stay until he learned his trade. He was not the only one with
a like mental attitude.
The quality of men in the average prison is about the same as that of
the men who are in the United States Army. The man who enlists is a
prisoner; for him to run away is a very serious offense, and yet he is
not locked up at night, nor is he surrounded by a high wall.
The George Junior Republic is simply a farm, unfenced and unpatroled,
excepting by the boys who are in the Republic, and yet it is a penal
institution. The prison of the future will not be unlike a young ladies'
boarding school, where even yet the practice prevails of taking the
inmates out all together, with a guard, and allowing no one to leave
without a written permit.
As society changes, so changes the so-called criminal. In any event, I
know this--that Max Nordau did not make out his case.
There is no criminal class.
Or for that matter we are all criminals. "I have in me the capacity for
every crime," said Emerson.
The man or woman who goes wrong is a victim of unkind environment.
Booker Washington says that when the negro has something that we want,
or can perform a task that we want done, we waive the color line, and
the race problem then ceases to be a problem. So it is with the Ex.
Question. When the ex-convict is able to show that he is useful to the
world, the world will cease to shun him. When Superintendent Whittaker
graduates a man it is pretty good evidence that the man is able and
willing to render a service to society.
The only places where the ex-convicts get the icy mitt are pink teas
and prayer meetings. An ex-convict should work all day and then spend
his evenings at the library, feeding his mind--then he is safe.
If I were an ex-convict I would fight shy of all "Refuges," "Sheltering
Arms," "Saint Andrew's Societies" and the philanthropic "College
Settlements." I would never go to those good professional people, or
professional good people, who patronize the poor and spit upon the
alleged wrongdoer, and who draw sharp lines of demarcation in
distinguishing between the "good" and the "bad." If you can work and are
willing to work, business men will not draw the line on you. Get a job,
and then hold it down hard by making yourself necessary. Employers of
labor and the ex-convicts themselves are fast settling this Ex.
Question, with the help of the advanced type of the Reform School where
the inmates are being taught to be useful and are not punished nor
patronized, but are simply given a chance. My heart goes out in sympathy
to the man who gives a poor devil a chance. I myself am a poor devil!
The Sergeant
A colonel in the United States Army told me the other day something like
this: The most valuable officer, the one who has the greatest
responsibility, is the sergeant. The true sergeant is born, not made--he
is the priceless gift of the gods. He is so highly prized that when
found he is never promoted, nor is he allowed to resign. If he is
dissatisfied with his pay, Captain, Lieutenant and Colonel chip in--they
cannot afford to lose him. He is a rara avis--the apple of their eye.
His first requirement is that he must be able to lick any man in the
company. A drunken private may damn a captain upside down and wrong-side
out, and the captain is not allowed to reply. He can neither strike with
his fist, nor engage in a cussing match, but your able sergeant is an
adept in both of these polite accomplishments. Even if a private strike
an officer, the officer is not allowed to strike back. Perhaps the man
who abuses him could easily beat him in a rough-and-tumble fight, and
then it is quite a sufficient reason to keep one's clothes clean. We
say the revolver equalizes all men, but it doesn't. It is disagreeable
to shoot a man. It scatters brains and blood all over the sidewalk,
attracts a crowd, requires a deal of explanation afterward, and may cost
an officer his stripes. No good officer ever hears anything said about
him by a private.
The sergeant hears everything, and his reply to backslack is a
straight-arm jab in the jaw. The sergeant is responsible only to his
captain, and no good captain will ever know anything about what a
sergeant does, and he will not believe it when told. If a fight occurs
between two privates, the sergeant jumps in, bumps their heads together
and licks them both. If a man feigns sick, or is drunk, the sergeant
chucks him under the pump. The regulations do not call for any such
treatment, but the sergeant does not know anything about the
regulations--he gets the thing done. The sergeant may be twenty years
old or sixty--age does not count. The sergeant is a father to his
men--he regards them all as children--bad boys--and his business is to
make them brave, honorable and dutiful soldiers.
The sergeant is always the first man up in the morning, the last man to
go to bed at night. He knows where his men are every minute of the day
or night. If they are actually sick, he is both nurse and physician, and
dictates gently to the surgeon what should be done. He is also the
undertaker, and the digging of ditches and laying out of latrines all
fall to his lot. Unlike the higher officers, he does not have to dress
"smart," and he is very apt to discard his uniform and go clothed like a
civilian teamster, excepting on special occasions when necessity demands
braid and buttons.
He knows everything, and nothing. No wild escapade of a higher officer
passes by him, yet he never tells.
Now one might suppose that he is an absolute tyrant, but a good sergeant
is a beneficent tyrant at the right time. To break the spirit of his men
will not do--it would unfit them for service--so what he seeks to do is
merely to bend their minds so as to match his own. Gradually they grow
to both love and fear him. In time of actual fight he transforms cowards
into heroes. He holds his men up to the scratch. In battle there are
often certain officers marked for death--they are to be shot by their
own men. It is a time of getting even--and in the hurly-burly and
excitement there are no witnesses. The sergeant is ever on the lookout
for such mutinies, and his revolver often sends to the dust the head
revolutionary before the dastardly plot can be carried out. In war-time
all executions are not judicial.
In actual truth, the sergeant is the only real, sure-enough fighting man
in the army. He is as rare as birds' teeth, and every officer anxiously
scans his recruits in search of good sergeant timber.
In business life, the man with the sergeant instincts is even more
valuable than in the army. The business sergeant is the man not in
evidence--who asks for no compliments or bouquets--who knows where
things are--who has no outside ambitions, and no desire save to do his
work. If he is too smart he will lay plots and plans for his own
promotion, and thereby he is pretty sure to defeat himself.