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.