"For Christ's sake, Cap, give me the price of a sandwich!"
I stopped and surveyed the speaker, not because the
request was unusual, but because the applicant for aid had
not acquired the beggar's whine. He was a large, powerful
man, evidently a mechanic, for every trade leaves its
peculiar stamp upon its followers.
"Why should I give you a dime? You are far more able to
work than I. A man with half your strength should be
ashamed to beg."
"Work?" he retorted bitterly. "Give me a job--at anything--
and see if I do not prove myself a man."
"But I have nothing for you to do."
"A dozen men have told me that to-day . You sneer at me
because I do not earn the bread I eat, yet decline to give
me an opportunity to do so."
I steered him against a lunch counter and watched him
chisel desolation into a silver dollar, then listened to his
story--one that I had heard a hundred times within the year.
Thrown out of employment by the business depression, he
had tramped in search of work until he found himself
penniless, starving in the streets of a strange city. He
handed me a letter, dated St. Louis, written by his wife.
Some of the words were misspelled and the bad
chirography was blotted as if by falling tears, but it breathed
the spirit of a Roman matron, of a Spartan mother. Both
the children were ill. She had obtained a little sewing and
provided food and some medicine, but two months' rent
was due and the landlord would turn them out unless it was
promptly paid. She would do the best she could, and knew
that her husband would do the same. Then through the
blinding tears came a flash of nether fire. Transformed into
respectable English it read:
"Were I a man I would not tramp from city to city begging
employment only to be refused. Were I a man I would not
see my babies starve while people are piling up millions of
money which they can never need. In this country there
should be an opportunity for every man to make a living.
Were I a man I would make an effort to release myself and
my unhappy fellows from this brutal industrial bondage, this
chronic pauperism--if it cost my life. I have two sons,
whom God knows I do dearly love; but I would consecrate
them to the holy cause of human liberty if I knew they
would perish on the scaffold. I would rather see them die
like dogs than live like slaves."
He sat a long time silent after returning the letter to his
pocket, then said as though speaking to himself:
"I wonder if the rich people ever pause to reflect that
there's a million brawny men in my condition to-night--a
million men who only lack a leader? I wonder if they
think we'll stand this kind o' thing forever? Don't talk
to me about patriotism," he interrupted, fiercely. "No man
can be a patriot on an empty stomach! Why should I care
for the preservation of a government of, for and by the
plutocrat? Let it go to the devil across lots! D--n a flag
beneath which a competent and industrious mechanic
cannot make a living. Anarchy? Is anarchy worse than
starvation? When conditions become such that a
workingman is half the time an ill-fed serf, and the other
half a wretched vagabond, he's ready for a change of any
kind--by any means. I am supposed to be entitled to 'Life,
Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.' I have Liberty--to
starve--and I can pursue Happiness--or rainbows--to my
heart's content. There's absolutely no law prohibiting my
using the horns of the moon for a hatrack if I feel so
disposed!"
. . .
The optimists who are depending upon the "conservatism"
of the American people to maintain intact our political and
industrial systems; who proclaim that the present too
apparent spirit of unrest is but the ephemeral effect of a few
professional agitators, are of the same myopic brood as
those French aristocrats who declared that all was well until
the crust over the tartarean fires--steadily eaten away from
beneath, steadily hammered upon from above--gave way
with a crash like the crack of doom and that fair land was
transformed as if by infernal magic into a high-flaming
vortex of chaos, engulfing all forms and formulas,
threatening the civilization of a world.
"After us the deluge!" cried those court parasites, who, with
more understanding than their fellows, read aright the
mene, mene, tekel upharsin traced upon the walls of
royalty. But the deluge waited not upon their convenience.
Like another avatar of Death gendered by Pride in the
womb of Sin, it burst forth to appall the world. But the
American multi-millionaires mock at the "deluge"--can in
nowise understand how it were possible for the thin crust
that holds in thrall the fierce Gehenna fires to give 'way
beneath THEIR feet, dance they upon it never so hard.
The American nation is trembling on the verge of an
industrial revolution--a revolution that is inevitable; that will
come peaceably if it can, forcibly if it must. So ripe are the
American workingmen for revolt against the existing order
of things; so galled are they by the heavy yoke laid upon
them; so desperate have they become that it but needs a
strong man to organize and lead them, and our present
industrial system--perhaps our political, also--would crumble
like an eggshell in the grip of an angry Titan.
Nor is the dissatisfaction confined to the industrial class, the
farmer, that Atlas upon whose broad shoulders the great
world rests, is in full sympathy with every attack made upon
the Cormorant by the Commune. While not ready for a
revolution by force, he would not take up arms in defense
of the prescriptive rights of the plutocrat from the assaults
of the proletariat. Yet the American press proclaims that all
is well! The "able editor" looks into his leather spectacles--
free trade or high tariff brand--and with owl-like gravity
announces that if the import tax on putty be increased
somewhat, or fiddle-strings be placed on the free list, the
American mechanic will have money to throw at the birds--
that mortgages and mendicancy will pass like a hideous
nightmare, and the farmer gayly bestride his sulky plow
attired like unto Solomon in all his glory.
. . .
What is wrong? In God's name, what is right? Here we
have the most fertile land upon the globe, the best
supplied with all things necessary to a prosperous
people. Our resources are not half developed; there is no
dearth of capital; our working people are the most
intelligent, energetic and capable upon which the sun ever
shone.
Man for man the world never contained their equal. Their
productive capability is the marvel even of this age of
industrial miracles. And yet, with every nerve strained to its
utmost tension; toiling, saving--at very death-grips with
destiny--they are sinking year by year deeper into the
Slough of Despond--into that most frightful of all Gehennas,
the hell of want!
Nor is this all. While those who toil are but fighting a losing
battle wearing out hand and heart and brain for a crust that
becomes ever scantier, ever more bitter--there are
thousands and tens of thousands who cannot even obtain
the poor privilege of tramping in this brutal treadmill, but
must stand with folded arms and starve, else beg or steal.
All this might be borne--would be endured with heroic
fortitude--if such were the lot of all; but while the opportunity
to wear out one's strength for a bare existence is becoming
ever more a privilege to be grateful for, we are making
millionaires by the hundreds. While the many battle
desperately for life, the few are piling up fortunes beside
which the famed wealth of ancient Lydia's kings were but a
beggar's patrimony. The employer is becoming ever more
an autocrat, the employee ever more dependent upon his
good pleasure for the poor privilege of existing upon the
earth.
. . .
To say that the "conservatism" of the American
workingman will cause him to patiently endure all this is to
brand him a spiritless slave, deserving not only slavery, but
the shackles and the knout. He will not endure it much
longer, and when his patience reaches its utmost limit--
when he tires of filling his belly with the East wind supplied
him in such plentitude by aspiring politicians and "able
editors," look ye to see something break.
. . .
The problems for our statesmen to solve are, First, how to
insure to every person able and willing to work an
opportunity to earn an honest livelihood; Second, to effect a
more suitable distribution of the wealth created among the
factors engaged in its production. All other problems now
engaging the attention of publicists sink into insignificance
beside these. They are to practical statecraft what the
immortality of the soul is to theology. They must be solved;
at least, some progress must be made in that direction or
force will ere long attempt it. The trouble with such
convulsions is that they invariably produce temporary evil,
but do not always compensate it with permanent good.
They are a kind of social mania a potu, racking the whole
organism, debilitating it--good chiefly as frightful examples
of what evil customs lead to.
To diagnose the disease and prescribe a remedy were no
easy task. There is infinitely more the matter than a
maladjustment of the tariff, inflated railway stocks or a
dearth of white dollars. It is a most difficult, a wonderfully
intricate problem--one entirely without precedent. The rapid
development of America; the still more remarkable
advancement in the science of mechanics, conjoined to a
political organism not yet fully developed, but half
understood, yet marking an epoch in man's social progress;
commercial customs of by-gone days surviving in the midst
of much that is new--really when you come to think of it you
may well wonder that we have got thus far without more
than one great convulsion! Clearly it is no place for
catholicons.
That a comparatively small class of men are absorbing the
wealth of the country as fast as it is produced, leasing to
those who create it scarce a bare subsistence, is patent to
all; that the vast body of the people, clothed with political
power and imbued with the spirit of "equality," will not
permit such conditions to long continue, any thoughtful man
will concede. Even in European countries, where the
working people have come to regard privileged classes as a
matter of course, there are mutterings of a coming storm
that will only gather fresh terrors by delay. In Europe the
change will probably be wrought by revolution; in America it
may be achieved by peaceful evolution if the moneyed
aristocracy does not, with its checks and repressions--with
its corrupted judiciary, purchased legislators and
obsequious press--drive a people, already sorely vexed, to
unreasoning madness.
. . .
What shall we do? We must avoid the two extremes--that
of the radical reformer and the apostle of laissez faire.
We will find a middle course safest and best--will need to
proceed with caution, but by no means with cowardice.
The politico-economic school that would at once change the
existing order of things with as much sang-froid as a
miller substitutes steam for water-power forgets that society
is not a machine; that it was not made to order like a
newspaper editorial, and that to attempt by a radical
process to make it other than what it is--to change its
genius arbitrarily--were as fatuous as trying to transform a
wolf into a watchdog by a chemical process or surgical
operation. But while the radical "reformer"--the man who
would ignore the lessons of history and launch boldly out
upon the tempestuous sea of experimentalism--is one
dangerous extreme, we must remember that it is not the
only one. In avoiding Scylla we must not forget
Charybdis. If we are to look ever to the past, to make no
experiments, to become the bondslaves of precedent, then
progress is at an end and society must petrify, retrograde
or consume itself in fierce fire whirlwinds.
When the American people emancipate themselves from
party-slavery--than which there is none more debasing;
when they cease to fight the battles of ambitious place-
hunters and begin in true earnest to fight their own, then,
and not till then, will the faults of our social organism be
rapidly reduced to the minimum. When the common people
of this country decline to be divided into two or more hostile
camps by "issues" carefully concocted by political
harlequins, then will the combined wisdom, purified of
partisan prejudice, evolve the best possible national polity.
How many of the hard-working people of this nation who
are now assiduously assailing or defending the dogma of
protection or free trade or any other of the many "issues"
evolved from time to time by professional politicians as a
kind of Pegasus upon which they fondly hope to ride into
power--ever carefully considered the question in all its
bearings; studied it from a national, sectional or even
individual standpoint. Questions upon which Adam Smith
and Auguste Compte, Jefferson and Hamilton disagreed,
are settled by the dicta of a partisan convention--composed
chiefly of political hacks and irresponsible hoodlums--with
less trouble than a colored wench selects a calico gown.
The American people, as P. T. Barnum long ago pointed
out, have a weakness for humbugs. They are the natural
prey of the charlatan, and in nothing more so than in
matters political. Despite their boasted intelligence, they
will follow with a trust that partakes of the pathetic the
mountebank who can perform the most sleight-of-hand
tricks, the demagogue who can make the most noise. They
think, but are too busy or indifferent to think deeply, to
reason closely. They "jump at conclusions," assert their
correctness stubbornly and prove the courage of their
convictions by their ballots. They demonstrate their
"independence" by choosing their political fetich, their
confidence in the infallibility of their judgment by worshiping
it blindly. Herein lies the chief danger--danger that the
American workingman will follow this or that ignus fatuus,
hoping thereby to find a shorter northwest passage to
impossible spice islands, until poverty has degraded him
from a self-respecting sovereign into a volcanic sans
culotte; until he loses hope of bettering his condition by
whereases, resolutions, trades-unions, acts of Congress,
etc., and, like another blind and desperate Samson, lays his
brawny hands upon the pillars of the temple and pulls it
down about his ears.
* * *
THE WOMAN THOU GAVEST ME.
Now that the clarion voice of the reformer is heard in the
land, demanding for woman all the rights and privileges
enjoyed by the sterner sex, perhaps it would be well to ask
the fair client to come into court and establish that "natural
equality" so vigorously claimed for her, as well as the fact, if
fact it be, that she is being "wronged" and "cruelly
oppressed" by the tyrant man.
Is it possible that the dear creature has, for some
thousands of years, been robbed of her birthright and
relegated to an inferior position in matters mundane simply
because her biceps are not so large as those of her
big brother, and she has no warlike whiskers?
As her attorneys in the suit to try title to this world's
wardship clamor for truth without trimmings, and rest their
case upon "principles of justice" untainted by prescription
or praemunire, suppose we grant their prayer and
proceed to the consideration of their cause unhandicapped
by chivalric sentiment.
That the greater intelligence should control the lesser must
be conceded. To deny it would be to deny man's right to
the life and labor of inferior animals, to question God's
authority to govern man or beast. If the experience of
several thousand years may be admitted in evidence the
subserviency of the minor to the major intelligence is an
immutable law of nature. Only equal minds can be
accorded equal authority without doing violence to this law.
Is woman man's intellectual peer, entitled to share equally
with him the wardship of this world? The simple fact that
for thousands of years man has been able to hold her in
that "state of subjection" of which her attorneys so bitterly
complain, is sufficient answer to this question,--is proof
positive that he is as much her superior mentally as
physically. This sounds unchivalrous, but she will please
remember that her attorneys insist that this cause be tried
solely upon its merits. Brute force does not rule the world.
If it did the lion or the elephant would be creation's lord,
and the Ethiop and the red Indian drive the Caucasian into
the waste places of the earth or reduce him to slavery.
Knowledge is power; brain not brawn is master throughout
the world. Had all Eve's fair daughters been blessed with
more than masculine strength their position would have
been practically the same. They would have sung lullabies
to the little ones, adorned themselves, and dreamed of
love and love's conquests while their brothers founded
empires, subdued the forces of nature and measured the
stars.
And both sexes would have been well content, as they
have ever been, despite the protests of self-constituted
"reformers" of the order established by the Infinite. Man is
creation's lord de facto and de jure. The immutable
laws of nature make his sovereignty both a privilege and a
duty. The voice of prophecy proclaims him king; he wears
his crown by Divine ordination and right of conquest.
Woman was created to be "an help-meet unto man," not
his co-ruler. It matters not whether Genesis be fact or
fiction; that such was her destiny she has proven by
fulfilling it.
Whatever "rights and privileges" she enjoys must be man's
free gift. Man asserts his position; woman can but ask to
share the fruits of his victories. These he can divide with
her; but he could not if he would, share with her his
sovereignty, his power, because he cannot endow her with
his judgment, his mental vigor, his courage and enterprise.
Whether he wills it or not, man must perforce remain the
master of the world, God's sole viceregent on this earth.
In very few civilized countries does man manifest much
opposition to the enfranchisement of woman. Many favor it
heartily, and those who object do so chiefly on the ground
that woman does not want it. Let a majority of the women
in any state of the American Union ask enfranchisement
and it will be accorded them. Let them unite in demanding
any particular legislation and it will be enacted. Let them
ask any possible thing whatsoever of their husbands and
brothers and it will not be denied them.
Woman does not demand the ballot, because her interest
centers in her home rather than her country; because she
shrinks from responsibility; because she knows that
she may safely trust her destiny to those who would die for
her.
Paradoxical as it may appear, woman is at once the subject
and the sovereign of man, his inferior and superior,
mentally and physically. His inferior in strength she is his
superior in beauty. Woman is the paragon of physical
perfection. It is small wonder that the simple people of
bygone days believed that gods and angels became
enamored of the daughters of men and left heaven to bask
in their sunny smiles. The mental differences of the sexes
correlate with the physical. Woman's mind is not so
comprehensive, her intellect not so strong as that of man,
but it is of finer texture. What it lacks in vigor it gains in
subtility. If the mind of man is a Corliss engine, throbbing
with resistless strength and energy, that of woman is a
Geneva watch, by which the mightier machine is regulated.
Occasionally a woman enters the field of masculine
endeavor and keeps pace with the strongest; but such
cases are rare exceptions. The women who have really
taken high rank in art or literature may be counted on the
fingers of one hand, and those who have achieved anything
remarkable in the field of invention, science or government,
upon the fingers of the other.
"It is not good that man should be alone;" and it would not
be did he, like Cadmus' soldiers, spring full grown from the
earth. Man is the brain, woman the heart of the human
race. She is the color and fragrance of the flower, the
bright bow in the black o'erhanging firmament of life, the
sweet chord that makes complete the human diapason.
If woman is kept in a "state of subjection," as those who
are trying to drag her into court and force her to file a bill of
grievances against her companion assert, she is certainly
the proudest of earthly subjects. If she is a "slave"
she is bound with chains of her own forging and wears
them because she wills it. In obeying she rules, in serving
she leads captive her captor. Really she is the autocrat of
earth, the power behind the throne, the ruler of those who
rule.
In all life's battles woman's love is man's chief incentive, his
greatest guerdon of victory. For woman he bares his
bosom to every peril, braves every danger. It is for her that
he subdues the elements and searches out the hidden
treasures of earth; for her that he measures the stars and
determines the procession of the planets, for her that he
fills the world with art and luxury,--for her that he is a
creative god, rather than a destructive demon.
Woman is with us but not of us. She is in very truth "but
little lower than the angels," and we should not drag her
down to our level under pretense of lifting her to greater
heights. Give to her every possible advantage; open to her
every calling and profession that she cares to enter; accord
her all she asks, not grudgingly but cheerfully; but do not
force upon her "rights" she does not want, duties she
would shun, and which that beneficent God, who gave her
to us to civilize and humanize us, destined for our own
strong hands.
* * *
CHRIST COMES TO TEXAS.