"APRES MOI LE DELUGE!"
Mrs. Bradley-Martin's sartorial kings and pseudo-queens,
her dukes and DuBarrys, princes and Pompadours, have
strutted their brief hour upon the mimic stage, disappearing
at daybreak like foul night-birds or an unclean dream--have
come and gone like the rank eructation of some crapulous
Sodom, a malodor from the cloacae of ancient capitals, a
breath blown from the festering lips of half-forgotten harlots,
a stench from the sepulcher of centuries devoid of shame.
Uncle Sam may now proceed to fumigate himself after his
enforced association with royal bummers and brazen
bawds; may comb the Bradley-Martin itch bacteria out of
his beard, and consider, for the ten-thousandth time, the
probable result of his strange commingling of royalty-
worshiping millionaire and sansculottic mendicant--how best
to put a ring in the nose of the golden calf ere it become a
Phalaris bull and relegate him to its belly. Countless
columns have been written, printed, possibly read, anent
the Bradley-Martin ball--all the preachers and teachers,
editors and other able idiots pouring forth voluminous
opinions. A tidal wave of printer's ink has swept across the
continent, churned to atrous foam by hurricanes of lawless
gibberish and wild gusts of resounding gab. The empyrean
has been ripped and the tympana of the too patient gods
ravished with fulsome commendation and foolish curse,
showers of Parthian arrows and wholesale consignments of
soft-soap darkening the sun as they hurtled hither and yon
through the shrinking atmosphere. A man dropping
suddenly in from Mars with a Nicaraguan canal scheme for
the consideration of Uncle Sam would have supposed
this simian hubbub and anserine to-do meant nothing less
than a new epocha for the universe, it being undecided
whether it should be auriferous or argentiferous--an age of
gold or a cycle of silver. Now that the costly "function" has
funked itself into howling farce, an uncomfortable failure,
and the infuscated revellers recovered somewhat from royal
katzenjammer, we find that the majestic earth has not
moved an inch out of its accustomed orbit, that the grass
still grows and the cows yet calve that the law of gravitation
remains unrepealed, and Omnipotence continues to bring
forth Mazzaroth in his season and guide Arcturus with his
sons. Perchance in time the American people may become
ashamed of having been thrown into a panic by the painful
effort of a pudgy parvenu to outdo even the Vanderbilts in
ostentatious vulgarity. Rev. Billy Kersands Rainsford
cannot save this country with his mouth, nor can Mrs.
Bradley-Martin wreck it with her money. It is entirely too
large to be permanently affected by the folly of any one
fool. Preacher and parvenu were alike making a
grandstand play. Now that the world has observed them,
and not without interest, let us hope that they will subside
for a little season.
This Dame DuBarry extravaganza was not without
significance to those familiar with history and its penchant
for repetition; but was by no means an epoch-maker. It
was simply one more festering sore on the syphilitic body
social--another unclean maggot industriously wriggling in
the malodorous carcass of a canine. It was another
evidence that civilization is in a continual flux, flowing now
forward, now backward--a brutal confession that the new
world aristocracy is oozing at present through the Armida-
palace or Domdaniel of DuBarrydom. The Bradley-Martins
are henceforth entitled to wear their ears interlaced
with laurel leaves as a sign of superiority in their "set."
They won the burro pennant honestly, if not easily, daylight
being plainly visible between their foam-crested crupper and
the panting nostrils of the Vanderbilts. They are now
monarch of Rag-fair, chief gyasticuti of the boundless realm
of Nescience and Noodledom. Mrs. Bradley-Martin has
triumphed gloriously, raised herself by her own garters to
the vulgar throne of Vanity, the dais of the almighty dollar.
She is now Delphic oracle of doodle-bugs and hierophant of
the hot stuff. Viva Regina! Likewise, rats! Like most of
New York's aristocracy, she is of even nobler lineage than
Lady Vere de Vere, daughter of a hundred earls, having
been sired by a duly registered American sovereign early in
the present century. His coat-of-arms was a cooper's adz
rampant, a beer-barrel couchant and the motto, "Two
heads are better than one." By wearing his neighbors'
cast-off clothes and feeding his family on cornbread and
"sow-belly," he was able to lay the foundation of that
fortune which has made his daughter facile princeps of
New York's patricians. John Jacob Astor, who acted as
royal consort to the cooper's regal daughter in the
quadrille d'honneur, is likewise descended from noble
Knights (of Labor) and dames of high degree. He traces
his lineage in unbroken line to that haughty Johann Jakob
who came to America in the steerage, wearing a Limburger
linsey-woolsey and a pair of wooden shoes. Beginning life
in the new world as a rat-catcher, he soon acquired a
gallon jug of Holland gin, a peck of Brummagem jewelry,
and robbed the Aborigines right and left. He wore the
same shirt the year 'round, slept with his dogs and invested
his groschens in such Manhattan dirt as he could
conveniently transport upon his person. Thus he enabled
his aristocratic descendants to wax so fat on "unearned
increment" that some of them must forswear their
fealty to Uncle Sam and seek in Yewrup a society whose
rough edges will not scratch the varnish off their culchah.
Mrs. Bradley-Martin does not exactly "look every inch a
queen," her horizontal having developed at the expense of
her perpendicular, suggesting the rather robust physique of
her father's beer barrels. Still, she is an attractive woman,
having the ruddy complexion of an unlicked postage stamp
and the go-as-you-please features of a Turkish carpet. Her
eyes are a trifle too ferrety, but the osculatory power of her
mouth in auld lang syne must have been such as to give
Cupid spinal curvature. Her nose retreats somewhat
precipitately from the chasm; but whether that be its original
pattern, or it has been gradually forced upwards by eager
pilgrims to her shrine of adjustable pearls, is a secret
hidden in her own heart. Like Willy Wally Astor, she finds
the customs of this country too crass to harmonize with her
supersensitive soul, and spends much time dangling about
the titled slobs "on the other side." Some time ago she
purchased the epicene young Earl of Craven as husband
for her daughter, in the humble hope of mixing cooperage
and coronets, and may yet be gran'ma to some little Lord
Bunghole or fair Lady Firkin. As a "pusher" in society she
can give points to Mrs. Potter Palmer or the wife of a
millionaire pork-packer . Although she has "seen" the bluff
of the notorious Smith-Vanderbilt-Belmont female and
"raised" her out of her bunion repositories, she has
probably not yet reached the summit of her social ambition.
Bred to shabby gentility , Miss Alva Smith proceeded to
"splurge" when she captured a Vanderbilt. She had
probably never seen a hundred dollar bill until permitted to
finger the fortune of the profane old ferryman who founded
her husband's aristocratic family. She was a parvenu, a
nouveau riche, and could not rest until she had
proclaimed that fact by squandering half a million of the
man's money whom she subsequently dishonored, on the
ball which Mrs. Bradley-Martin set herself to beat. Having
been divorced "for cause," she proceeded to crown her
gaucheries by purchasing for her ligneous-faced daughter a
disreputable duke who owes his title to a grand-aunt's
infamy--is the descendant of a plebeian who rose to power
by robbing dead soldiers and prostituting his sister to a
prince. Mrs. Bradley-Martin has trumped two of her rival's
cards--and a social game, like seven-up, "is never out till
it's played out."
The denunciation of the ball by Dr. Rainsford proved him
not only a notoriety-seeking preacher, but a selfish parasite
who lacks sufficient sense to disguise his hypocrisy. It
contained not one word of protest against the amassing of
enormous fortunes by the few at the expense of the many,
not a single plea for justice to a despoiled people, not one
word of Christian pity for their woes. It was simply a
warning--foolishly flung from the housetop instead of
whispered in the closet--that such reckless waste would
breed discontent in the home of want--would "make
demagogues and agitators dangerous!" Dr. Rainsford
would not alter, but conceal, existing conditions. His theory
is that robbery is all right so long as the people do not rebel
thereby imperiling the system by which they are despoiled.
From his fashionable pulpit and sumptuous home he hurls
forth his anathema-maranatha at those who would presume
to abridge the prescriptive rights of the plutocracy--who
doubt that grinding penury in a land bursting with fatness is
pleasing to the All-Father! He would by no means curtail
the wealth of Dives or better the condition of Lazarus; but
thinks it good policy for the former to refrain from piling his
plate so high in the presence of the hungry plebs, lest the
latter cease crying for crumbs and swipe the
tablecloth! Dr. Rainsford is a paid servant of Dives, his
duly ordained Pandarus. His duty is to tickle his masters
jaded palate with spiritual treacle seasoned with Jamaica
ginger, to cook up sensations as antidotes for ennui. If
the "agitators" cause a seismic upheaval that will wreck the
plutocracy, what is to become of the fashionable
preachers? Dr. Rainsford would not abolish Belshazzar's
feast--he would but close the door and draw the blinds, that
God's eye may not look upon the iniquity, nor his finger
trace upon the frescoed walls the fateful Mene Mene
Tekel Upharsin! Save thy breath, good doctor, to cool thy
dainty broth; for, mad with pride, thy master hears nor
heeds the gabble of the goose beneath his walls, nor the
watchdog's warning. Gnaw thy bone in peace, for the
people, schooled to patience and amused with panaceas,
will scarce resent the trampling of one more parvenu upon
their necks, be she ever so broad of beam. If some years
hence they should rise against the robbers, led on by
"dangerous demagogues," repine not, for every dog,
sacerdotal or otherwise, can but have his day.
Turgid Talmage must likewise unload; Talmage, who
presumes to teach not only theology but political economy;
who interlards his sermons with strange visions of Heaven,
dreams of Hell, and still more wonderful hints on how to
make a people terrestrially prosperous. He, like thousands
of "able editors," apologizes for such vulgar extravagance
by urging that it "puts money in circulation, makes
business better, and helps the people by supplying
employment!" Has the world passed into its dotage, or
simply become an universal asylum for idiots? If wanton
waste makes business better, then Uncle Sam has but to
squander in bal-masques, or other debauchery, his
seventy-five billions of wealth to inaugurate an industrial
boom! To gratify their taste for the barbaric, to
advertise themselves to all the earth as the eastern termini
of west-bound equines, the Bradley-Martins wiped out of
existence $500,000 of the world's wealth, leaving just that
much less available capital for productive enterprises. They
might as well have burned a building or sunk a vessel of
that value. It is urged that "labor was employed and paid."
Quite true; but tell me, thou resounding ministerial vacuum,
thou unreflecting editorial parrot, where is its product?
What has society to show for the expenditure of this
energy? A hole in its working capital--a hiatus in its larder
caused by employing and sustaining labor, not to produce
but to destroy. Prodigality on the part of the rich personally
benefits a few parasites, just as the bursting of a molasses
barrel fattens useless flies; but waste, by reducing the
amount of wealth available for reproduction, breeds general
want. A thousand editors have screamed in leaded type
that it were "worse for the wealthy to hoard than waste."
Thou lunatics, go learn the difference between a car and its
load of cotton, a bolt of muslin and that wherewith it is
measured, a nation's wealth and its exchange media. What
does a man with the wealth he "hoards?" Does he not
seek to make it earn an increment? Concentration of capital
may be bad for the people, but destruction of capital takes
the tools from their hands and the food from their lips. The
court of Louis XV., which American snobs have just
expended half-a-million trying to imitate, likewise, "made
business better" by wasting wealth--Madame DuBarry
posing as "public benefactress," and receiving no end of
encomiums from Paris shopkeepers, jewel merchants and
mantua-makers. Much money was "put in circulation and
labor employed" in furnishing forth the transient splendors
of players and prostitutes; but somehow France did not
prosper. Finally not even the pitiless screws of the
tax-farmer could wring blood from the national turnip. The
working capital of France was so far consumed that her
people stood helpless, perishing of hunger. Finally
Madame DuBarry was supplanted as "public benefactress"
by one with an even sharper tang to her tongue, namely,
la Belle Guillotine, who blithely led the quadrille
d'honneur, with a Robespierre for consort, to music
furnished gratis by the raucous throats of ragged sans-
culottes. Instead of lords and ladies treading the stately
minuet in Versailles saloons adorned with beauty roses, the
bare feet of hungry men beat time to the fierce Carmagnole
on Parisian pavements.
It is not a little suggestive that the participants in this
foolish fandango should have turned for inspiration to the court
of Louis XV., whose debauchery and depravity, the historian
declares, had not been paralleled since the year of Tiberius
and Commodus--that the Bradley-Martin "function" should
have been copied from the extravaganzas of a harlot!
What glorious exemplars for New York's Four Hundred!--a
dissolute king, and a woman thus apostrophized by Thomas
Carlyle: "Thou unclean thing, what a course was thine:
from that first truckle-bed, where thy mother bore thee to an
unnamed father; forward, through lowest subterranean
depths, and over highest sunlit heights of harlotdom and
rascaldom--to the guillotine-axe, which shears away thy
vainly whimpering head!" Of the 350 male revelers more
than 100 were costumed as Louis XV., while but three
considered Washington worthy of imitation. Was this the
result of admiration in New York's "hupper sukkles" for this
wretched Roi Faineant, or King Donothing, whose palace
was a brothel, and whose harlots stripped his subjects of
their paltry earnings and left them to perish? Louis XV.,
who permitted his country to be wined, its revenues
squandered, its provinces lost, and half-a-million men sent
to an untimely death that a prostitute might be revenged for
an epigram! Is that the kind of man our money lords
admire? Louis lived until the fleur-de-lis of France was
struck down in every land and dishonored on every sea,
then died, deserted by his drabs, cursed by his country,
and was consigned to the grave and the devil as
unceremoniously as though he were a dead dog! And now
more than one hundred men who have stripped the people
to enhance the splendor of palaces, don the royal robes of
this godless rake and do homage to bogus DuBarrys!
Small wonder that Dr. Rainsford feared such colossal
impudence might serve to remind Americans how France
got rid of royalty; might evoke a hoarse growl from the
many-headed monster; might cause some "dangerous
demagogue" to stir--perchance a Danton! Fit patron saint
for our own plutocracy is this swinish king, once called
Bien aime, the Well-beloved; but after some thirty years
of Bradley-Martinism, named Ame de boue--A soul of
mud! How much our super-select society resembles the
Madame DuBarrys, the Duc d'Aiguillons and Abbe Terrays,
who made the court of Louis a byword and a reproach, his
reign a crime, himself a hissing and a shaking of the head
of the nations!
Suggestive indeed that at the swellest of all swell affairs in
the American metropolis there should appear, according to
the press dispatches, "ten Mme. de Pompadours, eight
Mme. de Maintenons, four Mme. de la Vallieres, and three
Catherines of Russia." Good God! Has our "best society"
come to such a pass that its proudest ladies delight to
personate notorious prostitutes?" There was no Racine or
Moliere, no Charlotte Corday or Mme. de Stael"--the
men posed as profligate kings, the women as
courtesans! Yet in that same city young Mr. Seeley is
arrested for looking at a naked dancing-girl, and "Little
Egypt" has to "cut it" when she hears the cops! And what
is the difference, pray, between a Pompadour and a Five
Points nymph du pave? Simply this: The one rustles in
silks for diamonds, the other hustles in rags for bread, their
occupation being identical. New York was Tory even in
Revolutionary times. From its very foundation it has been
at the feet of royalty and mouthing of "divine right." It is
ever making itself an obtuse triangle before the god of its
idolatry--its knees and nose on the earth, its tail-feathers in
the air; but we had yet to learn that it considered "that
divinity which doth behedge a king" capable of sanctifying a
woman's shame, transforming a foul leman into an angel of
light! Catherine of Russia was an able woman, but a
notorious harlot, foul as Milton's portress of Hell; a woman
who, as Byron informs us, loved all he-things except her
husband. Is that why the masqueraders preferred the
character of Empress Catherine to that of Martha
Washington? Did they consider it more in keeping with the
company? Strange that each Russian empress was not
attended by a few of her favorite grenadiers, with "the fair-
faced Lanskoi," her boy-lover, thrown in as lagniappe.
More than one hundred Louis XVths and only ten
Pompadours! What a pity! But we may presume that each
Pompadour, like the frail original, was "in herself a host"!
Eight Maintenons, four Vallieres, and only one Louis XIVth
present to look after his personal property! How proud a
genuine American gentleman--one untainted with royalist
fever--would have felt to see his wife or daughter posing as
the leman of Lanskoi, of Louis XVth, or le Grande
Monarque--of whom Three-Eyed Billy of England once said
that he selected young men for his ministers and corrupt
old cats for his mistresses!
Half a million dollars gone up in frippery and flowers, and
the bedizened gang didn't get half the fun out of it that a
party of country yaps will extract from a candy-pulling or a
husking-bee. The Pompadours and DuBarrys didn't know
how. Louis XVth went around by himself in droves, stiff
and uncomfortable as a Presbyterian Sunday-school,
wishing every time his rapier galled his kibes or tangled his
royal legs that he had remained comfortably dead in that
dog-hole at St. Denis. There was entirely too much
formality for fun. The next time New York's toad-eaters
give a bal-masque they should disguise themselves as
American sovereigns and their consorts. Of course it will
be a trifle difficult for them to play the part of respectable
people; but they will find even awkward effort in that
direction refreshing, and calculated to inspire them with
respect for their country's flag.
* * *
A PILGRIMAGE TO PERDITION.
Sir Edwin Arnold is a profound optimist, and
apparently not a little proud of it. He recently said to a
reporter:
"The course of mankind is constantly towards perfection. I
believe in humanity. I believe in the world's great future.
The trend of human events emphasizes the truth of this
statement; though we may be horrified to-day by reading of
a brute who butchers his wife, these events should not
shake our faith. If we look at the matter philosophically we
will see that they are a diminishing series, and that the
world is growing grander and nobler,"
Optimism is a delightful thing, but is too frequently the
result of ignorance. Sir Edwin is a learned and talented
man, but he is evidently a stranger to the great world
which he discusses so complacently and approvingly. The
savant reposing in a palace-car, which is rushing through
the midnight storm at a rate of fifty miles an hour, regards
his situation with composure; but the unlettered engineer,
whose eye is on the track,--who notes every slippery curve,
swollen stream and overhanging bowlder,--who feels the
motive power of that proud train swaying and plunging like
a restless demon beneath his feet, is apt to be anxious
enough.
Sir Edwin is a palace-car passenger on the great world-
train, and knows little of the perils of the track. His coach
rolls smooth, he takes his ease and indulges in optimistic
moralizing, while those who serve him look death in the
face so frequently that they learn to mock him,--to take
desperate chances that may plunge them down to
destruction and drag all else after. It has been my lot to
look at life from the cab-windows, from the point of view of
the man with the grimy hand and the soiled jacket. While
Sir Edwin has been contemplating with dreamy interest the
faraway purple hills, I have been compelled to scrutinize
less giant objects closer at hand; hence it is not strange
that my opinion of the world should differ somewhat from
that entertained by the speculative author of "The Light of
Asia." In brief Sir Edwin knows all about the beauty, wealth
and success which make earth a Paradise for the few; I
something of that hideousness, poverty and despair that
make it a Purgatory for the many. That world to which Sir
Edwin belongs, and which he contemplates so approvingly,
is but the gold-leaf on the graven image, the bright foam on
the bosom of a bottomless sea, a verdant crust cast over a
chaos of fierce despair,--which will some day rip it into a
million ribbons, enact an all-embracing French Revolution
that will sweep our boasted "Car of Progress" back a
thousand years on the crimson crest of a wave of blood
and fire! If Sir Edwin had explored the infernal vortex
beneath his feet he would not talk so complacently of the
"trend of human events." For the benefit of Sir Edwin and
many other wealthy and cultured palace-car passengers
who amuse themselves with theories; who infer that
because human slavery is abolished in the Occident and
the thrones of the Orient are beginning to totter before the
might of democracy; because science is marching on to
triumph after triumph, and no Spanish Inquisition or English
Court of High Commission longer casts its upas-shadow
athwart the hearts of men, the great world is "growing
nobler and better," I hereby tender my services to pilot
them through that Perdition which does not hover
indeterminate in the inane limboes of dogmatic theology,
but hath a well-defined latitude and longitude; is visual,
tactual,--in which untold millions of mankind writhe and
shriek from the cradle to the grave!
. . .
It is no long journey to the portals of the nether world. In
many a costly church the worshipers may hear during the
rests in the doxology the shrieks of the damned. A walk of
a few blocks at most in any of our great, and many of our
smaller American cities will enable us to enter that earthly
Gehenna whose horrors the pen of Dante could scarce
picture, which threatens to engulf the world. Even in
Texas, a land so favored by the gods, so blest with brave
men and noble women, we may enter the purlieus of the
place of pain, across whose portal is inscribed the legend o'
dark despair; may commune with all Gehenna's grisly
gorgons and witness the writhings of thousands of wretched
creatures beneath the fierce fire-whips of the infernal furies.
Let us take a typical American city; not that here we are
nearer the great red heart of Hell than are the people of
other lands. What is true of one is true in greater or less
degree of every city throughout the world. We will suppose
the city we are to examine to contain a million inhabitants.
We will pause to contemplate its miles of broad streets and
magnificent buildings; its imposing schools and scores of
costly churches that rear their symmetrical spires far into
the empyrean and fill the great dome with their melodious
chimes; its marble fountains and costly plants which ravish
the senses with sweet perfumes; its wealth and wisdom,
luxury and learning, its philanthropic people and happy
homes were Peace reigns and Plenty ever smiles. That is
one side of the shield,--the one upon which the Arnolds and
Talmages have looked so long that they forget there is any
other,--that a golden veil may hide the face of a Fury or a
Fiend.
The clock is proclaiming Night and Sin's high noon; follow
me and I will show you why I do not believe in "humanity"
quite so implicitly as does Sir Edwin; why even Dr. Talmage
has failed to wean me from "the awful sin of pessimism."
It is not necessary to linger long in the low concert halls
and brothels where girls scarce in their teens are made the
prey of the rum-inflamed passions of brutes old enough to
he their grandsires; where old roues, many of whose
names are a power "on 'change," bid against each other
for half-developed maids whose virginity is certified to by a
physician; where green gawks from the country are made
drunk with cheap wines sold to them at fancy prices by
courtesans, plucked and turned over to a subsidized police
if they protest; where hundreds of pure girls are entrapped,
drugged and ruined every day of the world. These social
ulcers are so protrusive, have been written up so frequently
by enterprising young reporters who naively supposed that
to expose was to suppress, that even optimistic Dr.
Talmage must at least be cognizant that such places
exist,--even in Brooklyn, which enjoys the supernal blessing
of his direct ministrations, and from which moral Mecca his
sounding sentences are transmitted by the vicarious
apostles of the press to all men,--who possess a penchant
for light literature!
One glance into the low gambling dens, where haggard
creatures, created in God's image, but long ago degraded
below the brute level, nightly waste the few pence which
they pick up Heaven alone knows how,--perhaps by selling
the virtue of their daughters, robbing their wives of ill-got
gains or plundering the pockets of drunken laborers. We
may pass by the opium joints where women of all ages and
classes lie for hours, stupid with filthy fumes, at the mercy
of bestial orientals and drunken negroes; also those dives
devoted to forms of debauchery so debased that many a
blase man of the world does not believe their existence
more than a demoniacal dream. These are vortices of vice
too fearfully foul for eyes of aught but fiends; the air too
putrid for lungs that inhale that of pure and happy homes.
We must shun those plague spots, else bear false witness
to the world, for any true pen-picture of their hell-born
horrors would, like Medusa's awful face, turn all who gazed
thereon to stone!
. . .
We must content ourselves with traveling the purlieus of
Perdition, the sulphur-fumes of those profounder depths of
degradation being too strong for lungs accustomed to chant
optimistic lays; the glare of the burning marl too fierce for
eyes used only to vernal meads and still waters; but even
here, in the Purgatorium as it were, sights and sounds
calculated to appall the stoutest heart are not wanting.
Here stalks the demon Poverty. He is by no means
so hideous as some of his brethren in the infernal
hierarchy, and perchance we may inspect his dominions
without succumbing to moral hysteria.
Poverty? What do you know of it, my well-fed optimistic
friends? You pay your taxes, give a few pence to the
beggar at the street corner, perhaps contribute a few
dollars to this or the other relief fund that does not relieve,--
and wonder that people do not go to work and earn their
bread. "There is always work for those who really want it,"
one of you complacently informs me. Are you quite sure?
In a city like this we are traversing I have seen fifty
thousand men who "really wanted work," and could not find
it. Fifty thousand unemployed, destitute and desperate
people in one city. I was one of the number. Why didn't
they scatter? you will ask. Whither should they go, and
how? Take to the snow-clad country, be arrested as vags,
and herded as criminals? For my part I did "scatter,"--
tramped one hundred miles in a northern winter without
food, and found three days' employment,--loading ice into
box cars! Many of those fifty thousand idle men had
families to support. How did they do it? Now you are
getting into Hell!
Come with me and I will show you thousands of families in
this city alone who have not had in six months as good a
meal as could be picked out of your garbage barrel;
hundreds of families that sleep this winter night on the bare
floor of filthy tenements or huddled like swine on an armful
of foul rags and straw; delicate women and children dying
for lack of proper warmth and nourishment; hundreds of
men who regard it as a godsend to get arrested that they
may have shelter from the piercing winds of the night and a
bite to eat in the morning. Put your head into this 10-cent
lodging house if you want to get some new ideas regarding
the "trend of humanity." Glance into this low
groggery--but one of several thousand in this great
city--and "size up the gang" before being too sure that a
"pessimist" is simply a person troubled with a
superabundance of black bile. Of the million people who
make up this great city, probably six hundred thousand are
already plunged deep in the abyss where lurk Want and
Crime, or trembling on its verge, and the number who thus
"live from hand to mouth," who feel that they have "no
stake in the country,"--that God and man are against them--
is ever on the increase. That verdant, sunkissed crust
upon which Arnolds complacently saunter and Talmages
proudly strut, grows thinner year by year, while the fires
below wax ever hotter, more turbulent, more explosive!
Would you know how thin this crust actually is; how fissured
and honey-combed from beneath, until it can scarce sustain
its own weight, and the sulphur fumes ever rise through it
like steam through a sieve, inspect the city government and
note how and what constitutes the controlling power. When
you learn, as you will if you examine carefully, that those
thousands of vile drinking dens dictate who shall be our
public servants, and what laws we shall live under; that the
"madam" of the fashionable bagnio is more potent at police
headquarters than any delegation of the Y.M.C.A.; that no
whereas or resolution of philanthropists can withstand the
fiat of the ward bosses; that everywhere there is collusion
with criminals and jobbery, perhaps you will not be quite so
certain of "the world's great future."
. . .
Do you turn to the church to make good the promise of the
optimist? Let us explore the "amen corner" and see how
many pious souls we shall there find whose incomes are
chiefly drawn from buildings rented for immoral
purposes. Even while I write I see an old white-haired
man, whose power in prayer is the pride of his church,
making his rounds, collecting his monthly stipend from the
keepers of negro brothels and the lowest grade of drinking
dens,--places where nightly assemble people of all ages,
colors and sexes and enact scenes that might bring a blush
to even the brazen front of Belial!
The church? What is it doing to extinguish the well-nigh
shoreless Gehenna that threatens to engulf it? Drilling an
augur-hole here and there in the thin crust and pouring in a
few drops of water,--or oil, as the case may be; founding a
few missions; distributing a little dole; sending a few Bibles
to the heathen to offset the much bad whisky supplied them
by "Christian countries"; perfecting its choir and sending its
pastor to the Orient to hunt for "confirmation of Holy
Scripture "amid the mummified cats of Egypt or the hoary
trash of Palestine!
What is true of the city is true, though in lesser degree, of
the country. If you think our agricultural brethren have no
taste of Hell examine the list of mortgages! If you do not
believe that Moloch is the presiding deity of commerce visit
Trafalgar Square, the Place de la Concorde, or, worst of all,
our own Wall Street. In old times men who despoiled
others were called pirates and banditti; were execrated by
honest men, anathematized by the church, a price set upon
their heads by the State; yet they never pretended to be
other than what they were; they did their devilish work
openly, with the strong hand. Wall Street is a den of
banditti who rob, not by open force, but by secret fraud.
The tool of the seventeenth century freebooter was the
flashing sword; that of his nineteenth century successor the
cowardly and sneaking lie. The first pillaged a few ships,
towns and castles; the latter plunders hundreds of
thousands every year of the world, and then has the
sublime audacity to come into court and plead that his
business is both legitimate and necessary. And so rotten is
society,--so prostrate does it cower before the golden calf--
that the buccaneer, instead of being bastinadoed or
beheaded, is crowned with bays! How can we harmonize
these stubborn facts with Sir Edwin's view that "the course
of mankind is constantly toward perfection?" Of course we
should "look at the matter philosophically"; the trouble is
that too many content themselves merely with
philosophizing and do not look at the matter at all, but only
at some optimistic, far-fetched theory thereof.
It is very pleasant to close our eyes and believe--if we can--
that the world is gradually working out its salvation; that it is
steadily "growing grander and nobler"; to preach against
"the sins of pessimism"; but unfortunately the stubborn fact
is all too palpable that the shadow of the social world grows
ever broader and deeper; that while the sunlight gilds the
mountain tops the great valleys, wherein are congregated
the millions of "poor people who have no work," are buried
in cimmerian night. If Sir Edwin and Dr. Talmage will but
listen they may hear shrieks of woe and wail--not unmingled
with bitter curses--cleaving that inky pall; may hear voices
proclaiming, Let there be light--though the world blaze for it!
. . .
Progress? We boast of progress? Progress whither?
From the slavery of the auction-block and cat-o'-nine-tails to
that of the great industrial system, where souls as well as
bodies are bought and sold; where wealth is created as by
the magic wand of a genie or the touch of gold-accursed
King Midas, while thousands and tens of thousands beg in
God's great name for the poor privilege of wearing out their
wretched lives in the brutal treadmill,--to barter their blood
for a scanty crust of black bread and beg in vain;
then, finding the world against them, turn their hands
against the world,--become recruits to the great army of
crime. From the child-like simplicity, where man saw and
adored the Deity in all his works, heard his laughter in the
ripple of the stream, his voice in the thunder-storm and saw
his anger in the writhen bolt, to the present age of
skepticism, where he can see his Creator nowhere; and,
blinder than his barbarian ancestors--knowing more of
processes but less of principles--protests that Force is the
only Demiurgus, dead matter the only Immortal.
Progress toward Greatness! Greatness of what? Certainly
not of the individual, for the present conditions tend toward
mediocrity. Greatness of the State? What does eternity
know of States, that to promote their welfare immortal souls
should be sacrificed? Why toil and travail, suffer and sin
for toy balloons which destiny will whistle down the winds?
There are entirely too many self-commissioned watchmen,
who, like Sir Edwin, sit at ease in their boxes and cry all's
well,--meaning thereby that it is so with them; too many
seers who look into their own cozy back parlors and
imagine that they are standing on a Mirza's Hill and reading
the riddle of human life; too many listening enchanted to
their own sweet voices and mistaking the sound for a
world-wide paean of praise, or at least the drowsy hum of
human content. Such are blind Neros who complacently
fiddle while Rome is, if not actually burning, yet filled to
overflowing with combustibles, ready to burst into flame!