honest companies, have naturally an instinct and spur that prompteth
them unto virtuous actions, and withdraws them from vice, which is
called honor. Those same men, when by base subjection and constraint
they are brought under and kept down, turn aside from that noble
disposition, by which they formerly were inclined to virtue, to shake
off that bond of servitude, wherein they are so tyrannously enslaved;
for it is agreeable to the nature of man to long after things forbidden,
and to desire what is denied us. By this liberty they entered into a
very laudable emulation, to do all of them what they saw did please one.
If any of the gallants or ladies should say, 'Let us drink,' they would
all drink. If any one of them said, 'Let us play,' they all played. If
one said, 'Let us go a walking into the fields,' they went all. If it
were to go a hawking, or a hunting, the ladies mounted upon dainty
well-paced nags, seated in a stately palfrey saddle, carried on their
lovely fists either a sparhawk, or a lanneret, or a marlin, and the young
gallants carried the other kinds of hawks. So nobly were they taught,
that there was neither he nor she amongst them, but could read, write,
sing, play upon several musical instruments, speak five or six several
languages, and compose in them all very quaintly, both in verse and
prose. Never were seen so valiant knights, so noble and worthy, so
dexterous and skilful both on foot and horseback, more brisk and lively,
more nimble and quick, or better handling all manner of weapons, than
were there. Never were seen ladies so proper and handsome, so miniard
and dainty, less forward, or more ready with their hand, and with their
needle, in every honest and free action belonging to that sex, than were
there."
[Illustration]
+A few days ago+ the red ghost of revolution showed itself in the White
House. The President saw it and threatened it with his boxing fists:
"What are you looking for here, be off to Russia." "You are comical in
your excitement," answered Revolution. "You must know, I am not only
Russian, I am international, at home here as well as on the other side
of the great water."
+A Proposition.+--Would it not be wiser to explain theories out of life
and not life out of theories?
VIVE LE ROI
BY FRANCES MAULE BJORKMAN
Aye, vive le roi. The King is dead--
So move our lives from day to day.
The triumph of to-morrow's lord
Meets for our former chief's decay.
Then love and live and laugh and sing--
The world is good and life is free--
There's not a single care I know
That's worth a single tear from me.
What's love or fame or place or power?
What's wealth when we shall come to die?
What matters anything on earth
So long as only I am I?
The Joy or grief or love or shame
That holds its little hour of sway
Is only worth its destined time--
What use to try to make it stay?
Aye, let it go. The monarch dead,
A better king our shouts may hail
And if a worse--well, still be glad;
He too will pass behind the vail.
They all must pass--fame, joy and love,
The sting of grief, the blot of shame;
The only thing that really counts
Is how we bear the praise or blame.
I'll take the good the while it lasts
And when it goes I'll learn to sing,
All eager for the coming joy--
"The king is dead, long live the king."
Reflections of A Rich Man
+If God were not in existence+ we would have to order one from the
Professors of Theology.
The fear, instilled in the majority of the poor, with the God, Devil,
Heaven and Hell idea, is greater than their dread of a hundred thousand
policemen. Had we not given God the place of Chief Gendarme of the
Universe, we would need twice as many soldiers and police as we have
to-day.
* * * * *
+A poor devil+ who owns but one million dollars said to me the other day:
"I, in your place, would rather contribute money towards art and
literature than to donate it to the Baptist Church." What an
impracticable fellow! Art and literature, among the common people, only
tends to cause mischief. They are to remain our privilege. We know the
demands of good taste and we can afford to pay for the aesthetic
pleasures of life. The majority is unable to do that; besides, to teach
them the beauty of art only means to make them discontented and
rebellious against our authority.
* * * * *
+I frankly admit+ I never had a great admiration for Jesus of Nazareth. A
man of disordered circumstances arouses my disgust. Jesus was neither
engaged in any kind of a business, nor did he possess as much as a bank
account, nor even a steady home. He preached to the poor. What for? The
poor should work and not philosophize. The Scriptures tell nowhere that
Jesus returned the mule, upon which he made his entry into Jerusalem, to
the owner, or that he paid him for it. I strongly suspect he did not do
it. One thing is certain, I never would have taken this dreamer of the
abolition of profits as my business partner.
* * * * *
+It was very hot+ yesterday. I walked through my park, intending to betake
myself to my favorite place for rest and reverie. Suddenly I stood
still, arrested by the sight of a man lying under a tree. In my park?
And how the fellow looked! In rags and dirty! I have been told I was
kind-hearted, and I realized this myself at the moment. I walked over to
the man and inquired interestedly: "Are you ill?" He grunted in reply.
The wretch must have thought, in his sleep, that I was one of his kind.
My generosity did not cease. "If you need money, do not feel shy about
telling me. How much do you need. I am the rich X Y Z, who has a
fabulous fortune, as you have undoubtedly heard." At this remark the
scoundrel turned on the other side, with his back toward me, and said,
while yawning: "What I want? I want to sleep. Will you be good enough to
keep the mosquitoes away for two hours?" Within five minutes I had my
servant kick this impertinent and ungrateful wretch out of my park. If
all of the low class think as this fellow, I fear our charitable efforts
in their behalf will accomplish little.
[Illustration]
+Eleven million+, nine hundred and seventeen thousand, nine hundred and
forty-six dollars and fifty-eight cents is what the gallant Gen. Bingham
asks us for protecting us from each other for the ensuing year. With a
population of four million and 4.50 members to a family, we pay a
fraction less than $3 per head, and about $13.50 for a family, a year
for police protection in this enlightened Christian (750,000 of us are
Jews, but ours is a Christian city) city of ours. I'd give that silver
watch of mine away and mind my own business if I thought it would come
cheaper, but it won't do. H. H. Rogers is my brother and keeper, and he
insists he needs protection, and I must pay for it, so what can I do?
I've told him I'm a peaceful, propertyless man with no higher ambition
than to love my fellow-man--and woman, and mind my own business; but his
reply has invariably been, "I'm Dr. Tarr, and my system prevails in this
lunatic asylum!" I recognize the logic of his argument all right and
continue to pay for his protection and feel grateful for the privilege
of grumbling a little now and again.
COMSTOCKERY
By JOHN R. CORYELL
Be it understood that the shocking thing which we know as Comstockery,
goes back into the centuries for its origin; being, indeed, the perfect
flower of that asceticism, which was engrafted on the degraded
Christianity which took its name from Christ without in the least
comprehending the spirit of his lofty conception.
The man Comstock, who has the shameful distinction of having lent his
name to the idea of which he is the willing and probably the fit
exponent, may be dismissed without further consideration, since he is,
after all, only the inevitable as he is the deplorable result of that
for which he stands; seemingly without any sense of the shame and the
awfulness of it.
It may be said, too, in dismissing him, that it is of no consequence
whether the very unpleasant stories current concerning him are true or
not. It is altogether probable that a man who stands for what he does
and who glories in proclaiming the things he does, will also do things
for which he does not stand and which he does not proclaim. That is a
characteristic of most of us and only proves that, after all, he is not
less than human.
The only point that need be made in regard to the man who is proud of
representing Comstockery is, that if he had not done so, some other lost
soul would. In that sad stage of our social growth when death was the
penalty for most infractions of the law, an executioner could always be
found who took pride in his work and who seemed to be beyond the reach
of the scorn, the abhorrence and the contempt of his fellows.
Comstockery, as we know it, is apparently an organized effort to
regulate the morals of the people. If it were nothing more than this, it
would be absurd and negligible, because futile; for what we call morals
are only the observances which the conditions of life impose upon a
people; and an act depends, for its moral status, upon its relation to
those conditions. As, for example, horse-stealing in a closely settled
community, which has its railroads and other means of communication, is
a crime to be punished by a brief period of imprisonment; while in the
sparsely settled sections of a country, where the horse is an imperative
necessity of life, its theft becomes a hanging matter, whatever the
written law for that section of the country may be as to the punishment
of the crime. And men, brought up in law-abiding communities in the
deepest respect for the law, will, under the changed conditions of life,
not merely condone the infliction of a penalty in excess of that
provided by law, but will themselves assist, virtuously satisfied with
their conduct because the society of which they form a part has decided
that horse-stealing shall be so punished. On the other hand, there are
numerous laws on the statute books, still unrepealed and unenforceable
because the acts treated of are no longer held to be offences against
morality. In other words, the morals of a people can be regulated only
by themselves.
What Comstockery does is bad enough, but its real awfulness lies in the
fact that it seems to fairly enough represent us in our attitude toward
a certain class of ideas and things. It is the expression of our
essential immorality--using that word in its conventional sense--having
its roots deep down in pruriency, hypocrisy and ignorance. Like the
blush on the cheek of the courtesan, it deceives no one, but is none the
less a truthful expression, not of the thing it simulates, but of the
character of the simulator.
Comstockery was probably brought to this country by the first
Anglo-Saxon, whether pirate or minister of the gospel, who set foot on
this soil; certainly it was a finely blooming plant on the Mayflower,
and was soon blossoming here as never elsewhere in the world, giving out
such a fragrance that the peculiar odor of it has become a
characteristic of this land of liberty.
When the so-called Comstock laws were passed there was a real disease to
be treated: The symptoms of the disease were obscene books and pictures
which were being freely circulated among the children of the land,
boarding-schools, whether for girls or boys, being fairly flooded with
the pernicious literature. The work of confiscation, suppression and of
imprisonment was done thoroughly and conscientiously, so that in the
course of a comparatively short time it was difficult to find books or
pictures of the kind in question. It is said that the effectiveness of
the work done is best shown by the one or more libraries of obscene
books which the society, or some of its officers, have collected.
The value of the work done and the efficiency of the workers were
recognized in the passage from time to time of laws giving extraordinary
powers not alone to the popularly so-called "Comstock Society," but to
officers of the government. A perfect fury of purity took possession of
our legislators; they were determined to stamp out impurity. And perhaps
they were establishing reputations for themselves. It is recorded that
in the days of the Inquisition men established their orthodoxy by the
loudness of their cries against heresy; that in the times of the French
Revolution, men proved their patriotism by making charges of treason
against their neighbors; that practicing polygamists have purified
themselves by hounding a theoretical polygamist out of their legislative
body. Anyhow, the laws were passed, the thing was done.
And what was the thing that was done? A moral Inquisition had been
established. Arguing from a wrong premise a hideous conclusion had been
reached. It was voiced only a few weeks ago by an official of the
postoffice in Chicago, when confiscating a publication. He said in
substance, if not literally: "Any discussion of sex is obscene."
There it is in a few words--a complete and perfect treatise on
Comstockery! In the early days in some parts of New England, a man might
not kiss his wife on a Sunday. On common days, the filthy act was
permissible, but the Sabbath must not be so defiled. And now, any
discussion of sex is obscenity!
Pause a while and consider what this means and whither it will lead,
where it has already led. Discussion of sex is obscene; then sex,
itself, must be obscene; life and all that pertains to it must be
filthy. That is, providing it be the life of Man. The sex of flowers may
be discussed frankly and freely either for the pleasure of knowledge, or
in order to use knowledge for the purpose of improving the flower. The
sex of animals may be discussed; it is discussed in government
publications and in the many farm journals published throughout the
country, because it is necessary to improve the breed of our domestic
animals, because these animals are valuable. But discussion of the sex
of man is obscene!
There have been some changes in public sentiment, some changes, perhaps,
in the grey matter on the judicial bench, since the early days in New
York when Comstockery was most rampant: for what was tolerated then is
not tolerated now; some things that were judicially wrong then are
judicially right now. And in this change there is hope and the promise
of greater change.
In those early days a confectioner on Fulton street sought to attract
customers by exhibiting in his window a painting by a great artist. If
memory serves, it was "The Triumph of Charles V." by Hans Makart.
Figures of nude females were in the picture, and Comstockery established
in its censorship of art and solemnly unconscious of its appalling
ignorance, but true to its fundamental pruriency, ordered the picture
removed from the window. And it was removed. Just as Boston, finding its
bronze bacchante immodest, rejected the brazen hussey. And now she
stands on her pedestal in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, giving
joy to the beholder, and--not ordered down by Comstockery. Why? And why
is not the whole museum purged of its nude figures? It is a puzzle not
even to be solved by the theory of change in public sentiment; for it is
only a few months ago that the art censor in chief of Comstockery saw in
the window of an art dealer on Fifth Avenue a landscape in which
figured several nude children discreetly wandering away from the
beholder. The picture was ordered out of the window forthwith. And went.
A few blocks below, on Broadway, there were then and are now exhibited
in a window, numerous photographs of nude children, not all of them
discreet as to way of their going. Why? Has the art censor decided that
the photographs are innocuous, or that they are art?
But these instances and the amazing expeditions made by the censor into
the realm of literature are hardly more than ludicrous; and they can and
will correct themselves. But the frightful results of Comstockery, as
applied to life and to real purity, cannot be so lightly passed over.
And let it not be forgotten that an indictment of Comstockery is an
indictment of ourselves, for the prurient, hypocritical, degrading thing
can exist not one instant after we have declared that it shall perish.
It is no exaggeration to say that Comstockery is the arch enemy of
society. It seeks to make hypocrisy respectable; it would convert
impurity into a basic virtue; it labels ignorance, innocence; it has
legislated knowledge into a crime; and it seeks its perpetuation in the
degradation of an enfeebled human race. And that these are not
over-statements can easily be established to the satisfaction of any
reasonable mind.
The most creditable work ever done by Comstockery was the practical
suppression and elimination of the obscene book; but when that is said,
all is said. How worse than fatuous, how absolutely fiendish that
physician would be deemed who hid the signs of small-pox with paint and
powder and permitted his patient to roam at will among his fellows,
unwarned even of the nature of the fell disease that was devouring his
life. Nay, worse! What if the physician should have himself clothed with
plenary powers and should compel the poor wretch to refrain from making
his case known after he had discovered its nature? But this is precisely
what Comstockery does.
The obscene book was removed from circulation. In other words, the
symptom of the disease was hidden. But was anything done to eliminate
the disease, or to remove its cause? On the contrary, everything
possible was done to perpetuate the disease; everything possible was
done to prevent anyone who had suffered from the disease or who knew
anything about it, from imparting his knowledge. For the disease was
ignorance; ignorance of self, of life, of sex. And not only does
Comstockery strive to perpetuate ignorance, not only does it glorify
ignorance and miscall it innocence, not only does it elevate it into a
virtue, but it has legislated knowledge into a crime. The offence of the
book it had eliminated was not its vicious misinformation, but its use
of sex as a subject. The postoffice has said that any discussion of sex
is obscene and the courts have put one noble old man of over seventy
years into prison at hard labor, and have punished an aged woman
physician in some other way because they sought, in all purity and
right-mindedness, to help their brothers and sisters to a knowledge of
themselves.
It is true that, at last, there is a rift within the lute; or would it
better be called a leak in the sewer? Comstockery has not quite the
standing that it once had. When it was made generally known that a
postoffice official had said that any discussion of sex was obscene,
there followed such a rattling fire of reprobation and condemnation even
from many startled conventionalists, who could support the thing but
could not look it in the face, that the maker of the now historic phrase
was moved to deny that he had said it officially. In fact, there are
many signs, most of them still small, on the distant horizon, it is
true, which indicate that we are becoming alive to the fact that it is
imperative that sex should be discussed.
This is an age of radical ideas. Radicalism in politics, in religion, in
ethics is ripe; which is only another way of saying that we are
beginning to dare to think. Probably the most apparent, if not the most
significant, sign of the general radicalism, is the tendency to exalt
the science of life to an even higher plane than that which it occupied
in the days of Hellenic supremacy. We are beginning to understand that
right living is a purely physical matter, and that morals are only laws
of health; and if there are yet but few who dare take so radical a view
of morals as that, still there are quite as few who will not admit
freely that nothing can be immoral which is beneficial to the human
body.
Of course, it is unthinkable, even from the point of view of the most
conventional of orthodox Christians, that there can be any immorality in
sex, for sex in itself is absolutely a work of the deity, hence of the
highest morality, if it can have any such attribute at all. As well
might one give digestion a moral quality. Morality is surely a matter of
personal conduct. One may say that it is immoral to eat so much as to
injure one's health, but it is not a matter of record that any
considerable body of persons declares the stomach to be an immoral
organ, or the digestive function to be an immoral one, or any discussion
of digestion immoral. Then why sex or sex functions?
It is true that Comstockery has us to designate our legs, limbs, though
not at the present time with any legal penalty for not doing so; it
prescribes the word stomach for polite usage in describing that part of
the body which lies subjacent to the actual stomach, anterior to the
spinal column and posterior to the abdominal wall; it forbids a visible
bifurcated garment for the "limbs" of a female; and it does a variety of
other absurd things, all going to show that in some singular fashion it
has confounded acts with things; as one might call all knives immoral
because a few knives had been used to do murder with.
By what extraordinary process does Comstockery conjure decency into the
stomach and indecency into the bowels? But how rejoiced we should be
that it is no worse than indecent to speak of the receptacle of the
intestines by its common name. By some hocus pocus of which Comstockery
is easily capable it might have been obscene to speak of the digestive
process or of any of the digestive organs. We might easily have been
taught that digestion was a moral matter, not to be talked of, not to be
studied; ignorance of which was a virtue, knowledge of which a crime.
And then, under those conditions, if a person, possessed of a little
knowledge such as might have crept stealthily down the ages, were in a
fine humanitarian spirit to dare to publish some of the things he knew
in order to help dyspeptic humanity, he would have been robbed of his
worldly goods and clapped forthwith into jail. Fancy that under such
circumstances a man who had lived his three score and ten years and had
learned something from his own suffering and experience, something from
the secretly imparted information of others, might not say a word to
help his fellows. Is it not too absurd to contemplate without both tears
and laughter that that man who should plead with his fellow men to
abstain from habitually living on butter cakes and coffee, should be
charged with obscenity and imprisoned in consequence? And imagine some
sapient postoffice official solemnly declaring that any discussion of
digestion is obscene! Consider how the land would be flooded with
literature describing the pleasures of gluttony and depicting impossible
gastronomic feats! Consider, too, trying to cure indigestion and to
suppress the orgies of our children in pies, crullers, fritters and
butter cakes by the naive device of forbidding all knowledge of the
digestive function and making the utterance of the name of a digestive
organ an obscenity punishable by fine and imprisonment!
Digestion is a matter to be considered in the light of hygiene. So is
sex. Digestion is not in itself either moral or immoral. Neither is sex.
But there is the most hideous immorality in the ascription of obscenity
to sex, sex function or any phase of sex life. And this is the crime of
Comstockery. It has reared an awful idol to which have been sacrificed
the best of our youth; with hypocrisy the high-priest, ignorance the
creed, and pruriency the detective.
Comstockery strikes at the very root of life. It forbids that we shall
know how to live our best; it forbids that we shall know how to save our
children from the perils we have so discreditably passed through; it
raises barriers of false modesty between parents and children by
branding the very science of life an obscenity. Owing to the shocking
suggestions of Comstockery all that relates to life is degraded into the
gutter; and that which would be pure and sweet and wholesome in the home
or in the school, becomes filthy Comstockery on the snickering lips of
ignorant play-fellows.