AN HISTORICAL MONOGRAPH WRITTEN IN 4930

Of the many causes that conspired to bring about the lamentable failure of

"self-government" in ancient America the most general and comprehensive

was, of course, the impracticable nature of the system itself. In the

light of modern culture, and instructed by history, we readily discern the

folly of those crude ideas upon which the ancient Americans based what

they knew as "republican institutions," and maintained, as long as

maintenance was possible, with something of a religious fervor, even when

the results were visibly disastrous. To us of to-day it is clear that the

word "self-government" involves a contradiction, for government means

control by something other than the thing to be controlled. When the thing

governed is the same as the thing governing there is no government, though

for a time there may be, as in the case under consideration there was, a

considerable degree of forbearance, giving a misleading appearance of

public order. This, however, soon must, as in fact it soon did, pass away

with the delusion that gave it birth. The habit of obedience to written

law, inculcated by generations of respect for actual government able to

enforce its authority, will persist for a long time, with an ever

lessening power upon the imagination of the people; but there comes a time

when the tradition is forgotten and the delusion exhausted. When men

perceive that nothing is restraining them but their consent to be

restrained, then at last there is nothing to obstruct the free play of

that selfishness which is the dominant characteristic and fundamental

motive of human nature and human action respectively. Politics, which may

have had something of the character of a contest of principles, becomes a

struggle of interests, and its methods are frankly serviceable to personal

and class advantage. Patriotism and respect for law pass like a tale that

is told. Anarchy, no longer disguised as "government by consent," reveals

his hidden hand, and in the words of our greatest living poet,

lets the curtain fall,

And universal darkness buries all!

The ancient Americans were a composite people; their blood was a blend of

all the strains known in their time. Their government, while they had one,

being merely a loose and mutable expression of the desires and caprices of

the majority--that is to say, of the ignorant, restless and reckless--gave

the freest rein and play to all the primal instincts and elemental

passions of the race. In so far and for so long as it had any restraining

force, it was only the restraint of the present over the power of the

past--that of a new habit over an old and insistent tendency ever seeking

expression in large liberties and indulgences impatient of control. In the

history of that unhappy people, therefore, we see unveiled the workings of

the human will in its most lawless state, without fear of authority or

care of consequence. Nothing could be more instructive.

Of the American form of government, although itself the greatest of evils

afflicting the victims of those that it entailed, but little needs to be

said here; it has perished from the earth, a system discredited by an

unbroken record of failure in all parts of the world, from the earliest

historic times to its final extinction. Of living students of political

history not one professes to see in it anything but a mischievous creation

of theorists and visionaries--persons whom our gracious sovereign has

deigned to brand for the world's contempt as "dupes of hope purveying to

sons of greed." The political philosopher of to-day is spared the trouble

of pointing out the fallacies of republican government, as the

mathematician is spared that of demonstrating the absurdity of the

convergence of parallel lines; yet the ancient Americans not only clung to

their error with a blind, unquestioning faith, even when groaning under

its most insupportable burdens, but seem to have believed it of divine

origin. It was thought by them to have been established by the god

Washington, whose worship, with that of such _dii minores_ as Gufferson,

Jaxon and Lincon (identical probably with the Hebru Abrem) runs like a

shining thread through all the warp and woof of the stuff that garmented

their moral nakedness. Some stones, very curiously inscribed in many

tongues, were found by the explorer Droyhors in the wilderness bordering

the river Bhitt (supposed by him to be the ancient Potomac) as lately as

the reign of Barukam IV. These stones appear to be fragments of a monument

or temple erected to the glory of Washington in his divine character of

Founder and Preserver of republican institutions. If this tutelary deity

of the ancient Americans really invented representative government they

were not the first by many to whom he imparted the malign secret of its

inauguration and denied that of its maintenance.

Although many of the causes which finally, in combination, brought about

the downfall of the great American republic were in operation from the

beginning--being, as has been said, inherent in the system--it was not

until the year 1995 (as the ancients for some reason not now known

reckoned time) that the collapse of the vast, formless fabric was

complete. In that year the defeat and massacre of the last army of law and

order in the lava beds of California extinguished the final fires of

enlightened patriotism and quenched in blood the monarchical revival.

Thenceforth armed opposition to anarchy was confined to desultory and

insignificant warfare waged by small gangs of mercenaries in the service

of wealthy individuals and equally feeble bands of prescripts fighting for

their lives. In that year, too, "the Three Presidents" were driven from

their capitals, Cincinnati, New Orleans and Duluth, their armies

dissolving by desertion and themselves meeting death at the hands of the

populace.

The turbulent period between 1920 and 1995, with its incalculable waste of

blood and treasure, its dreadful conflicts of armies and more dreadful

massacres by passionate mobs, its kaleidoscopic changes of government and

incessant effacement and redrawing of boundaries of states, its

interminable tale of political assassinations and proscriptions--all the

horrors incident to intestinal wars of a naturally lawless race--had so

exhausted and dispirited the surviving protagonists of legitimate

government that they could make no further head against the inevitable,

and were glad indeed and most fortunate to accept life on any terms that

they could obtain.

But the purpose of this sketch is not bald narration of historic fact, but

examination of antecedent germinal conditions; not to recount calamitous

events familiar to students of that faulty civilization, but to trace, as

well as the meager record will permit, the genesis and development of the

causes that brought them about. Historians in our time have left little

undone in the matter of narration of political and military phenomena. In

Golpek's "Decline and Fall of the American Republics," in Soseby's

"History of Political Fallacies," in Holobom's "Monarchical Renasence,"

and notably in Gunkux's immortal work, "The Rise, Progress, Failure and

Extinction of The Connected States of America" the fruits of research have

been garnered, a considerable harvest. The events are set forth with such

conscientiousness and particularity as to have exhausted the possibilities

of narration. It remains only to expound causes and point the awful moral.

To a delinquent observation it may seem needless to point out the inherent

defects of a system of government which the logic of events has swept like

political rubbish from the face of the earth, but we must not forget that

ages before the inception of the American republics and that of France and

Ireland this form of government had been discredited by emphatic failures

among the most enlightened and powerful nations of antiquity: the Greeks,

the Romans, and long before them (as we now know) the Egyptians and the

Chinese. To the lesson of these failures the founders of the eighteenth

and nineteenth century republics were blind and deaf. Have we then reason

to believe that our posterity will be wiser because instructed by a

greater number of examples? And is the number of examples which they will

have in memory really greater? Already the instances of China, Egypt,

Greece and Rome are almost lost in the mists of antiquity; they are known,

except by infrequent report, to the archæologist only, and but dimly and

uncertainly to him. The brief and imperfect record of yesterdays which we

call History is like that traveling vine of India which, taking new root

as it advances, decays at one end while it grows at the other, and so is

constantly perishing and finally lost in all the spaces which it has

over-passed.

From the few and precious writings that have descended to us from the

early period of the American republic we get a clear if fragmentary view

of the disorders and lawlessness affecting that strange and unhappy

nation. Leaving the historically famous "labor troubles" for more extended

consideration, we may summarize here a few of the results of hardly more

than a century and a quarter of "self-government" as it existed on this

continent just previously to the awful end. At the beginning of the

"twentieth century" a careful study by trustworthy contemporary

statisticians of the public records and those apparently private ones

known as "newspapers" showed that in a population of about 80,000,000 the

annual number of homicides was not less than 10,000; and this continued

year after year to increase, not only absolutely, but proportionately,

until, in the words of Dumbleshaw, who is thought to have written his

famous "Memoirs of a Survivor" in the year 1908 of their era, "it would

seem that the practice of suicide is a needless custom, for if a man but

have patience his neighbor is sure to put him out of his misery." Of the

10,000 assassins less than three per cent. were punished, further than by

incidental imprisonment if unable to give bail while awaiting trial. If

the chief end of government is the citizen's security of life and his

protection from aggression, what kind of government do these appalling

figures disclose? Yet so infatuated with their imaginary "liberty" were

these singular people that the contemplation of all this crime abated

nothing of the volume and persistence of their patriotic ululations, and

affected not their faith in the perfection of their system. They were like

a man standing on a rock already submerged by the rising tide, and calling

to his neighbors on adjacent cliffs to observe his superior security.

When three men engage in an undertaking in which they have an equal

interest, and in the direction of which they have equal power, it

necessarily results that any action approved by two of them, with or

without the assent of the third, will be taken. This is called--or was

called when it was an accepted principle in political and other

affairs--"the rule of the majority." Evidently, under the malign

conditions supposed, it is the only practicable plan of getting anything

done. A and B rule and overrule C, not because they ought, but because

they can; not because they are wiser, but because they are stronger. In

order to avoid a conflict in which he is sure to be worsted, C submits as

soon as the vote is taken. C is as likely to be right as A and B; nay,

that eminent ancient philosopher, Professor Richard A. Proctor (or

Proroctor, as the learned now spell the name), has clearly shown by the

law of probabilities that any one of the three, all being of the same

intelligence, is far likelier to be right than the other two.

It is thus that the "rule of the majority" as a political system is

established. It is in essence nothing but the discredited and

discreditable principle that "might makes right"; but early in the life of

a republic this essential character of government by majority is not seen.

The habit of submitting all questions of policy to the arbitrament of

counting noses and assenting without question to the result invests the

ordeal with a seeming sanctity, and what was at first obeyed as the

command of power comes to be revered as the oracle of wisdom. The

innumerable instances--such as the famous ones of Galileo and Keeley--in

which one man has been right and all the rest of the race wrong, are

overlooked, or their significance missed, and "public opinion" is followed

as a divine and infallible guide through every bog into which it blindly

stumbles and over every precipice in its fortuitous path. Clearly, sooner

or later will be encountered a bog that will smother or a precipice that

will crush. Thoroughly to apprehend the absurdity of the ancient faith in

the wisdom of majorities let the loyal reader try to fancy our gracious

Sovereign by any possibility wrong, or his unanimous Ministry by any

possibility right!

During the latter half of the "nineteenth century" there arose in the

Connected States a political element opposed to all government, which

frankly declared its object to be anarchy. This astonishing heresy was not

of indigenous growth: its seeds were imported from Europe by the

emigration or banishment thence of criminals congenitally incapable of

understanding and valuing the blessings of monarchical institutions, and

whose method of protest was murder. The governments against which they

conspired in their native lands were too strong in authority and too

enlightened in policy for them to overthrow. Hundreds of them were put to

death, thousands imprisoned and sent into exile. But in America, whither

those who escaped fled for safety, they found conditions entirely

favorable to the prosecution of their designs.

A revered fetish of the Americans was "freedom of speech": it was believed

that if bad men were permitted to proclaim their evil wishes they would go

no further in the direction of executing them--that if they might say what

they would like to do they would not care to do it. The close relation

between speech and action was not understood. Because the Americans

themselves had long been accustomed, in their own political debates and

discussions, to the use of unmeaning declamations and threats which they

had no intention of executing, they reasoned that others were like them,

and attributed to the menaces of these desperate and earnest outcasts no

greater importance than to their own. They thought also that the foreign

anarchists, having exchanged the tyranny of kings for that of majorities,

would be content with their new and better lot and become in time good and

law-abiding citizens.

The anarchist of that far day (thanks to the firm hands of our gracious

sovereigns the species is now extinct) was a very different person from

what our infatuated ancestors imagined him. He struck at government, not

because it was bad, but because it was government. He hated authority, not

for its tyranny, but for its power. And in order to make this plain to

observation he frequently chose his victim from amongst those whose rule

was most conspicuously benign.

Of the seven early Presidents of the American republic who perished by

assassination no fewer than four were slain by anarchists with no personal

wrongs to impel them to the deed--nothing but an implacable hostility to

law and authority. The fifth victim, indeed, was a notorious demagogue who

had pardoned the assassin of the fourth.

The field of the anarchist's greatest activity was always a republic, not

only to emphasize his impartial hatred of all government, but because of

the inherent feebleness of that form of government, its inability to

protect itself against any kind of aggression by any considerable number

of its people having a common malevolent purpose. In a republic the crust

that confined the fires of violence and sedition was thinnest.

No improvement in the fortunes of the original anarchists through

immigration to what was then called the New World would have made them

good citizens. From centuries of secret war against particular forms of

authority in their own countries they had inherited a bitter antagonism to

all authority, even the most beneficent. In their new home they were worse

than in their old. In the sunshine of opportunity the rank and sickly

growth of their perverted natures became hardy, vigorous, bore fruit. They

surrounded themselves with proselytes from the ranks of the idle, the

vicious, the unsuccessful. They stimulated and organized discontent. Every

one of them became a center of moral and political contagion. To those as

yet unprepared to accept anarchy was offered the milder dogma of

Socialism, and to those even weaker in the faith something vaguely called

Reform. Each was initiated into that degree to which the induration of his

conscience and the character of his discontent made him eligible, and in

which he could be most serviceable, the body of the people still cheating

themselves with the false sense of security begotten of the belief that

they were somehow exempt from the operation of all agencies inimical to

their national welfare and integrity. Human nature, they thought, was

different in the West from what it was in the East: in the New World the

old causes would not have the old effects: a republic had some inherent

vitality of its own, entirely independent of any action intended to keep

it alive. They felt that words and phrases had some talismanic power, and

charmed themselves asleep by repeating "liberty," "all men equal before

the law," "dictates of conscience," "free speech" and all manner of such

incantation to exorcise the spirits of the night. And when they could no

longer close their eyes to the dangers environing them; when they saw at

last that what they had mistaken for the magic power of their form of

government and its assured security was really its radical weakness and

subjective peril--they found their laws inadequate to repression of the

enemy, the enemy too strong to permit the enactment of adequate laws. The

belief that a malcontent armed with freedom of speech, a newspaper, a vote

and a rifle is less dangerous than a malcontent with a still tongue in his

head, empty hands and under police surveillance was abandoned, but all too

late. From its fatuous dream the nation was awakened by the noise of arms,

the shrieks of women and the red glare of burning cities.

Beginning with the slaughter at St. Louis on a night in the year 1920,

when no fewer than twenty-two thousand citizens were slain in the streets

and half the city destroyed, massacre followed massacre with frightful

rapidity. New York fell in the month following, many thousands of its

inhabitants escaping fire and sword only to be driven into the bay and

drowned, "the roaring of the water in their ears," says Bardeal,

"augmented by the hoarse clamor of their red-handed pursuers, whose

blood-thirst was unsated by the sea." A week later Washington was

destroyed, with all its public buildings and archives; the President and

his Ministry were slain, Congress was dispersed, and an unknown number of

officials and private citizens perished. Of all the principal cities only

Chicago and San Francisco escaped. The people of the former were all

anarchists and the latter was valorously and successfully defended by the

Chinese.

The urban anarchists were eventually subdued and some semblance of order

was restored, but greater woes and sharper shames awaited this unhappy

nation, as we shall see.

In turning from this branch of our subject to consider the causes of the

failure and bloody disruption of the great American republic other than

those inherent in the form of government, it may not be altogether

unprofitable to glance briefly at what seems to a superficial view the

inconsistent phenomenon of great material prosperity. It is not to be

denied that this unfortunate people was at one time singularly prosperous,

in so far as national wealth is a measure and proof of prosperity. Among

nations it was the richest nation. But at how great a sacrifice of better

things was its wealth obtained! By the neglect of all education except

that crude, elementary sort which fits men for the coarse delights of

business and affairs but confers no capacity of rational enjoyment; by

exalting the worth of wealth and making it the test and touchstone of

merit; by ignoring art, scorning literature and despising science, except

as these might contribute to the glutting of the purse; by setting up and

maintaining an artificial standard of morals which condoned all offenses

against the property and peace of every one but the condoner; by

pitilessly crushing out of their natures every sentiment and aspiration

unconnected with accumulation of property, these civilized savages and

commercial barbarians attained their sordid end. Before they had rounded

the first half-century of their existence as a nation they had sunk so low

in the scale of morality that it was considered nothing discreditable to

take the hand and even visit the house of a man who had grown rich by

means notoriously corrupt and dishonorable; and Harley declares that even

the editors and writers of newspapers, after fiercely assailing such men

in their journals, would be seen "hobnobbing" with them in public places.

(The nature of the social ceremony named the "hobnob" is not now

understood, but it is known that it was a sign of amity and favor.) When

men or nations devote all the powers of their minds and bodies to the

heaping up of wealth, wealth is heaped up. But what avails it? It may not

be amiss to quote here the words of one of the greatest of the ancients

whose works--fragmentary, alas--have come down to us.

"Wealth has accumulated itself into masses; and poverty, also in

accumulation enough, lies impassably separated from it; opposed,

uncommunicating, like forces in positive and negative poles. The gods of

this lower world sit aloft on glittering thrones, less happy than

Epicurus's gods, but as indolent, as impotent; while the boundless living

chaos of ignorance and hunger welters, terrific in its dark fury, under

their feet. How much among us might be likened to a whited sepulcher:

outwardly all pomp and strength, but inwardly full of horror and despair

and dead men's bones! Iron highways, with their wains fire-winged, are

uniting all the ends of the land; quays and moles, with their innumerable

stately fleets, tame the ocean into one pliant bearer of burdens; labor's

thousand arms, of sinew and of metal, all-conquering everywhere, from the

tops of the mount down to the depths of the mine and the caverns of the

sea, ply unweariedly for the service of man; yet man remains unserved. He

has subdued this planet, his habitation and inheritance, yet reaps no

profit from the victory. Sad to look upon: in the highest stage of

civilization nine-tenths of mankind have to struggle in the lowest battle

of savage or even animal man--the battle against famine. Countries are

rich, prosperous in all manner of increase, beyond example; but the men of

these countries are poor, needier than ever of all sustenance, outward and

inward; of belief, of knowledge, of money, of food."

To this somber picture of American "prosperity" in the nineteenth century

nothing of worth can be added by the most inspired artist. Let us simply

inscribe upon the gloomy canvas the memorable words of an illustrious poet

of the period:

That country speeds to an untoward fate,

Where men are trivial and gold is great.

One of the most "sacred" rights of the ancient American was the trial of

an accused person by "a jury of his peers." This, in America, was a right

secured to him by a written constitution. It was almost universally

believed to have had its origin in Magna Carta, a famous document which

certain rebellious noblemen of another country had compelled their

sovereign to sign under a threat of death. That celebrated "bill of

rights" has not all come down to us, but researches of the learned have

made it certain that it contained no mention of trial by jury, which,

indeed, was unknown to its authors. The words _judicium parium_ meant to

them something entirely different--the judgment of the entire community of

freemen. The words and the practice they represented antedated Magna Carta

by many centuries and were common to the Franks and other Germanic

nations, amongst whom a trial "jury" consisted of persons having a

knowledge of the matter to be determined--persons who in later times were

called "witnesses" and rigorously excluded from the seats of judgment.

It is difficult to conceive a more clumsy and ineffective machinery for

ascertaining truth and doing justice than a jury of twelve men of the

average intelligence, even among ourselves. What, then, must this device

have been among the half-civilized tribes of the Connected States of

America! Nay, the case is worse than that, for it was the practice to

prevent men of even the average intelligence from serving as jurors.

Jurors had to be residents of the locality of the crime charged, and every

crime was made a matter of public notoriety long before the accused was

brought to trial; yet, as a rule, he who had read or talked about the

trial was held disqualified to serve. This in a country where, when a man

who could read was not reading about local crimes he was talking about

them, or if doing neither was doing something worse!

To the twelve men so chosen the opposing lawyers addressed their

disingenuous pleas and for their consideration the witnesses presented

their carefully rehearsed testimony, most of it false. So unintelligent

were these juries that a great part of the time in every trial was

consumed in keeping from them certain kinds of evidence with which they

could not be trusted; yet the lawyers were permitted to submit to them any

kind of misleading argument that they pleased and fortify it with

innuendoes without relevancy and logic without sense. Appeals to their

passions, their sympathies, their prejudices, were regarded as legitimate

influences and tolerated by the judges on the theory that each side's

offenses would about offset those of the other. In a criminal case it was

expected that the prosecutor would declare repeatedly and in the most

solemn manner his belief in the guilt of the person accused, and that the

attorney for the defense would affirm with equal gravity his conviction of

his client's innocence. How could they impress the jury with a belief

which they did not themselves venture to affirm? It is not recorded that

any lawyer ever rebelled against the iron authority of these conditions

and stood for truth and conscience. They were, indeed, the conditions of

his existence as a lawyer, a fact which they easily persuaded themselves

mitigated the baseness of their obedience to them, or justified it

altogether.

The judges, as a rule, were no better, for before they could become judges

they must have been advocates, with an advocate's fatal disabilities of

judgment. Most of them depended for their office upon the favor of the

people, which, also, was fatal to the independence, the dignity and the

impartiality to which they laid so solemn claim. In their decisions they

favored, so far as they dared, every interest, class or person powerful

enough to help or hurt them in an election. Holding their high office by

so precarious a tenure, they were under strong temptation to enrich

themselves from the serviceable purses of wealthy litigants, and in

disregard of justice to cultivate the favor of the attorneys practicing

before them, and before whom they might soon be compelled themselves to

practice.

In the higher courts of the land, where juries were unknown and appointed

judges held their seats for life, these awful conditions did not obtain,

and there Justice might have been content to dwell, and there she actually

did sometimes set her foot. Unfortunately, the great judges had the

consciences of their education. They had crept to place through the slime

of the lower courts and their robes of office bore the damnatory evidence.

Unfortunately, too, the attorneys, the jury habit strong upon them,

brought into the superior tribunals the moral characteristics and

professional methods acquired in the lower. Instead of assisting the

judges to ascertain the truth and the law, they cheated in argument and

took liberties with fact, deceiving the court whenever they deemed it to

the interest of their cause to do so, and as willingly won by a

technicality or a trick as by the justice of their contention and their

ability in supporting it. Altogether, the entire judicial system of the

Connected States of America was inefficient, disreputable, corrupt.

The result might easily have been foreseen and doubtless was predicted by

patriots whose admonitions have not come down to us. Denied protection of

the law, neither property nor life was safe. Greed filled his coffers from

the meager hoards of Thrift, private vengeance took the place of legal

redress, mad multitudes rioted and slew with virtual immunity from

punishment or blame, and the land was red with crime.

A singular phenomenon of the time was the immunity of criminal women.

Among the Americans woman held a place unique in the history of nations.

If not actually worshiped as a deity, as some historians, among them the

great Sagab-Joffoy, have affirmed, she was at least regarded with feelings

of veneration which the modern mind has a difficulty in comprehending.

Some degree of compassion for her mental inferiority, some degree of

forbearance toward her infirmities of temper, some degree of immunity for

the offenses which these peculiarities entail--these are common to all

peoples above the grade of barbarians. In ancient America these chivalrous

sentiments found open and lawful expression only in relieving woman of the

burden of participation in political and military service; the laws gave

her no express exemption from responsibility for crime. When she murdered,

she was arrested; when arrested, brought to trial--though the origin and

meaning of those observances are not now known. Gunkux, whose researches

into the jurisprudence of antiquity enable him to speak with commanding

authority of many things, gives us here nothing better than the conjecture

that the trial of women for murder, in the nineteenth century and a part

of the twentieth, was the survival of an earlier custom of actually

convicting and punishing them, but it seems extremely improbable that a

people that once put its female assassins to death would ever have

relinquished the obvious advantages of the practice while retaining with

purposeless tenacity some of its costly preliminary forms. Whatever may

have been the reason, the custom was observed with all the gravity of a

serious intention. Gunkux professes knowledge of one or two instances (he

does not name his authorities) where matters went so far as conviction and

sentence, and adds that the mischievous sentimentalists who had always

lent themselves to the solemn jest by protestations of great

_vraisemblance_ against "the judicial killing of women," became really

alarmed and filled the land with their lamentations. Among the phenomena

of brazen effrontery he classes the fact that some of these loud

protagonists of the right of women to assassinate unpunished were

themselves women! Howbeit, the sentences, if ever pronounced, were never

executed, and during the first quarter of the twentieth century the

meaningless custom of bringing female assassins to trial was abandoned.

What the effect was of their exemption from this considerable

inconvenience we have not the data to conjecture, unless we understand as

an allusion to it some otherwise obscure words of the famous Edward Bok,

the only writer of the period whose work has survived. In his monumental

essay on barbarous penology, entitled "Slapping the Wrist," he couples

"woman's emancipation from the trammels of law" and "man's better prospect

of death" in a way that some have construed as meaning that he regarded

them as cause and effect. It must be said, however, that this

interpretation finds no support in the general character of his writing,

which is exceedingly humane, refined and womanly.

It has been said that the writings of this great man are the only

surviving work of his period, but of that we are not altogether sure.

There exists a fragment of an anonymous essay on woman's legal

responsibility which many Americologists think belongs to the beginning of

the twentieth century. Certainly it could not have been written later than

the middle of it, for at that time woman had been definitely released from

any responsibility to any law but that of her own will. The essay is an

argument against even such imperfect exemption as she had in its author's

time.

"It has been urged," the writer says, "that women, being less rational and

more emotional than men, should not be held accountable in the same

degree. To this it may be answered that punishment for crime is not

intended to be retaliatory, but admonitory and deterrent. It is,

therefore, peculiarly necessary to those not easily reached by other forms

of warning and dissuasion. Control of the wayward is not to be sought in

reduction of restraints, but in their multiplication. One who cannot be

curbed by reason may be curbed by fear, a familiar truth which lies at the

foundation of all penological systems. The argument for exemption of women

is equally cogent for exemption of habitual criminals, for they too are

abnormally inaccessible to reason, abnormally disposed to obedience to the

suasion of their unregulated impulses and passions. To free them from the

restraints of the fear of punishment would be a bold innovation which has

as yet found no respectable proponent outside their own class.

"Very recently this dangerous enlargement of the meaning of the phrase

'emancipation of woman' has been fortified with a strange advocacy by the

female 'champions of their sex.' Their argument runs this way: 'We are

denied a voice in the making of the laws relating to infliction of the

death penalty; it is unjust to hold us to an accountability to which we

have not assented.' Of course this argument is as broad as the entire body

of law; it amounts to nothing less than a demand for general immunity from

all laws, for to none of them has woman's assent been asked or given. But

let us consider this amazing claim with reference only to the proposal in

the service and promotion of which it is now urged: exemption of women

from the death penalty for murder. In the last analysis it is seen to be a

simple demand for compensation. It says: 'You owe us a _solatium_. Since

you deny us the right to vote, you should give us the right to

assassinate. We do not appraise it at so high a valuation as the other

franchise, but we do value it.'

"Apparently they do: without legal, but with virtual, immunity from

punishment, the women of this country take an average of one thousand

lives annually, nine in ten being the lives of men. Juries of men, incited

and sustained by public opinion, have actually deprived every adult male

American of the right to live. If the death of any man is desired by any

woman for any reason he is without protection. She has only to kill him

and say that he wronged or insulted her. Certain almost incredible recent

instances prove that no woman is too base for immunity, no crime against

life sufficiently rich in all the elements of depravity to compel a

conviction of the assassin, or, if she is convicted and sentenced, her

punishment by the public executioner."

In this interesting fragment, quoted by Bogul in his "History of an

Extinct Civilization," we learn something of the shame and peril of

American citizenship under institutions which, not having run their

foreordained course to the unhappy end, were still in some degree

supportable. What these institutions became afterward is a familiar story.

It is true that the law of trial by jury was repealed. It had broken down,

but not until it had sapped the whole nation's respect for all law, for

all forms of authority, for order and private virtues. The people whose

rude forefathers in another land it had served roughly to protect against

their tyrants, it had lamentably failed to protect against themselves, and

when in madness they swept it away, it was not as one renouncing an error,

but as one impatient of the truth which the error is still believed to

contain. They flung it away, not as an ineffectual restraint, but as a

restraint; not because it was no longer an instrument of justice for the

determination of truth, but because they feared that it might again become

such. In brief, trial by jury was abolished only when it had provoked

anarchy.

Before turning to another phase of this ancient civilization I cannot

forbear to relate, after the learned and ingenious Gunkux, the only known

instance of a public irony expressing itself in the sculptor's noble art.

In the ancient city of Hohokus once stood a monument of colossal size and

impressive dignity. It was erected by public subscription to the memory of

a man whose only distinction consisted in a single term of service as a

juror in a famous murder trial, the details of which have not come down to

us. This occupied the court and held public attention for many weeks,

being bitterly contested by both prosecution and defense. When at last it

was given to the jury by the judge in the most celebrated charge that had

ever been delivered from the bench, a ballot was taken at once. The jury

stood eleven for acquittal to one for conviction. And so it stood at every

ballot of the more than fifty that were taken during the fortnight that

the jury was locked up for deliberation. Moreover, the dissenting juror

would not argue the matter; he would listen with patient attention while

his eleven indignant opponents thundered their opinions into his ears,

even when they supported them with threats of personal violence; but not a

word would he say. At last a disagreement was formally entered, the jury

discharged and the obstinate juror chased from the city by the maddened

populace. Despairing of success in another trial and privately admitting

his belief in the prisoner's innocence, the public prosecutor moved for

his release, which the judge ordered with remarks plainly implying his own

belief that the wrong man had been tried.

Years afterward the accused person died confessing his guilt, and a little

later one of the jurors who had been sworn to try the case admitted that

he had attended the trial on the first day only, having been personated

during the rest of the proceedings by a twin brother, the obstinate

member, who was a deaf-mute.

The monument to this eminent public servant was overthrown and destroyed

by an earthquake in the year 2342.

One of the causes of that popular discontent which brought about the

stupendous events resulting in the disruption of the great republic,

historians and archæologists are agreed in reckoning "insurance." Of the

exact nature of that factor in the problem of the national life of that

distant day we are imperfectly informed; many of its details have perished

from the record, yet its outlines loom large through the mist of ages and

can be traced with greater precision than is possible in many more

important matters.

In the monumental work of Professor Golunk-Dorsto ("Some Account of the

Insurance Delusion in Ancient America") we have its most considerable

modern exposition; and Gakler's well-known volume, "The Follies of

Antiquity," contains much interesting matter relating to it. From these

and other sources the student of human unreason can reconstruct that

astounding fallacy of insurance as, from three joints of its tail, the

great naturalist Bogramus restored the ancient elephant, from hoof to

horn.

The game of insurance, as practiced by the ancient Americans (and, as

Gakler conjectures, by some of the tribesmen of Europe), was gambling,

pure and simple, despite the sentimental character that its proponents

sought to impress upon some forms of it for the greater prosperity of

their dealings with its dupes. Essentially, it was a bet between the

insurer and the insured. The number of ways in which the wager was

made--all devised by the insurer--was almost infinite, but in none of them

was there a departure from the intrinsic nature of the transaction as seen

in its simplest, frankest form, which we shall here expound.

To those unlearned in the economical institutions of antiquity it is

necessary to explain that in ancient America, long prior to the disastrous

Japanese war, individual ownership of property was unrestricted; every

person was permitted to get as much as he was able, and to hold it as his

own without regard to his needs, or whether he made any good use of it or

not. By some plan of distribution not now understood even the habitable

surface of the earth, with the minerals beneath, was parceled out among

the favored few, and there was really no place except at sea where

children of the others could lawfully be born. Upon a part of the dry land

that he had been able to acquire, or had leased from another for the

purpose, a man would build a house worth, say, ten thousand _drusoes_.

(The ancient unit of value was the "dollar," but nothing is now known as

to its actual worth.) Long before the building was complete the owner was

beset by "touts" and "cappers" of the insurance game, who poured into his

ears the most ingenious expositions of the advantages of betting that it

would burn down--for with incredible fatuity the people of that time

continued, generation after generation, to build inflammable habitations.

The persons whom the capper represented--they called themselves an

"insurance company"--stood ready to accept the bet, a fact which seems to

have generated no suspicion in the mind of the house-owner. Theoretically,

of course, if the house did burn payment of the wager would partly or

wholly recoup the winner of the bet for the loss of his house, but in fact

the result of the transaction was commonly very different. For the

privilege of betting that his property would be destroyed by fire the

owner had to pay to the gentleman betting that it would not be, a certain

percentage of its value every year, called a "premium." The amount of this

was determined by the company, which employed statisticians and actuaries

to fix it at such a sum that, according to the law of probabilities, long

before the house was "due to burn," the company would have received more

than the value of it in premiums. In other words, the owner of the house

would himself supply the money to pay his bet, and a good deal more.

But how, it may be asked, could the company's actuary know that the man's

house would last until he had paid in more than its insured value in

premiums--more, that is to say, than the company would have to pay back?

He could not, but from his statistics he could know how many houses in ten

thousand of that kind burned in their first year, how many in their

second, their third, and so on. That was all that he needed to know, the

house-owners knowing nothing about it. He fixed his rates according to the

facts, and the occasional loss of a bet in an individual instance did not

affect the certainty of a general winning. Like other professional

gamblers, the company expected to lose sometimes, yet knew that in the

long run it _must_ win; which meant that in any special case it would

_probably_ win. With a thousand gambling games open to him in which the

chances were equal, the infatuated dupe chose to "sit into" one where they

were against him! Deceived by the cappers' fairy tales, dazed by the

complex and incomprehensible "calculations" put forth for his undoing, and

having ever in the ear of his imagination the crackle and roar of the

impoverishing flames, he grasped at the hope of beating--in an unwelcome

way, it is true--"the man that kept the table." He must have known for a

certainty that if the company could afford to insure him he could not

afford to let it. He must have known that the whole body of the insured

paid to the insurers more than the insurers paid to them; otherwise the

business could not have been conducted. This they cheerfully admitted;

indeed, they proudly affirmed it. In fact, insurance companies were the

only professional gamblers that had the incredible hardihood to parade

their enormous winnings as an inducement to play against their game. These

winnings ("assets," they called them) proved their ability, they said, to

pay when they lost; and that was indubitably true. What they did not

prove, unfortunately, was the _will_ to pay, which from the imperfect

court records of the period that have come down to us, appears frequently

to have been lacking. Gakler relates that in the instance of the city of

San Francisco (somewhat doubtfully identified by Macronus as the modern

fishing-village of Gharoo) the disinclination of the insurance companies

to pay their bets had the most momentous consequences.

In the year 1906 San Francisco was totally destroyed by fire. The

conflagration was caused by the friction of a pig scratching itself

against an angle of a wooden building. More than one hundred thousand

persons perished, and the loss of property is estimated by Kobo-Dogarque

at one and a half million _drusoes_. On more than two-thirds of this

enormous sum the insurance companies had laid bets, and the greater part

of it they refused to pay. In justification they pointed out that the deed

performed by the pig was "an act of God," who in the analogous instance of

the express companies had been specifically forbidden to take any action

affecting the interests of parties to a contract, or the result of an

agreed undertaking.

In the ensuing litigation their attorneys cited two notable precedents. A

few years before the San Francisco disaster, another American city had

experienced a similar one through the upsetting of a lamp by the kick of a

cow. In that case, also, the insurance companies had successfully denied

their liability on the ground that the cow, manifestly incited by some

supernatural power, had unlawfully influenced the result of a wager to

which she was not a party. The companies defendant had contended that the

recourse of the property-owners was against, not them, but the owner of

the cow. In his decision sustaining that view and dismissing the case, a

learned judge (afterward president of one of the defendant companies) had

in the legal phraseology of the period pronounced the action of the cow an

obvious and flagrant instance of unwarrantable intervention. Kobo-Dogarque

believes that this decision was afterward reversed by an appellate court

of contrary political complexion and the companies were compelled to

compromise, but of this there is no record. It is certain that in the San

Francisco case the precedent was urged.

Another precedent which the companies cited with particular emphasis

related to an unfortunate occurrence at a famous millionaires' club in

London, the capital of the renowned king, John Bui. A gentleman passing in

the street fell in a fit and was carried into the club in convulsions. Two

members promptly made a bet upon his life. A physician who chanced to be

present set to work upon the patient, when one of the members who had laid

the wager came forward and restrained him, saying: "Sir, I beg that you

will attend to your own business. I have my money on that fit."

Doubtless these two notable precedents did not constitute the entire case

of the defendants in the San Francisco insurance litigation, but the

additional pleas are lost to us.

Of the many forms of gambling known as insurance that called life

insurance appears to have been the most vicious. In essence it was the

same as fire insurance, marine insurance, accident insurance and so forth,

with an added offensiveness in that it was a betting on human

lives--commonly by the policy-holder on lives that should have been held

most sacred and altogether immune from the taint of traffic. In point of

practical operation this ghastly business was characterized by a more

fierce and flagrant dishonesty than any of its kindred pursuits. To such

lengths of robbery did the managers go that at last the patience of the

public was exhausted and a comparatively trivial occurrence fired the

combustible elements of popular indignation to a white heat in which the

entire insurance business of the country was burned out of existence,

together with all the gamblers who had invented and conducted it. The

president of one of the companies was walking one morning in a street of

New York, when he had the bad luck to step on the tail of a dog and was

bitten in retaliation. Frenzied by the pain of the wound, he gave the

creature a savage kick and it ran howling toward a group of idlers in

front of a grocery store. In ancient America the dog was a sacred animal,

worshiped by all sorts and conditions of tribesmen. The idlers at once

raised a great cry, and setting upon the offender beat him so that he

died.

Their act was infectious: men, women and children trooped out of their

dwellings by thousands to join them, brandishing whatever weapons they

could snatch, and uttering wild cries of vengeance. This formidable mob

overpowered the police, and marching from one insurance office to another,

successively demolished them all, slew such officers as they could lay

hands on, and chased the fugitive survivors into the sea, "where," says a

quaint chronicle of the time, "they were eaten by their kindred, the

sharks." This carnival of violence continued all the day, and at set of

sun not one person connected with any form of insurance remained alive.

Ferocious and bloody as was the massacre, it was only the beginning. As

the news of it went blazing and coruscating along the wires by which

intelligence was then conveyed across the country, city after city caught

the contagion. Everywhere, even in the small hamlets and the agricultural

districts, the dupes rose against their dupers. The smoldering resentment

of years burst into flame, and within a week all that was left of

insurance in America was the record of a monstrous and cruel delusion

written in the blood of its promoters.

A remarkable feature of the crude and primitive civilization of the

Americans was their religion. This was polytheistic, as is that of all

backward peoples, and among their minor deities were their own women. This

has been disputed by respectable authorities, among them Gunkux and the

younger Kekler, but the weight of archæological testimony is against them,

for, as Sagab-Joffy ingeniously points out, none of less than divine rank

would by even the lowest tribes be given unrestricted license to kill.

Among the Americans woman, as already pointed out, indubitably had that

freedom, and exercised it with terrible effect, a fact which makes the

matter of their religion pertinent to the purpose of this monograph. If

ever an American woman was punished by law for murder of a man no record

of the fact is found; whereas, such American literature as we possess is

full of the most enthusiastic adulation of the impossible virtues and

imaginary graces of the human female. One writer even goes to the length

of affirming that respect for the sex is the foundation of political

stability, the cornerstone of civil and religious liberty! After the

break-up of the republic and the savage intertribal wars that followed,

Gyneolatry was an exhausted cult and woman was relegated to her old state

of benign subjection.

Unfortunately, we know little of the means of travel in ancient America,

other than the names. It seems to have been done mainly by what were

called "railroads," upon which wealthy associations of men transported

their fellow-citizens in some kind of vehicle at a low speed, seldom

exceeding fifty or sixty miles an hour, as distance and time were then

reckoned--about equal to seven _kaltabs_ a _grillog_. Notwithstanding this

slow movement of the vehicles, the number and fatality of accidents were

incredible. In the Zopetroq Museum of Archæology is preserved an official

report (found in the excavations made by Droyhors on the supposed site of

Washington) of a Government Commission of the Connected States. From that

document we learn that in the year 1907 of their era the railroads of the

country killed 5,000 persons and wounded 72,286--a mortality which is said

by the commissioners to be twice that of the battle of Gettysburg,

concerning which we know nothing but the name. This was about the annual

average of railroad casualties of the period, and if it provoked comment

it at least led to no reform, for at a later period we find the mortality

even greater. That it was preventable is shown by the fact that in the

same year the railroads of Great Britain, where the speed was greater and

the intervals between vehicles less, killed only one passenger. It was a

difference of government: Great Britain had a government that governed;

America had not. Happily for humanity, the kind of government that does

not govern, self-government, "government of the people, by the people and

for the people" (to use a meaningless paradox of that time) has perished

from the face of the earth.

An inherent weakness in republican government was that it assumed the

honesty and intelligence of the majority, "the masses," who were neither

honest nor intelligent. It would doubtless have been an excellent

government for a people so good and wise as to need none. In a country

having such a system the leaders, the politicians, must necessarily all be

demagogues, for they can attain to place and power by no other method than

flattery of the people and subserviency to the will of the majority. In

all the ancient American political literature we look in vain for a single

utterance of truth and reason regarding these matters. In none of it is a

hint that the multitude was ignorant and vicious, as we know it to have

been, and as it must necessarily be in any country, to whatever high

average of intelligence and morality the people attain; for "intelligence"

and "morality" are comparative terms, the standard of comparison being the

intelligence and morality of the wisest and best, who must always be the

few. Whatever general advance is made, those not at the head are

behind--are ignorant and immoral according to the new standard, and unfit

to control in the higher and broader policies demanded by the progress

made. Where there is true and general progress the philosopher of

yesterday would be the ignoramus of to-day, the honorable of one

generation the vicious of another. The peasant of our time is incomparably

superior to the statesman of ancient America, yet he is unfit to govern,

for there are others more fit.

That a body of men can be wiser than its wisest member seems to the modern

understanding so obvious and puerile an error that it is inconceivable

that any people, even the most primitive, could ever have entertained it;

yet we know that in America it was a fixed and steadfast political faith.

The people of that day did not, apparently, attempt to explain how the

additional wisdom was acquired by merely assembling in council, as in

their "legislatures"; they seem to have assumed that it was so, and to

have based their entire governmental system upon that assumption, with

never a suspicion of its fallacy. It is like assuming that a mountain

range is higher than its highest peak. In the words of Golpek, "The early

Americans believed that units of intelligence were addable quantities," or

as Soseby more wittily puts it, "They thought that in a combination of

idiocies they had the secret of sanity."

The Americans, as has been said, never learned that even among themselves

majorities ruled, not because they ought, but because they could--not

because they were wise, but because they were strong. The count of noses

determined, not the better policy, but the more powerful party. The weaker

submitted, as a rule, for it had to or risk a war in which it would be at

a disadvantage. Yet in all the early years of the republic they seem

honestly to have dignified their submission as "respect for the popular

verdict." They even quoted from the Latin language the sentiment that "the

voice of the people is the voice of God." And this hideous blasphemy was

as glib upon the lips of those who, without change of mind, were defeated

at the polls year after year as upon those of the victors.

Of course, their government was powerless to restrain any aggression or

encroachment upon the general welfare as soon as a considerable body of

voters had banded together to undertake it. A notable instance has been

recorded by Bamscot in his great work, "Some Evil Civilizations." After

the first of America's great intestinal wars the surviving victors formed

themselves into an organization which seems at first to have been purely

social and benevolent, but afterward fell into the hands of rapacious

politicians who in order to preserve their power corrupted their followers

by distributing among them enormous sums of money exacted from the

government by threats of overturning it. In less than a half century after

the war in which they had served, so great was the fear which they

inspired in whatever party controlled the national treasury that the total

sum of their exactions was no less annually than seventeen million

_prastams_! As Dumbleshaw naïvely puts it, "having saved their country,

these gallant gentlemen naturally took it for themselves." The eventual

massacre of the remnant of this hardy and impenitent organization by the

labor unions more accustomed to the use of arms is beyond the province of

this monograph to relate. The matter is mentioned at all only because it

is a typical example of the open robbery that marked that period of the

republic's brief and inglorious existence; the Grand Army, as it called

itself, was no worse and no better than scores of other organizations

having no purpose but plunder and no method but menace. A little later

nearly all classes and callings became organized conspiracies, each

seeking an unfair advantage through laws which the party in power had not

the firmness to withhold, nor the party hoping for power the courage to

oppose. The climax of absurdity in this direction was reached in 1918,

when an association of barbers, known as Noblemen of the Razor, procured

from the parliament of the country a law giving it a representative in the

President's Cabinet, and making it a misdemeanor to wear a beard.

In Soseby's "History of Popular Government" he mentions "a monstrous

political practice known as 'Protection to American Industries.'" Modern

research has not ascertained precisely what it was; it is known rather

from its effects than in its true character, but from what we can learn of

it to-day I am disposed to number it among those malefic agencies

concerned in the destruction of the American republics, particularly the

Connected States, although it appears not to have been peculiar to

"popular government." Some of the contemporary monarchies of Europe were

afflicted with it, but by the divine favor which ever guards a throne its

disastrous effects were averted. "Protection" consisted in a number of

extraordinary expedients, the purposes of which and their relations to one

another cannot with certainty be determined in the present state of our

knowledge. Debrethin and others agree that one feature of it was the

support, by general taxation, of a few favored citizens in public palaces,

where they passed their time in song and dance and all kinds of revelry.

They were not, however, altogether idle, being required out of the sums

bestowed upon them, to employ a certain number of men each in erecting

great piles of stone and pulling them down again, digging holes in the

ground and then filling them with earth, pouring water into casks and then

drawing it off, and so forth. The unhappy laborers were subject to the

most cruel oppressions, but the knowledge that their wages came from the

pockets of those whom their work nowise benefited was so gratifying to

them that nothing could induce them to leave the service of their

heartless employers to engage in lighter and more useful labor.

Another characteristic of "Protection" was the maintenance at the

principal seaports of "customs-houses," which were strong fortifications

armed with heavy guns for the purpose of destroying or driving away the

trading ships of foreign nations. It was this that caused the Connected

States to be known abroad as the "Hermit Republic," a name of which its

infatuated citizens were strangely proud, although they had themselves

sent armed ships to open the ports of Japan and other Oriental countries

to their own commerce. In their own case, if a foreign ship came empty and

succeeded in evading the fire of the "customs-house," as sometimes

occurred, she was permitted to take away a cargo.

It is obvious that such a system was distinctly evil, but it must be

confessed our uncertainty regarding the whole matter of "Protection" does

not justify us in assigning it a definite place among the causes of

national decay. That in some way it produced an enormous revenue is

certain, and that the method was dishonest is no less so; for this

revenue--known as a "surplus"--was so abhorred while it lay in the

treasury that all were agreed upon the expediency of getting rid of it,

two great political parties existing for apparently no other purpose than

the patriotic one of taking it out.

But how, it may be asked, could people so misgoverned get on, even as well

as they did?

From the records that have come down to us it does not appear that they

got on very well. They were preyed upon by all sorts of political

adventurers, whose power in most instances was limited only by the

contemporaneous power of other political adventurers equally unscrupulous.

A full half of the taxes wrung from them was stolen. Their public lands,

millions of square miles, were parceled out among banded conspirators.

Their roads and the streets of their cities were nearly impassable. Their

public buildings, conceived in abominable taste and representing enormous

sums of money, which never were used in their construction, began to

tumble about the ears of the workmen before they were completed. The most

delicate and important functions of government were intrusted to men with

neither knowledge, heart nor experience, who by their corruption imperiled

the public interest and by their blundering disgraced the national name.

In short, all the train of evils inseparable from government of any kind

beset this unhappy people with tenfold power, together with hundreds of

worse ones peculiar to their own faulty and unnatural system. It was

thought that their institutions would give them peace, yet in the first

three-quarters of a century of their existence they fought three important

wars: one of revenge, one of aggression and one--the bloodiest and most

wasteful known up to that time--among themselves. And before a century and

a half had passed they had the humiliation to see many of their seaport

cities destroyed by the Emperor of Japan in a quarrel which they had

themselves provoked by their greed of Oriental dominion.

By far the most important factor concerned in bringing about the

dissolution of the republic and the incredible horrors that followed it

was what was known as "the contest between capital and labor." This

momentous struggle began in a rather singular way through an agitation set

afoot by certain ambitious women who preached at first to inattentive and

inhospitable ears, but with ever increasing acceptance, the doctrine of

equality of the sexes, and demanded the "emancipation" of woman. True,

woman was already an object of worship and had, as noted before, the right

to kill. She was treated with profound and sincere deference, because of

certain humble virtues, the product of her secluded life. Men of that time

appear to have felt for women, in addition to religious reverence, a

certain sentiment known as "love." The nature of this feeling is not

clearly known to us, and has been for ages a matter of controversy

evolving more heat than light. This much is plain: it was largely composed

of good will, and had its root in woman's dependence. Perhaps it had

something of the character of the benevolence with which we regard our

slaves, our children and our domestic animals--everything, in fact, that

is weak, helpless and inoffensive.

Woman was not satisfied; her superserviceable advocates taught her to

demand the right to vote, to hold office, to own property, to enter into

employment in competition with man. Whatever she demanded she eventually

got. With the effect upon her we are not here concerned; the predicted

gain to political purity did not ensue, nor did commercial integrity

receive any stimulus from her participation in commercial pursuits. What

indubitably did ensue was a more sharp and bitter competition in the

industrial world through this increase of more than thirty per cent, in

its wage-earning population. In no age nor country has there ever been

sufficient employment for those requiring it. The effect of so enormously

increasing the already disproportionate number of workers in a single

generation could be no other than disastrous. Every woman employed

displaced or excluded some man, who, compelled to seek a lower employment,

displaced another, and so on, until the least capable or most unlucky of

the series became a tramp--a nomadic mendicant criminal! The number of

these dangerous vagrants in the beginning of the twentieth century of

their era has been estimated by Holobom at no less than seven and a half

_blukuks_! Of course, they were as tow to the fires of sedition, anarchy

and insurrection. It does not very nearly relate to our present purpose,

but it is impossible not to note in passing that this unhappy result,

directly flowing from woman's invasion of the industrial field, was

unaccompanied by any material advantage to herself. Individual women, here

and there one, may themselves have earned the support that they would

otherwise not have received, but the sex as a whole was not benefited.

They provided for themselves no better than they had previously been

provided for, and would still have been provided for, by the men whom they

displaced. The whole somber incident is unrelieved by a single gleam of

light.

Previously to this invasion of the industrial field by woman there had

arisen conditions that were in themselves peculiarly menacing to the

social fabric. Some of the philosophers of the period, rummaging amongst

the dubious and misunderstood facts of commercial and industrial history,

had discovered what they were pleased to term "the law of supply and

demand"; and this they expounded with so ingenious a sophistry, and so

copious a wealth of illustration and example that what is at best but a

faulty and imperfectly applicable principle, limited and cut into by all

manner of other considerations, came to be accepted as the sole

explanation and basis of material prosperity and an infallible rule for

the proper conduct of industrial affairs. In obedience to this "law"--for,

interpreting it in its straitest sense they understood it to be

mandatory--employers and employees alike regulated by its iron authority

all their dealings with one another, throwing off the immemorial relations

of mutual dependence and mutual esteem as tending to interfere with

beneficent operation. The employer came to believe conscientiously that it

was not only profitable and expedient, but under all circumstances his

duty, to obtain his labor for as little money as possible, even as he sold

its product for as much. Considerations of humanity were not banished from

his heart, but most sternly excluded from his business. Many of these

misguided men would give large sums to various charities; would found

universities, hospitals, libraries; would even stop on their way to

relieve beggars in the street; but for their own work-people they had no

care. Straman relates in his "Memoirs" that a wealthy manufacturer once

said to one of his mill-hands who had asked for an increase of his wages

because unable to support his family on the pay that he was getting: "Your

family is nothing to me. I cannot afford to mix benevolence with my

business." Yet this man, the author adds, had just given a thousand

_drusoes_ to a "sea-man's home." He could afford to care for other men's

employees, but not for his own. He could not see that the act which he

performed as truly, and to the same degree, cut down his margin of profit

in his business as the act which he refused to perform would have done,

and had not the advantage of securing him better service from a grateful

workman.

On their part the laborers were no better. Their relations to their

employers being "purely commercial," as it was called, they put no heart

into their work, seeking ever to do as little as possible for their money,

precisely as their employers sought to pay as little as possible for the

work they got. The interests of the two classes being thus antagonized,

they grew to distrust and hate each other, and each accession of ill

feeling produced acts which tended to broaden the breach more and more.

There was neither cheerful service on the one side nor ungrudging payment

on the other.

The harder industrial conditions generated by woman's irruption into a new

domain of activity produced among laboring men a feeling of blind

discontent and concern. Like all men in apprehension, they drew together

for mutual protection, they knew not clearly against what. They formed

"labor unions," and believed them to be something new and effective in the

betterment of their condition; whereas, from the earliest historical

times, in Rome, in Greece, in Egypt, in Assyria, labor unions with their

accepted methods of "striking" and rioting had been discredited by an

almost unbroken record of failure. One of the oldest manuscripts then in

existence, preserved in a museum at Turin, but now lost, related how the

workmen employed in the necropolis at Thebes, dissatisfied with their

allowance of corn and oil, had refused to work, broken out of their

quarters and, after much rioting, been subdued by the arrows of the

military. And such, despite the sympathies and assistance of brutal mobs

of the populace, was sometimes the end of the American "strike."

Originally organized for self-protection, and for a time partly

successful, these leagues became great tyrannies, so reasonless in their

demands and so unscrupulous in their methods of enforcing them that the

laws were unable to deal with them, and frequently the military forces of

the several States were ordered out for the protection of life and

property; but in most cases the soldiers fraternized with the leagues, ran

away, or were easily defeated. The cruel and mindless mobs had always the

hypocritical sympathy and encouragement of the newspapers and the

politicians, for both feared their power and courted their favor. The

judges, dependent for their offices not only on "the labor vote," but, to

obtain it, on the approval of the press and the politicians, boldly set

aside the laws against conspiracy and strained to the utmost tension those

relating to riot, arson and murder. To such a pass did all this come that

in the year 1931 an inn-keeper's denial of a half-holiday to an under-cook

resulted in the peremptory closing of half the factories in the country,

the stoppage of all railroad travel and movement of freight by land and

water and a general paralysis of the industries of the land. Many

thousands of families, including those of the "strikers" and their

friends, suffered from famine; armed conflicts occurred in every State;

hundreds were slain and incalculable amounts of property wrecked and

destroyed.

Failure, however, was inherent in the method, for success depended upon

unanimity, and the greater the membership of the unions and the more

serious their menace to the industries of the country, the higher was the

premium for defection; and at last strike-breaking became a regular

employment, organized, officered and equipped for the service required by

the wealth and intelligence that directed it. From that moment the doom of

labor unionism was decreed and inevitable. But labor unionism did not live

long enough to die that way.

Naturally combinations of labor entailed combinations of capital. These

were at first purely protective. They were brought into being by the

necessity of resisting the aggressions of the others. But the trick of

combination once learned, it was seen to have possibilities of profit in

directions not dreamed of by its early promoters; its activities were not

long confined to fighting the labor unions with their own weapons and with

superior cunning and address. The shrewd and energetic men whose capacity

and commercial experience had made them rich while the laborers remained

poor were not slow to discern the advantages of coöperation over their own

former method of competition among themselves. They continued to fight the

labor unions, but ceased to fight one another. The result was that in the

brief period of two generations almost the entire business of the country

fell into the hands of a few gigantic corporations controlled by bold and

unscrupulous men, who, by daring and ingenious methods, made the body of

the people pay tribute to their greed.

In a country where money was all-powerful the power of money was used

without stint and without scruple. Judges were bribed to do their duty,

juries to convict, newspapers to support and legislators to betray their

constituents and pass the most oppressive laws. By these corrupt means,

and with the natural advantage of greater skill in affairs and larger

experience in concerted action, the capitalists soon restored their

ancient reign and the state of the laborer was worse than it had ever been

before. Straman says that in his time two millions of unoffending workmen

in the various industries were once discharged without warning and

promptly arrested as vagrants and deprived of their ears because a sulking

canal-boatman had kicked his captain's dog into the water. And the dog was

a retriever.

Had the people been honest and intelligent, as the politicians affirmed

them to be, the combination of capital could have worked no public

injury--would, in truth, have been a great public benefit. It enormously

reduced the expense of production and distribution, assured greater

permanency of employment, opened better opportunities to general and

special aptitude, gave an improved product, and at first supplied it at a

reduced price. Its crowning merit was that the industries of the country,

being controlled by a few men from a central source, could themselves be

easily controlled by law if law had been honestly administered. Under the

old order of scattered jurisdictions, requiring a multitude of actions at

law, little could be done, and little was done, to put a check on

commercial greed; under the new, much was possible, and at times something

was accomplished. But not for long; the essential dishonesty of the

American character enabled these capable and conscienceless

managers--"captains of industry" and "kings of finance"--to buy with money

advantages and immunities superior to those that the labor unions could

obtain by menaces and the promise of votes. The legislatures, the courts,

the executive officers, all the sources of authority and springs of

control, were defiled and impested until right and justice fled affrighted

from the land, and the name of the country became a stench in the nostrils

of the world.

Let us pause in our narrative to say here that much of the abuse of the

so-called "trusts" by their victims took no account of the folly,

stupidity and greed of the victims themselves. A favorite method by which

the great corporations crushed out the competition of the smaller ones and

of the "individual dealers" was by underselling them--a method made

possible by nothing but the selfishness of the purchasing consumers who

loudly complained of it. These could have stood by their neighbor, the

"small dealer," if they had wanted to, and no underselling could, have

been done. When the trust lowered the price of its product they eagerly

took the advantage offered, then cursed the trust for ruining the small

dealer. When it raised the price they cursed it for ruining themselves. It

is not easy to see what the trust could have done that would have been

acceptable, nor is it surprising that it soon learned to ignore their

clamor altogether and impenitently plunder those whom it could not hope to

appease.

Another of the many sins justly charged against the "kings of finance" was

this: They would buy properties worth, say, ten millions of "dollars" (the

value of the dollar is now unknown) and issue stock upon it to the face

value of, say, fifty millions. This their clamorous critics called

"creating" for themselves forty millions of dollars. They created nothing;

the stock had no dishonest value unless sold, and even at the most corrupt

period of the government nobody was compelled by law to buy. In nine cases

in ten the person who bought did so in the hope and expectation of getting

much for little and something for nothing. The buyer was no better than

the seller. He was a gambler. He "played against the game of the man who

kept the table" (as the phrase went), and naturally he lost. Naturally,

too, he cried out, but his lamentations, though echoed shrilly by the

demagogues, seem to have been unavailing. Even the rudimentary

intelligence of that primitive people discerned the impracticability of

laws forbidding the seller to set his own price on the thing he would sell

and declare it worth that price. Then, as now, nobody had to believe him.

Of the few who bought these "watered" stocks in good faith as an

investment in the honest hope of dividends it seems sufficient to say, in

the words of an ancient Roman, "Against stupidity the gods themselves are

powerless." Laws that would adequately protect the foolish from the

consequence of their folly would put an end to all commerce. The sin of

"over-capitalization" differed in magnitude only, not in kind, from the

daily practice of every salesman in every shop. Nevertheless, the popular

fury that it aroused must be reckoned among the main causes contributory

to the savage insurrections that accomplished the downfall of the

republic.

With the formation of powerful and unscrupulous trusts of both labor and

capital to subdue each other the possibilities of combination were not

exhausted; there remained the daring plan of combining the two

belligerents! And this was actually effected. The laborer's demand for an

increased wage was always based upon an increased cost of living, which

was itself chiefly due to increased cost of production from reluctant

concessions of his former demands. But in the first years of the twentieth

century observers noticed on the part of capital a lessening reluctance.

More frequent and more extortionate and reasonless demands encountered a

less bitter and stubborn resistance; capital was apparently weakening just

at the time when, with its strong organizations of trained and willing

strike-breakers, it was most secure. Not so; an ingenious malefactor,

whose name has perished from history, had thought out a plan for bringing

the belligerent forces together to plunder the rest of the population. In

the accounts that have come down to us details are wanting, but we know

that, little by little, this amazing project was accomplished. Wages rose

to incredible rates. The cost of living rose with them, for

employers--their new allies wielding in their service the weapons

previously used against them, intimidation, the boycott, and so

forth--more than recouped themselves from the general public. Their

employees got rebates on the prices of products, but for consumers who

were neither laborers nor capitalists there was no mercy. Strikes were a

thing of the past; strike-breakers threw themselves gratefully into the

arms of the unions; "industrial discontent" vanished, in the words of a

contemporary poet, "as by the stroke of an enchanter's wand." All was

peace, tranquillity and order! Then the storm broke.

A man in St. Louis purchased a sheep's kidney for seven-and-a-half

dollars. In his rage at the price he exclaimed: "As a public man I have

given twenty of the best years of my life to bringing about a friendly

understanding between capital and labor. I have succeeded, and may God

have mercy on my meddlesome soul!"

The remark was resented, a riot ensued, and when the sun went down that

evening his last beams fell upon a city reeking with the blood of a

hundred millionaires and twenty thousand citizens and sons of toil!

Students of the history of those troublous times need not to be told what

other and more awful events followed that bloody reprisal. Within

forty-eight hours the country was ablaze with insurrection, followed by

intestinal wars which lasted three hundred and seventy years and were

marked by such hideous barbarities as the modern historian can hardly

bring himself to relate. The entire stupendous edifice of popular

government, temple and citadel of fallacies and abuses, had crashed to

ruin. For centuries its fallen columns and scattered stones sheltered an

ever diminishing number of skulking anarchists, succeeded by hordes of

skin-clad savages subsisting on offal and raw flesh--the race-remnant of

an extinct civilization. All finally vanished from history into a darkness

impenetrable to conjecture.

* * * * *

In concluding this hasty and imperfect sketch I cannot forbear to relate

an episode of the destructive and unnatural contest between labor and

capital, which I find recorded in the almost forgotten work of Antrolius,

who was an eye-witness to the incident.

At a time when the passions of both parties were most inflamed and scenes

of violence most frequent it was somehow noised about that at a certain

hour of a certain day some one--none could say who--would stand upon the

steps of the Capitol and speak to the people, expounding a plan for

reconciliation of all conflicting interests and pacification of the

quarrel. At the appointed hour thousands had assembled to hear--glowering

capitalists attended by hireling body-guards with firearms, sullen

laborers with dynamite bombs concealed in their clothing. All eyes were

directed to the specified spot, where suddenly appeared (none saw

whence--it seemed as if he had been there all the time, such his

tranquillity) a tall, pale man clad in a long robe, bare-headed, his hair

falling lightly upon his shoulders, his eyes full of compassion, and with

such majesty of face and mien that all were awed to silence ere he spoke.

Stepping slowly forward toward the throng and raising his right hand from

the elbow, the index finger extended upward, he said, in a voice ineffably

sweet and serious: "Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, even

so do ye also unto them."

These strange words he repeated in the same solemn tones three times;

then, as the expectant multitude waited breathless for his discourse,

stepped quietly down into the midst of them, every one afterward declaring

that he passed within a pace of where himself had stood. For a moment the

crowd was speechless with surprise and disappointment, then broke into

wild, fierce cries: "Lynch him, lynch him!" and some have testified that

they heard the word "crucify." Struggling into looser order, the

infuriated mob started in mad pursuit; but each man ran a different way

and the stranger was seen again by none of them.