[Speech of St. Clair McKelway before the National Society of China
Importers, New York City, February 6, 1896.]
MR. CHAIRMAN AND FRIENDS:--The china I buy abroad is marked
"Fragile" in shipment. That which I buy at home is marked: "Glass--This
Side Up With Care." The foreign word of caution is fact. The American
note of warning is fiction--with a moral motive. The common purpose of
both is protection from freight fractors and baggage smashers. The
European appeals to knowledge. The American addresses the imagination.
The one expresses the truth. The other extends it. Neither is entirely
successful. The skill and care of shippers cannot always victoriously
cope with the innate destructiveness of fallen human nature. There is a
great deal of smashed crockery in the world.
You who are masters in the art of packing things and we whose vocation
is the art of putting things, both have reason to know that no pains of
placing or of preparation will guarantee freight or phrases, plates or
propositions, china of any kind or principles of any sort, from the
dangers of travel or from the tests of time. Your goods and our wares
have to take their chances in their way across the seas, throughout the
land and around the world. You lose some of yours merely in handling.
The defects of firing cannot be always foreseen. The intrusion of
inferior clay cannot be always prevented. The mere friction of contact
may produce bad nicks. Nor is the fineness nor the excellence of the
product an insurance against mishaps. From your factories or stores your
output is at the mercy of carriers without compunction, and in our
homes it is exposed to the heavy hands of servants without sentiment.
The pleasure of many a dinner is impaired by the fear or the
consciousness that inapt peasants are playing havoc with the treasures
of art on which the courses are served.
If, however, the ceramic kingdom is strewn with smashed crockery, how
much more so are the worlds of theology, medicine, politics, society,
law, and the like. No finer piece of plate was ever put forth than the
one inscribed: "I will believe only what I know." It was for years
agreeable to the pride and vanity of the race. It made many a fool feel
as if his forehead was lifted as high as the heavens, and that at every
step he knocked out a star. When, however, the discovery was made that
this assumption to displace deity amounted to a failure to comprehend
nature, some disappointment was admitted. He who affected by searching
to find out and to equal God could not explain the power by which a tree
pumps its sap from roots to leaves, or why a baby rabbit rejects the
grasses that would harm it, or why a puling infant divines its mother
among the motley and multitudinous mass of sibilant saints at a sewing
society which is discussing the last wedding and the next divorce. He
"who admits only what he understands" would have to look on himself as a
conundrum and then give the conundrum up. He would have the longest
doubts and the shortest creed on record. Agnosticism is part of the
smashed crockery of the moral universe.
Nor is the smug and confident contention: "Medicine is a science, one
and indivisible," so impressive and undented as it was. Sir Astley
Cooper in his plain, blunt way is reported to have described his own
idea of his own calling as "a science founded on conjecture and improved
by murder." The State of New York has rudely stepped in and legally and
irrevocably recognized three schools of medicine and will recognize a
fourth or a fifth as soon as it establishes itself by a sufficient
number of cures or in a sufficient number of cemeteries. Medical
intolerance cannot be legislated out of existence, but it has no further
recognition in legislation. A common and considerable degree of general
learning is by the State required of all intending students of medicine.
An equal and extended degree of professional study is required. An
identical measure of final examination with state certification and
state licensure is required. The claim that men and women must die
_secundum artem_ in order to have any permit to live here or to live
hereafter, has gone to the limbo of smashed crockery in the realm of
therapeutics. The arrogant pretension that men must die _secundum artem_
has been adjourned--_sine die_. And the State which prescribes uniform
qualifications among the schools will yet require uniform consultations
between them in the interest of the people whom they impartially prod
and concurrently purge with diversity of methods, but with parity of
price.
Other long impressive and long pretty plaques have also been
incontinently smashed. One was lovingly lettered: "Once a Democrat,
always a Democrat." Another was inscribed: "Unconditional
Republicanism." In the white light of to-day the truth that an
invariable partisan is an occasional lunatic becomes impressively
apparent. Party under increasing civilization is a factor, not a fetish.
It is a means, not an end. It is an instrument, not an idol. Man is its
master, not its slave. Not that men will cease to act on party lines.
Party lines are the true divisional boundary between schools of thought.
No commission is needed to discover or to establish those lines. They
have made their own route or course in human nature. The bondage from
which men will free themselves is bondage to party organizations. Those
organizations are combinations for power and spoils. They are feudal in
their form, predatory in their spirit, military in their methods, but
they necessarily bear no more relation to political principles than
Italian banditti do to Italian unity, or the men who hold up railway
trains do to the laws of transportation. Party slavery is a bad and
disappearing form of smashed crockery.
The smashed crockery of society and of law could also be remarked. Our
fathers' dictum, that it is the only duty of women to be charming,
deserves to be sent into retirement. It is no more their duty to be
charming than it is the duty of the sun to light, or the rose to
perfume, or the trees to cast a friendly shade. A function is not a
duty. In the right sense of the word it is a nature or a habit. It is
the property of women and it is their prerogative to be charming, but if
they made it a duty, the effort would fail, for the intention would be
apparent and the end would impeach the means. Indeed, the whole theory
of the eighteenth century about women has gone to the limbo of smashed
crockery. It has been found that education does not hurt her. It has
been discovered that learning strengthens her like a tonic and becomes
her like a decoration. It has been discovered that she can compete with
men in the domain of lighter labor, in several of the professions, and
in not a few of the useful arts. The impression of her as a pawn, a
property or a plaything, came down from paganism to Christianity and was
too long retained by the Christian world. There is even danger of excess
in the liberality now extended to her. The toast, "Woman, Once Our
Superior and Now Our Equal," is not without satire as well as
significance. There must be a measurable reaction against the ultra
tendency in progress which has evolved the New Woman, as the phrase is.
I never met one and I hope I never shall. The women of the present, the
girls of the period, the sex up-to-date, will more than suffice to
double our joys and to treble our expenses. The new fads, as well as the
old fallacies, can be thrown among the smashed crockery of demolished
and discarded misconceptions.
I intended to say much about the smashed crockery of the lawyers. I
intended to touch upon the exploded claim that clients are their slaves,
witnesses theirs for vivisection, courts their playthings, and juries
their dupes. More mummery has thrived in law than in even medicine or
theology. The disenchanting and discriminating tendency of a realistic
age has, however, somewhat reformed the bar. Fluency, without force, is
discounted in our courts. The merely smart practitioner finds his
measure quickly taken and that the conscientious members of his calling
hold him at arm's length. Judges are learning that they are not rated
wise when they are obscure, or profound when they are stupid, or
mysterious when they are reserved. Publicity is abating many of the
abuses both of the bench and the bar. It will before long, even in this
judicial department, require both rich and poor to stand equal before
the bar of justice. The conjugal complications of plutocrats will not be
sealed up from general view by sycophantic magistrates, while the
matrimonial infelicities of the less well-to-do are spread broad on the
records. The still continuing scandals of partitioning refereeships
among the family relatives of judges will soon be stopped and the shame
and scandal of damage suits or of libel suits, without cause, maintained
by procured and false testimony and conducted on sheer speculation, will
be brought to an end. The law is full of rare crockery, but it is also
replete with crockery that ought to be smashed. Much bad crockery in it
has been smashed and much more will be, if necessary, by the press,
which is itself not without considerable ceramic material that could be
pulverized with signal benefit to the public and to the fourth estate.
But why am I talking about smashed crockery when I am told that it is
the very life of your trade? Were crockery imperishable this would be
the last dinner of your association. Your members would be eating cold
victuals at area doors, passed to you on the plates you have made, by
the domestics whose free and easy carelessness is really the foundation
of your fortunes. You want crockery to be smashed, because the more
smash the more crockery and the more crockery the more output, and the
more output the more revenue, and the more revenue the more Waldorf
dinners, and the more Waldorf dinners the more opportunity for you to
make the men of other callings stand and deliver those speeches, which I
like to hear, and in the hope of hearing which I now give way.
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