Established by Edward L. Youmans
APPLETONS'
POPULAR SCIENCE
MONTHLY
EDITED BY
WILLIAM JAY YOUMANS
VOL. LIV
NOVEMBER, 1898, TO APRIL, 1899
NEW YORK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1899
COPYRIGHT, 1899,
BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.
VOL. LIV. ESTABLISHED BY EDWARD L. YOUMANS. NO. 5.
APPLETONS' POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.
MARCH, 1899.
_EDITED BY WILLIAM JAY YOUMANS._
CONTENTS.
PAGE
I. The Evolution of Colonies. VII. Social Evolution. By
J. COLLIER. 577
II. Politics as a Form of Civil War. By FRANKLIN SMITH. 588
III. My Pet Scorpion. By NORMAN ROBINSON. (Illustrated.) 605
IV. The Peoples of the Balkan Peninsula--The Greek, the Slav,
and the Turk. By Prof. WILLIAM Z. RIPLEY. (Illustrated.) 614
V. Marvelous Increase in Production of Gold. By ALEXANDER E.
OUTERBRIDGE, Jr. 635
VI. The California Penal System. By CHARLES HOWARD SHINN.
(Illus.) 644
VII. The Scientific Expert and the Bering Sea Controversy. By
GEORGE A. CLARK. 654
VIII. A School for the Study of Life under the Sea. By ELEANOR
HODGENS PATTERSON. 668
IX. Science in Education. By Sir ARCHIBALD GEIKIE, F. R. S. 672
X. Shall we Teach our Daughters the Value of Money? By Mrs.
GEORGE ELMORE IDE. 686
XI. Sketch of Clémence Royer. By M. JACQUES BOYER.
(With Portrait.) 690
XII. Editor's Table: Words of a Master.--Fads and Frauds 699
XIII. Scientific Literature 704
XIV. Fragments of Science 712
NEW YORK: D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, 72 FIFTH AVENUE.
SINGLE NUMBER, 50 CENTS. YEARLY SUBSCRIPTION, $5.00.
COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.
Entered at the Post Office at New York, and admitted for
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[Illustration: CLÉMENCE ROYER.]
APPLETONS' POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.
MARCH, 1899.
THE EVOLUTION OF COLONIES.
BY JAMES COLLIER.
VII.--SOCIAL EVOLUTION.
Perhaps there is no civilized institution to which, man has
accommodated himself with so ill a grace as monogamy. Hardly a
perversion of it has ever existed but may still be found. Polygamy is
widely spread in the most advanced communities; temporary polyandrous
_ménages à trois_ are known to exist elsewhere than among the Nairs
and Tibetans and _ancient_ Britons; the matriarchate in one shape or
another may be detected well outside the sixty peoples among whom Mr.
Tylor has discovered it; and marriage by free choice is far from
having superseded marriage by capture or by purchase. It is the less
surprising that abnormal or ancient forms of the union should have
been revived in colonies. In this relationship, as in most others, the
colonist, like the sperm cell after its junction with the germ cell,
sinks at once to a lower level, and the race has to begin life over
again. The fall is inevitable. The earliest immigrants are all of them
men. Everywhere finding indigenes in the newly settled country, they
can usually count on the complaisance or the submissiveness of the
tribesmen. Native women have a strange fascination for civilized men,
even for those who have been intimate with the European aristocracies
and have belonged to them. Adventurous Castins might find their
account in a relationship that was in perfect keeping with the wild
life they led. It is more strange that, enslaved by an appetite which
sometimes rose to a collective if seldom to a personal passion,
educated men, with a scientific or a public career flung open to them
at their option, able men who have written the best books about the
races they knew only too well, men of great position whose heroic
deeds and winning manners made them adored by women of their own race,
should have spoiled their prime, or inextricably entangled themselves,
or wrecked their own roof-tree and incurred lifelong desertion by the
wife of their youth. The bluest blood of Spain was not contaminated by
an alliance with the Incas, but just ten years ago the direct line of
an ancient English earldom was extinguished among the Kaffirs. The
truth seems to be that while a woman will not as a rule accept a man
who is her inferior in rank or refinement, a man easily contents
himself for the time with almost any female. The Bantu woman and the
Australian _zubra_ are not alluring, but they have never lacked
suitors. Colonial women shrink (or profess to shrink) from the
Chinaman; all colors--black, brown, red, and yellow--seem to be alike
to the undiscriminating male appetite. Yet it has its preferences. The
high official who stands unmoved before the cloudy attractions of the
Zulu, surrenders at discretion to the soft-voiced, dark-eyed,
plump-limbed daughters of Maoriland. In the last case a perverse
theory (of the future amalgamation of the races) may have been "the
light that led astray"; it certainly was used to justify their acts to
the consciences of the doers. Romance had its share: Browning's Waring
(who was premier as well as poet) threw a poetic glamour over the
miscegenation, as another minister found in the race the Ossianesque
attributes of his own Highlanders. It sometimes, even now, rises into
passion: the colonial schoolmaster who marries a native girl will
declare that his is a love match. But the chief reason at all times
was "the custom of the country." "It was the regular thing," remarked
an old legislator, looking ruefully back on his past. Nor is it to be
harshly censured. Corresponding to the Roman slave-concubinage which
Cato Major did not disdain to practice, it repeated a stage in the
history of the mother country when the invading Angles allied
themselves (as anthropology abundantly proves) with the native
Britons. While making a kind of atonement to the indigenes, it was a
solatium to the pioneer colonists for a life of hardship and
privation.
A higher grade was the concubinage of convictism, which was with women
of the same race and was capable of rising into normal marriage. In
the early days of New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land it seems to
have been almost universal, and it lasted for many years. Not one in
ten of the officials lived with his legally married wife. In the
latter colony it was suppressed by the governor, who ordered them to
marry the women by whom they had families. In the former, if Dr.
Lang's account of his exertions is accepted, it was put down by the
exposure of guilty parties. It was accompanied by other features of a
low social state. The public and private sale of wives was not
infrequent. The colonial equivalent for a wife, in the currency of
those days, was sometimes four gallons of rum, or five pounds sterling
and a gallon, or twenty sheep and a gallon; one woman was sold for
fifty sheep.
Around gold and silver mining encampments nondescript relationships of
a slightly higher order arise. They are with free women, though the
women are apt to be of the same class as Bret Harte's Duchess of Poker
Flat, answering to the Doll Tearsheets of hardly more civilized
communities. They often issue in marriage. In mining townships, and
even in colonial towns, professional men are to be found married to
unpresentable women.
In colonies of regular foundation normal marriages are contracted
under difficulties. Few women at first go out, the emigrants intending
to return when they have made their fortune. Women have accordingly to
be sent. In the seventeenth century a number of girls of good repute
were persuaded to emigrate to Virginia, a subscription being raised to
defray the cost. In the following century wives were sent to settlers
in French Louisiana on the same plan. To French Canada women were
dispatched by shiploads. They were selected (according to Parkman) as
butchers choose cattle: the plumpest were preferred, because they
could stand the winter best and would stay at home. In Virginia women
were offered for sale to eager colonists, who willingly paid one
hundred pounds of tobacco for one, or as much as one hundred and fifty
pounds for a very pretty girl; a debt incurred for the purchase of a
wife being considered a debt of honor. In the early days of
Canterbury, New Zealand, when a consignment of servant girls arrived,
young farmers would ride over the Port hills and carry them off,
though in the style rather of young Lochinvar than of the Sabine rape.
Settlers have often requested the agent general for the colony or the
mayor of their native town to send them out a wife. Wives so easily
acquired are apt to be lightly parted with, and within the last few
years, in colonial villages, amicable exchanges have been
effected--one woman going with her children to the house of another
man, whose wife and children made a reciprocal migration. Facts such
as these (which might readily be multiplied) show how easily so-called
civilized man sloughs off the conventions of ages and sinks to a
primitive level. They soon disappear, however, and social colonial
conditions rapidly assimilate themselves to those of the mother
country. In most young colonies marriage is universal and it is early.
After a few days' acquaintance couples rashly engage themselves, in
utter ignorance of one another's character or of their own, and a
precipitate marriage follows, with such results as might be expected.
Statistics show that the age of marriage on the part of women is
steadily rising. In the early days of each colony a girl was deemed
_passée_ if she did not get married before she was twenty-one. In the
decade that ended the first century of New South Wales the proportion
of married women under that age fell from 28.17 to 23.55 per cent; in
less prosperous Victoria, after only half a century, it fell from 21
to 17.4; in New Zealand there was a big drop from 29.4 to 19.7. The
proportion of married women under twenty-five has also seriously
declined. The decrease is noticeably correspondent with the increased
number of young women who are gaining their own livelihood--largely as
teachers and typewriters. On these lines the colonies are following
the lead of the mother country. Long engagements, followed by late
marriages with fewer children, take the place of short engagements
with hasty marriages and larger families. Female celibacy is no longer
dishonorable, and women are beginning to understand that they may be
far happier single and self-supporting. The quality of marriage
improves with its rarity. When an Australian M. A. marries an M. A.,
or the most brilliant of New Zealand professors marries one of his
most distinguished students, we feel, as when a Dilke marries a
Pattison, that the ideal of the union has been realized.
The growth of the colonial house follows the development of the family
and repeats the history of the race. The immigrant procures his abode,
as he afterward buys his clothes, ready made. The ancient troglodyte
lives to-day in the Derbyshire cave dweller; the original Romanist
settlers of Maryland were driven to take refuge in cave houses in
Virginia; and the New Zealand hermit, like "great Pæan's son" at
Lemnos, "weeps o'er his wound" of the heart in a cave by the
resounding sea. Where they can not be found ready dug they can be
excavated, as they were by some early Pennsylvania colonists. Others
in Virginia, New York, and New England found it easier to dig holes in
the ground, thus imitating the Germans of Tacitus, whose winter
residences are also repeated in those basements which form the
wholesome abode of the London domestic servant. The wattle-and-daub
house of the Anglo-Saxon villager has been everywhere reproduced in
the colonies, and may still be abundantly found.
If the occupation of caves and the burrowing of holes suggests man's
distant affinity to the carnivora and lower quadrupeds, his simian
origin is confirmed by the use he makes of the tree. In the infant
city of Philadelphia there were "few mansions but hollow trees." A
rude form of tent is the next stage, the canvas consisting (as may
still be seen among the poorer campers-out) of clothes or rags. Then,
as in the early days of Sydney, the tents were covered in with bushes
and thatched over. Next (as may to-day be observed in the neighborhood
of Coolgardie) a framework of branches is employed to support the
canvas, and the tent is converted into a cabin. A stride toward the
house is taken when the branches are replaced by a regular woodwork,
with doors and windows; the envelope being still sometimes canvas,
which is soon replaced by corrugated iron. The Brazilian country house
where Darwin lodged sixty years ago was built of upright posts with
interwoven boughs. Another line of development starts from the trunk
of the tree. The early American colonists made bark wigwams. The
Australian pastoralist "erected a temporary house, generally of large
sheets of bark, in the first instance." In countries where the winter
is more severe or the bark less substantial, the backwoodsman builds,
as the early colonist built, a rude cabin of round logs. Then the logs
are hewn, or they are split or sawn into planks, and built into the
weatherboard houses still common in the rural parts of Australia, and
general even in New Zealand towns. In their earliest stages they are
still without a floor and are roofed with thatch or shingle. Towns
often thus remain like early Sydney, "a mere assemblage of paltry
erections intermediate between the hut and the house." The
architecture is of the simplest. A "butt" and a "ben," with a
"lean-to," form the prevailing type. As the family grows or its wealth
increases, new portions are added, till many colonial houses look for
all the world as if they had "come out in penny numbers." Even with a
few stately structures--luxurious mansions, extensive government
offices, Gothic parliamentary buildings--a wooden city has an
indefinable meanness of appearance. It is improved out of existence by
the dread agency of fire. Like Charles's London, New Orleans and many
another colonial town have thus had an Augustan renewal. Houses are
now built of brick, stone, or concrete; tile, slate, and iron replaced
thatch and shingle; two stories were ventured on; chimneys were
smaller but safer. They became susceptible of architecture: Spanish
features were introduced into those of New Orleans; the more northern
colonies copied the English country house, with modifications to suit
the hotter or colder climate; and in New South Wales a taste for
mansion-building came into vogue along with splendid equipages,
liveried servants, and pedigrees. Such houses were at first arranged
in all degrees of irregularity and confusion. The street is a modern
invention. The cows returning from pasture laid out Boston, and the
bullock teams climbing up from the harbor charted Sydney. Towns in
manufactured colonies, as Savannah, Augusta, most South American
cities, Christchurch and Invercargill in New Zealand, were planned
before settlement and have their streets at right angles.
A hundred years ago Talleyrand, exiled in the United States, described
the journey from one of these cities to the interior as successively
exhibiting all past stages of the human habitation from the mansion
to the tent, and just a century later one of Talleyrand's countrymen,
M. Pierre Leroy-Beaulieu, traveling in the reverse direction, from
"the bush" to Coolgardie, witnessed the gradual transformation of the
tent into the two-storied hotel. A great part of the history of the
race in the matter of habitations is thus museumed in the space of a
few miles.
If the temple rises out of the tomb, is modeled on that, and remains
to the last pre-eminently a place of sacrifice, the church is an
enlarged dwelling house. It is the house of the god, as the fetichist
called it--the house of God, as we still reverently call it; and in
Romanist countries to this day it is in a manner the abode of two
divine personages, who figure as dizened and painted dolls that are
named respectively God and the Mother of God! Both lines of
development are rapidly recapitulated in colonies. The temple appears
as the cathedral, which has modest beginnings, but gradually assumes
the architecture and proportions of Gothic cathedrals, losing
relation to the primary wants of the worshipers--comfort and
audibility--ministering mainly to their higher needs, and if used for
preaching at all, reserved for such occasional and sensational pulpit
oratory as that of Dominican monks like Lacordaire at Notre Dame in
Paris, or of a Protestant Dominican like the late Canon Liddon at St.
Paul's in London. The church, chapel, or meeting house may be found in
colonial villages in its most rudimentary form, scarcely
distinguishable in style from a dwelling house. According to the sect
it belongs to, it develops in one of two opposite directions. The age
of cathedrals is past, even in Roman Catholic countries, but the
tendency of Anglican and allied churches is to simulate the old
cathedral; high ritualistic sections mimic the gorgeous Madeleine. The
more liberal denominations, on the other hand, develop downward; the
colonial Baptist tabernacle is on the lines of Spurgeon's great
building at Newington, but the ancient pulpit is widened into a
platform and the seats slope upward as in a concert hall; it is a mere
auditorium, in which the preacher is all. The development in this
direction finds its extreme in the secularist hall, which is a mere
concert room, with a piano in place of an organ. The ceremonial
development is on the same lines--toward the gradual adoption of
ancient rites by the older churches, toward more freedom in the
younger sects. Many a colonial clergyman has wrecked himself or his
congregation through too much ritualism; a few have injured themselves
through an excess of liberalism.
A parallel evolution takes place in church government. Where an
organized settlement is made on political principles, congregations
carry their minister with them, or rather the ministers carry their
congregations. Where the colony is normally founded and grows up as
the mother country grew, the first ministers, like the first preachers
of Christianity itself, are often laymen. In an interior county of
Virginia Morris read every Lord's day to his neighbors from the
writings of Luther and Bunyan, and a meeting house was at length built
for him; it is a typical instance of the beginnings of most churches.
The part of laymen remains long prominent in colonies. The Anglican
lay reader is everywhere a feature of colonial church life. In the
more flexible churches a storekeeper or retired sea captain will read
Spurgeon's sermons or preach excellent sermons of his own in an Otago
village or the Australian bush. Where missionaries have been sent out
to convert the heathen in a country afterward colonized, many of them
remain as ministers, as did Augustin and his monks in England. The
Presbyterian catechist likewise becomes a settled minister. Others
arrive. Men of independent character, like Dr. Lang, of Sydney,
resolve not to wait for any dead man's shoes in the kirk, but sail
beyond the seas to colonies where there is no minister of their own
denomination. Heretics, incompatibles, men who have failed, men whose
health has given way, emigrate in increasing numbers. Still, the
supply is long deficient. Clergymen were scarce in New York. A bounty
was offered to immigrants in Virginia. Six years after the
establishment of the Church of England in North Carolina there was
only one clergyman in the country. The few there are repeat the
history of the first Christian bishops and the early English monks in
serving a circuit of two, three, or more churches. The state comes to
the rescue by providing for their support. In England contributions
were at first voluntary; by the eighth century tithes were levied,
folk-land was granted, and private endowments were made. Just so was
the Church of England established and endowed in New York, Virginia,
and North Carolina; in Maryland a poll tax of forty pounds of tobacco
was levied for its support. In Connecticut and Massachusetts a church
was set up in each parish on Congregationalist principles by a vote of
the people, who elected the minister and voted his salary. So
uncertain was the tenure that in several States even the Anglican
minister was hired from year to year; and quite lately an Anglican
church in a British colony engaged its incumbent, as it might have
engaged its organist, for a term. In 1791 the Church of England in
Canada was partially established, and its clergy endowed with grants
of land. The Australasian colonies have pursued a very various policy.
By the Constitution Act of 1791 one seventh of the ungranted lands in
New South Wales was set apart for the support of a Protestant clergy.
An attempt to endow the Anglican Church in South Australia in the
early forties was defeated by a radical governor. A recrudescence of
the ecclesiastical principle permitted the church settlements of
Otago and Canterbury in New Zealand to appropriate a portion of the
funds derived from the sale of lands for the endowment of the
Presbyterian and Anglican churches respectively. So far the colonies
followed, latterly with halting steps, the history of the mother
country. As in political, so in ecclesiastical government, they have
anticipated that history. The American state churches did not survive
the Revolution. In Canada the Presbyterians and other sects
successfully asserted their claims to a share in the church
endowments, which between 1840 and 1853 were distributed among the
municipalities, all semblance of a connection between church and state
being thus destroyed. New South Wales passed through a period of
religious equality with concurrent endowment of the four most numerous
denominations, and a long struggle against the principle of
establishment was ended in 1879, when the reserves were devoted to the
purposes of education. The practice of confiscating for the church a
portion of the proceeds of the land sales was gradually dropped in
Otago and Canterbury, probably more for commercial reasons than in
consequence of the opposition of the democratic governor aforesaid,
who spoked the wheel of the South Australians. Yielding to
Nonconformist pressure, the liberal Government in 1869 enforced the
principle of religious equality throughout the crown colonies, which
were thus, willingly or not, made to follow the lead of the movement
in Ireland. The internal organization of the colonial church is also
anticipative. Fifty-two years ago Sir George Grey bestowed on the
Anglican Church in New Zealand, then governed by him, a constitution
modeled on that of the corresponding church in the United States, as
the political constitution he drafted for the colony was modeled on
the Constitution of the United States; and it has been imitated in
other Australasian colonies, which have thus declared themselves
independent of the mother church, while the colony is still
politically dependent on the mother country. In yet another point the
daughters have outstripped the parent. Three Presbyterian
denominations still fissure the old home of Presbyterianism; only two
have ever existed in the colonies, and for thirty years these two have
been one. The four chief Methodist sects in Australia are also said to
be on the point of amalgamating.
The development of doctrine runs a fourth parallel to those of
buildings, cult, and organization, and in a brief space it
recapitulates a long history. In early colonial communities religious
dogma is found in a state of "albuminous simplicity." "A healthy man,"
says Thoreau, "with steady employment, as wood-chopping at fifty cents
a cord, and a camp in the woods, will not be a good subject for
Christianity." Nor will a bush-faller, at twenty-five shillings the
acre. Distant from a church and a minister, he gets out of the way of
attending the rare services brought within his reach, and forgets the
religion in which he was nurtured. It does not mingle with his life.
He is usually married at a registrar's. His children are unbaptized.
His parents die unshriven. The dull crises of his mean existence come
and go, and religion stands dumb before them. The inner spiritual
realities fade from his view as their outward symbols disappear, and
bit by bit the whole theological vesture woven by nineteen Christian
centuries drops off him like Rip Van Winkle's rotten garments when he
woke from his long sleep. In the matter of religion, as in almost all
else, the colonist has to begin life again poor.
As population grows and people come nearer to one another, two things
happen. The churches push their skirmishers into the interior, plant
stations, and have regular services. Gradually the old doctrines
strike root in the new soil, and at length a creed answering to
Evangelicalism is commonly held, thus repeating the first stage in the
history of Christianity in Asia as in England. On the other hand, many
of those whom neglect had softened into indifference or hardened into
contempt assume a more decided attitude. With the spirit of
independence which colonial life so readily begets, and stimulated by
the skeptical literature of the day, they take ground against the
renascent religion. Secularism, which denies what Evangelicalism
affirms and is on a level with that, is born. It organizes itself, has
halls and Sunday meetings, catechisms and children's teaching,
newspapers, and a propaganda. For a while it is triumphant, openly
contemptuous of the current religious mythology, and menacing toward
its exponents. The Secularist leaders make their way to the bench and
the legislature, the cabinet and the premiership. It is here the hitch
arises. Some (by no means all) of these leaders are found to prefer
power to principle, and prudently let their secularism go by the board
when a wave of popular odium threatens to swamp the ship. Financial
distress spreads. The movement loses _éclat_. As Bradlaugh's Hall of
Science in London has been sold to the Salvation Army, the Freethought
Hall in Sydney has been purchased by the Methodists, and in other
colonial towns the cause has collapsed. But it always remains, whether
patent or latent, as a needed counterpoise to the crudities of
Evangelicalism, and it is the core of that increasing mass of
religious indifferentism which strikes those who have been brought up
in the old country. Statistics are said to prove that Australia is
more addicted to church-going than England. If they prove any such
thing, then statistics (as Mr. Bumble irreverently said of the British
Constitution) are hasses and hidiots. You may sit down on any Sunday
morning at a colonial table with a dozen highly respectable persons
of both sexes and all ages, not one of whom has any thought of going
to church that day. Such an experience would be impossible in England.
The mistake has arisen from comparing England as a whole, which has
classes below the line of church-going or indeed of civilization, with
Australia as a whole, where such classes hardly exist. Compare
Australia in this respect with the English middle classes, and the
fallacy will be manifest.
When a colony has hived off from the parent state at a time of
religious excitement, and especially when it has religion for its
_raison d'être_, it starts fully equipped on lines of its own, the
earlier naturalistic stages being dropped. English theology and
Puritan religion emigrated to North America in the seventeenth
century, and there for two centuries they for the most part remained.
Ever since, in New England and the States of the middle belt, religion
has played the same high part as it did in old England under Oliver.
There has, therefore, been a theological development in the United
States to which, till fifty years ago, there was no antecedent
parallel in the mother country. While it has produced no theologian or
pulpit orator of the first rank--no Calvin, but only Jonathan Edwards;
no Bossuet or Chalmers, but only Channing and Beecher--its theological
literature compares favorably with that of England during the same
period, and its preachers are acknowledged to be the best in
Christendom. States and colonies that have grown up more normally get
at length on the same lines, and as they put on civilization the
tendency is to adopt ever more of the dogmatic system long inseparable
from it. By a well-understood sociological law it generates its
contradictory and corrective, and there springs up a higher
type of denial than secularism--what Huxley felicitously named
Agnosticism--the position of those who know nothing about the matters
which theological dogma defines, not the position of those who say
that nothing can be known. As the Evangelical develops into the High
Churchman and he into the Catholic, the Secularist refines into the
Agnostic and rarefies into the Unknowabilist.
The literature of colonies is at first theological, as the literature
of all countries is at first hieratic; the priest alone can write. But
it is long before the stage of original production is reached, and
books have to be imported before they can be written. The daughter
must go to school with the mother, who supplies her with hornbooks.
The continuity of the spiritual germ-plasm is insured by the
transmission of books. Rome was thus initiated by Greece in every
theoretical branch of knowledge. Rome thus educated early Europe.
Chests of manuscripts from Thessalonica, Byzantium, and Crete were the
precursors of the Renaissance. Books brought by Benedict to England
formed the first English library. So is it long with all new
countries. To this day the book circulation of the United States is
largely English; in contemporary colonies it is overwhelmingly
English, almost wholly Spanish, exclusively French or Dutch. The
second stage also repeats the literary history of the mother
countries. Colonial literature is a prolongation of the parental
literature and is at first commentative and imitative of that. In a
school at Canterbury founded by two foreign monks English written
literature took its birth. The literature of mediæval Europe was a
continuation of Roman literature. This stage may last long. Seventy or
eighty years after the Declaration of Independence the literature of
New England was still English literature of a subtler strain--perhaps
lacking the strength of the old home-brew, but with a finer flavor.
Naturally, in far younger Australia even popular poetry is still
imitative--the hand is that of Gordon or of Kendall, but the voice is
Swinburne's. The beginnings of a truly national literature are humble.
They are never scholastic, but always popular. As chap-books, ballads,
and songs were the sources of the æsthetic literature of modern
Europe, the beginnings of general literature in the United States have
been traced to the old almanacs which, besides medical recipes and
advice to the farmer, contained some of the best productions of
American authors. It is further evidence of the popular origin of
native literature that some of its early specimens are works of humor.
The most distinctive work of early Canadian and American authors is
humorous, from Sam Slick to ----; but it would be rash to say _who_ is
the last avatar of the genius of humor. If an alien may say so without
offense, Walt Whitman's poems, with their profound intuitions and
artless metre, seem to be the start of a new æsthetic, and recall
ancient Beowulf. Australian literature, after a much shorter
apprenticeship, has lately, in both fiction and verse, again of a
popular character, made a new departure that is instinct with life and
grace and full of promise.
Literature and art have no independent value, but are merely the
phonographic record of mental states, and would practically cease to
exist (as they did during the middle ages) if these disappeared. The
grand achievement of new, as of old, countries is man-making, and
every colony creates a new variety. The chief agent is natural
selection, of which the seamy side appears in vicissitudes of fortune.
Here again the law prevails. These recapitulate those vicissitudes in
early European societies which make picturesque the pages of Gregory
of Tours. There are the same sudden rises, giddy prosperities, and
inevitable falls. In the simple communities of ancient Greece the
distance between antecedent and consequent was short, and the course
of causation plain. Hence in myth and legend, in early historians
like Herodotus, early poets like Pindar, early dramatists like
Æschylus, we find a deep sense of the fateful working of the laws of
life. The history of colonies is a sermon on the same text. Goodness
is speedily rewarded; retribution no longer limps _claudo pede_, like
Vulcan, but flies like Mercury with winged feet. In Europe a
high-handed wrongdoer like Napoleon may pursue his career unchecked
for fifteen years, or a high-handed rightdoer like Bismarck for
five-and-twenty years; a would-be colonial Bismarck or Napoleon is
commonly laid by the heels in the short duration of a colonial
parliament. The vision of providential government, or the reign of
law, in old countries is hard, because its course is long and
intricate; in a colony it is so comparatively simple that all may
understand it and find it (as Carlyle found it) "worthy of horror and
worship." From witnessing the ending of a world Augustine constructed
a theodicy, and so justified the ways of God to man. We may discover
in the beginnings of a world materials for a cosmodicy which shall
exhibit the self-operating justice inherent in the laws of the
universe.
POLITICS AS A FORM OF CIVIL WAR.
BY FRANKLIN SMITH.
Why is it that, in spite of exhortation and execration, the
disinclination of people in all the great democracies of the world to
take part in politics is becoming greater and greater? Why is it that
persons of fine character, scholarly tastes, and noble aims, in
particular, seek in other ways than association and co-operation with
politicians to better the lot of their fellows? Why is it, finally,
that with the enormous extension of political rights and privileges
during the past fifty years, there has occurred a social, political,
and industrial degeneration that fills with alarm the thoughtful minds
of all countries? Aside from the demoralization due to the destructive
wars fought since the Crimean, the answer to these questions is to be
found in the fact that at bottom politics is a form of civil war, that
politicians are a species of _condottieri_, and that to both may be
traced all the ethics and evils of a state of chronic war itself. In
the light of this truth, never so glaring as at present in the United
States, the peril to civilization is divested of mystery; it is the
peril that always flows from anarchy, and the refusal of enlightened
men to-day to engage in politics is as natural as the refusal of
enlightened men in other days to become brigands.
The analogy between war and politics is not new. The very language in
common use implies it. When people speak of "leaders," "rank and
file," "party loyalty," "campaigns," "spoils of victory," etc., which
figure so conspicuously and incessantly in political discussion, there
is only a fit appropriation of the militant terms invented by one set
of fighters to describe with vividness and precision the conduct of
another set. What is new about the matter is the failure of thoughtful
persons to perceive and to act upon their perception that in politics,
as in war, vast economic, social, and political evils are involved. To
be sure, lives are not often sacrificed, as in a battle, nor property
destroyed, as in a siege or an invasion. But even here the analogy is
not imperfect. Political riots have occurred that have brought out as
completely as any struggle over a redoubt or barricade the savage
traits of human nature. People were maimed and killed, and houses
wrecked and burned. Especially was that the case in this country
during the antislavery struggle and the period of reconstruction. Even
in these days of more calm, political contests as fatal as the
Ross-Shea _émeute_ in Troy are reported from time to time. Owing,
however, to the advance in civilization since the sack of Antwerp and
the siege of Saragossa, the devastation wrought by political warfare
has assumed forms less deplorable. But in the long run they will be
found to be just as fatal to everything that constitutes civilization,
and just as productive of everything that constitutes barbarism.
"Lawless ruffianism," says Carl Schurz, pointing out in his Life of
Henry Clay the demoralizing effects of the fierce political struggles
during Jackson's administrations, "has perhaps never been so rampant
in this country as in those days. 'Many of the people of the United
States are out of joint,' wrote Niles in August, 1835. 'A spirit of
riot and a disposition to "take the law in their own hand" prevails in
every quarter.' Mobs, riots, burnings, lynchings, shootings, tarrings,
duels, and all sorts of violent excesses, perpetrated by all sorts of
persons upon all sorts of occasions, seemed to be the order of the
day.... Alarmingly great was the number of people who appeared to
believe that they had the right to put down by force and violence all
who displeased them by act or speech or belief in politics, or
religion, or business, or in social life." It is only familiarity with
such fruits of violent political activity, only a vision impaired by
preconceived notions of the nature of politics, that blinds the public
to their existence.
To see why politics must be regarded as a form of civil war rather
than as a method of business, as a system of spoliation rather than as
a science to be studied in the public schools,[1] it is but needful to
grasp the fundamental purpose of government as generally understood.
It is not too much to say that nothing in sociology is regarded as
more indicative of an unsound mind or of a mean and selfish
disposition than the conception of government as a power designed to
prevent aggression at home and abroad. Such a conception has been
contemptuously called "the police conception." "Who would ever fight
or die for a policeman?" cried an opponent of it, trying to reduce an
adversary to ignominious silence. It was not sufficient to reply with
the counter question, "Who would not die for justice?" and thus expose
the fallacy of the crushing interrogation. "No one," came the retort,
"could care for a country that only protected him against swindlers,
robbers, and murderers. To merit his allegiance and to fire his
devotion, she must do more than that; she must help to make his life
easier, pleasanter, and nobler." Accordingly, the Government
undertakes for him a thousand duties that it has no business with. It
builds schools and asylums for him; it protects him against disease,
and, if needful, furnishes him with physicians and medicines; it sees
that he has good beef and pork, pure milk, and sound fruit; it refuses
to permit him to drink what he pleases, though it be only the cheaper
grades of tea, nor to eat chemical substitutes for butter and cheese,
except they bear authorized marks; it transports his mails, supplies
him with garden seeds, instructs him in the care of fowls, cattle, and
horses, shows him how to build roads, and tells him what the weather
will be; it insures him not only against incompetent plumbers,
barbers, undertakers, horseshoers, accountants, and physicians, but
also against the competition of the pauper labor of foreign countries;
it creates innumerable offices and commissions to look after the
management of his affairs, particularly to stand between him and the
"rapacity" of the corporations organized to supply the necessaries of
life at the lowest cost; it builds fleets of cruisers and vast coast
fortifications to frighten away enemies that never think of assailing
him, and to inspire them with the same respect for "the flag" that he
is supposed to feel. Indeed, there is hardly a thing, except simple
justice, cheap and speedy, that it does not provide to fill him with a
love of his country, and to make him ready to immolate himself upon
her altars.
But I can not repeat with too much emphasis that every expenditure
beyond that required to maintain order and to enforce justice, and
every limitation of freedom beyond that needful to preserve equal
freedom, is an aggression. In no wise except in method does it differ
from the aggressions of war. In war the property of an enemy is taken
or destroyed without his consent. In case of his capture his conduct
is shaped in disregard of his wishes. The seizure of a citizen's
property in the form of taxes for a purpose that he does not approve,
and the regulation of any part of his conduct not violative of the
rights of his neighbors, are precisely the same. If he is forbidden to
carry the mails and thus earn a living, his freedom is restricted. If
he can patronize no letter carrier but the Government, to which he
must pay a certain rate, no matter how excessive, he has to a degree
become a slave. The same is true if he can not employ whomever he
pleases to cut his hair, or to fix his plumbing, or to prescribe for
his health. Still truer is it if he is obliged to contribute to a
system of public education which he condemns, or to public charities
which he knows to be schools of pauperism, or to any institution or
enterprise that voluntary effort does not sustain. In whatever way the
Government may pounce upon him to force him to work for some one
besides himself and to square his conduct with notions not his own, he
is still a victim of aggression, and the aggression is none the less
real and demoralizing because it is not committed amid the roar of
cannon and the groans of the dying.
To what extent the American people have become victims of this kind of
aggression can not be determined with precision. Still, an idea may be
had from the volume of laws enacted at every legislative session, and
the amount of money appropriated to enforce them. A commonplace little
appreciated is that every one of them, no matter what its ostensible
object, either restricts or contributes to individual freedom. The
examination of any statute-book will soon make painfully apparent the
melancholy fact that the protection of individual freedom figures to
the smallest extent in the considerations of the wise and benevolent
legislator. Of the eight hundred enactments of the Legislature of the
State of New York in 1897, for example, I could find only fifty-eight
that had this supreme object in view. If we apply the same ratio to
the work of all the legislatures of the country, and, allowing for
biennial sessions, make it cover a period of two years--namely, 1896
and 1897--the astonishing result will be that, of the 14,718 laws
passed, all but 1,030 aim, not to the liberation but to the
enslavement of the individual. But to this restrictive legislation
must be added the thousands of acts and ordinances of town, city, and
county legislatures that are more destructive of freedom even than the
State and Federal legislation. If not more numerous, they are
certainly more minute, meddlesome, and exasperating.
As to the amount of plunder passing through the hands of the modern
_condottieri_, that is susceptible of an estimate much more accurate.
If we take the expenditures of all the governments of the United
States, Federal, State, municipal, county, and town, for a similar
period of two years, they reach the enormous total of two billion
dollars, equal to more than two thirds of the national debt at the
close of the civil war.[2] Of this sum only about one hundred and
twenty million dollars, or six per cent, are devoted to the legitimate
functions of government--namely, the maintenance of police and
courts--and one hundred and forty million dollars to the support of
the military establishment.[3] All the rest is expenditure that should
no more be intrusted to the Government--that is, subject to the
application of political instead of business methods--than the
expenditure of a household, or a farm, or a cotton mill, or an iron
foundry. Even if it were a legitimate expenditure of the Government,
it could not be collected nor expended without injustice. Tax laws
have never been and never will be framed that will not permit some one
to escape his share of the burdens of the community; and the heavier
those burdens are, as they are constantly becoming to an alarming
degree, the more desperate will be the effort to shirk them--the more
lightly will they rest upon the dishonest and unworthy, and the more
heavily upon the honest and worthy. Moreover, it has never been
possible, and it never will be possible, to expend money by political
methods without either waste or fraud, and most usually without both.
Such a volume of legislation and taxation permits of the easy
detection of the vital difference between the theory and practice of
politics. According to the text-books and professors, politics is the
science of government. In countries like the United States, where
popular institutions prevail, the purpose of its study is the
discovery and the application of the methods that shall enable all
citizens, rich and poor, to share alike in the inestimable privilege
of saying what laws they shall have, and bear in proportion to their
means the burdens it entails. Such a privilege is supposed to confer
innumerable benefits. Every one is assured of scrupulous justice. He
is made to feel profound gratitude for his happy deliverance from the
odious tyranny and discrimination of a monarchy or an aristocracy. The
participation of everybody in the important and beneficent work of
government possesses a rare educational value. It leads the ignorant
and indifferent to take a deep interest in public questions, and to
attempt, as their strength and ability allow, the promotion of the
welfare of their beloved country. Thus they escape the deplorable fate
of burial in the sordid and selfish pursuit of their own affairs, and
the consequent dwarfing of their minds and emotions. Rising to broader
views of life and duty, they become patriots, statesmen, and
philanthropists.
Enchanting as this picture is, one that can be found in the speeches
of every demagogue, male and female, as well as in the works of every
political philosopher of the orthodox faith, it has no sanction in
the practice of politics. As long as the greater part of legislation
and taxation has nothing whatever to do with government, properly
speaking, politics can have no kinship with any pursuit held in esteem
by men truly civilized. What it consists of may be reduced to a
desperate and disgraceful struggle between powerful organizations,
sometimes united, like the Italian _condottieri_ and the Spanish
brigands, in the form of "rings," to get control of the annual
collection and distribution of one billion dollars, and to reap the
benefits that grow out of the concession of privileges. The
legislation placing this vast power in the hands of the successful
combatants is only an incident of their work. It simply enables them
under the form of law to seize the taxpayer, bind him like another
Gulliver with rules and regulations, and to take from him whatever
they please to promote their political ambition and private interests.
From this point of view it is easy to see that politics has no more
kinship with science or justice than pillage. Nor is it likely to make
people more patriotic, high-minded, and benevolent than the rapacity
of Robin Hood or Fra Diavolo.