Dr. Borderson, it seemed, held the chair in Ethics at the University. I
knew a Borderson once and was very fond of him. Poor Frank! If he was
alive he would have more likely reached a prison or a hospital than a
professorship. Yet he was brilliant enough. We were great friends in
college, and before; let me see--thirty-five years ago. But he was
expelled for improper conduct, and went from bad to worse. The last I
had heard of him was in a criminal case--but he had run away and
disappeared. I well remembered the grief and shame it was to me at the
time to see such a promising young life ruined and lost so early.
Thinking of this, I was shown into the study of the great teacher of
ethics, and as I shook hands I met the keen brown eyes of--Frank
Borderson. He had both my hands and shook them warmly.
"Well, John! It is good to see you again. How well you look; how little
you have changed! It's a good world you've come back to, isn't it?"
"You are the most astonishing thing I've seen so far," I replied. "Do
you really mean it? Are you--a Professor of Ethics?"
"When I used to be a God-forsaken rascal, eh? Yes, it's really so. I've
taught Ethics for twenty years, and gradually pushed along to this
position. And I was a good deal farther off than Tibet, old man."
I was tremendously glad to see him. It was more like a touch of the old
life than anything I had yet found--except Nellie, of course. We spoke
for some time of those years of boyhood; of the good times we had had
together; of our common friends.
He kept me to dinner; introduced me to his wife, a woman with a rather
sad, sweet face, which seemed to bear marks of deep experience; and we
settled down for an evening's talk.
"I think you have come to the right person, John; not only because of my
special studies, but because of my special line of growth. If I can tell
you what changed me, so quickly and so wholly, you won't be much puzzled
about the others, eh?"
I fully agreed with him. The boy I knew was clever enough to dismiss all
theology, to juggle with philosophy and pick ethics to pieces; but his
best friends had been reluctantly compelled to admit that he had "no
moral character." He had, to my knowledge, committed a number of
unquestionable "sins," and by hearsay I knew of vices and crimes that
followed. And he was Dr. Borderson!
"I'll take myself as a sample, Whitman fashion," said he. "There I was
when you knew me--conceited, ignorant, clever, self-indulgent, weak,
sensual, dishonest. After I was turned out of college I broke a good
many laws and nearly all the commandments. What was worse, in one way,
was that my 'wages' were being paid me in disease--abominable disease.
Also I had two drug habits--alchohol and cocaine. Will you take me as a
sample?"
I looked at him. He had not the perfect health I saw so much of in the
younger people; but he seemed in no way an invalid, much less a drug
victim. His eyes were clear and bright, his complexion good, his hand
steady, his manner assured and calm.
"Frank," said I, "you beat anything I've seen yet. You stand absolutely
to my mind as an illustration of 'Before Taking' and 'After Taking.' Now
in the name of reason tell me what it was you Took!"
"I took a new grip on Life--that's the whole answer. But you
want to know the steps, and I'll tell you. The new stage of
ethical perception we are in now--or, as you would probably say,
this new religion--presents itself to me in this way:
"The business of the universe about us consists in the Transmission of
Energy. Some of it is temporarily and partially arrested in material
compositions; some is more actively expressed in vegetable and animal
form; this stage of expression we call Life. We ourselves, the human
animals, were specially adapted for high efficiency in storing and
transmitting this energy; and so were able to enter into a combination
still more efficient; that is, into social relations. Humanity, man in
social relation, is the best expression of the Energy that we know. This
Energy is what the human mind has been conscious of ever since it was
conscious at all; and calls God. The relation between this God and this
Humanity is in reality a very simple one. In common with all other life
forms, the human being must express itself in normal functioning.
Because of its special faculty of consciousness, this human engine can
feel, see, think, about the power within it; and can use it more fully
and wisely. All it has to learn is the right expression of its degree of
life-force, of Social Energy." He beamed at me. "I think it's about all
there, John."
"You may be a very good Professor of Ethics for these new-made minds,
but you don't reach the old kind--not a little bit. To my mind you
haven't said anything--yet."
He seemed a little disappointed, but took it mildly. "Perhaps I am a
little out of touch. Wait a moment--let me go back and try to take up
the old attitude."
He leaned back in his chair and shut his eyes. I saw an expression of
pain slowly grow and deepen on his face; and suddenly realized what he
was doing.
"Oh, never mind, Frank; don't do it; don't try. I'll catch on somehow."
He seemed not to hear me; but dropped his face in his hands. When he
raised it was clear again. "Now I can make things clearer perhaps,"
he said. "We had in our minds thirty years ago a strange hodge-podge of
old and new ideas. What was called God was still largely patterned after
the old tribal deity of the Hebrews. Our ideas of 'Sin' were still
mostly of the nature of disobedience--wrong only because we were told
not to do it. Sin as a personal offense against Somebody, and Somebody
very much offended; that was it. We were beginning to see something of
Social values, too, but not clearly. Our progress was in what we called
'The natural sciences'; and we did not think with the part of our minds
wherein we stored religion. Yet there was very great activity and
progress in religious thought; the whole field was in motion; the new
churches widening and growing in every direction; the older ones holding
on like grim death, trying not to change, and changing in spite of
themselves; and Ethics being taught indeed, but with no satisfying
basis. That's the kind of atmosphere you and I grew up in, John. Now
here was I, an ill-assorted team of impulses and characteristics,
prejudiced against religion, ignorant of real ethics, and generally
going to the devil--as we used to call it! You know how far down I
went--or something of it."
"Don't speak of it, Frank!" I said. "That was long ago; forget it, old
man!" But he turned toward me a smile of triumph.
"Forget it! I wouldn't forget one step of it if I could! Why, John, it's
because of my intimate knowledge of these down-going steps that I can
help other people up them!"
"You looked decidedly miserable just now, all the same, when you were
thinking them over."
"Oh, bless you, John, I wasn't thinking of myself at all! I was thinking
of the awful state of mind the world was in, and how it suffered! Of all
the horror and misery and shame; all that misplaced, unnecessary cruelty
we called punishment; the Dark Ages we were still in, in spite of all we
had to boast of. However, this new perception came."
I interrupted him.
"What came? Who came? Did you have a new revelation? Who did it? What do
you call it? Nobody seems to be able to give me definite information."
He smiled broadly. "You're a beautiful proof of the kind of mental
jumble I spoke of. Knowledge of evolution did not come by a revelation,
did it? Or did any one man, or two, give it to us? Darwin and Wallace
were not the only minds that helped to see and express that great idea;
and many more had to spread it. These great truths break into the
world-mind through various individuals, and coalesce so that we cannot
disconnect them. We have had many writers, preachers, lecturers, who
discoursed and explained; this new precept as to the relation between
man and God came with such a general sweep that no one even tries to
give personal credit for it. These things are not personal--they are
world-percepts."
"But every religion has had its Founder, hasn't it?"
"_I_ don't call it a religion, my dear fellow! It's a science, like any
other science. Ethics is The Science of Human Relation. It is called
Applied Sociology--that's all."
"How does a thing like that touch one, personally?" I asked.
"How does any science touch one personally? One studies a science, one
teaches a science, one uses a science. That's the point--the _use_ of
it. Our old scheme of religion was a thing to 'believe,' or 'deny'; it
was a sort of shibboleth, a test question one had to pass examination in
to get good marks! What I'm telling you about is a general recognition
of right behavior, and a general grasp of the necessary power."
"You leave out entirely the emotional side of religion."
"Do I? I did not intend to. You see, we do not distinguish religion from
life now, and are apt to forget old terms. You are thinking, I suppose,
of the love of God, and man, which we used to preach. We practice it
now.
"That Energy I spoke of, when perceived by us, is called Love. Love, the
real thing we had in mind when we said 'God is Love,' is beneficent
energy. It is the impulse of service, the desire to do, to help, to
make, to benefit. That is the 'love' we were told to bestow on one
another. Now we do."
"Yes; but what made you do it? What keeps you up to it?"
"Just nature, John. It is human nature. We used to believe otherwise."
He was quiet for a while.
"One of these new doctors got hold of me, when I was about as near the
bottom as one can go and get back. Not a priest with a formula, nor a
reformer with an exhortation; but a real physician, a soul-doctor, with
a passionate enthusiasm for an interesting case. That's what I was,
John; not a lost soul; not even a 'sinner'--just 'a case.' Have you
heard about these moral sanitariums?"
"Yes--but not definitely."
"Well, as soon as this view of things took hold, they began to want to
isolate bad cases, and cure them if they could. And they cured me."
"How, Frank--_how_? What did they tell you that you didn't know before?
What did they do to you?"
"Sane, strong, intelligent minds put themselves in connection with mine,
John, and shared their strength with me. I was made to feel that my
individual failure was no great matter, but that my social duty was;
that the whole of my dirty past was as nothing to all our splendid
future, that whatever I had done was merely to be forgotten--the sooner
the better, and that all life was open before me--all human life;
endless, beautiful, profoundly interesting--the game was on, and I was
in it.
"John-- I wish I could make you feel it. It was as if we had all along
had inside us an enormous reservoir of love, human love, that had
somehow been held in and soured! This new arrangement of our minds let
it out--to our limitless relief and joy. No 'sin'--think of that! Just
let it sink in. No such thing as sin. . . . We had, collectively and
privately, made mistakes, and done the wrong thing, often. What of it?
Of course we had. A growing race _grew that way_.
"Now we are wiser and need not keep on going wrong. We had learned that
life was far easier, pleasanter, more richly satisfying when followed on
these new lines--and the new lines were not hard to learn. Love was the
natural element of social life. Love meant service, service meant doing
one's special work well, and doing it for the persons served--of course!
"_All_ our mistakes lay in our belated Individualism. You cannot
predicate Ethics of individuals; you cannot fulfill any religion as
individuals. My fellow creatures took hold of me, you see. That power
that was being used so extensively for physical healing in our young
days had become a matter of common knowledge--and use."
"How many of these--moral hygienists--did you have?"
"Scores, hundreds, thousands--we all help one another now. If a person
is tired and blue and has lost his grip, if he can't rectify it by
change of diet and change of scene, he goes to a moral hygienist, as you
rightly call it, and gets help. I do a lot of that sort of work."
I meditated awhile, and again shook my head. "I'm afraid it's no use. I
can't make it seem credible. I hear what you say and I see what you've
done--but I do not get any clear understanding of the process. With
people as they were, with all those casehardened old sinners, all the
crass ignorance, the stupidity, the sodden prejudice, the apathy, the
selfishness--to make a world like that see reason--in thirty
years!--No--I don't get it."
"You are wrong in your premises, John. Human nature is, and was, just as
good as the rest of nature. Two things kept us back--wrong conditions,
and wrong ideas; we have changed both. I think you forget the sweeping
advance in material conditions and its effect on character. What made
the well-bred, well-educated, well-meaning, pleasant people we used to
know? Good conditions, for them and their ancestors. There were just as
pleasant people among the poor and among their millions of children;
they had every capacity for noble growth--given the chance. It took no
wholesale change of heart to make people want shorter hours, better pay,
better housing, food, clothes, amusements. As soon as the shameful
pressure of poverty was taken off humanity it rose like a freed spring.
Humanity's all right."
"There were some things all wrong," I replied, "that I know. You could
not obliterate hereditary disease in ten--or thirty years. You couldn't
make clean women of hundreds of thousands of prostitutes. You couldn't
turn an invalid tramp into a healthy gentleman."
He stopped me. "We could do better than that," he said, "and we have. I
begin to see your central difficulty, John; the difficulty that used to
hold us all. You are looking at life as a personal affair--a matter of
personal despair or salvation."
"Of course, what else is it?"
"What _else_! Why, that is no part of human life! Human life is social,
John, collectively, common, or it isn't human life at all. Hereditary
disease looks pretty hopeless when you see one generation or two or
three so cursed. But when you realize how swiftly the stream of human
life can be cleansed of it, you take a fresh hold. The percentage of
hereditary disease has sunk by more than half in thirty years, John, and
at its present rate of decrease will be gone, clean gone, in another
twenty. Remember that every case is known, and that they are either
prevented from transmitting the inheritance, isolated, or voluntarily
living single. Diseases from bad conditions we no longer endure, nor
diseases from ignorance, those from bacilli we are able to resist or
cure; disease was never a permanent thing--only an accident. As for the
prostitutes--we thought them 'ruined' because they were no longer
suitable for our demands in marriage. As if that was everything! I tell
you we opened a way out for them!"
"Namely?"
"Namely all the rest of life! Sex-life isn't everything, John. Not fit
to be a mother, we said to them; never mind--there is everything else in
the world to be. You may remember, my friend, that thousands of men, as
vicious as any prostitutes, and often as diseased, continued to live, to
work, and to enjoy. Why shouldn't the women? You haven't ruined your
lives, we said to them; only one part. It's a loss, a great loss, but
never mind, the whole range of human life remains open to you, the great
moving world of service and growth and happiness. If you're sick, you're
sick--we'll cure it if possible. If not, you'll die--never mind, we all
die--that's nothing."
"Does your new religion call death nothing?"
"Certainly. The fuss we made about death was wholly owing to the old
religions; the post-mortem religions, their whole basis was death."
"Hold on a bit. Do you mean to tell me the people aren't afraid of death
any more?"
"Not a bit. Why should they be? Every living thing dies; that's part of
the living. We do not hide it from children now, we teach it to them."
"Teach death--to children! How horrible!"
"Did you see or hear anything horrible in your educational excursions,
John? I know you didn't. No, they learn it naturally; in their gardens;
in their autumn and winter songs; in their familiarity with insects and
animals. Our children learn life, death, and immortality, from
silk-worms; and, then only incidentally. The silk is what they are
studying.
"It takes a great many silk-worms to make silk, generations of them.
They see them born, live and die, as incidents in silk culture. So we
show them how people are born, live and die, in the making of human
history. The idea is worked into our new educational literature--and all
our literature for that matter. We see human life as a continuous whole
now. People are only temporary parts of it. Dying isn't any more trouble
than being born.
"People feared death, originally, because it hint; being chased and
eaten was not pleasant. But natural dying does not hurt. Then they were
made to fear it by the hell-school of religions. All that is gone by.
Our religion rests on life."
"The life of this world or the life eternal?"
"The eternal life of this world, John. We have no quarrel with anyone's
belief as to what may happen after death, that is a free field; but the
glory and power of our religion is that it rests with assurance on
common knowledge of the beautiful facts of life. Here is Humanity, a
continuing stream of life. Its line of advance is clear. That which
makes Humanity stronger, wiser and happier is evidently what is right
for it to do. We do teach it to all our children."
"And they do it?"
"Of course they do it. Why shouldn't they?"
"But our evil tendencies----"
"We don't have evil tendencies, John--and never did. We have earlier and
later tendencies; and it is perfectly possible to show the child which
is which."
"But surely it is easier to follow the lower impulses than the higher;
easier to give way than to strive."
"There's the old misconception, John, that 'striving idea.' We assumed
that it was 'natural' to be 'bad' and 'unnatural' to be 'good'--that we
had to make special efforts, painful and laborious, to become better. We
had not seen, thirty years ago, that social evolution is as 'natural' as
the evolution of the horse from the eohippus. If it was easier to be an
eohippus than a horse why did the thing change?
"As to that army of 'fallen women' you are so anxious about, they just
got up again, that's all, got up and went on. They had only fallen from
one position; there was plenty of room left to stand and walk. Why they
were not a speck on society compared to the 'fallen men.' Two hundred
thousand prostitutes in the city of New York--well? How many patrons? A
million, at the least. They kept on doing business, and enjoying life. I
tell you, John, all the unnecessary evils of condition in the old days,
were as nothing to the unnecessary evils of our foolish ideas! And ideas
can be changed in the twinkling of an eye!
"As to your hoboes and bums, that invalid tramp you instanced--I can
settle your mind on that point. I was an invalid tramp, John; a
drunkard, a cocaine fiend, a criminal, sick, desperate, as bad as they
make them."
"Which brings us back to that 'moral sanitarium' I suppose?"
"Yes. I strayed away from it. I keep forgetting my own case. But it is
an excellent one for illustration. I was taken hold of with the strong
hand, and given a course of double treatment, deep and thorough. By
double treatment I mean physical and mental at once; such a complete
overhauling and wise care as enabled my exhausted vitality slowly to
reassert itself, and at the same time such strong tender cheerful
companionship, such well-devised entertainment, such interesting,
irresistible instruction--Why, John--put a tramp into Paradise, and
there's some hope of him."
I was about to say that tramps did not deserve Paradise, but as I
remembered what this man had been, and saw what he was now, I refrained.
He read my mind at once.
"It's not a question of desert, John. We no longer deal in terms of
personal reward or punishment. If I have a bad finger or a bad tooth I
save it if I can; not because it deserves it, but because I need it.
People who used to be called sinners are now seen to be diseased members
of society, and society turns all its regenerative forces on at once. We
never used to dream of that flood of power we had at hand--the
Regenerative Forces of Society!"
He sat smiling, his fine eyes full of light. "Sometimes we had to
amputate," he continued, "especially at first. It is very seldom
necessary now."
"You mean you killed the worst people?"
"We killed many hopeless degenerates, insane, idiots, and real perverts,
after trying our best powers of cure. But it is really astonishing to
see how much can be done with what we used to call criminals, merely by
first-class physical treatment. I can remember how strange it seemed to
me, having elaborate baths, massage, electric stimulus, perfect food,
clean comfortable beds, beautiful clothes, books, music, congenial
company, and wonderful instruction. It was very confusing. It went far
to rearrange all my ideas."
"If you treat--social invalids--like that, I should think they would
'lie down;' just to remain in hospital forever. Or go out and be bad in
order to get back again."
"Oh, no," he said. "A healthy man can't lie around and do nothing very
long. Also it is good outside too, remember. Life is good, pleasant,
easy. Why on earth should a man want to prowl around at night and steal
when he can have all he wants, with less effort, in the daytime? Happy
people do not become criminals.
"But I can tell you what treatment like that does to one. It gives a man
a new view of human life, of what it is he belongs to. A sense of pride
in our common accomplishment, of gratitude for the pleasure he receives,
of a natural desire to contribute something. I took this new ethics--it
satisfied me, it's reasonable, it's necessary. We make it our basic
study now, in all the schools. You must have noticed that?"
Yes, I had noticed it, as I looked back. "But they don't call it that,"
I said.
"No, they don't call it anything to the children. It is just life, the
rules of decent behavior."
We sat silent awhile after this. Things were clearing up a little in my
mind.
"A sort of crystallization of chaotic progressive thought into clear
diamonds of usable truth--is that about what happened?" I said.
"That's exactly it."
"And a general refutation and clearing out of--of."
"Of a lot of things we deeply believed--that were not so! That is what
was the matter with us, John. Our minds were full of what Mrs. Eddy
christened error. I wish I could make you feel what a sunrise it was to
the world when we left off believing lies and learned the facts."
"Can you, in a few words, outline a little of your new 'Ethics' to the
lay mind?"
"Easily. It is all 'lay' enough. We don't make a separate profession of
religion, or a separate science of ethics. Ethics is social hygiene--it
teaches how humanity must live in order to be well and strong. We show
the child the patent facts of social relation, how all our daily life,
our accumulated wealth and beauty and continuing power, rests on common
action, on what people do together. Everything about him teaches that.
Then we show him the reasons why such and such actions are wrong, what
the results are; how to avoid wrong lines of action and adopt right
ones. It's no more difficult than teaching any other game, and far more
interesting."
I suppose I looked unconvinced, for he added, "Remember we have nature
on our side. It is natural for a social animal to develop social
instincts; any personal desire which works against the social good is
clearly a survival of a lower pre-social period; wrong, in that it is
out of place. What we used to call criminals were relics of the past. By
artificially maintaining low conditions, such as poverty, individual
wealth, we bred low-grade types. We do not breed them any more."
Again we sat silent. I was nursing my knee and sat looking into the
fire; the soft shimmering play of rosy light and warmth with which
electricity now gave jewels to our rooms.
He followed my eyes.
"That clean, safe, beautiful power was always here, John--but we had not
learned of it. The power of wind and water and steam were here--before
we learned to use them. All this splendid power of human life was
here--only we did not know it."
After that talk with Frank Borderson I felt a little clearer in my mind
about what had taken place. I saw a good deal of him, and he introduced
me to others who were in his line of work. Also I got to know his wife
pretty well. She was not so great an authority on ethics as he; but an
excellent teacher, widely useful.
One day I said something to her about her lovely spirit, and what she
must have been to him--such an uplifting influence.
She laughed outright.
"I'll have to tell you the facts, Mr. Robertson, as part of your
instruction. So far from my uplifting him, he picked me out of the
gutter, literally, dead drunk in the gutter, the lowest kind of wreck.
He made me over. He gave me--Life."
Her eyes shone.
"We work together," she added cheerfully.
They did work together, and evidently knew much happiness. I noted a
sort of deep close understanding between them, as in those who have been
through the wars in company.
I found Nellie knew about them. "Yes, indeed," she said. "They are
devoted to each other, and most united in their work. He was just
beginning to try to work, after his own rebuilding; but feeling pretty
lonesome. He felt that he had no chance of any personal life, you see,
and there were times when he missed it badly. He had no right to marry,
of course; that is, with a well woman. And then he found this broken
lily--and mended it. There can't be any children, but there is great
happiness, you can see that."
"And they are--received?"
"Received?--Oh, I remember! You mean they are invited to dinners and
parties. Why, yes."
"Not among the best people, surely?"
"Precisely that, the very best; people who appreciate their wonderful
lives."
"Tell me this. Sister; what happened to the Four Hundred--the F.F.
V's--and the rest of the aristocracy?"
"The same thing that happened to all of us. They were only people, you
see. Their atrophied social consciousness was electrified with the new
thoughts and feelings. They woke up, too, most of them. Some just died
out harmlessly. They were only by-products."
I consulted a rather reactionary old professor of Sociology, Morris
Banks; one who had been teaching Political Economy in my youth, and who
ought to be able to remember things. I asked him if he would be so good
as to show me the dark side of this shield.
"Surely there must have been opposition, misunderstanding, the usual
difficulties of new adjustments," I said. "You remember the first years
of change--I wish you would give me a clear account of it."
The old man considered awhile: "Take any one state, any city, or country
locality, and study back a little," he said, "and you find the story is
about the same. There was opposition and dissent, of course, but it
decreased very rapidly. You see the improvements at first introduced
were such universal benefits that there could not be any serious
complaint.
"By the time we had universal suffrage the women were more than ready
for it, full of working plans to carry out, and rich by the experience
of the first trials.
"By the time Socialism was generally adopted we had case after case of
proven good in Socialistic methods; and also the instructive background
of some failures."
"But the big men who ran the country to suit themselves in my time, they
didn't give up without a struggle surely? You must have had _some_
fighting," I said.
He smiled in cheerful reminiscence. "We had a good deal of noise, if
that's what you mean. But there's no fighting to be done, with soldiers,
if the soldiers won't fight. Our workingmen declined to shoot or to be
shot any longer, and left the big capitalists to see what they could do
alone."
"But they had the capital?"
"Not all of it. The revenues of the cities and of the United States
Government are pretty considerable, especially when you save the seventy
per cent, we used to spend on wars past and possible; and the ten or
twenty more that went in waste and graft. With a Socialist State private
Capital has no grip!"
"Did you confiscate it?"
"Did not have to. The people who were worth anything, swung into line
and went to work like other people. Those that weren't were just let
alone. Nobody has any respect for them now."
"You achieved Socialism without bloodshed?"
"We did. It did not happen all at once, you see; just spread and spread
and proved its usefulness."