The young Lord Berkeley, with the fresh air of freedom in his nostrils,
was feeling invincibly strong for his new career; and yet—and yet—if
the fight should prove a very hard one at first, very discouraging,
very taxing on untoughened moral sinews, he might in some weak moment
want to retreat. Not likely, of course, but possibly that might happen.
And so on the whole it might be pardonable caution to burn his bridges
behind him. Oh, without doubt. He must not stop with advertising for
the owner of that money, but must put it where he could not borrow from
it himself, meantime, under stress of circumstances. So he went down
town, and put in his advertisement, then went to a bank and handed in
$500 for deposit.
“What name?”
He hesitated and colored a little; he had forgotten to make a
selection. He now brought out the first one that suggested itself:
“Howard Tracy.”
When he was gone the clerks, marveling, said:
“The cowboy blushed.”
The first step was accomplished. The money was still under his command
and at his disposal, but the next step would dispose of that
difficulty. He went to another bank and drew upon the first bank for
the $500 by check. The money was collected and deposited a second time
to the credit of Howard Tracy. He was asked to leave a few samples of
his signature, which he did. Then he went away, once more proud and of
perfect courage, saying:
“No help for me now, for henceforth I couldn’t draw that money without
identification, and that is become legally impossible. No resources to
fall back on. It is work or starve from now to the end. I am ready—and
not afraid!”
Then he sent this cablegram to his father:
“Escaped unhurt from burning hotel. Have taken fictitious name.
Goodbye.”
During the evening while he was wandering about in one of the outlying
districts of the city, he came across a small brick church, with a bill
posted there with these words printed on it: “MECHANICS’ CLUB DEBATE.
ALL INVITED.” He saw people, apparently mainly of the working class,
entering the place, and he followed and took his seat. It was a humble
little church, quite bare as to ornamentation. It had painted pews
without cushions, and no pulpit, properly speaking, but it had a
platform. On the platform sat the chairman, and by his side sat a man
who held a manuscript in his hand and had the waiting look of one who
is going to perform the principal part. The church was soon filled with
a quiet and orderly congregation of decently dressed and modest people.
This is what the chairman said:
“The essayist for this evening is an old member of our club whom you
all know, Mr. Parker, assistant editor of the Daily Democrat. The
subject of his essay is the American Press, and he will use as his text
a couple of paragraphs taken from Mr. Matthew Arnold’s new book. He
asks me to read these texts for him. The first is as follows:
“‘Goethe says somewhere that “the thrill of awe,” that is to say,
REVERENCE, is the best thing humanity has.”
“Mr. Arnold’s other paragraph is as follows:
“‘I should say that if one were searching for the best means to efface
and kill in a whole nation the discipline of respect, one could not do
better than take the American newspapers.”
p095.jpg (18K)
Mr. Parker rose and bowed, and was received with warm applause. He then
began to read in a good round resonant voice, with clear enunciation
and careful attention to his pauses and emphases. His points were
received with approval as he went on.
The essayist took the position that the most important function of a
public journal in any country was the propagating of national feeling
and pride in the national name—the keeping the people “in love with
_their_ country and _its_ institutions, and shielded from the
allurements of alien and inimical systems.” He sketched the manner in
which the reverent Turkish or Russian journalist fulfilled this
function—the one assisted by the prevalent “discipline of respect” for
the bastinado, the other for Siberia. Continuing, he said:
The chief function of an English journal is that of all other journals
the world over: it must keep the public eye fixed admiringly upon
certain things, and keep it diligently diverted from certain others.
For instance, it must keep the public eye fixed admiringly upon the
glories of England, a processional splendor stretching its receding
line down the hazy vistas of time, with the mellowed lights of a
thousand years glinting from its banners; and it must keep it
diligently diverted from the fact that all these glories were for the
enrichment and aggrandizement of the petted and privileged few, at cost
of the blood and sweat and poverty of the unconsidered masses who
achieved them but might not enter in and partake of them. It must keep
the public eye fixed in loving and awful reverence upon the throne as a
sacred thing, and diligently divert it from the fact that no throne was
ever set up by the unhampered vote of a majority of any nation; and
that hence no throne exists that has a right to exist, and no symbol of
it, flying from any flagstaff, is righteously entitled to wear any
device but the skull and crossbones of that kindred industry which
differs from royalty only business-wise—merely as retail differs from
wholesale. It must keep the citizen’s eye fixed in reverent docility
upon that curious invention of machine politics, an Established Church,
and upon that bald contradiction of common justice, a hereditary
nobility; and diligently divert it from the fact that the one damns him
if he doesn’t wear its collar, and robs him under the gentle name of
taxation whether he wears it or not, and the other gets all the honors
while he does all the work.
The essayist thought that Mr. Arnold, with his trained eye and
intelligent observation, ought to have perceived that the very quality
which he so regretfully missed from our press—respectfulness, reverence
—was exactly the thing which would make our press useless to us if it
had it—rob it of the very thing which differentiates it from all other
journalism in the world and makes it distinctively and preciously
American, its frank and cheerful irreverence being by all odds the most
valuable of all its qualities. “For its mission—overlooked by Mr.
Arnold—is to stand guard over a nation’s liberties, not its humbugs and
shams.” He thought that if during fifty years the institutions of the
old world could be exposed to the fire of a flouting and scoffing press
like ours, “monarchy and its attendant crimes would disappear from
Christendom.” Monarchists might doubt this; then “why not persuade the
Czar to give it a trial in Russia?” Concluding, he said:
Well, the charge is, that our press has but little of that old world
quality, reverence. Let us be candidly grateful that it is so. With its
limited reverence it at least reveres the things which this nation
reveres, as a rule, and that is sufficient: what other people revere is
fairly and properly matter of light importance to us. Our press does
not reverence kings, it does not reverence so called nobilities, it
does not reverence established ecclesiastical slaveries, it does not
reverence laws which rob a younger son to fatten an elder one, it does
not reverence any fraud or sham or infamy, howsoever old or rotten or
holy, which sets one citizen above his neighbor by accident of birth:
it does not reverence any law or custom, howsoever old or decayed or
sacred, which shuts against the best man in the land the best place in
the land and the divine right to prove property and go up and occupy
it. In the sense of the poet Goethe—that meek idolater of provincial
three carat royalty and nobility—our press is certainly bankrupt in the
“thrill of awe”—otherwise reverence; reverence for nickel plate and
brummagem. Let us sincerely hope that this fact will remain a fact
forever: for to my mind a discriminating irreverence is the creator and
protector of human liberty—even as the other thing is the creator,
nurse, and steadfast protector of all forms of human slavery, bodily
and mental.
Tracy said to himself, almost shouted to himself, “I’m glad I came to
this country. I was right. I was right to seek out a land where such
healthy principles and theories are in men’s hearts and minds. Think of
the innumerable slaveries imposed by misplaced reverence! How well he
brought that out, and how true it is. There’s manifestly prodigious
force in reverence. If you can get a man to reverence your ideals, he’s
your slave. Oh, yes, in all the ages the peoples of Europe have been
diligently taught to avoid reasoning about the shams of monarchy and
nobility, been taught to avoid examining them, been taught to reverence
them; and now, as a natural result, to reverence them is second nature.
In order to shock them it is sufficient to inject a thought of the
opposite kind into their dull minds. For ages, any expression of
so-called irreverence from their lips has been sin and crime. The sham
and swindle of all this is apparent the moment one reflects that he is
himself the only legitimately qualified judge of what is entitled to
reverence and what is not. Come, I hadn’t thought of that before, but
it is true, absolutely true. What right has Goethe, what right has
Arnold, what right has any dictionary, to define the word Irreverence
for me? What their ideals are is nothing to me. So long as I reverence
my own ideals my whole duty is done, and I commit no profanation if I
laugh at theirs. I may scoff at other people’s ideals as much as I want
to. It is my right and my privilege. No man has any right to deny it.”
Tracy was expecting to hear the essay debated, but this did not happen.
The chairman said, by way of explanation:
“I would say, for the information of the strangers present here, that
in accordance with our custom the subject of this meeting will be
debated at the next meeting of the club. This is in order to enable our
members to prepare what they may wish to say upon the subject with pen
and paper, for we are mainly mechanics and unaccustomed to speaking. We
are obliged to write down what we desire to say.”
Many brief papers were now read, and several offhand speeches made in
discussion of the essay read at the last meeting of the club, which had
been a laudation, by some visiting professor, of college culture, and
the grand results flowing from it to the nation. One of the papers was
read by a man approaching middle age, who said he hadn’t had a college
education, that he had got his education in a printing office, and had
graduated from there into the patent office, where he had been a clerk
now for a great many years. Then he continued to this effect:
The essayist contrasted the America of to-day with the America of
bygone times, and certainly the result is the exhibition of a mighty
progress. But I think he a little overrated the college-culture share
in the production of that result. It can no doubt be easily shown that
the colleges have contributed the intellectual part of this progress,
and that that part is vast; but that the material progress has been
immeasurably vaster, I think you will concede. Now I have been looking
over a list of inventors—the creators of this amazing material
development—and I find that they were not college-bred men. Of course
there are exceptions—like Professor Henry of Princeton, the inventor of
Mr. Morse’s system of telegraphy—but these exceptions are few. It is
not overstatement to say that the imagination-stunning material
development of this century, the only century worth living in since
time itself was invented, is the creation of men not college-bred. We
think we see what these inventors have done: no, we see only the
visible vast frontage of their work; behind it is their far vaster
work, and it is invisible to the careless glance. They have
reconstructed this nation—made it over, that is—and metaphorically
speaking, have multiplied its numbers almost beyond the power of
figures to express. I will explain what I mean. What constitutes the
population of a land? Merely the numberable packages of meat and bones
in it called by courtesy men and women? Shall a million ounces of brass
and a million ounces of gold be held to be of the same value? Take a
truer standard: the measure of a man’s contributing capacity to his
time and his people—the work he can do—and then number the population
of this country to-day, as multiplied by what a man can now do, more
than his grandfather could do. By this standard of measurement, this
nation, two or three generations ago, consisted of mere cripples,
paralytics, dead men, as compared with the men of to-day. In 1840 our
population was 17,000,000. By way of rude but striking illustration,
let us consider, for argument’s sake, that four of these millions
consisted of aged people, little children, and other incapables, and
that the remaining 13,000,000 were divided and employed as follows:
2,000,000 as ginners of cotton.
6,000,000 (women) as stocking-knitters.
2,000,000 (women) as thread-spinners.
500,000 as screw makers.
400,000 as reapers, binders, etc.
1,000,000 as corn-shellers.
40,000 as weavers.
1,000 as stitchers of shoe soles.
Now the deductions which I am going to append to these figures may
sound extravagant, but they are not. I take them from Miscellaneous
Documents No. 50, second session 45th Congress, and they are official
and trustworthy. To-day, the work of those 2,000,000 cotton-ginners is
done by 2,000 men; that of the 6,000,000 stocking-knitters is done by
3,000 boys; that of the 2,000,000 thread-spinners is done by 1,000
girls; that of the 500,000 screw makers is done by 500 girls; that of
the 400,000 reapers, binders, etc., is done by 4,000 boys; that of the
1,000,000 corn-shellers is done by 7,500 men; that of the 40,000
weavers is done by 1,200 men; and that of the 1,000 stitchers of shoe
soles is done by 6 men. To bunch the figures, 17,900 persons to-day do
the above-work, whereas fifty years ago it would have taken thirteen
millions of persons to do it. Now then, how many of that ignorant
race—our fathers and grandfathers—with their ignorant methods, would it
take to do our work to-day? It would take forty thousand millions—a
hundred times the swarming population of China—twenty times the present
population of the globe. You look around you and you see a nation of
sixty millions—apparently; but secreted in their hands and brains, and
invisible to your eyes, is the true population of this Republic, and it
numbers forty billions! It is the stupendous creation of those humble
unlettered, un-college-bred inventors—all honor to their name.
“How grand that is!” said Tracy, as he wended homeward. “What a
civilization it is, and what prodigious results these are! and brought
about almost wholly by common men; not by Oxford-trained aristocrats,
but men who stand shoulder to shoulder in the humble ranks of life and
earn the bread that they eat. Again, I’m glad I came. I have found a
country at last where one may start fair, and breast to breast with his
fellow man, rise by his own efforts, and be something in the world and
be proud of that something; not be something created by an ancestor
three hundred years ago.”