reason to be at fault in matters which involve the unknown. Aside from
that, there are many worse things for children than the survival of a
beautiful superstition. The same scruples might be applied, without any
element of doubt, to the idea of Santa Claus; but the spirit of that
belief, while it lasts, is so joyful, and its influence so benign, that
it would take an extremely dry heart and an excessive rule of reason to
desire its abolition.
CONJECTURE
And now, at last, we have reached a point, where, in thinking of the
future and the hope for coming generations, we may turn our gaze in a
new direction and enter the realm of conjecture and prophecy.
There is an old saying that "Coming events cast their shadows before."
If we let our thoughts dwell on the confused shadows which appear to be
hanging over the spirit of our present civilization, it is possible to
imagine that we can see in them the outlines of a coming event of the
most profound importance. This would be neither more, nor less, than the
birth of a new religion--or what amounts to the same thing, a new form
of religious belief.
What grounds are there for imagining such an absurdity? It is only a
conjecture--it could not be anything else--but for all that, it is not
necessarily an absurdity.
The conflict which is going on between the old traditional beliefs and
the advanced spirit of enlightenment has in it elements of
contradiction, too deep and too radical, to permit of a complete victory
on the part of either. If the struggle were to continue indefinitely, on
the present lines, it seems inevitable that countless numbers must be
found, on one extreme, who would never be willing to abandon their
faith; and, on the other extreme, would be countless numbers who could
never consent to a return to what they consider disproved and antiquated
superstitions. And somewhere between these two, will be a constantly
increasing mass of others, pushed and pulled in opposite directions,
half-pretending agreement with both sides, but without real loyalty to
either, trying in a more or less troubled way, to remain non-committal,
and arriving at a state of indifference, drifting along, without
leadership, or conviction.
If we may believe the testimony of observers in England, this condition
of affairs is already quite plainly indicated there--as much or more,
as it is in this country.
Such a situation is well nigh intolerable to humanity. The palpable
results of it can hardly fail to be disheartening to any normal being.
And out of this disheartenment will inevitably come a yearning, more or
less unconscious, but more and more appealing, for something different
and something better, a yearning for true and unquestionable leadership,
which can inflame the imagination, inspire new faith, and command
whole-souled devotion, as it points the way.
In the mysterious scheme of the universe, in the all-wise design, when
such a yearning becomes intense enough and widespread enough, I cannot
but believe that somehow, somewhere, out of a tenement, or out of a
palace, or out of the wilderness, will come the appointed leader. This
is the fateful event of my conjecture, which I imagine is casting its
shadow before, and which may bring a renewal of light and enthusiasm to
millions of troubled souls.
It may not come for a generation, or it may not come in a century, or it
may be close at hand. What the particular form and force of the new
inspiration will be like, is beyond the scope of the imagination.
But it is not so difficult to hazard a prophecy in regard to its
essence. There will be no claim, or creed, of any kind, to which
scientific information, or enlightened reason, can ever find ground to
take exception. It will not belittle admiration for the human body, or
the human brain, or even of pleasures and desires which may be purely
material; but, on the contrary, will encourage the development of them
all, as a relatively important part of the all-wise design. Above and
beyond these, will be a deeper and greater appeal to the most generous
and noble intuitions of the heart and soul. There will be very little
consideration for punishments, or rewards, or threats, or anger,--to
force the human soul into submission of any kind; but there will be
immense consideration for love of others and love of right, individual
responsibility and self-control. Pervading and illuminating all, will be
a blessed faith in the beauty and wisdom and purpose of the eternal
mystery.
And whenever, or wherever, this kind of ideal comes, and rings out
through the land, with compelling inspiration, I venture the prophecy
that the prevailing spirit of civilization will be ripe and ready to
receive it with open arms.
APPENDIX
_Los Angeles Times_, Feb. 8, 1921.
CRIMINAL IMPROPRIETY
We had supposed that the decadence obvious in the sartorial modes for
society women reached its limit last year and that a saner and more
decent sense of propriety would evince itself in the revulsion of public
taste. But the tendency to bizarre indecency has increased so that now
we are offered in our public ballrooms the spectacle of criminal
impropriety--of women's bare legs with painted knees, of naked backs and
lewdly veiled bosoms, of transparent skirts and suggestive nudity, of
decorated flesh and vulgar exposure generally--the sort of thing that
has ever preceded the downfall of civilizations. It has no relation
whatever to the nudity of innocence, as is perfectly obvious with one
glance at the type of dancing women that affects these disgusting
extremes, for their whole deportment is entirely in accord with their
scant covering and nastily conceived exposures. They are brazenly
inviting a certain kind of attention and they get only the sort of
attention they invite. They are degrading all womanhood with their
shamelessness, at a time when the more worthy of their sex have striven
to win and deserve to win that respect which should rightfully be
theirs.
The people are all overwhelmed by the appalling crime wave that has
beset the world--not only by murders, robberies and hold-ups, but by the
ghastly increase in marital unfaithfulness which clogs the divorce
courts; and the attacks against women and girls which have become a
daily department of the news. The incredible and loathsome conditions
cannot be overstated. They are widespread, staggering in their
viciousness. And we unhesitatingly declare that the preposterous
vulgarity and criminal impropriety of that vastly increasing number of
women who adopt these indecent modes for "party gowns" is, if not
responsible for the dirty conditions, at least a large and important
factor. And it is deplorable that, as the extremists jump from extreme
to extreme, the presumably decent women follow. They are slower to adopt
the full measure of indecency, but each season finds them
"conservatively" following at a respectful distance, so that the modes
for decent women to-day were the extremes of indecency a few short
seasons back.
Why do they do it? It is a poor explanation to declare that they thus
become more attractive to men. If they are honest with themselves, they
know very well that the sort of attraction thus engendered makes the
lowest possible appeal. If they are honest with themselves, they know
very well that masculine taste in such matters is absolutely in the
hands of women, that the standard they set is the standard which will
inevitably be adopted. It has been said that every country gets the
women it deserves, but rather would we say that every woman gets the
sort of attention she deserves. Intelligent women know this, no matter
what their argument to the contrary.
But the women, who are going to these disgusting and revolting extremes,
are not intelligent. Man may be vile, but he also has perception.
Observe the women in any public ballroom to-day--those who expose the
most have the least worthy of exposure. These lewd revelations are
certainly not in the cause of beauty. It is the fat and podgy, or the
lean and bony, female, for the most part, one who has neither natural
physical nor mental attraction, that resorts to this means of commanding
attention. She makes one appeal, and only one, and that to the very
lowest instincts of masculine human nature. No matter how she may
deceive herself to the contrary, she is deliberately catering to the
animal passion of men. Beautiful and charming women of mind and
character do not feel this urge to trade upon their "private charms."
But the unintelligent and dubious female is invariably the one to make a
bid for the only sort of attention she can hope to inspire.
Theodore Maynard, now lecturing before the women's clubs upon the
"Imminent Break-up of Civilization," defines civilization as that
condition of a people founded upon justice and honor. It is not a
question of brilliant inventions, of motor cars, telephones, magnificent
hotels, luxury and comfort. It is essentially a state of refinement,
culture and honor.
"I could not love thee, dear, so well, loved I not honor more."
That honor which is the very basis of civilization is essentially
chaste. And civilized women must be the essential guardians of chastity
and honor. Where women cater to the dishonorable and unchaste, there can
be no civilization, no sanctity of the home, which should be the very
citadel of honor.
Adam in Eden whined that Eve had demoralized him. Eve to-day whines that
Adam and his war have demoralized her. They are both wrong and both
culpable. And as in the old biblical story, God will hold both Adam and
Eve responsible and both shall be driven from the Garden of Eden, our
great modern civilization that is gaining all save honor, that keystone
of the arch without which it must fall to ruin.
And the modern unchastity of women's clothes, the crude, lewd, wholly
indefensible appeal to man's lowest instincts, the deliberate trading on
the unclean and the lustful side of human nature, is, we repeat, a basic
cause of that widespread dishonor and crime that are polluting
civilization to-day. Surely there are enough decent, intelligent,
noble-minded women left to halt this mad craze for criminal impropriety.
Surely they can and will take the lead for purity, decency and honor,
rather than be content to follow at long distance that road which leads
to nothing but degradation for all humanity. Women and only women, can
halt this mad delirium--this hideous craving for attention at any cost,
at all cost. Where can it end, except in utter degradation, not only for
their own sex, but for their husbands and their sons?
This utter debasement of that precious heritage called "love" is the
bitterest possible reflection upon our modern civilization. The sort of
attraction these unchaste, nakedly adorned, women "of fashion" hold out
can never inspire that precious, priceless thing which "passeth all
understanding," which survives all the travail of tribulation, that
beautiful emotion that "age cannot wither nor custom stale," which
radiates the dark places with shining light.
"Oh, woman, lovely woman! nature made thee
To temper man; we had been brutes without you;
There's in you all that we believe of heaven
Amazing brightness, purity and truth,
Eternal joy and everlasting love."
_Los Angeles Times_, Dec. 17, 1920.
The financial and business summary for December, issued by the Citizens'
National Bank, will be circulated to-day. This careful review of general
conditions classes business as unsatisfactory from the standpoint of
current activity, but hastens to explain that data supporting this
conclusion is on the surface, and then, arguing from the human
standpoint, says that there is greater need just now that we determine
when the tendency to cancel contracts, and otherwise strike the element
of integrity from our business relations, will cease, than there is that
we know when commodity prices will reach the bottom.
"To-day," the summary continues, "we are registering a very low point of
commercial morality, and as we approach the portals of a new year, a
year full of promise and plenty, there is a great need of a full
individual sense of our personal relations to one another.
"It is not a struggling that is tearing apart the commercial, social and
home circles of to-day; instead, it is the lack of struggle, a missing
ambition to stamp out the measure of selfishness that has been permitted
to breed in the human consciousness. Our growth during the coming years,
both as individual business concerns, as a nation, and as a race, will
be in a direct ratio to our re-establishment of individual and mass
integrity.
"The weakness of the bond market is merely an affair of permanence. It
seems to be purely a seller's market with the cause of the selling
temporarily prohibitive to reinvestment. The income tax has caused a new
seasonal liquidation period to be written into the category of
investment influences so that the present bond market, though definitely
in a major trend upward, still hangs down around bargain levels.
"Possibly some sympathetic bear influence is reflected into the present
bond market through the sharp breaks in the stock market, yet whatever
may be the cause of present low bond prices and dull activity, it is
certain that the underlying fundamentals in control of the investment
situation are favorable to a long swing upward, with the course to
higher levels graded and fit for rapid travel when the turn of the year
re-energizes the sinews of finance."
* * * * *
The protest against the present "blue-laws" is strong and the laws under
fire are branded as the limit of legislative meddling, but here are some
of the old laws that were really blue:
These laws once were in force in Connecticut:
No one shall run on the Sabbath day, or walk in his garden or elsewhere,
except reverently to and from meeting.
No one shall travel, cook victuals, make beds, sweep house, cut hair, or
shave on the Sabbath day.
No woman shall kiss her child on the Sabbath or fasting day.
The Sabbath shall begin at sunset on Saturday.
Whoever brings cards or dice into this dominion shall pay a fine of five
pounds.
No one shall read common prayer, keep Christmas or Saints' days, make
mince pies, dance, play cards or play on any instrument of music except
the drum, trumpet and Jew's harp.
No gospel minister shall join people in marriage; the magistrates only
shall join in marriage, as they may do it with less scandal to Christ's
church.
A man that strikes his wife shall pay a fine of ten pounds; a woman that
strikes her husband shall be punished as the court directs.
A wife shall be deemed good evidence against her husband.
No man shall court a maid in person, or by letter, without first
obtaining consent of her parents; five pounds penalty for the first
offense to imprisonment for the third offense.
Married persons must live together or be imprisoned.
Every male person shall have his hair cut round according to a cap.
A child over sixteen years old who strikes his father shall be put to
death.
A child over sixteen years old who is stubborn and rebellious shall be
put to death.
Whoever, professing the Christian religion, shall wittingly deny the
Song of Solomon to be the infallible word of God, may be whipped forty
lashes and fined fifty pounds.
Whoever marries two wives or more shall be executed.
Saying that the Christian religion is a politic device to keep ignorant
men in awe shall be punished with death.
Any man who uses tobacco in the street shall be fined, or if he do so in
his own house, a stranger being present, he shall be fined, but if on a
journey, five miles from any house, he may smoke.
Any single person without a servant, wishing to keep house by himself,
must get the consent of the selectmen unless he be a public officer.
Persons not proved guilty, but lying under a strong suspicion of guilt,
may be punished, though not so severely as would be the case had they
been convicted.
Every family must have a Bible, catechism and other good books.
_Los Angeles Times_, Feb. 5, 1921.
CROOKED MINDS
The prompt detection and punishment of the two kidnappers, who were
fools enough to believe that they could carry out a melodramatic
abduction and get away with it, is a satisfaction to the public. But it
does not remove the possibility of similar crimes, attempted and perhaps
executed, by the large class of individuals who, like the Carrs, have
crooked minds--minds that see only glamour and excitement in the life of
a criminal, that are willing to take any chance and gamble with their
own lives and liberty as the stakes, for revenge or merely to get money
to satisfy their physical demands.
Ten years, more or less, spent in the penitentiary is not likely to
straighten out the false conceptions of such men. The Carrs will
probably leave the prison with criminal tendencies strengthened by the
associations and repressions of penitentiary life.
It is just that such criminals should be put where they cannot prey upon
society. But, while we are dealing out due punishment, the main effort
of the social body should be put into the prevention of crime. We are
talking greatly, just now, of the world-wave of crime following the war.
Tomes are being written concerning its causes and its cures. But the
primary cause of all crime is the lack of true comprehension of the
meaning of life--a distorted viewpoint--a crooked mind.
The causes of such minds are many: heredity, environment, associations,
lack of proper self-control and understanding; they can all be summed
up, however, as the lack of moral sense in the individual and in the
race. The guiding star of existence, the conscience, in such cases, has
ceased to function; the goal ahead, a future existence, has been lost
sight of. Souls are adrift. Here is the secret of the unrest, the crime,
the upheaval of to-day.
The old forms of religion, with their rituals and professions, have lost
their hold upon a large portion of humanity. The newer and clearer
conceptions of the great truths that are the basis of all religion have
not, as yet, taken the place of the old beliefs in the minds and lives
of the majority. The people of the world are to-day at sea, with no
definite port ahead, with no guiding hand upon the helm of their ship.
In the chaos of this rudderless age state and church are making
desperate efforts to palliate the evils of nonreligion and its
consequence, non-morality. In our own country we are multiplying
state-provided nurseries, schools, playgrounds, gymnasiums, colleges and
hundreds of other substitutes for the homes and the home training that
fails under the strenuous tests of present-day life. We are enormously
attempting to train bodies and brains from the cradle to full
citizenship. But with all our provisions and equipment we are failing to
touch the real keystone of all character--the spiritual nature of man.
We are teaching morality because it is morality, proved by experience to
be expedient, on the whole, for a satisfactory career on the earth. But
our schools and our churches, also, are failing to teach the highest
secret of life--the self-control of mind and body through willed
righteousness, based upon a knowledge and comprehension of a God-created
and governed universe.
Nor do our schools and colleges train their pupils to an understanding
of their own mental powers and the development of right will, of sound
reason, of controlled and regulated action. We flood our children and
youth with equipment, with teachers, with opportunity for learning
things from the outside; yet our educational training is failing, as a
whole, in giving to the youth of this country the one essential thing
for right living--a true and high ideal and the strength of will to
attain it.
Men like the two just sent away; women like Mrs. Peete (whether she be
guilty of murder or not) are the products of a generation that has torn
itself away from its old anchors of religion, of duty and responsibility
and has not yet set up a new standard to true its conduct. State and
church, with all their will to do and their efforts and expenditure of
means, can never take the place of right-minded parents and homes where
children are taught by example and by word their true relations to God
and to their fellow-men. Crooked minds can only be prevented by heritage
from men and women, who understand their responsibility to God and to
their country, and who start their sons and daughters out upon the
journey of life with a chance, at least, for decency and uprightness.
_New York Tribune_, April 22, 1921.
MACAULAY ON AMERICA
_"Your Constitution Is All Sail and No Anchor"_
_The subjoined letter from the historian Macaulay to Henry S. Randall,
of Cortland, N.Y., is taken from an old file of The Cortland Standard.
It was published originally in Harper's Magazine._
Holly Lodge, Kensington,
London, May 23, 1857.
Dear Sir: The four volumes of the Colonial History of New York reached
me safely. I assure you that I shall value them highly. They contain
much to interest an English as well as an American reader. Pray accept
my thanks and convey them to the Regents of the University.
You are surprised to learn that I have not a high opinion of Mr.
Jefferson, and I am surprised at your surprise. I am certain that I
never wrote a line, and that I never, in Parliament, in conversation, or
even on the hustings--a place where it is the fashion to court the
populace--uttered a word indicating an opinion that the supreme
authority in a state ought to be intrusted to the majority of citizens
told by the head; in other words, to the poorest and most ignorant part
of society.
I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must,
sooner or later, destroy liberty or civilization or both. In Europe,
where the population is dense, the effect of such institutions would be
almost instantaneous. What happened lately in France is an example. In
1848 a pure democracy was established there. During a short time there
was reason to expect a general spoliation, a national bankruptcy, a new
partition of the soil, a maximum of prices, a ruinous load of taxation
laid on the rich for the purpose of supporting the poor in idleness.
Such a system would, in twenty years, have made France as poor and
barbarous as the France of the Carlovingians. Happily the danger was
averted; and now there is a despotism, a silent tribune, an enslaved
press. Liberty is gone, but civilization has been saved.
I have not the smallest doubt that if we had a purely democratic
government here the effect would be the same. Either the poor would
plunder the rich and civilization would perish, or order and prosperity
would be saved by a strong military government, and liberty would
perish.
You may think that your country enjoys an exemption from these evils. I
will frankly own to you that I am of a very different opinion. Your fate
I believe to be certain, though it is deferred by a physical cause. As
long as you have a boundless extent of fertile and unoccupied land your
laboring population will be far more at ease than the laboring
population of the Old World, and while that is the case the Jeffersonian
politics may continue to exist without causing any fatal calamity.
But the time will come when New England will be as thickly peopled as
old England. Wages will be as low and will fluctuate as much with you as
with us. You will have your Manchesters and Birminghams, and in those
Manchesters and Birminghams hundreds of thousands of artisans will
assuredly be sometimes out of work. Then your institutions will be
fairly brought to the test. Distress everywhere makes the laborer
mutinous and discontented, and inclines him to listen with eagerness to
agitators who tell him that it is a monstrous iniquity that one man
should have a million while another cannot get a full meal.