_Mammon_
Wealth, and the crimes that are committed in its name, and the
protests of the spirit of humanity against its power in society.
Paradise Lost
BY JOHN MILTON
(English lyric and epic poet, 1608-1674)
Mammon led them on--
Mammon, the least erected spirit that fell
From Heaven; for even in Heaven his looks and thoughts
Were always downward bent, admiring more
The riches of Heaven's pavement, trodden gold,
Than aught divine or holy else enjoyed
In vision beatific. By him first
Men also, and by his suggestion taught,
Ransacked the centre, and with impious hands
Rifled the bowels of their mother earth
For treasures better hid. Soon had his crew
Opened into the hill a spacious wound,
And digged out ribs of gold. Let none admire
That riches grow in Hell; that soil may best
Deserve the precious bane.
Miss Kilmansegg: Her Moral
BY THOMAS HOOD
(See pages 59, 171)
Gold! Gold! Gold! Gold!
Bright and yellow, hard and cold,
Molten, graven, hammer'd, and roll'd;
Heavy to get, and light to hold;
Hoarded, barter'd, bought, and sold,
Stolen, borrow'd, squander'd, doled:
Spurn'd by the young, but hugg'd by the old
To the very verge of the churchyard mould;
Price of many a crime untold:
Gold! Gold! Gold! Gold!
Good or bad a thousand-fold!
How widely its agencies vary--
To save--to ruin--to curse--to bless--
As even its minted coins express,
Now stamp'd with the image of Good Queen Bess,
And now of a bloody Mary.
Northern Farmer: New Style
BY ALFRED TENNYSON
(See page 77)
Dosn't thou 'ear my 'erse's legs, as they canters awaäy,
Proputty, proputty, proputty--that's what I 'ears 'em saäy.
Proputty, proputty, proputty--Sam, thou's an ass for thy paäins,
Theer's moor sense i' one o' 'is legs nor in all thy braäins.
Me an' thy muther, Sammy, 'as beän a-talkin' o' thee;
Thou's beän talkin' to muther, an' she beän a tellin' it me.
Thou'll not marry for munny--thou's sweet upo' parson's lass--
Noä--thou'll marry for luvv--an' we boäth on us thinks tha an ass.
Seeä'd her todaäy goä by--Saäint's daäy--they was ringing the bells.
She's a beauty thou thinks--an' soä is scoors o' gells,
Them as 'as munny an' all--wot's a beauty?--the flower as blaws.
But proputty, proputty sticks, an' proputty, proputty graws.
Doänt't be stunt: taäke time: I knaws what maäkes tha sa mad.
Warn't I craäzed fur the lasses mysén when I wur a lad?
But I knaw'd a Quaäker feller as often 'as towd ma this:
"Doän't thou marry for munny, but goä wheer munny is!"
Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep
BY JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER
(American capitalist, born 1839)
Then, and indeed for many years after, it seemed as though
there was no end to the money needed to carry on and develop
the business. As our successes began to come, I seldom put my
head upon the pillow at night without speaking a few words to
myself in this wise:
"Now a little success, soon you will fall down, soon you will
be overthrown. Because you have got a start, you think you are
quite a merchant; look out, or you will lose your head--go
steady." These intimate conversations with myself, I am sure,
had a great influence on my life.
From Ecclesiasticus
A merchant shall hardly keep himself from wrong-doing; and a
huckster shall not be acquitted of sin.
Past and Present
BY THOMAS CARLYLE
(See pages 31, 74, 133)
What is it, if you pierce through his Cants, his oft-repeated
Hearsays, what he calls his Worships and so forth,--what is
it that the modern English soul does, in very truth, dread
infinitely, and contemplate with entire despair? What _is_ his
Hell, after all these reputable, oft-repeated Hearsays, what is
it? With hesitation, with astonishment, I pronounce it to be:
The terror of "Not succeeding"; of not making money, fame, or
some other figure in the world,--chiefly of not making money!
Is not that a somewhat singular Hell?
[Illustration: MAMMON
GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS
(_English painter, member of the Royal Academy, 1817-1904_)]
[Illustration: MARRIAGE À LA MODE
WILLIAM HOGARTH
(_Old English artist, 1697-1764._
_Famous painting, representing an alliance between the son of
a broken-down old nobleman and the daughter of a rich city
merchant_)]
Dipsychus
BY ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH
(English poet and scholar, friend of Tennyson and Matthew
Arnold, 1819-1861)
As I sat at the café, I said to myself,
They may talk as they please about what they call pelf,
They may sneer as they like about eating and drinking,
But help it I cannot, I cannot help thinking,
How pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!
How pleasant it is to have money.
I sit at my table _en grand seigneur_,
And when I have done, throw a crust to the poor;
Not only the pleasure, one's self, of good living,
But also the pleasure of now and then giving.
So pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!
So pleasant it is to have money....
I drive through the streets, and I care not a d--n;
The people they stare, and they ask who I am;
And if I should chance to run over a cad,
I can pay for the damage if ever so bad.
So pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!
So pleasant it is to have money.
We stroll to our box and look down on the pit,
And if it weren't low should be tempted to spit;
We loll and we talk until people look up,
And when it's half over we go out to sup.
So pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!
So pleasant it is to have money.
The best of the tables and best of the fare--
And as for the others, the devil may care;
It isn't our fault if they dare not afford
To sup like a prince and be drunk as a lord.
So pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!
So pleasant it is to have money.
Utopia
BY SIR THOMAS MORE
(See page 160)
They marveile also that golde, whych of the owne nature is a
thinge so unprofytable, is nowe amonge all people in so hyghe
estimation, that man him selfe, by whome, yea and for the use
of whome it is so much set by, is in muche lesse estimation,
then the golde it selfe. In so muche that a lumpyshe
blockehedded churle, and whyche hathe no more wytte then an
asse, yea and as ful of noughtynes as of follye, shall have
nevertheless manye wyse and good men in subjectyon and bondage,
only for this, bycause he hath a greate heape of golde. Whyche
yf it shoulde be taken from hym by anye fortune, or by some
subtyll wyle and cautele of the lawe, (whyche no lesse then
fortune dothe bothe raise up the lowe, and plucke downe the
highe) and be geven to the moste vile slave and abject dryvell
of all his housholde, then shortely after he shal goo into the
service of his servaunt, as an augmentation or overplus beside
his money. But they muche more marvell at and detest the madnes
of them, whyche to those riche men, in whose debte and daunger
they be not, do give almost divine honoures, for none other
consideration, but bicause they be riche: and yet knowing them
to bee suche nigeshe penny fathers, that they be sure as longe
as they live, not the worthe of one farthinge of that heape
of gold shall come to them. These and such like opinions have
they conceaved, partely by education, beinge brought up in that
common wealthe, whose lawes and customes be farre different
from these kindes of folly, and partely by good litterature and
learning.
The Crown of Wild Olive
BY JOHN RUSKIN
(See page 106)
It is physically impossible for a well-educated, intellectual,
or brave man to make money the chief object of his thoughts;
as physically impossible as it is for him to make his dinner
the principal object of them. All healthy people like their
dinners, but their dinner is not the main object of their
lives. So all healthily minded people like making money--ought
to like it, and to enjoy the sensation of winning it: but the
main object of their life is not money; it is something better
than money.
Don Juan
BY LORD BYRON
(See pages 233, 340)
Oh, Gold! Why call we misers miserable?
Theirs is the pleasure that can never pall;
Theirs is the best bower-anchor, the chain-cable
Which holds fast other pleasures great and small.
Ye who but see the saving man at table
And scorn his temperate board, as none at all,
And wonder how the wealthy can be sparing,
Know not what visions spring from each cheese-paring....
Perhaps he hath great projects in his mind
To build a college, or to found a race,
An hospital, a church--and leave behind
Some dome surmounted by his meagre face;
Perhaps he fain would liberate mankind,
Even with the very ore that makes them base;
Perhaps he would be wealthiest of his nation,
Or revel in the joys of calculation....
"Love rules the camp, the court, the grove--for love
Is heaven, and heaven is love:" so sings the bard;
Which it were rather difficult to prove
(A thing with poetry in general hard).
Perhaps there may be something in "the grove,"
At least it rhymes to "love"; but I'm prepared
To doubt (no less than landlords of their rental)
If "courts" and "camps" be quite so sentimental.
But if Love don't, _Cash_ does, and Cash alone:
Cash rules the grove, and fells it too besides;
Without cash, camps were thin, and courts were none;
Without cash, Malthus tells you, "take no brides."
So Cash rules Love the ruler, on his own
High ground, as virgin Cynthia sways the tides:
And as for "Heaven being Love," why not say honey
Is wax? Heaven is not Love, 'tis Matrimony.
BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
(See page 181)
Gold? yellow, glittering, precious gold?...
This yellow slave
Will knit and break religions; bless the accursed;
Make the hoar leprosy adored; place thieves,
And give them title, knee and approbation
With senators on the bench.
The Cave of Mammon
(_From "The Faerie Queene"_)
BY EDMUND SPENSER
(Old English poet, 1552-1599)
At last he came unto a gloomy glade
Cover'd with boughs and shrubs from heavens light,
Whereas he sitting found in secret shade
An uncouth, salvage, and uncivile wight,
Of griesly hew and fowle ill-favour'd sight;
His face with smoke was tand, and eies were bleard,
His head and beard with sout were ill bedight,
His cole-blacke hands did seem to have ben seard
In smythes fire-spitting forge, and nayles like clawes appeard....
And round about him lay on every side
Great heapes of gold that never could be spent;
Of which some were rude owre, not purifide,
Of Mulcibers devouring element;
Some others were new driven, and distent
Into great ingowes and to wedges square;
Some in round plates withouten moniment;
But most were stampt, and in their metal bare
The antique shapes of kings and kesars straung and rare....
"What secret place," quoth he, "can safely hold
So huge a mass, and hide from heavens eie?
Or where hast thou thy wonne, that so much gold
Thou canst preserve from wrong and robbery?"
"Come thou," quoth he, "and see." So by and by
Through that black covert he him led, and fownd
A darksome way, which no man could descry,
That deep descended through the hollow grownd,
And was with dread and horror compassèd arownd....
So soon as Mammon there arrived, the dore
To him did open and affoorded way:
Him followed eke Sir Guyon evermore,
Ne darknesse him ne daunger might dismay.
Soone as he entred was, the dore streightway
Did shutt, and from behind it forth there lept
An ugly feend, more fowle then dismall day:
The which with monstrous stalke behind him stept,
And ever as he went dew watch upon him kept.
Well hopèd hee, ere long that hardy guest,
If ever covetous hand, or lustfull eye,
Or lips he layd on thing that likte him best,
Or ever sleepe his eie-strings did untye,
Should be his pray: and therefore still on hye
He over him did hold his cruell clawes,
Threatning with greedy gripe to doe him dye,
And rend in peeces with his ravenous pawes,
If ever he transgrest the fatall Stygian lawes.
In all that rowme was nothing to be seene
But huge great yron chests, and coffers strong,
All bard with double bends, that none could weene
Them to efforce by violence or wrong;
On every side they placèd were along.
But all the grownd with sculs was scattered
And dead mens bones, which round about were flong;
Whose lives, it seemed, whilome there was shed,
And their vile carcases now left unburièd.
Mammon Marriage
BY GEORGE MACDONALD
(Scotch novelist and clergyman, 1824-1905)
The croak of a raven hoar!
A dog's howl, kennel-tied!
Loud shuts the carriage-door:
The two are away on their ghastly ride
To Death's salt shore!
Where are the love and the grace?
The bridegroom is thirsty and cold!
The bride's skull sharpens her face!
But the coachman is driving, jubilant, bold,
The devil's pace.
The horses shiver'd and shook
Waiting gaunt and haggard
With sorry and evil look;
But swift as a drunken wind they stagger'd
'Longst Lethe brook.
Long since, they ran no more;
Heavily pulling they died
On the sand of the hopeless shore
Where never swell'd or sank a tide,
And the salt burns sore.
Flat their skeletons lie,
White shadows on shining sand;
The crusted reins go high
To the crumbling coachman's bony hand
On his knees awry.
Side by side, jarring no more,
Day and night side by side,
Each by a doorless door,
Motionless sit the bridegroom and bride
On the Dead-Sea-shore.
Snobs and Marriage
(_From "The Book of Snobs"_)
BY WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
(English novelist and satirist of manners, 1811-1863)
People dare not be happy for fear of Snobs. People dare not
love for fear of Snobs. People pine away lonely under the
tyranny of Snobs. Honest kindly hearts dry up and die. Gallant
generous lads, blooming with hearty youth, swell into bloated
old bachelorhood, and burst and tumble over. Tender girls
wither into shrunken decay, and perish solitary, from whom
Snobbishness has cut off the common claim to happiness and
affection with which Nature endowed us all. My heart grows sad
as I see the blundering tyrant's handiwork. As I behold it I
swell with cheap rage, and glow with fury against the Snob.
Come down, I say, thou skulking dullness. Come down, thou
stupid bully, and give up thy brutal ghost! And I arm myself
with the sword and spear, and taking leave of my family, go
forth to do battle with that hideous ogre and giant, that
brutal despot in Snob Castle, who holds so many gentle hearts
in torture and thrall.
In Bohemia
BY JOHN BOYLE O'REILLY
(Irish-born American journalist, 1844-1890)
The thirsty of soul soon learn to know
The moistureless froth of the social show,
The vulgar sham of the pompous feast
Where the heaviest purse is the highest priest;
The organized charity, scrimped and iced,
In the name of a cautious, statistical Christ.
Vanity Fair
(_From "The Pilgrim's Progress"_)
BY JOHN BUNYAN
(English thinker and religious rebel, who was put in prison and
there wrote one of the world's great allegories; 1628-1688)
Then I saw in my dream, that when they were got out of the
wilderness, they presently saw a town before them, and the name
of that town is Vanity; and at the town there is a fair kept,
called Vanity Fair. It is kept all the year long.... At this
fair are all such merchandise sold as houses, lands, trades,
places, honors, preferments, titles, countries, kingdoms,
lusts, pleasures; and delights of all sorts, such as harlots,
wives, husbands, children, masters, servants, lives, blood,
bodies, souls, silver, gold, precious stones, and what not.
And moreover, at this fair there are at all times to be seen
jugglings, cheats, games, plays, fools, apes, knaves, and
rogues, and that of every kind.
Here are to be seen, too, and that for nothing, thefts,
murders, adulteries, false-swearers, and that of a blood-red
color.
The Sins of Society
BY BERNARD VAUGHAN
(The sermons of a Jesuit priest, in Mayfair, London, which
caused great excitement among the "Smart Set")
Society nowadays, as we all know, is every bit as material
as it was when Dives was alive. It still cares very little,
indeed, for what it cannot either put on or into itself. It
is self-centred. Its fair votaries must be set up by the best
man-milliner, and fed up by the best man-cook; and then,
provided they are known at the opera by their diamonds, in
Mayfair by their motors, and at Cowes by their yacht, nothing
else matters, especially if they happen to have a house at
Ascot and a launch at Henley for the racing weeks.
It is not so much persons as things that count in this age of
materialism. Hence there is but one sin less pardonable than
that of being dull, and that is being poor. After all, there
may be some excuse for dulness if you have money, but there
is simply none at all for poverty, which like dirt on one's
shoes, or dust on one's gown, must be brushed away from sight
as soon as possible. Not even poor relatives are tolerated or
recognized, except occasionally on an "off-day," when, like
some unfortunate governesses in such households, they may be
asked to look in at tea-time, when nobody is there. Surely
all this is very contemptible, and altogether unworthy of old
English traditions. Yes, but old English traditions, with
rare exceptions, are being swept away by the incoming tide
of millionaire wealth, so that, nowadays, it matters little
what you are, but much, nay, everything, what you have. If you
command money, you command the world. If you have none, you are
nobody, though you be a prince.
(_From a leading London newspaper_)
Father Vaughan's knotted lash is sharp, and he wields it
sternly, but it does not raise one weal on the delicate flesh
of these massaged and manicured Salomes and Phrynes. His scorn
is savage, but it does not produce more than a polite smile
on these soft, faultless faces. His contempt is bitter, but
it does not make a single modish harlot blush. They are dimly
amused by the excitement of the good man. They are not in the
least annoyed. They are, on the contrary, eager to ask him to
dinner. What a piquant sensation to serve adultery with the
sauce of asceticism!
Father Vaughan says that if King Herod and Herodias and Salome
were to arrive in Mayfair they would be petted by the Smart
Set. The good father, in the innocence of his heart, underacts
the role of Sa-vaughan-rola. Herod and Herodias and Salome
have arrived. They are here. We know them. We see them daily.
Their names are in the newspapers. They were at Ascot. They
are present at the smartest weddings at St. George's, Hanover
Square. Do we despise them? Do we boycott them? Do we cut
them. By no means. We honor and reverence them. We may talk
about their bestialities in the privacy of the boudoir and the
smoking-room, but in public the theme is discreetly evaded.
Fifth Avenue, 1915
BY HERMANN HAGEDORN
(American poet, born 1882. The following poem is a _rondel_,
an interesting case of the use of an artificial old French
verse-form in a vital way)
The motor cars go up and down,
The painted ladies sit and smile.
Along the sidewalks, mile on mile,
Parade the dandies of the town.
The latest hat, the latest gown,
The tedium of their souls beguile.
The motor cars go up and down,
The painted ladies sit and smile.
In wild and icy waters drown
A thousand for a rock-bound isle.
Ten thousand in a black defile
Perish for justice or a crown.
The motor cars go up and down....
Hotel Life[A]
[A] Copyright, 1905. By permission of Charles Scribner's Sons.
(_From "The House of Mirth"_)
BY EDITH WHARTON
(Contemporary American novelist)
The environment in which Lily found herself was as strange
to her as its inhabitants. She was unacquainted with the
world of the fashionable New York hotel--a world over-heated,
over-upholstered, and overfitted with mechanical appliances
for the gratification of fantastic requirements, while the
comforts of a civilized life were as unattainable as in a
desert. Through this atmosphere of torrid splendor moved wan
beings as richly upholstered as the furniture, beings without
definite pursuits or permanent relations, who drifted on a
languid tide of curiosity from restaurant to concert-hall, from
palm-garden to music-room, from "art-exhibit" to dressmaker's
opening. High-stepping horses or elaborately equipped motors
waited to carry these ladies into vague metropolitan distances,
whence they returned, still more wan from the weight of their
sables, to be sucked back into the stifling inertia of the
hotel routine. Somewhere behind them in the background of
their lives, there was doubtless a real past, peopled by real
human activities: they themselves were probably the product of
strong ambitions, persistent energies, diversified contacts
with the wholesome roughness of life; yet they had no more real
existence than the poet's shades in limbo.
Lily had not been long in this pallid world without discovering
that Mrs. Hatch was its most substantial figure.... The daily
details of her existence were as strange to Lily as its general
tenor. The lady's habits were marked by an Oriental indolence
and disorder peculiarly trying to her companion. Mrs. Hatch
and her friends seemed to float together outside the bounds
of time and space. No definite hours were kept; no fixed
obligations existed: night and day floated into one another
in a blur of confused and retarded engagements, so that one
had the impression of lunching at the tea-hour, while dinner
was often merged in the noisy after-theatre supper which
prolonged Mrs. Hatch's vigil until daylight. Through this
jumble of futile activities came and went a strange throng of
hangers-on--manicures, beauty-doctors, hair-dressers, teachers
of bridge, of French, of "physical development." ... Mrs. Hatch
swam in a haze of indeterminate enthusiasms, of aspirations
culled from the stage, the newspapers, the fashion-journals,
and a gaudy world of sport still more completely beyond her
companion's ken.
The Parasitic Female
(_From "Woman and Labor"_)
BY OLIVE SCHREINER
(In the preface to this book, it is explained that it is
only a faint sketch from memory of part of a great work, the
manuscript of which was destroyed during the Boer war)
In place of the active laboring woman, upholding society by her
toil, had come the effete wife, concubine or prostitute, clad
in fine raiment, the work of others' fingers; fed on luxurious
viands, the result of others' toil, waited on and tended by the
labor of others. The need for her physical labor having gone,
and mental industry not having taken its place, she bedecked
and scented her person, or had it bedecked and scented for
her, she lay upon her sofa, or drove or was carried out in her
vehicle, and, loaded with jewels, she sought by dissipations
and amusements to fill up the inordinate blank left by the
lack of productive activity. And the hand whitened and the
frame softened, till at last, the very duties of motherhood,
which were all the constitution of her life left her, became
distasteful, and, from the instant when her infant came damp
from her womb, it passed into the hands of others, to be
tended and reared by them; and from youth to age her offspring
often owed nothing to her personal toil. In many cases so
complete was her enervation, that at last the very joy of
giving life, the glory and beatitude of a virile womanhood,
became distasteful; and she sought to evade it, not because of
its interference with more imperious duties to those already
born of her, or to her society, but because her existence of
inactivity had robbed her of all joy in strenuous exertion
and endurance in any form. Finely clad, tenderly housed, life
became for her merely the gratification of her own physical and
sexual appetites, and the appetites of the male, through the
stimulation of which she could maintain herself. And, whether
as kept wife, kept mistress, or prostitute, she contributed
nothing to the active and sustaining labors of her society.
She had attained to the full development of that type which,
whether in modern Paris or New York or London, or in ancient
Greece, Assyria, or Rome, is essentially one in its features,
its nature, and its results. She was the "fine lady," the human
female parasite--the most deadly microbe which can make its
appearance on the surface of any social organism.
Wherever in the history of the past this type has reached its
full development and has comprised the bulk of the females
belonging to any dominant class or race, it has heralded its
decay. In Assyria, Greece, Rome, Persia, as in Turkey today,
the same material conditions have produced the same social
disease among the wealthy and dominant races; and again and
again, when the nation so affected has come into contact with
nations more healthily constituted, this diseased condition has
contributed to its destruction.
In the Market-Place
(_From "Beyond the Breakers"_)
BY GEORGE STERLING
(California poet, born 1869)
In Babylon, high Babylon,
What gear is bought and sold?
All merchandise beneath the sun
That bartered is for gold;
Amber and oils from far beyond
The desert and the fen,
And wines whereof our throats are fond--
Yea! and the souls of men!
In Babylon, grey Babylon,
What goods are sold and bought?
Vesture of linen subtly spun,
And cups from agate wrought;
Raiment of many-colored silk
For some fair denizen,
And ivory more white than milk--
Yea! and the souls of men!...
In Babylon, sad Babylon,
What chattels shall invite?
A wife whenas your youth is done,
Or leman for a night.
Before Astarte's portico
The torches flare again;
The shadows come, the shadows go--
Yea! and the souls of men!
In Babylon, dark Babylon,
Who take the wage of shame?
The scribe and singer, one by one,
That toil for gold and fame.
They grovel to their masters' mood
The blood upon the pen
Assigns their souls to servitude--
Yea! and the souls of men!
Dinner à la Tango
BY EDWIN BJÖRKMAN
(American critic, born in Sweden 1866)
It is after eight o'clock in one of the smaller dining-rooms of
a fashionable New York hotel. The middle of the room is cleared
for dancing. At one end a small orchestra is working furiously
at a melody that affects the mind like the triple-distilled
essence of nervous unrest. Every table is occupied by merry
groups of men and women in evening dress. Above our heads are
strung almost invisible wires, to which are attached colored
lanterns, gaudy mechanical butterflies, and huge red and green
toy balloons. Just as we enter, a stoutish, heavy-faced chap
with a monocle slaps the next man on the back and cries out:
"We must be gay, old boy!"
The open square in the middle is filled with dancers. They trip
and slide and dip. They side-step and back-step and gyrate.
They wave their arms like pump-handles, or raise them skyward,
palm to palm, as if in prayer. There are among them young girls
with shining faces full of inarticulate desire; simpering
young men with a leer lurking at the bottom of their vacant
stares; stiff-legged and white-haired old men with drooping
eyelids; and stern-jawed matrons with hand-made faces of a
startling purple hue. But on every face, young or old, bright
or dull, there beams a smile or clings a smirk, for the spirit
of the place demands gaiety at any price.
On the tables are strewn gaily trimmed packages that open with
a report, and yield up gaily colored paper caps. Rubicund
gentlemen place the caps over their bald spots, while women
pick the big butterflies to pieces, and put the fragments into
their hair until they look like barbarous princesses. Men and
women drink and dance, feast and flirt, sing and laugh and
shout....
Gay is the scene indeed: gay the music and the laughter; gay
the wine that sparkles in the glasses; gay the swirling,
swaying maze of dancing couples; gay the bright balloons and
brilliant dresses of the women. And it is as if my mind's eye
saw these words written in burning letters on the wall:
_Leave care behind, all ye that enter here!_
But out there on Fifth Avenue a lot of unkempt, unreasonable
men and women are marching savagely behind a black flag.
Evils of Gold
BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
(See pages 181, 492)
O thou sweet king killer, and dear divorce
'Twixt natural son and sire! thou bright defiler
Of Hymen's purest bed! thou valiant Mars;
Thou ever young, fresh, loved, and delicate wooer,
Whose blush doth thaw the consecrated snow
That lies on Dian's lap! thou visible god,
That solder'st close impossibilities,
And mak'st them kiss; that speak'st with every tongue,
To every purpose! O thou touch of hearts!
Think, thy slave, man, rebels; and by thy virtue
Set them into confounding odds, that beasts
May have the world in empire.
The Theory of the Leisure Class[A]
[A] By permission of the Macmillan Co.
BY THORSTEIN VEBLEN
(American university professor)
The function of dress as an evidence of ability to pay does
not end with simply showing that the wearer consumes valuable
goods in excess of what is required for physical comfort.
Simple conspicuous waste of goods is effective and gratifying
as far as it goes; it is good _prima facie_ evidence of
pecuniary success, and consequently _prima facie_ evidence
of social worth. But dress has subtler and more far-reaching
possibilities than this crude, first-hand evidence of
wasteful consumption only. If, in addition to showing that
the wearer can afford to consume freely and uneconomically,
it can also be shown in the same stroke that he or she is not
under the necessity of earning a livelihood, the evidence of
social worth is enhanced in a very considerable degree. Our
dress, therefore, in order to serve its purpose effectually,
should not only be expensive, but it should also make plain
to all observers that the wearer is not engaged in any kind
of productive labor. In the evolutionary process by which our
system of dress has been elaborated into its present admirably
perfect adaptation to its purpose, this subsidiary line of
evidence has received due attention. A detailed examination
of what passes in popular apprehension for elegant apparel
will show that it is contrived at every point to convey the
impression that the wearer does not habitually put forth
any useful effort. It goes without saying that no apparel
can be considered elegant, or even decent, if it shows the
effect of manual labor on the part of the wearer, in the way
of soil or wear. The pleasing effect of neat and spotless
garments is chiefly, if not altogether, due to their carrying
the suggestion of leisure--exemption from personal contact
with industrial processes of any kind. Much of the charm
that invests the patent-leather shoe, the stainless linen,
the lustrous cylindrical hat, and the walking-stick, which
so greatly enhance the native dignity of a gentleman, comes
of their pointedly suggesting that the wearer cannot when so
attired bear a hand in any employment that is directly and
immediately of any human use....
The dress of women goes even farther than that of men in the
way of demonstrating the wearer's abstinence from productive
employment. It needs no argument to enforce the generalization
that the more elegant styles of feminine bonnets go even
farther towards making work impossible than does the man's
high hat. The woman's shoe adds the so-called French heel
to the evidence of enforced leisure afforded by its polish;
because this high heel obviously makes any, even the simplest
and most necessary manual work extremely difficult. The like
is true even in a higher degree of the skirt and the rest of
the drapery which characterizes woman's dress. The substantial
reason for our tenacious attachment to the skirt is just this:
it is expensive and it hampers the wearer at every turn and
incapacitates her for all useful exertion. The like is true of
the feminine custom of wearing the hair excessively long.
But the woman's apparel not only goes beyond that of the modern
man in the degree in which it argues exemption from labor; it
also adds a peculiar and highly characteristic feature which
differs in kind from anything habitually practiced by the men.
This feature is the class of contrivances of which the corset
is the typical example. The corset is, in economic theory,
substantially a mutilation, undergone for the purpose of
lowering the subject's vitality and rendering her permanently
and obviously unfit for work. It is true, the corset impairs
the personal attractions of the wearer, but the loss suffered
on that score is offset by the gain in reputability which comes
of her visibly increased expensiveness and infirmity. It may
broadly be set down that the womanliness of woman's apparel
resolves itself, in point of substantial fact, into the more
effective hindrance to useful exertion offered by the garments
peculiar to women.
The Vanity of Human Wishes
BY SAMUEL JOHNSON
(English essayist and poet, 1709-1784. The poem from which
these lines are taken is a paraphrase of the Roman poet Juvenal)
But, scarce observed, the knowing and the bold
Fall in the general massacre of gold;
Wide wasting pest! that rages unconfined,
And crowds with crimes the records of mankind;
For gold his sword the hireling ruffian draws,
For gold the hireling judge distorts the laws;
Wealth heaped on wealth, nor truth nor safety buys,
The dangers gather as the treasures rise.
Letters from a Chinese Official
BY G. LOWES DICKINSON
(This little book, published anonymously, was taken for a genuine
document by many critics, among others, Mr. William Jennings Bryan,
who wrote an elaborate answer to it. The writer is an English
university lecturer)
When I review my impressions of the average English citizen,
impressions based on many years' study, what kind of man do I
see? I see one divorced from Nature, but unreclaimed by Art;
instructed, but not educated; assimilative, but incapable
of thought. Trained in the tenets of a religion in which he
does not believe--for he sees it flatly contradicted in every
relation of life--he dimly feels that it is prudent to conceal
under a mask of piety the atheism he is hardly intelligent
enough to avow. His religion is conventional; and, what is
more important, his morals are as conventional as his creed.
Charity, chastity, self-abnegation, contempt of the world and
its prizes--these are the words on which he has been fed from
his childhood upward. And words they have remained, for neither
has he anywhere seen them practiced by others, nor has it ever
occurred to him to practice them himself. Their influence,
while it is strong enough to make him a chronic hypocrite, is
not so strong as to show him the hypocrite he is. Deprived
on the one hand of the support of a true ethical standard,
embodied in the life of the society of which he is a member,
he is duped, on the other, by lip-worship of an impotent
ideal. Abandoned thus to his instinct, he is content to do as
others do, and, ignoring the things of the spirit, to devote
himself to material ends. He becomes a mere tool; and of such
your society is composed. By your works you may be known. Your
triumphs in the mechanical arts are the obverse of your failure
in all that calls for spiritual insight.
Stupidity Street
BY RALPH HODGSON
(Contemporary English poet, who publishes his work in tiny
pamphlets with quaint illustrations)
I saw with open eyes
Singing birds sweet
Sold in the shops
For the people to eat,
Sold in the shops of
Stupidity Street.
I saw in vision
The worm in the wheat;
And in the shops nothing
For people to eat;
Nothing for sale in
Stupidity Street.
The Souls of Black Folk
BY W. E. BURGHARDT DU BOIS
(Professor in the University of Atlanta, born 1868; a prominent
advocate of the rights of his race)
In the Black World, the Preacher and Teacher embodied once
the ideals of this people,--the strife for another and a
juster world, the vague dream of righteousness, the mystery of
knowing; but today the danger is that these ideals, with their
simple beauty and weird inspiration, will suddenly sink to a
question of cash and a lust for gold. Here stands this black
young Atalanta, girding herself for the race that must be run;
and if her eyes be still toward the hills and sky as in the
days of old, then we may look for noble running; but what if
some ruthless or wily or even thoughtless Hippomenes lay golden
apples before her? What if the negro people be wooed from a
strife for righteousness, from a love of knowing, to regard
dollars as the be-all and the end-all of life? What if to the
Mammonism of America be added the rising Mammonism of the
re-born South, and the Mammonism of this South be reinforced
by the budding Mammonism of its half-awakened black millions?
Whither, then, is the new-world quest of Goodness and Beauty
and Truth gone glimmering?
Co-operation and Nationality
BY "A.E." (GEORGE W. RUSSELL)
(See page 252)
When steam first began to puff and wheels go round at so
many revolutions per minute, the wild child humanity, who
had hitherto developed his civilization in picturesque
unconsciousness of where he was going, and without any set
plan, was caught and put in harness. What are called business
habits were invented to make the life of man run in harmony
with the steam engine, and his movements rival the train in
punctuality. The factory system was invented, and it was an
instantaneous success. Men were clothed with cheapness and
uniformity. Their minds grew numerously alike, cheap and
uniform also. They were at their desks at nine o'clock, or at
their looms at six. They adjusted themselves to the punctual
wheels. The rapid piston acted as pacemaker, and in England,
which started first in the modern race for wealth, it was an
enormous advantage to have tireless machines of superhuman
activity to make the pace, and nerve men, women and children
to the fullest activity possible. Business methods had a long
start in England, and irregularity and want of uniformity
became after a while such exceptions that they were regarded as
deadly sins. The grocer whose supplies of butter did not arrive
week after week by the same train, at the same hour, and of the
same quality, of the same color, the same saltness, and in the
same kind of box, quarrelled with the wholesaler, who in his
turn quarrelled with the producer. Only the most machine-like
race could win custom. After a while every country felt it had
to be drilled or become extinct. Some made themselves into
machines to enter the English market, some to preserve their
own markets. Even the indolent Oriental is getting keyed up,
and in another fifty years the Bedouin of the desert will be at
his desk and the wild horseman of Tartary will be oiling his
engines.
The Communist Manifesto
BY KARL MARX AND FREDERICK ENGELS
(Published in 1848, the charter of the modern Socialist
movement)
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put
an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has
pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound
man to his "natural superiors," and has left remaining no
other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest,
than callous "cash payment." It has drowned the most heavenly
ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of
philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical
calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange
value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered
freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom--Free
Trade.
Portrait of an American
BY LOUIS UNTERMEYER
(See pages 42, 418)
He slobbers over sentimental plays
And sniffles over sentimental songs.
He tells you often how he sadly longs
For the ideals of the dear old days.
In gatherings he is the first to raise
His voice against "our country's shameful wrongs."
He storms at greed. His hard, flat tone prolongs
The hymns and mumbled platitudes of praise.
I heard him in his office Friday past.
"Look here," he said, "their talk is all a bluff;
You mark my words, this thing will never last.
Let them walk out--they'll come back quick enough.
We'll have all hands at work--and working fast!
How do they think we're running this--for _love_?"
A Living Wage
BY J. PIERPONT MORGAN
(American banker; testimony before the United States Commission
on Industrial Relations)
QUESTION: Do you consider ten dollars a week enough for a
'longshoreman with a family to support?
ANSWER: If that's all he can get, and he takes it, I should say
it's enough.
Impressions
BY HAROLD MONRO
(Contemporary English poet)
He's something in the city. Who shall say
His fortune was not honorably won?
Few people can afford to give away
As he, or help the poor as he has done.
Neat in his habits, temperate in his life:
Oh, who shall dare his character besmirch?
He scarcely ever quarrels with his wife,
And every Sabbath strictly goes to church.
He helps the village club, and in the town
Attends parochial meetings once a week,
Pays for each purchase ready-money down:
Is anyone against him?--Who will speak?
There is a widow somewhere in the north,
On whom slow ruin gradually fell,
While she, believing that her God was wroth,
Suffered without a word--or she might tell.
And there's a beggar somewhere in the west,
Whose fortune vanished gradually away:
Now he but drags his limbs in horror lest
Starvation feed on them--or he might say.
And there are children stricken with disease,
Too ignorant to curse him, or too weak.
In a true portrait of him all of these
Must figure in the background--they shall speak.
New Varieties of Sin
(_From "Sin and Society"_)
BY EDWARD ALSWORTH ROSS
(American college professor, born 1866, a prominent advocate of
academic freedom)
Today the sacrifice of life incidental to quick success rarely
calls for the actual spilling of blood. How decent are the
pale slayings of the quack, the adulterator, and the purveyor
of polluted water, compared with the red slayings of the
vulgar bandit or assassin! Even if there is blood-letting, the
long-range, tentacular nature of modern homicide eliminates
all personal collision. What an abyss between the knife-play
of brawlers and the law-defying neglect to fence dangerous
machinery in a mill, or to furnish cars with safety couplers!
The providing of unsuspecting passengers with "cork"
life-preservers secretly loaded with bars of iron to make up
for their deficiency in weight of cork, is spiritually akin
to the treachery of Joab, who, taking Amasa by the beard "to
kiss him," smote Amasa "in the fifth rib"; but it wears a very
different aspect. The current methods of annexing the property
of others are characterized by a pleasing indirectness and
refinement. The furtive, apprehensive manner of the till-tapper
or the porch-climber would jar disagreeably upon the tax-dodger
"swearing off" his property, or the city official concealing
a "rake-off" in his specifications for a public building. The
work of the card-sharp and the thimblerigger shocks a type of
man that will not stick at the massive "artistic swindling" of
the contemporary promoter....
One might suppose that an exasperated public would sternly
castigate these modern sins. But the fact is, the very
qualities that lull the conscience of the sinner blind the
eyes of the on-lookers. People are sentimental, and bastinado
wrong-doing not according to its harmfulness, but according to
the infamy that has come to attach to it. Undiscerning, they
chastise with scorpions the old authentic sins, but spare the
new. They do not see that boodling is treason, that blackmail
is piracy, that embezzlement is theft, that speculation
is gambling, that tax dodging is larceny, that railroad
discrimination is treachery, that the factory labor of children
is slavery, that deleterious adulteration is murder. It has not
come home to them that the fraudulent promoter "devours widows'
houses," that the monopolist "grinds the faces of the poor,"
that mercenary editors and spellbinders "put bitter for sweet
and sweet for bitter." The cloven hoof hides in patent leather;
and to-day, as in Hosea's time, the people "are destroyed for
lack of knowledge." The mob lynches the red-handed slayer,
when it ought to keep a gallows Haman-high for the venal mine
inspector, the seller of infected milk, the maintainer of a
fire-trap theatre. The child-beater is forever blasted in
reputation, but the exploiter of infant toil, or the concocter
of a soothing syrup for the drugging of babies, stands a pillar
of society. The petty shoplifter is more abhorred than the
stealer of a franchise, and the wife-whipper is outcast long
before the man who sends his over-insured ship to founder with
its crew.
BY JACK LONDON
Far better to have the front of one's face pushed in by the
fist of an honest prize-fighter than to have the lining of
one's stomach corroded by the embalmed beef of a dishonest
manufacturer.
Tono-Bungay
BY H. G. WELLS
(English novelist, born 1866; author of many strange romances of
modern science, and later, of penetrating studies of social injustice
and hypocrisy. The present novel tells of the career of a financial
potentate who begins life with a patent-medicine business)
It was my uncle's genius that did it. No doubt he
needed me--I was, I will admit, his indispensable right
hand; but his was the brain to conceive. He wrote every
advertisement; some of them even he sketched. You must
remember that his were the days before the _Times_
took to enterprise and the vociferous hawking of that
antiquated _Encyclopædia_. That alluring, button-holing,
let-me-just-tell-you-quite-soberly-something-you-ought-to-know
style of newspaper advertisement, with every now and then a
convulsive jump of some attractive phrase into capitals, was
then almost a novelty. "Many people who are MODERATELY well
think they are QUITE well," was one of his early efforts. The
jerks in capitals were, "DO NOT NEED DRUGS OR MEDICINE," and
"SIMPLY A PROPER REGIMEN TO GET YOU IN TONE." One was warned
against the chemist or druggist who pushed "much-advertised
nostrums" on one's attention. That trash did more harm than
good. The thing needed was regimen--and Tono-Bungay!
Very early, too, was that bright little quarter column, at
least it was usually a quarter column in the evening papers:
"HILARITY--TONO-BUNGAY. Like Mountain Air in the Veins."
The penetrating trio of questions: "Are you bored with your
Business? Are you bored with your Dinner? Are you bored with
your Wife?"--that, too, was in our Gower Street days. Both
these we had in our first campaign when we worked London south,
central, and west; and then, too, we had our first poster,--the
HEALTH, BEAUTY AND STRENGTH one. That was his design; I happen
still to have got by me the first sketch he made for it....
By all modern standards the business was, as my uncle would
say, "absolutely _bona fide_." We sold our stuff and got the
money, and spent the money honestly in lies and clamor to sell
more stuff. Section by section we spread it over the whole
of the British Isles; first working the middle-class London
suburbs, then the outer suburbs, then the home counties,
then going (with new bills and a more pious style of "ad")
into Wales, a great field always for a new patent-medicine,
and then into Lancashire. My uncle had in his inner office a
big map of England, and as we took up fresh sections of the
local press and our consignments invaded new areas, flags
for advertisements and pink underlines for orders showed our
progress.
"The romance of modern commerce, George!" my uncle would say,
rubbing his hands together and drawing in air through his
teeth. "The romance of modern commerce, eh? Conquest. Province
by Province. Like sogers."
We subjugated England and Wales; we rolled over the Cheviots
with a special adaptation containing eleven per cent. of
absolute alcohol; "Tono-Bungay: Thistle Brand." We also had
the Fog poster adapted to a kilted Briton in a misty Highland
scene....
As I look back at them now, those energetic years seem all
compacted to a year or so; from the days of our first hazardous
beginning in Farrington Street with barely a thousand pounds'
worth of stuff or credit all told--and that got by something
perilously like snatching--to the days when my uncle went to
the public on behalf of himself and me (one-tenth share) and
our silent partners, the drug wholesalers and the printing
people and the owner of that group of magazines and newspapers,
to ask with honest confidence for £150,000. Those silent
partners were remarkably sorry, I know, that they had not taken
larger shares and given us longer credit when the subscriptions
came pouring in. My uncle had a clear half to play with
(including the one-tenth understood to be mine).
£150,000--think of it!--for the goodwill in a string of lies
and a trade in bottles of mitigated water! Do you realize the
madness of the world that sanctions such a thing? Perhaps you
don't. At times use and wont certainly blinded me. If it had
not been for Ewart, I don't think I should have had an inkling
of the wonderfulness of this development of my fortunes; I
should have grown accustomed to it, fallen in with all its
delusions as completely as my uncle presently did. He was
immensely proud of the flotation. "They've never been given
such value," he said, "for a dozen years." But Ewart, with his
gesticulating hairy hands and bony wrists, is single-handed
chorus to all this as it plays itself over again in my memory,
and he kept my fundamental absurdity illuminated for me during
all this astonishing time.
"It's just on all fours with the rest of things," he remarked;
"only more so. You needn't think you're anything out of the
way."
Man the Reformer
BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON
(See page 235)
It is only necessary to ask a few questions as to the progress
of the articles of commerce from the fields where they grew,
to our houses, to become aware that we eat and drink and
wear perjury and fraud in a hundred commodities. We are all
implicated in this charge. The sins of our trade belong to
no class, to no individual. Everybody partakes, everybody
confesses, yet none feels himself accountable. The trail of
the serpent reaches into all the lucrative professions and
practices of man. Nay, the evil custom reaches into the whole
institution of property, until our laws which establish and
protect it seem not to be the issue of love and reason, but of
selfishness.
To a Certain Rich Young Ruler
BY CLEMENT WOOD
(A sonnet which was widely circulated at the time of the
Colorado coal-strike of 1913-14)
White-fingered lord of murderous events,
Well are you guarding what your father gained;
With torch and rifle you have well maintained
The lot to which a heavenly providence
Has called you; laborers, risen in defense
Of liberty and life, lie charred and brained
About your mines, whose gutted hills are stained
With slaughter of these newer innocents.
Ah, but your bloody fingers clenched in prayer!
Your piety, which all the world has seen!
The godly odor spreading through the air
From your efficient charity machine!
Thus you rehearse for your high rôle up there,
Ruling beside the lowly Nazarene!
FROM THE POLITICS OF ARISTOTLE
(See page 480)
A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to
religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment
from a ruler whom they consider godfearing and pious. On the
other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing
that he has the gods on his side.
BY AMOS
(Hebrew prophet, B. C. 760)
I hate, I despise your feasts, and I will take no delight in
your solemn assemblies. Yea, though you offer me your burnt
offerings and meal offerings, I will not accept them; neither
will I regard the peace offerings of your fat beasts. Take thou
away from me the noise of thy songs; for I will not hear the
melody of thy viols. But let judgment roll down as waters, and
righteousness as a mighty stream.
Concerning Charity
BY JOHN R. LAWSON
(Part of a statement before the United States Commission on Industrial
Relations, 1915. The writer was the representative of the miners in
charge of the Colorado strike, and went to work as a pit-boy at the
age of eight)
There is another cause of industrial discontent. This is the
skillful attempt that is being made to substitute Philanthropy
for Justice. There is not one of these foundations, now
spreading their millions over the world in showy generosity,
that does not draw those millions from some form of industrial
injustice. It is not _their_ money that these lords of
commercialized virtue are spending, but the withheld wages of
the American working-class.
I sat in this room and heard a great philanthropist read the
list of activities of his Foundation "to promote the well-being
of mankind." An international health commission to extend to
foreign countries and peoples the work of eradicating the
hookworm; the promotion of medical education and health in
China; the investigations of vice conditions in Europe; one
hundred thousand dollars for the American Academy in Rome,
twenty thousand a year for widows' pensions in New York, one
million for the relief of Belgians, thirty-four millions for
the University of Chicago, thirty-four millions for a General
Education Board. A wave of horror swept over me during that
reading, and I say to you that that same wave is now rushing
over the entire working-class of the United States. Health for
China, a refuge for birds in Louisiana, food for the Belgians,
pensions for New York widows, university training for the
elect--and never a thought or a dollar for the many thousands
of men, women and children who starved in Colorado, for the
widows robbed of husbands and children of their fathers, by
law-violating conditions in the mines. There are thousands of
this great philanthropist's former employees in Colorado today
who wish to God that they were in Belgium to be fed, or birds
to be cared for tenderly.
Crowds
BY GERALD STANLEY LEE
(Contemporary American author and lecturer, formerly a
clergyman)
As I have watched my fellow human beings, what I have come to
want most of all in this world is the inspired employer--or
what I have called the inspired millionaire or organizer; the
man who can take the machines off the backs of the people, and
take the machines out of their wits, and make the machines free
their bodies and serve their souls.
If we ever have the inspired employer, he will have to be made
by the social imagination of the people, by creating the spirit
of expectation and challenge toward the rich among the masses
of the people....
Nothing is more visionary than trying to run a world without
dreams, especially an economic world. It is because even bad
dreams are better in this world than having no dreams at all
that bad people so-called are so largely allowed to run it.
In the final and practical sense, the one factor in economics
to be reckoned with is Desire.
The Dying Boss
BY LINCOLN STEFFENS
(American writer upon social problems, born 1866. A story of the
political leader of a corrupt city, who lies upon his death-bed, and
has asked to have the meaning of his own career made plain to him)
"What kind of a kid were you, Boss?" I began.
"Pretty tough, I guess," he answered.
"Born here?"
"Yes; in the Third Ward."
"Tough then as it is now?"
"Tougher," he said.
"Produces toughness the way Kansas produces corn," I remarked.
"Father?" I asked.
"Kept a saloon; a driver before that."
"Mother a girl of the ward?"
"Yes," he said. "She was brought up there; but she came to this
country with her father from England, as a baby."
"What sort of woman was she?"
"Quiet," he said; "always still; silent-like; a worker. Kept
the old man straight--some; and me too--'s well as she could.
She's th' one that got him off th' wagon and started in th'
liquor business."
"You were poor people?"
"Yes."
"And common?"
"Y-yes-s."
"A child of the people," I commented: "the common people."
He nodded, wondering.
"One of the great, friendless mass of helpless humanity?"
He nodded.
"That wasn't your fault, was it?" I said. "Not to blame for
that? That's not your sin, is it?"
He shook his head, staring, and he was so mystified that I
said that most people were "pretty terribly punished for being
born poor and common." He nodded, but he wasn't interested or
enlightened, apparently. "And you learned, somehow, that the
thing to do was to get yourself on, get up out of it, make a
success of your life?"
"Yes," he said slowly. "I don't know how, but I did get that,
somehow."
"That was the ideal they taught you," I said. "Never heard of
getting everybody on and making a success of society; of the
city and State?"
But this line of questioning was beyond him. I changed my
tack....
"In that first interview we had," I said, "you insisted that,
while the business boss was the real boss, the sovereign, you
had some power of your own. And you described it today as the
backing of your own ward, which, you said, you had in your
pocket. When you became boss, you got the backing, the personal
support, of other wards, didn't you?"
"Seven of 'em," he counted. "Made th' leaders myself."
"And you developed a big personal following in other wards,
too?"
"Sure," he said; "in every one of them. I was a popular leader;
not only a boss, but a friend with friends, lots of 'em. The
people liked me."
"That's the point," I said. "The people liked you."
He nodded warmly.
"The common people," I went on, and he was about to nod, but
he didn't. And his fingers became still. "Your own people--the
great helpless mass of the friendless mob--liked you." His eyes
were fixed on mine. "They followed you; they trusted you."
I paused a moment, then I asked: "Didn't they, Boss?"
"Yes," he said with his lips alone.
"They didn't set a watch on you, did they?" I continued. "They
voted as you bade them vote, elected the fellows you put on the
tickets of their party for them. And, after they elected them,
they left it to them, and to you, to be true to them; to stick
to them; to be loyal."
His eyes fell to his fingers, and his fingers began again to
pick.
"And when your enemies got after you and accused you," I said,
"the people stuck by you?"
No answer; only the fingers picked.
"The great, friendless mass--the hopeful, hopeless
majority--they were true to you and the party, and they
re-elected you."
His eyes were on mine again, and there was light in them; but
it was the reflected light of fire, and it burned.
"And you--you betrayed them," I said; and I hurried on, piling
on the fuel, all I had. "They have power, the people have,
and they have needs, great common needs; and they have great
common wealth. All your fat, rich franchises, all your great
social values, the values added to land and franchise by the
presence of the great, common, numerous mass, all the city's
public property--all are theirs, their common property. They
own enough in common to meet all their great common needs, and
they have an organization to keep for them and to develop for
their use and profit all these great needed social values. It
is the city; the city government; city, State, and national.
And they have, they breed in their own ranks, men like you,
natural political leaders, to go into public life and lead
them, teach them, represent them. And they leave it all to
you, trusting you. And you, all of you--not you alone, Boss,
but all of you: ward leaders; State leaders; all the national
political bosses--you all betray them. You receive from them
their votes, so faithfully given, and you transform them into
office-holders whom you teach or corrupt and compel to obey
you. So you reorganize the city government. You, not the Mayor,
are the head of it; you, not the council, are its legislature;
you, not the heads of departments, are the administrators of
the property and the powers of the people of your city; the
common, helpless, friendless people. And, having thus organized
and taken over all this power and property and--this beautiful
faith, you do not protect their rights and their property.
What do you do with it, Boss?"
He started. He could not answer. I answered for him:
"You sell 'em out; you turn over the whole thing--the city,
its property, and its people--to Business, to the big fellows;
to the business leaders of the people. You deliver, not only
franchises, privileges, private rights and public properties,
and values, Boss: you--all of you together--have delivered the
government itself to these men, so that today this city, this
State, and the national government represent, normally, not the
people, not the great mass of common folk, who need protection,
but--Business; preferably bad business; privileged business; a
class; a privileged class."
He had sunk back among the pillows, his eyes closed, his
fingers still. I sounded him.
"That's the system," I repeated. "It's an organization of
social treason, and the political boss is the chief traitor. It
couldn't stand without the submission of the people; the real
bosses have to get that. They can't buy the people--too many of
them; so they buy the people's leaders, and the disloyalty of
the political boss is the key to the whole thing."
These was no response. I plumbed him again.
"And you--you believe in loyalty, Boss," I said--"in being true
to your own." His eyes opened. "That's your virtue, you say,
and you said, too, that you have practiced it."
"Don't," he murmured.
A Ballad of Dead Girls
BY DANA BURNET
(American poet, born 1888)
Scarce had they brought the bodies down
Across the withered floor,
Than Max Rogosky thundered at
The District Leader's door.
Scarce had the white-lipped mothers come
To search the fearful noon,
Than little Max stood shivering
In Tom McTodd's saloon!
In Tom McTodd's saloon he stood,
Beside the silver bar,
Where any honest lad may stand,
And sell his vote at par.
"Ten years I've paid the System's tax,"
The words fell, quivering, raw;
"And now I want the thing I bought--
Protection from the law!"
The Leader smiled a twisted smile:
"Your doors were locked," he said.
"You've overstepped the limit, Max--
A hundred women ... dead!"
Then Max Rogosky gripped the bar
And shivered where he stood.
"You listen now to me," he cried,
"Like business fellers should!
"I've paid for all my hundred dead,
I've paid, I've paid, I've paid."
His ragged laughter rang, and died--
For he was sore afraid.
"I've paid for wooden hall and stair,
I've paid to strain my floors,
I've paid for rotten fire-escapes,
For all my bolted doors.
"Your fat inspectors came and came--
I crossed their hands with gold.
And now I want the thing I bought,
The thing the System sold."
The District Leader filled a glass
With whiskey from the bar,
(The little silver counter where
He bought men's souls at par.)
And well he knew that he must give
The thing that he had sold,
Else men should doubt the System's word,
Keep back the System's gold.
The whiskey burned beneath his tongue:
"A hundred women dead!
I guess the Boss can fix it up,
Go home--and hide," he said.
* * * * *
All day they brought the bodies down
From Max Rogosky's place--
And oh, the fearful touch of flame
On hand and breast and face!
All day the white-lipped mothers came
To search the sheeted dead;
And Horror strode the blackened walls.
Where Death had walked in red.
But Max Rogosky did not weep.
(He knew that tears were vain.)
He paid the System's price, and lived
To lock his doors again.
BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
(See pages 181, 492, 507)
The strongest castle, tower and town,
The golden bullet beats it down.
The Miner's Tale
BY MAY BEALS
(A tragedy at Coal Creek, Tennessee, May 19, 1902)
The lord of us he lay in his bed--
Good right had he, good right!
But we were up before night had fled,
Out to the mine in the dawning red;
Slaves were we all, by hunger led
Into the land of night.
The master knew of our danger well,
We also knew--we knew.
His greed for profits had served him well,
But he over-reached him, as fate befell,
And I alone am left to tell,
Death's horrors I lived through
The master dreamed, mayhap, of his gold,
But we were awake--awake,
Buried alive in the black earth's mold;
And some who yet could a pencil hold,
Wrote till their hands in death grew cold,
For wife or sweetheart's sake.
Letters they wrote of farewell--farewell,
To mother, sweetheart, wife:
What words of comfort could they tell--
Comfort for those who loved them well,
Up from the jaws of the earth's black hell
That was crushing out their life.
The master cursed, as masters do--
Good right had he, good right!
But the fear of our vengeance stirred him, too;
He sailed, with some of his pirate crew,
To Europe, and reveled a year or two;
Great might has he--great might!
Romance
BY SEYMOUR DEMING
(Contemporary American writer)
The old idea of romance: The country boy goes to the city,
marries his employer's daughter, enslaves some hundreds of his
fellow humans, gets rich, and leaves a public library to his
home town.
The new idea of romance: To undo some of the mischief done by
the old idea of romance.
The Soul's Errand
BY SIR WALTER RALEIGH
(Written by the English soldier and statesman, 1552-1618, just
before his execution)
Go, Soul, the body's guest,
Upon a thankless errand;
Fear not to touch the best;
The truth shall be thy warrant:
Go, since I needs must die,
And give them all the lie.
Go tell the Court it glows
And shines like rotten wood;
Go tell the Church it shows
What's good, but does no good:
If Court and Church reply
Give Court and Church the lie.
Tell Potentates they live
Acting, but oh! their actions;
Not loved, unless they give,
Nor strong but by their factions:
If Potentates reply,
Give Potentates the lie.
Tell men of high condition,
That rule affairs of state,
Their purpose is ambition;
Their practice only hate:
And if they do reply,
Then give them all the lie....
Tell Physic of her boldness;
Tell Skill it is pretension;
Tell Charity of coldness;
Tell Law it is contention:
And if they yield reply,
Then give them all the lie....
So when thou hast, as I
Commanded thee, done blabbing;
Although to give the lie
Deserves no less than stabbing:
Yet stab at thee who will,
No stab the Soul can kill.
December 31st
BY LASCELLES ABERCROMBIE
(Contemporary English poet)
What is he hammering there,
That devil swinking in Hell?
Oh, he forges a cunning New Year,
God knows he does it well.
Mill and harrow and rake,
A restless enginery
Of men and women to make
Cruelty, Harlotry.
Sisters of the Cross of Shame
BY DANA BURNET
(See page 531)
The Sisters of the Cross of Shame,
They smile along the night;
Their houses stand with shuttered souls
And painted eyes of light.
Their houses look with scarlet eyes
Upon a world of sin;
And every man cries, "Woe, alas!"
And every man goes in.
The sober Senate meets at noon,
To pass the Woman's Law,
The portly Churchmen vote to stem
The torrent with a straw.
The Sister of the Cross of Shame,
She smiles beneath her cloud--
(She does not laugh till ten o'clock,
And then she laughs too loud.)
And still she hears the throb of feet
Upon the scarlet stair,
And still she dons the cloak of shame
That is not hers to wear.
The sons of saintly women come
To kiss the Cross of Shame;
Before them, in another time,
Their worthy fathers came....
And no man tells his son the truth,
Lest he should speak of sin;
And every man cries, "Woe, alas!"
And every man goes in.
Bringing the Light
(_From "A Bed of Roses"_)
BY W. L. GEORGE
(Contemporary English novelist. The life-story of a woman wage-earner
who is driven by the pressure of want to a career of shame. In the
following scene she argues with a suffrage-worker, who has called upon
her, in ignorance of her true character)
The woman's eyes were rapt, her hands tightly clenched, her
lips parted, her cheeks a little flushed. But Victoria's face
had hardened suddenly.
"Miss Welkin," she said quietly, "has anything struck you about
this house, about me?"
The suffragist looked at her uneasily.
"You ought to know whom you are talking to," Victoria went on,
"I am a.... I am a what you would probably call ... well, not
respectable."
A dull red flush spread over Miss Welkin's face, from the line
of her tightly pulled hair to her stiff white collar; even her
ears went red. She looked away into a corner.
"You see," said Victoria, "it's a shock, isn't it? I ought not
to have let you in. It wasn't quite fair, was it?"
"Oh, it isn't that, Mrs. Ferris," burst out the suffragist,
"I'm not thinking of myself.... Our cause is not the cause of
rich women or poor women, of good women or bad; it's the cause
of woman. Thus, it doesn't matter who she is, so long as there
is a woman who stands aloof from us there is still work to do.
I know that yours is not a happy life; and we are bringing the
light."
"The light!" echoed Victoria bitterly. "You have no idea, I
see, of how many people there are who are bringing the light
to women like me. There are various religious organizations
who wish to rescue us and house us comfortably under the
patronage of the police, to keep us nicely and feed us on what
is suitable for the fallen; they expect us to sew ten hours a
day for these privileges, but that is by the way. There are
also many kindly souls who offer little jobs as charwomen to
those of us who are too worn out to pursue our calling; we
are offered emigration as servants in exchange for the power
of commanding a household; we are offered poverty for luxury,
service for domination, slavery to women instead of slavery to
men. How tempting it is!" ...
The suffragist said nothing for a second. She felt shaken by
Victoria's bitterness.... "The vote does not mean everything,"
she said reluctantly. "It will merely ensure that we rise like
the men when we are fit."
"Well, Miss Welkin, I won't press that. But now, tell me, if
women got the vote to-morrow, what would it do for my class?"
"It would be raised...."
"No, no, we can't wait to be raised. We've got to live, and
if you 'raise' us we lose our means of livelihood. How are
you going to get to the root cause and lift us, not the next
generation, at once out of the lower depths?"
The suffragist's face contracted.
"Everything takes time," she faltered. "Just as I couldn't
promise a charwoman that her hours would go down and her wages
go up the next day, I can't say that ... of course your case is
more difficult than any other, because ... because...."
"Because," said Victoria coldly, "I represent a social
necessity. So long as your economic system is such that there
is not work for the asking for every human being--work, mark
you, fitted to strength and ability--so long on the other hand
as there is such uncertainty as prevents men from marrying, so
long as there is a leisure class who draw luxury from the labor
of other men; so long will my class endure as it endured in
Athens, in Rome, in Alexandria, as it does now from St. John's
Wood to Pekin."
The Selling of Love
(_From "Love's Coming of Age"_)
BY EDWARD CARPENTER
(See page 186)
The commercial prostitution of love is the last outcome of
our whole social system, and its most clear condemnation.
It flaunts in our streets, it hides itself in the garment
of respectability under the name of matrimony, it eats in
actual physical disease and death right through our midst;
it is fed by the oppression and the ignorance of women, by
their poverty and denied means of livelihood, and by the
hypocritical puritanism which forbids them by millions not only
to gratify but even to speak of their natural desires; and it
is encouraged by the callousness of an age which has accustomed
men to buy and sell for money every most precious thing--even
the life-long labor of their brothers, therefore why not also
the very bodies of their sisters?
The Butcher's Stall
(_From "Les Villes Tentaculaires:" The Octopus Cities_)
BY ÉMILE VERHAEREN
(Belgian poet, born 1855. When Maurice Maeterlinck was suggested as a
member of the French Academy, he recommended that the honor should be
conferred upon Verhaeren instead. Beginning his career as a decadent
and victim of disease, Verhaeren evolved into a rhapsodist of modern
civilization. No poet has ever approached him in the portrayal and
interpretation of factories, forges, railroads, and all the phenomena
of industrialism. Of late he has become an ardent Socialist. The poem
here quoted is from a book portraying the sins and agonies of great
cities. Only portions of the poem could be printed in a work intended
for general circulation in English; but even of these passages the
editor will venture the assertion that never before has the horror of
prostitution been so packed into human speech)
Hard by the docks, soon as the shadows fold
The dizzy mansion-fronts that soar aloft,
When eyes of lamps are burning soft,
The shy, dark quarter lights again its old
Allurement of red vice and gold.
Women, blocks of heaped, blown meat,
Stand on low thresholds down the narrow street,
Calling to every man that passes;
Behind them, at the end of corridors,
Shine fires, a curtain stirs
And gives a glimpse of masses
Of mad and naked flesh in looking-glasses.
Hard by the docks
The street upon the left is ended by
A tangle of high masts and shrouds that blocks
A sheet of sky;
Upon the right a net of grovelling alleys
Falls from the town--and here the black crowd rallies
And reels to rotten revelry.
It is the flabby, fulsome butcher's stall of luxury,
Time out of mind erected on the frontiers
Of the city and the sea.
Far-sailing melancholy mariners
Who, wet with spray, thru grey mists peer,
Cabin-boys cradled among the rigging, and they who steer
Hallucinated by the blue eyes of the vast sea-spaces,
All dream of it, evoke it when the evening falls;
Their raw desire to madness galls;
The wind's soft kisses hover on their faces;
The wave awakens rolling images of soft embraces;
And their two arms implore
Stretched in a frantic cry towards the shore.
And they of offices and shops, the city tribes,
Merchants precise, keen reckoners, haggard scribes,
Who sell their brains for hire, and tame their brows,
When the keys of desks are hanging on the wall,
Feel the same galling rut at even-fall,
And run like hunted dogs to the carouse.
Out of the depths of dusk come their dark flocks,
And in their hearts debauch so rudely shocks
Their ingrained greed and old accustomed care,
That they are racked and ruined by despair.
It is the flabby, fulsome butcher's stall of luxury,
Time out of mind erected on the frontiers
Of the city and the sea.
Come from what far sea-isles or pestilent parts?
Come from what feverish or methodic marts?
Their eyes are filled with bitter, cunning hate,
They fight their instincts that they cannot sate;
Around red females who befool them, they
Herd frenzied till the dawn of sober day.
The panelling is fiery with lewd art;
Out of the wall nitescent knick-knacks dart;
Fat Bacchuses and leaping satyrs in
Wan mirrors freeze an unremitting grin....
And women with spent loins and sleeping croups
Are piled on sofas and arm-chairs in groups,
With sodden flesh grown vague, and black and blue
With the first trampling of the evening's crew.
One of them slides a gold coin in her stocking;
Another yawns, and some their knees are rocking;
Others by bacchanalia worn out,
Feeling old age, and, sniffing them, Death's snout,
Stare with wide-open eyes, torches extinct,
And smooth their legs with hands together linked....
It is the flabby, fulsome butcher's stall of luxury,
Wherein Crime plants his knives that bleed,
Where lightning madness stains
Foreheads with rotting pains,
Time out of mind erected on frontiers that feed
The city and the sea.
Fomá Gordyéeff
BY MAXIM GORKY
(Perhaps the most famous novel of the Russian writer, the life-story
of the son of a prosperous merchant, a youth who wrecks himself in a
vain search for some outlet for his energies, and at the end commits
suicide)
"Where is the merchant to spend his energy? He cannot spend
much of it on the Exchange, so he squanders the excess of his
muscular capital in drinking-bouts in _kabaky_; for he has
no conception of other applications of his strength, which
are more productive, more valuable to life. He is still a
beast, and life has already become to him a cage, and it is
too narrow for him with his splendid health and predilection
for licentiousness. Hampered by culture, he at once starts to
lead a dissolute life. The debauch of a merchant is always the
revolt of a captive beast. Of course this is bad. But, ah! it
will be worse yet, when this beast shall have gathered some
sense and shall have disciplined it. Believe me, even then he
will not cease to create scandals, but they will be historical
events. For they will emanate from the merchant's thirst for
power; their aim will be the omnipotence of one class, and the
merchant will not be particular about the means toward the
attainment of this aim.
"Where am I to make use of my strength, since there is no
demand for it? I ought to fight with robbers, or turn a robber
myself. In general I ought to do something big. And that would
be done, not with the head, but with the arms and breast. While
here we have to go to the Exchange and try to aim well to make
a rouble. What do we need it for? And what is it, anyway? Has
life been arranged in this form forever? What sort of life is
it, if everyone finds it too narrow for him? Life ought to be
according to the taste of man. If it is narrow for me; I must
move it asunder that I may have more room. I must break it
and reconstruct it. But how? That's where the trouble lies!
What ought to be done that life may be freer? That I don't
understand, and that's all there is to it!"
Venus Pandemos
BY RICHARD DEHMEL
(Contemporary German poet, born 1863)
This was the last time. I was lounging in
The night-café that lights the suburb gloom,
Tired with the reek of sultry sofa plush,
And with my glowing toddy, and the steam
Of women sweating in their gowns: tired, lustful.
Clouds of tobacco smoke were wavering through
The laughter and the haggling cries and shrieks
Of painted women and the men they drew.
The rattling at the sideboard of the spoons
Cheered on the hubbub of the mart of love
Uninterrupted like a tambourine....
I was about to choose, when, where I sate,
The crimson curtain of the door was split,
And a fresh couple entered. A cold draught
Cut through the heated room, and some one swore;
But through the crowd the pair stepped noiselessly.
Over against me at the transverse end
Of the corridor, whence they could sweep the room,
They took their seats. The chandelier of bronze
Hung o'er them like an awning heavy, old.
And no one seemed to know the couple, but
At my right hand I heard a hoarse voice pipe:
"I must have come across that pair before."
He sat quite still. The loud gray of the air
Almost recoiled before his callous brow,
Which wan as wax rose into his sparse hair.
His great pale eye-lids hung down deep and shut,
On both sides lay around his sunken nose
Their shadows, and through his thin beard shone the skin.
And only when the woman at his side,
Less tall than he, and of a lissom shape,
Hissed, giggling, in his ear some obscene word,
Half rose of one black eye the heavy lid,
And slowly round he turned his long, thin neck,
As when a vulture lunges at a corpse.
And silent and more silent grew the room;
All eyes were fixed upon the silent guest,
And on the woman squatted, strange to see.
"She is quite young"--a whispering round me went;
And with a child's greed she was drinking milk.
Yet almost old she seemed to me, whenever
Her tongue shot through a gap in her black teeth,
Her pointed tongue out of her hissing mouth,
While her gray, eager glance took in the room;
The gaslight in it shone like poisonous green.
And now she rose. He had not touched his glass;
A great coin lit the table. She went out;
He automatically followed her.
The crimson curtain round the door fell to,
Once more the cold draught shivered through the heat,
But no one cursed. Through me a shiver ran.
I did not choose a partner--suddenly
I knew them: it was Syphilis and Death.