Do you know that shock? I mean, when you come, at your regular hour,
into the sick room where you have watched for months, and find the
medicine bottles all gone, the night table removed, the bed stripped,
the furniture set stiffly to rights, the windows up, the room cold,
stark, vacant--and you catch your breath. Do you know that shock?
The man who has written a long book has that experience the morning
after he has revised it for the last time, seen the bearers convey it
from the house, and sent it away to the printer. He steps into his study
at the hour established by the habit of months--and he gets that little
shock. All the litter and the confusion are gone. The piles of dusty
reference books are gone from the chairs, the maps from the floor; the
chaos of letters, manuscripts, notebooks, paper knives, pipes, matches,
photographs, tobacco jars, and cigar boxes is gone from the writing
table. The furniture is back where it use to be in the long ago. The
housemaid, forbidden the place for five months, has been there, and
tidied it up, and scoured it clean, and made it repellent and awful.
I stand here this morning, contemplating this desolation, and I realize
that if I would bring back the spirit that made this hospital homelike
and pleasant to me, I must restore the aids to lingering dissolution to
their wonted places, and nurse another patient through and send it forth
for the last rites, with many or few to assist there, as may happen; and
that I will do.
AS REGARDS PATRIOTISM
(About 1900)
It is agreed, in this country, that if a man can arrange his religion so
that it perfectly satisfies his conscience, it is not incumbent upon him
to care whether the arrangement is satisfactory to anyone else or not.
In Austria and some other countries this is not the case. There the
state arranges a man’s religion for him, he has no voice in it himself.
Patriotism is merely a religion--love of country, worship of country,
devotion to the country’s flag and honor and welfare.
In absolute monarchies it is furnished from the throne, cut and dried,
to the subject; in England and America it is furnished, cut and dried,
to the citizen by the politician and the newspaper.
The newspaper-and-politician-manufactured Patriot often gags in private
over his dose; but he takes it, and keeps it on his stomach the best he
can. Blessed are the meek.
Sometimes, in the beginning of an insane shabby political upheaval, he
is strongly moved to revolt, but he doesn’t do it--he knows better. He
knows that his maker would find it out--the maker of his Patriotism, the
windy and incoherent six-dollar subeditor of his village newspaper--and
would bray out in print and call him a Traitor. And how dreadful that
would be. It makes him tuck his tail between his legs and shiver. We all
know--the reader knows it quite well--that two or three years ago nine
tenths of the human tails in England and America performed just that
act. Which is to say, nine tenths of the Patriots in England and America
turned traitor to keep from being called traitor. Isn’t it true? You
know it to be true. Isn’t it curious?
Yet it was not a thing to be very seriously ashamed of. A man can
seldom--very, very seldom--fight a winning fight against his training;
the odds are too heavy. For many a year--perhaps always--the training of
the two nations had been dead against independence in political thought,
persistently inhospitable toward patriotism manufactured on a man’s own
premises, Patriotism reasoned out in the man’s own head and fire-assayed
and tested and proved in his own conscience. The resulting Patriotism
was a shop-worn product procured at second hand. The Patriot did not
know just how or when or where he got his opinions, neither did he care,
so long as he was with what seemed the majority--which was the main
thing, the safe thing, the comfortable thing. Does the reader believe he
knows three men who have actual reasons for their pattern of
Patriotism--and can furnish them? Let him not examine, unless he wants
to be disappointed. He will be likely to find that his men got their
Patriotism at the public trough, and had no hand in its preparation
themselves.
Training does wonderful things. It moved the people of this country to
oppose the Mexican War; then moved them to fall in with what they
supposed was the opinion of the majority--majority Patriotism is the
customary Patriotism--and go down there and fight. Before the Civil War
it made the North indifferent to slavery and friendly to the slave
interest; in that interest it made Massachusetts hostile to the American
flag, and she would not allow it to be hoisted on her State House--in
her eyes it was the flag of a faction. Then by and by, training swung
Massachusetts the other way, and she went raging South to fight under
that very flag and against that aforetime protected interest of hers.
There is nothing that training cannot do. Nothing is above its reach or
below it. It can turn bad morals to good, good morals to bad; it can
destroy principles, it can recreate them; it can debase angels to men
and lift men to angelship. And it can do any one of these miracles in a
year--even in six months.
Then men can be trained to manufacture their own Patriotism. They can be
trained to labor it out in their own heads and hearts and in the privacy
and independence of their own premises. It can train them to stop taking
it by command, as the Austrian takes his religion.