“Make a guess. See how near you can come.”
She brightened, and exclaimed:
“I shall dearly like it, sir, if you don’t mind. If I guess right
will you tell me?”
“Yes.”
“Honor bright?”
“Honor bright? What is that?”
She laughed delightedly and said:
“That’s a good start! I was _sure_ that that phrase would catch you.
I know one thing, now, all right. I know----”
“What do you know?”
“That you are not an American. And you aren’t, _are_ you?”
“No. You are right. I’m not--honor bright, as you say.”
She looked immensely pleased with herself, and said:
“I reckon I’m not always smart, but _that_ was smart, anyway. But
not so _very_, after all, because I already knew--believed I
knew--that you were a foreigner, by another sign.”
“What was that?”
“Your accent.”
She was an accurate observer; I do speak English with a heavenly
accent, and she had detected the foreign twang in it. She ran
charmingly on, most naïvely and engagingly pleased with her triumph:
“The minute you said, ‘See ’ow near you can come to it,’ I said to
myself, ‘Two to one he is a foreigner, and ten to one he’s English.’
Now that _is_ your nationality, _isn’t_ it?”
I was sorry to spoil her victory, but I had to do it: “Ah--you’ll
have to guess again.”
“What--you are not an Englishman?”
“No--honor bright.”
She looked me searchingly over, evidently communing with
herself--adding up my points, then she said:
“Well, you don’t _look_ like an Englishman, and that is true.” After
a little she added, “The fact is, you don’t look like _any_
foreigner--not quite like ... like _anybody_ I’ve seen before. I
will guess some more.”
She guessed every country whose name she could think of and grew
gradually discouraged. Finally she said:
“You must be the Man Without a Country--the one the story tells
about. You don’t seem to have any nationality at all. How did you
come to come to America? Have you any kinfolks here?”
“Yes--several.”
“Oh, then you came to see _them_.”
“Partly--yes.”
She sat awhile, thinking, then:
“Well, I’m not going to give up quite yet. Where do you live when
you are at home--in a city, or in the country?”
“Which do you think?”
“Well, I don’t quite know. You _do_ look a little countrified, if
you don’t mind my saying it; but you look a little citified,
too--not much, but a little, although you can’t read, which is very
curious, and you are not used to newspapers. Now _my_ guess is that
you live mainly in the country when you are at home, and not very
much in the city. Is that right?”
“Yes, quite right.”
“Oh, good! Now I’ll take a fresh start.”
Then she wore herself to the bone, naming cities. No success. Next
she wanted me to help her a little with some “pointers,” as she
phrased it. Was my city large? Yes. Was it very large? Yes. Did they
have mobiles there? No. Electric light? No. Railroads, hospitals,
colleges, cops? No.
“Why, then, it’s not civilized! Where _can_ that place be? Be good
and tell me just one peculiarity of it--then maybe I can guess.”
“Well, then, just one; it has gates of pearl.”
“Oh, go along! That’s the New Jerusalem. It isn’t fair to joke.
Never mind. I’ll guess it yet--it will come into my head pretty
soon, just when I’m not expecting it. Oh, I’ve got an idea! Please
talk a little in your own language--that’ll be a good pointer.” I
accommodated her with a sentence or two. She shook her head
despondently.
“No,” she said, “it doesn’t sound human. I mean, it doesn’t sound
like any of these other foreigners. It’s pretty enough--it’s quite
pretty, I think--but I’m sure I’ve not heard it before. Maybe if you
were to pronounce your name---- What _is_ your name, if you’ll be
so good?”
“Adam.”
“Adam?”
“Yes.”
“But Adam _what_?”
“That is all--just Adam.”
“Nothing at all but just that? Why, how curious! There’s plenty of
Adams; how can they tell you from the rest?”
“Oh, that is no trouble. I’m the only one there is, there where I’m
from.”
“Upon my word! Well, it beats the band! It reminds a person of the
old original. That was his name, too, and he hadn’t any but
that--just like you.” Then, archly, “You’ve heard of him, I
suppose?”
“Oh yes! Do you know him? Have you ever seen him?”
“_Seen_ him? Seen _Adam_? Thanks to goodness, no! It would scare me
into fits.”
“I don’t see why.”
“You don’t?”
“No.”
“_Why_ don’t you see why?”
“Because there is no sense in a person being scared of his kin.”
“_Kin?_”
“Yes. Isn’t he a distant relative of yours?”
She thought it was prodigiously funny, and said it was perfectly
true, but _she_ never would have been bright enough to think of it.
I found it a new and most pleasant sensation to have my wit admired,
and was about to try to do some more when that young fellow came. He
planted himself on the other side of the young woman and began a
vapid remark about the weather, but she gave him a look that
withered him and got stiffly up and wheeled the baby away.
BIBLE TEACHING AND RELIGIOUS
PRACTICE
Religion had its share in the changes of civilization and national
character, of course. What share? The lion’s. In the history of the
human race this has always been the case, will always be the case,
to the end of time, no doubt; or at least until man by the slow
processes of evolution shall develop into something really fine and
high--some billions of years hence, say.
The Christian’s Bible is a drug store. Its contents remain the same;
but the medical practice changes. For eighteen hundred years these
changes were slight--scarcely noticeable. The practice was
allopathic--allopathic in its rudest and crudest form. The dull and
ignorant physician day and night, and all the days and all the
nights, drenched his patient with vast and hideous doses of the most
repulsive drugs to be found in the store’s stock; he bled him,
cupped him, purged him, puked him, salivated him, never gave his
system a chance to rally, nor nature a chance to help. He kept him
religion sick for eighteen centuries, and allowed him not a well day
during all that time. The stock in the store was made up of about
equal portions of baleful and debilitating poisons, and healing and
comforting medicines; but the practice of the time confined the
physician to the use of the former; by consequence, he could only
damage his patient, and that is what he did.
Not until far within our century was any considerable change in the
practice introduced; and then mainly, or in effect only, in Great
Britain and the United States. In the other countries to-day, the
patient either still takes the ancient treatment or does not call
the physician at all. In the English-speaking countries the changes
observable in our century were forced by that very thing just
referred to--the revolt of the patient against the system; they were
not projected by the physician. The patient fell to doctoring
himself, and the physician’s practice began to fall off. He modified
his method to get back his trade. He did it gradually, reluctantly;
and never yielded more at a time than the pressure compelled. At
first he relinquished the daily dose of hell and damnation, and
administered it every other day only; next he allowed another day to
pass; then another and presently another; when he had restricted it
at last to Sundays, and imagined that now there would surely be a
truce, the homœopath arrived on the field and made him abandon hell
and damnation altogether, and administered Christ’s love, and
comfort, and charity and compassion in its stead. These had been in
the drug store all the time, gold labeled and conspicuous among the
long shelfloads of repulsive purges and vomits and poisons, and so
the practice was to blame that they had remained unused, not the
pharmacy. To the ecclesiastical physician of fifty years ago, his
predecessor for eighteen centuries was a quack; to the
ecclesiastical physician of to-day, his predecessor of fifty years
ago was a quack. To the every-man-his-own-ecclesiastical-doctor
of--when?--what will the ecclesiastical physician of to-day be?
Unless evolution, which has been a truth ever since the globes,
suns, and planets of the solar system were but wandering films of
meteor dust, shall reach a limit and become a lie, there is but one
fate in store for him.
The methods of the priest and the parson have been very curious,
their history is very entertaining. In all the ages the Roman Church
has owned slaves, bought and sold slaves, authorized and encouraged
her children to trade in them. Long after some Christian peoples had
freed their slaves the Church still held on to hers. If any could
know, to absolute certainty, that all this was right, and according
to God’s will and desire, surely it was she, since she was God’s
specially appointed representative in the earth and sole authorized
and infallible expounder of his Bible. There were the texts; there
was no mistaking their meaning; she was right, she was doing in this
thing what the Bible had mapped out for her to do. So unassailable
was her position that in all the centuries she had no word to say
against human slavery. Yet now at last, in our immediate day, we
hear a Pope saying slave trading is wrong, and we see him sending an
expedition to Africa to stop it. The texts remain: it is the
practice that has changed. Why? Because the world has corrected the
Bible. The Church never corrects it; and also never fails to drop in
at the tail of the procession--and take the credit of the
correction. As she will presently do in this instance.
Christian England supported slavery and encouraged it for two
hundred and fifty years, and her Church’s consecrated ministers
looked on, sometimes taking an active hand, the rest of the time
indifferent. England’s interest in the business may be called a
Christian interest, a Christian industry. She had her full share in
its revival after a long period of inactivity, and this revival was
a Christian monopoly; that is to say, it was in the hands of
Christian countries exclusively. English parliaments aided the slave
traffic and protected it; two English kings held stock in
slave-catching companies. The first regular English slave
hunter--John Hawkins, of still revered memory--made such successful
havoc, on his second voyage, in the matter of surprising and burning
villages, and maiming, slaughtering, capturing, and selling their
unoffending inhabitants, that his delighted queen conferred the
chivalric honor of knighthood on him--a rank which had acquired its
chief esteem and distinction in other and earlier fields of
Christian effort. The new knight, with characteristic English
frankness and brusque simplicity, chose as his device the figure of
a negro slave, kneeling and in chains. Sir John’s work was the
invention of Christians, was to remain a bloody and awful monopoly
in the hands of Christians for a quarter of a millennium, was to
destroy homes, separate families, enslave friendless men and women,
and break a myriad of human hearts, to the end that Christian
nations might be prosperous and comfortable, Christian churches be
built, and the gospel of the meek and merciful Redeemer be spread
abroad in the earth; and so in the name of his ship, unsuspected but
eloquent and clear, lay hidden prophecy. She was called _The Jesus_.
But at last in England, an illegitimate Christian rose against
slavery. It is curious that when a Christian rises against a rooted
wrong at all, he is usually an illegitimate Christian, member of
some despised and bastard sect. There was a bitter struggle, but in
the end the slave trade had to go--and went. The Biblical
authorization remained, but the practice changed.
Then--the usual thing happened; the visiting English critic among us
began straightway to hold up his pious hands in horror at our
slavery. His distress was unappeasable, his words full of bitterness
and contempt. It is true we had not so many as fifteen hundred
thousand slaves for him to worry about, while his England still
owned twelve millions, in her foreign possessions; but that fact did
not modify his wail any, or stay his tears, or soften his censure.
The fact that every time we had tried to get rid of our slavery in
previous generations, but had always been obstructed, balked, and
defeated by England, was a matter of no consequence to him; it was
ancient history, and not worth the telling.
Our own conversion came at last. We began to stir against slavery.
Hearts grew soft, here, there, and yonder. There was no place in the
land where the seeker could not find some small budding sign of pity
for the slave. No place in all the land but one--the pulpit. It
yielded at last; it always does. It fought a strong and stubborn
fight, and then did what it always does, joined the procession--at
the tail end. Slavery fell. The slavery text remained; the practice
changed, that was all.
During many ages there were witches. The Bible said so. The Bible
commanded that they should not be allowed to live. Therefore the
Church, after doing its duty in but a lazy and indolent way for
eight hundred years, gathered up its halters, thumb-screws, and
firebrands, and set about its holy work in earnest. She worked hard
at it night and day during nine centuries and imprisoned, tortured,
hanged, and burned whole hordes and armies of witches, and washed
the Christian world clean with their foul blood.
Then it was discovered that there was no such thing as witches, and
never had been. One does not know whether to laugh or to cry. Who
discovered that there was no such thing as a witch--the priest, the
parson? No, these never discover anything. At Salem, the parson
clung pathetically to his witch text after the laity had abandoned
it in remorse and tears for the crimes and cruelties it has
persuaded them to do. The parson wanted more blood, more shame, more
brutalities; it was the unconsecrated laity that stayed his hand. In
Scotland the parson killed the witch after the magistrate had
pronounced her innocent; and when the merciful legislature proposed
to sweep the hideous laws against witches from the statute book, it
was the parson who came imploring, with tears and imprecations, that
they be suffered to stand.
There are no witches. The witch text remains; only the practice has
changed. Hell fire is gone, but the text remains. Infant damnation
is gone, but the text remains. More than two hundred death penalties
are gone from the law books, but the texts that authorized them
remain.
Is it not well worthy of note that of all the multitude of texts
through which man has driven his annihilating pen he has never once
made the mistake of obliterating a good and useful one? It does
certainly seem to suggest that if man continues in the direction of
enlightenment, his religious practice may, in the end, attain some
semblance of human decency.
THE WAR PRAYER
(Dictated 1904-05)
It was a time of great and exalting excitement. The country was up
in arms, the war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of
patriotism; the drums were beating, the bands playing, the toy
pistols popping, the bunched firecrackers hissing and spluttering;
on every hand and far down the receding and fading spread of roofs
and balconies a fluttering wilderness of flags flashed in the sun;
daily the young volunteers marched down the wide avenue gay and fine
in their new uniforms, the proud fathers and mothers and sisters and
sweethearts cheering them with voices choked with happy emotion as
they swung by; nightly the packed mass meetings listened, panting,
to patriot oratory which stirred the deepest deeps of their hearts,
and which they interrupted at briefest intervals with cyclones of
applause, the tears running down their cheeks the while; in the
churches the pastors preached devotion to flag and country, and
invoked the God of Battles, beseeching His aid in our good cause in
outpouring of fervid eloquence which moved every listener. It was
indeed a glad and gracious time, and the half dozen rash spirits
that ventured to disapprove of the war and cast a doubt upon its
righteousness straightway got such a stern and angry warning that
for their personal safety’s sake they quickly shrank out of sight
and offended no more in that way.
Sunday morning came--next day the battalions would leave for the
front; the church was filled; the volunteers were there, their young
faces alight with martial dreams--visions of the stern advance, the
gathering momentum, the rushing charge, the flashing sabers, the
flight of the foe, the tumult, the enveloping smoke, the fierce
pursuit, the surrender!--them home from the war, bronzed heroes,
welcomed, adored, submerged in golden seas of glory! With the
volunteers sat their dear ones, proud, happy, and envied by the
neighbors and friends who had no sons and brothers to send forth to
the field of honor, there to win for the flag, or, failing, die the
noblest of noble deaths. The service proceeded; a war chapter from
the Old Testament was read; the first prayer was said; it was
followed by an organ burst that shook the building, and with one
impulse the house rose, with glowing eyes and beating hearts, and
poured out that tremendous invocation--
“God the all-terrible! Thou who ordainest,
Thunder thy clarion and lightning thy sword!”
Then came the “long” prayer. None could remember the like of it for
passionate pleading and moving and beautiful language. The burden of
its supplication was, that an ever-merciful and benignant Father of
us all would watch over our noble young soldiers, and aid, comfort,
and encourage them in their patriotic work; bless them, shield them
in the day of battle and the hour of peril, bear them in His mighty
hand, make them strong and confident, invincible in the bloody
onset; help them to crush the foe, grant to them and to their flag
and country imperishable honor and glory--
An aged stranger entered and moved with slow and noiseless step up
the main aisle, his eyes fixed upon the minister, his long body
clothed in a robe that reached to his feet, his head bare, his white
hair descending in a frothy cataract to his shoulders, his seamy
face unnaturally pale, pale even to ghastliness. With all eyes
following him and wondering, he made his silent way; without
pausing, he ascended to the preacher’s side and stood there,
waiting. With shut lids the preacher, unconscious of his presence,
continued his moving prayer, and at last finished it with the words,
uttered in fervent appeal, “Bless our arms, grant us the victory, O
Lord our God, Father and Protector of our land and flag!”
The stranger touched his arm, motioned him to step aside--which the
startled minister did--and took his place. During some moments he
surveyed the spellbound audience with solemn eyes, in which burned
an uncanny light; then in a deep voice he said:
“I come from the Throne--bearing a message from Almighty God!” The
words smote the house with a shock; if the stranger perceived it he
gave no attention. “He has heard the prayer of His servant your
shepherd, and will grant it if such shall be your desire after I,
His messenger, shall have explained to you its import--that is to
say, its full import. For it is like unto many of the prayers of
men, in that it asks for more than he who utters it is aware
of--except he pause and think.
“God’s servant and yours has prayed his prayer. Has he paused and
taken thought? Is it one prayer? No, it is two--one uttered, the
other not. Both have reached the ear of Him Who heareth all
supplications, the spoken and the unspoken. Ponder this--keep it in
mind. If you would beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! lest
without intent you invoke a curse upon a neighbor at the same time.
If you pray for the blessing of rain upon your crop which needs it,
by that act you are possibly praying for a curse upon some
neighbor’s crop which may not need rain and can be injured by it.
“You have heard your servant’s prayer--the uttered part of it. I am
commissioned of God to put into words the other part of it--that
part which the pastor--and also you in your hearts--fervently prayed
silently. And ignorantly and unthinkingly? God grant that it was so!
You heard these words: ‘Grant us the victory, O Lord our God!’ That
is sufficient. The _whole_ of the uttered prayer is compact into
those pregnant words. Elaborations were not necessary. When you have
prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results
which follow victory--_must_ follow it, cannot help but follow it.
Upon the listening spirit of God the Father fell also the unspoken
part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen!
“O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go
forth to battle--be Thou near them! With them--in spirit--we also go
forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the
foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds
with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale
forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the
guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to
lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to
wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief;
help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to
wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and
hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy
winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee
for the refuge of the grave and denied it--for our sakes who adore
Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their
bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with
their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded
feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of
Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are
sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.”
(_After a pause._) “Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak!
The messenger of the Most High waits.”
It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there
was no sense in what he said.
CORN-PONE OPINIONS
(Written in 1900)
Fifty years ago, when I was a boy of fifteen and helping to inhabit
a Missourian village on the banks of the Mississippi, I had a friend
whose society was very dear to me because I was forbidden by my
mother to partake of it. He was a gay and impudent and satirical and
delightful young black man--a slave--who daily preached sermons from
the top of his master’s woodpile, with me for sole audience. He
imitated the pulpit style of the several clergymen of the village,
and did it well, and with fine passion and energy. To me he was a
wonder. I believed he was the greatest orator in the United States
and would some day be heard from. But it did not happen; in the
distribution of rewards he was overlooked. It is the way, in this
world.
He interrupted his preaching, now and then, to saw a stick of wood;
but the sawing was a pretense--he did it with his mouth; exactly
imitating the sound the bucksaw makes in shrieking its way through
the wood. But it served its purpose; it kept his master from coming
out to see how the work was getting along. I listened to the sermons
from the open window of a lumber room at the back of the house. One
of his texts was this:
“You tell me whar a man gits his corn pone, en I’ll tell you what
his ’pinions is.“
I can never forget it. It was deeply impressed upon me. By my
mother. Not upon my memory, but elsewhere. She had slipped in upon
me while I was absorbed and not watching. The black philosopher’s
idea was that a man is not independent, and cannot afford views
which might interfere with his bread and butter. If he would
prosper, he must train with the majority; in matters of large
moment, like politics and religion, he must think and feel with the
bulk of his neighbors, or suffer damage in his social standing and
in his business prosperities. He must restrict himself to corn-pone
opinions--at least on the surface. He must get his opinions from
other people; he must reason out none for himself; he must have no
first-hand views.
I think Jerry was right, in the main, but I think he did not go far
enough.
1. It was his idea that a man conforms to the majority view of his
locality by calculation and intention.
This happens, but I think it is not the rule.
2. It was his idea that there is such a thing as a first-hand
opinion; an original opinion; an opinion which is coldly reasoned
out in a man’s head, by a searching analysis of the facts involved,
with the heart unconsulted, and the jury room closed against outside
influences. It may be that such an opinion has been born somewhere,
at some time or other, but I suppose it got away before they could
catch it and stuff it and put it in the museum.
I am persuaded that a coldly-thought-out and independent verdict
upon a fashion in clothes, or manners, or literature, or politics,
or religion, or any other matter that is projected into the field of
our notice and interest, is a most rare thing--if it has indeed ever
existed.
A new thing in costume appears--the flaring hoopskirt, for
example--and the passers-by are shocked, and the irreverent laugh.
Six months later everybody is reconciled; the fashion has
established itself; it is admired, now, and no one laughs. Public
opinion resented it before, public opinion accepts it now, and is
happy in it. Why? Was the resentment reasoned out? Was the
acceptance reasoned out? No. The instinct that moves to conformity
did the work. It is our nature to conform; it is a force which not
many can successfully resist. What is its seat? The inborn
requirement of self-approval. We all have to bow to that; there are
no exceptions. Even the woman who refuses from first to last to wear
the hoopskirt comes under that law and is its slave; she could not
wear the skirt and have her own approval; and that she _must_ have,
she cannot help herself. But as a rule our self-approval has its
source in but one place and not elsewhere--the approval of other
people. A person of vast consequences can introduce any kind of
novelty in dress and the general world will presently adopt
it--moved to do it, in the first place, by the natural instinct to
passively yield to that vague something recognized as authority, and
in the second place by the human instinct to train with the
multitude and have its approval. An empress introduced the
hoopskirt, and we know the result. A nobody introduced the bloomer,
and we know the result. If Eve should come again, in her ripe
renown, and reintroduce her quaint styles--well, we know what would
happen. And we should be cruelly embarrassed, along at first.
The hoopskirt runs its course and disappears. Nobody reasons about
it. One woman abandons the fashion; her neighbor notices this and
follows her lead; this influences the next woman; and so on and so
on, and presently the skirt has vanished out of the world, no one
knows how nor why; nor cares, for that matter. It will come again,
by and by; and in due course will go again.
Twenty-five years ago, in England, six or eight wine glasses stood
grouped by each person’s plate at a dinner party, and they were
used, not left idle and empty; to-day there are but three or four in
the group, and the average guest sparingly uses about two of them.
We have not adopted this new fashion yet, but we shall do it
presently. We shall not think it out; we shall merely conform, and
let it go at that. We get our notions and habits and opinions from
outside influences; we do not have to study them out.
Our table manners, and company manners, and street manners change
from time to time, but the changes are not reasoned out; we merely
notice and conform. We are creatures of outside influences; as a
rule we do not think, we only imitate. We cannot invent standards
that will stick; what we mistake for standards are only fashions,
and perishable. We may continue to admire them, but we drop the use
of them. We notice this in literature. Shakespeare is a standard,
and fifty years ago we used to write tragedies which we couldn’t
tell from--from somebody else’s; but we don’t do it any more, now.
Our prose standard, three quarters of a century ago, was ornate and
diffuse; some authority or other changed it in the direction of
compactness and simplicity, and conformity followed, without
argument. The historical novel starts up suddenly, and sweeps the
land. Everybody writes one, and the nation is glad. We had
historical novels before; but nobody read them, and the rest of us
conformed--without reasoning it out. We are conforming in the other
way, now, because it is another case of everybody.
The outside influences are always pouring in upon us, and we are
always obeying their orders and accepting their verdicts. The Smiths
like the new play; the Joneses go to see it, and they copy the Smith
verdict. Morals, religions, politics, get their following from
surrounding influences and atmospheres, almost entirely; not from
study, not from thinking. A man must and will have his own approval
first of all, in each and every moment and circumstance of his
life--even if he must repent of a self-approved act the moment after
its commission, in order to get his self-approval _again_: but,
speaking in general terms, a man’s self-approval in the large
concerns of life has its source in the approval of the peoples about
him, and not in a searching personal examination of the matter.
Mohammedans are Mohammedans because they are born and reared among
that sect, not because they have thought it out and can furnish
sound reasons for being Mohammedans; we know why Catholics are
Catholics; why Presbyterians are Presbyterians; why Baptists are
Baptists; why Mormons are Mormons; why thieves are thieves; why
monarchists are monarchists; why Republicans are Republicans and
Democrats, Democrats. We know it is a matter of association and
sympathy, not reasoning and examination; that hardly a man in the
world has an opinion upon morals, politics, or religion which he got
otherwise than through his associations and sympathies. Broadly
speaking, there are none but corn-pone opinions. And broadly
speaking, corn-pone stands for self-approval. Self-approval is
acquired mainly from the approval of other people. The result is
conformity. Sometimes conformity has a sordid business interest--the
bread-and-butter interest--but not in most cases, I think. I think
that in the majority of cases it is unconscious and not calculated;
that it is born of the human being’s natural yearning to stand well
with his fellows and have their inspiring approval and praise--a
yearning which is commonly so strong and so insistent that it cannot
be effectually resisted, and must have its way.
A political emergency brings out the corn-pone opinion in fine force
in its two chief varieties--the pocketbook variety, which has its
origin in self-interest, and the bigger variety, the sentimental
variety--the one which can’t bear to be outside the pale; can’t bear
to be in disfavor; can’t endure the averted face and the cold
shoulder; wants to stand well with his friends, wants to be smiled
upon, wants to be welcome, wants to hear the precious words, “_He’s_
on the right track!” Uttered, perhaps by an ass, but still an ass of
high degree, an ass whose approval is gold and diamonds to a smaller
ass, and confers glory and honor and happiness, and membership in
the herd. For these gauds many a man will dump his life-long
principles into the street, and his conscience along with them. We
have seen it happen. In some millions of instances.
Men think they think upon great political questions, and they do;
but they think with their party, not independently; they read its
literature, but not that of the other side; they arrive at
convictions, but they are drawn from a partial view of the matter in
hand and are of no particular value. They swarm with their party,
they feel with their party, they are happy in their party’s
approval; and where the party leads they will follow, whether for
right and honor, or through blood and dirt and a mush of mutilated
morals.
In our late canvass half of the nation passionately believed that in
silver lay salvation, the other half as passionately believed that
that way lay destruction. Do you believe that a tenth part of the
people, on either side, had any rational excuse for having an
opinion about the matter at all? I studied that mighty question to
the bottom--came out empty. Half of our people passionately believe
in high tariff, the other half believe otherwise. Does this mean
study and examination, or only feeling? The latter, I think. I have
deeply studied that question, too--and didn’t arrive. We all do no
end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking. And out of it we get
an aggregation which we consider a boon. Its name is Public Opinion.
It is held in reverence. It settles everything. Some think it the
Voice of God.