KUMAMOTO, May, 1894.
DEAR HENDRICK,-- ... I think there was one mistake in the story of
OEdipus and the Sphinx. It was the sweeping statement about the Sphinx's
alternative. It isn't true that she devoured every one who couldn't
answer her riddles. Everybody meets the Sphinx in life;--so I can
speak from authority. She doesn't kill people like me,--she only bites
and scratches them; and I've got the marks of her teeth in a number
of places on my soul. She meets me every few years and asks the same
tiresome question,--and I have latterly contented myself with simply
telling her, "I don't know."
It now seems to me that I was partly wrong in a former letter to you
about business morality: I took much too narrow a view of the case,
perhaps. The comparison between the Western and Oriental brain--which
everybody is forced to make after a few years' sojourn here--now appears
to me appalling in its results. The Western business man is really
a very terrible and wonderful person. He is the outcome, perhaps, of
a mediæval wish. For types are created by men's wishes--just as men
themselves are created. The greatest teaching of science is that no
Body made us,--but we made ourselves under the smart stimulus of pain.
Well, as I was saying, the business man is an answer to a wish. (You
know about the frogs who asked Jupiter for a King.) In the age of
robber-barons, racks, swordmills, and _droit de cuissage_,--men prayed
Jupiter for Law, Order, System. Jupiter (in the shape of a very, very
earnest desire) produced the Business man. He represents insatiate
thirst of dominion, supreme intellectual aggressive capacity, faultless
practical perceptivity, and the art of handling men exactly like pawns.
But he represents also Order, System, Law. He is Organization, and is
King of the Earth. The pawns cry out, "We are not pawns." But he always
politely answers, "I am sorry to disagree with you, but I find it
expedient for our mutual interest to consider you pawns; besides, I have
no time to argue the matter. If you think you are not pawns, you must
show the faculty of Organization."
The tyranny of the future must be that of Organization: the monopoly,
the trust, the combination, the associated company--representing
supremely perfect mathematical unification of Law, Order, and System.
Much more powerful than the robber-baron, or Charlemagne, or Barbarossa,
these are infinitely less human,--having no souls, etc. (What would
be the use of souls!--souls only waste time.) Business is exact and
dangerous and powerful like a colossal dynamo: it is the extreme of
everything men used to pray for,--and it is _not_ what they did _not_
pray for. Perhaps they would like the robber-baron better.
We little petty outsiders--the gnats hovering about life--feel the world
is changing too quickly: all becoming methodical as an abacus. There
isn't any more room for us. Competition is of no use. Law, Order, and
System fill the places without consulting us,--the editorial desks, the
clerkships, the Government posts, the publishers' offices, the pulpits,
the professorships, the sinecures as well as the tough jobs. Where a
worker is unnecessary, a pawn is preferred. (Oh, for a lodge in some
vast wilderness!--provided with a good table and a regular supply of
reading from Murray's circulating library!) One thing is dead sure: in
another generation there can be no living by dreaming and scheming of
art: only those having wealth can indulge in the luxury of writing books
for their own pleasure....
Faithfully ever,
LAFCADIO HEARN.