I have, this morning, read your review of "A Thoughtless Yes." I wish
to thank you for the pleasant things said and also to make the
connection--which I am surprised to see did not present itself to your
mind--between the title and the burden of the stories or sketches.
It is not so easy as you may suppose to get a title which shall be
exactly and fully descriptive of a collection of tales or sketches,
each one of which was written to suggest thoughts and questions on some
particular topic or topics to which people usually pay the tribute of a
thoughtless yes. With one--possibly two--exceptions each sketch means to
suggest to the reader that there may be a very large question mark put
after many of the social, religious, economic, medical, journalistic, or
legal fiats of the present civilization.
You say that "in 'The Lady of the Club' she [meaning me] does not show
how poverty results from a thoughtless yes. Perhaps she does not see
that it does." I had in my mind exactly that point when I wrote the
story and when I decided upon the title for the book. No, I do not
attempt in such sketches to show _how_, but to show _that_, such and
such conditions exist and that it is wrong. I want to suggest a question
of the justice and the right of several things; but I want to leave each
person free to think out, not my conclusion or remedy, but a conclusion
and a remedy, and at all events to make him refuse, henceforth, the
thoughtless yes of timid acquiescence to things as they are simply
because they are. In the "Lady of the Club" I meant to attack the
impudent authority that makes such a condition of poverty possible,
by calling sympathetic attention to its workings. There are one or two
other ideas sustained by authority, to which, to the readers of that
tale, I wished to make a thoughtless yes henceforth impossible. At least
I hoped to arouse a question. One is taxation of church property. I
wished to point out that by shirking their honest debts churches heap
still farther poverty and burden upon the poor. I hoped, too, to
suggest that the idea of "charity," to which most people give a warmly
thoughtless yes, must be an indignity or impossibility where, even they
would say, it was most needed. I wanted to call attention to the fact
that a physician and a man of tender heart and lofty soul were compelled
to make themselves criminals, before the law, to even be kind to the
dead. That conditions are so savage under the present system that such a
case is absolutely hopeless while the victims live and outrageous after
they are dead. To all of these dictates of impudent authority, to which
most story readers pay the tribute of a thoughtless yes, I wanted to
call attention in such a way that henceforth a question must arise in
their minds. I hoped to show, too, that even so lofty a character
as Roland Barker was tied hand and foot--until it made him almost a
madman--by a system of economics and religion and law which so interlace
as to sustain each other and combine to not only crush the poor but to
prevent the rich from helping along even where they desire to do so.
These were the main points upon which that particular tale was intended
to arouse a mental attitude of thoughtful protest There are other, minor
ones, which I need not trouble you to recall. If you will notice, nearly
all of the tales end (or stop without an end) with an open question for
the reader to settle--to settle his way, not mine. Indeed, I am not yet
convinced that my own ideas of the changes needed and the way to bring
them about are infallible. I am still open to conviction. I have tried
to grasp the Socialist, Communist, Anarchist, Single-tax, Free-land, and
other ideas and to comprehend just what each could be fairly expected
to accomplish if established--to see the _pros_ and _cons_ of these
and other schemes for social improvement. These, and the varying cults
ranged between, each seems to me to have certain strong points and
certain weak ones. Each seems to me to overlook some essential feature;
and yet I have no system to offer that I think would be better or would
work better than some of these. Indeed, I do most earnestly believe that
_the_ inspired way is yet to be struck out, and I do not believe that
I am the one to do it Meanwhile I can do some things. I can suggest
questions, and, sometimes, answers. But I am not a god, and I do not
want all people to answer my way. I do want to help prevent, now and
henceforth, the tribute of a thoughtless yes from being given to a good
many established wrongs.
Since such able thinkers as you are have--in the main--already refused
such tribute, I am perfectly satisfied to let each of these answer the
questions I have suggested or may suggest in my fiction in the way that
seems most hopeful to him.
Meantime, the vast majority of story readers have not yet had their
emotions touched by the dramatic presentation of "the other side."
Fiction has--in the main--worked to make them accept without question
all things as authority has presented them. Who knows but that a lofty
discontent may be stirred in some soul who can solve the awful problems
and at the same time reconcile the various cults of warring philosophers
so that they may combine for humanity and cease to divide for
revenue--or personal pique? I do not believe that the province of a
story is to assume to give the solution of philosophical questions that
have puzzled and proved too much for the best and ablest brains. I have
no doubt that fiction may stir and arouse to thought many who cannot
understand and will not heed essays or argument or preaching, while
it may also present the same thoughts in a new light to those who do.
Personally I do not believe in tacking on to fiction a "moral" or an
"in conclusion" which shall switch all such aroused thoughts into one
channel. Clear thinking and right feeling may lead some one, who is new
to such protest, to solutions that I have not reached. So let us each
question "impudent authority," whether it be in its stupid blindness to
heredity or to environment; and I shall be content that you solve the
new order by an appeal to Anarchism _via_ free land; or that Matilda
Joslyn Gage solve it by the ballot for women and hereditary freedom from
slavish instincts stamped upon a race bom of superstitious and subject
mothers.
Personally I do not believe that all the free land, free money or
freedom in the world, which shall leave the mothers of the race (whether
in or out of marriage) a subject class or in a position to transmit to
their children the vices or weaknesses of a dominated dependent, will
ever succeed in populating the world with self-reliant, self-respecting,
honorable and capable people.
On the other hand, I do not see how the ballot in the hands of woman
will do for her all that many believe it will. That it is her right
and would go far is clear; but after that, your question of economics
touches her in a way that it does not and cannot touch men, and I am
free to confess that as yet I have heard of no economic or social plan
that would not of necessity, in my opinion, bear heaviest upon those who
are mothers. So you will see that when I suggested the desirability in
"For the Prosecution" of having mothers on the bench and as jurors where
a case touched points no man living does or can understand in all its
phases, I do not think that would right all the wrong nor solve all the
questions suggested by such a trial; but I thought it would help push
the car of right and justice in the direction of light which we all hope
is ahead.
You believe more in environment than in heredity; I believe in both, and
that both are sadly and awfully awry, largely because too many people
in too many ways pay to impudent authority the tribute of a thoughtless
yes.
It is one of the saddest things in this world to see the brave and
earnest men who fight so nobly for better and fairer economic conditions
for "Labor," pay, much too often, the tribute of a thoughtless yes to
the absolute pauper status of all womanhood They resent with spirit
the idea that men should labor for a mere subsistence and always be
dependent upon and at the financial mercy of the rich. They do not
appear to see that to one-half of the race even that much economic
independence would be a tremendous improvement upon her present status.
How would Singletax or Free-land help this? You may reply that Anarchism
would solve that problem. Would it? With maternity and physical
disabilities in the scale? To my mind, all the various economic schemes
yet put forward lack an essential feature. They provide for a free
and better manhood, but they pay the tribute of a thoughtless yes to
impudent authority in the case of womanhood, in many things. And so long
as motherhood is serfhood, just so long will this world be populated
with a race easy to subjugate, weak to resist oppression, criminal
in its instincts of cruelty toward those in its power, and humble and
subservient toward authority and domination. Character rises but little
above its source. The mother molds the man. If she have the status, the
instincts, and the spirit of a subordinate, she will transmit these,
and the more enlightened she is the surer is this, because of her
consciousness of her own degradation.
Look at the Kemmler horror. People all marvel at his "brutish nature
and his desire to kill." No one says anything about the fact, which was
merely mentioned at his trial, that his "father was a butcher and his
mother helped in the business." Did you know that this is also true of
Jesse Pomeroy; the boy who "from infancy tortured animals and killed
whatever he could?"
Would all this sort of thing mean absolutely nothing to women of the
same social and scientific status enjoyed by the men who assisted at the
trials of these two and at the legal murder of one? In ordinary women,
of course, it would not stir very deep thought But these were not
ordinary men. They were far more than that, Almost all the women who
have spoken or written to me of the Kemmler horror have touched that
thought Have you heard a man discuss it? Is there a reason for this? Do
we pay the tribute of a thoughtless yes to all that clusters about the
present ideas on such subjects and about their criminal medicolegal
aspects? But this letter grows too long.
With great respect and hearty good wishes,