I never felt so much the value of a house with a backlog in it as during
the late spring; for its lateness was its main feature. Everybody was
grumbling about it, as if it were something ordered from the tailor, and
not ready on the day. Day after day it snowed, night after night it blew
a gale from the northwest; the frost sunk deeper and deeper into the
ground; there was a popular longing for spring that was almost a prayer;
the weather bureau was active; Easter was set a week earlier than the
year before, but nothing seemed to do any good. The robins sat under the
evergreens, and piped in a disconsolate mood, and at last the bluejays
came and scolded in the midst of the snow-storm, as they always do scold
in any weather. The crocuses could n't be coaxed to come up, even with
a pickaxe. I'm almost ashamed now to recall what we said of the weather
only I think that people are no more accountable for what they say of
the weather than for their remarks when their corns are stepped on.
We agreed, however, that, but for disappointed expectations and the
prospect of late lettuce and peas, we were gaining by the fire as much
as we were losing by the frost. And the Mistress fell to chanting the
comforts of modern civilization.
THE FIRE-TENDER said he should like to know, by the way, if our
civilization differed essentially from any other in anything but its
comforts.
HERBERT. We are no nearer religious unity.
THE PARSON. We have as much war as ever.
MANDEVILLE. There was never such a social turmoil.
THE YOUNG LADY. The artistic part of our nature does not appear to have
grown.
THE FIRE-TENDER. We are quarreling as to whether we are in fact
radically different from the brutes.
HERBERT. Scarcely two people think alike about the proper kind of human
government.
THE PARSON. Our poetry is made out of words, for the most part, and not
drawn from the living sources.
OUR NEXT DOOR. And Mr. Cumming is uncorking his seventh phial. I never
felt before what barbarians we are.
THE MISTRESS. Yet you won't deny that the life of the average man is
safer and every way more comfortable than it was even a century ago.
THE FIRE-TENDER. But what I want to know is, whether what we call
our civilization has done any thing more for mankind at large than to
increase the ease and pleasure of living? Science has multiplied wealth,
and facilitated intercourse, and the result is refinement of manners and
a diffusion of education and information. Are men and women essentially
changed, however? I suppose the Parson would say we have lost faith, for
one thing.
MANDEVILLE. And superstition; and gained toleration.
HERBERT. The question is, whether toleration is anything but
indifference.
THE PARSON. Everything is tolerated now but Christian orthodoxy.
THE FIRE-TENDER. It's easy enough to make a brilliant catalogue of
external achievements, but I take it that real progress ought to be in
man himself. It is not a question of what a man enjoys, but what he can
produce. The best sculpture was executed two thousand years ago.
The best paintings are several centuries old. We study the finest
architecture in its ruins. The standards of poetry are Shakespeare,
Homer, Isaiah, and David. The latest of the arts, music, culminated in
composition, though not in execution, a century ago.
THE MISTRESS. Yet culture in music certainly distinguishes the
civilization of this age. It has taken eighteen hundred years for
the principles of the Christian religion to begin to be practically
incorporated in government and in ordinary business, and it will take a
long time for Beethoven to be popularly recognized; but there is growth
toward him, and not away from him, and when the average culture has
reached his height, some other genius will still more profoundly and
delicately express the highest thoughts.
HERBERT. I wish I could believe it. The spirit of this age is expressed
by the Calliope.
THE PARSON. Yes, it remained for us to add church-bells and cannon to
the orchestra.
OUR NEXT DOOR. It's a melancholy thought to me that we can no longer
express ourselves with the bass-drum; there used to be the whole of the
Fourth of July in its patriotic throbs.
MANDEVILLE. We certainly have made great progress in one art,--that of
war.
THE YOUNG LADY. And in the humane alleviations of the miseries of war.
THE FIRE-TENDER. The most discouraging symptom to me in our undoubted
advance in the comforts and refinements of society is the facility
with which men slip back into barbarism, if the artificial and external
accidents of their lives are changed. We have always kept a fringe of
barbarism on our shifting western frontier; and I think there never was
a worse society than that in California and Nevada in their early days.
THE YOUNG LADY. That is because women were absent.
THE FIRE-TENDER. But women are not absent in London and New York, and
they are conspicuous in the most exceptionable demonstrations of social
anarchy. Certainly they were not wanting in Paris. Yes, there was a city
widely accepted as the summit of our material civilization. No city was
so beautiful, so luxurious, so safe, so well ordered for the comfort
of living, and yet it needed only a month or two to make it a kind of
pandemonium of savagery. Its citizens were the barbarians who destroyed
its own monuments of civilization. I don't mean to say that there was
no apology for what was done there in the deceit and fraud that preceded
it, but I simply notice how ready the tiger was to appear, and how
little restraint all the material civilization was to the beast.
THE MISTRESS. I can't deny your instances, and yet I somehow feel that
pretty much all you have been saying is in effect untrue. Not one of
you would be willing to change our civilization for any other. In your
estimate you take no account, it seems to me, of the growth of charity.
MANDEVILLE. And you might add a recognition of the value of human life.
THE MISTRESS. I don't believe there was ever before diffused everywhere
such an element of good-will, and never before were women so much
engaged in philanthropic work.
THE PARSON. It must be confessed that one of the best signs of the times
is woman's charity for woman. That certainly never existed to the same
extent in any other civilization.
MANDEVILLE. And there is another thing that distinguishes us, or is
beginning to. That is, the notion that you can do something more with a
criminal than punish him; and that society has not done its duty when
it has built a sufficient number of schools for one class, or of decent
jails for another.
HERBERT. It will be a long time before we get decent jails.
MANDEVILLE. But when we do they will begin to be places of education and
training as much as of punishment and disgrace. The public will provide
teachers in the prisons as it now does in the common schools.
THE FIRE-TENDER. The imperfections of our methods and means of selecting
those in the community who ought to be in prison are so great, that
extra care in dealing with them becomes us. We are beginning to learn
that we cannot draw arbitrary lines with infallible justice. Perhaps
half those who are convicted of crimes are as capable of reformation as
half those transgressors who are not convicted, or who keep inside the
statutory law.
HERBERT. Would you remove the odium of prison?
THE FIRE-TENDER. No; but I would have criminals believe, and society
believe, that in going to prison a man or woman does not pass an
absolute line and go into a fixed state.
THE PARSON. That is, you would not have judgment and retribution begin
in this world.
OUR NEXT DOOR. Don't switch us off into theology. I hate to go up in a
balloon, or see any one else go.
HERBERT. Don't you think there is too much leniency toward crime and
criminals, taking the place of justice, in these days?
THE FIRE-TENDER. There may be too much disposition to condone the crimes
of those who have been considered respectable.
OUR NEXT DOOR. That is, scarcely anybody wants to see his friend hung.
MANDEVILLE. I think a large part of the bitterness of the condemned
arises from a sense of the inequality with which justice is
administered. I am surprised, in visiting jails, to find so few
respectable-looking convicts.
OUR NEXT DOOR. Nobody will go to jail nowadays who thinks anything of
himself.
THE FIRE-TENDER. When society seriously takes hold of the reformation
of criminals (say with as much determination as it does to carry an
election) this false leniency will disappear; for it partly springs from
a feeling that punishment is unequal, and does not discriminate enough
in individuals, and that society itself has no right to turn a man over
to the Devil, simply because he shows a strong leaning that way. A part
of the scheme of those who work for the reformation of criminals is
to render punishment more certain, and to let its extent depend upon
reformation. There is no reason why a professional criminal, who won't
change his trade for an honest one, should have intervals of freedom in
his prison life in which he is let loose to prey upon society. Criminals
ought to be discharged, like insane patients, when they are cured.
OUR NEXT DOOR. It's a wonder to me, what with our multitudes of statutes
and hosts of detectives, that we are any of us out of jail. I never
come away from a visit to a State-prison without a new spasm of fear and
virtue. The faculties for getting into jail seem to be ample. We want
more organizations for keeping people out.
MANDEVILLE. That is the sort of enterprise the women are engaged in, the
frustration of the criminal tendencies of those born in vice. I believe
women have it in their power to regenerate the world morally.
THE PARSON. It's time they began to undo the mischief of their mother.
THE MISTRESS. The reason they have not made more progress is that they
have usually confined their individual efforts to one man; they are now
organizing for a general campaign.
THE FIRE-TENDER. I'm not sure but here is where the ameliorations of the
conditions of life, which are called the comforts of this civilization,
come in, after all, and distinguish the age above all others. They have
enabled the finer powers of women to have play as they could not in a
ruder age. I should like to live a hundred years and see what they will
do.
HERBERT. Not much but change the fashions, unless they submit themselves
to the same training and discipline that men do.
I have no doubt that Herbert had to apologize for this remark afterwards
in private, as men are quite willing to do in particular cases; it is
only in general they are unjust. The talk drifted off into general and
particular depreciation of other times. Mandeville described a picture,
in which he appeared to have confidence, of a fight between an Iguanodon
and a Megalosaurus, where these huge iron-clad brutes were represented
chewing up different portions of each other's bodies in a forest of the
lower cretaceous period. So far as he could learn, that sort of thing
went on unchecked for hundreds of thousands of years, and was typical of
the intercourse of the races of man till a comparatively recent period.
There was also that gigantic swan, the Plesiosaurus; in fact, all the
early brutes were disgusting. He delighted to think that even the lower
animals had improved, both in appearance and disposition.
The conversation ended, therefore, in a very amicable manner, having
been taken to a ground that nobody knew anything about.