Those monosyllabic explosions were merely an expression of the rapidity
with which poor old Jefferson was turning over in his grave as he
realized to what uses modern statesmen of all shades of political belief
were putting his name. It must be a tough proposition for a simple old
Democrat like Jefferson to find his memory harnessed up to every bit of
entomological economic thought now issuing from the political asylums of
his native land."
"Pouf!" said the Bibliomaniac. "You are a reactionary, Sir."
"Ubetcha," said the Idiot. "First principles first, say I. But to come
back to clairvoyants. I am very anxious to get hold of a medium, Doctor,
and the sooner the better. I'm going to give up Wall Street. I can't
afford to stay there any longer unless I move out of this restful
paradise of food and thought and take up my abode in a Mills Hotel, or
charter a bench in the park from the city. The only business we had in
our office last week was a game of poker between the firm and its
employes, and the firm tided itself over the emergency by winning my
salary for the next six weeks. Another week of such activity would
prostrate me financially, and I am going to open a literary bureau to
deal in posthumous literature."
"Posthumous literature is the curse of letters," said the Bibliomaniac.
"It generally means the publication of the rejected, or personally
discarded, manuscripts of a dead author, which results in the serious
impairment of the quality of his laurels. It ought to be made a
misdemeanor to print the stuff."
"I agree with you entirely as to that, Mr. Bib," said the Idiot. "This
business of emptying the pigeonholes of deceased scribes, and printing
every last scrap of scribbling to be found there, whether they intended
it to be printed or not, is reprehensible, and I for one would gladly
advocate a law requiring executors of a literary estate to burn all
unpublished manuscripts found among the decedent's papers merely as a
matter of protection to a great name. But it isn't that kind of
posthumous production that I am going in for. It's the production
posthumously produced that I am after, and I need a first-class medium
as a side partner to get hold of the stuff for me."
"Preposterous!" sniffed the Bibliomaniac.
"Sounds that way, Mr. Bib," said the Idiot, "but, all the same, here's a
lady over in England has recently published a book of short stories by
the late Frank R. Stockton, which his genial spirit has transmitted to
the world through her. Now, if this thing can be done by Stockton, I
don't see why it can't be done by Milton, Shakespeare, Moses, and
others, and if I can only get hold of a real Psyche I'm going to get up
a posthumous literary trust that will stagger humanity."
"I guess it will!" laughed the Doctor.
"Yes, sir," said the Idiot enthusiastically. "The first thing I shall do
will be to send the lady after Charles Dickens and good old Thackeray,
and apply for the terrestrial rights to all their literary subsequences,
and, as a publisher really ought to do, I shall not content myself with
just taking what they write of their own accord, but I'll supply them
with subject matter. My posthumous literary trust will have a definite
policy.
"Can't you gentlemen imagine, for instance, what those two men could do
with little old New York as it is to-day? What glorious results would
come from turning Dickens loose on the underworld, and setting
Thackeray's pen to work on the hupper sukkles of polite s'ciety! If
there ever was a time when the reading public were ripe for another
'Oliver Twist' or another 'Vanity Fair', that time is now, and I can
hardly sleep nights for thinking about it."
"I don't see it at all," said the Bibliomaniac. "'Oliver Twist' is quite
perfect as it is."
"No doubt," retorted the Idiot, "but it isn't up-to-date, Mr. Bib. For
example, think of a scene described by Dickens in which Fagin, now
become a sort of man higher up, or at least one of his agents, takes
little Oliver out into a Bowery back yard and makes a proficient gunman
out of the kid, compelling him to practice in the flickering glare of an
electric light at shooting tailor's dummies on a rapidly moving
platform, with a .42-caliber six-shooter, until the lad becomes so
expert that he can hit nineteen out of twenty as they pass, missing the
twentieth only by a hair's breadth because it represents a man Fagin
wants to scare and not kill.
"Or think of how Thackeray would take hold of this tango tangle and
expose the cubic contents of that Cubist crowd, and handle the exquisite
dullness of the smart set, not with the glib brilliance of the man on
the outside, who novelizes what he reads in the papers, but with the
sounder satire of the man who knows from personal observation what he is
writing about! Great heavens--the idea makes my mouth water!"
"That might be worth while," confessed the Bibliomaniac. "But how are
you going to get the facts over to Dickens and Thackeray?"
"I shall not need to," said the Idiot. "All they'll have to do will be
to project themselves in spirit over here into the very midst of the
scenes to be described. As spirits they will have the entree into any
old kind of society they wish to investigate, and in that respect they
will have the advantage over us poor mortals who can't go anywhere
without having to take our confounded old bodies along with us. Then
after I had arranged matters with Dickens and Thackeray, I'd send my
psychic representative after Alexander Dumas, and get him to write a
sequel to 'The Three Musketeers', and 'Twenty Years After', which I
should call 'Two Hundred and Ninety Years After, a Romance of 1916', in
which D'Artagnan, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis should return to modern
times and try their hands on trench work, introducing the aeroplane, the
submarine, and all the other appurtenances of war, from the militant
brick to the dynamite bomb. Why, a good, rip-staving old Dumas tale of
adventure of to-day, with those old heroes of his mixed up with the
Militant Suffragettes and the Crown Prince of Germany, would be what old
Doctor Johnson would have called a cracker-jack, if he had had the
slightest conception of the possibilities of the English language."
"Wouldn't interest me in the least," said the Bibliomaniac coldly, "If
there is anything under the canopy that I despise it is so-called
romance. Now, if you could get hold of some of the solider things, such,
for instance, as Macaulay might write, or"--
"Ah!" said the Idiot, triumphantly, "it is there that my scheme would
work out most beneficently. My special articles on historic events by
personal participators would thrill the world.
"From Adam I would secure the first and only authentic account of the
Fall, with possibly an expression of his opinion as to the validity of
the Darwinian theory. From Noah, aided and abetted by Shem, Ham, and
Japhet, would come a series of sea stories narrating in thrilling style
the story of The Flood, or How We Landed the Zoo on Ararat. A line or
two from Balaam's Ass on the subject of modern Socialism would fill the
reading world with wonder. A series of papers specially prepared for a
woman's magazine by Henry VIII. on 'Wild Wives I Have Wedded', edited,
possibly, with copious footnotes by Brigham Young, would bring fortune
to the pockets of the publishers.
"And then the poets--ah, Mr. Bib, what treasures of poesy would this
plan of mine not bring within our reach! Dante could write a new
'Inferno' introducing a new torture in the form of Satan compelling a
Member of Congress to explain the Tariff bill. Homer could sing the
sufferings and triumphs of arctic exploration in a new epic entitled
'The Chilliad', or possibly expend his genius upon the story of the rise
and fall of Bryan in immortal periods under the title of 'The
Billiad'"--
"Or describe your progressive idiocy under the title of 'The Silliad!'"
put in the Bibliomaniac.
"Ubetcha!" cried the Idiot. "Or tell the sad tale of your life under the
title of 'The Seniliad.' And in addition to these wonders, who can
estimate to what extent we should all profit were our more serious
reviews to secure articles from Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, and old
Ben Franklin on the present state of the nation! Why, an article
dictated off-hand by the shade of Lincoln on the thousands who are now
flattering themselves that they occupy his shoes, illustrated with those
apt anecdotes of which he was a master, and pointed with his gloriously
dry humor, under the title of 'Later Links', would alone make the
venture worth while, even if nothing else came of it."
"Oh, well," said the Bibliomaniac, rising, "perhaps there is something
in the idea after all, and I wish you success, Mr. Idiot--and, by the
way, if the scheme works out as you expect it to, and you happen to come
across old AEsculapius, ask him for me for an authoritative statement of
the origin and proper treatment of idiocy, will you?"
"Sure," said the Idiot, turning to his breakfast, "but it really isn't
necessary to do that, Mr. Bib. Our good old friend, the Doctor here, is
quite capable of curing you at any time you consent to put yourself
unreservedly in his hands."
VI
ON MEDICAL CONSERVATION
"I see by the paper this morning," said the Idiot, as he put three lumps
of sugar into his pocket and absent-mindedly dropped his eyeglasses into
his coffee, "that, thanks to the industry of our Medical Schools and
Colleges, the world is richer by thirty thousand new doctors to-day than
it was yesterday. How does the law of supply and demand work in cases of
that kind, Doctor Squills?"
"Badly--very badly, indeed," said the Doctor, with a gloomy shake of his
head. "The profession is sadly overcrowded, and mighty few of us are
making more than a bare living."
"I was afraid that was the case," said the Idiot sympathetically. "I was
talking with a prominent surgeon at the Club the other night, and he was
terribly upset over the situation. He intimated that we have been
ruthlessly squandering our natural internal resources almost as
riotously and as blindly as our lumbermen have been destroying the
natural physical resources of the country. He assured me that he himself
had reached a point in his career where there was hardly a vermiform
appendix left in sight, and where five years ago he was chopping down
not less than four of these a day for six days of the week at a thousand
dollars per, it was now a lucky time for him when he got his pruning
knife off the hook once a month."
"That vermiform appendix craze was all a fad anyhow," said the
Bibliomaniac sourly. "Like the tango, and bridge, and golf, and
slumming, and all the rest of those things that Society takes up, and
then drops all of a sudden like a hot stick. It looked at one time as if
nobody could hope to get into society who hadn't had his vermiform
removed."
"Well, social fad or not," said the Idiot, "whatever it was, there is no
question about it that serious inroads have been made upon what we may
call our vermiforests, and unless something is done to protect them, by
George, in a few years we won't have any left except a few stuffed
specimens down in the Smithsonian Institution.
"I asked my friend Doctor Cuttem why he didn't call for a Vermiform
Conservation Congress to see what can be done either to prevent this
ruthless sacrifice of a product that if suitably safeguarded should
supply ourselves, and our children, and our children's children to the
uttermost posterity, with ample appendicular resources for the
maintenance in good style of a reasonable number of surgeons; or to
re-seed scientifically where the unscientific destruction of these
resources is uncontrollable. How about that, Doctor? Suppose you remove
a man's vermiform appendix--is there any system of medical, or surgical,
fertilization and replanting that would cause two vermiforms to grow
where only one grew before, so that sooner or later every human interior
may become a sort of garden-close, where one can go and pluck a handful
of vermiform appendices every morning, like so many hardy perennials in
full bloom?"
"I'm afraid not," smiled the Doctor.
"Anybody but the Idiot would know that it couldn't be done," said the
Bibliomaniac, "because if it could be done it would have been done long
ago. When you find men successfully transplanting rabbits' tails on
monkeys, and frogs' legs on canary birds, you can make up your mind that
if it were within the range of human possibility they would by this time
have vermiform appendices sprouting lushly in geranium pots for
insertion into the systems of persons desiring luxuries of that sort."
"You mustn't sneer at the achievements of modern surgery, Mr. Bib," said
the Idiot. "There is no telling how soon any one of us may need to avail
himself of its benefits. Who knows--maybe a surgeon will come along some
day who will be able to implant a sense of humor in you, to gladden all
your days."
"Preposterous!" snapped the Bibliomaniac.
"Well, it does seem unlikely," said the Idiot, "but I know of a young
doctor who without any previous experience planted a little heart in a
frigid Suffragette; and though I know the soil is not propitious, even
you may sometime be blossoming luxuriantly within with buds of cheer and
sweet optimism. But however this may be, it is the unquestioned and sad
fact that a once profitable industry for our surgically-inclined
brothers has slumped; and they tell me that even those surgeons who have
adopted modern commercial methods, and give away a set of Rudyard
Kipling's Works and a year's subscription to the _Commoner_ with every
vermiform removed, are making less than a thousand dollars a week out of
that branch of their work."
"Mercy!" cried the Poet. "What couldn't I do if I had a thousand dollars
a week!"
"You could afford to write real poetry all the time, instead of only
half the time, eh, old man?" said the Idiot affectionately. "But don't
you mind. We're all in the same boat. I'd be an infinitely bigger idiot
myself if I had half as much money as that."
"Impossible!" said the Bibliomaniac, chuckling over his opportunity.
"Green-eyed monster!" smiled the Idiot. "But speaking of this
overcrowding of the profession, it is a surprise to me, Doctor, that so
many young men are taking up medicine these days, when competent
observers everywhere tell us that the world is getting better all the
time.
"If that is true, and the world really is getting better all the time,
it is fair to assume that some day it will be entirely well, and then,
let me ask you, what is to become of all the doctors? It will not be a
good thing for Society ever to reach a point where it has such an army
of unemployed on its hands, and especially that kind of an army, made up
as it will be of highly intelligent but desperately hungry men, face to
face with starvation, and yet licensed by the possession of a medical
diploma to draw, and have filled, prescriptions involving the whole
range of the materia medica, from Iceland moss and squills up to prussic
acid and cyanide of potassium.
"It makes me shudder to think of it!" said Mr. Brief, the lawyer, with a
grin at the Doctor.
"Shudder isn't the word!" said the Idiot. "The bare idea makes my flesh
creep like a Philadelphia trolley car! Coxey's Army was bad enough, made
up as it was of a poor, miserable lot of tramps and panhandlers, all so
unused to labor as to be really jobshy; but in their most riotous moods
the worst those poor chaps could do was to heave a few bricks or a dead
cat through a millinery shop window, or perhaps bat a village magnate on
the back of the head with a bed slat. There was nothing insidiously
subtle about the warfare they waged upon Society.
"But suppose that, laboring under a smarting sense of similar wrongs,
there should come to be such a thing as old Doctor Pepsin's Army of
Unemployed Physicians and Surgeons, marching through the country, headed
for the White House in order to make an impressive public demonstration
of their grievances! What a peril to the body politic that would be! Not
only could the surgeons waylay the village magnates and amputate their
legs, and seize hostile editors and cut off the finger with which they
run their typewriting machines, and point with alarm with; but the more
insidious means of upsetting the public weal by pouring calomel into our
wells, putting castor oil in our reservoirs, leaving cholera germs and
typhoid cultures under our door mats, or transferring a pair of
jackass's legs to the hind-quarters of an old family horse, found
grazing in the pasture, would transform a once smiling countryside into
a scene of misery and desolation."
"Poor, poor Dobbin!" murmured the Bibliomaniac.
"Indeed, Mr. Bib, it will be poor, poor Dobbin!" said the Idiot. "I
don't think that many people besides you and myself realize how
desperately serious a menace it is that hangs over us; and I feel that
one of the first acts of the Administration, after it has succeeded in
putting grape juice into the Constitution as our national tipple, and
constructed a solid Portland cement wall across the Vice President's
thorax to insure that promised four years of silence, should be an
effort to control this terrible situation."
"You talk as if it could be done," said the Doctor doubtfully.
"Of course it can be done," said the Idiot. "Doctors being engaged in
Inter-State Commerce--"
"Doctors? Interstate Commerce?" cried Mr. Brief. "That's a new one on
me, Mr. Idiot. Everybody is apparently in Interstate Commerce in your
opinion. Seems to me it was only the other day that you spoke of
Clairvoyants being in it."
"Sure," said the Idiot. "And it's the same way with the doctors. In
ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, where a man passes from this state
into the future state, you'll find a doctor mixed up in it somewhere,
even if it's only as a coroner. This being so, it would be perfectly
proper to refer the matter to the Interstate Commerce Commission for a
solution.
"Anyhow, something ought to be done to handle the situation while the
menace is in its infancy. We need the ounce of prevention. Now, my
suggestion would be that the law should step in and either place a limit
to the number of doctors to be turned out annually, on a basis of so
many doctors to so many hundreds of population--say three doctors to
every hundred people--just as in certain communities the excise law
allows only one saloon for every thousand registered voters; or else,
since the State permits medical schools to operate under a charter,
authorizing them to manufacture physicians and surgeons ad lib., and
turn them loose on the public, the State should provide work for these
doctors to do.
"To this end we might have, for instance, a Bureau of Disease
Dissemination, subject perhaps to the jurisdiction of the Secretary of
the Interior, under whose direction, acting in cooeperation with the
Department of Agriculture, every package of seeds sent out by a
Congressman to his constituents would have a sprinkling of germs of one
kind or another mixed in with the seeds, thus spreading little epidemics
of comparatively harmless disorders like the mumps, the measles, or the
pip, around in various over-healthy communities where the doctors were
in danger of going over the hill to the poorhouse. Surely if we are
justified in making special efforts to help the farmers we ought not to
hesitate to do the doctors a good turn once in a while."
"You think the public would stand for that, do you?" queried the
Bibliomaniac scornfully.
"Oh, the public is always inhospitable to new ideas at first," said the
Idiot, "but after a while they get so attached to them that you have to
start an entirely new political party to prove that they are
reactionary. But, as the Poet says,
"Into all lives some mumps must fall,
"and the sooner we get 'em over with the better. If the public once
wakes up to the fact that the measles and the mumps are as inevitable as
a coal bill in winter, or an ice bill in summer, it will cheerfully
indorse a Federal Statute which enables us to have these things promptly
and be done with 'em. It's like any other disagreeable thing in life. As
old Colonel Macbeth used to say to that dear old Suffragette wife of
his,
"If 'twere done when 'tis done, then 'twere well
It were done quickly.
"It's like taking a cold bath in the morning. You don't mind it at all
if you jump in in a hurry and then jump out again.
"But even if the public didn't take that sensible view of it, we have
legislative methods by which the thing could be brought about without
the public knowing anything about it. For instance, supposing somebody
in Congress were to introduce an innocent little bill appropriating five
hundred thousand dollars, for the erection of a residence for a United
States Ambassador to the Commonwealth of California, for the avowed
object of keeping somebody in San Francisco to see that Governor Johnson
didn't declare war on Japan without due notice to the Navy Department,
what could be simpler than the insertion in that bill of a little joker
providing that from the date of the enactment of this statute the
Department of Agriculture is authorized and required to expend the sum
of twenty thousand dollars annually on the dissemination, through
Congressional seed packages, of not less than one ounce per package of
germs of assorted infantile and other comparatively harmless disorders,
for the benefit of the medical profession? Taxidermists tell us that
there are more ways than one to skin a cat, and the same is true of
legislation.
"There's only one other way that I can see to bring the desired
condition about, and that is to permit physicians to operate under the
same system of ethics as that to be found in the plumbing business. If a
plumber is allowed, as he is allowed in the present state of public
morality, to repair a leak in such a fashion to-day that new business
immediately and automatically develops requiring his attention
to-morrow, I see no reason why doctors should not be permitted to do the
same thing. Called in to repair a mump, let him leave a measle behind.
The measle cured, a few chicken-pox left carelessly about where they
will do the most good will insure his speedy return; and so on. Every
physician could in this way take care of himself, and by a skilful
manipulation of the germs within his reach should have no difficulty not
only in holding but in increasing his legitimate business as well."
"Ugh!" shuddered Mrs. Pedagog. "You almost make me afraid to let the
Doctor stay in this house a day longer."
"Don't be afraid, Madame," said the Doctor amiably. "After all, I'm a
doctor, you know, and not a plumber."
"I'll guarantee his absolute harmlessness, Mrs. Pedagog," said the
Idiot. "We're perfectly safe here. It is no temptation to a doctor to
sow the germs of disorder among people like ourselves who have reduced
getting free medical advice to a system."
"Well," said Mr. Brief, the lawyer, "your plan is all right for the
doctors, but why the Dickens don't somebody suggest something for us
lawyers once in awhile? There were seventy thousand new lawyers turned
out yesterday, and you haven't even peeped."
"No," said the Idiot, "it isn't necessary. You lawyers are well provided
for. With one National Congress, and forty-eight separate State
Legislatures working twenty-four hours a day, turning out fifty-seven
new varieties of law every fifteen minutes, all so phrased that no human
mind can translate them into simple English, there's enough trouble
constantly on hand to keep twenty million lawyers busy for thirty
million years, telling us not what we can't do, but what few things
there are left under the canopy that a man of religious inclinations can
do without danger of arrest!"
VII
THE U. S. TELEPHONIC AID SOCIETY
"Well, Mr. Idiot," said the Doctor, as the Idiot with sundry comments on
the top-loftical condition of the thermometer fanned his fevered brow
with a tablespoon, "I suppose in view of the hot weather you will be
taking a vacation very shortly."
"Not only very shortly, but excessively shortly," returned the Idiot.
"Its shortliness will be of so brief a nature that nobody'll notice any
vacant chairs around where I am accustomed to sit. But let me tell you,
Dr. Squills, it is too hot for sarcasm, so withhold your barbs as far
as I am concerned, and believe me always very truly yours, Nicholas J.
Doodlepate."
"Sarcasm?" said the Doctor in a surprised tone. "Why, my dear fellow, I
wasn't sarcastic, was I? I am sure I didn't mean to be."