more so than the average of mankind. Yes, I suspect that is so, but
I suspect also that it is only a provisional resignation. We reached
out and got the next thing--each other. That was highly satisfactory
and a good deal better than if we had waited for something else.
But this reaching out for the next thing seems to be a continuing
process, and I suspect it has to go on till stopping-time, and that
satisfaction in life is pretty closely geared to the ability to
maintain it effectively. That is not altogether a soothing reflection,
but I don’t know that it is desirable that all reflections should be
soothing. A fair proportion of them ought to be stimulating. I observe
that I read the writings of the efficient when my energies are high,
and when they are low find solace in those of the lazy--only they must
not be too lazy to write. Some of the very best writers were lazy, and
struggled with it. Maybe it’s hard work to be a writer, but then it’s
hard work to be _much_ of anything. But that’s nothing! Nobody wastes
sympathy, or ought to, on hard workers, provided they get in fair
measure what they go out after. And one of the greatest things they get
is increased ability to work hard. This is not entirely my discovery.
It was suggested by an aged friend, but as far as I have experimented
with it I think it is so. Of course, the suggestion was accompanied
by a reminder in quotation-marks that life would be endurable except
for its pleasures, but that’s not to be accepted too confidently. It
depends on the pleasures and whether they please or not. There are
a lot of things that are labeled “pleasure,” and most of them are
price-marked in more or less forbidding figures, but the considerable
satisfactions of life seem to be conditions of the mind which may
be related to living conditions that cost money, but which are not
themselves price-marked in figures that are at all plain. There’s polo,
a good, lively pleasure and fairly high-priced and consumptive also
of time, but I judge the main value of active sports of that sort to
aspiring men is indirect. They contribute to a physical efficiency
which is useful just so far as it promotes mental efficiency--sanity
and activity of mind, spontaneity of thought and speech and power. No
doubt for some men sports are a form of discipline. They train some
spirits to exertion, and make for energy and supply driving force for
work, but, dear me, they take a lot of time and tend to consume more
energy than they furnish. They are fine for boys, soldiers, Englishmen,
and people with a disposition to grow fat, and an excellent vacation
employment for some people, but I suspect there is an economic warrant
for the disposition of the common run of American adults to intrust
the transaction of their active sports to persons who can give their
whole time to them, and whose skilful exertions it is restful now and
then to watch.
I remember my classmate Hollaway saying one day of a group of sporty
young gentlemen whom we were discussing, “The things that seem to amuse
them would not give me pleasure.” That was true. Hollaway liked to
_think_. That was the way he had most of his fun. He was willing to put
in enough physical exertion to make his machinery run smoothly, and
liked, as a rule, to do it quickly and have it over, but he got his fun
out of what went on in his head, and in talk. He practised and enjoyed
all the mental processes, observation, cogitation, consideration,
reflection, rumination, imagination, and the rest, with resulting and
accompanying discourse. Nobody around had more fun than Hollaway.
Somebody said he had a “happy activity of the soul.” Maybe that is out
of Emerson. I’ll ask Cordelia, who confesses to some acquaintance with
Emerson. But, anyhow, the happy activity of the soul is good to have
and not visibly price-marked nor denied necessarily, like the opera
and polo, to the impecunious.
Going out to visit the Peytons was an enlivening change, and gave
us new topics for discourse and reflection, but the best of it was
to talk about it with Cordelia. I like the tranquillity of being
married--married, that is, to Cordelia. Visiting the Peytons is a bit
of embroidery on the fabric of life, but coming home to the flat and
staying in all the evening and reading as many of the contemporary
periodicals as I can manage to get hold of and get time to explore, and
talking to Cordelia--that is the very web of life. I seldom have the
sense of justification in life so strongly as in these domesticated
discourses with Cordelia. I have got her to reading the contemporary
periodicals and the newspapers and keeping some track of what is going
on in the world. I don’t know what kind of radicals we will turn out to
be if we keep our minds on that diet. But I get the other point of view
down-town, where my employment is largely to assist my boss to help
gentlemen with property to adjust the management of their concerns to
laws contrived with intent to retard their processes of acquisition.
It is nip and tuck in these days between the gentlemen who make the
progressive political periodicals and the gentlemen who control the
railroads and banks and trusts and their employees, to determine who
is going to run the country. As things are, the country is run, after
a fashion. The wheels do turn, and production and distribution are
accomplished. To be sure, the wheels screech more or less, and the
production is pretty wasteful compared with what the professional
economists say it might be, and the stream of distribution runs so
lumpy that it makes you laugh; but a fair proportion of the Lord’s will
seems to be done, and hopeful people calculate that the proportion
is increasing, though you might not always think so to read the
progressive periodicals. A large part of the happy activity of nature
consists of the big creatures eating the little ones, but we complain
awfully about it when we think we see it going on in human society,
and the law, whose humble but aspiring servant I am, was invented to
check it. Everything that is invented to check that propensity tends
to develop an appetite of its own. The law, the church, the walking
delegate, all have in them the ingredients of voracity, and I dare say
the same ingredients are latent in the progressive periodicals. Who has
the brains to govern will govern, and the mere substitution of lean
masters for fat ones is not necessarily an advantage. I suppose it is
largely our own consciousness of that that restrains us from taking the
country away from the interests and giving it to the periodicals; and
besides, of course, it is harder, because the interests hang on so to
what is theirs, and the law, which is me, finds so many obstacles to
detaching them.
Well, practising law all day below Canal Street in the interest
of the interests, and reading the progressive periodicals all the
evening--there’s such a raft of them--in the interest of righteousness,
altruism, and the people, ought to make me a very broad-minded
person--so broad-minded probably that I shall lose sense of direction
and fetch up in the driver’s place on a Brooklyn street-car.
And yet probably not, with Cordelia as a partner. I have consulted her
about going to the Assembly. Not that anybody wants me to go there,
but it looks interesting. I wish my boss would employ me to go there
and see that I did not starve. But he couldn’t very well. I would
be a legislator in the employ of an employee of the interests, and
all the fun would be gone. Father and Father-in-law might finance me,
but neither of them is that much of a patriot. If I were employed
by one of the periodicals there would be less scandal in that, but
that’s not a practical thought. I dare say that I shall have to make
considerably more progress in the practice of my profession before I
can go to Albany, and by that time I shall have become too valuable to
myself and dependent associates to be spared to go there. After all,
I got married, and I suppose that is as fatal an indiscretion as a
person of my attenuated means should permit himself at this stage of
his endeavors. It is about politics very much as it is about getting
married--if you wait till you’re ready, you can’t. It seems as if
everything had to be shot on the wing. We ought to be governed by
people of independent means. They are the only people who can afford
the employment. But most people who have independent means have a point
of view to match, and there you are--it isn’t quite the point of view
of a large proportion of the governed. Just so contradictory things
are, and yet, after all, it’s that that makes the game.
My, my! We have been married nearly a year, and have not yet repented.
Our circumstances improve a little from month to month. Besides The
Firm’s regular contribution to my maintenance, I pick up odd jobs now
and then on my own account. Father and Father-in-law take occasional
chances in the lottery of my accomplishments by sending me bits of
business, and I pick up other bits from other people. I have even made
literary compositions, and tried, not always fruitlessly, to sell them.
That is a good enough game, if one dared give himself to it, but,
except as compounded with politics, economics, or public service of
some sort, it leads away from law, so I don’t follow it hard.
IV
THE BABY
Undoubtedly the baby makes a great difference. He fills up the flat,
for one thing. I foresee that he will turn us out of it. Nevertheless
he is valuable, and probably worth his space even in New York. His
name is Samuel French. Cordelia named him after her father. She is
extremely pleased with him. So is Matilda Finn, so is my mother, so
is my mother-in-law. Even the trained assistant to nature who was
here to welcome him seemed very pleased to meet Samuel, and both his
grandfathers have been around to inspect him, and have approved and
duly benefacted him. Neither of these aged but still profitable men has
had a grandchild before, and they seem to like it. As for me, naturally
I am like to burst with the pride at being associated, however humbly,
with an achievement so important. Father-in-law is building a new
room on to his summer palace in Connecticut, with a view, I think, to
the more convenient entertainment of his new descendant, and I think
that nothing but consideration for my fiscal incapacity withholds him
from building Cordelia a country house. By various expedients I have
swelled our sixty dollars a week to about seventy, which is a grateful
gain, and appreciable in spite of the demands of the Post-office,
the public transportation companies, the market-men, and the other
agencies of depletion, so corroding to the fiscal being; but even--let
me see, seven times fifty-two weeks--but even $3,640 is not an annual
income that seems equal to the maintenance of two residences. I guess
if we are to have a suburban home it must be an all-the-year-round
home for the present, and father-in-law’s place in Connecticut is not
just the right place for that. It is some miles from the station, and
involves maintenance of horsepower of some sort, and of course that
is unspeakable except as father-in-law provides it. Our lay would be
a villa about the length of a baseball ground from the station, or,
better still, something five cents from Wall Street by tunnel or
trolley, and you catch the car on the next corner.
But think of the crowd on the car!
No, I won’t think of it. It is the common lot hereabouts, and I should
be able to stand my share of it, which I would not get in full, anyhow,
because, being a lawyer, I can leave home a little later, and leave
for home usually a little earlier or later than the great body of the
workers for a living.
My new responsibility has brought me a variety of new appreciations.
As a parent I find I have new sentiments about parents, and increased
esteem and regard for them as pillars that uphold life and direct it.
Beyond doubt, they are fine for upholding grandchildren. No doubt
there would be considerably more grandchildren in our world if there
were more grandparents who recognized their responsibilities and made
provision, as a matter of course, to meet them. But that does not
accord with the lively individualism of our generation. Not only are
we all desirous of independent life, but our parents prefer it for us.
Accordingly, when we get above the social plane in which independent
life for man and wife can be maintained for twenty dollars a week,
marriage is apt to come late. There are immense advantages about that
social plane in which twenty dollars a week is a complete living, and
the wife is cook and housemaid, wife, mother, and nurse all in one,
and the state provides education, and the doctor adjusts his charges
to your income, and all the man has to look after is food, clothes,
shelter, and pocket money! I hope the people who are born with a call
on that phase of existence appreciate their luck. To rise to the
twenty-dollar-a-week phase must be full of satisfactions, but to drop
to it is quite another matter. Whatever starting-point is dealt out to
us, it is from that point that we have to go on, and, whether we like
it or not, the point at which it behooves us to arrive is measured from
the point at which we start.
Raising babies must have been very much simplified by the invention of
the kodak. There is no attitude, expression, sentiment, costume, or
absence of costume of Samuel that this handy little instrument has not
perpetuated. And inasmuch as Samuel varies and progresses from hour to
hour, acquiring personality, weight, and accomplishments, changing in
his features and developing new resemblances, the click of the kodak
is almost as frequent in our flat as the whir of the sewing-machine.
When infants had to run to the photographer’s for every new picture, I
don’t see how they got their natural rest. You know they sleep about
eighteen hours a day. One would think that with all that somnolence a
baby would be no more trouble than a dormouse, but Samuel is almost
a complete occupation. As an example of woman’s work he qualifies by
being never done. When he is asleep he is about to waken, and when
he is awake he is about to sleep, and either way he is either taking
nourishment or about to take it, or taking a bath, or changing his
clothes, or acquiring ideas, or taking first lessons in language. Since
I have known him I sympathize with the woman who thought it just as
easy to raise six children as one, because one took up all your time,
and six couldn’t do more.
I never saw Cordelia so much amused with anything, and I admit to
being, myself, more diverted and entertained than I should have thought
possible. I had a puppy once that was a delight, so cheerful, so
prodigal of affectionate welcomes, and so incessant in his activities.
Mother has got him now. She appropriated him--or he her--and kept him,
she said, to remind her of me. But Samuel beats the puppy. He does not
get around as briskly yet as the puppy did, but he has the same delight
in very simple toys, and a similar liveliness of mind, and a like
capacity to be pleased. He is quite a lot like that puppy as he was
when I first got him.
I didn’t need anything to increase my interest in getting home at
night. Cordelia attended to that. But Samuel has increased it. He is
awake when I get home, and, though he is usually getting ready to go to
bed, he always expresses a flattering satisfaction at meeting me again,
and has interesting details of progress to report, and smiles, and puts
out arms, and makes inarticulate noises, and sits in my lap, and makes
an inventory of my accessible properties.
And, of course, there is a great deal to be told about him, including
the day’s report of what has been said of him by admiring friends, and
of the visits he has made and received, and, now and then, statistics
of his weight and progress in intelligence and activity. I think
Cordelia talks to Matilda Finn and her various visitors about him all
day, and then to me about him most of the evening. It is surprising
that so small a carcass should afford so much discourse.
We have entered him at a suitable school, which is perhaps another
token of the incompleteness of my emancipation. You know that for some
years past some of the boarding-schools have been so highly esteemed,
for one reason or another, by unemancipated parents that they have
coveted the privilege of having their sons go to them, and, to insure
getting it, have entered their boys’ names at those schools as soon as
they were born. So I entered Samuel at the school where I went myself.
If that implied incompleteness of emancipation in me, I don’t care.
Samuel must have his chance. It is enough for _me_ to be emancipated.
Emancipation is a personal affair, like conversion, and no one ought to
try to force his emancipation on any one else, least of all a parent
on a child. Samuel may prefer the old order, and by the time he grows
up we may have the wherewithal to enable him to experiment with it if
there is any of it left. I don’t know that there will be, and, to be
sure, when did life offer a bigger or more uncertain speculation than
this that Samuel yawns and gapes in the face of? Perhaps I ought not to
call it uncertain, except as to times and means and details, but that’s
enough; and as to those the uncertainty is ample. The great task that
is doing now seems to be the improvement of the common lot. No doubt
that is always going on when civilization is in its forward moods, but
nowadays there is uncommon urgency about it, and remarkable command
and handling of the progressive forces, and apparent enfeeblement of
the powers of resistance. It is very attractive, very hopeful, but I
suppose no thoughtful person denies that it is possible to improve the
common lot so much and so fast as to force society into the hands of a
receiver. That is one possibility that little Samuel is up against, and
for that matter so are his parents; for the receivership may come, and
reorganization after it, before Samuel is old enough to sit into the
game.
My! my! what will you see, little son? All the women voting, all
the trades-unions joined under a single head, armies abolished, the
immediate will of majorities the supreme and only law, detachable
marriage, detachable judges, detachable constitutions?
You may, you may; and so may your parents, for that matter, and are
as likely to, perhaps, as you are. But stay with us, none the less.
There seems always to be good sport in this world for good sports--no
matter what may be going on. Folks lived, and liked to live, hereabouts
when the men walked between plow-handles with a rifle across their
shoulders, and they can stand considerable variations in public habits
without losing the appetite for life. An unchanging order is bound to
grow tiresome, always did, always will; though outside of China it is
hard to find one, and even there the old order is moving now. We must
try to make a good sport of Samuel; one who will be interested in life
no matter what, and, when new rules are making, have a say about them.
I don’t see why I hang back so about votes for women. At times I think
I am not opposed. I think I don’t care. But I read all the opposed
discourse that has any sense in it with sympathy, and all the _pro_
discourse in a critical spirit, rejoicing when it seems to me unsound.
It is true enough that there is no compelling reason why I should want
votes for women. _My_ proprietors don’t want them. Mother sniffs at
them. Cordelia is observant, with very much such an instinctive leaning
toward the _antis_ as I have. Why should I excite myself about “equal
suffrage” when my ladies like things better as they are? Aren’t mother
and Cordelia representative women? A great deal more so, I think, than
most of the suffragists. The mass of women hereabouts don’t seem to
be concerned about voting. The suffragists in agitating to make them
concerned seem to be trying to create an artificial want. They go about
to persuade women that they are oppressed, and are rated politically
with insane persons, criminals, and aliens.
Now, what is all that? Is it progress, or is it mischief? Is it based
on a mistaken conception of women’s job, or is it a natural detail of
the redistribution of powers and privileges that appears to be going
on? Am I opposed because I am a pig and a stand-patter and an old fogy?
Are votes worth so much fuss, anyhow, and is it going to make any vital
difference whether American women have them or not?
I don’t know that it is. The women and the men are so inextricably
bound together that it is inconceivable that with woman suffrage the
vote should divide in proportions materially different from what
happens now. But that’s not a reason for letting suffrage come. I
do think that at present men and women do not long work together on
the same level at the same tasks. Where women come in either they
work under the direction of men or the men go out. The departments
of life in which they rule--and there are plenty of them--are those
in which men do not compete. I don’t think they can compete with men
as voters or as organizers and directors of political government. If
the suffragists get their votes for women, they will get an enlarged
electorate controlled by men as now. And why should it be expected that
the controlling men in that case will be better than they are now? Are
the mass of women wiser, more honest, and better judges of men than the
mass of men? I don’t think so. I think men and women are just mates.
There seems to be a woman to match every man, but different from him,
and a man to match almost every woman. It is not sensible to compare a
superior woman with an ordinary or inferior man, and point out that she
is fitter to vote than he is. Of course she is, but that does not touch
the real question, which is whether government will be better conducted
with votes for all women than it is now.
Those agitators talk about the “injustice” of depriving women of the
ballot. They might as well talk of the injustice of the refusal of
water to run uphill. There’s no injustice about it. It is nature. If it
can be bettered, all right. Water will run uphill if there is enough
pressure behind it. But if injustice has been done woman about her
vote, it was done when she was born female and not male, and the appeal
from that lies to the higher court.
Was there any done? Take it by and large, is it a misfortune to born
a girl and not a boy? That may happen to any of us any time we happen
to be born. It’s a toss-up. It’s not the slightest credit to us to be
born male, and certainly it should not be the slightest discredit to us
to be born female; but according as we are born male or female we are
born to different duties. If political government is one of the male
duties, civilization will not get ahead by having men loosen their
hold on it. For my part I suppose that down in the intricacies of my
composition I have an instinctive conviction, or hunch, that political
government is a male attribute, and that out of that comes my objection
to abdicate, or even dilute, my share of it. Instinctive convictions
have great weight in these matters, though the surface arguments they
put out may be inadequate or mistaken, as the anti-suffrage arguments
are so apt to be. The suffragist expounders demolish them, and think
that they have accomplished something; but, alas! the demolition of
puerile arguments leaves the question just where it was, with the pith
of it still untouched. Still I think the agitation does good, bothering
people like me, and making us think; asking us, What does belong to
women, then, if not votes? How else are you going to give them equal
life? What does justice demand for them if not the suffrage?
If the males since the beginning of time have overestimated their
importance and erred in regarding themselves as specialists in
government, then it is only a matter of time when we shall be disabused
of that error and shaken down into our rightful places. But if
government--meaning political government rather than domestic--really
prospers better in the long run in the hands of males, in their hands
it is likely to stay--the substance of it certainly, however that
shadow we call a vote may flutter off, and wherever it may alight.
Nothing happens without a cause. If the men are to be abased, doubtless
it will be for their abundant sins. If they will not work as men
should, they will lose their jobs. If they will not govern as men
should, they will be governed. History is a record of the strong races
subduing the weak, and the wise the foolish, to the end that strength
and wisdom shall prevail in human affairs. In these days of Monroe
doctrines and alliances and arbitration treaties those harsh processes
seem to have been superseded. Is this invasion by women of the province
of men a new expedient of Nature to preserve the competition that is
essential to human progress?
We cannot beat Nature. She is obdurate, resourceful, impossible to
fool, with a trick to meet every trick that is offered her. She seems
determined that man shall come to something and plays man against
man to make him better himself, and is probably equal, if occasion
demands it, to play one half of him against the other. For of course
that is what woman is--the other half of man. There cannot be a real
competition between the two halves, for they are inseparably joined
and have to pull each other along. But for all that, they are distinct
individuals, and one in a given period may make faster progress than
the other, with a good deal of disturbance of relations and equities
and ideas. What man gets, woman gets; what woman gets, man gets. When
woman gets education, liberty, opportunity, protection, the whole race
gets those benefits.
Then shall we say that when woman gets the vote the race is that much
ahead? It may be, but to me it has not been so revealed up to these
presents. Who gave man strength gave him dominion. If he loses dominion
it will be because he has either misused his strength or lost it.