Transcriber’s Notes:
Underscores “_” before and after a word or phrase indicate _italics_
in the original text.
Equal signs “=” before and after a word or phrase indicate =bold=
in the original text.
Small capitals have been converted to SOLID capitals.
Antiquated spellings have been preserved.
Typographical errors have been silently corrected.
=“TOM WATSON”=
is the one historian through whom we get the point of
view of the laborer, the mechanic, the plain man, in a
style that is bold, racy and unconventional. There is
no other who traces so vividly the life of a _people_
from the time they were savages until they became the
most polite and cultured of European nations, as he
does in
=THE STORY OF FRANCE=
In two handsome volumes, dark red cloth, gilt tops, price $5.00.
“It is well called a story, for it reads like a
fascinating romance.”—_Plaindealer_, Cleveland.
“A most brilliant, vigorous, human-hearted story
this: so broad in its sympathies, so vigorous in
its presentations, so vital, so piquant, lively and
interesting. It will be read wherever the history of
France interests men, which is everywhere.”—_New York
Times’ Sat. Review._
=NAPOLEON=
=A SKETCH OF HIS LIFE, CHARACTER, STRUGGLES
AND ACHIEVEMENTS.=
Illustrated with Portraits and Facsimiles.
Cloth, 8vo, $2.25 net. (Postage 20c.)
“The Splendid Study of a Splendid Genius” is the
caption of a double-column editorial mention of this
book in _The New York American and Journal_ when it
first appeared. The comment urged every reader of that
paper to read the book and continued:
“There does not live a man who will not be enlarged
in his thinking processes, there does not live a boy
who will not be made more ambitious by honest study of
Watson’s Napoleon * * *
“If you want the best obtainable, most readable, most
intelligent, most genuinely American study of this
great character, read Watson’s history of Napoleon.”
=“TOM WATSON”=
in these books does far more than make history as
readable as a novel of the best sort. He tells the
truth with fire and life, not only of events and
causes, but of their consequences to and their
influence on the great mass of people at large. They
are epoch-making books which every American should
read and own.
Orders for the above books will be filled by
TOM WATSON’S MAGAZINE, 121 West 42nd Street, New York City.
TOM WATSON’S MAGAZINE
THE MAGAZINE WITH A PURPOSE BACK OF IT
=June, 1905=
_Editorials_ _Thomas E. Watson_ 385
_Our Creed—National Politics and Policies—Is It Paul Jones’s
Body?—Is the Black Man Superior to the White?—Amending
the Constitution—“Take the Children”—Paternalism—Planting
Corn—Not Parson Brownlow’s Son—Mr. President!—Did You
Know It?—Rural Free Delivery to Country People—Random
Paragraphs—The Gods We Worship._
_Poverty_ _John H. Girdner, M.D._ 417
_Tuck-of-Drum_ _Alfred Tressider Sheppard_ 420
_The Southern Negro as a Property-Owner_ _Leonora Beck Ellis_ 428
_A Japanese Populist_ _Thomas C. Hutten_ 434
_The King’s Image_ _Walter E. Grogan_ 437
_The Story of a Suppressed Populist Newspaper_ _Thos. H. Tibbles_ 446
_Pole Baker_ (Chapters VII-IX) _Will N. Harben_ 451
_A Phase of the Money Problem Bankers Dare Not
Discuss_ _Albert Griffin_ 463
_A Leaf from a Protective Tariff Catechism_ _Joel Benton_ 467
_Monopoly, The Power Behind The Trust_ _Joseph Dana Miller_ 472
_The Heritage of Maxwell Fair_ (Conclusion) _Vincent Harper_ 479
_Educational Department_ _Thomas E. Watson_ 497
_The Track Walker_ _Theodore Dreiser_ 502
_The House of Cards_ _Ruth Sterry_ 503
_The Say of Other Editors_ 504
_News Record_ 508
Application made for entry as Second-Class Matter at
New York (N. Y.) Post Office, March, 1905
Copyright, 1905, in U. S. and Great Britain.
Published by TOM WATSON’S MAGAZINE,
121 West 42d Street, N. Y.
TERMS: $1.00 A YEAR; 10 CENTS A NUMBER
TOM WATSON’S MAGAZINE ADVERTISER
How to Overthrow Plutocracy
Several million people in the United States are in substantial accord
with the demands of the People’s Party. A majority of all voters would
welcome Government Ownership of Railroads and other public utilities. The
recent great victory in Chicago for Municipal Ownership demonstrates this
fact. What Chicago has done locally can be accomplished in the nation—and
WILL be done as soon as the people overcome
Political Inertia
With many the voting habit becomes fixed after one or two elections. The
ordinary man keeps on “voting ’er straight” long after he has discovered
that his party’s actions are out of joint with his own views. Party
“regularity” commands the average man’s support long after he KNOWS his
party is headed wrong. Some really great men, even, have placed party
“regularity” before principle.
A Great Light
on the correct principle of organization is to be found in that admirable
work by George Gordon Hastings,
The First American King
A dashing romance, in which a scientist and a detective of today wake up
seventy-five years later to find His Majesty, Imperial and Royal, William
I, Emperor of the United States and King of the Empire State of New York,
ruling the land, with the real power in the hands of half a dozen huge
trusts. Automobiles have been replaced by phaërmobiles; air-ships sail
above the surface of the earth; there has been a successful war against
Russia; a social revolution is brewing. The book is both an enthralling
romance and a serious sociological study, which scourges unmercifully the
society and politics of the present time, many of whose brightest stars
reappear in the future under thinly disguised names. There are wit and
humor and sarcasm galore—a stirring tale of adventure and a charming love
story.
Hon. Thomas E. Watson says:
“I read ‘The First American King,’ and found it one of the most
interesting books I ever opened. Mr. Hastings has not only presented a
profound study of our social and economic conditions, but he has made the
story one of fascination. It reminds me at times of Bellamy’s ‘Looking
Backward,’ but the story is told with so much more human interest, the
situations themselves are so much more dramatic, that it impresses me
very much more favorably than any book of that kind I have ever known.”
Interesting as the story is as a romance and as a critical sociological
study, one of its vitally important points is
How to Organize
=Mr. Hastings says:=
“It has been suggested,” continued General Mainwarren, “that a wise
course for patriotic leaders of your day would have been to have
abandoned the hope of converting and securing the grown voters as
a body. It would have been best for them, at a given time, to have
said: ‘Beginning from today, we will pay no attention to any male who
is more than fifteen years of age and who is now, or within the next
six years will be, entitled to a vote. But we will direct all efforts
to an entirely new body of suffragists.’ They should then have turned
their attention to the _women of the land_, to the mothers of future
generations of voters. It has been said that ‘Every woman is at heart a
royalist.’ It could with equal truth be said: ‘Every woman is by nature
a politician.’ ... Look at the influence exerted politically by various
women of whom history speaks.”
This Is the Key-Note of Success
For fifteen years the People’s Party, in season and out of season, has
preached “Equal Rights to All, Special Privileges to None.” It has
persistently demanded that government shall attend to public matters,
and that private business shall be conducted by individuals with the
least possible interference—and absolutely no favoritism—by government.
It has continually demanded public ownership and government operation
of railroads and other public utilities. It has urged the initiative,
referendum and the recall; a scientific money system; the abolition
of monopoly in every form. Millions of voters—as the Chicago election
clearly indicates—are in accord with the People’s Party; but heretofore
the voting habit, the “vote ’er straight” political insanity, has kept
them in political slavery.
Educate the Boys
Let us train up a new generation of voters—without diminishing our
efforts to break up old party habits—who will have the courage of
conviction and correct ideas regarding politics and economics. Let us
interest the mothers, so we can have the boys taught to cast their first
votes on the side of Justice. Habit will then keep them voting right.
Let Us Begin Now
Mr. Hastings’s book is a thought-provoker. It combines romance with
sociology and teaches while entertaining. With “The First American King”
and TOM WATSON’S MAGAZINE in another 100,000 homes, our first great step
will be taken toward overcoming plutocracy. With this end in view, we
have made arrangements whereby we can offer a dollar book, 350 pages, and
a dollar magazine one year, 128 pages monthly, both for only $1.50.
Tom Watson’s Magazine and The First American King $1.50
In order to treat all alike, the book will be sent postpaid to any
present subscriber of TOM WATSON’S MAGAZINE on receipt of 60 cents. No
person not a subscriber can buy “The First American King” of us for
a cent less than $1.00. If you have not already subscribed for the
magazine, send us $1.50 today for this attractive combination, and
expedite the work of building up the People’s Party of the future.
Address all orders to
TOM WATSON’S MAGAZINE, 121 West 42d Street, New York
* * * * *
_SOME POPULIST PRINCIPLES_
(1) Public Ownership of Public Utilities, including Railroads,
Telegraphs, Telephones, etc.
(2) Direct Legislation by the people: the Initiative, Referendum and
Recall.
(3) The election of all officers by the people.
(4) Graduated Income Tax and Inheritance Tax.
(5) National Currency created by the Government without the intervention
of National Banks; every dollar to be the equal of every other dollar.
(6) Postal Savings Banks; the eight-hour day, regulation of Child Labor
in Factories, Sweat-shops and similar avocations.
(7) Opposition to land monopoly.
(8) Removal of Tariff burdens from the necessaries of life which the poor
must have to live.
=Populism= seeks to put political power into the hands of the people and
to work out a system of =Equal and Exact Justice to all, without special
favors to any=.
=_TOM WATSON’S MAGAZINE_=
VOL. I JUNE, 1905 No. 4
_Editorials_
BY THOMAS E. WATSON
_Our Creed_
The People’s Party does not attempt the impossible, or seek the
unattainable.
Our young men do not dream dreams; our old men do not see visions. We
are wedded to practical reforms which have been tried in civilized
communities, and which have vindicated themselves by results.
We do not propose to re-create society, subvert law and order, confiscate
property, or substitute a new system of government for the old.
We do not want to tear down the house in order to repair it.
We do not hope to build a perfect state with imperfect human hands, but
we do intend to make the government as nearly perfect as possible, to the
end that it shall represent that conception of justice which deals with
all men alike, and allows to every child of Adam a fair chance in the
world which God created as a home for the human race.
* * * * *
We believe that the government should be clothed with all the attributes
of sovereignty; that _the government should govern_, and should _not
delegate to private citizens or corporations_ any part of its sovereign
power.
The creation of a national currency has always been an attribute of
sovereignty—of royalty.
In a system where the people rule the people succeed to the power of the
king; and that attribute of sovereignty which the king exercised and
did not delegate should be exercised by the people and should not be
delegated.
Therefore, the Populists, successors to the old Greenbackers, have always
clung to it as an article of faith that the Federal Government should
exercise its constitutional right to create a currency, and should
not delegate that power to national banks or to private citizens or
corporations.
The government should supply the country with a sufficient amount of
national money, every dollar of which should be equal to any other; every
dollar of which should be a full legal tender for all claims, public and
private, and _no dollar of which should be made redeemable in any other
dollar_.
* * * * *
We believe that those things which are essentially public in their nature
and their use should belong to the public, and should be equally enjoyed
by all.
Just as the navigable rivers are public to the beggar and the millionaire
alike, just as the Bay and the Gulf and the Harbor and the navigable
Lakes are the common property of the rich and the poor, the high and low,
the black and white, so we believe that the roads should be common ground
upon which every citizen should be free to pass upon terms of equality,
and that the iron highways of today, which were taken from the people
by the exercise of the right of Eminent Domain, should be restored to
the public by the same law of Eminent Domain, a fair compensation having
been paid, and the property operated hereafter for the benefit of all the
people.
So with the Telegraph and the Telephone and Express Companies.
In every city and town we believe that the municipality, which is a
part of the state’s sovereignty, should take over to itself those
public utilities which in their very nature are monopolies, and, just
compensation having been paid, that these utilities should be used for
the benefit of the people, to whom they belong.
* * * * *
We believe that the government should be supported by a system of
taxation in which each citizen will pay taxes _in proportion to his
ability to pay_.
We believe in a Tax on the Franchises enjoyed by private corporations.
We believe that the Income Tax would be the fairest of all taxes, because
it would take for the support of the government, not the property of
the citizen, but a portion of the income which the citizen derives from
that property, or from his individual exertions, and the tax would be
proportioned to the income.
That property or that salary could not be enjoyed without the protection
and the advantages which flow from government, and it is eminently
fair, where the government has protected me, or where it affords me
such opportunities, that I can receive a large income from any source
whatever, I should pay to the government, in return for its protection
and its advantages, a fair share of that which I could not have made
without that protection and those advantages.
Under our present system a man like John D. Rockefeller pays no more
Tariff tax when he buys a hat than a doctor or lawyer or preacher pays
when he buys a hat. So with the shoes, the clothes, the crockery on the
table, the furniture in the house. Many a citizen whose income does not
amount to ten thousand dollars per year pays fully as much Tariff tax in
the purchasing of necessary articles of clothing, furniture and food as
John D. Rockefeller pays, whose income is counted monthly by the millions
of dollars.
The same thing is true of Carnegie, Morgan, Hill, Harriman, Gould,
Cassatt, Vanderbilt. Many a farmer whose income from his farm may not do
more than give his family an actual support, after the operating expenses
are paid, contributes annually a greater sum in Tariff tax to the Federal
Government than is paid by the fabulously wealthy beneficiaries of class
legislation.
* * * * *
It has been said that the People’s Party dodges the Tariff issue. This is
not true.
One of our earliest platforms, which has been repeatedly reindorsed,
declares:
“_We demand the removal of the Tariff tax from the necessaries of life
which the poor must have to live._”
This is precisely the principle announced by Thomas Jefferson, who
declared that the taxes should be so laid that the luxuries of life would
bear the burden of government, and that his ideal was a system in which
the poor would be entirely relieved from the crushing weight of taxation.
Furthermore, we have said that legislation should not be so framed as to
build up one business at the expense of another.
If the People’s Party platform were enacted into law, _there could be no
such thing as a Trust in the United States_.
In order that the people should become the victims of such tyranny as
that exercised by the Trusts two things are necessary: _Foreign relief
must be made impossible, and domestic relief made impracticable_.
The Tariff wall keeps the foreigner from interfering; the railroads and
the national banks supporting the Trusts make it impossible for domestic
dissatisfaction to assert itself effectively.
_If the people should put upon the free list those articles which are
made the subject of the Trusts, the foreigner could at once invade the
market, and destroy the monopoly upon which the Trust is based._
If the Populist principles of finance and of transportation should be
carried into effect, the Government abolishing national banks and private
ownership of transportation lines, _the rebate would be impossible,
discriminations would cease, equality would prevail, and there would be
no collusion between the national banks and the railroads by which Trusts
are made invincible as they are now invincible_.
* * * * *
We believe in direct Legislation—putting the power of making laws and
choosing rulers back into the hands of those to whom it belongs—and the
election of all officers by the people.
The people should not be made to await the pleasure of the Legislature
or of Congress. They should not be kept in ignorance of what the law is
until legislative acts become known through the newspapers. There should
be in every case the right to initiate those laws which they want, and to
veto, through the Referendum, any law which they do not like.
When an officer whom they have elected shows by any vote or act that he
is not the man they took him to be, they should not have to wait till the
expiration of his term to get a better man. They should have the right to
recall the officer the moment he betrays his trust.
* * * * *
We believe in the eight-hour day for labor in Government works, in
factories, workshops and mines.
We believe in the regulation of child labor in factories, workshops and
mines, to the end that children of tender age shall not be made to slave
out their lives in order that corporations shall have cheap labor and
large dividends.
Saturn, the old fable tells us, devoured his own children: Christian
civilization does the same thing.
As long as we permit children of ten and twelve years to labor from eight
to fourteen hours per day in our mills and workshops modern civilization
is another Saturn. _We are devouring our own children._
* * * * *
We believe that the land, the common heritage of all the people, should
not be monopolized for speculative purposes, or by alien ownership, but
that legislation should be so shaped as to encourage to its full extent
the right of every man born into this world to till the soil and make a
living out of it.
And one of the principal reasons why we favor a graduated income tax,
which increases by geometrical progression as the income increases, is
that it automatically keeps the wealth of the country in a constant sort
of redistribution, and acts as a check upon that excessive accumulation
which is recognized by all intelligent thinkers as one of the most
serious perils and intolerable evils of our present era of class
legislation.
These are the most important articles of our faith. It is for these
principles that we have struggled ever since 1891—with never a doubt that
they were sound, that they would constantly gain converts, _that they
would ultimately win_.
When I founded the _People’s Party Paper_ in Atlanta, Ga., in 1891 (which
paper lived and toiled for these principles until the fusion movement of
1896 killed it, as it killed twelve hundred other Populist papers), I
announced the same purpose which I announced in the prospectus of this
magazine.
My faith was as firm in 1891 as it is today, and I had as little doubt
then as I have now that Populism is just as sure to triumph as the sun is
to continue to warm the world.
The reforms will be effected _because the country needs them_. It cannot
stand much more of the present system. It will not accept Socialism.
Occupying the middle ground of radical, but practical reform, Populism is
inevitable.
_National Politics and Policies_
There is a saying that the difference between a wise man and a fool is
that the wise man never makes the same mistake twice, while the fool
continues to make it without limit.
It is of supreme importance that those who will act as political leaders
during the next four years should think clearly in order that they may
act wisely.
We have not, as yet, discovered any brighter lamp with which to guide our
footsteps than that which Patrick Henry named the Lamp of Experience.
If I felt that our national leaders were about to repeat a disastrous
mistake and adopt a policy which seems the continuance of the reign of
class legislation and special privilege, I should be false to my own
sense of duty if I did not at this early day point out that error and
warn the Jeffersonians against it.
I say Jeffersonians because, after all is said and done, there are but
two great differences of political thought in the United States—never
have been but two; never will be but two.
On the one hand are those who believe that legislation should be dictated
by the interest of the few; that the powers and the benefits of good
government should be monopolized by the few; that the blessings and the
opportunities of life should be the heritage of the few; that wealth and
privilege and national initiative should perpetually be the legacy of the
few.
On the other hand is the Jeffersonian idea that the human family are all
alike the children of God; that the earth and all it contains was created
for the benefit of this human family, and that any system of law and
government which gathers into the hands of the few an unjust proportion
of the common estate, to the exclusion of the vast majority, is an
infamous invasion of the natural rights of man.
Now, what is it that endangers the cause of the Jeffersonians?
What is it that seems to me to be so certain to insure the continuance of
the rule of the few over the many?
It is the continued existence of the political alignment of the great
mass of the people in two political parties, each of which, in its heart
of hearts, is wedded to the rule of the few.
Neither one of these parties wants any material change in our present
system of legislation or of administration.
Both of them are absolutely dominated by the same interests.
In the ranks of each of these parties are found the powerful railroad
kings, the irresistible trusts, the indispensable national banks, the
vastly influential insurance companies.
As a matter of fact, nearly every board of management of every predatory
corporation against which the people are rising in revolt is made up half
and half of Democrats and Republicans, in order that, no matter which
party wins at the polls, the corporation will have influence at court.
It is so clear to me that the only possible hope for the people is to
drive these two parties together while the people unite under another
standard.
In vain does Judge Parker talk about the difference between his Democracy
and the Republicanism of Mr. Roosevelt. During the campaign he was unable
to state any difference, and there is, in fact, no difference.
Between Belmont’s ideas of government and those of Mark Hanna there is
not the slightest difference.
Between the Democratic corporation and the Republican corporation it is
absurd to claim that there is any difference.
Between Democratic manufacturers and Republican manufacturers no human
being of intelligence will expect any difference or find any.
In other words, the millionaire beneficiaries of class legislation
control both of the old parties, and the battle which they wage year
after year, decade after decade, is a mere sham battle. The strategy of
the corporations consists in keeping the people divided in order that the
corporations may rule.
Believing this to be true, I am painfully impressed with the fact that
Mr. Bryan is making a huge mistake.
The pity of it is, he has already made that mistake twice, and is now
making it for the third time.
What is the mistake?
It consists of the effort to get radical reform out of a party which has
always been dominated and always will be dominated by conservatives. When
the currency was contracted just after the Civil War and ruin brought
upon so many thousands of people in this country, it took the joint
action of both the old parties to do it.
When the revenue taxes were taken off railroads, manufactures, insurance
companies, bank checks and express companies, soon after the close of the
Civil War, it took the joint action of both the old parties to do it.
When the Income Tax was lifted from the burdened shoulders of the rich,
it took the joint action of both the old parties to do it.
When Silver was struck down and the Gold Standard forced upon us, it took
the joint action of both the old parties to do it.
When our National Bank System was enthroned, and that terribly unjust
system was chartered to prey upon the people, it required the joint
action of both the old parties to do it.
When Congress, over the protest of Thaddeus Stevens and others, obeyed
the command of the Rothschilds (delivered at Washington personally by
August Belmont, the father of the present Boss of the Democratic Party),
and declared by legislative enactment that the banks should be paid in
gold while the soldier at the front should be paid in greenbacks, it
required the joint action of both the old parties to do it.
There has never been a necessary act of Congress—necessary to the rule
of the few, necessary to carry out the Hamiltonian ideal—that did not
rest for support one foot on the Republican Party and the other on the
Democratic Party.
The man who does not know this to be true is unfamiliar with official
records.
The time has been when Mr. Bryan held the same opinions which I am
expressing now. The time has been when he declared, in speech and
writing, that there was no hope for reform in the Democratic Party.
In 1896 Mr. Bryan, in the Omaha _World-Herald_, editorially asked:
“_Can a National Convention harmonize the discordant elements of the
Democratic Party? Impossible._
“Suppose the advocates of bimetallism control the National Convention
and nominate a Free Silver Democrat upon a free coinage platform, will
Cleveland, Carlisle, Olney, Morton, _et al._ support the ticket? Of
course not. They say that the free coinage of silver means individual
dishonesty, commercial disaster and national dishonor, and if they
believe what they say they ought not to support the ticket, because
their duty to their country is higher than their duty to their party
organization. If, on the other hand, the convention nominates a Gold
Standard Democrat on a platform indorsing the gold standard, gold bonds
and national bank currency, should the nominee be supported by those who
believe the gold standard to be a conspiracy of the capitalistic classes
against the producers of wealth—a crime against mankind? Who says they
should?
“If to continue Mr. Cleveland’s financial policy is to declare war
against the common people, what friend of the common people would be
willing to enlist in such a warfare, even at the command of his party?
“The Democratic Party cannot serve God and Mammon; it cannot serve
plutocracy and at the same time defend the rights of the masses.
“If it yields to the plutocracy it ought to lose, and it will lose, the
support of the masses; if it espouses the cause of the people, it cannot
expect either votes or contributions from the capitalistic classes and
from the great corporations.”
In pursuance of this very correct line of reasoning, Mr. Bryan resolutely
declared that if the Democratic Party adopted the gold standard, “_I
promise you that I will go out and serve my country and my God under some
other name, even if I must go alone._”
Again Mr. Bryan said, in his book called “The First Battle,” Chapter III,
page 124, “In that speech I took the position which I have announced
since on several occasions, namely, that I would not support for the
Presidency an advocate of the gold standard.”
Again Mr. Bryan said: “Does the individual member of a party at all times
reserve the right to vote against the nominee of a party, and to abandon
his party entirely whenever in his judgment his duty to his country
requires it? He may abandon the party temporarily, as, for instance,
when an unfit candidate is nominated, or the voter may abandon his party
permanently, either when he himself changes his opinion upon a paramount
public question or when his party changes its position.”
Now let the reader compare the present attitude of Mr. Bryan with the
political ethics expounded by him in his book.
He was then the idol of the radicals; he was then the Tribune of the
People.
He was the strong and stalwart foe of every plutocrat, every Wall Street
interest, every beneficiary of class legislation.
The people hailed him with an enthusiasm which had not been known since
the days of Henry Clay. So great was their faith in him that he swept
into his movement in 1896 the Free Silver organization and the great bulk
of the Populist Party.
Who is it that cannot see how loftily he held his flag in those days? Who
is it that does not realize how sadly it droops today?
From the noble stand of 1893 and 1896, what a falling off is there!
Boldly he declared that he would never support for the Presidency an
advocate of the gold standard. Yet, when Judge Parker slapped his face
in public with the Gold Telegram of 1904, the dauntless Bryan turned the
other cheek, like a very meek Christian indeed.
He had said that a Democrat might bolt his party _temporarily_ upon the
nomination of an unfit candidate; he had said that Judge Parker was an
unfit candidate, but he did not bolt the nomination, even _temporarily_.
He had said that the voter might abandon his party _permanently_ when
that party changed its position upon a paramount public question; yet
when the Democratic Party, with extraordinary suddenness, changed its
position upon more than one paramount question in 1904, Mr. Bryan did not
bolt his party _permanently_.
He had said that if the Democrats took up the Republican financial
policy, which meant the slavery of the debtors of this country and the
impoverishment of the people, he would go out and serve his country and
his God under some other name, even if he had to go alone. Yet when his
party did come over to the Republican financial policy, and came by
telegraph at that, _Mr. Bryan did not go out to serve either his country
or his God under some other name_.
He had said to his brother Democrats: “If you are ready to go down
on your knees and apologize for what you have said” (abuse of the
Republicans and the gold standard), “you will go without me.”
Yet when the Democratic Party, at the St. Louis Convention in 1904, went
down on its knees, in effect, to apologize for the abuse which they had
heaped upon the Republicans for eight years, they did not go without Mr.
Bryan. The knees of Mr. Bryan hit the floor in timely cadence with the
knees of all the others, and when he filed out of the convention hall the
dust was there to show it just as it was there to show it on the knees of
all the others.
Bryan himself asked the question in 1896: “Can a National Convention
harmonize the discordant elements of the Democratic Party?” He answered
his own question in the comprehensive word, “_Impossible_.”
The event of the campaign of 1896 showed that he was right, for the
Cleveland-Carlisle-Belmont element knifed him.
In the campaign of 1900 they knifed him again. In the campaign of 1904,
when the convention nominated a gold standard Democrat on a platform
indorsing the gold standard, gold bonds and the gold bank currency,
the people refused to support the sell-out of the National Democratic
Party to Wall Street, just as Mr. Bryan, in 1896, prophesied that they
would, in spite of the fact that the prophet of 1896 had become the gold
standard nominee’s most earnest advocate in the campaign of 1904.
In other words, the people had become so inoculated with the true gospel
of Bryan, the Tribune of 1893 and 1896, that they refused to follow the
change of heart and the change of conduct which came over Bryan, the
Parkerite of 1904.
Will not Mr. Bryan reflect upon this and draw a lesson from it? He
himself has declared that he is attempting the impossible in trying to
harmonize the discordant elements of the Democratic Party.
What is the real statesmanship demanded at this time?
That those who believe in Jeffersonian ideals, whether they are now
in the Republican, Democratic, Populist or Socialist parties, should
come together without prejudice for party names, and should unite in
the common cause of driving from power the beneficiaries of class
legislation, no matter whether those beneficiaries are called Democrats
or Republicans.
Let the Belmonts and Morgans get together in the same party so that we
can fight them both at the same time.
As long as we cling to party differences and party names our efforts will
come to naught, as they did in 1896, 1900 and 1904.
Mr. Bryan wants the reform movement to stop and wait for him, while for
four years he struggles to get the better of the plutocratic element of
his own party. If they were able to wrest control from him when he had so
much more advantage than he has now, how can we expect him to take that
control from their strong hands?
But, suppose he does succeed in defeating the Belmont-Cleveland element
in the convention of 1908, does he not know that they will fulfil his
prediction again and knife him as they have done twice already?
On the other hand, suppose they conquer him in 1908 as they did in 1904,
will he not submit tamely to kiss the hand that smote him as he did in
the last convention? Most assuredly he will.
He lost his opportunity to fly the flag of revolt when he failed to
resent the Gold Telegram of 1904. That opportunity passed, never to
return.
Absolutely the only hope of radical reform lies in a straight-out,
aggressive and fearless _fight upon both the old parties_, which in turn
have had control of the Government, and which have played into each
other’s hands in forging the chains of class legislation which now bind
and burden the Common People.
_Is It Paul Jones’s Body?_
Have they found the body of John Paul Jones?
The experts say that they have.
To the legal mind, the fact that _experts_ had to be called in to pass
upon the question of identity is sufficient to arouse suspicion and
provoke investigation.
As stated in a former number, I was certain they would find Paul Jones—in
their minds—for that was what they were looking for.
Whenever, for instance, the medical expert starts out to find arsenic in
the human stomach, arsenic generally shows up all right enough.
In like manner French experts were called in to identify a certain corpse
as that of Paul Jones, and, after the most elaborate and beautifully
regular formalities, they solemnly pronounced the verdict which they knew
was expected and which they were predisposed to find.
“This is Paul Jones, isn’t it?” asks General Porter, most suavely, not to
say persuasively.
How could the politest experts of the politest people on earth say nay?
The case was pitiful.
The search for Paul Jones’s body had reached a crisis. Only four leaden
coffins had been found in the old graveyard, and one of these _had_ to be
Paul Jones, because he had been buried in such a coffin, and the other
three bore name-plates which showed they could not be his.
The fourth bore no name-plate; therefore it _must_ be Jones’s coffin.
The necessity of the situation required it.
Consequently, polite French experts measure, compare, incubate, decide
and bring in the verdict desired.
Looking at the matter as a lawyer, I should say that there is not
sufficient legal evidence offered, as yet, to establish the identity of
the dead body.
The cemetery in which Commodore Paul Jones was buried was closed by law
in 1793.
_A canal was afterward cut through it._
The great sea-fighter was buried, as Napoleon was, in uniform.
In the Life of him—“Great Commanders’ Series”—by Cyrus Townsend Brady,
the statement is made that _Paul Jones was buried in the American
uniform_, and that _a sword and other articles were placed in the coffin_.
The body which General Porter has found was _not_ clad in uniform.
There was no sword, or other article, found in the coffin.
Commodore Jones died of dropsy, which had swollen his body to such an
extent that he could not button his waistcoat.
Yet the French experts declare that all the measurements tally exactly
with those of the living Jones.
* * * * *
_Should They Do So?_
Awful changes take place after death, and they are greater with some than
with others.
Should the measurements of a corpse which had been entombed more than
a hundred years correspond _exactly_ with those of the same body when
alive?
Most biographers put the _height_ of Admiral Jones at “about five feet
and eight inches.”
Won’t you find a greater number of men—in France especially—whose height
is “about five feet eight inches” than you’ll find at any other figure?
And will you not find more _corpses_ of about that length?
Yet in these measurements consists the whole of the testimony which has
been offered to the American people to convince them that the body of
Paul Jones is at last to come home.
Unless the matter of the uniform and the sword be cleared up, it is
impossible to accept the conclusion arrived at by the experts.
This corpse may be, as already stated, a good enough Jones for that
$35,000, but it has not yet been shown to be John Paul Jones, the naval
hero of our War of Independence.
_Is the Black Man Superior to the White?_
With statistics one can prove many things—the conclusion arrived at
depending, in all cases, considerably upon the man behind the figures.
This time the man behind the figures is Doctor Booker Washington—may his
shadow never grow less!
In the course of a recent lecture, the learned Doctor laid down the
proposition that the black man is superior to the white, and he proved
it—proved it by statistics.
He said that there is 85 per cent. of illiteracy among the Spaniards,
while there is only 54 per cent. of illiteracy among the negroes;
therefore the negroes are clearly more advanced in civilization than the
Spaniards.
Poor old Spain!
The learned Doctor further demonstrated that there is 65 per cent. of
illiteracy among the Italians; therefore the negroes are far ahead
of Italy. Russian illiteracy being 70 per cent. the black man takes
precedence of the land of Peter the Great, Skobelef, Gorky, Turgenef and
Tolstoy. South America, having an illiteracy of 80 per cent., falls far
to the rear of the negro—and Castro must add this additional kick to the
many he has already received from North America.
Proud of his statistics, Doctor Booker Washington exclaims: “_The negro
race has developed more rapidly in the thirty years of its freedom than
the Latin race has in one thousand years of freedom._”
That’s a bold statement, Doctor.
To say nothing of its accuracy, may it not have been an unwise thing
for you to claim that the black man has risen during thirty years more
rapidly in the scale of civilization than the whites have risen in a
thousand?
True, you confine yourself to the Italians, the Spaniards, the Russians
and the South Americans, but when you say the darkest of all the colored
races is superior to that great section of the white race named by you,
does it not occur to you that you may create a feeling of resentment
among _all_ the whites?
You have thousands of true friends throughout the entire country—white
men who have most generously helped you in your work, helped you
with money, with moral support and with a certain amount of social
recognition. Your admirers refer to you as a great man. They allude to
your work as a great work. The South helps you with appropriations, just
as the North helps you with donations. We want to see you succeed in
building up your race.
But have you a single white friend who will indorse your statement
that the black race is so superior to the whites that it can do in one
generation what it required the whites a thousand years to do?
Do you imagine that your friends, President Roosevelt, Mr. Carnegie, Dr.
Hart, Bishop Potter, and others, will like you better when they hear you
putting forth a claim to race superiority? Doctor, you have overshot the
mark.
_Whenever the North wakes up to the fact that you are teaching the blacks
that they are superior to the whites, you are going to feel the east
wind._
What do you mean by racial development, Doctor?
Apparently your standard of measurement is illiteracy. That is to say, if
a greater number of negroes than of Spaniards can read, then the negro
has achieved a higher plane in civilization.
Is that your idea? Does the ability to read constitute race development?
According to that, a million negro children attend school twelve months
and become “civilized” because they have learned to spell “Baker” and to
read “Mary had a little lamb.”
Does it not strike you, Doctor, that such a measure might be delusive?
In making up your tables of illiteracy, why didn’t you include _all the
negroes_, as you included _all_ the Italians, _all_ the Spaniards, _all_
the Russians?
Why leave out your home folks in Africa, Doctor?
Why omit Santo Domingo and Haiti?
If you will number _all_ the negroes, Doctor, your percentage of
illiteracy _among the blacks_ may run up among the nineties, and knock
your calculation into a cocked hat.
* * * * *
In the West Indies God poured His blessings with lavish hand upon the
island of Haiti. The French went there and built up a civilization. The
Revolution of 1789 freed the negroes who were held in slavery by the
whites, and civil war soon followed.
The blacks outnumbered the whites and the climate was their ally. Yellow
fever did for them what frost did for the Russians when Napoleon struck
at their liberties. They achieved freedom, and they have had it, not for
thirty years, but for a hundred years.
_What have your people done with their freedom in Santo Domingo,
Doctor?_ Back, back into barbarism, voodooism, human sacrifice, social
and political anarchy they have plunged; and their history is one long
blood-stained record of backsliding from the standard which the French
had already established. Even now your black brethren in Santo Domingo
are beseeching the white man of the United States to do that which they
are unable to do—administer national affairs. In self-defense this
Government may have to treat Santo Domingo as Great Britain treats
Jamaica, both governments acting upon the demonstrated fact that the
blacks, _left to themselves_, are incapable of self-government and race
development.
* * * * *
But before entering into a comparison of racial progress, Doctor, it
is in order to note the fact that you accredit the negro with only
thirty years of freedom. Why, Doctor, _the negro race, as a race, has
enjoyed just as long a period of freedom as the Celts, the Latins, the
Anglo-Saxons and the Slavs_.
The black race in Africa was as free as the Indian race in North America.
During the thousand years in which the whites were painfully creating
the civilization which _you_ now enjoy, _your_ race, in its native home,
was doing pretty much the same things which the red race was doing in
North America. Your people were running about in the woods, naked, eating
raw meat, eternally at war—tribe with tribe—steeped in ignorance, vice
and superstition, with an occasional lapse into human sacrifice and
cannibalism.
_Your race, as a race, is free now in Africa, as it has been since the
dawn of history:—where is the civilization which it worked out for
itself?_ It does not exist; it never did exist.
The negro has been absolutely unable to develop as a race when left to
himself. Nowhere, at any time, has he developed a system of agriculture,
or commerce, or manufactures, made headway in mining or engineering, or
conceived a system of finance. Never has he produced a system of laws,
institutions of state, religious organization, or worked out a political
ideal. Never has he created a literature, or developed original capacity
for the fine arts. His foot has never even crossed the threshold of the
world of creative painting, sculpture, music, architecture Into the
realms of science, in the domain of original thought, in the higher
reaches of mental power where the human mind grapples with vast problems,
material and spiritual, the problems of time and eternity, the negro has
never entered. No word has ever fallen from his lips that was not the
echo of what some white man had already said. He has sometimes _put his
foot in the white man’s track_, but that is the best he has ever done.
* * * * *
Compare this imitative race with the great Latin stock—a stock from
which sprang Rienzi and Garibaldi, Cavour and Napoleon, Da Vinci and
Galileo, Savonarola and Leo the Tenth, Titian and Bellini, Raphael and
Michelangelo.
The Latin race, whether in Spain, Italy or South America, has developed
systems of agriculture, finance, commerce, manufactures, education,
religion, government—has created literature, laws and institutions of
state, has evidenced capacity in science and art.
* * * * *
The negroes superior to the Latins?
Heavens above!
During the thousand years which Doctor Washington says that the Latins
have done less than the negroes have done in thirty, Spain rose into
world-power, dominated the European Continent, shook England’s throne to
its base, broke the Turkish scimiter in the great sea-fight of Lepanto,
evolved a splendid literature, reached the highest development in the
Fine Arts, launched Columbus upon his voyage into unknown seas to test
the suggestion of another Latin—Toscanelli—and thus took the first daring
step in that marvelous chapter of Discovery whose sober facts are grander
and stranger than Romance.
Has the learned Doctor ever studied the history of Mexico—the Latin
country south of us?
Since a foreign yoke was thrown off and Mexico “found herself,” what
country has made nobler progress?
The negro in Santo Domingo has had a hundred years of freedom; Mexico
scarce half so many; _yet compare the Mexico of today with the Santo
Domingo of today._ Left to themselves, the Latins of Mexico have built up
a magnificent civilization.
Left to themselves, the negroes of Santo Domingo have destroyed what the
French had already built.
_In Mexico conditions get better, year after year._
_In Santo Domingo conditions grow worse, year after year._
If the learned Doctor wants to make a study in contrasts, let him first
read “Where Black Rules White,” by Hesketh Prichard, and then read “The
Awakening of a Nation,” by Charles F. Lummis, and I venture to say that
some of his cocky self-complacency as to the superiority of the negroes
over the whites will ooze out of him.
* * * * *
As to Italy—can it be that Italy has done less in a thousand years than
the negroes have done in thirty?
The greatest man that ever lived was of Italian extraction. Taine says
that Napoleon was a true Italian in character and intellect. If that
be true, then _the two greatest men the world ever saw_ were Latins.
Wherever the civilized man lives today his environment, his thoughts, his
ideals, his achievements are more or less influenced by the life and work
of Cæsar and Napoleon.
If any two men may be said to have created the material modern world
those two Latins did it.
If modern Europe is any one man, it is Napoleon. His laws,
schools—social, political, financial, educational institutions—have wrung
from rulers ever since the homage of imitation.
In literature how illustrious is Italy?
It was Petrarch who was “the Columbus of a new spiritual atmosphere, the
discoverer of modern culture.”
It was he who broke away from monkish medievalism, created the humanistic
impulse, treated “man as a rational being apart from theological
determination,” modernizing literature.
The “short story” writers of fiction—Edgar Poe, Guy de Maupassant and
Kipling—had their teacher in Boccaccio and his _novella_.
Modern history traces its methods, its spirit and its form to Villani,
Guicciardini, and that wonderful type of Latin genius, Machiavelli.
_The whole world goes to school to the Latins!_
No painter hopes to excel Correggio, Paul Veronese, Antonio Allegro,
Tintoretto, Velasquez, Murillo. No sculptor expects to eclipse Niccola
Pisano, Orvieto, Orcagna or Luca della Robbia.
No worker in gold, silver and bronze believes he can surpass Ghiberti,
Cellini and Donatello.
Architects the world over despair of rivaling Alberti, Bramante, Giulo
Romano, Palladio.
These masters were masters to their own generation, four and five hundred
years ago; they have been masters ever since; they are masters still.
Wherever civilization extends its frontiers these deathless Latins are
in the van—teaching what Truth and Beauty are, refining the thoughts,
elevating the ideals, improving the methods, inspiring the efforts of man.
* * * * *
_The negroes have done more than this, and in thirty years?_
You had forgotten the Renaissance, hadn’t you, Doctor?
Asia was decaying, Africa was in its normal state of savagery, Europe lay
torpid under the weight of ignorance and superstition. Where learning
existed at all its spirit was dull, its form heavy, its progress fettered
by ancient canons and cumbrous vestments.
Suddenly the Angel of Light—her face a radiance, her presence an
inspiration—puts a silver trumpet to her lips and blows, blows, till all
the world of white men hears the thrilling notes.
And lo! there is a resurrection! What was best in the learning of the
past becomes young again, and ministers to the minds of men.
Literature springs to life, throws off antiquated dress, and takes
its graceful modern form. The fine arts flourish as never before; the
canvas, the marble, the precious metal, feel the subtle touch of the
eager artist, and give birth to beauty which is immortal. The heavy
prison-castle of the Frank, the Goth, the Norman, the Anglo-Saxon,
retires abashed before the elegant, airy, poetic palace of the
Renaissance.
Nor does the revival of learning limit itself to literature,
architecture, painting, sculpture. It extends to law, to commerce, to
agriculture, to religion, to education.
Whence came the Renaissance, Doctor Washington? Whence came that mighty
revival of intellectual splendor which still influences the world? From
the Latin race, which you affect to despise. From these Italians whom you
say are so inferior in development to the negro.
Italy led the modern world in almost everything which we call
civilization—she is today one of the world’s most inspiring teachers,
nor will her power for good be gone till the Christian religion is
repudiated, the voice of music hushed, the wand of literature broken, the
force of law defied, the witchery of art lost to the minds, the hearts
and the souls of men.
And yet Doctor Washington asserts, to one audience after another,
that those glorious achievements of the Latins, the Italians, these
imperishable and ever potent achievements of a thousand years, are
exceeded by what the negroes have done in thirty years!
From the Latin England took her religious organization, as Germany and
Austria and France had done. Through the Latin the classic literature of
Greece and earlier Rome came into the modern world—an eternal debt which
we owe mainly to Petrarch.
The Bourbon kings imported from Italy the architects, painters,
sculptors, landscape gardeners, who laid upon uncouth feudal France the
rich mantle of Italian beauty.
It was the Latin who taught modern Europe how to farm, how to irrigate,
how to engrave, how to make paper from rags, how to bridge the rivers,
how to pave the streets, how to make canals.
Some of Shakespeare’s plays are elaborations and dramatizations of
Italian _novellas_. Chaucer, the father of English poetry, frankly copied
from the Italian model.
Milton had Dante for pioneer, Spenser had Ariosto, and Byron’s best work
is in the Italian form.
I presume, Doctor, that at this season of the year you are copying the
style of the white man, and that you are wearing a straw hat.
Well, the Latins taught us how to make straw hats.
I presume that you recognize the value of _glass_—one of whose hundreds
of uses is to show you how you look.
Well, the Latin taught us how to make glass.
I presume you realize how much the modern world, during the last thousand
years, has been indebted to the modern ship.
Well, the Latin taught the Anglo-Saxon how to build modern ships.
I presume you appreciate good rice, Doctor.
Well, the seed of the heavy upland rice which we have in this
country was brought out of Italy in the pockets of Thomas
Jefferson—gentleman-smuggler in that instance.
I presume you will wear pink silk undergarments this season as usual,
won’t you, Doctor?
Well, the Latin taught modern Europe how to make and use silk.
And remember that the Latin took the clumsy musical instruments of the
ancient world and fashioned them into the perfect forms of the present
time; and that the Italians, whom you despise, had created the violin
while your race was “rattling the bones” and gradually climbing toward
the “cakewalk.”
* * * * *
What has the negro in these United States been doing for the last thirty
years, Doctor?
_Copying the white man._ That’s all.
He has simply been imitating, as best he could, the dress, the talk, the
manners, the methods, the work of the whites.
The Latin whites _originated_ a civilization; the negroes are _copying_
one. Is there no difference between the higher genius which conceives and
the lower talent which copies?
It required the genius of Raphael to conceive and paint “The
Transfiguration.” Any ordinary artist can make a fair copy of it. But
does anyone compare the copyist with the original artist? It required
the genius of Sangallo and Michelangelo to rear St. Peter’s at Rome: any
well-educated architect of today might rear its duplicate. But would that
make the modern architect equal to the two Italian masters?
Ten thousand negro men and women may be able to sit down at the piano and
render Verdi’s “Il Trovatore,” but does that entitle the negroes to class
themselves with the Italian composer?
My thought is this—the negro, assisted in every possible way by the
whites, is copying the ways and learning the arts of the white man; _but
the fact that he can learn to read the white man’s book does not make
him the equal of the white race which produced the book._ The fact that
he may learn from us how to practice law or medicine does not make him
equal to the white race which _created_ the code of laws and the science
of medicine. It may have required a thousand years _for us to learn_ that
which we can _teach him in one year_, but the point is that the negro,
in his native home, had just as much time and opportunity to evolve a
civilization as we had, AND HE DID NOT DO IT.
Let me repeat to you, Doctor, the unvarnished truth—for it may do you
good:
The advance made by your race in America is _the reflection_ of the white
man’s civilization. Just that and nothing more. The negro lives in the
light of the white man’s civilization and _reflects a part of that light_.
He imitates an example kept before his eyes; copies models never out of
his sight; echoes the words the white man utters; patterns after the
manners and the methods of the whites around him, and thus _reflects_
our civilization.
He has originated nothing, and if the copy, the pattern, the example were
taken away he would fall back as he did in Haiti.
He has never either evolved nor sustained a civilization of his own.
Fortunately for the _Afro-American_, he finds himself better situated
than his brethren elsewhere. In Africa and Haiti _they_ have to scuffle
_for themselves_. Result—barbarism.
In America _he_ swells the ranks of civilization’s advancing army, and he
_has_ to go forward. We not only support him with aid of all sorts, we
not only give him daily precept and example, but we _compel_ him to live
a better life than he would live in Africa and Haiti. This compulsion
is of two kinds, the fear of punishment and the hope of reward—thus
enlisting two of the most powerful passions of the human being.
It should be significant to Doctor Washington that the only portion of
his race which has ever made any development is that which has the vast
advantage of being sustained, encouraged, taught, led and _coerced_ by
the whites among whom they live.
Not long ago a negro preacher whose self-appreciation was as great as
that of Doctor Washington went out to Liberia to subdue the heathen, in
the home of the negro race.
The heathen were not subdued, but the preacher was. He threw off his
store clothes, gave a whoop, gathered up an armful of wives and broke for
the woods; the “Call of the Wild” was too much for his newly soldered
civilization.
Now, I don’t mean to say that Doctor Washington would relapse,
under similar circumstances; but when I hear him call his new race
_Afro-Americans_ and listen while he soberly tells them that _they are
superior to the whites_, I beg that he will remember his kin across the
sea, his brethren in Santo Domingo, the decadents of Liberia, and the
tens of thousands of his race here in this country who devoutly believe
in witch doctors, in ghosts, in the conjure bag, and in the power of one
negro to undo another by the mysterious but invincible “Trick.”
Remember this, Doctor, education is a good thing, but _it never did, and
never will, alter the essential character of a man or a race_.
Of course, Doctor, if you think your race the equal of ours, you have the
right to say it. It’s a free country, you know.
But, really, you ought not to “crowd the monkey” by putting in a claim
for superiority.
_Such a claim does your race no good._
It _may_ do them harm. It may cultivate a spirit of truculent
self-assertion which even your warmest admirers, North and South, might
find it hard to tolerate.
In the “History of Civilization,” Buckle says:
“Above all this, there is a far higher movement; and as the tide rolls
on, now advancing, now receding, there is, amid its endless fluctuations,
one thing, and one alone, which endures forever. The actions of bad men
produce only temporary evil, the actions of good men only temporary good;
and eventually the good and the evil altogether subside, are neutralized
by subsequent generations, absorbed by the incessant movement of future
ages. But the discoveries of great men never leave us; they are immortal,
they contain those eternal truths which survive the shock of empires,
outlive the struggle of rival creeds and witness the decay of successive
religions. All _these_ have their different measures and their different
standards; one set of opinions for one age, another set for another.
_They_ pass away like a dream; they are as a fabric of a vision, which
leaves not a rack behind. _The discoveries of genius alone remain_: it
is to _them_ we owe all that we now have, _they_ are for all ages and
for all times; never young, and never old, _they_ bear the seeds of
their own life, they flow on in a perennial and undying stream; _they_
are essentially cumulative, and giving birth to the additions which they
subsequently receive, _they thus influence the most distant posterity,
and after the lapse of centuries produce more effect than they were able
to do even at the moment of their promulgation._”
Noble lines!
And amid these “discoveries of genius” to which “we owe all that we now
have,” bearing the seeds of intellectual life and improvement to “the
most distant posterity” what treasures are richer than those which the
Latin brings?
Architecture, Agriculture, Manufactures, Commerce, Civil Engineering,
Finance, Legislation, Religious Organization, Sculpture, Painting, Music,
Literature, Science, the wedding of the Fine Arts to Religion—in each and
every one of these fields _his_ genius has been creative and masterful.
_Upon our civilization the Latin has imposed, as an everlasting blessing,
an imperishable Public Debt._
What does civilization owe to the negro?
Nothing!
_Nothing!!_
NOTHING!!!
_Amending the Constitution_
I am not one of those who believe that the Constitution of the United
States is a flawless piece of workmanship.
It was not so considered by those who made it nor by those who adopted
it. It never would have been ratified had it not been that amendments
were promised and misrepresentation made as to the character of the
instrument.
There has been a great deal of discussion recently about making a new
Constitution or amending the old.
When the Constitution was adopted _a government was created_ of which the
Constitution is the supreme law, and _this cannot be changed except in
the manner prescribed in the instrument itself_.
If two-thirds of the states composing the Union, acting through their
legislatures, shall apply to Congress for “a Constitutional convention
for proposing amendments,” and these amendments should be ratified by
three-fourths of the states, then a practically new Constitution might be
framed; but in no other legal way could the people alter the fundamental
law.
Congress can take the initiative by a vote of two-thirds of both Houses,
and can propose amendments which, if adopted by three-fourths of the
states, would become a part of the Constitution; but it must occur to all
that this method of effecting reform is slow and cumbrous to the last
degree.
_The framers of the Constitution meant that it should be so._
In a very able article in the last number of this magazine Mr. Frederick
Upham Adams discusses the necessity for amendments to the Constitution.
He cites four changes that should be made.
First.—The election of President and Vice-President should not be decided
by a majority of the states, but by a majority of the people.
Second.—United States Senators should not be elected by legislatures, but
by direct vote of the people of the states.
Third.—The states should be represented in the Senate according to
population.
Fourth.—The powers and functions of the Federal Judiciary should be
enumerated and limited.
I heartily concur with Mr. Adams in his view of the Federal Judiciary. It
has usurped functions and powers unprecedented in the history of judicial
tribunals.
In order to change the character of the government at Athens from an
aristocracy to a democracy Solon gave the people control of the courts,
which _exercised the supreme power over laws and men_. Aristotle says
that by this method the people established a democracy where there had
previously been an aristocracy. The aristocrat controlled the lawmaking
power, but as the people controlled the judiciary a pure democracy
resulted.
Alexander Hamilton used the same device _for the opposite purpose_.
He took away from the people and put into the hands of the aristocracy
_the supreme control over our laws and rulers_, and our judiciary,
thus controlled, has changed the United States, which under the old
Confederation was a democracy, into an aristocracy.
It will require a Constitutional amendment to drive the usurpers from the
high place in which they are entrenched, but such an amendment cannot
possibly be passed through the _Upper House of Congress_ and through
the _Upper Houses of three-fourths of the states_ until a tremendous
revolution shall have taken place in public sentiment.
If we should attempt to curtail the powers of the Federal Judges by
Constitutional amendment we should surely find “Jordan a hard road to
travel.” Most of us would be dead and forgotten before the purpose could
be reached by that route.
What, then, can be done?
_The swiftest remedy for the evil lies in the election of a President who
will_ ASSERT HIS EXECUTIVE AUTHORITY.
The very essence of our system of government is the _Balance of Power_.
The Legislative function should not encroach upon the Judicial; the
Executive should not invade the Legislative, and the Judicial should not
usurp prerogatives belonging to the other two.
_Inherent in each of these three departments of government lies the power
of self-defense._
Just as the Government, as a whole, has the inherent, inalienable right
of self-preservation against external or internal attack, so each of the
three separate departments of the Government has the inherent right of
self-preservation as against an attack from either one or both of the
other two.
When John Marshall made the attempt to encroach upon the Executive,
during the administration of Mr. Jefferson, the President treated the
Court with contempt, and the Court was powerless to go forward. When the
same partisan Judge made a decision against the state of Georgia, which
President Andrew Jackson considered unjust, the Executive refused to
support the Judiciary, and the decision came to naught.
When Chief-Justice Taney, during President Lincoln’s administration,
encroached, as the President thought, upon the Executive, the Judiciary
again came to grief.
_Had Mr. Cleveland been at heart in favor of the Income tax of 1893, the
Supreme Court would never have dared to pronounce against it._
That law was based upon a principle which the Supreme Court had indorsed
for a hundred years, and the first deliverance of the Judges upon the act
of 1893 was favorable to it.
That act was the outcome of the work of the Legislative department
acting within the scope of its authority. The Executive department had
sanctioned the act, and it had become LAW.
Had Cleveland boldly announced his purpose to _execute that law, by
virtue of his inherent power as Chief Executive_, the Supreme Court would
never have made the second decision, which was a national scandal.
By that decision the accumulated wealth of the millionaires is exempted
from taxation—relieved of the duty of contributing to the support of the
Government by whose unjust laws those millions were accumulated.
But let the people really get in power; let them really elect a
President; let them place in authority another Andrew Jackson, who isn’t
afraid to show his friendship for the common man and his animosity to
the greedy corporation—_then_ you will see the Supreme Court draw in its
horns.
Federal Judges are human like the rest of us, and they know with
considerable accuracy which side their bread is buttered on.
_Get the right sort of man in the Executive Chair, get the right sort of
men in Congress, create the right sort of public opinion, and I venture
the prediction that the Federal Judiciary will not attempt the role of
Dame Partington without meeting with the same luck._
* * * * *
I agree with Mr. Adams also that Senators should be elected by the direct
vote of the people in each state, but he is perhaps in error when he
says that the system of electing Senators by state legislatures is “the
fountain head of the corruption of American politics.”
On the contrary, there never could have been a corrupt Senate until there
was a corrupt Legislature. When New Jersey sent to the Senate a man like
Jim Smith the Legislature of New Jersey had already become corrupt.
When Pennsylvania sent to the Senate a man like Quay the Legislature of
Pennsylvania had already become corrupt. Standard Oil had to buy the Ohio
Legislature before Henry B. Payne became United States Senator.
In other words, the corrupt Senator is simply the fruit of the tree of
legislative corruption, and the corrupt Legislature has been too often
the result of corrupt elections.
We might as well tell the truth, and the whole truth, while we are
discussing the question. _Every one of us knows that elections of almost
every sort, from the highest to the lowest—town, county, state and
national—have been influenced by money and whisky, fraudulent practices
of all sorts, the stuffed ballot-box, the doctored returns, and the God’s
truth about the matter is that the people themselves are, to a large
extent, responsible for the kind of men who get into the Legislature,
into the House of Representatives and into the Senate._
Too many of our honest men have shirked election duty, as they have
shirked jury duty; and just as ignorant or corrupt juries too often
decide questions in the court house, so the ignorant or corrupt
voters—pliant tools in the hands of unscrupulous politicians—decide
questions of legislation which require the best thought and the best
energies of our most intelligent and upright citizens.
If direct legislation and the Recall should be put in practice, there
could not be such things as corrupt legislatures, and therefore there
would be no such thing as corrupt senatorial elections.
The fountain having been purified, the stream would be pure. At present
the fountain itself is too often impure, and therefore the stream which
flows from it cannot be pure.
* * * * *
On the other two points made by Mr. Adams there will be greater
difference of opinion. His objections proceed upon the assumption
that the United States is a nation with a government national in all
particulars. Here he is at fault.
Our Government is only partially national. It is Federal, also, in part.
It is not altogether the one nor altogether the other.
Ours is a peculiar system. To the foreign world we present the aspect
of a sovereign nation. Among ourselves we are a collection of sovereign
states which, for purposes stated in the preamble of the Constitution,
have delegated to the central Government a portion of those powers which
once belonged entirely to those sovereign states.
The state government existed before the Federal Government came into
being. If the Federal Government were abolished tomorrow, each one of
the states would still remain a sovereign state capable of conducting
government.
The state of Connecticut, for instance, was an independent republic when
there was no such thing as the United States.
Would Connecticut ever have gone into an “indissoluble union” if she had
not been assured that this union was to be composed of “indestructible
states”? The two propositions are linked together in Constitutional law.
Among sovereigns all are, in law, equal, and each one of these states was
sovereign at the time the union of states was formed.
Would either of those independent sovereign states have accepted a place
of inferiority in the Government? Assuredly not.
Then how is the indestructibility of the states guaranteed in the
Constitution? By giving the state, as a state, its full power in the
United States Senate, and, in a smaller degree, in the election of Chief
Magistrate.
The Constitution itself was modeled by delegates chosen, not by
citizens of the United States, _acting as individuals composing the
entire nation_, but by voters acting as _citizens composing distinct
and independent states to which they respectively belonged_. When the
completed Constitution was referred back to the people for adoption, it
was not acted upon by them as citizens of the entire nation, but it was
ratified by each state, acting as a state, separate and distinct from
every other state. _Therefore the Constitution itself is the result, not
of a national, but of a Federal act._
Mr. Madison himself took this ground in _The Federalist_. The facts all
prove it.
In the exercise of its legislative powers the Federal Government is both
national and Federal. The House of Representatives is a national body,
because it is composed of members chosen according to population. The
Senate is a Federal body, because it is chosen by the states, acting as
states.
The executive department of our Government also combines in itself both
the national and the Federal features.
The Electoral College is composed of two messengers from each state, and
also of messengers equal in number to the members which the state has in
the House of Representatives.
The two messengers first mentioned correspond with the two Senators,
and therefore represent the state in its Federal capacity. The other
messengers correspond with the Representatives of the state in the Lower
House, and as the Lower House is national, so those messengers are
national.
If the people fail to elect a President, and the election is thrown into
the House of Representatives, _this House, which in its organization as
a legislative body is national, at once becomes Federal, because each
state has one vote, and the voice of Ohio or Pennsylvania is not more
potent than that of Rhode Island or Delaware_.
It is only when our Government comes to put its laws into operation that
it is purely national.
It is not strictly correct, politically or legally, to say that the
United States is a nation, for a nation does not properly exist when the
Government is one of limited power. That our Government is one of limited
power, absolute only within the sphere of action granted to it by the
states, cannot be denied. While secession has been forever decided as not
being among the reserved rights of the states, there are very many other
reserved rights which still belong to the states, and which always should
be retained.
As the Washington _Post_ remarked some time since: “The United States
has not a single voter, and does not hold elections for any office. _All
elections are state elections._”
Already there has been too much concentration of power in the central
Government. To take away from the states their power of selecting
Senators would be nothing short of revolution, and would lead to such a
consolidation of power as would entirely change the form and spirit of
our Government.
If the principles of Populism grow strong enough to carry the large
states they will probably be found strong enough to carry the small
states. If they be found strong enough to control the state elections,
they will control national offices, because, as the Washington Post very
aptly points out, _the Federal Government holds no elections and has
no voters_: it is the state that holds the election and furnishes the
voters; it is the state that prescribes the limits of the franchise,
and says how, when, where and by whom these elections shall be held;
_and even the Federal Judiciary has not yet ventured to infringe in the
slightest degree upon that reserved right of the separate states_.
* * * * *
Speaking of the equal representation of the states in the Senate, Mr.
Adams says, “_This vicious compromise was made in the Constitutional
Convention as the price for the perpetuation of slavery._”
This compromise he characterizes further as “_cowardly and unfair_.” And
he adds: “Now that the logic of events has made this a nation, despite
the restrictive clauses of the Constitution, the dual participation of
the unrepresentative Senate is so grotesque that its continuance is
fraught with a danger which at any time is likely to precipitate civil
war.”
Is Mr. Adams quite sure that “this vicious compromise was the price of
the perpetuation of slavery”?
Of course, I knew in a general way that slavery had been responsible
for pretty nearly every mean old thing that has ever happened to this
country; and it has always grieved me, with more or less poignancy, that
New England could not have _foreseen_ that she couldn’t make slavery
pay. We lost much precious time while she was discovering that she
couldn’t. When at length she _did_ discover that there was no money in
it for _her_, she thoughtfully sold most of her slaves, and went in for
Emancipation.
_Then_, to be sure, the sacred “Cause of Freedom” advanced at a gallop;
but, as I said, we had lost a good deal of time waiting for New England
to make her experiment, and a good deal of unhappiness resulted.
But while I knew all this, in a general way, I really was not aware
that the slave-owning states in the Constitutional Convention forced
Washington, Madison, Franklin and Randolph to act in the cowardly and
vicious manner described by Mr. Adams.
The state of Virginia bitterly opposed the equal representation of the
states in the Senate. This was strange conduct in Virginia, if the
purpose of that compromise was the “perpetuation of slavery.”
The state of New Jersey was the leader of those states in the convention
which demanded equal representation in the Senate. If that senatorial
equality was intended to perpetuate slavery, New Jersey’s attitude was
most peculiar.
This compromise which Mr. Adams calls “vicious, cowardly and unfair” is
known to constitutional history as _the Connecticut Compromise_. The men
who championed it most ably were Roger Sherman and Oliver Ellsworth. Were
these men actuated by a desire to perpetuate slavery?
All the books which I have read upon the subject state that equal
representation in the Senate was a compromise which _the smaller states
wrung from the larger states, as the price of the union_, not the price
of the “perpetuation of slavery.”
New Jersey, Connecticut and Delaware were afraid to give up their
independent, sovereign existence as states and to go into a union
where the large states, like Pennsylvania and Virginia, would have so
much greater power than themselves, if that power should be based on
population.
When New Jersey refused to consider any plan of union which did not
safeguard the interests of the small states, she was not thinking of
perpetuating slavery. When Roger Sherman and Oliver Ellsworth made such a
determined fight to preserve, in part, the equality which then prevailed
among the states, they were not thinking of perpetuating slavery. _Their
motive was to protect Connecticut, the small state, against Virginia and
other large states._
When Benjamin Franklin finally proposed that the Convention adopt the
Connecticut idea, that aged philosopher and friend of human liberty was
not acting in the interest of the slave-owners.
When Washington gave his consent, he was not guilty of cowardice and
unfairness for the purpose of protecting slavery.
These men knew perfectly well that they were exceeding their authority in
making a _new_ Constitution. They were sent there _to amend_ the Articles
of Confederation; and when New Jersey, Connecticut and Delaware took the
resolute position which was voiced by Patterson, Roger Sherman and Oliver
Ellsworth, Washington and Franklin both had sense enough to know that it
would be utter folly to go before the people, seeking a ratification of
_a new Constitution_, unless the difference between big states and little
states had been first adjusted in the Constitutional Convention. Indeed,
Rhode Island, another small state, was so jealous of her rights that she
refused to send delegates to the Convention.
My authorities are Bancroft’s “History of the United States,” “The
Constitutional History” of Landon, McMaster’s “With the Fathers,”
Hildreth’s “History of the United States,” Schouler’s “History of the
United States.”
The latter historian says expressly that the compromise under discussion
“_was secured through the determination of the smaller states not to
yield entirely the rule of representation which the larger states were
bent on invading_,” and, he adds, “_this compromise admirably preserves
the composite character of our system_.”
The historian declares that the smaller states expressly committed to the
New Jersey plan which sought to retain the sovereignty of the states were
New Jersey, Connecticut and Delaware.
Hildreth, in his “History of the United States,” takes the same position,
and says: “The party of the smaller states, known also as the State
Rights Party, included the delegates from Connecticut, New Jersey,
Delaware and a majority of those from Maryland and New York.
“The party of the larger states, or National Party, included not only
_the delegates from Virginia, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania_, but also
those from _the two Carolinas and Georgia_, states which anticipated a
very rapid increase of population.”
(I could quote Woodrow Wilson to the same effect, only Woodrow isn’t
worth while.)
* * * * *
Now it must occur to Mr. Adams that these facts are at war with his
theory.
Virginia, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, the two Carolinas and Georgia
would never have been found opposing the equality of representation of
the states in the Senate if the purpose of that senatorial equality was
the perpetuation of the institution of slavery.
There _was_ a compromise which the slave-owners wrung as a concession
from the free states, but this compromise benefited them _in the lower
House, not in the Senate_.
When the Constitution gave the slave states representation based upon
_three-fifths of the slaves_, the institution of slavery derived strength
from the _national idea_ of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Virginia—_not
from the State Rights idea_ of New Jersey, Delaware and Connecticut.
“_Take the Children_”
In France the Privileged Classes had created a situation which pleased
them perfectly.
A fifth of the soil belonged to 30,000 noble families; another fifth
belonged to the clergy; another fifth belonged to the king and city
governments; the remaining two-fifths belonged to all the other people,
middle class and peasants.
To the support of the Government the clergy contributed nothing except as
a free gift; the nobility contributed pretty much what they pleased, and
they did not please to contribute a great deal.
The king’s family spent $55,000,000 per year. Two brothers of the king
spent $2,000,000; and, to pay the debts of one princely bankrupt, King
Louis XVI took $3,000,000 out of the public funds.
Two hundred and ninety-five cooks served in the king’s kitchen. Nearly
two thousand horses stood in his stables. A squad of soldiers escorted
his dinner to the table. A magnificent band furnished music while he
ate, and a dozen gallant lords, paid for the service, helped him to
undress and get to bed when the arduous do-nothing of the day had been
finished.
Some 30,000,000 Frenchmen did not enter into this world of privilege.
The merchant, the lawyer, the doctor, the manufacturer, the farmer, the
laborer—all these stood outside the pearly gates, catching only a glimpse
of the radiance within, hearing only, as from a distance, the music of
this Eden, created by class legislation.
The peasant neither owned his land absolutely nor _himself_ absolutely.
Over him and his was suspended the heavy sword of class privilege.
The noble hunter of game, who enjoyed the exclusive privilege of killing
game, might trample down his grain with the utmost unconcern, at whatever
time the pleasure of the noble huntsman dictated. Mr. Peasant was not
allowed to protect his fields and crops by putting up any kind of
inclosure.
Mr. Peasant must not kill the wild boar or the antlered stag, even though
those noble beasts, reserved for noble huntsmen, were destroying the crop
upon which he and his family were dependent for a living.
He could not, under any conditions whatsoever, destroy the pigeons which
came sweeping down upon his grain, nor must he, during certain seasons,
manure his crop or hoe out the grass, lest he injure the flavor of the
young partridges, and deprive them of the shelter necessary for their
comfort and growth.
He could not press his grapes save at the nobleman’s wine-press, nor
grind his wheat save at the nobleman’s mill, nor bake his bread elsewhere
than in the nobleman’s oven.
These monopolies were peculiar to the lord, and the peasant must pay toll
lest the lord’s revenues decrease.
The peasant could not vote, had really no civic existence, was not
considered in the government of the country; could be made to work
whether he wished to do so or not for the noble and the king. His horses
could be taken from the cart, or from the plow, if his superiors
demanded it. Neither for his labor nor his horse was he paid. He could
not put salt into his victuals without paying a high price for it, and he
was not allowed to eat his victuals unsalted. The law _compelled_ him to
buy a certain portion of salt every year at an exorbitant price.
The church took from him one-tenth of all he made, besides which he must
pay fees for christenings, marriages, burials and pardons for sins—to say
nothing of prayers in behalf of the living, the dying and the dead. The
feudal lord took from him annually a certain part of all he made.
The French historian Taine says that in some portions of France the
peasant paid in feudal dues, church tithes and royal taxes _more than
three-fourths of all that he made_. In other portions of France _the
entire net produce of the soil went to the church and state_, and so
great was the intolerable burden that _the peasants quit in despair, left
the land to become a desert waste, and flocked to the cities to swell the
army of The Wretched_.
To throw off the shackles of this frightful system of misgovernment the
French Revolutionist roused the people.
At first Great Britain rejoiced in the movement which Lafayette,
Mirabeau, Necker, Sieyès and Camille Desmoulins inaugurated. These
early revolutionists declared their purpose to set up a constitutional
government in France such as Great Britain enjoyed, but when these
moderate and constitutional reformers were thrown aside by the radical
democrats who were determined to establish a republic—when this democracy
had confiscated the lands held by the church, had issued paper money
and had taken for national uses the abandoned estates of the immigrant
nobles, the ruling powers of church and state in Great Britain became
greatly alarmed, and it was resolved that war to the death should be
waged against the principles of the French Revolution.
Unless this were done, democracy might assert itself in Great Britain,
and those things which had been taken from the people under forms of
law might be restored in the same way to the original owners. Therefore
William Pitt, Prime Minister and actual ruler of Great Britain, declared
war upon France, blockaded her coasts, organized European kings into
confederacies against her, and for more than a dozen dreadful years
poured armed legions upon her.
During this era of “blood and iron” men were torn from peaceful pursuits
throughout Great Britain to supply the navy and the army with food for
powder.
As a necessary consequence, the demand for labor was greater than the
supply; and as England depends especially upon her manufactures, it was
there that the scarcity of labor was most injuriously felt.
It is said that a deputation representing the manufacturers waited upon
the Prime Minister and laid their grievances before him, asking the
question, “_What must we do?_”
Mr. Pitt is reported to have answered, “TAKE THE CHILDREN.”
This story may not be true, but it is a fact that it represented
precisely the emergency, and the manner in which that emergency was met.
It also represents correctly the attitude of Mr. Pitt as defined in his
speeches in Parliament.
A cruel, unjustifiable war had devoured the laborer who should have been
at his task. The laws had dragged him into the army and into the navy
whether he wished to go or not. Press-gangs had prowled about the lanes
and alleys clutching at every poor man who happened to be sound of limb,
and had carried him off by force into a battleship, where he might be
kept until the bride whom he had left at the church door had counted him
as dead, or until the family which he had left contented and happy had
been lost to the knowledge of men.
_Having taken the father, the same remorseless class-greed demanded the
child, and took it._
Upon the altar of English lust for money has been sacrificed more
helpless men, women and children than ever fell before the ruthless
hordes of Tamerlane or Attila.
“Within carefully guarded limits, child-labor is no more to be objected
to in manufactures than in agriculture, but in the early days of the
factory system these limits were utterly discarded.
“In the infancy of the system it became the custom of the master
manufacturers to contract with the managers of workhouses throughout
England and of the charities of Scotland, to send their young children
to the factories of the great towns. _Many thousands of children between
the ages of six and ten_ were thus sent, absolutely uncared for and
unprotected, and left to the complete disposal of masters who often had
not a single thought except speedily to amass a fortune, and _who knew
that if the first supply of infant labor were used up there was still
much more to be obtained_.
“Thousands of children at this early age might be found working in the
factories of England and Scotland, usually from twelve to fourteen,
sometimes even fifteen and sixteen hours a day, not unfrequently during
the greater part of the night. _Destitute or drunken or unnatural parents
made it a regular system to raise money by hiring out their children from
six, sometimes from five, years old, by written contracts and for long
periods. In one case brought before Parliament a gang of these children
was put up for sale among a bankrupt’s effects, and publicly advertised
as part of the property._ In another an agreement was disclosed between
a London parish and a Lancashire manufacturer in which it was stipulated
that _with every twenty sound children one idiot should be taken_.”
* * * * *
“Even as late as 1840, when the most important manufactures had been
regulated by law, Lord Ashley was able to show that _boys employed in the
carpet manufacture at Kidderminster were called up at three and four in
the morning, and kept working sixteen or eighteen hours_: that children
five years old were engaged in the unhealthy trade of pin-making, and
were kept at work from six in the morning to eight at night.” (Lecky,
“England in Eighteenth Century.”)
In the coal mines and in the salt mines men, women and children were
literally beasts of burden—were chattels, and when the mines were
sold the human machines passed from one owner to another just as the
mechanical apparatus passed.
There were women who in these coal mines, where the tunnels were too
narrow to allow them to stand upright, had to crawl back and forward on
their hands and knees for fourteen to sixteen hours a day, drawing after
them the trucks loaded with coal.
_These trucks were securely fastened to the woman by means of a chain
which passed between her legs and was attached to a belt strapped round
her waist. The woman seldom wore any clothes except an old pair of
trousers made of sacking._
“Little children were forced to work underground from year to year.
Deep in the gloom of a night which had neither moonlight nor stars;
rarely ever seeing the face of nature and of day—lost to God’s glory of
sunlight, shady woods, silvery waters—lost to intelligence, happiness,
enjoyment, reduced to the helpless condition of beasts of burden.”
What was true of the mines was also true of the factories.
Men, women and children were forced to work for a number of hours
absolutely inconsistent with physical and moral development.
In the year 1833 Lord Ashley led in the noble effort to redeem the
children from the clutches of unscrupulous commercialism, and to lighten
the burden of men and women by regulating the hours of labor and the
conditions of service.
After a most stubborn resistance, in which the corporations urged
against the reform every reason which we hear urged in our day, England
did herself the immense credit of checking the tyranny of those who were
grinding the lives out of the poor in order that the rich should become
richer.
In this country the cry of commercialism is the same as that which in
Great Britain said, “_Take the children_.”
Corporations want cheap labor. If they can’t get the adult, they take the
child.
In the Southern states the tendency to employ children has had alarming
development. In 1880 the total number of cotton factory employees was
16,740. Of these, 4,090 were children under sixteen years of age. In
the year 1900 the total number of employees had increased to 97,559. Of
these, 24,459 _were children under sixteen years of age_.
In the states outside of the South there were, in 1880, 155,803 employees
in cotton factories. Of this number, 24,243 were children under sixteen
years of age. In the year 1900 the total number of cotton factory
employees in states outside of the South was 205,302. Of these, only
15,796 were children under sixteen years of age.
In other words, within the Southern states the children under sixteen
years of age constitute now, as they did twenty years ago, _25 per cent.
of all the operatives employed_: whereas, _in the states outside the
South the children under sixteen number less than 8 per cent. of all
those employed_. Therefore the situation which was justly considered so
bad in Great Britain that it was reformed seventy years ago, and which
has been reformed in most of the states outside of the South, is three
times worse in the South than it is in any other portion of the Union,
_and is just as bad now as it was twenty years ago_.
In _The Tradesman_, of Chattanooga, Tenn., August 15, 1902, the statement
is made that the number of children under sixteen years of age now at
work in the Southern mills approximated 50,000.
The 50,000 little ones who troop to the mill every morning, breathe the
steam-heated, dust-laden, germ-infected atmosphere of the close rooms
throughout the entire day, who light, with lanterns, their way home
across the fields when darkness has fallen, are white children. During
the same hours that these white boys and girls are finding their way to
the factory where their energy and strength is offered up as a sacrifice
to mammon, 50,000 black children are singing merrily on their way to
school, _where they are gaining what the white children are losing_.
Glance forward twenty years and ask yourselves what will be the relative
positions of the 50,000 white children and the 50,000 black children. _It
will be a miracle if most of those white children are not either in their
graves, or in the hospitals, or in the slums, or in the prisons, while
the 50,000 black children will be holding clerkships in some department
of the Federal Government._
The kind of civilization which we are going to have in the future
is being determined now. Race development and progress cannot be
extemporized or bought ready-made. It is a matter of preparing the soil,
planting the seed, cultivating the crop.
We shall reap as we shall have sown.
The most profoundly disgusting feature of the Southern political
situation today is that _the Democratic bosses who control our state
legislatures will not allow us to give our white children as good
treatment as the negro children are getting_.
Almost universally the Southern mills are controlled by Northern
capitalists; but it is the Southern politician, officeholder, editor or
stockholder who rushes to the legislature saying that _child slavery must
continue because it is good for the child_.
These Northern capitalists who own Southern mills are, to a large extent,
Republicans in politics. The unprincipled Southern men who put up a plea
in behalf of child slavery are almost exclusively Democratic.
Just as J. P. Morgan, the Republican railroad king, uses the Southern
Democratic machine to rob the people through his railroads, so the
Northern Republican millowner uses the Southern Democratic politician to
rivet upon the Southern white child the chains of commercial serfdom,
_ruinous to the child and ominous to the future of the white race in the
South_.
It was class-greed which first raised the cry, “_Take the children_.” It
is class-greed which _now_ says, “TAKE THE CHILDREN.”
_Paternalism_
One of the dreadfulest words that ever scared a mossback is “Paternalism.”
He does not know what it means, and he does not want to know. He flees
from it as from something too blood-curdling to look upon. His leaders,
his orators, his editors, have all told him that no language could fully
describe the horrors of “Paternalism”; and therefore he feels that while
poverty, slavery, hunger and starvation are sometimes annoying incidents
in life, they bear no comparison to the pitiless rigors of “Paternalism.”
He has got used to unmerciful taxes, to ill-paid labor, to squalid
surroundings, to empty pockets, and to the cry of children hungering
for bread. All these discomforts he can stand, because they have come
to him in the natural course of events under the rule of Democracy
and Republicanism. But the very idea of a new party springing up and
practicing “Paternalism” unnerves him. He fears he couldn’t stand it.
We had this terror-stricken victim of Democratic bugabooism in mind today
when we read the decision of Cleveland’s Attorney-General, to the effect
that whisky in a bonded warehouse could not be reached by process from a
State Court.
Under a law which has stealthily slipped upon the statute-book while the
people were not noticing, the producers of distilled liquors get the
privilege of storing their “firewater” in a government warehouse and
getting a certificate of deposit.
The Government takes care of the whisky until the owner feels like paying
a tax upon it.
Formerly, under an act passed by Republicans and Democrats, this
exemption from tax lasted three years. At the last session of Congress
the Democrats, out of tender consideration for the poor, downtrodden
Whisky Trust, extended this exemption to eight years.
The great and good Government of the United States, therefore, steps
forward through its officers, and kindly says to the distiller: “Hand me
your whisky bottle: I’ll take care of it for you until you get ready to
pay your taxes.”
Not only does our great and good Government say substantially these very
words to the distiller, but it guards his whisky bottle so jealously
that no writ or execution or other process from a State Court is allowed
to touch the liquor which is thus being held by the Government for the
benefit of the owner.
Governor Tillman, of South Carolina, tried to bring his power as Chief
Magistrate of a sovereign state to bear on some of the whisky which Uncle
Sam was taking care of for the Whisky Trust, but the voice of our great
and good Government was promptly heard saying, “Keep off the Grass.”
Brave Benjamin had to let the whisky alone.
The certificate of deposit issued on the liquor by the Government to the
distiller becomes at once valuable commercial paper upon which he can get
any amount of money he wants.
He can go to New York, borrow money on his certificate at 2 per cent.,
and use it for eight years without difficulty, because the money-lenders
have the certificate which shows to them that the Government is taking
good care of the whisky all the time.
Is this “Paternalism”?
If so, please don’t mention it to the mossback whom we have described.
It might make him run away and tear the buggy up.
_Planting Corn_
The bluebird was out today; out in his glossiest plumage, his throat
gurgling with song.
For the sunlight was warm and radiant in all the South, and the coming
spring had laid its benediction on every field and hedge and forest.
The smell of newly plowed ground mingled with the subtle incense of the
yellow jasmine; and from every orchard a shower of the blossoms of peach
and apple and pear was wafted into the yard and hung lovingly on the
eaves and in the piazzas of the old homestead—the old and faded homestead.
Was there a cloud in all the sky? Not one, not one.
“Gee! Mule!!!”
“Dad blast your hide, why don’t you gee-e-EE!!”
Co-whack! goes the plowline on the back of the patient mule—the dignified
upholder of mortgages, “time price” accounts, and the family credit
generally.
Down the furrow, and up the furrow; down to the woods, and up to the
fence—there they go, the sturdy plowman and his much-enduring but
indispensable mule.
For the poplar leaves are now as big as squirrel-ears and it’s “time to
plant corn.”
On moves the plowman, steady as a clock, silent and reflective.
Right after him comes the corndropper, dropping corn.
The grains faintly chink as the bare feet of the corndropper hurry past;
and before the corn has well cuddled itself into the shoe-heel of the
plowman’s track, down comes the hoe of the “coverer”—and then the seeds
pass into the portals of the great unknown; the unknown of burial, of
death and of life renewed.
Peeping from the thicket, near at hand, the royal redbird makes note
of what is going on, nor is the thrush blind to the progress of the
corndropper. And seated with calm but watchful dignity on the highest
pine in the thicket sits the melancholy crow, sharpening his appetite
with all the anticipated pleasures of simple larceny.
The mocking-bird circles and swoops from tree to tree, and in her
matchless bursts of varied song no cadence is wanting, no melody missed.
The hum of the bees is in the air; white butterflies, like snowflakes,
fall down the light and lazily float away.
The robin lingers about the China tree, and the bluejay, lifting his
plumed frontlet, picks a quarrel with every feathered acquaintance and
noisily asserts his grievances.
The jo-ree has dived deeper into the thicket, and the festive sapsucker,
he of the scarlet crest, begins to come to the front, inquisitive as to
the location of bugs and worms.
On such a day, such a cloudless, radiant, flower-sweetened day, the
horseman slackens the rein as he rides through lanes and quiet fields;
and he dares to dream that the children of God once loved each other.
On such a day one may dream that the time might come when they would do
so again.
Rein in and stop, here on this high hill! Look north, look east where
the sun rises, look south, look west where the sun sets—on all sides the
scene is the same. In every field the steady mule, the steady plowman and
the children dropping corn.
Close the eye a moment and look at the picture fancy paints. Every field
in Georgia is there, every field in the South is there. And in each
the figures are the same—the steady mule and the steady man, and the
pattering feet of the children dropping corn.
In these furrows lie the food of the republic; on these fields depend
life, and health and happiness.
Halt those children—and see how the cheek of the world would blanch at
thought of famine!
Paralyze that plowman—and see how national bankruptcy would shatter every
city in the Union.
Dropping corn! A simple thing, you say.
And yet, as those white seeds rattle down to the sod and hide away for a
season, it needs no peculiar strength of fancy to see a Jacob’s ladder
crowded with ascending blessings.
Scornfully the railroad king would glance at these small teams in each
small field; yet check those corndroppers and his cars would rot on the
road and rust would devour the engines in the roundhouse. The banker
would ride through those fields thinking only of his hoarded millions,
nor would he ever startle himself with the thought that his millions
would melt away in mist were those tiny hands never more to be found
dropping corn. The bondholder, proud in all the security of the untaxed
receiver of other people’s taxes, would see in these fields merely the
industry from which he gathers tribute; it would never dawn on his mind
that without the opening of those furrows and the hurrying army of
children dropping corn his bond wouldn’t be worth the paper it is written
on.
Yet it is literally so.
Feed the world, and it can live, work, produce and march on. Starve it,
and what becomes of railroads, banks, mills, mines, notes, mortgages and
bonds?
Great is the might of this republic!—great in its schools, churches,
courts, legislatures; great in its towns and cities; great in its
commerce, great in its manufactures, great in its colossal wealth.
But sweep from under it all these worn and wasted fields, strike into
idleness or death the plowman, his wife and his child, and what becomes
of the gorgeous structure whose foundation is his field?
Halt the food growers, and what becomes of your gold and its “intrinsic
value”?
How much of your gold can you eat?
How many of your diamonds will answer the need of a loaf?
But enough.
It is time to ride down the hill. The tinkle of the cow-bell follows the
sinking sun—both on the way home.
So with many an unspoken thought I ride homeward, thinking of those who
plant the corn.
And hard indeed would be the heart that, knowing what these people do and
bear and suffer, yet would not fashion this prayer to the favored of the
republic: “O rulers, lawmakers, soldiers, judges, bankers, merchants,
editors, lawyers, doctors, preachers, bondholders! _Be not so unmindful
of the toil and misery of those who feed you!_”
_Not Parson Brownlow’s Son_
KNOXVILLE, TENN., April 26, 1905.
_Hon. Thomas E. Watson, Thomson, Ga._
DEAR SIR: In your article on “Politics and Economics” in TOM
WATSON’S MAGAZINE for May, you speak of the salary grab of
congressmen as follows: “Tennessee will not be shocked to
know that ‘Slippery Jim’ Richardson voted for the grab.
She may be shocked to know that Brownlow did the same
thing—Brownlow, the _son_ of the famous Parson.”
You are entirely mistaken about Walter P. Brownlow, to
whom you refer, being a son of the “famous Parson.” Parson
Brownlow has only one son living, Colonel John Bell Brownlow,
who commanded the regiment in which I was an officer, the
Ninth Tennessee Cavalry Volunteers of the Union troops during
the Civil War, and who lives in this city and is not a member
of Congress now nor has he ever been.
Please publish this in full in your issue for June and
greatly oblige me.
Respectfully,
W. R. MURPHY.
P.S.—I am a constant reader of your magazine and am enjoying
your articles very much; and not only yours, but those of
Frederick Upham Adams. Many of the truths which you utter
through the medium of your great magazine will prove to
be precious seed sown in the rich soil of the national
conscience, and the fruitage will be invaluable.—W. R. M.
_Mr. President!_
Won’t you _please_ quiet down now and get to business? _Don’t_ you think
you can give us a rest on speeches and photographs?
_Can’t_ you leave it to the women to do as they think best on the baby
question?
If you will just sit still a while and attend to your own business, you
have no idea how many people will be thankfully appreciative.
Why don’t you _concentrate your efforts_ and peg away until you
accomplish something?
Why start up so much game which you never bag?
You said you were going to compel the Cattle Kings to take their barbed
wire fences off the public lands—and you haven’t done it.
Why don’t you give Colonel John Mosby free rein and let him cut the wire?
You said you were going to discipline the Railroads and the Trusts—and
you haven’t done it.
Why don’t you have your prosecuting officers take out warrants for such
men as Armour, the Rockefellers and Rogers?
You _know_ they are law-breakers; _deal with them as law-breakers_.
Don’t seine the pond for minnows when you can harpoon such whales as
these.
Hit the big criminals—_hit them hard_—and eighty million people will
cheer you on!
You led us to believe that you meant to revise the Tariff; why don’t you
follow it up?
You _know_ that _the Trust exists because of the Railroad and the Tariff_.
The Railroad gives the _special favor_; the Tariff _prevents foreign
Competition_—and there you are. _The Trust is born of these two Special
Favors_, one given by the Tariff and the other by private contracts
violative of law.
To break any and all Trusts _remove the Tariff on the articles controlled
by the Trusts, and at the same time relentlessly prosecute as common
criminals every Railroad Official, however high and rich, who grants to
one shipper any sort of favor not granted to all_.
There isn’t a Trust in the United States that you can’t bust in twelve
months if you go at it with these weapons.
The Free List for trust-controlled articles; Criminal Warrants for the
Armours, Swifts, Harrimans, Rockefellers, Morgans, Belmonts—all who are
“in the game.”
Here’s a work worthy of you, Mr. Roosevelt.
_It needs you!_
It wants your pluck, your energy, your honesty, your tenacity; won’t you
buckle to the task?
Let the baby question alone. There will always be plenty of babies.
Don’t you fret about that. The women know what’s what.
Turn your head another way. Put your attention on _your_ job.
_A great man’s task invites you—demands you._
RISE TO IT LIKE A GREAT MAN!
_Did You Know It?_
Did you know that a private corporation got its clutch upon the
Monongahela River generations ago and shut off free navigation?
Did you know that this private monopoly exercised the power of dictating
to every dollar’s worth of produce transported upon that highway the
terms upon which it should go to market?
Did you know that _the people at large_, who were robbed by this gigantic
and unnatural monopoly, _complained vainly_ during all these long and
dreary years of corporation tyranny?
Did you know that as soon as _the corporations which are working in coal
and iron_ got tired of said monopoly and began to complain, our great and
good Government at once had ears to hear and eyes that could see?
Did you know that patriots of the Carnegie stripe, who had to pay
tribute to the Monongahela monopoly, were losing $425,000 per year to
said monopoly; _and that Carnegie and Company went to our great and good
Government and demanded that said Government buy out said Monongahela
monopoly_?
Did you know that our great and good Government immediately harkened to
the wails of Carnegie and his Company _and appointed a commission to
assess the value of said Monongahela monopoly_?
Did you know that said monopoly, being wise in its generation, realized
that its hour had come and that its best policy was to sell out at a high
price?
_Did you know that the Commission appraised the monopoly franchise at
more than three and a half million dollars, and that our great and good
Government paid the money?_
Did you know that _your cash_ was thus lifted out of the Treasury _to pay
for a free river for Carnegie and his Company_; and that nobody thought
it worth while to say “Turkey” to you about it?
This buying-off of the private monopoly which throttled the commerce of a
great section was a good thing to do. We are glad it was done. The people
can now navigate the Monongahela as freely as Carnegie can do it; but is
it not mortifying to reflect _that the PEOPLE were powerless against the
wrong until the coal and iron kings took the case in hand_?
And isn’t it amazing to see how easily the doors of the Treasury fly
open, and the millions pour out, when the Privileged Corporations want it
done?
When it became a matter of self-interest to the Privileged Corporations
to buy out the Monongahela monopoly the Constitution was not in the way
nor was the money lacking.
Whenever it suits the same Privileged Classes to unload the Railroads on
to the Government at fancy prices it will be done. When that day comes
the Constitution will not be in the way nor will the means be lacking.
Whenever the Privileged Classes want ANYTHING done the Constitution
approves and the cash box is full.
It is only when the masses want anything done that our Constitution
becomes a fretful porcupine with quills erect and our cash box has a
hollow sound.
If you want to have a jolly time with that gay old creature, the United
States Constitution, join the Privileged Corporations.
If you want to frolic with the United States Treasury and pay for what
you want with public money, join the Privileged Corporations.
_Rural Free Delivery to Country People_
(Extract from the _People’s Party Paper_, March, 1893, Mr.
Watson’s paper, commenting upon the passage of the _first
appropriation_ for the R. F. D.)
The annual appropriations for the free delivery of mails was, until the
present administration, confined to cities of over 10,000 inhabitants. At
the suggestion of Mr. Wanamaker, an experiment was made in smaller towns
enjoying daily mails, but as yet no country neighborhoods had obtained
the privilege.
On Friday, February 17, 1893, when the annual appropriation was pending,
Mr. Watson proposed an amendment as follows:
For free delivery service, including existing experimental
free delivery offices, $11,254,900, of which the sum of
$10,000 shall be applied, under the direction of the
Postmaster-General, to experimental free delivery in rural
communities other than towns and villages.
Mr. Watson urged that the paragraph proposed to be amended “provides
for the expenditure of $11,254,943 for free delivery service. The
amendment reduced the amount of that expenditure and simply directed
that the Postmaster-General should apply $10,000 of the appropriation
to experimental free delivery in rural communities.” The following
discussion followed:
_Mr. Watson_—“Mr. Chairman, the present law provides for an experimental
free delivery in rural communities; but as I understand it—and the
chairman of the committee, the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr.
Henderson), makes the same statement to the House—_the law has been
construed to mean cities, towns and villages_, and there are now in
operation experimental free deliveries in certain towns and villages.
“The law expressly provides for ‘rural communities,’ and it seems to me
where the general laws make such provision there is no hardship in taking
a small amount from this appropriation, only $10,000, and appropriating
it for _experimental free delivery in absolutely rural communities_, that
is to say, _in the country pure and simple, among the farmers, in those
neighborhoods where they do not get their mail more than once in every
two weeks, and where these deserving people have settled in communities
one hundred years old and do not receive a newspaper that is not two
weeks behind the times_.
“The amendment proposes not to increase the appropriation; it actually
diminishes it by a nominal amount, but takes $10,000 of it to be provided
for _experimental free delivery in absolutely rural communities, instead
of towns and villages, which the authorities construe to mean ‘rural
communities.’_ In other words, I think that part of the money ought to
be spent _in the country_, where the law provides it shall be spent, and
having made this statement, if we can have another division, and the
committee is against my amendment, I will yield to its will.”
_Mr. Henderson, of North Carolina_—“Mr. Chairman, the only law on the
subject at all is in the very language used in this appropriation bill:
“‘For free delivery service, including existing experimental free
delivery offices.’
“That is all the law now on the statute-books in regard to this question.
“_I do not want the statement of the gentleman from Georgia in regard to
there being a law on the statutes as to rural free delivery to go without
correction._”
_Mr. Watson_—“Mr. Chairman, _this delivery in the small towns and
villages is called ‘rural free delivery.’_”
_Mr. Henderson, of North Carolina_—“But as a matter of fact _there is no
law_ except that stated here in this appropriation bill.”
The amendment was adopted by the House. This opens up the way for the
farmers to secure services on an equal footing with the residents of
the towns and the cities. It is one of the first instances in which the
Government has put itself in daily touch with the citizen of the rural
community. If followed up by successive Congresses, this entering wedge
may cleave the way for a system of intercommunication that will remove a
great inconvenience and cause for dissatisfaction in country homes. As a
first step its importance cannot be overestimated.
_Random Paragraphs_
You may say what you please about Castro, but I glory in his spunk.
President of Venezuela, he was sitting comfortably in his seat when, one
day, another Venezuelan who wanted the job cooked up an Insurrection.
South American revolutions, like all other procedures in civilized
communities, have to be financed.
The question with the leader of the Venezuelan insurrection was:
“Who will finance _me_?”
The Asphalt Trust stepped forward with necessary funds.
No doubt the Trust was assured by Matos, the Insurgent leader, that in
the event his revolution succeeded the Trust was to have dominion over
Venezuela, like unto that which Standard Oil has over our own Eden of
Christian Civilization.
At any rate, the Trust put up its money on Matos, who turned out to be
the wrong horse.
Castro won. But the Trust continued to help Matos even after he had lost.
Died hard, you see, because death is not the law of Nature with Trusts.
Usually they live and the other fellow dies.
The Asphalt Trust is composed, in part, of American experts in Frenzied
Finance. These marauders who were seeking new worlds to conquer planned
to catch Venezuela in the same net which holds _us_.
Castro defied them, fought them in the Courts, whipped them, took away
the franchise for non-performance of contract, etc.
Then they had the brazen audacity to demand that our Government coerce
Castro.
The Trusts rule the United States—shall little Venezuela check their
career of conquest?
Away with the feeble Castro!
Said the Trust to Roosevelt:
“Shake your big stick at this South American crank and make him
_Arbitrate_!”
Says Roosevelt to Castro:
“Arbitrate with the Asphalt Trust, or——”
Says Castro to Roosevelt:
“Arbitrate nothing! Hands off, or——”
In other words, our Government, friendly always to Frenzied Finance, put
up a bluff on Castro.
Whereupon Castro stood pat and “called” Roosevelt.
And, all at once, Mr. Roosevelt went a-hunting, and left Taft—the portly,
handsome, self-complacent Taft—“sitting on the lid.”
Bully for you, Castro!
Evidently you are “some punkins.”
* * * * *
Would to heaven we had a Castro to smash the Beef Trust!
Roosevelt and young Garfield don’t seem to know where to take hold. The
legal proceedings do not advance half so rapidly as does the price of
beef.
* * * * *
If you have never read Herbert Casson’s “Organized Self-Help,” do so. A
brighter, braver, stronger book is not picked up often. No matter how
much you may already know, your information will be greater when you
shall have mastered this little volume.
* * * * *
The reason why Sir Plausible Voluble, of Nebraska, is so mixed up on the
Railroad Question is that his talk-talk-talk commenced, as usual, before
he understood his subject. At first he advocated state ownership, which
would have given us forty-odd different systems. Now he has reached the
point where he wants the Nation to own national lines of transportation
while the states are to own “local lines.” _Wouldn’t_ we have a sweet
time deciding which roads are national and which are local?
* * * * *
Under the present system every line of transportation has a double
character, partly national and partly local, and _the traffic_ on every
line is partly state and partly inter-state.
You can no more separate what is national from what is local in the
railroads than you can in the Post-Office.
_Every_ postal route is at once local and national. A letter may come
five miles, five hundred or five thousand—the _system_ carries it to its
destination.
So with freight and passengers. The so-called local railroad will carry
freight from the adjoining county, from the adjoining state, from the
remotest section of the Union, and from the lands beyond our borders. So
with passengers.
Why, then, should anybody be talking tommyrot about “_local lines_”?
Said Betsy Prig to Sairey Gamp, concerning the alleged existence of a
certain Mrs. Harris, “_I don’t believe there is no sich a person._”
Says I to W. J. B., concerning the alleged “local lines of
transportation,” I don’t believe there is any such thing as a local line
of transportation.
* * * * *
The reasoning which sustains government ownership of a part of the
railroads inevitably leads to the ownership of all.
At _such_ a cherry, why take two bites?
Why have a system where there is certain to be a clash between state
management and national management?
Why leave the gaps down for inequalities in rates?
Why not insure _uniformity_ by unity of ownership and management?
Why not learn a lesson from the German Empire, and avoid state ownership
altogether?
* * * * *
However, I am glad to see that our Nebraska friend is making progress.
Give him time, and he will arrive.
For a convert who jumped on our platform of Government Ownership so
recently as last July, he does fairly well. But if he would use his
thinking apparatus a little more, and his organs of speech a little less,
he would get on faster.
“Local lines” of transportation—_at this time_?
He might as well say that the artery in his left hind leg is a “local
artery.”
* * * * *
The New York _World_ says:
“If Judge Parker is a Democrat, Mr. Bryan is not. If Mr. Bryan is a
Democrat, Judge Parker is not.
“No party-name is wide enough to blanket two such irreconcilable theories
of government.”
That’s where the _World_ falls down.
The Democratic party-name is wide enough to blanket anything and
everything, anybody and everybody.
I’ve seen it cover the Prohibitionist and the Saloon-Keeper, the
Gold-Bug and the Free-Silverite, the corporation lobbyist and the
Bible-class expert, the Free Trader and the Protectionist, the Bank
men and the Anti-Bank men, the Income Tax men and the Anti-Income Tax
men, the Expansionists and the Imperialists, the Inflationists and the
Contractionists, strict Constructionists and those who sent the United
States Army to quell a local disturbance in Illinois over the protest of
a Democratic Governor.
There is no earthly difference, antagonism, variance of creed, or policy,
or purpose, or persons that the Democratic party-name is not “wide enough
to blanket.”
* * * * *
The Democratic party-name not wide enough to blanket Judge Parker and W.
J. B.?
Oh, yes, it is.
It did so in 1904, and it will do so again.
If Bryan whips Parker in the Convention of 1908, Parkerites will knife
Bryan as they did in 1896 and 1900.
If Parker beats Bryan in the Convention, Bryan will “come across” in
1908, as he did in 1904.
This play of politics is a very pretty game, and the politicians get a
good deal out of it.
The people are kept interested and excited, but the people don’t get
anything out of it.
It is not seriously intended that they should.
Primarily, the game is played for the benefit of the players.
* * * * *
Tom Taggart, the gambling-hell man of Indiana, must feel very funny
when he looks back and sees the imposing lines of Democratic preachers,
Bible-class graduates, Amen-corner grunters and family-prayer
brethren who are meekly following _him_, Taggart, as he, the official
Commander-in-Chief of the Democratic Party, bravely leads his loyal hosts
upward and onward.
If Tom T. has any sense of humor he must enjoy such a situation with
exquisite relish.
_The Gods We Worship_
The savage African, in the wilds of his native home, takes a few sticks
and some cloth and makes an idol which he calls Mumbo Jumbo, and before
which he falls prostrate, in devout worship.
Whereat we civilized fools all laugh at said African, and call him a
barbarian—as indeed he is.
Nevertheless, it is quite apparent that while we make no gods out of
sticks and calico, we worship Mumbo Jumbos of our own just the same.
Take, for instance, the Gold Reserve. Nature did not produce it; it has
no life, no motion other than that which we lunatics give it.
One day it occurred to John Sherman to stack up, in the Treasury, a cool
hundred million dollars, and keep it there, idle.
He straightway created the _Gold Reserve_.
Any law for this? No.
Any necessity for it? No.
Any popular demand for it? No.
His excuse was that he wanted a Gold Reserve out of which to pay off the
$346,000,000 in Greenbacks “when presented for redemption.”
Was anybody clamoring for the redemption of Greenbacks? No.
Was there any law under which anybody had a right to go to the Treasury
and demand gold for Greenbacks? No.
Was there any custom or policy which authorized this setting apart of
gold to redeem Greenbacks? No.
But Sherman did it, just the same, and it soon appeared that he had made
us a Mumbo Jumbo which we all worshiped and before whose mysterious power
we all fell prostrate.
As long as Sherman was Secretary of the Treasury the Gold Reserve was
sacred. Congress looked upon it with awe. The President did it reverence.
The newspapers bent to it in speechless adoration. The politicians rubbed
the skin off their stomachs groveling before it. The people—the great
inert mass within which is irresistible might if they but had courage and
co-operation—patiently padded their knees and, likewise, knelt in mute
submission.
The Gold Reserve was a national institution—like the Washington
Monument—not to be desecrated, but recognized, supported, defended.
Senators alluded to it as they would to Plymouth Rock or Mount Vernon. It
was a fixed fact which nobody disputed and all respected.
Statutes referred to it, in passing, as they did to West Point or
Yellowstone Park—something that was permanent, national, inseparable from
the life of the Republic.
There never was a law for the Gold Reserve, there never was a necessity
for it, there never was an antecedent discussion in regard to it,
and there never was a particle of financial sense in it. Nobody ever
presented Greenbacks for redemption until Mr. Carlisle made his infamous
ruling, and gold was paid out for paper and bonds issued to get the gold
back.
The Gold Reserve was useless until it became, under Carlisle’s ruling, a
bait to set the bond trap with.
To show that it has no influence upon the value of Greenbacks we need
only to point to the fact that although the size of the Gold Reserve
constantly fluctuated for about a year after Carlisle’s ruling, the value
of the Greenbacks has not varied at all.
If the Greenbacks depended on the Gold Reserve, their value would have
risen and fallen with the Gold Reserve.
The Greenbacks do not, and never did, depend on the Gold Reserve.
They depend on the credit of the Government, and the known fact that
the credit of the Government is based on $80,000,000,000 of national
wealth. Their legal tender quality, their usefulness as money, their
receivability for taxes and public dues, make them good in the eyes of
the people irrespective of any Gold Reserve.
John Sherman had no more right to make a Gold Reserve than he had to make
a Silver Reserve.
Greenbacks were no more redeemable in gold than they were in silver.
But why argue the case? The verdict is already made up in the minds
of the jury. Both the old parties pay their vows to the Gold Reserve.
Mumbo Jumbo is shrined in the hearts of both Democrats and Republicans.
Sherman’s god rules.
We quake every time they tell us that anything bad has happened to the
Gold Reserve. We used to toss in our sleep, muttering distressfully, when
the news would come that the Gold Reserve “is dwindling.”
What good does Mumbo Jumbo do the naked African? None.
But then, you see, the African doesn’t know it. Therein he is a fool.
What good does _our_ Mumbo Jumbo, the Gold Reserve, do _us_? None.
But then, you see, we do not know it.
Wherein _we are bigger fools than the African is_.
_Poverty_
BY JOHN H. GIRDNER, M.D.
I have just read Mr. Robert Hunter’s book entitled “Poverty.” It
contains much valuable information, mostly in the form of statistics and
references to other publications concerning the poor in different parts
of the United States and England. It is a good book of reference; but
to my mind its principal virtue is as a thought provoker. The question,
“What are you going to do about poverty?” stares the reader in the face
from between the lines on every page, and it haunts him after he has laid
the book aside.
We of the United States are accustomed to boast of our material wealth
and prosperity. When the writer or the orator wishes to wring the hearts
of his audience and deceive them into the belief that ours, as conducted
at present, is the very best of all governments, he draws a harrowing
picture of the dreadful suffering of the poor of London; and then we pull
the Stars and Stripes a little more closely about us, and, as that other
Pharisee, we thank God that we are not like other men. Before we shed any
more tears over the poor of London let us see if we cannot find use for
our tears nearer home.
Mr. Charles Booth made a thorough and exhaustive investigation into the
conditions of poverty in London in 1891. He found that 1,300,000, or
about 30 per cent. of the population of that city were unable to obtain
the necessaries of life. This 30 per cent. were “living in conditions, if
not of actual misery, at any rate bordering upon it.”
Mr. B. S. Rountree made a similar investigation in the typical
provincial town of York, England. He found that about 28 per cent.
of the inhabitants of York were living in destitution. Mr. Rountree
adds: “We have been accustomed to look upon the poverty of London as
exceptional, but when the result of careful investigation shows that the
proportion of poverty in London is practically equaled in what may be
regarded as a typical provincial town, we are forced to the startling
probability that from 25 to 30 per cent. of the town populations of the
United Kingdom are living in poverty.”
Let us turn from England to the United States, and see how much poverty
there is in our own country, among our own workmen, or producing class.
The report of the State Board of Charities for New York State shows that
an average of about 26 per cent. of the population were aided, by both
private and public charities, during each of the three years 1897, 1898
and 1899; and according to the report of the official statistician of the
city of Boston for 1903 more than 20 per cent. of the entire population
of that city were aided by the public authorities alone. This does not
include private charities. In fact, all statistics of charitable works
are defective, because they can never include the efforts to relieve
suffering and poverty made by those who do not let the left hand know
what the right hand is doing.
Commenting on the above statistics from Boston and New York State, Mr.
Hunter says: “If the figures are correct as published, the persons in
New York State in distress in 1897, and in Boston in 1903, would equal
proportionately the number of those in poverty in London.”
Here are other facts about poverty worth remembering: “In the face of
widespread poverty, there have not been for over half a century in
England so few paupers, either actually or proportionately, as there are
now. The population of England has increased from 18,000,000 persons in
1851 to 29,000,000 in 1889. During this period the number of paupers
actually fell off. London has lost in pauper population fifteen times as
fast as she has gained in general population.”
On the other hand, the returns from the almshouses in the United States
show that the number of paupers increased almost as fast as population
during the decade from 1880 to 1890. In Hartford, Conn., which is said
to be the richest per capita city in the United States, the number of
paupers increased 50 per cent. during this same decade.
Now, when you hear a Republican spellbinder draw harrowing word-pictures
of poverty among the English workmen, and paint glowing pictures of the
marvelous wealth and happy condition of the workmen in our own country,
and when you read editorials in subsidized protectionist newspapers about
the “miseries of the working classes” in free trade England and the great
prosperity among the highly protected workmen of the United States,
just remember that according to the best information obtainable about
twenty-five to thirty persons out of every hundred living in the towns
and cities _both in England and the United States_ suffer from poverty.
And for the past forty years poverty has steadily _decreased_ in England
and steadily and rapidly _increased_ in the United States. And no amount
of ranting by the spellbinder or misrepresentation by the editor can
alter these facts.
Mr. Hunter is of the opinion that 70,000 New York children go to school
underfed. This statement caused astonishment and doubt in some quarters.
But I contend that any trained physician who will note the very large
percentage of anemic faces among the children as they issue from the
public schoolhouses of this city will agree with me that Mr. Hunter’s
estimate of 70,000 underfed children is most likely far below the mark.
The Children’s Aid Society and other charitable organizations maintain a
number of industrial schools for poor children in this city. The total
daily average of children attending these schools is 10,707. Inspector
Lecktrecker recently made a thorough investigation into the condition
of these children. Mr. Lecktrecker’s report goes into great detail.
Summed up, the report shows that of the 10,707 children attending these
industrial schools 8,852 are actually underfed by reason of poverty
at home. It was found that the best breakfast that any of these 8,852
children had was a piece of bread and a cup of tea or coffee. A diet not
only inadequate for nourishment, but actually destructive to a child’s
nervous system.
A grown-up person only requires enough nourishment to repair the waste,
wear and tear incident to the daily activities of brain and muscle. A
child not only requires this, but it requires added nourishment for the
growth and development of all the tissues of its body. No wonder we are
raising up a class of people in this city which I have called in another
place “Newyorkitics.” No wonder there is an ever-increasing procession
of broken-down brains and nervous systems heading for the hospitals
for insane. No wonder that crime is on the increase. What better can
be expected from adults whose brains and nerves have been starved and
stunted from birth?
But what exactly is poverty? Destitution of property; indigence; want
of convenient means of subsistence; need. That is what the dictionary
says poverty is. Want of convenient means of subsistence is the want
of some one or all of the five chemical substances called proximate
principles, which we take and must have to sustain animal life. The
continual absence of these chemical substances from the human stomach,
together with lack of clothing sufficient to protect the body against the
elements, causes physical pain or suffering with degeneration and final
death of the animal body. This is a literal scientific definition of the
word poverty as applied to the animal or material man.
The adulteration of food which is carried on to such an alarming
extent in the United States is an important factor in this poverty or
underfeeding question. Even those who are able to buy a sufficient
_quantity_ of food have no assurance that the _quality_ is such as will
properly nourish their bodies.
When you satisfy the cravings of hunger by putting into the human stomach
watered milk, or cheese which is part wax, or sugar mixed with plaster of
Paris, or chocolate which contains only a suggestion of the rich cacao
beans, or any of the adulterated articles of food for sale especially in
the poorer sections of the city, you not only tax the system to digest
and dispose of a quantity of useless and maybe poisonous material, but
every tissue in the body is thereby robbed of its proper nourishment.
It is as much, or more, poverty and underfeeding to fill the stomach with
material which does not contain the five _proximate principles_, _i.e._,
nourishment, as not to fill it at all. The laws against substitution and
adulteration of human food and drink ought to be more stringent than
the laws against horse stealing. Yet, as I am informed, all efforts at
such legislation are invariably met with the cry that it will interfere
with the _business interests_ of the country. Here, as in so many
other instances, when an attempt is made to secure common justice and
protection for the lives and property and rights of the plain people, we
run up against the _business interests_. The curse of this country today
is that everything, even human life, must be sacrificed when necessary to
the BUSINESS INTERESTS.
The industry captains are killing and maiming the people now just as the
military captains used to do, and for the same objects—to satisfy greed
and selfishness.
The negro slave in the South in slavery days was further removed from
poverty and the fear of poverty than any man I have ever known. When his
day’s work was finished he came home from the field or the shop and he
found a substantial, well-cooked dinner awaiting him. After dinner he
went to his comfortable cabin and sat before a blazing log fire, or, in
warm weather, he sat out under the stars, fanned by the night winds. His
wife and children were nearly always around him, as were his companions,
the other slaves belonging to his master and the plantation.
This man did not have a single care or responsibility on earth. He did
not have to meet a grinding landlord next day demanding rent. He did not
have to cudgel his brains to find a way to meet a note due next week. He
did not have to pay for food, clothes, light and heat for himself and
his family. That pang of anguish so familiar to us all when we think of
the possibility of our loved ones suffering from want and the fear of
want when we are gone never wrung the heart of that black man. Child
labor as it exists under the present system was unknown to the children
of the black slaves. “Over the hills to the poor-house,” when age and
decrepitude had made him no longer useful, had no terrors for the black
slave. The “system” of slavery made it perfectly certain that his owner
would provide food, clothes and shelter for him in his old days, and
for his children, no matter what happened. This black man, slave as he
was, had a better guarantee against poverty and the fear of poverty for
himself and family than any life insurance company can give. Even Mr. Tom
Lawson could not find fault with the security of this policy.
Another thing the slave father did not have to worry about was sickness
in his family. When one of his children became ill an ambulance from a
charity hospital did not back up in front of the negro quarters, cart
the child off to become one patient more in Ward No. ——, and serve as
“material” for a clinical lecture while it lived, and as “material”
for the dissecting-table after it was dead. No, nothing of the kind
happened. When the slave became ill the best medical skill and nursing
were provided, and, if need be, the patient was taken to the “big house”
where the master lived so the mistress could superintend the treatment,
and in case of death the body was put in a neat coffin, and a procession
composed of all the blacks and whites on the plantation followed the
remains to the colored graveyard on the hill, burial services were read,
a hymn sung and the body lowered to its final resting-place. This is
a glimpse at the condition of the slave in life and death in slavery
days. I am not putting in a brief in favor of chattel slavery. I was
born an abolitionist. My father was a slave-owner and my early life was
spent in the midst of it, yet I abhorred the system as a child, and that
abhorrence has grown with years. But I am now writing about poverty, and
my point is: that chattel slavery as it existed in the South is the only
state of society I know of in which poverty and the fear of poverty among
the workers or producing class were absolutely abolished by law.
Under the old system the negro was a slave, you say. So he was. But if I
read Mr. Hunter’s book aright, the laborer under the present industrial
system is also a slave. The laborer has a vote now and the slave did
not. Yes, but the slave had a full dinner-pail _all the time_ and the
white voting laborer has not. The comparative value between his vote and
a full dinner-pail in the mind of the white laborer under the present
system was demonstrated in the election of 1896 and 1900, when he gladly
gave his vote to the Republican Party for the _mere promise_ of a full
dinner-pail.
_Tuck-of-Drum_
BY ALFRED TRESIDDER SHEPPARD
(Copyright in Great Britain by A. T. Sheppard.)
At nine o’clock Josephine beat a vigorous reveille on the drum that had
led old troops into action. It was the second of December; the sun of
Austerlitz shone on the grass and trees in the little front white garden,
and was fast melting the delicate tracery of fern and frond on the oval
window of Monsieur Tuck-of-Drum’s bedroom.
A curious name, Tuck-of-Drum; the echo of an ancient story told round
camp-fires long burned out; a scrap of wreckage floating, like its
owner, when the seas of years held so much that was forgotten. Dominique
Laplume was proud of the name; for even the village children, whispering
“Monsieur Tuck-of-Drum” behind his back, brought the flicker of a smile
to his grizzled face and the ghost of a flash to eyes dim and watery with
age.
On Austerlitz day, for many years, the drum had roused him from his
slumbers. He had slept heavily, this old warrior; “a thousand thunders!”
he said sometimes in self-excuse, “when one has made one’s bed as often
on straw or the solid ground——”
His son, growing from childhood to manhood, plied the drumsticks in
his time; he fell at Solferino. His son’s son held them in his turn;
the earth still lay bare and trampled over him at Gravelotte. They had
given much to France, these Laplumes. Now Josephine, with her black
sleeves rolled high on her thin white arms, and her dimpled face set into
desperate earnestness, took her dead father’s place, and thundered at the
parchment until the old man’s husky voice answered the summons.
Her sabots clattered down the stairs. Coughing and grunting, Monsieur
Tuck-of-Drum began to dress. The clothes he had worn the day—and many
days—before hung from their pegs in a chintz-covered recess. On a
rush-bottomed chair near the bed, carefully brushed and pipeclayed, lay
coat, and belts, and breeches, and gaiters that had gathered mud, in
their time, from half the kingdoms of Europe. On the dressing-table the
cross of the Legion of Honor rested in its little leather case.
At last his shaking fingers opened the door. The drum lay outside; the
drum, and, on the drum, the gigantic bearskin, bullet-bitten in old
fights, moth-marked during long, idle years. He came downstairs in full
regimentals. Madame Laplume was talking to the village postmaster at the
open door. She ran to meet him. Her eyes were misty, for she remembered
last year’s reveille; but there was a ring of gladness in her greeting.
“Good morning, grandfather!” she cried, kissing him on both cheeks; “a
happy Austerlitz day. There is news, too——”
“News?” Dying fires flamed up for a second in his old eyes.
“D’Aurelles de Paladines is driving them back,” she said. “We
won everywhere yesterday—everywhere. Chanzy has forced the
Bavarians back on Orgères. We have taken Guillonville, Terminiers,
Monnerville—and—and—where else, Josephine?”
“Goniers, Villepain, Faverolles,” little Josephine chimed in, repeating
the names glibly, like a well-conned lesson.
“And they say the brave General Duerot has broken out of Paris, and is
marching to join the Army of the Loire!”
“Good!”
Monsieur Tuck-of-Drum sat down stiffly, the joints in his long limbs
cracking; he held the coffee-cup to his lips, but the coffee danced and
splashed out. He jerked the cup down quickly, and brushed a drop from his
mustache with an impatient hand.
“It is just as I have said,” he cried suddenly and fiercely, springing
to his feet. “We have them like trapped rats! Did I not say so, Héloïse?
Even the little Josephine has heard me. Listen, Josephine. These Germans,
these enemies of our dear France, begin to pay for their folly. They
hated us because our great Emperor led us once to all their capitals—to
Stuttgart, to Dresden, to Munich, to Berlin—because their kings bowed
hats-in-hand before the soldiers of France; because we cut up their
country with our swords as I—look you!—cut this bread of mine.” And with
nervous hands he sliced white, crust-ringed circles from the roll. “But
now—ah, the Emperor, our great Emperor, is dead; and the Marshals and the
Grande Armée have marched away. They found us asleep, unready; like rats,
like locusts, they swarmed into our cornfields and our vineyards. But we
are awake at last! We are ready at last! The revenge begins!”
“It begins,” echoed Madame Laplume. “But come, grandfather, your coffee
grows cold, and——”
“The punishment begins!” he continued, his voice shrill as the neigh
of an old war-horse. “Look you!” He held up a gnarled hand. “Here is
Duerot, with the troops of Paris. Here”—he raised the other, its knotted
fingers stretched out—“are De Paladines, Chanzy, De Sonis, Jauréguiberry,
with the Army of the Loire. Now see; the Germans are between them.” He
snatched a morsel of the bread he had been cutting and brought his palms
together. “The Germans—the Germans——”
“You have cut your hand, grandfather,” cried Josephine.
He stopped, and looked dumbly at his palm. A splinter of crust had grazed
the skin. The bread rolled to the floor.
“They are crushed,” he mumbled, bringing down his heel. “Miscreants! that
they should dare to enter France! But they will pay for their folly; ah,
they will pay well! I knew; I said it. ‘Wait,’ I said, when they came
to us with their long faces and their stories of defeat. ‘France has
slept; but she will shake herself and awake.’ _Mon Dieu_, yes. Why I—I
who speak, my little Josephine, put a hundred to flight when I was young,
with this little drum alone: that is why they call great-grandfather
Monsieur Tuck-of-Drum, my dear. See, it is the sun of Austerlitz that
shines on the white trees. Sixty-five long years ago—sixty-five long
years ago—the great Emperor pinned this cross on my breast; ‘Ah, this is
Monsieur Tuck-of-Drum,’ he said, pinching my ear, ‘who beat the charge in
the village, and put a hundred to flight.’ That was nothing; we did those
things. And again—today—the sun of Austerlitz——”
He broke off suddenly as the door opened and a fat old man, with a large,
hairless, foolish face—the face of a great baby, still eying the world
with wonder—entered the room. He, too, wore the uniform of the Emperor’s
Guard. The veterans embraced.
“You have heard the news?” cried Laplume. “Ah, it is arranged. Austerlitz
day—the day of Austerlitz—sees victory again for France, my dear
Hippolyte. Sit down, sit down. Héloïse mixes the salad. Héloïse! Here is
Monsieur Bergeret. It has been a struggle, my friend, but we have saved
a bottle and a snack for today; we have arranged it, I say.” He sniffed,
nudged his comrade and chuckled. A pleasant smell of cooking already
pervaded the sitting-room, floating in from the kitchen in the rear.
Madame Laplume, who had vanished while Dominique was telling the child of
France and its ancient glories, reappeared, with bare and powdery arms;
Sergeant Hippolyte saluted, and passed a wavering hand over his foolish
chin. Monsieur Tuck-of-Drum, talking garrulously all the while, patted
his old comrade’s accoutrements into shape; fastened a button; untwisted
a red shoulder-knot; rearranged an ill-adjusted strap. Age was dulling
the Sergeant’s brain a little; “he does not wear as well as I,” thought
Tuck-of-Drum, with the pathetic pride of age.
There was a metallic “tap-tap” and a clatter of sabots on the cobbles of
the village street. “Jacques Dufour arrives!” cried Dominique Laplume,
and flung the door open with a flourish.
It was like the gathering of ghosts from the past. It _was_ a gathering
of ghosts from the past. These three, with their wrinkled cheeks, their
quavering voices, their scanty white hair, their battered uniforms
and weapons—these three were all that were left of that band of young
recruits who, in the great days of France, had marched down the village
street, shouting the songs of the Empire, blowing kisses to fair faces in
the windows and the roadsides, exchanging glances with bright eyes that
had grown dim at last and closed on earth and all its color and glitter.
Like spars, they floated still, scarred and encrusted by the waves of
time that had engulfed a generation so heroic, stupendous.
Dufour, wrinkled, wizened, twisted with rheumatism, limped to his place.
His grandson carried his musket and placed it in a corner by Bergeret’s;
the old man had lost a limb at Quatre Bras and needed a stout stick to
aid the wooden leg.
“I will come again at six, grandfather,” the boy piped shrilly in his
ear. “I say I will come again to fetch you at six.”
“No, no; Pierre must stay,” interrupted Monsieur Laplume. “Eh? He must
stay, too, and hear the stories of the olden days—the days of the glories
of France.” The boy’s eyes lit up. “Come, we are ready. He shall sit by
the little Josephine.”
By and bye Madame Laplume brought in the meal, steaming from the oven.
Bottles of red wine were ranged on the table.
“There were five of us last year,” Dufour muttered. “Buffet and Deyrolles
have dismissed.”
“Eight the year before,” said Bergeret, rubbing his hands and smiling
vacuously.
“The ranks grow thin, comrades,” said Laplume. “Well, the first toast!”
They rose, and drank in silence to the memory of that great man whom they
had fought and bled and suffered for long since—and still remembered and
adored. They drank to the old Marshals, to the Grande Armée, to village
comrades whose bones lay in the Peninsula, in Germany, in Belgium, in the
churchyards of France, but whose faces, dim and mournful, still looked
at them through the mists of years, and whose voices still echoed in
their memories. They lit cigars and pipes; but the room was full of the
smoke of ancient battles. They talked of Desaix, Bessières, Junot, Murat,
Lannes, Masséna, Ney—the old, unforgotten names. If they could come
again! Ah, if _he_ could come again—how the scattered remnants of his
lost legions would rally round him, and young France hurry to the eagles,
and the glorious days return!
“But we are making an end; we are making an end,” cried Tuck-of-Drum
fiercely, bringing down his fist and making plates and bottles jump with
the vehemence of the blow. “Chanzy and Duerot have them in the trap at
last. I said so—did I not? Even the little Josephine remembers. On the
day of Austerlitz——”
An ominous booming, distant, sullen, like an echo of old years of strife,
sounded in their ears.
“It is thunder!” cried Pierre. Little Josephine clutched her mother’s arm.
The veterans exchanged glances. “What the devil—” began Laplume. They
flung open the door and stepped into the village street. Two or three
people, white-faced, had stopped to listen.
The distant guns roared again. What were they doing there—then—in that
direction? Tuck-of-Drum looked puzzled, doubtful. This day of all the
year, this great day of his life, was bound up with all his thoughts;
one hope, one conviction, possessed him, and had shone steadily through
all the gloom of the last few months. The day of Austerlitz would see
the eagle turn upon its foes; the sun of Austerlitz would look down upon
the invading army scattered like chaff before the wind—crushed, rather,
like grain between the two millstones, the armies of Paris and the Loire.
The previous day’s successes confirmed him. But what were the guns doing
there? The fighting should be far beyond Orgères by this time. He beat
down a flicker of uncertainty.
“Bah, it goes well,” he muttered. “They make their last stand. Come,
comrades, let us drink to Chanzy and the Army of the Loire.”
Poor, foolish Bergeret soon fell asleep, huddled in his chair; but the
wine put fire into the veins of his comrades. Pierre and Josephine
listened round-eyed as they talked of bivouacs and camp-fires; of ancient
comrades and conquered cities; of Austerlitz and the heights of Pratzen,
and the Menitz Lake.
“Sixty-five years ago at this very hour”—so the talk went on. “Do you
remember? Have you forgotten?” They argued, they shouted, in their old
voices that broke from gruffness into shrill quavers, ludicrous under
other circumstances, but now pathetic. They moved bottles, glasses,
salt-cellars, to illustrate the disposition of troops; in the blue
smoke-clouds the children, drinking in their words, could almost catch
the glint of the Cuirassiers’ breastplates, the glittering gold-lacing
of the Hussars, the rise and fall of green epaulets as the voltigeurs
moved into line, the yellow facings of Oudinot’s Grenadiers, the
clamorous mêlée of horse and foot. They discussed the present fighting,
the mistakes of generals; and here Héloïse, eager as they for the success
of the cause which had cost her husband’s life, joined in with the names
and dates and figures at her tongue’s tip. In the distance the sullen
guns were booming.
“If I were with them!” sighed Tuck-of-Drum. “They had no room for the old
soldier; yet I can beat a charge as well as ever! I—I who speak, could
fire a musket with the best of them!”
“Grandfather volunteered,” piped Josephine.
“Yes,” said Héloïse, eying the old man proudly; “but they wanted him
to take care of us. ‘You must look after the women and children for
us, Monsieur Laplume,’ said the officer. ‘You have done your share for
France in the field. You know what our great Emperor wrote, “It will
be sufficient for you to say, ‘I was at the battle of Austerlitz,’ to
authorize the reply, ‘Behold, a brave man.’”’”
Dominique Laplume waved a hand in depreciation, as if to brush aside
the praise. “A brave man? Every Frenchman is brave. It is in the blood
of France. We need not be proud of what we cannot help. We have been
unfortunate, yes; badly led, yes; but the men—the men——”
The door opened suddenly. The village postmaster stood again at the
entrance, his eyes starting, his face lemon-colored, his lips livid
under the straggling beard. “All is lost!” he cried. “We are betrayed,
defeated! Chanzy is driven back! The enemy advances!”
The door rattled in the grasp of his shaking hand. He limped off to
spread the news of the disaster, which grew with his terror. Laplume,
Dufour, Madame Héloïse, started to their feet and looked at each other
blankly. The sudden, awe-struck silence woke Bergeret, who looked round
with wide, foolish eyes. Josephine’s mouth twitched and tears gathered.
Pierre clenched his brown fists.
“Come,” cried Monsieur Tuck-of-Drum suddenly. He donned the great
bearskin, the others followed his example, Bergeret fumbling foolishly
with its heavy chain. His baby face expressed wonder rather than the
alarm, the bitter disappointment, the wrath, written on the faces of
Madame Héloïse and Laplume and Dufour. Tuck-of-Drum girded on his sword
and slung the straps of his drum over his old bent shoulders. He thrust
Bergeret’s musket into the Sergeant’s hand. Dufour motioned to Pierre,
and hobbled out; the boy followed him. Madame Héloïse Laplume ran to the
door to intercept them. “Where are you going, grandfather? Where are you
going?” she gasped.
“Stand back, Héloïse. We go to call the village. Stay here; stay with the
little Josephine.”
She paused irresolute. After all, though they could do no good, what harm
could they do—these three old men? They were going to call the village.
Yet there was a look on the ancient soldier’s face she had not seen since
the day of the first great reverse, when he had gone, with his head erect
and old fires flashing in his dim blue eyes, to offer his feeble services
to France.
Suddenly, loud and distinct above the distant booming of the guns, his
drum sounded—beating an assembly in the quiet village street. She put her
hand to her breast and ran out. If the Germans were really coming——
She clutched his arm.
“Are you mad, grandfather?” she gasped. “Come in; come in and finish your
wine and pipes together. There are only boys and women and old men in the
village. They can do nothing——”
He shook her off.
Well, even the enemy, cruel though they were, could never harm men so
old, so feeble and defenseless. They would ride through, laughing in
their beards, mouthing their uncouth jokes at the faded uniforms from
which their sires had once fled in terror; but—no, they would never harm
them. Josephine was crying softly within. She turned back to the house.
Up the centre of the village street marched Tuck-of-Drum, drumming,
drumming with an energy surprising and pathetic, as though he could call
from their weed-grown graves the lads who had once jumped so smartly to
the rattle of the parchment.
“_Rat-a-plan! rat-a-plan!_” sounded the summons; his hands had not lost
their cunning, though they ached and grew weary with the unwonted strain.
Behind him staggered Bergeret, his great bearskin toppling forward over
the fat, smooth, foolish face; Dufour hobbled in the rear, his stick and
wooden leg tapping the cobbles; little Pierre, beside him, dragged the
heavy musket.
Pale faces, working in terror, peered from the café of the Boule d’Or.
Tuck-of-Drum burst open the door. On the little tables glasses of bock,
tiny glasses of spirits, stood half emptied. The men had all risen;
the tawdry, gilded mirrors, cracked and dusty, distorted their faces,
showing them more pallid, more unhealthy even than in life. Three or
four old men—not so old as the veterans by many years—three or four
washed-out-looking lads, rejected even by the army that had dragged
men in from the very highways and hedges to resist the invaders—turned
startled looks on the newcomers.
“The enemy is coming!” said Tuck-of-Drum. “Comrades, let us march against
them, like the men of Dreux, of Châteauneuf! Look—the sun of Austerlitz
is going down! Today, all France must help——”
They exchanged glances; they huddled together like sheep.
“What is the use?” one muttered.
“Aye, what is the use?”
A youth sniggered vacuously. “You are sixty years too late, Monsieur
Tuck-of-Drum. If the great Emperor could come back now, if France had a
man—” The speaker shrugged his shoulders, spread out his hands with a
gesture of helplessness and looked round for assent.
“If—if—if!” cried Dominique Laplume. “_We_ will lead you—we, of the
Grand Army! Today all France must rise. All must help. It is the great
effort. Today France conquers—or is conquered. ‘If’ never won a battle.
Come, I say! Jules Brienne, your grandfather carried an eagle at Marengo.
Monsieur Grenier, your uncle fell by our side, fighting bravely, on the
field of Austerlitz.”
He argued, ordered, entreated; in vain.
“Bah! Poltroons!” he muttered, and turned on his heel.
Again the drum sounded.
“Yes, go out and play with your toy, Papa Tuck-of-Drum,” cried young
Brienne after him. Laplume did not hear. They marched next to the Café de
l’Ecu. The village postmaster, shaking still and casting nervous looks
round him like a frightened horse, was telling his story to a similar
assembly.
“Pah!” muttered old Dufour, twirling his thin mustache, “these villages
are the rubbish heaps of France. The men are all away.” Again the appeal
was made. A fat man, with fishy eyes and yellow, pendulous cheeks,
shrugged his shoulders and raised protesting hands. “What can we do? What
can we do?”
“They would finish us all with a volley. We should be killed,” whined
another man.
“Killed? And what then?” Laplume snorted with fierce contempt.
“Let us be killed then!” broke in Dufour, crashing his stick down on the
sanded floor. “It would be worth it. A thousand times worth it! Let each
village in France raise a wall of dead against the invaders!”
Bergeret nodded his foolish head again and again with emphasis. The fat
man began to talk fast, volubly, excitedly, pouring torrents of abuse
on the Emperor, generals, government, the enemy, waving his fat hands,
shrugging his fat shoulders. The curtained door of the café opened. He
stopped suddenly and lamely. A countryman burst in.
“They are coming—they are coming!” he shrieked. “I have seen them in
the road. I ran through the woods. Hundreds of them! I have seen their
lances—the sun on their lances!”
“Come!” cried Dominique Laplume in a voice of thunder. “In the name of
France!”
No one stirred. He looked round, scorn in his old eyes. “We will
go, then—Bergeret, Dufour—my old comrades.” His voice choked with
bewilderment, disappointment, anger.
* * * * *
They went out. The air was sharp with frost. It was very still in the
village. The sun, a red ball of fire, still glowed on the frosted trees;
on the white and yellow walls of the cottages; on the white fields and
white-cowled windmills; on the powdered cobbles of the street. A segment
of moon, strangely like a pierrot head, thrust through curtains of cloud,
its mouth whimsically awry, peered down sideways at the earth—at the
white earth, where legions of tiny men, like ants, hurried to kill or
be killed in their bewildering quarrels. The distances were blue—the
shimmering steel-blue of winter distances. Here and there a column of
black smoke, shot through again and again with tongues of fire, went
up to heaven; the smoke of burning villages; little sacrifices France
offered for her folly to gods not yet appeased.
“To the bridge,” said Tuck-of-Drum. They marched in silence. The drum was
silent. At the end of the long, straggling street a tiny bridge spanned a
frozen stream which the enemy must cross. By the side of it was a clump
of bushes, so thick that, even leafless, they formed a screen behind
which the veterans and the boy crouched down.
“They might have broken down the bridge at least,” grumbled Dufour.
“Menitz was frozen, and the Emperor——”
“They are coming!” whispered Pierre.
His sharp ears, close to the ground, had caught the _clip-clop_ of
approaching hoofs.
Tuck-of-Drum drew his sword and rested its hilt on the rough wooden
parapet of the bridge. “Fix bayonets!” he growled.
Sergeant Bergeret should have given the word, but he carried out the
order placidly, drawing the sword from its scabbard and fixing it with
his fumbling fingers. “Put it in for me,” muttered Dufour, handing his
bayonet to Pierre. “Now give me the musket—so—and run home, good lad.
Embrace me and then run home.”
He sat on the ground, his wooden leg stiff and straight in front of him,
and clutched the bayonet. Pierre’s lips tightened; he did not move. “Go
home, I say!”
“Hush, they come!” whispered Tuck-of-Drum.
Peering through the brushwood, they could see, on the road ahead, the
pennoned lances of German Uhlans, rising and falling with the jolting of
the horses. The hoofs clicked louder and louder on the frozen road.
Suddenly Tuck-of-Drum sprang up.
“The Guard will advance,” he growled, with a little hoarse laugh, the
faint echo of one that men now dead had heard and talked of, long since.
Joy, fierce, savage joy of fighting, dormant so long but not extinct,
flared up and flashed in his faded eyes. And yet, with the joy, a rage
terrible and righteous shook him as he saw the glitter of the steel, the
fluttering pennons, the casques and foreign uniforms—the foes of France,
violating the sacred soil of which the dust of his race had made.
His trembling hands clutching the drumsticks, he advanced to the centre
of the bridge. Bergeret stood on his right, his bayonet extended. Dufour
grasped the parapet, dragged himself up, groaning in spite of clenched
teeth, planted his wooden leg firmly, and, leaning against the woodwork
of the bridge, rested the butt of his weapon on the ground, the tremulous
steel pointed toward the enemy. Pierre came to help him. “Go back! go
back!” he growled, pushing the boy aside with all his feeble strength.
Pierre slipped on the frozen earth and fell, clutching at the bushes.
Suddenly Dominique Laplume sounded the _pas de charge_.
A strange, pitiful defiance this, echoing back through the deserted
village street, floating mournfully out to the white, empty fields,
sending its arrogant, useless challenge to the ribbon of white road
ahead. “_Rat-a-plan! rat-a-plan!_” The old drum, that had sent a hundred
men flocking like sheep before it—the old drum that Jules, who fell at
Solferino, that Dominique, who fell at Gravelotte, had beaten on winter
mornings of their boyhood—answered nobly to this last great effort, and
seemed a living, sentient thing, entering into the brave spirit of the
challenge.
There was a startled shout, a clatter of stones, as the Uhlans reined in
their horses.
“They fly!” shrieked Tuck-of-Drum; “they—ah!”
Half a dozen carbines shot up and flashed fire. There was a hoarse cry in
German; an officer struck aside the stock of a man’s weapon.
Dufour’s bayonet clattered down; he slid into the thicket, his wooden
leg scoring a long, jagged line in the frosty road. Bergeret was on his
knees, a light of strange intelligence dawning in his smooth, foolish
face; quite suddenly he fell sideways on to his fallen bearskin, matted
already with his blood.
Tuck-of-Drum still stood in the centre of the bridge. The drumsticks
descended on a drum pierced and soundless—then dropped, one after the
other, slowly, from his nerveless grasp. The world swung around him. The
poplars down the roadway on which his glazing eyes were fixed marched,
doubled, moved into echelon and square. “_La Grande Armée! La Grande
Armée!_”
Was it the cry of the Germans, in wonder, in derision, in pity? Or did
his quivering lips frame the words? Ghosts formed round him; the ghosts
of the old battalions who had marched, long back, into silence. They
swayed, they heaved, in countless numbers; file after file, rank after
rank, regiment after regiment, formed up, doubled into place, and passed
him by. He saw the flash of breastplates, the crimson fronts of the
Polish lancers, the red plumes of the line, the bearskins of the Guards,
the glittering eagles of France.
“My comrades—O my comrades!” He staggered forward, with stretched-out
hands. A confused murmur buzzed in his ears; it swelled into a
tumult—“_and the shout of a king was among them_.”
One hand sought the bearskin. Suddenly he fell face forward.
* * * * *
Under the wide sky, in the uniform of their dead Emperor, the three
veterans lay together; a young boy crouched near them, bleeding from an
unnoticed wound, and sobbing.
A night wind crept over the frozen fields; a little wind, like a sigh
from France for her ruined homes, her smoking villages, her slain
children, her lost cause and faded glories.
The sun of Austerlitz sank down behind the poplars.
_The Royal Road to Learning_
FREDDIE—What’s an honorary degree, dad?
JOHNSON—That’s a title a college confers on a man who would never be able
to get it if he had to pass an examination.
* * * * *
The hardest kind of work is looking for it.
_The Southern Negro as a Property-Owner_
BY LEONORA BECK ELLIS
Between the Southern negro as property and the Southern negro as
a property-owner worthy of account, American progress has set its
milestones thick and strongly marked. Yet, as mere years go, the time has
been short indeed for a transition of meanings so vast.
The act of emancipation brought in its train several very serious
problems, and more than one of these must be acknowledged to have grown
graver with further-reaching complexities and involutions as the decades
have passed. But in the present article these are not under consideration.
The point we desire to emphasize is that one of the most difficult
questions brought to issue in the emancipation of the negro has already
solved itself by what we are accustomed to call natural processes.
When the epochal pen-stroke fell and $3,000,000,000 worth of Southern
property was suddenly obliterated as property, yet stood there in plain
world’s view, like the metamorphosed dragon’s teeth, as men with the
rights of men, there were masters of statecraft everywhere who faced one
another blankly, asking how such a situation was to resolve itself. Not
even the most sanguine saw any reason to hope that so complex an issue
as that involved in the relation of the freedmen to the land could be
brought to satisfactory or righteous solution until at least three or
four generations had mingled dust with dust.
The relation of the freedmen to the soil! Here was the problem that must
have given pause to an older state, a European nation, say, upon the eve
of liberating at one stroke four millions of serfs.
But young nations, like young individuals, often let their deep
convictions sweep them unprepared into strange conditions and perils,
from which only the magnificent vitality of youth rescues them without
disaster.
The United States Government has, for half a dozen years past, recognized
it as a duty to compile and offer for public reading certain facts and
figures relating to the progress of the negro in acquiring education,
following different pursuits and trades, and accumulating property. Out
of the various reports upon these subjects issued from the Department of
Labor since 1897 it is probably the information set forth regarding the
property-holdings of the former slaves and slaves’ children in three or
four Southern states that will strike the greatest number of people with
surprise, even with that form of astonishment which borders on unbelief.
Yet this surprise is of the healthful type, and the unbelief passes when
a closer investigation is made into the matter.
The closer investigation is undoubtedly worth while, and it will prove
profitable for a little while to exchange general statements and sweeping
surveys for definite figures, well verified data and typical cases within
a limited territory.
Therefore, to illustrate clearly that particular phase of the negro’s
progress, the adjustment of his relations to the land and his steadily
advancing gains in real estate and other property-holdings, it will
serve best to take the state of Georgia and present certain comparative
data relating to the situation here.
Our choice of the commonwealth of Georgia for the setting forth of
this matter, instead of some sister state, can be easily justified.
Although the youngest of the original thirteen states, and the only
one whose early constitution barred slavery from its boundaries, yet,
when the Civil War came on Georgia had long been a slave state of great
importance, and at once took a leading part in the struggle. Her people
suffered heavier losses from the war, it is authoritatively claimed, than
those of any other state except Virginia, the old order of things being
more utterly wrecked and old landmarks more completely effaced here than
elsewhere.
There are other reasons for our choice less disputable even than these.
Georgia has the largest area of any state east of the Mississippi River,
and, in her great sweep of 59,475 square miles, from the Appalachian
Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean, exhibits the greatest diversity of soil,
climate and physical features, all of which must be conceded to affect
negro life and industry. Lying largely in the so-called “Black Belt,” the
state still presents quite as marked a diversity of social conditions as
of physical, nor have any of the former slave-holding states been more
strongly affected than this by the industrial and educational movements
which have stirred the South within the last few years. It is only
fair to call attention, likewise, to the fact that, while Georgia is
recognized as the centre of some of the most radical thought and action
upon the negro question, yet this condition is counterbalanced by the
existence within its borders of a mass of white voters who seem more than
ordinarily swayed by an intense sense of justice to the black. Witness
the manner in which all bills tending toward negro disfranchisement meet
summary defeat before the Georgia Legislature, and, again, the defeat of
the last year’s movement to divide the state’s educational funds in such
a way as to allow to colored schools only the pro rata share representing
taxes on the property of the negro.
Furthermore, it may be added here, that while the state has no Hampton
or Tuskeegee within her borders, still she has most excellent public
schools for negroes, and in several cities she is now giving them
admirable training in manual and industrial arts along with the academic
studies, as, notably, at Columbus; and she also has an important branch
of her state university devoted to the industrial, technical and manual
training of colored youths—that is, the Industrial College for Negroes at
Savannah, a high-grade institution wholly supported by public funds.
If the selection of Georgia for a local study of the negro’s material
progress does not yet appear justified, then the last, and in itself
wholly adequate, reason may now be assigned, namely, that the state
has the largest negro population of any in the Union, her colored
people numbering 1,034,998, or a bare trifle under 50 per cent. of the
entire population. Observe that in this state are congregated more than
one-eighth as many blacks as are scattered throughout the remaining half
a hundred states and territories of the Union.
New Year’s Day of 1863 saw 470,000 freedmen in Georgia, these in the
main having been ushered into liberty in quite as destitute a condition,
regarding land and other worldly possessions, as that in which they
were ushered into existence. The exceptions to this generally prevalent
destitution were favored slaves here and there whose former masters and
mistresses, too often nearly destitute themselves, had deeded them little
homesteads, or in some other way given them a start in independence.
Or, again, there were exceptions in the case of the few thousands upon
whom General Sherman and his associates had bestowed certain donatives
in the shape of wages, usually unearned, and bounty money or lands, all
distributed with the injudiciousness expected in such a situation.
Today, barely one generation’s space removed from that hour of strange
and sorrowful conditions, these freedmen and their children pay taxes
on more than a million acres of Georgia land, not to mention houses,
household goods, stock, agricultural implements, merchandise and other
taxable properties. If the situation speaks well for American life and
opportunities, it also speaks well for the black man, and more eloquently
still for his chances in the South.
The toilsome processes by which the Georgia negro has climbed from
destitution to his present state of comparative prosperity deserve more
than a passing glance. Do not think it was the same as if you or your
neighbor, or even Mr. Riis’s European, who is to be refashioned into an
American, should start today without money or lands, without friends
except those destitute as yourselves. We should know where to turn, what
work to take up, how to apply whatever of skill or energy or special
aptitudes might exist within us. Failing of skill or marked aptitudes
of our own, failing even of an ordinarily good education, we should at
least have within us inherited instincts to help us out of the difficult
situation. Above all, we should know what was in the world, what was
worth striving for, where to set our aims.
But what of skill did the negro have, save in the rudimentary forms
of agriculture? Whither, save for restraining influences, would his
inherited instincts have led him? What did he know of life experientially
beyond the log square of a slave’s cabin, or by observation and hearsay
beyond the compass of the plantation lord’s domain?
No; set it down that the new freedman was poorer than the poorest, and,
except in rare cases, more ignorant than can now be readily conceived of.
In such condition, with no higher aims to impel him to work than the bare
instinct of self-preservation, his work must of necessity be for many
years only a bread-meat-and-shelter matter.
Yet, somehow—who can tell by what strange evolution?—working on blindly,
gropingly, toilsomely, he has still contrived to press forward, until
today, with a generation scarcely gone, he stands on a plane no one
counted on his reaching under a hundred years. And the best of all his
gains is that the most intelligent of his race have come to comprehend
what true progress means, and to compare the slight space traversed by
their people with the vast upward stretch reaching away in front of them.
During one of the large conventions which recently met in a Georgia
city, a visitor from New England asked me, with genuine concern: “But
where do your better class negroes live? Or are there no blacks decently
housed, no places at least approximately clean and comfortable that they
can claim as homes? In various cities through your section I have found
only swarming and fetid negro quarters, the worst of slums, a menace to
municipal health, both physical and moral. Is there nothing more hopeful
than this to show for the race?”
Admitting the general truth of his imputation, I was still able to
point out to him a few streets, or sections of streets, where the most
intelligent and prosperous of the blacks of the city had made themselves
real homes. Yet even these, he demurred, bordered too close upon those
same slums he had been fretting over. For in Southern cities the people
of this race keep together, it will be noted.
But I told my guest to come with me to the country if he would see the
negro at his racial best. Agriculture, I assured him, had come very near
to spelling out salvation for this people. Instance the state conference
of colored farmers convening not so very long ago in Savannah. Nearly two
hundred delegates were present, and everyone owned his own home, many
being comparatively wealthy. One in particular was pointed out as worth
$50,000, made entirely from agriculture.
In the country, then, we must still look for the best average of the
negro’s home, his domestic life and virtues, as well as his industry
and thrift. A brief investigation of conditions brought our New England
friend to the same conclusion, and he went away much better satisfied as
to the prospects of the race.
Certain facts and figures which interested this intelligent student of
racial conditions will doubtless interest scores of others, and they are,
therefore, offered in the present paper.
Georgia has 137 counties, each constituting a small commonwealth
in itself. Being settled at irregular periods and under diverse
circumstances, varying, moreover, in topography and character of the soil
and climate, these counties exhibit each a different ratio of the negroes
to the whites.
A glance at the maps may aid in forming a clear idea of the movements and
growth of the black population in Georgia. In 1790, it will be observed,
the counties near the coast were the only ones settled, and if the black
folk were inconsiderable in numbers, so were the white.
But by 1800 the slaves were showing a rapid increase, and were being
moved up the Savannah River, while from that time to 1840 the population,
both white and black, exhibited a marked tendency to seek the rich lands
of the interior, pushing westward and, a little later, southwestward.
At the close of the year 1900 the blacks of the state had increased from
the few thousands of slaves of a century back, held chiefly on the coast,
to more than a million free people, fairly well dispersed through all but
the extreme mountain counties and paying taxes on many million dollars of
Georgia property.
From the office of the comptroller-general of the state there is issued
annually a full report of the property-holdings of both blacks and
whites, set forth with exactness of detail county by county. From the
file of these reports it is easy to make a comparative study, in brief
or at length, of past changes, progress or retrogression, and the present
status in any or all of the Georgia counties. But the general reader will
be able to draw his conclusions from a glance at a few of these.
Chatham County, the original seat of settlement, is perhaps the best
starting-point. It is located in Southeastern Georgia, washed by the
Savannah River and the tides of the Atlantic, has for its county seat
Savannah, the second city of the state, and comprises mainly a stretch
of marshland, low islands and flat, sandy tracts. In early days a brisk
slave trade brought many negroes to this county, and since the war
the city of Savannah has attracted the freedmen in great numbers. The
relations between whites and blacks have been more uniformly cordial
here than elsewhere, the former being in the main of the original
slave-holding class, and the latter largely house servants. The situation
is thus in direct contrast to that in Atlanta, for instance. By the year
1790 there were already 8,313 blacks in Chatham County, as against 2,456
whites; while the census of a hundred years later shows an increase to
54,757 negroes and 22,966 whites.
Sherman’s celebrated field order, issued immediately after his investment
of Savannah, gave hundreds of former slaves temporary possession of
valuable lands on the coast and sea islands of this county, as it did to
a lesser extent in certain other sections of the state. This tenure was
in some cases brief, but in many others became permanent. Hence, even
as early as 1875, we find the freedmen owning 1,491 acres of Chatham’s
land, valued at upward of $70,000, besides town and city realty worth
$152,760. Twenty-five years later they had multiplied these figures by
four, approximately. No bad showing, when all things are taken into
consideration.
Another coast county, Liberty, is beyond doubt the most interesting in
its history of all the so-called “black counties.” This, too, is located
in the southeastern portion of Georgia, a neighbor of Chatham’s, with
much the same climate and topographical features, and was laid out in
1777. But the history of its first settlers deserves to be traced much
further back, for, in 1695, there had come to South Carolina a little
colony of New England Puritans, breaking off from the parent church
at Dorchester, Mass., and led by Joseph Soul, a Harvard graduate and
teacher. Their location in South Carolina having proved unhealthful, they
were attracted by Oglethorpe’s little Georgia settlement, and, having
secured a grant of 32,000 acres on the present site of Liberty County,
they removed thither in 1752, their colony then numbering 280 whites and
536 negro slaves! The county was laid off as Midway, but later changed
its name to Liberty. It should be remarked that when secession from the
Union became an issue this county voted solidly against it.
After the Civil War the land here was thrown largely on the market, and
at several places, notably Woodville, Ogeechee and Belmont, numbers of
negroes united themselves into colonies and bought extensive tracts.
There are now in the county nearly ten thousand negroes, with half that
number of whites; and the former own more than 50,000 acres of land.
Appling is a county also in the southeastern portion of the state, but
presenting a very different showing. It is a level county, inland, with
poor soil, and the tide of slaves poured around it without touching it.
In 1820 there were just eighty-six negroes within its borders. When
manumission came there were only about seven hundred Appling County
slaves to be set free. At the present time it is estimated that there are
3,000 negroes in the county, with more than twice that number of whites.
But from the comptroller-general’s latest report it appears that the
former own 17,946 acres of land, such land as it is!
Now run up to Central Georgia. Here is found the flourishing city
of Macon, in the county of Bibb. The census of 1890 gave Macon a
population of 22,746, of whom one-half were negroes. The land in this
section is hilly, with soil mixed, good and bad. Twenty-five years ago
there were something over 11,000 negroes in the county, outnumbering
the whites by nearly two thousand, and they owned 2,611 acres of land.
Now the blacks have a trifle more than doubled in numbers, as well as
in property-holdings. Observe, too, the higher value of the negro’s
farm lands in this section. His 4,500 acres of Bibb County land is now
assessed at $413,300, which amount, added to his town and city realty and
other taxable properties, makes an aggregate value of $719,380 in this
county alone.
A little to the northeast of Bibb County lies Baldwin, of which
Milledgeville, the former state capital, is the chief town. This was a
very wealthy ante-bellum section, with large holdings in slaves as well
as lands. When the Civil War began Baldwin County could muster 5,000
slaves, although of the whites, rich and poor, there were only 4,000.
When the census of 1890 was taken the negroes had increased to 9,343, the
whites only to 5,262. Last year the negroes were paying taxes on 6,501
acres of Baldwin County land, valued at $26,599, besides a large amount
of city and town property and other possessions, the whole aggregating
$104,592.
Take another county in Middle Georgia, a county of good lands but without
a town of any size in it, therefore representing more nearly a plain
agricultural average. Any one of a score might be selected. Let us say
Butts, a small but prosperous county which was laid out in 1825 and at
the outbreak of the war had 3,082 slaves and 3,375 whites. A quarter of a
century ago its freedmen, numbering approximately 4,000 people, owned but
ninety-seven acres of land in the entire county and $350 worth of town
property. Have they climbed since 1875? In numbers they are now estimated
at 7,000, against a like number of whites, and last year these negroes
paid taxes on 1,613 acres of good average farming land, and on other
property which ran the total valuation in Butts up to $49,941.
In the mountain counties of Georgia it has been different, the increase
in number of negroes as well as their possessions being slow and
uncertain, while the whites have maintained a steady progress in such
sections. This, however, is clearly accounted for by the lesser ratio
the agricultural interests bear to others in mountainous districts, and
the dependence of the negroes upon the former. Glance at Gilmer County,
with its sixty-nine blacks and almost 10,000 whites, the former paying
taxes on a few hundred acres of rocky hillsides, and their whole county
property aggregating, by the most recent returns, only $957, while the
latter show taxable possessions valued at $728,000. In Rabun, Towns,
Flannin and neighboring counties the situation shows much the same.
This brief study of typical counties may be closed with certain
comparative data from Fulton, which contains the state’s capital,
Atlanta, a progressive and rapidly growing city distinctly of the “New
South” type. Fulton was not laid out until 1853, hence is relatively
young in the sisterhood of counties. Only about 2,000 slaves were set
free in this county. Compare the number with the 16,000 manumitted in
Chatham. But today there are more than 50,000 negroes in Fulton, and,
although they own but a thousand acres of land in the county, yet the
aggregate value of their whole property is a bare trifle below one
million dollars!
To extract the most important meanings from such figures is not
difficult. In connection with them several facts should be kept in mind,
the first of which is that the negro’s land-holdings in Georgia as well
as in adjoining states are usually parceled out in very small individual
lots. In a canvass of fifty-six typical counties of the state, the
following table was established to show the average size of the farm
lots among negro proprietors:
CLASSIFIED SIZE PER CENT. OF
TOTAL OWNERS
Under 10 acres 30.50
10 or under 40 acres 27.00
40 or under 100 acres 21.85
100 or under 200 acres 12.80
200 or under 500 acres 6.89
500 acres or over .93
The fifty-six counties canvassed represent the majority of negro holdings
in the state, and the average here established may fairly be taken as
that of the state at large, or, indeed, of the agricultural South. The
fact that a very large proportion of the farms are so limited in size
as to amount only to gardens, or, in negro parlance, “patches,” augurs
well rather than ill, for it means many small proprietors instead of
merely a few large ones and the rest all renters or day laborers. Since
out of 369,265 black people in the state ten years of age or over who
are engaged in gainful occupations, almost two-thirds are employed in
some line of agricultural work, is it not well that the million acres
owned by negroes should be distributed in small holdings? It is easy to
deduce from this the manifest decline of the metayer, or tenant system
of farming. To be sure, these one-acre, or even ten-acre farms will
seldom support the owner, though he may have the smallest family, or none
at all. Such farms are largely instances of what may be called, in the
German phrase, _Parzellenbetriebe_—that is, farms not large enough to
occupy the labor of a family, but serving as sources of partial support
to those with supplementary occupations. Yet, in many cases, these little
plots of ground will grow to goodly farms within a few years. The same
story has been traced a thousand times in the past quarter of a century.
It will be remarked, also, that the negro’s town and city property
is increasing greatly. In 1880 the assessed value of such property
was only $1,201,992, or 20 per cent. of their entire state property;
while in 1902 it is $4,389,422, which is close to 29 per cent. of the
state’s aggregate. Thus, while agriculture gave the freedman his start
in self-maintenance, and is still his chief dependence, yet paths of
employment and sources of revenue in cities are being discovered by him
more and more as the years go by and his education progresses.
Before passing to the close, another point is worthy of especial note,
interesting both the economist and the sociologist. In 1875 the assessed
value of the household and kitchen furniture owned by all the negroes in
the state, then numbering between six and seven million souls, was only
$21,186, or something like three cents’ worth to each individual. But in
1902 the assessed value of the same class of property was $1,688,541, or
a trifle over the value of a dollar and a half to each colored man, woman
and child in the state. Upon this phase of development and progress no
comment is needed.
In brief, then, the black people of Georgia paid taxes for 1902 on
1,175,291 acres of land, and upon an entire property aggregating
$15,188,069 in assessed value. This means, beyond the shadow of a doubt,
that the negroes of Georgia, or, broadly speaking, the South, are
accumulating property and acquiring homes. And since the negro with a
home is almost sure to stand for law, order and civic faithfulness, it
means, moreover, a reaching out toward higher standards of living, not
material living alone, but social life, mental and moral striving and
achievements.
Comprehending the situation in its fulness, no man can deny that the race
is actually _started_ on the road to better things than their past might
have indicated that they were capable of attaining.
_A Japanese Populist_
BY THOMAS C. HUTTEN
_Author of “National Characteristics,” “The Farthest East”_
Two years ago a prominent Russian patriot admitted a misgiving that
nothing but a miracle could shake the strongholds of Czarish despotism.
It does not impeach the correctness of his view that the miracle has been
accomplished.
A giant has entered the political arena; a new world power has risen from
the dust of a Buddhist serf-kennel, and it is about time to recognize the
fact that the marvel of evolution has been effected by progress in the
direction of popular democracy.
The memorable vote of the daimios was a renunciation of class privileges.
Of the forty amendments in the new constitution of the Japanese Empire,
twenty-six tend to reform the abuses of class legislation. The nation
controls two-thirds of its mines. Stockholders of a telegraph monopoly
have been forced to accept a time limit of their contract. Six hundred
and twenty miles of railroads are managed—and successfully managed—by
a national board of administration. The Government, in the name of the
nation, builds its own warships and welds its own armor-plates, instead
of farming out jobs to the highest briber. The Ways and Means Committee
of 1901 reduced direct taxation almost on the exact plan of the system
recommended by the reformer Bakunin—reserving building lots in new cities
and granting tenures from two to ten years at gradually increasing rates
of rent.
Populist reforms have rendered the Government popular enough to make the
nation invincible.
And the world-wide need of those reforms has been repeatedly urged by
Japanese travelers, and with the emphasis of strong personal conviction,
especially by a keen observer who visited Europe and North America in the
summer of 1903.
Professor Yashinto Korioky, agent of a Tokio reform club, explored
the United States without the assistance of the guides trained by our
Star-spangled Uncle and with often remarkable results.
“Surprises,” he says, “indeed, began before we had set foot on the soil
of the great moral Republic. Above the sea mist and above the gathering
clouds a fire gleamed like a meteor on the western horizon, and one of
the Chinese steerage passengers, venturing to inquire, ascertained that
it was a statue of liberty, furnishing light to the world. The next
moment a sailor struck him between the eyes, and he admitted that he saw
several starlike, luminous objects.”
A TEST OF RIGHTEOUSNESS
“The next morning,” he continues, “I got my traveling scrip, but was
informed that our boat was moored on the wharf of an island, where
immigrants are assorted according to the degree of their rectitude.
Some pass the ordeal of scrutiny with ease, others with difficulty, for
reasons which I was not always able to discern. I noticed, however, that
the Government has coined shekels of silver with inscriptions expressing
sentiments of virtue—“In God we trust,” or similar words—and whenever
a traveler came provided with a goodly number of these tokens, his
righteousness seemed to be taken for granted.”
PATERNAL SOLICITUDE
“The investigations of the learned officials in some cases extended to
articles of wearing apparel. One Canton trader had underlined his tunic
with eighty yards of fine silk, which, being discovered, were unwound and
confiscated to enforce a lesson of modesty in the matter of dress.”
WORLDLINESS SUPPRESSED
“He was, however, allowed to proceed, more fortunate than two of his
countrymen who had crossed the ocean for the first time, and were sent
back at the expense of the Chinese contractors. Forty years ago these
worldly toilers were admitted as freely as other foreigners; but it was
noticed that they worked sixteen hours a day and seven days in the week,
thus disregarding the duty of providing leisure for spiritual exercises.
And as their lack of repentance was, moreover, aggravated by the rapid
accumulation of coin, it was finally decided to remove them for the
promotion of their higher interests.”
A SCHOOL OF PATIENCE
“Animals that are most carefully excluded from the residence quarters
of Japanese towns enjoy the freedom of many American cities. Cats roam
at large and dogs are permitted to defile public monuments.... After
dark their clamor exceeds the vociferations of the East Indian jackals
and robs thousands of sleep; but it is perhaps necessary that taxpaying
citizens should be trained in lessons of self-denial.”
GOVERNMENT MAN-TRAPS
“Knowing my reputation for veracity, be prompt, my brother, to intercede
if the unregenerate of your neighborhood should question the following
facts: In the course of each year some 80,000,000 ox-loads of grain are
manufactured into a health-destroying poison; ... coal stoves, pretty as
the vases of Nagasaki, radiate warmth in winter; fans, operated by unseen
forces, mitigate the heat of the summer season. Singers often warble with
the skill of the sirens. In the neighborhood of these seductive traps
the Government then posts its man-catchers and awaits results. It may
seem incredible. But I have been informed that in Southern China monkeys
are often captured by similar devices. When the poison begins to operate
they fall bewildered, and their awakening in a cage the next morning must
tend to mitigate the frivolity of their disposition.”
A THOUGHTFUL LANDLORD
“The owner of the estate, we ascertained, was a timber merchant, as well
as a pillar of virtue, and a large number of trees in the rear of the
building had recently been felled—probably to give the neighborhood a
more unobstructed view of heaven.”
COMPENSATING LEGISLATION
“Those stock gamblers, whose conspiracies had ruined thousands, were not
mistaken in their expectation that the law would protect them against the
risk of a riot. Children, gambling for peanuts, are promptly arrested.
The advantages of magisterial virtue cannot be overrated.”
FOUR-HANDED FILIPINOS
“Apes, almost as dissolute as sparrows, are exhibited in the parks of
several American cities.... In the Philippine Islands a large number of
these animals has recently been captured and caged—probably to limit
their opportunity for worldly enjoyments.”
NEMESIS
“But we learned that the steam launch scudding along the west shore of
the bay was a smuggler, and its pursuer a Government revenue tug. For
weeks—perhaps for months—the contrabandists, of Canadian origin, had been
selling meat at frivolous rates, and the avengers of sacrilege were now
at their heels.”
JUVENILE DEPRAVITY
“From the window of one of these air-trains, a package came clattering
down on the sidewalk, scattering a shower of biscuits and hard-boiled
eggs which were seized and devoured by the children of poverty before the
guardians of law and order could interfere. One youngster of five or six
years captured a piece of fruit cake and took to his heels with whoops of
unregenerate glee, whereupon two older boys raced him down and deprived
him of his prize—probably to restrain his penchant for dietetic luxuries.”
MENDICANCY LIMITED
“Two constables dragged along a shrieking girl, who every now and then
resisted progress by throwing herself on the ground.... Of what crime
could a child of her age possibly have been guilty? ... It appeared that
she had been begging in support of an invalid mother, thus tempting
taxpaying citizens to an expenditure of coin that should have been
reserved for other purposes....
“Begging, however, is not wholly prohibited. Politicians often solicit
millions in behalf of candidates who pledge themselves to protect the
associations of wealth and suppress the holiday amusements of the poor.”
WINGED REFUGEES
“... saw nothing but a few crows and two kingfishers, flitting up
and down the rocky banks of the brook. Experience had made them
unapproachably shy, perhaps much to the regret of the neighboring saints,
since they had probably been guilty of fishing on Sunday.”
A FASTING-CURE VICTORY
“Some forty families had been evicted to make room for a trainload of
meek immigrants, who agreed to subsist on potatoes and the promise of a
better hereafter.”
SKY LADDERS
“Seclusion in the upper cavities of these brick mountains must entail
incredible hardships, ... but the landlords seem to hold that all these
discomforts are compensated by the advantage of dwelling nearer heaven.”
A CHEERING PROSPECT
“In Oriental cities, with rare exceptions, everything suggesting the
thought of death is hidden out of view; no sculptor would venture
to exhibit an assortment of gravestones; but people to whom life
brings nothing but a roundabout of toil and tedium may find solace in
contemplating mementoes of the hour that will witness the end of their
doom.”
* * * * *
The philanthropic traveler left his native land with ideals presaging
a universal brotherhood of nations—perhaps under the leadership of
our great Republic—but admits that, under present circumstances, our
popular policy of expansion is, at best, only an attempt to widen the
ring-walls of our slave-pen, before its gates are closed by a syndicate
of bloodsuckers and boodle legislators.
_The King’s Image_
BY WALTER E. GROGAN
_Author of “The Dregs of Wrath,” “The King’s Sceptre,” “The
Curse of the Fultons,” etc._
I knew him at once. He was grayer, he was grimmer, he was more than ever
like a man of granite, hard and immobile, but I knew him. The sight of
him gravely unfolding his table napkin and covering his thin knees at
luncheon in the little hotel set my thoughts back over ten years. I was
then a lad of sixteen. I had seen him constantly in the queer medieval
streets of Tsalburg, the little capital of Ertaria in the Balkans. Gray
and grim, he was then the General Commandant of the army, the iron right
hand of the Wolf King Peter XII. He was grayer and grimmer now, but
undoubtedly the man. For a while I racked my memory for his name. It came
suddenly. General Hartzel! Undoubtedly the man.
The _Times_ supplied me with many conjectures. The senile old King
was dead; his heir, the Prince Paul, had lived his own life in Europe
incognito, and the heir was not forthcoming. Rumor said he was in Paris.
For three days I watched the General. He knew no one at the hotel, he
spoke to no one, but I saw him more than once in earnest conversation
with a young man about my own age, about my own height, about my own
color, but—for the sake of my own vanity—alike in no other particular.
This was—the information was easily come by—the Comte de Troisétoilles,
a young Frenchman of position, now considerably taken with the beautiful
singer, Mlle. Aimée Bergeaux. That was the story noised about, and
in proof thereof her little steam yacht rode in the harbor, he was
constantly with her, and a rumor was essential to the place. A companion,
large, fat, unmistakably German and delightfully placid, cast a broad,
complacent smile of propriety over the romance.
My General, I noted, snarled at the soprano for whose smiles princes
competed. He was thorough, was my General, dear man of stone. Venus
herself would have been baffled by him. But he spoke earnestly and
vehemently to the Count, he who was so taciturn.
On the evening of the third day I met my General on the south cliff by
the absurd little fort. There was a streak of smoke on the horizon. He
was shaking a fist at it, a violent, tempestuous fist.
I have been a prey to sudden impulses all my life. I had maintained an
Englishman’s reserve for three days. I broke it suddenly on the cliff. I
accosted the General in Ertarian.
“You are disturbed, General Hartzel,” I said.
He wheeled round surprisingly. His astonishment grew when he saw me, the
silent companion of his luncheons.
“Monsieur speaks Ertarian,” he said.
“A little,” I answered modestly, yet with inward elation. To surprise a
man of granite! Elation was surely pardonable.
“As a native,” he continued. I bowed. “It is wonderful! Are you Ertarian?”
“No,” I replied.
“No,” he echoed with regret. “You are English. I saw you smoke a pipe.
But you know my real name? I am Captain Schneidlitz here.”
I laughed. “Pardon me, General, I have been amusing myself with your
surprise. My father was British Minister at Tsalburg for many years. As a
boy I spent my holidays there. Hence my accent.”
“Your name is—?” he demanded.
“Havensea,” I answered.
“Then your father is ——?”
“Exactly. I am now the head of my family. It is a large family, General.
I have tens of aunts; my cousins are limitless. I pass an uneasy life
trying to evade them and my unnecessary title. It is difficult—please
respect my incognito as I respect yours, Captain Schneidlitz.”
“You dislike your title?” he asked eagerly.
“The coronet has given me a headache of the soul. You don’t know how
terrible a British title is. It is a mere lever for opening bazaars, a
free ticket to everybody’s dinners.”
“You object to yourself?” His question, the question of the man of
granite, was tremulous with excitement.
“Pardon me,” I answered; “not to myself—but to the impossibility of being
myself. I am an English peer. I have not even the picturesqueness of
poverty. You do not understand. In Ertaria they do not hold flower shows.
I do not object to myself—I object to Lord Havensea.”
The General looked round anxiously. A wide-breeched soldier was walking
toward the fort; a white-stringed bonnet was going home. Seaward the
streak of smoke blackened the eye of the sun. The sight of that caused
the man of granite to swear solemnly in Ertarian—a language admitting a
wide choice of expression to a man oppressed with a sense of wrong.
“I will reply to your first question,” he said. He spoke in a low voice.
He was under some strong emotion. “I am disturbed. That little streak of
smoke dissolving out there represents my hopes dissipated, evaporated. My
hopes are the hopes of Ertaria. We are a small country, but we are proud.”
“A country’s pride invariably compensates for lack of acres.”
“It is a jest to you,” he said sadly. I had expected him to be angry at
my flippant remark. The sadness of his voice slipped past my guard. Here
at last I had found a man who could feel.
“Your pardon, General,” I said more soberly than I had previously spoken.
“The pride of Ertaria I know rests upon an unstained national honor.”
“If you believed that!” he cried.
“I do,” I answered stoutly. “Frankly, you are all absurd, but it is
a glorious absurdity. Small, hemmed in by enemies, you have kept an
independence, noble and untainted, for seven hundred years.”
“You believe it! Why not?” he cried excitedly. “Your father, the dear
Lord Havensea, loved us. He was our friend. His representations at St.
James’s saved us once. You inherited his love. We are in peril now.”
“Ah,” said I, “the lost heir.”
“He is out there under that streak of smoke.”
“He was the Comte de Troisétoilles?”
“Yes. The French singer is Russian. You understand?”
“Kidnapped! Scratch a French soprano and you will find a Russian. My
General!” I was indeed sorry for him. He was honest, was this man of
granite. He loved his country. And Prince Paul—“Royal robes should cover
men, not flattered fools.”
“You understand. The great game is lost. I love Ertaria as I love nothing
else. I would pour out my blood willingly for her. That would be nothing.
I have been the guardian of her honor. That was everything. And now the
hand of the greedy Bear is stretched out for it. And it is lost. At least
five minutes ago I said it was lost. But now you—you can save it—the
great game, the honor of Ertaria, the independence, the life-blood!”
“I! My dear General, I am a tired English peer recovering from a surfeit
of municipal and parochial addresses.”
“You—only you. You are an Englishman, you speak Ertarian, you resemble
the Prince Paul somewhat; he is unknown in Ertaria. You are out of love
with your own identity; you long for something else, for some other
life——”
“My dear General, speak out the whole of your madness.”
“Come, Lord Havensea, and hold the throne!”
I was staggered, astounded. For a moment I watched the smoke becoming
thinner and thinner. Suddenly it seemed to pop out. It was of course a
trick of the imagination.
“You are an Englishman—therefore you have courage.”
It was transcendent flattery. A throne!
“It is madness, my General,” I said. His eyes sparkled.
“It is the madness we love,” he said softly. “And it is for the country,
my country. The poor fool will come back. Don’t let it be too late. Keep
the throne for him—and for us, for the Ertarian children unborn that they
be not born the slaves of the Muscovite. You have read the history of
Poland?”
“It is folly, but—” I commenced.
“The train starts tonight, my Prince, at eleven. The West Station. I will
make all things ready.” The General looked out at the winking sun. The
real Prince was kidnapped, but in his dire need Fate had tossed him a
pseudo one.
It was the wildest of folly, of course, but once seriously embarked upon,
it was remarkable how smoothly it ran. I returned to the hotel, paid my
bill, sent my valet home to England, and met the General at the station.
I entered the first-class compartment a private English gentleman—even
my poor little title left in the custody of my lawyers in Ely Place—and
across the Ertarian frontier I stepped out Paul V.
We alighted at a small station. There were three or four anxious-looking
men on its slender platform. They were dressed in the frock coat of
ceremony. One man only was conspicuous in a gorgeous uniform. It reminded
me of my own Havensea livery. I was preparing to be royally gracious
to him when Hartzel whispered he was the station-master. It was a
brilliant morning; the sun lay on the white caps of the mountain pass
and glistened; big butterflies painted the field; the air was clear,
rarified. I was in excellent spirits.
The General watched the absurd little engine puff its way onward. Then he
turned to me, took off his hat, knelt and kissed my hand. The spectacle
of my man of granite kneeling, his honest, ugly face figured by emotion,
struck me strangely.
“To my God, my Country and my King are my life and my honor dedicated,”
he said, the quaint old formula of allegiance in Ertaria. The frock
coats went through the same performance. It lacked the earnestness of
the General and had a note of anxiety. They looked as though they
were expecting a troop of Cossacks over the edge of the pass and were
nervous. But the ceremony marked a step in the game. Until then I was
in a transition state. I was no longer Lord Havensea, but I had not yet
become King until I had stepped out of my uncomfortable compartment into
a kingdom.
“Gentlemen,” I said in their own picturesque tongue, “you are the first
of my subjects to welcome me. Not as King will I speak to you now, but as
a fellow-worker, for my heart also is dedicated to God and Ertaria.”
That struck some spark into their dull faces.
“Seven centuries of liberty are in our hands,” said I. “The dead fathers
of Ertaria have given us this heritage. It is that which I come to
preserve—in peace if God wills, but if not, the history of Ertaria tells
us how to act.”
Bombast if you will, but it brought life, valor, strength into their
faces.
As for the man of granite, his eyes flashed. Ten minutes more and we were
galloping up the white ribbon of a road toward Tsalburg, embarked upon as
mad a mission as was ever enacted in this Balkan basin of mad missions.
Our frock-coated friends remained behind. I kissed each on his scrubby
cheek, and told him to guard our frontier. They swore to this with tears
in their eyes.
“Well,” said I, “we have played the first act of the farce.”
“You have done well,” my mentor replied. “But this is no farce. It is a
perilous game to play.”
“You did not tell me so before, General. A spice of danger gives it a
zest.”
“You speak like a soldier.”
“I was a soldier—that was before I became a peer and was a personage.
Shall I pass muster? Will they perceive I am no King? Will the people be
with me?”
“Keep a brave heart and that will carry you through. The Russian
Minister, of course, will know you are an impostor.”
“The deuce he will!”
“You must bluff him.”
“And four weeks ago I received the freedom of an English town from a
successful grocer! Hartzel, my blood races! Here are romance, adventure!
I am your debtor for life!”
“That debt may be liquidated at any moment,” he said grimly. For a minute
his old face softened, and then it was as hard as ever. I knew that some
touch of remorse had stabbed him. The game was nothing to me; he was
staking my life for a cause in which I had no concern. Then came the
thought of his country. No life mattered then.
That night we lay in a small town, and I was shown secretly to a few of
the town’s chief men; and the next night we slept in the General’s house
at Tsalburg. The rumor of my coming circulated furiously. At eleven
o’clock, when I was preparing to rest, tired with my long journey, a
mob assembled in the square outside and sang the national anthem for an
hour or so. Hartzel harangued them from the balcony. I was fatigued. I
could not be disturbed, but on the morrow their King would meet them.
That was the purport of his speech. The national anthem broke out again,
and presently, with the poetical inspiration of the nation, they sang a
legendary serenade.
Hartzel came to my room and sat on the edge of my bed. I was nearly dead
with fatigue, but he was inexorable.
“Tomorrow will see the crucial test of our scheme, so you must listen.
There are two factions in Ertaria. In the late King’s reign I kept the
Tertourgkis in abeyance.”
“The Tertourgkis!” I cried, memory stirring me. “They had some feud with
the reigning family and—and there was a daughter.”
“You remember?” he said. “Prince Tertourgki is an old man. His wealth and
his lands go to this daughter, his only child. She is very beautiful.”
“She was a beautiful child, dark and serene as night.”
“The Prince has claims to the throne. He is the descendant of the
Tertourgkis, who reigned in the fifteenth century. They were despots, and
a revolution set the Borros on the throne. The Prince has never abrogated
his claim. There is a second cousin——”
“My General, the rest is easy to decipher. The second cousin has
aspirations for the hand of the Princess Marie; he is the puppet of the
Russians; the Tertourgkis’ influence is great; we fear the loyalty of the
army; we must deal quickly with the second cousin.”
“You are quick at guessing,” the General answered slowly. “You know——”
“On my word, nothing—nothing but the name of the Princess Marie. When
the world was younger, General, there was a large garden and a young
schoolboy—he thought himself a man—and a little child and flowers.
Together they made a happy time. The sun was always shining. The little
child worshiped the big schoolboy—and he graciously permitted it.”
“Your father’s house! Ah, well, you know something, but not all. As the
King lay dying I—I arranged a marriage between the Princess Marie and the
absent Paul.”
I sat up in bed.
“The Prince Paul!” I exclaimed.
“The Prince Paul,” he assented stolidly. “He consented. The Prince looked
kindly upon it; the Princess would not give a definite answer. When the
Prince arrived, she said, she would give him her answer personally.”
“This is your arrangement?” I asked.
“It was a diplomatic stroke,” he said.
“You took an unwarrantable liberty,” I cried warmly. “Why was I not told
of this before?”
“Because you would not have come.”
“And now?”
“Now it is different. You are caught in the toils.”
“It is an unwarrantable liberty! You have engaged me matrimonially
without any reference to my feelings.”
“I have engaged Prince Paul.”
“Who am I?”
“Who you are for the present. My dear Havensea, you do not consider my
position.”
“You have had precious little consideration for mine!”
“It is not yours. You are an actor playing a role. In a short while you
will make a graceful bow and exit.”
“I am not at all sure that it will be graceful.”
“As you will. That does not matter at all. You play a part for a little
while. They will not dare to keep the real Prince a prisoner for long.”
“I am to cheat this girl?”
“What does it matter? It is a royal alliance—there are no considerations
but that of policy. I do not propose to marry you to her.”
“Thanks. That is considerate.”
“My dear Havensea, you are perturbed. The Princess is to marry the Crown.
She is piqued at the long delay of the Prince. There is no question of
sentiment.”
“Suppose there were?”
He looked at me curiously for a moment.
“That is a proposition I will not entertain,” he answered.
“I will not do it!” I cried angrily.
“You will,” he replied quietly. “You have already impersonated the King.
Have you considered the consequences? I say nothing about you. You are
a brave man. But you have already compromised many honest men—and one
dishonest old man. We are only half civilized. That is part of our
charm—at least to you. The people would be very angry. You would be
killed!”
“By Jove, you are a pleasant philosopher!”
“To a brave man that may mean little—life is a mere stake. But the honest
men and the dishonest old man would die also. You could not have my death
upon your conscience!”
“You deserve it, my General; you deserve it, on my honor!”
“Possibly.” He waved it aside resolutely as a matter of small
consequence. “There is also Ertaria. Shall we grant that the Princess
may not be happy? Then there is one woman unhappy and a nation free.
Havensea, you do not understand the stake for which we play. It is not a
crown, nor a woman’s heart, but a nation’s freedom. The heel of Russia
bruises the very souls of men. Russia knouts a man’s soul. Where is
Poland today? It is a great game to save a nation from that curse.”
The man of granite spoke soberly. There was no impassioned appeal. He
spoke of facts. As a boy I knew something of this terror of Russia. This
rugged, hard man was a hero. He played his life not for advancement, but
for the good of his country. My heart warmed to him. And, as he said,
there was also Ertaria.
“I shall go through with it, General,” I said at length. Our hands closed
on that; in the winking light of a candle I saw his eyes glitter. He did
not speak for a full minute. Then he muttered in a low voice, “If you
were only a Borro!”
“It would have been fatiguing,” I said. “I should have quarreled with
you. There is not room on the throne for two men.”
He laughed abruptly at that.
The next morning General Hartzel aroused me at an unearthly hour. He made
me dress in a steel-corseleted uniform. It was exceedingly gorgeous and
stiff with gold lace.
“It is the uniform of the Colonel of the Royal Guards,” he told me.
“Promotion is rapid in Ertaria,” I said. “I was an unconsidered subaltern
in our Blues.”
“The army is reviewed today on the Plain of Liberty,” he said, “by Prince
Tertourgki. He is regent during your absence.”
“And the second cousin?”
“Is his aide-de-camp—Prince Otho. The Russian Minister will be there.”
“And his august name?” I demanded.
“Baron Ivaniski.”
“My dear General!” I cried. “There is a saying, ‘The luck of the
Havenseas.’ The luck holds good. The Russian Bear shall dance, I promise
you!”
“What does Your Majesty mean?”
“His Majesty knows a story, General, a pretty, ornate and most scandalous
story. Ivaniski was an attaché at Berlin when my uncle was Ambassador. It
will be the only good turn Uncle John has ever done me.”
For two mortal hours after a particularly disappointing breakfast—the
General betrayed but an indifferent regard to cuisine—I was gracious to
the peculiarly uninteresting big men of Tsalburg. I signed innumerable
papers, and at a hint from the General kissed those worthy of the honor.
It afforded them far more satisfaction than it did me.
At noon I mounted a black charger, and, accompanied only by the
General, set out for the Plain of Liberty. Hartzel had misled—to use a
euphemism—the populace as to my movements, so that it was merely at odd
whiles that I was called upon to acknowledge shouts of greeting.
The Plain of Liberty is a tableland upon the hill that rises above the
town. From it Tsalburg can be seen spread out in picturesque confusion.
It is a big plain, and its name is derived from the presence in its
centre of a huge column surmounted by a figure of Liberty. On the base
of this column are inscribed the names of the more or less traditional
heroes who are popularly supposed to have engineered the independence of
the country. This column has become a subject of sentimental worship with
the nation.
On this plain were assembled the populace of Tsalburg to witness the
review of the major part of the troops of the country, some fifteen
thousand. Prince Tertourgki had selected a place near the column as a
saluting base, and the troops, when we arrived, were drawn up in review
order. The column stood, as it were, a huge, gray sentinel between the
Prince and the troops.
“Some of the officers I could trust expect you!” the General cried.
“Spur on to the troops. Now is our crisis. The Baron has tampered with
some of the regiments, but to what extent I cannot say. If the troops
receive you Ertaria is saved.”
“Your true gambler risks all on a single throw!” I shouted, clapping
spurs into my charger. It was a glorious gallop. My blood raced in my
veins. My horse was maddened by the touch of the spur. I thundered on
down the level turf. I saw the stir of surprise in the populace. I caught
a waver of ranks as the troops craned forward to see me come. Then a
flash of inspiration came to me. As I raced by the column I suddenly
drew rein, flinging my horse back on his haunches. For a moment he lay
crouched backward, and in that moment I had raised my sword in salute of
the column. Then the charger leaped forward, and I rode to the front of
the troops.
Such a shout greeted me as I have never heard before. It roared about my
ears like thunder. “Long live the King!” they cried, and the populace
took up the words, “Long live the King!”
I raised my hand and there was silence.
“Comrades,” I shouted, “we all alike serve under Liberty. The statue of
our dead heroes watches over King and people.” Again the air was rent.
I turned. General Hartzel, following me, had just cantered up. On his
grim, granite face was a smile like wintry sunshine.
“General Hartzel,” I cried, “you will march the troops past in review
order!” Then I cantered over to the saluting base. I was King!
An old man in uniform was fidgeting about on a gray horse. At his side
was a young officer, dark, almost swarthy, whispering eagerly. In a
landau at the back sat a frock-coated gentleman with an order in his
buttonhole. He had the broadness between the eyes of the Tartar. With him
was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. Out of her big black eyes
shone the light of admiration. In a mist I saw again the small child in
the garden, her wondering worship and the big English schoolboy.
“Prince,” I cried, “will you do me the honor of taking the salute?”
I spoke to him so as to force an answer. The unexpected compliment
flustered him.
“Your Majesty,” he faltered, “my usefulness is over.”
“No,” I replied, engineering my restive charger to the discomfiture of
the second cousin, “we will work together for Ertaria, Prince.” I held
out my hand, and in a moment the white-haired old fellow was off his
horse and kneeling, kissing my hand. How the populace roared aloud their
pleasure! The bands crashed out the national anthem, ladies fluttered
their scarfs, a whole forest of hats waved in the air. I was King, and
apparently popular. It was an exhilarating feeling. I thought of the real
Paul shut up in a satinwood cabin on board a kicking little steam yacht,
and smiled.
The Prince and I took the salute; he reined in to a respectful distance.
Afterward I was conducted to the landau. The Prince stayed a moment to
speak to the second cousin. I rode up alone and dismounted.
“Have you no welcome for the King, Princess Marie?” I asked.
“You know me? My father told you?” Her voice was serene, low, like silver
bells on a summer evening.
“No. The Prince has said nothing. But I knew that the Princess Marie was
the most beautiful woman in Ertaria.” She smiled at me. I met her smiling
eyes. It was then I regretted that I was merely playing a part. The small
child had grown into a wondrously beautiful woman. I know that from the
moment my eyes met hers in that long look I loved her. Hers were eloquent
also, so eloquent that she veiled them quickly with long, thick, black,
curling lashes, and the rich color mounted to her cheek.
“But Your Majesty,” the Russian’s lips curled in a sneer, “has seen the
Princess’s photograph.”
“One has no conception of sunlight from observation of the moon, Baron,”
I answered.
“And you are really the King, Paul V.” His voice was challenging, his
eyes were gleaming with anger. The elaborate and desperate project of
kidnapping the Prince had failed at the very moment of its success. In
his pocket, I thought, were the particulars of Paul’s involuntary voyage,
and yet here was a king to thwart all his plans.
“And you are really the Baron Ivaniski—of Berlin?” He grew white to the
lips at the concealed threat in my voice.
“Of Berlin?” he faltered. “I have no connection with Berlin.”
“Your memory is short, Baron. In November of ’84 you were surely in
Berlin. I believe, if I tried, I could persuade you of that. Lord
Derwenthurst was a friend of mine.”
“Ah, yes, I had forgotten,” he muttered. I could have laughed at him, he
had become so craven and so cringing. Uncle John had told me of the Baron
and his gambling debts, and his attempt to sell a Russian secret to us.
Uncle John was too honest for a diplomat. He refused, and extracted from
the young attaché a signed declaration of his treason. The alternative
was that of forwarding the proposal to the Russian Ambassador.
Riding to the palace with my granite General, he expressed approval of my
day’s work.
“Ah, General,” said I, “the public enthusiasm is stimulating. Not all the
school children of my native town, bribed by oranges and buns, can shout
like your honest people.”
“And the Princess?” he asked anxiously.
“And the Princess is divine.”
A week passed in a whirl of popular excitement. No one guessed; the
Russian dared not speak openly. In any case I hardly think Russia
would have avowed her kidnapping of the Prince. As it was, the Baron
had too great a fear of the document he believed I held. On the second
day the Princess gave me her answer. We were betrothed. Public joy
expressed itself in gala nights at the Opera, in fireworks, in torchlight
processions. And for me all the zest of the game I was playing departed.
As I listened to Marie, as I learned from her own lips that she loved
me, I realized bitterly the part I was playing. Not all the General’s
sophistries could disguise it from me. I was cheating her. And her trust
was perfect. I writhed under her praise, I was tortured by the possession
of her love, a possession which, come by honestly, I would have treasured
beyond all else.
On the eighth day, the evening of the gala ball, my granite General came
to my private chamber.
“The _Coquette_ entered Trieste last night,” he said harshly. I started.
_Coquette_ was the name of the soprano’s yacht.
“Well?” I replied. We stared at each other. General Hartzel had been
growing brusk and ill-humored with me. I think he guessed at the romance.
“The King will be here tomorrow night.”
“Suppose I answer that by saying the King is here?”
“You will not do that. Your honor is engaged.”
“You have been teaching me to do without honor.”
“I must tell her tonight.”
I rose. “You will not. I will tell her.”
“You will seek to dissuade her!”
“I will tell her. It is my right, Hartzel.”
“You promise——?”
“I promise nothing. Man, do you think I will slink out of this like a
whipped cur? I have cheated. I will confess.”
After the first ceremonial reception I slipped into the dark garden. My
brain was hot. I wanted to feel the soft coolness of the night. In an
avenue I stumbled upon the Prince Otho and the Russian Baron. They barred
my way.
“Impostor!” cried the Prince. The news had leaked out. The Russian knew
and had told his friend.
I took off my glove and struck him in the face.
“After the fourth waltz,” I said. “There is a moon. In the walled garden.
And, gentlemen, whatever you may know, keep silence. Berlin will speak if
you do.”
I sought Hartzel. He was not difficult to find. He was dogging my steps
like a spy. I told him of my meeting in the garden, and asked him to be
my second.
“He is a good swordsman,” he said. I think he was sorry.
“Then I sincerely hope the real Paul won’t miss his train. To have the
throne vacant again would be annoying.”
“And you?” he asked.
“My dear General,” I said, with a smile, “when a man is giving up a pearl
of infinite value he does not care much for the tarnished gold of his own
life.”
The fourth waltz I danced with the Princess Marie.
“I wish to speak to you soberly, seriously, sedately, Marie. May I? Come
to the little conservatory and sit out the thirteenth.”
“It is an unlucky number.”
“No number is unlucky that gives me your presence,” I said lightly.
* * * * *
In the moonlight we stripped to our shirts. It was nearly as light as day.
“This is a mistake,” my granite General said. He was thinking of the risk
to his scheme and the ease with which both men could have been arrested.
“No, General. This may be reparation,” I answered.
Prince Otho was an excellent swordsman. That I knew at once. His wrist
was supple and strong as steel. We engaged and fought slowly, cautiously.
He had a dangerous, wicked riposte which I guarded twice, more by luck
than by skill. Undoubtedly he was my master. I smiled grimly at this. I
was sorry, because I wished to speak to Marie. And yet, perhaps, this
was a better way. Ah, a scratch! I had turned too late, and the sting in
my shoulder told me I was hit.
“He is hit! It is enough!” cried General Hartzel.
“A mere scratch!” I answered hotly, and we engaged again. It was evident
the Prince was waiting for an opening to kill. Two opportunities for
serious wounds he passed. Then suddenly he made a quick lunge over my
guard. I stepped back quickly; he could not recover his guard; he fell
back. Hartzel leaned over him.
“That ends it,” he said complacently. “Four weeks, at least, in bed. This
is an accident, Baron.”
* * * * *
The thirteenth dance. The lights were very low. There was the heavy,
thick scent of gardenias. The Chinese lanterns swayed curiously. When I
pulled myself together they were still. The wound pricked unpleasantly.
Marie came.
“This is most unorthodox, Your Majesty,” she said mockingly. “Everyone is
asking for you.”
“Will you sit down, dear?” I spoke very slowly. In truth the pain in my
arm was like a red-hot steel needle. She sobered quickly. I could not see
very well. I think she went white. She sat down meekly. I could see her
big eyes, only her eyes.
“Paul!” she breathed.
“I am not Paul,” I said. “I am not King. I am only the King’s image, a
poor counterfeit.”
“Paul!” she said again. Then she checked herself.
“He will be here tomorrow. My period of usefulness will be over. He—he
was kidnapped. I came—because I was bored, because there was some chance
of adventure, because an old man pleaded for his country. Now it is all
over—the King comes, the King’s image is wanted no longer.”
“Paul, I want you,” she said in a low voice.
“I am not Paul. And—and, Marie, there is duty! A nation may groan under
the tyranny of Russia unless—You understand, Marie. Our lives cannot
always be ministers to our desires. We—we are caught in the toils; we
can only obey, we can only do our duty, trusting that somehow it will be
found good.”
“For us?” she asked.
“For your people.”
“You say that that is my duty, Paul?”
“Yes.”
“And you love me?”
“And I love you,” I answered. The lanterns were swinging madly now. Over
their light was a new mist growing, growing. I bit my lip—but the throb
of the wound was agony.
“I believe you, dear,” she said simply. “It—it seems hard that—that so
much should rest upon one poor girl. I think I know what—you mean. The
people shall be happy though the Queen’s heart break.” She rose and came
toward me. She caught me by my wounded shoulder and kissed me. And with
all the agony of it that kiss I hold in my heart always as a dear memory.
When she went the lanterns whirled, the mist shut down on my eyes, and I
fell. General Hartzel found me.
The next morning early, recovered of my swoon, I rode out of Tsalburg.
General Hartzel rode with me a little way.
“If you had only been the real King,” he said, with more feeling than I
thought possible, “and not——”
“And not the King’s image,” I filled in. “It is a pity when the clay
image has a living heart.”
_The Story of a Suppressed Populist Newspaper_
BY THOMAS H. TIBBLES
_People’s Party Candidate for Vice-President_
At one time there were fifteen hundred weekly papers advocating the
principles of the Omaha platform. Some of them had large plants, some
only a few cases of type and a Washington press, but all were actuated
by one purpose—to make conditions easier for those who toiled on farms,
in shops, factories, mines and mills. Among those still fighting up to
the first of April of this year was the _Nebraska Independent_. Many
such papers were crushed by various devices, chief among which was that
the great advertisers of the land, all being allied with Wall Street,
refused to give them any business. Numerous instances could be cited
where Populist papers were refused advertisements given to plutocratic
papers not having one-tenth the circulation, and paid for at a higher
rate than the proprietors of the Populist papers would have taken. In
the files of the _Nebraska Independent_ may be found scores of letters
from advertising agents, who had been solicited for business, saying:
“If you will make your paper an exclusively agricultural journal we will
be glad to give you a good line of business, but we cannot patronize it
as long as it advocates Populism.” Every reform editor has had the same
experience.
Thirteen years ago the agricultural papers everywhere were publishing
articles defending Populist principles. Then all at once such articles
were seen in their pages no more, and immediately the papers were
flooded with high-priced advertising. The religious press was caught in
the same trap. It is strange that the devout readers of those papers
never once had their suspicions aroused when they saw so many display
advertisements of trusts, banks and promotion schemes in their modest
little religious journals. Notwithstanding all such schemes, the
_Nebraska Independent_ lived and its circulation gradually extended into
every state and territory. It became evident that to get rid of it other
tactics would have to be employed. To destroy the paper was not the
objective. It was to destroy the People’s Party. With the _Independent_
in hostile hands the political fortifications built up by it in Nebraska
and other states would be deserted and the Bryan, Belmont, Sheehan and
Tom Taggart Democratic Party could walk in and take possession.
The main battle was fought in the Populist state convention August 10,
1904. The proposition to force a fusion with the Democrats under the lead
of the most disreputable end of Wall Street, fresh from its victory in
St. Louis, on the face of it was most absurd. But the doing of absurd
things never ruffles the placid countenance of Mr. Bryan. The idea that
there could be any real opposition to his imperial will in Nebraska,
aside from the Republican Party, never seemed to enter his mind.
Heretofore when Mr. Bryan entered a Democratic or Populist convention,
the Fusion Populists and Democrats immediately bowed and worshiped. The
only thing that convention had to do was to find out what Mr. Bryan
wished and then proceed to do it with all possible haste. It became
evident that this convention would have to be handled differently. Mr.
Bryan all the winter, spring and summer had been denouncing Judge Parker
as a “dishonest candidate, running on a dishonest platform,” and then he
had come home from St. Louis, sat down at his desk and the first words
that he wrote were: “I shall vote for Parker and Davis.” The Populists
remembered how for eight years he had been coming to their conventions,
and in his sweet and winning way telling them how noble they were to
put principle above party and vote for men of another party if they
thought they could advance reform by so doing. Many of them, who had
always supported Mr. Bryan since he first appeared on the battlefields
of politics, thought that the time had come when he should practice what
he preached. Mr. Bryan realized that there was trouble ahead, but it was
thought if the _Nebraska Independent_ would support the Bryan plan that
a fusion legislature could be elected that would send Mr. Bryan to the
United States Senate.
The editor of the _Independent_ was obstreperous. He had had enough of
fusion with a party half of which was more disreputably plutocratic than
the Republican Party, and whose “irrevocable” rules were so rigid that
they required a man, upon a vote of a convention, to come out boldly
before the people and advocate a policy he had denounced by pen and
voice for eight years. All sorts of schemes were devised to bring this
obstreperous editor into subjection to the imperial will of Mr. Bryan.
The first was to send all the leading men of the state, from the Chief
Justice down, to use persuasion. That failed. Then Mr. Bryan’s personal
daily organ in the state tried a new deal. It poured out on Mr. Tibbles
the most fulsome flattery day after day. It said if he would only say
“fusion” every Populist in the state would obey his command. When all
that failed Mr. Bryan came himself. The proposition that he made was
that a fusion electoral ticket be put in the field composed of four
Populists and four Democrats, Mr. Bryan saying that, “in the event of
their election, each party could count the full vote as its own.” The
proposition was instantly rejected. Others followed. Mr. Bryan came to
the _Independent_ editorial-room four different times, using all his
eloquence and persuasive powers to get the editor to consent to and
advocate a fusion with a party that had nominated Parker, and whose
campaign was put into the hands of the most disreputable gang that ever
sought Wall Street favor.
Mr. Bryan gave orders that everything visible, clear to the political
horizon, and other things invisible lying behind the floating clouds,
should be offered to the Populist convention providing that the Populists
would fuse. The battle was fought out on the convention floor. Many
Democrats had secured seats as delegates. One Democrat came over from
his own convention and answered to the call of Thurston County in the
Populist convention which had no delegates present, and voted the fifteen
votes that county was entitled to every time for fusion. Out of the
hell-broth brewed in that all-night session there floated upon the fusion
scum Bryan, Belmont, Sheehan, Tom Taggart and, remember this last name,
George W. Berge.
Nearly the whole state ticket was given to the Populists—only three
unimportant offices being conceded to the Democrats, and Berge—George
Washington Berge—captured the prize infamy, the fusion nomination
for Governor. Bryan would allow no other name to be mentioned in the
Democratic convention, although there were two or three Democrats there
who had spent time and much money during the previous eight years
fighting Bryan’s battles for him, and who had expressed a desire to
receive a complimentary vote for that office. When Bryan speaks the
_Nebraska Democrat_ turns pale.
The _Independent_ was still a thorn in the side of these fusionists.
The editor openly declared that he never would vote for or support a
Belmont-Bryan-Parker Democrat. Then it was that fusion itch for office
and Bryan diplomacy joined forces to destroy the _Independent_. The
plutocratic Republican attacks upon it had been of no avail, and week
after week it had proclaimed the doctrines of the People’s Party for ten
years. In an open fight against awful odds it had fought battle after
battle, sometimes victorious and sometimes defeated, but it fought on. It
took fusion treason, it took the work of men who constantly proclaimed
themselves Populists, who insisted upon attending Populist conventions
while their sole aim was to destroy the People’s Party, to do what all
the hosts of plutocracy had failed to do.
As soon as the vote for fusion had been announced in the convention as
prevailing, more than half the delegates present—whole counties had been
voted for fusion when only one or two delegates were in the city—rose and
left. The next morning they hired a hall and discussed the proposition
of putting a straight Populist ticket in the field, but when it was
remembered that the fusionists had the legal organization and the ticket
would have to go on the ballot under some other name than People’s Party
the project was abandoned. The result was that 20,000 Populists voted
the Republican ticket, 30,000 stayed at home and refused to vote, and
a little over 20,000 voted the Populist national ticket. The Senate of
the Nebraska Legislature was solidly Republican; the House had only nine
fusionists in it. Mr. Bryan saw to it that they all cast their votes for
a straight Democrat for United States Senator. All that was necessary to
get the fusionists to do that, both those who called themselves Democrats
and those who called themselves Populists, was for them to imagine that
they heard a far-off rumble that sounded like the voice of Bryan saying:
“Vote for a Democrat.”
When the conventions were over and the campaign committees appointed,
the fusionists found that it was a difficult thing to make a campaign
in Nebraska. Something must be done to get the _Independent_ to fight
the battle for them, but the _Independent_ still declared that it would
not support a Parker Democrat. Then, sad to relate, the editor of the
_Independent_ got taken in himself.
The chairman of the Democratic State Committee, a brother-in-law to
Bryan, came to Mr. Tibbles declaring that he represented Mr. Bryan and
was speaking in Bryan’s name, and made the following proposition:
If Mr. Tibbles would spend most of his time out of the state during the
campaign, and let the _Independent_ support the fusion ticket, all of
whose nominees except three were Populists, Mr. Bryan on his part would
agree to go to Arizona or Colorado and get sick. He would continue to
keep sick until the close of the campaign, so sick that he would not be
able to make any political speeches at all. An exception was made in
regard to Indiana. It was said that Mr. Bryan had promised to make three
speeches in Indiana in support of his old personal friend who was running
for Governor in that state, but it was further stipulated that these
three speeches should not be political speeches, but repetitions of Mr.
Bryan’s lecture on “Ideals.”
Mr. Bryan went to Arizona and sent home a letter saying that he was
worse and would not be able to deliver any political speeches during the
campaign. That letter was printed in the Lincoln daily papers and was
shown to Mr. Tibbles as proof that Mr. Bryan was keeping his contract.
The chairman of the Democratic State Committee went to New York, saw
Parker, Sheehan, Belmont, Tom Taggart and the rest of the band of
financial and political pirates. He came home with money for campaign
expenses. Then Mr. Bryan hired a special train and started out
speech-making in Nebraska and in other states. The surprising rapidity
with which his lung healed has never been equaled in all the history of
medicine. But when the votes were counted it was learned that wherever
Mr. Bryan spoke, whether from the rear end of his car, on a platform
by the railway side, or in theatre or hall, a tidal wave of Republican
votes followed him, although he pleaded with his Democratic hearers to
be “regular.” Hundreds of thousands of Democrats listened to this man,
who for eight years had been denouncing Wall Street and all its ways,
and was now consorting with the most disreputable part of Wall Street,
urging them to vote to keep it in power. Humiliated, sad at heart,
their idol carrying the banner of the enemy, in the enemy’s ranks, they
turned their backs in scorn upon Mr. Bryan, went to the polls and voted
the Republican ticket. If they were to have Wall Street and plutocracy,
they wanted the old, genuine article, not “something just as good.” The
fusionists declared that wherever Watson or Tibbles spoke they made votes
for Roosevelt. They did not make one Roosevelt vote where Bryan made a
thousand.
Mr. Berge—George Washington Berge—received a large vote for Governor.
That was because Mickey, the Republican, who was running for re-election,
was cordially hated by the whole Republican Party. Thirty thousand
Republicans voted for Berge, and then he was defeated. But Berge is a
fusionist. He wants office, and especially the office of Governor of
Nebraska.
It seemed necessary, if Mr. Bryan was to prove his undying love for the
Democratic Party, to convince all Eastern Democrats that he would forever
prove “regular” no matter who was nominated or what the platform was,
and it seemed to the fusionists, if they were to have any of the spoils
of victory when the national Government was captured, that the People’s
Party must be destroyed. It must never hold another state or national
convention. They all agreed that the party had done a wonderful work for
the nation, that its principles were being everywhere adopted, but it
must be crucified, officially pronounced dead and buried, and the first
step toward that object was the destruction of the _Nebraska Independent_.
Mr. Berge is a lawyer. He never has had a day’s experience in a newspaper
office. He announced that he would start a paper in Lincoln in opposition
to the _Independent_. Then a proposition was made to the proprietor of
the _Independent_ to sell out. A very large price was offered. When the
proprietor faced these facts he began to get discouraged. He had grown
up in Lincoln. He had associated with these fusionists for years. The
fight which he saw in the near future with these men was an unpleasant
thing to contemplate. The cost of running a great newspaper plant is
large. When it was known that the home advertising would in part be lost,
and also a large share of the job work, the moment the editor defied
Bryan and the fusionists, the outlook was gloomy. To those whom the
_Independent_ had always fought in the city and state were to be added
hundreds of others who had passed as friends. And the proprietor became
discouraged.
It _is_ somewhat discouraging to go to a convention ostensibly composed
of men of your own party and see the most active members of it engaged in
a scheme to destroy your party. These have been the conditions in every
Populist convention in the state of Nebraska since 1890. The only thing
that prevented the party from being destroyed sooner was the _Nebraska
Independent_. The fusionists became more and more convinced of that
fact, and the scheme was invented to publish a paper in opposition in
the same city, which, while claiming to be Populistic, would work for
the destruction of the party. Credit for the invention belongs to George
Washington Berge. The hope was entertained that when the People’s Party
was destroyed all the Populists would go into the Democratic Party, and
George Washington Berge would be Governor and W. J. Bryan United States
Senator.
The proprietor of the _Independent_ was bound in the contract
transferring to George Washington Berge the title to the paper, not to
engage in the business of publishing a reform paper for five years, but
the fusionists found that it would be impossible to put any shackles on
the editor. He intends to fight on. Just as all the world is beginning to
accept Populist principles he does not propose to sheathe his sword and
stand by, a passive spectator. The greatest battle of the age is to be
fought. He “is going up against” that crowd again.
The columns of the _Independent_ have been an open forum for any man who
thought he had something that would benefit humanity. In the columns of
the paper he could always voice his sentiments. Besides that, it has been
a journal of economics, sociology, philosophy, ethics, finance, single
tax, land, Government and all the decent news. Now it has gone into the
hands of an ordinary Western lawyer who never read a standard work of
authority on any one of these subjects. It is to be a personal organ
after the fashion of the one that W. J. Bryan publishes in the same town.
W. J. Bryan is the most accomplished orator of the day. He has personal
acquaintances in every state and territory. Millions have met and shaken
hands with him. George W. Berge has some acquaintances outside of
Lancaster County, Nebraska, and besides that, Berge is a Populist engaged
in destroying the Populist Party. These are his elements of success.
The Populists of the different states and territories who have been
readers of the _Independent_ will in the near future have a place to
express their views and read discussions of the great problems that are
pressing for solution. We will be heard. For years not a great daily
would print a line in defense of the fundamental principles of Populism.
Now magazines are making fortunes for their proprietors who have admitted
some of these principles to their pages. Some of these magazines have
a greater circulation than was ever known before anywhere in the world
for monthly periodical literature. The People’s Party is not dead. The
_Nebraska Independent_ will rise from its ashes stronger and better
than ever before. The vilest, rottenest, worst smelling spot in all the
preserves of plutocracy is that place where the fusionist roams, seeking
to destroy the organization that gave him the only opportunities of his
life.
_Pole Baker_
BY WILL N. HARBEN
_Author of “The Georgians,” “Abner Daniel,” etc._
SYNOPSIS OF PREVIOUS CHAPTERS
In a small Georgia town a friendship has grown up between
Pole Baker, reformed moonshiner and an unusual and likable
character, and young Nelson Floyd, who was left as a baby in
a mountain cabin by an unknown woman just before her death.
Floyd, in the face of many trials and temptations, has worked
his way up in the world and made a man of himself. Jeff Wade
appears at the store, in which Floyd has become a partner,
to avenge on him a rumored injustice to Wade’s sister. Pole
Baker’s tact prevents a duel by making Floyd see that the
unselfish course is for him to avoid a meeting. Cynthia
Porter comes to the store, alarmed for Floyd’s safety. On his
way home to his family Pole falls a victim to his besetting
sin of drink. Cynthia rejects the suit of the Rev. Jason
Hillhouse and refuses to act on his warnings against Floyd’s
attentions. At a corn-shucking given by Pole, Floyd wins
the right to kiss Cynthia, and on their way home claims his
privilege without actually asking to marry her and proposes
in vain that, since her mother dislikes him, she meet him at
times on signal in the grape-arbor. That night, while Cynthia
is regretting even her slight weakness, her suspicious and
tactless mother half accuses her and hints that the worry
over Cynthia and Floyd has caused her to fear an attack of
insanity.
CHAPTER VII
On the following Saturday morning there was a considerable gathering of
farmers at Springtown. A heavy fall of rain during the night had rendered
the soil unfit for plowing, and it was a sort of enforced holiday. Many
of them stood around Mayhew & Floyd’s store. Several women and children
were seated between the two long counters, on boxes and the few available
chairs. Nelson Floyd was at the high desk in the rear, occupied with
business letters, when Pole Baker came in at the back door and stood near
him, closely scanning the long room.
“Where’s the old man?” he asked when Floyd looked up and saw him.
“Not down yet; dry up, Pole! I was making a calculation and you knocked
it hell-west and crooked.”
“Well, I reckon that kin wait. I’ve got a note fer you.” Pole was taking
it from his coat pocket.
“Miss Cynthia?” Floyd asked eagerly.
“Not by a long shot,” said Pole. “I reckon maybe you’ll wish it was.” He
threw the missive on the desk and went on in quite a portentous tone: “I
come by Jeff Wade’s house, Nelson, on my way back from the mill. He was
inside with his wife and childern, an’ as I was passin’ one of the little
boys run out to the fence and called me in to whar he was. He’s a queer
fellow! I saw he was tryin’ to keep his wife in the dark, fer what you
reckon he said?”
“How do I know?” The young merchant, with a serious expression of face,
had torn open the envelope but not yet unfolded the sheet of cheap,
blue-lined writing paper.
“Why, he jest set thar in his chair before the fire, an’ as he handed it
up to me he sorter looked knowin’ an’ said, said he: ‘Pole, I’m owin’
Mayhew & Floyd a little balance on my account, an’ they seem uneasy. I
wish you’d take this here note to young Floyd. He’s always stood to me
sorter, an’ I believe he’ll git old Mayhew to wait on me a little while.’”
“Did he say that, Pole?” Floyd had opened the note, but was looking
straight into Baker’s eyes.
“Yes, he said them words, Nelson, although he knowed I was on hand that
day when he paid off his bill in full. I couldn’t chip in thar before
his wife, an’ the Lord knows I couldn’t tell him I had an idea what was
in the note, so I rid on as fast as I could. I had a turn o’ meal under
me an’ I tuck it off an’ hid it in the thicket t’other side o’ Duncan’s
big spring. I wasn’t goin’ to carry a secret war message a-straddle o’
two bushels o’ meal warm from the rocks. An’ I’d bet my hat that scrap o’
paper means battle.”
Floyd read the note. There was scarcely a change in the expression of his
face or a flicker of his eyelashes as he folded it with steady fingers
and held it in his hand.
“Yes, he says he has got the whole story, Pole,” Floyd said. “He gives me
fair warning as a man of honor to arm myself. He will be here at twelve
o’clock to the minute.”
“Great God!” Pole ejaculated. “You hain’t one chance in a million to
escape with yore life. You seed how he shot t’other day. He was excited
then—he was as calm as a rock mountain when I seed him a while ago, an’
his ride to town will steady ’im more. He sorter drawed down his mouth at
one corner an’ cocked up his eye, same as to say: ‘You understand; thar
hain’t no use in upsettin’ women folks over a necessary matter o’ this
sort.’ Looky here, Nelson, old friend, some’n has got to be done, an’
it’s got to be done in a hurry.”
“It will have to be done at twelve o’clock, anyway,” Floyd said calmly, a
grim smile almost rising to his face. “That’s the hour he’s set.”
“Do you mean to tell me you are a-goin’ to set thar like a knot on a log
an’ ’low that keen-eyed mountain sharpshooter to step up in that door an’
peg away at you?”
“No, I don’t mean that, exactly, Pole,” Floyd smiled coldly. “A man ought
not to insult even his antagonist that way. You see, that would be making
the offended party liable for wilful, cold-blooded murder before the law.
No, I’ve got my gun here in the drawer, and we’ll make a pretense at
fighting a duel, even if he downs me in the first round.”
“You are a darn fool, that’s what you are!” Pole was angry without
knowing why. “Do you mean to tell me you are a-goin’ to put yore life up
like that to gratify a scamp like Jeff Wade?”
“I’d deserve to be kicked off the face of the earth,” Floyd responded
with firmness, “if I turned tail and ran. He seems to think I may light
out; I judge that by his setting the time a couple of hours ahead, but
I’ll give him satisfaction. I’m built that way, Pole. There is no use
arguing about it.”
“My God, my God!” Pole said under his breath. “Hush! Thar comes Mayhew. I
reckon you don’t want him to know about it!”
“No, he’d be in for swearing out a peace warrant. For all you do, don’t
let him on to it, Pole. I want to write a letter or two, before Wade
comes. Don’t let the old man interrupt me.”
“I’ll feel like I’m dancin’ on yore scaffold,” the farmer growled. “I
want my mind free to—to study. Thar! He’s stopped to talk to Joe Peters.
Say, Nelson, I see Mel Jones down thar talkin’ to a squad in front o’ the
door; they’ve got the’r heads packed together as close as sardines. I see
through it now. By God, I see through _that_!”
“What is it you see through, Pole?” Floyd looked up from Wade’s note, his
brow furrowed.
“Why, Mel’s Jeff Wade’s fust cousin; he’s on to what’s up, an’ he’s
confidin’ it to a few; it will be all over this town in five minutes, an’
the women an’ childern will hide out to keep from bein’ hit. Thar they
come in at the front now, an’ they are around the old man like red ants
round the body of a black one. He’ll be on to it in a minute. Thar, see?
What did I tell you? He’s comin’ this way. You can tell by the old duck’s
walk that he’s excited.”
Floyd muttered something that escaped Pole’s ears, and set to work
writing. Mayhew came on rapidly, tapping his heavy cane on the floor, his
eyes glued on the placid profile of his young partner.
“What’s this I hear?” he panted. “Has Jeff Wade sent you word that he was
comin’ here to shoot you?”
Pole laughed out merrily, and, stepping forward, slapped the old merchant
familiarly on the arm. “It’s a joke, Mr. Mayhew!” he said. “I put it
up on Mel Jones as we rid in town; he’s always makin’ fun o’ women fer
tattlin’, an’ said I to myse’f, said I, ‘I’ll see how deep that’s rooted
under yore hide, old chap,’ an’ so I made that up out o’ whole cloth. I
was jest tellin’ Nelson, here, that I’d bet a hoss to a ginger-cake that
Mel ’ud not be able to keep it, an’ he hain’t. Nelson, by George, the
triflin’ skunk let it out inside o’ ten minutes, although he swore to me
he’d keep his mouth shet. I’ll make ’im set up the drinks on that.”
“Well, I don’t like such jokes!” Mayhew fumed. “Jokes like that and
what’s at the bottom of them don’t do a reputable house any good. And I
don’t want any more of them. Do you understand, sir?”
“Oh, yes, I won’t do it ag’in,” answered Pole in an almost absent-minded
tone. His eyes were now on Floyd, and despite his assumed lightness of
manner the real condition of things was bearing heavily on him. Just then
a rough-looking farmer, in a suit of home-made jeans, straw hat and shoes
worn through at the bottom, came back to them. He held in his hand the
point of a plow and looked nervously about him.
“Everybody’s busy down in front,” he said, “an’ I want to git a quarter’s
wuth o’ coffee.” His glance, full of curiosity, was now on Floyd’s face.
“I want to stay till Wade comes, _myself_, but my old woman’s almost got
a spasm. She says she seed enough bloodshed durin’ the war, an’ then she
always liked Mr. Floyd. She says she’d mighty nigh as soon see an own
brother laid out as him. Mr. Floyd sorter done us a favor two year back
when he stood fer us on our corn crop, an’, as fer me, why, of course,
I——”
“Look here, Bill Champ,” Pole burst out in a spontaneous laugh. “I
thought you had more sense than to swallow a joke like that. Go tell yore
old woman that I started that tale jest fer pure fun. Nelson here an’
Wade is good friends.”
“Oh, well, ef that’s it, that’s different,” the farmer said. “But from
the way Mel Jones talked down thar a body would think you fellers was
back here takin’ Mr. Floyd’s measure fer his box. I’ll go quiet my wife.
She couldn’t talk of a thing all the way here this mornin’ but a new
dress she was goin’ to git an’ now she’s fer hurryin’ back without even
pickin’ out the cloth.”
“No, I don’t like this sort o’ thing,” old Mayhew growled as the customer
moved away. “An’ I want you to remember that, Baker.”
“Ah, you dry up, old man!” Pole retorted, with a mechanical laugh. “You’d
live longer an’ enjoy life better ef you’d joke more. Ef the marrow o’ my
bones was as sour as yourn is I’d cut my throat or go into the vinegar
business.”
At this juncture Captain Duncan came in the store and walked back to the
trio.
“Good morning,” he said cheerily. “Say, Floyd, I’ve heard the news, and
thought if you wanted to borrow a pair of real, good, old-fashioned
dueling pistols, why, I’ve got a pair my father owned. They were once
used by General——”
“It’s all a joke, Captain,” Pole broke in, winking at the planter and
casting a look of warning at the now unobservant Mayhew.
“Oh, is _that_ it?” Duncan was quick of perception. “To tell you the
truth, I thought so, boys. Yes, yes”—he was studying Floyd’s calm face
admiringly—“yes, it sounded to me like a prank somebody was playing.
Well, I thought I’d go fishing this evening, and came in to get some
hooks and lines. Fine weather, isn’t it? But the river’s muddy. I’ll go
down and pick out some tackle.”
He had just gone when an old woman wearing a cheap breakfast shawl over
her gray head, a dress of dingy solid black calico and a pair of old,
heavy shoes approached from the door in the rear.
“I got yore summons, Mr. Mayhew,” she said in a thin, shaky voice.
“Peter, my husband, was so downhearted that he wouldn’t come to town, an’
so I had to do it. So you are goin’ to foreclose on us? The mule an’ cow
is all on earth we’ve got to make the crop on, and when they are gone we
will be plumb ruined.”
The face of the old merchant was like carved stone.
“You got the goods, didn’t you, Mrs. Stark?” he asked harshly.
“Oh, yes, nobody hain’t disputin’ the account,” she answered plaintively.
“And you agreed faithfully if you didn’t pay this spring that the mule
and cow would be our property?”
“Oh, yes, of course! As I say, Mr. Mayhew, I’m not blamin’ you-uns. Thar
hain’t a thing for me an’ Peter to do but thrust ourselves on my daughter
and son-in-law over in Fannin, but I’d rather die than go. We won’t be
welcome; they are loaded down with childern too young to work. So it’s
settled, Mr. Mayhew—I mean ef we drive over the mule an’ cow thar won’t
be no lawsuit?”
“No, there won’t be any suit. I’d let this pass and give you more time,
Mrs. Stark, but a thing like that can’t be kept quiet through the
country, an’ there are fifty customers of ours over your way who ’ud be
running here with some cock-and-bull story and we’d be left high and dry
with the goods to pay for in market and nothing to show for it. We make
our rules, Mrs. Stark, and they are clearly understood at the time the
papers are signed.”
“Never you mind, Mrs. Stark, I’ll fix that all right.” It was Nelson
Floyd who was speaking, and with a face full of pity and tenderness he
had stepped forward and was offering to shake hands.
The little woman, her lips twitching and drawn, gave him her trembly
hand, her eyes wide open in groping wonder.
“I don’t understand, Nelson—Mr. Floyd. You mean——?”
“I mean that I’ll have your entire account charged to me and you can take
your time about paying it—next fall or the next, or any time it suits
you. I’ll not press you for it, if you never pay it. I passed your place
the other day, and your crop looks very promising. You are sure to get
out of debt this coming fall.”
“Oh, Nelson—I—I don’t know what to do about it. Mr. Mayhew says——”
“But I say it’s all right,” Floyd broke in as he laid his hand softly on
her shoulder. “Go down in front and buy what you need to run on. I’ll
assume the risk, if there is any.”
Mayhew turned suddenly; his face was white and his lip shook.
“Do you mean to say that you are going to step in and——?”
“Step in nothing,” Floyd said calmly. “I hope I won’t have to remind
you, sir, of our clearly written agreement of partnership in which it is
plainly stated that I may use my judgment in regard to customers whenever
I wish.”
“You’ll ruin us—you’ll break us all to smash, if you do this sort of
thing,” Mayhew panted. “It will upset our whole system.”
“I don’t agree with you, sir,” Floyd answered, “but we won’t argue about
it. If you don’t intend to abide by our agreement then say so and we will
part company.”
Mayhew stared in alarm for a moment, then he said:
“There’s no use talking about parting. I only want to kind of hold you in
check. You get your sympathies stirred up and make plunges sometimes when
you ought to act with a clear head. You say the crop looks well; then,
it’s all right. Go ahead, Mrs. Stark. Anything Nelson does is agreeable
to me.”
“Well, it’s mighty good of you both,” the old woman said, wiping tears of
joy from her eyes. “No, I won’t buy anything today. I’ll ride out to the
farm as quick as I can and tell Peter the good news. He’s mighty nigh out
of his senses about it.”
Mayhew followed her down into the store. It was as if he were ashamed to
meet the quizzical look which Pole Baker had fixed upon him. He had no
sooner turned his back than Pole faced Floyd and asked: “How does she
stand by your ticker?”
Floyd looked at his watch. “It’s a quarter-past eleven,” he said.
“The hell it is!” Pole went to the back door and looked out at the dreary
stable-yard and barn. He stood there for several minutes in deep thought.
Then he seemed to make up his mind on something that was troubling him,
for he suddenly thrust his hand into his hip-pocket and drew out a
revolver and rapidly twirled the cylinder with his heavy thumb.
“Yes, I ’lowed I’d swore off from shootin’ scrapes,” he mused; “but I
shore have to git in this ’un. I’d never look Sally an’ the childern
in the face agin ef I was to stand still an’ let that dead shot kill
the best friend me an’ them ever had. No, Poley, old boy, you’ve got to
enlist this mornin’, an’ thar hain’t no two ways about it. I’d take a
drink on that, but a feller’s aim hain’t wuth a dang when he sees double.”
His attention was suddenly attracted to Floyd, who had left his stool and
was putting a revolver into the pocket of his sack coat. Pole shoved his
own cautiously back into his pocket and went to his friend’s side.
“What you goin’ to do now?” he asked.
“I have just thought of something that ought to be attended to,” was
Floyd’s answer. “Is Mel Jones still down there?”
“Yes; I see ’im now through the left-hand window,” said Pole. “Do you
want to see ’im?”
“Yes.” Floyd moved in the direction indicated and Pole wonderingly
followed. Outside on the pavement at the corner of the store Mel Jones
stood talking to a group of eager listeners. He stopped when he saw
Floyd, and looked in the opposite direction, but in a calm voice the
young merchant called him.
“Mel, may I see you a minute?”
“Certainly.” The face of the gaunt farmer fell as he came forward, his
eyes shifting uneasily.
“I got a message from Jeff Wade just now,” said Floyd.
“Oh, did you? Is that so?” the fellow exclaimed.
“Yes; he says he has a private matter to settle with me, and says he’ll
be here at the store at twelve. Now, as you see, there are a good many
people standing around—women and children, and somebody might get hurt or
frightened. You know where Price’s spring is, down behind the old brick
yard?”
“Oh, yes; I know where it is, Floyd.”
“Well, you will do me a favor if you will ride out to Wade’s and tell him
I’ll meet him there. He could reach it without coming through town, and
we’d escape a lot of prying people who would be in the way.”
“That’s a good idea,” said Jones, his strong face lighting up. “Yes, I’ll
go tell ’im. I’m glad to see that you are a man o’ backbone, Floyd. Some
’lowed you’d throw up the sponge an’ leave fer parts unknown, but Jeff’s
got to tackle the rale stuff. I kin see that, Floyd. Minnie Wade raised a
lots o’ devilment, an’ my wife says whatever rumors spread about her was
her own fault. But Jeff cayn’t be expected to see it through a woman’s
eyes. I wish you was goin’ to meet a man that wasn’t sech a dead shot. I
seed Jeff knock a squirrel out of a high tree with his six-shooter that
three men had missed with rifles.”
“I’ll try to take care of myself, Mel. But you’d better hurry up and get
to him before he starts to town.”
“Oh, I’ll git ’im all right,” said the farmer, and he went out to the
hitching-rack, jumped on his horse and galloped away.
The group Jones had been talking to now drew near, their eyes and mouths
open.
“It’s all off, boys,” Pole said, with one of his inscrutable laughs.
“Explanations an’ apologies has been exchanged—no gore today. It was a
big mistake all round.”
This version soon spread, and a sigh of relief went up from everybody.
Fifteen minutes passed. Pole was standing in the front door of the
store, cautiously watching Floyd, who had gone back to his desk to write
a letter. Suddenly Pole missed him from his place.
“He’s tryin’ to give me the slip,” Pole said. “He’s gone out at the back
door and has made fer the spring. Well, he kin _think_ he’s throwed old
Pole off, but he hain’t by a jugful. I know now which road Jeff Wade will
come by, an’ I’ll see that skunk before Nelson does or no prayers hain’t
answered.”
He went out to the hitching-rack, mounted, and, waving his hand to the
few bystanders who were eying him curiously, rode away, his long legs
swinging back and forth from the flanks of his horse. A quarter of a
mile outside of the village he came to a portion of the road leading to
Jeff Wade’s house that was densely shaded, and there he drew rein and
dismounted.
“Thar hain’t no other way fer ’im to come,” he said, “an’ he’s my
meat—that is, unless the damn fool kin be fetched to reason.”