* * * * *
It is time that the flamboyant and flowery, the unreal, was cut out of
our oratory and literature. Kill it. Talk straight, think straight,
live straight. The flamboyant, the flowery is the product of slavery,
of idleness, of high living and no thinking. It is a relic of the past,
of feudalism, a mixture of chivalry and unclear thinking. The great
poet, the great writer, the great orator is he who talks the greatest
good sense. Anything else is the badge of mediocrity. The tendency of
everything these strenuous days, from literature to life insurance,
is expressed in the phrase: “Get there.” How amusing the efforts of a
Tennessee statesman in a recent great occasion, majestically sweeping
the heavens with his hands and solemnly proclaiming that “Tennessee had
set more stars in the galaxy of glory than all the other States.” Bosh!
Tennessee has as many fools to the acre as any other State, and what she
should do just now is to set more hens and fewer stars!
* * * * *
People who live with nature soon learn a great deal. The best way to
study nature is to get in harmony with the laws of nature. The best
advice ever given on longevity was from the cheerful old gentleman who
said: “To live long, live naturally, eat what you want and walk on the
sunny side of the street.” Children think that some great man made up the
horrid rules of grammar, and then all the world learned them and went to
talking. They do not know that the world talked first and the rules of
grammar were deduced from the talking. From the facts of life we draw our
rules.
And Nature is the Great Fact.
I was thinking of one of her facts the other day—she has so many
thousands—but I noticed it is a fact that the man who works the soil is a
natural-born optimist. Let the farmer fail year after year and he still
plants, hoping. Let the merchant fail one year and he is badly shaken—one
more—another, maybe—and he is done. That is the Fact. Now for the rule:
God intended man to love, to cultivate, to cling to the soil. In other
words, is not farming man’s natural vocation, since neither drought nor
flood nor failure can shut out from his heart that instinct of hoping
which has come down to him through centuries of farming fathers?
* * * * *
We—and that means England and America—have used the Jap to fight our
battles for us. The issue has been the stopping of the tide of Moscovites
across Asia, the killing of their influence in the East, the grasping
from covetous hands the yellow empire, richer than mints of yellow gold
to the nation that shall supply their wants. That means the open door
until Japan decides to close it for the world and that the Muscovite must
forever be bound between the Baltic and the North Sea and the ice zone
of the Pacific, all of which was necessary. Arrogant and ignorant Russia
needed this chastisement. But is it not time to stop? We are chuckling
now, but the greatest problem lies before us. Sixteenth century Russia
has met twentieth century Japan, and walked from the woods of barbarity
into the daylight of a Mauser-swept, mine-entangled, smokeless-plowed
field of death. The harvest has been as certain as when the Gauls came
out of the woods to meet the steel-sheathed legions of Caesar.
History does not stop at one page. One was made at Port Arthur and the
Straits of Japan, now—
“Let China alone,” said Napoleon, “she is a sleeping giant.” The
fight has been for China, and the wily Jap, playing on the unfailing
cupidity and conquering, grabbing instinct of the Anglo-Saxon, has won.
Hereafter China belongs to Japan. Give her just a century to vitalize
the nation which, if the world were stood in a line, would count every
fourth fighter as hers, and the white race will face the problem of its
existence. At Portsmouth recently, when the Sabbath came, the Russian
went to church. The Jap only laughed, and voted to work on. Shintoism
knows no Sunday, no soul, no to-morrow, no eternity. Shintoism is blind
chance pitched against the barb-wire of blind unbelief.
It is time to see clearly—to turn. We have conquered our own kin with a
soulless, smiling, ghost-born being who is far-sighted and will yet make
our children wonder why we gave him a Mauser for posterity. As for us, we
will always be for the white man and the Christian.
* * * * *
Trotwood’s Monthly has installed a new feature in magazine management. We
call him Jonah. He is a bright boy who does things around the editorial
room. They are not always done right, but when he finishes with them we
are willing to aver that they are always done. One of his duties is to
read all of the poetry submitted—and it is coming in with a rush—condemn
the bad and pass the good up to Trotwood for final judgment. Here are his
comments on an execrable batch of it sent in under the title of “Piping
Lays” by a good, sweet, but sadly misguided being, whose name begins
with Tillie:
Hear we hav a poet boald.
Naught I’m frank to sa is worce,
Than the “Flowery” tales she’s told,
In her akrobatic verce.
Tillie fane would pipe a lay
That would markit fur a song,
But her Piping duz not pa,
Why? Bekaus her meter’s rong.
Tillie mite reverse the phraze
’Til her muse is neerer ripe,
And insted of piping lays
Tri her hand at laying pipe.