Book X
Mammon
Wealth, and the crimes that are committed in its name, and the protests of the spirit of humanity against its power in society.
Paradise Lost
BY JOHN MILTON
(English lyric and epic poet, 1608-1674)
Mammon led them on-- Mammon, the least erected spirit that fell From Heaven; for even in Heaven his looks and thoughts Were always downward bent, admiring more The riches of Heaven's pavement, trodden gold, Than aught divine or holy else enjoyed In vision beatific. By him first Men also, and by his suggestion taught, Ransacked the centre, and with impious hands Rifled the bowels of their mother earth For treasures better hid. Soon had his crew Opened into the hill a spacious wound, And digged out ribs of gold. Let none admire That riches grow in Hell; that soil may best Deserve the precious bane.
Miss Kilmansegg: Her Moral
BY THOMAS HOOD
(See pages 59, 171)
Gold! Gold! Gold! Gold! Bright and yellow, hard and cold, Molten, graven, hammer'd, and roll'd; Heavy to get, and light to hold; Hoarded, barter'd, bought, and sold, Stolen, borrow'd, squander'd, doled: Spurn'd by the young, but hugg'd by the old To the very verge of the churchyard mould; Price of many a crime untold: Gold! Gold! Gold! Gold! Good or bad a thousand-fold! How widely its agencies vary-- To save--to ruin--to curse--to bless-- As even its minted coins express, Now stamp'd with the image of Good Queen Bess, And now of a bloody Mary.
Northern Farmer: New Style
BY ALFRED TENNYSON
(See page 77)
Dosn't thou 'ear my 'erse's legs, as they canters awaäy, Proputty, proputty, proputty--that's what I 'ears 'em saäy. Proputty, proputty, proputty--Sam, thou's an ass for thy paäins, Theer's moor sense i' one o' 'is legs nor in all thy braäins.
Me an' thy muther, Sammy, 'as beän a-talkin' o' thee; Thou's beän talkin' to muther, an' she beän a tellin' it me. Thou'll not marry for munny--thou's sweet upo' parson's lass-- Noä--thou'll marry for luvv--an' we boäth on us thinks tha an ass.
Seeä'd her todaäy goä by--Saäint's daäy--they was ringing the bells. She's a beauty thou thinks--an' soä is scoors o' gells, Them as 'as munny an' all--wot's a beauty?--the flower as blaws. But proputty, proputty sticks, an' proputty, proputty graws.
Doänt't be stunt: taäke time: I knaws what maäkes tha sa mad. Warn't I craäzed fur the lasses mysén when I wur a lad? But I knaw'd a Quaäker feller as often 'as towd ma this: "Doän't thou marry for munny, but goä wheer munny is!"
Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep
BY JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER
(American capitalist, born 1839)
Then, and indeed for many years after, it seemed as though there was no end to the money needed to carry on and develop the business. As our successes began to come, I seldom put my head upon the pillow at night without speaking a few words to myself in this wise:
"Now a little success, soon you will fall down, soon you will be overthrown. Because you have got a start, you think you are quite a merchant; look out, or you will lose your head--go steady." These intimate conversations with myself, I am sure, had a great influence on my life.
From Ecclesiasticus
A merchant shall hardly keep himself from wrong-doing; and a huckster shall not be acquitted of sin.
Past and Present
BY THOMAS CARLYLE
(See pages 31, 74, 133)
What is it, if you pierce through his Cants, his oft-repeated Hearsays, what he calls his Worships and so forth,--what is it that the modern English soul does, in very truth, dread infinitely, and contemplate with entire despair? What is his Hell, after all these reputable, oft-repeated Hearsays, what is it? With hesitation, with astonishment, I pronounce it to be: The terror of "Not succeeding"; of not making money, fame, or some other figure in the world,--chiefly of not making money! Is not that a somewhat singular Hell?
Dipsychus
BY ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH
(English poet and scholar, friend of Tennyson and Matthew Arnold, 1819-1861)
As I sat at the café, I said to myself, They may talk as they please about what they call pelf, They may sneer as they like about eating and drinking,
But help it I cannot, I cannot help thinking, How pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho! How pleasant it is to have money.
I sit at my table en grand seigneur, And when I have done, throw a crust to the poor; Not only the pleasure, one's self, of good living, But also the pleasure of now and then giving. So pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho! So pleasant it is to have money....
I drive through the streets, and I care not a d--n; The people they stare, and they ask who I am; And if I should chance to run over a cad, I can pay for the damage if ever so bad. So pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho! So pleasant it is to have money.
We stroll to our box and look down on the pit, And if it weren't low should be tempted to spit; We loll and we talk until people look up, And when it's half over we go out to sup. So pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho! So pleasant it is to have money.
The best of the tables and best of the fare-- And as for the others, the devil may care; It isn't our fault if they dare not afford To sup like a prince and be drunk as a lord. So pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho! So pleasant it is to have money.
Utopia
BY SIR THOMAS MORE
(See page 160)
They marveile also that golde, whych of the owne nature is a thinge so unprofytable, is nowe amonge all people in so hyghe estimation, that man him selfe, by whome, yea and for the use of whome it is so much set by, is in muche lesse estimation, then the golde it selfe. In so muche that a lumpyshe blockehedded churle, and whyche hathe no more wytte then an asse, yea and as ful of noughtynes as of follye, shall have nevertheless manye wyse and good men in subjectyon and bondage, only for this, bycause he hath a greate heape of golde. Whyche yf it shoulde be taken from hym by anye fortune, or by some subtyll wyle and cautele of the lawe, (whyche no lesse then fortune dothe bothe raise up the lowe, and plucke downe the highe) and be geven to the moste vile slave and abject dryvell of all his housholde, then shortely after he shal goo into the service of his servaunt, as an augmentation or overplus beside his money. But they muche more marvell at and detest the madnes of them, whyche to those riche men, in whose debte and daunger they be not, do give almost divine honoures, for none other consideration, but bicause they be riche: and yet knowing them to bee suche nigeshe penny fathers, that they be sure as longe as they live, not the worthe of one farthinge of that heape of gold shall come to them. These and such like opinions have they conceaved, partely by education, beinge brought up in that common wealthe, whose lawes and customes be farre different from these kindes of folly, and partely by good litterature and learning.
The Crown of Wild Olive
BY JOHN RUSKIN
(See page 106)
It is physically impossible for a well-educated, intellectual, or brave man to make money the chief object of his thoughts; as physically impossible as it is for him to make his dinner the principal object of them. All healthy people like their dinners, but their dinner is not the main object of their lives. So all healthily minded people like making money--ought to like it, and to enjoy the sensation of winning it: but the main object of their life is not money; it is something better than money.
Don Juan
BY LORD BYRON
(See pages 233, 340)
Oh, Gold! Why call we misers miserable? Theirs is the pleasure that can never pall; Theirs is the best bower-anchor, the chain-cable Which holds fast other pleasures great and small. Ye who but see the saving man at table And scorn his temperate board, as none at all, And wonder how the wealthy can be sparing, Know not what visions spring from each cheese-paring....
Perhaps he hath great projects in his mind To build a college, or to found a race, An hospital, a church--and leave behind Some dome surmounted by his meagre face; Perhaps he fain would liberate mankind, Even with the very ore that makes them base; Perhaps he would be wealthiest of his nation, Or revel in the joys of calculation....
"Love rules the camp, the court, the grove--for love Is heaven, and heaven is love:" so sings the bard; Which it were rather difficult to prove (A thing with poetry in general hard). Perhaps there may be something in "the grove," At least it rhymes to "love"; but I'm prepared To doubt (no less than landlords of their rental) If "courts" and "camps" be quite so sentimental.
But if Love don't, Cash does, and Cash alone: Cash rules the grove, and fells it too besides; Without cash, camps were thin, and courts were none; Without cash, Malthus tells you, "take no brides." So Cash rules Love the ruler, on his own High ground, as virgin Cynthia sways the tides: And as for "Heaven being Love," why not say honey Is wax? Heaven is not Love, 'tis Matrimony.
BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
(See page 181)
Gold? yellow, glittering, precious gold?... This yellow slave Will knit and break religions; bless the accursed; Make the hoar leprosy adored; place thieves, And give them title, knee and approbation With senators on the bench.
The Cave of Mammon
(From "The Faerie Queene")
BY EDMUND SPENSER
(Old English poet, 1552-1599)
At last he came unto a gloomy glade Cover'd with boughs and shrubs from heavens light, Whereas he sitting found in secret shade An uncouth, salvage, and uncivile wight, Of griesly hew and fowle ill-favour'd sight; His face with smoke was tand, and eies were bleard, His head and beard with sout were ill bedight, His cole-blacke hands did seem to have ben seard In smythes fire-spitting forge, and nayles like clawes appeard....
And round about him lay on every side Great heapes of gold that never could be spent; Of which some were rude owre, not purifide, Of Mulcibers devouring element; Some others were new driven, and distent Into great ingowes and to wedges square; Some in round plates withouten moniment; But most were stampt, and in their metal bare The antique shapes of kings and kesars straung and rare....
"What secret place," quoth he, "can safely hold So huge a mass, and hide from heavens eie? Or where hast thou thy wonne, that so much gold Thou canst preserve from wrong and robbery?" "Come thou," quoth he, "and see." So by and by Through that black covert he him led, and fownd A darksome way, which no man could descry, That deep descended through the hollow grownd, And was with dread and horror compassèd arownd....
So soon as Mammon there arrived, the dore To him did open and affoorded way: Him followed eke Sir Guyon evermore, Ne darknesse him ne daunger might dismay. Soone as he entred was, the dore streightway Did shutt, and from behind it forth there lept An ugly feend, more fowle then dismall day: The which with monstrous stalke behind him stept, And ever as he went dew watch upon him kept.
Well hopèd hee, ere long that hardy guest, If ever covetous hand, or lustfull eye, Or lips he layd on thing that likte him best, Or ever sleepe his eie-strings did untye, Should be his pray: and therefore still on hye He over him did hold his cruell clawes, Threatning with greedy gripe to doe him dye, And rend in peeces with his ravenous pawes, If ever he transgrest the fatall Stygian lawes.
In all that rowme was nothing to be seene But huge great yron chests, and coffers strong, All bard with double bends, that none could weene Them to efforce by violence or wrong; On every side they placèd were along. But all the grownd with sculs was scattered And dead mens bones, which round about were flong; Whose lives, it seemed, whilome there was shed, And their vile carcases now left unburièd.
Mammon Marriage
BY GEORGE MACDONALD
(Scotch novelist and clergyman, 1824-1905)
The croak of a raven hoar! A dog's howl, kennel-tied! Loud shuts the carriage-door: The two are away on their ghastly ride To Death's salt shore!
Where are the love and the grace? The bridegroom is thirsty and cold! The bride's skull sharpens her face! But the coachman is driving, jubilant, bold, The devil's pace.
The horses shiver'd and shook Waiting gaunt and haggard With sorry and evil look; But swift as a drunken wind they stagger'd 'Longst Lethe brook.
Long since, they ran no more; Heavily pulling they died On the sand of the hopeless shore Where never swell'd or sank a tide, And the salt burns sore.
Flat their skeletons lie, White shadows on shining sand; The crusted reins go high To the crumbling coachman's bony hand On his knees awry.
Side by side, jarring no more, Day and night side by side, Each by a doorless door, Motionless sit the bridegroom and bride On the Dead-Sea-shore.
Snobs and Marriage
(From "The Book of Snobs")
BY WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
(English novelist and satirist of manners, 1811-1863)
People dare not be happy for fear of Snobs. People dare not love for fear of Snobs. People pine away lonely under the tyranny of Snobs. Honest kindly hearts dry up and die. Gallant generous lads, blooming with hearty youth, swell into bloated old bachelorhood, and burst and tumble over. Tender girls wither into shrunken decay, and perish solitary, from whom Snobbishness has cut off the common claim to happiness and affection with which Nature endowed us all. My heart grows sad as I see the blundering tyrant's handiwork. As I behold it I swell with cheap rage, and glow with fury against the Snob. Come down, I say, thou skulking dullness. Come down, thou stupid bully, and give up thy brutal ghost! And I arm myself with the sword and spear, and taking leave of my family, go forth to do battle with that hideous ogre and giant, that brutal despot in Snob Castle, who holds so many gentle hearts in torture and thrall.
In Bohemia
BY JOHN BOYLE O'REILLY
(Irish-born American journalist, 1844-1890)
The thirsty of soul soon learn to know The moistureless froth of the social show, The vulgar sham of the pompous feast Where the heaviest purse is the highest priest; The organized charity, scrimped and iced, In the name of a cautious, statistical Christ.
Vanity Fair
(From "The Pilgrim's Progress")
BY JOHN BUNYAN
(English thinker and religious rebel, who was put in prison and there wrote one of the world's great allegories; 1628-1688)
Then I saw in my dream, that when they were got out of the wilderness, they presently saw a town before them, and the name of that town is Vanity; and at the town there is a fair kept, called Vanity Fair. It is kept all the year long.... At this fair are all such merchandise sold as houses, lands, trades, places, honors, preferments, titles, countries, kingdoms, lusts, pleasures; and delights of all sorts, such as harlots, wives, husbands, children, masters, servants, lives, blood, bodies, souls, silver, gold, precious stones, and what not.
And moreover, at this fair there are at all times to be seen jugglings, cheats, games, plays, fools, apes, knaves, and rogues, and that of every kind.
Here are to be seen, too, and that for nothing, thefts, murders, adulteries, false-swearers, and that of a blood-red color.
The Sins of Society
BY BERNARD VAUGHAN
(The sermons of a Jesuit priest, in Mayfair, London, which caused great excitement among the "Smart Set")
Society nowadays, as we all know, is every bit as material as it was when Dives was alive. It still cares very little, indeed, for what it cannot either put on or into itself. It is self-centred. Its fair votaries must be set up by the best man-milliner, and fed up by the best man-cook; and then, provided they are known at the opera by their diamonds, in Mayfair by their motors, and at Cowes by their yacht, nothing else matters, especially if they happen to have a house at Ascot and a launch at Henley for the racing weeks.
It is not so much persons as things that count in this age of materialism. Hence there is but one sin less pardonable than that of being dull, and that is being poor. After all, there may be some excuse for dulness if you have money, but there is simply none at all for poverty, which like dirt on one's shoes, or dust on one's gown, must be brushed away from sight as soon as possible. Not even poor relatives are tolerated or recognized, except occasionally on an "off-day," when, like some unfortunate governesses in such households, they may be asked to look in at tea-time, when nobody is there. Surely all this is very contemptible, and altogether unworthy of old English traditions. Yes, but old English traditions, with rare exceptions, are being swept away by the incoming tide of millionaire wealth, so that, nowadays, it matters little what you are, but much, nay, everything, what you have. If you command money, you command the world. If you have none, you are nobody, though you be a prince.
(From a leading London newspaper)
Father Vaughan's knotted lash is sharp, and he wields it sternly, but it does not raise one weal on the delicate flesh of these massaged and manicured Salomes and Phrynes. His scorn is savage, but it does not produce more than a polite smile on these soft, faultless faces. His contempt is bitter, but it does not make a single modish harlot blush. They are dimly amused by the excitement of the good man. They are not in the least annoyed. They are, on the contrary, eager to ask him to dinner. What a piquant sensation to serve adultery with the sauce of asceticism!
Father Vaughan says that if King Herod and Herodias and Salome were to arrive in Mayfair they would be petted by the Smart Set. The good father, in the innocence of his heart, underacts the role of Sa-vaughan-rola. Herod and Herodias and Salome have arrived. They are here. We know them. We see them daily. Their names are in the newspapers. They were at Ascot. They are present at the smartest weddings at St. George's, Hanover Square. Do we despise them? Do we boycott them? Do we cut them. By no means. We honor and reverence them. We may talk about their bestialities in the privacy of the boudoir and the smoking-room, but in public the theme is discreetly evaded.
Fifth Avenue, 1915
BY HERMANN HAGEDORN
(American poet, born 1882. The following poem is a rondel, an interesting case of the use of an artificial old French verse-form in a vital way)
The motor cars go up and down, The painted ladies sit and smile. Along the sidewalks, mile on mile, Parade the dandies of the town.
The latest hat, the latest gown, The tedium of their souls beguile. The motor cars go up and down, The painted ladies sit and smile.
In wild and icy waters drown A thousand for a rock-bound isle. Ten thousand in a black defile Perish for justice or a crown. The motor cars go up and down....
Hotel Life[A]
[A] Copyright, 1905. By permission of Charles Scribner's Sons.
(From "The House of Mirth")
BY EDITH WHARTON
(Contemporary American novelist)
The environment in which Lily found herself was as strange to her as its inhabitants. She was unacquainted with the world of the fashionable New York hotel--a world over-heated, over-upholstered, and overfitted with mechanical appliances for the gratification of fantastic requirements, while the comforts of a civilized life were as unattainable as in a desert. Through this atmosphere of torrid splendor moved wan beings as richly upholstered as the furniture, beings without definite pursuits or permanent relations, who drifted on a languid tide of curiosity from restaurant to concert-hall, from palm-garden to music-room, from "art-exhibit" to dressmaker's opening. High-stepping horses or elaborately equipped motors waited to carry these ladies into vague metropolitan distances, whence they returned, still more wan from the weight of their sables, to be sucked back into the stifling inertia of the hotel routine. Somewhere behind them in the background of their lives, there was doubtless a real past, peopled by real human activities: they themselves were probably the product of strong ambitions, persistent energies, diversified contacts with the wholesome roughness of life; yet they had no more real existence than the poet's shades in limbo.
Lily had not been long in this pallid world without discovering that Mrs. Hatch was its most substantial figure.... The daily details of her existence were as strange to Lily as its general tenor. The lady's habits were marked by an Oriental indolence and disorder peculiarly trying to her companion. Mrs. Hatch and her friends seemed to float together outside the bounds of time and space. No definite hours were kept; no fixed obligations existed: night and day floated into one another in a blur of confused and retarded engagements, so that one had the impression of lunching at the tea-hour, while dinner was often merged in the noisy after-theatre supper which prolonged Mrs. Hatch's vigil until daylight. Through this jumble of futile activities came and went a strange throng of hangers-on--manicures, beauty-doctors, hair-dressers, teachers of bridge, of French, of "physical development." ... Mrs. Hatch swam in a haze of indeterminate enthusiasms, of aspirations culled from the stage, the newspapers, the fashion-journals, and a gaudy world of sport still more completely beyond her companion's ken.
The Parasitic Female
(From "Woman and Labor")
BY OLIVE SCHREINER
(In the preface to this book, it is explained that it is only a faint sketch from memory of part of a great work, the manuscript of which was destroyed during the Boer war)
In place of the active laboring woman, upholding society by her toil, had come the effete wife, concubine or prostitute, clad in fine raiment, the work of others' fingers; fed on luxurious viands, the result of others' toil, waited on and tended by the labor of others. The need for her physical labor having gone, and mental industry not having taken its place, she bedecked and scented her person, or had it bedecked and scented for her, she lay upon her sofa, or drove or was carried out in her vehicle, and, loaded with jewels, she sought by dissipations and amusements to fill up the inordinate blank left by the lack of productive activity. And the hand whitened and the frame softened, till at last, the very duties of motherhood, which were all the constitution of her life left her, became distasteful, and, from the instant when her infant came damp from her womb, it passed into the hands of others, to be tended and reared by them; and from youth to age her offspring often owed nothing to her personal toil. In many cases so complete was her enervation, that at last the very joy of giving life, the glory and beatitude of a virile womanhood, became distasteful; and she sought to evade it, not because of its interference with more imperious duties to those already born of her, or to her society, but because her existence of inactivity had robbed her of all joy in strenuous exertion and endurance in any form. Finely clad, tenderly housed, life became for her merely the gratification of her own physical and sexual appetites, and the appetites of the male, through the stimulation of which she could maintain herself. And, whether as kept wife, kept mistress, or prostitute, she contributed nothing to the active and sustaining labors of her society. She had attained to the full development of that type which, whether in modern Paris or New York or London, or in ancient Greece, Assyria, or Rome, is essentially one in its features, its nature, and its results. She was the "fine lady," the human female parasite--the most deadly microbe which can make its appearance on the surface of any social organism.
Wherever in the history of the past this type has reached its full development and has comprised the bulk of the females belonging to any dominant class or race, it has heralded its decay. In Assyria, Greece, Rome, Persia, as in Turkey today, the same material conditions have produced the same social disease among the wealthy and dominant races; and again and again, when the nation so affected has come into contact with nations more healthily constituted, this diseased condition has contributed to its destruction.
In the Market-Place
(From "Beyond the Breakers")
BY GEORGE STERLING
(California poet, born 1869)
In Babylon, high Babylon, What gear is bought and sold? All merchandise beneath the sun That bartered is for gold; Amber and oils from far beyond The desert and the fen, And wines whereof our throats are fond-- Yea! and the souls of men!
In Babylon, grey Babylon, What goods are sold and bought? Vesture of linen subtly spun, And cups from agate wrought; Raiment of many-colored silk For some fair denizen, And ivory more white than milk-- Yea! and the souls of men!...
In Babylon, sad Babylon, What chattels shall invite? A wife whenas your youth is done, Or leman for a night. Before Astarte's portico The torches flare again; The shadows come, the shadows go-- Yea! and the souls of men!
In Babylon, dark Babylon, Who take the wage of shame? The scribe and singer, one by one, That toil for gold and fame. They grovel to their masters' mood The blood upon the pen Assigns their souls to servitude-- Yea! and the souls of men!
Dinner à la Tango
BY EDWIN BJÖRKMAN
(American critic, born in Sweden 1866)
It is after eight o'clock in one of the smaller dining-rooms of a fashionable New York hotel. The middle of the room is cleared for dancing. At one end a small orchestra is working furiously at a melody that affects the mind like the triple-distilled essence of nervous unrest. Every table is occupied by merry groups of men and women in evening dress. Above our heads are strung almost invisible wires, to which are attached colored lanterns, gaudy mechanical butterflies, and huge red and green toy balloons. Just as we enter, a stoutish, heavy-faced chap with a monocle slaps the next man on the back and cries out:
"We must be gay, old boy!"
The open square in the middle is filled with dancers. They trip and slide and dip. They side-step and back-step and gyrate. They wave their arms like pump-handles, or raise them skyward, palm to palm, as if in prayer. There are among them young girls with shining faces full of inarticulate desire; simpering young men with a leer lurking at the bottom of their vacant stares; stiff-legged and white-haired old men with drooping eyelids; and stern-jawed matrons with hand-made faces of a startling purple hue. But on every face, young or old, bright or dull, there beams a smile or clings a smirk, for the spirit of the place demands gaiety at any price.
On the tables are strewn gaily trimmed packages that open with a report, and yield up gaily colored paper caps. Rubicund gentlemen place the caps over their bald spots, while women pick the big butterflies to pieces, and put the fragments into their hair until they look like barbarous princesses. Men and women drink and dance, feast and flirt, sing and laugh and shout....
Gay is the scene indeed: gay the music and the laughter; gay the wine that sparkles in the glasses; gay the swirling, swaying maze of dancing couples; gay the bright balloons and brilliant dresses of the women. And it is as if my mind's eye saw these words written in burning letters on the wall:
Leave care behind, all ye that enter here!
But out there on Fifth Avenue a lot of unkempt, unreasonable men and women are marching savagely behind a black flag.
Evils of Gold
BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
(See pages 181, 492)
O thou sweet king killer, and dear divorce 'Twixt natural son and sire! thou bright defiler Of Hymen's purest bed! thou valiant Mars; Thou ever young, fresh, loved, and delicate wooer, Whose blush doth thaw the consecrated snow That lies on Dian's lap! thou visible god, That solder'st close impossibilities, And mak'st them kiss; that speak'st with every tongue, To every purpose! O thou touch of hearts! Think, thy slave, man, rebels; and by thy virtue Set them into confounding odds, that beasts May have the world in empire.
The Theory of the Leisure Class[A]
[A] By permission of the Macmillan Co.
BY THORSTEIN VEBLEN
(American university professor)
The function of dress as an evidence of ability to pay does not end with simply showing that the wearer consumes valuable goods in excess of what is required for physical comfort. Simple conspicuous waste of goods is effective and gratifying as far as it goes; it is good prima facie evidence of pecuniary success, and consequently prima facie evidence of social worth. But dress has subtler and more far-reaching possibilities than this crude, first-hand evidence of wasteful consumption only. If, in addition to showing that the wearer can afford to consume freely and uneconomically, it can also be shown in the same stroke that he or she is not under the necessity of earning a livelihood, the evidence of social worth is enhanced in a very considerable degree. Our dress, therefore, in order to serve its purpose effectually, should not only be expensive, but it should also make plain to all observers that the wearer is not engaged in any kind of productive labor. In the evolutionary process by which our system of dress has been elaborated into its present admirably perfect adaptation to its purpose, this subsidiary line of evidence has received due attention. A detailed examination of what passes in popular apprehension for elegant apparel will show that it is contrived at every point to convey the impression that the wearer does not habitually put forth any useful effort. It goes without saying that no apparel can be considered elegant, or even decent, if it shows the effect of manual labor on the part of the wearer, in the way of soil or wear. The pleasing effect of neat and spotless garments is chiefly, if not altogether, due to their carrying the suggestion of leisure--exemption from personal contact with industrial processes of any kind. Much of the charm that invests the patent-leather shoe, the stainless linen, the lustrous cylindrical hat, and the walking-stick, which so greatly enhance the native dignity of a gentleman, comes of their pointedly suggesting that the wearer cannot when so attired bear a hand in any employment that is directly and immediately of any human use....
The dress of women goes even farther than that of men in the way of demonstrating the wearer's abstinence from productive employment. It needs no argument to enforce the generalization that the more elegant styles of feminine bonnets go even farther towards making work impossible than does the man's high hat. The woman's shoe adds the so-called French heel to the evidence of enforced leisure afforded by its polish; because this high heel obviously makes any, even the simplest and most necessary manual work extremely difficult. The like is true even in a higher degree of the skirt and the rest of the drapery which characterizes woman's dress. The substantial reason for our tenacious attachment to the skirt is just this: it is expensive and it hampers the wearer at every turn and incapacitates her for all useful exertion. The like is true of the feminine custom of wearing the hair excessively long.
But the woman's apparel not only goes beyond that of the modern man in the degree in which it argues exemption from labor; it also adds a peculiar and highly characteristic feature which differs in kind from anything habitually practiced by the men. This feature is the class of contrivances of which the corset is the typical example. The corset is, in economic theory, substantially a mutilation, undergone for the purpose of lowering the subject's vitality and rendering her permanently and obviously unfit for work. It is true, the corset impairs the personal attractions of the wearer, but the loss suffered on that score is offset by the gain in reputability which comes of her visibly increased expensiveness and infirmity. It may broadly be set down that the womanliness of woman's apparel resolves itself, in point of substantial fact, into the more effective hindrance to useful exertion offered by the garments peculiar to women.
The Vanity of Human Wishes
BY SAMUEL JOHNSON
(English essayist and poet, 1709-1784. The poem from which these lines are taken is a paraphrase of the Roman poet Juvenal)
But, scarce observed, the knowing and the bold Fall in the general massacre of gold; Wide wasting pest! that rages unconfined, And crowds with crimes the records of mankind; For gold his sword the hireling ruffian draws, For gold the hireling judge distorts the laws; Wealth heaped on wealth, nor truth nor safety buys, The dangers gather as the treasures rise.
Letters from a Chinese Official
BY G. LOWES DICKINSON
(This little book, published anonymously, was taken for a genuine document by many critics, among others, Mr. William Jennings Bryan, who wrote an elaborate answer to it. The writer is an English university lecturer)
When I review my impressions of the average English citizen, impressions based on many years' study, what kind of man do I see? I see one divorced from Nature, but unreclaimed by Art; instructed, but not educated; assimilative, but incapable of thought. Trained in the tenets of a religion in which he does not believe--for he sees it flatly contradicted in every relation of life--he dimly feels that it is prudent to conceal under a mask of piety the atheism he is hardly intelligent enough to avow. His religion is conventional; and, what is more important, his morals are as conventional as his creed. Charity, chastity, self-abnegation, contempt of the world and its prizes--these are the words on which he has been fed from his childhood upward. And words they have remained, for neither has he anywhere seen them practiced by others, nor has it ever occurred to him to practice them himself. Their influence, while it is strong enough to make him a chronic hypocrite, is not so strong as to show him the hypocrite he is. Deprived on the one hand of the support of a true ethical standard, embodied in the life of the society of which he is a member, he is duped, on the other, by lip-worship of an impotent ideal. Abandoned thus to his instinct, he is content to do as others do, and, ignoring the things of the spirit, to devote himself to material ends. He becomes a mere tool; and of such your society is composed. By your works you may be known. Your triumphs in the mechanical arts are the obverse of your failure in all that calls for spiritual insight.
Stupidity Street
BY RALPH HODGSON
(Contemporary English poet, who publishes his work in tiny pamphlets with quaint illustrations)
I saw with open eyes Singing birds sweet Sold in the shops For the people to eat, Sold in the shops of Stupidity Street.
I saw in vision The worm in the wheat; And in the shops nothing For people to eat; Nothing for sale in Stupidity Street.
The Souls of Black Folk
BY W. E. BURGHARDT DU BOIS
(Professor in the University of Atlanta, born 1868; a prominent advocate of the rights of his race)
In the Black World, the Preacher and Teacher embodied once the ideals of this people,--the strife for another and a juster world, the vague dream of righteousness, the mystery of knowing; but today the danger is that these ideals, with their simple beauty and weird inspiration, will suddenly sink to a question of cash and a lust for gold. Here stands this black young Atalanta, girding herself for the race that must be run; and if her eyes be still toward the hills and sky as in the days of old, then we may look for noble running; but what if some ruthless or wily or even thoughtless Hippomenes lay golden apples before her? What if the negro people be wooed from a strife for righteousness, from a love of knowing, to regard dollars as the be-all and the end-all of life? What if to the Mammonism of America be added the rising Mammonism of the re-born South, and the Mammonism of this South be reinforced by the budding Mammonism of its half-awakened black millions? Whither, then, is the new-world quest of Goodness and Beauty and Truth gone glimmering?
Co-operation and Nationality
BY "A.E." (GEORGE W. RUSSELL)
(See page 252)
When steam first began to puff and wheels go round at so many revolutions per minute, the wild child humanity, who had hitherto developed his civilization in picturesque unconsciousness of where he was going, and without any set plan, was caught and put in harness. What are called business habits were invented to make the life of man run in harmony with the steam engine, and his movements rival the train in punctuality. The factory system was invented, and it was an instantaneous success. Men were clothed with cheapness and uniformity. Their minds grew numerously alike, cheap and uniform also. They were at their desks at nine o'clock, or at their looms at six. They adjusted themselves to the punctual wheels. The rapid piston acted as pacemaker, and in England, which started first in the modern race for wealth, it was an enormous advantage to have tireless machines of superhuman activity to make the pace, and nerve men, women and children to the fullest activity possible. Business methods had a long start in England, and irregularity and want of uniformity became after a while such exceptions that they were regarded as deadly sins. The grocer whose supplies of butter did not arrive week after week by the same train, at the same hour, and of the same quality, of the same color, the same saltness, and in the same kind of box, quarrelled with the wholesaler, who in his turn quarrelled with the producer. Only the most machine-like race could win custom. After a while every country felt it had to be drilled or become extinct. Some made themselves into machines to enter the English market, some to preserve their own markets. Even the indolent Oriental is getting keyed up, and in another fifty years the Bedouin of the desert will be at his desk and the wild horseman of Tartary will be oiling his engines.
The Communist Manifesto
BY KARL MARX AND FREDERICK ENGELS
(Published in 1848, the charter of the modern Socialist movement)
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors," and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment." It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom--Free Trade.
Portrait of an American
BY LOUIS UNTERMEYER
(See pages 42, 418)
He slobbers over sentimental plays And sniffles over sentimental songs. He tells you often how he sadly longs For the ideals of the dear old days. In gatherings he is the first to raise His voice against "our country's shameful wrongs." He storms at greed. His hard, flat tone prolongs The hymns and mumbled platitudes of praise.
I heard him in his office Friday past. "Look here," he said, "their talk is all a bluff; You mark my words, this thing will never last. Let them walk out--they'll come back quick enough. We'll have all hands at work--and working fast! How do they think we're running this--for love?"
A Living Wage
BY J. PIERPONT MORGAN
(American banker; testimony before the United States Commission on Industrial Relations)
QUESTION: Do you consider ten dollars a week enough for a 'longshoreman with a family to support?
ANSWER: If that's all he can get, and he takes it, I should say it's enough.
Impressions
BY HAROLD MONRO
(Contemporary English poet)
He's something in the city. Who shall say His fortune was not honorably won? Few people can afford to give away As he, or help the poor as he has done.
Neat in his habits, temperate in his life: Oh, who shall dare his character besmirch? He scarcely ever quarrels with his wife, And every Sabbath strictly goes to church.
He helps the village club, and in the town Attends parochial meetings once a week, Pays for each purchase ready-money down: Is anyone against him?--Who will speak?
There is a widow somewhere in the north, On whom slow ruin gradually fell, While she, believing that her God was wroth, Suffered without a word--or she might tell.
And there's a beggar somewhere in the west, Whose fortune vanished gradually away: Now he but drags his limbs in horror lest Starvation feed on them--or he might say.
And there are children stricken with disease, Too ignorant to curse him, or too weak. In a true portrait of him all of these Must figure in the background--they shall speak.
New Varieties of Sin
(From "Sin and Society")
BY EDWARD ALSWORTH ROSS
(American college professor, born 1866, a prominent advocate of academic freedom)
Today the sacrifice of life incidental to quick success rarely calls for the actual spilling of blood. How decent are the pale slayings of the quack, the adulterator, and the purveyor of polluted water, compared with the red slayings of the vulgar bandit or assassin! Even if there is blood-letting, the long-range, tentacular nature of modern homicide eliminates all personal collision. What an abyss between the knife-play of brawlers and the law-defying neglect to fence dangerous machinery in a mill, or to furnish cars with safety couplers! The providing of unsuspecting passengers with "cork" life-preservers secretly loaded with bars of iron to make up for their deficiency in weight of cork, is spiritually akin to the treachery of Joab, who, taking Amasa by the beard "to kiss him," smote Amasa "in the fifth rib"; but it wears a very different aspect. The current methods of annexing the property of others are characterized by a pleasing indirectness and refinement. The furtive, apprehensive manner of the till-tapper or the porch-climber would jar disagreeably upon the tax-dodger "swearing off" his property, or the city official concealing a "rake-off" in his specifications for a public building. The work of the card-sharp and the thimblerigger shocks a type of man that will not stick at the massive "artistic swindling" of the contemporary promoter....
One might suppose that an exasperated public would sternly castigate these modern sins. But the fact is, the very qualities that lull the conscience of the sinner blind the eyes of the on-lookers. People are sentimental, and bastinado wrong-doing not according to its harmfulness, but according to the infamy that has come to attach to it. Undiscerning, they chastise with scorpions the old authentic sins, but spare the new. They do not see that boodling is treason, that blackmail is piracy, that embezzlement is theft, that speculation is gambling, that tax dodging is larceny, that railroad discrimination is treachery, that the factory labor of children is slavery, that deleterious adulteration is murder. It has not come home to them that the fraudulent promoter "devours widows' houses," that the monopolist "grinds the faces of the poor," that mercenary editors and spellbinders "put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter." The cloven hoof hides in patent leather; and to-day, as in Hosea's time, the people "are destroyed for lack of knowledge." The mob lynches the red-handed slayer, when it ought to keep a gallows Haman-high for the venal mine inspector, the seller of infected milk, the maintainer of a fire-trap theatre. The child-beater is forever blasted in reputation, but the exploiter of infant toil, or the concocter of a soothing syrup for the drugging of babies, stands a pillar of society. The petty shoplifter is more abhorred than the stealer of a franchise, and the wife-whipper is outcast long before the man who sends his over-insured ship to founder with its crew.
BY JACK LONDON
Far better to have the front of one's face pushed in by the fist of an honest prize-fighter than to have the lining of one's stomach corroded by the embalmed beef of a dishonest manufacturer.
Tono-Bungay
BY H. G. WELLS
(English novelist, born 1866; author of many strange romances of modern science, and later, of penetrating studies of social injustice and hypocrisy. The present novel tells of the career of a financial potentate who begins life with a patent-medicine business)
It was my uncle's genius that did it. No doubt he needed me--I was, I will admit, his indispensable right hand; but his was the brain to conceive. He wrote every advertisement; some of them even he sketched. You must remember that his were the days before the Times took to enterprise and the vociferous hawking of that antiquated Encyclopædia. That alluring, button-holing, let-me-just-tell-you-quite-soberly-something-you-ought-to-know style of newspaper advertisement, with every now and then a convulsive jump of some attractive phrase into capitals, was then almost a novelty. "Many people who are MODERATELY well think they are QUITE well," was one of his early efforts. The jerks in capitals were, "DO NOT NEED DRUGS OR MEDICINE," and "SIMPLY A PROPER REGIMEN TO GET YOU IN TONE." One was warned against the chemist or druggist who pushed "much-advertised nostrums" on one's attention. That trash did more harm than good. The thing needed was regimen--and Tono-Bungay!
Very early, too, was that bright little quarter column, at least it was usually a quarter column in the evening papers: "HILARITY--TONO-BUNGAY. Like Mountain Air in the Veins." The penetrating trio of questions: "Are you bored with your Business? Are you bored with your Dinner? Are you bored with your Wife?"--that, too, was in our Gower Street days. Both these we had in our first campaign when we worked London south, central, and west; and then, too, we had our first poster,--the HEALTH, BEAUTY AND STRENGTH one. That was his design; I happen still to have got by me the first sketch he made for it....
By all modern standards the business was, as my uncle would say, "absolutely bona fide." We sold our stuff and got the money, and spent the money honestly in lies and clamor to sell more stuff. Section by section we spread it over the whole of the British Isles; first working the middle-class London suburbs, then the outer suburbs, then the home counties, then going (with new bills and a more pious style of "ad") into Wales, a great field always for a new patent-medicine, and then into Lancashire. My uncle had in his inner office a big map of England, and as we took up fresh sections of the local press and our consignments invaded new areas, flags for advertisements and pink underlines for orders showed our progress.
"The romance of modern commerce, George!" my uncle would say, rubbing his hands together and drawing in air through his teeth. "The romance of modern commerce, eh? Conquest. Province by Province. Like sogers."
We subjugated England and Wales; we rolled over the Cheviots with a special adaptation containing eleven per cent. of absolute alcohol; "Tono-Bungay: Thistle Brand." We also had the Fog poster adapted to a kilted Briton in a misty Highland scene....
As I look back at them now, those energetic years seem all compacted to a year or so; from the days of our first hazardous beginning in Farrington Street with barely a thousand pounds' worth of stuff or credit all told--and that got by something perilously like snatching--to the days when my uncle went to the public on behalf of himself and me (one-tenth share) and our silent partners, the drug wholesalers and the printing people and the owner of that group of magazines and newspapers, to ask with honest confidence for £150,000. Those silent partners were remarkably sorry, I know, that they had not taken larger shares and given us longer credit when the subscriptions came pouring in. My uncle had a clear half to play with (including the one-tenth understood to be mine).
£150,000--think of it!--for the goodwill in a string of lies and a trade in bottles of mitigated water! Do you realize the madness of the world that sanctions such a thing? Perhaps you don't. At times use and wont certainly blinded me. If it had not been for Ewart, I don't think I should have had an inkling of the wonderfulness of this development of my fortunes; I should have grown accustomed to it, fallen in with all its delusions as completely as my uncle presently did. He was immensely proud of the flotation. "They've never been given such value," he said, "for a dozen years." But Ewart, with his gesticulating hairy hands and bony wrists, is single-handed chorus to all this as it plays itself over again in my memory, and he kept my fundamental absurdity illuminated for me during all this astonishing time.
"It's just on all fours with the rest of things," he remarked; "only more so. You needn't think you're anything out of the way."
Man the Reformer
BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON
(See page 235)
It is only necessary to ask a few questions as to the progress of the articles of commerce from the fields where they grew, to our houses, to become aware that we eat and drink and wear perjury and fraud in a hundred commodities. We are all implicated in this charge. The sins of our trade belong to no class, to no individual. Everybody partakes, everybody confesses, yet none feels himself accountable. The trail of the serpent reaches into all the lucrative professions and practices of man. Nay, the evil custom reaches into the whole institution of property, until our laws which establish and protect it seem not to be the issue of love and reason, but of selfishness.
To a Certain Rich Young Ruler
BY CLEMENT WOOD
(A sonnet which was widely circulated at the time of the Colorado coal-strike of 1913-14)
White-fingered lord of murderous events, Well are you guarding what your father gained; With torch and rifle you have well maintained The lot to which a heavenly providence Has called you; laborers, risen in defense Of liberty and life, lie charred and brained About your mines, whose gutted hills are stained With slaughter of these newer innocents.
Ah, but your bloody fingers clenched in prayer! Your piety, which all the world has seen! The godly odor spreading through the air From your efficient charity machine! Thus you rehearse for your high rôle up there, Ruling beside the lowly Nazarene!
FROM THE POLITICS OF ARISTOTLE
(See page 480)
A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider godfearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side.
BY AMOS
(Hebrew prophet, B. C. 760)
I hate, I despise your feasts, and I will take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Yea, though you offer me your burnt offerings and meal offerings, I will not accept them; neither will I regard the peace offerings of your fat beasts. Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs; for I will not hear the melody of thy viols. But let judgment roll down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.
Concerning Charity
BY JOHN R. LAWSON
(Part of a statement before the United States Commission on Industrial Relations, 1915. The writer was the representative of the miners in charge of the Colorado strike, and went to work as a pit-boy at the age of eight)
There is another cause of industrial discontent. This is the skillful attempt that is being made to substitute Philanthropy for Justice. There is not one of these foundations, now spreading their millions over the world in showy generosity, that does not draw those millions from some form of industrial injustice. It is not their money that these lords of commercialized virtue are spending, but the withheld wages of the American working-class.
I sat in this room and heard a great philanthropist read the list of activities of his Foundation "to promote the well-being of mankind." An international health commission to extend to foreign countries and peoples the work of eradicating the hookworm; the promotion of medical education and health in China; the investigations of vice conditions in Europe; one hundred thousand dollars for the American Academy in Rome, twenty thousand a year for widows' pensions in New York, one million for the relief of Belgians, thirty-four millions for the University of Chicago, thirty-four millions for a General Education Board. A wave of horror swept over me during that reading, and I say to you that that same wave is now rushing over the entire working-class of the United States. Health for China, a refuge for birds in Louisiana, food for the Belgians, pensions for New York widows, university training for the elect--and never a thought or a dollar for the many thousands of men, women and children who starved in Colorado, for the widows robbed of husbands and children of their fathers, by law-violating conditions in the mines. There are thousands of this great philanthropist's former employees in Colorado today who wish to God that they were in Belgium to be fed, or birds to be cared for tenderly.
Crowds
BY GERALD STANLEY LEE
(Contemporary American author and lecturer, formerly a clergyman)
As I have watched my fellow human beings, what I have come to want most of all in this world is the inspired employer--or what I have called the inspired millionaire or organizer; the man who can take the machines off the backs of the people, and take the machines out of their wits, and make the machines free their bodies and serve their souls.
If we ever have the inspired employer, he will have to be made by the social imagination of the people, by creating the spirit of expectation and challenge toward the rich among the masses of the people....
Nothing is more visionary than trying to run a world without dreams, especially an economic world. It is because even bad dreams are better in this world than having no dreams at all that bad people so-called are so largely allowed to run it.
In the final and practical sense, the one factor in economics to be reckoned with is Desire.
The Dying Boss
BY LINCOLN STEFFENS
(American writer upon social problems, born 1866. A story of the political leader of a corrupt city, who lies upon his death-bed, and has asked to have the meaning of his own career made plain to him)
"What kind of a kid were you, Boss?" I began.
"Pretty tough, I guess," he answered.
"Born here?"
"Yes; in the Third Ward."
"Tough then as it is now?"
"Tougher," he said.
"Produces toughness the way Kansas produces corn," I remarked. "Father?" I asked.
"Kept a saloon; a driver before that."
"Mother a girl of the ward?"
"Yes," he said. "She was brought up there; but she came to this country with her father from England, as a baby."
"What sort of woman was she?"
"Quiet," he said; "always still; silent-like; a worker. Kept the old man straight--some; and me too--'s well as she could. She's th' one that got him off th' wagon and started in th' liquor business."
"You were poor people?"
"Yes."
"And common?"
"Y-yes-s."
"A child of the people," I commented: "the common people."
He nodded, wondering.
"One of the great, friendless mass of helpless humanity?"
He nodded.
"That wasn't your fault, was it?" I said. "Not to blame for that? That's not your sin, is it?"
He shook his head, staring, and he was so mystified that I said that most people were "pretty terribly punished for being born poor and common." He nodded, but he wasn't interested or enlightened, apparently. "And you learned, somehow, that the thing to do was to get yourself on, get up out of it, make a success of your life?"
"Yes," he said slowly. "I don't know how, but I did get that, somehow."
"That was the ideal they taught you," I said. "Never heard of getting everybody on and making a success of society; of the city and State?"
But this line of questioning was beyond him. I changed my tack....
"In that first interview we had," I said, "you insisted that, while the business boss was the real boss, the sovereign, you had some power of your own. And you described it today as the backing of your own ward, which, you said, you had in your pocket. When you became boss, you got the backing, the personal support, of other wards, didn't you?"
"Seven of 'em," he counted. "Made th' leaders myself."
"And you developed a big personal following in other wards, too?"
"Sure," he said; "in every one of them. I was a popular leader; not only a boss, but a friend with friends, lots of 'em. The people liked me."
"That's the point," I said. "The people liked you."
He nodded warmly.
"The common people," I went on, and he was about to nod, but he didn't. And his fingers became still. "Your own people--the great helpless mass of the friendless mob--liked you." His eyes were fixed on mine. "They followed you; they trusted you."
I paused a moment, then I asked: "Didn't they, Boss?"
"Yes," he said with his lips alone.
"They didn't set a watch on you, did they?" I continued. "They voted as you bade them vote, elected the fellows you put on the tickets of their party for them. And, after they elected them, they left it to them, and to you, to be true to them; to stick to them; to be loyal."
His eyes fell to his fingers, and his fingers began again to pick.
"And when your enemies got after you and accused you," I said, "the people stuck by you?"
No answer; only the fingers picked.
"The great, friendless mass--the hopeful, hopeless majority--they were true to you and the party, and they re-elected you."
His eyes were on mine again, and there was light in them; but it was the reflected light of fire, and it burned.
"And you--you betrayed them," I said; and I hurried on, piling on the fuel, all I had. "They have power, the people have, and they have needs, great common needs; and they have great common wealth. All your fat, rich franchises, all your great social values, the values added to land and franchise by the presence of the great, common, numerous mass, all the city's public property--all are theirs, their common property. They own enough in common to meet all their great common needs, and they have an organization to keep for them and to develop for their use and profit all these great needed social values. It is the city; the city government; city, State, and national. And they have, they breed in their own ranks, men like you, natural political leaders, to go into public life and lead them, teach them, represent them. And they leave it all to you, trusting you. And you, all of you--not you alone, Boss, but all of you: ward leaders; State leaders; all the national political bosses--you all betray them. You receive from them their votes, so faithfully given, and you transform them into office-holders whom you teach or corrupt and compel to obey you. So you reorganize the city government. You, not the Mayor, are the head of it; you, not the council, are its legislature; you, not the heads of departments, are the administrators of the property and the powers of the people of your city; the common, helpless, friendless people. And, having thus organized and taken over all this power and property and--this beautiful faith, you do not protect their rights and their property. What do you do with it, Boss?"
He started. He could not answer. I answered for him:
"You sell 'em out; you turn over the whole thing--the city, its property, and its people--to Business, to the big fellows; to the business leaders of the people. You deliver, not only franchises, privileges, private rights and public properties, and values, Boss: you--all of you together--have delivered the government itself to these men, so that today this city, this State, and the national government represent, normally, not the people, not the great mass of common folk, who need protection, but--Business; preferably bad business; privileged business; a class; a privileged class."
He had sunk back among the pillows, his eyes closed, his fingers still. I sounded him.
"That's the system," I repeated. "It's an organization of social treason, and the political boss is the chief traitor. It couldn't stand without the submission of the people; the real bosses have to get that. They can't buy the people--too many of them; so they buy the people's leaders, and the disloyalty of the political boss is the key to the whole thing."
These was no response. I plumbed him again.
"And you--you believe in loyalty, Boss," I said--"in being true to your own." His eyes opened. "That's your virtue, you say, and you said, too, that you have practiced it."
"Don't," he murmured.
A Ballad of Dead Girls
BY DANA BURNET
(American poet, born 1888)
Scarce had they brought the bodies down Across the withered floor, Than Max Rogosky thundered at The District Leader's door.
Scarce had the white-lipped mothers come To search the fearful noon, Than little Max stood shivering In Tom McTodd's saloon!
In Tom McTodd's saloon he stood, Beside the silver bar, Where any honest lad may stand, And sell his vote at par.
"Ten years I've paid the System's tax," The words fell, quivering, raw; "And now I want the thing I bought-- Protection from the law!"
The Leader smiled a twisted smile: "Your doors were locked," he said. "You've overstepped the limit, Max-- A hundred women ... dead!"
Then Max Rogosky gripped the bar And shivered where he stood. "You listen now to me," he cried, "Like business fellers should!
"I've paid for all my hundred dead, I've paid, I've paid, I've paid." His ragged laughter rang, and died-- For he was sore afraid.
"I've paid for wooden hall and stair, I've paid to strain my floors, I've paid for rotten fire-escapes, For all my bolted doors.
"Your fat inspectors came and came-- I crossed their hands with gold. And now I want the thing I bought, The thing the System sold."
The District Leader filled a glass With whiskey from the bar, (The little silver counter where He bought men's souls at par.)
And well he knew that he must give The thing that he had sold, Else men should doubt the System's word, Keep back the System's gold.
The whiskey burned beneath his tongue: "A hundred women dead! I guess the Boss can fix it up, Go home--and hide," he said.
* * * * *
All day they brought the bodies down From Max Rogosky's place-- And oh, the fearful touch of flame On hand and breast and face!
All day the white-lipped mothers came To search the sheeted dead; And Horror strode the blackened walls. Where Death had walked in red.
But Max Rogosky did not weep. (He knew that tears were vain.) He paid the System's price, and lived To lock his doors again.
BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
(See pages 181, 492, 507)
The strongest castle, tower and town, The golden bullet beats it down.
The Miner's Tale
BY MAY BEALS
(A tragedy at Coal Creek, Tennessee, May 19, 1902)
The lord of us he lay in his bed-- Good right had he, good right! But we were up before night had fled, Out to the mine in the dawning red; Slaves were we all, by hunger led Into the land of night.
The master knew of our danger well, We also knew--we knew. His greed for profits had served him well, But he over-reached him, as fate befell, And I alone am left to tell, Death's horrors I lived through
The master dreamed, mayhap, of his gold, But we were awake--awake, Buried alive in the black earth's mold; And some who yet could a pencil hold, Wrote till their hands in death grew cold, For wife or sweetheart's sake.
Letters they wrote of farewell--farewell, To mother, sweetheart, wife: What words of comfort could they tell-- Comfort for those who loved them well, Up from the jaws of the earth's black hell That was crushing out their life.
The master cursed, as masters do-- Good right had he, good right! But the fear of our vengeance stirred him, too; He sailed, with some of his pirate crew, To Europe, and reveled a year or two; Great might has he--great might!
Romance
BY SEYMOUR DEMING
(Contemporary American writer)
The old idea of romance: The country boy goes to the city, marries his employer's daughter, enslaves some hundreds of his fellow humans, gets rich, and leaves a public library to his home town.
The new idea of romance: To undo some of the mischief done by the old idea of romance.
The Soul's Errand
BY SIR WALTER RALEIGH
(Written by the English soldier and statesman, 1552-1618, just before his execution)
Go, Soul, the body's guest, Upon a thankless errand; Fear not to touch the best; The truth shall be thy warrant: Go, since I needs must die, And give them all the lie.
Go tell the Court it glows And shines like rotten wood; Go tell the Church it shows What's good, but does no good: If Court and Church reply Give Court and Church the lie.
Tell Potentates they live Acting, but oh! their actions; Not loved, unless they give, Nor strong but by their factions: If Potentates reply, Give Potentates the lie.
Tell men of high condition, That rule affairs of state, Their purpose is ambition; Their practice only hate: And if they do reply, Then give them all the lie....
Tell Physic of her boldness; Tell Skill it is pretension; Tell Charity of coldness; Tell Law it is contention: And if they yield reply, Then give them all the lie....
So when thou hast, as I Commanded thee, done blabbing; Although to give the lie Deserves no less than stabbing: Yet stab at thee who will, No stab the Soul can kill.
December 31st
BY LASCELLES ABERCROMBIE
(Contemporary English poet)
What is he hammering there, That devil swinking in Hell? Oh, he forges a cunning New Year, God knows he does it well.
Mill and harrow and rake, A restless enginery Of men and women to make Cruelty, Harlotry.
Sisters of the Cross of Shame
BY DANA BURNET
(See page 531)
The Sisters of the Cross of Shame, They smile along the night; Their houses stand with shuttered souls And painted eyes of light.
Their houses look with scarlet eyes Upon a world of sin; And every man cries, "Woe, alas!" And every man goes in.
The sober Senate meets at noon, To pass the Woman's Law, The portly Churchmen vote to stem The torrent with a straw.
The Sister of the Cross of Shame, She smiles beneath her cloud-- (She does not laugh till ten o'clock, And then she laughs too loud.)
And still she hears the throb of feet Upon the scarlet stair, And still she dons the cloak of shame That is not hers to wear.
The sons of saintly women come To kiss the Cross of Shame; Before them, in another time, Their worthy fathers came....
And no man tells his son the truth, Lest he should speak of sin; And every man cries, "Woe, alas!" And every man goes in.
Bringing the Light
(From "A Bed of Roses")
BY W. L. GEORGE
(Contemporary English novelist. The life-story of a woman wage-earner who is driven by the pressure of want to a career of shame. In the following scene she argues with a suffrage-worker, who has called upon her, in ignorance of her true character)
The woman's eyes were rapt, her hands tightly clenched, her lips parted, her cheeks a little flushed. But Victoria's face had hardened suddenly.
"Miss Welkin," she said quietly, "has anything struck you about this house, about me?"
The suffragist looked at her uneasily.
"You ought to know whom you are talking to," Victoria went on, "I am a.... I am a what you would probably call ... well, not respectable."
A dull red flush spread over Miss Welkin's face, from the line of her tightly pulled hair to her stiff white collar; even her ears went red. She looked away into a corner.
"You see," said Victoria, "it's a shock, isn't it? I ought not to have let you in. It wasn't quite fair, was it?"
"Oh, it isn't that, Mrs. Ferris," burst out the suffragist, "I'm not thinking of myself.... Our cause is not the cause of rich women or poor women, of good women or bad; it's the cause of woman. Thus, it doesn't matter who she is, so long as there is a woman who stands aloof from us there is still work to do. I know that yours is not a happy life; and we are bringing the light."
"The light!" echoed Victoria bitterly. "You have no idea, I see, of how many people there are who are bringing the light to women like me. There are various religious organizations who wish to rescue us and house us comfortably under the patronage of the police, to keep us nicely and feed us on what is suitable for the fallen; they expect us to sew ten hours a day for these privileges, but that is by the way. There are also many kindly souls who offer little jobs as charwomen to those of us who are too worn out to pursue our calling; we are offered emigration as servants in exchange for the power of commanding a household; we are offered poverty for luxury, service for domination, slavery to women instead of slavery to men. How tempting it is!" ...
The suffragist said nothing for a second. She felt shaken by Victoria's bitterness.... "The vote does not mean everything," she said reluctantly. "It will merely ensure that we rise like the men when we are fit."
"Well, Miss Welkin, I won't press that. But now, tell me, if women got the vote to-morrow, what would it do for my class?"
"It would be raised...."
"No, no, we can't wait to be raised. We've got to live, and if you 'raise' us we lose our means of livelihood. How are you going to get to the root cause and lift us, not the next generation, at once out of the lower depths?"
The suffragist's face contracted.
"Everything takes time," she faltered. "Just as I couldn't promise a charwoman that her hours would go down and her wages go up the next day, I can't say that ... of course your case is more difficult than any other, because ... because...."
"Because," said Victoria coldly, "I represent a social necessity. So long as your economic system is such that there is not work for the asking for every human being--work, mark you, fitted to strength and ability--so long on the other hand as there is such uncertainty as prevents men from marrying, so long as there is a leisure class who draw luxury from the labor of other men; so long will my class endure as it endured in Athens, in Rome, in Alexandria, as it does now from St. John's Wood to Pekin."
The Selling of Love
(From "Love's Coming of Age")
BY EDWARD CARPENTER
(See page 186)
The commercial prostitution of love is the last outcome of our whole social system, and its most clear condemnation. It flaunts in our streets, it hides itself in the garment of respectability under the name of matrimony, it eats in actual physical disease and death right through our midst; it is fed by the oppression and the ignorance of women, by their poverty and denied means of livelihood, and by the hypocritical puritanism which forbids them by millions not only to gratify but even to speak of their natural desires; and it is encouraged by the callousness of an age which has accustomed men to buy and sell for money every most precious thing--even the life-long labor of their brothers, therefore why not also the very bodies of their sisters?
The Butcher's Stall
(From "Les Villes Tentaculaires:" The Octopus Cities)
BY ÉMILE VERHAEREN
(Belgian poet, born 1855. When Maurice Maeterlinck was suggested as a member of the French Academy, he recommended that the honor should be conferred upon Verhaeren instead. Beginning his career as a decadent and victim of disease, Verhaeren evolved into a rhapsodist of modern civilization. No poet has ever approached him in the portrayal and interpretation of factories, forges, railroads, and all the phenomena of industrialism. Of late he has become an ardent Socialist. The poem here quoted is from a book portraying the sins and agonies of great cities. Only portions of the poem could be printed in a work intended for general circulation in English; but even of these passages the editor will venture the assertion that never before has the horror of prostitution been so packed into human speech)
Hard by the docks, soon as the shadows fold The dizzy mansion-fronts that soar aloft, When eyes of lamps are burning soft, The shy, dark quarter lights again its old Allurement of red vice and gold.
Women, blocks of heaped, blown meat, Stand on low thresholds down the narrow street, Calling to every man that passes; Behind them, at the end of corridors, Shine fires, a curtain stirs And gives a glimpse of masses Of mad and naked flesh in looking-glasses. Hard by the docks The street upon the left is ended by A tangle of high masts and shrouds that blocks A sheet of sky; Upon the right a net of grovelling alleys Falls from the town--and here the black crowd rallies And reels to rotten revelry.
It is the flabby, fulsome butcher's stall of luxury, Time out of mind erected on the frontiers Of the city and the sea.
Far-sailing melancholy mariners Who, wet with spray, thru grey mists peer, Cabin-boys cradled among the rigging, and they who steer Hallucinated by the blue eyes of the vast sea-spaces, All dream of it, evoke it when the evening falls; Their raw desire to madness galls; The wind's soft kisses hover on their faces; The wave awakens rolling images of soft embraces; And their two arms implore Stretched in a frantic cry towards the shore.
And they of offices and shops, the city tribes, Merchants precise, keen reckoners, haggard scribes, Who sell their brains for hire, and tame their brows, When the keys of desks are hanging on the wall, Feel the same galling rut at even-fall, And run like hunted dogs to the carouse. Out of the depths of dusk come their dark flocks, And in their hearts debauch so rudely shocks Their ingrained greed and old accustomed care, That they are racked and ruined by despair.
It is the flabby, fulsome butcher's stall of luxury, Time out of mind erected on the frontiers Of the city and the sea.
Come from what far sea-isles or pestilent parts? Come from what feverish or methodic marts? Their eyes are filled with bitter, cunning hate, They fight their instincts that they cannot sate; Around red females who befool them, they Herd frenzied till the dawn of sober day. The panelling is fiery with lewd art; Out of the wall nitescent knick-knacks dart; Fat Bacchuses and leaping satyrs in Wan mirrors freeze an unremitting grin....
And women with spent loins and sleeping croups Are piled on sofas and arm-chairs in groups, With sodden flesh grown vague, and black and blue With the first trampling of the evening's crew. One of them slides a gold coin in her stocking; Another yawns, and some their knees are rocking; Others by bacchanalia worn out, Feeling old age, and, sniffing them, Death's snout, Stare with wide-open eyes, torches extinct, And smooth their legs with hands together linked....
It is the flabby, fulsome butcher's stall of luxury, Wherein Crime plants his knives that bleed, Where lightning madness stains Foreheads with rotting pains, Time out of mind erected on frontiers that feed The city and the sea.
Fomá Gordyéeff
BY MAXIM GORKY
(Perhaps the most famous novel of the Russian writer, the life-story of the son of a prosperous merchant, a youth who wrecks himself in a vain search for some outlet for his energies, and at the end commits suicide)
"Where is the merchant to spend his energy? He cannot spend much of it on the Exchange, so he squanders the excess of his muscular capital in drinking-bouts in kabaky; for he has no conception of other applications of his strength, which are more productive, more valuable to life. He is still a beast, and life has already become to him a cage, and it is too narrow for him with his splendid health and predilection for licentiousness. Hampered by culture, he at once starts to lead a dissolute life. The debauch of a merchant is always the revolt of a captive beast. Of course this is bad. But, ah! it will be worse yet, when this beast shall have gathered some sense and shall have disciplined it. Believe me, even then he will not cease to create scandals, but they will be historical events. For they will emanate from the merchant's thirst for power; their aim will be the omnipotence of one class, and the merchant will not be particular about the means toward the attainment of this aim.
"Where am I to make use of my strength, since there is no demand for it? I ought to fight with robbers, or turn a robber myself. In general I ought to do something big. And that would be done, not with the head, but with the arms and breast. While here we have to go to the Exchange and try to aim well to make a rouble. What do we need it for? And what is it, anyway? Has life been arranged in this form forever? What sort of life is it, if everyone finds it too narrow for him? Life ought to be according to the taste of man. If it is narrow for me; I must move it asunder that I may have more room. I must break it and reconstruct it. But how? That's where the trouble lies! What ought to be done that life may be freer? That I don't understand, and that's all there is to it!"
Venus Pandemos
BY RICHARD DEHMEL
(Contemporary German poet, born 1863)
This was the last time. I was lounging in The night-café that lights the suburb gloom, Tired with the reek of sultry sofa plush, And with my glowing toddy, and the steam Of women sweating in their gowns: tired, lustful.
Clouds of tobacco smoke were wavering through The laughter and the haggling cries and shrieks Of painted women and the men they drew. The rattling at the sideboard of the spoons Cheered on the hubbub of the mart of love Uninterrupted like a tambourine....
I was about to choose, when, where I sate, The crimson curtain of the door was split, And a fresh couple entered. A cold draught Cut through the heated room, and some one swore; But through the crowd the pair stepped noiselessly. Over against me at the transverse end Of the corridor, whence they could sweep the room, They took their seats. The chandelier of bronze Hung o'er them like an awning heavy, old. And no one seemed to know the couple, but At my right hand I heard a hoarse voice pipe: "I must have come across that pair before."
He sat quite still. The loud gray of the air Almost recoiled before his callous brow, Which wan as wax rose into his sparse hair. His great pale eye-lids hung down deep and shut, On both sides lay around his sunken nose Their shadows, and through his thin beard shone the skin. And only when the woman at his side, Less tall than he, and of a lissom shape, Hissed, giggling, in his ear some obscene word, Half rose of one black eye the heavy lid, And slowly round he turned his long, thin neck, As when a vulture lunges at a corpse.
And silent and more silent grew the room; All eyes were fixed upon the silent guest, And on the woman squatted, strange to see. "She is quite young"--a whispering round me went; And with a child's greed she was drinking milk. Yet almost old she seemed to me, whenever Her tongue shot through a gap in her black teeth, Her pointed tongue out of her hissing mouth, While her gray, eager glance took in the room; The gaslight in it shone like poisonous green.
And now she rose. He had not touched his glass; A great coin lit the table. She went out; He automatically followed her. The crimson curtain round the door fell to, Once more the cold draught shivered through the heat, But no one cursed. Through me a shiver ran.
I did not choose a partner--suddenly I knew them: it was Syphilis and Death.
Book XI
War
Pictures of a terrible evil, and denunciations of it, which will be found especially timely at the present hour.
I Sing the Battle
(From "The Cry of Youth")
BY HARRY KEMP
(See pages 37, 351)
I sing the song of the great clean guns that belch forth death at will. Ah, but the wailing mothers, the lifeless forms and still!
I sing the songs of the billowing flags, the bugles that cry before. Ah, but the skeletons flapping rags, the lips that speak no more!
I sing the clash of bayonets and sabres that flash and cleave. And wilt thou sing the maimed ones, too, that go with pinned-up sleeve?
I sing acclaimèd generals that bring the victory home. Ah, but the broken bodies that drip like honey-comb!
I sing of hearts triumphant, long ranks of marching men. And wilt thou sing the shadowy hosts that never march again?
War
(From "Beyond the Breakers")
BY GEORGE STERLING
(See page 504)
The night was on the world, and in my sleep I heard a voice that cried across the dark: "Give steel!" And gazing I beheld a red, Infernal stithy. There were Titans five Assembled, thewed and naked and malign Against the glare. One to the furnace throat, Whence issued screams, fed shapes of human use-- The hammer, axe and plow. Those molten soon, Another haled the dazzling ingot forth With tongs, and gave it to the anvil. Two, With massy sledges throbbing at the task, Harried the gloom with unenduring stars And poured a clangorous music on the dark, With loud, astounding shock and counter-shock Incessant. And the fifth colossus stood The captain of that labor. From his form Spread wings more black than Hell's high-altar--ribbed As are the vampire-bat's. The night grew old, And I was then aware they shaped a sword....
In that domain and interval of dream 'Twas dawn upon the headlands of the world, And I, appalled, beheld how men had reared A mountain, dark below the morning star-- A peak made up of houses and of herds, Of cradles, yokes and all the handiwork Of man. Upon its crest were gems and gold, Rare fabrics, and the woof of humble looms. Harvests and groves and battlements were made Part of its ramparts, and the whole was drenched With oil and wine and honey. Then thereon Men bound their sons, the fair, alert and strong, Sparing no household. And when all were bound, Brands were brought forth: the mount became a pyre. Black from that red immensity of flame, A tower of smoke, upcoiling to the sky, Was shapen by the winds, and took the form Of him who in the stithy gave command. A shadow between day and men he stood; His eyes looked forth on nothingness; his wings Domed desolations, and the scarlet sun Glowed through their darkness like a seal that God Might set on Hell forever. Then the pyre Shrank, and he reeled. Whereat, to save that shape Their madness had evoked in death and pain, Men rose and made a second sacrifice.
Sartor Resartus
BY THOMAS CARLYLE
(See pages 31, 74, 133, 488)
What, speaking in quite unofficial language, is the net-purport and upshot of war? To my own knowledge, for example, there dwell and toil, in the British village of Dumdrudge, usually some five hundred souls. From these, by certain "Natural Enemies" of the French, there are successfully selected, during the French war, say thirty able-bodied men: Dumdrudge, at her own expense, has suckled and nursed them: she has, not without difficulty and sorrow, fed them up to manhood, and even trained them to crafts, so that one can weave, another build, another hammer, and the weakest can stand under thirty stone avoirdupois. Nevertheless, amid much weeping and swearing, they are selected; all dressed in red, and shipped away, at the public charges, some two thousand miles, or say only to the south of Spain; and fed there till wanted. And now to that same spot, in the south of Spain, are thirty similar French artisans, from a French Dumdrudge, in like manner wending; till at length, after infinite effort, the two parties come into actual juxtaposition, and Thirty stands fronting Thirty, each with a gun in his hand. Straightway the word "Fire!" is given and they blow the souls out of one another, and in place of sixty brisk useful craftsmen, the world has sixty dead carcasses, which it must bury, and anew shed tears for. Had these men any quarrel? Busy as the Devil is, not the smallest! They lived far enough apart; were the entirest strangers; nay, in so wide a Universe, there was even, unconsciously, by Commerce, some mutual helpfulness between them. How then? Simpleton! their Governors had fallen out; and, instead of shooting one another, had the cunning to make these poor blockheads shoot.--Alas, so is it in Deutschland, and hitherto in all other lands; still as of old, "what devilry soever Kings do, the Greeks must pay the piper!"--In that fiction of the English Smollett, it is true, the final Cessation of War is perhaps prophetically shadowed forth; where the two Natural Enemies, in person, take each a Tobacco-pipe, filled with Brimstone; light the same, and smoke in one another's faces, till the weaker gives in: but from such predicted Peace-Era, what blood-filled trenches, and contentious centuries, may still divide us!
The Soldier's Oath
BY KAISER WILHELM OF GERMANY
(Speech delivered in 1891)
Recruits! Before the altar and the servant of God you have given me the oath of allegiance. You are too young to know the full meaning of what you have said, but your first care must be to obey implicitly all orders and directions. You have sworn fidelity to me, you are the children of my guard, you are my soldiers, you have surrendered yourselves to me, body and soul. Only one enemy can exist for you--my enemy. With the present Socialist machinations, it may happen that I shall order you to shoot your own relatives, your brothers, or even your parents--which God forbid--and then you are bound in duty implicitly to obey my orders.
The Coming of War
BY LEO TOLSTOY
(See pages 88, 110, 148, 276, 374, 416)
The bells will peal, long-haired men will dress in golden sacks to pray for successful slaughter. And the old story will begin again, the awful customary acts.
The editors of the daily Press will begin virulently to stir men up to hatred and manslaughter in the name of patriotism, happy in the receipt of an increased income. Manufacturers, merchants, contractors for military stores, will hurry joyously about their business, in the hope of double receipts.
All sorts of Government officials will buzz about, foreseeing a possibility of purloining something more than usual. The military authorities will hurry hither and thither, drawing double pay and rations, and with the expectation of receiving for the slaughter of other men various silly little ornaments which they so highly prize, as ribbons, crosses, orders, and stars. Idle ladies and gentlemen will make a great fuss, entering their names in advance for the Red Cross Society, and ready to bind up the wounds of those whom their husbands and brothers will mutilate; and they will imagine that in so doing they are performing a most Christian work.
And, smothering despair within their souls by songs, licentiousness, and wine, men will trail along, torn from peaceful labor, from their wives, mothers and children--hundreds of thousands of simple-minded, good-natured men with murderous weapons in their hands--anywhere they may be driven.
They will march, freeze, hunger, suffer sickness, and die from it, or finally come to some place where they will be slain by thousands or kill thousands themselves with no reason--men whom they have never seen before, and who neither have done nor could do them any mischief.
And when the number of sick, wounded, and killed becomes so great that there are not hands enough left to pick them up, and when the air is so infected with the putrefying scent of the "food for powder" that even the authorities find it disagreeable, a truce will be made, the wounded will be picked up anyhow, the sick will be brought in and huddled together in heaps, the killed will be covered with earth and lime, and once more all the crowd of deluded men will be led on and on till those who have devised the project, weary of it, or till those who thought to find it profitable receive their spoil.
And so once more men will be made savage, fierce, and brutal, and love will wane in the world, and the Christianizing of mankind, which has already begun, will lapse for scores and hundreds of years. And so once more the men who reaped profit from it all, will assert with assurance that since there has been a war there must needs have been one, and that other wars must follow, and they will again prepare future generations for a continuance of slaughter, depraving them from their birth.
Slavery
BY WILLIAM COWPER
(English poet, 1731-1800)
O for a lodge in some vast wilderness, Some boundless contiguity of shade, Where rumor of oppression and deceit, Of unsuccessful or successful war, Might never reach me more. My ear is pained, My soul is sick, with every day's report Of wrong and outrage with which earth is filled. There is no flesh in man's obdurate heart, It does not feel for man; the natural bond Of brotherhood is severed as the flax That falls asunder at the touch of fire. He finds his fellow guilty of a skin Not colored like his own; and having power To enforce the wrong, for such a worthy cause Dooms and devotes him as his lawful prey. Lands intersected by a narrow frith Abhor each other. Mountains interposed Make enemies of nations, who had else Like kindred drops been mingled into one. Thus man devotes his brother, and destroys; And, worse than all, and most to be deplored, As human nature's broadest, foulest blot, Chains him, and tasks him, and exacts his sweat With stripes, that Mercy, with a bleeding heart, Weeps when she sees inflicted on a beast.
The Biglow Papers
BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
(These poems, first published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1846, voiced the bitter opposition of New England to the Mexican war as a slave-holders' enterprise)
Thrash away, you'll hev to rattle On them kittle-drums o' yourn,-- 'Tain't a knowin' kind o' cattle Thet is ketched with mouldy corn; Put in stiff, you fifer feller, Let folks see how spry you be,-- Guess you'll toot till you are yeller 'Fore you git ahold o' me!...
Ez fer war, I call it murder,-- There you hev it plain an' flat; I don't want to go no furder Than my Testyment fer that; God hez sed so plump an' fairly, It's ez long ez it is broad, An' you've got to git up airly Ef you want to take in God.
'Tain't your eppyletts an' feathers Make the thing a grain more right; 'Tain't afollerin' your bell-wethers Will excuse ye in His sight; Ef you take a sword an' dror it, An' go stick a feller thru, Guv'mint ain't to answer for it, God'll send the bill to you.
Wut's the use o' meetin'-goin' Every Sabbath, wet or dry, Ef it's right to go amowin' Feller-men like oats an' rye? I dunno but wut it's pooty Trainin' round in bobtail coats,-- But it's curus Christian dooty This 'ere cuttin' folks's throats....
Tell ye jest the eend I've come to Arter cipherin' plaguey smart, An' it makes a handy sum, tu, Any gump could larn by heart; Laborin' man an' laborin' woman Hev one glory an' one shame. Ev'y thin' thet's done inhuman Injers all on 'em the same.
'Tain't by turnin' out to hack folks You're agoin' to git your right, Nor by lookin' down on black folks Coz you're put upon by white; Slavery ain't o' nary color, 'Tain't the hide thet makes it wus, All it keers fer in a feller 'S jest to make him fill its pus.
To a Nine-inch Gun
BY P. F. MCCARTHY
(This poem came to the New York World office on a crumpled piece of soiled paper. The author's address was given as Fourth Bench, City Hall Park)
Whether your shell hits the target or not, Your cost is Five Hundred Dollars a Shot. You thing of noise and flame and power, We feed you a hundred barrels of flour Each time you roar. Your flame is fed With twenty thousand loaves of bread. Silence! A million hungry men Seek bread to fill their mouths again.
Kruppism
(From "The Present Hour")
BY PERCY MACKAYE
(American poet and dramatist, born 1875)
Crowned on the twilight battlefield, there bends A crooked iron dwarf, and delves for gold, Chuckling: "One hundred thousand gatlings--sold!" And the moon rises, and a moaning rends The mangled living, and the dead distends, And a child cowers on the chartless wold, Where, searching in his safety vault of mold, The kobold kaiser cuts his dividends.
We, who still wage his battles, are his thralls, And dying do him homage; yea, and give Daily our living souls to be enticed Into his power. So long as on war's walls We build engines of death that he may live, So long shall we serve Krupp instead of Christ.
BY THE EMPRESS CATHERINE II OF RUSSIA
(1729-1796)
The only way to save our empires from the encroachment of the people is to engage in war, and thus substitute national passions for social aspirations.
BY FREDERICK THE GREAT OF PRUSSIA
(1712-1786)
If my soldiers were to begin to reflect, not one of them would remain in the ranks.
Our Father Which Art in Heaven
(From "The Human Slaughter-House")
BY WILHELM LAMSZUS
(A novel by a Hamburg school-teacher, published in 1913. Although banned by the authorities in some places, over 100,000 copies were sold in Germany in a few weeks)
We rejoined the Colors on Friday. On Monday we are to move out. Today, being Sunday, is full-dress Church Parade.
I slept badly last night, and am feeling uneasy and limp.
And now we are sitting close-packed in church.
The organ is playing a voluntary.
I am leaning back and straining my ears for the sounds in the dim twilight of the building. Childhood's days rise before my eyes again. I am watching a little solemn-faced boy sitting crouched in a corner and listening to the divine service. The priest is standing in front of the altar, and is intoning the Exhortation devoutly. The choir in the gallery is chanting the responses. The organ thunders out and floods through the building majestically. I am rapt in an ecstasy of sweet terror, for the Lord God is coming down upon us. He is standing before me and touching my body, so that I have to close my eyes in a terror of shuddering ecstasy....
That is long, long ago, and is all past and done with, as youth itself is past and done with....
Strange! After all these years of doubt and unbelief, at this moment of lucid consciousness, the atmosphere of devoutness, long since dead, possesses me, and thrills me so passionately that I can hardly resist it. This is the same heavy twilight--these are the same yearning angel voices--the same fearful sense of rapture--
I pull myself together, and sit bolt upright on the hard wooden pew.
In the main and the side aisles below, and in the galleries above, nothing but soldiers in uniform, and all, with level faces, turned toward the altar, toward that pale man in his long dignified black gown, toward that sonorous, unctuous mouth, from whose lips flows the name of God.
Look! He is now stretching forth his hands. We incline our heads. He is pronouncing the Benediction over us in a voice that echoes from the tomb. He is blessing us in the name of God, the Merciful. He is blessing our rifles that they may not fail us; he is blessing the wire-drawn guns on their patent recoilless carriages; he is blessing every precious cartridge, lest a single bullet be wasted, lest any pass idly through the air; that each one may account for a hundred human beings, may shatter a hundred human beings simultaneously.
Father in Heaven! Thou art gazing down at us in such terrible silence. Dost Thou shudder at these sons of men? Thou poor and slight God! Thou couldst only rain Thy paltry pitch and sulphur on Sodom and Gomorrah. But we, Thy children, whom Thou hast created, we are going to exterminate them by high-pressure machinery, and butcher whole cities in factories. Here we stand, and while we stretch our hands to Thy Son in prayer, and cry Hosannah! we are hurling shells and shrapnel in the face of Thy Image, and shooting the Son of Man down from His Cross like a target at the rifle-butts.
And now the Holy Communion is being celebrated. The organ is playing mysteriously from afar off, and the flesh and blood of the Redeemer is mingling with our flesh and blood.
There He is hanging on the Cross above me, and gazing down upon me.
How pale those cheeks look! And those eyes are the eyes as of one dead! Who was this Christ Who is to aid us, and Whose blood we drink? What was it they once taught us at school? Didst Thou not love mankind? And didst Thou not die for the whole human race? Stretch out Thine arms toward me. There is something I would fain ask of Thee.... Ah! they have nailed Thy arms to the Cross, so that Thou canst not stretch out a finger toward us.
Shuddering, I fix my eyes on the corpse-like face and see that He died long ago, that He is nothing more than wood, nothing other than a puppet. Christ, it is no longer Thee to whom we pray. Look there! Look there! It is he. The new patron saint of a Christian State! Look there! It is he, the great Genghis Khan. Of him we know that he swept through the history of the world with fire and sword, and piled up pyramids of skulls. Yes, that is he. Let us heap up mountains of human heads, and pile up heaps of human entrails. Great Genghis Khan! Thou, our patron saint! Do thou bless us! Pray to thy blood-drenched father seated above the skies of Asia, that he may sweep with us through the clouds; that he may strike down that accursed nation till it writhes in its blood, till it never can rise again. A red mist swims before my eyes. Of a sudden I see nothing but blood before me. The heavens have opened, and the red flood pours in through the windows. Blood wells up on the altar. The walls run blood from the ceiling to the floor, and--God the Father steps out of the blood. Every scale of his skin stands erect, his beard and hair drip blood. A giant of blood stands before me. He seats himself backward on the altar, and is laughing from thick, coarse lips--there sits the King of Dahomey, and he butchers his slaves. The black executioner raises his sword and whirls it above my head. Another moment and my head will roll down on the floor--another moment and the red jet will spurt from my neck.... Murderers, murderers! None other than murderers! Lord God in Heaven!
Then--
The church door opens creaking--
Light, air, the blue of heaven, burst in.
I draw a breath of relief. We have risen to our feet, and at length pass out of the twilight into the open air.
My knees are still trembling under me.
We fall into line, and in our hob-nailed boots tramp in step down the street toward the barracks. When I see my mates marching beside me in their matter-of-fact and stolid way, I feel ashamed, and call myself a wretched coward. What a weak-nerved, hysterical breed, that can no longer look at blood without fainting! You neurasthenic offspring of your sturdy peasant forebears, who shouted for joy when they went out to fight!
I pull myself together and throw my head back.
I never was a coward, and eye for eye I have always looked my man in the face, and will so do this time, too, happen what may.
The War Prayer[A]
[A] (Quoted by special permission of Harper & Brothers.)
BY MARK TWAIN
(American humorist. See page 265. This "War Prayer," withheld from publication until after Mark Twain's death, pictures the assembling of soldiers in church, and the prayer of the chaplain for victory. In answer to the prayer, God sends down a white-robed messenger, who voices the unspoken meaning of the prayer.)
"O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended through wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sport of the sun-flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it--for our sakes, who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask of one who is the Spirit of love and who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset, and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Grant our prayer, O Lord, and Thine shall be the praise and honor and glory now and ever, Amen."
(After a pause.) "Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak!--the messenger of the Most High waits."
The Illusion of War
BY RICHARD LE GALLIENNE
(American poet, born in England, 1866)
War I abhor, and yet how sweet The sound along the marching street Of drum and fife, and I forget Wet eyes of widows, and forget Broken old mothers, and the whole Dark butchery without a soul.
Without a soul, save this bright drink Of heady music, sweet as hell; And even my peace-abiding feet Go marching with the marching street-- For yonder, yonder goes the fife, And what care I for human life!
The tears fill my astonished eyes, And my full heart is like to break; And yet 'tis all embannered lies, A dream those little drummers make.
O, it is wickedness to clothe Yon hideous grinning thing that stalks, Hidden in music, like a queen, That in a garden of glory walks, Till good men love the thing they loathe.
Art, thou hast many infamies, But not an infamy like this-- Oh, snap the fife, and still the drum, And show the monster as she is!
Lay Down Your Arms
BY BARONESS BERTHA VON SUTTNER
(Austrian novelist and peace advocate, 1850-1914. Her protest against war, published in 1889, made a deep impression throughout Europe. In the following scene a woman is taken to visit a field of battle with the hospital-corps)
No more thunder of artillery, no more blare of trumpets, no more beat of drum; only the low moans of pain and the rattle of death. In the trampled ground some redly-glimmering pools, lakes of blood; all the crops destroyed, only here and there a piece of land left untouched, and still covered with stubble; the smiling villages of yesterday turned into ruins and rubbish. The trees burned and hacked in the forests, the hedges torn with grape-shot. And on this battle-ground thousands and thousands of men dead and dying--dying without aid. No blossoms of flowers are to be seen on wayside or meadow; but sabres, bayonets, knapsacks, cloaks, overturned ammunition wagons, powder wagons blown into the air, cannon with broken carriages. Near the cannon, whose muzzles are black with smoke, the ground is bloodiest. There the greatest number and the most mangled of dead and half-dead men are lying, literally torn to pieces with shot; and the dead horses, and the half-dead which raise themselves on their feet--such feet as they have left--to sink again; then raise themselves up once more and fall down again, till they only raise their head to shriek out their pain-laden death-cry. There is a hollow way quite filled with corpses trodden into the mire. The poor creatures had taken refuge there no doubt to get cover, but a battery has driven over them, and they have been crushed by the horses' hoofs and the wheels. Many of them are still alive--a pulpy, bleeding mass, but "still alive".
And yet there is still something more hellish even than all this, and that is the appearance of the most vile scum of humanity, as it shows itself in war--the appearance and activity of "the hyenas of the battlefield." "Then slink on the monsters who grope after the spoils of the dead, and bend over the corpses and over the living, mercilessly tearing off their clothes from their bodies. The boots are dragged off the bleeding limbs, the rings off the wounded hands, or to get the ring the finger is simply chopped off, and if a man tries to defend himself from such a sacrifice, he is murdered by these hyenas; or, in order to make him unrecognizable, they dig his eyes out."
I shrieked out loud at the doctor's last words. I again saw the whole scene before me, and the eyes into which the hyena was plunging his knife were Frederick's soft, blue, beloved eyes.
"Pray, forgive me, dear lady, but it was by your own wish----"
"Oh, yes; I desire to hear it all. What you are now describing was the night that follows the battle; and these scenes are enacted by the starlight?"
"And by torchlight. The patrols which the conquerors send out to survey the field of battle carry torches and lanterns, and red lanterns are hoisted on signal poles to point out the places where flying hospitals are to be established."
"And next morning, how does the field look?"
"Almost more fearful still. The contrast between the bright smiling daylight and the dreadful work of man on which it shines has a doubly-painful effect. At night the entire picture of horror is something ghostly and fantastic. By daylight it is simply hopeless. Now you see for the first time the mass of corpses lying around on the lanes, between the fields, in the ditches, behind the ruins of walls. Everywhere dead bodies--everywhere. Plundered, some of them naked; and just the same with the wounded. Those who, in spite of the nightly labor of the Sanitary Corps, are still always lying around in numbers, look pale and collapsed, green or yellow, with fixed and stupefied gaze, or writhing in agonies of pain, they beg any one who comes near to put them to death. Swarms of carrion crows settle on the tops of the trees, and with loud croaks announce the bill of fare of the tempting banquet. Hungry dogs, from the villages around, come running by and lick the blood from wounds. Further afield there are a few hyenas to be seen, who are still carrying on their work hastily. And now comes the great interment."
"Who does that--the Sanitary Corps?"
"How could they suffice for such a mass of work? They have fully enough to do with the wounded."
"Then troops are detailed for the work?"
"No. A crowd of men impressed, or even offering themselves voluntarily--loiterers, baggage people, who are supporting themselves by the market-stalls, baggage-wagons and so forth, and who now have been hunted away by the force of the military operations, together with the inhabitants of the cottages and huts--to dig trenches--good large ones, of course--wide trenches, for they are not made deep--there is no time for that. Into these the dead bodies are thrown, heads up or heads down just as they come to hand. Or it is done in this way: A heap is made of the corpses, and a foot or two of earth is heaped up over them, and then it has the appearance of a tumulus. In a few days rain comes on and washes the covering off the festering dead bodies! but what does that matter? The nimble, jolly grave-diggers do not look so far forward. For jolly, merry workmen they are, that one must allow. Songs are piped out there, and all kinds of dubious jokes made--nay, sometimes a dance of hyenas is danced round the open trench. Whether life is still stirring in several of the bodies that are shovelled into it or are covered with the earth, they give themselves no trouble to think. The thing is inevitable, for the stiff cramp often comes on after wounds. Many who have been saved by accident have told of the danger of being buried alive which they have escaped. But how many are there of those who are not able to tell anything! If a man has once got a foot or two of earth over his mouth he may well hold his tongue."
Before Sedan
BY AUSTIN DOBSON
(English poet and essayist, born 1840)
Here in this leafy place Quiet he lies, Cold, with his sightless face Turned to the skies; 'Tis but another dead; All you can say is said.
Carry his body hence,-- Kings must have slaves; Kings climb to eminence Over men's graves; So this man's eye is dim;-- Throw the earth over him.
Doubt
(From "The Present Hour")
BY PERCY MACKAYE
(One of a group of six sonnets, entitled "Carnage," written in September, 1914)
So thin, so frail the opalescent ice Where yesterday, in lordly pageant, rose The monumental nations--the repose Of continents at peace! Realities Solid as earth they seemed; yet in a trice Their bastions crumbled in the surging floes Of unconceivable, inhuman woes, Gulfed in a mad, unmeaning sacrifice.
We, who survive that world-quake, cower and start, Searching our hidden souls with dark surmise: So thin, so frail--is reason? Patient art-- Is it all a mockery, and love all lies? Who sees the lurking Hun in childhood's eyes? Is hell so near to every human heart?
The Wife of Flanders
BY GILBERT K. CHESTERTON
(See page 180)
Low and brown barns, thatched and repatched and tattered, Where I had seven sons until to-day-- A little hill of hay your spur has scattered.... This is not Paris. You have lost your way.
You, staring at your sword to find it brittle, Surprised at the surprise that was your plan; Who, shaking and breaking barriers not a little, Find never more the death-door of Sedan.
Must I for more than carnage call you claimant, Pay you a penny for each son you slay? Man, the whole globe in gold were no repayment For what you have lost. And how shall I repay?
What is the price of that red spark that caught me From a kind farm that never had a name? What is the price of that dead man they brought me? For other dead men do not look the same.
How should I pay for one poor graven steeple Whereon you shattered what you shall not know? How should I pay you, miserable people? How should I pay you everything you owe?
Unhappy, can I give you back your honor? Tho' I forgave, would any man forget? While all our great green earth has, trampled on her, The treason and terror of the night we met.
Not any more in vengeance or in pardon, One old wife bargains for a bean that's hers, You have no word to break; no heart to harden. Ride on and prosper. You have lost your spurs.
Buttons
BY CARL SANDBURG
(Contemporary American poet)
I have been watching the war map slammed up for advertising in front of the newspaper office. Buttons--red and yellow buttons--blue and black buttons--are shoved back and forth across the map.
A laughing young man, sunny with freckles, Climbs a ladder, yells a joke to somebody in the crowd, And then fixes a yellow button one inch west And follows the yellow button with a black button one inch west.
(Ten thousand men and boys twist on their bodies in a red soak along a river edge, Gasping of wounds, calling for water, some rattling death in their throats.) Who by Christ would guess what it cost to move two buttons one inch on the war map here in front of the newspaper office where the freckle-faced young man is laughing to us?
The Wine Press
BY ALFRED NOYES
(English poet, born 1880)
A Murdered man, ten miles away, Will hardly shake your peace, Like one red stain upon your hand; And a tortured child in a distant land Will never check one smile to-day, Or bid one fiddle cease.
The News
It comes along a little wire, Sunk in a deep sea; It thins in the clubs to a little smoke Between one joke and another joke, For a city in flames is less than the fire That comforts you and me.
The Diplomats
Each was honest after his way, Lukewarm in faith, and old; And blood, to them, was only a word, And the point of a phrase their only sword, And the cost of war, they reckoned it In little disks of gold.
They were cleanly groomed. They were not to be bought. And their cigars were good. But they had pulled so many strings In the tinselled puppet-show of kings That, when they talked of war, they thought Of sawdust, not of blood;
Not of the crimson tempest Where the shattered city falls: They thought, behind their varnished doors, Of diplomats, ambassadors, Budgets, and loans and boundary-lines, Coercions and re-calls.
The Charge
Slaughter! Slaughter! Slaughter! The cold machines whirred on. And strange things crawled amongst the wheat With entrails dragging round their feet, And over the foul red shambles A fearful sunlight shone....
The maxims cracked like cattle-whips Above the struggling hordes. They rolled and plunged and writhed like snakes In the trampled wheat and the blackthorn brakes, And the lightnings leapt among them Like clashing crimson swords.
The rifles flogged their wallowing herds, Flogged them down to die. Down on their slain the slayers lay, And the shrapnel thrashed them into the clay, And tossed their limbs like tattered birds Thro' a red volcanic sky.
War
(From "Songs of Joy")
BY WILLIAM H. DAVIES
(An English poet whose "Autobiography of a Super-tramp" was given to the world with an introduction by Bernard Shaw)
Ye Liberals and Conservatives, Have pity on our human lives, Waste not more blood on human strife; Until we know some way to use This human blood we take or lose, 'Tis sin to sacrifice our life.
When pigs are stuck we save their blood And make puddings for our food, The sweetest and the cheapest meat; And many a woman, man and boy Have ate those puddings with great joy, And oft-times in the open street.
Let's not have war till we can make, Of this sweet life we lose or take, Some kind of pudding of man's gore; So that the clergy in each parish May save the lives of those that famish Because meat's dear and times are poor.
In Praise of the Warrior
(From "Don Quixote")
BY MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
(Best known of Spanish novelists, 1547-1616; himself a soldier, captured and made a galley-slave in Algiers)
I am not a barbarian, and I love letters, but let us beware of according them pre-eminence over arms, or even an equality with arms. The man of letters, it is very true, instructs and illuminates his fellows, softens manners, elevates minds, and teaches us justice, a beautiful and sublime science. But the warrior makes us observe justice. His object is to procure us the first and sweetest of blessings, peace, gentlest peace, so necessary to human happiness. This peace, adorable blessing, gift divine, source of happiness, this peace is the object of war. The warrior labors to procure it for us, and the warrior therefore performs the most useful labor in the world.
Song of the Exposition
BY WALT WHITMAN
(See pages 184, 268)
Away with themes of war! away with War itself! Hence from my shuddering sight, to never more return, that show of blacken'd, mutilated corpses! That hell unpent, and raid of blood--fit for wild tigers, or for lop-tongued wolves--not reasoning men! And in its stead speed Industry's campaigns! With thy undaunted armies, Engineering! Thy pennants, Labor, loosen'd to the breeze! Thy bugles sounding loud and clear!
Woman and War
(From "Woman and Labor")
BY OLIVE SCHREINER
(See pages 240, 246, 504)
In supplying the men for the carnage of a battlefield, women have not merely lost actually more blood, and gone through a more acute anguish and weariness, in the months of bearing and in the final agony of child-birth, than has been experienced by the men who cover it; but, in the months of rearing that follow, the women of the race go through a long, patiently endured strain which no knapsacked soldier on his longest march has ever more than equalled; while, even in the matter of death, in all civilized societies, the probability that the average woman will die in child-birth is immeasurably greater than the probability that the average male will die in battle.
There is, perhaps, no woman, whether she have borne children, or be merely potentially a child-bearer, who could look down upon a battlefield covered with slain, but the thought would rise in her, "So many mothers' sons! So many young bodies brought into the world to lie there! So many months of weariness and pain while bones and muscles were shaped within! So many hours of anguish and struggle that breath might be! So many baby mouths drawing life at women's breasts;--all this, that men might lie with glazed eyeballs, and swollen faces, and fixed, blue, unclosed mouths, and great limbs tossed--this, that an acre of ground might be manured with human flesh, that next year's grass or poppies or karoo bushes may spring up greener and redder, where they have lain, or that the sand of a plain may have the glint of white bones!" And we cry, "Without an inexorable cause, this must not be!" No woman who is a woman says of a human body, "It is nothing!"
The Arsenal at Springfield
BY HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
(Probably the most popular of American poets, 1807-1882)
This is the Arsenal. From floor to ceiling, Like a huge organ, rise the burnished arms; But from their silent pipes no anthem pealing Startles the villages with strange alarms.
Ah! what a sound will rise--how wild and dreary-- When the death-angel touches those swift keys! What loud lament and dismal Miserere Will mingle with their awful symphonies!
I hear even now the infinite fierce chorus-- The cries of agony, the endless groan, Which, through the ages that have gone before us, In long reverberations reach our own....
Is it, O man, with such discordant noises, With such accursed instruments as these, Thou drownest Nature's sweet and kindly voices, And; arrest the celestial harmonies?
Were half the power that fills the world with terror, Were half the wealth bestowed on camps and courts, Given to redeem the human mind from error, There were no need of arsenals or forts.
War and Peace
BY BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
(American statesman, 1706-1790)
I join with you most cordially in rejoicing at the return of peace. I hope it will be lasting, and that mankind will at length, as they call themselves reasonable creatures, have reason enough to settle their differences without cutting throats; for, in my opinion, there never was a good war or a bad peace. What vast additions to the conveniences and comforts of life might mankind have acquired, if the money spent in wars had been employed in works of utility! What an extension of agriculture, even to the tops of the mountains; what rivers rendered navigable, or joined by canals; what bridges, aqueducts, new roads, and other public works, edifices and improvements, rendering England a complete paradise, might not have been obtained by spending those millions in doing good, which in the last war have been spent in doing mischief--in bringing misery into thousands of families, and destroying the lives of so many working people, who might have performed the useful labors.
A Prayer of the Peoples
(From "The Present Hour")
BY PERCY MACKAYE
(See pages 561, 572)
God of us who kill our kind! Master of this blood-tracked Mind Which from wolf and Caliban Staggers toward the star of Man-- Now, on Thy cathedral stair, God, we cry to Thee in prayer!
Where our stifled anguish bleeds Strangling through Thine organ reeds, Where our voiceless songs suspire From the corpses in Thy choir-- Through Thy charred and shattered nave, God, we cry on Thee to save!
Save us from our tribal gods! From the racial powers, whose rods-- Wreathed with stinging serpents--stir Odin and old Jupiter From their ancient hells of hate To invade Thy dawning state....
Lord, our God! to whom, from clay, Blood and mire, Thy peoples pray-- Not from Thy cathedral's stair Thou hearest:--Thou criest through our prayer For our prayer is but the gate: We, who pray, ourselves are fate.
War
BY THE GREAT INDIAN, CHIEF JOSEPH
Hear me, my warriors; my heart is sick and sad; Our chiefs are killed, The old men are all dead, It is cold and we have no blankets; The little children are freezing to death. Hear me, my warriors; my heart is sick and sad; From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever!
A Project for a Perpetual Peace
BY JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU
(A document published 1756 in which the French philosopher outlined in detail a plan for a European federation, which seems in 1915 to have become the next step in civilization)
As a more noble, useful, and delightful Project never engaged the human mind, than that of establishing a perpetual peace among the contending nations of Europe, never did a writer lay a better claim to the attention of the public than he who points out the means to carry such a design into execution. It is indeed very difficult for a man of probity and sensibility, not to be fired with a kind of enthusiasm on such a subject; nay, I am not clear that the very illusions of a heart truly humane, whose warmth makes everything easily surmountable, are not in this case more eligible than that rigid and forbidding prudence, which finds in its own indifference and want of public spirit, the chief obstacle to everything that tends to promote the public good.
I doubt not that many of my readers will be forearmed with incredulity, to withstand the pleasing temptation of being persuaded; and indeed I sincerely lament their dullness in mistaking obstinacy for wisdom. But I flatter myself, that many an honest mind will sympathize with me in that delightful emotion, with which I take up the pen to treat of a subject so greatly interesting to the world. I am going to take a view, at least in imagination, of mankind united by love and friendship: I am going to take a contemplative prospect of an agreeable and peaceful society of brethren, living in constant harmony, directed by the same maxims, and joint sharers of one common felicity; while, realizing to myself so affecting a picture, the representation of such imaginary happiness will give me the momentary enjoyment of a pleasure actually present.
Let the People Vote on War
BY ALLEN L. BENSON
(American Socialist writer, born 1871)
Each voter should sign his or her name to the ballot that is voted. In counting, the ballots for war should be kept apart from the ballots against war. In the event of more than half of the population voting for war, those who voted for war should be sent to the front in the order in which they appeared at their respective polling places. Nobody who voted against war should be called to serve until everybody who voted for war had been sent to the front.
Anti-Militarism
(From "The Red Wave")
BY JOSEPH-HENRY ROSNY, THE ELDER
(French novelist, member of the Académie des Goncourts; born 1856. A novel of revolutionary Syndicalism. The present scene describes a debate organized between champions of the revolutionary and the conservative labor unions, the "Reds" and the "Yellows"; a grand Homeric combat of ideas, in which the audience is wrought to a furious pitch of excitement, and does as much talking as the orators. In the following extract, from about forty pages of mingled eloquence and humor, the champion of the "Reds" announces "the grave and dreadful problem of anti-militarism")
A long shudder agitated the hostile crowds. All the wild beasts quivered in their cages. Rougemont, immobile, scarcely raised his hand; never before had his voice sounded more grave and more pathetic.
"Ah, yes! Question profound and dreadful. No one has been troubled by it more than I, for I am not among those bold internationalists who deny their country. I love my land of France. To make our happiness perfect, we must have the land of France. But who would dare to say that we, the poor, are any other thing upon that land than food for suffering and food for barracks? The worst Prussian, provided that he owns a coin of a hundred sous--is he not superior to the unhappy wretch who rummages in empty pockets? All the pleasures, all the beauty, all the luxury, our most beautiful daughters, belong to the rich cosmopolitan: he possesses the enchanter's ring. If you have nothing, you will live more a stranger in your country than the dog of a swindling millionaire. If you have nothing, you will be insulted, scorned, hunted, locked in prison for vagabondage. La patrie! La patrie of the poor! It is a fable, a symbol, an inscription upon a military-list or a school-book--the most bitter derision! Your right, unhappy ones--it is to suffer and defend the soil, which belongs to your master, to him who possesses. For him, for him alone, our France devotes each year a billion francs for army and navy....
"It is necessary purely and simply to suppress the budget of the army and navy," thundered Rougemont, with such force that he broke the tumult. "France must give all at once, without hesitation, the example of disarmament. And that would be a thing so grand and so beautiful that the entire universe would applaud, that all humanity would turn toward her. From that day alone we should be at the head of the nations, and our country would become the country of free men!"
"Under the heel of Wilhelm!"
"A Poland!"
"Guts for the cats!"
"Sold! Rubbish! Meat for sheenies!"
"... living in boiling water like lobsters!"
All at once, the tumult sank. The voice of the orator forced itself upon the ear, high as a bell, precise as a clarion. "Free, superb, and triumphant! Queen of the peoples, goddess of the unfortunate! If we should disarm, before ten years, France would become a land of pilgrimage, the Mecca of men. Before twenty years, the other nations would have followed her example. As for making of us a Poland, let them try it! Have you then forgotten the teachings of history? Do you not know that our grand armies, our innumerable victories--we have won as many victories as all the rest of Europe together--have only ended in the crushing of Waterloo and the collapse of Sedan? On the contrary, Italy, dismembered for centuries, Italy, which cannot count its defeats, is become a free nation. That is because it is inhabited by a race, clean and well-defined, upon which the foreigner has been unable to impress his mark. France enslaved, she, the most intelligent of nations, she who has had the most influence upon minds and hearts! Come now, that is not possible, that will never happen! But the people who would howl indignation at the dismembering of a disarmed France, would let a war-like France go down to ruin: she would be only one country like the others. So, I repeat it without scruple: it is necessary that we should give the magnificent example of disarmament. Only then shall we be a nation loved and admired among nations. Only then will all hearts turn toward us. Only then will the idea that anyone could touch France seem a sacrilege such as no tyrant would risk!"
The Dawn
BY ÉMILE VERHAEREN
(In this play the Belgian poet has voiced his hopes for the regeneration of human society. The city of Oppidomagne is besieged by a hostile army, and the revolutionists in both armies conspire and revolt. The gates of the city are thrown open, and the end of war declared. A captain in the hostile army is speaking over the body of Hérénian, leader of the revolutionists in the city)
I was his disciple, and his unknown friend. His books were my Bible. It is men like this who give birth to men like me, faithful, long obscure, but whom fortune permits, in one overwhelming hour, to realize the supreme dream of their master. If fatherlands are fair, sweet to the heart, dear to the memory, armed nations on the frontiers are tragic and deadly; and the whole world is yet bristling with nations. It is in their teeth that we throw them this example of our concord. (Cheers.) They will understand some day the immortal thing accomplished here, in this illustrious Oppidomagne, whence the loftiest ideas of humanity have taken flight, one after another, through all the ages. For the first time since the beginning of power, since brains have reckoned time, two races, one renouncing its victory, the other its humbled pride, are made one in an embrace. The whole earth must needs have quivered, all the blood, all the sap of the earth must have flowed to the heart of things. Concord and good will have conquered hate. (Cheers.) Human strife, in its form of bloodshed, has been gainsaid. A new beacon shines on the horizon of future storms. Its steady rays shall dazzle all eyes, haunt all brains, magnetize all desires. Needs must we, after all these trials and sorrows, come at last into port, to whose entrance it points the way, and where it gilds the tranquil masts and vessels.
(Enthusiasm of all; the people shout and embrace. The former enemies rise and surround the speaker. Those of Oppidomagne stretch their arms towards him.)
The Springtime of Peace
(From "Studies in Socialism")
BY JEAN LÉON JAURÉS
(Editor of l'Humanité, and leader of the French Socialist movement, 1859-1914; probably the most eminent of Socialist parliamentarians, assassinated by a fanatic at the outbreak of the war with Germany. The following is the peroration of a speech delivered at an Anglo-French parliamentary dinner, 1903)
The majesty of suffering labor is no longer dumb: it speaks now with a million tongues, and it asks the nations not to increase the ills which crush down the workers by an added burden of mistrust and hate, by wars and the expectation of wars.
Gentlemen, you may ask how and when and in what form this longing for international concord will express itself to some purpose.... I can only answer you by a parable which I gleaned by fragments from the legends of Merlin, the magician, from the Arabian Nights, and from a book that is still unread.
Once upon a time there was an enchanted forest. It had been stripped of all verdure, it was wild and forbidding. The trees, tossed by the bitter winter wind that never ceased, struck one another with a sound as of breaking swords. When at last, after a long series of freezing nights and sunless days that seemed like nights, all living things trembled with the first call of spring, the trees became afraid of the sap that began to move within them. And the solitary and bitter spirit that had its dwelling within the hard bark of each of them said very low, with a shudder that came up from the deepest roots: "Have a care! If thou art the first to risk yielding to the wooing of the new season, if thou art the first to turn thy lancelike buds into blossoms and leaves, their delicate raiment will be torn by the rough blows of the trees that have been slower to put forth leaves and flowers."
And the proud and melancholy spirit that was shut up within the great Druidical oak spoke to its tree with peculiar insistence: "And wilt thou, too, seek to join the universal love-feast, thou whose noble branches have been broken by the storm?"
Thus, in the enchanted forest, mutual distrust drove back the sap, and prolonged the death-like winter even after the call of spring.
What happened at last? By what mysterious influence was the grim charm broken? Did some tree find the courage to act alone, like those April poplars that break into a shower of verdure, and give from afar the signal for a renewal of all life? Or did a warmer and more life-giving beam start the sap moving in all the trees at once? For lo! in a single day the whole forest burst forth into a magnificent flowering of joy and peace.
BY MICAH
(Hebrew prophet, B. C. 700)
He shall judge among many people, and rebuke strong nations afar off: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid; for the mouth of the Lord of hosts hath spoken it.