Diana stands behind the horses, against the great, golden moon–a radiant halo. She has just unloosed an arrow from her bow. Her draperies are of indefinite color, the rose and lilac and amber of sunset. Her face, it will be noted, though she stands against the moon, is lighted from in front. In that fact lies the secret of the illumination. For this picture was supposedly painted at that one Byronic hour of the year when
The sun was setting opposite the moon.
Turner, in a small water color, has worked out a similar problem, with the cool copper of the harvest moonlight bathing one side of an old stone tower, the warm rose of sunset the other. In Mr. Elliott’s great canvas the mutual lights kill all shadows, and out toward the great yellow disk of the moon the invisible sun floods its lilac and pink, kindling the waves, the draperies of the goddess, the wet flanks of the horses, and suffusing the whole painting with its delicate, bright warmth, which is yet kept too cool for gaudiness by the twilight of the moon.
While this canvas was being unpacked in Washington last winter, Mr. Elliott was exhibiting in Boston his portrait of his mother-in-law, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe. It was begun and nearly finished at Newport four or five years ago; but Mr. Elliott has not cared to complete it, for during the interval the “Grand Old Lady” has considerably changed in appearance. She is now more than ninety years old. When the sittings began, Mrs. Howe had just recovered from an illness, and could read or talk only for brief periods. Mostly she sat looking out of her window at a bird which had a nest in a nearby tree. In this attitude, the eyes raised, the face quiet yet alert, the artist has caught her; calm, patient, but with one hand characteristically clenched on the arm of her chair, showing a touch of hidden force and commanding will. She is dressed in light green. The background is an indistinguishable brown. Her eyes have that very delicate light blue of advanced age, wistful yet prophetic. The skin, too, has the rare ivory delicacy of old age, of old age gently dealt with and protected. The light is unobtrusive yet luminous–morning sunshine. The picture is utterly simple; the more so for its touch of incompleteness. The masses are broad, artless. It is tender, reverential, a sweet and solemn glorification of old age, and of the old age of a distinguished spirit.
And at the exhibition in Boston one of the women visitors complained to the artist: “But you know, Mr. Elliott, when Mrs. Howe comes to the Woman’s Club, she always looks so bright and animated, and always has something smart to say!”
To which the artist replied: “No doubt, my dear lady. But I was not painting a president of the New England Woman’s Club, but the author of `The Battle Hymn of the Republic.’ “
Queen Margherita of Italy made a truer comment when she saw the portrait in Mr. Elliott’s studio in Rome. “That portrait deserves to go into any collection in the world,” she said, “not because it is a good portrait of a distinguished old woman, but because it is a portrait of Old age as it ought to be.”
Can it be that a mere Continental Queen is a better judge of art than a member of a Boston Woman’s Club? Such thoughts are very disturbing!
Queen Margherita, ever since she first visited Mr. Elliott’s studio in Rome ten years ago, has been his warm patron. It was for her he made his well known silver-point portrait of the late King Humbert, which she carries with her on all journeys. It has, indeed the boldness of line inseparable from good silver-point drawing, where a stroke once laid on is indelible and no “working over” is possible. When “Diana of the Tides ” was exhibited in Rome in February, 1909, the Queen was one of the first visitors. She was not the first, the Chinese Minister arriving ahead of all others, on the stroke of ten–the opening hour–attended by all his suite, to signify his profound Celestial veneration for the Fine Arts. The Queen, seeing the picture, expressed delight and volunteered to tell her son, King Victor Emmanuel, about it.
A few days later, at seven thirty in the morning, there came a knocking at the door, with the announcement, “A message from the King.”
The King, said the messenger, would follow in an hour. Presumably there was some hurry of preparation in the Elliott family. A New York artist, at any rate, at seven thirty A. M. would be in no condition to receive a crowned head–or any other! Promptly at eight thirty–punctuality being a royal virtue–King Victor Emmanuel drove up in a motor car with two aides. He remained half an hour. Being fond of horses, he found much in the picture genuinely to interest him. The artist accompanied the monarch to the door of his car, where he thanked him for the honor of his visit.
“Not at all,” said the King, in his excellent English. “My mother told me to come.”
Which shows, at least, that the Fifth Commandment is honored in Italy.
The twenty-four pastel drawings made to illustrate Mrs. Anderson’s fairy tale, “The Great Sea Horse,” were also exhibited in America last winter. Made immediately after Mr. Elliott’s heartbreaking labor on the rocking soil of Sicily, they are none the less quiet, childish, and fanciful in their charm. Only one of them might have been inspired by the turning over in his uneasy sleep of the giant buried beneath Etna–the picture of the naked giant sitting on a headland and emptying his hot pipe ashes into the sea, where they form a volcano. The grim, grotesque old fellow is carefully drawn, with a fine rhythm of line in the seated limbs. His bulk dwarfs the headland, and his head and shoulders grow blue and pale in the sky. One questions why the ashes do not fall farther out to sea; they seem to lie in the shallow tide water on the beach. Barring this note of smallness, the picture is a true grotesque in miniature.
Mr. Elliott also works in genuine miniature. He has painted several portraits–of Mrs. Potter Palmer, the Chanler sisters of New York, and many more. He has painted landscapes, as well. Professor Barrett Wendell possesses a charming example. Most recently he has been engaged on a large mural decoration, best fitted, perhaps, for a music room, showing Pan seated on a tree trunk by a lake, making into a pipe the broken reeds in his hand after Syrinx eluded him. No horizon line shows. Pan and his tawny leopard skin (his automobile coat, the artist calls it) tell against the high purple banks across the lake. The god is making the best of his loss–making music of it, in fact. He was the eternal boy, before Mr. Barrie rediscovered him and surnamed him Peter.
And there is something of the eternal boy about John Elliott. He plays with a paint box on a fifty-foot ceiling or a twenty-seven- foot end wall, turns aside to paint a miniature on ivory, drops all his paints when a great national calamity comes and is converted into an architect overnight, building a whole town in four months and making it as beautiful as he can in the process, though the “practical” man would say that utility alone was demanded; and then, when this work is over, turning blithely back again to make pictures for a fairy book. He is strong, through his fresh imagination, to combine ancient myth with modern science in a huge decorative canvas, to reflect the dignity and loveliness and spiritual power of an exalted old age, to do practical work in a practical crisis–and to joy, at the same time, with the moon baby dancing on the beach!
“Jack Elliott,” they will tell you who know him, “has an artistic temperament.” Well, if this be the artistic temperament, what a pity there is not more of it in the world! It is not the temperament that is self-centered, whining, ineffectual. It is the temperament that does whatever comes to hand as well as it can, for sheer love of the task, and of beautiful workmanship that through imagination wins to sympathy, and through imagination grasps the opportunity to do practical work beautifully, where others would only do it practically. It is the temperament eternally boyish and buoyant, which is on the side of sweetness and light.
Perhaps it is not what the world means by the artistic temperament. But it is the temperament of the true artist. “Never do a pot-boiler,” said Mr. Elliott to a young painter the other day. “Let one of your best things go to boil the pot.” In these words is a rule of conduct that all of us–artists or artisans brokers or clerks, men or women–might well walk by toward the light of a more beautiful and cooperative society.
***************************************************************** Vol. XXIII No.2 AUGUST 1910
THE HEATHEN {page 193-204}
By JACK LONDON
Author of ” The Call of the Wild,” “Martin Eden,” etc.
I met him first in a hurricane. And though we had been through the hurricane on the same schooner, it was not until the schooner had gone to pieces under us that I first laid eyes on him. Without doubt I had seen him with the rest of the Kanaka crew on board, but I had not consciously been aware of his existence, for the Petite Jeanne was rather overcrowded. In addition to her eight or ten Kanaka sea men, her white captain, mate, and supercargo, and her six cabin passengers, she sailed from Rangiroa with something like eighty-five deck passengers–Paumotuans and Tahitians, men, women, and children, each with a trade-box, to say nothing of sleeping-mats, blankets, and clothes-bundles.
The pearling season in the Paumotus was over, and all hands were returning to Tahiti. The six of us cabin passengers were pearl-buyers. Two were Americans, one was Ah Choon, the whitest Chinese I have ever known, one was a German, one was a Polish Jew, and I completed the half-dozen. It had been a prosperous season. Not one of us had cause for complaint, nor one of the eighty-five deck passengers either. All had done well, and all were looking forward to a rest-off and a good time in Papeete. Of course the Petite Jeanne was overloaded. he was only seventy tons, and she had no right to carry a tithe of the mob she had on board. Beneath her hatches she was crammed and jammed with pearl shell and copra. Even the trade-room was packed full of shell. It was a miracle that the sailors could work her. There was no moving about the decks. They simply climbed back and forth along the rails. In the night-time they walked upon the sleepers, who carpeted the deck, two deep, I’ll swear. Oh, and there were pigs and chickens on deck, and sacks of yams, while every conceivable place was festooned with strings of drinking cocoanuts and bunches of bananas. On both sides, between the fore and main shrouds, guys had been stretched, just low enough for the fore-boom to swing clear; and from each of these guys at least fifty bunches of bananas were suspended.
It promised to be a messy passage, even if we did make it in the two or three days that would have been required if the southeast trades had been blowing fresh. But they weren’t blowing fresh. After the first five hours, the trade died away in a dozen gasping fans. The calm continued all that night and the next day–one of those glaring, glossy calms when the very thought of opening one’s eyes to look at it is sufficient to cause a headache. The second day a man died, an Easter Islander, one of the best divers that season in the lagoon. Smallpox, that is what it was, though how smallpox could come on board when there had been no known cases ashore when we left Rangiroa is beyond me. There it was, though, smallpox, a man dead, and three others down on their backs. There was nothing to be done. We could not segregate the sick, nor could we care for them. We were packed like sardines. There was nothing to do but die–that is, there was nothing to do after the night that followed the first death. On that night, the mate, the supercargo, the Polish Jew, and four native divers sneaked away in the large whaleboat. They were never heard of again. In the morning the captain promptly scuttled the remaining boats, and there we were.
That day there were two deaths; the following day three; then it jumped to eight. It was curious to see how we took it. The natives, for instance, fell into a condition of dumb, stolid fear. The captain–Oudouse, his name was, a Frenchman–became very nervous and voluble. The German, the two Americans, and myself bought up all the Scotch whisky and proceeded to drink. The theory was beautiful–namely, if we kept ourselves soaked in alcohol, every smallpox germ that came into contact with us would immediately be scorched to a cinder. And the theory worked, though I must confess that neither Captain Oudouse nor Ah Choon was attacked by the disease either. The Frenchman did not drink at all, while Ah Choon restricted himself to one drink daily.
We had a week of it, and then the whisky gave out. It was just as well, or I shouldn’t be alive now. It took a sober man to pull through what followed, as you will agree when I mention the little fact that only two men did pull through. The other man was the Heathen–at least that was what I heard Captain Oudouse call him at the moment I first became aware of the Heathen’s existence.
But to come back. It was at the end of the week that I happened to glance at the barometer that hung in the cabin companion-way. Its normal register in the Paumotus was 29.90, and it was quite customary to see it vacillate between 29.85 and 30.00, or even 30.05; but to see it, as I saw it, down to 29.62, was sufficient to chill the blood of any pearl-buyer in Oceania.
I called Captain Oudouse’s attention to it, only to be informed that he had watched it going down for several hours. There was little to do, but that little he did very well, considering the circumstances. He took off the light sails, shortened right down to storm canvas, spread life-lines, and waited for the wind. His mistake lay in what he did after the wind came. He hove to on the port tack, which was the right thing to do south of the Equator, IF–and there was the rub–IF one were NOT in the direct path of the hurricane. We were in the direct path. I could see that by the steady increase of the wind and the equally steady fall of the barometer. I wanted to turn and run with the wind on the port quarter until the barometer ceased falling, and then to heave to. We argued till he was reduced to hysteria, but budge he would not. The worst of it was that I could not get the rest of the pearl-buyers to back me up. Who was I, anyway, to know more about the sea and its ways than a properly qualified captain?
Of course, the sea rose with the wind, frightfully, and I shall never forget the first three seas the Petite Jeanne shipped. She had fallen off, as vessels do when hove to, and the first sea made a clean breach. The lifelines were only for the strong and well, and little good were they even for these when the women and children, the bananas and cocoanuts, the pigs and trade-boxes, the sick and the dying, were swept along in a solid, screeching, groaning mass.
The second sea filled the Petite Jeanne’s decks flush with the rails, and, as her stern sank down and her bow tossed skyward, all the miserable dunnage of life and luggage poured aft. It was a human torrent. They came head-first, feet-first, sidewise, rolling over and over, twisting, squirming, writhing, and crumpling up. Now and again one or another caught a grip on a stanchion or a rope, but the weight of the bodies behind tore such grips loose. I saw what was coming, sprang on top the cabin, and from there into the mainsail itself. Ah Choon and one of the Americans tried to follow me, but I was one jump ahead of them. The American was swept away and over the stern like a piece of chaff. Ah Choon caught a spoke of the wheel and swung in behind it. But a strapping Rarotonga vahine[1]–she must have weighed two hundred and fifty–brought up against him and got an arm around his neck. He clutched the Kanaka steersman with his other hand. And just at that moment the schooner flung down to starboard. The rush of bodies and the sea that was coming along the port runway between the cabin and the rail, turned abruptly and poured to starboard. Away they went, vahine, Ah Choon, and steersman; and I swear I saw Ah Choon grin at me with philosophic resignation as he cleared the rail and went under.
[1] woman
The third sea–the biggest of the three–did not do so much damage. By the time it arrived, nearly everybody was in the rigging. On deck perhaps a dozen gasping, half-drowned, and half-stunned wretches were rolling about or attempting to crawl into safety. They went by the board, as did the wreckage of the two remaining boats. The other pearl-buyers and myself, between seas, managed to get about fifteen women and children into the cabin and battened down. Little good it did the poor creatures in the end.
Wind? Out of all my experiences I could not have believed it possible for the wind to blow as it did. There is no describing it. How can one describe a nightmare? It was the same way with that wind. It tore the clothes off our bodies. I say TORE THEM OFF, and I mean it. I am not asking you to believe it. I am merely telling something that I saw and felt. There are times when I do not believe it myself. I went through it, and that is enough. One could not face that wind and live. It was a monstrous thing, and the most monstrous thing about it was that it increased and continued to increase. Imagine countless millions and billions of tons of sand. Imagine this sand tearing along at ninety, a hundred, a hundred and twenty, or any other number of miles per hour. Imagine, further, this sand to be invisible, impalpable, yet to retain all the weight and density of sand. Do all this, and you may get a vague inkling of what that wind was like. Perhaps sand is not the right comparison. Consider it mud, invisible, impalpable, but heavy as mud. Nay, it goes beyond that. Consider every molecule of air to be a mud-bank in itself. Then try to imagine the multitudinous impact of mud-banks–no, it is beyond me. Language may be adequate to express the ordinary conditions of life, but it cannot possibly express any of the conditions of so enormous a blast of wind. It would have been better had I stuck by my original intention of not attempting a description.
I will say this much: The sea, which had risen at first, was beaten down by that wind. More–it seemed as if the whole ocean had been sucked up in the maw of the hurricane and hurled on through that portion of space which previously had been occupied by the air. Of course, our canvas had gone long before. But Captain Oudouse had on the Petite Jeanne something I had never before seen on a South Sea schooner a sea-anchor. It was a conical canvas bag, the mouth of which was kept open by a huge hoop of iron. The sea-anchor was bridled something like a kite, so that it bit into the water as a kite bites into the air–but with a difference. The sea-anchor remained just under the surface of the ocean, in a perpendicular position. A long line, in turn, connected it with the schooner. As a result, the Petite Jeanne rode bow-on to the wind and to what little sea there was.
The situation really would have been favorable, had we not been in the path of the storm. True, the wind itself tore our canvas out of the gaskets, jerked out our topmasts, and made a raffle of our running gear; but still we would have come through nicely had we not been square in front of the advancing storm-center. That was what fixed us. I was in a state of stunned, numbed, paralyzed collapse from enduring the impact of the wind, and I think I was just about ready to give up and die when the center smote us. The blow we received was an absolute lull. There was not a breath of air. The effect on one was sickening. Remember that for hours we had been at terrific muscular tension, withstanding the awful pressure of that wind. And then, suddenly, the pressure was removed. I know that I felt as though I were about to expand, to fly apart in all directions. It seemed as if every atom composing my body was repelling every other atom, and was on the verge of rushing off irresistibly into space. But that lasted only for a moment. Destruction was upon us.
In the absence of the wind and its pressure, the sea rose. It jumped, it leaped, it soared straight toward the clouds. Remember, from every point of the compass that inconceivable wind was blowing in toward the center of calm. The result was that the seas sprang up from every point of the compass. There was no wind to check them. They popped up like corks released from the bottom of a pail of water. There was no system to them, no stability. They were hollow, maniacal seas. They were eighty feet high at the least. They were not seas at all. They resembled no sea a man had ever seen. They were splashes, monstrous splashes, that is all, splashes that were eighty feet high. Eighty! They were more than eighty. They went over our mastheads. They were spouts, explosions. They were drunken. They fell anywhere, anyhow. They jostled one another, they collided. They rushed together and collapsed upon one another, or fell apart like a thousand waterfalls all at once. It was no ocean any man ever dreamed of, that hurricane-center. It was confusion thrice confounded. It was anarchy. It was a hell-pit of sea water gone mad.
The Petite Jeanne? I don’t know. The Heathen told me afterward that he did not know. She was literally torn apart, ripped wide open, beaten into a pulp, smashed into kindling wood, annihilated. When I came to, I was in the water, swimming automatically, though I was about two-thirds drowned. How I got there I had no recollection. I remembered seeing the Petite Jeanne fly to pieces at what must have been the instant that my own consciousness was buffeted out of me. But there I was, with nothing to do but make the best of it, and in that best there was little promise. The wind was blowing again, the sea was much smaller and more regular, and I knew that I had passed through the center. Fortunately, there were no sharks about. The hurricane had dissipated the ravenous horde that had surrounded the death ship.
It was about midday when the Petite Jeanne went to pieces, and it must have been two hours afterward when I picked up with one of her hatch-covers. Thick rain was driving at the time, and it was the merest chance that flung me and the hatch-cover together. A short length of line was trailing from the rope handle, and I knew that I was good for a day at least, if the sharks did not return. Three hours later, possibly a little longer, sticking close to the cover and, with closed eyes, concentrating my whole soul upon the task of breathing in enough air to keep me going and, at the same time, to avoid breathing in enough water to drown me, it seemed to me that I heard voices. The rain had ceased, and wind and sea were easing marvelously. Not twenty feet away from me, on another hatch-cover, were Captain Oudouse and the Heathen. They were fighting over the possession of the cover–at least the Frenchman was.
“Paien noir!” I heard him scream, and at the same time I saw him kick the Kanaka.
Now, Captain Oudouse had lost all his clothes except his shoes, and they were heavy brogans. It was a cruel blow, for it caught the Heathen on the mouth and the point of the chin, half-stunning him. I looked for him to retaliate, but he contented himself with swimming about forlornly, a safe ten feet away. Whenever a fling of the sea threw him closer, the Frenchman, hanging on with his hands, kicked out at him with both feet. Also, at the moment of delivering each kick, he called the Kanaka a black heathen.
“For two centimes I’d come over there and drown you, you white beast!” I yelled.
The only reason I did not go was that I felt too tired. The very thought of the effort to swim over was nauseating. So I called to the Kanaka to come to me, and proceeded to share the hatch-cover with him. Otoo, he told me his name was (pronounced
And that was how Otoo and I first came together. He was no fighter. He was all sweetness and gentleness, a love-creature though he stood nearly six feet tall and was muscled like a gladiator. He was no fighter, but he was also no coward. He had the heart of a lion, and in the years that followed I have seen him run risks that I would never dream of taking. What I mean is that, while he was no fighter, and while he always avoided precipitating a row, he never ran away from trouble when it started. And it was ” ‘Ware shoal!” when once Otoo went into action. I shall never forget what he did to Bill King. It occurred in German Samoa. Bill King was hailed the champion heavyweight of the American navy. He was a big brute of a man, a veritable gorilla, one of those hard-hitting, rough-housing chaps, and clever with his fists as well. He picked the quarrel, and he kicked Otoo twice and struck him once before Otoo felt it to be necessary to fight. I don’t think it lasted four minutes, at the end of which time Bill King was the unhappy possessor of four broken ribs, a broken fore-arm, and a dislocated shoulder-blade. Otoo knew nothing of scientific boxing. He was merely a man-handler, and Bill King was something like three months in recovering from the bit of man-handling he received that afternoon on Apia beach.
But I am running ahead of my yarn. We shared the hatch-cover between us. We took turn and turn about, one lying flat on the cover and resting, while the other, submerged to the neck, merely held on with his hands. For three days and nights, spell and spell, on the cover and in the water, we drifted over the ocean. Toward the last I was delirious most of the time, and there were times, too, when I heard Otoo babbling and raving in his native tongue. Our continuous immersion prevented us from dying of thirst, though the sea water and the sunshine gave us the prettiest imaginable combination of salt pickle and sunburn. In the end, Otoo saved MY life; for I came to, lying on the beach twenty feet from the water, sheltered from the sun by a couple of cocoanut leaves. No one but Otoo could have dragged me there and stuck up the leaves for shade. He was lying beside me. I went off again, and the next time I came around it was cool and starry night and Otoo was pressing a drinking cocoanut to my lips.
We were the sole survivors of the Petite Jeanne. Captain Oudouse must have succumbed to exhaustion, for several days later his hatch-cover drifted ashore without him. Otoo and I lived with the natives of the atoll for a week, when we were rescued by a French cruiser and taken to Tahiti. In the meantime, however, we had performed the ceremony of exchanging names. In the South Seas such a ceremony binds two men closer together than blood-brothership. The initiative had been mine, and Otoo was rapturously delighted when I suggested it.
“It is well,” he said, in Tahitian. “For we have been mates together for three days on the lips of Death.”
“But Death stuttered,” I smiled.
“It was a brave deed you did, master,” he replied, “and Death was not vile enough to speak.”
“Why do you `master’ me?” I demanded, with a show of hurt feelings. “We have exchanged names. To you I am Otoo. To me you are Charley. And between you and me, forever and forever, you shall be Charley and I shall be Otoo. It is the way of the custom. And when we die, if it does happen that we live again, somewhere beyond the stars and the sky, still shall you be Charley to me and I Otoo to you.”
“Yes, master,” he answered, his eyes luminous and soft with joy.
“There you go!” I cried indignantly.
“What does it matter what my lips utter?” he argued. “They are only my lips. But I shall think OTOO always. Whenever I think of myself I shall think of you. Whenever men call me by name I shall think of you. And beyond the sky and beyond the stars always and forever you shall be Otoo to me. Is it well, master?”
I hid my smile and answered that it was well.
We parted at Papeete. I remained ashore to recuperate, and he went on in a cutter to his own island, Bora Bora. Six weeks later he was back. I was surprised, for he had told me of his wife and said that he was returning to her and would give over sailing on far voyages.
“Where do you go, master?” he asked, after our first greetings.
I shrugged my shoulders. It was a hard question. “To all the world, “was my answer. “All the world, all the sea, and all the islands that are in the sea.”
“I will go with you,” he said simply. “My wife is dead.”
I never had a brother, but from what I have seen of other men’s brothers I doubt if any man ever had one who was to him what Otoo was to me. He was brother, and father and mother as well. And this I know–I lived a straighter and a better man because of Otoo. I had to live straight in Otoo’s eyes. Because of him I dared not tarnish myself. He made me his ideal, compounding me, I fear, chiefly out of his own love and worship; and there were times when I stood close to the steep pitch of hell and would have taken the plunge had not the thought of Otoo restrained me. His pride in me entered into me until it became one of the major rules in my personal code to do nothing that would diminish that pride of his. Naturally, I did not learn right away what his feelings were toward me. He never criticised, never censured, and slowly the exalted place I held in his eyes dawned upon me, and slowly I grew to comprehend the hurt I could inflict upon him by being anything less than my best.
For seventeen years we were together. For seventeen years he was at my shoulder, watching while I slept, nursing me through fever and wounds, aye, and receiving wounds in fighting for me. He signed on the same ships with me, and together we ranged the Pacific from Hawaii to Sydney Head and from Torres Strait to the Galapagos. We blackbirded from the New hebrides and the Line Islands over to the westward, clear through the Louisiades, New Britain, New Ireland, and New Hanover. We were wrecked three times–in the Gilberts, in the Santa Cruz group, and in the Fijis. And we traded and salved wherever a dollar promised in the way of pearl and pearl shell, copra, beche de mer, hawkbill turtle shell, and stranded wrecks.
It began in Papeete, immediately after his announcement that he was going with me over all the sea and the islands in the midst thereof. There was a club in those days in Papeete, where the pearlers, traders, captains, and South Sea adventurers foregathered. The play ran high and the drink ran high, and I am very much afraid that I kept later hours than were becoming or proper. No matter what the hour was when I left the club, there was Otoo waiting to see me safely home. At first I smiled. Next I chided him. Then I told him flatly I stood in need of no wet-nursing. After that I did not see him when I came out of the club. Quite by accident, a week or so later, I discovered that he still saw me home, lurking across the street among the shadows of the mango trees. What could I do? I know what I did do. Insensibly I began to keep better hours. On wet and stormy nights, in the thick of the folly and the fun, the thought would come to me of Otoo keeping his dreary vigil under the dripping mangoes. Truly, he made me a better man.
Yet he was not strait-laced. And he knew nothing of common Christian morality. All the people on Bora Bora were Christians. But he was a heathen, the only unbeliever on the island, a gross materialist who believed that when he died he was dead. He believed merely in fair play and square-dealing. Petty meanness, in his code, was almost as serious as wanton homicide, and I am sure that he respected a murderer more than a man given to small practices. Concerning me, personally, he objected to my doing anything that was hurtful to me. Gambling was all right. He was an ardent gambler himself. But late hours, he explained, were bad for one’s health. He had seen men who did not take care of themselves die of fever. He was no teetotaler, and welcomed a stiff nip any time when it was wet work in the boats. On the other hand, he believed in liquor in moderation. He had seen many men killed or disgraced by squareface or Scotch.
Otoo had my welfare always at heart. He thought ahead for me, weighed my plans and took a greater interest in them than I did myself. At first, when I was unaware of this interest of his in my affairs, he had to divine my intentions, as, for instance, at Papeete, when I contemplated going partners with a knavish fellow countryman on a guano venture. I did not know he was a knave. Nor did any white man in Papeete. Neither did Otoo know; but he saw how thick we were getting and found out for me, and that without my asking. Native sailors from the ends of the seas knock about on the beach in Tahiti, and Otoo, suspicious merely, went among them till he had gathered sufficient data to justify his suspicions. Oh, it was a nice history, that of Randolph Waters! I couldn’t believe it when Otoo first narrated it, but when I sheeted it home to Waters he gave in without a murmur and got away on the first steamer to Auckland.
At first, I am free to confess, I resented Otoo’s poking his nose into my business. But I knew that he was wholly unselfish, and soon I had to acknowledge his wisdom and discretion. He had his eyes open always to my main chance, and he was both keen-sighted and far-sighted. In time he became my counselor, until he knew more of my business than I did myself. He really had my interest at heart more than I did. Mine was the magnificent carelessness of youth, for I preferred romance to dollars, and adventure to a comfortable billet with all night in. So it was well that I had some one to look out for me. I know that if it had not been for Otoo, I should not be here to-day.
Of numerous instances, let me give one. I had had some experience in blackbirding before I went pearling in the Paumotus. Otoo and I were on the beach in Samoa–we really were on the beach and hard aground–when my chance came to go as a recruiter on a blackbird brig. Otoo signed on before the mast, and for the next half-dozen years, in as many ships, we knocked about the wildest portions of Melanesia. Otoo saw to it that he always pulled stroke-oar in my boat. Our custom, in recruiting labor, was to land the recruiter on the beach. The covering boat always lay on its oars several hundred feet off shore, while the recruiter’s boat, also lying on its oars, kept afloat on the edge of the beach. When I landed with my trade goods, leaving my steering sweep apeak, Otoo left his stroke position and came into the stern sheets, where a Winchester lay ready to hand under a flap of canvas. The boat’s crew was also armed, the Sniders concealed under canvas flaps that ran the length of the gunwales. While I was busy arguing and persuading the woolly-headed cannibals to come and labor on the Queensland plantations Otoo kept watch. And often and often his low voice warned me of suspicious actions and impending treachery. Sometimes it was the quick shot from his rifle, knocking a nigger over, that was the first warning I received. And in my rush to the boat his hand was always there to jerk me flying aboard.
Once, I remember, on Santa Anna, the boat grounded just as the trouble began. The covering boat was dashing to our assistance, but the several score of savages would have wiped us out before it arrived. Otoo took a flying leap ashore, dug both hands into the trade goods, and scattered tobacco, beads, tomahawks, knives, and calicoes in all directions. This was too much for the woolly heads. While they scrambled for the treasures, the boat was shoved clear and we were aboard and forty feet away. And I got thirty recruits off that very beach in the next four hours.
The particular instance I have in mind was on Malaita, the most savage island in the easterly Solomons. The natives had been remarkably friendly; and how were we to know that the whole village had been taking up a collection for over two years with which to buy a white man’s head? The beggars are all head-hunters, and they especially esteem that of a white man. The fellow who captured the head would receive the whole collection. As I say, they appeared very friendly, and this day I was fully a hundred yards down the beach from the boat. Otoo had cautioned me, and, as usual when I did not heed him, I came to grief. The first thing I knew a cloud of spears sailed out of the mangrove swamp at me. At least a dozen were sticking into me. I started to run, but tripped over one that was fast in my calf and went down. The woolly heads made a run for me, each with a long-handled, fantail tomahawk with which to hack off my head. They were so eager for the prize that they got in one another’s way. In the confusion I avoided several hacks by throwing myself right and left on the sand. Then Otoo arrived–Otoo the man-handler. In some way he had got hold of a heavy war-club, and at close quarters it was a far more efficient weapon than a rifle. He was right in the thick of them, so that they could not spear him, while their tomahawks seemed worse than useless. He was fighting for me, and he was in a true Berserker rage. The way he handled that club was amazing. Their skulls squashed like overripe oranges. It was not until he had driven them back, picked me up in his arms, and started to run, that he received his first wounds. He arrived in the boat with four spear-thrusts, got his Winchester, and with it got a man for every shot. Then we pulled aboard the schooner and doctored up.
Seventeen years we were together. He made me. I should to-day be a supercargo, a recruiter, or a memory, if it had not been for him.
“You spend your money, and you go out and get more,” he said, one day. “It is easy to get money, now. But when you get old, your money will be spent and you will not be able to go out and get more. I know, master. I have studied the way of white men. On the beaches are many old men who were young once and who could get money just like you. Now they are old, and they have nothing, and they wait about for the young men like you to come ashore and buy drinks for them.
“The black boy is a slave on the plantations. He gets twenty dollars a year. He works hard. The overseer does not work hard. He rides a horse and watches the black boy work. He gets twelve hundred dollars a year. I am a sailor on the schooner. I get fifteen dollars a month. That is because I am a good sailor. I work hard. The captain has a double awning and drinks beer out of long bottles. I have never seen him haul a rope or pull an oar. He gets one hundred and fifty dollars a month. I am a sailor. He is a navigator. Master, I think it would be very good for you to know navigation.
Otoo spurred me on to it. He sailed with me as second mate on my first schooner, and he was far prouder of my command than was I myself. Later on it was:
“The captain is well paid, master, but the ship is in his keeping and he is never free from the burden. It is the owner who is better paid, the owner who sits ashore with many servants and turns his money over.”
“True, but a schooner costs five thousand dollars–an old schooner at that,” I objected. “I should be an old man before I saved five thousand dollars. “
“There be short ways for white men to make money,” he went on, pointing ashore at the cocoanut-fringed beach.
We were in the Solomons at the time, picking up a cargo of ivory-nuts along the east coast of Guadalcanar.
“Between this river mouth and the next it is two miles,” he said. “The flat land runs far back. It is worth nothing now. Next year–who knows!–or the year after–men will pay much money for that land. The anchorage is good. Big steamers can lie close up. You can buy the land four miles deep from the old chief for ten thousand sticks of tobacco, ten bottles of squareface, and a Snider, which will cost you maybe one hundred dollars. Then you place the deed with the commissioner, and the next year, or the year after, you sell and become the owner of a ship.”
I followed his lead, and his words came true, though in three years instead of two. Next came the grass-lands deal on Guadalcanar–twenty thousand acres on a governmental nine hundred and ninety-nine years’ lease at a nominal sum. I owned the lease for precisely ninety days, when I sold it to the Moonlight Soap crowd for half a fortune. Always it was Otoo who looked ahead and saw the opportunity. He was responsible for the salving of the Doncaster–bought in at auction for five hundred dollars and clearing fifteen thousand after every expense was paid. He led me into the Savaii plantation and the cocoa venture on Upolu.
We did not go seafaring so much as in the old days now. I was too well off. I married and my standard of living rose; but Otoo remained the same old-time Otoo, moving about the house or trailing through the office, his wooden pipe in his mouth, a shilling undershirt on his back, and a four-shilling lava-lava about his loins. I could not get him to spend money. There was no way of repaying him except with love, and God knows he got that in full measure from all of us. The children worshiped him, and if he had been spoilable my wife would surely have been his undoing.
The children! He really was the one who showed them the way of their feet in the world practical. He began by teaching them to walk. He sat up with them when they were sick. One by one, when they were scarcely toddlers, he took them down to the lagoon and made them into amphibians. He taught them more than I ever knew of the habits of fish and the ways of catching them. In the bush it was the same thing. At seven, Tom knew more woodcraft than I ever dreamed existed. At six, Mary went over the Sliding Rock without a quiver–and I have seen strong men balk at that feat. And when Frank had just turned six he could bring up shillings from the bottom in three fathoms.
“My people in Bora Bora do not like heathen; they are all Christians; and I do not like Bora Bora Christians,” he said one day, when I, with the idea of getting him to spend some of the money that was rightfully his, had been trying to persuade him to make a visit to his own island in one of our schooners–a special voyage that I had hoped to make a record-breaker in the matter of prodigal expense.
I say one of OUR schooners, though legally, at the time, they belonged to me. I struggled long with him to enter into partnership.
“We have been partners from the day the Petite Jeanne went down,” he said at last. “But if your heart so wishes, then shall we become partners by the law. I have no work to do, yet are my expenses large. I drink and eat and smoke in plenty–it costs much, I know. I do not pay for the playing of billiards, for I play on your table; but still the money goes. Fishing on the reef is only a rich man’s pleasure. It is shocking, the cost of hooks and cotton line. Yes, it is necessary that we be partners by the law. I need the money. I shall get it from the head clerk in the office.”
So the papers were made out and recorded. A year later I was compelled to complain.
“Charley,” said I, “you are a wicked old fraud, a miserly skinflint, a miserable land-crab. Behold, your share for the year in all our partnership has been thousands of dollars. The head clerk has given me this paper. It says that during the year you have drawn just eighty-seven dollars and twenty cents.”
“Is there any owing me?” he asked anxiously.
“I tell you thousands and thousands,” I answered.
His face brightened as with an immense relief.
“It is well,” he said. “See that the head-clerk keeps good account of it. When I want it, I shall want it, and there must not be a cent missing. If there is,” he added fiercely, after a pause, “it must come out of the clerk’s wages.”
And all the time, as I afterward learned, his will, drawn up by Carruthers and making me sole beneficiary, lay in the American consul’s safe.
But the end came as the end must come to all human associations. It occurred in the Solomons, where our wildest work had been done in the wild young days, and where we were once more–principally on a holiday, incidentally to look after our holdings on Florida Island and to look over the pearling possibilities of the Mboli Pass. We were lying at Savo, having run in to trade for curios. Now Savo is alive with sharks. The custom of the woolly heads of burying their dead in the sea did not tend to discourage the sharks from making the adjacent waters a hang-out. It was my luck to be coming aboard in a tiny, overloaded, native canoe, when the thing capsized. There were four woolly heads and myself in it, or rather, hanging to it. The schooner was a hundred yards away. I was just hailing for a boat when one of the woolly heads began to scream. Holding on to the end of the canoe, both he and that portion of the canoe were dragged under several times. Then he loosed his clutch and disappeared. A shark had got him.
The three remaining niggers tried to climb out of the water upon the bottom of the canoe. I yelled and cursed and struck at the nearest with my fist, but it was no use. They were in a blind funk. The canoe could barely have supported one of them. Under the three it up-ended and rolled sidewise, throwing them back into the water.
I abandoned the canoe and started to swim toward the schooner, expecting to be picked up by the boat before I got there. One of the niggers elected to come with me, and we swam along silently, side by side, now and again putting our faces into the water and peering about for sharks. The screams of the men who stayed by the canoe informed us that they were taken. I was peering into the water when I saw a big shark pass directly beneath me. He was fully sixteen feet in length. I saw the whole thing. He got the woolly head by the middle and away he went, the poor devil, head, shoulders, and arms out of water all the time, screeching in a heart-rending way. He was carried along in this fashion for several hundred feet, when he was dragged beneath the surface.
I swam doggedly on, hoping that that was the last unattached shark. But there was another. Whether it was one that had attacked the natives earlier, or whether it was one that had made a good meal elsewhere, I do not know. At any rate, he was not in such haste as the others. I could not swim so rapidly now, for a large part of my effort was devoted to keeping track of him. I was watching him when he made his first attack. By good luck I got both hands on his nose, and, though his momentum nearly shoved me under, I managed to keep him off. He veered clear and began circling about again. A second time I escaped him by the same maneuver. The third rush was a miss on both sides. He sheered at the moment my hands should have landed on his nose, but his sandpaper hide–I had on a sleeveless undershirt–scraped the skin off one arm from elbow to shoulder.
By this time I was played out and gave up hope. The schooner was still two hundred feet away. My face was in the water and I was watching him maneuver for another attempt, when I saw a brown body pass between us. It was Otoo.
“Swim for the schooner, master,” he said, and he spoke gayly, as though the affair was a mere lark. “I know sharks. The shark is my brother.”
I obeyed, swimming slowly on, while Otoo swam about me, keeping always between me and the shark, foiling his rushes and encouraging me.
“The davit-tackle carried away, and they are rigging the falls,” he explained a minute or so later, and then went under to head off another attack.
By the time the schooner was thirty feet away I was about done for. I could scarcely move. They were heaving lines at us from on board, but these continually fell short. The shark, finding that it was receiving no hurt, had become bolder. Several times it nearly got me, but each time Otoo was there just the moment before it was too late. Of course Otoo could have saved himself any time. But he stuck by me.
“Good by, Charley, I’m finished,” I just managed to gasp.
I knew that the end had come and that the next moment I should throw up my hands and go down.
But Otoo laughed in my face, saying:
“I will show you a new trick. I will make that shark damn sick.”
He dropped in behind me, where the shark was preparing to come at me.
“A little more to the left,” he next called out. “There is a line there on the water. To the left, master, to the left.”
I changed my course and struck out blindly. I was by that time barely conscious. As my hand closed on the line I heard an exclamation from on board. I turned and looked. There was no sign of Otoo. The next instant he broke surface. Both hands were off at the wrist, the stumps spouting blood.
“Otoo,” he called softly, and I could see in his gaze the love that thrilled in his voice. Then, and then only, at the very last of all our years, he called me by that name.
“Good by, Otoo,” he called.
Then he was dragged under, and I was hauled aboard, where I fainted in the captain’s arms.
And so passed Otoo, who saved me and made me a man, and who saved me in the end. We met in the maw of a hurricane and parted in the maw of a shark, with seventeen intervening years of comradeship the like of which I dare to assert have never befallen two men, the one brown and the other white. If Jehovah be from his high place watching every sparrow fall, not least in His Kingdom shall be Otoo, the one heathen of Bora Bora. And if there be no place for him in that Kingdom, then will I have none of it.
***************************************************************** Vol. XXIII No.2 AUGUST 1910
THE QUESTION “HOW?” {page 205-208}
By WILLIAM HANNA THOMSON, M.D., LL.D.
Author of ” Brain and Personality,” “What is Physical Life?” etc.
Physician to the Roosevelt Hospital; Consulting Physician to the New York State Manhattan Hospital for the Insane; formerly Professor of the Practice of Medicine and Diseases of the Nervous System, New York University Medical College; Ex-President of the New York Academy of Medicine, etc.
IN one of Carlyle’s earliest productions, dealing with the philosophy of Clothes, he showed that a man quite plainly reveals his inner self by what he wears. So we would now discuss what the being, Man, reveals about himself by his eternal question, “How?”
As language is a lofty endowment and, moreover, on this earth exclusively human, we would lead up to the subject by stating what the parts of speech are.
According to the Arabs, who surpass all other peoples in the study of language–for they claim that they have twenty-five thousand books on grammar in their literature–the parts of speech are three; and, as one of their old scholars states, this threefold division of speech is not confined to one language, but is universal, because human speech does not differ with the difference of human tongues. These three parts are: first, nouns–the names of things; second, verbs–the names of events; and, third, the partitives–or the words which express the relations of things to events. Thus the most abstract of verbs, “to be,” refers to an event; for when a man says, “I am,” he is mentioning an event in the history of the universe which did not occur till he existed.
This division, however, necessitates that the adjectives should be regarded as nouns; and so they are classed in all Semitic languages, as the Hebrew, the Arabic, the Syriac, etc. The writers of the New Testament, therefore, could not write Greek without continually falling into their native Hebrew idiom; so that if the passages were translated literally, some modern expositions would have to be much modified. Thus, “Who created the worlds by the word of his power” means “Who created the worlds by his powerful word.” “The body of our humiliation” is “our humiliating body.” “Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” is “from this deadly body,” as the context of the passage clearly shows. In each case the second noun is the adjective modifying the first.
Moreover, the most interesting deduction from this division of the parts of speech is that the partitives are far the highest in rank among words, because they express pure relations, which only the royal mind of man can so distinctly perceive as to make words for them. Thus, a dog can learn his own name, and understand the verbs “go” and “come,” especially with the imperative tone of his master; but he could never understand the words “outgoing year” or “incoming year.”
Prepositions belong to the partitives, and, with different prepositions attached to one and the same thing or noun, the human mind can step through the vast regions of thought as easily as the ether can vibrate through space. Thus the Latin scriptio, the name of a thing, a writing, gives us the following changes, according to the preposition: An Ascription is not a CONscription, by any means; nor does a conscription mean anything like a DEScription; nor is that the same thing with an INscription; nor when we PREscribe for a man are we PROscribing him; and every one of us knows, when the agent of a worthy cause enters, what the difference is between a SUBscription and a SUPERscription.
To the adverbs, however, must be given the preeminence among all human words. But even here there are gradations in rank. Thus the adverb, “Why?” may be nothing but a question of curiosity, and hence its idea may be suggested to an inquisitive monkey. But it is not so with the question, “How?” “Why?” may be answered by an affirmation, but “How?” can be answered only by a demonstration. Now, as our object is to call speech to witness as to what is in man, or, in other words, what man is himself, we will proceed to analyze the testimony of this word, “How?”
“HOW” FINDS A PLANET
First: It does not refer to anything which appears on the surface. Instead, it seeks to find the hidden and the unknown by following up one clue after another. When the astronomer, Leverrier, found that the planets Saturn and Uranus did not come to time, he asked himself how that could be. Meanwhile, the answer to any number of “hows” must have been previously demonstrated by him and by other astronomers before the movements of these great and distant heavenly bodies could be shown as not according to the clock-like regularity of planets in their courses. He reasoned that only one probable “how” could account for the facts; namely, another planet of just such a size and weight, and moving at just such a distance, would suffice thus to hold back Saturn and Uranus in their orbits. And so he calculated how large this heavenly body was, how heavy it was, and then just where it was, until, by this human but sure detective system, astronomers caught sight of Neptune–after Leverrier told them where to look for it.
But, after all, to decide how the vast heavenly bodies move in space is easy compared with finding out how to make a sewing machine go. For a needle to thread itself and then rapidly proceed to sew without the help of fingers calls for the discovery of more “hows” than are needed to explain Laplace’s “Mecanique celeste.” Mass and gravity suffice for the one, but only a Yankee’s mind could have created the other.
We have now come to a great word–“create.” A creator is a being who gives origin to things which would not exist but for his intelligent purpose and design. Now, man has simply filled this earth with his own creations, all due to himself alone and to none other, and all again by pondering the question, “How?” He began, for instance, by putting a hole through a flint hatchet, and ended with putting a hole through the Alps. In this last, an engineer stood at the foot of the great mountain and asked himself how he could tunnel it for nations to pass through. He saw a small stream dashing down the mountainside and at once found his desired “how,” for he made that stream work big drills by compressed air, till the everlasting rocks themselves had to give in.
But man is an infinite creator–by which we mean that his creative capacity is limitless and inexhaustible. No sooner does he create one thing than he turns to create another thing totally different from it. A locomotive thundering past with a long train has no resemblance to a telegraph line, nor that, in turn, to a great printing press. Man coolly sets at defiance the most fundamental laws of physical science.
Thus, a heavy load of passengers, sitting in no less heavy cars, if put on a smooth inclined plane must slide down faster and faster to the bottom, or Vulcan would be confounded. But man strings a thin wire overhead, which would snap instantly if the load gave it one pull; but something which, some “how,” man causes to pass along that wire, makes the trolley with its live freight go uphill faster than a horse can run.
THE ETHER ENSLAVED
And what about that mysterious ether? It can neither be seen, heard, felt, handled, smelt, nor tasted. Nevertheless, man has learned so much about its “how” that he is turning it into as menial a servant, obedient to his wishes, as he has made of electricity, the cause of sublime thunder; for man bids the ether carry his stock quotations or any other message of his to the ends of the earth.
These are great doings, but really no greater than his small doings, for the least of these is just as impossible for other earthly creatures as are an Alpine tunnel or a battleship. A large convention of chimpanzees could not combine to make one pin or one sleeve-button, if they tried.
All this is because man is native to the world of relations, which no other earthly beings are, because they cannot go beyond the information provided by their bodily senses. Man, on the contrary, gains infinitely more knowledge than his bodily senses can afford. By studying the relations of abstract points to abstract lines, he becomes a mathematician. Following up the many “hows” of chemistry, he talks about molecules, atoms, and ions as fluently as: if he had seen or handled them.
MAN IS INVISIBLE
This explains how man can and does create. Every great invention existed first in the mind of the inventor. So the great engineer who made the Brooklyn Bridge never had to handle one of the materials used in its construction, for every stone, wire, and bolt was provided for in that engineer’s mind before any part of that tremendous mass of matter could be seen on the earth.
Moreover, this great human creator is as invisible as the Divine Creator Himself. People are continually saying that they will not believe in a thing till they can see it, thus pinning their faith to the testimony of that one of our senses which makes more mistakes than do all our other senses put together. When a man six feet high is a mile off, it says that he is only six inches high. The eye can see nothing of the vast microscopic living world which lies within six inches of the eyeball, and so we have had to invent a microscope to make up for this serious deficiency. But what would the Russian Witte not have given if he could have telegraphed to St. Petersburg that he had actually SEEN the Japanese Komura while they were talking about making peace at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and that he knew just what the courteous Jap thought and proposed! All that he saw was the Asiatic’s smiling face and other things of his outside. Every human personality belongs to the real world, the world of the Unseen, and cannot be known except as he chooses to reveal himself.
BRAIN NOT THE MAN
Some persons might object here that the brain is both visible and tangible in man, and that man is in his brain, and, therefore, the brain is man. Medical science, however, shows that the brain no more thinks than the hand and foot do, but is simply the instrument of the invisible thinker. The proof of this is that we have two brains, just as we have two eyes and two ears, but that only one of our two brain hemispheres is the instrument for talking, thinking, or knowing. Which one of the two hemispheres will be the mental one will depend altogether on how it has been TAUGHT by the invisible thinker, who will begin to teach the left hemisphere if he is right-handed, or the right hemisphere if he is left-handed. He will leave the other hemisphere in each case wholly speechless or thoughtless, and concerned only with the business of governing the muscles or receiving the bodily sensations of its corresponding side. If brain matter really itself thought, we should have two thinking and speaking hemispheres–and this the first case of loss of speech by an apoplectic clot would disprove.
“By thy words thou shalt be judged.” This means that man is to be judged by his own creations, for it is only men who create words. By their words they show what is in them, both intellectually and morally. We have demonstrated that the being who can ask the question, “How?” naturally belongs to the universe. Already he knows what stuff inconceivably distant stars are made of; and the “how” to know that he found in a small glass prism.
THE MORAL “HOW”
It would seem, therefore, as if it were by some temporary accident that he is held to this little material speck of matter called the earth. And this impression grows upon us as we study the greatest facts of human life. We enter this world knowing nothing and not nearly so well equipped to take care of ourselves as are other animals. There is no helplessness like that of a babe. But wonderfully early he begins to ask the question, “How?” A little boy will ask more questions in a day than his father will ask in a week; nor can he be stopped or deceived, because the question, “Why?” you can answer as you please, but not “How?”
He who can ask “How?” can be a learner as long as he exists, whether here or hereafter. In his life here he may become either a great financier or a great statesman, but certainly not either unless he knows how. Any education, in fact, is simply learning how.
What is true in the intellectual world is still more true in the moral world. Whenever a question bearing on morals enters, every one should stop and ask, “How?” A mistake here is like entering the wrong gate in a large railroad station. The longer you stay in its corresponding train, the farther it will take you from where you should go. For example, there are some who say that the human will is not free, but that our actions are all, in the last analysis, according to our make-up. In other words, we are machines which must go as they are made to go. There is, therefore, no right nor wrong in human conduct, for machines cannot be held responsible for conduct or the way they go–there can be no sinful automobile or wicked windmill.
According to these reasoners, therefore, when human law punishes one who has robbed a widow of all she had, or has seduced the daughter of a friend, or committed a cold-blooded murder, the law is wholly illogical in punishing him, because, since he is a machine, his punishment is like throwing a clock out of a window if it does not keep good time. The only answer to such a talker should be, “Get out!” with particular emphasis on the “out.”
—-WHO WOULD BE A YOUNG LADY
By SARAH N. CLEGHORN
1830
Sister walks past the garden wall
In monstrous hoop, and slippers small, And polonaise, and sash, and all,
To join the Dorcas Circle.
She’ll sit indoors, and stitch, and moon, And sip her tea, and clink her spoon,
This whole blue, breezy afternoon! For so do all Young Ladies.
Come, Poll, come, Bet! Escaped from school, We’ll wade across the shallows cool
Of Roaring Tom and Silver Pool,
And climb the pines of Randal.
Far up the mountain path we’ll go,
And leave the Raven Rocks below,
And creep inside the caves of snow, To hear their echoes thunder!
Let briers scratch, let brambles tear Our oft-patched frocks–we shall not care: Green are the woods, and fresh the air; Then who would be a Young Lady?
***************************************************************** Vol. XXIII No.2 AUGUST 1910
INSTEAD OF AN ARTICLE {page 209-214} About Pittsburg and, Incidentally, about Editing a Magazine
Important articles in magazines of the type of “COLLIER’S,” “MCCLURE’S,” the “AMERICAN,” and “EVERYBODY’S,” like plays, are rewritten rather than written. Too begin with, there must be the idea, then to find the man or woman best able to embody it. That settled, the author must steep himself in his subject. When he acquires mastery, his findings are written down and submitted to the editor. This may take months; it often requires years.
It has happened that the editor did not know what he wanted until he read this first draft. Now he has the subject spread before him by an authority. His associates all read it and criticise. Sometimes that first draft is flawless, but most often it is returned to the author with direction for reconstruction. The process may be repeated half a dozen times. Finally the manuscript is satisfactory, which means that it is valuable, simply expressed, and readable. It is in shape for publication. It is put into type and sent around to outside experts who are the representative authorities on the subject.
In these days a magazine can afford to have its conclusions disputed, but its facts must be incontrovertible. Perhaps the trouble the big publications take to be right–and that means square and just, as well as accurate–explains such prestige and influence as they now enjoy in America.
At a women’s club gathering in Mississippi, recently, Harris Dickson told his audience something about an article of his that had recently appeared in “EVERYBODY’S.” He explained that a manuscript written by another man had been sent him to put in shape. The facts were there, and the moral, but the treatment was technical. It lacked carrying power. Dickson knew nothing of the other author, and so proceeded to get up the subject at first hand. He took not one of the facts for granted. After three months he returned the revised manuscript to the magazine. It was sent back, with specific directions for rewriting. In due course he again remailed it to the editor, who congratulated him on his achievement–for that is what it was. Then the article, having attained a satisfactory form (it was on Fraternal Insurance), was sent round among the experts. The first man who read it was a high official of one of the old line insurance companies, but a hearty believer in the fraternal system. He returned it with approval and an elaborate criticism. Then it was submitted to the chief insurance commissioner of a western state–the undoubted political authority on the subject. The approval and criticisms of both men, with the manuscript, were again forwarded to Mr. Dickson. The necessary corrections having been incorporated, the manuscript was ready for the printer. To make assurance doubly sure, proofs were sent out to prominent officials of leading fraternal organizations, who returned them with most commendatory letters. And then, and only then, did it appear in the magazine.
Mr. Dickson’s audience, doubtless under the impression that magazines are produced by editors out of the contributions sent them by mail, expressed surprise that so much time, effort, and money should be devoted to what seemed a comparatively unimportant subject. Yet it involved a matter that concerned five million men and their families, and a tremendous controversy. Its appearance has made the controversy even keener, and of course the enemies of sanity and good order in fraternalism are now hurling bolts at us. However, when we have done our part and know we are right, we stay put.
Mr. Dickson told part of what to us is a familiar story. In this instance he knew nothing of the time and trouble the author and ourselves had taken just to get together the facts and place them in the right perspective. We began on this particular article in November, 1906, and during the interval it was being worked at or over by one of some dozen men. The same is true of most of our big series. “The Woman’s Invasion” represented two and a half years of work. Fifteen months elapsed between the delivery of Judge Lindsey’s first manuscript and the beginning of publication in the magazine. Trained writers, the best men we know about, are out investigating and gathering the facts for the articles we will print a year hence. This is the process of magazine making to-day. It is not peculiar to “EVERYBODY’S”; it is the rule with “COLLIER’S,” “MCCLURE’S,” the AMERICAN, and SUCCESS.”
INSTEAD OF AN ARTICLE
This is all by way of introduction to the story of an article that was not written. About the time the Pittsburg flare-up began to show itself in the papers, it occurred to us that some exposition of the situation there would be of value and interest to our readers. Before going about it, we debated it very carefully. Some of us in the office (and this magazine is edited by all of us) were fairly familiar with the subject, and we believed it would subserve no useful purpose to tackle it along the “Shame of the Cities” lines. We agreed that the way to approach Pittsburg was to consider what had happened there, not as a sporadic outburst, but as an economic symptom. Whom could we get that was far enough from the controversies involved to treat the subject objectively and with a big perspective? Brand Whitlock. The Mayor of Toledo knows more about cities and their governments, and the evils that arise within them, than any other man, and he can write–with knowledge, with sympathy, with clarity. Also he knew Pittsburg. So we telegraphed to find if he was free to write an article, and, when he replied in the affirmative, the following letter was sent him:
April 1, 1910. DEAR MR. WHITLOCK:
The article we want is on Pittsburg. It is neither our purpose nor our desire merely to “muckrake” Pittsburg or any other city. The eruption there is typical of similar conditions in other great civic centers throughout the country, and it seems to us it might be made the text of a diagnosis of the whole municipal problem in America.
Here are a few thoughts that occur to me which might be represented:
We have come to realize that the real trouble in our country is Privilege. Big business, in its ruthless pursuit of results, has the ultimate responsibility for the ills that confront us in political, social, and commercial life. The graft scandals, the bank defalcations, etc., are simply symptoms of internal disorders. They are the eruptions of the disease.
Pittsburg might be called the typical get-rich-quick community. Its great wealth is based on the abundant coal and iron with which the Creator loaded its environment. Down on those deposits fasten thousands of Americans seized with the mania of money-making. They coin the coal and iron into millions. They work feverishly; they work their men furiously. It’s a mad, frenzied scramble for success and sensation. To get rich quicker, they exact excessive protection from Congress–first to prop up infant industries, then to consolidate abnormal profits. If the government undertakes to deny their demands, they bluster first, then intrigue, then intimidate. Mills are closed down; the “prosperity” of the country is threatened, lobbies are organized, corruption funds subscribed, until Congress succumbs and new “jokers” are written into steel tariffs.
In the meantime a huge city is upreared. But this city is run for the benefit of its industries, not for the comfort of its inhabitants. Street railway, gas, electric corporations are organized, ostensibly to serve the community, actually enabling a greedy group to make more money. Again, what cannot be gained by request is won by force and guile.
Over and over again the various processes are repeated, until you have built up a sort of City Monstrous, dedicated to machinery, in which all the men and many of the women are just machines, and there is no ideal save that of feverish industrial adventure and accomplishment. Power–blind, ruthless, marvel-working, bending backs and bodies to its will–is Pittsburg’s god, and Success its divine attribute Success that spells Gold, the instrument of exploitation and sensation. What wonder that weaker men, confronted by the colossal rewards of industrial conquest, are frenzied with the gold fever? In the absence of communal patriotism, graft becomes an incident. Graft and greed are the minor watchwords of success. Get money, anyway–but get it. Is it surprising that cashiers graft, that aldermen graft, that city officials graft, that there’s a very pandemonium of graft? Isn’t it the way the other fellows get rich?
All of a sudden the poison clogs the pores, and the infection blotches the surface–and every one is horrified. The great manufacturers, the great merchants, the great lawyers–high priests of the Power God–throw up their hands. Can such things be? Dreadful, horrible!–blindly oblivious of their own responsibility for the epidemic.
More startling still to the conquerors were the pitiless revelations of the Survey, exhibiting in mathematical terms the cost to the human factor of this monstrous material success. Hordes of anaemic, emaciated men and women, exhausted by long hours of toil, piled thick in wretched hovels, underfed, half-clothed, dragging out a miserable existence unrelieved by leisure or rest or recreation–the Juggernaut toll of efficiency–of the passion for results at any price. Against this horror, what avails Pittsburg’s panorama of splendid churches, of lordly palaces, of noble art museums, of great orchestras, richly endowed educational institutions–the patriotic tribute of the conquerors to civilization? What is this boasted civilization of ours worth–not Pittsburg’s only, for Pittsburg is an incident–if it be reared on the wrecked and depleted bodies of men at its base?
There would then be the opportunity in the article to suggest the regenerated Pittsburg–all this furious energy hitherto devoted to material success turned to social betterment and decent government. The turn of the worker comes. The conquerors, having learned that they cannot take greedily what belongs to a community, and find happiness, turn magnificently to the rescue of their own downtrodden. The old question–what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul?–has been burned into Pittsburg humanity once again.
For several years the newspapers have carried stories about these successive scandals in Pittsburg, until people have in a measure become confused as to how they connect, whether all are really parts of the same story. I doubt if the average man who reads the article in the morning paper has a clear grasp of what has been going on, and he can’t discover it without hunting back through the files. Once we published an article by Owen Wister about the Capitol frauds in Pennsylvania, after the newspapers had been printing countless columns on the subject for months, and it was one of the most successful articles we have used, because of the way it crystallized and interpreted the whole occurrence.
A similar service is here suggested. Write the story of Pittsburg dramatically; crystallize the big exposures of the last few years through which bankers and politicians have been going to prison, culminating with the present crisis in the City Council; bring out the economic significance of these occurrences to Pittsburg, to the United States. Such an article will help all of us to see where we are “at,” will help develop civic consciousness in New York, Chicago, San Francisco. It is immensely well worth doing.
I’m not dictating your article. What is written here is purely suggestive. You must tell what you see and find in your own way. You will, anyway. You know most of the facts. You are in touch with the balance. We’ll help to get material. If you will, you can put up an article that the country will read. We’d like copy as soon as possible.
Sincerely,
J. O’H. COSGRAVE,
Editor.
Mr. Whitlock, replied, expressing willingness to handle the subject along the lines indicated, and asked for whatever assistance we could render him. William Hard, a member of our editorial force, had spent some time in Pittsburg, acquiring material for his “Woman’s Invasion,” and he recommended J. J. Nordman, a reporter of that city, as the best man to equip Mr. Whitlock with the historical details of the exposure. He would thus have immediately a succinct, up-to-date statement of the case for his use as a skeleton.
Mr. Nordman was willing to help, and soon after got into communication with Mr. Whitlock. Here is an account of his service, which was accompanied by a letter from District Attorney Blakeley, certifying to his reliability and knowledge of the facts.
May 10, 1910.
HON. BRAND WHITLOCK, Toledo, Ohio. Dear Sir:
Mr. Cosgrave has asked me to forward you matter bearing on the Pittsburg graft expose and such clippings as I may have.
I shall weave the facts together with no effort towards literary form, but rather in letter form, and present it to you not later than Monday next.
Enclosed please find what I have termed a “Retrospect,” being a review of the political conditions leading to and making possible the present expose.
Such clippings as I have will be forwarded with matter. I enclose letter from Mr. Blakeley.
Very respectfully,
J. JEROME NORDMAN.
After that we waited, rather impatiently, it must be confessed, for Whitlock’s manuscript. After the passage of other admonitory letters and telegrams, we received the following letter. We print it “instead of an article.” In our opinion, it is an extraordinarily valuable summary of the whole subject of municipal misrule. It goes far and beyond Pittsburg, and deep into economic, social, and national conditions of which that city is but an instance and an illustration. And, moreover, it sets forth just how such an article, could we find the right man to do it, should be written. Here it is:
Executive Offices
THE CITY OF TOLEDO 3 June, 1910. JOHN O’HARA COSGRAVE, Esquire,Editor
EVERYBODY’S MAGAZINE.
DEAR MR. COSGRAVE:
The Pittsburg story is big, too big and too important and too significant to do at second hand. I have had a valuable correspondence with Mr. Nordman, and he has most kindly put his information, and in clear form, at my disposal. He has sent me his scrapbook of newspaper clippings, and he has written me at length and in detail of the various exposures and prosecutions. I have made inquiries, too, from friends, and I have been thinking over the story that you propose. But it won’t go, and I have concluded that it ought not to go in that form; and that is the only form in which it is possible for me now to tell it.
I find just what I expected to find, or I find the familiar symptoms of what I expected to find. The intelligent answers to the several questions I put to Mr. Nordman after our first few letters are exactly what I expected them to be. One city is all cities; and all exhibit the same effects, proceeding from the same causes. Look about you, anywhere, and if you see graft, and bribery, and corruption, you’ll find a bi-partisan machine controlling nominations and elections to municipal offices, and representing the few who consider themselves privileged to exploit the people by means of franchises in public utilities, etc. It’s as easy as it is for a physician to tell what ails a sallow and emaciated Southern “cracker” who shivers with chills one day, and burns up with fever the next.
And so, in Pittsburg, I found the usual Republican machine with its big boss, the usual Democratic machine and its little boss, and the two, as usual, working together, the Democratic boss and his tools rewarded by a few small offices on “bi-partisan” boards, and the like; then the street railway system and other public utility corporations which these bosses represent, and for which they procure franchises. And after this, the “better element,” the “eminently respectable” citizens, supporting this combination, enjoying the fruits of its labor, and influencing the business interests of the city in the way that gives such perfect exemplification of the evils of class government in our cities–the same, old, sordid story.
The revelations, as they are called–though by this time they should have ceased to be revelations, and have become “recognitions” in this country–made by the newspaper clippings before me are the expected indications of the deeper, underlying causes. The superficial observer sees in them merely a corrupt council; and, from the fact that councilmen have taken bribes, he makes the daring deduction that some one gave them the bribes; he sees that councilmen have been grafting, and then is naively astonished by the revelation that some business men higher up, although not very much higher up, have been caught and publicly disgraced. He sees, too, a brave and fearless prosecutor who is sending these men to prison; and there are the usual predictions that out of all this there is to come to Pittsburg “good” government–that is, government by honest men, to be aided, perhaps, by the adoption of the commission plan. That is to say, we have here the subject only in its personal aspect, and not in its institutional, sociological, economic aspect.
THE SAME OLD STORY OF GRAFT
Now, to be frank, the story of the grafting doesn’t interest me much, though it is as saddening and depressing as ever; and I can’t work up enough enthusiasm for that feature of it to write anything that would be worth your while to print, or worth anybody’s while to read. Toward the subject I feel the same apathy that was felt toward the ordinary newspaper account of some casualty by Thoreau, who would not read, as you will remember, the accounts–for example–of crimes and accidents, because, having once grasped the principle, he felt it unnecessary to multiply, indefinitely, instances of that principle. The story of Pittsburg, so far as it has been related to me, is merely the old, squalid story of municipal graft. I have the names and the dates in an orderly and logical way–who were sent to the penitentiary, and when, and for what particular crime, and what the judge said in pronouncing sentence, etc. All of this has been told over and over and over again in the newspapers and magazines during the last few years; the only difference lies in the names and the dates and the place. Indeed, Pittsburg’s story in this respect is hardly as interesting as the old stories–it is, if anything, more commonplace, more squalid.
But behind all this, there is, of course, a story, and a big one, as you unerringly divined. Reading between the lines of the dry recital of facts with which I have been provided, and peering a little way behind the scenes, I come, I think, upon the real story, the one that some one should write, the one that some one should print.
The first chapter, perhaps, is the story of the old political machines in Pittsburg, and of that interesting, and–in certain elemental, human senses–strong personality, Chris Magee, the boss–who has a monument.
Then, there is another personality, of a different sort, in Blakeley, the district attorney. My accounts are meager and bald, and yet I catch glimpses of a striking personality. This district attorney, I should imagine, is a man with the best ideals of the legal profession, honest, capable, sincere, and unafraid; a man, withal, who knows life and politics and can play the game without being soiled in its many contacts. What draws me to him, even at this distance, is that he seems to have little of the Puritan in him, as there is too apt to be in prosecutors who convict, and push their victims within prison doors. And he is another chapter of the story. But I don’t know Blakeley; I can’t describe him, I can’t interpret him, and I haven’t the time nor the opportunity just now to become acquainted with him.
Then there is the story of the organization of the Civic League, or whatever they call it, and especially the story of its operations. These good citizens, it seems, hired a detective to come and run their men down for them. To me the private detective is not the most inspiring and heroic figure on our modern scene; but that is neither here nor there. One of these detectives evidently has not only ability but versatility, and in an interesting manner combines the occupation of a detective with the profession of an evangelist. It was not, however, he who worked the old panel game–much as a black paramour might work it down in the Tenderloin–on certain councilmen, led them into a trap, and then exposed them–an achievement in confused morals that has not been permitted to go unapplauded. There are those, of course, in every city who could think fondly and smugly of themselves as doing, in this way, preeminently the will of God; and such deeds not infrequently make men self-righteous.
But, of course, I may be mistaken about the present application of this generalization, and, as I should like to be just, or, what is better, to be charitable, I should hesitate, on such unsupported conclusions, to write it down for the public eye. There are, of course, those who with logic can justify the larger end by the smaller means, and thus excuse certain deviations from the straight line of the moral ideal, and thereby hold one back from the temptation to divide his moral indignation about equally between pursuer and pursued. But, if he claimed one’s sympathy for the pursuers, he could not prevent one’s pity from going to the ruined councilmen.
THE SHOCK TO CARNEGIE
But beyond all this–and here I think I touch on the real story–there is the peculiar temper and tendency of Pittsburg. Pittsburg is an artistic center; fortunes have been lavished in endowing schools and universities and palaces for art, on symphonies and oratorios. All the expressions of a new, ruling plutocracy are easily discernible here, as in all such epochs of society recorded in history; just, for instance, as Ferrero describes them in the last phases of the Roman Republic. And when Carnegie returns, he sheds tears and wrings his hands because of the corruption that has been exposed, and he fails, as many in Pittsburg seem to fail, to note the necessary, if subtle, relation that must exist between all this corruption and debauchery between all this art and music, and–shall I say?–the tariff on steel.
This, however, isn’t all; though this is part. Pittsburg is a moral town; the most moral, in the conventional sense, in all America. She won’t even allow the kids to play baseball on a back lot on Sunday. A woman, an old friend of mine who lives in Pittsburg, said: “I think it very unfortunate that the Survey was published. It overlooks Pittsburg’s good points. For instance, Pittsburg has more churches than any city of its size in America. More people of our class go to church than in any place I ever saw; more money is given to charity. People just pour out of their houses and into the churches on Sunday morning.” She was quite serious–and she expressed Pittsburg, or the ruling class of Pittsburg, exactly.
Now I don’t mean to say that Pittsburg is especially hypocritical; but she does seem to be pharisaical. The article about Pittsburg should find its beginnings, perhaps, away back in the days of scholasticism, and come down through the moss hags of Scotland; and its title should be “Pious Pittsburg,” or something like that. Written properly–if I am right–it would be an eloquent exposition of phariseeism at its apotheosis.
THE REAL STORY OF PITTSBURG
Now I can’t write this, because I haven’t the evidence to prove what I see, or think I see. All I have is the mere outline–and the outline applies, as I have said, to most cities. What one should have is the color, the detail, the thousand and one little things in the way of personality–you know what I mean; all that which is necessary to “lend artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.” (I wish I were in New York to-night! I’d go to the Casino and see the revival of “The Mikado.”) The Pittsburg story can’t be written, and it should not be written, without this; and to do it properly one would have to spend much time in Pittsburg and become saturated with the atmosphere of the place; and when he emerged, if he ever did emerge, he would be ready to undertake this rather stupendous study in psychology. I do not feel at all equipped for this task, and no amount of material without the personal contact could equip me for this service. With my material, I could only write the old and squalid story of a rather commonplace exposure of municipal grafting, and that wouldn’t be worth while.
The story of Pittsburg would be all that the story of any city is–as I have indicated: the bi-partisan machine, the public service corporation, etc.–but it would be more. It would illustrate the curious effects of long acceptance of cold, intellectual theories in place of religion, and how this develops the ability to separate morals and manners; how one’s theology needn’t interfere with one’s religion, and all that. It would be the story of the union of politics and business; and the trail would lead up to those proud and insolent aristocracies that are founded on the purchase of the privilege of making the laws, and down to those stews of horror where they pay for the privilege of breaking the laws. It would be the story of Chris Magee, the good-natured, human boss; of Blakeley, the upright prosecutor; of the methods of hired detectives and the corruption of officialdom. Pittsburg has riches, art, organized charity, and piety; but she lacks wealth, beauty, social justice, and religion. And sending the “bad” to prison, and electing the “good” to office, and changing the paper charters of the city, are not going to work any real reform. They think they’ll get “good government” and “civic righteousness,” and then their problems will be solved. This is what they propose to do; this is all they tell us now, and I can’t write a story on that. The story would be as futile as little legal reforms.
It is, however, consoling and inspiring to believe–yes, to know–that there are in Pittsburg–as in all cities–hundreds of thousands of decent, virtuous, wholesome, toiling people; that these make up by far the larger part of the population, too, and that they will save Pittsburg, and make her as good as she is great. It is a fact stimulating to the imagination and encouraging to the soul that, in all these stores and shops and mills, there are hard-working, modest, unknown thousands who are pure and loyal, who are humanity’s hope; that even the most stunted and abused figures out of the Survey give more promise than that class which rides upon their backs and devours them as it rides.
Good government, efficient government, if by those phrases is meant, as is usually meant, government by the “good”–whoever they may be!–and the efficient, will not do; it will avail nothing to Pittsburg or to any city, to substitute for grafters, great or petty, personally honest men who will legally give away franchises for nothing, instead of bartering them illegally for big bribes. Pittsburg can’t be saved by an aristocracy of the better element, she can be saved only by democracy–with a very little “d.” And she will be saved that way some day, never fear, though not until all the other cities are similarly saved.
I shall await with interest what you think of my suggestions.
Your ever sincere friend, BRAND WHITLOCK.
***************************************************************** Vol. XXIII No.2 AUGUST 1910
THE WOMEN OF TO-MORROW {page 215-226 part 1.}
By WILLIAM HARD
EDITOR’S NOTE: It is commonly supposed that only the women of poverty are affected by modern industrial conditions. On the contrary, modern industrial conditions are having their greatest influence among the women who, before marriage, enjoy wide educational opportunities, and who, after marriage, enjoy the blessing of partial leisure. It is among these women that economic developments are producing the profoundest changes in habit of life and in character of mind. Mr Hard, who will be remembered by all readers of the “Woman’s Invasion,” has spent two years in the diligent investigation of this subject, and has acquired an authoritative knowledge of it.
EVERY Jack has his Jill.” It is a tender twilight thought, and it more or less settles Jill.
When the Census Man was at work in 1900, however, he went about and counted 2,260,000 American women who were more than twenty-five years old and who were still unmarried.
It is getting worse (or better) with every passing decade, and out of it is emerging a new ideal of education for women, an ideal which seems certain to penetrate the whole educational system of the United States, all the way from the elementary schools to the universities.
The Census Man groups us into age periods. The period from twenty-five to twenty-nine is the most important matrimonially because it is the one in which most of us get pretty well fixed into our life work. Out of every 1,000 women in that period, in the year 1890, the Census Man found 254 who were still unmarried. In 1900, only ten years later, he found 275.
There is not so much processional as recessional about marriage at present. In navigating the stormy waters of life in the realistic pages of the census reports, it is not till we reach the comparatively serene, landlocked years from forty-five to fifty-four that we find ourselves in an age-period in which the number of single women has been reduced to less than ten per cent. of the total. The rebound from this fact hits education hard. As marriage recedes, and as the period of gainful work before marriage lengthens, the need of real technical preparation for that gainful work becomes steadily more urgent, and the United States moves steadily onward into an era of trained women as well as trained men.
In Boston, at that big new college called Simmons–the first of its kind in the United States–a regular four-year college of which the aim is to send out every graduate technically trained to earn her living in a certain specific occupation, there were enrolled last year, besides some five hundred undergraduate women, some eighty other women who had already earned their bachelor’s degrees at other colleges, such as Bryn Mawr, Wellesley, Smith, Vassar, Radcliffe, Leland Stanford, and the University of Montana.
These eighty women, after eight years in elementary schools, four years in high school, and four years in college, were taking one year more in technical school in order to be–what? Not doctors or lawyers or architects. Not anything in the “learned” professions. But to be “social workers” in settlements or for charity societies, to be librarians, to be stenographers and secretaries.
The Bachelor of Arts from Vassar who is going to be a stenographer, and who is taking her year of graduate study at Simmons, will go to work at the end of the year and then, six months later, if she has made good, will get from Simmons the degree of Bachelor of Science. At that point in her life she will have two degrees and seventeen years of schooling behind her. A big background. But we are beginning to do some training for almost everything.
Did you ever see a school of salesmanship for department-store women employees? You can see one at the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union in Boston. Under the guidance of Mrs. Lucinda W. Prince, the big department stores of Boston have come to think enough of this school to send girls to it every morning and to pay them full wages while they take a three months’ course.
If you will attend any of the classes, in arithmetic, in textiles, in hygiene, in color and design, in demonstration sales, in business forms, you will get not only a new view of the art of selling goods over the counter but a new vision of a big principle in education.
In the class on color, for instance, you will at first be puzzled by the vivid interest taken by the pupils in the theory of it. You have never before observed in any classroom so intimate a concern about rainbows, prisms, spectra, and the scientific sources of aesthetic effects. Your mind runs back to your college days and returns almost alarmed to this unacademic display of genuine, spontaneous, unanimous enthusiasm toward a classroom study of a theoretical subject. At last the reason for it works into your mind. These girls are engaged in the practice of color every afternoon, over hats, ribbons, waists, gloves, costumes. When you begin once to study a subject which reaches practice in your life, you cannot stop with practice. A law of your mind carries you on to the philosophy of it.
Right there you see the reason why trade training, broadly contrived, broadens not only technique but soul, trains not only to earn but to live. “Refined selling,” some of the girls call the salesmanship which they learn in Mrs. Prince’s class. They have perceived, to some extent, the relation between the arts and sciences on the one hand and their daily work on the other.
To a much greater extent has this relation been perceived by the young woman who has taken the full four-year course in, say, “Secretarial Studies” in Simmons and who, throughout her English, her German, her French, her Sociology, and her History, as well as throughout her Typewriting, her Shorthand, and her Commercial Law, has necessarily kept in mind, irradiating every subject, the light it may throw on the specific work she is to do.
“Ah! There, precisely, is the danger. Every Jack should have his Jill; but if every Jill has her job, why, there again the wedding day goes receding some more into the future. Let them stop all this foolishness and get married, as their grandparents did!”
Poor Jack! Poor Jill! They get lectured at all the time about the postponement of marriage, and they can no more control it than they can control the size of the city of New York. Theoretically, everybody on Manhattan Island could get up and go away and leave the island vacant. Actually, it can’t and won’t be done. Theoretically, we should all of us get married young. We fall in love young enough. But, actually, we can’t get married young, and don’t. The reasons are given later. Meanwhile, just notice, and just ponder, the following facts.
It was in the United States as a whole that the Census Man found 275 out of every 1,000 women in the twenty-five-to-twenty-nine age–period unmarried. But the United States consists of developed and undeveloped regions. The cities are the high points of development. Look at the cities:
In Chicago, out of every 1,000 women in the age period from twenty-five to twenty-nine, there were 314 who were unmarried. In Denver there were 331. In Manhattan and the Bronx there were 356. In Minneapolis there were 369. In Philadelphia there were 387.
Southern New England, however, is the most industrially developed part of the United States, the part in which social conditions like those of the older countries of the world are most nearly reached.
In Fall River, out of every 1,000 women in the twenty-five-to-twenty-nine period, the unmarried were 391. In New Haven they were 393. In Boston they were 452.
In view of such facts, how can anybody object to the steps which have been taken recently toward giving the women in the manufacturing trades, as well as the women in the commercial trades, some little preparation for the work in which they are likely to spend so many years?
In the Manhattan Trade School for Girls, in the last eighteen months of record, the enrollment was 1,169. More and more the girls in this school are willing to stay in it for a full year. They have finished at least five grades of the public school, and they are now learning to be milliners, to be dressmakers, to be operators of electric-power machines, to be workers in paste and glue in such occupations as candle-shade-making, to be workers with brush and pencil in furnishing the manufacturing trades with designs.
It is not only a matter of learning to do one particular thing in one particular department in one particular trade. That they could learn in a factory. It is a matter of getting some understanding of a whole trade, or getting some kind of a view of how the world is run. Nobody wants to make people into machines. The object of a good trade school is precisely the reverse. It is the common school which makes people into machines, when it sends them directly from books, which do not explain the working world, out into that world to become uncomprehending appendages to minute processes in infinitely subdivided manufacturing organizations.
A good trade school, besides teaching the technique of the machine, covers what Mrs. Woolman, the director of the Manhattan School, in her wonderful report of last year called the “middle ground” between general academic preparatory work on the one hand and practical trade training on the other. In this “middle ground” the pupil takes simple courses in, for instance, “Civics” and “Industries.”
“Nothing to it,” says an irritated manufacturer. “Nothing to it at all! I can’t get a good office boy any more. I can’t get anybody, boy or girl, who wants to do anything but just hold down a job and grab a pay-envelope. Too much schooling! Those inventors and pioneers who came out of New England and made this country from a hunting-ground into an empire–they didn’t have all this monkey-business in technical schools and trade schools. They just went to work. That’s all. I say send ’em to work young and let ’em sweat. That’s what makes men and women.”