Atlantic Classics Volume I Part 9

No lesson of the Civil War was more striking than that taught by the swift transitions of our citizen soldiery from civil to military life, and back again. This impressed me as a boy, and I used to wonder, as I pa.s.sed my heroes on their peaceful errands in the street, why they had put down the sword when there must still be work somewhere for fighting men to do. The judge of the federal court at this time was Walter Q.

Gresham, brevetted brigadier-general, who was destined later to adorn the cabinets of presidents of two political parties. He was cordial and magnetic; his were the handsomest and friendliest of brown eyes, and a n.o.ble gravity spoke in them. Among the lawyers who practiced before him were Benjamin Harrison and Thomas A. Hendricks, who became respectively President and Vice-President.

Those Hoosiers who admired Gresham ardently were often less devotedly attached to Harrison, who lacked Gresham's warmth and charm. General Harrison was akin to the Covenanters who bore both Bible and sword into battle. His eminence in the law was due to his deep learning in its history and philosophy. Short of stature, and without grace of person,--with a voice pitched rather high,--he was a remarkably interesting and persuasive speaker. If I may so put it, his political speeches were addressed as to a trial judge rather than to a jury, his appeal being to reason and not to pa.s.sion or prejudice. He could, in rapid flights of campaigning, speak to many audiences in a day without repeating himself. He was measured and urbane; his discourses abounded in apt ill.u.s.tration; he was never dull. He never stooped to pietistic clap-trap, or chanted the jaunty chauvinism that has so often caused the Hoosier stars to blink.

Among the Democratic leaders of that period, Hendricks was one of the ablest, and a man of many attractive qualities. His dignity was always impressive, and his appearance suggested the statesman of an earlier time. It is one of immortality's harsh ironies that a man who was a gentleman, and who stood moreover pretty squarely for the policies that it pleased him to defend, should be published to the world in a bronze effigy in his own city as a bandy-legged and tottering tramp, in a frock coat that never was on sea or land.

Joseph E. McDonald, a Senator in Congress, was held in affectionate regard by a wide const.i.tuency. He was an independent and vigorous character who never lost a certain raciness and tang. On my first timid venture into the fabled East I rode with him in a day-coach from Was.h.i.+ngton to New York on a slow train. At some point he saw a peddler of fried oysters on a station platform, alighted to make a purchase, and ate his luncheon quite democratically from the paper parcel in his car seat. He convoyed me across the ferry, asked where I expected to stop, and explained that he did not like the European plan; he liked, he said, to have 'full swing at a bill of fare.'

I used often to look upon the towering form of Daniel W. Voorhees, whom Sulgrove, an Indiana journalist with a gift for translating Macaulay into Hoosierese, had named 'The Tall Sycamore of the Wabash.' In a crowded hotel lobby I can still see him, cloaked and silk-hatted, the centre of the throng, and my strict upbringing in the antagonistic political faith did not diminish my admiration for his eloquence.

Such were some of the characters who came and went in the streets of our provincial capital in those days.

III

In discussions under captions similar to mine it is often maintained that railways, telegraphs, telephones, and newspapers are knitting us together, so that soon we shall all be keyed to a metropolitan pitch.

The proof adduced in support of this is of the most trivial, but it strikes me as wholly undesirable that we should all be ironed out and conventionalized. In the matter of dress, for example, the women of our town used to take their fas.h.i.+ons from _G.o.dey's_ and _Peterson's via_ Cincinnati; but now that we are only eighteen hours from New York, with a well-traveled path from the Wabash to Paris, my counselors among the elders declare that the tone of our society--if I may use so perilous a word--has changed little from our good old black alpaca days. The hobble skirt receives prompt consideration in the 'Main' street of any town, and is viewed with frank curiosity, but it is only a one day's wonder. A lively runaway or the barbaric yawp of a new street fakir may dethrone it at any time.

New York and Boston tailors solicit custom among us biennially, but nothing is so stubborn as our provincial distrust of fine raiment. I looked with awe, in my boyhood, upon a pair of mammoth blue-jeans trousers that were flung high from a flagstaff in the centre of Indianapolis, in derision of a Democratic candidate for governor, James D. Williams, who was addicted to the wearing of jeans. The Democrats sagaciously accepted the challenge, made 'honest blue jeans' the battle-cry, and defeated Benjamin Harrison, the 'kid-glove' candidate of the Republicans. Harmless demagoguery this or bad judgment on the part of the Republicans; and yet I dare say that if the sartorial issue should again become acute in our politics the banner of bifurcated jeans would triumph now as then. A Hoosier statesman who to-day occupies high office once explained to me his refusal of sugar for his coffee by remarking that he didn't like to waste sugar that way; he wanted to keep it for his lettuce. I do not urge sugared lettuce as symbolizing our higher provincialism, but mayonnaise may be poison to men who are nevertheless competent to construe and administer law.

It is much more significant that we are all thinking about the same things at the same time, than that Farnam Street, Omaha, and Fifth Avenue, New York, should vibrate to the same shade of necktie. The distribution of periodicals is so managed that California and Maine cut the leaves of their magazines on the same day. Rural free delivery has. .h.i.tched the farmer's wagon to the telegraph office, and you can't buy his wife's b.u.t.ter now until he has scanned the produce market in his newspaper. This immediacy of contact does not alter the provincial point of view. New York and Texas, Oregon and Florida, will continue to see things at different angles, and it is for the good of all of us that this is so. We have no national political, social, or intellectual centre. There is no 'season' in New York, as in London, during which all persons distinguished in any of these particulars meet on common ground.

Was.h.i.+ngton is our nearest approach to such a meeting-place, but it offers only short vistas. We of the country visit Boston for the symphony, or New York for the opera, or Was.h.i.+ngton to view the government machine at work, but nowhere do interesting people representative of all our ninety millions ever a.s.semble under one roof.

All our capitals are, as Lowell put it, 'fractional,' and we shall hardly have a centre while our country is so nearly a continent.

Nothing in our political system could be wiser than our dispersion into provinces. Sweep from the map the lines that divide the states and we should huddle like sheep suddenly deprived of the protection of known walls and flung upon the open prairie. State lines and local pride are in themselves a pledge of stability. The elasticity of our system makes possible a variety of governmental experiments by which the whole country profits. We should all rejoice that the parochial mind is so open, so eager, so earnest, so tolerant. Even the most buckramed conservative on the Eastern coastline, scornful of the political follies of our far-lying provinces, must view with some interest the dallyings of Oregon with the Referendum, and of Des Moines with the Commission System. If Milwaukee wishes to try Socialism, the rest of us need not complain. Democracy will cease to be democracy when all its problems are solved and everybody votes the same ticket.

States that produce the most cranks are prodigal of the corn that pays the dividends on the railroads the cranks despise. Indiana's amiable feeling toward New York is not altered by her sister's rejection or acceptance of the direct primary, a benevolent device of n.o.blest intention, under which, not long ago, in my own commonwealth, my fellow citizens expressed their distrust of me with unmistakable emphasis. It is no great matter, but in open convention also I have perished by the sword. Nothing can thwart the chastening hand of a righteous people.

All pa.s.ses; humor alone is the touchstone of democracy. I search the newspapers daily for tidings of Kansas, and in the ways of Oklahoma I find delight. The Emporia _Gazette_ is quite as patriotic as the Springfield _Republican_ or the New York _Post_, and to my own taste, far less depressing. I subscribed for a year to the Charleston _News and Courier_, and was saddened by the tameness of its sentiments; for I remember (it must have been in 1884) the shrinking horror with which I saw daily in the Indiana Republican organ a quotation from Wade Hampton to the effect that 'these are the same principles for which Lee and Jackson fought four years on Virginia's soil.' Most of us are entertained when Colonel Watterson rises to speak for Kentucky and invokes the star-eyed G.o.ddess. When we call the roll of the states, if Malvolio answer for any, let us suffer him in tolerance and rejoice in his yellow stockings. 'G.o.d give them wisdom that have it; and those that are fools, let them use their talents.'

Every community has its dissenters, protestants, kickers, cranks, the more the merrier. I early formed a high resolve to strive for members.h.i.+p in this execrated company. George W. Julian,--one of the n.o.blest of Hoosiers,--who had been the Free-Soil candidate for Vice-President in 1852, a delegate to the first Republican convention, five times a member of Congress, a supporter of Greeley's candidacy, and a Democrat in the consuls.h.i.+p of Cleveland, was a familiar figure in our streets. In 1884 I was dusting law-books in an office where mugwumpery flourished, and where the iniquities of the tariff, Matthew Arnold's theological opinions, and the writings of Darwin, Spencer, and Huxley were discussed at intervals in the day's business.

IV

It is constantly complained that we Americans give too much time to politics, but there could be no safer way of utilizing that extra drop of vital fluid which Matthew Arnold found in us. Epithets of opprobrium pinned to a Nebraskan in 1896 were riveted upon a citizen of New York in 1910, and who, then, was the gentleman? No doubt many voices will cry in the wilderness before we reach the promised land. A people which has been fed on the Bible is bound to hear the rumble of Pharaoh's chariots.

It is in the blood to feel the oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely. The winter evenings are long on the prairies, and we must always be fas.h.i.+oning a crown for Caesar or rehearsing his funeral rites.

No great danger can ever seriously menace the nation so long as the remotest citizen clings to his faith that he is a part of the governmental mechanism and can at any time throw it out of adjustment if it doesn't run to suit him. He can go into the court-house and see the men he helped to place in office; or if they were chosen in spite of him, he pays his taxes just the same and waits for another chance to turn the rascals out.

Mr. Bryce wrote: 'This tendency to acquiescence and submission; this sense of the insignificance of individual effort, this belief that the affairs of men are swayed by large forces whose movement may be studied but cannot be turned, I have ventured to call the Fatalism of the Mult.i.tude.' It is, I should say, one of the most encouraging phenomena of the score of years that have elapsed since Mr. Bryce's _American Commonwealth_ appeared, that we have grown much less conscious of the crus.h.i.+ng weight of the ma.s.s. It has been with something of a child's surprise in his ultimate successful manipulation of a toy whose mechanism has baffled him that we have begun to realize that, after all, the individual counts. The pressure of the ma.s.s will yet be felt, but in spite of its persistence there are abundant signs that the individual is a.s.serting himself more and more, and even the undeniable acceptance of collectivist ideas in many quarters helps to prove it. With all our faults and defaults of understanding,--populism, free silver, c.o.xey's army, and the rest of it,--we of the West have not done so badly. Be not impatient with the young man Absalom; the mule knows his way to the oak tree!

Blaine lost Indiana in 1884; Bryan failed thrice to carry it. The campaign of 1910 in Indiana was remarkable for the stubbornness of 'silent' voters, who listened respectfully to the orators but left the managers of both parties in the air as to their intentions. In the Indiana Democratic State Convention of 1910 a gentleman was furiously hissed for ten minutes amid a scene of wildest tumult; but the cause he advocated won, and the ticket nominated in that memorable convention succeeded in November. Within fifty years Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois have sent to Was.h.i.+ngton seven presidents, elected for ten terms. Without discussing the value of their public services it may be said that it has been an important demonstration to our Mid-Western people of the closeness of their ties with the nation, that so many men of their own soil have been chosen to the seat of the presidents; and it is creditable to Maine and California that they have cheerfully acquiesced.

In Lincoln the provincial American most n.o.bly a.s.serted himself, and any discussion of the value of provincial life and character in our politics may well begin and end in him. We have seen verily that

Fishers and choppers and ploughmen Shall const.i.tute a state.

Whitman, addressing Grant on his return from his world's tour, declared that it was not that the hero had walked 'with kings with even pace the round world's promenade';

But that in foreign lands, in all thy walks with kings, Those prairie sovereigns of the West, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Ohio's, Indiana's millions, comrades, farmers, soldiers, all to the front, Invisibly with thee walking with kings with even pace the round world's promenade, Were all so justified.

What we miss and what we lack who live in the provinces seem to me of little weight in the scale against our compensations. We slouch,--we are deficient in the graces, we are p.r.o.ne to boast, and we lack in those fine reticences that mark the cultivated citizen of the metropolis. We like to talk, and we talk our problems out to a finish. Our commonwealths rose in the ashes of the hunter's campfires, and we are all a great neighborhood, united in a common understanding of what democracy is, and animated by ideals of what we want it to be. That saving humor which is a philosophy of life flourishes amid the tall corn. We are old enough now--we of the West--to have built up in ourselves a species of wisdom, founded upon experience, which is a part of the continuing unwritten law of democracy. We are less likely these days to 'wobble right' than we are to stand fast or march forward like an army with banners.

We provincials are immensely curious. Art, music, literature, politics--nothing that is of contemporaneous human interest is alien to us. If these things don't come to us we go to them. We are more truly representative of the American ideal than our metropolitan cousins, because (here I lay my head upon the block) we know more about, oh, so many things! We know vastly more about the United States, for one thing.

We know what New York is thinking before New York herself knows it, because we visit the metropolis to find out. Sleeping-cars have no terrors for us, and a man who has never been west of Philadelphia seems to us a singularly benighted being. Those of our Western school-teachers who don't see Europe for three hundred dollars every summer get at least as far east as Concord, to be photographed by the rude bridge that arched the flood.

That fine austerity, which the voluble Westerner finds so smothering on the Boston and New York express, is lost utterly at Pittsburg. From gentlemen cruising in day-coaches--rude wights who advertise their personal sanitation and literacy by the toothbrush and fountain-pen planted st.u.r.dily in their upper left-hand waistcoat pockets--one may learn the most prodigious facts and the philosophy thereof. 'Sit over, brother; there's h.e.l.l to pay in the Balkans,' remarks the gentleman who boarded the inter-urban at Peru or Connersville, and who would just as lief discuss the papacy or child-labor, if revolutions are not to your liking.

In Boston a lady once expressed her surprise that I should be hastening home for Thanksgiving Day. This, she thought, was a New England festival. More recently I was asked by a Bostonian if I had ever heard of Paul Revere. Nothing is more delightful in us, I think, than our meekness before instruction. We strive to please; all we ask is 'to be shown.'

Our greatest gain is in leisure and the opportunity to ponder and brood.

In all these thousands of country towns live alert and shrewd students of affairs. Where your New Yorker scans headlines as he 'commutes'

homeward, the villager reaches his own fireside without being shot through a tube, and sits down and reads his newspaper thoroughly. When he repairs to the drug-store to abuse or praise the powers that be, his wife reads the paper, too. A United States Senator from a Middle Western State, making a campaign for renomination preliminary to the primaries, warned the people in rural communities against the newspaper and periodical press with its scandals and heresies. 'Wait quietly by your firesides, undisturbed by these false teachings,' he said in effect; 'then go to your primaries and vote as you have always voted.'

His opponent won by thirty thousand,--the amiable answer of the little red schoolhouse.

V

A few days ago I visited again my native town. On the slope where I played as a child I listened in vain for the mourning bugle; but on the college campus a bronze tablet commemorative of those sons of Wabash who had fought in the mighty war quickened the old impressions. The college buildings wear a look of age in the gathering dusk.

Coldly, sadly descends The autumn evening. The field Strewn with its dank yellow drifts Of withered leaves, and the elms, Fade into dimness apace, Silent; hardly a shout From a few boys late at their play!

Brave airs of cityhood are apparent in the town, with its paved streets, fine hall and library; and everywhere are wholesome life, comfort, and peace. The train is soon hurrying through gray fields and dark woodlands. Farmhouses are disclosed by glowing panes; lanterns flash fitfully where farmers are making all fast for the night. The city is reached as great factories are discharging their laborers, and I pa.s.s from the station into a hurrying throng homeward bound. Against the sky looms the dome of the capitol; the tall shaft of the soldiers' monument rises ahead of me down the long street and vanishes starward. Here where forests stood seventy-five years ago, in a state that has not yet attained its centenary, is realized much that man has sought through all the ages,--order, justice, and mercy, kindliness and good cheer. What we lack we seek, and what we strive for we shall gain. And of such is the kingdom of democracy.

Our Lady Poverty

By Agnes Repplier

I

The last people to read the literature of poverty are the poor, and this fact may be cited as one of the ameliorations of their lot. If they were a.s.sured day after day that they were degraded and enslaved, it would be a trifle hard for them to cherish their respectability, and enjoy their freedom. If their misery were dinned into their ears, they would naturally cease being cheerful. If they were convinced that tears are their portion, they would no longer have the temerity to laugh. Indeed their mirth is frankly repellent to the dolorous writers of to-day.

A burst of hollow laughter from a hopeless heart

is permitted as seemly and in character; even the poet of the slums grants this outlet for emotion; but the rude sounds which denote hilarity disturb the sympathetic soul. One agitated lady describes with shrinking horror the merriment of the scrub-women going to their labor.

All the dignity, all the sacredness of womanhood are defiled by these poor old creatures tramping through the chill dawn; and yet, and yet,--oh, mockery of n.o.bler aspirations!--'The scrub-women were going to work, and they went laughing!'

The dismalness of serious writers, especially if humanity be their theme, is steeping us in gloom. The obsession of sorrow seems the most reasonable of all obsessions, because facts can be crowded upon facts (to the general exclusion of truth) by way of argument and ill.u.s.tration.

And should facts fail, there are bitter generalizations which shroud us like a pall.

Behind all music we can hear The insistent note of hunger-fear; Beyond all beauty we can see The land's defenseless misery.

Mr. Percy MacKaye in his preface to that treatise on eugenics which he has christened _To-Morrow_, and humorously designated as a play, makes this inspiriting statement: 'Our world is hideously unhappy, and the insufferable sense of that unhappiness is the consecration of modern leaders in art. Realism is splendidly their incentive.'

This opens up a cheering vista for the public. If the dramatists of the near future are to have no finer consecration than an insufferable sense of unhappiness, we must turn for amus.e.m.e.nt to lectures and organ recitals. If novelists and poets are to be hallowed by grief, there will be nothing left for light-hearted readers save the study of political economy, erstwhile called the dismal science, but now, by comparison, gay. No artist yet was ever born of an insufferable sense of unhappiness. No leader and helper of men was ever bedewed with tears.

The world is old, and the world is wide. Of what use are we in its tumultuous life, if we do not know its joys, its griefs, its high emotions, its call to courage, and the echo of the laughter of the ages?