Chapter II: The Pleasures of Buncombe (1)

The most striking contradiction of our civilisation is the fundamental reverence for truth which we profess and the thorough-going disregard for it which we practice. This is the veriest commonplace. The lowest journalism fattens on pointing it out and the highest clergy prosper in the same occupation. According to them all, the world is rotten to the core with hypocrisy and falsehood.

But while they agree on the condition, the physicians of the world order hopelessly differ on the remedy. Without disagreeing on the condition, either, we want to suggest nevertheless that it is a bit naïve of the philosophers to diagnose from the mere scarcity of truth that the world is sick with an incurable malady. Is it not just possible that they cannot cure us for the basic reason that we are not ill?

And if we are not ill, the worries of the moralists should dissolve into good cheer. Can we, then, be well though the truth be not in us? Strangely late in the history of philosophy, we now for the first time address ourselves to that problem.

God and Truth have from the earliest times been the two ideas that have commanded the greatest reverence. They have been much argued by the philosophers, with many curious parallels and one striking contrast. Typical of the parallels are the long disputes about whether there can reasonably be supposed to exist either an absolute god or an absolute truth. The one contrast is that while the philosophers have discussed at great length whether God is good, they have never discussed whether Truth is good. Is it not a bit suspicious that this is the one thing they have always assumed? And in a world of chaotic philosophies that get us nowhere, is it not high time to ask if there be any sound reason why Truth should be exempted from that fundamental scrutiny to which even the gods have had to submit?

In addressing ourselves to this hitherto neglected question, as to whether truth is good, we adopt in the first instance a test which has long appealed to the common sense of mankind: _By their fruits shall ye know them._

In defining our subject, we admit at once that the truth may have effects outside of the immediate field in which we shall study it, that of human affairs. It is like the question of soul. For thousands of years the civilization which is intellectually descended from the lands around the Mediterranean has agreed that all men have souls. Usually those who speculated have considered that women have souls also, a few that horses and dogs have souls, and the most generous that all animals have them. But it is only the highest intellectuals and the most benighted savages who have ever conceded souls to plants and sticks and stones. We shall ignore, for the time being, such possible extensions of our subject, and discuss Truth solely in its relation to men (including women).

As both definition and defense of our method, we premise, further, that mankind frequently does much better than it knows. Nearly all of us, for instance, can keep in balance as we walk along upright, though the physiologists are still arguing about exactly how we do it. Similarly, the biologists tacitly agree that we know what life is; for they test their definitions of life by measuring them against the reality which they feel they know, though they cannot define it quite successfully.

Go through any considerable number of examples like the preceding, selecting them, if you like, from every sphere of life, and you will gradually reach a firm confidence in the reasonableness of human actions as compared with the flightiness of our theories and the contradictions so frequently involved in our explanations. That may be because (admitting the evolutionary theory and the geological time scale) we, and the pre-human ancestors from which we inherit our traits, have been acting so as to save our bodies and reach our desires for a good many million years longer than we have been speculating on how to save our souls and protect our reputations. And practice makes perfect.

We arrive then at a simple problem: If we ignore all theories and study those instances where mankind has preferred truth or falsehood the one to the other, we shall be in a position to determine which set of choices has been of the greater benefit.

In a later and more rigorous inquiry we may go in for objective proofs, like statistics. Here we shall use only such examples as are well-known to everyone, so that the conclusions we state will certainly be merely the equivalent of the reader’s own verdict, set before him in print.

Few things are more generally admitted than that parents, in most cases, love their children and desire their greatest good. These parents may be in error as to what constitutes good, but this is beside the mark, for we are at the moment merely trying to find out what it is they think is for the children’s welfare. Of course, if you ask them, they will quote you Truth with a capital, or more likely TRUTH all in capitals. For so have they been taught to protest. But study their actions, which are a surer guide than their words.

THE CASE OF INFANTS

To put it bluntly, most loving parents take the greatest care to surround children not with truth but with deception.

We cannot deceive children before they are born, so we do the next best thing and practice every deception about them. We conceal, not only from children but also from grown persons so far as possible, how babies come into the world. The marriage is announced, and even made a public occasion, but thereafter everything is mystery. Pregnancy is concealed by an artful dress, the expectant mother hides or goes to a remote place. In some classes of society it is rather a breach of etiquette if the doctor talks openly about whom he is going to attend that night. There is a blare of publicity after the birth, in which, however, only a few things may be told--the weight and sex of the child, whom it resembles, and in a very general way how the mother is progressing. But the fact that the child looks red and wrinkled, that its eyes do not focus, and several other details about it, are of so private a nature that many mothers discover these and other more “intimate” things only in their own children. And certainly to most fathers the new-born looks as surprising as it looks unpleasant. That, by the way, is a fact every parent must conceal--it would be dreadful if anyone were ever to find out what a disagreeable shock his first-born was to him.

The reader may here want to stop and argue with the author that all this is but decent and proper reticence--which if he does he pleases the author very much. For there would be nothing to argue about. The author, too, feels that this is how all these things should be. He certainly would hate to break any such taboos. But let us not argue one way or the other. To do so would be unscientific. We should pursue our inquiry with a steady view to just one thing: Is it true that the majority of people feel and do as stated? From that survey will emerge a general conclusion as to which it is that men really prefer in practice, truth or falsehood.

The systematic deception of the child usually begins almost at the moment of birth. The instrument is speech, most fittingly, since our studies will show that this is the favorite means of deception throughout life. At first, the child does not understand any words, and balks the mother thereby. However, she makes capital of this dilemma by seeing to it that her baby shall chiefly hear (and therefore learn) only incorrect speech. This is known as teaching the child “baby talk.”

There are certain standard forms of baby talk which, through wide usage, are not completely deceptive; as when the child is taught to say that papa has gone bye-bye when the meaning is that papa has gone out. Accordingly, most mothers invent a special jargon so that each child grows up with several dozen sounds or combinations of sounds which are either not words of any language or else are real words with perverted meanings.

As the child grows up he discovers that he has been deceived in the first speech taught him; and thus he gets an early and practical lesson in one of the main concerns of life--how to deceive others.

As soon as the child has acquired a vocabulary by which he can be misled, people begin to deceive him in ways that increase in complexity with his growing faculties. Many of these are specially devised by his mother and family and do not lend themselves to sociological study, for they are seldom placed on record. But there is a general system, one broad aspect of which is stories, especially classics, that fall under the heads of fairy tales and folklore.

There has come to my attention a very practical way of determining what people really think of the place of folklore in the education of the young. As there has been prejudice to guard against, I need to describe the manner of my investigation before I come to the matter of it.

In a very tentative and general conversation I casually introduce the subject of bolshevism. In three cases out of four there is an immediate hostile reaction, and then I go no further, for my desire has been to get an opinion on a reported bolshevik undertaking, and a person who bristles at their very name is certain to be opposed to anything they sponsor. Correspondingly I get in some cases reactions of favorable enthusiasm, and these are equally hopeless, for they would naturally support any part of the bolshevik program.

In the few cases of seeming freedom from bias, I proceed to retail, without vouching for it, what I have heard about certain educational experiments conducted in the Soviet Union. It really makes no difference about the truth of these reports, for a person scientific enough to be neither strongly pro- nor strongly anti-bolshevik is also intelligent enough to consider a hypothetical case and give the same sort of verdict he would if it were a real one.

It is said, then, that the Soviet powers believe in the maxim of Paul about proving all things and accepting only those that can stand the most rigid investigation. I do not know (I must say, since the subject has been brought up) whether the bolsheviks are trying to discourage baby-talk, insisting that mothers shall speak a real language even to the youngest child; but it has been represented to me that from the time the child begins to speak the government makes an effort to see that it is told only the truth.

One of the first things western mothers tell their children is about Jack and the Beanstalk. The Russians feel reasonably certain that there never was such a Jack or Beanstalk. Accordingly, neither that fabled youngster nor the fabled plant is ever mentioned, I am told, to the up-to-date bolshevik-sponsored child.

But, says the Russian, there are in real life things quite as interesting and marvelous as Jack and his stalk; for instance, a child named Tom instead of Jack, and surnamed Edison. Nothing very marvelous is reported about this Tommy while he was small. But when he became a sizable boy, or perhaps even later, he got an idea about how a string could be heated till it became red and even white, and how this string could be put in a glass bottle and hung up to give a light much brighter than any lamp that ever existed up to that time.

The Soviet educators are said to maintain that by applying the same ability and ingenuity to telling the story of Tom and the glowing string that has been used in popularizing the adventures of Jack and his Beanstalk, you could create an equally vivid story, equally entertaining and, they contend, more beneficial since it is “true.”

In the case of a child taught to believe in the Beanstalk, it becomes necessary to tell him later (or else to let him find out for himself) that it never existed. Some psychologists claim that there is an injurious mental shock involved when a child’s faith is shattered. What the Soviets emphasize is that if Jack had been real the child’s interest would not have had to cease at the age of five or six, but might have continued growing until the larger boy gradually mastered all the history and later grasped the achievements of Jack. If, then, instead of Jack and the Beanstalk, you begin with Tom and the red-hot string, there is no shock, they argue, no dead halt, no shifting of interest from one thing to another, but instead a growing delight in the whole adventurous life of Thomas Alva Edison that finally develops into a grasp of all the sciences with which he was concerned.

I seldom get this far in my second-hand explanation before my listeners stop me with rhapsodies on the glories of the imagination and diatribes against the bolsheviks who now for the first time are seen by these previously impartial people to be insidious foemen of the soul.

This counterblast used to floor me and I would stop at that point; but more recently I have developed a flanking operation. People strong on the beauties of the soul are nearly always great admirers of Maeterlinck. So I apparently change the subject, falling in with their praise of the imagination and asking if they think its subtle beauties are anywhere more evident than in the great son of Belgium. There is usually agreement, and soon we are communing ecstatically together about his book on the bee.

The next step is to ask the champions of the imagination whether they remember that Maeterlinck says near the beginning of that book (which we have just agreed is one of his greatest works) that he has long since given up trying to invent anything half so marvelous as the truth. Oh, yes, they remember that, but they always understood it to mean Truth with a capital letter, which is something very different from a fact, and apparently means anything you are so fond of that you are prepared to stick to it whether it is true or not. But a little discussion about the sort of truth which Maeterlinck says he is trying to present in the Bee, and the sort which the bolsheviks say they are trying to present about Edison, shows that both are of the same kind. This conclusion results in no increase of admiration for the bolsheviks but a noticeable decrease of liking for Maeterlinck, who apparently has been cheating some of his readers into thinking that he was telling them Truths when he was only telling facts.

Usually the outcome of the conversation is a feeling of how blessed are we whose imaginations have been stimulated and delighted by Little Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard with his many wives, and tales of that sort, and what an eclipse of the imagination is spreading its shadow over Russia, where even little children have to be told the truth.

The Soviet campaign against folklore in general has been paralleled by an American campaign for Santa Claus in particular, which shows the differing temper of the two countries. Santa, it is well known, drives reindeer. Now it happens that some friends of mine own a hundred thousand reindeer in Alaska and have been trying to find a market for them. Other friends of mine own and edit _The Kansas City Star_, one of the most respectable and respected newspapers in the United States. Theodore Roosevelt, after he had been President, thought it an honor to be one of its editors: and the standards of personnel, management and policy are quite as high now as then. My Alaskan friends are, in ideals and character, not below the level of even the _Star_. However, they were not at that time as well-known, nor was their standing in the community possibly of as direct business value to them. You might, therefore, suspect them of using Santa Claus to help them find a reindeer market, no matter what they thought of the Saint himself. But surely the _Star_, whose business sense is as keen as its ethics are scrupulous, would not touch the enterprise unless its editors were sure of two things: that Santa was all right, for otherwise the _Star_ would not associate with him even for profit; and that nearly everybody else thought Santa all right, for otherwise the _Star_ would not profit by associating with him.

The campaign was planned to deceive the children of Kansas City into believing that the real Santa with his real gift-bearing reindeer had entered into an arrangement to arrive in Kansas City some weeks before Christmas and to be on exhibition there. The _Star_ organization were his alleged representatives and the part for which I was requisitioned by the Lomen Reindeer Corporation was to write to the kiddies a letter telling how I had visited Santa in his northern home and what message he had sent by me to the children of the United States. My letter would be printed on dozens of front pages, aggregating millions in circulation, for this was a nation-wide campaign handled by newspapers or department stores in many of the larger cities, such as Cleveland, Brooklyn, Denver, Oklahoma City, and I have forgotten what other places. The letter I wrote was deceptive, though not literally untruthful. It was printed by all the papers engaged in the Real Santa campaign, and between me and a thousand other willing collaborators who all felt we were doing the nation’s children a real service, we fooled them so thoroughly that the _Star_ (to come back to that worthy paper) was able to stage a parade through the streets of Kansas City that was even larger, it was said, than the American Legion could muster when they held their National Convention in the same city the year before. The entire police force was needed to control the crowd. Some other cities did almost as well.

I have heard much comment on the campaign waged by the _Star_, and by the like-minded papers of other cities, and none has been unfavorable. I believe the mayor of Kansas City thanked the _Star_ for a great public service--or something of that sort. But mayors do such things rather perfunctorily--whatever is done by a prominent enough citizen or foreigner, at that they publicly rejoice. But tradesmen are usually more hard-headed, and their chief organizations are discreet and particular to be always on the side of the common weal. But higher than any of our non-religious bodies in its ideals and aims is likely to be the Parent-Teacher Association of the city. Listen, then, to what they said in a display proclamation which occupied, in suitably large print, nearly a whole page of _The Kansas City Star_ on Christmas Day, 1925:

To _The Kansas City Star_:

May we express our congratulations and appreciation to _The Star_ on the wonderful success of its enterprise in bringing Santa Claus and his reindeer to Kansas City and acting as the host, friend and guide of the children’s Christmas saint.

We believe all Kansas City and our neighboring towns share with us in our felicitation. It is nothing new for _The Star_ to be generously mindful of the children at Christmas time. We have not forgotten _Snow White_, _The Seven Swans_ and _Peter Pan_! But this year Santa Claus and his reindeer have been brought “in person,” have paraded our streets, visited our schools and hospitals and have taken their Christmas cheer directly to the children and to the older folk as well.

The Old Spirit of Christmas has been revived and stimulated, and everybody has been made happier and better by this Yuletide visit. With this Christmas Spirit in our hearts, we now think it most fitting to thank _The Star_ publicity for its unique and happy achievement.

TO SANTA CLAUS AND
HIS HOST:

A MERRY CHRISTMAS AND
THANK YOU

Merchants Association:
Parent-Teacher Association:
Chamber of Commerce

You agree with them, heartily, Gentle Reader, I am sure. And so do I. The pudgy Saint with his sleigh load of gifts and his eight reindeer is part of the glory and romance of childhood. You and I, when we were small and believed in him, saw with our mundane eyes nothing more than a jolly old man in a red coat with a crinkly smile and a flowing beard; the more blessed youngsters of today (thanks to the Lomen Corporation in Alaska and men of humanity and vision in our cities who cooperate with them), become personally acquainted with Dancer and Prancer, and Donner and Blitzen, and all the other members of the famous team. They ride in the sleigh with Santa and they ride on the backs of his deer. They are thrilled by the no longer simulated (as in our day) interest of their parents who now stand shivering with cold and quivering with delight as they are shoved about by policemen to make way for a Santa-and-Reindeer parade as large and enthusiastic as ever marched behind a young lady that swam the channel or a young gentleman who flew the Atlantic.

Best of all, this apparent faith of the elders enables us to stretch the faith of the younger generation a year or two longer than was possible before the Lomen concern thought of providing real reindeer to make the mythical Saint more real. We used to lose such beliefs when we were five, but today the Parent-Teacher Association, the Merchants Association, the Chamber of Commerce, and the _Star_ are able to stretch the faith of Kansas City at least till seven--two years of happy unreality given to thousands of children in that one city alone. And so in many other cities. Multiplying the clear gain, two years for each child, by the total number of children affected, we have an aggregate of millions of happiness-years added for this nation alone. When the fashion spreads to other countries and continues through the years, the total gain to the world will become incalculable.

Preserving the faith of children was the main purpose of the Santa campaign, but the more enterprising newspapers used the opportunity to benefit older readers as well. The Denver paper (which we will not name, for some people mistakenly consider it wrong to deceive grown-ups) erected an imitation snow house near where the reindeer were kept (I think it was at the municipal buildings) and employed an Eskimo, who had never before seen that sort of snow house except in movies, to explain to visitors that he and other reindeer herders of Alaska dwelt in that kind of snow house when they were at home. So far as I could judge, and I was in Denver at the time, every grown person, from Unitarian to Rotarian, swallowed that as readily as the children did the Santa part, and with as much satisfaction. Such beliefs have a moral as well as an entertainment value. It certainly makes you more content with a hall bedroom if you can visualize the Alaska Eskimos shivering in huts of snow.

But this about Alaska snow houses and the preservation of the faith of adults, has been a digression. We must proceed with our systematic inquiry into the planned and benevolent deception of the growing child.

THE CASE OF THE GRADE SCHOOL

We aim in this book at no more than establishing a reasonable presumption either in favor of truth as opposed to deception or else in favor of deception as opposed to truth. We shall not, therefore, attempt a study of our educational system as a whole but shall take a few cases that are typical.

_The Teaching of History_: Under this head we shall consider two general problems and then a few specific instances.

One of those disadvantages of facts which their advocates usually admit, is that they are complicated. Another is that in most cases people cannot agree as to what are the facts. Simplification and standardization are therefore necessary, especially for the young. This is universally conceded.

Not till the prospective historian starts graduate work in a university does he usually begin to have any conception of how debatable are most of the things that he has been taught as a child. The disillusionment then continues rapidly until he feels like selecting as the best definition of his specialty the one usually credited to Napoleon: “History is a set of lies agreed upon.” But (and this is significant), in spite of the high average moral tone of our populations, few historians become crusaders against history. The simplest, and I believe the correct, explanation is that they think that, on the whole, deceiving children does them good.

When we entered the 1914-18 war, we suddenly discovered that most of our school histories were anti-British. Many of them were forthwith changed to pro-British, without a murmur from anyone except a few people who (we all agreed, as soon as they began to protest) were either pro-Germans or Pacifists. But the War, after we got into it, was so short that before it was over there was not time to oust all the anti-British propaganda from the texts. I had the instructive experience of being in a city where a violent newspaper controversy sprang up between correspondents, some of whom advocated anti-British history but most of whom favored pro-British. The ground of the pros was that we ought to stand by our former allies, that there might soon be another war, and that we should bring up the younger generation strong for English-speaking unity, because that was the natural basis of the coming alignment. Some argued specifically that we might be able to annex Canada if we used the same sort of histories as the Canadians and therefore grew up to the same beliefs. Even the Hearst papers, which then opposed this view and anything else that seemed to favor the British, later came out for the principle and advocated an English-speaking union.

The voices which suggested an impartial history were few and weak. Thus did what we believe to be the sound common sense of the people manifest itself. For next after patriotism comes a right world outlook. We must know in advance what country to favor in time of trouble. And how can the needed unanimity be secured in a democracy except by teaching the youngsters to like the right country so that they may vote correctly when they later come to decide tariffs, treaties and wars?

Much proof of what no one doubts is tedious and we have gone far enough in the argument. Certainly if you are pro-British, you will see at once that teaching love for British ideals, respect for British institutions, cannot help but benefit any country. If you are not pro-British, you can arrive at the same conclusion by substituting in the discussion the name of whatever country you most admire. Call that country X. You will then at once see the advantage of teaching the rising generation to be pro-X, or _proex_--to coin a much-needed word.

The reader may here object that even if it is agreed that history teaching in the schools should be chiefly for the purpose of laying down principles to guide us in life, it does not follow that we have to teach children to be in favor of any particular country or set of countries. Perhaps you are a pronounced isolationist and think we are strong enough to go it alone, then this strength would be increased by the solidarity we would gain if we learned in school to dislike all other nations and later ran our government and shaped our private actions so as to get them all to dislike us. That is an old and much-advocated principle: that real unity can be attained only in the face of a common enemy. Very well, then, you are not a Proex but an Antex, and you must go about trying to get the schools into your hands. Let the best men win! It looks just now as if it would be the Antexes.

Coming to specific problems of truth in history, we need little but a catalogue to see on which side we stand. Supposing, just for argument, that the biographers of Lincoln could prove, as some of them have tried to do, that he was of illegitimate descent, would you then want that taught in the schools? The conclusive arguments against are: (1) Such teaching would attack the Home, the most precious of all our institutions; for Lincoln is our greatest national hero, and having him illegitimate, even if only back in his parents’ or grandparents’ generation, would be a destructive influence. (2) That teaching would also attack the institution of National Heroes. Lincoln is our greatest hero; nothing is more beneficial than to have heroes to look up to; we would not look up to Lincoln quite so much if he were in any degree illegitimate; therefore we ought to hide the fact, if it were a fact. (3) Nothing could be gained by encouraging children to attach scandal to the names of great men. (4) It would be in bad taste to teach in school about the illegitimacy of anyone. On the basis of these and many similar reasons, all decent people will agree that the question of whether Lincoln was illegitimate should never be mentioned in the schools.

To be on the safe side, the author states here emphatically that the biographers who favor the legitimacy of Lincoln, even unto the third and fourth generation, have, in his opinion, much the best of the argument. For this book might possibly fall into the hands of minors.

It is maintained by some that it would do no harm for adults to know the fact, if it were a fact, that Lincoln was illegitimate. Their reasoning is that character is formed in infancy and that the perverting influence of a truth, no matter how improper, is negligible in adults. We agree with that contention, and the more readily because it is in harmony with the conclusion at which we are fast arriving (a conclusion, by the way, at which you could arrive still faster with less reasoning): The purpose of child training is to build character, and all education should therefore trend toward that goal. The truth should be admitted into the curriculum or kept out of it by that test alone. Facts of a disturbing nature should be permitted, if at all, only when characters have set beyond the reasonable possibility of change.

The importance of discretion in history teaching was once brought forcibly to my attention when I was spending a summer in northern Vermont, and found in use three miles away across the Canadian line in Quebec, school texts in which the War of 1812 differed so much from the war in the Vermont histories that you would hardly believe it was the same war. You can readily see how wise that was on both sides. Imagine the discord that would be introduced into the teaching of Canadian patriotism if they used Vermont histories, and similarly what havoc a Canadian history could work, if tossed into our school system like a stone into delicate machinery. Nor is there any halfway course possible. If you were to cut out all the contradictions, there would be little left of that particular war; neither would the leavings be any good for inculcating patriotism or other moral virtues into either Canadians or Americans. Obviously things had best remain as they are.

Or would you ever hint in the history courses that Sir Galahad never had a bath? That Tristram’s courting, so touchingly described by Edwin Arlington Robinson, must have smelled pretty strong even at arm’s length (except when the wind was just right)? That some of the most revered saints of the Church made vows never to bathe and never to be unkind to the lice that swarmed over them? And that the only two great bathing eras of known history were the ancient period which historians call the decline of the Roman Empire, when civilization was going to the dogs, and our modern period, when the Fundamentalists tell us we are all going to the Devil? Would not such teaching suggest that there may be a connection between clean bodies and unclean living? And what could be worse for æsthetics or for the soap trade?

The fact was, of course, that Tristram liked the smell of his sweetheart, and she liked his, both being used to it, and that the sinners as well as the saints of the Middle Ages really enjoyed what we would call the stink of foul linen. The past was not necessarily such an unpleasant time for those who lived in it (in view of their tastes). But, even after dwelling on that, most of us will remain convinced of the superiority of our own taste, and will continue unwilling that historical studies shall in any way encourage those of our youngsters who seem to have been born with medieval propensities for dirt.

Indeed, what possible good end could be served by letting such facts (if they be facts) gain currency through history teaching? Would patriotism, good manners, or good morals profit thereby? Would such teaching build character? Certainly not, and the present course is the right one: to say nothing about bathing in the Age of Chivalry, but to imply always that cleanliness is the natural state and passion of man--excepting rare miscreants who come to school inadequately washed behind the ears.

And so we might go on, canvassing our histories and our moral, political and æsthetic judgments till we arrive at the conclusion that in school texts at least the truth needs to be very judiciously handled.

_The Teaching of Physiology_: If the truth be a tricky thing in history, it is no less so in many other “branches” taught in the first eight grades of school. For instance, consider physiology. We need not dwell on sex, which most of us instinctively and rightly feel must not be thrust upon the young, but will instead continue under this head the discussion with which we ended the section on history.

Cleanliness may seem to lie in the field of æsthetics, but it has the most practical value. You would be ostracized socially if people knew you did not bathe; you would be worse off than if you had halitosis and four-out-of-five pyorrhea. Personality courses, books on etiquette, and the efforts of the Hamilton Institute combined with Pelmanism would be of little avail to gain you preferment. Listerine could not remove the odor nor Pond’s Cream make your countenance seem agreeable. So at least, we believe, and so the rising generation must be taught to believe, or cleanliness may depart from among us.

But it is now said by some of the physiologists (doubtless untruly) that nearly all the supposed scientific arguments for bathing are fictions and fallacies. _Item_: The skin does not excrete any appreciable amount of harmful substances from the body, nor do the pores “breathe.” Therefore your system is not purified by “keeping the pores open” and one argument on bathing-for-health disappears. _Item_: A chief function of the skin is to protect the body; poisons, such as mercury, cannot enter your body through a skin proofed with its own secretions, but will seep through if the natural lubricants have been washed away with warm water, soap, or other methods. Therefore your health is, in this respect at least, the safer the less you bathe, and another of the standard arguments vanishes. _Item_: The skin’s own secretions keep it softer and in better condition than any substitute yet discovered. This is a deserved pat on the shoulder for the Lord who made us, but a rather stiff jolt for the cosmetic manufacturers. _Item_: The body odors come chiefly from three areas or parts of the body (that are too taboo for mention even here). Keeping these clean goes nine-tenths of the way toward freeing you from odors that other normal humans can detect, and changing your underwear every day, or even every other day, would go the remaining one-tenth, thus removing that argument for bathing.

And so on for many arguments more, the sum of which is that if you have a healthy skin it is safe enough to bathe if you like; but with eczema and certain other diseases you must not bathe if you want to stop the blotches from spreading, or to sleep for the itching at night.

Now just assume, for argument’s sake, that all the above (or to be conservative, say half of it), is true. Then ask yourself, would you be in favor of having little children of the dirty-ear stage find out about it? The slogan was, in the generation of our parents: “Cleanliness is next to Godliness.” But the investment in soap and in the allied industries has grown faster since then than the property of the churches, and the soaps advertise more. Today the sales talk sways the nation, and it is doubtful if godliness even approaches cleanliness in popularity. We must fight harder, therefore, to keep such physiology out of the schools, than any fundamentalist has yet fought to keep Darwinism out of the colleges. And we shall succeed, backed as we are by the advertising funds and the publicity genius of the whole soap industry from Bon Ami to Zap.

But there is one disquieting thought: The interests of Listerine and the perfumers are opposed to those of the soap and bath towel manufacturers. Europe, too, may seek to control our cleanliness, as it does our politics, by its insidious propaganda. But, fortunately, it will be disunited. It will be England pleading that odors be removed with Lifebuoy against France urging that they be covered up with Houbigant. These may kill each other off. Then there will be apathy and discord at home among our Napoleons of business. Some will stand aside from the struggle, for great houses, like Colgate, make soap as well as perfume. The underwear manufacturers will be against both, and so will the laundries, for they will want us to get rid of odors by frequent changes of linen. Frequent launderings wear out clothes and thus benefit the cotton planters of the South and the wool ranchers of the West.

The issue will be doubtful if the battle ever starts. We, the great public, having once been won over from France and the perfume to England and the tub, should try to prevent the issue from ever rising again by keeping the unæsthetic new physiology out of the schools.

Furthermore, especially as this book may fall into the hands of minors, the so-called new physiology is doubtless all wrong. So let us continue circulating the story about the page in Venice who was clothed in gold leaf for a pageant and who died of suffocation because his pores could not breathe. Let us never forget suggesting, when we see a lad whose face is covered with pimples, that he has doubtless been neglecting his wash basin and soap. And let us soft pedal the fact, if it be a fact, that abstinence from bathing is frequently prescribed by the most expensive skin specialists.

_The Teaching of Geography_: The teaching of this science brings out a new consideration--the reticence customarily practiced in it, while no less benevolent than in the other subjects, is based on motives new in our discussion and results in benefits of a different kind.

When facts are played down in geography teaching it is not usually because they would be in bad taste or otherwise detrimental to the character of the scholars, but rather because they are too complicated. The teachers are busy and overworked, and the pupils have limited time for the curriculum, for some of them may have to quit school soon and go to work. A complicated idea takes a long time to teach, it is hard to learn and difficult to remember and understand. From both the giving and receiving end, simplicity is therefore desirable, but facts have usually the unfortunate defect of being complicated. In the practice of teaching it is therefore often necessary and sometimes desirable to ignore them. We can best and most sympathetically understand this if we take a case where we have been ourselves deceived, for we shall then be able to testify from personal knowledge that we have benefited, or at least that we have suffered no harm.

The best geographical example under this head is perhaps one of those upon which we touched briefly in the first section of this book--that, other things being equal, the farther north you go the colder it gets, no matter what the time of year. We shall develop that topic more fully than we did before, exploring some of its more instructive and entertaining ramifications.

First we need perspective from the history of geographical science. As in many other cases, we owe the beginnings of learning in this field to the Greeks. They may have borrowed from earlier civilizations, and probably did; but they formulated the doctrines and cast them into the molds in which many of them are still set. One of their chief achievements was that they worked out the laws of temperature distribution over the earth substantially as we learned them in the grade schools up to a few years ago, and roughly as they still remain in the minds of the general public.

Already five hundred years before Christ, the Greeks knew that the earth was a sphere. They understood the migration of the sun northward over the earth in summer and southward in winter between what they called, and what we still call, the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. They also determined the polar circles beyond which the sun does not rise in winter nor set in summer. This was dividing the earth into five logical zones. The Greeks and the rest of mankind lived, they said, in a zone that was temperate. But if you crossed the Mediterranean and were to travel south into Africa you would get too near the sun and come first to a section unpleasantly hot, then to one intolerable, and last to a burning region where no living thing, either plant or animal, could exist by reason of the fierce downpour of the sun’s heat. This was the Torrid Zone. Going north from Greece you came similarly first to lands unpleasantly cold, then to others intolerable, and last to a permanently frozen region “where life is as impossible because of the freezing as it is in the Torrid Zone because of the burning.” South of the tropics there doubtless was another temperate zone and this might be inhabited--probably was, in fact, though we should never know except by inference, as no one could ever cross the burning tropics. And at the south end of the earth would be a second frozen zone.

Thus from their doctrines of beauty, simplicity, and symmetry, and from the principles of logic the Greeks evolved laws of temperature distribution which are so easy to explain and understand that if you had never heard of them before you could have grasped both them and their necessary implications from a description no longer nor better composed than mine that you have just read. Such a natural law is a boon to teacher and student alike. No wonder, then, that it held its ground from more than four hundred years before Christ to more than fourteen hundred years after, as John Kirtland Wright has recently proved in a long and scholarly work published by the American Geographical Society of New York: _The Geographical Lore of the Time of the Crusades_.

That we do not still have in the schools these Greek temperature laws in all their pristine simplicity is due to two of mankind’s most troublesome qualities, cupidity and skepticism. In the fifteenth century Western Europe was greedy for the riches of the Far East, and the road to Cathay, traveled by Marco Polo and his predecessors and successors, had been closed by Mohammedan victories over the less bigoted Mongols. It is usually easy to disbelieve anything that crosses our desires, and so doubts began to arise as to whether the tropic lands were really burning hot and the tropic oceans boiling. Henry the Navigator gets most of the credit for cooling off the burning zone by sending out ship after ship that went farther and farther south along the West Coast of Africa, each returning with fearful tales of what they had seen or imagined, but most of them nevertheless returning and thus giving hope that others might go still farther. At last a ship did sail to where the sun stood overhead without cooking the sailors alive. Indeed, she returned with the story that the days had not been hotter right below the sun than they were on some occasions in Portugal.

So began the “Conquest of the Tropics,” and so ended the simplicity of the Greek laws of temperature distribution. Every work on meteorology of college grade now tells you that the highest temperatures registered by thermometers in the shade, under weather bureau conditions, are not recorded in the Torrid Zone at all; but in the Temperate (!) Zones. Probably the highest in-the-shade records so far taken are those of Death Valley, California, about 900 miles north of the northern edge of the Torrid Zone--136°; almost certainly the highest temperatures that can be recorded in Africa are in the Sahara Desert, also north of the tropics. If there are higher temperatures south of the Equator we feel sure they will not be near the Equator, but near the tropic of Capricorn or else (more likely) in the South Temperate Zone.

These principles are now known to all authors of text books, but they are still able to maintain a degree of simplicity in the lower school grades by implying it is average temperatures that matter, and by saying nothing about extremes. The fact is that averages count for some things and extremes for others, and that both are important. It is not, of course, the average cold of January that sometimes destroys the fruit in the South, but the one extreme night; similarly it is not the average heat of July that kills by sunstroke in New York but the one extreme day. Extremes are really more important, in that sense, than averages; but averages are much simpler and more teachable. It is so complicated to explain and remember that extremes may be high where averages are high, that extremes may be high where averages are low, and that extremes may be low where averages are low. We would certainly have to lengthen out our school courses if we went into such hairsplitting, and our millions of potential workers would be kept out of the mills and factories even longer than they are now. Besides, the complexities of facts are bewildering and confusing to the average mind, and never give the feeling of enlightenment you have when you grasp a simple principle which throws a flood of logical light on a previously haphazard world.

It is unfortunate--or perhaps fortunate--that we have not space to go deeply into the history of the way in which the simple Greek law of temperature distribution has been gradually broken down by explorers who went to remote places and came back with stories of conditions that did not fit into the theory, and how the scientists toiled at fitting together the mosaic pieces till they finally evolved an explanation that does fit all the facts. But we must give at least a brief sketch.

The investigation that has been going on since the days of Prince Henry the Navigator started from the simple Greek proposition: There is no cold and the greatest heat on the Equator, no extreme of either heat or cold in the North Temperate Zone, and no heat but merely intense cold at the North Pole. The first slight exceptions to this had, of course, been noted long before Henry’s day: The mountain tops are cold. Other discrepancies due to sea breezes, ocean currents, and many other things soon followed, but they were, on the whole, not very difficult to explain as exceptions to the rule. True enough, the altitude one was taken to be a universal exception; mountains were said to be colder than their surroundings in any zone at any time of year, and it became a popular saying that climbing a few feet up was like traveling a good many miles north.

All exceptions other than altitude were explained in the Middle Ages, and down to our day, as an inroad of conditions from one zone into the territory of another--the Gulf Stream warmed the British Isles because it came from the tropics, the Labrador Current cooled Newfoundland because it came from the Arctic, and so on. New Yorkers still speak of sunstroke waves as coming from the Equator, even on occasions when the press reports few or no deaths south of Washington and the weather bureau shows that Boston is hotter than Richmond (those who think about it at all probably supposing that the heat arrives by some special conveyance through the upper atmosphere). By similar acceptance of theory and lack of reasoning, cold winds are still spoken of as coming from the North Pole.

Serious trouble for the classic theory first developed when travelers returned from the Arctic with their reports. John Davis, whose name you find on the strait west of Greenland, said, for instance, that he had been far within the so-called Frozen Zone “three divers times” (1585-1588) and that he had on occasion found the weather there “as salubrious as ever I did in the Isles of De Verde”--which was certainly amazing, for those islands lie in the region supposed until Prince Henry’s time (after 1400 A.D.) to be lifeless “because of the burning.”

Both before and after Davis there were, however, conflicting reports from the Arctic explorers, those of the hero kind speaking (with modest reserve) only about the cold, while those of the commercial type, like Davis, dwelt on the surprising heat. On the whole there was reason for the textbook writers to side uncompromisingly with the Greeks (particularly in elementary education, where simplicity is most desirable), so long as any travelers continued to support them.

The balance was more seriously disturbed than ever before when the weather bureaus entered the field, and the U. S. Weather Bureau, for instance, began to report from Fort Yukon, Alaska, which is within the Arctic Circle, temperatures and humidities like those which kill people in New York. After that the classic simplicity of the zone in which it is “always cold” could be maintained only by ignoring the records. This has been done with remarkable success, for the textbooks stating or plainly inferring that it is never warm in the Arctic were in extensive use in American schools for more than twenty years after the Bureau at Washington began to publish at government expense Arctic temperatures ranging up to 100° in the shade. You can verify this by going ten years back in the geographies used by the schools of your own neighborhood--not in every case, but in most.