Chapter I: Part 1

By Agnes Repplier

COUNTER-CURRENTS.

AMERICANS AND OTHERS.

A HAPPY HALF-CENTURY AND OTHER ESSAYS.

IN OUR CONVENT DAYS.

COMPROMISES.

THE FIRESIDE SPHINX. With 4 full-page and 17 text Illustrations by Miss E. BONSALL.

BOOKS AND MEN.

POINTS OF VIEW.

ESSAYS IN IDLENESS.

IN THE DOZY HOURS, AND OTHER PAPERS.

ESSAYS IN MINIATURE.

A BOOK OF FAMOUS VERSE. Selected by Agnes Repplier. In Riverside Library for Young People.

THE SAME. _Holiday Edition._

VARIA.

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
BOSTON AND NEW YORK

COUNTER-CURRENTS

BY

AGNES REPPLIER, LITT.D.

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1916

COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY AGNES REPPLIER

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

_Published April 1916_

THIRD IMPRESSION, AUGUST 1916

Note

These nine essays, in their original form, were published in the _Atlantic Monthly_ during the past three years.

Contents

The Cost of Modern Sentiment 1

Our Loss of Nerve 33

Christianity and War 63

Women and War 98

The Repeal of Reticence 136

Popular Education 165

The Modest Immigrant 197

Waiting 233

Americanism 260

COUNTER-CURRENTS

The Cost of Modern Sentiment

We are rising dizzily and fearlessly on the crest of a great wave of sentiment. When the wave breaks, we may find ourselves submerged, and in danger of drowning; but for the present we are full of hope and high resolve. Forty years ago we stood in shallow water, and mocked at the mid-Victorian sentiment, then ebbing slowly with the tide. We have nothing now in common with that fine, thin, tenacious conception of life and its responsibilities. We do not prate about valour for men, and domesticity for women. A vague humanity is our theme. We do not feel the fastidious distaste for repulsive details which made our grandparents culpably negligent. All knowledge, apart from its quality, and apart from our requirements, now seems to us desirable. Taste is no longer a controlling force. We do not, if we can help it, look “that jade, Duty,”--I use Sir Walter Scott’s phrase, and he knew the lady in question better than do most men,--squarely in the face; but we speak well of her behind her back, which is more than Sir Walter did. To hear us talk, one would imagine that she never cost a pang.

The sentiment of to-day is social and philanthropic. It has no affiliations with art, which stands aloof from it,--a new experience for the world. It dominates periodical literature, minor fiction, and serious verse; but it has so far given nothing of permanent value to letters. It is in high favour with politicians, and is echoed loudly from all party platforms. It has unduly influenced our attitude toward the war in Europe, and toward our defences at home. It is a force to be reckoned with, and to be controlled. It is capable of raising us to a better and clearer vision, or of weakening our judgment and shattering our common sense. If we value our safety, we must forever bear in mind that sentiment is subjective, and a personal thing. However exalted and however ardent, it cannot be accepted as a scale for justice, or as a test for truth.

The issues with which our modern sentiment chiefly concerns itself are the conditions of labour, the progress of women, the social evil, and--for the past two years--the overwhelming question of peace and war. Sometimes these issues are commingled. Always they have a bearing upon one another. There is also a distinct and perilous tendency toward sentiment in matters political and judicial; while an excess of emotionalism is the stumbling-block of those noble associations which work for the protection of animals. It is profoundly discouraging to read in the accredited organ of an American humane society an angry protest against Vilhjalmur Stefansson’s being permitted the use of Eskimo dogs on his Arctic explorations, because, forsooth, when he went hungry, the dogs went hungry too, and because their feet were hurt by the ice. The writer (a woman) reminds us that these dogs (like all other animals) are not “free agents”; and she calls upon public opinion and law to rescue them. We hear about the “long arm of the law,” but it would be a giant stretch that could reach Stefansson in his ice-fields. “Men who do such things,” she affirms, “are not heroes of the highest type; and, anyway, when you have found or explored the North Pole or the South Pole, what can you do with it?”

This query is hard to answer. Perhaps no explorer wants to do anything with the Poles; but just leave them as they are, uncolonized for the present. They are not the only things in the world which have no commercial value. But if Stefansson is not a hero, of what stuff are heroes made, and where shall we look to find one? And with all Europe crying out in its agony of pain, is it worth our while to worry over a few dogs, who are doing, under hard conditions, the work they are fitted to do?

The same journal insults the intelligence of its readers by printing a wild rhapsody of Mrs. Annie Besant’s, apparently under the illusion that it can be accepted as an argument for vegetarianism. I venture to quote one particularly mad paragraph as an illustration of the unplumbed depths to which emotional humanitarianism can descend:--

“The killing of animals in order to devour their flesh is so obviously an outrage on all humane feelings, that one is almost ashamed to mention it in a paper that is regarding man as a director of evolution. If any one who eats flesh could be taken to the shambles, to watch the agonized struggles of the terrified victims as they are dragged to the spot where knife or mallet slays them; if he could be made to stand with the odours of the blood reeking in his nostrils; if there his astral vision could be opened so that he might see the filthy creatures that flock round to feast on the loathsome exhalations, and see also the fear and horror of the slaughtered beasts as they arrive in the astral world, and send back thence currents of dread and hatred that flow between men and animals in constantly re-fed streams; if a man could pass through these experiences, he would be cured of meat-eating forever.”

Now, when one has belonged for many years to the society which printed this precious paragraph, when one has believed all one’s life that to be sentient is to possess rights, and that, not kindness only, but justice to the brute creation is an essential element of decent living, it is hard to be confronted with unutterable nonsense about astral currents and astral visions. It is harder still to be held indirectly responsible for the publication of such nonsense, and to entertain for the thousandth time the weary conviction that common sense is not a determining factor in humanity.

Mr. Chesterton, upon whom the delight of startling his readers never seems to pall, has declared that men are more sentimental than women, “whose only fault is their excessive sense.” Also that the apparent absorption of the modern world in social service is not the comprehensive thing it seems. The general public still remains indifferent. This may or may not be true. It is as hard for Mr. Chesterton as for the rest of us to know much about that remnant of the public which is not writing, or lecturing, or collecting data, or collecting funds, or working for clubs and societies. But no one can say that the social reformer is the slighted creature that he was a half-century ago. He meets with the most distinguished consideration, and he is always accorded the first hearing in print and on the platform. He commands our respect when he deals soberly with sober facts in sober language, when his conclusions are just, his statements irrefutable. He is less praiseworthy when he flies to fiction, an agreeable but unconvincing medium; or to verse, which, as the theologian said of “Paradise Lost,” “proves nothing.” It is very good verse sometimes, and its grace of sentiment, its note of appeal, find an easy echo in the reader’s heart.

A little poem called “The Factories,” published in “McClure’s Magazine” for September, 1912, gives an almost perfect example of the modern point of view, of the emotional treatment of an economic question, and of the mental confusion which arises from the substitution of sympathy for exactness.

“I have shut my little sister in from life and light
(For a rose, for a ribbon, for a wreath across my hair),
I have made her restless feet still until the night,
Locked from sweets of summer, and from wild spring air:
I who ranged the meadow-lands, free from sun to sun,
Free to sing, and pull the buds, and watch the far wings fly,
I have bound my sister till her playing-time is done,--
Oh, my little sister, was it I?--was it I?

“I have robbed my sister of her day of maidenhood
(For a robe, for a feather, for a trinket’s restless spark),
Shut from Love till dusk shall fall, how shall she know good,
How shall she pass scatheless through the sin-lit dark?
I who could be innocent, I who could be gay,
I who could have love and mirth before the light went by,
I have put my sister in her mating-time away,--
Sister, my young sister, was it I?--was it I?

“I have robbed my sister of the lips against her breast
(For a coin, for the weaving of my children’s lace and lawn),
Feet that pace beside the loom, hands that cannot rest:
How can she know motherhood, whose strength is gone?
I who took no heed of her, starved and labor worn,
I against whose placid heart my sleepy gold-heads lie,
Round my path they cry to me, little souls unborn,--
God of Life--Creator! It was I! It was I.”

Now if by “I” is meant the average woman who wears the “robe,” the “ribbon,” the “feather,” and possibly--though rarely--the “wreath across my hair,” “I” must protest distinctly against assuming a guilt which is none of mine. I have not shut my little sister in a factory, any more than I have ranged the meadow-lands, “free from sun to sun.” What I probably am doing is trying to persuade my sister to cook my dinner, and sweep my house, and help me to take care of my “gold-heads,” who are not always so sleepy as I could desire. If my sister declines to do this at a wage equal to her factory earnings, and with board and lodging included, she is well within her rights, and I have no business, as is sometimes my habit, weakly to complain of her decision. If I made my household arrangements acceptable to her, she would come. As this is difficult or distasteful to me, she goes to a factory instead. The right of every man and woman to do the work he or she chooses to do, and can do, at what wages, and under what conditions he or she can command, is the fruit of centuries of struggle. It is now so well established that only the trade unions venture to deny it.

In that vivid and sad study of New York factory life, published some years ago by the Century Company, under the title of “The Long Day,” a girl who is out of work, and who has lost her few possessions in a lodging-house fire, seeks counsel of a wealthy stranger who has befriended her.

“The lady looked at me a moment out of fine, clear eyes.

“‘You would not go into service, I suppose?’ she asked slowly.

“I had never thought of such an alternative before, but I met it without a moment’s hesitation. ‘No, I would not care to go into service,’ I replied; and, as I did so, the lady’s face showed mingled disappointment and disgust.

“‘That is too bad,’ she answered, ‘for, in that case, I’m afraid I can do nothing for you.’ And she went out of the room, leaving me, I must confess, not sorry for having thus bluntly decided against wearing the definite badge of servitude.”

Here at least is a refreshingly plain statement of facts. The girl in question bore the servitude imposed upon her by the foremen of half a dozen factories; she slept for many months in quarters which no domestic servant would consent to occupy; she ate food which no servant would be asked to eat; she associated with young women whom no servant would accept as equals and companions. But, as she had voluntarily relinquished comfort, protection, and the grace of human relations between employer and employed, she accepted her chosen conditions, and tried successfully to better them along her chosen lines. The reader is made to understand that it was as unreasonable for the benevolent lady--who had visions of a trim and white-capped parlor-maid dancing before her eyes--to show “disappointment and disgust” because her overtures were rejected, as it would have been to charge the same lady with robbing the girl of her “day of maidenhood,” and her “little souls unborn,” by shutting her up in a factory. If we will blow our minds clear of generous illusions, we shall understand that an emotional verdict has no validity when offered as a criterion of facts.

The excess of sentiment, which is misleading in philanthropy and economics, grows acutely dangerous when it interferes with legislation, or with the ordinary rulings of morality. The substitution of a sentimental principle of authority for the impersonal processes of law confuses our understanding, and undermines our sense of justice. It is a painful truth that most laws have had their origin in a profound mistrust of human nature (even Mr. Olney admits that the Constitution, although framed in the interests of freedom, is not strictly altruistic); but the time is hardly ripe for brushing aside this ungenerous mistrust, and establishing the social order on a basis of pure enthusiasm. The reformers who light-heartedly announce that people are “tired of the old Constitution anyway,” voice the buoyant creed of ignorance. I once heard a popular lecturer say of a popular idol that he “preferred making precedents to following them,” and the remark evoked a storm of applause. It was plain that the audience considered following a precedent to be a timorous and unworthy thing for a strong man to do; and it was equally plain that nobody had given the matter the benefit of a serious thought. Believers in political faith-healing enjoy a supreme immunity from doubt.

This growing contempt for paltry but not unuseful restrictions, this excess of sentiment, combined with paucity of humour and a melodramatic attitude toward crime, has had some discouraging results. It is ill putting the strong man, or the avenging angel, or the sinned-against woman above the law, which is a sacred trust for the preservation of life and liberty. It is ill so to soften our hearts with a psychological interest in the lawbreaker that no criminal is safe from popularity. The “Nation” performed a well-timed duty when it commented grimly on the message sent to the public by a murderer, and a singularly cold-blooded murderer, through the minister who attended him on the scaffold: “Mr. Beattie desired to thank his many friends for kind letters and expressions of interest, and the public for whatever sympathy was felt or expressed.”

It sounds like a cabinet minister who has lost an honoured and beloved wife; not like an assassin who has lured _his_ wife to a lonely spot, and there pitilessly killed her. One fails to see why “kind letters” and “expressions of interest” should have poured in upon this malefactor, just as one fails to see why a young woman who shot her lover a few months later in Columbus, Ohio, should have received an ovation in the court-room. It was not even her first lover (it seldom is); but when a gallant jury had acquitted her of all blame in the trifling matter of manslaughter, “the crowd shouted its approval”; “scores of women rushed up to her, and insisted upon kissing her”; and an intrepid suitor, stimulated by circumstances which might have daunted a less mettlesome man, announced his intention of marrying the heroine on the spot.

In New York a woman murdered her lover because he refused his aid--a dastardly refusal--when her husband had cast her off. She was not only acquitted by a jury,--which was to be expected; but the husband, pleased with the turn affairs had taken, restored her to his home and his affections; and a sympathetic newspaper offered this explanation to a highly gratified public: “They are Sicilians, and in Sicily a woman may retrieve her own honour and avenge her husband’s, only by doing as this woman had done.”

Perhaps. But New York is not Sicily, our civilization is not Sicilian civilization, and our courts of law are not modelled on a Sicilian vendetta. The reporter described with all the eloquence of his craft the young wife reconciled and joyous in her husband’s arms, laughing and singing to her baby, happier than she had been at any time since her honeymoon. A pretty picture, if the shadow of a murdered man did not intrude upon it.

Our revolt from the old callous cruelty--the heart-sickening cruelty of the eighteenth century--has made us tender to criminals, and strangely lenient to their derelictions. It inspires genial visitors at Sing Sing to write about the “fine type” of men, sentenced for the foulest of crimes. It fills us all with concern lest detention prove irksome to the detained, lest baseball and well-appointed vaudeville should not sufficiently beguile the tedium of their leisure hours.

“Imprisonment alone is not
A thing of which we would complain,
And ill-conwenience is our lot,
But do not give the convick pain.”

Sentiment has been defined as a revolt from the despotism of facts. It is often a revolt from authority, which, to the sentimentalist, seems forever despotic; and this revolt, or rather this easy disregard of authority, is fatal to the noblest efforts of the humanitarian. The women of wealth and position who from time to time fling themselves with ardour into the cause of striking shirt-waist-makers and garment-makers are always well intentioned, but not always well advised. In so far as they uphold the strikers in what are often just and reasonable demands, they do good work; and the substantial aid they give is sweetened by the spirit in which it is given,--the sense of fellow feeling with their kind. But there is no doubt that one of the lessons taught at such times to our foreign-born population is that the laws of our country may be disregarded with impunity. The picketers who attack the “scab” workers, and are arrested for disorderly conduct, are swiftly released, to become the heroines of the hour. I once remonstrated with a friend who had given bail for a dozen of these young lawbreakers, and she answered reproachfully: “But they are so ignorant and helpless. There were two poor bewildered girls in court yesterday who did not know enough English to understand the charge made against them. You could not conceive of anything more pathetic.”

I said that a young woman who bowled over another young woman into the gutter understood perfectly the charge made against her, whether she spoke English or not. One does not have to study French or Spanish to know that one may not knock down a Frenchman or a Spaniard. No civilized country permits this robust line of argument. But reason is powerless when sentiment takes the helm. It would be as easy to argue with a conflagration as with unbalanced zeal. The vision of a good cause debauched by intemperance is familiar to all students of sociology; but it is no less melancholy for being both recognizable and ridiculous.

A moderate knowledge of history--which, though discouraging, is also enlightening--might prove serviceable to all the enthusiasts who are engaged in making over the world. Many of them (in this country, at least) talk and write as if nothing in particular had happened between the Deluge and the Civil War. That they sometimes know as little of the Civil War as of the Deluge is proven by the lament of an ardent and oratorical pacifist that this great struggle should be spoken of in school histories as a war for the preservation of the Union, instead of a war for the abolishment of slavery. A lady lecturer, very prominent in social work, has made the gratifying announcement that “the greatest discovery of the nineteenth century is woman’s discovery of herself. It is only within the last fifty years that it has come to be realized that a woman is human, and has a right to think and act for herself.”

Now, after all, the past cannot be a closed page, even to one so exclusively concerned with the present. A little less talking, a little more reading, and such baseless generalizations would be impossible, even on that stronghold of ignorance, the platform. If women failed to discover themselves a hundred, or five hundred years ago, it was because they had never been lost; it was because their important activities left them no leisure for self-contemplation. Yet Miss Jane Addams, who has toiled so long and so nobly for the bettering of social conditions, and whose work lends weight to her words, displays in “A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil” the same placid indifference to all that history has to tell. What can we say or think when confronted by such an astounding passage as this?

“Formerly all that the best woman possessed was a negative chastity, which had been carefully guarded by her parents and duennas. The chastity of the modern woman of self-directed activity and of a varied circle of interests, which give her an acquaintance with many men as well as women, has therefore a new value and importance in the establishment of social standards.”

“Negative chastity!” “Parents and duennas!” Was there ever such a maiden outlook upon life! It was the chastity of the married woman upon which rested the security of the civilized world;--that chastity which all men prized, and most men assailed, which was preserved in the midst of temptations unknown in our decorous age, and held inviolate by women whose “acquaintance with many men” was at least as intimate and potent as anything experienced to-day. Committees and congresses are not the only meeting-grounds for the sexes. “Remember,” says M. Taine, writing of a time which was not so long ago that it need be forgotten, “remember that during all these years women were paramount. They set the social tone, led society, and thereby guided public opinion. When they appeared in the vanguard of political progress, we may be sure that the men were following.”

We might be sure of the same thing to-day, were it not for the tendency of the modern woman to sever her rights and wrongs from the rights and wrongs of men; thereby resembling the disputant who, being content to receive half the severed baby, was adjudged by the wise Solomon to be unworthy of any baby at all. Half a baby is every whit as valuable as the half-measure of reform which fails to take into impartial consideration the inseparable claims of men and women. Even in that most vital of all reforms, the crusade against social evils, the welfare of both sexes unifies the subject. Here again we are swayed by our anger at the indifference of an earlier generation, at the hard and healthy attitude of men like Huxley, who had not imagination enough to identify the possible saint with the certain sinner, and who habitually confined their labours to fields which promised sure results. “In my judgment,” wrote Huxley, “a domestic servant, who is perhaps giving half her wages to support her old parents, is more worthy of help than half a dozen Magdalens.”

If we are forced to choose between them,--yes. But our esteem for the servant’s self-respecting life, with its decent restraints and its purely normal activities, need not necessarily harden our hearts against the women whom Mr. Huxley called “Magdalens,” nor against those whom we luridly designate as “white slaves.” No work under Heaven is more imperative than the rescue of young and innocent girls; no crime is more dastardly than the sale of their youth and innocence; no charity is greater than that which lifts the sinner from her sin. But the fact that we habitually apply the term “white slave” to the wilful prostitute as well as to the entrapped child shows that a powerful and popular sentiment is absolved from the shackles of accuracy. Also that this absolution confuses the minds of men. The sentimentalist pities the prostitute as a victim; the sociologist abhors her as a menace. The sentimentalist conceives that men prey, and women are preyed upon; the sociologist, aware that evil men and women prey upon one another ceaselessly and ravenously, has no measure of mercy for sin. The sentimentalist clings tenaciously to the association of youth with innocence; the sociologist knows that even the age-limit which the law fixes as a boundary-line of innocence has no corresponding restriction in fact. It is inconceivable that so many books and pamphlets dealing with this subject--books and pamphlets now to be found on every library shelf, and in the hands of young and old--should dare to ignore the balance of depravity, the swaying of the pendulum of vice.

A new and painful instance of the cost of modern sentiment is afforded by the statement of Miss Addams and other pacifists that middle-aged men are in favour of strengthened defences, and that young men oppose them, as savouring of militarism; that middle-aged men cling to the belief that war may be just and righteous, and that young men reject it, as unreservedly and inevitably evil. I am loath to accept this statement, as I am loath to accept all unpleasant statements; but if it be--as I presume it is--based upon data, or upon careful observation, it fits closely with my argument. The men under thirty are the men who have done their thinking in an era of undiluted sentiment. The men over forty were trained in a simpler, sterner creed. The call to duty embraced for them the call to arms.

“A country’s a thing men should die for at need.”

Some of them remember the days when Americans died for their country, and it is a recollection good for the soul. Again, the men over forty were taught by men; the men under thirty were taught by women; and the most dangerous economy practised by our extravagant Republic is the eliminating of the male teacher from our public schools. It is no insult to femininity to say that the feminization of boys is not a desirable development.

It was thought and said a few years ago that the substitution of organized charities for the somewhat haphazard benevolence of our youth would exclude sentiment, just as it excluded human and personal relations with the poor. It was thought and said that the steady advance of women in commercial and civic life would correct the sentimental bias which only Mr. Chesterton has failed to observe in the sex. No one who reads books and newspapers, or listens to speeches, or indulges in the pleasures of conversation can any longer cherish these illusions. No one can fail to see that sentiment is the motor power which drives us to intemperate words and actions; which weakens our judgment, and destroys our sense of proportion. The current phraseology, the current criticisms, the current enthusiasms of the day, all betray an excess of emotionalism. I pick up a table of statistics, furnishing economic data, and this is what I read: “Case 3. Two children under five. Mother shortly expecting the supreme trial of womanhood.” That is the way to write stories, and, possibly, sermons; but it is not the way to write reports. I pick up a newspaper, and learn that an Englishman visiting the United States has made the interesting announcement that he is a reincarnation of one of the Pharaohs, and that an attentive and credulous band of disciples are gathering wisdom from his lips. I pick up a very serious and very well-written book on the Brontë sisters, and am told that if I would “touch the very heart of the mystery that was Charlotte Brontë” (I had never been aware that there was anything mysterious about this famous lady), I will find it--save the mark!--in her passionate love for children.

“We are face to face here, not with a want, but with an abyss, depth beyond depth of tenderness, and longing, and frustration; with a passion that found no clear voice in her works because it was one with the elemental nature in her, undefined, unuttered, unutterable!”

It was certainly unuttered. It was not even hinted at in Miss Brontë’s novels, nor in her voluminous correspondence. Her attitude toward children--so far as it found expression--was the arid but pardonable attitude of one who had been their reluctant caretaker and teacher. If, as we are now told, “there were moments when it was pain for Charlotte to see the children born of and possessed by other women,” there were certainly hours--so much she makes clear to us--in which the business of looking after them wearied her beyond her powers of endurance. It is true that Miss Brontë said a few, a very few friendly words about these little people. She did not, like Swift, propose that babies should be cooked and eaten. But this temperate regard, this restricted benevolence, gives us no excuse for wallowing in sentiment at her expense.

“If some virtues are new, all vices are old.” We can reckon the cost of misdirected emotions by the price which the past has paid for them. We know the full significance of that irresponsible sympathy which grows hysterical over animals it should soberly protect; which accuses the consumer of strange cruelties to the producer; which condones lawbreaking and vindicates the lawbreaker; which admits no difference between attack and resistance, between a war of aggression and a war of defence; which confuses moral issues, ignores experience, and insults the intelligence of mankind.

The reformer whose heart is in the right place, but whose head is elsewhere, represents a waste of force; and we cannot afford any waste in the conservation of honour and goodness. We cannot afford errors of judgment, or errors of taste. The business of leading lives morally worthy of men is neither simple nor easy. And there are moments when, with the ageing Fontenelle, we sigh and say, “I am beginning to see things as they are. It is surely time for me to die.”

Our Loss of Nerve

If any lover of Hogarth will look at the series of pictures which tell the story of the Idle and the Industrious Apprentice, he will feel that while the industrious apprentice fitted admirably into his time and place, the idle apprentice had the misfortune to be born out of date. In what a different spirit would his tragic tale be told to-day, and what different emotions it would awaken. A poor tired boy, who ought to be at school or at play, sleeping for very exhaustion at his loom. A cruel boss daring to strike the worn-out lad. No better playground given him in the scant leisure which Sunday brings than a loathsome grave-yard. No healthier sport provided for him than gaming. And, in the end, a lack of living wage forcing him to steal. Unhappy apprentice, to have lived and sinned nearly two centuries too soon! And as if this were not a fate bitter enough for tears, he must needs have contrasted with him at every step an industrious companion, whom that unenlightened age permitted to work as hard as he pleased, even for the benefit of a master, and to build up his own fortunes on the foundation of his own worth. Hogarth’s simple conception of personal responsibility and of personal equation is as obsolete as the clumsy looms at which his apprentices sit, and the full-skirted coats they wear.

Yet the softening of the hard old rules, the rigid old standards, has not tended to strengthen the fibre of our race. Nobody supposes that the industrious apprentice had an enjoyable boyhood. As far as we can see, going to church was his sole recreation, as it was probably the principal recreation of his master’s daughter, whose hymn-book he shares, and whom he duly marries. _Her_ home-life doubtless bore a strong resemblance to the home-life of the tumultuous heroine of “Fanny’s First Play,” who tells us with a heaving breast that she never knew what a glorious thing life was until she had knocked out a policeman’s tooth. Hogarth’s young lady would probably have cared little for this form of exercise, even had the London policemen of 1748 been the chivalrous sufferers they were in 1911. She is a buxom, demure damsel; and in her, as in the lad by her side, there is a suggestion of reserve power. They are citizens in the making, prepared to accept soberly the restrictions and responsibilities of citizenship, and to follow with relish the star of their own destinies.

And all things considered, what can be better than to make a good job out of a given piece of work? “That intricate web of normal expectation,” which Mr. Gilbert Murray tells us is the very essence of human society, provides incentives for reasonable men and women, and provides also compensations for courage. What Mr. Murray calls a “failure of nerve” in Greek philosophy and Greek religion is the relaxing of effort, the letting down of obligation. With the asceticism imposed, or at least induced, by Christianity, “the sacrifice of one part of human nature to another, that it may live in what survives the more completely,” he has but scant and narrow sympathy; but he explains with characteristic clearness that the ideals of Greek citizenship withered and died, because of a weakening of faith in normal human resistance. “All the last manifestations of Hellenistic religion betray a lack of nerve.”

It is with the best intentions in the world that we Americans are now engaged in letting down the walls of human resistance, in lessening personal obligation; and already the failure of nerve is apparent on every side. We begin our kindly ministrations with the little kindergarten scholar, to whom work is presented as play, and who is expected to absorb the elements of education without conscious effort, and certainly without compulsion. We encourage him to feel that the business of his teacher is to keep him interested in his task, and that he is justified in stopping short as soon as any mental process becomes irksome or difficult. Indeed, I do not know why I permit myself the use of the word “task,” since by common consent it is banished from the vocabulary of school. Professor Gilman said it was a word which should never be spoken by teacher, never heard by pupil, and no doubt a kind-hearted public cordially agreed with him.

The firm old belief that the task is a valuable asset in education, that the making of a good job out of a given piece of work is about the highest thing on earth, has lost its hold upon the world. The firm old disbelief in a royal road to learning has vanished long ago. All knowledge, we are told, can be made so attractive that school-children will absorb it with delight. If they are not absorbing it, the teacher is to blame. Professor Wiener tells us that when his precocious little son failed to acquire the multiplication tables, he took him away from school, and let him study advanced mathematics. Whereupon the child discovered the tables for himself. Mrs. John Macy, well known to the community as the friend and instructor of Miss Helen Keller, has informed a listening world that she does not see why a child should study _anything_ in which he is not interested. “It is a waste of energy.”

Naturally, it is hard to convince parents--who have the illusions common to their estate--that while exceptional methods may answer for exceptional cases (little William Pitt, for instance, was trained from early boyhood to be a prime minister), common methods have their value for the rank and file. It is harder still to make them understand that enjoyment cannot with safety be accepted as a determining factor in education, and that the mental and moral discipline which comes of hard and perhaps unwilling study is worth a mine of pleasantly acquired information. It is not, after all, a smattering of chemistry, or an acquaintance with the habits of bees, which will carry our children through life; but a capacity for doing what they do not want to do, if it be a thing which needs to be done. They will have to do many things they do not want to do later on, if their lives are going to be worth the living, and the sooner they learn to stand to their guns, the better for them, and for all those whose welfare will lie in their hands.

The assumption that children should never be coerced into self-control, and never confronted with difficulties, makes for failure of nerve. The assumption that young people should never be burdened with responsibilities, and never, under any stress of circumstances, be deprived of the pleasures which are no longer a privilege, but their sacred and inalienable right, makes for failure of nerve. The assumption that married women are justified in abandoning their domestic duties, because they cannot stand the strain of home-life and housekeeping, makes for failure of nerve. The assumption that invalids must yield to invalidism, must isolate themselves from common currents of life, and from strong and stern incentives to recovery, makes for failure of nerve. The assumption that religion should content itself with persuasiveness, and that morality should be sparing in its demands, makes for failure of nerve. The assumption that a denial of civic rights constitutes a release from moral obligations makes for such a shattering failure of nerve that it brings insanity in its wake. And the assumption that poverty justifies prostitution, or exonerates the prostitute, lets down the last walls of human resistance. It is easier to find a royal road to learning than a royal road to self-mastery and self-respect.

A student of Mr. Whistler’s once said to him that she did not want to paint in the low tones he recommended; she wanted to keep her colours clear and bright. “Then,” replied Mr. Whistler, “you must keep them in your tubes. It is the only way.” If we want bright colours and easy methods, we must stay in our tubes, and avoid the inevitable complications of life by careful and consistent uselessness. We may nurse our nerves in comfortable seclusion at home, or we may brace them with travel and change of scene. It does not matter; we are tube-dwellers under any skies. We may be so dependent upon amusements that we never call them anything but duties; or we may be as devout as La Fontaine’s rat, which piously retired from the society of other rats into the heart of a Dutch cheese. We may be so rich that the world forgives us, or so poor that the world exonerates us. In each and every case we destroy life at the roots by a denial of its obligations, a fear of its difficulties, an indifference to its common rewards.

The seriousness of our age expresses itself in eloquent demands for gayety. The gospel of cheerfulness, I had almost said the gospel of amusement, is preached by people who lack experience to people who lack vitality. There is a vague impression that the world would be a good world if it were only happy, that it would be happy if it were amused, and that it would be amused if plenty of artificial recreation--that recreation for which we are now told every community stands responsible--were provided for its entertainment.

A few years ago an English clergyman made an eloquent appeal to the public, affirming that London’s crying need was a score of “Pleasure-Palaces,” supported by taxpayers, and free as the Roman games. Gladiators being, indeed, out of date, lions costly, and martyrs very scarce, some milder and simpler form of diversion was to be substituted for the vigorous sports of Rome. Comic songs and acrobats were, in the reverend gentleman’s opinion, the appointed agents for the regeneration of the London poor. It is worthy of note that the drama did not occur to him as a bigger and broader pastime. It is worthy of note that the drama is fast losing ground with the proletariat, once its staunch upholders. A very hard-thinking English writer, Mr. J. G. Leigh, sees in the substitution of cheap vaudeville for cheap melodrama an indication of what he calls loss of stamina, and of what Mr. Murray calls loss of nerve. “When the sturdy melodrama, with its foiled villainy and triumphant virtue, ceases to allure, and people want in its place the vulgar vapidities of the vaudeville, we may be sure there is a spirit of sluggish impotence in the air.”

To-day the moving pictures present the most triumphant form of cheap entertainment. They are good of their kind, and there is a visible effort to make them better; but the “special features” by which they are accompanied in the ten-and fifteen-cent shows,--the shrill songs, the dull jokes, the clumsy clog-dances,--are all of an incredible badness. Compared with them, the worst of plays seems good, and the ill-paid actors who storm and sob through “Alone in a Great City,” or “No Wedding Bells for Her,” assume heroic proportions, as ministering to the emotions of the heart.

The question of amusement is one with which all classes are deeply concerned. _Le Monde où l’on s’amuse_ is no longer the narrow world of fashion. It has extended its border lines to embrace humanity. It is no longer an exclusively adult world. The pleasures of youth have become something too important for interference, too sacred for denial. Whatever may be happening to parents, whatever their cares and anxieties, the sons and daughters must lose none of the gayeties now held essential to their happiness. They are trained to a selfishness which is foreign to their natures, and which does them grievous wrong. A few years ago I asked an acquaintance about her mother, with whom she lived, and who was, I knew, incurably ill. “She is no better,” said the lady disconsolately, “and I must say it is very hard on my children. They cannot have any of their young friends in the house. They cannot entertain. They have been cut off from all social pleasures this winter.”

I said it was a matter of regret, and I forbore to add that the poor invalid would probably have been glad to die a little sooner, had she been given the chance. It was not the mere selfishness of old age which kept her so long about it. Yet neither was my acquaintance the callous creature that she seemed. Left to herself, she would not have begrudged her mother the time to die; but she had been deeply imbued with the conviction that young people in general, and her own children in particular, should never be saddened, or depressed, or asked to assume responsibilities, or be called upon for self-denial. She was preparing them carefully for that failure of nerve which would make them impotent in the stress of life.

The desire of the modern philanthropist to provide amusement for the working-classes is based upon the determination of the working classes to be amused. He is as keen that the poor shall have their fill of dancing, as Dickens, in his less enlightened age, was keen that the poor should have their fill of beer. He knows that it is natural for young men and women to crave diversion, and that it is right for them to have it. What he does not clearly understand, what Dickens did not clearly understand, is that to crave either amusement or drink so weakly that we cannot conquer our craving, is to be worthless in a work-a-day world.

And worse than worthless in a world which is called upon for heroism and high resolve. A cruel lesson taught by the war is the degeneracy of the British workman, who, in the hour of his country’s need, has clung basely to his ease and his sottishness. What does it avail that English gentlemen fling away their lives with unshrinking courage, when the common people, from whose sturdy spirit England was wont to draw her strength, have shrivelled into a craven apathy. The contempt of the British soldier for the British artisan is not the contempt of the fighting man for the man of peace. It is the loathing of the man who has accepted his trust for the man who can do and bear nothing; who cries out if his drink is touched, who cries out if his work is heavy, who cries out if his hours are lengthened, who has parted with his manhood, and does not want it back. Whatever England has needed for the regeneration of her sons, it was certainly not “pleasure-palaces” and cheap amusements. The “sluggish impotence” which Mr. Leigh observed four years ago, did not call, and does not call, for relaxation. The only cure will be so stern that no one cares to prophesy its coming.

And Americans! Well, thousands of people bearing that name assembled in New York on the 13th of November, 1915, under the auspices of the Woman’s Peace Party, and amused themselves by denouncing the Administration, howling down all mention of national defence, and jeering every time the word patriotism (which we used to think a noble word) was spoken in their hearing. Men endeared themselves to the audience by declaring that they would not risk their all too precious lives to fight for any cause, and women intelligently asked why a foreign rule would not be just as good as a home one. They did not seem aware that Brussels was having a less enviable time than Boston or Milwaukee. Profound foolishness swayed the audience, abysmal ignorance soothed it. There was an abundant showing of childish irrationality; there was the apathy which befits old age; but of intelligence or of virility there was nothing.

This loss of nerve, this “weakening of faith in normal human resistance,” means the disintegration of citizenship. It is the sudden call to manhood which shows us where manhood is not to be found. We Americans, begirt by sentiment, mindful of our ease, and spared for more than half-a-century from ennobling self-sacrifice, have been seeking smooth and facile methods of reform. The world, grown old in ill-doing, responds nimbly to our offers of amusement, but balks at the austere virtues which no cajolery can disguise. The more it is amused, the more it assumes amusement to be its due; and this assumption receives the support and encouragement of those whose experience must have taught them its perils.

Miss Jane Addams, in her careful study of the Chicago streets, speaks of the “pleasure-loving girl who demands that each evening shall bring her some measure of recreation.” Miss Addams admits that such a girl is beset by nightly dangers, but does not appear to think her attitude an unnatural or an unreasonable one. A very able and intelligent woman who has worked hard for the establishment of decently conducted dance-halls in New York,--dance-halls sorely needed to supplant the vicious places of entertainment where drink and degradation walk hand in hand,--was asked at a public meeting whether the girls for whose welfare she was pleading never stayed at home. “Never,” was the firm reply, “and will you pardon me for saying, Neither do you.” The retort provoked laughter, because the young married woman who had put the question probably never did spend a night at home, unless she were entertaining. She represented a social summit,--a combination of health, wealth, beauty, charm and high spirits. But there were scores of girls and women in the audience who spent many nights at home. There are hundreds of girls and women in what are called fashionable circles who spend many nights at home. There are thousands of girls and women in more modest circumstances who spend many nights at home. If this were not the case, our cities would soon present a spectacle of demoralization. They would be chaotic on the surface, and rotten at the core.

It is claimed that the nervous exhaustion produced by hours of sustained and monotonous labour sends the factory girl into the streets at night. She is too unstrung for rest. That this is in a measure true, no experienced worker will deny, because every experienced worker is familiar with the sensation. Every woman who has toiled for hours, whether with a sewing machine or a typewriter, whether with a needle or a pen, whether in an office or at home, has felt the nervous fatigue which does not crave rest but distraction, which makes her want to “go.” Every woman worth her salt has overcome this weakness, has mastered this desire. It is probable that many men suffer and struggle in the same fashion. Dr. Johnson certainly did. With inspired directness, he speaks of people who are “afraid to go home and think.” He knew that fear. Many a night it drove him through the London streets till daybreak. He conquered it, conquered the sick nerves so at variance with his sound mind and sound principles, and his example is a beacon light to strugglers in the gloom.

Naturally, the working girl knows nothing about Dr. Johnson. Unhappily, she knows little of any beacon light or guide. But, if she be a reasonable human being, she _does_ know that to expect every evening to “bring her some measure of recreation” is an utterly unreasonable demand, and that it can be gratified only at the risk of her physical and moral undoing. She has been taught to read in our public schools; she is provided with countless novels and story-books by our public libraries; the lightest of light literature is at her command. Is this not enough to tide her over a night or two in the week? If her clothes never need mending or renovating, she is unlike any other woman the world has got to show. If there is never any washing, ironing, or housework for her to do, her position is at once unusual and regrettable. If she will not sometimes read, or work, or, because she is tired, go early to bed; if her craving for amusement has reached that acute stage when only the streets, or the moving pictures, or the dance-hall will satisfy it, she has so completely lost nerve that she has no moral stamina left. She may be virtuous, but she is an incapable weakling, and the working man who marries her ruins his life. Such girls swell the army of deserted wives which is the despair of all organized charities.

The sincere effort to regenerate the world by amusing it is to be respected; but it is not the final word of reform. The sincere effort to regenerate the world by a legal regulation of wages is a new version of an old story,--the shifting of personal obligation, the search for somebody’s door at which to lay the burden of blame. It is also a denial of human experience, inherited and acquired, and a rejection of the only doctrine which stands for self-respect: “Temptations do not make the man, but they show him for what he is.” Qualities nourished by this stern and sane doctrine die with the withering of faith.

So much well-meant, but not harmless nonsense--nonsense is never harmless--has been preached concerning women and their wages, that we are in the predicament of Sydney Smith when Macaulay flooded him with talk. We positively “stand in the slops.” A professor of economics in an American college offers out of the fulness of his heart the following specific and original remedy for existing ills: “My idea is that one of the best ways to get an increased remuneration for women is to make them worth it.”

“My idea!” This is what it means to have the scientific mind at work. A unique proposition (what have we been thinking about with our free schools for the past hundred years?), unclogged by detail, unhampered by ways and means. And if we do not see salvation in truisms, if we are daunted by the gulf between people who are theorizing and people who are merely living, we can take refuge with the reformers who demand “increased remuneration for women” whether they are worth it or not; who would make the need of the worker, and not the quality of the work, the determining factor in wages. We may “protect women from themselves,” by prohibiting them from accepting less than their legal hire.