Chapter XVIII (1)

The spring, when they traveled back to the north, was so perceptibly nearer that the fugitive soft days strayed in advance at intervals that were briefer. They chose one for their journey, and its clear sunshine and hints at faint greenness were so exhilarating to Miss Alicia that she was a companion to make any journey an affair to rank with holidays and adventures. The strange luxury of traveling in a reserved first-class carriage, of being made timid by no sense of unfitness of dress or luggage, would have filled her with grateful rapture; but Rose, journeying, with Pearson a few coaches behind, appeared at the carriage window at every important station to say, “Is there anything I may do for you, ma’am?” And there really never was anything she could do, because Mr. Temple Barholm remembered everything which could make her comfort perfect. In the moods of one who searches the prospect for suggestions as to pleasure he can give to himself by delighting a dear child, he had found and bought for her a most elegant little dressing-bag, with the neatest of plain-gold fittings beautifully initialed. It reposed upon the cushioned seat near her, and made her heart beat every time she caught sight of it anew. How wonderful it would be if poor dear, darling mama could look down and see everything and really know what happiness had been vouchsafed to her unworthy child!

Having a vivid recollection of the journey made with Mr. Palford, Tembarom felt that his whole world had changed for him. The landscape had altered its aspect. Miss Alicia pointed out bits of freshening grass, was sure of the breaking of brown leaf-buds, and more than once breathlessly suspected a primrose in a sheltered hedge corner. A country-bred woman, with country-bred keenness of eye and a country-bred sense of the seasons’ change, she saw so much that he had never known that she began to make him see also. Bare trees would be thick-leaved nesting-places, hedges would be white with hawthorn, and hold blue eggs and chirps and songs. Skylarks would spring out of the fields and soar into the sky, dropping crystal chains of joyous trills. The cottage gardens would be full of flowers, there would be poppies gleaming scarlet in the corn, and in buttercup-time all the green grass would be a sheet of shining gold.

“When it all happens I shall be like a little East-Sider taken for a day in the country. I shall be asking questions at every step,” Tembarom said. “Temple Barholm must be pretty fine then.”

“It is so lovely,” said Miss Alicia, turning to him almost solemnly, “that sometimes it makes one really lose one’s breath.”

He looked out of the window with sudden wistfulness.

“I wish Ann--” he began and then, seeing the repressed question in her eyes, made up his mind.

He told her about Little Ann. He did not use very many words, but she knew a great deal when he had finished. And her spinster soul was thrilled. Neither she nor poor Emily had ever had an admirer, and it was not considered refined for unsought females to discuss “such subjects.” Domestic delirium over the joy of an engagement in families in which daughters were a drug she had seen. It was indeed inevitable that there should be more rejoicing over one Miss Timson who had strayed from the fold into the haven of marriage than over the ninety-nine Misses Timson who remained behind. But she had never known intimately any one who was in love--really in love. Mr. Temple Barholm must be. When he spoke of Little Ann he flushed shyly and his eyes looked so touching and nice. His voice sounded different, and though of course his odd New York expressions were always rather puzzling, she felt as though she saw things she had had no previous knowledge of--things which thrilled her.

“She must be a very--very nice girl,” she ventured at length. “I am afraid I have never been into old Mrs. Hutchinson’s cottage. She is quite comfortably off in her way, and does not need parish care. I wish I had seen Miss Hutchinson.”

“I wish she had seen you,” was Tembarom’s answer.

Miss Alicia reflected. “She must be very clever to have such--sensible views,” she remarked.

If he had remained in New York, and there had been no question of his inheriting Temple Barholm, the marriage would have been most suitable. But however “superior” she might be, a vision of old Mrs. Hutchinson’s granddaughter as the wife of Mr. Temple Barholm, and of noisy old Mr. Hutchinson as his father-in-law was a staggering thing.

“You think they were sensible?” asked Tembarom. “Well, she never did anything that wasn’t. So I guess they were. And what she says _goes_. I wanted you to know, anyhow. I wouldn’t like you not to know. I’m too fond of you, Miss Alicia.” And he put his hand round her neat glove and squeezed it. The tears of course came into her tender eyes. Emotion of any sort always expressed itself in her in this early-Victorian manner.

“This Lady Joan girl,” he said suddenly not long afterward, “isn’t she the kind that I’m to get used to--the kind in the pictorial magazine Ann talked about? I bought one at the depot before we started. I wanted to get on to the pictures and see what they did to me.”

He found the paper among his belongings and regarded it with the expression of a serious explorer. It opened at a page of illustrations of slim goddesses in court dresses. By actual measurement, if regarded according to scale, each was about ten feet high; but their long lines, combining themselves with court trains, waving plumes, and falling veils, produced an awe-inspiring effect. Tembarom gazed at them in absorbed silence.

“Is she something like any of these?” he inquired finally.

Miss Alicia looked through her glasses.

“Far more beautiful, I believe,” she answered. “These are only fashion-plates, and I have heard that she is a most striking girl.”

“A beaut’ from Beautsville!” he said. “So that’s what I’m up against! I wonder how much use that kind of a girl would have for me.”

He gave a good deal of attention to the paper before he laid it aside. As she watched him, Miss Alicia became gradually aware of the existence of a certain hint of determined squareness in his boyish jaw. It was perhaps not much more than a hint, but it really was there, though she had not noticed it before. In fact, it usually hid itself behind his slangy youthfulness and readiness for any good cheer.

One may as well admit that it sustained him during his novitiate and aided him to pass through it without ignominy or disaster. He was strengthened also by a private resolve to hear himself in such a manner as would at least do decent credit to Little Ann and her superior knowledge. With the curious eyes of servants, villagers, and secretly outraged neighborhood upon him, he was shrewd enough to know that he might easily become a perennial fount of grotesque anecdote, to be used as a legitimate source of entertainment in cottages over the consumption of beans and bacon, as well as at great houses when dinner-table talk threatened to become dull if not enlivened by some spice. He would not have thought of this or been disturbed by it but for Ann. She knew, and he was not going to let her be met on her return from America with what he called “a lot of funny dope” about him.

“No girl would like it,” he said to himself. “And the way she said she ‘cared too much’ just put it up to me to see that the fellow she cares for doesn’t let himself get laughed at.”

Though he still continued to be jocular on subjects which to his valet seemed almost sacred, Pearson was relieved to find that his employer gradually gave himself into his hands in a manner quite amenable. In the touching way in which nine out of ten nice, domesticated American males obey the behests of the women they are fond of, he had followed Ann’s directions to the letter. Guided by the adept Pearson, he had gone to the best places in London and purchased the correct things, returning to Temple Barholm with a wardrobe to which any gentleman might turn at any moment without a question.

“He’s got good shoulders, though he does slouch a bit,” Pearson said to Rose. “And a gentleman’s shoulders are more than half the battle.”

What Tembarom himself felt cheered by was the certainty that if Ann saw him walking about the park or the village, or driving out with Miss Alicia in the big landau, or taking her in to dinner, or even going to church with her, she would not have occasion to flush at sight of him.

The going to church was one of the duties of his position he found out. Miss Alicia “put him on” to that. It seemed that he had to present himself to the villagers “as an example.” If the Temple Barholm pews were empty, the villagers, not being incited to devotional exercise by his exalted presence, would feel at liberty to remain at home, and in the irreligious undress of shirt-sleeves sit and smoke their pipes or, worse still, gather at “the Hare and Hounds” and drink beer. Also, it would not be “at all proper” not to go to church.

Pearson produced a special cut of costume for this ceremony, and Tembarom walked with Miss Alicia across the park to the square-towered Norman church.

In a position of dignity the Temple Barholm pews overlooked the congregation. There was the great square pew for the family, with two others for servants. Footmen and house-maids gazed reverentially at prayer-books. Pearson, making every preparation respectfully to declare himself a “miserable sinner” when the proper moment arrived, could scarcely restrain a side glance as the correctly cut and fitted and entirely “suitable” work of his hands opened the pew-door for Miss Alicia, followed her in, and took his place.

Let not the fact that he had never been to church before be counted against him. There was nothing very extraordinary in the fact. He had felt no antipathy to church-going, but he had not by chance fallen under proselyting influence, and it had certainly never occurred to him that he had any place among the well-dressed, comfortable-looking people he had seen flocking into places of worship in New York. As far as religious observances were concerned, he was an unadulterated heathen, and was all the more to be congratulated on being a heathen of genial tendencies.

The very large pew, under the stone floor of which his ancestors had slept undisturbedly for centuries, interested him greatly. A recumbent marble crusader in armor, with feet crossed in the customary manner, fitted into a sort of niche in one side of the wall. There were carved tablets and many inscriptions in Latin wheresoever one glanced. The place was like a room. A heavy, round table, on which lay prayer-books, Bibles, and hymn-books, occupied the middle. About it were arranged beautiful old chairs, with hassocks to kneel on. Toward a specially imposing chair with arms Miss Alicia directed him with a glance. It was apparently his place. He was going to sit down when he saw Miss Alicia gently push forward a hassock with her foot, and kneel on it, covering her face with her hands as she bent her head. He hastily drew forth his hassock and followed her example.

That was it, was it? It wasn’t only a matter of listening to a sermon; you had to do things. He had better watch out and see that he didn’t miss anything. She didn’t know it was his first time, and it might worry her to the limit if he didn’t put it over all right. One of the things he had noticed in her was her fear of attracting attention by failing to do exactly the “proper thing.” If he made a fool of himself by kneeling down when he ought to stand up, or lying down when he ought to sit, she’d get hot all over, thinking what the villagers would say. Well, Ann hadn’t wanted him to look different from other fellows or to make breaks. He’d look out from start to finish. He directed a watchful eye at Miss Alicia through his fingers. She remained kneeling a few moments, and then very quietly got up. He rose with her, and took his big chair when she sat down. He breathed more freely. That was the first round.

It was not a large church, but a gray and solemn impression of dignity brooded over it. It was dim with light, which fell through stained-glass memorial windows set deep in the thick stone walls. The silence which reigned throughout its spaces seemed to Tembarom of a new kind, different from the silence of the big house. The occasional subdued rustle of turned prayer-book leaves seemed to accentuate it; the most careful movement could not conceal itself; a slight cough was a startling thing. The way, Tembarom thought, they could get things dead-still in English places!

The chimes, which had been ringing their last summons to the tardy, slackened their final warning notes, became still slower, stopped. There was a slight stir in the benches occupied by the infant school. It suggested that something new was going to happen. From some unseen place came the sound of singing voices--boyish voices and the voices of men. Tembarom involuntarily turned his head. Out of the unseen place came a procession in white robes. Great Scott! every one was standing up! He must stand up, too. The boys and men in white garments filed into their seats. An elderly man, also in white robes, separated himself from them, and, going into his special place, kneeled down. Then he rose and began to read:

“When the wicked man turneth away from his wickedness--”

Tembarom took the open book which Miss Alicia had very delicately pushed toward him. He read the first words,--that was plain sailing,--then he seemed to lose his place. Miss Alicia turned a leaf. He turned one also.

“Dearly beloved brethren--”

There you were. This was once more plain sailing. He could follow it. What was the matter with Miss Alicia? She was kneeling again, everybody was kneeling. Where was the hassock? He went down upon his knees, hoping Miss Alicia had not seen that he wasn’t going to kneel at all. Then when the minister said “Amen,” the congregation said it, too, and he came in too late, so that his voice sounded out alone. He must watch that. Then the minister knelt, and all the people prayed aloud with him. With the book before him he managed to get in after the first few words; but he was not ready with the responses, and in the middle of them everybody stood up again. And then the organ played, and every one sang. He couldn’t sing, anyhow, and he knew he couldn’t catch on to the kind of thing they were doing. He hoped Miss Alicia wouldn’t mind his standing up and holding his book and doing nothing. He could not help seeing that eyes continually turned toward him. They’d notice every darned break he made, and Miss Alicia would know it. He felt quite hot more than once. He watched her like a hawk; he sat down and listened to reading, he stood up and listened to singing; he kneeled, he tried to chime in with “Amens” and to keep up with her bending of head and knee. But the creed, with its sudden turn toward the altar, caught him unawares, he lost himself wholly in the Psalms, the collects left him in deep water, and the Litany baffled him by changing from “miserable sinners” to “Spare us Good Lord.” If he could have found the place he would have been all right, but his anxiety excited him, and the fear of embarrassing Miss Alicia by going wrong made the morning a strenuous thing. He was so relieved to find he might sit still when the sermon began that he gave the minister the attention of a religious enthusiast.

By the time the service had come to an end the stately peace of the place had seemed to sink into his being and become part of himself. The voice of the minister bestowing his blessing, the voices of the choir floating up to the vaulted roof, stirred him to a remote pleasure. He liked it, or he knew he would like it when he knew what to do. The filing out of the choristers, the silent final prayer, the soft rustle of people rising from their knees, somehow moved him by its suggestion of something before unknown. He was a heathen, but a heathen vaguely stirred.

He was very quiet as he walked home across the park with Miss Alicia.

“How did you enjoy the sermon?” she asked with much sweetness.

“I’m not used to sermons, but it seemed all right to me,” he answered. “What I’ve got to get on to is knowing when to stand up and when to sit down. I wasn’t much of a winner at it this morning. I guess you noticed that.”

But his outward bearing had been much more composed than his inward anxiety had allowed him to believe. His hesitations had not produced the noticeable effect he had feared.

“Do you mean you are not quite familiar with the service?” she said. Poor dear boy! he had perhaps not been able to go to church regularly at all.

“I’m not familiar with any service,” he answered without prejudice. “I never went to church before.”

She slightly started and then smiled.

“Oh, you mean you have never been to the Church of England,” she said.

Then he saw that, if he told her the exact truth, she would be frightened and shocked. She would not know what to say or what to think. To her unsophisticated mind only murderers and thieves and criminals _never_ went to church. She just didn’t know. Why should she? So he smiled also.

“No, I’ve never been to the Church of England,” he said.

(To be continued)

INVULNERABLE

BY WILLIAM ROSE BENÉT

The armorers met me at the marge of life,
The weapon-bearers, calling each his ware,
Praising sword or spear or sinuous knife
Fashioned for the strife
In the forest depths that lay before,
To ward off malice or to pierce despair;
Shields that could affright
All the hissing snakes in Envy’s hair;
Or, when Peril’s sudden arrow sped,
Crying how bucklers, stern of proof and bright,
Glanced the shaft, the rancor overbore;
Or iron helms, securely vizarded,
Turned the thrusts of mockery and spite.
Loudly “Arm you! Arm you!” rose their cry;
And I chose a shield, Indifference,
And a blade, Sharp Wit, for my defense.
Close-meshed mail beneath my gaberdine
Glittered all unseen.
Proud I strode and whirled my sword on high.
Then my friend went by,
Passing in his shining joy unarmed,
With not even an amulet that charmed;
Singing for the innocence confessed
In his sparkling eyes, his buoyant breast;
Swiftly, gaily thrusting through the trees
To his deep and darkling forest doom,
As I thought. But still before me goes,
Blithe and wonderful, his candid smile
Every ambushed shadow to illume,
And the quickening sympathy that glows
Sudden on his cheek when friends seem foes,
And his utter radiance without guile,
Merry ignorance where I am--_wise_?

Where they lurk and snarl and close with me,
All unscathed of foemen passeth he,
Seeing no strife, unarmed eternally,
And e’en the Terrors turn away their eyes!

UNDER WHICH FLAG, LADIES, ORDER OR ANARCHY?

THE PENNSYLVANIA ASSOCIATION FOR WOMAN SUFFRAGE DISAVOWS VIOLENCE

In the April ~Century~, in an editorial article, “The Silent Suffragists of America,” we called upon the official organizations in the United States advocating woman suffrage to abandon their passive and tolerant attitude toward the methods of the English militants, a plea which we had also made in the number for November last.[23] We have received letters of approval of this article from representative women on each side of the suffrage question. It is a matter of sincere gratification to us to publish at the first opportunity the letter which follows from Miss Eleanor Cuyler Patterson of Chestnut Hill (Philadelphia):

I have read with interest the temperate and wise opinion printed
in “Topics of the Time” in the April number of ~The Century
Magazine~. It gives me great pleasure to send you the
resolution on this subject passed by the executive committee of the
Pennsylvania Association for Woman Suffrage on March 7, 1913.

“Although we do not pass judgment on the methods of other
organizations, _we disclaim all connection with militant
organizations, and do not indorse or intend to use militant
methods_, but shall continue to employ educational methods as in
the past.”

Here at last we have from an official suffrage organization in America a sober-minded expression of opinion on this burning subject. It ought to be the beginning of a sincere effort to rescue the whole woman movement from the shallow thinking and super-emotionalism that are likely to wreck it.

That this sort of protest is much needed is shown from the following passage from a letter to “The New York Times” from a leading advocate of the suffrage, Mrs. Eunice Dana Brannan, which is the first public expression of what we must regard as a very unfortunate, not to say shocking, frame of mind on the part of many refined and well-educated American women:

The suffragists in America are agreed in their belief that militant
action is _not called for_. Injustice to women is not so evident
nor so general as in England, and the attitude of the majority of
American men is certainly fairer and more honestly chivalrous.
_But, in spite of these amiable differences, it is quite possible
that if the Eastern States continue to deny enfranchisement to
their women, while the Western States continue to grant it, the
women thus discriminated against would find the political anomaly
of their position so impossible to bear that even militancy would
seem to them justifiable._

The words we have italicized are deplorably significant. They mean, for instance, that the immunity of New York City from similar outrages is to be dependent only upon the granting of the suffrage by the State. “Militant action is not called for”--yet, but will be called for if the voters of the East, however conscientiously, shall deny the suffrage to women!

In striking contrast is this extract from an open letter, printed in “The New York Times” of April 14, from Mrs. Helen Magill White (Mrs. Andrew D. White) of Ithaca, New York, addressed “To the Treasurer of the National American Woman Suffrage Association.” After recording her friendly attitude toward the movement, Mrs. White closes her letter with these downright words:

I never until lately admitted to myself the possibility of our
_essential_ inferiority--such that, in matters of government, we
could without outrage be classed with children, with idiots and
insane, and with criminals.

But now that I see our own kinswomen across the sea sowing the wind
to reap the whirlwind--sowing seeds of lawlessness which we may see
in our own day, I greatly fear, blossoming in an anarchism more
terrible than anything yet known to history--and when I see our own
women protesting feebly or not at all, and even, to some extent,
encouraging, I have not a cent to contribute nor a word of sympathy
for any association of women which does not publicly and earnestly
protest against such a line of procedure. It resembles the kicking
and biting of spoiled children, the raving and gibbering of insane
and idiots--and the unbridled license of the most abandoned
criminals. All these classes think solely of what they want, and
self-constitute themselves arbiters of what they should have. What
it may cost other human beings, innocent though they be, for them
to grasp at the objects of their desire by whatever means may come
to hand, does not touch their minds; and so it would seem to be
with those women of England; and so, also, with those of our own
women who condone their offenses--who would condone such action _in
any cause_.

Mrs. White here indicates both the responsibility of sincere, educated, and thoughtful suffragists and an effective method whereby they may hold the official organizations to their duty. Not a dollar should be subscribed to their work until they have pledged themselves that no part of their funds shall go to the support of lawlessness, and have made as definite a disclaimer of sympathy and intention as the Pennsylvania society, the action of which, at this time, is a patriotic public service of the highest order.

We have nothing but respect for the women of America who are earnestly convinced that the extension of the suffrage gives promise of a brighter day for humanity, and we take this opportunity to record our abhorrence not only of violence by women but of such interference with peaceable parades as disgraced the city of Washington on the third of March. In these days of turbulence of action and of thought, there is no securer anchorage to the mind than Chatham’s saying, “Where law ends, tyranny begins.”

NEWSPAPER INVASION OF PRIVACY

IS THE PAUL PRY AND PEEPING TOM TYPE OF REPORTING ON THE INCREASE?

The newspapers printed the initial paragraph of Mr. Pierpont Morgan’s will, and some of them made it the theme of very respectful and profitable comment. It was as intimate a statement as can well be imagined, a solemn committal of the soul of the maker of the will into the hands of his Saviour, and a charge to his children to maintain and defend “the blessed doctrine of the complete atonement for sin through the blood of Jesus Christ.”

But Mr. Morgan was a public person. All of us, in that sense, became members of his family. We had made our way to his bedside as he lay dying in Rome, and we expected to be given his will to read as soon as his wife and son and daughters had read it. They were obliged to give it to us: what could they do? Mr. Morgan, by reason of his great wealth and his distinguished public service had lost the privilege of privacy.

At the same time, there were those who read the will, and especially the beginning of it, with a certain sense of embarrassment, as if they had been found reading a neighbor’s private letters. The situation is one which arises in connection with some modern biographies and autobiographies, but the newspapers present it to our conscience every day. Now is abundantly fulfilled the prediction of an old book which said, “There is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; and hid, that shall not be known.” When the book promises further that that which is spoken in the ear in closets shall be proclaimed upon the housetops, we seem to see the reporter in the midst of his characteristic activities. All the closet doors are now wide open; or, if they are shut and locked against us, there are dictagraphs inside.

The other day at a great college a student was found dead in bed. The reporter who put the fact in the paper reported also that the president and the dean, and other persons much older and perhaps wiser than himself, had done their best to keep the matter private. Their endeavors appear to have been entirely for the sake of the student’s family and friends. There was no suspicion of anything wrong except such as the reporter himself conveyed to heighten the interest. These kindly endeavors the reporter, according to his own frank and impudent confession, had frustrated. No purpose seems to have been served by the publication except that the reporter got his money for it.

The other day, in the midst of a suit for divorce, the wife was stricken with a mortal disease, and the husband was sent for. She was unconscious when he arrived, and he knelt by her bedside, praying. Then she opened her eyes and saw him, and told him that she loved him still. Behind the door was a reporter, with his paper in one hand and his pencil in the other, putting down what he saw and heard through the crack, and going out to shout it through a megaphone in the street.

Two lads in a high school fought a duel over the attentions which one was paying to the other’s sister. The local newspapers gave it nearly as much space as they gave to the floods in Ohio. The little girls who looked on were all interviewed, and we were told what the sister said when she went to see her wounded lover in the hospital. Of course the perspective was absurd, but the performance was by no means absurd.

So with the divorce-suits that are tried in the court-rooms, which have no walls, where the busy reporters prepare themselves to tell us a hundred things that we have no right to know. A brutal husband forces his wife to sue him for divorce as her only defense against his cruelty, and the newspapers coöperate with him in exposing to the common gaze all the tender privacies of the woman’s soul.

We read such revelations, at first ashamed, as if we were looking through a keyhole, then somewhat brutalized ourselves by the experience. Thus the line is blurred between the publicity which is for the good of the people and for the terror of offenders, and the publicity which is only gossip and scandal printed for no other purpose than to sell the papers and make money. Whatever the remedy, the fact is plain that our sense of the honest rights of privacy is dulled. If Lady Godiva were to ride through the streets of Coventry to-day, there would be Peeping Toms in groups at every window with cameras and machines for taking moving pictures.

It is not improbable that one of the next important movements in this country will be for a greater sense of responsibility to wholesome public opinion on the part of the press. There is so much that is good and helpful and truly progressive in the better newspapers, and they are so sound on the larger questions of national policy, that it is to be hoped that the reformation of the grosser faults of journalism will be initiated by them. And in saying this we must not forget the offenses against good taste and good morals which are continually being perpetrated by certain periodicals that appear but once a month.

THE CHANGING VIEW OF GOVERNMENT

A GROWING SENSE OF ITS DUTIES TO THE PEOPLE

A member of Congress summed up the strongest impression from his latest electoral campaign as being that the people in this country are coming to have a much more vivid sense of the Government as “a political entity” which “owes duties.” He obviously means something more than Secretary Hay’s famous phrase about the “administrative entity” of China. This is no mere quibble about Pope’s “forms of government.” It implies a wide departure from the old view that government is a necessary evil, to be kept as limited as possible. However we explain or interpret the new conception, its existence and increasing sway over the minds of men will not be questioned by any one who keeps his eyes open to the facts. He may call the tendency socialistic or simply an extension of the democratic principle, but that it has now become a part of American political thinking he cannot well deny.

Equally undeniable is it that the idea that people have of the nature and function of their Government is more important than any mere question of governmental machinery. We hear much of a movement to “restore the government to the people.” All manner of political devices are commended, or else condemned, to bring about a more direct participation by the citizen in the work of government. Be these proposals wise or foolish, it is plain that the chief question lies behind them. It is what the people wish their Government to be; what they would now have done by those responsible for its conduct; what they themselves would undertake by means of governmental agencies in case those agencies were somehow made more quickly responsive to the popular will. Show a political philosopher what the driving forces of a republic really desire it to be or to become, and he will be able to get much more instruction out of that, much more material on which to base prophecies respecting future development, than he possibly can from endless talk about primaries and conventions, ballot-laws and corrupt-practices acts. Those are only means and machinery; the end aimed at is the main thing.

Looking back at the recent enlargement of governmental activities, and endeavoring to read in them the new sense of duties owed, we are able to detect at least a few general indications and even certain principles. For example, it is clear that the people are demanding, and will more and more demand, that their governments, local and national, do a great deal more than was formerly expected to conserve the physical health of the nation. Here is the origin of pure-food laws, of meat-inspection, of statutes against the adulteration of drugs. In this feeling of the vital relation that ought to exist between the Government and the bodily well-being of its subjects we have also the explanation of official campaigns against disease, of the movement for a national quarantine, and of the great broadening of the work everywhere laid upon health officers.

All this has not come about through a deliberate or reasoned change in the point of view. It is, rather, the result of quiet pressure from the practical side. Large problems of public health have pushed themselves to the front; and in seeking to solve them, the people have merely laid hold of the powers of government as ready and efficient instruments. It is now tacitly assumed that the Government is under a continuing obligation to guard the people against epidemic disease and exposure to impure food and deleterious drugs. This is now distinctly one of the duties owed.

But life is more than meat, liberty and equality of opportunity are more precious than health. And in seeking to preserve these, the work of our Government during the last few years has made of official activity something very different from the conceptions and standards of 1787 or 1850--something which is no doubt open to abuse, but which, we are persuaded, has thus far been largely beneficial in its practical manifestations.

When the Government takes hold of the evil of railway rebating with a strong hand, it is not alone a question of enforcement of the law, but of striking down an insidious and dangerous form of special privilege. The real offense in the old rebate system, now happily so nearly a thing of the past, was not alone its secret favors to a secret few, but its gross discrimination against the unprotected many. It was the denial of the right to compete on equal terms. This is the intolerable thing in a free democracy. It can endure the sight of great wealth, of vast fortunes honestly gained, but it cannot submit to a method of accumulating property which destroys the opportunities of thousands in order to give unfair advantages to one. It is the determination to keep the career open to talent, not to shut it up to favoritism, which has been the animating spirit in the long struggle to prevent the railroads from virtually creating private fortunes at their own sweet will, and bringing whom they please to penury by means of rebates.

A like attitude and animus are seen in the other forms of legislative restriction upon great corporations. All the anti-monopoly laws and anti-trust suits, all the regulating statutes and the public-utilities commissions, have one principle at bottom, and it is to make all men stand equal before the law. On the one hand to strike down oppression, on the other to equalize opportunity, has been the intent of these new activities of government which, whatever else they show, leave no doubt of an altogether changed view of what governments owe.

In all these matters, the greatest peril that lurks in our path is that of being misled by abstractions. If we talk overmuch of “government,” we are in danger of forgetting the human beings who make it up. If we are afflicted by bad rulers, it is no help to us to fall back upon an ideal conception of “the state.” The state is simply men acting. Much amusement was created in Paris by an innocent peasant who passed from one public building to another demanding that he be allowed to see _l’état_. He had heard of it all his life; he thought it was something at the capital; being there, he wanted to inspect it at close range. He was an unsophisticated rustic, but was he not right in his instinct? We are not, after all, governed by an “entity.” Government is the most concrete of human affairs. It is vested in mortal men. And in all the agitations and the hopes and fears of our day respecting the extension of governmental functions, and the quickening of the whole idea of what the state owes to citizens, it would be fatal to forget that government cannot be made better except by putting better men in charge of it.

THE TWO-BILLION-DOLLAR CONGRESS

A NATIONAL BUDGET THE REMEDY FOR EXTRAVAGANCE IN APPROPRIATIONS

The time is overripe for a fundamental change in our method of making annual appropriations for the cost of the National Government. A glance at the result of the work done by the various congressional committees charged with the duty of preparing appropriation bills is enough to bring conviction that order and system must be substituted for the present chaotic methods; while, if we could penetrate the secrets of the committee-rooms, the country would stand appalled at the ignoble tricks and devices by which the “pork-barrel” is filled and the money of the taxpayers wantonly and wickedly wasted.

The Democrats in their platform of 1912 “denounce the profligate waste of money wrung from the people by oppressive taxation through the lavish appropriations of recent Republican Congresses,” and they demand “a return to that simplicity and economy which befits a democratic Government.” How did they keep faith with the people under this self-denying ordinance? In the session of Congress immediately following, the second regular session of the Sixty-second Congress, which adjourned on March 4, they passed appropriation bills aggregating $1,098,647,960, and authorized contracts on public works committing the Government to a further expenditure of $76,956,174, making a total demand upon the treasury for the year ending June 30, 1914, of $1,175,604,134, a sum that surpasses all previous congressional achievements in extravagance. Not only that, but the grand total of the appropriations and contracts authorized in the two years of the Sixty-second Congress was $2,238,470,990, which is to be compared with $2,151,610,940 of the Sixty-first Congress. This is democratic economy and simplicity with a vengeance. The Democrats surpassed by more than $86,000,000 the exploits of the previous Republican Congress, which they had denounced as profligate.

But the Republican pot cannot call the Democratic kettle black. The blame falls upon both parties, for both have been profligate. Not only is the method of drawing up the appropriation schedules indefensible, but many of the senators and congressmen of both parties exhibit a degree of greed and rapacity in grabbing for the people’s money that is fairly comparable with the behavior of a drunken army looting a captive city. The river-and-harbor appropriation of $41,000,000, and the public-buildings appropriation amounting to $45,000,000 more, cover multitudes of log-rolling sins, of costly improvements of streams never navigable, of imposing buildings for small towns, veritable “grabs” of money to foster local pride, put district constituents in a good humor, and lay the foundation for safe majorities in the next congressional elections. The sin here is not alone that of profligate wastefulness; it is a pretty direct form of bribery of the voter. The staggering appropriation for pensions belongs in this category. The Service Pension Act added $25,000,000 to this item of expenditure, which in this fiscal year is raised to the great sum of $180,300,000. And we are now observing the fiftieth anniversaries of events of the war!

The national balance-sheet for the year which this “return to that simplicity and economy which befits a democratic Government” presents for the scrutiny of the voter and the taxpayer stands thus: estimated revenue of the Government under existing laws, $991,791,508; direct appropriations, $1,098,647,960; deficit, $106,856,452. But there must be added to the appropriations $76,976,174 of contract commitments authorized, raising the deficit to the colossal total of $183,812,626.

How shall this riot of extravagance be checked? By concentrating the power of control over appropriation bills and by establishing a definite responsibility for them. Two methods have been proposed. President Taft in a special message urged upon Congress the plan of a national budget. The various departments would prepare the estimates as now; these would be diligently studied and coördinated, with constant reference to the estimated revenue of the year; and the Executive would then submit to Congress such a budget statement as in most other countries the legislative body receives from the Government. In the House of Representatives this budget would be considered by a budget committee, or, if the old name were retained, by the Committee on Appropriations. And the report of that committee, of course, would be subject to discussion and amendment by the House. Representative Fitzgerald of the Appropriations Committee and ex-Speaker Cannon agree in advising a return to the practice of intrusting, the preparation of appropriation bills to a single Committee on Appropriations.

Prior to the year 1865, the Committee on Ways and Means had control of appropriation bills. Then the Committee on Appropriations was created, with full control of supply bills. In 1885, because of jealousy of the great power exercised by Samuel J. Randall, the bills making provision for the army, the diplomatic and consular service, the military academy, the navy, Indian affairs, and the post-office, were taken away from the Committee on Appropriations. This change marked the beginning of the era of extravagance. Under the present system, appropriations are made in thirteen annual bills, and “eight different committees, unrelated to one another, without coöperation, are charged with the duty” of preparing these bills. No fairer invitation to extravagance could be issued. Each committee works with regard only to itself, and, as we have seen, all together work without regard to the revenue side of the account. Coordination is impossible, and no balanced and well-apportioned budget could be the result of such a system.

The national-budget plan proposed by Mr. Taft should have the most serious consideration of Congress and of the country. Objection is made that this plan is “wholly inapplicable to our system of government.” It may be admitted at once that it is wholly incongruous with the present “system” of Congress in respect to appropriations. It would smash in both heads of the “pork-barrel,” and apprehension of that catastrophe, rather than any constitutional scruple, we imagine, is the motive of the objections that have been raised. It is true that the House under the Constitution originates revenue bills. But there is no constitutional impediment to the submission of estimates by the Executive, since that has been the practice of the Government since the beginning. A budget based upon the “needs of the Government economically administered,” and scrupulously adjusted to the revenue account, is the most promising remedy for the evils of the present method of preparing bills in eight committees, working with no recognized relation or understanding, under which extravagance has grown into a habit.

ERRATUM

In the April ~Century~, on page 821, by a misapprehension M. André Tardieu was spoken of as the editor of the “Revue des Deux Mondes,” to which he is a contributor. The editor is M. Francis Charmes of the French Academy.--~The Editor.~

ON THE LADY AND HER BOOK

_A Plea for the Suppression of a Catchword_

BY HELEN MINTURN SEYMOUR

_My dear George_:

The magazine containing “Confessions of a Novel Reader” arrived not two hours ago, and I have just come from its perusal. When a young man cares enough about his spinster aunt to send her his latest literary production on the very day it appears it does seem ungracious to do what I am about to do--make the letter of acknowledgment one continuous complaint. But you touched me on a sensitive spot, George. Your essay proved the proverbial straw, the drop that filled a cup of bitterness to overflowing.

Perhaps you suspect that this tirade comes from an elderly New Englander’s aversion to those very outspoken writers whom you admire. Not a bit of it. Worship at whatever shrine you please. I, too, in my young days, distressed my elders by my attachment to strange gods. It is a waste of time to be shocked, since most of us have gone in for “daring” literature when we were green in judgment. It is a phase of youth, like a boy’s swagger. No, all the trouble came from one little paragraph, which you probably never dreamed would upset me. You said--oh, you said--that no woman enjoys Dumas! That cut me to the heart, George,--and coming from you!

“A woman cannot read--” “A woman does not like--” We have heard those expressions so often! Sometimes the statement is used to illustrate the limitations of feminine sympathy. Sometimes the supposed limitations of feminine sympathy are used to support the statement. I don’t know which is worse, to go softly all one’s days, lest some individual weakness be foisted on the whole unfortunate sex, or to feel that individual tastes avail nothing as examples of female character.

Hark to Mr. Paul Elmer More on Christina Rossetti. He finds her “perfectly passive attitude toward the powers that command her heart and soul” makes her “the purest expression in English of the feminine genius.” Mrs. Browning sinks to a lower level because “her political opinions, her passion for reform, her scholarship ... simply carry her into the sphere of masculine poets, where she suffers by comparison.” But, “even within the range of strictly feminine powers her genius is not simple and typical.” How he comes to his conclusion regarding the typical woman Mr. More neglects to tell us. But you will observe the advantage of this method for the doctrinaire. One has only to accept a certain premise (it matters not what), and by excluding as “not typical” every instance which might contradict it one can prove anything. Thus, a certain book on the Negro proved, some years ago, that the colored race was a hopeless mass of laziness, vice, and stupidity. The writer hastened to forestall criticism by declaring that the well-conducted Negro, wherever and whenever found, was not typical of the race.

Here comes Dr. William Lyon Phelps, all amazement because women have enjoyed the soldier tales of Kipling. To him the preference is as out of place in a woman as her presence in a bar-room amid oaths and tobacco-juice. Well, if there were as much color, adventure, and excellent broad comedy in the bar-room as in the best of these stories a lady might even forgive the profanity and the filthy floor. And you must remember that life, for all the realists may say, is not literature. We take our broad comedy, selected and arranged, from an author. Life is like a variety show; we sit through a deal of vulgar stupidity for the sake of a laugh or two. Furthermore, I believe plenty of men who enjoy _Mistress Doll Common_ when Ben Jonson leads her on the stage would find her sadly dull in real life. Perhaps I have grown more patient with the limitations of sex since the days when I read “Monte Cristo” in the hayloft; but I still fume under that particular form of petticoat tyranny which would extend to books. Sex may pervade all the departments of life, but I hold that it should stop at the library door.

Divest yourself of certain odious catchwords, my dear boy. Toss certain theories into the waste-basket, where they belong. Forget that any one ever called woman “the subjective sex,” and that somebody described her as a “divine totality” (I think it was divine). Any superfluous subjectiveness is wearing away in the freer air which has done so much to destroy woman’s “personal outlook.” Remember that women are no more of a piece than are their fathers or brothers, but a hodge-podge of miscellaneous and often contradictory tastes. “Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are,” runs the saying. “Tell me what you read and I will tell you what you are,” says the critic by implication. Now, what is that middle-aged relative of mine who keeps a place in her heart of hearts for “Pride and Prejudice” and “Pan Michael,” for “The Essays of Elia” and “Junius’s Letters”? Verily, we seek our books as we seek the society of many friends, to suit a mood, with no regard for totalities.

By the way, is not this just another instance of that mania for pigeonholing human tastes and playing them off against one another? If you appreciate Sienkiewicz, you must share the opinion of “The Virginian” (and Mr. Wister) regarding Jane Austen; and if you find entertainment in the human comedy as played in English country towns at the end of the eighteenth century, it stands to reason that you are not the person for the Poland of the seventeenth. It avails you little to protest that you find an equal pleasure in routing _Lady Catherine_ with _Elizabeth_ and Tartars with _Volodyovski_. One of these days I intend to found a society for the suppression of useless comparisons. I can understand how a Trinitarian and a Unitarian, a Democrat and a Republican, a suffragist and an anti-suffragist might drift naturally into discussion. But why, when I speak a good word for the canine race, must my acquaintance, B, launch aggressively into praise of cats, as if my love of dogs were a challenge? Why may I not enjoy Tennyson without calling down on myself the scorn of the Browningite? It annoys me to have my pets or my poets made the excuse for a wrangle. I refuse to commit myself to any type of novel.

But, you may remind me, I went so far as to keep a parrot “once, long ago.” I plead guilty, yet, Mark Twain to the contrary, a parrot is no index to character. _John Silver_ kept one, but nobody ever compared him to a maiden lady.

So, dear George, when you meet some gentle spinster with a flavor of “Cranford” about her, give her the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps she likes nothing better than to swagger in imagination through the streets of old Paris in company with the immortal three, brandishing a sheaf of rapiers taken from the cardinal’s guard.

--And between you and me, George, I never saw a “typical woman.”

Your affectionate aunt,
_Anne Coddington_.

ON THE USE OF HYPERBOLE IN ADVERTISING

_From a Lady who Suffers from Skepticism to a Friend who is Healthily Credulous_

BY AGNES REPPLIER

_My dear Eleanor_:

No, Eleanor, I have not read “The Three Golden Apples.” I have not even read the reviews. But I _have_ read the publishers’ notice, because they were good enough to send it to me. They say the book is the literary masterpiece of our day, that it stands unrivaled in tensity of situation, that it is an epoch-making narrative, and a masterly contribution to the problems that confront the thinking world. Upon which I find myself murmuring with _Sancho Panza_, “Nothing else, mine honest friend?” Why not say simply and plainly that it is the greatest novel ever written, and that Clarence Coventry (have you ever met him, Eleanor? He is a charming man) is the greatest novelist ever born? Why, when people are soaring in the pure and limitless realms of fancy, should they stop short, as if they were impeded by facts?

Now even if I did not know Clarence--who writes quite as well as his neighbors--I should be chilled into apathy by the publishers’ red-hot enthusiasm. The phrase “epoch-making” is calculated to chill any reader who has encountered it before and who remembers what it usually means. And though I am well aware that epochs are not made or marred by even a readable novel, I don’t like being told pure nonsense, and I don’t like being hounded by advertisements. Why, Eleanor, since I have been running over to New York every few weeks to see Amy and the children, and staring out of the car-windows at ninety weary miles of continuous advertising, I am cured forever of touching pills or pickles.