Chapter XI: Part 11

The American custom of "treating" is receiving some severe criticism from the European press. It deserves it. It is one of the most ridiculous and hurtful that ever cursed mankind. It is responsible for the bulk of the crime and pauperism usually accredited to John Barleycorn. Where there is no treating there's usually little intemperance. When a man steps into a "resort" for a glass of beer he's pretty apt to find a party lined up at the bar. He wants to pay for his beer, drink it and take his departure. But this is not permitted. He may have no more than a passing acquaintance with any of those present, but he must drink with the crowd, and having done so feels obligated to ask the crowd to drink with him. It does so, and he's "out" from one to three dollars. Having drunk with Tom he must drink with Dick and with Harry, and when he departs he's more than half drunk. The chances are that he could ill afford the expense incurred--that if left to himself he would have taken one drink instead of a dozen. "Treating" is a foolish custom that should be abolished in the interest of sobriety. It is good neither for the saloon nor for society. It is not good for the saloon because it occasions drunkenness and disorder and causes it to be avoided by thousands of otherwise good paying patrons. It is not good for society because weak men waste their substance, and a drunken man is an unsafe citizen. But the treating habit has too strong a grip on the American people to be eliminated by magazine essays--it must be made a misdemeanor. I am told that in Germany it matters NOT how friendly the members of a symposiac may be, everybody is expected to order and pay for his own booze. The result is that the German drinking place is respectable as the average restaurant and is patronized by almost the entire people. Temperance is the rule--stimulants are freely used but seldom abused. The treating habit is born of the American desire to "splurge." It means an enormous waste of money. It likewise means a sinful waste of good wine, for when a crowd of men belly a bar and pour stimulants into themselves as swine absorb swill it really matters little whether they drink Pomeroy See or barrel-house booze. They do not enjoy their potations--their only desire is to make drunk come. The treating habit is making of us a swinish people and strengthening the hands of the Prohibitionists. . . .

The "Rev." Sam Jones of Jawgy has broken loose again. This time he sets his cornstalk spear in rest and charges full tilt at the public school system and pretty much everything else in sight. His pathway is strewn with a gruesome wreck of the English grammar. Sam discussing the merits of education suggest a brindle mule criticising the Venus de Milo or a scavenger expatiating on the odors of Araby. His reverence (?) has become imbued with the idea that it spoils a boy to educate him, which goes to prove that the less a man knows the more he despises knowledge. But we can scarce blame Sam for railing at education. He is but obeying the law of self-preservation. When the people learn to distinguish between a hawk and a heron-saw they will drive this putrid-mouth little blatherskite from the pulpit. . . .

The New York Press wants all niggers holding federal offices in the South "armed to the teeth" for their own protection. It has an idea that the South is peopled only by "white savages" whose favorite sport is the shooting of nigger officer-holders from ambush. Like the erstwhile Artemus Ward's monkey, the editor of the Press is "a most amusin kuss." The South never gets angry at that kind of an animal. Occasionally a corrupt Republican administration appoints some ignorant Ethiopian to office who becomes insufferably insolent to his white neighbors and is called down with a six-shooter; but for every negro office-holder "assassinated by Southern savages" at least five white women are dragged from their homes by Northern white-caps and brutally abused. Who says so? I do; and I stand ready to prove it by the files of the leading Republican paper of this nation for ten years past. I refer, of course, to the St. Louis Globe- Democrat, the best all-around newspaper in the world. The South has very little affection for nigger office- holders, but they are full as safe as any other class of citizens so long as they behave themselves. The black man is not to blame for accepting an office, it is the Republican administration that deserves censure in thus making him the political superior of his white brethern. It is not the nigger who deserves killing, but the meddlesome Yankee editors who encourage him to be insolent.

. . .

According to press report a fashionable New York society female has dismissed her maid and engaged a valet. Well, if the dear creature enjoys having a man dress and undress her, comb her hair and lace her corsets why should an envious world stand on its hinder legs and carp? New York fashionables must have some antidote for ennui. If it be proper for ladies to have valets I presume that it is permissible for men to have maids. What is sauce for the goose should be sauce for the gander. Verily "the world do move."

. . .

In the morning Mr. Logan wore a doeskin box coat with pearl buttons nearly as large as alarm clocks in two rows on it. His spats were old-gold color to match. In the afternoon he wore a dark plaid coat and trousers and a saffron-colored vest. The vest was garnished with maroon-colored inch-and-a-quarter checks. He wore an Ascot scarf, dark blue, with lavender polka dots. His scarfpin was a gold whip four inches long and set with a half-inch turqoise in the middle. He wore ox-blood shoes in the morning and ox-blood gloves and in the afternoon his shoes and gloves were buff colored. In the evening he wore full dress.--Chicago Times-Herald.

And still we wonder at the increase of crime! Could any self-respecting Texan with a six-shooter concealed about his person be expected to meet such a gorgeous bird o' paradise and suffer it to escape? I wonder if Mr. Logan scrapes his tongue, manicures his toes and puts his moustache on curl papers? And I wonder what the devil old "Black Jack" would say could he wake up long enough to take survey of his clothes-horn of a son? And I wonder what the deuce the woman who married it will do with it? And I wonder why the hades his ma doesn't lead the little man out into the woodshed, remove his panties, lay him across the maternal knee and hit him 'steen times across the rear elevation with a green cypress shingle? Think of a featherless he animal playing peacock--no mission in God's world but to dress and undress itself three times a day. . . .

The New York Medical Record says that "a custom prevails in this country that ministers should be considered as free from pecuniary obligation to the doctor for service rendered." The Record then proceeds to file a very vigorous kick because of the aforesaid custom, broadly intimating that sky-pilots in general are long on gall and short on gratitude. There is certainly no reason why the preacher, who usually receives a good salary, should not pay for his poultices and pills. When he relieves cases of soul-sickness he does so "for the glory of God" and the long green. He expects to be paid twice for his services--once here and again in heaven. The doctor of medicine is not infrequently poorer in this world's goods than the preacher, and he looks forward to but one fee. He should not be deprived of that by men who sweetly sing:

"I would not live always, I ask not to stay."

If the doctors treat the dominies gratis it follows as a matter of course that they must recoup themselves by adding to the bills of their lay brethren, just as railway companies which carry preachers at half-rate must saddle the loss upon their other patrons.

. . .

Mintonville, Ky., not only sticks to its gods, but insists on clinging with a death grip to its good old orthodox devil, horns, hoofs and tail. The Rev. Gilham of the Christian church of that city, who has doubtless discovered recently that that unimportant portion of the world which moves and has its being outside of Mintonville had several centuries back diplomatically dropped the devil question, undertook to inform his flock that he, too had arrived at the conclusion that his Satanic Majesty was a myth, a delusion and a snare, a howling farce. The reverend gentleman's intentions were good, but he had reckoned without his congregation. They had always had a devil who was responsible for their pecadilloes; he was a convenient little institution to have around when the pecadilloes were a little more numerous than was compatible with the moral standard of Mintonville, and they realized that if the devil were removed from the Mintonville directory they would have to reform or shoulder their own shortcomings. Either course was quite too sad to contemplate. In fact the Mintonvillians positively would not contemplate them. Give them their devil and they could safely straddle between the horns of their dilemma. Remove their devil and they were undone. But Parson Gilham asserted that there was no devil. Mintonville had consequently to choose between their devil and their parson. The world could furnish more parsons but it couldn't furnish more devils. It was the parson and the devil for it and the red downed the black--the parson had to go. The reverend gentleman was ejected from his sacred office with scorn and contumely and likewise a number of pistol shots. It is to be supposed that the devil now reigns triumphant in Mintonville, while Gilham smooths down his clerical coat-tails from the horizontal to the proper perpendicular and wonders if he has not, like the proverbial parrot, talked too damned much.

* * * THE FOOTLIGHT FAVORITES. BY ETHELYN LESLIE HUSTON.

In the December ICONOCLAST there appeared a tirade on "The Stage and Stage Degenerates" that was as sweeping in its assertions as it was narrow in its views. The writer revels in reminiscences of his newspaper associations with the cheap beer-drinking, sand-floor class, swings their vices and vulgarities before the public, describes them as garbed in "loud patterned" trousers and snow- white overcoats and epitomizes the whole thing as an Augean stable, impure, impossible, vile, vulgar and bad. He then tells us calmly that "these are the representatives of their profession, so far as America is concerned," and he gives them to us as the "middle class of the people of the footlights."

If these are the "middle class," what is the next grade below? Where does he place the dividing line? Does he make no distinction between the vaudeville, continuous performance buffoons and the thousands who are "not stars," but working well and perhaps hoping? Does he call our scullery-maids and stable-boys "representative American middle class?" Does he call Mable Strickland and other dainty little hard-workers in minor parts typical of the hideous coarseness and vice he has described? Does he bracket THEM with his beer-drunk, easy-virtue "chorus-girls?" Does he realize all he means when he says of those he depicts "there were no stars among them, and none of the lower stratum?" Briefly, did he know what he was writing about?

When a man sits down on a curb stone with his feet in the gutter to "study life" and imagines himself a philosopher, while he moralizes on the muddy feet that pass him, he would probably feel grieved if the strong hand of some clear-headed individual lifted him up out of the gutter's filth and he was informed that much depended upon one's view being from a level, not an incline. We do not Judge our middle-class citizens by our cooks, and it is apt to suggest unwisdom, to express it very mildly, to gauge the men and women workers of the stage by beer-hall habitues and fleshling courtesans.

This an age of work and a generation of workers. The times, the conditions, the needs of the century are driving women out into the world as never before in the world's history. They must work to live and to help others live and in every line of work possible is woman found. The stage gives employment to thousands of women eminently fitted to entertain and amuse the public. Under ordinary conditions the great army of players find its lot a not unpleasant one. Women bears its harness lightly, to whom manual labor would be a mental and physical crucifixion. It is a labor of brain as well as body, of the soul as well as the senses, of the artistic as well as the prosaic. Its temptations are many and its pitfalls are many, but they are little, if any, more than are the temptations in many other fields of self-support for women. And notwithstanding the gentleman's profound deductions, there are a number of good women on the American stage even if they are not "given credit for being so by their fellow professionals"--and iconoclastic writers. And by these I do not mean the weary females described by Lizzie Annandale as reclining on the shoulders of their men companions, in mal-adorous day coaches on cross-continent "jumps." These women, if he will pardon the contradiction, are not the "representative middle class of the American stage." They are the scullery-maid class, for they are on the lowest rung of the professional ladder and few ever ascend from that lowest rung. It is their native element.

But these women who are neither "stars or the lower stratum," who study and labor, even though the labor be light through being one of love for their profession, who give a refinement and a sweetness to the many little dramas that appeal to critique and common folk alike, who speak to us of wife and sister and mother and sweetheart, and whose voices are as sweet and gestures as gentle and personalities as refined as are those of our own home women nestling safe in the firelight of our ingle-nook--these women are not immoral in a ratio of "ten to one." And with them, as with our home women, it is not their sense of morality that is their greatest safe-guard. It is their sense of refinement. It is a mistake to think that only Christian and moral women are virtuous. "Passion leaps o'er cold decree," and Christian precepts and moral teaching are cold and distant things when the blood leaps like molton lava through heart and brain. With Marguerite telling her beads, the prayers become but a babble of empty sound on her lips when the sweet poison of her lover's teachings crept through ear and heart and opened to her wondering, frightened dreams a Paradise of sense and sound and sweetness and dreamy, swooning loveliness before which her pictured pearl and golden heaven waxed chill and distant and austere. Prayers did not save Francesca from the sweet torment of her Passion and her Purgatory. Prayers save but rarely, for they are to darkness and to mystery that give back only the awful weight of silence--silence under which the frantic heart struggles and stifles as beneath a pall. Prayers reach out to an infinity that is shrouded always, but the lover's lips are sweet and the caress is close and the arms are warm and human. What wonder if the brain forgets when the heart thirsts and pleads? What wonder if the reason waver and faint when the winged god nestles close in the breast? What woman if the woman wake and thrill and "answers to the touch of one musician's hand" as an instrument that is silent till the master touch sweep the strings? What wonder if the marble warm and waken and throb to quick life beneath the passion of Pygmalion's kiss? What wonder if women love with an answering love if their God have so created? And what wonder if their prayer to him faint on their lips beneath the surging diapason of the waking heart beneath? If he so created, what then? If he "saw them made and said 'twas good," what then? If he made love chief, to deity and then destroy, its ecstacy blending with agony "as swells and swoons, across the wold the tinkling of the camel's bell," what then? If he made the greatest thing in the world and life speaks to life as a magnet to the pole, what then? Can you break that strong, silent current by a breathed invocation? Did not the Man cry from the cross in his exquisite agony, "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani!" And if his divine faith fainted on the threshold of his kingdom, is it strange if human faith sink beneath life's crucifixion and the babble of priest grow poor and harsh before the sweetness of "a little laughter and a little love"--the only hyssop in the sponge of vinegar? And we wander so far to find so little!

In Jean Paul's cry "How lonely is everyone in this wide charnal of the universe!"--is the explanation of--much.

We are as we are. And Allah is great.

And because we are as we are, it is fallacy to think that the good women, in the accepted sense of the term, are the only virtuous ones. Women of the stage and of the world ponder little on Moses and the prophets. Their lives are too full of grinding fact to reck much of unsubstantial fancies. And Prayer and Priest save women from little if Personality be not there. Teachings of virtue and morality are lip service and things of air. But when a woman's self rises to defend her honor--an honor that is a sacred thing in its own worth, not a question that will but win her reward in other life, then does true morality speak and then does woman find her greatest safeguard. A woman is but a weak thing who must cower behind the skirts of her religion to guard her purity. And these women of the stage who are its "middle class" are also its gentlewomen. For unfortunately its "stars" many of them but rival the other "stratum" in lawless infamy. In that, did the writer in December make his supreme mistake.

Temptation in the footlight world is strong, but a woman's pride is stronger. Under temptation's test, her religion might was dim, but her refinement would rise as a battlement in defense. Her church and creed might waver and sink, but that undefinable innocence which we call womanhood, would lead her, a Dian, through the fires of hell. In society and the slums a large percentage of women are courtesans by choice. The one has a refinement that is but a veneer, and the other has no refinement at all. And as with the world, so with the stage. In the middle class are found the truer gentlewomen. Women of the drama must of necessity be gentlewomen, the refinement must be innate, or they would fail utterly. An actress who is a gentlewoman can with her art stoop to portray sin, but an actress who is a common woman cannot rise to portray a refinement of which her coarse nature has no conception. Mrs. Kendal a woman who is as the wife of Caesar, can become a "Second Mrs. Tanguery" before the footlights. But Lizzie Annadale's chorus girl could never enact the role of a Mrs. Kendal on or off the stage. The former is a comparatively light task. The latter is an impossibility. And because they are refined women, though not necessarily "good" women, are they as a class virtuous women. Their instinctive womanhood would shrink from an impure life as quickly as they would lift their skirts from the mire of the gutter. The deadly chill of physical repulsion would be as strong in one case as in the other. In individual cases they have "sinned" as we term it, but qui voulez vous! The ratio on the stage is little larger than that of the world's middle class and not at all larger than that of the world's society women. I also object to those wild fanatics who would "elevate the stage," not because it would be Herculean labor, but because the aforesaid fanatics would find larger and more fruitful fields for their efforts in the shadow of their own church spire. Let them leave the women of the footlights alone and turn their attention to the women in the boxes. It would give a bored public relief and be distinctly and beautifully amusing--as an experiment. Waco, Texas, December 11, 1897.

* * * GINX'S BABY. BY WILLIAM MARION REEDY.

In an old book store I found the other day, a little book that should not have been forgotten. It was written almost twenty-eight years ago by a man named Jenkins, an Englishman, born in India, and educated in part, in the United States. The name of the book is "Ginx's Baby; His Birth and Other Misfortunes."

With the remarkable growth of altruism or humanitarianism in the last thirty years, with the application of sincere sympathy as one of the possible solvents of the mystery of misery, it is strange that this book should have passed from the minds of men. The book is a true satire. That is to say its irony is excited for the benefit of mankind. The pessimism of the story, its note of despair, is in reality, a summons to man to do better by his brother. Underlying its bitterness there is such a gentleness of heart as must uplift the reader's own.

The author has the great gift of humor, which all true pessimists possess, and none more than Schopenhauer. He loves humanity though he scourges it. He loves, above all, the little children whom Christ loved, as typifying the heart perfect in innocence.

Somewhat the quality of Dickens is in his method of thought, and his turns of expression; but he is not the evident artist that Dickens is. He does not seek opportunity to revel in mere rhetoric. He goes for the heart of his subject and his literary charms are displayed quite incidentally to his progress thereto. His stylism does not clog his story or cumber his argument. The result is that he produced a tract of the Church of Man which is a powerful argument for a realization in Man of the Church of God. His book is superbly human and "Ginx's Baby" deserves immortality with other dream- children of good men's hearts and minds in story and in song.

Room for Ginx's Baby in the gallery of undying children; with Marjorie Fleming, Sir Walter's "Bonnie, Wee Coodlin' Doo," with Pater's "Child in the House," with Ouida's "Bebe," with Mrs. Burnett's "Fauntleroy," with Barrie's "Sentimental Tommy," with all the little ones in the books of Dickens and the poems and stories of Eugene Field.

The child in literature is something new, comparatively. We need more of the effort to understand the child mind, the child heart, the child point of view. It will aid us to develop the child, if once we can enter his world and come into sympathy with his impression. It will purify ourselves, this fresh, new, beautiful world of the child's; its clear, pure air will wash clean our souls; its innocence of doom will revive our hope. The child is a soul fresh from God's mint. If only we could study it more we might re-gain, from the contemplation, some of our own lost innocence, and, when we come to die, go to our Maker, like Thackery's immortal Col. Newcombe, with our hearts "as a little child's."

But "Ginx's Baby" is not an idyl. It is a tragedy. It breathes the spirit of Malthus, only the spirit is transformed into one of pity for the victim of life rather than one of preservation of the nation. We are not, in this book, the victim of the baby. The baby is our victim. His story will illustrate the philosophy better than any attempt at interpretation, and the humor of the telling only intensifies the tragedy. "The name of the father of Ginx's Baby was Ginx. By a not unexceptional coincidence, its mother was Mrs. Ginx. The gender of Ginx's Baby was masculine." That is the first paragraph of the book, and there you have a hint of the flippant flavor; also a very strong suggestion of Mr. Charles Dickens. The hero of the book was a thirteenth child. Ominously humorous! The mother previously had distinguished herself. On October 25th, one year after marriage, Mrs. Ginx was safely delivered of a girl. No announcement of this appeared in the papers. On April 10th, following, "the whole neighborhood, including Great Smith Street, Marsham Street, Great and Little Peter Street, Regent Street, Horseferry Road, and Strutton Ground, was convulsed by the report a woman named Ginx had given birth to "a triplet, consisting of two girls and a boy." The Queen heard of it, as this birth got into the papers, and sent the mother three pounds. Protecting infant industry! And protection, it seems, resulted in over-production for, in a twelvemonth, there were triplets again, two sons and a daughter. Her Majesty sent four pounds. The neighbors protested and began to manifest their displeasure uncouthly, so the Ginx family removed into Rosemary Street, where the tale of Mrs. Ginx's offspring reached one dozen. Then Ginx mildly entered protest. If there were any more, singles, twins or triplets, he would drown him, her or them, in the water-butt. This was immediately after the arrival of Number 12.

Here, under the chapter-heading of "Home, Sweet Home," the author, still reminiscent of Dickens, but delightfully compact and laconic, describes the miserable dwelling of the Ginx's with a bitterness of humor that mocks the sentiment of Howard Payne's song. As a specimen of clean realism, this description is more effective than anything of Zola's; for Zola's realism is idealism gone mad. The squalor of the slum is heightened by the associations that cling to the name Rosemary. A bit of sermonizing upon the responsibilities of landlords for the souls in that slum, and the author reverts to Ginx and his family.

"Ginx had an animal affection for his wife, that preserved her from unkindness even in his cups." You thank the author for not succumbing to realism and making Ginx a brute. Ginx worked hard and gave his wife his earnings, less sixpence, with which sum he retreated, on Sundays, from his twelve children, to the ale-house to listen sleepily while ale-house demagogues prescribed remedies for State abuses. He was ignorant of policies and issues; simply one of a million victims of the theories upon which statesmen experiment in legislation and taxation. He was one of the many dumb and almost unfeeling "chaotic fragments of humanity" to be hewn into shape in one of two ways; either by "coarse artists seeking only petty profit, unhandy, immeasurably impudent," or by instruction to be made "civic corner-stone polished after the similitude of a palace." He was appalled by the many mouths he had to feed. He was touched by his wife's continuous heroism of sacrifice for the children, and he felt, in a dim fashion, something of an intuition of "her unsatisfied cravings and the dense motherly horrors that sometimes brooded over her" as she nursed her infants. She believed that God sends food to fill the mouths He sends. She had been able to get along. She would be able to get along.

Ginx, feeling another infant straw would break his back. determined to drown the straw. Mrs. Ginx, clinging to No. Twelve, listened aghast. The stream of her affections, though divided into twelve rills, would not have been exhausted in twenty-four, and her soul, forecasting its sorrows, yearned after that nonentity Number Thirteen. Ginx sought to comfort her by the suggestion that she could not have any more. But she knew better.

After eighteen months the baby was born. Ginx thought it all out before the event. "He wouldn't go on the parish. He couldn't keep another youngster to save his life. He would not take charity. There was nothing to do but drown the baby." He must have talked his intentions at the ale-house, for the people in the neighborhood watched her "time" with interest. Going home one afternoon, he saws signs of excitement around his door. He entered. He took up the little stranger and bore it from the room. "His wife would have arisen but a strong power called weakness held her back." Out on the street, with the crowd following him, Ginx stopped to consider. "It is all very well to talk about drowning your baby, but to do it you need two things--water and opportunity. He turned toward Vauxhall Bridge. The crowd cried "Murder!"

"Leave me alone nabors," shouted Ginx; "this is my own baby and I'll do wot I likes with it. I kent keep it an' if I've got anythin' I can't keep, it's best to get rid of it, ain't it? This child's goining over Vauxhall Bridge."

The women clung to his arms and coat-tails. A man happened along. "A foundling? Confound the place, the very stones produce babies."

"It weren't found at all. It's Ginx's baby," cried the crowd.

"Ginx's baby. Who's Ginx?'

"I am," said Ginx.

"Well?"

"Well!"

"He's going to drown it!" came the chorus.

"Going to drown it? Nonsense!" said the officer.

"I am," said Ginx.

"But, bless my heart, that's murder!"

"No, 'tain't," said Ginx. "I've twelve already at home. Starvashon's shure to kill this 'un. Best save it the trouble."

The officer declares this is quite contrary to law and he recites the law, but that doesn't affect Ginx. He fails utterly to see why, if Parliament will not let him abandon the child, Parliament does not provide for the child; for all the other twelve. The officer declares that the parish has enough to do to take care of foundlings and children of parents who can't or won't work. Says Ginx: "Jest so. You'll bring up bastards and beggars' pups but you won't help an honest man keep his head above water. This child's head is goin' under water anyhow!" and he dashed for the bridge, with the screaming crowd at his heels.

A philosopher interposes at this stage with a query as to how Ginx came to have so many children. Of course Ginx had to laugh. The philosopher urges that Ginx had no right to bring children into the world unless he could feed, clothe and educate them, and Ginx replies that he's like to know how he could help it, as a married man. The philosopher goes over the old, old tale of rationalism in life. Ginx should not have married a poor woman, should not have gone on sub-dividing his resources by the increase of what must be a degenerate offspring, should not have married at all.

"Ginx's face grew dark. He was thinking of 'all those years' and the poor creature that, from morning to night and Sunday to Sunday, in calm and storm, had clung to his rough affections; and the bright eyes and the winding arms so often trellised over his tremendous form, and the coy tricks and laughter that had cheered so many tired hours. He may have been much of a brute, but he felt that, after all, that sort of thing was denied to dogs and pigs."

The philosopher could not answer these thoughts nor the rejoinder question to his own: what is a man or woman to do that doesn't marry?

And so the argument proceeds, the philosopher losing ground all the time because his rationality is based upon changing man's nature, not on making something out of "what's nateral to human beings." The act of parliament idea of solving the problem is riddled effectively by a stonemason, who points out that the head-citizen is not so worthy as the heart-citizen. In brief, the philosopher is routed by the doctrine that love is better than law.

Ginx proceeds to the river again, but is stopped by a nun who asks for the child. She uncovers the queer ruby face and kisses it. After this Ginx could not have touched a hair of the child's head. His purpose dies but his perplexity is alive. The nun takes the child, and Ginx, in gratitude for her assurance that the child shall not be sent back to him, stands treat for the crowd. The child's life in the convent is material for some good satiric writing upon the question of his salvation. The picture is absurdly over-drawn so far as its effectiveness against conventional charity is concerned, but it touches the question of religious bigotry surely and strongly. Indeed the method of treatment here verges closely upon the Rabelaisian, as where the sisters want to make the sign of the cross upon Mrs. Ginx's breasts before allowing the baby to suck. Mrs. Ginx refused "the Papish idolaters" and the Protestant Detectoral Association is brought to the rescue of the child from superstition.

A little man with a keen Roman nose--he could scent Jesuits a mile off--took up the cause of the child and it got into court. The matter became a cause celebre. London was in a turmoil over "the Papal abduction." The author sketches it all graphically with a convincing fidelity of caricature. The "Sisters of Misery" triumphed. They retained the baby. Then after attempting to sanctify the baby--a ceremony wholly imaginary and described with a smutch of revolting coarseness--the sisters send the baby packing back to the Protestant Detectoral Association.

The Protestants had him, but the Dissenters protested against his being given to an Anglican refuge. The scene at the mass-meeting to celebrate young Ginx's rescue from the incubus of a delusive superstition is described with rare appreciation of the foibles of character. The bombast, the cant, the flapdoodle and flubdub, the silly unction of different kinds of preachers are "done to a hair." Five hours the meeting raged, and at last a resolution that the Metropolitan pulpit should take up the subject, and the churches take up a collection for the Baby on the next Sunday having been passed, the meeting adjourned--forgetting all about the Baby. A strange woman took the Baby "for the sake of the cause." He had been provided with a splendid layette by an enthusiastic Protestant Duchess.

"Some hours later Ginx's Baby, stripped of the Duchess' beautiful robes was found by a policeman, lying on a door step in one of the narrow streets not a hundred yards" from the meeting place. "By an ironical chance he was wrapped in a copy of the largest daily paper in the world."

"The Baby was recovered, the preachers "praught." The collections and the donations and subscriptions amounted to thirteen hundred and sixty pounds, ten shillings, and three and one-half pence. How the money was spent is shown in a deliciously absurd balance-sheet. Not quite 100 pounds were spent upon the Baby. The other money was wasted in various forms and styles of "guff." "In an age of luxury," says the Baby's biographer, "we are grown so luxurious as to be content to pay agents to do our good deeds, but they charge us three hundred per cent. for the privilege."

How the police found and treated the Baby is a chapter full of subtle sarcasm, leading up to the still more sarcastic portrayal of the way the Baby fared in the hands of the Committee appointed to take care of him. He was likely to be torn to pieces between contending divines. The debates in Committee are illuminating expositions of different varieties of bigotry. His body was almost forgotten, while the philanthropists were trying to decide what to do with his soul. Few of the reverend gentlemen "would be content unless they could seize him when his young nature was plastic and try to imprint on immortal clay the trade-mark of some human invention."

Twenty-three meetings of the Committee were held and unity was as far of at the last as at the first. The Secretary asked the Committee to provide money to meet the Baby's liabilities, but the Committee instantly adjourned and no effort afterwards could get a quorum together. The persons who had charge of the foundling began to dun the Secretary and to neglect the child, now thirteen months old. They sold his clothes and absconded from the place where they had been "framing him for Protestantism." As a Protestant question Ginx's Baby vanished from the world.

Wrapped in a potato sack, the baby was found one night, on the pavement exactly over a line dividing two parishes. The finder was a business man. He noted the exact spot where the child lay and took it to--the other parish. He would not be taxed for its support. The parish guardians would not accept the child. As the man who found the child was a guardian of the other parish, he was trying to foist a bastard,--perhaps his own--upon their parish. A motion was made to "get rid of the brat." "A church warden, who happened to be a gentleman," suggested the services of a lawyer. The brutality of the guardians as they examined and discussed the child is depicted with terrible power. The lawyer says the Board will have to take the Baby, pro tem, or "create an unhappy impression on the minds of the public."

"Damn the public!" said Mr. Stink, a dog-breeder member of the Board, thus antecedently plagiarizing an American millionaire. The parish accepts the Baby under protest, and a formal written protest addressed to the Baby, name unknown, is pinned on the potato sack. The two parishes go to law about the child. Neither wishes to take care of it. At Saint Bartemeus's workhouse, a notice was posted forbidding the officials, assistants and servants to enter the Baby's room, pendente lite, or to render it any service or assistance on pain of dismissal. The Baby was nigh starvation. The master of the work-house stealthily fed him on pap, saying in a loud voice as he did so, "Now youngster, this is without prejudice, remember! I give you due notice--without prejudice."

The Baby became ill. A nobleman discovered him and laid his case before a magistrate. The papers made a sensation on the Baby's case. There was a terrific hullabaloo. An inquiry was held. The guardians became furious. "The reports of their proceedings read like the vagaries of a lunatic asylum or the deliberations of the American Senate." They discharged the kindly master. The Baby was locked in a room. Food was passed to him on a stick. The inquiry was denounced and the bewildered public gnashed its teeth at everybody who had anything to do with, or say of, Ginx's Baby. "At last St. Bartemeus' parish had to keep him and the guardians, keeping carefully within the law, neglected nothing that could sap little Ginx's vitality, deaden his instincts, derange moral action, cause hope to die within his infant breast almost as soon as it was born." Every pauper was to them an obnoxious charge to be reduced to a MINIMUM or NIL. The Baby's constitution alone prevented his reduction to NIL.

The bill of costs against St. Bartemeus was 1,600 pounds. Just as it was taxed, one of the persons who had deserted Ginx's Baby was arrested for theft. The Baby's clothes, given by the Duchess, were found in this person's possession. She confessed all about the Baby, and so the guardians traced the Baby's father and delivered to Ginx, through an agent, the famous child, with the benediction--"There he is; damn him!"

Mrs. Ginx couldn't recognize the Baby. His brothers and sisters would have nothing to do with him. Ginx took the Baby out one night, left it on the steps of a large building in Pall Mall, and slunk away out of the pages of "this strange, eventful history." The Baby piped. The door of the house, a club, opened and the baby was taken in. It was the Radical Club, but it was as conservative as it could be in its reception of the waif, and it was only in perfunctory kindness that the Club gave him shelter. The Fogey Club heard of the Baby and bethought itself of making campaign material of him. The Fogies instructed their "organs" to dilate upon the disgraceful apathy of the Radicals toward the foundling. The Fogies kidnapped the Baby; the Radicals stole him back. The Baby was again a great "question." However, other questions supervened, although it was understood that Sir Charles Sterling was "to get a night" to bring up the case of Ginx's Baby in Parliament. Associations were formed in the metropolis for disposing of Ginx's Baby by expatriation or otherwise. A peer suddenly sprung the matter by proposing to send the Baby to the Antipodes at the expense of the nation. The question was debated with elaborate stilted stultitude and the noble lord withdrew his motion.

The Baby tired of life at the clubs. He borrowed some clothes, some forks, some spoons, without leave, and then took his leave. No attempt was made to recover him. He was fifteen. "He pitted his wits against starvation." He found the world terribly full everywhere he went. He went through a career of penury, of honest and dishonest callings, of 'scapes and captures, imprisonments and other punishments.

Midnight on Vauxhall Bridge! The form of a man emerged from the dark and outlined itself against the haze of sky. There was a dull flash of a face in the gloom. The shadow leaped far out into the night. Splash! "Society, which, in the sacred names of Law and Charity, forbade the father to throw his child over Vauxhall Bridge, at a time when he was alike unconscious of life and death, has at last driven him over the parapet into the greedy waters."

The questions of the book I have condensed here are as alive to-day as are thousands of other Ginx's Babies in all our big cities. While philanthropists and politicians, priests and preachers, men and women theorize about the questions, the questions grow "more insoluble." What is to be done? is the first question. How is it to be done is a question which is secondary and its discussion is useless until the first is settled. Too much State drove Ginx's Baby into the Thames. What's everybody's business is nobody's business. If the uncountable babies of innumerable Ginx's are to be aided, some one must aid them for the mere pleasure there is in loving-kindness.

A baby is a human being, not a problem. A baby can't be explained away by pure reason, because he didn't come by that route. Love brought him here and only Love can nourish him to the fullness of growth in soul and mind. True many come who, seemingly, were better drowned like surplus puppies or kittens. But who shall select those to survive? Grecian wisdom once attempted to improve on "natural selection" and Greece is the ghost of a vanished glory. Why shouldn't Ginx have drowned his Baby--or himself before the multiplication in the result of which the Baby was a unit?

I don't know why, unless because there is, in every life, even the most successful, apparently, enough of unhappiness and failure and emptiness to justify, at a given moment, a "leap in the dark." This logic of suicide would annihilate the race. The unwelcome Baby may be the best. Life must try us all. Those who do not stand the test disappear. Their own weakness eliminate them. Myriads must fail that a few may succeed a very little.

Ginx at least owed his Baby reparation for bringing about the first misfortune, his birth. Ginx was a sophist. His mercy of murder for the child was regard for himself. His reasoning was right. His heart was full of self and, ergo, wrong. Ginx surrendered before the fight was fought. So did the Baby. There is nothing for it, my good masters, but a fight to a finish. Yes, even though Birnam Wood come to Dunsinane, still must we fight, like Macbeth, and all the more valiantly for that we know our sins are heavy upon our heads and hearts. "Courage, my comrades, the devil is dead," said Denys of Burgundy. But there is a greater courage, my comrades: it is fighting the devil who never dies until the devil in us all shall die. This is not the courage of despair, but of hope and faith that by conquest of ourselves shall Evil be slain, though only in a fair, far time, and by scores of deaths of us and of our kind. That is why the book "Ginx's Baby" is false in its demonstration that it had been better if the "hero" had been thrown off the bridge at first. Its philosophy is the philosophy of the "quitter." The only courage is to endure.

And what shall we do for the Ginx's Babies so multitudinous in their misery? These, too, we must endure. It were well to love them a little, as babies, and not to discuss them so much as "questions." It were well if there were a little more individual charity; a good deal less of the kind described by Boyle O'Reilly as conducted "in the name of a cautious statistical Christ." If every one would do a little good for the poor, the unfortunate, the afflicted, the sum of all our doing would be a great deal of good. Take a penny from every person in the United States and give it to one man and he has seven hundred thousand dollars. Every Ginx's Baby in any land can be helped somewhat, and Ginx himself must do his share, to the full limit of his capacity for doing. We cannot save them all; cannot make their lives successes. Success is the sum of many failures. A million seeds must die that one rose may bloom. You or I may be the means, in part, of saving one child from the plunge of Vauxhall Bridge or through the gallows-trap. And one is worth while. That is the way to "look out for number one." Individual effort for individuals is the true humanitarianism. Lift up the person nearest you, who needs assistance. Bend to him and feel your own statue increase by so much as you uplift him. Et voila tout. St. Louis, December 16th, 1897.

* * * WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH MISSOURI? BY WILLIAM MARION REEDY.

The art of politics in Missouri is not more depraved than in most other states, I imagine; but it seems that in Missouri the practitioners of that art are somewhat coarser-grained and smaller-minded than men in the like charlatanry elsewhere. I think I may write of them and their methods in the capacity of critic, without obtruding my prejudices as a gold-bug.

Missouri, like every other Western State, took kindly to the silver theory; indeed, possessing, as one of its chief citizens, Mr. Bland, a champion of silver for thirty years, Missouri was as ready for 16 to 1 as any silver producing State. "Coin's" book found welcome wide and warm when it appeared among a people who admired Mr. Bland, and who had equally admired "Farmer" Hatch.

But while the people of Missouri were for silver it was only partly in deference to popular opinion that the Democratic party declared for that doctrine.

When Col. Chas. H. Jones became editor of the Republic, coming from Jacksonville, Florida, he was taken up by the then Governor David R. Francis, a grain merchant, or speculator, a very rich man and an aristocrat. The two were fast friends until, Col. Jones having married, the wife of the governor, for reasons sufficient to herself, refused to receive Mrs. Jones. Out of this social episode grew a feud. As the first result of that feud Col. Jones was forced out of the Republic. He went to the New York World. Ad interim, however, he managed to defeat the plan of President Cleveland to name Mr. Francis as a member of his cabinet in 1893. When Col. Jones fell out with Mr. Francis, the editor made an alliance with Mr. Joel Stone, who succeeded Mr. Francis as governor of Missouri.

In course of time Col. Jones was sent West to take charge of the Post-Dispatch. When he arrived in St. Louis he conferred with Governor Stone. Col. Jones wanted to destroy Francis, who had control of the Democratic party machinery. Francis had been "mentioned" for president. He was the brilliant, if chilly, leader of the party. He had wealth and he and his friends could "take care of" the visiting rural committeeman. Col. Jones scented the silver sentiment in the State. That sentiment suggested, naturally, antipathy to wealthy bosses and "grain gamblers." Col. Jones declared that the way to destroy Francis was by "taking up silver." And Col. Jones "took it up" with a vengeance. The sentiment had been lurking among the people all the time. For years the party committees warned the speakers to "steer clear of the money question." Col. Jones in print and Governor Stone on the stump, appealed to the people on the very thing the old rulers of the party had hedged on, and the battle was on.

Mr. Francis evaded the fight. He wanted harmony. He was suave and clammy but non-committal. He did not wish to come out for silver. He did not wish to oppose the silver people. Once or twice he threatened to fight and then he threw up his hands. Missouri declared for silver at 16 to 1, without a dissenting voice in the convention. The State committee was enlarged to render Mr. Francis' friends innocuous. Col. Jones and Governor Stone voted to support Bland for President at the Chicago convention and the National battle was precipitated. When Missouri declared for silver, with a candidate who represented the silver issue wholly and whose character endeared him especially to the bucolics everywhere, the silver sentiment became a political force to reckon with the stampede that ended with the nomination of Mr. Bryan was started.

So it seems to me that if Mrs. Francis had swallowed her prejudices and received Mrs. Jones there might have been a great deal of different history. Mrs. Jones was the Helen of the Siege of Wall Street. This incident is important only as showing, once again, how trifling things affect the destinies of Nations.

Had Mr. Francis and Col. Jones never disagreed, Col. Jones never would have left the "Republic." Col. Jones would have stood by Francis' interests as a banker and monied man. Col. Jones never would have obtained control of the "Post-Dispatch." Silver sentiment would have been smothered by the politicians of Missouri and Bland never would have been a candidate. There would have been no Missouri alliance with Mr. Altgeld and the combination of peculiar political ability that was attracted to Stone. Jones and Altgeld never would have dominated the Chicago convention as wholly as they did. To resent an affront to Mrs. Jones the Democratic party was rent asunder. Mr. Bland was taken up to destroy Mr. Francis and was himself destroyed in due time. The senators from Missouri, Messrs. Vest and Cockrell, were forced into the anti-Francis movement under threat of defeat by the men who had identified themselves with the popular feeling for their own purposes.

The late Mr. McCullagh of the Globe-Democrat, told me, when Vest became a silver champion that it was because he had to do so to retain his seat, and that Mr. McCullagh was a friend and extravagant admirer of Mr. Vest and his abilities.

Whatever one may think of silver he must admit that the turning down of Mr. Francis was a good thing. Mr. Francis represented the dodging Democracy. He stood for the evasion of a great issue; for intellectual and moral cowardice, for nauseous neutralism. Mr. Francis was the impersonation of political insincerity. He thought of the party--of keeping the party together, with himself on top--and his stand for what the opponents of silver call "sound money" was a very perfunctory performance. He never declared himself against the Chicago platform until he was offered the Secretaryship of the Interior, vice Hoke Smith, resigned.

In this we have a picture of the man whom I saw alluded to the other day as "the leader of the sound money forces in Missouri." A leader! Why, he couldn't be induced to come within the borders of the State, during the fight, nor did he come until he came home to vote, when, under the inspiration of a stupendous sound money parade, he declared himself.