Chapter XIV: Book X: Mammon (1)

Wealth, and the crimes that are committed in its name, and the protests of the spirit of humanity against its power in society.

Paradise Lost

BY JOHN MILTON

(English lyric and epic poet, 1608-1674)

Mammon led them on--
Mammon, the least erected spirit that fell
From Heaven; for even in Heaven his looks and thoughts
Were always downward bent, admiring more
The riches of Heaven's pavement, trodden gold,
Than aught divine or holy else enjoyed
In vision beatific. By him first
Men also, and by his suggestion taught,
Ransacked the centre, and with impious hands
Rifled the bowels of their mother earth
For treasures better hid. Soon had his crew
Opened into the hill a spacious wound,
And digged out ribs of gold. Let none admire
That riches grow in Hell; that soil may best
Deserve the precious bane.

Miss Kilmansegg: Her Moral

BY THOMAS HOOD

(See pages 59, 171)

Gold! Gold! Gold! Gold!
Bright and yellow, hard and cold,
Molten, graven, hammer'd, and roll'd;
Heavy to get, and light to hold;
Hoarded, barter'd, bought, and sold,
Stolen, borrow'd, squander'd, doled:
Spurn'd by the young, but hugg'd by the old
To the very verge of the churchyard mould;
Price of many a crime untold:
Gold! Gold! Gold! Gold!
Good or bad a thousand-fold!
How widely its agencies vary--
To save--to ruin--to curse--to bless--
As even its minted coins express,
Now stamp'd with the image of Good Queen Bess,
And now of a bloody Mary.

Northern Farmer: New Style

BY ALFRED TENNYSON

(See page 77)

Dosn't thou 'ear my 'erse's legs, as they canters awaäy,
Proputty, proputty, proputty--that's what I 'ears 'em saäy.
Proputty, proputty, proputty--Sam, thou's an ass for thy paäins,
Theer's moor sense i' one o' 'is legs nor in all thy braäins.

Me an' thy muther, Sammy, 'as beän a-talkin' o' thee;
Thou's beän talkin' to muther, an' she beän a tellin' it me.
Thou'll not marry for munny--thou's sweet upo' parson's lass--
Noä--thou'll marry for luvv--an' we boäth on us thinks tha an ass.

Seeä'd her todaäy goä by--Saäint's daäy--they was ringing the bells.
She's a beauty thou thinks--an' soä is scoors o' gells,
Them as 'as munny an' all--wot's a beauty?--the flower as blaws.
But proputty, proputty sticks, an' proputty, proputty graws.

Doänt't be stunt: taäke time: I knaws what maäkes tha sa mad.
Warn't I craäzed fur the lasses mysén when I wur a lad?
But I knaw'd a Quaäker feller as often 'as towd ma this:
"Doän't thou marry for munny, but goä wheer munny is!"

Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep

BY JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER

(American capitalist, born 1839)

Then, and indeed for many years after, it seemed as though there was no end to the money needed to carry on and develop the business. As our successes began to come, I seldom put my head upon the pillow at night without speaking a few words to myself in this wise:

"Now a little success, soon you will fall down, soon you will be overthrown. Because you have got a start, you think you are quite a merchant; look out, or you will lose your head--go steady." These intimate conversations with myself, I am sure, had a great influence on my life.

From Ecclesiasticus

A merchant shall hardly keep himself from wrong-doing; and a huckster shall not be acquitted of sin.

Past and Present

BY THOMAS CARLYLE

(See pages 31, 74, 133)

What is it, if you pierce through his Cants, his oft-repeated Hearsays, what he calls his Worships and so forth,--what is it that the modern English soul does, in very truth, dread infinitely, and contemplate with entire despair? What _is_ his Hell, after all these reputable, oft-repeated Hearsays, what is it? With hesitation, with astonishment, I pronounce it to be: The terror of "Not succeeding"; of not making money, fame, or some other figure in the world,--chiefly of not making money! Is not that a somewhat singular Hell?

GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS

(_English painter, member of the Royal Academy, 1817-1904_)]

WILLIAM HOGARTH

(_Old English artist, 1697-1764._

_Famous painting, representing an alliance between the son of a broken-down old nobleman and the daughter of a rich city merchant_)]

Dipsychus

BY ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH

(English poet and scholar, friend of Tennyson and Matthew Arnold, 1819-1861)

As I sat at the café, I said to myself,
They may talk as they please about what they call pelf,
They may sneer as they like about eating and drinking,

But help it I cannot, I cannot help thinking,
How pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!
How pleasant it is to have money.

I sit at my table _en grand seigneur_,
And when I have done, throw a crust to the poor;
Not only the pleasure, one's self, of good living,
But also the pleasure of now and then giving.
So pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!
So pleasant it is to have money....

I drive through the streets, and I care not a d--n;
The people they stare, and they ask who I am;
And if I should chance to run over a cad,
I can pay for the damage if ever so bad.
So pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!
So pleasant it is to have money.

We stroll to our box and look down on the pit,
And if it weren't low should be tempted to spit;
We loll and we talk until people look up,
And when it's half over we go out to sup.
So pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!
So pleasant it is to have money.

The best of the tables and best of the fare--
And as for the others, the devil may care;
It isn't our fault if they dare not afford
To sup like a prince and be drunk as a lord.
So pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!
So pleasant it is to have money.

Utopia

BY SIR THOMAS MORE

(See page 160)

They marveile also that golde, whych of the owne nature is a thinge so unprofytable, is nowe amonge all people in so hyghe estimation, that man him selfe, by whome, yea and for the use of whome it is so much set by, is in muche lesse estimation, then the golde it selfe. In so muche that a lumpyshe blockehedded churle, and whyche hathe no more wytte then an asse, yea and as ful of noughtynes as of follye, shall have nevertheless manye wyse and good men in subjectyon and bondage, only for this, bycause he hath a greate heape of golde. Whyche yf it shoulde be taken from hym by anye fortune, or by some subtyll wyle and cautele of the lawe, (whyche no lesse then fortune dothe bothe raise up the lowe, and plucke downe the highe) and be geven to the moste vile slave and abject dryvell of all his housholde, then shortely after he shal goo into the service of his servaunt, as an augmentation or overplus beside his money. But they muche more marvell at and detest the madnes of them, whyche to those riche men, in whose debte and daunger they be not, do give almost divine honoures, for none other consideration, but bicause they be riche: and yet knowing them to bee suche nigeshe penny fathers, that they be sure as longe as they live, not the worthe of one farthinge of that heape of gold shall come to them. These and such like opinions have they conceaved, partely by education, beinge brought up in that common wealthe, whose lawes and customes be farre different from these kindes of folly, and partely by good litterature and learning.

The Crown of Wild Olive

BY JOHN RUSKIN

(See page 106)

It is physically impossible for a well-educated, intellectual, or brave man to make money the chief object of his thoughts; as physically impossible as it is for him to make his dinner the principal object of them. All healthy people like their dinners, but their dinner is not the main object of their lives. So all healthily minded people like making money--ought to like it, and to enjoy the sensation of winning it: but the main object of their life is not money; it is something better than money.

Don Juan

BY LORD BYRON

(See pages 233, 340)

Oh, Gold! Why call we misers miserable?
Theirs is the pleasure that can never pall;
Theirs is the best bower-anchor, the chain-cable
Which holds fast other pleasures great and small.
Ye who but see the saving man at table
And scorn his temperate board, as none at all,
And wonder how the wealthy can be sparing,
Know not what visions spring from each cheese-paring....

Perhaps he hath great projects in his mind
To build a college, or to found a race,
An hospital, a church--and leave behind
Some dome surmounted by his meagre face;
Perhaps he fain would liberate mankind,
Even with the very ore that makes them base;
Perhaps he would be wealthiest of his nation,
Or revel in the joys of calculation....

"Love rules the camp, the court, the grove--for love
Is heaven, and heaven is love:" so sings the bard;
Which it were rather difficult to prove
(A thing with poetry in general hard).
Perhaps there may be something in "the grove,"
At least it rhymes to "love"; but I'm prepared
To doubt (no less than landlords of their rental)
If "courts" and "camps" be quite so sentimental.

But if Love don't, _Cash_ does, and Cash alone:
Cash rules the grove, and fells it too besides;
Without cash, camps were thin, and courts were none;
Without cash, Malthus tells you, "take no brides."
So Cash rules Love the ruler, on his own
High ground, as virgin Cynthia sways the tides:
And as for "Heaven being Love," why not say honey
Is wax? Heaven is not Love, 'tis Matrimony.

BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

(See page 181)

Gold? yellow, glittering, precious gold?...
This yellow slave
Will knit and break religions; bless the accursed;
Make the hoar leprosy adored; place thieves,
And give them title, knee and approbation
With senators on the bench.

The Cave of Mammon

(_From "The Faerie Queene"_)

BY EDMUND SPENSER

(Old English poet, 1552-1599)

At last he came unto a gloomy glade
Cover'd with boughs and shrubs from heavens light,
Whereas he sitting found in secret shade
An uncouth, salvage, and uncivile wight,
Of griesly hew and fowle ill-favour'd sight;
His face with smoke was tand, and eies were bleard,
His head and beard with sout were ill bedight,
His cole-blacke hands did seem to have ben seard
In smythes fire-spitting forge, and nayles like clawes appeard....

And round about him lay on every side
Great heapes of gold that never could be spent;
Of which some were rude owre, not purifide,
Of Mulcibers devouring element;
Some others were new driven, and distent
Into great ingowes and to wedges square;
Some in round plates withouten moniment;
But most were stampt, and in their metal bare
The antique shapes of kings and kesars straung and rare....

"What secret place," quoth he, "can safely hold
So huge a mass, and hide from heavens eie?
Or where hast thou thy wonne, that so much gold
Thou canst preserve from wrong and robbery?"
"Come thou," quoth he, "and see." So by and by
Through that black covert he him led, and fownd
A darksome way, which no man could descry,
That deep descended through the hollow grownd,
And was with dread and horror compassèd arownd....

So soon as Mammon there arrived, the dore
To him did open and affoorded way:
Him followed eke Sir Guyon evermore,
Ne darknesse him ne daunger might dismay.
Soone as he entred was, the dore streightway
Did shutt, and from behind it forth there lept
An ugly feend, more fowle then dismall day:
The which with monstrous stalke behind him stept,
And ever as he went dew watch upon him kept.

Well hopèd hee, ere long that hardy guest,
If ever covetous hand, or lustfull eye,
Or lips he layd on thing that likte him best,
Or ever sleepe his eie-strings did untye,
Should be his pray: and therefore still on hye
He over him did hold his cruell clawes,
Threatning with greedy gripe to doe him dye,
And rend in peeces with his ravenous pawes,
If ever he transgrest the fatall Stygian lawes.

In all that rowme was nothing to be seene
But huge great yron chests, and coffers strong,
All bard with double bends, that none could weene
Them to efforce by violence or wrong;
On every side they placèd were along.
But all the grownd with sculs was scattered
And dead mens bones, which round about were flong;
Whose lives, it seemed, whilome there was shed,
And their vile carcases now left unburièd.

Mammon Marriage

BY GEORGE MACDONALD

(Scotch novelist and clergyman, 1824-1905)

The croak of a raven hoar!
A dog's howl, kennel-tied!
Loud shuts the carriage-door:
The two are away on their ghastly ride
To Death's salt shore!

Where are the love and the grace?
The bridegroom is thirsty and cold!
The bride's skull sharpens her face!
But the coachman is driving, jubilant, bold,
The devil's pace.

The horses shiver'd and shook
Waiting gaunt and haggard
With sorry and evil look;
But swift as a drunken wind they stagger'd
'Longst Lethe brook.

Long since, they ran no more;
Heavily pulling they died
On the sand of the hopeless shore
Where never swell'd or sank a tide,
And the salt burns sore.

Flat their skeletons lie,
White shadows on shining sand;
The crusted reins go high
To the crumbling coachman's bony hand
On his knees awry.

Side by side, jarring no more,
Day and night side by side,
Each by a doorless door,
Motionless sit the bridegroom and bride
On the Dead-Sea-shore.

Snobs and Marriage

(_From "The Book of Snobs"_)

BY WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY

(English novelist and satirist of manners, 1811-1863)

People dare not be happy for fear of Snobs. People dare not love for fear of Snobs. People pine away lonely under the tyranny of Snobs. Honest kindly hearts dry up and die. Gallant generous lads, blooming with hearty youth, swell into bloated old bachelorhood, and burst and tumble over. Tender girls wither into shrunken decay, and perish solitary, from whom Snobbishness has cut off the common claim to happiness and affection with which Nature endowed us all. My heart grows sad as I see the blundering tyrant's handiwork. As I behold it I swell with cheap rage, and glow with fury against the Snob. Come down, I say, thou skulking dullness. Come down, thou stupid bully, and give up thy brutal ghost! And I arm myself with the sword and spear, and taking leave of my family, go forth to do battle with that hideous ogre and giant, that brutal despot in Snob Castle, who holds so many gentle hearts in torture and thrall.

In Bohemia

BY JOHN BOYLE O'REILLY

(Irish-born American journalist, 1844-1890)

The thirsty of soul soon learn to know
The moistureless froth of the social show,
The vulgar sham of the pompous feast
Where the heaviest purse is the highest priest;
The organized charity, scrimped and iced,
In the name of a cautious, statistical Christ.

Vanity Fair

(_From "The Pilgrim's Progress"_)

BY JOHN BUNYAN

(English thinker and religious rebel, who was put in prison and there wrote one of the world's great allegories; 1628-1688)

Then I saw in my dream, that when they were got out of the wilderness, they presently saw a town before them, and the name of that town is Vanity; and at the town there is a fair kept, called Vanity Fair. It is kept all the year long.... At this fair are all such merchandise sold as houses, lands, trades, places, honors, preferments, titles, countries, kingdoms, lusts, pleasures; and delights of all sorts, such as harlots, wives, husbands, children, masters, servants, lives, blood, bodies, souls, silver, gold, precious stones, and what not.

And moreover, at this fair there are at all times to be seen jugglings, cheats, games, plays, fools, apes, knaves, and rogues, and that of every kind.

Here are to be seen, too, and that for nothing, thefts, murders, adulteries, false-swearers, and that of a blood-red color.

The Sins of Society

BY BERNARD VAUGHAN

(The sermons of a Jesuit priest, in Mayfair, London, which caused great excitement among the "Smart Set")

Society nowadays, as we all know, is every bit as material as it was when Dives was alive. It still cares very little, indeed, for what it cannot either put on or into itself. It is self-centred. Its fair votaries must be set up by the best man-milliner, and fed up by the best man-cook; and then, provided they are known at the opera by their diamonds, in Mayfair by their motors, and at Cowes by their yacht, nothing else matters, especially if they happen to have a house at Ascot and a launch at Henley for the racing weeks.

It is not so much persons as things that count in this age of materialism. Hence there is but one sin less pardonable than that of being dull, and that is being poor. After all, there may be some excuse for dulness if you have money, but there is simply none at all for poverty, which like dirt on one's shoes, or dust on one's gown, must be brushed away from sight as soon as possible. Not even poor relatives are tolerated or recognized, except occasionally on an "off-day," when, like some unfortunate governesses in such households, they may be asked to look in at tea-time, when nobody is there. Surely all this is very contemptible, and altogether unworthy of old English traditions. Yes, but old English traditions, with rare exceptions, are being swept away by the incoming tide of millionaire wealth, so that, nowadays, it matters little what you are, but much, nay, everything, what you have. If you command money, you command the world. If you have none, you are nobody, though you be a prince.

(_From a leading London newspaper_)

Father Vaughan's knotted lash is sharp, and he wields it sternly, but it does not raise one weal on the delicate flesh of these massaged and manicured Salomes and Phrynes. His scorn is savage, but it does not produce more than a polite smile on these soft, faultless faces. His contempt is bitter, but it does not make a single modish harlot blush. They are dimly amused by the excitement of the good man. They are not in the least annoyed. They are, on the contrary, eager to ask him to dinner. What a piquant sensation to serve adultery with the sauce of asceticism!

Father Vaughan says that if King Herod and Herodias and Salome were to arrive in Mayfair they would be petted by the Smart Set. The good father, in the innocence of his heart, underacts the role of Sa-vaughan-rola. Herod and Herodias and Salome have arrived. They are here. We know them. We see them daily. Their names are in the newspapers. They were at Ascot. They are present at the smartest weddings at St. George's, Hanover Square. Do we despise them? Do we boycott them? Do we cut them. By no means. We honor and reverence them. We may talk about their bestialities in the privacy of the boudoir and the smoking-room, but in public the theme is discreetly evaded.

Fifth Avenue, 1915

BY HERMANN HAGEDORN

(American poet, born 1882. The following poem is a _rondel_, an interesting case of the use of an artificial old French verse-form in a vital way)

The motor cars go up and down,
The painted ladies sit and smile.
Along the sidewalks, mile on mile,
Parade the dandies of the town.

The latest hat, the latest gown,
The tedium of their souls beguile.
The motor cars go up and down,
The painted ladies sit and smile.

In wild and icy waters drown
A thousand for a rock-bound isle.
Ten thousand in a black defile
Perish for justice or a crown.
The motor cars go up and down....

Hotel Life[A]

[A] Copyright, 1905. By permission of Charles Scribner's Sons.

(_From "The House of Mirth"_)

BY EDITH WHARTON

(Contemporary American novelist)

The environment in which Lily found herself was as strange to her as its inhabitants. She was unacquainted with the world of the fashionable New York hotel--a world over-heated, over-upholstered, and overfitted with mechanical appliances for the gratification of fantastic requirements, while the comforts of a civilized life were as unattainable as in a desert. Through this atmosphere of torrid splendor moved wan beings as richly upholstered as the furniture, beings without definite pursuits or permanent relations, who drifted on a languid tide of curiosity from restaurant to concert-hall, from palm-garden to music-room, from "art-exhibit" to dressmaker's opening. High-stepping horses or elaborately equipped motors waited to carry these ladies into vague metropolitan distances, whence they returned, still more wan from the weight of their sables, to be sucked back into the stifling inertia of the hotel routine. Somewhere behind them in the background of their lives, there was doubtless a real past, peopled by real human activities: they themselves were probably the product of strong ambitions, persistent energies, diversified contacts with the wholesome roughness of life; yet they had no more real existence than the poet's shades in limbo.

Lily had not been long in this pallid world without discovering that Mrs. Hatch was its most substantial figure.... The daily details of her existence were as strange to Lily as its general tenor. The lady's habits were marked by an Oriental indolence and disorder peculiarly trying to her companion. Mrs. Hatch and her friends seemed to float together outside the bounds of time and space. No definite hours were kept; no fixed obligations existed: night and day floated into one another in a blur of confused and retarded engagements, so that one had the impression of lunching at the tea-hour, while dinner was often merged in the noisy after-theatre supper which prolonged Mrs. Hatch's vigil until daylight. Through this jumble of futile activities came and went a strange throng of hangers-on--manicures, beauty-doctors, hair-dressers, teachers of bridge, of French, of "physical development." ... Mrs. Hatch swam in a haze of indeterminate enthusiasms, of aspirations culled from the stage, the newspapers, the fashion-journals, and a gaudy world of sport still more completely beyond her companion's ken.

The Parasitic Female

(_From "Woman and Labor"_)

BY OLIVE SCHREINER

(In the preface to this book, it is explained that it is only a faint sketch from memory of part of a great work, the manuscript of which was destroyed during the Boer war)

In place of the active laboring woman, upholding society by her toil, had come the effete wife, concubine or prostitute, clad in fine raiment, the work of others' fingers; fed on luxurious viands, the result of others' toil, waited on and tended by the labor of others. The need for her physical labor having gone, and mental industry not having taken its place, she bedecked and scented her person, or had it bedecked and scented for her, she lay upon her sofa, or drove or was carried out in her vehicle, and, loaded with jewels, she sought by dissipations and amusements to fill up the inordinate blank left by the lack of productive activity. And the hand whitened and the frame softened, till at last, the very duties of motherhood, which were all the constitution of her life left her, became distasteful, and, from the instant when her infant came damp from her womb, it passed into the hands of others, to be tended and reared by them; and from youth to age her offspring often owed nothing to her personal toil. In many cases so complete was her enervation, that at last the very joy of giving life, the glory and beatitude of a virile womanhood, became distasteful; and she sought to evade it, not because of its interference with more imperious duties to those already born of her, or to her society, but because her existence of inactivity had robbed her of all joy in strenuous exertion and endurance in any form. Finely clad, tenderly housed, life became for her merely the gratification of her own physical and sexual appetites, and the appetites of the male, through the stimulation of which she could maintain herself. And, whether as kept wife, kept mistress, or prostitute, she contributed nothing to the active and sustaining labors of her society. She had attained to the full development of that type which, whether in modern Paris or New York or London, or in ancient Greece, Assyria, or Rome, is essentially one in its features, its nature, and its results. She was the "fine lady," the human female parasite--the most deadly microbe which can make its appearance on the surface of any social organism.

Wherever in the history of the past this type has reached its full development and has comprised the bulk of the females belonging to any dominant class or race, it has heralded its decay. In Assyria, Greece, Rome, Persia, as in Turkey today, the same material conditions have produced the same social disease among the wealthy and dominant races; and again and again, when the nation so affected has come into contact with nations more healthily constituted, this diseased condition has contributed to its destruction.

In the Market-Place

(_From "Beyond the Breakers"_)

BY GEORGE STERLING

(California poet, born 1869)

In Babylon, high Babylon,
What gear is bought and sold?
All merchandise beneath the sun
That bartered is for gold;
Amber and oils from far beyond
The desert and the fen,
And wines whereof our throats are fond--
Yea! and the souls of men!

In Babylon, grey Babylon,
What goods are sold and bought?
Vesture of linen subtly spun,
And cups from agate wrought;
Raiment of many-colored silk
For some fair denizen,
And ivory more white than milk--
Yea! and the souls of men!...

In Babylon, sad Babylon,
What chattels shall invite?
A wife whenas your youth is done,
Or leman for a night.
Before Astarte's portico
The torches flare again;
The shadows come, the shadows go--
Yea! and the souls of men!

In Babylon, dark Babylon,
Who take the wage of shame?
The scribe and singer, one by one,
That toil for gold and fame.
They grovel to their masters' mood
The blood upon the pen
Assigns their souls to servitude--
Yea! and the souls of men!

Dinner à la Tango

BY EDWIN BJÖRKMAN

(American critic, born in Sweden 1866)

It is after eight o'clock in one of the smaller dining-rooms of a fashionable New York hotel. The middle of the room is cleared for dancing. At one end a small orchestra is working furiously at a melody that affects the mind like the triple-distilled essence of nervous unrest. Every table is occupied by merry groups of men and women in evening dress. Above our heads are strung almost invisible wires, to which are attached colored lanterns, gaudy mechanical butterflies, and huge red and green toy balloons. Just as we enter, a stoutish, heavy-faced chap with a monocle slaps the next man on the back and cries out:

"We must be gay, old boy!"

The open square in the middle is filled with dancers. They trip and slide and dip. They side-step and back-step and gyrate. They wave their arms like pump-handles, or raise them skyward, palm to palm, as if in prayer. There are among them young girls with shining faces full of inarticulate desire; simpering young men with a leer lurking at the bottom of their vacant stares; stiff-legged and white-haired old men with drooping eyelids; and stern-jawed matrons with hand-made faces of a startling purple hue. But on every face, young or old, bright or dull, there beams a smile or clings a smirk, for the spirit of the place demands gaiety at any price.

On the tables are strewn gaily trimmed packages that open with a report, and yield up gaily colored paper caps. Rubicund gentlemen place the caps over their bald spots, while women pick the big butterflies to pieces, and put the fragments into their hair until they look like barbarous princesses. Men and women drink and dance, feast and flirt, sing and laugh and shout....

Gay is the scene indeed: gay the music and the laughter; gay the wine that sparkles in the glasses; gay the swirling, swaying maze of dancing couples; gay the bright balloons and brilliant dresses of the women. And it is as if my mind's eye saw these words written in burning letters on the wall:

_Leave care behind, all ye that enter here!_

But out there on Fifth Avenue a lot of unkempt, unreasonable men and women are marching savagely behind a black flag.

Evils of Gold

BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

(See pages 181, 492)

O thou sweet king killer, and dear divorce
'Twixt natural son and sire! thou bright defiler
Of Hymen's purest bed! thou valiant Mars;
Thou ever young, fresh, loved, and delicate wooer,
Whose blush doth thaw the consecrated snow
That lies on Dian's lap! thou visible god,
That solder'st close impossibilities,
And mak'st them kiss; that speak'st with every tongue,
To every purpose! O thou touch of hearts!
Think, thy slave, man, rebels; and by thy virtue
Set them into confounding odds, that beasts
May have the world in empire.

The Theory of the Leisure Class[A]

[A] By permission of the Macmillan Co.

BY THORSTEIN VEBLEN

(American university professor)

The function of dress as an evidence of ability to pay does not end with simply showing that the wearer consumes valuable goods in excess of what is required for physical comfort. Simple conspicuous waste of goods is effective and gratifying as far as it goes; it is good _prima facie_ evidence of pecuniary success, and consequently _prima facie_ evidence of social worth. But dress has subtler and more far-reaching possibilities than this crude, first-hand evidence of wasteful consumption only. If, in addition to showing that the wearer can afford to consume freely and uneconomically, it can also be shown in the same stroke that he or she is not under the necessity of earning a livelihood, the evidence of social worth is enhanced in a very considerable degree. Our dress, therefore, in order to serve its purpose effectually, should not only be expensive, but it should also make plain to all observers that the wearer is not engaged in any kind of productive labor. In the evolutionary process by which our system of dress has been elaborated into its present admirably perfect adaptation to its purpose, this subsidiary line of evidence has received due attention. A detailed examination of what passes in popular apprehension for elegant apparel will show that it is contrived at every point to convey the impression that the wearer does not habitually put forth any useful effort. It goes without saying that no apparel can be considered elegant, or even decent, if it shows the effect of manual labor on the part of the wearer, in the way of soil or wear. The pleasing effect of neat and spotless garments is chiefly, if not altogether, due to their carrying the suggestion of leisure--exemption from personal contact with industrial processes of any kind. Much of the charm that invests the patent-leather shoe, the stainless linen, the lustrous cylindrical hat, and the walking-stick, which so greatly enhance the native dignity of a gentleman, comes of their pointedly suggesting that the wearer cannot when so attired bear a hand in any employment that is directly and immediately of any human use....

The dress of women goes even farther than that of men in the way of demonstrating the wearer's abstinence from productive employment. It needs no argument to enforce the generalization that the more elegant styles of feminine bonnets go even farther towards making work impossible than does the man's high hat. The woman's shoe adds the so-called French heel to the evidence of enforced leisure afforded by its polish; because this high heel obviously makes any, even the simplest and most necessary manual work extremely difficult. The like is true even in a higher degree of the skirt and the rest of the drapery which characterizes woman's dress. The substantial reason for our tenacious attachment to the skirt is just this: it is expensive and it hampers the wearer at every turn and incapacitates her for all useful exertion. The like is true of the feminine custom of wearing the hair excessively long.

But the woman's apparel not only goes beyond that of the modern man in the degree in which it argues exemption from labor; it also adds a peculiar and highly characteristic feature which differs in kind from anything habitually practiced by the men. This feature is the class of contrivances of which the corset is the typical example. The corset is, in economic theory, substantially a mutilation, undergone for the purpose of lowering the subject's vitality and rendering her permanently and obviously unfit for work. It is true, the corset impairs the personal attractions of the wearer, but the loss suffered on that score is offset by the gain in reputability which comes of her visibly increased expensiveness and infirmity. It may broadly be set down that the womanliness of woman's apparel resolves itself, in point of substantial fact, into the more effective hindrance to useful exertion offered by the garments peculiar to women.

The Vanity of Human Wishes

BY SAMUEL JOHNSON

(English essayist and poet, 1709-1784. The poem from which these lines are taken is a paraphrase of the Roman poet Juvenal)

But, scarce observed, the knowing and the bold
Fall in the general massacre of gold;
Wide wasting pest! that rages unconfined,
And crowds with crimes the records of mankind;
For gold his sword the hireling ruffian draws,
For gold the hireling judge distorts the laws;
Wealth heaped on wealth, nor truth nor safety buys,
The dangers gather as the treasures rise.

Letters from a Chinese Official

BY G. LOWES DICKINSON

(This little book, published anonymously, was taken for a genuine document by many critics, among others, Mr. William Jennings Bryan, who wrote an elaborate answer to it. The writer is an English university lecturer)

When I review my impressions of the average English citizen, impressions based on many years' study, what kind of man do I see? I see one divorced from Nature, but unreclaimed by Art; instructed, but not educated; assimilative, but incapable of thought. Trained in the tenets of a religion in which he does not believe--for he sees it flatly contradicted in every relation of life--he dimly feels that it is prudent to conceal under a mask of piety the atheism he is hardly intelligent enough to avow. His religion is conventional; and, what is more important, his morals are as conventional as his creed. Charity, chastity, self-abnegation, contempt of the world and its prizes--these are the words on which he has been fed from his childhood upward. And words they have remained, for neither has he anywhere seen them practiced by others, nor has it ever occurred to him to practice them himself. Their influence, while it is strong enough to make him a chronic hypocrite, is not so strong as to show him the hypocrite he is. Deprived on the one hand of the support of a true ethical standard, embodied in the life of the society of which he is a member, he is duped, on the other, by lip-worship of an impotent ideal. Abandoned thus to his instinct, he is content to do as others do, and, ignoring the things of the spirit, to devote himself to material ends. He becomes a mere tool; and of such your society is composed. By your works you may be known. Your triumphs in the mechanical arts are the obverse of your failure in all that calls for spiritual insight.

Stupidity Street

BY RALPH HODGSON

(Contemporary English poet, who publishes his work in tiny pamphlets with quaint illustrations)

I saw with open eyes
Singing birds sweet
Sold in the shops
For the people to eat,
Sold in the shops of
Stupidity Street.

I saw in vision
The worm in the wheat;
And in the shops nothing
For people to eat;
Nothing for sale in
Stupidity Street.

The Souls of Black Folk

BY W. E. BURGHARDT DU BOIS

(Professor in the University of Atlanta, born 1868; a prominent advocate of the rights of his race)

In the Black World, the Preacher and Teacher embodied once the ideals of this people,--the strife for another and a juster world, the vague dream of righteousness, the mystery of knowing; but today the danger is that these ideals, with their simple beauty and weird inspiration, will suddenly sink to a question of cash and a lust for gold. Here stands this black young Atalanta, girding herself for the race that must be run; and if her eyes be still toward the hills and sky as in the days of old, then we may look for noble running; but what if some ruthless or wily or even thoughtless Hippomenes lay golden apples before her? What if the negro people be wooed from a strife for righteousness, from a love of knowing, to regard dollars as the be-all and the end-all of life? What if to the Mammonism of America be added the rising Mammonism of the re-born South, and the Mammonism of this South be reinforced by the budding Mammonism of its half-awakened black millions? Whither, then, is the new-world quest of Goodness and Beauty and Truth gone glimmering?

Co-operation and Nationality

BY "A.E." (GEORGE W. RUSSELL)

(See page 252)

When steam first began to puff and wheels go round at so many revolutions per minute, the wild child humanity, who had hitherto developed his civilization in picturesque unconsciousness of where he was going, and without any set plan, was caught and put in harness. What are called business habits were invented to make the life of man run in harmony with the steam engine, and his movements rival the train in punctuality. The factory system was invented, and it was an instantaneous success. Men were clothed with cheapness and uniformity. Their minds grew numerously alike, cheap and uniform also. They were at their desks at nine o'clock, or at their looms at six. They adjusted themselves to the punctual wheels. The rapid piston acted as pacemaker, and in England, which started first in the modern race for wealth, it was an enormous advantage to have tireless machines of superhuman activity to make the pace, and nerve men, women and children to the fullest activity possible. Business methods had a long start in England, and irregularity and want of uniformity became after a while such exceptions that they were regarded as deadly sins. The grocer whose supplies of butter did not arrive week after week by the same train, at the same hour, and of the same quality, of the same color, the same saltness, and in the same kind of box, quarrelled with the wholesaler, who in his turn quarrelled with the producer. Only the most machine-like race could win custom. After a while every country felt it had to be drilled or become extinct. Some made themselves into machines to enter the English market, some to preserve their own markets. Even the indolent Oriental is getting keyed up, and in another fifty years the Bedouin of the desert will be at his desk and the wild horseman of Tartary will be oiling his engines.

The Communist Manifesto

BY KARL MARX AND FREDERICK ENGELS

(Published in 1848, the charter of the modern Socialist movement)

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors," and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment." It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom--Free Trade.

Portrait of an American

BY LOUIS UNTERMEYER

(See pages 42, 418)

He slobbers over sentimental plays
And sniffles over sentimental songs.
He tells you often how he sadly longs
For the ideals of the dear old days.
In gatherings he is the first to raise
His voice against "our country's shameful wrongs."
He storms at greed. His hard, flat tone prolongs
The hymns and mumbled platitudes of praise.

I heard him in his office Friday past.
"Look here," he said, "their talk is all a bluff;
You mark my words, this thing will never last.
Let them walk out--they'll come back quick enough.
We'll have all hands at work--and working fast!
How do they think we're running this--for _love_?"

A Living Wage

BY J. PIERPONT MORGAN

(American banker; testimony before the United States Commission on Industrial Relations)

QUESTION: Do you consider ten dollars a week enough for a 'longshoreman with a family to support?

ANSWER: If that's all he can get, and he takes it, I should say it's enough.

Impressions

BY HAROLD MONRO

(Contemporary English poet)

He's something in the city. Who shall say
His fortune was not honorably won?
Few people can afford to give away
As he, or help the poor as he has done.

Neat in his habits, temperate in his life:
Oh, who shall dare his character besmirch?
He scarcely ever quarrels with his wife,
And every Sabbath strictly goes to church.

He helps the village club, and in the town
Attends parochial meetings once a week,
Pays for each purchase ready-money down:
Is anyone against him?--Who will speak?

There is a widow somewhere in the north,
On whom slow ruin gradually fell,
While she, believing that her God was wroth,
Suffered without a word--or she might tell.

And there's a beggar somewhere in the west,
Whose fortune vanished gradually away:
Now he but drags his limbs in horror lest
Starvation feed on them--or he might say.

And there are children stricken with disease,
Too ignorant to curse him, or too weak.
In a true portrait of him all of these
Must figure in the background--they shall speak.

New Varieties of Sin

(_From "Sin and Society"_)

BY EDWARD ALSWORTH ROSS

(American college professor, born 1866, a prominent advocate of academic freedom)

Today the sacrifice of life incidental to quick success rarely calls for the actual spilling of blood. How decent are the pale slayings of the quack, the adulterator, and the purveyor of polluted water, compared with the red slayings of the vulgar bandit or assassin! Even if there is blood-letting, the long-range, tentacular nature of modern homicide eliminates all personal collision. What an abyss between the knife-play of brawlers and the law-defying neglect to fence dangerous machinery in a mill, or to furnish cars with safety couplers! The providing of unsuspecting passengers with "cork" life-preservers secretly loaded with bars of iron to make up for their deficiency in weight of cork, is spiritually akin to the treachery of Joab, who, taking Amasa by the beard "to kiss him," smote Amasa "in the fifth rib"; but it wears a very different aspect. The current methods of annexing the property of others are characterized by a pleasing indirectness and refinement. The furtive, apprehensive manner of the till-tapper or the porch-climber would jar disagreeably upon the tax-dodger "swearing off" his property, or the city official concealing a "rake-off" in his specifications for a public building. The work of the card-sharp and the thimblerigger shocks a type of man that will not stick at the massive "artistic swindling" of the contemporary promoter....

One might suppose that an exasperated public would sternly castigate these modern sins. But the fact is, the very qualities that lull the conscience of the sinner blind the eyes of the on-lookers. People are sentimental, and bastinado wrong-doing not according to its harmfulness, but according to the infamy that has come to attach to it. Undiscerning, they chastise with scorpions the old authentic sins, but spare the new. They do not see that boodling is treason, that blackmail is piracy, that embezzlement is theft, that speculation is gambling, that tax dodging is larceny, that railroad discrimination is treachery, that the factory labor of children is slavery, that deleterious adulteration is murder. It has not come home to them that the fraudulent promoter "devours widows' houses," that the monopolist "grinds the faces of the poor," that mercenary editors and spellbinders "put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter." The cloven hoof hides in patent leather; and to-day, as in Hosea's time, the people "are destroyed for lack of knowledge." The mob lynches the red-handed slayer, when it ought to keep a gallows Haman-high for the venal mine inspector, the seller of infected milk, the maintainer of a fire-trap theatre. The child-beater is forever blasted in reputation, but the exploiter of infant toil, or the concocter of a soothing syrup for the drugging of babies, stands a pillar of society. The petty shoplifter is more abhorred than the stealer of a franchise, and the wife-whipper is outcast long before the man who sends his over-insured ship to founder with its crew.

BY JACK LONDON

Far better to have the front of one's face pushed in by the fist of an honest prize-fighter than to have the lining of one's stomach corroded by the embalmed beef of a dishonest manufacturer.

Tono-Bungay

BY H. G. WELLS

(English novelist, born 1866; author of many strange romances of modern science, and later, of penetrating studies of social injustice and hypocrisy. The present novel tells of the career of a financial potentate who begins life with a patent-medicine business)

It was my uncle's genius that did it. No doubt he needed me--I was, I will admit, his indispensable right hand; but his was the brain to conceive. He wrote every advertisement; some of them even he sketched. You must remember that his were the days before the _Times_ took to enterprise and the vociferous hawking of that antiquated _Encyclopædia_. That alluring, button-holing, let-me-just-tell-you-quite-soberly-something-you-ought-to-know style of newspaper advertisement, with every now and then a convulsive jump of some attractive phrase into capitals, was then almost a novelty. "Many people who are MODERATELY well think they are QUITE well," was one of his early efforts. The jerks in capitals were, "DO NOT NEED DRUGS OR MEDICINE," and "SIMPLY A PROPER REGIMEN TO GET YOU IN TONE." One was warned against the chemist or druggist who pushed "much-advertised nostrums" on one's attention. That trash did more harm than good. The thing needed was regimen--and Tono-Bungay!

Very early, too, was that bright little quarter column, at least it was usually a quarter column in the evening papers: "HILARITY--TONO-BUNGAY. Like Mountain Air in the Veins." The penetrating trio of questions: "Are you bored with your Business? Are you bored with your Dinner? Are you bored with your Wife?"--that, too, was in our Gower Street days. Both these we had in our first campaign when we worked London south, central, and west; and then, too, we had our first poster,--the HEALTH, BEAUTY AND STRENGTH one. That was his design; I happen still to have got by me the first sketch he made for it....

By all modern standards the business was, as my uncle would say, "absolutely _bona fide_." We sold our stuff and got the money, and spent the money honestly in lies and clamor to sell more stuff. Section by section we spread it over the whole of the British Isles; first working the middle-class London suburbs, then the outer suburbs, then the home counties, then going (with new bills and a more pious style of "ad") into Wales, a great field always for a new patent-medicine, and then into Lancashire. My uncle had in his inner office a big map of England, and as we took up fresh sections of the local press and our consignments invaded new areas, flags for advertisements and pink underlines for orders showed our progress.

"The romance of modern commerce, George!" my uncle would say, rubbing his hands together and drawing in air through his teeth. "The romance of modern commerce, eh? Conquest. Province by Province. Like sogers."

We subjugated England and Wales; we rolled over the Cheviots with a special adaptation containing eleven per cent. of absolute alcohol; "Tono-Bungay: Thistle Brand." We also had the Fog poster adapted to a kilted Briton in a misty Highland scene....

As I look back at them now, those energetic years seem all compacted to a year or so; from the days of our first hazardous beginning in Farrington Street with barely a thousand pounds' worth of stuff or credit all told--and that got by something perilously like snatching--to the days when my uncle went to the public on behalf of himself and me (one-tenth share) and our silent partners, the drug wholesalers and the printing people and the owner of that group of magazines and newspapers, to ask with honest confidence for £150,000. Those silent partners were remarkably sorry, I know, that they had not taken larger shares and given us longer credit when the subscriptions came pouring in. My uncle had a clear half to play with (including the one-tenth understood to be mine).

£150,000--think of it!--for the goodwill in a string of lies and a trade in bottles of mitigated water! Do you realize the madness of the world that sanctions such a thing? Perhaps you don't. At times use and wont certainly blinded me. If it had not been for Ewart, I don't think I should have had an inkling of the wonderfulness of this development of my fortunes; I should have grown accustomed to it, fallen in with all its delusions as completely as my uncle presently did. He was immensely proud of the flotation. "They've never been given such value," he said, "for a dozen years." But Ewart, with his gesticulating hairy hands and bony wrists, is single-handed chorus to all this as it plays itself over again in my memory, and he kept my fundamental absurdity illuminated for me during all this astonishing time.

"It's just on all fours with the rest of things," he remarked; "only more so. You needn't think you're anything out of the way."

Man the Reformer

BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON

(See page 235)

It is only necessary to ask a few questions as to the progress of the articles of commerce from the fields where they grew, to our houses, to become aware that we eat and drink and wear perjury and fraud in a hundred commodities. We are all implicated in this charge. The sins of our trade belong to no class, to no individual. Everybody partakes, everybody confesses, yet none feels himself accountable. The trail of the serpent reaches into all the lucrative professions and practices of man. Nay, the evil custom reaches into the whole institution of property, until our laws which establish and protect it seem not to be the issue of love and reason, but of selfishness.

To a Certain Rich Young Ruler

BY CLEMENT WOOD

(A sonnet which was widely circulated at the time of the Colorado coal-strike of 1913-14)

White-fingered lord of murderous events,
Well are you guarding what your father gained;
With torch and rifle you have well maintained
The lot to which a heavenly providence
Has called you; laborers, risen in defense
Of liberty and life, lie charred and brained
About your mines, whose gutted hills are stained
With slaughter of these newer innocents.

Ah, but your bloody fingers clenched in prayer!
Your piety, which all the world has seen!
The godly odor spreading through the air
From your efficient charity machine!
Thus you rehearse for your high rôle up there,
Ruling beside the lowly Nazarene!

FROM THE POLITICS OF ARISTOTLE

(See page 480)

A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider godfearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side.

BY AMOS

(Hebrew prophet, B. C. 760)

I hate, I despise your feasts, and I will take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Yea, though you offer me your burnt offerings and meal offerings, I will not accept them; neither will I regard the peace offerings of your fat beasts. Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs; for I will not hear the melody of thy viols. But let judgment roll down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.

Concerning Charity

BY JOHN R. LAWSON

(Part of a statement before the United States Commission on Industrial Relations, 1915. The writer was the representative of the miners in charge of the Colorado strike, and went to work as a pit-boy at the age of eight)

There is another cause of industrial discontent. This is the skillful attempt that is being made to substitute Philanthropy for Justice. There is not one of these foundations, now spreading their millions over the world in showy generosity, that does not draw those millions from some form of industrial injustice. It is not _their_ money that these lords of commercialized virtue are spending, but the withheld wages of the American working-class.