Chapter XIV: Part 14

Mrs. Nora Blatch DeForest has tried to show by tables that woman's voting benefits women and children in the passage of laws fixing the "age of consent" for girls; in fixing the age under which the consent of parent or guardian is necessary for marriage; the age below which employment of children in factories is prohibited; the maximum length of a day's work for children, and the hours within which women may work in factories. The tabulation includes the more recent suffrage states of Arizona, California, Illinois, Oregon, and Washington, in which most of the beneficial laws enumerated were passed under male suffrage. In them and in Utah--excepting the four other suffrage states where there are no limiting laws for women's work--the average day's labor for women is 9.2 hours in the ten suffrage states as against 9.9 hours in the nineteen partial suffrage states, and 10.1 hours in the nineteen non-suffrage states. The maximum day's work for a child is 8.6 hours in the suffrage states, 9 hours in the partial suffrage states, and 9.5 hours in the non-suffrage states, while the ages for prohibited child labor are 14.3 years, 14.1 years, and 13.3 years, respectively. In the same order, the ages at which the consent of parent or guardian is required for marriage of young women are 18.9 years, 19.3 years, and 19.1 years, respectively, and the ages at which girls may consent to their own ruin are 17.5 years, 16.6 years, and 15 years in the three groups of states.

Now, if populations be considered in these three groups, instead of political divisions merely, it will be found that only 5,193,116 people in the suffrage states of California, Colorado, Idaho, and Kansas are under the law which fixes the ideal "age of consent" at 18; that 6,229,263 people are under this beneficent law in the non-suffrage states of Florida, Missouri, and Tennessee, and 17,161,100 people have passed this law in the partial suffrage states of Delaware, Massachusetts, Montana, Nebraska, New York, North Dakota, and Wisconsin; it should be observed, too, that the women voters in the partial suffrage states--less than 5 per cent. of those women vote, by the way--have nothing to do with electing the men who passed this and the other laws discussed by Mrs. DeForest. Like proportions of population hold with respect to all the laws passed in the three classes of states; taking the best law in each case, it may be shown that more people have it under male suffrage than under equal suffrage.

Thus far this article must seem disappointing to sincere suffragists for it reads like an "anti" document. In the length and breadth of this Union there are no distinctive results of woman suffrage where it has been granted in part or in whole.

But there are abundant results of the feminist movement. In agitating for the ballot Lucretia Mott and her fellow and sister suffragists builded better than they knew. In _not_ following the English method of making suffrage a paramount issue "first, last, and all the time," they and the latter-day suffragists have rapidly brought to pass the feminist reforms, including the extension of the suffrage to women. They have not played the shrew like the English militants, and they are making greater headway than the militants. In this country the redress of woman's grievances has come ante hoc and cum hoc--not post hoc, and hardly ever propter hoc--with respect to woman's suffrage. The cases of California and Washington, the male-elected legislatures of which gave to women workers eight-hour laws at the same time they granted them the suffrage, are fairly typical; "indirect influence" accomplished both results.

Whether the vote in woman's hands may ultimately be better utilized; whether she may use it to aid in freeing the men voters from their thraldom to long ballots and the bosses, with the result of giving both sexes the direct influence on their government that they both lack--that is a question quite beyond the scope of this article.

THE BABY AND THE BEE

The baby lay in her carriage looking up at the over-hanging soft green leaves and white flowers of a lilac bush. A light wind came rather chilly from the north, despite the day of blue sky and flooding sunshine, and so the carriage had been wheeled a little around a south corner of the house, and left there. Baby was alone with her thumbs and fingers, her big wide eyes and the warm sunshine and her busy little brain. She was a baby of early mental development. Her parents thought her in the way to be a genius.

In the white flowers among the soft green leaves of the lilac bush busy worker bees foraged. They worked actively in the warm sunshine, some lapping up with long tongues of marvelous complexity the nectar from the open flowerets, while others loaded their thighs with the sticky yellowish pollen. They came and went between the flowers and their distant hive, each one doing its own work unaided and unhindered and even apparently unnoticed by any other.

The baby watched them with big wide eyes, uncomprehending, for nature study had not yet come into her curriculum. She liked their activity though, and more than once put up her tiny hands uncertainly as if to feel or grasp them.

Suddenly one of the bees, with the pollen baskets on its thighs filled to overflowing, dropped down on to the knitted afghan that covered the baby's body below the arms. It staggered about a moment, buzzed its wings violently without being able to fly, and then resignedly stood still with legs outspread and wings occasionally gently vibrating. The baby's eyes, soon tired of staring up into the too bright sky, turned their attention to her wriggling thumbs, and, a moment after, discovered the tired bee. She put out one hand suddenly toward it.

"Excuse me," said the bee, "but I wouldn't touch me if I were you."

"Why?" asked the baby, "shall I hurt you?"

"No, but I should have to hurt you," answered the bee gently.

"You? You little thing hurt me? That's rather absurd, isn't it?"

"Much littler things than I can hurt much bigger things than you," said the bee, sententiously. "But, really, don't you know what I am, and what I can do?"

"No, pardon me for my stupid ignorance, but I do not. I seem to have seen a picture in one of my father's books that resembles you; but it was labelled _Apis mellifica_, and that told me very little."

"Oh! yes, that was me," proudly replied the bee. "That is what I am called in books. But outdoors here my name is Bee, Honeybee."

"Thank you, Bee. And my name is Baby. I also have another name; in fact several other names. But I rather prefer Baby. It relieves me of much responsibility, and gives me certain powers that my other names fail to carry with them. May I ask if you read much?"

"I do not read at all," answered the bee, "I do not need to," it added. "I know all that I need to know when I am born."

"You mean that you do not have to study, to study books, long rows of books, in order to know how to live?" asked the baby in surprise. "If so then it is no wonder that my father writes about you as he does; that he says you are the example for us all; and that you and your cousins the, er, Formicidae...."

"Oh, the ants, yes. That we are ...?"

"That you are the true successes among all the animals because your knowledge has led you to establish the perfect society, and to become the only true communists among them all. He says that your life should be the guide for ours; that when we human beings can thoroughly adopt your ways we shall have solved all our problems."

"How wonderfully you talk!" interrupted the bee. "I suppose that comes from reading. You do read a lot, I suppose?"

"Well, I am making a beginning, yes," answered the baby with a sigh. "But it is discouraging sometimes. Here I've only just got through the _Encyclopedia Britannica_ and now they have turned out a new edition. But I get a great deal of my knowledge of life from hearing my father and mother talk; and my nurse, she is a very superior person, too."

"Your father writes books? He is a literary man, then?" asked the bee.

"Oh, no; not at all. He is a scientific man. He writes books only because he has such important things to tell the people."

"And he writes about me and my cousins the ants? He tells the people that they should live as we do? Well, that is encouraging. To tell the truth, some of us have rather envied you humans. We have wanted to be like you."

"Oh, that is silly. Anyway, to be like us in our present stage of evolution."

"In your present stage of, of--I am afraid I don't quite understand," said the bee, rubbing one antenna over its face in a rather bewildered way.

"Oh, like us as we are now. We are in a dreadful way just now. We used to have a very good conceit of ourselves. We were even happy. But that was because we were so ignorant of our true condition. We know better now, thanks to my father and some other observant and thoughtful men. They have seen how miserable we are and they are telling everybody about it. That is necessary, you know, in order to change it. They are writing about it in the newspapers, in the magazines, in little books, in big books. Our business, our politics, our government, our society, our religion, our very line of evolution; all wrong. At the bottom of it all there is one great trouble; we are too much interested in ourselves as individuals. We want things for ourselves. We should, of course, only want things for the people of the future. We should live for the race, not the individual; just as you do, you know."

"Why, that's funny! We complain of just the opposite. We don't see why we shouldn't have some good things for ourselves, and not do everything all the time for future bees. Even they won't have a good time for they will have to work for still more future bees."

"But think of the race; the wonderful race to come!" burst in the baby.

"Ah, yes, I suppose. But pardon me, please, I am a little dizzy with all this. You know I dropped down here to die; but I have been so much interested in what you said. However, I am afraid I really must die in a few minutes; and if I don't seem to be particularly bright just now you will understand and excuse me, won't you?" And the bee settled down a little lower on her stiffly outstretched legs, and vibrated both antennae gently as if to take a few last smells of the lilac-fragrant air.

"Why, this is terrible! You poor dear bee. Dying! And you talk of it as if it were nothing! Isn't there something we can do? I will call somebody. All I have to do is to scream once, and somebody will come in a hurry."

"Oh, please don't trouble yourself at all. Dying is of no importance whatever with us, you know. In fact if I am old enough or worn out enough to be weak I have no right to wish to live longer, and it would be wrong for anyone to help me. That is part of our perfect communism, you know. We only live for each other and for the race. And if we are weak or sick--but you know, of course, from hearing your father explain it."

The baby was silent for a moment. Her big, wide eyes, strained even wider now by horror and pity, were fastened on the bee, while it held its own head up as bravely as it could to look steadily into the baby's face. The bee and the baby had someway become friends. Both felt it. And they were silent together, but understanding each other, as friends can.

The baby spoke first. "Dear Bee, if I can't do anything to save you, is there anything I can do"--and a tear rolled down into her mouth--"after?"

"Thank you; you are surprisingly good. Do you really want to do something? Well, if you could someway arrange to see that my load of pollen"--and it moved its two laden hind legs slightly--"gets to the hive, it would be a great favor to me."

"Why, that is dreadful again! You are only thinking of the others. I mean can't I do something just for you, alone?"

The bee did not answer. Her hind legs slid down and out until they were nearly flat on the afghan. Suddenly the baby's face lighted. And with an extraordinary and extremely precocious display of energy and precision of movement--thus beautifully proving the words of that lamented philosopher who said that we ordinarily draw on only about half our resources--she twisted herself around so that her hands could reach the bee, and put them out directly to it.

"Now don't hurt me, the way you said you could," she whispered, "for I am going to help you." And she lifted the bee gently in one hand and with the long sharp nail of the tiny fore finger of the other--a nail the nurse had neglected for several days--she deftly pried the pollen masses off the bee's legs. Then she gently put it down again and twisted back into place, smiling happily.

"There," she said, "that will relieve you of the weight of those horrid great pollen loads. It will help you, I am sure."

It certainly did help the bee. It stood up much higher on its legs than before. It even made a few feeble steps nearer the baby's face. But it did not say anything for a full minute, and when it did speak its voice betrayed its very strong feeling. Its antennae quivered, and its wings lifted and fell spasmodically. It was a much moved bee.

"This is very wonderful; the influence you have over me, Baby," it said. "I ought, by all our tradition and knowledge, to have stung you. I ought to sting every live thing that touches me that doesn't have the nest odor. And you haven't. But you do have a very pleasing smell, someway. Is that the odor of goodness?"

"Why, no, I suppose it's just the bathed baby odor," said the baby. "I had my bath only half an hour ago and was put out here to go to sleep. Only usually I don't go to sleep. Sometimes I lie and think, and sometimes I just lie and feel good."

"And then I shouldn't at all have let you take off my pollen loads," went on the bee, musingly. "If I should be found by any bees after I am dead without any pollen on my legs or nectar in my honey stomach they would think very badly of me indeed. That is," it added a little bitterly, "if they should think anything about me at all. But I can't feel as badly as I ought to, someway. I really feel a great deal better with those loads off. And I thank you for being so good to me."

"I feel much better, too," said the baby, with a beautiful smile and sweet little gurgle. "Better because you are better, and better because I made you better. I don't think either my bath or my bottle makes me feel better. You dear bee, I wish I could always help you."

"Thank you, Baby. If I were really going to live much longer I should always remember your smell, and come to you if I were in trouble."

"Ah," cried the baby, with her eyes dancing, "then you have learned something. You didn't know everything when you were born, after all. I expect it is not too wise to get all one's knowledge from one's ancestors. Probably the world changes, and new things come into it, and one needs to be ready to learn. Now we humans are much newer things than you bees, and there are new things in our lives. That's why my father's science, which explains everything by the old things, has always seemed to me to leave something out of account. What does your father think about it?"

The bee lifted its antennae in surprise. Not having eyelids to open nor eyebrows to lift, a surprised bee can only lift its antennae.

"Why, of course, I don't know what my father thinks. I don't know my father. I haven't even seen him. Or if I have seen him with the others in the hive, I haven't known which one was he. I only know he was one of the strongest and best flying bees in the hive or he would never have been able to marry my mother."

The baby, whose eyes had opened very wide as the bee first began to speak, soon recovered herself, for she remembered what her father had written in the report of one of his committees, the Committee on Eugenics, she thought it was. She had read parts of it one day when the nurse had left her for an hour in her father's study.

"Oh, yes, I had forgotten. Only the biggest and strongest bees can be the fathers of the future bees. And that's about all your father does, isn't it; just be your father."

"Yes, we kill them off after mother begins bearing us," answered the bee simply.

"Gracious, what a dreadful thing to do!"

"Why, not at all. They are all pretty old then. And we strong young bees can do the work much better. In fact they couldn't do the work at all. They would only be extra mouths to bring food for, and extra bodies to give space to in the hive. It is far better for the race to get them out of the way," said the bee.

"But your mother; you know her, don't you? And you don't kill her, I hope?" said the baby anxiously.

"Well, I do know her, but she doesn't know me. You see when one does nothing but bear children, and has twenty or thirty thousand of them, and more, all very much alike, she couldn't expect to be much interested in any one of them, or even to know them apart. She only bears us; the nurses take care of us from the moment we are born until we are able to take care of ourselves. We don't kill our mother, anyway as long as she is vigorous and not too old, for it is very economical to have a few carefully selected, tested mothers produce all the children. But doesn't your father write about all of that in his book that tells people how to live like us?"

Baby was silent for a little while; then answered thoughtfully. "Why, yes; I had forgotten for the moment. He does have most of it in. But I think not that about killing off the fathers so soon. I'd hate to think of killing my father. He is such good fun sometimes; besides being no end of good to me all the time. He is especially good, I think, because I am not very strong, you know. I guess I shan't ever be able to walk. It's my back or something. Nobody tells me much, but I have heard them talk. And then always father comes and kisses me; and he cries a little."

The bee looked earnestly up into the baby's face. "It seems to me," it said after a moment, "that your father isn't very consistent. If you can never walk, he ought to kill you now, hadn't he? Excuse me, I didn't mean to say anything dreadful, but isn't that what the welfare of your race demands? Only strong well people to live; especially the women, the mothers of the race?"

The baby had recovered from her start at the bee's first words, and kept silent, evidently very thoughtful. Then a slow smile came over her face.

"I guess it's just because my father is a human being and not a bee or any other lower animal that he isn't consistent. Excuse me, but you know we have to call them that from our point of view. We are animals; science is right about that. And we do animal things. But there are so many different animal things. Not all animals are alike, are they? There are big differences between you and a starfish, aren't there; or just a stupid polyp that can only shut up and open like a plant, and eat, and bud off little polyps and jellyfishes. And probably there are big differences between a man and, well, even a bee or an ant. It's the scientific fashion just now to be awfully economical about explanations. What will explain a polyp is tried on the bees; and what explains the successful life of the bees and ants is made to do for human beings. I sometimes think my father's training is too much for his head. I know it contradicts his heart. Do you know, though, he isn't so inconsistent as he seems. For he says to mother that, weak as I am, I may sometime do more for the world than the strongest washerwoman that ever bore ten children. He says," and the baby dropped her voice to a soft whisper, "that I may write a beautiful poem or a great book that teaches faith and love, and do the world a lot of good by it. And mother says that whether I write it or not, I _am_ a poem of beauty and a book that teaches love. So I suppose that is why father is so inconsistent about--about killing me, you know."

Just then a step sounded from the path around the corner.

"Oh, that is the nurse," cried the baby. "She will take me in. And she is so stupid; she won't let me have you in the house."

"Oh, well, anyway I have to be dying so soon now," said the bee, also a little sadly. "I am sorry that I can never see you again. It has all been so interesting. And you have taught me some things, and besides, and more than all, you have been good to me. I--I think you are going to be worth while to your race. I think you are already. You are worth while to all of us; to the whole world. You have given me ten minutes of happy living. Could you do just one little thing more for me? Will you drop me down under the lilac bush, so I can have our flowers, that we both like so well, over me when I am dead?" And one antenna rubbed slowly over one of the bee's eyes, as if this approach to humanness had engendered the impossible, a bee's tear.

The baby twisted her infirm little body about again, stretched out her hands, and gently lifted the bee. "Good-bye, dear Bee," she whispered; "Good-bye, dear Baby," answered the bee. Then the baby carried the bee to her lips, and kissed it.

At that very moment the nurse leaned over the carriage with an indulgent smile on her face, which changed swiftly to horrified dismay as she saw the bee at baby's lips. She cried aloud, while baby with a quick flirt of little hands lightly tossed the bee under the lilac. As the nurse saw the tears streaming down the baby's face she believed her worst fears realized, and catching the child to her bosom, she ran into the house saying over and over:

"Did a bad bee sting my itty bitty sweetie angel?" And as she ran she was amazed to hear among the baby's sobs what sounded like a spoken word repeated again and again. Baby really seemed to be saying, "_No, No, No, No!_"

THE CASE FOR PIGEON-HOLES

The gigantic desk at which the Essayist was seated displayed row on row of pigeon-holes, and above them all was a big white card, on which appeared, in distinct black letters:

Saturday, January 31, 1914

7.30 a. m. ...... 12.30 p. m. ......... Pigeon-holes
12.30 p. m. ...... 3.00 p. m. ......... Miscellany
3.00 p. m. ......

but the rest of the day need not concern us.

The Essayist had been reared in a stronghold of Method--a home where the dishes were never left over and the tools were always returned to their places, where the children always went to Sunday School and never stopped to think that they didn't enjoy it, and their elders always went to prayer-meeting and never missed church--in a word, where everybody was always doing everything never and always, and nobody ever doing anything sometimes.

Thus it came to pass that the Madness of Method followed, or rather pursued, him all his days, and his existence was filled with devices for the facilitation of the business of life. The big desk was one of these devices. It had a hundred and twenty pigeon-holes, and their labelling, especially in the rows that were to receive classified ideas, was a triumph of invention. He had had trouble with ideas. They got wrongly assorted, or lost, got away over night, flew at him in parabolic curves and never came back, or flitted about his head and would not submit to scrutiny, and otherwise flouted him. He would have no more of it.

Just now he was contemplating with a glow of satisfaction not only his own particular pigeon-holes, but Pigeon-holes Universal. Blessings on the soul of that primitive man, the first really deserving to be called ancestor of the human race, who noticed that some things were like other things--that the world about him was not a mere agglomeration of endless individual objects and phenomena! What an impulse to the setting in order of the world's business, for example, and what relief to himself, when the Lucretian father of astronomy and history settled to the satisfaction of himself and his hairy fellows that the same sun they saw sink behind the hills at night would appear again next morning:

And when the sun and light of day had gone,
With wailings loud they did not roam the fields,
Crying for it among the shades of night,
But quiet lay, in slumber sepulchred,
Until the sun, with rosy torch, should come,
And bring his light into the heaven again.

Hence the pigeon-holing of day and night, of moon and stars, of seasons and years, "seed-time and harvest, heat and hoary frost," of all the possibilities of life and achievement. Incomparable benefaction!

And what ineffable relief--his thoughts ran on--when men began to realize that some human beings were like others not only in form, but in feeling; that it was not necessary to scan each individual act of your neighbor in order to form a basis for each of your own acts, but that some details of conduct were _semper_, _ubique_, _ab omnibus_! What a gain to be able to classify men into friends and enemies, to set apart by themselves the common good and the common bane, to be aware of correspondences of action and emotion, to judge of the future by the past! What an advance on the high road leading to stability of expectation and all its fruitful consequences!

And when men began to apply the principle of pigeon-holing to the actual business of life, what economy of time and of energy! Civilization itself, with its multitudinous associations of human beings in common effort, was a big desk with pigeon-holes. Man had _noticed_, and was fast approaching the peak of perfection, while the races of wild, wide-wandering beasts, ignorant both of the blessings and of the very conception of pigeon-holing, still lived their hard and coarse existence among the acorn-bearing groves,

Of common welfare had no thought, nor knew
The use of law and custom among men.

With all its intelligence, effort, and boldness, what would the human race not achieve! What had it not achieved already! The Essayist's enthusiasm was kindled as he thought of the past and present wonders of classification and organization--of races, nations, parties, unions, communities, families; of the marvels of social, educational, political, industrial, and military coöperation; of the religions and philosophies of history; of classified and recorded knowledge. He thought of the arts, sciences, law, and the crafts, with everything about them all printed in books and deposited in libraries, where anyone might read and learn. What high and rapid building, what numerous and rushing trains, what capacious liners and freighters, what ease and quickness of communication, what mingling of nations, what universalization of ideas! What wise use of means, and what efficiency! In education alone, scores of thousands of children in his own land, large and small, rich and poor, various in blood, quality, and color, were at that moment being instructed by common methods with common money in common ideas and ideals--the homogeneous fine flour of American citizenship ground in one great mill of omnicapacious hopper.

He looked next into the future, and there saw glorious visions. For pigeon-holing was not only progress, but cumulative progress. The greatest of its many virtues was that the more it was perfected, the more time there was to make it still more perfect. Pigeon-holing begat organization; organization begat leisure; leisure begat contemplation; contemplation begat wisdom; wisdom begat action; action begat progress; progress meant advance in civilization; and civilization meant more and better pigeon-holing. The chain was endless.

Yes, pigeon-holing meant cumulative progress, and the cumulative process had never been so rapid, nor given so much promise, as just now. The world had never before possessed so many appliances to facilitate the pigeon-holing of men and things and movements. There had always been enormous losses in efficiency. Now, however, nothing was being lost or wasted, as in the days when System had been a less jealous goddess; now, everything which men found out was being accurately recorded or neatly tied up, or carefully deposited, or put into the general circulation of life universal, or otherwise conserved.

And not only was everything conserved, but production itself, thanks to pigeon-holing, was far more rapid now than ever before. The march of civilization was quickening to double time. Pigeon-holing and Efficiency were the two great features of the age, and walked, or rather rushed, hand in hand. The more pigeon-holing, the more efficiency; the more efficiency, the more time saved; the more time saved, the more pigeon-holes; and so on, with ever increasing momentum, _in saecula saeculorum amen_. From the labor unions that maintained walking delegates and boycotts, to the great trusts that were responsible for high-priced beef and long-packed eggs and pure-food inspectors, everyone was working with the greatest possible speed and efficiency, and everything was being pigeon-holed to the utmost perfection. It was the age of time-tables and interest-tables, cash registers, and adding machines; steam shovels, steam seeders, harvesters, and threshers; cyclometers, pedometers, and taxicabs; type-writing and linotyping and photography; telephones and automobiles and book reviews; technical schools and teachers' courses, education by correspondence, books on etiquette and how-to-enjoy-the-arts, piano-players and phonographs; library cataloguers, Who's Whos, encyclopedias, and blanks-to-be-filled-out-and-returned-at-once; world languages, one-class steamers, democracy, cosmopolitanism, and peace conferences; tinned foods, department stores, and women's clubs; reference Bibles, dictionaries of handy quotations, hints on diet, menus for the month, short cuts to culture, wireless telegraphy, big guns and big business, joy riding, air-ships, simplified spellings, and a universal A.B. degree.

Let us not be surprised if the Essayist grew a trifle delirious. Progress is a thing of enthusiasm, and its devotees are easily wrought upon by the frenzy of the god.

What was to be the glorious goal of this cumulative progress? The Essayist's thoughts took on aërial daring. In the realm of knowledge, for example--what an inspiring vision! He had often thought of the pity of it--that scholars through the ages had consumed their lives in effort that was largely in vain: laboriously amassing the knowledge possessed by their predecessors, only to die and leave it as scant as when they had received it.

But that was in the olden time. Now, with the art of printing democratized, with specialization firmly established, with all the wonderful book-keeping and card-cataloguing that characterized intellectual activities, with the willingness of scholars to study and record _everything_, and of libraries to purchase and preserve _everything_, for fear of losing _anything_, with all the learning of the past immediately at hand, and with all the means and appliances available for its rapid utilization, why might scholarship not aspire to reach the absolute heights of knowledge? Might it not be possible now for the scholar to receive the torch of learning fully ablaze, and to run the race that was set before him without the necessity of stopping to renew or even trim it--for him to make, so to speak, more effective dashes at the pole of learning--or to build to the very heaven the intellectual Tower of Babel, whose downfall would not be so easily possible now as in an age when men had not been alive to the need of linguistic pigeon-holes?

But intellect was not the greatest thing in the world. Might not the ever increasing skill in pigeon-holing lead before long to a definition of religion, the cessation of doctrinal quarrels, and the sinking of all differences in a common ideal of administration, conduct, and even belief? Yes; might it not lead to the final obliteration of national and racial, and even social, distinctions? Might it not lead, and at no distant date, not only to democracy and social equality, but to universal democracy--when the war-drum throbbed no longer, etc.?

Having thus in imagination surveyed the glories of pigeon-holing, the Essayist seized upon his pen, and rapidly set his thoughts to paper, not omitting to make liberal use of the pigeon-holes before him whenever he adumbrated quotations with which he thought his page might be embellished.

The task finished, he glanced at the clock. The forenoon was only half spent. Looking over his sheets, too, he observed that his essay was only half the length an intelligent and good-natured reader ought to endure.

This was just as he would have it, for he had begun with the definite intention of appearing both for and against pigeon-holes. There was time enough left to make his work symmetrical by presenting the other side, and to append a conveniently stated conclusion. He knew from the editors that readers in general disliked nothing quite so much as being left to make up their own minds.

* * * * *

So he took up the pen again.

What! After all that rhapsodizing, not a believer in pigeon-holes?

Not so bad as that. He was a believer, but not a blind believer. The fact is, he had a lively sense of the limitations of pigeon-holing. He had arrived at familiarity with both its virtues and its defects through personal experience. He had dealt in pigeon-holes himself, had made them, used them, and had been in them, and for years had been growing more and more conscious that the use of them was a difficult and delicate matter.

Earlier in life, it had not been so. He still remembered vividly the time when all men were easily classifiable--into good and bad, Christian and heathen, saved and unsaved, rich and poor, wise and foolish, as easily as into black and white, or fat and lean; when all nations except the United States, and all governments except democracy, were inferior. He remembered the surprise with which he had heard for the first time that there was a difference between prohibition and temperance, that there were many forms of intemperance besides drunkenness, that English government had many points of superiority over American. He had always supposed that with those questions it was as with slavery in the mind of Charles Sumner: "Gentlemen, to this slavery question there can be no other side."

He also recalled the ferment started in his mind by a much respected teacher's remark that all truth was relative, not absolute: whether a man was good depended on what you meant by goodness; whether two and two made four depended on whether one and one made two; grammar and spelling were after all only fashions, and things that appeared in print might not be true; not even the dictionary was absolute, and the Bible was not inspired in every letter and punctuation mark.

All this shook the ground under his feet, and it took some time to recover. That about the Bible and the dictionary was especially confounding. He reeled to and fro, and staggered like a drunken man, and was at his wit's end.

You will call him stupid. He was. Most pigeon-holers are, to tell the truth. He was like them in being so busy with virtuous action that he found but little time for thought. He used the pigeon-holes customary in his neighborhood, without questioning the correctness of content or label.

But in time he came to realize that there was religion outside of sects and that there were many believers who were unconscious unbelievers, that men might be honest and still dishonorable, that a great deal of the most pernicious lying in the world was done without the utterance of a syllable, that the guiltless were often criminal and the criminal guiltless, that many democrats were really aristocrats, many fools really wise, many a rich man poor and many a poor man rich, many a learned man ignorant, many pessimists really optimists, and many optimists really stumbling-blocks to progress.

By the Saturday morning on which we catch sight of him, he had come to have a wholesome distrust of the pigeon-holes of others; and whenever he took a specimen from his own, he submitted it to fresh examination, tolerating pigeon-holes at all only under perpetual protest against men's careless use of them.

For there were multitudinous differences between things to all appearances absolutely alike. It was impossible to classify even the inanimate without some sort of violence. Even the products of the die and the press showed variation, however infinitesimal; and as for Nature, in her realm there were no two things alike. Plants, animals, persons, mountains, valleys, and streams--unending variety was the rule. The two faces most alike in all the world proved widely different on close examination, and the points of difference between the persons who owned them were infinite.

And not only that. Not only _were_ all individual things really different from all other things, but each individual thing _seemed_ different to different persons. Pigeon-holing implied pigeon-holers, and no two pigeon-holers were alike. Like the artists in Plato, they saw the same thing from different angles: "I mean, that you may look at a bed from different points of view, obliquely or directly, or from any other point of view, and the bed will appear different, but there is no difference in reality." The same man appeared better or worse, according to the standards of his judge; the same rain was good or bad, according to the health or the purpose of the person under the umbrella. One man's meat was another man's poison. No two men ever formulated the same definition of a thing, let alone an abstraction; and if definitions agreed in words, the words themselves meant different things to their authors. The Essayist thought of the desperate pass of Philosophy, patiently waiting while her disciples fruitlessly endeavored to define each other's definitions. Lucky for life that living did not hang on wisdom of that sort!

Yes, more than that; no thing--at least, no living thing--had ever been seen twice in exactly the same aspect by the same person. Not only did the object change from second to second, under the outward impulse of sun and wind and rain and the inner impulse of expanding cell, but the beholder himself was absolutely identical at no two moments. He might change his physical position, or be subject to any of the thousand mutations that sweep over the human spirit like waves of shadow over the wheat. Everything was in the state of flux. Becoming, not Being, was the order of all things. And more, each reacted not only upon its fellow, but upon everything else. The shifting of an atom affected every other atom in the universe. Withdraw a drop of water from the ocean, and there was immediate readjustment of all the waters that covered the earth. Withdraw a member from human society, or change him by ever so little--in health, so that he ate more; in stature, so that he wore more; in morals, so that he acted differently--and the whole fabric suffered modification. Nothing could be lost, nothing changed, without impairing in some sort the universal order. Nothing could be duplicated.

And so in the world of ideas. There was no item of truth not connected with and dependent upon all other truth. Let an individual idea in the ocean of a man's ideas suffer modification, and there was instant readjustment of all his other ideas, and of his emotions, and of his actions; and, under their impulse, of the actions, emotions, and ideas of all other individuals. Truth was one great, unified whole, never yet beheld, save in partial vision, by the human mind. To know one item in all its connections was to possess all knowledge. For the botanist who knew completely the flower, the mystery of the universe was solved.

What folly, then, to look for perfect pigeon-holing, when no two atoms could be found alike, to say nothing of the motions of the human spirit,

Swift as a shadow, short as any dream.

And what injustice and cruelty might it be guilty of, did its devotees become too rapt in their enthusiasm!

What injustice had they not been guilty of, in the past! What violence done to nature and to man! What forcings together and what tearings asunder! What attenuations and amputations on Procrustean beds! What heart-burnings they had caused, what hatred and what strife! What wars on sea and land, what slaughter, what laying waste, what famine, disease, and hardship, what bereavement, what languishings in prison, what falling of men from high estates, what oppression, what rackings and twistings and manglings of limbs, what persecutions and executions and excommunications and banishments, what sunderings of nations and communities, what separations of persons really congenial who would have been friends if left to themselves, what disorders--all sprung from men's desire to force their fellows into their own social and religious pigeon-holes! And ideas--what struggling and bleeding and screaming of _them_ at being forced by brutal hands into narrow and stifling cells with other ideas in mutual hot resentment. History was filled with the heartless compulsion of men and things and ideas into groups where they rebelled against going.

Nor were persecutions and strife confined to the past. The injustices of pigeon-holing were rampant in the Essayist's own enlightened time. The old-time sets of pigeon-holes might no longer be used to such deadly purpose, but there were others that bade fair to take their place. The pigeon-holes of religion were less insisted on, but the pigeon-holes of science gave promise of another tyranny hardly less unendurable. The two prime factors in tyranny--arrogant authority and superstitious multitude--were already clearly to be seen. The tyranny of aristocratic pigeon-holing seemed past, but its place was being taken by the hardly less outrageous tyranny of democracy's pigeon-holes. In a world that boasted of producing the greatest equality known to human kind, there were more classifiers and more class feeling than men had ever known before. The pigeon-holes were different, but they were there, and their partitions as impenetrable as ever.

The very consciousness that they _were_ in different compartments kept men from attempting to understand each other, let alone their real differences; more, it made them hostile, and even aggressive. What philosopher, from Thales to the latest enemy of Pragmatism, what dogmatist, from the Stoic to the latest ridiculer of Christian Science, what political critic, from Aristophanes to the anarchist of yesterday, ever tried or was willing to understand his opponent, and did not wilfully misrepresent in order to confute him? Longfellow was right when he said that the South should come to see the North, the North go to see the South, and then the war would be over. Let men forsake their pigeon-holes and meet face to face, and many a problem of religion, philosophy, sociology, industry, and pedagogy would cease to be a problem--and many an official and professorial chair would be vacant.

But for the most part, either from their own impulse or from compulsion, men remained in their pigeon-holes. Many a man who had voluntarily emerged found his fellows unwilling to stir to meet him, or even take note of his having come forth. Many a man could not get out, if he would, and spent his life beating against the partitions, clamoring loudly and unheeded for redistribution on the ground of a thousand facts.

In vain! The malefactor and the magdalen could be rescued from their pigeon-holes only by a miracle, were they ever so repentant and filled with good works. The world had disposed of them, ceased to consider them, forgotten them--even though it was a loser as well as a tyrant. What service had been lost to the State by the pigeon-holing of party--talent and patriotism denied a sphere of usefulness because of being among the minority! What willing hearts lost to religion because of the pigeon-holes of creed and denomination! And there were men who were misjudged and abused all their lives long, living sacrifices to some accident of pigeon-holing, and to the neglect which was its usual consequence. Give a dog a bad name, and hang him.

Away with pigeon-holing then, as violent, tyrannical, and oppressive, a foe to individuality of men and ideas, and an obstacle to real progress! Away with curbs and yardsticks and tapes and molds and stamps and presses and dies, and all manner of interference with nature and her methods of expansion! Let nature, and especially human nature, realize itself, like any plant or flower! Fired by imagination, the Essayist started up, glowering at his desk and thinking of the axe. He had not yet attained, you see, to the full measure of Scientific Calm, and was in a fair way to usurp the functions of judge, jury, and sheriff, as well as attorney.

But he sat back again, and reflected. No pigeon-holes at all? What heresy, thus to fly in the face of his own practice, and of evolution! Imagine it--for men to eat only when hungry, to plan a costume for every dinner out, to have no office hours and no fixed prices, no churches and no schools, no coined money, no uniforms in parades, and no parades, no laws to regulate conduct in the large, no street numbers, no marks by which to detect a book agent or a mine promoter before answering the door-bell, no catalogues, no voting-machines, no diplomas, no marriage-bond, no social and religious ties at all! Why, what was that but anarchy?

Of course it was anarchy, and the Essayist knew it all the time. You must remember that he had set out to present both sides of the case. If he was a bit carried away by his own pleading, that is not a bad fault in the advocate.

And now he was ready to assume also the role of judge, and to charge the jury--by which I mean, of course, the readers of THE UNPOPULAR.

Being a Horatian, he summed up in favor of the Golden Mean, and recommended pigeon-holing to the favorable consideration of the jury. It had its proper use, and it had its misuse. There was harmless pigeon-holing, where you reduced to order dead and material things, or classified living entities on the basis of essentials. So long as you did no great violence, and were ready to entertain motions for reconsideration, it was desirable for the sake of economy in time and energy to use pigeon-holes, even at some cost. In other words, if you were to enjoy the benefits of civilization, or, indeed, to possess it at all, you must introduce into the anarchy of perfect individualism a greater or less degree of the artificiality of collectivism.

But there was a limit beyond which neither individual man nor society in the aggregate should go.

A limit, Your Honor? And pray, who was to establish the limit? That was not so easy. Clearly, no man could establish the limit for another man. Each man must determine for himself; and society must determine for _its_ self, by means of that most mysterious of all consciousnesses, the universal consciousness.

In other words, pigeon-holing was the creation of no rule; it was an Art. The masterpiece was an individual product, a resolution of many forces. And civilization, so closely dependent upon pigeon-holing, was an Art, not a science--no, not even a social science. Let those who looked to save society by invention and application of rules alone consider well their ways. No anarchist was farther removed than they from the truth that should make men free.

In still other words, it was the Golden Mean which society, as well as the individual, should strive for. And this was no easy Panacea. The Golden Mean meant struggle--a struggle constant and eternal--to maintain an equilibrium. You had to watch unceasingly your balances, and to shift and reshift your weights--without intermittence, and forever. The devotion called for was so great that it took the inspiration of religious ideals to insure it. Human society was a Gothic cathedral--a unified and beautiful structure, but one whose complex members exerted everlasting pressure each on each, and must not long be left to themselves. To measure, and hew, and build, was not all. The pile could not be finished at once and forever. Let the architect relax his watchfulness, and decaying members soon would spoil the symmetry of the noble lines, or even precipitate the whole in awful ruin.

And here was where lay most of the trouble with pigeon-holing, past and present. Man was lazy. It was not wholly the enlightened desire for progress which had inspired him to pigeon-holing, and was continuing to inspire. Dislike of work, and selfishness, and vanity, all played a part as well, and not a small one.

It was so reposeful to dispose of things in the large--to educate by the hundred thousand, to rest in the arms of creed, to stand at the lever of a great machine, to have your tailor plan your suits and the cook or the newspaper your meals, to have a dozen pigeon-holes into which you conveniently popped new acquaintances and had them off your mind forever. It was so much easier to force men to accept your own beliefs and plans than to take the trouble to acquaint yourself with theirs. It was so much more satisfying and final to follow mere logic and go to the end of the process than always to be engaged in that most laborious of tasks--thinking and forming judgments. To write a volume embodying all the facts was much easier than to write an essay presenting the essentials and their interpretation. A perfectly democratic or a perfectly absolute government was far less difficult to plan than the ideal commonwealth. It was much easier to act on insufficient premises than to travail with thought and find that after all there was no ground for action. It was easier to be an ignoramus or a pedant than a real scholar, a dogmatist or an atheist than a good preacher, a lecturer on education than a teacher, a slouch or a dandy than a well dressed man, a persecutor or a humanitarian than a saver of souls, a despot or an anarchist than a shepherd of the people, a censor or an abettor than a monitor and adviser, a total abstainer or a drunkard than a temperate man, a conservative or a radical than a patriot, a boor or a fop than a gentleman. It was easier to be a beast, or not to be at all, than to be a MAN.

The Essayist looked at the clock. It was twelve-thirty. Once more he had successfully pigeon-holed the hours of his morning.

THE GREEKS ON RELIGION AND MORALS

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