Chapter I (5)

Apparently every dreamer is a medium for this flow, but dreamers vary immensely in their capacity to receive it--from Hodge, who dreams only when he has eaten too much, or Professor Gradgrind who never dreams at all, up to Mrs. Thompson and Mrs. Piper.

As oft remarked, dreams generally are nonsense, but some dreams, or parts of some dreams, are perhaps the most significant things we know. Each vision, waking or sleeping, must have a cause, and as an expression of that cause, must be veridical. On the one hand, the cause of a trivial dream is generally too trivial to be ascertained: it may be too much lobster, or impaired circulation or respiration; while on the other hand (and here the paradox seems to be explained), the cause of an important dream must, _ex vi termini_, be some important event. But important events are rare, and therefore significant dreams are rare; while trivial events are frequent, and therefore trivial dreams are frequent.

The important and rare event _may_ be such a conjunction of circumstances and temperaments as makes it possible for a postcarnate intelligence, assuming the existence of such, to communicate with an incarnate one. That such apparent communications are rare tends to indicate their genuineness.

* * * * *

Now to develop a little farther the time-honored hypothesis of a cosmic soul as explaining dreams, and supported by them.

Admit, provisionally at least, that the medium is merely an extraordinary dreamer. Does a man do his own dreaming, or is it done for him? Does a man do his own digesting, circulating, assimilating, or is it done for him? If he does not do these things himself, who does? About the physical functions through the sympathetic nerve, we answer unhesitatingly: the cosmic force. How, then, about the psychic functions? Are they done by the cosmic psyche?

Like respiration, they are partly under our control, but that does not affect the problem. Who runs them when we do not run them, even when we try to stop them that we may get to sleep? Even when, after they have yielded to our entreaties to stop, and we are asleep, they begin going again--without our will. The only probability I can make out is that our thinking is run by a power not ourselves, as much as our other partly involuntary functions.

To hold that a man does his own dreaming--that it is done by a secondary layer of his own consciousness--is to hold that we are made up of layers of consciousness, of which the poorest layer is that of what we call our waking life, and the better layers are at our service only in our dreams--that when a man is asleep or mad he can solve problems, compose music, create pictures, to which, when awake and in his sober senses, and in a condition to profit by his work, and give profit from it, he is inadequate.

Nay more, the theory claims that a man's working consciousness--his self--the only self known to him or the world, will hold and shape his life by a set of convictions which, in sleep, he will _himself_ prove wrong, and thereby revolutionize his philosophy and his entire life. Wouldn't it be more reasonable to attribute all such results--the solutions of the problems, the music, the pictures, the corrections of the errors--to a power outside himself?

I cannot believe that there's anything in my individual consciousness which my experience or that of my ancestors has not placed there--in raw material at least; or that in working up that raw material _I_ can exert any genius in my sometimes chaotic dreams that I cannot exert in my systematized waking hours. All the people I meet and talk with in my dreams _may_ have been met and talked with by me or my forebears, though I don't believe it; but the works of art I see have not been known to me or my ancestors or any other mortal; nor have I any sign of the genius to combine whatever elements of them I may have seen, into any such designs. And when in dreams _other_ persons tell me things contrary to my firmest convictions, in which things I later discover germs of most important workable truth, the persons who tell me that, and who are different from me as far as fairly decent persons can differ from each other, are certainly not, as the good Du Prel would have us believe, myself. All these things are not figments of _my_ mind--if they are figments of a mind, it's a mind bigger than mine. The biggest claim I can make, or assent to anybody else making, is that my mind is telepathically receptive of the product of that greater mind.

Here are some farther evidences of the greater mind, given by Lombroso (_After Death, What?_, 320 f.):

It is well known that in his dreams Goethe solved many weighty
scientific problems and put into words many most beautiful verses.
So also La Fontaine (_The Fable of Pleasures_) and Coleridge and
Voltaire. Bernard Palissy had in a dream the inspiration for one
of his most beautiful ceramic pieces....

Holde composed while in a dream _La Phantasie_, which reflects in
its harmony its origin; and Nodier created _Lydia_, and at the
same time a whole theory on the future of dreaming. Condillac in
dream finished a lecture interrupted the evening before. Kruger,
Corda, and Maignan solved in dreams mathematical problems and
theorems. Robert Louis Stevenson, in his _Chapters on Dreams_,
confesses that portions of his most original novels were composed
in the dreaming state. Tartini had while dreaming one of his most
portentous musical inspirations. He saw a spectral form
approaching him. It is Beelzebub in person. He holds a magic
violin in his hands, and the sonata begins. It is a divine adagio,
melancholy-sweet, a lament, a dizzy succession of rapid and
intense notes. Tartini rouses himself, leaps out of bed, seizes
his violin, and reproduces all that he had heard played in his
sleep. He names it the _Sonata del Diavolo_,...

Giovanni Dupré got in a dream the conception of his very beautiful
_Pietà_. One sultry summer day Dupré was lying on a divan thinking
hard on what kind of pose he should choose for the Christ. He fell
asleep, and in dream he saw the entire group at last complete,
with Christ in the very pose he had been aspiring to conceive, but
which his mind had not succeeded in completely realizing.

It is a quite frequent experience that a person perplexed by a problem at night finds it solved on waking in the morning. Efforts to remember, which are unsuccessful before going to sleep, on waking are often found accomplished.

A dream is a work of genius, and in many respects, perhaps most, especially in vividness of imagination, the best example we have. It is the most spontaneous, constructed with the least effort from fewest materials, the least restrained, and often immeasurably surpassing all works of waking genius in the same department. A genius gets a trifling hint, and being inspired by the gods (anthropomorphic for: flowed in upon by the cosmic soul?) builds out of the hint a poem or a drama or a symphony. You and I build dreams surpassing the poem or the drama or the symphony, but our friends Dryasdust and Myopia inquire into our experiences, and sometimes find a little hint on which a dream was built, and then all dreams are demonstrated things unworthy of serious consideration. Is it not a more rational view that the fact that the soul can in the dream state elaborate so much from so little, indicates it to be then already in a life which has no limits?

Havelock Ellis, in his _World of Dreams_, says (p. 229):

Our eyes close, our muscles grow slack, the reins fall from our
hands. But it sometimes happens that the horse knows the road home
even better than we know it ourselves.

He puts "the horse" outside of the dreamer plainly enough here. He further says (p. 280).

If we take into account the complete psychic life of dreaming,
subconscious as well as conscious, it is waking, not sleeping,
life which may be said to be limited.... Sleep, Vaschide has said,
is not, as Homer thought, the brother of Death, but of Life, and,
it may be added, the elder brother....

He quotes from Bergson (_Revue Philosophique_, December, 1908, p. 574):

This dream state is the substratum of our normal state. Nothing is
added in waking life; on the contrary, waking life is obtained by
the limitation, concentration, and tension of that diffuse
psychological life which is the life of dreaming.... To be awake
is to will; cease to will, detach yourself from life, become
disinterested: in so doing you pass from the waking ego to the
dreaming ego, which is less _tense_, but more _extended_ than the
other.

Ellis continues (p. 281):

I have cultivated, so far as I care to, my garden of dreams, and
it scarcely seems to me that it is a large garden. Yet every path
of it, I sometimes think, might lead at last to the heart of the
universe.

But with the exception of a few spasmodic inspirations, the records of dreams, ordinary or from the sensitives, contain nothing new--nothing to relieve man from the blessed necessity of eating his bread, intellectual as well as material, in the sweat of his brow; and, perhaps more important still, little to make the interests or responsibilities of this life weaker because of any realized inferiority to those of a possible later life.

It would apparently be inconsistent in Nature, or God, if you prefer, to start our evolution under earthly conditions, educating us in knowledge and character through labor and suffering, but at the same time throwing open to our perceptions, from another life, a wider range of knowledge and character attainable without labor or suffering.

I have no time or space or inclination to argue with those who deny a plan in Nature. He who does, probably lives away from Nature. It appears to have been a part of that plan that for a long time past most of us should "believe in" immortality, and that, at least until very lately, none of us should know anything about it. Confidence in immortality has been a dangerous thing. So far we haven't all made a very good use of it. Many of the people who have had most of it and busied themselves most with it, so to speak, have largely transferred their interests to the other life, and neglected and abused this one. "Other-worldliness" is a well-named vice, and positive evidence of immortality might be more dangerous than mere confidence in it.

All this, I think, supports the notion that whatever, if anything, is in store for us beyond this life, it would be a self-destructive scheme of things (or Scheme of Things, if you prefer) that would throw the future life into farther competition with our interests here, at least before we are farther evolved here. Looking at history by and large, we children have not generally been trusted with edge tools until we had grown to some sort of capacity to handle them. If the Mesopotamians or Egyptians or Greeks or Romans had had gunpowder, it looks as if they would have blown most of themselves and each other out of existence, and the rest back into primitive savagery, and stayed there until the use of gunpowder became one of the lost arts. But the new knowledge of evolution has given the modern world a new intellectual interest; and the new altruism, a new moral one. The reasons for doing one's best in this life, and doing it actively, are so much stronger and clearer than they were when so many good people could fall into asceticism and other-worldliness, that perhaps we are now fit to be trusted with proofs of an after life. It is very suggestive that these apparent proofs came contemporaneously with the new knowledge tending to make them safe; and equally suggestive that it is when we have begun to suffer from certain breakdowns in religion, that we have been provided with new material for bracing it up.

At the opposite extreme, it also is suggestive that these new indications that our present life is a petty thing beside a future one, have come just when modern science has so increased our control over material nature that we are in peculiar danger of having our interest in higher things buried beneath material interests, and enervated by over-indulgence in material delights.

If it be true that, roughly speaking, we are not entrusted with dangerous things before we are evolved to the point where we can keep their danger within bounds, the fact that we have not until very lately, if yet, been entrusted with any verification of the dream of the survival of bodily death, would seem to confer upon the spiritistic interpretation of the recent apparent verifications, a pragmatic sanction--an accidental embryo pun over which the historic student is welcome to a smile, and which, since the preceding clause was written, I have seen used in all seriousness by Professor Giddings. Conclusive or not, that "sanction" is certainly an addition to the arguments that existed before, including the general argument from evolution. And, so far as the phenomena go to establish the spiritistic hypothesis, surely they are not to be lightly regarded because as yet they do not establish it more conclusively.

* * * * *

When during the last century science bowled down the old supports of the belief in immortality, there grew up a tendency to regard that belief as an evidence of ignorance, narrowness, and incapacity to face the music. May not disregard of the possible new supports be rapidly becoming an evidence of the same characteristics?

When the majority of those who have really studied the phenomena of the sensitives, starting with absolute skepticism, have come to a new form of the old belief; and when, of the remaining minority, the weight of respectable opinion goes so far as suspense of judgment, how does the argument look? Isn't it at least one of those cases of new phenomena where it is well to be on guard against old mental habits, not to say prejudices?

Is it not now vastly more _reasonable_ to believe in a future life than it was a century ago, or half a century, or quarter of a century? Is it not already more reasonable to believe in it than not to believe in it? Is it not already appreciably harder _not_ to believe in it than it was a generation ago?

* * * * *

So far as I can see, the dream life, from mine up to Mrs. Piper's, vague as it is, is an argument for immortality _based on evidence_.

The sensitives are not among the world's leading thinkers or moralists--are not more aristocratic founders for a new faith than were a certain carpenter's son and certain fishermen; and only by implication do the sensitives suggest any moral truths, but they do offer more facts to the modern demand for facts.

Spiritism has a bad name, and it has been in company where it richly deserved one; but it has been coming into court lately with some very important-looking testimony from very distinguished witnesses; and some rather comprehensive minds consider its issues supreme--the principal issues now upon the horizon, between the gross, luxurious, unthinking, unaspiring, uncreating life of today, and everything that has, in happier ages, given us the heritage of the soul--the issues between increasing comforts and withering ideals--between water-power and Niagara.

The doubt of immortality is not over the innate reasonableness of it: the universe is immeasurably more reasonable with it than without it; but over its practicability after the body is gone. We, in our immeasurable wisdom, don't see how it can work--we don't see how a universe that we don't begin to know, which already has given us genius and beauty and love, and which seems to like to give us all it can--birds, flowers, sunsets, stars, Vermont, the Himalayas, and the Grand Canyon; which, most of all, has given us the insatiable soul, can manage to give us immortality. Well! Perhaps we ought not to be grasping--ought to call all we know and have, enough, and be thankful--thankful above all, perhaps, that as far as we can see, the hope of immortality cannot be disappointed--that the worst answer to it must be oblivion. But on whatever grounds we despair of more (if we are weak enough to despair), surely the least reasonable ground is that we cannot see more: the mole might as well swear that there is no Orion.

THE MUSES ON THE HEARTH

"How to be efficient though incompetent" is the title suggested by a distinguished psychologist for the vocational appeals of the moment. Among these raucous calls none is more annoying to the ear of experience than the one which summons the college girl away from the bounty of the sciences and the humanities to the grudging concreteness of a domestic science, a household economy, from which stars and sonnets must perforce be excluded. We have, indeed, no quarrel with the conspicuous place now given to the word "home" in all discussions of women's vocations. Suffragists and anti-suffragists, feminists and anti-feminists have united to clear a noble term from the mists of sentimentality and to reinstate it in the vocabulary of sincere and candid speakers. More frankly than a quarter of a century ago, educated women may now glory in the work allotted to their sex. The most radical feminist writer of the day has given perfect expression to the home's demand. Husband and children, she says, have been able to count on a woman "as they could count on the fire on the hearth, the cool shade under the tree, the water in the well, the bread in the sacrament." We may go farther and say that our high emprise does not depend upon husband and children. Married or unmarried, fruitful or barren, with a vocation or without, we must make of the world a home for the race. So far from quarrelling with the hypothesis of the domestic scientists, we turn it into a confession of faith. It is their conclusions that will not bear the test of experience. Because women students can anticipate no more important career than home-making, it is argued that within their four undergraduate years training should be given in the practical details of house-keeping. Any woman who has been both a student and a housekeeper knows that this argument is fallacious.

Before examining it, however, we must clear away possible misunderstandings. Our discussion concerns colleges and not elementary schools. Those who are loudest in denouncing the aristocratic theory of a college education must admit that colleges contain, even today, incredible as it sometimes seems, a selected group of young women. It is also true that the High Schools contain selected groups. Below them are the people's schools. The girls who do not go beyond these are to be the wives of working men, in many cases can learn nothing from their mothers, and before marriage may themselves be caught in the treadmill of daily labor. It is probable that to these children of impoverished future we should give the chance to learn in school facts which may make directly for national health and well-being. But the girls in the most democratic state university in this country are selected by their own ambition, if by nothing else, for a higher level of life. Their power and their opportunities to learn do not end on Commencement Day. The higher we go in the scale of education, until we reach the graduate professional schools, the less are we able and the less need we be concerned to anticipate the specific activities of the future.

Furthermore, we are discussing colleges of "liberal" studies, not technical schools. Into the former have strayed many students who belong in the latter. The tragic thing about their errantry is that presidents and faculties, instead of setting them in the right path, try to make the college over to suit them. The rightful heirs to the knowledge of the ages are despoiled. The most down-trodden students are those who cherish a passion for the intellectual life. Among these are as many women as men. If domestic science were confined to separate schools, as all applied sciences ought to be, we should have nothing but praise for a subject admirably conceived, and often admirably taught. In these schools it may be studied by such High School graduates as prefer to deal with practical rather than with pure science, and, in a larger way, by such college graduates as wish to supplement theory with practice for professional purposes. But in liberal colleges domestic science is but dross handed out to seekers after gold. Against its intrusion into the curriculum no protest can be too stern.

Faith in this study seems to rest upon the belief that the actual experiences of life can be anticipated. This is a fallacy. There is no dress rehearsal for the rôle of "wife and mother." It is a question of experience piled on experience, life piled on life. The only way to perform the tasks, understand the duties, accept the joys and sorrows of any given stage of existence is to have performed the tasks, learned the duties, fought out the joys and sorrows of earlier stages. In so far as "housekeeping" means the application of principles of nutrition and sanitation, these principles can be acquired at the proper time by an active, well-trained mind. The preparation needed is not to have learned facts three or five or ten years in advance, when theories and appliances may have been very different, but to have taken up one subject after another, finding how to master principles and details. This new subject is not recondite nor are we unconquerably stupid. To learn as we go--_discere ambulando_--need not turn the home into an experiment station.

But "every woman knows" that housekeeping, when it is a labor of love and not a paid profession, goes far deeper than ordering meals or keeping refrigerators clean, or making an invalid's bed with hospital precision. We are more than cooks. We furnish power for the day's work of men, and for the growth of children's souls. We are more than parlor maids. We are artists, informing material objects with a living spirit. We are more even than trained nurses. We are companions along the roads of pain, comrades, it may be, at the gates of death. Back of our willingness to do our full work must lie something profounder than lectures on bacteria, or interior decoration, or an invalid's diet or a baby's bath. Specific knowledge can be obtained in a hurry by a trained student. What cannot be obtained by any sudden action of the mind is _the habit_ of projecting a task against the background of human experience as that experience has been revealed in history and literature, and of throwing into details the enthusiasm born of this larger vision. She is fortunate who comes to the task of making a home with this habit already formed. Her student life may have cast no shadow of the future. When she was reading Æschylus or Berkeley, or writing reports on the Italian despots, or counting the segments of a beetle's antennæ, she may not have foreseen the hours when the manner of life and the manner of death of human beings would depend upon her. She was merely sanely absorbed in the tasks of her present. But in later life she comes to see that in performing them, she learned to disentangle the momentary from the permanent, to prefer courage to cowardice, to pay the price of hard work for values received. Age may bring what youth withholds, a sense of humor, a mellow sympathy. But only youth can begin that habitual discipline of mind and will which is the root, if not of all success, at least of that which blooms in the comfort of other people. Carry the logic of the vocation-mongers to its extreme. Grant that every girl in college ought someday to marry, and that we must train her, while we have her, for this profession. Then let the college insist on honest work, clear thinking and bright imagination in those great fields in which successive generations reap their intellectual harvest. Captain Rostron of the Carpathia once spoke to a body of college students who were on fire with enthusiasm for the rescuer of the Titanic's survivors. He ended with some such words as these: "Go back to your classes and work hard. I scarcely knew that night what orders were coming out when I opened my mouth to speak, but I can tell you that I had been preparing to give those orders ever since I was a boy in school." Many a home may be saved from shipwreck in the future because today girls are doing their duty in their Greek class rooms and Physics laboratories.

But this fallacy of domesticity probes deeper than we have yet indicated. It is, in the last analysis, superficial to ticket ourselves off as house-keepers or even as women. What are these unplumbed wastes between housekeepers and teachers, mothers and scholars, civil engineers and professors of Greek, senators and journalists, bankers and poets, men and women? A philosopher has pointed out that what we share is vastly greater than what separates us. We walk upon and must know the same earth. We live under the same sun and stars. In our bodies we are subject to the same laws of physics, biology and chemistry. We speak the same language, and must shape it to our use. We are products of the same past, and must understand it in order to understand the present. We are vexed by the same questions about Good and Evil, Will and Destiny. We all bury our dead. We shall all die ourselves. Back of our vocations lies human life. Back of the streams in which we dabble is that immortal sea which brought us hither. To sport upon its shore and hear the roll of its mighty waters is the divine privilege of youth.

If any difference is to be made in the education of boys and girls, it must be with the purpose of giving to future women more that is "unvocational," "unapplied," "unpractical." As it happens, such studies as these are the ones which the mother of a family, as well as a teacher or writer, is most sure to apply practically in her vocation. The last word on this aspect of the subject was said by a woman in a small Maine town. Her father had been a day laborer, her husband was a mechanic. She had five children, and, of course, did all the house-work. She also belonged to a club which studied French history. To a foolish expression of surprise that with all her little children she could find time to write a paper on Louis XVI she retorted angrily: "With all my children! It is for my children that I do it. I do not mean that they shall have to go out of their home, as I have had to, for everything interesting." But the larger truth is that the value of a woman as a mother depends precisely upon her value as a human being. And it is for that reason that in her youth we must lead one who is truly thirsty only to fountains pouring from the heaven's brink. It might seem cruel if it did not merely illustrate the law of risk involved in any creative process, that the more generously women fulfil the "function of their sex" the more they are in danger of losing their souls to furnish a mess of pottage. The risk of life for life at a child's birth is more dramatic but no truer than the risk of soul for body as the child grows. In the midst of petty household cares the nervous system may become a master instead of a servant, a breeder of distempers rather than a feeder of the imagination. The unhappiness of homes, the failure of marriage, are due as often to the poverty-stricken minds, the narrowed vision of women as to the vice of men.

Their sense is with their senses all mix'd in,
Destroyed by subtleties these women are.

George Meredith's prayer for us, "more brain, O Lord, more brain!" we shall still need when "votes for women" has become an outworn slogan.

No one claims that character is produced only by college training or any other form of education. There are illiterate women whose wills are so steady, whose hearts are so generous, and whose spirits seem to be so continuously refreshed that we look up to them with reverence. They have their own fountains. It would be a mistake to suppose that because they are "open at the outlet" they are "closed at the reservoir." But there is a class of women who are impelled toward knowledge (as still others are impelled toward music or art) and whose success in anything they do will depend upon their state of mind. We ought to assume that the girls who go to college belong to this class, however far from the springs of Helicon they mean to march in the future. It is a terrible thing that we should think of taking one hour of their time while they are in college for any course that does not enrich the intellect and add to the treasury of thoughts and ideas upon which the woman with a mind will always be drawing. Spirit is greater than intellect, and may survive it in the course of a long life. But in the active years, for this kind of woman, the mental life becomes one with the spiritual. A lusty serviceableness will issue from their union. If mental interests seem sterile, the cure, as far as the college is concerned with it, is to deepen, not to lessen the love of learning. The renewal of sincerity, humility and enthusiasm in the age-old search for truth is more necessary than the introduction of new courses, which must be applied to be of value, and which at this time in a girl's experience, and under these conditions, can give only partial and superficial data.

Our lives are subject to a thousand changes. In the home as well as out of it, we shall meet, face to face, fruition and disappointment, rapture and pain, hope and despair. In these tests of the soul's health what good will _domestic_ science do us? Not by sanitation is sanity brought forth. Women do not gather courage from calories, nor faith from refrigerators. But every added milestone along the road from youth to age shows us the truth of Cicero's claim, made after he had borne public care and known private grief, for the faithful, homely companionship of intellectual studies: "For other things belong neither to all times and ages nor all places; but these pursuits feed our growing years, bring charm to ripened age, adorn prosperity, offer a refuge and solace to adversity, delight us at home, do not handicap us abroad, abide with us through the watches of the night, go with us on our travels, make holiday with us in the country."

Upon women, in crucial hours, may depend the peace of the old, the fortune of the middle-aged, the hopefulness of the young. In such an hour we do not wish to be dismissed as were the women of Socrates's family, who had had no part in the bright life of the Athens of which he was taking leave. Shall we become the bread in the sacrament of life, ourselves unfed? the fire on the hearth, ourselves unkindled?

THE LAND OF THE SLEEPLESS WATCHDOG

If from almost any given point in the United States you start out towards the Southwest, you will reach in time the Land of the Sleepless Watchdog. On each of the scattered farms, defending it against all intruders, you will find a band of eager and vociferous dogs--dogs who magnify their calling because they have no other, and who, by the same token lose all sense of proportion in life. It is "theirs not to reason why," but to put up warnings and threats, and to be ready for the fight that never comes.

If you enter a domain without previous understanding with them, you are powerless for mischief, for you are in the center of a publicity beside which any other publicity is that of a hermit's cell. The whole farm knows where you are, and all are suspicious of your predatory intentions. You can have none under these conditions. Meanwhile the whole pack voices its opinion of you and your unworthiness.

This is supposing that you are actually there. If you are not, it amounts to the same thing. Every dog knows that you meant to be there, or at any rate, that to be there was the scheme of someone equally bad. The slightest rustle of the wind, the call of a bird, the ejaculation responsive to a flea--any of these, anything to set the pack going.

And one pack starts the next. And the cries of the two start the third and the fourth, and each of these reacts on the first. The cry passes along the line, "We have him at last, the mad invader." There being no other enemy, they cry out against each other. And of late years, since the barbed wire choked the cattle ranges, and gave pause to the coyote, there has been no enemy. But the dogs are there, though their function has passed away. It is but a tradition--a remembrance. Only to the dogs themselves does any reality exist.

Yet, such is the nature of dogs and men, the watchdog was never more numerous nor more alert than today. He was never in better voice, and having nothing whatever to do, he does it to the highest artistic perfection. At least one justification remains. Civilization has not done away with the moon. In the stillness of night, its great white face peeps over the hills at intervals no dog has yet determined. Under this weird light, strange shadowy forms trip across the fields. The watchdogs of each farm have given warning, and the whole countryside is eager with vociferation.

Men say the Sleepless Watchdog's bark is worse than his bite. This may be, but it is certain that his feed is worse than both bark and bite together. In the language of economics, the Sleepless Watchdog is an unremunerative investment. He has "eaten his master out of house and home," and by the same token, he imagines that he himself is now the master.

* * * * *

By this time, the gentle but astute reader has observed that this is no common "Dog Story," but a parable of the times we live in; and that the real name of the Land of the Sleepless (but unremunerative) Watchdog is indeed Europe.

And because of the noisy and costly futility of the whole system in his own and other countries, Professor Ottfried Nippold of Frankfort-on-the-Main, has made a special study of the Watchdogs of Germany.

The good people of the Fatherland some forty years ago were drawn into a great struggle with their neighbors beyond the Rhine. To divert his subjects' attention from their ills at home, the Emperor of France wagered his Rhine provinces against those of Prussia, in the game of War. The Emperor lost, and the King of Prussia took the stakes: for in those days it was a divine right of Kings to deal in flesh and blood.

The play is finished, the board is cleared, Alsace and Lorraine were added to Germany, and the mistake is irretrievable. A fact accomplished cannot be blotted out. But hopeless as it all is, there are watchdogs who, on moonlight nights, call across the Vosges for revenge--for honor, for War, War, War. And the German watchdogs cry War, War, War. The word sounds the same in all languages. The watchdogs bark, but the battle will never begin.

It is Professor Nippold's purpose, in his little book _Der Deutsche Chauvinismus_, to show that the clamor is not all on one side. The watchdogs of the Paris Boulevards are noisy enough, but those of Berlin are just the same. And as these are not all of Germany, so the others are not all of France. A great, thrifty, honest, earnest, cultured nation does not find its voice in the noises of the street. On the other hand, Germany, industrious, learned, profound and brave, is busy with her own affairs. She would harm no one, but mind her own business. But she is entangled in mediæval fashions. She has her own band of watchdogs, as noisy, as futile, as unthinkingly clamorous as ever were those of France. The "Sleepless Watchdog" in France is known as a Chauvinist, in England as a Jingo, in Prussia as a Pangermanist. They all bay at the same moon, are excited over the same fancies; they hear nothing, see nothing but one another. All alike live in an unreal world, in its essentials a world of their own creation. With all of them the bark is worse than the bite, and their "Keep" is more disastrous than both together.

And as each nation should look after its own, Dr. Nippold lists--blacklists if you choose--the Chauvinists of Germany.

At first glance, they make an imposing showing. A long series of newspapers, dozens of pamphlets, categories of bold and impressive warnings against the schemes of England and France, a set of appeals in the name of patriotism, of religion, of force, of violence. A long-drawn call to hate, to hate whatever is not of our own race or class; and above all the banding together of the "noblest" profession as against the encroachments of mere civilians, of men whose hands are soiled with other stains than blood.

We have, first and foremost, General Keim, Keim the invincible, Keim the insatiable, Keim of the Army-League, Keim the arch hater of England and of Russia and of France, Keim the jewel of the fighting Junker aristocracy of Prussia--the band of warriors who despise all common soldiers--"white slave" conscripts, and with them all civilians, who at the best are only potential common soldiers. "War, war, on both frontiers," is Keim's obsessing vision. War being inevitable and salutary, it cannot come too soon. The duty of hate, he urges on all the youth of Germany, maidens as well as men. It is said that Keim is the only man of the day who can maintain before an audience of Christians such a proposition as this: "We must learn to hate, and to hate with method. A man counts little who cannot hate to a purpose. Bismarck was hate."

From Gaston Choisy's clever character sketch of General Keim, we learn that as a soldier or tactician, he was a man of no note. He has no ability as a thinker or as a speaker, but this he has: "the courage of his vulgarity." "At the age of 68, suffering from Bright's Disease, he travelled all Germany, his great head always in ebullition, gathering everywhere for the war-fire all the news, all the stories and all the lies susceptible of aiding the Cause." "Without Bismarck's authority, he had his manner--a mixture of baseness, of atrocious joviality, a studied cynicism and a lack of conscience." "How generous are circumstances! The spirit of Von Moltke the silent, with the speech of an _enfant terrible_, an endless flow of language, an endless course of words."

To the Chauvinists of France, Keim is indeed Germany. As to his own country, Von Ferlach sagely remarks: "Keims and Keimlings unfortunately are all about us. But they are a vanishing minority." The great culture peoples do not hate one another. ("Die grossen Kultur-volker hassen einander nicht.")

Next on the black list, comes General Frederick von Bernhardi, with his _Germany and the Next War_, the need to obliterate France, while giving the needed chastisement to England. A retired officer of cavalry, said to be disgruntled through failure of promotion, a tall, spare, serious, prosy figure, a writer without inspiration, a speaker without force. Germany has never taken him seriously; for he lacks even the clown-charm of his rival Keim, but the mediæval absurdities and serious extravagances in his defense of war are well tempered to stir the eager watchdogs in the rival lands. In spite of his pleas, "historical, biological and philosophical," for war, he is a man of peace, for which, in the words of General Eichhorn, "one's own sword is the best and strongest pledge."

Doubtless other retired officers hold views of the same sort, as do doubtless many who could not be retired too soon for the welfare of Germany. Into the nature of their patriotism, the Zabern incident has thrown a great light. "Other lands may possess an army," a Prussian officer is quoted as saying, "the army possesses Germany."

The vanities and follies of Prussian militarism are concentrated in the movement called Pangermanism. Behind this, there seem to be two moving forces, the Prussian Junker aristocracy, and the financial interests which center about the house of Krupp. The purposes of Pangermanism seem to be, on the one hand, to prevent parliamentary government in Germany; and on the other, to take part in whatever goes on in the world outside. Just now, the control of Constantinople is the richest prize in sight, and that fateful city is fast replacing Alsace in the passive role of "the nightmare of Europe." The journalists called Conservative find that "Germany needs a vigorous diplomacy as a supplement to her power on land and sea, if she is to exercise the influence she deserves." And a vigorous foreign policy is but another name for the use of the War System as a means of pushing business. From the daily press of Germany may be culled many choice examples of idle Jingo talk, but analysis of the papers containing it shows their affiliation with the "extreme right," a small minority in German politics, potent only through the indiscretions of the Crown Prince, and through the fact that the Constitution of Germany gives its people no control over administrative affairs. The journals of this sort--the _Tägliche Rundschau_, the _Berliner Post_, the _Deutsche Tageszeitung_, and the _Berliner Neueste Nachrichten_ are the property of Junker reactionists, or else, like the _Lokal Anzeiger_, the _Rheinisch-Westphalische Zeitung_, the organs merely of the War trade House of Krupp. Out from the ruck of hack writers, there stands a single imposing figure, Maximilian Harden, the "poet of German politics," who "casts forth heroic gestures and thinks of politics in terms of æsthetics, the prophet of a great, strong and saber-rattling nation," whose force shall be felt everywhere under the sun.

Bloodthirsty pamphlets in numbers, are listed by Nippold. But the anonymous writers ("Divinator," "Rhenanus," "Lookout," "Deutscher," "Politiker," "Activer General" and "Deutscher Officier") count for less than nothing in personal influence. They do little more than bay at the moon.

Impressive as Nippold's list seems at first, and dangerous to the peace of the world, after all one's final thought is this: How few they are, and how scant their influence, as compared with the wise, sane, commonsense of sixty millions of German people. The two great papers that stand for peace and sanity, the _Berliner Tageblatt_ and the _Frankfurter Zeitung_, with the _Münchener Neueste Nachrichten_, are read daily by more Germans than all the reactionary sheets combined. The Socialist organ _Vorwaerts_, avowedly opposed to monarchy as well as to militarism, carries farther than all the organs of Pangermanism of whatever kind.

We may justly conclude that the war spirit is not the spirit of Germany, a nation perforce military because the people cannot help themselves. So far as it goes, it is the spirit of a narrow clique of "sleepless watchdogs" whose influence is waning, and would be non-existent were it not for the military organization which holds Germany by the throat, but which has pushed the German people just as far as it dares.

A second lesson is that while forms of government, and social traditions, may differ, the relation of public opinion towards war is practically the same in all the countries of Western Europe. It is in its way the test of European civilization. Each nation has its "sleepless watchdogs," and those of one nation fire the others, when the proper war scares are set in motion by the great unscrupulous group of those who profit by them. The war promoters, the apostles of hate, form a brotherhood among themselves, and their success in frightening one nation reacts to make it easier to scare another.

This the reader may remember, as a final lesson. There is no civilized nation which longs for war. There is nowhere a reckless populace clamoring for blood. The schools have done away with all that. The spread of commerce has brought a new Earth with new sympathies and new relations, in which international war has no place.

If you are sure that your own nation has no design to use violence on any other, you may be equally sure that no other has evil designs on you. The German fleet is not built as a menace to England; whether it be large or small should concern England very little. Just as little does the size of the British fleet bear any concern to Germany. The German fleet is built against the German people. The growth of the British army and navy has in part the same motive. Armies and navies hold back the waves of populism and democracy. They seem a bulwark against Socialism. But in the great manufacturing and commercial nations, they will not be used for war, because they cannot be. The sacrifice appalls: the wreck of society would be beyond computation.

But still the sleepless watchdogs bark. It is all that they can do, and we should get used to them. In our own country, whatever country it may be, we have our own share of them, and some of them bear distinguished names. No other nation has any more, and no nation takes them really seriously, any more than we do. And one and all, their bark is worse than their bite, and the cost of feeding them is doubtless worse than either.

EN CASSEROLE

_Special to our Readers_

Those of you who have not received your REVIEWS on time will probably now find a double interest in the article in the last number, on _Our Government Subvention to Literature_. In conveying periodicals so cheaply, not only is Uncle Sam engaged in a bad job, but he is doing it cheaply, and consequently badly, and he has more of it than he can well handle. _He is at length carrying them as freight_, and most of you know what that means. We are receiving complaints of delay on all sides, and an appreciable part of the unwelcome subvention Uncle Sam is giving us, goes in sending duplicates of lost copies. We don't acknowledge any obligation, legal or moral, to do this; but we love our subscribers--more or less disinterestedly--and try to do them all the kinds of good we can. Partly to enable us to do that, as long as the subvention is given, we follow the example of the excellent Pooh Bah, and put our pride (and the subvention) into our pockets. Even if we did not love our subscribers so, we should have to do the pocketing all the same, because our competitors do. Competitors are always a very shameless sort of people.

We wish, however, that Uncle Sam would keep his subvention in his own pocket, and so lead to a higher plane all competitors in the magazine business, including some of those who don't want to rise to a higher plane. The best of such a proceeding on his part would be that he would also, through the complicated influences described in the article referred to encourage up to a higher plane those who write for popular magazines. Those who write for THE UNPOPULAR REVIEW are, of course, on the highest possible plane already. This remark is made solely for the benefit of readers taking up the REVIEW for the first time. To others it is superfluous, and if there is anything we try to avoid, it is, as we have so many times to tell volunteer contributors, superfluities. Even popularity we do not try to avoid, but--!

The foregoing paragraph was written with little thought of what was coming to be added to it. You and we have something to be proud of. Our REVIEW has been doing its part in saving all Europe from the waste of hundreds of millions of money, and the literatures of all Europe from a degradation like that through which our own is passing. Read the following letter:

Dear Mr. [Editor]:

I have already sent a line through ---- thanking you for the copy
of THE UNPOPULAR REVIEW, which you were good enough to send me,
but I should like to repeat my thanks to you again direct, and at
the same time, tell you how the REVIEW has been of service to
European publishers.

The article in the last number entitled _Our Government Subvention
to Literature_ naturally interested me very much from a personal
point of view, but the statistics you give showing the effect of
second class matter rate on book sales was very valuable to me as
the representative of the English Publishers on the Executive
Committee of the International Publishers Congress.

At the Congress held at Budapest last June, a resolution was
adopted instructing the Congress to press for a reduced rate of
postage on periodicals, and an international stamp. The steps to
be taken in order to carry out this resolution were discussed at
the meeting of the Committee last week held at Leipzig, when I
produced the copy of your article, and gave the Committee a
summary of the statistics. The result was the unanimous decision
to take no further steps in the matter.

I tremble to think of what might have happened if I had not had
your article before me, for the point of view which you have put
forward was one that had not occurred to anyone else connected
with the Congress, and if the resolution had not been cut out at
this last meeting of the Executive Committee, it would have gone
before the Postal Conference which is to be held in Madrid this
autumn, backed by practically every European country.

I feel we all owe you a debt of gratitude for bringing out the
facts so clearly, and believe that you will like to know what has
taken place.

While we are not slow to take all the credit that our supporters and ourselves are entitled to in this matter, we should be very slow tacitly to accept the lion's share of it, which is due to Colonel C.W. Burrows of Cleveland, who supplied all of the facts and nearly all of the expression of the article in question, and who has for years, lately as President of the One Cent Letter Postage League, been devoting himself with unsparing energy and self-sacrifice to stopping the waste of money and capacity that the mistaken outbreak of paternalism we are discussing has brought upon the country.

Demos is a good fellow--when he behaves himself, and that generally means when he is not abused or flattered; but how supremely ridiculous, not to say destructive, he is when he gets to masquerading in the robes of the scholar or the judge; and how criminal is the demagogue who seeks personal aggrandisement by dangling those robes before him.

* * * * *

Our modesty has been so anesthetized by the preceding letter, that it permits us to show you, in strict confidence of course, a paragraph from another. A new subscriber, apparently going it blind on the recommendation of a friend, writes:

"I am told it is the best gentleman's magazine in the United
States."

Now, somehow, "gentleman" is a word that we are very chary of using. We couldn't put that remark on an advertising page, but perhaps there is no inconsistency in putting it here, and confessing that we like it--and that we even suspect that we have always had a subconscious idea that it was just what we were after--that it includes, or ought to include, about everything that we are trying to accomplish. In any interpretation, it is certainly an encouragement to keep pegging away.

* * * * *

Most of our readers probably remember a letter on pp. 432-3 of the _Casserole_ of the April-June number, from an individual who thought we were trying to humbug the wage-receiving world into a false and dangerous contentment with existing conditions. This inference was probably drawn from our insistent promulgation of the belief that a man's fortune depends more upon himself than upon his conditions.

As a contrast to that remarkable letter, it is a great pleasure to call attention to the following still more remarkable one. It is from a printer--not one in our employ.