The Contributors' Club

I THINK that Mr. Sedgwick’s article, in the last Atlantic, on the Lobby is an excellent one, besides being timely and much needed. It deals with a semi-institutional thing which has become a great public injury and a great national disgrace; and the writer handles his subject in a manner which happily unites sagacity and worldly wisdom with a nice sense of honor. The wrong to which he directs attention as the cause, origo et fons, of the lobby — that is, the irresponsibility, or rather the legal inapproachability, of those who administer our government — is a reproach to our honesty, and to our boasted freedom and our common sense; and the remedy which he proposes, the passage of an act remitting to the courts all claims whatever against the government, is one of the efficacy of which, to a certain point, there can be no doubt. Let there be an end to the passage of what are known as “ private bills ” for the remedy of private wrongs, done intentionally or unintentionally by the government, and of course the occupation of the men who “ lobby ” for such bills is gone. But it seems to me that Mr. Sedgwick’s article, with all its sagacity, takes a view of the lobby so limited that it may almost be justly called narrow. He regards the lobby simply as the result of the necessity of pressing private claims upon the government through the legislative body; and it is upon this appreciation of it alone that he grounds his discussion of its structure, its functions, and its mode of procedure, and also his proposal of the method for its extinction. But I think that all those who have observed the working of our legislative bodies in conjunction with that of the lobby will be of the opinion, after a little reflection, that if from the lobbyists those for private claims only were removed from the purlieus of the Capitol at Washington, and of the capitols of the various States, the most important and the most dangerous, if not the most numerous, part of that large and not very admirable or estimable body of our fellow-citizens would remain undisturbed. These and their work Mr. Sedgwick does not consider. True, he does say that manufacturers striving for protection, steamships and railways wishing to be subsidized, would have their representatives in the lobby; but he does this in rather a passing notice, by the way; and even these added to the others do not make up the lobby. There still remains the most important part of it,—the most powerful and the most pernicious. The lobby most to be dreaded, and the destruction of which is most imperatively demanded by the public good, is that which boldly, almost openly, seeks to bring about legislation against the interests of the people at large in favor of great and wealthy corporations, and of manufacturing establishments or individuals so rich, and the employers of so many men, that they have almost the importance and the power of corporations. And this influence is not exerted in favor of any claims which these have upon the government for wrongs suffered at the hands of its officers, but either in favor of schemes of profit by these corporations and wealthy employers of many voters, in disregard of the rights of the public, or in opposition to proposed measures for the general benefit which would in some way or other check their arrogant disregard of public rights, or limit their gains. Every man who knows anything at all about public affairs knows that such corporate bodies, firms, and individuals have now, next to the representatives— those who may be called the caucus leaders — of the two great political parties, the largest influence in almost all our legislative bodies, not excepting that at Washington. Indeed, both the political parties entangle themselves in alliances with them for the sake of their support. What a “ Commodore” Vanderbilt will do, or a “ Tom” Scott, has become an important question in a political contest. And was it not long a by-word that the president of the Camden and Amboy Railroad carried the State of New Jersey in his breeches’ pocket? What have been the revelations of recent years as to legislation in New York, affecting rich money-making corporations who wish to extort money from the public, or to take it in payment for Services rendered only with regard to their (the corporations’) interest? Tweed was eagerly sought as a director of such corporations, and Tweed used the lobby in their interest as well as in that of his infamous ring. But the lobby existed before Tweed; and indeed without the preëxistence of the lobby Tweed would have been impossible, or at the most a creature of very imperfect development. Nor was it in the prosecution of private claims for wrongs that Oakes Ames desired that a large sum of money should be put “ where it would do the most good.” The condition of public affairs in this respect has come to be simply this: A measure of legislation is proposed for the public benefit. A great corporation or a great manufacturing establishment sees that the measure, if it becomes a law, will affect its interests, either by directly diminishing its receipts, or by increasing its expenditures. The matter is looked at merely as one of business. The question with the directors of the corporation or the manufacturers is simply, How shall we protect our interests? What will be the account of profit and loss? If this measure becomes a law, it will cost us so many thousands of dollars yearly; now, if by employing lobby agents at such a cost, and by the expenditure of so much money in the way in which it will do the most good, we can save so many thousands of dollars yearly, sound business principles require that we should use the lobby and expend the money. As to other principles besides those of business, what have corporations, with neither souls to be saved nor bodies to be kicked, to do with them? And manufacturing establishments, when they develop themselves largely, take on the form, to use a phrase of the naturalists, of corporations, and with their form receive also their spirit. These ” parties ” have their representatives in the lobby and in communication with it, whose business it is to look after their interests; but there is no one whose business it is to look after the interests of the people at large, except the legislator; and he is the very one upon whom the lobbyist brings his powers of persuasion, verbal and material, to bear. To give the people an even chance, there should be a lobby in the public interest. But who would pay for that? In like manner “ jobs ” are lobbied through the state legislatures and through Congress. Of the number of these jobs, their enormity and the great and superfluous expenditure of the public money which they involve, the public has little knowledge. They are rarely brought to light by investigation. Investigation, somehow or other, does not take that direction. There has been much talk lately of overpaid official persons. There are very few such, under any of our state governments, or under the federal government. The cities and their “ ring” officers furnish almost the only examples. But the excess of all the salaries of all the officers of all the governments in the country is as nothing compared with the iniquitous expenditure of the public money in jobs; and these jobs, not private claims for wrongs suffered, give the lobby its greatest and its most lucrative employment. We have lately seen a great financial measure, one which affects the business and the honor of the whole country, pressed through Congress with indecent haste, and most indecorous treatment of the president’s veto. That measure, avowedly in the interest of the debtor class, is notoriously in the interest of men already of great wealth. Does any one believe that the lobby had nothing to do with the Silver Bill? Few men could be of such simple understanding. This is the great lobby, and such are its works. And the remedy? What remedy can there be in a land where the great maxim seems to be, Get money honestly if you can, but get it, and if dishonestly it matters little. “ Querenda pecunia prima; post nummos virtus.” The countless sad revelations of the last five years as to the betrayal of trusts on the part of managers of public institutions and of private individuals of respectable standing show that there is no hope for the abolition of the worst element of our lobby but in the elevation of the moral tone of the whole people.

— It seems to me that the lucid, brilliant, and generally fair reviewer of The Story of Avis, in your April number, deals with certain of his facts somewhat after the fashion that the Rev. Joseph Cook adopts with regard to his scientific quotations. Here is an instance: “ It is a rather remarkable fact that no unmarried woman has ever yet achieved the highest order of distinction. Maria Theresa, Mary Somerville, Elizabeth Browning, George Eliot — who cannot recite the brief catalogue in his sleep? —have all been married women, almost all mothers,” etc. Now, admitting such a statement as the above within the category of facts at all, it has but one leg, and that a rather weak one, to stand upon. For what way save as a ruler did Maria Theresa achieve distinction, and as a ruler how was she greater than Elizabeth of England? Although, as Mrs. Browning, Elizabeth Barrett became more extensively known, did she not under her maiden name strike as true a vein of poetry? And beyond all question, was not the rank of the woman who calls herself George Eliot securely established by the five or six books she published while she remained Marian Evans? The world, too, has pretty well decided that the two works she has given it as Mrs. Lewes are no more than very elaborated reproductions of what made Marian Evans famous. Mary Somerville’s work being of an altogether different order, she of course achieved her best when the heyday of imagination was over, and she had a respite from the taxes and cares of her first uncongenial marriage.

But was your reviewer’s catalogue necessarily so brief? Could not De Staël have entered it? She, too, while adding another married woman to the list, would have served to make good the assertion of scientists as to the incompatibility of wifehood, of rather of motherhood, with intellectual achievement, since all her noteworthy work was done during her widowhood. The same may be said of George Sand, who would have her freedom at any cost.

What man of her day was more than the peer of that hard-headed spinster, Harriet Martineau? And how about “the fiery-hearted vestal of Haworth,” Charlotte Bronté, whose imagination created such a wonderfully real world, while her life partook so little of the actual ? Perhaps your reviewer would not rank her among the first, although she can to-day command and satisfy a wider variety of tastes than can any of her above-mentioned sisters.

As to Miss Phelps’s Avis, of course every fair-minded reader is disappointed. The author makes the lamentable mistake of using her own fine powers upon a creature who has the desire without the patience or perseverance to be great, and who lacks oven the commonplace virtue of making the best of circumstances into which her own nature forced her to enter. To drop her limp hands by her side just as she is freed from her troubles, and at the very period of life, too, when the best work is generally begun,—such a heroine is not worth using ink and paper upon, let alone talent.

But because Miss Phelps, or anybody else, wants to sing pæans upon celibacy, is that a reason why reviewers must seize upon the first little string of brittle statements that occurs to them, and air it for the public good; and newspaper men catch up the refrain and reëcho it for the public good, and in defense of the holy state of matrimony? As if a state that nine persons out of every ten use all the powers that God gave them to enter needed any such factitious defense! No; the combined light of all the wise virgins that ever trimmed their lamps at the first hour can’t alter a tittle of the facts of human nature. Certain theologians may need whatever props they can lay hold on in defending themselves against the incursions of modern views, but adherents of matrimony can surely afford to dispense with them.

— The following fragment of chronology, from the work-basket of a Memphis lady, may interest those concerned in mnemonics: —

General Forrest was buried the day my new hat came home.

Hayes was inaugurated the spring I made over my old silk.

Dickens died when Jennie was a baby.

Lincoln was killed when Mary was creeping.

The civil war broke out when Sallie was cutting her teeth.

The king of Spain was born the year I was married.

— Mr. Richard Grant White lays down the general principle that “in language whatever is distinctively American is bad,” and then points out that the names of things peculiar to this country are not properly Americanisms. Agreeing with this, up to a certain point, I should like to ask him how he would regard cases where a partial variation in the form of things has led to a variation in words between the two nations. For instance, the vehicles on railways in England were and are modeled on private carriages, and hence are properly called by that name; while for our vehicles for the same purpose a new shape has been devised, for which the word carriage would be inappropriate. Would he have us call these structures by the English name? Nay, to carry it a step farther, when the same identical thing has come into existence simultaneously in England and America, and has taken a different name in each, would he require that we should abolish the American name and take up the English one? When Mr. White goes to his office by the horse-car, for instance, does he call that mode of communication a tramway? If not, does he not violate his own canon ?

It seems to me that in the parallel development of two great branches of one race, a time must come when equal property rights in the common language must be recognized. The more vigorous the vitality of the stock, the more inevitable will this be. Even if the inventions and institutions of the two branches run parallel, there will still be local divergencies that will require different names to describe them accurately. As the German philosopher in Hyperion says, “ Pardon must be granted to the novelty of words when it serves to illustrate the obscurity of things.”

— In the rather severe criticism of Helen’s Babies in the last Contributor’s Club, the point seems to be that the baby talk which constitutes the chief charm of the book is unnatural, — in fact impossible. An example given is Toddie’s “ I want to shee yours watch.” It is left to “ any intelligent and observing mother whether such a little child as Toddie does not always say, ‘ see you ’atch ’ rather than ‘ shee yours watch,’ ” indicating an inability to articulate the w while taking the y as a matter of course. A child of two years and three months is playing in the room as I write. She says twenty times a day, “ Dacie wants wind up’oo watch,” pronouncing plainly the w, but dropping entirely the y. It simply proves that children differ, and that it is impossible to lay down rules for either their thoughts or their modes of expressing them. A mother of six bright, healthy children said recently that no two of them ever talked alike. One put words together at eleven months; another, two years and a half old, could make only inarticulate sounds; one little girl, speaking very plainly otherwise, did not say “yes” until nearly five years old, using “ no ” indiscriminately for both. If children of the same parents, brought up under the same influences, differ so materially, why should not there be a still greater difference in others? It is the old story of fiction believed and fact doubted.

A child may pronounce a word wrongly from misapprehension at first, and continue its use from habit. Such a word in an otherwise plain sentence may sound improbable, but be none the less natural. Little Gracie’s usual morning greeting is, “ Ain’t we doin’ to have no dep-us? ” She can say breakfast almost plainly if she wants to, but she evidently don't want to. “Helen’s Babies” lead a long procession of “ Husbands,” “ Wives ” “ Mothers-in-law,” “ Lovers,” “ Boys,” and “ Girls ” of whom the less said the better; and possibly, reading some of these last first, one might find the Babies a little silly, perhaps, but hardly vulgar; and it is but simple justice to the vast army of readers to say that they found in the little book much of the fresh, genuine, child love that brightens so many of our homes.