Maxim Silencers for Old Wheezes

I

THEY are good souls. But so was the section hand who laid a railroad tie across the track to save the train. True, the train did not strike the splintered rail: there was not enough left of it. This, of those first- and second-class passengers who, over coffee in the old-rose dining saloon, casually discuss that mutiny of crew and steerage which they know by the comfortable title of ‘Unrest.‘

The discussion is chronic. The world is eternally plagued by a class of estimable people who dread the new. Their instinct is to club it over the head. Since that primitive implement went out of fashion they have carried an antique flint-lock pistol known as an Old Wheeze. With this they take deliberate aim and the noise which follows is, ‘ Of course, there is some truth in what you say, but you can never change human nature.’ Now while old campaigners like Columbus, Darwin, Cromwell, and Giordano Bruno could view this weapon with equanimity, it did often terrify amateur rebels into silence, until one bolder than the rest looked unflinchingly into the bore. The reward of his courage was this damaging discovery: the Old Wheeze is loaded with nothing but blank cartridges.

Still, the noise is annoying. It disturbs rational conversation; and then there are the fledgling revolutionists who wonder if the thing might not be loaded after all. Hence the invention of the Maxim Silencer. Unlike the Old Wheeze, it is loaded: not to kill, but to quell. Its action is at once salutary and humane. Since the culprits are not personal offenders but class offenders, exemplary persons, — pillars of society, — if they were maimed we should be the first to grieve. But silenced they must be, as much for their own sakes as for ours. So these little implements will be found useful, not only in self-defense, but in defense of those dumb, sweating myriads of our fellow humans who are being offered up daily on the bloody altar of our criminal complacency.

The most serious thing in the world is a joke. That is why earnest people, when all the ordinary forms of language have failed them, are thrust back on paradox. When they begin walking on their hands, you may know that they are converted. ‘A dodge to court publicity!’ Not at all. Walking on their hands is a spiritual necessity. For the test of belief is the ability to laugh: none but robust believers can risk a joke about their creed. Carlyle knew this. ‘Faith,’ says he, ‘is properly the one thing needful. How, with it, Martyrs, otherwise weak, can cheerfully endure the shame and the cross; and without it, Worldlings puke-up their sick existence, by suicide, in the midst of luxury.’ The lukewarm marvel at Salvationists, radiantly penniless, yet in perpetual high spirits; just as your conservative stares in wonderment at a tableful of radicals who rock and cackle over remarks which he supposes not only meaningless but silly.

Humor is our safety-valve for hearts and minds surcharged. You may recall having seen, perhaps to your horror and amazement, fairly well-civilized families returning in a state bordering on hilarity from thenew-made grave of one bitterly mourned. Or the day a college instructor returned from his mother’s funeral, and, to the dismay of himself and his class, kept them in a gale. Suffering, on our own behalf or on behalf of others, intensifies our faculties; and when we can bear no more, we joke. Therefore, good neighbors, do not be misled by these gibes into supposing that the social throes which gave them birth are funny.

There was a sentence in the old grammar which we learned to parse. It went thus: ‘ Our sincerest laughter is fraught with some pain.’ We learned to parse that sentence; did we learn, I wonder, the meaning of laughter born of pain? We earn the right to laugh at serious fun by having first suffered. Are our souls robust enough to laugh among the flames — not cynically, not bitterly, but in that bold, gay spirit which can find even among these shadows a smile to brighten the gloom for its fellows?

These jokes, then, are for the serious. And I can at least rely on revolutionist Christians (at once the most serious and the most frivolous of people) to see the fun.

II

Enter, therefore, that grizzled progenitor of all Old Wheezes, that prehistoric refuge of the dunce, ‘You must be crazy.’ The Maxim Silencer coolly replies, ‘ Madness is the state of being in the minority.’ The next, hardly less ancient of days, is, ‘ If we did divide every thing equally, we should soon have it all back again exactly as it is now.’ Your Maxim Silencer rejoins, ‘If we did jam the tiller as hard to starboard as it is now jammed to port (which nobody proposes), we would only be steering in a circle, — as we are doing.’ And, giving that time to seep in, it asks, ‘Why not steer a straight course for a change?’

Just why the topic of poverty should be the instant signal for a riotous orgy of Old Wheezes is not clear, unless from the flurried impulse of us all to prove that we, personally, cannot be held responsible, and if we can, there is really nothing to be done. The kind of thing you get is,—

‘ If they spent less money on drink, they would not be so poor.’

The short, sharp shock for this is, —

No; nor you so rich.

But another, mindful of the alcoholism inbred by underfeeding and overwork, replies to this smooth apology of the overfed and underworked, —

Quite so. If they were not so poor, they would have more money ; and if they had more money, they would not be so poor.

Like the line-for-line dialogue, the stichomuthiae of Greek drama, another collection of these hoary saws whereby the well-housed are wont to shunt their accountability, piles up as does the climacteric page of Æschylean tragedy: —

‘ I am willing to aid the worthy poor, but . . .'

If they are worthy why should they be poor?

‘They don’t save what they get.’

Nothing from nothing leaves nothing.

‘If you did pay them more, they would only spend it foolishly.’

On whose example?

‘Of course, I will help all I can.’

All you can without getting off their backs.

At this point occurs that serene dismissal of the whole housing problem: —

‘Give them bathtubs, and they put ashes in them.’

Do you wish that considered as comment on what has been done for them, or on what needs to be done?

‘ The trouble is we are letting in too many of these damn foreigners,’

That is what they think.

‘ Why all this discontent? I can’t see that things are any different now from what they have been.’

That is why.

‘ Well, I believe, not in revolution, but in evolution.’

So did the Court of Louis XVI.

III

Be warned. This duty of squelching the fuddy-duds can get very awkward. First, like the college graduates torpid with baccalaureate sermons, you conceive yourselves to be Battling with Wrong. This picturesque illusion is shattered by the discovery that you are battling in haggard reality with certain revered aunts, cherished sisters, neighbors who were so kind when the children had measles, and your brother whom you positively know to be a prince of fine fellows even though he does superintend a spinning-mill. Next it appears that you are not battling with them, but with their stupidity. Now they are apparently clever enough in other ways, and certainly not the bloody-minded despots their own words would lead us to believe; so you are forced to the conclusion that you are struggling, not with their stupidity, but with their misinformation. And since they, like yourself, have been lavishly miseducated from first youth up to extreme old age, the job of changing their minds, — not to mention their hearts, — is no forenoon’s coupon-clipping.

But meanwhile they must not be allowed to spring these rusty triggers under the impression that they are passing intelligent comment on the social earthquake. Not only is it unfair, — unfair to them, but still more unfair to those who are perishing in the clumsy machinery which persists by grace of these vain repetitions of the social heathen,— it is worse: it is unsafe.

A phrase much in use among those who would designate persons not of their own stratum is, ‘These People.’ ‘These people’ (you are to understand) ‘do not appreciate what is done for them.’ Or we learn that all those interlocking shackles of unemployment are to be knocked off the wrists of the down-and-outs with the bland assumption, ‘ If you did offer these people a job, they would n’t work.’ Now, waiving the somewhat obvious deduction that for the immigrants of yesterday to refer to the immigrants of to-day as ‘These People’ is to imply a fundamental difference between us and them which it is unsafe to assume, let me merely give warning that this particular wheeze is a gun which can be turned on its users to deadly execution. ‘These people’ can quite as well signify the cultured ‘goops ’ who speak of their supposed social inferiors in this general tone of contemptuous pity. ‘These people’ are quite as truly the social heathen of our own class, our own set, our own households, whom it is the main, and about the only business of our time to convert from churchianity to Christ.

It was only the other day that we began to smell a mouse in the meal of philanthropy. First, the ‘worthy poor’ aforementioned, spying, it may be, a spot of their own blood on the conscience money, declined it without thanks. Then Dr. Gladden signed a minority report. That minority is speedily becoming a plurality as it dawns on us that industrialism, with the devastating zeal for improvement which diverts a woodland brook through a brand-new iron sewer-pipe, has jobbed out that gracious Christian virtue, charity, as the impulse to share our best, to the ruthless section boss of competition. Charity no longer begins at home. Charity begins at the directors’ meeting, if not at the Probate Court. Charity is not puffed up for the simple reason that it must get out and hustle. Nor need we be surprised when competitive charity behaves exactly as any other competitive industry is obliged to behave if it intends to continue in business. It has this warning in its ears: ‘Stand in with the owning class, and your philanthropy is secure. Forfeit their favor, and you go begging with the other beggars.’ Thus, the Maxim Silencer is prompt in response to the recommendation, —

‘ Let the worthy poor apply to organized charity,’ —

Organized charity is the sterilized milk of human kindness.

Of course, until we can enforce our demand not for charity but for sharity, sterilized milk is better than none. The point is, if the milk were pure it would never need to be sterilized at all. But when, emboldened by this concession, the philanthropy-monger returns to the joust with, —

‘ What would the hospitals do; what would the colleges do; what would the churches themselves do without our millionaire philanthropists?’ — let him be told, —

Lose their bodies and save their souls.

More explicitly, it may be said of these million-dollar philanthropists: —

Having sold their souls for a million, they are now dickering to buy them back for five hundred thousand — the bargainhunt of eternity.

IV

In that after-dinner peace-on-earth which descends on the genteel when they have pushed back from the table and lighted private-brand cigars, expect the one about widows and orphans. Or let it be written as financiers, schooled to plausible glibness, pronounce it: widowzanorphans. I may as well confess that this one had me puzzled for a middling good while. To be sure, I was unable to encounter any of those down-trodden investresses, save a few who had endured, I admit, the not inconsiderable hardship of riding in a motor car of last year’s model; but the bankers and brokers lifted lamentation so feelingly, and spoke in terms of such evident intimacy with these injured ladies and their distressed offspring that one felt convinced of deep sorrow — somewhere. That finance should so take to heart this form of oppression when its sympathies were beckoned to water with their tears a field so much more fertile among the children of the Southern textile industry and the widows of striking miners, was also bewildering. Yet in the mahogany sanctuaries of the ticker-tape, drop by drop, distilled these mournful dews for widowzanorphans.

But quite recently, a breath of rash candor from the heart of a great banking house has blown this fog out to sea. The coastline stands revealed. Thus reads the widowzanorphans’ riddle:—

These mourning crocodiles are the Sairy Gamps of finance: and Widowzanorphans are their Mrs. Harris.

It seems a pity that from the little list of the Lord High Executioner, Koko should have omitted the gentleman who, while bragging that his children have never had anything but the best, imparts the ingenious theory, —

‘ Anyhow, these children are better off working in the mills than running the streets.’

Explain that, —

If mills were run for children, children would be running neither the streets nor the mills.

Also, with the Great Unmissed classify him who propounds either or both of the barnacled objections to disturbing the mildew of the law. He exclaims, —

‘ Freak legislation! ’

Remind him, —

The freak legislation of to-day is the tradition of to-morrow.

Or he protests, —

‘ This is an infringement of personal liberty,’— permitting the reply, on a basis of no very searching Biblical scholarship, —

The most sweeping infringement of personal liberty in history is the Decalogue.

At this, scenting the sulphurous pitfumes of government ownership, he is sure to yell, —

’It’s confiscation: that’s what it is!’

You have your chance: —

Yes, but they did n’t pay for the slaves.

For educated illiterates — the ones who remark that Millet’s art was so exquisite, is n’t it a pity he chose such common subjects? — there is a special course of sprouts. Their first offense is as follows, —

‘ If they don’t like this country, why don’t they get out? ’

Because (explains the Silencer) the steamship companies and mill corporations which brought them here have n’t the same inducement to take them back.

And their second is like unto it, —

‘ They wouldn’t keep clean if you gave them a chance. They don’t wish to live any other way.’

If that, were true (says the Silencer) we should all still be living as ‘they’ are.

Or the stock objection to social revolution, —

‘ The trouble is, it is a gospel of hatred.’

This soft impeachment the revolutionist may admit with the best grace in the world, —

A gospel of hatred of injustice.

And then comes that rudimentary thought of the unthinking, ‘The fact is, most people don’t think.’ There follows a disquisition on ‘the essential shallowness of human nature,’ which totally overlooks the unflattering light which such an opinion throws on the holder of it, ending with, —

‘People are just like a flock of sheep.’

It is then time to quote, with all the gentleness which the words deserve, —

And he saw the multitude and had compassion on them, for they were as sheep not having a shepherd.

The same god-like dream, the same vision of poor, herded humanity that visited Christ has visited us. It moved Him to compassion. It moves us to contempt.

And if, after this, you are told, —

‘ Still, you cannot expect me to consider them my intellectual equals,’ — it is permissible to say, without temper, though, it may be, with some regret, —

That point may disturb you. It never bothered Christ.

V

It was the end of summer, and, in a garage beside the strand of the much-sounding sea, the piano and pianola of a bird-of-passage cottager were in pickle pending shipment back to town. The jolly young chauffeurs, with that blend of mechanical expertness and personal freedom with the property under their charge for which they draw their pay, quickly learned to operate this machine without a license. When all the tangos in its repertory had been rehearsed, to the nausea even of themselves, they blew the dust off a few rolls of ‘that classy stuff.’ Then befell a wondrous thing. Liszt’s Rigoletto Fantasie came pealing out of the garage. And, as poor Snout screamed on beholding Bottom wearing the ass’s head, so might any amateur of music have cried, ‘O Liszt! thou art changed: what do I see on thee?’ Or with Quince, ‘Bless thee, Liszt! bless thee! thou art translated.’ Such a Rigoletto Fantasie as never was. Rhythms inverted; tempo sprinting or hobbling at a limp, — a Rigoletto gone stark, raving daft. The chauffeurs were performing the physical interpretation of Liszt’s none-tooheady virtuoso piece, unsuspecting that certain mental processes were intended to accompany the performance.

This‘admired disorder’ of the chauffeurs and the demented pianola I can only compare, for razzle-dazzling chaos, with the ‘admired disorder’ of the public mind during strike time. To cull from this season of quacking folly only a few of the choice ones, this pronouncement occurs early in the disturbance: — ' Business conditions are not such as to warrant an increase in wages at this time.’

A constellation of quotation marks would not faintly indicate the repetitions of this immemorial wheeze. Revolutionists who have opened their eyes and begun to mew know, of course, that, Whenever workmen ask for higher pay, an acute business depression instantly precedes.

Next, the professional, professorial, clerking, shop-keeping classes, — all the poor relations, — dutifully repeat, —

‘ Strikers who resort to violence forfeit all claim on public sympathy.’

Let such gentry be informed:— Had the same principle been applied in the struggle for political liberty which you thus apply to the struggle for industrial liberty,you would now be warbling for your national anthem, ‘God Save the King.’

At this point, the college graduate who, chiefly because he owed it to his social position, chose banking as his vocation and a crack cavalry troop as his avocation, and is now engaged in the exalted task of cowing hungry men and women, promulgates the decree, —

‘ If there is more rioting by the strikers I will place the city under martial law.’

Or, as the little boy was heard to say early one morning to his baby brother who slept with him, —

Donald, why can’t you lie still and let me spank you in peace?

Meanwhile, the managers of the industry will not have failed to assure the respectables through the columns of the soft-pedal press, —

‘Our employees were perfectly satisfied with conditions until outside agitators came in to stir up trouble.’

The managers can receive at least this encouragement, —

You have good Scriptural authority for this: it was the grievance of the Jewish riding classes against an outside agitator from Nazareth. The law, fortunately, was with them. It is still.

Also, unless all signs fail, expect this: —

‘Should there be a return to violence, the manager said, the plant may be removed from this town altogether.’

Although, sobered by the knowledge that the same threat was recently invoked by an exasperated university president, we might hesitate to comment on the imbecility of this, still, when we picture the probable vicissitudes of, let us say, a soap-factory which would flee as a bird to some blessed isle where industrial squabbles never intrude, no Maxim Silencer quite so serves this egregious nonsense as does the couplet, easily its peer for maudlin hilarity, —

Those who complain that syndicalists ‘do not fight in the open’ may be referred to this definition of sabotage: —

Sabotage is shooting at the British from behind stone fences .

Finally, for an epilogue to the Congressional inquiries which roar you as gently as a sucking dove, and to the conspiracy trials from which these our (cater) pillars of society emerge triumphantly vindicated, give us an academic investigator of the stand-pat variety, lecturing likewise on the ethics of Syndicalism (ahem!) to remark, —

‘ The militia are very forbearing. In fact, several of the companies were composed largely of union men.’

RAUCOUS VOICE (from rear of hall):

Were there union labels on the bullets ?

VI

Let me explain why it is without the least misgiving that I come to the Old Wheeze as it is cherished, like the flintlock over the kitchen mantelpiece, by that section of society which has ‘settled down.’ It is, I know, the popular belief that he who takes his lamp and descends into these mine-damps of received opinion does so at no small personal risk; that the gaseous formulas — substitutes for thought — which compose the intellectual atmosphere of these narrow, dark galleries are, in contact— let us say — even with lamplight, violently explosive. The danger is greatly overrated. Thinkers of every stripe — poets, dramatists, sages, novelists, holy men, and artists — have been doing it continually and coming back unsinged. The truth is, the case between society and its critics is much the case of capitalism versus militant democracy as studied in its industrial wing, the I.W.W. Capitalism and the I.W.W. are not so far apart as they suppose. Each is a better friend to the other than it is to itself. That is the encouraging part. Capital makes propaganda for the I.W.W. far faster than the I.W.W. could hope to manufacture propaganda for itself; and the I.W.W., by letting noisy steam out of the safetyvalve, defers a threatened bursting of the boiler which would wreck the plant.

Similarly, the family, as the cellular form of our social organism, has less to lose and more to gain by renovating criticism than any other single institution. Yet here is the hitch. No amount of patient explaining seems to carry it to the comprehensions of the unthinking timid that an attack can be aimed, not at an institution, but at the abuse of it, — especially if with them, as with the money-changers in the temple, the abuse is the institution. Hence the agonized clucking and cackling which goes up at the faintest suggestion that, everything is not up to actuarial standards within the four walls of the home has frightened off all but the bolder spirits. The others, though they may have come along with only the most generous intentions of freshening up the coop, resent the suspicion that they are out to steal the chickens. Perhaps the point can be made clear by saying that the reproach is not against the family at all, but against that brand of comfortbesotted domesticity which has forsaken its place in the ranks of the mighty onward march of the world’s militants — a domesticity which is bound to grow a thick skin against the smart of desertion, and which flouts the impetuous acts of impassioned altruism with the sneer, ‘It is not good taste.’

Waiving the retort that good taste is a luxury for non-combatants, the Silencer says, —

Moral conviction and good manners never did keep house together. Gentleman is a compound word — of aristocratic origin — in which the important half is not gentle, but man.

Then, if domesticity is unwary enough to drag out and train its prerevolutionary nine-pounder, —

‘ Of course, what you say is true, but this is not the time or place to say it,’ — let the Maxim Silencer up and at it: —

The only season for preaching is out of season, because the truth is always out of season.

One seems to remember that it was the Victorian age which was so emphatic on the indecorum of ‘washing dirty linen in public.’ The result is that the laundry has all been left for the children. Speak gently to the twentieth century: its Monday wash is a hard one. As for decency itself, that sniff which shirks the whole responsibility of sex-education with ‘It’s not proper,’ merits the rebuke, —

In the toleration of free speech, and inequanimity in the presence of the nude, custom is everything.

If this misses, there is another with aim more deadly, —

The Pauline doctrine slandered the very sources of life. Is it any wonder that life has slandered Paulinanity?

And when, after all that has happened, domesticity is found harboring those beneficiaries of the iniquity they defend — those who announce, —

‘ There is and always must be one code of morals for men and another for women,’ —

let them hear the scientific fact of a male autocracy contending for its property rights in sex: —

A governing class instinctively legislates in its own interest. Men are the governing class. Hence the double code.

But be more gentle with that pathos of frustration which sends each generation yearning forward into the future of its children, — unless an age lies down on its offspring with the sigh,— ‘ I hope to see my son achieve what I myself have failed to do.’

Then inquire,—

On what assurance ? Why make fatherhood Failure’s plot to succeed by proxy ?

The worst of these aspirations of the parent age which strain forward into the new for their fulfillment is that they shackle the young; for the new generation, if it is worth its salt, will have fashioned a few ideals of its own, and they will be different. Each age has its own definition of romance, and the split is bound to come. More awkward still, it becomes a theorem in world-history that the Maxim Silencer of one age is the Old Wheeze of the next. Here they stand, in deadly parallel, —

The old idea of romance: The country boy goes to the city, marries his employer’s daughter, enslaves some hundreds of his fellow humans, gets rich, and leaves a public library to his hometown. The new idea of romance; To undosome of the mischief done by the old idea of romance.

It should be added that the newness of this idea of romance is a newness not confined to this or any other single age of history. Always half the task of the children is knocking down the black walnut of their parents to the lowest bidder, or bestowing it on any settlement house which will give it room.

Two dogged and persistent offenders remain. The first, which exhumes clan morality in the early dawn of internationalism, — a very vile kind of bodysnatching indeed, — the Silencer may admonish, —

’Blood’ while ‘thicker than water ’ requires thinning for use as a social beverage.

But the other, the degrading excuse of a parent age too laggard to keep up with its children,—

‘Yes, but he never misses a Sunday at church,’ — you are not to spare. Straight from the shoulder with the left-arm jab let it come: —

Church-going is the anæsthesia of the social conscience.

VII

If cultivated people (people who know a mezzotint from a dry-point, a tonic from a dominant, Sheraton from Chippendale, an Anacreontic from a Sapphic, — and the age we have just had the privilege of burying preened itself that it did, in matters like these, know a hawk from a handsaw, — will insist on uttering these social blasphemies, then ‘ What ’ —to borrow their own language — ‘can we expect from the Lower Classes?’ Well, let them hear: red revolution. As ye go, preach, saying, ‘ Repent, for the kingdom of heaven on earth is at hand.’

For the Lower Classes are much better educated these days than their cultured brethren. It came about by accident, — as we say. Wrenched by the pain of the burden that had lain so long on its right shoulder, the working class writhed, the other day, to shift the weight to its left. In transit, the balance of the burden was disturbed. It wabbled. The bearer suddenly guessed that the whole weight might be toppled off. And since that day, nothing has been the same.

And it will never be the same again. There is not much to fear for to-day. The bearer is a patient beast. But there is an end to his patience, and this article is consumed with imprudent rapidity by ‘social superiors’ who are as some elsewise admirable person who was simply never taught that it is wrong to steal; or as a dear little boy whose elders neglected to tell him that if he meant to keep friends with himself and the world, he must eschew the green apples of cut-throat industrialism. Or they are as two gentle old ladies, neighbors of my aunt, who were bequeathed a parrot by an adventurous nephew of a sardonic turn. Geoffrey, sojourning in Cuba with the army of occupation, had there acquired the parrot, which spoke only Spanish, but spoke that tongue with a fluency and an emphasis truly astounding in so scrubby a bird. Most of it was unintelligible, save one phrase which may better be conveyed in a purely onomato-poetic line after the Aristophanic manner, as thus: —

This phrase so delighted the old gentlewomen that it passed into a byword with them. They babbled ‘Alla lolla begolla’ to each other in sheer lightness of heart as they went about their household tasks, until a military superior of their late nephew, a guest in their house, chanced to hear it, and stiffened with horror. He forebore, like the gentleman he was, to take the ladies at their word, but hastened to inform them as explicitly as decorum would permit, that, were he to do so, they could not possibly be considered ladies.

So when I hear dear old persons and dear young persons, too, of the ‘sheltered-lives’ variety, sweetly observing: ‘If “they” would rather starve in the cities than live comfortably in the country, why, let them,’ I do not tell them that they are uttering a shocking blasphemy compared to which ‘Alla lolla begolla ’ is a golden text to be lisped by the infant class. I merely inquire,

Why starve them at all ?

Of course, it is not remotely intimated that any one who will read these lines has ever emitted any such antisocial bulls. Only don’t do it again.

And now, if those ante-bellum contemporaries of ours will pause in their vehement denials that such things as class-lines exist in this land of the free, — long enough to reflect that such a contention is essentially a class-view, — perhaps we can then set tooth to the kernel of the matter. Good neighbors, to the prayers you murmur morning and evening, add another petition, and throw into it all the strength of your souls: ‘Lord, visit not on those who are dear to me my eighth and deadliest sin — the sin of indifference.’

For the platitudinarians who grind out the brutal phrases of this tabulation are folks whom we know to be a dozen times sweeter, a hundred times finer, than we can ever hope to be. They are old teachers who led us one spring along the golden road of Homeric verse; music masters who first unlocked for us the treasure-chest of Beethoven’s chamber music; uncles who ‘understood boys,’ perhaps because they never had any of their own; and grandfathers who risked their necks relaying runaway slaves along the underground railway of the fifties. Not one of them, you see, who is not the real thing. Not one of them but would be crushed with remorse did he realize half the social import of these formulas he repeats with such confident glibness. Now, while these shibboleths of the pass-by-on-the other-siders are what we naturally expect from the rich malefactors of the newspaper cartoonists, when such raw atrocities begin to proceed out of the mouths of our own folks, it is time to worry. The sweet faces, the snowy hair, the kind hearts, the white lives, show in sinister contrast to the stark, blood-chilling horror of the things they say, or rather, repeat. From the lips of an aged jurist of ripe scholarship and character rugged as the Berkshire granite which fashioned it, I have heard this comment on the Crucifixion, —

‘ I do not see how Pilate could have acted otherwise than as he did. He had to consider what the home government wanted of him.’

With such philosophy as this in the pates of our elders, is it any wonder that the young stand stock-still, appalled? Is it any wonder that those revolutionists who are doing their utmost to save us from ourselves suffer the stripes and spitting of that other ‘stirrer-up of the people’? Is it any wonder that to the reproach of anti-patriotism from the anti-patriots these worldpatriots reply sadly, —

The man least acceptable to an established government is a patriot. The man least acceptable to an established religion is a Messiah?