Cure-Alls

I

IT was a chemist’s window on a dingy street corner, and there stood in it a portrait of the once famous practitioner whose sign was an uplifted forefinger, and whose slogan was ‘While there is life, there is hope.’ Beneath, printed in fair large text, was this jubilant couplet: —

and, reading it, I was made pleasantly aware of the survival of human confidences: not merely the confidences of my childhood, but the confidences of the childhood of the world. For uncounted years mankind believed, ignorantly but not illogically, that Nature, who had provided multitudinous ills for her children, had also provided correspondingly multitudinous cures. The ills she gave open-handedly, mindful of her duty to destroy; the cures she gave grudgingly and under pressure, but they were always to be found for the seeking.

With a still more touching simplicity, we believe in this age of experience that for the evils, spiritual, material, and intellectual, which beset us, remedies are at hand. There’s a pious pill, a social pill, a political pill, for every ill, and they are offered to us at the street corners of life. Their action is assured. Their numbers arc as remarkable as their variety. They range all the way from licensing parents, which is warranted to curtail the birth-rate, to a bonus on babies, which is warranted to increase it; from simplicity of living, which is doing without things we do not need, to ‘consumptionism,’ which is acquiring things we do not want; from Fundamentalism, which is the triumph of the rigid, to Spiritism, which is the triumph of the nebulous. Distinguished specialists offer us private and particular remedies for our private and particular ills. A few years ago an enterprising lady succeeded in persuading a number of Americans who had heretofore been considered sane that if they changed their proper names — she chose the new names — and wore specified colors — she chose the colors—they would grow as healthy, wealthy, and wise as if they got up early in the morning.

Color psychology is playing an interesting part in the rehabilitation of the world. The happy possessors of an aura distinguishable to the medium’s eye are very particular about its shade. Readers of Raymond — and nine years ago everybody was a reader of Raymond — will remember the use of colors, as described in that jocund volume. According to reports received through ‘Feda,’ a youthful control of volatile disposition and retarded mentality, spirits residing in the ‘beyond’ absorbed goodness and greatness through rays of parti-colored light. If they were unloving, they stood in pink rays and grew affectionate. If they were stupid, they stood in orange rays and grew intelligent. If they were materialistic, they stood in blue rays, the most delicate and powerful oi all, blue being the light of pure spiritual healing. The simplicity oi this device, compared to our cumbersome human methods, could not be too highly recommended; and we were assured that in the coming years the world would learn the curative and educational value of colors, and so be spared much misdirected effort.

Nine years before the revelations of Raymond, Achille Ricciardi, an ingenious and enthusiastic theorist, assigned an aesthetic value to colors; and his assumptions are reset irom time to time by equally ingenious and far more practical authorities. Ricciardi held that colors have a life of their own, ‘a rich treasury of emotive connotations,’ and that they not only feed our sensations but control them. He never affirmed that these emotive connotations were alike under different conditions. The moral values of red and blue were the only ones he believed to be beyond dispute. To-day we hear st range stories of rooms painted yellow in which nobody feels cold, and of rooms painted slate-blue in which nobody feels warm; of rooms hung with violet in which people weep without cause, and of rooms hung with orange in which people laugh without reason. One color psychologist informs us that light brown and blue inspire confidence in business ventures, and that green walls and yellow curtains inspire corresponding confidence in religious teaching. Another, equally assured, is of the opinion that a pink kitchen will make a cook contented with her work, and so bring about the radical regeneration of the world.

It is all very interesting, very sanguine, and a little contradictory. From those mysterious statistics that are compiled by people who enjoy an infinity of leisure, and the precise purposes of which are hidden from the profane, we learn that yellow — the delight of the Orient — is regarded with disfavor by American undergraduates of both sexes. These young people can hardly have inherited the aversion of the early Christians for what was once considered a lascivious hue; but a large majority confess to liking it least among colors. Perhaps its arbitrary and wholly fanciful association with a certain type of journalism, as well as with slackers and obstructionists during the war, may lie at the root of this antipathy. I, at least, should be sorry to see it exchanged for pink in American kitchens, were it only for the sake of the child, Henry Adams, aged three, sitting in the sunlight on the yellow kitchen floor, and remembering this first happy consciousness of color all the rest of his life.

II

Applied psychology, autosuggestions, and royal roads to learning or to wealth are among the cure-alls urged upon us by kindly, but not altogether disinterested, reformers. Simple and easy systems for the dissolution of discord and strife; simple and easy systems for the development of personality and power; booklets of counsel on ‘How to Get What We Want, which is impossible; booklets on Visualization,’ warranted to make us want what we get, which is ignoble. ‘Let science cure your ills!' is the clarion cry of one miracle-monger. ‘Let culture crown your life!’ is the soft whisper of another. The common pursuit of wealth is proffered as a human bond, which it has never been; the individual pursuit of knowledge is proffered as a social asset, which it can never be.

When Dr. Eliot selected his famous five-foot shelf of books, he little dreamed that it would be lifted to the proud preeminence of a cure-all. For years scholars and readers had diverted themselves by making lists of the best ten books, the best fifty books, the best hundred books, the best books to read on a desert island, presuming we were cast away with a little library of our own selection. Indeed, the Librarian of the University of Pennsylvania has come forward with a list of the best thousand books, which is warranted to keep us profitably employed for the rest of our natural lives. Dr. Eliot was the first to associate measurement with erudition, and the practical nature of this device, combined with the sanction of his name, gave to his list — which was frankly personal — ascendency over other lists, which were frankly scholastic or frankly popular. Literature is alien to the natural man; but the limitations of a five-foot shelf were everywhere understood and appreciated.

With what result? Dr. Eliot has expressed from time to time a veritable enthusiasm for that shop-worn word,

’ efficiency ‘; but it has never been a factor in his intellectual pursuits, and it was certainly not haunting his mind when he compiled his brief and weighty list. One does not grow efficient by reading Jonson, or Shelley, or Marlowe. The irony of fate decreed that his five-foot shelf should, in the course of time, be converted into a five-foot pill-box, the contents of which, when absorbed in homoeopathic doses, are warranted to fit us for all the emergencies of life. We are asked to believe that financiers are impressed with the conversation of young men who have read The Wealth of Nations, and that pretty girls surrender themselves to the charm of suitors conversant with the Areopagitica. The Fruits of Solitude lends sparkle to a dinner party; the Religio Medici and the Confessions of Saint Augustine, books written for the secret pleasure and the secret solace of humanity, assume an unsuspected value when retailed for the edification of society. Education, once defined as ‘the transmission of a moral and intellectual tradition,’ has crystallized into a compact substance, absorbed without effort and imparted without reserve, as useful as a ready reckoner, as universally popular as a trump card.

Reformatory measures are hailed as cure-alls by people who have a wholesome confidence in the perfectibility of human nature, and no discouraging acquaintance with history to dim it. The Eighteenth and the Nineteenth Amendments of our Constitution were such gigantic steps, reaching so far and involving so much, that five and six years are manifestly periods too short to permit of our forming any reasonable opinion of their value. Indeed, Mr. Brownell has pointed out that the data of human life are unfitted to serve the purpose of theoretic demonstration. It takes more than one generation to test the soundness of men’s intelligence, the prophetic vision of their enthusiasms. Senator Borah emphasized this point when he told the Philadelphia Forum that Prohibition had failed in the past because it lacked the sympathy of the nation; but that it would triumph in the future because the sympathy of the nation would be with it.

At present it comes under the head of statutes which Mrs. Gerould has described as passed in the interests of morality, and evaded in the interests of human nature. If it were possible to make a moral law out of a civil law, if it were possible to legislate evil into an innocent thing, or innocence into an evil thing, the path of the legislator would be smooth, and revolutionists — the purest-minded of them would be the sinners, and not the saviors of the world. A sumptuary law, to be successful, must be in accord with the temperament of the people. Geneva seems to have liked Calvin s rulings. At least it professed to like them; and the worldlings who found them past bearing fled to more habitable towns.

The Eighteenth Amendment deprived the United States of an enormous revenue. Its enforcement costs the taxpayer anywhere from $10,000,000 to $30,000,000 a year. This is a point worthy of consideration. We ought to get something handsome for that money; we ought to be sure that it is something we want, and very sure that none of the millions are misappropriated. So much has been written on the subject that the public has ceased to read any of it. A glance at Poole’s Index from 1919 to 1925 will show that this was the only lifesaving course to pursue. Even the phraseology of the writers no longer calls for comment. The anti-Prohibitionist’s urbane allusions to wine and beer, the Prohibitionist’s invariable use of the terms ‘run’ and ‘booze,’ illustrate to perfection Mr. Henry Sedgwick’s analysis of the prejudices and partisanships of words.

‘An indoctrinated and collective virtue,’ says Santayana, ‘turns easily to fanaticism. It imposes irrational sacrifices.’ This is the story of all inquisitions, religious, moral, political. Torquemada never dies. He merely turns his attention from heresy to some reprobated form of self-government or self-indulgence. And always his intentions are of the best. Always he offers a sharp remedy for errors to which he is disinclined. Freedom is no less displeasing to him than temperance, which is the child of freedom, the eternal principle of moderation, inherited by Christianity from the noblest forms of paganism, and raised to the glory of a cardinal virtue for the upholding of the dignity of man.

If the Eighteenth Amendment was admittedly a measure of reform, a stupendous cure-all designed for the deliverance of the nation, the Nineteenth Amendment would never have been thought of in these terms, had it not been for the overardent and oversanguine assertions of its supporters. It was a measure of reason, of justice, of legitimate and inevitable progress. Those who had it at heart saw it — very naturally — through a golden haze, and talked about it as the promise of a golden age. Enthusiastic feminists, the ones who did the talking, said, and perhaps believed, that women voters would be more honest and intelligent than men voters, and that women officials would be more honest and able than men officials. They assigned to themselves the glory of ‘race-building,’ quite as though they built alone. When they were idealistic, they foretold that the religion of women, which is the religion of birth, would replace the religion of men, which is the religion of death. When they were practical, they engaged to clean up politics, clean up vice, clean up streets. The city, the state, and the nation are but expansions of the family, and they were prepared to adopt and mother them all.

Now this is not much more than political parties promise at election time. The essence of electioneering is the repeated assertion that the safety of the country and the welfare of its citizens depend on our voting the Republican or the Democratic ticket. Nobody expects the millennium as the result of such voting, but nobody hesitates to predict it. The enfranchisement of women was hailed as a ‘world-changing phenomenon.’ ‘Elevate’ was the word most often used to express the working of the new freedom, the new influence in public life. Opponents of the measure accepted their defeat with the good grace of those who were at heart indifferent; and the only people to be pitied were the insistent agitators, who, deprived overnight of a perfectly good cause to agitate, were compelled to fall back on a mad medley of reforms, social, international, psychological, pathological—all of them matters with which they profess an appalling familiarity, and which they urge upon our reluctant consideration.

To expect elevation from the rank and file of women voters is manifestly absurd. It is also manifestly unjust. If, being less intelligent, less informed, and less experienced than men, they are not less conscientious, they give sufficient proof of their fitness to cast a ballot. At present there seems to be some trouble in persuading them to cast it. After listening for years to impassioned appeals for the suffrage,

I listened last autumn to impassioned reproaches for its neglect. Clubs and societies spent themselves in exhorting women to vote. Badges to be worn by those who had fulfilled this duty were distributed, and the badgeless ones were asked to consider themselves as the moral lepers of the community. An active and intelligent minority, which had wrestled for its rights and won them, faced an apathetic and elusive majority, and compelled it to accept its good fortune.

III

A great and growing moderation is noticeable in the public utterances of American women. Now and then they get a word of bad advice, as when Lady Astor told them they could hold the balance of power — which is, let us hope, as impossible as it is undesirable.

Holding the balance of power means selling out to the highest bidder, a very demoralizing process. Now and ihon an enthusiast like Kathleen Norris, who has not outlived her enthusiasms, finds herself able to speak of women as the crusaders of the body politic. Now and then a hardy fighter like Elizabeth Robins (Parks, not Pennell) asserts with undiminished vigor that the moral power of women is the appointed antidote to the perverted physical power which has hitherto ruled the world. Now and then, but very seldom, a feminist born out of dale runs amuck through the formalities of Christian civilization. Less than two years ago a writer in the Century lifted up her voice in a spirited tirade against Saint Paul, whose very moderate appreciation of women — ‘sex-embitterment,’ she called it — stood responsible in her eyes for the failures of Christianity. The ‘stuffy asceticism’ of the Middle Ages, the ‘polluted atmosphere’ of the Reformation, the ‘follies and brutalities’ of our own time — all could be traced back to the Apostle of the Gentiles, and all originated in His imperious masculinity, which the wives and widows of the infant Church were not courageous enough, or discontented enough, to deny.

These varieties of the cure-all doctrine, with which we were once sadly familiar, grow rarer with every year of suffrage and experience. When women have gone one step further, and have secured through legitimate State legislature their equal rights, we shall never hear them again. By that time ‘sex-embitterment’ will have been relegated to the dustbin. At present it is only very belligerent pacifists who strike the old note of anger and contempt. Even when they are disposed to be moderate, their moderation conveys a reproach. ‘ In the matter of war, the women’s point of view has asserted itself in clear contradistinction to men’s,’wrote Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt a few years ago in the Womans Home Companion. ‘It is not that women will oppose an individual war when it comes, but that they oppose the blunders of government which cause war. . . . Women realize that it is nobler to lead a nation out of trouble than to lead it through trouble when trouble comes.’

It is just possible that men, wise men, have realized this for a few thousand years, and have found the leading of nations more difficult than the leading of sheep. We have Mr. Roots word for it — and he ought to know — that ‘democracies are always in trouble.’ Yet they are ‘cure-alls’ themselves, very high up in the order of deliverance, and must be extricated with care and tenderness from the consequences of their own blunders. When pacifists, more impatient, or more masterful than Mrs. Catt, ask immediate assurance of a world peace, something universal and unbreakable, which will take effect overnight, and last out the century, statesmen sigh and smile, and face with fresh discouragement the difficulties of their task. The demand that governments shall ‘instantly’ disarm, ‘under pain of revolution and overthrow,’sounds businesslike; but if the governments have not yet disarmed, who is to bell the cat? The oft-repeated threat that women will refuse to bear children while there is a shadow of war in the sky is practical in purpose, but nebulous in outline. Nature is a strong antagonist. She has two things to do, create and destroy, and she does them with all her might. The procreative impulse is extinguishable in individuals, but not in the race. There is something to be said for as well as against it; but impulses arc independent of argument. While middle-aged spinsters of irreproachable morals arc bidding men make their choice between war and children, babies are being born so fast that their immediate needs keep the country hard at work providing for them.

An exasperated American politician has said that women’s political views defy classification. This is only partially true, and when it is true the reason is not far to seek. Party politics are subordinated in the minds of some women to feminism—the desire to advance their own sex — and in the minds of others to reform. The uneradicated cure-all notion affects their point of view. They attach more importance to the private character of a candidate than men do, and less to the principles he advocates and the work he has done. Where could a woman have been found to echo Sydney Smith’s heartfelt wish that Mr. Perceval had whipped his boys and saved his country?

The very able women speakers who pleaded for the Democratic cause before the last elections dwelt largely on moral, and lightly on practical, reforms. They had a great deal to say about the Teapot Dome, — some of them carried around a huge teapot as a symbolic and satiric device, — but very little about taxes and tariffs and the high cost of living. They were passionately aware of political corruption, though naturally disposed to look for it only on one side of the fence; but they had apparently never bought a pair of blankets since the passing of the Fordney-McCumber bill. Hearing them, I thought of those Tudor-ruled Britons who shrugged scornful shoulders when their fat king married and murdered his wives; but who voiced a prompt and stern denial to his exorbitant. demands for money. ‘ Prerogative monarchs,’ says Trevelyan, are the making of constitutional lawyers’; and the triumph of representative government is humane taxation. The supreme triumph will come when to humane taxation is added wise expenditure. With the dawning of that day the world and Democracy will be made safe for each other, and the plague of officialism will be healed.

IV

Perhaps a profound distaste for the methods of Hapsburgs and Hohenzollerns may have disposed us to concede to Democracy a species of holiness, a curative value, not easily analyzed or proved.

wrote Emerson in 1863, voicing his own pardonable weariness, which he never doubted was shared by the Almighty. In 1914 Autocracy gave to the world an object lesson in organized and efficient evil that made Democracy’s blundering incompetence seem like the shining of angels’ wings. What if the power of the people is apt to degrade public service to a common level of incapacity! What if intellectual inequalities are as distasteful to it as social inequalities! What if waste, corruption, and the miscarriage of justice can be laid to its charge! These sins are not the sins of Cain. They do not cry to Heaven for vengeance; but plead for time, and patience, and renewed confidence in a public conscience, which, though not always an intelligent conscience, is acutely sensitive to direction.

An ingenious theory advanced by Santayana maintains that leadership is immaterial in a pure democracy because of the ‘contagious sympathy’ of the pure democrats. As soon as the pressure of circumstance necessitates leadership, the pure democracy becomes a rudimentary monarchy. This is true, inasmuch as every government holds in it the rudiments of another form of government. How far the democracy of the United States is a pure democracy, it would be hard to tell. There are those who hold with our kind English critic, Lord Bryce, that we are wholly and triumphantly democratic; and there are those who hold with our caustic Canadian critic, Sir Andrew Macphail, that we are not democratic at all; that in no other civilized country are the liberties of the people more frequently and systematically raided. One thing is sure. Leadership affects us less than does the contagious sympathy of our fellows. It was not leadership which took us into the Great War, — our leaders were men of many minds, — it was the contagious sympathy of pure democrats who, like Emerson, were tired of the ways of kings.

Plato, whose words have a curious fashion of sounding as if they had been spoken the day before yesterday, says that Democracy is ‘a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, which dispenses equality alike to equals and unequals.’ Even little lap-dogs, he observes, walk about consequentially, with their noses in the air, and get out of nobody’s way. Criminals are treated benevolently. Men condemned to exile or to death are neither exiled nor executed. They ‘just stay where they are,’ and, when they appear in public, affect the demeanor of heroes.

Translated into slang, this paragraph might appear any day in any newspaper as the observation of a sardonic American humorist. It will be remembered that Lord Bryce admits we are an ‘indulgent’ people, and that our courts of justice could thole amends. It is also plain to his reluctant vision that Democracy as an institution fails to vivify intellectual life. But he most firmly believes that, for all its difficulties in a country subject to unresting immigration, it makes for methodical progress, and that it embodies a spirit of hopefulness, not to be found elsewhere. I his last asset is our heaviest and our best, do hope unreasonably for immediate results is distressful; but to hope with deep and abiding patience for the future is inspiration and strength. ‘The mapped lands and chartered waters of orderly development’ lie well within our reach.

If misdirected effort sidetracks us, we arc not the only travelers through life who must retrace our steps. And if the worst comes to the worst, and the measure of accomplishment is always unfulfilled, then surely everlasting hope is no bad cure-all for the sadness of an imperfect world.

‘For every age,’ says the melancholy Conrad, ‘is fed on illusions, lest men should renounce life early, and the human race come to an end.’