Marse Henry Part 15

"Now, gentlemen," I continued, "I don't mean to argue the case. It is not debatable. I am just from the White House, and I am authorized by the President to say that if you send this bill to him he will veto it."

That, of course, settled it. They held it up. But after the presidential election it reached Arthur, and he did veto it. Not till Cleveland came in did Porter obtain his restoration.

Curiously enough General Grant approved this. I had listened to the debate in the House--especially the masterly speech of William Walter Phelps--without attaining a clear understanding of the many points at issue. I said as much to General Grant.

"Why," he replied, "the case is as simple as A, B, C. Let me show you."

Then, with a pencil he traced the Second Bull Run battlefield, the location of troops, both Federal and Confederate, and the exact pa.s.sage in the action which had compromised General Porter.

"If Porter had done what he was ordered to do," he went on, "Pope and his army would have been annihilated. In point of fact Porter saved Pope's Army." Then he paused and added: "I did not at the outset know this. I was for a time of a different opinion and on the other side. It was Longstreet's testimony--which had not been before the first Court of Inquiry that convicted Porter--which vindicated him and convinced me."

Chapter the Tenth

Of Liars and Lying--Woman Suffrage and Feminism--The Professional Female--Parties, Politics, and Politicians in America

I

All is fair in love and war, the saying hath it. "Lord!" cried the most delightful of liars, "How this world is given to lying." Yea, and how exigency quickens invention and promotes deceit.

Just after the war of sections I was riding in a train with Samuel Bowles, who took a great interest in things Southern. He had been impressed by a newspaper known as The Chattanooga Rebel and, as I had been its editor, put innumerable questions to me about it and its affairs. Among these he asked how great had been its circulation.

Without explaining that often an entire company, in some cases an entire regiment, subscribed for a few copies, or a single copy, I answered: "I don't know precisely, but somewhere near a hundred thousand, I take it."

Then he said: "Where did you get your press power?"

This was, of course, a poser, but it did not embarra.s.s me in the least.

I was committed, and without a moment's thought I proceeded with an imaginary explanation which he afterward declared had been altogether satisfying. The story was too good to keep--maybe conscience p.r.i.c.ked--and in a chummy talk later along I laughingly confessed.

"You should tell that in your dinner speech tonight," he said. "If you tell it as you have just told it to me, it will make a hit," and I did.

I give it as the opinion of a long life of experience and observation that the newspaper press, whatever its delinquencies, is not a common liar, but the most habitual of truth tellers. It is growing on its editorial page I fear a little vapid and colorless. But there is a general and ever-present purpose to print the facts and give the public the opportunity to reach its own conclusions.

There are liars and liars, lying and lying. It is, with a single exception, the most universal and venial of human frailties. We have at least three kinds of lying and species, or types, of liars--first, the common, ordinary, everyday liar, who lies without rime or reason, rule or compa.s.s, aim, intent or interest, in whose mind the part.i.tion between truth and falsehood has fallen down; then the sensational, imaginative liar, who has a tale to tell; and, finally, the mean, malicious liar, who would injure his neighbor.

This last is, indeed, but rare. Human nature is at its base amicable, because if nothing hinders it wants to please. All of us, however, are more or less its unconscious victims.

Compet.i.tion is not alone the life of trade; it is the life of life; for each of us is in one way, or another, compet.i.tive. There is but one disinterested person in the world, the mother who whether of the human or animal kingdom, will die for her young. Yet, after all, hers, too, is a kind of selfishness.

The woman is becoming over much a professional female. It is of importance that we begin to consider her as a new species, having enjoyed her beauty long enough. Is the world on the way to organic revolution? If I were a young man I should not care to be the lover of a professional female. As an old man I have affectionate relations with a number of suffragettes, as they dare not deny; that is to say, I long ago accepted woman suffrage as inevitable, whether for good or evil, depending upon whether the woman's movement is going to stop with suffrage or run into feminism, changing the character of woman and her relations to men and with man.

II

I have never made party differences the occasion of personal quarrel or estrangement. On the contrary, though I have been always called a Democrat, I have many near and dear friends among the Republicans.

Politics is not war. Politics would not be war even if the politicians were consistent and honest. But there are among them so many changelings, cheats and rogues.

Then, in politics as elsewhere, circ.u.mstances alter cases. I have as a rule thought very little of parties as parties, professional politicians and party leaders, and I think less of them as I grow older. The politician and the auctioneer might be described like the lunatic, the lover and the poet, as "of imagination all compact." One sees more mares' nests than would fill a book; the other pure gold in pinchbeck wares; and both are out for gudgeons.

It is the habit--nay, the business--of the party speaker when he mounts the raging stump to roar his plat.i.tudes into the ears of those who have the simplicity to listen, though neither edified nor enlightened; to aver that the horse he rides is sixteen feet high; that the candidate he supports is a giant; and that he himself is no small figure of a man.

Thus he resembles the auctioneer. But it is the mock auctioneer whom he resembles; his stock in trade being largely, if not altogether, fraudulent. The success which at the outset of party welfare attended this legalized confidence game drew into it more and more players. For a long time they deceived themselves almost as much as the voters. They had not become professional. They were amateur. Many of them played for sheer love of the gamble. There were rules to regulate the play. But as time pa.s.sed and voters multiplied, the popular preoccupation increased the temptations and opportunities for gain, inviting the enterprising, the skillful and the corrupt to reconst.i.tute patriotism into a commodity and to organize public opinion into a bill of lading. Thus politics as a trade, parties as trademarks, the politicians, like harlots, plying their vocation.

Now and again an able, honest and brave man, who aims at better things, appears. In the event that fortune favors him and he attains high station, he finds himself surrounded and thwarted by men less able and courageous, who, however equal to discovering right from wrong, yet wear the party collar, owe fealty to the party machine, are sometimes actual slaves of the party boss. In the larger towns we hear of the City Hall ring; out in the counties of the Court House ring. We rarely anywhere encounter clean, responsible administration and pure, disinterested, public service.

The taxpayers are robbed before their eyes. The evil grows greater as we near the centers of population. But there is scarcely a village or hamlet where graft does not grow like weeds, the voters as gullible and helpless as the infatuated victims of bunko tricks, ingeniously contrived by professional crooks to separate the fool and his money. Is self-government a failure?

None of us would allow the votaries of the divine right of kings to tell us so, albeit we are ready enough to admit the imperfections of universal suffrage, too often committing affairs of pith and moment, even of life and death, to the arbitrament of the mob, and costing more in cash outlay than royal establishments.

The quadrennial period in American politics, set apart and dedicated to the election of presidents, magnifies these evil features in an otherwise admirable system of government. That the whipper-snappers of the vicinage should indulge their propensities comes as the order of their nature. But the party leaders are not far behind them. Each side construes every occurrence as an argument in its favor, a.s.suring it certain victory. Take, for example, the latest state election anywhere.

In point of fact, it foretold nothing. It threw no light upon coming events, not even upon current events. It leaves the future as hazy as before. Yet the managers of either party affect to be equally confident that it presages the triumph of their ticket in the next national election. The wonder is that so many of the voters will believe and be influenced by such transparent subterfuge.

Is there any remedy for all this? I much fear that there is not.

Government, like all else, is impossible of perfection. It is as man is--good, bad and indifferent; which is but another way of saying we live in a world of cross purposes. We in America prefer republicanism.

But would despotism be so demurrable under a wise unselfish despot?

III

Contemplating the contrasts between foreign life and foreign history with our own one cannot help reflecting upon the yet more startling contrasts of ancient and modern religion and government. I have wandered not a little over Europe at irregular intervals for more than fifty years. Always a devotee to American inst.i.tutions, I have been strengthened in my beliefs by what I have encountered.

The mood in our countrymen has been overmuch to belittle things American. The commercial spirit in the United States, which affects to be nationalistic, is in reality cosmopolitan. Money being its G.o.d, French money, English money, anything that calls itself money, is wealth to it. It has no time to waste on theories or to think of generics. "Put money in thy purse" has become its motto. Money const.i.tutes the reason of its being. The organic law of the land is Greek to it, as are those laws of G.o.d which obstruct it. It is too busy with its greed and gain to think, or to feel, on any abstract subject. That which does not appeal to it in the concrete is of no interest at all.

Just as in the days of Charles V and Philip II, all things yielded to the theologian's misconception of the spiritual life so in these days of the Billionaires all things spiritual and abstract yield to what they call the progress of the universe and the leading of the times. Under their rule we have had extraordinary movement just as under the lords of the Palatinate and the Escurial--the medieval union of the devils of bigotry and power--Europe, which was but another name for Spain, had extraordinary movement. We know where it ended with Spain. Whither is it leading us? Are we traveling the same road?

Let us hope not. Let us believe not. Yet, once strolling along through the crypt of the Church of the Escurial near Madrid, I could not repress the idea of a personal and physical resemblance between the effigies in marble and bronze looking down upon me whichever way I turned, to some of our contemporary public men and seeming to say: "My love to the President when you see him next," and "Don't forget to remember me kindly, please, to the chairmen of both your national committees!"

IV

In a world of sin, disease and death--death inevitable--what may man do to drive out sin and cure disease, to the end that, barring accident, old age shall set the limit on mortal life?

The quack doctor equally in ethics and in physics has played a leading part in human affairs. Only within a relatively brief period has science made serious progress toward discovery. Though Nature has perhaps an antidote for all her poisons many of them continue to defy approach.

They lie concealed, leaving the astutest to grope in the dark.

That which is true of material things is truer yet of spiritual things.

The ideal about which we hear so much, is as unattained as the fabled bag of gold at the end of the rainbow. Nor is the doctrine of perfectability anywhere one with itself. It speaks in diverse tongues.

Its processes and objects are variant. It seems but an iridescent dream which lends itself equally to the fancies of the impracticable and the scheming of the self-seeking, breeding visionaries and pretenders.