Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 Part 1

Reflections and Comments 1865-1895.

by Edwin Lawrence G.o.dkin.

PEACE

The horrors of war are just now making a deeper impression than ever on the popular mind, owing to the close contact with the battle-field and the hospital into which the railroad and the telegraph and the newspaper have brought the public of all civilized countries. Wars are fought out now, so to speak, under every man's and woman's eyes; and, what is perhaps of nearly as much importance, the growth of commerce and manufactures, and the increased complication of the social machine, render the smallest derangement of it anywhere a concern and trouble to all nations.

The consequence is that the desire for peace was never so deep as it is now, and the eagerness of all good people to find out some other means of deciding international disputes than mutual killing never so intense.

And yet the unconsciousness of the true nature and difficulties of the problem they are trying to solve, which is displayed by most of those who make the advocacy of peace their special work, is very discouraging. We are far from believing that the incessant and direct appeals to the public conscience on the subject of war are not likely in the long run to produce some effect; but it is very difficult to resist the conclusion that the efforts of the special advocates of peace have thus far helped to spread and strengthen the impression that there is no adequate subst.i.tute for the sword as an arbiter between nations, or, in other words, to harden the popular heart on the subject of military slaughter. It is certain that, during the last fifty years, the period in which peace societies have been at work, armies have been growing steadily larger, the means of destruction have been multiplying, and wars have been as frequent and as b.l.o.o.d.y as ever before; and, what is worse, the popular heart goes into war as it has never done in past ages.

The great reason why the more earnest enemies of war have not made more progress toward doing away with it, has been that, from the very outset of their labors down to the present moment, they have devoted themselves mainly to depicting its horrors and to denouncing its cruelty. In other words, they almost invariably approach it from a side with which nations actually engaged in it are just as familiar as anybody, but which has for the moment a.s.sumed in their eyes a secondary importance. The peace advocates are constantly talking of the guilt of killing, while the combatants only think, and will only think, of the n.o.bleness of dying. To the peace advocates the soldier is always a man going to slaughter his neighbors; to his countrymen he is a man going to lose his life for their sake--that is, to perform the loftiest act of devotion of which a human being is capable. It is not wonderful, then, that the usual effect of appeals for peace made by neutrals is to produce mingled exasperation and amus.e.m.e.nt among the belligerents. To the great majority of Europeans our civil war was a shocking spectacle, and the persistence of the North in carrying it on a sad proof of ferocity and l.u.s.t of dominion. To the great majority of those engaged in carrying it on the struggle was a holy one, in which it was a blessing to perish. Probably nothing ever fell more cruelly on human ears than the taunts and execrations which American wives and mothers heard from the other side of the ocean, heaped on the husbands and sons whom they had sent to the battle-field, never thinking at all of their slaying, but thinking solely of their being slain; and very glad indeed that, if death had to come, it should come in such a cause. If we go either to France or Germany to-day, we shall find a precisely similar state of feeling. If the accounts we hear be true--and we know of no reason to doubt them--there is no more question in the German and French mind that French and German soldiers are doing their highest duty in fighting, than there was in the most patriotic Northern or Southern home during our war; and we may guess, therefore, how a German or French mother, the light of whose life had gone out at Gravelotte or Orleans, and who hugs her sorrow as a great gift of G.o.d, would receive an address from New York on the general wickedness and folly of her sacrifice.

The fact is--and it is one of the most suggestive facts we know of--that the very growth of the public conscience has helped to make peace somewhat more difficult, war vastly more terrible.

When war was the game of kings and soldiers, the nations went into it in a half-hearted way, and sincerely loathed it; now that war is literally an outburst of popular feeling, the friend of peace finds most of his logic powerless. There is little use in reasoning with a man who is ready to die on the folly or wickedness of dying. When a nation has worked itself up to the point of believing that there are objects within its reach for which life were well surrendered, it has reached a region in which the wise saws and modern instances of the philosopher or lawyer cannot touch it, and in which pictures of the misery of war only help to make the martyr's crown seem more glorious.

Therefore, we doubt whether the work of peace is well done by those who, amidst the heat and fury of actual hostilities, dwell upon the folly and cruelty of them, and appeal to the combatants to stop fighting, on the ground that fighting involves suffering and loss of life, and the destruction of property. The princ.i.p.al effect of this on "the average man" has been to produce the impression that the friends of peace are ninnies, and to make him smile over the earnestness with which everybody looks on his own wars as holy and inevitable, and his neighbors' wars as unnecessary and wicked. Any practical movement to put an end to war must begin far away from the battle-field and its horrors. It must take up and deal with the various influences, social and political, which create and perpetuate the state of mind which makes people ready to fight. Preaching up peace and preaching down war generally are very like general homilies in praise of virtue and denunciation of vice. Everybody agrees with them, but n.o.body is ever ready to admit their applicability to his particular case. War is, in our time, essentially the people's work. Its guilt is theirs, as its losses and sufferings are theirs. All attempts to saddle emperors, kings, and n.o.bles with the responsibility of it may as well be given up from this time forward.

Now, what are the agencies which operate in producing the frame of mind which makes people ready to go to war on small provocation?

It is at these the friends of peace must strike, in time of peace, and not after the cannon has begun to roar and the country has gone mad with patriotism and rage. They are, first of all, the preaching in the press and elsewhere of the false and pernicious doctrine that one nation gains by another's losses, and can be made happy by its misery; that the United States, for instance, profits in the long run by the prostration of French, German, or English industry. One of the first duties of a peace society is to watch this doctrine, and hunt it down wherever they see it, as one of the great promoters of the pride and hardness of heart which make war seem a trifling evil. America can no more gain by French or German ruin than New York can gain by that of Ma.s.sachusetts. Secondly, there is the mediaeval doctrine that the less commercial intercourse nations carry on with each other the better for both, and that markets won or kept by force are means of gain. There has probably been no more fruitful source of war than this. It has for three centuries desolated the world, and all peace a.s.sociations should fix on it, wherever they encounter it, the mark of the beast. Thirdly, there is the tendency of the press, which is now the great moulder of public opinion, to take what we may call the pugilist's view of international controversies.

The habit of taunting foreign disputants, sneering at the cowardice or weakness of the one who shows any sign of reluctance in drawing the sword, and counting up the possible profit to its own country of one or other being well thrashed, in which it so frequently indulges, has inevitably the effect not only of goading the disputants into hostilities, but of connecting in the popular mind at home the idea of unreadiness or unwillingness to fight with baseness and meanness and material disadvantage. Fourthly, there is the practice, to which the press, orators, and poets in every civilized country steadily adhere, of maintaining, as far as their influence goes, the same notions about national honor which once prevailed about individual "honor"--that is, the notion that it is discreditable to acknowledge one's self in the wrong, and always more becoming to fight than apologize. "The code" has been abandoned in the Northern States and in England in the regulations of the relations of individual men, and a duellist is looked on, if not as a wicked, as a crack-brained person; but in some degree in both of them, and in a great degree in all other countries, it still regulates the mode in which international quarrels are brought to a conclusion.

Last of all, and most important of all, it is the duty of peace societies to cherish and exalt the idea of _law_ as the only true controller of international relations, and discourage and denounce their submission to _sentiment_. The history of civilization is the history of the growth amongst human beings of the habit of submitting their dealings with each other to the direction of rules of universal application, and their withdrawal of them from the domain of personal feeling. The history of "international law" is the history of the efforts of a number of rulers and statesmen to induce nations to submit themselves to a similar regime--that is, to subst.i.tute precedents and rules based on general canons of morality and on principles of munic.i.p.al law, for the dictates of pride, prejudice, and pa.s.sion, in their mode of seeking redress of injuries, of interpreting contracts, exchanging services, and carrying on commercial dealings. Their success thus far has been only partial. A nation, even the most highly civilized, is still, in its relations with its fellows, in a condition somewhat a.n.a.logous to that of the individual savage. It chooses its friends from whim or fancy, makes enemies through ignorance or caprice, avenges its wrongs in a torrent of rage, or through a cold-blooded thirst for plunder, and respects rules and usages only fitfully, and with small attention to the possible effect of its disregard of them on the general welfare. The man or the woman and, let us say, "the mother"--since that is supposed to be, in this discussion, a term of peculiar potency--who tries to exert a good influence on public opinion on all these points, to teach the brotherhood of man as an economical as well as a moral and religious truth; to spread the belief that war between any two nations is a general calamity to the civilized world; that it is as unchristian and inhuman to rouse national combativeness as to rouse individual combativeness, as absurd to a.s.sociate honor with national wrong-doing as with individual wrong-doing; and that peace among nations, as among individuals, is, and can only be, the product of general reverence for _law_ and general distrust of _feeling_--may rest a.s.sured that he or she is doing far more to bring war to an end than can be done by the most fervid accounts of the physical suffering it causes. It will be a sorrowful day for any people when their men come to consider death on the battle-field the greatest of evils, and the human heart will certainly have sadly fallen off when those who stay at home have neither grat.i.tude nor admiration for those who shoulder the musket, or are impressed less by the consideration that the soldiers are going to kill others than by the consideration that they are going to die themselves. There are things worth cheris.h.i.+ng even in war; and the seeds of what is worst in it are sown not in camps, barracks, or forts, but in public meetings and newspapers and legislatures and in literature.

CULTURE AND WAR

The feeling of amazement with which the world is looking on at the Prussian campaigns comes not so much from the tremendous display of physical force they afford--though there is in this something almost appalling--as from the consciousness which everybody begins to have that to put such an engine of destruction as the German army into operation there must be behind it a new kind of motive power. It is easy enough for any government to put its whole male population under arms, or even to lead them on an emergency to the field. But that an army composed in the main of men suddenly taken from civil pursuits should fight and march, as the Prussian army is doing, with more than the efficiency of any veteran troops the world has yet seen, and that the administrative machinery by which they are fed, armed, transported, doctored, shrived, and buried should go like clock-work on the enemy's soil, and that the people should submit not only without a murmur, but with enthusiasm, to sacrifices such as have never before been exacted of any nation except in the very throes of despair, show that something far more serious has taken place in Prussia than the transformation of the country into a camp.

In other words, we are not witnessing simply a levy _en ma.s.se_, nor yet the mere maintenance of an immense force by a military monarchy, but the application to military affairs of the whole intelligence of a nation of great mental and moral culture. The peculiarity of the Prussian system does not lie in the size of its armies or the perfection of its armament, but in the character of the men who compose it. All modern armies, except Cromwell's "New Model Army"

and that of the United States during the rebellion, have been composed almost entirely of ignorant peasants drilled into pa.s.sive obedience to a small body of professional soldiers. The Prussian army is the first, however, to be a perfect reproduction of the society which sends it to the field. To form it, all Prussian men lay down their tools or pens or books, and shoulder muskets.

Consequently, its excellences and defects are those of the community at large, and the community at large being cultivated in a remarkable degree, we get for the first time in history a real example of the devotion of mind and training, on a great scale, to the work of destruction.

Of course, the quality of the private soldier has in all wars a good deal to do with making or marring the fortunes of commanders; but it is safe to say that no strategists have over owed so much to the quality of their men as the Prussian strategists. Their perfect handling of the great ma.s.ses which are now manoeuvring in France has been made in large degree possible by the intelligence of the privates. This has been strikingly shown on two or three occasions by the facility with which whole regiments or brigades have been sacrificed in carrying a single position.

With ordinary troops, only a certain amount can be deliberately and openly exacted of any one corps. The highest heights of devotion are often beyond their reach. But if it serves the purposes of a Prussian commander to have all the cost of an a.s.sault fall on one regiment, he apparently finds not the slightest difficulty in getting it to march to certain destruction, and not blindly as peasants march, but as men of education, who understand the whole thing, but having made it for this occasion their business to die, do it like any other duty of life--not hilariously or enthusiastically or recklessly, but calmly and energetically, as they study or manufacture or plough. They get themselves killed not one particle more than is necessary, but also not one particle less.

A nation organized in this way is a new phenomenon, and is worth attentive study. It gives one a glimpse of possibilities in the future of modern civilization of which few people have hitherto dreamed, and it must be confessed that the prospect is not altogether pleasing. We have been flattering ourselves--in Anglo-Saxondom, at least--for many years back that all social progress was to be hereafter in the direction of greater individualism, and among us, certainly, this view has derived abundant support from observed facts. But it is now apparent that there is a tendency at work, which appears to grow stronger and stronger every day, toward combination in all the work of life.

It is specially observable in the efforts of the working cla.s.ses to better their condition; it still more observable in the efforts of capital to fortify itself against them and against the public at large; and there is, perhaps, nothing in which more rapid advances have been made of late years than in the power of organization. The working of the great railroads and hotels and manufactories, of the trades unions, of the co-operative a.s.sociations, and of the monster armies now maintained by three or four powers, are all ill.u.s.trations of it. The growth of power is, of course, the result of the growth of intelligence, and it is in the ratio of the growth of intelligence.

Prussia has got the start of all other countries by combining the whole nation in one vast organization for purposes of offence and defence. Hitherto nations have simply subscribed toward the maintenance of armies and concerned themselves little about their internal economy and administration; but the Prussians have converted themselves into an army, and have been enabled to do so solely by subjecting themselves to a long process of elaborate training, which has changed the national character. When reduced to the lowest point of humiliation after the battle of Jena, they went to work and absolutely built up the nation afresh. We may not altogether like the result. To large numbers of people the Prussian type of character is not a pleasing one, nor Prussian society an object of unmixed admiration, and there is something horrible in a whole people's pa.s.sing their best years learning how to kill. But we cannot get over the fact that the Prussian man is likely to furnish, consciously or unconsciously, the model to other civilized countries, until such time as some other nation has so successfully imitated him as to produce his like.

Let those who believe, as Mr. Wendell Phillips says that he believes, that "the best education a man can get is what he gets in picking up a living," and that universities are humbugs, and that from the newspapers and lyceum lecture the citizen can always get as much information on all subjects, human and divine, as is good for him or the State, take a look at the Prussian soldier as he marches past in his ill-fitting uniform and his leather helmet. First of all, we observe that he smokes a great deal. According to some of us, the "tobacco demon" ought by this time to have left him a thin, puny, hollow-eyed fellow, with trembling knees and palpitating heart and listless gait, with shaking hands and an intense craving for ardent spirits. You perceive, however, that a burlier, broader-shouldered, ruddier, brighter-eyed, and heartier-looking man you never set eyes on; and as he swings along in column, with his rifle, knapsack, seventy rounds of ammunition, blanket, and saucepan, you must confess you cannot help acknowledging that you feel sorry for any equal body of men in the world with which that column may get into "a difficulty." He drinks, too, and drinks a great deal, both of strong beer and strong wine, and has always done so, and all his family friends do it, and have only heard of teetotalism through the newspapers, and, if you asked him to confine himself to water, would look on you as an amiable idiot. Nevertheless, you never see him drunk, nor does his beer produce on him that utterly bemuddling or brain-paralyzing effect which is so powerfully described by our friend Mr. James Parton as produced on him by lager-bier, in that inquiry into the position of "The Coming Man" toward wine, some copies of which, we see, he is trying to distribute among the field-officers. On the contrary, he is, on the whole, a very sober man, and very powerful thinker, and very remarkable scholar. There is no field of human knowledge which he has not been among the first to explore; no heights of speculation which he has not scaled; no problem of the world over which he is not fruitfully toiling. Moreover, his thoroughness is the envy of the students of all other countries, and his hatred of sham scholars.h.i.+p and slipshod generalization is intense.

But what with the tobacco and the beer, and the scholars.h.i.+p and his university education, you might naturally infer that he must be a kid-glove soldier, and a little too nice and dreamy and speculative for the actual work of life. But you never were more mistaken. He is leaving behind him some of the finest manufactories and best-tilled fields in the world. Moreover, he is an admirable painter and, as all the world knows, an almost unequalled musician; or if you want proof of his genius for business, look at the speed and regularity with which he and his comrades have transported themselves to the Rhine, and see the perfection of all the arrangements of his regiment. And now, if you think his "bad habits,"

his daily violations of your notions of propriety, have diminished his power of meeting death calmly--that n.o.blest of products of culture--you have only to follow him up as far as Sedan and see whether he ever flinches; whether you have ever read or heard of a soldier out of whom more marching and fighting and dying, and not flighty, boisterous dying either, could be got.

Now, we can very well understand why people should be unwilling to see the Prussian military system spread into other countries, or even be preserved where it is. It is a pitiful thing to have the men of a whole civilized nation spending so much time out of the flower of their years learning to kill other men; and the lesson to be drawn from the recent Prussian successes is a.s.suredly not that every country ought to have an army like the Prussian army, though we confess that, if great armies must be kept up, there is no better model than the Prussian. The lesson is that, whether you want him for war or peace, there is no way in which you can get so much out of a man as by training him, and training him not in pieces but the whole of him; and that the trained men, other things being equal, are pretty sure in the long run to be the masters of the world.

THE COMPARATIVE MORALITY OF NATIONS

We had, four or five weeks ago, a few words of controversy with the _Christian Union_ as to the comparative morality of the Prussians and Americans, or, rather, their comparative religiousness--meaning by religiousness a disposition "to serve others and live as in G.o.d's sight;" in other words, unselfishness and spirituality. We let it drop, from the feeling that the question whether the Americans or Prussians were the better men was only a part, and a very small part, of the larger question. How do we discover which of any two nations is the purer in its life or in its aims? and, is not any judgment we form about it likely to be very defective, owing to the inevitable incompleteness of our premises? We are not now going to try to fix the place of either Prussia or the United States in the scale of morality, but to point out some reasons why all comparisons between them should be made by Americans with exceeding care and humility. There is hardly any field of inquiry in which even the best-informed man is likely to fall into so many errors; first, because there is no field in which the vision is so much affected by prejudices of education and custom; and, secondly, because there is none in which the things we see are so likely to create erroneous impressions about the things we do not see. But we may add that it is a field which no intelligent and sensible man ever explores without finding his charity greatly stimulated.

Let us give some ill.u.s.trations of the errors into which people are apt to fall in it. Count Gasparin, a French Protestant, and as spiritually minded a man as breathed, once talking with an American friend expressed in strong terms his sense of the pain it caused him that Mr. Lincoln should have been at the theatre when he was killed, not, the friend found, because he objected in the least to theatre-going, but because it was the evening of Good Friday--a day which the Continental Calvinists "keep" with great solemnity, but to which American non-episcopal Protestants pay no attention whatever. Count Gasparin, on the other hand, would have no hesitation in taking a ride on Sunday, or going to a public promenade after church hours, and, from seeing him there, his American friend would draw deductions just as unfavorable to the Count's religious character as the Count himself drew with regard to Mr. Lincoln's.

Take, again, the question of drinking beer and wine. There is a large body of very excellent men in America who, from a long contemplation of the evils wrought by excessive indulgence in intoxicating drinks, have worked themselves up to a state of mind about all use of such drinks which is really discreditable to reasonable beings, leads to the most serious platform excesses, and is perfectly incomprehensible to Continental Europeans. To the former, the drinking even of lager beer connotes, as the logicians say, ever so many other vices--grossness and sensuality of nature, extravagance, indifference to home pleasures, repugnance to steady industry, and a disregard of the precepts of religion and morality. To many of them a German workman, and his wife and children, sitting in a beer-garden on a summer's evening, which to European moralists and economists is one of the most pleasing sights in the world, is a revolting spectacle, which calls for the interference of the police. Now, if you go to a beer-garden in Berlin you may, any Sunday afternoon, see doctors of divinity--none of your rationalists--but doctors of real divinity, to whom American theologians go to be taught, doing this very thing, and, what is worse, smoking pipes. An American who applied to this the same course of reasoning which he would apply to a similar scene in America, would simply be guilty of outrageous folly. If he argued from it that the German doctor was selfish, or did not "live as in the sight of G.o.d," the whole process would be a model of absurdity.

Foreigners have drawn, on the other hand, from the American "diligence in business," conclusions with regard to American character far more uncomplimentary than those the _Christian Union_ has expressed with regard to the Prussians. There are not a few religious and moral and cultivated circles in Europe in which the suggestion that Americans, as a nation, were characterized by thoughtfulness for others and a sense of G.o.d's presence would be received with derisive laughter, owing to the application to the phenomena of American society of the process of reasoning on which, we fear, the _Union_ relies. Down to the war, so candid and perspicacious a man as John Stuart Mill might have been included in this cla.s.s. The earlier editions of his "Elements of Political Economy" contained a contemptuous statement that one s.e.x in America was entirely given up to "dollar-hunting" and the other to "breeding dollar-hunters." In other words, he held that the American people were plunged in the grossest materialism, and he doubtless based this opinion on that intense application of the men to commercial and industrial pursuits which we see all around us, which no church finds fault with, but which, we know, bad as its effects are on art and literature, really coexists with great generosity, sympathy, public spirit, and ideality.

Take, again, the matter of chast.i.ty, on which the _Union_ touched. We grant at the outset that wherever you have cla.s.ses, the women of the lower cla.s.s suffer more or less from the men of the upper cla.s.s, and anybody who says that seductions, accomplished through the effect on female vanity of the addresses of "superiors in station," while almost unknown here, are very numerous in Europe, would find plenty of facts to support him. But, on the other hand, an attempt made to persuade a Frenchman that the familiar intercourse which the young people of both s.e.xes in this country enjoy was generally pure, would fail in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred. That it should be pure is opposed to all his experience of human nature, both male and female; and the result of your argument with him would be that he would conclude either that you were an extraordinarily simple person, or took him for one.

On the other hand, we believe the German, who thinks nothing of drinking as much wine or beer as he cares for, draws from the conduct of the American young woman whom he sees abroad, and from what he reads in our papers about "free love," Indiana divorces, abortion, and what not, conclusions with regard to American chast.i.ty very different from those of the _Union_; and, if you sought to meet him in discussion, he would overwhelm you with facts and cases which, looked at apart from the general tenor of American life and manners, it would be very hard to dispose of. He would say, for instance, that we are not, perhaps, guilty of as many violations of the marriage vows as Europeans; but that we make it so light a vow that, instead of violating it, we get it abrogated, and then follow our will; and then he would come down on us with boarding-house and hotel life, and other things of the same kind, which might make us despise him, but would make it a little difficult to get rid of him.

There is probably no minor point of manners which does more to create unfavorable impressions of Europeans among the best cla.s.s of Americans--morally the best, we mean--than the importance attached by the former to their eating and drinking; while there is nothing which does more to spread in Europe impressions unfavorable to American civilization than the indifference of Americans, and, we may add, as regards the progressive portion of American society--cultivated indifference--to the quality of their meals and the time of eating them. In no European country is moderate enjoyment of the pleasures of the table considered incompatible with high moral aims, or even a sincerely religious character; but a man to whom his dinner was of serious importance would find his position in an a.s.sembly of American reformers very precarious. The German or Frenchman or Englishman, indeed, treats a man's views of food, and his disposition or indisposition to eat it in company with his fellows as an indication of his place in civilization. Savages love to eat alone, and it has been observed in partially civilized communities relapsing into barbarism, that one of the first indications of their decline was the abandonment of regular meals on tables, and a tendency on the part of the individuals to retire to secret places with their victuals. This is probably a remnant of the old aboriginal instinct which we still see in domesticated dogs, and was, doubtless, implanted for the protection of the species in times when everybody looked on his neighbor's bone with a hungry eye, and the man with the strong hand was apt to have the fullest stomach. Accordingly, there is in Europe, and indeed everywhere, a tendency to regard the growth of a delicacy in eating, and close attention to the time and manner of serving meals and their cookery, and the use of them as promoters of social intercourse, as an indication of moral as well as material progress. To a large number of people here, on the other hand, the bolting of food--ten-minute dinners, for instance--and general unconsciousness of "what is on the table," is a sign of preoccupation with serious things. It may be; but the German love of food is not necessarily a sign of grossness, and that "overfed" appearance, of which the _Union_ spoke, is not necessarily a sign of inefficiency, any more than leanness or cadaverousness is a sign of efficiency. There is certainly some power of hard work in King William's army, and, indeed, we could hardly point to a better ill.u.s.tration of the truth, that all the affairs of men, whether political, social, or religious, depend for their condition largely on the state of the digestion.

Honesty, by which we mean that cla.s.s of virtues which Cicero includes in the term _bona fides_, has, to a considerable extent, owing, we think, to the peculiar humanitarian character which the circ.u.mstances of the country have given to the work of reform, been subordinated in the United States to brotherly kindness. Now, this right to arrange the virtues according to a scale of its own, is something which not only every age, but every nation, has claimed, and, accordingly, we find that each community, in forming its judgment of a man's character, gives a different degree of weight to different features of it. Keeping a mistress would probably, anywhere in the United States, damage a man's reputation far more seriously than fraudulent bankruptcy; while horse-stealing, which in New England would be a comparatively trifling offence, out in Montana is a far fouler thing than murder. But in the European scale, honesty still occupies the first place. Bearing this in mind, it is worth any man's while who proposes to pa.s.s judgment on the morality of any foreign country, to consider what is the impression produced on foreign opinion about American morality by the story of the Erie Railroad, by the career of Fisk, by the condition of the judicial bench in the commercial capital of the country, by the charges of corruption brought against such men as Trumbull and Fessenden at the time of the impeachment trial; by the comically prominent and beloved position which Butler has held for some years in our best moral circles, and by the condition of the civil service.

The truth is that it is almost impossible for anybody to compare one nation with another fairly, unless he possesses complete familiarity with the national life of both, and therefore can distinguish isolated facts from symptomatic facts.

The reason why some of the phenomena of American society which shock foreigners greatly, do not shock even the best Americans so much, is not that the latter have become hardened to them--though this counts for something--but that they know of various counteracting and compensating phenomena which prevent, or are sure to prevent, them in the long run from doing the mischief which they seem to threaten. In other words, they understand the checks and balances of their society as well as its tendencies.

Anybody who considers these things will be careful how he denounces people whose manners differ from his own for want of spirituality or morality, and we may add that any historical student engaged in comparing the morality of the age in which he lives with that of any other age which he knows only through chronicles, will do well to exercise the same caution for the same reasons.

THE "COMIC-PAPER" QUESTION

It is recorded of a patriotic member of the Committee of Ways and Means, that after hearing from the Special Commissioner of the Revenue an elaborate and strongly fortified argument which made a deep impression on the committee in favor of a reduction of the whiskey tax, on the ground that the then rate, two dollars a gallon, could not be collected--he closed the debate, and carried the majority with him, by declaring that, for his part, he never would admit that a government which had just suppressed the greatest rebellion the world ever saw, could not collect two dollars a gallon on whiskey. A large portion of the public approaches the comic-paper problem in much the same spirit in which this gentleman approached the whiskey tax. The country has plenty of humor, and plenty of humorists. It fills whole pages of numerous magazines and whole columns of numerous newspapers with really good jokes every month. It supplies great numbers of orators and lecturers and diners-out with "little stories,"

which, of their kind, cannot be surpa.s.sed. There is probably no country in the world, too, in which there is so much constantly going on of the fun which does not need local knowledge or coloring to be enjoyed, but will bear exportation, and be recognized as the genuine article in any English-speaking part of the world. Moreover, there is in the real American stories an amount of suggestiveness, a power of "connotation," which cannot be affirmed of those of any other country. A very large number of them are real contributions to sociology, and of considerable value too. Besides all this, the United States possesses, what no other nation does, several professed jesters--that is, men who are not only humorous in the ordinary sense of the term, but make a business of cracking jokes, and are recognized as persons whose duty it is to take a jocose view of things. Artemus Ward, Josh Billings, and Mark Twain, and the Rev. P. V. Nasby, and one or two others of less note, are a kind of personages which no other society has produced, and could in no other society attain equal celebrity. In fact, when one examines the total annual production of jokes in the United States, one who knows nothing of the past history of the comic-paper question can hardly avoid the conclusion that such periodicals would run serious risk of being overwhelmed with "good things" and dying of plethora. Yet the melancholy fact is that several--indeed, all that have been started--have died of inanition; that is, of the absence of jokes. The last one says it offered all the great humorists in the country plenty of work, and their own terms as to pay, and failed to enlist them, and the chance jokes apparently were neither numerous enough nor good enough to keep it afloat.

Now what is the cause of this disheartening state of things? Why can the United States not have a comic paper of their own? The answers to this question vary, though of course not greatly. They are mostly given in the shape of a history, with appropriate comments, of the unsuccessful attempts made to establish comic papers; one went down because it did not sympathize with the liberal and humane movements of the day, and laughed in the pro-slavery interest; another, because it never succeeded in getting hold of a good draughtsman for its engravings; and another venture failed, among other mistakes, we are told, because it made fun of the New York _Tribune_. The explanation which finds most general favor with the public is, that while in England, France, and Germany "the great dailies" confine themselves to the serious treatment of the topics of the day, and thus leave room for the labors of _Punch_, or _Kladderadatsch_, or _Charivari_, in America all papers do their own joking; and, if it seems desirable to take a comic view of anything or anybody, take it on the spot in their own columns.

Hence any paper which starts on a comic basis alone meets with rivals in all its sober-minded contemporaries, and comes to grief. The difficulty it has to contend with is, in short, very like that which the professional laundress or baker has to contend with, owing to the fact that families are accustomed to do their own was.h.i.+ng and bake their own bread. And, indeed, it is not unlike that with which professional writers of all kinds have to contend, owing to the readiness of clergymen, lawyers, and professors to write, while doing something else. An ordinary daily paper supplies, besides its serious disquisitions, fun enough for one average household--sometimes in single jokes, and sometimes in the shape of "sparkle" or "spiciness" in grave articles. Often enough it is very poor stuff, but it amuses people, without turning their attention away from the sober work of life, which is the only way in which the vast body of Americans are willing to be amused. Newspaper comedians have here, what they would not have in London, a chance of letting off a joke once a day, and six or seven jokes a week is more than any comic paper is willing or able to take from any one contributor, partly owing to the need of variety in a paper given wholly to humor, and partly owing to want of s.p.a.ce. Anybody, therefore, who has humor for sale finds a readier market among the dailies or magazines, and a far wider circle of readers, than he would in any comic paper.

The charge that our comic papers have generally opposed the friends of liberty and progress--that is the most intelligent and appreciative portion of the public--is quite true, but it does not go far to account for their failure. _Punch_ has done this steadily ever since its establishment, without serious injury. No good cause has ever received much backing from it till it became the cause of the majority, or indeed has escaped being made the b.u.t.t of its ridicule; and we confess we doubt whether "the friends of progress,"

using the term in what we may call its technical sense, were ever a sufficiently large body, or had ever sufficient love of fun, to make their disfavor of any great consequence. Most people in the United States who are very earnestly enlisted in the service of "a cause"

look on all ridicule as "wicked," and regard with great suspicion anybody who indulges in it, whether he makes them the object of it or not. They bore with it, when turned against slavery, from one or two distinguished humorists, because its effectiveness was plain; but we doubt whether any man who had the knack of seeing the ludicrous side of things ever really won their confidence, partly owing to their own natural want of humor, and partly to their careful cultivation of a habit of solemnity of mind as the only thing that can make an "advanced" position really tenable, to say nothing of comfortable. The causes of all successes, as of all failures, in the literary world are of course various, and no doubt there is a good deal of truth in all that has been said in solution of the comic-paper problem. American humorists of the best cla.s.s can find something better or more lucrative to do than writing for a comic paper; while the poor American humorists, like the poor humorists of all countries, are coa.r.s.e and vulgar, even where they are not stupid.

But there is one striking difference between American society and those societies in which comic papers have succeeded which not only goes a good way to explain their failure here, but puts a better face on some of their efforts--such as their onslaughts on the friends of progress--than they seem to wear at first sight.

To furnish sufficient food for fun to keep a comic paper afloat, a country must supply a good many strong social contrasts for the professional joker to play upon, and must have a large amount of reverence for social distinctions and dignities for him to shock.

Two-thirds of the zest with which foreign comic papers are read is due to the fact that they caricature persons or social circles with which the ma.s.s of their readers are not thoroughly familiar, and whose habits and ways of looking at things they do not share or only partly share. A good deal of the fun in _Punch_, for instance, consists in making costermongers or cabmen quarrel with the upper cla.s.ses, in ridicule of Jeames's attempts to imitate his master, of Brown's efforts to sc.r.a.pe acquaintance with a peer, of the absurd figure cut by the "cad" in the hunting-field, and of the folly of the city clerk in trying to dress and behave like a guardsman. In short, the point of a great number of its best jokes is made by bringing different social strata into sharp comparison. The peculiarities of Irishmen and Scotchmen also furnish rich materials to the caricaturist. He never tires of ill.u.s.trating the blunders and impudence of the one and the hot patriotism and n.i.g.g.ardliness of the other. The Irish Highlander, who denies, in a rich brogue, that any Irish are ever admitted into his regiment, and the cannie burgher from Aberdeen, who, on his return home from a visit to London, says it's an "awfu' dear place; that he hadna' been twa oors in the toon when bang went saxpence," are types which raise a laugh all over the United Kingdom, and all because, again, they furnish materials for ludicrous contrast which everybody is capable of appreciating.

Neither the Irishman, Scotchman, nor Englishman, as such, can be made to yield much fun, if sketched alone. It is when ranged alongside of each other, and measured by the English middle-cla.s.s standard of propriety, that they become entertaining.

In a h.o.m.ogeneous society, like that of the United States, none of this material is to be found. The New Englander, to be sure, furnishes a type which differs from the Middle-States man or the Southerner or Westerner, but none of them differs enough to make him worth caricaturing. His speech, his dress, his modes of acting and thinking so nearly resemble those of his neighbors in other parts of the country that after the comic writer or draughtsman had done his best or his worst upon him, it would remain still a little doubtful where the joke came in. The Irishman, and especially the New York Irish voter, and his sister Bridget, the cook, have during the past ten years rendered more or less service as b.u.t.ts for caricaturists, but they are rapidly wearing out. They are not many-sided persons at best, and their characteristics have become a.s.sociated in the American mind with so much that is uncomfortable and repulsive in domestic and political life, that it becomes increasingly difficult to get a native to laugh at them. It must be confessed, too, that the Irish in America have signally belied the poet's a.s.sertion, "_Coelum non animam mutant qui trans mare currunt_." There is nothing more striking in their condition than the almost complete disappearance from their character, at least in its outward manifestations, of the vivacity, politeness, kindliness, comical blundering impetuosity, and double-sightedness, out of which the Irishman of the stage and Jo Miller's Irishman who made all the bulls were manufactured in the last century. Of the other nationalities we need hardly speak, as the English-speaking public knows little of them, although the German Jew is perhaps the most durable material the comic writer has ever worked on.