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_ Chapter X
The young Lord Berkeley, with the fresh air of freedom in his nostrils,
was feeling invincibly strong for his new career; and yet--and yet--if
the fight should prove a very hard one at first, very discouraging, very
taxing on untoughened moral sinews, he might in some weak moment want to
retreat. Not likely, of course, but possibly that might happen. And so
on the whole it might be pardonable caution to burn his bridges behind
him. Oh, without doubt. He must not stop with advertising for the owner
of that money, but must put it where he could not borrow from it himself,
meantime, under stress of circumstances. So he went down town, and put
in his advertisement, then went to a bank and handed in the $500 for
deposit.
"What name?"
He hesitated and colored a little; he had forgotten to make a selection.
He now brought out the first one that suggested itself:
"Howard Tracy."
When he was gone the clerks, marveling, said:
"The cowboy blushed."
The first step was accomplished. The money was still under his command
and at his disposal, but the next step would dispose of that difficulty.
He went to another bank and drew upon the first bank for the 500 by
check. The money was collected and deposited a second time to the credit
of Howard Tracy. He was asked to leave a few samples of his signature,
which he did. Then he went away, once more proud and of perfect courage,
saying:
"No help for me now, for henceforth I couldn't draw that money without
identification, and that is become legally impossible. No resources to
fall back on. It is work or starve from now to the end. I am ready--and
not afraid!"
Then he sent this cablegram to his father:
"Escaped unhurt from burning hotel. Have taken fictitious name.
Goodbye."
During the, evening, while he was wandering about in one of the outlying
districts of the city, he came across a small brick church, with a bill
posted there with these words printed on it: "MECHANICS' CLUB DEBATE.
ALL INVITED." He saw people, apparently mainly of the working class,
entering the place, and he followed and took his seat. It was a humble
little church, quite bare as to ornamentation. It had painted pews
without cushions, and no pulpit, properly speaking, but it had a
platform. On the platform sat the chairman, and by his side sat a man
who held a manuscript in his hand and had the waiting look of one who is
going to perform the principal part. The church was soon filled with a
quiet and orderly congregation of decently dressed and modest people.
This is what the chairman said:
"The essayist for this evening is an old member of our club whom you all
know, Mr. Parker, assistant editor of the Daily Democrat. The subject
of his essay is the American Press, and he will use as his text a couple
of paragraphs taken from Mr. Matthew Arnold's new book. He asks me to
read these texts for him. The first is as follows:
"'Goethe says somewhere that "the thrill of awe," that is to say,
REVERENCE, is the best thing humanity has."
"Mr. Arnold's other paragraph is as follows:
"'I should say that if one were searching for the best means to efface
and kill in a whole nation the discipline of respect, one could not do
better than take the American newspapers."
Mr. Parker rose and bowed, and was received with warm applause. He then
began to read in a good round resonant voice, with clear enunciation and
careful attention to his pauses and emphases. His points were received
with approval as he went on.
The essayist took the position that the most important function of a
public journal in any country was the propagating of national feeling and
pride in the national name--the keeping the people "in love with their
country and its institutions, and shielded from the allurements of alien
and inimical systems." He sketched the manner in which the reverent
Turkish or Russian journalist fulfilled this function--the one assisted
by the prevalent "discipline of respect" for the bastinado, the other for
Siberia. Continuing, he said:
The chief function of an English journal is that of all other journals
the world over: it must keep the public eye fixed admiringly upon certain
things, and keep it diligently diverted from certain others. For
instance, it must keep the public eye fixed admiringly upon the glories
of England, a processional splendor stretching its receding line down the
hazy vistas of time, with the mellowed lights of a thousand years
glinting from its banners; and it must keep it diligently diverted from
the fact that all these glories were for the enrichment and
aggrandizement of the petted and privileged few, at cost of the blood and
sweat and poverty of the unconsidered masses who achieved them but might
not enter in and partake of them. It must keep the public eye fixed in
loving and awful reverence upon the throne as a sacred thing, and
diligently divert it from the fact that no throne was ever set up by the
unhampered vote of a majority of any nation; and that hence no throne
exists that has a right to exist, and no symbol of it, flying from any
flagstaff, is righteously entitled to wear any device but the skull and
crossbones of that kindred industry which differs from royalty only
business-wise-merely as retail differs from wholesale. It must keep the
citizen's eye fixed in reverent docility upon that curious invention of
machine politics, an Established Church, and upon that bald contradiction
of common justice, a hereditary nobility; and diligently divert it from
the fact that the one damns him if he doesn't wear its collar, and robs
him under the gentle name of taxation whether he wears it or not, and the
other gets all the honors while he does all the work.
The essayist thought that Mr. Arnold, with his trained eye and
intelligent observation, ought to have perceived that the very quality
which he so regretfully missed from our press--respectfulness, reverence
--was exactly the thing which would make our press useless to us if it
had it--rob it of the very thing which differentiates it from all other
journalism in the world and makes it distinctively and preciously
American, its frank and cheerful irreverence being by all odds the most
valuable of all its qualities. "For its mission--overlooked by Mr.
Arnold--is to stand guard over a nation's liberties, not its humbugs and
shams." He thought that if during fifty years the institutions of the
old world could be exposed to the fire of a flouting and scoffing press
like ours, "monarchy and its attendant crimes would disappear from
Christendom." Monarchists might doubt this; then "why not persuade the
Czar to give it a trial in Russia?" Concluding, he said:
Well, the charge is, that our press has but little of that old world
quality, reverence. Let us be candidly grateful that it is so. With its
limited reverence it at least reveres the things which this nation
reveres, as a rule, and that is sufficient: what other people revere is
fairly and properly matter of light importance to us. Our press does not
reverence kings, it does not reverence so called nobilities, it does not
reverence established ecclesiastical slaveries, it does not reverence
laws which rob a younger son to fatten an elder one, it does not
reverence any fraud or sham or infamy, howsoever old or rotten or holy,
which sets one citizen above his neighbor by accident of birth: it does
not reverence any law or custom, howsoever old or decayed or sacred,
which shuts against the best man in the land the best place in the land
and the divine right to prove property and go up and occupy it. In the
sense of the poet Goethe--that meek idolater of provincial three carat
royalty and nobility--our press is certainly bankrupt in the "thrill of
awe"--otherwise reverence; reverence for nickel plate and brummagem.
Let us sincerely hope that this fact will remain a fact forever: for to
my mind a discriminating irreverence is the creator and protector of
human liberty--even as the other thing is the creator, nurse, and
steadfast protector of all forms of human slavery, bodily and mental.
Tracy said to himself, almost shouted to himself, "I'm glad I came to
this country. I was right. I was right to seek out a land where such
healthy principles and theories are in men's hearty and minds. Think of
the innumerable slaveries imposed by misplaced reverence! How well he
brought that out, and how true it is. There's manifestly prodigious
force in reverence. If you can get a man to reverence your ideals, he's
your slave. Oh, yes, in all the ages the peoples of Europe have been
diligently taught to avoid reasoning about the shams of monarchy and
nobility, been taught to avoid examining them, been taught to reverence
them; and now, as a natural result, to reverence them is second nature.
In order to shock them it is sufficient to inject a thought of the
opposite kind into their dull minds. For ages, any expression of so-
called irreverence from their lips has been sin and crime. The sham and
swindle of all this is apparent the moment one reflects that he is
himself the only legitimately qualified judge of what is entitled to
reverence and what is not. Come, I hadn't thought of that before, but it
is true, absolutely true. What right has Goethe, what right has Arnold,
what right has any dictionary, to define the word Irreverence for me?
What their ideals are is nothing to me. So long as I reverence my own
ideals my whole duty is done, and I commit no profanation if I laugh at
theirs. I may scoff at other people's ideals as much as I want to. It
is my right and my privilege. No man has any right to deny it."
Tracy was expecting to hear the essay debated, but this did not happen.
The chairman said, by way of explanation:
"I would say, for the information of the strangers present here, that in
accordance with our custom the subject of this meeting will be debated at
the next meeting of the club. This is in order to enable our members to
prepare what they may wish to say upon the subject with pen and paper,
for we are mainly mechanics and unaccustomed to speaking. We are obliged
to write down what we desire to say."
Many brief papers were now read, and several offhand speeches made in
discussion of the essay read at the last meeting of the club, which had
been a laudation, by some visiting professor, of college culture, and the
grand results flowing from it to the nation. One of the papers was read
by a man approaching middle age, who said he hadn't had a college
education, that he had got his education in a printing office, and had
graduated from there into the patent office, where he had been a clerk
now for a great many years. Then he continued to this effect:
The essayist contrasted the America of to-day with the America of bygone
times, and certainly the result is the exhibition of a mighty progress.
But I think he a little overrated the college-culture share in the
production of that result. It can no doubt be easily shown that the
colleges have contributed the intellectual part of this progress,
and that that part is vast; but that the material progress has been
immeasurably vaster, I think you will concede. Now I have been looking
over a list of inventors--the creators of this amazing material
development--and I find that they were not college-bred men. Of course
there are exceptions--like Professor Henry of Princeton, the inventor of
Mr. Morse's system of telegraphy--but these exceptions are few. It is
not overstatement to say that the imagination--stunning material
development of this century, the only century worth living in since time
itself was invented, is the creation of men not college-bred. We think
we see what these inventors have done: no, we see only the visible vast
frontage of their work; behind it is their far vaster work, and it is
invisible to the careless glance. They have reconstructed this nation--
made it over, that is--and metaphorically speaking, have multiplied its
numbers almost beyond the power of figures to express. I will explain
what I mean. What constitutes the population of a land?. Merely the
numberable packages of meat and bones in it called by courtesy men and
women? Shall a million ounces of brass and a million ounces of gold be
held to be of the same value? Take a truer standard: the measure of a
man's contributing capacity to his time and his people--the work he can
do--and then number the population of this country to-day, as multiplied
by what a man can now do, more than his grandfather could do. By this
standard of measurement, this nation, two or three generations ago,
consisted of mere cripples, paralytics, dead men, as compared with the
men of to-day. In 1840 our population was 17,000,000. By way of rude
but striking illustration, let us consider, for argument's sake, that
four of these millions consisted of aged people, little children, and
other incapables, and that the remaining 13,000,000 were divided and
employed as follows:
2,000,000 as ginners of cotton.
6,000,000 (women) as stocking-knitters.
2,000,000 (women) as thread-spinners.
500,000 as screw makers.
400,000 as reapers, binders, etc.
1,000,000 as corn shellers.
40,000 as weavers.
1,000 as stitchers of shoe soles.
Now the deductions which I am going to append to these figures may sound
extravagant, but they are not. I take them from Miscellaneous Documents
No. 50, second session 45th Congress, and they are official and
trustworthy. To-day, the work of those 2,000,000 cotton-ginners is done
by 2,000 men; that of the 6,000,000 stocking-knitters is done by 3,000
boys; that of the 2,000,000 thread-spinners is done by 1,000 girls; that
of the 500,000 screw makers is done by 500 girls; that of the 400,000
reapers, binders, etc., is done by 4,000 boys; that of the 1,000,000 corn
shelters is done by 7,500 men; that of the 40,000 weavers is done by
1,200 men; and that of the 1,000 stitchers of shoe soles is done by
6 men. To bunch the figures, 17,900 persons to-day do the above-work,
whereas fifty years ago it would have taken thirteen millions of persons
to do it. Now then, how many of that ignorant race--our fathers and
grandfathers--with their ignorant methods, would it take to do our work
to-day? It would take forty thousand millions--a hundred times the
swarming population of China-twenty times the present population of the
globe. You look around you and you see a nation of sixty millions--
apparently; but secreted in their hands and brains, and invisible to your
eyes, is the true population of this Republic, and it numbers forty
billions! It is the stupendous creation of those humble unlettered,
un-college-bred inventors--all honor to their name.
"How grand that is!" said Tracy, as he wended homeward. "What a
civilization it is, and what prodigious results these are! and brought
about almost wholly by common men; not by Oxford-trained aristocrats,
but men who stand shoulder to shoulder in the humble ranks of life and
earn the bread that they eat. Again, I'm glad I came. I have found a
country at last where one may start fair, and breast to breast with his
fellow man, rise by his own efforts, and be something in the world and be
proud of that something; not be something created by an ancestor three
hundred years ago." _
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