I

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

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

Still, the noise is annoying. It disturbs rational conversation; and then there are the fledgling revolutionists who wonder if the thing might not be loaded after all. Hence the invention of the Maxim Silencer. Unlike the Old

Wheeze, it is loaded: not to kill, but to quell. Its action is at once salutary and humane. Since the culprits are not personal offenders but class offenders, exemplary persons, -pillars of society,

if they were maimed we should be the first to grieve. But silenced they must be, as much for their own sakes as for ours. So these little implements will be found useful, not only in self-defense, but in defense of those dumb, sweating myriads of our fellow humans who are being offered up daily on the bloody altar of our criminal complacency.

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

Humor is our safety-valve for hearts

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

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

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

II

Enter, therefore, that grizzled progenitor of all Old Wheezes, that prehistoric refuge of the dunce, 'You must be crazy.' The Maxim Silencer coolly replies, 'Madness is the state of being in the minority.' Thenext, hardly less ancient of days, is, 'If we did divide every thing equally, we should soon have it all back again exactly as it is now.' Your Maxim Silencer rejoins, 'If we did jam the tiller as hard to starboard as it is now jammed to port (which nobody proposes), we would only be steering in a

circle, as we are doing.' And, giving that time to seep in, it asks, 'Why not steer a straight course for a change?'

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

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

The short, sharp shock for this is,
No; nor you so rich.

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

Like the line-for-line dialogue, the stichomuthiae of Greek drama, another collection of these hoary saws whereby the well-housed are wont to shunt their accountability, piles up as does the climacteric page of Eschylean tragedy:'I am willing to aid the worthy poor, but...'

If they are worthy why should they be poor?

'They don't save what they get.' Nothing from nothing leaves nothing. 'If you did pay them more, they would only spend it foolishly.' On whose example?

'Of course, I will help all I can.' All you can without getting off their backs.

At this point occurs that serene dismissal of the whole housing problem:'Give them bathtubs, and they put ashes in them.'

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

'The trouble is we are letting in too many of these damn foreigners.'

That is what they think.

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

That is why.

A phrase much in use among those who would designate persons not of their own stratum is, 'These People.' "These people' (you are to understand) 'do not appreciate what is done for

So did the Court of Louis XVI.

III

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

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

terlocking shackles of unemployment are to be knocked off the wrists of the down-and-outs with the bland assumption, 'If you did offer these people a job, they would n't work.' Now, waiving the somewhat obvious deduction that for the immigrants of yesterday to refer to the immigrants of to-day as 'These People' is to imply a fundamental difference between us and them which it is unsafe to assume, let me merely give warning that this particular wheeze is a gun which can be turned on its users to deadly execution. "These people' can quite as well signify the cultured 'goops' who speak of their supposed social inferiors in this general tone of contemptuous pity. "These people' are quite as truly the social heathen of our own class, our own set, our own households, whom it is the main, and about the only business of our time to convert from churchianity to Christ.

It was only the other day that we began to smell a mouse in the meal of philanthropy. First, the 'worthy poor' aforementioned, spying, it may be, a spot of their own blood on the conscience money, declined it without thanks. Then Dr. Gladden signed a minority report. That minority is speedily becoming a plurality as it dawns on us that industrialism, with the devastating zeal for improvement which diverts a woodland brook through a brand-new iron sewer-pipe, has jobbed out that gracious Christian virtue, charity, as the impulse to share our best, to the ruthless section boss of competition. Charity no longer begins at home. Charity begins at the directors' meeting, if not at the Probate Court. Charity is not puffed up for the simple reason that it

who had endured, I admit, the not inconsiderable hardship of riding in a motor car of last year's model; but the bankers and brokers lifted lamentation so feelingly, and spoke in terms of such evident intimacy with these injured ladies and their distressed offspring that one felt convinced of deep sorrow somewhere. That finance should so take to heart this form of oppression when its sympathies were beckoned to water with their tears a field so much more fertile among the children of the Southern textile industry and the widows of striking miners, was also bewildering. Yet in the mahogany sanctuaries of the ticker-tape, drop by drop, distilled these mournful dews for widowZanorphans.

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

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

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

Anyhow, these children are better off working in the mills than running the streets.' Explain that,

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

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

Remind him,

The freak legislation of to-day is the tradition of to-morrow. Or he protests,

'It's confiscation: that's what it is!' You have your chance:

Yes, but they didn't pay for the slaves. For educated illiterates the ones who remark that Millet's art was so exquisite, is n't it a pity he chose such common subjects? - there is a special course of sprouts. Their first offense is as follows,

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

That point may disturb you. It never bothered Christ.

V

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

And their second is like unto it, 'They wouldn't keep clean if you gave them a chance. They don't wish to live any other way.'

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

Or the stock objection to social revolution,

"The trouble is, it is a gospel of hatred.'

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

A gospel of hatred of injustice.

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

'People are just like a flock of sheep.' It is then time to quote, with all the gentleness which the words deserve,

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