VI

Let me explain why it is without the least misgiving that I come to the Old Wheeze as it is cherished, like the flintlock over the kitchen mantelpiece, by that section of society which has 'settled down.' It is, I know, the popular belief that he who takes his lamp and descends into these mine-damps of received opinion does so at no small personal risk; that the gaseous formulas substitutes for thought which compose the intellectual atmosphere of these narrow, dark galleries are, in contactlet us say even with lamplight, violently explosive. The danger is greatly overrated. Thinkers of every stripe poets, dramatists, sages, novelists, holy men, and artists have been doing it have been doing it continually and coming back unsinged. The truth is, the case between society and its critics is much the case of capitalism versus militant democracy as studied in its industrial wing, the I.W.W. Capitalism and the I.W.W. are not so far apart as they suppose. Each is a better friend to the other than it is to itself. That is the encouraging part. Capital makes propaganda for the I.W.W. far faster than the I.W.W. could hope to manufacture propaganda for itself; and the I.W.W., by letting noisy steam out of the safetyvalve, defers a threatened bursting of the boiler which would wreck the plant.

Similarly, the family, as the cellular form of our social organism, has less to lose and more to gain by renovating criticism than any other single institution. Yet here is the hitch. No amount of patient explaining seems to carry it to the comprehensions of the unthinking timid that an attack can be aimed, not at an institution, but at the abuse of it, -especially if with them, as with the money-changers in the temple, the abuse is the institution. Hence the agonized clucking and cackling which goes up at

the faintest suggestion that everything is not up to actuarial standards within the four walls of the home has frightened off all but the bolder spirits. The others, though they may have come along with only the most generous intentions of freshening up the coop, resent the suspicion that they are out to steal the chickens. Perhaps the point can be made clear by saying that the reproach is not against the family at all, but against that brand of comfortbesotted domesticity which has forsaken its place in the ranks of the mighty onward march of the world's militants - a domesticity which is bound to grow a thick skin against the smart of desertion, and which flouts the impetuous acts of impassioned altruism with the sneer, 'It is not good taste.'

Waiving the retort that good taste is a luxury for non-combatants, the Silencer says,

Moral conviction and good manners never did keep house together. Gentleman is a compound word of aristocratic origin in which the important half is not gentle, but man.

Then, if domesticity is unwary enough to drag out and train its prerevolutionary nine-pounder,

'Of course, what you say is true, but this is not the time or place to say it,' let the Maxim Silencer up and at it:

The only season for preaching is out of season, because the truth is always out of

season.

One seems to remember that it was the Victorian age which was so emphatic on the indecorum of 'washing dirty linen in public.' The result is that the laundry has all been left for the children. Speak gently to the twentieth century: its Monday wash is a hard one. As for decency itself, that sniff which shirks the whole responsibility of sex-education with 'It's not proper,' merits the rebuke, —

In the toleration of free speech, and in

On what assurance? Why make fatherhood Failure's plot to succeed by proxy?

The worst of these aspirations of the parent age which strain forward into the new for their fulfillment is that they shackle the young; for the new generation, if it is worth its salt, will have fashioned a few ideals of its own, and they will be different. Each age has its own definition of romance, and the split is bound to come. More awkward still, it becomes a theorem in world-history that the Maxim Silencer of one age is the Old Wheeze of the next. Here they stand, in deadly parallel,

The old idea of romance: The country boy goes to the city, marries his employer's daughter, enslaves some hundreds of his fellow humans, gets rich, and leaves a public library to his home town.

The new idea of romance: To undo

some of the mischief done by the old idea of romance.

It should be added that the newness of this idea of romance is a newness not confined to this or any other single age of history. Always half the task of the children is knocking down the black walnut of their parents to the lowest bidder, or bestowing it on any settlement house which will give it room.

Two dogged and persistent offenders remain. The first, which exhumes clan morality in the early dawn of internationalism, a very vile kind of bodysnatching indeed, the Silencer may admonish,

VII

If cultivated people (people who know a mezzotint from a dry-point, a tonic from a dominant, Sheraton from Chippendale, an Anacreontic from a Sapphic, — and the age we have just had the privilege of burying preened itself that it did, in matters like these, know a hawk from a handsaw,—will insist on uttering these social blasphemies, then 'What'-to borrow their own language - 'can we expect from the Lower Classes?' Well, let them hear: red revolution. As ye go, preach, saying, 'Repent, for the kingdom of heaven on earth is at hand.'

For the Lower Classes are much better educated these days than their cul

tured brethren. It came about by accident, as we say. Wrenched by the pain of the burden that had lain so long on its right shoulder, the working class writhed, the other day, to shift the weight to its left. In transit, the balance of the burden was disturbed. It wabbled. The bearer suddenly guessed that the whole weight might be toppled off. And since that day, nothing has been the same.

And it will never be the same again. There is not much to fear for to-day. The bearer is a patient beast. But there is an end to his patience, and this article is consumed with imprudent rapidity by 'social superiors' who are as some elsewise admirable person who was simply never taught that it is wrong to steal; or as a dear little boy whose elders neglected to tell him that if he meant to keep friends with himself and the world, he must eschew the green apples of cut-throat industrialism. Or they are as two gentle old ladies, neighbors of my aunt, who were bequeathed a parrot by an adventurous nephew of a sardonic turn. Geoffrey, sojourning in Cuba with the army of occupation, had there acquired the parrot, which spoke only Spanish, but spoke that tongue with a fluency and an emphasis truly astounding in so scrubby a bird. Most of it was unintelligible, save one phrase which may better be conveyed in a purely onomato-poetic line after the Aristophanic manner, as thus:

Alla lolla begolla.

This phrase so delighted the old gentlewomen that it passed into a byword with them. They babbled 'Alla lolla begolla' to each other in sheer lightness of heart as they went about their household tasks, until a military superior of their late nephew, a guest in their house, chanced to hear it, and stiffened with horror. He forebore, like the gentleman he was, to take the ladies at their word, but hastened to inform them as expli

citly as decorum would permit, that, were he to do so, they could not possibly be considered ladies.

So when I hear dear old persons and dear young persons, too, of the ‘sheltered-lives' variety, sweetly observing: "If "they" would rather starve in the cities than live comfortably in the country, why, let them,' I do not tell them that they are uttering a shocking blasphemy compared to which 'Alla lolla begolla' is a golden text to be lisped by the infant class. I merely inquire, Why starve them at all?

Of course, it is not remotely intimated that any one who will read these lines has ever emitted any such antisocial bulls. Only don't do it again.

And now, if those ante-bellum contemporaries of ours will pause in their vehement denials that such things as class-lines exist in this land of the free,

long enough to reflect that such a contention is essentially a class-view, perhaps we can then set tooth to the kernel of the matter. Good neighbors, to the prayers you murmur morning and evening, add another petition, and throw into it all the strength of your souls: 'Lord, visit not on those who are dear to me my eighth and deadliest sin the sin of indifference.'

For the platitudinarians who grind out the brutal phrases of this tabulation are folks whom we know to be a dozen times sweeter, a hundred times finer, than we can ever hope to be. They are old teachers who led us one spring along the golden road of Homeric verse; music masters who first unlocked for us the treasure-chest of Beethoven's chamber music; uncles who 'understood boys,' perhaps because they never had any of their own; and grandfathers who risked their necks relaying runaway slaves along the underground railway of the fifties. Not one of them, you see, who is not the real thing. Not one of

them but would be crushed with remorse did he realize half the social import of these formulas he repeats with such confident glibness. Now, while these shibboleths of the pass-by-on-the other-siders are what we naturally expect from the rich malefactors of the newspaper cartoonists, when such raw atrocities begin to proceed out of the mouths of our own folks, it is time to worry. The sweet faces, the snowy hair, the kind hearts, the white lives, show in sinister contrast to the stark, blood-chilling horror of the things they say, or rather, repeat. From the lips of an aged jurist of ripe scholarship and character rugged as the Berkshire granite which fashioned it, I have heard this comment on the Crucifixion,

'I do not see how Pilate could have acted otherwise than as he did. He had to consider what the home government wanted of him.'

With such philosophy as this in the pates of our elders, is it any wonder that the young stand stock-still, appalled? Is it any wonder that those revolutionists who are doing their utmost to save us from ourselves suffer the stripes and spitting of that other 'stirrer-up of the people'? Is it any wonder that to the reproach of anti-patriotism from the anti-patriots these worldpatriots reply sadly,

The man least acceptable to an established government is a patriot. The man least acceptable to an established religion is a Messiah?

HE was in the heart of the crowd, in it, and of it,the crowd of late afternoon whose simultaneous movement is the expression of a common wish to cease to be a crowd. His was one of the thousand faces that are almost tragical with weariness, tragical without thought. At five o'clock the sparkle of the morning is forgotten. There is no seeking of hidden treasure in the face opposite, for the face opposite, whosesoever it may be, has become too hatefully intrusive with its own burden to yield any light of recognition.

He was running down the Elevated stairs at the appointed minute, when his foot slipped and he fell. It seemed hardly a second before he was up again,

angered by the sudden congestion about him. One white-cheeked woman put her hand to her mouth and gave a cry.

'Let me by!' he exclaimed, straining to break through the fast-pressing barrier. The very throng of which he had been an undistinguishable member had suddenly closed round him, focusing its Argus glance upon him, nearer and nearer, and it was only by extreme struggle that he was able to push away and be free.

He sat down in the train, breathless from his final sprint. He felt as if the incident had roused him from some deep lethargy of which he had hitherto been unaware. With his quickened pulse, his thoughts ran more quickly, more