<p><SPAN name="ch10" id="ch10"></SPAN></p>
<h2> CHAPTER X. </h2>
<p><br/><br/></p>
<p>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 $500 for deposit.</p>
<p>"What name?"</p>
<p>He hesitated and colored a little; he had forgotten to make a selection.
He now brought out the first one that suggested itself:</p>
<p>"Howard Tracy."</p>
<p>When he was gone the clerks, marveling, said:</p>
<p>"The cowboy blushed."</p>
<p>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:</p>
<p>"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!"</p>
<p>Then he sent this cablegram to his father:</p>
<p>"Escaped unhurt from burning hotel. Have taken fictitious name. Goodbye."</p>
<p>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:</p>
<p>"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:</p>
<p>"'Goethe says somewhere that "the thrill of awe," that is to say,
REVERENCE, is the best thing humanity has."</p>
<p>"Mr. Arnold's other paragraph is as follows:</p>
<p>"'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."</p>
<p><SPAN name="p095" id="p095"></SPAN></p>
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<p><br/><br/><br/><br/></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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 hearts 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."</p>
<p>Tracy was expecting to hear the essay debated, but this did not happen.
The chairman said, by way of explanation:</p>
<p>"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."</p>
<p>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:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>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:</p>
</blockquote>
<table summary="">
<tr>
<td>
2,000,000
</td>
<td>
as ginners of cotton.
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
6,000,000
</td>
<td>
(women) as stocking-knitters.
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
2,000,000
</td>
<td>
(women) as thread-spinners.
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
500,000
</td>
<td>
as screw makers.
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
400,000
</td>
<td>
as reapers, binders, etc.
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
1,000,000
</td>
<td>
as corn-shellers.
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
40,000
</td>
<td>
as weavers.
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
1,000
</td>
<td>
as stitchers of shoe soles.
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>"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."</p>
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