Part 14

Mr. von Schierbrand contributes to the solution of this question a very entertaining and instructive volume. From his standpoint, which is a most interesting one, the importance of the trade of the Far East to ourselves is not to be overestimated. The wonderful productive energy of the United States makes the need of new markets imperative. Four hundred millions of Chinese can furnish us such markets. Basing our figures on the precedent of Japan, China, if she would, could buy of the world $35,000,000,000 more. Her mineral wealth, still undeveloped, is greater than that of North America.

The author’s masterly marshaling of the means and the methods necessary to increase our commercial opportunities is the feature of his book. The political school to which he belongs and to which an immense majority of Americans belong, if the recent election meant anything, studies, at the same moment, the tonnage of the battleships and the quality of the cotton blouse on the Chinese coolie’s back. It carries us around the immense circle of the Pacific and calls the roll of the powers and principalities of the future—Canada, America, Java, Sumatra, Celebes, Borneo, Australia, the Philippines, Japan, China, Siberia,—and asks which of the nations shall share with us these riches. England’s claim the writer dismisses with few words. England is conservative and decadent. Russia is more dangerous. She aims to absorb all Asia and close the door in the face of the world. The writer has an interesting discussion of the Russo-Japanese war in the course of which he prods the English again for not choking the Russians while they can.

Germany he pronounces our most formidable rival. German industry, frugality, patience and skill have brought her up since 1870, when she was purely an agricultural state, to the front rank in manufactures and in foreign trade. It may be added, parenthetically, that she is making persistent efforts to free herself from the American cotton monopoly.

Turning to the Japanese, the writer mentions a fact whose significance is little appreciated in America. Japan practically monopolizes now the trade in manufactured cotton with China, and, what is still more significant, she gets nearly all her raw cotton from India.

What is the secret purpose of Japan? Nobody knows. Does she see herself supplanting the wornout Manchu dynasty and leading the millions of the East to the mastery of Asia by the strength of her military genius? Will she then shut the doors to the outside world, as, in the sixteenth century, she shut her own? The writer makes light of the so-called Yellow Peril, arguing that Japan does not wish to exploit the latent military strength of China, but aspires to lead her in the path of industrial progress after the Western models upon which Japan has fashioned herself.

Mr von Schierbrand ignores the underlying spiritual differences that separate the Oriental from the European, differences that will always be the cause of hostility, open or veiled, between them. After all it is not so important who is to get the trade of the East but what are the ideals that are finally to prevail there—the Christian ideals or Oriental fatalism. It could be wished that the author felt more interest in such discussions. One is tempted to quote against him his own words in another connection: “Beside the mad passion for gain there is no charm in rest, lettered ease, travel, still less in labor for the general good—charity, education, the state; the ruling passion must rage on, business must be expanded regardless of profit and with eyes closed to impending loss. Instead of making ourselves more homes and more beautiful things and cultured people in them, we cherish the tenement house and the narrow life, and go on piling up and shoving out what we are pleased to call goods, goods, goods.” It is well enough to chasten ourselves with such reflections as we go on with the author to weigh the claim of the United States to the lion’s share in the trade of the Pacific.

The author bases our claim on the strategic advantage which the Panama Canal is to give us, and this part of the book is unquestionably most interesting to the South. The relation of the richest granary in the world, the Mississippi Valley, to the Canal will rid it of the need of railways. The canal will bring New York closer to the west coast of South America than San Francisco, and New Orleans will be seven hundred miles nearer still. The commercial availability of Southern coal and iron will be immensely increased and the harbors of the South will assume an importance long withheld from them as ports of call.

The book as a whole is well written, and the last chapters, which summarize the author’s conclusions, especially so. What he has to say about public opinion and of the force, more universal still, the primary need of the human race of food, which together share the sovereignty of the modern world, is well said and more philosophical by far than is usual with the books of the imperialists.

L.

THE COLOR LINE. By WILLIAM BENJAMIN SMITH. McClure, Phillips and Co., New York.

It is always a satisfaction when what has been dumbly felt is put at last into a clear-cut scientific concept. This is what William Benjamin Smith has done for us with his book on the negro problem. The South has always felt that the problem was not one involving philanthropy or the rights of man or any sort of altruism. Those are considerations that have to do with individuals. The negro problem is purely a question of race. As Mr. Bagehot pointed out in his clever book, “Physics and Politics,” the differences existing to-day between the Aryan races and the negro are greater than any causes now acting are capable of creating in present-day men. The laws of heredity are not fully known, but it is certain that the descendants of cultivated parents have an inborn aptitude for civilization due to the structure of their nervous systems. The uncivilized races do not improve; they have not the basis on which to build, but instead have inherited natures twisted into a thousand curious habits, a thousand strange prejudices and a thousand grotesque superstitions. The moment it is admitted that the difference between white and black is the product of evolution the hope of bridging the difference by education is gone. That it must be admitted is the thesis of Mr. Smith’s book, which ought to be read by every man and woman in the country who is open to reason. Once admitted, the conclusion follows swiftly and irresistibly. The duty of the white man to maintain in its purity the germ plasm of the white race justifies the denial of social equality to the black man. This is a duty which no sentimentality can excuse for it is a duty to civilization, to posterity, to the country. Neglect it, and mongrelization follows inevitably. We quote from the book: “It is this immediate jewel of her soul that the South watches with such a dragon eye, that she guards with more than vestal vigilance, with a circle of perpetual fire. The blood thereof is the life thereof; he who would defile it would stab her in her heart of hearts, and she springs to repulse him with the fiercest instinct of self-preservation.”

Mr. Smith has brought to his argument a wealth of learning and research which places his book in the rank of an authority on a much misunderstood question.

L.

THE PURSUIT OF PHYLLIS. By JOHN HARWORD BACON. Henry Holt, New York. Price, $1.25.

Tom Mott, a clever literateur of New York, is ordered to take a rest by his physician, and goes abroad to seek recreation and relaxation. At his London hotel, he finds in his dresser drawer some letters addressed to Miss Phyllis Huntingdon in the handwriting of an old chum, and impelled by a Quixotic impulse, he determines to restore them to their owner in person. From London he proceeds to Paris, thence to Marseilles, through the Mediterranean to Port Said and the Orient, very much in the style of an up-to-date Gabriel and Evangeline affair, always finding at each port that Miss Huntingdon’s departure had antedated his arrival by a few hours. Finally his quest is rewarded at Colombo on the island of Ceylon, where he meets Phyllis, a ruddy-haired, winsome young woman, who is likened successively by the imaginative Mr. Mott to a dish of pink ice cream, a rosy-tipped peony, and the summer girl on a magazine cover. They come back together across the world, ending the trip, after the excitement of a misunderstanding and a quarrel, in orthodox fashion. A lively trifle of globe-trotting and philandering is “The Pursuit of Phyllis,” easy to read, and disarming criticism by its utter lack of seriousness and significance.

DAPHNE AND HER LAD. By M. J. LAGEN and CALLY RYLAND. Henry Holt, New York. Price, $1.25.

A story told in letters—the brilliant and showy correspondence so much affected in fiction and so rarely indulged in in real life. The writers, too, are newspaper folk, a man and a woman, each editor of a woman’s page, and we mildly wonder how they ever found time to sacrifice so much good “copy” to private correspondence. At first, the exchange of letters is but a journalistic flirtation between two unknown personalities, and it is maintained and continued to the point of intimate self-revelation and ardent lovemaking before the writers meet in the last chapter. The disclosure and denouement of the conclusion come with somewhat of a shock to the unsuspecting reader who has followed the airy persiflage and sentimental outpourings of these industrious letter writers with no thought of such a tragic ending as that on which the curtain falls. It was Stevenson who said that to give a bad ending to a story meant to end happily, or vice versa, was an unpardonable literary crime, and we must hold the authors of “Daphne and Her Lad” guilty of this offense. The story was not framed along the tragic lines which logically or artistically lead to hopeless misery, and the final impression is disturbing and ineffective.

THE MILLIONAIRE BABY. By ANNA KATHERINE GREEN. The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Indianapolis. Price, $1.50.

A startling crime, innumerable clues, the gradual elimination of every reasonable and plausible theory, and the construction of the wildest, most improbable explanation to fit the problem—these are the lines on which the detective stories of Anna Katherine Green are invariably framed, and “The Millionaire Baby” is no exception to the rule. A little girl, heiress to an immense fortune, is kidnapped during a garden fete at her parents’ palatial home on the Hudson, under most unusual circumstances, and the reader is at once lost in a labyrinth of mysterious old men, magnetic ladies, amazing coincidences, and secret chambers. The way out is pointed ultimately by a young detective, and the reader emerges feeling rather “sold.” Despite the writer’s unspeakable rhetoric and crude methods, her stories have a way of getting themselves read, and a large constituency will welcome “The Millionaire Baby.”

TENNESSEE HISTORY STORIES. By T. C. KARNS. B. F. Johnson Publishing Co., Richmond, Va.

The writer belongs to that loyal band of missionaries who are spreading abroad among the children of the nation the knowledge of the importance of the western chain of settlements on the Tennessee and Kentucky frontiers in the history of the United States. The stories he tells of John Sevier, of James Robertson and Daniel Boone, while written for the children, are well worth reading and the book is sure to earn a place in the curriculum of the primary schools.

THE FIDDLE AND THE BOW.

By Robert L. Taylor.

We dream of a heaven beyond the stars, but there are heavens all around us with beautiful gates ajar to those who have eyes to see and ears to hear. I have seen heavens of delight where the meadows flashed with dew and the crows were on the wing. I have seen heavens of music where the linnet swept her lute and the thrush rang his silver bells in the dusky chambers of the forest.

I once sat on the grassy brink of a southern stream in the gathering twilight of evening and listened to a concert of Nature’s musicians who sang as God hath taught them to sing. The katydid led off with a trombone solo; the cricket chimed in with his E flat cornet; the bumble-bee played on his violincello, and the jaybird laughed with his piccolo. The music rose to grandeur with the deep bass horn of the big black beetle; the mocking-bird’s flute brought me to tears of rapture, and the screech-owl’s fife made me want to fight; the tree-frog blew his alto horn; the jar-fly clashed his tinkling cymbals; the woodpecker rattled his kettledrum and the locust jingled his tambourine. The music rolled along like a sparkling river in sweet accompaniment with the oriole’s leading violin; but it suddenly hushed when I heard a ripple of laughter among the hollyhocks before the door of a happy country home. I saw a youth standing there in the shadows holding his sweetheart’s hand in his. There were a few whispers, tender and low—the lassie vanished in the cottage—the lad vanished over the hill, and as he vanished he swung his hat in the shadows and sang back to her his happy love song:

“My thoughts will fly to thee, my own, Swift as a dove, To cheer thee when alone, My own true love.”

And the birds inclined their heads to listen to his song as it died away on the drowsy evening air.

That night I slept in a mansion

“I closed my eyes on garnished rooms To dream of meadows and clover blooms,”

but while I dreamed, I was serenaded by a band of mosquitoes and this is the song they sang above my pillow:

“Buz-z-z! buz-z-z! no bars around this bed, Buz-z-z! buz-z-z! no hair upon this head, mosquitoes, Buz-z-z! buz-z-z! we’ll paint old baldy red, There’ll be a hot time in the old town to-night!”

There are heavens all around us with beautiful gates ajar. I have seen a June morning unbar a gate of roses and come forth from her palace in the sky bearing in her girdle of light the keys to a thousand heavens. I have seen her kindle a sun in every dewdrop and touch the waking hills with glory. I caught the odor of honeysuckles and the note of a lark as it rose exultant from the meadow. There were the glimmer of painted wings among the clover blossoms and the hum of teeming bees rich with the spoils of plundered beauty. There were the green trail of a winding river and the low music of its joyous waters dashing among the rocks of distant rapids. I heard the shouts and splashes of noisy boys down at the old swimming hole under the spreading elms. An old time darky went shambling by, with his cup of bait and his fishing pole. The wine of June was in his veins and he tangled his song with the honey song of the bees:

“O, my Hannah, lady, I do a-love-a you! They ain’t no baby So good and true! In Louisiana I could die, If you wuz only nigh! O, tell me, Hannah, lady, Whose black-a-baby is a-you?”

And he cut the pigeon wing in the clover and then sat down on a bumble-bee. It invited him to rise, and he rose; and it was difficult for the old man to tell which was the warmer—the June in his heart or the June in the bumble-bee.

A lovesick lad met his sweetheart down in the shady lane and poured out his soul to her under the locust bloom. I saw him push his boat from the shore and dip his oars in the clear heaven of the crystal waters. She was his only companion. And as the painted keel darted away like a bird beneath the bending boughs and went skimming round the bend of the river I heard their voices blending up among the cliffs and shadows singing a sweet love song. To him, she was a full blow’n rose of beauty; to her, he was a daisy. To him her ribbons were streaks of light; to her his fuzzy upper lip was a poem. They floated and fished and fished and floated away the golden hours; and while they fished and floated, he wooed her—he wooed and he wooed and he wooed—until, at length, he won her; and, as they floated homeward in the evening, dreaming of wedding bells and orange blossoms,

He held her soft little hand in his, Smoothing her hair so brown; The boat struck a rock and they both fell in, Just as the sun went down!

I looked upon these scenes of light and love and I walked in the heaven of the beautiful, the somnambulist of a rapturous dream.

O, matchless dream maker, voluptuous June! Enchantress of the sun, Eden builder of the world! There is a magic in thy touch which melts the icicles in the veins of age and makes the tropic blood of youth run roses.

There are heavens all around us with beautiful gates ajar: I have seen October open a gate of opal and I walked in the heaven of autumnal glory. I have seen her splash the forest with the tints of a thousand shattered rainbows, and then draw the misty veil of Indian summer—that mysterious phantom of the air that conjures the sunlight into yellow amber and turns the world into a dream.

I joined the farmers in the jubilee of the county fair, and walked through streets of pumpkins, purple avenues of turnips, and fragrant boulevards of onions, enough to bring the world to tears.

There was the sound of the hunter’s horn at the break of day. I mounted my gallant steed and galloped away to the rendezvous, and every breath of the cool, crisp October air was like a draught of exhilarating wine. The hunters assembled at the appointed place, the eager hounds were unleashed and they scurried away like ghosts in the gloomy woods. They coursed and circled like flying shadows—now and then giving tongue as they took up the scent of some cold and doubtful trail. Faster and faster they circled, until they jumped the fox from his covert and opened in full cry, and it was like a sudden burst of music from a band. Away they bounded, bellowing their deep-mouthed serenade to the wily knight of the red plume, who showed them a clean pair of heels. They pushed him up the rocky steeps and pressed him down the dusky hollows, they swung him through the highland gaps and whirled him round the ridges. Over the hills and round the knob Sir Reynard led the band until the waking echoes caught up the flying melody and sent it pulsing from cliff to cliff and from crag to crag! On fled the fox with tireless leap! on followed the hounds with smoking mouths! On and on, over hill and dale, through forest and field until finally the music died away like the chime of distant bells!

How sweet are the lips of morning that kiss the waking world; how sweet is the bosom of night that pillows the world to rest; but sweeter than the lips of morning and sweeter than the bosom of night is the voice of music that wakes a world of joys and soothes a world of sorrows. It is like some unseen ethereal ocean whose silver surf forever breaks in song. All nature is full of music. There is a melody in every sunbeam, a sunbeam in every melody. There is a love song in every flower, a sonnet in every gurgling fountain, a hymn in every rolling billow. Music is the twin angel of light, the first born of heaven, and mortal ear and mortal eye have caught only the echo and the shadow of their celestial glories.

The violin is the poet laureate of music—violin of the virtuoso and master, fiddle of the untutored in the ideal art. It is the aristocrat of the palace and the hall; it is the democrat of the unpretentious home and humble cabin. As violin, it weaves its garlands of roses and camellias; as fiddle it scatters its modest violets. It is admired by the cultured for its magnificent powers and wonderful creations. It is loved by the millions for its simple melodies.

One bright morning just before Christmas Day, an official stood in the executive chamber in my presence as governor of Tennessee, and said:

“Governor, I have been implored by a poor, miserable wretch in the penitentiary to bring you this rude fiddle. It was made by his own hands with a penknife during the hours allotted to him for rest. It is entirely without value, as you can see, but it is his petition to you for mercy. He begged me to say that he has neither influential friends nor attorneys to plead for him; and all that he asks is that, when the governor shall sit at his own happy fireside on Christmas eve with his own happy children around him, he will play one tune to them on this rough fiddle and think of a cabin far away in the mountains whose hearthstone is cold and desolate and surrounded by a family of poor little helpless ragged children, crying for bread and waiting and listening for the footsteps of their father.”

Who would not have been touched by such an appeal? The record was examined. Christmas eve came. The governor sat that night at his own happy fireside, with his own happy children around him and he played one tune to them on that rough fiddle. The fireside of the cabin in the mountains was bright and warm. A pardoned prisoner sat with his baby on his knee, surrounded by his happy children and in the presence of his rejoicing wife. And, although there was naught but rags and squalid poverty around him his heart sang,

“Be it ever so humble, There’s no place like home.”

When I used to play the role of governor of the old Volunteer State, I often felt the stings of criticism for the liberal use of the pardoning power. But I saw old mothers with their white locks and wrinkled brows swoon at the governor’s feet every day. I saw old fathers with broken hearts and tear-stained faces and heard them plead by the hour for their wayward boys. I saw a wife and seven children clad in tatters and rags and barefooted in midwinter fall down upon their knees around him who held the pardoning power. I saw a little girl climb upon the governor’s knee and put her little arms around his neck and I heard her ask him if he had little girls; and then I saw her sob upon his bosom as though her little heart would break and heard her plead for mercy for her poor, miserable, wretched convict father. I saw want and woe and agony and anguish unutterable pass before the gubernatorial door. And I said: “Let this heartless world condemn! let the critics frown and rail, but he who hath power and doth not temper justice with mercy will cry in vain himself for mercy on that great day when God shall judge the merciful and the unmerciful!”

SOUTHERN PLATFORM DEPARTMENT

CONDUCTED IN

THE INTEREST

of THE LYCEUMS

of THE SOUTH