Chapter 18

Married persons must live together or be imprisoned.

Every male person shall have his hair cut round according to a cap.

A child over sixteen years old who strikes his father shall be put to death.

A child over sixteen years old who is stubborn and rebellious shall be put to death.

Whoever, professing the Christian religion, shall wittingly deny the Song of Solomon to be the infallible word of God, may be whipped forty lashes and fined fifty pounds.

Whoever marries two wives or more shall be executed.

Saying that the Christian religion is a politic device to keep ignorant men in awe shall be punished with death.

Any man who uses tobacco in the street shall be fined, or if he do so in his own house, a stranger being present, he shall be fined, but if on a journey, five miles from any house, he may smoke.

Any single person without a servant, wishing to keep house by himself, must get the consent of the selectmen unless he be a public officer.

Persons not proved guilty, but lying under a strong suspicion of guilt, may be punished, though not so severely as would be the case had they been convicted.

Every family must have a Bible, catechism and other good books.

_Los Angeles Times_, Feb. 5, 1921.

CROOKED MINDS

The prompt detection and punishment of the two kidnappers, who were fools enough to believe that they could carry out a melodramatic abduction and get away with it, is a satisfaction to the public. But it does not remove the possibility of similar crimes, attempted and perhaps executed, by the large class of individuals who, like the Carrs, have crooked minds--minds that see only glamour and excitement in the life of a criminal, that are willing to take any chance and gamble with their own lives and liberty as the stakes, for revenge or merely to get money to satisfy their physical demands.

Ten years, more or less, spent in the penitentiary is not likely to straighten out the false conceptions of such men. The Carrs will probably leave the prison with criminal tendencies strengthened by the associations and repressions of penitentiary life.

It is just that such criminals should be put where they cannot prey upon society. But, while we are dealing out due punishment, the main effort of the social body should be put into the prevention of crime. We are talking greatly, just now, of the world-wave of crime following the war. Tomes are being written concerning its causes and its cures. But the primary cause of all crime is the lack of true comprehension of the meaning of life--a distorted viewpoint--a crooked mind.

The causes of such minds are many: heredity, environment, associations, lack of proper self-control and understanding; they can all be summed up, however, as the lack of moral sense in the individual and in the race. The guiding star of existence, the conscience, in such cases, has ceased to function; the goal ahead, a future existence, has been lost sight of. Souls are adrift. Here is the secret of the unrest, the crime, the upheaval of to-day.

The old forms of religion, with their rituals and professions, have lost their hold upon a large portion of humanity. The newer and clearer conceptions of the great truths that are the basis of all religion have not, as yet, taken the place of the old beliefs in the minds and lives of the majority. The people of the world are to-day at sea, with no definite port ahead, with no guiding hand upon the helm of their ship.

In the chaos of this rudderless age state and church are making desperate efforts to palliate the evils of nonreligion and its consequence, non-morality. In our own country we are multiplying state-provided nurseries, schools, playgrounds, gymnasiums, colleges and hundreds of other substitutes for the homes and the home training that fails under the strenuous tests of present-day life. We are enormously attempting to train bodies and brains from the cradle to full citizenship. But with all our provisions and equipment we are failing to touch the real keystone of all character--the spiritual nature of man. We are teaching morality because it is morality, proved by experience to be expedient, on the whole, for a satisfactory career on the earth. But our schools and our churches, also, are failing to teach the highest secret of life--the self-control of mind and body through willed righteousness, based upon a knowledge and comprehension of a God-created and governed universe.

Nor do our schools and colleges train their pupils to an understanding of their own mental powers and the development of right will, of sound reason, of controlled and regulated action. We flood our children and youth with equipment, with teachers, with opportunity for learning things from the outside; yet our educational training is failing, as a whole, in giving to the youth of this country the one essential thing for right living--a true and high ideal and the strength of will to attain it.

Men like the two just sent away; women like Mrs. Peete (whether she be guilty of murder or not) are the products of a generation that has torn itself away from its old anchors of religion, of duty and responsibility and has not yet set up a new standard to true its conduct. State and church, with all their will to do and their efforts and expenditure of means, can never take the place of right-minded parents and homes where children are taught by example and by word their true relations to God and to their fellow-men. Crooked minds can only be prevented by heritage from men and women, who understand their responsibility to God and to their country, and who start their sons and daughters out upon the journey of life with a chance, at least, for decency and uprightness.

_New York Tribune_, April 22, 1921.

MACAULAY ON AMERICA

_"Your Constitution Is All Sail and No Anchor"_

_The subjoined letter from the historian Macaulay to Henry S. Randall, of Cortland, N.Y., is taken from an old file of The Cortland Standard. It was published originally in Harper's Magazine._

Holly Lodge, Kensington, London, May 23, 1857.

Dear Sir: The four volumes of the Colonial History of New York reached me safely. I assure you that I shall value them highly. They contain much to interest an English as well as an American reader. Pray accept my thanks and convey them to the Regents of the University.

You are surprised to learn that I have not a high opinion of Mr. Jefferson, and I am surprised at your surprise. I am certain that I never wrote a line, and that I never, in Parliament, in conversation, or even on the hustings--a place where it is the fashion to court the populace--uttered a word indicating an opinion that the supreme authority in a state ought to be intrusted to the majority of citizens told by the head; in other words, to the poorest and most ignorant part of society.

I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty or civilization or both. In Europe, where the population is dense, the effect of such institutions would be almost instantaneous. What happened lately in France is an example. In 1848 a pure democracy was established there. During a short time there was reason to expect a general spoliation, a national bankruptcy, a new partition of the soil, a maximum of prices, a ruinous load of taxation laid on the rich for the purpose of supporting the poor in idleness.

Such a system would, in twenty years, have made France as poor and barbarous as the France of the Carlovingians. Happily the danger was averted; and now there is a despotism, a silent tribune, an enslaved press. Liberty is gone, but civilization has been saved.

I have not the smallest doubt that if we had a purely democratic government here the effect would be the same. Either the poor would plunder the rich and civilization would perish, or order and prosperity would be saved by a strong military government, and liberty would perish.

You may think that your country enjoys an exemption from these evils. I will frankly own to you that I am of a very different opinion. Your fate I believe to be certain, though it is deferred by a physical cause. As long as you have a boundless extent of fertile and unoccupied land your laboring population will be far more at ease than the laboring population of the Old World, and while that is the case the Jeffersonian politics may continue to exist without causing any fatal calamity.

But the time will come when New England will be as thickly peopled as old England. Wages will be as low and will fluctuate as much with you as with us. You will have your Manchesters and Birminghams, and in those Manchesters and Birminghams hundreds of thousands of artisans will assuredly be sometimes out of work. Then your institutions will be fairly brought to the test. Distress everywhere makes the laborer mutinous and discontented, and inclines him to listen with eagerness to agitators who tell him that it is a monstrous iniquity that one man should have a million while another cannot get a full meal.

In bad years there is plenty of grumbling here, and sometimes a little rioting. But it matters little. For here the sufferers are not the rulers. The supreme power is in the hands of a class, numerous indeed, but select; of an educated class; of a class which is, and knows itself to be, deeply interested in the security of property and the maintenance of order. Accordingly, the malcontents are firmly yet gently restrained. The bad time is got over without robbing the wealthy to relieve the indigent. The springs of national prosperity soon begin to flow again; work is plentiful, wages rise and all is tranquillity and cheerfulness. I have seen England pass three or four times through such critical seasons as I have described.

Through such seasons the United States will have to pass in the course of the next century, if not this. How will you pass through them? I heartily wish you a good deliverance. But my reason and my wishes are at war and I cannot help foreboding the worst. It is quite plan that your government will never be able to restrain a distressed and discontented majority. For with you the majority is the government, and has the rich, who are always a minority, absolutely at its mercy.

The day will come when in the State of New York a multitude of people, none of whom has had more than half a breakfast, or expects to have more than half a dinner, will choose a legislature. Is it possible to doubt what sort of a legislature will be chosen? On one side is a statesman preaching patience, respect for vested rights, strict observance of public faith. On the other is a demagogue ranting about the tyranny of capitalists and usurers and asking why anybody should be permitted to drink champagne and to ride in a carriage while thousands of honest folks are in want of necessaries. Which of the two candidates are likely to be preferred by a workingman who hears his children cry for more bread?

I seriously apprehend that you will, in some such seasons of adversity as I have described, do things which will prevent prosperity from returning; that you will act like people who should in a year of scarcity devour all the seed corn and thus make the next year not of scarcity, but of absolute famine. There will be, I fear, spoliation. The spoliation will increase the distress. The distress will produce fresh spoliation.

There is nothing to stop you. Your Constitution is all sail and no anchor. As I said before, when a society has entered on this downward progress, either civilization or liberty must perish. Either some Cæsar or Napoleon will seize the reins of government with a strong hand, or your republic will be as fearfully plundered and laid waste by barbarians in the twentieth century as the Roman Empire was in the fifth, with this difference, that the Huns and vandals who ravaged the Roman Empire came from without, and that your Huns and vandals will have been engendered within your own country by your own institutions.

I have the honor to be, dear sir, your faithful servant, T.B. Macaulay.

H.S. Randall, Esq., etc., etc., etc.

A FOOL'S PARADISE

Radical propagandists, with a sublime disregard for facts and history, persist in extolling the tenets of Russian Communism as new discoveries in the art of government. They assert that the Bolshevists have solved for the first time in history the problem of social equality. They say the experiment of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" has never before been attempted and that it fails to find favor outside Russia because peoples are always prone to condemn what they do not understand.

Russia, however, is but the last of many countries to rebel against its own prosperity. During the twenty years preceding the World War Russia enjoyed the greatest growth and development, both of its resources and education, in the history of the country. Two-thirds of the agricultural land in the nation was owned and occupied by the farming classes, which comprised nearly three-fourths of the population. In ten years the number of depositors in the savings banks of Russia had doubled and the gross amount of the deposits had quadrupled.

Then came the war, to be followed by Bolshevism. The experience of Russia in the last two years, however, is not unique in the history of nations. The narration of the spoliation of the rich, the confiscation of the estates and the profligate waste of the national substance is only a repetition, almost verse for verse and line for line, of the license and the abuses of the last years of the Athenian democracy. It was then demonstrated that the impoverishing of the rich could not enrich the poor, and that a state without wealth will soon be a state without liberty. In the idiom of the gallery gods, it is all "old stuff."

The Charmides of Xenophon's "Banquet" celebrates the pleasures and profits of poverty. He once possessed a fortune that made him fear thieves and sycophants--in reality the same thing--Athens had levied heavy taxes on the rich and had passed laws making it a capital offense for a person of wealth to attempt to flee the state. The money raised by thus taxing the wealthy was distributed to the poor in the public places. Any one holding a certificate showing that he had not sufficient wealth to be taxed was admitted free to the theaters and was entitled to one meal a day at restaurants supported by the state.

The people's council, fearful that there might be a disposition to stop this waste of public money, passed acts which decreed capital punishment to any orator who should propose to modify the laws which made "poverty a blessing."

Charmides recounts that he once lived in a state of perpetual terror. New taxes were decreed every day, each of which he was compelled to pay. He was deprived of the liberty even of leaving the state. His lot was worse than that of the meanest slave.

Behold! a fertile imagination came to his rescue. He embarked in a speculation in which failure was inevitable. Good fortune attended him. Within a brief time he was penniless and happy. The unfortunate speculator who had gained possession of the wealth of Charmides lived for a brief time in the agony of wealth; then he attempted to flee the state, was apprehended and executed.

Charmides makes votive offerings to the gods of Athens for his escape from the terror and servitude of property. "How comfortably I sleep!" he cries. "The republic has confidence in me. I am no longer threatened. It is I who threaten others. A free man, I can go or stay. I appear at the theater. I am admitted free. The rich rise in trembling and offer me the best seats. When I walk abroad in the streets they stand aside to offer me an unobstructed passage. To-day I resemble a tyrant. Then I was a slave. Then I paid tribute to the state. Now the state, my tributary, supports me. I lose nothing; for I have nothing."

For a time democratic Athens was a veritable Bolshevist paradise. But when the ranks of the rich became depleted, when none cared longer to engage in any profitable industry, the public revenue fell until there was no money to support the happy idlers. The rich were tortured in the vain hope that they would produce hidden treasure; but the public treasury remained empty.

This period of riotous profligacy followed the happy conclusion for Athens of the Theban war. When the Athenian proletariat discovered that the state was about to pass under the yoke of Philip they hunted down the remnant of the wealthy class that still remained, executed some, banished others and sold still others into slavery for "betraying the Athenian state and leaving it helpless before its enemies."

Shortly afterwards Athens came under the despotism of Philip, who speedily conscripted this proletariat for forced labor. For a hundred years afterwards, however, Athenian writers in bewailing their loss of liberty blamed the fall of Athens upon the "rich," who failed to arm and equip a force to fight Philip.

All the wisdom of her philosophers, all the art and learning whose loss the world still mourns, fell before the onslaught of this triumphant democracy. The culture of the few could not prevail against the greed of the many. Domestic conditions became so intolerable that a majority of the Athenians welcomed the stern but salutary rule of the tyrant. For they had learned that the tyranny of a despot is easier to be borne than that of universal poverty.

One does not have to interrogate the future to learn whither Russia under Bolshevism is tending; one has but to look to the past. Like causes cannot produce unlike effects. Under given conditions national eclipses can be predicted as surely as the eclipses of the planets.

_Los Angeles Times_, May 4, 1921.

NAPOLEON'S CENTENNIAL

The hundredth anniversary of the passing of Napoleon centers attention anew on one of the baffling figures of all time--a man at once attractive and repulsive; a soldier of infinite courage who on at least one occasion acted the coward; a master strategist who, to the last, seemed never to fully grasp that strategy by which he almost recast a world.

He found Europe feudal and left it modern. He opened up new realms of knowledge to the servants; revolutionized military tactics; founded lasting industries; gave a new birth to French law; mocked and yet fostered freedom.

More volumes have been written regarding him than any other character in history--one excepted. Nevertheless, he still remains the most elusive, the most unsatisfying genius that the world has ever known.

His accomplishments have by this time been fully set forth and properly valued. We know that he stands practically alone as the greatest strategist of the ages. Cromwell, on a smaller scale and within a far more limited sphere, more nearly approaches him, perhaps, than does any other.

We know also that he was an adroit politician and a statesman on a scale rarely equalled in Europe. He was also an orator and an adept at coining phrases. He was an executive of immense power and a man of tremendous personal charm.

Of course, he was relentless, cruel, unscrupulous and all the rest of it, as we have been so often told. But, praise and blame aside, the question of the source of his power still remains the important thing.

Certainly he was not great because he was a brilliant student, for, all in all, he was not deeply read. It could hardly be claimed that he was of the electric, assimilative type, for he would listen to no one and held opinions of others in contempt. He was not even a strong reasoner as the term is generally used.

Wherein, then, lay that genius which makes him the outstanding Frenchman and one of the supreme personages of history? Apparently he was pre-eminent because, more than almost any man who ever lived, he had the power of harnessing his intuitive processes to his practical problems.

He, it seems, was able to tap that vast, hidden and unsung reservoir of knowledge which is the epitome of all that the human mind has grasped and which, though flowing through the subconscious mind of all, is available in its entirety to but few--and then in all too brief flashes.

The theory of the quality of the human mind, with its every-day, jerky reasoning powers and its submerged, smooth intuitions, finds its strongest support in such an individual.

The subliminal mind, psychologists tell us, reaches out into daily life when the normal intelligence is in abeyance--as in sleep or profound relaxation. This subliminal (below the threshold) mind is swifter than the conscious mind and over-reaches it in a flash. It is practically unerring. It is controlled by laws not yet grasped to any great extent. It is hidden from life, yet rules it.

Mystics have the gift, in varying degree, of allowing their subconscious minds to engulf and enfold them. The real poets have written in words that live because, unknowingly, they have fallen back on and given expression to the accumulated hopes and visions of the mind of man. The prophets have simply been those with the power to make their instincts vocal. Genius, in all its phases, is seemingly but the measure of the extent to which men coördinate their two minds, their instinct and their reason.

Napoleon, in practically every crisis in which he functioned, struck those about him as being in a dazed and unnatural condition. He had those same periods of semi-stupefaction that characterized Cæsar, Paul, Alexander, Goethe, Lincoln and other exceptional men at the time of or immediately following a terrific use of their mental machinery.

What, then, if, in the final analysis, it should be shown that Napoleon's greatness lay in the fact that he did not take his own mind or any other man's mind too seriously?

Transcriber's notes:

Obvious typographical errors corrected.

Obvious Punctuation errors standardised.

Page 333 "It is quite plan that": As per original.

End of Project Gutenberg's Heart and Soul, by Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)