Part 2
I am a believer in fashion. It is the duty of every woman to make herself as beautiful and attractive as she possibly can. "Handsome is as handsome does," but she is much handsomer if well dressed. Every man should look his very best. I am a believer in good clothes. The time never ought to come in this country when you can tell a farmer's daughter simply by the garments she wears. I say to every girl and woman, no matter what the material of your dress may be, no matter how cheap and coarse it is, cut it and make it in the fashion. I believe in jewelry. Some people look upon it as barbaric, but in my judgment, wearing jewelry is the first evidence the barbarian gives of a wish to be civilized. To adorn ourselves seems to be a part of our nature, and this desire, seems to be everywhere and in everything. I have sometimes thought that the desire for beauty covers the earth with flowers. It is this desire that paints the wings of moths, tints the chamber of the shell, and gives the bird its plumage and its song. Oh! daughters and wives if you would be loved, adorn yourselves--if you would be adorned, be beautiful!
26. A Wholesome Word to the Stingy
I despise a stingy man. I don't see how it is possible for a man to die worth fifty millions of dollars or ten millions of dollars, in a city full of want, when he meets almost every day the withered hand of beggary and the white lips of famine. How a man can withstand all that, and hold in the clutch of his greed twenty or thirty millions of dollars, is past my comprehension. I do not see how he can do it. I should not think he could do it any more than he could keep a pile of lumber where hundreds and thousands of men were drowning in the sea. I should not think he could do it. Do you know I have known men who would trust their wives with their hearts and their honor, but not with their pocketbook; not with a dollar. When I see a man of that kind I always think he knows which of these articles is the most valuable.
27. The Boss of the Family
If you are the grand emperor of the world, you had better be the grand emperor of one loving and tender heart, and she the grand empress of yours. The man who has really won the love of one good woman in this world, I do not care if he dies a beggar, his life has been a success. I tell you it is an infamous word and an infamous feeling--a man who is "boss," who is going to govern in his family; and when he speaks let all the rest of them be still; some mighty idea is about to be launched from his mouth. Do you know I dislike this man?
28. Be Honor Bright!
A good way to make children tell the truth is to tell it yourself. Keep your word with your child the same as you would with your banker. Be perfectly honor bright with your children, and they will be your friends when you are old.
29. The Opera at the Table
I like to hear children at the table telling what big things they have seen during the day; I like to hear their merry voices mingling with the clatter of knives and forks. I had rather hear that than any opera that was ever put upon the stage. I hate this idea of authority.
30. A Child's laugh sweeter than Apollo's lyre
I said, and I say again, no day can be so sacred but that the laugh of a child will make the holiest day more sacred still. Strike with hand of fire, oh, weird musician, thy harp, strung with Apollo's golden hair; fill the vast cathedral aisles with symphonies sweet and dim, deft toucher of the organ keys; blow, bugler, blow, until thy silver notes do touch the skies, with moonlit waves, and charm the lovers wandering on the vine-clad hills: but know, your sweetest strains are discords all, compared with childhood's happy laugh, the laugh that fills the eyes with light and every heart with joy; oh, rippling river of life, thou art the blessed boundary-line between the beasts and man, and every wayward wave of thine doth drown some fiend of care; oh, laughter, divine daughter of joy, make dimples enough in the cheeks of the world to catch and hold and glorify all the tears of grief.
31. Don't Wake the Children
Let your children sleep. Do not drag them from their beds in the darkness of night. Do not compel them to associate all that is tiresome, irksome and dreadful with cultivating the soil. Treat your children with infinite kindness--treat them as equals. There is no happiness in a home not filled with love. When the husband hates his wife--where the wife hates the husband; where the children hate their parents and each other--there is a hell upon earth.
32. How to Deal with Children
Some Christians act as though they thought when the Lord said, "Suffer little children to come unto me," that he had a rawhide under his mantle--they act as if they thought so. That is all wrong. I tell my children this: Go where you may, commit what crime you may, fall to what depths of degradation you may, I can never shut my arms, my heart or my door to you. As long as I live you shall have one sincere friend; do not be afraid to tell anything wrong you have done; ten to one if I have not done the same thing. I am not perfection, and if it is necessary to sin in order to have sympathy, I am glad I have committed sin enough to have sympathy. The sterness of perfection I do not want. I am going to live so that my children can come to my grave and truthfully say, "He who sleeps here never gave us one moment of pain." Whether you call that religion or infidelity, suit yourselves; that is the way I intend to do it.
33. Give a Child a Chance
Do not create a child to be a post set in an orthodox row; raise investigators and thinkers, not disciples and followers; cultivate reason, not faith; cultivate investigation, not superstition; and if you have any doubt yourself about a thing being so, tell them about it; don't tell them the world was made in six days--if you think six days means six good whiles, tell them six good whiles. If you have any doubts about anybody being in a furnace and not being burnt, or even getting uncomfortably warm, tell them so--be honest about it. If you look upon the jaw-bone of a donkey as not a good weapon, say so. Give a child a chance. If you think a man never went to sea in a fish, tell them so, it won't make them any worse. Be honest--that's all; don't cram their heads with things that will take them years to unlearn; tell them facts--it is just as easy. It is as easy to find out botany, and astronomy, and geology, and history--it is as easy to find out all these things as to cram their minds with things you know nothing about.
34. The Greatest Liars in Michigan
I was over in Michigan the other day. There was a boy over there at Grand Rapids about five or six years old, a nice, smart boy, as you will see from the remark he made--what you might call a nineteenth century boy. His father and mother had promised to take him out riding for about three weeks, and they would slip off and go without him. Well, after a while that got kind of played out with the little boy, and the day before I was there they played the trick on him again. They went out and got the carriage, and went away, and as they rode away from the front of the house, he happened to be standing there with his nurse, and he saw them. The whole thing flashed on him in a moment. He took in the situation, and turned to his nurse and said, pointing to his father and mother: "There go the two biggest liars in the State of Michigan!" When you go home fill the house with joy, so that the light of it will stream out the windows and doors, and illuminate even the darkness. It is just as easy that way as any in the world.
35. Forgive the Children!
When your child confesses to you that it has com mitted a fault, take the child in your arms, and let it feel your heart beat against its heart, and raise your children in the sunlight of love, and they will be sunbeams to you along the pathway of life. Abolish the club and the whip from the house, because, if the civilized use a whip, the ignorant and the brutal will use a club, and they will use it because you use the whip.
36. A Solemn Satire on Whipping Children
If there is one of you here that ever expect to whip your child again, let me ask you something. Have your photograph taken at the time, and let it show your face red with vulgar anger, and the face of the little one with eyes swimming in tears. If that little child should die I cannot think of a sweeter way to spend an Autumn afternoon than to take that photograph and go to the cemetery, where the maples are clad in tender gold, and when little scarlet runners are coming, like poems of regret, from the sad heart of the earth; and sit down upon that mound, I look upon that photograph, and think of the flesh, made dust, that you beat. Just think of it. I could not bear to die in the arms of a child that I had whipped. I could not bear to feel upon my lips, when they were withering beneath the touch of death, the kiss of one that I had struck.
37. The Whips and Gods are Gone!
Children are better treated than they used to be; the old whips and gods are out of the schools, and they are governing children by love and sense. The world is getting better; it is getting better in Maine. It has got better in Maine, in Vermont. It is getting better in every State of the North.
INDIVIDUALITY
38. Absolute Independence of the Individual
What we want to-day is what our fathers wrote. They did not attain to their ideal; we approach it nearer, but have not yet reached it. We want, not only the independence of a state, not only the independence of a nation, but something far more glorious--the absolute independence of the individual. That is what we want. I want it so that I, one of the children of Nature, can stand on an equality with the rest; that I can say this is my air, my sunshine, my earth, and I have a right to live, and hope, and aspire, and labor, and enjoy the fruit of that labor, as much as any individual, or any nation on the face of the globe.
39. Saved by Disobedience
I tell you there is something splendid in man that will not always mind. Why, if we had done as the kings told us five hundred years ago, we would all have been slaves. If we had done as the priests told us, we would all have been idiots. If we had done as the doctors told us, we would all have been dead. We have been saved by disobedience. We have been saved by that splendid thing called independence, and I want to see more of it, day after day, and I want to see children raised so they will have it. That is my doctrine.
40. Intellectual Tyranny
Nothing can be more infamous than intellectual tyranny. To put chains upon the body is as nothing compared with putting shackles on the brain. No god is entitled to the worship or the respect of man who does not give, even to the meanest of his children, every right that he claims for himself.
41. Say What You Think
I do not believe that the tendency is to make men and women brave and glorious when you tell them that there are certain ideas upon certain subjects that they must never express; that they must go through life with a pretense as a shield; that their neighbors will think much more of them if they will only keep still; and that above all is a God who despises one who honestly expresses what he believes. For my part, I believe men will be nearer honest in business, in politics, grander in art--in everything that is good and grand and beautiful, if they are taught from the cradle to the coffin to tell their honest opinions.
42. I Want to Put Out the Fires of Hell
Some people tell me that I take away the hope of immortality. I do not. Leave heaven as it was! I want to put out the fires of hell. I want to transfer the war from this earth to heaven. Some tell me Jehovah is God, and another says Ali is God, and another that Brahma is God. I say, let Jehovah, and Ali, and Brahma fight it out. Let them fight it out there, and whoever is victor, to that God I will bow.
43. The Puritans
When the Puritans first came they were narrow. They did not understand what liberty meant--what religious liberty, what political liberty, was; but they found out in a few years. There was one feeling among them that rises to their eternal honor like a white shaft to the clouds--they were in favor of universal education. Wherever they went they built school houses, introduced books, and ideas of literature. They believed that every man should know how to read and how to write, and should find out all that his capacity allowed him to comprehend. That is the glory of the Puritan fathers.
44. A Star in the Sky of Despair
Every Christian, every philanthropist, every believer in human liberty, should feel under obligation to Thomas Paine for the splendid service rendered by him in the darkest days of the American Revolution. In the midnight of Valley Forge, "The Crisis" was the first star that glittered in the wide horizon of despair. Every good man should remember with gratitude the brave words spoken by Thomas Paine in the French Convention against the death of Louis. He said: "We will kill the king, but not the man. We will destroy monarchy, not monarch."
45. Do not Shock the Heathen!
You send missionaries to Turkey, and tell them that the Koran is a lie. You shock them. You tell them that Mahomet was not a prophet. You shock them. It is too bad to shock them. You go to India, and you tell them that Vishnu was nothing, that Purana was nothing, that Buddha was nobody, and your Brahma, he is nothing. Why do you shock these people? You should not do that; you ought not to hurt their feelings. I tell you no man on earth has a right to be shocked at the expression of an honest opinion when it is kindly done, and I don't believe there is any God in the universe who has put a curtain over the fact and made it a crime for the honest hand of investigation to endeavor to draw that curtain.
46. I will Settle with God Myself
They say to me, "God will punish you forever, if you do these things." Very well. I will settle with him. I had rather settle with him than any one of his agents. I do not like them very well. In theology I am a granger--I do not believe in middlemen. What little business I have with Heaven I will attend to myself.
47. I Claim my Right to Guess
I claim, standing under the flag of nature, under the blue and the stars, that I am the peer of any other man, and have the right to think and express my thoughts. I claim that in the presence of the Unknown, and upon a subject that nobody knows anything about, and never did, I have as good a right to _guess_ as anybody else.
48. The Brain a Castle
Surely it is worth something to feel that there are no priests, no popes, no parties, no governments, no kings, no gods, to whom your intellect can be compelled to pay reluctant homage. Surely it is a joy to know that all the cruel ingenuity of bigotry can devise no prison, no dungeon, no cell in which for one instant to confine a thought; that ideas cannot be dislocated by racks, nor crushed in iron boots, nor burned with fire. Surely it is sublime to think that the brain is a castle, and that within its curious bastions and winding halls the soul, in spite of all words and all beings, is the supreme sovereign of itself.
49. I am Something
The universe is all there is, or was, or will be. It is both subject and object; contemplator and contemplated; creator and created; destroyer and destroyed; preserver and preserved; and hath within itself all causes, modes, motions, and effects. In this there is hope. This is a foundation and a star. The infinite embraces all there is. Without the all, the infinite cannot be. I am something. Without me the universe cannot exist.
50. Every Man a Bight to Think
Now we have come to the conclusion that every man has a right to think. Would God give a bird wings and make it a crime to fly? Would he give me brains and make it a crime to think? Any God that would damn one of his children for the expression of his honest thought wouldn't make a decent thief. When I read a book and don't believe it, I ought to say so. I will do so and take the consequence like a man.
51. Too Early to Write a Creed
These are the excuses I have for my race, and taking everything into consideration, I think we have done extremely well. Let us have more liberty and free thought. Free thought will give us truth. It is too early in the history of the world to write a creed. Our fathers were intellectual slaves; our fathers were intellectual serfs. There never has been a free generation on the globe. Every creed you have got bears the mark of whip, and chain, and fagot.
There has been no creed written by a free brain. Wait until we have had two or three generations of liberty and it will then be time enough to seize the swift horse of progress by the bridle and say--thus far and no farther; and in the meantime let us be kind to each other; let us be decent towards each other. We are all travelers on the great plain we call life, and there is nobody quite sure what road to take--not just dead sure, you know. There are lots of guide-boards on the plain and you find thousands of people swearing to-day that their guide-board is the only board that shows the right direction. I go and talk to them and they say: "You go that way, or you will be damned." I go to another and they say: "You go this way, or you will be damned."
52. Every Mind True to Itself
In my judgment, every human being should take a road of his own. Every mind should be true to itself--should think, investigate and conclude for itself. This is a duty alike incumbent upon pauper and prince.
PROGRESS
53. The Torch of Progress.
In every age some men carried the torch of progress and handed it to some other, and it has been carried through all the dark ages of barbarism, and had it not been for such men we would have been naked and uncivilized to-night, with pictures of wild beasts tattooed on our skins, dancing around some dried snake fetish.
54. Gold makes a Barren Landscape
Only a few days ago I was where they wrench the precious metals from the miserly clutch of the rocks. When I saw the mountains; treeless, shrubless, flowerless, without even a spire of grass, it seemed to me that gold had the same effect upon the country that holds it, as upon the man who lives and labors only for it. It affects the land as it does the man. It leaves the heart barren without a flower of kindness--without a blossom of pity.
55. A Grand Achievement
There is nothing grander than to rescue from the leprosy of slander the reputation of a great and generous name. There is nothing nobler than to benefit our benefactors.
56. The Divorce of Church and State
The Constitution of the United States was the first decree entered in the high court of a nation, forever divorcing Church and State.
57. Professors
Instead of dismissing professors for finding something out, let us rather discharge those who do not. Let each teacher understand that investigation is not dangerous for him; that his bread is safe, no matter how much truth he may discover, and that his salary will not be reduced, simply because he finds that the ancient Jews did not know the entire history of the world.
58. Developement
I thought after all I had rather belong to a race of people that came from skulless vertebrae in the dim Laurentian period, that wiggled without knowing they were wiggling, that began to develope and came up by a gradual developement until they struck this gentleman in the dugout coming up slowly--up--up--up--until, for instance, they produced such a man as Shakespeare--he who harvested all the fields of dramatic thought, and after whom all others have been only gleaners of straw, he who found the human intellect dwelling in a hut, touched it with the wand of his genius and it became a palace--producing him and hundreds of others I might mention--with the angels of progress leaning over the far horizon beckoning this race of work and thought--I had rather belong to a race commencing at the skulless vertebrae producing the gentleman in the dugout and so on up, than to have descended from a perfect pair, upon which the Lord has lost money from that day to this. I had rather belong to a race that is going up than to one that is going down. I would rather belong to one that commenced at the skulless vertebrae and started for perfection, than to belong to one that started from perfection and started for the skulless vertebrae.
59. Poet's Dream
When every church becomes a school, every cathedral a university, every clergyman a teacher, and all their hearers brave and honest thinkers, then, and not until then, will the dream of poet, patriot, philanthropist and philosopher, become a real and blessed truth.
60. The Temple of the Future
We are laying the foundations of the grand temple of the future--not the temple of all the gods, but of all the people--wherein, with appropriate rites, will be celebrated the religion of Humanity. We are doing what little we can to hasten the coming of the day when society shall cease producing millionaires and mendicants--gorged indolence and famished industry--truth in rags, and superstition robed and crowned. We are looking for the time when the useful shall be the honorable; and when Reason, throned upon the world's brain, shall be the King of Kings, and God of Gods.
61. The final Goal
We do not expect to accomplish everything in our day; but we want to do what good we can, and to render all the service possible in the holy cause of human progress. We know that doing away with gods and supernatural persons and powers is not an end. It is a means to the end; the real end being the happiness of man.
62. The Eighteenth Century
At that time the seeds sown by the great Infidels were beginning to bear fruit in France. The people were beginning to think. The Eighteenth Century was crowning its gray hairs with the wreath of Progress. On every hand Science was bearing testimony against the Church. Voltaire had filled Europe with light; D'Holbach was giving to the _elite_ of Paris the principles contained in his "System of Nature." The Encyclopedists had attacked superstition with information for the masses. The foundation of things began to be examined. A few had the courage to keep their shoes on and let the bush burn. Miracles began to get scarce. Everywhere the people began to inquire. America had set an example to the world. The word Liberty was in the mouths of men, and they began to wipe the dust from their knees. The dawn of a new day had appeared.
POLITICAL QUESTIONS
63. Liberty--Fraternity--Equality!
All who stand beneath our banner are free. Ours is the only flag that has in reality written upon it: Liberty, Fraternity, Equality--the three grandest words in all the languages of men. Liberty: Give to every man the fruit of his own labor--the labor of his hand and of his brain. Fraternity: Every man in the right is my brother. Equality: The rights of all are equal. No race, no color, no previous condition, can change the rights of men. The Declaration of Independence has at last been carried out in letter and in spirit. To-day the black man looks upon his child and says: The avenues of distinction are open to you--upon your brow may fall the civic wreath. We are celebrating the courage and wisdom of our fathers, and the glad shout of a free people, the anthem of a grand nation, commencing at the Atlantic, is following the sun to the Pacific, across a continent of happy homes.
64. Liberty!