Part 2

What women have been opposing is the primitive monotony of the Anglo-Saxon trend. It has meant a mixture of politics and commerce so primitive and so naive that Frenchmen are amazed when they visit America and note the striking difference between the culture of the women and the mentality of the average man.

One of your great mystics has said: "The chemical constituents of human bodies is the same. The ashes of a saint and the ashes of a sinner give the same chemical results. As human bodies they are the same, but their functions separate them and make them totally different, so that the difference cannot by any hocus-pocus of metaphysics or magic be bridged or spanned."

Two things of the same material are really different if their functions are different. The real substance of a thing is in its function. We have to judge people by the things they do, not by their appearance; for there is no clear understanding between two persons whose aims are different. This is why there are so many divorces. This is why so many intellectual women live separate lives from their husbands in the same house.

People seem to be similar and equal but they differ according to their functions. If we take a philosopher, a hangman and a sailor who appear to be equal as human beings we shall see that in their functions there is nothing in common. The souls of these men are different in the very nature, origin and purpose of their existence.

Thousands of people move in a world of material shadows while their souls, the substance of which is intellectual and spiritual, inhabit a sphere absolutely apart. Especially is this the case with many of the cultured women of our time who are compelled to live a double life. Their intellects are far removed from the ordinary pursuits of the commercial world.

A woman of spiritual culture who marries a commercial man has married a shadow. A woman of high ideals who marries a professional politician has hitched her motor car to a meteor. A romantic woman married to a multi-millionaire whose world is bound in liberty bonds loses her liberty. A metaphysical woman who marries a financier is handicapped by the physical.

A union of spiritual functions with material formulas is impossible, for there is no way in which mere sensation can be made to harmonize with the higher emotions.

The new era of woman, which is just beginning to dawn, will direct education; and through education, politics; through politics, the progress of nations. Heretofore, the commercial and political world had a free hand. The progressive element was confined to a limited number of men in the colleges and the ministry, together with a remnant of law-makers. But their influence was negative owing to lack of material support.

Women will now present a formidable force in numbers, backed by a spiritual power, aided by men who understand the difference between functions and appearance, sensuous desires and ideal emotions.

For years I maintained that women do not realize the power they possess. They live so much in a world of their own that they do not regard the man-made commercial world as worth elevating.

Thousands of men are living in a sphere some degrees below the normal. They have been surrounded from the beginning with influences that obliterate all the higher faculties of the mind.

It has taken woman some centuries to rise to power, but the work is only half done. Never can the commercial instinct and the intellectual ideal be made to harmonize. The two spheres of consciousness are totally distinct.

The modern intellect has been organized without considering the moral meaning of its activity. This has caused the delusion that the crowning glory of European culture is the dreadnaught. Ninety per cent of all modern inventions are for bodily destruction or bodily comfort. While the body lolls in luxury, the spirit is soused in lethargy.

As Ouspensky says, we have created two lives--one material, the other spiritual. I believe this is owing to the fact that man is living and working in the material and woman in the spiritual. In other words, she is carrying her own responsibilities on one shoulder and man's baneful burdens on the other. The figure of Atlas holding up the Globe should be changed to that of a female.

One would think that in these days, when psychology is taught even to children, that a man who has lived forty years in the world of action would know better than to boast of his eternal activities. The word "busy" has grown to be a veritable fetish with thousands who have little or nothing to do. The truth is, most men are not half as busy as they seem and not more than a fourth as wise as they look.

We have to find out by exact analysis just what incentive lies behind people's actions. What makes the distinction is the quality of our acts. Everything in the material and the spiritual worlds is judged according to quality. Gold, diamonds, clothes, bricks, music, poetry, literature, are adjudged, in the last resort, on the basis of intrinsic value. When people are engaged in pursuits for the sake of money the results will be on a plane with the quality of the incentive.

In the work done by women in the past fifty years in this country, the incentive has been of a higher quality than that shown by men.

While men introduced a coarse realism into the novel, women saved the situation by new ideals. I do not think there would be much left worth reading today but for woman's taste and judgment.

In the world of intellect and emotion things hang together. A low plane of intellect will produce low impulses. The more we know the greater our control of the different sense organs. Nothing can happen without a corresponding cause behind it.

The hysteria so common at great political conventions is caused by the exceedingly limited intelligence of the managers and directors who labor under the illusion that blind impulse is tantamount to vision. In other words, where the critical faculties are not developed anything can happen. And it is not difficult to predict that when political conventions are swayed by hysterical temperaments the authority at the White House will have all he can do to steer the Ship of State through the troubled waters of impulse and confusion.

There is a will to power that is blind. There is another will to power that brings the higher emotions to bear on the lower impulses, controls and directs the organs of sense.

The people who elect a President are the ones who will influence his actions. And when we talk about a President being a good man for business we are compelled to seek for the reason behind the statement.

If finance lands a President at the White House, women, children, teachers and philosophers must shift for themselves, since the supreme test lies in function, and not in manners, words and looks. And finance means finesse.

Do not expect great innovations at the Capitol until a strong woman takes her seat at the White House; and by this I do not mean one of Barnum's bearded ladies.

Conservatism is a good thing when it is coupled with vision and judgment, but bear in mind that monotony and mediocrity start in the same groove, run at the same pace and arrive at the same grave.

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

There is but one mark of patriotism and that is vigilance and enthusiasm. The cause of your trouble is the sincerity with which your foes think and act and the lukewarm sentiment shown by Americans. The reason is to be found in the comfort and luxury of the present day compared with the pioneer sacrifices of your fathers and grandfathers. Your opponents are vindictive as well as vigilant. They mean what they say and do what they will. They are working as individuals, as well as in groups and parties, but Americans who inherited the land with liberty are exchanging both for the license of the maw.

When school teachers and farm hands are permitted to leave the country for the city, the end is not so far off as your sophisticated solons of the State Capitols would lead you to suppose.

I once stated that three movings equal one fire, and I can say now that the lack of teachers and farm hands has resulted in a damage equal to one revolution. No calamity comes and goes single handed. The world, the flesh and the devil are a triumvirate bound together by ties of consanguinity. Your school teachers are passing over to the world, your farm laborers to the flesh, and your ministers to the devil.

You are browsing on the stubble. One delinquency involves another, and eventually the monetary capital of the nation may be reduced to that of France. The nation will awake one day to the disillusioning fact that peace and progress cannot be gauged by commercial prosperity alone. For without food what avails your steel, your oil and your gold?

If you could witness the mortification poor Andrew Carnegie is now undergoing because of his lack of vision, you would have a lesson not soon forgotten. He built libraries but furnished no books to fill them. It was like building houses without windows. When leading business men commit such folly what can you expect of the nation at large?

The three things most needed by the people are food, raiment and shelter. The next three are instruction, religion and discipline. Liberty is a privilege; it comes after all the others. The individual has no rights inimical to those of the collective conscience.

Until you learn this fundamental maxim, all your knowledge will prove but a sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal.

The nations are rattling over the cobble stones of bankruptcy on a buckboard of compromise, on the high road to revolution.

JOHN MARSHALL

(The Expounder of the Constitution)

Recorded October, 1920

Some recent decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States are, more than any other factor, calculated to develop and foster an element of national unrest. Its deliberations are beyond the intelligence of many and above the interests of the majority. Its psychology is that of a divorce between capital and labor. Its rulings remind me of what transpired in England early in the nineteenth century.

Many who were not socialists are beginning to turn from the older order, imbued with the feeling that nothing could happen in the future worse for the country at large than the conditions that are being endured in the present.

A revolution arrives after a series of connected events which exhausts the patience of the public, and events are moving with intensity as well as rapidity.

DANIEL WEBSTER

You will search the pages of history in vain without finding a parallel to present conditions.

The war gave Bohemia her freedom; at the same time it licensed a bohemian poet to keep Italy stewing in her own juice, a bohemian journalist from New York to direct affairs in Moscow, and a bohemian socialist from Switzerland to rule over Russia.

Added to this a fashionable ladies' pianist has tried his hand, or should I say fingers, in the science of unfurling the sails of Poland's new Ship of State, while shop-keepers direct affairs in Germany and pusilanimous politicians keep the people of America in a state of tepid trepidation and flatulent turmoil. Can you wonder that the country is being hypnotized by the sight of so many cantankerous cataleptics?

Macbeth declared he had waded in so far that returning would be as perilous as going on. Nothing will move them until they are swamped by the high tide of reaction and flung as flotsam on the rocks of a stormy opportunism.

A new Damocles has a sword suspended over the National Capitol, and liberty hangs to the hinges of the Constitution by a hair.

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

While a few people are ready to return to first principles, many are giving expressions to Garden of Eden proclivities. But instead of the old Eve, you have the new Amazon; instead of the old serpent, copperheads in Congress; instead of the old Adam, fresh brands of bluebeards.

Agreeable to the apple of the new Adam's eye and the fruitarian diet of the new Eden, some ladies have adopted the fig-leaf standard. But let that pass for the moment, always bearing in mind that he who loses his sense of humor loses his equilibrium.

Millions of people are dancing their legs off to keep their heads on.

Providence is wiser than the moralists.

There was a way out of the trenches and there is a way out of the pessimism developed by the dying dispensation. It is not so much a question of keeping your powder dry as it is of keeping your wits from congealing.

Beware of nebulous notions and theories. Uncanny kinks lead to calamitous brain storms. A stitch in the side saves nine--kicks behind the solar plexus.

BENJAMIN WADE

(Late Governor of Ohio--U. S. Senator)

Viewed in the light that shines on the White House, there is no difference between a man from Ohio and a gentleman from Indiana.

Men from the pumpkin pie districts think and feel alike, judging world politics by the yard-stick method that prevailed in their villages when they were young men. They are not always aware that political ruts cause social ructions.

The all-wool-and-a-yard-wide politician was home-spun and honestly patriotic, but what you need is a home-spun thinker whose vision has got beyond the yard-stick measure and can take in the whole world.

An old-school president, at this juncture, will have little more authority than a Congo king would have at a conference of jurists in Paris.

Has anyone taken the trouble to find out just what distinguishes the minority from the majority?

While the home-spun politician was eating cookies and buckwheat cakes made by his mother in the Middle West, some millions in New York, Chicago, Cleveland, and other foreign centers, were partaking of wienerwurst, sauerkraut, Swiss cheese and rye bread, and clinking beer glasses, according to the custom of Continental Europe.

If we say that a statesman represents Americanism, the question arises what kind of Americanism? The Yankee, the Southerner, each had his place in the political economy of America from 1776 to the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, and even up to the Cleveland Administration, after which conditions began to change with startling rapidity, when the children born of foreign parents were beginning to come of age and the European ferment began to leaven the lumps of sectional dough.

The man who occupies the White House in 1921 should take Time by the forelock and the profiteer with the padlock, know how to translate "Es ist verboten" into Russian, and say, "Get thee behind me, Satan," in Esperanto.

If honesty, alone, is the best and only policy, our country would be safe, but honesty is only one of the qualities necessary in these days to carry a President through the mazes of a complex administration. Honesty does not always imply clear vision or even ordinary common sense. The faculties of diplomatic tact and political judgment are infinitely more important, and experience still more so.

In America the roles enacted by professional politicians remind one of a masquerade where everyone is trying to penetrate behind the masks and guessing is the rule. If in this heterogeneous ball-room you slap your partner on the back, you may elicit a grunt from a grouchy bolshevik or a groan from a disgruntled "bohemian."

And yet Congress enacts laws for Americans who understand no dialect but their own and who have to engage interpreters when they visit Paris. How many wealthy Americans realize that these United States have outgrown the cookie era, the buckwheat pancake era, the corn cob era, the wooden nutmeg era, and arrived at the root-hog-or-die era?

Young America today no more resembles the young America of thirty years ago than a butterfly resembles a caterpillar. Young men and women are sixty per cent cosmopolitan and forty per cent rebel.

During the next five years the number of young people who will insist on thinking for themselves will increase two-fold, because in that time many thousands of children born of foreign parents in America will have become mature enough to have fixed upon some sort of ideal.

Congress will realize the situation when it is too late for regrets to be of any service. Which calls to mind a story apropos of this pressing subject: A landlady, having no means of obtaining meat for her boarders, made a stew out of a litter of kittens. The truth became known in a day or two. One of the boarders said the very thought made her sick, to which the landlady replied: "Feeling sick won't do no good; them kittens has all been digested."

DON PIATT

(Late Editor of "The Capital," Washington, D. C.)

Where are the debaters whose rapier tongues ripped up the rag dolls of Congress and kept the floor of the House supplied with fresh saw-dust, whose fantastic fencing and heart-piercing thrusts were the delight of the gallery and the terror of fire eaters. Gone, gone where the woodbine twineth. What went they out for to see? A reed shaken by the wind? There is a difference in reeds. Tom Reed of Maine shook the House, but the House never shook him. What were his favorite drinks? There was plenty to choose from in the Washington of his day. But note the difference between the wit of the Maine Reed and that of the Missouri Reed.

On the other hand, where did Bryan get the "cross of gold" inspiration in the old days? Did he do it on tannic acid released from tea leaves? Who will ever know? One thing is certain--he never again rose to the same level.

Is our planet revolving toward a second edition of puritanism? Probably. The esprit de corps that animated the body politic begins to resemble a corpse with the esprit evaporated.

The human mind needs moments of exaltation as well as relaxation. Brilliant results are not produced by lukewarm sentiments expressed in a voice that lacks enthusiasm.

Washington is now a resort for celluloid cynics and a refuge for asbestos patriots whose marmorian snobbery makes me think of the ruins of temples abandoned by the gods and forgotten by man.

The great blunder of the prohibitionists was made when they condemned beer and light wine. Nature abhors abruptness. Progress is not made by sudden jerks and violent laws passed in a hurry.

If a few persons living in an obscure village in Ohio can bring about a movement like prohibition, the same influence can bring about a return of the old Connecticut blue laws.

Violent actions are followed by violent reactions. From this there is no escape.

The fundamental objection to prohibition, as it stands, lies in the cold fact that provincialism, no matter how sincere, can never compete with international common sense and cosmopolitan culture.

Village residents are ignorant of the laws that govern society in the most intelligent centers of the world. What will be the result in the long run? Antagonism between the people of the cities and the people of the country.

When they prohibit tobacco, a war of cuss words will be followed by a battle of cuspidors, and the very crows will cuss the crocuses.

BENJAMIN DISRAELI

Some Members of Parliament have lost their reason, the majority have lost their wits, all are without vision.

Lloyd George presents the curious spectacle of a man of the people who observes them through the glasses of a Welsh Calvinist. He is a democrat with the demeanor of a lord, a radical who has fallen between the two stools of the middle-class and the landed aristocracy. Nonconformist sentimentality, on one hand, and titled wealth on the other, have blinded him to the imperative needs of the time and the dangers that confront the Empire.

The English people of the past twenty years have suffered as much from misgovernment as the Germans and the Russians, but they cannot stop the present stream of progress by clatter in the House and appeals to patriotism.

For years England has been saddled with cabinets composed of professional humorists and hum-drum moralists.

Augustine Birrell was a diluted edition of Sydney Smith, and Bonar Law should have been a professor of theology in a Presbyterian seminary. Sir Edward Carson played the role of an unfrocked priest in the service of demiurgos. Earl Curzon is a political derelict whose presence in the Council Chamber prevents unity and impedes progress.

History will record their acts as the most amazing in the annals of Great Britain. I see nothing for the old order but unconditional surrender. The hand-writing on the wall was visible in 1909, but no preparation was made for the change which is now sweeping the country with cyclonic force.

We, from our side, can do no more than utter some words of warning for the few who have ears to hear, the tidal wave of change not being confined to particular countries or regions.

I, too, when Prime Minister, was blind to the reality, having been born and reared in an atmosphere as foreign to that of the masses as the atmosphere of the Winter Palace was foreign to the peasants of Russia.

We staggered under the load of a wealthy and titled upper class. They consumed the people's time and imposed infinite misery on some millions of toilers, and for these things we rewarded the men at the top with fresh titles.

As you know, I led the Conservative Party in England for many years, but that Party was, and still is, avid for power.

The Liberal Party was made up of men using Nonconformity as an instrument of advancement. They placed opportunity above the truth, position above principle, power above progress. We were all intellectual automatons, set in motion by springs wound up by leaders who were themselves automatons.

England goes by machinery. Her very existence is mechanical. Now, when a loose screw stops the evolution of the wheels, the whole nation stops.

In what way can we be said to excel in probity of conduct the people of Ireland? In what way are we superior to Irish politicians? The scandals that occurred in London during the war would not have been tolerated in Dublin under an Irish Parliament. And still England is being led by a Welsh Calvinist, opposed by a Scottish humorist who says his prayers, backed by Anglican agnostics and middle-class dissenters overwhelmed with fear.

We always imitate the French, but while we accepted Voltairianism in principle, the French had the courage to put it into practice.

While the French became practical pagans in 1789, we became practical hypocrites.

It is this element that has created the moral indifference of the Anglican Church and the intellectual apathy of the so-called Nonconformist conscience. This is why there is no stability behind the old phraseology, the old ceremonials, the old confessions of faith--now so many catch-words which the people abhor. And this is why the working men find it so easy to send their leaders to Parliament. For the same reason Russian radicalism is certain of a warm welcome on English soil.

It is true that this hypocrisy is subconscious, having had its origin during the French Revolution. This renders it far more dangerous because political leaders in England today are mentally incompetent to realize the danger that lies before them.

We cannot reason with people whose vision is dulled by four generations of moral apathy. Hence they will continue to "kick against the pricks" to the bitter end. There will be strife added to strife, confusion to confusion, and they, themselves, will invite the drastic events which must follow so much stubborn resistance to the demands of common justice and the progress of civilization.

PRINCE BISMARCK

Recorded November 3d, 1920