Part 41

_Answer_. Of course, I believe that there are thousands of men and women who honestly believe not only in the improbable, not only in the absurd, but in the impossible. Heterodoxy, so-called, occupies the half-way station between superstition and reason. A heretic is one who is still dominated by religion, but in the east of whose mind there is a dawn. He is one who has seen the morning star; he has not entire confidence in the day, and imagines in some way that even the light he sees was born of the night. In the mind of the heretic, darkness and light are mingled, the ties of intellectual kindred bind him to the night, and yet he has enough of the spirit of adventure to look toward the east. Of course, I admit that Christians and heretics are both honest; a real Christian must be honest and a real heretic must be the same. All men must be honest in what they think; but all men are not honest in what they say. In the invisible world of the mind every man is honest. The judgment never was bribed. Speech may be false, but conviction is always honest. So that the difference between honest belief, as shared by honest religious thinkers and heretics, is a difference of intelligence. It is the difference between a ship lashed to the dock, and on making a voyage; it is the difference between twilight and dawn--that is to say, the coming of the sight and the coming of the morning.

_Question_. Are women becoming freed from the bonds of sectarianism?

_Answer_. Women are less calculating than men. As a rule they do not occupy the territory of compromise. They are natural extremists. The woman who is not dominated by superstition is apt to be absolutely free, and when a woman has broken the shackles of superstition, she has no apprehension, no fears. She feels that she is on the open sea, and she cares neither for wind nor wave. An emancipated woman never can be re-enslaved. Her heart goes with her opinions, and goes first.

_Question_. Do you consider that the influence of religion is better than the influence of Liberalism upon society, that is to say, is society less or more moral, is vice more or less conspicuous?

_Answer_. Whenever a chain is broken an obligation takes its place. There is and there can be no responsibility without liberty. The freer a man is, the more responsible, the more accountable he feels; consequently the more liberty there is, the more morality there is. Believers in religion teach us that God will reward men for good actions, but men who are intellectually free, know that the reward of a good action cannot be given by any power, but that it is the natural result of the good action. The free man, guided by intelligence, knows that his reward is in the nature of things, and not in the caprice even of the Infinite. He is not a good and faithful servant, he is an intelligent free man.

The vicious are ignorant; real morality is the child of intelligence; the free and intelligent man knows that every action must be judged by its consequences; he knows that if he does good he reaps a good harvest; he knows that if he does evil he bears a burden, and he knows that these good and evil consequences are not determined by an infinite master, but that they live in and are produced by the actions themselves.

--_Evening Advertiser_, New York, February 6, 1892.

WORD PAINTING AND COLLEGE EDUCATION.

_Question_. What is the history of the speech delivered here in 1876? Was it extemporaneous?

_Answer_. It was not born entirely of the occasion. It took me several years to put the thoughts in form--to paint the pictures with words. No man can do his best on the instant. Iron to be beaten into perfect form has to be heated several times and turned upon the anvil many more, and hammered long and often.

You might as well try to paint a picture with one sweep of the brush, or chisel a statue with one stroke, as to paint many pictures with words, without great thought and care. Now and then, while a man is talking, heated with his subject, a great thought, sudden as a flash of lightning, illumines the intellectual sky, and a great sentence clothed in words of purple, falls, or rather rushes, from his lips--but a continuous flight is born, not only of enthusiasm, but of long and careful thought. A perfect picture requires more details, more lights and shadows, than the mind can grasp at once, or on the instant. Thoughts are not born of chance. They grow and bud and blossom, and bear the fruit of perfect form.

Genius is the soil and climate, but the soil must be cultivated, and the harvest is not instantly after the planting. It takes time and labor to raise and harvest a crop from that field called the brain.

_Question_. Do you think young men need a college education to get along?

_Answer_. Probably many useless things are taught in colleges. I think, as a rule, too much time is wasted learning the names of the cards without learning to play a game. I think a young man should be taught something that he can use--something he can sell. After coming from college he should be better equipped to battle with the world--to do something of use. A man may have his brain stuffed with Greek and Latin without being able to fill his stomach with anything of importance. Still, I am in favor of the highest education. I would like to see splendid schools in every State, and then a university, and all scholars passing a certain examination sent to the State university free, and then a United States university, the best in the world, and all graduates of the State universities passing a certain examination sent to the United States university free. We ought to have in this country the best library, the best university, the best school of design in the world; and so I say, more money for the mind.

_Question_. Was the peculiar conduct of the Rev. Dr. Parkhurst, of New York, justifiable, and do you think that it had a tendency to help morality?

_Answer_. If Christ had written a decoy letter to the woman to whom he said: "Go and sin no more," and if he had disguised himself and visited her house and had then lodged a complaint against her before the police and testified against her, taking one of his disciples with him, I do not think he would have added to his reputation.

--_The News_, Indianapolis, Indiana, February 18, 1892.

PERSONAL MAGNETISM AND THE SUNDAY QUESTION.

[Colonel Ingersoll was a picturesque figure as he sat in his room at the Gibson House yesterday, while the balmy May breeze blew through the open windows, fluttered the lace curtains and tossed the great Infidel's snowy hair to and fro. The Colonel had come in from New York during the morning and the keen white sunlight of a lovely May day filled his heart with gladness. After breakfast, the man who preaches the doctrine of the Golden Rule and the Gospel of Humanity and the while chaffs the gentlemen of the clerical profession, was in a fine humor. He was busy with cards and callers, but not too busy to admire the vase full of freshly-picked spring flowers that stood on the mantel, and wrestled with clouds of cigar smoke, to see which fragrance should dominate the atmosphere.

To a reporter of _The Commercial Gazette_, the Colonel spoke freely and interestingly upon a variety of subjects, from personal magnetism in politics to mob rule in Tennessee. He had been interested in Colonel Weir's statement about the lack of gas in Exposition Hall, at the 1876 convention, and when asked if he believed there was any truth in the stories that the gas supply had been manipulated so as to prevent the taking of a ballot after he had placed James G. Blaine in nomination, he replied: ]

All I can say is, that I heard such a story the day after the convention, but I do not know whether or not it is true. I have always believed, that if a vote had been taken that evening, Blaine would have been nominated, possibly not as the effect of my speech, but the night gave time for trafficking, and that is always dangerous in a convention. I believed then that Blaine ought to have been nominated, and that it would have been a very wise thing for the party to have done. That he was not the candidate was due partly to accident and partly to political traffic, but that is one of the bygones, and I believe there is an old saying to the effect that even the gods have no mastery over the past.

_Question_. Do you think that eloquence is potent in a convention to set aside the practical work of politics and politicians?

_Answer_. I think that all the eloquence in the world cannot affect a trade if the parties to the contract stand firm, and when people have made a political trade they are not the kind of people to be affected by eloquence. The practical work of the world has very little to do with eloquence. There are a great many thousand stone masons to one sculptor, and houses and walls are not constructed by sculptors, but by masons. The daily wants of the world are supplied by the practical workers, by men of talent, not by men of genius, although in the world of invention, genius has done more, it may be, than the workers themselves. I fancy the machinery now in the world does the work of many hundreds of millions; that there is machinery enough now to do several times the work that could be done by all the men, women and children of the earth. The genius who invented the reaper did more work and will do more work in the harvest field than thousands of millions of men, and the same may be said of the great engines that drive the locomotives and the ships. All these marvelous machines were made by men of genius, but they are not the men who in fact do the work.

[This led the Colonel to pay a brilliant tribute to the great orators of ancient and modern times, the peer of all of them being Cicero. He dissected and defined oratory and eloquence, and explained with picturesque figures, wherein the difference between them lay. As he mentioned the magnetism of public speakers, he was asked as to his opinion of the value of personal magnetism in political life.]

It may be difficult to define what personal magnetism is, but I think it may be defined in this way: You don't always feel like asking a man whom you meet on the street what direction you should take to reach a certain point. You often allow three or four to pass, before you meet one who seems to invite the question. So, too, there are men by whose side you may sit for hours in the cars without venturing a remark as to the weather, and there are others to whom you will commence talking the moment you sit down. There are some men who look as if they would grant a favor, men toward whom you are unconsciously drawn, men who have a real human look, men with whom you seem to be acquainted almost before you speak, and that you really like before you know anything about them. It may be that we are all electric batteries; that we have our positive and our negative poles; it may be that we need some influence that certain others impart, and it may be that certain others have that which we do not need and which we do not want, and the moment you think that, you feel annoyed and hesitate, and uncomfortable, and possibly hateful.

I suppose there is a physical basis for everything. Possibly the best test of real affection between man and woman, or of real friendship between man and woman, is that they can sit side by side, for hours maybe, without speaking, and yet be having a really social time, each feeling that the other knows exactly what they are thinking about. Now, the man you meet and whom you would not hesitate a moment to ask a favor of, is what I call a magnetic man. This magnetism, or whatever it may be, assists in making friends, and of course is a great help to any one who deals with the public. Men like a magnetic man even without knowing him, perhaps simply having seen him. There are other men, whom the moment you shake hands with them, you feel you want no more; you have had enough. A sudden chill runs up the arm the moment your hand touches theirs, and finally reaches the heart; you feel, if you had held that hand a moment longer, an icicle would have formed in the brain. Such people lack personal magnetism. These people now and then thaw out when you get thoroughly acquainted with them, and you find that the ice is all on the outside, and then you come to like them very well, but as a rule first impressions are lasting. Magnetism is what you might call the climate of a man. Some men, and some women, look like a perfect June day, and there are others who, while the look quite smiling, yet you feel that the sky is becoming overcast, and the signs all point to an early storm. There are people who are autumnal--that is to say, generous. They have had their harvest, and have plenty to spare. Others look like the end of an exceedingly hard winter--between the hay and grass, the hay mostly gone and the grass not yet come up. So you will see that I think a great deal of this thing that is called magnetism. As I said, there are good people who are not magnetic, but I do not care to make an Arctic expedition for the purpose of discovering the north pole of their character. I would rather stay with those who make me feel comfortable at the first.

[From personal magnetism to the lynching Saturday morning down at Nashville, Tennessee, was a far cry, but when Colonel Ingersoll was asked what he thought of mob law, whether there was any extenuation, any propriety and moral effect resultant from it, he quickly answered: ]

I do not believe in mob law at any time, among any people. I believe in justice being meted out in accordance with the forms of law. If a community violates that law, why should not the individual? The example is bad. Besides all that, no punishment inflicted by a mob tends to prevent the commission of crime. Horrible punishment hardens the community, and that in itself produces more crime.

There seems to be a sort of fascination in frightful punishments, but, to say the least of it, all these things demoralize the community. In some countries, you know, they whip people for petty offences. The whipping, however, does no good, and on the other hand it does harm; it hardens those who administer the punishment and those who witness it, and it degrades those who receive it. There will be but little charity in the world, and but little progress until men see clearly that there is no chance in the world of conduct any more than in the physical world.

Back of every act and dream and thought and desire and virtue and crime is the efficient cause. If you wish to change mankind, you must change the conditions. There should be no such thing as punishment. We should endeavor to reform men, and those who cannot be reformed should be placed where they cannot injure their fellows. The State should never take revenge any more than the community should form itself into a mob and take revenge. This does harm, not good. The time will come when the world will no more think of sending men to the penitentiary for stealing, as a punishment, that it will for sending a man to the penitentiary because he has consumption. When that time comes, the object will be to reform men; to prevent crime instead of punishing it, and the object then will be to make the conditions such that honest people will be the result, but as long as hundreds of thousands of human beings live in tenements, as long as babes are raised in gutters, as long as competition is so sharp that hundreds of thousands must of necessity be failures, just so long as society gets down on its knees before the great and successful thieves, before the millionaire thieves, just so long will it have to fill the jails and prisons with the little thieves. When the "good time" comes, men will not be judged by the money they have accumulated, but by the uses they make of it. So men will be judged, not according to their intelligence, but by what they are endeavoring to accomplish with their intelligence. In other words, the time will come when character will rise above all. There is a great line in Shakespeare that I have often quoted, and that cannot be quoted too often: "There is no darkness but ignorance." Let the world set itself to work to dissipate this darkness; let us flood the world with intellectual light. This cannot be accomplished by mobs or lynchers. It must be done by the noblest, by the greatest, and by the best.

[The conversation shifting around to the Sunday question; the opening of the World's Fair on Sunday, the attacks of the pulpit upon the Sunday newspapers, the opening of parks and museums and libraries on Sunday, Colonel Ingersoll waxed eloquent, and in answer to many questions uttered these paragraphs: ]

Of course, people will think that I have some prejudice against the parsons, but really I think the newspaper press is of far more importance in the world than the pulpit. If I should admit in a kind of burst of generosity, and simply for the sake of making a point, that the pulpit can do some good, how much can it do without the aid of the press? Here is a parson preaching to a few ladies and enough men, it may be, to pass the contribution box, and all he says dies within the four walls of that church. How many ministers would it take to reform the world, provided I again admit in a burst of generosity, that there is any reforming power in what they preach, working along that line?

The Sunday newspaper, I think, is the best of any day in the week. That paper keeps hundreds and thousands at home. You can find in it information about almost everything in the world. One of the great Sunday papers will keep a family busy reading almost all day. Now, I do not wonder that the ministers are so opposed to the Sunday newspaper, and so they are opposed to anything calculated to decrease the attendance at church. Why, they want all the parks, all the museums, all the libraries closed on Sunday, and they want the World's Fair closed on Sunday.

Now, I am in favor of Sunday; in fact, I am perfectly willing to have two of them a week, but I want Sunday as a day of recreation and pleasure. The fact is we ought not to work hard enough during the week to require a day of rest. Every day ought to be so arranged that there would be time for rest from the labor of that day. Sunday is a good day to get business out of your mind, to forget the ledger and the docket and the ticker, to forget profits and losses, and enjoy yourself. It is a good day to go to the art museums, to look at pictures and statues and beautiful things, so that you may feel that there is something in this world besides money and mud. It is a good day, is Sunday, to go to the libraries and spend a little time with the great and splendid dead, and to go to the cemetery and think of those who are sleeping there, and to give a little thought to the time when you, too, like them, will fall asleep. I think it is a good day for almost anything except going to church. There is no need of that; everybody knows the story, and if a man has worked hard all the week, you can hardly call it recreation if he goes to church Sunday and hears that his chances are ninety-nine in a hundred in favor of being eternally damned.

So it is I am in favor of having the World's Fair open on Sunday. It will be a good day to look at the best the world has produced; a good day to leave the saloons and commune for a little while with the mighty spirits that have glorified this world. Sunday is a good day to leave the churches, where they teach that man has become totally depraved, and look at the glorious things that have been wrought by these depraved beings. Besides all this, it is the day of days for the working man and working woman, for those who have to work all the week. In New York an attempt was made to open the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Sunday, and the pious people opposed it. They thought it would interfere with the joy of heaven if people were seen in the park enjoying themselves on Sunday, and they also held that nobody would visit the Museum if it were opened on Sunday; that the "common people" had no love for pictures and statues and cared nothing about art. The doors were opened, and it was demonstrated that the poor people, the toilers and workers, did want to see such things on Sunday, and now more people visit the Museum on Sunday than on all the other days of the week put together. The same is true of the public libraries. There is something to me infinitely pharisaical, hypocritical and farcical in this Sunday nonsense. The rich people who favor keeping Sunday "holy," have their coachman drive them to church and wait outside until the services end. What do they care about the coachman's soul? While they are at church their cooks are busy at home getting dinner ready. What do they care for the souls of cooks? The whole thing is pretence, and nothing but pretence. It is the instinct of business. It is the competition of the gospel shop with other shops and places of resort.

The ministers, of course, are opposed to all shows except their own, for they know that very few will come to see or hear them and the choice must be the church or nothing.

I do not believe that one day can be more holy than another unless more joyous than another. The holiest day is the happiest day-- the day on which wives and children and men are happiest. In that sense a day can be holy.

Our idea of the Sabbath is from the Puritans, and they imagined that a man has to be miserable in order to excite the love of God. We have outgrown the old New England Sabbath--the old Scotch horror. The Germans have helped us and have set a splendid example. I do not see how a poor workingman can go to church for recreation--I mean an orthodox church. A man who has hell here cannot be benefitted by being assured that he is likely to have hell hereafter. The whole business I hold in perfect abhorrence.

They tell us that God will not prosper us unless we observe the Sabbath. The Jews kept the Sabbath and yet Jehovah deserted them, and they are a people without a nation. The Scotch kept Sunday; they are not independent. The French never kept Sunday, and yet they are the most prosperous nation in Europe.

--_Commercial Gazette_, Cincinnati, Ohio, May 2, 1892.

AUTHORS.

_Question_. Who, in your opinion, is the greatest novelist who has written in the English language?

_Answer_. The greatest novelist, in my opinion, who has ever written in the English language, was Charles Dickens. He was the greatest observer since Shakespeare. He had the eyes that see, the ears that really hear. I place him above Thackeray. Dickens wrote for the home, for the great public. Thackeray wrote for the clubs. The greatest novel in our language--and it may be in any other--is, according to my ideas, "A Tale of Two Cities." In that, are philosophy, pathos, self-sacrifice, wit, humor, the grotesque and the tragic. I think it is the most artistic novel that I have read. The creations of Dickens' brain have become the citizens of the world.

_Question_. What is your opinion of American writers?

_Answer_. I think Emerson was a fine writer, and he did this world a great deal of good, but I do not class him with the first. Some of his poetry is wonderfully good and in it are some of the deepest and most beautiful lines. I think he was a poet rather than a philosopher. His doctrine of compensation would be delightful if it had the facts to support it.