Chapter 27

_Answer_. I believe that the plays of Shakespeare are the most valuable things in the possession of the human race. No man can read and understand Shakespeare without being an intellectually developed man. If Shakespeare could be as widely circulated as the Bible--if all the Bible societies would break the plates they now have and print Shakespeare, and put Shakespeare in all the languages of the world, nothing would so raise the intellectual standard of mankind. Think of the different influence on men between reading Deuteronomy and "Hamlet" and "King Lear"; between studying Numbers and the "Midsummer Night's Dream"; between pondering over the murderous crimes and assassinations in Judges, and studying "The Tempest" or "As You Like It." Man advances as he develops intellectually. The church teaches obedience. The man who reads Shakespeare has his intellectual horizon enlarged. He begins to think for himself, and he enjoys living in a new world. The characters of Shakespeare become his acquaintances. He admires the heroes, the philosophers; he laughs with the clowns, and he almost adores the beautiful women, the pure, loving, and heroic women born of Shakespeare's heart and brain. The stage has amused and instructed the world. It had added to the happiness of mankind. It has kept alive all arts. It is in partnership with all there is of beauty, of poetry, and expression. It goes hand in hand with music, with painting, with sculpture, with oratory, with philosophy, and history. The stage has humor. It abhors stupidity. It despises hypocrisy. It holds up to laughter the peculiarities, the idiosyncrasies, and the little insanities of mankind. It thrusts the spear of ridicule through the shield of pretence. It laughs at the lugubrious and it has ever taught and will, in all probability, forever teach, that Man is more than a title, and that human love laughs at all barriers, at all the prejudices of society and caste that tend to keep apart two loving hearts.

_Question_. What is your opinion of the progress of the drama in educating the artistic sense of the community as compared with the progress of the church as an educator of the moral sentiment?

_Answer_. Of course, the stage is not all good, nor is--and I say this with becoming modesty--the pulpit all bad. There have been bad actors and there have been good preachers. There has been no improvement in plays since Shakespeare wrote. There has been great improvement in theatres, and the tendency seems to me be toward higher artistic excellence in the presentation of plays. As we become slowly civilized we will constantly demand more artistic excellence. There will always be a class satisfied with the lowest form of dramatic presentation, with coarse wit, with stupid but apparent jokes, and there will always be a class satisfied with almost anything; but the class demanding the highest, the best, will constantly increase in numbers, and the other classes will, in all probability, correspondingly decrease. The church has ceased to be an educator. In an artistic direction it never did anything except in architecture, and that ceased long ago. The followers of to-day are poor copyists. The church has been compelled to be a friend of, or rather to call in the assistance of, music. As a moral teacher, the church always has been and always will be a failure. The pulpit, to use the language of Frederick Douglass, has always "echoed the cry of the street." Take our own history. The church was the friend of slavery. That institution was defended in nearly every pulpit. The Bible was the auction-block on which the slave-mother stood while her child was sold from her arms. The church, for hundreds of years, was the friend and defender of the slave-trade. I know of no crime that has not been defended by the church, in one form or another. The church is not a pioneer; it accepts a new truth, last of all, and only when denial has become useless. The church preaches the doctrine of forgiveness. This doctrine sells crime on credit. The idea that there is a God who rewards and punishes, and who can reward, if he so wishes, the meanest and vilest of the human race, so that he will be eternally happy, and can punish the best of the human race, so that he will be eternally miserable, is subversive of all morality. Happiness ought to be the result of good actions. Happiness ought to spring from the seed a man sows himself. It ought not to be a reward, it ought to be a consequence, and there ought to be no idea that there is any being who can step between action and consequence. To preach that a man can abuse his wife and children, rob his neighbors, slander his fellow-citizens, and yet, a moment or two before he dies, by repentance become a glorified angel is, in my judgment, immoral. And to preach that a man can be a good man, kind to his wife and children, an honest man, paying his debts, and yet, for the lack of a certain belief, the moment after he is dead, be sent to an eternal prison, is also immoral. So that, according to my opinion, while the church teaches men many good things, it also teaches doctrines subversive of morality. If there were not in the whole world a church, the morality of man, in my judgment, would be the gainer.

_Question_. What do you think of the treatment of the actor by society in his social relations?

_Answer_. For a good many years the basis of society has been the dollar. Only a few years ago all literary men were ostracized because they had no money; neither did they have a reading public. If any man produced a book he had to find a patron--some titled donkey, some lauded lubber, in whose honor he could print a few well-turned lies on the fly-leaf. If you wish to know the degradation of literature, read the dedication written by Lord Bacon to James I., in which he puts him beyond all kings, living and dead--beyond Caesar and Marcus Aurelius. In those days the literary man was a servant, a hack. He lived in Grub Street. He was only one degree above the sturdy vagrant and the escaped convict. Why was this? He had no money and he lived in an age when money was the fountain of respectability. Let me give you another instance: Mozart, whose brain was a fountain of melody, was forced to eat at table with coachmen, with footmen and scullions. He was simply a servant who was commanded to make music for a pudding-headed bishop. The same was true of the great painters, and of almost all other men who rendered the world beautiful by art, and who enriched the languages of mankind. The basis of respectability was the dollar.

Now that the literary man has an intelligent public he cares nothing for the ignorant patron. The literary man makes money. The world is becoming civilized and the literary man stands high. In England, however, if Charles Darwin had been invited to dinner, and there had been present some sprig of nobility, some titled vessel holding the germs of hereditary disease, Darwin would have been compelled to occupy a place beneath him. But I have hopes even for England. The same is true of the artist. The man who can now paint a picture by which he receives from five thousand to fifty thousand dollars, is necessarily respectable. The actor who may realize from one to two thousand dollars a night, or even more, is welcomed in the stupidest and richest society. So with the singers and with all others who instruct and amuse mankind. Many people imagine that he who amuses them must be lower than they. This, however, is hardly possible. I believe in the aristocracy of the brain and heart; in the aristocracy of intelligence and goodness, and not only appreciate but admire the great actor, the great painter, the great sculptor, the marvelous singer. In other words, I admire all people who tend to make this life richer, who give an additional thought to this poor world.

_Question_. Do you think this liberal movement, favoring the better class of plays, inaugurated by the Rev. Dr. Abbott, will tend to soften the sentiment of the orthodox churches against the stage?

_Answer_. I have not read what Dr. Abbott has written on this subject. From your statement of his position, I think he entertains quite a sensible view, and, when we take into consideration that he is a minister, a miraculously sensible view. It is not the business of the dramatist, the actor, the painter or the sculptor to teach what the church calls morality. The dramatist and the actor ought to be truthful, ought to be natural--that is to say, truthfully and naturally artistic. He should present pictures of life properly chosen, artistically constructed; an exhibition of emotions truthfully done, artistically done. If vice is presented naturally, no one will fall in love with vice. If the better qualities of the human heart are presented naturally, no one can fail to fall in love with them. But they need not be presented for that purpose. The object of the artist is to present truthfully and artistically. He is not a Sunday school teacher. He is not to have the moral effect eternally in his mind. It is enough for him to be truly artistic. Because, as I have said, a great many times, the greatest good is done by indirection. For instance, a man lives a good, noble, honest and lofty life. The value of that life would be destroyed if he kept calling attention to it--if he said to all who met him, "Look at me!" he would become intolerable. The truly artistic speaks of perfection; that is to say, of harmony, not only of conduct, but of harmony and proportion in everything. The pulpit is always afraid of the passions, and really imagines that it has some influence on men and women, keeping them in the path of virtue. No greater mistake was ever made. Eternally talking and harping on that one subject, in my judgment, does harm. Forever keeping it in the mind by reading passages from the Bible, by talking about the "corruption of the human heart," of the "power of temptation," of the scarcity of virtue, of the plentifulness of vice--all these platitudes tend to produce exactly what they are directed against.

_Question_. I fear, Colonel, that I have surprised you into agreeing with a clergyman. The following are the points made by the Rev. Dr. Abbott in his editorial on the theatre, and it seems to me that you and he think very much alike--on that subject. The points are these:

1. It is not the function of the drama to teach moral lessons.

2. A moral lesson neither makes nor mars either a drama or a novel.

3. The moral quality of a play does not depend upon the result.

4. The real function of the drama is like that of the novel--not to amuse, not to excite; but to portray life, and so minister to it. And as virtue and vice, goodness and evil, are the great fundamental facts of life, they must, in either serious story or serious play, be portrayed. If they are so portrayed that the vice is alluring and the virtue repugnant, the play or story is immoral; if so portrayed that the vice is repellant and the virtue alluring, they play or story is moral.

5. The church has no occasion to ask the theatre to preach; though if it does preach we have a right to demand that its ethical doctrines be pure and high. But we have a right to demand that in its pictures of life it so portrays vice as to make it abhorrent, and so portrays virtue as to make it attractive.

_Answer_. I agree in most of what you have read, though I must confess that to find a minister agreeing with me, or to find myself agreeing with a minister, makes me a little uncertain. All art, in my judgment, is for the sake of expression--equally true of the drama as of painting and sculpture. No poem touches the human heart unless it touches the universal. It must, at some point, move in unison with the great ebb and flow of things. The same is true of the play, of a piece of music or a statue. I think that all real artists, in all departments, touch the universal and when they do the result is good; but the result need not have been a consideration. There is an old story that at first there was a temple erected upon the earth by God himself; that afterward this temple was shivered into countless pieces and distributed over the whole earth, and that all the rubies and diamonds and precious stones since found are parts of that temple. Now, if we could conceive of a building, or of anything involving all Art, and that it had been scattered abroad, then I would say that whoever find and portrays truthfully a thought, an emotion, a truth, has found and restored one of the jewels.

--_Dramatic Mirror_, New York, April 21, 1888.

PROTECTION AND FREE TRADE.

_Question_. Do you take much interest in politics, Colonel Ingersoll?

_Answer_. I take as much interest in politics as a Republican ought who expects nothing and who wants nothing for himself. I want to see this country again controlled by the Republican party. The present administration has not, in my judgment, the training and the political intelligence to decide upon the great economic and financial questions. There are a great many politicians and but few statesmen. Here, where men have to be elected every two or six years, there is hardly time for the officials to study statesmanship--they are busy laying pipes and fixing fences for the next election. Each one feels much like a monkey at a fair, on the top of a greased pole, and puts in the most of his time dodging stones and keeping from falling. I want to see the party in power best qualified, best equipped, to administer the Government.

_Question_. What do you think will be the particular issue of the coming campaign?

_Answer_. That question has already been answered. The great question will be the tariff. Mr. Cleveland imagines that the surplus can be gotten rid of by a reduction of the tariff. If the reduction is so great as to increase the demand for foreign articles, the probability is that the surplus will be increased. The surplus can surely be done away with by either of two methods; first make the tariff prohibitory; second, have no tariff. But if the tariff is just at that point where the foreign goods could pay it and yet undersell the American so as to stop home manufactures, then the surplus would increase.

As a rule we can depend on American competition to keep prices at a reasonable rate. When that fails we have at all times the governing power in our hands--that is to say, we can reduce the tariff. In other words, the tariff is not for the benefit of the manufacturer--the protection is not for the mechanic or the capitalist --it is for the whole country. I do not believe in protecting silk simply to help the town of Paterson, but I am for the protection of the manufacture, because, in my judgment, it helps the entire country, and because I know that it has given us a far better article of silk at a far lower price than we obtained before the establishment of those factories.

I believe in the protection of every industry that needs it, to the end that we may make use of every kind of brain and find use for all human capacities. In this way we will produce greater and better people. A nation of agriculturalists or a nation of mechanics would become narrow and small, but where everything is done, then the brain is cultivated on every side, from artisan to artist. That is to say, we become thinkers as well as workers; muscle and mind form a partnership.

I don't believe that England is particularly interested in the welfare of the United States. It never seemed probable to me that men like Godwin Smith sat up nights fearing that we in some way might injure ourselves. To use a phrase that will be understood by theologians at least, we ought to "copper" all English advice.

The free traders say that there ought to be no obstructions placed by governments between buyers and sellers. If we want to make the trade, of course there should be no obstruction, but if we prefer that Americans should trade with Americans--that Americans should make what Americans want--then, so far as trading with foreigners is concerned, there ought to be an obstruction.

I am satisfied that the United States could get along if the rest of the world should be submerged, and I want to see this country in such a condition that it can be independent of the rest of mankind.

There is more mechanical genius in the United States than in the rest of the world, and this genius has been fostered and developed by protection. The Democracy wish to throw all this away--to make useless this skill, this ingenuity, born of generations of application and thought. These deft and marvelous hands that create the countless things of use and beauty to be worth no more than the common hands of ignorant delvers and shovelers. To the extent that thought is mingled with labor, labor becomes honorable and its burden lighter.

Thousands of millions of dollars have been invested on the faith of this policy--millions and millions of people are this day earning their bread by reason of protection, and they are better housed and better fed and better clothed than any other workmen on the globe.

The intelligent people of this country will not be satisfied with President Cleveland's platform--with his free trade primer. They believe in good wages for good work, and they know that this is the richest nation in the world. The Republic is worth at least sixty billion dollars. This vast sum is the result of labor, and this labor has been protected either directly or indirectly. This vast sum has been made by the farmer, the mechanic, the laborer, the miner, the inventor.

Protection has given work and wages to the mechanic and a market to the farmer. The interests of all laborers in America--all men who work--are identical. If the farmer pays more for his plow he gets more for his plowing. In old times, when the South manufactured nothing and raised only raw material--for the reason that its labor was enslaved and could not be trusted with education enough to become skillful--it was in favor of free trade; it wanted to sell the raw material to England and buy the manufactured article where it could buy the cheapest. Even under those circumstances it was a short-sighted and unpatriotic policy. Now everything is changing in the South. They are beginning to see that he who simply raises raw material is destined to be forever poor. For instance, the farmer who sells corn will never get rich; the farmer should sell pork and beef and horses. So a nation, a State, that parts with its raw material, loses nearly all the profits, for the reason that the profit rises with the skill requisite to produce. It requires only brute strength to raise cotton; it requires something more to spin it, to weave it, and the more beautiful the fabric the greater the skill, and consequently the higher the wages and the greater the profit. In other words, the more thought is mingled with labor the more valuable is the result.

Besides all this, protection is the mother of economy; the cheapest at last, no matter whether the amount paid is less or more. It is far better for us to make glass than to sell sand to other countries; the profit on sand will be exceedingly small.

The interests of this country are united; they depend upon each other. You destroy one and the effect upon all the rest may be disastrous. Suppose we had free trade to-day, what would become of the manufacturing interests to-morrow? The value of property would fall thousands of millions of dollars in an instant. The fires would die out in thousands and thousands of furnaces, innumerable engines would stop, thousands and thousands would stop digging coal and iron and steel. What would the city that had been built up by the factories be worth? What would be the effect on farms in that neighborhood? What would be the effect on railroads, on freights, on business--what upon the towns through which they passed? Stop making iron in Pennsylvania, and the State would be bankrupt in an hour. Give us free trade, and New Jersey, Connecticut and many other States would not be worth one dollar an acre.

If a man will think of the connection between all industries--of the dependence and inter-dependence of each on all; of the subtle relations between all human pursuits--he will see that to destroy some of the grand interest makes financial ruin and desolation. I am not talking now about a tariff that is too high, because that tariff does not produce a surplus--neither am I asking to have that protected which needs no protection--I am only insisting that all the industries that have been fostered and that need protection should be protected, and that we should turn our attention to the interests of our own country, letting other nations take care of themselves. If every American would use only articles produced by Americans--if they would wear only American cloth, only American silk--if we would absolutely stand by each other, the prosperity of this nation would be the marvel of human history. We can live at home, and we have now the ingenuity, the intelligence, the industry to raise from nature everything that a nation needs.

_Question_. What have you to say about the claim that Mr. Cleveland does not propose free trade?

_Answer_. I suppose that he means what he said. His argument was all for free trade, and he endeavored to show to the farmer that he lost altogether more money by protection, because he paid a higher price for manufactured articles and received no more for what he had to sell. This certainly was an argument in favor of free trade. And there is no way to decrease the surplus except to prohibit the importation of foreign articles, which certainly Mr. Cleveland is not in favor of doing, or to reduce the tariff to a point so low that no matter how much may be imported the surplus will be reduced. If the message means anything it means free trade, and if there is any argument in it it is an argument in favor of absolutely free trade. The party, not willing to say "free trade" uses the word "reform." This is simply a mask and a pretence. The party knows that the President made a mistake. The party, however, is so situated that it cannot get rid of Cleveland, and consequently must take him with his mistake--they must take him with his message, and then show that all he intended by "free trade" was "reform."

_Question_. Who do you think ought to be nominated at Chicago?