and consumer. By sanitary and medical science the average length of
human life has been increased. Chemistry has taught us how to fertilize
the fields, forestry and engineering how to prevent both inundation
and drought, invention how to master the adverse forces of Nature and
make alliance with the friendly ones by labor-saving machinery, so that
the work of one man will now sustain many in idleness—with no lack of
persons who by birth, breeding, disposition and taste are eligible to
sustentation. The milder sway of modern government, the elimination
of the “gory tyrant” as a factor in the problem of existence and the
better protection of property and life have had, even directly, no
mean influence on the death rate. These and many other causes have
combined to make the conditions of life so comparatively easy that an
extraordinary impetus has been given to the business of living; mankind
may be said to have taken it up as a congenial pursuit. The cloud of
despair that shadowed the face of all Europe during those centuries
of misrule and ignorance fitly called the Dark Ages has lifted, and
multitudes are thronging into the sunshine. It is not a perfect beam,
but its warmth and lumination are incomparably superior to anything
of which the older generations ever dreamed. But the result is over
population, and the result of over population is war, pestilence,
famine, rapine, immorality, ignorance, anarchy, despotism, slavery,
decivilization—depopulation!

This is man’s eternal round; this is the course of “progress”; in this
circle moves the “march of mind.” The one goal of civilization is
barbarism; to the condition whence it emerged a nation must return, and
every invention, every discovery, every beneficent agency hastens the
inevitable end. An ancient civilization would last a thousand years;
confined to the same boundaries, a modern civilization would exhaust
itself in half that time; but by emigration and interchange we uphold
ourselves till all can go down together. One people cannot relapse till
all similar peoples are ready.

Already we discern ominous instances of the working of the universal
law. Consciously or unconsciously, all the modern statesmen of Europe
are contesting for “territorial aggrandizement.” They desire both
extension of boundaries and colonial possessions. They quarrel with the
statesmen of neighboring nations on this pretext and on that, and send
their armies of invasion to capture and hold provinces. They dispatch
their navies to distant seas to take possession of unconsidered
islands. They must have more of the earth’s surface upon which to
settle their surplus populations. All the wars of modern Europe have
that ultimate, underlying cause.

The battle knows not why it is fought. It is for standing room. If
it were not for the horrors of war the horrors of peace would be
appalling. Peace is more fatal than war, for all must die, and in peace
more are born. The bullet forestalls the pestilence by proffering a
cleaner and decenter death.

What has all this to do with the labor question? “Industrial
discontent” has many causes, but the chief is over-population. (In
this country it is as yet a “coming event,” but its approach is rapid,
and already it has “cast its shadow before.”) Where there are too many
producers they are thinned out to make an army, which serves the double
purpose of keeping the rest of them in subjection and resisting the
pressure from without. Armies are to fight with; no nation dares long
maintain one in idleness; it is too costly for a toy; the people burn
to see it put to practical use. They do not love it; they promise
themselves the advantage of seeing it killed; but when the killing
begins their blood is up and they want to go soldiering.

Our labor troubles—our strikes, boycotts, riots, dynamitation, can have
but one outcome. We are not exempt from the inexorable. We shall soon
hear a general clamor for increase of the army—to protect us against
aggression from the east and the west. We shall have the army.

That is as far as one cares to follow the current of events into the
dubious regions of prediction. What lies beyond is momentous enough
to be waited for; but any man who fails to discern the profound
significance of the events amongst which he is moving to-day may justly
boast himself impregnable to the light.

                                THE JEW

A noted Jewish rabbi has been uttering his mind concerning
“manufacturers of mixed marriages”—clergymen, that is to say, who marry
Christians to Jewesses and Jews to Christianesses. In the opinion
of this gentleman of God such marriages are accursed, and those of
his pious brethren who assist the devil in bringing them about are
imperfectly moral. Doubtless it is desirable that the parties to a
marriage should cherish the same form of religious error, lest in
their zeal to save each other’s immortal part they lay too free a hand
upon the part that is mortal. But domestic infelicity is not the evil
that the learned doctor has in apprehension: what he fears is nothing
less momentous than the extinction of Judaism! On consideration it
appears not unlikely that in a general blending of races that result
would ensue. But what then?—will the hand of some great anarch let the
curtain fall and universal darkness cover all? Will the passing of
Judaism be attended with such discomfortable befallings as the wreck
of matter and the crush of worlds?

Good old Father Time has seen the genesis, development, decay and
effacement of thousands of religions far more ancient and quite as
well credentialed as that of Israel. The most daring of that faith’s
expounders will hardly claim for it an age exceeding a half-dozen
millenniums; whereas the least venturesome anthropologian will affirm
for the human race an antiquity of hundreds. It is hardly likely that
the world has ever been without great religions, of which all but a few
(so new that they smell of paint and varnish) are as dead as the dodo.
No portents foreshadowed their extinction, no cataclysms followed. The
world went spinning round the sun in its immemorial way; men lived
and loved, fought, laughed, cursed, lied, gathered gold and dreamed
of an after-life as before. No mourners follow the hearse of a dead
religion, no burial service is read at the grave. Does the good rabbi
really believe that the faith which he professes, rooted in time, will
flourish in eternity? Can he suppose that its fate will be different
from that of its predecessors, whose temples, rearing their fronts in
great cities, the seats of mighty civilizations in every part of the
habitable globe, have perished with the empires that they adorned, and
left not a vestige nor a memory behind? Does he think that of all the
incalculable religions that have swept in successive dream-waves the
ocean of mystery his alone marks a continuous current setting toward
some shining shore of truth and life and bearing thither all ships
obedient to its trend?

I can not help thinking that the pious rabbi would better serve his
people by less zeal in broadening and blackening the delimiting lines
by which their foolish fathers circumscribed their sympathies and
interests and made their race a peculiar people, peculiarly disliked.
The best friend of the Jews is not he who confirms them in their narrow
and resented exclusiveness, but he who persuades them of its folly,
advises them to a larger life than is comprised in rites and rituals,
the ceremonies and symbolisms of a long-dead past, and strives to show
them that the world is wider than Judea and God more than a private
tutor to the children of Israel.

Why do they fear effacement by absorption? If the entire Jewish race
should disappear (as sooner or later all races do) that would not mean
that the Jews were dead, but that Judaism was dead. No single life
would have gone out because of that, and all that is good in the race
would live, suffusing and perhaps ennobling the characters of races
having still a name. All that is useful and true in Jewish law and
Jewish letters and Jewish art would be preserved to the world; the rest
could well be spared. Even the rabbis’ occupation would not be gone:
they would thrive as priests of another faith. Man is not likely to
cease forming himself into “congregations,” for he likes to see his
teachers “close to.” Even if preaching were abolished many kinds of
light and profitable employment would remain.

As matters now are, mixed marriages—between Jew and Gentile—are not to
be advised. But matters are now not as they should be, nor does our
holy friend’s teaching tend to make them so. Let the Jew learn why he
is subject to hate and persecution by the Gentile. It is not, as he
professes to think, and doubtless does think, because his ancestors,
ages ago, denied the Godhood and demanded the life of another Jew.
Other races and sects deny Christ without offense; and the Gentile who
daily crucifies him afresh is no less active in dislike of the Jew
than the most devout Christian of them all. Christ and Christianity
have nothing to do with it. Nor is the explanation found in the Jew’s
superior thrift, nor in any of those commercial qualities whereby,
legitimately or illegitimately, he gets the better of his Gentile
competitor; though those advantages too pitilessly used against
a stupid and improvident peasantry have sometimes compelled his
expatriation by sovereigns who cared no more what he believed than what
he ate.

The Christians will cease to dislike and persecute the Jews when
the Jews abandon their affronting claim to special and advantageous
relations with the Lord of All. The claim would be no less irritating
if well founded, as many Christians believe that once it was. When has
it not been observed that a favorite child is hated by its brothers and
sisters? Did not the brethren of Joseph seek his undoing? In missing
the lesson of it the Jew “recks not his own rede.” When was it not
thought an insult to say, “I am holier than thou,” and when did not
small minds “strike back” with brutal hands? The Christian mind is a
small mind, the Christian hand a brutal hand.

The Jew may reply: “I do not say so; in the pulpit I forbear to
denounce other peoples and other creeds as outside the law and devoid
of the divine grace.” In words he does not say so, but he says so with
emphasis in his care to preserve his racial and religious isolation; in
his practice of self-mutilation and the affronting reasons in which he
disguises his consciousness of the shame of it; in his maintenance of
a spiritual quarantine; in the diligence with which he repairs time’s
ravages in his Great Wall, lest Nature take advantage of the breach
and some caroling Gentile youth leap lightly through to claim a Jewish
maid. In a thousand ways, all having for purpose the safeguarding of
his racial isolation in a ghetto of his own invention, the orthodox
Jew shouts aloud his conviction of his superior holiness and peculiar
worth. Naturally, the echo is not unmixed with Christian denial,
formulated too frequently into unrighteous decrees by the voice of
authority.

None than I can have a greater regard for the Jewish character, as
found at its best in the higher types of the Jewish people, and not
found at all in those members of the race who alone are popularly
thought of as Jews. None than I can have a deeper detestation of
the spirit at the back of persecution of the Jews, in all its forms
and degrees. Rather than have a hand in it I would have no hand. Yet
I venture to say that if a high degree of contributory negligence,
constituting a veritable invitation to evil, is foolish the calamity
entailed is entitled to a place in the list of expectable phenomena;
and if a certain presumptuous self-righteousness is bad its natural and
inevitable punishment is not entirely undeserved.

In the mud that the Christian hand flings at the Jew there is a little
gold; in the Christian’s dislike of him there is what the assayers and
analysts call “a trace” of justice. He who thinks that whole races of
men, through long periods of time, hate for nothing has considered
history to little purpose and knows not well the constitution of
the human mind. It should seriously be considered whether, not the
chief, but the initial, fault may not be that of the Jew, who was not
always the unaggressive non-combatant, the long-suffering victim, that
centuries of oppression and repression have tended to make him. If we
may believe his own historical records, which the Christian holds in
even higher veneration than he does himself, he was once a very bad
neighbor. No worse calamity could then befall a feeble people than
the attention of an Israelite king. Believing themselves the salt of
the earth, his warlike subjects had always in pickle a rod for every
Gentile back. Every contiguous tribe which did not accept their God
incurred their savage hatred, expressed in incredible cruelties. They
ruled their little world with an iron hand, dealing damnation round and
forcing upon their neighbors a currency of bloody noses and cracked
crowns. Even now they have not renounced their irritating claim to
primacy in the scale of being, though no longer able to assert it with
fire and sword. It is significant, however, that here in the new world,
at a long remove from the inspiring scenes of their petty power and
gigantic woes—their parochial glory and imperial abjection—they have
somewhat abated the arrogance of their pretensions; and in obvious
consequence, the brutal Christian hand is lifted more languidly against
them in service of a softened resentment.

Being neither Christian nor Jew, and with only an intellectual
interest in their immemorial feud, I find in it, despite its most
tragic and pathetic incidents, something essentially comic—something
to bring a twinkle to the eye of an Apuleius and draw the merriment
of a Rabelais, “laughing sardonically in his easy chair.” That two
races of reasoning beings, inhabiting one small planet and having the
same sentiments, passions, virtues, vices and interests, should pass
loveless centuries, distrusting, hating and damaging each other is so
ludicrous a proposition that no degree of familiarity with it as a
fact suffices to deprive it altogether of its opéra bouffe character.
Nevertheless it is not to be laughed away. It must be dealt with
seriously, if at all; and it is encouraging to observe that more and
more it is taking attention in this country, where it can be considered
with less heat, and therefore more light, than elsewhere.

If the Jew cares for justice he must learn, first, that it does not
exist in this world, and second, that the least intolerable form of
injustice goes by favor with the hand of fellowship; and the hand of
fellowship is not offered to him who stands austerely apart saying: “I
am holier than thou.” America has given to the Jews political and civic
equality. If they want more more is attainable. But it is their move.

  1898.

               WHY THE HUMAN NOSE HAS A WESTERN EXPOSURE

When Bishop Berkeley had the good luck to write,

    Westward the course of empire takes it way,

he suggested a question which has not, to my knowledge, been adequately
answered: Why? Why do all the world’s peoples that move at all move
ever toward the west, a human tide, obedient to the suasion of some
mysterious power, setting up new “empires” superior to those enfeebled
by time, as is the fate of empires? Many a thoughtful observer has
confessed himself unable to name the law at the back or front of the
movement. Yet a law there must be: things of that kind do not come
about by accident.

A natural law is one thing, a cause is another, and the cause of this
universal tendency to “go West” may not lie too deep for discovery.
May it not be that the glory of the sunset has something to do with
it?—has all to do with it, for that matter. In civilization sunsets
count for little—we know too much. We know that the magical landscapes
of the sunset are “airy nothings”—optical illusions. But we inherit
instincts from primitive ancestors to whom they were less unreal. The
savage is a poet who

    Sees God in clouds, and hears Him in the wind,

reading into the visible aspects of nature many a meaning which in
the light of exact knowledge we have read out of them. Not a Grecian
of the whole imaginative race that had sight of Proteus rising from
the sea and heard old Triton blow his wreathèd horn could beat him at
that. He knows that beyond the mountains that he dares not scale, and
beyond the sea-horizon that he has not the means to transgress, lies a
land wherein are all beauty and possibilities of happiness. To him the
crimson lakes, purple promontories, golden coasts and happy isles of
cloudland are veritable presentments of actual regions below. He never
bothers his shaggy pate with the question “Can such things be?”—his
eyes tell him that they are. Why should he not have ever in heart the
wish to reach and occupy the delectable realm to which the sun daily
points the way and sometimes discloses? That is the way he feels about
it and his forefathers felt about it, as is shown in the myths and
legends of many tribes. And because they so felt we have from them the
wanderlust that lures us ever a-west.

To this hypothesis it may be objected that the cloudscapes of the
sunrise ought, logically, to offset the others, giving the race a
divided urge. But the primitive ancestor was not an early riser; he was
a notorious sluggard, as is the savage of to-day, and seldom saw the
sunrise—so seldom that its fascination did not get into the blood of
him and from his into ours. Even when he did see the cloudlands of the
dawn he was not in a frame of mind to observe them, being engrossed in
rounding up the early cave-bear or preparing an astonishment for his
sleeping enemy. But the chromatic glories of the country reflected in
the sunset sky took his attention when it was most alert. Moreover,
those of the dawn are distinctly inferior, as we are assured by
credible witnesses who have observed them, through the happy chance of
having been up all night companioning the katydids and whip-poor-wills.

                         Transcriber’s Notes:

  - Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).
  - Blank pages have been removed.
  - A few obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected,
    otherwise inconsistent spelling has been left as is.