The Forerunner Part 30

She stiffened a little at this rather tame ending. She was stirred, uneasy, dissatisfied. She felt as if something had been offered and withdrawn; something was lacking.

"It seems such a funny business--for a man," she said.

"Any funnier than Delmonico's?" he asked. "It's a business that takes some ability--witness the many failures. It is certainly useful. And it pays--amazingly."

"I thought it was real estate," she insisted.

"It is. I'm in a real estate office. I buy and sell houses--that's how I came to take this up!"

He rose up, calmly and methodically, walked over to the fire, and laid his notebook on it. "There wasn't any strength in any of those objections, my dear," said he. "Especially the first one. Previous marriage, indeed! You have never been married before. You are going to be--now."

It was some weeks after that marriage that she suddenly turned upon him--as suddenly as one can turn upon a person whose arms are about one--demanding.

"And why don't you smoke?--You never told me!"

"I shouldn't like to kiss you so well if you smoked!"--said he.

"I never had any idea," she ventured after a while, "that it could be--like this."

LOCKED INSIDE

She beats upon her bolted door, With faint weak hands; Drearily walks the narrow floor; Sullenly sits, blank walls before; Despairing stands.

Life calls her, Duty, Pleasure, Gain-- Her dreams respond; But the blank daylights wax and wane, Dull peace, sharp agony, slow pain-- No hope beyond.

Till she comes a thought! She lifts her head, The world grows wide!

A voice--as if clear words were said-- "Your door, o long imprisoned, Is locked inside!"

PRIVATE MORALITY AND PUBLIC IMMORALITY

There is more sense in that convenient trick of blaming "the old Adam"

for our misbehavior than some of us have thought. That most culpable sinner we no longer see as a white-souled adult baby, living on uncooked food in a newmade garden, but as a husky, hairy, highly carnivorous and bloodthirsty biped, just learning his giant strength, and exercising it like a giant.

Growing self-conscious and intelligent, he developed an ethical sense, and built up system after system of morals, all closely calculated to advance his interests in this world or the next. The morals of the early Hebrews, for instance, with which we are most familiar, were strictly adjusted to their personal profit; their conception of Diety definitely engaging to furnish protection and reward in return for specified virtuous conduct.

This is all reasonable and right in its way. If good conduct were not ultimately advantageous it would not be good. The difficulty with the ancient scheme of morality lies in its narrow range. "The soul that sinneth it shall die," is the definite statement; the individual is the one taken to task, threatened, promised, exhorted and punished. Our whole race-habit of thought on questions of morality is personal. When goodness is considered it is "my" goodness or "your" goodness--not ours; and sins are supposed to be promptly traceable to sinners; visible, catchable, hangable sinners in the flesh. We have no mental machinery capable of grasping the commonest instances of collective sin; large, public continuing sin, to which thousands contribute, for generations upon generations; and under the consequences of which more thousands suffer for succeeding centuries. Yet public evils are what society suffer from most to-day, and must suffer from most in increasing ratio, as years pa.s.s.

In concrete instance, we are most definitely clear as to the verb "to steal." This is wrong. It says so in the Bible. It if a very simple commandment. If a man steals he is a thief. And our law following slowly along after our moral sense, punishes stealing. But it is one man stealing from one other man who is a thief. It is the personal attack upon personal property, done all at once, which we can see, feel, and understand. Let a number of men in combination gradually alienate the property of a number of other men--a very large number of other men, and our moral sense makes no remark. This is not intended in any ironic sense--it is a plain fact, a physiological, or psychological fact.

The racial mind, long accustomed to attach moral values to personal acts only, cannot, without definite effort, learn to attach them to collective acts. We can do it, in crude instances, when mere numbers are in question and the offence is a plain one. If a number of men in a visible moving group commit murder or arson before our eyes, we had as lief hang a dozen as one: but when it comes to tracing complicity and responsibility in the deaths of a few screaming tenants of firetrap tenements, a death unnecessary perhaps, but for the bursting of the fire hose--then we are at fault. The cringing wretch who lit the oilsoaked rags in the cellar we seize in triumph. He did it. Him we can hang.

"The soul that sinneth it shall die." But if the fire is "an accident,"

owing to "a defective flue," if the fire-escape breaks, the stairs give away under a little extra weight, or ill-built walls crumble prematurely--who can we lay hands on? Where is the soul that sinneth?

Our brains are not trained to follow a complex moral relation; we travel in the deep ruts of mental habit as old as Adam aforesaid. Our sense of duty, of obligation, of blame or praise is all hopelessly egotistic.

"Who is to blame?" we continue to say; when we should say, "Who are to blame?" One heavy dose of poison resulting in one corpse shows us murder. A thousand tiny doses of poison, concealed in parcels of food, resulting in the lowered vitality, increased illness and decreased efficiency of thousands of persons, shows us nothing. There is need to-day for very honest mental effort in readjusting our moral sense so that we may recognize social evils, social offenders and social responsibility.

Here we are all together, rising and falling in ma.s.ses under the influence of other person's conduct, with no possibility of tracing the death of this particular baby to the dirty hands of that particular milker of far-off cows. It wasn't murder--he never saw the baby. You can't hang a man for not washing his hands. We see babies die, look in vain for the soul that sinneth, and do nothing.

We should have a poor opinion of any state where there was no moral sense ai all, no weight of public opinion to uphold standards, no measures to protect innocence and punish crime. This we should call barbarism or savagery, and feel proud of our Christian civilization, where we legislate so profusely and punish so severely--when we can lay hands on individual offenders, whose crimes, though small, are at least whole ones. But we are in precisely that state of barbarism in regard to the fractional crimes of our complex social life.

If seven doctors in succession refuse to answer a poor man's call and he dies for lack of medical aid--who has killed him? Has he seven murderers--or is each doctor one-seventh of a murderer? Or is it not murder at all just to let a man die?

If again, the doctor does his duty and the man dies because the medicine given him was different from what the doctor ordered--a cheaper, weaker drug, an adulteration or subst.i.tute--then who killed him? The druggist who sold--the clerk who put up the prescription--the advertiser of the stuff--the manufacturer of it--or those who live on money invested in the manufacturing company? "The clerk!" we cry, delightedly. "He put up the poison! He knew it was not what was ordered! He did it with his hands!" "The soul that sinneth _it_ shall die." And perhaps it does--or at least the body of it. Yet the same drug goes on poisoning.

We might perhaps pa.s.s on from that s.h.a.ggy Adam of our remote past and his necessary limitations, and begin to study the real relation of human beings in modern life, learning at last that human conduct changes as society develops, that morality is no longer a mere matter of "thou shalt" and "thou shalt not," but a vast complex of mutually interactive conduct in which personal responsibility has small place.

Take an evil like our railroad management with its yearly tale of bloodshed and dismemberment, its hundreds and thousands of killed and wounded. We cannot pick out and hang a director or president when the dead brakeman is dragged out from between the cars that did not have automatic couplers. The man is dead, is killed, is murdered--but we cannot fix responsibility. Can we arrest for murder the poor mother who is caring for her boy sick with typhoid fever; just because she empties slops on a watershed that feeds a little brook, that feeds a river, that feeds a city--and thousands die of that widespread disease? She is not personally guilty of murder. There are others in plenty between her and the victim and many back of her to blame for her ignorance. Who can untangle the responsibility for the ruin of a girl who was utterly untaught, underpaid, improperly dressed, ill-fed, influenced by every gorgeously dressed idle woman who stood before her counter, and tempted by many men in turn? There is the one "sin"--but is she the only "sinner"?

Consider the two awful instances of recent date--the Iroquois Theatre fire in Chicago, the Sloc.u.m disaster in New York. Even if it were possible to "fix responsibility," to find the one person, or more than one whom we could prove to blame for these holocausts, what could we do to these persons as fit punishment for such an injury to society? If we could devise tortures prolonged and painful enough to make such criminals feel as felt their dying victims, what good would that do? It would raise no dead, restore no health, prevent no repet.i.tion of similar horrors. That much has been established by the history of our primitive systems--punishment does not prevent.

What does?

Here is the real question for society to ask--Adam did not know enough.

The age of personal morals is the age of personal punishment. The age of recognized public evils is the age of prevention. This we are beginning to see, beginning to do. After the Iroquois fire we were more stringent in guarding our theatres. After the Sloc.u.m disaster the inspection of steamships was more thorough. After the slaughter of the innocents in the burning schoolhouse, many other school buildings were condemned and more were safeguarded.

But this is only a beginning--a feeble, temporary, ineffectual effort.

Social morality does not consist in spasmodic attempts to be good, following upon some terrible catastrophe. A mother's duty to a child is not mere pa.s.sionate protection after it has fallen through the ice; the soldier's duty is not confined to wild efforts to recover the flag after it has been lost. We have a constant definite active duty to society, each one of us; there lies our responsibility and failing therein is our fault.

When men or women fail in full honest efficient performance of their social service, which means their special kind of work, they sin--if we must call it sin--against society. Better drop the very name and thought of "sin" and say merely, "Why are we to-day so inefficient and unreliable in our social duty?" For reason good. We are not taught social duty. For further reason that we are taught much that militates against it. Our social instinct is not yet strong enough to push and pull us into perfect relation with one another without conscious effort.

We need to be taught from infancy, which way our duty lies--the most imperative duty of a human creature--to give his life's best service to humanity.

This would call for new standards in the nursery, the school and the shop, as well as the platform, press and pulpit. That is our crying need; a truer standard of duty, and the proper development of it. The School City is a step this way, a long one; as is the George Junior Republic and other specific instances of effort to bring out the social sense.

But it is in our work that we need it most. From babyhood we should be taught that we are here dependent on one another, beautifully specialized that we may serve one another; owing to the State, our great centralized body, the whole service of our lives. What every common soldier knows and most of them practice is surely not too difficult for a common business man. Our public duty is most simple and clear--to do our best work for the service of the world. And our personal sin--the one sin against humanity--is to let that miserable puny outgrown Ego--our exaggerated sense of personality--divert us from that service.

[Unt.i.tled]

With G.o.d Above--Beneath--Beside-- Without--Within--and Everywhere; Rising with the resistless tide Of life, and Sure of Getting There.

Patient with Nature's long delay, Proud of our conscious upward swing; Not sorry for a single day, And Not Afraid of Anything!

With Motherhood at last awake-- With Power to Do and Light to See-- Women may now begin to Make The People we are Meant to Be!

THE HUMANNESS OF WOMEN