Child and Country Part 11

"But as an investment--you see, that's where the Jerseys fall down--they don't weigh much at the butcher's."

The styles change more slowly in the country.... I found this good economy so prevalent as to be rather high for humour. In fact, that's exactly why you can't get "grand" stakes in the country.... I related the episode to a man interested in the prevention of cruelty. He said:

"Don't blame it all on the country. I saw one of those butcher's abominations in a city street yesterday--cart with crate, new calf inside, old moaning mammy dragged after to the slaughter--a very interesting tumbril, but she hadn't conspired against the government.

For a year she had given the best of her body to nourish that little bewildered bit of veal--and now we were to eat what was left of her....

Also I pa.s.sed through a certain railway yard of a big city last holidays. You recall the zero weather? Tier on tier of crated live chickens were piled there awaiting s.h.i.+pment--crushed into eight-inch crates, so that they could not lift their heads. Poe pictured an atrocious horror like that--a man being held in a torture-cell in such a position that he could not stand erect. It almost broke a man's nerve, to say nothing of his neck, just to read about it.... I had seen this thing before--yet never as this time. Queer how these things happen! A man must see a thing like that just right, in full meaning, and then tell it again and again--until enough others see, to make it dangerous to s.h.i.+p that way. I got the idea then, 'Suppose a man would make it his life-work to change those crates--to make those crates such a stench and abomination, that poultry butchers would not dare use them. What a worthy life work that would be!...' And then I thought, 'Why leave it for the other fellow?...' The personal relation is everything," he concluded.

There was something round and equable about this man's talk, and about his creeds. He was "out for the chickens," as he expressed it. This task came to him and he refused to dodge. Perhaps he will be the last to see the big thing that he is doing, for he is in the ruck of it. And then very often a man sets out to find a pa.s.sage to India and gets a New World. In any case, to put four inches on the chicken-crates of America is very much a man's job, when one considers the relation of tariff to bulk in freight and express.

Yet there is _efficiency_ even to that added expenditure--a very thrilling one, if the public would just stop once and think. If you have ever felt the heat of anger rising in your breast, given way to it, and suffered the la.s.situde and self-hatred of reaction, it will be easy for you to believe the demonstrable truth that anger is a poison. Fear is another; and the breaking down of tissue as a result of continued torture is caused by still another poison. The point is that we consume these poisons. The government is very active in preventing certain diseased meats from reaching our tables, but these of fear, rage, blood-madness and last-days-of-agony are subtler diseases which have so far had little elucidation.

Though this is not a plea for vegetarianism, one should not be allowed to forget too long the tens of thousands of men and boys who are engaged in slaughtering--nor the slaughtered.... Long ago there was a story of an opera cloak for which fifty birds of paradise gave their life and bloom. It went around the world, that story, and there is much beauty in the wild to-day because of it. The trade in plumes has suffered. Styles change--but there is much Persian lamb still worn. Perhaps in good time the Messiah of the lambs will come forth, as the half-frozen chickens found theirs in the city yards.

The economical end will not cover all the sins; that is, the repression of cruelty on an efficiency basis. Repressed cruelty will not altogether clear the air, nor laws. A true human heart cannot find its peace, merely because cruelty is concealed. There was a time when we only hoped to spare the helpless creatures a t.i.the of their suffering, but that will not suffice now. A clean-up is demanded and the forces are at work to bring it about.

Formerly it was granted that man's rise was mainly on the necks of his beasts, but that conception is losing ground. Formerly, it was enough for us to call attention on the street to the whip of a brutal driver, but it has been found that more is required. You may threaten him with the police, even with lynching; you may frighten him away from his manhandling for the moment--but in some alley, he is alone with his horse afterward. His rage has only been flamed by resistance met. It is he who puts the poor creature to bed.

The fear of punishment has always been ineffectual in preventing crime, for the reason that the very pa.s.sion responsible for the crime masters the fear.... It is difficult to discuss these ravages on a purely physical basis, for the ramifications of cruelty are c.u.mulatively intense, the higher they are carried. Ignorance is not alone the lack of knowing things; it is the coa.r.s.eness of fibre which resists all the fairer and finer bits of human reality. Just so long as men fail to master the animals of which they are composed, the poor beasts about them will be harrowingly treated.

So there are many arms to the campaign. Specific facts must be supplied for the ignorant, an increasingly effective effort toward the general education of the public; but the central energy must be spent in lifting the human heart into warmth and sensitiveness.

On a recent January night, an animal welfare society had a call to one of the city freight-yards where a carload of horses was said to be freezing to death. It was not a false alarm. The agents knew that these were not valuable horses. Good stock is not s.h.i.+pped in this precarious fas.h.i.+on. It was a load of the feeble and the aged and maimed--with a few days' work left in them, if continuously whipped, gathered from the fields and small towns by buyers who could realise a dollar or two above the price of the hide--to meet the demand of the alley-minded of the big city. The hard part is that it costs just as much pain for such beasts to freeze to death, in the early stages, at least. The investment would have been entirely spoiled had it been necessary to furnish blankets for the s.h.i.+pment.

The public reading a story of this adventure, remarks, "Why, I thought all that was stopped long ago----"

Just as underwriters will gamble on anything, even to insure a s.h.i.+p that is to run a blockade, if the premium is right--so will a certain element of trade take a chance on s.h.i.+pping such horses, until the majority of people are awake and responsive to the impulses of humanity. It isn't being sanctified to be above cruelty; it is only the beginning of manhood proper.

The newspapers and all publicity methods are of great service, but the mightiest effort is to lift the majority of the people out of the lethargy which renders them immune to pangs of the daily spectacle. The remarkable part is that the people are ready, but they expect the stimulus to come from without instead of from within.

Custom is a formidable enemy--that herd instinct of a people which causes it to accept as right the methods of the many. Farmers to-day everywhere are following the manner of Devlin; yet the story brings out the lineaments of most shocking and unforgettable cruelty. How can one expect effective revulsion on the part of a band of medical students when the bearded elders bend peering over their vivisections? What are children to do when their parents shout _mad-dog_ and run for clubs and pitch-forks at the pa.s.sing of a thirst-frenzied brute; or the teamster when the blacksmith does not know the anatomy of a horse's foot?

Ignorance is the mother of cruelty, and custom is the father.

The great truths that will fall in due time upon all the sciences--upon astronomy, pathology, even upon criminology--are the results of flashes of intuition. Again and again this is so. The material mind is proof against intuition, and of necessity cruel. It keeps on with its burnings, its lancings, its brandings, its collections of skulls and cadavers, until its particular enlightener appears. The dreadful thing to consider is that each department of cruelty brings its activity up into a frightful state of custom and action, before the exposures begin.

Which brings us to the very pith of the endeavour: The child is ready to change--that is the whole story. The child is fluid, volatile, receptive to reason. In all our world-life there is nothing so ostentatiously or calamitously amiss as the ignorance and customs of our relation to children. The child will change in a day. The child is ready for the beauty and the mystery of mercy. The prison-house must not be closed to sensitiveness and intuition. If that can be prevented the problem of animal welfare is solved, and in the end we will find that much more has been done for our children than for the animals. So often again we set out to discover the pa.s.sage to India and reach the sh.o.r.es of a New World.

14

CHILDREN CHANGE

The first of the young men to come to Stonestudy followed an attraction which has never been quite definite to me. He was strongly educated, having studied art and life at Columbia and other places. His chief interest at first appeared to be in the oriental philosophy which he alleged to have found in my work. After that he intimated that he aspired to write. The second young man came from Dakota, also a college-bred. A teacher there wrote to me about him. I looked at some of his work, and I found in it potentialities of illimitable promise. I was not so excited as I would have been had I not met this discovery in other cases from the generation behind us. Their fleets are upon every sea.

The need of a living was somehow arranged, I worked with the two a while in the evening on short ma.n.u.script matters. In fact, the dollar-end has not pinched so far; and they help a while in the garden in the afternoons, designating the period, Track, as they named the little cla.s.s after mid-day, Chapel. At first, I was in doubt as to whether they really belonged to the cla.s.s. It was primarily designed for the younger minds--and I was unwilling to change that.

You would think it rather difficult--I know I did--to bring the work in one cla.s.s for ages ranging from eleven to twice that. I said to the young men:

"Of course it is _their_ hour. I don't want to bore you, but come if you like. Be free to discontinue, if what you get isn't worth the time. As for me--the young ones come first, and I am not yet ready for two cla.s.ses."

They smiled. About a week later, they came in a half-hour late. It happened we had been having an exceptionally good hour.

"I would rather have you not come, if you cannot come on time," I said.

They sat down without any explanation. It was long afterward that I heard they had been busy about a trunk; that their delay had been unavoidable in getting it through customs, a barbarous and war-making inconvenience which cannot flourish much longer. And one day we went out into the garden together for the hoes, and the Dakota young man said:

"Chapel is the best hour of the day----"

He said more, and it surprised me from one who talked so rarely. This younger generation, as I have said, has an impediment of speech. It is not glib nor explanatory.... One of the happiest things that has ever befallen me is the spirit of the Chapel. It happened that The Abbot brought in a bit of work that repeated a rather tiresome kind of mis-technicality--an error, I had pointed out to him before. I took him to task--lit into him with some force upon his particular needs of _staying down_ a little each day--or the world would never hear his voice.... In the silence I found that the pain was no more his than the others in the room--that they were all sustaining him, their hearts like a hammock for him, their minds in a tensity for me to stop.... I did.

The fact is, I choked at the discovery.... They were very far from any compet.i.tive ideal. They were one--and there's something immortal about that. It gave me the glimpse of what the world will some time be. There is nothing that so thrills as the many made one.... Power bulks even from this little group; the sense of self flees away; the glow suffuses all things--and we rise together--a gold light in the room that will come to all the world.

It is worth dwelling upon--this spirit of the Chapel.... The war has since come to the world, and many who are already toiling for the reconstruction write to the Study from time to time--from different parts of the world. I read the cla.s.s a letter recently from a young woman in England. It was like the cry of a soul, and as I looked up from the paper, a glow was upon their faces. A group of workers in the Western coast send us their letters and actions from time to time, and another group from Was.h.i.+ngton. All these are placed before the Chapel kindred for inspiration and aliment.

"As this is the time for you to be here," I said one day, "the time shall come for you to go forth. All that you are bringing to yourselves from these days must be tried out in the larger fields of the world. You will meet the world in your periods of maturity and genius--at the time of the world's greatest need. That is a clue to the splendid quality of the elect of the generation to which you belong. You are watching the end of the bleakest and most terrible age--the breaking down at last of an iron age. It has shattered into the terrible disorder of continental battlefields. But you belong to the builders, whose names will be called afterward."

... I have come to the Chapel torn and troubled; and the spirit of it has calmed and restored me. They are so ready; they listen and give....

We watch the world tearing down--from this quietude. We have no country but G.o.d's country. Though we live in the midst of partisans.h.i.+p and madness, we turn our eyes ahead and build our thoughts upon the New Age--just children.

... For almost a year I had been preparing a large rose-bed--draining, under-developing the clay, softening the humus. The bed must be developed first. The world is interested only in the bloom, in the fruit, but the florists talk together upon their work before the plants are set. The roses answered--almost wonderfully. They brought me the old romance of France and memories of the Ireland that has vanished. This point was touched upon in the Foreword--how in the joy of the roses that answered months after the labour was forgotten, it suddenly occurred what a marvel is the culture of the human soul.

The preparation of the mind is paramount. Not a touch of care or a drop of richness is lost; not an ideal fails. These young minds bring me the thoughts I have forgotten--fruited thoughts from their own boughs. They are but awakened. They are not different from other children. Again and again it has come to me from the wonderful unfoldings under my eyes, that for centuries the world has been maiming its children--that only those who were wonderfully strong could escape, and become articulate as men.

Again, the splendid fact is that children change. You touch their minds and they are not the same the next day.

... I do not see how preachers talk Sunday after Sunday to congregations, which, though edified, return to their same little questionable ways. There are people in the cults who come to teachers and leaders to be ignited. They swim away with the new message; they love it and are lifted, but it subsides within them. In their depression and darkness they seek the outer ignition again. We must be self-starters.... I once had a cla.s.s of men and women in the city. We met weekly and some of the evenings were full of delight and aspiration.

For two winter seasons we carried on the work. After a long summer we met together and even in the joy of reunion, I found many caught in their different conventions--world ways, the obvious and the temporal, as if we had never breathed the open together. It was one of the great lessons to me--to deal with the younger generation. I sometimes think the younger the better. I have recalled again and again the significance of the Catholic priests' saying--"Give us your child until he is seven only----"

In one year I have been so accustomed to see young people change--to watch the expression of their splendid inimitable selves, that it comes like a grim horror how the myriads of children are literally sealed in the world.

We believe that G.o.d is in everything; that we would be fools, or at best innocuous angels if there were not evil in the world for us to be ground upon and master. We are held and refined between the two attractions--one of the earth and the other a spiritual uplift. We believe that the sense of Unity is the first deep breath of the soul, the precursor of illumination; that the great Brotherhood conception must come from this sense. Next to this realisation, we believe that man's idea of time is an illusion, that immortality is here and now; that nothing can happen to us that is not the right good thing; that the farther and faster we go, the more beautiful and subtle is the system of tests which are played upon us; that our first business in life is to reconcile these tests to our days and hours, to understand and regard them from the standpoint of an unbroken life, not as a three-score-and-ten adventure here. You would think these things hard to understand--they are not. The littlest ones have it--the two small boys of seven and nine, who have not regularly entered the Chapel.

The little girl brought us some of these thoughts in her own way, and without t.i.tle:

The soul is very old. It has much to say, if one learns to listen. If one makes his body fine, he can listen better. And if one's body is fine from the beginning, it is because he has learned to listen before. All that we have learned in past ages is coiled within. The good a man does is all kept in the soul, and all his lessons. The little fairy people that played around him and told him queer things when he was first a rock, then flowers and trees, are still printed in his soul. The difficult thing is to bring them out into the world, to tell them. By listening, in time, the soul's wonderful old voice will tell us all things, so that we can write and tell about them. Every thought we try so hard to get, is there. It is like losing track of a thimble. If you know it is somewhere and you need it badly enough, you will find it.

The brain cannot get for us a mighty thought. The brain can only translate soul-talk into words. It was not the _brain_ which told Fichte, a long, long time ago, that Germany was going wrong and that _he_ should fix it by telling them the right way to go; but it was the brain that told the people not to listen to him, but to go on just as they had been.

It is always the brain that makes one add columns correctly, and learn the number tables and how to spell words. But these will come themselves, without a life spent studying them.

After a life of this kind, the soul is not a bit farther ahead than it was when coming into the world in the body of a baby.

The brain will also show one the way to make money, perhaps lots of it, the most terrible thing that can happen to you, unless, as Whitman says, "you shall scatter with lavish hand all that you earn or achieve."