Memoirs of a Superfluous Man

The art of aristocrats, the art of enriching life.

—MARY M. COLUM.

THE tenor of my intellectual life ran smoothly, being wholly self-directed up to my eighth year. My father’s library was large but unpretentious; it existed only for the sake of what lay between the book-covers. There was nothing in it to gratify a collector’s spirit; indeed, the collector’s spirit had no foothold anywhere in our family. One can understand book-collecting as a business, but only on the seller’s side, not the buyer’s, except as one would buy in order to sell; one can understand it, that is, as brokerage. I never knew a person who collected books, bric-à-brac, postage-stamps, anything, for the sheer sake of having them, who impressed me as being good for much else. True, I have not met many such, so I may be recording only a set of coincidences. Perhaps also my distaste for accumulating any kind of possessions has affected my judgement, though I am by no means persuaded that it has.

I read some books, looked into others, and looked at a great many, thus putting myself on the way to realising, as I did much later, the amount of education one gets by looking at the backs of books. One’s mind is broadened and loosened by simple observation of the immense variety of subjects that have engaged men’s attention. Then too it sometimes happens that the casual impressions made by certain subjects do something towards preparing the mind to receive more serious impressions later. As an illustration of this, I remember rummaging out a thin little elementary Hebrew grammar (I have no idea how such a thing happened to be there) and leafing it over by the light of a flickering momentary curiosity, then laying it aside for good and all. Years afterward, however, when an interest in Hebrew poetry caused me to do a little work on the language, I was astonished to see how much I remembered noticing on those few pages, and how clearly I remembered it.

Good literature was much easier come by in my early days than it is now, and it was also much cheaper. One reason for this was that the United States had no international copyright-law until some time in the early ‘nineties; American publishers could reproduce the works of foreign authors at no more than the cost of printing and binding. Concerns like the Seaside Library and Lovell’s Library drove a roaring trade in pirated books at ten cents a copy, paper-bound, or twenty cents for “double numbers.” Their lists were incredibly long. I got my first taste of French literature from a translation of Eugène Sue’s novel, The Wandering Jew, which the Seaside Library put out at twenty cents. The time I put on it was well spent, for in his architectonics Sue was unquestionably as great a storyteller as Dumas, though not so great in his management of detail. Curiously, I read nothing of Dumas until much later. I was fifteen when Monte-Cristo came my way via one of these cheap editions; and after that, nothing until I was past thirty. My first detective-story was Gaboriau’s gorgeous old shocker, File no. 113; it came to me by way of some pirated reprint, I think in the Seaside Library which also carried me through the infinite variety of Jules Verne.

We were all receleurs in those days. Not being a Benthamite, I am unable to defend literary piracy on high moral grounds, but I must admit that the massive testimony of our book-catalogues from, say, 1860 to 1890 comes nearer to making a complete case for the whole doctrine of expediency than anything else I know of. If Bentham’s “greatest good to the greatest number” sums up the whole canon of right and wrong, no more convincing evidence could be adduced. The foreign authors and publishers suffered, but as Bentham might have said, “what are they among so many?” Their loss was the gain of innumerable thousands. Probably American authorship also suffered by competition in a rigged market, though I do not remember that protectionist spellbinders ever brought this aspect of law-made privilege up to public notice.

Another reason why good literature was more easily accessible then than now is that the proportion of literacy in our population was much lower, and publishers were not under such heavy economic pressure to block up the access to good literature with trash. In Massachusetts, where literacy would be presumably highest, there were nearly a hundred thousand persons unable to read or write. Things were no better in Connecticut, where one-tenth of the child-population got no schooling at all; and it would be fair to suppose that in the more newly-settled regions of the country the level of literacy would be very considerably lower. One might assume that as the level of literacy rose, the level of general intelligence would rise with it, and consequently that the economic demand for good literature would also rise. This, roughly, was Mr. Jefferson’s idea, and indeed it has always been at the root of our system of free public instruction for everyone. It has, however, somehow failed to work out according to expectation. The level of literacy has been pushed up very nearly to the practicable limit, but the level of general intelligence seems not to have risen appreciably, and the economic demand for good literature is apparently no greater in relation to a population of a hundred and thirty million than it was to one that was going on for sixty million; in fact, one would say it is much less. The reason for this is plain enough; there is nothing recondite about it. In his view of literacy, Mr. Jefferson was only half right. He was obviously right in premising that no illiterate person can read; but he was guilty of a thundering non distributio medii in his tacit conclusion that any literate person can read. On the contrary, as I discovered as long ago as my undergraduate days, very few literate persons are able to read, very few indeed. This can be proven by observation and experiment of the simplest kind. I do not mean that the great majority are unable to read intelligently; I mean that they are unable to read at all—unable, that is, to carry away from a piece of printed matter anything like a correct idea of its content. They are more or less adept at passing printed matter through their minds, after a fashion, especially such matter as is addressed to mere sensation, (and knowledge of this fact is nine-tenths of a propagandist’s equipment), but this is not reading. Reading implies a use of the reflective faculty, and very few have that faculty developed much beyond the anthropoid stage, let alone possessing it at a stage of development which makes reading practicable.

As I said, the fact that few literate persons can read is easily determinable by experiment. What first put me on track of it was a remark by one of my old professors. He said that there were people so incompetent, so given to reading with their eyes and their emotions instead of with their brains, that they would accuse the Psalmist of atheism because he had written, “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.” The remark stuck by me, and I remember wondering at the time whether the trouble might be that such people hardly had the brains to read with. It seemed possible. At nearly the same time I came across the observation of Bishop Butler, who was for a few years a contemporary of Mr. Jefferson—he died in 1752, and Mr. Jefferson was born in 1743—the observation that most people were handier at passing things through their minds than they were at thinking about them; and therefore, considering the kind of thing they read, very little of their time was more idly spent than the time spent in reading. Again I wondered whether this could mainly be accounted for on the grounds of sheer inability to do otherwise. The curiosity excited by these two obiter dicta has caused me to keep a weather eye out on the reading-habits of my fellow-beings ever since, and they have testified with monotonous regularity to the fact that while the ability to read must presuppose literacy, literacy is no guarantee whatever of the ability to read, nor even would it suggest that ability to an ordinarily observant mind. One might suppose that so simple and easily demonstrable a fact as this would long ago have attracted attention and caused comment; but it seems not to have done so.

The ex-president of one of our colleges tells me that for a dozen years he carried on experiments in the value of literacy, using freshmen as his guinea-pigs; that is to say, he experimented on persons who were not only literate, but who had gone so far as to pass their entrance-examinations. Selecting a paragraph of very simple but non-sensational prose, he asked his students, taking them one by one, to read it carefully; then to read it carefully again; then to read it aloud to him; then to write down the gist of it in their own words. Hardly any one could do it; hardly any one was able to bring anything like an adequate power of reflective thought to bear upon the substance of a simple paragraph. In other words, they could not read.

II

Few diversions have interested and amused me more than watching the operation of Gresham’s law as it bore progressively on the permeation of a whole people by Mr. Jefferson’s faulty logic. Our primary assumption was that literacy is a good-in-itself, an absolute good; therefore everybody should be taught to read and write. Any question about this was inadmissible; any doubt that everybody could be so taught was disallowed. When I came on the scene, our system of popular instruction was driving straight ahead with all its might towards its goal of universal literacy, naïvely unaware that any such formidable obstacle as Gresham’s law lay in its way. True, this obstacle was not yet in plain view, but surely one would think that the collective foresight of a whole country would have suspected that it must be there. Plenty of bad literature was knocking about in my boyhood, but not enough of it to drive out the good; that is to say, nothing like the full force of Gresham’s law had as yet been brought to bear on literary production. Publishers could make a decent profit out of producing books designed, not for persons who were merely literate, but for a relatively small and steady market composed of persons who could read. But within my lifetime the country became largely literate, thus opening an immense market made up of persons who were unable to read but, as Bishop Butler said, were able to pass literary produce through their minds. As this market widened, the satisfaction of it became increasingly profitable, and therefore the best energies of publishers, dragooned under the iron hand of Gresham’s law, were bent that way. Moreover, this market was unsteady; being based on nothing but irrational fancy, it had its ups and downs, its hot and cold fits of susceptibility or indifference towards this-or-that type of produce, this-or-that lure of sensational appeal. Forecasting such a market became mostly guesswork, and the character of publishing changed considerably in consequence; from a business it became essentially a gamble bolstered by shrewdness in a meretricious mode of salesmanship. Thus the operation of Gresham’s law progressively edged publishers farther and farther out of the category of merchants, properly so called, and farther towards the category of gamblers and touts.

I have seen the fortunes of periodical publications follow the fortunes of books, showing even more clearly what the irresistible force of Gresham’s law can do. When literacy was at a low level they could maintain themselves at a high level of quality and command a fairly profitable market. As the level of literacy rose, their level of quality sank and their market thinned. In the middle ‘seventies, when our population was getting on for sixty million, Harper’s Magazine had a larger circulation by one-third than it has now over a population more than twice as large. Its average circulation from year to year for the first fifteen years of its existence, 1850-1865, was all of ten per cent more than its average for the fifteen years last past. In the matter of quality, Harper’s deserves all praise for standing out against deterioration as long as a ray of hope was left; yet comparing the issues for any year, say between 1875 and 1885, with those for any year between 1930 and 1940, a person of any literary experience can return but the one verdict.

I speak of Harper’s with deep affection because I knew it so well and owe it so much. We subscribed for it and also for Scribner’s Monthly, which in 1881 was merged into the Century. My father had volumes of these running back as far as 1873, Harper’s in austere black leather binding, and the others in dark red cloth ornamented in gold. Publishers of periodicals profited by our parochial copyright-law, like book-publishers. Harper’s, for instance, carried long serials in the magazine, then ran them off in book form from the same plates to sell at fifty cents in paper, $1.50 in cloth. At these prices the publishers could afford to pay the authors something, and I think Harper’s did pay some authors, though I am not sure about this being a regular practice; Thackeray, I know, was paid $2000 in 1858 for The Virginians. The Franklin Square Library, which the Harper brothers built up almost entirely out of British reprints, was several cuts above the Seaside and Lovell’s in workmanship. There is nothing like such commercial bookmaking being done today. Its contents also averaged higher, reproducing most of the first-class and second-class British fiction of the period. In the early days these magazines illustrated their pages lavishly with jack-knife pine board woodcuts which seem rather ridiculous now, but which have a certain antiquarian interest as giving an idea of the actual appearance of men and things at the time. Later the magazines did better; in the hands of Pennell, Frost, Abbey, illustrating showed itself as a great art.

Continental literature scarcely existed for us. On a mere perusal of our book-lists one could understand Matthew Arnold’s observation that in the things of the spirit America could hardly lay claim to be more than a province of England. Yet it was Scribner’s which fixed forever my veneration for Tourgueniev as incomparably the greatest of artists in fiction; it published a translation by Professor Boyesen of the two stories of the nobleman Tchertapkhanov, and the story called A Living Mummy, both from the Annals of a Sportsman. Harper’s gave me a translation of the beautiful little prose idyl of Germelshausen, from the German of Gerstäcker. Again, Scribner’s published a couple of delightful Flemish folk-tales, and a charming German legend of the water-princess Use. It also introduced me to Jules Verne through an abridged version of The Mysterious Island, run as a serial; which led to my reading every work of this truly fascinating man that I could get my hands on, and through the Seaside Library I got my hands on all of them, I believe, but two. Moreover, one of these periodicals,—I no longer remember which one,—brought me the affecting story of Mother Michel’s cat, so dear to the heart of French children. I have always been meaning to look this story up and find out what its source was. It may have been lifted from the Journal des Enfants, the first child’s periodical to appear in France, if not (as I think it was) the first to appear anywhere. None was ever better done or more successful. It was an enterprise of the able and fastidious Lautour-Mézerai, which brought him in $20,000 a year, even after paying men of letters like Paul Lacroix and Charles Nodier to write for it, and keeping up a solid backlog of best-sellers such as the elder Dumas, Léon Gozlan, Emile Souvestre and Eugène Sue. The joys and sorrows of Mother Michel’s cat made a story that was plenty good enough for the authorship of any of these, even as seen through the hazy medium of a translation.

In comparing Harper’s Magazine of that period with the Harper’s of today, one notices that the reader got about four times as much reading-matter to the issue as he gets now. Harper’s was lavish with serials; it ran them two and three abreast; and they were something which one could really call serials. Harper’s ran Thackeray’s Virginians through 1858, and in 1865 it ran Armadale and Our Mutual Friend side by side. The earliest volume to which I had access, the one for 1873, carried serials by Anne Thackeray, Wilkie Collins and Charles

Reade. Through subsequent volumes I got acquainted with George Eliot, Trollope, Miss Mulock, Professor James de Mille, (his fine old sob-starter, The Living Link, full of mystery and horror, ran through 1874), R. D. Blackmore, Thomas Hardy, and William Black, who sometimes put his heroes and heroines through most distressing situations. His Macleod of Dare, which ran as a serial, brought out a protest in verse from one of Harper’s readers. I can recall the first few lines of it:

O Mr. Black! Dear William Black!

Why will you be so blue?

For hypochondria’s deepest dye

Seems surely dyed in you.

Oh, why with living corpses fill

The darkling dreadful main,

Or fish them out again at will,

Only to go insane?

—I forget the rest. Black wrote good novels, however; his Madcap Violet, Kilmeny, A Princess of Thule, were good enough for anybody, and still are. In fact, the second-raters of the period were considerably bigger men than modern opinion credits them with being. One turned to them with especial relief after first-raters like Reade and Dickens were bitten by the bug of the Uplift and took to preaching. After Hard Times, for example, or Put Yourself In His Place, a turn at Shandon Bells or A Castle In Spain would taste uncommonly good. Only a few years ago, somewhere, somehow, I happened on an old novel by C. Welsh Mason, called Rape of the Gamp, which I had read as a boy; Harper’s serialised it in 1875. When I reread it I found that my childish impressions were correct; a cultivated reader of today would find more merit in it than he might expect. These disparaged second-raters seem to me to have understood the true function of the ποίησις as Aristotle and Hesiod expound it, much better than the first-raters who took to pulpiteering, and to have served it with far greater fidelity.

But it was not only fiction that Harper’s serialised. It serialised anything that was too good to be lost and too long to be run in one piece. Emilio Castelar’s work on the republican movement in Europe, still in many respects the best treatment of the subject, ran through ten or more issues; so did another elaborate historical serial called The First Century of the Republic. I recall one on house-furnishings; one on exploration in Central Africa; one called South Coast Saunterings in England; one on travel in Mexico; and one in particular called Recollections of an Old Stager. This was made up of informal backstairs gossip about actors who had strutted and fretted through their little hour on our political scene in the days of Webster, Clay and Calhoun.

One is struck by the scope of the older periodical, the range of topics it presents. It gives a vivid idea of the number of things in the world which are interesting to the best reason and spirit of man, and also gives a lively sense of how interesting they are. Again, one is impressed by the amount of material in it which is addressed to reflective thought, and is therefore as good and as fresh today as when it was first read, fifty or sixty years ago. The modern periodical is relatively devoid of such material; whereas in my youth, besides what magazines like Harper’s and the Century contained, we had three national monthly reviews, one of them very distinguished, which dealt in nothing else. Henry Adams said that the succession of Presidents from Washington to Grant was almost enough in itself to upset the whole Darwinian theory; and if he had lived to see the succession extended to the present time he would perhaps say it was quite enough. So one may say that the course of the North American Review from its illustrious editorship under Sparks, Everett, Dana, Lowell, Adams, down to the present time, is quite enough to upset the notion that universal literacy is an absolute good. The North American Review stands today as intellectual America’s most impressive monument to the genius of Sir Thomas Gresham.

In forming an editorial policy, the brothers Harper apparently decided that out of fifty million Americans, more or fewer, there were probably about 100,000 who could read, and that out of these there was a respectable number who enjoyed the exercise of reflective thought. They appear to have taken this hundred thousand as their prospective clientèle, and to have baited their trap with an appropriately diversified lure. The temporary abeyance of Gresham’s law enabled them to take this course and follow it profitably up to the last decade of the century. They could not do this now; no one could do it at any time these forty years.

The result was nuts for the inquiring disposition of a small shaver like myself. My parents took in St. Nicholas for me; I read it and liked it, but I had no such interest in it as I had in Harper’s and the Century. When I was through with an issue or a volume, I was through with it, while with the others I was never through, nor would I be through now if I could provide myself with a full file of Harper’s and the Century down to 1890. St. Nicholas left me where it found me; the others followed my growth. I have often thought that the most unfortunate thing about children’s literature is that it is written for children; when one ceases to be a child one has hardly anything left to go on with as a permanent asset. I read St. Nicholas for five or six years, and the only thing in it that I could read now was Lucretia Hale’s stories of the Peterkin family, and these, like Alice, the Bab Ballads and the Snark, were not written for children; children were rather their occasion than their cause. Possibly I could re-read Frank Stockton’s A Jolly Fellowship which ran as a serial in St. Nicholas, but I am not sure. I think I might, though I remember little about it, because I know that a year or so after I read it I did go back to it and read it again.

One of the luckiest strokes in an uncommonly lucky life was my liberty to wander freely over the field opened to me by Harper’s and the Century, especially by Harper’s. They gave me my start towards a sound sense of what culture is, and of how desirable it is. Long afterwards, when I found culture defined as knowledge of the best that has been thought and said in the world, I could appraise these publications at their true value. Their aim was to clear and strengthen this sense in those who to some degree presumably had it, and to arouse it in the casual person like myself, whom good fortune had somehow made eligible. The snippets which they distributed were a Vorspeise clipped off the best available for this general purpose; not always the best there was, perhaps, but the best that for one reason or another could be made serviceable.

Five years ago I spent a delightful summer in the truly delightful country of Portugal, where I saw a state of things which once more set me wondering about the actual net value of universal literacy in any society. Portugal was densely illiterate; apparently no one knew what the volume of illiteracy was, for I got all sorts of estimates on it, running anywhere from fifty to eighty per cent of the population. I missed the customary roadsigns and roadside advertisements; in fact, advertisements of any kind were strangely infrequent; and I was told that they would not pay because too few people could read them. I noticed the absence of anything like what we call “popular literature,” the production whereof has become so gigantic an industry with us. Lisbon had a newspaper which seemed fairly prosperous. Knowing no Portuguese, I floundered through one issue with what help I could muster from Latin, French and Italian, and gathered a provisional notion that it was pretty good, though it appeared to be written for a degree of intelligence somewhat above the ordinary, rather than for popular consumption. Its methods of distribution also indicated this, as well as I could make them out. I already knew that Portugal, as a French authority says, had une petite élite extrémement brillante et cultivée, and the evidence was overwhelming that this was the only possible clientèle towards which publishers might look.

One consequence of this interested me particularly. Lisbon’s population comes to something like half a million, and it is a considerable retail trading-centre for the country at large. I was there at rather a bad moment for trade; goods were moving slowly just then, and the commercial exhibits were not especially impressive, except in two lines where they were indeed impressive—jewellery and books. Judging in relation to the volume of population and the volume of literacy, I have never seen so many, so well-stocked, and so handsome bookstores in any city. Judging in the same way, I calculated that in order to match Lisbon, New York would have to show very nearly as many bookstores as it used to show beer-saloons in the days before Prohibition.

To me the implications of this were obvious and striking. I saw, however, that, (to use our current jargon), the more socially-minded and forward-looking Portuguese disregarded them, and that the country was out to follow the fashion of modern republics since 1789 by pressing for an indiscriminate spread of literacy. I could find no evidence that the wisdom of this course had been challenged or even considered; apparently Mr. Jefferson’s estimate of universal literacy’s value was taken as axiomatic. I thought that instead of going in for this policy hand-over-head and sight-unseen, the Portuguese might have been wiser first to examine it thoroughly by the light which the experience of other societies could throw on it; the experience of our own society especially, since we have been most heavily committed to that policy and have done most with it. I did not suggest this to my Portuguese friends, however; my opinion was not asked, nor would I have given it if it had been asked. I had no wish to wet-blanket the amiable and kindly Portuguese, nor did I have any exalted notion that I could or should enlighten them, least of all that it was my good-neighbourly duty to try; and a person who feels no such stirrings within him is a superfluous man in any Kulturkampf.

It is one of my oddest experiences that I have never been able to find any one who would tell me what the net social value of a compulsory universal literacy actually comes to when the balance of advantage and disadvantage is drawn, or wherein that value consists. The few Socratic questions which on occasion I have put to persons presumably able to tell me have always gone by the board. These persons seemed to think, like Protagoras on the teaching of virtue, that the thing was so self-evident and simple that I should know all about it without being told; but in the hardness of my head or heart I still do not find it so. Universal literacy helps business by extending the reach of advertising and increasing its force; and also in other ways. Beyond that I see nothing on the credit side. On the debit side, it enables scoundrels to beset, dishevel and debauch such intelligence as is in the power of the vast majority of mankind to exercise. There can be no doubt of this, for the evidence of it is daily spread wide before us on all sides. More than this, it makes many articulate who should not be so, and otherwise would not be so. It enables mediocrity and sub-mediocrity to run rampant, to the detriment of both intelligence and taste. In a word, it puts into a people’s hands an instrument which very few can use, but which everyone supposes himself fully able to use; and the mischief thus wrought is very great. My observations leave me no chance of doubt about the side on which the balance of social advantage lies, but I do not by any means insist that it does lie there.

III

When I was eight years old I began to study Latin and Greek under—what shall I say? Should I say under my father’s teaching, instruction, direction, supervision, tutorship? No, I have precisely the right word in mind, but unfortunately the dictionaries say it is not a good word; that is, they say so by implication, for they do not mention it at all. My able and distinguished friend Mr. Charles A. Beard long ago remarked to me how sorry he was that the word l’arn, so well and truly seasoned by hard service in New England, should have gone completely out of currency as a transitive verb. “You can’t teach a person anything,” he said, “and certainly you can’t learn him anything, but maybe you can l’arn him something.” There is a nice distinction here, and one so highly valuable as to seem especially well worth preserving for the sake of those whose concern with pedagogy is professional; and yet I suppose it is a dynasty of doctrinaire schoolmarms of both sexes which has done most to wipe it out.

I do not recall that my father ever taught me anything, but in the course of two years, no question, he l’arned me a huge deal of Greek and Latin. It was all done informally and briefly; he never tried to do more than keep my chin above water. We had no schedule, no fixed daily tasks, no regular hours. When he had time, he would ask me what I had been up to, try me out on the knotty bits to make sure I had got them properly straightened up, throw in a word or two here and there which usually anticipated something lying ahead, and that was all there was to it. In the first instance, my interest in these studies, or rather my curiosity about them, was sprung by noticing that the dictionary gave so many of our words as coming from these sources. Naturally, however, it was not long before I became interested in the languages on their own account and rather keen to know what the people who spoke them were like and what they did with themselves. For these reasons, I suppose, pottering about with the languages never seemed like work to me, and I can take no credit whatever to myself for any proficiency which may have come of it; no more than for my proficiency, or lack of proficiency, at billiards, baseball, tennis, teaching, writing, editing, or any one of the many pursuits to which I have set a ‘prentice hand in the course of my life. Certainly no one ever pointed my nose towards Rome and Athens; in fact, I had puzzled out the Greek alphabet correctly and memorised it before my father took hold, or, (I think), even before he noticed what I was about. I took up the job on my own, kept at it as I pleased, and was fully prepared to drop it if it failed to pan out. Apparently it is in the constitution of man that nothing done under these conditions seems like work. It may also be that these are the primary conditions requisite for l’arning a person something, and that l’arning him consists merely in taking advantage of them intelligently; but I do not know that this is so; it is only my opinion.

Being alone in my undertakings, I had the inestimable advantage of being unaffected by the law of diminishing returns. I got all I could take in of everything that was coming my way. Not until much later, when I had seen something of mass-education and observed its results, did I perceive how great this advantage is. With Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other, the student gets the best out of Hopkins and gets as much of it as he can absorb; the law of diminishing returns does not touch him. Add twenty students, and neither he nor the twenty gets the same thing; add two hundred, and it is luck if anybody gets anything remotely like the same thing. All Souls College, Oxford, planned better than it knew when it limited the number of its undergraduates to four; four is exactly the right number for any college which is really intent on getting results. Socrates chatting with a single protagonist meant one thing, and well did he know it. Socrates lecturing to a class of fifty would mean something woefully different, so he organised no class and did no lecturing. Jerusalem was a university town, and in a university every day is field-day for the law of diminishing returns. Jesus stayed away from Jerusalem, and talked with fishermen here and there, who seem to have pretty well got what He was driving at; some better than others, apparently, but all on the whole pretty well. And so we have it that unorganised Christianity was one thing, while organised Christianitv has consistently been another.

IV

It was while we were living in Brooklyn that politics first came under my conscious notice. I wrote an account of this in an essay published a dozen years ago, so I can do no better than to repeat the substance of it here. A short distance over the line which separated our semi-rural section from the more densely-populated central district of Brooklyn stood a ramshackle one-storey turtle-shaped wooden building known as the Wigwam. In some way I had heard it was a “political headquarters,” but I did not know what that meant, and was not interested enough to ask. It was an evil-looking affair, dirty and disreputable, and the people who frequented it looked to me even more disreputable than the premises. We children were never actually forbidden to investigate it, as far as I know, but I recollect my mother saying once in an off-hand way that it was a good place to keep away from. I believe none of us was ever inside it, or wished to be.

One summer a campaign came on. I think it may have been a Presidential year, but I am not sure; something at any rate important enough to stir up a great commotion in Brooklyn’s political circles. In the evenings the Wigwam became a kind of Malebolge, spewing up long columns of drunken loafers who marched and counter-marched, some carrying banners and transparencies, and others carrying tin torches that sent out clouds of kerosene-smoke. What first attracted my attention to these obscene performances was the sound of a steam-calliope at the head of a troop of marchers. I took this to mean that a circus-parade was going on, and when I went down there and found that there was no circus, I was disappointed and did not care what was taking place.

Thus my first impression of politics was unfavourable; and my disfavour was heightened by subsequently noticing that the people around me always spoke of politics and politicians in a tone of contempt. This was understandable. If all I had casually seen,—the Wigwam and its denizens, the processions of disgusting hoodlums who sweat and stank in the parboiling humidity of our Indian-summer nights,—if all this was of the essence of politics, if it was part and parcel of carrying on the country’s government, then obviously a decent person could find no place in politics, not even the place of an ordinary voter, for the forces of ignorance, brutality and indecency would outnumber him ten to one. Nevertheless there was an anomaly here. We were all supposed to respect our government and its laws, yet by all accounts those who were charged with the conduct of government and the making of its laws were most dreadful swine; indeed, the very conditions of their tenure precluded their being anything else. For a moment I wondered why this should be so; but my wonderment almost immediately petered out, and I did not brood over the rationâle of politics again for a great many years.

One incident of election night, however, stuck in my memory. Some devoted patriot, very far gone in whisky, wandered up in our direction and fell by the wayside in a vacant lot where he lay all night, mostly in a comatose state. At intervals of half an hour or so he roused himself up, apparently conscious that he was not doing his duty by the occasion, and tried to sing the chorus of “Marching Through Georgia,” but he could never get quite through the first three measures without relapsing into somnolence. It was very amusing; he always began so bravely and earnestly, and always faded out so lamentably.

Having devoted a great part of my latter years to a close observation of public affairs in many lands, I have often had occasion to remember that man. His sense of patriotism and patriotic duty still seems as intelligent and competent as that of any one I have met since then, and his mode of expressing it still seems as effective as any I could suggest.