 THE PASSIONS OF MEN ARE ACTORS, EVENTS ARE THEIR MOTIONS, ALL HISTORY IS THEIR SPEECH. IN THE LONG PLAY OF THE AGES A HUMAN BEING SOMETIMES BECOMES AN EVENT. A nation's passion takes a personnel. Such beings are the expression of the gathered mind-force of millions. He only who keeps himself aloof from all feeling can remain the spectator of the hour. All that humanity which is held within the beating, coiling, surging tides of passion has no individuality. It sinks its personality to become a vein in the limb of this giant, a pulse in the heart of that titan. Only when out of the spirit of the times the event is born, only when the act is complete, the curtain rung down, only then does the intellectuality of the vein, the pulse, rise to the level of the dispassionate. Only then can it survey a tragedy and say, this was necessary. A reaction and say, this was inevitable. Yet as a drop of blood is a quivering living flashing ruby beside the dead, pale pearl of a stagnant pool, so is one drop of feeling a shining thing, a living thing, beside the deadness of the intellect which judges while the heart is stone. Beside those quiet bayous of brain which reflect back the images of them very purely, very stillly, giving no heed to the great rushing river of heart that rolls on, hurries on so close beside them. By and by, by and by, the river reaches the grand great sea, and the water spread out calm and deep, so deep that the stars of the upper sea, the lights of the higher life, shine far up from them as a babe smiles up into its mother's eyes, and up still to the distant source of the light within the eyes. It is to men and women a feeling that I speak, men and women of the millions, men and women in the hurrying current, not to the shallow egotist who holds himself apart, and with the Phariseeism of intellectuality exclaims, I am more just than now. But to those whose every fibre of being is vibrating with emotion as aspen leaves quiver in the breath of storm. To those whose hearts swell with a pity at the pitiful toil of women, the weariness of young children, the handcuff helplessness of strong men. To those whose blood runs quick along the veins, like wildfire on the dry grass of prairies, when the wind whirls aside the smokings of a holocaust. And, courting the teeth of the flame, the black priestess, injustice, beckons it on while her feet stamp on the cinders of the sacrifice. To those whose heart strings thrill at the touch of love like the sweet, low, musical lack of childhood, or thrum with hate like the singing vibration of the bow springs speeding the arrow of death. I speak to those whose eyes behold all things through a haze of gray, or rose, or gold, born of their surroundings, and which miss slips away only when the gaze is leveled on that dead past whose passions and whose deeds are ended, to whom the present is always a mourning with the dimness of mourning around it, the past clear and still no veil on its face, for the veil has been shredded asunder. For he only who intensely perceives the nature of his surroundings, and he and he only who has felt, and keenly felt, all the throbs and throes of life, can judge with any degree of truth the action of that which is past. You, you who have loved, you who have joyed, you who have suffered, it belongs to you to people the silent streets of the silent cities with forms now vanished, to comprehend something of the passions which animated their action. It belongs to you to understand how the fury of a great energy, striking terrible aimless blows in the dark, may yet, across the chasm awful mistake, touch the hand of a greater justice. If from a panoramic survey of the past some wisdom may be gathered, then let the dramas of old ages tell us what have been the mainsprings of their motions, so we shall understand what action ushered in the drama of the nineteenth century. Westward the Star of Empire holds its way. Following the course of those majestic spheres of fire which whirl each in its vast ellipse, treading away in a long, southwesterly path athwart the heavens, obedient to that superior attraction which through all the universe holds good. The attraction of greater for lesser things, the tide of our life upon our world has risen and swelled and rolled away to the south and west. Away in the orient source of the sunlight, away where the glitter of eyes shines up to meet the morning, nations have risen and plunged down impetuously over the sleeping regions of darkness and of heat, bearing with them the breeze-stirring life of the north and the on-treading light of the east. And out of this conquered earth have arisen the mixed passions of another life and another race. Still the governing stars wheel on, and the tide of life which paused only to gather strength rolls up again, and once more a nation is born, and new passions dictate the action of the peoples. Down, down it sweeps over the Altaian hills, over the Himalayan ranges, over the land of the Euphrates and Tigris, over the deserts of Arabia the barren, the fields of Arabia the stony, and the grasses and waters of Arabia the happy, to those low shores the home of dark mausoleums and darker pyramids, on to the now classic land of Greece and golden Italy, and the home of the dark-eyed moors. Sweeps till it touches the frothing sea, and brightly born upon its upper crest shines the glory, the splendor, the magnificence of the warring powers which dictated the action of Greece and Rome. For centuries their hoisted spears send back the burnished glitter of the sun, and then the light dies out, down rushing from the north land again the tide of vigor pours, and the health and strength of barbarism conquers the weakness of a tottering civilization. Far away over the miles of sparkling sea, in the darkness and the silence, a continent lies waiting, waiting for the coming of the light, waiting for the swelling of the tide. Slowly at last a ripple creeps over the strange beach, and the flood rolls on, and again a continent becomes a cradle, and the empire star sends on its rays to kiss the forehead of the rising world, over the breath of all our continent that mighty wave is flowing still. Standing today almost upon the threshold of another world, and looking back down this long-visted past, gradually there dawns upon reflection's vision, gradually there grows out of the confusion of forms and the babble of sounds, a clearer perception of the motor powers which have dictated the action of this past, a better idea of the grand plot which, driven by these motor powers, the passions are working out. For above the long procession of scenes and events, above the monster massings of happiness and woe, above war and peace of centuries, above the nations that have risen and fallen, above the life and above the grave, the winged and shadowy embodiments of two great ideas float and rest, and those two principles are called authority and liberty, or if it please you better, God and liberty. The one is all clad in the purple and scarlet of pomp and of power, while the other stands a glorious shining center in the white radiance of freedom. Yet not always. Far back in time authority stood on thrones and altars, with the plumed sables of despotism waving on his brow, while in his hands he held two iron guides, the one to fetter thought, the other to fetter action, and these two guides were called the church and the state. Liberty, ah, liberty was then a name scarcely to pass the ships, dreamed of only in solitude, spoken of only in dungeons. Yet out of the blackest mire the whitest lily blooms, out of the dungeon, out of the sorrow, out of the sacrifice, out of the pain grew this child of the heart, and pure and strong she grew until the sabled plumes have tottered on the despot's brow, and a great palsy shakes the hands that once so firmly held the guives of church and state. Forever seeking to overthrow each other, the one for the aggrandizement of self, the other for the love of all mankind, these two powers have contended, and every energy, every passion, every desire, good or evil, has been ranged on this side or on that, blunderingly or wisely, and nations have swung to and fro in their breath as upon a hinge. And one by one the powers of authority have crippled, and step by step liberty has advanced, until today mankind is beginning to measure the forces that, struggling blindly together, are yet evolving light, to drink in the sublime ideal of freedom. Yet oh how long the struggle with vested ignorance, with greed and power! When upon the drama of the nineteenth century the curtain rose, liberty, triumphant on the younger shores, lay prone and hurled in Europe. Against fifteen centuries of crowned and throned and tithed curse and woe, unutterable, she had risen with such a fearful convulsive strength, that when she had moaned down king, priest and throne, and gorged the guillotine with blood, she sank back, exhausted from the struggle, and the hated tyrant rose again. The wild desire to conquer, to possess, to control, to hold in subjection, seemed to dominate with an unconquerable strength, and the gathered mind-force of millions of people wrought itself into the single brain of Napoleon Bonaparte. This human being became an event this nation's passion took a personnel. The spirit of the times produced this man, and authority smiled as one after another the despots of Europe plotted and planned, only to be overthrown by this incarnation of ambition, while the scenes were shifted from the vine-land to the rhineland, from the sun-land to the snow-land, and through them all the great event glowed out, lit high by the rust-red light. While well the plot was working, the empire triumphant, nations subjected, the fetter of action closing its terrible teeth, liberty manacled on the left, the armies of God massing their forces, advancing, preparing to close down the iron jaw of the iron guy upon the right, to imprison thought, to re-establish the union of fetters, to link up the broken chains, to burden human hope and human will and human life once more with the awful oppression of church and state. But liberty will not, cannot die. Wounded and bruised and pinioned sore, condemned to the use of instruments that were none of hers, she wrought with England's jealousy, with Wellington's emulation, with fear, with love, with hate. Impelled by one motive or another, the nations of the coalition moved in concert. Napoleon had been merango, he had been australitz, he became waterloo, and when across that awful field rolled the last long cannon-boom, when the silence settled, when the quick and the dead lay sleeping and the wounded died, justice and suffering touched hands across the gulf of blood, and liberty heard them whisper six semper tyranus. In the tableau that followed, she, the ideal of our dreams, still stood pale and fettered, but a smile lit up her face, and a light gleamed in her eyes, as she saw authority real and stagger from the blow-witch, though it did not sever, yet sheddered half the strength of both its fetters. For the strength of God lies in a vast unity, an ownership of ideas backed up by the brute force under the command of the individual in whom that ownership of ideas is vested. While the strength of liberty lies in the very essence of things themselves, the fact that no law or force can ever destroy the individualities of existence, and of necessity the natural tendency to break all bonds, which seek to control thought, and all force which locks up those bonds entailing liberty of action as the outcome of liberty of thought. And just in proportion as churches have become dismembered, and states have been broken up, no matter that each new church and each new state were but another form of despotism, just in that proportion has the principle of liberty been served, for each new religious establishment has been an assertion of the right to think differently from the fashionable creed. Each change has been a movement away from the centralization of power. So with Waterloo in the background, with authority lashed to impotent rage before it, and liberty pinioned, yet with the lit smile still upon her countenance, the tableau light flames up and dies, and the curtain falls upon the first great act. Those who think, those who feel, those who hope, know why that smile was there. For looking away over the long blue roll of water that swelled like an interlude between, she beheld the sublime opening scene of the act that followed. Far up the wonderful stage the distant mountains lift their circling crests. At their feet the water sweep like a march of music. Vast acres of untrodden grassland shower their emerald well. Nearer the front the lower hills rise up, and then the short Atlantic slope, all writhe with busy life, bends down to meet the sea. On the right the whorefrost sheens and shines on the majestic northern forests, while the glittering earth, dipped in its bath of frozen crystal, spreads like a field of diamonds. On the left the white flakes of the orange bloom fall like a shimmering bridal veil. The wind floats up like a perfume, and the lazy, lazy languor of warmth creeps all about. Behind it all, behind the hills and the prairies and the lifted summits, the mystical golden light of the West drops down, filling the dim lit distance with the glory of promise. The silver light of the Empire Star glides over the Atlantic slope, and its rays, like guiding fingers, point onward to the gathering shadows. Now the passions of men begin to move up this vast platform with an energy never before witnessed, diverted from their old-time channels of struggle against the oppression of gods and kings and the bitterness of birth-hatred, with a freedom of opportunity denied in the old world, and with such unstinted natural resources waiting for the magic transformer, the genius of humanity, ambition of power, avarice, pride, jealousy, all those motors born out of the old regime of a state-propped god, bred and multiplied through generations till they have come to be looked upon as natural laws of human existence, began to work together to plant this untrodden earth, to sow in its furrows the seed of a new erase, and paradoxical, as it may sound, to work for their own destruction, their final elimination from the human brain. Or perhaps it were more correct to say that with the barriers of old institutions taken away they naturally begin their retransformation into those beautiful sentiments from which they originally warped, distorted, misshapen by that warped, distorted, misshapen idea called God. So do they inaugurate the grand era of development. So do they answer the oft-repeated question, What incentive would there be for labor or genius if the institutions that compel them to struggle were broken down? Look at the stage of the past and see. Never before had thought been so free. Never before had ability been less cramped, less starved, or less compelled. And never before did genius dare so much for purposes so great. Never before did the engines which drive the tide of life along a continent send forth a stream of so much vigor. A new light breaks along the pathway of the stars, and swells and rolls and floods the great scene with a dawn burst so magnificent that the very hills blush in its rising splendor. It is the dawn which the night of God so long held shrouded. It is that which is born when superstition dies. It is that phoenix, which rises from the ashes of religion. It is that clear bent flame of all the great forces of nature, brought to the knowledge of mankind by delving reason, and shot like northern streamers from the heart of her the Church of God so long held throttled. Science. It is that which shone reflected in the eyes of liberty when pale and manacled she stood before the field of Waterloo. The ray of the under-earth came up to join the ray of the cloud shot down. The energies of sky and mine and sea were clasped to bring down the wealth of the mountains to the shore, and to transport the life of the now populous strip of slope to the unclaimed regions of the West. In the broad blaze of light the scene is shifted, the golden effulgence melts and flows around that sea-girdled kingdom, where quietly but surely the two great engines of authority are being shriven apart. The dynasties of kings are growing dusty, much of their power is but a legend. The Church is shrinking in her garments. The desires of this people are slow to move, but deeply rooted and strong, and so far as they have moved forward they have never moved back. There have been no gigantic strides, no reactions. Little by little the idea of divinely delegated power has been crippled till the English Bishop and the English Lord have become mere titled mockeries in comparison with their ancient feudal meaning. But stop! Close lying there, almost beneath her stretching shadows, another island flashes like a green star in its sea-blue setting. And from that island there rises up the cry of a great devotion, clinging blindly to its greatest curse, its priest-hedged God, while persecuting even unto death by the fanaticism of another faith, and the pleading of hunger while day-long and night-long the shuttle flies in the flax loom, and the earth yields her golden fruition, only to lay the ships that buried away from the famine-white lips and the toil-hardened hands that produced it. Early devotion prays to its God, that God whom it calls all wise, all powerful and all just, and the English Lord, who cannot thus subdue his own countrymen, reaches out the long arm of the law across the channel for his rent, and with God looking on it is given, and still, while the hollow-eyed women kneel at the altar for help, the scene widens out, and away in the distance the seven-hilled city lifts up from the sea, and from the dome of the Vatican, from that great mortared hill of God, the vicar of Christ calls out, my tribute, my Peter-pence, and with God looking on it is given, and then from the foot of that tear-stained altar, where so many lips of woe have pressed, where so many helpless hands have clasped, where so many hearts have broken, comes the ironical promise of Jehovah, ask and thou shalt receive. O God is a very promising personage, indeed, very promising, but like some of his disciples very poor pay. Liberty, shadowed, invisible, yet a muffled voice is repeating the words which not so long ago rang from the lips of one who stood almost beneath the shadow of the scaffold, who walks to-day in prison gloom. You see me only in your cells, you see me only in the grave, you see me only wandering lone beside the exile's sullen wave, ye fools! Do I not also live where ye have sought to pierce in vain? It's not a nook for me to dwell in every heart, in every brain. Not every brow that boldly thinks erect with manhood's honest pride does not each bosom shelter me that beats with honors generous tide. Not every workshop-burning woe, not every hut that harbors grief. Ha! Am I not the breath of life that pans and struggles for relief? Ah! Poor panting, struggling, misery laid in Ireland! How God laughs with glee to see his shackles wait your misery! The scene is shifting, the stage is darkening, a strange eclipse obscures the shafted light, darker, darker. Now a low red fire gleams like a winking eye along the foreground. It runs, it hisses like a snake. There another leaps up, there another, France, Germany, Italy, the continent blazes with the fires of the commune. That spirit which, drunken with blood, reeled from the guillotine at ninety-three, to be crushed beneath the upbuilding of the empire, has once more arisen. And out of the hot hells of fury, and jealousy, and hate, out of the pitiless struggle between vested rights and wrongs, with high ancestral lineage, and the great out-crying of a piteous ignorance against the oppression, whose injustice it feels, but cannot analyze, grows the sublime idea which priests have anethymized and states of outlawed, the sacred dogma of equality. Insofar as that ideal was made possible of conception, insofar as the masses began to understand something of the causes of their ills, insofar as the purpose of liberty was served, no matter that the arms of oppression were triumphant, the dawn of the thought of equal liberty upon the mass of the unthinking was a far greater victory than any triumph of arms. So when the fires died down, and the low reflection gleamed for an instant over those questant Indian valleys and Altian ranges, where the main plot of old centuries had been laid, and then paled out before the white flare lighting the tableau of the second act, liberty stood with chained hands lifted toward her enemy, while a proud look, playing like an iridescent flame in her eyes, said, playing as lips could speak it, I have unbound their thoughts, they will one day unbind my hands. Slowly the curtain falls on the fair prisoner and the flowering God. The solemn ocean interlude rolls in again. Then the rising curtain shows the curving slope, the rock romance of hills, the wide green valley with its threading silver, the sweeping mountains with the mirage of the blue Pacific lifted high in the sky behind them, the frosted pines, the orange groves. Moving upon the nearer stage two great masses of humanity are seen facing each other, the fires of ambition, of stubborn pride, of determination for the mastery flash like flint sparks in the eyes of both. Rage is gathering as the stage light darkens. Yet these two opposing forces are not all. From under the groves of bridal bloom comes a mournful, chant-like requiem. Under the bloom four million voices cry in pain. Upon the darkened faces, upturned that darkening day, fall the white petals helplessly as hope falls on the faces of the dead till I beside them. In the beautiful land of the sun four million human beings clank the chains of the chattel-slave. Ah, what music! Liberty! Liberty was a wraith, fleeting ghost-like through the lonely rice-swamps. Terrible, ignisfatuous of the quagmire, strange, mystical, banishing moon-shimmer on the darkly ominous waters lying so silent, so level, beneath the droop of Spanish moss and cypress. There it was they drove thee. There, there were the quaking earth shivered with its branded burden. Where the fever and the miasma were thy breathing, and thy sacred eyes were dimmed with winding sheets of mist that floated, oh, so dankly, oh, so coldly! A stream of tears that rose as fast as their doos might fall. There was thou exiled, thou the god-hunted, thou the law-driven, thou the immortal. Yet, oh, so dear men love thee, Liberty, that even here in thy last terrible citadel of woe, humanity linked arms with death and woe thee still. Woe thee with the ringing bay of bloodhounds in its ears. Woe thee with the wolf-hunger gnawing at its throat. Woe thee with the clinging miasma winding its anacondine folds around its fever-thin body. Woe thee with the dark pathos of a dying eye, while the diseased and hungered limbs lay stiffening in their agony. And thou was true, oh, Liberty! Out of thy bitter exile thou didst call to them, and point them on to hope, and thou didst call too to those strange-eyed dreamers, whose faces shone amidst the rank and file of those dominated by local hate alone, as shines a clear star among driving clouds. Against them authority has hurled his curses. Spit upon by the godly, despised by the law-abiding, yet they have dared to say to church and law, Think what you please of me but free the slave. I, the church persecuted, and the law hunted down, and for the love of God, men set traps to catch their fellow man. Even the wise men, the wise men at Washington, against whose mandates it is treason to speak. I, a matter for the scaffold in these days, even the wise men built a trap to uphold the divine institution, and sent it forth to the people labelled the Fugitive Slave Law, and as in other days human beings died for their opinions, but the opinions did not die. Has not one of our latter-day martyrs said, Men die, but principles live? See, the light which has been slowly fading from the right and left shines with a frightful brilliancy upon one point. North and south lie darkened, but harper's fairy glows. There is a wild, mad charge, a shifting of the light, a scaffold, a doomed old man bending his grand white head, to mount the fatal steps with a child slave's kiss yet warm upon his lips. And then only a dull, lifeless pendulum in human form, swinging to and fro. And the church and the law were satisfied, when those dumb lips were cold, and the dead limbs were stiff, and God and harper's fairy had no more to fear from old John Brown. But the church and the law have not always been wise, they have not always understood that the martyrs to creed and code have done as much by their death, for the propagation of their principles, as the martyrs of creed and code, and God and the state so to wind whose reaping was a terrible whirlwind when they hung John Brown. Across the dim platform the passions of hate and pride moved toward each other. It is the old combat of the forces of authority, each contending not for the vindication of right, but for the maintenance of power over the other. It is a terrific struggle of brute strength and strategy and cunning and ferocity, and well-might those who conceived the ideal beautiful of freedom shrink horror struck from the blood-soaked path their feet must tread to reach it. Not strange if some should pause and shudder and cry out, is it worth the sacrifice? But up from the dust where hope lay trodden, and out of the trenches where the sacrifice lay hid, and over the plains all scarred with bullets and plowed with shells, breathed the whisper, It is not bane. It was not in bane, for as at Waterloo the struggle of ambition against ambition defeated the first purpose of authority, the centralization of power, and gave a partial victory to her whom both hated, so Antietam, Fredericksburg, Vicksburg, Gettysburg, while in themselves representing only the British struggle of opposition, based on the desire to domineer, really wrought out the victory of that ideal which dwelt in the minds of those anethymized by God and outlawed by the State. For when the hot lips of the iron mouths grew cold, liberty forsook her lonely fastness, came forth upon the desolated plain, and mounting still to the summits of the blue-hazed hills looked away over the ruined homes, the depopulated cities, the gloom clouded faces, and though her tears fell fast, an ineffable tenderness shone upon her features as the torrent of pale light flowed round her form, defining its snow whiteness in relief against the sable of four million freedmen smiling over their stricken chains. Swiftly following the tablo fire comes the eastern scene, where in the very center of its power the church is shaken by an invader, and Garibaldi becomes the personnel of the event. Then follows the conclave of the Vatican, whereby that singular logic known to the Roman church, the vote of fallible beings renders the pope infallible. Upon the heels of this, the breaking of that strong tooth of the church in the expulsion of the order of the society of Jesus by the German Reichstag, and the overthrow of Kingcraft in France. The curtain falls. Behind the scene is being prepared for the last great act. And now, in the interval of waiting, let us think. So far we have been surveying the completed. While we can understand something of the passions which animated this past, we can feel something of the pulsations which throbbed in its arteries, flowed in its veins, yet we can speak of it without overriding a motion either upon one side or the other. The river of heart has reached the sea. The troubled waters have spread out deep, and up from their depths shine the still reflections of those great lights which guilt the stages of the past. Calmly now we can look at the reaction from the French Revolution to the Empire and say, this was inevitable. Of Napoleon's fall, this was necessary. Of the awakening of science, this was a natural result. Of the uprising of forty-eight, this was the premature birth of an idea forced upon the people by the oppression of authority. We can forget the choking agony of John Brown and declare his death of victory. We can look upon the awful waste of blood in the Civil War and say, it was pitiful, but the goblet of woe must needs have been spilled, full of red-life wine, ere the horse and hollow throat of tyranny were satisfied. We can see where each of the contending principles has lost and gained, and measuring the sum totals against each other must decide that the old despotism is losing ground, that instead of the supreme authority of God the supreme sovereignty of the individual is the growing idea. But now we have come to a stage where we can no longer be cool spectators. In what happens now we too must be part and parcel of the action. We too must hope and toil and struggle and suffer. We are no longer looking through the clear, still atmosphere of the dead. Beyond our forms the wheeling mists are circled, and before our eyes the haze lies thick, the haze of gold or the haze of gray. The dimness of the yet-to-be befolgs our sight, and the rush of hope and fear blinds all our faculties. You who stand well upon the heights of love, of comfort, of happiness, heeding not the darkness and the sorrow beneath you, behold, with upcast eyes, the great figures of God and freedom wound about, showered with light. To you there is no menace in their darting eyes. There is no purpose in their full-drawn statues. There is no jarring in their clarion voices. No, for your senses you are stupid in your luxury. Your brains are dulled, too dulled to think. Your ears are glutted with the ring of gold. In your vain and foolish hearts you dream that what you see there is a shadowy bridle, that there at last religion and science, statecraft and freedom, are meeting to embrace each other. Ah! Go on, bookmakers, press-writers, doctors and lawyers and preachers and teachers. Go on talking your incompatibilities. Go on teaching your absurdities. Dream out your short-lived dream. At your feet beneath the shadow of your capitals and domes, under the tuition of your few-facted, much-fictioned literature, from out your chaos of truth-flavored lies, from before your pulpits, your rostrums and your seats of learning, something is growing. Something that is looking you in the eyes, that is analyzing your statements, that is revolving your institutions in its brain, that is crushing your sofastries in its merciless machinery as fine as grain is ground between the whitened mill-rollers. Free thought is looking at you, gentlemen. More than that, it questions you. It puts you on the witness stand. It cross-examines you. It says, do you believe in God, and you answer, yes. Do you believe him to be omnipotent, omniscient, and all-just? Certainly. Less than this would not be God. Then you believe he has the power to order all things as he wills, and being all-just he wills all things according to justice? Yes. Then you believe him to be the impartially loving father of all his created children? Yes. And each one of those children has an equal right to life and liberty? Yes. Then look upon this earth beneath you, this earth of beings whose lives are of so poor account to you, and tell us, where is God, and what is he doing? Everyone has a right to life. What mockery? When the control of the necessaries of life is given to the few by the state, and above the seal of the law the priest has to set the seal of the church. Verily, you do take my life when you take that whereby I live. Is this your divine justice? What irony to tell me I am free if at that same time you have it in your power to withhold the means of my existence? Free! If you look down here at these whose side is shadowed with the ebb and shadows of despair, these, the homeless, the disinherited, the product of whose toil you take and leave them barely enough to live upon, live to toil on, and keep you in your luxury. You, the moneyed idlers, you, the bookmakers and the journalists, who do more to cry down truth, to laud our social lies, our economic despots and our pious frauds, than any other propaganda can. You, the doctors, whose drugs have cursed the world with poison-eaten bodies, corroded the health of unborn generations with your medicated slime, and when the sources of life have yielded to the hungry body so poor a stream that for lack of air and earth and sun and food and clothing and recreation, it drooped and sickened, to have bottled up some nauseating stuff, and with oracular wisdom have taught them to imagine it could undo what years of misery had done. You, the lawmakers, who have twisted nature's code till to be natural is to be criminal. You who have laud away the earth that was not yours to give. You who even seek to charter the sea and make the commandment across the middle of this river thou shalt not go, unless thou render tribute unto Caesar. You who never inquire what is justice but what is law. And you, the teachers, you who pray of the glory of knowledge as the remedy for the evils of the world, and boast your compulsory law of education, while a stronger law than all the wordy sentences ever graven upon statute books, is driving the children out of the school ground into the factory, into the sawmill, into the shaft, into the furrow, into the myriad camps of toil, to the dust of the wheel, to the heat of the furnace, till their pallid cheeks and bloodless lips are bleached like bones beneath the desert sun, and their clogged lungs rattle in their breathing pain. Will you look at these, the understratum of your social earth, and tell them they are free? Will you tell them ignorance is their greatest curse and education their only remedy? Will you say to these children, we have provided free schools for you, and now we compel you to attend them, whether you have anything to eat and wear or not? Will you tell these people, there is a good, kind, merciful God who loves them, meeting out justice to them from the skies? No, you will not. You cannot. The words will die upon your lips ere you utter them. Do you know what it is they see up there above you, they whose eyes look through the mist of gray and the shroud of darkness? They see your God of justice, a pitiless slave-driver, his church more brutal than the lash, his state more merciless than the bloodhound. They see themselves a thousand million serfs more hopelessly enthralled, more helplessly chained than even the lashed and tortured body of the chattel slave. For them there is no refuge, no escape. In every land the master rules. No fugitive slave-law need now be passed. There is no place to flee. The whole horizon is iron-bound. White and black alike are yoke together, and the master yields no distinction, shows no mercy. The bare pittance of existence is the mead for him who toils, and him who cannot, starvation. With a preacher to help him die. That is the justice that they see here in the shadowy lines above your golden haze. And they see, too, a conflict preparing between those two antagonistic forces such as never before the world has witnessed. They see your God concentrating his strength to fight so bitter a battle with liberty as shall crush the spirit of individuality forever from the race. They see him ranging his forces, those forces blood and brood through all the anguished past, the blacklist, the club, the sword, the rifle, the prison, I, the scaffold. They see them all, and know that ere your God will yield his vested rights. The noblest of the race will have been stricken. The most unselfish will have been tortured in his dungeons. The white robes of innocence will have been reddened in her own martyr's blood, and death will have shadowed many and many a home, unless you shall hearken to the voice of liberty and save yourselves while there is yet time. They see the wide stage spreading out. They see the passions moving over it. They see there, in the center, beneath the rolling brilliance of the Empire State, the tragic inauguration of the act. They see a grim and blackened thing, a silent thing, the demonic effigy of Torquemata spirit, the frozen laughter of the dark ages at our boasted civilization. They see twelve stolid fools before this nineteenth-century gallows. They see the hiding-place of that thing masquerading under the sacred name of justice, which shrinks even from the gaze of the lauding press and the imbecile jurymen, and does unknown its deed of murder. They see four shrouded forms. They hear four muffled voices, a broken sentence, and an awful hush. And then, O crowning irony of all, they see advancing to speak to them over the bodies of the murdered, and mowed back from a hundred pulpits comes the echo, Jehovah masked as Jesus. Ah, the divine cowardice of it! Mild is the light in the Nazarene eyes, tender the tone of the Nazarene voice. Ah, people whom I love, for whom my life was given long ago on cavalry, what rashness is it that you meditate? Is it that you are weary of the yoke of love I lay on you? Is this your faith? Have I not promised you a sweet release when your dark pilgrimage on earth is o'er? Exiles you are upon this world of pain, and if oppression comes to weigh you down, if hunger shows his long fangs at your hearth, if your chilled limbs are cramped with bitter cold, the while your neighbor hoards his fuel up, if you are driven out upon the street with crying children, clinging piteously, and begging you for shelter from the storm. If your hard toil is taken by the law to satisfy a corporation's greed, if fever and distress nudge your heart, and still you tread the weary wine-press out, knowing no rest until the death-hour comes, if all these things discourage and perplex, no tis for love of you I order it. For thus I would point you to paradise, win you from all pleasure of the world, and fix your hopes on heaven's eternity. Whom the Lord loveth, him he chasteneth. So then it is for love that these things are. For love of you I press your life-blood out. For love of you I load you down with pain. For love of you I take your rights away. For love of you I institute the law that slaves you to the grasping millionaire. For love of you I pile the glutted hordes of Vanderbilt and Goode and Rothschild and the rest. For love of you I rent the right to breathe in a poor tenement of dingy dirt. For love of you I make machines a curse. For love of you I make you toil long hours, and those who cannot toil I turn adrift to wander as they may. Sons into dens where thievery is learned as a fine art. Daughters to barter their virginity till competition forces down the price of lust, and death is left them as a last resort. Ah! what a golden crown and sweet-toned harp! What a resplendent white robe! Await the soul whom God so loves while on earth it dwells. I, for the love of you these men were murdered, and for my glory! And through my holy love they roast in hell. For they would take away the instruments whereby I lure you to my blessed abode. They would have taught you what your freedom meant. They would have told you to regain your rights. They would have contradicted my commands and lost you heaven. And if not heaven, hell! Keep to your faith, my people, trust in God. Break not the altars where your fathers knelt. Trust to your teachers. Keep within the law. Bow to the church and kiss the state's great toe. So shall good order be observed, obeyed, and as peace reigned in Warsaw, so anon shall peace, goodwill to men reign on the earth. These are the words that fall from the lips of him you call the merciful, the just. These are the sounds that sink into ears of those upon whose toil you are dependent for your existence. Judge you how they will be received. And now you, the dwellers on the lifted heights, listen to the voice that follows him, for these are words that concern you, and if you listen to their warning you may yet save yourselves the desolation and the ruin that otherwise must come. This deep, bell-peeling voice that echoes through the corridors of thought, till almost death's chill sleepers might arise again, is the voice which called for centuries to the empire, cease your oppressions or the people rise, and to the kingdom, curse not the new world with your tyrannies, it will rebel, and to the master, put not the lash upon your bonded slave, for the time will come when every stroke will rise like a warrior armed to burn and waste and kill. The empire laughed, the kingdom ignored, the planters sneered, but the time came when laugh and sneer died to white ashes. The time came when France got drunk with blood to vomit crime, when England lost the brightest jewel in her coronal, when the south waited in blood and tears and knelt her pride before a conqueror. And now she, the liberator, the destined conqueror of God calls out to you, yield up your sceptres ere they be torn from you, give back the stolen earth, the mine, the sea, give back the source of life, give back the light, for a black, bitter hour is waiting you, an awful gulf unfathomed in its depth, if you do not now pause and render justice. Ah, thou, whatever be thy awful name, which like a serpent's trail hath marked the earth, whether Jehovah, Buddha, Joss, or Christ. Thou who hast done for love what others do for most inventum tate, how hast thou hated these happy ones? Is this impartial justice, then, to these, to pour the golden treasures of the earth into their lips, that these may feast and toast and so forget thee and thy promised heaven? Truly thou hast been most unkind to them, since kindness means with thee a tearing out of even the heart and entrails of existence. Bah, how thou liest! To what most pitiable trick of speech has thou been forced? Thinkest thou the dwellers in the darkness longer take thy creed of crystalline deception? No, they laugh at thee, they spew thee out, they spit at thee. Say, look at this long procession coming here. Here are the murderers with their red-hued eyes. Here the adulterers with their lecherous glance. Here are the prostitutes with their mark of shame. Here are the gamblers with their itching hands. Here are the thieves with furtive lips and eyes. Here are the liars with their dastard tongues. Here all the train that crime can muster up reviews before thee. And after them a ghastly, fearful sight. Kill the victims of their blackened hearts, slain, ruined, desolated by thy love. And now, behold, another train comes on a train whose name is Legion. Here the dark, brooded faces from the mines. Here the hard, sun-brown cheeks from out the furrow. Here the dull visage from the lumber-camp. Here the wan eyes from the whirling factory. Here the gaunt giants from the furnace-fire. Here the tarred hands from off the steam and sea. Here all the aching limbs that stand behind the fashionable counter. Here, oh pitiful sight of all, those whose home is in the street, whose table is in the garbage-pile, the vast, helpless body of the unemployed. And ever as they march they drop and drop into the earth that swallows them, and over their graves the march goes on. These are thy victims, God. These are the creatures of thy church and law. Speak no more of the breaking of altars, thou who has broken every altar that the human heart holds dear. Take thy position at the head of the murderous column. And when thou hast marched away into the past, thou and thy preachers and thy praetors of justice, then will the earth return to justice and the great law of nature reign upon the earth. Then will her broad, green acres yield their wealth to him who toils and him alone. Then will the storehouses of nature yield her fuel and her light, not to the corporation whose high-priced lobbying can buy it. For in that time no wealth nor entry can purchase the heritage of all, but to all the sons and daughters of labour. And then upon this earth there shall be no hungry mouths, no freezing limbs, no children spending the hours of youth in gaining a miserable livelihood, no women crying, it's oh to be a slave, along with the barbarous Turk, where woman has never a soul to save if this is Christian work. No men wandering aimlessly in search of a master for their slavery. But oh, careless dwellers upon the heights, awaken now! Do not wait till reason, persuasion, judgment, coolness are swept down before the rising whirlwind. Bend your energies now to the eradication of the authority idea, to riding the wrongs of your fellow men. Do it for your own interest, for if you slumber on, ah, me, you will awaken one day, when an ominous rumble prefaces the waking of a terrific underground thunder, when the earth shakes in a frightful, odd fit, when from out the parched throats of the people a burning cry will come like lava from a crater, bread, bread, bread. No more preachers, no more politicians, no more lawyers, no more gods, no more heavens, no more promises, bread. And then when you hear a terrible laden groan, know that at last, here in your free America, beneath the floating banner of the stars and stripes, more than fifty million human hearts have burst, a dynamite bomb that will shock the continent to its foundations and knock the sea back from its shores. It is no boast, it is no threat, thus history's iron law decrees, the day grows hot, oh Babylon, tis cool beneath thy willow trees. End of the Drama of the Nineteenth Century. Let me make myself understood on two points now, so that when discussion arises later words may not be wasted in considering things not in question. First, how shall we measure doing well or doing ill? Second, what I mean by marriage. So much as I have been able to put together the pieces of the universe in my small head, there is no absolute right or wrong. There is only a relativity, depending on the consciously, though very slowly altering condition of a social race in respect to the rest of the world. Right and wrong are social conceptions. Mind, I do not say human conceptions. The names right and wrong truly are of human invention only. But the conception right and wrong, dimly or clearly, has been wrought out with more or less effectiveness by all intelligent social beings, and the definition of right as sealed and approved by the successful conduct of social beings is that mode of behavior which best serves the growing need of that society. As to what that need is, certainly it has been in the past and for the most part indicated by the unconscious response of the structure, social or individual, to the pressure of its environment. Up until a few years since, I believed with Huxley, Van Hartman and my teacher, Lum, that it was wholly so determined that consciousness might discern and obey or oppose, but had no voice in deciding the course of social development. If it decided to oppose, it did so to its own ruin, not to the modification of the unconsciously determined ideal. Of late years, I have been approaching the conclusion that consciousness has a continuously increasing part in the decision of social problems, that while it is a minor voice and must be for a long time to come, it is nevertheless the dawning power which threatens to over hurl old processes and old laws, and supplant them by other powers and other ideals. I know no more fascinating speculation than this of the role of consciousness in present and future revolution. However, it is not our present speculation. I speak of it only because in determining what constitutes well-being at present, I shall maintain that the old ideal has been considerably modified by unconscious reaction against the superfluities produced by unconscious striving towards a certain end. The question now becomes, what is the growing ideal of human society, unconsciously indicated and unconsciously discerned and illuminated? By all the readings of progress, this indication appears to be the free individual. A society whose economic, political, social, and sexual organization shall secure and constantly increase the scope of being to its several units, whose solidarity and continuity depend upon the free attraction of its component parts, and in no wise upon compulsory forms. Thus we are agreed that this is the discernible goal of our present social striving. There is no hope that we shall agree in the rest of the argument. For it would be vastly easy to prove that if the maintenance of the old divisions of society into classes, each with specialized services to perform, the priesthood, the military, the wage earner, the capitalist, the domestic servant, the breeder, etc., is in accord with the growing force of society, then marriage is the thing, and they who marry do well. But this is the point at which I stand, and from which I shall measure well and ill-doing, that the aim of social striving now is the free individual, implying all the conditions necessary to that freedom. Now the second thing. What shall we understand as marriage? Some fifteen or eighteen years ago when I had not been out of the convent long enough to forget its teachings, nor lived and experienced enough to work out my own definitions. I considered that marriage was a sacrament of the church, or it was civil ceremony performed by the state, by which a man and a woman were united for life, or until the divorce court separated them. With all the energy of a neophyte-free thinker, I attacked religious marriage as an unwarranted interference on the part of the priest with the affairs of individuals. Condemned the, until death do us part, promise as one of the immoralities which made a person a slave through all his future to his present feelings, and urge the miserable vulgarity of both the religious and civil ceremony by which the intimate personal relations of two individuals are made topic of comment and jest by the public. By all this I still hold. Nothing is more disgustingly vulgar to me than the so-called sacrament of marriage, outraging of all delicacy and the trumpeting of private matters in the general ear. Need I recall, for example, the unprinted and unprintable floating literature concerning the marriage of Alice Roosevelt, when the so-called American princess was targeted by every lewd jester in the country, because, forsooth, the whole world had to be informed of her forthcoming union with Mr. Longworth. But it is neither the religious nor the civil ceremony that I refer to now, when I say that those who marry do ill. The ceremony is only a form, a ghost, a meatless shell. By marriage I mean the real thing, the permanent relation of a man and a woman, sexual and economical, whereby the present home and family life is maintained. It is of no importance to me whether this is a polygamous, polyandric or monogamous marriage, nor whether it is blessed by a priest, permitted by a magistrate, contracted publicly or privately, or not contracted at all. It is the permanent, dependent relationship which I affirm is detrimental to the growth of individual character, and to which I am unequivocally opposed. Now my opponents know where to find me. In the old days to which I have eluded, I contended, warmly and sincerely, for the exclusive union of one man and one woman as long as they were held together by love, and for the dissolution of the arrangement upon the desire of either. We talked in those days most enthusiastically about the bond of love, and it only. Nowadays I would say that I prefer to see a marriage based purely on business considerations, than a marriage based on love. That is not because I am in the least concerned with the success of the marriage, but because I am concerned with the success of love, and I believe that the easiest, surest and most applicable method of killing love is marriage, marriage as I have defined it. I believe that the only way to preserve love in anything like the ecstatic condition which renders it worthy of a distinctive name, otherwise it is either lust or simply friendship, is to maintain the distances. Never allow love to be vulgarized by the indecencies of continuous close communion. Better to be in familiar contempt of your enemy than the one you love. I presume that some who are unacquainted with my opposition to legal and social forms are ready to exclaim, do you want to do away with the relation of the sexes altogether and cover the earth with monks and nuns? By no means. While I am not over and above anxious about the repopulation of the earth, and should not shed any tears if I knew that the last man had already been born, I am not advocating sexual total abstinence. If the advocates of marriage had merely to prove the case against complete sexual abstinence, their task would be easy. The statistics of insanity, and in general all manner of aberrations, would alone constitute a big item in the charge. No. I do not believe that the highest human being is the unsexed one, or the one who extirpates his passions by violence, whether religious or scientific violence. I would have people regard all their normal instincts in a normal way, neither gluttonizing nor starving them, neither exalting them beyond their true service, nor denouncing them as the servitors of evil, both of which mankind or want to do in considering the sexual passion. In short, I would have men and women so arrange their lives that they shall always, at all times, be free beings in this regard, as in all others. The limit of abstinence or indulgence can be fixed by the individual alone, what is normal for one being, excess for another, and what is excess at one period of life being normal at another. And as to the effects of such normal gratification of such normal appetite upon population, I would have them conscientiously controlled, as they can be, are to some extent now, and will be more and more through the progress of knowledge. The birth rate of France and of native-born Americans gives evidence of such conscious control. But, say the advocates of marriage, what is there in marriage to interfere with the free development of the individual? What does the free development of the individual mean, if not the expression of manhood and womanhood? And what is more essential to either than parentage and the rearing of young? But is it not the fact that the latter requires a period of from fifteen to twenty years the essential need which determines the permanent home? It is the scientific advocate of marriage that talks this way. The religious man bases his talk on the will of God, or some other such metaphysical matter. I do not concern myself with him. I concern myself only with those who contend that as man is the latest link in evolution, the same racial necessities which determine the social and sexual relations of allied races will be found shaping and determining these relations in man, and that, as we find among the higher animals that the period of rearing the young, to the point of caring for themselves, usually determines the period of conjugality. It must be concluded that the greater attainments of man, which have so greatly lengthened the educational period of youth, must likewise have fixed the permanent family relation as the ideal condition for humanity. This is but the conscious extension of what unconsciousness, or perhaps semi-conscious adaptation, had already determined for the higher animals, and in savage races to an extent. If people are reasonable, sensible, self-controlled, as to other people they will keep themselves anyway, no matter how things are arranged, does not the marriage state secure this great fundamental purpose of the primal social function, which is at the same time an imperative demand of individual development, better than any other arrangement. With all its failures, is it not the best that has been tried, or with our present light has been conceived? In endeavoring to prove the opposite of this contention, I shall not go to the failures to prove my point. It is not my purpose to show that a vast number of marriages do not succeed. The divorce court records do that. But as one swallow doesn't make a summer, nor a flock of swallows either. So divorces do not in themselves prove that marriage in itself is a bad thing. Only that a goodly number of individuals make mistakes. This is indeed an unanswerable argument against the indissolubility of marriage, but not against marriage itself. I will go to the successful marriages, the marriages in which whatever the friction man and wife have spent a great deal of agreeable time together, in which the family has been provided for by honest work decently paid, as the wage system goes, of the father, and preserved within the home by the saving labor and attention of the mother. The children given a reasonable education and started in life on their own account, and the old folks left to finish up life together, each resting secure in the knowledge that he has a tried friend until death severs the bond. This, I conceive, is the best form that marriage can present, and I opine it is often or dreamed of then realized. But sometimes it is realized, yet from the viewpoint that the object of life should be the development of individuality, such have lived less successfully than many who have not lived so happily. Welcome to the first great point, the point that the physical parentage is one of the fundamental necessities of self-expression. Here I think is where the factor of consciousness is in process of overturning the methods of life, life working unconsciously, blindly sought to preserve itself by generation, by manifold generation. The mind is simply staggered by the productivity of a single stalk of wheat, or of a fish, or of a queen bee, or of a man. One is smitten the appalling waste of generative effort, numbed with helpless pity for the little things, the infinitude of little lives, that must come forth and suffer and die of starvation, of exposure, as a prey to other creatures, and all to no end, but that out of the multitude a few may survive and continue the type. Man, at war with nature, and not yet master of the situation, obeyed the same instinct, and by prolific parentage maintained his war. To the Hebrew patriarch, as to the American pioneer, a large family man's strength, the wealth of brawn and sinew to continue the conquest of forest and field, it was the only resource against annihilation. Therefore the instinct towards physical creation was one of the most imperative determinants of action. Now the law of all instinct is, that it survives long after the necessity which created it has ceased to exist, and acts mischievously. The usual method of reckoning with such a survival, since such and such a thing exists, is an essential part of the structure, not obliged to account for itself and bound to be gratified. I am perfectly certain, however, that the more conscious consciousness becomes, or in other words, the more we become aware of the conditions of life and our relations therein, their new demands and the best way of fulfilling them, the more speedily will instincts no longer demanded be dissolved from the structure. How stands the war upon nature now? Why? So that short of a planetary catastrophe, we are certain of the conquest. Consciousness, the alert brain, the dominant will, invention, discovery, mastery of hidden forces, we are no longer compelled to use the blind method of limitless propagation to equip the race with hunters and trappers and fishers and sheepkeepers and soil tillers and breeders. For the original necessity which gave rise to the instinct of prolific parentage is gone. The instinct itself is bound to die, and is dying, but will die faster as men grasp more and more of the whole situation. In proportion as the parenthood of the brain becomes more and more prolific, as ideas spread, multiply and conquer, the necessity for great physical production declines. This is my first contention. Hence the development of individuality does no longer necessarily imply numerous children, nor indeed necessarily any children at all. That is not to say that no one will want children, nor to prophecy race suicide. It is simply to say that there will be fewer born, with better chances of surviving, developing and achieving. Indeed with all the clash of tendencies, the consciousness of our present society is having his driven home to it. Supposing that the majority will still desire, or let me go further and say, do still desire, this limited parentage. The question now becomes, is this the overshadowing need in the development of the individual? Or are there other needs equally imperative? If there are other needs equally imperative, must not these be taken equally into account in deciding the best manner of conducting one's life? If there are not other needs equally imperative, is it not still an open question whether the married state is the best means of securing it? In answering these questions, I think it will again be safe to separate into a majority and a minority. There will be a minority to whom the rearing of children will be the great dominant necessity of their being, and a majority to whom this will be one of their necessities. Now what are the other necessities, the other physical and mental appetites, the desire for food and raiment and housing after the individual's own taste, the desire for sexual association, not for reproduction, the artistic desires, the desire to know with its thousand ramifications which may carry the soul from the depths of the concrete to the heights of the abstract, the desire to do, that is, to imprint one's will upon the social structure, whether as a mechanical contriver, a force harnacer, a combiner, a dream translator, whatever may be the particular mode of the personal organization, the desire for food, shelter and raiment, it should at all times lie within the individual's power to furnish for himself. But the method of home keeping is such that after the relation has been maintained for a few years, the interdependence of one on the other has become so great that each is somewhat helpless when circumstance destroys the combination, the man less so, the woman wretchedly so. She has done one thing in a secluded sphere, and while she may have learned to do that thing well, which is not certain, the method of training is not at all satisfactory. It is not a thing which has equipped her with the confidence necessary to go about making an independent living. She is timid above all, incompetent to deal with the conditions of struggle. The world of production has swept past her. She knows nothing of it. On the other hand, what sort of an occupation is it for her to take domestic service under some other woman's rule? The conditions and pay of domestic service are such that every independent spirit would prefer to slave in a factory, where at least the slavery ends with the working hours. As for men, only a few days since a staunch free unionist told me, apparently without shame, that were it not for his wife he would be a tramp and a drunkard, simply because he is unable to keep a home. In his eyes the chief merit of the arrangement is that his stomach is properly cared for. This is a degree of helplessness which I should have thought he would have shrunk from admitting, but is nevertheless probably true. Now this is one of the greatest objections to the married condition, as it is to any other condition which produces like results. In choosing one's economic position in society, one should always bear in mind that it should be such as should leave the individual uncripled and all-around person, with both productive and preservative capacities. A being pivoted within. Concerning the sexual appetite, irrespective of reproduction, the advocates of marriage claim, and with some reason, that it tends to preserve normal appetite and satisfaction, and is both a physical and moral safeguard against excesses, with their attendant results, disease. That it does not do so entirely. We have ample and painful proof continuously before our eyes. As to what it may accomplish, it is almost impossible to find out the truth, for religious asceticism has so built the feeling of shame into the human mind on the subject of sex that the first instinct, when it is brought under discussion, seems to be to lie about it. This is especially the case with women. The majority of women usually wish to create the impression that they are devoid of sexual desires, and think they have paid the highest compliment to themselves when they say, Personally, I am very cold. I have never experienced such an attraction. Sometimes this is true, but oftener it is a lie. A lie born of centuries of the pernicious teachings of the church. A roundly developed person will understand that she pays no honor to herself by denying herself fullness of being, whether to herself or of herself. Though without doubt, where such a deficiency really exists, it may give room for an extra growth of some other qualities, perhaps of higher value. In general, however, notwithstanding women's lies, there is no such deficiency. In general, young, healthy beings of both sexes desire such relations. What then, is marriage the best answer to the need? Suppose they marry, say it twenty years, or thereabouts, which will be admitted as the time when sexual appetite is most active. The consequence is, I am just now leaving children out of account, that the two are thrown too much and too constantly in contact, and speedily exhaust the delight of each other's presence. Then irritations begin. The familiarities of life in common breed contempt. What was once a rare joy becomes a matter of course, and loses all its delicacy. Very often it becomes a physical torture to one, usually the woman, while it still retains some pleasure to the other, for the reason that bodies, like souls, do most seldom, almost never, parallel each other's development. And this lack of parallelism is the greatest argument to be produced against marriage. No matter how perfectly adapted to each other two people may be at any given time, it is not the slightest evidence that they will continue to be so. In no period of life is more deceptive as to what future development may be than the age I have just been speaking of. The age when physical desires and attractions being strongest, they obscure or hold an abeyance, the other elements of being. The terrible tragedies of sexual antipathy, mostly for shame's sake, will never be revealed, but they have filled the earth with murder. And even in those homes where harmony has been maintained, and all is apparently peaceful, it is mainly so through the resignation and self-suppression of either the man or the woman. One has consented to be largely effaced for the preservation of the family and social respect. But awful as these things are, these physical degradations, they are not so terrible as the ruined souls. When the period of physical predominance is passed, and soul tendencies begin more and more strongly to assert themselves. How dreadful is the recognition that one is bound by common parentage to one to remain in the constant company of one from whom one finds oneself going farther and farther away in thought every day. Not a day exclaim the advocates of free unions. I find such exclamation worse folly than the talk of holy matrimony believers. The bonds are there, the bonds of life in common, the love of the home built by joint labor, the habit of association independence. They are very real chains, finding both, and not to be thrown off lightly. Not in a day or a month, but only after long hesitation, struggle in grievous, grievous pain, can the wrench of separation come. Offener, it does not come at all. The chapter from the lives of two men recently deceased will illustrate my meaning. Ernest Crosby wedded, and I assume happily, to a lady of conservative thought and feeling, himself the conservative, came into his soul's own at the age of thirty-eight while occupying the position of judge of the international court at Cairo. From then on the whole radical world knows Ernest Crosby's work. Yet what a position was his compelled by honour to continue the functions of a social life which he disliked. To quote the words of his friend Leonard Abbott. A prisoner in his palatial home, waited on by servants and lackeys. Yet to the end he remained enslaved by his possessions. Had Crosby not been bound, had not union and family relations with one who holds very different views of life in faith and honour held him, should we not have had a very different life some? Like his great teacher Tolstoy, likewise made absurd, his life contradicted by his works, because of his union with a woman who has not developed along parallel lines. The second case, Hugh O. Pentecost. From the year 1887 on, whatever were his special tendencies, Pentecost was in the main a sympathiser with the struggle of labour, an opposer of oppression, persecution and prosecution in all forms. Yet through the influence of his family relations, because he felt in honour bound to provide greater material comfort and a better standing in society than the position of a radical speaker could give, he consented at one time to be the puppet of those he had most strenuously condemned, to become a district attorney, a prosecutor. And worse than that, depaint himself as a misled baby for having done the best act of his life to protest against the execution of the Chicago anarchists. That this influence was brought to bear upon him, I know from his own lips, repetition in a small way of the treason of Benedict Arnold, who for his Tory wife's sake laid everlasting infamy upon himself. I do not say there was no self-excusing in this, no Eve did tempt me taint, but surely it had its influence. I speak of these two men because these instances are well known, but everyone knows of such instances among more obscure persons, and often where the woman is the one whose higher nature is degraded by the bond between herself and her husband. And this is one side of the story. What of the other side? What of the conservative one who finds himself bound to one who outrages every principle in his or hers? People will not, and cannot, think and feel the same at the same moments throughout any considerable period of life, and therefore their moments of union should be rare and of no binding nature. I return to the subject of children. Since this also is a normal desire, can it not be gratified without the sacrifice of individual freedom required by marriage? I see no reason why it cannot. I believe that children may be as well brought up in an individual home, or in a communal home, as in a dual home, and that impressions of life will be far pleasanter if received in an atmosphere of freedom and independent strength, than in an atmosphere of secret repression and discontent. I have no very satisfactory solutions to offer to the various questions presented by the child problem, but neither do the advocates of marriage. Certain to me it is that no one of the demands of life should ever be answered in a manner to preclude future free development. I have seen no great success from the old method of raising children under the indissoluble marriage yoke of the parents. Our conservative parents probably consider their radical children great failures, though it probably does not occur to them that their system is in any way at fault. Neither have I observed a gain in the child of the free union. Neither have I observed that the individually raised child is any more likely to be a success or a failure. Up to the present no one has given a scientific answer to the child problem. Those papers which make a specialty of it, such as Lucifer, are full of guesses and theories and suggested experiments, but no infallible principles for the guidance of intentional or actual parents have as yet been worked out. Therefore I see no reason why the rest of life should be sacrificed to an uncertainty. That love and respect may last. I would have unions rare and impermanent. That life may grow. I would have men and women remain separate personalities. Have no common possessions with your lover more than you might freely have with one not your lover. As I believe that marriage stales love brings respect into contempt, outrages all the privacies and limits the growth of both parties, I believe that they who marry do ill. End of They Who Marry Do Ill, recording by Rhonda Federman.