 This is the LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. This recording is by Mark Smith of Simpsonville, South Carolina. Abraham Lincoln, on the subject of taxation in order to fund a government, to the people of Illinois, 1843. The system of loans is but temporary in its nature and must soon explode. It is a system not only ruinous while it lasts, but one that must soon fail and leave us destitute. As an individual who undertakes to live by borrowing soon finds his original means devoured by interest, and next no one left to borrow from, so must it be with a government. We repeat then that a tariff sufficient for revenue, or a direct tax, must soon be resorted to, and indeed we believe this alternative is now denied by no one. But which system shall be adopted? Some of our opponents in theory admit the propriety of a tariff sufficient for revenue, but even they will not in practice vote for such a tariff, while others boldly advocate direct taxation. Inasmuch, therefore, as some of them boldly advocate direct taxation, and all the rest, or so nearly all as to make exceptions needless, refuse to adopt the tariff, we think it is doing them no injustice to class them all as advocates of direct taxation. Indeed, we believe they are only delaying an open avowal of the system till they can assure themselves that the people will tolerate it. Let us then briefly compare the two systems. The tariff is the cheaper system, because the duties, being collected in large parcels, at a few commercial points, will require comparatively few officers in their collection. While by the direct tax system the land must be literally covered with assessors and collectors, going forth like swarms of Egyptian locusts, devouring every blade of grass and other green thing. And again, by the tariff system the whole revenue is paid by the consumers of foreign goods, and those chiefly the luxuries, and not the necessaries of life. By this system the man who contents himself to live upon the products of his own country pays nothing at all, and surely that country is extensive enough, and its products abundant and varied enough to answer all the real wants of its people. In short, by this system the burden of revenue falls almost entirely on the wealthy and luxurious few, while the substantial and labouring many, who live at home and upon home products, go entirely free. By the direct tax system none can escape. However strictly the citizen may exclude from his premises all foreign luxuries, fine cloths, fine silks, rich wines, golden chains and diamond rings. Still for the possession of his house, his barn and his home-spun, he is to be perpetually haunted and harassed by the tax-gatherer. With these views we leave it to be determined whether we, or our opponents, are more truly democratic on the subject, and of speech. This recording is in the public domain. All is not gold that glitters. The city has been afflicted for a short time by a curious eruption, a breaking out of jewelry stores with large placards in their windows inscribed, Take your choice for one dollar. It is all very well to tell a fellow to take his choice, but there is in these windows nothing choice to take. Why should we, or any man, be anxious to possess various small fragments of brass stamped in fantastic forms and of no value except to the loser? These storekeepers announce their wares at rare bargains, but we believe, we know in fact, that this sort of bargain is greatly overdone. Spytentifle, who is inclined to be metaphysical, says that the affair is based on a philosophical principle. Every man thinks that there are a few good articles and a great many bad ones in these one dollar jewelry mills, and every man also thinks that he is shrewd enough to pick out the thing upon which the dealer makes no profit. Every man rushes in, then planks down his dollar and carries off a, what is it? A connecting link between brass and copper. It is suggested, however, that there is some gold in the rings, pins, brooches, lockets, pencil cases, et cetera, et cetera of the one dollar shops. Oriide, the composition of which they are made, is said to give off, in vapor, when assayed, a faintly infinitesimal quantity of gold. That which remains is infinitesimally less. We know of a young lady to whom some gentleman, more benevolent than judicious, presented a chain, bought as a rare bargain for one dollar. The maiden, having no rooted antipathy to ornaments of any kind, twined the chain above her neck. At night, when making her toilette de nuit, she observed a dark, lead-colored ring about her snowy and swan-like throat, reminding her of Elsie Venner and some more of a young woman mentioned on page 55 of Aldrich's Last Vimes of Poems, who had, quote, a dark blue scar on her throat, unquote. The next day, this young lady of the chain told a friend that the gold had been polished with whiting or something that blackened her neck. She was dually surprised to learn that it was only brass and thundering poor brass at that. The one dollar jewels are, in fact, much inferior to the average of decent bell pulls. The result of this explosion of jewelry is painful. Of course, it plays the dickens with the legitimate business, and the consequence is that all the respectable stores have to inaugurate a one dollar department in which they sell as bad jewelry as anybody. The metropolis is inundated with it. The east side absolutely gleams, glitters, glows, glares, shines, shimmers, and scintillates with it. Every bookbinderess and apprentice boy possesses a mass of trinkets that, in size and number, at least, rival the crown jewels of many a kingdom. And they tell us that the country, the far and pleasing agricultural districts, swarmed with similar shops. Whoa, whoa to the Arcadian lawyer of the coming summer. Amaryllis will shine in tawdry bracelets, and Daphnis will sport a hideous locket. A monstrous mosaic will rise and fall upon the bosom of Phyllis, and the sheep will gaze and wonder upon the gorgeous guard chain of their Formosan pester, Corridan. But when the summer has come and gone, when the moist air and earthy exhalations of the country shall have done their work, Amaryllis will look with disgust upon a pile of greenish and odorous things, stained in blackened by vertically, and say with a regretful voice, These are my jewels, end of all is not gold that glitters. Read by Leanne Howlett. The awful German language by Mark Twain. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. A little learning makes the whole world kin. Proverbs 32-7 I went often to look at the collection of curiosities in Heidelberg Castle, and one day I surprised the keeper of it with my German. I spoke entirely in that language. He was greatly interested, and after I had talked a while, he said my German was very rare, possibly unique, and wanted to add it to his museum. If he had known what it had cost me to acquire my art, he would also have known that it would break any collector to buy it. Harris and I had been hard at work on our German during several weeks at that time, and although we had made good progress, it had been accomplished under great difficulty and annoyance, for three of our teachers had died in the meantime. A person who has not studied German can form no idea of what a perplexing language it is. Surely there is not another language that is so slip-shot and systemless, and so slippery and elusive to the grasp. One is washed about in it, hither and thither, in the most helpless way, and when at last he thinks he has captured a rule which offers firm ground to take a rest on amid the general rage and turmoil of the ten parts of speech, he turns over the page and reads, Let the pupil make careful note of the following exceptions. He runs his eye down and finds that there are more exceptions to the rule than instances of it. So overboard he goes again to hunt for another error rat and find another quicksand. Such has been and continues to be my experience. Every time I think I have got one of these four confusing cases where I am the master of it, a seemingly insignificant preposition intrudes itself into my sentence, clothed with an awful and unsuspecting power, and crumbles the ground from under me. For instance, my book inquires after a certain bird, it is always inquiring after things which are no sort of consequence to anybody. Where is the bird? Now the answer to this question, according to the book, is that the bird is waiting in the blacksmith shop on account of the rain. Of course no bird would do that, but then you must stick to the book. Very well, I begin to cipher out the German for that answer. I begin at the wrong end necessarily, for that is the German idea. I say to myself, Regen, rain, is masculine, or maybe a disfeminine, or possibly neuter. It is too much trouble to look now. Therefore it is either there, the Regen, or die, the Regen, or das, the Regen. According to which gender it may turn out to be when I look. In the interest of science I will cipher it out on the hypothesis that it is masculine. Very well, then the rain is der Regen, if it is simply in the quiescent state of being mentioned without enlargement or discussion, nominative case. But if this rain is lying around in a kind of general way on the ground, then it is definitely located, it is doing something, that is resting, which is one of the German Grammar's ideas of doing something. And this throws the rain into the dative case, and makes it der Regen. However, this rain is not resting, but is doing something actively. It is falling, to interfere with the bird likely. And this indicates movement, which has the effect of sliding it into the accusative case, and changing der Regen into der Regen. Having completed the grammatical horoscope of this matter, I answer up confidently, and state in the German, that the bird is staying in the blacksmith's shop, Regen, on account of den Regen. Then the teacher lets me softly down, with the remark that whatever the word Regen drops into a sentence, it always throws that subject into the genitive case, regardless of consequences, and that therefore this bird stayed in the blacksmith's shop, Regen des Regens. Note bene, I was informed later, by a higher authority, that there was an exception, which permits one to say, Regen den Regen, in certain peculiar and complex circumstances, but that this exception is not extended to anything but rain. There are ten parts of speech, and they are all troublesome. An average sentence, in a German newspaper, is a sublime and impressive curiosity. It occupies a quarter of a column, it contains all the ten parts of speech, not in regular order, but mixed. It is built mainly of compound words constructed by the writer on this spot, and not to be found in any dictionary. Six or seven words compacted into one, without joint or seam, that is, without hyphens. It treats a fourteen or fifteen different subjects, each enclosed in a parentheses of its own, and here and there are extra parentheses, which re-enclose three or four of the minor parentheses, making pens within pens. Finally, all the parentheses and re-parentheses are massed together between a couple of king parentheses, one of which is placed in the first line of the majestic sentence, and the other in the middle of the last line of it, after which comes the verb. And you find out for the first time what the man has been talking about, and after the verb, merely by way of ornament, as far as I can make out, the writer shovels in chhabnzenkevesinkehapthabngevorinzein, or words to that effect, and the monument is finished. I suppose that this closing hara is in the nature of the flourish to a man's signature, not necessary, but pretty. German books are easy enough to read when you hold them before the looking glass or stand on your head, so as to reverse the construction. But I think that to learn to read and understand a German newspaper is a thing which must always remain an impossibility to a foreigner. Yet even the German books are not entirely free from attacks of the parenthesis distemper, though they are usually so mild as to cover only a few lines, and therefore when you at last get down to the verb it carries some meaning to your mind because you are able to remember a good deal of what has gone before. Now here is a sentence from a popular and excellent German novel, which has a slight parenthesis in it. I will make a perfectly literal translation and throw in the parenthesis marks and some hyphens for the assistance of the reader, though in the original there are no parenthesis marks or hyphens, and the reader is left to flounder through to the remote verb the best way he can. But when he upon the street, the parenthesis, in satin and silk covered now very unconstrained after the newest fashion dress, parenthesis, government counsellor's wife met, etc., etc. Note, in the German this is when he upon the street, the parenthesis, in satin and silk covered now very unconstrained after the newest fashion dress, government counsellor's wife met, etc. That is from The Old Man's Self-Secret by Mrs. Marlitt. And that sentence is constructed upon the most approved German model. You observe how far that verb is from the reader's base of operations. Well, in a German newspaper they put their verb away over on the next page, and I have heard that sometimes after stringing along the exciting preliminaries and parentheses for a column or two, they get in a hurry and have to go to press without getting to the verb at all. Of course then, the reader is left in a very exhausted and ignorant state. We have the parenthesis disease in our literature too, and one may see cases of it every day in our books and newspapers, but with us it is the mark and sign of an unpracticed writer or a cloudy intellect, whereas with the Germans it is doubtless the mark and sign of a practiced pen and of the presence of that sort of luminous intellectual fog which stands for clearness among these people. For surely it is not clearness. It necessarily can't be clearness. Even a jury would have penetration enough to discover that. A writer's ideas must be a good deal confused, a good deal out of line and sequence, when he starts out to say that a man met a counselor's wife in the street, and then right in the midst of this so simple undertaking halts these approaching people and makes them stand still until he jots down an inventory of the woman's dress. That is manifestly absurd. It reminds a person of those dentists who secure your instant and breathless interest in a tooth by taking a grip on it with the forceps and then stand there and draw through a tedious anecdote before they give the dreaded jerk. Parentheses in literature and dentistry are in bad taste. The Germans have another kind of parenthesis which they make by splitting a verb in two and putting half of it at the beginning of an exciting chapter and the other half at the end of it. Can anyone conceive of anything more confusing than that? These things are called separable verbs. The German grammar is blistered all over with separable verbs and the wider the two portions of one of them are spread apart, the better the author of the crime is pleased with his performance. A favorite one is Reistaab, which means departed. Here is an example which I called from a novel and reduced to English. The trunks being now ready, he dee, after kissing his mother and sisters and once more pressing to his bosom his adored Gretchen who dressed in simple white muslin with a single tuberose in the ample folds of her rich brown hair had tuttered feebly down the stairs still pale from the terror and excitement of the past evening but longing to lay her poor aching head yet once again upon the breast of him whom she loved more dearly than life itself, parted. However, it is not well to dwell too much on the separable verbs. One is sure to lose his temper early and if he sticks to the subject and will not be warned it will at last either soften his brain or petrify it. Personal pronouns and adjectives are a fruitful nuisance in this language and should be left out. For instance, the same sound zee means you and it means she and it means her and it means it and it means they and it also means them. Think of the ragged poverty of a language which has to make one word do the work of six and a poor little weak thing of only three letters at that but mainly think of the exasperation of never knowing which of these meanings the speaker is trying to convey. This explains why whenever a person says zee to me I generally try to kill him if a stranger. Now observe the adjective. Here was a case where simplicity would have been an advantage therefore for no other reason the inventor of this language complicated it all he could. When we wish to speak of our good friend or friends in our enlightened tongue we stick to the one form and have no trouble or hard feeling about it but with the German tongue it is different. When a German gets his hands on an adjective he declines it and keeps on declining it until the common sense is all declined out of it. It is as bad as Latin. It says for instance singular. Nominative. Mein gute Freund, my good friend. Genitive. Minus guten Freundes, of my good friend. Dative. Meinem guten Freund, to my good friend. Accusative. Meinem guten Freund, my good friend. Plural. Nominative. Meinem guten Freund, my good friends. Genitive. Meinem guten Freund, of my good friends. Dative. Meinem guten Freund, to my good friends. Accusative. Meinem guten Freund, my good friends. Now let the candidate for the asylum try to memorize those variations and see how soon he will be elected. One might better go without friends in Germany than take all this trouble about them. I have shown what a bother it is to decline a good male friend. Well this is only a third of the work for there is a variety of new distortions of the adjective to be learned when the object is feminine and still another when the object is neuter. Now there are more adjectives in this language than there are black cats in Switzerland and they must all be as elaborately declined as the examples above suggested. Difficult? Troublesome? These words cannot describe it. I heard a Californian student in Heidelberg say in one of his calmest moods that he would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective. The inventor of the language seems to have taken pleasure in complicating it in every way he could think of. For instance, if one is casually referring to a house, house, or a horse, ferd, or a dog, Hund, he spells these words as I have indicated. But if he is referring to them in the dative case, he sticks on a foolish and unnecessary I and spells them house, ferd, Hund. So as an added I often signifies the plural as the S does with us. The new student is likely to go on for a month making twins out of a dative dog before he discovers his mistake. And on the other hand, many a new student who could ill afford loss has bought and paid for two dogs and only got one of them because he ignorantly bought that dog in the dative singular when he really supposed he was talking plural which left the law on the seller's side of course by the strict rules of grammar and therefore a suit for recovery could not lie. In German, all the nouns begin with a capital letter. Now that is a good idea and a good idea in this language is necessarily conspicuous from its lonesomeness. I consider this capitalizing of nouns a good idea because by reason of it, you are almost always able to tell a noun the minute you see it. You fall into error occasionally because you mistake the name of a person for the name of a thing and waste a good deal of time trying to dig a meaning out of it. German names almost always do mean something and this helps to deceive the student. I translated a passage one day which said that the infuriated Tigris broke loose and utterly ate up the unfortunate fur forest, Tannenwald. While I was girding up my loins to doubt this, I found out that Tannenwald in this instance was a man's name. Every noun has a gender and there is no sense or system in the distribution so the gender of each must be learned separately and by heart. There is no other way. To do this one has to have a memory like a memorandum book. A young lady has no sex while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip and what callous disrespect for the girl. See how it looks in print. I translate this from a conversation in one of the best of the German Sunday school books. Gretchen. Wilhelm, where is the turnip? Wilhelm. She has gone to the kitchen. Gretchen. Is the accomplished and beautiful English maiden? Wilhelm. It has gone to the opera. To continue with the German genders, a tree is male, its buds are female, its leaves are neuter, horses are sexless, dogs are male, cats are female. Tomcats included, of course. A person's mouth, neck, bosom, elbows, fingers, nails, feet, and body are of the male sex and his head is either male or neuter, according to the word selected to signify it, and not according to the sex of the individual who wears it. For in Germany, all of the women have either male heads or sexless ones. A person's nose, lips, shoulders, breast, hands, and toes are of the female sex and his hair, ears, eyes, chin, legs, knees, heart, and conscience haven't any sex at all. The inventor of the language probably got what he knew about a conscience from hearsay. Now, by the above dissection, the reader will see that in Germany a man may think he is a man, but when he comes to look into the matter closely, he is bound to have his doubts. He finds that in sober truth, he is a most ridiculous mixture, and if he ends by trying to comfort himself with the thought that he can at least depend on a third of this mess as being manly and masculine, the humiliating second thought will quickly remind him that in this respect he is no better off than any woman or cow in the land. In the German, it is true that by some oversight of the inventor of the language, a woman is female, but a wife, vibe, is not, which is unfortunate. A wife here has no sex, she is neuter, so, according to the grammar, a fish is he, his scales are she, but a fish wife is not either. To describe a wife as sexless may be called under description. That is bad enough, but over description is surely worse. A German speaks of an Englishman as the Englander. To change the sex, he adds in, and that stands for Englishwoman. Englanderin. That seems descriptive enough, but still it is not exact enough for a German, so he proceeds the word with that article, which indicates that the creature to follow is feminine and writes it down thus. Die Englanderin. Which means the she Englishwoman. I consider that that person is over described. Well, after the student has learned the sex of a great number of nouns, he is still in a difficulty because he finds it impossible to persuade his tongue to refer to things as he and she and him and her, which it has been always accustomed to refer to as it. When he even frames a German sentence in his mind with the hymns and hers in the right places and then works up his courage to the utterance point, it is no use. The moment he begins to speak, his tongue flies the track and all of those labored males and females come out as it's. And even when he is reading German to himself, he always calls those things it, whereas he ought to read it in this way. The tale of the fishwife and its sad fate. Note, I capitalized the nouns in the German and ancient English fashion. It is a bleak day. Hear the rain how he pours and the hail how he rattles and see the snow how he drifts along and of the mud how deep he is. Ah, the poor fishwife it is stuck fast in the mire, it has dropped its bit of fishes and its hands have been cut by the scales as it seized some of the falling creatures and one scale has even got into its eye and it cannot get her out. It opens its mouth to cry for help but if any sound comes out of him alas, he is drowned by the raging of the storm. And now a Tomcat has got one of the fishes and she will surely escape with him. No, she bites off a fin, she holds her in her mouth, will she swallow her? No, the fishwife's brave mother dog deserts his puppies and rescues the fin which he eats himself as his reward. Oh horror, the lightning has struck the fishbasket, he sets him on fire see the flame how she licks the doomed utensil with her red and angry tongue. Now she attacks the helpless fishwife's foot, she burns him up all but the big and even she is partly consumed and she still spreads still she waves her fiery tongues she attacks the fishwife's leg and destroys it, she attacks its hand and destroys her also she attacks the fishwife's leg and destroys her also she attacks its body and consumes him she reads herself about its heart and it is consumed next about its breast and in a moment she is a cinder now she reaches its neck goes, now it's chin it goes, now it's nose she goes in another moment except help come the fishwife will be no more time presses, is there none to secour and save? yes, joy joy with flying feet the she English woman comes but alas the generous she female is too late where now is the faded fishwife it has ceased from its sufferings gone to a better land all that is left of it for its loved ones to lament over is this poor smoldering ash heap ah woeful woeful ash heap let us take him up tenderly reverently upon the lowly shovel and bear him to his long rest with the prayer that when he rises again it will be a realm where he will have one good square responsible sex and have it all to himself instead of having a mangy lot of food for him in spots there now, the reader can see for himself that this pronoun business is a very awkward thing for the unaccustomed tongue I suppose that in all languages the similarities of look and sound between words which have no similarity in meaning are a fruitful source of perplexity to the foreigner it is so in our tongue and it is notably the case in the German now there is that troublesome word fermelt there is a closer resemblance either real or fancied to three or four other words that I never know whether it means despised, painted, suspected or married until I look in the dictionary and then I find it means the latter there are a lot of such words and they are a great torment to increase the difficulty there are words which seem to resemble each other and yet do not but they make just as much trouble hence there is the word vermieten to let, to lease, to hire and the word verheiraten another way of saying to marry I heard of an Englishman who knocked at a man's door in Heidelberg and proposed in the best German he could command to verheiraten that house then there are some words which mean one thing when you emphasize the first syllable but something very different when you throw the emphasis on the last syllable for instance there is a word which means a runaway or the act of glancing through a book according to the placing of the emphasis and another word which signifies to associate with a man or to avoid him according to where you put the emphasis and you can generally depend on putting it in the wrong place and getting into trouble there are some exceedingly useful words in this language schlag for example and tsuk there are three quarters of a column of schlag in the dictionary and a column and a half of tsuk the word schlag means blow, stroke, dash, hit, shock, clap, slap, time, bar, coin, stamp, kind, sort, manner, way, apoplexy, wood cutting, enclosure, field, forest clearing this is its simple and exact meaning that is to say it's restricted, it's fettered but there are ways by which you can set it free so that it can soar away as on the wings of the morning and never be at rest you can hang any word you please to its tail and make it mean anything you want you can begin with schlagadr which means artery and you can hang on the whole dictionary word by word clear through the alphabet to schlagvasser which means bilge water and including schlagmutter and mother-in-law just the same with tsuk strictly speaking tsuk means pool, tug, draft, procession march, progress, flight, direction expedition train, caravan passage, smoke, touch, line flourish, trait of character, feature liniment, chess move, organ stop team, width, bias, draw propensity, inhalation, disposition but that thing which it does not mean when all its legitimate penance have been hung on has not been discovered yet one cannot overestimate the usefulness of schlag and tug armed with just these two and the word alzo what cannot the foreigner on German soil accomplish? the German word alzo is the equivalent of the English phrase you know and it does not mean anything at all in talk although sometimes it does in print every time a German opens his mouth an alzo falls out and every time he shuts it he bites one and two that was trying to get out now the foreigner equipped with these three noble words is the master of the situation let him talk right along fearlessly let him pour his indifferent German forth and when he lacks for a word let him heave a schlag into the vacuum all the chances are that it fits like a plug but if it does not let him promptly heave a tsuk after it the two together can hardly fail to bung the hole but if by a miracle they should fail let him simply say alzo and this will give him a moment's chance to think of the need for word in Germany when you load your conversational gun it is always best to throw in a schlag or two and a tsuk or two because it doesn't make any difference how much of the rest of the charge may scatter you are bound to bag something with them then you blandly say alzo and load up again nothing gives such an error of grace and elegance and unconstraint to a German or an English conversation as to scatter it full of alzo's or you know's in my notebook I find this entry July 1st in the hospital yesterday a word of 13 syllables was successfully removed from a patient a north German from near Hamburg but as most unfortunately the surgeons had opened him in the wrong place under the impression that he contained a panorama he died the sad advent has cast a gloom over the whole community that paragraph furnishes a text for a few remarks about one of the most curious and notable features of my subject the length of German words some German words are so long that they have a perspective observe these examples these things are not words they are alphabetical processions and they are not rare one can open a German newspaper at any time and see them marching majestically across the page and if he has any imagination he can see the banners and hear the music too they impart a martial thrill to the meekest subject I take a great interest in these curiosities whenever I come across a good one I stuff it and put it in my museum in this way I have made quite a valuable collection when I get duplicates I exchange with other collectors and thus increase the variety of my stock here are some rare specimens which I lately bought at an auction sale of the effects of a bankrupt Brickabrack hunter General Staatsverordnetenversammlungen Altertums Wissenschaften Kinderbewahrungsanstalten Unabhängigkeitserklärungen Wiedererstellungen Wiedererstellungen mit Strebungen Waffenstirschen unterhandlungen of course when one of these great mountain ranges go stretching across the printed page it adorns and ennobles that literary landscape but at the same time it is a great distress to the new student for it blocks up his way he cannot crawl under it or climb over it or tunnel through it so he resorts to the dictionary for help but there is no help there the dictionary must draw the line somewhere so it leaves this sort of words out and it is right because these long things are hardly legitimate words but are rather combinations of words and the inventor of them ought to have been killed they are compound words with the hyphens left out the various words used in building them are in the dictionary but in a very scattered condition so you can hunt the materials out one by one and get at the meaning at last but it is a tedious and harassing business I have tried this process upon some of the above examples Freundschaftsbezeugungen seems to be friendship demonstrations which is only a foolish and clumsy way of saying demonstrations of friendship Unabhängigheitserklärungen seems to be independence declarations which is no improvement upon declarations of independence so far as I can see General Staatsverordnetenversammlungen seems to be general state representatives meetings as nearly as I can get at it a mere rhythmical gushy euphemism for meetings of the legislature I judge we used to have a good deal of this sort of crime in our literature but it has gone out now we used to speak of a thing as a never to be forgotten circumstance instead of cramping into it the simple and sufficient word memorable and then calmly going about our business as if nothing had happened in those days we were not content to embalm the thing and bury it decently we wanted to build a monument over it but in our newspapers the compounding disease lingers a little to the present day but with the hyphens left out in the German fashion this is the shape it takes instead of saying Mr. Simmons clerk of the county and district courts was in town yesterday the new form puts it thus clerk of the county and district court Simmons was in town yesterday this saves neither time nor ink and has an awkward sound besides one often sees a remark like this in our papers Mrs. Assistant District Attorney Johnson returned to her city residence yesterday for the season that is a case of really unjustifiable compounding because it not only saves no time or trouble but confers a title on Mrs. Johnson which she has no right to but these little instances are trifles indeed contrasted with the ponderous and dismal German system of piling jumbled compounds together I wish to submit the following local item from the Mannheim Journal by way of illustration in the day before yesterday shorter after 11 o'clock night the in this town standing tavern called the Wagner was downburned when the fire to the on the down burning house restings Stork's nest reached flew the parent Stork's away but when the by the raging fire surrounded nest itself caught fire straightway plunged the quick returning mother Stork into the flames and died her wings over her young ones outspread even the cumbersome German construction is not able to take the pathos out of that picture indeed it somehow seems to strengthen it this item is dated away back yonder months ago I could have used it sooner but I was waiting to hear from the father Stork I am still waiting also if I had not shown that the German is a difficult language I have at least intended to do so I have heard of an American student who has asked how he was getting along with his German and who answered promptly I am not getting along at all I have worked at hard for three level months and all I have got to show for it is one solitary German phrase glasses of beer he paused for a moment reflectively and added with feeling but I have got that solid and if I have also not shown that German is a harassing and infuriating study my execution has been at fault and not my intent I heard lately of a worn and sorely tired American student who used to fly to a certain German word for relief when he could bear up longer the only word whose sound was sweet and precious to his ear and healing to his lacerated spirit this was the word damit it was only the sound that helped him not the meaning note it generally means in its general sense herewith and so at last when he learned that the emphasis was not on the first syllable his only stay in support was gone and he faded away and died I think that a description of any loud stirring tumultuous episode must be tamer in German than in English our descriptive words of this character have such a deep strong resonant sound while their German equivalents do seem so thin and mild and energy less boom burst crash roar storm bellow blow thunder explosion howl cry shout yell groan battle hell these are magnificent words they have a force and magnitude of sound befitting the things which they describe but their German equivalents would be ever so nice to sing the children to sleep with or else my awe inspiring ears were made for display and not for superior usefulness in analyzing sounds would any man want to die in a battle which was called by so tame a term as a slasht or would not a consumptive feel too much bundled up who was about to go out in a shirt collar and a seal ring into a storm which the bird song word Gewitter was employed to describe and observe the strongest of the several German equivalents for an explosion Ausbruch our word toothbrushes more powerful than that it seems to me that the Germans could do worse than imported into their language to describe particularly tremendous explosions with the German word for hell Hülle sounds more like than anything else therefore how chipper frivolous and unimpressive it is if a man were told in German to go there could he really rise to the dignity of feeling insulted having pointed out in detail the several vices of this language I now come to the brief and pleasant task of pointing out its virtues the capitalizing nouns I have already mentioned but far before this virtue stands another that of spelling a word according to the sound of it after one short lesson in the alphabet the student can tell how any German word is pronounced without having to ask whereas in our language if a student should inquire of us what does B O W spell we should be obliged to reply nobody can tell what it spells when you set it off by itself you can only tell by referring to the context and finding out what it signifies whether it is a thing to shoot arrows with or not head or the forward end of a boat there are some German words which are singularly and powerfully effective for instance those which describe lowly peaceful and affectionate home life those which deal in love in any and all forms from your kindly feeling and honest goodwill toward the passing stranger clear up to courtship those which deal with the outdoor nature in its softest and loveliest aspects with meadows forests and birds and flowers the fragrance and sunshine of summer and the moonlight of peaceful winter nights in a word those which deal with any and all forms of rest repose and peace those also which deal with the creatures and marvels of fairyland and lastly and chiefly in those words which express pathos is the language surpassing rich and effective there are German songs which can make a stranger to the language cry that shows that the sound of the words is correct it interprets the meanings with truth and with exactness and so the ear is informed and through the ear the heart the Germans do not seem to be afraid to repeat a word when it is the right one they repeat it several times if they choose that is wise but in English when we have used a word a couple of times in a paragraph we imagine that we are growing and so we are weak enough to exchange it for some other word which only approximates exactness to escape what we wrongly fancy is a greater blemish repetition may be bad but surely in exactness is worse there are people in the world who would take a great deal of trouble to point out the faults in a religion or a language and go blandly about their business without suggesting any remedy I am not that kind of person I have shown that the German language needs reforming very well I am ready to reform it at least I am ready to make the proper suggestions such a course as this might be immodest in another but I have devoted upward of nine full weeks first and last to a careful and critical study of this tongue and thus have acquired a confidence in my ability to reform it which no mere superficial culture could have conferred upon me in the first place I would leave out the date of case it confuses the plurals and besides nobody ever knows when he is in the date of case except he discover it by accident and then he does not know when or where it was that he got into it or how long he has been in it or how he is going to get out of it again the date of case is but an ornamental folly it is better to discard it in the next place I would move the verb further up to the front you may load up with ever so good a verb but I noticed that you never really bring down a subject with it at its present German range you only cripple it so I insist that this important part of speech should be brought forward to a position where it may easily be seen with the naked eye thirdly I would import some strong words from the English tongue to swear with and also to use in describing all sorts of vigorous things in a vigorous way note adamped and its variations and enlargements are words which have plenty of meaning but the sounds are so mild and ineffectual that German ladies can use them without sin German ladies who could not be induced to commit a sin by any persuasion or compulsion promptly rip out one of these harmless little words when they tear their dresses or don't like the soup and sounds about as wicked as are my gracious constantly saying Mein Gott, Gott in Himmel Herr Gott, der Herr Jesus etc they think our ladies have the same custom perhaps for I once heard a gentle and lovely old German lady say to a sweet young American girl the two languages are so alike how pleasant that is we say you say fourthly I would reorganize the sexes and distribute them accordingly to the will of the creator this as a tribute of respect if nothing else fifthly I would do away with those great long compounded words or require the speaker to deliver them in sections with intermissions for refreshments to wholly do away with them would be best for ideas are more easily received and digested when they come one at a time than when they come in bulk intellectual food is like any other it is and more beneficial to take it with a spoon than with a shovel sixthly I would require a speaker to stop when he is done and not hang a string of those useless habens in gewesen ge hapt haben gewod in seins to the end of his oration these sort of gi-jaws undignify a speech instead of adding a grace they are therefore an offense and should be discarded seventhly I would discard the parenthesis also the re-parenthesis the re-re-parenthesis and the re-re-re-re-re-re-re-parentheses and likewise the final wide-reaching on closing-king parenthesis I would require every individual be he high or low to unfold a plain straight-forward tail or else coil it and sit on it and hold his piece infractions of this law should be punishable with death and eighthly, and the last I would retain zuge and schlag with their pendants and discard the rest of the vocabulary. This would simplify the language. I have now named what I regard as the most necessary and important changes. These are perhaps all I could be expected to name for nothing, but there are other suggestions which I can and will make in case my proposed application shall result in my being formally employed by the government in the work of reforming the language. My philological studies have satisfied me that a gifted person ought to learn English, barring spelling and pronouncing, in 30 hours, French in 30 days, and German in 30 years. It seems manifest then that the latter tongue ought to be trimmed down and repaired. If it is to remain as it is, it ought to be gently and reverently set aside among the dead languages, for only the dead have time to learn it. A fourth of July oration in the German tongue delivered at a banquet of the Anglo-American Club of Students by the author of this book. Gentlemen, since I arrived a month ago in this old wonderland, this vast garden of Germany, my English tongue has so often proved a useless piece of baggage to me and so troublesome to carry around in a country where they haven't the checking system for luggage, that I finally set to work and learn the German language. Also, it pleases me that this is the case, because it must be in a half-saceless degree, hopefully, that man on an occasion like this should be able to speak his speech in foreign He-Boards. For this reason, I have no pure privilege, no prosperity, no, I mean, hope, as pure hope, I have managed to tackle this business in the German language, um Gottes Willen. Also, they must be so friendly and forgive me the interladation of one or two English words here and there, because I think that the German is not a very copious language, and so when you've really got anything to say, you've got to draw on a language that can stand with the strain. But if you can't understand my speech, I will translate it later, if he doesn't want to have such a service, then he should have it. I don't know what Wollen haben werden sollen sein Hitte means, but I notice they always put it at the end of a German sentence, merely for general literary gorgeousness, I suppose. This is a great and justly honoured day, a day which is worthy of the veneration in which it is held by the true patriots of all climes and nationalities, a day which offers a fruitful theme for thought and speech, and my friends, no, my friends, my friends, well, take your choice, they're all the same price. I don't know which one is right. Also, ich habe gehabt, haben werden gewesen sein, as Goethe says in his Paradise Lost, ich, ich, that is to say, ich, but let us change cars. Also, die Anblich, so viele Großbritannische und Amerikanische hier zusammengetroffen in Brüderische Concorde, it's far a welcome and inspiring spectacle. And what has moved you to it? Can the terse German tongue rise to the expression of this impulse? Is it Freundschaftsbezeugungen, Statt verordneten Verzammlungen, familien Eigentumlichkeiten? Nein, oh nein! This is a crisp and noble word, but it fails to pierce the marrow of the impulse, which has gathered this friendly meeting and produced diese Anblich. Eine Anblich-Werze ist gut zu zähnen, gut für die Augen in a foreign land, in a far country. Eine Anblich-Gesotze, as in die gewöhnliche Heidelberger Phrase, nennt man ein schönes Aussicht. Ja, freilich natürlich, wahrscheinlich ebenso wohl. Also, die Aussicht auf dem Königstuhl mehr grüß ist, aber geistliche Sprache nicht so schön, lob Gott. Because sie sind hier zusammengetroffen in Brüderlichem Concorde, ein größer Tank zu fahren, whose high benefits were not for one land and one locality, but have conferred a measure of good upon all lands that know liberty today, and love it. Hundert Jahre vor Huber waren die Engländer und die Amerikaner feinde, aber heute sind sie herzlich und freunde, Gott sei dank. May this good fellowship endure, may these banners here blended in amity so remain, may they never any more wave over opposing hosts, or be stained with blood which was kindred, is kindred, and always will be kindred, until a line drawn upon a map shall be able to say, this bars the ancestral blood from flowing in the veins of the descendant. End of the awful German language by Mark Twain. The Causes for which a president can be impeached by C. M. Ellis from the Atlantic Monthly, January 1867. This is the LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Constitution provides in express terms that the president, as well as the vice president, and all civil officers may be impeached for treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors. It was framed by men who had learned to their sorrow the falsity of the English maxim that the king can do no wrong, and established by the people who meant to hold all their public servants the highest and the lowest to the strictest accountability. All were jealous of any, squinting towards monarchy, and determined to allow to the chief magistrate no sort of regal immunity but to secure his faithfulness and their own rights by holding him personally answerable for his misconduct and to protect the government by making adequate provision for his removal. Moreover, they did not mean that the door should not be locked till after the horse had been stolen. By the Constitution, the House of Representatives has the sole power of impeachment and the Senate the sole power to try all impeachments. When the president of the United States is tried on impeachment, the chief justice is to preside. The concurrence of two-thirds of the members present is necessary to convict. The president, vice president, and all civil officers of the United States shall be removed from office on impeachment for and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors. But judgment cannot extend further than to removal and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust, or profit under the United States. Thus it is obvious that the founders of the government meant to secure it effectually against all official corruption and wrong by providing for process to be initiated at the will of the popular branch and furnishing an easy, safe, and sure method for the removal of all unworthy and unfaithful servants. By defining treason exactly by prescribing the precise proofs and limiting the punishment of it, they guarded the people against one form of tyrannical abuse of power and they intended to secure them effectually against all injury from abuses of another sort by holding the president responsible for his misdemeanors using the broadest term. They guarded carefully against all dangers of popular excesses and any injustice to the accused by withholding the general power of punishment. This term misdemeanor therefore should be liberally construed for the same reason that treason should not be extended by construction. It is not better for the state that traders should remain in office than that innocent men should be expelled. Besides, it is true in relation to this procedure that the higher the post, the higher the crime. What then is the meaning of high crimes and misdemeanors for which a president may be removed? Neither the constitution nor the statutes have determined. It follows therefore that the House must judge for what offenses it will present articles and the Senate decide for what it will convict. And from the very nature of the wrongs for which impeachment is the sole adequate remedy as well as from the fact that the office of president and all its duties and relations are new, it is essential that they should be undefined. Otherwise, there could be no security for the state. But it does not by any means follow that therefore, either the House or the Senate can act arbitrarily or that there are not rules for the guidance of their conduct. The terms, high crimes and misdemeanors, like many other terms and phrases used in the Constitution, as for instance pardon, habeas corpus, ex post facto and the term impeachment itself, had a settled meaning at the time of the establishment of the Constitution. There was no need of definition for it was left to the House's exhibitors and the Chief Justice and the Senate as judges of the articles to apply well understood terms in nuditus, mutandus to new circumstances as the exigencies of state and the ends for which the Constitution was established should require. The subject matter was new. The president was a new officer of state, his duties, his relations to the various branches of government and to the people, his powers, his oath, functions, duties, responsibilities were all new. In some respects, old customs and laws were a guide. In others, there was neither precedent nor analogy. But the common law principle was to be applied to the new matters according to their exigencies as the common law of contracts and of carriers is applied to carriage by steamboats and railroads to corporations and expresses which have come into existence centuries since the law was established. Impeachment, the presentment of the most solemn grand inquest of the whole kingdom had been in use from the earliest days of the English Constitution and government. The terms, high crimes and misdemeanors in their natural sense embrace a very large field of actions. They are broad enough to cover all criminal misconduct of the president, all acts of commission or omission forbidden by the Constitution and the laws. To the word misdemeanor indeed is naturally attached a yet broader signification which would embrace personal character and behavior as well as the proprieties of official conduct. Nor was nor is there any just reason why it should be restricted in this direction. For an establishing a permanent national government to ensure purity and dignity, to secure the confidence of its own people and command the respect of foreign powers. It is not unfit that civil officers and most especially the highest of all the head of the people should be answerable for personal demeanor. The term misdemeanor was likewise used to designate all legal offenses lower than felonies, all the minor transgressions, all public wrongs, not felonious in character. The common law punished whatever acts were productive of disturbance to the public peace or tended to incite to the commission of crime or to injure the health or morals of the people such as profanity, drunkenness, challenging to fight, soliciting to the commission of crime, carrying infection through the streets and in this variety of offenses. These terms when used to describe political offenses have a signification co-extensive with or rather analogous to, but yet more extensive than their legal expectation. For as John Quincy Adams said, the legislature was vested with power of impeaching and removing for trivial transgressions beneath the cognizance of the law. The sense in which they are used in the constitution is rendered clearer and more precise by the long line of precedents of decided cases to be found in the state trials and historical collections. Selden in his judicature of parliament and Koch in his institutes refer to many of these and commons names more than 50 impeachable offenses. Amongst these are subverting the fundamental laws and introducing arbitrary power for an ambassador to give false information to the king, to make a treaty between two foreign powers without the knowledge of the king, to deliver up towns without consent of his colleagues, to incite the king to act against the advice of parliament, to give the king evil counsel, for the speaker of the House of Commons to refuse to proceed, for the Lord Chancellor to threaten the other judges to make them subscribed to his opinions. Woodison, who began to lecture in 1777 and whose works expressed the sense in which the terms were understood by the contemporaries of the founders of the Constitution, says that such kinds of misdeeds as peculiarly injured the commonwealth by the abuses of high offices of trust are the most proper and have been the most usual grounds for this kind of prosecution, as for example, for the Lord Chancellor to act grossly contrary to the duty of his office, for the judges to mislead the sovereign by unconstitutional opinions, for any other magistrates to attempt to subvert the fundamental laws or introduce arbitrary power, as for a privy counselor to propose or support pernicious or dishonorable practices. These text writers seem to have been referred to and followed by our later ones, but to the offenses enumerated by these authorities, we must add others taken from cases in the state trials. The High Court of Impeachment had included amongst political high crimes and misdemeanors the following, these, for a secretary of state to abuse the pardoning power, for the Lord Chancellor and Chief Justice of Ireland to attempt to subvert the laws and government and the rights of parliament, for the Attorney General to prefer charges of treason falsely, for a privy counselor to try to alienate the affections of the people, for the Lord Chancellor to assume to dispense with the statutes and to control them. It had been held to be a misdemeanor to incite the king to ill manners, to put away from the king good officers and put about him wicked ones of their own party to maintain robbers and murderers causing the king to pardon them, to get ascendancy over the king and turn his heart from the peers of the realm, to prevent the great men of the realm from advising with the king, save in presence of the accused, and to cause the king to appoint sheriffs named by them so as to get such men returned to parliament as they desired, to the undoing of the loyal lords and the good laws and customs, to taunt the king's counselors and call them unworthy to sit in council when they advise the king to reform the government or to write letters declaring them traitors. The nature of the charges may be illustrated by one of the allegations against an evil judge. We give article eight. The said William Scrogg's being advanced to be Lord Chief Justice of the Court of King's Bench, ought by a sober, grave, and virtuous conversation to have given a good example to the king's liege people and to demean himself answerable to the dignity of so imminent a station, yet on the contrary thereof, he doth by his frequent and notorious excesses and debaucheries and his profane and atheistical discourses affront Almighty God, dishonor his majesty, give countenance and encouragement to all manner of vice and wickedness, and bring the highest scandal in the public justice of the kingdom. Such was the nature of political offenses as known to the framers of the constitution. It answered to the natural sense of the terms of the constitution as understood by the people in establishing it. And it is plain that the founders of the government meant to establish when such a government is vital to the safety and stability of the state, a jurisdiction coextensive with the influence of the officers subjected to it and with their official duties, their functions and their public relations. The federalist in treating of this jurisdiction of the Senate regarded it as extending over those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men and termed political as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to society itself. The people of America meant to arrest their government on executive responsibility and to apply to the president the principles which had been established is applicable only to the ministers, servants and advisors of the king. But to show what they regarded as the range of royal duty, they had put on record a list of charges against their own king himself commencing thus. He has refused his assent to laws the most wholesome and necessary for the public good on which they justified revolution. The Declaration of Independence will aid in determining what they would regard as offenses of the executive. No president has been impeached, but the charges exhibited against several other public officers throw light upon this subject. In 1797, articles of impeachment were found against William Blunt, a senator. The misdemeanors were not charged as being done in the execution of any office under the United States. He was not charged with misconduct in office but with an attempt to influence the United States Indian interpreter and to alienate the affection and confidence of the Indians. After the impeachment was known, but before it was presented to the Senate, the Senate expelled him resolving that he was guilty of a high misdemeanor entirely inconsistent with his public trust and duty as a senator. In 1804, John Pickering, judge of the district court of New Hampshire was removed for one misbehavior as a judge and amongst other causes, four. For appearing drunk and frequently in a profane and indecent manner invoking the name of the supreme being. In 1804, Judge Chase was impeached and tried for arbitrary, oppressive and unjust conduct and delivering his opinion on the law beforehand and debarring counsel from arguing the law and for unjust, impartial and intemperate conduct and obliging counsel to reduce their statements to writing, the use of rude and contemptuous language and intemperate and vexatious conduct. These are cases of contemporaneous exposition. There have been other cases in the various states and some more recent ones in Congress, but they are not necessary to illustrate the subject. Just on the eve of the war, the Senate expelled Bright for writing a letter to Jefferson Davis, introducing a man with an improvement in firearms as a reliable person. As Judge Story remarked, political offenses are of so various and complex a character, so utterly incapable of being defined or classified that the task of positive legislation would be impracticable if it were not almost absurd to attempt it. Referring to the text writers we have named and the causes of impeachment enumerated by them, he seems to justify the extremist cases by saying that though they now seem harsh and severe, perhaps they were rendered necessary by existing corruptions and the importance of suppressing a spirit of favoritism and court intrigue. But others, again, he adds, were found that in the most salutary public justice, such as impeachments for malversations and neglects in office, for official oppression, extortion and deceit, and especially for putting good magistrates out of office and advancing bad. He puts a case on which he expresses no opinion in such form that there can scarcely be any doubt of his opinion or any possibility of two opinions concerning it. Suppose a judge should countenance or aid insurgents in a meditated conspiracy or insurrection against the government. This is not a judicial act and yet it ought certainly to be impeachable. Thus it appears that the political offenses of the Constitution, for which civil officers are removable, embrace, besides the high crimes and misdemeanors of the criminal law, arrange as wide as the circle of official duties and the influences of official position. They include not only breaches of duty, but also misconduct during the tenure of office. They extend to acts for which there is no criminal responsibility whatsoever. They reach even personal conduct. They include not merely acts of usurpation, but all such acts as tend to subvert the just influence of official position to degrade the office, to contaminate society, to impair the government, to destroy the proper relations of civil officers to the people and to the government and to the other branches of the government. In fine, it may also be said that for a president to have done anything which he ought not to have done or to have left undone anything which he ought to have done is just cause for his impeachment if the House, by a majority vote, feels called on to make it the ground of charges and the Senate, by a two-thirds vote, determines it to be sufficient. For the safety of the state is a supreme law and these bodies are the final judges thereof. End of the causes for which a president can be impeached by C.M. Ellis. Read by Leanne Howlett. Is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit us at www.librivox.org. Crimes of Carnegie. Protest against condoning crime in the name of philanthropy, says Eugene V. Debs. Buy Eugene V. Debs. Published in Missouri Socialist, volume one, number 15, April 13th, 1901, page two. Many thousands of misguided people are applauding the alleged philanthropy of Andrew Carnegie and of these by far the larger number are working men. Manifestly they have forgotten or they have never heard of the horrors of homestead or perhaps they are too ignorant to understand or too cowardly to profit by the bloody lesson. The reckless prodigality of Carnegie with the plunder of his victims brings into boldest prominence the crimes he committed when they protested against his monstrous rapacity. Then what? An army of 300 Pinkerton mercenaries were hired by this bloody benefactor to kill the men whose labor had made him a millionaire. He did not have the courage to execute his own murderous designs so he commissioned another monster, Frick, by name, with bloodless veins and a heart of steel to commit the crimes while he went to Europe and held high carnival with the titled snobs there until the ghastly work was done. It was one of the foulest conspiracies ever concocted against the working class and the very thought of its atrocities after nearly 10 years fires the blood and crimson's the cheeks with righteous indignation. Not only were the Pinkerton murderers hired by Carnegie to kill his employees but he had his steelworks surrounded by wires charged with deadly electric currents and by pipes filled with boiling water so that in the event of a strike or lockout he could shock the life out of the very wretched bodies or scald the flesh from their miserable bones. And this is the man who proposes to erect libraries for the benefit of the working class and incidentally for the glory of Carnegie. Will the working men of this country accept any gift from the hands of Carnegie read with the blood of their slain comrades? That some of them have already done so is to their everlasting shame. The employees who a few days ago received with expressions of gratitude the bonded booty to be held in trust for them until they become paupers have to base themselves beyond expression. They may have to work for Carnegie but they are not compelled to recognize as a gift the pennies he throws to them in return for the dollars he stole from them. And when they do they are guilty of treason to their murdered brothers and are better described as spineless poll trunes than as self-respecting working men. Some years ago when Carnegie endowed the first library for the alleged benefit of working men I objected and I object now with increased emphasis. Such a library is monumental of the degeneracy of the working class. It is a lasting rebuke to their intelligence and their integrity. The working men of Newcastle have led the revolt. Let their splendid example be followed wherever a Carnegie library is suggested. Let mass meetings of working men be held and let the horrifying scenes of the homestead massacre be presented to stir them to a sense of indignation at the vulgar and insulting display of the spoil exploited from their class. Let honest working men everywhere protest against the acceptance of a gift which condones crime in the name of philanthropy. Let them put themselves upon record in terms that appeal to the honor of their class and the respect of all mankind. We want libraries and we will have them in glorious abundance when capitalism is abolished and the working men are no longer robbed by the philanthropic pirates of the Carnegie class. Then the library will be as it should be, a noble temple dedicated to culture and symbolizing the virtues of the people. Eugene Debs, March 30, 1901. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. Recording by Brent Floyd. Dedication in preface to The Golden Treasury, edited by Francis T. Paul Grave. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Dedication to Alfred Tennyson, poet laureate. This book in its progress has recalled often to my memory a man with whose friendship we were once honored to whom no region of English literature was unfamiliar and who, whilst rich in all the noble gifts of nature, was most eminently distinguished by the noblest and the rarest, just judgment and high-hearted patriotism. It would have been, hence, a peculiar pleasure and pride to dedicate what I have endeavored to make a true national anthology of three centuries to Henry Hallam. But he is beyond the reach of any human tokens of love and reverence, and I desire, therefore, to place before it a name united with his by associations which, whilst poetry retains her hold on the minds of Englishmen, are not likely to be forgotten. Your encouragement, given while traversing the wild scenery of Trier and Denus, led me to begin the work, and it has been completed under your advice and assistance. For the favor now asked, I have thus a second reason, and to this I may add, the homage which is your right as poet, and the gratitude due to a friend whose regard I rate at no common value. Permit me, then, to inscribe yourself a book which, I hope, may be found by many a lifelong fountain of innocent and exalted pleasure, a source of animation to friends when they meet, and able to sweeten solitude itself with best society, with a companionship of the wise and the good, with the beauty which the eye cannot see, and the music only heard in silence. If this collection proves a storehouse of delight to labor and to poverty, if it teaches those indifferent to the poets to love them, and those who love them to love them more, the aim and the desire entertained in framing it will be fully accomplished. Preface. This little collection differs, it is believed, from others in the attempt made to include in it all the best original lyrical pieces and songs in our language, by writers not living, and none besides the best. Many familiar verses will hence be met with, also many which should be familiar. The editor will regard as his fittest readers, those who love poetry so well, that he can offer them nothing not already known and valued. For those who take up the book in serious and scholarly spirit, the following remarks on the plan and the execution are added. The editor is acquainted with no strict and exhaustive definition of lyrical poetry, but he has found the task of practical decision increase in clearness and in facility as he advanced with the work, whilst keeping in view a few simple principles. Lyrical has been here held essentially to imply that each poem shall turn on some single thought, feeling or situation. In accordance with this narrative, description and didactic poems, unless accompanied by rapidity of movement, brevity and the coloring of human passion have been excluded. Humorous poetry, except in the very infrequent instances where a truly poetical tone pervades the whole with what is strictly personal, occasional and religious, has been considered foreign to the idea of the book. Blank verse and the ten syllable couplet with all pieces markedly dramatic have been rejected as alien from what is commonly understood by song and rarely conforming to lyrical conditions and treatment, but it is not anticipated nor is it possible that all readers shall think the line accurately drawn. Some poems as Grey's Elegy, The Allegro and Pensaroso, Wordsworth's Ruth or Campbell's Lord Ullin might be claimed with perhaps equal justice for a narrative or descriptive selection, whilst with reference especially to ballads and sonnets, the editor can only state that he has taken his utmost pains to decide without caprice or partiality. This also is all he can plead in regard to a point even more liable to question. What degree of merit should give rank among the best? That a poem shall be worthy of the writer's genius, that it shall reach a perfection commensurate with its aim, that we should require finish in proportion to brevity, that passion, color and originality cannot atone for serious imperfections in clearness, unity or truth, that a few good lines do not make a good poem, that popular estimate is serviceable as a guidepost more than a compass, above all that excellence should be looked for rather in the whole than in the parts. Such and other canons have been always steadily regarded. He may, however, add that the pieces chosen and a far larger number rejected have been carefully and repeatedly considered, and that he has been aided throughout by two friends of independent and exercised judgment, besides the distinguished person addressed in the dedication. It is hoped that by this procedure the volume has been freed from that one-sidedness which must beset individual decisions, but for the final choice the editor is alone responsible. It would obviously have been invidious to apply the standard aimed at in this collection to the living, nor, even in the cases where this might be done without offence, does it appear wise to attempt to anticipate the verdict of the future on our contemporaries. Should the book last, poems by Tennyson, Bryant, Clare, Lowell, and others will no doubt claim and obtain their place among the best, but the editor trusts that this will be affected by other hands and in days far distant. Chalmers' vast collection, with the whole works of all accessible pieces, will be the most important and most important and most important piece of the book. The poems, again, with the whole works of all accessible poets not contained in it, and the best anthologies of different periods, have been twice systematically read through, and it is hence improbable that any omissions which may be regretted are due to oversight. The poems are printed entire, except in a very few instances, specified in the notes, where a stanza has been omitted. The omissions have been risked only when the piece brought to a closer lyrical unity, and, as essentially opposed to this unity, extracts obviously such are excluded. In regard to the text, the purpose of the book has appeared to justify the choice of the most poetical version, wherever more than one exists, and much labour has been given to present each poem in disposition, spelling, and punctuation to the greatest advantage. For the permission under which the copyright pieces are inserted, thanks or due the respective proprietors, without whose liberal concurrence the scheme of the collection would have been defeated. In the arrangement the most poetically effective order has been attempted. The English mind has passed through phases of thought and cultivation, so various and so opposed during these three centuries of poetry, that a rapid passage between old and new, like rapid alteration of the eye's focus in looking at the landscape, will always be wearisome and hurtful to the sense of beauty. The poems have therefore been distributed into books corresponding, one, to the ninety years closing about 1616, two, thence to 1700, three, to 1800, four, to the half-century just ended, or looking at the poets who more or less give each portion its distinctive character, they might be called the books of Shakespeare, Milton, Gray, and Wordsworth. The volume in this respect, so far as the limitations of its range allow, accurately reflects the natural growth and evolution of our poetry. Originally chronological sequence, however, rather fits a collection aiming at instruction than at pleasure and the wisdom which comes through pleasure, within each book the pieces have therefore been arranged in gradations of feeling or subject. The development of the symphonies of Mozart and Beethoven has been here thought of as a model, and nothing placed without careful consideration, and it is hoped that the contents of this anthology will thus be found to represent a certain unity, as episodes, in the noble language of Shelley, to that great poem which all poets, like the co-operating thoughts of one great mind, have built up since the beginning of the world. As he closes his long survey, the editor trusts he may add, without egotism, that he has found the vague general verdict of popular fame more just, than those have thought who, with too severe a criticism, would confine judgments on poetry to the selected few of many generations. Not many appeared to have gained reputation without some gift or performance that, in due degree, deserved it, and if no verses by certain writers who show less strength than sweetness, or more thought than mastery and expression are printed in this volume, it should not be imagined that they have been excluded without much hesitation and regret, far less that they have been slighted. Throughout this vast and pathetic array of singers now silent, few have been honored with the name poet, and have not possessed a skill in words, a sympathy with beauty, a tenderness of feeling, or seriousness in reflection, which render their works, although never perhaps attaining, that loftier and finer excellence here required, better worth reading than much of what fills the scanty hours that most men spare for self-improvement, or for pleasure in any of its more elevated and permanent forms. And if this be true of even mediocre poetry, for how much more are we indebted to the best? Like the fabled fountain of the Azores, but with a more various power, the magic of this art can confer on each period of life its appropriate blessing, on early years' experience, on maturity, calm, on age, youthfulness. Poetry gives treasures more gold than gold, leading us in higher and healthier ways than those of the world, and interpreting to us the lessons of nature. But she speaks best for herself. Her true accents, if the plan has been executed with success, may be heard throughout the following pages. Wherever the poets of England are honored, wherever the dominant language of the world is spoken, it is hoped that they will find fit audience, and of dedication and preface to the golden treasury. In reflecting upon the different degrees of enjoyment presented to us in the contemplation of nature, we find that the first place must be assigned to a sensation which is wholly independent of an intimate acquaintance with the physical phenomena presented to our view, or of the peculiar character of the region surrounding us. In the uniform plain bounded only by a distant horizon, where the lowly heather, the cystus, or waving grasses, deck the soil, on the ocean shore, where the waves, softly rippling over the beach, leave a track, green with the weeds of the sea, everywhere, the mind is penetrated by the same sense of the grandeur and vast expanse of nature, revealing to the soul, by a mysterious inspiration, the existence of laws that regulate the forces of the universe. Mere communion with nature, mere contact with the free air, exercise a soothing yet strengthening influence on the wearied spirit, calm the storm of passion, and soften the heart when shaken by sorrow to its inmost depths. Everywhere, in every region of the globe, in every stage of intellectual culture, the same sources of enjoyment are alike vouchsafe to man. The earnest and solemn thoughts awakened by a communion with nature intuitively arise from a presentiment of the order and harmony pervading the whole universe, and from the contrast we draw between the narrow limits of our own existence and the image of infinity revealed on every side, whether we look upward to the starry vault of heaven, scan the far stretching plain before us, or seek to trace the dim horizon across the vast expanse of ocean. The contemplation of the individual characteristics of the landscape, and of the confirmation of the land in any definite region of the earth, gives rise to a different source of enjoyment, awakening impressions that are more vivid, better defined, and more congenial to certain phases of the mind than those of which we have already spoken. At one time the heart is stirred by a sense of the grandeur of the face of nature, by the strife of the elements, or, as in northern Asia, by the aspect of the dreary barrenness of the far stretching steps. At another time, softer emotions are excited by the contemplation of rich harvests, rested by the hand of man from the wild fertility of nature, or by the sight of human habitations raised beside some wild and foaming torrent. Here I regard less the degree of intensity than the difference existing in the various sensations that derive their charm and permanence from the peculiar character of the scene. If I might be allowed to abandon myself to the recollections of my own distant travels, I would instance, among the most striking scenes of nature, the calm sublimity of a tropical night, when the stars, not sparkling as in our northern skies, shed their soft and planetary light over the gently heaving ocean. Or I would recall the deep valleys of the Cordilleras, where the tall and slender palms pierced the leafy veil around them, and waving on high their feathery and arrow-like branches for, as it were, a forest above a forest. Or I would describe the summit of the peak of Tenerife, when a horizontal layer of clouds, dazzling in whiteness, has separated the cone of cinders from the plain below, and suddenly the ascending current pierces the cloudy veil, so that the eye of the traveler may range from the brink of the crater, along the vine-clad slopes of Urotava, to the orange gardens and banana groves that skirt the shore. In scenes like these it is not the peaceful charm uniformly spread over the face of nature that moves the heart, but rather the peculiar physiognomy and confirmation of the land, the features of the landscape, the ever-varying outline of the clouds, and their blending with the horizon of the sea, whether it lies spread before us like a smooth and shining mirror, or as dimly seen through the morning mist. All that the senses can but imperfectly comprehend, all that is most awful in such romantic scenes of nature may become a source of enjoyment to man, by opening a wide field to the creative powers of his imagination. Impressions change with the varying movements of the mind, and we are led by a happy illusion to believe that we receive from the external world that with which we have ourselves invested it. End of The Different Degrees of Enjoyment Presented by the Contemplation of Nature Last Honours to Emerson Read for LibriVox.org by Alan Davis-Strake Preparations for a Simple Funeral at the Concord Unitarian Church From the New York Times Concord Mass, April 28, 1882 The arrangements for the funeral of Mr. Emerson are not yet quite completed. The time for the public service, however, has been fixed at 3.30 on Sunday afternoon, and the place the Unitarian Church has already announced, but the order of exercises is not quite arranged. Word has been received by Telegraph, in reply to invitations to be present, from the Reverend Dr. W. H. Furness of Philadelphia, and the Reverend Dr. Frederick H. Hedge of Cambridge, announcing that they will attend, and it is expected that the Reverend James Freeman Clark will also take some part in the exercises. It is probable that there will be brief addresses by all of these gentlemen, each of whom has long enjoyed the close friendship of Mr. Emerson. Dr. Furness has been his close friends since childhood, and the two were classmates in the old Boston Latin School. The Unitarian Church here has been without a settled pastor for several months, the Reverend Grinnell Reynolds, its former pastor, being now the Secretary of the American Unitarian Association. At the present time he is absent in the West on business connected with his office, and it is thought that he cannot reach here in season for the services, which he would be likely to conduct if he were here. In his absence the Reverend Mr. Brown, a Unitarian clergyman of Brookline, who has supplied the Concord pulpit occasionally of late, may conduct them. Mr. Emerson has attended this church somewhat regularly of late, and its ministers were welcome guests in his home. The same simplicity that characterized the recent funeral of Longfellow will mark Sunday's ceremonies here. There will be an absence of display. The church exercises will not be tirelessly extended, nor severely formal, and there will be no showy procession to the grave. The family and chief mourners, with the exception perhaps of Mrs. Emerson, whose health is delicate, will walk from the old house at the conclusion of the private services there, to the church. After the more public exercises here the coffin will be borne to the sleepy hollow cemetery, the Paul Bearers walking by its side and friends following on foot. To many these simple and un ostentatious ceremonies will recall the funeral and burial of Hawthorne here. This was on a bright sunny June afternoon seventeen years ago. A host of literary people and men and women of distinction were present on that occasion, and no doubt will be gathered in the old town on Sunday afternoon. Longfellow, Holmes, Emerson, Lowell, Fields, Whipple, and Alcott were in the company assembled in this same unitarian church on that occasion. And after the simple exercises here, consisting mainly of an address by James Freeman Clark, delivered in his particularly quiet and informal way, they walked beside or followed the body of their friend to the same restful village graveyard. Then as will probably be the case now, there was no hearse and no long line of somber funeral carriages. On the coffin was carried the manuscript of Hawthorne's last and unfinished romance, and his grave was filled with flowers. Emerson's body will be placed in the family vault beside those of the wife of his youth, whose early death, just as he was entering upon his career, so touched and saddened him. Here also are buried the son he lost and the brother. His resting place will be in the neighborhood of that of Hawthorne and also that of Thoreau. Hawthorne is buried in a retired part of the cemetery on the brow of the hill and in the midst of a cluster of tall pines, a spot which was a favorite one with a shy romancer, where he used frequently to stroll during his quiet, retired life at Concord, to muse and meditate. Opposite the grave of Hawthorne is Thoreau's, marked by a simple slab, recording only his name and the dates of his birth and death. Fitting notice will before long be taken of Emerson's death by the people of Concord and some exercises held in which the school children may take part. The Social Club Circle, the famous village club which celebrated its centennial anniversary a short time ago, and at which Mr. Emerson made his last appearance on any formal occasion in the town, will take appropriate action on his death at its next meeting. The Concord Summer School of Philosophy will devote a day of its session the coming season, probably Saturday, July 22, to a discussion of Mr. Emerson's character and work by several of the eminent men who take part in the literary work of this particular institution, which invites so many modern philosophers from distant parts to this famous town. Mr. Emerson was the oldest member of the Social Circle and had belonged to it for over forty years, and in the Summer School of Philosophy he took much interest, appearing occasionally when his health would permit at its meetings when some famous essayist was the attraction or some more than ordinary philosophic discussion was the feature. Many calls have been made at the Emerson homestead and messages of condolence received today. Among the callers were Mr. Emerson's venerable long-time neighbor, A. Bronson Alcott, and Dr. C. A. Bartoll of Boston. The body of Mr. Emerson has been partially embalmed. The countenance remains the same peaceful and serene look it bore at the time of death. London, April 29. The news, in its obituary article on Ralph Waldo Emerson, says that no history of the development of intellect in the nineteenth century would be complete, which takes no account of Mr. Emerson's works. And of last honors to Emerson from the New York Times. This recording is in the public domain. The Materialist Basis of Education by Lena Morrow-Lewis. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Materialist Basis of Education by Lena Morrow-Lewis. Among the many contributions the capitalist system has made to the progress of the race, one of the most valuable was the necessity of educating the members of the working class. No right or privilege or opportunity is given a lower or underclass, unless that right or opportunity makes for the benefit and interest of the upper or dominant class. Two hundred years ago, one could find but few working men who could read or write. Education was the privilege of the upper class only. It was not necessary for the surf in the field to have a trained mind in order to plow a straight furrow. The skill to swing a scythe or sickle required no mental training or education. But the introduction and development of machinery and the use of steam and electricity necessitated a different type of worker from the unlettered, untutored surf in the field of the woman at the spinning wheel. To transform the crude ore into a fine steel rail required new skill. To assemble all the various elements together into a mighty engine called for the trained and educated workmen. To operate an engine demanded the skilled engineer. In short the new industrial processes which the capitalist system gave the world necessitated the education and mental training of the workers in order that they might be fit and efficient wealth producers. Capitalism therefore created the economic and material reasons for the need of the great mass of the workers to be educated. It democratized education. While economic and material benefits have accrued to the master class through the education of the workers. While large profits were only possible through a trained and skilled laboring class. Yet in this very thing which makes for the triumph of the master class financially we see a potent and powerful factor in bringing about the political and industrial supremacy of the working class. Knowledge is power. Only as the workers have knowledge and intelligence can they solve the problem of their own political and industrial freedom. The capitalist masters have educated the workers to their advantage today but for their undoing tomorrow. The thing that makes for the triumph of capitalism ultimately makes for its own downfall. Education of the workers for the benefit of the capitalist class means gain and profit only for the few, the upper class of today. Education of the workers for the benefit of the working class means gain and profit for the working class and ultimately for the whole human race. That which has served the capitalist class will someday serve the working class. The trained minds that create profits for the masters of today will create wealth for the producers to enjoy tomorrow. The future victories of the working class lie not so much in their numbers. The workers have always been in the vast majority but in the knowledge that they possess the ability to intelligently organize and act together on the political and economic fields let us ever remember that knowledge is power.