MURMURINGS OF A COMMON SCOLD

66

BY BURGES JOHNSON

SAYS to him he hadn't ought to go out on strike, and he says to me what does a dub like you know about it, and I says to him I wouldn't waste time arguing with a man whose parents was furriners."

Here is a pretty bit of debate. The question is, resolved, that to strike is wrong. The case for the negative may be briefly stated-to wit, my opponent is an ignoramus. The case for the affirmative is, with equal brevity, that the negative is of foreign parentage. The rightness or wrongness of striking has thus been thrashed out. There has been on both sides a use of the intuitive rather than the logical method; and intuition, I am told, is a sort of subconscious reasoning. Yet one might complain that on the surface the speakers did not hold strictly to the point. Little boys do a better piece of work when they cry, antiphonally: ""Tis!" ""Tain't!" ""Tis!" ""Tain't!"

I like to converse with my fellow men. It is pleasant to find those that agree with me in any sort of opinion, but pleasanter still to find those that disagree, if they will stick to the point. But I do not like people who think that shouting very loud will convince me, or who believe that they meet my argument by disparaging my parentage.

I wish I could assert that all persons who dispute in such fashion are uneducated. But they are not. Although this complaint starts off with a dialogue between two of the presumably uncultured majority, it is my belief that our "intellectuals" do the most of that sort of arguing. You may disagree with me;

I trust you will. But I know I am right!

As a matter of fact, here in these United States our developing national habits of mind are against us. The Russian Jew, when he first comes to us, is a great debater. He can discuss an abstraction and stick to the point interminably. His forbears have been debating ever since Joseph's brethren reasoned together and Job argued with Bildad and the rest of that lugubrious debating team, and ever since Daniel reasoned with the king. But the Russian Jews have in recent centuries done very little reasoning with kings. So, instead, they have become adept in discussing abstractions with one another.

In fact, oppressed common folk from the old monarchies are almost always better debaters than ourselves. Arguing abstract principles has been the only possible exercise of their natural interest in methods of human government. Perhaps that is why, when control of government suddenly falls into their hands, they try to put abstractions at once into practice without any compromise with expediency, and make such a mess of it. Our political forbears were all radical in their day, even the most conservative of them, but they argued principles instead of personalities, and stuck to the point, until they achieved great, constructive, working compromises.

But see what has been happening to us, long trained in self-government. Our political bulk has necessarily done away with the town meeting, that school of shrewd debate. We have come to discuss principles in terms of candidates. "A protective tariff is wise," says Mr. Candidate. "You're a Seventh Day Adventist," retorts his opponent; and the

voters are deeply shaken. "I ask your support of certain political policies,' says Mr. Statesman. "You drink but termilk!" shrieks an opposition press.

A vast number of intellectuals who really believed in Theodore Roosevelt's policies opposed him because they accepted a distorted newspaper picture of his personality. "What do you think of the proposed league of nations?" I asked a lady of alleged intelligence. "He had no business taking his wife to Europe,' she answers promptly. "Shall we accept Dewey's political platform?" inquires a section of the press. "We gave him a house and he deeded it to his wife!" shrieks an aroused populace. Ad personam, ad turgam, ad nauseam.

I have heard more of this sort of thing proportionately from learned counselors and ladies at afternoon teas than I have from trainmen and car conductors. I suspect, and the suspicion is based on evidence, that farmers and the followers of other deliberative callings are least guilty.

However that may be, the custom of missing the point in argument seems to be more and more a custom with averagely intelligent people. In trying to suggest a reason for this tendency one might charge it up to those broad-backed scapegoats of the present moment-the newspapers and the movies. One encourages emotionalism and the other lazy-mindedness. But I am not going to charge it wholly to them, because I am neither wise enough nor foolish enough to be sure of my ground. Certain it is, however, that well-considered, wellargued editorials are finding less room in the daily press and less attention when they appear there, and certain it is that people whose reading is largely newspapers and movie captions meet with very few influences to counteract either emotionalism or lazy mindedness, and both of these are the foes of clean-cut argument.

The greatest foe of all to good debate is the tendency to make a personal attack. "That is a lie" and "You are a

liar" are two statements very different in their import, and yet a great many people do not see the difference. The former is at least pertinent and has direct bearing upon the question at issue, even though it seems to lack reasoning power as well as good manners. But the latter is impertinent in every sense of the word, for it is conceivable that a liar may happen to stand upon the truthful side in many disputes.

This protest of mine is all the more bitter because it applies more particularly to that class of people which includes the greatest number of my friends and acquaintances. It would be a pleasure to have any of them dispute these assertions, but not on the ground that I am a common scold or that my nose is crooked.

THE CONSERVATIVE

BY C. A. BENNETT

FIRST he needs to be defined. Well,

then

...

Tennyson once wrote in his sententious way:

That man's the true Conservative

Who lops the molder'd branch away.

No; I do not mean that. I prefer that definition given by some unknown epigrammatist, "A conservative is a man who believes that nothing should ever be done for the first time." That is perfect. It catches the essence of the man and his creed-the opposition to change not because it disturbs the existing order, but just because it is change; natural human inertia reflected upon and transformed into a philosophy-a fact turned into a theory to justify the fact.

Of course, he never states his philosophy in such simple, naked form; this is, so to speak, the main root or trunk which proliferates and burgeons into a matted tropical growth of subordinate dogmas and middle axioms. One may get instruction and entertainment from examining some of these.

There is, for example, the great and sacrosanct principle of Continuity. In explaining what this means he will inform you, with the air of one patiently bestowing enlightenment, that before the time of Darwin men believed in catastrophic change. Social transformations were revolutionary; in religious life sudden and violent conversion was popular; the course of nature was supposed to be subject to upheavals and miraculous interventions. But Darwin changed all that. Now we know that natura non facit saltum, and our motto must henceforward be, "Not revolution, but evolution." In practice the principle seems to come to this-that every change must be so slight, gradual, and inconspicuous as hardly to amount to a change at all. Any change, therefore, which is perceptible is for that very reason undesirable and is to be dismissed from consideration with the gnomic warning that it is no good trying to introduce Utopias overnight. We must confine ourselves to making infinitesimal alterations—that is, we must do practically nothing at a time; the inference being that if only everyone will busy himself with effecting practically nothing at a time in a million years or so Utopia will have been silently and almost automatically achieved.

Then there is the great principle of Compromise. It rests upon an axiom which runs: After all, we live in a practical world. It may be exhibited in a simple example. A wants to paint a wall black. B wants to paint it white. They finally agree to paint it gray. That is compromise. The peculiar virtue of this device is that, in time, A and B come to believe that, in a practical, rough-and-tumble world, gray-a nice, conservative gray, as the tailors have it -is the only possible color for walls. Anyone who believes that walls either can or should be painted black or white or any color that is not strict gray thereby declares himself an Extremist, a Crank, an Absolutist, an Idealist, a Doctrinaire, and an Unpractical Visionary.

And once you have called a man by one of these names you need seek no farther for epithets with which to discredit himself and his policy.

Passing over such notable principles as, “You can't turn back the hands of the clock," "The best way to change a bad law is to obey it," "Don't swap horses when crossing the stream,' "Festina lente," and "Reform from within," I will mention only one other conservative formula. It is known as The Necessity for Looking on the Bright Side of Things. This is fundamental, for the desire for change starts from a perception of badness somewhere, and if you want to resist change you must be able to show that every item of bad is somehow counterbalanced by an item of good. From this we infer that it is as dangerous to tamper with this equilibrium as with the balance of nature. So, if some one calls your attention to intolerable industrial conditions, you maintain that this represents only one side of the picture, and that one could discover plenty of just employers and contented employees if one only looked for them. Or suppose you are offered the aggressive and repulsive mediocrity of Main Street as a true picture of life, you deny it hotly, averring that the author deliberately selected the unpleasant elements, and that he could have easily discerned many admirable and even lovable traits in his characters if he had taken the trouble to look for them. Obviously, then, there is no need to do anything about the industrial system or Main Street.

I am sometimes assured by my friends that the salvation of the world rests with the conservatives-the steady, practical conservatives. I cannot believe it. Their creed is a creed of evasions and postponements and dilutions. In the atmosphere of their mind all principles lose their cutting edge and convictions their force; in that enervating climate the distinction between right and wrong disappears in a blur of expediency, and the virtue goes out of all ideals. Surely

these are not the people and wisdom. shall not die with them. And even if I should come to believe that the race of conservatives were the chosen instrument, I should continue to hope that my belief was unfounded. For the world that they would save would not be worth saving.

I

SHAD

BY LAURA SPENCER PORTOR

WENT into a fish market of the

better sort not long ago, a fish market of distinction, as was testified by this sign in the window, "We Have Shad from the River Washington Crossed." It was that early season when a livelier iris burns upon the turtle dove, and when a housekeeper's fancy, lightly or heavily, according to the weight of her purse, turns to thoughts of shad roe.

I had for ten days or more been inquiring casually, while the fishman was tying up my pan fish, as to the price of shad roe. And he would say sympathetically, with that engaging smile of his which he turns on me in contradistinction to the great gravity, not to say reverence, with which he serves the rich:

"Pretty high yet."

He is kind, that fishman, and his "Pretty high yet," with which he always prefaced his quotation of the price, was meant to soften the blow and to show that his judgment was sound-that he knew at a glance that I was not of the very rich, yet that he nevertheless did not hold that against me; that he honored me also, after a fashion, and even quite liked me.

"Pretty high yet!-Two dollars and a half a pair." "Pretty high yet!-Two dollars a pair!" "Pretty high yet!-A dollar and eighty-five a pair!" "A dollar fifty!"

So by gradations, day after day! Then a day dawned! It was neither pan fish nor oysters that I was destined to carry home with me.

He came forward wiping his large, clean hands on his large, immaculate apron. I almost thought he was going to shake hands with me.

"How much is shad roe to-day?" I ventured.

"Beautiful shad roe!" he declared, and, with his chest out, led me to them. "Ever see prettier ones than that?" He took a pair up deftly, delicately, and flapped them on to a sheet of white wrapping paper and held them forward on one palm. "That's as beautiful a pair of shad roe as you'd ever see. Beautiful!" "How much?"

Pride, delight-delight in the chance now afforded me could not have been better expressed than his manner and voice expressed them.

"One dollar and a quarter!"

He hardly waited for my assent. His was a skilled eye. I do not know whether it was by some subtle impression conveyed to him by the make and fashion of my hat, or my shoes, or my manner of speaking, or the timbre of my voice, or whether by some delicate impression composite of all these that he knew my type and possibilities so accurately that he could be sure that my conscience, stopping short of all former prices, would not stop short of this.

"You'll take this pair? Beautiful! Certainly! I thought you'd like them! You'll never get better! Beautiful!"

He was an artist, you see. He called them "beautiful," leaving it to utilitarians or a later hour to call them delicious.

I turned, perhaps fatuously, to my old, original, philosophic tendencies of a tender sort.

"I suppose everybody wants shad roe these days."

"Yes, they do. In the market where I got these this morning I saw one man buy eleven hundred pairs for one hotel. He paid a dollar apiece for them straight."

"Eleven hundred!" I said. "For one hotel?"

"Yes."

"Mercy! I wonder there are any shad left."

"Oh, they're very fortunate," he said; "they've only got a short season. Only about two months. The rest of the time they're off and there's nobody wanting them, and you can't get them."

"Still," I said, dubiously, "eleven hundred for one hotel!"

He smiled at this; gave me my neatly tied-up bundle, my price check, assured me again with a gracious smile I should be sure to find the roe "beautiful." I think he would have accompanied me to the door but for the advent of a middleaged dame whom even my unpracticed eye recognized as a wealthy customer, who then crossed his vision. I saw him suddenly grow grave, reverent, as pompous as a fish-selling parson, were there such a species.

I left him, and, free from his engaging smile, noticed for the first time a lesser employee, a fish boy who was unpacking at that moment a barrel of shad, laying each one in its place in the neat rows which he was making of them on the marble-topped fish counter-all this performed with an accustomed, deft, repetitious movement.

These shad were, indeed, worthy the fishman's adjective! These were "beautiful" shad-beautiful beyond any words of mine to describe.

I know! They are looked on usually with a marketable eye, which appraises them for weight, freshness, and possible price. To such an eye they were but shad-fresh-looking, choice, of a goodly size, lying on a marble fish counter, already temptingly decorated with delicate sprigs of parsley, like the frail shadow of coming events-shad, soon to be eaten and enjoyed.

But had you that habit of detachment which the mind acquires when it has learned to look upon created creation without personal bias, nor thought of personal gain nor hunger, nor hope of possession, then you would have seen them for creatures of a most marvelous order.

VOL. CXLIII.-No. 854.-33

Take any one of them, just as the fish boy lifts it up. Is there not something kingly about it? Look at this creature, finally still now, but who, even before that, never, like the domesticated animals, capitulated to heed men's speech. Is he not fit to bring up the King's most priceless jewel in his mouth, if he chose, now, as he did in the ancient fairy tale? Might not Gulnare herself, troubled, have gone to such an one for silver counsel? Who, looking at these, can wonder that in our less arrogant days we built up such a noble mythology and so much worthy fairy lore?

Beautiful? Beautiful indeed, exceedingly. Clothed in preciousness. As they lay there before me they were such creatures-I am serious-as an angel might have stopped to look at; such as an eye that had never seen them might have doted on. Clean, silver, ruby, and opal! I have often wondered at the maintained smoothness and the immitigable severity of that extreme beauty of order in which the birds go clothed, which nothing successfully assails, and which not even the driven storms of the heavens can disarrange; yet I am not sure but there may be here a still better marvel-this shining mail, in which the best imagination might clothe invulnerably a fairy prince these silver scales, silver, ruby, and opal and pearl! Did ever Galahad go clothed in such armor, seeking the Grail? Let anyone with a fresh eye and a heart without prejudice give himself the answer.

I have seen the most beautiful of our own species our women-bedeck themselves in an expensive but poor imitation of this spangled beauty, that is but the common daily garb of these. And I have seen them drift, in the arms of men of a not too high order, in "swallow-tails," to the rhythms of a labored and contrived music, in the making of which musicians, for the most part, get red in the face and break many a fiddle string. Whereas these, but a little while since, moved in inimitable beauty and to im