CHAPTER VIII. A LESSON IN WORLD-REFORM.
Project Gutenberg EPUB3 edition
Brownson, Orestes Augustus
“Things are best as God made them,” added Mr. Cotton. “Men and women have each their peculiar character and sphere. Women would gain nothing by exchanging the petticoat for the breeches, or men by exchanging the breeches for the petticoat.”
“But I wish,” said Leila, poutingly, “to be treated as a reasonable being, and that the young gentlemen who do me the honor to address me would treat me as if I had common sense. I do not want compliments paid to my hands and feet, my face, lips, nose, eyes, and eyebrows.”
“And yet,” said I, “my sweet Leila, they are well worth complimenting.”
She smiled, and seemed not displeased.
“I suspect,” remarked Mr. Cotton, with his Puritan slyness, “that the young lady finds the affluence of such compliments more endurable than she would their absence.”
“I do not deal much in compliments,” said Mr. Merton, “but I do not much fancy persons who are always wise, and never open their mouths without giving utterance to some grave maxim for the conduct of life. There is a time to be silly as well as a time to be wise. Life is made up of little things, and he is a sad moralist who has no leniency for trifles. I love myself to look upon a pretty face, and find no great objection to those pleasant nothings which are the current coin of well-bred conversation between the sexes. Even a gallant speech, a happily-turned compliment, when it brings no blush to the cheek of modesty, is quite endurable.”
“I thought you were a parson, Mr. Merton,” said Priscilla, “and am surprised to find you so tolerant of what it is said your cloth generally condemns.”
“The fair Priscilla may have mistaken my cloth. I am a man, and I hope a gentleman. I love society, and find an exquisite charm in the social intercourse of cultivated men and women. That charm would vanish were they to meet and converse, not as men and women, gentlemen and ladies, but as simple human beings. Could you carry out your doctrine, your sex would, I fear, be the first to suffer from it.”
“Perhaps they would,” said Priscilla; “but it is woman’s lot to suffer, and she was born to redeem the race by her private sorrows. She will not shrink from the sacrifice. You need her at the polls, in the legislative halls, in the executive chair, on the judge’s bench, as well as in the saloon, to give purity and elevation to your affections, disinterestedness and courage to your conduct.”
“Rather let her be present to infuse noble qualities into our hearts in childhood, and to cherish and invigorate them in our manhood,” added Mr. Merton. “Let her mission be by a sweet, quiet, and gentle influence to form us from our infancy for lofty and heroic deeds, and let it be ours to do them.”
“I do not like this discussion at all,” broke in Thomas Jefferson Andrew Jackson Hobbs, a thorough-going radical, with an unshaved and unwashen face, long, lank, uncombed hair, and a gray, patched frock coat, leather pantaloons, a red waistcoat, and a red bandanna handkerchief tied round his neck for a cravat. “The world can never be reformed by the instrumentality of government, whether in the hands of man or woman. The curse of the world is that it has been governed too much. That is the best government that governs least, and a better is that which governs none at all. We want no government, least of all a government made up of female politicians and intriguers. There never yet was a great crime or a great iniquity, but a woman had a hand in it. The devil, when he would ruin mankind, always begins by seducing woman, and making her his accomplice. We must get rid of all government, break down church and state, sweep away religion and politics, and exterminate all priests and politicians, whether in pantaloons or petticoats, in broadcloth or homespun, and bring back that state of things which was in Judea, ‘when there was no king in Israel, and every man did what was right in his own eyes.’”
“Boldly said,” remarked Signor Giovanni Urbini, a leader of young Italy, “but it is hardly wise. The people are not yet, especially in my country, prepared for it. They have so long been the slaves of power, and the tools of superstition, that they would be shocked at its bare announcement. They must have their Madonnas, their San Carlos, their San Felippos, and their capucin frati. But a thoroughgoing democratic revolution is no doubt needed, and such a revolution will necessarily result in a no less thorough and radical revolution in religion; but this last we had better leave to come of itself. You cannot work with purely negative ideas. You must have something positive, and that must be the positive idea of the age. Kings, princes, nobles, priests, religions in our times are at a discount, and the secret, silent, but irresistible tendency is to bring up the people. Assert, then, boldly everywhere people-king, people-pontiff, people-god. Fling out to the breeze the virgin banner of the people. Go forth to war in the name of the people, in the inspiration of the people, and always and everywhere shout THE PEOPLE, THE PEOPLE. Break the fetters which now bind the people, emancipate them from their present masters, assert their supremacy, and establish their power, which of course in the last analysis will be our power over them. They will then re-organize society, religion, and politics, and every thing else, after the best model, and in the way which will best meet our wishes.”
“I am decidedly opposed to my friend Urbini’s doctrine,” frankly asserted M. Beaubien, from the sunny south of France, “I want no king-people, and if I must be tyrannized over, I prefer it should be by one man rather than the many-headed and capricious multitude. The evils under which society groans is individualism, which now exerts itself in universal competition, so highly prized by your foolish and stupid political economists. These evils can be removed by no political or religious revolution, neither by your Luthers nor your Robespierres. They can be removed only by the pacific organization of labor, and the arrangement of laborers in groups and series according to their special tastes and capacities, on the newly-discovered principle that ‘attractions are proportional to destiny.’”
“A better plan,” suggested M. Icarie, also from la belle France, “is to abolish all private property, all private households, industry, and economy, and have the whole community supported, lodged, fed, clothed, feasted or nursed, and transported from place to place, from house to house, at the public expense.”
“Admirable,” interposed Mr. Cotton, “but who will support the public, and whence will the public draw its funds?”
“Singular questions,” replied M. Icarie. “The public will support itself, and draw the necessary funds from the public treasury, as a matter of course.”
“And where does the treasury get them?” asked, with a sneer, M. Le Prohne, a native of the ancient Dauphiny, who towered head and shoulders above all the rest. “All your schemes are idle and absurd; property is robbery; abolish it, and all distinction between thine and mine, and establish a grand People’s Bank, and give each one an equal credit on its books.”
“And who,” sarcastically remarked M. Icarie, “will take care of the Bank, and be responsible for its managers, or see that the drafts of individuals are duly honored?”
“Why not,” I asked in my enthusiasm, “make an equal division of property among all the members of the community?”
“That would do very well for a start,” suggested Mr. Cotton, “but he was afraid that come Saturday night, a good many would demand, like the sailor, that the property be divided again, as they no longer retained their proportion.”
This produced a smile, and as it was late, the company broke up and departed. Those who had had an opportunity of bringing forward their views were very much edified; others who had been obliged to listen, or to keep back their own projects, thought the party exceedingly dull, and could not help thinking that the evening had been spent very unprofitably.
There were, indeed, persons there with plans of reform as wise, as deep, and as practicable as those I have taken notice of, and I owe an apology to their authors for my omissions. These omissions are the result of no ill feeling, and of no intentional neglect; and I certainly would repair them, but as I am pressed for time, and am not writing a history of reformers and projected reforms in a thousand volumes in-folio, the thing is absolutely out of the question. Let it suffice for me to say, that I have by me still some thousand and one of these projects, all of which their authors did me the honor to send me, with their respects, and all of which I examined with all the care and diligence they deserved.
I returned to my lodgings, not so much enlightened or edified by what I had heard as I might have desired, though not much disappointed or discouraged. No plan had been suggested that was not unsatisfactory, and, taken in itself alone, that was not obviously either mischievous or absurd. But under them all I saw one and the same spirit, the spirit of the age, and all were striking indications of a great and powerful movement in the direction of something different from what is now the established order. No one of them would be realized, but it was well to encourage this movement, to join with this free and powerful spirit. Something, as Mr. Micawber was wont to say, “might turn up,” and out of the seeming darkness light might at length shine, and out of the apparent chaos order might finally spring forth. I would lend myself to the spirit working, and trust to future developments. With that I undressed, went to bed, and dreamed of Leila, no, Priscilla; no, yes,—it was Priscilla. I was the victorious champion of reform. She was binding my brow with the crown of laurel, when I awoke, and was sad that it was only a dream.