Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 171
A perpetual corruption to imply,
And the steady obligation of a just administration
To consider every statement is a lie.
When the Orator enrages in a speech of fifty pages,
He does not really mean to use a gun,
When the candidate enlarges on the vigour of his charges
It is only just his little bit of fun.
O, there’s nothing on the platform,
And there’s nothing in the press,
Give it this or that form,
Its neither more nor less,
Liquefied loquacity,
Ink in torrents shed,
Copious Mendacity,
But really, nothing said.
When the business man is busy with the buzzing of his brain
And his mind is set on bonds and stocks and shares,
While he’s building up the country with his utmost might and main,
Do you think it’s for the country that he cares?
When he’s making us a railroad, when he’s digging us a mine
Every philanthropic benefit he flaunts,
When he says that he has blest us with his output of asbestos,
It is nothing but our money that he wants.
Why bother then to fake it, why not knock us down and take it?
Let the jobber be a robber if he must,
Let the banker tell the teller to go down into the cellar,
And then hash the cash and swear the bank is bust.
O, there’s only Sin in Syndicates,
And who can trust a Trust?
The Golden Cloth
Conceals the Moth
And cankers into Rust.
The truly wise
Will lift his eyes
Towards a higher goal.
Will steal a pile
That’s worth the while
And get out whole.
Then gather in the meadows all, as quickly as you can,
The pompous politician and the bulky business man,
Let the lawyer in the lilies lie becalmed in statu quo,
And the broker break off broking just for half an hour or so:
Let the politician prattle to the periwinkle blue,
Covered over with the clover let him play at Peek-a-boo,
Let the clergy in the cowslips cuddle down and double up,
And there imbibe the buttermilk from out the buttercup.
Let us gambol,
Let us ramble,
O’er the flower-embowered lea,
O’er the meadow
In the shadow
Of the elderberry tree.
Let us dress us
As may bless us,
With no public there to see,
Care not which is
Proper breeches
For a summer negligee,
Or array us
To display us
In a pair of flannel pants,
Taking chances
On advances
From the enterprising ants.
Then at even
When the heaven
Reddens to the western sky,
All together
In the heather
Sing a summer
Lullaby.
The Old College and the New University
(WRITTEN FOR THE “McGill Annual” of 1923.)
I have it on tradition that in the year 1860 or thereabouts, the way in which a student matriculated into a college was, that the venerable gentleman named the Principal called him into his office and asked him who his father was, and whether he had read Virgil.
If the old gentleman liked the answers to these questions, he let the boy in.
Nowadays when a student matriculates, it requires in the first place some four pages of printed regulations to tell him how; after which there is demanded two weeks of continuous writing, and the consumption of at least twenty square yards of writing paper.
One of these two systems is what we now call Organization; the other is not. I dare not doubt for a minute which is the best. There is the same difference as there is between a Court Martial and an Appeal to the Privy Council, so that it would be folly, if not treason, to express a preference for the older plan.
But like many other things the plan was not wholly bad. For they do say that sometimes the venerable Principal would keep the boy talking for half an hour or so, and when the youth left, he would say, “Remarkable boy, that! Has the makings of a scholar in him!” And the little matriculant, his heart swollen with pride, would hurry away to the college library with a new fever for Virgil’s Æneid burning within him. By such and similar processes there was set up in the college a sort of personal relationship, not easily established nowadays even by the “contact” section of the “Committee on Friendliness.”
For nowadays every matriculant is just a name and a number, and when he gets to the first year he is merely a “case,” and in his second year simply a “seat,” and in his third year a “condition,” and in his fourth year, at the best, a “parchment,” and after that not even a memory.
There can, of course, be no doubt that present days and present things are better — none whatever. To anybody who attended a place that was called a “college” and had three hundred students, it is wonderful to come back and find it grown — or at any rate swollen, inflated, shall I say? — into a University of three thousand students, with a President instead of a Principal, and with as many “faculties” and departments and committees as there are in the League of Nations. It is wonderful to think of this vast organization pouring out its graduates like beans out of a hopper. It is marvellous, I repeat, to reflect on the way that everything is organized, standardized, unified, and reduced to a provable sample of excellence.
The college athletics of the older day, how feeble they seem by comparison now. The group of students gathered round the campus in the October dusk to cheer the football team — each cheering, or calling, upon some poor notion of his own as to the merits of the play — how crude it seems beside the organized hysteria of the Rooters Club. The college daily journal of to-day with its seven columns of real “news,” and needing nothing but a little murder to put it right in line with the big one-cent papers, the organs of one-cent opinion — how greatly superior it is to the old time College Journal. That poor maundering thing made its appearance at irregular intervals, emerging feebly like the Arctic sun from behind its cloud of debt, and containing nothing later in the way of “news” than a disquisition on The Art of William Shakespeare.
Or take the college library of the old days, how limited it was, with its one ancient librarian, with a beard that reached his girdle, handing out the books one by one, and remembering the students by their faces. As if up-to-date students had any!
The old college is no doubt gone and we could not bring it back if we would. But it would perhaps be well for us if we could keep alive something of the intimate and friendly spirit that inspired it.
Whereupon, I am certain, someone will at once propose a University committee on brotherly love, with power to compel attendance and impose fines.
The Diversions of a Professor of History
IN MY EARLIER days of college teaching, I was for a time, under the sharp spur of necessity, a professor of history. I expected at that period that my researches in this capacity would add much to our knowledge of the known globe. They did not. But they at least enabled me to survive the financial strain of the long vacation by writing historical poetry for the press.
The little verses which here follow were written day by day and appeared here and there in the forgotten corners of odd newspapers. They occasioned about as much interest or illumination as a fire-fly at midday.
It will be noted that I used up only the month of August. Any professor of history in the same need as I was may have all the other eleven months.
TO-DAY IN HISTORY
August 4, 1778
(Victory of Gwalior)
O, the neglected education
Of this poor young Canadian nation,
To think that you never heard before
Of the wonderful victory of Gwalior!
How the British suffered with heat and thirst
And they curst
Their worst
Till they nearly burst
And then in the end came out victorious.
O! wasn’t the whole thing Gwaliorious.
August 2, 1704
(Battle of Blenheim)
This was the very occasion when
Great Marlborough gained the battle of Blen.
The rest of the noble word won’t rhyme,
Say it in silence or call it “heim.”
On the very same spot
In other years
Old Caspar shed his senile tears
And the reason was
If you ask me why
Because his father was “forced to fly!”
O, poor old Caspar, you really ought
To have lived in the age of the aeronaut.
August 5, 1809
(Birth of Alfred Tennyson)
On this very day
At early morn
Lord Alfred Tennyson chanced to be born.
Had it not been so, I really hate
To think of the poor elocutionist’s fate.
He couldn’t have been
The sad May Queen,
He couldn’t have brayed
The Light Brigade
To a ten cent audience (half afraid,
When he hitches
His breeches
With soldier-like twitches
To shew how the Russians were killed in the ditches).
He never could shake
With emotion and make
The price of a meal with his ‘Break, Break, Break.’
Alas, poor bloke,
He’d be broke, broke, broke.
August 8, 1843
(The Annexation of Natal)
When we in touch with heathens come,
We send them first a case of rum,
Next, to rebuke their native sin,
We send a missionary in:
Then when the hungry Hottentot
Has boiled his pastor in a pot,
We teach him Christian, dumb contrition,
By means of dum-dum ammunition,
The situation grows perplexed,
The wicked country is annexed:
But, O! the change when o’er the wild,
Our sweet Humanity has smiled!
The savage shaves his shaggy locks,
Wears breeches and Balbriggan socks,
Learns Euclid, classifies the fossils,
Draws pictures of the Twelve Apostles,—
And now his pastor at the most,
He is content to simply roast:
Forgetful of the art of war,
He smokes a twenty cent cigar,
He drinks not rum, his present care is
For whisky and Apollinaris.
Content for this his land to change,
He fattens up and dies of mange.
Lo! on the ashes of his Kraal,
A Protestant Ca-the-der-al!
August 9, 1902
(King Edward VII crowned)
Again the changing year shall bring
The Coronation of a King,
While yet the reign seemed but begun,
The sceptre passes to the son.
O! little, little round of life,
Where each must walk the selfsame way,
O, little fever fret and strife
That passes into yesterday
When each at last, with struggling breath,
Clasps in the dark the hand of Death.
O! Sorrow of our Common Lot,
Go, mark it well, and Envy not.
August 10, 1866
(The Straits Settlements founded)
Tell me now, will you please relate,
Why do they call these Settlements straight?
Does it mean to say
That the gay
Malay
Is too moral
To quarrel
In any way?
Does he never fight
On a Saturday night,
When he’s drunk in his junk
And his heart is light?
Have they got no music, no whisky, no ladies?
Well—it may be straight, but it’s gloomy as Hades.
August 12, 1905
(Anglo-Japanese Alliance)
Valiant, noble Japanee,
Listen to Britannia’s plea,
Since the battle of Yalu
I’ve been yearning all for you;
Since the fight at Meter Hill
Other suitors make me ill;
Tell me not of German beaux
Addle-headed, adipose,
Double-barrelled Dutchman plain,
Sullen, sombre sons of Spain,
Flaxen Swede, Roumanian red,
Fickle Frenchmen, underfed,
Nay, I care for none of these,
Take me, O, my Japanese,
Yamagata, you of Yeddo,
Fold me, hold me to your heart,
Togo, take me to Tokio,
Tell me not that we must part;
In your home at Nagasaki
Cuddle me against your Khaki,
Since the Russians couldn’t tan you,
Rule, I pray you, Rule Britannia!
August 14, 1763
(Admiral Albemarle took Havana)
On a critical day,
In those awful wars,
The fleet, they say,
Ran out of cigars;
It sounds like a nightmare, a dream, a bogie,
They hadn’t even a Pittsburg stogie,
Nor a single plug,
Of the noble drug,
And from vessel to vessel the signal flew
“Our Sailors are dying for want of a chew.”
From boyhood up those sailors had been
Preserved and pickled in nicotine,
By conscientious smoking and drinking
They had kept themselves from the horror of thinking.
Then Admiral Albemarle looked to leeward
And summoned in haste his bedroom steward,
And said, “My hearty, just cast your eyes on
The sou’-sou’-west, and skin the horizon,
That cloud of smoke and that fort and banner?”
The sailor answered, “That place is Havana.”
Within a second or even a fraction
The Admiral summoned the ships to action,
The signal was read by every tar,
“You hit a Spaniard and get a cigar.”
Now need I say to readers that smoke
How the furious burst of Artillery broke,
How they shot at Havana, bombarded and shook it
And so as a matter of course they took it.
The terms of surrender were brief but witty,
“We’ll take the cigars, you can keep the city.”
August 11, 1535
(Jacques Cartier discovered the St. Lawrence)
This is the day
When Cartier
Came sailing up to the Saguenay.
He found the St. Lawrence
Without a chart.
O, wasn’t Cart.
Exceedingly smart!
August 15, 1870
(Manitoba becomes a Province)
Now everybody, drunk or sober,
Sing loud the praise of Manitoba;
Throw back your head, inflate your chest,
And sing the glories of the West;
Sing, without slackening or stop,
The jubilation of the crop;
Sing of the bending ear of wheat,
That stands at least some fourteen feet;
And soft its tasselled head inclines,
To flirt with the potato vines;
Sing of the prairie covered over
With cabbage trees and shrubs of clover;
While English settlers lose their way
In forests of gigantic hay.
How wonderful be it confessed,
The passing of the bygone West;
The painted Indian rides no more,
He stands—at a tobacco store,
His cruel face proclaims afar
The terror of the cheap cigar;
Behold his once downtrodden squaw,
Protected by Provincial Law;
Their tee-pee has become—Oh, gee,
A station on the G.T.P.,
And on the scenes of Ancient War,
Thy rails I.C.O. C.P.R.
August 16, 1713
(New Brunswick founded)
I need not sing your praises, every word
Of mine, New Brunswick, would appear absurd
Beside the melody that freely pours
From out these polysyllables of yours.
Where Chedabudcto roars and bold Buctouche
Rivals the ripples of the Restigouche;
Or where beneath its ancient British flag
Aroostook faces Mettawamkeag.
Oh, fairy-land of meadow, vale and brook
Kennebekasis, Chiputneticook,
Shick-Shock and Shediac, Point Escuminac,
Miramachi and Peticodiac.
This is no place to try poetic wit,
I guess at least I know enough to quit.
August 17, 1896
(Gold discovered in the Yukon)
This is the day
In a climate cold
They found that wretched thing called Gold;
That miserable, hateful stuff,
How can I curse at it enough,
That foul, deceitful, meretricious,
Abominable, avaricious,
That execrable, bought and sold
Commodity that men call gold.
How can I find the words to state it,
The deep contempt with which I hate it;
I charge you, nay, I here command it,
Give it me not, I could not stand it:
You hear me shout, you mark me holler?
Don’t dare to offer me a dollar.
The mere idea of taking it
