Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 215
“Your next question asks whether the minority has too much power in the United States. Again a wonderfully shrewd inquiry. How do you manage to think of these things? Has it too much power? Let me think a little. In order to answer your question, I’m afraid I shall have to read over the history of the United States from the Declaration of Independence.
“You ask next, What is my opinion of a democracy? This I can answer briefly. It is the form of government under which you are permitted to live.
“Your next question is, ‘What is a responsible government?’ I admit the keenness of the inquiry. It is amazing the way you get to the center of things. But I am not prepared. Give me a month on this, if you possibly can.
“Your last question (for the present) reads ‘How would the adoption of the British System affect our Supreme Court?’ Here again I can hardly answer without perhaps fatiguing you with details. But I will write to Justice Taft and to Lord Reading and while we are waiting for their answers perhaps you would care to send me along a few more questions. I can be working on them in my spare time.”
I had written the above letter and then on second thoughts I decided not to send it. What would be the use? The kind of young man who sends out the questionnaires is quite impervious to satire.
The only thing to do is to try to form a league of grown-up people who refuse to be investigated. I propose to be the first in it. Henceforth I will answer no questions except to the census taker and the income tax man.
If any college girl is investigating the upward trend of mortality among mules or the downward movement of morality among humans, she need not come to me. If any young man is making a chart or diagram or a graph to show the per capita increase of crime let him go to the penitentiary. My door henceforth is closed.
This Expiring World
I have just been reading in the press the agonizing statement that there are only 4,000,000,000,000 cords of pulp wood left in the world, and that in another fifty years it will be all gone. After that there will be no pulp. Who is it that is consuming all this pulp, I do not know. I am sure that in my own home, apart from a little at breakfast, we don’t use any.
But the main point is that in fifty years it will all be finished. In fifty years from now, where there used to be great forests of pulp-trees reaching to the furthest horizon, there will be nothing but a sweep of bare rolling rocks, lifeless and untenanted, where nothing will be heard except the mournful cry of the waterfowl circling in the empty sky over what was once the forests of North America.
Or no — I forgot. It seems that there will be no waterfowl either. In the very same newspaper I read that the waterfowl of America are disappearing so fast that in another forty years they will be extinct. Parts of the country that only a few years ago were literally black with black duck, teal, ptarmigan, and pemmican now scarcely support one flamingo to the square mile. In another generation the whole continent will have turned into farms, fields, motor roads, and the motor cars will have penetrated everywhere.
Motor cars, did I say? I fear I am in error there again. In forty years there will be no motor cars. Gasoline, it is certain, is running out. Professor Glumb of Midnight, Alaska, has just made a calculation to show that at the rate at which we are using up the world’s gasoline, the supply will end in forty years.
He warns us that even now there are only 4,000,000,000,000,000 gallons in sight. There may be just a little more, he thinks, under the Red Sea; he has not been down, but he doubts if there are more than a couple of million billion gallons. In a little time it will be all gone. The motor cars will stand packed in rows and it won’t be possible to move them an inch.
And what is worse, it won’t be any use trying to substitute coal. There won’t be any. It is to run out the year before gasoline. Our reckless use of it all through the nineteenth century has brought us to the point where there are only 10,000,000,000,000 tons left. Assuming that we go on consuming it, even at our present rate, the last clinkers will be raked out of the last furnace in 1964. After that the furnace man will simply draw his salary and sit in the cellar: there won’t be a thing for him to do.
At first some of the scientists — such as Professor Hoopitup of Joy College — were inclined to think that electricity might take the place of coal as a source of power, heat, light, and food. But it appears not. The electricity is nearly all gone. Already the Chicago drainage canal has lowered Niagara Falls the tenth of an inch, and in places where there was once the white foaming cataract leaping in a sheet of water a foot thick, there is now only eleven inches and nine-tenths.
We may perhaps last on a little longer if we dam the St. Lawrence, and dam the drainage canal, and dam the Hudson — in short, if we dam the whole continent up and down. But the end is in sight. In another forty years the last kilowatt of electricity will have been consumed, and the electric apparatus will be put in a museum, and exhibited as a relic of the past to the children of the future.
Children? No, no, I forgot. It is hardly likely there will be any, forty years hence. The children are disappearing as rapidly as the gasoline and the waterfowl. It is estimated that the increase of the birth rate on this continent is steadily falling. A few years ago it was 40 per thousand, then it sank to 20, then it passed to 10, and now it is down to decimal four something. If this means anything it means that today we have an average of a thousand adults to decimal four something of a child. The human race on this continent is coming to a full stop.
Moreover, the same fate that is happening to gasoline and coal seems to be overtaking the things of the mind. It is, for example, a subject of universal remark that statesmen seem to be dying out. There may be a few very old statesmen still staggering round, but as a class they are done. In the same way there are no orators: they’re gone. And everybody knows that there is hardly such a thing left now as a gentleman of the old school. I think that one was seen a month or so ago somewhere in a marsh in Virginia. But that’s about the last. In short, civility is dead, polite culture is gone, and manners are almost extinct.
On the other side of the account I can find nothing conspicuous except the very notable increase of the criminal class. It has recently been calculated by Professor Crook (graduate of Harvard and Sing Sing) that within forty years every other man will belong to the criminal class; and even the man who isn’t the other man will be pretty tough himself.
In other words, the outlook is bad. As I see it, there is nothing for it but to enjoy ourselves while we can. The wise man will go out, while it is still possible, and get some pulp and a pint of gasoline and a chunk of coal and have a big time.
Are We Fascinated with Crime?
Most readers will agree with me that of late the newspapers have been fine reading. First there was the account of the new murder in Cleveland where the body was sent away by express. Then there was the story of the bob-haired bandit — it didn’t say whether man or woman — who held up an entire subway station and got clean away with the iron ticket office. There was the man who killed his mother-in-law and refused to give any reason, and the high-school girl of fifteen who shot the teacher because he tried to teach her algebra. Along with this there were two kidnappings, three disappearances of reputable citizens, two degeneracies and a little sprinkling of bank robberies and train wrecking in Arkansas. Take it all in all it made the morning paper well worth reading. With a sheet of news like that the trip on the street car to one’s work passes like a moment.
There were of course the foreign murders, too. But I generally keep them for my lunch hour. I find it hard to get up the same interest when they murder Turks and Finns and Letts as when you have the thing right at home. One body packed in a trunk in Cleveland and sent by express is better to me than a whole car-load lot of Letts. I get more out of it. But taking them all together and adding up the home and foreign crimes I found that yesterday’s paper was thirty per cent straight criminality. That I think is about a record and will compare very favorably with Soviet Russia or with the Dark Ages. Indeed I doubt if the Dark Ages, even in equatorial Africa, had anything on us in point of interest in crime.
My first feeling over this record was one of pride. But afterwards on reflection I began to feel a little bit disturbed about it, and to wonder whether as a race and a generation we are not getting morbidly fascinated with crime, and liable to suffer for it?
Our newspapers are filled with bandits, safe breakers, home wreckers, crooks, policemen and penitentiaries. The stories that sell best are stories in which there is murder right straight off on the first page. The sneaking fascination of the daring criminal has put the soldier and the patriot nowhere. Stories of brave men who give their lives for their country are now written only for children. Grown up people read about daring criminals, who talk worse English than the first year class at a college and call a trust company a “crib” and a bank manager a “stiff.” That is the kind of literature that is making Shakespeare and Milton and Emerson sound like a lecture on anthropology.
If a rich man is killed by his chauffeur in Tampa, Florida, and his body hidden in the gasoline tank, why should you and I worry? We don’t live in Tampa and we have no chauffeur and gasoline is too expensive for us to waste like that.
Yet a whole continent will have to sit up and read a column of news about such a simple little event as that.
I suppose that in a sense this hideous interest in crime and its punishment is as old as humanity. It must have created quite a stir when Cain killed Abel. On our own continent our oldest knowledge of manners and customs is the story of the Indian’s delight in torture, feebly paralleled by the Puritan’s pleasure in throwing rotten eggs at a sinner in the stocks. In what are now called the “good old times” in England, say about the time of the Tudors, people used to tramp long distances with a “lunch” in their pockets to go and see a man burnt in a sheet of white flame. One reads stories of people taking little children to executions and holding them up to see. Even when the days of the burning were over people still gathered in crowds of a morning round Newgate jail in London to see the hangings. Rare sport it must have been. For a specially good show they were there the night before, sitting up all night to hold the good places.
In what we call the civilized countries mankind has forbidden itself the pleasure of inflicting tortures and watching executions. But we are breaking out in a new spot. The same evil instinct finds another vent. Since we are not allowed any longer to go to executions and to take a personal part in crimes we like to read about them. And the vast apparatus of our press and our telegraph can give us opportunities in this direction of which our ancestors never dreamed. Think what could have been made by a first class New York newspaper organization, and by the moving picture people, of the burning of Latimer and Ridley? It seems like a lost opportunity.
Under our conditions we don’t have to confine ourselves, as the man of two centuries ago did, to the crimes of our own neighbourhood. We can gather them in from all the world. He had to be content with a hanging every now and then. We can have a dozen or two every day, and if we care to count Finns and Letts, easily a hundred.
But the moralist — that’s me — is bound to ask where is it leading us? What is the result of it on our minds and characters, this everlasting dwelling on crime. Somebody wrote long ago that —
Vice is a monster of such hideous mien,
That to be hated needs but to be seen,
But too oft seen, familiar with her face
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.
The same is true of crime. The everlasting depiction and perusal of it corrupts the mind — not yours of course, my dear reader, because you are strong minded. But it corrupts the feeble mind. Personally I admit that I found myself reflecting on the man that killed his mother-in-law and gave no reason and wondering perhaps — but let it go.
Everybody knows that this North American Continent — the people of the United States, the Canadians, the Mexicans and the Eskimos — is undergoing a wave of crime such as was never known before. Some people attribute this to one thing, some to another. Some say it is because of the decline of Presbyterianism, and some say it is an effect of motor cars. But my own idea is that the chief cause of it is crime literature, crime news and universal outbreak of crime interest.
One naturally asks what are we going to do about it? Many people would immediately suggest that the first thing to be done is to amend the federal constitution of the United States so as to forbid all morbid interest in crime; and then to pass a series of state statutes for hanging anybody who takes too much interest in hanging.
I don’t think that the evil can be cured that way. That is a method of doing things that has worn pretty thin. In the United States and Canada we have got so many prohibitive and preventive statutes already that we are in danger of all being in jail before we are done with it. The only remedy is the slow but efficacious force of public opinion of what used to be called, in days before legislatures made statutes, the working of the spirit.
For social evils the first remedy is a social consciousness of the evil. If the community becomes conscious of its unwholesome morbid interest in crime, that already will start the cure. Sensible persons here and there will begin to take the mote — or the motor — out of their own eye — as a first step toward taking the beam out of their neighbors. Newspapers and magazine makers and moving picture makers have no innate desire to foist crime news on the public. They are probably sick of it. Left to themselves they would rather go fishing or dig in the garden. The notion that a newspaper reporter is half brother to the criminal is erroneous. In point of news, and amusements and pictures, the public always gets what the public wants. This is a pity, but it is so.
There is no need for anybody to start a “national movement” in this matter. Personally I refuse to join in it. I have been dragged into too many already — swatting flies, and going to see mother on May 11th, and never spitting except at home — my time is all taken up with them.
But anybody can start a movement by beginning with himself. That’s what I mean to do. Henceforth it is of no use for a newspaper editor to hand me out stories of crime and violence. I’m done with them. I want to read the quiet stuff — about how the autumn hoe crop is looking, and about the latest lectures on paleontology and how cold it has turned at Nome in Alaska. That kind of thing improves the human mind and does nothing but good.
But before I do start, I’d just like to have one little peep at that news I see in today’s paper about the man who murdered the barber in Evansville because he was too slow in shaving him. That sounds good, but after that I’m done.
Round Our City
At the Ladies Culture Club
A Lecture on The Fourth Dimension
It has become a fixed understanding that with each approaching winter there begins the open season for the various Ladies Culture Clubs. I suppose that this kind of club exists in everybody else’s town just as it does in mine. We have one in my town that meets at eleven (every other Tuesday), has just a small cup of coffee and just a tiny sandwich, hears an hour’s talk, usually on music or art, and then goes home.
Then there’s one that meets at lunch, every second Thursday and every third Tuesday, quite informally, just eats a tiny beefsteak with a nice dish of apple pie after it and listens to a speech on national affairs, excluding of course all reference to political parties or politics, or public opinion, and all references to actual individuals or actual facts.
After that there’s a club, mostly of older women, which meets at three (without refreshments till after) and discusses social problems such as how to keep younger women in hand. This club meets every first Monday in the month unless it falls at the beginning of a week.
But the club that has most interested me recently is the Ladies Culture Club because I had the honor of visiting it a little while ago. The club was founded two winters ago — as was explained to me over the ice cream by the president — with the idea that it is a pity that women know so little of science and that nowadays science is really becoming a quite important thing, and when you think of radio and electrons and atoms and things like that one ought to know something about them for fear of your feeling ignorant.
So when the club was founded it was made absolutely and exclusively a woman’s club, men taking no part in it whatever, except that men are invited to be the speakers and to sit on the platform and attend the meetings.
The day I was there the meeting was held in the ballroom of the new Grand Palaver hotel, because that is a simple place suitable for science. There were no decorations except flowers and no music except a Hungarian orchestra which stopped the moment the lecture began. This is a rule of the club.
The attendance was so large that several of the ladies remarked with pride that it would hardly have been possible to get an equal number of men to come at three o’clock in the afternoon to listen to a lecture on Four Dimensional Space.
The great mass of members were seated in chairs on the floor of the ballroom with a certain number of men here and there among them; but they were a peculiar kind of men. The president and a group of ladies were on a raised platform and they had in the middle of them Professor Droon who was to lecture on Four Dimensional Space. In front of him they had put a little table with a glass and water, enough water to last a camel for a four days’ trip. Behind Professor Droon was a barricade of chairs and plants with spikes. He couldn’t escape.
The President rose and made the regulation announcement that there were a good many members who had not yet paid their fees this season and it was desirable that they should do so owing to the high cost of bringing lecturers to the club.
