Contents VOLUME I No. 1. JANUARY-MARCH, 1914 - H. B. Brougham David Starr Jordan EN CASSEROLE: Tobacco and Alcohol - Answering Big Questions - De- cency and the Stage- What's the Matter with our Colleges? (Vernon L. KELLOGG) — Proportionate News (F. J. MATHER, JR.) — Charles W. Burrows tion - A Model of Divinatory Criticism (CALVIN THOMAS) — Some Deserving "Climbers” — Simplified Spelling VOL. I JANUARY, 1914 NO. I THE NEW IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT WE E call it new. Yet there is nothing new under the sun - which statement, like most proverbs, is but a half truth. The world has always been full of irrepressible conflicts, and will be as long as life is worth living in it- and longer. There was one between centrifugal and centripetal force, at the very start (assuming a start), when the star dust began to whirl, and all that have been since have been but differentiations from it. Old ones are between sexinstinct and monogamy, between license and order, or call it liberty and authority if you please, or freedom and slavery. Sex-instinct, license, liberty, freedom are centrifugal; monogamy, order, authority, even slavery, are centripetal. The conflict between freedom and slavery gave rise to the phrase The Irrepressible Conflict. It came through Seward at the time of the Civil War. That Irrepressible Conflict has been succeeded by one which we have called new, but which, though in a comparatively quiescent state, is older than Jack Cade or even than Cleon. It took its start in the fact that in human evolution, from the pithecanthropos up, some of us have not got along as fast as others. Primitively, the conflict began by those in front enslaving those behind — the minority enslaving the majority. But that built Athens; and with it, civilization - as we regard it. (This starting point is selected somewhat arbitrarily, but most starting points must be.) It now looks, though, as if the boot were getting on the other leg - the majority trying to enslave the minority; and if they do before humanity is much farther evolved, what Athens started will stop. But probably the result of the conflict will not be as bad as that. Something like it has happened at times, however say when Southern Europe was rolled over by Northern Europe, and when the Paris that had breeches was rolled over by the Paris that had none; and possibly something like it began when Americans that had three thousand dollars a year and found work for the rest of the people, and paid wages, and bought the produce of the soil, and made commerce and finance and the best in statecraft and science and letters and the arts - when in two instances these men were legislated away from powers and immunities granted to others. Of all human conditions, the difference among men in capacities, and consequently in possessions, is perhaps the most troublesome; and yet it is because of that very condition, that most men have done most of the things that raised them from the lowest savagery. The progress of the world, as a whole, has depended upon the superior man leading the way, and upon the mass of men working to keep up with him. Of course we in our wisdom can ask why it was necessary to evolve men at different rates, thus imposing upon most of us the pains of inferiority and envy, and the strains of emulation. We don't know, but so it is. Life is full of such paradoxes, way down to the existence side by side of free will and necessity; and the only effective way of life is to devote to each of the opposing conditions the best action our little intellects can direct, without wasting them over vain efforts at reconciliations that are beyond us. Although the wage-earner of to-day is better off than the kings of yore in every particular except that there are more men for him to envy, that particular is a constant source of unhappiness to him, and is rapidly making him a constant source of unhappiness to everybody else. The man behind is getting more and more in conflict with the man in front. Until lately the disturbances have been local and spasmodic. Now they have become nationwide and world-wide; and until evolution has got so near its goal of equilibration that the differences between men are much less than now, and the sympathies much greater, the conflict will be irrepressible. The differences from which it springs were, as is well known, much less among the ancestors who shaped our government than they are among ourselves. Leaving out the slaves who did nothing in that work, the population was nearer homogeneous in wealth and race than it is now, and the differences were not so great as to cause much conflict. There was virtually no proletariat. In those days it took character to emigrate to these shores: in these days, it almost seems to take character not to. The nation consisted then almost entirely of farmers and landowners, and there continued some sort of basis for all the talk of equality, until the proletariat “tasted blood" in the greenbacks issued as a war measure. The impression brought by them into the minds of the ignorant, and fostered by the demagogues, was that to make everybody rich, it was only necessary to print more. This delusion. dropped into the minds of the first proletariat in the world which had long enjoyed common-school education, and in that soil it grew rapidly, and whenever put down in one form, it has arisen in another. When people were satisfied that the millennium could not be brought about by greenbacks, they felt certain, under the instruction of that eminent financier our present Secretary-of-State, that it could be brought about by silver. When they got through playing with that delusion, they were entirely ready to welcome a flood of other delusions which had found their principal sources in Europe among men denied the electoral franchise. Up to that time the toy of political equality had kept the American proletariat sufficiently amused to prevent their paying much attention to the socialism, anarchism and similar "isms" which had agitated the same classes abroad. But the essential conditions had all the while been the same here, and the assassination of McKinley illustrated that the great republic was at last as far along in a certain sort of "progress as the older civilizations. It was the direct consequence of the crazy doctrines preached all the way from Emma |