Part 12 (1/2)
THE PARSON. Everything is tolerated now but Christian orthodoxy.
THE FIRE-TENDER. It's easy enough to make a brilliant catalogue of external achievements, but I take it that real progress ought to be in man himself. It is not a question of what a man enjoys, but what he can produce. The best sculpture was executed two thousand years ago.
The best paintings are several centuries old. We study the finest architecture in its ruins. The standards of poetry are Shakespeare, Homer, Isaiah, and David. The latest of the arts, music, culminated in composition, though not in execution, a century ago.
THE MISTRESS. Yet culture in music certainly distinguishes the civilization of this age. It has taken eighteen hundred years for the principles of the Christian religion to begin to be practically incorporated in government and in ordinary business, and it will take a long time for Beethoven to be popularly recognized; but there is growth toward him, and not away from him, and when the average culture has reached his height, some other genius will still more profoundly and delicately express the highest thoughts.
HERBERT. I wish I could believe it. The spirit of this age is expressed by the Calliope.
THE PARSON. Yes, it remained for us to add church-bells and cannon to the orchestra.
OUR NEXT DOOR. It's a melancholy thought to me that we can no longer express ourselves with the ba.s.s-drum; there used to be the whole of the Fourth of July in its patriotic throbs.
MANDEVILLE. We certainly have made great progress in one art,--that of war.
THE YOUNG LADY. And in the humane alleviations of the miseries of war.
THE FIRE-TENDER. The most discouraging symptom to me in our undoubted advance in the comforts and refinements of society is the facility with which men slip back into barbarism, if the artificial and external accidents of their lives are changed. We have always kept a fringe of barbarism on our s.h.i.+fting western frontier; and I think there never was a worse society than that in California and Nevada in their early days.
THE YOUNG LADY. That is because women were absent.
THE FIRE-TENDER. But women are not absent in London and New York, and they are conspicuous in the most exceptionable demonstrations of social anarchy. Certainly they were not wanting in Paris. Yes, there was a city widely accepted as the summit of our material civilization. No city was so beautiful, so luxurious, so safe, so well ordered for the comfort of living, and yet it needed only a month or two to make it a kind of pandemonium of savagery. Its citizens were the barbarians who destroyed its own monuments of civilization. I don't mean to say that there was no apology for what was done there in the deceit and fraud that preceded it, but I simply notice how ready the tiger was to appear, and how little restraint all the material civilization was to the beast.
THE MISTRESS. I can't deny your instances, and yet I somehow feel that pretty much all you have been saying is in effect untrue. Not one of you would be willing to change our civilization for any other. In your estimate you take no account, it seems to me, of the growth of charity.
MANDEVILLE. And you might add a recognition of the value of human life.
THE MISTRESS. I don't believe there was ever before diffused everywhere such an element of good-will, and never before were women so much engaged in philanthropic work.
THE PARSON. It must be confessed that one of the best signs of the times is woman's charity for woman. That certainly never existed to the same extent in any other civilization.
MANDEVILLE. And there is another thing that distinguishes us, or is beginning to. That is, the notion that you can do something more with a criminal than punish him; and that society has not done its duty when it has built a sufficient number of schools for one cla.s.s, or of decent jails for another.
HERBERT. It will be a long time before we get decent jails.
MANDEVILLE. But when we do they will begin to be places of education and training as much as of punishment and disgrace. The public will provide teachers in the prisons as it now does in the common schools.
THE FIRE-TENDER. The imperfections of our methods and means of selecting those in the community who ought to be in prison are so great, that extra care in dealing with them becomes us. We are beginning to learn that we cannot draw arbitrary lines with infallible justice. Perhaps half those who are convicted of crimes are as capable of reformation as half those transgressors who are not convicted, or who keep inside the statutory law.
HERBERT. Would you remove the odium of prison?
THE FIRE-TENDER. No; but I would have criminals believe, and society believe, that in going to prison a man or woman does not pa.s.s an absolute line and go into a fixed state.
THE PARSON. That is, you would not have judgment and retribution begin in this world.
OUR NEXT DOOR. Don't switch us off into theology. I hate to go up in a balloon, or see any one else go.