MUSINGS ON CURRENT TOPICS

First Paper

North American Review, February, 1901

It is a rare pleasure to make a good end of a long and strenuous effort; to put wholly out of the mind a subject that has filled every chamber of it for two years. Minds are lodging-houses. The lodgers are of all sorts-casuals and regulars, modest attic-dwellers who have no call bells, and first-floor boarders who rent a large space and fill a larger one. Now and then some pretentious and exacting fellow crowds out every other lodger and takes the house. There is not wanting a sense of the dignity the house borrows from this august guest; but emancipation abides his going. When the last truckload of his baggage has departed, and the door is barred against the spirits that have a penchant for garnished houses, what a glad sense of freedom the overworked mistress feels! Every room vacant, but nothing "to let." This will not do for a permanent state, but as a short experience it is ecstatic. I have known what it is to have an imperial tenant of the whole mind, and have experienced the joys of an ouster. The case of Venezuela, in the Anglo-Venezuelan arbitration,

demanded the unremitting labor of two years. What a sense of freedom came, when every book and paper connected with the case was put out of sight! I was again in fellowship with the undergraduates dancing over the grave of the calculus. The trouble with the calculus is that you must work out the problems, you must bring the answers. If you could stop when one problem gets hard and try another, as the squirrel does with his nuts, the undergraduate would regard the book differently. A non sequitur is a hateful thing. Answers must be right. But it is not, I hope, a sin against a sound mind to stop short of an answer; you do not need to climb to the top of every hill you see. To raise questions, to speculate, to balance such pros and cons as come easy, and to stop short of conclusions, is admissible -in vacation.

The notes that follow are largely exercises of that sort, made chiefly during the winter days when there were no tenants, and the sign "to let" was not in the window.

The electric, self-binding newspaper drops its sheaves at our feet with bewildering rapidity. The stackers must keep up; but a vagrant may take a sheaf for a pillow and lie down in the shade.

THE ANTI-WAR PARTY

There is an anti-war party in Great Britain and another in the United States. A war seems to imply

an anti-war party. Indeed, the Gospels carry such an implication in a general sense. Both here and in Great Britain the anti-war party has been brought under fire of bitter invective. We, for the most part, decline to discuss with the anti-war man the justice of the war. That issue has been voted upon and carried, we say, and every one is bound, not only as to his actions, but as to his speech.

But is the morality of the motto, "My country, right or wrong," susceptible of defense? Is it not to say: "It is right to do wrong?"-for the sentiment implies action. But may it not be quite the right, and even the necessary, thing to say nothing "just now"? If my father is engaged in a wanton assault upon another man, and blows are being exchanged,. I must in my heart condemn my father; but am I called upon to trip him, or to encourage his adversary by telling him his adversary is in the right? That would clearly be the duty of a bystander not of the blood of either combatant. But do I very much offend, or become particeps, if I withhold for the moment an expression of my disapprobation of my father's conduct? Or, on the other hand, can it be demanded as a filial duty that I cheer him on, and when his weapon fails give him another? Is it unfilial to say, "Father, you are in the wrong-stop"? I can not get him into a closet that I may say this in his ear. His antagonist will hear it. And, if I speak in the necessary hearing

of both, can my father retort, "If I am killed, you are my murderer; you have encouraged my adversary"? But, if the battle goes too hardly against him, must I not intervene and save his life? I can flagellate his spirit while I am binding his wounds. But if he is the victor, must I not bind the wounds of his adversary, and support his adversary's demand for compensation?

A country at war is very intolerant-the home guards more than the veterans, and the politicians most of all. When war is once flagrant, public sentiment—at least that part of it that finds expression -demands that every citizen shall be active in support of it. To speak against the war, to impugn its justice, is to encourage the enemy, is to be guilty of the death of such of your countrymen as afterward fall in action. The mob may not seek you, but you are a "suspect" to your neighbors. You will not be heard to offer such specious suggestions as that not you who opposed but those who brought on an unjust war are guilty of the blood of the brave fellows who are sent into action.

Indeed, you will not be heard at all, by this generation of your countrymen, unless disasters in war and money burdens open the way. Your magnanimity and sense of justice will be praised by the alien people in whose behalf your voice was raised. They may even build monuments in your honor, as we did to Pitt; but the home newspapers will, while

you live, make you wish you had never been born; and, when you are dead, they will now and then exhume your skeleton to frighten those who live after you. You must give your soul to torments and expatriate your fame. A sea will roll between your monument and your bones. But a monument is a community rather than a personal necessity. The free spirit of a just man does not need a perch.

"The gentleman tells us America is obstinate, America is almost in open rebellion. Sir, I rejoice that America has resisted! Three millions of people so dead to all the feelings of liberty as voluntarily to be slaves, would have been fit instruments to make slaves of all the rest."

For more than a century, American school-boys declaimed these words of Pitt. Virginia voted him a statue and New York set one up at Wall and William streets.

"Congress passed," says Frothingham, "a warm and grateful vote of thanks to the noble advocates of civil and religious liberty, in and out of Parliament, who had generously defended the cause of America."

In his proposed address to the king, in 1777, Burke said many like things, the nobility of which we have greatly applauded.

The utterances of these great Englishmen are very like in spirit to what Senator Hoar has recently said about the war in the Philippines. We do not