Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers
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For mark this:
THE TRUSTS WILL INEVITABLY COMPEL THE LABOR UNIONS TO BECOME
POLITICAL UNIONS.
TRUSTS WILL MAKE IT CLEAR TO UNIONS THAT THEIR ONLY HOPE IS IN
POLITICAL ACTION WHICH SHALL GIVE THEM THE POWER TO CONTROL
LEGISLATION.
When individual firms are competing the injustice of one firm may
be punished and controlled by a strike.
THE TRUST WILL RENDER THE STRIKE LAUGHABLE AND USELESS.
Suppose all the shops or manufactories of a certain kind to be
under the control of one trust. What good will a strike do? The
concern in which the strike occurs will simply stop work. Its
business will go to other concerns in the trust; the firm in
which the strike occurs will calmly draw its share of the trust
profits and laugh at the strikers. The latter will lose their
wages and time--no one else will lose anything.
What does one paper mill care for a strike if all the other mills
in the Paper Trust are running, and making the money which it
nominally loses? ----
Perhaps the workingmen think they can stop ALL the manufactures
of a certain kind. In the first place they probably cannot--with
trusts that reach across 3,000 miles of country.
And if they could, what about the TRUST OF TRUSTS?
If the trusts are not already formed into a formal union for
mutual support they soon will be. And the union of trusts
already exists so far as practical sympathy goes.
Havemeyer will gladly spend millions of trust money--not his
own--to help Morgan in a coal-trust fight.
Rockefeller will spare a few hundred thousand if necessary to buy
a small State Legislature and prevent passage of laws threatening
a weak little trust now and dangerous to him in the long run.
----
Jealousy, mistrust, and the lack of really competent leaders may
delay political union among workmen for a time.
But the political union must come. Bigger work must be done by
American workmen than chattering about little local wage
regulations or quarreling about hours or overtime.
The question at issue is:
SHALL ORGANIZED CAPITAL CONTROL THE PEOPLE, OR SHALL THE PEOPLE
CONTROL ORGANIZED CAPITAL AND LIMIT ITS POWER?
The workingmen are the people. They are the interested parties,
and they have got to vote together pretty soon or fight together
a little later.
THE TRUSTS ARE NATIONAL SCHOOL TEACHERS
Look at the coal strike, the opinions that it calls forth, and
notice how respectability dances and hops from one foot to the
other when the RESPECTABLE shoe pinches and the RESPECTABLE
toe suffers.
A little while ago the man who spoke against trusts and general
monopolies of public necessities was called demagogue, socialist,
anarchist, inciter of the masses against the classes, and so on.
But along comes the Beef Trust and begins to punish even the
respectable "upper" classes. Double prices for food mean a
serious difference even in a very respectable income.
Then you have the respectabilities also suddenly developing signs
of demagogism, socialism and anarchy.
They want the tariff taken off of foodstuffs. They want the
managers of the Food Trust put in jail.
The Beef Trust teaches the nation one interesting lesson--namely,
that by excessive extortion the trusts will lose soon their
respectable friends and unite all of the people against them.
The Beef Trust also teaches that the language called socialistic
and anarchistic, when confined to working people, becomes
profound political economy when uttered by some
respectability with a pinched toe. ----
The Coal Trust is a later and even more radical national teacher.
The respectable individual who a short time ago could see no
difference between advocating Government ownership of national
resources and communism or thievery has seen a wonderful light
while gazing on his coal fire at Twelve Dollars a ton.
Judges on the bench, eminently respectable newspapers--by which
we mean those newspapers representing the interests of men who
think with their pockets--are expressing the most radical
out-and-out socialistic ideas.
One of the mildest suggestions made by these respectabilities is
that the Government should seize the coal mines and work them for
the benefit of the people, setting aside the preposterous claims
of the Coal Trust.
Papers like the Springfield Republican, the Philadelphia
Ledger and other solemn organs of antiquity are advocating,
without knowing it, ideas which mean inevitably universal
government ownership of monopolies.
The Coal Trust as a public educator is an undoubted success, more
of a success than it would like to be if it could understand the
nature of its teachings.
If the Government has a right to seize coal mines and work them
for the people, as respectability now declares, why has it not a
right to seize railroads, telegraphs and all the other great
industries whose value depends entirely upon the national
population? ----
Many men in this world hated their teachers while they were being
whipped in the old- fashioned way, but look back with gratitude
later on to those same teachers and those same whippings.
Our national teachers, the trusts, are severe teachers. Their
lessons are hard lessons, and they believe in very unpleasant
forms of corporal punishment--inflicting hunger and cold upon
their pupils.
This nation in time will look back with gratitude to the lessons
and to the whippings of the trusts.
The trusts are teaching us inevitably that competition is
antiquated; that organization is the real basis of industry.
They are teaching us that it is feasible and necessary for the
nation eventually to take possession of and manage its own
properties, industrial as well as others.
A WOMAN TO BE PITIED
Why is it that comparatively few women find intense enjoyment in
life after middle age?
Why is it that you cannot duplicate among women such careers in
old age as the careers of Spencer, Gladstone, Huxley, or any of
the great men whose interest lies in mental activity and mental
achievement?
One reason is this: A great majority of women are inclined to
accept and adopt without question the ideas formed for them.
THEY GIVE UP THINKING EARLY IN LIFE.
When a human being stops thinking, that human being's life
practically ends.
All over the country you may see thousands and hundreds of
thousands of calm, settled, placid-faced, middle-aged women.
They admire themselves and they are admired generally. They
ought to be pitied.
They think now on all subjects just as they thought ten or
twenty or thirty years ago.
They view with horror things which they know nothing about. They
reject opinions which they don't understand; they have unlimited
faith in matters of which they know absolutely nothing. ----
Every one pities a man whose existence and enjoyments are limited
to the physical, sentimental side of life.
We all feel that a man of fifty, unless hard conditions and want
have ground interest and vitality out of him, ought to be at his
best. He ought to be active, alert, OPEN TO NEW IDEAS.
His mind is his one asset, and he should be constantly adding to
his knowledge, to his observation, and therefore he should be
constantly changing his mental point of view.
Many women suffer undoubtedly from the sentimental, physical and
intellectual reaction caused by the cessation of the
responsibility of maternity.
Such passionate affection, devotion and self-sacrifice are
lavished upon the children that when they grow up nothing more
seems worth while except to set them a good example.
Many other things are worth while: And as improving civilization
frees women more and more from the endless cares of the petty
household and the worries of poverty, the field for their mental
development will steadily expand.
When woman shall have accomplished her greatest material duty,
that of fully populating the earth, big families will no longer
be known, not more than two years of any woman's life will be
devoted to the worries of infancy, and then woman will have to do
her share of the world's thinking and its original intellectual
work. ----
For her own sake and for the sake of those about her, every
woman, whatever her age, should realize that there is no old age
for the brain well cared for.
Many men and women view with sentimental reverence the picture of
a middle-aged lady, old before her time, sitting in her
rocking-chair, knitting placidly, without one original thought in
a month.
This sentimental idea is a false one.
The type of woman to be admired is Mrs. Julia Ward Howe,
eighty-four years old, filling Carnegie Hall with her wonderful
voice, thrilling with admiration all of those who listened to
her, reciting with the greatest mental power her splendid battle
hymn, "Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory of the Coming of the Lord."
THERE is a woman who enjoys her life. It is safe to say that
the eighty-fourth year of her existence is as happy as any year
that preceded it.
She is an old woman, and to most women that means sorrow and
dulness. But she is happy, admired and useful, BECAUSE SHE
THINKS.
There are in the United States hundreds of thousands of splendid
brains going to waste among our women, because they do not
realize the duty of using, to the last, all the intellectual
power within them.
WHEN WILL WOMAN'S MENTAL LIFE BEGIN?
It is pathetic to hear women of intelligence arguing in support
of woman's claim to "equality" with man.
Of course, woman is really man's superior in important matters.
She is vastly superior morally, beyond any question.
She does the greatest work in the world; she gives to earth its
thinking population and creates every one of the great men that
move civilization along. ----
But otherwise, in the way of MATERIAL accomplishment, woman
cannot be said to equal man at present, and she cannot be said
ever to have equaled him.
Many of the most intelligent women demand recognition for woman
as equal or superior to man in all ways.
They are deeply hurt if in gentle, patient reply you ask them to
mention a female equivalent to a Newton, Archimedes or
Shakespeare. It annoys them to tell them that a million
autopsies prove fundamental differences between male and female
brains in favor of the former--at least as regards volume and
depth of cerebral convolutions.
Sometimes, after you have listened to a proud, high-spirited
woman trying to prove that women would equal men in material
accomplishment, if only they had a chance, you get so sad that
you find yourself helping her out--digging up De Sevignes,
De Staels, and other "great" women who have made up in brains
for what they perhaps lacked in femininity. ----
It is necessary to bear in mind that this earth, when man was
turned loose upon it, was really a sort of desert island. It was
a conglomeration of swamps, forests, deserts--all filled with
wild beasts. Even the human beings, struggling feebly toward
better days, were not far from the beasts at first. (They are
not very far from them even now.)
Two kinds of work had to be done. The men had to fight, dig,
hunt, drain marshes and murder each other.
The women had to SUPPLY THE MEN to do all the working and
fighting and killing.
Beasts, wars, fevers killed off the sons of women almost as fast
as they could bear them. Women must supply the demand for
soldiers and workers and at the same time a surplus big enough to
populate the globe. Thus far she has put on earth fourteen
hundred millions of her own kind. Quite an achievement, we
should say, when the career of a Napoleon or an Alexander called
for a couple of million of men extra, or a plague like the
black death, due to man's stupid lack of cleanliness, wiped out
two-thirds of Europe's people. ----
Men were the material workers--of course they exceeded in
material achievement the women nursing babies at home.
But woman, caring for her children, sacrificing her life for
them, developed on earth the moral sentiments, started each
generation on its career a little better than its predecessor.
She could not do all this and do the material things as well. In
fact, she could not even THINK except on matters very near to
her cradle, or her affections.
Remember that throughout the world's history it has been the lot
of a vast majority of women to be constantly caring for young
infants, or young children. Families of twenty children, or even
more, have been common. It is probable that woman from the
beginning of our racial existence until now has been the mother
of from fifteen to twenty-five children on an average.
The dullest mind can see what that means.
Atrocious suffering. Endless worry about the children. Constant
warfare against the man's selfish brutality.
How could woman rear her twenty children and at the same time do
other work? How could she keep every thought, every effort of
her brain on her offspring and develop her mind in other ways at
the same time?
Give a man one young child to take care of FOR ONE DAY, and when
you return to him you find a semi-imbecile, half-tearful
creature.
In every great man's life you hear some remark of this sort:
"How can I work, Maria, if you let the children make such a
noise?"
Well, how could the millions of Marias work with the children
hanging to their skirts all through history? ----
But a better day is ahead for woman, and we are proud to point it
out to her.
Wise men begin to wonder what we shall do when the earth is fully
peopled? Shall we kill surplus babies, or what shall we do?
There will be no surplus babies. Nature will arrange that.
For every two human beings on earth two new ones will be born.
Wars will be ended. Common sense will have done away with the
unnecessary illness which now robs millions of mothers.
No woman will have more than two children. Education will be
understood. Women will not be slaves to their babies. They will
be admired and thanked and made happy before the babies arrive
--instead of being half ashamed, as at present.
The rearing of children will be simple. Each woman, instead of
devoting twenty years of her life to child slavery, will have
practically her whole life to devote to other things. She will
be able to cultivate her mind. She will have more of a hold on
Mr. Selfish Man, and he will have to pay more attention to her.
WOMAN'S hour of full mental development will arrive with the
final and complete population of the globe, just as man's day of
real mental growth will come after he shall have mastered the
forces of nature and learned the elements of true social science.
----
Even then we do not anticipate that repulsive "equality" between
men and women which is so much prated about.
The complete human being is not A MAN, nor is it A WOMAN. The
COMPLETE human being is a man AND a woman. The TWO MAKE ONE.
Each
will contribute a share to the perfection of the whole. That was
the way it was planned from the beginning, and we think we could
prove it, if this column were six feet longer.
THE COW THAT KICKS HER WEANED CALF IS ALL HEART
An estimable and very intelligent lady criticises modern
education, saying, "So much brain is forced into the girl
nowadays that it crowds out her heart." ----
At the risk of shattering the foundations of romance and poetry,
it must be said here once and for all that the heart has nothing
whatever to do with the emotions. It is simply a pump, and a
large part of its work consists in pumping blood to the brain.
The greater the brain, the greater and more active the heart must
be. A serpent, with little or no brain and a cold disposition
all around, gets along very nicely with little or no heart.
Those who speak of the heart as opposed to the mind mean to speak
of unreasoning sentiment as opposed to intellectual strength.
The lady quoted and many others say that the woman and mother
should be all affection, and that development of the mind
diminishes the affection.
We wish to lay down a few rules; we invite criticism.
The best thing, the only important thing about a woman, a man, a
baby, or any other human being, is the intellect.
Affection is a beautiful thing, but affection is BORN in the
brain and CONFINED to the brain.
A young woman looks at a splendid creature in a soldier's
uniform. Her heart beats fast, and she imagines, as all
antiquity has imagined, that the heart is the seat of the
emotions. Nonsense!
The emotion is in the BRAIN, which has just received, through
the optic nerve, a conception of the lovely vision in brass
buttons. The heart is ordered to pump more blood to the head of
the young girl, to supply mental activity and the becoming blush.
If you hear bad news you feel the effect on your heart; sometimes
you fall unconscious. That is because the brain sensation is so
strong as to interfere with the heart's action. You feel the
shock that the brain sends to the heart. ----
The idea that cultivation of the mind interferes with a woman's
moral, sentimental, or motherly qualities is foolish twaddle.
The idea that mere sentiment, ignorant, vague affection are
sufficient without education to make a first-class human mother
is false and feeble.
Have you ever seen a cow follow the wagon that carries her calf
to the butcher shop? It is a very sad sight, the plaintive
lowing of the poor mother as she follows behind begging for
her child to be restored. Every farmer knows that there is no
necessity for hitching the cow to the wagon when her calf is
inside. She will follow that calf until she drops.
There is your loving, devoted mother without education. The
cow's heart, to use the old expression, is all right. Her mental
equipment is perfectly suited to a cow. Nature and society
require that she should give the utmost love to her calf this
year, and give all of that same love to another calf next year.
Bring back in three months that calf that she follows now with
such pitiful appeals. If the weaned calf tries to re-establish
the old relationship, its mother, "all heart and no head," will
kick it in the ribs and then butt it across the lot. ----
It's all right for the COW to be all heart and no head; she
does not need the higher education.
It is all right for the humble savage mother in the dark African
jungle to be built on the same lines. Like the cow, all that she
has to do is to take care of the baby until it is able to run
around and forage for itself.
But the civilized mother, the woman who must do her duty in the
present and in the future as well, requires a good mind, love
based upon knowledge and a sense of justice, affection that
follows the child from the cradle to maturity, gradually
substituting for intense motherly physical care an equally
intense and loving intellectual companionship and guidance. ----
It is important, of course, that mothers of all kinds, human or
animal, should be cheerful, and above all healthy, able to feed
their babies themselves and feed them well.
But as the brain in a human being is above the stomach, so the
intellect in a mother is above the mere maternal affection
inspired by babyhood.
The great mothers are those who, when they cease feeding the
child's body, can begin to feed the child's brain.
The great men are great, and they were lucky, because they had
mothers who did not cease to feed them when they were weaned, but
kept on feeding them mentally into their manhood. ----
The woman with a big brain is the best IN EVERY WAY.
She is better before she is married, for she attracts the man of
intelligence, and establishes a family of intelligent beings.
She is better as a young wife, because the ambition and
intelligence in her call out the ambition and intelligence in her
husband.
Hers is the happy home that needs no divorce lawyer. Pink
cheeks, small feet, squeezed waists, curly hair and such things
disappear or get tiresome. And all pink cheeks are very much
alike, as Dr. Johnson said of the green fields.
But intelligence never gets tiresome; no two brains are ever at
all alike if well developed. A woman of intelligence always
develops new qualities; she can never be monotonous.
There is no such thing as too much education, although educating
us primitive men and women is apt to develop unexpected
littleness. and thus create prejudice. ----
Note this important fact: The bigger the brain, the bigger the
heart, not only physically, but sentimentally and morally. It
takes brain to feel real emotion; a well-developed mind to
develop real sentiment, real affection.
A foolish, ignorant young woman may be pleasant enough to look
at, but she is like a white, pink-eyed rabbit--ornamental, but a
poor companion.
RESPECTABLE WOMEN WHO LISTEN TO "FAUST"
You know what happens in Gounod's great opera, "Faust," which is
based on Goethe's work.
An old man--his name is Faust--yearns for youth. He gets the
youth, makes the devil's acquaintance, sells his soul to the
devil for the devil's help. In the opera the devil is politely
called Mephistopheles. Everybody is beautifully dressed, from
the devil and Faust, the peasant girls and the ballet dancers, to
the old grandmothers, with their diamonds and pearls, in the
boxes.
If you want to study human nature, you ought to look at the
respectable old and young women at the opera while "Faust" is
sung.
The centre of the whole thing is a young woman named Marguerite.
When the curtain goes up she has the best of intentions, the best
character, the prettiest of faces, and two long, yellow braids
down her back. She is dressed very prettily indeed, and in the
opera house she has a high-sounding name, like Melba, Nordica,
Calve or Patti.
Every night that "Faust" is sung this young woman goes to the
bad.
Every night that "Faust" is sung every woman in the audience
sympathizes with Marguerite, who behaves so badly. Many shed
tears over her misfortune. All forgive her, feel sorry for
her, and know that she is not to blame.
The most severe old woman in the most expensive box would put her
arms around Marguerite's neck and tell her not to fret. ----
How does that old lady act if on the way to her carriage she
finds the sidewalk obstructed by some unfortunate creature who
has Marguerite's sorrows without Marguerite's good clothes? Does
she not say that it is an outrage for the police to allow such
things?
Possibly she will observe that in the opera Marguerite has not a
fair chance.
Faust has such beautiful silk tights, one leg striped and the
other leg covered with spangles; and, besides, he has a devil to
bring a box of jewels to tempt Marguerite.
But we should like to tell the conservative old lady that the
erring housemaid whom she may have judged so severely had greater
temptation and a better excuse than did Marguerite, even though
she could not get her voice up quite so high.
Mephistopheles is just as busy with housemaids and poor,
overworked shopgirls as with any Marguerite that ever lived. And
his work is made easier by long hours, dull routine and hopeless
future.
It is strange and sad that moral women find it so easy to
sympathize with the Marguerite whose sins and life end in the
beautiful "Anges purs, anges radieux" aria written by Gounod, and
not with the Marguerite who ends in the hospital, the morgue and
the Potter's Field.
It makes a great difference, apparently, to moral and virtuous
women whether the erring Marguerite has a famous tenor on one
side of her and a famous basso on the other, or whether she has
on one side of her Bellevue Hospital and on the other side
Blackwell's Island.
WHY WOMEN SHOULD VOTE
In this country and throughout the world women progress toward
the full possession of the ballot, and toward equality with men
in educational facilities.
In one State after another women are beginning to practise law,
they are obtaining new suffrage rights, they flock to newly
opened schools and colleges.
In England and Scotland, but a few years ago, only a few men in
the population were allowed to vote--money was the requisite
quality. To-day, in those countries, women vote at county
elections, and in many cases at municipal elections. In Utah,
Colorado and Idaho women as voters have the same rights as men.
They have certain rights as voters in nine other States. In the
great Commonwealth of New Zealand, so far ahead of all the rest
of the world in humanity and social progress, the wife votes
absolutely as her husband does. ----
The woman who votes becomes an important factor in life, for a
double reason. In the first place, when a woman votes the
candidate must take care that his conduct and record meet with a
good woman's approval, and this makes better men of the
candidates.
In the second place, and far more important, is this reason:
When women shall vote, the political influence of the good men in
the community will be greatly increased. There is no doubt
whatever that women, in their voting, will be influenced by the
men whom they know. But there is also no doubt that they will be
influenced by the GOOD men whom they know.
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