Behind her stands the ghost
of the most bloody war of the century caused in a peaceful land by
Long
temporising with lawlessness, by letting things slide, by shiftlessness
and blind disregard for all save the material need of the hour, till the
hour long conceived and let alone stood up full-armed, and men said,
'Here is an unforeseen crisis,' and killed each other in the name of God
for four years.
In a heathen land the three things that are supposed to be the pillars
of moderately decent government are regard for human life, justice,
criminal and civil, as far as it lies in man to do justice, and good
roads. In this Christian city they think lightly of the first - their own
papers, their own speech, and their own actions prove it; buy and sell
the second at a price openly and without shame; and are, apparently,
content to do without the third. One would almost expect racial sense of
humour would stay them from expecting only praise - slab, lavish, and
slavish - from the stranger within their gates. But they do not. If he
holds his peace, they forge tributes to their own excellence which they
put into his mouth, thereby treating their own land which they profess
to honour as a quack treats his pills. If he speaks - but you shall see
for yourselves what happens then. And they cannot see that by untruth
and invective it is themselves alone that they injure.
The blame of their city evils is not altogether with the gentlemen,
chiefly of foreign extraction, who control the city. These find a people
made to their hand - a lawless breed ready to wink at one evasion of the
law if they themselves may profit by another, and in their rare leisure
hours content to smile over the details of a clever fraud. Then, says
the cultured American, 'Give us time. Give us time, and we shall
arrive.' The otherwise American, who is aggressive, straightway proceeds
to thrust a piece of half-hanged municipal botch-work under the nose of
the alien as a sample of perfected effort. There is nothing more
delightful than to sit for a strictly limited time with a child who
tells you what he means to do when he is a man; but when that same
child, loud-voiced, insistent, unblushingly eager for praise, but
thin-skinned as the most morbid of hobbledehoys, stands about all your
ways telling you the same story in the same voice, you begin to yearn
for something made and finished - say Egypt and a completely dead mummy.
It is neither seemly nor safe to hint that the government of the largest
city in the States is a despotism of the alien by the alien for the
alien, tempered with occasional insurrections of the decent folk. Only
the Chinaman washes the dirty linen of other lands.
St. Paul, Minnesota.
Yes, it is very good to get away once more and pick up the old and ever
fresh business of the vagrant, loafing through new towns, learned in
the manners of dogs, babies, and perambulators half the world over, and
tracking the seasons by the up-growth of flowers in stranger-people's
gardens.
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