CHAPTER XXII.
I believe in feeding and grooming, whether of a horse or a man. I have no scientific knowledge, though I spent years in school, and hardly know what the term means, so I have had to rely on my instinct or common sense, and Icannot rid myself of the idea that the first thing we need, whether men or horses, is enough to eat. I have often thought, in my blind way, that most of the crime of the world is due to poverty, poverty of work, and poverty of food and clothing. I cannot forget the remark of Mr. Percy, that if he was poor and in want, as these people are, he would likely lie and steal as they do. I have often thought that I would have done the same. When the poor, the abject poor, willing to labor, but can get nothing to do, see the rich, living in luxury, and most of them by extortion and tyranny, how can they help being socialists or nihilists, or anything under heaven that promises them a chance of relief?
The longer I live, the more charitable I become towards the shortcomings and sins of the poor.
The rich have no excuse for sinning, while those in want have the best reasons. I can even think kindly of Judas. He was the treasurer or financial secretary, and had to provide for the other twelve and himself. As none of them earned a penny, he must have had a sorry time of it, to get anything to put in the bag, if the people were not more generous than they are nowadays. Most of the twelve, I doubt not, were experts at finding fault, and especially that changeful, fiery-tempered Peter! Judas often felt the lash of his tongue, when the meals were not forthcoming, or insufficient. I doubt if Judas had any intention of betraying his master to death. He probably thought those who made the request to see him, wished only to talk to him, or may be worry him a little, and if he could get thirty pieces of silver for such a slight favor, it would help him in his commissariat department for many days to come.
His intentions were probably of the best, but the result surprised him, grieved him to death, and he did what any real man would do, killed himself. At any rate, the betrayers of virtue, the seducers of ignorant, innocent girls, the rich tyrants and extortioners, those who oppress and rob the poor, and lots of people who do abominable things, and all sinners, for every one is a traitor to goodness, should never take up even the smallest pebble to hurl at the badgered and bewildered Judas.
Another, and it may be a queer notion I have, and it is this; that about all the sins we commit are by the body. I doubt if the soul ever sins. It is the house we live in that is forever decaying and tumbling down about our ears that brings us into trouble, or as a vehicle in which we go about, always running us into some scrape or other, yet the soul is made responsible for it all.
Many become so absorbed in thinking of what they call the sins of the soul, that they have no time to look after the vices of the body. If our bodies could be kept in subjection, kept strong, healthy and clean, we need not worry much about the salvation of ourselves, our souls.
Touching the subject of food again. I was much interested in a book on Honey Bee Culture loaned me by Mr. Jasper, a subject on which I had never read.
One particular item of importance was the production of queens. There are three kinds of bees in a family. The drones are the males, large, clumsy fellows, whose only use is to furnish a husband to the queen. They are idle, never do any kind of work, but always great eaters, and like their types in human society the least useful, they make the most noise, by the loud hum of their heavy vibrating wings.
The workers, styled “the bees” by Aristotle, are neuters or undeveloped females, of which there are from fifteen thousand to forty thousand in a colony or family. They gather the honey, secrete the wax, collect the pollen, protect the hive from intrusion, and manage the general affairs of the family, the younger members, before they are strong enough to go abroad, build the comb, ventilate the hive by flapping their wings, and thus grow stronger, feed the larvæ and cap the cells until they are able to make journeys outside.
The queen is a fully developed female, the only one in the family. She is the mother of all, and only meets her husband once, at the beginning of her life. Her only work or duty is to lay eggs, which she does at the rate of two to three thousand a day, and during the extreme limit of her life of five years, may lay one million three hundred thousand eggs to keep up the family circle. This is smallbusiness compared to that of a queen of the white ants that lays eighty thousand eggs a day! No wonder that we have such an infinite multitude of these pests!
The making of a queen is peculiar and interesting. Suppose she dies, or is unfit for duty. There is then great consternation and excitement, for without a queen or mother, the bees know that their family would be extinct in a short time, as the workers only live from one to three months. If a cell can be found containing a neuter egg they enlarge it to three or four times its former dimensions to form a regal palace. After the egg has been hatched, which takes place three days after it has been laid, the bees fill this large cell with what is called “royal jelly.” This is a delicate, highly concentrated food of a rich, creamy color, made by the bees eating honey and ejecting it from their stomachs after it has been partially digested. Floating in this nectar the larva lives and thrives until after sixteen days from the laying of the egg, she appears as a full grown, graceful queen, and in a few days takes her marriage flight, meets her husband and then begins her work of life.
The point of my story is that it is the “royal jelly” that makes her a queen, elevating her and making her a mother. Had it not been for this royal food she received, she would have remained a neuter, a most honorable and necessary member of the family, but not a mother. This has given me great proof in favor of my theory of the value of good food in the making of grander men and women. If regal jelly can change a neuter worker bee into a queen, why should not good food raise ordinary human beings into kings and queens of humanity? A starved human animal must necessarily lack courage, energy, ambition, and most of the traits that go to make up manhood. Any one who has studied the rearing of domestic animals knows how almost useless it is to try and make anything of one that has been starved in its infancy by lack of food. It is often better to kill it at once than to waste time and money on it. I do not suggest this treatment in the case of stunted human infants, though the Spartans pursued this method in making themselves a brave strong race, by destroying all theirpuny, crippled children. However, I cannot help thinking that it were far better if some people had never been born, or had taken their quietus in infancy, than to live years of suffering, degradation and misery. When I have looked upon maimed, disgusting creatures, I have agreed with John Stuart Mill that suicide is justifiable, and that it would be Godlike to help these unfortunate spirits to escape from their pest houses. This, however, pertains to another subject, and I may have shown the perverseness or obliquity of my nature by alluding to it. What I would urge in all sincerity is, that humanity should take at least as much care in producing and rearing its progeny, as it does in rearing its domestic animals.
Another item in regard to the bees struck me. That when the queen has once received her husband, and there was no further need of the drones, the bees destroyed all or most of them as useless, idle eaters. It might be severe, and yet I cannot help thinking that humanity might imitate the wisdom of the busy bees, and destroy all the drones, the idle eaters of the world. Let not any one hold up his hands in horror at such a suggestion, for who but our God made the bees, and gave them this instinct of righteousness, and showed them how to deal with the vagabonds in their community? Instead of saying with the wise man, “Go to the ant thou sluggard,” why not say, “Let us go to the toiling bees, and learn of them how to deal with the human drones, if not to adopt the drastic method of the bees, at least make the idlers go to work.”
The zemindars are the drones of India, the dissipated idlers. They should be exterminated by the workers or by the government, and the industry and progress of India be rid of its greatest curse.
We might learn many a lesson from the industry of the bees, when we poor mortals get tired or lazy. To make one pound of clover honey, bees must deprive sixty thousand clover blossoms of their nectar, and to do this they have to make three million seven hundred and fifty thousand visits to the blossoms. That is, if one bee alone collected the pound of honey it would have to make that many journeys back and forth from the hive to the flowers. Whenwe consider that the distance traveled is often from one to three miles in a journey, how can we compute the miles this little toilsome creature has to make to collect the pound of honey that we consider of so little worth? Surely there is many an open bible in nature, from which we could gather many a lesson if we were not so bigoted, proud and stupid. I am reminded of a remark of Charles Kingsley’s, “Ere I grow too old, I trust to be able to throw away all pursuits save natural history, and die with my mind full of God’s facts instead of men’s lies.”
Another item of interest. There is no king or emperor among the bees, as Shakespere states in his play of King Henry the Fifth, nor a queen. Theirs is a democratic government without even a leader, the worker bees each attending to their own business, all acting together on some general principle for the common welfare. The queen, so-called by men, is only such in name, as she does nothing but her duty, as the only mother, to provide for the increase and continuance of the family. There is no ruler with a royal squad of idle relatives to live in dissipation and luxury on the industry of the laborers, no blathering parliament, no judges, no high or low courts, no big salaries, no legal members to fleece the innocent, no policemen, for there are no evil-doers, no annual budgets to provide for from the increased taxation of the poor, no expense of any kind whatever, as there are no idlers except a few drones kept in case of a paternal necessity, the most being killed,—no criminals, no poor, no rich, no castes! What a lesson a nation of bees can teach the most exalted human nation on earth! And yet humanity in this nineteenth century boasts itself as being civilized, enlightened and Christian, and having been created in the image of God!
The old station life again. The blessed books, the gardens and the duties of each day occupied my attention.
One day I received a note, asking me to meet a committee. A new road was to be opened, and as it affected my property, I was to be consulted. I went at the appointed time. A friend introduced me to several I had not met before, and then “Mr. Smith, this is Mr. Japhet.”“O, yes!” said he, “I have seen Mr. Japhet, and gad! I never hear that name, but I am reminded of the story, ‘Japhet in search of his father!’” and he chuckled at his bright saying. I replied, “Mr. Smith, I have heard you make that reference several times. Once you asked me if I was in search of my father, and I told you I was, and wished you to help me find him. Now I can tell you that I have found him, and perhaps you would like to see his photograph, here it is.” And I pulled the picture out of my coat pocket, and held it up for him to see. “I have lately been down to Jalalpur to see him. He is Mr. H. J. Smith, the commissioner, and may be some relation of yours?” The fellow turned white, then red. There was a tableaux, a quiet scene for some moments, when one of the party blustered out, “Come fellows, let’s get to work, as I have got to go to Mrs. Tinkle’s to see about some confounded party.”
Our business was soon finished, and as I was going out through the yard my friend remarked, “I say, Japhet, what was that deuce of a joke you got off on Smith?” “Joke?” said I, “There was no joke at all.” “Great Scot!” he exclaimed, “you don’t mean to say that you and Smith are half brothers?” “I have said nothing of the kind,” I replied, “only I know this, that H. J. Smith, commissioner at Jalalpur, is my father, and if he is also this Smith’s father, you can draw your own conclusions, I am not bound to make any statement.” He fairly shouted, “Great heavens! you don’t tell me! Well, ta, ta, I must hurry, or the devil will be to pay with Mrs. Tinkle.”
We had no newspaper in our station. A paper is an expensive luxury to the publisher, and besides we didn’t need any. Mrs. Tinkle, the wife of the colonel, was our newspaper and news-carrier all in one, a host in that direction. If we had anything good, bad or indifferent, that we wanted to circulate, and there were many things that no living man would dare to print unless he was prepared for death, we got them all to Mrs. Tinkle, and they went with the wind, or as fast as her ponies could take her. When my friend said he was going to Mrs. Tinkle’s, I knew and could have sworn to it, that before they had closed their eyes in sleep that night every one in the station would learnthat Smith and Japhet were half brothers! Confound the impudence of the fellow! If he had only treated me with the least respect I would have never given a hint, but his continued bullying I could not endure. I felt as badly about the relationship as he possibly could. It would not be a credit to either of us. I will say, however, that he never troubled himself about “Japhet in search of his father” again. Some one told me that Smith had denounced the story as a red-hot lie, and asked if they would take him to be a fool. Yet everybody believed the story, for they knew the character of old Smith too well to doubt it, and probably believed young Smith to be a fool. About that photograph, how did I happen to have it in my pocket just at the right time?
I knew that Smith as a magistrate was on that committee, that he couldn’t well turn his back on me, as he had before done, that if he noticed me at all he would give me a shot or a thrust of some kind, so with deliberate forethought, or malice prepense, if that is a better term, I put the photograph in my pocket, ready for I knew not what, anything that might come. In time of peace, prepare for war. So did I.
It may be thought that I had some streaks of wickedness in me. I have often thought that myself. I have gone through enough ill-usage in my life to make a saint profane and revengeful. As I do not believe in any erasing or washing away of sins or forgetting them, I try to be as good as I can be under adverse circumstances, and never sin unless I am absolutely compelled to. I have ever desired to live a life of peace and righteousness, if only others would let me do so. If a dog snarls or bites at me, when I am quietly passing, I feel like striking him, or when a fellow mortal deliberately hurts me, I am inclined to give him one in return, treating him as I do the dog. The many kicks and insults that have come to me along the way have reminded me that Cain and I were alike in this respect, that we both had a mark put upon us, but with this difference, that his mark was that any one seeing him should not kill him, and my mark was to let any one who saw me wipe his feet on me if he could, or give me some mean thrust. But who is there that has not a mark of some kind?