TOPICS OF THE TIME

SHALL IT BE COMPULSORY?

MACAULAY, who did not believe in universal suffrage, had a fine sneer at the folly of supposing that the great policies of a modern nation could be determined by the ballot-box. But this will do to put alongside his famous prediction that “spoliation” of the rich by the poor would begin in the United States in the twentieth century. That century is here and spoliation has not begun, while the ballot-box has gone on, in England as well as in America, from one conquest to another; until now, in either country, it is regarded, if not as the final arbiter of national destinies, at least as the power which sets up one party or administration and puts another down. Yet during the very years when voting by the mass of the citizens has been marching on to political supremacy, there has been coming in a new set of doubts, or anxieties, concerning the whole process. This concern may be only one way of recognizing the sovereignty of the ballot. If it is sovereign, care must be taken that it functions safely. Granted that its decisions are conclusive, the more reason for seeing to it that they are freely and clearly pronounced. If we are to listen for the voice of the people in their votes, nothing must be permitted to obstruct or confuse that utterance.

It was doubtless this feeling that lay behind the movement to reform and simplify the ballot and to guard elections against corruption. That is a long and familiar story. One device after another, one safeguard following another, has been urged and adopted, and each has in its turn done something to purify our electoral methods. It would be impossible for the nation to lurch back now to the loose and hugger-mugger system under which both State and national elections were held fifty or sixty years ago. The “repeater” has been largely eliminated; the way of the venal voter has been made hard; official ballots have replaced the tricky things that party-workers used to “hand out”; corrupt-practice acts and registration laws have weeded out a great deal of the bribery and fraud that were formerly common. Yet despite all these and the other advances, a distinctly new uneasiness about the whole process of voting has recently been making itself manifest. Many thoughtful citizens have been troubled by doubts not whether elections are honest, but whether they can be made fully representative of the popular will; not whether the citizen can freely cast a pure ballot, but whether he cares enough about it to cast any ballot at all.

What disturbs many in this connection is the evidence seeming to show that the number of voters is not increasing as fast as the population. Figures both of registered voters and of actual ballots cast are scrutinized, with the result of appearing to prove a growing disinclination to make full exercise of the right of suffrage. From one Presidential campaign to another during the last dozen years, the total poll has not risen as it should. Some statistics of the vote in Wisconsin were recently published which seemed startling in their implications. That State, though having a marked growth in population, has been casting a vote fewer by many thousands than were polled ten years ago. Partial explanations suggest themselves. Wisconsin elections have been one-sided and foregone conclusions; so that the inducement to make efforts to bring out a full vote has often been lacking. Moreover, the very reforms in the State’s election laws may have had the effect of cutting off what was before a purchasable or fraudulent vote. This was the kind of vote which in the old days Tammany used to ask for money in order to “get out.” One rich man replied to a solicitor of funds that he would not give five thousand dollars to get that vote “out,” but would gladly subscribeten thousand to keep it “in.” It is possible that the keeping “in” of corrupt votes, by means of reform legislation vigorously enforced, has had something to do with the apparent check in the normal increase of the voters.

After every fair allowance has been made, however, the fact is notorious that many citizens entitled to vote do not go to the polls. The registration figures often fall far below what they should be, and the ballots finally cast and counted reveal a surprisingly large number of indifferents or stay-at-homes. Hence the demand, which seems to be a rising demand, that the citizen be compelled by law to do his duty as an elector, if he will not do it unforced. Compulsory voting has been advocated of late by the Attorney-General of the United States. No one would class Mr. Wickersham among the impetuous faddists. He has studied European practice and precedents in the matter of inflicting penalties upon citizens who fail to exercise the franchise, and favors the adoption of some modified form of such legislation in this country. The argument for it will certainly be greatly reinforced if we are widely to enter upon the experiment of law-making by initiative and referendum. The people are sovereign, but if only a portion of them speak, how are we to know the real voice of authority? There have been elections, some of them passing on statutes referred to the electorate, some on important constitutional changes, in which the votes of only a majority of a minority were effective. If that should become common, the case for compulsory voting would obviously be stronger. Objections to it at present lie mainly against details. It is urged, for example, that no compulsion should be laid upon the voter to choose between two candidates neither of whom could he conscientiously support. But in that event he could cast a blank or a “scratched” ballot. He is within his right in refusing to express a preference between two equally offensive nominees; but it may be held that he has no right to remain away from the polls. Mr. Chesterton has argued that all who fail to vote should be “counted in the negative,” but that is to put a premium upon sloth. An active negative by ballot is much more significant than mere abstention. We know too well what “apathy” means in elections; but we should be much better off if, instead of their apathy at home, we had all our citizens expressing their honest zeal or their burning indignation at the polls.

The whole subject is not yet ripe for positive remedies embodied in law, but the deep interest taken in it is both suggestive and encouraging. It helps one to believe that the democratic experiment will continue to keep level with its problems as they successively present themselves. Whatever the exact method of reform that may be adopted, it must not omit to tie up intelligence with duty. Voting, whether it should be made compulsory or not, cannot safely be severed from education. The two must always go together, as they did in Emerson’s vision of the ideal commonwealth, where, before

Each honest man shall have his vote,Each child shall have his school.

Each honest man shall have his vote,

Each child shall have his school.

WITH A PRACTICAL SUGGESTION

THE old saying that “Books make the best presents” must be in the minds of many in the pre-Christmas season, and many a parent is puzzling over the problem of selection. The classics of their childhood they know—some of these the classics of three generations; in fact, ever since children began to be considered as worth writing for. But here is the year’s new “bumper” crop of books, in fine array of type and picture and gay cover—what is to be done with them? Who is to sift and choose between the good and the bad? And all that are not good must be considered bad, for nothing is so bad as a poor book. May the publishers’ imprint be implicitly relied upon? May the authors’ reputation, name, or vogue be blindly accepted? May the reviewers’ judgment be made the standard? Obviously it is impossible, if only for economic reasons, to buy and sample, not to say read, a tithe of the books presented for choice. Either parents must renounce the responsibility, restrict the range to a few volumes, or get some efficient aid from others.

We venture a suggestion. This issue of THECENTURYwill appear just a month before Christmas. In nearly every town of 2500 inhabitants there is a literary clubor a woman’s club which through a committee of its members might set on foot an advisory censorship of children’s reading, which another year would become more effective. To be helpful, it should start with a standard of what are the desiderata in books for the young. Negatively, one must aim to exclude immoral, priggish, namby-pamby, artificial, cynical, and unsympathetic writing. To these must be added the seventh deadly sin of dullness.

No profit grows where is no pleasure ta’en,

and unless a book is interesting, it would better never have been conceived. On the positive side the aim should be wholesomeness, vitality, inspiration, humanness, and, most of all, an appeal to the imagination. A child needs not so much books of knowledge of the “how” type, which satisfy craving for facts, as those that set forth the wonders of the world so suggestively as to stimulate his search for the “why.” Those of two generations ago who were steeped in copy-book morality know what an effort it was to displace it with the natural religion of human sympathy. And it is because, in the reading and training of boys, there is danger of neglecting the robust—what we may call the wholesomely perilous—that it is important that every such committee as we have suggested should have the counsel of men. When its list shall have been made, the committee should be subjected to cross-examination, in order that the principles of selection should become fixed not only in the minds of its members, but in those of the entire club. Whatever the result might be upon children, it would be salutary upon parents, arousing them to the importance, and to the qualities, of mental pure food. It is not to be expected that the committee’s recommendations would be impeccable or that they would always be followed. Indeed, the same experiment might be tried with more advantage in a circle of a dozen families of friends related by a similarity of tastes and standards.

Even more in need of supervision is the periodical pabulum. There are two or three American magazines for children the tone and traditions of which are so firmly established and so well known as to place them beyond the need of censorship. Their editors are alive to the exclusion of the objectionable, but are chiefly occupied with the search for valuable and delightful articles. The editorship of a child’s magazine, by reason of its many limitations, is one of the most difficult tasks in the educational world. The bearing of every article, poem, and picture has to be considered in its formative influence upon character. The editor has to think for the child, the parent, and the teacher, and at the same time he must never lose sight of the noble function of delight, which it is his privilege to exercise. We know of one such, to whom, through his rare sympathy with children, these responsibilities have become insight. Joyous himself, he knows how to communicate joy to a world of children.

When it comes to the juvenile page of the newspaper, the need of censorship is acute. Some of the daily journals, which are properly proud of their own ethical standards and of the influence of their editorial columns, have no moral compunction in leaving to a syndicate the preparation of the children’s page or the colored supplements. Otherwise careful and conscientious parents will turn over to their children, without examination, sheets of vulgar, grotesque, badly drawn, and badly colored pictures on unworthy themes, the chief influence of which is to glorify sheer mischief and bad manners. Many protests have been made against these by public associations and in some quarters there has been improvement, but the censorship of thoughtful and mature minds would still find much to condemn.

In what is selected for the children let us make a plea for the best poetry. A world is all before us where to choose, and if the interpretation of masterpieces of verse be not pedagogic, but sympathetic, the resources of pleasure thus available are rich and enduring. The parsing and analysis of Pope’s “Essay on Man” may so spoil one’s taste for that writer as to obscure the sublimity of his “Universal Prayer.” America more than any other country cultivates, and needs to cultivate, the love of poetry. Here we are confronted with materialism as a daily spectacle.

Things are in the saddle,And ride mankind.

Things are in the saddle,

And ride mankind.

We need every stimulus to the imagination, every spur to spirituality, every rhythm of harmony. We need not onlymusic itself but the music that is in poetry. The arts are, so to speak, fighting for their lives, and a brave fight it is. We need them to uplift and crown and glorify democracy, and we shall produce greater poetry as there is a deeper love and appreciation of the great poetry that exists. It is, therefore, no small service to the future of America to instil in our young people a respect and love for poetry. We find these suggestive lines in the autobiography of Charles Darwin:

If I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.

THE year 1912, by its manifestations of internal violence, its external wars, and by its hardly less disquieting rumors of wars, has afforded from time to time the pretext for much cynical satire at the expense of the advocates of peace and arbitration. A strange sort of beginning of the millennium this, it is said, which has witnessed Italy’s year-long war with Turkey; the old Balkan wounds reopened, with the religious issue involved; China aflame with bloody revolt against her Manchu dynasty; Mexico in the throes of a rebellion little less than civil war; turbulent Cuba barely escaping American intervention, actually exercised in Nicaragua; Morocco the bone of contention of two snarling powers; and withal Great Britain and Germany like open powder-magazines exposed to the peril of a careless smoker—a year, moreover, that has seen strikes of unusual acerbity in England and in Massachusetts, and the unearthing of such vast conspiracies against life and property as the one executed by the McNamaras and their associates and the other avowed by the Industrial Workers of the World. The threat of the latter to raze the Salem jail is matched by the intention of McNamara, recently revealed, to blow up the Panama Canal. As a climax of horror comes the attempt of a disordered mind to assassinate Colonel Roosevelt. Surely, at first glance one might think that the wild beast in man has lately come to the surface to a surprising and disheartening extent.

It would be futile to claim that this sinister impression is entirely offset by the fact that some of these events have aspects of self-restraint and progress; that China, through her overturn, is making the way toward freedom and self-government; that Cuba has again shown that she is learning the same lessons; that the responsible conservative forces of England, France, and Germany have refused to follow the hotheads who talk lightly of war. There remain in human nature, modern or barbarian, primal impulses of hatred, violence, and lawlessness.

It is one of the most important functions of education, government, and religion to subdue these impulses, and this can be done, in part, by turning their force into new channels. Through Tesla’s discovery and invention the natural turbulence of the mountain stream, even that of Niagara itself, is electrically utilized to do the work of the world at a great distance. It is the aim of the inventive resources of philanthropy to do something similar with the wild and waste forces of humanity itself. Wise benevolence is increasingly occupied with imposing not only upon others, but upon ourselves, restraints without which we should revert to the brute. Sometimes this is done by solemn formalities like the Constitution of the United States; sometimes the compact is the tacit one of civilization involved in the establishment and observance of law. This it is now sought to extend to nations, by the agreement to enlarge the limits of judicial arbitration which already exist in every modern country, and thus through men and peoples of advanced ideas of justice to affect those more backward. Because of this great opportunity to uplift the world, those in authority are under obligation—a sort ofnoblesse oblige—to hold their own country to its highest standards of conduct, internal or international.

Whatever the croakers may say, there is no relapse from the sentiment in favor of arbitration and peace. There have been righteous rebellions, and probably therewill be others, but there are many wars based on territorial aggression or trivial or fancied wrongs which may be prevented by an appeal to an international court. Compulsory this appeal must be, by our consent in the cool air of wisdom: but along with humanity at large we shall be the gainer. Arbitration is a shorter cut to justice than war has ever been.

At this time of the recurrence of the festival of the Prince of Peace, it is becoming to the Christian world to renew its faith in the power of love to cast out hatred, of good-will to accomplish the uplifting of humanity through sympathy and opportunity. Such a vast work demands the ultimate release of the forces now held in readiness for international wars. Prevent by arbitration the causes of such wars, and you divert colossal waste forces—including the constant anxieties of the people—to the real and crying need of the times.

THE NEEDLESS INVASION OF THE YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK

ON the twenty-fifth of November there is to be a hearing before the Secretary of the Interior to receive and consider the report of a board of army engineers to determine whether or not there is any other adequate source of water-supply for San Francisco than the beautiful Hetch-Hetchy Valley, which the city desires to submerge for a reservoir. This valley, as our readers know, is a part of the great Yosemite National Park, and lies eighteen miles north of the Yosemite Valley, just over the divide, so to speak. The representatives of the city have already acknowledged before the Public Lands Committee of the Senate that they could find an adequate supply of pure water “anywhere along the Sierra,” to the north of the valley—“if,” as they said, “we would pay for it!” The mainspring of the assault upon the people’s National Park—and, if it shall succeed, it will be but the first of many similar assaults on other parks—is the desire to get something for nothing. The public interest in resisting the attempt is to save from destruction one of the most wonderful of the Sierra gorges, which a good wagon road would make an integral part of the Yosemite trip. It remains to be seen whether any amount of speciousness, any elaborate and misleading volume of argument will be able to obscure the main issue—the wanton invasion of the people’s greatest park.

We believe that the Roosevelt administration had no more legal or moral right to divert a part of this National Park from the purposes for which it was created, as was done by the Garfield grant, than it would have had to give away the nation’s coal-fields in Alaska. The Sierra Club, contending with the unlimited financial resources of San Francisco, has yet presented a “brief” which riddles the arguments of the city’s case.

That fable teaches that the time to save the rest of our great scenery is before it is largely visited, for then it will become to the advantage of some “interest” to divert it from the use of posterity.

THEEditor of THECENTURYinvites the offer of contributions to the departments of “Open Letters” and “Lighter Vein.”In “Open Letters” the aim should be a light and lively treatment of social, political, domestic, artistic, or other topics in an easy, natural, epistolary style, having the give-and-take of correspondence, and witty or humorous treatment, mellow, without didacticism; articles should have a novel and piquant motive; and, in order to save them from dilettantism, they should have useful and substantial suggestions. A convenient length is fifteen hundred words.For the “Lighter Vein” Department contributions are invited of brief narratives from real life, of a humorous character, and of such entertaining interest as will entitle them to rank as good “after-dinner stories.” What is desired is not so much a short anecdote as a narrative of about a thousand words, having a certain natural plot. It is desired to avoid stock stories which, told in past generations, are located in the present. While in general the stories should be humorous, once in a while that quality might be varied by something unusually dramatic, quaint, or curious. The Editor must be assured that the articles have not before been in print.All contributions found available will be paid for at the magazine’s customary rates.

THEEditor of THECENTURYinvites the offer of contributions to the departments of “Open Letters” and “Lighter Vein.”

In “Open Letters” the aim should be a light and lively treatment of social, political, domestic, artistic, or other topics in an easy, natural, epistolary style, having the give-and-take of correspondence, and witty or humorous treatment, mellow, without didacticism; articles should have a novel and piquant motive; and, in order to save them from dilettantism, they should have useful and substantial suggestions. A convenient length is fifteen hundred words.

For the “Lighter Vein” Department contributions are invited of brief narratives from real life, of a humorous character, and of such entertaining interest as will entitle them to rank as good “after-dinner stories.” What is desired is not so much a short anecdote as a narrative of about a thousand words, having a certain natural plot. It is desired to avoid stock stories which, told in past generations, are located in the present. While in general the stories should be humorous, once in a while that quality might be varied by something unusually dramatic, quaint, or curious. The Editor must be assured that the articles have not before been in print.

All contributions found available will be paid for at the magazine’s customary rates.

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