Niccolo Machiavelli the Visionary (1892 Article)

Machiavelli the Visionary 1892

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The reader of Machiavelli's "Prince" meets with a disappointment when he turns to its author's life. Instead of finding, as he expects, a statesman of indomitable ambition, relentless will, and unscrupulous ingenuity, he finds only a timid and irresolute doctrinaire. Niccolo Machiavelli was at the mercy of his times. He dallied first with good and then with evil. Indecisive in emergencies, he brought upon himself the contempt both of the good and the bad, and so mismanaged his affairs,with all his time-serving, that he died in poverty and neglect. His book, "The Prince," was the masterly work of a theorist who lacked the one pre-eminent amiability of theorists, comparative innocence of evil. Though he was a close, accurate, and shrewd observer of all the political machinations of his time, he proved by his life that it is one thing to observe shrewdly, and quite another thing to perform skillfully. With all his cunning he was visionary—at once a cynic and an enthusiast.

Born in Florence in 1469, Machiavelli early attached himself to the political fortunes of his native city, and by the close of the century had attained the rank of second chancellor and secretary. He was employed in many embassies of varying importance, where he watched, always with interest and often with admiration, the unscrupulous courses of the Italian popes and princes, above all of Caesar Borgia. Here his reports and comments were of invaluable service to his superiors. On his return he was permitted to organize the Florentine militia. He entered on the scheme in high feather and with disinterested zeal. His enthusiasm was contagious, and his country-men put their chief confidence for protection in his native soldiery, only to find it disastrously incompetent and untrustworthy in an emergency. Even more impracticable was the extravagant scheme, with which he identified himself, of altering the course of the river Arno that hostile Pisa might be deprived of all communication with the sea; a scheme which came much nearer draining the Florentine treasury than draining the bed of the Arno. In the bitter factional struggles which soon after followed in Florence, he courageously adhered to the falling fortunes of his party till it was too late to gain any worldly advantage by desertion, when, with a sudden and futile cowardice, he made abject overtures to the conquerors, and then, as many an impoverished author has written for a pittance a treatise on the secret of wealth, so Machiavelli, his country overrun by enemies and himself in exile, attempted to pick up a little political patronage by writing an essay on the best method of acquiring a princedom.

To quote his latest biographer, no man was less Machiavellian than Machiavelli. Political self-advancement was bread and meat—the sum of life—to his ideal "Prince." So self-centered was this "Prince" that l'etat c'est moi might have been his motto. The State centered about his person, and the world centered about his State. His selfishness took on heroic proportions. Machiavelli himself, on the other hand, so far from diligently seeking self-advancement, was constantly neglecting his own interests to indulge in far-away and impossible day-dreams —in daydreams of a mighty Italian empire which should reproduce the classic grandeur of ancient Rome. He was absorbed in his visions of a future united Italy. His more humdrum moments were spent in scheming and manipulating in behalf of the rights and usurpations of his native city. Only such scraps of time as he had left were used in "looking out for number one."

Artful dissimulation was another of the characteristics of the "Prince" whom Machiavelli depicted. Offensive naivete characterized the depictor. Indeed, the very frankness of his essays shows how little of a Machiavellian Machiavelli was. Had the "Prince" himself written a book, he would have filled it, no doubt, with highly moral sentiments, that he might dupe the people. Machiavelli, when he wrote, blabbed out all his knavery. "There is a ruler at this time," says Machiavelli, "who has nothing in his mouth but fidelity and peace, and yet, had he exercised either the one or the other, they had robbed him before this both of his power and reputation." Machiavelli was so unsagacious as to have nothing in his mouth but faithlessness and intrigue. No wonder, then, that he lost both his reputation and his power. He fell far short of the duplicity of Frederick the Great, who publicly denounced the immorality of "The Prince," while secretly profiting by much of its unscrupulous advice!

In his books, indeed, Machiavelli had the courage of his immoral convictions; but in his life he lacked the audacity of evil. He had no stomach for cruelty. His letters from the bloody court of Caesar Borgia, we are told, "betray a certain agonized terror beneath a veil of cynicism." He banished the memory of horrible sights by writing ribald letters full of salacious scandal to his cronies in Florence. It was, indeed, the shamefaced consciousness of his own timidity which made him envy with an exaggerated admiration the bold, superhuman criminality of the Borgias. He belonged to that class of whom he said contemptuously: "They do not know how to be honorably bad, or perfectly good; and as a completely wicked act has some greatness or some element of generosity in it, so they cannot perform it." As the cripple often looks with envious wonder on the vigor of the bully, and occasionally mistakes bullying for prowess, so Machiavelli often mistook effrontery in evil for courage. He had enough moral scruple to keep from brazen evil; he had enough humane sentiment to be frequently amiable even to his enemies; but he had too little moral sense not to envy the more unscrupulous and hard-hearted. Their purposes were his ideals. With wonderful literary skill he magnified and depicted their aims in his imaginative sketch, "The Prince."

Machiavelli worshiped worldly success with an enthusiasm that made him visionary. He was as fanatically wedded to his theory of the salvation of society by political management as the most bigoted Anabaptist could be to his theory of an antinomian justification by faith. He held the orthodox belief in the total depravity of man. He was so convinced that all men were liars that even the most scandalous news he looked upon with some slight suspicion. He believed that men were evil by nature and good only by necessity, and trusted to a gigantic absolute despotism, maintained by force and fraud, to bring about that necessity. Such morals as he had were jesuitical; he believed that the end justified the means. But the end he had in mind was far beyond human reach, and the means he suggested were in some measure the invention of the imagination. If Machiavelli was great, it was not because he was shrewd and practical, it was because he was an imaginative thinker and a clear and audaciously frank writer.

His masterpiece, "The Prince," is not the work of a successful practical politician, as it is generally supposed to be. If there be virtue in it, it has not that virtue. But it is, in the first place, a wonderful work of art, fit to stand above the "Barry Lyndon" of Thackeray, above the "Cenci" of Shelley, by the side of the Satan of "Paradise Lost" and the Iago of Shakespeare. It has all the qualities of great art — clearness, unity, energy. It personifies remorseless ambition. It typifies in gigantic figure the politicians of Machiavelli's day. It holds a magnifying mirror up to an important aspect of nature—to the political Italy of the Renaissance—to humanity at its worst. Men have always dared to be a worse thing than they have dared to say. Machiavelli dared say it.

For a more important reason, "The Prince" is a great book. Its author had a genius for abstract reasoning. He was a born maxim-maker. He created the science of modern politics. To do it, he divorced it from all morality. But in this he did not differ in method from the old-school political economist, while much might be said for the method of both. To be sure, there can be no such thing as successful government or commerce utterly divorced from morality, just as truly as there can be nothing of merely two dimensions. Yet, as geometricians have worked out many problems in two dimensions, so Machiavelli has worked out many problems in government without any consideration of morality. It was, however, a serious practical defect in his theories that he forgot that there is some such thing as moral law even in the most depraved communities, and that the worst of men have consciences, often quite sensitive to other people's sins. The life of Machiavelli, as depicted by the painstaking and authoritative specialist, Professor Pasquale Villari, is the life of a "scholar in politics." As a text-book on government, no book compares with "The Prince" for suggestiveness, just as the work-of many another impractical theorist has furnished, in its less degree, suggestion; as a depiction of character, few books are more graphic and powerful, though that character is in part the creature of the imagination; but Machiavellianism as set forth in "The Prince," and Machiavellianism as a whole, never has succeeded in the world, and there is no likelihood that it ever will.

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The Psychology of the Ouija Board by J. Allen Gilbert, Ph.D., M.D. 1920

The Psychology of the Ouija Board by J. Allen Gilbert, Ph.D., M.D. 1920

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THE Ouija Board is based upon a thoroughly scientific and defensible principle. The same principle is manifest in many of the phenomena of life that are accepted without question, though explanation of the same is shrouded in the same mystery attributed to the Ouija. Ouija has the advantage of novelty and advertisement. The commercial aspects of the board will be ignored in this paper.

As introductory to the point at issue, let us select two rather fundamental principles: (1) Every act that we perform is preceded by an imaginary picture of the completed action; and (2) every psychic state tends to its duplication in its physical complement. In fact, both are one and inseparable in experience. It is impossible to separate the physical from the psychical. For present discussion the above principles might be appropriately combined into the one statement that any psychic state proceeds automatically or reflexly to its natural physical equivalent, and vice versa.

Take, for example, so simple an act as picking up a pencil from the desk. If the act is analyzed into its fundamental elements it will be found that the first element in the process is an imaginary picture of the hand grasping the pencil, plus the sensations involved in the act. This imaginary picture is then automatically reproduced by the physical organism and the imaginary experience is replaced by the real experience unless there is something to prevent or inhibit the act as such. Those functions which are not under control of the inhibitive centers are purely automatic and can be counted upon with a certainty in proportion to their freedom from disturbing and inhibiting influences. We can find illustrations of this fact in great number. While the normal metabolic processes are largely automatic they are dependent to a marked degree upon the mental attitude of the individual. The stomach, for example, is fooled into secretion even more thoroughly by the concept of food than by the concrete reality of a foreign substance in the stomach, even though that substance be the best of food. The ingested meal handicapped by the inhibitive influences of strong emotion “lies on the stomach like a lump of lead,” while the appropriate psychic state will call out the secretions of both mouth and stomach, even in complete absence of food as such.

The inhibitory influences of the emotions upon the gastrointestinal tract are too common to need emphasis. They have found their way into medical nomenclature under the term "nervous dyspepsia."
Ancient literature--pre-eminently, the Bible-—speaks of “bowels of mercy and compassion.” The effect of the emotions upon the intestines was so manifest that the abdomen was looked upon as the seat of the emotions. Every emotion finds its reflection in every metabolic phase of the physical organism. Syncope, diuresis, enuresis, diarrhea, the various forms of shock, et cetera, present themselves as flagrant examples of the principle in question.

The individual who is scared “stiff,” or “white as a sheet” is the victim of an inhibitory obliteration of an automatic process. Fright as a stimulus to peristalsis to the point of overcoming the retaining sphincters has won for itself an expression familiar to all and quite common in street-waif parlance but incompatible with polite society, though extremely eloquent so far as expression of the psychophysical principle involved is concerned.

Automatic action, uninfluenced by the higher centers, is always natural and directed strictly to the purpose for which it was intended. We walk naturally so long as we pay no attention to the process, but as soon as a superimposed conscious state is admitted as an element in the process it becomes unnatural and awkward, even to the point of absolute collapse. The very essence of true stage acting consists in living the part so thoroughly psychologically that there is nothing for the physical organism to do but follow automatically. In proportion as Self-consciousness is allowed to intrude itself on the program, to that extent do the shaking trouser, the stiffened muscles, the dry mouth and the quivering lip betray the underlying stagefright. The young man who could enjoy the evening party if he could only leave his feet and hands at home has merely reached that stage in development in which the upper and lower neurons have not as yet learned the necessary team work. He has allowed his consciousness to creep into his hands and feet and it is out of place there. Naturally, it is like a fish out of water.

The stiff-legged walk of the youngest member of our family in the presence of strangers became proverbial in the home. All we older brothers had to do was to glance furtively at his feet as he started across the floor and the picture was complete. The whole musculature was thrown out of gear. Physical and psychical confusion was complete with an eifervescence of emotion that was amusing in the extreme.

Back of such situations is to be found a principle which has been appropriately called the motor power of an idea. Take, for example, one of the simplest experiments that can be performed in psychology. Let the attempt be made to hold a suspended plumb-bob steadily and accurately over a dot on the floor. Now, while holding the hand steady in a continuous effort to keep the bob directly over the spot, let your imagination depict the plumb-bob first to the left and then to the right of the spot. If you will continue this imaginary picturing of the bob alternately to the left and right, eventually the bob will start swinging in spite of your effort to keep it directly over the spot on the floor. In this simple experiment is to be found the whole principle of the Ouija in its simplest form. Any flash of consciousness, momentary or of minimal intensity though it be, tends to objectify itself in its physical equivalent. A perfect poker face is an impossibility.

Even our dreams manifest the same principle unmistakably. It is in sleep that the subconscious has fullest play. My memory pictures are very vivid of a dream in which I was actively engaged in a foot-ball game. I can see the ball yet as it came at me in my dream. With one lunge I threw myself upon it with the stern reality of the floor as my only reward for my vigorous tackle. The subconscious dream picture had objectified itself in muscle activity until I was bodily out of bed on the floor. Subconscious life, as well as conscious life, has its physical counterpart in proportion to the vividness of the psychic states which act as the correlate of the physical concomitant.

One of our confreres refuses to have an office higher from the ground than the fourth story because of a strong tendency for him to jump when looking out of the window. While standing on the top of Baker Theater with a companion during the passing of a recent parade, I detected him standing with one foot propped against the bottom of the parapet and his head and body leaning somewhat backward. He explained the fact by saying that the advanced protecting foot gave him some feeling of assurance against a tendency to jump which he admitted was very strong in him. Everybody has this tendency in proportion to the intensity of the imaginary picture relative to jumping and for some the situation is not without danger. In such the tendency becomes uncontrollable and occasionally reports of suicide by jumping from a window or precipice creep into our papers, whereas, if the facts were known, in many of these cases we would recognize, not a real suicide, but an automatic transplantation of a subconscious state into its complementary overt act.

This principle invades the realm of conscious life also. We all tend to do the thing that our imagination depicts or that is suggested to us, whether that suggestion be an autosuggestion or one initiated from without. It is often difficult to separate the conscious from the unconscious response to stimuli. Fresh from college and the examination in psychology, a friend suggested that we try out this principle on a farmer who was strolling leisurely down the platform of the depot. In a sharp strident voice, my friend cried out, “Sit down." As though shot, the farmer dropped but
caught himself before falling completely. The subconscious reaction was practically instantaneous. In the meantime, consciousness gained time to analyze the situation and he became the very picture of anger that he should have been taken so unawares. His lower neurons had simply stolen a march on him while the upper neurons with their voluntary control were at a minimum, or, at least, belated.

Bed-wetting comes under the same category. The bladder becomes full. The message goes to the cord asking for relief and if the inhibitory centers are off duty, as they are in early life or in sound sleep, the whole process is confined to the lower neuron as a mere reflex and the message goes back releasing the sphincter and evacuating the bladder, shunting, as it were, the collateral activity of the upper neuron. When the upper inhibitive centers are on duty, the inhibition is in proportion to the intensity of the psychic state represented by the upper neuron. When the upper neurons are only sufficiently active to accomplish partial inhibition of the lower neurons, the stimulus from the lower neurons is not entirely lost and the day may yet be saved by the subconscious. The stimulus frequently serves as the framework of a dream which depicts the boy in an appropriate place for evacuation of the bladder. This dream picture naturally tends to objectification, thus reducing the inhibitive powers and the lower neurons are able to break through the weaker inhibition and a wet bed is the result. In the great majority of cases, if not in all, the wetting of the bed is but the objectification of subconscious states as represented in dream life. As the upper and higher inhibitive powers are more and more developed the habit is gradually broken by a more and more complete control of the upper over the lower neurons. However, even in adult life the stimulus from the bladder combined with an extremely vivid dream picture will break down the controlling inhibition and even we adults are embarrassed at times by a partial evacuation of the bladder under the deceptive trickery of a vivid dream. Full consciousness usually intervenes to head off the process before the bladder has emptied itself sufficiently to carry the incriminating evidence over to the next morning. Unless we show the good sense to rise and empty the bladder voluntarily the same program will be repeated.

It requires a process of education to be able to read to onesself without moving the lips in the process because of the universal tendency for psychic states to repeat themselves in their physical equivalents. The man who goes muttering along the sidewalk betrays by every expression the mental attitude he is in. Even the character and speed of his gait reflect the general mental picture that betrays itself in his muttering speech. Such an individual merely follows the line of least resistance which allows every emotion to be translated completely into its physical correlate without obstruction or inhibition. If he will pull himself together, as it were, and analyze the situation he will find that his mental pictures are carrying him through the experience which his lips are depicting to an imaginary audience. Strictly speaking, he is not talking to himself but to the object of his imagination and his imagination is running riot both in the stimuli that it gives out and the rat-atat-tat which he is playing on the physical organism without interference from without.

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The crystal gazer entertains himself with the same sort of phantasmagoria. The pictures he sees are but objectifications of his subconscious states in response to the meager stimuli offered by the crystal. He sits gazing listlessly into the crystal with conscious effort reduced to a minimum and immediately in the crystal appears a genuine panoramic objectification of his own subconscious thoughts and imaginary pictures, which he reads off as though they had all the objective reality of the world of things. A bed of red-hot coals in the fireplace will often give better results than the crystal, and many are the individuals who reap extreme pleasure from this form of entertainment as they loll listlessly in front of the open fire.

The description of faces by mediums is probably a duplicate of the same principle.

Not everybody is able to throw himself into that spirit of reverie which is necessary to results in the tapping of the subconscious by various methods such as cited above. Everyone, however, does have a storehouse of subconscious knowledge from which he draws when the proper association appears or when the conscious subsides sufficiently to allow the subconscious to strut upon the stage. No conscious experience is ever forgotten; it is in the subconscious; all it needs is the proper association or the subordination of consciousness to a sufficient degree to allow the subconscious to appear. This is exactly what happens in dreams and trances.

As we advance into the higher types of such phenomena we encounter the automatic writer, the somnambulist, presentiments, so-called “hunches,” prophetic dreams, clairvoyance, et cetera, all of which are to be explained on the same basis, viz., displacements of the conscious by the subconscious which has gained temporary control of the physical mechanism common to both.

Those human alarm clocks who are able to set their mental machinery to wake at any set hour of the night, those animated compasses who retain an infallible sense of direction, those vivified barometers who are always able to sense an oncoming storm, and similar enigmata from the standpoint of scientific explanation are but exemplification of an underlying subconscious store of knowledge varying with the individual.

There is a more or less general belief in the instinctive intuition of woman as compared with the more logical conclusions of man. On a snap judgment she is more likely to be right than man. Her only reason for her opinion is the proverbial “because.” She has no other but she does have “hunches” and these “hunches” are but the outcroppings of the subconscious which is undoubtedly less under the domination of the conscious in woman than is the case with men. So-called “hunches” are of value. If in doubt on two opinions not subject to logical proof, always take the first—it is more liable to be right. For example, if in writing a letter you write a word and then doubt as to whether you spelled it correctly, the chances are that it is spelled correctly. If you stop to discuss it or consider it at length, you might as well go to the dictionary and look it up. Final decision gets harder and harder unless some logical reasoning offers the solution. So-called “hunches” or presentiments are not accidents or coincidences by any means. They are outcroppings of the subconscious, and are often of value.

Practically all of us have had experiences such as are detailed in this paper. Comparatively few — possibly none — have had experiences as automatic writers or somnambulists, merely because we are unable to dissociate various groups of experiences and deal with them on a separate basis. Degrees of success with these various phenomena must of necessity vary with the individual.

The somnambulist (sleep-walker) rises in his sleep, walks about as though awake, performs remarkable feats that are impossible in his waking self and returns to bed with total amnesia for the period of time in question. Mental tasks that were impossible before retiring are now performed with ease and, to his surprise, he finds an hitherto incomplete task finished on his desk, his own handwriting and the testimony of his friends being guarantee for the fact that he himself performed the task. There is but one explanation to be offered. The subconscious has taken the field and, through the agency of the physical organism, has carried out the process, which, so far as self-conscious personality is concerned, represents a true and more or less complete dissociation of personality.

The automatic writer presents a condition of even greater complexity and yet even more to the point in the explanation of Ouija. With his mind absorbed in some book or mental process which engrosses his attention, it will be seen that the hand of the genuine automatic writer is completely anesthetic, grows restless, and makes aimless indefinite motions —a sort of abortive attempt at writing. The hand, in addition to being anesthetic, seems entirely out from under the control of the consciousness. If the hand is now screened from his view, the aimless movements become somewhat more definite. If a pencil is put in the hand, it will begin to move and write with an aimless scrawl or semblance of writing. Ask the hand a question and it will write off hastily an answer to your question. Extended conversations can thus be called out from the anesthetic hand. After the sitting is over, the subject is completely unaware of having written anything and denies authorship of the things written.

It is exactly as though some highly musical member of the family has temporarily deserted the piano, giving an opportunity for one of the younger and less skilled members of the household to mount the stool and inflict upon us his special improviso strains which are a peculiar mixture of discords with just sufficient chords to remind you that it is music.

In such facts as these we are face to face with the principle underlying Ouija. Automatic writing, planchette, and ouija are all based upon the same principle. They are all forms of automatic writing in which the subconscious uses the mechanism at its disposal to strut upon the stage and delineate facts which are otherwise crowded out of full conscious life. No one is more surprised at the results than the individual who is operating the board. Not understanding himself, he naturally attributes it all to external agencies. To be sure, there are all grades of fakes but there are also true automatic writers who can successfully use this means of tapping the subconscious. If not understood, there is little wonder that the phenomena are attributed to spirit control, messages from the dead, or communications of the supernatural. The true writer swears he is not manipulating the ouija board. His statement is only partially true. He is not moving it consciously but is certainly moving it subconsciously. He is as unconscious of the process as is the man who goes to bed and is unconscious of the dissociated personality that rises in the somnambulistic perambulation and does all sorts of feats without conscious recognition of the experiences when in his normal waking self. After a sitting with the automatic writer he does not identify himself with the writing performed by the anesthetic hand. The only way that ouija differs from this process is in the fact that ouija spells out while the automatic writer writes out the dictations of the subconscious.

Not every man can manipulate ouija. For some it does nothing. For others, merely to touch it and ask it a question will insure prompt answer to the same. It varies with the individual. The highest success in the manipulation of ouija requires two main elements in the individual: (1) The power to dissociate various groups of experiences; and (2) a marked tendency for psychic states to go over automatically into their physical correlate. Variations in these elements furnish the multitudinous degrees of success to be found in various individuals. Where both of these elements are present to their maximum intensity in the same individual, the ouija furnishes a valuable method of tapping the subconscious. Ouija does not move of its own accord nor is it moved by powers outside the individual manipulating the same. The answers you get from ouija are but the embodiment of subconscious states, significant or insignificant in proportion to the intimacy of the relation that can be established between conscious and subconscious states.

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Plants, Medicine and Folk-lore by T. F. Thiselton Dyer 1889

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The Folk-Lore of Plants By T. F. Thiselton Dyer 1889

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Folk-lore is always a fascinating study, and no branch of it offers more of peculiar interest than that of plants. Prof. Dyer, therefore, has chosen a popular theme, one that has engaged the attention of many writers before him, and the present volume is a condensation in large part from previous books and papers upon the subject. In the author's own prefatory words it is "a brief, systematic summary, with a few illustrations in each case of the many branches into which the subject naturally subdivides itself." The book before us is, therefore, a hand-book to all who are interested in the subject upon which it treats. A mention of some of the twenty-three chapters into which the work is divided will help to present a faint idea of the scope and success of Prof. Dyer's compilation. Plants in witchcraft, plants in fairy lore, love-charms, plant language, doctrine of signatures, sacred plants, plants in folk-medicine, and mystic plants; these are suggestive of the careful systematic work done by the author. It is impossible to epitomize a work of this kind which in itself is an epitome of a vast subject. The foot-notes and references, one or more on nearly every page, illustrate how very wide has been the gleaning of the painstaking author. Open the book at any page, and a pleasing, succinct statement will be found of some ancient superstition of plant spirit, plant worship, plant witchery, plant demonology, or plant legend.

Darwin, in his famous work upon "Movements of Plants," says: "Why a touch, slight pressure, or any other irritant such as electricity, heat, or the absorption of animal matter should modify the turgescence of the affected cells in such a manner as to cause movement we do not know." In the light of this frank confession of ignorance by one of the wisest of Nature's modern students it is not strange that during the early ages of the world every living thing was believed to be under the direct control of some spirit, good or evil, which was none the less real to the ignorant people because unseen. It was natural for the ancients to ascribe causes to well-established effects, and the world of plant life came in for its full share. They believed blindly in the vegetable origin of the human race—that is, man sprang from some sacred world-tree. In modem times the belief is not altogether different from this, but the method is through the gradual unfolding of the higher from the lower by the slow process of evolution. In like manner the ancients, in seeking for a divinity, ascribed superhuman power to the mighty oak, and clothed other trees as with the garb of gods. The worship of to-day is often of structures far less lofty and inspiring than the forest giants. In our time we can with profit glance back and note the growth of ideas as they broaden with the ages and see that our own idols must be broken in pieces by the relentless wheels of progress. This is one of the good features of such books as the one before us, and should make them popular, because being a history of the people in everyday life—their common thought and conversation.

We must remember that the day of folklore is not past; superstition has not given place to science, and the reign of isolated absurdities still holds sway in many minds in place of law and order. It may be no worse to attribute the hidden evil of the world to plants possessed of Satan than to believe that there is a creature with horns and a cloven foot seeking for the innocent to satisfy his capacious maw.

Some of the most charming examples of plant lore are found in that portion having to do with fairies. Of course, the fairy itself is a pleasing myth that will require many ages to eradicate from the human mind, because it adds so much of innocent beauty to a majority of the nursery rhymes and children's tales. The whole deception of Santa Claus is one born to an endless earthly life, because having only a happy and healthful influence upon both the old who practice it and the young who are so delightfully deceived. There is a perennial pleasure in the thought that a tulip-blossom is a cradle in which mother fairies lull their little ones to sleep. To this day the finder of a four-leaved clover is considered by many as a person born to good luck—a notion that has descended from an older idea, namely, that the monstrous leaf was a talisman which enabled its wearer to detect the haunts of fairies. Much of fairy lore clusters around the so-called fairy rings, that is, the green circles in old pastures within which the elfs were supposed to dance at night by the light of the moon. Modern science has extracted the last breath of poetry from this common phenomenon and left it as a dry fact in the cyclopædias.

Flowers play no insignificant rôle in lovemaking at the present day, and no schoolgirl's botany is complete unless she can discourse fluently upon the language of flowers. Some plants are naturally symbolic of certain ideas. Thus, grass readily may stand for usefulness and the cypress for mourning, the poppy for sleep, and the trembling aspen for fear. Other plants do not carry their florigraphical meaning in plain sight, but have acquired their adopted meaning in ways that are lost in oblivion while the symbol remains. Thus the rose was dedicated to Venus by the early Romans and Greeks, and now stands for love, especially the deep red varieties. The constancy of the violet and the curiosity of the sycamore are far less evident than the weeping nature of the drooping willow.

The degree of credence given by many to the strange stories of fabulous plants is one of constant surprise to those whose knowledge shows up the traditions in their true light. The barnacle-tree is an instance to the point, and the following is a sixteenth-century description of it: "There are found in the north of Scotland and the isles adjacent, called Orcades, certain trees whereon do grow small fishes of a white color, tending to russet, wherein are contained little living creatures; which shells in time of maturity do open and out of them grow those little living things which, falling into the water, do become fowls whom we call barnacles, in the north of England brant geese, and in Lancaster tree geese; but the others that do fall upon the land perish and do come to nothing." There is more foundation in fact for this exaggeration of trees which, overhanging and dipping into water at high tide, may bear barnacles than in the wonder-working moonwort which would open locks, and unshoe horses treading upon it—certainly a very unsafe herb in the hands of unscrupulous house-breakers—providing the fable were true. Under the "doctrine of signatures" the author brings together a large amount of interesting matter illustrating the old idea that each medicinal plant has some sign of color, shape, etc., which indicates its healing power either for the whole body or for some particular organ. For example, red juice is for the blood, yellow for jaundice, the liver leaf—shaped like a liver—for the liver, etc. This doctrine was carried to an almost amusing excess. Thus, the shell of walnut, which resembles a human skull somewhat, was used for troubles of the brain. The aspen was employed for palsy; and mistletoe, a plant that grows in a suspended position, was good for dizziness.

Young people even could find much amusement in the chapter upon games, having plant lore as the basis and often set to rhyme.

Folk-lore in medicine is a vast subject receiving its full measure of treatment. Strange are many of the rhymes in this section of the subject. A single couplet is here indulged in:

"Eat an apple going to bed,
Make the doctor beg his bread,"

which is only a striking way of saying—

That apple eaten upon retiring
Is better than the doctor hiring—

a statement that may not be in accord with the teaching of the theory and practice of modern medicine.

The book before us is full of weird things that cast a peculiar light upon the past, and add new luster to the present. The human mind in the early centuries was saturated with unaccountable notions of the wildest sort. Prof. Dyer has shown a master's hand in dealing with the occult theme. He has been happy in his selections, conscientious in treatment, and clever in the grouping of the otherwise almost isolated and independent fables, superstitions, and legends.

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Birth Rates Now at Historic Lows...and the New Anne of Green Gables

Birth Rates are at Historic Lows and Here's a Major Reason

For 100 years, the US government has tracked the birth rate. It is now at historic lows. There are many reasons, but one has to do with the dramatic change in the way society regards the economic value of kids.

To illustrate the point, let’s reflect on the continuing popularity of Anne of Green Gables, the 1908 book by Canadian writer Lucy M. Montgomery. Yes, it is charming, and ridiculously so. It’s beyond me why the new Netflix rendering (Anne with an E) is getting bad reviews. It’s probably because so many people are attached to the book and the myriad previous cinematic renderings. Still, I find the new one delightful in every way, and I’ve been thinking on precisely why.

Before the Progressive Era, children were regarded as aspiring adults with as many responsibilities as they could handle. 

Beyond the solid acting and timeless story of a brilliant orphan growing up and finding her way in the world, the show introduces us into a time gone by. It is set on Prince Edward Island sometime in the late 19th century, before cars, phones, and indoor temperature control. So, sure, that’s different. So is the language and cultural mores.
The Status of Kids 
That’s not what truly strikes us, however. What is dazzling to watch is the completely different relationship between kids and adults that existed then. The status of kids in society was unlike today.
They were aspiring adults and given as many responsibilities as they could handle within their range of competence, which was always shifting in the direction of more and more.

There was no Department of Labor and Department of Human Resources to "protect" them from living full lives. Kids in those days were regarded as valuable because they were tangibly productive. They worked, gained skills, and produced for their families or otherwise worked for businesses here and there. They were assets. As they gained skills, discipline, and a work ethic, they could become ever more valuable to their custodians and communities. This is a major reason why people wanted them. And the kids, in turn, were socialized to be grateful to their benefactors whether at home or work.

And notice from the story of Anne that a main job of kids in those days was to care for people in their aging years. So kids were valuable on both ends of the life spectrum: as co-workers when the kids are young and then as helpers as their custodians age.

What’s different today? Now kids are mostly a financial cost and defined as such, because the law, educational system, and welfare state make it that way. Oh sure, people still love their kids. Emotionally and spiritually, we speak piously and beautifully of the infinite value of their lives. 
And, of course, everyone agrees. There is a social status that comes with having kids and they can be an entryway to new friend networks. 

And yet. Let’s talk dollars and cents. When considering whether to have kids, people know that they will contribute little to household management, and nothing positive to the bottom line, and then they must consider how much they will have to spend. You can look it up on online cost calculators. For example, if you are married and want two kids in the American South, you are going to spend $732K. That’s a daunting figure, and that’s before you start shelling out for college.

In return for which, they offer...the infinite value of their very existence.

Is it any wonder that the birthrate has fallen to its lowest level in more than 100 years? Yes, there are other reasons having to do with technology and greater economic certainty. Still, if you forcibly reduce the value of anything, and people have any choice over it, they will produce less and less of it. This is precisely what has happened to the status of children over the last century.

Why Would You Want to Be Anne?
How did this happen? Let’s look at the story of Anne.

If you forcibly reduce the value of anything, and people have any choice over it, they will produce less and less of it.

Anne is 13 years old when the story starts. She has lived a very hard life due to circumstances beyond her control. She had lived in the orphanage but gets a new start when a family adopts her, in order to get a obtain a worker who only needs room and board. The family asked for a boy from the orphanage but there was some mix up and they sent a girl. The adoptive family (an aging brother and sister) reluctantly agree to keep her only after she charms them and proves that she can bring productivity to the household. She shows off her skills, among which include her incredible erudition.
It was a much poorer world, obviously, and only the rich kids could afford to be in school full time. Anne was mostly self taught but she loved reading, dreaming, fantasizing, imagining. She read whenever she could, by candlelight, exhausted at the end of the day. And she was brilliant, even without focus or being institutionalized.

A reason this story has riveted children for so many generations comes down to the challenges, opportunities, tragedies, and triumphs she experiences in an exciting, varied, interesting life – which is to say, a life in an economically free society. She was a child in a world that aspired for her to become an adult, and deal with actual adult-like tasks and responsibilities. Yes, that involved schooling but this was not forced and it was not the only purpose of her life. She could even drink wine! 

Back then, kids were not nationalized by the state, their every move controlled by public institutions, and forbidden from working by the government. They were challenged with as many adult responsibilities as they could handle. That Anne works hard, can do anything a boy can do, picks up vast skills, and her path of learning is largely unscripted is a real source of delight for readers and viewers. She proves herself up to the task.

What Changed?
Soon after the book was written, public policy concerning kids began to change. Public schooling was made nearly universal in the developed world. Private schooling began its long path of decline to the point that by mid-century they were operated either by churches or only available to the rich. These public schools entered on the trajectory of every government project: planned, managed from the top, treating every student as an unindividuated unit of an aggregate, soldiers in a. kid army, each put through the paces for twelve years.

During the New Deal, “Child labor” was completely banned. It remains so today, with rare exceptions.

Then school was made compulsory in the Progressive Era. Families and kids had no choice. In such a world, would Anne have been adopted? Why would she be? Instead of realizing her value, she would have been stuffed into a holding cell for twelve years, and her caretakers would have been fiduciarily responsible for providing room and board with no compensation. There would have been no market for her person at all.

A couple of decades later, public policy went the full way. During the New Deal, “Child labor” was completely banned. It remains so today, with rare exceptions (you can be a child actor and you can work for your family business). Mostly kids are denied their inherent human rights to work and prevented from being valuable to others according to their own skills and desires.

The law books say you can work from 14 but the limits are too strict and the paperwork too long. Even at 16, there are jobs you can have and jobs you are allowed to accept. You aren’t really free to earn money serving others until you are 18, by which time kids are socialized to want to do anything but that.

And all of this is done for their well being.

Then governments instituted Social Security, medical care for the aged, and publicly funded homes for the “retired.” That lets kids completely off the hook for taking care of their parents. The inverse also becomes true: they are less valuable to parents because they are no longer necessary for end-of-life care.

Public policy killed the value of kids in the world, denying their rights to choose, work, and serve others.

The upshot is that public policy killed the value of kids in the world, denying their rights to choose, work, and serve others. Society literally decided to devalue them to the point that they are all cost when young and unnecessary when their caretakers are old.

It’s even worse. Kids today are corralled into collectives defined by age, given an authority figure to lord over them and lecture them for 12 years, and the only job they are allowed to have is to cough back the information the teacher tells them, sitting in desks, day after day for the whole of their growing up.

When we discover that the kids are bored and misbehave, we stuff them full of drugs, belittle them, jail them for misbehavior, and finally turn them out into the world at the age of 18 with no skills, work ethic, or knowledge of what it means actually to succeed in life. 

We no longer live in an agricultural or even industrial age that was physically grueling (the great excuse for why we stop allowing them remunerative work). In digital times, there are whole worlds of safe work that kids could do while learning and enjoying life. Kids would have such better lives. 

We just don’t allow it.

We think Anne’s orphanage was cruel. But she escaped because an adoptive family saw her value. She found her groove. At least she didn’t grow up in today’s regimented, regulated, exclusionary world from which there is no escape for any kids, ever.

Bring Back Green Gables
My own theory of why we love this book and can’t get enough of the movies about a story so far back in time is simple: kids in those days were regarded by society as real human beings with rights and dignity and opportunity. They could live full and wonderful lives. They lived real lives as part of real life.

Their rights were not systematically violated by the law in the name of helping them. The Progressives came along and deployed the violence of the state to make their lives better, and here we are today. 

Is it any wonder that we are nostalgic about the life of kids in those days? And is it any wonder that people have to think very carefully about producing them today?

Jeffrey A. Tucker

Jeffrey Tucker is Director of Content for the Foundation for Economic Education. He is also Chief Liberty Officer and founder of Liberty.me, Distinguished Honorary Member of Mises Brazil, research fellow at the Acton Institute, policy adviser of the Heartland Institute, founder of the CryptoCurrency Conference, member of the editorial board of the Molinari Review, an advisor to the blockchain application builder Factom, and author of five books. He has written 150 introductions to books and many thousands of articles appearing in the scholarly and popular press.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

The Cruelty of Charity By Margaret Sanger 1922

The Cruelty of Charity By Margaret Sanger 1922 (Abridged)

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"Fostering the good-for-nothing at the expense of the good is an extreme cruelty. It is a deliberate storing up of miseries for future generations. There is no greater curse to posterity than that of bequeathing them an increasing population of imbeciles."~Herbert Spencer

The last century has witnessed the rise and development of philanthropy and organized charity. Coincident with the all-conquering power of machinery and capitalistic control, with the unprecedented growth of great cities and industrial centers, and the creation of great proletarian populations, modern civilization has been confronted, to a degree hitherto unknown in human history, with the complex problem of sustaining human life in surroundings and under conditions flagrantly dysgenic.

The program, as I believe all competent authorities in contemporary philanthropy and organized charity would agree, has been altered in aim and purpose. It was first the outgrowth of humanitarian and altruistic idealism, perhaps not devoid of a strain of sentimentalism, of an idealism that was aroused by a desperate picture of human misery intensified by the industrial revolution. It has developed in later years into a program not so much aiming to succor the unfortunate victims of circumstances, as to effect what we may term social sanitation. Primarily, it is a program of self-protection. Contemporary philanthropy, I believe, recognizes that extreme poverty and overcrowded slums are veritable breeding-grounds of epidemics, disease, delinquency and dependency. Its aim, therefore, is to prevent the individual family from sinking to that abject condition in which it will become a much heavier burden upon society.

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There is no need here to criticize the obvious limitations of organized charities in meeting the desperate problem of destitution. We are all familiar with these criticisms: the common indictment of "inefficiency" so often brought against public and privately endowed agencies. The charges include the high cost of administration; the pauperization of deserving poor, and the encouragement and fostering of the "undeserving"; the progressive destruction of self-respect and self-reliance by the paternalistic interference of social agencies; the impossibility of keeping pace with the ever-increasing multiplication of factors and influences responsible for the perpetuation of human misery; the misdirection and misappropriation of endowments; the absence of interorganization and coordination of the various agencies of church, state, and privately endowed institutions; the "crimes of charity" that are occasionally exposed in newspaper scandals. These and similar strictures we may ignore as irrelevant to our present purpose, as inevitable but not incurable faults that have been and are being eliminated in the slow but certain growth of a beneficent power in modern civilization. In reply to such criticisms, the protagonist of modern philanthropy might justly point to the honest and sincere workers and disinterested scientists it has mobilized, to the self-sacrificing and hard-working executives who have awakened public attention to the evils of poverty and the menace to the race engendered by misery and filth.

Even if we accept organized charity at its own valuation, and grant that it does the best it can, it is exposed to a more profound criticism. It reveals a fundamental and irremediable defect. Its very success, its very efficiency, its very necessity to the social order, are themselves the most unanswerable indictment. Organized charity itself is the symptom of a malignant social disease.

Those vast, complex, interrelated organizations aiming to control and to diminish the spread of misery and destitution and all the menacing evils that spring out of this sinisterly fertile soil, are the surest sign that our civilization has bred, is breeding and is perpetuating constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents and dependents. My criticism, therefore, is not directed at the "failure" of philanthropy, but rather at its success.

These dangers inherent in the very idea of humanitarianism and altruism, dangers which have to-day produced their full harvest of human waste, of inequality and inefficiency, were fully recognized in the last century at the moment when such ideas were first put into practice. Readers of Huxley's attack on the Salvation Army will recall his penetrating and stimulating condemnation of the debauch of sentimentalism which expressed itself in so uncontrolled a fashion in the Victorian era. One of the most penetrating of American thinkers, Henry James, Sr., sixty or seventy years ago wrote: "I have been so long accustomed to see the most arrant deviltry transact itself in the name of benevolence, that the moment I hear a profession of good will from almost any quarter, I instinctively look around for a constable or place my hand within reach of a bell-rope. My ideal of human intercourse would be a state of things in which no man will ever stand in need of any other man's help, but will derive all his satisfaction from the great social tides which own no individual names. I am sure no man can be put in a position of dependence upon another, without the other's very soon becoming-if he accepts the duties of the relation-utterly degraded out of his just human proportions. No man can play the Deity to his fellow man with impunity-I mean, spiritual impunity, of course. For see: if I am at all satisfied with that relation, if it contents me to be in a position of generosity towards others, I must be remarkably indifferent at bottom to the gross social inequality which permits that position, and, instead of resenting the enforced humiliation of my fellow man to myself in the interests of humanity, I acquiesce in it for the sake of the profit it yields to my own self-complacency. I do hope the reign of benevolence is over; until that event occurs, I am sure the reign of God will be impossible."

To-day, we may measure the evil effects of "benevolence" of this type, not merely upon those who have indulged in it, but upon the community at large. These effects have been reduced to statistics and we cannot, if we would, escape their significance.

Organized charity is thus confronted with the problem of feeble-mindedness and mental defect. But just as the State has so far neglected the problem of mental defect until this takes the form of criminal delinquency, so the tendency of our philanthropic and charitable agencies has been to pay no attention to the problem until it has expressed itself in terms of pauperism and delinquency. Such "benevolence" is not merely ineffectual; it is positively injurious to the community and the future of the race.

But there is a special type of philanthropy or benevolence, now widely advertised and advocated, both as a federal program and as worthy of private endowment, which strikes me as being more insidiously injurious than any other. This concerns itself directly with the function of maternity, and aims to supply GRATIS medical and nursing facilities to slum mothers. Such women are to be visited by nurses and to receive instruction in the "hygiene of pregnancy"; to be guided in making arrangements for confinements; to be invited to come to the doctor's clinics for examination and supervision. They are, we are informed, to "receive adequate care during pregnancy, at confinement, and for one month afterward." Thus are mothers and babies to be saved. "Childbearing is to be made safe." The work of the maternity centers in the various American cities in which they have already been established and in which they are supported by private contributions and endowment, it is hardly necessary to point out, is carried on among the poor and more docile sections of the city, among mothers least able, through poverty and ignorance, to afford the care and attention necessary for successful maternity. Now, as the findings of Tredgold and Karl Pearson and the British Eugenists so conclusively show, and as the infant mortality reports so thoroughly substantiate, a high rate of fecundity is always associated with the direst poverty, irresponsibility, mental defect, feeble-mindedness, and other transmissible taints. The effect of maternity endowments and maternity centers supported by private philanthropy would have, perhaps already have had, exactly the most dysgenic tendency. The new government program would facilitate the function of maternity among the very classes in which the absolute necessity is to discourage it.

Such "benevolence" is not merely superficial and near-sighted. It conceals a stupid cruelty, because it is not courageous enough to face unpleasant facts. Aside from the question of the unfitness of many women to become mothers, aside from the very definite deterioration in the human stock that such programs would inevitably hasten, we may question its value even to the normal though unfortunate mother. For it is never the intention of such philanthropy to give the poor over-burdened and often undernourished mother of the slum the opportunity to make the choice herself, to decide whether she wishes time after to time to bring children into the world. It merely says "Increase and multiply: We are prepared to help you do this." Whereas the great majority of mothers realize the grave responsibility they face in keeping alive and rearing the children they have already brought into the world, the maternity center would teach them how to have more. The poor woman is taught how to have her seventh child, when what she wants to know is how to avoid bringing into the world her eighth.

Such philanthropy, as Dean Inge has so unanswerably pointed out, is kind only to be cruel, and unwittingly promotes precisely the results most deprecated. It encourages the healthier and more normal sections of the world to shoulder the burden of unthinking and indiscriminate fecundity of others; which brings with it, as I think the reader must agree, a dead weight of human waste. Instead of decreasing and aiming to eliminate the stocks that are most detrimental to the future of the race and the world, it tends to render them to a menacing degree dominant.

On the other hand, the program is an indication of a suddenly awakened public recognition of the shocking conditions surrounding pregnancy, maternity, and infant welfare prevailing at the very heart of our boasted civilization. So terrible, so unbelievable, are these conditions of child-bearing, degraded far below the level of primitive and barbarian tribes, nay, even below the plane of brutes, that many high-minded people, confronted with such revolting and disgraceful facts, lost that calmness of vision and impartiality of judgment so necessary in any serious consideration of this vital problem. Their "hearts" are touched; they become hysterical; they demand immediate action; and enthusiastically and generously they support the first superficial program that is advanced. Immediate action may sometimes be worse than no action at all. The "warm heart" needs the balance of the cool head. Much harm has been done in the world by those too-good-hearted folk who have always demanded that "something be done at once."

They do not stop to consider that the very first thing to be done is to subject the whole situation to the deepest and most rigorous thinking. As the late Walter Bagehot wrote in a significant but too often forgotten passage:

"The most melancholy of human reflections, perhaps, is that on the whole it is a question whether the benevolence of mankind does more good or harm. Great good, no doubt, philanthropy does, but then it also does great evil. It augments so much vice, it multiplies so much suffering, it brings to life such great populations to suffer and to be vicious, that it is open to argument whether it be or be not an evil to the world, and this is entirely because excellent people fancy they can do much by rapid action, and that they will most benefit the world when they most relieve their own feelings; that as soon as an evil is seen, `something' ought to be done to stay and prevent it. One may incline to hope that the balance of good over evil is in favor of benevolence; one can hardly bear to think that it is not so; but anyhow it is certain that there is a most heavy debt of evil, and that this burden might almost all have been spared us if philanthropists as well as others had not inherited form their barbarous forefathers a wild passion for instant action."

It is customary, I believe, to defend philanthropy and charity upon the basis of the sanctity of human life. Yet recent events in the world reveal a curious contradiction in this respect. Human life is held sacred, as a general Christian principle, until war is declared, when humanity indulges in a universal debauch of bloodshed and barbarism, inventing poison gases and every type of diabolic suggestion to facilitate killing and starvation. Blockades are enforced to weaken and starve civilian populations-women and children. This accomplished, the pendulum of mob passion swings back to the opposite extreme, and the compensatory emotions express themselves in hysterical fashion. Philanthropy and charity are then unleashed. We begin to hold human life sacred again. We try to save the lives of the people we formerly sought to weaken by devastation, disease and starvation. We indulge in "drives," in campaigns of relief, in a general orgy of international charity.

We are thus witnessing to-day the inauguration of a vast system of international charity. As in our more limited communities and cities, where self-sustaining and self-reliant sections of the population are forced to shoulder the burden of the reckless and irresponsible, so in the great world community the more prosperous and incidentally less populous nations are asked to relieve and succor those countries which are either the victims of the wide-spread havoc of war, of militaristic statesmanship, or of the age-long tradition of reckless propagation and its consequent over-population.

The people of the United States have recently been called upon to exercise their traditional generosity not merely to aid the European Relief Council in its efforts to keep alive three million, five hundred thousand starving children in Central Europe, but in addition to contribute to that enormous fund to save the thirty million Chinese who find themselves at the verge of starvation, owing to one of those recurrent famines which strike often at that densely populated and inert country, where procreative recklessness is encouraged as a matter of duty. The results of this international charity have not justified the effort nor repaid the generosity to which it appealed. In the first place, no effort was made to prevent the recurrence of the disaster; in the second place, philanthropy of this type attempts to sweep back the tide of miseries created by unrestricted propagation, with the feeble broom of sentiment. As one of the most observant and impartial of authorities on the Far East, J. O. P. Bland, has pointed out: "So long as China maintains a birth-rate that is estimated at fifty-five per thousand or more, the only possible alternative to these visitations would be emigration and this would have to be on such a scale as would speedily overrun and overfill the habitable globe. Neither humanitarian schemes, international charities nor philanthropies can prevent widespread disaster to a people which habitually breeds up to and beyond the maximum limits of its food supply." Upon this point, it is interesting to add, Mr. Frank A. Vanderlip has likewise pointed out the inefficacy and misdirection of this type of international charity.

Mr. Bland further points out: "The problem presented is one with which neither humanitarian nor religious zeal can ever cope, so long as we fail to recognize and attack the fundamental cause of these calamities. As a matter of sober fact, the benevolent activities of our missionary societies to reduce the deathrate by the prevention of infanticide and the checking of disease, actually serve in the end to aggravate the pressure of population upon its food-supply and to increase the severity of the inevitably resultant catastrophe. What is needed for the prevention, or, at least, the mitigation of these scourges, is an organized educational propaganda, directed first against polygamy and the marriage of minors and the unfit, and, next, toward such a limitation of the birth-rate as shall approximate the standard of civilized countries. But so long as Bishops and well meaning philanthropists in England and America continue to praise and encourage `the glorious fertility of the East' there can be but little hope of minimizing the penalties of the ruthless struggle for existence in China, and Nature's law will therefore continue to work out its own pitiless solution, weeding out every year millions of predestined weaklings."

This rapid survey is enough, I hope, to indicate the manifold inadequacies inherent in present policies of philanthropy and charity. The most serious charge that can be brought against modern "benevolence" is that it encourages the perpetuation of defectives, delinquents and dependents. These are the most dangerous elements in the world community, the most devastating curse on human progress and expression. Philanthropy is a gesture characteristic of modern business lavishing upon the unfit the profits extorted from the community at large. Looked at impartially, this compensatory generosity is in its final effect probably more dangerous, more dysgenic, more blighting than the initial practice of profiteering and the social injustice which makes some too rich and others too poor.

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Ancient Books & their Materials by Emily C. Pearson 1871

Ancient Books and their Materials by Emily Clemens Pearson 1871

The most ancient materials used for recording events were bricks, tiles, shells, and tables of stone. The modes of writing on these different substances were various. The tiles and brick were impressed with a stamp when in a soft state; the shells and tablets of stone were etched or graven, the figures or characters being cut in their surface, and in some cases also stained with various colors. It was by the ancient art of stamping that the walls, palaces, and Towers of Babylon were covered with hieroglyphics, which have but recently been brought to light from under the immense mounds of Mesopotamia by Layard and other explorers.

The patriarch Job, who is supposed to have lived about 2,300 years after the creation, exclaimed, "O that my words were now written! O that they were printed in a book! that they were graven with an iron pen, and hid in the rock forever!" Stung with the unjust accusation of his friends, he desires to record his words that the generations following might see the justice of his cause. The English translation has given the allusion to printing to the text, the original word signifying rather to engrave on a plate, which was doubtless the only printing known to Job.

Montfaucon purchased at Rome in 1699 an ancient book entirely composed of lead. It was about four inches long and three inches wide; and not only were the two pieces that formed the cover, and the leaves, six in number, of lead, but also the stick inserted through the rings to hold the leaves together, as well as the hinges and nails. It contained figures of Egyptian idols, and unintelligible writing.

China, our ancestor in invention, from remote ages had a kind of stereotyping or printing. It was not, however, as some have supposed, like our printing, phonetic, or the expression of sound, but, like the Egyptian, hieroglyphical; being purely of an artificial structure, denoting every idea by its appropriate sign without any relation to the utterance, and speaking to the eye like the numerical ciphers of the Europeans, which every one understands and utters in his own way. And like most other nations of antiquity, the Chinese were content to remain without alphabetical writing. It is, however, due to the Chinese to add, that they led the way in making good printing-paper. When they invented making it, does not appear, some affirming that they had the use of it from time immemorial; others that they first discovered it in the second century of the Christian era.

Brass, as more durable, was used for inscriptions designed to last the longest, such as treaties, laws, and alliances. Seals, also, were used by the ancients for impressing soft substances. In the British Museum there is a stamp of metal with raised letters. On the back of it is a ring, enabling the owner to wear it as a signet; his name, Caius Julius Caecilius Hermias, being engraved in reversed letters upon it.

This seal of Hermias was intended for stamping parchment with ink, as is shown by the fact that the roughness of the surface below the letters unfits it for stamping any soft substance into which it would sink, as into wax. If rubbed with printers' ink and pressed upon paper, it prints very well. Thus the seed of this noble art was among the Romans. With a block of wood covered with raised letters, they might have printed a page, as well as a single name. But they were suffered to grope their way from age to age blindfolded to the art of which they had the clew. They almost grasped the great discovery, unconscious of the prize.

Quintilian, speaking of the education of youth, says, "When the boy has begun to trace the forms of the letters, it will be useful for him to have the letters of the tablet engraved, that through them, as through furrows, he may draw his style. For thus he will neither make mistakes, being prevented by the edges on both sides, nor will he be able to go beyond the proper bound; and by tracing quickly and frequently certain forms, he will strengthen his joints, and will not need the assistance of some one to put his hand above his own, and guide it." Here we find that the old Romans knew something of the art of stenciling.

The Emperor Justin, who lived in the sixth century, could not write, and, to avoid the shame of making only a mark for his name, caused holes to be bored through a tablet in the shape of the first four letters of his name. Through these holes he traced the letters in red ink. Theodoric, King of the Ostrogoths, it is said, wrote his name through a gold plate, in the same manner.

Tablets, or little tables of wood, as well as of metal, came at length to take the place of stone tables. The thin wooden tables were sometimes covered with wax, which was written upon with a style, or ivory pencil. These were so much hire tracing in the sand, as soon to be laid aside, and the smooth, inner bark of trees, called liber in the Latin, was used instead; also the leaves of the palm-tree, cloths of cotton and linen, the intestines and skins of animals, and the backs of tortoises. We derive our name book from the Danish bog, the beech-tree, since that was used to engrave on in Denmark, because of its abundance.

The Egyptians very early employed a broadleafed rush growing on the banks of the Nile, as a material upon which to write. This was the papyrus, a word which has given its name to our modern paper. Large bundles of papyrus manuscripts, covered with hieroglyphics, have been found in the ancient tombs and temples of that country, some of which are capable of being deciphered at the present day.

Parchment, which is the prepared skins of animals, came into use B. c. 250. It was so called from Pergamus (membrana peryamea), whose king, Eumenes, seeking to collect a library which should vie with that of Alexandria, and being debarred a supply of papyrus by the jealousy of the Ptolemies, had recourse to this substitute. After the eighth century, parchment generally took the place of papyrus.

Ancient books were not commonly disposed in a square form, as with us, but were rolled up. Hence the word volume, signifying a roll.

Paper from cotton and linen rags began, it is thought, to be made as early as the ninth century. For several centuries, however, the manufacture was so scanty as to increase very little the facilities for copying. Gradually, it became more plentiful, and writing material of small cost laid the foundation for that cheap and expeditious mode of copying which we call printing.

In the age when parchment was used, it was often difficult to be obtained; and it became common to erase the original writing from a manuscript and trace another upon it. A parchment thus used was called palimpsest, which means "twice prepared for writing." Thus, many valuable works were destroyed to make way for newer, and, in some cases, less important ones. Happily we live in a time when we have no occasion to destroy one library to produce another.

It seems strange, too, that a transcriber familiar with the labor of copying would not be deterred by his love of learning from putting even one book out of existence. But necessity knew no law; and the writer, deeming his own work to possess greater utility, sacrificed another to make room for it, — to such straits were the scribes sometimes brought for the lack of writing material. Struggling to express thought, there was no room to put it down. Written language, scarcely second to spoken language, had almost perished; and had the art of printing been invented before paper was known, it would have been comparatively useless.

The writing and rewriting on parchment, as it was often done two or three times, has recently led learned men to make these ancient parchments a study; and they have thus deciphered or read the last writing, then, effacing that, have deciphered the second, and, effacing that, have read the first, — often the most valuable, — and in this way have brought to light lost works, and found out many important facts of history.

The books of those early days were written out by hand, manuscripta; and the profession of the copyist was one of the most numerous, honorable, and lucrative. Some booksellers employed great numbers of copyists, paying them salaries, and made their own livelihood on the profits of selling the works thus copied. There were in Rome, and in some of the great cities of Greece and of Asia, particular places where such works were sold. The rich also sometimes had slaves, prized more highly and treated more familiarly than other slaves, who were devoted by them to copying the works of antiquity and of their time, for their libraries. Government, too, employed a great many copyists for its edicts, and orators employed them in transcribing their discourses. Later, the eunuchs copied at Byzantium the chief works of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew antiquity. Finally, there were the monks, who, in the retirement of the monasteries, gave their time very much to the multiplication of books by the slow process of writing.

In every great religious house, or abbey, there was an apartment called the scriptorium, or writing-room, where boys and young men were employed from morning till night in copying the singing-books of the choir, and the less valuable books of the library. Only a few of the monks copied in this large apartment, enough to give directions, and keep order among the boys and novices. Most of the "Holy Fathers," as they chose to be styled, spent their time in the cells, transcribing Bibles and other valuable works.

A monk copying. He has a cowl on his head, and wears the priest's long gown with flowing sleeves. His waist is girt with a belt; and he sits bolt upright, or slightly leans forward in the most perpendicular of arm-chairs, which seems to be joined to the desk of his cell. How curiously he holds his quill and pointed ferule! His prior is cautious and methodical; for he has chained the manuscript from which the monk is copying to the wall, as if experience had taught him that he cannot overmuch trust the brothers.

An author of those times would make a similar appearance, save that there would be no book before him, unless for reference.

Richard de Bury, Bishop of Durham, in his "Philobiblion," a treatise on the love of books, written by him in Latin in 1344, gives a good picture of the transcriber, or copyist of the monastery. He says: "As it is necessary for a State to provide military arms, and prepare plentiful stores of provisions for soldiers who are about to fight, so it is evidently worth the labor of the Church to fortify itself against the attacks of pagans and heretics with a multitude of sound books. But, because everything that is of use to mortals decays through lapse of time, it is necessary for volumes corroded by age to be restored by new successors, that books may not cease to exist. Hence it is that Ecclesiastes truly says, in the 12th chapter, 'There is no end of making many books.' For, as the bodies of books decay, so a remedy is found out by the prudence of clerks, by which a holy book paying the debt of nature [i. e., dying] may have one succeed it, and a seed may be raised up like to the most holy deceased, and that saying of Ecclesiastes, chapter thirtieth, be verified: 'The father is dead, and as it were not dead, for he hath left behind him a son like unto himself.'"

Then he goes on to upbraid the priests for soiling books, giving us rather an unfavorable impression concerning the habits of the monks. One would suppose that they could command the leisure to keep clean. The Bishop just quoted deplores "the unwashed hands, the dirty nails, the greasy elbows leaning upon the volume, the munching of fruit and cheese over the open leaves, which were the marks of careless and idle readers," and suggestive also, some would say, of lack of culture and refinement, and even that their religion was of a low type; else would it not, at least, have produced the virtue which is next to godliness?

Then follow sound and sensible directions how to use books. "Let there be a mature decorum in opening and closing of volumes, that they may neither be unclasped with precipitous haste, nor thrown aside after use without being duly closed."

Says an English writer: "When a volume was at last produced in fair parchment, or vellum, after the arduous labor of years, it was covered with immensely thick lids of wood and leather, studded with large nails, and curiously clasped, and was studiously preserved from the common gaze on the shelves of the monastic library.

"The splendid volumes thus made, bore evidence, however, not only of persevering industry, but of great ingenuity; the letters at the beginning of each chapter or section being adorned with curious devices. Frequently, too, a painting called an illumination was introduced radiant with gold, crimson, and azure. But no vulgar or unpriestly eyes looked on their contents, unless, indeed, we except kings and princes; they were only unclasped on days of solemnity, by the abbot or the prior, and then restored, like the jewels of the priesthood, to their dusty cases."

Montgomery says, "The readers of those days were rather gluttons than epicures in their taste for literature," canonizing all books because they were books, as children eulogize their toys without noticing the quality. "To say all that could be said on any theme, whether in verse or prose, was the fashion of the times; and as few read but those who were devoted to reading by an irresistible passion or professional necessity, and few wrote but those who were equally impelled by an inveterate instinct, great books were the natural produce of the latter, who knew not how to make little ones; and great books only could appease the voracity of the former. Great books, therefore, were both the fruits and the proofs of the ignorance of the age. They were mostly composed in the gloom and torpor of the cloister, and it almost required a human life to read the works of an author of this description, because it was nearly as easy to compound as to digest such crudities." These labors of the learned could not of course interest the common people, as they could neither understand nor buy them. These were books without meaning, — with so little logic and connection that the more one read, the deeper he got into the maze or tangled mass of words. "And the lucubrations through a thousand years, of many a noble, many a lovely mind, which only wanted better direction how to unfold its energies or display its graces to benefit or delight mankind, were but passing meteors, that made visible the darkness out of which they rose, and into which they sank again to be hid forever."

Nevertheless, we owe it to the monks to say that there were many good and learned men among them, and for much that is valuable in our libraries we can not thank them enough. We can never consult a concordance of the Bible without calling to mind that they first conceived the idea of such a work, and numbers of them, jointly laboring long and incessantly, nobly laid its foundations, on which others who came after raised the structure and reaped the glory.

It will be readily inferred from what has been said that books in those times were scarce and costly. Only the rich could afford to have them, and they had but very few. The monasteries and universities had libraries, and occasionally one was found in the castles of the nobility. The Cathedral of Notre Dame, in Strasbourg, was famed for its splendid collection of five hundred volumes. The Countess of Anjou bought a book of Homilies, paying for it two hundred sheep, five quarters of wheat, and the same quantity of rye and millet. Henry V., King of England, borrowed a book from the Countess of Westmoreland; and not having returned it at his death, the Countess petitioned the Privy Council that it might be restored to her by an order under the privy seal, which was done with all formality.

Richard de Bury, whom we have already mentioned, had gathered in his life-time, by copying with his own hand and by purchase, a valuable library. In his will he bestowed a portion of it upon "a company of scholars residing in a hall at Oxford," and one of his chapters is headed "A Provident Arrangement by which Books may be lent to Strangers," meaning, by strangers, students of Oxford not belonging to that hall.

This library, from which a book could not be borrowed without giving ample security, was finally given to Durham, now Trinity College, and contained more books than all the bishops of England had then in their possession. For many years after they were received they were kept in chests, under the custody of several scholars chosen for that purpose. It was not till the reign of Henry IV. that a library was built in that college; and then the books were taken out of the old sepulchral chests, and "were put into pews or studies and chained to them." In 1300, the library of Oxford consisted of a few tracts kept in a chest.

The statutes of St. Mary's College, Oxford, in the reign of Henry VI., furnish striking proof of the obstacles to study caused by a scarcity of books. "Let no scholar occupy a book in the library above one hour, or two hours at most, so that others shall be hindered from the use of the same." This reveals quite a famine of books, but not so great as at a still earlier period of the Church, when one book was given out by the librarian to each of a religious fraternity at the beginning of Lent, to be read diligently during the year, and to be returned the following Lent.

The old way of shutting up books in chests shows that they could not be often changed, for whenever one was wanted the whole pile must be disturbed.

The next plan was to allow the books the privilege of light and air, but to chain them to desks and in cages, as if their keepers looked upon them literally as riches with wings ready to fly away.

The following passage, malediction of some grim friar perhaps, was often written on the first leaf of a book: "Cursed be he who shall steal or tear out the leaves, or in any way injure this book."

A milder and more modern couplet, is —

"Steal not this book for fear of shame,
For here you see the owner's name."

Thus various were the devices from time to time to secure the possession of treasures more precious than gold.

How different the state of things at this day! Instead of being rare and expensive luxuries, books are abundant both in the homes of the rich and the poor.

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