Complete Works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

  “Are we any blinder than other people, my lady? Do they recognize these glaring facts any better than we do?”

  Ellador sat still a moment, running over her fresh clear view of the world, past and present.

  “No,” she said. “No other people is any better — in all ways — except New Zealanders perhaps. Yet ever so many countries are wiser in some particulars, and you — with all your advantages — haven’t sense enough to see it. Oh I know you’ll say the others don’t see it either, but you ought to. You are free — and you are able to act when you do see. No, Van — there’s no excuse for you. You had supreme advantages, you made a brave start, you established a splendid beginning, and then you sat back and bragged about your ancestors and your resources — and your prospects — and let the vermin crawl all over you.”

  Her eyes were grave, her tone solemn, her words most offensive.

  “Look here, Ellador, why will you use that term? It’s very disagreeable.”

  “What else can you call these people who hang like clusters of leeches on the public treasury, who hop like fleas to escape the law, who spin webby masses of special legislation in which to breed more freely, who creep and crawl on every public work that is undertaken, and fatten undisturbed on all private business? What do you call your ‘sidewalk speculators’ in theater-tickets, for instance — but vermin? Just to steal a ticket and go to see the play would be a clean manly thing to do compared to this. They are small ones, openly disgusting, yet you do nothing but grumble a little.

  “To turn from little to big I want to know what you call your sleeping-car extortionists? What is the size limit of vermin, anyhow? I suppose if a flea was a yard long he would be a beast of prey, wouldn’t he?”

  “You certainly are — drastic, my dear girl. But what have you got against the sleeping cars? I’ve always thought our service was pretty good.”

  She shook her head slowly, regarding me with that motherly patient expression.

  “The resignation of the American public to its devourers is like that of — of a sick kitten. You remember that poor little lean thing we picked up, and had to drop, quick, and brush ourselves? Why Van Jennings — don’t you even know you are being robbed, to the bone, by that sleeping-car company? Look here, please—”

  Then she produced one of those neat little sheets of figures I had so learned to respect. Most damaging things, Ellador’s figures.

  “Twelve double berths to a car, beside the ‘stateroom,’ or rooms which I won’t count; twenty-four passengers, who have already bought a ticket on which they are entitled to transportation with accommodations in the day-coach. Usual price $5.00 for twenty-four hours. For this $5.00 the passenger receives by day a whole seat instead of a half one — unless there is a day crowd and then extra seats are cheerfully sold to other victims — I have seen sleeping-cars crowded to standing! By night he has a place to lie down — three by three by six, with a curtain for privacy.”

  “Well, but he is being carried on his journey all the time,” I urged.

  “So he is in the day-coach or chair-car. This money is not for transportation — that’s paid for. It is for special accommodation. I am speaking of the kind of accommodation, and what is extorted for it. The night arrangements are what you know. Look at the price.”

  “Two dollars and a half isn’t so much,” I urged, but she pursued relentlessly. “Wouldn’t you think it was much, here, in this hotel, for a space of that size?”

  I looked about me at the comfortable room in the first-class hotel where we were then lodged, and thought of the preceding night, when we had had our two berths on the car. Here was a room twelve by fourteen by ten. There were two windows. There was a closet and a bathroom. There was every modern convenience in furniture. There was a wide, comfortable bed. My room adjoined it, equally large and comfortable.

  “This is $2.00 for twenty-four hours,” she remarked. “That was $5.00.”

  “Sleeping cars are expensive to build,” I remarked feebly.

  “More expensive than hotels?” she asked. “The hotel must pay ground rent, and taxes.”

  “The sleeping cars are not always full,” I urged.

  “Neither are the hotels — are they?”

  “But the car has to be moved—”

  “Yes, and the railroad company pays the sleeping car for being moved,” she triumphed.

  I wanted to say something about service; tried to, but she made merry over it.

  “They have one conductor for their string of sleepers, and as to porters — we mostly pay them, you know.”

  I did know, of course.

  “This is how I have figured it,” said Ellador. “Of course I don’t know the exact facts about their business, and they won’t tell, but look at it this way: Suppose they average twenty passengers per car — staterooms and all — at $5.00 a day; that’s $100.00 a day income, $36,500.00 a year per car. Now they pay the porter about $30.00 a month, I understand, or less, leaving the public to do the rest. Each car’s fraction of the conductor’s wages wouldn’t be more than $20.00, I should think; there’s $50.00 a month, $600 a year for service. Then there is laundry work and cleaning — forty sheets — pillow-cases — towels — flat-work rates of course; and renovating at the end of the journey. I don’t believe it comes to over — say $800.00 a year. Then there is insurance, depreciation, repairs—”

  “Look here, Ellador, where did you get up these technicalities? Talking with business men, I suppose — as usual?”

  “Yes, of course,” she agreed. “And I’m very proud of them. Well — I’ll allow $1,600.00 a year for that. That is $3,000.00 for their running expenses. And remember they are paid something for running — I don’t know how much. That leaves $33,500.00. I will magnanimously leave off that $3,500.00 — for times when they carried fewer passengers — call it a clear income of $30,000.00 a year. Now that is 10 per cent. of $300,000.00. You don’t honestly suppose that one sleeping car costs three hundred thousand dollars — do you, Van?”

  I did not. I knew better. Anybody knows better.

  “If it costs $100,000 to build and fit a sleeping car,” she went on calmly, “then they could charge about $1.75 for their berths, and still ‘make money,’ as you call it. If ten per cent. is a legitimate ‘profit,’ I call the extra twenty per cent. a grinding extortion. What do you call it?”

  “Up to date I never called it anything. I never noticed it.”

  She nodded. “Exactly. You people keep quiet and pay three times what is necessary for the right to live. You are bled — sucked — night and day, in every direction. Now then, if these blood-suckers are beasts of prey — fight them, conquer them. If they are vermin — Oh, I know you don’t like the word — but Van, what is your estimate of people who are willing to endure — vermin?”

  10. RACE AND RELIGION

  Going about with Ellador among familiar conditions, and seeing things I never dreamed were there, was always interesting, though sometimes painful. It was like carrying a high-powered light into dark places. As she turned her mind upon this or that feature of American life it straightway stood out sharply from the surrounding gloom, as the moving searchlight of a river boat brings out the features of the shore.

  I had known clever women, learned women, even brilliant women, a few. But the learned ones were apt to be a bit heavy, the clever ones twinkled and capered like spangled acrobats, and the brilliant ones shone, indeed, like planets among stars, but somehow did not illuminate much.

  Ellador was simple enough, modest enough. She was always keeping in mind how little she knew of our civilization, but what she saw she saw clearly and was able to make her hearers see. As I watched her, I began to understand what a special strength it was not to have in one’s mind all the associate ideas and emotions ours are so full of. She could take up the color question, for instance, and discuss it dispassionately, with no particular sentiment, one way or the other. I heard her once with a Southern sociologist, who was particularly strong
on what he called “race conflicts.”

  He had been reading a paper at some scientific meeting which we attended, a most earnest paper, full of deep feeling and some carefully selected facts. He spoke of the innate laziness of the negro race, their inborn objection to work, their ineducability — very strong on this — but his deepest horror was “miscegenation.” This he alluded to in terms of the utmost loathing, hardly mitigated by the statement that it was impossible.

  “There is,” he averred, “an innate, insuperable, ineradicable, universal race antipathy, which forever separates the negro from the white.”

  Ellador had her chance at him afterward, with quite a group about, and he was too polite or insufficiently ingenious to escape. First she asked him what was the market price of a good, ablebodied negro before the war; if it was not, as she had read, about a thousand dollars. To this he agreed unsuspectingly. She inquired, further, if there had not been laws in the slave States forbidding the education of negroes, and if there were not laws still forbidding their intermarriage with whites. To this he agreed also; he had to. Then she asked whether the sudden emancipation of the negro had not ruined many rich men; if the major part of the wealth of the South had not been in slaves and the products of their labor. Here again could be no denial.

  “But,” she said, “I do not understand, yet. If negroes can not or will not work, why was one worth a thousand dollars? And how could the owners have accumulated wealth from their inefficiency? If they could not learn anything, why was it necessary to make laws forbidding their education; and if there is this insuperable antipathy separating the races, why are the laws against miscegenation needed?”

  He was quite naturally incensed. There were a good many of his previous hearers about, some of them looking quite pleased, and he insisted rather stormily that there was this deep-seated antipathy, and that every Southerner, at least, knew it.

  “At what age does it begin?” she asked him. He looked at her, not getting the drift of her question.

  “This innate antipathy,” she pursued gentry. “I have seen the Southern babies clinging to their black nurses most affectionately. At what age does the antipathy begin?” He talked a good bit then, with much heat, but did not seem to meet the points she raised, merely reiterating much of what he had said before. Then she went on quite calmly.

  “And your millions of mulattos — they appear, not only against the law, but against this insuperable antipathy?”

  This seemed to him so unwomanly of her, that he made some hasty excuse and got away, but his position was upheld by another man, for a moment. His little speech was mainly emotion, there are such hot depths of feeling on this subject in the children of slave owners that clear reasoning is naturally hard to find. This man made a fine little oration, with much about the noble women of the South, and how he, or any man, would lay down his life to protect them against the faintest danger of social contact with the colored race, against the abomination of a proposal of marriage from a black man.

  “Do you mean,” said Ellador slowly, her luminous eyes on his, “that if black men were free to propose to white women, the white women would accept them?”

  At this he fairly foamed with horror. “A white woman of the South would no sooner marry a black man than she would a dog.”

  “Then why not leave it to the women?” she inquired.

  Neither of these men were affected, save in the way of deep annoyance, by Ellador’s gentle questions, but many of her hearers were, and she, turning that searchlight of hers on the subject, later announced to me that it seemed rather a long but by no means a difficult problem.

  “About ten million negroes, counting all the mulattos, quadroons, octoroons and so on, to about ninety million whites,” she said.

  “As a mere matter of interbreeding, following the previous habits of the white men, it could be worked out mathematically — how long it would take to eliminate the negro, I mean.”

  “But suppose there remains a group of negros, that have race pride and prefer to breed true to the stock,” I suggested. “What then?”

  “If they are decent, orderly and progressive, there is no problem, surely. It is the degraded negro that is so feared. The answer to that is easy. Compulsory and efficient education, suitable employment at fair wages, under good conditions — why, don’t you see, dear,” she interrupted herself to say, “the proof that it is not impossible is in what has been accomplished already. Here you white people wickedly brought over the ocean a great lot of reluctant black ones, and subjected them to several generations of slavery. Yet in those few generations these previously savage people have made noble progress.”

  She reeled off to me a list of achievements of the negro race, which I found surprising. Their development in wealth, in industry, in the professions, even the arts, was, considering the circumstances, astonishing.

  “All you have to do is to improve the cultural conditions, to increase the rate of progress. It’s no problem at all.”

  “You are a wonder,” I told her. “You come out of that little far away heaven of yours, and dip into our tangle of horror and foolishness, and as soon as the first shock is over, you proceed to administer these little doses of wisdom, as if a mere pill or two would set the whole world straight.”

  “It would,” said Ellador, “if you’d take it.”

  “Do you mean that seriously?” I demanded.

  “I do. Why not? Why, Van — you’ve got all the necessary ingredients for peace and happiness. You don’t have to wait a thousand years to grow. You’re here. It’s just a little matter of — behaving differently.”

  I laughed. “Exactly, my dear. And in Herland, so far as I make out, you behave accordingly to your perceptions and decisions. Here we don’t.”

  “No,” she admitted, grudgingly, “You don’t, not yet. But you could” she persisted, triumphantly. “You could in a minute, if you wanted to.”

  I ducked this large proposition, and asked her if she had an answer to the Jewish race question as simple as that of the negro.

  “What’s the question?” she countered.

  “I suppose there’s more than one question involved,” I answered slowly, “but mine would be: why don’t people like Jews?”

  “I won’t be severe with your question, Van, though it’s open to criticism. Not all people feel this race prejudice. And I’ll tell you frankly that this is a bigger wide spread. It has deeper roots. I’ve one than the other. It’s older. It’s more looked into it — a little?”

  I grinned. “Well, you young encyclopedia, what did you discover?”

  “I soon discovered that the very general dislike to this one people is not due to the religious difference between them and Christians; it was quite as general and strong, apparently, in very ancient times.”

  “Do you think it is a race feeling, then, an ‘insuperable, ineradicable,’ etc., antipathy.”

  “No,” she said, “there are other Semitic and allied races to whom there is no general objection. I don’t think it can be that. I have several explanations to suggest, of varying weight. Here’s one of them. The Jews are the only surviving modern people that have ever tried to preserve the extremely primitive custom of endogenous marriage. Everywhere else, the exogenous habit proved itself best and was generally accepted. This people is the only one which has always assumed itself to be superior to every other people and tried to prevent intermarriage with them.”

  “That’s twice you’ve said ‘tried,’” I put in. “Do you mean that they have not succeeded?”

  “Of course they haven’t,” she replied, cheerfully. “When people endeavor to live in defiance of natural law, they are not as a rule very successful.”

  “But, they boast the purity of their race—”

  “Yes, I know they do, and other people accept it. But, Van, dear, surely you must have noticed the difference between, say, the Spanish and the German Jews, for instance. Social contract will do much in spite of Ghettos, but it har
dly alters the color of the eyes and hair.”

  “Well, my dear, if it is not religion, nor yet race, what is it?”

  “I have two other suggestions, one sociologic, one psychic. The first is this: In the successive steps of social evolution, the Jewish people seem not to have passed the tribal stage. They never made a real nation. Apparently they can’t. They live in other nations perforce.”

  “Why perforce?” I interrupted.

  “Well, if they don’t die, they have to live somewhere, Van. And unless they go and set up a new nation in a previously uninhabited country, or on the graves of the previous inhabitants, they have to live in other nations, don’t they?”

  “But they were a nation once,” I urged.

  “In a way, — yes. They had a piece of land to live on and they lived on it, as tribes, not as one people. According to their own account, ten out of twelve of these tribes got lost, somehow, and the others didn’t seem to mind. No — they could not maintain the stage of social organization rightly called a nation. Their continuing entity is that of a race, as we see in far lesser instance in gypsies. And the more definitely organized peoples have, not a racial, but a sociological aversion to this alien form of life, which is in them, but not of them.”

  “But, Ellador, do not the modern Jews make good citizens in whatever country they are in?”

  “They do, in large measure, wherever they are allowed,” she agreed; “and both this difference and the old marriage difference would long ago have been outgrown but for the last one — the psychic one.”

  “Do you mean what that writer in Blackwood’s said about Spain: ‘There seems to be something Spanish in the minds of Spaniards which causes them to act in a Spanish manner?’”

  She laughed. “All of that, Van, and a lot more.” She stopped, looking away toward the far horizon. “I never tire of the marvel and interest of your mixed humanity,” she resumed. “You see we were just us. For two thousand years we have been one stock and one sex. It’s no wonder we can think, feel, act as one. And it’s no wonder you poor things have had such a slow, tumultuous time of it. All kinds of races, all kinds of countries, all kinds of conditions, and the male sex to manage everything. Why, Van, the wonder is that before this last worldquake of war, you could travel about peaceably almost anywhere, I understand. Surely that ought to prove, once and for all how safe and quiet the world might be.”