Delphi Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Illustrated)

by Bierce, Ambrose

  Employers seldom fail, and never for long, to get all the workmen they need. The field into which women have put their sickles was already overcrowded with reapers. Whatever employment women have obtained has been got by displacing men — who would otherwise be supporting women. Where is the general advantage? We may shout “high tariff,” “combination of capital,” “demonetization of silver,” and what not, but if searching for the cause of augmented poverty and crime, “industrial discontent” and the tramp evil, instead of dogmatically expounding it, we should take some account of this enormous, sudden addition to the number of workers seeking work. If any one thinks that within the brief period of a generation the visible supply of labor can be enormously augmented without profoundly affecting the stability of things and disastrously touching the interests of wage-workers let no rude voice dispel his dream of such maleficent agencies as his slumbrous understanding may joy to affirm. And let our Widows of Ashur unlung themselves in advocacy of quack remedies for evils of which themselves are cause; it remains true that when the contention of two lions for one bone is exacerbated by the accession of a lioness the squabble is not composable by stirring up some bears in the cage adjacent.

  Indubitably a woman is under no obligation to sacrifice herself to the good of her sex by foregoing needed employment in the hope that it may fall to a man gifted with dependent women. Nevertheless our congratulations are more intelligent when bestowed upon her individual head than when sifted into the hair of all Eve’s daughters. This is a world of complexities, in which the lines of interest are so intertangled as frequently to transgress that of sex; and one ambitious to help but half the race may profitably know that every effort to that end provokes a counterbalancing mischief. The “enlargement of woman’s opportunities” has benefited individual women. It has not benefited the sex as a whole, and has distinctly damaged the race. The mind that can not discern a score of great and irreparable general evils distinctly traceable to “emancipation of woman” is as impregnable to the light as a toad in a rock.

  A marked demerit of the new order of things — the régime of female commercial service — is that its main advantage accrues, not to the race, not to the sex, not to the class, not to the individual woman, but to the person of least need and worth — the male employer. (Female employers in any considerable number there will not be, but those that we have could give the male ones profitable instruction in grinding the faces of their employees.) This constant increase of the army of labor — always and everywhere too large for the work in sight — by accession of a new contingent of natural oppressibles makes the very teeth of old Munniglut thrill with a poignant delight. It brings in that situation known as two laborers seeking one job — and one of them a person whose bones he can easily grind to make his bread; and Munniglut is a miller of skill and experience, dusted all over with the evidence of his useful craft. When Heaven has assisted the Daughters of Hope to open to women a new “avenue of opportunities” the first to enter and walk therein, like God in the Garden of Eden, is the good Mr. Munniglut, contentedly smoothing the folds out of the superior slope of his paunch, exuding the peculiar aroma of his oleaginous personality and larding the new roadway with the overflow of a righteousness stimulated to action by relish of his own identity. And ever thereafter the subtle suggestion of a fat philistinism lingers along that path of progress like an assertion of a possessory right.

  It is God’s own crystal truth that in dealing with women unfortunate enough to be compelled to earn their own living and fortunate enough to have wrested from Fate an opportunity to do so, men of business and affairs treat them with about the same delicate consideration that they show to dogs and horses of the inferior breeds. It does not commonly occur to the wealthy “professional man,” or “prominent merchant,” to be ashamed to add to his yearly thousands a part of the salary justly due to his female bookkeeper or typewriter, who sits before him all day with an empty belly in order to have an habilimented back. He has a vague, hazy notion that the law of supply and demand is mandatory, and that in submitting himself to it by paying her a half of what he would have to pay a man of inferior efficiency he is supplying the world with a noble example of obedience. I must take the liberty to remind him that the law of supply and demand is not imperative; it is not a statute but a phenomenon. He may reply: “It is imperative; the penalty for disobedience is failure. If I pay more in salaries and wages than I need to, my competitor will not; and with that advantage he will drive me from the field.” If his margin of profit is so small that he must eke it out by coining the sweat of his workwomen into nickels I’ve nothing to say to him. Let him adopt in peace the motto, “I cheat to eat.” I do not know why he should eat, but Nature, who has provided sustenance for the worming sparrow, the sparrowing owl and the owling eagle, approves the needy man of prey and makes a place for him at table.

  Human nature is pretty well balanced; for every lacking virtue there is a rough substitute that will serve at a pinch — as cunning is the wisdom of the unwise, and ferocity the courage of the coward. Nobody is altogether bad; the scoundrel who has grown rich by underpaying workmen in his factory will sometimes endow an asylum for indigent seamen. To oppress one’s own workmen, and provide for the workmen of a neighbor — to skin those in charge of one’s own interests while cottoning and oiling the residuary product of another’s skinnery — that is not very good benevolence, nor very good sense, but it serves in place of both. The man who eats pâté de fois gras in the sweat of his girl cashier’s face, or wears purple and fine linen in order that his typewriter may have an eocene gown and a pliocene hat, seems a tolerably satisfactory specimen of the genus thief; but let us not forget that in his own home — a fairly good one — he may enjoy and merit that highest and most honorable title on the scroll of woman’s favor, “a good provider.” One having a claim to that glittering distinction should enjoy immunity from the coarse and troublesome question, “From whose backs and bellies do you provide?”

  So much for the material results to the sex. What are the moral results? One does not like to speak of them, particularly to those who do not and can not know — to good women in whose innocent minds female immorality is inseparable from flashy gowning and the painted face; to foolish, book-taught men who honestly believe in some protective sanctity that hedges womanhood. If men of the world with years enough to have lived out of the old régime into the new would testify in this matter there would ensue a great rattling of dry bones in bodices of reform-ladies. Nay, if the young man about town, knowing nothing of how things were in the “dark backward and absym of time,” but something of the moral distance between even so free-running a creature as the society girl and the average working girl of the factory, the shop and the office, would speak out (under assurance of immunity from prosecution) his testimony would be a surprise to the cartilaginous virgins, blowsy matrons, acrid relicts and hairy males of Emancipation. It would pain, too, some very worthy but unobservant persons not in sympathy with “the cause.”

  Certain significant facts are within the purview of all but the very young and the comfortably blind. To the woman of to-day the man of to-day is imperfectly polite. In place of reverence he gives her “deference”; to the language of compliment has succeeded the language of raillery. Men have almost forgotten how to bow. Doubtless the advanced female prefers the new manner, as may some of her less forward sisters, thinking it more sincere. It is not; our giddy grandfather talked high-flown nonsense because his heart had tangled his tongue. He treated his woman more civilly than we ours because he loved her better. He never had seen her on the “rostrum” and in the lobby, never had heard her in advocacy of herself, never had read her confessions of his sins, never had felt the stress of her competition, nor himself assisted by daily personal contact in rubbing the bloom off her. He did not know that her virtues were due to her secluded life, but thought, dear old boy, that they were a gift of God.

  A MAD WORLD

  Let us suppose tha
t in tracing its cycloidal curves through the unthinkable reaches of space traversed by the solar system our planet should pass through a “belt” of attenuated matter having the property of dementing us! It is a conception easily enough entertained. That space is full of malign conditions incontinuously distributed; that we are at one time traversing a zone comparatively innocuous and at another spinning through a region of infection; that away behind us in the wake of our swirling flight are fields of plague and pain still agitated by our passage through them, — all this is as good as known. It is almost as certain as it is that in our little annual circle round the sun are points at which we are stoned and brick-batted like a pig in a potato-patch — pelted with little nodules of meteoric metal flung like gravel, and bombarded with gigantic masses hurled by God knows what? What strange adventures await us in those yet untraveled regions toward which we speed? — into what malign conditions may we not at any time plunge? — to the strength and stress of what frightful environment may we not at last succumb? The subject lends itself readily enough to a jest, but I am not jesting: it is really altogether probable that our solar system, racing through space with inconceivable velocity, will one day enter a region charged with something deleterious to the human brain, minding us all mad-wise.

  By the way, dear reader, did you ever happen to consider the possibility that you are a lunatic, and perhaps confined in an asylum? It seems to you that you are not — that you go with freedom where you will, and use a sweet reasonableness in all your works and ways; but to many a lunatic it seems that he is Rameses II, or the Holkar of Indore. Many a plunging maniac, ironed to the floor of a cell, believes himself the Goddess of Liberty careering gaily through the Ten Commandments in a chariot of gold. Of your own sanity and identity you have no evidence that is any better than he has of his. More accurately, I have none of mine; for anything I know, you do not exist, nor any one of all the things with which I think myself familiarly conscious. All may be fictions of my disordered imagination. I really know of but one reason for doubting that I am an inmate of an asylum for the insane — namely, the probability that there is nowhere any such thing as an asylum for the insane.

  This kind of speculation has charms that get a good neck-hold upon attention. For example, if I am really a lunatic, and the persons and things that I seem to see about me have no objective existence, what an ingenious though disordered imagination I must have! What a clever coup it was to invent Mr. Rockefeller and clothe him with the attribute of permanence! With what amusing qualities I have endowed my laird of Skibo, philanthropist. What a masterpiece of creative humor is my Fatty Taft, statesman, taking himself seriously, even solemnly, and persuading others to do the same! And this city of Washington, with its motley population of silurians, parvenoodles and scamps pranking unashamed in the light of day, and its saving contingent of the forsaken righteous, their seed begging bread, — did Rabelais’ exuberant fancy ever conceive so — but Rabelais is, perhaps, himself a conception.

  Surely he is no common maniac who has wrought out of nothing the history, the philosophies, sciences, arts, laws, religions, politics and morals of this imaginary world. Nay, the world itself, tumbling uneasily through space like a beetle’s ball, is no mean achievement, and I am proud of it. But the mental feat in which I take most satisfaction, and which I doubt not is most diverting to my keepers, is that of creating Mr. W.R. Hearst, pointing his eyes toward the White House and endowing him with a perilous Jacksonian ambition to defile it. The Hearst is distinctly a treasure.

  On the whole, I have done, I think, tolerably well, and when I contemplate the fertility and originality of my inventions, the queer unearthliness and grotesque actions of the characters whom I have evolved, isolated and am cultivating, I cannot help thinking that if Heaven had not made me a lunatic my peculiar talent might have made me an entertaining writer.

  EPIGRAMS OF A CYNIC

  If every hypocrite in the United States were to break his leg to-day the country could be successfully invaded to-morrow by the warlike hypocrites of Canada.

  To Dogmatism the Spirit of Inquiry is the same as the Spirit of Evil, and to pictures of the latter it appends a tail to represent the note of interrogation.

  “Immoral” is the judgment of the stalled ox on the gamboling lamb.

  In forgiving an injury be somewhat ceremonious, lest your magnanimity be construed as indifference.

  True, man does not know woman. But neither does woman.

  Age is provident because the less future we have the more we fear it.

  Reason is fallible and virtue invincible; the winds vary and the needle forsakes the pole, but stupidity never errs and never intermits. Since it has been found that the axis of the earth wabbles, stupidity is indispensable as a standard of constancy.

  In order that the list of able women may be memorized for use at meetings of the oppressed sex, Heaven has considerately made it brief.

  Firmness is my persistency; obstinacy is yours.

  A little heap of dust, A little streak of rust, A stone without a name — Lo! hero, sword and fame.

  Our vocabulary is defective; we give the same name to woman’s lack of temptation and man’s lack of opportunity.

  “You scoundrel, you have wronged me,” hissed the philosopher. “May you live forever!”

  The man who thinks that a garnet can be made a ruby by setting it in brass is writing “dialect” for publication.

  “Who art thou, stranger, and what dost thou seek?” “I am Generosity, and I seek a person named Gratitude.” “Then thou dost not deserve to find her.” “True. I will go about my business and think of her no more. But who art thou, to be so wise?” “I am Gratitude — farewell forever.”

  There was never a genius who was not thought a fool until he disclosed himself; whereas he is a fool then only.

  The boundaries that Napoleon drew have been effaced; the kingdoms that he set up have disappeared. But all the armies and statecraft of Europe cannot unsay what you have said.

  Strive not for singularity in dress; Fools have the more and men of sense the less. To look original is not worth while, But be in mind a little out of style.

  A conqueror arose from the dead. “Yesterday,” he said, “I ruled half the world.” “Please show me the half that you ruled,” said an angel, pointing out a wisp of glowing vapor floating in space. “That is the world.”

  “Who art thou, shivering in thy furs?” “My name is Avarice. What is thine?” “Unselfishness.” “Where is thy clothing, placid one?” “Thou art wearing it.”

  To be comic is merely to be playful, but wit is a serious matter. To laugh at it is to confess that you do not understand.

  If you would be accounted great by your contemporaries, be not too much greater than they.

  To have something that he will not desire, nor know that he has — such is the hope of him who seeks the admiration of posterity. The character of his work does not matter; he is a humorist.

  Women, and foxes, being weak, are distinguished by superior tact.

  To fatten pigs, confine and feed them; to fatten rogues, cultivate a generous disposition.

  Every heart is the lair of a ferocious animal. The greatest wrong that you can put upon a man is to provoke him to let out his beast.

  When two irreconcilable propositions are presented for assent the safest way is to thank Heaven that we are not as the unreasoning brutes, and believe both.

  Truth is more deceptive than falsehood, for it is more frequently presented by those from whom we do not expect it, and so has against it a numerical presumption.

  A bad marriage is like an electrical thrilling machine: it makes you dance, but you can’t let go.

  Meeting Merit on a street-crossing, Success stood still. Merit stepped off into the mud and went around him, bowing his apologies, which Success had the grace to accept.

  “I think,” says the philosopher divine, “Therefore I am.” Sir, here’s a surer sign: We know we live, for with our every
breath we feel the fear and imminence of death.

  The first man you meet is a fool. If you do not think so ask him and he will prove it.

  He who would rather inflict injustice than suffer it will always have his choice, for no injustice can be done to him.

  There are as many conceptions of a perfect happiness hereafter as there are minds that have marred their happiness here.

  We yearn to be, not what we are, but what we are not. If we were immortal we should not crave immortality.

  A rabbit’s foot may bring good luck to you, but it brought none to the rabbit.

  Before praising the wisdom of the man who knows how to hold his tongue ascertain if he knows how to hold his pen.

  The most charming view in the world is obtained by introspection.

  Love is unlike chess, in that the pieces are moved secretly and the player sees most of the game. But the looker-on has one incomparable advantage: he is not the stake.

  It is not for nothing that tigers choose to hide in the jungle, for commerce and trade are carried on, mostly, in the open.

  We say that we love, not whom we will, but whom we must. Our judgment need not, therefore, go to confession.

  Of two kinds of temporary insanity, one ends in suicide, the other in marriage.

  If you give alms from compassion, why require the beneficiary to be “a deserving object?” No other adversity is so sharp as destitution of merit.

  Bereavement is the name that selfishness gives to a particular privation.