Gradually the thinking men of the world, the statesmen and the doers, are beholding the fact that mankind is an organism, and that a country is only as rich as its poorest citizen; that an athlete with Bright's disease is not worth as much to humanity as a small, lively and healthy boy of ten with cheek of tan and freckles to spare. Health comes from right living, and living without useful effort is only existence.

People living on the pavement or in sky-scrapers soon degenerate.

Man can not thrive apart from land. Abject poverty is found only in great cities, where population is huddled like worms in a knot.

The highest average of intelligence, happiness and prosperity is found in villages, where each family owns its home, and the renter is the rare exception.

The word "renter" we used Out West as a term of contempt. The ownership of an acre of land gives a sense of security which religion can not bestow. God's acre, with vegetables, fruits, flowers, a cow and poultry, places a family beyond the reach of famine, even if not of avarice. Moreover, this single acre means sound sleep, good digestion and resultant good thoughts, all from digging in the dirt and mixing with the elements. "All wealth comes from the soil," says Adam Smith, and he might have added, man himself comes from the soil and is brother to the trees and the flowers. Men can no more live apart from land than can the grass. The ownership of a very small plot of ground steadies life, lends ballast to existence, and is a bond given to society for good behavior.

"I am no longer an anarchist—I have bought a lot and am building a house," a Russian refugee advised his restless colleagues at home, when they wrote, asking him for quotations on dynamite.

It is obvious and easy to say that the people who make city slums possible do not want to own houses and would not live upon land and improve it, if they could.

The worst about this statement is that it is true. They are so sunken in fear, superstition and indifference that they lack the squirrel's thrift in providing a home and laying in a stock of provisions; they are even without the ground-hog's ambition to burrow. They are too sodden to know what they are missing, and are lacking in the imagination which pictures a better condition.

They are like those pigmy bondsmen who work in the cotton-mills of the South—yellow, gaunt, too dead to weep, too hopeless to laugh, too pained to feel.

From these creatures and creators of slums it is absurd to talk of gratitude for the offer of betterment. People who expect gratitude do not deserve it. Neither can the slumsters by force be placed on land and be expected to till it. A generation, at least, will be required to work a change, and this change will come through educating the children—through the kindergarten and the kindergarten methods—and most of all through school-gardens. The so-called "back districts" are fast being annihilated, for quick transportation is bringing city and country close together. The time is coming, and shortly, too, when a fare of one cent a mile will be the universal rule, and a mile a minute will not be regarded as an unusual speed.

Now here is something which Henry George did not say, and if he knew was too diplomatic to mention: The reason the people have not had possession of the land is because they did not want it. The ownership of the land you need to use comes in answer to prayer—and prayer is the soul's desire, uttered or unexpressed. The will of the people is supreme. If fraud and rascality exist in high places, it is because we elect rascals to office.

The will of the people is supreme. When we cease toadying to brainless nabobs, and quit imitating them as soon as we get the money, we will be on the road to reformation. As it is, most poor people are just itching to live as the rich do. The average servant-girl who gets married quits work then and there, and is quite content to live the rest of her life as a slave, asking her husband for a quarter at a time and cajoling the money out of him by hook or crook, or else explorating his trousers for free coinage when opportunity offers. Fresh air is free, but the average individual does not know it; and neither would this same person use land if it were given him. Freedom is a condition of mind.

Yet apart from the "submerged tenth" is a very large class of people to whom land and a home would be a positive paradise, and who are simply forced into flats and tenements on account of present economic conditions: the land is monopolized, and held by men who neither improve it themselves nor will they allow others to. Then hold it awaiting a rise in value.

This increase in value is not on account of anything the owner may do —in fact, he is usually an absentee and does nothing. The increase comes from the enterprise and thrift of people for whom the owner has no interest, beyond contempt.

If these enterprising people who do the work of the world—making the things the world needs—want more land for their business or for homes, they have to pay the absentee for the increased value which they themselves have brought about. When you beautify and enrich the value of your own lot by improving it, you are making it impossible to buy the vacant lot next to you without bankruptcy.

Moreover, you are taxed by the State for any improvement you make on your land, and this taxation on improvements must of necessity tend toward discouragement of improvement. It is really a surer way to make money, to hang on to land and do nothing, than to improve it.

The remedy proposed by Henry George is simply the Single Tax, and this tax to be on land values and not on improvements.

That is to say, with the Single Tax, the man who owns the vacant lot covered with briars and brambles would pay the same tax that you pay on your lot next door upon which you have built a house, barn and conservatory and planted trees and flowers.

The immediate tendency of this policy would be to cause the gentleman who owned the vacant lot devoted to cockleburs to put up on it a sign, "For Sale Cheap."

Even the opponents of the Single Tax agree that its inauguration would at once throw on the market a vast acreage of unimproved land, and that is just the one reason why they oppose it. All those thousands of acres held by estates, trustees and idle heirs, in the vicinity of Boston, Philadelphia and up the Hudson, would be for sale.

The single tax would give the land back to the people, or at least make it possible for people who want it to get what they could use. Those who have the desire to improve land, and improve themselves by improving it, would no longer be blocked.

The fresh blood of the country which makes the enterprise of cities possible comes from the boys and the girls who warmed their feet on October mornings where the cows lay down; who have been brought up to work on land, to plant and hoe and harvest and look after livestock. This is all education, and very necessary education. "A sand-pile and dirt in which to dig is the divine right of every child," says Judge Lindsey.

And if it is the divine right of a child to dig in the dirt, why isn't it the divine right of the grown-up? It is, and would be so recognized were it not for the fact that we have been obsessed by a fallacy called "the divine right of property." This idea has come down to us from the Reign of the Barons, when a dozen men owned all of England, and plain and unlettered people could not legally own a foot of land. All paid tribute to the Barons, who were actually and literally robbers.

We will grant of course that what a man produces and creates is his, but the land to which he may be legal heir and which probably he has never seen, and which certainly he does not use or improve, is his only through a legal fiction. When the matter of legal fiction was explained to Colonel Bumble and he was told that legally a husband knew the whereabouts of his wife, because the law regarded a man and wife as one, Colonel Bumble replied with acerbity, "The law is a hass."

Comparatively few people have the courage of Colonel Bumble, so they do not express themselves; but the commonsense of the world is now coming to believe that the law was made for man, and not man for the law.

The only people who oppose the single tax are the holders of land who are hanging on to it expecting to grow rich through inertia.

The problem of civilization is to eliminate the parasite. The idle person is no better than a dead one and takes up more room. The man who lives on the labor of others is a menace to himself and to society.

The taxes necessary to support the government should be paid by those who have the funds wherewith to be idle; no longer should the chief burden fall on the home-maker.

Tax the land, and the man who owns it will have to make it productive by labor, or else get out and allow some one else to have a chance.

Do not drive the landlords out—tax them out.

Let the land gravitate to the people who have the disposition and the ability to improve it—and that is just what the Single Tax will do. So this, then, is the philosophy of Henry George.



GARIBALDI

Priests look backward, not forward. They think that there were once men better and wiser than those who now live, therefore priests distrust the living and insist that we shall be governed by the dead. I believe this is an error, and hence I set myself against the Church and insist that men shall have the right to work out their lives in their own way, always allowing to others the right to work out their lives in their own way, too. —Garibaldi



The writer who tells the simple facts in the life of Garibaldi lays himself open to the charge of evolving melodrama, wild and riotous.

Garibaldi's personal friends and admirers always referred to him in such words as these: patriot, savior, father-noble, generous, pure- hearted, unselfish, devoted, philanthropic.

They transferred the infallibility of Pope Pius the Ninth to his enemy, Garibaldi.

The Pope was not much given to rhetorical lyddite, so when the name of Garibaldi was mentioned he simply stopped his ears and hissed. He acknowledged that in all the bright lexicon of words there was not a symbol strong enough to express his contempt for Joseph Garibaldi.

The actual fact was that Pio Nono, for whom Garibaldi named his favorite donkey, had very much in common with Garibaldi. Had they met as strangers on sea or plain, they would have delighted in each other's society. They were both kind, courteous, considerate, highly intelligent men. They were lovers of their kind.

Garibaldi's passion was to benefit men by giving them freedom. The Pope's prayer was to benefit men by giving them religion.

But freedom without responsibility leads to license, and license unrestrained means slavery, and religion not safeguarded by freedom is superstition; and what is superstition but slavery?

Before Garibaldi was twenty he began to read Mazzini, whom Margaret Fuller called the Emerson of Italy—and Margaret Fuller knew both Emerson and Mazzini intimately and well. She lived for one and died for the other.

Mazzini, the delicate, the esthetic, the spiritual, the subtle, was a candle whose beams burned bright for all Italy. His dream of a free and united Italy caught Garibaldi, the rugged, daring son of the sea, and fired his heart. Mazzini was a thinker; Garibaldi a fighter.

Italy had twice been queen of the world: first, when Julius Caesar ushered in an age of light; and second, when Columbus, child of Genoa, the same city that mothered Mazzini, sailed the seas. The first Italian Renaissance we call the Age of Augustus; the second, the Age of Michelangelo.

The third great tidal wave of reason, Garibaldi said, would live as the Age of Mazzini.

But there be those in Italy now, wise and influential, who call it the Age of Garibaldi.

Without Mazzini, there would have been no Garibaldi. Italy would today probably be where she was when these young men conceived their patriotic dream: the Pope supreme temporal ruler of Rome, and the rest of Italy divided up into a dozen cringing provinces, each presided over by a princeling, who, on favor of some patron, Austria, Germany or France, the favor duly viseed by the Pope, was allowed to call himself king. The final authority of the Pope was undisputed in things both temporal and spiritual, and he who questioned or expressed his doubts was guilty of two crimes: heresy and treason, the two artificial papier-mache offenses which made the Dark Ages very dark.

The hope of Mazzini was to make Italy a republic. But the time was not yet ripe. They ousted the Pope, but Fate compromised with Destiny, and Victor Emmanuel, a republican monarchist from Sicily, was made king in name, but with a safety-brake in way of a ministry that could annul his edicts.

And so Mazzini and Garibaldi, each individually a failure, won— although success came not in the way they expected, nor was it their heart's desire.

That bold and magnificent equestrian statue of Garibaldi crowns the heights of Rome, looking down upon the Eternal City; the dust of Mazzini rests in a village churchyard; but both live in the hearts of humanity as men who gave their lives to make men free.

* * * * *

Garibaldi was born in the city of Nice in Eighteen Hundred Seven, being one of the advance-guard of a brigade of genius, for great men come in groups. His parents were poor, and being well under the heel of the priest, were only fairly honest. The father was a waterman who plied the Riviera in a leaky schooner—poling, rowing, or sailing, as Providence provided. Once the good man was returning home after a cruise where ill luck was at the helm. The priest had blessed him when he started, and would be on hand when he came back to receive his share of the loot, for business was then, and is yet, in Italy, a kind of legalized freebooting. Then it was that the honest fisherman lapsed and lifted the nets of another between the dawn and the day.

The son, then only twelve years of age, scorned the act and declared he would steal a ship or nothing. The boy was duly punished in the interests of piety and also to relieve the pent-up emotions of the parents.

The heroic spirit of Garibaldi was not a legacy from either his father or his mother. However, they dowered him with health and great bodily strength, and this physical superiority had much, no doubt, to do in shaping his life's course.

Men fall victims to their facility. Musicians, for instance, often become intoxicated by their own sweet sounds, and are lured on to unseemliness, making much discord in life's symphony.

The late-lamented Brann had a felicity and a facility in the use of words that finally cost him his life. Men with pistol facility and word felicity die by the pistol. The brain of the prizefighter does not convolve: he relies more on his "jabs" than on thoughts that burn —and those who live by the hammer die by the hammer.

There is no doubt that Garibaldi's romantic career in a lifelong fight for freedom was born of a liking for the fray, to express it bluntly, with freedom as a convenient excuse. This sounds unkind, but it is not. Garibaldi loved peace so much that he was willing to fight for it any day.

While yet a youth he became captain of his father's craft, and Garibaldi Senior took the wheel and obeyed orders.

Then we hear that Garibaldi was an expert swimmer, a rather unusual accomplishment for a sailor. He was always on the lookout for an opportunity to dive overboard, disrobing in the air, and rescuing the perishing. There is even a legend of his having saved a washer-woman from drowning when he was but eight years old. A captious critic has remarked that probably the old lady fell into her washtub. Thereupon, a kinsman of the great man comes forward to give the facts, which are that the woman was doing laundry-work by the riverside, and stooping over, fell into the damp and was rescued by the boy. But it also seems on the word of Garibaldi himself that the woman would not have fallen in had not the boy suddenly appeared behind her playing bear, thus bringing about the catastrophe which he averted.

When Garibaldi was twenty-one he was in command of a small schooner bound for the Black Sea on a trading expedition. The intent of the expedition was twofold: to sell the merchandise which the ship carried, and also if possible to capture certain bands of pirates that were infesting the dank, dark waters. It is perhaps quite needless to say that pirates are often men who are engaged in the laudable undertaking of protecting the shipping from pirates, just as admission to the bar is a sort of commercial letter of marque and reprisal.

That Garibaldi was a pirate, only his enemies said. But anyway, Garibaldi and a band of twenty boys, all younger than himself, sailed away to victory or to death.

It proved to be neither; for they were captured by pirates, who took their arms, provisions, merchandise, and even their compasses and clothing, leaving only their ship and the sky overhead and the water beneath.

Garibaldi took the capture as coolly as did Caesar under similar conditions, and talked poetry and philosophy with the pirates, and the gentlemen gave back a few provisions, with apologies and regrets for having troubled so fine a gentleman.

The next day, our friends, innocent of clothing, fell in with an English ship that ministered to their wants. Captain Taylor of the English ship was so impressed with the young captain that he wrote home about him, describing his courtesy, intelligence, and poetic fervor, all made manifest as Garibaldi stood on the deck of his schooner clad only in a doormat.

At this time Garibaldi had read the history of his country; in imagination he saw the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome. And better still, he had figured out in his own mind why sleep and death, and moth and dust, and rust and ruin had settled down upon the race, and mankind had endured a thousand years of theological nightmare.

He knew that save in freedom alone does the intellect flower and blossom; that joy is the legal tender of the soul; that only through liberty can men progress and grow; and that great and beautiful work can be done only by a free and happy people.

The torch that fired his intellect was Mazzini, who was publishing a little periodical of protest that voiced what its editor felt, who wrote right out of his heart, and whose cry was, "Freedom and United Italy—an Italy free from the rule of the Pope."

Mazzini, the son of a doctor, expressed what many thought and felt, but dare not say. He had stated in no mincing phrase that the rule of the priest meant mental subjugation and a gradual, creeping, insidious return of the Dark Ages. He printed it on slips of paper and passed them out upon the street when but a youth in the High School.

Thereupon, Mazzini had been duly cautioned, and on repeating his offense his little folder of ideas was suppressed, and the precious fonts and presses thrown into the sea with the street-sweepings of the town.

The next month Mazzini's magazine appeared just the same, printed by night at the office of a friend, and then its author was safely placed behind prison-bars. The authorities dare not kill him—besides, what is the use?—but they proposed to teach him a wholesome lesson and break his fiery spirit if possible, this being the policy that had continued from the time of Socrates. To hold truth secure by putting down the man of initiation—the man of insight who could see a better condition—all who were filled with a discontent that challenged the perfection of the present order—this to the many meant safety; the men in power simply taking their cue from the rabble—"Away with him!"

And Garibaldi hearing of the trouble that had come to Mazzini, whom he admired but had not yet met, hastened home and threw himself into the cause. He got together a little band of foolish youths, and planned a revolution.

He enlisted as a sailor on board the "Eurydice," a government craft, intending to revolt, steal the ship and go to the rescue of Mazzini. But about this time Mazzini was released with a warning, it being thought that a dreamy, penniless lawyer's clerk could not make much trouble anyway.

Mazzini and Garibaldi were totally different in their methods and habits of thought. Garibaldi reverenced Mazzini and called him master, and Mazzini admired the daring of Garibaldi, and no doubt was influenced and encouraged by him to continue sending out his little leaflets of liberty, which were secretly printed and circulated, read and reread, and passed along. Examined by us now, they seem innocent indeed, as harmless as pages lifted from Emerson's essay on "Nature," but actually they were the dynamite that was to rend the rocks of Italy's Gibraltar of orthodoxy.

Matters were now culminating fast. Mazzini and Garibaldi were organizing secret bands of "Young Italy." The arrangement was to secure and hold a certain point on the Swiss frontier as headquarters, and from there make open war upon Austria and the Pope. Like John Brown, these zealous revolutionaries felt sure that, at the call to arms, the subjugated provinces would cast off their shackles and join hands with the liberators. They did not realize that slavery is a condition of mind, and that as a class slaves are quite happy in their serfdom, being as unaware of their true condition as are those caught in the coils of superstition. No one sees the coils but the free man on the outside. The beauty of freedom's fight is that it frees the fighter.

The secret societies known as "Young Italy" failed in their secrecy. No secrets can be kept except for a day. Spies were duly initiated, and the report of the daily doings was handed in to the Pope and his council. To capture Garibaldi and Mazzini and hang them would have been easy; but to do this might bring about the very storm so much feared. So the word was passed that the conspirators were to be arrested; a price was placed upon their heads, and an opportunity was given them to escape.

Mazzini traveled leisurely through France, which offered him safe passage to London. Garibaldi remained on the border, and with a little band engaged in joyous guerrilla warfare, hoping for a general revolt. The time was not yet ripe, and nothing he could then do would gather up the scattered forces of freedom and crystallize them.

Fighting was then going on in South America—when are they not fighting in South America?—and Garibaldi thought he saw an opportunity to strike a blow for freedom, and so he sailed away for the equator, filled with a passion for freedom, desiring only to give himself for the benefit of humanity. Yet his heart was with "Young Italy," and that the time would come when he would return and break the fetters that the Pope had forged for the minds of men, he always knew and prophesied. Such was the firm purpose and unwavering faith of Joseph Garibaldi.

* * * * *

Arriving in South America, Garibaldi took time to investigate conditions. Then he offered his services to Don Gonzales, who had set up a republic on a side street, and was fighting the power of the Emperor of Brazil.

Don Gonzales was delighted with Garibaldi—Garibaldi won every one he desired to win. He had the rare quality which we call "personal charm."

Garibaldi was fitted out with a ship which he manned with sixteen of his countrymen—fighters of his own selection, men of his own intrepid spirit. This crew constituted the navy of the new republic, and Garibaldi was given the title, "Secretary of the Navy." He called his ship the "Mazzini," writing to the prophet and patriot in London for his blessing; but without waiting for it sailed away to victory. The first bout with the enemy secured them a prize in the way of a ship four times the size of their own, well provisioned and carrying one hundred men. Garibaldi at once scuttled his own craft, ran up his flag on board the prize, and calling all hands on deck solemnly christened her the "Mazzini," in loving token of the ship just sent to Davy Jones' locker. Then the question arose, What should be done with the prisoners?

Garibaldi gave them their choice of being sent ashore in safety, with a week's provisions and their side-arms, or re-enlisting under his own glorious banner. The men without parley, one and all cried, "We are yours to do with as you will!" Emerson says, "The work of eloquence is to change the opinions of a lifetime in twenty minutes." This being true, Garibaldi must have been eloquent, and eloquence is personality. The Corsican, in his Little Corporal's uniform, walked out before the legions sent to capture him, and before he had uttered a word, they cried, "Command us!" and threw down their arms.

The power of Garibaldi over men was superb. He won through the devotion of his soldiers. When he struck he hit quick and hard, and then he made his victory secure by magnanimity toward the defeated. It was his policy never to put prisoners in irons, or disgrace or humiliate them. He banished hate from their hearts by saying: "You are brave fighters! You are after my own heart. I need you!"

Julius Caesar had a deal of this same temperament, and if the sober, serious, spiritual and priestly quality of Mazzini could have been fused with the fighting spirit of Garibaldi we would have had the Julian soul once more with us. Possibly Rome is not yet dead, Shakespeare to the contrary notwithstanding.

* * * * *

Garibaldi and his gallant crew on board the "Mazzini" kept the enemy speculating. On one occasion when pursued, Garibaldi ran his ship up a narrow bay, one of the winding mouths of the Amazon. The two ships in pursuit were sure they had him in a trap and followed fast, intending to drive him so far inland that when the tide turned he would be held fast on the rocks, and then they could land a force, as they had five times as many men as he, and shoot his ship full of holes at their leisure from the shore. But Garibaldi was a sailor, and he had the true pilot's intuition for finding the channel. Suddenly, as the pursuing ships rounded a bend, from the height of a commanding precipice a deadly stream of shot and shell was poured down through the defenseless decks. And the gunners on the ships could not elevate their cannon to get the range. Garibaldi had taken his best cannon from his ship and masked this battery on shore. For two months he had worked to lure the enemy to their ruin. The scheme worked.

On shore he was equally fertile in resource, and his plan of getting his troops in the neighborhood of the enemy, and lighting long lines of campfires so as to mislead as to the number of his troops, was with him a common form of strategy. Then lo! as his campfires burned brightly, he would circle the foe and stampede them by simultaneous attacks on both flanks, making a mob of what twenty minutes before was an army.

He also had a way of retreating before the enemy, and at last making a seemingly stubborn resistance on some friendly ridge or hilltop. The enemy would then pause, re-form and charge. But a thousand yards before the hilltop would be reached, Garibaldi's men, secreted in sunken roadways or the dry beds of waterways, would rise like sprouting dragons' teeth and scatter their rain of death. His men wore bright red shirts so as to protect themselves from the danger of being shot by their own comrades. Later, the appearance of the red shirt struck terror to the foe. In Italy now, when you see a red-shirted brigade, do not imagine it is a volunteer fire-company out for a holiday—it is merely a company of militia called "The Garibaldians."

Garibaldi became a sort of superstition in South America. His appearance on land or sea, at seemingly the same time, his sudden sallies and miraculous disappearances, carried out the idea that he was the Devil incarnate. The armies sent to capture him came home with the report, "We would have killed or captured him, but alas, God ordained that he should not be found!"

Fighting along the shore with simply a few ships, by co-operating with the land forces, and having that scouted and maligned thing, "horse marines," at his quick command, he wore the enemy to a frazzle. His tactics were those of Quintus Fabius, who supplied us our word "Fabian"—opportunist. Fabius fought the combined hosts of Hannibal for ten years, as one to five, and was never captured and never defeated. When peace was declared he dictated his own terms, and was given royal honors when he rode through the streets of Rome at the head of his tattered troops, just as Christian DeWet, the valiant Boer, was tendered an ovation when he visited London, which he had first festooned with crape.

* * * * *

Garibaldi was operating in a horse country, a country, by the way, in physical features, not unlike that over which DeWet occasionally rode at the rate of one hundred miles from sunset to day-dawn. Garibaldi, although a sailor born, did not ride a horse with face toward the horse's tail, as sailormen are said to do in one of Kipling's merry tales. However, he might have done so, for he was a most daring rider, and in South America filled in the time with many excursions ashore, where he chose his companions from the ship by lot, there always being a great desire among the men to follow close to their beloved leader. He insisted that all of his men should be horsemen as well as soldiers, for no one could tell when they might have to abandon their ships and take to the land.

These wild, free excursions into the sparsely settled interior were not fraught with much danger, for the plainsmen were mostly with the republic, and Garibaldi took great pains to treat with the citizen's family. For instance, although cattle were plentiful and of little value, when he wanted fresh meat he always asked for it. The same with horses. "Treat citizens as friends, informing them that you come to protect, not to destroy," was his injunction.

One valuable possession Garibaldi secured in Brazil, however, was taken without legal permission. It seems Garibaldi on one of his journeys inland had halted with six of his band for dinner at the house of a planter and ranchman. The place was fair to look upon, the house situated in a clump of trees that lined the bank of a stream. Near at hand were orange-groves and great banks of azaleas in full bloom. On the hillside were grapes that grew in purple clusters, which made poor Garibaldi think of his far-off Italy, the home from which he was exiled, and to which return meant death.

Garibaldi reined into the yard and sat hatless on his horse, looking at this scene of peace, prosperity, and gentle, smiling beauty. A sense of loneliness swept over him. He thought of himself as a homeless outcast, without love, friendless, fighting an eternal fight for people whom he did not know, and very few of whom indeed knew him even by name.

A barking of the dogs brought several servants to the door. On seeing the red-shirted soldiers, their rifles across the pommels of their saddles, the servants hastily ran back and proceeded to bar the doors and windows. Garibaldi smiled wearily and was inwardly debating whether he would try to show the inmates of the house that he was a friend or ride away.

Just then the door opened and a woman came out on the veranda. She was a young woman, not over twenty—dark, slight, handsome and intelligent. She looked at Garibaldi, and her self-possession made the invincible fighter blush to the roots of his long yellow hair and tawny beard. She was not afraid. She walked down the steps, and in a pleasant voice said, "You are Garibaldi." And Garibaldi was on the point of denying it, for he had not heard a woman's voice in four months, and was all unnerved. His tongue refused to do its bidding, and he only bowed, and then tried to apologize for his intrusion.

"You are Garibaldi, and if you insist on remaining to dinner, I will prepare the meal for you—I can do nothing else."

She spoke in Spanish, and as Garibaldi replied, he was mindful that his Castilian was terribly broken. Then he spoke in Italian, and when she answered in very broken Latin, they both smiled. They were even. When he learned that her husband was not at home, he refused to enter the house, but sat on the veranda, and there the lady served him and his companions with her own fair hands, as the servants stood by and looked on perplexed. Garibaldi did not eat much—his appetite had vanished. He followed the frail and beautiful young woman furtively with his eyes as she moved back and forth heaping the plates of his hungry troopers. He thought she looked sad and preoccupied.

Garibaldi tried to speak, but his Spanish had suddenly taken wing. But when the lady entered the house and returned with one of Mazzini's little pamphlets on liberty, he started and then almost sobbed as he read the well-remembered words, "Do that which is right, and fear no man, for man was made to be free."

He saw that the pamphlet was one of the master's earliest productions, and how it should have preceded him four thousand miles he could only guess, and the lady's command of Italian was not sufficient to explain. But in his joy he held out his hand to her, and she responded to his grasp. There was an understanding. They were both lovers of liberty.

Garibaldi felt that he must not remain—he must hasten away ere he said or did something foolish. "You must not come back, my husband is a royalist," said the lady, "and he will be greatly displeased when he knows you have been here. But you were hungry and I have fed you—now good-by." She held out her hand and then hastily broke away before the soldier could take it. Garibaldi mounted his horse, and followed by the troopers rode slowly down the bed of the stream, and as they disappeared into the thicket of azaleas, Garibaldi looked back. The lady was standing on the veranda leaning against a pillar. She held up the Mazzini pamphlet. Garibaldi removed his hat.

* * * * *

Garibaldi was on a tour of inspection, getting a good idea of the coast-line, and patriotism and duty should have kept him steadily on the march.

But something else was tugging at his heart. He rode ten miles, halted and pitched camp. Early the next morning he rode back alone, leaving his rifle behind, but keeping his pistols in his belt. He wanted to see the husband of the beautiful young lady. The man must be a pretty good kind of man—a royalist by birth probably, but if he could be rightly informed might become a friend of the cause.

When Garibaldi reached the house, the lady was on the veranda—she seemed to be expecting him. She was sad, pale, serious, and dressed in blue. She called her husband out and introduced him, and he and Garibaldi shook hands. Garibaldi tried to talk with him about Mazzini, but as near as Garibaldi could guess the rancher had never heard the name.

The man was fully twenty years older than his wife, and Garibaldi guessed, from his looks, that his wealth was an inheritance, not an accumulation. A little further talk and the facts developed as Garibaldi had suspected—the man was a degenerate scion of Spanish aristocracy. He seemed too stupid or too indifferent to know who his visitor was, or what he stood for. He brought out strong drink and then suggested cards as a diversion.

Garibaldi did not like the looks of the man, and courteously declined his pasteboard suggestions. All the time the young woman stood a little way off and looked wistfully at the red-shirted soldier. Her lips moved in pantomime—she was trying to say something to him. Garibaldi talked about nothing, laughed aloud, and requested his host to mix him a drink. While the man was busy at the sideboard, Garibaldi moved carelessly toward the woman and caught her whispered words, "Do not drink—go at once—he has sent for help—the place will be surrounded in half an hour—go, I implore you!"

And all the time Garibaldi talked garrulously and sauntered around the room. He took up the glass the man handed him, and raising it to his lips, did not drink—but tossed the contents full into the face of the person who had prepared the mixture. The man coughed, sputtered, swore and Garibaldi backed to the door, one hand on a pistol at his belt. He reached the veranda and looked for his horse. The horse was gone! Garibaldi sprang back into the house, covering the royalist with his pistol. "My horse, or you die—order my horse brought to the door!" The man protested, begged, swore he knew nothing about the horse. "I'll fetch your horse!" called the woman, and running around the house brought the horse from a thicket, where it had evidently been led by some servant. Again Garibaldi backed out of the house, requesting the man to follow, which he obediently did at a distance of five paces, his hands high in the air, as if in blessing. With pistol still in hand Garibaldi mounted the horse, and as he did so the little lady moaned, "He may kill me for this, but I would do it again—for you!" Garibaldi kicked his right foot out of the stirrup, and held out his hand. The lady without the slightest hesitation placed her foot in the empty stirrup and leaped lightly up behind. As she did so Garibaldi fired two shots well over the head of the paralyzed husband of his late wife, and gave his horse the spurs. In a minute horse and riders, two, were more than a quarter of a mile away over the plain, the lady seated safely behind, her arms gently but surely enfolding the red shirt. As they passed over a ridge they looked back, and there stood the degenerate scion of royalty, his hands high above his head. He had forgotten to take them down.

* * * * *

But should any prosaic reader imagine that this little story is too melodramatic to be true, I refer him to the monograph, "Garibaldi the Patriot," by Alexandre Dumas, who got his data from the record written by Garibaldi, himself. Moreover, Anita, for it was she, told the tale to Madame Brabante, who in turn gave the facts to Margaret Fuller Ossoli.

We do not know Anita's last name. When she placed her foot in the stirrup of Garibaldi's saddle, she gave herself to him, body, mind and spirit, for better, for worse, in sickness and in health, through evil and good report, forever. By that act she left the past behind: even the name "Anita" was a name that Garibaldi gave her, and if he ever knew the story of her life before they met, he never thought it worth while to mention it. Probably he did not care—life for both of them really dated from the day they met. He was thirty-one, she was twenty- two.

When Garibaldi rode into camp, with the lady on the crupper, the six red-shirted ones in waiting were not surprised. They were never surprised at anything their master did. They believed in him as they believed in God—only more so. And so they asked no questions—for Garibaldi was one of the men that common men never interrogated.

"Break camp!" was the order, and in ten minutes they were on the march, two men trailing a mile behind as a rear-guard. At midnight they were safely aboard the good ship "Mazzini."

Anita proved herself a worthy mate for Garibaldi. She was the first woman to wear a Garibaldi waist, although for the most part she wore men's clothes, with two pistols in her belt and a rifle in her hands, and wherever Joseph went, there went Anita. She was his servant, his slave, his comrade, his wife. Read his autobiography and you will find how lasting, loyal and tender his devotion was toward her. He was a fatalist—a man without fear—and many times when surrounded by an overwhelming foe, he simply bided his time and fought his way through to safety. "When other men are ready to surrender, I hold fast," he said. When once cut off by four soldiers of the enemy, and they approached with loaded rifles and bayonets fixed, he drew his sword and shouted, "I am Garibaldi—you are my prisoners!" and down went the rifles.

At another time he and Anita were caught by a band of forty troopers in a log cabin in a clearing. They flung open the door, and standing, one on each side, showed only the long glittering point of a spear across the doorway. The enemy demanded a parley, but finally, not knowing the number of persons inside, and realizing that a charge meant death for two of the company, they withdrew. Silence and the unknown are the only things really terrible.

And so Joseph and Anita lived and loved and fought, and incidentally studied the few books which they possessed, and at odd times wrote poetry. A year after that first ride on the back of the horse that carried double, a son was born to them. A contemporary tells of seeing Anita riding horseback, the chubby babe carried like a papoose, looking out wonderingly at the world, which for him was just six months old. In three years this baby boy was riding behind his mother on the crupper, and another baby had come to do the papoose act.

So passed eight years of adventure by land and sea, in wood and vale, on mountain and plain. Garibaldi had given Brazil all the freedom she deserved—all she knew how to use. He was crowned as "The Hero of Montevideo," and could have taken a place high in the councils of the State. But across the sea he heard the rumble of battle going on in his beloved fatherland, and the dream of a United Italy was still vivid in his mind, and of course, vivid, too, in the mind of Anita. So they sailed away, taking with them a hundred of their loyal, loving men in the red shirts, who refused to be left behind. Arriving in Italy, Garibaldi went at once to the home of his mother, who had mourned him as lost and now received him as one risen from the dead. Anita and the children appealed to the good woman, and her heart went out to them, as if, indeed, they were all her own, loved into life.

When all at once, remembering her son's indifference for the Church, she asked when and where they were married, Joseph looked at Anita, and Anita looked at Joseph, and then they acknowledged that they had only been married by a sailor, who had said the ceremony as he remembered it, adding, "And may God have mercy on your souls." Hastily the mother packed them off to a priest, who administered the right of extreme marital unction, and charged them double fee on account of their carelessness. They paid the fee, laughing inwardly, but glad to relieve the mother of her qualms.

The children were left in the care of the grandmother, and Joseph and Anita went forth to enlist under the banner of Charles Albert of Piedmont and make war on superstition and the Pope.

* * * * *

Charles Albert had been a staunch supporter of the very conditions against which the striplings, Joseph Mazzini and Joseph Garibaldi, had made war twenty years previous. But nations, like men, sometimes have experiences that make them grow by throes and throbs, by leaps and bounds. The writings of Mazzini had been constantly distributed and circulated, and the fact that they were tabued by the government added to the joys of the illicit. A well-defined wave of republicanism swept the land. Those sensitive to ideas awoke, like lilacs sensitive to the breath of May.

King Charles Albert, of all the Italian kinglets, alone guessed the temper of his people, and issued to them a constitution with the right of franchise. This meant war upon the Austrian protectorate and the Pope.

Volunteers from the other provinces flocked to the standard of Piedmont. And about this time it was that Garibaldi and Anita offered their services to the insurgent army. Charles Albert feared his old- time foe, for Garibaldi was of a nature that detested compromise, and the Piedmontese could not understand how he was willing to fight under the banner of a king, even a king who had forsworn tyranny and reform. But other provinces were seceding, and erelong Joseph Garibaldi found himself at the head of a thousand Neapolitans, all clad in red shirts, well armed, carrying banners upon which were sentiments like these: "Man was made to be free!" "Down with priest and Pope!" and "Let us own ourselves!"

The reformer paints things with a broom: exaggeration indeed is a necessary part of his equipment. Garibaldi could not understand that Italy was not ripe for a simple religion of love for wife, child and neighbor, paying one's debts, and earning one's daily bread by honest toil. He could not appreciate that the many really did not care for either political or mental freedom, much preferring mendicancy to work, and quite willing to delegate their thinking to a college of cardinals. And so he waged his earnest fight, with a faith as full and complete as the faith that actuated Old John Brown, whose soul goes marching on.

In Eighteen Hundred Forty-nine, some of the provinces had capitulated and joined forces with France and Austria, the insurgent leaders having been promised places in the excise—the compromise hastened no doubt by cold and hunger. Garibaldi's own force was much reduced and he took to the mountains, abandoning his cavalry equipment. Orders were out that he, or any of his band, caught should be shot, without trial, by fours in presence of their companions and the army. Thirty of his men and four of his best officers had been so executed.

He and Anita were surrounded and had taken refuge in a cornfield. Anita was wounded and delirious with thirst and fever. A Garibaldian had volunteered to go for water across an open field. Garibaldi watched the man and saw him shot down by French soldiers in ambush. He remained, knowing the enemy would soon come out of hiding to rob the dead. Garibaldi waited close beside the body of his dead companion, and killed with his own hands the man who had done the deed.

He got the water and carried it back to Anita in the cornfield. But she now had no need of it—she was dead. Garibaldi remained by the body until nightfall, and then carried it to the house of a peasant nearby. He made the peasant woman understand that the dead was a woman, a mother, like herself, and must be given decent burial—the woman understood.

The torches of the enemy could be seen near at hand, trailing Garibaldi from the cornfield to the house. He covered the beloved form with his scarf, and giving the peasant woman his purse, hurried forth barely in time to elude the pursuers. He made his way alone to the seashore and found refuge in Venice.

There was a price upon his head, but still there were many throughout Italy from Milan to Sicily who spoke of him as patriot and savior.

As a diplomatic move Rome relented, and Garibaldi was allowed to move to Caprera, a rocky island ten miles from the coast. Here he lived with his mother and children, writing, studying, farming; lived as Victor Hugo lived at Guernsey, only without the wealth, but in touch with Mazzini, exiled in London.

In Eighteen Hundred Fifty-three, Garibaldi came to New York and remained nearly two years. He went into business under an assumed name and accumulated two thousand dollars, so the little business must have prospered.

In Eighteen Hundred Fifty-four Naples was again in revolt, and Garibaldi heard the trumpets of battle from afar. He returned to Italy, and with his two thousand dollars bought the Island of Caprera, that his children might be insured a home, and also, possibly, to convince the government at Rome that he had come to stay.

Twice he left his beloved Caprera to work out his great dream of a United Italy. He fought with troops that had no commissary; battled with superstition; and saw his name belittled by those he sought to serve. Finally he entered Naples at the head of an army and was proclaimed Dictator. But statesmanship is business; and business is to organize and discipline, and use the forces of monotonous peace. Garibaldi expected too much: he wanted to see the Church uprooted, the princes sent on their way, and the people supreme. This was not to be. He did, however, live to see the Pope relinquish his temporal power, and a United Italy, but with Victor Emmanuel, son of Charles Albert, as king. The people still wanted a king, and they wanted their Church, even though an emasculated one.

In Eighteen Hundred Seventy, Garibaldi and his son, the firstborn of Anita, offered their services to Gambetta and enlisted with France to fight against Germany. And yet Garibaldi had nothing against Germany, and had fought France in many a tedious campaign, but he thought that France now stood opposed to papal power, while Germany sympathized with it.

After the war Garibaldi was elected to the Italian Parliament, and performed, at least, one good piece of work: he succeeded in getting an appropriation to erect a statue of Bruno upon the exact spot where this lover of truth and right was burned alive, by order of the Pope, for teaching that the earth revolved.

In September, Nineteen Hundred Four, the World's Free-Thought Convention was held in Rome, and a committee was appointed to decorate the statue of Bruno and hold at its base a memorial meeting. The principal address was by Ernst Haeckel. In the course of his remarks Haeckel said:

We meet in the Eternal City in the cause of liberty and the cause of truth. We need to express, each in his own way, unfettered and unvexed by coercion and fear of suppression, the things we believe are right and just and beautiful, and should be said. We know but little, but in this we are agreed—that there is no final, arbitrary and dogmatic truth. Truth is a point of view; as we know more and comprehend more, we will express more. Man has today freedom to breathe, freedom to study, freedom to grow, such as he never before had since time began. Man has today more faith than he ever had before—more faith in himself, more faith in his fellows. Thinking, like the physical act of walking, is a matter of faith. For the privilege of being here today, in this place, expressing what we think, we are under special obligations to one man, and the entire world of progress is under obligation to this man—and that man is Garibaldi.

Garibaldi passed peacefully away at his beloved Caprera in Eighteen Hundred Eighty-two, aged seventy-five, gently ministered to by his children and grandchildren. The insurance-company that might have insured his life when he was twenty would have made money on the transaction regardless of rate. Yet he was the hero of sixty-seven battles on land and sea, and engaged in more than two hundred personal encounters, where rifles, pistols, stilettos, swords or cudgels played their part. Behold the irony of Fate!

No man was ever more detested, hated, feared—no man was ever better loved. That he was a sternly honest, sincere man, singularly pure in motive and abstemious in habit, even his bitterest enemies do not dispute. If Savonarola was God-intoxicated, Garibaldi was freedom- mad.

He refused bribes, declined honors, put aside titles, and died as penniless as he was born, and as he had lived. His life was consecrated to one thing—Liberty.



RICHARD COBDEN

What I contend is that England is today so situated in every particular of her domestic and foreign circumstances that, by leaving other governments to settle their own business and fight out their own quarrels, and by attending to the vast and difficult affairs of her own enormous realm, and the condition of her people, she will not only be setting the world an example of noble morality, which no other nation is so happily free to set, but she will be following the very course which the maintenance of her own greatness most imperatively demands. It is precisely because Great Britain is so strong in resources, in courage, in institutions, in geographical position, that she can, before all other European powers, afford to be moral, and to set the example of a mighty nation walking in the paths of justice and peace. —Cobden



Richard Cobden never had any chance in life. He was born in an obscure hamlet of West Sussex, England, in Eighteen Hundred Four. His father was a poor farmer, who lost his freehold and died at the top, whipped out, discouraged, when the lad was ten years old. Richard Cobden became a porter, a clerk, a traveling salesman, a mill-owner, a member of parliament, an economist, a humanitarian, a statesman, a reformer. Up to his thirteenth year he was chiefly interested in the laudable task of making a living—getting on in the world. During that year, and seemingly all at once and nothing first, just as bubbles do when they burst, he beheld the problem of business from the broad vantage- ground of humanitarianism. But he did not burst, for his dreams were spun out of life's realities, and today are coming true; in fact, many of them came true in his own time. Richard Cobden ceased to be provincial and became universal.

He saw that commerce, instead of being merely a clutch for personal gain, was the chief factor in civilization. He realized that we are educated through our efforts to get food and clothing; and therefore the man who ministers to the material wants of humanity is really the true priest. The development of every animal has come about through its love-emotions and its struggle to exist.

A factory in a town changes every person in the town, mentally and physically. This being true, does not the management of this factory call for men of heart and soul—broad-minded, generous, firm in the right? Then every factory is influenced by the laws of the land, and each country is influenced by the laws of other countries, since most countries that are engaged in manufacturing find a market abroad.

Cobden set himself to inquire into the causes of discontent and failure, of progress and prosperity. And not content merely to philosophize, he carried his theories into his own enterprises.

Many of our modern business betterments seem to have had their rise in the restless, prophetic brain of Richard Cobden. He of all men sought to make commerce a science, and business a fine art. The world moves slowly.

It is only a few years ago that we in America thought to have in our President's Cabinet a Secretary of Commerce and Labor.

Listen to what Cobden wrote in Eighteen Hundred Forty-three:

In the close council of every king, or president, or prince, should be a man of affairs whose life is devoted to commerce and labor, and the needs and requirements of peace. His work is of far greater moment than that of men-of-war. Battleships ever form a suggestion for their use, and as long as we have armies, men will kill, fight and destroy. Soldiers who do not want to fight are not of this earth. Prepare for war and war will come. When government gives to the arts of peace the same thought and attention that it gives to the arts of war, we will have peace on earth and good-will among men. But so long as the soldier takes precedence of the businessman in the political courts of the world, famine, death, disease and want will crouch at our doors. Commerce is production, war is destruction. The laws of production and distribution must and will be made a science; and then and not until then will happiness come to mankind and this earth serve as a pattern for the paradise of another life, instead of being a pandemonium.

* * * * *

Emerson defines commerce as carrying things from where they are plentiful to where they are needed. Business is that field of human endeavor which undertakes to supply the materials to humanity that life demands.

The clergy are our spiritual advisers, preparing us for a pleasant and easy place in another world. The lawyers advise us on legal themes— showing us how to obey the law, or else evade it, and they protect us from lawyers. The doctors look after us when disease attacks our bodies—or when we think it does.

We used to talk about "The Three Learned Professions"; if we use the phrase now, it is only in a Pickwickian sense, for we realize that there are at present fifty-seven varieties of learned men.

The greatest and most important of all the professions is that of Commerce, or Business. Medicine and law have their specialties—a dozen each—but business has ten thousand specialties, or divisions.

So important do we now recognize business, or this ministering to the material wants of humanity, that theology has shifted its ground, and within a few years has declared that to eat rightly, dress rightly, and work rightly are the fittest preparation for a life to come.

The best lawyers now are businessmen, and their work is to keep the commercial craft in a safe channel, where it will not split on the rocks of litigation nor founder in the shallows of misunderstanding. Every lawyer will tell you this, "To make money you must satisfy your customers."

The greatest change in business came with the one-price system.

The old idea was for the seller to get as much as he possibly could for everything he sold. Short weight, short count, and inferiority in quality were considered quite proper and right, and when you bought a dressed turkey from a farmer, if you did not discover the stone inside the turkey when you weighed it and paid for it, there was no redress. The laugh was on you. And moreover a legal maxim—caveat emptor, "Let the buyer beware"—made cheating legally safe.

Dealers in clothing guaranteed neither fit nor quality, and anything you paid for, once wrapped up and in your hands, was yours beyond recall—"Business is business," was a maxim that covered many sins.

A few hundred years ago business was transacted mostly through fairs and ships, and by pedlers. Your merchant of that time was a peripatetic rogue who reduced prevarication to a system.

The booth gradually evolved into a store, with the methods and customs of the irresponsible keeper intact: the men cheated their neighbors and chuckled in glee until their neighbors cheated them, which, of course, they did. Then they cursed each other, began again, and did it all over. John Quincy Adams tells of a certain deacon who kept a store near Boston, who always added in the year 1775, at the top of the column, as seventeen dollars and seventy-five cents.

The amount of misery, grief, disappointment, shame, distress, woe, suspicion and hate caused by a system which wrapped up one thing when the buyer expected another, and took advantage of his innocence and ignorance as to quality and value, can not be computed in figures. Suffice it to say that duplicity in trade has had to go. The self- preservation of the race demanded honesty, square dealing, one price to all. The change came only after a struggle, and we are not quite sure of the one-price deal yet.

But we have gotten thus far: that the man who cheats in trade is tabu. Honesty as a business asset is fully recognized. If you would succeed in business you can not afford to sell a man something he does not want; neither can you afford to disappoint him in quality, any more than in count. Other things being equal, the merchant who has the most friends will make the most money. Our enemies will not deal with us. To make a sale and acquire an enemy is poor policy. To a pedler or a man who ran a booth at a bazaar or fair, it was "get your money now or never." Buyer and seller were at war. One transaction and they never met again. The air was full of hate and suspicion, and the savage propensity of physical destruction was refined to a point where hypocrisy and untruth took the place of violence—the buyer was as bad as the seller: if he could buy below cost he boasted of it. To catch a merchant who had to have money was glorious—we smote him hip and thigh! Later, we discovered that being strangers he took us in.

The one-price system has come as a necessity, since it reduces the friction of life, and protects the child or simple person in the selection of things needed, just the same as if the buyer were an expert in values and a person who could strike back if imposed upon. Safety, peace and decency demanded the one-price system. And so we have it—with possibly a discount to the clergy, to schoolteachers, and relatives as close as second cousins. But when we reach the point where we see that all men are brothers, we will have absolute honesty and one price to all.

And this change in business methods, in our mental attitude towards trade, has all grown out of a dimly perceived but deeply felt belief in the brotherhood of man, of the solidarity of the race—also, in the further belief that life in all of its manifestations is Divine.

Therefore, he who ministers to the happiness and well-being of the life of another is a priest and is doing God's work. Men must eat, they must be clothed, they must be housed. It is quite as necessary that you should eat good food as that you should read good books, hear good music, hear good sermons, or look upon beautiful pictures. The necessary is the sacred.

There are no menial tasks. "He that is greatest among you shall be your servant." The physical reacts on the spiritual and the spiritual on the physical, and, rightly understood, are one and the same thing. We live in a world of spirit and our bodies are the physical manifestation of a spiritual thing, which for lack of a better word we call "God." We change men by changing their environment. Commerce changes the environment and gives us a better society. To supply good water, better sanitary appliances, better heating apparatus, better food, served in a more dainty way—these are all tasks worthy of the highest intelligence and devotion that can be brought to bear upon them, and every Christian preacher in the world today so recognizes, believes and preaches. We have ceased to separate the secular from the sacred. That is sacred which serves.

Once, a businessman was a person who not only thrived by taking advantage of the necessities of people, but who also banked on their ignorance of values. But all wise men now know that the way to help yourself is to help humanity. We benefit ourselves only as we benefit others. And the recognition of these truths is what has today placed the businessman at the head of the learned professions—he ministers to the necessities of humanity.

Out of blunder and bitterness comes wisdom. Men are taught through reaction, and all experience that does not kill you is good.

When the father of Richard Cobden gave up hope and acknowledged defeat, the family of a full dozen were farmed out among relatives. The kind kinsmen who volunteered to look after the frail and sensitive Richard evaded responsibility by placing the lad in a boys' boarding- school. Here he remained from his tenth until his sixteenth year. Once a year he was allowed to write a letter home to his mother, but during the five years he saw her but once.

Hunger and heartache have their uses. Richard Cobden lived to strike the boarding-school fallacy many a jolting blow; but it required Charles Dickens to complete the work by ridicule, just as Robert Ingersoll laughed the Devil out of church. We fight for everything until the world regards it as ridiculous, then we abandon it. So long as war is regarded as heroic, we will fight for it; when it becomes absurd it will die.

Said Richard Cobden in a speech in the House of Commons: "Of all the pathetic fallacies perpetuated, none seems to me more cruelly absurd than the English Boarding-School for boys. The plan of taking the child of seven, eight or ten years away from his parents, and giving him into the keeping of persons who have only a commercial interest in him, and compelling him to fight for his life among little savages as unhappy as himself, or sink into miserable submission, seems too horrible to contemplate." Yet this plan of so-called education continued up to about fifty years ago, and was upheld and supported by the best society of England, including the clergy, who were usually directly "particeps criminis" in the business.

Logic and reason failed to dislodge the folly, and finally it was left to a stripling reporter, turned novelist, to give us Squeers and Dotheboys Hall. This fierce ridicule was the thing which finally punctured the rhinoceros hide of the pedagogic blunder.

There is one test for all of our educational experiments—will it bring increased love? That which breeds hate and fosters misery is bad in every star. Compare the boarding-school idea with the gentle philosophy of Friedrich Froebel, and note how Froebel always insists that the education of the mother and her child should go forward hand in hand. Motherhood is for the mother, and she who shifts the care of her growing child to a Squeers, not only immerses her child in misery but loses the opportunity of her life.

When Richard was sixteen he was transferred from the boarding-school to his uncle's warehouse in London. His position was that of a poor relation, and his work in the warehouse was to carry bundles and manipulate a broom. His shy and sensitive ways caught the attention of a burly and gruff superintendent, whose gruffness was only on the outside. This man said to the boy, before he had been sweeping a week: "Young 'un, I obsarve with my hown hies that you sweeps in the corners. For this I raises your pay a shilling a week, and makes you monkey to the shipping-clerk."

In a year the shipping-clerk was needed as a salesman, and Richard took his place. In another year Richard was a salesman, and canvassing London for orders. Very shortly after he became convinced that to work for relations was a mistake. Twenty years later the thought crystallized in his mind thus: Young man, you had better neither hire relatives nor work for them. It means servility or tyranny or both. You do not want to be patronized nor placed under obligations, nor have other helpers imagine you are a favorite. To grow you must be free—let merit count and nothing else. Probably this was what caused a wise man to say, "The Devil sent us our relatives, but thank Heaven we can choose our friends for ourselves."

Relatives often assume a fussy patronizing management which outsiders never do. And so at twenty we find Cobden cutting loose from relatives. He went to work as a commercial traveler selling cotton prints. That English custom of the "commercial dinner," where all the "bagmen" that happened to be in the hotel dine at a common table, as a family, and take up a penny collection for the waiter, had its rise in the brain of Cobden. He thought the traveling salesman should have friendly companionship, and the commercial dinner with its frank discussions and good-fellowship would in degree compensate for the lack of home. This idea of brotherhood was very strong in Richard Cobden's heart. And always at these dinners he turned the conversation into high and worthy channels, bringing up questions of interest to the "boys," and trying to show them that the more they studied the laws of travel, the more they knew about commerce, the greater their power as salesmen. His journal about this time shows, "Expense five shillings for Benjamin Franklin's 'Essays,'" and the same for "'Plutarch's Lives.'" And from these books he read aloud at the bagmen's dinners.

Cobden anticipated in many ways that excellent man, Arthur F. Sheldon, and endeavored to make salesmanship a fine art.

From a salesman on a salary, he evolved into a salesman on a salary and commission. Next he made a bold stand with two fellow-travelers and asked for the exclusive London agency of a Manchester print-mill. A year later he was carrying a line of goods worth forty thousand pounds on unsecured credit. "Why do you entrust me with all these goods when you know I am not worth a thousand pounds in my own name?"

And the senior member of the great house of Fort, Sons and Company answered: "Mr. Cobden, we consider the moral risk more than we do the financial one. Our business has been built up by trusting young, active men of good habits. With us character counts." And Cobden went up to London and ordered the words, "Character Counts!" cut deep in a two-inch oak plank which he fastened to the wall in his office.

At twenty-seven his London brokerage business was netting him an income of twelve hundred pounds a year. It seems at this time that Fort and Sons had a mill at Sabden, which on account of mismanagement on the part of superintendants had fallen into decay. The company was thinking of abandoning the property, and the matter was under actual discussion when in walked Cobden.

"Sell it to Cobden," said one of the directors, smiling.

"For how much?" asked Cobden.

"A hundred thousand pounds," was the answer.

"I'll take it," said Cobden, "on twenty years' time with the privelege of paying for it sooner if I can." Cobden had three valuable assets in his composition—health, enthusiasm and right intent. Let a banker once feel that the man knows what he is doing, and is honest, and money is always forthcoming.

And so Cobden took possession of the mill at Sabden. Six hundred workers were employed, and there was not a school nor a church in the village. The workers worked when they wanted, and when they did not they quit. Every pay-day they tramped off to neighboring towns, and did not come back until they had spent their last penny. In an endeavor to discipline them, the former manager had gotten their ill- will, and they had mobbed the mill and broken every window. Cobden's task was not commercial: it was a problem in diplomacy and education. To tell of how he introduced schools, stopped child labor, planted flowerbeds and vegetable-gardens, built houses and model tenements, and disciplined the workers without their knowing it, would require a book. Let the simple fact stand that he made the mill pay by manufacturing a better grade of goods than had been made, and he also raised the social status of the people. In three years his income had increased to ten thousand pounds a year.

"At thirty," says John Morley, "Cobden passed at a single step from the natural egotism of youth to the broad and generous public spirit of a great citizen." Very early in his manhood Cobden discovered that he who would do an extraordinary work must throw details on others, and scheme for leisure. Cobden never did anything he could hire any one else to do. He saved himself to do work that to others was impossible. That is to say, he picked his men, and he chose men of his own type—healthy, restless, eager, enthusiastic, honest men. The criticism of Disraeli that "Cobden succeeded in business simply because he got other people to do his work," is sternly true. It proves the greatness of Cobden.

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And so we find Richard Cobden, the man who had never had any chance in life, thirty years old, with an income equal to thirty-five thousand dollars a year, and at the head of a constantly growing business. He had acquired the study habit ten years before, so really we need shed no tears on account of his lack of college training. He knew political history—knew humanity—and he knew his Adam Smith. And lo! cosmic consciousness came to him in a day. His personal business took second place, and world problems filled his waking dreams.

These second births in men can usually be traced to a book, a death, a person, a catastrophe—a woman. If there was any great love in the life of Cobden I would make no effort to conceal it—goodness me!

But the sublime passion was never his, otherwise there would have been more art and less economics in his nature. Yet for women he always had a high and chivalrous regard, and his strong sense of justice caused him to speak out plainly on the subject of equal rights at a time when to do so was to invite laughter.

And so let x—Miss X—symbol the cause of Richard Cobden's rebirth. He placed his business in charge of picked men, and began his world career by going across to Paris and spending three months in studying the language and the political situation. He then moved on to Belgium and Holland, passed down through Germany to Switzerland, across to Italy, up to Russia, back to Rome, and finally took ship at Naples for England by way of Gibraltar. On arriving at Sabden he found that, while the business was going fairly well, it had failed to keep the pace that his personality had set. When the man is away the mice will play—a little. Things drop down. Eternal vigilance is not only the price of liberty, but of everything else, and success in business most of all.

Cobden knew the truth—that by applying himself to business he could become immensely rich. But if he left things to others, he could at the best expect only a moderate income on the capital he had already acquired. Everything is bought with a price—make your choice! Richard Cobden chose knowledge, service to mankind, and an all-round education, rather than money. He spent six months at his print-mill, and again fared forth upon his journeyings.

He visited Spain, Turkey, Greece and Egypt, spending several months in each country, studying the history of the place on the spot. What interested him most was the economic reasons which led to advance and fall of nations. In Eighteen Hundred Thirty-five he started for America on a sailing-vessel, making the passage in just five weeks. One letter to his brother from America contains the following:

I am thus far on my way back again to New York, which city I expect to reach on the Eighth instant, after completing a tour through Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Pittsburgh, Lake Erie to Buffalo, Niagara Falls, Albany (via Auburn, Utica, Schenectady), and the Connecticut Valley to Boston and Lowell. On my return to New York, I propose giving two days to the Hudson River, going up to Albany one day, and returning the next; after which I shall have two or three days for the purpose of taking leave of my good friends in New York, previous to going on board the "Britannia" on the Sixteenth. My journey may be called a pleasure-trip, for without an exception or interruption of any kind I have enjoyed every minute of the too short time allowed me for seeing this truly magnificent country. No writer has yet done justice to America. Her lakes, rivers, forests and cataracts are peculiarly her own, and when I think of their superiority to all that we have in the Old World, and still more, when I recollect that by a mysterious ordinance of their Creator, these were hid from "learned ken" till modern times, I fell into the fanciful belief that the Western continent was brought forth at a second birth, and intended by Nature as a more perfect specimen of her handiwork. But how in the name of breeding must we account for the degeneracy of the human form in this otherwise mammoth-producing soil? The men are but sorry descendants from the noble race that begot their ancestors. And as for the women—my eyes have not found one that deserves to be called a wholesome, blooming, pretty woman since I have been here! One-fourth part of the women look as if they had just recovered from a fit of jaundice; another quarter would in England be termed in a state of decided consumption; and the remainder are fitly likened to our fashionable women, haggard and jaded with the dissipation of a London season. There, now, haven't I out-Trolloped Mrs. Trollope! But leaving the physical for the moral, my estimate of American character has improved, contrary to my expectations, by this visit. Great as was my previous esteem for the qualities of this people, I find myself in love with their intelligence, their sincerity, and the decorous self-respect that actuates all classes. The very genius of activity seems to have found its fit abode in the souls of this restless and energetic race.

Among other interesting items which Cobden made note of in America was that everywhere wood was used for fuel, "excepting at Brownsville, Virginia, where beds of coal jut out of the hillside, and all the people have to do is to help themselves." Pittsburgh interested him, and he spent a week there: went to a theater and heard England hissed and Columbia exalted. Pittsburgh burned only wood for fuel, the wood being brought down on flatboats. At Youngstown, Ohio, were three hundred horses used on the many stagecoaches that centered there. There was a steamboat that ran from Cleveland to Buffalo in two days and a night, stopping seven times on the way to take on passengers and goods and wood for fuel. At Buffalo you could hear the roar of Niagara Falls and see the mist. Arriving at the Canada side of the Falls he was shaved by a negro who was a runaway slave, all negroes in Canada being free.

Cobden says: "The States are not especially adapted for agricultural products, the land being hilly and heavily wooded. American exports are cotton, wool, hides and lumber." It will thus be seen that in Eighteen Hundred Thirty-six America had not been discovered.

Arriving in England, Cobden began to write out his ideas and issue them in pamphlet form at his own expense. For literature, as such, he seemed to have had little thought, literature being purely a secondary love-product.

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Cobden's work was statistical, economic, political and philosophic. From writing he read his pamphlets before various societies and lyceums. Debates naturally followed, and soon Cobden was forced to defend his theories.

He was nominated for a seat in Parliament and was defeated. Next year he ran again and was elected. The political canvass had given freedom to his wings; he had learned to think on his feet, to meet interruption, to parry in debate. The air became luminous with reasons.

England then had a tax on everything, including bread. On grains and meat brought into England there was an import tax which was positively prohibitive. This tax was for the dual purpose of raising revenue for the Government, and to protect the English farmer. Of course, the farmer believed in this tax which prevented any other country from coming into competition with himself.

Cobden thought that food-products should pass unobstructed to where they were needed, and that any other plan was mistaken and vicious. The question came up in the House of Commons, and Cobden arose to speak. Anyone who then spoke of "free trade" was considered disloyal to his country. Cobden used the word and was hissed. He waited and continued to speak. "Famine is possible only where trade is restricted," and he proved his proposition by appeals to history, and a wealth of economic information that hushed the House into respectful silence. As an economist he showed he was the peer of any man present. The majority disagreed with him, but his courteous manner won respect, and his resourceful knowledge made the opposition cautious.

Soon after he brought up a public-school measure, and this was voted down on the assumption that education was a luxury, and parents who wanted their children educated should look after it themselves, just as they did the clothing and food of the child. At best, education should be left to the local parish, village or city government.

Cobden was in the minority; but he went back to Manchester and formed the Anti-Corn-Law League, demanding that wheat and maize should be admitted to the United Kingdom free of duty, and that no tax of any kind should be placed on breadstuffs. The farmers raised a howl— incited by politicians—and Cobden was challenged to go into farming communities and debate the question. The enemy hoped, and sincerely believed, he would be mobbed. But he accepted the challenge, and the debate took place, with the result that he was for the most part treated with respect, since he convinced his hearers that agriculture was something he knew more about than did the landlords. He showed farmers how to diversify crops and raise vegetables and fruits, and if grains would flow in cheaper than they could raise them, why then take the money they received from vegetables and buy grain! It was an uphill fight, but Cobden threw his soul into it, and knew that some day it would win.

Cobden's contention was that all money necessary to run the Government should be raised by direct taxation on land, property and incomes, and not on food any more than on air, since both are necessary to actual existence. To place a tariff on necessities, keeping these things out of the country and out of the reach of the plain and poor people who needed them, was an inhumanity. A tariff should be placed on nothing but articles of actual luxury—things people can do without—but all necessities of life should flow by natural channels, unobstructed. An indirect tax is always an invitation to extravagance on the part of Government, and also, it is a temptation to favor certain lines of trade at the expense of others, and so is class legislation. Government must exist for all the people, never for the few, and the strong and powerful must consider the lowly and weak.

The landed gentry upheld the Corn Laws and used the word "commercial" as an epithet. Very naturally they made their tenants believe that if free trade were allowed, the farmers would be worse than bankrupt, and commercialism rampant. Cobden stood for the manufacturing public and the cities. The landlords tried to disparage Cobden by declaring that smoky, dirty Birmingham was his ideal. Cobden's task was to make England see that the less men tampered with the natural laws of trade the better, and that no special class of citizens should suffer that others might be prosperous, and that business and manufacturing must and could be rescued from their low estate and be made honorable. And so the fight went on. From a curiosity to hear what Cobden might say, interest in the theme subsided, and the opposition adopted the cheerful habit of trooping out to the cloakroom whenever Cobden arose to speak.

Cobden had at least one very great quality which few reformers have: he was patient with the fools. Against stupidity he never burst forth in wrath. Impatience with stupidity is a fine mark of stupidity. He knew the righteousness of his cause, and repeated and kept repeating his arguments in varied form. His platform manner was conversational and friendly. He often would use the phrase, "Come, let us just talk this matter over together." And so he quickly established close, friendly terms with his hearers, which, while lacking the thrill of oratory, made its impress upon a few who grew to love the man. John Bright tells of "the mild, honest look of love and genuineness that beamed from his eyes," and which told the story even better than his words.

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And so the Anti-Corn-Law agitation continued. Sir Robert Peel, as head of the Ministry, sought in every possible way to silence Cobden and bring him into contempt, even to denouncing him as "a dangerous agitator who would, if he could, do for London what Robespierre did for Paris." But time went on as time does, and Cobden had been before the country as the upholder of unpopular causes for more than ten years. There was famine in Ireland. By the roadside famishing mothers held to their withered breasts dying children, and called for help upon the passers-by. Cobden described the situation in a way that pierced the rhinoceros hides of the landlords, and they offered concessions of this and that. Cobden said, "Future generations will stand aghast with amazement when they look back upon this year and see children starving for bread in Ireland, and we forbidding the entry of corn into the country with a prohibitive tariff, backing up this law with armed guns."

The common people began to awake. If famine could occur in Cork and Dublin, why not in Manchester and London? The question came close, now. The Anti-Corn-Law League saw its opportunity. Mass meetings were held in all cities and towns. In Manchester, Cobden asked for funds to carry on the agitation. He himself headed the list with a thousand pounds. Twenty-three manufacturers followed his lead in three minutes. Windsor and Westminster now sat up and rubbed their sleepy eyes, and Sir Robert Peel sent word to Cobden asking for a conference. Cobden replied, "All we desire is an immediate repeal of the Corn Laws—no conference is necessary."

Sir Robert Peel sent in his resignation as Prime Minister, saying he could not in conscience comply with the demands of the mob, and while compliance seemed necessary to avoid revolution, others must make the compromise. The Queen then appointed Lord John Russell as Prime Minister and ordered him to form a new Cabinet and give an office to Cobden. Lord Russell tried for four days to meet the issue, and endeavored to placate the people with platitude and promise. Cobden refused all office, and informed Lord Russell that he preferred to help the Crown by remaining an outside advocate.

Every Government, at the last, is of the people, by the people, but whether for the people depends upon whether the people are awake. And now England did not care for a radical change of rulers; all the citizens wanted was that those in power recede from their position and grant the relief demanded. The Queen now reconsidered the resignation of Sir Robert Peel and refused to accept it, and he again assumed the reins. An extraordinary session of the House of Commons was called and the Corn Laws were repealed. The House of Lords concurred. The nobility was absolutely routed, and Cobden, "the sooty manufacturer," had won.

Strangely enough, panic did not follow, nor did the yeomanry go into bankruptcy. The breadstuffs flowed in, and the manufacturing population being better fed at a less outlay than formerly, had more money to spend. Great general prosperity followed, and the gentry, who had threatened to abandon their estates if the Corn Laws were repealed, simply raised their rents a trifle and increased the gaming limit.

Sir Robert Peel publicly acknowledged his obligation to Cobden, and Lord Palmerston, who had fought him tooth and nail, did the same, explaining, "A new epoch has arisen, and England is a manufacturing country, and as such the repeal of the Corn Laws became desirable." As though he would say, "To have had free trade before this new epoch arose, would have been a calamity." A large sum had been subscribed but not used in the agitation. And now by popular acclaim it was decided that this money should go to Cobden personally as a thank- offering. When the proposition was made, new subscriptions began to flow in, until the sum of eighty thousand pounds was realized. Cobden's business had been neglected. In his fight for the good of the nation his own fortune had taken wing. He announced his intention of retiring from politics and devoting himself to trade, and this was that which, probably, caused the tide to turn his way. He hesitated about accepting the gift, which amounted to nearly half a million dollars, but finally concluded that only by accepting could he be free to serve the State, and so he acceded to the wishes of his friends. Some years later, Lord Palmerston offered him a baronetcy and a seat in the cabinet, but he preferred still to help the State as an outside advocate.