THE COMMONWEALTH OF MAN TH art. I INTRODUCTION "THE MAN WITH THE HOE" HIS is the title of a picture by a great painter. At first glance it has no soul, no idea, and, therefore, no beauty. Face, form, soil, scene, are ugly. Their ugliness serves no aim of comparison or contrast. It fills the whole field of vision. It seems ugly for the sake of ugliness alone. It is and can be typical of nothing else. It can not be a type of labor-not even of the lowest and most ignorant grade of labor. The labor of the hoe as a type deals with no such barren soil and wears no such idiotic brow. The soil is as idiotic as the brow, the brow as barren as the soil. No growth can come from either. For either, culture is hopeless. As well ask who grew those thorns and rocks as who "slanted that brow." Nature as a realm of chance, if there be any such realm, might be equally responsible for both-nature, and not man, in any sense that differences man from nature. Man as man does not choose such soil for labor, much less curse it with rocks and thorns, to be afterward hoed away; neither does man as man breed or mature idiots to serve any of his social aims. The meanest greed has too much sense. If from the hoe, which was man's first and simplest industry, has grown our whole industrial civilization with all the amenities, arts, laws, and religions which attend and characterize it, that hoe surely belonged to other than an idiot's hand and wrought in other than a hopeless soil. But a poet has seen the picture and turned it into a type of labor as labor appears to him. To him labor is under a curse. The curse is not God's, but man's. The name of the curse is civilization. Civilization means decline, not progress; decay, not growth. It blood-poisons society. Its institutions are tumors, abscesses-the hydrocephalus of reason. Earth was once an Eden: civilization has blasted it. Man was once erect and heavenward-looking: civilization has bowed his head, and bent his back, and fixed his empty eye on the ground. Primitive man was a bold-browed sage who thought as he dug, and saw an under-sky in the ground he stood on, with flowers and fruits for stars; civilization has loosened the jaw of his high purpose, and blown out the divine light in his brain. "Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans The emptiness of ages in his face, And on his back the burden of the world. Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw? To trace the stars and search the heavens for power; O masters, lords and rulers in all lands, After the silence of the centuries? 991 Now, civilization means the civilized Family, the civilized State, and the Church which has brought them forth, so that as its product they may rightly be called Christendom-the rule of the Church's Christ in the world. At least, the Church has consecrated, if it did not create, these great social forms, and therefore is responsible for their immemorial wrongs and infamies. It has consecrated private property, and owns a good share. It has 1 Mr. Markham's poem is so widely known that it is not thought necessary to quote it in full. consecrated interest, and lives largely by the income of endowments. It has consecrated kings, and crowns them in the name of its Christ. It has consecrated war, and taught prayers for battle and for victory. In fact, modern civilization was for a thousand years under the tutelage of the Church's canon law, whose spirit informs the whole system of jurisprudence which has expanded that law to the needs and liberties of our own day. Woe to them all! They have "put gulfs between man and the seraphim.' They have committed "time's tragedy," "betrayed, plundered, profaned, and disinherited" humanity. Nor can they "ever straighten up this shape," or "touch it again with immortality," or make right their own tale of "immemorial infamies, perfidious wrongs, immedicable woes." Away with them in that hour when "whirlwinds of rebellion shake the world "! But whence "the whirlwinds of rebellion"? Not from idiots with hoes. Their hoes would avail little against dynamite guns; nor could these brains generate whirlwinds wild enough to ruin empires of civilized statesmen and armies. "Dead to rapture and despair," "things that grieve not and that never hope," they are only too content with their doom. They must get ideas; they must learn arts; they must be organized into armies of discontent. They must see visions of a wisdom more wise, an equity more fair, a beauty more beautiful, a manhood more divine, than civilization has reached. How will such visions come to empty eyes? Not by grubbing dirt. Ideals are not potatoes. The ideals of society belong to scholars, poets, thinkers-scholars trained |