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As a social philosopher he is no less clear-visioned than as a poetic dreamer, and in prose no less than in verse he is striking sturdy blows for a newer, a higher and a finer social order-the order of the Golden Rule the day of practical fraternity for which so many of our truest men and women are valiantly striving. An example of his recent prose thought along economic lines is found in a contribution by him to a recent issue of The Cosmopolitan entitled "When I Am Dictator." After pointing out the fact to which statesmen seem to be so perversely blind: that enforced idleness of any considerable portion of the citizens of a state constitutes one of the gravest possible menaces to national integrity, lowering the moral ideals, weakening the efficiency and embittering the life of the individual, he urges the importance of lifting from the man out of work "the fate of hunger and the fear of to-morrow." He then continues: "It is the first duty of a government to see to it that all her people have the opportunity to live by labor. She must keep open the gates of opportunity, so that every man and every woman may have the material resources for living a complete life. A government that fails in this fails in the vital thing."

The poet next refers to the most "pathetic fact of the modern world," the "ever-growing army of enforced idlers going onward in the shadow of civilization." "There are always tens of thousands of these able-bodied men" knocking vainly at the door of opportunity, a fact that explains the phenomenon that when there is a strike there is always an army of men ready to take the strikers' places. He also shows that this army of idle men must come to be one of the great menaces to public safety, for a man must do one of three things-work, beg or steal. If the labor market denies a man labor, and the law forbids beggary," there is nothing left him but the dread alternatives of stealing or dying of starvation. "In a government where a man cannot find

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work, he finds it easy to lose faith in government." He is then ripe for revolution and anarchy.

For he is

finding no work to do all the dramas of "A man wanting to live by work, yet the poets furnish no spectacle more tragic Here the man is in than that man's case. world where he must eat bread. Social a world, not of his own choosing-in a conditions forbid him to work, and the laws forbid him to be idle. gravely told that he must not be a vagrant. He is reminded that every man must have a visible means of support: otherwise the jail swallows him. It is illogical, if not grotesque, in a government to punish a secured to him the opportunity to make vagrant, when the government has not a living by work."

Mr. Markham holds that it is clearly the part of wisdom and sound statesmanship no less than the august duty imposed by justice and the Christ ideal, to give to every man the opportunity to engage in productive labor-labor that shall create wealth and sustain self-respecting manhood.

"This would not be paternalism: it would be fraternalism. And we need to make government the organ of the fraternal principle. Paternalism is a system that relieves a man of individual effort that puts bread into his open and and circus' idea of the Romans. But waiting mouth. This was the 'bread the wise father dividing the farm among his boys, so that all, both strong and weak,

shall have a chance to live-that is fra

ternalism. Fraternalism is justice, it is Christianity; and towards this ideal we must press more and more with the process of the suns."

In closing this brief sketch of our poetprophet, we cannot refrain from giving the following little poem instinct with a great truth that should be indelibly stamped on the consciousness of every American in the present crucial hour in our history:

"Voices are crying from the dust of Tyre,

From Baalbec and the stones of Babylon— We raised our pillars upon Self-Desire,

And perished from the large gaze of the sun.

"Eternity was on the pyramid,

And immortality on Greece and Rome; But in them all the ancient Traitor hid,

And so they tottered like unstable foam. "There was no substance in their soaring hopes; The voice of Thebes is now a desert cry; A spider bars the road with filmy ropes, Where once the feet of Carthage thundered by.

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DEMOCRACY'S CALL TO THE STATESMANSHIP OF

WE

TO-DAY.

A CONVERSATION WITH EDWIN MARKHAM.

By B. O. FLOWER.

E WERE seated in one of the great hostelries of New York city. Without, the roar and tumult of life swept by. Only the faint sound of the ceaseless murmur reached us. But a few moments before, when entering the building, we paused, arrested as it were by the din of the conflict, the remorseless battle of modern metropolitan life, and at that moment there had been borne in upon our minds the meaning of the struggle. Here millions were in conflict. Some were money-mad and striving under the spell of the master-passion to acquire gold. Others were no less fiercely struggling for a bare livelihood or to keep the hunger wolf from frail and tender lives; while above and beyond, in the din of the battle we seemed to hear the sound and echo of that other conflict which bears with it the fate of the republic -the battle between reaction and imperialism, fed by the selfish desires of privileged interests, and the democracy of the Declaration of Independence the democracy of Jefferson and Lincoln, based on the idea of freedom, justice and fraternity.

We had been discussing recent events and their portents, and turning to the

poet I thus took up the thread of the conversation that had engaged us in the street:

"It has often been noted by historians that some one thought or ideal becomes the keynote or master-concept of an age in periods of great moral awakening. It seems to me that all things point to a new civic renaissance that may do much not only to bring our republic back to the old ideals of democracy, but also to a higher ideal of statesmanship. What are your views on this point and what do you conceive to be the master-demand of twentieth-century statesmanship?"

"Everyone seems to feel," replied the poet, "a great seismic wave passing over the whole world. This is distinctly the age of social awakening. A new sense is breaking through the crust of customthe sense of solidarity, perhaps the most powerful emotion in the heart of man. We are all coming to see that we belong together; that humanity is one; that in a very deep and vital sense humanity has but one hope, one destiny. This sense is the basis of the democratic passion, and out of this passion will finally spring that new order which was foretold by St. John on Patmos and struggled for by Mazzini, Garibaldi, Jefferson, Lincoln,

and all the social heroes and apostles of the race. Poor is the statesmanship that is empty of this ideal, dead to this passion." "Do you not conceive it to be necessary," I ventured to ask, "in order to break up the new despotism of corporate wealth and machine-rule, that the initiative and referendum be introduced into our political life, so that they may be as easily applied as they are in the republic of Switzerland?"

"I certainly do," replied Mr. Markham. "If we had men wholly consecrated to the common welfare-men guided by conscience and richly endowed with wisdom, then we might trust ourselves to the ideal of a purely representative government; but as long as the people must fight their servants in order to receive any fragment of justice, it is necessary for the people to come closer and closer to the management of public affairs. As life now is, it is of the first importance that the initiative, referendum and right of recall be introduced as effective measures for public safety. The more truly democratic we can make our government, the more certain we are of peaceful progress. No doubt we must get closer to the source of political life, which is the people. Our country now is largely in the hands of the land-barons and the trust-barons. It is becoming a government of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations. "I asked your views on this question largely because of the extraordinary statement recently made by United States Senator Henry Cabot Lodge in an attack upon Direct-Legislation which he made at the celebration of the two hundredth anniversary of the town of Brookline. After extolling the town-meeting system for the government of small communities, he said:

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“On the other hand the methods of the town-meeting should never be permitted to trench upon the representative government of state or nation. . . . The essence of representative government is responsibility, and when that responsi

bility ceases representative government becomes anarchy and we are fairly on our way to such scenes as were enacted during the French Revolution, when the Paris mob, breaking into the Assembly or Convention, dictated the passage of laws. The control of the electors over the representative is direct, and if he does not satisfy them he can be replaced, but it is not to be forgotten that he represents not merely the people of his own district but in due proportion the people of the entire state. If responsibility is taken from him by compelling him to vote for measures solely because they have secured a certain number of petitioners, or if he is at liberty to refer measures of all sorts to popular vote, he ceases to be a representative and becomes a mere machine of record. When responsibility vanishes representative government is at an end and all the safeguards of debate and discussion, of deliberate action, of amendment or compromise, are gone forever, legislative anarchy would ensue, and we might easily find ourselves in a position where the mob of a single large city would dominate legislation and laws would be thrust upon us ruinous to the state itself and to the best interests of the entire people of the state.""

"Are those the Senator's words or merely an abstract?" asked the poet.

"They are his verbatim utterances. I personally heard the address, which Mr. Lodge read from manuscript. He also presented a copy to the press and the address was published in full in the Boston Transcript. Indeed, it was on the presses of the Transcript when the Senator was delivering it at Brookline; so it is not only his verbatim utterance but his view expressed with deliberation."

"It seems to me, then, that Senator Lodge," said Mr. Markham, "is sadly wanting in that faith in the people that marked our great democratic statesman, Lincoln, who constantly insisted that the people can be trusted; that the great heart of the world is just. The Senator says that the legislator represents the

people, but he more frequently represents some soulless corporation or base political boss. Direct-Legislation would surely do something to destroy this growing danger to the nation."

"Under democratic government," I ventured, "of course the people are the fountain-head or source of rule and the representative is merely their public servant, while under aristocratic, monarchal, or other form of class-government the people are the pawns or subjects of the ruling power and not the sovereigns or real masters. This, in fact, is a chief difference between democracy and classrule, and in the light of present conditions, where the absolute mastership is in the hands of the party-boss and the machine controlled by privileged interests, nothing could be more absurd, fallacious or essentially out of harmony with the genius and spirit of free government than the stand taken by Senator Lodge, who for some years has has been politically speaking the boss or feudal lord of Massachusetts."

"Yes," replied the poet, "we have been supposing that our officers are our servants, but we are now awakening to the fact that our officers are the servants of our new commercial feudalism. The Senator says that the people have the power to recall their faithless representative, but, alas! he cannot be recalled until he has plundered the public cupboard. Perhaps even at the end of his term of office the boss, the 'kept' editor and the controlled machine may thrust him back into the plundered house to again betray the people in the interests of his real masters. Something must be done to give the people a more certain control of the political machine now run in the interests of unjust privilege and commercial piracy. We are in a government where our political philosophy is based on the idea that the people are the one fountain-head of political authority, the one source of all that shall be law and government. The distinguished Senator's views, if adopted, would serve to hinder, if not to frustrate,

a direct expression of the will of the people. This would doubtless be gratifying to privileged interests and to the representatives of commercial piracy, but it is reactionary and anti-democratic."

"You will notice, Mr. Markham," I observed, "that the Senator is solicitous lest the people's representatives should become mere machines of record for registering the people's desires. If they fail to register the people's desires, are they in any true sense their representatives? As a matter of fact, whatever else they are, they are not the representatives of the people or what they pretend to be. Now one of the chief objections that in recent years has been advanced against the people's misrepresentatives in our municipal government, in legislatures, in Congress, and especially in the United States Senate, where Mr. Lodge is a leading member, is that the officials are merely machines for registering the commands or wishes-not of the people, it is true, but of the great public-service corporations, such as the railways and the express companies, the Standard Oil Company, the Wall-street gamblers and other privileged interests that make the political boss and the controlled machine wellnigh invincible by reason of the campaign contributions and other favors. I have never heard of Senator Lodge being in the least concerned on account of the persistent manner in which his colleagues have disregarded the welfare, the wishes and the demands of the people when making themselves mere machines of record to register the wishes or the commands of corporate wealth.

"We have surely gone far from the old democratic moorings and well into the domain of class-rule, if the people's servvant is not expected to carry out the wishes of the people. If he is to be the creature of the political boss or the tool of corporate wealth, which is now frequently the case, he ceases to be the popular representative and becomes the betrayer of the people, and the whole theory of our government is set at defiance. And

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