Books: Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9
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Elbert Hubbard >> Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9
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So London supplied an abandoned warehouse called "The Foundry," and
here the Wesleys met in a vast body for a service of song and praise.
Methodism is largely a matter of temperament--it fits the needs of a
certain type. The growing mind is not content to have everything done
for it. The Catholics and Episcopalians were doing too much for their
people, and not letting the people do enough for themselves. The
Methodist class-meeting allowed the lowliest member to lift up his
voice and make his own appeal to the Throne of Grace. Prayer is for
the person who prays, and only very dull people doubt its efficacy.
The God in your own heart always harkens to your prayer, and if it is
reasonable and right, always answers it.
"Methodism raised the standard of intellect in England to a degree no
man can compute," says Lecky the freethinking historian. Drunkenness,
gambling, dog-fighting, bear-baiting in whole communities were
replaced by the singing of hymns, prayers and "testimonies," in which
every one had a part. Wesley loved flowers and often carried garden-
seeds to give away, and then on his next trip would remember to ask
about results. He encouraged his people to be tidy in their dress and
housekeeping, and gentle in their manners.
Thousands learned to read that they might read the Bible; thousands
sang who had never tried to sing before; and although the singing may
have been of a very crude quality and the public speaking below par,
yet it was human expression and therefore education, evolution,
growth. That Wesley thought Methodism a finality need not be allowed
to score against him. His faith and zeal had to be more or less blind,
otherwise he would not have been John Wesley; philosophers with the
brain of Newton, Spencer, Hegel, Schopenhauer, could never have done
the work of Wesley. Had Wesley known more, he would have done less. He
was a God-intoxicated man--his heart was aflame with divine love.
He carried the standard far to the front, and planted the flowing
pennant on rocky ramparts where all the world could see. To carry the
flag further was the work of others yet to come.
It was only in the year Seventeen Hundred Eighty-four, when Wesley was
eighty-one years old, that he formally broke loose from the mother-
church and Methodism was given a charter from the State. At this time
John Wesley announced himself as a "Scriptural Episcopus," or a bishop
by divine right, greatly to the consternation of his brother Charles.
But the morning stars still sang together, even after he had ordained
his comrade, Asbury, "Bishop of America" and conferred the title of
bishop on a dozen others. It was always, however, carefully explained
that they were merely Methodist-Episcopal bishops and not Episcopal
bishops. A year before his death Wesley issued an order that no
Methodist services should be held at the hours of the regular church
service, and that no Methodist bishop should wear a peculiar robe,
have either a fixed salary, residence or estate, nor should he on any
account allow any one to address him as "My Lord."
It was a very happy life he led--so full of work that there was no
time for complaint. The constant horseback riding kept his system in
perfect health. At eighty-five he said: "I never have had more than a
half-hour's depression in my life. My controlling mood has been one of
happiness, thankfulness and joy." Wesley endeavored not to make direct
war upon the Established Church--he hoped it would reform itself. He
did not know that men with fixed and fat incomes seldom die and never
resign; and his innocence in thinking he could continue on his course
of organizing "Methodist Societies," and still keep his place within
the Church, reveals his lack of logic. Moreover, he never had enough
imagination to see that the Methodist Church would itself become great
and strong and powerful and rich, and be an institution very much like
the one from which in his eighty-first year he at last broke away.
Charles Wesley and Whitefield died members of the Church of England,
and were buried in consecrated ground; but John Wesley passed
peacefully out in his eighty-eighth year, requesting that his body be
buried in City Road Chapel, in the plot of ground that he by his life,
love and work had consecrated. And it was so done.
HENRY GEORGE
The more you study this question, the more you will see that the
true law of social life is the law of love, and law of liberty, the
law of each for all and all for each; that the golden rule of morals
is also the golden rule of the science of wealth; that the highest
expressions of religious truth include the widest generalizations of
political economy.
--_Henry George_
[Illustration: HENRY GEORGE]
Henry George died in Eighteen Hundred Ninety-seven. Nearly twenty
years have passed since men heard his voice, looked on his strong,
lithe, active form, saw the gleam of his honest eyes, and felt the
presence of a man--a man who wanted nothing and gave everything--a man
who gave himself. Twenty years!
And in those years the world has experienced, and is now passing
through, a peaceful revolution such as men have never before seen.
Those years have given us a new science of religion; a new education;
a new penology; a new healing art; a new method in commerce.
The wisdom of honesty as a business asset is nowhere questioned, and
the clergy has ceased to call upon men to prepare for death. We are
preparing to live, and the way we are preparing to live is by living.
The remedy Henry George prescribed for economic ills was as simple as
it was new, and new things and simple things are ever looked on as
objectionable. The universality of conservatism proves that it must
have its use and purpose in the eternal order. It keeps us from going
too fast; it prevents us from bringing about changes for which mankind
is not prepared. Nature's methods are evolutionary, not revolutionary.
Slaves can not be made free by edict. Moses led his people out of only
one kind of captivity, and in the wilderness they wandered in bondage
still. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation did not free the colored
race, because it is the law of God that he who would be free must free
himself. A servile people are slaves by habit, and habit is the only
fetter. Freedom, like happiness, is a condition of mind. A whining,
complaining, pinching, pilfering class that listens for the whistle,
watches the clock, that works only when under the menacing eye of the
boss, and stands in eternal fear of the blue envelope here, and
perdition hereafter, can never be made free by legislative enactment.
Freedom can not be granted, any more than education can be imparted:
both must be achieved, or we yammer forever without the pale. A
simple, strong and honest people is free. People enslaved by
superstition and ruled by the dead have work at filing fetters ahead
of them, which only they themselves can do. Henry George did not
realize this, and his strength lay in the fact that he did not. He did
not know when men get the crook out of their backs, the hinges out of
their knees, and the cringe out of their souls, that then they are
free. Slaves place in the hands of tyrants all the power that tyrants
possess. Fortunate it was for Henry George, and for the world, that he
did not know that any man who labors to help the workingman will be
mobbed by the proletariat for his pains a little later on. Monarchies
maybe ungrateful, but their attitude is a sweet perfume compared to
the ingratitude of the laborer. He can be helped only by stealth, and
his freedom must come from within. The moral weakness of man is the
one thing that makes tyranny possible.
Tyranny is a condition in the heart of serfs. Tyrants tyrannize only
over people of a certain cast of mind. Tyrants are men who have stolen
power--convicts who have wrested guns from their guards. Watch them,
and in a little while they will again shift places. Henry George was a
very great man: great in his economic, prophetic insight; great in his
faith, his hope, his love. He gave his message to the world, and
passed on, scourged, depressed, undone, because the world did not
accept the truths he voiced. Yet all for which he strived and
struggled will yet come true--his prayer will be answered. And the
political parties and the men who in his life opposed him are now
adopting his opinions, quoting his reasons, and in time will bring
about the changes he advocated. Of all modern prophets and reformers,
Henry George is the only one whose arguments are absolutely
unanswerable and whose forecast was sure.
* * * * *
Henry George was that rare, peculiar and strange thing--an honest man.
Whether he had genius or not we can not say, since genius has never
been defined twice alike, nor put in the alembic and resolved into its
constituent parts. All accounts go to show that from very childhood
Henry George was singularly direct and true. His ancestry was Welsh,
Scotch and English in about equal proportions, and the traits of the
middle class were his, even to a theological sturdiness that robbed
his mind of most of its humor. Reformers must needs be color-blind,
otherwise they would never get their work done--they see red or purple
and nothing else. Born in Philadelphia in Eighteen Hundred Thirty-
nine, on Tenth Street, below Pine, in a house still standing, and
which should be marked with a bronze plate, but is not, Henry George
took on a good many of the moral traits of his Quaker neighbors. His
father was a clerk in the Custom-House, having graduated from a
position as sea-captain on account of an excess of caution and a taste
for penmanship. Later the good man went into the publishing business,
backed by the Episcopal Church, and issued Sunday-School leaflets,
sermons and prayer-books. In fact, he became the official printer of
the denomination. With him was a man named Appleton, who finally went
over to New York and started in on his own account, founding the firm
of D. Appleton and Company, which forty years thereafter was to
publish to the world a book called, "Progress and Poverty."
The worthy father of Henry George was a good Churchman, but not a
businessman. He bought the things he ought not, and left unsold the
things he should have worked off. He didn't know the value of time.
Other people did things while he was getting ready to commence to
begin.
And so the whirligig of time sent him back to his desk at the Custom-
House, on a salary so modest that it meant poverty, and progress crab-
fashion.
The children old enough to work got jobs, and Henry of the red hair
and freckles found a place as printer's devil at two dollars a week.
College was out of the question, and Girard Institute was regarded as
infidelic. However, episcopacy did not have quite so strong a hold
on this household as it once had. The Georges believed in freedom and
took William Lloyd Garrison's paper, "The Liberator," and the mother
read it aloud by the light of a penny dip. Next came "Uncle Tom's
Cabin," and when, in Eighteen Hundred Fifty-six, the Republican Party
was born, the George family, father, mother and children, all had
pronounced views on the subject of human rights--very different views
from those held by the royal Georges of England. When Henry George was
sixteen, the restlessness of coming manhood found expression, and he
shipped before the mast and sailed away to the Antipodes. The boy had
the small, compact form, the physical activity and the daring which
make a first-class sailor, but happily his brain was too full of ideas
to transform him into a dog of the sea.
A trip to Australia, with salt pork all the time, sea-biscuit every
day, lobscouse on Sundays, plum-duff once a month, and a total absence
of mental stimulus, cured him of the idea that freedom was to be found
on the bounding wave and the rolling deep.
At seventeen he was back at the case, setting type and getting a man's
pay because he was able to "rastle the dic.," which means that he was
on familiar terms with the dictionary and could correct proof.
Education is a matter of desire, and the printer's case with bad copy
to revise is better than "English Twenty-two" at Harvard. Henry George
moused nights at the Quaker Apprentices' Library, and he also read
Franklin's "Autobiography"; his mind was full of Poor Richard maxims,
which he sprinkled through his diary; but best of all, with seven
other printers he formed another "Junta," and they met twice a week to
discuss "poetry, economics and Mormonism." It was very sophomoric, of
course, but boys of eighteen who study anything and defend it in
essays and orations are right out on the highway which leads to
superiority. The trouble with the 'prentice is that he does not know
how to spend his evenings; the love of leisure and the wish for a good
time cause the moments to slip past him, out of his reach forever, out
into the great ocean of time.
Life is a sequence--the logical, farseeing mind is a cumulative
consequence. Men who are wise at forty were not idle at twenty. "Read
anything half an hour a day, and in ten years you will be learned,"
says Emerson.
Henry George worked and read, and the "Junta" gave him the first taste
of that intoxicating thing, thinking on one's feet. We grow by
expression, and never really know a thing until we tell it to somebody
else. Henry George was getting an education, getting it in the only
way any one ever can, or has, or does--getting it by doing.
But the wanderlust was again at work; California was calling--the land
of miracle--and printer's ink began to pall. Henry George was a
sailor; every part of a sailing ship was to him familiar--from bilge-
water to pennant, from bowsprit to sternpost. He could swab the
mainmast, reef the topsail in a squall, preside in the cook's-galley,
or if the mate were drunk and the captain ashore he could take charge
of the ship, put for open sea and ride out the storm by scudding
before the wind.
Ships in need of sailors were lying in the offing. When young Henry
George took a walk it was always along the docks. He knew every ship
there in the Delaware, and visited with the sailormen, who told of the
happenings in far-off climes. News from California much interested
him; California was another America, hopelessly separated from us by
an impassable range of forbidding mountains, reinforced with desert
plains, peopled only by hostile savages. But the sea was an open
highway to this land of enchantment. California called! And finally
Henry George overcame temptation by succumbing to it, and sailed away
southward in the staunch little ship "Shubrick," bound for the modern
Eldorado by way of Cape Horn. It was a six months' passage, with many
stops and much trading, and time that seem lifted out of the calendar
and thrown away. Henry George arrived in California penniless. But he
had health and a willingness to work. He became a farmhand, a tramp
pedler, a laborer shoveling gravel into a sluice-way and standing all
day knee-deep in water. It was all good, for it taught the youth that
life was life; and wherever you go you carry your mental and spiritual
assets, as well as your cares, on the crupper. Then there came a job
in the composing-room of a newspaper, and the life-work of Henry
George was really begun, for his employers had discovered that he
could "rastle the dic.," and if copy were scarce he could create it.
* * * * *
The gold-fever got into the blood of Henry George, and his savings
became a shining mark for the mining-shark. A thousand men lose money
at mining where one strikes pay-gravel. Henry George was one of the
thousand.
He got good wages and boarded at the best hotel in San Francisco, the
"What Cheer House." This storied hostelry was owned by a man named
Woodward, who had a few ideas of his own. Woodward not only hated Rum,
Romanism and Rebellion, but also women. Woodward was a confirmed
bachelor, having been confirmed by a lady bachelor in some dark,
mysterious way, years before. So no woman was allowed either to stop
at the hotel or to work in it. The labor was done by Chinese, and
Henry George wrote home to his sisters, describing the place as an
immaculate conception.
Next to the fact that no women were allowed in the "What Cheer House,"
was the further more astounding proposition that the place was run on
absolutely temperance principles, thus, for the time at least,
silencing that hoary adage of the genus wiseacre that no hotel can
succeed without a bar. Woodward became rich, and from the proceeds of
his temperance hotel founded Woodward Gardens--a park beloved by all
who know their San Francisco.
The third peculiar thing about this hotel was that it had a library of
a thousand volumes.
It was the only public library in San Francisco at that time, and it
was the books that led Henry George to spend twice as much for board
as he otherwise would have done.
While Henry George was at the "What Cheer House," an English traveler
added a volume to the little library, Buckle's "History of
Civilization." Woodward tried to read the book, but failing to become
interested in it, between serving the soup and the fish, handed it to
a waiter saying, "Here, give it to that red-headed printer; he can get
something out of it if anybody can." Henry George took the book to his
room, and that night sat reading it until two o'clock in the morning.
That statement of Buckle's, "Adam Smith's 'Wealth of Nations' has
influenced civilization more profoundly than any other book ever
written, save none," caught the young printer's attention.
The next day he looked in the library for the "Wealth of Nations," and
sure enough, it was there! He began to read. He read and reread. And
whether Buckle's statement is correct or not, this holds: Adam Smith's
"Wealth of Nations" influenced Henry George more profoundly than any
other book he had ever read.
Henry George was not yet immune from the gold-fever microbe, and
several times was lured away into the mountains, "grubstaking" a man
with hope plus and secrets as to gold-bearing quartz that would
paralyze the world.
When twenty-one we find our young man one of six printers who bought
out the "Evening Journal." Henry George was foreman of the composing-
room, but took a hand anywhere and everywhere. A curious comment on
the business acumen of the "Journal" men lies in their agreement that
all should have an equal voice in the policy of the paper. Hence we
infer that all were equally ignorant of the stern fact that in
business nothing succeeds but one-man power. So the "Journal" went
drifting on the rocks in financial foggy weather and the hungry waves
devoured her.
When Fate desires a great success she sends her chosen one failure.
Henry George at twenty-two was ragged, in debt--and also in love. The
"What Cheer House" was all right for a man getting good wages, but
when you go into business for yourself it is different, and George
found board with a private family.
The lady in the case was Miss Fox, ward and niece of the landlord with
whom the impecunious printer boarded.
Annie Fox and our printer read Dana's "Household Book of Poetry," with
heads close together.
The inevitable happened--they decided to pool their poverty in the
interests of progress. To ask the landlord for his blessing seemed out
of the question, in view of the fact that the printer was two weeks
behind in his board. The girl had the proverbial clothes on her back.
Matthew McClosky, the uncle, was a good deal of a man. He showed his
shrewdness and appreciation of the present order by buying a large
tract of land near the city, and grew rich on the unearned increment.
Had his niece and the printer confided in him they might have shared
in his prosperity, in which case "Progress and Poverty" would never
have been written.
It was the memorable year of Eighteen Hundred Sixty-one. The heart of
Henry George was with the Union--he had decided to enlist. He told the
girl so behind the kitchen-door. Her answer was a flood of tears, and
a call to arms. The result was that the next night the couple stole
out, and made their way to a Methodist parsonage, where they were
married.
Henry George was nominally a member of the Methodist Church, but the
creed of Thomas Paine was more to his liking--"The world is my
country; mankind are my friends; to do good is my religion." The young
lady was a Catholic, and so the preacher compromised by reading the
Episcopal service. The only witnesses were the minister's wife and
Henry George's chum, Isaac Trump. "I didn't catch your friend's name,"
said the minister in filling out the marriage-certificate.
"I. Trump," was the reply.
"I observe you do," was the answer; "but oblige me with the
gentleman's name."
There are three great epochs in life--birth, death, marriage. The
first two named you can not avoid. Since life is a sequence, no one
can say what would have happened had not this or that occurred. Mrs.
George proved an honest, earnest, helpful wife. Her conservatism
curbed the restless spirit of her husband and gave his mind time to
ripen, for until his marriage the ideals of the French Revolution were
strong in his heart. He saw the evils of life and was intent on
changing them. The Catholic faith is an elastic one, both esoteric and
exoteric, and those who are able can take the poetic view of dogma
instead of the literal, if they prefer. Henry George and his wife took
the spiritual or symbolic view, and moved steadily forward in the
middle of the road. He was too gentle and considerate to quote
Voltaire and Rousseau at inopportune times, and she sustained and
encouraged his mental independence. All of which is here voiced with
one foot on the soft pedal, and with no thought of putting forth an
argument to the effect that young gentlemen with liberal views should
marry ladies who belong to the Catholic persuasion.
The day after his marriage the bridegroom found work in a printery at
twelve dollars a week, and thus was the pivotal point safely rounded.
* * * * *
Here was a man absolutely honest, with no bad habits, industrious and
economical, but lacking in that peculiar something which spells
success. The type is not rare. One trouble was that our Henry George
stuck to no one place long enough to make himself a necessity. Men of
half his ability made twice as much money.
The days went by, and Henry George wrote to Trump, "I am advance-agent
for the stork." Now storks bring love and hope--and care, and anxious
days and sleepless nights. Henry George's domestic affairs had
steadied his bark, and while his relatives in Philadelphia thought he
carried an excess of Romish ballast, it was all for the best. He read,
studied, thought, and wanting little his mind did not list either to
port or to starboard.
Henry George had graduated from the case into the editorial room. He
worked on all the newspapers, by turn, in San Francisco and
Sacramento, and had come to be regarded as one of the strongest
editorial writers on the Coast. The business office was beyond his
province, and as a newspaper was a business venture, and is run
neither to educate the public nor for the proprietor's health, the
manager did not look upon Henry George as exactly "safe." And hence
the reason is plain why George was regarded as a sectional bookcase
and not as a fixture.
At thirty he had evolved to a point where the New York "Tribune" asked
him to write a signed editorial for them on the Chinese question. Then
he wrote for the "Overland Monthly"; and when a great literary light
came to San Francisco to appear on the lyceum stage, Henry George was
asked to introduce him to the audience, especially if the man was
believed to have heresy secreted on his person, in which case of
course the local clergy took no risks of contamination, not being
immune.
On the occasion of the death of a certain tramp printer, whose name is
now lost to us in the hell-box of time, no clergyman being found to
perform the service, Henry George officiated, and preached a sermon
which rang through the city like a trumpet-call, extolling not what
the man was, but what he might have been.
This custom of the laity taking charge of funerals still exists in the
West, to a degree not known, say, in New England, where in certain
localities people are not considered legally dead unless both an
orthodox doctor and an orthodox preacher officiate.
The very poor, and the outcasts of society, in San Francisco began to
look upon Henry George as the Bishop of Outsiders. Often he was called
upon to go and visit the stricken, the sick and the dying. And there
was a kind of poetic fitness in all this, for the man possessed that
superior type of moral and intellectual fiber which makes a great
physician or an excellent priest--he could "minister." And it was only
division of labor that separated the offices of doctor and priest, and
actually they are and should be one.
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