The Outlook Optimistic & Pessimistic – Moses Harman, 10/4/1907

“In the twentieth century war will be dead; slavery will be dead; persecution for opinion’s sake will be dead;
monarchy will be dead; plutocracy will be dead; aristocracy will be dead; the governments of this world will
be merged into one universal republic—one universal brotherhood of equal rights for all and special privile
-ges for none.” Such, in substance and partly in exact words, were the glowing predictions of Victor Hugo,
one of the greatest writers of the nineteenth century of the Christian chronology—the third century of the
more scientific Brunonian chronology. Optimism is good when based on facts and reasonable probability,
but when based upon false or inadequate premises, optimism may prove to be a bad thing. It may bring
about a revulsion, a reaction towards pessimism, because of disappointment—because of failure to mater
-ialize or practicalize the good things promised, at the time and in the way promised by the optimistic prophet.
And such, it is to be feared, will be the result of this famous prophecy by the noble and grand humanitarian,
Victor Hugo. One of the greatest men of the eighteenth century, Patrick Henry, said, “I have no guide for my
feet but the lamp of experience,” and this saying is echoed by the wise and good of all times. All knowledge,
all real knowledge, of man and his relations, of man and his institutions—all ethical knowledge—comes
through experience. Experience shows that like causes produce like effects under like conditions—every
time. Judged by this rule, the glowing predictions of Victor Hugo will not be realized during the twentieth
century of the Christian Era. Looking for causes and conditions producing human ills, we have absolutely
no reason to believe that war will be dead within the next hundred years, or that the cooperative common
-wealth—the universal brotherhood of mankind—will be practicalized within the next hundred years.

All things desirable, and at the same time conceivable, will become the real—will become the actual, the prac
-tical, the factual—given us time enough; but Hugo has not given us time enough in which to make his dream
a reality. Today the causes of war, and the conditions that make these causes active, are such as to make war
in the near future a logical necessity. National wars—that is, wars between classes or sections of nations—and
wars between nations, races, tribes, and peoples—international wars—are today a logical necessity and will
continue to be a logical necessity until causes and conditions are radically changed. What are these causes
and conditions? There are certain ethical maxims, sociologic maxims, that carry all the force of axioms in
mathematics. One of these maxims reads thus: “The institutions of every nation or people are as good and as
bad as the people themselves who make these institutions; or—what is the same thing—who passively submit
to institutions fastened upon them by their ancestors or by foreign powers.” The necessary inference, the logical
conclusion, from this ethical maxim is that to get better institutions, better laws, better customs—whether political,
economic, social, or religious—we must have better people. It needs no argument to show that people were here
on earth before their institutions, and that people make institutions and are not made by them, although it is readily
admitted that institutions react upon their makers. Let us briefly consider our political, or governmental, institutions.
Time was when all men bowed in meek acquiescence to the commands, “Fear God; honor the king.” “Submit your
-selves to the powers that be, for the powers that be are ordained of God.” In later times there have been many
successful rebellions against the idea that men must have a king, an earthly king, to rule over them; but these
same persons who want no king accept the doctrine that the “voice of the people is the voice of God,” forgetting
that the people themselves may be as tyrannical, as despotic, and as unreasoning as any monarch, whether
that monarch be elected by men or appointed by a supposed divine ruler of the universe.

Experience has shown that there is little gained by the change from a hereditary monarchy to an elective one,
and that every government of man by man, whether called a monarchy, aristocracy, or republic, is as good and
as bad as the people who make or who submit to that government. The government of Russia, for instance, is
neither better nor worse than the people of Russia. An unlimited autocracy is the ideal government in the minds
of most Russians. The czar is an unlimited autocrat and will continue to be such until he ceases to be the ideal
of the masses of Russians. The ideal of the English people is a limited monarch: a ruler whose powers are re-
stricted by a so-called constitution and by a House of Commons—the chief legislative body elected by the property
-owning minority of the people, excluding women, minors, the non-taxpayers, and foreigners among the males
—and by a hereditary House of Lords to act as a buffer between the king, the judiciary, and the clergy, on the
one hand, and the people on the other. So long as such a form of government is the ideal of the masses of people
in England, just so long will limited monarchy successfully resist all efforts towards radical governmental reform
in that country. Likewise in the country called the United States of America. Most people in this country will tell
you that there was a “revolution” in 1776, whereby the government was changed from a monarchy to a republic.
Never was there a greater mistake. There was no change in the spirit or in the basic principles of government.
The war of 1776 resulted in a division of the British empire; a part of the American colonies of that empire separated,
set up a government of their own, in which the form and spirit of that of the mother country was very closely
followed. As in the mother country, there are three principal branches of government—the legislative, the
executive, and the judiciary; the legislative consisting of two houses—the “lower” house, elected by the
people (in England called the Commons, in this country called the House of Representatives), and an
“upper” house, here called the “Senate,” there called the “House of Lords.”

The executive department of the government of England is supposed to be the hereditary monarch, but such is
not the case. The king is the figurehead of the executive department, not the real ruler. The real executive is the
prime minister, appointed by the king at the dictation of the people as represented by the House of Commons.
Whenever the prime minister finds himself in the minority on any question of national importance, he resigns his
portfolio, and a new minister is appointed whose views are known to be in accord with the wishes of the people,
as determined by the votes of the popular branch of the government. To show how nearly powerless the titular
monarch of England is, the story is told that W. E. Gladstone, when prime minister, carried a bill to the queen
and asked her to sign it. “No,” said Queen Victoria, “I will not sign that bill.” “But you must sign it,” said Gladstone.
“What’s that?” replied the queen. “Do you know who it is you are talking to? Do you know that I am the queen
of England?” “Yes,” said the prime minister, “you are queen of England, but I am the people of England!” The
bill was signed! It is said the veto power has not been exercised by the English monarch for more than a hundred
years. Compared with this English figurehead, our president is a real live monarch. With his veto power over
legislation, his appointive power—in the army, the navy, the post office department, the judiciary department,
cabinet offices, etc., etc.—he can well afford to say, as did the old French king: “The State? Why, that is me! I
am the State!” In England they have “primogeniture” and hereditary aristocracy, but these governmental evils
are more than offset on this side of the Atlantic by corporate aristocracy, landlord aristocracy (including railway
and mine-owning lords), and through the control of the volume and issue of “legal tender” money by the banking
lords. The parallels and contrasts between the English and American governments could easily be extended
much farther, but what I have mentioned is quite enough to show that the American people did not get rid of
monarchy and aristocracy when they revolted against the rule of old King George and of his prime minister
Lord North. It is quite enough to show that in many respects we have copied the worst features of the mother
country’s institutions and failed to absorb the better features.

A study of the history of our federal constitution, as revealed in the Life, Letters, and Speeches of Patrick He
-nry by Wirt Henry, his grandson, shows us that the framers of our “Magna Charta” never intended this to be
a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. They desired and intended it to be a government
of, by, and for the property-owning class. The British monarchy was their ideal, and they modeled the new
government after this ideal, in spirit, and as nearly in form as the temper of the people of the revolted colonies
would allow them. As in the mother country, so in this country the issue and volume of money is a government
monopoly, and the class that owns and controls the government controls the issue and the volume of money.
By means of this power it is easy to secure tribute (interest) from all trades, all occupations, by those who can
get on the right side of money; and then, through mortgages on land, it is easy for money to capture land,
houses, factories—in fact, all other forms of property—by creating a scarcity of money, by precipitating a panic,
and thus gathering in the accumulations of a lifetime produced by the honest toil of those who do not desire
to rob their fellow beings through the governmental device of legal-tender (debt-paying) money. Talk of “dishonest
money,” “tainted money”—is there any of this government money (which means bankers’ money) that is not
dishonest? that is not tainted with robbery of the real earners of all wealth? Barnum, in his famous lecture on
money, said, “Get on the right side of money; for if you do not, money will beat you in the long run,”—meaning,
of course, that the owners of money will beat you out of your honest earnings through interest and rent.
But the worst of all the institutions copied from the parent government is the marital, the conjugal, the mating
-for-home-and-family institution. Home and family are necessary to human happiness; necessary to the right
homing and right training of the coming generation. Government control of money is a terrible evil, and the
prolific parent of untold crimes and miseries; but government control over the mating-instinct is the legitimate
parent of still more crimes and miseries than is the control of volume and issue of money, because it is more
permanent, more lasting. The cure for the evils of government control in either case is simple enough.

It is comprised in one word: namely, Liberty! Abolish the money of privilege—the robber money, the bankers’
money—substituting therefor the money of Freedom! Let every man and woman have the undisputed right (the
political as well as the natural right) to issue his or her own money, being responsible always for its redemption,
as per terms of issue. No one being compelled to take his money and no one having the power to compel him
to buy the money of privilege to pay his debts, there would be fewer debts made, and these would be paid upon
honor instead of on compulsion. Then there could be no money panics to demoralize trade, impoverish the
honestly industrious, and send millions of innocent people prematurely to their graves. And in the same way,
and for similar but still more forceful reasons, we should abolish the marriage of authority and the divorce of
authority—the government-controlled and church-controlled marriage. Let marriage and divorce be private and
personal affairs, as food, drink, and worship are personal, and as they are elsewhere in nature’s realms—as
among birds and beasts that mate for a season or for life—for family reasons. Let woman, who by nature owns
the creatory, control that creatory, thereby controlling the issue and volume of reproduction—so far, at least, as
she herself is concerned. Then there would be fewer children born and these would be cared for upon honor
and because of love, instead of on compulsion, or to keep them out of the poorhouse, as now. Then there would
be no “illegitimates” born except such as are by nature illegitimate, which is the fate of most children born under
present laws and conditions. Artificial laws and customs produce artificial children; that is, unnatural children
—hunch-backs, club-footed, epileptic, imbecile, idiotic, and, what is incomparably worse, born so deformed
mentally that they naturally drift to vicious and criminal ways of living. This kind of deformity is far more
common than is physical deformity, but far less apparent to the ignorant and superstitious observer who
attributes all vicious and criminal tendencies to “depravity” inherited from Adam and Eve, instead of tracing
such abnormalities to their legitimate cause, namely, the ignorance of parents and the enslavement of
womanhood and motherhood in the conjugal relation.

These are some of the reasons that compel many of us to look upon Hugo’s prophecy as entirely too optimistic
for the next century, if not for many centuries to come. Our money laws and our marriage and divorce laws are
too firmly established in our governmental and societary fabric to permit the hope that they will be eliminated or
radically changed for hundreds of years to come; and until they are abolished or radically changed we may
expect the same kind of wars, the same kind of oppressions and slaveries, or very similar kinds, to continue.
Until womanhood awakes to a sense of the fearful responsibility incurred in bringing children into the world,
and until children are educated, trained, from infancy in the science and art of parenthood with far greater
care than is now devoted to educating and training them for any of the other occupations or professions,
we may expect with infallible certainty that crimes and criminals, penitentiaries, and asylums for the insane
and idiotic will continue to increase, as now, in greater ratio than population increases. At present the greatest
and worst overproduction is overproduction of the unfit, of those who are unfitted from birth for the struggle of
existence; and the worst feature of all this is the demand for increased production of the unfit, the demand for
a perennial supply of “hewers of wood and drawers of water.” The most important, most necessary, then, of all
strikes is a strike of motherhood against this demand; but when, oh when, will womanhood and motherhood go
on strike against this demand of the lords of creation? against the Napoleons who want soldiers; the Roosevelts
who want voters; the “captains of industry” who want cheap and contented laborers? to say nothing of sheriffs,
prosecuting attorneys, “criminal” lawyers, judges of courts, etc., etc., who want victims to justify the payment of
their salaries and their lordly perquisites? Echo answers, When?