Charles Erskine Scott Wood

“ I will go out from the Desert while yet I am. I will cast off my fetters and even in rags I will, like a street singer, sing my song. I will sing my song of meditation and defiance ; But even as I go I look back and see the Desert smiling
scornfully. I hear her mocking whisper.
Only Man has enforced his brother;
Only Man has compelled servitude.
Only Man has dwarfed his own godhood, cherished
Poverty and exalted Ugliness. Only Man has defied Nature and set up the idols of his
ignorance. He has denied Freedom and Beauty. ”

“ Universities and dictionaries are the enemies to originality. There is a university fashion in thought as well as in dress—and most men never change the costume.
My voice is for the universities as storehouses of valuable knowledge and places o mental training; but as they are admittedly not a necessity in education, so I would like to see them more the home of workers on individual and original lines; and I would like the young man with his diploma to look inside his own head and reflect: Although you dress a monkey in silk, he will still be a monkey. ”

“ The flowers bloom in the Desert joyously. They do not weary themselves with questioning ; They are careless whether they be seen, or praised. They blossom unto life perfectly and unto death perfectly,
leaving nothing unsaid. They spread a voluptuous carpet for the feet of the Wind And to the frolic Breezes which overleap them, they
whisper: "Stay a moment. Brother ; plunder us of our passion ; "Our day is short, but our beauty is eternal." ”

“ Notwithstanding the greater freedom of women today, women, as a whole, are still dependents, still under masculine domination, still idlers or drudges. They do not, as a whole, care anything about the suffrage question; so I remain obstinate in my belief that the work of these leaders in a just and righteous cause should be among the women.
All things come to a vast and united body of the people which knowg what it wants and insistently demands it. Women must, as a class, demand the suffrage; women as a class must be economically and mentally free. ”

“ The monkey dressed in the silk gown of a college education will still be a monkey.
I am an advocate of college training. It is a luxury none should reject who can have it. It offers ore already dug, and a harvest of friendships; but each man must refine his own ore and win his own friends. The college cannot and does not create one elemental trait. Only the thoughtless and foolish believe a college can make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. ”

“ Every sport, if kept clean, has a good effect, not only as recreation, but, like the play of puppies and kittens, it helps prepare for the contests of life. There is in every town, not excepting Portland, a tendency to support the home team. This is natural. But there seems to be a growing tendency to support it, fair or foul; to insult and mob the umpire who dares decide against the favorites. ”

“ The mountains afar girdle the Desert as a zone of
amethyst ; Pale, translucent walls of opal, Girdling the Desert as Life is girt by Eternity, They lift their heads high above our tribulation Into the azure vault of Time ”

“ So I say they be but sheep and calves who find assurance in a diploma. It is at best but an honorable certificate as to time and course; it cannot of itself impart knowledge. It is not to be conjured with. If the knowledge be not in the brain, the diploma is use- less; and if it be in the mind, the diploma is unnecessary. The struggle to get a diploma by cramming and cribbing is only self-deception. ”

“ And the marvel is that Nero, Louis, Charles and Nicholas have found armies of loyal peasants willing to die for them, to forge their own chains the stronger.
Truly of any existing order of things, man makes a fetich. He dreads change, yet only by change has he ceased to be a besotted slave. The most patient animal is not the ox nor the ass. It is man. ”

“ Because they have put on clothes.
They imitate each other in the follies of their ignorance ;
And all is falsity. They mould all to a false pattern.
The blind correcting the blind.
The more ignorant compelling the less ignorant. ”

“ The college year has begun, and at its end the young man will vault over the bars;, and, pointing his diploma at the world, will shout, "Hold up your hands." But, alas, the world will not stand and deliver for a volley of sheepskins. ”

“ But superior or not, the truth remains that the umpire is part of the game. He is the judge. He does his best, and it is part of the square game to submit to his decisions after fair protests have been decently made. He cannot please every one, and the tendency toward a riot, first by one side, then by the other, when he is obliged to decide against one or the other, is not creditable to any sense of fair play.
It is a pity that in the colleges so few get the benefit of the sports. They have become semi-professional. ”

“ If the great body of women will become so interested as to know their rights and demand them in no uncertain terms, making both parties feel that they will not submit longer to this injustice, but that every home in the land will feel their decided revolt, each party will hasten to be the first to earn the woman gratitude by advocating the woman vote. An aroused popular opinion is all controlling everywhere. ”

“ Anna Shaw, a most eloquent and able woman, commenting on this, said that it was useless to wait until all women wanted the suffrage, because all women never would, just as all men do not now want it; and cited, as example, that the Democratic party gave the suffrage to the laboring man, though all laboring men did not ask it, and the Republican party gave it to negroes, though they did not ask it. But it seems to me that history shows that no government has ever cared for abstract justice. ”

“ We of English blood ought to set up altars at Runny- mede, Marston Moor and Bunker Hill to the worship of Rebellion and Mutiny; by them we have inherited all that makes life worth living and by them others in other lands' and our children shall inherit more and more freedom. ”

“ Mutiny on the Battleship Kuiaz Potemkino and Revolution at Odessa
Russia is learning that the strength of a nation is not in powder and battleships, but in the willing patriotism of a people. Willing patriotism and tyranny cannot exist together. ”

“ To prove that mind itself is not created in colleges, we have only to recall such names as Copernicus, Bruno, Galileo, Newton, Watts, Stephenson, Franklin, Faraday, Edison, Westinghouse, Darwin, Pasteur, Washington, Lincoln, Walt Whitman. The worship of the diploma helps us to respect brainless men who can spell correctly, and to accept fools who know the reign of Queen Anne, or the periods of Homeric poems. ”

“ Instead of the public opinion of the grandstand and the bleachers condemning this unfairness, it seems to encourage the man who will put up the biggest bluff and raise the loudest outcry against the umpire. It is not a very healthy sign of American fair play when a whole field of players and spectators start out to mob one small umpire. ”

“ Oregon has established the whipping post for wife-beaters. Certainly wife-beaters deserve beating of some kind, but as I read of the first chastisement—the observing crowd, the bared back, the skin gradually welling out its blood, the groans of the victim—I wondered if in the creation of so brutalizing a drama we were not paying a high price for the cure. Whether the public was not being hurt more than the back of the man brute. ”

“ The people of Russia are learning that after all has been said about vested rights, inherited rights, the will of God and the rights of the intelligent few, the real truth is that the laws and policies of a country must be for the mass of the people. It is the many v/ho make every country. It is the toil of the many which supports the privileged few everywhere. The laws of nature are for the many. Only the laws of man create privileges for the few. ”

“ The cause of woman suffrage depends, at present, wholly on inherent abstract justice. No party has anything to gain from it so neither party will voluntarily hand it to them. If women will become interested, and will, as a body — not, of course, every woman — but if the general mass will make either party feel that practically the solid woman vote will, because of inherent circumstancesi, go to that party — women will get the suffrage at once. ”

“ If it were not for the interstate commerce clause of the United States Constitution we would surely have interstate protective tariff, in spite of the fact that freedom of commerce among the states has been one of the elemental causes of our progress as a nation. ”

“ Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad. There need have been no English revolution if only there could have been English evolution. But Charles obstinately adhered to what he believed his God-given prerogatives and lost his head, and the evolution came through bloody revolution. ”

“ The old gentleman with the unspellable and unpronounceable name, who is the Grand Metropolitan or Chief Synod or Pope of the Greek Church, stiffens the neck of the Czar against all reform, against every change in the "Godgiven" and very enjoyable special privileges of the ruling classes, and notwithstanding the fine leaven of Constitutional government which is working all over Europe, it is probable that the Russian lump will be leavened only with blood, as were England and France. ”

“ Women are the mothers and instructors of men, and if the general opinion among women was earnestly for the right to vote there would in two or three generations be a body of men voters taught to believe in the justice of woman suffrage.
The existing political powers will not offer the voting franchise to women till they eee some selfish gain in it. Women must, and only women can, make them see that gain — the hope of new recruits or the fear of moral revolt. ”

“ We are a highly moral nation. Well, at least, highly respectable! We are a Christian nation in everything but practice. We are a great commercial success, and commerce is too sacred a thing to be mussed up with practical Christianity. ”

“ It is a blind people which fixes its eyes on the railroad and considers it the sum of all tranportation. Only second to it are the wagon roads, and intelligent farming communities ought to appreciate the tremendous yearly loss to the whole community in bad roads. ”

“ There is no self-made man. The qualities he has and the will power to develop those qualities are mere inheritances, like the weaknesses of his less fortunate brother, and the lack of will power to resist those weaknesses.
The college life is of as much value, or more, than its studies. ”

“ My own address before the National Woman's Suffrage Association was an endeavor to show that when women do vote, it will be only so many added votes to be used, as now, in the various parties by the real mastera of the nation, the professional politicians, to register their will ”

“ I need not say I have no excuse for any man who, knowing better, has defeated the law and defrauded the people, especially of so valuable and limited a property as land. But I think it has not been enough noticed that the Government itself has encouraged the frauds. ”

“ He is admittedly harmless, and so far as disclosed is sane; but it shocked the police that a man should live so far from saloons and in such an uncomfortable way. Under the principles of anarchy, this man, so long as he did not steal nor hurt any one, would be allowed to live his own life as he pleased, whether it pleased the police or not. ”

“ But when Chinese guilds threaten to boycott American products, then the American Christian for the first time sees that his conduct has not only been un-Christian, but ignorant, coarse and vulgar—and also unprofitable. ”

“ A brilliant lawyer, an able and upright judge. A genial friend with a large sense of humor and a large store of pity. And yet his greatest quality as judge and as a man was his sympathy with all men. All men to him were brothers. ”

“ Formerly stove peddlers and wagon peddlers went through the rural districts of Idaho and Oregon and sold good stoves and good wagons at prices lower tlmn those fancied by the country store. To buy good stoves and wagons cheaply was a benefit to the farmer, but that doesn't count. He is only a victim. So the Legislatures of Idaho and Oregon, representing the country store and the local dealer, passed laws putting such an outrageous tax on the stove and wagon peddlers as to put them out of business. ”

“ A power of disposal of the public lands, unqualified and unconditional, which ought not to be conceded to any body of men; (2) the body of men represents really a special shrewd governing class, not the rather ignorant mass of plain people. Not till the ignorant mass perceives the evil and the remedy will the remedy come. ”

“ When I think of Russia's despotism, her salt mines and Siberian wastes,, her voiceless dungeons under the Neva, her peasantry treated like cattle, Omiltchuck shot down in c old blood because he dared to voice a plea for food, artisans and shopkeepers of Odessa mow^ed down by machine guns, plighted word broken, and men who had surrendered on the faith marched out in squads of fifty and shot to death, insolent Grand Dukes and feudal aristocracy repeating the old tyrannies of France, I wonder at our intelligent journalistic headlines — ' ' The Pirates Forced to Sur- render ”