Ida M. Tarbell

“ There has never been seen, indeed, in the world’s history, a more splendid courage in bearing burdens than the people of the United States—North and South—showed in the Civil War. It is an inspiring thing to study. If it had had no reverse! But it is one of the curious and puzzling phenomena of human nature that the situation which inspires some to their highest endeavor arouses others to their lowest. That the same cause makes martyrs of some men, cormorants of others. If a war for a great cause brings out the nobler qualities of human nature, it brings out at the same time the vicious. ”

“ A woman is often slow to learn that good housekeeping alone cannot produce a milieu in which family happiness thrives and to which people naturally gravitate. She looks at it as the fulfillment of the law—the end of her Business. It is the exaggerated place she gives it in the scheme of things, which brings disaster to her happiness and gives substance to the argument that woman's lot in life is fatal to her development. Housekeeping is only the shell of a Woman's Business. Women lose themselves in it as men lose themselves in shopkeeping, farming, editing. ”

“ But Napoleon refused; it was the soldiers upon whom he called.
“We have not been conquered [he told the army] . Come and range yourselves under the standard of your chief; his existence depends upon you; his interests, his honor, and his glory are yours. Victory will march at double-quick time. The eagle with the national colors will fly from steeple to steeple to the towers of Notre Dame. Then you will be able to show your scars with honor; then you will be able to boast of what you have done; you will be the liberators of the country....” ”

“ Poor little Sabinsport! Born only to know and to desire her own corner of the earth, wishing only that her people should be free to work out their lives in peace—she had a long road to travel before her mind could grasp the mighty problems the Great War had put up to the peoples of the earth, before her heart could feel as her own the passions and aspirations that burned and drove onward the scores of big and little peoples that fate had brought into the struggle.
But there was no problem in Belgium’s case. Germany had sworn to respect her neutrality and she had broken her oath. ”

“ This, then, is high protection’s most perfect work—a state of a half million people turning out an annual product worth $279,438,000, the laborers in the chief industry underpaid, unstable, and bent with disease, the average employers rich, self-satisfied, and as indifferent to social obligation as so many robber barons. It is an industrial oligarchy made by a nation’s beneficence under the mistaken notion that it was working out a labor’s paradise. Not only is it a travesty of the principles of protection, it is a mockery of that very individualism behind which it takes refuge. ”

“ Will there be enough good will in China to coöperate when these rearrangements are made? Will there be enough in the United States to accept the pledges of mutual support which must be made if the nations concerned are to limit their armaments? Have we enough faith in men to accept the only possible alternative in the present world to unlimited armament, and that is, a union of peoples pledged to face misunderstandings at their beginning, to separate them into their elements, and to bring all the force of collective judgment and intelligence to adjustment? ”

“ Food supplies had to be abandoned, as there were no horses to draw them. Thousands stretched out by the fire at night never to awaken in the morning. Cold and starvation killed them.
At Smolensk the army presented an appalling spectacle. Napoleon headed it, clad in furs, his expression set and stern. Behind him came the captains, majors, and lieutenants, then a few harnessed wagons with the emperor’s war chest and papers; after that the straggling forces, many of them unarmed, limping, half frozen, some wandering away with wild looks, others falling by the roadside never to rise again. ”

“ One of the severest strains society makes on human life is that of adapting itself to ever changing conditions: yesterday it dragged us in a stagecoach; to-day it hurls us across country in limited expresses; to-morrow we shall fly! Once twilight and darkness were without, shadows and dim recesses within; now, wherever men gather there is one continuous blazing day. He who would keep his task abreast with the day must accept speed and light; for the law is, think, feel, do in the terms of your day, if you would keep your hold on your day. ”

“ Young men, boys, old men, steadily marching to death, and always behind them others coming to fill their places—the earth ravaged of its manhood. High hearts, great loves, beautiful talents, beneficent powers, destroyed until the earth had been stripped of its best. Women, steadfast and brave, giving lovers, sons, friends—all that made life fruitful and lovely—giving them with no waver in their heroic souls, the only outward sign their whitening hair, their sinking cheeks, their anguished eyes. ”

“ So long as Josephine was true, no other woman could have existed for him. Such is the strange exclusiveness in love, of a nature, brutal, sweet, and strong like Napoleon’s. It should never be forgotten, however, that when the poor little creole realized, that to keep her position she must be faithful, she never after gave offense, and that as the years went on her devotion to her husband became a cult. Nothing indeed in the history of women is more pathetic than the patience, the sweetness, with which Josephine performed all the exacting and uncongenial duties of her position as Empress. ”

“ Kelley to a tariff-made Pittsburg, blind to the appalling inhumanity of her mills, or to the shameless looting of a great state building. Once the appeal to men’s greed is the established rule of a state’s politics, the inevitable outcome is every degree and species of baseness. On the other hand, a people trained by its leaders to think of the general good, to consider principles and ideals as of first importance to national life, to feel that our fundamentals must be preserved before everything else—such a people will rise to any height of enthusiasm and sacrifice. ”

“ To insist that they are anything else is to overlook the facts of life, to doubt the sanity of mankind which hopefully and courageously goes on building, building, building, sacrificing, binding itself forever and ever to what?—a shell? No, to the institution which its observation and experience tell it, is the one out of which men and women have gotten the most hope, dignity, and joy,—the place through which, whatever its failures and illusions, they get the fullest development and the opportunity to render the most useful social service. ”

“ The loves of men and women bent before the flood. Patsy had been caught in the onrush. She could not escape—would not, though her heart was breaking over Ralph’s contempt for her great, consuming passion. What she did not realize at all, and what Dick could not make her see, was that Ralph himself had in these last years been swept away by a splendid, unselfish ideal akin to her own, that all his efforts in Sabinsport had been to realize his hopes, that the war had stripped him of his cause, and that he had not as yet found his way out of the ruins. ”

“ One may be convinced that the fundamental principles of his life were despotic; that he used the noble ideas of personal liberty, of equality, and of fraternity, as a tyrant; that the whole tendency of his civil and military system was to concentrate a power in a single pair of hands, never to distribute it where it belonged, among the people; one may feel that he frequently sacrificed personal dignity to a theatrical desire to impose on the crowd as a hero of classic proportions, a god from Olympus; one may groan over the blood he spilt. ”

“ It is a new knowledge of that tide of life which breaks at her very gate that the childless and the free American woman needs, if she is to discharge her obligation to the uncared-for child. To force these facts upon her, to cry to her, "You are the woman,—you cannot escape the guilt of the woe and crime which must come from the neglect of childhood in your radius,"—this is the business of every man and woman who has had the pain and the privilege of seeing something of the actual life of the people of this world. ”

“ Any one who has observed the life of the working-man on both sides of the Atlantic knows that wages, conditions, opportunities, are vastly superior as a whole in the United States. It is a New World, with a New World’s hopes. But it is only the blind and deaf who do not realize that the same forces of allied greed and privilege which have made life so hard for so many in the Old World are at work, seeking to repeat here what they have done there. ”

“ Love makes one sensitive—sensitive to fleeting shadows that others never see, to secret hopes and faiths that others never know. Dick had not been long home before he began to understand that Sabinsport, hammering at her war tasks like a Vulcan, hating her enemy as robustly and openly as any primitive deity, still was restless in heart, dissatisfied with the war, untouched by its loftiest aims and hopes. ”

“ As a matter of fact, Napoleon regarded the divorce as a great state affair. To perpetuate France’s peace, stability, glory, an heir was necessary; therefore he and Josephine who loved each other parted. They suffered that France might live. The divorce then, was to be regarded as a sacrificial rite, and Josephine was to be placed before the country as a noble victim to whom the greatest honor then and ever should be shown. Such was Napoleon’s idea, and quietly, in this month after his return from Schönbrunn, he was preparing a ceremony which would put the affair in this light to the country. ”

“ Wherever you find in woman this perversion—old maidish is perhaps the most accurate word for her—it is a sacrifice of the human to the material. A house without sweet human litter, without the trace of many varying tastes and occupations, without the trail of friends who perhaps have no sense of beauty but who love to give, without the scars of use, and the dust of running feet—what is it but a meatless shell! ”

“ They were the best of friends, this eager, active, confident young editor and this cool, humorous-eyed, thoughtful young parson. Wide apart in birth, in type of education, in their contacts with the world, they were close in a love of decency and justice, in contempt for selfishness and vulgarity. Both were accidents in Sabinsport, and so looked at the town in a more or less detached way. This fact, their instinctive trust and liking for each other, and the clinching force of the great tragedy in which they had first met had made them friends. ”

“ But practically everybody but the beneficiaries were for cleaning up the tariff. The evils inherent in it—and nobody of intelligence ever denied that they were many—were big, easily seen:
Enormous profits to the few; steadily increasing prices to the many; one-sided development of the country; factories growing like gourds and no ships of our own to carry the goods in; the country sacrificed to the city, the peace of God to the blare and the roar of the steel furnace. These ungrateful children of protection had grown until they threatened to crush us. ”

“ Soldiers! you have precipitated yourselves like a torrent from the summit of the Apennines; you have driven back and dispersed all that opposed your march. Piedmont, liberated from Austrian tyranny, has yielded to her natural sentiments of peace and amity towards France. Milan is yours, and the Republican flag floats throughout Lombardy, while the Dukes of Modena and Parma owe their political existence solely to your generosity. The army which so haughtily menaced you, finds no barrier to secure it from your courage. ”

“ The end of living is a life—fair, sound, sweet, complete. The vast machinery of life to which we give so much attention, our governments and societies, our politics and wrangling, is nothing in itself. It is only a series of contrivances to insure the chance to grow a life. He who proves that he can conquer his conditions, can adjust himself to the machinery in which he finds himself, he is the most genuine of social servants. He realizes the thing for which we talk and scheme, and so proves that our dreams are not vain! ”

“ He grew sick and faint as he saw men he loved making their landings through spitting shell and shrapnel, saw them crawling through mesquite and sand to attack, saw them wounded and abandoned, going mad under the burning sun or dying of pain and exhaustion where they lay on beach or hillside. It was infernal; a mad, romantic adventure, gallantly, chivalrously undertaken and carried on to its ghastly failure.
Dick could neither forgive nor forget Gallipoli. Then came the attack on Verdun—and the crust broke in Sabinsport. He was no longer alone now in his anxiety. Everybody cared. ”

“ In spite of the sinister events of the sojourn at Bayonne—it was here that the King of Spain, Charles IV., and his heir, Ferdinand, abdicated their rights and that Joseph Bonaparte was made King of Spain—there was much gaiety around Josephine. There were dinners and fêtes and drives, and the French Empress and the Spanish Queen Louise seemed to enjoy each other’s society as if a throne were not changing hands and a noble house falling, because of the disgraceful inaction and jealousy of one ruler and the cynical ambition and self-confidence of the other. ”

“ It is a place where men and women of all ages, conditions, and points of view are welcome. So far as I have been able to discover, genuine freedom of mind and friendliness of spirit are what have made Hull House possible and are what will decide its future after the day of the great woman who has mothered it and about whom it revolves. There is no formula for building a Hull House—any more than there is a home. Both are the florescence of a spirit and a mind. Each will form itself according to the ideas, the tastes, and the cultivation of the individuality at its center. ”

“ Going to Europe was still an adventure. There had been a time when Sabinsport numbered so few people that had been to Europe that she had formed a society, “The Social Club of Those Who Have Been to Europe.” It had not lasted long, for she had a sense of humor which saved her from keeping alive that which savored of snobbery, and the Social Club of Those Who Have Been to Europe died a quiet and early death. ”

“ From the populace Alexander and Talleyrand feared nothing; it was too exhausted to ask anything but peace. Their most serious difficulty was the army. All over the country the cry of the common soldiers was, “Let us go to the emperor.” “The army,” declared Alexander, “is always the army; as long as it is not with you, gentlemen, you can boast of nothing. The army represents the French nation; if it is not won over, what can you accomplish that will endure?”
Every influence of persuasion, of bribery, of intimidation, was used with the soldiers and generals. ”

“ Knowing nothing but your work is one of the commonest human mistakes. Pitifully enough it is often a deliberate mistake—the only way or the easiest way one finds to quiet an unsatisfied heart. The undue place given good housekeeping in many a woman's scheme of life is the more tragic because it is a distortion of one of the finest things in the human experience—the satisfaction of doing a thing well. It is a satisfaction which the worker must have if he is to get joy from his labor. But labor is not for the sake of itself. ”

“ Whatever their professions, they went forth to lay bare the futility and selfishness and greed of the present world. They had no perspective, no charity, no experience, but they had zeal, courage, and the supporting vision of a world where no man knew want, no woman dragged a weary life through factory or mill, no child was not busy and happy.
Never has there poured into the country a group more convinced of its own righteousness and the essential selfishness of all who did not see with their eyes or share their confidence in the possibility of regeneration through system. ”

“ In one of these romps the little, low silk slippers which the Empress always wore slipped off, and Napoleon, seizing them, threw them into the surf, making Josephine walk back to her carriage in stocking feet. It was with such frolics that the two enlivened the days at Marrac, in the summer of 1808. Their journey back to Paris was a triumphal procession, wherein Josephine, by her tact, her amiability, her unflagging interest, won every heart. Never had she seemed more admirable to Napoleon as an Empress, never more charming as a woman. ”

“ In the normal girl-child it comes out, as does her craving for a doll. Nature is telling her what her work in the world is to be. It stays with her to the end, its flame often flickering long after her arms have ceased their desire to cradle a child. Scorn it, ridicule it, deny it, it is nature's will, and as such must be obeyed, and in the obeying should be honored.
But this instinct, which has led men and women from strings of shells to modern clothes, like every other human instinct, has its distortions. ”