Various

“ The facts of Socialism, the truth about Socialism, are open to ascertainment by every college and university trustee, by every president, by every giver of funds whose benefactions are employed in part to support the teaching of this devil’s creed that is to supplant our old-time reverence for the altar, the hearth-fire, the family, the graves of kindred, and the flag. There is no vital difference between Socialists. ”

“ A moment’s dreamlike quiet had succeeded the dreamlike noise. Over his head the sky was clear and growing gold, barred with the black flocks of wild-fowl that flew to their feeding-grounds in the valley. The sun rose with the hard flash of metal, and the blink of metal answered from the ruined roof of Mannering’s house. Blake’s breath drew cold. Was he also to die uselessly, wastefully, his work unfinished, under the spears of Wakonda? “Steady, men, steady, and fire slowly! It is ours to hold the gate.”
The Haussa sergeant leaped to his feet. ”

“ Miss Alicia would breathe, enraptured as he jumped from one story to another. “It’s exactly like a wonderful tale.”
She learned to know the New York streets when they blazed with heat, when they were hard with frozen snow, when they were sloppy with melting slush or bright with springtime sunshine and spring winds blowing, with pretty women hurrying about in beflowered spring hats and dresses and the exhilaration of the world-old springtime joy. She found herself hurrying with them. ”

“ TAXES FOR EVERYBODY WHEN the wrack and waste of war are done, and ceased are the tumults and the shouting, the harder task lies before the statesman and the financier of paying the cost. A great war, at least down to very recent times, has usually carried with it haphazard and wasteful financing, an oppressive debt, unequal and burdensome taxation, and a depreciated currency. The aftermath of the Civil War was no exception. At its close all these evils lay heavy upon the people of the United States. ”

“ Life is fermenting in the midst of the dust, the discomfort, the almost ghastly silence.
The great bazaar of Stamboul is a city within a city. As you stand before its entrance you think of a fortress full of immured treasures. And there are treasures of price under the heavy arches, in the [Pg 381] long roofed-over lanes. The bazaars of Tunis seem minute, of Damascus ephemeral, of Cairo dressed up, of Jerusalem crushed together and stifling, when compared with the vast bazaars of Stamboul, which have a solidity, a massiveness, unshared by their rivals. ”

“ Lady Verita hesitated.
“I have,” she said finally.
ON receipt of the magazine, Captain Adair flew home as if he had been a dynamite cartridge. For the first time in his life he was stirred enough to be really very much worth while.
“What did I tell you?” he cried, rushing in upon the guilty person without even having stopped to be brushed by his valet. “Now you have done it. We’ll have to tell now.”
Verita wasn’t in the least upset. If he had been plate-glass and she had been a hammer, she couldn’t have been more aware of where the advantage lay. ”

“ The best thinking is done by men of imagination; the best action is accomplished by men of poise; for, by poise is meant the faculty of holding one’s course courageously to the compass among contrary winds and waves. The value of high literary, artistic, and musical standards is not that they make poise and imagination universal, but that they affect the world secondarily, through the leaders in whom these qualities are developed. Who shall compute the worth to humanity of one great thinker, one great novelist, one great poet, one great painter, one great sculptor, one great composer? ”

“ Socialism is at work, too, in the schools, and it has schools of its own, and in this city its “Sunday-schools.” The doctrines are put before children and youth not as doctrines of destruction and confiscation, and of revolution by violence and bloodshed, but as principles of ethics, of social justice, and the common good, all leading up to the beautiful dream of the brotherhood of man. ”

“ He had realized from the first that New York life had a singular attraction for her. The unrelieved dullness of her life—those few years of youth in which she had stifled vague longings for the joys experienced by other girls; the years of middle age spent in the dreary effort to be “submissive to the will of God,” which, honestly translated, signified submission to the exactions and domestic tyrannies of “dear papa” and others like him—had left her with her capacities for pleasure as freshly sensitive as a child’s. The smallest change in the routine of existence thrilled her with excitement. ”

“ In their open spaces, patches of waste ground, perhaps a few goats are trying to browse among rubbish and stones, a few little children are loitering, two or three silent men may be sitting under a vine by a shed, which is a Turkish café. There is no sound of steps or of voices. One has no feeling of being in a great city, of being in a city at all. Little there is of romance, little of that mysterious and exquisite melancholy which imaginative writers have described. Dullness and shabbiness brood over everything. Yet an enormous population lives in the apparently empty houses. ”

“ What the business man usually lacks is imagination; but imagination was perhaps the largest element in Mr. Morgan’s mind. It was this that made his actions great. It was his constructive imagination that made it possible for Mr. Claflin, President of the New York Chamber of Commerce and himself a distinguished man of affairs, to say: “Like the founders of this nation, Mr. Morgan had prophetic vision; like them, he was an organizer of scattered possibilities and a builder of mighty structures such as no man had built before.” ”

“ Every one has migrated long ago from this quarter of Stamboul. If you stay here, you will be quite alone.” But the old Turk knew very well that all the houses were full of people, of imprisoned women. What a fate to be one of the prisoners!
That was my thought as I looked at the sacred pigeons, circling in happy freedom over the garden where Bajazet slumbers under his catafalque, fluttering round the cupolas of their mosque, and beneath the gray-pink-and-white arcade, with its dull-green and plum-colored columns, or crowding together upon the thin branches of their plane-tree. ”

“ Quietly and with a fine casualness he conveyed the whole picture of the new order at Temple Barholm. He did it with wonderfully light touches, and yet the whole thing was to be seen—the little old maid in her exquisite clothes, her unmistakable stamp of timid good breeding, her protecting adoration combined with bewilderment; the long, lean, not altogether ill-looking New York bounder, with his slight slouch, his dangerously unsophisticated-looking face, and his American jocularity of slang phrase. ”

“ Stamboul near the waterside is full of contrasts so sharp, so strange that they bewilder and charm, and sometimes render uneasy even one who has wandered alone through many towns of the East. Sordid and filthy, there is yet something grandiose in it, something hostile and threatening in the watchful crowds that are forever passing by. Between the houses the sea-wind blows up, and you catch glimpses of water, of masts, of the funnels of steamers. Above the cries of the nations rise the long-drawn wails and the hootings of sirens. ”

“ The fire-tower of Galata looks toward the fire-tower of Stamboul across a forest of masts; but no watchfulness, no swiftness of action, can prevent flames from continually sweeping through Stamboul, leaving waste places behind them, but dying at the feet of the mosques. As one looks at Stamboul from the heights of Pera, it rises on its hills across the water, beyond the sea of the Golden Horn, like a wonderful garden city, warm, almost ruddy, full of autumnal beauty, with its red-brown roofs and its trees. ”

“ Here was a fresh sensation in good earnest, the more pronounced from the fact that there was a very thoughtless dowager marchioness in the Veritas family. It was not many hours before all London was buzzing, and none of the buzzing was louder than that set up by the wheels of the irate aunt’s car as they hummed round and round, spinning her rapidly toward her niece. For the earl’s eldest sister lived near Windsor and was very, very rich, quite rich enough to have a good and legal right to a thoughtless disposition, the latter combined, be it added, with a most uncertain temper. ”

“ From the Bosporus you can see it extending from the hilltop almost to the sea, a great property, outside the city, yet dominating it, with dense groves of trees in which wild animals were kept, with open spaces, with solitary buildings and lines of roofs, and the cupola of the mosque of the soldiers. All about it are the high walls which a coward raised up to protect him and his fear. The mosque is below the great entrance-gates on a steep hillside beyond the walls. ”

“ London, even New York, seems to me almost peaceful in comparison with Constantinople. There is no sound of dogs. They are all dead. But even their sickly howling, of which one has heard much, must surely have been overpowered by the uproar one hears to-day, except perhaps in the dead of night.
Soldiers seem to be everywhere. To live in Constantinople is like living in some vast camp. When I was there, Turkey was preparing feverishly for war. The streets were blocked with trains of artillery. The steamers in the harbor were vomiting forth regiments of infantry. ”

“ SIMON-PURE Socialism is so ugly, so red in tooth and claw, that to be hated it needs but to be seen and understood. Yet there are so many dilutions of Socialism on the market, emotional adulterations and attenuations of the genuine brand, that the inexperienced seeker is pretty sure to have a mixture far below full strength palmed off on him, and after tasting he will be likely to say that the stuff is not so bad, after all. Socialism is offered in the guise of bland and salutary reforms ”

“ At present the American spinster is in a transition stage, a stage so replete with advantages that we may be permitted to hope it will last long. She has escaped from the chimney-corner, and is not yet shut up in banks and offices. She does a reasonable amount of work, and embraces every reasonable opportunity of enjoyment. She gratifies her own tastes, and cherishes her natural affinities. She sometimes cultivates her mind, and she never breaks her heart. ”

“ Some flew far to the tall white-and-gray minaret of their mosque, others settled on the cupola above the fountain. A few, venturous truants, disappeared in the direction of the seraskierat wall, not far off. The greater number returned to their plane-tree on the right of the lover and the scribe. And as the lover suggested, and the scribe wrote from right to left, the pigeons puffed out their breasts and cooed, calling other pilgrims to remember that even the sacred have their carnal appetites, and to honor the poor widow’s memory before going up to the mosque to pray. ”