Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 56.djvu/510

496 Highbinders in Chinatown, you can not have failed to have recognized that feminism and Orientalism are very similar. To be or not to be; to be alive or to be dead; to be drunk or to be sober—'tis all the same for the people; 'tis Nirvana. You wish to vulgarize Neminism. What follows your success? Immediately every State will make it an obligatory study in the public schools, and when, in the distant future, we meet the Chinamen face to face, we will be ready to exterminate them or be exterminated by them; for it is an axiom of sociology, which it is to be hoped Mr. Giddings will see the value of and will in the next edition of his Social Euclid make number one, that when two societies completely differing in origin, history, manners, institutions, and laws come together they start in the more quickly to cut each other's throats when they have a common idea in which they can locate a difference, and hence find a logical excuse to begin.

I would have preferred that our president had taken up this unpleasant task of criticising your mischievous efforts to vulgarize our beautiful science, which, like the true religion of the Egyptians, should be retained sub rosa in the temples; but she, as you yourself have said, does not like controversial publicity, and has often remarked that our science is like the mushroom, for, though it is the child of darkness and Byzantian filth, it is eminently adapted to be retained by weak stomachs, while for others it may be nauseating. I am, sir, very respectfully,

, M. Plane.

Though religiously refraining from introducing my own personality in the foregoing, it being a cardinal point in our science that it is good form to appear modest—videri quam esse, as was said of Cato—I am, nevertheless, obliged to observe that I am not at all in any way related to the Dr. Pangloss, LL. D., A. S. S., mentioned in the play of the Heir at Law, nor yet, though perhaps more spiritually akin, to that other Dr. Pangloss—Dr. Leibnitz Pangloss, the tutor of Candide mentioned by the late Monsieur Voltaire of happy memory. Dr. L. Pangloss, a fine old fellow at bottom, was engaged in showing how, in the best possible words, a cause always precedes its effect; for instance, Monsieur the Baron Thunder den Trockendorf has a nose, argues he—it will carry spectacles, hence the nose was created for spectacles, and spectacles are created. It is plain that Dr. L. Pangloss was a scientist. Now, I am a sociologist, and it is the hope of my life to fill the chair of Monadology in the new American university, where I intend to show that while the rich are becoming richer the poor will become richer than the rich in contemplating how much more satisfaction the rich get out