Page:The Pacific Monthly vol. 14.djvu/130



It is said the Czar has issued an ukase making Trepoff dictator and has prohibited any meeting of the Zemstovs and any agitation for Constitutional government.

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 Archbishops, the Bishops, the Clergy, supported the Divine Eights of the Crown, and their preachings and teachings made Charles more obstinate. Louis XIV, Louis XV, and even Louis XVI, though he cut but little figure in the already breaking tempest, adhered to their Kingly special privilege, and in this were maintained by cardinal, archbishop and abbe. 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.

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. Still that cannot be, for this is a law—and the Law is all wise, without fault.

I thought, too, what a soothing effect this would have on the lower nature of the man, and how it would tend to make him return home to love the wife who had testified against him. As I understand the case, he had deposited his wages with her, and because she would not give them back to him, he beat her and struck her in the face and bruised her badly. So far as he is concerned, I am not wasting any sympathy, but I am wondering how his being beaten and then turned loose with a lacerated back will tend to elevate public morals or increase happy homes, or even prevent wife-beating.

This is another argument in favor of Molinari 's theory that war will cease and international arbitration and an international police system will come because war is too expensive. A battleship costs about four millions, and it becomes a useless waste, if a quarter of a million dollar torpedo-boat can put the battleship to sleep in three minutes.

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. 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. But the Farmer is still patient. Job was a farmer.