Evening Republican, Volume 17, Number 276, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 November 1913 — PURITAN ANCESTOR [ARTICLE]

PURITAN ANCESTOR

Had a Powerful Influence on the American People. In Hla Original Home He —Favored “Direct Action” and In the Western World Built on Empire— What He AccomplishedNew York. —In a great many affairs that go wrong today the social mlrded detectives do not say, Cherchez le femme; they say, Cherchez the puritan ancestor. That dour figure in sugar loaf hat and buff jerkin and breeches striding on his way to church with his flintlock and his Bible, Is responsible for an extraordinary number of tjiings that now afflict us. He stands in the way of a minimum wage, of Sunday baseball, of the uplifting of the Btage, of the speedy solution of the white slave problem, the divorce problem, the saloon problem, the eugenics problem, the 1 a. m. lobster palace problem, and a good many other problems which, the theatrical managers on Broadway are aching to solve, but are not allowed to. The cavaliers despised the puritan ancestor because he spoke through his nose. But that was a minor fault. The real sin is that he refused to speak at all. He Is the original patentee of the conspiracy of silence to which all our ills are due, as contrasted with the happy nations of the continent where there is no conspiracy of silence on all these fascinating topics, and consequently these problems do not exist. The puritan exalted salvation at the expense of conversation. thus failing to perceive that the latter Is the indispensable condition of the former. If he had not been so afraid of calling a spade a spade, we should now hare a flourishing literature and drama and art, and we should have done away with the social evil, even as conversational people like the French and the Germans have done away with it. Considering that the truth alone can be the basis of true progress and civilization It is astonishing how many things that whining, hypocritical puritan ancestor accomplished In his day. In his original home in England he had not been going many years before he cut off the head of a king, sent another king packing about his business, and in other ways pursued a policy of “direct action” that should appeal enormously to W. D. Haywood. Crossing the Atlantic, he helped to lay the foundations of an empire. For a man who hated to call a spade a spade, it Is remarkable how well h? could use that familiar agricultural Implement. He used it to dig up the ungrateful soil of a rock bound, frost-bitten commonwealth. Later he shouldered his spade and. still speaking through his nose, but for the most, part faithful to his conspiracy of silence, he dug up the more grateful soil of the Mississippi valley and the western prairies and the Pacific river valleys, with occasional deviations to the pickax when he struck the orebearing lands of Colorado and tbe Sierras. He did not lose the early habit of carrying his flintlock Into tbe field. He ÜBed it in Kansas, and five years later he was carrying It over a thousand miles of battlefield. In his own hypocritical way h» called it a fight for free institutions against slavery. When the war was over he went back to farming and railroad bullying, persistent in his churchgoing habits and the tl aditional conspiracy of silence. W® are forced to the conclusion thfit the puritan ancestor fared better than he deserved and builded bet-

ter than he know. Else how can we explain the surprising fact that, In spite of his aversion to discussing sex phenomena arid Sex rights, he created a form of society in which woman attained a prestige, a freedom of action and a scope of opportunity such as she had not known in previous ages. Let others explain how the puritanic ancestor, laboring under the handicap of atrophied conversational powers, ignorant of the works of Ellen Key and Oliver Schreiner, succeeded in working out a theory that it is man s function to labor and provide, and woman’s function to expand and enjoy. The task is too difficult for the present writer. Nor can he explain this other startling fact that, without any knowledge that this is the century of the child, without explicit recognition of the sacred duty he owed to the future of the race as embodied in the child, the puritan ancestor, wherever he went, built his schoolbouse and his church simultaneously, and after the schoolhouse he erected high schools, and after the high schools he created universities, and stinted himself In order that his children might go to these universities and might have more money to spend than was good for them.