A BID FOR AN EDITORSHIP
I THINK I should like to be an editor, if somebody would do all the disagreeable, hard work for me, and leave me only the fancy touches. I don't know how profound my political articles would be, but they would be mine. I think my book reviews would be pleasant reading, at least to everybody but some of the authors. I should have a high railing round my editorial desk, and "through the lattice" microscopically and leisurely regard the row of expectant men waiting outside for a hearing. I should not need a spittoon in my office. Nobody should contribute to my paper who smoked, or chewed, or snuffed tobacco; that would diminish my contributors' list about right. I should discard Webster and Walker, and inaugurate a dictionary of my own. I should allow anybody who felt inclined to send me samples of big strawberries and peaches, and bunches of flowers; and I should get a fine library, free gratis, out of the books sent me to review. As to grinding the axes of the givers in return, why that, of course, should always be left to the option of the editor. Before I commenced an editor's life, I should secure money enough in some way to be able to snap my fingers in the face of that grim ogre, "Stop my Paper!" I tell you I wouldn't stop it. It is a free country. I'd keep on sending it to him. I'd always have something in every number about him, so that he couldn't do without having it, how much soever he might want to.
Then you should see my desk. It should be dusted once a year, to show editors what a desk might be. My editorial chair shouldn't pivot; there should be no shadow of turning about that. Gibraltar should be a circumstance to it. The windows of my editorial den should be scraped with a sharp knife occasionally, to take off sufficient dirt to enable me to write legibly. I should keep my best bonnet in a bandbox under my desk, for any sudden dress emergency, as do editors their go-to-meetin' hat. Like them, too, I should have a small looking-glass for – visitors! also a bottle of – "medicine" for – visitors! I don't think I should need a safe, as the principles upon which my paper would be conducted would render it unnecessary. My object would be to amuse myself, and say just what came uppermost, not by any means to please or edify my species. Now, I have examined all the papers that cross my threshold, and I am very sure that I have hit on quite an original idea.
If it stormed badly on publication day, I wouldn't send the poor devils in my employ out with my paper, just because my subscribers fancied they wanted it. Let 'em wait. The first fair day they'd have it, of course. In the meantime, the printer's devil, and the compositors, and the rest of 'em, could play chequers till the sky cleared up.
If anybody sued me for libel, I'd – I'd whine out, "Aint you ashamed to annoy a female? Why don't you strike one of your own size?" I should insist on being treated with the deference due to a woman, though in all respects I should demand the untrammeled-seven-leagued-boots-freedom of a man. My object would be to hit everybody smack between the eyes, when I felt like it; and when I saw brutal retribution coming, to throw my silk apron over my head and whimper.
I have not yet decided upon the title of my paper. Children are not generally baptized until after they are born. Nor do I know who will stand sponsor. All that is in the misty future. As to the price, I should nail up a cash-box at the foot of the stairs, and people could drop in whatever they liked. I should, by that means, not only show my unshaken confidence in human nature, but also learn in what estimation the general public held my services. There's nothing so dear to my heart as spontaneity.
A SERMON TO PLYMOUTH PULPIT
O MR. BEECHER! that you should recommend "candy," or "sugar plums," it is all the same, for the youngsters. That you should be quoted through the length and breadth of the land as having done so, to the delight of these youngsters, and the candy-merchants, and the dentists, and the doctors generally! To be candid, I am ashamed of you.
Do you suppose that you are the only grandparent in the land? The only loving, the only proud grandparent? I am a grandparent. I can love as hard as you can. I can show just as bewildering a grandchild as you can. It is just as hard for me to say No to that grandchild as it is for you to say No to yours; but – excuse me —I can do it. She is five years old, but never touches candy. When she was three, a lady in an omnibus gave her a red and white peppermint stick, and she turned to me and asked "if it were not a pretty toy?" She knows now that candy is to eat; but when it is given her, whether in my presence or not, she says, "I am not allowed to eat candy." Meantime, she loves beefsteak, she loves potatoes, she drinks milk and eats bread, with a relish that candy-fed children never know. Either you are very right, or I am very wrong. You see I am touchy on this subject, having worn out several pens and distributed much ink in the crusade against it; and here you, in the Ledger, right under my very nose, with one frisk of your magic pen, cover me with indelible ignominy!
"Mr. Beecher says children should have candy;" and, what is more, he thinks they should be bought to be good by it! Oh, fie!
Well, now, I reply: Mr. Beecher is a man. If his grandchild has the stomach-ache, it is the women of the family who will soothe it, and bear its cries and its wakeful nights. If the little teeth prematurely decay and ache, it is the women who will accompany it to the dentist's for the heart-rending wrench of cold iron. Mr. Beecher, in short, decided this candy question from a man's standpoint. He took the popular side of the question with the children, who will always shout hosanna to him for the same. But, my dear sir, the mothers who, going home after shopping through Broadway, stop each day for the poisonous parcel of sweets for Johnny and Susy, need restraint, not encouragement, from you. They "can't imagine what ails Susy or Johnny, to be so fretful" after eating it. Of course they never for a moment suppose it to be candy. Didn't they eat candy? And are they buried yet? I ask another question: What is the state of their teeth and digestion to-day? What their powers of endurance as mothers? What, in short, do they annually contribute to enable the fat family doctor to ride in his carriage and live in Fifth Avenue? That's what I want to know.
O Mr. Beecher! well as I like you, I don't know what to say to you; and what makes the case more aggravating, I know I shall keep on liking you, whatever you say. That's the worst of it, and you know it. And I am going to send this right off to the Ledger office without a second reading, lest I should qualify it, or trim it up, or make it more respectful because you are "a minister."
No, sir; I won't do it; I'll take example by a rampant female at a public meeting the other night, who was scolding her husband for not getting her a better seat. The distressed man laid his hand on her arm, saying, "Hush! here's Fanny Fern; she will hear you." With distended nostrils, that admirable woman replied, "I don't care for six hundred Fanny Ferns!"
My dear sir, your hand is too well accustomed to drawing a moral, for me to presume to do it for you in this case! Adieu.
FEMALE CLERKS
I HAVE heard the objection made, by women, to female clerks in stores, that they are less civil and attentive to their own sex than are male clerks. I can only answer for myself, that I have never found any reason to complain of them in this regard. In fact, I often wonder at their patience and civility under very trying circumstances. I suppose gallantry supplies the place of patience in male clerks. With so many fresh, pretty, dimpled young faces to look at, a young man need not be so very churlish, though he be not christened Job.
Female clerks, it always seemed to me, must necessarily give out first in their feet. That incessant standing, from morning to night, must be more trying to them than to men. Many women, I know, can walk miles more easily than they could stand for half an hour.
After making a purchase at a store quite late in the afternoon, I said to the young girl who waited upon me, —
"How very tired you must get of us women, day after day!"
"There is a great difference in them," she civilly replied.
"But don't your feet ache sadly?" I asked. "That always seemed to me the most trying part of it."
She smiled as she pulled from under the seat, behind the counter, a stool.
"I thought that mitigation of weariness was against all regulations in stores," I replied.
"Not in this," was her answer. "Mr. – has always allowed his female clerks to sit down when they were tired."
Now, I was so pleased at this that I should like to give that employer's name in full on this page. Here was a man who was wise enough, and, above all, humane enough, to look on their side of the question. In doing so, of course, he did not overlook his own. In doing so, he may also have known that there is a point when even a woman's india-rubber patience, may be stretched too far. He may have known that, when soul and body gave out, and a customer came in at that trying moment, and the "last ounce" having been "laid on the camel's back," the article inquired for they "did not keep!" I say he might have been keen enough to have known this. I prefer to believe, that being a good, kind-hearted man, he tried to make service for these young girls as light as he would wish it made for his own young daughters, were they in that position. It is very certain that, which way soever we look at it, it is an example which other employers would do well to follow.
It wont do the male clerks any harm to stand still; but I would be very glad to have inaugurated this humane consideration for the young women. I heard one of them tell a friend, the other day, that she had to go directly to bed each evening on her return home, because her feet and back ached so intolerably.
Another suggestion: When employers have any occasion to reprove these young women, if they would not mortify them by doing it in the presence and in the hearing of customers, it would not only be more pleasant for the latter, but would be more likely to have its proper effect on the offender. I have sometimes heard such brutal things said by employers to a blushing young girl, whose eyes filled with tears at her helplessness to avert it, or to reply to it, that I never could enter the store again, for fear of a repetition of the distressing scene, although, so far as I personally was concerned, I had nothing to complain of.
The moral of all this is, that men in the family, and in the store too, must look upon women in a different light from that to which they are accustomed; before, to use a detestable phrase, but one which will appeal most strongly to the majority, they "can get the most work out of them." Physicians understand this. Every man is not a physician, but he ought at least to know that backaches and headaches, and heartaches too, are not confined to his own sex.
BLUE MONDAY
"BLUE Monday." By this name clergymen designate the day. Preaching as they do, two sermons on the Sabbath, sometimes three – not to mention Sunday-school exhortations, and possible funerals and marriages; of course, I take no account of what may have happened, on Sunday, in their own families, no more than does the outside world. "The minister" must, like a conductor of a railroad train, be "up to time," – hence "Blue Monday." Flesh and blood is flesh and blood, although covered by a surplice or a cassock, and will get tired, even in a good cause. Therefore the worn-out clergyman takes Monday for a day of rest, for truly the Sabbath is none. He wanders about and tries to give his brains a holiday – I say tries, because he often misses it by wandering into the book-stores, or going to see a publisher, instead of taking a drive, or a ramble in the fields, or wooing nature, who never fails to lay a healing hand on her children.
But Blue Monday does not belong exclusively to clergymen – oh, mother of many children! as you can testify. True, you call it by another name – "Washing-day," – but it is all one, as far as exhaustion is its characteristic. May the gods grant that on that day, when your assistant in nursery-labor must often make up the deficiencies involved in the terrible "family-wash," that no "plumber" or "gas-fitter" send in his bill, to "rile" the good man of the house, to exclaim against the "expenses of housekeeping," and send you into your Babel of a nursery, with moist eyes and a heavy heart? It is poor comfort, after you have cried it out, to try to pacify yourself by saying, Well, he didn't mean to say I'm sorry I ever was married, yet it hurts me all the same; men are so thoughtless about such things, and they go out after hurling such a poisoned arrow, and forget, even if they ever knew it, that they have left it there to rankle all day; and are quite astonished, and, perhaps, disgusted when they come back that the good lady is not in excellent spirits, as they are, and wonder what she, with a comfortable home, and nothing but house matters to attend to, can find to worry her. Now, Mrs. Jones, and Mrs. Jenkins, and Mrs. Smith, I'll lay a wager with each of you, that your husbands have done that very thing, more times than you can count, and on "Blue Monday" too.
Ah! these "chance words," and the thick-skinned utterers of them. Ah! the pity that the needle is no hindrance to the bitter thoughts they bring; but that over the little torn apron or frock, the tears of discouragement fall; the bitterest of all – that he hasn't the least idea "he has said anything," but is, very likely, inviting some fellow that very minute to "take a drink" with him, or to smoke a dozen cigars more or less, spite the "expense." My dears, wipe your eyes. If you look for consistency in the male creature, you'll need a microscope to find it. Your expenses hurt him dreadfully; when I say yours, I mean not only your personal expenses, but the house expenses; for don't you see, had he staid a bachelor, he wouldn't have had a plumber's bill to pay – and that's all your fault, because you said "yes," when he got on his knees to implore you that he might have the felicity of paying your mutual plumber's bill.
But that was then, and this is now!
But isn't it perfectly delicious when those men come home, after making some such blundering speech, the innocent way, after hanging up their hats, that they'll walk into your presence, rubbing their hands, and fetch up standing in the middle of the room with, "Why! what's the matter?" as they catch sight of their wives' lugubrious faces. I tell you, Mr. Smith, and Mr. Jones, and Mr. Jenkins, whatsoever else you do, don't hold your wives responsible for that which they are no more to blame for than yourselves. Or if you will insist upon going over their hearts with a cart-wheel, in this manner, have the manliness when you come home, not to pooh-pooh the resentful tears you have caused.
The fact is, you are but blunderers as far as women are concerned. You are elephants trying with your huge paws to pat humming-birds. Nine out of every ten you demolish. Only physicians understand a woman; and they don't always act up to the light they have.
I would like to write a book on some kinds of legal murder; that is if really good people had not such moonshine notions about "delicacy." This class are really the drags on the wheel of reform. I don't say that sometimes it is not necessary, and even right, to drive rough-shod right over them, if they will persist in walking in such a narrow path; but one does it after all with regret, because they so sincerely believe themselves to be in the "path of duty," as they call it. Dear me! if there ever was a perverted phrase, this is one! It makes me sick to hear it.
What do I mean by "legal murders"? Well, if a woman is knocked on the head with a flat-iron by her husband and killed, or if arsenic is mixed with her food, or if a bullet is sent through her brain, the law takes cognizance of it. But what of the cruel words that just as surely kill, by constant repetition? What of the neglect? What of the diseased children of a pure, healthy mother? What of the ten or twelve, even healthy children, "who come," one after another, into the weary arms of a really good woman, who yet never knows the meaning of the word rest till the coffin-lid shuts her in from all earthly care and pain? Is the self-sacrifice and self-abnegation all to be on one side? Is the "weaker" always to be the stronger in this regard? I could write flaming words about "the inscrutable Providence which has seen fit to remove our dear sister in her youth from the bosom of her young family," as the funeral prayer phrases it.
Providence did nothing of the sort. Poor Providence! It is astonishing how busy people are making up bundles to lay on His shoulders! I imagine Providence meant that women, as well as men, should have a right to their own lives. That they, equally with men, should rest when they can go no further on the road without dying. That while the father sits down to smoke the tobacco which "Providence" always seems to furnish him with, although his family may not have bread to eat, his wife should not stagger to her feet, and try to shoulder again her family cares and expenses.
Sometimes – nay, often – in view of all this, I rejoice in regarding the serene Mrs. Calla-Lily. She goes on just like a man. When she is tired she lies down, and stays there till she is rested, and lets the domestic world wag. If she don't feel like talking, she reads. If the children are noisy, she sweetly and cunningly gets out of the way, on that convenient male pretext, "putting a letter in the post-office." She don't "smoke," but she has her little comforts all the same, and at the right time, although the heavens should fall, and little Tommy's shoes give out. She looks as sleek and smooth and fair as if she were really a lily; and everybody says, "What a delightful person she is! and how bright and charming at all times!"
Now this spectacle soothes me, after seeing the long procession of bent, hollow-eyed, broken-spirited women who are legally murdered.
I exclaim, Good! and think of the old rhyme:
"Look out for thyself,
And take care of thyself,
For nobody cares for thee."
Of course this is very "unamiable" in me, but amiability is not the only or the best quality in the world. I have seen people without a particle of it, as the phrase is often understood, who were the world's real saviours; and I have seen those human oysters, "amiable" people, till sea-sickness was not a circumstance to the condition of my mental and moral stomach.
What a millennial world this would be, if every one were placed in the niche for which he or she were best fitted. Now I know a capital architect who was spoiled, when he became a minister. A dreadful mess he makes of it working on the spiritual temple, as pastor of a country church; whose worshippers each insist upon shaping every brick and lath to their minds before he puts them together; and then they doubt if his cement will do. Poor man! – I know of a merchant, helplessly fastened to the yardstick, who should be an editor. I know of a lawyer, who has peace written all over him, and yet whose life is one interminable fight. I know scores of bright, intelligent women, alive to their finger-tips to everything progressive, good and noble, whose lives, hedged in by custom and conservatism, remind me of that suggestive picture in all our Broadway artist-windows, of the woman with dripping hair and raiment, clinging to the fragment of rock overhead, while the dark waters are surging round her feet. I know little sensitive plants of children, who are no more understood by those who are daily in their angel presence, than the Saviour was by his crucifiers. Children who, mentally, morally, and physically, are being tortured in their several Gethsemanes to the death; and I know sweet and beautiful homes, where plenty, and intelligence, and Christianity dwell, where no little child's laugh has ever been heard, and no baby smile shall ever fill it with blessed sunshine. I know coarse-natured men and women who curse the earth with their presence, whose thoughts and lives are wholly base and ignoble, and yet who fill high places; and I know heaven's own children – patient, toiling, hopeful – sowing seeds which coarse, hurrying feet trample in the earth as they go, little heeding the harvest which shall come after their careless footsteps.
Life's discipline! That is all we can say of it.
How any one with eyes to see all this, can doubt Immortality, and yet bear their life from one day to another, I cannot tell. How persons can say, in view of all these cross-purposes, I am satisfied with this life, and – had I my way – would never leave it, is indeed, a mystery. It must be that the soul were left out of them.
But this doleful talk wont do – will it? I should not dispel illusions – should I? Now, that last is a question I can't settle: whether it were better, if you see a friend crossing a lovely meadow, rejoicing in the butterflies, and flowers, and lovely odors, to warn him that there is a ditch between him and the road, into which he will presently fall; or to let him enjoy himself while he can, and plump into it, without anticipatory fears? What do you think? Anyhow, it is no harm to wish you all a happy summer.
Would it not be well for those who report the "dress" of ladies at a public dinner to instruct themselves in advance as to color? One can always tell whether a man or a woman is the reporter, by the blunders of the former in mistaking blue for green, lilac for rose, and black for pink. The world moves on, to be sure, in either case; but since reporting must be done on such infinitesimal matters, it were better it were well done. A lady who studiously avoids flashy apparel does not care to read in the morning paper that "she appeared in a yellow gown trimmed with pink." Perhaps the avoidance of the "flowing bowl" by male reporters would conduce to greater correctness of millinery statement.