Martyrs All!
I
THE Age of Miracles is perhaps past, but that of Martyrs is with us still. Brought up in my pious youth upon Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (illustrated edition), I have always realized that Protestants were persecuted, but only recently did I learn, from a survey of modern Catholic preaching, that our Catholic friends feel just the same way. Whether this is a survival from the days of Nero and Diocletian, or a modern adjustment to supposedly Puritan America, I do not rightly know.
Certainly within the Protestant communion the atmosphere is still tinged with persecution odors, real or imaginary. Episcopalians are ‘superior’ to Presbyterians, Presbyterians to Congregationalists, Congregationalists to Unitarians and Baptists, Baptists to Methodists (or vice versa), and all of them to Holiness people and the Church of God. And perhaps this is the place to mention ministers’ sons, who have been cruelly misrepresented in fiction and literature generally, as I who am one should know.
My Quaker friends assure me that misunderstandings with the authorities are not unknown in their religious history; some special instances, indeed, are very vivid in memory unto this day. The Mormons are still keenly conscious of persecution, social if not civil, and even the atheists feel, and doubtless in some places really are, mildly oppressed.
How far this sense of being persecuted is a luxurious inheritance from other and sturdier times is a question that at once presents itself. At any rate the smoke of persecution still hangs thickly or thinly over our whole religious scene.
But not the religious scene alone. Consider the economic. Has not Labor long been oppressed by Capital? The picturesque idea of Crucifying Labor upon a Cross of Gold certainly had some background. And nowadays Capital in its turn is being more and more pounced upon by patriotic politicians who need the money so badly. The surtax now being levied upon the ascending levels or brackets is so great that we cry out, ‘Blessed be Nothing, for it shall not be taken away from us!’ Nor is Capital altogether dumb before its shearer, but, on the contrary, utters loud outcries under the stress of persecution.
Indeed it would be difficult to find a class now more definitely under the chariot wheels than the bankers. The legislatures at one end of the rack and the depositors at the other are turning the screws with a will, until — incredibly enough — we are beginning to feel sorry for the bankers. As the early Christians were so persecuted for supposedly having burned Rome that the Romans began to feel actually sorry for them (consult your Tacitus), so now the poor bankers. Perhaps they are somewhat to blame, but after all the fault is n’t wholly theirs.
Not that the politicians have it all their own way. They too are sometimes reminded that it is not roses, roses all the way, but the patriot’s path may be at times a thorny one. In more than one metropolis they are being rudely assailed, not only by the harmless raillery of the playful press, but even by the coarser hands of bailiffs and constables. It has been often observed that no one should qualify as a surgeon who has not experienced in his own person at least one major operation, and why should not those arch-persecutors, the politicians, have a taste of it themselves? It is not impossible that they may actually be better persecutors in the end because of it.
II
It must by this time be quite clear that we are a persecuting people, well abreast of Nero, Decius, and Genghis Khan, to say the least. Our eyes once opened to this amazing fact, we begin to perceive persecution, or at least the persecuted, on every hand. The railroads are terribly persecuted — foiled, baffled, and controlled. They are, in fact, reduced to positive bondage by the Interstate Commerce Commission, which, it seems, compels them to make bricks without straw, and slays their first-born generally.
And this is clearly the place to utter a feeble wail on behalf of their hated rivals, the motorists. Formerly a free and joyful generation, these are now worn down with manifold exactions. The gasoline tax, originally two cents, has risen to three cents, then to four cents. A gentleman from Oklahoma tells me that in Iowa, he believes, it is five cents. No doubt it soon will be; this may be advance information. Six and eight cents are being proposed. The movement seems to be only getting under way.
The state charges you $20 a year on your car; $40 if you have two; the city $20 on each. I look daily for our alderman to propose a modest tax — say $10 per annum — on automobiles operating in our ward. Of course this is inevitable; it is just a question of who thinks of it first. Smaller places defray their current expenses by arresting opulent-looking travelers by motor who may stray across their miserable precincts. Any pretext will do. Is it not clear that the automobilists are at the present hour perhaps the most bitterly persecuted lot of us all?
But in this headlong listing of oppressed ‘groups,’ as it is now proper to call them, we are overlooking the most ancient and time-honored martyrs of all, the agrarians. When have they not been lamenting their miserable lot? Certainly since the dawn of history, at the very least, and no doubt with very good reason. A distinguished theologian of my acquaintance, once having occasion to spade up the clay soil of his small garden, remarked that it had given him a wholly new conception of the earth’s magnitude. But not only must the agrarians wrestle with this gigantic task, but in doing it they are harshly denied such poor compensations as credits, debentures, stabilizations, and the like, which they strongly crave. This inhumanity is shown them, it appears, by bankers and politicians — two groups which, as we have seen, are not without a sense of persecution themselves in their weak way. But they are mere tyros at it, beside the agrarians, or ‘farmers,’ as they are derisively called.
One of these latter, of my acquaintance, fordone with persecution, has voluntarily banished himself from the American scene and taken up his solitary abode upon an island of the Pacific, thirty miles from the nearest settlement, and with no human company but the keeper of the lighthouse
— as a kind of vast, resentful gesture to his oppressors. I can recall nothing like it since Shakespeare.
Of course this sort of thing does not appeal to me. Something less costly and magnificent might make them feel a good deal worse. But it reflects the agrarian persecution complex at its maximum, and says to any scoffers who may deny the whole thing, ‘There must be a persecution, for here is a martyr.'
In the literary field, who does not know that, where two or three authors are gathered together, an unfailing topic is the rapacity, avarice, cruelty, and greed of publishers? Some refuse the choicest works (here we point with satisfaction to the immortal incident of R.L.S. and the office boy). Others actually snatch the manuscript, half finished, from our supine fingers. Some charge too much for our works, others too little. ’Corrections’ too are a source of discord. Sometimes they swallow the royalties up bodily. Formats, blurbs, and jackets are other forms of annoyance. Sometimes without the least warning they change the color of the cover from a soft, seductive rose to a repulsive mouse-color or drab. Flesh and blood can hardly bear the afflictions put upon helpless authors
— chief among which is, of course, that they never sell half as many of our books as they really should.
There is also the whole matter of persecution in education. This ranges from the oppressed schoolboy whom the brutal teacher hits with a cane (see English literature, passim) to the professor who is ‘relieved’ by his capricious and tyrannical employers for saying the wrong thing. In some institutions of learning, it is said, professors suffer grievous persecutions from the deans — recalling the terrible incident of the Oxford tutor who was starved to death, in the tower of New College, in the seventeenth century, by his Dean!
Even college presidents, who would seem to have achieved security and calm, if anybody has, are haunted and hounded by grisly shapes of trustees, faculty, students, and alumni. One of the soundest of them, having recently celebrated his retirement from active presidential life, was heard to express the most boundless satisfaction at no longer having to give any heed whatever to these turbulent bodies. No wonder these excellent men are sometimes heard demanding, in the experienced tones of authority, the foremost place in the Army of Martyrs.
Within the fields of learning, too, science is (or was) persecuted by theology and the classics, and now persecutes its greedy little sisters, the social sciences, causing them to weep scalding tears.
III
One is more and more struck in all this by the skillful use made of persecution — not so much by the persecutors as by the persecuted. If you can really show that you are a victim of persecution, you have achieved something. People will rally round you — that is, people of the right sort, who feel persecuted themselves.
On the other hand, if you can make out that somebody is a persecutor, you have him at a serious disadvantage. You have turned the tables on him. He is put on the defensive and may soon be in full retreat. So well recognized is the advantage of the persecuted that even the press, which would seem to have everything its own way, occasionally yearns for it, and may be heard complaining of the loss of its ‘liberty’! You wonder what it would do if it had it.
And why should I speak of the mutual persecution of Wet and Dry? The ‘tyranny of drink’ is a phrase that tells its own story. But the Wets, awakening to the tactical disadvantage of being cast for the persecutors, have assumed the rôle of martyrs, and now depict the Dry as a savage and brutal Simon Legree, gnashing his whiskers, cracking a whip, and supported by bloodhounds. A crusade has been declared to rescue I know not what holy place from the infidel, and the persecution complex has a new incarnation.
The Pacifist, too, is a persecuted man. He is vehemently assailed by the press, the admirals, and the Navy League, and finds it difficult to become a citizen of the United States. The Militarist also takes some hard knocks now and then, but in this matter of being persecuted he cannot compare with the Pacifist. The Supreme Court has settled that.
Much reading of the lamentations uttered so abundantly in the Vox Populi columns and the like has convinced me that perhaps our most persecuted class is the real-estate owners. It appears that between the janitors and coal dealers and mortgage holders on the one hand, and the taxing bodies (of which there are said to be 15,000 in our state) on the other, these unhappy creatures, including myself, will soon be torn limb from limb, and, even so, will not provide limbs enough to go round. Some of our citizens, being unable to meet these varied exactions, have relinquished their hearths and homes to the state, which is thereby unexpectedly set up in business as a landlord, prepared to rent the premises, duly decorated, to all and sundry. Should this condition become general, it may be hard to tell us pretty soon from a little bit of the Soviet Republic.
And when it comes to the whole racial complex, with its superiorities and its rancors, one can only exclaim with the Apostle, ‘Who is sufficient for these things?’ The Negro, the Chinese, the Irishman, the Jew, the Scot, the Dutchman, the Italian, the Englishman, the Yankee — one knows not where to end. And yet we are, all in all, a tolerant and a patient people.
Eminent actors, too, have been heard to say that the stage is doomed. What with the movies and the talkies on the one hand, and the stage hands and the ticket speculators on the other, they declare, the days of the legitimate drama are numbered. There is also the innumerable company of family martyrs, so familiar to us all.
I do not propose to psychologize about all this, or to attempt to rationalize it. It may be in many instances an escape mechanism for the disappointed. I do not deny that there is a great deal of truth in some of these attitudes. But it has seemed to me that a broad and rapid survey might help to correct what must often be a morbid state of mind. For I would not, of course, increase this vast web of misunderstanding; I would allay it.
It must, at any rate, be clear that there are more martyrs now than ever before. Indeed it seems difficult now to accomplish anything unless you are persecuted or can convince people that you are. The modern position is one thunderous endorsement of the ancient beatitude, ‘Blessed are the persecuted.’ One perceives that numbers of people perfectly well off are trying to make out that they are oppressed. We have reached a point where a majority of our people are martyrs, or claim to be. The persecution complex has become a disease, and, more than that, an epidemic. And if there is anything sadder than a persecuted man, it is one who thinks he is, and is n’t.