Delphi complete works of.., p.232
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 232
To-day, for example, there is a World’s Horse running in a World Race in Cuba. I’m betting on that. And there’s a World Man swimming the Irish Channel — or, no, he’s drowned; but, anyway, there’s some man swimming some channel somewhere — a World Channel — he’s doing it for a World Belt or something. Anyway, I am betting on him. Why wouldn’t I? Personally, I couldn’t swim across the Lachine Canal. So all I can do is bet. You too.
There’s a slight consolation in the fact that these world people come to a natural end. Some one else out-worlds them. I know perfectly well that sooner or later Edward Aspiration Smith will run up against something a little stouter than himself. At the Pan-Continental World’s Entire Globe Million-Dollar Contest, Ed will be beaten out by a Chinese boy from Shantung, who can’t read or write, but weighs half a pound more than Ed. And that half pound will hurl Edward clean down to the bottom again, and people will look on him as quite thin and his book “How I Became Fat” will lose its sale entirely. Such is the poison of the World Stuff.
So it is coming about that we are getting to have a group of World People superior to the rest of ourselves. We sit and look on. The other day in a New York restaurant, they pointed out to me the World’s Most Highly Paid Plumber eating supper with the World’s Champion Baggage-Smasher, and there was a World’s Prize Lady Mannequin eating with them. Could I have had her with me? No. I was outclassed.
If this thing goes much further, I propose to start a society of World Assassinators and send them out. If I do, I warn such people as Mr. Charlie Chaplin and Mr. Fairbanks and Mr. Tunney and the Lady Mannequin, who got the World’s Beauty Prize, to look out. But, pshaw, what would be the use? Before my society was a month old, it would hold a competition and some one in it would take the World Prize for Assassination, and I would have to bet on him.
But I’d like at least to warn the public that some of the consequences of the world stuff are going to be as serious as they are unforeseen. Take the case of War — a thing in itself quite as unimportant to the world as Prize Fights or Tennis or Beauty Contests. We are in danger of losing it. Not so very long ago everybody was content, amply content, with a quiet little war between one or two nations, just doing the best they could without any outsiders.
Any one of us would, for example, have been satisfied with a select little war between the United States and England, fought out between ourselves with no interference. We might perhaps have allowed the French to look on or even to take a small part because they are old friends. But beyond that we never had any aspirations at all.
But look at the present situation. We are all so spoilt with the idea of a World War that we won’t be content with anything less. I talked the other day with an officer of very high rank in the American Army who expressed to me exactly what is felt in his profession about the outlook.
“You can’t blame us,” he said, “if we are discouraged. The prospect of war, that is, of a real war, a World War, seems most unpromising. Several times lately we could, of course, have had a war with Mexico. But our fellows say they simply wouldn’t fall for it. It’s not worth while. War with Japan used to sound inviting a few years ago. But after all, there are only about seventy million of them and one hundred and ten million of us, or one hundred and eighty million all together — bush league stuff!
“As for a World War,” he continued, “you just can’t get them to come in or at least to agree when it is to be. Some nations would like it to be before Christmas, and others want to wait till after New Year’s when the public are less preoccupied. The result is going to be that, first thing we know, we won’t get any war at all.”
There: That’s the situation as I see it, and the danger that prompts me to write this essay. After which, the only thing to do is to hand the manuscript to a World Organization to give it a World Printer.
Get Off the Earth NOW THAT THIS GLOBE IS USED UP, LET’S LOOK FOR ANOTHER
I WAS HAVING a talk the other day with McGinnis, the famous Frenchman who has just flown from Norway to Nigeria. I think it was he. Anyway, it was either McGinnis or else Raoul de la Robinette, the great American aviator, or the Italian, Schwarz. One mixes these flyers.
The point is that the flyer was complaining that, in the shape in which things are now, there is nowhere left to fly to. “Where can we go?” he asked. “You remember that last summer when Lindbergh and then Chamberlin and then Byrd and the others flew across the Atlantic Ocean, it created quite a stir. But how long did it last? Within a few months the newspapers carried headings such as “Chicago Girl Flies to France,” “Octogenarian Hops Atlantic” — that sort of thing.
“Presently it didn’t even amount to that. Here’s a paragraph, for example,” continued the aviator, “cut out of yesterday’s paper, that reads: ‘Concert Postponed. Madame Hoopitup, the Great Dutch Soprano, who was to have appeared in New York, will be unable to appear to-night owing to a severe cold. It is thought that she may have contracted this in her transatlantic jump. Her medical man, who flew at once from Ohdam to her assistance, has sent for her daughter, who is now flying to Rio to join her brother who will fly with her to her mother.’
“So you see there is nowhere to fly to. After the Atlantic, we soon used up the rest. Somebody flew across to Japan, but the Japanese got back at us at once. Then it was announced that the great Polish aviator, William Henry O’Heir, would fly from Warsaw to the desert of Gobi. And he had everything ready when just then a Mongolian flyer from Gobi landed in Warsaw.
“We’ve tried the poles and that’s nothing. There’s a restaurant now at each of them. In fact, there are no queer places left in the world any more. All the odd spots are gone. The Negus of Abyssinia is advertising for American bartenders. The Grand Llama of Tibet gave an interview on Mother’s Day on the dangers of cigarette-smoking. The Khan of Tartary has put in a golf course, and the Rajah of Sarawak is playing chess by radio with the Begum of Bhopal.
“What’s the good of flying? There’s nowhere to fly to.”
He ceased and left me. And hardly had he gone when I fell into the company of another distressed acquaintance whose principal interest in life till only recently has been radio and all that goes with it.
“I’m done with it,” he said. “There’s nowhere to talk to. Only a few years ago, it gave us a great thrill when New York actually talked to Chicago. Then we lengthened it out to San Francisco and Vancouver. Then there came a time — how childish it seems now — when people actually got excited because New York talked to London.
“It’s queer that no one foresaw what was bound to happen. The earth is only 25,000 miles round at the roundest. And it’s less if you just run round the top half of it. You can’t get more than 12,500 miles away from anybody if you try.
“When New York called up Rumbumabad in the Punjab, they were halfway round the world. And when London called up Dunedin, New Zealand, and Hammerfest, Norway, spoke to Tierra del Fuego, Patagonia, the thing was over.
“There’s nowhere to talk to now. The only reason to talk now would be to hear what they say and think. And that’s nothing. They say and think just what we do. Nobody now is far enough away. Unless,” he concluded wistfully, “we can get off the earth!”
And a little later I met a third. “Business?” he said, “rotten. There’s nobody to sell to. I’ve just been through equatorial Africa selling cars — selling our new closed car with self-regulating refrigeration and a lion-catcher in front. But it’s no good. They’ve all got them. All the highways from Tanganyika to Lake Tchad are crowded with them. There’s no use inventing any more new devices. They just go all over the world in a day.
“And to think that when first I saw equatorial Africa thirty years ago, those people would buy glass beads and trade a chunk of ivory six feet long for a broken soda water bottle.
“But it’s no use. Nowadays everybody knows everything and everybody has everything, and you can’t sell anything. The only way to sell things now would be to get clear off the earth itself. There must be some new boobs somewhere.”
And so, too, the next one. “Travel,” he said. “Why should I? There’s nowhere to travel to. Every place has become just like every other place. Wherever you go you see big signs up with the words GARAGE and GASOLINE. The Chinese wear English golf suits, and the English wear Chinese pyjamas. There are no local manners and customs left. All the world eats French omelettes, chop suey, finnan haddie, and Chicago ham. Even the dervishes now have a room and a bath, and the Hottentots use safety razors. Travel is ended.”
And so it happened that just after I had listened to these different complaints, I read in the paper that paragraph that everybody saw the other day about the possibility of getting to the moon. It seems that Professor What’s-his-name — the great physicist of that big university — says that with modern explosives a huge cannon could easily fire people clear beyond the earth’s attraction and land them on the moon like mashie shots on a golf green.
That’s the thing for us. We’ve spoilt this poor old globe. We’ve got it all so explored and surveyed and exploited, so organized and so uniform, so entirely subdued to our use that the whole place is tame and wearisome. There are no rough spots left.
But think of the moon. With hardly enough atmosphere to breathe in, with great pits and caverns ten miles deep, with internal fires and external darkness, and with life primitive and hideous in the sunken crevasses.
What a place! What a romance, what a chance for inventions, and what a market.
Let us hop off for it, one by one. Go ahead, Colonel Lindbergh, you’re first.
Of course, we don’t come back. But who cares?
Bygone Currents
The Lost World of Yesterday A PEN PICTURE OF THE VANISHED PAST — THE HORSE AND BUGGY
YOU MIGHT SEE it in “Anno Domini 1880,” skimming along any country road, it or them, the Horse and Buggy. A fairy vehicle, it seemed, light and swift, so that the buckboard and the lumber wagon seemed at once hopelessly clumsy, slow, and inconvenient. It was the last word in ease.
It had a step to step in by, so that there was no need to throw oneself over the side, as in the lumber wagon. It had springs between the body — the chassis — and the axle, so that when the wheels hit a stone or bumped into a rut the light chassis oscillated in the air like a canary’s nest on a willow bough.
With the buckboard, each jolt was a collision, head-on and uncompromising; the lumber wagon had about as much give and take as a war chariot; the buggy danced upon its springs like a daffodil.
In front was a dashboard sheltering from the splash of mud, and folded into it, by a miracle of inventive ingenuity, a waterproof rug or cover for the knees. Behind the seat, by another stroke of invention, was a sort of locker or receptacle that would hold two quart bottles.
But the real point of the horse and buggy was their speed. Goodbye to the heavy lumber wagon left behind in the dusty road as we spin past on the green grass that edges the track; goodbye to the buckboard, once the dashing marvel of the corduroy road; goodbye to the hayrack and the horse-threshing-machine, and the other vehicles of the country highway. The buggy passes them as if they are standing still.
The horse and buggy had no speed indicator. But they could hit up seven miles an hour with ease, and make it ten if the horse ran away. There was no speed limit in terms of miles; the law forbade reckless driving, but seven miles an hour was all right anywhere, except only inside a village, or an incorporated town, or a municipality, or beside a church, where it fell to two, and up-hill, where it sank to one.
The horse and buggy used no gasoline. With them, there was no painful nuisance of filling the tank or cranking up. It wasn’t necessary. Just get the lantern and go out to the stable and slip the harness on the horse, bring him round to the trough and break the ice if it was winter, or if it was summer just pump a little till the pump started and fill up the trough, and then put the horse into the buggy and bring them round to the back door, and that was all.
A smart man could hitch in fifteen minutes. Even a child could do it all except the tail-strap.
When the horse and buggy skimmed along in 1880 in the hey-day of their popularity, there was in the buggy, typically, a lady and gentleman — I beg pardon, I am forgetting how to use my own original language — there was in it a “young feller and a girl.” He was taking her “out for a spin.” In 1880, to “spin” a girl was the sure way to win her.
The young feller wore his store clothes, gingerbread brown, and a black hat copied from the North American pirates, and the girl had on a colored dress copied from the Algonquins. They didn’t take their fashions from France in 1880. They got them right here.
The spin in the horse and buggy as compared with the modern motor car — also called the automobile or the horseless carriage — was safety itself. The horse might dash into a snake fence and hurl the girl over it on to a pile of stones in the fence corner; but without damage — you couldn’t hurt those girls in 1880.
The horse might, of course, get a puncture by picking up a stone, but all you had to do was to speak softly to it, lift its leg, and kick it in the stomach. In a few minutes you were off again.
The young feller and the girl in the horse and buggy were making love. They didn’t know it, but they were. They thought that they were just out for a spin looking at the crops.
“Them oats,” he said, “of Bob Ames’s’s ain’t headin’ out the way they should.”
“No, indeed,” she answered, “they didn’t ought to be so green still.”
Both of them had been to school — in the red schoolhouse on the road itself; both of them could “speak grammar” if they tried to; but that would be affected. And when he said, “I ain’t seen no crops on the whole equally superior to them there,” the language had a home feeling about it that you don’t get in a spelling book.
Some of these young fellers of 1880 afterwards sat in legislatures, or preached from city pulpits, and became the nation builders of this continent. But when they gave up saying “this here” and “them there,” they had taken on something alien to their true selves — but did they ever really give it up? I doubt it. In the most plutocratic homes of the continent, when the English butler’s back is turned, your host may still say to you, “Try one of these here cigars.” And if you come from where he does, you will answer, “Yes, sir, they’re a good cigar, them.”
But I forgot the horse and buggy — they’re off and gone a quarter mile down the road; they’re passing through Riddel’s Bush on the hillside, and the swinging boughs and the green leaves nod over their heads. Not making love? I am not so sure of it. Look — the young feller has handed to the girl a “conversation lozenge,” a white, flat piece of peppermint candy with a motto on it in red poison: “If you love me as I love you no knife can cut our love in two.”
When that lozenge was passed from hand to hand in 1880, it was as full of meaning as when Morgan the Buccaneer handed a chip to his associate pirate, or the Turkish Sultan a bowstring to his Vizier. It spelt fate. And if the girl took it and ate it — I mean, “took and eat it” (I keep slipping up on this language) — then her fate was settled.
At the end of the vista of green trees, she could see already in her fancy the meeting-house and the minister and the stern paraphernalia of marriage as it was in 1880.
The horse and buggy have done their work. Turn them head home in the evening twilight.
Come Back to School AND LET US SEE WHAT THE DEAR OLD DAYS FELT LIKE
A NUMBER OF excellent people, as they pass from youth to middle age, begin to look back with regret to their days at school. The idea grows in their minds that their school days were the happiest period in their lives.
Many a prosperous business man pauses in the intervals of his lunch at the club, or stands a moment pensive on his golf course, to recall with wistful longing the days when he was a boy at school. “Yes, sir,” he says to himself or to his neighbour, “I didn’t know it at the time, but those certainly were happy days.” And his neighbour, between the puffs of a Havana cigar, agrees with him.
So let us see what it was really like.
Come back with me for one morning in school.
You, my good friend, prosperous business man and happy head of a household, you will be good enough to transport yourself in fancy back to your school days. Come along to school with me and let us see how you like it.
And by the way, hurry up! School begins at 9 a.m. and you have to be there. I know that you generally get to your office at nine, but then, if you don’t arrive there, nothing happens. This morning, if you are not there at nine, there’s going to be trouble.
A man nearly twice as high as you are and weighing three times as much will interview you about it. In proportion to your present size — that is, so as to reproduce your proper schoolboy impression — he would be eleven feet high and weigh half a ton. And his proposition to you would be that if you can’t come to school on time, you and he will have a few words to say about it.
However, luckily we needn’t worry this time. By good luck here we are at school right on time. But, say, for heaven’s sake! throw away that cigar! Have you forgotten that you can’t smoke in school!
Now you can stand up and pray for five minutes — that will do you a whole lot of good — and then we’ll go right into the arithmetic class.
Take your seat — yes, that little wooden bench; you don’t have a cushion — and let’s begin the arithmetic, the very same thing that you must have enjoyed so hugely in those old days you talk about.
