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of waitresses included not a few women studying medicine as well as schoolteachers, besides one young woman from California who wanted to see the East and could afford to travel only by some such expedient. To see this battalion of young women dressed in white-not black -moving through the great, brilliantly lighted dining-hall filled with seven hundred guests, where all appointments were fresh and dainty, and flowers added fragrance to every table, was an objectlesson in the aesthetic possibilities of fitness which can make of service a lady's work.

At

At more than one hotel where the Spectator stopped subsequently during his short summer trip, the remembrance of these "lady waitresses" was forced back upon him by way of contrast. one leading Canadian hotel, for example, where the service was particularly bad, the Spectator found that the waiters were imported hundreds of miles from Boston and New York. Being, of course, those who, as a rule, lacked steady places at home, and proving largely inefficient, a number from each invoice were shipped back at the end of each week and their places supplied with fresh importations. Yet, so the Spectator was told, the number of people out of employment in that vicinity was depressingly large. At another resort, one possibly as well known by name as any in the States, the waiters were all colored, of a type, unfortunately, which explains why the colored brother has been so completely displaced as a hotel waiter in New York and many of the larger cities; the type that with open obviousness conforms service to the expected size of the fee, and in the person of the head waiter waves the ordinary guest to an obscure seat with an insolent condescension which means a preliminary payment of five dollars as the price of ordinary decency. This experience set the Spectator wondering whether the old type of colored waiter had completely passed away the type of loquacious, though not familiar, waiter, sincerely interested in the guest's wants and amusingly anxious to supply them, sometimes a little over-zealous, but never offensive and always unaffectedly friendly; a warmhearted type to which only the social

martinet could be unresponsive. The Spectator was glad later to discover the persistence of that type at Saratoga.

The Spectator was at Saratoga during the meetings of the Social Scientists, and witnessed a little incident bearing on the Southern attitude toward the race question which seemed to him typical of the old South and the new. A paper had been read by President Baldwin, of the Long Island Railroad-Mr. Baldwin is one of Mr. Booker T. Washington's trustees-in which the claim was made that the race question will be solved as soon as the colored man is ready to accept the opportunities of industrial education, and to ignore questions of politics and social equality until a new recognition has been earned on a readjustment of race relationship. In the audience was Mr. T. Thomas Fortune, the Radical race leader, who, being granted the privilege of the floor, entered an impassioned protest against any implied limitation on education for the black that did not apply equally to the white-a protest which sentimentally appealed to all as the natural feeling of one of Mr. Fortune's selfwon position despite his color. Near the Spectator were seated two Southern lawyers from different States. The one could hardly restrain himself, so evidently indignant was he that a representative audience could thus permit itself to be harangued by one of the despised race. As he twisted nervously about in his seat, the Spectator was prepared for an outbreak-a "scene" -from him at any moment, and drew a sign of relief when Mr. Fortune finished. The other Southern lawyer sat as interested, but apparently as unconcerned, personally, as any Northerner in the audience. When the protest was finished, he rose and asked permission to make a reply. He began by complimenting Mr. Fortune on the strength of his appeal, conceding the theoretical injustice of much against which he protested. He then passed on to emphasize the fact that the race question in the South is a condition and not a theory, and made the same appeal as Mr. Baldwin, based on personal experience, for the elimination of the race question from politics and society, in the

"What interested the

even

Spectator was the attitude of the first Southerner while the second Southerner was speaking. At the start he seemed more indignant than during Mr. Fortune's protest-that a Southern white man should actually so far forget himself as to answer a colored man. But as the second Southerner went on, making his points with so much consideration, yet with evident certainty of conviction, the first Southerner gradually came to a state of rest, listening quietly and attentively, and in the end joined in the applause as heartily as any one present. It was a great triumph for the method of the new over the old South.

While at Saratoga the Spectator met a Charleston friend who, in discussing the race question, related a curious incident of the shooting of Captain Dawson, the well-known editor of the Charleston "News and Courier." Captain Dawson, it will be recalled, was pre-eminently a man of the new South. He was specially honored by the Pope for his services in bringing dueling into disrepute, and had also an honorable record for his strong protests against lynching. Captain Dawson, it may be remembered, called at the house of a neighbor to protest against the neighbor's offensive attentions, as he construed them, paid to a governess in his own family. In the altercation that ensued he was shot and killed. Indignation ran high that night in Charleston, Captain Dawson being universally popular, and the general belief being, then, at least, that the shooting was not in selfdefense. The sheriff intimated to the employees of the "News and Courier" that if an attack were made on the jail there woud be no resistance, and the employees actually headed a crowd that started, rope in hand, for the jail. Before they had gone a block one of the printers halted them, exclaiming passionately: "Boys, if the old man were alive, the first thing he would say would be-' Give the law a chance.' Can we do for him dead what he would stop us from doing if living?" The cry, "Give the law a chance," was taken up and heeded, the crowd slowly dispersing. "And," added the Spectator's friend, "the neighbor who shot Captain Dawson was legally tried

and acquitted. Captain Dawson's protests against lynching saved the neck of the man who killed him."

The telling of this story to a group of interested listeners led to the telling of quite a different story of the curious vagaries of the inebriated brain. It concerns another prominent editor, not a Southerner, now deceased, whose name, for obvious reasons, the Spectator withholds. This editor had but one failing, the conspicuous failing, it sometimes seems, of brilliant men, that of occasional inebriation. One evening, in this condition, when he was sure to be seized with some strange fancy, he came in after an evening at the theater, where he had seen Kean in Richard III., to dictate a notice. With ingenuity and genuine subtlety, he elaborated in apparently perfect good faith the absurd proposition that Kean was too great an actor to waste time on such trivialities as Shakespearean productions, and should find a play worthy of his powers. His managing editor, to whose attention the offender called the article, with an injunction to omit it if it would not do (being apparently sober enough to appreciate that he had done at least a risqué thing), decided to print it as an awful warning to the editor himself. sensation it caused the next day, and the anger of the actor, who threatened a libel suit for what he took to be a sarcastic attack, actually had the sobering effect desired.

The inebriated editor's topsy-turvy view of Kean and Shakespeare recalled to the Spectator a delightful story with a delightful moral to it told by Professor Trent in a recent essay. A college student, being asked whether he thought Bacon could have written Shakespeare's plays, replied indignantly, being more in love with philosophy than with poetry, "Not much! He wouldn't have wasted his time on such wretched stuff!" That young man, adds Professor Trent, "was not joking, on the principle that a foolish question required a foolish answer; he was merely furnishing an unconscious example of the folly of untrained, impressionist criticism."

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HE creation of the world is complete. The heavens above, the earth beneath, the water under the earth, are all there, and the multitude of living creatures; and God, the creator, declares they are very good. A man makes something. He has made it, and then passes judgment upon it. The artist looks upon his picture, the poet upon the song he has sung, the inventor upon his invention. It is of infinite importance to him whether it is good. These things are feeble pictures of the scene set before us in these closing verses of the first chapter of Genesis. God himself was brought forth in that world. It is a part of his own being. He is looking upon himself when he looks upon the world.

Behind all progress, behind all life any man is living at any moment, there always will sound a great undertone which must

This sermon was preached in Trinity Church, Boston,

on November 24, 1892. The notes from which this arcicle were transcribed were furnished to The Outlook by the Rev. L. H. Waring.

AND GOD SAW EVERYTHING THAT HE HAD MADE, AND, BEHOLD, IT WAS VERY GOOD.-GEN. I, 31.

beat through every conception man must have of himself and his fortunes-this first utterance of God when he looked upon the earth, "and, behold, it was very good." I know not what words could come to us on Thanksgiving Day, on this day of rejoicing, so richly as these words of God himself when he looked forth on the new-made world, and "it was very good."

There are two different facts to be noted with regard to man and his work and progress. One of them is the actual condition of the world, and the other is man's conception of it. They belong together. The one is the essential nature and character of the world, and the other is what man thinks with relation to the world. They are two different facts. The one is objective, the other subjective; that which exists in fact, and that which exists in thought. It is good for man to study these. He is studying the great conditions of life-how the hills were built,

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how they are building. He is studying history, and economic and social life. Along with the actual facts it is well for man to see whether his thoughts and feelings concerning them are right. What does man think of the world? God proclaims it is good. He looks abroad and sees, as no human being ever began to see, all the possibilities of evil, all the issues involved, every sin that has been committed or is going to be, all the dangers and perils; and yet there remains the everlasting word of God that declares it is very good. Now, does man take that same view of it? As we listen to the chatter and musings of our fellow-men, we find there are two distinct conceptions on the part of men, one of which coincides with the voice of God, the other being directly opposed and contradictory to God's word. They come to us out of our homes and out of our streets-these two conceptions, one that it is a bad world, and one that it is a good world. One man calls himself a pessimist, and believes that this world is distinctly a bad one, and that it is moving on to more evil. He sees evil behind every hill, beating in every pulse, in every movement and in every development of human life. What a power the pessimist is in the world! In certain shapes this voice is louder in this time than any other times when philosophers are declaring, as if it were an exhaustive statement, that the great evil of this world is the will of man to live; that man would escape from life by suicide, if suicide really were an escape from life; when these philosophers write books and have schools for pupils who teach after them; when, in the ordinary talk of man to man about the future, there is this cry, "The world is growing worse and worse, and man is moving on towards destruction," when something like a wail meets the new-born babe, and when the old man is dismissed again and again as if he had escaped from the world. When that is current, I say it is time for us to beware of pessimism.

What right have we who are optimists to be optimists? One of these two great classes of men forever delightedly, enthusiastically repeats the words of God, and the other denies them every day. It is necessary that we should explain exactly what we mean by optimism. To some, to

many people, it is a silly sound. The pessimist says, "Yes, you have not been in the slum. You have not looked upon pinched faces. Therefore you say this world is a good world." Now our claim is, the more, the longer, a man lives, the more of an optimist he is. This is a time of definition. It is not so much a time when people believe this and disbelieve that as one when we dispute about our terms. The world is going down into profounder thought and understanding because it will believe or disbelieve with an intenser action on the soul. What do we mean, then, by optimism? It is not a thing of temperament. It is not that certain people are born with cheerful dispositions and other people with gloomy souls. There is that predisposition this way or that way; but natural temperament alone would make man no more than a brute. Nor is optimism the belief that this is a thoroughly good world in which we live; nor is it simply a careless passing over of the evils of life because we do not choose to look at them. On the contrary, a man is an optimist just because he thinks the world a good one, because he sees the whiteness in which God made it, because he sees its possibilities behind every accomplishment. The optimist is the one who feels most bitterly and fully the sin and degradation in the world. Nor is optimism a way of seeing how everything is going to come out for good. A man says, "Tell me what is going to happen; how is this evil to be eradicated." When I say, "I cannot tell," he turns to me and says, "What sort of optimism is that which does not know how the accomplishment is to be?" But the full, complete fulfillment of life would not be that. I know the time shall come when I shall enter into knowledge and truth and into communion with God. Optimism is not personal temperament, nor careless, idle desire, nor simply a broad, clear anticipation of every detail in which the world is going to work itself.

On the other hand, what is it? It is a great belief in a great purpose underlying the world for good, for human fulfillment, which is absolutely certain to fulfill itself somewhere, somehow. Where, how, I do not know. No man does know. There is this underlying purpose, in which there are perpetual hindrances, but more and

more asserting its own fulfillment.

That is optimism. That is what God saw when he looked upon the world and knew. Do you think God was surprised or disappointed when, by and by, the creature he had created sinned? Did not God know beforehand the possibility, the power, of sin? The optimist hears underground, and sees every now and then breaking under the surface, in the Everlasting Presence, the hope that such a history of man has not been able to subdue and that the black and hateful devils of human life have not been able to crush. The hopes of man, the thoughts of man, are facts, as true as the mountain that stands, the battle that has been fought, the reformation that has been made; and this hope of the certainty, the fact that optimism exists, that man is able to conceive of it and keep it, is, in a certain sense, proof that optimism is true. A man who believes in it more and more, even with sin and misery turning up-a man may even, by the very capacity of sinfulness, by the accidents of misfortune and calamity, find some new opening into that great dream. There is the everlast ing growth of man in those great things which must of necessity fulfill themselves. What are the things that are growing greater greater in the world to-day than at any time before? The sense of responsibility and the consciousness of wrong. I defy a min to put his finger upon any page of history when it was clearer than it is to-day that man has something to do with his brethren and that they are his breth

ren.

Yes, it belongs to nations, too. No nation dare act to-day in sublime selfishness. No man dare act to-day as if he didn't care for anybody behind himself.

The deepest life of every human creature, wherever it shows itself, is found in reaching forth in sympathy and acceptation, in the everlasting presence of optimism, the hope that justifies itself, and the growth of responsibility and human brotherhood. It is no trifler who believes in those things and reads their secrets. Let us get rid of the idea that optimism is a mere expedient for happiness, that it is a gay and cheerful way of looking at this world. That there is before man a certain end, that there is in him a prophecy of what a man may be, moves him as it can never move a man who thinks it is

all natural, and who knows no eagle soaring to the sun. The sadness and joy of life belong together. The gladder the world is, the sadder it is; and the sadder it is, the gladder it will be. May I read you the words of the greatest optimist of modern times:

"That God, which ever lives and loves, One God, one law, one element, And one far-off divine event To which the whole creation moves."1 God is not one who sets the world running like a clock. He is the everlasting Life and Light.

Who are they who have been optimists? That is one way we judge of the deepest spiritual truths of any thought. Have they been men who simply dwelt upon the surface of things? I cannot call their names, for they are legion, but the poets are all optimists. Tennyson, sad as he is, sings it every day. It was the same with Browning, and with our own Lowell and his great strains; and it was the same with Whittier, too, who had a hope. They were men who were poets because their souls were full of the certainty of the fulfillment of our human life. Every man must take a hand to make the world better.

All religions are optimistic. A religion. is religious just in proportion as it is optimistic. Our race is an optimistic race. Our land is an optimistic land, in spite of the dreamers' ugly dreams. Even in the generations not yet passed away is seen a great revulsion, a casting out of a vast iniquity, and colossal peace. Who is the optimist of all optimists? Who stands in the center of human history and sees everything, and in its inmost depths knows what it really is? Christ is the optimist, with his blessing and pitying hands. Nobody ever believed in the certain fulfillment of human life as he did. Oh! my friends, we are in grand company when

we

are optimists. If we may not soar with the highest of them, at least we will look up and rejoice in their soaring.

This, then, is what we claim as the justification of our optimism. Nay; go back to the beginning. It came forth from God, who in his first great utterance declared the world good. Our optimism, then, is no silly thing; and its justification is by its own hope. Oh, my friends, never be ashamed, in your college room or in Tennysor's "In Memoriam."

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