Has Life Any Meaning? a Debate

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LITTLE BLUE BOOK NO. 171 Edited by E. Haldeman-Julius

Has Life Any Meaning ? A Debate Frank Harris and Percy Ward UNION STAGE 1

LITTLE BLUE BOOK NO. 171 Edited by E. Haldeman-Julius

Has Life Any Meaning ? A Debate Frank Harris and Percy Ward

HALDEMAN-JULIUS COMPANY GIRARD, KANSAS

PUBLIC DEBATE ON THE QUESTION HAS LIFE ANY MEANING ? Affirmative: FRANK HARRIS "The Man Shakespeare ," "Oscar Wilde, His Life and Confessions ," etc. Negative: PERCY WARD Lecturer of the Rationalist Educational Society

SUNDAY, APRIL 11, 1920 KIMBALL HALL, CHICAGO Stenographic Report by Maclaskey and Maclaskey , Shorthand Reporters , Chicago

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

HAS LIFE ANY MEANING ? A DEBATE PERCY WARD'S FIRST SPEECH Fellow Sufferers : Schopenhauer, the great German philosopher, said that the right form of address between man and man is not " Sir," and the like, but "my fellow sufferer." Acting upon that profound philosopher's suggestion, I begin my speech by addressing you as "fellow sufferers." In that sympathetic phrase I in clude, of course, our excellent chairman and my distinguished friend , the enemy, Mr. Frank Harris. A story is told about two Irishmen who were , walking down the Strand in London. They no ticed a cripple, sitting on the sidewalk, blind and deaf ; his legs missing, his arms gone. A card attached to the cripple's coat stated that he was an English working man and had suf fered these injuries in a factory explosion . One of the Irishmen slipped a shilling into the crip ple's cap. The other asked : "Why did you do that? Don't you see that he's an Englishman? The English are the arch-foes of Ireland ; and yet you gave that cripple, an Englishman, a shilling." Said the other: "That's so ; but he is the first Englishman I ever saw trimmed to suit me." Frank Harris was born in Ireland. I had the misfortune to be born in England. And it is a misfortune to be born in England- or anywhere

HAS LIFE ANY MEANING? else ! Now, an Irishman's idea of heaven is a chance to "trim" an Englishman. I am not satisfied with marrying an Irish lady. I tempt Fate by engaging in a debate with an Irish gentleman who can wield an intellectual shilla lah more effectively than any other living son of Erin! My friends must think I am greedy for punishment! Mark Twain, in a letter to a clergyman, said that when a man is a pessimist before forty eight, he knows too much ; and if he is an op timist after forty-eight, he knows too little. Now, I do not like to label myself like a pot of jam or a jar of pickles . But I may say that I am not an optimist. And I do hope it is not necessary to inform you that I am not forty eight! An ex-Christian Scientist was once asked why he had become a back-slider, or unchristian-unscientific. He confessed that he was tired of being "so damned happy all the time." I think we need some good doses of pessimism to make life interesting after the monotony of optimism . Has life any meaning? Judging by the size of this audience, there is evidently some doubt about the question. I trust we shall answer it to your satisfaction . My case this morning rests upon three ques tions. First : How can life have any meaning at all, when all living things, along with the world on which they live, are doomed to death and destruction ? Second : What meaning can there be to life , when its dominant law is age long and world-wide struggle for existence ? And, third: What possible meaning can there be to life, when the chief experience of living things is suffering and pain? My whole case is based on those three questions. If, in my second and third speeches, I find myself "up

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against it" I shall keep repeating those three questions ! Astronomers are pretty certain that the de struction of our earth is inevitable. Our globe has not always existed ; and it will not always exist. We learn from astronomical science that this tiny ball on which we live- which, like a moth in the universal ether, flies around the candle of the sun- will some day perish and be as if it had never been . The moon is a dead world- one of countless dead worlds in the cemetery of space. The moon is the skeleton at our feast. It holds up to our eyes the fate of our planet. It is made of the same material as our earth ; it was originally part of our earth. Because of its smaller size, it cooled off faster than its mother earth. Some day our earth will become as is the moon, the corpse of a world. Astronomers tell us that, beyond any ques tion, all life on our planet is destined to come to an end by the extinction of the sun. The sun is continually radiating a stupendous amount of light and heat into space. It has done so for millions of years ; and may go on doing so for millions of years. But it cannot go on doing so forever. Although the quantity of heat in the sun is very great, it is not end less. The sun is growing smaller year by year. It has been calculated that the diameter of the sun is shrinking about 250 feet every year. Now, it is a certain conclusion that the sun must gradually cool. The heat sent by the sun to our earth will some day cease. When the sun has cooled to a certain extent, it will cease to give the earth sufficient light and sufficient heat. The terrible coldness of icy space will some day enwrap the earth; the earth even tually will become frozen to the core ; and hu

HAS LIFE ANY MEANING? man life-all life-will be forever wiped off the face of the planet. That is the prophecy of science regarding the doom of man and his world. Many attempts have been made to visualize the final cataclysm. A grim picture of the des tiny of the earth has been painted by Camille Flammarion, the eminent French astronomer. He writes : From the summit of the mountains the mantle of the snows will be spread over the valleys, driv ing before it both life and civilization . New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Constantinople, Rome, would successively sleep under the eternal snows. Such towns would then be only arid deserts split with fissures much more terrible than the solitudes of those Polar regions at present known to us. ** * * The last representatives of the hu man race will come and expire on the shores of the last remaining equatorial sea, beneath the rays of a feeble sun that from henceforth will only light a moving tomb that shall turn again and again around a light-giving but insufficient heat. At this epoch our planet would have reached a tem perature approximating to 273 degrees below zero. In 10,000,000 years the great body of the earth worn, aged, sterile, and solitary- will bear on its dried surface the ruins of its brilliant past.

The stage of human life, with all its trage

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No one has matched Shakespeare's sublime utterance in the familiar passage : Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air ; And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inhabit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind.

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dies and comedies, with all its laughter and all its tears , with all its sorrows and all its joys, with all the achievements of science and of civilization, with all the beauties of nature and of art, will some day vanish like a dream ! Now, nearly all the religions of the world admit that this life is not worth while , that this life has no meaning at all, unless there is for man a life after death in which he is to be compensated for his sufferings in the pres ent life. Consider, then, the belief in the individual immortality of man in the light of the revela tions of astronomy. Death is the law of the universe. Yet "man, proud man, dressed in a little brief authority, most ignorant of what he's most assured," is so conceited as to im agine that he is the one and only form of exist ence in the infinite universe that is an excep tion to the universal law of death . "It is to laugh." My gifted friend , John Emerson Rob erts, has eloquently said : S How splendidly audacious is man's hope of im mortality! Man dreaming that he shall live for ever ! Yesterday he was not, yet believes he will be tomorrow. Without a past, yet claiming an everlasting future for his own. Commend me to the superb audacity of the human soul that has dared to frame so colossal a dream of things. Planets age, decay and pass away ; continents themselves crumble ; mountains corrode ; the grand bulwarks of the sea are worn by waves and fretted by the tooth of time. Worlds themselves grow old ; stars die and perish ; suns burn out their ceaseless fires and the galaxies of heaven know them no more. Yet man, a thing of dust, a breath, a passing specter, a bubble on the boundless sea, infinitesimal man dreams of life everlasting . Death, he says, shall not be death to him. He will arise and pass on and on , youthful and joyous, jocund and free, forever and forever. The dreamer as

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suming the qualities of the eon ; the finite claiming infinity ; dust defying death ; the molecule making itself God ; the meanest saying, "I am eterinty.' Such is man, who lays to his soul the flattering unction that he shall live forever. Can audacity go further? With what immeasurable egotism is man's best hope won ! Can arrogance, pride and vainglory transcend such appalling impertinence?

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I ask my friendly foeman, therefore, in view of the fact that death is the doom of man and the doom of his world , what is the significance of human life ? What does it mean ? My.an swer, in the words of Goldberg, the cartoonist, is, "It doesn't mean anything." Now, I come to my second question: What meaning can there be to life when its dominant law is age-long, world-wide, struggle for exis tence? Is Natural Selection a process which has any meaning? Is Natural Selection a plan which you can imagine was designed by intelligence and benevolence ? For countless ages our world has been a vast battle field. Nature has pro duced more organisms than can find room and food . The result of this profligate increase of life has been a universal and ceaseless struggle for existence. Life has been a perpetual war fare of animal against animal, with no mercy to the vanquished. By means of this struggle for existence , the weakest are crushed out ; and the fittest -or fitter- survive to propagate their race. Only by this ceaseless strife and slaying has life maintained itself. The essential condition for the conservation of any life is the destruc tion of many other lives. In this universal and eternal strife, each makes war with the rest to win. I ask my distinguished opponent, is there any

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meaning, any purpose, any sense, in this piti less, ceaseless struggle, which is the supreme law of all life ? This evolution of living things, brought about by devilish cruelty and bloody competition, brings into plainest relief the utter meaninglessness of life. If any god deliberately designed that organic evolution should be a process of excruciating suffering, awful agony, and merciless slaugh ter, then such a god is either infinitely bad or infinitely mad. Such a god is either an al mighty criminal or an almighty lunatic. George Bernard Shaw says in his Man and Superman : "The imagination cannot conceive a viler criminal than he who should build an other London like the present one, nor a greater benefactor than he who should destroy it." Now, I want to improve upon George Bernard Shaw. I often improve upon God, so why not on George Bernard Shaw ? I would not attempt to improve upon Frank Harris. That would be an impossibility. But I would improve upon Shaw and say : "The imagination cannot con ceive a viler criminal than he who should create another world like the present one, nor a greater benefactor than he who should de stroy it." Now I come to my third question : What possible meaning can there be to life, when the chief experience of living beings is suffering and pain? The facts of daily human experience all wit ness to the reign of nonsense in human life. "This unintelligible world" is a theater of misery. Schopenhauer says : "If a god has made this world, I would not like to be that A06 god ; the misery of the world would break my heart."

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What does life mean to the majority of men and women ? What are they living for ? Think of the wearisome occupations which slay per sonality, and make human life a vanity. I invite Mr. Frank Harris to consider In gersoll's indictment of modern civilization : In the days of savagery the strong devoured the weak- actually ate their flesh. In spite of all the laws that man has made, in spite of all advance in science, literature and art, the strong, the cunning, the heartless still live on the weak, the unfor tunate and foolish . True, they do not eat their "flesh, they do not drink their blood, but they live on their labor, on their self-denial, their weariness and want. The poor man who deforms himself by toil, who labors for wife and child through all his anxious, barren, wasted life who goes to the grave without even having had one luxury-has been the food of others. He has been devoured by his fel low men. The poor woman living in the bare and lonely room, cheerless and fireless, sewing night and day to keep starvation from a child, is slowly being eaten by her fellow men. When I take into consideration the agony of civilized life- the num ber of failures, the poverty, the anxiety, the tears, the withered hopes, the bitter realities, the hunger, the crime, the humiliation , the shame-I am almost forced to say that cannibalism, after all, is the most merciful form in which man has ever lived upon his fellow man.

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FRANK HARRIS' FIRST SPEECH Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen : I noticed that your chairman emphasized the restriction of the thirty- five minutes' speech just a hint to me not to go further. I proposed to Mr. Percy Ward- when he told me the usual sequence of things in such a debate as this-I proposed to him to limit the speeches to ten minutes each and let us have an intimate talk about the matter. In set speeches we don't get near each other- minds don't touch in such a way. When Mr. Percy Ward begins by telling you that life is not worth living and that God is either mad or bad, I have only old Cato's an swer for him. He said : "There are fifty easy ways out of this life ; he is a coward who com plains about it." Mr. Percy Ward believes in death, final and complete ; absolute rest from all our troubles. He can get it in half a min ute. He comes here and tells you that he is tired of being here and that anybody who sent him here is a fool or an ass ; that God is a lunatic ; and all the rest of it. What has it all to do with Percy Ward ? He can end it in a minute. He is the master of his fate, the cap tain of his soul. As to me, I am not tired of it all. All this pessimism is absolutely silly, as well as bad it is not true and discouraging to boot. Goethe, the greatest thinker in the modern world, says : "Keep your doubts, your fears, your pessimism, to yourself. I have enough doubts and fears of my own. But, if you have any hopes, if you have any encouragements, to give men in this

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world, then give them and you will become a benefactor to your kind." It seems to me that it is impossible to discuss this matter. It is so simple. We , all of us, by living, every day, disprove this gentleman's argument. So all I have to do is to sit and Ilook at him and grin. I don't see any possible argument in it. He quotes Shakespeare to you. Let me also quote him to you. He says : "There's a divin ity that shapes our ends , rough hew them as we will." Mr. Percy Ward would change that. He would say : "There's a divinity that shapes our ends rough, hew them as we will." This new reading, I must confess, was first sug gested to me by Mr. Percy Ward himself. He tells you that science has predicted that the sun will disappear. The moon is an object of contempt. The pity of it ! I wonder, has he ever gone with a girl for a walk on a moon light night ? I cannot begin to talk about this pessimistic nonsense. My friend , Mr. Percy Ward, tells us that the end of all being is constant suffering and pain. Schopenhauer says SO. Well, Schopenhauer was a great philosopher, a real thinker. I don't know what was the matter with him. You know, he also talked about the fair sex. He referred to them as "that undersized narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped, short-legged race," and scoffed at their beauty. With that belief, I can understand Schopenhauer saying this is a vale of tears. But I have not that conception. I have known perfectly beautiful girls' figures, again and again- more lovely than any sculptor's dream. Thank God! And I want to say that for the kisses of one of them I would endure all this horrible misery

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all over again. And I am twenty years older than my friend Mr. Ward. The argument is this : Because you cannot sit down to the feast of life and enjoy it for ever, from eternity to eternity, it is not worth beginning. But have we stomachs to go on with through eternity? I am satisfied with my sixty or seventy years of the feast- completely. I have enjoyed it all, every bit of it. Even to the drawing of the curtain at the end, I have enjoyed it all. And I would cheerfully go through it all again-how cheerfully ! When Mr. Percy Ward gets to sixty, I hope he will begin to realize how cheerfully he would be sixteen again instead of sixty! Mr. Ward tells you that the sun contracts two feet, seven inches, every hundred years , or something- I don't know what. He tells you that scientists assert that the sun is con tracting steadily. A few years ago the world was almost shocked by the discovery that one little atom, called radium, gives off heat and gives off light, continuously, without diminu tion of the original substance ; and scientists have begun to remodel all their talk about the sun losing its heat, light, and all the rest of it. I want you to keep in mind a single verse that Mr. Percy Ward quoted. It is from Shakespeare. These our actors , As I foretold you, were all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air. Who shall set a limit to what this spirit of man can do ? Hardly have we crossed the last continent and mapped out Central Africa when we are able to voyage through air spaces in finitely larger than the whole of our planet, and able to go down under the seas, as well

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two new worlds to explore. There is no limit to the unconquerable spirit of man! Then Mr. Percy Ward tells you about this little worm, man ; about this little span of life ; and all the rest of it! I prefer to look on his achievements rather than his limitations. Look at what man has done already ! Such and such an astronomer and mathematician discovers, and proves, that because of the aberrations in one star there must be a great world near it-whirling around , burned out, in icy darkness-the weight of which deflects this star from its proper course. He deter mines the size of the burned-out planet and everything about it, and it has never been seen by human eyes ! And, at the same time, an other astronomer was doing exactly the same thing and arriving at exactly the same result. Think of proving the existence of something that has never been seen! A thought in the mind of this atom, man, is a law governing the furthest star. Auguste Comte, the philosopher, said in 1849 or 1850, that there were two things that would never be discovered. The one was the origin of life ; the other, the chemical composition of the stars. A couple of years later, two German students-awful Huns ! -two German students were working together in their laboratory, pass ing oxygen, passing hydrogen, through a prism , and catching the various colors on a white sheet. They found out that the various ele ments gave different colors. Hydrogen, for instance, showed a wavy black line. They were extremely interested . Kirchoff, one of the students, said to the other, Bunsen : "We'd better go to Leer's Cafe, or we'll not get any thing to eat." He pulled on his coat and started . Bunsen put down the prism on the

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window-sill ; and they went to lunch . When they came back, Kirchoff said : "Who has been here? Somebody has put the wavy hydrogen line on that sheet of ours." Bunsen replied : "Nobody could get in. I had the key with me. What does it mean?" They loked at the sheet a minute and could not make it out. Suddenly Bunsen reached for his prism, and the wavy line disappeared. The two students looked at each other. They had discovered the chemical composition of the stars ! It was the dying sunlight coming through the prism and writing the hydrogen line on the sheet. The chemical composition of the stars had been discovered, though a few years before Comte had said it could never be discovered by man ! Mr. Percy Ward would put a limit to our unconquerable spirits . Think of what we have Think of the little chattering come from ! ape that is only two or three hundred thousand years away from us! See her, with her little jealousies and all the rest of it, and the little bit of mother love that is going to come and redeem all of it and change it all- the little bit of love in her that is so full of promise for the future that some of us can live on the promise alone, and forecast a glorious future from our sunless past. Mr. Percy Ward refers to eternal life . He wants the banquet to go on forever. I believe that death is the end. Here is another passage from Shakespeare about it : Men must endure Their going hence even as their coming hither. Ripeness is all.

"Ripeness is all." It is a very good object to put before men- to come to ripeness , the full power of your faculties. Excellent! A

16 HAS LIFE ANY MEANING ? good thing that Mr. Percy Ward has left out of his conclusion . But there is still a better one-perhaps the deepest meaning of life. The deepest thing in life is not happiness. The deepest thing is growth ; to come more and more into kin with the greatest who have thought and felt in the past ; to feel oneself on a level with the best ; to stand as Keats put it "on the forehead of the time to come," with the thoughts of five thousand years in our minds and in our souls-and all the hopes and sweet feelings they have caused-a forecast of the joys that those who come after us are going to taste ; for joy is growing and the domain of darkness shrinking . I would like to talk to you, if I could, about the Holy Spirit of Man, and about the Super man who will come, must come. What does it matter to us what God is, if we can make ourselves gods ? All the ideas of love, of wis dom of self-restraint and self-control, can be here materialized in our lives. Why do you complain when you can make yourselves gods? Why don't you rise to the limit of your powers? What is this man talk ing about-that you cannot do this thing and the other ? You cannot live forever. He does not even know the relativity of space and time. You can live like a god for a night! Crowd in great thoughts and feel ings ; enjoy the throbbing flood of love ; and see if it is not endless to you! All the eternity you want! Goethe says : Die Zeit ist mein Vermaechtniss , Wie herrlech weit und breit. Time is our inheritance, How lordly wide and broad.

Have you ever tried to live a day as greatly

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as you could ; as richly as you could ; as nobly as you could? When I look out on Chicago one of the ugliest cities in the world- I don't think you have ; because if you lived noble lives for one day, you wouldn't be able to stand Chicago. But there is one beautiful view in Chicago on Wabash Avenue, looking north to the Auditorium. A noble building, strangely out of place in Chicago, evidently made by a great man, a great spirit- Louis Sullivan. I stopped there staring, and wondering at the pity of it, the other afternoon. And not a person stopped with me-all Percy Wards, don't you know, complaining of being tired be cause they run up and down . And today again, I stopped and looked at it, the endless long lines of it leading the soul up and up into the blue! Louis Sullivan, a great living soul among you ! You ought to be proud of it. The argument that life cannot have a mean ing because death is the end-that there can be no joy because the joy is not going on for ever- I cannot answer such piffle. Then Mr. Ward adduces the argument that because the dominant law of life is the strug gle for existence, therefore it is no good . But. out of the struggle for existence comes prog ress! He didn't tell you that. This is the end and object of the struggle for existence- prog ress, growth-the little apes, evolving higher and higher and higher, through his ferocious struggle, to get to be men. Out of the struggle have evolved the different races, all getting better and better ; all getting wiser and wiser ; all getting more and more humane. For, after all, what is civilization but the humanization of men in society ? We are trying to make the ape human. I answer Mr. Percy Ward's first argument

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about the hatefulness of death with some verses from Swinburne : From too much love of living, From hope and fear set free, We thank with brief thanksgiving Whatever gods may be That no life lives forever ; That dead men rise up never ; That even the weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea. Then star nor sun shall waken, Nor any change of light ; Nor sound of water shaken, Nor any sound or sight ; Nor wintry days nor vernal, Nor days nor things diurnal ; Only the sleep eternal In the eternal night. I would like to quote you, too, Walt Whit man's poem on Death, "beneficent death" ; but it is too long. Then you must all remember the beautiful phrase, I think it is in the Bible : "He giveth his beloved sleep." But "the dominant law of life is a struggle for existence," and it is very dreadful for the lowest planes of life. It is ennobling, however, for all, because the end of it is progress , growth, development into something better. That is my reply to Percy Ward's second argu ment. Mr. Ward's third argument is that the chief experience of every living thing is pain and suffering, from the cradle to the grave. All I can do is to shrug my shoulders and say: For God's sake get out of it ! I wouldn't endure fifty or sixty years of suffering! I notice one funny thing about myself. It

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may be an experience of yours. Looking back over my life I find that it is the memories of joy and love and delight that remain with me. The suffering I cannot remember ; I cannot call back a pang to save my soul . My mem ories go back to the days when I kissed the first girl. My . God . I remember them one after the other, like a chaplet of pearl beads . And at night I count them over and over again, my soul bowed in adoration of the girls who have given me such kindness and love ; and of the men who have given me such friendship and such companionship. I got it on all sides! This desperate struggle for existence ? Why, my God! am I the only lucky dog ? I tell you , you are all pretty lucky, or else you would not. be here!

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PERCY WARD'S SECOND SPEECH My friend, the foeman, is a hopelessly in curable optimist. He literally wallows in cheerfulness. My friend asks me: If life is not worth while, why not end it ? Well, as Clarence Dar row puts it, " there is nothing to make a pessi mist commit suicide, because he knows he is going to die, anyway." For another reason, I would not dream of committing suicide be cause I am waiting for Mr. Frank Harris to publish his autobiography. How does Mr. Harris justify the ways of God to man ? He tells us that out of the strug gle for existence there comes progress . Sir . Oliver Lodge argues that the painful process of evolution will eventually result in a state of universal love. And Mr. W. H. Mallock re 1 torts : "Whatever be God's future , we cannot forget his past." When my delightfully optimistic antagonist points out the beauty and the order in nature, he forgets the cruel means by which the beauty and the order have been obtained. The fit survive ; the unfit perish. Many are projected ; few are selected. Mr. Frank Harris is eloquent about the successes but dumb about the fail ures. He marks the hits, but overlooks the misses. In one sense, however, my friend does not overlook the "misses"! But, seriously, Mr. Harris looks at the result- the Survival of the Fittest ; but he overlooks the process- Natural Selection. I would ask my friendly foeman : What of the countless myriads who have suf

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fered and died while God or Evolution has been working out this growth, this betterment, this progress ? What about the myriads of human babies who have died before they reached the age of one year ? What meaning was there to their life ? Their epitaph might well be : If I was so quickly done for, What on earth was I begun for? If we are to credit God for the survival of the fittest, we ought to censure him for the unfitness of the non-surviving. Mr. Harris spoke about "the holy spirit of man.99 Delicious sarcasm ! My friend says : "Think of what we have come from! " and tells us of the apes and their bit of mother love ; and the superman who will come. And yet among nations of men as among beasts of prey, there is the same bloody, mean ingless strife. The law of combat holds sway over the human race as it does over the animal world. The appearance of man has made no difference to the battle of life. Why, man has erected the law of combat into the law of his own existence. Man has actually perfected the means by which the battle for life may be carried on. Behold great states, armed from head to foot, periodically shedding each other's blood in streams. The final end of all prog ress of all human culture- is war! No won der Mark Twain said : "When I get over on the other side, I shall use my influence to have the human race drowned again, and this time drowned good, no omissions, no ark." Mr. Frank Harris suggests that we, our selves, should become gods. If I were to pray, I would slightly change the prayer of Robert

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HAS LIFE ANY MEANING ? Browning and say: "Make no more Frank Harrises, God, but elevate the race at once." My friend reminds me that there is radium in the sun. Well, what of it ? It may prolong the life of the sun a few millions of years and thereby, alas, prolong the tragedy of human existence. Then Mr. Harris tells us that he too, be lieves death is the end. Well, in that case, how can life have any meaning ? It is the very fact of death that makes life absolutely mean ingless. When all is said and done, the in evitable end of all the highest developments of the human spirit is death. Sooner or later, death will undo whatever we have done. To what end is cosmic evolution moving ? All this life which rises, step by step, from moneron to man, is impotent effort the road to no where. Imagine an artist devoting his entire life to the painting of a wonderful picture, and then when his picture is completed , tearing it to ribbons. What could be the meaning of such a painter's behavior ? What meaning can the longest life have; in comparison with eternity? Man was non existent for ever in the past before his birth . He will be non-existent forever in the future after his death . Between these two eternities, there is a moment of consciousness. As Schop enhauer puts it : "Life is a uselessly disturb episode in the blessed repose of nothing +ing ness."" We were dead millions and billions and trillions of years before we were born, and did not suffer the slightest inconvenience. And we shall be dead for millions and billions and trillions of years after our funeral. "We should worry! " Now, I want to conclude this speech with a

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quotation from an eminent man about whom Mr. Harris can tell us something- Arthur J. Balfour. In his Foundation of Belief, Mr. Balfour says : Man, so far as natural science by itself is able to teach us, is no longer the final cause of the universe, the Heaven-descended heir of all the ages. His very existence is an accident, his story a brief and transitory episode in the life of one of the meanest of the planets. Of the combination of causes which first converted a dead organic compound into the living progenitors of humanity, science indeed as yet knows nothing. It is enough that from such beginnings famine, disease, and mutual slaughter, fit nurses of the future lords of creation, have gradually evolved, after infinite travail, a race with conscience enough to feel that it is vile, and intelligence enough to know that it is insignificant. We survey the past, and see that its history is of blood, and tears, of helpless blun dering, of wild revolt, of stupid acquiescence, of empty aspirations. We sound the future, and learn that after a period, long compared with the indi vidual life, but short indeed compared with the divisions of time open to our investigation, the energies of our system will decay, the glory of the sun will be dimmed, and the earth, tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate the race which for a moment disturbed its solitude. Man will go down into the pit, and all his thoughts will perish. The uneasy consciousness, which in this obscure corner has for a long space broken the contented silence of the universe, will be at rest. Matter will know itself no longer. "Imperishable monuments" and "immortal deeds," death itself, and love stronger than death, will be as though they had never been. Nor will anything that is be better or worse for all that the labor, genius, devotion , and suffering of men have striven through countless generations to effect.

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FRANK HARRIS' SECOND SPEECH I notice they are all trying to confuse the issue, Mr. Ward particularly ; and the chairman paid me compliments. I can also say that my first meeting with Percy Ward was a delightful and great experience to me. Strauss says in his Life of Jesus : "The noble man lives for ever in all those who have received spiritual influences from him." I have had spiritual in fluences from Percy Ward ; and therefore I owe him something more than courtesy. I owe him the gratitude that men should show to their benefactors in this vale of tears . To illustrate all this pessimism from the be ginning, he wound up the whole thing with "We should worry !" That is the result of his argument-that is the end of the whole of his pessimism-"We should worry! " He claims that is pessimism ! The real pessimists , the Carlyles, the Schopenhauers, the Swifts, do not talk like that. He mentioned a gentleman that I love talk ing about-Arthur_Balfour. I am going to tell you a story about Balfour. Lord Salisbury, his uncle, the head of the Conservative Party, was built like Sir Oliver Lodge. Nobody was ever as wise as Oliver Lodge looks. Lord Salisbury sent once to get a bird's eye view of a gentle man afterward called Major Kitchener. I was, at that time, editor of the Fortnightly Review, and supposed to have some sense. The moment I saw Kitchener, I said : "No one ever was so great a soldier as Kitchener looks." I will now go to Lord Salisbury again. It took the deaths of three or four people to bring him to the front -to give him his position . Before that, he

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had been a writer on the Saturday Review. He had a colossal position in England as the head of the Conservative Party. Arthur Balfour was his nephew-tall, thin, with a scholarly stoop. Even as a young man Arthur Balfour was ex tremely interested in everything, with the most exquisite courtesy possible. One remembered that he had been in the throne rooms of Eu rope. No one ever had such courtly manners and no one ever had a much colder heart. I was very eager to know about Arthur Balfour. I was young in London, and I met a great lady . I don't mind giving her name- she is dead now Driving -the Dowager Lady Shrewsbury. home from some dinner, she was kind enough to say she would drop me on the way. I said : "What about Arthur Balfour ?" She said : "He never interested me." "But tell me something -?" about him- is he in love with Lady T "Oh, I don't really know." I said : "Oh, please tell me about him, I want to know, Does Lady Salisbury like him ?" "Oh," she said, "oh, Lady Salisbury? I will tell you what she told me about him once. I said to her : ' Really, is he getting to the front in the House of Commons ?' She said : ' Oh, my dear, I don't know really. He has no temperament ; he is of no interest at all to us women ; no woman cares whether he is dead or alive ; he hasn't got any more temperament than my poor old Bob.'' ("Bob" was Lord Salisbury. ) That, to me, was the explanation of Arthur Balfour's cynicism and pessimism. He hadn't any more temperament than "my poor old Bob! " Now, we know Swift had no temperament; therefore he was a bitter pessimist. We know Carlyle had no temperament-at least, so Mrs. Carlyle insisted - therefore, he was a pessimist. I don't believe Mr. Ward is a pessimist at all. "We should worry !" He talks about the

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man that has done a picture a great picture ; and then, sooner or later, it vanishes and does not exist any more. Therefore, what was the use of painting it ? But, the joy in the work! The delight in feeling that he is among the great painters of the world! What a sacred pleasure ! I have tried, for the last five or six years to write stories ; have published some in Pear son's. I have an infallible judge- my wife. Like all people who create, I believe that every babe that comes, don't you know, is the finest ever. I am delighted with my newest story ; and read it over and say to myself : "This is a wonder." And then when the first delight is over, I give it to my wife and say: "Will you read this and see what you think of it?" The next day, or two or three hours afterwards, she comes in, puts it down, and says. "It is all right." "Not among my best?" "Oh, no." And I know she is right, always right! The other day the fate of Vienna inspireu me, and I wanted to write a story telling what Vienna had meant to me. It taught me music and gave me some episodes of love. And I sat down and wrote a story of a musician . When I had finished it, I gave to it my wife, asking: "I wonder what you think of it ?" She brought it back in a couple of hours, handed it to me, and I waited for the doom . At last she said: "I don't know whether it is your best or not, but I think it is among the first half dozen." I said : "Ah!" She went out of the room. I cried like a child for hours, in sheer joy and thankfulness that at last I had been able to do it again ; I had feared that the shaping spirit of imagination had left me altogether and for all time. Two things in the world are worth much. The one is love. The other, thinking a new

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thought, a real new idea, a new story or play or I will not even take up the fifteen minutes, completely. You remember the lines of Tenny son, among his best : nobody has written many good ones. Men, my brothers, men the workers, ever doing something new ; That which they have done but earnest of the things that they shall do.

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PERCY WARD'S THIRD SPEECH My optimistic opponent mentioned Thomas Carlyle. When it was reported of Margaret Fuller that she accepted the universe, Thomas Carlyle said : "By God, she'd better." But Carlyle seemed to accept the universe with some misgivings. Looking up at the midnight stars, he once said : "A sad spectacle ! If they be inhabited, what a scope for pain and folly ; and if they be not inhabited, what a waste of space ." We have to accept the uni verse. We have no choice in the matter. Pessimists are needed to ballast the too buoy ant optimists. The man who didn't know the gun was loaded was an optimist. He's buried . The man who was scared that the gun might go off, whether it was loaded or not, was a pessimist. He's still alive and kicking. The optimist lounges upon the deck of a crowded boat, smiling and content. The pessi mist at his side smells smoke and starts to The optimist says : "Oh, it's your fidget. imagination. Don't worry. It will turn out all right in the end." Nevertheless , the pes simist noses around till he discovers the fire, which is then quietly put out. When, on his return, he tells the optimist of it, the optimist exclaims triumphantly : "Why, didn't I tell you it would turn out all right in the end?” The exasperating part of the whole affair is that the optimist's optimism is justified thanks to the pessimism of the pessimist. An optimist will saunter out on a cloudy morning minus an umbrella, because he knows perfectly well that he can borrow one from a pessimist, if it rains . And he generally can ! The opti mist goes daily through life, wearing the smile

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that won't come off, safe in the knowledge that drunken men and cheerful idiots will be looked after somehow. To be a pessimist does not mean that one cannot work as hard, enjoy as deeply and achieve as much, as the optimist. The pessi mist plays the game ' of life the best he can, without wasting time, thought or energy in speculating as to whether the prize is plated or sterling. To the pessimist, the game and its playing are far better than the prize. The pes simist tries to make the best of the worst. He knows that happiness is the feeling we experi ence when we are too busy to be unhappy. Mr. Frank Harris told us in his first speech that even if we haven't eternal stomachs , that is no reason why we should not sit down to enjoy life's feast. That is my own attitude. Life may be worth while, even if it hasn't any meaning. A man spreads a banquet and invites his friends. They are gathered round the festive board and about to dine, when the host says : "I'm not going to eat." The amazed guests inquire:" Why, don't you feel well?" The host replies: "I never felt better in my life ." "Well ," say the guests, "perhaps you don't care for the dishes ?" and the host answers : "This is my favorite menu." "Maybe," the guests suggest, "you don't like the company." The host de clares : "These are my best friends ." "What, then, is the matter ?" the guests ask. Suppose the host were to explain : "I am not going to partake of this banquet unless I am absolutely certain that I shall have another banquet to morrow, just as good ! " You would call such a host a fool. And some of you would put be fore the word "fool " a strong Biblical adjective. And so the man who refuses to make the best of this life because he is not sure of another is a fool.

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The pessimist agrees with Schopenhauer when he says : "In judging any man we must always remember that he is really a being who ought never to have existed--a being who is atoning for the sin of his existence by all kinds of suffering , and finally by death.' That at titude, I think, makes one sympathetic with all human kind. In his first speech, Mr. Harris quoted from Goethe that the pessimist should keep his doubts to himself. Well, Mr. Harris does not practice what he preaches. George Bernard Shaw has said that a man should never practice what he preaches because he will bring his preaching into disrepute. My friendly enemy, in a wonderful article on James Thomson- the greatest of pessimistic poets- writes of his greatest poem, The City of Dreadful Night : The builded desolation and passionate despair of Thomson's poem took complete possession of my spirit. Verse after verse once read printed itself in my brain unforgetably ; ever since, they come back to me in dark hours, and I find myself using them as a bitter tonic. Take such a verse as this : The sense that every struggle brings defeat Because Fate holds no prize to crown success ; That all the oracles are dumb or cheat Because they have no secret to express ; That none can pierce the vast black veil uncertain Because there is no light beyond the curtain ; That all is vanity and nothingness. Such words sink deep into the heart as meteors into the earth dropped from some higher sphere. And now, in closing, I wish to say that it has given me infinite joy to meet in debate so dis tinguished a friendly foeman as Frank Harris a man who has been and is a brave soldier in the Liberation War of Humanity - and whose rare and rich genius, and sweet and sympa thetic soul, are among the all too few consola tions of human life.

IEANING?

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FRANK HARRIS' THIRD SPEECH Just as Percy Ward has finished me off by declaring himself an optimist-"We should worry" so I am going to declare myself a pes simist, just to give him a chance. He is continually asking me what meaning there is in life. There are many meanings in life. There is one meaning for the young man and another for the young girl-though they are not the same, seldom even alike. I think of the two ends of an electric wire ; one might be compared to the pessimist and the other to the optimist ; one to the boy, the other to the girl. Put a full current on in a man and a woman. As the ends draw together, within a few inches , for a minute they splutter and splutter, getting hotter and hotter. And if you attach them , they fuse. So with the boy and the girl ; and so with the optimist and the pessimist. Percy Ward told you a story. I don't see the point of it. I am going to tell you a story, too. I am afraid it is a naughty one, but it is abso lutely from life ; and that, it seems to me, re deems everything. A troop ship was coming back from Africa. One man on board had won He had been severely the Victoria Cross. wounded and everybody was looking at this young fellow with a great deal of admiration. He paid particular attention, almost from the first day, to a very pretty girl, and the whole of the ship was talking of the admiration paid by the hero to the pretty girl. Then came very bad weather. The captain-it was he who told me the story-said it was one of the very worst storms he had ever been in. He began to de

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bate whether he would have to run for shelter. He had never been in such weather : had lost four or five boats-a thing that seldom happens to a big passenger liner. On the second day, in what was almost the worst of the storm , the captain was on the bridge. He suddenly saw this Victoria Cross man poke his head up, and ask : "Are we in any danger, Captain ?" The Captain was astonished to see this hero wondering about danger. He said: "There is always danger on the sea; but I don't think there is room for much fear." Twenty three hours later there was almost a catastrophe. The rudder was carried away ; the vessel pitched helplessly in the turmoil of te vaters -and the captain was more than busy. Suddenly at his feet on the bridge he saw white face of the Victoria Cross man. "Captain is there any danger ?" "Danger? Lot's of it," said the Captain, "but I don't see why you are bothering me at such a moment. Are you afraid ?" "No, Captain ; I only thought if the danger got really bad, I would have a kiss today, anyhow." The Cap tain understood then his anxiety about the ship going down. He was going, by gad, to profit by he last five minutes!

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