He had Ose relaExtravangerous ment has disease. with it. nd great he body ested in at is far of our ght. of the n of this nomy in nk upon more we as been a great ent less 2,417 in a great be rem wer William E. Borah, Senator from Idaho. for and devotion to established law is indispensable to our happiness and to our prosperity and to the maintenance of our civilization. While disregard for any law is serious enough, it has always seemed to me far more significant and far more serious when that disregard relates to the great charter of government under which we live. Defiance or disregard of the Con stitution or any of its provisions strilas at the very foundation of a government of law and order, undermines the whole structure of orderly and regulated liberty. I am aware that there are provisions in our Constitution, particularly the Eighteenth Amendment, which many of our people believe ought not to be there. But certainly no reflecting or law-abiding citizen will contend that, so long as the Constitution stands unmodified and un changed 2 ernment requires that the Constitution be respected and enforced. No one can deny the right of a citizen, or a body of citizens, to urge a change of the Constitution -to rewrite all or any part of it is a right which no one ought to challenge. But while it is the fundamental law, it is nothing less than a betrayal of the first principles of free government to disregard it, or any provision of it. There should be a nation-wide movement for law enforcement, not alone an appeal to the officers to do their duty, but also to the people generally, that public opinion may be molded in support of the cause. The Republican party can perform no greater service to the cause of good government than by making law enforcement one of its primary obligations and duties. The people as a whole expect it and good morals and sound and secure government demand it. I have sought to accentuate the importance of the foregoing because I regard them as the most immediate and important problems with which the party must deal. The discussion of these matters leaves neither time nor space to more than mention some of the other things of only little less importance. The transportation problem, the coal problem, legislation touching the development of electric power, present a line of work which calls for a vast amount of careful preparation and the highest order of constructive talent. The responsibility has been placed upon the party for four years in the executive department and probably as long in the legislative department. We shall have to deal with these subjects within that time. They cannot wait, and we cannot take the risk of having them wait. The sooner we get at the task the better. It would seem that we should take up the work at once and begin by appointing agencies for investigation and study, to be followed by legislation, somewhat as we are proposing to do with the agricultural problem. Delay is dangerous, principally for the reason that, too long postponed, a crisis will come and we shall have to enact ill-considered and hasty and harmful legislation. Under the whip and overnight, as is our wont, we will undertake If to solve some of the most difficult delicate problems imaginable. winter should present the coal proposi as it was presented some two winters we would be at the mercy of two group men-the government would be in a tressing situation and practically h less. If these were new problems, it w be different, but they have been wai for consideration a long time. In foreign affairs the most interes questions of a century are begging for tention. I am just as much opposed foreign political entanglements or eng ments as one could well be. They s to me not only unwise and dangerous actually an embarrassment, a hindra in the great leadership which may, if choose, be ours in the cause of disar ment and peace. The fact that we w no foreign political obligations or tanglements does not in any sense reli us from concern and consideration to ing those great principles which lie at base of not only our material but spiritual progress and power. We ought to lead out in re-establish and bringing down to date a body of ternational law. A court without a b of laws under, and in accordance w which it may function would be unw able, and if workable most undesirable menace. We ought to seek to incorp ate in that code provisions which wo express the judgment of mankind that is a crime and should no longer be cepted among enlightened nations a legitimate institution for the settlem of international disputes; then the tablishment of an international judi tribunal divorced from and independ of all international politics or political stitutions, with power and jurisdiction hear and decide all questions arising der international law or treaties. We render a singularly great service to cause of peace and disarmament and the advancement and happiness of whole human family, and we can do without sacrificing or even putting pawn our freedom of action or our so eignty and without departing from traditional policies under which we ha come into our present place of prest and power. If this oposition ters ago groups of in a dislly helpit would waiting teresting ng for atposed to I engagehey seem erous but indrance ay, if we disarmawe want ; or ense relieve on touchlie at the but our ablishing ir sover rom the Reminiscences of Conrad BY JOHN GALSWORTHY know." With the young second mate, a cheerful, capable young seaman, very English, he was friendly; and respectful, if faintly ironic, with his whiskered, stout old English captain. I was supposed to be studying navigation for the Admiralty Bar, and every day would work out the ship's position with the captain. On one side of the saloon table we would sit and check our observations on this important matter with those of Conrad, who would sit on the other side of the table and look at us a little quizzically. For Conrad had commanded ships, and his subordinate position on the Torrens was only due to the fact that he was then still convalescent from the Congo experience which had nearly killed him. Many evening watches in fine weather we spent on the poop. Ever the great teller of a tale, he had already nearly twenty years of tales to tell. Tales of ships and storms, of Polish revolution, of his youthful Carlist gun-running adventure, of the Malay seas, and the Congo; and of men and men; all to a listener who had the insatiability of a twenty-five year old. It was in March, 1893, that I first met Conrad on board the English sailing ship Torrens in Adelaide Harbor. He was superintending the stowage of cargo. Very dark he looked in the burning sunlight-tanned, with a peaked brown beard, almost black hair, and dark brown eyes, over which the lids were deeply folded. He was thin, not tall, his arms very long, his shoulders broad, his head set rather forward. He spoke to me with a strong foreign accent. He seemed to me strange on an English ship. For fifty-six days I sailed in his company. The chief mate bears the main burden of a sailing ship. All the first night he was fighting a fire in the hold. None of us seventeen passengers knew of it till long after. It was he who had most truck with the tail of that hurricane off the Leeuwin, and later with another storm. He was a good seaman, watchful of the weather; quick in handling the ship; considerate with the apprentices-we had a long, unhappy Belgian youth among them, who took unhandily to the sea and dreaded going aloft; Conrad compassionately spared him all he could. With the crew he was popular; they were individuals to him, not a mere gang; and long When, seven or eight years later, Conrad, though then in his best period and long acclaimed a great writer by the few, was struggling, year in year out, to keep a roof over him amidst the apathy of the many who afterward fell over each other to read him in his worst period, I remember urging him to raise the wind by taletelling in public. He wouldn't, and he was right. Still, so incomparable a raconteur must have made a success, even nature. Between his voyages in those las of his sailor's life Conrad used to s rooms in Gillingham Street, near V Station. It was there that he re prodigiously, and there that he su from bouts of that lingering Congo which dogged his health and faste deep, fitful gloom over his spirit. letter to me he once said: "I don anything of actual bodily pain, for is my witness, I care for that less nothing." He was, indeed, truly st and his naturally buoyant spirit re with extreme suddenness. But al years I knew him-thirty-one-he h fight for decent health. Such word "I have been abominably ill-abo bly is the right word," occur again again in his letters, and his cre achievement in a language not nati him, in face of these constant bouts ness, approaches the marvellous. It was the sea that gave Conrad t English language. A fortunate acc he could so easily have written i French language. He started his hood, as it were, at Marseilles. In a l to me, 1905, he says: "In Marseilles begin life thirty-one years ago. It' place where the puppy opened his e He was ever more at home with Fr literature than with English, spoke language with less accent, liked Fre men, and better understood their cl thoughts. And yet, perhaps, not an accident; for, after all, he had the ing quality which has made the En the great sea nation of the world; an suppose, his instinct led him to see English ships the fullest field of ex] sion for his roving nature. England, was to him the romantic country; it been enshrined for him, as a boy in land, by Charles Dickens. He alv spoke of Dickens with the affection have for the writers who captivate youth. No one, I take it, ever read the ear Conrad without the bewildered fasc tion of one opening eyes on a new wo without, in fact, the feeling he hin describes in that passage of "You where he wakes up in the open boat ir first Eastern port, and sees "the I looking at him." I doubt if he will be surpassed as a creator of what last days to stay at r Victoria e read so e suffered ongo fever astened a rit. In a don't say for, God less than ly stoical, it reacted ut all the -he had to words as: -abominaagain and = creative native to uts of ill ;. ad to the accident en in the his manIn a letter illes I did It's the his eyes." h French >oke that ! Frenchir clearer not quite I the rov: English d; and, I seek in f expresind, too, '; it had y in Poalways :tion we rate our : earliest fascinaW world; himself Youth,' Westerners term "exotic atmosphere." The Malay coasts and rivers of "Almayer's Folly," "An Outcast of the Islands" and the first pages of "The Rescue"; the Congo of "Heart of Darkness"; the Central Southern America of "Nostromo," with many other land and sea scapes, are bits of atmospheric painting "in excelsis." Only one expression adequately describes the sensations of us who read "Almayer's Folly" in 1894. We rubbed our eyes. Conrad was critically accepted from the very start; he never published a book that did not rouse a chorus of praise; but it was twenty years before he was welcomed by the public with sufficient warmth to give him a decent income. "Chance," in 1914-an indifferent Conrad-at last brought him fortune. From that year on to the end his books sold well; yet, with the exception of "The Secret Sharer" and some parts of "Victory," none of his work in that late period was quite up to his own exalted mark. Was it natural that popular success should have coincided with the lesser excellence; or was it simply an example of how long the strange takes to pierce the pickled hide of the reader of fiction? It does disservice to Conrad's memory to be indiscriminate in praise of his work. Already, in reaction from this wholesale laudation, one notices a tendency in the younger generation to tilt the nose skyward and talk of his "parade." The shining work of his great period was before their time; it places him among the finest writers of all ages. Conrad's work, from "An Outcast of the Islands" to "The Secret Agent," his work in "The Secret Sharer," in the first chapters of "The Rescue" (written in 1898), and in some portions of "Victory," are to his work in "The Arrow of Gold" and the last part of "The Rescue," as the value of pearl to that of mother-of-pearl. He was very tired toward the end; he wore himself clean out. To judge him by tired work is absurd; to lump all his work together, as if he were always the same Conrad, imperils a just estimate of his great ness. I first re-encountered Conrad some Garden Opera. with us both. It was already his fourteenth time of seeing that really dramatic opera. The blare of Wagner left him as cold as it leaves me; but he had a curious fancy for Meyerbeer. In June 1910 he wrote: "I suppose I am now the only human being in these islands who thinks Meyerbeer a great composer; and I am an alien at that, and not to be wholly trusted." But music, fond though he was of it, could play no great part in a life spent at sea, and, after his marriage in 1895, in the country. He went up to town but seldom. He wrote always with blood and tears and needed seclusion for it. A letter to me, from Pent Farm in July 1900, thus describes the finish of "Lord Jim." "The end of 'Lord Jim' has been pulled off with a steady drag of twentyone hours. I sent wife and child out of the house (to London) and sat down at 9 A. M. with a desperate resolve to be done with it. Now and then I took a walk round the house, out at one door, in at the other. Ten-minute meals-a great hush. Cigarette ends growing into a mound similar to a cairn over a dead hero. Moon rose over the barn, looked in at the window and climbed out of sight. Dawn broke, brightened. I put the lamp out, and went on with the morning breeze blowing the sheets of MS. all over the room. Sun rose. I wrote the last word and went into the dining-room. Six o'clock. I shared a piece of cold chicken with Escamillo" (his dog), "who was very miserable and in want of sympathy, having missed the child dreadfully all day. Felt very well, only sleepy; had a bath at seven, and at 8:30 was on my way to London." "Carmen" was a vice I find another letter, on the finish of "Nostromo." |