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Page 10
Nothing is clearer than that our pre-existence is a dream, having
absolutely no basis in anything that we know or can hope to know. Of
after-existence there is said to be evidence, or rather testimony, in
assurances of those who are in present enjoyment of it--if it is
enjoyable. Whether this testimony has actually been given--and it is the
only testimony worth a moment's consideration--is a disputed point. Many
persons living this life profess to have received it. But nobody
professes, or ever has professed, to have received a communication of
any kind from one in actual experience of the fore-life. "The souls as
yet ungarmented," if such there are, are dumb to question. The Land
beyond the Grave has been, if not observed, yet often and variously
described: if not explored and surveyed, yet carefully charted. From
among so many accounts of it that we have, he must be fastidious indeed
who cannot be suited. But of the Fatherland that spreads before the
cradle--the great Heretofore, wherein we all dwelt if we are to dwell in
the Hereafter, we have no account. Nobody professes knowledge of that.
No testimony reaches our ears of flesh concerning its topographical or
other features; no one has been so enterprising as to wrest from its
actual inhabitants any particulars of their character and appearance.
And among educated experts and professional proponents of worlds to be
there is a general denial of its existence.
I am of their way of thinking about that. The fact that we have no
recollection of a former life is entirely conclusive of the matter. To
have lived an unrecollected life is impossible and unthinkable, for
there would be nothing to connect the new life with the old--no thread
of continuity--nothing that persisted from the one life to the other.
The later birth would be that of another person, an altogether different
being, unrelated to the first--a new John Smith succeeding to the late
Tom Jones.
Let us not be misled here by a false analogy. Today I may get a thwack
o' the mazzard which will give me an intervening season of
unconsciousness between yesterday and to-morrow. Thereafter I may live to
a green old age with no recollection of anything that I knew, or did, or
was before the accident; yet I shall be the same person, for between the
old life and the new there will be a _nexus_, a thread of continuity,
something spanning the gulf from the one state to the other, and the
same in both--namely, my body with its habits, capacities and powers.
That is I; that identifies me to others as my former self--authenticates
and credentials me as the person that incurred the cranial mischance,
dislodging memory.
But when death occurs _all_ is dislodged if memory is; for between two
merely mental or spiritual existences memory is the only _nexus_
conceivable; consciousness of identity is the only identity. To live
again without memory of having lived before is to live another.
Re-existence without recollection is absurd. There is nothing to
re-exist.
EMANCIPATED WOMAN
What I should like to know is, how "the enlargement of woman's sphere"
by her entrance into various activities of commercial, professional and
industrial life benefits the sex. It may please Helen Gougar and satisfy
her sense of logical accuracy to say, as she does: "We women must work
in order to fill the places left vacant by liquor-drinking men." But who
filled these places before? Did they remain vacant, or were there then
disappointed applicants, as now? If my memory serves, there has been no
time in the period that it covers when the supply of workers--abstemious
male workers--was not in excess of the demand. That it has always been
so is sufficiently attested by the universally inadequate wage rate.
Employers seldom fail, and never for long, to get all the workmen they
need. The field into which women have put their sickles was already
overcrowded with reapers. Whatever employment women have obtained has
been got by displacing men--who would otherwise be supporting women.;
Where is the general advantage? We may shout "high tariff," "combination
of capital," "demonetization of silver," and what not, but if searching
for the cause of augmented poverty and crime, "industrial discontent"
and the tramp evil, instead of dogmatically expounding it, we should
take some account of this enormous, sudden addition to the number of
workers seeking work. If any one thinks that within the brief period of
a generation the visible supply of labor can be enormously augmented
without profoundly affecting the stability of things and disastrously
touching the interests of wage-workers let no rude voice dispel his
dream of such maleficent agencies as his slumbrous understanding may joy
to affirm. And let our Widows of Ashur unlung themselves in advocacy of
quack remedies for evils of which themselves are cause; it remains true
that when the contention of two lions for one bone is exacerbated by the
accession of a lioness the squabble is not composable by stirring up
some bears in the cage adjacent.
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