The People, Yes Read online

  The hoary English folk saying, “He’d skin a

  louse and send the hide to market,” is surpassed

  in gayety by the antique Persian

  proverb, “He snatches away a flea’s hat,”

  meaning his calculations are very small,

  indeed, indeed. He could sit down and

  figure out how it might be possible to

  sneak up on a flea, snatch off its hat, and

  then by a circuitous route reach a market

  place where he would deliver the hat in

  exchange for what it might bring from

  someone who had a pet flea suffering

  for the want of a hat or from someone

  collecting flea hats who wished to add

  this particular specimen.

  Who do you think you are

  and where do you think you came from?

  From toenails to the hair of your head you are

  mixed of the earth, of the air,

  Of compounds equal to the burning gold and amethyst

  lights of the Mountains of the Blood of

  Christ at Santa Fe.

  Listen to the laboratory man tell what you are

  made of, man, listen while he takes you apart.

  Weighing 150 pounds you hold 3,500 cubic feet of

  gas—oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen.

  From the 22 pounds and 10 ounces of carbon in

  you is the filling for 9,000 lead pencils.

  In your blood are 50 grains of iron and in the rest

  of your frame enough iron to make a spike

  that would hold your weight.

  From your 50 ounces of phosphorus could be made

  800,000 matches and elsewhere in your physical

  premises are hidden 60 lumps of sugar, 20 teaspoons

  of salt, 38 quarts of water, two ounces

  of lime, and scatterings of starch, chloride of

  potash, magnesium, sulphur, hydrochloric acid.

  You are a walking drug store and also a cosmos and

  a phantasmagoria treading a lonesome valley,

  one of the people, one of the minions and

  myrmidons who would like an answer to the

  question, “Who and what are you?”

  One of the people seeing sun, fog, zero weather,

  seeing fire, flood, famine, having meditations

  On fish, birds, leaves, seeds,

  Skins and shells emptied of living form,

  The beautiful legs of Kentucky thoroughbreds

  And the patience of army mules.

  The sea holds colors in its own way:

  below 55 fathoms no black,

  below 300 fathoms no red, violet, white, gray,

  below 600 fathoms no purple, green, orange:

  “yellow and brown occur at all depths.”

  What have you above the ears?

  Or are you dead from the neck up?

  If you don’t look out for yourself nobody else will.

  What counts most is what you got under your own hat.

  Your best friend is yourself.

  Every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost.

  I’m the only one of my friends I can count on.

  I’m not in business for my health.

  I’m a lone wolf; I work by myself.

  I’m for me, myself and company.

  Who said you could work this side of the street?

  God loves the thief but he also loves the owner.

  The big thieves hang the little thieves.

  Set a thief to catch a thief.

  Office without pay makes thieves.

  The carpenters have sinned and the tailors are hanged.

  He must have killed a few to get what he’s got.

  They’ll sell you anything, even the blue sky.

  Have you seen one man selling the ocean to another?

  A farmer between two lawyers is a fish between two cats.

  The rich own the land and the poor own the water.

  The rich get richer and the poor get children.

  The rich have baby napkins, the poor have diapers.

  The big houses have small families and the small

  houses big families.

  Why did Death take the poor man’s cow and the rich

  man’s child?

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  The mazuma, the jack, the shekels, the kale,

  The velvet, the you-know-what,

  The what-it-takes, a roll, a wad,

  Bring it home, boy.

  Bring home the bacon.

  Start on a shoestring if you have to.

  Then get your first million.

  The second million is always easier than the first.

  And if you get more of them round iron men than you

  can use you can always throw them at the birds:

  it’s been done.

  Now take some men, everything they touch turns into

  money: they know how the land lays: they can

  smell where the dollars grow.

  Money withers if you don’t know how to nurse it along:

  money flies away if you don’t know where to put it.

  The first question is, Where do we raise the money,

  where is the cash coming from?

  A little horse sense helps: an idea and horse sense

  take you far: if you got a scheme ask yourself,

  Will it work?

  And let me put one bug in your ear: inside information

  helps: how many fortunes came from a tip, from

  being on the ground first, from hearing a piece of

  news, from fast riding, early buying, quick selling,

  or plain dumb luck?

  Yes, get Lady Luck with you and you’re made: some

  fortunes were tumbled into and the tumblers at first

  said, Who would have believed it? and later, I knew

  just how to do it

  Yes, Lady Luck counts: before you’re born pick the

  right papa and mama and the news-reel boys will be

  on the premises early for a shot of you with your

  big toe in your mouth.

  Money is power: so said one.

  Money is a cushion: so said another.

  Money is the root of evil: so said

  still another.

  Money means freedom: so runs an old

  saying.

  And money is all of these—and more.

  Money pays for whatever you want—if

  you have the money.

  Money buys food, clothes, houses, land,

  guns, jewels, men, women, time to be

  lazy and listen to music.

  Money buys everything except love,

  personality, freedom, immortality,

  silence, peace.

  Therefore men fight for money.

  Therefore men steal, kill, swindle,

  walk as hypocrites and whited

  sepulchers.

  Therefore men speak softly carrying

  plans, poisons, weapons, each in the

  design: The words of his mouth were

  as butter but war was in his heart.

  Therefore nations lay strangle holds on

  each other; bombardments open, tanks

  advance, salients are seized, aviators

  walk on air; truckloads of amputated

  arms and legs are hauled away.

  Money is power, freedom, a cushion, the

  root of all evil, the sum of blessings.

  “Tell us what is money.

  For we are ignorant of money, its ways and

  meanings,

  Each a child in a dark storm where people

  cry for money.”

  Where the carcass is the buzzards gather.

  Where the treasure is the heart is also.

  Money breeds money.

  Money runs the world.

  Money talk is bigger than talk talk.

  No ear is de
af to the song that gold sings.

  Money is welcome even when it stinks.

  Money is the sinew of love and of war.

  Money breaks men and ruins women.

  Money is a great comfort.

  Every man has his price.

  There are men who can’t be bought.

  There are women beyond purchase.

  When you buy judges someone sells justice.

  You can buy anything except day and night.

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  The poobahs rise and hold their poobah sway

  till their use is over

  and other poobahs hitherto unheard of

  step into their shoes and sit at the big tables

  and have their say-so

  till events order the gong for them:

  and the fathers can never arrange for the sons

  to be what the fathers were

  in the days that used to be: not for long:

  both the people and the poobahs—

  life will not let them be.

  A little bird flits to the window sills

  morning by morning:

  “Whither goest thou? whither and whither?”

  They die at noon and midnight,

  they are born in the morning, the afternoon,

  and the river goes on

  and the foamflecks of the river go on.

  The same great river carries along

  its foamflecks of poobahs and plain people.

  They and their houses go down the river,

  houses built for use or show

  down the crumbling stream they go—

  cabins, frame lumber cottages, installment bungalows,

  mail order residences picked from a catalogue,

  mansions whose windows and gables laughed a rivalry,

  down the same river they all go.

  A few stand, a few last longer than others

  while time and the rain, water and air and time

  have their way,

  morning by morning the little birds on the window sills:

  “Whither goest thou? whither and whither?”

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  Was he preaching or writing poetry or talking through his hat? He was a Chinaman saying, “The fishes though deep in the water may be hooked. The birds though high in the air may be shot. Man’s heart only is out of reach. The heavens may be measured. The earth may be surveyed. The heart of man alone is not to be known.”

  “Sleep softly, eagle forgotten,” wrote an Illinois poet at the grave of the only governor of Illinois sure to be named by remote generations.

  “You have no ruins in America so I thought I would come and visit you,” said an English lord to a paralyzed hobo poet in Camden, New Jersey.

  “The fundamental weakness in every empire and every great civilization was the weakness in the character of the upper classes,” ventured a Yale professor in a solemn moment.

  “When historians of the future tell posterity what the World War was about, they will agree upon a cause that nobody who fought it ever suspected,” said the chief of the high command of the Allied Armies.

  “Bring me my liar,” said a king calling for the historian of the realm.

  “History is bunk,” said a history-making motor car king.

  “Words,” added this motor car king, “are a camouflage for what is going on in the mind.”

  “History is a fable agreed upon,” said a shriveled smiling Frenchman.

  “Even if you prove it, who cares?” demanded an Illinois state librarian.

  “I shall arrange the facts and leave the interpretation to the reader,” said the hopeful biographer to the somber historian.

  “The moment you begin to arrange you interpret,” emitted the somber historian.

  “Do you make your newspaper for yourself or the public?” was asked a New York founder who replied, “For the public, of course.”

  “Why isn’t your newspaper more intelligent?” was asked a Chicago publisher who laughed, “We make our newspaper for boobs.”

  “Secret influence is the greatest evil of our time,” testified a Harvard president from a birthmarked anxious face.

  “And,” added another world-renowned educator, “the crooked-est crooks in the United States government have been well educated.”

  “Nevertheless,” quoth an old-fashioned bibulous mayor of Milwaukee, “this dying for principle is all rot.”

  “Put a dollar on the shelf thirty days and you have a dollar,” said one president of the Pennsylvania railroad. “Put a workingman on the shelf thirty days and you have a skeleton.”

  “The struggle,” said a delegate from the coal miners, “is between stockholders who do not labor as against laborers who do not hold stock.”

  “The cry of ‘Let us alone,’” urged a British commoner, “grows less resolute, more touched with frenzy.”

  “Thou shalt not steal,” added another commoner, “assumes thou shalt not be stolen from.”

  “To cure the depression,” said one adviser early in the depression, “you must put the patient on a rich, heavy diet because he is starving for nourishment and at the same time you must starve him because he is suffering and overstuffed with rich food.”

  “You make rifles,” said an eagle-faced old railroad fireman to ten thousand Chicago workingmen at a summer picnic, “you make rifles—and you’re always at the wrong end of them.”

  “The mystery of mysteries,” contributed an engineer, “is to watch machinery making machinery.”

  “Art,” offered an artist, “is something you can’t put into words and when you do it isn’t art.”

  “When I am not engaged in thought,” said the possessor of one great mind, “I am employed in recovering from its effects.”

  “Millionaires,” said one having two hundred millions, “millionaires who laugh are rare.”

  “War requires three things,” urged a short commentator with a long head, “first, money; second, money; and third, money.”

  “Man,” spoke up an anthropologist, “is a two-legged animal without feathers, the only one who cooks his food, uses an alphabet, carries firearms, drinks when he is not thirsty, and practices love with an eye on birth control.”

  “On the one hand an ignorant and arrogant government, and on the other hand a gang of ignorant and arrogant hoodlums—so often the voters must choose between these two,” said a desperate registered voter in Philadelphia as he put a seidel of bock beer under his belt only two blocks from Independ ence Hall and the celebrated crack in the silent Liberty Bell.

  “For what are we fighting?” inquired a Richmond editor in 1863. “An abstraction.”

  “Peace and amity,” said a Georgian in the same year, “is obstructed by only two circumstances, the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers, and Original Sin.”

  “Sometimes,” offered a Concord hermit building a hut for himself, “we class those who are one-and-a-half-witted with the half-witted because we appreciate only a third of their wit.”