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"That only shows a great want of taste on your part," said the old Sage, severely. "Isms and Ologies, and things of that sort, are very tasty, when you become used to them." "What are Isms and Ologies, if you please, Sir?" asked Marjorie. "Oh, there are various kinds," was the reply.
Though for many years well known as an ardent politician, and associated by popular prejudice with that class of untried social theories which are known by the name of isms, his tone is singularly calm and dispassionate.
If we examine the Labor Union and the Closed Shop, and Strikes and Socialism and Bolshevism, and all those other kindred isms, we can see, readily enough, that the under side of them all is tarred with the same brush self-interest, selfishness, greed, individual and collective, and reason, argument, excuse, more or less distorted and perverted, but more or less enlightened by the principles of modern Science, as they appear to the average intellect.
Your man is already 'solid' with Professor Alaric Hobbs, who is a quaint genius, and withal, a hard-headed Yankee, but full of cranks and 'isms." Anson Anstruther exchanged doubtful glances with Alixe Delavigne, who was still very agnostic.
Our own industrial production, as distinguished from agricultural production, has fallen rapidly since the armistice. Some of the fall is due to war weariness, some to "isms" that have infected us from Europe, some to the natural abandonment of high cost production brought into play during the war, some to strikes and a host of other wastes.
Anne was never attended by the crowd of willing victims who hovered around Philippa's conquering march through her Freshman year; but there was a lanky, brainy Freshie, a jolly, little, round Sophomore, and a tall, learned Junior who all liked to call at Thirty-eight, St. John's, and talk over 'ologies and 'isms, as well as lighter subjects, with Anne, in the becushioned parlor of that domicile.
He played upon her sympathy, he played upon her childish innocence, he played upon that pitiful, weak sentimentality which caused her to believe in pacifism and altruism and socialism and all the other "isms" that were jumbled up in her head. And so in a couple of weeks Peter had succeeded in his purpose of carrying little Jennie by storm. And then, how enraptured he was!
His description of himself about this time as "an Ishmaelitish editor" is not bad, nor his quotation of "Woe is me my mother! for I was born a man of strife" as applicable to the growing belligerency of his relations with the anti-slavery brethren in consequence of the new ideas and isms, which were taking possession of his mind and occupying the columns of the Liberator.
We have had from time to time all sorts of isms and schisms in this world; and Yankee ingenuity has furnished us, withal, with a great variety of notions and notable things; among which, wooden nutmegs, wooden bacon hams, horn gun flints and wooden seeds of different kinds, are not the least remarkable.
But I really am sincere about my 'isms. The arguments in favour of any one 'ism' are unanswerable, and I have to admit the truth of each, whenever I consider it. All human thought ends in the blind alley of Paradox. Hegel was a word-juggler. Nice phrases are pleasing, but let us not take them seriously."
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