THE RETURN OF SENATOR JOSEPH BARTHOLDI MICHAEL FROM THE WORLD GOVERNMENT TO SPRINGFIELD. HIS CONVERSE OF HIGH IMPORT WITH A JAPANESE ELDER STATESMAN WHO IS A COMMISSIONER TO OUR WORLD’S FAIR.  
July 14, 2018:—The regular session of the World Senate has ended, and all the talk in the coffee houses is of the imminent return of Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Second, namesake of the high dandy of one hundred years ago, himself a reversion to tribe still further, in that he is a replica of the Iron Gentleman, except that he has a hotter temper in old age, which makes him a most tigerish fighter in the World Senate.
Today, being the Iron Gentleman’s birthday, is a family festival with the Michaels and, in the very early morning, before there are any passers by, the leading representatives of the family are hand in hand in silence around the original forge of the Iron Gentleman, for a little while. The bellows is blowing and the fire is high and there is the 267beginning of a blade in the flame, for they remember that he has said: “I will return to you only in the leaping flame of the forge fire.” Then they repeat the Lord’s Prayer and disperse, before the town is awake, leaving, according to custom, one man to finish the blade, at his leisure:—in this case Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Third.
St. Friend, the Giver of Bread, has told me that the Michaels in general have old fashioned Bible reading in their homes, with old hymns and family prayers, every morning or evening no matter what pet heresies may be running through the tribe. Not many of them accept the formally designed altars of Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Third, they have left here hammering a blade, unless they are direct fanatical converts to the Flower Religion.
This evening I find myself one of a party in the library of St. Friend. We have been given an uplifting welcome by the saint, and the Thibetan Boy. Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Third, the non-entity whose fortunes seem always thrust upon me, is of the party. Black Hawk Boone is there. Our special guest is Sake Shioya, one of the Elder Statemen of Japan, and in America because he is head of the Department of Asiatic Art in the World’s Fair of the University of Springfield. At 268home, when not in the Japanese Cabinet, he is professor Sake Shioya of the Doshisha University of Japan, and brother of Nataro Shioya, the leading Japanese representative in the Senate of the World Government.
For a lifetime the brothers have shouted through Japan: “We will strike off the head of the Singapore Snake with the Sword of the Samurai.” St. Friend passes round the cigars and, himself, sticks to his corncob pipe. Perhaps it is because we are under the portrait of Alexander Campbell our talk turns to religious controversy. St. Friend says: “The world over, Jew, Catholic, Protestant, used to hate each other to the point of slaughter, though all spoke the name of Abraham and several other patriarchs with the same reverence, and invoked Abraham’s tribal God. Now the Marxians of the world revere Marx and Hegel as these others did Abraham and Jehovah, but the only way to keep them from cutting each other’s throats is for the World Government to stand between them.”
“Indeed it is true,” confirms Shioya, “The Purple Flag Marxians of Japan, the Yellow Flag Marxians of China, the White Flags of Thibet, the Black Flags of Russia, the Red Flags of Central Europe, the Gray Flags of 269America, all conspire against one another, with at least five times five which is twenty-five hates, in all, to be mathematical. Yet they all read the same Marx to tatters. When the Yellow Flag Marxians of China agree among themselves sufficiently to fall upon the Purples of Japan, a thing we are momently expecting, the World Government will have a stern police duty, especially since both sides are being urged on by Singapore.”
Samiri Shioya, that austere old man, continues, saying that which he can more gracefully say than any of the rest of us: “Instead of a world of three classes, special privileged, middle class, and peasantry, as these Marxians think it to be, it is, from my brother’s standpoint and my own, a globe whose seas and continents are spread with fifty to one hundred antagonistic races, mutually repellent. These fifty to one hundred races dye thoroughly, with the dye of race-mysticism, any economic teaching they take up. So practical world statesmanship, from the Japanese standpoint and I am glad to say, from the standpoint of the fiery Michael also, has dealt with race. Our statesmen advocated the principle of one vote to every main tribe in the world and fractional votes in due proportion to the size of the small tribes, long 270before your Michael entered the Senate, and every speech he has made there to strengthen that doctrine has been cheered from end to end of Japan.”
July 15:—Senator Joseph Bartholdi Michael is here and has refused the conspicuous first place in the great sunset parade and drill held in his honor and has taken his place in the ranks with his son, and has demanded that the whole ceremony be in honor of the Star Spangled Banner and the International Flag. Those flags have been put up in special size and splendor, all over the town, even more than is the custom. And the borders of the parks around Camp Lincoln are one tremendous fleet of these banners. I find myself on the drill ground near the aged Japanese statesman. I am huddled on the side of the reviewing platform with the newspaper men, and we watch those strange Japanese eyes, and are amazed at his fiery enthusiasm for the International Flag. The reviewing platform is by the famous wrought-iron gates, hammered out by the Iron Gentleman and his three sons and three daughters.
Just as he named the sword “The Avanel Sword,” knowing not of the child who was coming in one hundred years, he named these “The Avanel Gates,” for the perhaps mythical 271Avanel of more than one hundred years ago.
These gates are massive and towering, yet a little distance away are wonderfully trellised vines, seeming to be climbing the white wall from which the gates are swung.
In the center of each design is a Golden Rain Tree. The blossoms of the tree are most delicately wrought, and shining with gold foil against the black. These trees were, in especial, the work of the hammers of the three daughters.
But now, to the delight of the old Japanese, and the delight of us all, the magnificent cavalcade of men and women sweeps in from their city parade through these ancestral gates, to the Camp Lincoln grounds, in order, yet in riot, after the manner of a great dance of gay and inspired horses and horsemen. And they are all within the command of Avanel, standing high in her stirrups, and as much beneath her eye and as subject to her entranced fancy, as has been St. Friend, the Giver of Bread, when she uttered his sermons for him, hardly knowing how she did it, except that she spoke her mind.
The men on horseback are but the background of the girls in their Diana mood. The huntress, and yet the Pallas Athena, seems 272roused in all these girls in white. Most of them are in their first strength:—high school girls when they are still a bit Tom boy; that which is with every girl for a year or half a lifetime as a reminiscence of the primeval girlhood of her far grandmothers, when they rode the two-toed and three-toed horse in equestrian dance and revel.
High above all the other flags, on gigantic poles on either side of the reviewing stand, are the official flags of the field. The poles are of equal height and the flags are of identical size and importance in the eyes of the paraders, as they salute them and salute the Japanese each time round the field:—while the afterglow turns the air to crimson and orange and grey pearl.
They go by screaming and screeching with delight, and sweep and cut the air with their Avanel blades in a sunset sword-drill. When they pass Avanel, whose horse is now near us, the salute in sign of submission to her pride, is given with all a girl Amazon’s fantastic chivalry: the Boone dagger, lifted high overhead. In her person at least, the Boones of Springfield have put the Michaels of Springfield under their feet. And certainly the whitest thing in the whole whirlwind of 273white is the spirited head of old Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Second. Whatever the morrow between these clans, his submission is made as she sights him, and he bows and salutes in the last afterglow, and she forces him to lead the review beside her.
The Japanese watches and wonders and says to the press gallery that of course no day can be women’s day and men’s day equally, and this is one of the days of the women.
Now all the while I have been wondering about a certain device that is the millinery and nonsense of this drill park, the globe that is the mechanical toy of these laughing girls. Now the whole company are whirling round and round that giant school-globe that looms like the dome of the Taj Mahal in the center of the field. Upon the surface of the sphere of hollow crystal, the map of the world now begins to blaze out as darkness comes on, the continents in the conventional colors of the school globes from the beginning of the log school house days. The interior of the sphere is a vapor, the color of the sea, but becoming iridescent as though the world were but a bubble blown by the fancy of one of the powers of the universe. The changes of light 274are painted upon the faces of the riders and the flanks of the horses.
July 17:—The Japanese is addressing the leaders of the Horseshoe Brotherhood and the Amazons. He says in conclusion:—“Hardly a man on the earth wanted the war to come that was waged against the World Government thirty years ago, if we are to believe the professions then made. So far as I can discover not one responsible statesman expected or intended it. Such dynamite may be touched off again, and this time it will be with more cause and more open anticipation. So though the responsible ones like Michael and my brother, if I may say so, are doing their best to prevent war, half the world is drilling and riding and marching, and flying about in practice war planes, and even here where the Great World’s Fair of the University of Springfield is going on, that seems in itself an assurance of international brotherhood forever, you are drilling more zealously every day.
“Pardon me, if for a moment I speak as an old man to his grandchildren. I ask to be forgiven if I am jealous of the furious and romantic years just coming on, jealous for the farther future, and for its vindication. The immediate years, I know, will fill our 275cups with sorrow whether we live or die. But I ask of you one Spartan thing, beyond fighting ten years—if ten years be necessary to subdue mad Singapore. Remember not only the virtues but the follies of your mothers, the Amazons, and your fathers, the Horseshoe Brotherhood, who rode side by side and fought so nobly thirty years ago. I can speak of this because I can say without flinching that our Japanese men and women Samurai went through the same glories and follies, with them in the same battle line. Forever after, they have lived in that war on that battle line. Do not go on perpetually climbing into office because you can recount military history, as many of our Samurai have done, drowning out the man or woman who wants to speak of matters thirty years ahead and plan such a thing as your Fair or University. No war ushers in the perfect state. The great wars are not all fought with the sword. To speak in the Christian phrase, remember that every yesterday is but a box of costly spikenard to be broken on the feet of Holy Tomorrow. Though you fight ten wars, let yesterday be your enemy. Otherwise you fight but as the nations that died before Confucius, and Mencius.”
July 18:—The same group as on the 14th 276of July are around the library table of St. Friend with the addition of the gigantic Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Second, who is among us as though he were in his boyhood again, being as he says, “Back home, after so long.” The idolizing friendship of the Japanese and his private secretary but provoke him to franker monologues and a greater disposition to sprawl about with his hair mussed up and his head on one side like an eagle acting the robin. He has his arm around his son, as though he would push him in amongst us. As the evening progresses, in reply to some quite pointed questions from the Japanese, on behalf of his brother and himself, who want to act upon the information, discreetly but definitely, Joseph Bartholdi Mi............