【有声英语文学名著】不会发生在这里(13)
时间:2019-01-26 作者:英语课 分类:有声英语文学名著
英语课
It Can't Happen Here
by Sinclair Lewis
Chapter 13
And when I get ready to retire I'm going to build me an up-to-date bungalow 1 in some lovely resort, not in Como or any other of the proverbial Grecian isles 3 you may be sure, but in somewheres like Florida, California, Santa Fe, & etc., and devote myself just to reading the classics, like Longfellow, James Whitcomb Riley, Lord Macaulay, Henry Van Dyke 4, Elbert Hubbard, Plato, Hiawatha, & etc. Some of my friends laugh at me for it, but I have always cultivated a taste for the finest in literature. I got it from my Mother as I did everything that some people have been so good as to admire in me.
Zero Hour, Berzelius Windrip.
Certain though Doremus had been of Windrip's election, the event was like the long-dreaded passing of a friend.
"All right. Hell with this country, if it's like that. All these years I've worked--and I never did want to be on all these committees and boards and charity drives!--and don't they look silly now! What I always wanted to do was to sneak 5 off to an ivory tower--or anyway, celluloid, imitation ivory--and read everything I've been too busy to read."
Thus Doremus, in late November.
And he did actually attempt it, and for a few days reveled in it, avoiding everyone save his family and Lorinda, Buck 6 Titus, and Father Perefixe. Mostly, though, he found that he did not relish 7 the "classics" he had so far missed, but those familiar to his youth: Ivanhoe, Huckleberry Finn, Midsummer Night's Dream, The Tempest, L'Allegro, The Way of All Flesh (not quite so youthful, there), Moby Dick, The Earthly Paradise, St. Agnes' Eve, The Idylls of the King, most of Swinburne, Pride and Prejudice, Religio Medici, Vanity Fair.
Probably he was not so very different from President-Elect Windrip in his rather uncritical reverence 9 toward any book he had heard of before he was thirty. . . . No American whose fathers have lived in the country for over two generations is so utterly 12 different from any other American.
In one thing, Doremus's literary escapism failed him thoroughly 13. He tried to relearn Latin, but he could not now, uncajoled by a master, believe that "Mensa, mensae, mensae, mensam, mensa"--all that idiotic 14 A table, of a table, to a table, toward a table, at in by or on a table--could bear him again as once it had to the honey-sweet tranquillity 15 of Vergil and the Sabine Farm.
Then he saw that in everything his quest failed him.
The reading was good enough, toothsome, satisfying, except that he felt guilty at having sneaked 16 away to an Ivory Tower at all. Too many years he had made a habit of social duty. He wanted to be "in" things, and he was daily more irritable 17 as Windrip began, even before his inauguration 18, to dictate 19 to the country.
Buzz's party, with the desertions to the Jeffersonians, had less than a majority in Congress. "Inside dope" came to Doremus from Washington that Windrip was trying to buy, to flatter, to blackmail 20 opposing Congressmen. A President-Elect has unhallowed power, if he so wishes, and Windrip--no doubt with promises of abnormal favors in the way of patronage--won over a few. Five Jeffersonian Congressmen had their elections challenged. One sensationally 21 disappeared, and smoking after his galloping 22 heels there was a devilish fume 23 of embezzlements. And with each such triumph of Windrip, all the well-meaning, cloistered 24 Doremuses of the country were the more anxious.
All through the "Depression," ever since 1929, Doremus had felt the insecurity, the confusion, the sense of futility 25 in trying to do anything more permanent than shaving or eating breakfast, that was general to the country. He could no longer plan, for himself or for his dependants 26, as the citizens of this once unsettled country had planned since 1620.
Why, their whole lives had been predicated on the privilege of planning. Depressions had been only cyclic storms, certain to end in sunshine; Capitalism 27 and parliamentary government were eternal, and eternally being improved by the honest votes of Good Citizens.
Doremus's grandfather, Calvin, Civil War veteran and ill-paid, illiberal 28 Congregational minister, had yet planned, "My son, Loren, shall have a theological education, and I think we shall be able to build a fine new house in fifteen or twenty years." That had given him a reason for working, and a goal.
His father, Loren, had vowed 29, "Even if I have to economize 30 on books a little, and perhaps give up this extravagance of eating meat four times a week--very bad for the digestion 31, anyway--my son, Doremus, shall have a college education, and when, as he desires, he becomes a publicist, I think perhaps I shall be able to help him for a year or two. And then I hope--oh, in a mere 32 five or six years more--to buy that complete Dickens with all the illustrations--oh, an extravagance, but a thing to leave to my grandchildren to treasure forever!"
But Doremus Jessup could not plan, "I'll have Sissy go to Smith before she studies architecture," or "If Julian Falck and Sissy get married and stick here in the Fort, I'll give 'em the southwest lot and some day, maybe fifteen years from now, the whole place will be filled with nice kids again!" No. Fifteen years from now, he sighed, Sissy might be hustling 33 hash for the sort of workers who called the waiter's art "hustling hash"; and Julian might be in a concentration camp--Fascist or Communist!
The Horatio Alger tradition, from rags to Rockefellers, was clean gone out of the America it had dominated.
It seemed faintly silly to hope, to try to prophesy 34, to give up sleep on a good mattress 35 for toil 36 on a typewriter, and as for saving money--idiotic!
And for a newspaper editor--for one who must know, at least as well as the Encyclopædia, everything about local and foreign history, geography, economics, politics, literature, and methods of playing football--it was maddening that it seemed impossible now to know anything surely.
"He don't know what it's all about" had in a year or two changed from a colloquial 37 sneer 38 to a sound general statement regarding almost any economist 39. Once, modestly enough, Doremus had assumed that he had a decent knowledge of finance, taxation 40, the gold standard, agricultural exports, and he had smilingly pontificated everywhere that Liberal Capitalism would pastorally lead into State Socialism, with governmental ownership of mines and railroads and water-power so settling all inequalities of income that every lion of a structural 41 steel worker would be willing to lie down with any lamb of a contractor 42, and all the jails and tuberculosis 43 sanatoria would be clean empty.
Now he knew that he knew nothing fundamental and, like a lone 44 monk 45 stricken with a conviction of sin, he mourned, "If I only knew more! . . . Yes, and if I could only remember statistics!"
The coming and the going of the N.R.A., the F.E.R.A., the P.W.A., and all the rest, had convinced Doremus that there were four sets of people who did not clearly understand anything whatever about how the government must be conducted: all the authorities in Washington; all of the citizenry who talked or wrote profusely 46 about politics; the bewildered untouchables who said nothing; and Doremus Jessup.
"But," said he, "now, after Buzz's inauguration, everything is going to be completely simple and comprehensible again--the country is going to be run as his private domain 47!"
Julian Falck, now sophomore 48 in Amherst, had come home for Christmas vacation, and he dropped in at the Informer office to beg from Doremus a ride home before dinner.
He called Doremus "sir" and did not seem to think he was a comic fossil. Doremus liked it.
On the way they stopped for gasoline at the garage of John Pollikop, the seething 49 Social Democrat 50, and were waited upon by Karl Pascal--sometime donkey-engine-man at Tasbrough's quarry 51, sometime strike leader, sometime political prisoner in the county jail on a thin charge of inciting 52 to riot, and ever since then, a model of Communistic piety 53.
Pascal was a thin man, but sinewy 54; his gaunt and humorous face of a good mechanic was so grease-darkened that the skin above and below his eyes seemed white as a fish-belly, and, in turn, that pallid 55 rim 56 made his eyes, alert dark gipsy eyes, seem the larger. . . . A panther chained to a coal cart.
"Well, what you going to do after this election?" said Doremus. "Oh! That's a fool question! I guess none of us chronic 57 kickers want to say much about what we plan to do after January, when Buzz gets his hands on us. Lie low, eh?"
"I'm going to lie the lowest lie that I ever did. You bet! But maybe there'll be a few Communist cells around here now, when Fascism begins to get into people's hair. Never did have much success with my propaganda before, but now, you watch!" exulted 58 Pascal.
"You don't seem so depressed 59 by the election," marveled Doremus, while Julian offered, "No--you seem quite cheerful about it!"
"Depressed? Why good Lord, Mr. Jessup, I thought you knew your revolutionary tactics better than that, way you supported us in the quarry strike--even if you are the perfect type of small capitalist bourgeois 60! Depressed? Why, can't you see, if the Communists had paid for it they couldn't have had anything more elegant for our purposes than the election of a pro-plutocrat, itching 62 militarist dictator like Buzz Windrip! Look! He'll get everybody plenty dissatisfied. But they can't do anything, barehanded against the armed troops. Then he'll whoop 63 it up for a war, and so millions of people will have arms and food rations 11 in their hands--all ready for the revolution! Hurray for Buzz and John Prang the Baptist!"
"Karl, it's funny about you. I honestly believe you believe in Communism!" marveled young Julian. "Don't you?"
"Why don't you go and ask your friend Father Perefixe if he believes in the Virgin 64?"
"But you seem to like America, and you don't seem so fanatical, Karl. I remember when I was a kid of about ten and you--I suppose you were about twenty-five or -six then--you used to slide with us and whoop like hell, and you made me a ski-stick."
"Sure I like America. Came here when I was two years old--I was born in Germany--my folks weren't Heinies, though--my dad was French and my mother a Hunkie from Serbia. (Guess that makes me a hundred per cent American, all right!) I think we've got the Old Country beat, lots of ways. Why, say, Julian, over there I'd have to call you 'Mein Herr' or 'Your Excellency,' or some fool thing, and you'd call me, 'I say-uh, Pascal!' and Mr. Jessup here, my Lord, he'd be 'Commendatore' or 'Herr Doktor'! No, I like it here. There's symptoms of possible future democracy. But--but--what burns me up--it isn't that old soap-boxer's chestnut 65 about how one tenth of 1 per cent of the population at the top have an aggregate 66 income equal to 42 per cent at the bottom. Figures like that are too astronomical 67. Don't mean a thing in the world to a fellow with his eyes--and nose--down in a transmission box--fellow that doesn't see the stars except after 9 P.M. on odd Wednesdays. But what burns me up is the fact that even before this Depression, in what you folks called prosperous times, 7 per cent of all the families in the country earned $500 a year or less--remember, those weren't the unemployed 68, on relief; those were the guys that had the honor of still doing honest labor 69.
"Five hundred dollars a year is ten dollars a week--and that means one dirty little room for a family of four people! It means $5.00 a week for all their food--eighteen cents per day per person for food!--and even the lousiest prisons allow more than that. And the magnificent remainder of $2.50 a week, that means nine cents per day per person for clothes, insurance, carfares, doctors' bills, dentists' bills, and for God's sake, amusements--amusements!--and all the rest of the nine cents a day they can fritter away on their Fords and autogiros and, when they feel fagged, skipping across the pond on the Normandie! Seven per cent of all the fortunate American families where the old man has got a job!"
Julian was silent; then whispered, "You know--fellow gets discussing economics in college--theoretically sympathetic--but to see your own kids living on eighteen cents a day for grub--I guess that would make a man pretty extremist!"
Doremus fretted 70, "But what percentage of forced labor in your Russian lumber 71 camps and Siberian prison mines are getting more than that?"
"Haaa! That's all baloney! That's the old standard come-back at every Communist--just like once, twenty years ago, the muttonheads used to think they'd crushed any Socialist 72 when they snickered 'If all the money was divided up, inside five years the hustlers would have all of it again.' Prob'ly there's some standard coup 73 de grace like that in Russia, to crush anybody that defends America. Besides!" Karl Pascal glowed with nationalistic fervor 74. "We Americans aren't like those dumb Russki peasants! We'll do a whole lot better when we get Communism!"
And on that, his employer, the expansive John Pollikop, a woolly Scotch 75 terrier of a man, returned to the garage. John was an excellent friend of Doremus; had, indeed, been his bootlegger all through Prohibition 76, personally running in his whisky from Canada. He had been known, even in that singularly scrupulous 77 profession, as one of its most trustworthy practitioners 79. Now he flowered into mid-European dialectics:
"Evenin', Mist' Jessup, evenin', Julian! Karl fill up y' tank for you? You want t' watch that guy--he's likely to hold out a gallon on you. He's one of these crazy dogs of Communists--they all believe in Violence instead of Evolution and Legality. Them--why say, if they hadn't been so crooked 80, if they'd joined me and Norman Thomas and the other intelligent Socialists 81 in a United Front with Roosevelt and the Jeffersonians, why say, we'd of licked the pants off Buzzard Windrip! Windrip and his plans!"
("Buzzard" Windrip. That was good, Doremus reflected. He'd be able to use it in the Informer!)
Pascal protested, "Not that Buzzard's personal plans and ambitions have got much to do with it. Altogether too easy to explain everything just blaming it on Windrip. Why don't you read your Marx, John, instead of always gassing about him? Why, Windrip's just something nasty that's been vomited 82 up. Plenty others still left fermenting 83 in the stomach--quack economists 84 with every sort of economic ptomain! No, Buzz isn't important--it's the sickness that made us throw him up that we've got to attend to--the sickness of more than 30 per cent permanently 85 unemployed, and growing larger. Got to cure it!"
"Can you crazy Tovarishes cure it?" snapped Pollikop, and, "Do you think Communism will cure it?" skeptically wondered Doremus, and, more politely, "Do you really think Karl Marx had the dope?" worried Julian, all three at once.
"You bet your life we can!" said Pascal vaingloriously.
As Doremus, driving away, looked back at them, Pascal and Pollikop were removing a flat tire together and quarreling bitterly, quite happily.
Doremus's attic 86 study had been to him a refuge from the tender solicitudes 87 of Emma and Mrs. Candy and his daughters, and all the impulsive 88 hand-shaking strangers who wanted the local editor to start off their campaigns for the sale of life insurance or gas-saving carburetors, for the Salvation 89 Army or the Red Cross or the Orphans 90' Home or the Anti-cancer Crusade, or the assorted 91 magazines which would enable to go through college young men who at all cost should be kept out of college.
It was a refuge now from the considerably 92 less tender solicitudes of supporters of the President-Elect. On the pretense 93 of work, Doremus took to sneaking 94 up there in mid-evening; and he sat not in an easy chair but stiffly, at his desk, making crosses and five-pointed 95 stars and six-pointed stars and fancy delete signs on sheets of yellow copy paper, while he sorely meditated 96.
Thus, this evening, after the demands of Karl Pascal and John Pollikop:
"'The Revolt against Civilization!'
"But there's the worst trouble of this whole cursed business of analysis. When I get to defending Democracy against Communism and Fascism and what-not, I sound just like the Lothrop Stoddards--why, I sound almost like a Hearst editorial on how some college has got to kick out a Dangerous Red instructor 97 in order to preserve our Democracy for the ideals of Jefferson and Washington! Yet somehow, singing the same words, I have a notion my tune 98 is entirely 99 different from Hearst's. I don't think we've done very well with all the plowland and forest and minerals and husky human stock we've had. What makes me sick about Hearst and the D.A.R. is that if they are against Communism, I have to be for it, and I don't want to be!
"Wastage of resources, so they're about gone--that's been the American share in the revolt against Civilization.
"We can go back to the Dark Ages! The crust of learning and good manners and tolerance 100 is so thin! It would just take a few thousand big shells and gas bombs to wipe out all the eager young men, and all the libraries and historical archives and patent offices, all the laboratories and art galleries, all the castles and Periclean temples and Gothic cathedrals, all the cooperative stores and motor factories--every storehouse of learning. No inherent reason why Sissy's grandchildren--if anybody's grandchildren will survive at all--shouldn't be living in caves and heaving rocks at catamounts.
"And what's the solution of preventing this debacle? Plenty of 'em! The Communists have a patent Solution they know will work. So have the Fascists 101, and the rigid 102 American Constitutionalists--who call themselves advocates of Democracy, without any notion what the word ought to mean; and the Monarchists--who are certain that if we could just resurrect the Kaiser and the Czar and King Alfonso, everybody would be loyal and happy again, and the banks would simply force credit on small businessmen at 2 per cent. And all the preachers--they tell you that they alone have the inspired Solution.
"Well, gentlemen, I have listened to all your Solutions, and I now inform you that I, and I alone, except perhaps for Walt Trowbridge and the ghost of Pareto, have the perfect, the inevitable 103, the only Solution, and that is: There is no Solution! There will never be a state of society anything like perfect!
"There never will be a time when there won't be a large proportion of people who feel poor no matter how much they have, and envy their neighbors who know how to wear cheap clothes showily, and envy neighbors who can dance or make love or digest better."
Doremus suspected that, with the most scientific state, it would be impossible for iron deposits always to find themselves at exactly the rate decided 104 upon two years before by the National Technocratic 105 Minerals Commission, no matter how elevated and fraternal and Utopian the principles of the commissioners 106.
His Solution, Doremus pointed out, was the only one that did not flee before the thought that a thousand years from now human beings would probably continue to die of cancer and earthquake and such clownish mishaps 107 as slipping in bathtubs. It presumed that mankind would continue to be burdened with eyes that grow weak, feet that grow tired, noses that itch 61, intestines 108 vulnerable to bacilli, and generative organs that are nervous until the age of virtue 109 and senility. It seemed to him unidealistically probable, for all the "contemporary furniture" of the 1930's, that most people would continue, at least for a few hundred years, to sit in chairs, eat from dishes upon tables, read books--no matter how many cunning phonographic substitutes might be invented, wear shoes or sandals, sleep in beds, write with some sort of pens, and in general spend twenty or twenty-two hours a day much as they had spent them in 1930, in 1630. He suspected that tornadoes 110, floods, droughts, lightning, and mosquitoes would remain, along with the homicidal tendency known in the best of citizens when their sweethearts go dancing off with other men.
And, most fatally and abysmally 111, his Solution guessed that men of superior cunning, of slyer foxiness, whether they might be called Comrades, Brethren, Commissars, Kings, Patriots 112, Little Brothers of the Poor, or any other rosy 113 name, would continue to have more influence than slower-witted men, however worthy 78.
All the warring Solutions--except his, Doremus chuckled--were ferociously 114 propagated by the Fanatics 115, the "Nuts."
He recalled an article in which Neil Carothers asserted that the "rabble-rousers" of America in the mid-'thirties had a long and dishonorable ancestry 116 of prophets who had felt called upon to stir up the masses to save the world, and save it in the prophets' own way, and do it right now, and most violently: Peter the Hermit 117, the ragged 118, mad, and stinking 119 monk who, to rescue the (unidentified) tomb of the Savior from undefined "outrages 120 by the pagans," led out on the Crusades some hundreds of thousands of European peasants, to die on the way of starvation, after burning, raping 121, and murdering fellow peasants in foreign villages all along the road.
There was John Ball who "in 1381 was a share-the-wealth advocate; he preached equality of wealth, the abolition 122 of class distinctions, and what would now be called communism," and whose follower 123, Wat Tyler, looted London, with the final gratifying result that afterward 124 Labor was by the frightened government more oppressed than ever. And nearly three hundred years later, Cromwell's methods of expounding 125 the sweet winsomeness 126 of Purity and Liberty were shooting, slashing 127, clubbing, starving, and burning people, and after him the workers paid for the spree of bloody 128 righteousness with blood.
Brooding about it, fishing in the muddy slew 129 of recollection which most Americans have in place of a clear pool of history, Doremus was able to add other names of well-meaning rabble-rousers:
Murat and Danton and Robespierre, who helped shift the control of France from the moldy 130 aristocrats 131 to the stuffy 132, centime-pinching shopkeepers. Lenin and Trotzky who gave to the illiterate 133 Russian peasants the privileges of punching a time clock and of being as learned, gay, and dignified 135 as the factory hands in Detroit; and Lenin's man, Borodin, who extended this boon 136 to China. And that William Randolph Hearst who in 1898 was the Lenin of Cuba and switched the mastery of the golden isle 2 from the cruel Spaniards to the peaceful, unarmed, brotherly-loving Cuban politicians of today.
The American Moses, Dowie, and his theocracy 137 at Zion City, Illinois, where the only results of the direct leadership of God--as directed and encouraged by Mr. Dowie and by his even more spirited successor, Mr. Voliva--were that the holy denizens 138 were deprived of oysters 139 and cigarettes and cursing, and died without the aid of doctors instead of with it, and that the stretch of road through Zion City incessantly 140 caused the breakage of springs on the cars of citizens from Evanston, Wilmette, and Winnetka, which may or not have been a desirable Good Deed.
Cecil Rhodes, his vision of making South Africa a British paradise, and the actuality of making it a graveyard 141 for British soldiers.
All the Utopias--Brook Farm, Robert Owen's sanctuary 142 of chatter 143, Upton Sinclair's Helicon Hall--and their regulation end in scandal, feuds 144, poverty, griminess, disillusion 145.
All the leaders of Prohibition, so certain that their cause was world-regenerating that for it they were willing to shoot down violators.
It seemed to Doremus that the only rabble-rouser to build permanently had been Brigham Young, with his bearded Mormon captains, who not only turned the Utah desert into an Eden but made it pay and kept it up.
Pondered Doremus: Blessed be they who are not Patriots and Idealists, and who do not feel they must dash right in and Do Something About It, something so immediately important that all doubters must be liquidated--tortured--slaughtered! Good old murder, that since the slaying 146 of Abel by Cain has always been the new device by which all oligarchies 147 and dictators have, for all future ages to come, removed opposition 148!
In this acid mood Doremus doubted the efficacy of all revolutions; dared even a little to doubt our two American revolutions--against England in 1776, and the Civil War.
For a New England editor to contemplate 149 even the smallest criticism of these wars was what it would have been for a Southern Baptist fundamentalist preacher to question Immortality 150, the Inspiration of the Bible, and the ethical 151 value of shouting Hallelujah. Yet had it, Doremus queried 152 nervously 153, been necessary to have four years of inconceivably murderous Civil War, followed by twenty years of commercial oppression of the South, in order to preserve the Union, free the slaves, and establish the equality of Industry with Agriculture? Had it been just to the Negroes themselves to throw them so suddenly, with so little preparation, into full citizenship 154, that the Southern states, in what they considered self-defense, disqualified them at the polls and lynched them and lashed 155 them? Could they not, as Lincoln at first desired and planned, have been freed without the vote, then gradually and competently educated, under federal guardianship 156, so that by 1890 they might, without too much enmity, have been able to enter fully 157 into all the activities of the land?
A generation and a half (Doremus meditated) of the sturdiest and most gallant 158 killed or crippled in the Civil War or, perhaps worst of all, becoming garrulous 159 professional heroes and satellites of the politicians who in return for their solid vote made all lazy jobs safe for the G.A.R. The most valorous, it was they who suffered the most, for while the John D. Rockefellers, the J. P. Morgans, the Vanderbilts, Astors, Goulds, and all their nimble financial comrades of the South, did not enlist 160, but stayed in the warm, dry counting-house, drawing the fortune of the country into their webs, it was Jeb Stuart, Stonewall Jackson, Nathaniel Lyon, Pat Cleburne, and the knightly 161 James B. McPherson who were killed . . . and with them Abraham Lincoln.
So, with the hundreds of thousands who should have been the progenitors 162 of new American generations drained away, we could show the world, which from 1780 to 1860 had so admired men like Franklin, Jefferson, Washington, Hamilton, the Adamses, Webster, only such salvages 163 as McKinley, Benjamin Harrison, William Jennings Bryan, Harding . . . and Senator Berzelius Windrip and his rivals.
Slavery had been a cancer, and in that day was known no remedy save bloody cutting. There had been no X-rays of wisdom and tolerance. Yet to sentimentalize this cutting, to justify 164 and rejoice in it, was an altogether evil thing, a national superstition 165 that was later to lead to other Unavoidable Wars--wars to free Cubans, to free Filipinos who didn't want our brand of freedom, to End All Wars.
Let us, thought Doremus, not throb 166 again to the bugles 167 of the Civil War, nor find diverting the gallantry of Sherman's dashing Yankee boys in burning the houses of lone women, nor particularly admire the calmness of General Lee as he watched thousands writhe 168 in the mud.
He even wondered if, necessarily, it had been such a desirable thing for the Thirteen Colonies to have cut themselves off from Great Britain. Had the United States remained in the British Empire, possibly there would have evolved a confederation that could have enforced World Peace, instead of talking about it. Boys and girls from Western ranches 169 and Southern plantations 170 and Northern maple 171 groves 172 might have added Oxford 173 and York Minster and Devonshire villages to their own domain. Englishmen, and even virtuous 174 Englishwomen, might have learned that persons who lack the accent of a Kentish rectory or of a Yorkshire textile village may yet in many ways be literate 134; and that astonishing numbers of persons in the world cannot be persuaded that their chief aim in life ought to be to increase British exports on behalf of the stock-holdings of the Better Classes.
It is commonly asserted, Doremus remembered, that without complete political independence the United States could not have developed its own peculiar 175 virtues 176. Yet it was not apparent to him that America was any more individual than Canada or Australia; that Pittsburgh and Kansas City were to be preferred before Montreal and Melbourne, Sydney and Vancouver.
No questioning of the eventual 177 wisdom of the "radicals 178" who had first advocated these two American revolutions, Doremus warned himself, should be allowed to give any comfort to that eternal enemy: the conservative manipulators of privilege who damn as "dangerous agitators 179" any man who menaces their fortunes; who jump in their chairs at the sting of a gnat 180 like Debs, and blandly 181 swallow a camel like Windrip.
Between the rabble-rousers--chiefly to be detected by desire for their own personal power and notoriety--and the un-self-seeking fighters against tyranny, between William Walker or Danton, and John Howard or William Lloyd Garrison 182, Doremus saw, there was the difference between a noisy gang of thieves and an honest man noisily defending himself against thieves. He had been brought up to revere 8 the Abolitionists: Lovejoy, Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Harriet Beecher Stowe--though his father had considered John Brown insane and a menace, and had thrown sly mud at the marble statues of Henry Ward 10 Beecher, the apostle in the fancy vest. And Doremus could not do otherwise than revere the Abolitionists now, though he wondered a little if Stephen Douglas and Thaddeus Stephens and Lincoln, more cautious and less romantic men, might not have done the job better.
"Is it just possible," he sighed, "that the most vigorous and boldest idealists have been the worst enemies of human progress instead of its greatest creators? Possible that plain men with the humble 183 trait of minding their own business will rank higher in the heavenly hierarchy 184 than all the plumed 185 souls who have shoved their way in among the masses and insisted on saving them?"
by Sinclair Lewis
Chapter 13
And when I get ready to retire I'm going to build me an up-to-date bungalow 1 in some lovely resort, not in Como or any other of the proverbial Grecian isles 3 you may be sure, but in somewheres like Florida, California, Santa Fe, & etc., and devote myself just to reading the classics, like Longfellow, James Whitcomb Riley, Lord Macaulay, Henry Van Dyke 4, Elbert Hubbard, Plato, Hiawatha, & etc. Some of my friends laugh at me for it, but I have always cultivated a taste for the finest in literature. I got it from my Mother as I did everything that some people have been so good as to admire in me.
Zero Hour, Berzelius Windrip.
Certain though Doremus had been of Windrip's election, the event was like the long-dreaded passing of a friend.
"All right. Hell with this country, if it's like that. All these years I've worked--and I never did want to be on all these committees and boards and charity drives!--and don't they look silly now! What I always wanted to do was to sneak 5 off to an ivory tower--or anyway, celluloid, imitation ivory--and read everything I've been too busy to read."
Thus Doremus, in late November.
And he did actually attempt it, and for a few days reveled in it, avoiding everyone save his family and Lorinda, Buck 6 Titus, and Father Perefixe. Mostly, though, he found that he did not relish 7 the "classics" he had so far missed, but those familiar to his youth: Ivanhoe, Huckleberry Finn, Midsummer Night's Dream, The Tempest, L'Allegro, The Way of All Flesh (not quite so youthful, there), Moby Dick, The Earthly Paradise, St. Agnes' Eve, The Idylls of the King, most of Swinburne, Pride and Prejudice, Religio Medici, Vanity Fair.
Probably he was not so very different from President-Elect Windrip in his rather uncritical reverence 9 toward any book he had heard of before he was thirty. . . . No American whose fathers have lived in the country for over two generations is so utterly 12 different from any other American.
In one thing, Doremus's literary escapism failed him thoroughly 13. He tried to relearn Latin, but he could not now, uncajoled by a master, believe that "Mensa, mensae, mensae, mensam, mensa"--all that idiotic 14 A table, of a table, to a table, toward a table, at in by or on a table--could bear him again as once it had to the honey-sweet tranquillity 15 of Vergil and the Sabine Farm.
Then he saw that in everything his quest failed him.
The reading was good enough, toothsome, satisfying, except that he felt guilty at having sneaked 16 away to an Ivory Tower at all. Too many years he had made a habit of social duty. He wanted to be "in" things, and he was daily more irritable 17 as Windrip began, even before his inauguration 18, to dictate 19 to the country.
Buzz's party, with the desertions to the Jeffersonians, had less than a majority in Congress. "Inside dope" came to Doremus from Washington that Windrip was trying to buy, to flatter, to blackmail 20 opposing Congressmen. A President-Elect has unhallowed power, if he so wishes, and Windrip--no doubt with promises of abnormal favors in the way of patronage--won over a few. Five Jeffersonian Congressmen had their elections challenged. One sensationally 21 disappeared, and smoking after his galloping 22 heels there was a devilish fume 23 of embezzlements. And with each such triumph of Windrip, all the well-meaning, cloistered 24 Doremuses of the country were the more anxious.
All through the "Depression," ever since 1929, Doremus had felt the insecurity, the confusion, the sense of futility 25 in trying to do anything more permanent than shaving or eating breakfast, that was general to the country. He could no longer plan, for himself or for his dependants 26, as the citizens of this once unsettled country had planned since 1620.
Why, their whole lives had been predicated on the privilege of planning. Depressions had been only cyclic storms, certain to end in sunshine; Capitalism 27 and parliamentary government were eternal, and eternally being improved by the honest votes of Good Citizens.
Doremus's grandfather, Calvin, Civil War veteran and ill-paid, illiberal 28 Congregational minister, had yet planned, "My son, Loren, shall have a theological education, and I think we shall be able to build a fine new house in fifteen or twenty years." That had given him a reason for working, and a goal.
His father, Loren, had vowed 29, "Even if I have to economize 30 on books a little, and perhaps give up this extravagance of eating meat four times a week--very bad for the digestion 31, anyway--my son, Doremus, shall have a college education, and when, as he desires, he becomes a publicist, I think perhaps I shall be able to help him for a year or two. And then I hope--oh, in a mere 32 five or six years more--to buy that complete Dickens with all the illustrations--oh, an extravagance, but a thing to leave to my grandchildren to treasure forever!"
But Doremus Jessup could not plan, "I'll have Sissy go to Smith before she studies architecture," or "If Julian Falck and Sissy get married and stick here in the Fort, I'll give 'em the southwest lot and some day, maybe fifteen years from now, the whole place will be filled with nice kids again!" No. Fifteen years from now, he sighed, Sissy might be hustling 33 hash for the sort of workers who called the waiter's art "hustling hash"; and Julian might be in a concentration camp--Fascist or Communist!
The Horatio Alger tradition, from rags to Rockefellers, was clean gone out of the America it had dominated.
It seemed faintly silly to hope, to try to prophesy 34, to give up sleep on a good mattress 35 for toil 36 on a typewriter, and as for saving money--idiotic!
And for a newspaper editor--for one who must know, at least as well as the Encyclopædia, everything about local and foreign history, geography, economics, politics, literature, and methods of playing football--it was maddening that it seemed impossible now to know anything surely.
"He don't know what it's all about" had in a year or two changed from a colloquial 37 sneer 38 to a sound general statement regarding almost any economist 39. Once, modestly enough, Doremus had assumed that he had a decent knowledge of finance, taxation 40, the gold standard, agricultural exports, and he had smilingly pontificated everywhere that Liberal Capitalism would pastorally lead into State Socialism, with governmental ownership of mines and railroads and water-power so settling all inequalities of income that every lion of a structural 41 steel worker would be willing to lie down with any lamb of a contractor 42, and all the jails and tuberculosis 43 sanatoria would be clean empty.
Now he knew that he knew nothing fundamental and, like a lone 44 monk 45 stricken with a conviction of sin, he mourned, "If I only knew more! . . . Yes, and if I could only remember statistics!"
The coming and the going of the N.R.A., the F.E.R.A., the P.W.A., and all the rest, had convinced Doremus that there were four sets of people who did not clearly understand anything whatever about how the government must be conducted: all the authorities in Washington; all of the citizenry who talked or wrote profusely 46 about politics; the bewildered untouchables who said nothing; and Doremus Jessup.
"But," said he, "now, after Buzz's inauguration, everything is going to be completely simple and comprehensible again--the country is going to be run as his private domain 47!"
Julian Falck, now sophomore 48 in Amherst, had come home for Christmas vacation, and he dropped in at the Informer office to beg from Doremus a ride home before dinner.
He called Doremus "sir" and did not seem to think he was a comic fossil. Doremus liked it.
On the way they stopped for gasoline at the garage of John Pollikop, the seething 49 Social Democrat 50, and were waited upon by Karl Pascal--sometime donkey-engine-man at Tasbrough's quarry 51, sometime strike leader, sometime political prisoner in the county jail on a thin charge of inciting 52 to riot, and ever since then, a model of Communistic piety 53.
Pascal was a thin man, but sinewy 54; his gaunt and humorous face of a good mechanic was so grease-darkened that the skin above and below his eyes seemed white as a fish-belly, and, in turn, that pallid 55 rim 56 made his eyes, alert dark gipsy eyes, seem the larger. . . . A panther chained to a coal cart.
"Well, what you going to do after this election?" said Doremus. "Oh! That's a fool question! I guess none of us chronic 57 kickers want to say much about what we plan to do after January, when Buzz gets his hands on us. Lie low, eh?"
"I'm going to lie the lowest lie that I ever did. You bet! But maybe there'll be a few Communist cells around here now, when Fascism begins to get into people's hair. Never did have much success with my propaganda before, but now, you watch!" exulted 58 Pascal.
"You don't seem so depressed 59 by the election," marveled Doremus, while Julian offered, "No--you seem quite cheerful about it!"
"Depressed? Why good Lord, Mr. Jessup, I thought you knew your revolutionary tactics better than that, way you supported us in the quarry strike--even if you are the perfect type of small capitalist bourgeois 60! Depressed? Why, can't you see, if the Communists had paid for it they couldn't have had anything more elegant for our purposes than the election of a pro-plutocrat, itching 62 militarist dictator like Buzz Windrip! Look! He'll get everybody plenty dissatisfied. But they can't do anything, barehanded against the armed troops. Then he'll whoop 63 it up for a war, and so millions of people will have arms and food rations 11 in their hands--all ready for the revolution! Hurray for Buzz and John Prang the Baptist!"
"Karl, it's funny about you. I honestly believe you believe in Communism!" marveled young Julian. "Don't you?"
"Why don't you go and ask your friend Father Perefixe if he believes in the Virgin 64?"
"But you seem to like America, and you don't seem so fanatical, Karl. I remember when I was a kid of about ten and you--I suppose you were about twenty-five or -six then--you used to slide with us and whoop like hell, and you made me a ski-stick."
"Sure I like America. Came here when I was two years old--I was born in Germany--my folks weren't Heinies, though--my dad was French and my mother a Hunkie from Serbia. (Guess that makes me a hundred per cent American, all right!) I think we've got the Old Country beat, lots of ways. Why, say, Julian, over there I'd have to call you 'Mein Herr' or 'Your Excellency,' or some fool thing, and you'd call me, 'I say-uh, Pascal!' and Mr. Jessup here, my Lord, he'd be 'Commendatore' or 'Herr Doktor'! No, I like it here. There's symptoms of possible future democracy. But--but--what burns me up--it isn't that old soap-boxer's chestnut 65 about how one tenth of 1 per cent of the population at the top have an aggregate 66 income equal to 42 per cent at the bottom. Figures like that are too astronomical 67. Don't mean a thing in the world to a fellow with his eyes--and nose--down in a transmission box--fellow that doesn't see the stars except after 9 P.M. on odd Wednesdays. But what burns me up is the fact that even before this Depression, in what you folks called prosperous times, 7 per cent of all the families in the country earned $500 a year or less--remember, those weren't the unemployed 68, on relief; those were the guys that had the honor of still doing honest labor 69.
"Five hundred dollars a year is ten dollars a week--and that means one dirty little room for a family of four people! It means $5.00 a week for all their food--eighteen cents per day per person for food!--and even the lousiest prisons allow more than that. And the magnificent remainder of $2.50 a week, that means nine cents per day per person for clothes, insurance, carfares, doctors' bills, dentists' bills, and for God's sake, amusements--amusements!--and all the rest of the nine cents a day they can fritter away on their Fords and autogiros and, when they feel fagged, skipping across the pond on the Normandie! Seven per cent of all the fortunate American families where the old man has got a job!"
Julian was silent; then whispered, "You know--fellow gets discussing economics in college--theoretically sympathetic--but to see your own kids living on eighteen cents a day for grub--I guess that would make a man pretty extremist!"
Doremus fretted 70, "But what percentage of forced labor in your Russian lumber 71 camps and Siberian prison mines are getting more than that?"
"Haaa! That's all baloney! That's the old standard come-back at every Communist--just like once, twenty years ago, the muttonheads used to think they'd crushed any Socialist 72 when they snickered 'If all the money was divided up, inside five years the hustlers would have all of it again.' Prob'ly there's some standard coup 73 de grace like that in Russia, to crush anybody that defends America. Besides!" Karl Pascal glowed with nationalistic fervor 74. "We Americans aren't like those dumb Russki peasants! We'll do a whole lot better when we get Communism!"
And on that, his employer, the expansive John Pollikop, a woolly Scotch 75 terrier of a man, returned to the garage. John was an excellent friend of Doremus; had, indeed, been his bootlegger all through Prohibition 76, personally running in his whisky from Canada. He had been known, even in that singularly scrupulous 77 profession, as one of its most trustworthy practitioners 79. Now he flowered into mid-European dialectics:
"Evenin', Mist' Jessup, evenin', Julian! Karl fill up y' tank for you? You want t' watch that guy--he's likely to hold out a gallon on you. He's one of these crazy dogs of Communists--they all believe in Violence instead of Evolution and Legality. Them--why say, if they hadn't been so crooked 80, if they'd joined me and Norman Thomas and the other intelligent Socialists 81 in a United Front with Roosevelt and the Jeffersonians, why say, we'd of licked the pants off Buzzard Windrip! Windrip and his plans!"
("Buzzard" Windrip. That was good, Doremus reflected. He'd be able to use it in the Informer!)
Pascal protested, "Not that Buzzard's personal plans and ambitions have got much to do with it. Altogether too easy to explain everything just blaming it on Windrip. Why don't you read your Marx, John, instead of always gassing about him? Why, Windrip's just something nasty that's been vomited 82 up. Plenty others still left fermenting 83 in the stomach--quack economists 84 with every sort of economic ptomain! No, Buzz isn't important--it's the sickness that made us throw him up that we've got to attend to--the sickness of more than 30 per cent permanently 85 unemployed, and growing larger. Got to cure it!"
"Can you crazy Tovarishes cure it?" snapped Pollikop, and, "Do you think Communism will cure it?" skeptically wondered Doremus, and, more politely, "Do you really think Karl Marx had the dope?" worried Julian, all three at once.
"You bet your life we can!" said Pascal vaingloriously.
As Doremus, driving away, looked back at them, Pascal and Pollikop were removing a flat tire together and quarreling bitterly, quite happily.
Doremus's attic 86 study had been to him a refuge from the tender solicitudes 87 of Emma and Mrs. Candy and his daughters, and all the impulsive 88 hand-shaking strangers who wanted the local editor to start off their campaigns for the sale of life insurance or gas-saving carburetors, for the Salvation 89 Army or the Red Cross or the Orphans 90' Home or the Anti-cancer Crusade, or the assorted 91 magazines which would enable to go through college young men who at all cost should be kept out of college.
It was a refuge now from the considerably 92 less tender solicitudes of supporters of the President-Elect. On the pretense 93 of work, Doremus took to sneaking 94 up there in mid-evening; and he sat not in an easy chair but stiffly, at his desk, making crosses and five-pointed 95 stars and six-pointed stars and fancy delete signs on sheets of yellow copy paper, while he sorely meditated 96.
Thus, this evening, after the demands of Karl Pascal and John Pollikop:
"'The Revolt against Civilization!'
"But there's the worst trouble of this whole cursed business of analysis. When I get to defending Democracy against Communism and Fascism and what-not, I sound just like the Lothrop Stoddards--why, I sound almost like a Hearst editorial on how some college has got to kick out a Dangerous Red instructor 97 in order to preserve our Democracy for the ideals of Jefferson and Washington! Yet somehow, singing the same words, I have a notion my tune 98 is entirely 99 different from Hearst's. I don't think we've done very well with all the plowland and forest and minerals and husky human stock we've had. What makes me sick about Hearst and the D.A.R. is that if they are against Communism, I have to be for it, and I don't want to be!
"Wastage of resources, so they're about gone--that's been the American share in the revolt against Civilization.
"We can go back to the Dark Ages! The crust of learning and good manners and tolerance 100 is so thin! It would just take a few thousand big shells and gas bombs to wipe out all the eager young men, and all the libraries and historical archives and patent offices, all the laboratories and art galleries, all the castles and Periclean temples and Gothic cathedrals, all the cooperative stores and motor factories--every storehouse of learning. No inherent reason why Sissy's grandchildren--if anybody's grandchildren will survive at all--shouldn't be living in caves and heaving rocks at catamounts.
"And what's the solution of preventing this debacle? Plenty of 'em! The Communists have a patent Solution they know will work. So have the Fascists 101, and the rigid 102 American Constitutionalists--who call themselves advocates of Democracy, without any notion what the word ought to mean; and the Monarchists--who are certain that if we could just resurrect the Kaiser and the Czar and King Alfonso, everybody would be loyal and happy again, and the banks would simply force credit on small businessmen at 2 per cent. And all the preachers--they tell you that they alone have the inspired Solution.
"Well, gentlemen, I have listened to all your Solutions, and I now inform you that I, and I alone, except perhaps for Walt Trowbridge and the ghost of Pareto, have the perfect, the inevitable 103, the only Solution, and that is: There is no Solution! There will never be a state of society anything like perfect!
"There never will be a time when there won't be a large proportion of people who feel poor no matter how much they have, and envy their neighbors who know how to wear cheap clothes showily, and envy neighbors who can dance or make love or digest better."
Doremus suspected that, with the most scientific state, it would be impossible for iron deposits always to find themselves at exactly the rate decided 104 upon two years before by the National Technocratic 105 Minerals Commission, no matter how elevated and fraternal and Utopian the principles of the commissioners 106.
His Solution, Doremus pointed out, was the only one that did not flee before the thought that a thousand years from now human beings would probably continue to die of cancer and earthquake and such clownish mishaps 107 as slipping in bathtubs. It presumed that mankind would continue to be burdened with eyes that grow weak, feet that grow tired, noses that itch 61, intestines 108 vulnerable to bacilli, and generative organs that are nervous until the age of virtue 109 and senility. It seemed to him unidealistically probable, for all the "contemporary furniture" of the 1930's, that most people would continue, at least for a few hundred years, to sit in chairs, eat from dishes upon tables, read books--no matter how many cunning phonographic substitutes might be invented, wear shoes or sandals, sleep in beds, write with some sort of pens, and in general spend twenty or twenty-two hours a day much as they had spent them in 1930, in 1630. He suspected that tornadoes 110, floods, droughts, lightning, and mosquitoes would remain, along with the homicidal tendency known in the best of citizens when their sweethearts go dancing off with other men.
And, most fatally and abysmally 111, his Solution guessed that men of superior cunning, of slyer foxiness, whether they might be called Comrades, Brethren, Commissars, Kings, Patriots 112, Little Brothers of the Poor, or any other rosy 113 name, would continue to have more influence than slower-witted men, however worthy 78.
All the warring Solutions--except his, Doremus chuckled--were ferociously 114 propagated by the Fanatics 115, the "Nuts."
He recalled an article in which Neil Carothers asserted that the "rabble-rousers" of America in the mid-'thirties had a long and dishonorable ancestry 116 of prophets who had felt called upon to stir up the masses to save the world, and save it in the prophets' own way, and do it right now, and most violently: Peter the Hermit 117, the ragged 118, mad, and stinking 119 monk who, to rescue the (unidentified) tomb of the Savior from undefined "outrages 120 by the pagans," led out on the Crusades some hundreds of thousands of European peasants, to die on the way of starvation, after burning, raping 121, and murdering fellow peasants in foreign villages all along the road.
There was John Ball who "in 1381 was a share-the-wealth advocate; he preached equality of wealth, the abolition 122 of class distinctions, and what would now be called communism," and whose follower 123, Wat Tyler, looted London, with the final gratifying result that afterward 124 Labor was by the frightened government more oppressed than ever. And nearly three hundred years later, Cromwell's methods of expounding 125 the sweet winsomeness 126 of Purity and Liberty were shooting, slashing 127, clubbing, starving, and burning people, and after him the workers paid for the spree of bloody 128 righteousness with blood.
Brooding about it, fishing in the muddy slew 129 of recollection which most Americans have in place of a clear pool of history, Doremus was able to add other names of well-meaning rabble-rousers:
Murat and Danton and Robespierre, who helped shift the control of France from the moldy 130 aristocrats 131 to the stuffy 132, centime-pinching shopkeepers. Lenin and Trotzky who gave to the illiterate 133 Russian peasants the privileges of punching a time clock and of being as learned, gay, and dignified 135 as the factory hands in Detroit; and Lenin's man, Borodin, who extended this boon 136 to China. And that William Randolph Hearst who in 1898 was the Lenin of Cuba and switched the mastery of the golden isle 2 from the cruel Spaniards to the peaceful, unarmed, brotherly-loving Cuban politicians of today.
The American Moses, Dowie, and his theocracy 137 at Zion City, Illinois, where the only results of the direct leadership of God--as directed and encouraged by Mr. Dowie and by his even more spirited successor, Mr. Voliva--were that the holy denizens 138 were deprived of oysters 139 and cigarettes and cursing, and died without the aid of doctors instead of with it, and that the stretch of road through Zion City incessantly 140 caused the breakage of springs on the cars of citizens from Evanston, Wilmette, and Winnetka, which may or not have been a desirable Good Deed.
Cecil Rhodes, his vision of making South Africa a British paradise, and the actuality of making it a graveyard 141 for British soldiers.
All the Utopias--Brook Farm, Robert Owen's sanctuary 142 of chatter 143, Upton Sinclair's Helicon Hall--and their regulation end in scandal, feuds 144, poverty, griminess, disillusion 145.
All the leaders of Prohibition, so certain that their cause was world-regenerating that for it they were willing to shoot down violators.
It seemed to Doremus that the only rabble-rouser to build permanently had been Brigham Young, with his bearded Mormon captains, who not only turned the Utah desert into an Eden but made it pay and kept it up.
Pondered Doremus: Blessed be they who are not Patriots and Idealists, and who do not feel they must dash right in and Do Something About It, something so immediately important that all doubters must be liquidated--tortured--slaughtered! Good old murder, that since the slaying 146 of Abel by Cain has always been the new device by which all oligarchies 147 and dictators have, for all future ages to come, removed opposition 148!
In this acid mood Doremus doubted the efficacy of all revolutions; dared even a little to doubt our two American revolutions--against England in 1776, and the Civil War.
For a New England editor to contemplate 149 even the smallest criticism of these wars was what it would have been for a Southern Baptist fundamentalist preacher to question Immortality 150, the Inspiration of the Bible, and the ethical 151 value of shouting Hallelujah. Yet had it, Doremus queried 152 nervously 153, been necessary to have four years of inconceivably murderous Civil War, followed by twenty years of commercial oppression of the South, in order to preserve the Union, free the slaves, and establish the equality of Industry with Agriculture? Had it been just to the Negroes themselves to throw them so suddenly, with so little preparation, into full citizenship 154, that the Southern states, in what they considered self-defense, disqualified them at the polls and lynched them and lashed 155 them? Could they not, as Lincoln at first desired and planned, have been freed without the vote, then gradually and competently educated, under federal guardianship 156, so that by 1890 they might, without too much enmity, have been able to enter fully 157 into all the activities of the land?
A generation and a half (Doremus meditated) of the sturdiest and most gallant 158 killed or crippled in the Civil War or, perhaps worst of all, becoming garrulous 159 professional heroes and satellites of the politicians who in return for their solid vote made all lazy jobs safe for the G.A.R. The most valorous, it was they who suffered the most, for while the John D. Rockefellers, the J. P. Morgans, the Vanderbilts, Astors, Goulds, and all their nimble financial comrades of the South, did not enlist 160, but stayed in the warm, dry counting-house, drawing the fortune of the country into their webs, it was Jeb Stuart, Stonewall Jackson, Nathaniel Lyon, Pat Cleburne, and the knightly 161 James B. McPherson who were killed . . . and with them Abraham Lincoln.
So, with the hundreds of thousands who should have been the progenitors 162 of new American generations drained away, we could show the world, which from 1780 to 1860 had so admired men like Franklin, Jefferson, Washington, Hamilton, the Adamses, Webster, only such salvages 163 as McKinley, Benjamin Harrison, William Jennings Bryan, Harding . . . and Senator Berzelius Windrip and his rivals.
Slavery had been a cancer, and in that day was known no remedy save bloody cutting. There had been no X-rays of wisdom and tolerance. Yet to sentimentalize this cutting, to justify 164 and rejoice in it, was an altogether evil thing, a national superstition 165 that was later to lead to other Unavoidable Wars--wars to free Cubans, to free Filipinos who didn't want our brand of freedom, to End All Wars.
Let us, thought Doremus, not throb 166 again to the bugles 167 of the Civil War, nor find diverting the gallantry of Sherman's dashing Yankee boys in burning the houses of lone women, nor particularly admire the calmness of General Lee as he watched thousands writhe 168 in the mud.
He even wondered if, necessarily, it had been such a desirable thing for the Thirteen Colonies to have cut themselves off from Great Britain. Had the United States remained in the British Empire, possibly there would have evolved a confederation that could have enforced World Peace, instead of talking about it. Boys and girls from Western ranches 169 and Southern plantations 170 and Northern maple 171 groves 172 might have added Oxford 173 and York Minster and Devonshire villages to their own domain. Englishmen, and even virtuous 174 Englishwomen, might have learned that persons who lack the accent of a Kentish rectory or of a Yorkshire textile village may yet in many ways be literate 134; and that astonishing numbers of persons in the world cannot be persuaded that their chief aim in life ought to be to increase British exports on behalf of the stock-holdings of the Better Classes.
It is commonly asserted, Doremus remembered, that without complete political independence the United States could not have developed its own peculiar 175 virtues 176. Yet it was not apparent to him that America was any more individual than Canada or Australia; that Pittsburgh and Kansas City were to be preferred before Montreal and Melbourne, Sydney and Vancouver.
No questioning of the eventual 177 wisdom of the "radicals 178" who had first advocated these two American revolutions, Doremus warned himself, should be allowed to give any comfort to that eternal enemy: the conservative manipulators of privilege who damn as "dangerous agitators 179" any man who menaces their fortunes; who jump in their chairs at the sting of a gnat 180 like Debs, and blandly 181 swallow a camel like Windrip.
Between the rabble-rousers--chiefly to be detected by desire for their own personal power and notoriety--and the un-self-seeking fighters against tyranny, between William Walker or Danton, and John Howard or William Lloyd Garrison 182, Doremus saw, there was the difference between a noisy gang of thieves and an honest man noisily defending himself against thieves. He had been brought up to revere 8 the Abolitionists: Lovejoy, Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Harriet Beecher Stowe--though his father had considered John Brown insane and a menace, and had thrown sly mud at the marble statues of Henry Ward 10 Beecher, the apostle in the fancy vest. And Doremus could not do otherwise than revere the Abolitionists now, though he wondered a little if Stephen Douglas and Thaddeus Stephens and Lincoln, more cautious and less romantic men, might not have done the job better.
"Is it just possible," he sighed, "that the most vigorous and boldest idealists have been the worst enemies of human progress instead of its greatest creators? Possible that plain men with the humble 183 trait of minding their own business will rank higher in the heavenly hierarchy 184 than all the plumed 185 souls who have shoved their way in among the masses and insisted on saving them?"
n.平房,周围有阳台的木造小平房
- A bungalow does not have an upstairs.平房没有上层。
- The old couple sold that large house and moved into a small bungalow.老两口卖掉了那幢大房子,搬进了小平房。
n.小岛,岛
- He is from the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea.他来自爱尔兰海的马恩岛。
- The boat left for the paradise isle of Bali.小船驶向天堂一般的巴厘岛。
岛( isle的名词复数 )
- the geology of the British Isles 不列颠群岛的地质
- The boat left for the isles. 小船驶向那些小岛。
n.堤,水坝,排水沟
- If one sheep leap over the dyke,all the rest will follow.一只羊跳过沟,其余的羊也跟着跳。
- One ant-hole may cause the collapse of a thousand-li dyke.千里长堤,溃于蚁穴。
vt.潜行(隐藏,填石缝);偷偷摸摸做;n.潜行;adj.暗中进行
- He raised his spear and sneak forward.他提起长矛悄悄地前进。
- I saw him sneak away from us.我看见他悄悄地从我们身边走开。
n.雄鹿,雄兔;v.马离地跳跃
- The boy bent curiously to the skeleton of the buck.这个男孩好奇地弯下身去看鹿的骸骨。
- The female deer attracts the buck with high-pitched sounds.雌鹿以尖声吸引雄鹿。
n.滋味,享受,爱好,调味品;vt.加调味料,享受,品味;vi.有滋味
- I have no relish for pop music.我对流行音乐不感兴趣。
- I relish the challenge of doing jobs that others turn down.我喜欢挑战别人拒绝做的工作。
vt.尊崇,崇敬,敬畏
- Students revere the old professors.学生们十分尊敬那些老教授。
- The Chinese revered corn as a gift from heaven.中国人将谷物奉为上天的恩赐。
n.敬畏,尊敬,尊严;Reverence:对某些基督教神职人员的尊称;v.尊敬,敬畏,崇敬
- He was a bishop who was held in reverence by all.他是一位被大家都尊敬的主教。
- We reverence tradition but will not be fettered by it.我们尊重传统,但不被传统所束缚。
n.守卫,监护,病房,行政区,由监护人或法院保护的人(尤指儿童);vt.守护,躲开
- The hospital has a medical ward and a surgical ward.这家医院有内科病房和外科病房。
- During the evening picnic,I'll carry a torch to ward off the bugs.傍晚野餐时,我要点根火把,抵挡蚊虫。
定量( ration的名词复数 ); 配给量; 正常量; 合理的量
- They are provisioned with seven days' rations. 他们得到了7天的给养。
- The soldiers complained that they were getting short rations. 士兵们抱怨他们得到的配给不够数。
adv.完全地,绝对地
- Utterly devoted to the people,he gave his life in saving his patients.他忠于人民,把毕生精力用于挽救患者的生命。
- I was utterly ravished by the way she smiled.她的微笑使我完全陶醉了。
adv.完全地,彻底地,十足地
- The soil must be thoroughly turned over before planting.一定要先把土地深翻一遍再下种。
- The soldiers have been thoroughly instructed in the care of their weapons.士兵们都系统地接受过保护武器的训练。
adj.白痴的
- It is idiotic to go shopping with no money.去买东西而不带钱是很蠢的。
- The child's idiotic deeds caused his family much trouble.那小孩愚蠢的行为给家庭带来许多麻烦。
n. 平静, 安静
- The phenomenon was so striking and disturbing that his philosophical tranquillity vanished. 这个令人惶惑不安的现象,扰乱了他的旷达宁静的心境。
- My value for domestic tranquillity should much exceed theirs. 我应该远比他们重视家庭的平静生活。
v.潜行( sneak的过去式和过去分词 );偷偷溜走;(儿童向成人)打小报告;告状
- I sneaked up the stairs. 我蹑手蹑脚地上了楼。
- She sneaked a surreptitious glance at her watch. 她偷偷看了一眼手表。
adj.急躁的;过敏的;易怒的
- He gets irritable when he's got toothache.他牙一疼就很容易发脾气。
- Our teacher is an irritable old lady.She gets angry easily.我们的老师是位脾气急躁的老太太。她很容易生气。
n.开幕、就职典礼
- The inauguration of a President of the United States takes place on January 20.美国总统的就职典礼于一月二十日举行。
- Three celebrated tenors sang at the president's inauguration.3位著名的男高音歌手在总统就职仪式上演唱。
v.口授;(使)听写;指令,指示,命令
- It took him a long time to dictate this letter.口述这封信花了他很长时间。
- What right have you to dictate to others?你有什么资格向别人发号施令?
n.讹诈,敲诈,勒索,胁迫,恫吓
- She demanded $1000 blackmail from him.她向他敲诈了1000美元。
- The journalist used blackmail to make the lawyer give him the documents.记者讹诈那名律师交给他文件。
- Newspapers reported the incident sensationally, making it appear worse than it really was. 报纸大肆渲染这件事,描述得更不像话。 来自辞典例句
- However Gattuso has sensationally come out against the 28-year-old's signature. 然而加图索已经公开的站出来反对签下这名28岁的球员。 来自互联网
n.(usu pl.)(浓烈或难闻的)烟,气,汽
- The pressure of fume in chimney increases slowly from top to bottom.烟道内压力自上而下逐渐增加,底层住户的排烟最为不利。
- Your harsh words put her in a fume.你那些难听的话使她生气了。
adj.隐居的,躲开尘世纷争的v.隐退,使与世隔绝( cloister的过去式和过去分词 )
- the cloistered world of the university 与世隔绝的大学
- She cloistered herself in the office. 她呆在办公室里好像与世隔绝一样。 来自《简明英汉词典》
n.无用
- She could see the utter futility of trying to protest. 她明白抗议是完全无用的。
- The sheer futility of it all exasperates her. 它毫无用处,这让她很生气。
受赡养者,受扶养的家属( dependant的名词复数 )
- The government has agreed to take only 150 refugees plus their dependants. 政府承诺只收留150 名难民及家属。
- There are approximately 12 million migrants with their dependants living in the EU countries. 大约有1200万流动工人带着家属居住在欧盟诸国。
n.资本主义
- The essence of his argument is that capitalism cannot succeed.他的论点的核心是资本主义不能成功。
- Capitalism began to develop in Russia in the 19th century.十九世纪资本主义在俄国开始发展。
adj.气量狭小的,吝啬的
- His views are markedly illiberal.他的观点非常狭隘。
- Don't be illiberal in your words to show your love.不要吝啬自己的语言表达你的情感。
起誓,发誓(vow的过去式与过去分词形式)
- He vowed quite solemnly that he would carry out his promise. 他非常庄严地发誓要实现他的诺言。
- I vowed to do more of the cooking myself. 我发誓自己要多动手做饭。
v.节约,节省
- We're going to have to economize from now on. 从现在开始,我们不得不节约开支。
- We have to economize on water during the dry season. 我们在旱季不得不节约用水。
n.消化,吸收
- This kind of tea acts as an aid to digestion.这种茶可助消化。
- This food is easy of digestion.这食物容易消化。
adj.纯粹的;仅仅,只不过
- That is a mere repetition of what you said before.那不过是重复了你以前讲的话。
- It's a mere waste of time waiting any longer.再等下去纯粹是浪费时间。
催促(hustle的现在分词形式)
- Our quartet was out hustling and we knew we stood good to take in a lot of change before the night was over. 我们的四重奏是明显地卖座的, 而且我们知道在天亮以前,我们有把握收入一大笔钱。
- Men in motors were hustling to pass one another in the hustling traffic. 开汽车的人在繁忙的交通中急急忙忙地互相超车。
v.预言;预示
- He dares to prophesy what will happen in the future.他敢预言未来将发生什么事。
- I prophesy that he'll be back in the old job.我预言他将重操旧业。
n.床垫,床褥
- The straw mattress needs to be aired.草垫子该晾一晾了。
- The new mattress I bought sags in the middle.我买的新床垫中间陷了下去。
vi.辛劳工作,艰难地行动;n.苦工,难事
- The wealth comes from the toil of the masses.财富来自大众的辛勤劳动。
- Every single grain is the result of toil.每一粒粮食都来之不易。
adj.口语的,会话的
- It's hard to understand the colloquial idioms of a foreign language.外语里的口头习语很难懂。
- They have little acquaintance with colloquial English. 他们对英语会话几乎一窍不通。
v.轻蔑;嘲笑;n.嘲笑,讥讽的言语
- He said with a sneer.他的话中带有嘲笑之意。
- You may sneer,but a lot of people like this kind of music.你可以嗤之以鼻,但很多人喜欢这种音乐。
n.经济学家,经济专家,节俭的人
- He cast a professional economist's eyes on the problem.他以经济学行家的眼光审视这个问题。
- He's an economist who thinks he knows all the answers.他是个经济学家,自以为什么都懂。
n.征税,税收,税金
- He made a number of simplifications in the taxation system.他在税制上作了一些简化。
- The increase of taxation is an important fiscal policy.增税是一项重要的财政政策。
adj.构造的,组织的,建筑(用)的
- The storm caused no structural damage.风暴没有造成建筑结构方面的破坏。
- The North American continent is made up of three great structural entities.北美大陆是由三个构造单元组成的。
n.订约人,承包人,收缩肌
- The Tokyo contractor was asked to kick $ 6000 back as commission.那个东京的承包商被要求退还6000美元作为佣金。
- The style of house the contractor builds depends partly on the lay of the land.承包商所建房屋的式样,有几分要看地势而定。
n.结核病,肺结核
- People used to go to special health spring to recover from tuberculosis.人们常去温泉疗养胜地治疗肺结核。
- Tuberculosis is a curable disease.肺结核是一种可治愈的病。
adj.孤寂的,单独的;唯一的
- A lone sea gull flew across the sky.一只孤独的海鸥在空中飞过。
- She could see a lone figure on the deserted beach.她在空旷的海滩上能看到一个孤独的身影。
n.和尚,僧侣,修道士
- The man was a monk from Emei Mountain.那人是峨眉山下来的和尚。
- Buddhist monk sat with folded palms.和尚合掌打坐。
ad.abundantly
- We were sweating profusely from the exertion of moving the furniture. 我们搬动家具大费气力,累得大汗淋漓。
- He had been working hard and was perspiring profusely. 他一直在努力干活,身上大汗淋漓的。
n.(活动等)领域,范围;领地,势力范围
- This information should be in the public domain.这一消息应该为公众所知。
- This question comes into the domain of philosophy.这一问题属于哲学范畴。
n.大学二年级生;adj.第二年的
- He is in his sophomore year.他在读二年级。
- I'm a college sophomore majoring in English.我是一名英语专业的大二学生。
沸腾的,火热的
- The stadium was a seething cauldron of emotion. 体育场内群情沸腾。
- The meeting hall was seething at once. 会场上顿时沸腾起来了。
n.民主主义者,民主人士;民主党党员
- The Democrat and the Public criticized each other.民主党人和共和党人互相攻击。
- About two years later,he was defeated by Democrat Jimmy Carter.大约两年后,他被民主党人杰米卡特击败。
n.采石场;v.采石;费力地找
- Michelangelo obtained his marble from a quarry.米开朗基罗从采石场获得他的大理石。
- This mountain was the site for a quarry.这座山曾经有一个采石场。
刺激的,煽动的
- What are you up to inciting mutiny and insubordination? 你们干吗在这里煽动骚动的叛乱呀。
- He was charged with inciting people to rebel. 他被控煽动民众起来叛乱。
n.虔诚,虔敬
- They were drawn to the church not by piety but by curiosity.他们去教堂不是出于虔诚而是出于好奇。
- Experience makes us see an enormous difference between piety and goodness.经验使我们看到虔诚与善意之间有着巨大的区别。
adj.多腱的,强壮有力的
- When muscles are exercised often and properly,they keep the arms firm and sinewy.如果能经常正确地锻炼肌肉的话,双臂就会一直结实而强健。
- His hard hands and sinewy sunburned limbs told of labor and endurance.他粗糙的双手,被太阳哂得发黑的健壮四肢,均表明他十分辛勤,非常耐劳。
adj.苍白的,呆板的
- The moon drifted from behind the clouds and exposed the pallid face.月亮从云朵后面钻出来,照着尸体那张苍白的脸。
- His dry pallid face often looked gaunt.他那张干瘪苍白的脸常常显得憔悴。
n.(圆物的)边,轮缘;边界
- The water was even with the rim of the basin.盆里的水与盆边平齐了。
- She looked at him over the rim of her glass.她的目光越过玻璃杯的边沿看着他。
adj.(疾病)长期未愈的,慢性的;极坏的
- Famine differs from chronic malnutrition.饥荒不同于慢性营养不良。
- Chronic poisoning may lead to death from inanition.慢性中毒也可能由虚弱导致死亡。
狂喜,欢跃( exult的过去式和过去分词 )
- The people exulted at the victory. 人们因胜利而欢腾。
- The people all over the country exulted in the success in launching a new satellite. 全国人民为成功地发射了一颗新的人造卫星而欢欣鼓舞。
adj.沮丧的,抑郁的,不景气的,萧条的
- When he was depressed,he felt utterly divorced from reality.他心情沮丧时就感到完全脱离了现实。
- His mother was depressed by the sad news.这个坏消息使他的母亲意志消沉。
adj./n.追求物质享受的(人);中产阶级分子
- He's accusing them of having a bourgeois and limited vision.他指责他们像中产阶级一样目光狭隘。
- The French Revolution was inspired by the bourgeois.法国革命受到中产阶级的鼓励。
adj.贪得的,痒的,渴望的v.发痒( itch的现在分词 )
- The itching was almost more than he could stand. 他痒得几乎忍不住了。 来自《现代汉英综合大词典》
- My nose is itching. 我的鼻子发痒。 来自《简明英汉词典》
n.大叫,呐喊,喘息声;v.叫喊,喘息
- He gave a whoop of joy when he saw his new bicycle.他看到自己的新自行车时,高兴得叫了起来。
- Everybody is planning to whoop it up this weekend.大家都打算在这个周末好好欢闹一番。
n.处女,未婚女子;adj.未经使用的;未经开发的
- Have you ever been to a virgin forest?你去过原始森林吗?
- There are vast expanses of virgin land in the remote regions.在边远地区有大片大片未开垦的土地。
n.栗树,栗子
- We have a chestnut tree in the bottom of our garden.我们的花园尽头有一棵栗树。
- In summer we had tea outdoors,under the chestnut tree.夏天我们在室外栗树下喝茶。
adj.总计的,集合的;n.总数;v.合计;集合
- The football team had a low goal aggregate last season.这支足球队上个赛季的进球总数很少。
- The money collected will aggregate a thousand dollars.进帐总额将达一千美元。
adj.天文学的,(数字)极大的
- He was an expert on ancient Chinese astronomical literature.他是研究中国古代天文学文献的专家。
- Houses in the village are selling for astronomical prices.乡村的房价正在飙升。
adj.失业的,没有工作的;未动用的,闲置的
- There are now over four million unemployed workers in this country.这个国家现有四百万失业人员。
- The unemployed hunger for jobs.失业者渴望得到工作。
n.劳动,努力,工作,劳工;分娩;vi.劳动,努力,苦干;vt.详细分析;麻烦
- We are never late in satisfying him for his labor.我们从不延误付给他劳动报酬。
- He was completely spent after two weeks of hard labor.艰苦劳动两周后,他已经疲惫不堪了。
焦躁的,附有弦马的,腐蚀的
- The wind whistled through the twigs and fretted the occasional, dirty-looking crocuses. 寒风穿过枯枝,有时把发脏的藏红花吹刮跑了。 来自英汉文学
- The lady's fame for hitting the mark fretted him. 这位太太看问题深刻的名声在折磨着他。
n.木材,木料;v.以破旧东西堆满;伐木;笨重移动
- The truck was sent to carry lumber.卡车被派出去运木材。
- They slapped together a cabin out of old lumber.他们利用旧木料草草地盖起了一间小屋。
n.社会主义者;adj.社会主义的
- China is a socialist country,and a developing country as well.中国是一个社会主义国家,也是一个发展中国家。
- His father was an ardent socialist.他父亲是一个热情的社会主义者。
n.政变;突然而成功的行动
- The monarch was ousted by a military coup.那君主被军事政变者废黜了。
- That government was overthrown in a military coup three years ago.那个政府在3年前的军事政变中被推翻。
n.热诚;热心;炽热
- They were concerned only with their own religious fervor.他们只关心自己的宗教热诚。
- The speech aroused nationalist fervor.这个演讲喚起了民族主义热情。
n.伤口,刻痕;苏格兰威士忌酒;v.粉碎,消灭,阻止;adj.苏格兰(人)的
- Facts will eventually scotch these rumours.这种谣言在事实面前将不攻自破。
- Italy was full of fine views and virtually empty of Scotch whiskey.意大利多的是美景,真正缺的是苏格兰威士忌。
n.禁止;禁令,禁律
- The prohibition against drunken driving will save many lives.禁止酒后开车将会减少许多死亡事故。
- They voted in favour of the prohibition of smoking in public areas.他们投票赞成禁止在公共场所吸烟。
adj.审慎的,小心翼翼的,完全的,纯粹的
- She is scrupulous to a degree.她非常谨慎。
- Poets are not so scrupulous as you are.诗人并不像你那样顾虑多。
adj.(of)值得的,配得上的;有价值的
- I did not esteem him to be worthy of trust.我认为他不值得信赖。
- There occurred nothing that was worthy to be mentioned.没有值得一提的事发生。
n.习艺者,实习者( practitioner的名词复数 );从业者(尤指医师)
- one of the greatest practitioners of science fiction 最了不起的科幻小说家之一
- The technique is experimental, but the list of its practitioners is growing. 这种技术是试验性的,但是采用它的人正在增加。 来自辞典例句
adj.弯曲的;不诚实的,狡猾的,不正当的
- He crooked a finger to tell us to go over to him.他弯了弯手指,示意我们到他那儿去。
- You have to drive slowly on these crooked country roads.在这些弯弯曲曲的乡间小路上你得慢慢开车。
社会主义者( socialist的名词复数 )
- The socialists saw themselves as true heirs of the Enlightenment. 社会主义者认为自己是启蒙运动的真正继承者。
- The Socialists junked dogma when they came to office in 1982. 社会党人1982年上台执政后,就把其政治信条弃之不顾。
- Corbett leaned against the wall and promptly vomited. 科比特倚在墙边,马上呕吐了起来。
- She leant forward and vomited copiously on the floor. 她向前一俯,哇的一声吐了一地。 来自英汉文学
v.(使)发酵( ferment的现在分词 );(使)激动;骚动;骚扰
- The fermenting wine has bubbled up and over the top. 发酵的葡萄酒已经冒泡,溢了出来。 来自辞典例句
- It must be processed through methods like boiling, grinding or fermenting. 它必须通过煮沸、研磨、或者发酵等方法加工。 来自互联网
n.经济学家,经济专家( economist的名词复数 )
- The sudden rise in share prices has confounded economists. 股价的突然上涨使经济学家大惑不解。
- Foreign bankers and economists cautiously welcomed the minister's initiative. 外国银行家和经济学家对部长的倡议反应谨慎。 来自《简明英汉词典》
adv.永恒地,永久地,固定不变地
- The accident left him permanently scarred.那次事故给他留下了永久的伤疤。
- The ship is now permanently moored on the Thames in London.该船现在永久地停泊在伦敦泰晤士河边。
n.顶楼,屋顶室
- Leakiness in the roof caused a damp attic.屋漏使顶楼潮湿。
- What's to be done with all this stuff in the attic?顶楼上的材料怎么处理?
n.关心,挂念,渴望( solicitude的名词复数 )
- The partial solicitudes of 5th of article have gone to the installation problem of execution office. 在对执行权进行系统的阐述之后,文章的第五部分分析了执行机关的设置问题。 来自互联网
adj.冲动的,刺激的;有推动力的
- She is impulsive in her actions.她的行为常出于冲动。
- He was neither an impulsive nor an emotional man,but a very honest and sincere one.他不是个一冲动就鲁莽行事的人,也不多愁善感.他为人十分正直、诚恳。
n.(尤指基督)救世,超度,拯救,解困
- Salvation lay in political reform.解救办法在于政治改革。
- Christians hope and pray for salvation.基督教徒希望并祈祷灵魂得救。
孤儿( orphan的名词复数 )
- The poor orphans were kept on short commons. 贫苦的孤儿们吃不饱饭。
- Their uncle was declared guardian to the orphans. 这些孤儿的叔父成为他们的监护人。
adj.各种各样的,各色俱备的
- There's a bag of assorted sweets on the table.桌子上有一袋什锦糖果。
- He has always assorted with men of his age.他总是与和他年令相仿的人交往。
adv.极大地;相当大地;在很大程度上
- The economic situation has changed considerably.经济形势已发生了相当大的变化。
- The gap has narrowed considerably.分歧大大缩小了。
n.矫饰,做作,借口
- You can't keep up the pretense any longer.你无法继续伪装下去了。
- Pretense invariably impresses only the pretender.弄虚作假欺骗不了真正的行家。
a.秘密的,不公开的
- She had always had a sneaking affection for him. 以前她一直暗暗倾心于他。
- She ducked the interviewers by sneaking out the back door. 她从后门偷偷溜走,躲开采访者。
adj.尖的,直截了当的
- He gave me a very sharp pointed pencil.他给我一支削得非常尖的铅笔。
- She wished to show Mrs.John Dashwood by this pointed invitation to her brother.她想通过对达茨伍德夫人提出直截了当的邀请向她的哥哥表示出来。
深思,沉思,冥想( meditate的过去式和过去分词 ); 内心策划,考虑
- He meditated for two days before giving his answer. 他在作出答复之前考虑了两天。
- She meditated for 2 days before giving her answer. 她考虑了两天才答复。
n.指导者,教员,教练
- The college jumped him from instructor to full professor.大学突然把他从讲师提升为正教授。
- The skiing instructor was a tall,sunburnt man.滑雪教练是一个高高个子晒得黑黑的男子。
n.调子;和谐,协调;v.调音,调节,调整
- He'd written a tune,and played it to us on the piano.他写了一段曲子,并在钢琴上弹给我们听。
- The boy beat out a tune on a tin can.那男孩在易拉罐上敲出一首曲子。
ad.全部地,完整地;完全地,彻底地
- The fire was entirely caused by their neglect of duty. 那场火灾完全是由于他们失职而引起的。
- His life was entirely given up to the educational work. 他的一生统统献给了教育工作。
n.宽容;容忍,忍受;耐药力;公差
- Tolerance is one of his strengths.宽容是他的一个优点。
- Human beings have limited tolerance of noise.人类对噪音的忍耐力有限。
n.法西斯主义的支持者( fascist的名词复数 )
- The old man was seized with burning hatred for the fascists. 老人对法西斯主义者充满了仇恨。 来自《简明英汉词典》
- Zoya heroically bore the torture that the Fascists inflicted upon her. 卓娅英勇地承受法西斯匪徒加在她身上的酷刑。 来自《简明英汉词典》
adj.严格的,死板的;刚硬的,僵硬的
- She became as rigid as adamant.她变得如顽石般的固执。
- The examination was so rigid that nearly all aspirants were ruled out.考试很严,几乎所有的考生都被淘汰了。
adj.不可避免的,必然发生的
- Mary was wearing her inevitable large hat.玛丽戴着她总是戴的那顶大帽子。
- The defeat had inevitable consequences for British policy.战败对英国政策不可避免地产生了影响。
adj.决定了的,坚决的;明显的,明确的
- This gave them a decided advantage over their opponents.这使他们比对手具有明显的优势。
- There is a decided difference between British and Chinese way of greeting.英国人和中国人打招呼的方式有很明显的区别。
adj.由技术专家官员组成的;受技术官僚影响的
- But there is method in Europe's technocratic madness, the official went on. 但欧洲的专家政治论者的愤怒是有原因的,这个位官员接着说道。 来自互联网
- Mr Juppé was floored in part by his contemptuous, technocratic attitude towards union leaders. 朱佩对工会领导蛮横与不屑,是导致他一败涂地的部分原因。 来自互联网
n.专员( commissioner的名词复数 );长官;委员;政府部门的长官
- The Commissioners of Inland Revenue control British national taxes. 国家税收委员管理英国全国的税收。 来自《简明英汉词典》
- The SEC has five commissioners who are appointed by the president. 证券交易委员会有5名委员,是由总统任命的。 来自英汉非文学 - 政府文件
n.轻微的事故,小的意外( mishap的名词复数 )
- a series of mishaps 一连串的倒霉事
- In spite of one or two minor mishaps everything was going swimmingly. 尽管遇到了一两件小小的不幸,一切都进行得很顺利。 来自《现代汉英综合大词典》
n.肠( intestine的名词复数 )
- Perhaps the most serious problems occur in the stomach and intestines. 最严重的问题或许出现在胃和肠里。 来自辞典例句
- The traps of carnivorous plants function a little like the stomachs and small intestines of animals. 食肉植物的捕蝇器起着动物的胃和小肠的作用。 来自辞典例句
n.德行,美德;贞操;优点;功效,效力
- He was considered to be a paragon of virtue.他被认为是品德尽善尽美的典范。
- You need to decorate your mind with virtue.你应该用德行美化心灵。
n.龙卷风,旋风( tornado的名词复数 )
- Tornadoes, severe earthquakes, and plagues create wide spread havoc. 龙卷风、大地震和瘟疫成普遍的毁坏。 来自互联网
- Meteorologists are at odds over the working of tornadoes. 气象学者对龙卷风的运动方式看法不一。 来自互联网
adv.极糟地;可怕地;完全地;极端地
- But the two-and-a-half-year-olds, much to my and their parents' surprise, failed abysmally. 但是两岁半的孩子根本不会找,我们与孩子的父母都很意外。 来自互联网
- Research and development spending by existing firms is abysmally low. 该数据能衡量新增的商业业务量和对创业的态度。 来自互联网
爱国者,爱国主义者( patriot的名词复数 )
- Abraham Lincoln was a fine type of the American patriots. 亚伯拉罕·林肯是美国爱国者的优秀典型。
- These patriots would fight to death before they surrendered. 这些爱国者宁愿战斗到死,也不愿投降。
adj.美好的,乐观的,玫瑰色的
- She got a new job and her life looks rosy.她找到一份新工作,生活看上去很美好。
- She always takes a rosy view of life.她总是对生活持乐观态度。
野蛮地,残忍地
- The buck shook his antlers ferociously. 那雄鹿猛烈地摇动他的鹿角。
- At intervals, he gritted his teeth ferociously. 他不时狠狠的轧平。
狂热者,入迷者( fanatic的名词复数 )
- The heathen temple was torn down by a crowd of religions fanatics. 异教徒的神殿被一群宗教狂热分子拆除了。
- Placing nukes in the hands of baby-faced fanatics? 把核弹交给一些宗教狂热者手里?
n.祖先,家世
- Their ancestry settled the land in 1856.他们的祖辈1856年在这块土地上定居下来。
- He is an American of French ancestry.他是法国血统的美国人。
n.隐士,修道者;隐居
- He became a hermit after he was dismissed from office.他被解职后成了隐士。
- Chinese ancient landscape poetry was in natural connections with hermit culture.中国古代山水诗与隐士文化有着天然联系。
adj.衣衫褴褛的,粗糙的,刺耳的
- A ragged shout went up from the small crowd.这一小群人发出了刺耳的喊叫。
- Ragged clothing infers poverty.破衣烂衫意味着贫穷。
adj.臭的,烂醉的,讨厌的v.散发出恶臭( stink的现在分词 );发臭味;名声臭;糟透
- I was pushed into a filthy, stinking room. 我被推进一间又脏又臭的屋子里。
- Those lousy, stinking ships. It was them that destroyed us. 是的!就是那些该死的蠢猪似的臭飞船!是它们毁了我们。 来自英汉非文学 - 科幻
引起…的义愤,激怒( outrage的第三人称单数 )
- People are seeking retribution for the latest terrorist outrages. 人们在设法对恐怖分子最近的暴行进行严惩。
- He [She] is not allowed to commit any outrages. 不能任其胡作非为。
v.以暴力夺取,强夺( rape的现在分词 );强奸
- In response, Charles VI sent a punitive expedition to Brittany, raping and killing the populace. 作为报复,查理六世派军讨伐布列塔尼,奸淫杀戮平民。 来自《简明英汉词典》
- The conquerors marched on, burning, killing, raping and plundering as they went. 征服者所到之处烧杀奸掠,无所不做。 来自互联网
n.废除,取消
- They declared for the abolition of slavery.他们声明赞成废除奴隶制度。
- The abolition of the monarchy was part of their price.废除君主制是他们的其中一部分条件。
n.跟随者;随员;门徒;信徒
- He is a faithful follower of his home football team.他是他家乡足球队的忠实拥护者。
- Alexander is a pious follower of the faith.亚历山大是个虔诚的信徒。
adv.后来;以后
- Let's go to the theatre first and eat afterward. 让我们先去看戏,然后吃饭。
- Afterward,the boy became a very famous artist.后来,这男孩成为一个很有名的艺术家。
论述,详细讲解( expound的现在分词 )
- Soon Gandhi was expounding the doctrine of ahimsa (nonviolence). 不久甘地就四出阐释非暴力主义思想。
- He was expounding, of course, his philosophy of leadership. 当然,他这是在阐述他的领导哲学。
adj.尖锐的;苛刻的;鲜明的;乱砍的v.挥砍( slash的现在分词 );鞭打;割破;削减
- Slashing is the first process in which liquid treatment is involved. 浆纱是液处理的第一过程。 来自辞典例句
- He stopped slashing his horse. 他住了手,不去鞭打他的马了。 来自辞典例句
adj.非常的的;流血的;残忍的;adv.很;vt.血染
- He got a bloody nose in the fight.他在打斗中被打得鼻子流血。
- He is a bloody fool.他是一个十足的笨蛋。
v.(使)旋转;n.大量,许多
- He slewed the car against the side of the building.他的车滑到了大楼的一侧,抵住了。
- They dealt with a slew of other issues.他们处理了大量的其他问题。
adj.发霉的
- She chucked the moldy potatoes in the dustbin.她把发霉的土豆扔进垃圾箱。
- Oranges can be kept for a long time without going moldy.橙子可以存放很长时间而不腐烂。
n.贵族( aristocrat的名词复数 )
- Many aristocrats were killed in the French Revolution. 许多贵族在法国大革命中被处死。 来自《简明英汉词典》
- To the Guillotine all aristocrats! 把全部贵族都送上断头台! 来自英汉文学 - 双城记
adj.不透气的,闷热的
- It's really hot and stuffy in here.这里实在太热太闷了。
- It was so stuffy in the tent that we could sense the air was heavy with moisture.帐篷里很闷热,我们感到空气都是潮的。
adj.文盲的;无知的;n.文盲
- There are still many illiterate people in our country.在我国还有许多文盲。
- I was an illiterate in the old society,but now I can read.我这个旧社会的文盲,今天也认字了。
n.学者;adj.精通文学的,受过教育的
- Only a few of the nation's peasants are literate.这个国家的农民中只有少数人能识字。
- A literate person can get knowledge through reading many books.一个受过教育的人可以通过读书而获得知识。
a.可敬的,高贵的
- Throughout his trial he maintained a dignified silence. 在整个审讯过程中,他始终沉默以保持尊严。
- He always strikes such a dignified pose before his girlfriend. 他总是在女友面前摆出这种庄严的姿态。
n.恩赐,恩物,恩惠
- A car is a real boon when you live in the country.在郊外居住,有辆汽车确实极为方便。
- These machines have proved a real boon to disabled people.事实证明这些机器让残疾人受益匪浅。
n.神权政治;僧侣政治
- Shangzhou was an important period for the formation and development of theocracy.商周时期是神权政治形成与发展的重要阶段。
- The Muslim brothers look as if they will opt for civil society rather than theocracy.穆斯林兄弟看起来好像更适合文明的社会,而非神权统治。
n.居民,住户( denizen的名词复数 )
- polar bears, denizens of the frozen north 北极熊,在冰天雪地的北方生活的动物
- At length these denizens of the swamps disappeared in their turn. 到了后来,连这些沼泽国的居民们也不见了。 来自辞典例句
牡蛎( oyster的名词复数 )
- We don't have oysters tonight, but the crayfish are very good. 我们今晚没有牡蛎供应。但小龙虾是非常好。
- She carried a piping hot grill of oysters and bacon. 她端出一盘滚烫的烤牡蛎和咸肉。
ad.不停地
- The machines roar incessantly during the hours of daylight. 机器在白天隆隆地响个不停。
- It rained incessantly for the whole two weeks. 雨不间断地下了整整两个星期。
n.坟场
- All the town was drifting toward the graveyard.全镇的人都象流水似地向那坟场涌过去。
- Living next to a graveyard would give me the creeps.居住在墓地旁边会使我毛骨悚然。
n.圣所,圣堂,寺庙;禁猎区,保护区
- There was a sanctuary of political refugees behind the hospital.医院后面有一个政治难民的避难所。
- Most countries refuse to give sanctuary to people who hijack aeroplanes.大多数国家拒绝对劫机者提供庇护。
vi./n.喋喋不休;短促尖叫;(牙齿)打战
- Her continuous chatter vexes me.她的喋喋不休使我烦透了。
- I've had enough of their continual chatter.我已厌烦了他们喋喋不休的闲谈。
n.长期不和,世仇( feud的名词复数 )
- Quarrels and feuds between tribes became incessant. 部落间的争吵、反目成仇的事件接连不断。 来自英汉非文学 - 文明史
- There were feuds in the palace, no one can deny. 宫里也有斗争,这是无可否认的。 来自辞典例句
vt.使不再抱幻想,使理想破灭
- Do not say anything to disillusion them.别说什么叫他们泄气的话。
- I'd hate to be the one to disillusion him.我不愿意成为那个让他幻想破灭的人。
杀戮。
- The man mimed the slaying of an enemy. 此人比手划脚地表演砍死一个敌人的情况。
- He is suspected of having been an accomplice in the slaying,butthey can't pin it on him. 他有嫌疑曾参与该杀人案,但他们找不到证据来指控他。
n.寡头统治的政府( oligarchy的名词复数 );寡头政治的执政集团;寡头统治的国家
- All past oligarchies have fallen from power either because they ossified or because they grew soft. 过去所有的寡头政体所以丧失权力,或者是由于自己僵化,或者是由于软化。 来自英汉文学
n.反对,敌对
- The party leader is facing opposition in his own backyard.该党领袖在自己的党內遇到了反对。
- The police tried to break down the prisoner's opposition.警察设法制住了那个囚犯的反抗。
vt.盘算,计议;周密考虑;注视,凝视
- The possibility of war is too horrifying to contemplate.战争的可能性太可怕了,真不堪细想。
- The consequences would be too ghastly to contemplate.后果不堪设想。
n.不死,不朽
- belief in the immortality of the soul 灵魂不灭的信念
- It was like having immortality while you were still alive. 仿佛是当你仍然活着的时候就得到了永生。
adj.伦理的,道德的,合乎道德的
- It is necessary to get the youth to have a high ethical concept.必须使青年具有高度的道德观念。
- It was a debate which aroused fervent ethical arguments.那是一场引发强烈的伦理道德争论的辩论。
v.质疑,对…表示疑问( query的过去式和过去分词 );询问
- She queried what he said. 她对他说的话表示怀疑。 来自《简明英汉词典》
- \"What does he have to do?\" queried Chin dubiously. “他有什么心事?”琴向觉民问道,她的脸上现出疑惑不解的神情。 来自汉英文学 - 家(1-26) - 家(1-26)
adv.神情激动地,不安地
- He bit his lip nervously,trying not to cry.他紧张地咬着唇,努力忍着不哭出来。
- He paced nervously up and down on the platform.他在站台上情绪不安地走来走去。
n.市民权,公民权,国民的义务(身份)
- He was born in Sweden,but he doesn't have Swedish citizenship.他在瑞典出生,但没有瑞典公民身分。
- Ten years later,she chose to take Australian citizenship.十年后,她选择了澳大利亚国籍。
adj.具睫毛的v.鞭打( lash的过去式和过去分词 );煽动;紧系;怒斥
- The rain lashed at the windows. 雨点猛烈地打在窗户上。
- The cleverly designed speech lashed the audience into a frenzy. 这篇精心设计的演说煽动听众使他们发狂。 来自《简明英汉词典》
n. 监护, 保护, 守护
- They had to employ the English language in face of the jealous guardianship of Britain. 他们不得不在英国疑忌重重的监护下使用英文。
- You want Marion to set aside her legal guardianship and give you Honoria. 你要马丽恩放弃她的法定监护人资格,把霍诺丽娅交给你。
adv.完全地,全部地,彻底地;充分地
- The doctor asked me to breathe in,then to breathe out fully.医生让我先吸气,然后全部呼出。
- They soon became fully integrated into the local community.他们很快就完全融入了当地人的圈子。
adj.英勇的,豪侠的;(向女人)献殷勤的
- Huang Jiguang's gallant deed is known by all men. 黄继光的英勇事迹尽人皆知。
- These gallant soldiers will protect our country.这些勇敢的士兵会保卫我们的国家的。
adj.唠叨的,多话的
- He became positively garrulous after a few glasses of wine.他几杯葡萄酒下肚之后便唠唠叨叨说个没完。
- My garrulous neighbour had given away the secret.我那爱唠叨的邻居已把秘密泄露了。
vt.谋取(支持等),赢得;征募;vi.入伍
- They come here to enlist men for the army.他们来这儿是为了召兵。
- The conference will make further efforts to enlist the support of the international community for their just struggle. 会议必将进一步动员国际社会,支持他们的正义斗争。
n.祖先( progenitor的名词复数 );先驱;前辈;原本
- The researchers also showed that the progenitors mature into neurons in Petri dishes. 研究人员还表示,在佩特里培养皿中的脑细胞前体可以发育成神经元。 来自英汉非文学 - 生命科学 - 大脑与疾病
- Though I am poor and wretched now, my progenitors were famously wealthy. 别看我现在穷困潦倒,我家上世可是有名的富翁。 来自互联网
海上营救( salvage的名词复数 ); 抢救出的财产; 救援费; 经加工后重新利用的废物
- A man salvages coal at a cinder dump site in Changzhi, Shanxi province China. 中国山西长治,一名男子在煤渣处理站捡拾煤炭。
vt.证明…正当(或有理),为…辩护
- He tried to justify his absence with lame excuses.他想用站不住脚的借口为自己的缺席辩解。
- Can you justify your rude behavior to me?你能向我证明你的粗野行为是有道理的吗?
n.迷信,迷信行为
- It's a common superstition that black cats are unlucky.认为黑猫不吉祥是一种很普遍的迷信。
- Superstition results from ignorance.迷信产生于无知。
v.震颤,颤动;(急速强烈地)跳动,搏动
- She felt her heart give a great throb.她感到自己的心怦地跳了一下。
- The drums seemed to throb in his ears.阵阵鼓声彷佛在他耳边震响。
妙脆角,一种类似薯片但做成尖角或喇叭状的零食; 号角( bugle的名词复数 ); 喇叭; 匍匐筋骨草; (装饰女服用的)柱状玻璃(或塑料)小珠
- Blow, bugles, blow, set the wild echoes flying. "响起来,号角,响起来,让激昂的回声在空中震荡"。
- We hear the silver voices of heroic bugles. 我们听到了那清亮的号角。
vt.挣扎,痛苦地扭曲;vi.扭曲,翻腾,受苦;n.翻腾,苦恼
- They surely writhe under this pressure.他们肯定对这种压力感到苦恼。
- Her words made him writhe with shame.她的话使他惭愧地感到浑身不自在。
大农场, (兼种果树,养鸡等的)大牧场( ranch的名词复数 )
- They hauled feedlot manure from the ranches to fertilize their fields. 他们从牧场的饲养场拖走肥料去肥田。
- Many abandoned ranches are purchased or leased by other poultrymen. 许多被放弃的牧场会由其他家禽监主收买或租用。
n.种植园,大农场( plantation的名词复数 )
- Soon great plantations, supported by slave labor, made some families very wealthy. 不久之后出现了依靠奴隶劳动的大庄园,使一些家庭成了富豪。 来自英汉非文学 - 政府文件
- Winterborne's contract was completed, and the plantations were deserted. 维恩特波恩的合同完成后,那片林地变得荒废了。 来自辞典例句
n.槭树,枫树,槭木
- Maple sugar is made from the sap of maple trees.枫糖是由枫树的树液制成的。
- The maple leaves are tinge with autumn red.枫叶染上了秋天的红色。
树丛,小树林( grove的名词复数 )
- The early sun shone serenely on embrowned groves and still green fields. 朝阳宁静地照耀着已经发黄的树丛和还是一片绿色的田地。
- The trees grew more and more in groves and dotted with old yews. 那里的树木越来越多地长成了一簇簇的小丛林,还点缀着几棵老紫杉树。
n.牛津(英国城市)
- At present he has become a Professor of Chemistry at Oxford.他现在已是牛津大学的化学教授了。
- This is where the road to Oxford joins the road to London.这是去牛津的路与去伦敦的路的汇合处。
adj.有品德的,善良的,贞洁的,有效力的
- She was such a virtuous woman that everybody respected her.她是个有道德的女性,人人都尊敬她。
- My uncle is always proud of having a virtuous wife.叔叔一直为娶到一位贤德的妻子而骄傲。
adj.古怪的,异常的;特殊的,特有的
- He walks in a peculiar fashion.他走路的样子很奇特。
- He looked at me with a very peculiar expression.他用一种很奇怪的表情看着我。
美德( virtue的名词复数 ); 德行; 优点; 长处
- Doctors often extol the virtues of eating less fat. 医生常常宣扬少吃脂肪的好处。
- She delivered a homily on the virtues of family life. 她进行了一场家庭生活美德方面的说教。
adj.最后的,结局的,最终的
- Several schools face eventual closure.几所学校面临最终关闭。
- Both parties expressed optimism about an eventual solution.双方对问题的最终解决都表示乐观。
n.激进分子( radical的名词复数 );根基;基本原理;[数学]根数
- Some militant leaders want to merge with white radicals. 一些好斗的领导人要和白人中的激进派联合。 来自《简明英汉词典》
- The worry is that the radicals will grow more intransigent. 现在人们担忧激进分子会变得更加不妥协。 来自辞典例句
n.(尤指政治变革的)鼓动者( agitator的名词复数 );煽动者;搅拌器;搅拌机
- The mud is too viscous, you must have all the agitators run. 泥浆太稠,你们得让所有的搅拌机都开着。 来自辞典例句
- Agitators urged the peasants to revolt/revolution. 煽动者怂恿农民叛变(革命)。 来自辞典例句
v.对小事斤斤计较,琐事
- Strain at a gnat and swallow a camel.小事拘谨,大事糊涂。
- He's always straining at a gnat.他总是对小事很拘谨。
adv.温和地,殷勤地
- There is a class of men in Bristol monstrously prejudiced against Blandly. 布里斯托尔有那么一帮人为此恨透了布兰德利。 来自英汉文学 - 金银岛
- \"Maybe you could get something in the stage line?\" he blandly suggested. “也许你能在戏剧这一行里找些事做,\"他和蔼地提议道。 来自英汉文学 - 嘉莉妹妹
n.卫戍部队;驻地,卫戍区;vt.派(兵)驻防
- The troops came to the relief of the besieged garrison.军队来援救被围的守备军。
- The German was moving to stiffen up the garrison in Sicily.德军正在加强西西里守军之力量。
adj.谦卑的,恭顺的;地位低下的;v.降低,贬低
- In my humble opinion,he will win the election.依我拙见,他将在选举中获胜。
- Defeat and failure make people humble.挫折与失败会使人谦卑。
n.等级制度;统治集团,领导层
- There is a rigid hierarchy of power in that country.那个国家有一套严密的权力等级制度。
- She's high up in the management hierarchy.她在管理阶层中地位很高。