The Hawaiian Gazette

Once upon a time a locomotive engineer was on trial in a police court, charged with assault. It appeared from the evidence that in the culmination of a quarrel, he had taken a copper hammer from his tool chest and with it had beaten his opponent over the head to a knock-out. The justice looked puzzled. "Why," he asked, "did you particularly select a copper hammer?"

The engineer looked surprised at the ignorance of the bench. "Why," he said, "I didn't want to mar the man!" For a copper hammer, as everybody knows, is used about machinery to tap the fine steel keys and other pieces into place without denting the material.

It may happen sometimes in great moral reforms, in ethical revolutions, in political contests, that some men are so obtuse, others so hopelessly ignorant, and a few others, again, so viciously dangerous, that a sledge-hammer of chilled steel is thought necessary for the pounding in of a new idea, or the beating out of the useless brains. If the man is to be prepared for the coroner, a sledge-hammer is perhaps as effective as any other implement. But that is rarely the case. Indeed, it might be said to be never the case.

For a man is a very delicate unit in the complex construction of the universe. He is so essential to the perfect condition of things that his place, once made vacant, can be filled only by another man. If he is a vicious man, he may be only a valuable bit of mechanism misplaced. If he is stupid, he may be only a misfit in the wrong slot. If he rattles too much, he may be a man in the right place working loose. What he needs is not destruction, but readjustment. And society needs to be careful with him, lest he be indelibly scarred and badly marred by disfiguring dents in the process of realignment.

It is frequently necessary to use force in compelling the insurgent member of society to fit into the right place. Use the copper hammer on him. It drives quite as well, and doesn't mar the machine. The worst thing in the world to use on a balky horse is the whip. It has spoiled many good horses. It has rarely made a good one out of a bad one. Just enough of a touch to let him know there is one in the whip socket. The best horsemen use the copper hammer.

The bitterest fights in the world used to be its religious wars. They drenched Christian lands with fraternal blood. Men hold their special creeds just as dearly and as tenaciously as ever. But they no longer beat on each other's shields of bronze and helmets of brass with clanging battle axes of steel. They use the copper hammer so deftly that the unconscious divine, lying on his back in the planked arena, taking the interdenominational count, does not show a dent on the shining bald head which received the theological "wallop," speaking after the manner of sporting men.

Even when a man is sent to the penitentiary, the modern idea is not to maul him with a rod of iron; to drive into his consciousness the sense of his crime by incessant shame and punishment, but rather to make of him a good citizen. His punishment is well deserved. But we use the copper hammer.

We differ in our political views and our policies of statecraft as widely as darkness differs from light. And so long as we are yet imperfect men, with strong prejudices, we will give and take hard blows in every campaign. Let us fight hard, but use the copper hammer, that the head of our fallen foe—if he be one that falls—may not reproach the victor with the pathos of many lumps and a multitude of corresponding dents. In our social, religious and political wars let us use the copper hammer, and so bring on the millennium.