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Title: Notes on democracy
Author: H. L. Mencken
Release date: March 12, 2024 [eBook #73150]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926
Credits: Emmanuel Ackerman and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NOTES ON DEMOCRACY ***
Transcriber’s Note: Italics are enclosed in _underscores_. Additional
notes will be found near the end of this ebook.
NOTES ON DEMOCRACY
_THE WORKS OF H. L. MENCKEN_
PREJUDICES FIRST SERIES¹
PREJUDICES SECOND SERIES¹
PREJUDICES THIRD SERIES¹
PREJUDICES FOURTH SERIES¹
PREJUDICES FIFTH SERIES¹
SELECTED PREJUDICES²
A BOOK OF BURLESQUES¹
BOOK OF PREFACES¹
IN DEFENSE OF WOMEN¹ ³
THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE¹ ³
NOTES ON DEMOCRACY¹
THE AMERICAN CREDO
[_With George Jean Nathan_]
_OUT OF PRINT_
VENTURES INTO VERSE
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW: HIS PLAYS
THE ARTIST
A LITTLE BOOK IN C MAJOR
DAMN: A BOOK OF CALUMNY
MEN VS. THE MAN
[_With Robert Rives LaMonte_]
HELIOGABALUS¹
[_With Mr. Nathan_]
EUROPE AFTER 8·15
[_With Mr Nathan and Willard H. Wright_]
THE PHILOSOPHY OF FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE¹
1 Also Published in England
2 Published only in England
3 Also Published in Germany in translation
_TRANSLATIONS_
THE ANTICHRIST, BY F W NIETZSCHE
_BOOKS ABOUT MR MENCKEN_
H. L. MENCKEN, BY ERNEST BOYD
[_Robert M. McBride & Company_]
THE MAN MENCKEN, BY ISAAC GOLDBERG
[_Simon & Schuster_]
_NEW YORK: ALFRED · A · KNOPF_
NOTES ON
DEMOCRACY
By H. L. MENCKEN
[Illustration]
PUBLISHED AT THE BORZOI · NEW YORK · BY
ALFRED · A · KNOPF
COPYRIGHT, 1926, BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
PUBLISHED, OCTOBER, 1926
SECOND PRINTING, NOVEMBER, 1926
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
CONTENTS
I. DEMOCRATIC MAN
1. His Appearance in the World 3
2. Varieties of _Homo Sapiens_ 9
3. The New Psychology 15
4. Politics Under Democracy 22
5. The Rôle of the Hormones 28
6. Envy as a Philosophy 35
7. Liberty and Democratic Man 43
8. The Effects Upon Progress 51
9. The Eternal Mob 64
II. THE DEMOCRATIC STATE
1. The Two Kinds of Democracy 71
2. The Popular Will 77
3. Disproportional Representation 88
4. The Politician Under Democracy 99
5. Utopia 106
6. The Occasional Exception 115
7. The Maker of Laws 122
8. The Rewards of Virtue 129
9. Footnote on Lame Ducks 138
III. DEMOCRACY AND LIBERTY
1. The Will to Peace 147
2. The Democrat as Moralist 152
3. Where Puritanism Fails 166
4. Corruption Under Democracy 176
IV. CODA
1. The Future of Democracy 195
2. Last Words 206
DEMOCRATIC MAN
I
DEMOCRATIC MAN
1.
_His Appearance in the World_
Democracy came into the Western World to the tune of sweet, soft
music. There was, at the start, no harsh bawling from below; there was
only a dulcet twittering from above. Democratic man thus began as an
ideal being, full of ineffable virtues and romantic wrongs--in brief,
as Rousseau’s noble savage in smock and jerkin, brought out of the
tropical wilds to shame the lords and masters of the civilized lands.
The fact continues to have important consequences to this day. It
remains impossible, as it was in the Eighteenth Century, to separate
the democratic idea from the theory that there is a mystical merit,
an esoteric and ineradicable rectitude, in the man at the bottom of
the scale--that inferiority, by some strange magic, becomes a sort
of superiority--nay, the superiority of superiorities. Everywhere on
earth, save where the enlightenment of the modern age is confessedly
in transient eclipse, the movement is toward the completer and more
enamoured enfranchisement of the lower orders. Down there, one hears,
lies a deep, illimitable reservoir of righteousness and wisdom,
unpolluted by the corruption of privilege. What baffles statesmen is to
be solved by the people, instantly and by a sort of seraphic intuition.
Their yearnings are pure; they alone are capable of a perfect
patriotism; in them is the only hope of peace and happiness on this
lugubrious ball. The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy!
This notion, as I hint, originated in the poetic fancy of gentlemen
on the upper levels--sentimentalists who, observing to their distress
that the ass was over-laden, proposed to reform transport by putting
him into the cart. A stale Christian bilge ran through their veins,
though many of them, as it happened, toyed with what is now called
Modernism. They were the direct ancestors of the more saccharine
Liberals of to-day, who yet mouth their tattered phrases and dream
their preposterous dreams. I can find no record that these phrases, in
the beginning, made much impression upon the actual objects of their
rhetoric. Early democratic man seems to have given little thought to
the democratic ideal, and less veneration. What he wanted was something
concrete and highly materialistic--more to eat, less work, higher
wages, lower taxes. He had no apparent belief in the acroamatic virtue
of his own class, and certainly none in its capacity to rule. His
aim was not to exterminate the baron, but simply to bring the baron
back to a proper discharge of baronial business. When, by the wild
shooting that naturally accompanies all mob movements, the former end
was accidentally accomplished, and men out of the mob began to take
on baronial airs, the mob itself quickly showed its opinion of them
by butchering them deliberately and in earnest. Once the pikes were
out, indeed, it was a great deal more dangerous to be a tribune of the
people than to be an ornament of the old order. The more copiously
the blood gushed, the nearer that old order came to resurrection. The
Paris proletariat, having been misled into killing its King in 1793,
devoted the next two years to killing those who had misled it, and by
the middle of 1796 it had another King in fact, and in three years
more he was King _de jure_, with an attendant herd of barons, counts,
marquises and dukes, some of them new but most of them old, to guard,
symbolize and execute his sovereignty. And he and they were immensely
popular--so popular that half of France leaped to suicide that their
glory might blind the world.
Meanwhile, of course, there had been a certain seeping down of
democratic theory from the metaphysicians to the mob--obscured by the
uproar, but still going on. Rhetoric, like a stealthy plague, was
doing its immemorial work. Where men were confronted by the harsh,
exigent realities of battle and pillage, as they were everywhere on
the Continent, it got into their veins only slowly, but where they had
time to listen to oratory, as in England and, above all, in America,
it fetched them more quickly. Eventually, as the world grew exhausted
and the wars passed, it began to make its effects felt everywhere.
Democratic man, contemplating himself, was suddenly warmed by the
spectacle. His condition had plainly improved. Once a slave, he was now
only a serf. Once condemned to silence, he was now free to criticize
his masters, and even to flout them, and the ordinances of God with
them. As he gained skill and fluency at that sombre and fascinating
art, he began to heave in wonder at his own merit. He was not only, it
appeared, free to praise and damn, challenge and remonstrate; he was
also gifted with a peculiar rectitude of thought and will, and a high
talent for ideas, particularly on the political plane. So his wishes,
in his mind, began to take on the dignity of legal rights, and after
a while, of intrinsic and natural rights, and by the same token the
wishes of his masters sank to the level of mere ignominious lusts. By
1828 in America and by 1848 in Europe the doctrine had arisen that all
moral excellence, and with it all pure and unfettered sagacity, resided
in the inferior four-fifths of mankind. In 1867 a philosopher out of
the gutter pushed that doctrine to its logical conclusion. He taught
that the superior minority had no virtues at all, and hence no rights
at all--that the world belonged exclusively and absolutely to those who
hewed its wood and drew its water. In less than half a century he had
more followers in the world, open and covert, than any other sophist
since the age of the Apostles.
Since then, to be sure, there has been a considerable recession from
that extreme position. The dictatorship of the proletariat, tried
here and there, has turned out to be--if I may venture a prejudiced
judgment--somewhat impracticable. Even the most advanced Liberals,
observing the thing in being, have been moved to cough sadly behind
their hands. But it would certainly be going beyond the facts to say
that the underlying democratic dogma has been abandoned, or even
appreciably overhauled. To the contrary, it is now more prosperous
than ever before. The late war was fought in its name, and it was
embraced with loud hosannas by all the defeated nations. Everywhere
in Christendom it is now official, save in a few benighted lands
where God is temporarily asleep. Everywhere its fundamental axioms
are accepted: (_a_) that the great masses of men have an inalienable
right, born of the very nature of things, to govern themselves, and
(_b_) that they are competent to do it. Are they occasionally detected
in gross and lamentable imbecilities? Then it is only because they
are misinformed by those who would exploit them: the remedy is more
education. Are they, at times, seen to be a trifle naughty, even
swinish? Then it is only a natural reaction against the oppressions
they suffer: the remedy is to deliver them. The central aim of all
the Christian governments of to-day, in theory if not in fact, is to
further their liberation, to augment their power, to drive ever larger
and larger pipes into the great reservoir of their natural wisdom. That
government is called good which responds most quickly and accurately
to their desires and ideas. That is called bad which conditions their
omnipotence and puts a question mark after their omniscience.
2.
_Varieties of Homo Sapiens_
So much for the theory. It seems to me, and I shall here contend, that
all the known facts lie flatly against it--that there is actually no
more evidence for the wisdom of the inferior man, nor for his virtue,
than there is for the notion that Friday is an unlucky day. There was,
perhaps, some excuse for believing in these phantasms in the days when
they were first heard of in the world, for it was then difficult to put
them to the test, and what cannot be tried and disproved has always
had a lascivious lure for illogical man. But now we know a great deal
more about the content and character of the human mind than we used to
know, both on high levels and on low levels, and what we have learned
has pretty well disposed of the old belief in its congenital intuitions
and inherent benevolences. It is, we discover, a function, at least
mainly, of purely physical and chemical phenomena, and its development
and operation are subject to precisely the same natural laws which
govern the development and operation, say, of the human nose or lungs.
There are minds which start out with a superior equipment, and proceed
to high and arduous deeds; there are minds which never get any further
than a sort of insensate sweating, like that of a kidney. We not only
observe such differences; we also begin to chart them with more or
less accuracy. Of one mind we may say with some confidence that it
shows an extraordinary capacity for function and development--that its
possessor, exposed to a suitable process of training, may be trusted
to acquire the largest body of knowledge and the highest skill at
ratiocination to which _Homo sapiens_ is adapted. Of another we may say
with the same confidence that its abilities are sharply limited--that
no conceivable training can move it beyond a certain point. In other
words, men differ inside their heads as they differ outside. There are
men who are naturally intelligent and can learn, and there are men who
are naturally stupid and cannot.
Here, of course, I flirt with the so-called intelligence tests, and so
bring down upon my head that acrid bile which they have set to flowing.
My plea in avoidance is that I have surely done my share of damning
them: they aroused, when they were first heard of, my most brutish
passions, for pedagogues had them in hand. But I can only say that time
and experience have won me to them, for the evidence in favor of them
slowly piles up, pedagogues or no pedagogues. In other words, they
actually work. What they teach is borne out by immense accumulations of
empiric corroboration. It is safe, nine times out of ten, to give them
credence, and so it seems to me to be safe to generalize from them. Is
it only a coincidence that their most frantic critics are the Liberals,
which is to say, the only surviving honest believers in democracy?
I think not. These Liberals, whatever their defects otherwise, are
themselves capable of learning, and so they quickly mastered the fact
that MM. Simon and Binet offered the most dangerous menace to their
vapourings ever heard of since the collapse of the Holy Alliance.
Their dudgeon followed. In two ways the tests give aid and comfort to
their enemies. First, they provide a more or less scientific means
of demonstrating the difference in natural intelligence between man
and man--a difference noted ages ago by common observation, and held
to be real by all men save democrats, at all times and everywhere.
Second, they provide a rational scale for measuring it and a rational
explanation of it. Intelligence is reduced to levels, and so given
a reasonable precision of meaning. An intelligent man is one who
is capable of taking in knowledge until the natural limits of the
species are reached. A stupid man is one whose progress is arrested
at some specific time and place before then. There thus appears in
psychology--and the next instant in politics--the concept of the
unteachable. Some men can learn almost indefinitely; their capacity
goes on increasing until their bodies begin to wear out. Others stop in
childhood, even in infancy. They reach, say, the mental age of ten or
twelve, and then they develop no more. Physically, they become men,
and sprout beards, political delusions, and the desire to propagate
their kind. But mentally they remain on the level of school-boys.
The fact here is challenged sharply by the democrats aforesaid, but
certainly not with evidence. Their objection to it is rather of a
metaphysical character, and involves gratuitous, transcendental
assumptions as to what ought and what ought not to be true. They echo
also, of course, the caveats of other and less romantic critics, some
of them very ingenious; but always, when hard pressed, they fall back
pathetically upon the argument that believing such things would be in
contempt of the dignity of man, made in God’s image. Is this argument
sound? Is it, indeed, new? I seem to have heard it long ago, from the
gentlemen of the sacred faculty. Don’t they defend the rubbish of
Genesis on the theory that rejecting it would leave the rabble without
faith, and that without faith it would be one with the brutes, and very
unhappy, and, what is worse, immoral? I leave such contentions to the
frequenters of Little Bethel, and pause only to observe that if the
progress of the human race had depended upon them we’d all believe
in witches, ectoplasms and madstones to-day. Democracy, alas, is also
a form of theology, and shows all the immemorial stigmata. Confronted
by uncomfortable facts, it invariably tries to dispose of them by
appeals to the highest sentiments of the human heart. An anti-democrat
is not merely mistaken; he is also wicked, and the more plausible he
is the more wicked he becomes. As I have said, the earliest of modern
democrats were full of Christian juices. Their successors never get
very far from Genesis I, 27. They are Fundamentalists by instinct,
however much they may pretend to a mellow scepticism.
One undoubted fact gives them a certain left-handed support, though
they are far too discreet to make use of it. I allude to the fact
that man on the lower levels, though he quickly reaches the limit of
his capacity for taking in actual knowledge, remains capable for a
long time thereafter of absorbing delusions. What is true daunts him,
but what is _not_ true finds lodgment in his cranium with so little
resistance that there is only a trifling emission of heat. I shall go
back to this singular and beautiful phenomenon later on. It lies at the
heart of what is called religion, and at the heart of all democratic
politics no less. The thinking of what Charles Richet calls _Homo
stultus_ is almost entirely in terms of palpable nonsense. He has a
dreadful capacity for embracing and cherishing impostures. His history
since the first records is a history of successive victimizations--by
priests, by politicians, by all sorts and conditions of quacks. His
heroes are always frauds. In all ages he has hated bitterly the men
who were labouring most honestly and effectively for the progress of
the race. What such men teach is beyond his grasp. He believes in
consequence that it is unsound, immoral and of the devil.
3.
_The New Psychology_
The concept of arrested development has caused an upheaval in
psychology, and reduced the arduous introspections of the old-time
psychologists to a series of ingenious but unimportant fancies. Men are
_not_ alike, and very little can be learned about the mental processes
of a congressman, an ice-wagon driver or a cinema actor by studying
the mental processes of a genuinely superior man. The difference is
not only qualitative; it is also, in important ways, quantitative. One
thus sees the world as a vast field of greased poles, flying gaudy and
seductive flags. Up each a human soul goes shinning, painfully and with
many a slip. Some climb eventually to the high levels; a few scale
the dizziest heights. But the great majority never get very far from
the ground. There they struggle for a while, and then give it up. The
effort is too much for them; it doesn’t seem to be worth its agonies.
Golf is easier; so is joining Rotary; so is Fundamentalism; so is
osteopathy; so is Americanism.
In an aristocratic society government is a function of those who
have got relatively far up the poles, either by their own prowess or
by starting from the shoulders of their fathers--which is to say,
either by God’s grace or by God’s grace. In a democratic society it
is the function of all, and hence mainly of those who have got only a
few spans from the ground. Their eyes, to be sure, are still thrown
toward the stars. They contemplate, now bitterly, now admiringly, the
backsides of those who are above them. They are bitter when they sense
anything rationally describable as actual superiority; they admire
when what they see is fraud. Bitterness and admiration, interacting,
form a complex of prejudices which tends to cast itself into more or
less stable forms. Fresh delusions, of course, enter into it from time
to time, usually on waves of frantic emotion, but it keeps its main
outlines. This complex of prejudices is what is known, under democracy,
as public opinion. It is the glory of democratic states.
Its content is best studied by a process of analysis--that is, by
turning from the complex whole to the simpler parts. What does the
mob think? It thinks, obviously, what its individual members think.
And what is that? It is, in brief, what somewhat sharp-nosed and
unpleasant children think. The mob, being composed, in the overwhelming
main, of men and women who have not got beyond the ideas and emotions
of childhood, hovers, in mental age, around the time of puberty,
and chiefly below it. If we would get at its thoughts and feelings
we must look for light to the thoughts and feelings of adolescents.
The old-time introspective psychology offered little help here. It
concerned itself almost exclusively with the mental processes of
the more reflective, and hence the superior sort of adults; it fell
into the disastrous fallacy of viewing a child as simply a little
man. Just as modern medicine, by rejecting a similar fallacy on the
physical plane, has set up the science and art of pediatrics, so the
new behaviourist psychology has given a new dignity and autonomy to
the study of the child mind. The first steps were very difficult.
The behaviourists not only had to invent an entirely new technique,
like the pediatricians before them; they also had to meet the furious
opposition of the orthodox psychologists, whose moony speculations
they laughed at and whose authority they derided. But they persisted,
and the problems before them turned out, in the end, to be relatively
simple, and by no means difficult to solve. By observing attentively
what was before everyone’s nose they quickly developed facts which left
the orthodox psychologists in an untenable and absurd position. One by
one, the old psychological categories went overboard, and with them a
vast mass of vague and meaningless psychological terminology.
On the cleared ground remained a massive discovery: that the earliest
and most profound of human emotions is fear. Man comes into the world
weak and naked, and almost as devoid of intelligence as an oyster, but
he brings with him a highly complex and sensitive susceptibility to
fear. He can tremble and cry out in the first hours of his life--nay,
in the first minute. Make a loud noise behind an infant just born, and
it will shake like a Sunday-school superintendent taken in adultery.
Take away its support--that is, make it believe that it is falling--and
it will send up such a whoop as comes from yokels when the travelling
tooth-puller has at them. These fears, by their character, suggest
that they have a phylogenic origin--that is, that they represent
inherited race experience, out of the deep darkness and abysm of time.
Dr. John B. Watson, the head of the behaviourist school, relates
them to the daily hazards of arboreal man--the dangers presented
by breaking tree branches. The ape-man learned to fear the sudden,
calamitous plunge, and he learned to fear, too, the warning crack. One
need not follow Dr. Watson so far; there is no proof, indeed, that
man was ever arboreal. But it must be obvious that this emotion of
fear is immensely deep-seated--that it is instinctive if anything is
instinctive. And all the evidence indicates that every other emotion
is subordinate to it. None other shows itself so soon, and none other
enters so powerfully into the first functioning of the infant mind.
And to the primeval and yet profoundly rational fears that it brings
into the world it quickly adds others that depart farther and farther
from rationality. It begins to fear ideas as well as things, strange
men as well as hostile nature. It picks up dreads and trepidations
from its mother, from its nurse, from other children. At the age of
three years, as Dr. Watson shows, its mental baggage is often little
more than a vast mass of such things. It has anxieties, horrors, even
superstitions. And as it increases in years it adds constantly to the
stock.
The process of education is largely a process of getting rid of such
fears. It rehearses, after a fashion, the upward struggle of man.
The ideal educated man is simply one who has put away as foolish the
immemorial fears of the race--of strange men and strange ideas, of
the powers and principalities of the air. He is sure of himself in
the world; no dread of the dark rides him; he is serene. To produce
such men is the central aim of every rational system of education;
even under democracy it is one of the aims, though perhaps only
a subordinate one. What brings it to futility is simply the fact
that the vast majority of men are congenitally incapable of any
such intellectual progress. They cannot take in new ideas, and they
cannot get rid of old fears. They lack the logical sense; they are
unable to reason from a set of facts before them, free from emotional
distraction. But they also lack something more fundamental: they are
incompetent to take in the bald facts themselves. Here I point to the
observations of Dr. Eleanor R. Wembridge, a practical psychologist of
great shrewdness. Her contribution is the discovery that the lower
orders of men, though they seem superficially to use articulate
speech and thus to deal in ideas, are actually but little more
accomplished in that way than so many trained animals. Words, save
the most elemental, convey nothing to them. Their minds cannot grasp
even the simplest abstractions; all their thinking is done on the
level of a few primitive appetites and emotions. It is thus a sheer
impossibility to educate them, as much so as it would be if they were
devoid of the five senses. The school-marm who has at them wastes her
time shouting up a rain-spout. They are imitative, as many of the
lower animals are imitative, and so they sometimes deceive her into
believing that her expositions and exhortations have gone home, but a
scientific examination quickly reveals that they have taken in almost
nothing. Thus ideas leave them unscathed; they are responsive only to
emotions, and their emotions are all elemental--the emotions, indeed,
of tabby-cats rather than of men.
4.
_Politics Under Democracy_
Fear remains the chiefest of them. The demagogues, _i. e._, the
professors of mob psychology, who flourish in democratic states are
well aware of the fact, and make it the corner-stone of their exact
and puissant science. Politics under democracy consists almost wholly
of the discovery, chase and scotching of bugaboos. The statesman
becomes, in the last analysis, a mere witch-hunter, a glorified smeller
and snooper, eternally chanting “Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum!” It has been so in
the United States since the earliest days. The whole history of the
country has been a history of melodramatic pursuits of horrendous
monsters, most of them imaginary: the red-coats, the Hessians, the
monocrats, again the red-coats, the Bank, the Catholics, Simon Legree,
the Slave Power, Jeff Davis, Mormonism, Wall Street, the rum demon,
John Bull, the hell hounds of plutocracy, the trusts, General Weyler,
Pancho Villa, German spies, hyphenates, the Kaiser, Bolshevism. The
list might be lengthened indefinitely; a complete chronicle of the
Republic could be written in terms of it, and without omitting a single
important episode. It was long ago observed that the plain people,
under democracy, never vote _for_ anything, but always _against_
something. The fact explains, in large measure, the tendency of
democratic states to pass over statesmen of genuine imagination and
sound ability in favour of colourless mediocrities. The former are
shining marks, and so it is easy for demagogues to bring them down;
the latter are preferred because it is impossible to fear them. The
demagogue himself, when he grows ambitious and tries to posture as a
statesman, usually comes ignominiously to grief, as the cases of Bryan,
Roosevelt and Wilson dramatically demonstrate. If Bryan had confined
himself, in 1896, to the chase of the bugaboo of plutocracy, it is
very probable that he would have been elected. But he committed the
incredible folly of throwing most of his energies into advocating a
so-called constructive program, and it was thus easy for his opponents
to alarm the mob against him. That program had the capital defect of
being highly technical, and hence almost wholly unintelligible to
all save a small minority; so it took on a sinister look, and caused
a shiver to go down the democratic spine. It was his cross-of-gold
speech that nominated him; it was his cow State political economy that
ruined him. Bryan was a highly unintelligent man, a true son of the
mob, and thus never learned anything by experience. In his last days he
discovered a new issue in the evolutionary hypothesis. It was beyond
the comprehension of the mob, and hence well adapted to arousing its
fears. But he allowed his foes to take the offensive out of his hands,
and in the last scene of all he himself was the pursued, and the tide
of the battle was running so heavily against him that even the hinds at
Dayton, Tenn., were laughing at him.
Government under democracy is thus government by orgy, almost by
orgasm. Its processes are most beautifully displayed at times when they
stand most naked--for example, in war days. The history of the American
share in the World War is simply a record of conflicting fears, more
than once amounting to frenzies. The mob, at the start of the uproar,
showed a classical reaction: it was eager only to keep out of danger.
The most popular song, in the United States, in 1915, was “I Didn’t
Raise My Boy to be a Soldier.” In 1916, on his fraudulent promise to
preserve that boy from harm, Wilson was reëlected. There then followed
some difficult manœuvres--but perhaps not so difficult, after all,
to skilful demagogues. The problem was to substitute a new and worse
fear for the one that prevailed--a new fear so powerful that it would
reconcile the mob to the thought of entering the war. The business was
undertaken resolutely on the morning after election day. Thereafter,
for three months, every official agency lent a hand. No ship went
down to a submarine’s torpedo anywhere on the seven seas that the
State Department did not report that American citizens--nay, American
infants in their mothers’ arms--were aboard. Diplomatic note followed
diplomatic note, each new one surpassing all its predecessors in moral
indignation. The Department of Justice ascribed all fires, floods and
industrial accidents to German agents. The newspapers were filled with
dreadful surmises, many of them officially inspired, about the probable
effects upon the United States of the prospective German victory. It
was obvious to everyone, even to the mob, that a victorious Germany
would unquestionably demand an accounting for the United States’ gross
violations of neutrality. Thus a choice of fears was set up. The first
was a fear of a Germany heavily beset, but making alarming progress
against her foes. The second was a fear of a Germany delivered from
them, and thirsting for revenge on a false and venal friend. The second
fear soon engulfed the first. By the time February came the mob was
reconciled to entering the war--reconciled, but surely not eager.
There remained the problem of converting reluctant acquiescence into
enthusiasm. It was solved, as always, by manufacturing new fears. The
history of the process remains to be written by competent hands: it
will be a contribution to the literature of mob psychology of the
highest importance. But the main outlines are familiar enough. The
whole power of the government was concentrated upon throwing the plain
people into a panic. All sense was heaved overboard, and there ensued
a chase of bugaboos on a truly epic scale. Nothing like it had ever
been seen in the world before, for no democratic state as populous as
the United States had ever gone to war before. I pass over the details,
and pause only to recall the fact that the American people, by the end
of 1917, were in such terror that they lived in what was substantially
a state of siege, though the foe was 3000 miles away and obviously
unable to do them any damage. It was only the draft, I believe, that
gave them sufficient courage to attempt actual hostilities. That
ingenious device, by relieving the overwhelming majority of them of any
obligation to take up arms, made them bold. Before it was adopted they
were heavily in favour of contributing only munitions and money to the
cause of democracy, with perhaps a few divisions of Regulars added for
the moral effect. But once it became apparent that a given individual,
John Doe, would not have to serve, he, John Doe, developed an
altruistic eagerness for a frontal attack in force. For every Richard
Roe in the conscript camps there were a dozen John Does thus safely
at home, with wages high and the show growing enjoyable. So an heroic
mood came upon the people, and their fear was concealed by a truculent
front. But not from students of mob psychology.
5.
_The Rôle of the Hormones_
Two other emotions are observed in the raw human being, fresh from
God’s hands: one is rage, and the other is what, for want of a more
accurate name, may be called love. This love, of course, is something
quite different from the thing that poets sing. It is a great deal more
earthly, and perhaps a great deal more honest. It manifests itself
typically in a delight in being tickled; its psychic overtones take the
form of being amiable. The child that is capable of it in the fullest
measure is the one that coos loudest when its mother pats and strokes
it, and tucks it into bed. In these sad days, when every flapper has
read Freud and ponders on the libido, there is no need, I take it, for
me to explain that such delights have their seats chiefly in erogenous
zones, and have more to do with the hormones than with the soul. Here
the new child psychology confirms the observations of the Freudians,
and reinforces their allegation that even the most tender and innocent
infant may be worthy of suspicion. Dr. Watson says that the dreadful
phenomenon of tumescence in the male can occur at birth--a satirical
fact of the first calibre, if a fact. It concerns us here only because
the incurable infantilism of the inferior man brings him to manhood
with his emotions in this department substantially what they were when
he yielded himself to auto-erotic exercises in the cradle.
But there is yet a difference, and it is important. In character
his amorous fancies are the same; in intensity they are immensely
exaggerated. His brain, in the first years of his second decade, ceases
to develop, but simultaneously his glands begin to unfold gloriously,
and presently they dominate his whole organism. In his middle teens,
he is no more than a vast geyser of hormones. The sweet passion of
love, in these years, is to him precisely what it is to a Tom cat.
If he is of the bucolic variety of _Homo stultus_ he has his will of
his neighbour’s daughter, and there begins a race between the village
pastor and the village _sage-femme_. If he is of the urban proletariat,
he finds the outer world more inhospitable to the inner urge, for there
are no dark lanes in the cities and no moonlight nights, but the urge
itself remains irresistible and so in some way or other, vicariously or
in harsh physiological terms, he yields himself to it, and loses his
immortal soul.
Later on the thing grows more subtle and even more refined. His
vast capacity for illusion, his powerful thirst for the not true,
embellishes his anthropoid appetite without diminishing it, and he
begins to toy with sentiment, even with a sort of poetry. If you want
to discover the content of that poetry go look at any movie, or listen
to any popular song. At its loftiest, it is never far from the poetry
of a rooster in a barnyard. Love, to the inferior man, remains almost
wholly a physical matter. The heroine he most admires is the one who
offers the grossest sexual provocation; the hero who makes his wife
roll her eyes is a perambulating phallus. The eminent psychologists
who conduct tabloid newspapers make this fact the corner-stone of their
metaphysical system. Their ideal piece of news is one in which nothing
is left to the imagination that can be wormed through the mails. Their
readers want no sublimation and no symbolism.
Love, as Freud explains, has many meanings. It runs from the erotic
to the philanthropic. But in all departments and on all planes the
inferior man reduces it to terms of his own elemental yearnings. Of
all his stupidities there is none more stupid than that which makes
it impossible for him to see beyond them, even as an act of the
imagination. He simply cannot formulate the concept of a good that
is not his own good. The fact explains his immemorial heat against
heretics, sacred and secular. His first thought and his last thought,
contemplating them, is to stand them up against a wall, and have at
them with musketry. Go back into history as far as you please, and you
will find no record that he has ever opened his mouth for fairness,
for justice, for decency between man and man. Such concepts, like the
concepts of honour and of liberty, are eternally beyond him, and belong
only to his superiors. The slaughters in the Roman arena delighted
him; he applauded Torquemada; only yesterday he was marching against
radicals--_i. e._, idiots who lamented his exploitation and sought to
end it--with the American Legion. His natural cowardice, of course,
moves him powerfully in such situations: his congenital fear is easily
translated into cruelty. But something must also be said for his
mere incapacity to project himself into the place of the other, his
deficiency in imagination. Are the poor charitable? Then it is only to
the poor. When their betters stand before them, asking for something
that they may withhold--when they are thus confronted, though the thing
asked for be only fair dealing, elemental justice, common decency, they
are wolves.
In a previous work I have adverted to the appalling development
of this wolfishness among peasants. They may be safely assumed, I
believe, to represent the lowest caste among civilized men. They are
the closest, both in their avocations and in their mental processes,
to primeval man. One may think of them as the sediment remaining in
the filter after the stream of progress has gone through. Even the
city proletariat is appreciably superior, if only because it embraces
those more intelligent yokels who have had the wit to escape from the
dreadful drudgery of the dunghill. Well, give a glance at the theology
and politics prevailing on the land. The former, in all countries and
all ages, has kept contact with the primitive animism of savages: it
bristles everywhere with demons, witches and ghosts. In its public
aspect it is as intolerant of heresy as Thibetan lamaism. The yokel
not only believes that all heretics are doomed to be roasted in hell
through all eternity; he also holds that they should be harassed as
much as possible on this earth. The anti-evolution laws of the South
afford an instructive glimpse into the peasant mind. They are based
frankly upon the theory that every man who dissents from the barnyard
theology is a scoundrel, and devoid of civil rights. That theory was
put very plainly by the peasant attorney-general during the celebrated
Scopes trial, to the visible satisfaction of the peasant judge.
In politics the virtuous clod-hopper, again speaking for inferior
man, voices notions of precisely the same sort. The whole process
of government, as he views it, is simply a process of promoting his
private advantage. He can imagine no good save his own good. When his
affairs are prospering--which is to say, when the needs of the city man
are acute, and the latter is thus at his mercy--he rams his advantage
home with relentless ferocity. For him to show any altruism in such
a situation, or even any common humanity, would be so strange as to
appear fabulous. But when things are running against him he believes
that the city man should be taxed to make up his losses: this is the
alpha and omega of all the brummagem progressivism that emanates from
the farm. That “progressivism,” in the hands of political mountebanks,
is swathed in the trappings of Service, but at the heart of it there
is nothing but bald self-seeking. The yokel hates everyone who is
not a yokel--and is afraid of everyone. He is democratic man in the
altogether. He is the glory and bulwark of all democratic states. The
city proletarian may be flustered and run amok by ideas--ideas without
any sense, true enough, but still ideas. The yokel has room in his head
for only one. That is the idea that God regards him fondly, and has a
high respect for him--that all other men are out of favour in heaven
and abandoned to the devil.
6.
_Envy As a Philosophy_
But under this pretension to superiority, of course, there lies an
uncomfortable realization of actual inferiority. The peasant hates;
_ergo_, he envies--and “l’envie,” as Heine said to Philarète Chasles,
“est une infériorité qui s’avoue.” The disdain that goes with genuine
superiority is something quite different; there is no sign of it in
him. He is so far from it, indeed, that he can imagine no higher
delights than such as proceed from acts which, when performed by the
hated city man, he denounces as crimes, and tries to put down by law.
It is the cabaret that makes a Prohibitionist of him, not the drunkard
in the gutter. Doomed himself to drink only crude and unpalatable
stimulants, incompetently made and productive of depressing malaises,
and forced to get them down in solitary swinishness behind the door,
he naturally longs for the varieties that have a more delicate and
romantic smack, and are ingested in gay society and to the music of
harps and sackbuts. That longing is vain. There are no cabarets in
the village, but only sordid speak-easies, selling raw spirits out
of filthy jugs. Drinking cider in the barn is so lonely as to be a
sort of onanism. Where is the music? Where are the whirling spangles,
the brilliant lights? Where is the swooning, suffocating scent of
lilies-of-the-valley, Jockey Club? Where, above all, are the lost
and fascinating females, so thrillingly described by the visiting
evangelist? The yokel peeks through a crack in the barn-door and
glimpses his slatternly wife laboriously rounding up strayed pigs: to
ask her in for a friendly bumper would be as appalling as asking in the
cow. So he gets down his unappetizing dram, feels along his glabella
for the beginning headache, and resumes his melancholy heaving of
manure--a Prohibitionist by conscience, doubly-riveted and immovable.
In all his politics this envy is manifest. He hates the plutocrats
of the cities, not only because they best him in the struggle for
money, but also because they spend their gains in debaucheries that
are beyond him. Such yellow-backs as “Night Life in Chicago” have
done more, I believe, to propagate “idealism” in the corn-and-hog
belt than all the eloquence of the Pfeffers and Bryans. The yokels,
reading them in secret, leave them full of a passionate conviction
that such Babylonish revels must be put down, if Christianity is to
survive--that it is obviously against the will of God that a Chicago
stock-broker should have five wives and fifty concubines, and an Iowa
swineherd but one--and that one a strictly Christian woman, even at
the purple moments when wits and principles tend naturally to scatter.
In the cities, as everyone knows, women move toward antinomianism:
it is a scandal throughout Christendom. Their souls, I daresay, are
imperilled thereby, but certainly no one argues that it makes them
less charming--least of all the husbandman behind his remote plough,
tortured by ruby reflections of the carnalities at Atlantic City and
Miami. On the land, however, that movement has but little genuine
force, despite a general apeing of its externals. The female young may
bob their hair, but they do not reject divine revelation. I am told by
experts that it is still a sort of marvel, as it was in the youth of
Abraham Lincoln, to find a farm-wife who has definitely renounced the
theology of the local pastors. The fact has obvious moral--and, by
an easy step, political--consequences. There are about six and a half
million farmers in the United States. Keep in mind the fact that at
least six millions of them are forced to live in unmitigated monogamy
with wives whose dominant yearning is to save the heathen hordes in
India from hell fire, and you will begin to get some grasp of the
motives behind such statutes as the celebrated Mann Act. The sea-sick
passenger on the ocean liner detests the “good sailor” who stalks past
him a hundred times a day, obscenely smoking large, greasy, gold-banded
cigars. In precisely the same way democratic man hates the fellow who
is having a better time of it in this world. Such, indeed, is the
origin of democracy. And such is the origin of its twin, Puritanism.
The city proletarian, of course, is a cut above the hind, if only
because his natural envy of his betters is mitigated and mellowed by
_panem et circenses_. His life may be swinish, but it is seldom dull.
In good times there is actual money in his hand, and immense and
complicated organizations offer him gaudy entertainment in return for
it. In bad times his basic wants are met out of the community funds,
and he is even kept in certain luxuries, necessary to his contentment.
The immense development of public charity in the cities of the United
States has yet to find adequate analysis and record. Nothing quite
like it was ever known in past ages, nor is it paralleled in any other
country to-day. What lies under it, I daresay, is simply the fact
that the plutocracy of the Republic, having had more experience with
democracy than the plutocracy anywhere else, has attained to a higher
skill in dealing with the proletarian. He is never dangerous so long as
his belly is filled and his eyes kept a-pop; and in this great land,
by Divine Providence, there is always enough surplus wealth, even in
the worst times, to finance that filling and popping. The plethora of
means has bred a large class of experts, professionally devoted to
the business. They swarm in all the American cities, and when genuine
wants fail them they invent artificial wants. This enterprise in the
third theological virtue has gone to great lengths. The proletarian,
in his office as father, is now reduced by it to the simple biological
function of a boar in a barnyard. From the moment the fertilized ovum
attaches itself to the _decidua serotina_ he is free to give himself
whole-heartedly to politics, drink and the radio. There is elaborate
machinery for instructing the partner of his ecstasies in the whole
art and mystery of maternity, and all the accompanying expenses are
provided for. Obstetricians of the highest eminence stand ready to
examine her and counsel her; gynecologists are at hand to perform any
necessary operations; trained nurses call at her home, supply and
prepare her diet, warn her against a too animated social life, hand her
instructive literature, and entertain her with anecdotes suitable to
her condition. If she is too clumsy or too lazy to fashion a layette,
or can’t afford the materials, it is provided free of charge. And when
she comes to term at last she is taken into a steam-heated hospital,
boarded without cost, and delivered in a brilliant, aseptic, and, in so
far as money can make it so, painless manner.
Nor is this all. Once she has become a mother her benefits only
increase. If she wants to get rid of her child it is taken off her
hands, and eager propagandists instruct her in the science of avoiding
another. If she chooses to keep it there is elaborate machinery for
reducing the care and cost of it to nothing. Visiting nurses of a
dozen different varieties stand ready to assume the burdens of washing
it, dosing it with purges, and measuring out its victuals. Milk is
supplied free--and not simply common cow’s milk, but cow’s milk
modified according to the subtlest formulæ of eminent pediatricians.
Ice is thrown in as a matter of course. Medicines are free at the
neighbourhood dispensary. If the mother, recovering her figure, wishes
to go shopping, she may park her baby at a _crèche_, and, on the plea
that she is employed as a charwoman, leave it there all day. Once it
can toddle the kindergarten yawns for it, and in holiday time the
public playground, each officered by learned experts. The public school
follows, and with it a host of new benefits. Dentists are in attendance
to plug and pull the youngster’s teeth at the public charge. Oculists
fit it with horn-rimmed spectacles. It is deloused. Free lunches
sustain it. Its books cost nothing. It is taught not only the three
R’s, but also raffiawork, bookkeeping, basketball, salesmanship, the
new dances, and parliamentary law. It learns the causes of the late war
and the fallacies of Socialism.
The rest you know as well as I do. The proletarian is so artfully
relieved of the elemental gnawings which constantly terrorize the
peasant and so steadily distracted from all sober thinking that
his natural envy of his betters is sublimated into a sort of boozy
contentment, like that of a hog in a comfortable sty. He escapes
boredom, and with it, brooding. The political imbecilities which
pile up in great waves from the prairies break upon the hard rock of
his urban cynicism like rollers upon the strand. His pastors have
but a slight hold upon him, and so cannot stir him up to the frantic
hatreds which move the yokel. Even his wife emancipates herself from
the ancient demonology of the race: his typical complaint against her
is not that she is made anaphrodisiacal by Christian endeavour but
that she is too worldly and extravagant, and spreads her charms too
boldly. The rustic, alone upon his dung-hill, has time to nurse his
grievances; the city moron is diverted from them by the shows that
surround him. There was a time when yellow journalism promised to
prod him to dudgeon, and even to send him yelling to the barricades.
But the plutocracy has deftly drawn its fangs, and in its place are
the harmless tabloids. They ease his envy by giving him a vicarious
share in the debaucheries of his economic superiors. He is himself,
of course, unable to roar about the country in a high-powered car,
accompanied by a beautiful coloured girl of large gifts for the art of
love, but when he reads of the scions of old Knickerbocker families
doing it he somehow gets a touch of the thrill. It flatters him to
think that he lives in a community in which such levantine joys are
rife. Thus his envy is obscured by civic pride, by connoisseurship, and
by a simple animal delight in good shows. By the time the tale reaches
the yokel it is reduced to its immoral elements, and so makes him smell
brimstone. But the city proletarian hears the frou-frou of perfumed
skirts.
7.
_Liberty and Democratic Man_
Under the festive surface, of course, envy remains: the proletarian is
still a democrat. The fact shows itself grimly whenever the supply of
_panem et circenses_ falls off sharply, and the harsh realities make
themselves felt. All the revolutions in history have been started by
hungry city mobs. The fact is, indeed, so plain that it has attracted
the notice even of historians, and some of them deduce from it the
doctrine that city life breeds a love of liberty. It may be so, but
certainly that love is not visible in the lower orders. I can think of
no city revolution that actually had liberty for its object, in any
rational sense. The ideas of freedom that prevail in the world to-day
were first formulated by country gentlemen, aided and abetted by poets
and philosophers, with occasional help from an eccentric king. One of
the most valid of them--that of free speech--was actually given its
first support in law by the most absolute monarch of modern times,
to wit, Frederick the Great. When the city mob fights it is not for
liberty, but for ham and cabbage. When it wins, its first act is to
destroy every form of freedom that is not directed wholly to that end.
And its second is to butcher all professional libertarians. If Thomas
Jefferson had been living in Paris in 1793 he would have made an even
narrower escape from the guillotine than Thomas Paine made.
The fact is that liberty, in any true sense, is a concept that lies
quite beyond the reach of the inferior man’s mind. He can imagine and
even esteem, in his way, certain false forms of liberty--for example,
the right to choose between two political mountebanks, and to yell
for the more obviously dishonest--but the reality is incomprehensible
to him. And no wonder, for genuine liberty demands of its votaries a
quality he lacks completely, and that is courage. The man who loves it
must be willing to fight for it; blood, said Jefferson, is its natural
manure. More, he must be able to _endure_ it--an even more arduous
business. Liberty means self-reliance, it means resolution, it means
enterprise, it means the capacity for doing without. The free man is
one who has won a small and precarious territory from the great mob
of his inferiors, and is prepared and ready to defend it and make it
support him. All around him are enemies, and where he stands there is
no friend. He can hope for little help from other men of his own kind,
for they have battles of their own to fight. He has made of himself a
sort of god in his little world, and he must face the responsibilities
of a god, and the dreadful loneliness. Has _Homo boobiens_ any talent
for this magnificent self-reliance? He has the same talent for it that
he has for writing symphonies in the manner of Ludwig van Beethoven, no
less and no more. That is to say, he has no talent whatsoever, nor even
any understanding that such a talent exists. Liberty is unfathomable to
him. He can no more comprehend it than he can comprehend honour. What
he mistakes for it, nine times out of ten, is simply the banal right to
empty hallelujahs upon his oppressors. He is an ox whose last proud,
defiant gesture is to lick the butcher behind the ear.
“The vast majority of persons of our race,” said Sir Francis Galton,
“have a natural tendency to shrink from the responsibility of standing
and acting alone.” It is a pity that the great pioneer of studies
in heredity did not go beyond the fact to its obvious causes: they
were exactly in his line. What ails “the vast majority of persons of
our race” is simply the fact that, to their kind, even such mild and
narrow liberties as they can appreciate are very recent acquisitions.
It is barely a century and a half--a scant five generations--since
four-fifths of the people of the world, white and black alike, were
slaves, in reality if not in name. I could fill this book with
evidence, indubitable and overwhelming. There are whole libraries
upon the subject. Turn to any treatise on the causes of the French
Revolution, and you will find the French peasant of 1780 but little
removed, in legal rights and daily tasks, from the _fellahin_ who built
Cheops’ pyramid. Consult any work on the rise of the Industrial System
in England, and you will find the towns of that great liberty-loving
land filled, in the same year, with a half-starved and anthropoid
proletariat, and the countryside swarming with a dispossessed and
despairing peasantry. Open any school-book of American history, and
you will see Germans sold like cattle by their masters. If you thirst
for more, keep on: the tale was precisely the same in Italy, in
Spain, in Russia, in Scandinavia, and in what remained of the Holy
Roman Empire. The Irish, at the close of the Eighteenth Century, were
clamped under a yoke that it took more than a century of effort to
throw off. The Scotch, roving their bare intolerable hills, were only
two steps removed from savagery, and even cannibalism. The Welsh, but
recently delivered from voodooism to Methodism, were being driven
into their own coal-mines. There was no liberty anywhere in Europe,
even in name, until 1789, and there was little in fact until 1848.
And in America? Again I summon the historians, some of whom begin to
grow honest. America was settled largely by slaves, some escaped but
others transported in bondage. The Revolution was imposed upon them
by their betters, chiefly, in New England, commercial gents in search
of greater profits, and in the South, country gentlemen ambitious to
found a nobility in the wilderness. Universal manhood suffrage, the
corner-stone of modern free states, was only dreamed of until 1867, and
economic freedom was little more than a name until years later.
Thus the lower orders of men, however grandiloquently they may talk
of liberty to-day, have actually had but a short and highly deceptive
experience of it. It is not in their blood. The grandfathers of
at least half of them were slaves, and the great-grandfathers of
three-fourths, and the great-great-grandfathers of seven-eighths, and
the great-great-great-grandfathers of practically all. The heritage
of freedom belongs to a small minority of men, descended, whether
legitimately or by adultery, from the old lords of the soil or from
the patricians of the free towns. It is my contention that such a
heritage is necessary in order that the concept of liberty, with
all its disturbing and unnatural implications, may be so much as
grasped--that such ideas cannot be implanted in the mind of man at
will, but must be bred in as all other basic ideas are bred in. The
proletarian may mouth the phrases, as he did in Jefferson’s day, but he
cannot take in the underlying realities, as was also demonstrated in
Jefferson’s day. What his great-great-grand-children may be capable of
I am not concerned with here; my business is with the man himself as he
now walks the world. Viewed thus, it must be obvious that he is still
incapable of bearing the pangs of liberty. They make him uncomfortable;
they alarm him; they fill him with a great loneliness. There is no high
adventurousness in him, but only fear. He not only doesn’t long for
liberty; he is quite unable to stand it. What he longs for is something
wholly different, to wit, security. He needs protection. He is afraid
of getting hurt. All else is affectation, delusion, empty words.
The fact, as we shall see, explains many of the most puzzling
political phenomena of so-called free states. The great masses of men,
though theoretically free, are seen to submit supinely to oppression
and exploitation of a hundred abhorrent sorts. Have they no means
of resistance? Obviously they have. The worst tyrant, even under
democratic plutocracy, has but one throat to slit. The moment the
majority decided to overthrow him he would be overthrown. But the
majority lacks the resolution; it cannot imagine taking the risk. So
it looks for leaders with the necessary courage, and when they appear
it follows them slavishly, even after their courage is discovered to
be mere buncombe and their altruism only a cloak for more and worse
oppressions. Thus it oscillates eternally between scoundrels, or, if
you would take them at their own valuation, heroes. Politics becomes
the trade of playing upon its natural poltroonery--of scaring it half
to death, and then proposing to save it. There is in it no other
quality of which a practical politician, taking one day with another,
may be sure. Every theoretically free people wonders at the slavishness
of all the others. But there is no actual difference between them.
8.
_The Effects Upon Progress_
It follows that the inferior man, being a natural slave himself, is
quite unable to understand the desire for liberty in his superiors.
If he apprehends that desire at all it is only as an appetite for
a good of which he is himself incapable. He thus envies those who
harbour it, and is eager to put them down. Justice, in fact, is always
unpopular and in difficulties under democracy, save perhaps that false
form of so-called social justice which is designed solely to get the
laborer more than his fair hire. The wars of extermination that are
waged against heretical minorities never meet with any opposition on
the lower levels. The proletarian is always ready to help destroy the
rights of his fellow proletarian, as was revealed brilliantly by the
heroic services of the American Legion in the pogrom against Reds,
just after the late war, and even more brilliantly by the aid that the
American Federation of Labour gave to the same gallant crusade. The
city workman, oppressed by Prohibition, mourns the loss of his beer,
not the loss of his liberty. He is ever willing to support similar
raids upon the liberty of the other fellow, and he is not outraged when
they are carried on in gross violation of the most elemental principles
of justice and common decency. When, in a democratic state, any protest
against such obscenities is heard at all, it comes from the higher
levels. There a few genuine believers in liberty and justice survive,
huddled upon a burning deck. It is to be marvelled at that most of
them, on inspection, turn out to be the grandsons of similar heretics
of earlier times? I think not. It takes quite as long to breed a
libertarian as it takes to breed a race-horse. Neither may be expected
to issue from a farm mare.
The whole progress of the world, even in the direction of ameliorating
the lot of the masses, is always opposed by the masses. The notion
that their clamour brought about all the governmental and social
reforms of the last century, and that those reforms were delayed by the
superior minority, is sheer nonsense; even Liberals begin to reject
it as absurd. Consider, for example, the history of the American
Department of Agriculture. Whatever the corruptions and imbecilities
of this department in democratic hands, it must be plain to everyone
that the net effect of its work over many years has been a series of
immense benefits to the American farmer--benefits that have at once
reduced his labour and augmented his profits. Nevertheless, it is a
matter of history that the farmers of the United States, when the
Department began as a bureau of the Patent Office in 1830, opposed it
almost unanimously, and that for years their bitter derision kept it
feeble. Without leaving the United States one may go even farther back.
When John Adams, during his presidency, proposed to set up a Weather
Bureau, he was denounced as an idiot and a scoundrel, as Henry Adams
has set forth in the introduction to “The Decay of Democratic Dogma.”
Examples from our own time are so numerous and notorious that it is
needless to direct attention to them. It is axiomatic that all measures
for safeguarding the public health are opposed by the majority, and
that getting them upon the books is mainly a matter of deceiving
and checkmating it. What happened in Los Angeles when a vaccination
ordinance was submitted to a popular referendum is typical of what
would happen anywhere under the same circumstances. The ordinance was
rejected, and smallpox spread in the town. The proletariat, alarmed,
then proceeded against it by going to Christian Scientists, osteopaths
and chiropractors. Precisely the same thing happened in Switzerland.
Turn now to Germany, a country lately delivered from despotism by the
arms of altruistic heroes. The social legislation of that country, for
more than half a century, afforded a model to all other countries. All
the workingmen’s insurance, minimum wage, child labour and other such
acts of the United States are bald imitations of it, and in England,
before the war, the mountebank Lloyd-George borrowed his whole bag
of tricks from it. Well, Dr. Hans Delbrück, in his “Regierung und
Volkswille,” tells us that this legislation was fought step by step at
home, and with the utmost ferocity, by the beneficiaries of it. When
Bismarck formulated it and essayed to get it through the Reichstag
he was opposed by every mob-master in the Empire, save only his kept
Socialist, Ferdinand Lassalle. The common people were so heavily
against him for several years that he had to carry on the government
without the consent of the Reichstag--that is, unconstitutionally,
and at the risk of his head. If the proletariat had been able to get
control of the German courts, as it had got control of the Reichstag,
it would have deposed him from office and condemned him to death for
high treason. His treason consisted in trying to formulate a code of
legislation designed to restore its old rights under the Prussian
common law, destroyed by the rise of the industrial system, and to
grant it many new and valuable benefits.
“Let any competently instructed person,” says Sir Henry Maine, “turn
over in his mind the great epochs of scientific invention and social
change during the past two centuries, and consider what would have
occurred if universal suffrage had been established at any one of
them.” Here, obviously, Sir Henry speaks of universal suffrage that is
genuinely effective--suffrage that registers the actual will of the
people accurately and automatically. As we shall see, no such thing
exists in the world to-day, save in limited areas. Public policies are
determined and laws are made by small minorities playing upon the fears
and imbecilities of the mob--sometimes minorities of intelligent and
honest men, but usually minorities of rogues. But the fact does not
disturb the validity of Maine’s argument. “Universal suffrage,” he
goes on, “would certainly have prohibited the spinning-jenny and the
power loom. It would certainly have forbidden the threshing-machine.
It would have prevented the adoption of the Gregorian Calendar; it
would have restored the Stuarts. It would have proscribed the Roman
Catholics, with the mob which burned Lord Mansfield’s house and
library in 1780; and it would have proscribed the Dissenters, with
the mob which burned Dr. Priestley’s house and library in 1791.” So
much for England. What of the United States? I point briefly to the
anti-evolution acts which now begin to adorn the statute-books of the
Hookworm Belt, all of them supported vociferously by the lower orders.
I point to the anti-vivisection and anti-contraception statutes, to the
laws licensing osteopaths and other such frauds, and to the multitude
of acts depriving relatively enlightened minorities of the common
rights of free assemblage and free speech. They increase in proportion
as _vox populi_ is the actual voice of the state; they run with that
“more democracy” which Liberals advocate. “Nothing in ancient alchemy,”
says Lecky, “was more irrational than the notion that increased
ignorance in the elective body will be converted into increased
capacity for good government in the representative body; that the best
way to improve the world and secure rational progress is to place
government more and more under the control of the least enlightened
classes.”
The hostility of _Homo neandertalensis_ to all exact knowledge, even
when its effect is to work him benefits, is not hard to understand.
He is against it because it is complex, and, to his dark mind,
occult--because it puts an unbearable burden upon his meagre capacity
for taking in ideas, and thus propels him into the realm of the
unknowable and alarming. His search is always for short cuts, simple
formulæ, revelation. All superstitions are such short cuts, whether
they issue out of the African jungle or out of Little Bethel. So are
all political platitudes and shibboleths. Their one aim is to make
the unintelligible simple, and even obvious. No man who has not had
a long and arduous education in the physical sciences can understand
even the most elementary concepts of, say, pathology, but even a hind
at the plow can take in the theory of chiropractic in two lessons.
Hence the vast popularity of chiropractic among the submerged, and
of osteopathy, Christian Science, spiritualism and all the other half
rational and half supernatural quackeries with it. They are idiotic,
like the tales displayed in the movies, but, again like the tales
displayed in the movies, they are simple--and every man, high or low,
prefers what he can understand to what puzzles and dismays him. The
popularity of the farrago of absurdities called Fundamentalism--and
it is popular among peasants, not only in the United States, but
everywhere in Christendom--is thus easily understood. The cosmogonies
that educated men toy with are all inordinately complex. To comprehend
their veriest outlines requires an immense stock of exact knowledge
and a special habit of thought, quite different in kind from the habit
of thought which suffices for listening to the radio. It would be as
vain to try to teach these cosmogonies to peasants as it would be to
try to teach them to streptococci. But the cosmogony set forth in
the first chapter of Genesis is so simple that a yokel can grasp it
instantly. It collides ludicrously with many of the known facts, but he
doesn’t know the known facts. It is logically nonsensical, but to him
the nonsensical, in the sciences as in politics, has an irresistible
fascination. So he accepts the Word with loud hosannas, and has one
more excuse for hating his betters.
Turn to any other field of knowledge, and the story remains the
same. It is a tragic but inescapable fact that most of the finest
fruits of human progress, like all of the nobler virtues of man, are
the exclusive possession of small minorities, chiefly unpopular and
disreputable. Of the sciences, as of the fine arts, the average human
being, even in the most literate and civilized of modern States, is
as ignorant as the horned cattle in the fields. What he knows of
histology, say, or protozoölogy, or philology, or paleontology is
precisely nothing. Such things lie beyond his capacity for learning,
and he has no curiosity about them. The man who has any acquaintance
with them seems to him to be a ridiculous figure, with a touch of the
sinister. Even those applied sciences which enter intimately into his
everyday existence remain outside his comprehension and interest.
Consider, for example, chemistry and biology. The whole life of the
inferior man, including especially his so-called thinking, is purely
a biochemical process, and exactly comparable to what goes on in a
barrel of cider, yet he knows no more about chemistry than a cow and no
more about biology than its calf. The new physics, in the form of the
radio, saves him from the appalling boredom of his hours of leisure,
but physics itself remains as dark to him as theosophy. He is more
ignorant of elementary anatomy and physiology than the Egyptian quacks
of 4000 B.C. His knowledge of astronomy is confined to a few marvels,
most of which he secretly doubts. He has never so much as heard of
ethnology, pathology or embryology. Greek, to him, is only a jargon
spoken by boot-blacks, and Wagner is a retired baseball player. He has
never heard of Euripides, of Hippocrates, of Aristotle, or of Plato.
Or of Vesalius, Newton, and Roger Bacon. The fine arts are complete
blanks to him. He doesn’t know what a Doric column is, or an etching,
or a fugue. He is as ignorant of sonnets and the Gothic style as he
is of ecclesiastical politics in Abyssinia. Homer, Virgil, Cervantes,
Bach, Raphael, Rubens, Beethoven--all such colossal names are empty
sounds to him, blowing idly down the wind. So far as he is concerned
these great and noble men might as well have perished in the cradle.
The stupendous beauties that they conjured into being are nothing to
him: he sticks to the tabloids and the movies, with _Hot Dog_ or its
like for Sunday afternoon. A politician by instinct and a statesman by
divine right, he has never heard of “The Republic” or “Leviathan.” A
_Feinschmecker_ of pornography, he is unaware of Freud.
The Egyptian night that hedges him round is not, perhaps, without its
high uses and consolations. Learning survives among us largely because
the mob has not got news of it. If the notions it turns loose descended
to the lowest levels, there would be an uprising against them, and
efforts would be made to put them down by law. In a previous treatise,
adverting to this probability, I have sounded a warning against the
fatuous effort to put the fine arts into the common-school curriculum
in the United States. Its dangers are diminished, no doubt, by the fact
that the teachers told off to execute it are themselves completely
ignorant, but they remain dangers none the less. The peasants of
Georgia, getting wind of the fact that grand operas were being played
in Atlanta, demanded that the State Legislature discourage them with a
tax of $1000 a performance. In the Middle West, after the late war,
the American Legion proceeded with clubs against fiddlers who played
Beethoven and Bach. Everywhere in America galleries of paintings are
under suspicion, and in most States it is impossible for them to
display works showing the female figure below the clavicle. Nor is this
distrust of the fine arts confined to the rural sections. The most
active censorship of literature, for example, is to be found in Boston.
The Methodist anthropoids of the town, supported by the _Chandala_ of
the Latin rite, clerical and lay, carry on so violent a crusade against
certain hated books, unquestionably of sound quality, that the local
booksellers fear to stock them. Much of the best literature of the
world, indeed, is forbidden to the Bostonian, heir though he may be to
Emerson and Thoreau. If he would read it, he must procure it by stealth
and read it behind the door, as a Kansan (imagining that so civilized a
one exists) procures and consumes Clos Vougeot.
In all this there is a great deal less of yearning for moral perfection
than there is of mere hatred of beauty. The common man, as a matter
of fact, has no yearning for moral perfection. What ails him in that
department is simply fear of punishment, which is to say, fear of his
neighbours. He has, in safe privacy, the morals of a variety actor.
Beauty fevers and enrages him for another and quite different reason.
He cannot comprehend it, and yet it somehow challenges and disturbs
him. If he could snore through good music he would not object to it;
the trouble with it is that it keeps him awake. So he believes that it
ought to be put down, just as he believes that political and economic
ideas which disturb him and yet elude him ought to be put down. The
finest art is safe from him simply because he has no contact with it,
and is thus unaware of it. The fact, in this great Republic, saves the
bacon of Johann Sebastian Bach. His music remains lawful because it
lies outside the cognizance of the mob, and of the abandoned demagogues
who make laws for the mob. It has thus something of the quality of
the colours beyond violet and of the concept of honour. If, by some
abominable magic, it could be brought within range, it would at once
arouse hostility. Its complexity would puzzle and dismay; its lack of
utilitarian purpose would affright. Soon there would be a movement to
proscribe it, and Baptist clergymen would rove the land denouncing
it, as they now denounce the plays of Shakespeare and the science
of Darwin. In the end some poor musician, taken playing it in rural
Tennessee, would be hailed before a Judge Raulston, tried by a jury of
morons, and railroaded to the calaboose.
9.
_The Eternal Mob_
Such is man on the nether levels. Such is the pet and glory of
democratic states. Human progress passes him by. Its aims are
unintelligible to him and its finest fruits are beyond his reach:
what reaches him is what falls from the tree, and is shared with his
four-footed brothers. He has changed but little since the earliest
recorded time, and that change is for the worse quite as often as it
is for the better. He still believes in ghosts, and has only shifted
his belief in witches to the political sphere. He is still a slave to
priests, and trembles before their preposterous magic. He is lazy,
improvident and unclean. All the durable values of the world, though
his labour has entered into them, have been created against his
opposition. He can imagine nothing beautiful and he can grasp nothing
true. Whenever he is confronted by a choice between two ideas, the one
sound and the other not, he chooses almost infallibly, and by a sort
of pathological compulsion, the one that is not. Behind all the great
tyrants and butchers of history he has marched with loud hosannas, but
his hand is eternally against those who seek to liberate the spirit
of the race. He was in favour of Nero and Torquemada by instinct, and
he was against Galileo and Savonarola by the same instinct. When a
Cagliostro dies he is ready for a Danton; from the funeral of a Barnum
he rushes to the triumph of a Bryan. The world gets nothing from him
save his brute labour, and even that he tries to evade. It owes nothing
to him that has any solid dignity or worth, not even democracy. In
two thousand years he has moved an inch: from the sports of the arena
to the lynching-party--and another inch: from the obscenities of the
Saturnalia to the obscenities of the Methodist revival. So he lives
out his life in the image of Jahveh. What is worth knowing he doesn’t
know and doesn’t want to know; what he knows is not true. The cardinal
articles of his credo are the inventions of mountebanks; his heroes are
mainly scoundrels.
Do I forget his central virtue--at least in Christendom? Do I forget
his simple piety, his touching fidelity to the faith? I forget nothing:
I simply answer, What faith? Is it argued by any rational man that
the debased Christianity cherished by the mob in all the Christian
countries of to-day has any colourable likeness to the body of ideas
preached by Christ? If so, then let us have a better teaching of
the Bible in the public-schools. The plain fact is that this bogus
Christianity has no more relation to the system of Christ than it
has to the system of Aristotle. It is the invention of Paul and his
attendant rabble-rousers--a body of men exactly comparable to the corps
of evangelical pastors of to-day, which is to say, a body devoid of
sense and lamentably indifferent to common honesty. The mob, having
heard Christ, turned against Him, and applauded His crucifixion. His
theological ideas were too logical and too plausible for it, and his
ethical ideas were enormously too austere. What it yearned for was
the old comfortable balderdash under a new and gaudy name, and that
is precisely what Paul offered it. He borrowed from all the wandering
dervishes and soul-snatchers of Asia Minor, and flavoured the stew with
remnants of the Greek demonology. The result was a code of doctrines
so discordant and so nonsensical that no two men since, examining
it at length, have ever agreed upon its precise meaning. But Paul
knew his mob: he had been a travelling labour leader. He knew that
nonsense was its natural provender--that the unintelligible soothed
it like sweet music. He was the _Stammvater_ of all the Christian
mob-masters of to-day, terrorizing and enchanting the mob with their
insane damnations, eating their seven fried chickens a week, passing
the diligent plate, busy among the women. Once the early church emerged
from the Roman catacombs and began to yield to that reorganization
of society which was forced upon the ancient world by the barbarian
invasions, Paul was thrown overboard as Methodists throw Wesley
overboard when they acquire the means and leisure for golf, and Peter
was put in his place. Peter was a blackguard, but he was at least free
from any taint of Little Bethel. The Roman Church, in the aristocratic
feudal age, promoted him _post mortem_ to the Papacy, and then raised
him to the mystical dignity of Rock, a rank obviously quasi-celestial.
But Paul remained the prophet of the sewers. He was to emerge centuries
later in many incarnations--Luther, Calvin, Wesley, and so on. He
remains to-day the arch-theologian of the mob. His turgid and witless
metaphysics make Christianity bearable to men who would be repelled by
Christ’s simple and magnificent reduction of the duties of man to the
duties of a gentleman.
THE DEMOCRATIC STATE
II
THE DEMOCRATIC STATE
1.
_The Two Kinds of Democracy_
The lowly Christian I have limned is not only the glory of democratic
states, but also their boss. Sovereignty is in him, sometimes both
actually and legally, but always actually. Whatever he wants badly
enough, he can get. If he is misled by mountebanks and swindled by
scoundrels it is only because his credulity and imbecility cover a
wider area than his simple desires. The precise form of the government
he suffers under is of small importance. Whether it be called a
constitutional monarchy, as in England, or a representative republic,
as in France, or a pure democracy, as in some of the cantons of
Switzerland, it is always essentially the same. There is, first, the
mob, theoretically and in fact the ultimate judge of all ideas and the
source of all power. There is, second, the camorra of self-seeking
minorities, each seeking to inflame, delude and victimize it. The
political process thus becomes a mere battle of rival rogues. But the
mob remains quite free to decide between them. It may even, under the
hand of God, decide for a minority that happens, by some miracle, to be
relatively honest and enlightened. If, in common practice, it sticks to
the thieves, it is only because their words are words it understands
and their ideas are ideas it cherishes. It has the power to throw them
off at will, and even at whim, and it also has the means.
A great deal of paper and ink has been wasted discussing the difference
between representative government and direct democracy. The theme is a
favourite one with university pundits, and also engages and enchants
the stall-fed Rousseaus who arise intermittently in the cow States,
and occasionally penetrate to Governors’ mansions and the United
States Senate. It is generally held that representative government, as
practically encountered in the world, is full of defects, some of them
amounting to organic disease. Not only does it take the initiative in
law-making out of the hands of the plain people, and leave them only
the function of referees; it also raises certain obvious obstacles
to their free exercise of that function. Scattered as they are, and
unorganized save in huge, unworkable groups, they are unable, it is
argued, to formulate their virtuous desires quickly and clearly,
or to bring to the resolution of vexed questions the full potency
of their native sagacity. Worse, they find it difficult to enforce
their decisions, even when they have decided. Every Liberal knows
this sad story, and has shed tears telling it. The remedy he offers
almost always consists of a resort to what he calls a purer democracy.
That is to say, he proposes to set up the recall, the initiative
and referendum, or something else of the sort, and so convert the
representative into a mere clerk or messenger. The final determination
of all important public questions, he argues, ought to be in the hands
of the voters themselves. They alone can muster enough wisdom for the
business, and they alone are without guile. The cure for the evils of
democracy is more democracy.
All this, of course, is simply rhetoric. Every time anything of the
kind is tried it fails ingloriously. Nor is there any evidence that
it has ever succeeded elsewhere, to-day or in the past. Certainly
no competent historian believes that the citizens assembled in a New
England town-meeting actually formulated _en masse_ the transcendental
and immortal measures that they adopted, nor even that they contributed
anything of value to the discussion thereof. The notion is as absurd
as the parallel notion, long held by philologues of defective powers
of observation, that the popular ballads surviving from earlier ages
were actually composed by the folk. The ballads, in point of fact,
were all written by concrete poets, most of them not of the folk; the
folk, when they had any hand in the business at all, simply acted as
referees, choosing which should survive. In exactly the same way the
New England town-meeting was led and dominated by a few men of unusual
initiative and determination, some of them genuinely superior, but
most of them simply demagogues and fanatics. The citizens in general
heard the discussion of rival ideas, and went through the motions of
deciding between them, but there is no evidence that they ever had all
the relevant facts before them or made any effort to unearth them, or
that appeals to their reason always, or even usually, prevailed over
appeals to their mere prejudice and superstition. Their appetite for
logic, I venture, seldom got the better of their fear of hell, and
the Beatitudes moved them far less powerfully than blood. Some of the
most idiotic decisions ever come to by mortal man were made by the New
England town-meetings, and under the leadership of monomaniacs who are
still looked upon as ineffable blossoms of the contemporary _Kultur_.
The truth is that the difference between representative democracy
and direct democracy is a great deal less marked than political
sentimentalists assume. Under both forms the sovereign mob must employ
agents to execute its will, and in either case the agents may have
ideas of their own, based upon interests of their own, and the means
at hand to do and get what they will. Moreover, their very position
gives them a power of influencing the electors that is far above
that of any ordinary citizen: they become politicians _ex officio_,
and usually end by selling such influence as remains after they have
used all they need for their own ends. Worse, both forms of democracy
encounter the difficulty that the generality of citizens, no matter
how assiduously they may be instructed, remain congenitally unable
to comprehend many of the problems before them, or to consider all of
those they do comprehend in an unbiased and intelligent manner. Thus
it is often impossible to ascertain their views in advance of action,
or even, in many cases, to determine their conclusions _post hoc_. The
voters gathered in a typical New England town-meeting were all ardent
amateurs of theology, and hence quite competent, in theory, to decide
the theological questions that principally engaged them; nevertheless,
history shows that they were led facilely by professional theologians,
most of them quacks with something to sell. In the same way, the
great masses of Americans of to-day, though they are theoretically
competent to decide all the larger matters of national policy, and have
certain immutable principles, of almost religious authority, to guide
them, actually look for leading to professional politicians, who are
influenced in turn by small but competent and determined minorities,
with special knowledge and special interests. It was thus that the
plain people were shoved into the late war, and it is thus that they
will be shoved into the next one. They were, in overwhelming majority,
against going in, and if they had had any sense and resolution they
would have stayed out. But these things they lacked.
2.
_The Popular Will_
Thus there is no need to differentiate too pedantically between the
two forms of democratic government, for their unlikeness is far more
apparent than real. Nor is there any need to set up any distinction
between the sort of democracy that is met with in practice, with its
constant conflicts between what is assumed to be the popular will
and the self-interest of small but articulate and efficient groups,
and that theoretical variety which would liberate and energize the
popular will completely. The latter must remain purely theoretical
for all time; there are insuperable impediments, solidly grounded in
the common mind, to its realization. Moreover, there is no reason
for believing that its realization, if it should ever be attained by
miracle, would materially change the main outlines of the democratic
process. What is genuinely important is not that the will of mankind in
the mass should be formulated and made effective at all times and in
every case, but simply that means should be provided for ascertaining
and executing it in capital cases--that there shall be no immovable
impediment to its execution when, by some prodigy of nature, it takes
a coherent and apposite form. If, over and beyond that, a sufficient
sense of its immanent and imminent potency remains to make politicians
walk a bit warily, if the threat always hangs in the air that under
_x_ circumstances and on _y_ day it may be heard from suddenly and
devastatingly, then democracy is actually in being. This is the case,
it seems to me, in the United States. And it is the case, too, in every
European country west of Vienna and north of the Alps.
The American people, true enough, are sheep. Worse, they are donkeys.
Yet worse, to borrow from their own dialect, they are goats. They
are thus constantly bamboozled and exploited by small minorities of
their own number, by determined and ambitious individuals, and even
by exterior groups. The business of victimizing them is a lucrative
profession, an exact science, and a delicate and lofty art. It has
its masters and it has its quacks. Its lowest reward is a seat
in Congress or a job as a Prohibition agent, _i. e._, a licensed
blackleg; its highest reward is immortality. The adept practitioner
is not only rewarded; he is also thanked. The victims delight in his
ministrations, as an hypochondriacal woman delights in the flayings of
the surgeon. But all the while they have the means in their hands to
halt the obscenity whenever it becomes intolerable, and now and then,
raised transiently to a sort of intelligence, they do put a stop to
it. There are no legal or other bars to the free functioning of their
will, once it emerges into consciousness, save only such bars as they
themselves have erected, and these they may remove whenever they so
desire. No external or super-legal power stands beyond their reach,
exercising pressure upon them; they recognize no personal sovereign
with inalienable rights and no class with privileges above the common
law; they are even kept free, by a tradition as old as the Republic
itself, of foreign alliances which would condition their autonomy. Thus
their sovereignty, though it is limited in its everyday exercise by
self-imposed constitutional checks and still more by restraints which
lie in the very nature of government, whatever its form, is probably
just as complete in essence as that of the most absolute monarch who
ever hanged a peasant or defied the Pope.
What is too often forgotten, in discussing the matter, is the fact
that no such monarch was ever actually free, at all times and under
all conditions. In the midst of his most charming tyrannies he had
still to bear it in mind that his people, oppressed too much, could
always rise against him, and that he himself, though a king _von Gottes
Gnaden_, was yet biologically only a man, with but one gullet to slit;
and if the people were feeble or too craven to be dangerous, then
there was always His Holiness of Rome to fear or other agents of the
King of Kings; and if these ghostly mentors, too, were silent, then
he had to reckon with his ministers, his courtiers, his soldiers, his
doctors, and his women. The Merovingian kings were certainly absolute,
if absolutism has ever existed outside the dreams of historians;
nevertheless, as every schoolboy knows, their sovereignty was gradually
undermined by the mayors of the palace, and finally taken from them
altogether. So with the emperors of Japan, who succumbed to the
shoguns, who succumbed in their turn to a combination of territorial
nobles and city capitalists, not unlike that which brought King John
to bay at Runnymede. It seems to me that the common people, under such
a democracy as that which now prevails in the United States, are more
completely sovereign, in fact as well as in law, than any of these
ancient despots. They may be seduced and enchained by a great variety
of prehensile soothsayers, just as Henry VIII was seduced and enchained
by his wives, but, like Henry again, they are quite free to throw off
their chains whenever they please, and to chop off the heads of their
seducers. They could hang Dr. Coolidge to-morrow if they really wanted
to do it, or even Bishop Manning. They could do it by the simple device
of intimidating Congress, which never fails to leap when their growl is
palpably in earnest. And if Congress stood out against them, they could
do it anyhow, under protection of the jury system. The executioners,
once acquitted, could not be molested more, save by illegal processes.
Similar executioners walk the land to-day, especially in the South, and
no one dares to challenge them. They are visible symbols of the powers
that lie in the mob, once it makes up its mind.
Nor is there much force or relevancy in the contention that democracy
is incomplete in the United States (as in England, France, Germany and
all other democratic countries) because certain classes of persons
are barred from full citizenship, sometimes for reasons that appear
to be unsound. To argue thus is to argue against democracy itself,
for if the majority has not the right to decide what qualifications
shall be necessary to participate in its sovereignty, then it has no
sovereignty at all. What one usually finds, on examining any given
case of class disfranchisement, is that the class disfranchised is
not actively eager, as a whole, for the ballot, and that its lack of
interest in the matter is at least presumptive evidence of its general
political incompetence. The three-class system of voting survived so
long in Belgium and Prussia, not because the masses victimized had no
means at hand to put an end to it, but simply because they were so
inept at politics, and so indifferent to the rights involved, that they
made no genuine effort to do so. The agitation against the system was
carried on mainly by a small minority, and many of its leaders were not
even members of the class transgressed. Here we have a reminder of
the process whereby democracy itself came in: it was forced upon its
beneficiaries by a small group of visionaries, all of them standing
outside the class benefited. So again, in our own time, with the
extension of the franchise to women. The great masses of women in all
countries were indifferent to the boon, and there was a considerable
body that was cynically hostile. Perhaps a majority of the more ardent
suffragists belonged biologically to neither sex.
Since the abolition of the three-class system in Prussia there has
been absolutely no improvement in the government of that country; on
the contrary, there has been a vast falling off in its honesty and
efficiency, and it has even slackened energy in what was formerly
one of its most laudable specialties: the development of legislation
for the protection of the working class, _i. e._, the very class
that benefited politically by the change. Giving women the ballot,
as everyone knows, has brought in none of the great reforms promised
by the suffragists. It has substituted adultery for drunkenness as
the principal divertissement at political conventions, but it has
accomplished little else. The majority of women, when they vote at all,
seem to vote unwillingly and without clear purpose; they are, perhaps,
relatively too intelligent to have any faith in purely political
remedies for the sorrows of the world. The minorities that show
partisan keenness are chiefly made up of fat women with inattentive
husbands; they are victimized easily by the male politicians,
especially those who dress well, and are thus swallowed up by the great
parties, and lose all separate effectiveness. Certainly it is usually
difficult to discover, in the election returns, any division along
anatomical lines. Now and then, true enough, a sentimentality appealing
especially to the more stupid sort of women causes a transient
differentiation, as when, for example, thousands of newly-enfranchised
farm-wives in the United States voted against Cox, the Democratic
presidential candidate, in 1920, on the double ground (_a_) that he was
a divorcé and hence an antinomian, and (_b_) that the titular chief of
his party, Dr. Wilson, had married again too soon after the death of
his first wife. But such fantastic sentimentalities, after all, rarely
enter into practical politics. When they are lacking the women voters
simply succumb to the sentimentalities that happen to be engaging their
lords and masters. The extension of the franchise has not changed the
general nature of the political clown-show in the slightest. Campaigns
are still made upon the same old issues, and offices go to the same
old mountebanks, with a few Jezebels added to the corps to give it
refinement.
There is little reason for believing that the extension of the
franchise to the classes that still remain in the dark would make
government more delicately responsive to the general will. Such
classes, as a matter of fact, are now so few and so small in numbers
in all of the Western nations that they may be very conveniently
disregarded. It is as if doctors of philosophy, members of the Society
of the Cincinnati or men who could move their ears were disfranchised.
In the United States, true enough, there is one disfranchised group
that is much larger, to wit, that group of Americans whose African
descent is visible to the naked eye and at a glance. But even in this
case, the reality falls much below the appearance. The more intelligent
American Negroes vote in spite of the opposition of the poor whites,
their theological brothers and economic rivals, and not a few of them
actually make their livings as professional politicians, even in the
South. At the Republican National Convention at Chicago, in 1920, such
a swart statesman gave an inspiring exhibition of his powers, and in
the presence of a vast multitude. His name was Henry Lincoln Johnson,
and he has since gone to that bourn where black is white. When he died
Dr. Coolidge sent a long and flirtatious telegram of condolence to his
widow. The widow of Jacques Loeb got no such telegram. This Johnson
was chairman of the Georgia delegation, and his colleagues were all
of the Nordic race. But though they came from the very citadel of the
Ku Klux Klan, he herded them in a public and lordly manner, and voted
them as if they had been stuffed chemises. As Nordics, no doubt, they
viewed him with a bitter loathing, but as politicians yearning for jobs
they had to be polite to him, and even fawning. He has his peers and
successors in all the American States. In many a proud city, North and
South, the Aframericans hold the balance of power, and know it.
Moreover, even those who are actually disfranchised, say in the rural
wastes of the South, may remove their disability by the simple device
of moving away, as, in fact, hundreds of thousands have done. Their
disfranchisement is thus not intrinsic and complete, but merely a
function of their residence, like that of all persons, white or black,
who live in the District of Columbia, and so it takes on a secondary
and trivial character, as hay-fever, in the pathological categories,
takes on a secondary and trivial character by yielding to a change of
climate. Moreover, it is always extra-legal, and thus remains dubious:
the theory of the fundamental law is that the coloured folk may and
do vote. This theory they could convert into a fact at any time by
determined mass action. The Nordics might resist that action, but they
could not halt it: there would be another Civil War if they tried to
do so, and they would be beaten a second time. If the blacks in the
backwaters of the South keep away from the polls to-day it is only
because they do not esteem the ballot highly enough to risk the dangers
that go with trying to use it. That fact, it seems to me, convicts them
of unfitness for citizenship in a democratic state, for the loftiest
of all the rights of the citizen, by the democratic dogma, is that of
the franchise, and whoever is not willing to fight for it, even at the
cost of his last drop of gore, is surely not likely to exercise it
with a proper sense of consecration after getting it. No one argues
that democracy is destroyed in the United States by the fact that
millions of white citizens, perfectly free under the law and the local
_mores_ of their communities to vote, nevertheless fail to do so. The
difference between these negligent whites and the disfranchised Negroes
is only superficial. Both have a clear legal right to the ballot; if
they neglect to exercise it, it is only because they do not esteem
it sufficiently. In New York City thousands of freeborn Caucasians
surrender it in order to avoid jury duty; in the South thousands of
Negroes surrender it in order to avoid having their homes burned and
their heads broken. The two motives are fundamentally identical; in
each case the potential voter values his peace and security more than
he values the boon for which the Fathers bled. He certainly has a right
to choose.
3.
_Disproportional Representation_
The matter of disproportional representation, already alluded to in
connection with the Prussian-Belgian voting system, is intimately
bound up with this question of disfranchised classes, for it must be
plain that a community whose votes, man for man, count for only half
as much as the votes of another community is one in which half of
the citizens are, to every practical intent, unable to vote at all.
As everyone knows, the United States Senate is constituted upon a
disproportional plan. Each State, regardless of population, has two
Senators and no more, and the votes of the two representing so small
and measly a State as Delaware or Nevada count for precisely as much
as the votes of the Senators from Pennsylvania or New York. The same
sophistication of the one-man-one-vote formula extends into the States
themselves. There is hardly a large city in the United States that has
completely proportional representation in the State Legislature. In
almost every State, sometimes with slight ameliorative differences,
the upper house of the Legislature is constituted upon the plan of the
Federal Senate--that is, the divisions run according to geographical
boundaries rather than according to population, and the congested
urban centres tend to be grossly under-represented. Moreover, the
lower house commonly shows something of the same disharmony, even
when it is ostensibly based upon proportional representation, for the
cities grow in population much faster than the country districts, and
reapportionment always lags behind that growth.
These facts fever certain romantic fuglemen of so-called pure
democracy, and they come forward with complicated remedies, all of
which have been tried somewhere or other and failed miserably. The
truth is that disproportional representation is not a device to nullify
democracy, but simply a device to make it more workable. All it
indicates, at least in the United States, is that the sovereign people
have voluntarily sacrificed a moiety of the democratic theory in order
to attain to a safer and more efficient practice. If they so desired
they could sweep all of the existing inequalities out of existence--not
instantly, perhaps, but nevertheless surely. Every such inequality
is founded upon their free will, and nearly every one enjoys their
complete approval. What lies under most of them is not a wish to give
one voter an advantage over another, but a wish to counter-balance an
advantage lying in the very nature of things. The voters of a large
urban centre, for example, are able to act together far more promptly
and effectively than their colleagues of the wide-flung farms. They
live in close contact both physically and mentally; opinions form among
them quickly, and are maintained with solid front. In brief, they
show all of the characters of men in a compact mob, and the voters
of the rural regions, dispersed and largely inarticulate, cannot
hope to prevail against them by ordinary means. So the yokels are
given disproportionally heavy representation by way of make-weight:
it enables them to withstand the city stampede. There are frequent
protests from the cities when, taking advantage of their strength in
the State Legislatures, the yokels dodge their fair share of the burden
of taxation, but it is perhaps significant that there is seldom any
serious protest against the plan of organization of the United States
Senate, despite the fact that it has cursed the country with such
bucolic imbecilities as Prohibition. In both cases, genuine discontent
would make itself felt, for the majority under democracy remains the
majority, whatever laws and constitutions may say to the contrary, and
when its blood is up it can get anything it wants.
Most of the so-called constitutional checks, in fact, have yielded, at
one time or other, to its pressure. No one familiar with the history
of the Supreme Court, for example, need be told that its vast and
singular power to curb legislation has always been exercised with one
eye on the election returns. Practically all of its most celebrated
decisions, from that in the Dred Scott case to that in the Northern
Securities case, have reflected popular rages of the hour, and many
of them have been modified, or even completely reversed afterward,
as the second thought of the plain people has differed from their
first thought. This responsiveness to the shifts of popular opinion
and passion is not alone due to the fact that the personnel of the
court, owing to the high incidence of senile deterioration among
its members, is constantly changing, and that the President and the
Senators, in filling vacancies, are bound as practical politicians to
consider the doctrines that happen to be fashionable in the cross-roads
grocery-stores and barber-shops. It is also due, and in no small
measure, to the fact that the learned and puissant justices are, in the
main, practical politicians themselves, and hence used to keeping their
ears close to the grass-roots. Most of them, before they were elevated
to the ermine, spent years struggling desperately for less exalted
honours, and so, like Representatives, Senators and Presidents, they
show a fine limberness of the _biceps femoris_, _semitendinosus_ and
_semimembranosus_, and a beautiful talent for reconciling the ideally
just with the privately profitable. If their general tendency, in late
years, has been to put the rights of property above the rights of man
then it must be obvious that they have not lost any popularity thereby.
In boom times, indeed, democracy is always very impatient of what used
to be called natural rights. The typical democrat is quite willing to
exchange any of the theoretical boons of freedom for something that he
can use. In most cases, perhaps, he is averse to selling his vote for
cash in hand, but that is mainly because the price offered is usually
too low. He will sell it very willingly for a good job or for some
advantage in his business. Offering him such bribes, in fact, is the
chief occupation of all political parties under democracy, and of all
professional politicians.
For all these reasons I esteem it a vanity to discuss the question
whether the democracy on tap in the United States is really ideal.
Ideal or not, it works, and the people are actually sovereign. The
governmental process, perhaps, could be made more quickly responsive to
the public will, but that is merely a temporal detail; it is responsive
enough for all practical purposes. Any conceivable change in the laws
could be effected without tampering with the fundamental scheme. The
fact, no doubt, largely explains the hostility of the inferior American
to the thing called direct action--the darling of his equals in most
other countries. He is against it, not merely because he is a coward
and distrusts liberty, but also, and maybe mainly, because he believes
that revolution, in the United States, is unnecessary--that any reform
advocated by a respectable majority, or even by a determined minority,
may be achieved peacefully and by constitutional means. In this
belief he is right. The American people, keeping strictly within the
Constitution, could do anything that the most soaring fancy suggested.
They could, by a simple amendment of that hoary scripture, expropriate
all the private property in the land, or they could expropriate
parts of it and leave the rest in private hands; they have already,
in fact, by tariff juggling, by Prohibition and by other devices,
destroyed billions of dollars of property without compensation and
even without common politeness, and the Constitution still survives.
They could enfranchise aliens if they so desired, or children not
taxed, or idiots, or the kine in the byres. They could disfranchise
whole classes, _e. g._, metaphysicians or adulterers, or the entire
population of given regions. They have done such things. They could
abolish the Federal and State Legislatures, as they have already
abolished the city councils in hundreds of municipalities. They could
extend the term of the President to life, or they could reduce it to
one year, or even to one day. They could provide that he must shave his
head, or that he must sleep in his underclothes. They could legalize
his assassination for malfeasance, and the assassination of all other
recreant public officers, as I myself once proposed, entirely within
my rights as a citizen and a patriot. They could introduce burning
at the stake, flogging, castration, ducking and tar-and-feathering
into our system of legal punishment; they have already done so in
the South by acclamation, regardless of the law and the courts, and,
as the phrase is, have got away with it. They could abolish the jury
system, abandon the writ of _habeas corpus_, authorize unreasonable
searches and seizures, legalize murder by public officers and provide
that all Federal judges be appointed by the Anti-Saloon League: a
beginning has been made in all these fields by the Volstead Act. They
could make war without constitutional authority and refuse to engage in
it in the face of a constitutional declaration. They could proscribe
individuals or classes, and deny them the protection of the laws. They
could convert arson into a laudable act, provide a bounty for persons
skilled at mayhem and make it a crime to drink coffee or eat meat.
They have already, either by Federal action or by State action, made
crimes of such intrinsically harmless acts as drinking wine at meals,
smoking cigarettes on the street, teaching the elements of biology,
wearing a red necktie on the street, and reading “Das Kapital” and
“The Inestimable Life of the Great Gargantua.” They could, with equal
facility, make it criminal to refuse to do these things. Finally,
they could, if they would, abandon the republican form of government
altogether, and set up a monarchy in place of it; during the late war
they actually did so in fact, though refraining from saying so frankly.
They could do all of these things freely and even legally, without
departing in the slightest from the principles of their fundamental
compact, and no exterior agency could make them do any of them
unwillingly.
It is thus idle to amass proofs, as Hans Delbrück does with great
diligence, that the result of this or that election was not a
manifestation of a concrete popular wish. The answer, nine times out
of ten, is that there _was_ no popular wish. The populace simply
passed over the matters principally at issue as incomprehensible or
unimportant, and voted irrelevantly or wantonly. Or, in large part, it
kept away from the polls. Both actions might be defended plausibly by
democratic theorists. The people, if they are actually sovereign, have
a clear right to be wanton when the spirit moves them, and indifference
to an issue is an expression of opinion about it. Thus there is little
appositeness in the saying of another German, the philosopher Hegel,
that the masses are that part of the state which doesn’t know what it
wants. They know what they want when they actually want it, and if they
want it badly enough they get it. What they want principally are safety
and security. They want to be delivered from the bugaboos that ride
them. They want to be soothed with mellifluous words. They want heroes
to worship. They want the rough entertainment suitable to their simple
minds. All of these things they want so badly that they are willing to
sacrifice everything else in order to get them. The science of politics
under democracy consists in trading with them, _i. e._, in hoodwinking
and swindling them. In return for what they want, or for the mere
appearance of what they want, they yield up what the politician wants,
and what the enterprising minorities behind him want. The bargaining is
conducted to the tune of affecting rhetoric, with music by the choir,
but it is as simple and sordid at bottom as the sale of a mule. It lies
quite outside the bounds of honour, and even of common decency. It is a
combat between jackals and jackasses. It is the master transaction of
democratic states.
4.
_The Politician Under Democracy_
I find myself quoting yet a third German: he is Professor Robert
Michels, the economist. The politician, he says, is the courtier
of democracy. A profound saying--perhaps more profound than the
professor, himself a democrat, realizes. For it was of the essence
of the courtier’s art and mystery that he flattered his employer in
order to victimize him, yielded to him in order to rule him. The
politician under democracy does precisely the same thing. His business
is never what it pretends to be. Ostensibly he is an altruist devoted
whole-heartedly to the service of his fellow-men, and so abjectly
public-spirited that his private interest is nothing to him. Actually
he is a sturdy rogue whose principal, and often sole aim in life is
to butter his parsnips. His technical equipment consists simply of an
armamentarium of deceits. It is his business to get and hold his job
at all costs. If he can hold it by lying he will hold it by lying; if
lying peters out he will try to hold it by embracing new truths. His
ear is ever close to the ground. If he is an adept he can hear the
first murmurs of popular clamour before even the people themselves are
conscious of them. If he is a master he detects and whoops up to-day
the delusions that the mob will cherish next year. There is in him,
in his professional aspect, no shadow of principle or honour. It is
moral by his code to get into office by false pretences, as the late
Dr. Wilson did in 1916. It is moral to change convictions overnight, as
multitudes of American politicians did when the Prohibition avalanche
came down upon them. Anything is moral that furthers the main concern
of his soul, which is to keep a place at the public trough. That place
is one of public honour, and public honour is the thing that caresses
him and makes him happy. It is also one of power, and power is the
commodity that he has for sale.
I speak here, of course, of the democratic politician in his rôle of
statesman--that is, in his best and noblest aspect. He flourishes also
on lower levels, partly subterranean. Down there public honour would be
an inconvenience, so he hawks it to lesser men, and contents himself
with power. What are the sources of that power? They lie, obviously,
in the gross weaknesses and knaveries of the common people--in their
inability to grasp any issues save the simplest and most banal, in
their incurable tendency to fly into preposterous alarms, in their
petty self-seeking and venality, in their instinctive envy and hatred
of their superiors--in brief, in their congenital incapacity for the
elemental duties of citizens in a civilized state. The boss owns
them simply because they can be bought for a job on the street or
a load of coal. He holds them, even when they pass beyond any need
of jobs or coal, by his shrewd understanding of their immemorial
sentimentalities. Looking at Thersites, they see Ulysses. He is the
state as they apprehend it; around him clusters all the romance that
used to hang about a king. He is the fount of honour and the mould of
form. His barbaric code, framed to fit their gullibility, becomes an
example to their young. The boss is the eternal _reductio ad absurdum_
of the whole democratic process. He exemplifies its reduction of all
ideas to a few elemental wants. And he reflects and makes manifest
the inferior man’s congenital fear of liberty--his incapacity for
even the most trivial sort of independent action. Life on the lower
levels is life in a series of interlocking despotisms. The inferior
man cannot imagine himself save as taking orders--if not from the
boss, then from the priest, and if not from the priest, then from some
fantastic drill-sergeant of his own creation. For years the reformers
who flourished in the United States concentrated their whole animus
upon the boss: it was apparently their notion that he had imposed
himself upon his victims from without, and that they could be delivered
by destroying him. But time threw a brilliant light upon that error.
When, as and if he was overthrown there appeared in his place the
prehensile Methodist parson, bawling for Prohibition and its easy jobs,
and behind the parson loomed the grand goblin, natural heir to a long
line of imperial worthy potentates of the Sons of Azrael and sublime
chancellors of the Order of Patriarchs Militant. The winds of the world
are bitter to _Homo vulgaris_. He likes the warmth and safety of the
herd, and he likes a bell-wether with a clarion bell.
The art of politics, under democracy, is simply the art of ringing it.
Two branches reveal themselves. There is the art of the demagogue,
and there is the art of what may be called, by a shot-gun marriage
of Latin and Greek, the demaslave. They are complementary, and both
of them are degrading to their practitioners. The demagogue is one
who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be
idiots. The demaslave is one who listens to what these idiots have
to say and then pretends that he believes it himself. Every man who
seeks elective office under democracy has to be either the one thing
or the other, and most men have to be both. The whole process is one
of false pretences and ignoble concealments. No educated man, stating
plainly the elementary notions that every educated man holds about
the matters that principally concern government, could be elected to
office in a democratic state, save perhaps by a miracle. His frankness
would arouse fears, and those fears would run against him; it is his
business to arouse fears that will run in favour of him. Worse, he must
not only consider the weaknesses of the mob, but also the prejudices
of the minorities that prey upon it. Some of these minorities have
developed a highly efficient technique of intimidation. They not only
know how to arouse the fears of the mob; they also know how to awaken
its envy, its dislike of privilege, its hatred of its betters. How
formidable they may become is shown by the example of the Anti-Saloon
League in the United States--a minority body in the strictest sense,
however skillful its mustering of popular support, for it nowhere
includes a majority of the voters among its subscribing members, and
its leaders are nowhere chosen by democratic methods. And how such
minorities may intimidate the whole class of place-seeking politicians
has been demonstrated brilliantly and obscenely by the same corrupt and
unconscionable organization. It has filled all the law-making bodies of
the nation with men who have got into office by submitting cravenly to
its dictation, and it has filled thousands of administrative posts, and
not a few judicial posts, with vermin of the same sort.
Such men, indeed, enjoy vast advantages under democracy. The mob,
insensitive to their dishonour, is edified and exhilarated by their
success. The competition they offer to men of a decenter habit is
too powerful to be met, so they tend, gradually, to monopolize all
the public offices. Out of the muck of their swinishness the typical
American law-maker emerges. He is a man who has lied and dissembled,
and a man who has crawled. He knows the taste of boot-polish. He has
suffered kicks in the tonneau of his pantaloons. He has taken orders
from his superiors in knavery and he has wooed and flattered his
inferiors in sense. His public life is an endless series of evasions
and false pretences. He is willing to embrace any issue, however
idiotic, that will get him votes, and he is willing to sacrifice
any principle, however sound, that will lose them for him. I do not
describe the democratic politician at his inordinate worst; I describe
him as he is encountered in the full sunshine of normalcy. He may be,
on the one hand, a cross-roads idler striving to get into the State
Legislature by grace of the local mortgage-sharks and evangelical
clergy, or he may be, on the other, the President of the United States.
It is almost an axiom that no man may make a career in politics in the
Republic without stooping to such ignobility: it is as necessary as a
loud voice. Now and then, to be sure, a man of sounder self-respect may
make a beginning, but he seldom gets very far. Those who survive are
nearly all tarred, soon or late, with the same stick. They are men who,
at some time or other, have compromised with their honour, either by
swallowing their convictions or by whooping for what they believe to
be untrue. They are in the position of the chorus girl who, in order
to get her humble job, has had to admit the manager to her person. And
the old birds among them, like chorus girls of long experience, come to
regard the business resignedly and even complacently. It is the price
that a man who loves the clapper-clawing of the vulgar must pay for
it under the democratic system. He becomes a coward and a trimmer _ex
officio_. Where his dignity was in the days of his innocence there is
now only a vacuum in the wastes of his subconscious. Vanity remains to
him, but not pride.
5.
_Utopia_
Thus the ideal of democracy is reached at last: it has become a psychic
impossibility for a gentleman to hold office under the Federal Union,
save by a combination of miracles that must tax the resourcefulness
even of God. The fact has been rammed home by a constitutional
amendment: every office-holder, when he takes oath to support the
Constitution, must swear on his honour that, summoned to the death-bed
of his grandmother, he will not take the old lady a bottle of wine. He
may say so and do it, which makes him a liar, or he may say so and not
do it, which makes him a pig. But despite that grim dilemma there are
still idealists, chiefly professional Liberals, who argue that it is
the duty of a gentleman to go into politics--that there is a way out of
the quagmire in that direction. The remedy, it seems to me, is quite as
absurd as all the other sure cures that Liberals advocate. When they
argue for it, they simply argue, in words but little changed, that
the remedy for prostitution is to fill the bawdy-houses with virgins.
My impression is that this last device would accomplish very little:
either the virgins would leap out of the windows, or they would cease
to be virgins. The same alternatives confront the political aspirant
who is what is regarded in America as a gentleman--that is, who is one
not susceptible to open bribery in cash. The moment his leg goes over
the political fence, he finds the mob confronting him, and if he would
stay within he must adapt himself to its tastes and prejudices. In
other words, he must learn all the tricks of the regular mountebanks.
When the mob pricks up its ears and begins to whinny, he must soothe it
with balderdash. He must allay its resentment of the fact that he is
washed behind the ears. He must anticipate its crazes, and join in them
vociferously. He must regard its sensitiveness on points of morals, and
get what advantage he can out of his anæsthesia on points of honour.
More, he must make terms with the mob-masters already performing upon
its spines, chiefly agents of prehensile minorities. If he neglects
these devices he is swiftly heaved over the fence, and his career in
statecraft is at an end.
Here I do not theorize; there are examples innumerable. It is an axiom
of practical politics, indeed, that the worst enemies of political
decency are the tired reformers--and the worst of the worst are those
whose primary thirst to make the corruptible put on incorruption
was accompanied by a somewhat sniffish class consciousness. Has the
United States ever seen a more violent and shameless demagogue than
Theodore Roosevelt? Yet Roosevelt came into politics as a sword drawn
against demagogy. The list of such recusants might be run to great
lengths: I point to the late Mitchel of New York and the late Lodge
of Massachusetts and pass on. Lodge lived long enough to become a
magnificent _reductio ad absurdum_ of the gentleman turned democratic
messiah. It was a sheer impossibility, during the last ten years of
his life, to disentangle his private convictions from the fabric of
his political dodges. He was the perfect model of the party hack, and
if he performed before the actual mob less unchastely than Roosevelt
it was only because his somewhat absurd façade unfitted him for that
science. He dealt in jobs in a wholesale manner, and with the hearty
devotion of a Penrose or a Henry Lincoln Johnson. Popularly regarded as
an unflinching and even adamantine fellow, he was actually as limber as
an eel. He knew how to jump. He knew when to whisper and when to yell.
As I say, I could print a long roster of similar apostates; the name of
Penrose himself should not be forgotten. I do not say that a gentleman
may not thrust himself into politics under democracy; I simply say that
it is almost impossible for him to stay there and remain a gentleman.
The haughty amateur, at the start, may actually make what seems to be
a brilliant success, for he is commonly full of indignation, and so
strikes out valiantly, and the mob crowds up because it likes a brutal
show. But that first battle is almost always his last. If he retains
his rectitude he loses his office, and if he retains his office he has
to dilute his rectitude with the cologne spirits of the trade.
Such is the pride that we pay for the great boon of democracy: the
man of native integrity is either barred from the public service
altogether, or subjected to almost irresistible temptations after he
gets in. The competition of less honourable man is more than he can
bear. He must stand against them before the mob, and the sempiternal
prejudices of the mob run their way. In most other countries of a
democratic tendency--for example, England--this outlawry and corruption
of the best is checked by an aristocratic tradition--an anachronism,
true enough, but still extremely powerful, and yielding to the times
only under immense pressure. The English aristocracy (aided, in part,
by the plutocracy, which admires and envies it) not only keeps a large
share of the principal offices in its own hands, regardless of popular
rages and party fortunes; it also preserves an influence, and hence a
function, for its non-officeholding members. The scholarship of Oxford
and Cambridge, for example, can still make itself felt at Westminster,
despite the fact that the vast majority of the actual members of
the Commons are ignoramuses. But in the United States there is no
aristocracy, whether intellectual or otherwise, and so the scholarship
of Harvard, such as it is, is felt no more on Capitol Hill than it
is at Westerville, Ohio. The class of politicians, indeed, tends to
separate itself sharply from all other classes. There is none of that
interpenetration on the higher levels which marks older and more secure
societies. Roosevelt, an imitation aristocrat, was the first and only
American President since Washington to make any effort to break down
the barriers. A man of saucy and even impertinent curiosities, and
very eager to appear to the vulgar as an Admirable Crichton, he made
his table the resort of all sorts and conditions of men. Among them
were some who actually knew something about this or that, and from
them he probably got useful news and advice. Beethoven, if he had been
alive, would have been invited to the White House, and Goethe would
have come with him. But that eagerness for contacts outside the bounds
of professional politics is certainly not a common mark of American
Presidents, nor, of American public officials of any sort. When the
lamented Harding sat in Lincoln’s chair his hours of ease were spent
with bootleggers, not with metaphysicians; his notion of a good time
was to refresh himself in the manner of a small-town Elk, at golf,
poker, and guzzling. The tastes of his successor are even narrower: the
loftiest guests he entertains upon the _Mayflower_ are the editors of
party newspapers, and there is no evidence that he is acquainted with
a single intelligent man. The average American Governor is of the same
kidney. He comes into contact with the local _Gelehrte_ only when a
bill is up to prohibit the teaching of the elements of biology in the
State university.
The judiciary, under the American system, sinks quite as low. Save
when, by some miscarriage of politics, a Brandeis, a Holmes, a Cardozo
or a George W. Anderson is elevated to the bench, it carries on its
dull and preposterous duties quite outside the stream of civilized
thought, and even outside the stream of enlightened juridic thought.
Very few American judges ever contribute anything of value to legal
theory. One seldom hears of them protesting, either _ex cathedra_
or as citizens, against the extravagances and absurdities that fast
reduce the whole legal system of the country to imbecility; they
seem to be quite content to enforce any sort of law that is provided
for their use by ignorant and corrupt legislators, regardless of its
conflict with fundamental human rights. The Constitution apparently
has no more meaning to them than it has to a Prohibition agent. They
have acquiesced almost unanimously in the destruction of the First,
Second, Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendments, and supinely connived at
the invasion of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth. The reason is not far to
seek. The average American judge, in his days at the bar, was not a
leader but a trailer. The judicial office is not attractive, as a rule,
to the better sort of lawyers. We have such a multiplicity of courts
that it has become common, and judges are so often chosen for purely
political reasons, even for the Supreme Court of the United States,
that the lawyer of professional dignity and self-respect hesitates
to enter into the competition. Thus the bench tends to be filled
with duffers, and many of them are also scoundrels, as the frequent
complaints against their extortions and tyrannies testify. The English
bench, as everyone knows, is immensely better: the fact is often noted
with lamentation by American lawyers. And why? Simply because the
governing oligarchy in England, lingering on in spite of the democratic
upheaval, keeps jealous guard over the judiciary in the interest of
its own class, and thereby prevents the elevation of the preposterous
shysters who so frequently attain to the ermine in America. Even when,
under the pressure of parlous times, it admits an F. E. Smith to the
bench, it at least makes sure that he is a competent lawyer. The way
is thus blocked to downright ignoramuses, and English jurisprudence,
so much more fluent and reasonable than our own, is protected against
their dull stupidities. Genuine talent, however humble its origin, may
get in, but not imbecility, however pretentious. In the United States
the thing runs the other way. In the States, where judges are commonly
elected by popular vote, the shyster has every advantage over the
reputable lawyer, including that of yearning for the judicial salary
with a vast and undivided passion. And when it comes to the Federal
courts, once so honourable, he has every advantage again, including the
formidable one of knowing how to crook his knee gracefully to the local
dispenser of Federal patronage (in the South, often a worthless Negro)
and to the Methodist wowsers of the Anti-Saloon League.
6.
_The Occasional Exception_
I do not argue, of course, that the shyster invariably prevails. As I
have said, a man of unquestionable integrity and ability occasionally
gets to the bench, even of the State courts. In the same way a man
of unquestionable integrity and ability sometimes finds himself in
high executive or legislative office; there are even a few cases of
such men getting into the White House. But the thing doesn’t happen
often, and when it does happen it is only by a failure of the rule.
The self-respecting candidate obviously cannot count on that failure:
the odds are heavily against him from the start, and every effort he
makes to diminish them involves some compromise with complete candour.
He may take refuge in cynicism, and pursue the cozening of the
populace as a sort of intellectual exercise, cruel but not unamusing,
or he may accept the conditions of the game resignedly, and charge
up the necessary dodges and false pretences to spiritual profit and
loss, as a chorus girl charges up her favours to the manager and his
backer; but in either case he has parted with something that must
be tremendously valuable to a self-respecting man, and is even more
valuable to the country he serves than it is to himself. Contemplating
such a body as the national House of Representatives one sees only a
group of men who have compromised with honour--in brief, a group of
male Magdalens. They have been broken to the goose-step. They have
learned how to leap through the hoops of professional job-mongers and
Prohibitionist blackmailers. They have kept silent about good causes,
and spoken in causes that they knew to be evil. The higher they rise,
the further they fall. The occasional mavericks, thrown in by miracle,
last a session, and then disappear. The old Congressman, the veteran of
genuine influence and power, is either one who is so stupid that the
ideas of the mob are his own ideas, or one so far gone in charlatanry
that he is unconscious of his shame. Our laws are made, in the main, by
men who have sold their honour for their jobs, and they are executed by
men who put their jobs above justice and common sense. The occasional
cynics leaven the mass. We are dependent for whatever good flows out of
democracy upon men who do not believe in democracy.
Here, perhaps, it will be urged that my argument goes beyond the
democratic scheme and lodges against government itself. There is, I
believe, some cogency in the caveat. All government, whatever its form,
is carried on chiefly by men whose first concern is for their offices,
not for their obligations. It is, in its essence, a conspiracy of a
small group against the masses of men, and especially against the
masses of diligent and useful men. Its primary aim is to keep this
group in jobs that are measurably more comfortable and exhilarating
than the jobs its members could get in free competition. They are
thus always willing to make certain sacrifices of integrity and
self-respect in order to hold those jobs, and the fact is just as plain
under a despot as it is under the mob. The mob has its flatterers
and bosh-mongers; the king has his courtiers. But there is yet a
difference, and I think it is important. The courtier, at his worst, at
least performs his genuflections before one who is theoretically his
superior, and is surely not less than his equal. He does not have to
abase himself before swine with whom, ordinarily, he would disdain to
have any traffic. He is not compelled to pretend that he is a worse man
than he really is. He needn’t hold his nose in order to approach his
benefactor. Thus he may go into office without having dealt his honour
a fatal wound, and once he is in, he is under no pressure to sacrifice
it further, and may nurse it back to health and vigour. His sovereign,
at worst, has a certain respect for it, and hesitates to strain it
unduly; the mob has no sensitiveness on that point, and, indeed, no
knowledge that it exists. The courtier’s sovereign, in other words, is
apt to be a man of honour himself. When, in 1848 or thereabout, the
late Wilhelm I of Prussia was offered the imperial crown by a so-called
parliament of his subjects, he refused it on the ground that he could
take it only from his equals, _i. e._, from the sovereign princes of
the _Reich_. To the democrats of the world this attitude was puzzling,
and on reflection it began to seem contemptible and offensive. But
that was not to be marveled at. To a democrat any attitude based upon
a concept of honour, dignity and integrity seems contemptible and
offensive. Once Frederick the Great was asked why he gave commissions
in his army only to _Junker_. Because, he answered, they will not
lie and they cannot be bought. That answer explains sufficiently the
general democratic theory that the _Junker_ are not only scoundrels,
but also half-wits.
The democratic politician, facing such plain facts, tries to save his
_amour propre_ in a characteristically human way; that is to say,
he denies them. We all do that. We convert our degradations into
renunciations, our self-seeking into public spirit, our swinishness
into heroism. No man, I suppose, ever admits to himself candidly that
he gets his living in a dishonourable way, not even a Prohibition
agent or a biter off of puppies’ tails. The democratic politician,
confronted by the dishonesty and stupidity of his master, the mob,
tries to convince himself and all the rest of us that it is really
full of rectitude and wisdom. This is the origin of the doctrine that,
whatever its transient errors, it always comes to right decisions
in the long run. Perhaps--but on what evidence, by what reasoning,
and for what motives! Go examine the long history of the anti-slavery
agitation in America: it is a truly magnificent record of buncombe,
false pretences, and imbecility. This notion that the mob is wise, I
fear, is not to be taken seriously: it was invented by mob-masters to
save their faces: there was a lot of chatter about it by Roosevelt,
but none by Washington, and very little by Jefferson. Whenever
democracy, by an accident, produces a genuine statesman, he is found
to be proceeding on the assumption that it is not true. And on the
assumption that it is difficult, if not impossible to go to the mob for
support, and still retain the ordinary decencies. The best democratic
statesmanship, like the best non-democratic statesmanship, tends to
safeguard the honour of the higher officers of state by relieving them
of that degrading necessity. As every schoolboy knows, such was the
intent of the Fathers, as expressed in Article II, Sections 1 and 2, of
the Constitution. To this day it is a common device, when this or that
office becomes steeped in intolerable corruption, to take it out of
the gift of the mob, and make it appointive. The aspirant, of course,
still has to seek it, for under democracy it is very rare that office
seeks the man, but seeking it of the President, or even of the Governor
of a State, is felt to be appreciably less humiliating and debasing
than seeking it of the mob. The President may be a Coolidge, and the
Governor may be a Blease or a Ma Ferguson, but he (or she) is at least
able to understand plain English, and need not be put into good humour
by the arts of the circus clown or Baptist evangelist.
To sum up: the essential objection to feudalism (the perfect antithesis
to democracy) was that it imposed degrading acts and attitudes upon
the vassal; the essential objection to democracy is that, with few
exceptions, it imposes degrading acts and attitudes upon the men
responsible for the welfare and dignity of the state. The former was
compelled to do homage to his suzerain, who was very apt to be a brute
and an ignoramus. The latter are compelled to do homage to their
constituents, who in overwhelming majority are certain to be both.
7.
_The Maker of Laws_
In the United States, the general democratic tendency to crowd
competent and self-respecting men out of the public service is
exaggerated by a curious constitutional rule, unknown in any other
country. This is the rule, embodied in Article I, Sections 2 and 3, of
the Constitution and carried over into most of the State constitutions,
that a legislator must be an actual resident of the district he
represents. Its obvious aim is to preserve for every electoral unit
a direct and continuous voice in the government; its actual effect
is to fill all the legislative bodies of the land with puerile local
politicians, many of them so stupid that they are quite unable to
grasp the problems with which government has to deal. In England it
is perfectly possible for the remotest division to choose a Morley to
represent it, and this, in fact, until the recent rise of the mob, was
not infrequently done. But in the United States every congressional
district must find its representative within its own borders, and only
too often there is no competent man available. Even if one happens to
live there--which in large areas of the South and many whole States
of the newer West, is extremely improbable--he is usually so enmeshed
in operations against the resident imbeciles and their leaders, and
hence so unpopular, that his candidacy is out of the question. This
is manifestly the case in such States as Tennessee and Mississippi.
Neither is without civilized inhabitants, but in neither is it possible
to find a civilized inhabitant who is not under the ban of the local
Fundamentalist clergy, and _per corollary_, of the local politicians.
Thus both States, save for occasional accidents, are represented in
Congress by delegations of pliant and unconscionable jackasses, and
their influence upon national legislation is extremely evil. It was the
votes of such ignoble fellows, piling in from all the more backward
States, that forced the Eighteenth Amendment through both Houses of
Congress, and it was the votes of even more degraded noodles, assembled
from the backwoods in the State Legislatures, that put the amendment
into the Constitution.
If it were possible for a congressional district to choose any man
to represent it, as is the case in all other civilized countries,
there would be more breaks in the monotony of legislative venality and
stupidity, for even the rustic mob, in the absence of strong local
antipathies, well fanned by demagogues, might succumb occasionally
to the magic of a great name. Thus a Roscoe Pound might be sent to
Congress from North Dakota or Nevada, though it is obvious that
he could not be sent from the Massachusetts district in which he
lives, wherein his independence and intelligence are familiar and
hence offensive to his neighbours. But this is forbidden by the
constitutional rule, and so North Dakota and Nevada, with few if any
first-rate men in them, must turn to such men as they have. The result
everywhere is the election of a depressing gang of incompetents,
mainly petty lawyers and small-town bankers. The second result is
a House of Representatives that, in intelligence, information and
integrity, is comparable to a gang of bootleggers--a House so deficient
in competent leaders that it can scarcely carry on its business. The
third result is the immense power of such corrupt and sinister agencies
as the Anti-Saloon League: a Morley would disdain its mandates,
but Congressman John J. Balderdash is only too eager to earn its
support at home. A glance through the Congressional Directory, which
prints autobiographies (often full of voluptuous self-praise) of all
Congressmen, is enough to show what scrub stock is in the Lower House.
The average Southern member, for example, runs true to a standard
type. He got his early education in a hedge school, he proceeded to
some preposterous Methodist or Baptist college, and then he served
for a time as a schoolteacher in his native swamps, finally reaching
the dignity of county superintendent of schools and meanwhile reading
law. Admitted to the bar, and having got a taste of county politics
as superintendent, he became district attorney, and perhaps, after a
while, county judge. Then he began running for Congress, and after
three or four vain attempts, finally won a seat. The unfitness of such
a man for the responsibilities of a law-maker must be obvious. He is
an ignoramus, and he is quite without the common decencies. Having
to choose between sense and nonsense, he chooses nonsense almost
instinctively. Until he got to Washington, and began to meet lobbyists,
bootleggers and the correspondents of the newspapers, he had perhaps
never met a single intelligent human being. As a Congressman, he
remains below the salt. Officialdom disdains him; he is kept waiting in
anterooms by all the fourth assistant secretaries. When he is invited
to a party, it is a sign that police sergeants are also invited. He
must be in his second or third term before the ushers at the White
House so much as remember his face. His dream is to be chosen to go on
a congressional junket, _i. e._, on a drunken holiday at government
expense. His daily toil is getting jobs for relatives and retainers.
Sometimes he puts a dummy on the pay-roll and collects the dummy’s
salary himself. In brief, a knavish and preposterous nonentity, half
way between a kleagle of the Ku Klux and a grand worthy bow-wow of the
Knights of Zoroaster. It is such vermin who make the laws of the United
States.
The gentlemen of the Upper House are measurably better, if only
because they serve for longer terms. A Congressman, with his two-year
term, is constantly running for re-election. Scarcely has he got to
Washington before he must hurry home and resume his bootlicking of
the local bosses. But a Senator, once sworn in, may safely forget
them for two or three years, and so, if there is no insuperable
impediment in his character, he may show a certain independence, and
yet survive. Moreover, he is usually safer than a Congressman, even as
his term ends, for his possession of a higher office shows that he is
no inconsiderable boss himself. Thus there are Senators who attain to
a laudable mastery of the public business, particularly such as lies
within the range of their private interests, and even Senators who show
the intellectual dignity and vigour of genuine statesmen. But they are
surely not numerous. The average Senator, like the average Congressman,
is simply a party hack, without ideas and without anything rationally
describable as self-respect. His backbone has a sweet resiliency;
he knows how to clap on false whiskers; it is quite impossible to
forecast his action, even on a matter of the highest principle, without
knowing what rewards are offered by the rival sides. Two of the most
pretentious Senators, during the Sixty-Ninth Congress, were the
gentlemen from Pennsylvania: one of them, indeed, was the successor to
the lamented Henry Cabot Lodge as the intellectual snob of the Upper
House. Yet both, under pressure, performed such dizzy flops that even
the Senate gasped. It was amusing, but there was also a touch of
pathos in it. Here were men who plainly preferred their jobs to their
dignity. Here, in brief, were men whose private rectitude had yielded
to political necessity--the eternal tragedy of democracy. I turn to the
testimony of a Senator who stands out clearly from the rest: the able
and uncompromisingly independent Reed of Missouri. This is what he said
of his colleagues, to their faces, on June 2, 1924:
[The pending measure] will be voted for by cowards who would rather
hang on to their present offices than serve their country or defend
its Constitution. It would not receive a vote in this body were
there not many individuals looking over their shoulders toward
the ballot-boxes of November, their poltroon souls aquiver with
apprehension lest they may pay the price of courageous duty by
the loss of the votes of some _bloc_, clique, or coterie backing
this infamous proposal. My language may seem brutal. If so, it is
because it lays on the blistering truth.
Senator Reed, in this startling characterization of his fellow
Senators, plainly violated the rules of the Senate, which forbid
one member to question the motives of another. But there was no
Senator present that day who cared to invoke those rules. They all
knew that Reed told the truth. Their answer to him was to slink into
the cloak-rooms, and leave him to roar at the Vice-President and the
clerks. He not only described the Senate accurately; he also described
the whole process of law-making under democracy. Our laws are invented,
in the main, by frauds and fanatics, and put upon the statute books by
poltroons and scoundrels.
8.
_The Rewards of Virtue_
I have spoken of the difficulties confronting an intelligent and
honourable man who aspires to public office under this system. If he
succeeds, it is only by a suspension of natural laws, and his success
is seldom more than transient: his first term is commonly his last.
And if, favoured by luck again, he goes on, it is only in the face
of opposition of an almost incredible bitterness. The case of the
Senator I have just mentioned is aptly in point. He is a man of obvious
ability and integrity, but in his last campaign in Missouri he was
opposed by a combination of all the parties and all their factions,
with the waspish ghost of the late Dr. Wilson hanging over the
battlefield. It was only his own amazing talents as a popular orator,
aided by the post-war _Katzenjammer_ and a local delight in vigorous,
rough-and-ready-fighters, that overcame the tremendous odds against
him. In most other American States he would have been defeated easily;
in many of them his defeat would have been overwhelming. Only in the
newer States and in the border States have such men any chance at all.
Where party fidelity has run strong for years they are barred from
public life completely. No Senator of any genuine dignity and ability
could come out of the Georgia of to-day, and none could come out of the
Vermont. Such States must be content with party hacks, and the country
as a whole must submit to their depressing imbecilities and ignoble
contortions. All of them are men who have trimmed and fawned. All of
them are forbidden a frank and competent discussion of most of the
principal issues facing the nation.
But there is something yet worse, and that is the assumption of his
cowardice and venality that lies upon even the most honourable man,
brought into public office by a miracle. The mob is quite unable to
grasp the concept of honour, and that incapacity is naturally shared
by the vast majority of politicians. Thus the acts of a public man
of genuine rectitude are almost always ascribed, under democracy, to
sordid and degrading motives, _i. e._, to the sort of motives that
would animate his more orthodox colleagues if they were capable of
his acts. I believe that the fact is more potent in keeping decent
men out of public life in the United States than even the practical
difficulties that I have rehearsed, and that it is mainly responsible
for the astounding timorousness of our politics. Its effects were
brilliantly displayed during the final stages of the battle over the
Eighteenth Amendment. The Prohibitionist leaders, being mainly men of
wide experience in playing upon the prejudices and emotions of the mob,
developed a technique of terrorization that was almost irresistible.
The moment a politician ventured to speak against them he was accused
of the grossest baseness. It was whispered that he was a secret
drunkard and eager to safeguard his tipple; it was covertly hinted that
he was in the pay of the Whiskey Ring, the Beer Trust, or some other
such bugaboo. The event showed that the shoe was actually on the other
foot--that many of the principal supporters of Prohibition were on the
pay-roll of the Anti-Saloon League, and that judges, attorneys-general
and other high officers of justice afterward joined them there. But the
accusations served their purpose. The plain people, unable to imagine
a man entering public life with any other motive than that which would
have moved them themselves if they had been in his boots--that is to
say, unable to imagine any other motive save a yearning for private
advantage--reacted to the charges as if they had been proved, and
so more than one man of relatively high decency, as decency goes in
American life, was driven out of office. Upon those who escaped the
lesson was not lost. It was five or six years before any considerable
faction of politicians mustered up courage enough to defy the
Prohibitionists, and even then what animated them was not any positive
access of resolution but simply the fact that the Anti-Saloon League
was obviously far gone in corruption, with some of its chief agents in
revolt against its methods, and others in prison for grave crimes and
misdemeanours.
I am, myself, not cursed with the itch for public office, but I have
been engaged for years in the discussion of public questions, and so
I may be forgiven, I hope, for intruding my own experience here. That
experience may be described briefly: there has never been a time when,
attacking this or that current theory, I have not been accused of being
in the pay of its interested opponents, and I believe that there has
never been a time when this accusation was not generally believed.
Years ago, when the Prohibitionists were first coming to power, they
charged me with taking money from the brewers and distillers, and
to-day they charge me with some sort of corrupt arrangement with the
bootleggers, despite the plain fact that the latter are not their
opponents at all, but their allies. The former accusation seemed so
plausible to most Americans that even the brewers finally gave it
credit: they actually offered to put me on their pay-roll, and were
vastly surprised when I declined. It was simply impossible for them, as
low-caste Americans, to imagine a man attempting to discharge a public
duty disinterestedly; they believed that I had to be paid, as their
rapidly dwindling _bloc_ of Congressmen had to be paid. So in all
other directions. When, fifteen or twenty years ago, I began exposing
the quackeries of osteopaths, chiropractors and other such frauds, they
resorted instantly to the device of accusing me of taking a retainer
from the mythical Medical Trust, _i. e._, from such men as the Mayo
brothers, Dr. George Crile, and the faculty of the Johns Hopkins.
Later on, venturing to denounce the nefarious political activity of
the Methodist Church, and of its ally, the Ku Klux Klan, I was accused
by spokesmen for the former of receiving bribes from the Vatican. The
comstocks went even further. When I protested against their sinister
and dishonest censorship of literature, they charged me publicly with
being engaged in the circulation of pornography, and actually made a
vain and ill-starred attempt to railroad me to jail on that charge.
The point is that such accusations are generally believed, especially
when they are leveled at a candidate for office. The average American
knows what he would do in like case, and he believes quite naturally
that every other man is willing and eager to do the same. At the start
of my bout with the comstocks, just mentioned, many American newspapers
assumed as a matter of course that I was guilty as charged, and some
of them, having said so, were forced into elaborate explanations
afterward to purge themselves of libel. Of the rest, most concluded
that the whole combat was a sham battle, provoked on my own motion to
give me what they regarded as profitable publicity. When I speak of
newspapers, of course, I speak of concrete men, their editors. These
editors, under democracy, constitute an extremely powerful class. Their
very lack of sound knowledge and genuine intelligence gives them a
special fitness for influencing the mob, and it is augmented by their
happy obtuseness to notions of honour. Their daily toil consists in
part of praising men and ideas that are obviously fraudulent, and in
part of denouncing men and ideas that are respected by their betters.
The typical American editor, save in a few of the larger towns, may
be described succinctly as one who has written a million words in
favour of Coolidge and half a million against Darwin. He is, like the
politician, an adept trimmer and flatterer. His job is far more to him
than his self-respect. It must be plain that the influence of such men
upon public affairs is generally evil--that their weight is almost
always thrown against the public man of dignity and courage--that such
a public man cannot hope to be understood by them, or to get any useful
support from them. Even when they are friendly they are apt to be so
for preposterous and embarrassing reasons. Thus they give their aid to
the sublime democratic process of eliminating all sense and decency
from public life. Coming out of the mob, they voice the ideas of the
mob. The first of those ideas is that a fraud is somehow charming and
reassuring--in the common phrase, that he is a regular fellow. The
second is that an honest and candid man is dangerous--or, perhaps more
accurately, that there is no such animal.
The newspaper editor who rises above this level encounters the
same incredulous hostility from his fellows and his public that
is encountered by the superior politician, cast into public life
by accident. If he is not dismissed at once as what is now called
a Bolshevik, _i. e._, one harbouring an occult and unintelligible
yearning to put down the Republic and pull God off His throne,
he is assumed to be engaged in some nefarious scheme of personal
aggrandizement. I point, as examples, to the cases of Fremont Older,
of San Francisco, and Julian Harris, of Columbus, Ga., two honest, able
and courageous men, and both opposed by the vast majority of their
colleagues. The democratic process, indeed, is furiously inimical to
all honourable motives. It favours the man who is without them, and
it puts heavy burdens upon the man who has them. Going further, it is
even opposed to mere competence. The public servant who masters his
job gains nothing thereby. His natural impatience with the incapacity
and slacking of his fellows makes them his implacable enemies, and he
is viewed with suspicion by the great mass of democrats. But here I
enter upon a subject already discussed at length by a competent French
critic, the late Emile Faguet, of the French Academy, who gave a whole
book to it, translated into English as “The Cult of Incompetence.”
Under democracy, says Faguet, the business of law-making becomes a
series of panics--government by orgy and orgasm. And the public service
becomes a mere refuge for prehensile morons--get yours, and run.
9.
_Footnote on Lame Ducks_
Faguet makes no mention of one of the curious and unpleasant
by-products of democracy, of great potency for evil in both England
and the United States: perhaps, for some unknown reason, it is less a
nuisance in France. I allude to the sinister activity of professional
politicians who, in the eternal struggle for office and its rewards,
have suffered crushing defeats, and are full of rage and bitterness.
All politics, under democracy, resolves itself into a series of
dynastic questions: the objective is always the job, not the principle.
The defeated candidate commonly takes his failure very badly, for it
leaves him stripped bare. In most cases his fellow professionals take
pity on him and put him into some more or less gaudy appointive office,
to preserve his livelihood and save his face: the Federal commissions
that harass the land are full of such lame ducks, and they are not
unknown on the Federal bench. But now and then there appears one whose
wounds are too painful to be assuaged by such devices, or for whom no
suitable office can be found. This majestic victim not infrequently
seeks surcease by a sort of running amok. That is to say, he turns what
remains of his influence with the mob into a weapon against the nation
as a whole, and becomes a chronic maker of trouble. The names of Burr,
Clay, Calhoun, Douglas, Blaine, Greeley, Frémont, Roosevelt and Bryan
will occur to every attentive student of American history. There have
been many similar warlocks on lower levels; they are familiar in the
politics of every American county.
Clay, like Bryan after him, was three times a candidate for the
Presidency. Defeated in 1824, 1832 and 1840, he turned his back upon
democracy, and became the first public agent and attorney for what
are now called the Interests. When he died he was the darling of the
Mellons, Morgans and Charlie Schwabs of his time. He believed in
centralization and in the blessings of a protective tariff. These
blessings the American people still enjoy. Calhoun, deprived of the
golden plum by an unappreciative country, went even further. He seems
to have come to the conclusion that its crime made it deserve capital
punishment. At all events, he threw his strength into the plan to
break up the Union. The doctrine of Nullification owed more to him
than it owed to any other politician, and after 1832, when his hopes
of getting into the White House were finally extinguished, he devoted
himself whole-heartedly to preparing the way for the Civil War. He was
more to blame for that war, in all probability, than any other man. But
if he had succeeded Jackson the chances are that he would have sung
a far less bellicose tune. The case of Burr is so plain that it has
even got into the school history-books. If he had beaten Jefferson in
1800 there would have been no duel with Hamilton, no conspiracy with
Blennerhassett, no trial for treason, and no long exile and venomous
repining. Burr was an able man, as politicians go under democracy, and
the young Republic stood in great need of his peculiar talents. But his
failure to succeed Adams made a misanthrope of him, and his misanthropy
was vented upon his country, and more than once brought it to the verge
of disaster.
There have been others like him in our own time: Blaine, Frémont,
Hancock, Roosevelt, Bryan. If Blaine had been elected in 1876 he would
have ceased to wave the bloody shirt; as it was, he was still waving
it, recklessly and obscenely, in 1884. No man laboured more assiduously
to keep alive the hatreds flowing out of the Civil War; his whole
life was poisoned by his failure to reach the White House, and his
dreadful cramps and rages led him into a long succession of obviously
anti-social acts. Roosevelt went the same route. His débâcle in 1912
converted him into a sort of political killer, and until the end of his
life he was constantly on the warpath, looking for heads to crack. The
outbreak of the World War in 1914 brought him great embarrassment, for
he had been the most ardent American exponent, for years past, of what
was then generally regarded as the German scheme of things. For a few
weeks he was irresolute, and seemed likely to stick to his guns. But
then, perceiving a chance to annoy and damage his successful enemy,
Wilson, he swallowed the convictions of a lifetime, and took the other
side. That his ensuing uproars had evil effects must be manifest.
Regardless of the consequences, either at home or abroad, he kept on
arousing the mob against Wilson, and in the end he helped more than
any other man to force the United States into the war. His aim, it
quickly appeared, was to turn the situation to his own advantage: he
made desperate and shameless efforts to get a high military command
at the front--a post for which he was plainly unfitted. When Wilson,
still smarting from his attack, vetoed this scheme, he broke into fresh
rages, and the rest of his life was more pathological than political.
The fruits of his reckless demagogy are still with us.
Bryan was even worse. His third defeat, in 1908, convinced even so
vain a fellow that the White House was beyond his reach, and so he
consecrated himself to reprisals upon those who had kept him out of
it. He saw very clearly who they were: the more intelligent minority
of his countrymen. It was their unanimous opposition that had thrice
thrown the balance against him. Well, he would now make them infamous.
He would raise the mob, which still admired him, against everything
they regarded as sound sense and intellectual decency. He would post
them as sworn foes to all true virtue and true religion, and try, if
possible, to put them down by law. There ensued his frenzied campaign
against the teaching of evolution--perhaps the most gross attack
upon human dignity and decorum ever made by a politician, even under
democracy, in modern times. Those who regarded him, in his last years,
as a mere religious fanatic were far in error. It was not fanaticism
that moved him, but hatred. He was an ambulent boil, as anyone could
see who encountered him face to face. His theological ideas were
actually very vague; he was quite unable to defend them competently
under Clarence Darrow’s cross-examination. What moved him was simply
his colossal lust for revenge upon those he held to be responsible for
his downfall as a politician. He wanted to hurt them, proscribe them;
if possible, destroy them. To that end he was willing to sacrifice
everything else, including the public tranquillity and the whole system
of public education. He passed out of life at last at a temperature of
110 degrees, his eyes rolling horribly toward 1600 Pennsylvania avenue,
N.W. and its leaky copper roof. In the suffering South his fever lives
after him. The damage he did was greater than that done by Sherman’s
army.
Countries under the hoof of despotism escape such lamentable
exhibitions of human frailty. Unsuccessful aspirants for the crown
are either butchered out of hand or exiled to Paris, where tertiary
lues quickly disposes of them. The Crown Prince, of course, has his
secret thoughts, and no doubt they are sometimes homicidal, but he is
forced by etiquette to keep them to himself, and so the people are not
annoyed and injured by them. He cannot go about praying publicly that
the King, his father, come down with endocarditis, nor can he denounce
the old gentleman as an idiot and advocate his confinement in a _maison
de santé_. Everyone, of course, knows what his hopes and yearnings
are, but no one has to listen to them. If he voices them at all it is
only to friendly and discreet members of the diplomatic corps and to
the ladies of the half and quarter worlds. Under democracy, they are
bellowed from every stump.
DEMOCRACY AND LIBERTY
III
DEMOCRACY AND LIBERTY
1.
_The Will to Peace_
Whenever the liberties of _Homo vulgaris_ are invaded and made a mock
of in a gross and contemptuous manner, as happened, for example, in the
United States during the reign of Wilson, Palmer, Burleson and company,
there are always observers who marvel that he bears the outrage with so
little murmuring. Such observers only display their unfamiliarity with
the elements of democratic science. The truth is that the common man’s
love of liberty, like his love of sense, justice and truth, is almost
wholly imaginary. As I have argued, he is not actually happy when free;
he is uncomfortable, a bit alarmed, and intolerably lonely. He longs
for the warm, reassuring smell of the herd, and is willing to take the
herdsman with it. Liberty is not a thing for such as he. He cannot
enjoy it rationally himself, and he can think of it in others only as
something to be taken away from them. It is, when it becomes a reality,
the exclusive possession of a small and disreputable minority of men,
like knowledge, courage and honour. A special sort of man is needed
to understand it, nay, to stand it--and he is inevitably an outlaw
in democratic societies. The average man doesn’t want to be free. He
simply wants to be safe.
Nietzsche, with his usual clarity of vision, saw the point clearly.
Liberty, he used to say, was something that, to the general, was too
cold to be borne. Nevertheless, he apparently believed that there
was an unnatural, drug-store sort of yearning for it in _all_ men,
and so he changed Schopenhauer’s will-to-live into a will-to-power,
_i. e._, a will-to-free-function. Here he went too far, and in the
wrong direction: he should have made it, on the lower levels, a
will-to-peace. What the common man longs for in this world, before and
above all his other longings, is the simplest and most ignominious
sort of peace--the peace of a trusty in a well-managed penitentiary.
He is willing to sacrifice everything else to it. He puts it above his
dignity and he puts it above his pride. Above all, he puts it above
his liberty. The fact, perhaps, explains his veneration for policemen,
in all the forms they take--his belief that there is a mysterious
sanctity in law, however absurd it may be in fact. A policeman is a
charlatan who offers, in return for obedience, to protect him (_a_)
from his superiors, (_b_) from his equals, and (_c_) from himself.
This last service, under democracy, is commonly the most esteemed of
them all. In the United States, at least theoretically, it is the only
thing that keeps ice-wagon drivers, Y. M. C. A. secretaries, insurance
collectors and other such human camels from smoking opium, ruining
themselves in the night clubs, and going to Palm Beach with Follies
girls. It is a democratic invention.
Here, though the common man is deceived, he starts from a sound
premiss: to wit, that liberty is something too hot for his hands--or,
as Nietzsche put it, too cold for his spine. Worse, he sees in it
something that is a weapon against him in the hands of his enemy,
the man of superior kidney. Be true to your nature, and follow its
teachings: this Emersonian counsel, it must be manifest, offers an
embarrassing support to every variety of the _droit de seigneur_. The
history of democracy is a history of efforts to force successive
minorities to be _un_true to their nature. Democracy, in fact, stands
in greater peril of the free spirit than any sort of despotism ever
heard of. The despot, at least, is always safe in one respect: his
own belief in himself cannot be shaken. But democracies may be
demoralized and run amok, and so they are in vast dread of heresy, as
a Sunday-school superintendent is in dread of scarlet women, light
wines and beer, and the unreadable works of Charles Darwin. It would be
unimaginable for a democracy to submit serenely to such gross dissents
as Frederick the Great not only permitted, but even encouraged. Once
the mob is on the loose, there is no holding it. So the subversive
minority must be reduced to impotence; the heretic must be put down.
If, as they say, one of the main purposes of all civilized government
is to preserve and augment the liberty of the individual, then surely
democracy accomplishes it less efficiently than any other form. Is the
individual worth thinking of at all? Then the superior individual is
worth more thought than his inferiors. But it is precisely the superior
individual who is the chief victim of the democratic process. It not
only tries to regulate his acts; it also tries to delimit his thoughts;
it is constantly inventing new forms of the old crime of imagining the
King’s death. The Roman _lex de majestate_ was put upon the books,
not by an emperor, nor even by a consul, but by Saturninus, a tribune
of the people. Its aim was to protect the state against aristocrats,
_i. e._, against free spirits, each holding himself answerable only
to his own notions. The aim of democracy is to break all such free
spirits to the common harness. It tries to iron them out, to pump them
dry of self-respect, to make docile John Does of them. The measure of
its success is the extent to which such men are brought down, and made
common. The measure of civilization is the extent to which they resist
and survive. Thus the only sort of liberty that is real under democracy
is the liberty of the have-nots to destroy the liberty of the haves.
This liberty is supposed, in some occult way, to enhance human dignity.
Perhaps, in one of its aspects, it actually does. The have-not gains
something valuable when he acquires the delusion that he is the
equal of his betters. It may not be true--but even a delusion, if it
augments the dignity of man, is something. Certain apparent realities
grow out of it: the peasant no longer pulls his forelock when he meets
the baron, he is free to sue and be sued, he may denounce Huxley as a
quack. But the thing, alas, works both ways. As one pan of the scale
goes up, the other comes down. If democracy really loves the dignity
of man, then it kills the thing it loves. Where it prevails, not even
the King can be dignified in any rational sense: he becomes Harding,
jabbering of normalcy, or Coolidge, communing with his preposterous
_Tabakparlement_ around the stove. Nor the Pope: he becomes a Methodist
bishop in a natty business-suit, and with a toothbrush moustache. Nor
the Generalissimo: he becomes Pershing, haranguing Rotary, and slapping
the backs of his fellow Elks.
2.
_The Democrat as Moralist_
Liberty gone, there remains the majestic phenomenon of democratic law.
A glance at it is sufficient to show the identity of democracy and
Puritanism. The two, indeed, are but different facets of the same
gem. In the psyche they are one. For both get their primal essence
out of the inferior man’s fear and hatred of his betters, born of his
observation that, for all his fine theories, they are stronger and of
more courage than he is, and that as they go through this dreadful
world they have a far better time. Thus envy comes in; if you overlook
it you will never understand democracy, and you will never understand
Puritanism. It is not, of course, a speciality of democratic man. It is
the common possession of all men of the ignoble and incompetent sort,
at all times and everywhere. But it is only under democracy that it is
liberated; it is only under democracy that it becomes the philosophy
of the state. What the human race owes to the old autocracies, and how
little, in these democratic days, it is disposed to remember the debt!
Their service, perhaps, was a by-product of a purpose far afield, but
it was a service none the less: they held the green fury of the mob in
check, and so set free the spirit of superior man. Their collapse under
Flavius Honorius left Europe in chaos for four hundred years. Their
revival under Charlemagne made the Renaissance possible, and the modern
age. What the thing was that they kept from the throat of civilization
has been shown more than once in these later days, by the failure of
their enfeebled successors. I point to the only too obvious examples
of the French and Russian Revolutions. The instant such a catastrophe
liberates the mob, it begins a war to the death upon superiority
of every kind--not only upon the kind that naturally attaches to
autocracy, but even upon the kind that stands in opposition to it. The
day after a successful revolution is a blue day for the late autocrat,
but it is also a blue day for every other superior man. The murder of
Lavoisier was a phenomenon quite as significant as the murder of Louis
XVI. We need no scientists in France, shouted MM. of the Revolutionary
Tribunal. Wat Tyler, four centuries before, reduced it to an even
greater frankness and simplicity: he hanged every man who confessed to
being able to read and write.
Democracy, as a political scheme, may be defined as a device for
releasing this hatred born of envy, and for giving it the force and
dignity of law. Tyler, in the end, was dispatched by Walworth; under
democracy he becomes almost the ideal Good Man. It is very difficult
to disentangle the political ideas of this anthropoid Good Man from
his theological ideas: they constantly overlap and coalesce, and the
democratic state, despite the contrary example of France, almost
always shows a strong tendency to be also a Puritan state. Puritan
legislation, especially in the field of public law, is a thing of
many grandiose pretensions and a few simple and ignoble realities.
The Puritan, discussing it voluptuously, always tries to convince
himself (and the rest of us) that it is grounded upon altruistic
and evangelical motives--that its aim is to work the other fellow’s
benefit against the other fellow’s will. Such is the theory behind
Prohibition, comstockery, vice crusading, and all its other familiar
devices of oppression. That theory, of course, is false. The Puritan’s
actual motives are (_a_) to punish the other fellow for having a
better time in the world, and (_b_) to bring the other fellow down to
his own unhappy level. Such are his punitive and remedial purposes.
Primarily, he is against every human act that he is incapable of
himself--safely. The adverb tells the whole story. The Puritan is
surely no ascetic. Even in the great days of the New England theocracy
it was impossible to restrain his libidinousness: his eyes rolled
sideways at buxom wenches quite as often as they rolled upward to
God. But he is incapable of sexual experience upon what may be called
a civilized plane; it is impossible for him to manage the thing as a
romantic adventure; in his hands it reduces itself to the terms of the
barnyard. Hence the Mann Act. So with dalliance with the grape. He can
have experience of it only as a furtive transaction behind the door,
with a dreadful headache to follow. Hence Prohibition. So, again, with
the joys that come out of the fine arts. Looking at a picture, he sees
only the model’s pudenda. Reading a book, he misses the ordeals and
exaltations of the spirit, and remembers only the natural functions.
Hence comstockery.
His delight in his own rectitude is grounded upon a facile assumption
that it is difficult to maintain--that the other fellow, being
deficient in God’s grace, is incapable of it. So he venerates himself,
in the moral department, as an artist of unusual talents, a virtuoso
of virtue. His error consists in mistaking a weakness for a merit, an
inferiority for a superiority. It is not actually a sign of spiritual
eminence to be moral in the Puritan sense: it is simply a sign of
docility, of lack of enterprise and originality, of cowardice. The
Puritan, once his mainly imaginary triumphs over the flesh and the
devil are forgotten, always turns out to be a poor stick of a man--in
brief, a natural democrat. His triumphs in the field of government are
as illusory as his triumphs as metaphysician and artist. No Puritan has
ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth
hearing, or a poem worth reading--and I am not forgetting John Milton,
who was not a Puritan at all, but a libertarian, which is the exact
opposite. The whole Puritan literature is comprised in “The Pilgrim’s
Progress.” Even in the department wherein the Puritan is most proud of
himself, _i. e._, that of moral legislation, he has done only second
and third rate work. His fine schemes for bringing his betters down to
his own depressing level always turn out badly. In the whole history
of human law-making there is no record of a failure worse than that of
Prohibition in the United States. Since the first uprising of the lower
orders, the modern age has seen but one genuinely valuable contribution
to moral legislation: I allude, of course, to the Code Napoléon. It
was concocted by a committee of violent anti-Puritans, and in the full
tide of a bitter reaction against democracy.
If democracy had not lain implicit in Puritanism, Puritanism would
have had to invent it. Each is necessary to the other. Democracy
provides the machinery that Puritanism needs for the quick and ruthless
execution of its preposterous inventions. Facing autocracy, it faces
insuperable difficulties, for its spokesmen can convince the King
only in case he is crazy, and even when he is crazy he is commonly
restrained by his ministers. But the mob is easy to convince, for
what Puritanism has to say to it is mainly what it already believes:
its politics is based upon the same brutal envies and quaking fears
that lie under the Puritan ethic. Moreover, the political machinery
through which it functions provides a ready means of translating
such envies and fears into action. There is need only to sound the
alarm and take a vote: the debate is over the moment the majority has
spoken. The fact explains the ferocious haste with which, in democratic
countries, even the most strange and dubious legislative experiments
are launched. Haste is necessary, lest even the mob be shaken by sober
second thought. And haste is easy, for the appeal to the majority is
officially the last appeal of all, and when it has been made there
is the best of excuses for cutting off debate. I have described the
precise process in a previous section. Fanatics inflame the mob, and
thereby alarm the scoundrels set up to make laws in its name. The
scoundrels precipitately do the rest. The Fathers were not unaware
of this danger in the democratic scheme. They sought to counteract
it by establishing upper chambers, removed by at least one degree
from the mob’s hot rages. Their precaution has been turned to naught
by depriving the upper chambers of that prophylactic remoteness, and
exposing them to the direct and unmitigated blast.
It must be plain that this process of law-making by orgy, with fanatics
supplying the motive-power and unconscionable knaves steering the
machine, is bound to fill the statute-books with enactments that
have no rational use or value save that of serving as instruments
of psychopathological persecution and private revenge. This is
found to be the case, in fact, in almost every American State. The
grotesque anti-syndicalist laws of California, the anti-evolution
laws of Tennessee and Mississippi, and the acts for the enforcement
of Prohibition in Ohio and Indiana are typical. They involve gross
invasions of the most elementary rights of the free citizen, but
they are popular with the mob because they have a virtuous smack and
provide it with an endless succession of barbarous but thrilling
shows. Their chosen victims are men the mob naturally envies and
hates--men of unusual intelligence and enterprise, men who regard their
constitutional liberties seriously and are willing to go to some risk
and expense to defend them. Such men are inevitably unpopular under
democracy, for their qualities are qualities that the mob wholly lacks,
and is uneasily conscious of lacking: it thus delights in seeing them
exposed to slander and oppression, and railroaded to prison. There
is always a district attorney at hand to launch the prosecution, for
district attorneys are invariably men who aspire to higher office,
and no more facile way to it is to be found than by assaulting and
destroying a man above the general. As I have shown, many an American
Congressman comes to Washington from a district attorney’s office:
you may be sure that he is seldom promoted because he has been jealous
of the liberties of the citizen. Many a judge reaches the bench by the
same route--and thereafter benignantly helps along his successors. The
whole criminal law in America thus acquires a flavour of fraud. It is
constantly embellished and reinforced by fanatics who have discovered
how easy it is to hurl missiles at their enemies and opponents from
behind ranks of policemen. It is executed by law officers whose private
prosperity runs in direct ratio to their reckless ferocity. And the
business is applauded by morons whose chief delight lies in seeing
their betters manhandled and humiliated. Even the ordinary criminal law
is so carried out--that is, when the accused happens to be conspicuous
enough to make it worth while. Every district attorney in America
goes to his knees every night to ask God to deliver a Thaw or a Fatty
Arbuckle into his hands. In the criminal courts a rich man not only
enjoys none of the advantages that Liberals and other defenders of
democracy constantly talk of; he is under very real and very heavy
burdens. The defence that Thaw offered in the White case would have
got a taxi-driver acquitted in five minutes. And had Arbuckle been a
waiter, no district attorney in the land would have dreamed of putting
him on trial for first-degree murder.
For such foul and pestiferous proceedings, of course, moral excuses are
always offered. The district attorney is an altruist whose one dream is
Law Enforcement; he cannot be terrified by the power of money; he is
the spokesman of the virtuous masses against the godless and abominable
classes. The same buncombe issues from the Prohibitionists, comstocks,
hunters of Bolshevists, and other such frauds. Its hollowness is
constantly revealed. The Prohibitionists, when they foisted their
brummagem cure-all upon the country under cover of the war hysteria,
gave out that their advocacy of it was based upon a Christian yearning
to abate drunkenness, and so abolish crime, poverty and disease.
They preached a millennium, and no doubt convinced hundreds of
thousands of naïve and sentimental persons, not themselves Puritans,
nor even democrats. That millennium, as everyone knows, has failed
to come in. Not only are crime, poverty and disease undiminished,
but drunkenness itself, if the police statistics are to be believed,
has greatly increased. The land rocks with the scandal. Prohibition
has made the use of alcohol devilish and even fashionable, and so
vastly augmented the number of users. The young of both sexes, mainly
innocent of the cup under license, now take to it almost unanimously.
In brief, Prohibition has not only failed to work the benefits that its
proponents promised in 1917; it has brought in so many new evils that
even the mob has turned against it. But do the Prohibitionists admit
the fact frankly, and repudiate their original nonsense? They do not.
On the contrary, they keep on demanding more and worse enforcement
statutes--that is to say, more and worse devices for harassing and
persecuting their opponents. The more obvious the failure becomes, the
more shamelessly they exhibit their genuine motives. In plain words,
what moves them is the psychological aberration called sadism. They
lust to inflict inconvenience, discomfort, and, whenever possible,
disgrace upon the persons they hate--which is to say, upon everyone who
is free from their barbarous theological superstitions, and is having
a better time in the world than they are. They cannot stop the use of
alcohol, nor even appreciably diminish it, but they _can_ badger and
annoy everyone who seeks to use it decently, and they _can_ fill the
jails with men taken for purely artificial offences, and they _can_ get
satisfaction thereby for the Puritan yearning to browbeat and injure,
to torture and terrorize, to punish and humiliate all who show any sign
of being happy. And all this they can do with a safe line of policemen
and judges in front of them; always they can do it without personal
risk.
It is this freedom from personal risk that is the secret of the
Prohibitionists’ continued frenzy, despite the complete collapse of
Prohibition itself. They know very well that the American mob, far from
being lawless, is actually excessively tolerant of written laws and
judicial fiats, however plainly they violate the fundamental rights of
free men, and they know that this tolerance is sufficient to protect
them from what, in more liberal and enlightened countries, would be
the natural consequences of their anti-social activity. If they had to
meet their victims face to face, there would be a different story to
tell. But, like their brethren, the comstocks and the professional
patriots, they seldom encounter this embarrassment. Instead, they
turn the officers of the law to the uses of their mania. More, they
reinforce the officers of the law with an army of bravos sworn to take
their orders and do their bidding--the army of so-called Prohibition
enforcement officers, mainly made up of professional criminals.
Thus, under democracy, the normal, well-behaved, decent citizen--the
Forgotten Man of the late William Graham Sumner--is beset from all
sides, and every year sees an augmentation of his woes. In order to
satisfy the envy and hatred of his inferiors and the blood lust of a
pack of irresponsible and unconscionable fanatics, few of them of any
dignity as citizens or as men and many of them obviously hypocritical
and corrupt, this decent citizen is converted into a criminal for
performing acts that are natural to men of his class everywhere, and
police and courts are degraded to the abhorrent office of punishing him
for them. Certainly it should not be surprising that such degrading
work has greatly diminished the authority of both--that Prohibition
has made the courts disreputable and increased general crime. A judge
who jails a well-disposed and inoffensive citizen for violating
an unjust and dishonest law may be defended plausibly, perhaps, by
legal casuistry, but it is very hard to make out a case for him as a
self-respecting man. Like the ordinary politician, he puts his job
above his professional dignity and his common decency. More than one
judge, unable to square such loathsome duties with his private notions
of honor, has stepped down from the bench, and left the business to a
successor who was more a lawyer and less a man.
3.
_Where Puritanism Fails_
Under the pressure of fanaticism, and with the mob complacently
applauding the show, democratic law tends more and more to be
grounded upon the maxim that every citizen is, by nature, a traitor,
a libertine, and a scoundrel. In order to dissuade him from his
evil-doing the police power is extended until it surpasses anything
ever heard of in the oriental monarchies of antiquity. In many American
States--for example, California and Pennsylvania--it is almost a
literal fact that the citizen has no rights that the police are
bound to respect. These awful powers, of course, are not exercised
against _all_ citizens. The man of influence with the reigning
politicians, the supporter of the prevailing delusions, and the adept
hypocrite--these are seldom molested. But the man who finds himself
in an unpopular minority is at the mercy of the _Polizei_, and the
easiest way to get into such a minority is to speak out boldly for the
Bill of Rights. Men have been clubbed and jailed in Pennsylvania for
merely mentioning it; scores have been jailed for protesting publicly
against its violation. Here the attack was at least frank, and, to
that extent, honest; more often it is made disingenuously, and to the
tune of pious snuffling. First an unpopular man is singled out for
persecution, and then a diligent search is made, with the police and
prosecuting officers and even the courts co-operating, for a law that
he can be accused of breaking. The enormous multiplicity of sumptuary
and inquisitorial statutes makes this quest easy. The prisoner begins
his progress through the mill of justice under a vague accusation
of disorderly conduct or disturbing the peace; he ends charged with
crimes that carry staggering penalties. There are statutes in many
States, notably California, that explore his mind, and lay him by the
heels for merely thinking unpopular thoughts. Once he is accused of
such heresy, the subsequent proceedings take on the character of a
lynching. His constitutional rights are swept away as of no validity,
and all the ancient rules of the Common Law--for example, those against
double jeopardy and hearsay--are suspended in order to fetch him. Many
of the newer statutes actually suspend these safeguards formally, and
though they are to that extent plainly unconstitutional, the higher
courts have not interfered with their execution. The Volstead Act, for
instance, destroys the constitutional right to a jury trial, and in its
administration the constitutional prohibition of unreasonable searches
and seizures and the rule against double jeopardy are habitually
violated. But no protest comes save from specialists in liberty,
most of whom are so busy keeping out of jail themselves that their
caveats are feeble and ineffective. The mob is always in favour of the
prosecution, for the prosecution is giving the show. In the face of
its applause, very few American judges have the courage to enforce the
constitutional guarantees--and still fewer prosecuting attorneys. As I
have said, a prosecuting attorney’s success depends very largely upon
his ferocity. American practice permits him an extravagance of attack
that would land him in jail, and perhaps even in a lunatic asylum, in
any other country, and the more passionately he indulges in it the
more certain becomes his promotion to higher office, including the
judicial. Perhaps a half of all American judges, at some time or other,
have been prosecuting officers. They carry to the bench the habits of
mind acquired on the other side of the bar; they seem to be generally
convinced that any man accused of crime is _ipso facto_ guilty, and
that if he is known to harbour political heresies he is guilty of a
sort of blasphemy when he mentions his constitutional rights.
This doctrine that a man who stands in contempt of the prevailing
ideology has no rights under the law is so thoroughly democratic that
in the United States it is seldom questioned save by romantic fanatics,
robbed of their wits by an uncritical reading of the Fathers. It not
only goes unchallenged otherwise; it is openly stated and defended, and
by high authorities. I point, for example, to the Right Rev. Luther B.
Wilson, who, as a bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, occupies
an office that is both ecclesiastical and political, and is of dignity
and puissance in both fields. Some time ago this Wilson was invited to
preach in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York--a delicate
acknowledgment of his importance by his rival prelate of the Anglican
Church, Monsignor Manning. His sermon, in brief, was a passionate plea
for the putting down of heresy, law or no law, Constitution or no
Constitution. “Atheism,” he declared, “is not only folly, but to the
state a traitor. It does not deserve a place and should not be defended
by any specious claim for immunity under the constitutional guaranties
of the right of free speech.” This bloodthirsty and astounding dictum,
though it came from a Christian ecclesiastic of a rank higher than
that attained by Christ Himself, seemed so natural that it attracted
no notice whatever. Not a single New York newspaper challenged it;
even the Liberal weeklies let it pass as too obvious for cavil. A
week or so later it was printed with approbation in all the Methodist
denominational organs, and since then many other bishops of that sect
have ratified it. The same doctrine is frequently stated plainly by
high legal officers, especially when a man accused of political heresy
is on trial--usually, of course, for an alleged infraction of the
ordinary law. As I have said in a previous chapter, it was applied to
atheists, exactly as Bishop Wilson applied it, during the celebrated
Scopes trial at Dayton, Tenn. Arthur Garfield Hays, defending Scopes,
arose at one point in the proceedings to protest that they were going
beyond the bounds of due process--that his client was not getting a
fair and impartial trial within the meaning of the Constitution. At
once the prosecuting attorney general, Stewart, answered candidly
that an atheist had no right to a fair trial in Tennessee, and the
judge on the bench, the learned Raulston, approved with a nod. Hays,
who is a Liberal, was so overcome that he sank in his place with a
horrified gurgle, but the Tennesseans in the courtroom saw nothing
strange in Stewart’s reply. They knew very well that, in all the States
South of the Potomac, save only Louisiana, Catholics, Negroes and all
the persons unable to speak the local dialects fluently shared the
disability of atheists. And if they were learned in American law, they
knew that anti-Catholics faced the same disability in Massachusetts,
like anti-Semites in New York, and that in every State there were
classes similarly proscribed. I do not here allude to the natural
difficulty that every man of notoriously heterodox ideas must encounter
every time he faces a jury, which is to say, twelve men of limited
information and intelligence, chosen precisely because of their lack of
intellectual resilience. I am speaking of the hostility he must look
for in prosecuting officers and judges, and in the newspapers that
sit in judgment upon them and largely determine their fortunes. I am
speaking of what has come to be a settled practice in American criminal
law.
It is difficult, indeed, for democracy to reconcile itself to what
may be called common decency. By this common decency I mean the
habit, in the individual, of viewing with tolerance and charity the
acts and ideas of other individuals--the habit which makes a man a
reliable friend, a generous opponent, and a good citizen. The democrat,
despite his strong opinion to the contrary, is seldom a good citizen.
In that sense, as in most others, he falls distressfully short. His
eagerness to bring all his fellow-citizens, and especially all those
who are superior to him, into accord with his own dull and docile way
of thinking, and to force it upon them when they resist, leads him
inevitably into acts of unfairness, oppression and dishonour which,
if all men were alike guilty of them, would quickly break down that
mutual trust and confidence upon which the very structure of civilized
society rests. Where democratic man is so firmly in possession of his
theoretical rights that resistance to him is hopeless, as it is in
large areas of the United States, he actually produces this disaster.
To live in a community so cursed is almost impossible to any man who
does not accept the democratic epistemology and the Puritan ethic,
which is to say, to any well-informed and self-respecting man. He is
harassed in so many small ways, and with such depressing violence and
lack of decency, that he is usually compelled to clear out. This fact,
in large part, explains the cultural collapse of New England and the
marked cultural backwardness of whole regions in the South and Middle
West. A man of sound sense, born into the Tennessee hinterland, not
only feels lonesome as he comes to maturity; he also feels unsafe. The
morons surrounding him hate him, and if they can’t lay him for mere
heresy, they will wait their chance and lay him for burning barns, for
poisoning wells, or for taking Russian gold. So he departs.
This irreconcilable antagonism between democratic Puritanism and common
decency is probably responsible for the uneasiness and unhappiness that
are so marked in American life, despite the great material prosperity
of the United States. Theoretically, the American people should be
happier than any other; actually, they are probably the least happy
in Christendom. The trouble with them is that they do not trust one
another--and without mutual trust there can be no ease, and no genuine
happiness. What avails it for a man to have money in the bank and a
Ford in his garage if he knows that his neighbours on both sides are
watching him through knotholes, and that the pastor of the tabernacle
down the road is planning to have him sent to jail? The thing that
makes life charming is not money, but the society of our fellow men,
and the thing that draws us toward our fellow men is not admiration
for their inner virtues, their hard striving to live according to the
light that is in them, but admiration for their outer graces and
decencies--in brief, confidence that they will always act generously
and understandingly in their intercourse with us. We must trust men
before we may enjoy them. Manifestly, it is impossible to put any
such trust in a Puritan. With the best intentions in the world he
cannot rid himself of the delusion that his duty to save us from our
sins--_i. e._, from the non-Puritanical acts that we delight in--is
paramount to his duty to let us be happy in our own way. Thus he is
unable to be tolerant, and with tolerance goes magnanimity. A Puritan
cannot be magnanimous. He is constitutionally unable to grasp the
notion that it is better to be decent than to be steadfast, or even
than to be just. So with the democrat, who is simply a Puritan doubly
damned. When the late Dr. Wilson, confronted by the case of poor
old silly Debs, decided instantly that Debs must remain in jail, he
acted as a true democrat and a perfect Puritan. The impulse to be
magnanimous, to forgive and forget, to be kindly and generous toward
a misguided and harmless old man, was overcome by the harsh Puritan
compulsion to observe the letter of the law at all costs. Every Puritan
is a lawyer, and so is every democrat.
4.
_Corruption Under Democracy_
This moral compulsion of the Puritan and democrat, of course, is
mainly bogus. When one has written off cruelty, envy and cowardice,
one has accounted for nine-tenths of it. Certainly I need not argue
at this late date that the _Ur_-Puritan of New England was by no
means the vestal that his heirs and assigns think of when they praise
him. He was not only a very carnal fellow, and given to lamentable
transactions with loose women and fiery jugs; he was also a virtuoso
of sharp practices, and to this day his feats in that department
survive in fable. Nor is there any perceptible improvement in his
successors. When a gang of real estate agents (_i. e._ rent sweaters),
bond salesman and automobile dealers gets together to sob for Service,
it takes no Freudian to surmise that someone is about to be swindled.
The cult of Service, indeed, is half a sop to conscience, and half
a bait to catch conies. Its cultivation in the United States runs
parallel with the most gorgeous development of imposture as a fine
art that Christendom has ever seen. I speak of a fine art in the
literal sense; in the form of advertising it enlists such talents as,
under less pious civilizations, would be devoted to the confection
of cathedrals, and even, perhaps, masses. A sixth of the Americano’s
income is rooked out of him by rogues who have at him officially, and
in the name of the government; half the remainder goes to sharpers who
prefer the greater risks and greater profits of private enterprise.
All schemes to save him from such victimizations have failed in the
past, and all of them, I believe, are bound to fail in the future;
most of the more gaudy of them are simply devices to facilitate fresh
victimizations. For democratic man, dreaming eternally of Utopias, is
ever a prey to shibboleths, and those that fetch him in his political
capacity are more than matched by those that fetch him in his rôle of
private citizen. His normal and natural situation, held through all the
vicissitudes of his brief history, has been that of one who, at great
cost and effort, has sneaked home a jug of contraband whiskey, sworn to
have issued out of a padlocked distillery, and then finds, on uncorking
it, that it is a compound of pepper, prune juice and wood alcohol.
This, in a sentence, is the history of democracy. It is, in detail,
the history of all such characteristically democratic masterpieces as
Bryanism, Ku Kluxery, and the war to end war. They are full of virtuous
pretences, and they are unmitigated swindles.
All observers of democracy, from Tocqueville to the Adams brothers
and Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, have marveled at its corruptions on the
political side, and speculated heavily as to the causes thereof. The
fact was noted in the earliest days of the democratic movement, and
Friedrich von Gentz, who began life as an Anglomaniac, was using it
as an argument against the parliamentary system so early as 1809.
Gentz, who served Metternich as the current Washington correspondents
serve whatever dullard happens to be President, contended that the
introduction of democracy on the Continent would bring in a reign of
bribery, and thus destroy the integrity and authority of the state.
The proofs that he was right were already piling up, in his day, in
the United States. They were destined to be greatly reinforced when
the Third Republic got under way in France in 1870, and to be given
impressive support when the German Republic set up shop in 1918. In
1919, for the first time since the coronation of Henry the Fowler,
a German Cabinet minister crossed the border between days, his loot
under his arm. The historians, immersed in their closets, marvel that
such things happen, and marvel even more that democracy takes them
calmly, and even lightly. Somewhere in “The Education of Henry Adams”
you will find an account of the gigantic peculations that went on
during the second Grant administration, and melancholy reflections
upon the populace’s philosophic acceptance of them as inevitable, and
even natural. In our own time we have seen the English mob embrace
and elevate to higher office the democratic statesmen caught in the
Marconi scandal, and the American mob condone almost automatically
the herculean raids upon the Treasury that marked the Wilson
administration, and the less spectacular but even more deliberate
thievings that went on under the martyred Harding. In the latter case
it turned upon the small body of specialists in rectitude who ventured
to protest, and in the end they found themselves far more unpopular
than the thieves.
Such phenomena, as I say, puzzle the more academic pathologists of
democracy, but as for me, I only say that they seem to be in strict
accord with God’s invariable laws. Why should democracy rise against
bribery? It is itself a form of wholesale bribery. In place of a
government with a fixed purpose and a visible goal, it sets up a
government that is a mere function of the mob’s vagaries, and that
maintains itself by constantly bargaining with those vagaries. Its
security depends wholly upon providing satisfactory bribes for the
prehensile minorities that constitute the mob, or that have managed to
deceive and inflame the mob. One day the labour leaders--a government
within the general government--must be bought with offices; the next
day the dupes of these labour leaders must be bought with legislation,
usually of a sort loading the ordinary scales of justice in their
favour; the day after there must be something for the manufacturers,
for the Methodists, for the Catholics, for the farmers. I have
exhibited, in another work, the fact that this last class demands
bribes pure and simple--that its yearnings for its own private
advantage are never ameliorated by yearnings for the common good. The
whole process of government under democracy, as everyone knows, is a
process of similar trading. The very head of the state, having no
title to his office save that which lies in the popular will, is forced
to haggle and bargain like the lowliest office-seeker. There has been
no President of the United States since Washington who did not go into
office with a long list of promises in his pocket, and nine-tenths of
them have always been promises of private reward from the public store.
It is surely not regarded as immoral, by the democratic ethic, to make
and execute such promises, though statesmen of lofty pretensions,
_e. g._, Lincoln, sometimes deny having made them. What is reproached
as immoral is making them, and then not keeping them. When the late
Dr. Wilson made William Jennings Bryan his Secretary of State the
act brought forth only tolerant smiles, though it was comparable to
appointing a chiropractor Surgeon-General of the Army--a feat which
Dr. Harding, a few years later, escaped performing only by a hair.
But if Wilson had forgotten his obligation to Bryan there would have
been an outburst of moral indignation, even among Bryan’s enemies, and
the collapse of Wilson would have come long before it did. When he
blew up at last it was not because, after promulgating his Fourteen
Points, he joined in swindling a helpless foe at Versailles; it was
because he tried, at Paris, to undo some of the consequences of
that fraud by forcing the United States into the League of Nations.
A democratic state, indeed, is so firmly grounded upon cheats and
humbugs of all sorts that they inevitably colour its dealings with
other nations, and so one always finds it regarded as a dubious friend
and a tricky foe. That the United States, in its foreign relations,
has descended to gross deceits and tergiversations since the earliest
days of the Republic was long ago pointed out by Lecky; it is regarded
universally to-day as a pious fraud--which is to say, as a Puritan.
Nor has England, the next most eminent democratic state, got the name
of _perfide Albion_ for nothing. Ruled by shady men, a nation itself
becomes shady.
In its domestic relations, of course, the same causes have the same
effects. The government deals with the citizens from whom it has its
mandate in a base and disingenuous manner, and fails completely to
maintain equal justice among them. It not only follows the majority
in persecuting those who happen to be unpopular; it also institutes
persecutions of its own, and frequently against men of the greatest
rectitude and largest public usefulness. I marvel that no candidate
for the doctorate has ever written a realistic history of the American
Department of Justice, ironically so called. It has been engaged
in sharp practices since the earliest days, and remains a fecund
source of oppression and corruption to-day. It is hard to recall an
administration in which it was not the centre of grave scandal. Within
our own time it has actually resorted to perjury in its efforts to undo
men guilty of flouting it, and at all times it has laboured valiantly
to nullify the guarantees of the Bill of Rights. The doings of its
corps of spies and _agents provocateurs_ are worthy the pen of some
confectioner of dime novels; at one time they were employed against
the members of the two houses of Congress, and the alarmed legislators
threw them off only by threatening to hold up their pay. As Mill long
ago pointed out, the tyranny of the majority under democracy is not
only shown in oppressive laws, but also in a usurped power to suspend
the operation of laws that are just. In this enterprise a democratic
government always marches ahead of the majority. Even more than the
most absolute oriental despotism, it becomes a government of men,
not of laws. Its favourites are, to all intents and purposes, immune
to criminal processes, whatever their offences, and its enemies are
exposed to espionage and persecution of the most aggravated sort. It
takes advantage of every passing craze and delusion of the mob to
dispose of those who oppose it, and it maintains a complex and highly
effective machine for launching such crazes and delusions when the
supply of them lags. Above all, it always shows that characteristically
Puritan habit of which Brooks Adams wrote in “The Emancipation of
Massachusetts”: the habit, to wit, of inflicting as much mental
suffering as possible upon its victims. That is to say, it not only has
at them by legal means; it also defames them, and so seeks to ruin them
doubly. The constant and central aim of every democratic government
is to silence criticism of itself. It begins to weaken, _i. e._, the
jobs of its component rogues begin to be insecure, the instant such
criticism rises. It is thus _fidei defensor_ before it is anything
else, and its whole power, legal and extra-legal, is thrown against the
sceptic who challenges its infallibility. Constitutional checks have
little effect upon its operations, for the only machinery for putting
them into effect is under its control. No ruler, indeed, ever wants to
be a constitutional ruler, and least of all the ruler whose reign has
a term, and who must make hay, in consequence, while the sun shines.
Under republics, as under constitutional monarchies, the history of
government is a history of successive usurpations. I avoid the banality
of pointing to the cases of Lincoln and Wilson. No man would want
to be President of the United States in strict accordance with the
Constitution. There is no sense of power in merely executing laws; it
comes from evading or augmenting them.
I incline to think that this view of government as a group of men
struggling for power and profit, in the face and at the expense of the
generality of men, has its place somewhere in the dark recesses of
the popular mind, and that it accounts, at least in large part, for
the toleration with which public corruption is regarded in democratic
states. Democratic man, to begin with, is corrupt himself: he will take
whatever he can safely get, law or no law. He assumes, naturally and
accurately, that the knaves and mountebanks who govern him are of the
same kidney--in his own phrase, that they are in public life for what
there is in it. It thus does not shock him to find them running true
to the ordinances of their nature. If, indeed, any individual among
them shows an unusual rectitude, and refuses spectacularly to take
what might be his for the grabbing, _Homo boobiens_ sets him down as
either a liar or an idiot, and refuses to admire him. So with private
rogues who tap the communal till. Democratic man is stupid, but he is
not so stupid that he does not see the government as a group of men
devoted to his exploitation--that is, as a group external to his own
group, and with antagonistic interests. He believes that its central
aim is to squeeze as much out of him as he can be forced to yield, and
so he sees no immorality in attempting a contrary squeeze when the
opportunity offers. Beating the government thus becomes a transaction
devoid of moral turpitude. If, when it is achieved on an heroic scale
by scoundrels of high tone, a storm of public indignation follows,
the springs of that indignation are to be found, not in virtue, but
in envy. In point of fact, it seldom follows. As I have said, there
was little if any public fury over the colossal stealings that went on
during the Wilson administration, and there was still less over the
smaller but perhaps even more cynical stealings that glorified the
short reign of Harding; in the latter case, in fact, most of the odium
settled upon the specialists in righteousness who laid the thieves by
the heels. The soldiers coming home from the War for Democracy did not
demand that the war profiteers be jailed; they simply demanded that
they themselves be paid enough to make up the difference between what
they got for fighting for their country and what they might have stolen
had they escaped the draft. Their chief indignation was lavished, not
upon the airship contractors who made off with a billion, but upon
their brothers who were paid $10 a day in the shipyards. The feats of
the former were beyond their grasp, but those of the latter they could
imagine--and envy.
This fellow feeling for thieves is probably what makes capitalism
so secure in democratic societies. Under absolutism it is always in
danger, and not infrequently, as history teaches, it is exploited and
undone, but under democracy it is safe. Democratic man can understand
the aims and aspirations of capitalism; they are, greatly magnified,
simply his own aims and aspirations. Thus he tends to be friendly to
it, and to view with suspicion those who propose to overthrow it. The
new system, whatever its nature, would force him to invent a whole
new outfit of dreams, and that is always a difficult and unpleasant
business, to workers in the ditch as to philosophers in the learned
grove. Capitalism under democracy has a further advantage: its enemies,
even when it is attacked, are scattered and weak, and it is usually
easily able to array one half of them against the other half, and
thus dispose of both. That is precisely what happened in the United
States after the late war. The danger that confronted capitalism was
then a double one. On the one side there was the tall talk that the
returning conscripts, once they got out of uniform, would demand the
punishment of the patriots who had looted the public treasury while
they were away. On the other side there was an uneasy rumour that a
war _Katzenjammer_ was heavily upon them, and that they would demand
a scientific inquiry into the true causes and aims of the war, and
into the manner and purposes of their own uncomfortable exploitation.
This double danger was quickly met and turned off, and by the simple
device of diverting the bile of the conscripts against those of
their own class who had escaped servitude, to wit, the small group
of draft-dodgers and conscientious objectors and the larger group of
political radicals, who were represented to be slackers in theory if
not in fact. Thus one group of victims was set upon the other, and
the fact that both had a grievance against their joint exploiters
was concealed and forgotten. Mob fears, easily aroused, aided in the
achievement of the _coup_. Within a few weeks gallant bands of American
Legionaries were hunting Reds down all the back-alleys of the land,
and gaudily butchering them, when found, at odds of a hundred to one.
I know of nothing more indicative of the strength of capitalism under
democracy than this melodramatic and extremely amusing business. The
scheme succeeded admirably, and it deserved to succeed, for it was
managed with laudable virtuosity, and it was based upon a shrewd
understanding of democratic psychology.
I believe that every other emergency that is likely to arise, at least
in the United States, will be dealt with in the same adroit and
effective manner. The same thing has been done in other democratic
states: I point to the so-called general strike in England in 1926,
which was wrecked by pitting half of the proletariat against the other
half. The capitalistic system now enlists the best brains in all the
democratic nations, including France and Germany, and I believe that,
instead of losing such support hereafter, it will get more and more
of it. As the old aristocracies decline, the plutocracy is bound to
inherit their hegemony, and to have the support of the nether mob.
An aristocratic society may hold that a soldier or a man of learning
is superior to a rich manufacturer or banker, but in a democratic
society the latter are inevitably put higher, if only because their
achievement is more readily comprehended by the inferior man, and he
can more easily imagine himself, by some favour of God, duplicating
it. Thus the imponderable but powerful force of public opinion
directs the aspirations of all the more alert and ambitious young
men toward business, and what is so assiduously practised tends to
produce experts. E. W. Howe, I incline to think, is quite right when
he argues that the average American banker or business man, whatever
his demerits otherwise, is at least more competent professionally than
the average American statesman, musician, painter, author, labour
leader, scholar, theologian or politician. Think of the best American
poet of our time, or the best soldier, or the best violoncellist,
and then ask yourself if his rank among his fellows in the world is
seriously to be compared with that of the late J. Pierpont Morgan
among financial manipulators, or that of John D. Rockefeller among
traders. The capitalists, in fact, run the country, as they run all
democracies: they emerged in Germany, after the republic arose from the
ruins of the late war, like Anadyomene from the sea. They organize and
control the minorities that struggle eternally for power, and so get a
gradually firmer grip upon the government. One by one they dispose of
such demagogues as Bryan and Roosevelt, and put the helm of state into
the hands of trusted and reliable men--McKinley, Harding, Coolidge.
In England, Germany and France they patronize, in a somewhat wistful
way, what remains of the old aristocracies. In the United States,
through such agents as the late Gompers, they keep Demos penned in a
gilt and glittering cage. Public opinion? Walter Lippmann, searching
for it, could not find it. A century before him Fichte said “_es gar
nicht existirte_.” Public opinion, in its raw state, gushes out in the
immemorial form of the mob’s fears. It is piped to central factories,
and there it is flavoured and coloured, and put into cans.
CODA
IV
CODA
1.
_The Future of Democracy_
Whether or not democracy is destined to survive in the world until
the corruptible puts on incorruption and the immemorial Christian
dead leap out of their graves, their faces shining and their yells
resounding--this is something, I confess, that I don’t know, nor
is it necessary, for the purposes of the present inquiry, that I
venture upon the hazard of a guess. My business is not prognosis,
but diagnosis. I am not engaged in therapeutics, but in pathology.
That simple statement of fact, I daresay, will be accepted as a
confession, condemning me out of hand as unfit for my task, and even
throwing a certain doubt upon my _bona fides_. For it is one of the
peculiar intellectual accompaniments of democracy that the concept of
the insoluble becomes unfashionable--nay, almost infamous. To lack a
remedy is to lack the very license to discuss disease. The causes of
this are to be sought, without question, in the nature of democracy
itself. It came into the world as a cure-all, and it remains primarily
a cure-all to this day. Any boil upon the body politic, however vast
and raging, may be relieved by taking a vote; any flux of blood may
be stopped by passing a law. The aim of government is to repeal the
laws of nature, and re-enact them with moral amendments. War becomes
simply a device to end war. The state, a mystical emanation from the
mob, takes on a transcendental potency, and acquires the power to
make over the father which begat it. Nothing remains inscrutable and
beyond remedy, not even the way of a man with a maid. It was not so
under the ancient and accursed systems of despotism, now happily purged
out of the world. They, too, I grant you, had certain pretensions of
an homeric gaudiness, but they at least refrained from attempts to
abolish sin, poverty, stupidity, cowardice, and other such immutable
realities. Mediæval Christianity, which was a theological and
philosophical _apologia_ for those systems, actually erected belief in
that immutability into a cardinal article of faith. The evils of the
world were incurable: one put off the quest for a perfect moral order
until one got to heaven, _post mortem_. There arose, in consequence,
a scheme of checks and balances that was consummate and completely
satisfactory, for it could not be put to a test, and the logical holes
in it were chinked with miracles. But no more. To-day the Holy Saints
are deposed. Now each and every human problem swings into the range of
practical politics. The worst and oldest of them may be solved facilely
by travelling bands of lady Ph.D.’s, each bearing the mandate of a
Legislature of kept men, all unfaithful to their protectors.
Democracy becomes a substitute for the old religion, and the antithesis
of it: the Ku Kluxers, though their reasoning may be faulty, are not
far off the facts in their conclusion that Holy Church is its enemy.
It shows all the magical potency of the great systems of faith. It
has the power to enchant and disarm; it is not vulnerable to logical
attack. I point for proof to the appalling gyrations and contortions of
its chief exponents. Read, for example, the late James Bryce’s “Modern
Democracies.” Observe how he amasses incontrovertible evidence that
democracy doesn’t work--and then concludes with a stout declaration
that it does. Or, if his two fat volumes are too much for you, turn to
some school reader and give a judicious perusal to Lincoln’s Gettysburg
Address, with its argument that the North fought the Civil War to save
self-government to the world!--a thesis echoed in falsetto, and by
feebler men, fifty years later. It is impossible, by any device known
to philosophers, to meet doctrines of that sort; they obviously lie
outside the range of logical ideas. There is, in the human mind, a
natural taste for such hocus-pocus. It greatly simplifies the process
of ratiocination, which is unbearably painful to the great majority
of men. What dulls and baffles the teeth may be got down conveniently
by an heroic gulp. No doubt there is an explanation here of the
long-continued popularity of the dogma of the Trinity, which remains
unstated in plain terms after two thousand years. And no doubt the
dogma of Transubstantiation came under fire in the Reformation because
it had grown too simple and comprehensible--because even the Scholastic
philosophy had been unable to convert its plain propositions into
something that could be believed without being understood. Democracy
is shot through with this delight in the incredible, this banal
mysticism. One cannot discuss it without colliding with preposterous
postulates, all of them cherished like authentic hairs from the
whiskers of Moses himself. I have alluded to its touching acceptance
of the faith that progress is illimitable and ordained of God--that
every human problem, in the very nature of things, may be solved.
There are corollaries that are even more naïve. One, for example, is
to the general effect that optimism is a virtue in itself--that there
is a mysterious merit in being hopeful and of glad heart, even in the
presence of adverse and immovable facts. This curious notion turns the
glittering wheels of Rotary, and is the motive power of the political
New Thoughters called Liberals. Certainly the attitude of the average
American Liberal toward the so-called League of Nations offered superb
clinical material to the student of democratic psychopathology. He
began by arguing that the League would save the world. Confronted by
proofs of its fraudulence, he switched to the doctrine that believing
in it would save the world. So, later on, with the Washington
Disarmament Conference. The man who hopes absurdly, it appears, is in
some fantastic and gaseous manner a better citizen than the man who
detects and exposes the truth. Bear this sweet democratic axiom clearly
in mind. It is, fundamentally, what is the matter with the United
States.
As I say, my present mandate does not oblige me to conjure up a system
that will surpass and shame democracy as democracy surpasses and
shames the polity of the Andaman Islanders or the Great Khan--a system
full-blown and perfect, like Prohibition, and ready to be put into
effect by the simple adoption of an amendment to the Constitution. Such
a system, for all I know, may lie outside the farthest soarings of the
human mind, though that mind can weigh the stars and know God. Until
the end of the chapter the ants and bees may flutter their sardonic
antennæ at us in that department, as they do in others: the last joke
upon man may be that he never learned how to govern himself in a
rational and competent manner, as the last joke upon woman may be that
she never had a baby without wishing that the Day of Judgment were a
week past. I am not even undertaking to prove here that democracy is
too full of evils to be further borne. On the contrary, I am convinced
that it has some valuable merits, not often described, and I shall
refer to a few of them presently. All I argue is that its manifest
defects, if they are ever to be got rid of at all, must be got rid of
by examining them realistically--that they will never cease to afflict
all the more puissant and exemplary nations so long as discussing
them is impeded by concepts borrowed from theology. As for me, I have
never encountered any actual evidence, convincing to an ordinary jury,
that _vox populi_ is actually _vox Dei_. The proofs, indeed, run the
other way. The life of the inferior man is one long protest against
the obstacles that God interposes to the attainment of his dreams,
and democracy, if it is anything at all, is simply one way of getting
’round those obstacles. Thus it represents, not a jingling echo of
what seems to be the divine will, but a raucous defiance of it. To
that extent, perhaps, it is truly civilized, for civilization, as I
have argued elsewhere, is best described as an effort to remedy the
blunders and check the cruel humours of the Cosmic Kaiser. But what is
defiant is surely not official, and what is not official is open to
examination.
For all I know, democracy may be a self-limiting disease, as
civilization itself seems to be. There are obvious paradoxes in its
philosophy, and some of them have a suicidal smack. It offers John Doe
a means to rise above his place beside Richard Roe, and then, by making
Roe his equal, it takes away the chief usufructs of the rising. I here
attempt no pretty logical gymnastics: the history of democratic states
is a history of disingenuous efforts to get rid of the second half of
that dilemma. There is not only the natural yearning of Doe to use
and enjoy the superiority that he has won; there is also the natural
tendency of Roe, as an inferior man, to acknowledge it. Democracy, in
fact, is always inventing class distinctions, despite its theoretical
abhorrence of them. The baron has departed, but in his place stand the
grand goblin, the supreme worthy archon, the sovereign grand commander.
Democratic man, as I have remarked, is quite unable to think of himself
as a free individual; he must belong to a group, or shake with fear
and loneliness--and the group, of course, must have its leaders.
It would be hard to find a country in which such brummagem serene
highnesses are revered with more passionate devotion than they get in
the United States. The distinction that goes with mere office runs far
ahead of the distinction that goes with actual achievement. A Harding
is regarded as genuinely superior to a Halsted, no doubt because his
doings are better understood. But there is a form of human striving
that is understood by democratic man even better than Harding’s, and
that is the striving for money. Thus the plutocracy, in a democratic
state, tends to take the place of the missing aristocracy, and even
to be mistaken for it. It is, of course, something quite different.
It lacks all the essential characters of a true aristocracy: a clean
tradition, culture, public spirit, honesty, honour, courage--above
all, courage. It stands under no bond of obligation to the state;
it has no public duty; it is transient and lacks a goal. Its most
puissant dignitaries of to-day came out of the mob only yesterday--and
from the mob they bring all its peculiar ignobilities. As practically
encountered, the plutocracy stands quite as far from the _honnête
homme_ as it stands from the Holy Saints. Its main character is its
incurable timorousness; it is for ever grasping at the straws held
out by demagogues. Half a dozen gabby Jewish youths, meeting in a
back room to plan a revolution--in other words, half a dozen kittens
preparing to upset the Matterhorn--are enough to scare it half to
death. Its dreams are of banshees, hobgoblins, bugaboos. The honest,
untroubled snores of a Percy or a Hohenstaufen are quite beyond it.
The plutocracy, as I say, is comprehensible to the mob because its
aspirations are essentially those of inferior men: it is not by
accident that Christianity, a mob religion, paves heaven with gold
and precious stones, _i. e._, with money. There are, of course,
reactions against this ignoble ideal among men of more civilized
tastes, even in democratic states, and sometimes they arouse the mob
to a transient distrust of certain of the plutocratic pretensions.
But that distrust seldom arises above mere envy, and the polemic
which engenders it is seldom sound in logic or impeccable in motive.
What it lacks is aristocratic disinterestedness, born of aristocratic
security. There is no body of opinion behind it that is, in the
strictest sense, a free opinion. Its chief exponents, by some divine
irony, are pedagogues of one sort or another--which is to say, men
chiefly marked by their haunting fear of losing their jobs. Living
under such terrors, with the plutocracy policing them harshly on one
side and the mob congenitally suspicious of them on the other, it is
no wonder that their revolt usually peters out in metaphysics, and
that they tend to abandon it as their families grow up, and the costs
of heresy become prohibitive. The pedagogue, in the long run, shows
the virtues of the Congressman, the newspaper editorial writer or the
butler, not those of the aristocrat. When, by any chance, he persists
in contumacy beyond thirty, it is only too commonly a sign, not that
he is heroic, but simply that he is pathological. So with most of
his brethren of the Utopian Fife and Drum Corps, whether they issue
out of his own seminary or out of the wilderness. They are fanatics;
not statesmen. Thus politics, under democracy, resolves itself into
impossible alternatives. Whatever the label on the parties, or the war
cries issuing from the demagogues who lead them, the practical choice
is between the plutocracy on the one side and a rabble of preposterous
impossibilists on the other. One must either follow the New York
_Times_, or one must be prepared to swallow Bryan and the Bolsheviki.
It is a pity that this is so. For what democracy needs most of all is
a party that will separate the good that is in it theoretically from
the evils that beset it practically, and then try to erect that good
into a workable system. What it needs beyond everything is a party of
liberty. It produces, true enough, occasional libertarians, just as
despotism produces occasional regicides, but it treats them in the same
drum-head way. It will never have a party of them until it invents and
installs a genuine aristocracy, to breed them and secure them.
2.
_Last Words_
I have alluded somewhat vaguely to the merits of democracy. One of them
is quite obvious: it is, perhaps, the most charming form of government
ever devised by man. The reason is not far to seek. It is based upon
propositions that are palpably not true--and what is not true, as
everyone knows, is always immensely more fascinating and satisfying to
the vast majority of men than what is true. Truth has a harshness that
alarms them, and an air of finality that collides with their incurable
romanticism. They turn, in all the great emergencies of life, to
the ancient promises, transparently false but immensely comforting,
and of all those ancient promises there is none more comforting than
the one to the effect that the lowly shall inherit the earth. It is
at the bottom of the dominant religious system of the modern world,
and it is at the bottom of the dominant political system. The latter,
which is democracy, gives it an even higher credit and authority
than the former, which is Christianity. More, democracy gives it a
certain appearance of objective and demonstrable truth. The mob man,
functioning as citizen, gets a feeling that he is really important to
the world--that he is genuinely running things. Out of his maudlin
herding after rogues and mountebanks there comes to him a sense of
vast and mysterious power--which is what makes archbishops, police
sergeants, the grand goblins of the Ku Klux and other such magnificoes
happy. And out of it there comes, too, a conviction that he is somehow
wise, that his views are taken seriously by his betters--which is what
makes United States Senators, fortune-tellers and Young Intellectuals
happy. Finally, there comes out of it a glowing consciousness of a
high duty triumphantly done--which is what makes hangmen and husbands
happy.
All these forms of happiness, of course, are illusory. They don’t last.
The democrat, leaping into the air to flap his wings and praise God,
is for ever coming down with a thump. The seeds of his disaster, as I
have shown, lie in his own stupidity: he can never get rid of the naïve
delusion--so beautifully Christian!--that happiness is something to be
got by taking it away from the other fellow. But there are seeds, too,
in the very nature of things: a promise, after all, is only a promise,
even when it is supported by divine revelation, and the chances against
its fulfilment may be put into a depressing mathematical formula.
Here the irony that lies under all human aspiration shows itself: the
quest for happiness, as always, brings only _un_happiness in the end.
But saying that is merely saying that the true charm of democracy
is not for the democrat but for the spectator. That spectator, it
seems to me, is favoured with a show of the first cut and calibre.
Try to imagine anything more heroically absurd! What grotesque false
pretences! What a parade of obvious imbecilities! What a welter
of fraud! But is fraud unamusing? Then I retire forthwith as a
psychologist. The fraud of democracy, I contend, is more amusing than
any other--more amusing even, and by miles, than the fraud of religion.
Go into your praying-chamber and give sober thought to any of the more
characteristic democratic inventions: say, Law Enforcement. Or to any
of the typical democratic prophets: say, the late Archangel Bryan. If
you don’t come out paled and palsied by mirth then you will not laugh
on the Last Day itself, when Presbyterians step out of the grave like
chicks from the egg, and wings blossom from their scapulæ, and they
leap into interstellar space with roars of joy.
I have spoken hitherto of the possibility that democracy may be a
self-limiting disease, like measles. It is, perhaps, something more:
it is self-devouring. One cannot observe it objectively without
being impressed by its curious distrust of itself--its apparently
ineradicable tendency to abandon its whole philosophy at the first sign
of strain. I need not point to what happens invariably in democratic
states when the national safety is menaced. All the great tribunes
of democracy, on such occasions, convert themselves, by a process as
simple as taking a deep breath, into despots of an almost fabulous
ferocity. Lincoln, Roosevelt and Wilson come instantly to mind: Jackson
and Cleveland are in the background, waiting to be recalled. Nor is
this process confined to times of alarm and terror: it is going on day
in and day out. Democracy always seems bent upon killing the thing it
theoretically loves. I have rehearsed some of its operations against
liberty, the very corner-stone of its political metaphysic. It not only
wars upon the thing itself; it even wars upon mere academic advocacy
of it. I offer the spectacle of Americans jailed for reading the Bill
of Rights as perhaps the most gaudily humorous ever witnessed in the
modern world. Try to imagine monarchy jailing subjects for maintaining
the divine right of Kings! Or Christianity damning a believer for
arguing that Jesus Christ was the Son of God! This last, perhaps, has
been done: anything is possible in that direction. But under democracy
the remotest and most fantastic possibility is a commonplace of every
day. All the axioms resolve themselves into thundering paradoxes, many
amounting to downright contradictions in terms. The mob is competent to
rule the rest of us--but it must be rigorously policed itself. There
is a government, not of men, but of laws--but men are set upon benches
to decide finally what the law is and may be. The highest function
of the citizen is to serve the state--but the first assumption that
meets him, when he essays to discharge it, is an assumption of his
disingenuousness and dishonour. Is that assumption commonly sound? Then
the farce only grows the more glorious.
I confess, for my part, that it greatly delights me. I enjoy democracy
immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.
Does it exalt dunderheads, cowards, trimmers, frauds, cads? Then the
pain of seeing them go up is balanced and obliterated by the joy of
seeing them come down. Is it inordinately wasteful, extravagant,
dishonest? Then so is every other form of government: all alike are
enemies to laborious and virtuous men. Is rascality at the very heart
of it? Well, we have borne that rascality since 1776, and continue
to survive. In the long run, it may turn out that rascality is
necessary to human government, and even to civilization itself--that
civilization, at bottom, is nothing but a colossal swindle. I do
not know: I report only that when the suckers are running well the
spectacle is infinitely exhilarating. But I am, it may be, a somewhat
malicious man: my sympathies, when it comes to suckers, tend to be coy.
What I can’t make out is how any man can believe in democracy who feels
for and with them, and is pained when they are debauched and made a
show of. How can any man be a democrat who is sincerely a democrat?
THE END
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