PREJUDICES

FOURTH SERIES




_THE WORKS OF H. L. MENCKEN_

  PREJUDICES: FIRST SERIES[1]

  PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES[1]

  PREJUDICES: THIRD SERIES[1]

  PREJUDICES: FOURTH SERIES

  A BOOK OF BURLESQUES[1]

  A BOOK OF PREFACES[1]

  IN DEFENSE OF WOMEN[1][2]

  THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE[1]

  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

  A BOOK OF CALUMNY

  MEN VS. THE MAN
  [_With R. R. LaMonte_]

  HELIOGABALUS[2]
  [_With Mr. Nathan_]

EUROPE AFTER 8:15 [_With Mr. Nathan and W. H. Wright_]

THE PHILOSOPHY OF FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE[1]


_TRANSLATIONS_

THE ANTICHRIST, BY F. W. NIETZSCHE


_NEW YORK: ALFRED · A · KNOPF_


FOOTNOTES:

[1] Also Published in England

[2] Also Published in Germany in translation




  PREJUDICES

  FOURTH SERIES

  By H. L. MENCKEN

  [Illustration]

  PUBLISHED AT THE BORZOI · NEW YORK · BY

  ALFRED · A · KNOPF




COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC. · PUBLISHED, OCTOBER, 1924 ·
SET UP, AND ELECTROTYPED BY THE VAIL-BALLOU PRESS, INC., BINGHAMTON, N.
Y. · PAPER FURNISHED BY W. F. ETHERINGTON & CO., NEW YORK. · PRINTED
AND BOUND BY THE PLIMPTON PRESS, NORWOOD, MASS. ·


THE FIRST EDITION OF “PREJUDICES: FOURTH SERIES” CONSISTS OF THIRTY-SIX
HUNDRED AND TEN COPIES AS FOLLOWS: ONE HUNDRED AND TEN ON BORZOI ALL
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MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA




  CONTENTS


  I The American Tradition,                           9

  II The Husbandman,                                 43

  III High and Ghostly Matters,                      61

  1. The Cosmic Secretariat,                         61

  2. The Nature of Faith,                            65

  3. The Devotee,                                    76

  4. The Restoration of Beauty,                      77

  5. End-Product,                                    78

  6. Another,                                        79

  7. Holy Clerks,                                    79

  IV Justice Under Democracy,                        85

  V Reflections on Human Monogamy,                  103

  1. The Eternal Farce,                             103

  2. Venus at the Domestic Hearth,                  108

  3. The Rat-Trap,                                  110

  4. The Love Chase,                                112

  5. Women as Realpolitiker,                        113

  6. Footnote for Suffragettes,                     114

  7. The Helpmate,                                  114

  8. The Mime,                                      116

  9. Cavia Cobaya,                                  117

  10. The Survivor,                                 118

  11. The Veteran’s Disaster,                       119

  12. Moral Indignation,                            119

  13. The Man and His Shadow,                       120

  14. The Balance-Sheet,                            123

  15. Yearning,                                     124

  VI The Politician,                                125

  VII From a Critic’s Notebook,                     138

  1. Progress,                                      138

  2. The Iconoclast,                                139

  3. The Artists’ Model,                            140

  4. The Good Citizen as Artist,                    140

  5. Definitive Judgments,                          141

  VIII Totentanz,                                   145

  IX Meditations in the Methodist Desert,           158

  1. The New Galahad,                               158

  2. Optimist vs. Optimist,                         161

  3. Caveat for the Defense,                        167

  4. Portrait of an Ideal World,                    173

  X Essay in Constructive Criticism,                180

  XI On the Nature of Man,                          197

  1. The Animal That Thinks,                        197

  2. Veritas Odium Parit,                           198

  3. The Eternal Cripple,                           199

  4. The Test,                                      200

  5. National Characters,                           201

  6. The Goal,                                      204

  7. Psychology at 5 A. M.,                         204

  8. The Reward,                                    205

  9. The Altruist,                                  205

  10. The Man of Honor,                             206

  XII Bugaboo,                                      207

  XIII On Government,                               220

  XIV Toward a Realistic Aesthetic,                 237

  1. The Nature of Art,                             237

  2. The One-Legged Art,                            240

  3. Symbiosis and the Artist,                      248

  XV Contributions to the Study of Vulgar
  Psychology,                                       253

  1. The Downfall of the Navy,                      253

  2. The Mind of the Slave,                         261

  3. The Art Eternal,                               269

  XVI The American Novel,                           278

  XVII People and Things,                           294

  1. The Capitol of a Great Republic,               294

  2. Ambassadors of Christ,                         296

  3. Bilder aus schöner Zeit,                       297

  4. The High Seas,                                 299

  5. The Shrine of Mnemosyne,                       300




PREJUDICES: FOURTH SERIES




I. THE AMERICAN TRADITION


1

Ever since Dr. William Crary Brownell, _de l’Académie Américaine_,
published his little volume, “Standards,” in 1917, a vast hullabaloo
has been going on among the native, white, Protestant _Gelehrten_ of
the Republic, particularly in the great open spaces of the South and
Middle West, in favor of what they call the American tradition in
letters. Perhaps I libel Brownell, a worthy if somewhat gummy man,
by hinting that he started this whooping; it may be that its actual
generator was George Creel, the Rev. Dr. Newell Dwight Hillis, the
Hon. James M. Beck, the Hon. A. Mitchell Palmer or some other such
master-mind of that patriotic and intelligent era. Whatever its
parentage, it was at least born in the holiest of wedlock, and to the
applause of all right-thinking men; and if I now presume to pull its
ear I surely hope that no one will suspect that I thereby question its
legitimacy. It is, in fact, absolutely and irrefragably American from
snout to _os calcis_, not only in outward seeming and demeanor, but
also in inner essence, and anyone who flouts it also flouts everything
that is most sacred in the spirit of Americanism. To that business I
herewith address myself briefly.

What, then, is the spirit of Americanism? I precipitate it conveniently
into the doctrine that the way to ascertain the truth about anything,
whether in the realms of exact knowledge, in the purple zone of the
fine arts or in the empyrean reaches of metaphysics, is to take a
vote upon it, and that the way to propagate that truth, once it has
been ascertained and proclaimed by lawful authority, is with a club.
This doctrine, it seems to me, explains almost everything that is
indubitably American, and particularly everything American that is most
puzzling to men of older and less inspired cultures, from American
politics to American learning, and from the lush and unprecedented
American code of morals to the amazing and almost fabulous American
code of honor. At one end it explains the archetypical buffooneries
of the Ku Klux Klan, the American Legion, the Anti-Saloon League, the
Department of Justice and all other such great engines of cultural
propaganda, and at the other end it explains the amusing theory that
the limits of the nation’s æsthetic adventures are to be fixed by a
vague and self-appointed camorra of rustic Ph.D.’s, and that any
artist, indigenous or imported, who dares to pass them is not only a
sinner against the beautiful but also a traitor to the flag, and that
he ought, shall and must be throttled by the secular arm. Patriotism
thus gathers in æsthetics and gives it suck, as it has already given
suck to ethics. There are artists who are worthy of the boon of
freedom, and there are artists who are criminal and must be put down,
as anarchists and polygamists are put down. The fancies of the poet in
his velvet coat, the vast soarings and grapplings of the metaphysician
in his damp cell, the writhings of the logician chained to his rock,
become either right or wrong, and whatever is right in them is American
and whatever is wrong is not American.

How far this last notion goes under the Constitution is best shown,
not in the relatively _pianissimo_ pronunciamentoes of such suave and
cautious dons as Brownell, who are themselves often sadly polluted
by foreign ideas, despite their heroic struggle to remember Valley
Forge and San Juan Hill, but in the far more frank and passionate
bulls of their followers in the seminaries of the cow States, where
every male of _Homo sapiens_ has copious _vibrissæ_ on his chest
and Nordic blue eyes in his head, and is a red-blooded, go-getting,
up-and-coming he-man. I introduce at once a perfect speciman, Doughty
of Texas--a savant but little known in the diabetic East, but for
long a favorite expert in comparative morals in the university at
Austin--not a professor, alas, for he lacks the Ph.D., but _amicus
curiæ_ to the other professors, as befits his trade of jurisconsult,
and a frequent author of critical papers. Doughty has passion but he
also has diligence: a combination not too common. Unlike the lean and
slippered Beers, of Yale, who once boasted that he had read none of the
books he was denouncing, Doughty is at pains to look into even the most
subversive, as a dutiful Censor Librorum looks into even “Science and
Health” and the works of Dr. Marie C. Stopes. Some time ago, determined
to get at and expose the worst, he plowed magnificently through a whole
library--through all the new poetry from Carl Sandburg to “The Spoon
River Anthology,” and all the new novels from Dreiser to Waldo Frank,
and all the vast mass of immoral criticism accompanying them, from that
in the _Dial_ and the _Nation_ to that in the _Little Review_, _S4N_
and the Chicago _Literary Times_. “For many months now,” he reported
when he emerged at last, “there has passed before me the whole ghastly
array.... I have read the ‘books’; the ‘fiction’ and the ‘verse’;
the ‘drama,’ the ‘articles’ and the ‘essays’; the ‘sketches’ and the
‘criticisms,’ and whatever else is squeaked and gibbered by these
unburied and not-to-be-handled dead.... It is this unnamable by-product
of congenital deficiency, perverted dissipation and adulterated
narcotics ... which I refer to as ‘modern [American] literature.’”

And what is the Texas Taine’s verdict upon this modern American
literature? The verdict, in brief, of all other right-thinking,
forward-looking he-men, North, East, South, West--the verdict of every
American who truly loves the flag, and knows congenitally what is right
and what is wrong. He not only finds that it is, in itself, nothing
but “swept-up rottenness and garbage--the dilute sewage of the sordid
mental slums of New York and Chicago”; he also finds that the ladies
and gentlemen who compose it are no more than “a horde of chancre-laden
rats,” that they constitute a “devil’s crew of perverted drug-addicts,”
that they are engaged unanimously upon a “flabby and feeble assault
... upon that ancient decency that for unnumbered generations of the
white Northern races of mankind, at least, has grown and strengthened
as a seed cast upon kindly soil,” and, finally, that “no one of the
‘writers’ of this unhappy array was in the service of the United
States in the Great War”--in brief, that the whole movement is no more
than a foul conspiracy to tear down the flag, uproot the Republic and
exterminate the Nordic Blond, and that, in consequence, it is the
duty of every American who is a member “of a white Nordic race, save
the Teutonic,” to come sliding down the pole, grab the tarpot, and
go galloping to the alarm. So concluding and stating in rich Texan
phrases, the Doughty proceeds to rend specifically a typical book by
one of these immigrant foes to “the heritage of American and English
men.”... The one he chooses is “Jurgen,” by James Branch Cabell, of
Virginia!


2

This long-horned policeman of letters, I admit, is more exuberant than
most. There are no soothing elms on the campus at Austin; instead there
is only the cindered _plaza de toros_ of the Ku Klux Klan. Patriotism,
down there, runs wilder than elsewhere. Men have large hands and loud
voices. The sight of the flag makes their blood leap and boil; when
it is affronted they cannot control themselves. Nevertheless, the
doctrine thus stated in harsh terms by the dreadful Doughty, is, in
its essence, precisely the doctrine of his more urbane colleagues--of
Brownell _de l’Académie Américaine_, of Brander Matthews _de l’Académie
Américaine_, of Sherman _de l’Académie Américaine_, of Erskine _de
l’Institut National_, of Boynton, of old Beers, of all the rest.
It is a doctrine, as I have said, that is thoroughly American--as
American, indeed, as Prohibition, correspondence schools, the Knights
of Pythias or chewing-gum. But by the same token it is a doctrine
that has no more fundamental sense or dignity than the politics of a
Coolidge or the theology of a Billy Sunday. It is, to come to the bald
fact at once, mere drivel--an endless series of false assumptions and
_non-sequiturs_--bad logic piled recklessly upon unsound facts. It is
the product of men who, drilled beyond their capacity for taking in
ideas and harrowed from infancy by harsh and unyielding concepts of
duty, have borrowed the patriotic philosophy of suburban pastors and
country schoolmarms, and now seek to apply it to the consideration of
phenomena that are essentially beyond their comprehension, as honor is
beyond the comprehension of a politician. It is rural Fundamentalism in
the black gown and disarming whiskers of _Wissenschaft_; its inevitable
fruit is what Ernest Boyd has aptly called Ku Klux Kriticism.

The simple truth, of course, is that the standards and traditions these
sublimated Prohibition enforcement officers argue for so eloquently
have no actual existence in the first-line literature of the American
people--that what they demand is not a lofty fidelity to a genuine
ideal, but only an artificial and absurd subservience to notions that
were regarded with contempt by every American of the civilized minority
even when they prevailed. In other words, what they argue for is not a
tradition that would take in Poe, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman and Mark
Twain, but a tradition that would pass over all these men to embrace
Cooper, Bryant, Donald G. Mitchell, N. P. Willis, J. G. Holland,
Charles Dudley Warner, Mrs. Sigourney and the Sweet Singer of Michigan.
Even Longfellow, I daresay, must be left out, for didn’t he drink of
green and terrible waters in Paris as a youth and didn’t Poe accuse him
of stealing from the Spanish and the German? Certainly even Longfellow,
to go back to Doughty’s interdict, “simmered in the devil’s cauldron of
central Europe” and was “spewed out of Italy and France.” Could Bryant
himself qualify? Didn’t he trifle with strange tongues and admire enemy
aliens? And what of Lowell? His Dante studies surely had a sinister
smack; one can’t imagine a Texas Grand Goblin approving them. Bayard
Taylor I refrain from mentioning at all. His translation of “Faust”
came to a just judgment at last when it was hurled from the shelves
of every American university patronized by the issue of 100 per cent.
Americans. Its incineration on a hundred far-flung campuses, indeed,
was the second great patriotic event of the _annus mirabilis_ which saw
the launching of Brownell’s “Standards” and the entrance of the Ku Klux
Klan into literary criticism.

How little the patriot-pedagogues know of the veriest elements
of American literary history was shown very amusingly some time
ago when one of them, a specialist in the Emerson tradition, got
himself into a lather denouncing some Greenwich Village Brandes for
arguing that beauty was independent of morals and its own sufficient
justification--only to be confronted by the disconcerting fact that
Emerson himself had argued the same thing. Can it be that even
pedagogues are unaware that Emerson came to fame by advocating a
general deliverance from the stupid and flabby tradition his name
is now evoked to support, that his whole system of ideas was an
unqualified protest against hampering traditions of every sort, that if
he were alive today he would not be with the professors but unalterably
against them? And Emerson was surely not alone. Go through the list of
genuinely first-rate men: Poe, Hawthorne, Whitman, Mark Twain. One and
all they stood outside the so-called tradition of their time; one and
all, they remained outside the tradition that pedants try so vainly
to impose upon a literature in active being today. Poe’s poems and
tales not only seemed strange to the respectable dolts of his time;
they seemed downright horrible. His criticism, which tells us even
more about him, was still worse: it impinged upon such dull fellows as
Griswold exactly as “Jennie Gerhardt” impinged upon the appalled tutors
in the alfalfa colleges. And what of Hawthorne? Hawthorne’s onslaught
upon the Puritan ethic was the most formidable and effective ever
delivered, save only Emerson’s. And Whitman? Whitman so staggered the
professors that it is only within the last few years that they have
begun to teach him at all; those who flourished in 1870 avoided all
mention of him as carefully as their successors of today avoid mention
of Dreiser or Cabell. And Mark Twain? I put a professor on the stand,
to wit, my Christian friend, Phelps of Yale. Go to Phelps’ “Essays on
Modern Novelists,” and you will find a long and humorous account of the
efforts of unintelligent pedagogues to read Mark out of the national
letters altogether--and go to Van Wyck Brooks’ “The Ordeal of Mark
Twain” and you will discover what great damage that imbecility did to
the man himself. Phelps printed his book in 1910. It was the first book
by a doctor of beautiful letters to admit categorically that Mark was
an artist at all! All the other professors, even in 1910, were still
teaching that Washington Irving was a great humorist and Mark a mere
clown, just as they are teaching now that the criticism of Howells and
Lowell was superior to the criticism of Huneker, and that Henry van
Dyke is a great artist and Cabell a bad one.

Historically, there is thus nothing but folly and ignorance in all
the current prattle about a restoration of the ancient American
tradition. The ancient American tradition, in so far as it was
vital and productive and civilized, was obviously a tradition of
individualism and revolt, not of herd-morality and conformity. If one
argues otherwise, one must inevitably argue that the great men of the
Golden Age were not Emerson, Hawthorne, Poe and Whitman, but Cooper,
Irving, Longfellow and Whittier. This nonsense, no doubt, is actually
argued in the prairie seminaries; it even has its prophets, perhaps, in
backwaters of the East; certainly one finds little in controversion of
it in the prevailing text-books. But it remains nonsense all the same.
The fact that it has been accepted for years explains the three great
disgraces of American letters: the long neglect of Whitman, Melville
and Mark Twain. And the fact that it is now challenged actively--that
practically all young Americans of any appreciable intelligence now
rebel against it--that the most significant sign of the times, in many
ways, is the open revolt of the new generation against the teaching
of their elders--this fact explains the new vigor that has got into
American literature, and its consequent running amok. That running
amok, to be sure, is leading to excesses--but so did the running amok
of Whitman lead to excesses; so did the timorous running amok of Mark
Twain. In order to get the rest of “Leaves of Grass” we must somehow
manage to survive “A Woman Waits for Me”; in order to get “Huckleberry
Finn” we must swallow the buffooneries of “The Innocents Abroad.” In
brief, we must be willing to pay a price for freedom, for no price that
is ever asked for it is half the cost of doing without it.


3

It so happens that many of the men and women who have sought to
exercise this freedom in our time have been of stocks other than
the so-called Anglo-Saxon, either wholly or in part--that they have
represented the newer stocks which threaten, not only in the fine arts
but in practically all departments of human activity, including even
business, to oust the Anglo-Saxon from his old hegemony. The fact,
in a day of increasing racial consciousness, has greatly colored the
whole controversy and made it extraordinarily bitter. The doctrine
gradually set up between 1914 and 1917, and given the full force of law
in the latter year, that a citizen of German blood, or suspected of
German blood, stood on a plane inferior to that occupied by a citizen
of British blood, and had a less valid claim to the equal protection
of the Constitution and the laws--this doctrine was extended, in
the post-war years of terror, to all Americans not specifically
Anglo-Saxon. How seriously it has been taken in the more remote parts
of the Republic is well displayed by the strophes that I have quoted
from good Doughty--a gentleman who seems quite as content to take
his anthropology from Madison Grant and Gertrude Atherton as he is to
take his manners from the cattle-herders of his native steppes. Even
more ludicrous attempts to set up Ku Klux criteria in letters might
be dredged from the writings of more urbane, and, in theory, more
intelligent and civilized critics--for example, Brander Matthews. The
rancorous animosity that has pursued such men as Dreiser is certainly
not wholly æsthetic, or even moral; it is, to a very large extent,
racial. The man is obviously not an Anglo-Saxon; _ergo_, there is
something sinister about him, and he must be put down. The more solid
becomes his position as a man of letters, the more offensive he
becomes to the colonial mind. His crime, indeed, is that he has made
headway--that a new American tradition, differing radically from the
old one that pedagogues preach, tends to grow up around him--that in
European eyes, and even in English eyes, he becomes more typical of
America than any of the literary Knights of Pythias who are pitted
against him. It thus becomes a matter of self-preservation to dispose
of him, and when it turns out to be difficult to do so by logical means
then there is a quick and easy recourse to evangelistic means.

The effects of this holy war, alas, have differed greatly from those
intended. Far from alarming and stampeding the non-Anglo-Saxons upon
whom it has been waged, it has actually forced them, despite their
differences, into a certain common action, and so made them far more
formidable than they were when it began. And far from establishing
any superiority in the Anglo-Saxon, it has only spread the suspicion
that, for all his pretensions, he must be a very inferior fellow at
bottom, else he would not be so eager to call in the mob to help him
in a purely literary feud. As one who has stood on the battlements for
years, and smelt the powder of every salvo, I can only report that I
have come to believe in this inferiority thoroughly, and that it seems
to me to be most obvious in those who most vociferously uphold the
so-called American tradition. They are, in the main, extremely stupid
men, and their onslaughts are seldom supported by any formidable weight
of metal. What they ask the rest of us to do, in brief, is simply to
come down voluntarily and irrationally to their own cultural level--the
level of a class that easily dominated the country when it was a
series of frontier settlements, but that has gradually lost leadership
as civilization has crept in. The rest of us naturally refuse, and
they thereupon try to make acquiescence a patriotic matter, and to
alarm the refractory with all sorts of fantastic penalties. But it
must be obvious that they fail far more often than they succeed--and
their failure is a melancholy proof of their intrinsic inferiority.
The current of thought in the United States, at least among the
relatively civilized minority, is not actually toward the abject
colonialism that they advocate; it is against that colonialism. We are
further from sweetness and light today than we ever were before, and
we are further from cultural slavery to the harassed and care-worn
Motherland. With overwhelming numbers on their side, and every form of
external authority, and all the prevailing shibboleths, the spokesmen
of Anglo-Saxon domination come to grief every time they tackle the
minority, or even any minority within the minority, and at no time do
they come to grief more dramatically than when they prepare for battle,
in the traditional Anglo-Saxon manner, by first trying to tie their
opponents’ hands.

When I speak of Anglo-Saxons, of course, I speak inexactly and in the
common phrase. Even within the bounds of that phrase the American
of the prevailing stock is Anglo-Saxon only partially, for there is
probably just as much Celtic blood in his veins as Germanic, and his
norm is to be found, not South of the Tyne and west of the Severn,
but on the bleak Scotch hills. Among the first English colonists
there were unquestionably many men of purely Teutonic stock from the
East and South of England, and their influence is yet visible in many
characteristic American folkways, in certain traditional American
ideas--some of them now surviving only in national hypocrisies--, and,
above all, in the fundamental peculiarities of the American dialect of
English. But their Teutonic blood was early diluted by Celtic strains
from Scotland, from the North of Ireland and from the West of England,
and today those Americans who are regarded as being most thoroughly
Anglo-Saxons--for example, the mountaineers of the Appalachian slopes
from Vermont to Georgia--are obviously far more Celtic than Teutonic,
not only physically but also mentally. They are leaner and taller than
the true English, and far more given to moral obsessions and religious
fanaticism. A Methodist revival is not an English phenomenon; it is
Scotch. So, fundamentally, is Prohibition. So is the American tendency,
marked by every foreign student of our history, to turn all political
combats into moral crusades. The English themselves, of course, have
been greatly polluted by Scotch, Irish and Welsh blood during the past
three centuries, and for years past their government has been largely
in the hands of Celts, but though this fact, by making them more like
Americans, has tended to conceal the difference that I am discussing,
it has certainly not sufficed to obliterate it altogether. Such a man
as Lloyd George, in all his ways of thinking, is almost precisely like
an American--but the English notion of humor remains different from the
American notion, and so does the English view of personal liberty,
and on the same level of primary ideas there are many other obvious
differences.

But though I am thus convinced that the American Anglo-Saxon wears a
false label, and grossly libels both of the great races from which
he claims descent, I can imagine no good coming of trying to change
it. Let him call himself whatever he pleases. Whatever he calls
himself, it must be plain that the term he uses designates a genuinely
distinct and differentiated race--that he is separated definitely, in
character and habits of thought, from the men of all other recognizable
strains--that he represents, among the peoples of the earth, almost
a special species, and that he runs true to type. There is, indeed,
very little tendency to variation in him--that is, in the mass. The
traits that he developed when the first mixture of races took place
in colonial days are the traits that he still shows; despite the
vast changes in his material environment, he is almost precisely the
same, in the way he thinks and acts, as his forefathers were. Some
of the other great races of men, during the past two centuries, have
changed very noticeably--for example, think of the complete dying out
of adventurousness in the Spaniards and its sudden appearance in the
Germans--but the American Anglo-Saxon has stuck to his hereditary guns.
Moreover, he tends to show much less variation than other races between
man and man. It is an axiom that, when five Russians or Germans meet,
there are four parties in conflict, but it is equally an axiom that,
among a hundred Americans, at least ninety-five will be found to hold
exactly the same views upon all subjects that they can grasp at all,
and may be trusted to react exactly alike to all ordinary stimuli.
No other race, save it be the Chinese, is so thoroughly solid, or so
firmly unresponsive to ideas from without.


4

The good qualities of this so-called Anglo-Saxon are many, and I am
certainly not disposed to question them, but I here pass them over
without apology, for he devotes practically the whole of his literature
and fully a half of his oral discourse to celebrating them himself,
and so there is no danger that they will ever be disregarded. No other
known man, indeed, is so violently the blowhard, save it be his English
kinsman; even the Frenchman, by comparison, is relatively modest and
reticent. In this fact lies the first cause of the ridiculous figure
he commonly cuts in the eyes of other people: he brags and blusters so
incessantly that, if he actually had the combined virtues of Socrates,
the Cid and the Twelve Apostles, he would still go beyond the facts,
and so appear a mere Bombastes Furioso. This habit, I believe, is
fundamentally English, but it has been exaggerated in the Americano
by his larger admixture of Celtic blood. In late years in America it
has taken on an almost pathological character, and is to be explained,
perhaps, only in terms of the Freudian necromancy. Braggadocio, in
the 100 per cent. American--“we won the war,” “it is our duty to
lead the world,” “the land of the free and the home of the brave,”
the “Americanization” movement, and so on--is probably no more than
a protective mechanism erected to conceal an inescapable sense of
inferiority.

That this inferiority is real must be obvious to any impartial
observer. Whenever the Anglo-Saxon, whether of the English or of the
American variety, comes into sharp conflict with men of other stocks,
he tends to be worsted, or, at best, to be forced back upon extraneous
and irrelevant aids to assist him in the struggle. Here in the United
States his defeat is so palpable that it has filled him with vast
alarms, and reduced him to seeking succor in grotesque and extravagant
devices. In the fine arts, in the sciences and even in the more complex
sorts of business the children of the later immigrants are running
away from the descendants of the early settlers. To call the roll of
Americans eminent in almost any field of human endeavor beyond that
of mere dull money-grubbing is to call a list of strange and often
outlandish names; even the panel of Congress presents a startling
example. Of the Americans who have come into notice during the past
fifty years as poets, as novelists, as critics, as painters, as
sculptors and in the minor arts, less than half bear Anglo-Saxon names,
and in this minority there are few of pure Anglo-Saxon blood. So in the
sciences. So in the higher reaches of engineering and technology. So
in philosophy and its branches. So even in industry and agriculture.
In those areas where the competition between the new and the old
blood-streams is most sharp and clear-cut, say in New York, in seaboard
New England and in the farming States of the upper Middle West, the
defeat of the Anglo-Saxon is overwhelming and unmistakable. Once his
predominance everywhere was actual and undisputed; today, even where
he remains heavily superior numerically, it is largely sentimental and
illusory.

The descendants of the later immigrants tend generally to move upward;
the descendants of the first settlers, I believe, tend plainly to move
downward, mentally, spiritually and even physically. Civilization is
at its lowest mark in the United States precisely in those areas where
the Anglo-Saxon still presumes to rule. He runs the whole South--and
in the whole South there are not as many first-rate men as in many a
single city of the mongrel North. Wherever he is still firmly in the
saddle, there Ku Kluxery flourishes, and Fundamentalism, and lynching,
and Prohibition, and all the other stupid and anti-social crazes of
inferior men. It is not in the big cities, with their mixed population,
that the death-rate is highest, and politics most corrupt, and religion
nearest to voodooism, and every decent human aspiration suspect; it is
in the areas that the recent immigrations have not penetrated, where
“the purest Anglo-Saxon blood in the world” still flows. I could pile
up evidences, but they are not necessary. The fact is too plain to
be challenged. One testimony will be sufficient: it comes from two
inquirers who made an exhaustive survey of a region in Southeastern
Ohio, where “the people are more purely Americans than in the rest of
the State”:

 Here gross superstition exercises strong control over the thought
 and action of a large proportion of the people. Syphilitic and other
 venereal diseases are common and increasing over whole counties, while
 in some communities nearly every family is afflicted with inherited
 or infectious disease. Many cases of incest are known; inbreeding is
 rife. Imbeciles, feeble-minded, and delinquents are numerous, politics
 is corrupt, and selling of votes is common, petty crimes abound, the
 schools have been badly managed and poorly attended. Cases of rape,
 assault, and robbery are of almost weekly occurrence within five
 minutes walk of the corporation limits of one of the county seats,
 while in another county political control is held by a self-confessed
 criminal. Alcoholic intemperance is excessive. Gross immorality and
 its evil results are by no means confined to the hill districts, but
 are extreme also in the towns.

As I say, the American of the old stock is not unaware of this steady,
and, of late, somewhat rapid degeneration--this gradual loss of his
old mastery in the land his ancestors wrung from the Indian and the
wild cat. He senses it, indeed, very painfully, and, as if in despair
of arresting it in fact, makes desperate efforts to dispose of it
by denial and concealment. These efforts often take grotesque and
extravagant forms. Laws are passed to hobble and cage the citizen of
newer stocks in a hundred fantastic ways. It is made difficult and
socially dangerous for him to teach his children the speech of his
fathers, or to maintain the cultural attitudes that he has inherited
from them. Every divergence from the norm of the low-cast Anglo-Saxon
is treated as an _attentat_ against the commonwealth, and punished
with eager ferocity. On the level of the country Ku Kluxers the
thing goes to the length of downright assault; a man in Arkansas or
Mississippi who ventured to speak a foreign language, or to concern
himself publicly with such of the fine arts as country Methodists
cannot comprehend, or to let it be known that he was a member of the
Roman Catholic Church would run some risk of being tarred and feathered
by his neighbors, or of having his house burned down over his head.
Worse, there is scarcely less pressure in the higher reaches of the
so-called intellect. The demand for a restoration of what is called the
American tradition in letters is nothing more or less, at bottom, than
a demand for a supine and nonsensical conformity--a demand that every
American, regardless of his racial character and his natural way of
thinking, force all his thoughts into the low-caste Anglo-Saxon mold.
It is bound to fail of effect, of course, and in that very fact lies
the best of imaginable proofs of the mental poverty of those who voice
it. It is not brought forward in an effort at persuasion; it is issued
as an order, raucously and absurdly--and every time it is flouted the
Anglo-Saxon slips another inch down the hill. He cannot prevail in fair
competition, and, for all his bellicose flourishes, he cannot prevail
by force and intimidation. There remains for him the rôle of martyr,
and in this he already begins to display himself affectingly. The
music of Americans, we are told gravely, is barred out of our concert
halls and opera houses because their managers and conductors are all
accursed foreigners. American painters and sculptors have to struggle
against a dense tide of immigrants. American criticism has become
so anti-American that poets and novelists of the old stock are on a
sort of blacklist, and cannot get justice. Only in the colleges does
the Anglo-Saxon intellectual hold his own, and even there he is now
menaced by swarms of Jews, and must devise means of putting them down
or perish with his brothers of the fine arts.


5

It so happens that I am myself an Anglo-Saxon--one of far purer blood,
indeed, than any of the half-bleached Celts who pass under the name in
the United States and England. I am Angle and I am Saxon, and I am very
little else, and that little is all safely white, Nordic, Protestant
and blond. Thus I feel free, without risk of venturing into bad taste,
to regard frankly the _soi-disant_ Anglo-Saxon of this incomparable
Republic and his rather less dubious cousin of the Motherland. How do
the two appear to me, after a quarter of a century spent largely in
accumulating their disfavor? What are the characters that I discern
most clearly in the so-called Anglo-Saxon type of man? I may answer
at once that two stick out above all others. One is his curious and
apparently incurable incompetence--his congenital inability to do any
difficult thing easily and well, whether it be isolating a bacillus or
writing a sonata. The other is his astounding susceptibility to fears
and alarms--in short, his hereditary cowardice.

To accuse so enterprising and successful a race of cowardice, of
course, is to risk immediate derision; nevertheless, I believe that a
fair-minded examination of its history will bear me out. Nine-tenths of
the great feats of derring-do that its sucklings are taught to venerate
in school--that is, its feats as a race, not the isolated exploits of
its extraordinary individuals, most of them at least partly of other
stocks--have been wholly lacking in even the most elementary gallantry.
Consider, for example, the events attending the extension of the two
great empires, English and American. Did either movement evoke any
genuine courage and resolution? The answer is plainly no. Both empires
were built up primarily by swindling and butchering unarmed savages,
and after that by robbing weak and friendless nations: Mexico, Spain,
the Boer republics. Neither produced a hero above the average run of
those in the movies; neither exposed the folks at home to the slightest
danger of reprisal. The battles of Omdurman and Manila Bay were typical
of these great swarmings of the Anglo-Saxon--the first a bald massacre,
and the second a combat at odds of at least fifty to one. They produced
highly typical Anglo-Saxon heroes--Kitchener, an Irishman, and Dewey,
largely French. Almost always, indeed, mercenaries have done the
Anglo-Saxon’s fighting for him--a high testimony to his common sense,
but scarcely flattering, I fear, to the truculence he boasts of. The
British empire was won mainly by Irishmen, Scotchmen and native
allies, and the American empire, at least in large part, by Frenchmen
and Spaniards. Moreover, neither great enterprise cost any appreciable
amount of blood; neither presented grave and dreadful risks; neither
exposed the conqueror to the slightest danger of being made the
conquered. The British won most of their vast dominions without having
to stand up in a single battle against a civilized and formidable
foe, and the Americanos won their continent at the expense of a few
dozen puerile skirmishes with savages. All the Indian wars in American
history, from the days of John Smith to those of Custer, did not bring
down as many men as the single battle of Tannenberg. The total cost of
conquering the whole area from Plymouth Rock to the Golden Gate and
from Lake George to the Everglades, including even the cost of driving
out the French, Dutch, English and Spaniards, was less than the cost of
defending Verdun.

So far as I can make out there is no record in history of any
Anglo-Saxon nation entering upon any great war without allies, nor
upon any war at all when there was the slightest danger of getting
beaten, or even of suffering serious damage. The French have done it,
the Dutch have done it, the Germans have done it, the Japs have done
it, and even such inferior nations as the Danes, the Spaniards, the
Boers and the Greeks have done it, but never the English or Americans.
Can you imagine the English taking such a chance as the Germans took
in 1914, or as the Turks took in 1922, or as the French prepare to
take today? Can you imagine the United States resolutely facing a war
in which the odds against it were as huge as they were against Spain
in 1898? It seems to me that the facts of history are wholly against
any such fancy. The Anglo-Saxon always tries to take a gang with him
when he goes to war, and even when he has it behind him he is very
uneasy, and prone to fall into panic at the first threat of genuine
danger. Here I put an unimpeachably Anglo-Saxon witness on the stand,
to wit, Dr. Charles W. Eliot, of Harvard. I find him saying, in an
article quoted with approbation by the _Congressional Record_, that
during the Revolutionary War the colonists now hymned so eloquently
in the school-books “fell into a condition of despondency from which
nothing but the steadfastness of Washington and the Continental army
_and the aid from France_ saved them,” and that “when the War of
1812 brought grave losses a considerable portion of the population
experienced a moral collapse, from which they were rescued only by the
exertions of a few thoroughly patriotic statesmen and the exploits of
three or four American frigates on the seas”--to say nothing of an
enterprising Corsican gentleman, Bonaparte by name. In both these
wars the Americans had enormous and obvious advantages, in terrain, in
allies and in men; nevertheless, they fought, in the main, very badly,
and from the first shot to the last a majority of them stood in favor
of making peace on almost any terms. The Mexican and Spanish Wars I
pass over as perhaps too obscenely ungallant to be discussed at all;
of the former, General U. S. Grant, who fought in it, said that it was
“the most unjust war ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.”
Who remembers that, during the Spanish War, the whole Atlantic Coast
trembled in fear of the Spaniards’ feeble fleet--that all New England
had hysterics every time a strange coal-barge was sighted on the
sky-line, that the safe-deposit boxes of Boston were emptied and their
contents transferred to Worcester, and that the Navy had to organize a
patrol to save the coast towns from depopulation? Perhaps those Reds,
atheists and pro-Germans remember it who also remember that during
the World War the entire country went wild with fear of an enemy who,
without the aid of divine intervention, obviously could not strike it a
blow at all--and that the great moral victory was gained at last with
the assistance of twenty-one allies and at odds of eight to one.

But the American Civil War remains? Does it, indeed? The almost
unanimous opinion of the North, in 1861, was that it would be over
after a few small battles; the first soldiers were actually enlisted
for but three months. When, later on, it turned unexpectedly into a
severe struggle, recruits had to be driven to the front by force,
and the only Northerners remaining in favor of going on were Abraham
Lincoln, a few ambitious generals and the profiteers. I turn to
Dr. Eliot again. “In the closing year of the war,” he says, “large
portions of the Democratic party in the North _and of the Republican
party_ advocated surrender to the Confederacy, _so down-hearted were
they_.” Down-hearted at odds of two to one! The South was plainly more
gallant, but even the gallantry of the South was largely illusory.
The Confederate leaders, when the war began, adopted at once the
traditional Anglo-Saxon device of seeking allies. They tried and
expected to get the aid of England, and they actually came very near
succeeding. When hopes in that direction began to fade (_i. e._, when
England concluded that tackling the North would be dangerous), the
common people of the Confederacy, the progenitors of the chivalric Ku
Kluxers of today, threw up the sponge, and so the catastrophe, when
it came at last, was mainly internal. The South failed to bring the
quaking North to a standstill because, to borrow a phrase that Dr.
Eliot uses in another connection, it “experienced a moral collapse of
unprecedented depth and duration.” The folks at home failed to support
the troops in the field, and the troops in the field began to desert.
Even so early as Shiloh, indeed, many Confederate regiments were
already refusing to fight.

This reluctance for desperate chances and hard odds, so obvious in the
military record of the English-speaking nations, is also conspicuous in
times of peace. What a man of another and superior stock almost always
notices, living among so-called Anglo-Saxons, is (_a_) their incapacity
for prevailing in fair rivalry, either in trade, in the fine arts or
in what is called learning--in brief, their general incompetence,
and (_b_) their invariable effort to make up for this incapacity
by putting some inequitable burden upon their rivals, usually by
force. The Frenchman, I believe, is the worst of chauvinists, but
once he admits a foreigner to his country he at least treats that
foreigner fairly, and does not try to penalise him absurdly for his
mere foreignness. The Anglo-Saxon American is always trying to do
it; his history is a history of recurrent outbreaks of blind rage
against peoples who have begun to worst him; hence Know Nothingism, Ku
Kluxery, American Legionism, and all the rest of it. Such movements
would be inconceivable in an efficient and genuinely self-confident
people, wholly assured of their superiority, as a Frenchman is of
his or a German of his, and they would be equally inconceivable in
a truly gallant and courageous people, disdaining unfair advantages
and overwhelming odds. Theoretically launched against some imaginary
inferiority in the non-Anglo-Saxon man, either as patriot, as democrat
or as Christian, they are actually launched at his general superiority,
his greater fitness to survive in the national environment. The effort
is always to penalize him for winning in fair fight, to handicap him in
such a manner that he will sink to the general level of the Anglo-Saxon
population, and, if possible, even below it. Such devices, of course,
never have the countenance of the Anglo-Saxon minority that is
authentically superior, and hence self-confident and tolerant. Of that
minority I do not speak here. It is serene in peace as it is brave in
war. But in the United States, at least, it is pathetically small, and
it tends steadily to grow smaller and feebler. The communal laws and
the communal _mores_ are made by the folk, and they offer all the proof
that is necessary, not only of its general inferiority, but also of
its alarmed awareness of that inferiority. The normal American of the
“pure-blooded” majority goes to rest every night with an uneasy feeling
that there is a burglar under the bed, and he gets up every morning
with a sickening fear that his underwear has been stolen.


6

It is difficult, I submit, to admire such a people unreservedly,
despite the good qualities that I have passed over. They lack the
ease and tolerance, the fine adventurousness and love of hazard which
go with a sense of firm security--in other words, with a sense of
genuine superiority. The Anglo-Saxon of the great herd is, in many
important respects, the least civilized of men and the least capable
of true civilization. His political ideas are crude and shallow. He
is almost wholly devoid of æsthetic feeling; he does not even make
folk-lore or walk in the woods. The most elementary facts about the
visible universe alarm him, and incite him to put them down. Educate
him, make a professor of him, teach him how to express his soul, and
he still remains palpably third-rate. He fears ideas almost more
cravenly than he fears men. His blood, I believe, is running thin;
perhaps it was not much to boast of at the start; in order that he may
exercise any functions above those of a trader, a pedagogue or a mob
orator, it needs the stimulus of other and less exhausted strains.
Poe, Whitman, Mark Twain--these were typical products of such crosses.
The fact that they increase is the best hope of the intellect in
America. They shake the old race out of its spiritual lethargy, and
introduce it to disquiet and experiment. They make for a free play of
ideas. In opposing the process, whether in politics, in letters or in
the ages-long struggle toward the truth, the prophets of Anglo-Saxon
purity and tradition only make themselves ridiculous. Under the
absurd _Kultur_ that they advocate Aggasiz would have been deported
and Whitman would have been hanged, and the most eminent literati
flourishing in the Republic today would be Edgar Guest and Dr. Frank
Crane.

The success of these so-called Anglo-Saxons in the world, I am
convinced, has been due, not so much to their merits but to their
defects--and especially to their high capacity for being alarmed and
their aversion to what may be called romance--in other words, to their
harshly practical minds, their disdain of intellectual enterprise,
their dull common sense. They have saved their hides and their money
while better sportsmen were taking chances. But the bitter must go
with the sweet. Such qualities belong to _Lumbricus terrestris_ rather
than to _Homo sapiens_. They may be valuable, but they are not pretty.
Today, at the height of his triumph in the world, the Anglo-Saxon
somehow looks shabby--England trembling before one-legged and bankrupt
France, the United States engaged in a grotesque _pogrom_ against the
wop, the coon, the kike, the papist, the Jap, the what-not--worse,
engaged in an even more grotesque effort to put down ideas as well as
men--to repeal learning by statute, regiment the arts by lynch-law,
and give the puerile ethical and theological notions of lonely farmers
and corner grocers the force and dignity of constitutional axioms. As
I stand on the side-lines, observing the show, I find it very hard to
admire. But, save when ethyl alcohol in dilute aqueous solution has
dulled my native pity, I find it even harder to laugh.




II. THE HUSBANDMAN


A reader for years of the _Congressional Record_, I have encountered
in its dense and pregnant columns denunciations of almost every human
act or idea that is imaginable to political pathology, from adultery
to Zionism, and of all classes of men whose crimes the legislative
mind can grasp, from atheists to Zoroastrians, but never once, so
far as I can recall, has that great journal shown the slightest
insolence, direct or indirect, to the humble husbandman, the lonely
companion of _Bos taurus_, the sweating and persecuted farmer. He is,
on the contrary, the pet above all other pets, the enchantment and
delight, the saint and archangel of all the unearthly Sganarelles
and Scaramouches who roar in the two houses of Congress. He is more
to them, day in and day out, than whole herds of Honest Workingmen,
Gallant Jack Tars and Heroic Miners; he is more, even, than a platoon
of Unknown Soldiers. There are days when one or another of these totems
of the statesman is bathed with such devotion that it would make the
Gracchi blush, but there is never a day that the farmer, too, doesn’t
get his share, and there is many a day when he gets ten times his
share--when, indeed, he is completely submerged in rhetorical vaseline,
so that it is hard to tell which end of him is made in the image of God
and which is mere hoof. No session ever begins without a grand assault
at all arms upon his hereditary foes, from the boll-weevil and the San
José scale to Wall Street and the Interstate Commerce Commission. And
no session comes to an end without a huge grist of new laws to save
him from them--laws embodying the most subtle statecraft of the most
daring and ingenious body of lawmakers ever assembled under one roof
on the habitable globe. One might almost argue that the chief, and
perhaps even only aim of legislation in These States is to succor and
secure the farmer. If, while the bombs of goose-grease and rockets of
pomade are going off in the two Chambers, certain evil men meet in the
basement and hook _banderillas_ into him--say, by inserting jokers into
the chemical schedule of a new tariff bill, or by getting the long-haul
rules changed, or by manipulating the loans of the Federal Reserve
Banks,--then the crime is not against him alone; it is against the
whole American people, the common decency of Christendom, and the Holy
Ghost. Horn a farmer, and you stand in contumacy to the platforms of
all known parties, to the devout faith of all known statesmen, and to
God. _Laborantem agricolam oportet primum de fructibus percipere._

Paul wrote to the Bishop of Ephesus, at the latest, in the year 65
A. D.; the doctrine that I have thus ascribed to the Mesmers
and Grimaldis of our politics is therefore not a novelty of their
contrivance. Nor is it, indeed, their monopoly, for it seems to be
shared by all Americans who are articulate and devote themselves to
political metaphysics and good works. The farmer is praised by all who
mention him at all, from archbishops to zoölogists, day in and day
out. He is praised for his industry, his frugality, his patriotism,
his altruistic passion. He is praised for staying on the farm, for
laboriously wringing our bread and meat from the reluctant soil, for
renouncing Babylon to guard the horned cattle on the hills. He is
praised for his patient fidelity to the oldest of learned professions,
and the most honorable, and the most necessary to all of us. He takes
on, in political speeches and newspaper editorials, a sort of mystical
character. He is no longer a mundane laborer, scratching for the
dollar, full of staphylococci, smelling heavily of sweat and dung; he
is a high priest in a rustic temple, pouring out his heart’s blood upon
the altar of Ceres. The farmer, thus depicted, grows heroic, lyrical,
pathetic, affecting. To murmur against him becomes a sort of sacrilege,
like murmuring against the Constitution, Human Freedom, the Cause of
Democracy.... Nevertheless, being already doomed, I herewith and hereby
presume to do it. More, my murmur is scored in the manner of Berlioz,
for ten thousand trombones _fortissimo_, with harsh, cacophonous chords
for bombardons and ophicleides in the bass clef. Let the farmer, so far
as I am concerned, be damned forevermore! To hell with him, and bad
luck to him! He is, unless I err, no hero at all, and no priest, and no
altruist, but simply a tedious fraud and ignoramus, a cheap rogue and
hypocrite, the eternal Jack of the human pack. He deserves all that he
suffers under our economic system, and more. Any city man, not insane,
who sheds tears for him is shedding tears of the crocodile.

No more grasping, selfish and dishonest mammal, indeed, is known to
students of the Anthropoidea. When the going is good for him he robs
the rest of us up to the extreme limit of our endurance; when the going
is bad he comes bawling for help out of the public till. Has anyone
ever heard of a farmer making any sacrifice of his own interests,
however slight, to the common good? Has anyone ever heard of a farmer
practising or advocating any political idea that was not absolutely
self-seeking--that was not, in fact, deliberately designed to loot the
rest of us to his gain? Greenbackism, free silver, government guarantee
of prices, all the complex fiscal imbecilities of the cow State John
Baptists--these are the contributions of the virtuous husbandmen to
American political theory. There has never been a time, in good seasons
or bad, when his hands were not itching for more; there has never
been a time when he was not ready to support any charlatan, however
grotesque, who promised to get it for him. Why, indeed, are politicians
so polite to him--before election, so romantically amorous? For the
plain and simple reason that only one issue ever interests or fetches
him, and that is the issue of his own profit. He must be promised
something definite and valuable, to be paid to him alone, or he is off
after some other mountebank. He simply cannot imagine himself as a
citizen of a commonwealth, in duty bound to give as well as take; he
can imagine himself only as getting all and giving nothing.

Yet we are asked to venerate this prehensile moron as the _Ur_-burgher,
the citizen _par excellence_, the foundation-stone of the state! And
why? Because he produces something that all of us must have--that we
must get somehow on penalty of death. And how do we get it from him?
By submitting helplessly to his unconscionable blackmailing--by paying
him, not under any rule of reason, but in proportion to his roguery
and incompetence, and hence to the direness of our need. I doubt that
the human race, as a whole, would submit to that sort of high-jacking,
year in and year out, from any other necessary class of men. When the
American railroad workman attempted it, in 1916, there was instant
indignation; when a certain small squad of the _Polizei_ tried it, a
few years later, there was such universal horror that a politician
who denounced the crime became President of the United States. But
the farmers do it over and over again, without challenge or reprisal,
and the only thing that keeps them from reducing us, at intervals, to
actual famine is their own imbecile knavery. They are all willing and
eager to pillage us by starving us, but they can’t do it because they
can’t resist attempts to swindle each other. Recall, for example, the
case of the cotton-growers in the South. They agreed among themselves
to cut down the cotton acreage in order to inflate the price--and
instantly every party to the agreement began planting _more_ cotton in
order to profit by the abstinence of his neighbors. That abstinence
being wholly imaginary, the price of cotton fell instead of going
up--and then the entire pack of scoundrels began demanding assistance
from the national treasury--in brief, began demanding that the rest of
us indemnify them for the failure of their plot to blackmail us!

The same demand is made almost annually by the wheat farmers of the
Middle West. It is the theory of the zanies who perform at Washington
that a grower of wheat devotes himself to that banal art in a
philanthropic and patriotic spirit--that he plants and harvests his
crop in order that the folks of the cities may not go without bread.
It is the plain fact that he raises wheat because it takes less labor
than any other crop--because it enables him, after working sixty days
a year, to loaf the rest of the twelve months. If wheat-raising could
be taken out of the hands of such lazy _fellahin_ and organized as the
production of iron or cement is organized, the price might be reduced
by a half, and still leave a large profit for _entrepreneurs_. It
vacillates dangerously today, not because speculators manipulate it,
but because the crop is irregular and undependable--that is to say,
because those who make it are incompetent. The worst speculators, as
everyone knows, are the farmers themselves. They hold their wheat
as long as they can, borrowing our money from the country banks and
hoping prayerfully for a rise. If it goes up, then we pay them an extra
and unearned profit. If it goes down, then they demand legislation
to prevent it going down next time. Sixty days a year they work; the
rest of the time they gamble with our bellies. It is probably the
safest gambling ever heard of. Now and then, true enough, a yokel who
plunges too heavily comes to grief, and is ingested by the county-town
mortgage-shark; now and then a whole county, or State or even larger
area goes bankrupt, and the financial dominoes begin falling down all
along the line from Saleratus Center to New York. But such catastrophes
are rare, and they leave no scars. When a speculator goes broke in Wall
Street it is a scandalous matter, and if he happens to have rooked
anybody of importance he is railroaded to jail. But when a speculator
goes broke in the great open spaces, there is a great rush of political
leucocytes to the scene, and presently it is made known that the sin
was not the speculator’s at all, but his projected victims’, and that
it is the prime duty of the latter, by lawful order upon the Treasurer
of the United States, to reimburse him his losses and set him up for a
new trial.

The notion that wheat would be much cheaper and the supply far more
dependable if it were grown, not by a motley horde of such puerile
loafers and gamblers, but by competent men intelligently organized is
not mine; I borrow it from Henry Ford, a busted seer. Since he betrayed
them to Dr. Coolidge for a mess of pottage, the poor Liberals, once
so enamored of his sagacity, denounce Ford as an idiot and a villain;
nevertheless, the fact remains that his discussion of the wastefulness
of our present system of wheat-growing, in the autobiography which
he didn’t write, is full of a powerful plausibility. Ford was born
and brought up on a farm--and it was a farm, as farms go, that was
very competently managed. But he knows very well that even the most
competent farmer is but seldom more adept than a chimpanzee playing
the violin. The Liberals, indeed, cannot controvert his judgment; they
have been thrown back upon belaboring his political morals. What he
proposes, they argue, is simply the enslavement of the present farmer,
now so gloriously free. With capitalism gradually absorbing his fields,
he would have to go to work as a wage-slave. Well, why not? For one,
I surely offer no objection. All the rubber we use today is raised by
slave labor; so is all the morphine consumed at Hollywood. Our children
are taught in school by slaves; our newspapers are edited by slaves.
Wheat raised by slave labor would be just as nutritious as wheat
raised by men earning $10,000 a year, and a great deal cheaper. If
the business showed a good profit, the political clowns at Washington
would launch schemes to confiscate it, as they now launch schemes to
make good the losses of the farmers. In any case, why bother about the
fate of the farmer? If wheat went to $10 a bushel tomorrow, and all
the workmen of the cities became slaves in name as well as in fact, no
farmer in this grand land of freedom would consent voluntarily to a
reduction of as much as ¹⁄₈ of a cent a bushel. “The greatest wolves,”
says E. W. Howe, another graduate of the farm, “are the farmers who
bring produce to town to sell.” Wolves? Let us not insult _Canis
lupus_. I move the substitution of _Hyæna hyæna_.

Meanwhile, how much truth is in the common theory that the husbandman
is harassed and looted by our economic system, that the men of the
cities prey upon him--specifically, that he is the chronic victim
of such devices as the tariff, railroad regulation, and the banking
system? So far as I can make out, there is none whatever. The net
effect of our present banking system, as I have already said, is that
the money accumulated by the cities is used to finance the farmers, and
that they employ it to blackmail the cities. As for the tariff, is it a
fact that it damages the farmer, or benefits him? Let us turn for light
to the worst Tariff Act ever heard of in human history: that of 1922.
It put a duty of 30 cents a bushel on wheat, and so barred out Canadian
wheat, and gave the American farmer a vast and unfair advantage. For
months running the difference in the price of wheat on the two sides
of the American-Canadian border--wheat raised on farms not a mile
apart--ran from 25 to 30 cents a bushel. Danish butter was barred out
by a duty of 8 cents a pound--and the American farmer pocketed the 8
cents. Potatoes carried a duty of 50 cents a hundredweight--and the
potato growers of Maine, eager, as the phrase has it, to mop up, raised
such an enormous crop that the market was glutted, and they went
bankrupt, and began bawling for government aid. High duties were put,
too, upon meats, upon cheese, upon wool--in brief, upon practically
everything that the farmer produced. But his profits were taken from
him by even higher duties upon manufactured goods, and by high freight
rates? Were they, indeed? There was, in fact, no duty at all upon many
of the things he consumed. There was no duty, for example, upon shoes.
The duty upon woolen goods gave a smaller advantage to the manufacturer
than the duty on wool gave to the farmer. So with the duty on cotton
goods. Automobiles were cheaper in the United States than anywhere else
on earth. So were all agricultural implements. So were groceries. So
were fertilizers.

But here I come to the brink of an abyss of statistics, and had better
haul up. The enlightened reader is invited to investigate them for
himself; they will bring him, I believe, some surprises, particularly
if he has been reading the _Congressional Record_ and accepting it
gravely. They by no means exhaust the case against the consecrated
husbandman. I have said that the only political idea he can grasp is
one which promises him a direct profit. It is, alas, not quite true: he
can also grasp one which has the sole effect of annoying and damaging
his enemy, the city man. The same mountebanks who get to Washington by
promising to augment his gains and make good his losses devote whatever
time is left over from that enterprise to saddling the rest of us with
oppressive and idiotic laws, all hatched on the farm. There, where
the cows low through the still night, and the jug of Peruna stands
behind the stove, and bathing begins, as at Biarritz, with the vernal
equinox--there is the reservoir of all the nonsensical legislation
which now makes the United States a buffoon among the great nations.
It was among country Methodists, practitioners of a theology degraded
almost to the level of voodooism, that Prohibition was invented, and it
was by country Methodists, nine-tenths of them actual followers of the
plow, that it was fastened upon the rest of us, to the damage of our
bank accounts, our dignity and our ease. What lies under it, and under
all the other crazy enactments of its category, is no more and no less
than the yokel’s congenital and incurable hatred of the city man--his
simian rage against everyone who, as he sees it, is having a better
time than he is.

That this malice is at the bottom of Prohibition, and not any
altruistic yearning to put down the evils of drink, is shown clearly
by the fact that most of the State enforcement acts--and even the
Volstead Act, as it is interpreted at Washington--permit the farmer
himself to make cider as in the past, and that every effort to deprive
him of that astounding immunity has met with the opposition of his
representatives. In other words, the thing he is against is not the
use of alcohol _per se_, but simply the use of alcohol in its more
charming and romantic forms. Prohibition, as everyone knows, has not
materially diminished the consumption of alcohol in the cities, but
it has obviously forced the city man to drink decoctions that he
would have spurned in the old days--that is, it has forced him to
drink such dreadful stuff as the farmer has always drunk. The farmer
is thus content with it: it brings his enemy down to his own level.
The same animus is visible in innumerable other moral statutes, all
ardently supported by the peasantry. For example, the Mann Act. The
aim of this amazing law, of course, is not to put down adultery;
it is simply to put down that variety of adultery which is most
agreeable. What got it upon the books was simply the constant gabble
in the rural newspapers about the byzantine debaucheries of urban
Antinomians--rich stockbrokers who frequented Atlantic City from
Friday to Monday, vaudeville actors who traveled about the country
with beautiful mistresses, and so on. Such aphrodisiacal tales, read
beside the kitchen-stove by hinds condemned to monogamous misery with
stupid, unclean and ill-natured wives, naturally aroused in them a vast
detestation of errant cockneys, and this detestation eventually rolled
up enough force to attract the attention of the quacks who make laws
at Washington. The result was the Mann Act. Since then a number of the
cow States have passed Mann Acts of their own, usually forbidding the
use of automobiles “for immoral purposes.” But there is nowhere a law
forbidding the use of barns, cow-stables, hay-ricks and other such
familiar rustic ateliers of sin. That is to say, there is nowhere a law
forbidding yokels to drag virgins into infamy by the technic practised
since Tertiary times on the farms; there are only laws forbidding city
youths to do it according to the technic of the great municipalities.

Here we come to the limits of bucolic moral endeavor. It never
prohibits acts that are common on the farms; it only prohibits
acts that are common in the cities. In many of the Middle Western
States there are statutes forbidding the smoking of cigarettes, for
cigarette-smoking, to the louts of those wastes, bears the aspect of a
citified and levantine vice, and if they attempted it themselves they
would be derided by their fellows and perhaps divorced by their wives,
just as they would be derided and divorced if they bathed every day,
or dressed for dinner, or attempted to play the piano. But chewing
tobacco, whether in public or in private, is nowhere forbidden by law,
for the plain reason that nine-tenths of all husbandmen practise it, as
they practise the drinking of raw corn liquor. The act not only lies
within their tastes; it also lies within their means, and hence within
their _mores_. As a consequence the inhabitants of the towns in those
remote marches are free to chew tobacco all they please, even at divine
service, but are clapped into jail the instant they light cigarettes.
The same consideration gets into comstockery, which is chiefly
supported, like Prohibition, by farmers and chiefly aimed at city
men. The Comstock Act is very seldom invoked against newspapers, for
the matter printed in newspapers lies within the comprehension of the
peasantry, and hence within their sphere of enjoyment. Nor is it often
invoked against cheap books of a frankly pornographic character--such
things as “Night Life in Chicago,” “Adventures on a Pullman Sleeper”
and “The Confessions of an ex-Nun”--for when yokels read at all, it
is commonly such garbage that they prefer. But they are hot against
the infinitely less gross naughtiness of serious books, including
the so-called classics, for these books they simply cannot read. In
consequence the force of comstockery is chiefly directed against such
literature. For one actually vile book that it suppresses it attempts
to suppress at least a dozen good ones.

Now the pious husbandman shows signs of an itch to proceed further. Not
content with assaulting us with his degraded and abominable ethics,
he begins trying to force upon us his still worse theology. On the
steppes Methodism has got itself all the estate and dignity of a State
religion; it becomes a criminal offense to teach any doctrine in
contempt of it. No civilized man, to be sure, is yet actually in jail
for the crime; civilized men simply keep out of such bleak parking
spaces for human Fords, as they keep out of Congress and Franz Josef
Land. But the long arm of the Wesleyan revelation now begins to stretch
forth toward Nineveh. The mountebank, Bryan, after years of preying
upon the rustics on the promise that he would show them how to loot
the cities by wholesale and _à outrance_, now reverses his collar and
proposes to lead them in a _jehad_ against what remains of American
intelligence, already beleagured in a few walled towns. We are not only
to abandon the social customs of civilization at the behest of a rabble
of peasants who sleep in their underclothes; we are now to give up
all the basic ideas of civilization and adopt the gross superstitions
of the same mob. Is this fanciful? Is the menace remote, and to be
disregarded? My apologies for suggesting that perhaps you are one of
the multitude who thought that way about Prohibition, and only half
a dozen years ago. Bryan is a protean harlequin, and more favored by
God than is commonly assumed. He lost with free silver but he won with
Prohibition. The chances, if my mathematics do not fail, are thus 1 to
1 that he will win, if he keeps his health, with Fundamentalism--in
his own phrase, that God will be put into the Constitution. If he does,
then _Eoanthrophus_ will triumph finally over _Homo sapiens_. If he
does, then the humble swineherd will drive us all into his pen.

Not much gift for Vision is needed to imagine the main outlines of
the ensuing _Kultur_. The city man, as now, will bear nine-tenths of
the tax burden; the rural total immersionist will make all the laws.
With Genesis firmly lodged in the Testament of the Fathers he will be
ten times as potent as he is now and a hundred times as assiduous. No
constitutional impediment will remain to cripple his moral fancy. The
Wesleyan code of Kansas and Mississippi, Vermont and Minnesota will
be forced upon all of us by the full military and naval power of the
United States. Civilization will gradually become felonious everywhere
in the Republic, as it already is in Arkansas. What I sing, I suppose,
is a sort of Utopia. But it is not the Utopia of bawdy poets and
metaphysicians; it is not the familiar Utopia of the books. It is a
Utopia dreamed by simpler and more virtuous men--by seven millions of
Christian bumpkins, far-flung in forty-eight sovereign States. They
dream it on their long journeys down the twelve billion furrows of
their seven million farms, up hill and down dale in the heat of the
day. They dream it behind the egg-stove on Winter nights, their boots
off and their socks scorching, Holy Writ in their hands. They dream it
as they commune with _Bos taurus_, _Sus scrofa_, _Mephitis mephitis_,
the Methodist pastor, the Ford agent. It floats before their eyes
as they scan the Sears-Roebuck catalogue for horse liniment, porous
plasters and Bordeaux mixture; it rises before them when they assemble
in their Little Bethels to be instructed in the word of God, the plots
of the Pope, the crimes of the atheists and Jews; it transfigures the
chautauquan who looms before them with his Great Message. This Utopia
haunts and tortures them; they long to make it real. They have tried
prayer, and it has failed; now they turn to the secular arm. The
dung-fork glitters in the sun as the host prepares to march....

Well, these are the sweet-smelling and altruistic agronomists whose
sorrows are the _leit-motif_ of our politics, whose votes keep us
supplied with Bryans and Bleases, whose welfare is alleged to be the
chief end of democratic statecraft, whose patriotism is the so-called
bulwark of this so-called Republic!




III. HIGH AND GHOSTLY MATTERS


I

_The Cosmic Secretariat_

The argument by design, once the bulwark of Christian apologetics, is
so full of holes that it is no wonder that it has had to be abandoned.
The more, indeed, the theologian seeks to prove the wisdom and
omnipotence of God by His works, the more he is dashed by evidences
of divine incompetence and stupidity. The world is not actually well
run; it is very badly run, and no Huxley was needed to labor the
obvious fact. The human body, very adeptly designed in some details, is
cruelly and senselessly bungled in other details, and every reflective
first-year medical student must notice a hundred ways to improve it.
How are we to reconcile this mixture of finesse and blundering with
the concept of a single omnipotent Designer, to whom all problems are
equally easy? If He could contrive so efficient and durable a machine
as the human hand, then how did He come to make such botches as the
tonsils, the gall-bladder, the uterus and the prostate gland? If He
could perfect the hip joint and the ear, then why did He boggle the
teeth?

Having never encountered a satisfactory--or even a remotely
plausible--answer to such questions, I have had to go to the trouble of
devising one myself. It is, at all events, quite simple, and in strict
accord with all the known facts. In brief, it is this: that the theory
that the universe is run by a single God must be abandoned, and that
in place of it we must set up the theory that it is actually run by a
board of gods, all of equal puissance and authority. Once this concept
is grasped all the difficulties that have vexed theologians vanish, and
human experience instantly lights up the whole dark scene. We observe
in everyday life what happens when authority is divided, and great
decisions are reached by consultation and compromise. We know that the
effects at times, particularly when one of the consultants runs away
with the others, are very good, but we also know that they are usually
extremely bad. Such a mixture, precisely, is on display in the cosmos.
It presents a series of brilliant successes in the midst of an infinity
of failures.

I contend that my theory is the only one ever put forward that
completely accounts for the clinical picture. Every other theory,
facing such facts as sin, disease and disaster, is forced to admit the
supposition that Omnipotence, after all, may not be omnipotent--a
plain absurdity. I need toy with no such nonsense. I may assume
that every god belonging to the council which rules the universe is
infinitely wise and infinitely powerful, and yet not evade the plain
fact that most of the acts of that council are ignorant and foolish.
In truth, my assumption that a council exists is tantamount to an _a
priori_ assumption that its acts are ignorant and foolish, for no
act of any conceivable council can be otherwise. Is the human hand
perfect, or, at all events, practical and praiseworthy? Then I account
for it on the ground that it was designed by some single member of
the council--that the business was handed over to him by inadvertence
or as a result of an irreconcilable difference of opinion among the
others. Had more than one member participated actively in its design it
would have been measurably less meritorious than it is, for the sketch
offered by the original designer would have been forced to run the
gauntlet of criticisms and suggestions from all the other councillors,
and human experience teaches us that most of these criticisms and
suggestions would have been inferior to the original idea--that many of
them, in fact, would have had nothing in them save a petty desire to
maul and spoil the original idea.

But do I here accuse the high gods of harboring discreditable human
weaknesses? If I do, then my excuse is that it is impossible to
imagine them doing the work universally ascribed to them without
admitting their possession of such weaknesses. One cannot imagine a
god spending weeks and months, and maybe whole geological epochs,
laboring over the design of the human kidney without assuming him to
have been moved by a powerful impulse to express himself vividly,
to marshal and publish his ideas, to win public credit among his
fellows--in brief, without assuming him to be egoistic. And one cannot
assume him to be egoistic without assuming him to prefer the adoption
of his own ideas to the adoption of any other god’s. I defy anyone to
make the contrary assumption without plunging instantly into clouds of
mysticism. Ruling it out, one comes inevitably to the conclusion that
the inept management of the universe must be ascribed to clashes of
egos, _i. e._, to petty spites and revenges, among the gods, for any
one of them alone, since we must assume him to be infinitely wise and
powerful, could run it perfectly. We suffer from bad stomachs simply
because the god who first proposed making a stomach aroused thereby
the ill-nature of those who had not thought of it, and because they
proceeded instantly to wreak that ill-nature upon him by improving, _i.
e._, botching, his work. We must reproduce our species in the familiar
arduous, uneconomic, embarrassing and almost pathological manner
because the god who devised the excellent process prevailing among the
protozoa had to be put in his place when he proposed to extend it to
the Primates.


2

_The Nature of Faith_

Many years ago, when I was more enterprising intellectually than I am
to-day, I proposed the application of Haeckel’s celebrated biogenetic
law--to wit, that the history of the individual rehearses the history
of the species--to the domain of human ideas. So applied, it leads to
some superficially startling but probably quite sound conclusions,
for example, that an adult poet is simply an individual in a state
of arrested development--in brief, a sort of moron. Just as all of
us, _in utero_, pass through a stage in which we are tadpoles, and
almost indistinguishable from the tadpoles which afterward become
frogs, so all of us pass through a stage, in our nonage, when we
are poets. A youth of seventeen who is not a poet is simply an ass:
his development has been arrested even anterior to the stage of the
intellectual tadpole. But a man of fifty who still writes poetry is
either an unfortunate who has never developed, intellectually, beyond
his teens, or a conscious buffoon who pretends to be something that he
isn’t--something far younger and jucier than he actually is--, just as
the late Richard Mansfield, in Schiller’s play, pretended, by the use
of a falsetto voice and a girlish skip, to be the eighteen-year-old Don
Carlos. Something else, of course, may enter into it. The buffoonery
may be partly conscious and deliberate, and partly Freudian. Many an
aging man keeps on writing poetry simply because it gives him the
illusion that he is still young. For the same reason, perhaps, he plays
tennis, wears green cravats, and tries to convince himself that he is
in love.

It is my conviction that no normal man ever fell in love, within the
ordinary meaning of the term, after the age of thirty. He may, at
forty, pursue the female of his species with great assiduity, and
he may, at fifty, sixty or even seventy, “woo” and marry a more or
less fair one in due form of law, but the impulse that moves him
to these follies at such ages is never the complex of illusions
and hallucinations that poets describe as love. This complex is
quite natural to all males between adolescence and the age of, say,
twenty-five, when the kidneys begin to disintegrate. For a youth
to reach twenty-one without having fallen in love in an abject and
preposterous manner would be for doubts to be raised as to his
normalcy. But if he does it after his wisdom teeth are cut, it is no
more than a sign that they have been cut in vain--that he is still in
his teens, whatever his biological and legal age. Love, so-called,
is based upon a view of women that is impossible to any man who has
had any experience of them. Such a man may, to the end of his life,
enjoy their society vastly, and even respect them and admire them, but,
however much he respects and admires them, he nevertheless sees them
more or less clearly, and seeing them clearly is fatal to the true
romance. Find a man of forty who heaves and moans over a woman in the
manner of a poet and you will behold either a man who ceased to develop
intellectually at twenty-four or thereabout, or a fraud who has his eye
on the lands, tenements and hereditaments of the lady’s deceased first
husband. Or upon her talents as nurse, cook, amanuensis and audience.
This, no doubt, is what George Bernard Shaw meant when he said that
every man over forty is a scoundrel.

As I say, my suggestion has not been adopted by psychologists, who,
in the main, are a very conservative and unimaginative body of men.
If they applied the biogenetic law in the field of religion they
might make some interesting observations. The chances are, indeed,
that religion belongs exclusively to an extremely early stage of
human development, and that its rapid decay in the world since the
Reformation is evidence of a very genuine progress. Reduced to its
logical essence, every religion now advocated in Christendom is
simply the doctrine that there are higher powers, infinitely wise and
virtuous, which take an active interest in the sordid everyday affairs
of men, and not infrequently intervene in them. This doctrine is not
purely romantic and _a priori_; it is based upon what is regarded by
its subscribers as objective evidence. But it must be plain that that
evidence tends to go to pieces as human knowledge widens--that it
appears massive and impressive in direct proportion as the individual
impressed is ignorant. A few hundred years ago practically every
phenomenon of nature was ascribed to superhuman intervention. The
plague, for example, was caused by God’s anger. So was war. So was
lightning. Today no enlightened man believes anything of the kind. All
these phenomena are seen to be but links in an endless chain of amoral
causation, and it is known that, given a certain quite intelligible and
usually inevitable combination of causes, they will appear infallibly
as effects. Thus religion gradually loses its old objective authority,
and becomes more and more a mere sentimentality. An enlightened man’s
view of it is almost indistinguishable from his view of the Spirit
of 1776, the Henty books, and the rosewood casket containing his
grandmother’s false teeth.

Such a man is not “dead” to religion. He was not born with a congenital
inaptitude for it. He has simply outgrown it, as he has outgrown
poetry, Socialism and love. At adolescence practically all individuals
have attacks of piety, but that is only saying that their powers
of perception, at that age, outrun their knowledge. They observe
the phenomenon, but cannot account for it. Later on, unless their
development is arrested, they gradually emerge from that romantic and
spookish fog, just as they emerge from the hallucinations of secular
romance. I speak here, of course, of individuals genuinely capable of
education--always a small minority. If, as the Army tests of conscripts
showed, nearly 50 per cent. of American adult males never get beyond
the mental development of a twelve-year-old child, then it must be
obvious that a much smaller number get beyond the mental development
of a youth at the end of his teens. I put that number, at a venture,
at 5 per cent. The remaining 95 per cent. never quite free themselves
from religious superstitions. They may no longer believe it is an
act of God every time an individual catches a cold, or sprains his
ankle, or cuts himself shaving, but they are pretty sure to see some
trace of divine intervention in it if he is struck by lightning, or
hanged, or afflicted with leprosy or syphilis. That God causes wars
has been believed by all the Presidents of the United States, save
Grover Cleveland, since Jefferson’s time. During the late war the then
President actually set aside a day for praying to God to stop what He
had started as soon as possible, and on terms favorable to American
investments. This was not done, remember, by a voodoo man in the
Congo forest, but by a sound Presbyterian, a Ph.D. of Johns Hopkins
University, and the best-dressed professor ever seen at Princeton.

I have said that all modern religions are based, at least on their
logical side, on this notion that there are higher powers which observe
all the doings of man, and constantly take a hand in them. It should
be added that a corollary is almost always appended, to the effect
that these higher powers also pronounce ethical judgments upon such
human acts as happen to be performed without this intervention, and are
themselves animated by a lofty and impeccable morality. Most religions,
of course, also embrace a concept of higher powers that are not benign,
but malignant--that is, they posit the existence of demons as well
as of gods. But there are very few in which the demons are regarded
as superior to the gods, or even as their full equals. The great
majority of creeds, East and West, savage and so-called civilized, put
the gods far above the demons, and teach that the gods always wish
the good of man, and that man’s virtue and happiness run in direct
ratio to his obedience to their desires. That is, they are all based
upon the doctrine of what is called the goodness of God. This is true
pre-eminently of the chief oriental faiths: Buddhism, Brahminism and
Confucianism. It is true even of Christianity, despite its luxuriant
demonology. No true Christian can believe that God ever deliberately
and wantonly injures him, or could conceivably wish him ill. The slings
and arrows of God, he believes, are brought down upon him by his own
ignorance and contumacy. He believes that if he could be like God he
would be perfect.

This doctrine of the goodness of God, it seems to me, is no more, at
bottom, than an evidence of arrested intellectual development. It
does not fit into what we know of the nature and operations of the
cosmos today; it is a survival from a day of universal ignorance. That
it is still given credit in the Far East is not surprising, for the
intellectual development of the Far East, despite all the nonsense that
is talked about Indian and Chinese “philosophy,” is really no further
advanced than that of Europe was in the time of St. Louis. The most
profound Hindoo or Chinese “philosopher” believes, as objective facts,
things that would make even a Georgia Fundamentalist snicker, and so
his “philosophy” is chiefly worthless, as was that of the Greeks. The
Greeks sometimes guessed right, just as the swamis and yoghis of Los
Angeles sometimes guess right, but in the main their speculations,
being based upon false observations, were valueless, and no one would
pay any attention to them today if it were not for the advertising they
get from theologians, who find them to their taste, and professional
“philosophers,” who make a living trying to teach them to sophomores.
But if the belief in the goodness of God is natural to misinformed
orientals, as it was natural to the singularly ignorant Greeks, it is
certainly _not_ natural to the enlightened races of the West today, for
all their science is simply a great massing of proofs that God, if He
exists, is neither good nor bad, but simply indifferent--an infinite
Force carrying on the operation of unintelligible processes without the
slightest regard, either one way or the other, for the comfort, safety
and happiness of man.

Why, then, does this belief survive? Largely, I am convinced, because
it is supported by another hoary relic from the adolescence of the
race, to wit, the weakness for poetry. The Jews fastened their religion
upon the Western world, not because it was more reasonable than the
religions of their contemporaries--as a matter of fact, it was vastly
less reasonable than many of them--, but because it was far more
poetical. The poetry in it was what fetched the decaying Romans, and
after them the barbarians of the North; not the so-called Christian
evidences. For the Jews were poets of a truly colossal eloquence,
and they put their fundamental superstitions into dithyrambs of such
compelling loveliness that they disarmed the common sense even of
skeptical Romans, and so knocked out all other contemporary religions,
many of which were in far closer accord with what was then known of
the true operations of the universe. To this day no better poetry has
ever been written. It is so powerful in its effects that even men who
reject its content in toto are more or less susceptible to it. One
hesitates to flout it on purely æsthetic grounds; however dubious it
may be in doctrine, it is nevertheless almost perfect in form, and so
even the most violent atheist tends to respect it, just as he respects
a beautiful but deadly toad-stool. For no man, of course, ever quite
gets over poetry. He may seem to have recovered from it, just as he may
seem to have recovered from the measles of his school-days, but exact
observation teaches us that no such recovery is ever quite perfect;
there always remains a scar, a weakness and a memory.

Now, there is reason for maintaining that the taste for poetry, in
the process of human development, marks a stage measurably later than
the stage of religion. Savages so little cultured that they know no
more of poetry than a cow have elaborate and often very ingenious
theologies. If this be true, then it follows that the individual, as he
rehearses the life of the species, is apt to carry his taste for poetry
further along than he carries his religion--that if his development
is arrested at any stage before complete intellectual maturity that
arrest is far more likely to leave him with poetical hallucinations
than it is to leave him with theological hallucinations. Thus, taking
men in the mass, there are many more natural victims of the former
than of the latter--and here is where the talent of the ancient Jews
does its execution. It holds countless thousands to the faith who are
actually against the faith, and the weakness with which it holds them
is their weakness for poetry, _i. e._, for the beautiful but untrue.
Put into plain, harsh words most of the articles they are asked to
believe would revolt them, but put into sonorous dithyrambs the same
articles fascinate and overwhelm them. It is not the logical substance
of the Old Testament that continues to hold the mind of modern man,
for that logical substance must often revolt him, even when he is of
sub-normal intelligence; it is the sonorous strophes of the ancient
bards and prophets. And it is not the epistemology, or the natural
history, or the ethical scheme, or the system of jurisprudence of the
New Testament that melts his heart and wets his eyes; it is simply the
poetical magic of the Sermon on the Mount, the exquisite parables, and
the incomparable story of the Child in the Manger.

This persistence of the weakness for poetry, no doubt, explains the
great growth of ritualism in an age of skepticism. Almost every
day theology gets another blow from science. So badly has it been
battered during the past century, indeed, that educated men now give
it little more credence than they give to sorcery, its ancient ally.
But squeezing out the logical nonsense does no damage to the poetry; on
the contrary, it frees, and, in a sense, dignifies the poetry. Paul’s
chief doctrines, clearly stated, offend the intelligence intolerably,
but clothed and concealed by the gorgeous vestments of the mass they
separate themselves from logic entirely and take on something of the
witchery of beauty. Thus there is a constant movement of Christians,
and particularly of newly-intellectual Christians, from the more
literal varieties of Christian faith to the more poetical varieties.
The normal Babbitt, in the United States, is born a Methodist or a
Baptist, but when he begins to lay by money he and his wife tend to
go over to the American branch of the Church of England, which is not
only more fashionable but also less revolting to the higher cerebral
centers. His daughter, when she emerges from the finishing-school,
is very High Church; his grand-daughter, if the family keeps its
securities, will probably go over to Rome.

In view of all this, I am convinced that the Christian church, as a
going concern, is quite safe from danger, despite the rapid growth
of agnosticism. The theology it merchants is full of childish and
disgusting absurdities; practically all the other religions of
civilized and semi-civilized man are more plausible. But all of these
religions, including even Moslemism, contain the fatal defect that they
appeal primarily to the reason. Christianity will survive not only
Modernism but also Fundamentalism, a much more difficult business.
It will survive because it makes its first and foremost appeal to
that moony sense of the poetic which is in all men--to that elemental
sentimentality which, in men of arrested mental development, which is
to say, in the average men of Christendom, passes for the passion to
seek and know beauty.


3

_The Devotee_

If religion is thus charming to the more enlightened modern Christian
only in proportion as it is poetical, _i. e._, as it is regarded as
not literally true, it is charming to the enlightened spectator only
when it is formal and hence more or less insincere. A devotee on her
knees in some abysmal and mysterious cathedral, the while solemn music
sounds, and clouds of incense come down the wind, and priests in
luxurious, levantine costumes busy themselves with stately ceremonials
in a dead and not too respectable language--this is unquestionably
beautiful, particularly if the devotee herself be sightly. But the
same devotee aroused to hysterical protestations of faith by the
shrieks and contortions of a Methodist dervish in the costume of a
Southern member of Congress, her knees trembling with the fear of
God, her hands clenched as if to do combat with Beelzebub, her lips
discharging hosannahs and hallelujahs--this is merely obscene.


4

_The Restoration of Beauty_

I have said that the poetry which safeguards Christianity from
destruction today was borrowed from the ancient Jews, authors of
the two Testaments. But there was a long period during which it was
overshadowed by purely logical ideas, many of them of a sort that would
be called bolshevistic today. The principal Christians of the apostolic
age were almost exactly like the modern Calvinists and Wesleyans--men
quite without taste or imagination, whoopers and shouters, low
vulgarians, cads. So far as is known, their public worship was wholly
devoid of the sense of beauty; their sole concern was with the
salvation of their so-called souls. Thus they left us nothing worth
preserving--not a single church, or liturgy, or even hymn. The objects
of art exhumed from the Catacombs are inferior to the drawings and
statuettes of Crô-Magnon man. All the moving beauty that adorns the
corpse of Christianity today came into being long after the Fathers had
perished. The faith was centuries old before Christians began to build
cathedrals, and nearly a thousand years old before they learned how to
build good ones. It was twelve hundred years old before they invented
mariolatry--the prime cause of the appearance of a purely Christian
poetry. We think of Christmas as the typical Christian festival, and
no doubt it is; none other is so generally kept by Christian sects,
or so rich in charm and beauty. Well, Christmas, as we now have it,
was almost unknown in Christendom until the Eleventh Century, when the
relics of St. Nicholas of Myra, originally the patron of pawnbrokers,
were brought from the East to Italy. At this time the Universal
Church was already torn by controversies and menaced by schisms, and
the shadow of the Reformation was plainly discernible in the West.
Religions, in fact, like castles, sunsets and women, never reach their
maximum of beauty until they are touched by decay.


5

_End-Product_

Christendom may be defined briefly as that part of the world in which,
if any man stands up in public and solemnly swears that he is a
Christian, all his auditors will laugh.


6

_Another_

At the end of one millennium and nine centuries of Christianity, it
remains an unshakable assumption of the law in all Christian countries
and of the moral judgment of Christians everywhere that if a man and a
woman, entering a room together, close the door behind them, the man
will come out sadder and the woman wiser.


7

_Holy Clerks_

Around no class of men do more false assumptions cluster than around
the rev. clergy, our lawful commissioners at the Throne of Grace. I
proceed at once to a crass example: the assumption that clergymen are
necessarily religious. Obviously, it is widely cherished, even by
clergymen themselves. The most ribald of us, in the presence of a holy
clerk, is a bit self-conscious, reticent and awed. I am myself given
to criticizing Divine Providence somewhat freely, but in the company
of the rector of my parish, even at the _Biertisch_, I tone down my
animadversions to a level of feeble and polite remonstrance. I know the
fellow too well, of course, to have any actual belief in his piety.
He is, in fact, rather less pious than the average right-thinking
Americano, and I doubt gravely that the sorceries he engages in
professionally every day awaken in him any emotion more lofty than
boredom. I have heard him pray for Coolidge, for the heathen and for
rain, but I have never heard him pray for himself. Nevertheless, the
public assumption that he is highly devout, though I dispute it, colors
all my intercourse with him, and deprives him of hearing some of my
most searching and intelligent observations.

All that is needed to expose the hollowness of this ancient delusion
is to consider the chain of causes which brings a young man to taking
holy orders. Is it, in point of fact, an irresistible religious impulse
that sets him to studying exegetics, homiletics and the dog-Greek of
the New Testament, and on irresistible religious impulse only, or is
it something quite different? I believe that it is something quite
different, and that that something may be described briefly as a desire
to shine in the world without too much effort. The young theologue,
in brief, is commonly an ambitious but somewhat lazy and incompetent
fellow, and he studies theology instead of medicine or law because it
offers a quicker and easier route to an assured job and public respect.
The sacred sciences may be nonsensical bores, but they at least have
the vast virtue of short-circuiting, so to speak, the climb up the
ladder of security. The young doctor, for a number of years after he
graduates, either has to work for nothing or to content himself with
the dregs of practise, and the young lawyer, unless he has unusual
influence or complete atrophy of the conscience, often teeters on
the edge of actual starvation. But the young divine is a safe and
distinguished man the moment he is ordained; indeed, his popularity,
especially among the faithful who are fair, is often greater at that
moment than it ever is afterward. His livelihood is assured instantly.
At one stroke, he becomes a person of dignity and importance, eminent
in his community, deferred to even by those who question his magic, and
vaguely and pleasantly feared by those who credit it.

These facts, you may be sure, are not concealed from ambitious young
men of the sort I have mentioned. Such young men have eyes, and even
a certain capacity for ratiocination. They observe the nine sons of
the police sergeant: one a priest at twenty-five, with a fine house
to live in, invitations to all christenings and birthday parties for
miles around, and plenty of time to go to the ball-game on Summer
afternoons; the others struggling desperately to make their livings as
piano-movers, tin-roofers, motormen or bootleggers. They observe the
young Methodist dominie in his Ford sedan, flitting about among the
women while their husbands labor down in the yards district, a clean
collar around his neck, a solid meal of fried chicken in his gizzard,
and his name in the local paper every day. They observe the Baptist
dervish in his white necktie, raiding saloons, touring the bawdy-houses
and raising hell generally, his tabernacle packed every Sunday night,
a noble clink of silver in his collection-plates, and a fat purse for
him now and then from the Ladies’ Aid or the Ku Klux Klan. Only crazy
women ever fall in love with young doctors or lawyers, but every young
clergyman, if he is so inclined, may have a whole harem, and with
infinitely less danger than a struggling lawyer, a bootlegger or a bank
clerk runs every day. Even if he is celibate, the gals bathe him in
their smiles; in truth, the more celibate he is, the more attention he
gets from them. No wonder his high privileges and immunities propagate
the sin of envy! No wonder there are still candidates for the holy
shroud, despite the vast growth of atheism among us!

It seems to me that the majority of the young men who are thus sucked
into holy orders are not actually pious at all, but rather somewhat
excessively realistic--that genuine piety is far more apt to keep a
youth out of the pulpit than to take him into it. The true devotee,
frequenting the sacred edifice constantly, becomes too familiar with
the daily duties of a clergyman to see any religious satisfaction in
them. In the main, they have nothing to do with religion at all, but
are basically social or commercial. In so far as a clergyman works at
all, he works as the general manager of a corporation, and only too
often it is in financial difficulties and rent by factions among the
stockholders. His specifically religious duties are of a routine and
monotonous nature, and must needs depress him mightily, as a surgeon is
depressed by the endless snaring of tonsils and excision of appendices.
He debases spiritual exaltation by reducing it to a hollow and
meaningless formality, as a politician debases patriotism and a lady of
joy debases love. He becomes, in the end, quite anæsthetic to religion,
and even hostile to it. The fact is made distressingly visible by the
right rev. the bench of bishops. For a bishop to fall on his knees
spontaneously and begin to pray to God would make almost as great
a scandal as if he mounted his throne in a bathing-suit. The piety
of the ecclesiastic, on such high levels, becomes wholly formal and
theoretical. The servant of God has been lifted so near to the saints
and become so familiar with the inner workings of the divine machinery
that the sense of awe and wonder has oozed out of him. He can no more
undergo a genuine religious experience than a veteran scene-shifter can
laugh at the wheezes of the First Gravedigger. It is, perhaps, well
that this is so. If the higher clergy were actually religious some of
their own sermons and pastoral epistles would scare them to death.




IV. JUSTICE UNDER DEMOCRACY


1

Perhaps the chief victims of Prohibition in the Republic, in the long
run, will turn out to be the Federal judges. I do not argue here, of
course, that drinking bootleg liquors will kill them bodily; I merely
suggest that enforcing the unjust and insane provisions of the Volstead
Act will rob them of all their old dignity. A dozen years ago a Federal
judge was perhaps the most dignified and respected official yet
flourishing under our democracy. The plain people, many years before
that, had lost all respect for lawmakers, whether Federal, State or
municipal, and save for the President himself, they had very little
respect left for the gentlemen of the executive arm, high or low. More,
they had begun to view the judiciary of the States very biliously, and
showed no sign of surprise when a member of it was taken in judicial
adultery. But for the Federal judges they still continued to have a
high veneration, and for plain reasons. _Imprimis_, the Federal judges
sat for life, and thus did not have to climb down from their benches
at intervals and clamor obscenely for votes. Secondly, the laws that
they were told off to enforce, and especially the criminal laws, were
few in number, simple in character, and thoroughly in accord with
almost universal ideas of right and wrong. No citizen in his right
mind had much sympathy for the felons who were shipped to Atlanta each
morning by the marshals of the Federal courts--chiefly counterfeiters,
fraudulent bankrupts, adulterators of food and drugs, get-rich-quick
swindlers, thieving letter-carriers, crooked army officers, and so on.
Public sentiment was almost unanimously behind the punishment of such
rogues, and it rejoiced that that punishment was in the hands of men
who carried on the business in an austere and elevated manner, without
fear and without favor. It was, in those days, almost unheard of for
a petit jury in a Federal court to acquit a prisoner whose guilt was
plain; the percentage of convictions in some jurisdictions ran beyond
ninety per cent. For guilt of the kind then dealt with by those courts
met with the reprehension of practically all men not professional
criminals themselves--and Federal juries, petit and grand, were picked
with some care, as Federal judges themselves were picked.

I describe a Golden Age, now lamentably closed. The Uplift in its
various lovely forms has completely changed the character of the work
done by a Federal judge. Once the dispenser of varieties of law that
only scoundrels questioned, he is now the harassed and ludicrous
dispenser of varieties of law that only idiots approve. It was the
Espionage Act, I suppose, that brought him to this new and dreadful
office, but it is Prohibition--whether of wine-bibbing, of drug-taking,
of interstate week-ending, or of what not--that has carried him beyond
the bounds of what, to most normal men, is common decency. His typical
job today, as a majority of the plain people see it, especially in the
big cities, is simply to punish men who have refused or been unable to
pay the bribes demanded by Prohibition enforcement officers. In other
words, he is now chiefly apprehended by the public, not as a scourge
of rascals, but as an agent of rascals and a scourge of peaceable
men. He gets a great deal more publicity than he used to get in his
palmy days, but it is publicity of a sort that rapidly undermines his
dignity. Unfortunately for him, but perhaps very fortunately for what
remains of civilized government among us, the plain people have never
been able to grasp the difference between law and justice. To them the
two things are one--or ought to be. So the fact that the judge is bound
by law to enforce all the intolerable provisions of the Volstead Act,
including even its implicit provision that men wearing its badges shall
get a fair percentage upon every transaction in bootlegging--this fact
does not relieve the judge himself of responsibility for the ensuing
injustice. All that the vulgar observe is that justice has departed
from his courtroom. Once the equal of an archbishop, he is now the
equal of a police captain; once respected, he is now distrusted and
disliked.

If this were all, of course, it might be possible to dismiss the whole
matter on the ground that the public is an ass. That men of the highest
worth are not always respected, even when they wear official robes, is
a commonplace. But in the present case there is more to it than merely
that. Not a few of the Federal judges have begun to show signs that
the noisome work that has been forced upon them has begun to achieve
its inevitable subjective effects; in other words, not a few begin to
attack their sneaking sense of its lack of dignity and good repute
by bedizening it with moral indignation. The judicial servant of the
Anti-Saloon League thus takes on some of the neo-Christian character
of the League’s own dervishes and sorcerers. He is not content to send
some poor yokel to jail for an artificial crime that, in the view of
at least eighty per cent. of all even half-civilized Americans, is
no crime at all; he must also denounce the culprit from the bench in
terms fit for a man accused of arson or mayhem. Here the Freudians,
perhaps, may have something to say; the great masses of the innocent
and sinful, knowing nothing of Freud, observe only that the learned
jurist is silly as well as unjust. There issues from that observation a
generally bilious view of his office and his person. He slides slowly
down a fatal chute. His day of arctic and envied eminence passes. A few
sensitive judges quietly retire from the bench. But the legal mind is
usually tougher than that. It can almost always find justification for
doing, as agent of the law, what would be inconceivable privately to a
man of honor.


2

The truth is, indeed, that the decline in dignity from which the
Federal judges now suffer is not wholly due to the external fact of
Prohibition; it is due quite as much to their own growing pliancy
and lack of professional self-respect. All that Prohibition does to
them is to make brilliantly plain, even to the meanest understanding,
their lamentable departure from that high integrity of purpose,
that assiduous concern for justice, that jealous watchfulness over
the rights of man which simple men, at all times and everywhere,
like to find in the judges set over them, and which the simple men
of the United States, not so long ago, saw or thought they saw in
the learned ornaments of the Federal bench. Before ever Volstead
emerged from the Christian Endeavor belt with his preposterous Act,
confidence had begun to shake. The country had seen Federal judges
who were unmistakably mountebanks; it had seen some who were, to
the naked eye, indistinguishable from rascals. It had seen one step
down from the highest court in the land to engage in an undignified
stumping-tour, soliciting the votes of the rabble. It had seen another
diligently insinuate himself into the headlines of the yellow press, in
competition with Jack Dempsey and Babe Ruth. It had seen others abuse
their powers of equity in the frank interest of capital, and deny the
commonest justice to poor men in their clutches. And during the war
it had grown accustomed to seeing the Federal bench converted into
a sort of rival to the rostrum of Liberty Loan orators, with judges
hurling pious objurgations at citizens accused of nothing worse than
speaking their minds freely, and all pretense to fair hearings and just
punishments abandoned.

Of late the multiplication of such Dogberries has gone on apace as the
best of the old-time judges have retired from the bench. These new
jurisconsults, rejecting justice openly and altogether, have even begun
to reject the Constitution and the law. A judicial process before them
is indistinguishable from a bull-fight, with the accused, if he is
unpopular enough, as the bull. It is their theory, apparently, that the
sole function of a judge is to fill the jails. If the accused happens
to be guilty or to be reasonably suspected of guilt, well and good. But
if, as in the Chicago Socialist trials, he is obviously innocent, to
hell with him anyhow. True enough, a majority of the Federal judges,
high and low, still stand clear of such buffooneries. Even in the midst
of the worst hysteria of the war there were plenty who refused to be
run amok by Palmer, Burleson and company; I need cite only Hand, J.,
and Rose, J., as admirable examples of a number of judges who preserved
their dignity ’mid the rockets’ red glare. But the headlines in the
newspapers had nothing to say about such judges; their blackest ink
was reserved for the other kind. That other kind gradually established
a view of the Federal bench that still persists, and that is growing
more and more fixed as the farce of Prohibition enforcement unrolls.
It is a view which, in brief, holds that the Federal bench is no
longer the most exalted and faithful protector of the liberties of
the citizen, but the most relentless and inordinate foe of them--that
its main purpose is not to dispense justice at all, but to get men
into jail, guilty or not guilty, by fair means or foul--that to this
end it is willing to lend itself to the execution of any law, however
extravagant, and to support that execution with a variety of casuistry
that is flatly against every ordinary conception of common sense and
common decency. The Espionage Act cases, the labor injunction cases,
the deportation cases, the Postal Act cases, the Mann Act cases, and
now the Prohibition cases--all of these, impinging in rapid succession
upon a people brought up to regard the Bill of Rights as a reality and
liberty as a precious thing, have bred suspicion of the Federal courts,
including especially the Supreme Court, and, on the heels of that
suspicion, a positive and apparently ineradicable distrust. I doubt
that the Radical fanatics who dodge about the land have ever converted
any substantial body of Americans to their crazy doctrines; certainly
there is not the slightest sign today of the Revolution that they were
predicting for last year, and the year before. But when they have
denounced the Federal courts and produced the overwhelming evidence,
their shots have gone home.

Now and then a judge has argued, defending himself against some
manifestation of popular discontent, that he is helpless--that he is
the agent, not of justice, but of law. Even in the hey-dey of the
Espionage Act a few were moved to make that apology from the bench,
including, if I remember rightly, the judge who sentenced Debs. The
distinction thus set up is one that seems clear to lawyers, but, as I
have said, it seldom gets a hospitable hearing from plain men. If the
latter believe anything at all it is that law without justice is an
evil thing--that such law, indeed, leads inevitably to a contradiction
in terms--that the highest duty of the judiciary is not to enforce it
pedantically, but to evade it, vitiate it, and, if possible, destroy
it. The plain man sees plenty of other sorts of law destroyed by the
courts; he can’t help wondering why the process is so seldom applied
to statutes that violate, not merely legal apothegms, but the baldest
of common sense. Thus when he beholds a Federal judge fining a man,
under a constitutional amendment prohibiting the sale of intoxicating
beverages, for selling a beverage that is admittedly not intoxicating,
or jailing another man who has got before the bar, as everyone knows,
not because he ran a still but because he refused to pay the bribe
demanded by the Prohibition enforcement officer, or issuing against a
third an injunction whose sole and undisguised purpose is to deprive
him, by a legal swindle, of his constitutional right to a trial by
jury of his peers--when he observes such monkey-shines going on in
the name of the law, is it any wonder that he concludes dismally that
the law is an ass, and its agent another? In ordinary life men cannot
engage in such lunatic oppressions of their fellow-men without paying a
penalty for it; even a policeman must be measurably more plausible and
discreet. If a judge is bound by his oath to engage in them, then so
much the worse for the judge. He can no more hope to be respected than
a hangman can hope to be respected.

The truth is, of course, that the judges are by no means under the
compulsion that is alleged. The injunction clause of the Volstead
Act actually has no constitutional mandate behind it; the only
constitutional mandate that I can find, bearing upon it at all, is
against it. That is to be found in the Fifth and Sixth Amendments.
The first of these amendments provides that “no person shall be held
to answer for a capital or otherwise infamous crime unless on a
presentment or indictment of a grand jury”; the second requires that
“in all criminal prosecutions the accused shall enjoy the right to a
speedy and public trial by an impartial jury of the State and district
wherein the crime shall have been committed.” It must be obvious to
everyone that the aim of the injunction clause is simply and solely to
deprive the accused of these safeguards--to rob him of his clear right
to a trial by a jury of his peers. The history of the clause reveals
the fact clearly. It was first heard of in Iowa in the early years
of the century, and it was invented there, not by Prohibitionists,
but by the frantic vice-crusaders who then raged and roared in the
hinterland, inflaming the pious with gaudy yarns about white slave
traders, seducers armed with hypodermic syringes, and other such
phantasms. In Iowa these vice-crusaders specialized in the harassing
of the sort of poor women who keep cheap lodging-houses. When such a
woman, by ignorance or inadvertance, admitted a lady no longer a lady
to her establishment, they raided her, dragged her to jail, and charged
her with keeping a bawdy-house. This was good sport, and the rev.
pastors urged it on every Sunday. But after the first uproar, it began
to develop defects, and the chief of these defects was that juries
refused to convict. Now and then a man of sense and self-respect got
upon the panel and spoiled the show. Perhaps he found it impossible to
believe the sworn testimony of the vice-crusaders. Perhaps he concluded
that the accused, though guilty, had been punished enough by the raid.
Whatever his motive, he hung the jury and killed the hunting.

It was then that Christian lawyers came to the rescue of pious and
baffled men. They did it by the simple process of throwing the whole
responsibility upon the judge. Juries were hard to intimidate; there
was always apt to be at least one juror who didn’t care a hoot what was
said against him from the sacred desk--some hell-cat who positively
rejoiced in the indignation of the knock-’em-down-and-drag-’em-out
clergy. But judges were tenderer. Some of them were candidates for
re-election to the bench; all of them were solicitous about their
dignity, and did not care to face ecclesiastical curses, pious
whispers, suggestive winks. So the Iowa lawyers amended the law by
inventing and inserting the injunction clause. This clause flatly
abolished the right of trial by jury. When the vice-crusaders found a
likely victim they simply got a friendly judge to issue an injunction
against her, restraining her from using her premises for immoral
purposes. Then they watched her closely. The moment they detected a
dubious female entering her door they raided her again, dragged her
before the same judge--and he jailed her for contempt of court, an
offense punishable summarily and without a jury trial. Nine times out
of ten, perhaps, a jury would have acquitted her, but the judge was
already safely against her.

This scheme gave the vice-crusaders a new lease of life and greatly
increased their takings in the Sunday-schools. Naturally enough,
the Prohibitionists, who were, in most cases, none other than the
vice-crusaders themselves, instantly borrowed it, and so it got into
the Prohibition acts of all the dry States. Volstead, as a country
State’s attorney on the Minnesota steppes, employed it diligently
and to vast effect. He put it into the Volstead Act as a matter of
course. There it stands today, a dishonest and disgraceful blemish
upon American law. Its deliberate aim is to take away from the
citizen accused of crime his constitutional right to a jury trial; no
imaginable argument in favor of it can dodge that plain fact. When
it is invoked, as under the Volstead Act, against a man who has been
found guilty of one violation of the act, it not only punishes him
doubly for that violation; it also punishes him in advance for a second
offense that he has admittedly not committed, and deprives him of his
constitutional means of defense in case he is subsequently accused. He
is, in brief, put absolutely at the mercy of the judge--and the judge
is already obviously suspicious of him, and may be a senile sadist or
Prohibitionist demagogue to boot. The constitutional provision that a
man accused of crime may throw himself upon a jury of plain men like
himself, sworn to regard only the evidence actually before them--that
if he is able to convince only one of the twelve that he is innocent,
or not proved guilty beyond a doubt, he shall go free--this fundamental
guarantee of the citizen, this most sacred of all human rights under
Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence, is specifically nullified and made a mock of
in order to satisfy the frenzy of a minority of fanatics!

That contempt of court should be an offense standing outside the
purview of the Fifth and Sixth Amendments--that a judge should have the
power to punish summarily all deliberate floutings of his dignity--this
may be reasonably argued, though there are many sound considerations
against it. But that it should be lawful to convert some other and
wholly unrelated offense into contempt of court by a legal fiction,
and so get around the Fifth and Sixth Amendments by a swindle--this
is surely more than any sensible man would soberly maintain. When it
is maintained, it is only by persons who are trying to put men into
jail by processes that any average jury would revolt against--mill
owners eager to get rid of annoying labor leaders, coal operators
bent upon making slaves of their miners, Prohibitionists lusting for
the punishment of their opponents. The injunction in strike cases has
been a stench for years; it is, indeed, so bad that a large number of
Federal judges refuse absolutely to employ it. It is a worse stench in
Prohibition cases, for here it is becoming a formidable and favorite
weapon, not merely in the hands of property-owners who want to put down
strikes, but in the hands of criminal Prohibition agents who seek to
wring blackmail from their victims. In brief, it has become a dishonest
means of oppression for men who are even more dishonest than it is.
Certainly it is idle to talk of respect for the laws when such devices
have legislative and judicial sanction. No reasonable man, save he be
ignorant of their nature and purpose, can conceivably respect them.
If, on the ground that whatever is in the law should be given full
faith and credit, he maintains that they should not be resisted, then
he maintains that the Bill of Rights is no more than a string of empty
phrases, and that any shyster who invents a way to evade and abrogate
it is a jurist as dignified as John Marshall.


3

Is a judge bound to lend himself to such gross and dishonest attacks
upon the common rights of the citizen? I am no lawyer, but I presume
to doubt it. There were judges in 1918 who did not think themselves
obliged to sacrifice the Bill of Rights to the Espionage Act, and
who resolutely refused to do so, and yet, so far as I know, nothing
happened to them; at least one of them, to my knowledge, has been since
promoted to a circuit. Why should any judge enforce the injunction
clause of the Volstead Act? Its enforcement is surely not an automatic
act; it involves deliberation and decision by the judge; he may refuse
his injunction without offering any explanation to anyone. What would
follow if he arose one day in his high pulpit, and announced simply
that his court was purged of all such oblique and dishonest enactments
henceforth--that he had resolved to refuse to lend himself to the
schemes of blackmailers with badges, or to harass and punish free
citizens in violation of their fundamental constitutional rights and
their plain dignity as human beings, or, in brief, to engage in any
other enterprise as a judge that he would shrink from engaging in as
a good citizen and a man of honor? Would the result be impeachment? I
should like to meet a Congressman insane enough to move the impeachment
of such a judge! Would it be a storm of public indignation?... Or would
it be a vociferous yell of delight?

It seems to me, indeed, that the first judge who rises to such a
rebellion will be the first judge ever to become a popular hero in
the Republic--that he will be elevated to the Supreme Court by a
sort of acclamation, even if it is necessary to get rid of one of
the sitting justices by setting fire to his gown. But even imagining
him so elevated, the remaining eight justices will still function,
and all of us know what they think of the Bill of Rights. Wouldn’t
such a rebel judge succumb to the system of which he was a discreet
particle? Couldn’t the other eight judges nullify and make a mock of
his heroic defiance? Could they, indeed? Then how? If a judge, high or
low, actually called in justice to rescue a citizen from the law, what
precisely could the Supreme Court do about it? I know of no appeal from
the District Attorney in criminal cases, once the accused has been put
in jeopardy; I know only of impeachment for judges who forget the lines
of the solemn farce to which they are sworn. But try to imagine the
impeachment of a judge charged with punching a hole in the Volstead
Act, and letting in some common justice and common decency!

So far, no such rambunctious and unprecedented judge has been heard
of,--none, that is, has objected to the injunction clause in toto
and head on--nor do I specifically predict his advent. He may come,
but probably he won’t. The law is a curse to all of us, but it is a
curse of special virulence to lawyers. It becomes for them a sort of
discreditable vice, a stealthy and degrading superstition. It robs them
of all balance, of all capacity for clear thought, of all imagination.
Judges tend to show this decay of the faculties in an exaggerated form;
they become mere automata, bound by arbitrary rules, precedents, the
accumulated imbecilities of generations of bad logic; to their primary
lack of sense as lawyers they add the bombastic manner of bureaucrats.
It is thus too much to hope for a judge showing any originality or
courage; one Holmes in an era of Hardings and Coolidges is probably
more than a fair allotment. But while the judges of the District Courts
go on driving wild teams of jackasses through the Bill of Rights,
and the rev. seniors of the Supreme Court give their approval to the
business in solemn form, sometimes but not always with Holmes, J., and
Brandeis, J., dissenting--while all this is going on, there are black
clouds rolling up from the hinterland, where the Constitution is
still taught in the schools and even Methodists are bred to reverence
Patrick Henry. The files of Congress already show the way the wind is
blowing--constitutional amendments to drag down and denaturize the
Supreme Court, simple acts to the same end, other acts providing for
the election of Federal judges, yet others even more revolutionary.
I know of no such proposal that has any apparent merit. Even the
best of them, hamstringing the courts, would only augment the power
of a Congress that is ten times worse. But so long as judges pursue
fatuously the evil business of converting every citizen into a subject,
demagogues will come forward with their dubious remedies, and, soon
or late, unless the bench pulls up, some of these demagogues will get
themselves heard.




V. REFLECTIONS ON HUMAN MONOGAMY


1

_The Eternal Farce_

AS every attentive patron of the drama is well aware, it is difficult
for even the most skillful actors to keep Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler” from
degenerating to farce in the performance. The reason is certainly
not occult. It lies in the plain fact that such transactions as the
dramatist here deals with--a neurotic woman’s effort to be heavily
romantic, her horror when romance is followed by pregnancy, the
manœuvres of a satanic and idiotic lover, the cuckolding of a husband
wearing whiskers--are intrinsically and incurably farcical. _All_ love
affairs, in truth, are farcical--that is, to the spectators. When one
hears that some old friend has succumbed to the blandishments of a
sweet one, however virtuous and beautiful she may be, one does not gasp
and roll one’s eyes; one simply laughs. When one hears, a year or two
later, that they are quarreling, one laughs again. When one hears that
the bride is seeking consolation from the curate of the parish, one
laughs a third time. When one hears that the bridegroom, in revenge,
is sneaking his stenographer to dinner at an Italian restaurant, one
laughs a fourth time. And so on. But when one goes to the theatre, the
dramatist often asks one to wear a solemn frown when he displays the
same puerile and ludicrous phenomena--that is, while he depicts a fat
actress as going crazy when she discovers that her husband, an actor
with a face like the abdomen of a ten-pin, has run off to Asbury Park,
N. J., with another actress who pronounces all French words in the
manner of the Texas Christian University.

The best dramatists, of course, make no such mistake. In Shakespeare
love is always depicted as comedy--sometimes light and charming, as in
“Twelfth Night,” but usually rough and buffoonish, as in “The Taming of
the Shrew.” This comic attitude is plainly visible even in such plays
as “Hamlet” and “Romeo and Juliet.” In its main outlines, I suppose,
“Hamlet” is properly looked upon as a tragedy, but if you believe that
the love passages are intended to be tragic then all I ask is that you
give a sober reading to the colloquies between Hamlet and Ophelia.
They are not only farcical; they are downright obscene; Shakespeare,
through the mouth of Hamlet, derides the whole business with almost
intolerable ribaldry. As for “Romeo and Juliet,” what is it but a
penetrating burlesque upon the love guff that was fashionable in the
poet’s time? True enough, his head buzzed with such loveliness that he
could not write even burlesque without making it beautiful--compare
“Much Ado About Nothing” and “Othello”--but nevertheless it is quite
absurd to say that he was serious when he wrote this tale of calf-love.
Imagine such a man taking seriously the spasms and hallucinations of
a _Backfisch_ of fourteen, the tinpot heroics of a boy of eighteen!
Shakespeare remembered very well the nature of his own amorous fancies
at eighteen. It was the year of his seduction by Ann Hathaway, whose
brothers later made him marry her, much to his damage and dismay. He
wrote the play at forty-five. Tell it to the Marines!

I have a suspicion that even Ibsen, though he seldom permitted himself
overt humor, indulged in some quiet spoofing when he wrote “A Doll’s
House,” “Hedda Gabler,” “The Lady From the Sea” and “Little Eyolf.” The
whole last act of “Hedda Gabler” could be converted into burlesque by
changing ten words; as I have said, it is almost always burlesque as
bad actors play it. In the cases of “Ghosts” and “The Master-Builder”
there can be no doubt whatever. The former is a piece of buffoonery
designed to make fun of the fools who were outraged by “A Doll’s
House”; the latter is a comic piece founded upon personal experience.
At the age of sixty Ibsen amused himself with a flirtation with a girl
of sixteen. Following the custom of her sex, she took his casual winks
and cheek-pinchings quite seriously, and began hinting to the whole
neighborhood that the old boy was hopelessly gone on her, and that
he intended to divorce Fru Ibsen and run off with her to Italy. All
this gave entertainment to Ibsen, who was a sardonic man, and he began
speculating as to what would happen to a man of his age who actually
yielded to the gross provocations of such a wench. The result was “The
Master-Builder.” But think of the plot! He makes the master-builder
climb a church-steeple, and then jump off! Imagine him regarding such
slap-stick farce seriously!

The world has very little sense of humor. It is always wagging its ears
solemnly over elaborate jocosities. For 600 years it has gurgled over
the “Divine Comedy” of Dante, despite the plain fact that the work
is a flaming satire upon the whole Christian hocus-pocus of heaven,
purgatory and hell. To have tackled such nonsense head-on, in Dante’s
time, would have been to flout the hangman; hence the poet clothed his
attack in an irony so delicate that the ecclesiastical police were
baffled. Why is the poem called a comedy? I have read at least a dozen
discussions of the question by modern pedants, all of them labored and
unconvincing. The same problem obviously engaged the scholars of the
poet’s own time. He called the thing simply “comedy”; they added the
adjective “divine” in order to ameliorate what seemed to them to be an
intolerable ribaldry. Well, here is a “comedy” in which human beings
are torn limb from limb, boiled in sulphur, cut up with red-hot knives,
and filled with molten lead! Can one imagine a man capable of such a
poem regarding such fiendish imbecilities seriously? Certainly not.
They appeared just as idiotic to him as they appear to you or me. But
the Federal judiciary of the day made it impossible to say so in plain
language, so he said so behind a smoke-screen of gaudy poetry. How
Dante would have roared if he could have known that six hundred years
later an illiterate President of the United States, a good Baptist with
money in the bank, married happily to a divorcée--would take the whole
thing with utter seriousness, and deliver a nonsensical harangue upon
the lessons in it for American Christians!

The case of Wagner’s “Parsifal” is still more remarkable. Even
Nietzsche was deceived by it. Like the most maudlin German fat woman at
Baireuth, he mistook the composer’s elaborate and outrageous burlesque
of Christianity for a tribute to Christianity, and so denounced him
as a jackass and refused to speak to him thereafter. To this day
“Parsifal” is given with all the trappings of a religious ceremonial,
and pious folks go to hear it who would instantly shut their ears if
the band began playing “Tristan und Isolde.” It has become, in fact,
a sort of “’Way Down East” or “Ben Hur” of music drama--a bait for
luring patrons who are never seen in the opera-house otherwise. But
try to imagine such a thumping atheist as Wagner writing a religious
opera seriously! And if, by any chance, you succeed in imagining it,
then turn to the Char-Freitag music, and play it on your victrola.
Here is the central scene of the piece, the moment of most austere
solemnity--and to it Wagner fits music that is so luscious and so
fleshly--indeed, so downright lascivious and indecent--that even I, who
am almost anæsthetic to such provocations, blush every time I hear it.
The Flower Maidens do not raise my blood-pressure a single ohm; I have
actually snored through the whole second act of “Tristan.” But when
I hear that Char-Freitag music all of my Freudian suppressions begin
groaning and stretching their legs in the dungeons of my unconscious.
And what does Char-Freitag mean? Char-Freitag means Good Friday!


2

_Venus at the Domestic Hearth_

One inclines to the notion that women--and especially homely
women--greatly overestimated the importance of physical beauty in
their eternal conspiracy against the liberty of men. It is a powerful
lure, to be sure, but it is certainly not the only one that fetches
the game, nor even, perhaps, the most effective one. The satisfaction
that a man gets out of conquering--which is to say, out of succumbing
to--a woman of noticeable pulchritude is chiefly the rather banal one
of parading her before other men. He likes to show her off as he likes
to show his expensive automobile or his big door-knob factory. It is
her apparent costliness that is her principal charm. Her beauty sets
up the assumption that she was sought eagerly by other men, some of
them wealthy, and that it thus took a lot of money or a lot of skill to
obtain the monopoly of her.

But very few men are so idiotic that they are blind to the hollowness
of such satisfactions. A husband, after all, spends relatively few
hours of his life parading his wife, or even contemplating her beauty.
What engages him far more often is the unromantic business of living
with her--of listening to her conversation, of trying to fathom and
satisfy her whims, of detecting and counteracting her plots against his
ego, of facing with her the dull hazards and boredoms of everyday life.
In the discharge of this business personal beauty is certainly not
necessarily a help; on the contrary, it may be a downright hindrance,
if only because it makes for the hollowest and least intelligent of
all forms of vanity. Of infinitely more value is a quality that women
too often neglect, to wit, the quality of simple amiability. The most
steadily charming of all human beings, male or female, is the one who
is tolerant, unprovocative, good-humored, kind. A man wants a show only
intermittently, but he wants peace and comfort every day. And to get
them, if he is sagacious, he is quite willing to sacrifice scenery.


3

_The Rat-trap_

Much of the discontent with modern marriage centers in the fact that
the laws which condition it and safeguard it all assume that its
purpose is the founding of a family. This was unquestionably its
purpose when those laws were devised, say three thousand years ago,
but that purpose, at least among the civilized minority, is now almost
forgotten. Very few educated men of today, it seems to me, have any
notion of founding a family in mind when they marry. Their vanity
takes different forms; moreover, they have rejected the old doctrine
that they have any duty in the premises; the _Stammhalter_ has pretty
well disappeared from their visions. Most of them, it is probable,
marry without any intelligible purpose whatever. Women flatter
them, mark them down and lure them to the holy altar: everything
else is afterthought. Many an American man finds himself on the
brink of marriage without ever having given any sober thought even
to so important a matter as the probable charm of his bride-elect as
mistress. This explains many connubial calamities.

As things stand, the only legal relief from uncomfortable marriages
is afforded by divorce. Every other workable device is frowned upon,
and most of them are punished. The chief purpose of legal divorce,
of course, is to protect the children of the marriage, _i. e._,
to safeguard the family. But the scheme is clumsy, expensive and
cruel. To employ it is to cut off a leg in order to cure what may
be, after all, merely a barked shin--worse, what may be no injury
at all. Suppose there _are_ no children? Suppose the marriage is
entered upon with the clear understanding that there _shall_ be no
children? In the latter case it is obviously insane to surround it
with safeguards for the family that will never exist. As well insure
a pile of bricks against fire. What is needed is legal recognition
of such marriages--recognition that will establish decorum and fair
play within their actual limits, but that will not seek to burden them
with conditions that look quite outside their limits. Human inertia
and sentimentality, of course, will be a long while countenancing any
such change. Until quite recently a marriage without children was
utterly impossible, save as an act of God, and so the inevitable, by
a familiar process, was converted into the creditable. This nonsense
survives, despite the disappearance of the excuse for it. It is
still believed, by the great majority of human beings, that there is
something mysteriously laudable about achieving viable offspring. I
have searched the sacred and profane scriptures for many years, but
have yet to find any logical ground for this notion. To have a child is
no more creditable than to have rheumatism--and no more discreditable.
Ethically, it is absolutely meaningless. And practically, it is mainly
a matter of chance.


4

_The Love Chase_

The notion that man is the aggressor in love is frequently supported
by old-fashioned psychologists by pointing to the example of the
lower animals. The lion, it appears, stalks the lioness to her shame
and undoing; the amorous cock pursues the reluctant and virtuous
hen. Granted. But all that this proves, giving the analogy all the
value asked for it, is that man is the aggressor as _lover_, pure and
simple, _i. e._, as seducer. Is he also the aggressor as suitor and
husband? To ask the question is almost to answer it.... Well, it is
precisely his rôle of husband that differentiates man from lion and
cock. And once he is thus differentiated, all his previous likeness
disappears.... In civilized societies, there is a double stalking:
for mistresses and for husbands. The fact that the majority of women
retain their virtue to the altar and that the majority of men, soon or
late, are married--this offers a capital indication of the relative
enthusiasm and pertinacity with which the two varieties of aggression
are carried on.


5

_Women as Realpolitiker_

Women in general are far too intelligent to have any respect for
so-called ideas. One seldom hears of them suffering and dying for
any of the bogus Great Truths that men believe in. When a woman is
on good terms with her husband she is quite willing to accept his
idiotic theorizings on any subject that happens to engage him, whether
theological, economic, epistemological or political. When one hears
of a Republican man who has a Democratic wife, or _vice versa_, it is
always safe to assume that she has her eye on a handsomer, richer or
more docile fellow, and is thinking of calling up a lawyer.


6

_Footnote for Suffragettes_

The double standard of morality will survive in this world so long as a
woman whose husband has been debauched is favored with the sympathetic
tears of other women, and a man whose wife has run away with an actor
is laughed at by other men.


7

_The Helpmate_

The notion that a true and loving (and, let us hope, amiable and
beautiful) wife inspires a man to high endeavor is largely illusory.
Every sane woman knows instinctively, as a matter of fact, that the
highest aspirations of her husband are fundamentally inimical to her,
and that their realization is apt to cost her her possession of him.
What she dreams of is not an infinitely brilliant husband, but an
infinitely “solid” one, which is to say, one bound irretrievably by the
chains of normalcy. It would delight her to see him get to the White
House, for a man in the White House is as relentlessly policed as an
archbishop. But it would give her a great deal of disquiet to see him
develop into a Goethe or a Wagner.

I have known in my time a good many men of the first talent, as talent
is reckoned in America, and most of them have been married. I can’t
recall one whose wife appeared to view his achievements with perfect
ease of mind. In every case the lady was full of a palpable fear--the
product of feminine intuition, _i. e._, of hard realism and common
sense--that his rise shook her hold upon him, that he became a worse
husband in proportion as he became a better man. In the logic I can
discern no flaw. The ideal husband is surely not a man of active and
daring mind; he is the man of placid and conforming mind. Here the good
business man obviously beats the artist and adventurer. His rewards are
all easily translated into domestic comfort and happiness. He is not
wobbled by the admiration of other women, none of whom, however much
they may esteem his virtues as a husband, are under any illusion as
to his virtues as a lover. Above all, his mind is not analytical, and
hence he is not likely to attempt any anatomizing of his marriage--the
starting point for the worst sort of domestic infelicity. No man,
examining his marriage intelligently, can fail to observe that it is
compounded, at least in part, of slavery, and that he is the slave.
Happy the woman whose husband is so stupid that he never launches into
that coroner’s inquest!


8

_The Mime_

The fundamental objection to actors, stripping the business of all mere
sophistry and snobbery, is that they give away the idiotic vanity of
the whole male sex. An actor is simply a man who, by word and strut,
says aloud of _him_self what all normal men think of _them_selves.
Thus he exposes, in a highly indiscreet and disconcerting manner, the
full force of masculine vanity. But I doubt that he exaggerates it.
No healthy male is ever actually modest. No healthy male ever really
thinks or talks of anything save himself. His conversation is one
endless boast--often covert, but always undiluted. His politics is a
mere sneering at what he conceives to be inferiors; his philosophy
is simply an exposure of asses; he cannot imagine himself save as
superior, dominating, the center of situations. Even his theology is
seldom more than a stealthy comparison of himself and God, to the
disadvantage of God.... The youngest flapper knows all this. Feminine
strategy, in the duel of sex, consists almost wholly of an adroit
feeding of this vanity. Man makes love by braggadocia. Woman makes love
by listening.... Once a woman passes a certain point in intelligence
she finds it almost impossible to get a husband: she simply cannot go
on listening without snickering.


9

_Cavia Cobaya_

I find the following in Theodore Dreiser’s “Hey-Rub-a-Dub-Dub”;

 Does the average strong, successful man confine himself to one woman?
 Has he ever?

The first question sets an insoluble problem. How are we, in such
intimate matters, to say what is the average and what is not the
average? But the second question is easily answered, and the answer
is, He has. Here Dreiser’s curious sexual obsession simply leads him
into absurdity. His view of the traffic of the sexes remains the naïve
one of an ex-Baptist nymph in Greenwich Village. Does he argue that
Otto von Bismarck was not a “strong, successful man”? If not, then
let him remember that Bismarck was a strict monogamist--a man full
of sin, but always faithful to his Johanna. Again, there was Thomas
Henry Huxley. Again, there was William Ewart Gladstone. Again, there
was Robert Edward Lee. Yet again, there were Robert Schumann, Felix
Mendelssohn, Johann Sebastian Bach, Ulysses S. Grant, Andrew Jackson,
Louis Pasteur, Martin Luther, Helmuth von Moltke, Stonewall Jackson,
Lyof Tolstoi, Robert Browning, Henrik Ibsen, William T. Sherman, Carl
Schurz, old Sam Adams, ... I could extend the list to pages.... Perhaps
I am unfair to Dreiser. His notion of a “strong, successful man” may
be, not such a genuinely superior fellow as Bismarck or Bach, but such
a mere brigand as Shonts, Yerkes or Jim Fisk. If so, he is still wrong.
If so, he still runs aground on John D. Rockefeller.


10

_The Survivor_

Around every bachelor of more than thirty-five legends tend to
congregate, chiefly about the causes of his celibacy. If it is not
whispered that he is damaged goods, and hence debarred from marriage by
a lofty concept of Service to the unborn, it is told under the breath
that he was insanely in love at the age of twenty-six with a beautiful
creature who jilted him for an insurance underwriter and so broke
his heart beyond repair. Such tales are nearly always moonshine. The
reason why the average bachelor of thirty-five remains a bachelor is
really very simple. It is, in brief, that no ordinarily attractive and
intelligent woman has ever made a serious and undivided effort to marry
him.


11

_The Veteran’s Disaster_

The tragedy of experience is that a man no longer believes it when a
woman shows all the orthodox signs of having been flustered by him. In
youth it gives him immense delight to discover that he has made a mash,
but when he gets into the middle years the thing merely annoys him. He
is irritated that yet another female Cagliostro should try to floor him
with the immemorial mumbo-jumbo, and so make a fool of him. The girl he
succumbs to is the one who tells him frankly that her heart is buried
in France, but that she admires him tremendously and would esteem it a
singular honor to be the wife of so meritorious a fellow. This helps to
explain, perhaps, why aging men so often succumb to flappers.


12

_Moral Indignation_

The ill-fame of the Turks in the English-speaking world is not due
to their political medievalism, as is usually alleged, but to their
practise of polygamy. That practise inevitably excites the erotic
imagination of men doomed to monogamy, and particularly of men doomed
to monogamy with despotic, prudish and unappetizing wives, which is to
say, the normal, typical men of England and the United States. They
envy the Turk his larger and more charming joys, and hence hate him.
Every time Reuter reports him dragging a fresh herd of dark-eyed,
voluptuous Georgian or Armenian women into his seraglio, they hate him
the more. The way to arouse a Puritan to his highest pitch of moral
indignation is not to burn down an orphan-asylum; the way to do it is
to grab a pretty girl around the waist and launch with her into the
lascivious measures of a Wiener Walz. Men always hate most what they
envy most.


13

_The Man and His Shadow_

Every man, whatever his actual qualities, is credited with and judged
by certain general qualities that are supposed to appertain to his sex,
particularly by women. Thus man the individual is related to Man the
species, often to his damage and dismay. Consider my own case. I am
by nature one of the most orderly of mortals. I have a place for every
article of my personal property, whether a Bible or a cocktail-shaker,
an undershirt or an eye-dropper, and I always keep it where it belongs.
I never drop cigar-ashes on the floor. I never upset a waste-basket.
I am never late for trains. I never run short of collars. I never go
out with a purple necktie on a blue shirt. I never fail to appear in
time for dinner without telephoning or telegraphing. Yet the women who
are cursed by God with the care of me maintain and cherish the fiction
that I am an extremely careless and even hoggish fellow--that I have
to be elaborately nursed, supervised and policed--that the slightest
relaxation of vigilance over my everyday conduct would reduce me
to a state of helplessness and chaos, with all my clothes mislaid,
half my books in the ash-can, my mail unanswered, my face unshaven,
and my office not unlike an I. W. W. headquarters after a raid by
the _Polizei_. It is their firm theory that, unaided by superior
suggestion, I’d wear one shirt six weeks, and a straw hat until
Christmas. They never speak of my work-room save in terms of horror,
though it is actually the most orderly room in my house. Weekly I am
accused of having lost all my socks and handkerchiefs, though they are
in my clothes-press all the while. At least once a month formal plans
are discussed for reorganizing my whole mode of life, that I may not
sink into irremediable carelessness, inefficiency and barbarism.

I note that many other men lie under the same benign espionage and
misrepresentation--in fact, nearly all men. But it is my firm belief
that very few men are really disorderly. The business of the world is
managed by getting order into it, and the feeling for discipline thus
engendered is carried over into domestic life. I know of very few men
who ever drop ashes on the dining-room rug, or store their collars in
their cigar-box, or put on brown socks with their dress-clothes, or
forget to turn off the water after they have bathed, or neglect to
keep dinner engagements--and most of these few, I am firmly convinced,
do it because their women-folk expect it of them, because it would
cause astonishment and dismay if they refrained. I myself, more than
once, have deliberately hung my hat on an electrolier, or clomped over
the parquetry with muddy shoes, or gone out in a snowstorm without
an overcoat, or come down to dinner in a ragged collar, or filled my
shirt-box with old copies of the _Congressional Record_, or upset a
bottle of green ink, or used Old Dutch Cleanser for shaving, or put
olives into Jack Rose cocktails, or gone without a hair-cut for three
or four weeks, or dropped an expensive beer _Seidel_ upon the hard
concrete of my cellar floor in order to give a certain necessary color
to the superstition of my oafishness. If I failed to do such things now
and then I’d become unpopular, and very justly so, for nothing is more
obnoxious than a human being who is always challenging and correcting
the prevailing view of him. Even now I make no protest; I merely record
the facts. On my death-bed, I daresay, I shall carry on the masquerade.
That is to say, I shall swallow a clinical thermometer or two, upset my
clam-broth over my counterpane, keep an ouija board and a set of dice
under my pillow, and maybe, at the end, fall clumsily out of bed.


14

_The Balance-Sheet_

Marriage, as everyone knows, is chiefly an economic matter. But too
often it is assumed that economics concerns only the wife’s hats; it
also concerns, and perhaps more importantly, the husband’s cigars. No
man is genuinely happy, married, who has to drink worse gin than he
used to drink when he was single.


15

_Yearning_

Ah, that the eugenists would breed a woman as capable of laughter as
the girl of twenty and as adept at knowing when not to laugh as the
woman of thirty-five!




VI. THE POLITICIAN


Half the sorrows of the world, I suppose, are caused by making false
assumptions. If the truth were only easier to ascertain the remedy for
them would consist simply of ascertaining it and accepting it. This
business, alas, is usually impossible, but fortunately not always: now
and then, by some occult process, half rational and half instinctive,
the truth gets itself found out and an ancient false assumption goes
overboard. I point, in the field of the social relations, to one which
afflicted the human race for millenniums: that one, to wit, which
credited the rev. clergy with a mysterious wisdom and awful powers.
Obviously, it has ceased to trouble all the superior varieties of
men. It may survive in those remote marches where human beings go to
bed with the cows, but certainly it has vanished from the cities.
Asphalt and the apostolic succession, indeed, seem to be irreconcilable
enemies. I can think of no clergyman in any great American city today
whose public dignity and influence are much above those of an ordinary
Class I Babbitt. It is hard for even the most diligent and passionate
of the ancient order to get upon the first pages of the newspapers;
he must make a clown-show, discreditable to his fraying cloth, or he
must blush unseen. When bishops begin launching thunderbolts against
heretics, the towns do not tremble; they laugh. When elders denounce
sin, sin only grows more popular. Imagine a city man getting a notice
from the ordinary of his diocese that he had been excommunicated. It
would trouble him far less, I venture, than his morning _Katzenjammer_.

The reason for all this is not hard to find. All the superior varieties
of men--and even the lowest varieties of city workmen are at least
superior to peasants--have simply rid themselves of their old belief
in devils. Hell no longer affrights and palsies them, and so the magic
of those who profess to save them from it no longer impresses them.
That profession, I believe, was bogus, and its acceptance was therefore
a false assumption. Being so, it made men unhappy; getting rid of it
has delivered them. They are no longer susceptible to ecclesiastical
alarms and extortions; _ergo_, they sleep and eat better. Think of
what life must have been under such princes of damnation as Cotton
Mather and Jonathan Edwards, with even bartenders and metaphysicians
believing in them! And then compare it to life under Bishop Manning and
the Rev. Dr. John Roach Straton, with only a few half-wits believing
in them! Or turn to the backwoods of the Republic, where the devil
is still feared, and with him his professional exterminators. In the
country towns the clergy are still almost as influential as they were
in Mather’s day, and there, as everyone knows, they remain public
nuisances, and civilized life is almost impossible. In such Neolithic
regions nothing can go on without their consent, on penalty of anathema
and hell-fire; as a result, nothing goes on that is worth recording.
It is this survival of sacerdotal authority, I begin to believe, and
not hookworm, malaria or the event of April 9, 1865, that is chiefly
responsible for the cultural paralysis of the late Confederate States.
The South lacks big cities; it is run by its country towns--and in
every country town there is some Baptist _mullah_ who rules by scaring
the peasantry. The false assumption that his pretensions are sound,
that he can actually bind and loose, that contumacy to him is a variety
of cursing God--this false assumption is what makes the yokels so
uneasy, so nervous, and hence so unhappy. If they could throw it off
they would burn fewer Aframericans and sing more songs. If they could
be purged of it they would be purged of Ku Kluxry too.

The cities got rid of that false assumption half a century ago,
and have been making cultural progress ever since. Somewhat later
they got rid of its brother, to wit, respect for government, and,
in particular, respect for its visible agents, the police. That
respect--traditional, and hence irrational--had been, for years,
in increasingly unpleasant collision with a great body of obvious
facts. The police, by assumption austere and almost sacrosanct, were
gradually discovered to be, in reality, a pack of rogues and but
little removed, save by superior impudence and enterprise, from the
cut-throats and purse-snatchers they were set to catch. When, a few
decades ago, the American people, at least in the big cities, began to
accept them frankly for what they were--when the old false assumption
of their integrity and public usefulness was quietly abandoned and a
new and more accurate assumption of their roguery was adopted in its
place--when this change was effected there was a measurable increase,
I believe, in the public happiness. It no longer astonished anyone
when policemen were taken in evildoing; indignation therefore abated,
and with it its pains. If, before that time, the corps of Prohibition
enforcement officers--_i. e._, a corps of undisguised scoundrels with
badges--had been launched upon the populace, there would have been a
great roar of wrath, and much anguished gnashing of teeth. People would
have felt themselves put upon, injured, insulted. But with the old
false assumption about policemen removed from their minds, they met the
new onslaught calmly and even smilingly. Today no one is indignant
over the fact that the extortions of these new _Polizei_ increase the
cost of potable alcohol. The false assumption that the police are
altruistic agents of a benevolent state has been replaced by the sound
assumption that they are gentlemen engaged assiduously, like the rest
of us, in finding meat and raiment for their families and in laying up
funds to buy Liberty Bonds in the next war to end war. This is human
progress, for it increases human happiness.

So much for the evidence. The deduction I propose to make from it is
simply this: that a like increase would follow if the American people
could only rid themselves of another and worse false assumption that
still rides them--one that corrupts all their thinking about the
great business of politics, and vastly augments their discontent and
unhappiness--the assumption, that is, that politicians are divided into
two classes, and that one of those classes is made up of good ones.
I need not argue, I hope, that this assumption is almost universally
held among us. Our whole politics, indeed, is based upon it, and has
been based upon it since the earliest days. What is any political
campaign save a concerted effort to turn out a set of politicians who
are admittedly bad and put in a set who are thought to be better? The
former assumption, I believe, is always sound; the latter is just as
certainly false. For if experience teaches us anything at all it
teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as
unthinkable as an honest burglar. His very existence, indeed, is a
standing subversion of the public good in every rational sense. He is
not one who serves the common weal; he is simply one who preys upon the
commonwealth. It is to the interest of all the rest of us to hold down
his powers to an irreducible minimum, and to reduce his compensation to
nothing; it is to his interest to augment his powers at all hazards,
and to make his compensation all the traffic will bear. To argue that
these aims are identical is to argue palpable nonsense. The politician,
at his ideal best, never even remotely approximated in practise, is a
necessary evil; at his worst he is an almost intolerable nuisance.

What I contend is simply that he would be measurably less a nuisance
if we got rid of our old false assumption about him, and regarded
him in the cold light of fact. At once, I believe, two-thirds of his
obnoxiousness would vanish. He would remain a nuisance, but he would
cease to be a swindler; the injury of having to pay freight on him
would cease to be complicated by the insult of being rooked. It is the
insult and not the injury that makes the deeper wounds, and causes the
greater permanent damage to the national psyche. All of us have been
trained, since infancy, in putting up with necessary evils, plainly
recognized _as_ evils. We know, for example, that the young of the
human species commonly smell badly; that garbage men, bootblacks and
messenger boys commonly smell worse. These facts are not agreeable, but
they remain tolerable because they are universally assumed--because
there is no sense of having been tricked and cozened in their perennial
discovery. But try to imagine how distressing fatherhood would become
if prospective fathers were all taught that the human infant radiates
an aroma like the rose--if the truth came constantly as a surprise!
Each fresh victim of the deception would feel that he had been basely
swindled--that his own child was somehow bogus. Not infrequently, I
suppose, he would be tempted to make away with it in some quiet manner,
and have another--only to be shocked again. That procedure would be
idiotic, admittedly, yet it is exactly the one we follow in politics.
At each election we vote in a new set of politicians, insanely assuming
that they are better than the set turned out. And at each election we
are, as they say in the Motherland, done in.

Of late the fraud has become so gross that the plain people begin
to show a great restlessness under it. Like animals in a cage, they
trot from one corner to another, endlessly seeking a way out. If the
Democrats win one year, it is a pretty sure sign that they will lose
the next year. State after State becomes doubtful, pivotal, skittish;
even the solid South begins to break. In the cities it is still worse.
An evil circle is formed. First the poor taxpayers, robbed by the
politicians of one great party and then by those of the other, turn
to a group of free-lance rogues in the middle ground--non-partisan
candidates, Liberals, reformers or what not: the name is unimportant.
Then, flayed and pillaged by these gentry as they never were by
the old-time professionals, they go back in despair to the latter,
and are flayed and pillaged again. Back to Bach! Back to Tammany!
Tammany reigns in New York because the Mitchel outfit was found to be
intolerable--in other words, because the reformers were found to be
even worse than the professionals. Is the fact surprising? Why should
it be? Reformers and professionals are alike politicians in search of
jobs; both are trying to bilk the taxpayers. Neither ever has any other
motive. If any genuinely honest and altruistic politician had come to
the surface in America in my time I’d have heard of him, for I have
always frequented newspaper offices, and in a newspaper office the
news of such a marvel would cause a dreadful tumult. I can recall no
such tumult. The unanimous opinion of all the journalists that I know,
excluding a few Liberals who are obviously somewhat balmy--they all
believed, for example, that the late war would end war,--is that, since
the days of the national Thors and Wotans, no politician who was not
out for himself, and for himself alone, has ever drawn the breath of
life in the United States.

The gradual disintegration of Liberalism among us, in fact, offers an
excellent proof of the truth of my thesis. The Liberals have come to
grief by fooling their customers, not merely once too often, but a
hundred times too often. Over and over again they have trotted out some
new hero, usually from the great open spaces, only to see him taken in
the immemorial malpractises within ten days. Their graveyard, indeed,
is filled with cracked and upset headstones, many covered with ribald
pencilings. Every time there is a scandal in the grand manner the
Liberals lose almost as many general officers as either the Democrats
or Republicans. Of late, racked beyond endurance by such catastrophes
at home, they have gone abroad for their principal heroes; losing humor
as well as hope, they now ask us to venerate such astounding paladins
as the Hon. Bela Kun, a gentleman who, in any American State, would not
only be in the calaboose, but actually in the death-house. But this
absurdity is only an offshoot of a deeper one. Their primary error lies
in making the false assumption that some politicians are better than
others. This error they share with the whole American people.

I propose that it be renounced, and contend that its renunciation
would greatly rationalize and improve our politics. I do not argue that
there would be any improvement in our politicians; on the contrary, I
believe that they would remain substantially as they are today, and
perhaps grow even worse. But what I do argue is that recognizing them
frankly for what they are would instantly and automatically dissipate
the indignation caused by their present abominations, and that the
disappearance of this indignation would promote the public contentment
and happiness. Under my scheme there would be no more false assumptions
and no more false hopes, and hence no more painful surprises, no more
bitter resentment of fraud, no more despair. Politicians, in so far
as they remained necessary, would be kept at work--but not with any
insane notion that they were arch-angels. Their rascality would be
assumed and discounted, as the rascality of the police is now assumed
and discounted. Machinery would be gradually developed to limit it
and counteract it. In the end, it might be utilized in some publicly
profitable manner, as the insensitiveness to filth of garbage men is
now utilized, as the reverence of the clergy for capitalism is now
utilized. The result, perhaps, would be a world no better than the
present one, but it would at least be a world more intelligent.

In all this I sincerely hope that no one will mistake me for one who
shares the indignation I have spoken of--that is, for one who believes
that politicians can be made good, and cherishes a fond scheme for
making them so. I believe nothing of the sort. On the contrary, I am
convinced that the art and mystery they practise is essentially and
incurably anti-social--that they must remain irreconcilable enemies of
the common weal until the end of time. But I maintain that this fact,
in itself, is not a bar to their employment. There are, under Christian
civilization, many necessary offices that demand the possession of
anti-social talents. A professional soldier, regarded realistically,
is much worse than a professional politician, for he is a professional
murderer and kidnaper, whereas the politician is only a professional
sharper and sneak-thief. A clergyman, too, begins to shrink and
shrivel on analysis; the work he does in the world is basically almost
indistinguishable from that of an astrologer, a witch-doctor or a
fortune-teller. He pretends falsely that he can get sinners out of
hell, and collects money from them on that promise, tacit or express.
If he had to go before a jury with that pretension it would probably go
hard with him. But we do not send him before a jury; we grant him his
hocus-pocus on the ground that it is necessary to his office, and that
his office is necessary to civilization, so-called. I pass over the
journalist delicately; the time has not come to turn State’s evidence.
Suffice it to say that he, too, would probably wither under a stiff
cross-examination. If he is no murderer, like the soldier, then he is
at least a sharper and swindler, like the politician.

What I plead for, if I may borrow a term in disrepute, is simply
_Realpolitik_, _i. e._, realism in politics. I can imagine a political
campaign purged of all the current false assumptions and false
pretenses--a campaign in which, on election day, the voters went
to the polls clearly informed that the choice between them was not
between an angel and a devil, a good man and a bad man, an altruist
and a go-getter, but between two frank go-getters, the one, perhaps,
excelling at beautiful and nonsensical words and the other at silent
and prehensile deeds--the one a chautauqua orator and the other a
porch-climber. There would be, in that choice, something candid, free
and exhilarating. Buncombe would be adjourned. The voter would make
his selection in the full knowledge of all the facts, as he makes
his selection between two heads of cabbage, or two evening papers,
or two brands of chewing tobacco. Today he chooses his rulers as he
buys bootleg whiskey, never knowing precisely what he is getting, only
certain that it is not what it pretends to be. The Scotch may turn out
to be wood alcohol or it may turn out to be gasoline; in either case
it is not Scotch. How much better if it were plainly labelled, for
wood alcohol and gasoline both have their uses--higher uses, indeed,
than Scotch. The danger is that the swindled and poisoned consumer,
despairing of ever avoiding them when he doesn’t want them, may
prohibit them even when he does want them, and actually enforce his own
prohibition. The danger is that the hopeless voter, forever victimized
by his false assumption about politicians, may in the end gather such
ferocious indignation that he will abolish them teetotally and at one
insane swoop, and so cause government by the people, for the people and
with the people to perish from this earth.




VII. FROM A CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK


1

_Progress_

The most important change that has come over American literature in
my time is this: that American satire, which once aimed all of its
shafts at the relatively civilized minority, now aims most of them at
the imbecile majority. If a satirist of today undertook to poke fun at
the paintings of Titian and the music of Richard Wagner, he would be
dismissed at once as a clown strayed in from the barber-shop weeklies
and the chautauquas. Yet Mark Twain did both, and to great applause. To
Mark, for all his humor, there was little that was ridiculous in such
American go-getters as George F. Babbitt. He looked upon one of them,
Henry H. Rogers, as his best friend, and he made another the hero of
“A Connecticut Yankee.” What amused Mark most profoundly was precisely
whatever was most worthy of sober admiration--sound art, good manners,
the aristocratic ideal. And he was typical of his age. The satirists
of the present age, though they may be less accomplished workmen, are
at all events more civilized men. What they make fun of is not what is
dignified, or noble, or beautiful, but what is shoddy, and ignoble, and
ugly.


2

_The Iconoclast_

Of a piece with the absurd pedagogical demand for so-called
constructive criticism is the doctrine that an iconoclast is a hollow
and evil fellow unless he can prove his case. Why, indeed, should he
prove it? Doesn’t he prove enough when he proves by his blasphemy
that this or that idol is defectively convincing--that at least _one_
visitor to the shrine is left full of doubts? The fact is enormously
significant; it indicates that instinct has somehow risen superior
to the shallowness of logic, the refuge of fools. The pedant and the
priest have always been the most expert of logicians--and the most
diligent disseminators of nonsense and worse. The liberation of the
human mind has never been furthered by such learned dunderheads; it has
been furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and
then went roistering down the highways of the world, proving to all men
that doubt, after all, was safe--that the god in the sanctuary was
finite in his power, and hence a fraud. One horse-laugh is worth ten
thousand syllogisms. It is not only more effective; it is also vastly
more intelligent.


3

_The Artists’ Model_

The doctrine that art is an imitation of nature is full of folly.
Nine-tenths of all the art that one encounters in this world is
actually an imitation of other art. Fully a half of it is an imitation
twice, thrice or ten times removed. The artist, in fact, is seldom an
accurate observer of nature; he leaves that gross and often revolting
exploration to geologists, engineers and anatomists. The last thing he
wants to see is a beautiful woman in the bright, pitiless sunlight.


4

_The Good Citizen as Artist_

Again, there is the bad author who defends his manufacture of magazine
serials and movie scenarios on the ground that he has a wife, and is in
honor bound to support her. I have seen a few such wives. I dispute
the obligation.... As for the biological by-products of this fidelity,
I rate them even lower. Show me 100 head of ordinary children who are
worth one “Heart of Darkness,” and I’ll subside. As for “Lord Jim,” I
would not swap it for all the children born in Trenton, N. J., since
the Spanish War.


5

_Definitive Judgments_

The doctrine that every critic worth reading is primarily an
artist--that his fundamental aim is not to ascertain the truth, or
to mete out justice, or to defend the maxims of Aristotle, or the
Ten Commandments, or the statues of the Harvard Corporation, or the
Harrison Anti-Narcotic Act, or the Mann Act--this doctrine seems to
give a great deal of offense to pedagogues, and every time one of them
mentions it he mourns. Always he makes the accusation that it relieves
the critic of his most important duty, to wit, the duty of telling
his readers what the thing he criticizes is, and how far it carries
out its pretension, and how it relates itself to other things in the
same category, or presumably in the same category. The answer here,
of course, is that no such duty exists. Its existence, indeed, is no
more than a delusion of pedagogues, who invariably labor under the
notion that they have said something about this or that when they have
given it a name. That delusion is responsible for all of the so-called
“criticism” that pedagogues write--the heavy, soggy essays upon Matthew
Arnold, Poe as a poet, Browning as a philosopher, the Pre-Raphaelites,
Henley, Schiller, Ibsen, Whitman, Milton, Herrick, Molière--in brief,
all the blowsy efforts to reach “definite judgments” that such tedious
wind-jammers delight in. What is accomplished by such “definitive
judgments”? Absolutely nothing. A hedge Lowell’s elaborate treatise
upon Joaquin Miller will never convince any intelligent man that Miller
was an important writer, nor will the same professor’s effort to fit
Ralph Waldo Emerson into the Methodist æsthetic and gnosiology ever
stop any intelligent man from reading Emerson for himself, and enjoying
him more or less. Such “criticism” invariably fails of its ostensible
purpose. In so far as it has any validity and significance at all, it
is not as jurisprudence but as work of art. In brief, the pedagogue,
when he essays criticism, becomes an artist in spite of himself. As a
moral man, of course, he avoids the sin of being a good artist, but
nevertheless he is, within the limits set by his superstitions, an
artist.

What separates good critics from bad ones is simply the fact that the
former are sound enough artists to make the matter they discuss seem
charming. It is by this route that they induce their readers to look
into it further, and so achieve their function. This function is not
to be confused with the pedagogical. It is infinitely more urbane and
expansive. Dryden was surely no schoolmaster, even _in petto_, but
when he set down his views about Shakespeare in his beautiful and
ingratiating prose he interested more readers in the Bard than a whole
herd of pedagogues could have mustered, and so, despite the chill that
often got into his enthusiasm, he probably did more than any other
man to rescue the greatest of English poets from his Restoration days
neglect. What a palpable artist finds interesting is very apt to seem
interesting to all persons of taste and education; what a mere birchman
advocates is apt to arouse their instinctive aversion. They do not want
to be told precisely what to think about the thing discussed; all they
want to be told is that it is worth examining. Every effort to lay down
immutable conclusions, to state impeccable principles, to instruct
them in their moral and æsthetic duties--in other words, every effort
to think for them, as a college tutor thinks for a sophomore, and a
professor for a tutor, and a university president for a professor, and
a board of trustees for a president--is bound to annoy them and chase
them away. Despite all the “definitive judgments” that pedants have
pronounced upon Walt Whitman, almost always unfavorably, he continues
to live and to grow. And despite all their herculean efforts to hold up
Howells, he is dead.




VIII. TOTENTANZ


I can think of no great city of this world (putting aside Rio de
Janeiro, Sydney and San Francisco) that is set amid scenes of greater
natural beauty than New York, by which I mean, of course, Manhattan.
Recall Berlin on its dismal plain, Paris and London on their toy
rivers, Madrid on its desert, Copenhagen on its swamp, Rome on its
ancient sewer and its absurd little hills, and then glance at Manhattan
on its narrow and rock-ribbed island, with deep rivers to either side
and the wide bay before it. No wonder its early visitors, however much
they denounced the Dutch, always paused to praise the scene! Before
it grew up, indeed, New York must have been strangely beautiful. But
it was the beauty of freshness and unsophistication--in brief, of
youth--and now it is no more. The town today, I think, is quite the
ugliest in the world--uglier, even, than Liverpool, Chicago or Berlin.
If it were actually beautiful, as London, say, is beautiful, or Munich,
or Charleston, or Florence, or even parts of Paris and Washington,
then New Yorkers would not be so childishly appreciative of the few
so-called beauty spots that it has--for example, Washington Square,
Gramercy Park, Fifth avenue and Riverside drive. Washington Square,
save for one short row of old houses on the North side, is actually
very shabby and ugly--a blot rather than a beauty spot. The trees,
year in and year out, have a mangy and sclerotic air; the grass is
like stable litter; the tall tower on the South side is ungraceful and
preposterous; the memorial arch is dirty and undignified; the whole
place looks dingy, frowsy and forlorn. Compare it to Mt. Vernon Square
in Baltimore: the difference is that between a charwoman and a grand
lady. As for Gramercy Park, it is celebrated only because it is in
New York; if it were in Washington or London it would not attract a
glance. Fifth avenue, to me, seems to be showy rather than beautiful.
What gives it its distinction is simply its spick and span appearance
of wealth; it is the only New York street that ever looks well-fed and
clean. Riverside drive lacks even so much; it is second-rate from end
to end, and especially where it is gaudiest. What absurd and hideous
houses, with their brummagem Frenchiness, their pathetic effort to look
aristocratic! What bad landscaping! What grotesque monuments! From
its heights the rich look down upon the foul scars of the Palisades,
as the rich of Fifth avenue and Central Park West look down upon the
anemic grass, bare rocks and blowing newspapers of Central Park. Alone
among the great cities of the East, New York has never developed a
domestic architecture of any charm, or, indeed, of any character at
all. There are neighborhoods in Boston, in Philadelphia, in Baltimore
and in many lesser cities that have all the dignity and beauty of
London, but in New York the brownstone mania of the Nineteenth Century
brought down the whole town to one level of depressing ugliness, and
since brownstone has gone out there has been no development whatever of
indigenous design, but only a naïve copying of models--the sky-scraper
from Chicago and the dwelling-house from Paris. Along Fifth avenue,
from the Fifty-ninth street corner to the upper end of Central Park,
there is not a single house that looks reposeful and habitable. Along
Park avenue--but Park avenue, for all its flash of creamy brick, is
surely one of the most hideous streets in all the world!

But the life of the city, it must be confessed, is as interesting as
its physical aspect is dull. It is, even more than London or Paris,
the modern Babylon, and since 1914 it has entered upon a period of
luxuriousness that far surpasses anything seen on earth since the fall
of the Eastern Empire. During many a single week, I daresay, more money
is spent in New York upon useless and evil things than would suffice
to run the kingdom of Denmark for a year. All the colossal accumulated
wealth of the United States, the greatest robber nation in history,
tends to force itself at least once a year through the narrow neck
of the Manhattan funnel. To that harsh island come all the thieves
of the Republic with their loot--bankers from the fat lands of the
Middle West, lumbermen from the Northwestern coasts, mine owners from
the mountains, oil speculators from Texas and Oklahoma, cotton-mill
sweaters from the South, steel magnates and manufacturers from the
Black Country, black-legs and exploiters without end--all laden with
cash, all eager to spend it, all easy marks for the town rogues and
panders. The result is a social organization that ought to be far
more attractive to novelists than it is--a society founded upon the
prodigious wealth of Monte Cristo and upon the tastes of sailors home
from a long voyage. At no time and place in modern times has harlotry
reached so delicate and yet so effusive a development; it becomes, in
one form or another, one of the leading industries of the town. New
York, indeed, is the heaven of every variety of man with something
useless and expensive to sell. There come the merchants with their
bales, of Persian prayer-rugs, of silk pajamas, of yellow girls, of
strange jugs and carboys, of hand-painted oil-paintings, of old books,
of gim-cracks and tinsel from all the four corners of the world, and
there they find customers waiting in swarms, their check-books open
and ready. What town in Christendom has ever supported so many houses
of entertainment, so many mines and mountebanks, so many sharpers
and coney-catchers, so many bawds and pimps, so many hat-holders
and door-openers, so many miscellaneous servants to idleness and
debauchery? The bootlegging industry takes on proportions that are
almost unbelievable; there are thousands of New Yorkers, resident
and transient, who pay more for alcohol every year than they pay for
anything else save women. I have heard of a single party at which the
guests drank 100 cases of champagne in an evening--100 cases at $100 a
case--and it was, as entertainments go in New York today, a quiet and
decorous affair. It is astonishing that no Zola has arisen to describe
this engrossing and incomparable dance of death. Upton Sinclair once
attempted it, in “The Metropolis,” but Sinclair, of course, was too
indignant for the job. Moreover, the era he dealt with was mild and
amateurish; today the pursuit of sensation has been brought to a far
higher degree of perfection. One must go back to the oriental capitals
of antiquity to find anything even remotely resembling it. Compared to
the revels that go on in New York every night, the carnalities of the
West End of Berlin are trivial and childish, and those of Paris and the
Côte d’Azure take on the harmless aspect of a Sunday-school picnic.

What will be the end of the carnival? If historical precedent
counts for anything, it will go on to catastrophe. But what sort of
catastrophe? I hesitate to venture upon a prophecy. Manhattan Island,
with deep rivers all around it, seems an almost ideal scene for a great
city revolution, but I doubt very much that there is any revolutionary
spirit in its proletariat. Some mysterious enchantment holds its
workers to their extraordinarily uncomfortable life; they apparently
get a vague sort of delight out of the great spectacle that they are
no part of. The New York workman patronizes fellow workmen from the
provinces even more heavily than the Wall Street magnate patronizes
country mortgage-sharks. He is excessively proud of his citizenship in
the great metropolis, though all it brings him is an upper berth in
a dog kennel. Riding along the elevated on the East Side and gaping
into the windows of the so-called human habitations that stretch on
either hand, I often wonder what process of reasoning impels, say, a
bricklayer or a truckdriver to spend his days in such vile hutches.
True enough, he is paid a few dollars more a week in New York than he
would receive anywhere else, but he gets little more use out of them
than an honest bank teller. In almost any other large American city
he would have a much better house to live in, and better food; in the
smaller towns his advantage would be very considerable. Moreover, his
chance of lifting himself out of slavery to some measure of economic
independence and autonomy would be greater anywhere else; if it is hard
for the American workman everywhere to establish a business of his own,
it is triply hard in New York, where rents are killingly high and so
much capital is required to launch a business that only Jews can raise
it. Nevertheless, the poor idiot hangs on to his coop, dazzled by the
wealth and splendor on display all around him. His susceptibility to
this lure makes me question his capacity for revolution. He is too
stupid and poltroonish for it, and he has too much respect for money.
It is this respect for money in the proletariat, in fact, that chiefly
safeguards and buttresses capitalism in America. It is secure among us
because Americans venerate it too much to attack it.

What will finish New York in the end, I suppose, will be an onslaught
from without, not from within. The city is the least defensible of
great capitals. Give an enemy command of the sea, and he will be able
to take it almost as easily as he could take Copenhagen. It has never
been attacked in the past, indeed, without being taken. The strategists
of the General Staff at Washington seem to be well aware of this fact,
for their preparations to defend the city from a foe afloat have always
been half-hearted and lacking in confidence. Captain Stuart Godfrey, U.
S. A., who contributes the note on the fortifications of the port to
Fremont Rider’s “New York City: A Guide to Travelers,” is at pains to
warn his lay readers that the existing forts protect only the narrow
spaces in front of them--that “they cannot be expected to prevent the
enemy from landing elsewhere,” _e. g_., anywhere along the long reaches
of the Long Island coast. Once such a landing were effected, the fact
that the city stands upon an island, with deep water behind it, would
be a handicap rather than a benefit. If it could not be taken and held,
it could at least be battered to pieces, and so made untenable. The
guns of its own forts, indeed, might be turned upon it, once those
forts were open to attack from the rear. After that, the best the
defenders could do would be to retire to the natural bombproofs in the
cellars of the Union Hill, N. J., breweries, and there wait for God
to deliver them. They might, of course, be able to throw down enough
metal from the Jersey heights to prevent the enemy occupying the city
and reopening its theatres and bordellos, but the more successful they
were in this enterprise the more cruelly Manhattan would be used.
Altogether, an assault from the sea promises to give the New Yorkers
something to think about.

That it will be attempted before many years have come and gone seems to
me to be very likely and I have a sneaking fear that it may succeed. As
a veteran of five wars and a life-long student of homicidal science,
I am often made uneasy, indeed, by the almost universal American
assumption that no conceivable enemy could inflict serious wounds
upon the Republic--that the Atlantic Ocean alone, not to mention the
stupendous prowess of _Homo americanus_, makes it eternally safe
from aggression. This notion has just enough truth in it to make it
dangerous. That the _whole_ country could not be conquered and occupied
I grant you, but no intelligent enemy would think for a moment of
trying to conquer it. All that would be necessary to bring even the
most intransigeant patriots to terms would be to take and hold a small
part of it--say the part lying to the East and North of the general
line of the Potomac river. Early in the late war, when efforts were
under way to scare the American _booboisie_ with the German bugaboo,
one of the Allied propagandists printed a book setting forth plans
alleged to have been made by the German General Staff to land an army
at the Virginia capes, march on Pittsburgh, and so separate the head of
the country from its liver, kidneys, gizzard, heart, spleen, bladder,
lungs and other lights. The plan was persuasive, but I doubt that it
originated in Potsdam; there was a smell of Whitehall upon it. One of
the things most essential to its execution, in fact, was left out as
it was set forth, to wit, a thrust southward from Canada to meet and
support the thrust northwestward. But even this is not necessary. Any
invader who emptied New York and took the line of the Hudson would have
Uncle Sam by the tail, and could enter upon peace negotiations with
every prospect of getting very polite attention. The American people,
of course, could go on living without New York, but they could not go
on living as a great and puissant nation. Steadily, year by year, they
have made New York more and more essential to the orderly functioning
of the American state. If it were cut off from the rest of the country
the United States would be in the hopeless position of a man relieved
of his medulla oblongata--that is to say, of a man without even enough
equipment left to be a father, a patriot and a Christian.

Nevertheless, it is highly probable that the predestined enemy, when
he comes at last, will direct his first and hardest efforts to cutting
off New York, and then make some attempt to keep it detached afterward.
This, in fact, is an essential part of the new higher strategy, which
is based upon economic considerations, as the old strategy was based
upon dynastic considerations. In the Middle Ages, the object of war
was to capture and hamstring a king; at present it is to dismember a
great state, and so make it impotent. The Germans, had they won, would
have broken up the British Empire, and probably detached important
territories from France, Italy and Russia, beside gobbling Belgium _in
toto_. The French, tantalized by a precarious and incomplete victory,
attempted to break up Germany, as they broke up Austria. The chances
are that an enemy capable of taking and holding New York would never
give it back wholly--that is, would never consent to its restoration to
the Union on the old terms. What would be proposed, I venture, would
be its conversion into a sort of free state--a new Dantzig, perhaps
functioning, as now, as the financial and commercial capital of the
country, but nevertheless lying outside the bounds politically. This
would solve the problem of the city’s subsistence, and still enable
the conqueror to keep his hold upon it. It is my belief that the New
Yorkers, after the first blush of horror, would agree to the new
arrangement and even welcome it. Their patriotism, as things stand, is
next to nothing. I have never heard, indeed, of a single honest patriot
in the whole town; every last man who even pretends to kiss the flag
is simply a swindler with something to sell. This indifference to the
great heart-throbs of the hinterland is not to be dismissed as mere
criminality; it is founded upon the plain and harsh fact that New York
is alien to the rest of the country, not only in blood and tastes,
but also in fundamental interests--that the sort of life that New
Yorkers lead differs radically from the sort of life that the rest of
the American people lead, and that their deepest instincts vary with
it. The city, in truth, already constitutes an independent free state
in all save the name. The ordinary American law does not run there,
save when it has been specifically ratified, and the ordinary American
_mores_ are quite unknown there. What passes as virtue in Kansas is
regarded as intolerable vice in New York, and _vice versa_. The town is
already powerful enough to swing the whole country when it wants to,
as it did on the war issue in 1917, but the country is quite impotent
to swing the town. Every great wave of popular passion that rolls up
on the prairies is dashed to spray when it strikes the hard rocks of
Manhattan.

As a free state, licensed to prey upon the hinterland but unharassed
by its Crô-Magnon prejudices and delusions, New York would probably
rise to heights of very genuine greatness, and perhaps become the most
splendid city known to history. For one thing, it would be able, once
it had cut the painter, to erect barriers and conditions around the
privilege of citizenship, and so save itself from the double flood
that now swamps it--first, of broken-down peasants from Europe, and
secondly and more important, of fugitive rogues from all the land
West and South of the Hudson. Citizenship in New York is now worth no
more than citizenship in Arkansas, for it is open to any applicant
from the marshes of Bessarabia, and, still worse, to any applicant
from Arkansas. The great city-states of history have been far more
fastidious. Venice, Antwerp, London, the Hansa towns, Carthage, Tyre,
Cnossus, Alexandria--they were all very sniffish. Rome began to wobble
when the Roman franchise was extended to immigrants from the Italian
hill country, _i. e._, the Arkansas of that time. The Hansa towns,
under the democracy that has been forced upon them, are rapidly sinking
to the level of Chicago and Philadelphia. New York, free to put an
end to this invasion, and to drive out thousands of the gorillas who
now infest it--more, free from the eternal blackmail of laws made at
Albany and the Methodist tyranny of laws made at Washington--could face
the future with resolution and security, and in the course of a few
generations it might conceivably become genuinely civilized. It would
still stand as toll-taker on the chief highway of American commerce; it
would still remain the premier banker and usurer of the Republic. But
it would be loosed from the bonds which now tend so strenuously to drag
it down to the level of the rest of the country. Free at last, it could
cease to be the auction-room and bawdy-house that it is now, and so
devote its brains and energy to the building up of a civilization.




IX. MEDITATIONS IN THE METHODIST DESERT


1

_The New Galahad_

My agents in attendance upon the so-called moving pictures tell me that
persons who frequent such shows begin to tire of Western films--that
they are no longer roused to clapper-clawing by the spectacle of
actors in patent-leather jack-boots murdering Indians and Mexicans.
Several of the astute Ashkenazim in charge of the movie industry,
noting that slackening of taste, have sought to find a new hero to
replace the scout and cowboy, but so far without success. The children
of today, young and old, seem to take no interest in pirates, nor are
they stirred by train-robbers, safe-blowers and other such illicit
adventurers. It can’t be that the movie censorship is to blame, for
the same thing is visible in the field of _belles lettres_. The dime
novel, once so prosperous, is practically dead. The great deeds of
the James brothers, known to every literate boy in my youth, are now
forgotten. And so are the great deeds of Nick Carter and Old Sleuth:
the detective has fallen with his prey.

What is needed, obviously, is a new hero for the infantry of the land,
for if one is not quickly supplied there is some danger that the boys
will begin admiring Y. M. C. A. secretaries, crooked members of the
Cabinet and lecturers on sex hygiene. In this emergency I nominate the
bootlegger--not, of course, the abject scoundrel who peddles bogus
Scotch in clubs and office buildings, but the dashing, romantic,
defiant fellow who brings the stuff up from the Spanish Main. He is,
indeed, almost an ideal hero. He is the true heir, not only of the
old-time Indian fighters and train-robbers, but also of the tough and
barnacled deep-water sailors, now no more. He faces the perils of the
high seas in a puny shallop, and navigates the worst coast in the world
in contempt of wind and storm. Think of him lying out there on wild
nights in Winter, with the waves piling mountain-high and the gale
standing his crazy little craft on her beam! Think of him creeping
in in his motor-boat on Christmas Eve, risking his life that the
greatest of Christian festivals may be celebrated in a Christian and
respectable manner! Think of him soaked and freezing, facing his exile
and its hardships uncomplainingly, saving his money that his old mother
may escape the poor-farm, that his wife may have her operation for
gall-stones, that his little children may be decently fed and clad,
and go to school regularly, and learn the principles of Americanism!

This brave lad is not only the heir of Jesse James and Ned Buntline;
he is also the heir of John Hancock and of all the other heroes who
throttled the accursed Hun in 1776. All the most gallant among them
were smugglers, and in their fragile craft they brought in, not only
rum, but also liberty. The Revolution was not only against the person
of the Potsdam tyrant, George III; it was also, and especially, against
harsh and intolerable laws--the worst of them the abhorrent Stamp
Act. But was the Stamp Act worse than Prohibition? I leave it to any
fair man. Prohibition, in fact, is a hundred times as foul, false,
oppressive and tyrannical. If the Stamp Act was worth a Revolution, the
Prohibition is worth a massacre and an earthquake. Well, it has already
bred its Hancocks, and soon or late, no doubt, it will breed its Molly
Pitchers, Paul Reveres and Mad Anthony Waynes. Liberty, driven from
the land by the Methodist White Terror, has been given a refuge by
the hardy boys of the Rum Fleet. In their bleak and lonely exile they
cherish her and keep her alive. Some day, let us hope, they will storm
the coast, slit the gullets of her enemies, and restore her to her
dominion. The lubbers of the land have limber necks; their blood runs
pale and yellow. But on the roaring deep there are still men who are
colossally he, and when the bugle calls they will not fail.


2

_Optimist vs. Optimist_

If these heroes _do_ fail, alas, alas, then all will be lost, including
honor. For there is not the slightest sign of revolt among the craven
hordes who cling to the land, ignominiously dependent for their very
existence as Christians upon the gallant fellows beyond the twelve-mile
limit. They simply go on hoping against hope. Each successive Congress
is to relieve them, rescue them, restore the liberties bequeathed to
them by the Fathers. And each successive Congress does nothing of the
kind. Nor, I believe, will any one coming hereafter. Congress is made
up eternally of petty scoundrels, pusillanimous poltroons, highly
vulnerable and cowardly men: they will never risk provoking the full
fire of the Anti-Saloon League. The notion that such degraded fellows
will ever rise up and put down Prohibition, so fondly cherished by
the wets, is thus a snare and a mocking, and so is the notion that
they will presently find a way to enforce it, cherished by the drys.
Optimist eat optimist! As for me, I can find no reason whatever for
believing that, within the lifetime of men now living, the voluptuous
consumption of alcohol will be countenanced by law in the Republic, and
neither do I see any reason for believing that it will ever be stopped,
nor, indeed, any reason for believing that any serious effort will be
made to stop it.

It is commonly argued by the more impatient and worthy opponents of the
Methodist millennium that the Eighteenth Amendment was slipped through
Congress and the State legislatures against the wishes of the majority
of American freemen--that the thing was accomplished by a sort of
trick, partly political and partly magical. It is further argued that,
had the soldiers who were then abroad, fighting for human liberty,
been at home and voting, they would have piled up such majorities for
wet candidates that both Houses of Congress would have been made proof
against the Anti-Saloon League. It seems to me that both contentions
are unsound. The Eighteenth Amendment, when it was passed, actually had
a majority behind it, and I incline to think that that majority was a
very substantial one. What made it so large was simply the war hysteria
of the time. _Homo boobiens_ was scientifically rowelled and run amok
with the news that all the German brewers of the country were against
the amendment; he observed himself that all German sympathizers,
whether actual Germans or not, were bitter opponents of it. His nights
made dreadful by dreams of German spies, he was willing to do anything
to put them down, and one of the things he was willing to do was to
swallow Prohibition. When he recovered from his terror, it was too
late; the first article of the Methodist Book of Discipline had been
read into the Constitution, and there it remains today, an unpleasant
fly in imperishable amber. The soldiers, had they been at home, would
have gone the way of their lay brothers. They were, if anything, even
more in terror of Germans than the latter, and even more eager to
floor them and so get rid of them. In every camp and cantonment Y. M.
C. A. secretaries addressed the conscripts daily, instructing them in
the moral nature of the crusade they were engaged in. The effects are
visible today in the familiar swineries of the American Legion; its
members are still down with the war psychosis. Moreover, it is not
to be forgotten that large numbers of soldiers could not have voted,
even if they had been at home. For example, those who were minors.
Again, the Southern Negroes. Yet again, the enormous number of aliens
who were rushed to the trenches by the draft boards to relieve native
patriots--in New York City alone, fully 25,000, most of them Russian
Jews. Finally, it is to be recalled that there was no plebiscite on
Prohibition--that the men who put it into the Constitution were all
safely in office at the time the test suddenly confronted them.

But what of the state of public opinion today? Isn’t it a fact that
hundreds of thousands of persons who were in favor of Prohibition in
1919 are now so disgusted by its colossal failure that they have turned
violently against it? I doubt it. I know of no such person. I know of a
great many persons who, though they voted for Prohibition when they had
the chance, or, at all events, favored it, now guzzle like actors or
policemen, but I believe that substantially all of them, if the thing
were put up to them tomorrow, would be for it again. Whoever believes
that they have changed heart is a very poor student of the Puritan
psyche. What a Puritan advocates and what he does have no necessary
connection. The late Anthony Comstock was a diligent collector of
dirty books, and used to entertain favored callers by exhibiting his
worst specimens to them. Nevertheless, Comstock was honestly in favor
of suppressing such books, and would have gone to the extreme length
of giving up his own recreation if he had ever been convinced that it
would have helped the cause. To the Puritan, indeed, moral obligation
is something quite outside personal conduct, and has very little
contact with it. He may be, in private, an extremely gross and porcine
fellow, and he frequently is, but that fact doesn’t diminish his
veneration for his ethical ideal in the slightest. Brought to the mark,
he always sticks to that ideal, however absurdly his conduct clashes
with it. As everyone knows, he is rather more prone than most other men
to commit fornication, particularly in its more sordid and degrading
forms; nevertheless, it is impossible to imagine him advocating any
relaxation of the prevailing sexual taboos, however beneficial it would
be. Again, as everyone also knows, he is very apt, when he drinks at
all, to make a hog of himself, for the amiable drinking customs of
civilized men are beyond him; nevertheless, it is impossible to imagine
him admitting specifically that any man has a right to drink at all.
This last fact explains something that often puzzles foreign observers:
the relative smallness and impotence of anti-Prohibition organizations
in America, despite the great amount of gabbling against Prohibition
that goes on. It is due to the Puritan’s fear of appearing on the side
of the devil. He will drink in private, but he will not defend the
practise in public.

It thus seems to me that so long as Puritanism remains the dominant
philosophy in America--and certainly it shows no sign of relaxing its
hold upon the low-caste Anglo-Saxon majority--it will be quite hopeless
to look for an abandonment of Prohibition, or even for any relaxation
of its extravagant and probably unconstitutional excesses. But for
precisely the same reason it seems to me to be very unlikely that
Prohibition will ever be enforced, or, indeed, that any honest effort
will ever be made to enforce it. For the Puritan’s enthusiasm for the
moral law is always grounded, at least in large part, upon a keen
realization that it is, after all, only an ideal--that it may be evaded
whenever the temptation grows strong enough--that he himself may evade
it, readily and safely. Like every other man, he likes to kick up now
and then, and forget his holiest principles. He achieves this kicking
up by sinning. When drinking was perfectly lawful, he got no pleasure
out of it and so tried to put it down, but now that it is against
the law he delights in it, and so long as he delights in it he will
keep on doing it. If the Seventh Commandment were repealed tomorrow,
military marriages would decrease 95 per cent. in rural America, and
the great hotels at Atlantic City would be given over to the bats and
owls. Let us, therefore, neither delude ourselves nor get into sweats
of Puritan-like fear. Prohibition officers will continue to beat the
land for stills and bribes until you and I are long gone and forgotten,
and bootleggers will continue to elude them. No genuinely wet President
will be elected, save by accident, in our time, and no President will
ever be able to enforce Prohibition. Respect for the Constitution will
be heard of in every campaign, and then it will be forgotten for four
years more. It will give candidates something to talk about, but it
will not give the rest of us anything to worry about.


3

_Caveat for the Defense_

The wets, I often think, are worse frauds than the drys. For example,
consider their great current eagerness to assure everyone that they
are absolutely against the saloon--that they would not revive it for
an instant, even if they could. All of their spokesmen stop short
dramatically after demanding the restoration of light wines and beer;
they are virtuously opposed, it would appear, to all forms of hard
liquor, as they are opposed to the saloon. In this position I can
detect nothing respectable. Either the advocates of it are hypocrites
trying to fool the Prohibitionists with pious protestations, or
they have been themselves corrupted by Methodist superstitions. The
plain fact is, of course, that the saloon, at its worst, was a great
deal better than any of the substitutes that have grown up under
Prohibition--nay, that it was a great deal better than the ideal
substitutes imagined by the Prohibitionists: for example, the Y. M.
C. A. And it must be equally plain that light wines and beer would
not always satisfy the yearning of the normal man for alcoholic
refreshment--that there are times when his system, if he is sound in
body, craves far stronger stuff. To say that such a normal man, at five
o’clock in the afternoon, wants to drink a _Humpen_ of beer, or that,
on a cold Winter morning, his inner urge would be met by half a bottle
of Ponet Canet is to say something so absurd that the mere statement
of it is sufficient refutation. The fact is, of course, that the last
chance to exile hard liquors for light wines and beer went glimmering
when the Eighteenth Amendment was ratified. In 1918, perhaps, the
scheme had a certain plausibility, for the American consumption of
spirits had been declining for years, and very good beer, imported from
Germany and Bohemia, was everywhere obtainable at low prices, and the
use of wine, chiefly because of the influence of Italian restaurants
and the propaganda of the California vine-growers, was rapidly
increasing. But the years of Prohibition have reconverted Americans
into a nation of whiskey and gin drinkers, as they were before the
Germans brought in lager beer in the fifties of the last century. Light
wines and beer, I believe, would not satisfy them now, even at meals;
there would be just as much bootlegging under a modified Volstead Act
as there is today. Prohibition has restored the hard guzzling of Daniel
Webster’s day.

As for the saloon, the case against it, as voiced by both
Prohibitionists and anti-Prohibitionists, is chiefly based upon a
recollection of what the thing was at its lowest and worst, which is
just as sensible as arguing against Christianity on the ground that a
certain minority of the rev. clergy are notorious swine. The utterly
vicious saloons were always relatively rare, even along the waterfront,
and an honest execution of the laws in force before Prohibition would
have exterminated them in ten days. Their existence was a proof, not
that the saloon itself was inherently evil, but simply that it could
be made evil by corrupt government. To blame it for that fact would
be like blaming the Constitution for the fact that Federal judges
habitually violate it. The normal saloon, I am convinced, was not an
evil influence in its vicinage, but a good one. It not only enabled
the poor man to effect that occasional escape from wife and children
which every man must make if he would remain sane; it also threw him
into a society palpably better than that of his home or his workshop,
and accustomed him to refinements which unquestionably improved him.
The conversation of a precinct leader or of a brewery collector would
make but little impression, I daresay, in the Century Club, on the
Harvard campus or in the cloakrooms of the United States Senate, but in
the average saloon of a poor neighborhood it took on an unmistakable
dignity and authority. This collector (or _Todsaufer_, as he was
called) had fresh news; he was a man of comparatively large affairs; he
had an air about him of the great world; most important of all, he was
professionally communicative and affable. The influence of such a man
upon the customers of the place, all of whom were bidden to drink and
permitted to converse with him, was necessarily for the good. He was,
in every sense comprehensible to them, a better man than they were. He
had the use of more money; he dressed better; he knew more; he couched
his ideas in subtler and more graceful terms; he was better bathed and
had better table manners. The effect of his visits, though perhaps not
as massive, was comparable to the effect that would have been worked by
visits by, say, Bishop Manning or Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler. In his
presence discussion took on a higher tone, and he left behind him, in
many a simple heart, an aspiration toward nobler things.

But it was not only the _Todsaufer_ who was a missionary of light and a
pattern of the amenities; so also was the saloon itself. It represented
the only concept of beauty and dignity that ever entered into the lives
of many of its customers. Surrounded all day by the inconceivable
hideousness of the American workshop, and confronted on their return
from work by the depressing ugliness of homes outfitted out of
department-stores and on the instalment plan, with slatternly women and
filthy children as the fauna of the scene, they found themselves, in
the saloon, in a markedly superior milieu. Here some regard was given
to æsthetics. Here was relatively pretentious architecture. Here were
polished hardwoods, resplendent mirrors, comfortable chairs, glittering
glassware and metals, innumerable small luxuries. Here, above all, was
an attempt at genuine cleanliness. The poor saloons of the by-streets
were not to be compared, of course, to the superb drinking-rooms of
the great hotels, but they were at least much cleaner than any of
the homes or factories surrounding them, and they were at least more
beautiful than the adjacent livery-stables, cigar-stores, barber-shops
and Methodist Little Bethels. Furthermore, they set forth an example
of life upon a more urbane and charming scale. Men had to be more
polite in saloons than they were at home; if they were not, they ran
risks of colliding with the fists of their fellow patrons and with the
bartender’s Excaliburs, the bung-starter and ice-pick. The braggart and
bully here met his quick doom; the unsocial fellow felt the weight of
public disapproval; the ignoramus learned the bitter taste of sniffs
and sneers. Life was more spacious spiritually and more luxurious
physically. Instead of the nicked chinaware of his home the customer
encountered shining glass; instead of spitting out of the window or
on the floor he discharged himself into magnificent brass spittoons
or into the brook that ran under the bar-rail; instead of the ghastly
fried beefsteaks and leathery delicatessen of his wife’s cuisine,
he ate appetizing herring, delicate _Wienerwürste_, well-devised
_Kartoffelsalat_, celery, olives, and even such exotic titbits as
_Blutwurst_, _Pumpernickel_, _Bohnensalat_ and caviare.

To argue that such luxuries and amenities had no effect is to argue
utter nonsense. I believe fully that the rise of the latter-day saloon
(a product of the financing of saloonkeepers by wealthy brewers,
so much denounced by superficial sociologists) had a very benign
effect upon American manners. It purged the city workmen of their old
boorishness and pugnacity; it taught them the difference between mere
fodder and civilized food; it shamed them into a certain cleanliness;
it gave them some dim comprehension of design and ornamentation. In
more than one American city the influence of the saloon is visible
today in ecclesiastical architecture, and everywhere it is visible
in theatre architecture. I name one thing specifically: the use of
polished hardwoods. The first parquetry ever seen in America was
in saloons. And so was the first tile-work. And so was the first
plate-glass. Where the saloon reached its highest development there
American life became richest and most expansive. The clatter against
it is ignorant, unfair, philistine and disingenuous.


4

_Portrait of an Ideal World_

That alcohol in dilute aqueous solution, when taken into the human
organism, acts as a depressant, not as a stimulant, is now so much
a commonplace of knowledge that even the more advanced varieties
of physiologists are beginning to be aware of it. The intelligent
layman no longer resorts to the jug when he has important business
before him, whether intellectual or manual; he resorts to it after
his business is done, and he desires to release his taut nerves
and reduce the steam-pressure in his spleen. Alcohol, so to speak,
unwinds us. It raises the threshold of sensation and makes us less
sensitive to external stimuli, and particularly to those that are
unpleasant. It reduces and simplifies the emotions. Putting a brake
upon all the qualities which enable us to get on in the world and
shine before our fellows--for example, combativeness, shrewdness,
diligence, ambition,--it releases the qualities which mellow us
and make our fellows love us--for example, amiability, generosity,
toleration, humor, sympathy. A man who has taken aboard two or three
cocktails is less competent than he was before to steer a battleship
down the Ambrose Channel, or to cut off a leg, or to draw up a deed
of trust, or to conduct Bach’s B minor mass, but he is immensely more
competent to entertain a dinner party, or to admire a pretty girl,
or to _hear_ Bach’s B minor mass. The harsh, useful things of the
world, from pulling teeth to digging potatoes, are best done by men
who are as starkly sober as so many convicts in the death-house, but
the lovely and useless things, the charming and exhilarating things,
are best done by men with, as the phrase is, a few sheets in the wind.
_Pithecanthropus erectus_ was a teetotaler, but the angels, you may be
sure, know what is proper at 5 P. M.

All this is so obvious that I marvel that no utopian has ever proposed
to abolish all the sorrows of the world by the simple device of getting
and keeping the whole human race gently stewed. I do not say drunk,
remember; I say simply gently stewed--and apologize, as in duty bound,
for not knowing how to describe the state in a more seemly phrase.
The man who is in it is a man who has put all of his best qualities
into his showcase. He is not only immensely more amiable than the cold
sober man; he is immeasurably more decent. He reacts to all situations
in an expansive, generous and humane manner. He has become more
liberal, more tolerant, more kind. He is a better citizen, husband,
father, friend. The enterprises that make human life on this earth
uncomfortable and unsafe are never launched by such men. They are not
makers of wars; they do not rob and oppress anyone; they invent no such
plagues as high tariffs, 100 per cent. Americanism and Prohibition.
All the great villainies of history, from the murder of Abel to the
Treaty of Versailles, have been perpetuated by sober men, and chiefly
by teetotalers. But all the charming and beautiful things, from the
Song of Songs to terrapin _à la_ Maryland, and from the nine Beethoven
symphonies to the Martini cocktail, have been given to humanity by men
who, when the hour came, turned from well water to something with color
to it, and more in it than mere oxygen and hydrogen.

I am well aware, of course, that getting the whole human race stewed
and keeping it stewed, year in and year out, would present formidable
technical difficulties. It would be hard to make the daily dose of
each individual conform exactly to his private needs, and hard to get
it to him at precisely the right time. On the one hand there would be
the constant danger that large minorities might occasionally become
cold sober, and so start wars, theological disputes, moral reforms, and
other such unpleasantnesses. On the other hand, there would be danger
that other minorities might proceed to actual intoxication, and so
annoy us all with their fatuous bawling or maudlin tears. But such
technical obstacles, of course, are by no means insurmountable. Perhaps
they might be got around by abandoning the administration of alcohol
_per ora_ and distributing it instead by impregnating the air with it.
I throw out the suggestion, and pass on. Such questions are for men
skilled in therapeutics, government and business efficiency. They exist
today and their enterprises often show a high ingenuity, but, being
chiefly sober, they devote too much of their time to harassing the rest
of us. Half-stewed, they would be ten times as humane, and perhaps at
least half as efficient. Thousands of them, relieved of their present
anti-social duties, would be idle, and eager for occupation. I trust
to them in this small matter. If they didn’t succeed completely, they
would at least succeed partially.

The objection remains that even small doses of alcohol, if each
followed upon the heels of its predecessor before the effects of the
latter had worn off, would have a deleterious effect upon the physical
health of the race--that the death-rate would increase, and whole
categories of human beings would be exterminated. The answer here is
that what I propose is not lengthening the span of life, but augmenting
its joys. Suppose we assume that its duration is reduced 20 per cent.
My reply is that its delights will be increased at least 100 per
cent. Misled by statisticians, we fall only too often into the error
of worshiping mere figures. To say that A will live to be eighty and B
will die at forty is certainly not to argue plausibly that A is more
to be envied than B. A, in point of fact, may have to spend all of his
eighty years in Kansas or Arkansas, with nothing to eat save corn and
hog-meat and nothing to drink save polluted river water, whereas B
may put in his twenty years of discretion upon the Côte d’Azure, _wie
Gott im Frankreich_. It is my contention that the world I picture,
even assuming the average duration of human life to be cut down 50 per
cent., would be an infinitely happier and more charming world than that
we live in today--that no intelligent human being, having once tasted
its peace and joy, would go back voluntarily to the harsh brutalities
and stupidities that we now suffer, and idiotically strive to prolong.
If intelligent Americans, in these depressing days, still cling to
life and try to stretch it out longer and longer, it is surely not
logically, but only atavistically. It is the primeval brute in them
that hangs on, not the man. The man knows only too well that ten years
in a genuinely civilized and happy country would be infinitely better
than a geological epoch under the curses he must face and endure every
day.

Moreover, there is no need to admit that the moderate alcoholization
of the whole race would materially reduce the duration of life. A
great many of us are moderately alcoholized already, and yet manage
to survive quite as long as the blue-noses. As for the blue-noses
themselves, who would repine if breathing alcohol-laden air brought
them down with delirium tremens and so sterilized and exterminated
them? The advantage to the race in general would be obvious and
incalculable. All the worst strains--which now not only persist, but
even prosper--would be stamped out in a few generations, and so the
average human being would move appreciably away from, say, the norm
of a Baptist clergyman in Georgia and toward the norm of Shakespeare,
Mozart and Goethe. It would take aeons, of course, to go all the way,
but there would be progress with every generation, slow but sure.
Today, it must be manifest, we make no progress at all; instead we
slip steadily backward. That the average civilized man of today is
inferior to the average civilized man of two or three generations ago
is too plain to need arguing. He has less enterprise and courage; he
is less resourceful and various; he is more like a rabbit and less
like a lion. Harsh oppressions have made him what he is. He is the
victim of tyrants.... Well, no man with two or three cocktails in him
is a tyrant. He may be foolish, but he is not cruel. He may be noisy,
but he is also genial, tolerant, generous and kind. My proposal
would restore Christianity to the world. It would rescue mankind from
moralists, pedants and brutes.




X. ESSAY IN CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM


I

One of the defects in the American system of government, if so superb a
confection of the human mind and heart may be said, without indecency,
to have any defects at all, lies in the fact that it fails to provide
swift and condign punishment for the special crimes of public
officials. Even when their wrong-doings take the form of offenses
against the ordinary criminal statutes of the realm--as, for example,
embezzlement, conversion, blackmail, armed entry, kidnaping or common
assault--it seems to be very difficult to bring them under the lash
of justice; they enjoy, as it were, an unwritten immunity to criminal
process, running with the constitutional immunity of United States
Senators, who cannot be taken by the _gendarmerie_, even for adultery
or bootlegging, while the Senate is in session. The thugs and perjurers
of the so-called Department of Justice, during the reign of the Martyr
Wilson, committed nearly all the crimes of fraud and violence on the
books, and yet, so far as I know, not one of them was ever punished,
or, indeed, so much as prosecuted. Several Federal district attorneys,
toward the end of that festival of oppression and worse, protested
against it publicly, and there were bitter yells from specialists in
human liberty and from the relatives, lodge-brothers and creditors of
some of the victims, but no Federal grand jury indicted any of the
criminals, and no Federal judge condemned them to the hulks. To this
day, if my agents are to be believed, the same thing is going on,
though perhaps on a more modest scale. Prohibition enforcement officers
in all parts of the country are breaking into houses without warrants,
destroying property without due process of law, engaging in blackmail
in a wholesale manner, and assaulting and murdering citizens almost at
their will, and yet one seldom hears of them going to jail for it, and
I know of none who has been hanged.

When it comes to crimes that are peculiar to public officials and
that arise out of the nature of their legal status, as bigamy and
wife-beating arise out of the nature of a married man’s, the case is
even worse. I allude here to such special offenses as dissipating the
public funds, loading the public rolls with useless and pediculous
job-holders, letting contracts and franchises to political and private
friends, converting public property to private uses, condoning crimes
against the government, and administering the laws in a partial and
dishonest manner--all of them impossible to the mere citizen and
taxpayer, as default in alimony is impossible to the bachelor. Here the
ordinary criminal statutes are obviously ineffective, and of special
statutes there are almost none. What was the late Mr. Fall guilty
of? His accusers, it appears, had to fall back upon the vague charge
of conspiracy, which was not unlike accusing a burglar of trespass.
With the general run of official delinquents it is impossible to go
even so far. Their crimes have no names, and no adequate punishments.
Certain high dignitaries, when taken in gross malfeasances, may be
impeached, and most lesser ones, though not all, may be cashiered.
But neither punishment is harsh enough to be a deterrent, and neither
is swift and sure. Since the first days of the Republic but eight
Federal job-holders have been brought before the bar of the Senate on
impeachment by the House of Representatives, and of these but two have
been found guilty and removed from office. Both of the latter were
judges; one was convicted of drunkenness on the bench and the other of
corrupt dealings with litigants. Is it argued seriously by anyone that,
during all those years, but two Federal judges have been guilty of such
offenses? Is it argued, indeed, that the bench is wholly guiltless of
them, and of all other crimes, today?

Many of the sitting Federal judges, as a matter of fact, are obviously
unfit for the duties they have to perform. Some of them owe their jobs
to litigants who are habitually before them, and others are admittedly
beholden to such corrupt agencies as the Anti-Saloon League. Is it
maintained that such dubious fellows make competent and respectable
judges, or that the clumsy and enormously costly process of impeachment
offers a practicable means of dealing with their frequent and flagrant
peccadillos? Plainly not. Even when their obscenities upon the bench
become publicly scandalous they are protected by the fact that
impeachment is essentially a political, not a judicial process, and
that in consequence it is excessively slow and uncertain--in other
words, by the fact that it lacks the very characters which legal
punishment fundamentally needs. It is, as a matter of practise, almost
as safe for a Federal judge to take care of his fellow-golfers and
scofflaws as it is for a Prohibition officer to blackmail a bootlegger
or for an agent of the Department of Justice to manufacture perjury
against so-called Reds. If he belongs to the party in control of
Congress he cannot be impeached for any crime short of highway robbery
or piracy on the high seas, and even if he belongs to the minority
party the citizen who complains of him must be extremely influential
to be heard at all, and extremely rich to meet the heavy costs of
prosecuting him. In brief, the remedy against him that is offered by
the Constitution and the laws is, in substance, no remedy at all. No
matter how grossly he violates his oath and the decencies, he commonly
remains upon the bench until some grateful litigant or syndicate of
litigants offers him a better job.

Moreover, it must be plain that the punishment of impeachment and
removal from office, or of removal by executive order, without
impeachment, is usually grossly inadequate. When job-holders become
so unbearably corrupt or incompetent that they are actually separated
from their jobs, they commonly deserve hanging, or, at least, long
confinement in the hoosegow. Simply to turn them out, leaving them free
to aspire to other offices, is as absurd as it would be to limit a
burglar’s punishment to kicking him out of the house. The case of the
late Denby, Secretary of the Navy, is in point. I have no opinion as to
the guilt or innocence of the gentleman; I merely recall the fact that
he was accused of the very grave offense of dissipating the national
property and imperilling the national defense. It would be difficult to
imagine anything more flagrantly anti-social, more thoroughly vicious,
more damaging to the common weal; put beside it, such ordinary crimes
as arson and larceny seemed relatively harmless. Nevertheless, the
worst punishment that could be inflicted upon Denby was the banal
one of depriving him of his office. It was impossible, for political
reasons, to impeach him or even to attempt to impeach him, and he was
simply turned out, with a file of high naval dignitaries saluting him
as he left and a great crowd cheering him as he got home. Here cause
and effect took on a disproportion that was truly colossal; it was
almost as if Czolgosz had been fined $10 for dispatching McKinley.
If Denby was innocent, he deserved the salute and the cheers without
the loss of his job. And if he was guilty, if only of negligence, he
plainly merited at least a geological epoch on Devil’s Island.


2

In the effete monarchies of the continent of Europe, now happily
abolished by God’s will, there was, in the old days of sin, a far more
intelligent and effective way of dealing with delinquent officials.
Not only were they subject, when taken in downright corruption, to the
ordinary processes of the criminal laws; in addition, they were liable
to prosecution in special courts for such offenses as were peculiar
to their offices. In this business the abominable Prussian state,
though founded by Satan, took the lead. It maintained a tribunal in
Berlin that devoted itself wholly to the trial of officials accused of
malfeasance, corruption, tyranny and incompetence, and any citizen
was free to lodge a complaint with the learned judges. The trial was
public and in accordance with rules fixed by law. An official found
guilty could be punished summarily and in a dozen different ways. He
could be reprimanded, reduced in rank, suspended from office for a
definite period, transferred to a less desirable job, removed from
the rolls altogether, fined, or sent to jail. If he was removed from
office he could be deprived of his right to a pension in addition,
or fined or jailed in addition. He could be made to pay damages to
any citizen he had injured, or to apologize publicly. All this,
remember, was in addition to his liability under the ordinary law,
and the statutes specifically provided that he could be punished
twice for the same offense, once in the ordinary courts and once in
the administrative court. Thus, a Prussian official who, imitating
the daily routine of the agents of our own Treasury or Department of
Justice, assaulted a citizen, invaded his house without a warrant, and
seized his property without process of law, could be deprived of his
office and fined heavily by the administrative court, sent to jail by
an ordinary court, and forced to pay damages to his victim by either
or both. Our Federal judges, as a matter of everyday practise, issue
thousands of injunctions depriving citizens of their clear right to
a jury trial, to the sanctity of domicile and to lawful assemblage,
all guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. Had a Prussian judge, overcome
by _kaiserliche_ passion, undertaken anything of the sort in those
far-off days of despotism, any aggrieved citizen might have haled him
before the administrative court and recovered heavy damages from him,
beside enjoying the felicity of seeing him transferred to some dismal
swamp in East Prussia, to listen all day to the unintelligible perjury
of Poles. The law specifically provided that responsible officials
should be punished, not more leniently than ordinary offenders, but
more severely. If a corrupt policeman got six months a corrupt chief of
police got two years. More, these statutes were enforced with Prussian
barbarity, and the jails were constantly full of errant officials.

I do not propose, of course, that such medieval laws be set up in
the United States. We have, indeed, gone far enough in imitating
the Prussian system already; if we go much further the moral and
enlightened nations of the world will have to unite in a new crusade
to put us down. Hints to that effect are not lacking even now; they
are heard in England every time the Department of State revives the
question of the Bahaman rum trade, and in France every time there is
mention of the war debt. As a matter of fact, the Prussian scheme
would probably prove ineffective in the Republic, if only because
it involved setting up one gang of job-holders to judge and punish
another gang. This worked very well in Prussia before the country was
civilized by force of arms because, as everyone knows, a Prussian
judge was trained in ferocity from infancy, and regarded every man
arraigned before him as guilty _ipso facto_; in fact, any thought of
a prisoner’s possible innocence was abhorrent to him as a reflection
upon the _Polizei_, and, hence, by inference, upon the Throne, the
whole monarchic idea, and God. But in America, even if they had no
other sentiment in common, which would be rarely, judge and prisoner
would often be fellow-Democrats or fellow-Republicans, and hence
jointly interested in protecting their party against scandal and
its members against the loss of their jobs. The operations of the
Department of Justice under Mr. Daugherty showed how this community
of interest impedes the flow of justice even today; it would be far
more obstructive, obviously, if job-holders had to execute the laws
against other job-holders, and not merely against the friends of
other job-holders. Moreover, the Prussian system has another plain
defect: the punishments it provides are, in the main, platitudinous
and banal. They lack dramatic quality, and they lack ingenuity and
appropriateness. To punish a judge taken in judicial crim. con. by
fining him or sending him to jail is a bit too facile and obvious. What
is needed is a system (_a_) that does not depend for its execution
upon the good-will of job-holders, and (_b_) that provides swift,
certain and unpedantic punishments, each fitted neatly to its crime.
Such a system, after due prayer, I have devised. It is simple, it is
unhackneyed, and I believe that it would work. It is divided into
two halves. The first half takes the detection and punishment of the
crimes of job-holders away from courts of impeachment, congressional
smelling committees, and other such agencies--_i. e._, away from other
job-holders--and vests it in the whole body of free citizens, male and
female. The second half provides that any member of that body, having
looked into the acts of a job-holder and found him delinquent, may
punish him instantly and on the spot, and in any manner that seems
appropriate and convenient--and that in case this punishment involves
physical damage to the job-holder, the ensuing inquiry by the grand
jury or coroner shall confine itself strictly to the question whether
the job-holder deserved what he got. In other words, I propose that it
shall be no longer _malum in se_ for a citizen to pummel, cow-hide,
kick, gouge, cut, wound, bruise, maim, burn, club, bastinado, flay or
even lynch a job-holder, and that it shall be _malum prohibitum_ only
to the extent that the punishment exceeds the job-holder’s deserts.
The amount of this excess, if any, may be determined very conveniently
by a petit jury, as other questions of guilt are now determined.
The flogged judge, or Congressman, or Prohibition officer, or other
job-holder, on being discharged from hospital--or his chief heir, in
case he has perished--goes before a grand jury and makes complaint,
and, if a true bill is found, a petit jury is empanelled and all the
evidence is put before it. If it decides that the job-holder deserved
the punishment inflicted upon him, the citizen who inflicted it is
acquitted with honor. If, on the contrary, it decides that this
punishment was excessive, then the citizen is adjudged guilty of
assault, mayhem, murder, or whatever it is, in a degree apportioned to
the difference between what the job-holder deserved and what he got,
and punishment for that excess follows in the usual course.


3

The advantages of this plan, I believe, are too patent to need
argument. At one stroke it removes all the legal impediments which now
make the punishment of a recreant job-holder so hopeless a process
and enormously widens the range of possible penalties. They are now
stiff and, in large measure, illogical; under the system I propose
they could be made to fit the crime precisely. Say a citizen today
becomes convinced that a certain judge is a jackass--that his legal
learning is defective, his sense of justice atrophied, and his conduct
of cases before him tyrannical and against decency. As things stand,
it is entirely impossible to do anything about it. A judge could not
be impeached on the mere ground that he is a jackass; the process is
far too costly and cumbersome, and there are too many judges liable to
the charge. Nor is anything to be gained by denouncing him publicly
and urging all good citizens to vote against him when he comes up
for re-election, for his term may have ten or fifteen years to run,
and even if it expires tomorrow and he is defeated the chances are
good that his successor will be quite as bad, and maybe even worse.
Moreover, if he is a Federal judge he never comes up for re-election
at all; once he has been appointed by the President of the United
States, at the advice of his more influential clients and with the
consent of their agents in the Senate, he is safe until he is so far
gone in senility that he has to be propped on the bench with pillows.
But now imagine any citizen free to approach him in open court and
pull his nose! Or even, in aggravated cases, to cut off his ears,
throw him out of the window, or knock him in the head with an ax!
How vastly more attentive he would be to his duties! How diligently
he would apply himself to the study of the law! How careful he would
be about the rights of litigants before him! How polite and even
suave he would become! For judges, like all the rest of us, are vain
fellows: they do not enjoy having their noses pulled. Do not forget
here that the ignominy resident in the operation would not be abated
by the subsequent trial of the puller, even if he should be convicted
and jailed. The fact would still be brilliantly remembered that at
least one citizen had deemed the judge sufficiently a malefactor to
punish him publicly, and to risk going to jail for it. A dozen such
episodes, and the career of any judge would be ruined, even though the
jails bulged with his critics. He could not maintain his dignity on
the bench; even his own catchpolls would snicker at him behind their
hands, especially if he showed a cauliflower ear, a black eye or a scar
over his bald head. Moreover, soon or late some citizen who had at
him would be acquitted by a petit jury, and then, obviously, he would
have to retire. It might be provided by law, indeed, that he should be
compelled to retire in that case--that an acquittal would automatically
vacate the office of the complaining job-holder.

The present system, as I have said, has in late years eloquently
demonstrated its ineffectiveness on a colossal scale in the great city
of Washington, the seat of the First Chief of the Republic and of a
hundred thousand job-holders of gradually lessening puissance, from
members of the Cabinet down to janitors, messengers and bookkeepers.
All efforts to impeach Daugherty failed; when he was got rid of
at last it was by a blow below the belt; in the case of Denby, his
fellow-Republicans of Detroit actually treated his dismissal as a
martyrdom, and received him when he got home with a band of music
and public prayers. If these eminent men were actually guilty of
malfeasance in office they obviously deserved far more rigorous
punishment; if they were guilty merely of carelessness and neglect they
deserved a severe handling as public nuisances. Under the existing
system they got what was virtually no punishment at all; under my
system, at the most moderate guess, some bored and impatient citizen,
during the long months when they were desperately hanging on to their
jobs, would have at least ventured to duck them in the Potomac or set
their shirt-tails afire. I doubt that any jury would have convicted
him of excess, even had he held them under while he counted 100,000.
The plain people could not make out just what they had done that was
immoral, if anything; but there was an almost universal feeling that
they were nuisances, and ought to be got rid of. Even if the citizen
who, under my system, had laid hands upon them had been convicted
subsequently and sent to jail, the weary newspaper readers of the land
would have given three cheers for him, and he would have become a
formidable candidate for the presidency on the completion of his term.
Even Dr. Coolidge, I daresay, would have had a very friendly feeling
for him, and perhaps might have sent him a box of cigars or some White
House pies while he was in jail.

I present my system formally to the consideration of the Congress, and
offer to explain it in greater detail before a joint session of both
Houses at any time not in conflict with my literary engagements. I
am no lawyer, to be sure. I once studied law for a space, but forgot
it on closing the books. But I retain enough technic to be convinced
that my scheme presents no constitutional difficulties. It violates
no constitutional right that I am aware of; on the contrary, it
specifically reaffirms the right to a trial by jury, now denied in a
wholesale and shameless manner by the Federal courts. It sets up no new
corps of corrupt and oppressive enforcement officers; it establishes
no new jobs; it does not augment the already excessive powers of the
police. If there is any lingering taint of injustice in it, then that
injustice would be suffered by job-holders, nine-tenths of whom now rob
and persecute the rest of us incessantly, and are fast habilitating the
doctrine that we are _feræ naturæ_ and have no rights that they are
bound to respect. It is a system of criminal law that is democratic
in the widest and loftiest sense. It augments the dignity and
responsibility of the citizen, and tends to increase his concern with
problems of government. It sets higher standards of conduct for public
officers than prevail now, and makes corruption and incompetence
dangerous. Above all, it breaks down the rigid and unintelligent
formalism of our scheme of punishments, and makes it infinitely more
pliant, appropriate and various. We have been tending for years to
reduce all punishments to two: fine and imprisonment, the first usually
no punishment at all, but a mere bribe to escape punishment, and the
second often cruel and almost always ineffective. That this tendency is
widely regarded as evil is shown by the extra-legal efforts to combat
it that are made constantly by the Ku Klux Klan, the American Legion
and other such agents of lynch law. My scheme would take over the
rich ingenuities of these agents and give them formal legal sanction;
it would restore to the art of putting down crime something of the
fine bounce and gusto that it had in the Middle Ages, when tort and
penalty were united by logical, and even, indeed, æsthetic bonds, and a
judge who was imaginative and original was esteemed. The certainty of
punishment would daunt the offender, and the uncertainty of its nature
would fill him with dread. Once proceeded against, he would become
enormously cautious and conscientious. A Congressman with his ears cut
off, you may be sure, would not do it again. A judge, after two or
three rocket flights through his court-room window, would be forced, by
an irresistible psychological process, to give heed thereafter to the
Constitution, the statutes, and the common rights of man. Even a police
captain or a United States Senator, once floored with a bung-starter or
rolled in a barrel, would begin to think.

I dedicate my plan to my country.




XI. ON THE NATURE OF MAN


1

_The Animal That Thinks_

That the great majority of human beings, even under our perfected
Christian civilization, are still almost as incapable of rational
thought as so many diamond-back terrapin--this is a fact to which
we have all been made privy of late by the babbling of eminent
psychologists. Granted. But let us not rashly assume that this
infirmity is confined strictly to the nether herd--that, above the
level where thinking may be said genuinely to begin, it goes on,
level by level, to greater and greater heights of clarity and acumen.
Nothing, indeed, of the sort. The curve goes upward for a while, but
then it begins to flatten, and finally it dips very sharply. Thinking,
indeed, is so recent an accomplishment phylogenetically that man is
capable of it only in a narrow area, as he is capable of sight and
hearing only in narrow areas. To one side lie the instinctive tropisms
and intellectual peristaltic motions of the simple, rational only by a
sort of pious license; to the other side lie the more complex but even
more nonsensical speculations of metaphysicians. The difference between
the two is vastly less than is commonly assumed; we are all misled by
the sombre, portentous manner of the metaphysicians. The truth is that
between a speech by a Salvation Army convert, a Southern Congressman or
a Grand Goblin of the Rotary Club and a philosophical treatise by an
American Neo-Realist there is no more to choose than between the puling
of an infant and the puling of a veteran of the Civil War. Both show
the human cerebrum loaded far beyond its Plimsoll mark; both, strictly
speaking, are idiotic.


2

_Veritas Odium Parit_

An old human delusion, largely fostered by theologians, is the one
to the effect that truth has a mysterious medicinal power--that its
propagation makes the world better and man happier ... _et cognoscetis
veritatem, et veritas liberabit vos_. But is this so-called truth about
truth true? It is not. The truth, nine times out of ten, is extremely
disturbing and uncomfortable; if it is not grossly discreditable to
someone it is apt to be painfully amazing to everyone. The masses
of men are thus wise to hold it in suspicion, as they are wise to
suspect that other delusion, liberty. Let us turn to an example. The
most rational religious ideas held in modern times, at least among
Christians, are probably those of the Unitarians; the most nonsensical
are those of the Christian Scientists. Yet it must be obvious to every
observer that the average Unitarian, even when he is quite healthy,
which is not often, is a sour, conscience-striken and unhappy fellow,
whereas, the average Christian Scientist, even when he is down with
gall-stones, is full of a childish and enviable peace. The one is
disquieted by his apprehension of the damning facts about God and the
universe; the other is lulled by his magnificent imbecilities. I have
had the honor of knowing, in my time, a number of eminent philosophers,
some of them intelligent. The happiest among the latter, in his moments
of greatest joy, used to entertain himself by drawing up wills leaving
his body to a medical college.


3

_The Eternal Cripple_

Man, at his best, remains a sort of one-lunged animal, never completely
rounded and perfect, as a bacillus, say, is perfect. If he shows
one valuable quality, it is almost unheard of for him to show any
other. Give him a head, and he lacks a heart. Give him a heart of
a gallon capacity, and his head holds scarcely a pint. The artist,
nine times out of ten, is a dead-beat and given to the debauching of
virgins, so-called. The patriot is a bigot, and, more often than not,
a cad and a coward. The man of physical bravery is often on a level,
intellectually, with a Baptist clergyman. The intellectual giant has
bad kidneys and cannot thread a needle. In all my years of search in
this world, from the Golden Gate in the West to the Vistula in the
East, and from the Orkney Islands in the North to the Spanish Main in
the South, I have never met a thoroughly moral man who was honorable.


4

_The Test_

Don’t ask what delusion he entertains regarding God, or what mountebank
he follows in politics, or what he springs from, or what he submits to
from his wife. Simply ask how he makes his living. It is the safest and
surest of all known tests. A man who gets his board and lodging on this
ball in an ignominious way is inevitably an ignominious man.


5

_National Characters_

The character of a nation, like its mind, is always determined, not by
the masses of its citizens, but by a small minority of resolute and
influential men. Nothing, for example, could be more absurd than the
common notion that the French, as a people, are gallant, courageous
and fond of hazard. The truth is that they are mainly dull shopkeepers
and peace-loving peasants, and have been driven into all their wars
of conquest by their masters, who are extraordinarily prehensile and
audacious. The French plain people bitterly disapproved the military
enterprises of Bonaparte, and resisted his conscriptions by every
means within their power. In the late war they abandoned themselves to
a melodramatic despair after the first few months, frequently broke
and ran under pressure, and were kept in the fight only by heroic
devices. The apparent resolution of France was largely external. That
is to say, it was supplied by England. Internally, it was confined to
a small group of leaders, most of them professional adventurers, and
many of them, such as Marshal Foch, of enemy blood. The French masses,
despite the enormous military advantages on their side, were ready to
quit after every losing battle, and after not a few--for example, the
Verdun operations--they did quit.

The character of the Germans, as it was displayed during the war,
was also foreign to the great majority of the German people. The
Germans are not pugnacious by nature, nor have they any talent for
organization; on the contrary, they are incurable particularists, and
never meet without quarrelling. Their political history is a history
of endless squabbles in the face of the enemy. Fully a half of them
believed in Napoleon I at the time he was ravaging their country; in
the late war millions of them were deceived by the late Woodrow’s
hypocritical Fourteen Points--a deliberate and successful device to
divide and conquer them. The gigantic skill and resolution visible
on the German side during the war were supplied by less than one per
cent. of the German people, and so were the harsh, realistic theories
which underlaid them. The average German was and is quite incapable
of any such theories; they horrify him almost as much as they would
horrify a member of the Lake Mohonk Conference. Once the one per cent.
of dominating Germans had been disposed of by their heavy losses on
the field, the rest of the nation turned out to be a mob of moony
sentimentalists, hot for all the democratic fallacies ever heard of,
and eager to put down every surviving man of genuine courage and
enterprise. That mob will continue to pursue these chimeras until a new
race of rulers arises--and then the world will once more mistake the
ideas of those rulers for the ideas of the average German.

The English are judged just as inaccurately, and in the same way.
There is, for example, the common notion that all Englishmen are
good sportsmen, resolute in battle, generous in victory and calm in
defeat. It would be difficult to imagine anything more ridiculous. The
English masses are probably the worst sportsmen in the world, save
only, perhaps, the American masses. During the war their hysterical
whoops and yells deafened the universe, and after it was over the
so-called khaki election brilliantly displayed the true color of
their generosity. To this day, like their brethren of the Republic,
they believe it to be quite honorable to pick a German’s pocket or
rob a German corpse. But there is in England a small minority of men,
chiefly Celtic in blood, who practise good sportsmanship as a sort of
substitute for religion, and these men are still influential enough to
give the hue of their own character to what appears to be the general
English character. Once they succumb to democracy, not even American
Anglomaniacs will ever mention English sportsmanship again.


6

_The Goal_

The central aim of civilization, it must be plain, is simply to defy
and correct the obvious intent of God, _e. g._, that five per cent. of
the people of Christendom shall die of smallpox every year, that the
issue of every love affair shall be a succession of little strangers,
that cows shall devote themselves wholly to nursing their calves, that
it shall take longer to convey a message from New York to Chicago than
it takes to convey one from New York to Newark, that the wicked shall
be miserable and the virtuous happy. Has civilization a motto? Then
certainly it must be “Not _Thy_ will, O Lord, but _ours_, be done!”


7

_Psychology at 5 A. M._

It is in the throes of sober second thought, of spiritual
_Katzenjammer_, that men reveal their true souls. The Puritan always
swears a bloody oath that he will never do it again. The civilized man
simply resolves to be a bit more careful next time.


8

_The Reward_

The cadence at the end is always in the crystalline and sardonic key
of C major.... The heroic sweatings and strivings of the Knights
Templar, for a whole age the marvel of Christendom, are now embalmed
in a single essay by James Anthony Froude, M.A., LL.D., an historian
of charming style but dubious accuracy. If it were not for that single
essay, it would be difficult, if not impossible, for an inquirer of
English speech to find out what their finish was, and why they perished
from the earth. Their old stronghold in London is now--what? An
office-building for lawyers, a roost for such rogues as they would have
put to the sword at sight. And Palestine, for which they died by the
thousand, is now given over to _Schnorrer_ and _Meshulachim_ from Grand
street and the Mile End road.


9

_The Altruist_

A large part of altruism, even when it is perfectly honest, is grounded
upon the fact that it is uncomfortable to have unhappy people about
one. This is especially true in family life. A man makes sacrifices
to his wife’s desires, not because he greatly enjoys giving up what
he wants himself, but because he would enjoy it even less to see her
cutting a sour face across the dinner table.


10

_The Man of Honor_

The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the
latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has
not been caught.




XII. BUGABOO


All of the Great Thinkers of the world, East, West, North and South,
have been alarming their customers, for two or three years past, with
the same bugaboo. According to the New York _Times_ and the Department
of State, there must be a complete restoration of the capitalistic
system in Russia and Mexico, or our sweet Christian civilization will
go to pot. According to the master-minds of France, the Germans must
first lose all their trade and then pay 10,000 cents on the dollar, or
our sweet Christian civilization will go to pot. According to H. G.
Wells, the Treaty of Versailles must be denounced by all parties to it,
or our sweet Christian civilization will go to pot. And so on, and so
on. On the main point the propagandists of all schools are unanimously
agreed: that the civilization of the West teeters on the edge of an
abyss, and that a few more wobbles will send it over. The barbarians
once more thunder upon the gates of Rome. Let the turmoils within go
on for a brief while longer, and they will burst in with their hellish
cries, and every great boon and usufruct that men have sweated and
died for since the days of Charlemagne, from the cathedral at Rheims
to the pneumatic automobile tire, and from fiddle music to diphtheria
antitoxin, and from the inferiority complex to the bichloride tablet,
will vanish in one universal catastrophe. Blood drips from the moon;
another general war impends. This war, according to Will H. Irwin, a
soothsayer employed by the _Saturday Evening Post_, will be so colossal
a butchery that there will be no survivors save a few undertakers and
profiteers, and no material salvage save a few stone quarries and a
couple of million bales of worthless bonds.

Personally, I should be glad to see such a war, for it seems to me
that the human race has run on long enough--that the high gods would
show unaccustomed sense if they dropped it into hell and so ended the
farce. I know of no existing nation that deserves to live, and I know
of very few individuals. But despite the fact that my wishes are thus
on the side of Dr. Irwin’s thought, I find it quite impossible to
follow him. In brief, I see absolutely no sign of a general _débâcle_.
On the contrary, it seems to me that the thing we call civilization was
never more secure than it is today, either in Europe or in America.
More bloodshed, of course, is pretty certain to come; the French, to
name only one people, are obviously headed for another shambles. But
that is a small matter, almost a private matter. Even the complete
destruction of France would not materially damage civilization, save,
perhaps, in the eyes of touring American Puritans, a-search for a moral
oasis. I also incline to think that England and the United States will
be by the ears before many years have come and gone, and that one
or the other of them, probably the United States, will get a severe
beating. But they have fought before, and civilization was scarcely
aware of it. Either could be wiped out utterly, and it would still be
possible to buy Ford parts, Bibles, oil stocks, canned salmon, union
suits, First Folio Shakespeares, hair tonics, books on sex hygiene,
diamonds, coffins, dice, dog soap, glass eyes, and all the other
great blessings of our Christian _Kultur_. Both could be destroyed,
wholly and horribly, and men in Italy would continue to grow excellent
wine, and men in Germany would continue to pursue the colloids and
the cocci, and men in Scandinavia would continue to shiver and curse
God through their long, grisly Winter nights, and so keep the world
supplied with its normal doses of theology, metaphysics and political
theory. Moreover, there are the Chinese. If the entire population of
Christendom were disposed of by some cosmic delousing operation the
Chinese would have a chance--a chance denied to them to-day, in free
competition, by their superior dignity, decency and sense of honor.

The interdependence of nations, indeed, is much overestimated by
sentimentalists, chiefly of the economic faculty. They permit the
gyrations of foreign exchange to alarm them. But what is it to a man
in Kansas, or Uruguay, or Saskatchewan, expressed in hard figures,
that a million Poles have been slaughtered, or that the Turks have
again ravaged Armenia, or that the British and Dutch are at odds over
human liberty and the oil-wells of Mesopotamia, or that Belgrade has
fallen, or that the French refuse to go back to work but propose to
live hereafter by highway robbery? It is, at most, a matter of ten
per cent. This is all he feels, and this is all he cares. If he shows
any excitement or even any interest it is because some drive manager
has played upon his credulities, as Dr. Wells seeks to play upon the
credulities of all of us. For one, I refuse to be alarmed. If Paris
were burned tomorrow, I’d scarcely know it on my estates in Maryland,
feeding upon my razor-back hams, listening to Caruso’s ghost, and
reading the state papers of Thomas Jefferson. Even if I tired of that
idyllic life and went abroad, I’d admire the ruins quite as much as I
have ever admired the Trocadero or the Eiffel tower. Both, perhaps,
would escape the fire--and no doubt the incendiaries would make off
with the best things in the Luxembourg and the Louvre. Nor am I greatly
alarmed by the current doctrine that the late war stamped out the
best strains of all the contesting nations, and that they are rapidly
sinking to the level of their lower classes. This alarm is raised in
an inflammatory book called “Is America Safe for Democracy?” by one
William McDougall, a Scotchman imported to civilize the sophomores at
Harvard. The McDougall also raises and parades another hobgoblin, once
a favorite of the immortal zany, Major-General Roosevelt. That is the
bugaboo of race suicide, especially among the upper classes. The wops
in the ditch and the Slovaks in the mining towns, it appears, breed
up to the limit of human endurance, but bank presidents seldom have
more than four or five legitimate children, and the great majority
of poets, metaphysicians, Oxford dons, lady Ph.D.s, assyriologists
and moving-picture actors are childless, and perhaps even sterile. At
the present rate of reproduction, says Prof. McDougall, 1000 Harvard
graduates of today will have but 50 descendants 200 years hence,
whereas 1000 Rumanians will have 100,000.

But what of it? On the one hand this gay professor assumes far too
readily that Harvard graduates, taking one with another, deserve
to be ranked as first-rate men, and on the other hand he greatly
overestimates the number of first-rate men needed to run the world,
and to insure a reasonable rate of human progress. The fact is that
the safeguarding and development of civilization are and always have
been in the exclusive care of a very small minority of human beings
of each generation, and that the rest of the human race consists
wholly of deadheads. Consider, for example, the telephone, a very
characteristic agent of Christian advancement. It has been invented,
perfected, organized and brought to every door in our own time by less
than 20 men--nay, by less than 10 men. All the others who have made
it, financed and installed it have been simply trailers. All the rest
of the human race has taken a free ride. The number of such first-rate
men in the world is always overestimated, and it is fatuously assumed
that they are identical with the wealthier minority of the population.
Prof. Dr. McDougall himself falls into this last error. He proves--what
everyone knew already--that the children of well-to-do parents are
brighter, by pedagogical standards, than the children of poor folk, but
this fact is of no significance. If it were, then pedagogues themselves
would rank as first-rate men, which is an absurdity; they are, in
fact, generally stupid, and seldom produce anything of value to the
world. The test of a first-rate man is not to be made by the criteria
of schoolmarms. It is to be made by asking the simple question: Has
he ever said or done anything that was not said or done before, and
is it something of positive and permanent value to the human race? If
the answer is yes, then he belongs to the superior minority; if it
is no, then he belongs to the mob, no matter how brilliantly he may
pass examinations, and no matter how greatly he may prosper under the
civilization that his superiors have fostered and developed.

The number of men who can pass this test is always extremely
small--vastly smaller than the uncritical worshipers of politicians,
university presidents, prima donna theologians, opera singers, lawyers,
popular philosophers, successful authors and other such human Fords
usually assume. How many exist at the present moment in the United
States? I turn to “Who’s Who in America” and find 23,443 names. But
a brief inspection is sufficient to show that only a small minority
are borne by first-rate men. I run over page after page and find
nothing but Fords--an army general who has done absolutely nothing
save obey orders and draw his pay, three authors of the eighth rate,
five or six pedagogues, a theologian or two, a Federal judge--who
ever heard of a Federal judge who left the world more intelligent,
more virtuous or more efficient than he found it?--a publisher of
bad books, two Congressmen, a bishop. I begin to despair. Finally,
I find a first-rate man: Bush of the Bush Terminals. One in 35.
The proportion, I think, is fair for the whole book. This makes
670 first-rate Americans in our time. Call it 700 to be safe. But
race-suicide among the upper classes will make it impossible to produce
even the 700 in the next generation? Nonsense! It is not necessary
that _every_ first-rate man leave children behind him; it is only
necessary that a few of them in each generation do so. Nature will do
the rest. The first-rate character may be concealed for a generation
or two, but soon or late it will reveal itself, and sometimes in many
individuals. This explains the common notion that first-rate men are
often produced in low life, _e. g._, the case of Lincoln. They are, but
not by low-lifers. Here the devil helps the angels, and the sinfulness
of man takes on a high human utility. Often the cross is concealed
in forgotten generations. The good blood is apparently lost in the
flood of proletarian bilge--but suddenly it begins to run red and
clear, and the platitudinarians have another up-from-slavery chapter
to wag their ears over. I believe fully that the first-rate men of
the world constitute a distinct and separate species--that they have
little, if anything, in common with the lower orders of men. But the
two races, fortunately for human progress, are mutually fertile. If
they ever cease to be, then God help us all! But there is absolutely
no sign that they are ceasing to be. So long as they remain as they
are there need be no worry about the future of civilization. The danger
is that first-rate men may grow too numerous, and so arouse the hatred
of the lower orders, as happened in Greece. The United States now
accommodates 700. If the number rose to 1000 I fear that the churches,
the newspapers, Congress and the American Legion would grow restless,
and that the catastrophe dreamed of by Prof. McDougall would begin to
cast its shadows before.

Meanwhile, all the current pulling of long faces is absurd. There is
not the slightest sign that the basic elements of modern civilization,
such as it is, are in any danger, proximately or remotely. Europe, at
the moment, is a bit weary, but no actual barbarians are thundering
at the gate; all the recognizable barbarians, in fact, are retreating
sadly into their native jungles, with troubles of their own. There is
no decline in Christian _morale_; if anything, there is far too much
Christian _morale_ on tap. The one thing that one may say accurately is
that there is a struggle for control within the borders of civilization
itself, to wit, between the masses of simple and stupid men and various
minorities of extremely egoistic and determined men. But neither side
is trying to destroy civilization, save in the indignant visions of
the other. On the contrary, both are trying their best to preserve it,
and whether one side wins or the other it will be duly preserved. Ten
years hence it will be just as easy to send a picture postcard or to
be beaten by a policeman as it is to-day, and wherever one may buy a
picture postcard the arts are safe and wherever one may be beaten by a
policeman law and order are safe, and when the arts and law and order
are safe, then civilization is also safe. False analogies are at the
bottom of most of the current fears--that is, when they are honest.
The analogy with Rome, so often cited, is especially nonsensical. A
few hundred thousand Romans were surrounded by countless millions of
barbarians, and the barbarians had arms quite as good as those of the
Romans. Where is any similar horde to be found today? Are the Japs
dangerous? Plainly not, save perhaps to the United States. The Japs,
with all of the odds on their side, took more than two years to beat
the Russians; they would stand up before a European coalition no more
than 10 days. The Chinese? They don’t want Europe; they want only
China. The blacks of Africa? Two German divisions could dispose of
all of them, given a fair, stand-up battle, in two hours. Nor is any
genuine fear to be deduced from the fate of the late Confederacy in
America. The intellectual collapse of the Southern States after the
Civil War was purely a local and geographical matter. Most of the
surviving Southerners who had been civilized before the war simply
moved North, leaving only a few cripples, the darkeys and a mob of poor
white trash behind. But civilization in the United States was certainly
not affected; in fact, the mixing of Southerners and Northerners in
the North probably improved it. Today, a half century afterward, even
some of the Southern poor whites are becoming relatively civilized. A
book store has been opened in New Orleans, a man in Mobile has bought
a violoncello, and only the other day, in Georgia, a white man was
actually taken by the constabulary for killing a dozen Negroes.

What the authors of elegies mistake for the collapse of civilization is
simply the internal struggle that I have mentioned--the ages-old combat
between the haves and the have-nots, now rendered transiently acute by
a parlous shortening of the things fought for. The ultimate issue of
that struggle seems to me to be plain enough. The have-nots will be
given a drubbing, and under the protection of a new and unprecedentedly
vigorous and daring capitalism the thing called Christian civilization
will be promoted as it has never been promoted before. My arteries
harden so fast--a consequence of my constant and quixotic sacrifice of
myself to the common weal--that I cannot hope to live into the full
flush of that new Golden Age, but I can at least smack my lips over it
in anticipation. What I see is a vast horde of inferior men broken,
after a hopeless, fruitless fight, to the hard, uninspiring labor of
the world--a race of slaves superbly regimented, and kept steadily
in order by great brigades of propagandists, official optimists,
scare-mongers, Great Thinkers and rev. clergy. And over them a minority
of capitalist overlords, well-fed, well-protected, highly respected,
politely envied, and lavishly supplied with endless stores of picture
postcards, gasoline, silk underwear, mayonnaise, Ponet Canet, toilet
soap and phonograph records.

The battle, in fact, is already half won. In France and the United
States capitalism can weather any conceivable storm. In England it
craftily encourages labor to a combat that will be to a finish, and
with capital on top. In Italy it is already in the saddle. In Germany
only the Junkers stave off the inevitable victory of money. In Russia
the Bolsheviks help capital everywhere by reducing the cause of the
have-nots to an absurdity. The other countries are not dogs, but mere
tails.... The United States, I believe, will see the thing brought to
its finest flower. There were no war losses here, but only profits.
In all other countries, the conscripts of the war are restless, and
inclined to move toward the Left. Here they are already superbly
organized to serve capital, and give the final touch of felicity to
the situation by serving it for nothing. On the evening of the same
day that an American Legionary has his wages reduced 40 per cent. and
his hours of labor increased 25 per cent., he goes out at his own risk
and expense and helps to tar and feather some visionary who tries to
convince him that he has been swindled. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court of
New York decides formally that “the courts ... must stand at all times
as the representatives of capital,” and the newspapers commend the
dictum in lavish terms.... I sing Utopia. It is about to burst upon us.






XIII. ON GOVERNMENT


1

“Government,” said William Godwin in that “Enquiry Concerning Political
Justice” which got Shelley two wives and lost him £6000 a year,
“can have no more than two legitimate purposes: the suppression of
injustice against individuals within the community, and the common
defense against external invasion.” The dictum, after a hundred and
thirty-one years, remains unimproved and perhaps unimprovable. Today,
to be sure, with Darwin behind us, we’d make some change in its terms:
what Godwin was trying to say, obviously, was that the central aim of
government was to ameliorate the struggle for existence--to cherish
and protect the dignity of man in the midst of the brutal strife of
_Homo neanderthalensis_. But that change would be simply substituting a
_cliché_ of the Nineteenth Century for one of the Eighteenth. All the
furious discussion of the subject that has gone on in the intervening
time has not changed the basic idea in the slightest. To the plain man
of today, as to the most fanatical Liberal or Socialist, government
appears primarily as a device for compensating his weakness, a machine
for protecting him in rights that he could not make secure with his
own arm. Even the Tory holds the same view of it: its essential
function, to him, is to safeguard his property against the lascivious
desires of those who, if they were not policed, would be tempted to
grab it. “Government,” said George Washington, “is not reason, it is
not eloquence--it is force.” Bad government is that which is weak,
irresolute and lacking in constabulary enterprise; when one has
defined it, one has also defined a bad bishop, cavalry captain or
policeman. Good government is that which delivers the citizen from
the risk of being done out of his life and property too arbitrarily
and violently--one that relieves him sufficiently from the barbaric
business of guarding them to enable him to engage in gentler, more
dignified and more agreeable undertakings, to his own content and
profit, and the advantage, it may be, of the commonwealth.

Unfortunately, this function is performed only imperfectly by any of
the forms of government now visible in Christendom, and Dr. Johnson was
perhaps justified in dismissing them all as but various aspects of the
same fraud. The citizen of today, even in the most civilized states,
is not only secured but defectively against other citizens who aspire
to exploit and injure him--for example, highwaymen, bankers, quack
doctors, clergymen, sellers of oil stock and contaminated liquor, and
so-called reformers of all sorts,--and against external foes, military,
commercial and philosophical; he is also exploited and injured almost
without measure by the government itself--in other words, by the very
agency which professes to protect him. That agency becomes, indeed,
one of the most dangerous and insatiable of the inimical forces
present in his everyday environment. He finds it more difficult and
costly to survive in the face of it than it is to survive in the
face of any other enemy. He may, if he has prudence, guard himself
effectively against all the known varieties of private criminals, from
stockbrokers to pickpockets and from lawyers to kidnapers, and he
may, if he has been burnt enough, learn to guard himself also against
the rogues who seek to rob him by the subtler device of playing upon
his sentimentalities and superstitions: charity mongers, idealists,
soul-savers, and others after their kind. But he can no more escape the
tax-gatherer and the policemen, in all their protean and multitudinous
guises, than he can escape the ultimate mortician. They beset him
constantly, day in and day out, in ever-increasing numbers and in ever
more disarming masks and attitudes. They invade his liberty, affront
his dignity and greatly incommode his search for happiness, and every
year they demand and wrest from him a larger and larger share of his
worldly goods. The average American of today works more than a full
day in every week to support his government. It already costs him more
than his pleasures and almost as much as his vices, and in another half
century, no doubt, it will begin to cost as much as his necessities.

These gross extortions and tyrannies, of course, are all practised on
the theory that they are not only unavoidable, but also laudable--that
government oppresses its victims in order to confer upon them the
great boons mentioned by Godwin. But that theory, I believe, begins to
be quite as dishonest as the chiropractor’s pretense that he pummels
his patient’s spine in order to cure his cancer: the actual object,
obviously, is simply to cure his solvency. What keeps such notions
in full credit, and safeguards them against destructive analysis, is
chiefly the survival into our enlightened age of a concept hatched in
the black days of absolutism--the concept, to wit, that government is
something that is superior to and quite distinct from all other human
institutions--that it is, in its essence, not a mere organization
of ordinary men, like the Ku Klux Klan, the United States Steel
Corporation or Columbia University, but a transcendental organism
composed of aloof and impersonal powers, devoid wholly of self-interest
and not to be measured by merely human standards. One hears it spoken
of, not uncommonly, as one hears the law of gravitation and the grace
of God spoken of--as if its acts had no human motive in them and stood
clearly above human fallibility. This concept, I need not argue, is
full of error. The government at Washington is no more impersonal than
the cloak and suit business is impersonal. It is operated by precisely
the same sort of men, and to almost the same ends. When we say that it
has decided to do this or that, that it proposes or aspires to do this
or that--usually to the great cost and inconvenience of nine-tenths of
us--we simply say that a definite man or group of men has decided to
do it, or proposes or aspires to do it; and when we examine this group
of men realistically we almost invariably find that it is composed
of individuals who are not only not superior to the general, but
plainly and depressingly inferior, both in common sense and in common
decency--that the act of government we are called upon to ratify and
submit to is, in its essence, no more than an act of self-interest by
men who, if no mythical authority stood behind them, would have a hard
time of it surviving in the struggle for existence.


2

These men, in point of fact, are seldom if ever moved by anything
rationally describable as public spirit; there is actually no more
public spirit among them than among so many burglars or street-walkers.
Their purpose, first, last and all the time, is to promote their
private advantage, and to that end, and that end alone, they exercise
all the vast powers that are in their hands. Sometimes the thing they
want is mere security in their jobs; sometimes they want gaudier and
more lucrative jobs; sometimes they are content with their jobs and
their pay but yearn for more power. Whatever it is they seek, whether
security, greater ease, more money or more power, it has to come out
of the common stock, and so it diminishes the shares of all other
men. Putting a new job-holder to work decreases the wages of every
wage-earner in the land--not enough to be noticed, perhaps, but enough
to leave its mark. Giving a job-holder more power takes something
away from the liberty of all of us: we are less free than we were in
proportion as he has more authority. Theoretically, we get something
for what we thus give up, but actually we usually get absolutely
nothing. Suppose two-thirds of the members of the national House of
Representatives were dumped into the Washington garbage incinerator
tomorrow, what would we lose to offset our gain of their salaries and
the salaries of their parasites? It may be plausibly argued, of course,
that the House itself is necessary to our happiness and salvation--that
we need it as we need trolley conductors, chiropodists and the men who
bite off puppies’ tails. But even if that be granted--and I, for one,
am by no means disposed to grant it--the plain fact remains that all
the useful work the House does might be done just as well by fifty men,
and that the rest are of no more utility to the commonwealth, in any
rational sense, than so many tight-rope walkers or teachers of mah jong.

The Fathers, when they launched the Republic, were under no illusions
as to the nature of government. Washington’s view of its inner
nature I have already quoted; Jefferson it was who said sagely that
“that government is best which governs least.” The Constitution in
its first form, perhaps, was designed chiefly to check the rising
pretensions of the lower orders, drunk with the democratic fustian of
the Revolutionary era, but when the Bill of Rights was added to it its
guns began to point more especially at the government itself, _i. e._,
at the class of job-holders, ever bent upon oppressing the citizen
to the limit of his endurance. It is, perhaps, a fact provocative
of sour mirth that the Bill of Rights was designed trustfully to
prohibit forever two of the favorite crimes of all known governments:
the seizure of private property without adequate compensation and the
invasion of the citizen’s liberty without justifiable cause and due
process of law. It is a fact provocative of mirth yet more sour that
the execution of these prohibitions was put into the hands of courts,
which is to say, into the hands of lawyers, which is to say, into
the hands of men specifically educated to discover legal excuses for
dishonest, dishonorable and anti-social acts. The actual history of
the Constitution, as everyone knows, has been a history of the gradual
abandonment of all such impediments to governmental tyranny. Today we
live frankly under a government of men, not of laws. What is the Bill
of Rights to a Roosevelt, a Wilson, a Palmer, a Daugherty, a Burns?
Under such tin-horn Cæsars the essential enmity between government and
citizen becomes only too plain, and one gets all the proof that is
needed of the eternal impossibility of protecting the latter against
the former. The government can not only evoke fear in its victims; it
can also evoke a sort of superstitious reverence. It is thus both an
army and a church, and with sharp weapons in both hands it is virtually
irresistible. Its personnel, true enough, may be changed, and so may
the external forms of the fraud it practises, but its inner nature is
immutable.

Politics, as hopeful men practise it in the world, consists mainly
of the delusion that a change in form is a change in substance. The
American colonists, when they got rid of the Potsdam tyrant, believed
fondly that they were getting rid of oppressive taxes forever and
setting up complete liberty. They found almost instantly that taxes
were higher than ever, and before many years they were writhing under
the Alien and Sedition Acts. The French, when they threw off the
monarchy at last, looked forward to a Golden Age of peace, plenty and
freedom. They are now wrecked by war, bankrupted beyond any chance
of recovery, and hag-ridden by an apparently unbreakable combination
of the most corrupt and cynical politicians ever seen in the world.
The experience of the Russians and Germans is even more eloquent.
The former have been ruined by their saviors, and in so far as they
have any power of reflection left, long for the restoration of the
tyranny they once ascribed to the devil. The latter, delivered from the
Hohenzollerns, now find the Schmidts and Krauses ten times as expensive
and oppressive. Six months after the republic was set up a German
cabinet minister, for the first time in the history of the nation,
was in flight over the border, his loot under his arm. In the first
flush of surprise and indignation the people took to assassinating
politicians, but before long they gave it up as hopeless: Schmidt fell
but Kraus still lived, and so government kept its vitality and its
character. Many Germans, reduced to despair, now advocate a complete
abolition of political government; if Stinnes had lived they would have
tried to make him dictator of the country. But political government,
_i. e._, government by professional job-holders, would have remained
in fact, despite its theoretical abolition, and its nature would have
been unchanged.

If downright revolution is thus incapable of curing the disease,
the ordinary reforms that men believe in sink to the level of bald
quackeries. Consider, for example, the history of so-called Civil
Service Reform in the United States. It came in on a wave of intense
public indignation against the whole governmental imposture; it
represented a violent and romantic effort to substitute an ideal of
public service for the familiar harsh reality of public exploitation.
For fifty years the American people had sweated and suffered under the
spoils system, that lovely legacy of the “reforms” of the Jackson era.
By the opening of the eighties they were ready to dispose of it by fair
means or foul. The job-holder, once theoretically a freeman discharging
a lofty and necessary duty, was seen clearly to be no more than a rat
devouring the communal corn; his public position was indistinguishable
from that of a child-stealer, a well-poisoner or a Sunday-school
superintendent; and that of his brother, the government contractor
and purveyor, was even lower. Many men of both classes, including
some very important ones, were clapped into jail, and many others had
to depart for Canada between days, along with the nightly squad of
clerical seducers and absconding bank cashiers. Thereupon seers and
prophets arose to lead the people out of the wilderness. A few wild
ones proposed, in effect, that government be abolished altogether,
but the notion outraged democratic sentiment, and so most of them
followed the job-holders into jail; some, in fact, were put to death
by more or less due process of law. The majority of soothsayers were
less revolutionary: they proposed only that the race of job-holders be
reformed by force, that government be purged and denaturized.

This was undertaken by what came to be called Civil Service Reform. The
essence of Civil Service Reform was the notion that the job-holder, in
return for his high prerogatives and immunities, should be compelled
to do an honest day’s work--that he should fit himself for it by hard
effort, as a barber fits himself for cutting hair. Led by such men of
Vision as E. L. Godkin, Charles J. Bonaparte and Theodore Roosevelt
(that, of course, was before Roosevelt deserted the flag and became
himself the archetypical job-holder), the reformers proceeded grimly
toward the dreadful purpose of making the job-holder a mere slave,
like a bookkeeper in a wholesale house. His pay and emoluments were
cut down and his labors were increased. Once the proudest and most
envied citizen of the Republic, free to oppress all other citizens to
the limit of their endurance, he became at one stroke a serf groaning
in a pen, with a pistol pointed at his head. If, despite the bars and
artillery surrounding him, his thrift enabled him to make a show of
decent prosperity, he was clapped into prison _ipso facto_, and almost
without a trial. A few short years saw his fall from the dizziest
height of ease to the lowest abyss of misery.

This, of course, could not go on, else politics would have tumbled into
chaos and government would have lost its basic character; nay, its very
life. What is more, it did _not_ go on, for human ingenuity, despite
the troubles of the time, was still functioning, and presently it found
a remedy for the disease--a remedy so perfect, indeed, that the patient
did not know he was taking it. That remedy was achieved by the simple
process of making two slight changes in the ideal of Civil Service
Reform itself. First the word Reform was lopped off, and then the word
Civil. There remained, then, only Service. This Service saved the day
for the job-holder; it gave him a new lease upon his job; it diverted
public suspicion from him; it converted him from a criminal into a sort
of philanthropist. It remains with us today, the heir and assign of
the old spoils system, as the bootlegger is the heir and assign of the
saloon-keeper.


3

The chief achievement of Service is that it has sucked reform into the
governmental orbit, and so made it official and impeccable--more,
highly profitable. The old-time reformer was one who got nothing
for his psychic corn-cures and shin-plasters--who gave them away
freely to all comers, seeking only righteousness himself--who often,
indeed, took a beating into the bargain. The new reformer, safe in a
government job, with a drastic and complex law behind him, is one who
is paid in legal tender, unfailingly proffered, for his passionate
but usually unintelligible services to humanity--a prophet of the new
enlightenment, a priest at a glittering and immense shrine. He is the
fellow who enforces the Volstead Act, the Mann Act, all the endless
laws for putting down sin. He is the bright evangelist who tours the
country teaching mothers how to have babies, spreading the latest
inventions in pedagogy, road-making, the export trade, hog-raising and
vegetable-canning, waging an eternal war upon illiteracy, hookworm,
the white slave trade, patent medicines, the foot and mouth disease,
cholera infantum, adultery, rum. He is, quite as often as not, female;
he is a lady Ph.D., cocksure, bellicose, very well paid. Male or
female, he represents the new governmental tyranny; he is Vision, vice
the spoils system, retired. The old-time job-holder, penned in the cage
of the Civil Service, is now only a peon, a brother to the ox. He has
to work quite as hard as if he labored for Judge Gary or Henry Ford,
and he is very much worse paid. The high prerogatives and usufructs
of government have slipped out of his hands. They are exercised and
enjoyed today by the apostles of Service, a horde growing daily, vastly
and irresistibly, in numbers, impudence, power and pay.

Few of the groaning taxpayers of These States, indeed, realize how
far this public merchandizing of buncombe has dispatched the old
spoils system, or how much it is costing them every year. During the
Civil War an army contractor who went to Washington looking for loot
announced frankly what he was after; as a result, he was constantly
under suspicion, and was lucky if he got away with as much as $100,000;
only a few Vanderbilts and Morgans actually stole more. During the late
war he called himself a dollar-a-year-man, put on a major’s uniform,
took oath to die if need be for the cause of democracy--and went home
with a million, at least. The job-holder has undergone a similar
metamorphosis; maybe apotheosis would be a better aimed word. In the
days of the spoils system he was, at best, an amateurish and inept
performer. The only reason he ever offered for demanding a place at
the public trough was that he deserved it--that he had done his share
to elect the ticket. The easy answer to him was that he was an obvious
loafer and scoundrel, and deserved nothing. But what answer is to be
made to his heir and assign, the evangelist of Service, the prophet of
Vision? He doesn’t start off with a bald demand for a job; he starts
off with a Message. He has discovered the long-sought sure cure for
all the sorrows of the world; he has the infallible scheme for putting
down injustice, misery, ignorance, suffering, sin; his appeal is not
to the rules of a sinister and discreditable game, but to the bursting
heart of humanity, the noblest and loftiest sentiments of man. His job
is never in the foreground; it is concealed in his Vision. To get at
the former one must first dispose of the latter. Well, who is to do it?
What true-born American will volunteer for the cynical office? Half are
too idiotic and the rest are too cowardly. It takes courage to flaunt
and make a mock of Vision--and where is courage?

Certainly not in this imperial commonwealth of natural kneebenders
and marchers in parades. Nowhere else in Christendom, save only in
France, is government more extravagant, nonsensical, unintelligent
and corrupt than here, and nowhere else is it so secure. It becomes
a sort of crime even to protest against its villainies; all the late
investigations of waste and corruption in Washington were attacked and
brought to wreck in the name of duty, decorum, patriotism. The citizen
objecting to felony by the agents of the sovereign state, acting in
its name, found himself posted as an anarchist! There was, of course,
some logic in this imbecility, as there is in everything insane. It
was felt that too violent an onslaught upon the disease might do gross
damage to the patient, that the attempt to extirpate what was foul and
excrescent might imperil what was useful and necessary. Is government,
then, useful and necessary? So is a doctor. But suppose the dear
fellow claimed the right, every time he was called in to prescribe for
a bellyache or a ringing in the ears, to raid the family silver, use
the family tooth-brushes, and execute the _droit de seigneur_ upon
the housemaid? Is it simply a coincidence that the only necessary
functionaries who actually perform any comparable brigandage are the
lawyers--the very men who, under democracy, chiefly determined the
form, policies and acts of the government?

This great pox of civilization, alas, I believe to be incurable, and
so I propose no new quackery for its treatment. I am against dosing
it, and I am against killing it. All I presume to argue is that
something would be accomplished by viewing it more realistically--by
ceasing to let its necessary and perhaps useful functions blind us
to its ever-increasing crimes against the ordinary rights of the
free citizen and the common decencies of the world. The fact that it
is generally respected--that it possesses effective machinery for
propagating and safeguarding that respect--is the main shield of
the rogues and vagabonds who use it to exploit the great masses of
diligent and credulous men. Whenever you hear anyone bawling for more
respect for the laws, whether it be a Coolidge on his imperial throne
or an humble county judge in his hedge court, you have before you one
who is trying to use them to his private advantage; whenever you hear
of new legislation for putting down dissent and rebellion you may be
sure that it is promoted by scoundrels. The extortions and oppressions
of government will go on so long as such bare fraudulence deceives
and disarms the victims--so long as they are ready to swallow the
immemorial official theory that protesting against the stealings of
the archbishop’s secretary’s nephew’s mistress’ illegitimate son is a
sin against the Holy Ghost. They will come to an end when the victims
begin to differentiate clearly between government as a necessary
device for maintaining order in the world and government as a device
for maintaining the authority and prosperity of predatory rascals and
swindlers. In other words, they will come to an end on the Tuesday
following the first Monday of November preceding the Resurrection Morn.






XIV. TOWARD A REALISTIC ÆSTHETIC


1

_The Nature of Art_

The dominating purpose of man in the world is to conquer Nature,
which is to say, to defeat the plain intent of God. God and man are
the eternal antagonists. Man makes progress every time he wins a new
victory; if he can hold his gains his progress is real. Poetry is one
device for defeating God. Its aim is to escape some of the pains of
reality by denying boldly that they exist--by saying, in some form or
other, that “I am the captain of my soul” and “all’s well with the
world.” This denial gives some comfort to human hearts, particularly
to the more romantic sort; it is a poor substitute, perhaps, for
the actual conquest of the harsh facts, but it is nevertheless a
substitute. Religion operates in precisely the same way; its primary
purpose is to read an intelligible and even laudable motive into the
inscrutable assaults of God. Poetry, of course, is a cut higher than
religion, logically speaking. It denies the facts, but it denies
them more or less speciously and sometimes almost convincingly; it
seldom, if ever, has to enounce the thumping and obvious absurdities
that religion relies upon. But it is nevertheless a denial of reality,
and hence very deficient as an agent of progress. Science is far more
effective. It does not deny the imbecilities and horrors of Nature;
it sets about actually modifying them, and even abolishing them.
When science conquers it is usually a conquest that is permanent. We
have got rid of wolves, ghosts and yellow fever finally and almost
completely; they no longer bother civilized men. In the same way we
have got rid of some of the horrors that religion raised--horrors worse
than those it sought to lay. Science is not only effective against
Nature; it is also effective against the dangerous remedies formerly
employed against Nature.

Religion and the arts are thus only second-rate means of achieving
man’s chief purpose in the world. They give him a lot of comfort,
but they expose him to the dangers which always follow the denial of
reality. The man who believes that God is personally interested in him
and will save him from harm is in a far more perilous situation than
the man who knows better; so, also, with the man who believes that what
poetry says is true. The other arts, having less ideational content,
are a good deal less menacing. The statements that architecture makes,
for example, are not against the plain facts but in accord with the
plain facts--for example, that St. Thomas’ Church is more beautiful
than the Jersey marshes or its own rector. So with music, and, to some
extent, with painting, though painting is hampered by its function of
representing Nature--that is, of reproducing Nature without comment,
or with very feeble and ineffective comment. Painting will become a
genuinely valuable art when it finally abandons representation. The
portrait of an ugly woman, even though the artist tries to ameliorate
her ugliness a bit, remains almost as horrible as the ugly woman
herself. That is to say, the artist simply multiplies and reinforces
the horror already concocted by God.

The arts that avoid representation are like science in this: that they
actually improve upon Nature, and so add permanently to man’s comfort
and happiness in the world. The Parthenon is not a mere idle denial
of the facts of life, like poetry; it is a positive improvement upon
the facts of life; it makes a Greek hilltop appreciably more beautiful
than it was as God made it, and so mitigates the horror of life to
man. Music achieves the same thing, and even more effectively. The
nine Beethoven symphonies do not deny any palpable fact; they merely
create new facts that are more agreeable than those previously
existing. There are no sounds in Nature comparable to the lovely
sounds that Beethoven evokes. Here man shows himself definitely the
superior of God. Poetry, of course, also achieves a measure of genuine
and permanent beauty. But it can do so only in its character as a
form of music. The blank verse of Shakespeare, as music, is as noble
a creation as the symphonies of Beethoven. But all poetry, even the
best, is corrupted by its logical content. It almost invariably _says_
something, and that something is almost always untrue. When man speaks
or believes an untruth he certainly makes no progress with his conquest
of Nature. On the contrary, he plainly gives up the battle, at least
for the moment. Instead of fighting resolutely and effectively, and so
improving his state, he simply buries his head in the sand.


2

_The One-Legged Art_

To me, at all events, painting seems to be half an alien among the fine
arts. Its credentials, of course, are sounder than those of acting,
but they are surely not as sound as those of music, poetry, drama,
sculpture and architecture. The trouble with painting is that it lacks
movement, which is to say, the chief function of life. The best a
painter can hope to accomplish is to fix the mood of an instant, the
momentary aspect of something. If he suggests actual movement he must
do it by palpable tricks, all of which belong to craftsmanship rather
than to art. The work that he produces is comparable to a single chord
in music, without preparation or resolution. It may be beautiful, but
its beauty plainly does not belong to the highest order. The senses
soon tire of such beauty. If a man stands before a given painting for
more than five or ten minutes, it is usually a sign of affectation: he
is trying to convince himself that he has more delicate perceptions
than the general. Or he is a painter himself and thus engrossed by
the technical aspects of it, as a plumber might be engrossed by the
technical aspects of a bathroom. Or he is enchanted by the story
that the picture tells, which is to say, by the literature that it
illustrates. True enough, he may go back to a painting over and over
again, just as a music-lover may strike and re-strike a chord that
pleases him, but it can’t hold him for long at one session--it can’t
move his feelings so powerfully that he forgets the real world he lives
in.

Sculpture is in measurably better case. The spectator, viewing a fine
statue, does not see something dead, embalmed and fixed in a frame;
he sees something that moves as he moves. A fine statue, in other
words, is not one statue, but hundreds, perhaps even thousands. The
transformation from one to another is infinitely pleasing; one gets
out of it the same satisfying stimulation that one gets out of the
unrolling of a string quartette, or out of such a poem as “Atalanta in
Calydon,” “Heart of Darkness” or “Faust.” So with architecture. It not
only revolves; it also moves vertically, as the spectator approaches
it. When one walks up a street past a beautiful building one certainly
gets an effect beyond that of a mere chord; it is the effect of a whole
procession of beautiful chords, like that at the beginning of the slow
movement of the “New World” symphony or that in the well-known and
much-battered Chopin prélude. If it were a painting it would soon grow
tedious. No one, after a few days, would give it a glance.

This intrinsic hollowness of painting has its effects even upon those
who most vigorously defend it as the queen of all the fine arts.
One hears of such persons “haunting the galleries,” but one always
discovers, on inquiry, that it is the show-rooms that they actually
haunt. In other words, they get their chief pleasure by looking at
an endless succession of _new_ paintings: the multitude of chords
produces, in the end, a sort of confused satisfaction. One never hears
of them going to a public gallery regularly, to look at this or that
masterpiece. Even the Louvre seldom attracts them more than a dozen or
so times in a life-time. The other arts make a far more powerful and
permanent appeal. I have read “Huckleberry Finn” at least twenty times
and “Typhoon” probably ten times, and yet both pleased me as much (nay,
more) the last time as they did the first time. I have heard each of
the first eight symphonies of Beethoven more than fifty times, and most
of Mozart’s, Haydn’s, Schubert’s and Schumann’s quite as often. Yet if
Beethoven’s C Minor were announced for performance tonight, I’d surely
go to hear it. More, I’d enjoy every instant of it. Even second-rate
music has this lasting quality. Some time ago I heard Johann Strauss’
waltz, “Geschichten aus dem Wiener Wald,” for the first time in a long
while. I knew it well in my goatish days; every note of it was still
familiar. Nevertheless, it gave me exquisite delight. Imagine a man
getting exquisite delight out of a painting of corresponding calibre--a
painting already so familiar to him that he could reproduce it from
memory!

Painters, like barbers and cigarmakers, are able to talk while they are
at work, and so they commonly gabble about their art a great deal more
than other artists, and the world, in consequence, has come to assume
that it is very complex, and full of subtleties. This is not true. Most
of its so-called subtleties are manufactured by painters who cannot
paint. The genuinely first-rate painters of the world have little
to say about the technique of their art, and seem to be unaware that
it is difficult. Go back to Leonardo’s notes and sketches: you will
find him a great deal more interested in anatomy than in painting. In
fact, painting was a sort of afterthought with him; he was primarily
an engineer, and the engineering that fascinated him most was that of
the human body. Come down, then, to Cézanne. He painted in the way that
seemed most natural to him, and was greatly astonished when a group of
bad painters, seeking to imitate him, began crediting him with a long
string of more or less mystical theories, by the Boul’ Mich’ out of the
article on optics in the Encyclopædia Britannica.

The earliest Paleolithic men were already accomplished painters
and sculptors. H. G. Wells, in his “Outline of History,” says that
“they drew astonishingly well.” “Paint,” he goes on, “was a big fact
in their lives. They were inveterate painters.” These savages were
so low that they had not even invented bows and arrows, usury, the
gallows or the notion of baptism by total immersion, and yet they were
already accomplished draftsmen. Some of their drawings on the walls
of their caves, indeed, remain a great deal more competent that the
average magazine illustration of today. They also carved in stone and
modelled in clay, and no doubt they were accomplished poets, as are
the lowest Zuñi Indians of our own time. Moreover, they soon began to
move out of their caves into artificial houses, and the principles of
architectural design that they devised at the very dawn of history
have been unchanged ever since, and are poll-parroted docilely every
time a sky-scraper thrusts its snout among the cherubim. True enough,
they could not draw as accurately as a photographic lens, but they
could certainly draw as accurately as, say, Matisse or Gauguin. It
remained for modern physicists, _i. e._, men disdainful of drawing,
to improve it. All the progress that has been made in the art during
the past fifty or sixty years has been based upon quiet filches from
the camera, just as all the progress that has been made in painting
has been based upon filches from the spectroscope. When one finds a
painter who professes to disdain these scientific aids, one always
beholds a painter who is actually unable to draw or paint, and who
seeks to conceal his incompetence by clothing it in hocus-pocus. This
is the origin of the new art that regales us with legs eight feet long,
complexions of olive green, and human heads related to the soap-box
rather than to the Edam cheese. This is the origin of all the gabble
one hears in ratty and unheated studios about cubism, vortism, futurism
and other such childish follies.

I regard any human being who, with proper instruction, cannot learn to
draw reasonably well as, to all intents and purposes, a moron. He is
in a stage of culture actually anterior to that of the Crô-Magnons. As
for a human being incapable of writing passable verse, he simply does
not exist. It is done, as everyone knows, by children--and sometimes so
well that their poems are printed in books and quite solemnly reviewed.
But good music is never written by children--and I am not forgetting
Mozart, Schubert and Mendelssohn. Music belongs to the very latest
stage of culture; to compose it in the grand manner requires long and
painful training, and the highest sort of natural skill. It is complex,
delicate, difficult. A miraculous youth may show talent for it, but he
never reaches anything properly describable as mastery of it until he
is thoroughly mature. The music that all of us think of when we think
of the best was written by men a bit bent by experience; it is quite
beyond the comprehension of the general. And so with prose. Prose has
no stage scenery to hide behind, as poetry has. It cannot use masks
and wigs. It is not naïve, but infinitely sophisticated. It is not
spontaneous, but must be fabricated by thought and painstaking. Prose
is the ultimate flower of the art of words. Next to music, it is the
finest of all the fine arts.

To return to music, it must be plain that it is enormously handicapped
as an art by the mere fact that its technique is so frightfully
difficult. I do not refer, of course, to the technique of the musical
executant, but to that of the composer. Any literate man can master
the technique of poetry in ten days, and that of the drama--despite
all the solemn hocus-pocus of the professors who presume to teach
it--in three weeks, but not even the greatest genius could do sound
work in the sonata form without years of preparation. To write a good
string quartette is not merely an act of creation, like writing a
love song; it is also an act of applied science, like cutting out a
set of tonsils. I know of no other art that demands so elaborate a
professional training. Perhaps the one which comes nearest to it is
architecture--that is, modern architecture. As the Greeks practised it,
it was relatively simple, for they used simple materials and avoided
all delicate problems of stress and strain; and they were thus able to
keep their whole attention upon pure design. But the modern architect,
with his complex mathematical and mechanical problems, must be an
engineer before he is an artist, and the sort of engineering that he
must master bristles with technical snares and conundrums. The serious
musician is in even worse case. Before he may write at all he must
take in and coördinate a body of technical knowledge that is almost as
great as the outfit of an astronomer. I say that all this constitutes a
handicap on the art of music. What I mean is that it scares off many
men who have sound musical ideas and would make good composers, but
who have no natural talent or taste for the technical groundwork. For
one Schubert who overcomes the handicap by sheer genius there must be
dozens who are repelled and discouraged. There is another, and perhaps
even worse disadvantage. The potential Schuberts flee in alarm, but
the Professor Sawdusts march in bravely. That is to say, music is hard
for musicians, but easy for pedants, grinds and examination-passers.
Its constant invasion by a hollow formalism is the result. It offers
an inviting playground to the bombastic jackass whose delight it is to
astonish the bourgeoisie with insane feats of virtuosity.


3

_Symbiosis and the Artist_

In contemplating the stupendous achievements of such a man as
Wagner--achievements so colossal that only a small minority of men,
specially trained, can even comprehend and appreciate them--one often
finds one’s self wondering how much further he would have gone had
he not been harassed by his two wives. His first wife, Minna Planer,
was frankly and implacably opposed to his life-work, and made
deliberate efforts to dissuade him from it. She regarded “Lohengrin” as
nonsensical and “Tannhäuser” as downright indecent. It was her constant
hope, until Wagner finally kicked her out, that he would give over such
stuff, and consecrate himself to the composition of respectable operas
in the manner of Rossini, her favorite composer. The only composition
of his that genuinely pleased her was a set of variations for the
_cornet à piston_ that he wrote in Paris. She was a singer, and had the
brains of one. It must be plain that the presence of such a woman--and
Wagner lived with her for twenty years--must have put a fearful burden
upon the man’s creative genius. No man can be absolutely indifferent to
the prejudices and opinions of his wife. She has too many opportunities
to shove them down his throat. If she can’t make him listen to them
by howling and bawling, she can make him listen by snuffling. To say
that he can carry on his work without paying any heed to her is equal
to saying that he can carry on his work without paying any heed to his
toothache, his conscience, or the boiler-factory next door. In spite of
Minna, Wagner composed a number of very fine music dramas. But if he
had poisoned her at the beginning of his career it is very likely that
he would have composed more of them, and perhaps even better ones.

His second wife, the celebrated Cosima Liszt-von Bülow, had far more
intelligence than Minna, and so we may assume that her presence in his
music factory was less of a handicap upon the composer. Nevertheless,
the chances are that she, too, did him far more harm than good. To
begin with, she was extremely plain in face--and nothing is more
damaging to the creative faculty than the constant presence of
ugliness. Cosima, in fact, looked not unlike a modern woman politician;
even Nietzsche, a very romantic young fellow, had to go crazy before
he could fall in love with her. In the second place, there is good
reason to believe that Cosima, until after Wagner’s death, secretly
believed that her father, Papa Liszt, was a far better musician. Men’s
wives almost invariably make some such mistake; to find one who can
separate the man of genius from the mere husband, and then estimate
the former accurately and fairly, is surely very rare. A woman usually
respects her father, but her view of her husband is mingled with
contempt, for she is of course privy to the transparent devices by
which she snared him. It is difficult for her, being so acutely aware
of the shallowness of the man, to give due weight to the dignity
of the artist. Moreover, Cosima had shoddy tastes, and they played
destructively upon poor Wagner. There are parts of “Parsifal” that
suggest her very strongly--more strongly, in fact, than they suggest
the author of “Die Götterdammerung.” I do not here decry Wagner; on
the contrary, I praise him, and perhaps excessively. It is staggering
to think of the work he did, with Minna and Cosima shrilling into his
ears. What interests me is the question as to how much further he might
have gone had he escaped the passionate affection of the two of them
and of their various volunteer assistants. The thought fascinates,
and almost alarms. There is a limit beyond which sheer beauty becomes
unseemly. In “Tristan und Isolde,” in the Ring, and even in parts of
“Parsifal,” Wagner pushes his music very near that limit. A bit beyond
lies the fourth dimension of tone--and madness. Both Beethoven and
Brahms, I believe, more than once edged over the line. Two bachelors.
Had Beethoven married in 1802, as he seems to have been tempted to do
by some scheming wench, it is doubtful that the world would ever have
heard the Eroica. In the Eroica there is everything that startles and
dismays a loving wife: brilliant novelty, vast complexity thunderous
turmoil, great bursts of undiluted genius. Even Beethoven never wrote
anything more astounding than its first movement; the first movement of
the C Minor is relatively elemental beside it. Nor is there anything so
revolutionary in the Ninth.

The Eroica, indeed, was written precisely at the moment when Beethoven
became fully conscious of his extraordinary powers--more accurately,
of his singular and unchallengeable _superiority_. It is the work, not
only of a man who is absolute master of his materials, but also of a
man who disdains his materials, and his customers with them. In the
first movement he simply spits into the face of the cosmos. Scarcely
ten measures have been played before one suddenly realizes that one
is in the presence of something entirely new in music--not merely new
in degree, but new in kind. It differs as much from anything written
before it, even by Beethoven, as a picture by Cézanne differs from a
picture by an English Academician. This first movement has never been
sufficiently studied and appraised: it is unutterably stupendous. In
the funeral march, I believe, Beethoven descends to some rather cheap
tricks, and in the scherzo he is often obvious. But in the first
movement, and to a slightly less degree in the last, he takes leave
of earth and disports himself among the gods. It is the composition
of a colossus. And a bachelor. No normal woman could have watched its
genesis without some effort to make it more seemly, more decorous
and connubial, more respectable. A faithful wife, present at its
first performance, would have blushed, shivered and sworn. Women hate
revolutions and revolutionists. They like men who are docile, and
well-regarded at the bank, and never late at meals.




XV. CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE STUDY OF VULGAR PSYCHOLOGY


1

_The Downfall of the Navy_

Few phenomena offer more refined and instructive entertainment to the
psychic pathologist than the American navy’s decline in popularity
during the past twenty-five years. At the time of the Spanish-American
War, as everyone sentient in those days will recall, it was easily
the premier service in the popular regard, and in even the least of
its exploits the great masses of the plain people took a violent and
vociferous pride. They were proud, too, of the army, and its heroic
efforts against the Hunnish hordes of Spain, and one of the great
captains of that army was made President for his stupendous feats of
blood and blather in the field; but it was the navy that they cherished
most, and the popular heroes that it produced were more numerous than
those of the army, and in the main they were far more fondly cherished.
Even the immortal Roosevelt, it will be remembered, was half a navy
man, and what got him into the White House, I believe, was less his
colossal butcheries in the land battles of the war, important though
they were to the cause of human liberty, than his long antecedent
struggles to free the navy from the politicians, and make it fit to
fight. The navy, indeed, was popular before the war began, or even
threatened. The army could tackle and massacre a whole tribe of Indians
without causing half the public thrill that followed the bombardment of
a Venezuelan coast village by the White Squadron, with a total loss of
but one blind cripple crippled in the other leg. This White Squadron,
I more than suspect, was the actual cause of the war itself. From the
day it first put to sea the plain people watched it with glowing pride,
and longed for a sight of it in action. If it had not been so handily
cruising in Latin-American waters, glittering truculently in the
sunshine, there would have been a great deal less public indignation
over the wrongs of the Cubeens. So superb a fighting arm was surely
not designed by God to rust in the scabbard. Thus the fashion arose
of drawing it out and poking it into Caribbean and South Atlantic
rat-holes. During the half dozen years before the laying of the Spanish
dragon was formally undertaken, such heroes as Schley and Fighting Bob
Evans carried the White Squadron into half the ports to the southward,
and knocked over a few church steeples in most of them. In the end, it
was just such an enterprise that took the _Maine_ into Havana harbor,
and provided the legal excuse for the war itself.

This was more than a quarter of a century ago. Today, it must be
obvious that there is very little public pride in the navy, and almost
no public interest. I doubt that one American schoolboy out of ten
thousand could name its present ranking officer; between 1890 and 1900
every schoolboy knew all the admirals by face and by name, and most
of the captains, and the patriotic epigrams of the more articulate of
them were chalked upon every schoolyard fence in the land. I was myself
a boy in those days, and remember even today such forgotten heroes
of the time as Admiral Gherardi, who commanded the White Squadron in
1893 and 1894, and was retired before the Spanish War; his portrait
was on the cigarette cards, along with those of Fighting Bob Evans and
Lillian Russell. Later on, having grown more reflective and critical,
I specialized in the Sampson-Schley controversy, and was a bitter
partisan of Schley, a native of my own Maryland Free State. Dewey,
Clark, Evans, Ridley, Hobson (God save us!), Ensign Bagley, Yoeman
Ellis, Sigsbee, Wainright--all these eminent tars were as real to the
boys of that era as John L. Sullivan or Amos Rusie. Turn now to today.
When the newspapers, a year or two ago, announced that a gentleman
named Admiral Sims had denied that the German U-boat commanders
committed the atrocities credited to them during the late war, how many
American boys recognized his name? I myself, though I am a historian by
profession, boggled him at first glance, mistaking him for a British
officer. For the life of me, I could not tell you the name of another
American naval officer.... Second thought: there was Admiral Benson.
But what he did in the war, save involve himself in some controversy
that has been forgotten, I can’t tell you. No other name occurs to me,
though I scratch my head and try various mnemonic dodges. Try me on the
names of the commanders who fought the celebrated Creel battle with the
U-boats, and I’ll have to slide down among the morons. If there was a
Hobson in that war, I can’t recall him. I remember many English and
German commanders--von Tirpitz, von Scheer, Jellicoe, Müller of the
Emden, König, and so on--but not a single American.

The fact is, of course, that the part the American navy played in
the war, though it was unquestionably important, was quite devoid
of the more spectacular varieties of gallantry, and so it failed to
make heroes. The battles fought were fought mainly by government
press-agents, not by the navy itself; the rest was dangerous but dull
policing, with some uninspiring running of ferry-boats. The navy, as
everyone knows, became a funk-hole for draft-dodgers. This may account,
in some measure, for the present public apathy regarding it; it is not
brilliant, and hence it is not charming. But its decay in popularity,
I believe, really antedated the war by several years; it was in the
shadows long before Admiral Sims transferred his swivel-chair from
Washington to London. What caused the change? Is it that the American
people have lost their old taste for the sea, and, in particular, their
old delight in the sort of heroes that it produces? Or is it that the
navy itself has actually lost some of its old romance and color? I
incline to think that the latter explanation explains more than the
former. My hazard is that the man who made the American navy unpopular
was the Hon. Josephus Daniels, and that he did it by trying to convert
every battleship into a chautauqua and Sunday-school. In the days when
the arrival of a naval vessel in port was the signal for hot times
ashore, with the saloons packed to the doors, and all the town’s wicked
women out _en masse_, and the streets made picturesquely perilous
by squads of drunken and roaring gobs--in those days every poor but
ambitious boy, when the job of tying up packages and running errands
began to palsy him, let his fancy turn toward thoughts of stealing off
to foreign parts, the Republic’s quarter in his pocket and riotous and
attractive company all about him. The sailor of that era was an obscene
but highly charming fellow. A great spaciousness was in him. He bore
the scars of the constabulary espantoons of distant and romantic lands.
He was a wholesale lover, a three-bottle man, a well of astounding
profanity. He held the admiration of every adventurous youth. He was
romance in baggy breeches, hell-bent down the mysterious by-ways of the
world.

Josephus changed all that. A Christian of tender conscience and a
firm believer in hell for the sinful, it appalled him to observe that
nine-tenths of the young men under his official charge were obviously
headed for the fire. When he got his secret reports of their doings in
Port Said, Callao, Singapore, Odessa, Smyrna, Vera Cruz, Norfolk, Va.,
and other such seaboard stews--when these lurid documents began pouring
in upon him from missionaries, Y. M. C. A. secretaries and other godly
men, he staggered under the horror, and was unfit for business for
days afterward. Having recourse to prayer, he was presently given
counsel by a voice from the burning bush. To hear was to act. First,
he abolished rum from the navy, and forced even the oldest admirals,
some of whom had been pickled for years and years, to go upon the
dubious water of far-flung and zymotic ports. Secondly, he forbade
the enlistment of young men who were fugitives from justice for
dog-stealing, moonshining, window-smashing and other such felonies--the
mainstays of the navy in the old days. Thirdly, he set up night schools
on every battleship, in charge of Christian men like himself, and then
day schools, and then schools running both day and night, and to the
customary instruction in the three R’s he added the whole curriculum
of the Y. M. C. A., from double-entry bookkeeping to public speaking,
and from show-card writing to venereal prophylaxis. Today a young man
goes into the navy from his native farm with nothing in his head save
a vast yearning to get away from the smell of cows--and comes out
in three years an accomplished paperhanger, with some knowledge of
the saxophone, electric wiring and first aid to the injured. The old
enlistment posters used to show a gob in a rickshaw with a Japanese
cutie; the new ones show him practising as a house and sign painter.
The old navy showed the boys the world, and taught them the difference
between Swedish punch and Javanese arrak; the new navy converts them
into sanitary plumbers and bookkeepers, and teaches them how to lead a
prayer-meeting.

Is it any wonder that it declines in popularity--that the youth of the
land is neglectful of its eminent commanders, and has to be lured into
enlistments by the arts of the grind-shop auctioneer? The Y. M. C. A.
already reigns universally on the dry land of the Republic; only the
remotest yokel in the highest hills can hope to escape its tentacles,
and even he is fetched by its sinister sister, the chautauqua. When
he dreams of the sea, he dreams of a realm that is free from all
this--of a realm still barbarous, unchastened and romantic--a realm
of free cavorting and exhilarating adventure. But when he gets to
the recruiting-office, the first thing he sees is a large lithograph
showing a class of gobs being instructed in algebra, grammar and
Christian doctrine. The master-at-arms who receives him hasn’t got
the old naked Venus tattooed on his arm; he has instead a portrait of
Dwight L. Moody, and in his button-hole is a button testifying that he
has recited 52 successive Golden Texts without an error and brought
20 heathen Danish sailors to the mourners’ bench. Instead of the old
booby-hatch for souses in this recruiting-office, there is now a gospel
hall with a melodeon. The talk is not of the yellow gals in Valparaiso,
the powerful red wines of Naples, the all-night shows of Marseilles,
the police of Liverpool and Kiel, but of the advantages of learning the
trades of tin-roofer, cost accountant and hardwood finisher. The rustic
candidate, his head buzzing with romance, is floored with statistics
and plunged into a bath of bichloride of mercury. No wonder his stomach
turns and his heart is broken! And no wonder the navy, thus purged of
all its old flavors and juices, has ceased to inflame the imagination
of the plain people. Suppose they heard from Hollywood that Charlie
Chaplin had become a hard-shell Baptist and opened a pants-pressing
parlor?


2

_The Mind of the Slave_

One of the forgotten divisions between men and men is that separating
those who enjoy the work they have to do in the world and those who
suffer it only as a necessary evil. The distinction, despite its
neglect by sociologists, is probably very important--certainly far more
important than the current divisions between producers and exploiters,
dolichocephalic Nordic blonds and brachycephalic Mediterraneans,
Darwinians and Christians, Republicans and Democrats, Protestants and
Catholics, wets and drys. A man’s politics, theology and other vices
engage his attention, after all, only in his moments of leisure, and
the shape of his cranium has very little demonstrable influence upon
what habitually goes on within it, but the nature of the work he does
in the world conditions every thought and impulse of his life, and his
general attitude toward it is almost indistinguishable from his general
attitude toward the cosmos.

At the one extreme lies the unmitigated slave--the man who has to spend
his whole life performing tasks that are incurably uninteresting, and
that offer no soothing whatever to his vanity. At the other extreme
is what Beethoven called the free artist--the man who makes a living,
with no boss directly over him, doing things that he enjoys enormously,
and that he would keep on doing gladly, even if all economic pressure
upon him disappeared. To the second category belong all the happiest
men in the world, and hence, perhaps, all the most useful men. For
what is done with joy is always better done, whether it be fashioning
a material object, thinking out a problem or kissing a pretty girl;
and the man who can make the rest of humanity pay him for being happy
is obviously a better man than the general, or, at all odds, a luckier
one. Here luck and superiority are one and the same. The fact that
Joseph Conrad could write better than I, was in a sense, a matter
of pure chance. He was born with his talent; he did not earn it.
Nevertheless, it was just as real as if he had got it by Christian
endeavor, and his superiority to me was thus perfectly genuine.

The slave is always conscious of his slavery, and makes constant and
often desperate efforts to mitigate it or to get rid of it altogether.
Sometimes he seeks that mitigation in outside activities that promise
to give him the sense of dignity and importance that his daily labor
denies him; sometimes he tries to give a false appearance of dignity
to his work itself. The last phenomenon must be familiar to every
American; it is responsible for various absurd devices to pump up
lowly trades by giving them new and high-sounding names. I point,
for example, to those of the real-estate agent and the undertaker.
Neither trade, it must be obvious, offers any stimulation to men of
genuine superiority. One could not imagine a Beethoven, a Lincoln
or even a Coolidge getting any joy out of squeezing apartment-house
tenants or pickling Odd Fellows. Both jobs, indeed, fail to satisfy the
more imaginative sort of men among those compelled to practise them.
Hence these men try to dignify them with hocus-pocus. The real-estate
agent, seeking to conceal his real purpose in life, lets it be known
grandly that he is an important semi-public functionary, that he has
consecrated himself to Service and is a man of Vision--and to prove
it he immerses himself in a private office with a secretary to insult
his customers, joins a Rotary Club, and begins to call himself a
realtor, a word as idiotic as flu, pep or gent. The ambitious washer
of the dead--until very lately a sort of pariah in all civilized
societies, like the hangman, the surgeon and the dog-catcher--proceeds
magnificently along the same route. At regular intervals I receive
impressive literature from a trade-union of undertakers calling
themselves the Selected Morticians. By this literature it appears
that the members thereof are professional men of a rank and dignity
comparable to judges or archbishops, and they are hot for the subtlest
and most onerous kind of Service, and even eager to offer their advice
to the national government. In brief, the realtor complex all over
again. I do not laugh at these soaring embalmers; I merely point out
that their nonsense proves how little the mere planting of martyred
lodge brothers satisfies their interior urge to be important and
distinguished--an urge that is in all of us.

But most of the trades pursued by slaves, of course, offer no such
opportunities for self-deceptive flummery. The clerk working in the
lime and cement warehouse of some remote town of the foreign missions
belt cannot conceivably convince himself that his profession is noble;
worse, he cannot convince anyone else. And so with millions of other
men in this great Republic, both urban and rural--millions of poor
fellows doomed their life long to dull, stupid and tedious crafts--the
lower sort of clerks, workmen, wagon-drivers, farmers, farm-laborers,
petty officials, grabbers of odd jobs. They must be downright idiots
to get any satisfaction out of their work. Happiness, the feeling that
they too are somebody, the sense of being genuinely alive, must be
sought in some other direction. In the big cities, that need is easily
met. Here there is a vast and complex machinery for taking the slave’s
mind off his desolateness of spirit--moving pictures to transport him
into a land of romance, where men (whom he always identifies with
himself) are brave, rich and handsome, and women (whom he identifies
with his wife--or perchance with her younger sister) are clean,
well-dressed and beautiful; newspapers to delight and instruct him
with their sports pages, their comic strips and their eloquent appeals
to his liberality, public spirit and patriotism; public bands and the
radio to play the latest jazz for him; circuses and parades; baseball,
races, gambling, harlotry and games in arenas; a thousand devices to
make him forget his woes. It is this colossal opportunity to escape
from life that brings yokels swarming to the cities, not any mere lust
for money. The yokel is actually far more comfortable on his native
soil; the city crowds and exploits him, and nine times out of ten he
remains desperately poor. But the city at least teaches him how to
forget his poverty; it amuses him and thrills him while it is devouring
him. I once knew an old colored woman, born in Southern Maryland, who
lived miserably in one room of a shack in an alley in Baltimore. When
asked why she did not go back to her village, where she would have
at least had better food and more air, she replied very simply that
there were never any parades in the country. It was a profound and
intelligent saying.

But millions of the slaves, of course, must remain in the small towns
or on the land; the cities can’t absorb all of them, nor even half of
them. They thus confront the problem of making life bearable out of
their own meagre resources. The devices that they adopt--political,
religious and social--are familiar to all of us, and account fully, it
seems to me, for some of the phenomena of American life that are most
puzzling to foreign observers. The hoop-la Methodist revival with its
psychopathological basis; the violent bitterness of rural politics; the
prosperity of the Ku Klux Klan and all the other clownish fraternal
orders; the persistent popularity of lynching, tarring and feathering,
barbarities of a dozen other varieties--all these things are no more
than manifestations of the poor hind’s pathetic effort to raise himself
out of his wallow, to justify and dignify his existence, to escape
from the sordid realities that daily confront him. To snort and froth
at a revival makes him conspicuous, prominent, a man of mark; it is
therefore easy to induce him to do it. To hold a petty county office
is eminence; hence he struggles for it frantically. To belong to the
Ku Klux gives him a mysterious and sinister dignity, and fills him
with a sense of power and consequence; he falls for it as quickly as
a city intellectual falls for the _Légion d’honneur_ or an LL.D. To
take a hand in a concrete tarring or lynching--this instantly makes
him feel that he has played an heroic rôle in the world, that he has
accomplished something large and memorable--above all, that he has
had a gaudy good time. In brief, all these things make him forget,
transiently or permanently, that he is a miserable worm, and of little
more actual importance on earth than his own hogs.

Long ago, I suggested that a good way to diminish lynching in the South
would be to establish brass bands in all the country towns. The bad
music, I argued, would engage and enchant both the blackamoors and
the poor white trash, and so discourage the former from crime and the
latter from seeking a savage satisfaction in its punishment. I now
improve and embellish that suggestion. That is to say, I propose that
the band scheme be shelved, and that bull-fighting be established as a
substitute. Why not, indeed? Cattle have to be killed, and the Southern
poor white is admittedly a savage. Why not combine the necessary
slaughter of horned quadrupeds with a show that will give that savage
a thrill and take his mind from his lowly lot, and so turn him from
seeking escape in politics, murder and voodoo theology? Bull-fights in
the South would not only diminish lynchings; they would also undermine
Prohibition. A happy peasantry would have no reason to divert itself
with homicide, and neither would it have any reason to belabor the rest
of us with the ethical and political manias of its Baptist dervishes.
The Ku Klux, it seems to me, is a good influence in the South rather
than a bad one, for it tends to regulate and formalize the normal
sports of the people, and so restrains excess. The trouble with
lynching before the Klan took charge of it was that men of the darker
races were often hanged and burned purely arbitrarily, simply because
the yokels of some Christian county could not stand boredom any longer.
But now rules are laid down and a sort of jurisprudence gets into it.
I have heard all kinds of wild charges against the Invisible Empire,
but I have never heard anyone allege that its responsible officers have
ever countenanced the execution of its laws upon anyone not obviously
guilty. This is an improvement. Life is safer and happier in Georgia
today that it was before the Rev. Dr. Simmons heard the voice. But it
would be even safer and even happier if the pure Anglo-Saxons down
there could work off their steam by going weekly to a _plaza de toros_,
and there see official _picadores_, _banderilleros_, and _matadors_,
all of them good Democrats and baptized men, lynch and burn (or even
merely geld) a reluctant and protesting male of _Bos taurus_.


3

_The Art Eternal_

One of the laudable by-products of the Freudian necromancy is
the discovery that lying, in most cases, is involuntary and
inevitable--that the liar can no more avoid it than he can avoid
blinking his eyes when a light flashes or jumping when a bomb goes
off behind him. At its worst, indeed, this necessity takes on a
downright pathological character, and is thus as innocent as sciatica
or albuminuria. It is part of the morbid baggage of hysterics and
neurasthenics: their lying is simply a symptom of their compulsive
effort to adjust themselves to an environment which bears upon them too
harshly for endurance. The rest of us are not quite so hard pushed,
but pushed we all are. In us the thing works through the inferiority
complex, which no man can escape. He who lacks it entirely is actually
reckoned insane by the fact: his satisfaction with his situation in
the world is indistinguishable from a delusion of grandeur. The great
majority of us--all, in brief, who are normal--pass through life in
constant revolt against our limitations, objective and subjective.
Our conscious thought is largely devoted to plans and specifications
for cutting a better figure in human society, and in our unconscious
the business goes on much more steadily and powerfully. No healthy
man, in his secret heart, is content with his destiny. Even the late
Woodrow, during his dizzy term as the peer of Lincoln and Washington,
was obviously tantalized by the reflection that, in earlier ages, there
had been Martin Luther, St. Ignatius Loyola and Paul of Tarsus. We
are tortured by such dreams and images as a child is tortured by the
thought of a state of existence in which it would live in a candy-store
and have two stomachs. The more we try to put the obscene apparition
away, the more it haunts and badgers us.

Lying is the product of the unconscious yearning to realize such
visions, and if the policeman, conscience, prevents the lie being put
into plain words, then it is at least put into more or less plausible
acts. We all play parts when we face our fellow-men, as even poets have
noticed. No man could bring himself to reveal his true character, and,
above all, his true limitations as a citizen and a Christian, his true
meannesses, his true imbecilities, to his friends, or even to his wife.
Honest autobiography is therefore a contradiction in terms: the moment
a man considers himself, even _in petto_, he tries to gild and fresco
himself. Thus a man’s wife, however realistic her view of him, always
flatters him in the end, for the worst she sees in him is appreciably
better, by the time she sees it, than what is actually there. What
she sees, even at times of the most appalling domestic revelation and
confidence, is not the authentic man at all, but a compound made up
in part of the authentic man and in part of his projection of a gaudy
ideal. The man who is most respected by his wife is the one who makes
this projection most vivid--that is, the one who is the most daring and
ingratiating liar. He can never, of course, deceive her utterly, but if
he is skillful he may at least deceive her enough to make her happy.

_Omnis homo mendax_: thus the Psalmist. So far the Freudians merely
parrot him. What is new in their gospel is the doctrine that lying is
instinctive, normal, and unavoidable--that a man is forced into it by
his very will-to-live. This doctrine purges the business of certain
ancient embarrassments, and restores innocence to the heart. Think of
a lie as a compulsion neurose, and you think of it more kindly. I need
not add, I hope, that this transfer of it from the department of free
will to that of determinism by no means disposes of the penalty that
traditionally pursues it, supposing it to be detected and resented.
The proponents of free will always make the mistake of assuming that
the determinists are simply evil fellows looking for a way to escape
the just consequences of their transgressing. No sense is in that
assumption. If I lie on the witness-stand and am detected by the
judge, I am jailed for perjury forthwith, regardless of my helplessness
under compulsion. Here justice refuses absolutely to distinguish
between a misfortune and a tort: the overt act is all it is concerned
with. But as jurisprudence grows more intelligent and more civilized
it may change its tune, to the benefit of liars, which is to say,
to the benefit of humanity. Science is unflinchingly deterministic,
and it has begun to force its determinism into morals. We no longer
flog a child afflicted with nocturnal enuresis; we have substituted
concepts of mental aberration for concepts of crime in a whole series
of cases: kleptomania-shoplifting, pyromania-arson, etc.; and, in the
United States at least, the old savage punishment of murderers is now
ameliorated by considerations of psychiatry and even of honor. On some
shining tomorrow a psychoanalyst may be put into the box to prove that
perjury is simply a compulsion neurose, like beating time with the foot
at a concert or counting the lamp-posts along the highway.

However, I have but small faith in millenniums, and do not formally
predict this one. Nor do I pronounce any moral judgment, pro or con:
moral judgments, as old Friedrich used to say, are foreign to my
nature. But let us not forget that lying, _per se_, is not forbidden
by the moral code of Christendom. Holy Writ dismisses it cynically,
and the statutes of all civilized states are silent about it. Only
the Chinese, indeed, make it a penal offense. Perjury, of course, is
prohibited everywhere, and also any mendacity which amounts to fraud
and deprives a fellow-man of his property, but that far more common
form of truth-stretching which has only the lesser aim of augmenting
the liar’s personal dignity and consequence--this is looked upon with
a very charitable eye. So is that form which has the aim of helping
another person in the same way. In the latter direction lying may
even take on the stature of a positive virtue. The late King Edward
VII, when Prince of Wales, attained to great popularity throughout
Christendom by venturing into downright perjury. Summoned into a court
of law to give expert testimony regarding some act of adultery, he lied
like a gentleman, as the phrase goes, to protect a woman. The lie, to
be sure, was intrinsically useless; no one believed that the lady was
innocent. Nevertheless, every decent Christian applauded the perjurer
for his good intentions, including even the judge on the bench, sworn
to combat false witness by every resource of forensics. All of us,
worms that we are, occasionally face the alternatives that confronted
Edward. On the one hand, we may tell the truth, regardless of
consequences, and on the other hand we may mellow it and sophisticate
it to make it humane and tolerable. It is universally held that the
man who chooses the first course is despicable. He may be highly moral,
but he is nevertheless a cad--as highly moral men have so curious a way
of being. But if he lies boldly, then he is held to be a man of honor,
and is respected as such by all other men of honor.

For the habitual truth-teller and truth-seeker, indeed, the world has
very little liking. He is always unpopular, and not infrequently his
unpopularity is so excessive that it endangers his life. Run your
eye back over the list of martyrs, lay and clerical: nine-tenths
of them, you will find, stood accused of nothing worse than honest
efforts to find out and announce the truth. Even today, with the
scientific passion become familiar in the world, the general view of
such fellows is highly unfavorable. The typical scientist, the typical
critic of institutions, the typical truth-seeker in every field is
held under suspicion by the great majority of men, and variously
beset by posses of relentless foes. If he tries to find out the
truth about arterio-sclerosis, or surgical shock, or cancer, he is
denounced as a scoundrel by the Christian Scientists, the osteopaths
and the anti-vivisectionists. If he tries to tell the truth about the
government, its agents seek to silence him and punish him. If he turns
to fiction and endeavors to depict his fellow-men accurately, he has
the Comstocks on his hands. In no field can he count upon a friendly
audience, and freedom from assault. Especially in the United States
is his whole enterprise viewed with bilious eye. The men the American
people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men
they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth. A
Galileo could no more be elected President of the United States than
he could be elected Pope of Rome. Both high posts are reserved for men
favored by God with an extraordinary genius for swathing the bitter
facts of life in bandages of soft illusion.

Behind this almost unanimous distrust of the truth-teller there is a
sound and sure instinct, as there is behind every other manifestation
of crowd feeling. What it shows is simply this: that the truth is
something too harsh and devastating for the majority of men to bear.
In their secret hearts they know themselves, and they can suffer the
thought of themselves only by idealizing the facts. The more trivial,
loathsome and degraded the reality, the more powerful and relentless
must be the idealization. An Aristotle, I daresay, may be able
occasionally to regard himself searchingly and dispassionately--but
certainly not an ordinary man. Here we come back to what we began with:
the inferiority complex. The truth-seeker forgets it, and so comes to
grief. He forgets that the ordinary man, at bottom, is always afraid
of himself, as of some horrible monster. He refuses to sanction the
lie whereby the ordinary man maintains his self-respect, just as the
bounder, put upon the stand, refuses to support the lie whereby a woman
maintains the necessary theory of her chastity. Thus he is unpopular,
and deserves to be.

Then why does he go on? Why does he kick up such a bother and suffer
such barbarous contumely, all to no end--for the majority of so-called
truths, it must be evident, perish as soon as they are born: no one
will believe them. The answer probably is that the truth-seeker is
moved by the same obscure inner necessity (in Joseph Conrad’s phrase)
that animates the artist. Something within him, something entirely
beyond his volition, forces him to pursue his fanatical and useless
quest--some impulse as blind as that which moves a puppy to chase its
tail. Again the compulsion neurose! But this one differs materially
from that of the liar. The latter is hygienic; it makes for peace,
health, happiness. The former makes only for strife and discontent.
It invades the immemorial pruderies of the human race. It breeds
scandals and heart-burnings. It is essentially anti-social, and hence,
by modern theories of criminology, diseased. The truth-seeker thus
becomes a pathological case. The average man is happily free from any
such malaise. He avoids the truth as diligently as he avoids arson,
regicide or piracy on the high seas, and for the same reason: because
he believes that it is dangerous, that no good can come of it, that it
doesn’t pay. The very thought of it is abhorrent to him. This average
man, I believe, must be accepted as the normal man, the natural man,
the healthy and useful man. He presents a character that is general
in the race, and favorable to its security and contentment. The truth
never caresses; it stings--and life is surely too short for sane men to
be stinging themselves unnecessarily. One would regard it as idiotic
even in a flea.

Thus the truth about the truth emerges, and with it the truth about
lying. Lying is not only excusable; it is not only innocent, and
instinctive; it is, above all, necessary and unavoidable. Without the
ameliorations that it offers life would become a mere syllogism, and
hence too metallic to be born. The man who lies simply submits himself
sensibly to the grand sweep and ripple of the cosmic process. The man
who seeks and tells the truth is a rebel against the inner nature of
all of us.




XVI. THE AMERICAN NOVEL


1

It is an ancient platitude of historical criticism that great wars and
their sequelæ are inimical to the fine arts, and particularly to the
art of letters. The kernel of truth in it lies in the obvious fact
that a people engaged in a bitter struggle for existence have no time
for such concerns, which demand not only leisure but also a certain
assured feeling of security, well-being and self-sufficiency--in
brief, the thing often called aristocratic (or sometimes intellectual)
detachment. No man ever wrote good poetry with his wife in parturition
in the next room, or the police preparing to raid his house, or his
shirt-tail afire. He needs to be comfortable to do it, and if not
actually comfortable, then at all events safe. Wars tend to make life
uncomfortable and unsafe--but not, it must be observed, inevitably
and necessarily, not always and invariably. A bitter and demoralizing
struggle goes with wars that are lost, and the same struggle goes with
wars that are won only by dint of stupendous and ruinous effort, but
it certainly does not go with wars that are won easily. These last do
not palsy and asphyxiate the artist, as he is palsied and asphyxiated
by cholera morbus, suits for damages or marriage. On the contrary, they
pump him full of ozone, and he is never more alive and lively than
following them.

I point to a few familiar examples. The Civil War, as everyone knows,
bankrupted the South and made a life a harsh and bitter struggle
for its people, and especially for the gentler and more civilized
minority of its people. In consequence, the South became as sterile
artistically, after Lee’s surrender, as Mexico or Portugal, and even
today it lags far behind the North in beautiful letters, and even
further behind in music, painting and architecture. But the war, though
it went on for four years, strained the resources of the North very
little, either in men or in money, and so its conclusion found the
Northerners very rich and cocky, and full of a yearning to astonish the
world, and that yearning, in a few decades, set up a new and extremely
vigorous American literature, created an American architecture of a
revolutionary character, and even laid the first courses of American
schools of music and painting. Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Henry James
and William Dean Howells, all of them draft dodgers in the war itself,
were in a very real sense products of the war, for they emerged as
phenomena of the great outburst of creative energy that followed it,
and all of them, including even James, were as thoroughly American as
Jay Gould, P. T. Barnum or Jim Fisk. The stars of the national letters
in the years before the war had been Americans only by geographical
accident. About Emerson there hung a smell of Königsberg and Weimar;
Irving was simply a New York Englishman; Poe was a citizen of No Man’s
Land; even Hawthorne and Cooper, despite their concern with American
themes, showed not the slightest evidence of an American point of
view. But Mark Twain, Howells and Whitman belonged to the Republic as
palpably as Niagara Falls or Tammany Hall belonged to it, and so did
James, though the thought horrified him and we must look at him through
his brother William to get the proof. Turn now to Europe. France,
harshly used in the war of 1870-71, was sterile for a decade, but the
wounds were not deep, and recovery was in full swing by 1880. Germany,
injured scarcely at all, produced Nietzsche almost before the troops
got home, and was presently offering an asylum and an inspiration
to Ibsen, preparing the way for the reform and modernization of the
theatre, and making contributions of the utmost value to practically
all of the arts and sciences. Spain, after the Armada, gave the world
Cervantes and then expired; England produced Shakespeare and founded a
literature that is not surpassed in history.

What has thus happened over and over again in the past--and I might
pile up examples for pages--may be in process of repetition today,
and under our very noses. All Europe, plainly enough, is in a state
of exhaustion and depression, and in no department of human activity
is the fact more visible than in that of the arts. Not only are the
defeated nations, Russia, Germany and Austria, producing nothing save
a few extravagant eccentricities; there is also a great lowness of
spirit in the so-called victorious nations, for their victory was
almost as ruinous as defeat. France, as after 1870, is running to a
pretentious and artificial morbidity in letters, and marking time in
music and painting; Italy is producing little save psychopathological
absurdities by such mountebanks as D’Annunzio and Papini; even England
shows all the signs of profound fatigue. The great English writers of
the age before the war are passing. Meredith is gone; Hardy has put
up his shutters; Kipling went to wreck in the war itself; Conrad is
dead; Shaw, once so agile and diverting, becomes a seer and prophet.
Nor is there any sign of sound progress among the younger men. Arnold
Bennett, a star of brilliant promise in 1913, is today a smoking
smudge. Wells has ceased to be an artist and become a prophet in the
Sunday supplements. Masefield has got no further than he was on August
2, 1914. The rest of the novelists are simply chasing their own tails.
The Georgian poets, having emerged gloriously during the war, now
disappear behind their manners. Only a few women, led by May Sinclair,
and a few iconoclastic young men, led by Aldous Huxley, are still
indubitably alive.

It seems to me that, in the face of this dark depression across the
water, the literary spectacle on this side takes on an aspect that is
extremely reassuring, and even a bit exhilarating. For the first time
in history, there begins to show itself the faint shadow of a hope
that, if all goes well, leadership in the arts, and especially in all
the art of letters, may eventually transfer itself from the eastern
shore of the Atlantic to the western shore. Our literature, as I have
more than once pointed out in the past, is still oppressed by various
heavy handicaps, chiefly resident in the failure of the new aristocracy
of money to function as an aristocracy of taste. The artist among
us is still a sort of pariah, beset by public contempt on the one
hand and by academic enmity on the other; he still lacks the public
position that his brothers enjoy in older and more civilized countries.
Nevertheless, it must be obvious to everyone that his condition tends
to improve materially--that, in our own time, it _has_ improved
materially--that though his rewards remain meagre, save in mere money,
his freedom grows steadily greater. And it must be obvious, too, that
he begins to show that that increasing freedom is not wholly wasted
upon him--that he knows how to use it, and is disposed to do so with
some gusto. What all the younger American writers have in common is a
sort of new-found elasticity or goatishness, a somewhat exaggerated
sense of aliveness, a glowing delight in the spectacle before them, a
vigorous and naïve self-consciousness. The schoolmaster critics belabor
them for it, and call it a disrespect for tradition, and try to put it
down by denouncing it as due to corrupt foreign influences. But it is
really a proof of the rise of nationalism--perhaps of the first dawn
of a genuine sense of nationality. No longer imitative and timorous,
as most of their predecessors were, these youngsters are attempting a
first-hand examination of the national scene, and making an effort to
represent it in terms that are wholly American. They are the pioneers
of a literature that, whatever its defects in the abstract, will at
least be a faithful reflection of the national life, that will be more
faithful, indeed, in its defects than in its merits. In England the
novel subsides into formulæ, the drama is submerged in artificialities,
and even poetry, despite occasional revolts, moves toward scholarliness
and emptiness. But in America, since the war, all three show the
artless and superabundant energy of little children. They lack, only
too often, manner and urbanity; it is no wonder that they are often
shocking to pedants. But there is the breath of life in them, and that
life is far nearer its beginning than its end.

The causes of all this are not far to seek. The American Legion is
right: we won the war. It cost us nothing in men; it brought us a huge
profit in money; as Europe has gone down, we have gone up. Moreover,
it produced a vast discharge of spiritual electricity, otherwise and
more injuriously dissipated in the countries more harshly beset. The
war was fought ignobly; its first and most obvious effect was to raise
up a horde of cads, and set them in authority as spokesmen of the
nation. But out of that swinishness there was bound to come reaction,
and out of the reaction there was bound to flow a desire to re-examine
the whole national pretension--to turn on the light, to reject old
formulæ, to think things out anew and in terms of reality. Suddenly the
old houses of cards came tumbling down, and the professors inhabiting
them ran about in their night-shirts, bawling for the police. The war,
first and last, produced a great deal more than John Dos Passos’ “Three
Soldiers.” It also produced Lewis’ “Babbitt,” and Cabell’s “Jurgen,”
and Fergusson’s “Capitol Hill,” and O’Neill’s “The Emperor Jones.” And,
producing them, it ended an epoch of sweetness and light.


2

The young American literatus of today, with publishers ready and eager
to give him a hearing, can scarcely imagine the difficulties which
beset his predecessor of twenty years ago; he is, indeed, far too
little appreciative of the freedom he has, and far too prone to flee
from hard work to the solace of the martyr’s shroud. When I first
began practise as a critic, in 1908, there was yet plenty of excuse
for putting it on. It was a time of almost inconceivable complacency
and conformity. Hamilton Wright Mabie was still alive and still taken
seriously, and all the young pedagogues who aspired to the critical
gown imitated him in his watchful stupidity. This camorra had delivered
a violent wallop to Theodore Dreiser eight years before, and he was
yet suffering from his bruises; it was not until 1911 that he printed
“Jennie Gerhardt.” Miss Harriet Monroe and her gang of new poets were
still dispersed and inarticulate; Miss Amy Lowell, as yet unaware of
Imagism, was writing polite doggerel in the manner of a New England
schoolmarm; the reigning dramatists of the nation were Augustus Thomas,
David Belasco and Clyde Fitch; Miss Cather was imitating Mrs. Wharton;
Hergesheimer had six years to go before he’d come to “The Lay Anthony”;
Cabell was known only as one who provided the text for illustrated
gift-books; the American novelists most admired by most publishers,
by most readers and by all practising critics were Richard Harding
Davis, Robert W. Chambers and James Lane Allen. It is hard indeed, in
retrospect, to picture those remote days just as they were. They seem
almost fabulous. The chief critical organ of the Republic was actually
the Literary Supplement of the New York _Times_. The _Dial_ was down
with diabetes in Chicago; the _Nation_ was made dreadful by the gloomy
humors of Paul Elmer More; the _Bookman_ was even more saccharine and
sophomoric than it is today. When the mild and _pianissimo_ revolt of
the middle 90’s--a feeble echo of the English revolt--had spent itself,
the Presbyterians marched in and took possession of the works. Most of
the erstwhile revoltés boldly took the veil--notably Hamlin Garland. No
novel that told the truth about life as Americans were living it, no
poem that departed from the old patterns, no play that had the merest
ghost of an idea in it had a chance. When, in 1908, Mrs. Mary Roberts
Rinehart printed a conventional mystery story which yet managed to have
a trace of sense in it, it caused a sensation. And when, two years
later, Dr. William Lyon Phelps printed a book of criticism in which
he actually ranked Mark Twain alongside Emerson and Hawthorne, there
was as great a stirring beneath the college elms as if a naked fancy
woman had run across the campus. If Hergesheimer had come into New
York in 1908 with “Cytherea” under his arm, he would have worn out his
pantaloons on publishers’ benches without getting so much as a polite
kick. If Eugene O’Neill had come to Broadway with “The Hairy Ape,” he
would have been sent to Edward E. Rose to learn the elements of his
trade. The devilish and advanced thing, in those days, was for the fat
lady star to give a couple of matinées of Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House.”

A great many men and a few women addressed themselves to the dispersal
of this fog. Some of them were imaginative writers who found it simply
impossible to bring themselves within the prevailing rules; some were
critics; others were young publishers. As I look back, I can’t find
any sign of concerted effort; it was, in the main, a case of each on
his own. The more contumacious of the younger critics, true enough,
tended to rally ’round Huneker, who, as a matter of fact, was very
little interested in American letters, and the young novelists had
a leader in Dreiser, who, I suspect, was quite unaware of most of
them. However, it was probably Dreiser who chiefly gave form to the
movement, despite the fact that for eleven long years he was silent.
Not only was there a useful rallying-point in the idiotic suppression
of “Sister Carrie”; there was also the encouraging fact of the man’s
massive immovability. Physically and mentally he loomed up like a
sort of headland--a great crag of basalt that no conceivable assault
seemed able to touch. His predecessor, Frank Norris, was of much softer
stuff. Norris, had he lived longer, would have been wooed and ruined,
I fear, by the Mabies, Boyntons and other such Christian critics, as
Garland had been wooed and ruined before him. Dreiser, fortunately for
American letters, never had to face any such seduction. The critical
schoolmarms, young and old, fell upon him with violence the moment he
appeared above the horizon of his native steppe, and soon he was the
storm center of a battle-royal that lasted nearly twenty years. The man
himself was solid, granitic, without nerves. Very little cunning was in
him and not much bellicose enterprise, but he showed a truly appalling
tenacity. The pedagogues tried to scare him to death, they tried to
stampede his partisans and they tried to put him into Coventry and get
him forgotten, but they failed every time. The more he was reviled,
sneered at, neglected, the more resolutely he stuck to his formula.
That formula is now every serious American novelist’s formula. They all
try to write better than Dreiser, and not a few of them succeed, but
they all follow him in his fundamental purpose--to make the novel true.
Dreiser added something, and here following him is harder: he tried
to make the novel poignant--to add sympathy, feeling, imagination to
understanding. It will be a long while before that enterprise is better
managed than he managed it in “Jennie Gerhardt.”

Today, it seems to me, the American imaginative writer, whether he
be novelist, poet or dramatist, is quite as free as he deserves to
be. He is free to depict the life about him precisely as he sees it,
and to interpret it in any manner he pleases. The publishers of the
land, once so fearful of novelty, are now so hospitable to it that
they constantly fail to distinguish the novelty that has hard thought
behind it from that which has only some Village mountebank’s desire
to stagger the wives of Rotarians. Our stage is perhaps the freest
in the world--not only to sensations, but also to ideas. Our poets
get into print regularly with stuff so bizarre and unearthly that
only Christian Scientists can understand it. The extent of this new
freedom, indeed, is so great that large numbers of persons appear to be
unable to believe in it; they are constantly getting into sweats about
the taboos and inhibitions that remain, for example, those nourished
by comstockery. But the importance and puissance of comstockery, I
believe, is quite as much overestimated as the importance and puissance
of the objurgations still hurled at sense and honesty by the provincial
professors of American Idealism, the Genius of America, and other
such phantasms. The Comstocks, true enough, still raid an occasional
book, particularly when their funds are running low and there is need
to inflame Christian men, but that their monkeyshines ever actually
_suppress_ a book of any consequence I very much doubt. The flood
is too vast for them. Chasing a minnow with desperate passion, they
let a whole school of whales go by. In any case, they confine their
operations to the single field of sex, and it must be plain that it
is not in the field of sex that the hottest battles against the old
American manner have been fought and won. “Three Soldiers” was far more
subversive of that manner than all the stories of sex ever written
in America--and yet “Three Soldiers” came out with the imprint of
one of the most respectable of American publishers, and was scarcely
challenged. “Babbitt” scored a victory that was still easier, and
yet more significant, for its target was the double one of American
business and American Christianity; it set the whole world to laughing
at two things that are far more venerated in the United States than
the bodily chastity of women. Nevertheless, “Babbitt” went down so
easily that even the alfalfa _Gelehrten_ joined in whooping for it,
apparently on the theory that praising Lewis would make the young of
the national species forget Dreiser. Victimized by their own craft,
the _Gelehrten_ thus made a foul attack upon their own principles, for
if their principles did not stand against just such anarchistic and
sacrilegious books, then they were without any sense whatever, as was
and is, indeed, the case.

I shall not rehearse the steps in the advance from “Sister Carrie,”
suppressed and proscribed, to “Babbitt,” swallowed and hailed. The
important thing is that, despite the caterwauling of the Comstocks
and the pedagogues, a reasonable freedom for the serious artist now
prevails--that publishers stand ready to print him, that critics exist
who are competent to recognize him and willing to do battle for him,
and that there is a large public eager to read him. What use is he
making of his opportunity? Certainly not the worst use possible, but
also certainly not the best. He is free, but he is not yet, perhaps,
worthy of freedom. He lets the popular magazine, the movie and the
cheap-John publisher pull him too hard in one direction; he lets the
vagaries of his politics pull him too hard in another. Back in 1908
I predicted the destruction of Upton Sinclair the artist by Upton
Sinclair the visionary and reformer. Sinclair’s bones now bleach upon
the beach. Beside them repose those of many another man and woman
of great promise--for example, Winston Churchill. Floyd Dell is on
his way--one novel and two doses of Greenwich Village psychology.
Hergesheimer writes novelettes for the _Saturday Evening Post_. Willa
Cather has won the Pulitzer Prize--a transaction comparable to the
election of Charles W. Eliot to the Elks. Masters turns to prose that
somehow fails to come off. Dreiser, forgetting his trilogy, experiments
rather futilely with the drama, the essay, free verse. Fuller renounces
the novel for book reviewing. Tarkington is another Pulitzer prizeman,
always on the verge of first-rate work but always falling short by an
inch. Many of the White Hopes of ten or fifteen years ago perished in
the war, as surely victims of its slaughter as Rupert Brook or Otto
Braun; it is, indeed, curious to note that practically every American
author who moaned and sobbed for democracy between the years 1914 and
1919 is now extinct. The rest have gone down the chute of the movies.

But all this, after all, may signify little. The shock troops have been
piled up in great masses, but the ground is cleared for those that
follow. Well, then, what of the youngsters? Do they show any sign of
seizing their chance? The answer is yes and no. On the one hand there
is a group which, revolving ’round the _Bookman_, talks a great deal
and accomplishes nothing. On the other hand there is a group which,
revolving ’round the _Dial_ and the _Little Review_, talks even more
and does even less. But on the third hand, as it were, there is a
group which says little and saws wood. There seems to be little in
common between its members, no sign of a formal movement, with its
_blague_ and its bombast, but all of them have this in common: that
they owe both their opportunity and their method to the revolution that
followed “Sister Carrie.” Most of them are from the Middle West, but
they are distinct from the Chicago crowd, now degenerated to posturing
and worse. They are sophisticated, disillusioned, free from cant, and
yet they have imagination. The raucous protests of the evangelists
of American Idealism seem to have no more effect upon them than the
advances of the Expressionists, Dadaists and other such café-table
prophets. Out of this dispersed and ill-defined group, I believe,
something will come. Its members are those who are free from the two
great delusions which, from the beginning, have always cursed American
letters: the delusion that a work of art is primarily a moral document,
that its purpose is to make men better Christians and more docile
cannon-fodder, and the delusion that it is an exercise in logic, that
its purpose is to prove something. These delusions, lingering beyond
their time, are responsible for most of the disasters visible in the
national literature today--the disasters of the radicals as well as
those of the 100 per cent. dunderheads. The writers of the future, I
hope and believe, will carefully avoid both of them.




XVII. PEOPLE AND THINGS


1

_The Capital of a Great Republic_

The fourth secretary of the Paraguayan legation.... The chief clerk
to the House committee on industrial arts and expositions.... The
secretary to the secretary to the Secretary of Labor.... The brother to
the former Congressman from the third Idaho district.... The messenger
to the chief of the Senate folding-room.... The doorkeeper outside the
committee-room of the House committee on the disposition of useless
executive papers.... The chief correspondent of the Toomsboro, Ga.,
_Banner_ in the Senate press-gallery.... The stenographer to the
assistant chief entomologist of the Bureau of Animal Industry.... The
third assistant chief computor in the office of the Naval Almanac....
The assistant Attorney-General in charge of the investigation of
postal frauds in the South Central States.... The former wife of the
former secretary to the former member of the Interstate Commerce
Commission.... The brother to the wife of the _chargé d’affaires_ of
Czecho-Slovakia.... The bootlegger to the ranking Democratic member
of the committee on the election of President, Vice-President and
representatives in Congress.... The acting assistant doorkeeper of
the House visitors’ gallery.... The junior Senator from Delaware....
The assistant to the secretary to the chief clerk of the Division of
Audits and Disbursements, Bureau of Stationery and Supplies, Postoffice
Department.... The press-agent to the chaplain of the House.... The
commercial attaché to the American legation at Quito.... The chauffeur
to the fourth assistant Postmaster-General.... The acting substitute
elevator-man in the Washington monument.... The brother to the wife of
the brother-in-law of the Vice-President.... The aunt to the sister of
the wife of the officer in charge of ceremonials, State Department....
The neighbor of the cousin of the step-father of the sister-in-law of
the President’s pastor.... The superintendent of charwomen in Temporary
Storehouse B7, Bureau of Navy Yards and Docks.... The assistant
confidential clerk to the chief clerk to the acting chief examiner of
the Patent Office.... The valet to the Chief Justice.


2

_Ambassadors of Christ_

Fifth avenue rectors with shining morning faces, preaching on Easter
to pews packed with stockbrokers, defendants in salacious divorce
suits, members of the Sulgrave Foundation and former Zionists....
Evangelists of strange, incomprehensible cults whooping and bawling
at two or three half-witted old women and half a dozen scared little
girls in corrugated iron tabernacles down near the railroad-yards....
Mormon missionaries pulling door-bells in Wheeling, W. Va., and Little
Rock, Ark., and handing naughty-looking tracts to giggling servant
girls.... Baptist doctors of divinity calling upon John the Baptist and
John D. Rockefeller to bear witness that the unducked will sweat in
hell forevermore.... Methodist candidates for the sacred frock, sent
out to preach trial sermons to backward churches in the mail-order
belt, proving magnificently in one hour that Darwin was an ignoramus
and Huxley a scoundrel.... Irish priests denouncing the Ku Klux
Klan.... Rabbis denouncing Henry Ford.... Presbyterians denouncing Flo
Zeigfeld.... Fashionable divines officiating at gaudy home weddings,
their ears alert for the popping of corks.... Street evangelists in
Zanesville, O., trying to convince a cop and five newsboys that no
man will be saved unless he be born again.... Missionaries in smelly
gospel-shops along the waterfront, expounding the doctrine of the
atonement to boozy Norwegian sailors, half of them sound asleep....
Cadaverous high-church Episcopalians.... Little fat Lutherans with
the air of prosperous cheese-mongers.... Dunkards with celluloid
collars and no neckties.... Southern Methodists who still believe
in slavery.... Former plumbers, threshing-machine engineers and
horse-doctors turned into United Brethren bishops.... Missionaries
collecting money from the mill children in Raleigh, N. C., to convert
the Spaniards and Italians to Calvinism.... Episcopal archdeacons
cultivating the broad English _a_.... Swedenborgians trying to explain
the “Arcana Cœlestia” to flabbergasted newspaper reporters.... Polish
clergymen leaping out of the windows at Polish weddings in Johnstown,
Pa., hoping that the next half-dozen beer-bottles won’t hit them....
Methodists pulling wires for bishoprics.... Quakers foreclosing
mortgages.... Baptists busy among the women.


3

_Bilder aus schöner Zeit_

The excellent lunch that the illustrious Crispi used to serve at
Delmonico’s at five o’clock in the afternoon.... The incomparable
orange blossom cocktails at Sherry’s, and the plates of salted
nuts.... The tavern cocktails at the Beaux Arts, each with its dash
of absinthe.... The Franziskaner Mai-Bock at Lüchow’s.... Dear old
Sieg’s noble Rhine wines at the Kaiserhof.... The long-tailed clams
and Spring onions at Rogers’, with Pilsner to wash them down.... The
amazingly good American quasi-Pilsner, made by Herr Abner, on the
Raleigh roof in Washington.... The Castel del Remy at the Brevoort,
cheap but perfect.... The very dark Kulmbacher at the Pabst place
in 125th street in the last days of civilization.... The burgundy
from the Cresta Blanca vineyards in California.... Michelob on warm
Summer evenings, with the crowd singing “Throw Out the Lifeline!”...
The old-time Florestan cocktails--50 per cent. London gin, 25 per
cent. French vermouth and 25 per cent. Martini-Rossi, with a dash of
Angostura bitters--drink half, then drink a glass of beer, and then
drink the other half.... That Hoboken red wine, so strangely smooth and
lovely.... The bad red wine (but capital cooking) at the Frenchman’s
in Lexington avenue.... Del Pezzo’s superb Chianti.... The ale at
Keen’s.... Obst’s herrings, with Löwenbraü to slack them.... The
astounding cocktail made by the head waiter at Henri’s.... Drinking
Faust all night in St. Louis in 1904.... The musty ale at Losekam’s
in Washington.... The draft _Helles_ at Krüger’s in Philadelphia.... A
Pilsner luncheon at the old Grand Union, from one to six.... A stray
bottle of perfect sauterne found in Rahway, New Jersey.... A wild
night drinking Swedish punch and hot water.... Two or three hot Scotch
nights.... Twenty or thirty Bass’ ale nights.... Five or six hundred
Pilsner nights....


4

_The High Seas_

The kid who sits in the bucket of tar.... The buxom stewardess who
comes in and inquires archly if one rang.... The humorous piano-tuner
who tunes the grand piano in the music-room in the 15-16ths-tone
scale.... The electric fan which, when a stray zephyr blows in
through the porthole, makes a noise like a dentist’s drill.... The
alien ship’s printer who, in the daily wireless paper, reports a
baseball score of 165 to 3.... The free Christian Science literature
in the reading-room.... The pens in the writing-room.... The elderly
_Grosshändler_ with the young wife.... The red-haired girl in the green
sweater.... The retired bootlegger disguised as a stockbroker....
The stockbroker disguised as a United States Senator.... The
boy who climbs into the lifeboat.... The chief steward wearing
the No. 18³⁄₄ collar.... The mysterious pipes that run along the
stateroom ceilings.... The discovery that one forgot to pack enough
undershirts.... The night watchman who raps on the door at 3.30
A. M. to deliver a wireless message reading “Sorry missed
you. Bon voyage”.... The bartender who adds a dash of witchhazel
to cocktails.... The wilting flowers standing in ice-pitchers and
spittoons in the hallways.... The fight in the steerage.... The old
lady who gets stewed and sends for the doctor.... The news that the
ship is in Long. 43°, 41′, 16″ W, Lat. 40°, 23′, 39″ N.... The report
that the starboard propeller has lost a blade.


5

_The Shrine of Mnemosyne_

The little town of Kirkwall, in the Orkney Islands, in a mid-Winter
mist, flat and charming like a Japanese print.... San Francisco and
the Golden Gate from the top of Twin Peaks.... Gibraltar on a Spring
day, all in pastel shades, like the back-drop for a musical comedy....
My first view of the tropics, the palm-trees suddenly bulging out of
the darkness of dawn, the tremendous stillness, the sweetly acid
smell, the immeasurable strangeness.... The Trentino on a glorious
morning, up from Verona to the Brenner Pass.... Central Germany from
Bremen to Munich, all in one day, with the apple trees in bloom....
Copenhagen on a wild night, with the _Polizei_ combing the town for
the American who upset the piano.... Christiania in January, with the
snow-clad statue of Ibsen looming through the gloom like a ghost in a
cellar.... The beach at Tybee Island, with the faint, blood-curdling
rattle of the land-crabs.... Jacksonville after the fire in 1902,
with the hick militiamen firing their machine-guns all night.... The
first inauguration of Woodrow, and the pretty suffragette who drank
beer with me at the Raleigh.... A child playing in the yard of a
God-forsaken town in the Wyoming desert.... Bryan’s farewell speech
at the St. Louis Convention in 1904.... Hampton Court on Chestnut
Sunday.... A New Year’s Eve party on a Danish ship, 500 miles off
the coast of Greenland.... The little pile of stones on the beach of
Watling’s Island, marking the place where Columbus landed.... The moon
of the Caribbees, seen from a 1000-ton British tramp.... A dull night
in a Buffalo hotel, reading the American Revised Version of the New
Testament.... The day I received the proofs of my first book.... A
good-bye on an Hoboken pier.... The Palace Hotel in Madrid.




INDEX


  Adams, Samuel, 118

  Aggasiz, Alexander, 41

  Allen, James Lane, 286

  Americanism, 10

  American Legion, 10, 38, 163, 195

  Anglo-Saxon, 21 _ff._

  Anti-Saloon League, 10, 88, 161, 183

  Atherton, Gertrude, 21


  Bach, Johann Sebastian, 117

  Beck, James M., 9

  Beers, Henry A., 12

  Beethoven, Ludwig van, 240, 251, 263

  Bennett, Arnold, 281

  Benson, Admiral, 256

  Bill of Rights, 99, 100, 226

  Bismarck, Otto von, 117

  Bonaparte, Charles J., 230

  _Bookman_, 286, 292

  Boyd, Ernest, 15

  Boynton, Percy H., 14

  Brahms, Johannes, 251

  Brandeis, Louis D., 101

  Brann, Otto, 292

  Brook, Rupert, 292

  Brooks, Van Wyck, 18

  Brownell, Wm. C., 9, 14, 16

  Browning, Robert, 118

  Bryan, Wm. Jennings, 58, 60

  Bryant, William Cullen, 16

  Bush, Irving T., 214

  Butler, Nicholas Murray, 170


  Cabell, James Branch, 14, 18, 40, 284, 285

  Cather, Willa, 285, 291

  Chambers, Robert W., 286

  Chaplin, Charlie, 261

  Chicago _Literary Times_, 12

  Civil Service Reform, 229

  Churchill, Winston, 291

  Clemens, Samuel L., 15, 17, 19, 138, 279, 280, 286

  Cleveland, Grover, 69

  Comstock, Anthony, 164

  _Congressional Record_, 43, 53, 122

  Conrad, Joseph, 141, 276, 281

  Coolidge, Calvin, 15, 48, 193, 263

  Cooper, James Fenimore, 16, 280

  Crane, Frank, 41

  Creel, George, 9, 256

  Czolgosz, Leon, 185


  Daniels, Josephus, 257

  D’Annunzio, Gabrielle, 261

  Dante, 106

  Daugherty, Harry, 188, 193, 226

  Davis, Richard Harding, 286

  Dell, Floyd, 291

  Denby, Edward, 184, 193

  Dewey, George, 255

  _Dial_, 12, 286, 292

  Dos Passos, John, 284, 290

  Doughty of Texas, 11 _ff._, 20

  Dreiser, Theodore, 12, 17, 18, 21, 117, 285, 287 _ff._, 292


  Edward VII, 273

  Edwards, Jonathan, 126

  Eliot, Charles W., 35, 37, 292

  Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 15, 17, 142, 280

  Erskine, John, 14

  Espionage Act, 87

  Evans, Fighting Bob, 254


  Fall, Albert B., 182

  Fisk, James, 118, 280

  Fitch, Clyde, 285

  Ford, Henry, 50, 232

  Frank, Waldo, 12

  Froude, James Anthony, 205

  Fuller, Henry B., 292

  Fundamentalism, 28, 76


  Garland, Hamlin, 286

  Gherardi, Admiral, 255

  Gladstone, Wm. Ewart, 117

  God, 61 _ff._, 116, 240

  Godfrey, Stuart, 151

  Godkin, E. L., 230

  Godwin, William, 220

  Grant, Madison, 21

  Grant, U. S., 36, 118

  Griswold, Rufus W., 17

  Guest, Edgar A., 41


  Haeckel, Ernst, 65

  Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 15, 17, 19, 280

  Hergesheimer, Joseph, 285, 287, 291

  Hillis, Newell Dwight, 9

  Holland, J. G., 16

  Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 101

  Howe, E. W., 51

  Howells, Wm. Dean, 279, 280

  Huneker, James, 18, 287

  Huxley, Aldous, 282

  Huxley, Thomas Henry, 117


  Ibsen, Henrik, 103, 105 _ff._, 118

  Irving, Washington, 18, 19, 280

  Irwin, Will H., 208


  Jackson, Andrew, 118

  Jackson, Stonewall, 118

  James, Henry, 279, 280

  Jefferson, Thomas, 226

  Jews, 72, 77

  Johnson, Samuel, 221

  Justice, Department of, 10, 180, 186


  Kipling, Rudyard, 281

  Ku Klux Klan, 10, 14, 16, 28, 30, 37, 38, 82, 127, 195, 266, 268

  Kun, Bela, 133


  Lee, Robert E., 117

  Lewis, Sinclair, 284, 290

  _Little Review_, 12, 292

  Lloyd-George, David, 24

  Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 16

  Lowell, Amy, 285

  Lowell, James Russell, 16

  Luther, Martin, 118


  McDougall, William, 211

  Manning, Wm. T., 126, 170

  Mansfield, Richard, 66

  Masefield, John, 281

  Mather, Cotton, 126

  Matthews, Brander, 14, 21

  Melville, Herman, 19

  Mendelssohn, Felix, 117, 246

  Meredith, George, 281

  Michigan, Sweet Singer of, 16

  Mitchell, Donald G., 16

  Moltke, Helmuth von, 118

  Monroe, Harriet, 285

  Moody, Dwight L., 260

  More, Paul Elmer, 286


  _Nation_, 12, 286

  New York _Times_, 207, 286

  Nietzsche, F. W., 107, 272, 280

  Norris, Frank, 288


  O’Neill, Eugene, 284, 287


  Palmer, A. Mitchell, 9, 91, 226

  Parthenon, 239

  Pasteur, Louis, 118

  Paul of Tarsus, 45

  Phelps, Wm. Lyon, 18, 286

  Poe, Edgar Allan, 15, 17, 19, 40, 280

  Prohibition, 24, 28, 54, 85 _ff._, 158 _ff._


  Rinehart, Mary Roberts, 286

  Rockefeller, John D., 118, 296

  Roosevelt, Theodore, 226, 230, 254


  Sandburg, Carl, 12

  Schley, Winfield S., 254

  Schubert, Franz, 246, 248

  Schurz, Carl, 118

  _S4N_, 12

  Shakespeare, Wm., 104, 178, 280

  Shaw, George Bernard, 67, 281

  Sherman, Wm. T., 118

  Sigourney, Lydia, 16

  Sims, Admiral, 256

  Sinclair, May, 282

  Sinclair, Upton, 149, 291

  Straton, John Roach, 126

  Strauss, Johann, 243

  Sunday, Billy, 15


  Tarkington, Booth, 292

  Taylor, Bayard, 16

  Texas, University of, 12, 14

  Thomas, Augustus, 285

  Tolstoi, Lyof, 118


  Van Dyke, Henry, 18


  Wagner, Cosima, 249

  Wagner, Richard, 107, 114, 138, 248 _ff._

  War, American Civil, 36, 233

  War, Mexican, 36

  War of 1812, 35

  War, Revolutionary, 35

  War, Spanish-American, 36

  War, World, 36, 233

  Warner, Charles Dudley, 16

  Washington, George, 221

  Wells, H. G., 207, 244, 281

  Whitman, Walt, 15, 17, 19, 40, 41, 279

  Whittier, John Greenleaf, 19

  Willis, N. P., 16

  Wilson, Woodrow, 70, 180, 202, 226


  Yerkes, Charles E., 118




Transcriber’s Notes

Page 15: “surburban pastors” changed to “suburban pastors”

Page 123: “clinical themometer” changed to “clinical thermometer”

Page 135: “basicly almost indistinguishable” changed to “basically
almost indistinguishable”

Page 180: “criminal statues” changed to “criminal statutes”

Page 282: “the Altantic” changed to “the Atlantic”

Page 295: “Stationary and Supplies” changed to “Stationery and Supplies”

In the index, “Poe, Edgar Allen” changed to “Poe, Edgar Allan”