BEING A PORTION OF A PAPER ON “CONSISTENCY,” READ BEFORE THE MONDAY
EVENING CLUB IN 1887.
(See Chapter clxiii)
... I have referred to the fact that when a man retires from his
political party he is a traitor--that he is so pronounced in plain
language. That is bold; so bold as to deceive many into the fancy that
it is true. Desertion, treason--these are the terms applied. Their
military form reveals the thought in the man's mind who uses them:
to him a political party is an army. Well, is it? Are the two things
identical? Do they even resemble each other? Necessarily a political
party is not an army of conscripts, for they are in the ranks by
compulsion. Then it must be a regular army or an army of volunteers.
Is it a regular army? No, for these enlist for a specified and
well-understood term, and can retire without reproach when the term is
up. Is it an army of volunteers who have enlisted for the war, and may
righteously be shot if they leave before the war is finished? No, it
is not even an army in that sense. Those fine military terms are
high-sounding, empty lies, and are no more rationally applicable to
a political party than they would be to an oyster-bed. The volunteer
soldier comes to the recruiting office and strips himself and proves
that he is so many feet high, and has sufficiently good teeth, and
no fingers gone, and is sufficiently sound in body generally; he is
accepted; but not until he has sworn a deep oath or made other solemn
form of promise to march under, that flag until that war is done or his
term of enlistment completed. What is the process when a voter joins a
party? Must he prove that he is sound in any way, mind or body? Must he
prove that he knows anything--is capable of anything--whatever? Does he
take an oath or make a promise of any sort?--or doesn't he leave himself
entirely free? If he were informed by the political boss that if he
join, it must be forever; that he must be that party's chattel and wear
its brass collar the rest of his days--would not that insult him? It
goes without saying. He would say some rude, unprintable thing, and turn
his back on that preposterous organization. But the political boss puts
no conditions upon him at all; and this volunteer makes no promises,
enlists for no stated term. He has in no sense become a part of an army;
he is in no way restrained of his freedom. Yet he will presently find
that his bosses and his newspapers have assumed just the reverse
of that: that they have blandly arrogated to themselves an ironclad
military authority over him; and within twelve months, if he is an
average man, he will have surrendered his liberty, and will actually be
silly enough to believe that he cannot leave that party, for any cause
whatever, without being a shameful traitor, a deserter, a legitimately
dishonored man.
There you have the just measure of that freedom of conscience, freedom
of opinion, freedom of speech and action which we hear so much inflated
foolishness about as being the precious possession of the republic.
Whereas, in truth, the surest way for a man to make of himself a target
for almost universal scorn, obloquy, slander, and insult is to stop
twaddling about these priceless independencies and attempt to exercise
one of them. If he is a preacher half his congregation will clamor for
his expulsion--and will expel him, except they find it will injure real
estate in the neighborhood; if he is a doctor his own dead will turn
against him.
I repeat that the new party-member who supposed himself independent will
presently find that the party have somehow got a mortgage on his soul,
and that within a year he will recognize the mortgage, deliver up his
liberty, and actually believe he cannot retire from that party from
any motive howsoever high and right in his own eyes without shame and
dishonor.
Is it possible for human wickedness to invent a doctrine more infernal
and poisonous than this? Is there imaginable a baser servitude than it
imposes? What slave is so degraded as the slave that is proud that he
is a slave? What is the essential difference between a lifelong democrat
and any other kind of lifelong slave? Is it less humiliating to dance to
the lash of one master than another?
This infamous doctrine of allegiance to party plays directly into the
hands of politicians of the baser sort--and doubtless for that it was
borrowed--or stolen--from the monarchial system. It enables them to
foist upon the country officials whom no self-respecting man would vote
for if he could but come to understand that loyalty to himself is his
first and highest duty, not loyalty to any party name.
Shall you say the best good of the country demands allegiance to party?
Shall you also say that it demands that a man kick his truth and his
conscience into the gutter and become a mouthing lunatic besides? Oh no,
you say; it does not demand that. But what if it produce that in spite
of you? There is no obligation upon a man to do things which he ought
not to do when drunk, but most men will do them just the same; and so
we hear no arguments about obligations in the matter--we only hear men
warned to avoid the habit of drinking; get rid of the thing that can
betray men into such things.
This is a funny business all around. The same men who enthusiastically
preach loyal consistency to church and party are always ready and
willing and anxious to persuade a Chinaman or an Indian or a Kanaka to
desert his church or a fellow-American to desert his party. The man who
deserts to them is all that is high and pure and beautiful--apparently;
the man who deserts from them is all that is foul and despicable. This
is Consistency--with a capital C.
With the daintiest and self-complacentest sarcasm the lifelong loyalist
scoffs at the Independent--or as he calls him, with cutting irony, the
Mugwump; makes himself too killingly funny for anything in this world
about him. But--the Mugwump can stand it, for there is a great history
at his back; stretching down the centuries, and he comes of a mighty
ancestry. He knows that in the whole history of the race of men no
single great and high and beneficent thing was ever done for the souls
and bodies, the hearts and the brains of the children of this world, but
a Mugwump started it and Mugwumps carried it to victory: And their names
are the stateliest in history: Washington, Garrison, Galileo, Luther,
Christ. Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a
human soul in this world-end never will.