varnish--and by the opposition we mean the group of Protestant churches
commonly called evangelical, to wit, the Methodist, the Baptist, the
Presbyterian and their attendant imitators and inferiors. It is out of
this group that the dominating religious attitude of the American people
arises, and, in particular is from this group that we get our doctrine
that religious activity is not to be challenged, however flagrantly it
may stand in opposition to common honesty and common sense. Under cover
of that artificial toleration--the product, not of a genuine liberalism,
but simply of a mob distrust of dissent--there goes on a tyranny that it
would be difficult to match in modern history. Save in a few large
cities, every American community lies under a sacerdotal despotism whose
devices are disingenuous and dishonourable, and whose power was
magnificently displayed in the campaign for Prohibition--a despotism
exercised by a body of ignorant, superstitious, self-seeking and
thoroughly dishonest men. One may, without prejudice, reasonably defend
the Catholic clergy. They are men who, at worst, pursue an intelligible
ideal and dignify it with a real sacrifice. But in the presence of the
Methodist clergy it is difficult to avoid giving way to the weakness of
indignation. What one observes is a horde of uneducated and inflammatory
dunderheads, eager for power, intolerant of opposition and full of a
childish vanity--a mob of holy clerks but little raised, in intelligence
and dignity, above the forlorn half-wits whose souls they chronically
rack. In the whole United States there is scarcely one among them who
stands forth as a man of sense and information. Illiterate in all save
the elementals, untouched by the larger currents of thought, drunk with
their power over dolts, crazed by their immunity to challenge by their
betters, they carry over into the professional class of the country the
spirit of the most stupid peasantry, and degrade religion to the estate
of an idiotic phobia. There is not a village in America in which some
such preposterous jackass is not in eruption. Worse, he is commonly the
leader of its opinion--its pattern in reason, morals and good taste. Yet
worse, he is ruler as well as pattern. Wrapped in his sacerdotal cloak,
he stands above any effective criticism. To question his imbecile ideas
is to stand in contumacy of the revelation of God.
A number of years ago, while engaged in journalism in a large American
city, one of us violated all journalistic precedents by printing an
article denouncing the local evangelical clergy as, with few exceptions,
a pack of scoundrels, and offered in proof their brisk and constant
trade in contraband marriages, especially the marriages of girls under
the age of consent. He showed that the offer of a two dollar fee was
sufficient to induce the majority of these ambassadors of Christ to
marry a girl of fourteen or fifteen to a boy a few years older. There
followed a great outcry from the accused, with the usual demands that
the offending paper print a retraction and discharge the guilty writer
from its staff. He thereupon engaged a clipping bureau to furnish him
with clippings from the newspapers of the whole country, showing the
common activities of the evangelical clergy elsewhere. The result was
that he received and reprinted an amazing mass of putrid scandal,
greatly to the joy of that moral community. It appeared that these
eminent Christian leaders were steadily engaged, North, East, South and
West, in doings that would have disgraced so many ward heelers or
oyster-shuckers--shady financial transactions, gross sexual
irregularities, all sorts of minor crimes. The publication of this
evidence from day to day gave the chronicler the advantage of the
offensive, and so got him out of a tight place. In the end, as if
tickled by his assault, the hierarchy of heaven came to his aid. That is
to say, the Lord God Jehovah arranged it that one of the leading
Methodist clergymen of the city--in fact, the chronicler's chief
opponent--should be taken in an unmentionable sexual perversion at the
headquarters of the Young Men's Christian Association, and so be forced
to leave town between days. This catastrophe, as we say, the chronicler
ascribes to divine intervention. It was entirely unexpected; he knew
that the fellow was a liar and a rogue, but he had never suspected that
he was also a hog. The episode demoralized the defence to such an extent
that it was impossible, in decency, to go on with the war. The
chronicler was at once, in fact, forced into hypocritical efforts to
prevent the fugitive ecclesiastic's pursuit, extradition, trial and
imprisonment, and these efforts, despite their disingenuous character,
succeeded. Under another name, he now preaches Christ and Him crucified
in the far West, and is, we daresay, a leading advocate of Prohibition,
vice-crusading and the other Methodist reforms.
But here we depart from the point. It is not that an eminent Wesleyan
should be taken in crim. con. with a member of the Y.M.C.A.; it is that
the whole Wesleyan scheme of things, despite the enormous multiplication
of such incidents, should still stand above all direct and devastating
criticism in America. It is an ignorant and dishonest cult of ignorant
and dishonest men, and yet no one has ever had at it from the front.
All the newspaper clippings that we have mentioned were extraordinarily
discreet. Every offence of a clergyman was presented as if it were an
isolated phenomenon, and of no general significance; there was never any
challenge of an ecclesiastical organization which bred and sheltered
such men, and carried over their curious ethics into its social and
political activities. That careful avoidance of the main issue is always
observable in These States. Prohibition was saddled upon the country,
against the expressed wish of at least two-thirds of the people, by the
political chicanery of the same organization, and yet no one, during the
long fight, thought to attack it directly; to have done so would have
been to violate the taboo described. So when the returning soldiers
began to reveal the astounding chicaneries of the Young Men's Christian
Association, it was marvelled at for a few weeks, as Americans always
marvel at successful pocket-squeezings, but no one sought the cause in
the character of the pious brethren primarily responsible. And so,
again, when what is called liberal opinion began to revolt against the
foreign politics of Dr. Wilson, and in particular, against his apparent
repudiation of his most solemn engagements, and his complete
insensibility, in the presence of a moral passion, to the most
elementary principles of private and public honour. A thousand critics,
friendly and unfriendly, sought to account for his amazing shifts and
evasions on unintelligible logical grounds, but no one, so far as we
know, ventured to point out that his course could be accounted for in
every detail, and without any mauling of the facts whatsoever, upon the
simple ground that he was a Presbyterian.
We sincerely hope that no one will mistake us here for anarchists who
seek to hold the Presbyterian code of ethics, or the Presbyterians
themselves, up to derision. We confess frankly that, as private
individuals, we are inclined against that code and that all our
prejudices run against those who subscribe to it--which is to say, in
the direction of toleration, of open dealing, and even of a certain mild
snobbishness. We are both opposed to moral enthusiasm, and never drink
with a moral man if it can be avoided. The taboos that we personally
subscribe to are taboos upon the very things that Presbyterians hold
most dear--for example, moral certainty, the proselyting appetite, and
what may be described as the passion of the policeman. But we are
surely not fatuous enough to cherish our ideas to the point of fondness.
In the long run, we freely grant, it may turn out that the Presbyterians
are right and we are wrong--in brief, that God loves a moral man more
than he loves an amiable and honourable one. Stranger things, indeed,
have happened; one might even argue without absurdity that God is
actually a Presbyterian Himself. Whether He is or is not we do not
presume to say; we simply record the fact that it is our present
impression that He is not--and then straightway admit that our view is
worth no more than that of any other pair of men.
Meanwhile, however, it is certainly not going too far to notice the
circumstance that there is an irreconcilable antithesis between the two
sorts of men that we have described--that a great moral passion is fatal
to the gentler and more caressing amenities of life, and _vice versa_.
The man of morals has a certain character, and the man of honour has a
quite different character. No one not an idiot fails to differentiate
between the two, or to order his intercourse with them upon an
assumption of their disparity. What we know in the United States as a
Presbyterian is pre-eminently of the moral type. Perhaps more than any
other man among us he regulates his life, and the lives of all who fall
under his influence, upon a purely moral plan. In the main, he gets the
principles underlying that plan from the Old Testament; if he is to be
described succinctly, it is as one who carries over into modern life,
with its superior complexity of sin, the simple and rigid ethical
concepts of the ancient Jews. And in particular, he subscribes to their
theory that it is virtuous to make things hot for the sinner, by which
word he designates any person whose conduct violates the ordinances of
God as he himself is aware of them and interprets them. Sin is to the
Presbyterian the salient phenomenon of this wobbling and nefarious
world, and the pursuit and chastisement of sinners the one avocation
that is permanently worth while. The product of that simple doctrine is
a character of no little vigour and austerity, and one much esteemed by
the great masses of men, who are always uneasily conscious of their own
weakness in the face of temptation and thus have a sneaking veneration
for the man apparently firm, and who are always ready to believe,
furthermore, that any man who seems to be having a pleasant time is a
rascal and deserving of the fire.
The Presbyterian likewise harbours this latter suspicion. More, he
commonly erects it into a certainty. Every single human act, he holds,
must be either right or wrong--and the overwhelming majority of them are
wrong. He knows exactly what these wrong ones are; he recognizes them
instantly and infallibly, by a sort of inspired intuition; and he
believes that they should all be punished automatically and with the
utmost severity. No one ever heard of a Presbyterian overlooking a
fault, or pleading for mercy for the erring. He would regard such an act
as the weakness of one ridden by the Devil. From such harsh judgments
and retributions, it must be added in fairness, he does not except
himself. He detects his own aberration almost as quickly as he detects
the aberration of the other fellow, and though he may sometimes
seek--being, after all, only human--to escape its consequences, he by no
means condones it. Nothing, indeed, could exceed the mental anguish of a
Presbyterian who has been betrayed, by the foul arts of some lascivious
wench, into any form of adultery, or, by the treason of his senses in
some other way, into a voluptuous yielding to the lure of the other
_beaux arts_. It has been our fortune, at various times, to be in the
confidence of Presbyterians thus seduced from their native virtue, and
we bear willing testimony to their sincere horror. Even the least pious
of them was as greatly shaken up by what to us, on our lower plane,
seemed a mere peccadillo, perhaps in bad taste but certainly not worth
getting into a sweat about, as we ourselves would have been by a gross
breach of faith.
But, as has been before remarked, the bitter must go with the sweet. In
the face of so exalted a moral passion it would be absurd to look for
that urbane habit which seeks the well-being of one's self and the other
fellow, not in exact obedience to harsh statutes, but in ease, dignity
and the more delicate sort of self-respect. That is to say, it would be
absurd to ask a thoroughly moral man to be also a man of honour. The
two, in fact, are eternal enemies; their endless struggle achieves that
happy mean of philosophies which we call civilization. The man of morals
keeps order in the world, regimenting its lawless hordes and organizing
its governments; the man of honour mellows and embellishes what is thus
achieved, giving to duty the aspect of a privilege and making human
intercourse a thing of fine faiths and understandings. We trust the
former to do what is righteous; we trust the latter to do what is
seemly. It is seldom that a man can do both. The man of honour
inevitably exalts the punctilio above the law of God; one may trust him,
if he has eaten one's salt, to respect one's daughter as he would his
own, but if he happens to be under no such special obligation it may be
hazardous to trust him with even one's charwoman or one's mother-in-law.
And the man of morals, confronted by a moral situation, is usually
wholly without honour. Put him on the stand to testify against a woman,
and he will tell all he knows about her, even including what he has
learned in the purple privacy of her boudoir. More, he will not tell it
reluctantly, shame-facedly, apologetically, but proudly and willingly,
in response to his high sense of moral duty. It is simply impossible for
such a man to lie like a gentleman. He lies, of course, like all of us,
and perhaps more often than most of us on the other side, but he does
it, not to protect sinners from the moral law, but to make their
punishment under the moral law more certain, swift, facile and
spectacular.
By this long route we get at our _apologia_ for Dr. Wilson, a man from
whom we both differ in politics, in theology, in ethics and in
epistemology, but one whose great gifts, particularly for moral
endeavour in the grand manner, excite our sincere admiration. Both his
foes and his friends, it seems to us, do him a good deal of injustice.
The former, carried away by that sense of unlikeness which lies at the
bottom of most of the prejudices of uncritical men, denounce him out of
hand because he is not as they are. A good many of these foes, of
course, are not actually men of honour themselves; some of them, in
fact, belong to sects and professions--for example, that of intellectual
Socialist and that of member of Congress--in which no authentic man of
honour could imaginably have a place. But it may be accurately said of
them, nevertheless, that if actual honour is not in them, then at least
they have something of the manner of honour--that they are moving in the
direction of honour, though not yet arrived. Few men, indeed, may be
said to belong certainly and irrevocably in either category, that of the
men of honour or that of the men of morals. Dr. Wilson, perhaps, is one
such man. He is as palpably and exclusively a man of morals as, say,
George Washington was a man of honour. He is, in the one category, a
great beacon, burning almost blindingly; he is, in the other, no more
than a tallow dip, guttering asthmatically. But the majority of men
occupy a sort of twilight zone, and the most that may be said of them is
that their faces turn this way or that. Such is the case with Dr.
Wilson's chief foes. Their eyes are upon honour, as upon some new and
superlatively sweet enchantment, and, bemused to starboard, they view
the scene to port with somewhat extravagant biliousness. Thus, when they
contemplate His Excellency's long and perhaps unmatchable series of
violations of his troth--in the matter of "keeping us out of the war,"
in the matter of his solemn promises to China, in the matter of his
statement of war aims and purposes, in the matter of his shifty dealing
with the Russian question, in the matter of his repudiation of the
armistice terms offered to the Germans, in the matter of his stupendous
lying to the Senate committee on foreign relations, and so on, _ad
infinitum_--when they contemplate all that series of evasions, dodgings,
hypocrisies, double-dealings and plain mendacities, they succumb to an
indignation that is still more than half moral, and denounce him
bitterly as a Pecksniff, a Tartuffe and a Pinto. In that judgment, as we
shall show, there is naught save a stupid incapacity to understand an
unlike man--in brief, no more than the dunderheadedness which makes a
German regard every Englishman as a snuffling poltroon, hiding behind
his vassals, and causes an Englishman to look upon every German as a
fiend in human form, up to his hips in blood.
But one expects a man's foes to misjudge him, and even to libel him
deliberately; a good deal of their enmity, in fact, is often no more
than a product of their uneasy consciousness that they have dealt
unfairly with him; one is always most bitter, not toward the author of
one's wrongs, but toward the victim of one's wrongs. Unluckily, Dr.
Wilson's friends have had at him even more cruelly. When, seeking to
defend what they regard as his honour, they account for his incessant
violation of his pledges--to the voters in 1916, to the soldiers drafted
for the war, to the Chinese on their entrance, to the Austrians when he
sought to get them out, to the Germans when he offered them his
fourteen points, to the country in the matter of secret diplomacy--when
his friends attempt to explain his cavalier repudiation of all these
pledges on the ground that he could not have kept them without violating
later pledges, they achieve, of course, only an imbecility, obvious and
damning, for it must be plain that no man is permitted, in honour, to
make antagonistic engagements, or to urge his private tranquillity or
even the public welfare as an excuse for changing their terms without
the consent of the parties of the second part. A man of honour is one
who simply does whatever he says he will do, provided the other party
holds to the compact too. One cannot imagine him shifting, trimming and
making excuses; it is his peculiar mark that he never makes
excuses--that the need of making them would fill him with unbearable
humiliation. The moment a man of honour faces the question of his
honour, he is done for; it can no more stand investigation than the
chastity of a woman can stand investigation. In such a character, Dr.
Wilson would have been bound irrevocably by all his long series of
solemn engagements, from the first to the last, without the slightest
possibility of dotting an "i" or of cutting off the tail of a comma. It
would have been as impossible for him to have repudiated a single one
of them at the desire of his friends or in the interest of his
idealistic enterprises as it would have been for him to have repudiated
it to his own private profit.
But here is where both foes and friends go aground; both attempt to
inject concepts of honour into transactions predominatingly, and perhaps
exclusively, coloured by concepts of morals. The two things are quite
distinct, as the two sorts of men are quite distinct. Beside the
obligation of honour there is the obligation of morals, entirely
independent and often directly antagonistic. And beside the man who
yields to the punctilio--the man of honour, the man who keeps his
word--there is the man who submits himself, regardless of his personal
engagements and the penalties that go therewith, to the clarion call of
the moral law. Dr. Wilson is such a man. He is, as has been remarked, a
Presbyterian, a Calvinist, a militant moralist. In that role, devoted to
that high cause, clad in that white garment, he was purged of all
obligations of honour to any merely earthly power. His one obligation
was to the moral law--in brief, to the ordinance of God, as determined
by Christian pastors. Under that moral law, specifically, he was
charged to search out and determine its violations by the accused in the
dock, to wit, by the German nation, according to the teaching of those
pastors and the light within, and to fix and execute a punishment that
should be swift, terrible and overwhelming.
To this business, it must be granted by even his most extravagant
opponents, he addressed himself with the loftiest resolution and
singleness of purpose, excluding all puerile questions of ways and
means. He was, by the moral law, no more bound to take into account the
process whereby the accused was brought to book and the weight of
retribution brought to bear than a detective is bound to remember how
any ordinary prisoner is snared for the mill of justice. The detective
himself may have been an important factor in that process; he may have
taken the prisoner by some stratagem involving the most gross false
pretences; he may have even played the _agent provocateur_ and so
actually suggested, planned and supervised the crime. But surely that
would be a ridiculous critic who would argue thereby that the detective
should forthwith forget the law violated and the punishment justly
provided for it, and go over to the side of the defence on the ground
that his dealings with the prisoner involved him in obligations of
honour. The world would laugh at such a moral moron, if it did not
actually destroy him as an enemy of society. It recognizes the two codes
that we have described, and it knows that they are antagonistic. It
expects a man sworn to the service of morality to discharge his duty at
any cost to his honour, just as it expects a man publicly devoted to
honour to keep his word at any cost to his or to the public morals.
Moreover, it inclines, when there is a conflict, toward the side of
morals; the overwhelming majority of men are men of morals, not men of
honour. They believe that it is vastly more important that the guilty
should be detected, taken into custody and exposed to the rigour of the
law than that the honour of this or that man should be preserved. In
truth, there are frequent circumstances under which they positively
esteem a man who thus sacrifices his honour, or even their own honour.
The man of _dis_honour may actually take on the character of a public
hero. Thus, in 1903, when the late Major General Roosevelt, then
President, tore up the treaty of 1846, whereby the United States
guaranteed the sovereignty of Columbia in the Isthmus of Panama, the
great masses of the American plain people not only at once condoned this
grave breach of honour, but actually applauded Dr. Roosevelt because his
act furthered the great moral enterprise of digging the canal.
These distinctions, of course, are familiar to all men who devote
themselves to the study of the human psyche; that morals and honour are
not one and the same thing, but two very distinct and even antithetical
things, is surely no news to the judicious. But what is thus merely an
axiom of ethics, politics or psychology is often kept strangely secret
in the United States. We have acquired the habit of evading all the
facts of life save those that are most superficial; by long disuse we
have almost lost the capacity for thinking analytically and accurately.
A thing may be universally known among us, and yet never get itself so
much as mentioned. Around scores of elementary platitudes there hangs a
shuddering silence as complete as that which hedges in the sacred name
of a Polynesian chief. At every election time, in our large cities, most
of the fundamental issues are concealed, particularly when they happen
to take on a theological colour, which is very often. It is, for
example, the timorous public theory, born of this fear of the forthright
fact, that when a man sets up as a candidate for, say, a judgeship, the
question of his private religious faith is of no practical
importance--that it makes no difference whether he is a Catholic or a
Methodist. The truth is, of course, that his faith is often of the very
first importance--that it will colour his conduct of the forensic
combats before him even more than his politics, his capacity to digest
proteids or the social aspirations of his wife. One constantly notes, in
American jurisprudence, the effects of theological prejudices on the
bench; there are at least a dozen controlling decisions, covering
especially the new moral legislation, which might almost be mistaken by
a layman for sermons by the Rev. Dr. Billy Sunday. The Prohibitionists,
during their long and very adroit campaign, shrewdly recognized the
importance of controlling the judiciary; in particular, they threw all
their power against the election of candidates who were known to be
Catholics, or Jews, or free-thinkers. As a result they packed the bench
of nearly every state with Methodist, Baptist and Presbyterian judges,
and these gentlemen at once upheld all their maze of outrageous
statutes. That they would do so if elected was known in advance, and
yet, so far as the record shows, it was a rare thing for any one to
attack them on the ground of their religion, and rarer still for any
such attack to influence many votes. The taboo was working. The majority
of voters were eager to avoid that issue. They felt, in some vague and
unintelligible way, that it was improper to raise it.