world in which the marriage relation is discussed more copiously than in
the United States, and yet there is no country in which its essentials
are more diligently avoided. Some years ago, seeking to let some
sagacity into the prevailing exchange of platitudes, one of us wrote a
book upon the subject, grounding it upon the obvious doctrine that women
have much more to gain by marriage than men, and that the majority of
men are aware of it, and would never marry at all if it were not for
women's relentless effort to bring them to it. This banality the writer
supported, by dint of great painstaking, in a somewhat novel way. That
is to say, he put upon himself the limitation of employing no theory,
statement of fact or argument in the book that was not already embodied
in a common proverb in some civilized language. Now and then it was a
bit hard to find the proverb, but in most cases it was very easy, and in
some cases he found, not one, but dozens. Well, this laborious
_pastiche_ of the obvious made such a sensation that it sold better than
any other book that the author had ever written--and the reviews
unanimously described it, either with praise or with blame, as an
extraordinary collection of heresies, most of them almost too acrid to
be bruited about. In other words, this mass of platitudes took Americans
by surprise, and somehow shocked them. What was commonplace to even the
peasants of the European Continent was so unfamiliar to even the
literate minority over here that the book acquired a sort of sinister
repute, and the writer himself came to be discussed as a fellow with the
habit of arising in decorous society and indelicately blowing his nose.
There is, of course, something of the same shrinking from the elemental
facts of life in England; it seems to run with the Anglo-Saxon. This
accounts for the shuddering attitude of the English to such
platitude-monging foreigners as George Bernard Shaw, the Scotsman
disguised as an Irishman, and G. K. Chesterton, who shows all the
physical and mental stigmata of a Bavarian. Shaw's plays, which once had
all England by the ears, were set down as compendiums of the
self-evident by the French, a realistic and plain-spoken people, and
were sniffed at in Germany by all save the middle classes, who
correspond to the _intelligentsia_ of Anglo-Saxondom. But in America,
even more than in England, they were viewed as genuinely satanic. We
shall never forget, indeed, the tremulous manner in which American
audiences first listened to the feeble rattling of the palpable in such
pieces as "Man and Superman" and "You Never Can Tell." It was precisely
the manner of an old maid devouring "What Every Girl of Forty-Five
Should Know" behind the door. As for Chesterton, his banal arguments in
favour of alcohol shocked the country so greatly that his previous high
services to religious superstition were forgotten, and today he is
seldom mentioned by respectable Americans.
V
It is necessary to repeat that we rehearse all these facts, not in
indignation, nor indeed in any spirit of carping whatever, but in
perfect serenity and simply as descriptive sociologists. This attitude
of mind is but little comprehended in America, where the emotions
dominate all human reactions, and even such dismal sciences as
paleontology, pathology and comparative philology are gaudily coloured
by patriotic and other passions. The typical American learned man
suffers horribly from the national disease; he is eternally afraid of
something. If it is not that some cheese-monger among his trustees will
have him cashiered for receiving a picture post-card from Prof. Dr.
Scott Nearing, it is that some sweating and scoundrelly German or
Frenchman will discover and denounce his cribs, and if it is not that
the foreigner will have at him, it is that he will be robbed of his step
from associate to full professor by some rival whose wife is more
amiable to the president of the university, or who is himself more
popular with the college athletes. Thus surrounded by fears, he
translates them, by a familiar psychological process, into indignations.
He announces what he has to say in terms of raucous dudgeon, as a negro,
having to go past a medical college at night, intones some bellicose
gospel-hymn. He is, in brief, vociferously correct. During the late
war, at a time of unusual suspicions and hence of unusual hazards, this
eagerness to prove orthodoxy by choler was copiously on exhibition. Thus
one of the leading American zooelogists printed a work in which, after
starting off by denouncing the German naming of new species as ignorant,
dishonest and against God, he gradually worked himself up to the
doctrine that any American who put a tooth into a slab of _Rinderbrust
mit Meerrettig_, or peeped at _Simplicissimus_ with the blinds down, or
bought his children German-made jumping-jacks, was a traitor to the
Constitution and a secret agent of the Wilhelmstrasse. And thus there
were American pathologists and bacteriologists who denounced Prof. Dr.
Paul Ehrlich as little better than a quack hired by the Krupps to poison
Americans, and who displayed their pious horror of the late Prof. Dr.
Robert Koch by omitting all acknowledgment of obligation to him from
their monographs. And finally there was the posse of "two thousand
American Historians" assembled by Mr. Creel to instruct the plain people
in the new theory of American history, whereby the Revolution was
represented as a lamentable row in an otherwise happy family,
deliberately instigated by German intrigue--a posse which reached its
greatest height of correct indignation in its approval of the celebrated
Sisson documents, to the obscene delight of the British authors thereof.
As we say, we are devoid of all such lofty passions, and hence must
present our observations in the flat, unimaginative, unemotional manner
of a dentist pulling a tooth. It would not be going too far, in fact, to
call us emotional idiots. What ails us is a constitutional suspicion
that the other fellow, after all, may be right, or, in any event, partly
right. In the present case we by no means reprehend the avoidance of
issues that we have described; we merely record it. The fact is that it
has certain very obvious uses, and is probably inevitable in a
democratic society. It is commonly argued that free speech is necessary
to the prosperity of a democracy, but in this doctrine we take no stock.
On the contrary, there are plain reasons for holding that free speech is
more dangerous to a democracy than to any other form of government, and
no doubt these reasons, if only unconsciously, were at the bottom of the
extraordinary body of repressive legislation put upon the books during
the late war. The essential thing about a democracy is that the men at
the head of the state are wholly dependent, for a continuance of their
power, upon the good opinion of the popular majority. While they are
actually in office, true enough, they are theoretically almost
completely irresponsible, but their terms of office are usually so short
that they must give constant thought to the imminent canvassing of their
acts, and this threat of being judged and turned out commonly greatly
conditions their exercise of their power, even while they hold it to the
full. Of late, indeed, there has actually arisen the doctrine that they
are responsible at all times and must respond to every shift in public
sentiment, regardless of their own inclinations, and there has even
grown up the custom of subjecting them to formal discipline, as by what
is called the recall. The net result is that a public officer under a
democracy is bound to regard the popular will during the whole of his
term in office, and cannot hope to carry out any intelligible plan of
his own if the mob has been set against it.
Now, the trouble with this scheme is that the mob reaches its
conclusions, not by logical steps but by emotional steps, and that its
information upon all save a very small minority of the questions
publicly at issue is always scant and inaccurate. It is thus constantly
liable to inflammation by adroit demagogues, or rabble-rousers, and
inasmuch as these rabble-rousers are animated as a sole motive by the
hope of turning out the existing officers of state and getting the
offices for themselves, the man in office must inevitably regard them as
his enemies and the doctrines they preach as subversive of good
government. This view is not altogether selfish. There is, in fact,
sound logic in it, for it is a peculiarity of the mob mind that it
always takes in most hospitably what is intrinsically most idiotic--that
between two antagonistic leaders it always follows the one who is
longest on vague and brilliant words and shortest on sense. Thus the man
in office, if he would be free to carry on his duties in anything
approaching freedom and comfort, must adopt measures against that
tendency to run amuck.
Three devices at once present themselves. One is to take steps against
the rabble-rousers by seeking to make it appear that they are traitors,
and so arousing the mob against them--in brief, to deny them their
constitutional right to free speech under colour of criminal statutes.
The second is to combine this plan with that of flooding the country
with official news by a corps of press-agents, chautauquans and other
such professors of deception. The third is to meet the rabble-rousers on
their own ground, matching their appeals to the emotions with appeals
even more powerful, and out-doing their vague and soothing words with
words even more vague and soothing. All three plans have been in
operation since the first days of the republic; the early Federalists
employed the first two with such assiduity that the mob of that time
finally revolted. All three have been brought to the highest conceivable
point of perfection by Dr. Wilson, a man whose resolute fidelity to his
moral ideas is matched only by his magnificent skill at playing upon
every prejudice and weakness of the plain people.
But men of such exalted and varied gifts are not common. The average
head of a democratic state is not _ipso facto_ the best rabble-rouser
within that state, but merely one of the best. He may be able, on fair
terms, to meet any individual rival, but it is rare for him to be able
to meet the whole pack, or even any considerable group. To relieve him
from that difficulty, and so prevent the incessant running amuck of the
populace, it is necessary to handicap all the remaining rabble-rousers,
and this is most effectively done by limitations upon free speech which
originate as statutes and gradually take on the form and potency of
national customs. Such limitations arose in the United States by
precisely that process. They began in the first years of the republic as
definite laws. Some of those laws were afterward abandoned, but what was
fundamentally sound in them remained in force as custom.
It must be obvious that even Dr. Wilson, despite his tremendous gift for
the third of the devices that we have named, would have been in sore
case during his second administration if it had not been for his
employment of the other two. Imagine the United States during the Summer
of 1917 with absolute free speech the order of the day! The mails would
have been flooded with Socialist and pacifist documents, every
street-corner would have had its screaming soap-box orator, the
newspapers would have shaken the very heavens with colossal alarms, and
conscientious objection would have taken on the proportions of a
national frenzy. In the face of such an avalanche of fears and
balderdash, there would have been no work at all for the German
propagandists; in fact, it is likely that a great many of them, under
suspicion on account of their relative moderation, would have been
lynched as agents of the American munitions patriots. For the mob, it
must be remembered, infallibly inclines, not to the side of the soundest
logic and loftiest purpose, but to the side of the loudest noise, and
without the artificial aid of a large and complex organization of
press-agents and the power to jail any especially effective opponent
forthwith, even a President of the United States would be unable to bawl
down the whole fraternity. That it is matter of the utmost importance,
in time of war, to avoid any such internal reign of terror must be
obvious to even the most fanatical advocate of free speech. There must
be, in such emergencies, a resolute pursuit of coherent policies, and
that would be obviously impossible with the populace turning
distractedly to one bogus messiah after another, and always seeking to
force its latest craze upon the government. Thus, while one may
perchance drop a tear or two upon the Socialists jailed by a sort of
lynch law for trying to exercise their plain constitutional rights, and
upon the pacifists tarred and feathered by mobs led by government
agents, and upon the conscientious objectors starved and clubbed to
death in military dungeons, it must still be plain that such barbarous
penalties were essentially necessary. The victims, in the main, were
half-wits suffering from the martyr complex; it was their admitted
desire to sacrifice themselves for the Larger Good. This desire was
gratified--not in the way they hoped for, of course, but nevertheless in
a way that must have given any impartial observer a feeling of profound,
if discreditable, satisfaction.
What a republic has to fear especially is the rabble-rouser who
advocates giving an objective reality to the gaudy theories which lie at
the foundations of the prevailing scheme of government. He is far more
dangerous than a genuine revolutionist, for the latter comes with ideas
that are actually new, or, at all events, new to the mob, and so he has
to overcome its congenital hostility to novelty. But the reformer who,
under a democracy, bases his case upon the principles upon which
democracy is founded has an easy road, for the populace is familiar
with those principles and eager to see them put into practical effect.
The late Cecil Chesterton, in his penetrating "History of the United
States," showed how Andrew Jackson came to power by that route. Jackson,
he said, was simply a man so naive that he accepted the lofty doctrines
of the Declaration of Independence without any critical questioning
whatever, and "really acted as if they were true." The appearance of
such a man, he goes on, was "appalling" to the political aristocrats of
1825. They themselves, of course, enunciated those doctrines daily and
based their whole politics upon them--but not to the point of really
executing them. So when Jackson came down from the mountains with the
same sonorous words upon his lips, but with the addition of a solemn
promise to carry them out--when he thus descended upon them, he stole
their thunder and spiked their guns, and after a brief struggle
he had disposed of them. The Socialists, free-speech fanatics,
anti-conscriptionists, anti-militarists and other such democratic
maximalists of 1917 and 1918 were, in essence, nothing but a new and
formidable horde of Jacksons. Their case rested upon principles held to
be true by all good Americans, and constantly reaffirmed by the highest
officers of state. It was thus extremely likely that, if they were
permitted to woo the public ear, they would quickly amass a majority of
suffrages, and so get the conduct of things into their own hands. So it
became necessary, in order that the great enterprises then under way
might be pushed to a successful issue, that all these marplots be
silenced, and it was accordingly done. This proceeding, of course, was
theoretically violative of their common rights, and hence theoretically
un-American. All the theory, in fact, was on the side of the victims.
But war time is no time for theories, and a man with war powers in his
hands is not one to parley with them.
As we have said, the menace presented by such unintelligent literalists
is probably a good deal more dangerous to a democracy than to a
government of any other form. Under an aristocracy, for example, such as
prevailed, in one form or another, in England, Germany, Italy and France
before the war, it is possible to give doctrinaires a relatively free
rein, for even if they succeed in converting the mob to their whim-wham,
there remain insuperable impediments to its adoption and execution as
law. In England, as every one knows, the impediment was a ruling caste
highly skilled in the governmental function and generally trusted by a
majority of the populace--a ruling caste firmly intrenched in the House
of Lords and scarcely less powerful in the House of Commons. In France
it was a bureaucracy so securely protected by law and custom that
nothing short of a political cataclysm could shake it. In Germany and
Italy it was an aristocracy buttressed by laws cunningly designed to
nullify the numerical superiority of the mob, and by a monarchical
theory that set up a heavy counterweight to public opinion.
In the face of such adroit checks and balances it is a matter of
relative indifference whether the mob blows scalding hot or freezing
cold. Whatever the extravagance of its crazes, there remains effective
machinery for holding them in check until they spend themselves, which
is usually soon enough. Thus the English government, though
theoretically as much opposed to anarchists as the American government,
gave them cheerful asylum before the war and permitted them to preach
their lamentable notions almost without check, whereas in America they
early aroused great fears and were presently put under such
disabilities that their propaganda became almost impossible. Even in
France, where they had many converts and were frequently in eruption,
there was far more hospitality in the Germany of Bismarck's day, the
Socialists, after a brief and aberrant attempt to suppress them, were
allowed to run free, despite the fact that their doctrine was quite as
abhorrent to German official doctrine as anarchism was to American
official doctrine. The German ruling caste of those days was sheltered
behind laws and customs which enabled it to pull the teeth of Socialism,
even in the face of enormous Socialist majorities. But under a democracy
it is difficult, and often downright impossible, to oppose the popular
craze of the moment with any effect, and so there must be artificial
means of disciplining the jake-fetchers who seek to set such enthusiasms
in motion. The shivering fear of Bolshevism, visible of late among the
capitalists of America, is based upon a real danger. These capitalists
have passed through the burning fires of Rooseveltian trust-busting and
Bryanistic populism, and they know very well that half a dozen Lenines
and Trotskis, turned loose upon the plain people, would quickly recruit
a majority of them for a holy war upon capital, and that they have the
political power to make such a holy war devastating.
The amateur of popular psychology may wonder why it is that the mob, in
the face of the repressions constantly practised in the United States,
does not occasionally rise in revolt, and so get back its right to be
wooed and ravished by all sorts of mountebanks. Theoretically it has
that right, and what is more, it has the means of regaining it; nothing
could resist it if it made absolute free speech an issue in a national
campaign and voted for the candidate advocating it. But something is
overlooked here, and that is the fact that the mob has no liking for
free speech _per se_. Some of the grounds of its animosity we have
rehearsed. Others are not far to seek. One of them lies in the mob's
chronic suspicion of all advocates of ideas, born of its distaste for
ideas themselves. The mob-man cannot imagine himself throwing up his job
and deserting his home, his lodge and his speakeasy to carry a new
gospel to his fellows, and so he is inclined to examine the motives of
any other man who does so. The one motive that is intelligible to him is
the desire for profit, and he commonly concludes at once that this is
what moves the propagandist before him. His reasoning is defective, but
his conclusion is usually not far from wrong. In point of fact, idealism
is not a passion in America, but a trade; all the salient idealists make
a living at it, and some of them, for example, Dr. Bryan and the Rev.
Dr. Sunday, are commonly believed to have amassed large fortunes. For an
American to advocate a cause without any hope of private usufruct is
almost unheard of; it would be difficult to find such a man who was not
plainly insane. The most eloquent and impassioned of American idealists
are candidates for public office; on the lower levels idealism is no
more than a hand-maiden of business, like advertising or belonging to
the Men and Religion Forward Movement.
Another and very important cause of the proletarian's failure to whoop
for free speech is to be found in his barbarous delight in persecution,
regardless of the merits of the cause. The spectacle of a man exercising
the right of free speech yields, intrinsically, no joy, for there is
seldom anything dramatic about it. But the spectacle of a man being
mobbed, jailed, beaten and perhaps murdered for trying to exercise it is
a good show like any other good show, and the populace is thus not only
eager to witness it but even willing to help it along. It is therefore
quite easy to set the mob upon, say, the Bolsheviki, despite the fact
that the Bolsheviki have the professed aim of doing the mob an
incomparable service. During the late high jinks of the Postoffice and
the Department of Justice, popular opinion was always on the side of the
raiding parties. It applauded every descent upon a Socialist or pacifist
meeting, not because it was very hotly in favour of war--in fact, it was
lukewarm about war, and resisted all efforts to heat it up until
overwhelming swarms of yokel-yankers were turned upon it--but because it
was in favour of a safe and stimulating form of rough-house, with the
police helping instead of hindering. It never stopped to inquire about
the merits of the matter. All it asked for was a melodramatic raid,
followed by a noisy trial of the accused in the newspapers, and the
daily publication of sensational (and usually bogus) evidence about the
discovery of compromising literature in his wife's stockings, including
records of his receipt of $100,000 from von Bernstorff, Carranza or some
other transient hobgoblin. The celebrated O'Leary trial was typical.
After months of blood-curdling charges in the press, it turned out when
the accused got before a court that the evidence against him, on which
it was sought to convict him of a capital offence, was so feeble that it
would have scarcely sufficed to convict him of an ordinary misdemeanor,
and that most of this feeble testimony was palpably perjured.
Nevertheless, public opinion was nearly unanimously against him from
first to last, and the jury which acquitted him was almost apologetic
about its inability to give the populace the crowning happiness of a
state hanging.
Under cover of the war, of course, the business of providing such shows
prospered extraordinarily, but it is very active even in time of peace.
The surest way to get on in politics in America is to play the leading
part in a prosecution which attracts public notice. The list of
statesmen who have risen in that fashion includes the names of many of
the highest dignity, _e.g._, Hughes, Folk, Whitman, Heney, Baker and
Palmer. Every district attorney in America prays nightly that God will
deliver into his hands some Thaw, or Becker, or O'Leary, that he may get
upon the front pages and so become a governor, a United States senator,
or a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. The late
crusade against W. R. Hearst, which appeared to the public as a great
patriotic movement, was actually chiefly managed by a subordinate
prosecuting officer who hoped to get high office out of it.