I have declaimed not a little in my time about the ignoble trade of
politics, the collective dishonesty of parties and the vulgarities of
the self-exploiting professional office hunters. Parties are parties.
Professional politics and politicians are probably neither worse nor
better—barring their pretensions—than other lines of human endeavor.
The play actor must be agreeable on the stage of the playhouse; the
politician on the highways and the hustings, which constitute his
playhouse—all the world a stage—neither to be seriously blamed for the
dissimulation which, being an asset, becomes, as it were, a second
nature.
The men who between 1850 and 1861 might have saved the Union and
averted the War of Sections were on either side professional
politicians, with here and there an unselfish, far-seeing, patriotic
man, whose admonitions were not heeded by the people ranging on
opposing sides of party lines. The two most potential of the party
leaders were Mr. Davis and Mr. Seward. The South might have seen and
known that the one hope of the institution of slavery lay in the Union.
However it ended, disunion led to abolition. The world—the whole trend
of modern thought—was set against slavery. But politics, based on party
feeling, is a game of blindman’s buff. And then—here I show myself a
son of Scotland—there is a destiny. “What is to be,” says the
predestinarian Mother Goose, “will be, though it never come to pass.”
That was surely the logic of the irrepressible conflict—only it did
come to pass—and for four years millions of people, the most
homogeneous, practical and intelligent, fought to a finish a fight over
a quiddity; both devoted to liberty, order and law, neither seeking any
real change in the character of its organic contract.
Human nature remains ever the same. These days are very like those
days. We have had fifty years of a restored Union. The sectional fires
have quite gone out. Yet behold the schemes of revolution claiming the
regenerative. Most of them call themselves the “uplift!”
Let us agree at once that all government is more or less a failure;
society as fraudulent as the satirists describe it; yet, when we turn
to the uplift—particularly the professional uplift—what do we find but
the same old tunes, hypocrisy and empiricism posing as “friends of the
people,” preaching the pussy gospel of “sweetness and light?”
“Words, words, words,” says Hamlet. Even as veteran writers for the
press have come through disheartening experience to a realizing sense
of the futility of printer’s ink must our academic pundits begin to
suspect the futility of art and letters. Words however cleverly writ on
paper are after all but words. “In a nation of blind men,” we are told,
“the one-eyed man is king.” In a nation of undiscriminating voters the
noise of the agitator is apt to drown the voice of the statesman. We
have been teaching everybody to read, nobody to think; and as a
consequence—the rule of numbers the law of the land, partyism in the
saddle—legislation, state and Federal, becomes largely a matter of
riding to hounds and horns. All this, which was true in the fifties, is
true to-day.
Under the pretense of “liberalizing” the Government the politicians are
sacrificing its organic character to whimsical experimentation; its
checks and balances wisely designed to promote and protect liberty are
being loosened by schemes of reform more or less visionary; while
nowhere do we find intelligence enlightened by experience, and
conviction supported by self-control, interposing to save the
representative system of the Constitution from the onward march of the
proletariat.
One cynic tells us that “A statesman is a politician who is dead,” and
another cynic varies the epigram to read “A politician out of a job.”
Patriotism cries “God give us men,” but the parties say “Give us votes
and offices,” and Congress proceeds to create a commission. Thus
responsibilities are shirked and places are multiplied.
Assuming, since many do, that the life of nations is mortal even as is
the life of man—in all things of growth and decline assimilating—has
not our world reached the top of the acclivity, and pausing for a
moment may it not be about to take the downward course into another
abyss of collapse and oblivion?
The miracles of electricity the last word of science, what is left for
man to do? With wireless telegraphy, the airplane and the automobile
annihilating time and space, what else? Turning from the material to
the ethical it seems of the very nature of the human species to meddle
and muddle. On every hand we see the organization of societies for
making men and women over again according to certain fantastic images
existing in the minds of the promoters. “_Mon Dieu_!” exclaimed the
visiting Frenchman. “Fifty religions and only one soup!” Since then
both the soups and the religions have multiplied until there is scarce
a culinary or moral conception which has not some sect or club to
represent it. The uplift is the keynote of these.