II.

Transplanted institutions grow but slowly; and civilization can not be

put into a ship and carried across an ocean. The history of this country

is a sequence of illustrations of these truths. It was settled by

civilized men and women from civilized countries, yet after two and a

half centuries with unbroken communication with the mother systems, it

is still imperfectly civilized. In learning and letters, in art and the

science of government, America is but a faint and stammering echo of

England.

For nearly all that is good in our American civilization we are indebted

to England; the errors and mischiefs are of our own creation. We have

originated little, because there is little to originate, but we have

unconsciously reproduced many of the discredited and abandoned systems

of former ages and other countries--receiving them at second hand, but

making them ours by the sheer strength and immobility of the national

belief in their newness. Newness! Why, it is not possible to make an

experiment in government, in art, in literature, in sociology, or in

morals, that has not been made over, and over, and over again. Fools

talk of clear and simple remedies for this and that evil afflicting the

commonwealth. If a proposed remedy is obvious and easily intelligible,

it is condemned in the naming, for it is morally certain to have been

tried a thousand times in the history of the world, and had it been

effective men ere now would have forgotten, from mere disuse, how to

produce the evil it cured.

There are clear and simple remedies for nothing. In medicine there

has been discovered but a single specific; in politics not one.

The interests, moral and natural, of a community in our highly

differentiated civilization are so complex, intricate, delicate and

interdependent, that you can not touch one without affecting all. It

is a familiar truth that no law was ever passed that did not have

unforeseen results; but of these results, by far the greater number are

never recognized as of its creation. The best that can be said of any

"measure" is, that the sum of its perceptible benefits seems so to

exceed the sum of its perceptible evils as to constitute a balance of

advantage. Yet the magnificent innocence of the statesman or philosopher

to whose understanding "the whole matter lies in a nutshell"--who thinks

he can formulate a practical political or social policy within the four

corners of an epigram--who fears nothing because he knows nothing--is

constantly to the fore with a simple specific for ills whose causes are

complex, constant and inscrutable. To the understanding of this creature

a difficulty well ignored is half overcome; so he buttons up his eyes

and assails the problems of life with the divine confidence of a blind

pig traversing a labyrinth.

The glories of England are our glories. She can achieve nothing that our

fathers did not help to make possible to her. The learning, the power,

the refinement of a great nation, are not the growth of a century,

but of many centuries; each generation builds upon the work of the

preceding. For untold ages our ancestors wrought to rear that "revered

pile," the civilization of England. And shall we now try to belittle the

mighty structure because other though kindred hands are laying the top

courses while we have elected to found a new tower in another land? The

American eulogist of civilization who is not proud of his heritage in

England's glory is unworthy to enjoy his lesser heritage in the lesser

glory of his own country.

The English are undoubtedly our intellectual superiors; and as the

virtues are solely the product of education--a rogue being only a dunce

considered from another point of view--they are our moral superiors

likewise. Why should they not be? It is a land not of log and pine-board

schoolhouses grudgingly erected and containing schools supported by such

niggardly tax levies as a sparse and hard-handed population will consent

to pay, but of ancient institutions splendidly endowed by the State and

by centuries of private benefaction. As a means of dispensing formulated

ignorance our boasted public school system is not without merit; it

spreads it out sufficiently thin to give everyone enough to make him a

more competent fool than he would have been without it; but to compare

it with that which is not the creature of legislation acting with malice

aforethought, but the unnoted outgrowth of ages, is to be ridiculous.

It is like comparing the laid-out town of a western prairie, its

right-angled streets, prim cottages, "built on the installment plan,"

and its wooden a-b-c shops, with the grand old town of Oxford, topped

with the clustered domes and towers of its twenty-odd great colleges;

the very names of many of whose founders have perished from human record

as have all the chronicles of the times in which they lived.

It is not alone that we have had to "subdue the wilderness;" our

educational conditions are otherwise adverse. Our political system is

unfavorable. Our fortunes, accumulated in one generation, are dispersed

in the next. If it takes three generations to make a gentleman one

will not make a thinker. Instruction is acquired, but capacity for

instruction is transmitted. The brain that is to contain a trained

intellect is not the result of a haphazard marriage between a clown and

a wench, nor does it get its tractable tissues from a hard-headed farmer

and a soft-headed milliner. If you confess the importance of race and

pedigree in a race horse and a bird dog how dare you deny it in a man?

I do not claim that the political and social system that creates an

aristocracy of leisure, and consequently of intellect, is the best

possible kind of human organization; I perceive its disadvantages

clearly enough. But I do not hold that a system under which all

important public trusts, political and professional, civil and military,

ecclesiastical and secular, are held by educated men--that is, men of

trained faculties and disciplined judgment--is not an altogether faulty

system.

It is only in our own country that an exacting literary taste is

believed to disqualify a man for purveying to the literary needs of a

taste less exacting--a proposition obviously absurd, for an exacting

taste is nothing but the intelligent discrimination of a judgment

instructed by comparison and observation. There is, in fact, no pursuit

or occupation, from that of a man who blows up a balloon to that of

the man who bores out the stove pipes, in which he that has talent and

education is not a better worker than he that has either, and he than

he that has neither. It is a universal human weakness to disparage

the knowledge that we do not ourselves possess, but it is only my own

beloved country that can justly boast herself the last refuge and asylum

of the impotents and incapables who deny the advantage of all knowledge

whatsoever. It was an American Senator (Logan) who declared that he

had devoted a couple of weeks to the study of finance, and found the

accepted authorities all wrong. It was another American Senator (Morton)

who, confronted with certain ugly facts in the history of another

country, proposed "to brush away all facts, and argue the question on

considerations of plain common sense."

Republican institutions have this disadvantage: by incessant changes in

the _personnel_ of government--to say nothing of the manner of men that

ignorant constituencies elect; and all constituencies are ignorant--we

attain to no fixed principles and standards. There is no such thing here

as a science of politics, because it is not to any one's interest to

make politics the study of his life. Nothing is settled; no truth finds

general acceptance. What we do one year we undo the next, and do over

again the year following. Our energy is wasted in, and our prosperity

suffers from, experiments endlessly repeated.

One of the disadvantages of our social system, which is the child of our

political, is the tyranny of public opinion, forbidding the utterance of

wholesome but unpalatable truth. In a republic we are so accustomed

to the rule of majorities that it seldom occurs to us to examine their

title to dominion; and as the ideas of might and right are, by our

innate sense of justice, linked together, we come to consider public

opinion infallible and almost sacred. Now, majorities rule, not because

they are right, but because they are able to rule. In event of collision

they would conquer, so it is expedient for minorities to submit

beforehand to save trouble. In fact, majorities, embracing, as they

do the most ignorant, seldom think rightly; public opinion, being the

opinion of mediocrity, is commonly a mistake and a mischief. But it is

to nobody's interest--it is against the interest of most--to dispute

with it. Public writer and public speaker alike find their account in

confirming "the plain people" in their brainless errors and brutish

prejudices--in glutting their omnivorous vanity and inflaming their

implacable racial and national hatreds.

I have long held the opinion that patriotism is one of the most

abominable vices affecting the human understanding. Every patriot in

this world believes his country better than any other country. Now, they

cannot all be the best; indeed, only one can be the best, and it follows

that the patriots of all the others have suffered themselves to

be misled by a mere sentiment into blind unreason. In its active

manifestation--it is fond of shooting--patriotism would be well enough

if it were simply defensive; but it is also aggressive, and the same

feeling that prompts us to strike for our altars and our fires impels

us likewise to go over the border to quench the fires and overturn the

altars of our neighbors. It is all very pretty and spirited, what the

poets tell us about Thermopylae, but there was as much patriotism at one

end of that pass as there was at the other. Patriotism deliberately and

with folly aforethought subordinates the interests of a whole to the

interests of a part. Worse still, the fraction so favored is determined

by an accident of birth or residence. Patriotism is like a dog which,

having entered at random one of a row of kennels, suffers more in

combats with the dogs in the other kennels than it would have done

by sleeping in the open air. The hoodlum who cuts the tail from a

Chinamen's nowl, and would cut the nowl from the body if he dared,

is simply a patriot with a logical mind, having the courage of his

opinions. Patriotism is fierce as a fever, pitiless as the grave, blind

as a stone and irrational as a headless hen.

There are two ways of clarifying liquids--ebullition and precipitation;

one forces the impurities to the surface as scum, the other sends them

to the bottom as dregs. The former is the more offensive, and that

seems to be our way; but neither is useful if the impurities are merely

separated but not removed. We are told with tiresome iteration that our

social and political systems are clarifying; but when is the skimmer to

appear? If the purpose of free institutions is good government where is

the good government?--when may it be expected to begin?--how is it to

come about? Systems of government have no sanctity; they are practical

means to a simple end--the public welfare; worthy of no respect if they

fail of its accomplishment. The tree is known by its fruit. Ours, is

bearing crab-apples.

If the body politic is constitutionally diseased, as I verily believe;

if the disorder inheres in the system; there is no remedy. The fever

must burn itself out, and then Nature will do the rest. One does not

prescribe what time alone can administer. We have put our criminal class

in power; do we suppose they will efface themselves? Will they restore

to _us_ the power of governing _them_? They must have their way and

go their length. The natural and immemorial sequence is: tyranny,

insurrection, combat. In combat everything that wears a sword has a

chance--even the right. History does not forbid us to hope. But it

forbids us to rely upon numbers; they will be against us. If history

teaches anything worth learning it teaches that the majority of mankind

is neither good nor wise. Where government is founded upon the public

conscience and the public intelligence the stability of States is a

dream. Nor have we any warrant for the Tennysonian faith that

"Freedom broadens slowly down

From precedent to precedent."

In that moment of time that is covered by historical records we have

abundant evidence that each generation has believed itself wiser and

better than any of its predecessors; that each people has believed

itself to have the secret of national perpetuity. In support of this

universal delusion there is nothing to be said; the desolate places

of the earth cry out against it. Vestiges of obliterated civilizations

cover the earth; no savage but has camped upon the sites of proud

and populous cities; no desert but has heard the statesman's boast of

national stability. Our nation, our laws, our history--all shall go down

to everlasting oblivion with the others, and by the same road. But I

submit that we are traveling it with needless haste.

But it is all right and righteous. It can be spared--this Jonah's

gourd civilization of ours. We have hardly the rudiments of a true

civilization; compared with the splendors of which we catch dim glimpses

in the fading past, ours are as an illumination of tallow candles. We

know no more than the ancients; we only know other things, but nothing

in which is an assurance of perpetuity, and little that is truly wisdom.

Our vaunted _elixir vito_ is the art of printing with moveable types.

What good will those do when posterity, struck by the inevitable

intellectual blight, shall have ceased to read what is printed? Our

libraries will become its stables, our books its fuel.

Ours is a civilization that might be heard from afar in space as

a scolding and a riot; a civilization in which the race has so

differentiated as to have no longer a community of interest and

feeling; which shows as a ripe result of the principles underlying it

a reasonless and rascally feud between rich and poor; in which one is

offered a choice (if one have the means to take it) between American

plutocracy and European militocracy, with an imminent chance of

renouncing either for a stultocratic republic with a headsman in the

presidential chair and every laundress in exile.

I have not a "solution" to the "labor problem." I have only a story.

Many and many years ago lived a man who was so good and wise that none

in all the world was so good and wise as he. He was one of those few

whose goodness and wisdom are such that after some time has passed their

fellowmen begin to think them gods and treasure their words as divine

law; and by millions they are worshiped through centuries of time.

Amongst the utterances of this man was one command--not a new nor

perfect one--which has seemed to his adorers so preeminently wise that

they have given it a name by which it is known over half the world. One

of the sovereign virtues of this famous law is its simplicity, which is

such that all hearing must understand; and obedience is so easy that any

nation refusing is unfit to exist except in the turbulence and adversity

that will surely come to it. When a people would avert want and strife,

or having them, would restore plenty and peace, this noble commandment

offers the only means--all other plans for safety or relief are as vain

as dreams, and as empty as the crooning of fools. And behold, here it

is: "All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye

even so to them."

What! you unappeasable rich, coining the sweat and blood of your workmen

into drachmas, understanding the law of supply and demand as mandatory

and justifying your cruel greed by the senseless dictum that "business

is business;" you lazy workman, railing at the capitalist by

whose desertion, when you have frightened away his capital, you

starve--rioting and shedding blood and torturing and poisoning by way

of answer to exaction and by way of exaction; you foul anarchists,

applauding with indelicate palms when one of your coward kind hurls a

bomb amongst powerless and helpless women and children; you imbecile

politicians with a plague of remedial legislation for the irremediable;

you writers and thinkers unread in history, with as many "solutions to

the labor problem" as there are dunces among you who can not coherently

define it--do you really think yourself wiser than Jesus of Nazareth? Do

you seriously suppose yourselves competent to amend his plan for dealing

with all the evils besetting states and souls? Have you the effrontery

to believe that those who spurn his Golden Rule you can bind to

obedience of an act entitled an act to amend an act? Bah! you fatigue

the spirit. Go get ye to your scoundrel lockouts, your villain strikes,

your blacklisting, your boycotting, your speech-ing, marching and

maundering; but if ye do not to others as ye would that they do to you

it shall occur, and that right soon, that ye be drowned in your own

blood and your pickpocket civilization quenched as a star that falls

into the sea.