convinced, has been due, not so much to their merits but to their
defects--and especially to their high capacity for being alarmed and
their aversion to what may be called romance--in other words, to their
harshly practical minds, their disdain of intellectual enterprise,
their dull common sense. They have saved their hides and their money
while better sportsmen were taking chances. But the bitter must go
with the sweet. Such qualities belong to _Lumbricus terrestris_ rather
than to _Homo sapiens_. They may be valuable, but they are not pretty.
Today, at the height of his triumph in the world, the Anglo-Saxon
somehow looks shabby--England trembling before one-legged and bankrupt
France, the United States engaged in a grotesque _pogrom_ against the
wop, the coon, the kike, the papist, the Jap, the what-not--worse,
engaged in an even more grotesque effort to put down ideas as well as
men--to repeal learning by statute, regiment the arts by lynch-law,
and give the puerile ethical and theological notions of lonely farmers
and corner grocers the force and dignity of constitutional axioms. As
I stand on the side-lines, observing the show, I find it very hard to
admire. But, save when ethyl alcohol in dilute aqueous solution has
dulled my native pity, I find it even harder to laugh.
II. THE HUSBANDMAN
A reader for years of the _Congressional Record_, I have encountered
in its dense and pregnant columns denunciations of almost every human
act or idea that is imaginable to political pathology, from adultery
to Zionism, and of all classes of men whose crimes the legislative
mind can grasp, from atheists to Zoroastrians, but never once, so
far as I can recall, has that great journal shown the slightest
insolence, direct or indirect, to the humble husbandman, the lonely
companion of _Bos taurus_, the sweating and persecuted farmer. He is,
on the contrary, the pet above all other pets, the enchantment and
delight, the saint and archangel of all the unearthly Sganarelles
and Scaramouches who roar in the two houses of Congress. He is more
to them, day in and day out, than whole herds of Honest Workingmen,
Gallant Jack Tars and Heroic Miners; he is more, even, than a platoon
of Unknown Soldiers. There are days when one or another of these totems
of the statesman is bathed with such devotion that it would make the
Gracchi blush, but there is never a day that the farmer, too, doesn’t
get his share, and there is many a day when he gets ten times his
share--when, indeed, he is completely submerged in rhetorical vaseline,
so that it is hard to tell which end of him is made in the image of God
and which is mere hoof. No session ever begins without a grand assault
at all arms upon his hereditary foes, from the boll-weevil and the San
José scale to Wall Street and the Interstate Commerce Commission. And
no session comes to an end without a huge grist of new laws to save
him from them--laws embodying the most subtle statecraft of the most
daring and ingenious body of lawmakers ever assembled under one roof
on the habitable globe. One might almost argue that the chief, and
perhaps even only aim of legislation in These States is to succor and
secure the farmer. If, while the bombs of goose-grease and rockets of
pomade are going off in the two Chambers, certain evil men meet in the
basement and hook _banderillas_ into him--say, by inserting jokers into
the chemical schedule of a new tariff bill, or by getting the long-haul
rules changed, or by manipulating the loans of the Federal Reserve
Banks,--then the crime is not against him alone; it is against the
whole American people, the common decency of Christendom, and the Holy
Ghost. Horn a farmer, and you stand in contumacy to the platforms of
all known parties, to the devout faith of all known statesmen, and to
God. _Laborantem agricolam oportet primum de fructibus percipere._
Paul wrote to the Bishop of Ephesus, at the latest, in the year 65
A. D.; the doctrine that I have thus ascribed to the Mesmers
and Grimaldis of our politics is therefore not a novelty of their
contrivance. Nor is it, indeed, their monopoly, for it seems to be
shared by all Americans who are articulate and devote themselves to
political metaphysics and good works. The farmer is praised by all who
mention him at all, from archbishops to zoölogists, day in and day
out. He is praised for his industry, his frugality, his patriotism,
his altruistic passion. He is praised for staying on the farm, for
laboriously wringing our bread and meat from the reluctant soil, for
renouncing Babylon to guard the horned cattle on the hills. He is
praised for his patient fidelity to the oldest of learned professions,
and the most honorable, and the most necessary to all of us. He takes
on, in political speeches and newspaper editorials, a sort of mystical
character. He is no longer a mundane laborer, scratching for the
dollar, full of staphylococci, smelling heavily of sweat and dung; he
is a high priest in a rustic temple, pouring out his heart’s blood upon
the altar of Ceres. The farmer, thus depicted, grows heroic, lyrical,
pathetic, affecting. To murmur against him becomes a sort of sacrilege,
like murmuring against the Constitution, Human Freedom, the Cause of
Democracy.... Nevertheless, being already doomed, I herewith and hereby
presume to do it. More, my murmur is scored in the manner of Berlioz,
for ten thousand trombones _fortissimo_, with harsh, cacophonous chords
for bombardons and ophicleides in the bass clef. Let the farmer, so far
as I am concerned, be damned forevermore! To hell with him, and bad
luck to him! He is, unless I err, no hero at all, and no priest, and no
altruist, but simply a tedious fraud and ignoramus, a cheap rogue and
hypocrite, the eternal Jack of the human pack. He deserves all that he
suffers under our economic system, and more. Any city man, not insane,
who sheds tears for him is shedding tears of the crocodile.
No more grasping, selfish and dishonest mammal, indeed, is known to
students of the Anthropoidea. When the going is good for him he robs
the rest of us up to the extreme limit of our endurance; when the going
is bad he comes bawling for help out of the public till. Has anyone
ever heard of a farmer making any sacrifice of his own interests,
however slight, to the common good? Has anyone ever heard of a farmer
practising or advocating any political idea that was not absolutely
self-seeking--that was not, in fact, deliberately designed to loot the
rest of us to his gain? Greenbackism, free silver, government guarantee
of prices, all the complex fiscal imbecilities of the cow State John
Baptists--these are the contributions of the virtuous husbandmen to
American political theory. There has never been a time, in good seasons
or bad, when his hands were not itching for more; there has never
been a time when he was not ready to support any charlatan, however
grotesque, who promised to get it for him. Why, indeed, are politicians
so polite to him--before election, so romantically amorous? For the
plain and simple reason that only one issue ever interests or fetches
him, and that is the issue of his own profit. He must be promised
something definite and valuable, to be paid to him alone, or he is off
after some other mountebank. He simply cannot imagine himself as a
citizen of a commonwealth, in duty bound to give as well as take; he
can imagine himself only as getting all and giving nothing.
Yet we are asked to venerate this prehensile moron as the _Ur_-burgher,
the citizen _par excellence_, the foundation-stone of the state! And
why? Because he produces something that all of us must have--that we
must get somehow on penalty of death. And how do we get it from him?
By submitting helplessly to his unconscionable blackmailing--by paying
him, not under any rule of reason, but in proportion to his roguery
and incompetence, and hence to the direness of our need. I doubt that
the human race, as a whole, would submit to that sort of high-jacking,
year in and year out, from any other necessary class of men. When the
American railroad workman attempted it, in 1916, there was instant
indignation; when a certain small squad of the _Polizei_ tried it, a
few years later, there was such universal horror that a politician
who denounced the crime became President of the United States. But
the farmers do it over and over again, without challenge or reprisal,
and the only thing that keeps them from reducing us, at intervals, to
actual famine is their own imbecile knavery. They are all willing and
eager to pillage us by starving us, but they can’t do it because they
can’t resist attempts to swindle each other. Recall, for example, the
case of the cotton-growers in the South. They agreed among themselves
to cut down the cotton acreage in order to inflate the price--and
instantly every party to the agreement began planting _more_ cotton in
order to profit by the abstinence of his neighbors. That abstinence
being wholly imaginary, the price of cotton fell instead of going
up--and then the entire pack of scoundrels began demanding assistance
from the national treasury--in brief, began demanding that the rest of
us indemnify them for the failure of their plot to blackmail us!
The same demand is made almost annually by the wheat farmers of the
Middle West. It is the theory of the zanies who perform at Washington
that a grower of wheat devotes himself to that banal art in a
philanthropic and patriotic spirit--that he plants and harvests his
crop in order that the folks of the cities may not go without bread.
It is the plain fact that he raises wheat because it takes less labor
than any other crop--because it enables him, after working sixty days
a year, to loaf the rest of the twelve months. If wheat-raising could
be taken out of the hands of such lazy _fellahin_ and organized as the
production of iron or cement is organized, the price might be reduced
by a half, and still leave a large profit for _entrepreneurs_. It
vacillates dangerously today, not because speculators manipulate it,
but because the crop is irregular and undependable--that is to say,
because those who make it are incompetent. The worst speculators, as
everyone knows, are the farmers themselves. They hold their wheat
as long as they can, borrowing our money from the country banks and
hoping prayerfully for a rise. If it goes up, then we pay them an extra
and unearned profit. If it goes down, then they demand legislation
to prevent it going down next time. Sixty days a year they work; the
rest of the time they gamble with our bellies. It is probably the
safest gambling ever heard of. Now and then, true enough, a yokel who
plunges too heavily comes to grief, and is ingested by the county-town
mortgage-shark; now and then a whole county, or State or even larger
area goes bankrupt, and the financial dominoes begin falling down all
along the line from Saleratus Center to New York. But such catastrophes
are rare, and they leave no scars. When a speculator goes broke in Wall
Street it is a scandalous matter, and if he happens to have rooked
anybody of importance he is railroaded to jail. But when a speculator
goes broke in the great open spaces, there is a great rush of political
leucocytes to the scene, and presently it is made known that the sin
was not the speculator’s at all, but his projected victims’, and that
it is the prime duty of the latter, by lawful order upon the Treasurer
of the United States, to reimburse him his losses and set him up for a
new trial.
The notion that wheat would be much cheaper and the supply far more
dependable if it were grown, not by a motley horde of such puerile
loafers and gamblers, but by competent men intelligently organized is
not mine; I borrow it from Henry Ford, a busted seer. Since he betrayed
them to Dr. Coolidge for a mess of pottage, the poor Liberals, once
so enamored of his sagacity, denounce Ford as an idiot and a villain;
nevertheless, the fact remains that his discussion of the wastefulness
of our present system of wheat-growing, in the autobiography which
he didn’t write, is full of a powerful plausibility. Ford was born
and brought up on a farm--and it was a farm, as farms go, that was
very competently managed. But he knows very well that even the most
competent farmer is but seldom more adept than a chimpanzee playing
the violin. The Liberals, indeed, cannot controvert his judgment; they
have been thrown back upon belaboring his political morals. What he
proposes, they argue, is simply the enslavement of the present farmer,
now so gloriously free. With capitalism gradually absorbing his fields,
he would have to go to work as a wage-slave. Well, why not? For one,
I surely offer no objection. All the rubber we use today is raised by
slave labor; so is all the morphine consumed at Hollywood. Our children
are taught in school by slaves; our newspapers are edited by slaves.
Wheat raised by slave labor would be just as nutritious as wheat
raised by men earning $10,000 a year, and a great deal cheaper. If
the business showed a good profit, the political clowns at Washington
would launch schemes to confiscate it, as they now launch schemes to
make good the losses of the farmers. In any case, why bother about the
fate of the farmer? If wheat went to $10 a bushel tomorrow, and all
the workmen of the cities became slaves in name as well as in fact, no
farmer in this grand land of freedom would consent voluntarily to a
reduction of as much as ¹⁄₈ of a cent a bushel. “The greatest wolves,”
says E. W. Howe, another graduate of the farm, “are the farmers who
bring produce to town to sell.” Wolves? Let us not insult _Canis
lupus_. I move the substitution of _Hyæna hyæna_.
Meanwhile, how much truth is in the common theory that the husbandman
is harassed and looted by our economic system, that the men of the
cities prey upon him--specifically, that he is the chronic victim
of such devices as the tariff, railroad regulation, and the banking
system? So far as I can make out, there is none whatever. The net
effect of our present banking system, as I have already said, is that
the money accumulated by the cities is used to finance the farmers, and
that they employ it to blackmail the cities. As for the tariff, is it a
fact that it damages the farmer, or benefits him? Let us turn for light
to the worst Tariff Act ever heard of in human history: that of 1922.
It put a duty of 30 cents a bushel on wheat, and so barred out Canadian
wheat, and gave the American farmer a vast and unfair advantage. For
months running the difference in the price of wheat on the two sides
of the American-Canadian border--wheat raised on farms not a mile
apart--ran from 25 to 30 cents a bushel. Danish butter was barred out
by a duty of 8 cents a pound--and the American farmer pocketed the 8
cents. Potatoes carried a duty of 50 cents a hundredweight--and the
potato growers of Maine, eager, as the phrase has it, to mop up, raised
such an enormous crop that the market was glutted, and they went
bankrupt, and began bawling for government aid. High duties were put,
too, upon meats, upon cheese, upon wool--in brief, upon practically
everything that the farmer produced. But his profits were taken from
him by even higher duties upon manufactured goods, and by high freight
rates? Were they, indeed? There was, in fact, no duty at all upon many
of the things he consumed. There was no duty, for example, upon shoes.
The duty upon woolen goods gave a smaller advantage to the manufacturer
than the duty on wool gave to the farmer. So with the duty on cotton
goods. Automobiles were cheaper in the United States than anywhere else
on earth. So were all agricultural implements. So were groceries. So
were fertilizers.
But here I come to the brink of an abyss of statistics, and had better
haul up. The enlightened reader is invited to investigate them for
himself; they will bring him, I believe, some surprises, particularly
if he has been reading the _Congressional Record_ and accepting it
gravely. They by no means exhaust the case against the consecrated
husbandman. I have said that the only political idea he can grasp is
one which promises him a direct profit. It is, alas, not quite true: he
can also grasp one which has the sole effect of annoying and damaging
his enemy, the city man. The same mountebanks who get to Washington by
promising to augment his gains and make good his losses devote whatever
time is left over from that enterprise to saddling the rest of us with
oppressive and idiotic laws, all hatched on the farm. There, where
the cows low through the still night, and the jug of Peruna stands
behind the stove, and bathing begins, as at Biarritz, with the vernal
equinox--there is the reservoir of all the nonsensical legislation
which now makes the United States a buffoon among the great nations.
It was among country Methodists, practitioners of a theology degraded
almost to the level of voodooism, that Prohibition was invented, and it
was by country Methodists, nine-tenths of them actual followers of the
plow, that it was fastened upon the rest of us, to the damage of our
bank accounts, our dignity and our ease. What lies under it, and under
all the other crazy enactments of its category, is no more and no less
than the yokel’s congenital and incurable hatred of the city man--his
simian rage against everyone who, as he sees it, is having a better
time than he is.
That this malice is at the bottom of Prohibition, and not any
altruistic yearning to put down the evils of drink, is shown clearly
by the fact that most of the State enforcement acts--and even the
Volstead Act, as it is interpreted at Washington--permit the farmer
himself to make cider as in the past, and that every effort to deprive
him of that astounding immunity has met with the opposition of his
representatives. In other words, the thing he is against is not the
use of alcohol _per se_, but simply the use of alcohol in its more
charming and romantic forms. Prohibition, as everyone knows, has not
materially diminished the consumption of alcohol in the cities, but
it has obviously forced the city man to drink decoctions that he
would have spurned in the old days--that is, it has forced him to
drink such dreadful stuff as the farmer has always drunk. The farmer
is thus content with it: it brings his enemy down to his own level.
The same animus is visible in innumerable other moral statutes, all
ardently supported by the peasantry. For example, the Mann Act. The
aim of this amazing law, of course, is not to put down adultery;
it is simply to put down that variety of adultery which is most
agreeable. What got it upon the books was simply the constant gabble
in the rural newspapers about the byzantine debaucheries of urban
Antinomians--rich stockbrokers who frequented Atlantic City from
Friday to Monday, vaudeville actors who traveled about the country
with beautiful mistresses, and so on. Such aphrodisiacal tales, read
beside the kitchen-stove by hinds condemned to monogamous misery with
stupid, unclean and ill-natured wives, naturally aroused in them a vast
detestation of errant cockneys, and this detestation eventually rolled
up enough force to attract the attention of the quacks who make laws
at Washington. The result was the Mann Act. Since then a number of the
cow States have passed Mann Acts of their own, usually forbidding the
use of automobiles “for immoral purposes.” But there is nowhere a law
forbidding the use of barns, cow-stables, hay-ricks and other such
familiar rustic ateliers of sin. That is to say, there is nowhere a law
forbidding yokels to drag virgins into infamy by the technic practised
since Tertiary times on the farms; there are only laws forbidding city
youths to do it according to the technic of the great municipalities.
Here we come to the limits of bucolic moral endeavor. It never
prohibits acts that are common on the farms; it only prohibits
acts that are common in the cities. In many of the Middle Western
States there are statutes forbidding the smoking of cigarettes, for
cigarette-smoking, to the louts of those wastes, bears the aspect of a
citified and levantine vice, and if they attempted it themselves they
would be derided by their fellows and perhaps divorced by their wives,
just as they would be derided and divorced if they bathed every day,
or dressed for dinner, or attempted to play the piano. But chewing
tobacco, whether in public or in private, is nowhere forbidden by law,
for the plain reason that nine-tenths of all husbandmen practise it, as
they practise the drinking of raw corn liquor. The act not only lies
within their tastes; it also lies within their means, and hence within
their _mores_. As a consequence the inhabitants of the towns in those
remote marches are free to chew tobacco all they please, even at divine
service, but are clapped into jail the instant they light cigarettes.
The same consideration gets into comstockery, which is chiefly
supported, like Prohibition, by farmers and chiefly aimed at city
men. The Comstock Act is very seldom invoked against newspapers, for
the matter printed in newspapers lies within the comprehension of the
peasantry, and hence within their sphere of enjoyment. Nor is it often
invoked against cheap books of a frankly pornographic character--such
things as “Night Life in Chicago,” “Adventures on a Pullman Sleeper”
and “The Confessions of an ex-Nun”--for when yokels read at all, it
is commonly such garbage that they prefer. But they are hot against
the infinitely less gross naughtiness of serious books, including
the so-called classics, for these books they simply cannot read. In
consequence the force of comstockery is chiefly directed against such
literature. For one actually vile book that it suppresses it attempts
to suppress at least a dozen good ones.
Now the pious husbandman shows signs of an itch to proceed further. Not
content with assaulting us with his degraded and abominable ethics,
he begins trying to force upon us his still worse theology. On the
steppes Methodism has got itself all the estate and dignity of a State
religion; it becomes a criminal offense to teach any doctrine in
contempt of it. No civilized man, to be sure, is yet actually in jail
for the crime; civilized men simply keep out of such bleak parking
spaces for human Fords, as they keep out of Congress and Franz Josef
Land. But the long arm of the Wesleyan revelation now begins to stretch
forth toward Nineveh. The mountebank, Bryan, after years of preying
upon the rustics on the promise that he would show them how to loot
the cities by wholesale and _à outrance_, now reverses his collar and
proposes to lead them in a _jehad_ against what remains of American
intelligence, already beleagured in a few walled towns. We are not only
to abandon the social customs of civilization at the behest of a rabble
of peasants who sleep in their underclothes; we are now to give up
all the basic ideas of civilization and adopt the gross superstitions
of the same mob. Is this fanciful? Is the menace remote, and to be
disregarded? My apologies for suggesting that perhaps you are one of
the multitude who thought that way about Prohibition, and only half
a dozen years ago. Bryan is a protean harlequin, and more favored by
God than is commonly assumed. He lost with free silver but he won with
Prohibition. The chances, if my mathematics do not fail, are thus 1 to
1 that he will win, if he keeps his health, with Fundamentalism--in
his own phrase, that God will be put into the Constitution. If he does,
then _Eoanthrophus_ will triumph finally over _Homo sapiens_. If he
does, then the humble swineherd will drive us all into his pen.