organism, acts as a depressant, not as a stimulant, is now so much
a commonplace of knowledge that even the more advanced varieties
of physiologists are beginning to be aware of it. The intelligent
layman no longer resorts to the jug when he has important business
before him, whether intellectual or manual; he resorts to it after
his business is done, and he desires to release his taut nerves
and reduce the steam-pressure in his spleen. Alcohol, so to speak,
unwinds us. It raises the threshold of sensation and makes us less
sensitive to external stimuli, and particularly to those that are
unpleasant. It reduces and simplifies the emotions. Putting a brake
upon all the qualities which enable us to get on in the world and
shine before our fellows--for example, combativeness, shrewdness,
diligence, ambition,--it releases the qualities which mellow us
and make our fellows love us--for example, amiability, generosity,
toleration, humor, sympathy. A man who has taken aboard two or three
cocktails is less competent than he was before to steer a battleship
down the Ambrose Channel, or to cut off a leg, or to draw up a deed
of trust, or to conduct Bach’s B minor mass, but he is immensely more
competent to entertain a dinner party, or to admire a pretty girl,
or to _hear_ Bach’s B minor mass. The harsh, useful things of the
world, from pulling teeth to digging potatoes, are best done by men
who are as starkly sober as so many convicts in the death-house, but
the lovely and useless things, the charming and exhilarating things,
are best done by men with, as the phrase is, a few sheets in the wind.
_Pithecanthropus erectus_ was a teetotaler, but the angels, you may be
sure, know what is proper at 5 P. M.
All this is so obvious that I marvel that no utopian has ever proposed
to abolish all the sorrows of the world by the simple device of getting
and keeping the whole human race gently stewed. I do not say drunk,
remember; I say simply gently stewed--and apologize, as in duty bound,
for not knowing how to describe the state in a more seemly phrase.
The man who is in it is a man who has put all of his best qualities
into his showcase. He is not only immensely more amiable than the cold
sober man; he is immeasurably more decent. He reacts to all situations
in an expansive, generous and humane manner. He has become more
liberal, more tolerant, more kind. He is a better citizen, husband,
father, friend. The enterprises that make human life on this earth
uncomfortable and unsafe are never launched by such men. They are not
makers of wars; they do not rob and oppress anyone; they invent no such
plagues as high tariffs, 100 per cent. Americanism and Prohibition.
All the great villainies of history, from the murder of Abel to the
Treaty of Versailles, have been perpetuated by sober men, and chiefly
by teetotalers. But all the charming and beautiful things, from the
Song of Songs to terrapin _à la_ Maryland, and from the nine Beethoven
symphonies to the Martini cocktail, have been given to humanity by men
who, when the hour came, turned from well water to something with color
to it, and more in it than mere oxygen and hydrogen.
I am well aware, of course, that getting the whole human race stewed
and keeping it stewed, year in and year out, would present formidable
technical difficulties. It would be hard to make the daily dose of
each individual conform exactly to his private needs, and hard to get
it to him at precisely the right time. On the one hand there would be
the constant danger that large minorities might occasionally become
cold sober, and so start wars, theological disputes, moral reforms, and
other such unpleasantnesses. On the other hand, there would be danger
that other minorities might proceed to actual intoxication, and so
annoy us all with their fatuous bawling or maudlin tears. But such
technical obstacles, of course, are by no means insurmountable. Perhaps
they might be got around by abandoning the administration of alcohol
_per ora_ and distributing it instead by impregnating the air with it.
I throw out the suggestion, and pass on. Such questions are for men
skilled in therapeutics, government and business efficiency. They exist
today and their enterprises often show a high ingenuity, but, being
chiefly sober, they devote too much of their time to harassing the rest
of us. Half-stewed, they would be ten times as humane, and perhaps at
least half as efficient. Thousands of them, relieved of their present
anti-social duties, would be idle, and eager for occupation. I trust
to them in this small matter. If they didn’t succeed completely, they
would at least succeed partially.
The objection remains that even small doses of alcohol, if each
followed upon the heels of its predecessor before the effects of the
latter had worn off, would have a deleterious effect upon the physical
health of the race--that the death-rate would increase, and whole
categories of human beings would be exterminated. The answer here is
that what I propose is not lengthening the span of life, but augmenting
its joys. Suppose we assume that its duration is reduced 20 per cent.
My reply is that its delights will be increased at least 100 per
cent. Misled by statisticians, we fall only too often into the error
of worshiping mere figures. To say that A will live to be eighty and B
will die at forty is certainly not to argue plausibly that A is more
to be envied than B. A, in point of fact, may have to spend all of his
eighty years in Kansas or Arkansas, with nothing to eat save corn and
hog-meat and nothing to drink save polluted river water, whereas B
may put in his twenty years of discretion upon the Côte d’Azure, _wie
Gott im Frankreich_. It is my contention that the world I picture,
even assuming the average duration of human life to be cut down 50 per
cent., would be an infinitely happier and more charming world than that
we live in today--that no intelligent human being, having once tasted
its peace and joy, would go back voluntarily to the harsh brutalities
and stupidities that we now suffer, and idiotically strive to prolong.
If intelligent Americans, in these depressing days, still cling to
life and try to stretch it out longer and longer, it is surely not
logically, but only atavistically. It is the primeval brute in them
that hangs on, not the man. The man knows only too well that ten years
in a genuinely civilized and happy country would be infinitely better
than a geological epoch under the curses he must face and endure every
day.
Moreover, there is no need to admit that the moderate alcoholization
of the whole race would materially reduce the duration of life. A
great many of us are moderately alcoholized already, and yet manage
to survive quite as long as the blue-noses. As for the blue-noses
themselves, who would repine if breathing alcohol-laden air brought
them down with delirium tremens and so sterilized and exterminated
them? The advantage to the race in general would be obvious and
incalculable. All the worst strains--which now not only persist, but
even prosper--would be stamped out in a few generations, and so the
average human being would move appreciably away from, say, the norm
of a Baptist clergyman in Georgia and toward the norm of Shakespeare,
Mozart and Goethe. It would take aeons, of course, to go all the way,
but there would be progress with every generation, slow but sure.
Today, it must be manifest, we make no progress at all; instead we
slip steadily backward. That the average civilized man of today is
inferior to the average civilized man of two or three generations ago
is too plain to need arguing. He has less enterprise and courage; he
is less resourceful and various; he is more like a rabbit and less
like a lion. Harsh oppressions have made him what he is. He is the
victim of tyrants.... Well, no man with two or three cocktails in him
is a tyrant. He may be foolish, but he is not cruel. He may be noisy,
but he is also genial, tolerant, generous and kind. My proposal
would restore Christianity to the world. It would rescue mankind from
moralists, pedants and brutes.
X. ESSAY IN CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM
I
One of the defects in the American system of government, if so superb a
confection of the human mind and heart may be said, without indecency,
to have any defects at all, lies in the fact that it fails to provide
swift and condign punishment for the special crimes of public
officials. Even when their wrong-doings take the form of offenses
against the ordinary criminal statutes of the realm--as, for example,
embezzlement, conversion, blackmail, armed entry, kidnaping or common
assault--it seems to be very difficult to bring them under the lash
of justice; they enjoy, as it were, an unwritten immunity to criminal
process, running with the constitutional immunity of United States
Senators, who cannot be taken by the _gendarmerie_, even for adultery
or bootlegging, while the Senate is in session. The thugs and perjurers
of the so-called Department of Justice, during the reign of the Martyr
Wilson, committed nearly all the crimes of fraud and violence on the
books, and yet, so far as I know, not one of them was ever punished,
or, indeed, so much as prosecuted. Several Federal district attorneys,
toward the end of that festival of oppression and worse, protested
against it publicly, and there were bitter yells from specialists in
human liberty and from the relatives, lodge-brothers and creditors of
some of the victims, but no Federal grand jury indicted any of the
criminals, and no Federal judge condemned them to the hulks. To this
day, if my agents are to be believed, the same thing is going on,
though perhaps on a more modest scale. Prohibition enforcement officers
in all parts of the country are breaking into houses without warrants,
destroying property without due process of law, engaging in blackmail
in a wholesale manner, and assaulting and murdering citizens almost at
their will, and yet one seldom hears of them going to jail for it, and
I know of none who has been hanged.
When it comes to crimes that are peculiar to public officials and
that arise out of the nature of their legal status, as bigamy and
wife-beating arise out of the nature of a married man’s, the case is
even worse. I allude here to such special offenses as dissipating the
public funds, loading the public rolls with useless and pediculous
job-holders, letting contracts and franchises to political and private
friends, converting public property to private uses, condoning crimes
against the government, and administering the laws in a partial and
dishonest manner--all of them impossible to the mere citizen and
taxpayer, as default in alimony is impossible to the bachelor. Here the
ordinary criminal statutes are obviously ineffective, and of special
statutes there are almost none. What was the late Mr. Fall guilty
of? His accusers, it appears, had to fall back upon the vague charge
of conspiracy, which was not unlike accusing a burglar of trespass.
With the general run of official delinquents it is impossible to go
even so far. Their crimes have no names, and no adequate punishments.
Certain high dignitaries, when taken in gross malfeasances, may be
impeached, and most lesser ones, though not all, may be cashiered.
But neither punishment is harsh enough to be a deterrent, and neither
is swift and sure. Since the first days of the Republic but eight
Federal job-holders have been brought before the bar of the Senate on
impeachment by the House of Representatives, and of these but two have
been found guilty and removed from office. Both of the latter were
judges; one was convicted of drunkenness on the bench and the other of
corrupt dealings with litigants. Is it argued seriously by anyone that,
during all those years, but two Federal judges have been guilty of such
offenses? Is it argued, indeed, that the bench is wholly guiltless of
them, and of all other crimes, today?
Many of the sitting Federal judges, as a matter of fact, are obviously
unfit for the duties they have to perform. Some of them owe their jobs
to litigants who are habitually before them, and others are admittedly
beholden to such corrupt agencies as the Anti-Saloon League. Is it
maintained that such dubious fellows make competent and respectable
judges, or that the clumsy and enormously costly process of impeachment
offers a practicable means of dealing with their frequent and flagrant
peccadillos? Plainly not. Even when their obscenities upon the bench
become publicly scandalous they are protected by the fact that
impeachment is essentially a political, not a judicial process, and
that in consequence it is excessively slow and uncertain--in other
words, by the fact that it lacks the very characters which legal
punishment fundamentally needs. It is, as a matter of practise, almost
as safe for a Federal judge to take care of his fellow-golfers and
scofflaws as it is for a Prohibition officer to blackmail a bootlegger
or for an agent of the Department of Justice to manufacture perjury
against so-called Reds. If he belongs to the party in control of
Congress he cannot be impeached for any crime short of highway robbery
or piracy on the high seas, and even if he belongs to the minority
party the citizen who complains of him must be extremely influential
to be heard at all, and extremely rich to meet the heavy costs of
prosecuting him. In brief, the remedy against him that is offered by
the Constitution and the laws is, in substance, no remedy at all. No
matter how grossly he violates his oath and the decencies, he commonly
remains upon the bench until some grateful litigant or syndicate of
litigants offers him a better job.
Moreover, it must be plain that the punishment of impeachment and
removal from office, or of removal by executive order, without
impeachment, is usually grossly inadequate. When job-holders become
so unbearably corrupt or incompetent that they are actually separated
from their jobs, they commonly deserve hanging, or, at least, long
confinement in the hoosegow. Simply to turn them out, leaving them free
to aspire to other offices, is as absurd as it would be to limit a
burglar’s punishment to kicking him out of the house. The case of the
late Denby, Secretary of the Navy, is in point. I have no opinion as to
the guilt or innocence of the gentleman; I merely recall the fact that
he was accused of the very grave offense of dissipating the national
property and imperilling the national defense. It would be difficult to
imagine anything more flagrantly anti-social, more thoroughly vicious,
more damaging to the common weal; put beside it, such ordinary crimes
as arson and larceny seemed relatively harmless. Nevertheless, the
worst punishment that could be inflicted upon Denby was the banal
one of depriving him of his office. It was impossible, for political
reasons, to impeach him or even to attempt to impeach him, and he was
simply turned out, with a file of high naval dignitaries saluting him
as he left and a great crowd cheering him as he got home. Here cause
and effect took on a disproportion that was truly colossal; it was
almost as if Czolgosz had been fined $10 for dispatching McKinley.
If Denby was innocent, he deserved the salute and the cheers without
the loss of his job. And if he was guilty, if only of negligence, he
plainly merited at least a geological epoch on Devil’s Island.
2
In the effete monarchies of the continent of Europe, now happily
abolished by God’s will, there was, in the old days of sin, a far more
intelligent and effective way of dealing with delinquent officials.
Not only were they subject, when taken in downright corruption, to the
ordinary processes of the criminal laws; in addition, they were liable
to prosecution in special courts for such offenses as were peculiar
to their offices. In this business the abominable Prussian state,
though founded by Satan, took the lead. It maintained a tribunal in
Berlin that devoted itself wholly to the trial of officials accused of
malfeasance, corruption, tyranny and incompetence, and any citizen
was free to lodge a complaint with the learned judges. The trial was
public and in accordance with rules fixed by law. An official found
guilty could be punished summarily and in a dozen different ways. He
could be reprimanded, reduced in rank, suspended from office for a
definite period, transferred to a less desirable job, removed from
the rolls altogether, fined, or sent to jail. If he was removed from
office he could be deprived of his right to a pension in addition,
or fined or jailed in addition. He could be made to pay damages to
any citizen he had injured, or to apologize publicly. All this,
remember, was in addition to his liability under the ordinary law,
and the statutes specifically provided that he could be punished
twice for the same offense, once in the ordinary courts and once in
the administrative court. Thus, a Prussian official who, imitating
the daily routine of the agents of our own Treasury or Department of
Justice, assaulted a citizen, invaded his house without a warrant, and
seized his property without process of law, could be deprived of his
office and fined heavily by the administrative court, sent to jail by
an ordinary court, and forced to pay damages to his victim by either
or both. Our Federal judges, as a matter of everyday practise, issue
thousands of injunctions depriving citizens of their clear right to
a jury trial, to the sanctity of domicile and to lawful assemblage,
all guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. Had a Prussian judge, overcome
by _kaiserliche_ passion, undertaken anything of the sort in those
far-off days of despotism, any aggrieved citizen might have haled him
before the administrative court and recovered heavy damages from him,
beside enjoying the felicity of seeing him transferred to some dismal
swamp in East Prussia, to listen all day to the unintelligible perjury
of Poles. The law specifically provided that responsible officials
should be punished, not more leniently than ordinary offenders, but
more severely. If a corrupt policeman got six months a corrupt chief of
police got two years. More, these statutes were enforced with Prussian
barbarity, and the jails were constantly full of errant officials.
I do not propose, of course, that such medieval laws be set up in
the United States. We have, indeed, gone far enough in imitating
the Prussian system already; if we go much further the moral and
enlightened nations of the world will have to unite in a new crusade
to put us down. Hints to that effect are not lacking even now; they
are heard in England every time the Department of State revives the
question of the Bahaman rum trade, and in France every time there is
mention of the war debt. As a matter of fact, the Prussian scheme
would probably prove ineffective in the Republic, if only because
it involved setting up one gang of job-holders to judge and punish
another gang. This worked very well in Prussia before the country was
civilized by force of arms because, as everyone knows, a Prussian
judge was trained in ferocity from infancy, and regarded every man
arraigned before him as guilty _ipso facto_; in fact, any thought of
a prisoner’s possible innocence was abhorrent to him as a reflection
upon the _Polizei_, and, hence, by inference, upon the Throne, the
whole monarchic idea, and God. But in America, even if they had no
other sentiment in common, which would be rarely, judge and prisoner
would often be fellow-Democrats or fellow-Republicans, and hence
jointly interested in protecting their party against scandal and
its members against the loss of their jobs. The operations of the
Department of Justice under Mr. Daugherty showed how this community
of interest impedes the flow of justice even today; it would be far
more obstructive, obviously, if job-holders had to execute the laws
against other job-holders, and not merely against the friends of
other job-holders. Moreover, the Prussian system has another plain
defect: the punishments it provides are, in the main, platitudinous
and banal. They lack dramatic quality, and they lack ingenuity and
appropriateness. To punish a judge taken in judicial crim. con. by
fining him or sending him to jail is a bit too facile and obvious. What
is needed is a system (_a_) that does not depend for its execution
upon the good-will of job-holders, and (_b_) that provides swift,
certain and unpedantic punishments, each fitted neatly to its crime.
Such a system, after due prayer, I have devised. It is simple, it is
unhackneyed, and I believe that it would work. It is divided into
two halves. The first half takes the detection and punishment of the
crimes of job-holders away from courts of impeachment, congressional
smelling committees, and other such agencies--_i. e._, away from other
job-holders--and vests it in the whole body of free citizens, male and
female. The second half provides that any member of that body, having
looked into the acts of a job-holder and found him delinquent, may
punish him instantly and on the spot, and in any manner that seems
appropriate and convenient--and that in case this punishment involves
physical damage to the job-holder, the ensuing inquiry by the grand
jury or coroner shall confine itself strictly to the question whether
the job-holder deserved what he got. In other words, I propose that it
shall be no longer _malum in se_ for a citizen to pummel, cow-hide,
kick, gouge, cut, wound, bruise, maim, burn, club, bastinado, flay or
even lynch a job-holder, and that it shall be _malum prohibitum_ only
to the extent that the punishment exceeds the job-holder’s deserts.
The amount of this excess, if any, may be determined very conveniently
by a petit jury, as other questions of guilt are now determined.
The flogged judge, or Congressman, or Prohibition officer, or other
job-holder, on being discharged from hospital--or his chief heir, in
case he has perished--goes before a grand jury and makes complaint,
and, if a true bill is found, a petit jury is empanelled and all the
evidence is put before it. If it decides that the job-holder deserved
the punishment inflicted upon him, the citizen who inflicted it is
acquitted with honor. If, on the contrary, it decides that this
punishment was excessive, then the citizen is adjudged guilty of
assault, mayhem, murder, or whatever it is, in a degree apportioned to
the difference between what the job-holder deserved and what he got,
and punishment for that excess follows in the usual course.
3