argument. At one stroke it removes all the legal impediments which now
make the punishment of a recreant job-holder so hopeless a process
and enormously widens the range of possible penalties. They are now
stiff and, in large measure, illogical; under the system I propose
they could be made to fit the crime precisely. Say a citizen today
becomes convinced that a certain judge is a jackass--that his legal
learning is defective, his sense of justice atrophied, and his conduct
of cases before him tyrannical and against decency. As things stand,
it is entirely impossible to do anything about it. A judge could not
be impeached on the mere ground that he is a jackass; the process is
far too costly and cumbersome, and there are too many judges liable to
the charge. Nor is anything to be gained by denouncing him publicly
and urging all good citizens to vote against him when he comes up
for re-election, for his term may have ten or fifteen years to run,
and even if it expires tomorrow and he is defeated the chances are
good that his successor will be quite as bad, and maybe even worse.
Moreover, if he is a Federal judge he never comes up for re-election
at all; once he has been appointed by the President of the United
States, at the advice of his more influential clients and with the
consent of their agents in the Senate, he is safe until he is so far
gone in senility that he has to be propped on the bench with pillows.
But now imagine any citizen free to approach him in open court and
pull his nose! Or even, in aggravated cases, to cut off his ears,
throw him out of the window, or knock him in the head with an ax!
How vastly more attentive he would be to his duties! How diligently
he would apply himself to the study of the law! How careful he would
be about the rights of litigants before him! How polite and even
suave he would become! For judges, like all the rest of us, are vain
fellows: they do not enjoy having their noses pulled. Do not forget
here that the ignominy resident in the operation would not be abated
by the subsequent trial of the puller, even if he should be convicted
and jailed. The fact would still be brilliantly remembered that at
least one citizen had deemed the judge sufficiently a malefactor to
punish him publicly, and to risk going to jail for it. A dozen such
episodes, and the career of any judge would be ruined, even though the
jails bulged with his critics. He could not maintain his dignity on
the bench; even his own catchpolls would snicker at him behind their
hands, especially if he showed a cauliflower ear, a black eye or a scar
over his bald head. Moreover, soon or late some citizen who had at
him would be acquitted by a petit jury, and then, obviously, he would
have to retire. It might be provided by law, indeed, that he should be
compelled to retire in that case--that an acquittal would automatically
vacate the office of the complaining job-holder.
The present system, as I have said, has in late years eloquently
demonstrated its ineffectiveness on a colossal scale in the great city
of Washington, the seat of the First Chief of the Republic and of a
hundred thousand job-holders of gradually lessening puissance, from
members of the Cabinet down to janitors, messengers and bookkeepers.
All efforts to impeach Daugherty failed; when he was got rid of
at last it was by a blow below the belt; in the case of Denby, his
fellow-Republicans of Detroit actually treated his dismissal as a
martyrdom, and received him when he got home with a band of music
and public prayers. If these eminent men were actually guilty of
malfeasance in office they obviously deserved far more rigorous
punishment; if they were guilty merely of carelessness and neglect they
deserved a severe handling as public nuisances. Under the existing
system they got what was virtually no punishment at all; under my
system, at the most moderate guess, some bored and impatient citizen,
during the long months when they were desperately hanging on to their
jobs, would have at least ventured to duck them in the Potomac or set
their shirt-tails afire. I doubt that any jury would have convicted
him of excess, even had he held them under while he counted 100,000.
The plain people could not make out just what they had done that was
immoral, if anything; but there was an almost universal feeling that
they were nuisances, and ought to be got rid of. Even if the citizen
who, under my system, had laid hands upon them had been convicted
subsequently and sent to jail, the weary newspaper readers of the land
would have given three cheers for him, and he would have become a
formidable candidate for the presidency on the completion of his term.
Even Dr. Coolidge, I daresay, would have had a very friendly feeling
for him, and perhaps might have sent him a box of cigars or some White
House pies while he was in jail.
I present my system formally to the consideration of the Congress, and
offer to explain it in greater detail before a joint session of both
Houses at any time not in conflict with my literary engagements. I
am no lawyer, to be sure. I once studied law for a space, but forgot
it on closing the books. But I retain enough technic to be convinced
that my scheme presents no constitutional difficulties. It violates
no constitutional right that I am aware of; on the contrary, it
specifically reaffirms the right to a trial by jury, now denied in a
wholesale and shameless manner by the Federal courts. It sets up no new
corps of corrupt and oppressive enforcement officers; it establishes
no new jobs; it does not augment the already excessive powers of the
police. If there is any lingering taint of injustice in it, then that
injustice would be suffered by job-holders, nine-tenths of whom now rob
and persecute the rest of us incessantly, and are fast habilitating the
doctrine that we are _feræ naturæ_ and have no rights that they are
bound to respect. It is a system of criminal law that is democratic
in the widest and loftiest sense. It augments the dignity and
responsibility of the citizen, and tends to increase his concern with
problems of government. It sets higher standards of conduct for public
officers than prevail now, and makes corruption and incompetence
dangerous. Above all, it breaks down the rigid and unintelligent
formalism of our scheme of punishments, and makes it infinitely more
pliant, appropriate and various. We have been tending for years to
reduce all punishments to two: fine and imprisonment, the first usually
no punishment at all, but a mere bribe to escape punishment, and the
second often cruel and almost always ineffective. That this tendency is
widely regarded as evil is shown by the extra-legal efforts to combat
it that are made constantly by the Ku Klux Klan, the American Legion
and other such agents of lynch law. My scheme would take over the
rich ingenuities of these agents and give them formal legal sanction;
it would restore to the art of putting down crime something of the
fine bounce and gusto that it had in the Middle Ages, when tort and
penalty were united by logical, and even, indeed, æsthetic bonds, and a
judge who was imaginative and original was esteemed. The certainty of
punishment would daunt the offender, and the uncertainty of its nature
would fill him with dread. Once proceeded against, he would become
enormously cautious and conscientious. A Congressman with his ears cut
off, you may be sure, would not do it again. A judge, after two or
three rocket flights through his court-room window, would be forced, by
an irresistible psychological process, to give heed thereafter to the
Constitution, the statutes, and the common rights of man. Even a police
captain or a United States Senator, once floored with a bung-starter or
rolled in a barrel, would begin to think.
I dedicate my plan to my country.
XI. ON THE NATURE OF MAN
1
_The Animal That Thinks_
That the great majority of human beings, even under our perfected
Christian civilization, are still almost as incapable of rational
thought as so many diamond-back terrapin--this is a fact to which
we have all been made privy of late by the babbling of eminent
psychologists. Granted. But let us not rashly assume that this
infirmity is confined strictly to the nether herd--that, above the
level where thinking may be said genuinely to begin, it goes on,
level by level, to greater and greater heights of clarity and acumen.
Nothing, indeed, of the sort. The curve goes upward for a while, but
then it begins to flatten, and finally it dips very sharply. Thinking,
indeed, is so recent an accomplishment phylogenetically that man is
capable of it only in a narrow area, as he is capable of sight and
hearing only in narrow areas. To one side lie the instinctive tropisms
and intellectual peristaltic motions of the simple, rational only by a
sort of pious license; to the other side lie the more complex but even
more nonsensical speculations of metaphysicians. The difference between
the two is vastly less than is commonly assumed; we are all misled by
the sombre, portentous manner of the metaphysicians. The truth is that
between a speech by a Salvation Army convert, a Southern Congressman or
a Grand Goblin of the Rotary Club and a philosophical treatise by an
American Neo-Realist there is no more to choose than between the puling
of an infant and the puling of a veteran of the Civil War. Both show
the human cerebrum loaded far beyond its Plimsoll mark; both, strictly
speaking, are idiotic.
2
_Veritas Odium Parit_
An old human delusion, largely fostered by theologians, is the one
to the effect that truth has a mysterious medicinal power--that its
propagation makes the world better and man happier ... _et cognoscetis
veritatem, et veritas liberabit vos_. But is this so-called truth about
truth true? It is not. The truth, nine times out of ten, is extremely
disturbing and uncomfortable; if it is not grossly discreditable to
someone it is apt to be painfully amazing to everyone. The masses
of men are thus wise to hold it in suspicion, as they are wise to
suspect that other delusion, liberty. Let us turn to an example. The
most rational religious ideas held in modern times, at least among
Christians, are probably those of the Unitarians; the most nonsensical
are those of the Christian Scientists. Yet it must be obvious to every
observer that the average Unitarian, even when he is quite healthy,
which is not often, is a sour, conscience-striken and unhappy fellow,
whereas, the average Christian Scientist, even when he is down with
gall-stones, is full of a childish and enviable peace. The one is
disquieted by his apprehension of the damning facts about God and the
universe; the other is lulled by his magnificent imbecilities. I have
had the honor of knowing, in my time, a number of eminent philosophers,
some of them intelligent. The happiest among the latter, in his moments
of greatest joy, used to entertain himself by drawing up wills leaving
his body to a medical college.
3
_The Eternal Cripple_
Man, at his best, remains a sort of one-lunged animal, never completely
rounded and perfect, as a bacillus, say, is perfect. If he shows
one valuable quality, it is almost unheard of for him to show any
other. Give him a head, and he lacks a heart. Give him a heart of
a gallon capacity, and his head holds scarcely a pint. The artist,
nine times out of ten, is a dead-beat and given to the debauching of
virgins, so-called. The patriot is a bigot, and, more often than not,
a cad and a coward. The man of physical bravery is often on a level,
intellectually, with a Baptist clergyman. The intellectual giant has
bad kidneys and cannot thread a needle. In all my years of search in
this world, from the Golden Gate in the West to the Vistula in the
East, and from the Orkney Islands in the North to the Spanish Main in
the South, I have never met a thoroughly moral man who was honorable.
4
_The Test_
Don’t ask what delusion he entertains regarding God, or what mountebank
he follows in politics, or what he springs from, or what he submits to
from his wife. Simply ask how he makes his living. It is the safest and
surest of all known tests. A man who gets his board and lodging on this
ball in an ignominious way is inevitably an ignominious man.
5
_National Characters_
The character of a nation, like its mind, is always determined, not by
the masses of its citizens, but by a small minority of resolute and
influential men. Nothing, for example, could be more absurd than the
common notion that the French, as a people, are gallant, courageous
and fond of hazard. The truth is that they are mainly dull shopkeepers
and peace-loving peasants, and have been driven into all their wars
of conquest by their masters, who are extraordinarily prehensile and
audacious. The French plain people bitterly disapproved the military
enterprises of Bonaparte, and resisted his conscriptions by every
means within their power. In the late war they abandoned themselves to
a melodramatic despair after the first few months, frequently broke
and ran under pressure, and were kept in the fight only by heroic
devices. The apparent resolution of France was largely external. That
is to say, it was supplied by England. Internally, it was confined to
a small group of leaders, most of them professional adventurers, and
many of them, such as Marshal Foch, of enemy blood. The French masses,
despite the enormous military advantages on their side, were ready to
quit after every losing battle, and after not a few--for example, the
Verdun operations--they did quit.
The character of the Germans, as it was displayed during the war,
was also foreign to the great majority of the German people. The
Germans are not pugnacious by nature, nor have they any talent for
organization; on the contrary, they are incurable particularists, and
never meet without quarrelling. Their political history is a history
of endless squabbles in the face of the enemy. Fully a half of them
believed in Napoleon I at the time he was ravaging their country; in
the late war millions of them were deceived by the late Woodrow’s
hypocritical Fourteen Points--a deliberate and successful device to
divide and conquer them. The gigantic skill and resolution visible
on the German side during the war were supplied by less than one per
cent. of the German people, and so were the harsh, realistic theories
which underlaid them. The average German was and is quite incapable
of any such theories; they horrify him almost as much as they would
horrify a member of the Lake Mohonk Conference. Once the one per cent.
of dominating Germans had been disposed of by their heavy losses on
the field, the rest of the nation turned out to be a mob of moony
sentimentalists, hot for all the democratic fallacies ever heard of,
and eager to put down every surviving man of genuine courage and
enterprise. That mob will continue to pursue these chimeras until a new
race of rulers arises--and then the world will once more mistake the
ideas of those rulers for the ideas of the average German.
The English are judged just as inaccurately, and in the same way.
There is, for example, the common notion that all Englishmen are
good sportsmen, resolute in battle, generous in victory and calm in
defeat. It would be difficult to imagine anything more ridiculous. The
English masses are probably the worst sportsmen in the world, save
only, perhaps, the American masses. During the war their hysterical
whoops and yells deafened the universe, and after it was over the
so-called khaki election brilliantly displayed the true color of
their generosity. To this day, like their brethren of the Republic,
they believe it to be quite honorable to pick a German’s pocket or
rob a German corpse. But there is in England a small minority of men,
chiefly Celtic in blood, who practise good sportsmanship as a sort of
substitute for religion, and these men are still influential enough to
give the hue of their own character to what appears to be the general
English character. Once they succumb to democracy, not even American
Anglomaniacs will ever mention English sportsmanship again.
6
_The Goal_
The central aim of civilization, it must be plain, is simply to defy
and correct the obvious intent of God, _e. g._, that five per cent. of
the people of Christendom shall die of smallpox every year, that the
issue of every love affair shall be a succession of little strangers,
that cows shall devote themselves wholly to nursing their calves, that
it shall take longer to convey a message from New York to Chicago than
it takes to convey one from New York to Newark, that the wicked shall
be miserable and the virtuous happy. Has civilization a motto? Then
certainly it must be “Not _Thy_ will, O Lord, but _ours_, be done!”
7
_Psychology at 5 A. M._
It is in the throes of sober second thought, of spiritual
_Katzenjammer_, that men reveal their true souls. The Puritan always
swears a bloody oath that he will never do it again. The civilized man
simply resolves to be a bit more careful next time.
8
_The Reward_
The cadence at the end is always in the crystalline and sardonic key
of C major.... The heroic sweatings and strivings of the Knights
Templar, for a whole age the marvel of Christendom, are now embalmed
in a single essay by James Anthony Froude, M.A., LL.D., an historian
of charming style but dubious accuracy. If it were not for that single
essay, it would be difficult, if not impossible, for an inquirer of
English speech to find out what their finish was, and why they perished
from the earth. Their old stronghold in London is now--what? An
office-building for lawyers, a roost for such rogues as they would have
put to the sword at sight. And Palestine, for which they died by the
thousand, is now given over to _Schnorrer_ and _Meshulachim_ from Grand
street and the Mile End road.
9
_The Altruist_
A large part of altruism, even when it is perfectly honest, is grounded
upon the fact that it is uncomfortable to have unhappy people about
one. This is especially true in family life. A man makes sacrifices
to his wife’s desires, not because he greatly enjoys giving up what
he wants himself, but because he would enjoy it even less to see her
cutting a sour face across the dinner table.
10
_The Man of Honor_
The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the
latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has
not been caught.
XII. BUGABOO
All of the Great Thinkers of the world, East, West, North and South,
have been alarming their customers, for two or three years past, with
the same bugaboo. According to the New York _Times_ and the Department
of State, there must be a complete restoration of the capitalistic
system in Russia and Mexico, or our sweet Christian civilization will
go to pot. According to the master-minds of France, the Germans must
first lose all their trade and then pay 10,000 cents on the dollar, or
our sweet Christian civilization will go to pot. According to H. G.
Wells, the Treaty of Versailles must be denounced by all parties to it,
or our sweet Christian civilization will go to pot. And so on, and so
on. On the main point the propagandists of all schools are unanimously
agreed: that the civilization of the West teeters on the edge of an
abyss, and that a few more wobbles will send it over. The barbarians
once more thunder upon the gates of Rome. Let the turmoils within go
on for a brief while longer, and they will burst in with their hellish
cries, and every great boon and usufruct that men have sweated and
died for since the days of Charlemagne, from the cathedral at Rheims
to the pneumatic automobile tire, and from fiddle music to diphtheria
antitoxin, and from the inferiority complex to the bichloride tablet,
will vanish in one universal catastrophe. Blood drips from the moon;
another general war impends. This war, according to Will H. Irwin, a
soothsayer employed by the _Saturday Evening Post_, will be so colossal
a butchery that there will be no survivors save a few undertakers and
profiteers, and no material salvage save a few stone quarries and a
couple of million bales of worthless bonds.
Personally, I should be glad to see such a war, for it seems to me
that the human race has run on long enough--that the high gods would
show unaccustomed sense if they dropped it into hell and so ended the
farce. I know of no existing nation that deserves to live, and I know
of very few individuals. But despite the fact that my wishes are thus
on the side of Dr. Irwin’s thought, I find it quite impossible to
follow him. In brief, I see absolutely no sign of a general _débâcle_.
On the contrary, it seems to me that the thing we call civilization was
never more secure than it is today, either in Europe or in America.
More bloodshed, of course, is pretty certain to come; the French, to
name only one people, are obviously headed for another shambles. But
that is a small matter, almost a private matter. Even the complete
destruction of France would not materially damage civilization, save,
perhaps, in the eyes of touring American Puritans, a-search for a moral
oasis. I also incline to think that England and the United States will
be by the ears before many years have come and gone, and that one
or the other of them, probably the United States, will get a severe
beating. But they have fought before, and civilization was scarcely
aware of it. Either could be wiped out utterly, and it would still be
possible to buy Ford parts, Bibles, oil stocks, canned salmon, union
suits, First Folio Shakespeares, hair tonics, books on sex hygiene,
diamonds, coffins, dice, dog soap, glass eyes, and all the other
great blessings of our Christian _Kultur_. Both could be destroyed,
wholly and horribly, and men in Italy would continue to grow excellent
wine, and men in Germany would continue to pursue the colloids and
the cocci, and men in Scandinavia would continue to shiver and curse
God through their long, grisly Winter nights, and so keep the world
supplied with its normal doses of theology, metaphysics and political
theory. Moreover, there are the Chinese. If the entire population of
Christendom were disposed of by some cosmic delousing operation the
Chinese would have a chance--a chance denied to them to-day, in free
competition, by their superior dignity, decency and sense of honor.
The interdependence of nations, indeed, is much overestimated by
sentimentalists, chiefly of the economic faculty. They permit the
gyrations of foreign exchange to alarm them. But what is it to a man
in Kansas, or Uruguay, or Saskatchewan, expressed in hard figures,
that a million Poles have been slaughtered, or that the Turks have
again ravaged Armenia, or that the British and Dutch are at odds over
human liberty and the oil-wells of Mesopotamia, or that Belgrade has
fallen, or that the French refuse to go back to work but propose to
live hereafter by highway robbery? It is, at most, a matter of ten
per cent. This is all he feels, and this is all he cares. If he shows
any excitement or even any interest it is because some drive manager
has played upon his credulities, as Dr. Wells seeks to play upon the
credulities of all of us. For one, I refuse to be alarmed. If Paris
were burned tomorrow, I’d scarcely know it on my estates in Maryland,
feeding upon my razor-back hams, listening to Caruso’s ghost, and
reading the state papers of Thomas Jefferson. Even if I tired of that
idyllic life and went abroad, I’d admire the ruins quite as much as I
have ever admired the Trocadero or the Eiffel tower. Both, perhaps,
would escape the fire--and no doubt the incendiaries would make off
with the best things in the Luxembourg and the Louvre. Nor am I greatly
alarmed by the current doctrine that the late war stamped out the
best strains of all the contesting nations, and that they are rapidly
sinking to the level of their lower classes. This alarm is raised in
an inflammatory book called “Is America Safe for Democracy?” by one
William McDougall, a Scotchman imported to civilize the sophomores at
Harvard. The McDougall also raises and parades another hobgoblin, once
a favorite of the immortal zany, Major-General Roosevelt. That is the
bugaboo of race suicide, especially among the upper classes. The wops
in the ditch and the Slovaks in the mining towns, it appears, breed
up to the limit of human endurance, but bank presidents seldom have
more than four or five legitimate children, and the great majority
of poets, metaphysicians, Oxford dons, lady Ph.D.s, assyriologists
and moving-picture actors are childless, and perhaps even sterile. At
the present rate of reproduction, says Prof. McDougall, 1000 Harvard
graduates of today will have but 50 descendants 200 years hence,
whereas 1000 Rumanians will have 100,000.