on American disciples is comic rather than serious. One of these
disciples, for instance, not long ago wrote a book on American
municipal problems, which ascribed our ethical and social shortcomings
in municipal matters in part to the sin of “militarism.” Now the mind
of this particular writer in making such a statement was influenced
not in the least by what had actually occurred or was occurring in
our cities, but by one of Tolstoy’s theories which has no possible
bearing upon American life. Militarism is a real factor for good or for
evil in most European countries. In America it has not the smallest
effect one way or the other; it is a negligible quantity. There are
undoubtedly states of society where militarism is a grave evil, and
there are plenty of circumstances in which the prime duty of man may be
to strive against it. But it is not righteous war, not even war itself,
which is the absolute evil, the evil which is evil always and under
all circumstances. Militarism which takes the form of a police force,
municipal or national, may be the prime factor for upholding peace and
righteousness. Militarism is to be condemned or not purely according
to the conditions. So eating horse meat is in itself a mere matter of
taste; but the early Christian missionaries in Scandinavia found that
serious evil sprang from the custom of eating horse meat in honor of
Odin. It is literally true that our very grave municipal problems in
New York or Chicago have no more to do with militarism than with eating
the meat of horses that have been sacrificed to pagan deities; and
a crusade against one habit, as an element in municipal reform, is
just about as rational as would be a crusade against the other. Oliver
Wendell Holmes said that it had taken a century to remove the lark
from American literature; because the poets insisted upon writing, not
about the birds they saw, but about the birds they had read of in the
writings of other poets. Militarism as an evil in our social life is as
purely a figment of the imagination as the skylark in our literature.
Moreover, the fact that in spite of this total absence of militarism
there is so much that is evil in our life, so much need for reform,
ought to show persons who think that the destruction of militarism
would bring about the millennium how completely they lack the sense of
perspective.
Another disciple used to write poetry in defense of the Mahdi,
apparently under the vague impression that this also was a protest
against militarism and therefore in line with Tolstoy’s teachings――as
very possibly it was. Now, Mahdism was as hideous an exhibition
of bloodthirsty cruelty, governmental tyranny, corruption and
inefficiency, and homicidal religious fanaticism as the world has ever
seen. Its immediate result was to destroy over half the population in
the area where it held sway, and to bring the most dreadful degradation
and suffering to the remainder. It represented in the aggregate more
wickedness, more wrong-doing, more human suffering, than all the
wickedness, wrong-doing, and human suffering in all the Christian
communities put together during the same period. It was characteristic
of the fantastic perversion of morality which naturally results
from the serious acceptance of Tolstoy as a moral teacher that one
manifestation of this acceptance should have been a defense of Mahdism.
Of course when the Anglo-Egyptian army overthrew Mahdism it conferred a
boon upon all mankind, and most of all upon the wretched inhabitants of
the Sudan.
So much for Tolstoyism in America, the only place where I have studied
it in action, and where its effect, although insignificant for good,
has been not much more significant for evil, being absurd rather than
serious. As to the effect in Russia itself, I am not competent to
speak. But the history of the Duma proved in the most emphatic way
that the greatest danger to liberalism in Russia sprang from the fact
that the liberals were saturated with just such folly as that taught
by Tolstoy. The flat contradiction between his theory and practice in
such matters as his preaching concerning the relations of the sexes,
and also concerning private property――for of course it is an unlovely
thing to profit by the private property of one’s wife and children,
while affecting to cast it aside――is explicable only by one of two
very sad hypotheses, neither of which it is necessary here to discuss.
The important point is that his preaching is compounded of some very
beautiful and lofty sentiments, with much that is utterly fantastic,
and with some things that are grossly immoral. The Duma fell far short
of what its friends in other lands hoped for, just because it showed
these very same traits, and because it failed to develop the power for
practical common-sense work. There were plenty of members who could
utter the loftiest moral sentiments, sentiments quite as lofty as those
once uttered by Robespierre; but there was an insufficiency of members
able and willing to go to work in practical fashion, able and willing
to try to make society measurably better by cutting out the abuses that
could be cut out, and by starting things on the right road, instead of
insisting upon doing nothing unless they could immediately introduce
the millennium and reform all the abuses of society out of hand with
a jump. What was needed was a body of men like those who made our
Constitution; men accustomed to work with their fellows, accustomed to
compromise; men who clung to high ideals, but who were imbued with the
philosophy which Abraham Lincoln afterwards so strikingly exemplified,
and were content to take the best possible where the best absolute
could not be secured. This was the spirit of Washington and his
associates in one great crisis of our National life, of Lincoln and his
associates in the other great crisis. It is the only spirit from which
it will ever be possible to secure good results in a free country; and
it is the direct negation of Tolstoyism.
To minimize the chance of anything but willful misunderstanding, let
me repeat that Tolstoy is a great writer, a great novelist; that
the unconscious influence of his novels is probably, on the whole,
good, even disregarding their standing as works of art; that even
as a professional moralist and philosophical adviser of mankind in
religious matters he has some excellent theories and on some points
develops a noble and elevating teaching; but that taken as a whole,
and if generally diffused, his moral and philosophical teachings, so
far as they had any influence at all, would have an influence for bad;
partly because on certain points they teach downright immorality, but
much more because they tend to be both foolish and fantastic, and if
logically applied would mean the extinction of humanity in a generation.
A Southerner’s View of the South
It seems rather queer to go abroad and discover an American author. Two
books have appeared in England during the last year or two, named “The
Scar” and “The Scourge.” They have been a success, not only in England,
but on the Continent; for translations have appeared or are appearing
in German, French, and Russian. Yet they are by an American, Mr.
Warrington Dawson, of South Carolina; and they deal with localities,
questions, and types exclusively and typically American. It is not
very creditable to us that this American, writing with unusual power
of American scenes and problems, should have an exclusively European
audience.
Mr. Dawson’s stories are laid in the country districts and small towns
of Virginia. In each volume a Northerner, in the first a woman, in the
second a man, is thrown into intimate contact with the members of a
proud caste of provincial aristocrats, who have been slowly sinking
under the burden of grinding poverty, whose poverty-stricken lives
are both hardening and narrowing, but in whose strongly individualized
natures there dwell qualities and capacities of the highest kind.
It is in his studies of these native Southern whites――both men and
women, both those who are painfully struggling upwards and those whom
an iron fate is slowly forcing downwards――and in his studies of the
dark-skinned alien race standing so utterly aloof from them and so
intimately connected with them, that Mr. Dawson excels; and it is not
necessary to agree with all his conclusions in order to appreciate
the value of his work. But almost equally good is the study of the
Northerner who dwells South, who has made a real business success,
who is in his own fashion devoted to the interests of the people with
whom he has spent his life, but whom they at bottom never cease to
regard as an interloper; and Mr. Dawson is entirely just in showing how
ungenerous and unwarranted part of this attitude is, and, on the other
hand, the measure of justification which it has in the hard narrowness
that makes the intruder insist on trying to do good to the community
in many ways which represent what is either unnecessary or even
injurious.
I have no intention of writing a criticism of Mr. Dawson’s two books;
but it is worth while calling attention to the fact that this author,
who writes with power and interest of vital home matters, has his
critics and his audience abroad, but has neither critics nor audience
at home. He should have both.
The Thraldom of Names
It behooves our people never to fall under the thraldom of names,
and least of all to be misled by designing people who appeal to the
reverence for or antipathy toward a given name in order to achieve some
alien purpose. Of course such misuse of names is as old as the history
of what we understand when we speak of civilized mankind. The rule of
a mob may be every whit as tyrannical and oppressive as the rule of a
single individual, whether or not called a dictator; and the rule of an
oligarchy, whether this oligarchy is a plutocracy or a bureaucracy, or
any other small set of powerful men, may in its turn be just as sordid
and just as bloodthirsty as that of a mob. But the apologists for the
mob or oligarchy or dictator, in justifying the tyranny, use different
words. The mob leaders usually state that all that they are doing
is necessary in order to advance the cause of “liberty,” while the
dictator and the oligarchy are usually defended upon the ground that
the course they follow is absolutely necessary so as to secure “order.”
Many excellent people are taken in by the use of the word “liberty”
at the one time, and the use of the word “order” at the other, and
ignore the simple fact that despotism is despotism, tyranny tyranny,
oppression oppression, whether committed by one individual or by many
individuals, by a State or by a private corporation.
Moreover, tyranny exercised on behalf of one set of people is very apt
in the long run to damage especially the representatives of that very
class by the violence of the reaction which it invites. The course of
the Second Republic in France was such, with its mobs, its bloody civil
tumults, its national workshops, its bitter factional divisions, as
to invite and indeed insure its overthrow and the establishment of a
dictatorship; while it is needless to mention the innumerable instances
in which the name of order has been invoked to sanction tyranny, until
there has finally come a reaction so violent that both the tyranny and
all public order have disappeared together. The Second Empire in France
led straight up to the Paris Commune; and nothing so well shows how
far the French people had advanced in fitness for self-government as
the fact that the hideous atrocities of the Commune, which rendered it
imperative that it should be rigorously repressed, nevertheless did
not produce another violent reaction, but left the French Republic
standing, and the French people as resolute in their refusal to be
ruled by a king as by a mob.
Of course when a great crisis actually comes, no matter how much
people may have been misled by names, they promptly awaken to their
unimportance. To the individual who suffered under the guillotine at
Paris, or in the drownings in the Loire, or to the individual who a
century before was expelled from his beloved country, or tortured,
or sent to the galleys, it made no difference whatever that one set
of acts was performed under Robespierre and Danton and Marat in the
name of liberty and reason and the rights of the people, or that the
other was performed in the name of order and authority and religion by
the direction of the Great Monarch. Tyranny and cruelty were tyranny
and cruelty just as much in one case as in the other, and just as
much when those guilty of them used one shibboleth as when they used
another. All forms of tyranny and cruelty must alike be condemned by
honest men.
We in this country have been very fortunate. Thanks to the teaching
and the practice of the men whom we most revere as leaders, of the
men like Washington and Lincoln, we have hitherto escaped the twin
gulfs of despotism and mob rule, and we have never been in any danger
from the worst forms of religious bitterness. But we should therefore
be all the more careful, as we deal with our industrial and social
problems, not to fall into mistakes similar to those which have brought
lasting disaster on less fortunately situated peoples. We have achieved
democracy in politics just because we have been able to steer a middle
course between the rule of the mob and the rule of the dictator. We
shall achieve industrial democracy because we shall steer a similar
middle course between the extreme individualist and the Socialist,
between the demagogue who attacks all wealth and who can see no wrong
done anywhere unless it is perpetrated by a man of wealth, and the
apologist for the plutocracy who rails against so much as a restatement
of the Eighth Commandment upon the ground that it will “hurt business.”
First and foremost we must stand firmly on a basis of good sound
ethics. We intend to do what is right for the ample and sufficient
reason that it is right. If business is hurt by the stern exposure
of crookedness and the result of efforts to punish the crooked
man, then business must be hurt, even though good men are involved
in the hurting, until it so adjusts itself that it is possible to
prosecute wrong-doing without stampeding the business community into
a terror-struck defense of the wrong-doers and an angry assault upon
those who have exposed them. On the other hand, we must beware, above
all things, of being misled by wicked or foolish men who would condone
homicide and violence, and apologize for the dynamiter and the assassin
because, forsooth, they choose to take the ground that crime is no
crime if the wicked man happens also to have been a shiftless and
unthrifty or lazy man who has never amassed property. It is essential
that we should wrest the control of the Government out of the hands of
rich men who use it for unhealthy purposes, and should keep it out of
their hands; and to this end the first requisite is to provide means
adequately to deal with corporations, which are essential to modern
business, but which, under the decisions of the courts, and because
of the short-sightedness of the public, have become the chief factors
in political and business debasement. But it would be just as bad to
put the control of the Government into the hands of demagogues and
visionaries who seek to pander to ignorance and prejudice by penalizing
thrift and business enterprise, and ruining all men of means, with,
as an attendant result, the ruin of the entire community. The tyranny
of politicians with a bureaucracy behind them and a mass of ignorant
people supporting them would be just as insufferable as the tyranny of
big corporations. The tyranny would be the same in each case, and it
would make no more difference that one was called individualism, and
the other collectivism, than it made in French history whether tyranny
was exercised in the name of the Commune or of the Emperor, of a
Committee of National Safety, or of a King.
The sinister and adroit reactionary, the sinister and violent radical,
are alike in this, that each works in the end for the destruction of
the cause that he professedly champions. If the one is left to his own
devices, he will utterly discredit the entire system of government by
individual initiative; and if the other is allowed to work his will,
he, in his turn, will make men so loathe interference and control by
the State that any abuses connected with the untrammeled control of
all business by private individuals will seem small by comparison. We
cannot afford to be empirical. We must judge each case on its merits.
It is absolutely indispensable to foster the spirit of individual
initiative, of self-reliance, of self-help; but this does not mean that
we are to refuse to face facts and to recognize that the growth of our
complex civilization necessitates an increase in the exercise of the
functions of the State. It has been shown beyond power of refutation
that unrestricted individualism, for instance, means the destruction
of our forests and our water supply. The dogma of “individualism”
cannot be permitted to interfere with the duty of a great city to see
that householders, small as well as big, live in decent and healthy
buildings, drink good water, and have the streets adequately lighted
and kept clean. Individual initiative, the reign of individualism, may
be crushed out just as effectively by the unchecked growth of private
monopoly if the State does not interfere at all, as it would be crushed
out under communism, or as it would disappear, together with everything
else that makes life worth living, if we adopted the tenets of the
extreme Socialists.
In 1896 the party of discontent met with a smashing defeat for the very
reason that, together with legitimate attacks on real abuses, they
combined wholly illegitimate advocacy even of the methods of dealing
with these real abuses, and in addition stood for abuses of their own
which, in far-reaching damage, would have cast quite into the shade
the effects of the abuses against which they warred. It was essential
both to the material and moral progress of the country that these
forces should be beaten; and beaten they were, overwhelmingly. But the
genuine ethical revolt against these forces was aided by a very ugly
materialism, and this materialism at one time claimed the victory as
exclusively its own, and advanced it as a warrant and license for the
refusal to interfere with any misdeeds on the part of men of wealth.
What such an attitude meant was set forth as early as 1896 by an
English visitor, the journalist Steevens, a man of marked insight. Mr.
Steevens did not see with entire clearness of vision into the complex
American character; it would have been marvelous if a stranger of his
slight experience here could so have seen; but it would be difficult to
put certain important facts more clearly than he put them. Immediately
after the election he wrote as follows (I condense slightly):
“In the United States legal organization of industry has been left
wholly wanting. Little is done by the State. All is left to the
initiative of the individual. The apparent negligence is explained
partly by the American horror of retarding mechanical progress, and
partly by their reliance on competition. They have cast overboard the
law as the safeguard of individual rights, and have put themselves
under the protection of competition, and of it alone. Now a trust
in its exacter acceptation is the flat negation of competition. It
is certain that commercial concerns make frequent, powerful, and
successful combinations to override the public interest. All such
corporations are left unfettered in a way that to an Englishman appears
almost a return to savagery. The defenselessness of individual liberty
against the encroachment of the railway companies, tramway companies,
nuisance-committing manure companies, and the like, is little less than
horrible. Where regulating acts are proposed, the companies unite to
oppose them; where such acts exist, they bribe corrupt officials to
ignore them. When they want any act for themselves, it can always be
bought for cash. [This is of course a gross exaggeration; and allusion
should have been made to the violent and demagogic attacks upon
corporations, which are even more common than and are quite as noxious
as acts of oppression by corporations.] They maintain their own members
in the legislative bodies――pocket Assemblymen, pocket Representatives,
pocket Senators. In the name of individual freedom and industrial
progress they have become the tyrants of the whole community. Lawless
greed on one side, and lawless brutality on the other――the outlook
frowns. On the wisdom of the rulers of the country in salving or
embittering these antagonisms――still more, on the fortune of the people
in either modifying or hardening their present conviction that to get
dollars is the one end of life――it depends whether the future of the
United States is to be of eminent beneficence or unspeakable disaster.
It may stretch out the light of liberty to the whole world. It may
become the devil’s drill-ground where the cohorts of anarchy will
furnish themselves against the social Armageddon.”
Mr. Steevens here clearly points out, what every one ought to
recognize, that if individualism is left absolutely uncontrolled as
a modern business condition, the curious result will follow that all
power of individual achievement and individual effort in the average
man will be crushed out just as effectively as if the State took
absolute control of everything. It would be easy to name several big
corporations, each one of which has within its sphere crushed out all
competition so as to make, not only its rivals, but its customers as
dependent upon it as if the Government had assumed complete charge of
the product. It would, in my judgment, be a very unhealthy thing for
the Government thus to assume complete charge; but it is even more
unhealthy to permit a private monopoly thus to assume it. The simple
truth is that the defenders of the theory of unregulated lawlessness in
the business world are either insincere, or blind to the facts, when
they speak of their system as permitting a healthy individualism and
individual initiative. On the contrary, it crushes out individualism;
save in a very few able and powerful men, who tend to become dictators
in the business world precisely as in the old days a Spanish-American
president tended to become a dictator in the political world.
Moreover, where there is absolute lawlessness, absolute failure by the
State to control or supervise these great corporations, the inevitable
result is to favor, among these very able men of business, the man who
is unscrupulous and cunning. The unscrupulous big man who gets complete
control of a given forest tract, or of a network of railways which
alone give access to a certain region, or who, in combination with his
fellows, acquires control of a certain industry, may crush out in the
great mass of citizens affected all individual initiative quite as much
as it would be crushed out by State control. The very reason why we
object to State ownership, that it puts a stop to individual initiative
and to the healthy development of personal responsibility, is the
reason why we object to an unsupervised, unchecked monopolistic control
in private hands. We urge control and supervision by the Nation as an
antidote to the movement for State Socialism. Those who advocate total
lack of regulation, those who advocate lawlessness in the business
world, themselves give the strongest impulse to what I believe would be
the deadening movement towards State Socialism.