rioting. But it matters little. For here the sufferers are not the
rulers. The supreme power is in the hands of a class, numerous indeed,
but select; of an educated class; of a class which is, and knows itself
to be, deeply interested in the security of property and the maintenance
of order. Accordingly, the malcontents are firmly yet gently restrained.
The bad time is got over without robbing the wealthy to relieve the
indigent. The springs of national prosperity soon begin to flow again;
work is plentiful, wages rise and all is tranquillity and cheerfulness.
I have seen England pass three or four times through such critical
seasons as I have described.
Through such seasons the United States will have to pass in the course
of the next century, if not this. How will you pass through them? I
heartily wish you a good deliverance. But my reason and my wishes are at
war and I cannot help foreboding the worst. It is quite plan that your
government will never be able to restrain a distressed and discontented
majority. For with you the majority is the government, and has the rich,
who are always a minority, absolutely at its mercy.
The day will come when in the State of New York a multitude of people,
none of whom has had more than half a breakfast, or expects to have more
than half a dinner, will choose a legislature. Is it possible to doubt
what sort of a legislature will be chosen? On one side is a statesman
preaching patience, respect for vested rights, strict observance of
public faith. On the other is a demagogue ranting about the tyranny of
capitalists and usurers and asking why anybody should be permitted to
drink champagne and to ride in a carriage while thousands of honest
folks are in want of necessaries. Which of the two candidates are likely
to be preferred by a workingman who hears his children cry for more
bread?
I seriously apprehend that you will, in some such seasons of adversity
as I have described, do things which will prevent prosperity from
returning; that you will act like people who should in a year of
scarcity devour all the seed corn and thus make the next year not of
scarcity, but of absolute famine. There will be, I fear, spoliation. The
spoliation will increase the distress. The distress will produce fresh
spoliation.
There is nothing to stop you. Your Constitution is all sail and no
anchor. As I said before, when a society has entered on this downward
progress, either civilization or liberty must perish. Either some Cæsar
or Napoleon will seize the reins of government with a strong hand, or
your republic will be as fearfully plundered and laid waste by
barbarians in the twentieth century as the Roman Empire was in the
fifth, with this difference, that the Huns and vandals who ravaged the
Roman Empire came from without, and that your Huns and vandals will have
been engendered within your own country by your own institutions.
I have the honor to be, dear sir, your faithful servant, T.B. Macaulay.
H.S. Randall, Esq., etc., etc., etc.
A FOOL'S PARADISE
Radical propagandists, with a sublime disregard for facts and history,
persist in extolling the tenets of Russian Communism as new discoveries
in the art of government. They assert that the Bolshevists have solved
for the first time in history the problem of social equality. They say
the experiment of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" has never before
been attempted and that it fails to find favor outside Russia because
peoples are always prone to condemn what they do not understand.
Russia, however, is but the last of many countries to rebel against its
own prosperity. During the twenty years preceding the World War Russia
enjoyed the greatest growth and development, both of its resources and
education, in the history of the country. Two-thirds of the agricultural
land in the nation was owned and occupied by the farming classes, which
comprised nearly three-fourths of the population. In ten years the
number of depositors in the savings banks of Russia had doubled and the
gross amount of the deposits had quadrupled.
Then came the war, to be followed by Bolshevism. The experience of
Russia in the last two years, however, is not unique in the history of
nations. The narration of the spoliation of the rich, the confiscation
of the estates and the profligate waste of the national substance is
only a repetition, almost verse for verse and line for line, of the
license and the abuses of the last years of the Athenian democracy. It
was then demonstrated that the impoverishing of the rich could not
enrich the poor, and that a state without wealth will soon be a state
without liberty. In the idiom of the gallery gods, it is all "old
stuff."
The Charmides of Xenophon's "Banquet" celebrates the pleasures and
profits of poverty. He once possessed a fortune that made him fear
thieves and sycophants--in reality the same thing--Athens had levied
heavy taxes on the rich and had passed laws making it a capital offense
for a person of wealth to attempt to flee the state. The money raised by
thus taxing the wealthy was distributed to the poor in the public
places. Any one holding a certificate showing that he had not sufficient
wealth to be taxed was admitted free to the theaters and was entitled to
one meal a day at restaurants supported by the state.
The people's council, fearful that there might be a disposition to stop
this waste of public money, passed acts which decreed capital punishment
to any orator who should propose to modify the laws which made "poverty
a blessing."
Charmides recounts that he once lived in a state of perpetual terror.
New taxes were decreed every day, each of which he was compelled to pay.
He was deprived of the liberty even of leaving the state. His lot was
worse than that of the meanest slave.
Behold! a fertile imagination came to his rescue. He embarked in a
speculation in which failure was inevitable. Good fortune attended him.
Within a brief time he was penniless and happy. The unfortunate
speculator who had gained possession of the wealth of Charmides lived
for a brief time in the agony of wealth; then he attempted to flee the
state, was apprehended and executed.
Charmides makes votive offerings to the gods of Athens for his escape
from the terror and servitude of property. "How comfortably I sleep!" he
cries. "The republic has confidence in me. I am no longer threatened. It
is I who threaten others. A free man, I can go or stay. I appear at the
theater. I am admitted free. The rich rise in trembling and offer me the
best seats. When I walk abroad in the streets they stand aside to offer
me an unobstructed passage. To-day I resemble a tyrant. Then I was a
slave. Then I paid tribute to the state. Now the state, my tributary,
supports me. I lose nothing; for I have nothing."
For a time democratic Athens was a veritable Bolshevist paradise. But
when the ranks of the rich became depleted, when none cared longer to
engage in any profitable industry, the public revenue fell until there
was no money to support the happy idlers. The rich were tortured in the
vain hope that they would produce hidden treasure; but the public
treasury remained empty.
This period of riotous profligacy followed the happy conclusion for
Athens of the Theban war. When the Athenian proletariat discovered that
the state was about to pass under the yoke of Philip they hunted down
the remnant of the wealthy class that still remained, executed some,
banished others and sold still others into slavery for "betraying the
Athenian state and leaving it helpless before its enemies."
Shortly afterwards Athens came under the despotism of Philip, who
speedily conscripted this proletariat for forced labor. For a hundred
years afterwards, however, Athenian writers in bewailing their loss of
liberty blamed the fall of Athens upon the "rich," who failed to arm
and equip a force to fight Philip.
All the wisdom of her philosophers, all the art and learning whose loss
the world still mourns, fell before the onslaught of this triumphant
democracy. The culture of the few could not prevail against the greed of
the many. Domestic conditions became so intolerable that a majority of
the Athenians welcomed the stern but salutary rule of the tyrant. For
they had learned that the tyranny of a despot is easier to be borne than
that of universal poverty.
One does not have to interrogate the future to learn whither Russia
under Bolshevism is tending; one has but to look to the past. Like
causes cannot produce unlike effects. Under given conditions national
eclipses can be predicted as surely as the eclipses of the planets.
_Los Angeles Times_, May 4, 1921.
NAPOLEON'S CENTENNIAL
The hundredth anniversary of the passing of Napoleon centers attention
anew on one of the baffling figures of all time--a man at once
attractive and repulsive; a soldier of infinite courage who on at least
one occasion acted the coward; a master strategist who, to the last,
seemed never to fully grasp that strategy by which he almost recast a
world.
He found Europe feudal and left it modern. He opened up new realms of
knowledge to the servants; revolutionized military tactics; founded
lasting industries; gave a new birth to French law; mocked and yet
fostered freedom.
More volumes have been written regarding him than any other character in
history--one excepted. Nevertheless, he still remains the most elusive,
the most unsatisfying genius that the world has ever known.
His accomplishments have by this time been fully set forth and properly
valued. We know that he stands practically alone as the greatest
strategist of the ages. Cromwell, on a smaller scale and within a far
more limited sphere, more nearly approaches him, perhaps, than does any
other.
We know also that he was an adroit politician and a statesman on a scale
rarely equalled in Europe. He was also an orator and an adept at coining
phrases. He was an executive of immense power and a man of tremendous
personal charm.
Of course, he was relentless, cruel, unscrupulous and all the rest of
it, as we have been so often told. But, praise and blame aside, the
question of the source of his power still remains the important thing.
Certainly he was not great because he was a brilliant student, for, all
in all, he was not deeply read. It could hardly be claimed that he was
of the electric, assimilative type, for he would listen to no one and
held opinions of others in contempt. He was not even a strong reasoner
as the term is generally used.
Wherein, then, lay that genius which makes him the outstanding Frenchman
and one of the supreme personages of history? Apparently he was
pre-eminent because, more than almost any man who ever lived, he had the
power of harnessing his intuitive processes to his practical problems.
He, it seems, was able to tap that vast, hidden and unsung reservoir of
knowledge which is the epitome of all that the human mind has grasped
and which, though flowing through the subconscious mind of all, is
available in its entirety to but few--and then in all too brief flashes.
The theory of the quality of the human mind, with its every-day, jerky
reasoning powers and its submerged, smooth intuitions, finds its
strongest support in such an individual.
The subliminal mind, psychologists tell us, reaches out into daily life
when the normal intelligence is in abeyance--as in sleep or profound
relaxation. This subliminal (below the threshold) mind is swifter than
the conscious mind and over-reaches it in a flash. It is practically
unerring. It is controlled by laws not yet grasped to any great extent.
It is hidden from life, yet rules it.
Mystics have the gift, in varying degree, of allowing their subconscious
minds to engulf and enfold them. The real poets have written in words
that live because, unknowingly, they have fallen back on and given
expression to the accumulated hopes and visions of the mind of man. The
prophets have simply been those with the power to make their instincts
vocal. Genius, in all its phases, is seemingly but the measure of the
extent to which men coördinate their two minds, their instinct and their
reason.
Napoleon, in practically every crisis in which he functioned, struck
those about him as being in a dazed and unnatural condition. He had
those same periods of semi-stupefaction that characterized Cæsar, Paul,
Alexander, Goethe, Lincoln and other exceptional men at the time of or
immediately following a terrific use of their mental machinery.
What, then, if, in the final analysis, it should be shown that
Napoleon's greatness lay in the fact that he did not take his own mind
or any other man's mind too seriously?
Transcriber's notes:
Obvious typographical errors corrected.
Obvious Punctuation errors standardised.
Page 333 "It is quite plan that": As per original.
End of Project Gutenberg's Heart and Soul, by Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)