Transcriber’s Note: Italics are enclosed in _underscores_. Additional
notes will be found near the end of this ebook.
NOTES ON DEMOCRACY
_THE WORKS OF H. L. MENCKEN_
PREJUDICES FIRST SERIES¹
PREJUDICES SECOND SERIES¹
PREJUDICES THIRD SERIES¹
PREJUDICES FOURTH SERIES¹
PREJUDICES FIFTH SERIES¹
SELECTED PREJUDICES²
A BOOK OF BURLESQUES¹
BOOK OF PREFACES¹
IN DEFENSE OF WOMEN¹ ³
THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE¹ ³
NOTES ON DEMOCRACY¹
THE AMERICAN CREDO
[_With George Jean Nathan_]
_OUT OF PRINT_
VENTURES INTO VERSE
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW: HIS PLAYS
THE ARTIST
A LITTLE BOOK IN C MAJOR
DAMN: A BOOK OF CALUMNY
MEN VS. THE MAN
[_With Robert Rives LaMonte_]
HELIOGABALUS¹
[_With Mr. Nathan_]
EUROPE AFTER 8·15
[_With Mr Nathan and Willard H. Wright_]
THE PHILOSOPHY OF FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE¹
1 Also Published in England
2 Published only in England
3 Also Published in Germany in translation
_TRANSLATIONS_
THE ANTICHRIST, BY F W NIETZSCHE
_BOOKS ABOUT MR MENCKEN_
H. L. MENCKEN, BY ERNEST BOYD
[_Robert M. McBride & Company_]
THE MAN MENCKEN, BY ISAAC GOLDBERG
[_Simon & Schuster_]
_NEW YORK: ALFRED · A · KNOPF_
NOTES ON
DEMOCRACY
By H. L. MENCKEN
[Illustration]
PUBLISHED AT THE BORZOI · NEW YORK · BY
ALFRED · A · KNOPF
COPYRIGHT, 1926, BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
PUBLISHED, OCTOBER, 1926
SECOND PRINTING, NOVEMBER, 1926
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
CONTENTS
I. DEMOCRATIC MAN
1. His Appearance in the World 3
2. Varieties of _Homo Sapiens_ 9
3. The New Psychology 15
4. Politics Under Democracy 22
5. The Rôle of the Hormones 28
6. Envy as a Philosophy 35
7. Liberty and Democratic Man 43
8. The Effects Upon Progress 51
9. The Eternal Mob 64
II. THE DEMOCRATIC STATE
1. The Two Kinds of Democracy 71
2. The Popular Will 77
3. Disproportional Representation 88
4. The Politician Under Democracy 99
5. Utopia 106
6. The Occasional Exception 115
7. The Maker of Laws 122
8. The Rewards of Virtue 129
9. Footnote on Lame Ducks 138
III. DEMOCRACY AND LIBERTY
1. The Will to Peace 147
2. The Democrat as Moralist 152
3. Where Puritanism Fails 166
4. Corruption Under Democracy 176
IV. CODA
1. The Future of Democracy 195
2. Last Words 206
DEMOCRATIC MAN
I
DEMOCRATIC MAN
1.
_His Appearance in the World_
Democracy came into the Western World to the tune of sweet, soft
music. There was, at the start, no harsh bawling from below; there was
only a dulcet twittering from above. Democratic man thus began as an
ideal being, full of ineffable virtues and romantic wrongs--in brief,
as Rousseau’s noble savage in smock and jerkin, brought out of the
tropical wilds to shame the lords and masters of the civilized lands.
The fact continues to have important consequences to this day. It
remains impossible, as it was in the Eighteenth Century, to separate
the democratic idea from the theory that there is a mystical merit,
an esoteric and ineradicable rectitude, in the man at the bottom of
the scale--that inferiority, by some strange magic, becomes a sort
of superiority--nay, the superiority of superiorities. Everywhere on
earth, save where the enlightenment of the modern age is confessedly
in transient eclipse, the movement is toward the completer and more
enamoured enfranchisement of the lower orders. Down there, one hears,
lies a deep, illimitable reservoir of righteousness and wisdom,
unpolluted by the corruption of privilege. What baffles statesmen is to
be solved by the people, instantly and by a sort of seraphic intuition.
Their yearnings are pure; they alone are capable of a perfect
patriotism; in them is the only hope of peace and happiness on this
lugubrious ball. The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy!
This notion, as I hint, originated in the poetic fancy of gentlemen
on the upper levels--sentimentalists who, observing to their distress
that the ass was over-laden, proposed to reform transport by putting
him into the cart. A stale Christian bilge ran through their veins,
though many of them, as it happened, toyed with what is now called
Modernism. They were the direct ancestors of the more saccharine
Liberals of to-day, who yet mouth their tattered phrases and dream
their preposterous dreams. I can find no record that these phrases, in
the beginning, made much impression upon the actual objects of their
rhetoric. Early democratic man seems to have given little thought to
the democratic ideal, and less veneration. What he wanted was something
concrete and highly materialistic--more to eat, less work, higher
wages, lower taxes. He had no apparent belief in the acroamatic virtue
of his own class, and certainly none in its capacity to rule. His
aim was not to exterminate the baron, but simply to bring the baron
back to a proper discharge of baronial business. When, by the wild
shooting that naturally accompanies all mob movements, the former end
was accidentally accomplished, and men out of the mob began to take
on baronial airs, the mob itself quickly showed its opinion of them
by butchering them deliberately and in earnest. Once the pikes were
out, indeed, it was a great deal more dangerous to be a tribune of the
people than to be an ornament of the old order. The more copiously
the blood gushed, the nearer that old order came to resurrection. The
Paris proletariat, having been misled into killing its King in 1793,
devoted the next two years to killing those who had misled it, and by
the middle of 1796 it had another King in fact, and in three years
more he was King _de jure_, with an attendant herd of barons, counts,
marquises and dukes, some of them new but most of them old, to guard,
symbolize and execute his sovereignty. And he and they were immensely
popular--so popular that half of France leaped to suicide that their
glory might blind the world.
Meanwhile, of course, there had been a certain seeping down of
democratic theory from the metaphysicians to the mob--obscured by the
uproar, but still going on. Rhetoric, like a stealthy plague, was
doing its immemorial work. Where men were confronted by the harsh,
exigent realities of battle and pillage, as they were everywhere on
the Continent, it got into their veins only slowly, but where they had
time to listen to oratory, as in England and, above all, in America,
it fetched them more quickly. Eventually, as the world grew exhausted
and the wars passed, it began to make its effects felt everywhere.
Democratic man, contemplating himself, was suddenly warmed by the
spectacle. His condition had plainly improved. Once a slave, he was now
only a serf. Once condemned to silence, he was now free to criticize
his masters, and even to flout them, and the ordinances of God with
them. As he gained skill and fluency at that sombre and fascinating
art, he began to heave in wonder at his own merit. He was not only, it
appeared, free to praise and damn, challenge and remonstrate; he was
also gifted with a peculiar rectitude of thought and will, and a high
talent for ideas, particularly on the political plane. So his wishes,
in his mind, began to take on the dignity of legal rights, and after
a while, of intrinsic and natural rights, and by the same token the
wishes of his masters sank to the level of mere ignominious lusts. By
1828 in America and by 1848 in Europe the doctrine had arisen that all
moral excellence, and with it all pure and unfettered sagacity, resided
in the inferior four-fifths of mankind. In 1867 a philosopher out of
the gutter pushed that doctrine to its logical conclusion. He taught
that the superior minority had no virtues at all, and hence no rights
at all--that the world belonged exclusively and absolutely to those who
hewed its wood and drew its water. In less than half a century he had
more followers in the world, open and covert, than any other sophist
since the age of the Apostles.
Since then, to be sure, there has been a considerable recession from
that extreme position. The dictatorship of the proletariat, tried
here and there, has turned out to be--if I may venture a prejudiced
judgment--somewhat impracticable. Even the most advanced Liberals,
observing the thing in being, have been moved to cough sadly behind
their hands. But it would certainly be going beyond the facts to say
that the underlying democratic dogma has been abandoned, or even
appreciably overhauled. To the contrary, it is now more prosperous
than ever before. The late war was fought in its name, and it was
embraced with loud hosannas by all the defeated nations. Everywhere
in Christendom it is now official, save in a few benighted lands
where God is temporarily asleep. Everywhere its fundamental axioms
are accepted: (_a_) that the great masses of men have an inalienable
right, born of the very nature of things, to govern themselves, and
(_b_) that they are competent to do it. Are they occasionally detected
in gross and lamentable imbecilities? Then it is only because they
are misinformed by those who would exploit them: the remedy is more
education. Are they, at times, seen to be a trifle naughty, even
swinish? Then it is only a natural reaction against the oppressions
they suffer: the remedy is to deliver them. The central aim of all
the Christian governments of to-day, in theory if not in fact, is to
further their liberation, to augment their power, to drive ever larger
and larger pipes into the great reservoir of their natural wisdom. That
government is called good which responds most quickly and accurately
to their desires and ideas. That is called bad which conditions their
omnipotence and puts a question mark after their omniscience.
2.
_Varieties of Homo Sapiens_
So much for the theory. It seems to me, and I shall here contend, that
all the known facts lie flatly against it--that there is actually no
more evidence for the wisdom of the inferior man, nor for his virtue,
than there is for the notion that Friday is an unlucky day. There was,
perhaps, some excuse for believing in these phantasms in the days when
they were first heard of in the world, for it was then difficult to put
them to the test, and what cannot be tried and disproved has always
had a lascivious lure for illogical man. But now we know a great deal
more about the content and character of the human mind than we used to
know, both on high levels and on low levels, and what we have learned
has pretty well disposed of the old belief in its congenital intuitions
and inherent benevolences. It is, we discover, a function, at least
mainly, of purely physical and chemical phenomena, and its development
and operation are subject to precisely the same natural laws which
govern the development and operation, say, of the human nose or lungs.
There are minds which start out with a superior equipment, and proceed
to high and arduous deeds; there are minds which never get any further
than a sort of insensate sweating, like that of a kidney. We not only
observe such differences; we also begin to chart them with more or
less accuracy. Of one mind we may say with some confidence that it
shows an extraordinary capacity for function and development--that its
possessor, exposed to a suitable process of training, may be trusted
to acquire the largest body of knowledge and the highest skill at
ratiocination to which _Homo sapiens_ is adapted. Of another we may say
with the same confidence that its abilities are sharply limited--that
no conceivable training can move it beyond a certain point. In other
words, men differ inside their heads as they differ outside. There are
men who are naturally intelligent and can learn, and there are men who
are naturally stupid and cannot.
Here, of course, I flirt with the so-called intelligence tests, and so
bring down upon my head that acrid bile which they have set to flowing.
My plea in avoidance is that I have surely done my share of damning
them: they aroused, when they were first heard of, my most brutish
passions, for pedagogues had them in hand. But I can only say that time
and experience have won me to them, for the evidence in favor of them
slowly piles up, pedagogues or no pedagogues. In other words, they
actually work. What they teach is borne out by immense accumulations of
empiric corroboration. It is safe, nine times out of ten, to give them
credence, and so it seems to me to be safe to generalize from them. Is
it only a coincidence that their most frantic critics are the Liberals,
which is to say, the only surviving honest believers in democracy?
I think not. These Liberals, whatever their defects otherwise, are
themselves capable of learning, and so they quickly mastered the fact
that MM. Simon and Binet offered the most dangerous menace to their
vapourings ever heard of since the collapse of the Holy Alliance.
Their dudgeon followed. In two ways the tests give aid and comfort to
their enemies. First, they provide a more or less scientific means
of demonstrating the difference in natural intelligence between man
and man--a difference noted ages ago by common observation, and held
to be real by all men save democrats, at all times and everywhere.
Second, they provide a rational scale for measuring it and a rational
explanation of it. Intelligence is reduced to levels, and so given
a reasonable precision of meaning. An intelligent man is one who
is capable of taking in knowledge until the natural limits of the
species are reached. A stupid man is one whose progress is arrested
at some specific time and place before then. There thus appears in
psychology--and the next instant in politics--the concept of the
unteachable. Some men can learn almost indefinitely; their capacity
goes on increasing until their bodies begin to wear out. Others stop in
childhood, even in infancy. They reach, say, the mental age of ten or
twelve, and then they develop no more. Physically, they become men,
and sprout beards, political delusions, and the desire to propagate
their kind. But mentally they remain on the level of school-boys.
The fact here is challenged sharply by the democrats aforesaid, but
certainly not with evidence. Their objection to it is rather of a
metaphysical character, and involves gratuitous, transcendental
assumptions as to what ought and what ought not to be true. They echo
also, of course, the caveats of other and less romantic critics, some
of them very ingenious; but always, when hard pressed, they fall back
pathetically upon the argument that believing such things would be in
contempt of the dignity of man, made in God’s image. Is this argument
sound? Is it, indeed, new? I seem to have heard it long ago, from the
gentlemen of the sacred faculty. Don’t they defend the rubbish of
Genesis on the theory that rejecting it would leave the rabble without
faith, and that without faith it would be one with the brutes, and very
unhappy, and, what is worse, immoral? I leave such contentions to the
frequenters of Little Bethel, and pause only to observe that if the
progress of the human race had depended upon them we’d all believe
in witches, ectoplasms and madstones to-day. Democracy, alas, is also
a form of theology, and shows all the immemorial stigmata. Confronted
by uncomfortable facts, it invariably tries to dispose of them by
appeals to the highest sentiments of the human heart. An anti-democrat
is not merely mistaken; he is also wicked, and the more plausible he
is the more wicked he becomes. As I have said, the earliest of modern
democrats were full of Christian juices. Their successors never get
very far from Genesis I, 27. They are Fundamentalists by instinct,
however much they may pretend to a mellow scepticism.
One undoubted fact gives them a certain left-handed support, though
they are far too discreet to make use of it. I allude to the fact
that man on the lower levels, though he quickly reaches the limit of
his capacity for taking in actual knowledge, remains capable for a
long time thereafter of absorbing delusions. What is true daunts him,
but what is _not_ true finds lodgment in his cranium with so little
resistance that there is only a trifling emission of heat. I shall go
back to this singular and beautiful phenomenon later on. It lies at the
heart of what is called religion, and at the heart of all democratic
politics no less. The thinking of what Charles Richet calls _Homo
stultus_ is almost entirely in terms of palpable nonsense. He has a
dreadful capacity for embracing and cherishing impostures. His history
since the first records is a history of successive victimizations--by
priests, by politicians, by all sorts and conditions of quacks. His
heroes are always frauds. In all ages he has hated bitterly the men
who were labouring most honestly and effectively for the progress of
the race. What such men teach is beyond his grasp. He believes in
consequence that it is unsound, immoral and of the devil.
3.
_The New Psychology_
The concept of arrested development has caused an upheaval in
psychology, and reduced the arduous introspections of the old-time
psychologists to a series of ingenious but unimportant fancies. Men are
_not_ alike, and very little can be learned about the mental processes
of a congressman, an ice-wagon driver or a cinema actor by studying
the mental processes of a genuinely superior man. The difference is
not only qualitative; it is also, in important ways, quantitative. One
thus sees the world as a vast field of greased poles, flying gaudy and
seductive flags. Up each a human soul goes shinning, painfully and with
many a slip. Some climb eventually to the high levels; a few scale
the dizziest heights. But the great majority never get very far from
the ground. There they struggle for a while, and then give it up. The
effort is too much for them; it doesn’t seem to be worth its agonies.
Golf is easier; so is joining Rotary; so is Fundamentalism; so is
osteopathy; so is Americanism.
In an aristocratic society government is a function of those who
have got relatively far up the poles, either by their own prowess or
by starting from the shoulders of their fathers--which is to say,
either by God’s grace or by God’s grace. In a democratic society it
is the function of all, and hence mainly of those who have got only a
few spans from the ground. Their eyes, to be sure, are still thrown
toward the stars. They contemplate, now bitterly, now admiringly, the
backsides of those who are above them. They are bitter when they sense
anything rationally describable as actual superiority; they admire
when what they see is fraud. Bitterness and admiration, interacting,
form a complex of prejudices which tends to cast itself into more or
less stable forms. Fresh delusions, of course, enter into it from time
to time, usually on waves of frantic emotion, but it keeps its main
outlines. This complex of prejudices is what is known, under democracy,
as public opinion. It is the glory of democratic states.
Its content is best studied by a process of analysis--that is, by
turning from the complex whole to the simpler parts. What does the
mob think? It thinks, obviously, what its individual members think.
And what is that? It is, in brief, what somewhat sharp-nosed and
unpleasant children think. The mob, being composed, in the overwhelming
main, of men and women who have not got beyond the ideas and emotions
of childhood, hovers, in mental age, around the time of puberty,
and chiefly below it. If we would get at its thoughts and feelings
we must look for light to the thoughts and feelings of adolescents.
The old-time introspective psychology offered little help here. It
concerned itself almost exclusively with the mental processes of
the more reflective, and hence the superior sort of adults; it fell
into the disastrous fallacy of viewing a child as simply a little
man. Just as modern medicine, by rejecting a similar fallacy on the
physical plane, has set up the science and art of pediatrics, so the
new behaviourist psychology has given a new dignity and autonomy to
the study of the child mind. The first steps were very difficult.
The behaviourists not only had to invent an entirely new technique,
like the pediatricians before them; they also had to meet the furious
opposition of the orthodox psychologists, whose moony speculations
they laughed at and whose authority they derided. But they persisted,
and the problems before them turned out, in the end, to be relatively
simple, and by no means difficult to solve. By observing attentively
what was before everyone’s nose they quickly developed facts which left
the orthodox psychologists in an untenable and absurd position. One by
one, the old psychological categories went overboard, and with them a
vast mass of vague and meaningless psychological terminology.
On the cleared ground remained a massive discovery: that the earliest
and most profound of human emotions is fear. Man comes into the world
weak and naked, and almost as devoid of intelligence as an oyster, but
he brings with him a highly complex and sensitive susceptibility to
fear. He can tremble and cry out in the first hours of his life--nay,
in the first minute. Make a loud noise behind an infant just born, and
it will shake like a Sunday-school superintendent taken in adultery.
Take away its support--that is, make it believe that it is falling--and
it will send up such a whoop as comes from yokels when the travelling
tooth-puller has at them. These fears, by their character, suggest
that they have a phylogenic origin--that is, that they represent
inherited race experience, out of the deep darkness and abysm of time.
Dr. John B. Watson, the head of the behaviourist school, relates
them to the daily hazards of arboreal man--the dangers presented
by breaking tree branches. The ape-man learned to fear the sudden,
calamitous plunge, and he learned to fear, too, the warning crack. One
need not follow Dr. Watson so far; there is no proof, indeed, that
man was ever arboreal. But it must be obvious that this emotion of
fear is immensely deep-seated--that it is instinctive if anything is
instinctive. And all the evidence indicates that every other emotion
is subordinate to it. None other shows itself so soon, and none other
enters so powerfully into the first functioning of the infant mind.
And to the primeval and yet profoundly rational fears that it brings
into the world it quickly adds others that depart farther and farther
from rationality. It begins to fear ideas as well as things, strange
men as well as hostile nature. It picks up dreads and trepidations
from its mother, from its nurse, from other children. At the age of
three years, as Dr. Watson shows, its mental baggage is often little
more than a vast mass of such things. It has anxieties, horrors, even
superstitions. And as it increases in years it adds constantly to the
stock.
The process of education is largely a process of getting rid of such
fears. It rehearses, after a fashion, the upward struggle of man.
The ideal educated man is simply one who has put away as foolish the
immemorial fears of the race--of strange men and strange ideas, of
the powers and principalities of the air. He is sure of himself in
the world; no dread of the dark rides him; he is serene. To produce
such men is the central aim of every rational system of education;
even under democracy it is one of the aims, though perhaps only
a subordinate one. What brings it to futility is simply the fact
that the vast majority of men are congenitally incapable of any
such intellectual progress. They cannot take in new ideas, and they
cannot get rid of old fears. They lack the logical sense; they are
unable to reason from a set of facts before them, free from emotional
distraction. But they also lack something more fundamental: they are
incompetent to take in the bald facts themselves. Here I point to the
observations of Dr. Eleanor R. Wembridge, a practical psychologist of
great shrewdness. Her contribution is the discovery that the lower
orders of men, though they seem superficially to use articulate
speech and thus to deal in ideas, are actually but little more
accomplished in that way than so many trained animals. Words, save
the most elemental, convey nothing to them. Their minds cannot grasp
even the simplest abstractions; all their thinking is done on the
level of a few primitive appetites and emotions. It is thus a sheer
impossibility to educate them, as much so as it would be if they were
devoid of the five senses. The school-marm who has at them wastes her
time shouting up a rain-spout. They are imitative, as many of the
lower animals are imitative, and so they sometimes deceive her into
believing that her expositions and exhortations have gone home, but a
scientific examination quickly reveals that they have taken in almost
nothing. Thus ideas leave them unscathed; they are responsive only to
emotions, and their emotions are all elemental--the emotions, indeed,
of tabby-cats rather than of men.
4.
_Politics Under Democracy_
Fear remains the chiefest of them. The demagogues, _i. e._, the
professors of mob psychology, who flourish in democratic states are
well aware of the fact, and make it the corner-stone of their exact
and puissant science. Politics under democracy consists almost wholly
of the discovery, chase and scotching of bugaboos. The statesman
becomes, in the last analysis, a mere witch-hunter, a glorified smeller
and snooper, eternally chanting “Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum!” It has been so in
the United States since the earliest days. The whole history of the
country has been a history of melodramatic pursuits of horrendous
monsters, most of them imaginary: the red-coats, the Hessians, the
monocrats, again the red-coats, the Bank, the Catholics, Simon Legree,
the Slave Power, Jeff Davis, Mormonism, Wall Street, the rum demon,
John Bull, the hell hounds of plutocracy, the trusts, General Weyler,
Pancho Villa, German spies, hyphenates, the Kaiser, Bolshevism. The
list might be lengthened indefinitely; a complete chronicle of the
Republic could be written in terms of it, and without omitting a single
important episode. It was long ago observed that the plain people,
under democracy, never vote _for_ anything, but always _against_
something. The fact explains, in large measure, the tendency of
democratic states to pass over statesmen of genuine imagination and
sound ability in favour of colourless mediocrities. The former are
shining marks, and so it is easy for demagogues to bring them down;
the latter are preferred because it is impossible to fear them. The
demagogue himself, when he grows ambitious and tries to posture as a
statesman, usually comes ignominiously to grief, as the cases of Bryan,
Roosevelt and Wilson dramatically demonstrate. If Bryan had confined
himself, in 1896, to the chase of the bugaboo of plutocracy, it is
very probable that he would have been elected. But he committed the
incredible folly of throwing most of his energies into advocating a
so-called constructive program, and it was thus easy for his opponents
to alarm the mob against him. That program had the capital defect of
being highly technical, and hence almost wholly unintelligible to
all save a small minority; so it took on a sinister look, and caused
a shiver to go down the democratic spine. It was his cross-of-gold
speech that nominated him; it was his cow State political economy that
ruined him. Bryan was a highly unintelligent man, a true son of the
mob, and thus never learned anything by experience. In his last days he
discovered a new issue in the evolutionary hypothesis. It was beyond
the comprehension of the mob, and hence well adapted to arousing its
fears. But he allowed his foes to take the offensive out of his hands,
and in the last scene of all he himself was the pursued, and the tide
of the battle was running so heavily against him that even the hinds at
Dayton, Tenn., were laughing at him.
Government under democracy is thus government by orgy, almost by
orgasm. Its processes are most beautifully displayed at times when they
stand most naked--for example, in war days. The history of the American
share in the World War is simply a record of conflicting fears, more
than once amounting to frenzies. The mob, at the start of the uproar,
showed a classical reaction: it was eager only to keep out of danger.
The most popular song, in the United States, in 1915, was “I Didn’t
Raise My Boy to be a Soldier.” In 1916, on his fraudulent promise to
preserve that boy from harm, Wilson was reëlected. There then followed
some difficult manœuvres--but perhaps not so difficult, after all,
to skilful demagogues. The problem was to substitute a new and worse
fear for the one that prevailed--a new fear so powerful that it would
reconcile the mob to the thought of entering the war. The business was
undertaken resolutely on the morning after election day. Thereafter,
for three months, every official agency lent a hand. No ship went
down to a submarine’s torpedo anywhere on the seven seas that the
State Department did not report that American citizens--nay, American
infants in their mothers’ arms--were aboard. Diplomatic note followed
diplomatic note, each new one surpassing all its predecessors in moral
indignation. The Department of Justice ascribed all fires, floods and
industrial accidents to German agents. The newspapers were filled with
dreadful surmises, many of them officially inspired, about the probable
effects upon the United States of the prospective German victory. It
was obvious to everyone, even to the mob, that a victorious Germany
would unquestionably demand an accounting for the United States’ gross
violations of neutrality. Thus a choice of fears was set up. The first
was a fear of a Germany heavily beset, but making alarming progress
against her foes. The second was a fear of a Germany delivered from
them, and thirsting for revenge on a false and venal friend. The second
fear soon engulfed the first. By the time February came the mob was
reconciled to entering the war--reconciled, but surely not eager.
There remained the problem of converting reluctant acquiescence into
enthusiasm. It was solved, as always, by manufacturing new fears. The
history of the process remains to be written by competent hands: it
will be a contribution to the literature of mob psychology of the
highest importance. But the main outlines are familiar enough. The
whole power of the government was concentrated upon throwing the plain
people into a panic. All sense was heaved overboard, and there ensued
a chase of bugaboos on a truly epic scale. Nothing like it had ever
been seen in the world before, for no democratic state as populous as
the United States had ever gone to war before. I pass over the details,
and pause only to recall the fact that the American people, by the end
of 1917, were in such terror that they lived in what was substantially
a state of siege, though the foe was 3000 miles away and obviously
unable to do them any damage. It was only the draft, I believe, that
gave them sufficient courage to attempt actual hostilities. That
ingenious device, by relieving the overwhelming majority of them of any
obligation to take up arms, made them bold. Before it was adopted they
were heavily in favour of contributing only munitions and money to the
cause of democracy, with perhaps a few divisions of Regulars added for
the moral effect. But once it became apparent that a given individual,
John Doe, would not have to serve, he, John Doe, developed an
altruistic eagerness for a frontal attack in force. For every Richard
Roe in the conscript camps there were a dozen John Does thus safely
at home, with wages high and the show growing enjoyable. So an heroic
mood came upon the people, and their fear was concealed by a truculent
front. But not from students of mob psychology.
5.
_The Rôle of the Hormones_
Two other emotions are observed in the raw human being, fresh from
God’s hands: one is rage, and the other is what, for want of a more
accurate name, may be called love. This love, of course, is something
quite different from the thing that poets sing. It is a great deal more
earthly, and perhaps a great deal more honest. It manifests itself
typically in a delight in being tickled; its psychic overtones take the
form of being amiable. The child that is capable of it in the fullest
measure is the one that coos loudest when its mother pats and strokes
it, and tucks it into bed. In these sad days, when every flapper has
read Freud and ponders on the libido, there is no need, I take it, for
me to explain that such delights have their seats chiefly in erogenous
zones, and have more to do with the hormones than with the soul. Here
the new child psychology confirms the observations of the Freudians,
and reinforces their allegation that even the most tender and innocent
infant may be worthy of suspicion. Dr. Watson says that the dreadful
phenomenon of tumescence in the male can occur at birth--a satirical
fact of the first calibre, if a fact. It concerns us here only because
the incurable infantilism of the inferior man brings him to manhood
with his emotions in this department substantially what they were when
he yielded himself to auto-erotic exercises in the cradle.
But there is yet a difference, and it is important. In character
his amorous fancies are the same; in intensity they are immensely
exaggerated. His brain, in the first years of his second decade, ceases
to develop, but simultaneously his glands begin to unfold gloriously,
and presently they dominate his whole organism. In his middle teens,
he is no more than a vast geyser of hormones. The sweet passion of
love, in these years, is to him precisely what it is to a Tom cat.
If he is of the bucolic variety of _Homo stultus_ he has his will of
his neighbour’s daughter, and there begins a race between the village
pastor and the village _sage-femme_. If he is of the urban proletariat,
he finds the outer world more inhospitable to the inner urge, for there
are no dark lanes in the cities and no moonlight nights, but the urge
itself remains irresistible and so in some way or other, vicariously or
in harsh physiological terms, he yields himself to it, and loses his
immortal soul.
Later on the thing grows more subtle and even more refined. His
vast capacity for illusion, his powerful thirst for the not true,
embellishes his anthropoid appetite without diminishing it, and he
begins to toy with sentiment, even with a sort of poetry. If you want
to discover the content of that poetry go look at any movie, or listen
to any popular song. At its loftiest, it is never far from the poetry
of a rooster in a barnyard. Love, to the inferior man, remains almost
wholly a physical matter. The heroine he most admires is the one who
offers the grossest sexual provocation; the hero who makes his wife
roll her eyes is a perambulating phallus. The eminent psychologists
who conduct tabloid newspapers make this fact the corner-stone of their
metaphysical system. Their ideal piece of news is one in which nothing
is left to the imagination that can be wormed through the mails. Their
readers want no sublimation and no symbolism.
Love, as Freud explains, has many meanings. It runs from the erotic
to the philanthropic. But in all departments and on all planes the
inferior man reduces it to terms of his own elemental yearnings. Of
all his stupidities there is none more stupid than that which makes
it impossible for him to see beyond them, even as an act of the
imagination. He simply cannot formulate the concept of a good that
is not his own good. The fact explains his immemorial heat against
heretics, sacred and secular. His first thought and his last thought,
contemplating them, is to stand them up against a wall, and have at
them with musketry. Go back into history as far as you please, and you
will find no record that he has ever opened his mouth for fairness,
for justice, for decency between man and man. Such concepts, like the
concepts of honour and of liberty, are eternally beyond him, and belong
only to his superiors. The slaughters in the Roman arena delighted
him; he applauded Torquemada; only yesterday he was marching against
radicals--_i. e._, idiots who lamented his exploitation and sought to
end it--with the American Legion. His natural cowardice, of course,
moves him powerfully in such situations: his congenital fear is easily
translated into cruelty. But something must also be said for his
mere incapacity to project himself into the place of the other, his
deficiency in imagination. Are the poor charitable? Then it is only to
the poor. When their betters stand before them, asking for something
that they may withhold--when they are thus confronted, though the thing
asked for be only fair dealing, elemental justice, common decency, they
are wolves.
In a previous work I have adverted to the appalling development
of this wolfishness among peasants. They may be safely assumed, I
believe, to represent the lowest caste among civilized men. They are
the closest, both in their avocations and in their mental processes,
to primeval man. One may think of them as the sediment remaining in
the filter after the stream of progress has gone through. Even the
city proletariat is appreciably superior, if only because it embraces
those more intelligent yokels who have had the wit to escape from the
dreadful drudgery of the dunghill. Well, give a glance at the theology
and politics prevailing on the land. The former, in all countries and
all ages, has kept contact with the primitive animism of savages: it
bristles everywhere with demons, witches and ghosts. In its public
aspect it is as intolerant of heresy as Thibetan lamaism. The yokel
not only believes that all heretics are doomed to be roasted in hell
through all eternity; he also holds that they should be harassed as
much as possible on this earth. The anti-evolution laws of the South
afford an instructive glimpse into the peasant mind. They are based
frankly upon the theory that every man who dissents from the barnyard
theology is a scoundrel, and devoid of civil rights. That theory was
put very plainly by the peasant attorney-general during the celebrated
Scopes trial, to the visible satisfaction of the peasant judge.
In politics the virtuous clod-hopper, again speaking for inferior
man, voices notions of precisely the same sort. The whole process
of government, as he views it, is simply a process of promoting his
private advantage. He can imagine no good save his own good. When his
affairs are prospering--which is to say, when the needs of the city man
are acute, and the latter is thus at his mercy--he rams his advantage
home with relentless ferocity. For him to show any altruism in such
a situation, or even any common humanity, would be so strange as to
appear fabulous. But when things are running against him he believes
that the city man should be taxed to make up his losses: this is the
alpha and omega of all the brummagem progressivism that emanates from
the farm. That “progressivism,” in the hands of political mountebanks,
is swathed in the trappings of Service, but at the heart of it there
is nothing but bald self-seeking. The yokel hates everyone who is
not a yokel--and is afraid of everyone. He is democratic man in the
altogether. He is the glory and bulwark of all democratic states. The
city proletarian may be flustered and run amok by ideas--ideas without
any sense, true enough, but still ideas. The yokel has room in his head
for only one. That is the idea that God regards him fondly, and has a
high respect for him--that all other men are out of favour in heaven
and abandoned to the devil.
6.
_Envy As a Philosophy_
But under this pretension to superiority, of course, there lies an
uncomfortable realization of actual inferiority. The peasant hates;
_ergo_, he envies--and “l’envie,” as Heine said to Philarète Chasles,
“est une infériorité qui s’avoue.” The disdain that goes with genuine
superiority is something quite different; there is no sign of it in
him. He is so far from it, indeed, that he can imagine no higher
delights than such as proceed from acts which, when performed by the
hated city man, he denounces as crimes, and tries to put down by law.
It is the cabaret that makes a Prohibitionist of him, not the drunkard
in the gutter. Doomed himself to drink only crude and unpalatable
stimulants, incompetently made and productive of depressing malaises,
and forced to get them down in solitary swinishness behind the door,
he naturally longs for the varieties that have a more delicate and
romantic smack, and are ingested in gay society and to the music of
harps and sackbuts. That longing is vain. There are no cabarets in
the village, but only sordid speak-easies, selling raw spirits out
of filthy jugs. Drinking cider in the barn is so lonely as to be a
sort of onanism. Where is the music? Where are the whirling spangles,
the brilliant lights? Where is the swooning, suffocating scent of
lilies-of-the-valley, Jockey Club? Where, above all, are the lost
and fascinating females, so thrillingly described by the visiting
evangelist? The yokel peeks through a crack in the barn-door and
glimpses his slatternly wife laboriously rounding up strayed pigs: to
ask her in for a friendly bumper would be as appalling as asking in the
cow. So he gets down his unappetizing dram, feels along his glabella
for the beginning headache, and resumes his melancholy heaving of
manure--a Prohibitionist by conscience, doubly-riveted and immovable.
In all his politics this envy is manifest. He hates the plutocrats
of the cities, not only because they best him in the struggle for
money, but also because they spend their gains in debaucheries that
are beyond him. Such yellow-backs as “Night Life in Chicago” have
done more, I believe, to propagate “idealism” in the corn-and-hog
belt than all the eloquence of the Pfeffers and Bryans. The yokels,
reading them in secret, leave them full of a passionate conviction
that such Babylonish revels must be put down, if Christianity is to
survive--that it is obviously against the will of God that a Chicago
stock-broker should have five wives and fifty concubines, and an Iowa
swineherd but one--and that one a strictly Christian woman, even at
the purple moments when wits and principles tend naturally to scatter.
In the cities, as everyone knows, women move toward antinomianism:
it is a scandal throughout Christendom. Their souls, I daresay, are
imperilled thereby, but certainly no one argues that it makes them
less charming--least of all the husbandman behind his remote plough,
tortured by ruby reflections of the carnalities at Atlantic City and
Miami. On the land, however, that movement has but little genuine
force, despite a general apeing of its externals. The female young may
bob their hair, but they do not reject divine revelation. I am told by
experts that it is still a sort of marvel, as it was in the youth of
Abraham Lincoln, to find a farm-wife who has definitely renounced the
theology of the local pastors. The fact has obvious moral--and, by
an easy step, political--consequences. There are about six and a half
million farmers in the United States. Keep in mind the fact that at
least six millions of them are forced to live in unmitigated monogamy
with wives whose dominant yearning is to save the heathen hordes in
India from hell fire, and you will begin to get some grasp of the
motives behind such statutes as the celebrated Mann Act. The sea-sick
passenger on the ocean liner detests the “good sailor” who stalks past
him a hundred times a day, obscenely smoking large, greasy, gold-banded
cigars. In precisely the same way democratic man hates the fellow who
is having a better time of it in this world. Such, indeed, is the
origin of democracy. And such is the origin of its twin, Puritanism.
The city proletarian, of course, is a cut above the hind, if only
because his natural envy of his betters is mitigated and mellowed by
_panem et circenses_. His life may be swinish, but it is seldom dull.
In good times there is actual money in his hand, and immense and
complicated organizations offer him gaudy entertainment in return for
it. In bad times his basic wants are met out of the community funds,
and he is even kept in certain luxuries, necessary to his contentment.
The immense development of public charity in the cities of the United
States has yet to find adequate analysis and record. Nothing quite
like it was ever known in past ages, nor is it paralleled in any other
country to-day. What lies under it, I daresay, is simply the fact
that the plutocracy of the Republic, having had more experience with
democracy than the plutocracy anywhere else, has attained to a higher
skill in dealing with the proletarian. He is never dangerous so long as
his belly is filled and his eyes kept a-pop; and in this great land,
by Divine Providence, there is always enough surplus wealth, even in
the worst times, to finance that filling and popping. The plethora of
means has bred a large class of experts, professionally devoted to
the business. They swarm in all the American cities, and when genuine
wants fail them they invent artificial wants. This enterprise in the
third theological virtue has gone to great lengths. The proletarian,
in his office as father, is now reduced by it to the simple biological
function of a boar in a barnyard. From the moment the fertilized ovum
attaches itself to the _decidua serotina_ he is free to give himself
whole-heartedly to politics, drink and the radio. There is elaborate
machinery for instructing the partner of his ecstasies in the whole
art and mystery of maternity, and all the accompanying expenses are
provided for. Obstetricians of the highest eminence stand ready to
examine her and counsel her; gynecologists are at hand to perform any
necessary operations; trained nurses call at her home, supply and
prepare her diet, warn her against a too animated social life, hand her
instructive literature, and entertain her with anecdotes suitable to
her condition. If she is too clumsy or too lazy to fashion a layette,
or can’t afford the materials, it is provided free of charge. And when
she comes to term at last she is taken into a steam-heated hospital,
boarded without cost, and delivered in a brilliant, aseptic, and, in so
far as money can make it so, painless manner.
Nor is this all. Once she has become a mother her benefits only
increase. If she wants to get rid of her child it is taken off her
hands, and eager propagandists instruct her in the science of avoiding
another. If she chooses to keep it there is elaborate machinery for
reducing the care and cost of it to nothing. Visiting nurses of a
dozen different varieties stand ready to assume the burdens of washing
it, dosing it with purges, and measuring out its victuals. Milk is
supplied free--and not simply common cow’s milk, but cow’s milk
modified according to the subtlest formulæ of eminent pediatricians.
Ice is thrown in as a matter of course. Medicines are free at the
neighbourhood dispensary. If the mother, recovering her figure, wishes
to go shopping, she may park her baby at a _crèche_, and, on the plea
that she is employed as a charwoman, leave it there all day. Once it
can toddle the kindergarten yawns for it, and in holiday time the
public playground, each officered by learned experts. The public school
follows, and with it a host of new benefits. Dentists are in attendance
to plug and pull the youngster’s teeth at the public charge. Oculists
fit it with horn-rimmed spectacles. It is deloused. Free lunches
sustain it. Its books cost nothing. It is taught not only the three
R’s, but also raffiawork, bookkeeping, basketball, salesmanship, the
new dances, and parliamentary law. It learns the causes of the late war
and the fallacies of Socialism.