relieved of the elemental gnawings which constantly terrorize the
peasant and so steadily distracted from all sober thinking that
his natural envy of his betters is sublimated into a sort of boozy
contentment, like that of a hog in a comfortable sty. He escapes
boredom, and with it, brooding. The political imbecilities which
pile up in great waves from the prairies break upon the hard rock of
his urban cynicism like rollers upon the strand. His pastors have
but a slight hold upon him, and so cannot stir him up to the frantic
hatreds which move the yokel. Even his wife emancipates herself from
the ancient demonology of the race: his typical complaint against her
is not that she is made anaphrodisiacal by Christian endeavour but
that she is too worldly and extravagant, and spreads her charms too
boldly. The rustic, alone upon his dung-hill, has time to nurse his
grievances; the city moron is diverted from them by the shows that
surround him. There was a time when yellow journalism promised to
prod him to dudgeon, and even to send him yelling to the barricades.
But the plutocracy has deftly drawn its fangs, and in its place are
the harmless tabloids. They ease his envy by giving him a vicarious
share in the debaucheries of his economic superiors. He is himself,
of course, unable to roar about the country in a high-powered car,
accompanied by a beautiful coloured girl of large gifts for the art of
love, but when he reads of the scions of old Knickerbocker families
doing it he somehow gets a touch of the thrill. It flatters him to
think that he lives in a community in which such levantine joys are
rife. Thus his envy is obscured by civic pride, by connoisseurship, and
by a simple animal delight in good shows. By the time the tale reaches
the yokel it is reduced to its immoral elements, and so makes him smell
brimstone. But the city proletarian hears the frou-frou of perfumed
skirts.
7.
_Liberty and Democratic Man_
Under the festive surface, of course, envy remains: the proletarian is
still a democrat. The fact shows itself grimly whenever the supply of
_panem et circenses_ falls off sharply, and the harsh realities make
themselves felt. All the revolutions in history have been started by
hungry city mobs. The fact is, indeed, so plain that it has attracted
the notice even of historians, and some of them deduce from it the
doctrine that city life breeds a love of liberty. It may be so, but
certainly that love is not visible in the lower orders. I can think of
no city revolution that actually had liberty for its object, in any
rational sense. The ideas of freedom that prevail in the world to-day
were first formulated by country gentlemen, aided and abetted by poets
and philosophers, with occasional help from an eccentric king. One of
the most valid of them--that of free speech--was actually given its
first support in law by the most absolute monarch of modern times,
to wit, Frederick the Great. When the city mob fights it is not for
liberty, but for ham and cabbage. When it wins, its first act is to
destroy every form of freedom that is not directed wholly to that end.
And its second is to butcher all professional libertarians. If Thomas
Jefferson had been living in Paris in 1793 he would have made an even
narrower escape from the guillotine than Thomas Paine made.
The fact is that liberty, in any true sense, is a concept that lies
quite beyond the reach of the inferior man’s mind. He can imagine and
even esteem, in his way, certain false forms of liberty--for example,
the right to choose between two political mountebanks, and to yell
for the more obviously dishonest--but the reality is incomprehensible
to him. And no wonder, for genuine liberty demands of its votaries a
quality he lacks completely, and that is courage. The man who loves it
must be willing to fight for it; blood, said Jefferson, is its natural
manure. More, he must be able to _endure_ it--an even more arduous
business. Liberty means self-reliance, it means resolution, it means
enterprise, it means the capacity for doing without. The free man is
one who has won a small and precarious territory from the great mob
of his inferiors, and is prepared and ready to defend it and make it
support him. All around him are enemies, and where he stands there is
no friend. He can hope for little help from other men of his own kind,
for they have battles of their own to fight. He has made of himself a
sort of god in his little world, and he must face the responsibilities
of a god, and the dreadful loneliness. Has _Homo boobiens_ any talent
for this magnificent self-reliance? He has the same talent for it that
he has for writing symphonies in the manner of Ludwig van Beethoven, no
less and no more. That is to say, he has no talent whatsoever, nor even
any understanding that such a talent exists. Liberty is unfathomable to
him. He can no more comprehend it than he can comprehend honour. What
he mistakes for it, nine times out of ten, is simply the banal right to
empty hallelujahs upon his oppressors. He is an ox whose last proud,
defiant gesture is to lick the butcher behind the ear.
“The vast majority of persons of our race,” said Sir Francis Galton,
“have a natural tendency to shrink from the responsibility of standing
and acting alone.” It is a pity that the great pioneer of studies
in heredity did not go beyond the fact to its obvious causes: they
were exactly in his line. What ails “the vast majority of persons of
our race” is simply the fact that, to their kind, even such mild and
narrow liberties as they can appreciate are very recent acquisitions.
It is barely a century and a half--a scant five generations--since
four-fifths of the people of the world, white and black alike, were
slaves, in reality if not in name. I could fill this book with
evidence, indubitable and overwhelming. There are whole libraries
upon the subject. Turn to any treatise on the causes of the French
Revolution, and you will find the French peasant of 1780 but little
removed, in legal rights and daily tasks, from the _fellahin_ who built
Cheops’ pyramid. Consult any work on the rise of the Industrial System
in England, and you will find the towns of that great liberty-loving
land filled, in the same year, with a half-starved and anthropoid
proletariat, and the countryside swarming with a dispossessed and
despairing peasantry. Open any school-book of American history, and
you will see Germans sold like cattle by their masters. If you thirst
for more, keep on: the tale was precisely the same in Italy, in
Spain, in Russia, in Scandinavia, and in what remained of the Holy
Roman Empire. The Irish, at the close of the Eighteenth Century, were
clamped under a yoke that it took more than a century of effort to
throw off. The Scotch, roving their bare intolerable hills, were only
two steps removed from savagery, and even cannibalism. The Welsh, but
recently delivered from voodooism to Methodism, were being driven
into their own coal-mines. There was no liberty anywhere in Europe,
even in name, until 1789, and there was little in fact until 1848.
And in America? Again I summon the historians, some of whom begin to
grow honest. America was settled largely by slaves, some escaped but
others transported in bondage. The Revolution was imposed upon them
by their betters, chiefly, in New England, commercial gents in search
of greater profits, and in the South, country gentlemen ambitious to
found a nobility in the wilderness. Universal manhood suffrage, the
corner-stone of modern free states, was only dreamed of until 1867, and
economic freedom was little more than a name until years later.
Thus the lower orders of men, however grandiloquently they may talk
of liberty to-day, have actually had but a short and highly deceptive
experience of it. It is not in their blood. The grandfathers of
at least half of them were slaves, and the great-grandfathers of
three-fourths, and the great-great-grandfathers of seven-eighths, and
the great-great-great-grandfathers of practically all. The heritage
of freedom belongs to a small minority of men, descended, whether
legitimately or by adultery, from the old lords of the soil or from
the patricians of the free towns. It is my contention that such a
heritage is necessary in order that the concept of liberty, with
all its disturbing and unnatural implications, may be so much as
grasped--that such ideas cannot be implanted in the mind of man at
will, but must be bred in as all other basic ideas are bred in. The
proletarian may mouth the phrases, as he did in Jefferson’s day, but he
cannot take in the underlying realities, as was also demonstrated in
Jefferson’s day. What his great-great-grand-children may be capable of
I am not concerned with here; my business is with the man himself as he
now walks the world. Viewed thus, it must be obvious that he is still
incapable of bearing the pangs of liberty. They make him uncomfortable;
they alarm him; they fill him with a great loneliness. There is no high
adventurousness in him, but only fear. He not only doesn’t long for
liberty; he is quite unable to stand it. What he longs for is something
wholly different, to wit, security. He needs protection. He is afraid
of getting hurt. All else is affectation, delusion, empty words.
The fact, as we shall see, explains many of the most puzzling
political phenomena of so-called free states. The great masses of men,
though theoretically free, are seen to submit supinely to oppression
and exploitation of a hundred abhorrent sorts. Have they no means
of resistance? Obviously they have. The worst tyrant, even under
democratic plutocracy, has but one throat to slit. The moment the
majority decided to overthrow him he would be overthrown. But the
majority lacks the resolution; it cannot imagine taking the risk. So
it looks for leaders with the necessary courage, and when they appear
it follows them slavishly, even after their courage is discovered to
be mere buncombe and their altruism only a cloak for more and worse
oppressions. Thus it oscillates eternally between scoundrels, or, if
you would take them at their own valuation, heroes. Politics becomes
the trade of playing upon its natural poltroonery--of scaring it half
to death, and then proposing to save it. There is in it no other
quality of which a practical politician, taking one day with another,
may be sure. Every theoretically free people wonders at the slavishness
of all the others. But there is no actual difference between them.
8.
_The Effects Upon Progress_
It follows that the inferior man, being a natural slave himself, is
quite unable to understand the desire for liberty in his superiors.
If he apprehends that desire at all it is only as an appetite for
a good of which he is himself incapable. He thus envies those who
harbour it, and is eager to put them down. Justice, in fact, is always
unpopular and in difficulties under democracy, save perhaps that false
form of so-called social justice which is designed solely to get the
laborer more than his fair hire. The wars of extermination that are
waged against heretical minorities never meet with any opposition on
the lower levels. The proletarian is always ready to help destroy the
rights of his fellow proletarian, as was revealed brilliantly by the
heroic services of the American Legion in the pogrom against Reds,
just after the late war, and even more brilliantly by the aid that the
American Federation of Labour gave to the same gallant crusade. The
city workman, oppressed by Prohibition, mourns the loss of his beer,
not the loss of his liberty. He is ever willing to support similar
raids upon the liberty of the other fellow, and he is not outraged when
they are carried on in gross violation of the most elemental principles
of justice and common decency. When, in a democratic state, any protest
against such obscenities is heard at all, it comes from the higher
levels. There a few genuine believers in liberty and justice survive,
huddled upon a burning deck. It is to be marvelled at that most of
them, on inspection, turn out to be the grandsons of similar heretics
of earlier times? I think not. It takes quite as long to breed a
libertarian as it takes to breed a race-horse. Neither may be expected
to issue from a farm mare.
The whole progress of the world, even in the direction of ameliorating
the lot of the masses, is always opposed by the masses. The notion
that their clamour brought about all the governmental and social
reforms of the last century, and that those reforms were delayed by the
superior minority, is sheer nonsense; even Liberals begin to reject
it as absurd. Consider, for example, the history of the American
Department of Agriculture. Whatever the corruptions and imbecilities
of this department in democratic hands, it must be plain to everyone
that the net effect of its work over many years has been a series of
immense benefits to the American farmer--benefits that have at once
reduced his labour and augmented his profits. Nevertheless, it is a
matter of history that the farmers of the United States, when the
Department began as a bureau of the Patent Office in 1830, opposed it
almost unanimously, and that for years their bitter derision kept it
feeble. Without leaving the United States one may go even farther back.
When John Adams, during his presidency, proposed to set up a Weather
Bureau, he was denounced as an idiot and a scoundrel, as Henry Adams
has set forth in the introduction to “The Decay of Democratic Dogma.”
Examples from our own time are so numerous and notorious that it is
needless to direct attention to them. It is axiomatic that all measures
for safeguarding the public health are opposed by the majority, and
that getting them upon the books is mainly a matter of deceiving
and checkmating it. What happened in Los Angeles when a vaccination
ordinance was submitted to a popular referendum is typical of what
would happen anywhere under the same circumstances. The ordinance was
rejected, and smallpox spread in the town. The proletariat, alarmed,
then proceeded against it by going to Christian Scientists, osteopaths
and chiropractors. Precisely the same thing happened in Switzerland.
Turn now to Germany, a country lately delivered from despotism by the
arms of altruistic heroes. The social legislation of that country, for
more than half a century, afforded a model to all other countries. All
the workingmen’s insurance, minimum wage, child labour and other such
acts of the United States are bald imitations of it, and in England,
before the war, the mountebank Lloyd-George borrowed his whole bag
of tricks from it. Well, Dr. Hans Delbrück, in his “Regierung und
Volkswille,” tells us that this legislation was fought step by step at
home, and with the utmost ferocity, by the beneficiaries of it. When
Bismarck formulated it and essayed to get it through the Reichstag
he was opposed by every mob-master in the Empire, save only his kept
Socialist, Ferdinand Lassalle. The common people were so heavily
against him for several years that he had to carry on the government
without the consent of the Reichstag--that is, unconstitutionally,
and at the risk of his head. If the proletariat had been able to get
control of the German courts, as it had got control of the Reichstag,
it would have deposed him from office and condemned him to death for
high treason. His treason consisted in trying to formulate a code of
legislation designed to restore its old rights under the Prussian
common law, destroyed by the rise of the industrial system, and to
grant it many new and valuable benefits.
“Let any competently instructed person,” says Sir Henry Maine, “turn
over in his mind the great epochs of scientific invention and social
change during the past two centuries, and consider what would have
occurred if universal suffrage had been established at any one of
them.” Here, obviously, Sir Henry speaks of universal suffrage that is
genuinely effective--suffrage that registers the actual will of the
people accurately and automatically. As we shall see, no such thing
exists in the world to-day, save in limited areas. Public policies are
determined and laws are made by small minorities playing upon the fears
and imbecilities of the mob--sometimes minorities of intelligent and
honest men, but usually minorities of rogues. But the fact does not
disturb the validity of Maine’s argument. “Universal suffrage,” he
goes on, “would certainly have prohibited the spinning-jenny and the
power loom. It would certainly have forbidden the threshing-machine.
It would have prevented the adoption of the Gregorian Calendar; it
would have restored the Stuarts. It would have proscribed the Roman
Catholics, with the mob which burned Lord Mansfield’s house and
library in 1780; and it would have proscribed the Dissenters, with
the mob which burned Dr. Priestley’s house and library in 1791.” So
much for England. What of the United States? I point briefly to the
anti-evolution acts which now begin to adorn the statute-books of the
Hookworm Belt, all of them supported vociferously by the lower orders.
I point to the anti-vivisection and anti-contraception statutes, to the
laws licensing osteopaths and other such frauds, and to the multitude
of acts depriving relatively enlightened minorities of the common
rights of free assemblage and free speech. They increase in proportion
as _vox populi_ is the actual voice of the state; they run with that
“more democracy” which Liberals advocate. “Nothing in ancient alchemy,”
says Lecky, “was more irrational than the notion that increased
ignorance in the elective body will be converted into increased
capacity for good government in the representative body; that the best
way to improve the world and secure rational progress is to place
government more and more under the control of the least enlightened
classes.”
The hostility of _Homo neandertalensis_ to all exact knowledge, even
when its effect is to work him benefits, is not hard to understand.
He is against it because it is complex, and, to his dark mind,
occult--because it puts an unbearable burden upon his meagre capacity
for taking in ideas, and thus propels him into the realm of the
unknowable and alarming. His search is always for short cuts, simple
formulæ, revelation. All superstitions are such short cuts, whether
they issue out of the African jungle or out of Little Bethel. So are
all political platitudes and shibboleths. Their one aim is to make
the unintelligible simple, and even obvious. No man who has not had
a long and arduous education in the physical sciences can understand
even the most elementary concepts of, say, pathology, but even a hind
at the plow can take in the theory of chiropractic in two lessons.
Hence the vast popularity of chiropractic among the submerged, and
of osteopathy, Christian Science, spiritualism and all the other half
rational and half supernatural quackeries with it. They are idiotic,
like the tales displayed in the movies, but, again like the tales
displayed in the movies, they are simple--and every man, high or low,
prefers what he can understand to what puzzles and dismays him. The
popularity of the farrago of absurdities called Fundamentalism--and
it is popular among peasants, not only in the United States, but
everywhere in Christendom--is thus easily understood. The cosmogonies
that educated men toy with are all inordinately complex. To comprehend
their veriest outlines requires an immense stock of exact knowledge
and a special habit of thought, quite different in kind from the habit
of thought which suffices for listening to the radio. It would be as
vain to try to teach these cosmogonies to peasants as it would be to
try to teach them to streptococci. But the cosmogony set forth in
the first chapter of Genesis is so simple that a yokel can grasp it
instantly. It collides ludicrously with many of the known facts, but he
doesn’t know the known facts. It is logically nonsensical, but to him
the nonsensical, in the sciences as in politics, has an irresistible
fascination. So he accepts the Word with loud hosannas, and has one
more excuse for hating his betters.
Turn to any other field of knowledge, and the story remains the
same. It is a tragic but inescapable fact that most of the finest
fruits of human progress, like all of the nobler virtues of man, are
the exclusive possession of small minorities, chiefly unpopular and
disreputable. Of the sciences, as of the fine arts, the average human
being, even in the most literate and civilized of modern States, is
as ignorant as the horned cattle in the fields. What he knows of
histology, say, or protozoölogy, or philology, or paleontology is
precisely nothing. Such things lie beyond his capacity for learning,
and he has no curiosity about them. The man who has any acquaintance
with them seems to him to be a ridiculous figure, with a touch of the
sinister. Even those applied sciences which enter intimately into his
everyday existence remain outside his comprehension and interest.
Consider, for example, chemistry and biology. The whole life of the
inferior man, including especially his so-called thinking, is purely
a biochemical process, and exactly comparable to what goes on in a
barrel of cider, yet he knows no more about chemistry than a cow and no
more about biology than its calf. The new physics, in the form of the
radio, saves him from the appalling boredom of his hours of leisure,
but physics itself remains as dark to him as theosophy. He is more
ignorant of elementary anatomy and physiology than the Egyptian quacks
of 4000 B.C. His knowledge of astronomy is confined to a few marvels,
most of which he secretly doubts. He has never so much as heard of
ethnology, pathology or embryology. Greek, to him, is only a jargon
spoken by boot-blacks, and Wagner is a retired baseball player. He has
never heard of Euripides, of Hippocrates, of Aristotle, or of Plato.
Or of Vesalius, Newton, and Roger Bacon. The fine arts are complete
blanks to him. He doesn’t know what a Doric column is, or an etching,
or a fugue. He is as ignorant of sonnets and the Gothic style as he
is of ecclesiastical politics in Abyssinia. Homer, Virgil, Cervantes,
Bach, Raphael, Rubens, Beethoven--all such colossal names are empty
sounds to him, blowing idly down the wind. So far as he is concerned
these great and noble men might as well have perished in the cradle.
The stupendous beauties that they conjured into being are nothing to
him: he sticks to the tabloids and the movies, with _Hot Dog_ or its
like for Sunday afternoon. A politician by instinct and a statesman by
divine right, he has never heard of “The Republic” or “Leviathan.” A
_Feinschmecker_ of pornography, he is unaware of Freud.
The Egyptian night that hedges him round is not, perhaps, without its
high uses and consolations. Learning survives among us largely because
the mob has not got news of it. If the notions it turns loose descended
to the lowest levels, there would be an uprising against them, and
efforts would be made to put them down by law. In a previous treatise,
adverting to this probability, I have sounded a warning against the
fatuous effort to put the fine arts into the common-school curriculum
in the United States. Its dangers are diminished, no doubt, by the fact
that the teachers told off to execute it are themselves completely
ignorant, but they remain dangers none the less. The peasants of
Georgia, getting wind of the fact that grand operas were being played
in Atlanta, demanded that the State Legislature discourage them with a
tax of $1000 a performance. In the Middle West, after the late war,
the American Legion proceeded with clubs against fiddlers who played
Beethoven and Bach. Everywhere in America galleries of paintings are
under suspicion, and in most States it is impossible for them to
display works showing the female figure below the clavicle. Nor is this
distrust of the fine arts confined to the rural sections. The most
active censorship of literature, for example, is to be found in Boston.
The Methodist anthropoids of the town, supported by the _Chandala_ of
the Latin rite, clerical and lay, carry on so violent a crusade against
certain hated books, unquestionably of sound quality, that the local
booksellers fear to stock them. Much of the best literature of the
world, indeed, is forbidden to the Bostonian, heir though he may be to
Emerson and Thoreau. If he would read it, he must procure it by stealth
and read it behind the door, as a Kansan (imagining that so civilized a
one exists) procures and consumes Clos Vougeot.