insensitive to their dishonour, is edified and exhilarated by their
success. The competition they offer to men of a decenter habit is
too powerful to be met, so they tend, gradually, to monopolize all
the public offices. Out of the muck of their swinishness the typical
American law-maker emerges. He is a man who has lied and dissembled,
and a man who has crawled. He knows the taste of boot-polish. He has
suffered kicks in the tonneau of his pantaloons. He has taken orders
from his superiors in knavery and he has wooed and flattered his
inferiors in sense. His public life is an endless series of evasions
and false pretences. He is willing to embrace any issue, however
idiotic, that will get him votes, and he is willing to sacrifice
any principle, however sound, that will lose them for him. I do not
describe the democratic politician at his inordinate worst; I describe
him as he is encountered in the full sunshine of normalcy. He may be,
on the one hand, a cross-roads idler striving to get into the State
Legislature by grace of the local mortgage-sharks and evangelical
clergy, or he may be, on the other, the President of the United States.
It is almost an axiom that no man may make a career in politics in the
Republic without stooping to such ignobility: it is as necessary as a
loud voice. Now and then, to be sure, a man of sounder self-respect may
make a beginning, but he seldom gets very far. Those who survive are
nearly all tarred, soon or late, with the same stick. They are men who,
at some time or other, have compromised with their honour, either by
swallowing their convictions or by whooping for what they believe to
be untrue. They are in the position of the chorus girl who, in order
to get her humble job, has had to admit the manager to her person. And
the old birds among them, like chorus girls of long experience, come to
regard the business resignedly and even complacently. It is the price
that a man who loves the clapper-clawing of the vulgar must pay for
it under the democratic system. He becomes a coward and a trimmer _ex
officio_. Where his dignity was in the days of his innocence there is
now only a vacuum in the wastes of his subconscious. Vanity remains to
him, but not pride.
5.
_Utopia_
Thus the ideal of democracy is reached at last: it has become a psychic
impossibility for a gentleman to hold office under the Federal Union,
save by a combination of miracles that must tax the resourcefulness
even of God. The fact has been rammed home by a constitutional
amendment: every office-holder, when he takes oath to support the
Constitution, must swear on his honour that, summoned to the death-bed
of his grandmother, he will not take the old lady a bottle of wine. He
may say so and do it, which makes him a liar, or he may say so and not
do it, which makes him a pig. But despite that grim dilemma there are
still idealists, chiefly professional Liberals, who argue that it is
the duty of a gentleman to go into politics--that there is a way out of
the quagmire in that direction. The remedy, it seems to me, is quite as
absurd as all the other sure cures that Liberals advocate. When they
argue for it, they simply argue, in words but little changed, that
the remedy for prostitution is to fill the bawdy-houses with virgins.
My impression is that this last device would accomplish very little:
either the virgins would leap out of the windows, or they would cease
to be virgins. The same alternatives confront the political aspirant
who is what is regarded in America as a gentleman--that is, who is one
not susceptible to open bribery in cash. The moment his leg goes over
the political fence, he finds the mob confronting him, and if he would
stay within he must adapt himself to its tastes and prejudices. In
other words, he must learn all the tricks of the regular mountebanks.
When the mob pricks up its ears and begins to whinny, he must soothe it
with balderdash. He must allay its resentment of the fact that he is
washed behind the ears. He must anticipate its crazes, and join in them
vociferously. He must regard its sensitiveness on points of morals, and
get what advantage he can out of his anæsthesia on points of honour.
More, he must make terms with the mob-masters already performing upon
its spines, chiefly agents of prehensile minorities. If he neglects
these devices he is swiftly heaved over the fence, and his career in
statecraft is at an end.
Here I do not theorize; there are examples innumerable. It is an axiom
of practical politics, indeed, that the worst enemies of political
decency are the tired reformers--and the worst of the worst are those
whose primary thirst to make the corruptible put on incorruption
was accompanied by a somewhat sniffish class consciousness. Has the
United States ever seen a more violent and shameless demagogue than
Theodore Roosevelt? Yet Roosevelt came into politics as a sword drawn
against demagogy. The list of such recusants might be run to great
lengths: I point to the late Mitchel of New York and the late Lodge
of Massachusetts and pass on. Lodge lived long enough to become a
magnificent _reductio ad absurdum_ of the gentleman turned democratic
messiah. It was a sheer impossibility, during the last ten years of
his life, to disentangle his private convictions from the fabric of
his political dodges. He was the perfect model of the party hack, and
if he performed before the actual mob less unchastely than Roosevelt
it was only because his somewhat absurd façade unfitted him for that
science. He dealt in jobs in a wholesale manner, and with the hearty
devotion of a Penrose or a Henry Lincoln Johnson. Popularly regarded as
an unflinching and even adamantine fellow, he was actually as limber as
an eel. He knew how to jump. He knew when to whisper and when to yell.
As I say, I could print a long roster of similar apostates; the name of
Penrose himself should not be forgotten. I do not say that a gentleman
may not thrust himself into politics under democracy; I simply say that
it is almost impossible for him to stay there and remain a gentleman.
The haughty amateur, at the start, may actually make what seems to be
a brilliant success, for he is commonly full of indignation, and so
strikes out valiantly, and the mob crowds up because it likes a brutal
show. But that first battle is almost always his last. If he retains
his rectitude he loses his office, and if he retains his office he has
to dilute his rectitude with the cologne spirits of the trade.
Such is the pride that we pay for the great boon of democracy: the
man of native integrity is either barred from the public service
altogether, or subjected to almost irresistible temptations after he
gets in. The competition of less honourable man is more than he can
bear. He must stand against them before the mob, and the sempiternal
prejudices of the mob run their way. In most other countries of a
democratic tendency--for example, England--this outlawry and corruption
of the best is checked by an aristocratic tradition--an anachronism,
true enough, but still extremely powerful, and yielding to the times
only under immense pressure. The English aristocracy (aided, in part,
by the plutocracy, which admires and envies it) not only keeps a large
share of the principal offices in its own hands, regardless of popular
rages and party fortunes; it also preserves an influence, and hence a
function, for its non-officeholding members. The scholarship of Oxford
and Cambridge, for example, can still make itself felt at Westminster,
despite the fact that the vast majority of the actual members of
the Commons are ignoramuses. But in the United States there is no
aristocracy, whether intellectual or otherwise, and so the scholarship
of Harvard, such as it is, is felt no more on Capitol Hill than it
is at Westerville, Ohio. The class of politicians, indeed, tends to
separate itself sharply from all other classes. There is none of that
interpenetration on the higher levels which marks older and more secure
societies. Roosevelt, an imitation aristocrat, was the first and only
American President since Washington to make any effort to break down
the barriers. A man of saucy and even impertinent curiosities, and
very eager to appear to the vulgar as an Admirable Crichton, he made
his table the resort of all sorts and conditions of men. Among them
were some who actually knew something about this or that, and from
them he probably got useful news and advice. Beethoven, if he had been
alive, would have been invited to the White House, and Goethe would
have come with him. But that eagerness for contacts outside the bounds
of professional politics is certainly not a common mark of American
Presidents, nor, of American public officials of any sort. When the
lamented Harding sat in Lincoln’s chair his hours of ease were spent
with bootleggers, not with metaphysicians; his notion of a good time
was to refresh himself in the manner of a small-town Elk, at golf,
poker, and guzzling. The tastes of his successor are even narrower: the
loftiest guests he entertains upon the _Mayflower_ are the editors of
party newspapers, and there is no evidence that he is acquainted with
a single intelligent man. The average American Governor is of the same
kidney. He comes into contact with the local _Gelehrte_ only when a
bill is up to prohibit the teaching of the elements of biology in the
State university.
The judiciary, under the American system, sinks quite as low. Save
when, by some miscarriage of politics, a Brandeis, a Holmes, a Cardozo
or a George W. Anderson is elevated to the bench, it carries on its
dull and preposterous duties quite outside the stream of civilized
thought, and even outside the stream of enlightened juridic thought.
Very few American judges ever contribute anything of value to legal
theory. One seldom hears of them protesting, either _ex cathedra_
or as citizens, against the extravagances and absurdities that fast
reduce the whole legal system of the country to imbecility; they
seem to be quite content to enforce any sort of law that is provided
for their use by ignorant and corrupt legislators, regardless of its
conflict with fundamental human rights. The Constitution apparently
has no more meaning to them than it has to a Prohibition agent. They
have acquiesced almost unanimously in the destruction of the First,
Second, Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendments, and supinely connived at
the invasion of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth. The reason is not far to
seek. The average American judge, in his days at the bar, was not a
leader but a trailer. The judicial office is not attractive, as a rule,
to the better sort of lawyers. We have such a multiplicity of courts
that it has become common, and judges are so often chosen for purely
political reasons, even for the Supreme Court of the United States,
that the lawyer of professional dignity and self-respect hesitates
to enter into the competition. Thus the bench tends to be filled
with duffers, and many of them are also scoundrels, as the frequent
complaints against their extortions and tyrannies testify. The English
bench, as everyone knows, is immensely better: the fact is often noted
with lamentation by American lawyers. And why? Simply because the
governing oligarchy in England, lingering on in spite of the democratic
upheaval, keeps jealous guard over the judiciary in the interest of
its own class, and thereby prevents the elevation of the preposterous
shysters who so frequently attain to the ermine in America. Even when,
under the pressure of parlous times, it admits an F. E. Smith to the
bench, it at least makes sure that he is a competent lawyer. The way
is thus blocked to downright ignoramuses, and English jurisprudence,
so much more fluent and reasonable than our own, is protected against
their dull stupidities. Genuine talent, however humble its origin, may
get in, but not imbecility, however pretentious. In the United States
the thing runs the other way. In the States, where judges are commonly
elected by popular vote, the shyster has every advantage over the
reputable lawyer, including that of yearning for the judicial salary
with a vast and undivided passion. And when it comes to the Federal
courts, once so honourable, he has every advantage again, including the
formidable one of knowing how to crook his knee gracefully to the local
dispenser of Federal patronage (in the South, often a worthless Negro)
and to the Methodist wowsers of the Anti-Saloon League.
6.
_The Occasional Exception_
I do not argue, of course, that the shyster invariably prevails. As I
have said, a man of unquestionable integrity and ability occasionally
gets to the bench, even of the State courts. In the same way a man
of unquestionable integrity and ability sometimes finds himself in
high executive or legislative office; there are even a few cases of
such men getting into the White House. But the thing doesn’t happen
often, and when it does happen it is only by a failure of the rule.
The self-respecting candidate obviously cannot count on that failure:
the odds are heavily against him from the start, and every effort he
makes to diminish them involves some compromise with complete candour.
He may take refuge in cynicism, and pursue the cozening of the
populace as a sort of intellectual exercise, cruel but not unamusing,
or he may accept the conditions of the game resignedly, and charge
up the necessary dodges and false pretences to spiritual profit and
loss, as a chorus girl charges up her favours to the manager and his
backer; but in either case he has parted with something that must
be tremendously valuable to a self-respecting man, and is even more
valuable to the country he serves than it is to himself. Contemplating
such a body as the national House of Representatives one sees only a
group of men who have compromised with honour--in brief, a group of
male Magdalens. They have been broken to the goose-step. They have
learned how to leap through the hoops of professional job-mongers and
Prohibitionist blackmailers. They have kept silent about good causes,
and spoken in causes that they knew to be evil. The higher they rise,
the further they fall. The occasional mavericks, thrown in by miracle,
last a session, and then disappear. The old Congressman, the veteran of
genuine influence and power, is either one who is so stupid that the
ideas of the mob are his own ideas, or one so far gone in charlatanry
that he is unconscious of his shame. Our laws are made, in the main, by
men who have sold their honour for their jobs, and they are executed by
men who put their jobs above justice and common sense. The occasional
cynics leaven the mass. We are dependent for whatever good flows out of
democracy upon men who do not believe in democracy.
Here, perhaps, it will be urged that my argument goes beyond the
democratic scheme and lodges against government itself. There is, I
believe, some cogency in the caveat. All government, whatever its form,
is carried on chiefly by men whose first concern is for their offices,
not for their obligations. It is, in its essence, a conspiracy of a
small group against the masses of men, and especially against the
masses of diligent and useful men. Its primary aim is to keep this
group in jobs that are measurably more comfortable and exhilarating
than the jobs its members could get in free competition. They are
thus always willing to make certain sacrifices of integrity and
self-respect in order to hold those jobs, and the fact is just as plain
under a despot as it is under the mob. The mob has its flatterers
and bosh-mongers; the king has his courtiers. But there is yet a
difference, and I think it is important. The courtier, at his worst, at
least performs his genuflections before one who is theoretically his
superior, and is surely not less than his equal. He does not have to
abase himself before swine with whom, ordinarily, he would disdain to
have any traffic. He is not compelled to pretend that he is a worse man
than he really is. He needn’t hold his nose in order to approach his
benefactor. Thus he may go into office without having dealt his honour
a fatal wound, and once he is in, he is under no pressure to sacrifice
it further, and may nurse it back to health and vigour. His sovereign,
at worst, has a certain respect for it, and hesitates to strain it
unduly; the mob has no sensitiveness on that point, and, indeed, no
knowledge that it exists. The courtier’s sovereign, in other words, is
apt to be a man of honour himself. When, in 1848 or thereabout, the
late Wilhelm I of Prussia was offered the imperial crown by a so-called
parliament of his subjects, he refused it on the ground that he could
take it only from his equals, _i. e._, from the sovereign princes of
the _Reich_. To the democrats of the world this attitude was puzzling,
and on reflection it began to seem contemptible and offensive. But
that was not to be marveled at. To a democrat any attitude based upon
a concept of honour, dignity and integrity seems contemptible and
offensive. Once Frederick the Great was asked why he gave commissions
in his army only to _Junker_. Because, he answered, they will not
lie and they cannot be bought. That answer explains sufficiently the
general democratic theory that the _Junker_ are not only scoundrels,
but also half-wits.
The democratic politician, facing such plain facts, tries to save his
_amour propre_ in a characteristically human way; that is to say,
he denies them. We all do that. We convert our degradations into
renunciations, our self-seeking into public spirit, our swinishness
into heroism. No man, I suppose, ever admits to himself candidly that
he gets his living in a dishonourable way, not even a Prohibition
agent or a biter off of puppies’ tails. The democratic politician,
confronted by the dishonesty and stupidity of his master, the mob,
tries to convince himself and all the rest of us that it is really
full of rectitude and wisdom. This is the origin of the doctrine that,
whatever its transient errors, it always comes to right decisions
in the long run. Perhaps--but on what evidence, by what reasoning,
and for what motives! Go examine the long history of the anti-slavery
agitation in America: it is a truly magnificent record of buncombe,
false pretences, and imbecility. This notion that the mob is wise, I
fear, is not to be taken seriously: it was invented by mob-masters to
save their faces: there was a lot of chatter about it by Roosevelt,
but none by Washington, and very little by Jefferson. Whenever
democracy, by an accident, produces a genuine statesman, he is found
to be proceeding on the assumption that it is not true. And on the
assumption that it is difficult, if not impossible to go to the mob for
support, and still retain the ordinary decencies. The best democratic
statesmanship, like the best non-democratic statesmanship, tends to
safeguard the honour of the higher officers of state by relieving them
of that degrading necessity. As every schoolboy knows, such was the
intent of the Fathers, as expressed in Article II, Sections 1 and 2, of
the Constitution. To this day it is a common device, when this or that
office becomes steeped in intolerable corruption, to take it out of
the gift of the mob, and make it appointive. The aspirant, of course,
still has to seek it, for under democracy it is very rare that office
seeks the man, but seeking it of the President, or even of the Governor
of a State, is felt to be appreciably less humiliating and debasing
than seeking it of the mob. The President may be a Coolidge, and the
Governor may be a Blease or a Ma Ferguson, but he (or she) is at least
able to understand plain English, and need not be put into good humour
by the arts of the circus clown or Baptist evangelist.
To sum up: the essential objection to feudalism (the perfect antithesis
to democracy) was that it imposed degrading acts and attitudes upon
the vassal; the essential objection to democracy is that, with few
exceptions, it imposes degrading acts and attitudes upon the men
responsible for the welfare and dignity of the state. The former was
compelled to do homage to his suzerain, who was very apt to be a brute
and an ignoramus. The latter are compelled to do homage to their
constituents, who in overwhelming majority are certain to be both.
7.
_The Maker of Laws_
In the United States, the general democratic tendency to crowd
competent and self-respecting men out of the public service is
exaggerated by a curious constitutional rule, unknown in any other
country. This is the rule, embodied in Article I, Sections 2 and 3, of
the Constitution and carried over into most of the State constitutions,
that a legislator must be an actual resident of the district he
represents. Its obvious aim is to preserve for every electoral unit
a direct and continuous voice in the government; its actual effect
is to fill all the legislative bodies of the land with puerile local
politicians, many of them so stupid that they are quite unable to
grasp the problems with which government has to deal. In England it
is perfectly possible for the remotest division to choose a Morley to
represent it, and this, in fact, until the recent rise of the mob, was
not infrequently done. But in the United States every congressional
district must find its representative within its own borders, and only
too often there is no competent man available. Even if one happens to
live there--which in large areas of the South and many whole States
of the newer West, is extremely improbable--he is usually so enmeshed
in operations against the resident imbeciles and their leaders, and
hence so unpopular, that his candidacy is out of the question. This
is manifestly the case in such States as Tennessee and Mississippi.
Neither is without civilized inhabitants, but in neither is it possible
to find a civilized inhabitant who is not under the ban of the local
Fundamentalist clergy, and _per corollary_, of the local politicians.
Thus both States, save for occasional accidents, are represented in
Congress by delegations of pliant and unconscionable jackasses, and
their influence upon national legislation is extremely evil. It was the
votes of such ignoble fellows, piling in from all the more backward
States, that forced the Eighteenth Amendment through both Houses of
Congress, and it was the votes of even more degraded noodles, assembled
from the backwoods in the State Legislatures, that put the amendment
into the Constitution.
If it were possible for a congressional district to choose any man
to represent it, as is the case in all other civilized countries,
there would be more breaks in the monotony of legislative venality and
stupidity, for even the rustic mob, in the absence of strong local
antipathies, well fanned by demagogues, might succumb occasionally
to the magic of a great name. Thus a Roscoe Pound might be sent to
Congress from North Dakota or Nevada, though it is obvious that
he could not be sent from the Massachusetts district in which he
lives, wherein his independence and intelligence are familiar and
hence offensive to his neighbours. But this is forbidden by the
constitutional rule, and so North Dakota and Nevada, with few if any
first-rate men in them, must turn to such men as they have. The result
everywhere is the election of a depressing gang of incompetents,
mainly petty lawyers and small-town bankers. The second result is
a House of Representatives that, in intelligence, information and
integrity, is comparable to a gang of bootleggers--a House so deficient
in competent leaders that it can scarcely carry on its business. The
third result is the immense power of such corrupt and sinister agencies
as the Anti-Saloon League: a Morley would disdain its mandates,
but Congressman John J. Balderdash is only too eager to earn its
support at home. A glance through the Congressional Directory, which
prints autobiographies (often full of voluptuous self-praise) of all
Congressmen, is enough to show what scrub stock is in the Lower House.
The average Southern member, for example, runs true to a standard
type. He got his early education in a hedge school, he proceeded to
some preposterous Methodist or Baptist college, and then he served
for a time as a schoolteacher in his native swamps, finally reaching
the dignity of county superintendent of schools and meanwhile reading
law. Admitted to the bar, and having got a taste of county politics
as superintendent, he became district attorney, and perhaps, after a
while, county judge. Then he began running for Congress, and after
three or four vain attempts, finally won a seat. The unfitness of such
a man for the responsibilities of a law-maker must be obvious. He is
an ignoramus, and he is quite without the common decencies. Having
to choose between sense and nonsense, he chooses nonsense almost
instinctively. Until he got to Washington, and began to meet lobbyists,
bootleggers and the correspondents of the newspapers, he had perhaps
never met a single intelligent human being. As a Congressman, he
remains below the salt. Officialdom disdains him; he is kept waiting in
anterooms by all the fourth assistant secretaries. When he is invited
to a party, it is a sign that police sergeants are also invited. He
must be in his second or third term before the ushers at the White
House so much as remember his face. His dream is to be chosen to go on
a congressional junket, _i. e._, on a drunken holiday at government
expense. His daily toil is getting jobs for relatives and retainers.
Sometimes he puts a dummy on the pay-roll and collects the dummy’s
salary himself. In brief, a knavish and preposterous nonentity, half
way between a kleagle of the Ku Klux and a grand worthy bow-wow of the
Knights of Zoroaster. It is such vermin who make the laws of the United
States.