because they serve for longer terms. A Congressman, with his two-year
term, is constantly running for re-election. Scarcely has he got to
Washington before he must hurry home and resume his bootlicking of
the local bosses. But a Senator, once sworn in, may safely forget
them for two or three years, and so, if there is no insuperable
impediment in his character, he may show a certain independence, and
yet survive. Moreover, he is usually safer than a Congressman, even as
his term ends, for his possession of a higher office shows that he is
no inconsiderable boss himself. Thus there are Senators who attain to
a laudable mastery of the public business, particularly such as lies
within the range of their private interests, and even Senators who show
the intellectual dignity and vigour of genuine statesmen. But they are
surely not numerous. The average Senator, like the average Congressman,
is simply a party hack, without ideas and without anything rationally
describable as self-respect. His backbone has a sweet resiliency;
he knows how to clap on false whiskers; it is quite impossible to
forecast his action, even on a matter of the highest principle, without
knowing what rewards are offered by the rival sides. Two of the most
pretentious Senators, during the Sixty-Ninth Congress, were the
gentlemen from Pennsylvania: one of them, indeed, was the successor to
the lamented Henry Cabot Lodge as the intellectual snob of the Upper
House. Yet both, under pressure, performed such dizzy flops that even
the Senate gasped. It was amusing, but there was also a touch of
pathos in it. Here were men who plainly preferred their jobs to their
dignity. Here, in brief, were men whose private rectitude had yielded
to political necessity--the eternal tragedy of democracy. I turn to the
testimony of a Senator who stands out clearly from the rest: the able
and uncompromisingly independent Reed of Missouri. This is what he said
of his colleagues, to their faces, on June 2, 1924:
[The pending measure] will be voted for by cowards who would rather
hang on to their present offices than serve their country or defend
its Constitution. It would not receive a vote in this body were
there not many individuals looking over their shoulders toward
the ballot-boxes of November, their poltroon souls aquiver with
apprehension lest they may pay the price of courageous duty by
the loss of the votes of some _bloc_, clique, or coterie backing
this infamous proposal. My language may seem brutal. If so, it is
because it lays on the blistering truth.
Senator Reed, in this startling characterization of his fellow
Senators, plainly violated the rules of the Senate, which forbid
one member to question the motives of another. But there was no
Senator present that day who cared to invoke those rules. They all
knew that Reed told the truth. Their answer to him was to slink into
the cloak-rooms, and leave him to roar at the Vice-President and the
clerks. He not only described the Senate accurately; he also described
the whole process of law-making under democracy. Our laws are invented,
in the main, by frauds and fanatics, and put upon the statute books by
poltroons and scoundrels.
8.
_The Rewards of Virtue_
I have spoken of the difficulties confronting an intelligent and
honourable man who aspires to public office under this system. If he
succeeds, it is only by a suspension of natural laws, and his success
is seldom more than transient: his first term is commonly his last.
And if, favoured by luck again, he goes on, it is only in the face
of opposition of an almost incredible bitterness. The case of the
Senator I have just mentioned is aptly in point. He is a man of obvious
ability and integrity, but in his last campaign in Missouri he was
opposed by a combination of all the parties and all their factions,
with the waspish ghost of the late Dr. Wilson hanging over the
battlefield. It was only his own amazing talents as a popular orator,
aided by the post-war _Katzenjammer_ and a local delight in vigorous,
rough-and-ready-fighters, that overcame the tremendous odds against
him. In most other American States he would have been defeated easily;
in many of them his defeat would have been overwhelming. Only in the
newer States and in the border States have such men any chance at all.
Where party fidelity has run strong for years they are barred from
public life completely. No Senator of any genuine dignity and ability
could come out of the Georgia of to-day, and none could come out of the
Vermont. Such States must be content with party hacks, and the country
as a whole must submit to their depressing imbecilities and ignoble
contortions. All of them are men who have trimmed and fawned. All of
them are forbidden a frank and competent discussion of most of the
principal issues facing the nation.
But there is something yet worse, and that is the assumption of his
cowardice and venality that lies upon even the most honourable man,
brought into public office by a miracle. The mob is quite unable to
grasp the concept of honour, and that incapacity is naturally shared
by the vast majority of politicians. Thus the acts of a public man
of genuine rectitude are almost always ascribed, under democracy, to
sordid and degrading motives, _i. e._, to the sort of motives that
would animate his more orthodox colleagues if they were capable of
his acts. I believe that the fact is more potent in keeping decent
men out of public life in the United States than even the practical
difficulties that I have rehearsed, and that it is mainly responsible
for the astounding timorousness of our politics. Its effects were
brilliantly displayed during the final stages of the battle over the
Eighteenth Amendment. The Prohibitionist leaders, being mainly men of
wide experience in playing upon the prejudices and emotions of the mob,
developed a technique of terrorization that was almost irresistible.
The moment a politician ventured to speak against them he was accused
of the grossest baseness. It was whispered that he was a secret
drunkard and eager to safeguard his tipple; it was covertly hinted that
he was in the pay of the Whiskey Ring, the Beer Trust, or some other
such bugaboo. The event showed that the shoe was actually on the other
foot--that many of the principal supporters of Prohibition were on the
pay-roll of the Anti-Saloon League, and that judges, attorneys-general
and other high officers of justice afterward joined them there. But the
accusations served their purpose. The plain people, unable to imagine
a man entering public life with any other motive than that which would
have moved them themselves if they had been in his boots--that is to
say, unable to imagine any other motive save a yearning for private
advantage--reacted to the charges as if they had been proved, and
so more than one man of relatively high decency, as decency goes in
American life, was driven out of office. Upon those who escaped the
lesson was not lost. It was five or six years before any considerable
faction of politicians mustered up courage enough to defy the
Prohibitionists, and even then what animated them was not any positive
access of resolution but simply the fact that the Anti-Saloon League
was obviously far gone in corruption, with some of its chief agents in
revolt against its methods, and others in prison for grave crimes and
misdemeanours.
I am, myself, not cursed with the itch for public office, but I have
been engaged for years in the discussion of public questions, and so
I may be forgiven, I hope, for intruding my own experience here. That
experience may be described briefly: there has never been a time when,
attacking this or that current theory, I have not been accused of being
in the pay of its interested opponents, and I believe that there has
never been a time when this accusation was not generally believed.
Years ago, when the Prohibitionists were first coming to power, they
charged me with taking money from the brewers and distillers, and
to-day they charge me with some sort of corrupt arrangement with the
bootleggers, despite the plain fact that the latter are not their
opponents at all, but their allies. The former accusation seemed so
plausible to most Americans that even the brewers finally gave it
credit: they actually offered to put me on their pay-roll, and were
vastly surprised when I declined. It was simply impossible for them, as
low-caste Americans, to imagine a man attempting to discharge a public
duty disinterestedly; they believed that I had to be paid, as their
rapidly dwindling _bloc_ of Congressmen had to be paid. So in all
other directions. When, fifteen or twenty years ago, I began exposing
the quackeries of osteopaths, chiropractors and other such frauds, they
resorted instantly to the device of accusing me of taking a retainer
from the mythical Medical Trust, _i. e._, from such men as the Mayo
brothers, Dr. George Crile, and the faculty of the Johns Hopkins.
Later on, venturing to denounce the nefarious political activity of
the Methodist Church, and of its ally, the Ku Klux Klan, I was accused
by spokesmen for the former of receiving bribes from the Vatican. The
comstocks went even further. When I protested against their sinister
and dishonest censorship of literature, they charged me publicly with
being engaged in the circulation of pornography, and actually made a
vain and ill-starred attempt to railroad me to jail on that charge.
The point is that such accusations are generally believed, especially
when they are leveled at a candidate for office. The average American
knows what he would do in like case, and he believes quite naturally
that every other man is willing and eager to do the same. At the start
of my bout with the comstocks, just mentioned, many American newspapers
assumed as a matter of course that I was guilty as charged, and some
of them, having said so, were forced into elaborate explanations
afterward to purge themselves of libel. Of the rest, most concluded
that the whole combat was a sham battle, provoked on my own motion to
give me what they regarded as profitable publicity. When I speak of
newspapers, of course, I speak of concrete men, their editors. These
editors, under democracy, constitute an extremely powerful class. Their
very lack of sound knowledge and genuine intelligence gives them a
special fitness for influencing the mob, and it is augmented by their
happy obtuseness to notions of honour. Their daily toil consists in
part of praising men and ideas that are obviously fraudulent, and in
part of denouncing men and ideas that are respected by their betters.
The typical American editor, save in a few of the larger towns, may
be described succinctly as one who has written a million words in
favour of Coolidge and half a million against Darwin. He is, like the
politician, an adept trimmer and flatterer. His job is far more to him
than his self-respect. It must be plain that the influence of such men
upon public affairs is generally evil--that their weight is almost
always thrown against the public man of dignity and courage--that such
a public man cannot hope to be understood by them, or to get any useful
support from them. Even when they are friendly they are apt to be so
for preposterous and embarrassing reasons. Thus they give their aid to
the sublime democratic process of eliminating all sense and decency
from public life. Coming out of the mob, they voice the ideas of the
mob. The first of those ideas is that a fraud is somehow charming and
reassuring--in the common phrase, that he is a regular fellow. The
second is that an honest and candid man is dangerous--or, perhaps more
accurately, that there is no such animal.
The newspaper editor who rises above this level encounters the
same incredulous hostility from his fellows and his public that
is encountered by the superior politician, cast into public life
by accident. If he is not dismissed at once as what is now called
a Bolshevik, _i. e._, one harbouring an occult and unintelligible
yearning to put down the Republic and pull God off His throne,
he is assumed to be engaged in some nefarious scheme of personal
aggrandizement. I point, as examples, to the cases of Fremont Older,
of San Francisco, and Julian Harris, of Columbus, Ga., two honest, able
and courageous men, and both opposed by the vast majority of their
colleagues. The democratic process, indeed, is furiously inimical to
all honourable motives. It favours the man who is without them, and
it puts heavy burdens upon the man who has them. Going further, it is
even opposed to mere competence. The public servant who masters his
job gains nothing thereby. His natural impatience with the incapacity
and slacking of his fellows makes them his implacable enemies, and he
is viewed with suspicion by the great mass of democrats. But here I
enter upon a subject already discussed at length by a competent French
critic, the late Emile Faguet, of the French Academy, who gave a whole
book to it, translated into English as “The Cult of Incompetence.”
Under democracy, says Faguet, the business of law-making becomes a
series of panics--government by orgy and orgasm. And the public service
becomes a mere refuge for prehensile morons--get yours, and run.
9.
_Footnote on Lame Ducks_
Faguet makes no mention of one of the curious and unpleasant
by-products of democracy, of great potency for evil in both England
and the United States: perhaps, for some unknown reason, it is less a
nuisance in France. I allude to the sinister activity of professional
politicians who, in the eternal struggle for office and its rewards,
have suffered crushing defeats, and are full of rage and bitterness.
All politics, under democracy, resolves itself into a series of
dynastic questions: the objective is always the job, not the principle.
The defeated candidate commonly takes his failure very badly, for it
leaves him stripped bare. In most cases his fellow professionals take
pity on him and put him into some more or less gaudy appointive office,
to preserve his livelihood and save his face: the Federal commissions
that harass the land are full of such lame ducks, and they are not
unknown on the Federal bench. But now and then there appears one whose
wounds are too painful to be assuaged by such devices, or for whom no
suitable office can be found. This majestic victim not infrequently
seeks surcease by a sort of running amok. That is to say, he turns what
remains of his influence with the mob into a weapon against the nation
as a whole, and becomes a chronic maker of trouble. The names of Burr,
Clay, Calhoun, Douglas, Blaine, Greeley, Frémont, Roosevelt and Bryan
will occur to every attentive student of American history. There have
been many similar warlocks on lower levels; they are familiar in the
politics of every American county.
Clay, like Bryan after him, was three times a candidate for the
Presidency. Defeated in 1824, 1832 and 1840, he turned his back upon
democracy, and became the first public agent and attorney for what
are now called the Interests. When he died he was the darling of the
Mellons, Morgans and Charlie Schwabs of his time. He believed in
centralization and in the blessings of a protective tariff. These
blessings the American people still enjoy. Calhoun, deprived of the
golden plum by an unappreciative country, went even further. He seems
to have come to the conclusion that its crime made it deserve capital
punishment. At all events, he threw his strength into the plan to
break up the Union. The doctrine of Nullification owed more to him
than it owed to any other politician, and after 1832, when his hopes
of getting into the White House were finally extinguished, he devoted
himself whole-heartedly to preparing the way for the Civil War. He was
more to blame for that war, in all probability, than any other man. But
if he had succeeded Jackson the chances are that he would have sung
a far less bellicose tune. The case of Burr is so plain that it has
even got into the school history-books. If he had beaten Jefferson in
1800 there would have been no duel with Hamilton, no conspiracy with
Blennerhassett, no trial for treason, and no long exile and venomous
repining. Burr was an able man, as politicians go under democracy, and
the young Republic stood in great need of his peculiar talents. But his
failure to succeed Adams made a misanthrope of him, and his misanthropy
was vented upon his country, and more than once brought it to the verge
of disaster.
There have been others like him in our own time: Blaine, Frémont,
Hancock, Roosevelt, Bryan. If Blaine had been elected in 1876 he would
have ceased to wave the bloody shirt; as it was, he was still waving
it, recklessly and obscenely, in 1884. No man laboured more assiduously
to keep alive the hatreds flowing out of the Civil War; his whole
life was poisoned by his failure to reach the White House, and his
dreadful cramps and rages led him into a long succession of obviously
anti-social acts. Roosevelt went the same route. His débâcle in 1912
converted him into a sort of political killer, and until the end of his
life he was constantly on the warpath, looking for heads to crack. The
outbreak of the World War in 1914 brought him great embarrassment, for
he had been the most ardent American exponent, for years past, of what
was then generally regarded as the German scheme of things. For a few
weeks he was irresolute, and seemed likely to stick to his guns. But
then, perceiving a chance to annoy and damage his successful enemy,
Wilson, he swallowed the convictions of a lifetime, and took the other
side. That his ensuing uproars had evil effects must be manifest.
Regardless of the consequences, either at home or abroad, he kept on
arousing the mob against Wilson, and in the end he helped more than
any other man to force the United States into the war. His aim, it
quickly appeared, was to turn the situation to his own advantage: he
made desperate and shameless efforts to get a high military command
at the front--a post for which he was plainly unfitted. When Wilson,
still smarting from his attack, vetoed this scheme, he broke into fresh
rages, and the rest of his life was more pathological than political.
The fruits of his reckless demagogy are still with us.
Bryan was even worse. His third defeat, in 1908, convinced even so
vain a fellow that the White House was beyond his reach, and so he
consecrated himself to reprisals upon those who had kept him out of
it. He saw very clearly who they were: the more intelligent minority
of his countrymen. It was their unanimous opposition that had thrice
thrown the balance against him. Well, he would now make them infamous.
He would raise the mob, which still admired him, against everything
they regarded as sound sense and intellectual decency. He would post
them as sworn foes to all true virtue and true religion, and try, if
possible, to put them down by law. There ensued his frenzied campaign
against the teaching of evolution--perhaps the most gross attack
upon human dignity and decorum ever made by a politician, even under
democracy, in modern times. Those who regarded him, in his last years,
as a mere religious fanatic were far in error. It was not fanaticism
that moved him, but hatred. He was an ambulent boil, as anyone could
see who encountered him face to face. His theological ideas were
actually very vague; he was quite unable to defend them competently
under Clarence Darrow’s cross-examination. What moved him was simply
his colossal lust for revenge upon those he held to be responsible for
his downfall as a politician. He wanted to hurt them, proscribe them;
if possible, destroy them. To that end he was willing to sacrifice
everything else, including the public tranquillity and the whole system
of public education. He passed out of life at last at a temperature of
110 degrees, his eyes rolling horribly toward 1600 Pennsylvania avenue,
N.W. and its leaky copper roof. In the suffering South his fever lives
after him. The damage he did was greater than that done by Sherman’s
army.
Countries under the hoof of despotism escape such lamentable
exhibitions of human frailty. Unsuccessful aspirants for the crown
are either butchered out of hand or exiled to Paris, where tertiary
lues quickly disposes of them. The Crown Prince, of course, has his
secret thoughts, and no doubt they are sometimes homicidal, but he is
forced by etiquette to keep them to himself, and so the people are not
annoyed and injured by them. He cannot go about praying publicly that
the King, his father, come down with endocarditis, nor can he denounce
the old gentleman as an idiot and advocate his confinement in a _maison
de santé_. Everyone, of course, knows what his hopes and yearnings
are, but no one has to listen to them. If he voices them at all it is
only to friendly and discreet members of the diplomatic corps and to
the ladies of the half and quarter worlds. Under democracy, they are
bellowed from every stump.
DEMOCRACY AND LIBERTY
III
DEMOCRACY AND LIBERTY
1.
_The Will to Peace_
Whenever the liberties of _Homo vulgaris_ are invaded and made a mock
of in a gross and contemptuous manner, as happened, for example, in the
United States during the reign of Wilson, Palmer, Burleson and company,
there are always observers who marvel that he bears the outrage with so
little murmuring. Such observers only display their unfamiliarity with
the elements of democratic science. The truth is that the common man’s
love of liberty, like his love of sense, justice and truth, is almost
wholly imaginary. As I have argued, he is not actually happy when free;
he is uncomfortable, a bit alarmed, and intolerably lonely. He longs
for the warm, reassuring smell of the herd, and is willing to take the
herdsman with it. Liberty is not a thing for such as he. He cannot
enjoy it rationally himself, and he can think of it in others only as
something to be taken away from them. It is, when it becomes a reality,
the exclusive possession of a small and disreputable minority of men,
like knowledge, courage and honour. A special sort of man is needed
to understand it, nay, to stand it--and he is inevitably an outlaw
in democratic societies. The average man doesn’t want to be free. He
simply wants to be safe.
Nietzsche, with his usual clarity of vision, saw the point clearly.
Liberty, he used to say, was something that, to the general, was too
cold to be borne. Nevertheless, he apparently believed that there
was an unnatural, drug-store sort of yearning for it in _all_ men,
and so he changed Schopenhauer’s will-to-live into a will-to-power,
_i. e._, a will-to-free-function. Here he went too far, and in the
wrong direction: he should have made it, on the lower levels, a
will-to-peace. What the common man longs for in this world, before and
above all his other longings, is the simplest and most ignominious
sort of peace--the peace of a trusty in a well-managed penitentiary.
He is willing to sacrifice everything else to it. He puts it above his
dignity and he puts it above his pride. Above all, he puts it above
his liberty. The fact, perhaps, explains his veneration for policemen,
in all the forms they take--his belief that there is a mysterious
sanctity in law, however absurd it may be in fact. A policeman is a
charlatan who offers, in return for obedience, to protect him (_a_)
from his superiors, (_b_) from his equals, and (_c_) from himself.
This last service, under democracy, is commonly the most esteemed of
them all. In the United States, at least theoretically, it is the only
thing that keeps ice-wagon drivers, Y. M. C. A. secretaries, insurance
collectors and other such human camels from smoking opium, ruining
themselves in the night clubs, and going to Palm Beach with Follies
girls. It is a democratic invention.