premiss: to wit, that liberty is something too hot for his hands--or,
as Nietzsche put it, too cold for his spine. Worse, he sees in it
something that is a weapon against him in the hands of his enemy,
the man of superior kidney. Be true to your nature, and follow its
teachings: this Emersonian counsel, it must be manifest, offers an
embarrassing support to every variety of the _droit de seigneur_. The
history of democracy is a history of efforts to force successive
minorities to be _un_true to their nature. Democracy, in fact, stands
in greater peril of the free spirit than any sort of despotism ever
heard of. The despot, at least, is always safe in one respect: his
own belief in himself cannot be shaken. But democracies may be
demoralized and run amok, and so they are in vast dread of heresy, as
a Sunday-school superintendent is in dread of scarlet women, light
wines and beer, and the unreadable works of Charles Darwin. It would be
unimaginable for a democracy to submit serenely to such gross dissents
as Frederick the Great not only permitted, but even encouraged. Once
the mob is on the loose, there is no holding it. So the subversive
minority must be reduced to impotence; the heretic must be put down.
If, as they say, one of the main purposes of all civilized government
is to preserve and augment the liberty of the individual, then surely
democracy accomplishes it less efficiently than any other form. Is the
individual worth thinking of at all? Then the superior individual is
worth more thought than his inferiors. But it is precisely the superior
individual who is the chief victim of the democratic process. It not
only tries to regulate his acts; it also tries to delimit his thoughts;
it is constantly inventing new forms of the old crime of imagining the
King’s death. The Roman _lex de majestate_ was put upon the books,
not by an emperor, nor even by a consul, but by Saturninus, a tribune
of the people. Its aim was to protect the state against aristocrats,
_i. e._, against free spirits, each holding himself answerable only
to his own notions. The aim of democracy is to break all such free
spirits to the common harness. It tries to iron them out, to pump them
dry of self-respect, to make docile John Does of them. The measure of
its success is the extent to which such men are brought down, and made
common. The measure of civilization is the extent to which they resist
and survive. Thus the only sort of liberty that is real under democracy
is the liberty of the have-nots to destroy the liberty of the haves.
This liberty is supposed, in some occult way, to enhance human dignity.
Perhaps, in one of its aspects, it actually does. The have-not gains
something valuable when he acquires the delusion that he is the
equal of his betters. It may not be true--but even a delusion, if it
augments the dignity of man, is something. Certain apparent realities
grow out of it: the peasant no longer pulls his forelock when he meets
the baron, he is free to sue and be sued, he may denounce Huxley as a
quack. But the thing, alas, works both ways. As one pan of the scale
goes up, the other comes down. If democracy really loves the dignity
of man, then it kills the thing it loves. Where it prevails, not even
the King can be dignified in any rational sense: he becomes Harding,
jabbering of normalcy, or Coolidge, communing with his preposterous
_Tabakparlement_ around the stove. Nor the Pope: he becomes a Methodist
bishop in a natty business-suit, and with a toothbrush moustache. Nor
the Generalissimo: he becomes Pershing, haranguing Rotary, and slapping
the backs of his fellow Elks.
2.
_The Democrat as Moralist_
Liberty gone, there remains the majestic phenomenon of democratic law.
A glance at it is sufficient to show the identity of democracy and
Puritanism. The two, indeed, are but different facets of the same
gem. In the psyche they are one. For both get their primal essence
out of the inferior man’s fear and hatred of his betters, born of his
observation that, for all his fine theories, they are stronger and of
more courage than he is, and that as they go through this dreadful
world they have a far better time. Thus envy comes in; if you overlook
it you will never understand democracy, and you will never understand
Puritanism. It is not, of course, a speciality of democratic man. It is
the common possession of all men of the ignoble and incompetent sort,
at all times and everywhere. But it is only under democracy that it is
liberated; it is only under democracy that it becomes the philosophy
of the state. What the human race owes to the old autocracies, and how
little, in these democratic days, it is disposed to remember the debt!
Their service, perhaps, was a by-product of a purpose far afield, but
it was a service none the less: they held the green fury of the mob in
check, and so set free the spirit of superior man. Their collapse under
Flavius Honorius left Europe in chaos for four hundred years. Their
revival under Charlemagne made the Renaissance possible, and the modern
age. What the thing was that they kept from the throat of civilization
has been shown more than once in these later days, by the failure of
their enfeebled successors. I point to the only too obvious examples
of the French and Russian Revolutions. The instant such a catastrophe
liberates the mob, it begins a war to the death upon superiority
of every kind--not only upon the kind that naturally attaches to
autocracy, but even upon the kind that stands in opposition to it. The
day after a successful revolution is a blue day for the late autocrat,
but it is also a blue day for every other superior man. The murder of
Lavoisier was a phenomenon quite as significant as the murder of Louis
XVI. We need no scientists in France, shouted MM. of the Revolutionary
Tribunal. Wat Tyler, four centuries before, reduced it to an even
greater frankness and simplicity: he hanged every man who confessed to
being able to read and write.
Democracy, as a political scheme, may be defined as a device for
releasing this hatred born of envy, and for giving it the force and
dignity of law. Tyler, in the end, was dispatched by Walworth; under
democracy he becomes almost the ideal Good Man. It is very difficult
to disentangle the political ideas of this anthropoid Good Man from
his theological ideas: they constantly overlap and coalesce, and the
democratic state, despite the contrary example of France, almost
always shows a strong tendency to be also a Puritan state. Puritan
legislation, especially in the field of public law, is a thing of
many grandiose pretensions and a few simple and ignoble realities.
The Puritan, discussing it voluptuously, always tries to convince
himself (and the rest of us) that it is grounded upon altruistic
and evangelical motives--that its aim is to work the other fellow’s
benefit against the other fellow’s will. Such is the theory behind
Prohibition, comstockery, vice crusading, and all its other familiar
devices of oppression. That theory, of course, is false. The Puritan’s
actual motives are (_a_) to punish the other fellow for having a
better time in the world, and (_b_) to bring the other fellow down to
his own unhappy level. Such are his punitive and remedial purposes.
Primarily, he is against every human act that he is incapable of
himself--safely. The adverb tells the whole story. The Puritan is
surely no ascetic. Even in the great days of the New England theocracy
it was impossible to restrain his libidinousness: his eyes rolled
sideways at buxom wenches quite as often as they rolled upward to
God. But he is incapable of sexual experience upon what may be called
a civilized plane; it is impossible for him to manage the thing as a
romantic adventure; in his hands it reduces itself to the terms of the
barnyard. Hence the Mann Act. So with dalliance with the grape. He can
have experience of it only as a furtive transaction behind the door,
with a dreadful headache to follow. Hence Prohibition. So, again, with
the joys that come out of the fine arts. Looking at a picture, he sees
only the model’s pudenda. Reading a book, he misses the ordeals and
exaltations of the spirit, and remembers only the natural functions.
Hence comstockery.
His delight in his own rectitude is grounded upon a facile assumption
that it is difficult to maintain--that the other fellow, being
deficient in God’s grace, is incapable of it. So he venerates himself,
in the moral department, as an artist of unusual talents, a virtuoso
of virtue. His error consists in mistaking a weakness for a merit, an
inferiority for a superiority. It is not actually a sign of spiritual
eminence to be moral in the Puritan sense: it is simply a sign of
docility, of lack of enterprise and originality, of cowardice. The
Puritan, once his mainly imaginary triumphs over the flesh and the
devil are forgotten, always turns out to be a poor stick of a man--in
brief, a natural democrat. His triumphs in the field of government are
as illusory as his triumphs as metaphysician and artist. No Puritan has
ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth
hearing, or a poem worth reading--and I am not forgetting John Milton,
who was not a Puritan at all, but a libertarian, which is the exact
opposite. The whole Puritan literature is comprised in “The Pilgrim’s
Progress.” Even in the department wherein the Puritan is most proud of
himself, _i. e._, that of moral legislation, he has done only second
and third rate work. His fine schemes for bringing his betters down to
his own depressing level always turn out badly. In the whole history
of human law-making there is no record of a failure worse than that of
Prohibition in the United States. Since the first uprising of the lower
orders, the modern age has seen but one genuinely valuable contribution
to moral legislation: I allude, of course, to the Code Napoléon. It
was concocted by a committee of violent anti-Puritans, and in the full
tide of a bitter reaction against democracy.
If democracy had not lain implicit in Puritanism, Puritanism would
have had to invent it. Each is necessary to the other. Democracy
provides the machinery that Puritanism needs for the quick and ruthless
execution of its preposterous inventions. Facing autocracy, it faces
insuperable difficulties, for its spokesmen can convince the King
only in case he is crazy, and even when he is crazy he is commonly
restrained by his ministers. But the mob is easy to convince, for
what Puritanism has to say to it is mainly what it already believes:
its politics is based upon the same brutal envies and quaking fears
that lie under the Puritan ethic. Moreover, the political machinery
through which it functions provides a ready means of translating
such envies and fears into action. There is need only to sound the
alarm and take a vote: the debate is over the moment the majority has
spoken. The fact explains the ferocious haste with which, in democratic
countries, even the most strange and dubious legislative experiments
are launched. Haste is necessary, lest even the mob be shaken by sober
second thought. And haste is easy, for the appeal to the majority is
officially the last appeal of all, and when it has been made there
is the best of excuses for cutting off debate. I have described the
precise process in a previous section. Fanatics inflame the mob, and
thereby alarm the scoundrels set up to make laws in its name. The
scoundrels precipitately do the rest. The Fathers were not unaware
of this danger in the democratic scheme. They sought to counteract
it by establishing upper chambers, removed by at least one degree
from the mob’s hot rages. Their precaution has been turned to naught
by depriving the upper chambers of that prophylactic remoteness, and
exposing them to the direct and unmitigated blast.
It must be plain that this process of law-making by orgy, with fanatics
supplying the motive-power and unconscionable knaves steering the
machine, is bound to fill the statute-books with enactments that
have no rational use or value save that of serving as instruments
of psychopathological persecution and private revenge. This is
found to be the case, in fact, in almost every American State. The
grotesque anti-syndicalist laws of California, the anti-evolution
laws of Tennessee and Mississippi, and the acts for the enforcement
of Prohibition in Ohio and Indiana are typical. They involve gross
invasions of the most elementary rights of the free citizen, but
they are popular with the mob because they have a virtuous smack and
provide it with an endless succession of barbarous but thrilling
shows. Their chosen victims are men the mob naturally envies and
hates--men of unusual intelligence and enterprise, men who regard their
constitutional liberties seriously and are willing to go to some risk
and expense to defend them. Such men are inevitably unpopular under
democracy, for their qualities are qualities that the mob wholly lacks,
and is uneasily conscious of lacking: it thus delights in seeing them
exposed to slander and oppression, and railroaded to prison. There
is always a district attorney at hand to launch the prosecution, for
district attorneys are invariably men who aspire to higher office,
and no more facile way to it is to be found than by assaulting and
destroying a man above the general. As I have shown, many an American
Congressman comes to Washington from a district attorney’s office:
you may be sure that he is seldom promoted because he has been jealous
of the liberties of the citizen. Many a judge reaches the bench by the
same route--and thereafter benignantly helps along his successors. The
whole criminal law in America thus acquires a flavour of fraud. It is
constantly embellished and reinforced by fanatics who have discovered
how easy it is to hurl missiles at their enemies and opponents from
behind ranks of policemen. It is executed by law officers whose private
prosperity runs in direct ratio to their reckless ferocity. And the
business is applauded by morons whose chief delight lies in seeing
their betters manhandled and humiliated. Even the ordinary criminal law
is so carried out--that is, when the accused happens to be conspicuous
enough to make it worth while. Every district attorney in America
goes to his knees every night to ask God to deliver a Thaw or a Fatty
Arbuckle into his hands. In the criminal courts a rich man not only
enjoys none of the advantages that Liberals and other defenders of
democracy constantly talk of; he is under very real and very heavy
burdens. The defence that Thaw offered in the White case would have
got a taxi-driver acquitted in five minutes. And had Arbuckle been a
waiter, no district attorney in the land would have dreamed of putting
him on trial for first-degree murder.
For such foul and pestiferous proceedings, of course, moral excuses are
always offered. The district attorney is an altruist whose one dream is
Law Enforcement; he cannot be terrified by the power of money; he is
the spokesman of the virtuous masses against the godless and abominable
classes. The same buncombe issues from the Prohibitionists, comstocks,
hunters of Bolshevists, and other such frauds. Its hollowness is
constantly revealed. The Prohibitionists, when they foisted their
brummagem cure-all upon the country under cover of the war hysteria,
gave out that their advocacy of it was based upon a Christian yearning
to abate drunkenness, and so abolish crime, poverty and disease.
They preached a millennium, and no doubt convinced hundreds of
thousands of naïve and sentimental persons, not themselves Puritans,
nor even democrats. That millennium, as everyone knows, has failed
to come in. Not only are crime, poverty and disease undiminished,
but drunkenness itself, if the police statistics are to be believed,
has greatly increased. The land rocks with the scandal. Prohibition
has made the use of alcohol devilish and even fashionable, and so
vastly augmented the number of users. The young of both sexes, mainly
innocent of the cup under license, now take to it almost unanimously.
In brief, Prohibition has not only failed to work the benefits that its
proponents promised in 1917; it has brought in so many new evils that
even the mob has turned against it. But do the Prohibitionists admit
the fact frankly, and repudiate their original nonsense? They do not.
On the contrary, they keep on demanding more and worse enforcement
statutes--that is to say, more and worse devices for harassing and
persecuting their opponents. The more obvious the failure becomes, the
more shamelessly they exhibit their genuine motives. In plain words,
what moves them is the psychological aberration called sadism. They
lust to inflict inconvenience, discomfort, and, whenever possible,
disgrace upon the persons they hate--which is to say, upon everyone who
is free from their barbarous theological superstitions, and is having
a better time in the world than they are. They cannot stop the use of
alcohol, nor even appreciably diminish it, but they _can_ badger and
annoy everyone who seeks to use it decently, and they _can_ fill the
jails with men taken for purely artificial offences, and they _can_ get
satisfaction thereby for the Puritan yearning to browbeat and injure,
to torture and terrorize, to punish and humiliate all who show any sign
of being happy. And all this they can do with a safe line of policemen
and judges in front of them; always they can do it without personal
risk.
It is this freedom from personal risk that is the secret of the
Prohibitionists’ continued frenzy, despite the complete collapse of
Prohibition itself. They know very well that the American mob, far from
being lawless, is actually excessively tolerant of written laws and
judicial fiats, however plainly they violate the fundamental rights of
free men, and they know that this tolerance is sufficient to protect
them from what, in more liberal and enlightened countries, would be
the natural consequences of their anti-social activity. If they had to
meet their victims face to face, there would be a different story to
tell. But, like their brethren, the comstocks and the professional
patriots, they seldom encounter this embarrassment. Instead, they
turn the officers of the law to the uses of their mania. More, they
reinforce the officers of the law with an army of bravos sworn to take
their orders and do their bidding--the army of so-called Prohibition
enforcement officers, mainly made up of professional criminals.
Thus, under democracy, the normal, well-behaved, decent citizen--the
Forgotten Man of the late William Graham Sumner--is beset from all
sides, and every year sees an augmentation of his woes. In order to
satisfy the envy and hatred of his inferiors and the blood lust of a
pack of irresponsible and unconscionable fanatics, few of them of any
dignity as citizens or as men and many of them obviously hypocritical
and corrupt, this decent citizen is converted into a criminal for
performing acts that are natural to men of his class everywhere, and
police and courts are degraded to the abhorrent office of punishing him
for them. Certainly it should not be surprising that such degrading
work has greatly diminished the authority of both--that Prohibition
has made the courts disreputable and increased general crime. A judge
who jails a well-disposed and inoffensive citizen for violating
an unjust and dishonest law may be defended plausibly, perhaps, by
legal casuistry, but it is very hard to make out a case for him as a
self-respecting man. Like the ordinary politician, he puts his job
above his professional dignity and his common decency. More than one
judge, unable to square such loathsome duties with his private notions
of honor, has stepped down from the bench, and left the business to a
successor who was more a lawyer and less a man.
3.
_Where Puritanism Fails_
Under the pressure of fanaticism, and with the mob complacently
applauding the show, democratic law tends more and more to be
grounded upon the maxim that every citizen is, by nature, a traitor,
a libertine, and a scoundrel. In order to dissuade him from his
evil-doing the police power is extended until it surpasses anything
ever heard of in the oriental monarchies of antiquity. In many American
States--for example, California and Pennsylvania--it is almost a
literal fact that the citizen has no rights that the police are
bound to respect. These awful powers, of course, are not exercised
against _all_ citizens. The man of influence with the reigning
politicians, the supporter of the prevailing delusions, and the adept
hypocrite--these are seldom molested. But the man who finds himself
in an unpopular minority is at the mercy of the _Polizei_, and the
easiest way to get into such a minority is to speak out boldly for the
Bill of Rights. Men have been clubbed and jailed in Pennsylvania for
merely mentioning it; scores have been jailed for protesting publicly
against its violation. Here the attack was at least frank, and, to
that extent, honest; more often it is made disingenuously, and to the
tune of pious snuffling. First an unpopular man is singled out for
persecution, and then a diligent search is made, with the police and
prosecuting officers and even the courts co-operating, for a law that
he can be accused of breaking. The enormous multiplicity of sumptuary
and inquisitorial statutes makes this quest easy. The prisoner begins
his progress through the mill of justice under a vague accusation
of disorderly conduct or disturbing the peace; he ends charged with
crimes that carry staggering penalties. There are statutes in many
States, notably California, that explore his mind, and lay him by the
heels for merely thinking unpopular thoughts. Once he is accused of
such heresy, the subsequent proceedings take on the character of a
lynching. His constitutional rights are swept away as of no validity,
and all the ancient rules of the Common Law--for example, those against
double jeopardy and hearsay--are suspended in order to fetch him. Many
of the newer statutes actually suspend these safeguards formally, and
though they are to that extent plainly unconstitutional, the higher
courts have not interfered with their execution. The Volstead Act, for
instance, destroys the constitutional right to a jury trial, and in its
administration the constitutional prohibition of unreasonable searches
and seizures and the rule against double jeopardy are habitually
violated. But no protest comes save from specialists in liberty,
most of whom are so busy keeping out of jail themselves that their
caveats are feeble and ineffective. The mob is always in favour of the
prosecution, for the prosecution is giving the show. In the face of
its applause, very few American judges have the courage to enforce the
constitutional guarantees--and still fewer prosecuting attorneys. As I
have said, a prosecuting attorney’s success depends very largely upon
his ferocity. American practice permits him an extravagance of attack
that would land him in jail, and perhaps even in a lunatic asylum, in
any other country, and the more passionately he indulges in it the
more certain becomes his promotion to higher office, including the
judicial. Perhaps a half of all American judges, at some time or other,
have been prosecuting officers. They carry to the bench the habits of
mind acquired on the other side of the bar; they seem to be generally
convinced that any man accused of crime is _ipso facto_ guilty, and
that if he is known to harbour political heresies he is guilty of a
sort of blasphemy when he mentions his constitutional rights.