ideology has no rights under the law is so thoroughly democratic that
in the United States it is seldom questioned save by romantic fanatics,
robbed of their wits by an uncritical reading of the Fathers. It not
only goes unchallenged otherwise; it is openly stated and defended, and
by high authorities. I point, for example, to the Right Rev. Luther B.
Wilson, who, as a bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, occupies
an office that is both ecclesiastical and political, and is of dignity
and puissance in both fields. Some time ago this Wilson was invited to
preach in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York--a delicate
acknowledgment of his importance by his rival prelate of the Anglican
Church, Monsignor Manning. His sermon, in brief, was a passionate plea
for the putting down of heresy, law or no law, Constitution or no
Constitution. “Atheism,” he declared, “is not only folly, but to the
state a traitor. It does not deserve a place and should not be defended
by any specious claim for immunity under the constitutional guaranties
of the right of free speech.” This bloodthirsty and astounding dictum,
though it came from a Christian ecclesiastic of a rank higher than
that attained by Christ Himself, seemed so natural that it attracted
no notice whatever. Not a single New York newspaper challenged it;
even the Liberal weeklies let it pass as too obvious for cavil. A
week or so later it was printed with approbation in all the Methodist
denominational organs, and since then many other bishops of that sect
have ratified it. The same doctrine is frequently stated plainly by
high legal officers, especially when a man accused of political heresy
is on trial--usually, of course, for an alleged infraction of the
ordinary law. As I have said in a previous chapter, it was applied to
atheists, exactly as Bishop Wilson applied it, during the celebrated
Scopes trial at Dayton, Tenn. Arthur Garfield Hays, defending Scopes,
arose at one point in the proceedings to protest that they were going
beyond the bounds of due process--that his client was not getting a
fair and impartial trial within the meaning of the Constitution. At
once the prosecuting attorney general, Stewart, answered candidly
that an atheist had no right to a fair trial in Tennessee, and the
judge on the bench, the learned Raulston, approved with a nod. Hays,
who is a Liberal, was so overcome that he sank in his place with a
horrified gurgle, but the Tennesseans in the courtroom saw nothing
strange in Stewart’s reply. They knew very well that, in all the States
South of the Potomac, save only Louisiana, Catholics, Negroes and all
the persons unable to speak the local dialects fluently shared the
disability of atheists. And if they were learned in American law, they
knew that anti-Catholics faced the same disability in Massachusetts,
like anti-Semites in New York, and that in every State there were
classes similarly proscribed. I do not here allude to the natural
difficulty that every man of notoriously heterodox ideas must encounter
every time he faces a jury, which is to say, twelve men of limited
information and intelligence, chosen precisely because of their lack of
intellectual resilience. I am speaking of the hostility he must look
for in prosecuting officers and judges, and in the newspapers that
sit in judgment upon them and largely determine their fortunes. I am
speaking of what has come to be a settled practice in American criminal
law.
It is difficult, indeed, for democracy to reconcile itself to what
may be called common decency. By this common decency I mean the
habit, in the individual, of viewing with tolerance and charity the
acts and ideas of other individuals--the habit which makes a man a
reliable friend, a generous opponent, and a good citizen. The democrat,
despite his strong opinion to the contrary, is seldom a good citizen.
In that sense, as in most others, he falls distressfully short. His
eagerness to bring all his fellow-citizens, and especially all those
who are superior to him, into accord with his own dull and docile way
of thinking, and to force it upon them when they resist, leads him
inevitably into acts of unfairness, oppression and dishonour which,
if all men were alike guilty of them, would quickly break down that
mutual trust and confidence upon which the very structure of civilized
society rests. Where democratic man is so firmly in possession of his
theoretical rights that resistance to him is hopeless, as it is in
large areas of the United States, he actually produces this disaster.
To live in a community so cursed is almost impossible to any man who
does not accept the democratic epistemology and the Puritan ethic,
which is to say, to any well-informed and self-respecting man. He is
harassed in so many small ways, and with such depressing violence and
lack of decency, that he is usually compelled to clear out. This fact,
in large part, explains the cultural collapse of New England and the
marked cultural backwardness of whole regions in the South and Middle
West. A man of sound sense, born into the Tennessee hinterland, not
only feels lonesome as he comes to maturity; he also feels unsafe. The
morons surrounding him hate him, and if they can’t lay him for mere
heresy, they will wait their chance and lay him for burning barns, for
poisoning wells, or for taking Russian gold. So he departs.
This irreconcilable antagonism between democratic Puritanism and common
decency is probably responsible for the uneasiness and unhappiness that
are so marked in American life, despite the great material prosperity
of the United States. Theoretically, the American people should be
happier than any other; actually, they are probably the least happy
in Christendom. The trouble with them is that they do not trust one
another--and without mutual trust there can be no ease, and no genuine
happiness. What avails it for a man to have money in the bank and a
Ford in his garage if he knows that his neighbours on both sides are
watching him through knotholes, and that the pastor of the tabernacle
down the road is planning to have him sent to jail? The thing that
makes life charming is not money, but the society of our fellow men,
and the thing that draws us toward our fellow men is not admiration
for their inner virtues, their hard striving to live according to the
light that is in them, but admiration for their outer graces and
decencies--in brief, confidence that they will always act generously
and understandingly in their intercourse with us. We must trust men
before we may enjoy them. Manifestly, it is impossible to put any
such trust in a Puritan. With the best intentions in the world he
cannot rid himself of the delusion that his duty to save us from our
sins--_i. e._, from the non-Puritanical acts that we delight in--is
paramount to his duty to let us be happy in our own way. Thus he is
unable to be tolerant, and with tolerance goes magnanimity. A Puritan
cannot be magnanimous. He is constitutionally unable to grasp the
notion that it is better to be decent than to be steadfast, or even
than to be just. So with the democrat, who is simply a Puritan doubly
damned. When the late Dr. Wilson, confronted by the case of poor
old silly Debs, decided instantly that Debs must remain in jail, he
acted as a true democrat and a perfect Puritan. The impulse to be
magnanimous, to forgive and forget, to be kindly and generous toward
a misguided and harmless old man, was overcome by the harsh Puritan
compulsion to observe the letter of the law at all costs. Every Puritan
is a lawyer, and so is every democrat.
4.
_Corruption Under Democracy_
This moral compulsion of the Puritan and democrat, of course, is
mainly bogus. When one has written off cruelty, envy and cowardice,
one has accounted for nine-tenths of it. Certainly I need not argue
at this late date that the _Ur_-Puritan of New England was by no
means the vestal that his heirs and assigns think of when they praise
him. He was not only a very carnal fellow, and given to lamentable
transactions with loose women and fiery jugs; he was also a virtuoso
of sharp practices, and to this day his feats in that department
survive in fable. Nor is there any perceptible improvement in his
successors. When a gang of real estate agents (_i. e._ rent sweaters),
bond salesman and automobile dealers gets together to sob for Service,
it takes no Freudian to surmise that someone is about to be swindled.
The cult of Service, indeed, is half a sop to conscience, and half
a bait to catch conies. Its cultivation in the United States runs
parallel with the most gorgeous development of imposture as a fine
art that Christendom has ever seen. I speak of a fine art in the
literal sense; in the form of advertising it enlists such talents as,
under less pious civilizations, would be devoted to the confection
of cathedrals, and even, perhaps, masses. A sixth of the Americano’s
income is rooked out of him by rogues who have at him officially, and
in the name of the government; half the remainder goes to sharpers who
prefer the greater risks and greater profits of private enterprise.
All schemes to save him from such victimizations have failed in the
past, and all of them, I believe, are bound to fail in the future;
most of the more gaudy of them are simply devices to facilitate fresh
victimizations. For democratic man, dreaming eternally of Utopias, is
ever a prey to shibboleths, and those that fetch him in his political
capacity are more than matched by those that fetch him in his rôle of
private citizen. His normal and natural situation, held through all the
vicissitudes of his brief history, has been that of one who, at great
cost and effort, has sneaked home a jug of contraband whiskey, sworn to
have issued out of a padlocked distillery, and then finds, on uncorking
it, that it is a compound of pepper, prune juice and wood alcohol.
This, in a sentence, is the history of democracy. It is, in detail,
the history of all such characteristically democratic masterpieces as
Bryanism, Ku Kluxery, and the war to end war. They are full of virtuous
pretences, and they are unmitigated swindles.
All observers of democracy, from Tocqueville to the Adams brothers
and Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, have marveled at its corruptions on the
political side, and speculated heavily as to the causes thereof. The
fact was noted in the earliest days of the democratic movement, and
Friedrich von Gentz, who began life as an Anglomaniac, was using it
as an argument against the parliamentary system so early as 1809.
Gentz, who served Metternich as the current Washington correspondents
serve whatever dullard happens to be President, contended that the
introduction of democracy on the Continent would bring in a reign of
bribery, and thus destroy the integrity and authority of the state.
The proofs that he was right were already piling up, in his day, in
the United States. They were destined to be greatly reinforced when
the Third Republic got under way in France in 1870, and to be given
impressive support when the German Republic set up shop in 1918. In
1919, for the first time since the coronation of Henry the Fowler,
a German Cabinet minister crossed the border between days, his loot
under his arm. The historians, immersed in their closets, marvel that
such things happen, and marvel even more that democracy takes them
calmly, and even lightly. Somewhere in “The Education of Henry Adams”
you will find an account of the gigantic peculations that went on
during the second Grant administration, and melancholy reflections
upon the populace’s philosophic acceptance of them as inevitable, and
even natural. In our own time we have seen the English mob embrace
and elevate to higher office the democratic statesmen caught in the
Marconi scandal, and the American mob condone almost automatically
the herculean raids upon the Treasury that marked the Wilson
administration, and the less spectacular but even more deliberate
thievings that went on under the martyred Harding. In the latter case
it turned upon the small body of specialists in rectitude who ventured
to protest, and in the end they found themselves far more unpopular
than the thieves.
Such phenomena, as I say, puzzle the more academic pathologists of
democracy, but as for me, I only say that they seem to be in strict
accord with God’s invariable laws. Why should democracy rise against
bribery? It is itself a form of wholesale bribery. In place of a
government with a fixed purpose and a visible goal, it sets up a
government that is a mere function of the mob’s vagaries, and that
maintains itself by constantly bargaining with those vagaries. Its
security depends wholly upon providing satisfactory bribes for the
prehensile minorities that constitute the mob, or that have managed to
deceive and inflame the mob. One day the labour leaders--a government
within the general government--must be bought with offices; the next
day the dupes of these labour leaders must be bought with legislation,
usually of a sort loading the ordinary scales of justice in their
favour; the day after there must be something for the manufacturers,
for the Methodists, for the Catholics, for the farmers. I have
exhibited, in another work, the fact that this last class demands
bribes pure and simple--that its yearnings for its own private
advantage are never ameliorated by yearnings for the common good. The
whole process of government under democracy, as everyone knows, is a
process of similar trading. The very head of the state, having no
title to his office save that which lies in the popular will, is forced
to haggle and bargain like the lowliest office-seeker. There has been
no President of the United States since Washington who did not go into
office with a long list of promises in his pocket, and nine-tenths of
them have always been promises of private reward from the public store.
It is surely not regarded as immoral, by the democratic ethic, to make
and execute such promises, though statesmen of lofty pretensions,
_e. g._, Lincoln, sometimes deny having made them. What is reproached
as immoral is making them, and then not keeping them. When the late
Dr. Wilson made William Jennings Bryan his Secretary of State the
act brought forth only tolerant smiles, though it was comparable to
appointing a chiropractor Surgeon-General of the Army--a feat which
Dr. Harding, a few years later, escaped performing only by a hair.
But if Wilson had forgotten his obligation to Bryan there would have
been an outburst of moral indignation, even among Bryan’s enemies, and
the collapse of Wilson would have come long before it did. When he
blew up at last it was not because, after promulgating his Fourteen
Points, he joined in swindling a helpless foe at Versailles; it was
because he tried, at Paris, to undo some of the consequences of
that fraud by forcing the United States into the League of Nations.
A democratic state, indeed, is so firmly grounded upon cheats and
humbugs of all sorts that they inevitably colour its dealings with
other nations, and so one always finds it regarded as a dubious friend
and a tricky foe. That the United States, in its foreign relations,
has descended to gross deceits and tergiversations since the earliest
days of the Republic was long ago pointed out by Lecky; it is regarded
universally to-day as a pious fraud--which is to say, as a Puritan.
Nor has England, the next most eminent democratic state, got the name
of _perfide Albion_ for nothing. Ruled by shady men, a nation itself
becomes shady.
In its domestic relations, of course, the same causes have the same
effects. The government deals with the citizens from whom it has its
mandate in a base and disingenuous manner, and fails completely to
maintain equal justice among them. It not only follows the majority
in persecuting those who happen to be unpopular; it also institutes
persecutions of its own, and frequently against men of the greatest
rectitude and largest public usefulness. I marvel that no candidate
for the doctorate has ever written a realistic history of the American
Department of Justice, ironically so called. It has been engaged
in sharp practices since the earliest days, and remains a fecund
source of oppression and corruption to-day. It is hard to recall an
administration in which it was not the centre of grave scandal. Within
our own time it has actually resorted to perjury in its efforts to undo
men guilty of flouting it, and at all times it has laboured valiantly
to nullify the guarantees of the Bill of Rights. The doings of its
corps of spies and _agents provocateurs_ are worthy the pen of some
confectioner of dime novels; at one time they were employed against
the members of the two houses of Congress, and the alarmed legislators
threw them off only by threatening to hold up their pay. As Mill long
ago pointed out, the tyranny of the majority under democracy is not
only shown in oppressive laws, but also in a usurped power to suspend
the operation of laws that are just. In this enterprise a democratic
government always marches ahead of the majority. Even more than the
most absolute oriental despotism, it becomes a government of men,
not of laws. Its favourites are, to all intents and purposes, immune
to criminal processes, whatever their offences, and its enemies are
exposed to espionage and persecution of the most aggravated sort. It
takes advantage of every passing craze and delusion of the mob to
dispose of those who oppose it, and it maintains a complex and highly
effective machine for launching such crazes and delusions when the
supply of them lags. Above all, it always shows that characteristically
Puritan habit of which Brooks Adams wrote in “The Emancipation of
Massachusetts”: the habit, to wit, of inflicting as much mental
suffering as possible upon its victims. That is to say, it not only has
at them by legal means; it also defames them, and so seeks to ruin them
doubly. The constant and central aim of every democratic government
is to silence criticism of itself. It begins to weaken, _i. e._, the
jobs of its component rogues begin to be insecure, the instant such
criticism rises. It is thus _fidei defensor_ before it is anything
else, and its whole power, legal and extra-legal, is thrown against the
sceptic who challenges its infallibility. Constitutional checks have
little effect upon its operations, for the only machinery for putting
them into effect is under its control. No ruler, indeed, ever wants to
be a constitutional ruler, and least of all the ruler whose reign has
a term, and who must make hay, in consequence, while the sun shines.
Under republics, as under constitutional monarchies, the history of
government is a history of successive usurpations. I avoid the banality
of pointing to the cases of Lincoln and Wilson. No man would want
to be President of the United States in strict accordance with the
Constitution. There is no sense of power in merely executing laws; it
comes from evading or augmenting them.
I incline to think that this view of government as a group of men
struggling for power and profit, in the face and at the expense of the
generality of men, has its place somewhere in the dark recesses of
the popular mind, and that it accounts, at least in large part, for
the toleration with which public corruption is regarded in democratic
states. Democratic man, to begin with, is corrupt himself: he will take
whatever he can safely get, law or no law. He assumes, naturally and
accurately, that the knaves and mountebanks who govern him are of the
same kidney--in his own phrase, that they are in public life for what
there is in it. It thus does not shock him to find them running true
to the ordinances of their nature. If, indeed, any individual among
them shows an unusual rectitude, and refuses spectacularly to take
what might be his for the grabbing, _Homo boobiens_ sets him down as
either a liar or an idiot, and refuses to admire him. So with private
rogues who tap the communal till. Democratic man is stupid, but he is
not so stupid that he does not see the government as a group of men
devoted to his exploitation--that is, as a group external to his own
group, and with antagonistic interests. He believes that its central
aim is to squeeze as much out of him as he can be forced to yield, and
so he sees no immorality in attempting a contrary squeeze when the
opportunity offers. Beating the government thus becomes a transaction
devoid of moral turpitude. If, when it is achieved on an heroic scale
by scoundrels of high tone, a storm of public indignation follows,
the springs of that indignation are to be found, not in virtue, but
in envy. In point of fact, it seldom follows. As I have said, there
was little if any public fury over the colossal stealings that went on
during the Wilson administration, and there was still less over the
smaller but perhaps even more cynical stealings that glorified the
short reign of Harding; in the latter case, in fact, most of the odium
settled upon the specialists in righteousness who laid the thieves by
the heels. The soldiers coming home from the War for Democracy did not
demand that the war profiteers be jailed; they simply demanded that
they themselves be paid enough to make up the difference between what
they got for fighting for their country and what they might have stolen
had they escaped the draft. Their chief indignation was lavished, not
upon the airship contractors who made off with a billion, but upon
their brothers who were paid $10 a day in the shipyards. The feats of
the former were beyond their grasp, but those of the latter they could
imagine--and envy.
This fellow feeling for thieves is probably what makes capitalism
so secure in democratic societies. Under absolutism it is always in
danger, and not infrequently, as history teaches, it is exploited and
undone, but under democracy it is safe. Democratic man can understand
the aims and aspirations of capitalism; they are, greatly magnified,
simply his own aims and aspirations. Thus he tends to be friendly to
it, and to view with suspicion those who propose to overthrow it. The
new system, whatever its nature, would force him to invent a whole
new outfit of dreams, and that is always a difficult and unpleasant
business, to workers in the ditch as to philosophers in the learned
grove. Capitalism under democracy has a further advantage: its enemies,
even when it is attacked, are scattered and weak, and it is usually
easily able to array one half of them against the other half, and
thus dispose of both. That is precisely what happened in the United
States after the late war. The danger that confronted capitalism was
then a double one. On the one side there was the tall talk that the
returning conscripts, once they got out of uniform, would demand the
punishment of the patriots who had looted the public treasury while
they were away. On the other side there was an uneasy rumour that a
war _Katzenjammer_ was heavily upon them, and that they would demand
a scientific inquiry into the true causes and aims of the war, and
into the manner and purposes of their own uncomfortable exploitation.
This double danger was quickly met and turned off, and by the simple
device of diverting the bile of the conscripts against those of
their own class who had escaped servitude, to wit, the small group
of draft-dodgers and conscientious objectors and the larger group of
political radicals, who were represented to be slackers in theory if
not in fact. Thus one group of victims was set upon the other, and
the fact that both had a grievance against their joint exploiters
was concealed and forgotten. Mob fears, easily aroused, aided in the
achievement of the _coup_. Within a few weeks gallant bands of American
Legionaries were hunting Reds down all the back-alleys of the land,
and gaudily butchering them, when found, at odds of a hundred to one.
I know of nothing more indicative of the strength of capitalism under
democracy than this melodramatic and extremely amusing business. The
scheme succeeded admirably, and it deserved to succeed, for it was
managed with laudable virtuosity, and it was based upon a shrewd
understanding of democratic psychology.