THE HAPPY ENDING
I have hesitated a long time over writing this last chapter, because of
the natural desire to give to my book a happy ending.
One may write critically of America and things American, but only if one
ends in a mood of hopeful confidence. There is so much youth, so much
latent power here, that one cannot fail to have faith that the spirit of
man will gain some enlargement from the experiment in living which we
are carrying on in this country.
And even if that were not true, egotism requires us to believe that we
are ever going forward to better things; for how should "the forces"
have the effrontery to establish so splendid a people as ourselves upon
so rich a continent, while reserving for us nothing but a commonplace
career, that of one of the many peoples who have from time to time
occupied the fairer regions of the earth?
At least we shall fill a place in history alongside Greece and Rome; we
feel it as the imaginative young man feels in himself the stirrings of
a future Shakespeare, Napoleon, or Lincoln.
The human mind refuses to conceive of so much power coming to ordinary
ends. The justice illusion which men have found so indispensable a
companion on their way through time requires the happy ending. As it is
only right and fair that when the forces send us a crisis they should
send us a man equal to it, so it is only right and fair that when they
put so great a people as ourselves in the world they should prepare for
it a splendid destiny.
I subscribe heartily to this doctrine. It is as convincing as any I have
ever seen based on the theory which we all cheerfully accept, that man
is not master of his own fate, that he does not need to be, that he had
better not be, that he reaps where he does not sow, reaps, indeed,
abundant crops.
In the preceding chapter, working toward the happy ending, I have
brought my characters to the verge of felicity: the perfect union
between minorities and majorities, which is the aim of all social order,
is in sight.
I have based my minorities upon self-interest, thus introducing into our
government the selfish interests banished therefrom twenty years ago.
Their banishment was an achievement of virtue. Their reintroduction is
the accomplishment of good sense. They are the great reality while the
world thinks as it does.
Since someone somewhere, in a treatise on economics probably, penned
the phrase "enlightened self-interest," we have all more or less become
enamored of the idea that wisdom--enlightenment--reposes in the bosom of
selfishness. Justice requires that wisdom should be somewhere. The
reasoning runs like this. The world cannot get on without wisdom.
Justice demands that the world should get on. Therefore there is wisdom
in the world. We know it is not in ourselves or in our neighbors. We
feel, therefore, that it must be in the bosom of perfect selfishness.
And as we cast our eyes about us we think we know where the bosom of
perfect selfishness is, and we feel assured.
Sometimes, of course, we place it in the heads of all mankind, it being
a thing that no one man has and no few men have, but which is one of
those mysterious properties of the aggregate which does not inhere in
the individuals composing the aggregate; a sort of colloidal element
that comes from shaking men up together, though all are without it
before the mixing and shaking.
Some would place it, as Mr. Wilson seems to in a famous passage on
minorities, in the breasts of the enlightened few. When the few
disagreed with him, he threw them and their wisdom in jail.
But wherever it is, it is sure to be found in a system which preserved
the old parties representing the general mind of the country along with
the new vertical political organizations, representing the minorities,
thrusting up like volcanoes upon the placid plane of politics that Mr.
Harding once delighted to survey.
You have in this combination the spontaneous wisdom of the masses, if
that is where wisdom generates. You have the wisdom of the few, if you
believe in impregnation from above, and you have the wisdom of
selfishness, if you believe as most of us do in the enlightenment of
self-interest. And no one ever located wisdom anywhere else than in
these three places, for the first, as I might easily demonstrate, is the
modern democratic name for the wisdom of God; the second is the wisdom
of men; and the third is the wisdom of the serpent; beside which there
are no other wisdoms.
This you will admit is moving rapidly and without reserve toward the
happy ending. But I think every writer of a novel has stuck his tongue
in his cheek as he wrote those benedictory words, "And they lived happy
ever after." And I stick my tongue in my cheek as I think of Mr. Gray
Silver, the effective director of the farmers' vertical political trust
sitting in the Senate, leading it perhaps in place of Senator Lodge of
Massachusetts.
To Mr. Lodge's petulant, imperious gesture--the sharp handclap for the
pages--would succeed Mr. Silver's fixing gesture, that of a country
merchant smoothing out a piece of silk before a customer at a counter.
Mr. Silver as he talks performs one constant motion, a gentle slow
moving of both hands horizontally, palms down.
Mr. Silver is a lobbyist with the powers of a dictator, or a dictator
with the habits of a lobbyist, whichever way you wish to look at it. A
former farmer, member of the West Virginia legislature, representative
of farm organizations at Washington, he rules the Senate with more power
than Mr. Lodge has or Mr. Harding has, but always with the gentle touch
of a general-storekeeper, spreading the wrinkles out of a yard of satin.
But even this little lobbyist has a certain definiteness which public
men generally lack. His feet are firmly placed upon reality. He speaks
for a solid body of opinion. He is a positive rather than a negative
force. He represents a fairly united minority which knows what it wants,
and men are strong or weak according as they are or are not spokesmen of
a cause; and the selfish interest of a group easily takes on the pious
aspect of a cause.
It is always better to deal with principals than with agents. Gray
Silver, Colonel John H. Taylor, the Apollo of the soldiers' bonus lobby,
perfect ladies' man in appearance, who is full of zeal also for a cause,
that of those who did not make money out of the war and who should in
common justice make it all the rest of their lives out of the peace, and
Wayne B. Wheeler, the fanatic leader of the drys, are all more real men
than those who do their bidding in the Senate and the House.
No, if I put my tongue in my cheek as I write the words "lived happy
ever after," it is because I see only a measure of improvement in the
freeing of men from existing political conventions which will come from
the effective emergence of minorities. A richer public life will result
from increased vitality of the legislative branch. But a rich public
life, no; for that requires men. You cannot fashion it out of Lodges,
Watsons, Curtises, Gillettes, Mondells, Hardings, Hugheses, and Hoovers,
or even Gray Silvers, Taylors, or Wheelers.
And we do not breed men in this country. If the test of a civilization
is an unusually high average of national comfort, achieved in a land of
unparalleled resources, whose exploitation was cut off from interruption
by foreign enemies, then this experiment in living which we have been
conducting in America has been a great success; if it is a further
freeing of the human spirit, such as finds its expression in the rare
individuals who make up the bright spots in all past human history, then
its success is still to be achieved.
Many blame the dullness and general averageness which afflicts us upon
democracy. There is democracy and there is timidity and stupidity; there
is the appeal to low intelligence; the compulsion to be a best seller
rests upon us all. _Post hoc propter hoc._
I am going to blame it upon the mistake Euclid made in his theorem about
two parallel lines. This was an error of Euclid's, modern mathematics
proves, unless you assume space to be infinite. Having committed
ourselves to Euclid, we committed ourselves to a space that was
infinite. Space being regarded as infinite, man was little, relatively.
Euclid having made his mistake about the parallels, it followed
inevitably that Mr. Harding should be little.
I use Mr. Harding only by way of illustration. You may fill any other
name you like of the Washington gallery into that statement of
inevitability and do it no violence. And this very interchangeability of
names suggests that you must go further back than democracy to find the
cause of today's sterility.
Besides, we have had infinite space, in our minds; but have we ever had
democracy there? De Gourmont writes that no religion ever dies, but it
rather lives on in its successor. Similarly, no form of government ever
dies; it survives in its successor. A nation does not become a democracy
by writing on a bit of paper, "resolved that we are a democracy, with a
government consisting of executive, legislative, and judicial branches
chosen by majority vote."
Government, however organized, is what exists in the minds of the
people, and in that mind is stored up a dozen superstitions, handed down
from primitive days, gathering force from time to time as new names are
given to them and new "scientific" bases are found for them.
We laugh at the divine right of kings, but we could not accept
self-government without bestowing on it an element of divinity. We have
the divine right of Public Opinion. We can hardly print these words
without the reverence of capital letters. The founders of modern
democracy knew there could be no government without a miraculous
quality. Formerly one mere man by virtue of ruling became something
divine. The miracle grew difficult to swallow. You could regard this one
man and see that he was a fool and had too many mistresses. He was the
least divine-looking thing that could be imagined. Very well then, put
the divine quality into something remote. All men by virtue of ruling
themselves became divine.
An immense inertia develops between theoretical self-government and the
practical reluctance of humanity to be governed by anything short of the
heavenly hosts. I don't know whether this reluctance springs from racial
modesty, the feeling that man is not good enough to govern himself, or
from racial egotism, the belief that nothing is too good to govern him;
but it is a great reality. The little men at Washington are will-less in
the conflict.
To overcome this inertia, minorities whose interests cannot wait upon
the slow benevolent processes of determinism or upon the divine
rightness of public opinion, form to prod the constitutional organs of
government into action. Mr. Gray Silver, the silk smoother, and Mr.
Wayne B. Wheeler, the Puritan fanatic, are both just as much parts of
the government as is Mr. Harding. So, too, is every one of the hundred
and more lobbies which issue publicity at Washington. We recognize this
plurality of our institutions in our common speech. We refer habitually
to the "invisible government," to "government by business," to "party
government," to "government by public opinion." We have little but
inertia, except as outside pressure is applied to it.
The little men at Washington live in all this confusion of an
excessively plural government. They are pushed hither and yon by all
these forces, organized and unorganized, mental and physical, real and
imaginary, that inhibit and impel self-government. They lean heavily
upon parties only to find parties bending beneath their weight. They
yield to blocs and lobbies. They watch publicity and put out their own
publicity to counteract it.
Like the ministers of crowned fools, they gull the present embodiment of
divine right and cringe before it. They are everything but the effective
realization of a democratic will.
All this sounds as if I were getting far from my happy ending, and you
begin to see me asking the old question, "Is democracy a failure?" But
no, it is too soon to ask it. Wait a thousand years until democracy has
had a real chance. A revolution--no really optimistic prognosis can be
written which does not have the world revolution in it--a revolution
will have to take place in men's minds before this is a democracy.
I would absolve myself from the taboo of this word. Property is a grand
form of clothes. A property revolution, such as the Socialists
recommend, would be little more important in setting men's minds free
for self-government, than would putting women in trousers be in setting
women's minds free for the achievement of sex equality.
Some German--I think it was Spengler--writing about some "Niedergang," I
think it was of western civilization--all Germans like to write about
Niedergangs--demonstrated that every new civilization starts with a new
theory of the universe, of space and time. That is, it starts with a
real revolution.
Well, then, here is the true happy ending; Einstein is giving us a new
theory of the universe, knocking the mathematical props from under
infinity, teaching us that man largely fashions the world out of his own
mind.
Man again tends to become what the old Greek radical called him, "The
measure of all things." Once he is, and it will take a long time for him
to admit that he is, there may be a real chance for democracy and for
the emergence of great individuals, who are after all the best evidence
of civilization.
You see the happy ending is Einstein and not the farm bloc.
Meanwhile we have the farm bloc, one sign of vitality amid much
deadness, a reassertion of the principle which the Fathers of the
Constitution held, that there must be room for the play of minorities in
our political system.
END
End of Project Gutenberg's Behind the Mirrors, by Clinton W. Gilbert