The Harrison “progress” (notable as precursor to many another) left
its heritage of shame, whereof each abaser would gladly have washed
the hands of him in his neighbor’s basin. All this was in due order
of nature, and was to have been expected. It was a phenomenon of the
same character as, in the loves of the low, the squabbling consequent
upon satiety and shame. We could not slink out of sight; we could not
deny our sycophancy, albeit we might give it another name; but we
could somewhat medicine our impaired self-esteem by dealing damnation
round on one another. The blush of shame turns easily to the glow
of indignation, and many a hatred is kindled at the rosy flame of
self-contempt. Persons conscious of having dishonored themselves are
doubly sensitive to any indignity put upon them by others. The vices
and follies of human nature are interdependent; they are not singly
roused to activity.
In my judgment, this entire incident of the President’s “tour” was
discreditable to President and people. I do not go into the question
of his motive in making it. Be that what it may, the manner of
it seems to me an outrage upon all the principles and sentiments
underlying republican institutions. In all but the name it was a “royal
progress”—the same costly ostentation, the same civic and military
pomp, the same solemn and senseless adulation, the same abasement of
spirit of the Many before the One. According to republican traditions
ten thousand times a year affirmed in every way in which affirmation
is possible, we fondly persuade ourselves that we hold as a true faith
in the hearts of our hearts that the One is the servant of the Many!
And it is no mere political catchphrase: he _is_ their servant; he _is_
their creature; all that in him to which they grovel (dignifying and
justifying their instinctive and inherited servility by names as false
as anything in ceremonial imposture) they themselves have made, as
truly as the heathen has made the wooden god before which he performs
his unmanly rite. It is precisely this thing—the superiority of the
people to their servants—that constitutes, and was by our fathers
understood to constitute, the essential, fundamental difference between
the system which they uprooted and the one which they planted in its
stead. Deluded men! how little they guessed the length and strength
and vitality of the roots left in the soil of the centuries when the
noxious harvestage had been cast as rubbish to the void!
I am no contestant for forms of government—no believer in either
the excellence or the permanence of any that has yet been devised.
That all men are created equal, in the best and highest sense of
the phrase, I hold, not as I observe it held by others, but as a
living faith. That an officeholder is a servant of the people; that
I am his political superior, owing him no deference, but entitled to
such deference from him as may be serviceable to keep him in mind of
his subordination—these are propositions which command my assent,
which I _feel_ to be true and which determine the character of my
personal relations with those whom they concern. That I should give my
hand, or bend my neck, or uncover my head to any man in mere homage
to, or recognition of, his office, great or small, is to me simply
inconceivable. These tricks of servility with the softened names
are the vestiges of an involuntary allegiance to power extraneous
to the performer. They represent in our American life obedience
and propitiation in their most primitive and odious forms. The man
who speaks of them as manifestations of a proper respect for “the
President’s great office” is either a rogue, a dupe or a journalist.
They come to us out of a fascinating but terrible past as survivals
of servitude. They speak a various language of oppression and the
superstition of man-worship; they carry forward the traditions of the
sceptre and the lash. Through the plaudits of the people may be heard
always the faint, far cry of the beaten slave.
Respect? Respect the good. Respect the wise. Let the President look
to it that he belongs to one of these classes. His going about the
country in gorgeous state and barbaric splendor as the guest of a
thieving corporation, but at our expense—shining and dining and
swining—unsouling himself of clotted nonsense in pickled platitudes
calculated for the meridian of Coon Hollow, Indiana, but ingeniously
adapted to each water tank on the line of his absurd “progress,” does
not prove it, and the presumption of his “great office” is against him.
Can you not see, poor misguided “fellow citizens,” how you permit your
political taskmasters to forge leg-chains of your follies and load you
down with them? Will nothing teach you that all this fuss-and-feathers,
all this ceremony, all this official gorgeousness and brass-banding,
this “manifestation of a proper respect for the nation’s head” has no
decent place in American life and American politics? Will no experience
open your stupid eyes to the fact that these shows are but absurd
imitations of royalty, to hold you silly while you are plundered by the
managers of the performance?—that while you toss your greasy caps in
air and sustain them by the ascending current of your senseless hurrahs
the programmers are going through your blessed pockets and exploiting
your holy dollars? No; you feel secure; power is of the People, and
you can effect a change of robbers every four years. Inestimable
privilege—to pull off the glutted leech and attach the lean one! And
you can not even choose among the lean leeches, but must accept those
designated by the programmers and showmen who have the reptiles in
stock! But then you are not “subjects;” you are “citizens”—there is
much in that. Your tyrant is not a “king;” he is a “president.” He
does not occupy a “throne,” but a “chair.” He does not succeed to it
by inheritance; he is pitchforked into it by the boss. Altogether, you
are distinctly better off than the Russian mujik who wears his shirt
outside his trousers and has never shaken hands with the Czar in all
his life.