questions that harass and dismay the helpless human race. Turn, for
example, to the sex problem. There is no half-baked ecclesiastic,
bawling in his galvanized-iron temple on a suburban lot, who doesn't
know precisely how it ought to be dealt with. There is no fantoddish
old suffragette, sworn to get her revenge on man, who hasn't a
sovereign remedy for it. There is not a shyster of a district attorney,
ambitious for higher office, who doesn't offer to dispose of it in
a few weeks, given only enough help from the city editors. And yet,
by the same token, there is not a man who has honestly studied it
and pondered it, bringing sound information to the business, and
understanding of its inner difficulties and a clean and analytical
mind, who doesn't believe and hasn't stated publicly that it is
intrinsically and eternally insoluble. I can't think of an exception,
nor does a fresh glance through the literature suggest one. The latest
expert to tell the disconcerting truth is Dr. Maurice Parmelee, the
criminologist. His book, "Personality and Conduct," is largely devoted
to demonstrating that the popular solutions, for all the support they
get from vice crusaders, complaisant legislators and sensational
newspapers, are unanimously imbecile and pernicious--that their only
effect in practice is to make what was bad a good deal worse. His
remedy is--what? An alternative solution? Not at all. His remedy, in
brief, is to abandon all attempts at a solution, to let the whole thing
go, to cork up all the reformers and try to forget it.
And in this proposal he merely echoes Havelock Ellis, undoubtedly
the most diligent and scientific student of the sex problem that the
world has yet seen--in fact, the one man who, above all others, has
made a decorous and intelligent examination of it possible. Ellis'
remedy is simply a denial of all remedies. He admits that the disease
is bad, but he shows that the medicine is infinitely worse, and so he
proposes going back to the plain disease, and advocates bearing it
with philosophy, as we bear colds in the head, marriage, the noises of
the city, bad cooking and the certainty of death. Man is inherently
vile--but he is never so vile as when he is trying to disguise and
deny his vileness. No prostitute was ever so costly to a community as
a prowling and obscene vice crusader, or as the dubious legislator or
prosecuting officer who jumps as he pipes.
Ellis, in all this, falls under the excommunication of the
sentimentalists. He demolishes one scheme without offering an
alternative scheme. He tears down without making any effort to build
up. This explains, no doubt, his general unpopularity; into mouths
agape for peruna, he projects only paralyzing streams of ice-water. And
it explains, too, the curious fact that his books, the most competent
and illuminating upon the subject that they discuss, are under the
ban of the Comstocks in both England and America, whereas the hollow
treatises of ignorant clerics and smutty old maids are merchanted with
impunity, and even commended from the sacred desk. The trouble with
Ellis is that he tells the truth, which is the unsafest of all things
to tell. His crime is that he is a man who prefers facts to illusions,
and knows what he is talking about. Such men are never popular. The
public taste is for merchandise of a precisely opposite character. The
way to please is to proclaim in a confident manner, not what is true,
but what is merely comforting. This is what is called building up. This
is constructive criticism.
IX. THE DRY MILLENNIUM
1
_The Holy War_
The fact that the enforcement of Prohibition entails a host of
oppressions and injustices--that it puts a premium upon the lowest
sort of spying, affords an easy livelihood to hordes of professional
scoundrels, subjects thousands of decent men to the worst sort of
blackmail, violates the theoretical sanctity of domicile, and makes
for bitter and relentless enmities,--this fact is now adduced by its
ever-hopeful foes as an argument for the abandonment of the whole
disgusting crusade. By it they expect to convert even a large minority
of the drys, apparently on the theory that the latter got converted
emotionally and hastily, and that an appeal to their sense of justice
and fair-dealing will debamboozle them.
No hope could be more vain. What all the current optimists overlook
is that the illogical and indefensible persecutions certain to occur
in increasing number under the Prohibition Amendment constitute the
chief cause of its popularity among the sort of men who are in favor
of it. The typical Prohibitionist, in other words, is a man full of
religious excitement, with the usual sadistic overtones. He delights
in persecution for its own sake. He likes to see the other fellow
jump and to hear him yell. This thirst is horribly visible in all
the salient mad mullahs of the land--that is, in all the genuine
leaders of American culture. Such skillful boob-bumpers as the Rev.
Dr. Billy Sunday know what that culture is; they know what the crowd
wants. Thus they convert the preaching of the alleged Word of God
into a rough-and-tumble pursuit of definite sinners--saloon-keepers,
prostitutes, Sabbath-breakers, believers in the Darwinian
hypothesis, German exegetes, hand-books, poker-players, adulterers,
cigarette-smokers, users of profanity. It is the chase that heats up
the great mob of Methodists, not the Word. And the fact that the chase
is unjust only tickles them the more, for to do injustice with impunity
is a sign of power, and power is the thing that the inferior man always
craves most violently.
Every time the papers print another account of a Prohibionist agent
murdering a man who resists him, or searching some woman's underwear,
or raiding a Vanderbilt yacht, or blackmailing a Legislature, or
committing some other such inordinate and anti-social act, they simply
make a thousand more votes for Prohibition. It is precisely that sort
of entertainment that makes Prohibition popular with the boobery. It
is precisely because it is unjust, imbecile, arbitrary and tyrannical
that they are so hot for it. The incidental violation of even the
inferior man's liberty is not sufficient to empty him of delight in
the chase. The victims reported in the newspapers are commonly his
superiors; he thus gets the immemorial democratic satisfaction out of
their discomfiture. Besides, he has no great rage for liberty himself.
He is always willing to surrender it at demand. The most popular man
under a democracy is not the most democratic man, but the most despotic
man. The common folk delight in the exactions of such a man. They like
him to boss them. Their natural gait is the goose-step.
It was predicted by romantics that the arrival of Prohibition would see
the American workingman in revolt against its tyranny, with mills idle
and industry paralyzed. Certain boozy labor leaders even went so far as
to threaten a general strike. No such strike, of course, materialized.
Not a single American workingman uttered a sound. The only protests
heard of came from a few barbarous foreigners, and these malcontents
were quickly beaten into submission by the _Polizei._ In a week or
two all the reserve stocks of beer were exhausted, and every jug of
authentic hard liquor was emptied. Since then, save for the ghastly
messes that he has brewed behind locked doors, the American workingman
has been dry. Worse, he has also been silent. Not a sound has come out
of him.... But his liver is full of bile? He nourishes an intolerable
grievance? He will get his revenge, soon or late, at the polls? All
moonshine! He will do nothing of the sort. He will actually do what
he always does--that is, he will make a virtue of his necessity, and
straightway begin believing that he _likes_ Prohibition, that it is
doing him a lot of good, that he wouldn't be without it if he could.
This is the habitual process of thought of inferior men, at all times
and everywhere. This is the sturdy common sense of the plain people.
2
_The Lure of Babylon_
One of the ultimate by-products of Prohibition and the allied
Puritanical barbarities will probably be an appreciable slackening in
the present movement of yokels toward the large cities. The thing that
attracted the peasant youth to our gaudy Sodoms and Ninevehs, in the
past, was not, as sociologists have always assumed, the prospect of
less work and more money. The country boy, in point of fact--that is,
the average country boy, the normal country boy--had to work quite as
hard in the city as he ever worked in the country, and his wages were
anything but princely. Unequipped with a city trade, unprotected by a
union, and so forced into competition with the lowest types of foreign
labor, he had to be content with monotonous, uninspiring and badly-paid
jobs. He did not become a stock-broker, or even a plumber; until the
war gave him a temporary chance at its gigantic swag, he became a car
conductor, a porter or a wagon-driver. And it took him many years to
escape from that sordid fate, for the city boy, with a better education
and better connections, was always a lap or two ahead of him. The
notion that yokels always succeed in the cities is a great delusion.
The overwhelming majority of our rich men are city-born and city-bred.
And the overwhelming majority of our elderly motormen, forlorn corner
grocerymen, neighborhood carpenters and other such blank cartridges are
country-bred.
No, it was not money that lured the adolescent husbandman to the
cities, but the gay life. What he dreamed of was a more spacious and
stimulating existence than the farm could offer--an existence crowded
with intriguing and usually unlawful recreations. A few old farmers may
have come in now and then to buy gold bricks or to hear the current
Henry Ward Beechers, but these oldsters were mere trippers--they never
thought of settling down--the very notion of it would have appalled
them. The actual settlers were all young, and what brought them on was
less an economic impulse than an æsthetic one. They wanted to live
magnificently, to taste the sweets that drummers talked of, to sample
the refined divertisements described in such works as "The Confessions
of an Actress," "Night Life in Chicago" and "What Every Young Husband
Should Know." Specifically, they yearned for a semester or two in the
theaters, the saloons and the bordellos--particularly, the saloons and
bordellos. It was this gorgeous bait that dragged them out of their
barn-yards. It was this bait that landed a select few in Wall street
and the United States Senate--and millions on the front seats of
trolley-cars, delivery-wagons and ash-carts.
But now Puritanism eats the bait. In all our great cities the public
stews are closed, and the lamentable irregularities they catered to are
thrown upon an individual initiative that is quite beyond the talents
and enterprise of a plow-hand. Now the saloons are closed too, and the
blind-pigs begin to charge such prices that no peasant can hope to pay
them. Only the theater remains--and already the theater loses its old
lavish devilishness. True enough, it still deals in pornography, but
that pornography becomes exclusive and even esoteric: a yokel could
not understand the higher farce, nor could he afford to pay for a
seat at a modern leg-show. The cheap burlesque house of other days is
now incurably moral; I saw a burlesque show lately which was almost a
dramatization of a wall-card by Dr. Frank Crane. There remains the
movie, but the peasant needn't come to the city to see movies--there is
one in every village. What remains, then, of the old lure? What sane
youth, comfortably housed on a farm, with Theda Bara performing at the
nearest cross-roads, wheat at $2.25 a bushel and milkers getting $75 a
month and board--what jejune rustic, not downright imbecile, itches for
the city to-day?
3
_Cupid and Well-Water_
In the department of amour, I daresay, the first effect of Prohibition
will be to raise up impediments to marriage. It was alcohol, in the
past, that was the primary cause of perhaps a majority of alliances
among civilized folk. The man, priming himself with cocktails to
achieve boldness, found himself suddenly bogged in sentimentality, and
so yielded to the ancient tricks of the lady. Absolutely sober men will
be harder to snare. Coffee will never mellow them sufficiently. Thus I
look for a fall in the marriage rate.
But only temporarily. In the long run, Prohibition will make marriage
more popular, at least among the upper classes, than it has ever
been in the past, and for the plain reason that, once it is in full
effect, the life of a civilized bachelor will become intolerable. In
the past he went to his club. But a club without a bar is as hideously
unattractive as a beautiful girl without hair or teeth. No sane man
will go into it. In two years, in fact, nine out of ten clubs will be
closed. The only survivors will be a few bleak rookeries for senile
widowers. The bachelor of less years, unable to put up with the society
of such infernos, will inevitably decide that if he must keep sober he
might just as well have a charming girl to ease his agonies, and so he
will expose himself in society, and some fair one or other will nab
him. At the moment, observing only the first effect of Prohibition, the
great majority of intelligent women are opposed to it. But when the
secondary effect begins to appear they will become in favor of it. They
now have the vote. I see no hope.
4
_The Triumph of Idealism_
Another effect of Prohibition will be that it will gradually empty
the United States of its present small minority of civilized men.
Almost every man that one respects is now casting longing eyes across
the ocean. Some of them talk frankly of emigrating, once Europe pulls
itself together. Others merely propose to go abroad every year and to
stay there as long as possible, visiting the United States only at
intervals, as a Russian nobleman, say, used to visit his estates in
the Ukraine. Worse, Prohibition will scare off all the better sort
of immigrants from the other side. The lower order of laborers may
continue to come in small numbers--each planning to get all the money
he can and then escape, as the Italians are even now escaping. But no
first-rate man will ever come--no Stephen Girard, or William Osier,
or Carl Schurz, or Theodore Thomas, or Louis Agassiz, or Edwin Klebs,
or Albert Gallatin, or Alexander Hamilton. It is not Prohibition
_per se_ that will keep them away; it is the whole complex of social
and political attitudes underlying Prohibition--the whole clinical
picture of Puritanism rampant. The United States will become a sort
of huge Holland--fat and contented, but essentially undistinguished.
Its superior men will leave it automatically, as nine-tenths of all
superior Hollanders leave Holland.
But all this, from the standpoint of Prohibitionists, is no argument
against Prohibition. On the contrary, it is an argument in favor of
Prohibition. For the men the Prohibitionist--_i. e.,_ the inferior sort
of Puritan--distrusts and dislikes most intensely is precisely what
the rest of humanity regards as the superior man. You will go wrong if
you imagine that the honest yeomen of, say, Mississippi deplore the
fact that in the whole state there is not a single distinguished man.
They actually delight in it. It is a source of genuine pride to them
that no such irreligious scoundrel as Balzac lives there, and no such
scandalous adulterer as Wagner, and no scoundrelly atheist as Huxley,
and no such rambunctious piano-thumper as Beethoven, and no such German
spy as Nietzsche. Such men, settling there, would be visited by a
Vigilance Committee and sharply questioned. The Puritan Commonwealth,
now as always, has no traffic with heretics.
X. APPENDIX ON A TENDER THEME
1
_The Nature of Love_
Whatever the origin (in the soul, the ductless glands or the
convolutions of the cerebrum) of the thing called romantic love, its
mere phenomenal nature may be very simply described. It is, in brief, a
wholesale diminishing of disgusts, primarily based on observation, but
often, in its later stages, taking on an hallucinatory and pathological
character. Friendship has precisely the same constitution, but the
pathological factor is usually absent. When we are attracted to a
person and find his or her proximity agreeable, it means that he or she
disgusts us less than the average human being disgusts us--which, if we
have delicate sensibilities, is a good deal more than is comfortable.
The elemental man is not much oppressed by this capacity for disgust;
in consequence, he is capable of falling in love with almost any woman
who seems sexually normal. But the man of a higher type is vastly more
sniffish, and so the majority of women whom he meets are quite unable
to interest him, and when he succumbs at last it is always to a woman
of special character, and often she is also one of uncommon shrewdness
and enterprise.
Because human contacts are chiefly superficial, most of the disgusts
that we are conscious of are physical. We are never honestly friendly
with a man who is dirtier than we are ourselves, or who has table
manners that are cruder than our own (or merely noticeably different),
or who laughs in a way that strikes us as gross, or who radiates some
odor that we do not like. We never conceive a romantic passion for a
woman who employs a toothpick in public, or who suffers from acne, or
who offers the subtle but often quite unescapable suggestion that she
has on soiled underwear. But there are also psychical disgusts. Our
friends, in the main, must be persons who think substantially as we
do, at least about all things that actively concern us, and who have
the same general tastes. It is impossible to imagine a Brahmsianer
being honestly fond of a man who enjoys jazz, or a man who admires
Joseph Conrad falling in love with a woman who reads Rex Beach. By the
same token, it is impossible to imagine a woman of genuine refinement
falling in love with a Knight of Pythias, a Methodist or even a
chauffeur; either the chauffeur is a Harvard aviator in disguise or the
lady herself is a charwoman in disguise. Here, however, the force of
aversion may be greatly diminished by contrary physical attractions;
the body, as usual, is enormously more potent than the so-called mind.
In the midst of the bitterest wars, with every man of the enemy held
to be a fiend in human form, women constantly fall in love with enemy
soldiers who are of pleasant person and wear attractive uniforms. And
many a fair agnostic, as every one knows, is on good terms with a
handsome priest....
Imagine a young man in good health and easy circumstances, entirely
ripe for love. The prompting to mate and beget arises within his
interstitial depths, traverses his lymphatic system, lifts his blood
pressure, and goes whooping through his _meatus auditorium externus_
like a fanfare of slide trombones. The impulse is very powerful. It
staggers and dismays him. He trembles like a stag at bay. Why, then,
doesn't he fall head over heels in love with the first eligible woman
that he meets? For the plain reason that the majority of women that he
meets offend him, repel him, disgust him. Often it is in some small,
inconspicuous and, at first glance, unanalyzable way. She is, in
general, a very pretty girl--but her ears stand out too much. Or her
hair reminds him of oakum. Or her mouth looks like his aunt's. Or she
has beer-keg ankles. Here very impalpable things, such as bodily odors,
play a capital part; their importance is always much underestimated.
Many a girl has lost a husband by using the wrong perfume, or by
neglecting to have her hair washed. Many another has come to grief by
powdering her nose too much or too little, or by shrinking from the
paltry pain of having some of her eyebrows pulled, or by employing a
lip-salve with too much purple in it, or by patronizing a bad dentist,
or by speaking incautiously of chilblains....
But eventually the youth finds his love--soon or late the angel
foreordained comes along. Who is this prodigy? Simply the _first_ girl
to sneak over what may be called the threshold of his disgusts--simply
the _first_ to disgust him so little, at first glance, that the loud,
insistent promptings of the Divine Schadchen have a chance to be
heard. If he muffs this first, another will come along, maybe soon,
maybe late. For every normal man there are hundreds of thousands in
Christendom, thousands in his own town, scores within his own circle
of acquaintance. This normal man is not too delicate. His fixed foci
of disgust are neither very numerous nor very sensitive. For the rest,
he is swayed by fashion, by suggestion, by transient moods. Anon a
mood of cynicism is upon him and he is hard to please, but anon he
succumbs to sentimentality and is blind to everything save the grossest
offendings. It is only the man of extraordinary sensitiveness, the man
of hypertrophied delicacy, who must search the world for his elective
affinity.
Once the threshold is crossed emotion comes to the aid of perception.
That is to say, the blind, almost irresistible mating impulse, now
fortuitously relieved from the contrary pressure of active disgusts,
fortifies itself by manufacturing illusions. The lover sees with an
eye that is both opaque and out of focus. Thus he begins the familiar
process of editing and improving his girl. Features and characteristics
that, observed in cold blood, might have quickly aroused his most
active disgust are now seen through a rose-tinted fog, like drabs in a
musical comedy. The lover ends by being almost anæsthetic to disgust.
While the spell lasts his lady could shave her head or take to rubbing
snuff, or scratch her leg at a communion service, or smear her hair
with bear's grease, and yet not disgust him. Here the paralysis of the
faculties is again chiefly physical--a matter of obscure secretions, of
shifting pressure, of metabolism. Nature is at her tricks. The fever
of love is upon its victim. His guard down, he is little more than a
pathetic automaton. The shrewd observer of gaucheries, the sensitive
sniffer, the erstwhile cynic, has become a mere potential papa.