The new year of 1918 was not a month old the day I went up to
Connecticut to see the Honorable Socrates Potter. I found the famous
country lawyer sitting in the very same chair from which, seven years
ago, he had told me the story of keeping up with Lizzie. His feet rested
peacefully on a table in front of him as he sat reading a law book.
Logs were burning in the fireplace. A spaniel dog lay dozing on a rug in
front of it. What a delightful flavor of old times and good tobacco was
in that inner office of his--with its portraits of Lincoln and his war
cabinet, of Silas Wright and Daniel Webster and Rufus Choate and Charles
Sumner, with its old rifle and powder horn hanging above the modest
mantel and its cases of worn law books! Beyond the closed door were busy
clerks and clicking typewriters, for Mr. Potter's business had grown
to large proportions, but here was peace and the atmosphere of
deliberation. There was never any haste in this small factory of
opinions.
“Hello! Have you come for another book?” he asked.
“Always looking for another book,” I answered. “It's about time that you
got into this big fight between Democracy and--”
“Deviltry,” he interrupted with a stern look. “By thunder I've offered
to take up the sword but they say I'm too old to fight. I don't believe
it. My great grandfather fought at Lexington when he was sixty-four.”
“You can do more good with some conversation than you could with a
sword or a gun,” I urged. “I've come up here to touch the button and now
you're expected to say something for the boys at the front and the folks
at home. Just turn your search-light on the general situation.”
“Well, I have quite a stock of shrapnel and liquid fire for the rear
line of the Germans,” he began. “My searchlight is a modest kind of a
lantern but we'll see what we can do with it.
“This time we'll talk on the subject of keeping up with William.
“The other day, in the rooms of the Connecticut Historical Society, I
was reading the diary of one Abigail Foote written in 1775. This, as I
remember it, was an average day in her life: Mended mother's hood, set a
red dye, hetchelled flax with Hannah, spun four pounds of whole wool,
spun thread for harness twine, worked on a cheese basket, read a sermon
of Doddridge's, scoured the pewter, milked the cows, carded wool, got
supper ready, went to bed at nine.
“I wish you to note that she went to bed at nine. Do you think that a
modern girl would knock off at nine? Not at all. She sticks to her task
until midnight and even longer. Abigail had only to be an ordinary human
being with nothing to do but work. The modern girl must have the beauty
of a goddess, the grace of a gazelle, the digestion of an ostrich, the
endurance of a horse and the remorse of a human being. It is a large
contract. “We are all familiar with the diary of a modern girl. Its
average day would be about as follows: Got up. Neck felt like a string
on a toy balloon. Had some toast and coffee. Had my hair dressed and
nails manicured. Put a new ribbon on my dog and walked him around the
block. Went to meeting of the charity committee. Learned that there
were many people out of work. Went to see the doctor who warned me about
overeating and late hours. Same old chestnut! Lunched with Mabel. Ate
half a pound of chocolates and so much cake that the butler had a
frightened look. Home again. Dressed. Went with mama to a lecture on the
insane. Mama woke me at five. It was all over. Went to Gladys's tea.
Danced half an hour. Home again. Dressed. Spent fifteen minutes with
papa and my dog. Went with Harry and mama to Gwendolyn's party. Danced
until midnight. Home at one. Nearly frozen. Talk about long hours and
poor pay and insufficient clothing; this reminds one of the story of
Washington's army in the worst winter of the revolution.
“Now, both of these girls toiled.
“The one in productive work with the wool and the flax. It was done
mostly for the comfort of others. The modern girl wears herself out
supering. Do you know what it means to super? It is to follow the
exacting industry of being superior.”
“Superior to what?” I asked.
“To productive work,” he went on. “Their toil is all in the service of
themselves and in pursuit of their own pleasure.
“That's what's the matter with this old earth. For many years more
than half its people have been supering--wasting their time in busy
idleness--on the high road to deviltry. You don't have to think twice
to decide that it is about the most dangerous of all crimes, my friend,
because it is the straight way to all crime. It leads direct to deceit,
theft, adultery and murder. It kills the sense of brotherhood in the
heart of man. It kills the spirit of Democracy. The world is being
strafed for it, in my opinion.
“Now the center and headquarters of all supering is Prussia--the home of
the superman--and Bill Hohenzollern, the Godful, is the head and front
of the whole push.
“There are two kinds of superiority--real and assumed. Real superiority
is largely unconscious of itself. It can never be inherited--there's the
important fact about it. You will recall that there are only three cases
on record of a great father begetting a great son. The son is apt to
have a sense of inherited superiority. It destroys everything worth
while in him.
“Of all the defects that flesh is heir to, a sense of inherited
superiority is the most deplorable. It is worse than insanity or idiocy
or curvature of the spine. There are millions of acres of land in Europe
occupied by nothing but a sense of inherited superiority; there are
millions of hands and intellects in Europe occupied by nothing but
a sense of inherited superiority, while billions of wealth have been
devoted to its service and embellishment. A man who has even a small
amount of it needs a force of porters and footmen to help him tote it
around, and a guard to keep watch for fear that some one will grab his
superiority and run off with it when his back is turned.
“A full equipment of inherited superiority, decorated with a title, a
special dialect, a lot of old armor and university junk, stuck out so
that there wasn't room for more than one outfit in a township. Most
of the bloodshed has been caused by the blunders or the hoggishness
of inherited superiority. It is the nursing bottle of insanity and the
Mellin's Food of crime.
“Now hot air has been the favorite dissipation of kings. James the First
was one of the world's greatest consumers of hot air; enough to put
him into business with the Almighty. To be sure, it was not a full
partnership. It was no absolute Hohenzollern monopoly of mortal
participation.
“There are two kinds of sense in men--common and preferred, plain and
fancy. The common has become the great asset of mankind; the preferred
its great liability. Our forefathers had large holdings of the common,
certain kings and their favorites of the preferred. The preferred
represented an immense bulk of inherited superiority and an alleged pipe
line leading from the king's throne to Paradise, and connected with the
fount of every blessing by the best religious plumbers. It always drew
dividends, whether the common got anything or not. The preferred holders
ran the plant and insisted that they held a first mortgage on it. When
they tried to foreclose with military power to back them, some of our
forefathers got out.
“We, their sons, are now crossing the seas to take up that ancient issue
between sense common and preferred and to determine the rights of each.
We are fighting for the foundations of Democracy--the dictates of common
sense.
“For the sake of saving time, I hope you will grant me license to resort
to the economy of slang. A man might do worse these days. There is one
great destroyer of common sense. It is hot air. I remember how scared of
it the Yankees used to be. They were most economical with their praise.
I never heard a word of it in my youth. It came to me after some travel
now and then--never to my face. They knew the deadly power of it--those
Yankees.
[Illustration: 0025]
“Now hot air has been the favorite dissipation of kings. James the First
was one of the world's' great consumers of hot air. He and his family
and friends took all that Great Britain could produce--never, I am glad
to say, a large amount, but enough to put James into business with the
Almighty. To be sure, it was not a full partnership. It was no absolute
Hohenzollern monopoly of mortal participation. It was comparatively
modest, but it was enough to outrage the common sense of the English.
After all, divine partnerships were not for the land of Fielding and
Smollett and Swift and Dickens and Thackeray. Too much humor there. Too
much liberty of the tongue and pen. Too great a gift for ridicule. Where
there is ridicule there can be no self-appointed counselors of God, and
handmade halos of divinity find their way to the garbage heap.
“Now, if we are to have sound common sense, we must have humor, and if
we are to have humor we must have liberty. There can be no crowned or
mitered knave, no sacred, fawning idiot, who is immune from ridicule; no
little tin deities who can safely slash you with a sword unless you give
them the whole of the sidewalk. Humor would take care of them; not the
exuberance that is born in the wine-press or the beer-vat--humor is no
by-product of the brewery---but the merriment that comes when common
sense has been vindicated by ridicule.
“Solemnity is often wedded to Conceit, and their children have committed
all the crimes on record. You may always look for the devil in the
neighborhood of some solemn and conceited ass who has inherited power
and who, like the one that Balaam rode, speaks for the Almighty. So,
when the devil came back, he steered for the most solemn and perfect ass
on the face of the earth--Bill Hohenzollern.
“In his soul the devil began to destroy the common sense of a race with
the atmosphere of hell--hot air. We have seen its effect. It inflates
the intellect. It produces the pneumatic, rubber brain--the brain that
keeps its friends busy with the pump of adulation; the brain stretched
to hold its conceit, out of which we can hear the hot air leaking in
streams of boastfulness. The divine afflatus of an emperor is apt to
make as much disturbance as a leaky steam-pipe. When the pumpers cease
because they are weary, it becomes irritated. Then all hands to the
pumps again. Soon there is no illusion of grandeur too absurd to be
real, no indictment of idiotic presumption which it is unwilling to
admit.
“By and by it breaks into the realm of the infinite and hastens to
the succor of God, for, to the pneumatic brain, God is slow and
old-fashioned. Thereafter it infests the heavenly throne and seeks to
turn it into a plant for the manufacture of improved morals, and, so as
to insure their popularity, every agent for these morals is to carry
a sword and a gun and a license to use them. The alleged improvement
consists in taking all the nots out of the ten commandments. Nots are
irritating to certain people who have plans for murder, rape, arson, and
piracy.
“Hohenzollern and Krupp had taken the Lord into partnership and begun
to give Him lessons in efficiency. Moreover, they were not to be free
lessons. The lessons were to be paid for, but they were willing to give
Him easy terms, for which they were to show Him how to hasten the slow
process of evolution. Evolution was hindered and delayed by sentiment
and emotion.
“Sentiment and emotion were a needless inheritance. Hohenzollern and
Krupp proposed to cut them out of life and abolish tears. Tears consumed
the time and strength of the people. They were factors of inefficiency.
What was the use of crying over spilled milk and dead people? Tears were
in the nature of a luxury. The poor could not afford them. Life was not
going to be lived any longer--it was to be conducted. It was to be a
kind of a hurried Cook's tour. Nobody would have to think or feel. All
that would be attended to by the proper official. Life was to be reduced
to a merciless iron plan like that of the beehive--the most perfect
example of efficiency in nature, with its two purposes of storage and
race perpetuation.
“No one ever saw a bee shedding tears or worrying about the murder of a
drone.
“The ideal of Germany was to be that of the insect. To the bee there is
nothing in the world but bees, enemies, and the nectar in flowers; to
the German there was to be nothing in the world but Germans, enemies,
and loot With no wall of pity and sentiment between them and other races
they could rain showers of bursting lyddite on the unsuspecting, and
after that the will of the Kaiser and God would be respected. The firm
would prosper. It is not the first time that conceit and Kultur have
hitched their wagon to infinity. It is the old scheme of Nero and
Caligula---the ancient dream of the pneumatic prince. He can rule a
great nation, but first he must fool it. First he must induce his people
to part with their common sense and take some preferred--a dangerous
quality of preferred. This he can do in a generation by the systematic
use of hot air.
“You may think that this endangered the national morals, but do not be
hasty. The morals were being looked after.
[Illustration: 0035]
“Every school, every pulpit, every newspaper, every book, became a
pumping-station for hot air impregnated with the new morals. Poets,
philosophers, orators, teachers, statesmen, romancers, were summoned to
the pumps: Rivers of beer and wine flowed into the national abdomen and
were converted into mental and moral flatulency.
“For thirty years Germany had been on a steady dream diet.
Every school, every pulpit, every newspaper, every book, became a
pumping-station for hot air impregnated with the new morals. Poets,
philosophers, orators, teachers, states' men, romancers, were summoned
to the pumps.
“Morning hate with its coffee and prayers, its hourly self-contentment
with its toil, its evening superiority with its beer and frankfurters.
History was falsified, philosophy bribed, religion coerced and
corrupted, conscience silenced--at first by sophistry, then by the iron
hand. Hot air was blowing from all sides. It was no gentle breeze. It
was a simoom, a tornado. No one could stand before it--not even a sturdy
Liebknecht or an unsullied Harden.
“Germany was inebriated with a sense of its mental grandeur and moral
pulchritude. Now moral pulchritude is like a forest flower. It can not
stand the fierce glare of publicity; you can not handle it as you would
handle sausages and dye and fertilizer. Observe how the German military
party is advertising its moral pulchritude--one hundred per cent, pure,
blue ribbon, _spurlos versenkt_, honest-to-God morality!--the kind that
made hell famous.
“I don't blame than at all. How would any one know that they had it if
they did not advertise it?
“It is easy to accept the hot-air treatment for common sense--easy even
for sober-minded men. The cocaine habit is not more swiftly acquired
and brings a like sense of comfort and exhilaration. Slowly the Germans
yielded to its sweet inducement. They began to believe that they were
supermen--the chosen people; they thanked God that they were not like
other men. Their first crime was that of grabbing everything in the
heaven of holy promise. It would appear that those clever Prussians had
arranged with St. Peter for all the reserved seats--nothing but standing
room left Heaven was to be a place exclusively for the lovers of
frankfurters and sauerkraut and Limburger cheese.
“God was altogether their God. Of course! Was He not a member of the
firm of Hohenzollern & Krupp? And, being so, other races were a bore and
an embarrassment. Would He not gladly be rid of them? Certainly. Other
races were God's enemies, and therefore German enemies. So it became the
right and duty of the Germans to reach out and possess the earth and its
fulness. The day had arrived. There was nothing in the world but Germans
and enemies and loot.
“Their great leader, in their name, had claimed a swinish monopoly of
God's favor. His was not the contention of James the First, that all
true kings enjoy divine-right--oh, not at all! Bill had grown rather
husky and had got his feet in the trough, and was going to crowd the
others out of it. He was the one and only. And as he crowded, he began
to pray, and his prayers came out of lips which had confessed robbery
and violated good faith and inspired deeds of inhuman frightfulness. His
prayers were therefore nothing more nor less than hot air aimed at the
ear of the Almighty and carrying with them the flavor of the swine-yard.
In all this Church and people stood by him. It would seem that the devil
had taken both unto a high mountain and showed them the kingdoms of the
earth and their glory, and that they had yielded to his blandishments.
“Now the thing that has happened to the criminal is this. In one way
or another, he loses his common sense. He ceases to see things in their
just relations and proportions. The difference between right and wrong
dwindles and disappears from his vision. He convinces himself that he
has a right to at least a part of the property of other people. Often he
acquires a comic sense of righteousness.
[Illustration: 0045]
“I have lately been in the devastated regions of northern France. I
have seen whole cities of no strategic value which the German armies had
destroyed by dynamite before leaving them to a silence like that of the
grave--the slow-wrought walls of old cathedrals and public buildings
tumbled into hopeless ruin; the châteaux, the villas, the little houses
of the poor, shaken into heaps of moldering rubbish. And I see in it
a sign of that greater devastation which covers the land of William
II--the devastation of the spirit of the German people; for where is
that moral grandeur of which Heine and Goethe and Schiller and Luther
were the far-heard compelling voices? I tell you it has all been leveled
into heaps of moldering rubbish--a thousand times more melancholy than
any in France.
“Behold the common sense of Germany become the sense that is common
only among criminals! The sooner we recognize that, the better. They are
really burglars in this great house of God we inhabit, seeking to rob it
of its best possessions--Hindenburglars! In this war we must give them
the consideration due a burglar, and only that. We must hit them how and
where we may. We are bound by no nice regard for fair play. We must kill
the burglar or the burglar will kill us.
“When I went away to the battle-front, a friend said to me:
“'Try to learn how this incredible thing came about and why it
continues. That is what every one wishes to know.'
“Well, hot air was the cause of it. Now why does it continue? My answer
is, bone-head--mostly plumed bone-head.
“Think of those diplomats who were twenty years in Germany and yet knew
nothing of what was going on around them and of its implications! You
say that they did know, and that they warned their peoples? Well,
then, you may shift the bone-heads on to other shoulders. Think of the
diplomatic failures that have followed!
“I bow my head to the people of England and to the incomparable valor
of her armies and fleets. My friendly criticism is aimed at the one and
only point in which she could be said to resemble Germany, viz., in a
certain limited encouragement of supermen.
“Now, if the last three years have taught us anything, it is this: the
superman is going to be unsupered. Considering the high cost of up-keep
and continuous adulation, he does not pay. He is in the nature of a
needless tax upon human life and security. His mistakes, even, to use no
harsher word, have slaughtered more human beings than there are in the
world. The born gentleman and professional aristocrat, with a hot-air
receiver on his name, who lives in a tower of inherited superiority and
looks down at life through hazy distance with a telescope, has and can
have no common sense. He is a good soldier, he knows the habits of the
grouse and the stag, he can give an admirable dinner, he understands the
principles of international law, but when international law turns into
international anarchy he is not big enough to find the way of common
sense through the emergency. He has not that intimate knowledge of human
nature which comes only of a long and close contact with human, beings.
Without that knowledge he will know no more of what is in the other
fellow's mind and the bluff that covers it in a critical clash of wits
than a baby sucking its bottle in a perambulator. He fails, and the cost
of his failure no man can estimate. He stands discredited. As a public
servant he is going into disuse and his going vindicates the judgment of
our forefathers as to like holders of sense preferred.
“Now is the time when all men must choose between two ideals:
Behold the common sense of Germany become the sense that is common only
among criminals! The sooner we recognize that, the better. They are
really burglars in this great house of God we inhabit, seeking to rob it
of its best possessions--Hindenburglars! the proud and merciless heart
on the one hand, that of the humble and contrite heart on the other;
between the Hun and the Anglo-Saxon, between evil and good. Faced by
such an issue I declare myself ready to lay all that I have or may have
on the old altar of our common faith.
“My friend, be of good cheer. The God of our Fathers has not been
Kaisered or Krupped or hurried in the least. There is no danger that
Heaven will be Teutonized.
“The shouting and the tumult dies--The captains and the kings depart--!
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice.
“An humble and a contrite heart Lord God of hosts, be with us yet.
“Lest we forget--lest we forget
“Lest we forget the innumerable dead who have nobly died, and the host
of the living who with a just and common sense and love of honor have
sent them forth to die. Lest we forget that we and our allies have not
been above reproach; that there were signs of decadence among us--in the
growing love of ease and idleness, in the tango dance of literature and
lust, in the exaltation of pleasure, in a very definite degeneration of
our moral fiber.
“Lest we forget that our spirit is being purified in the furnace of war
and the shadow of death. Do you remember the protest of those poilus
when some unclean plays were sent to the battle front for their
entertainment?
“'We are not pigs'--that was the message they sent back.
“Lest we forget that the spirit of man has been lifted up out of the
mud and dust of the battle lines, out of the body tortured with pain and
weariness and vermin, out of the close companionship of the dead into
high association on the bloody altar of liberty and sacrifice.
“Lest we forget that the spirit of our own boys shall be thus lifted up,
and our duty to put our house in order and make it a fit place for them
to live in when they shall have returned to it from battle-fields swept,
as a soldier has written, by the cleansing winds of God.”