Part 41

In bad years there is plenty of grumbling here, and sometimes a little rioting. But it matters little. For here the sufferers are not the rulers. The supreme power is in the hands of a class, numerous indeed, but select; of an educated class; of a class which is, and knows itself to be, deeply interested in the security of property and the maintenance of order. Accordingly, the malcontents are firmly yet gently restrained. The bad time is got over without robbing the wealthy to relieve the indigent. The springs of national prosperity soon begin to flow again; work is plentiful, wages rise and all is tranquillity and cheerfulness. I have seen England pass three or four times through such critical seasons as I have described.

Through such seasons the United States will have to pass in the course of the next century, if not this. How will you pass through them? I heartily wish you a good deliverance. But my reason and my wishes are at war and I cannot help foreboding the worst. It is quite plan that your government will never be able to restrain a distressed and discontented majority. For with you the majority is the government, and has the rich, who are always a minority, absolutely at its mercy.

The day will come when in the State of New York a multitude of people, none of whom has had more than half a breakfast, or expects to have more than half a dinner, will choose a legislature. Is it possible to doubt what sort of a legislature will be chosen? On one side is a statesman preaching patience, respect for vested rights, strict observance of public faith. On the other is a demagogue ranting about the tyranny of capitalists and usurers and asking why anybody should be permitted to drink champagne and to ride in a carriage while thousands of honest folks are in want of necessaries. Which of the two candidates are likely to be preferred by a workingman who hears his children cry for more bread?

I seriously apprehend that you will, in some such seasons of adversity as I have described, do things which will prevent prosperity from returning; that you will act like people who should in a year of scarcity devour all the seed corn and thus make the next year not of scarcity, but of absolute famine. There will be, I fear, spoliation. The spoliation will increase the distress. The distress will produce fresh spoliation.

There is nothing to stop you. Your Constitution is all sail and no anchor. As I said before, when a society has entered on this downward progress, either civilization or liberty must perish. Either some Caesar or Napoleon will seize the reins of government with a strong hand, or your republic will be as fearfully plundered and laid waste by barbarians in the twentieth century as the Roman Empire was in the fifth, with this difference, that the Huns and vandals who ravaged the Roman Empire came from without, and that your Huns and vandals will have been engendered within your own country by your own institutions.

I have the honor to be, dear sir, your faithful servant, T.B. Macaulay.

H.S. Randall, Esq., etc., etc., etc.

A FOOL'S PARADISE

Radical propagandists, with a sublime disregard for facts and history, persist in extolling the tenets of Russian Communism as new discoveries in the art of government. They assert that the Bolshevists have solved for the first time in history the problem of social equality. They say the experiment of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" has never before been attempted and that it fails to find favor outside Russia because peoples are always prone to condemn what they do not understand.

Russia, however, is but the last of many countries to rebel against its own prosperity. During the twenty years preceding the World War Russia enjoyed the greatest growth and development, both of its resources and education, in the history of the country. Two-thirds of the agricultural land in the nation was owned and occupied by the farming classes, which comprised nearly three-fourths of the population. In ten years the number of depositors in the savings banks of Russia had doubled and the gross amount of the deposits had quadrupled.

Then came the war, to be followed by Bolshevism. The experience of Russia in the last two years, however, is not unique in the history of nations. The narration of the spoliation of the rich, the confiscation of the estates and the profligate waste of the national substance is only a repetition, almost verse for verse and line for line, of the license and the abuses of the last years of the Athenian democracy. It was then demonstrated that the impoverishing of the rich could not enrich the poor, and that a state without wealth will soon be a state without liberty. In the idiom of the gallery gods, it is all "old stuff."

The Charmides of Xenophon's "Banquet" celebrates the pleasures and profits of poverty. He once possessed a fortune that made him fear thieves and sycophants--in reality the same thing--Athens had levied heavy taxes on the rich and had passed laws making it a capital offense for a person of wealth to attempt to flee the state. The money raised by thus taxing the wealthy was distributed to the poor in the public places. Any one holding a certificate showing that he had not sufficient wealth to be taxed was admitted free to the theaters and was entitled to one meal a day at restaurants supported by the state.

The people's council, fearful that there might be a disposition to stop this waste of public money, passed acts which decreed capital punishment to any orator who should propose to modify the laws which made "poverty a blessing."

Charmides recounts that he once lived in a state of perpetual terror. New taxes were decreed every day, each of which he was compelled to pay. He was deprived of the liberty even of leaving the state. His lot was worse than that of the meanest slave.

Behold! a fertile imagination came to his rescue. He embarked in a speculation in which failure was inevitable. Good fortune attended him. Within a brief time he was penniless and happy. The unfortunate speculator who had gained possession of the wealth of Charmides lived for a brief time in the agony of wealth; then he attempted to flee the state, was apprehended and executed.

Charmides makes votive offerings to the gods of Athens for his escape from the terror and servitude of property. "How comfortably I sleep!" he cries. "The republic has confidence in me. I am no longer threatened. It is I who threaten others. A free man, I can go or stay. I appear at the theater. I am admitted free. The rich rise in trembling and offer me the best seats. When I walk abroad in the streets they stand aside to offer me an unobstructed passage. To-day I resemble a tyrant. Then I was a slave. Then I paid tribute to the state. Now the state, my tributary, supports me. I lose nothing; for I have nothing."

For a time democratic Athens was a veritable Bolshevist paradise. But when the ranks of the rich became depleted, when none cared longer to engage in any profitable industry, the public revenue fell until there was no money to support the happy idlers. The rich were tortured in the vain hope that they would produce hidden treasure; but the public treasury remained empty.

This period of riotous profligacy followed the happy conclusion for Athens of the Theban war. When the Athenian proletariat discovered that the state was about to pass under the yoke of Philip they hunted down the remnant of the wealthy class that still remained, executed some, banished others and sold still others into slavery for "betraying the Athenian state and leaving it helpless before its enemies."

Shortly afterwards Athens came under the despotism of Philip, who speedily conscripted this proletariat for forced labor. For a hundred years afterwards, however, Athenian writers in bewailing their loss of liberty blamed the fall of Athens upon the "rich," who failed to arm and equip a force to fight Philip.

All the wisdom of her philosophers, all the art and learning whose loss the world still mourns, fell before the onslaught of this triumphant democracy. The culture of the few could not prevail against the greed of the many. Domestic conditions became so intolerable that a majority of the Athenians welcomed the stern but salutary rule of the tyrant. For they had learned that the tyranny of a despot is easier to be borne than that of universal poverty.

One does not have to interrogate the future to learn whither Russia under Bolshevism is tending; one has but to look to the past. Like causes cannot produce unlike effects. Under given conditions national eclipses can be predicted as surely as the eclipses of the planets.

Los Angeles Times, May 4, 1921.

NAPOLEON'S CENTENNIAL

The hundredth anniversary of the passing of Napoleon centers attention anew on one of the baffling figures of all time--a man at once attractive and repulsive; a soldier of infinite courage who on at least one occasion acted the coward; a master strategist who, to the last, seemed never to fully grasp that strategy by which he almost recast a world.

He found Europe feudal and left it modern. He opened up new realms of knowledge to the servants; revolutionized military tactics; founded lasting industries; gave a new birth to French law; mocked and yet fostered freedom.

More volumes have been written regarding him than any other character in history--one excepted. Nevertheless, he still remains the most elusive, the most unsatisfying genius that the world has ever known.

His accomplishments have by this time been fully set forth and properly valued. We know that he stands practically alone as the greatest strategist of the ages. Cromwell, on a smaller scale and within a far more limited sphere, more nearly approaches him, perhaps, than does any other.

We know also that he was an adroit politician and a statesman on a scale rarely equalled in Europe. He was also an orator and an adept at coining phrases. He was an executive of immense power and a man of tremendous personal charm.