Part 28

I cannot too often repeat that the world we inhabit is a world of sin, disease and death. Men will fight whenever they want to fight, and no artificial scheme or process is likely to restrain them. It is mainly the costliness of war that makes most against it. But, as we have seen the last four years, it will not quell the passions of men or dull national and racial ambitions.

All that Mr. Wilson and his proposed League of Nations can do will be to revamp, and maybe for a while to reimpress the minds of the rank and file, until the bellowing followers of Bellona are ready to spring.

Eternal peace, universal peace, was not the purpose of the Deity in the creation of the universe.

Nevertheless, it would seem to be the duty of men in great place, as of us all, to proclaim the gospel of good will and cultivate the arts of fraternity. I have no quarrel with the President on this score. What I contest is the self-exploitation to which he is prone, so lacking in dignity and open to animadversion.

Thus it was that instant upon the appearance of the proposed League of Nations I made bold to challenge it, as but a pretty conceit having no real value, a serious assault upon our national sovereignty.

Its argument seemed to me full of copybook maxims, easier recited than applied. As what I wrote preceded the debates and events of the last six months, I may not improperly make the following quotation from a screed of mine appearing in The Courier-Journal of the 5th of March, 1919:

"The League of Nations is a fad. Politics, like society and letters, has its fads. In society they call them fashion and in literature originality. Politics gives the name of 'issues' to its fads. A taking issue is as a stunning gown, or 'a best seller.' The President's mind wears a coat of many colors, and he can change it at will, his mood being the objective point, not always too far ahead, or clear of vision. Carl Schurz was wont to speak of Gratz Brown as 'a man of thoughts rather than of ideas.' I wonder if that can be justly said of the President? 'Gentlemen will please not shoot at the pianiste,' adjured the superscription over the music stand in the Dakota dive; 'she is doing the best that she knows how.'

"Already it is being proclaimed that Woodrow Wilson can have a third nomination for the presidency if he wants it, and nobody seems shocked by it, which proves that the people grow degenerate and foreshadows that one of these nights some fool with a spyglass will break into Mars and let loose the myriads of warlike gyascutes who inhabit that freak luminary, thence to slide down the willing moonbeam and swallow us every one!

"In a sense the Monroe Doctrine was a fad. Oblivious to Canada, and British Columbia and the Spanish provinces, it warned the despots of Europe off the grass in America. We actually went to war with Mexico, having enjoyed two wars with England, and again and again we threatened to annex the Dominion. Everything betwixt hell and Halifax was Yankee preëmpted.

"Truth to say, your Uncle Samuel was ever a jingo. But your Cousin Woodrow, enlarging on the original plan, would stretch our spiritual boundaries to the ends of the earth and make of us the moral custodian of the universe. This much, no less, he got of the school of sweetness and light in which he grew up.

"I am a jingo myself. But a wicked material jingo, who wants facts, not theories. If I thought it possible and that it would pay, I would annex the North Pole and colonize the Equator. It is, after the manner of the lady in the play, that the President 'doth protest too much,' which displeases me and where, in point of fact, I 'get off the reservation.'

"That, being a politician and maybe a candidate, he is keenly alive to votes goes without saying. On the surface this League of Nations having the word 'peace' in big letters emblazoned both upon its forehead and the seat of its trousers--or, should I say, woven into the hem of its petticoat?--seems an appeal for votes. I do not believe it will bear discussion. In a way, it tickles the ear without convincing the sense. There is nothing sentimental about the actualities of Government, much as public men seek to profit by arousing the passions of the people. Government is a hard and fast and dry reality. At best statesmanship can only half do the things it would. Its aims are most assured when tending a little landward; its footing safest on its native heath. We have plenty to do on our own continent without seeking to right things on other continents. Too many of us--the President among the rest, I fear--miscalculate the distance between contingency and desire.

"'We figure to ourselves The thing we like: and then we build it up: As chance will have it on the rock or sand-- When thought grows tired of wandering o'er the world, And homebound Fancy runs her bark ashore.'"

I am sorry to see the New York World fly off at a tangent about this latest of the Wilsonian hobbies. Frank Irving Cobb, the editor of the World, is, as I have often said, the strongest writer on the New York press since Horace Greeley. But he can hardly be called a sentimentalist, as Greeley was, and there is nothing but sentiment--gush and gammon--in the proposed League of Nations.

It may be all right for England. There are certainly no flies on it for France. But we don't need it. Its effects can only be to tie our hands, not keep the dogs away, and even at the worst, in stress of weather, we are strong enough to keep the dogs away ourselves.

We should say to Europe: "Shinny on your own side of the water and we will shinny on our side." It may be that Napoleon's opinion will come true that ultimately Europe will be "all Cossack or all republican." Part of it has come true already. Meanwhile it looks as though the United States, having exhausted the reasonable possibilities of democracy, is beginning to turn crank. Look at woman suffrage by Federal edict; look at prohibition by act of Congress and constitutional amendment; tobacco next to walk on the plank; and then!--Lord, how glad I feel that I am nearly a hundred years old and shall not live to see it!

Chapter the Thirty-First

The Age of Miracles--A Story of Franklin Pierce--Simon Suggs Billy Sunday--Jefferson Davis and Aaron Burr--Certain Constitutional Shortcomings

The years intervening between 1865 and 1919 may be accounted the most momentous in all the cycles of the ages. The bells that something more than half a century ago rang forth to welcome peace in America have been from that day to this jangled out of tune and harsh with the sounding of war's alarms in every other part of the world. We flatter ourselves with the thought that our tragedy lies behind us. Whether this be true or not, the tragedy of Europe is at hand and ahead. The miracles of modern invention, surpassing those of old, have made for strife, not for peace. Civilization has gone backward, not forward. Rulers, intoxicated by the lust of power and conquest, have lost their reason, and nations, following after, like cattle led to slaughter, seem as the bereft of Heaven "that knew not God."

We read the story of our yesterdays as it unfolds itself in the current chronicle; the ascent to the bank-house, the descent to the mad-house, and, over the glittering paraphernalia that follows to the tomb, we reflect upon the money-zealot's progress; the dizzy height, the dazzling array, the craze for more and more and more; then the temptation and fall, millions gone, honor gone, reason gone--the innocent and the gentle, with the guilty, dragged through the mire of the prison, and the court--and we draw back aghast. Yet, if we speak of these things we are called pessimists.

I have always counted myself an optimist. I know that I do not lie awake nights musing on the ingratitude either of my stars or my countrymen. I pity the man who does. Looking backward, I have sincere compassion for Webster and for Clay! What boots it to them, now that they lie beneath the mold, and that the drums and tramplings of nearly seventy years of the world's strifes and follies and sordid ambitions and mean repinings, and longings, and laughter, and tears, have passed over their graves, what boots it to them, now, that they failed to get all they wanted? There is indeed snug lying in the churchyard; but the flowers smell as sweet and the birds sing as merry, and the stars look down as loving upon the God-hallowed mounds of the lowly and the poor, as upon the man-bedecked monuments of the Kings of men. All of us, the least with the greatest, let us hope and believe shall attain immortal life at last. What was there for Webster, what was there for Clay to quibble about? I read with a kind of wonder, and a sickening sense of the littleness of great things, those passages in the story of their lives where it is told how they stormed and swore, when tidings reached them that they had been balked of their desires.

Yet they might have been so happy; so happy in their daily toil, with its lofty aims and fair surroundings; so happy in the sense of duty done; so happy, above all, in their own Heaven-sent genius, with its noble opportunities and splendid achievements. They should have emulated the satisfaction told of Franklin Pierce. It is related that an enemy was inveighing against him, when an alleged friend spoke up and said: "You should not talk so about the President, I assure you that he is not at all the man you describe him to be. On the contrary, he is a man of the rarest gifts and virtues. He has long been regarded as the greatest orator in New England, and the greatest lawyer in New England, and surely no one of his predecessors ever sent such state papers to Congress."

"How are you going to prove it," angrily retorted the first speaker.

"I don't need to prove it," coolly replied the second. "He admits it."

I cannot tell just how I should feel if I were President, though, on the whole, I fancy fairly comfortable, but I am quite certain that I would not exchange places with any of the men who have been President, and I have known quite a number of them.

I am myself accused sometimes of being a "pessimist." Assuredly I am no optimist of the Billy Sunday sort, who fancies the adoption of the prohibition amendment the coming of "de jubilo." Early in life, while yet a recognized baseball authority, Mr. Sunday discovered "pay dirt" in what Col. Mulberry Sellers called "piousness." He made it an asset and began to issue celestial notes, countersigned by himself and made redeemable in Heaven. From that day to this he has been following the lead of the renowned Simon Suggs, who, having in true camp meeting style acquired "the grace of God," turned loose as an exhorter shouting "Step up to the mourner's bench, my brethering, step up lively, and be saved! I come in on na 'er par, an' see what I draw'd! Religion's the only game whar you can't lose. Him that trusts the Lord holds fo' aces!"

The Billy Sunday game has made Billy Sunday rich. Having exhausted Hell-fire-and-brimstone, the evangel turns to the Demon Rum. Satan, with hide and horns, has had his day. Prohibition is now the trick card.

The fanatic is never either very discriminating or very particular. As a rule, for him any taking "ism" will suffice. To-day, it happens to be "whisky." To-morrow it will be tobacco. Finally, having established the spy system and made house-to-house espionage a rule of conventicle, it will become a misdemeanor for a man to kiss his wife.