Part 7

If democracy had not lain implicit in Puritanism, Puritanism would have had to invent it. Each is necessary to the other. Democracy provides the machinery that Puritanism needs for the quick and ruthless execution of its preposterous inventions. Facing autocracy, it faces insuperable difficulties, for its spokesmen can convince the King only in case he is crazy, and even when he is crazy he is commonly restrained by his ministers. But the mob is easy to convince, for what Puritanism has to say to it is mainly what it already believes: its politics is based upon the same brutal envies and quaking fears that lie under the Puritan ethic. Moreover, the political machinery through which it functions provides a ready means of translating such envies and fears into action. There is need only to sound the alarm and take a vote: the debate is over the moment the majority has spoken. The fact explains the ferocious haste with which, in democratic countries, even the most strange and dubious legislative experiments are launched. Haste is necessary, lest even the mob be shaken by sober second thought. And haste is easy, for the appeal to the majority is officially the last appeal of all, and when it has been made there is the best of excuses for cutting off debate. I have described the precise process in a previous section. Fanatics inflame the mob, and thereby alarm the scoundrels set up to make laws in its name. The scoundrels precipitately do the rest. The Fathers were not unaware of this danger in the democratic scheme. They sought to counteract it by establishing upper chambers, removed by at least one degree from the mob’s hot rages. Their precaution has been turned to naught by depriving the upper chambers of that prophylactic remoteness, and exposing them to the direct and unmitigated blast.

It must be plain that this process of law-making by orgy, with fanatics supplying the motive-power and unconscionable knaves steering the machine, is bound to fill the statute-books with enactments that have no rational use or value save that of serving as instruments of psychopathological persecution and private revenge. This is found to be the case, in fact, in almost every American State. The grotesque anti-syndicalist laws of California, the anti-evolution laws of Tennessee and Mississippi, and the acts for the enforcement of Prohibition in Ohio and Indiana are typical. They involve gross invasions of the most elementary rights of the free citizen, but they are popular with the mob because they have a virtuous smack and provide it with an endless succession of barbarous but thrilling shows. Their chosen victims are men the mob naturally envies and hates--men of unusual intelligence and enterprise, men who regard their constitutional liberties seriously and are willing to go to some risk and expense to defend them. Such men are inevitably unpopular under democracy, for their qualities are qualities that the mob wholly lacks, and is uneasily conscious of lacking: it thus delights in seeing them exposed to slander and oppression, and railroaded to prison. There is always a district attorney at hand to launch the prosecution, for district attorneys are invariably men who aspire to higher office, and no more facile way to it is to be found than by assaulting and destroying a man above the general. As I have shown, many an American Congressman comes to Washington from a district attorney’s office: you may be sure that he is seldom promoted because he has been jealous of the liberties of the citizen. Many a judge reaches the bench by the same route--and thereafter benignantly helps along his successors. The whole criminal law in America thus acquires a flavour of fraud. It is constantly embellished and reinforced by fanatics who have discovered how easy it is to hurl missiles at their enemies and opponents from behind ranks of policemen. It is executed by law officers whose private prosperity runs in direct ratio to their reckless ferocity. And the business is applauded by morons whose chief delight lies in seeing their betters manhandled and humiliated. Even the ordinary criminal law is so carried out--that is, when the accused happens to be conspicuous enough to make it worth while. Every district attorney in America goes to his knees every night to ask God to deliver a Thaw or a Fatty Arbuckle into his hands. In the criminal courts a rich man not only enjoys none of the advantages that Liberals and other defenders of democracy constantly talk of; he is under very real and very heavy burdens. The defence that Thaw offered in the White case would have got a taxi-driver acquitted in five minutes. And had Arbuckle been a waiter, no district attorney in the land would have dreamed of putting him on trial for first-degree murder.

For such foul and pestiferous proceedings, of course, moral excuses are always offered. The district attorney is an altruist whose one dream is Law Enforcement; he cannot be terrified by the power of money; he is the spokesman of the virtuous masses against the godless and abominable classes. The same buncombe issues from the Prohibitionists, comstocks, hunters of Bolshevists, and other such frauds. Its hollowness is constantly revealed. The Prohibitionists, when they foisted their brummagem cure-all upon the country under cover of the war hysteria, gave out that their advocacy of it was based upon a Christian yearning to abate drunkenness, and so abolish crime, poverty and disease. They preached a millennium, and no doubt convinced hundreds of thousands of naïve and sentimental persons, not themselves Puritans, nor even democrats. That millennium, as everyone knows, has failed to come in. Not only are crime, poverty and disease undiminished, but drunkenness itself, if the police statistics are to be believed, has greatly increased. The land rocks with the scandal. Prohibition has made the use of alcohol devilish and even fashionable, and so vastly augmented the number of users. The young of both sexes, mainly innocent of the cup under license, now take to it almost unanimously. In brief, Prohibition has not only failed to work the benefits that its proponents promised in 1917; it has brought in so many new evils that even the mob has turned against it. But do the Prohibitionists admit the fact frankly, and repudiate their original nonsense? They do not. On the contrary, they keep on demanding more and worse enforcement statutes--that is to say, more and worse devices for harassing and persecuting their opponents. The more obvious the failure becomes, the more shamelessly they exhibit their genuine motives. In plain words, what moves them is the psychological aberration called sadism. They lust to inflict inconvenience, discomfort, and, whenever possible, disgrace upon the persons they hate--which is to say, upon everyone who is free from their barbarous theological superstitions, and is having a better time in the world than they are. They cannot stop the use of alcohol, nor even appreciably diminish it, but they can badger and annoy everyone who seeks to use it decently, and they can fill the jails with men taken for purely artificial offences, and they can get satisfaction thereby for the Puritan yearning to browbeat and injure, to torture and terrorize, to punish and humiliate all who show any sign of being happy. And all this they can do with a safe line of policemen and judges in front of them; always they can do it without personal risk.

It is this freedom from personal risk that is the secret of the Prohibitionists’ continued frenzy, despite the complete collapse of Prohibition itself. They know very well that the American mob, far from being lawless, is actually excessively tolerant of written laws and judicial fiats, however plainly they violate the fundamental rights of free men, and they know that this tolerance is sufficient to protect them from what, in more liberal and enlightened countries, would be the natural consequences of their anti-social activity. If they had to meet their victims face to face, there would be a different story to tell. But, like their brethren, the comstocks and the professional patriots, they seldom encounter this embarrassment. Instead, they turn the officers of the law to the uses of their mania. More, they reinforce the officers of the law with an army of bravos sworn to take their orders and do their bidding--the army of so-called Prohibition enforcement officers, mainly made up of professional criminals. Thus, under democracy, the normal, well-behaved, decent citizen--the Forgotten Man of the late William Graham Sumner--is beset from all sides, and every year sees an augmentation of his woes. In order to satisfy the envy and hatred of his inferiors and the blood lust of a pack of irresponsible and unconscionable fanatics, few of them of any dignity as citizens or as men and many of them obviously hypocritical and corrupt, this decent citizen is converted into a criminal for performing acts that are natural to men of his class everywhere, and police and courts are degraded to the abhorrent office of punishing him for them. Certainly it should not be surprising that such degrading work has greatly diminished the authority of both--that Prohibition has made the courts disreputable and increased general crime. A judge who jails a well-disposed and inoffensive citizen for violating an unjust and dishonest law may be defended plausibly, perhaps, by legal casuistry, but it is very hard to make out a case for him as a self-respecting man. Like the ordinary politician, he puts his job above his professional dignity and his common decency. More than one judge, unable to square such loathsome duties with his private notions of honor, has stepped down from the bench, and left the business to a successor who was more a lawyer and less a man.

Where Puritanism Fails

Under the pressure of fanaticism, and with the mob complacently applauding the show, democratic law tends more and more to be grounded upon the maxim that every citizen is, by nature, a traitor, a libertine, and a scoundrel. In order to dissuade him from his evil-doing the police power is extended until it surpasses anything ever heard of in the oriental monarchies of antiquity. In many American States--for example, California and Pennsylvania--it is almost a literal fact that the citizen has no rights that the police are bound to respect. These awful powers, of course, are not exercised against all citizens. The man of influence with the reigning politicians, the supporter of the prevailing delusions, and the adept hypocrite--these are seldom molested. But the man who finds himself in an unpopular minority is at the mercy of the Polizei, and the easiest way to get into such a minority is to speak out boldly for the Bill of Rights. Men have been clubbed and jailed in Pennsylvania for merely mentioning it; scores have been jailed for protesting publicly against its violation. Here the attack was at least frank, and, to that extent, honest; more often it is made disingenuously, and to the tune of pious snuffling. First an unpopular man is singled out for persecution, and then a diligent search is made, with the police and prosecuting officers and even the courts co-operating, for a law that he can be accused of breaking. The enormous multiplicity of sumptuary and inquisitorial statutes makes this quest easy. The prisoner begins his progress through the mill of justice under a vague accusation of disorderly conduct or disturbing the peace; he ends charged with crimes that carry staggering penalties. There are statutes in many States, notably California, that explore his mind, and lay him by the heels for merely thinking unpopular thoughts. Once he is accused of such heresy, the subsequent proceedings take on the character of a lynching. His constitutional rights are swept away as of no validity, and all the ancient rules of the Common Law--for example, those against double jeopardy and hearsay--are suspended in order to fetch him. Many of the newer statutes actually suspend these safeguards formally, and though they are to that extent plainly unconstitutional, the higher courts have not interfered with their execution. The Volstead Act, for instance, destroys the constitutional right to a jury trial, and in its administration the constitutional prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures and the rule against double jeopardy are habitually violated. But no protest comes save from specialists in liberty, most of whom are so busy keeping out of jail themselves that their caveats are feeble and ineffective. The mob is always in favour of the prosecution, for the prosecution is giving the show. In the face of its applause, very few American judges have the courage to enforce the constitutional guarantees--and still fewer prosecuting attorneys. As I have said, a prosecuting attorney’s success depends very largely upon his ferocity. American practice permits him an extravagance of attack that would land him in jail, and perhaps even in a lunatic asylum, in any other country, and the more passionately he indulges in it the more certain becomes his promotion to higher office, including the judicial. Perhaps a half of all American judges, at some time or other, have been prosecuting officers. They carry to the bench the habits of mind acquired on the other side of the bar; they seem to be generally convinced that any man accused of crime is ipso facto guilty, and that if he is known to harbour political heresies he is guilty of a sort of blasphemy when he mentions his constitutional rights.

This doctrine that a man who stands in contempt of the prevailing ideology has no rights under the law is so thoroughly democratic that in the United States it is seldom questioned save by romantic fanatics, robbed of their wits by an uncritical reading of the Fathers. It not only goes unchallenged otherwise; it is openly stated and defended, and by high authorities. I point, for example, to the Right Rev. Luther B. Wilson, who, as a bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, occupies an office that is both ecclesiastical and political, and is of dignity and puissance in both fields. Some time ago this Wilson was invited to preach in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York--a delicate acknowledgment of his importance by his rival prelate of the Anglican Church, Monsignor Manning. His sermon, in brief, was a passionate plea for the putting down of heresy, law or no law, Constitution or no Constitution. “Atheism,” he declared, “is not only folly, but to the state a traitor. It does not deserve a place and should not be defended by any specious claim for immunity under the constitutional guaranties of the right of free speech.” This bloodthirsty and astounding dictum, though it came from a Christian ecclesiastic of a rank higher than that attained by Christ Himself, seemed so natural that it attracted no notice whatever. Not a single New York newspaper challenged it; even the Liberal weeklies let it pass as too obvious for cavil. A week or so later it was printed with approbation in all the Methodist denominational organs, and since then many other bishops of that sect have ratified it. The same doctrine is frequently stated plainly by high legal officers, especially when a man accused of political heresy is on trial--usually, of course, for an alleged infraction of the ordinary law. As I have said in a previous chapter, it was applied to atheists, exactly as Bishop Wilson applied it, during the celebrated Scopes trial at Dayton, Tenn. Arthur Garfield Hays, defending Scopes, arose at one point in the proceedings to protest that they were going beyond the bounds of due process--that his client was not getting a fair and impartial trial within the meaning of the Constitution. At once the prosecuting attorney general, Stewart, answered candidly that an atheist had no right to a fair trial in Tennessee, and the judge on the bench, the learned Raulston, approved with a nod. Hays, who is a Liberal, was so overcome that he sank in his place with a horrified gurgle, but the Tennesseans in the courtroom saw nothing strange in Stewart’s reply. They knew very well that, in all the States South of the Potomac, save only Louisiana, Catholics, Negroes and all the persons unable to speak the local dialects fluently shared the disability of atheists. And if they were learned in American law, they knew that anti-Catholics faced the same disability in Massachusetts, like anti-Semites in New York, and that in every State there were classes similarly proscribed. I do not here allude to the natural difficulty that every man of notoriously heterodox ideas must encounter every time he faces a jury, which is to say, twelve men of limited information and intelligence, chosen precisely because of their lack of intellectual resilience. I am speaking of the hostility he must look for in prosecuting officers and judges, and in the newspapers that sit in judgment upon them and largely determine their fortunes. I am speaking of what has come to be a settled practice in American criminal law.

It is difficult, indeed, for democracy to reconcile itself to what may be called common decency. By this common decency I mean the habit, in the individual, of viewing with tolerance and charity the acts and ideas of other individuals--the habit which makes a man a reliable friend, a generous opponent, and a good citizen. The democrat, despite his strong opinion to the contrary, is seldom a good citizen. In that sense, as in most others, he falls distressfully short. His eagerness to bring all his fellow-citizens, and especially all those who are superior to him, into accord with his own dull and docile way of thinking, and to force it upon them when they resist, leads him inevitably into acts of unfairness, oppression and dishonour which, if all men were alike guilty of them, would quickly break down that mutual trust and confidence upon which the very structure of civilized society rests. Where democratic man is so firmly in possession of his theoretical rights that resistance to him is hopeless, as it is in large areas of the United States, he actually produces this disaster. To live in a community so cursed is almost impossible to any man who does not accept the democratic epistemology and the Puritan ethic, which is to say, to any well-informed and self-respecting man. He is harassed in so many small ways, and with such depressing violence and lack of decency, that he is usually compelled to clear out. This fact, in large part, explains the cultural collapse of New England and the marked cultural backwardness of whole regions in the South and Middle West. A man of sound sense, born into the Tennessee hinterland, not only feels lonesome as he comes to maturity; he also feels unsafe. The morons surrounding him hate him, and if they can’t lay him for mere heresy, they will wait their chance and lay him for burning barns, for poisoning wells, or for taking Russian gold. So he departs.

This irreconcilable antagonism between democratic Puritanism and common decency is probably responsible for the uneasiness and unhappiness that are so marked in American life, despite the great material prosperity of the United States. Theoretically, the American people should be happier than any other; actually, they are probably the least happy in Christendom. The trouble with them is that they do not trust one another--and without mutual trust there can be no ease, and no genuine happiness. What avails it for a man to have money in the bank and a Ford in his garage if he knows that his neighbours on both sides are watching him through knotholes, and that the pastor of the tabernacle down the road is planning to have him sent to jail? The thing that makes life charming is not money, but the society of our fellow men, and the thing that draws us toward our fellow men is not admiration for their inner virtues, their hard striving to live according to the light that is in them, but admiration for their outer graces and decencies--in brief, confidence that they will always act generously and understandingly in their intercourse with us. We must trust men before we may enjoy them. Manifestly, it is impossible to put any such trust in a Puritan. With the best intentions in the world he cannot rid himself of the delusion that his duty to save us from our sins--i. e., from the non-Puritanical acts that we delight in--is paramount to his duty to let us be happy in our own way. Thus he is unable to be tolerant, and with tolerance goes magnanimity. A Puritan cannot be magnanimous. He is constitutionally unable to grasp the notion that it is better to be decent than to be steadfast, or even than to be just. So with the democrat, who is simply a Puritan doubly damned. When the late Dr. Wilson, confronted by the case of poor old silly Debs, decided instantly that Debs must remain in jail, he acted as a true democrat and a perfect Puritan. The impulse to be magnanimous, to forgive and forget, to be kindly and generous toward a misguided and harmless old man, was overcome by the harsh Puritan compulsion to observe the letter of the law at all costs. Every Puritan is a lawyer, and so is every democrat.

Corruption Under Democracy

This moral compulsion of the Puritan and democrat, of course, is mainly bogus. When one has written off cruelty, envy and cowardice, one has accounted for nine-tenths of it. Certainly I need not argue at this late date that the Ur-Puritan of New England was by no means the vestal that his heirs and assigns think of when they praise him. He was not only a very carnal fellow, and given to lamentable transactions with loose women and fiery jugs; he was also a virtuoso of sharp practices, and to this day his feats in that department survive in fable. Nor is there any perceptible improvement in his successors. When a gang of real estate agents (i. e. rent sweaters), bond salesman and automobile dealers gets together to sob for Service, it takes no Freudian to surmise that someone is about to be swindled. The cult of Service, indeed, is half a sop to conscience, and half a bait to catch conies. Its cultivation in the United States runs parallel with the most gorgeous development of imposture as a fine art that Christendom has ever seen. I speak of a fine art in the literal sense; in the form of advertising it enlists such talents as, under less pious civilizations, would be devoted to the confection of cathedrals, and even, perhaps, masses. A sixth of the Americano’s income is rooked out of him by rogues who have at him officially, and in the name of the government; half the remainder goes to sharpers who prefer the greater risks and greater profits of private enterprise. All schemes to save him from such victimizations have failed in the past, and all of them, I believe, are bound to fail in the future; most of the more gaudy of them are simply devices to facilitate fresh victimizations. For democratic man, dreaming eternally of Utopias, is ever a prey to shibboleths, and those that fetch him in his political capacity are more than matched by those that fetch him in his rôle of private citizen. His normal and natural situation, held through all the vicissitudes of his brief history, has been that of one who, at great cost and effort, has sneaked home a jug of contraband whiskey, sworn to have issued out of a padlocked distillery, and then finds, on uncorking it, that it is a compound of pepper, prune juice and wood alcohol. This, in a sentence, is the history of democracy. It is, in detail, the history of all such characteristically democratic masterpieces as Bryanism, Ku Kluxery, and the war to end war. They are full of virtuous pretences, and they are unmitigated swindles.

All observers of democracy, from Tocqueville to the Adams brothers and Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, have marveled at its corruptions on the political side, and speculated heavily as to the causes thereof. The fact was noted in the earliest days of the democratic movement, and Friedrich von Gentz, who began life as an Anglomaniac, was using it as an argument against the parliamentary system so early as 1809. Gentz, who served Metternich as the current Washington correspondents serve whatever dullard happens to be President, contended that the introduction of democracy on the Continent would bring in a reign of bribery, and thus destroy the integrity and authority of the state. The proofs that he was right were already piling up, in his day, in the United States. They were destined to be greatly reinforced when the Third Republic got under way in France in 1870, and to be given impressive support when the German Republic set up shop in 1918. In 1919, for the first time since the coronation of Henry the Fowler, a German Cabinet minister crossed the border between days, his loot under his arm. The historians, immersed in their closets, marvel that such things happen, and marvel even more that democracy takes them calmly, and even lightly. Somewhere in “The Education of Henry Adams” you will find an account of the gigantic peculations that went on during the second Grant administration, and melancholy reflections upon the populace’s philosophic acceptance of them as inevitable, and even natural. In our own time we have seen the English mob embrace and elevate to higher office the democratic statesmen caught in the Marconi scandal, and the American mob condone almost automatically the herculean raids upon the Treasury that marked the Wilson administration, and the less spectacular but even more deliberate thievings that went on under the martyred Harding. In the latter case it turned upon the small body of specialists in rectitude who ventured to protest, and in the end they found themselves far more unpopular than the thieves.

Such phenomena, as I say, puzzle the more academic pathologists of democracy, but as for me, I only say that they seem to be in strict accord with God’s invariable laws. Why should democracy rise against bribery? It is itself a form of wholesale bribery. In place of a government with a fixed purpose and a visible goal, it sets up a government that is a mere function of the mob’s vagaries, and that maintains itself by constantly bargaining with those vagaries. Its security depends wholly upon providing satisfactory bribes for the prehensile minorities that constitute the mob, or that have managed to deceive and inflame the mob. One day the labour leaders--a government within the general government--must be bought with offices; the next day the dupes of these labour leaders must be bought with legislation, usually of a sort loading the ordinary scales of justice in their favour; the day after there must be something for the manufacturers, for the Methodists, for the Catholics, for the farmers. I have exhibited, in another work, the fact that this last class demands bribes pure and simple--that its yearnings for its own private advantage are never ameliorated by yearnings for the common good. The whole process of government under democracy, as everyone knows, is a process of similar trading. The very head of the state, having no title to his office save that which lies in the popular will, is forced to haggle and bargain like the lowliest office-seeker. There has been no President of the United States since Washington who did not go into office with a long list of promises in his pocket, and nine-tenths of them have always been promises of private reward from the public store. It is surely not regarded as immoral, by the democratic ethic, to make and execute such promises, though statesmen of lofty pretensions, e. g., Lincoln, sometimes deny having made them. What is reproached as immoral is making them, and then not keeping them. When the late Dr. Wilson made William Jennings Bryan his Secretary of State the act brought forth only tolerant smiles, though it was comparable to appointing a chiropractor Surgeon-General of the Army--a feat which Dr. Harding, a few years later, escaped performing only by a hair. But if Wilson had forgotten his obligation to Bryan there would have been an outburst of moral indignation, even among Bryan’s enemies, and the collapse of Wilson would have come long before it did. When he blew up at last it was not because, after promulgating his Fourteen Points, he joined in swindling a helpless foe at Versailles; it was because he tried, at Paris, to undo some of the consequences of that fraud by forcing the United States into the League of Nations. A democratic state, indeed, is so firmly grounded upon cheats and humbugs of all sorts that they inevitably colour its dealings with other nations, and so one always finds it regarded as a dubious friend and a tricky foe. That the United States, in its foreign relations, has descended to gross deceits and tergiversations since the earliest days of the Republic was long ago pointed out by Lecky; it is regarded universally to-day as a pious fraud--which is to say, as a Puritan. Nor has England, the next most eminent democratic state, got the name of perfide Albion for nothing. Ruled by shady men, a nation itself becomes shady.

In its domestic relations, of course, the same causes have the same effects. The government deals with the citizens from whom it has its mandate in a base and disingenuous manner, and fails completely to maintain equal justice among them. It not only follows the majority in persecuting those who happen to be unpopular; it also institutes persecutions of its own, and frequently against men of the greatest rectitude and largest public usefulness. I marvel that no candidate for the doctorate has ever written a realistic history of the American Department of Justice, ironically so called. It has been engaged in sharp practices since the earliest days, and remains a fecund source of oppression and corruption to-day. It is hard to recall an administration in which it was not the centre of grave scandal. Within our own time it has actually resorted to perjury in its efforts to undo men guilty of flouting it, and at all times it has laboured valiantly to nullify the guarantees of the Bill of Rights. The doings of its corps of spies and agents provocateurs are worthy the pen of some confectioner of dime novels; at one time they were employed against the members of the two houses of Congress, and the alarmed legislators threw them off only by threatening to hold up their pay. As Mill long ago pointed out, the tyranny of the majority under democracy is not only shown in oppressive laws, but also in a usurped power to suspend the operation of laws that are just. In this enterprise a democratic government always marches ahead of the majority. Even more than the most absolute oriental despotism, it becomes a government of men, not of laws. Its favourites are, to all intents and purposes, immune to criminal processes, whatever their offences, and its enemies are exposed to espionage and persecution of the most aggravated sort. It takes advantage of every passing craze and delusion of the mob to dispose of those who oppose it, and it maintains a complex and highly effective machine for launching such crazes and delusions when the supply of them lags. Above all, it always shows that characteristically Puritan habit of which Brooks Adams wrote in “The Emancipation of Massachusetts”: the habit, to wit, of inflicting as much mental suffering as possible upon its victims. That is to say, it not only has at them by legal means; it also defames them, and so seeks to ruin them doubly. The constant and central aim of every democratic government is to silence criticism of itself. It begins to weaken, i. e., the jobs of its component rogues begin to be insecure, the instant such criticism rises. It is thus fidei defensor before it is anything else, and its whole power, legal and extra-legal, is thrown against the sceptic who challenges its infallibility. Constitutional checks have little effect upon its operations, for the only machinery for putting them into effect is under its control. No ruler, indeed, ever wants to be a constitutional ruler, and least of all the ruler whose reign has a term, and who must make hay, in consequence, while the sun shines. Under republics, as under constitutional monarchies, the history of government is a history of successive usurpations. I avoid the banality of pointing to the cases of Lincoln and Wilson. No man would want to be President of the United States in strict accordance with the Constitution. There is no sense of power in merely executing laws; it comes from evading or augmenting them.

I incline to think that this view of government as a group of men struggling for power and profit, in the face and at the expense of the generality of men, has its place somewhere in the dark recesses of the popular mind, and that it accounts, at least in large part, for the toleration with which public corruption is regarded in democratic states. Democratic man, to begin with, is corrupt himself: he will take whatever he can safely get, law or no law. He assumes, naturally and accurately, that the knaves and mountebanks who govern him are of the same kidney--in his own phrase, that they are in public life for what there is in it. It thus does not shock him to find them running true to the ordinances of their nature. If, indeed, any individual among them shows an unusual rectitude, and refuses spectacularly to take what might be his for the grabbing, Homo boobiens sets him down as either a liar or an idiot, and refuses to admire him. So with private rogues who tap the communal till. Democratic man is stupid, but he is not so stupid that he does not see the government as a group of men devoted to his exploitation--that is, as a group external to his own group, and with antagonistic interests. He believes that its central aim is to squeeze as much out of him as he can be forced to yield, and so he sees no immorality in attempting a contrary squeeze when the opportunity offers. Beating the government thus becomes a transaction devoid of moral turpitude. If, when it is achieved on an heroic scale by scoundrels of high tone, a storm of public indignation follows, the springs of that indignation are to be found, not in virtue, but in envy. In point of fact, it seldom follows. As I have said, there was little if any public fury over the colossal stealings that went on during the Wilson administration, and there was still less over the smaller but perhaps even more cynical stealings that glorified the short reign of Harding; in the latter case, in fact, most of the odium settled upon the specialists in righteousness who laid the thieves by the heels. The soldiers coming home from the War for Democracy did not demand that the war profiteers be jailed; they simply demanded that they themselves be paid enough to make up the difference between what they got for fighting for their country and what they might have stolen had they escaped the draft. Their chief indignation was lavished, not upon the airship contractors who made off with a billion, but upon their brothers who were paid $10 a day in the shipyards. The feats of the former were beyond their grasp, but those of the latter they could imagine--and envy.

This fellow feeling for thieves is probably what makes capitalism so secure in democratic societies. Under absolutism it is always in danger, and not infrequently, as history teaches, it is exploited and undone, but under democracy it is safe. Democratic man can understand the aims and aspirations of capitalism; they are, greatly magnified, simply his own aims and aspirations. Thus he tends to be friendly to it, and to view with suspicion those who propose to overthrow it. The new system, whatever its nature, would force him to invent a whole new outfit of dreams, and that is always a difficult and unpleasant business, to workers in the ditch as to philosophers in the learned grove. Capitalism under democracy has a further advantage: its enemies, even when it is attacked, are scattered and weak, and it is usually easily able to array one half of them against the other half, and thus dispose of both. That is precisely what happened in the United States after the late war. The danger that confronted capitalism was then a double one. On the one side there was the tall talk that the returning conscripts, once they got out of uniform, would demand the punishment of the patriots who had looted the public treasury while they were away. On the other side there was an uneasy rumour that a war Katzenjammer was heavily upon them, and that they would demand a scientific inquiry into the true causes and aims of the war, and into the manner and purposes of their own uncomfortable exploitation. This double danger was quickly met and turned off, and by the simple device of diverting the bile of the conscripts against those of their own class who had escaped servitude, to wit, the small group of draft-dodgers and conscientious objectors and the larger group of political radicals, who were represented to be slackers in theory if not in fact. Thus one group of victims was set upon the other, and the fact that both had a grievance against their joint exploiters was concealed and forgotten. Mob fears, easily aroused, aided in the achievement of the coup. Within a few weeks gallant bands of American Legionaries were hunting Reds down all the back-alleys of the land, and gaudily butchering them, when found, at odds of a hundred to one. I know of nothing more indicative of the strength of capitalism under democracy than this melodramatic and extremely amusing business. The scheme succeeded admirably, and it deserved to succeed, for it was managed with laudable virtuosity, and it was based upon a shrewd understanding of democratic psychology.

I believe that every other emergency that is likely to arise, at least in the United States, will be dealt with in the same adroit and effective manner. The same thing has been done in other democratic states: I point to the so-called general strike in England in 1926, which was wrecked by pitting half of the proletariat against the other half. The capitalistic system now enlists the best brains in all the democratic nations, including France and Germany, and I believe that, instead of losing such support hereafter, it will get more and more of it. As the old aristocracies decline, the plutocracy is bound to inherit their hegemony, and to have the support of the nether mob. An aristocratic society may hold that a soldier or a man of learning is superior to a rich manufacturer or banker, but in a democratic society the latter are inevitably put higher, if only because their achievement is more readily comprehended by the inferior man, and he can more easily imagine himself, by some favour of God, duplicating it. Thus the imponderable but powerful force of public opinion directs the aspirations of all the more alert and ambitious young men toward business, and what is so assiduously practised tends to produce experts. E. W. Howe, I incline to think, is quite right when he argues that the average American banker or business man, whatever his demerits otherwise, is at least more competent professionally than the average American statesman, musician, painter, author, labour leader, scholar, theologian or politician. Think of the best American poet of our time, or the best soldier, or the best violoncellist, and then ask yourself if his rank among his fellows in the world is seriously to be compared with that of the late J. Pierpont Morgan among financial manipulators, or that of John D. Rockefeller among traders. The capitalists, in fact, run the country, as they run all democracies: they emerged in Germany, after the republic arose from the ruins of the late war, like Anadyomene from the sea. They organize and control the minorities that struggle eternally for power, and so get a gradually firmer grip upon the government. One by one they dispose of such demagogues as Bryan and Roosevelt, and put the helm of state into the hands of trusted and reliable men--McKinley, Harding, Coolidge. In England, Germany and France they patronize, in a somewhat wistful way, what remains of the old aristocracies. In the United States, through such agents as the late Gompers, they keep Demos penned in a gilt and glittering cage. Public opinion? Walter Lippmann, searching for it, could not find it. A century before him Fichte said “es gar nicht existirte.” Public opinion, in its raw state, gushes out in the immemorial form of the mob’s fears. It is piped to central factories, and there it is flavoured and coloured, and put into cans.

CODA

CODA

The Future of Democracy

Whether or not democracy is destined to survive in the world until the corruptible puts on incorruption and the immemorial Christian dead leap out of their graves, their faces shining and their yells resounding--this is something, I confess, that I don’t know, nor is it necessary, for the purposes of the present inquiry, that I venture upon the hazard of a guess. My business is not prognosis, but diagnosis. I am not engaged in therapeutics, but in pathology. That simple statement of fact, I daresay, will be accepted as a confession, condemning me out of hand as unfit for my task, and even throwing a certain doubt upon my bona fides. For it is one of the peculiar intellectual accompaniments of democracy that the concept of the insoluble becomes unfashionable--nay, almost infamous. To lack a remedy is to lack the very license to discuss disease. The causes of this are to be sought, without question, in the nature of democracy itself. It came into the world as a cure-all, and it remains primarily a cure-all to this day. Any boil upon the body politic, however vast and raging, may be relieved by taking a vote; any flux of blood may be stopped by passing a law. The aim of government is to repeal the laws of nature, and re-enact them with moral amendments. War becomes simply a device to end war. The state, a mystical emanation from the mob, takes on a transcendental potency, and acquires the power to make over the father which begat it. Nothing remains inscrutable and beyond remedy, not even the way of a man with a maid. It was not so under the ancient and accursed systems of despotism, now happily purged out of the world. They, too, I grant you, had certain pretensions of an homeric gaudiness, but they at least refrained from attempts to abolish sin, poverty, stupidity, cowardice, and other such immutable realities. Mediæval Christianity, which was a theological and philosophical apologia for those systems, actually erected belief in that immutability into a cardinal article of faith. The evils of the world were incurable: one put off the quest for a perfect moral order until one got to heaven, post mortem. There arose, in consequence, a scheme of checks and balances that was consummate and completely satisfactory, for it could not be put to a test, and the logical holes in it were chinked with miracles. But no more. To-day the Holy Saints are deposed. Now each and every human problem swings into the range of practical politics. The worst and oldest of them may be solved facilely by travelling bands of lady Ph.D.’s, each bearing the mandate of a Legislature of kept men, all unfaithful to their protectors.

Democracy becomes a substitute for the old religion, and the antithesis of it: the Ku Kluxers, though their reasoning may be faulty, are not far off the facts in their conclusion that Holy Church is its enemy. It shows all the magical potency of the great systems of faith. It has the power to enchant and disarm; it is not vulnerable to logical attack. I point for proof to the appalling gyrations and contortions of its chief exponents. Read, for example, the late James Bryce’s “Modern Democracies.” Observe how he amasses incontrovertible evidence that democracy doesn’t work--and then concludes with a stout declaration that it does. Or, if his two fat volumes are too much for you, turn to some school reader and give a judicious perusal to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, with its argument that the North fought the Civil War to save self-government to the world!--a thesis echoed in falsetto, and by feebler men, fifty years later. It is impossible, by any device known to philosophers, to meet doctrines of that sort; they obviously lie outside the range of logical ideas. There is, in the human mind, a natural taste for such hocus-pocus. It greatly simplifies the process of ratiocination, which is unbearably painful to the great majority of men. What dulls and baffles the teeth may be got down conveniently by an heroic gulp. No doubt there is an explanation here of the long-continued popularity of the dogma of the Trinity, which remains unstated in plain terms after two thousand years. And no doubt the dogma of Transubstantiation came under fire in the Reformation because it had grown too simple and comprehensible--because even the Scholastic philosophy had been unable to convert its plain propositions into something that could be believed without being understood. Democracy is shot through with this delight in the incredible, this banal mysticism. One cannot discuss it without colliding with preposterous postulates, all of them cherished like authentic hairs from the whiskers of Moses himself. I have alluded to its touching acceptance of the faith that progress is illimitable and ordained of God--that every human problem, in the very nature of things, may be solved. There are corollaries that are even more naïve. One, for example, is to the general effect that optimism is a virtue in itself--that there is a mysterious merit in being hopeful and of glad heart, even in the presence of adverse and immovable facts. This curious notion turns the glittering wheels of Rotary, and is the motive power of the political New Thoughters called Liberals. Certainly the attitude of the average American Liberal toward the so-called League of Nations offered superb clinical material to the student of democratic psychopathology. He began by arguing that the League would save the world. Confronted by proofs of its fraudulence, he switched to the doctrine that believing in it would save the world. So, later on, with the Washington Disarmament Conference. The man who hopes absurdly, it appears, is in some fantastic and gaseous manner a better citizen than the man who detects and exposes the truth. Bear this sweet democratic axiom clearly in mind. It is, fundamentally, what is the matter with the United States.

As I say, my present mandate does not oblige me to conjure up a system that will surpass and shame democracy as democracy surpasses and shames the polity of the Andaman Islanders or the Great Khan--a system full-blown and perfect, like Prohibition, and ready to be put into effect by the simple adoption of an amendment to the Constitution. Such a system, for all I know, may lie outside the farthest soarings of the human mind, though that mind can weigh the stars and know God. Until the end of the chapter the ants and bees may flutter their sardonic antennæ at us in that department, as they do in others: the last joke upon man may be that he never learned how to govern himself in a rational and competent manner, as the last joke upon woman may be that she never had a baby without wishing that the Day of Judgment were a week past. I am not even undertaking to prove here that democracy is too full of evils to be further borne. On the contrary, I am convinced that it has some valuable merits, not often described, and I shall refer to a few of them presently. All I argue is that its manifest defects, if they are ever to be got rid of at all, must be got rid of by examining them realistically--that they will never cease to afflict all the more puissant and exemplary nations so long as discussing them is impeded by concepts borrowed from theology. As for me, I have never encountered any actual evidence, convincing to an ordinary jury, that vox populi is actually vox Dei. The proofs, indeed, run the other way. The life of the inferior man is one long protest against the obstacles that God interposes to the attainment of his dreams, and democracy, if it is anything at all, is simply one way of getting ’round those obstacles. Thus it represents, not a jingling echo of what seems to be the divine will, but a raucous defiance of it. To that extent, perhaps, it is truly civilized, for civilization, as I have argued elsewhere, is best described as an effort to remedy the blunders and check the cruel humours of the Cosmic Kaiser. But what is defiant is surely not official, and what is not official is open to examination.

For all I know, democracy may be a self-limiting disease, as civilization itself seems to be. There are obvious paradoxes in its philosophy, and some of them have a suicidal smack. It offers John Doe a means to rise above his place beside Richard Roe, and then, by making Roe his equal, it takes away the chief usufructs of the rising. I here attempt no pretty logical gymnastics: the history of democratic states is a history of disingenuous efforts to get rid of the second half of that dilemma. There is not only the natural yearning of Doe to use and enjoy the superiority that he has won; there is also the natural tendency of Roe, as an inferior man, to acknowledge it. Democracy, in fact, is always inventing class distinctions, despite its theoretical abhorrence of them. The baron has departed, but in his place stand the grand goblin, the supreme worthy archon, the sovereign grand commander. Democratic man, as I have remarked, is quite unable to think of himself as a free individual; he must belong to a group, or shake with fear and loneliness--and the group, of course, must have its leaders. It would be hard to find a country in which such brummagem serene highnesses are revered with more passionate devotion than they get in the United States. The distinction that goes with mere office runs far ahead of the distinction that goes with actual achievement. A Harding is regarded as genuinely superior to a Halsted, no doubt because his doings are better understood. But there is a form of human striving that is understood by democratic man even better than Harding’s, and that is the striving for money. Thus the plutocracy, in a democratic state, tends to take the place of the missing aristocracy, and even to be mistaken for it. It is, of course, something quite different. It lacks all the essential characters of a true aristocracy: a clean tradition, culture, public spirit, honesty, honour, courage--above all, courage. It stands under no bond of obligation to the state; it has no public duty; it is transient and lacks a goal. Its most puissant dignitaries of to-day came out of the mob only yesterday--and from the mob they bring all its peculiar ignobilities. As practically encountered, the plutocracy stands quite as far from the honnête homme as it stands from the Holy Saints. Its main character is its incurable timorousness; it is for ever grasping at the straws held out by demagogues. Half a dozen gabby Jewish youths, meeting in a back room to plan a revolution--in other words, half a dozen kittens preparing to upset the Matterhorn--are enough to scare it half to death. Its dreams are of banshees, hobgoblins, bugaboos. The honest, untroubled snores of a Percy or a Hohenstaufen are quite beyond it.

The plutocracy, as I say, is comprehensible to the mob because its aspirations are essentially those of inferior men: it is not by accident that Christianity, a mob religion, paves heaven with gold and precious stones, i. e., with money. There are, of course, reactions against this ignoble ideal among men of more civilized tastes, even in democratic states, and sometimes they arouse the mob to a transient distrust of certain of the plutocratic pretensions. But that distrust seldom arises above mere envy, and the polemic which engenders it is seldom sound in logic or impeccable in motive. What it lacks is aristocratic disinterestedness, born of aristocratic security. There is no body of opinion behind it that is, in the strictest sense, a free opinion. Its chief exponents, by some divine irony, are pedagogues of one sort or another--which is to say, men chiefly marked by their haunting fear of losing their jobs. Living under such terrors, with the plutocracy policing them harshly on one side and the mob congenitally suspicious of them on the other, it is no wonder that their revolt usually peters out in metaphysics, and that they tend to abandon it as their families grow up, and the costs of heresy become prohibitive. The pedagogue, in the long run, shows the virtues of the Congressman, the newspaper editorial writer or the butler, not those of the aristocrat. When, by any chance, he persists in contumacy beyond thirty, it is only too commonly a sign, not that he is heroic, but simply that he is pathological. So with most of his brethren of the Utopian Fife and Drum Corps, whether they issue out of his own seminary or out of the wilderness. They are fanatics; not statesmen. Thus politics, under democracy, resolves itself into impossible alternatives. Whatever the label on the parties, or the war cries issuing from the demagogues who lead them, the practical choice is between the plutocracy on the one side and a rabble of preposterous impossibilists on the other. One must either follow the New York Times, or one must be prepared to swallow Bryan and the Bolsheviki. It is a pity that this is so. For what democracy needs most of all is a party that will separate the good that is in it theoretically from the evils that beset it practically, and then try to erect that good into a workable system. What it needs beyond everything is a party of liberty. It produces, true enough, occasional libertarians, just as despotism produces occasional regicides, but it treats them in the same drum-head way. It will never have a party of them until it invents and installs a genuine aristocracy, to breed them and secure them.

Last Words

I have alluded somewhat vaguely to the merits of democracy. One of them is quite obvious: it is, perhaps, the most charming form of government ever devised by man. The reason is not far to seek. It is based upon propositions that are palpably not true--and what is not true, as everyone knows, is always immensely more fascinating and satisfying to the vast majority of men than what is true. Truth has a harshness that alarms them, and an air of finality that collides with their incurable romanticism. They turn, in all the great emergencies of life, to the ancient promises, transparently false but immensely comforting, and of all those ancient promises there is none more comforting than the one to the effect that the lowly shall inherit the earth. It is at the bottom of the dominant religious system of the modern world, and it is at the bottom of the dominant political system. The latter, which is democracy, gives it an even higher credit and authority than the former, which is Christianity. More, democracy gives it a certain appearance of objective and demonstrable truth. The mob man, functioning as citizen, gets a feeling that he is really important to the world--that he is genuinely running things. Out of his maudlin herding after rogues and mountebanks there comes to him a sense of vast and mysterious power--which is what makes archbishops, police sergeants, the grand goblins of the Ku Klux and other such magnificoes happy. And out of it there comes, too, a conviction that he is somehow wise, that his views are taken seriously by his betters--which is what makes United States Senators, fortune-tellers and Young Intellectuals happy. Finally, there comes out of it a glowing consciousness of a high duty triumphantly done--which is what makes hangmen and husbands happy.

All these forms of happiness, of course, are illusory. They don’t last. The democrat, leaping into the air to flap his wings and praise God, is for ever coming down with a thump. The seeds of his disaster, as I have shown, lie in his own stupidity: he can never get rid of the naïve delusion--so beautifully Christian!--that happiness is something to be got by taking it away from the other fellow. But there are seeds, too, in the very nature of things: a promise, after all, is only a promise, even when it is supported by divine revelation, and the chances against its fulfilment may be put into a depressing mathematical formula. Here the irony that lies under all human aspiration shows itself: the quest for happiness, as always, brings only unhappiness in the end. But saying that is merely saying that the true charm of democracy is not for the democrat but for the spectator. That spectator, it seems to me, is favoured with a show of the first cut and calibre. Try to imagine anything more heroically absurd! What grotesque false pretences! What a parade of obvious imbecilities! What a welter of fraud! But is fraud unamusing? Then I retire forthwith as a psychologist. The fraud of democracy, I contend, is more amusing than any other--more amusing even, and by miles, than the fraud of religion. Go into your praying-chamber and give sober thought to any of the more characteristic democratic inventions: say, Law Enforcement. Or to any of the typical democratic prophets: say, the late Archangel Bryan. If you don’t come out paled and palsied by mirth then you will not laugh on the Last Day itself, when Presbyterians step out of the grave like chicks from the egg, and wings blossom from their scapulæ, and they leap into interstellar space with roars of joy.