Part 6

In the world of intellect and emotion things hang together. A low plane of intellect will produce low impulses. The more we know the greater our control of the different sense organs. Nothing can happen without a corresponding cause behind it.

The hysteria so common at great political conventions is caused by the exceedingly limited intelligence of the managers and directors who labor under the illusion that blind impulse is tantamount to vision. In other words, where the critical faculties are not developed anything can happen. And it is not difficult to predict that when political conventions are swayed by hysterical temperaments the authority at the White House will have all he can do to steer the Ship of State through the troubled waters of impulse and confusion.

There is a will to power that is blind. There is another will to power that brings the higher emotions to bear on the lower impulses, controls and directs the organs of sense.

The people who elect a President are the ones who will influence his actions. And when we talk about a President being a good man for business we are compelled to seek for the reason behind the statement.

If finance lands a President at the White House, women, children, teachers and philosophers must shift for themselves, since the supreme test lies in function, and not in manners, words and looks. And finance means finesse.

Do not expect great innovations at the Capitol until a strong woman takes her seat at the White House; and by this I do not mean one of Barnum's bearded ladies.

Conservatism is a good thing when it is coupled with vision and judgment, but bear in mind that monotony and mediocrity start in the same groove, run at the same pace and arrive at the same grave.

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

There is but one mark of patriotism and that is vigilance and enthusiasm. The cause of your trouble is the sincerity with which your foes think and act and the lukewarm sentiment shown by Americans. The reason is to be found in the comfort and luxury of the present day compared with the pioneer sacrifices of your fathers and grandfathers. Your opponents are vindictive as well as vigilant. They mean what they say and do what they will. They are working as individuals, as well as in groups and parties, but Americans who inherited the land with liberty are exchanging both for the license of the maw.

When school teachers and farm hands are permitted to leave the country for the city, the end is not so far off as your sophisticated solons of the State Capitols would lead you to suppose.

I once stated that three movings equal one fire, and I can say now that the lack of teachers and farm hands has resulted in a damage equal to one revolution. No calamity comes and goes single handed. The world, the flesh and the devil are a triumvirate bound together by ties of consanguinity. Your school teachers are passing over to the world, your farm laborers to the flesh, and your ministers to the devil.

You are browsing on the stubble. One delinquency involves another, and eventually the monetary capital of the nation may be reduced to that of France. The nation will awake one day to the disillusioning fact that peace and progress cannot be gauged by commercial prosperity alone. For without food what avails your steel, your oil and your gold?

If you could witness the mortification poor Andrew Carnegie is now undergoing because of his lack of vision, you would have a lesson not soon forgotten. He built libraries but furnished no books to fill them. It was like building houses without windows. When leading business men commit such folly what can you expect of the nation at large?

The three things most needed by the people are food, raiment and shelter. The next three are instruction, religion and discipline. Liberty is a privilege; it comes after all the others. The individual has no rights inimical to those of the collective conscience.

Until you learn this fundamental maxim, all your knowledge will prove but a sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal.

The nations are rattling over the cobble stones of bankruptcy on a buckboard of compromise, on the high road to revolution.

JOHN MARSHALL

(The Expounder of the Constitution)

Recorded October, 1920

Some recent decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States are, more than any other factor, calculated to develop and foster an element of national unrest. Its deliberations are beyond the intelligence of many and above the interests of the majority. Its psychology is that of a divorce between capital and labor. Its rulings remind me of what transpired in England early in the nineteenth century.

Many who were not socialists are beginning to turn from the older order, imbued with the feeling that nothing could happen in the future worse for the country at large than the conditions that are being endured in the present.

A revolution arrives after a series of connected events which exhausts the patience of the public, and events are moving with intensity as well as rapidity.

DANIEL WEBSTER

You will search the pages of history in vain without finding a parallel to present conditions.

The war gave Bohemia her freedom; at the same time it licensed a bohemian poet to keep Italy stewing in her own juice, a bohemian journalist from New York to direct affairs in Moscow, and a bohemian socialist from Switzerland to rule over Russia.

Added to this a fashionable ladies' pianist has tried his hand, or should I say fingers, in the science of unfurling the sails of Poland's new Ship of State, while shop-keepers direct affairs in Germany and pusilanimous politicians keep the people of America in a state of tepid trepidation and flatulent turmoil. Can you wonder that the country is being hypnotized by the sight of so many cantankerous cataleptics?

Macbeth declared he had waded in so far that returning would be as perilous as going on. Nothing will move them until they are swamped by the high tide of reaction and flung as flotsam on the rocks of a stormy opportunism.

A new Damocles has a sword suspended over the National Capitol, and liberty hangs to the hinges of the Constitution by a hair.