[The pending measure] will be voted for by cowards who would rather hang on to their present offices than serve their country or defend its Constitution. It would not receive a vote in this body were there not many individuals looking over their shoulders toward the ballot-boxes of November, their poltroon souls aquiver with apprehension lest they may pay the price of courageous duty by the loss of the votes of somebloc, clique, or coterie backing this infamous proposal. My language may seem brutal. If so, it is because it lays on the blistering truth.
[The pending measure] will be voted for by cowards who would rather hang on to their present offices than serve their country or defend its Constitution. It would not receive a vote in this body were there not many individuals looking over their shoulders toward the ballot-boxes of November, their poltroon souls aquiver with apprehension lest they may pay the price of courageous duty by the loss of the votes of somebloc, clique, or coterie backing this infamous proposal. My language may seem brutal. If so, it is because it lays on the blistering truth.
Senator Reed, in this startling characterization of his fellow Senators, plainly violated the rules of the Senate, which forbid one member to question the motives of another. But therewas no Senator present that day who cared to invoke those rules. They all knew that Reed told the truth. Their answer to him was to slink into the cloak-rooms, and leave him to roar at the Vice-President and the clerks. He not only described the Senate accurately; he also described the whole process of law-making under democracy. Our laws are invented, in the main, by frauds and fanatics, and put upon the statute books by poltroons and scoundrels.
The Rewards of Virtue
I have spoken of the difficulties confronting an intelligent and honourable man who aspires to public office under this system. If he succeeds, it is only by a suspension of natural laws, and his success is seldom more than transient: his first term is commonly his last. And if, favoured by luck again, he goes on, it is only in the face of opposition of an almost incredible bitterness. The case of the Senator I have just mentioned is aptly in point. He is a man of obvious ability and integrity, but in his last campaign in Missouri he was opposed by a combinationof all the parties and all their factions, with the waspish ghost of the late Dr. Wilson hanging over the battlefield. It was only his own amazing talents as a popular orator, aided by the post-warKatzenjammerand a local delight in vigorous, rough-and-ready-fighters, that overcame the tremendous odds against him. In most other American States he would have been defeated easily; in many of them his defeat would have been overwhelming. Only in the newer States and in the border States have such men any chance at all. Where party fidelity has run strong for years they are barred from public life completely. No Senator of any genuine dignity and ability could come out of the Georgia of to-day, and none could come out of the Vermont. Such States must be content with party hacks, and the country as a whole must submit to their depressing imbecilities and ignoble contortions. All of them are men who have trimmed and fawned. All of them are forbidden a frank and competent discussion of most of the principal issues facing the nation.
But there is something yet worse, and that is the assumption of his cowardice and venality that lies upon even the most honourable man,brought into public office by a miracle. The mob is quite unable to grasp the concept of honour, and that incapacity is naturally shared by the vast majority of politicians. Thus the acts of a public man of genuine rectitude are almost always ascribed, under democracy, to sordid and degrading motives,i. e., to the sort of motives that would animate his more orthodox colleagues if they were capable of his acts. I believe that the fact is more potent in keeping decent men out of public life in the United States than even the practical difficulties that I have rehearsed, and that it is mainly responsible for the astounding timorousness of our politics. Its effects were brilliantly displayed during the final stages of the battle over the Eighteenth Amendment. The Prohibitionist leaders, being mainly men of wide experience in playing upon the prejudices and emotions of the mob, developed a technique of terrorization that was almost irresistible. The moment a politician ventured to speak against them he was accused of the grossest baseness. It was whispered that he was a secret drunkard and eager to safeguard his tipple; it was covertly hinted that he was in the pay of the Whiskey Ring, the Beer Trust, orsome other such bugaboo. The event showed that the shoe was actually on the other foot—that many of the principal supporters of Prohibition were on the pay-roll of the Anti-Saloon League, and that judges, attorneys-general and other high officers of justice afterward joined them there. But the accusations served their purpose. The plain people, unable to imagine a man entering public life with any other motive than that which would have moved them themselves if they had been in his boots—that is to say, unable to imagine any other motive save a yearning for private advantage—reacted to the charges as if they had been proved, and so more than one man of relatively high decency, as decency goes in American life, was driven out of office. Upon those who escaped the lesson was not lost. It was five or six years before any considerable faction of politicians mustered up courage enough to defy the Prohibitionists, and even then what animated them was not any positive access of resolution but simply the fact that the Anti-Saloon League was obviously far gone in corruption, with some of its chief agents in revolt against its methods, and others in prison for grave crimes and misdemeanours.
I am, myself, not cursed with the itch for public office, but I have been engaged for years in the discussion of public questions, and so I may be forgiven, I hope, for intruding my own experience here. That experience may be described briefly: there has never been a time when, attacking this or that current theory, I have not been accused of being in the pay of its interested opponents, and I believe that there has never been a time when this accusation was not generally believed. Years ago, when the Prohibitionists were first coming to power, they charged me with taking money from the brewers and distillers, and to-day they charge me with some sort of corrupt arrangement with the bootleggers, despite the plain fact that the latter are not their opponents at all, but their allies. The former accusation seemed so plausible to most Americans that even the brewers finally gave it credit: they actually offered to put me on their pay-roll, and were vastly surprised when I declined. It was simply impossible for them, as low-caste Americans, to imagine a man attempting to discharge a public duty disinterestedly; they believed that I had to be paid, as their rapidly dwindlingblocof Congressmen had to bepaid. So in all other directions. When, fifteen or twenty years ago, I began exposing the quackeries of osteopaths, chiropractors and other such frauds, they resorted instantly to the device of accusing me of taking a retainer from the mythical Medical Trust,i. e., from such men as the Mayo brothers, Dr. George Crile, and the faculty of the Johns Hopkins. Later on, venturing to denounce the nefarious political activity of the Methodist Church, and of its ally, the Ku Klux Klan, I was accused by spokesmen for the former of receiving bribes from the Vatican. The comstocks went even further. When I protested against their sinister and dishonest censorship of literature, they charged me publicly with being engaged in the circulation of pornography, and actually made a vain and ill-starred attempt to railroad me to jail on that charge.
The point is that such accusations are generally believed, especially when they are leveled at a candidate for office. The average American knows what he would do in like case, and he believes quite naturally that every other man is willing and eager to do the same. At the start of my bout with the comstocks, just mentioned, many American newspapers assumed as a matterof course that I was guilty as charged, and some of them, having said so, were forced into elaborate explanations afterward to purge themselves of libel. Of the rest, most concluded that the whole combat was a sham battle, provoked on my own motion to give me what they regarded as profitable publicity. When I speak of newspapers, of course, I speak of concrete men, their editors. These editors, under democracy, constitute an extremely powerful class. Their very lack of sound knowledge and genuine intelligence gives them a special fitness for influencing the mob, and it is augmented by their happy obtuseness to notions of honour. Their daily toil consists in part of praising men and ideas that are obviously fraudulent, and in part of denouncing men and ideas that are respected by their betters. The typical American editor, save in a few of the larger towns, may be described succinctly as one who has written a million words in favour of Coolidge and half a million against Darwin. He is, like the politician, an adept trimmer and flatterer. His job is far more to him than his self-respect. It must be plain that the influence of such men upon public affairs is generally evil—that their weight is almost alwaysthrown against the public man of dignity and courage—that such a public man cannot hope to be understood by them, or to get any useful support from them. Even when they are friendly they are apt to be so for preposterous and embarrassing reasons. Thus they give their aid to the sublime democratic process of eliminating all sense and decency from public life. Coming out of the mob, they voice the ideas of the mob. The first of those ideas is that a fraud is somehow charming and reassuring—in the common phrase, that he is a regular fellow. The second is that an honest and candid man is dangerous—or, perhaps more accurately, that there is no such animal.
The newspaper editor who rises above this level encounters the same incredulous hostility from his fellows and his public that is encountered by the superior politician, cast into public life by accident. If he is not dismissed at once as what is now called a Bolshevik,i. e., one harbouring an occult and unintelligible yearning to put down the Republic and pull God off His throne, he is assumed to be engaged in some nefarious scheme of personal aggrandizement.I point, as examples, to the cases of Fremont Older, of San Francisco, and Julian Harris, of Columbus, Ga., two honest, able and courageous men, and both opposed by the vast majority of their colleagues. The democratic process, indeed, is furiously inimical to all honourable motives. It favours the man who is without them, and it puts heavy burdens upon the man who has them. Going further, it is even opposed to mere competence. The public servant who masters his job gains nothing thereby. His natural impatience with the incapacity and slacking of his fellows makes them his implacable enemies, and he is viewed with suspicion by the great mass of democrats. But here I enter upon a subject already discussed at length by a competent French critic, the late Emile Faguet, of the French Academy, who gave a whole book to it, translated into English as “The Cult of Incompetence.” Under democracy, says Faguet, the business of law-making becomes a series of panics—government by orgy and orgasm. And the public service becomes a mere refuge for prehensile morons—get yours, and run.
Footnote on Lame Ducks
Faguet makes no mention of one of the curious and unpleasant by-products of democracy, of great potency for evil in both England and the United States: perhaps, for some unknown reason, it is less a nuisance in France. I allude to the sinister activity of professional politicians who, in the eternal struggle for office and its rewards, have suffered crushing defeats, and are full of rage and bitterness. All politics, under democracy, resolves itself into a series of dynastic questions: the objective is always the job, not the principle. The defeated candidate commonly takes his failure very badly, for it leaves him stripped bare. In most cases his fellow professionals take pity on him and put him into some more or less gaudy appointive office, to preserve his livelihood and save his face: the Federal commissions that harass the land are full of such lame ducks, and they are not unknown on the Federal bench. But now and then there appears one whose wounds are too painful to be assuaged by such devices, or for whom nosuitable office can be found. This majestic victim not infrequently seeks surcease by a sort of running amok. That is to say, he turns what remains of his influence with the mob into a weapon against the nation as a whole, and becomes a chronic maker of trouble. The names of Burr, Clay, Calhoun, Douglas, Blaine, Greeley, Frémont, Roosevelt and Bryan will occur to every attentive student of American history. There have been many similar warlocks on lower levels; they are familiar in the politics of every American county.
Clay, like Bryan after him, was three times a candidate for the Presidency. Defeated in 1824, 1832 and 1840, he turned his back upon democracy, and became the first public agent and attorney for what are now called the Interests. When he died he was the darling of the Mellons, Morgans and Charlie Schwabs of his time. He believed in centralization and in the blessings of a protective tariff. These blessings the American people still enjoy. Calhoun, deprived of the golden plum by an unappreciative country, went even further. He seems to have come to the conclusion that its crime made it deserve capital punishment. At all events, hethrew his strength into the plan to break up the Union. The doctrine of Nullification owed more to him than it owed to any other politician, and after 1832, when his hopes of getting into the White House were finally extinguished, he devoted himself whole-heartedly to preparing the way for the Civil War. He was more to blame for that war, in all probability, than any other man. But if he had succeeded Jackson the chances are that he would have sung a far less bellicose tune. The case of Burr is so plain that it has even got into the school history-books. If he had beaten Jefferson in 1800 there would have been no duel with Hamilton, no conspiracy with Blennerhassett, no trial for treason, and no long exile and venomous repining. Burr was an able man, as politicians go under democracy, and the young Republic stood in great need of his peculiar talents. But his failure to succeed Adams made a misanthrope of him, and his misanthropy was vented upon his country, and more than once brought it to the verge of disaster.
There have been others like him in our own time: Blaine, Frémont, Hancock, Roosevelt, Bryan. If Blaine had been elected in 1876 hewould have ceased to wave the bloody shirt; as it was, he was still waving it, recklessly and obscenely, in 1884. No man laboured more assiduously to keep alive the hatreds flowing out of the Civil War; his whole life was poisoned by his failure to reach the White House, and his dreadful cramps and rages led him into a long succession of obviously anti-social acts. Roosevelt went the same route. His débâcle in 1912 converted him into a sort of political killer, and until the end of his life he was constantly on the warpath, looking for heads to crack. The outbreak of the World War in 1914 brought him great embarrassment, for he had been the most ardent American exponent, for years past, of what was then generally regarded as the German scheme of things. For a few weeks he was irresolute, and seemed likely to stick to his guns. But then, perceiving a chance to annoy and damage his successful enemy, Wilson, he swallowed the convictions of a lifetime, and took the other side. That his ensuing uproars had evil effects must be manifest. Regardless of the consequences, either at home or abroad, he kept on arousing the mob against Wilson, and in the end he helped more than anyother man to force the United States into the war. His aim, it quickly appeared, was to turn the situation to his own advantage: he made desperate and shameless efforts to get a high military command at the front—a post for which he was plainly unfitted. When Wilson, still smarting from his attack, vetoed this scheme, he broke into fresh rages, and the rest of his life was more pathological than political. The fruits of his reckless demagogy are still with us.
Bryan was even worse. His third defeat, in 1908, convinced even so vain a fellow that the White House was beyond his reach, and so he consecrated himself to reprisals upon those who had kept him out of it. He saw very clearly who they were: the more intelligent minority of his countrymen. It was their unanimous opposition that had thrice thrown the balance against him. Well, he would now make them infamous. He would raise the mob, which still admired him, against everything they regarded as sound sense and intellectual decency. He would post them as sworn foes to all true virtue and true religion, and try, if possible, to put them down by law. There ensued his frenzied campaign against the teaching of evolution—perhapsthe most gross attack upon human dignity and decorum ever made by a politician, even under democracy, in modern times. Those who regarded him, in his last years, as a mere religious fanatic were far in error. It was not fanaticism that moved him, but hatred. He was an ambulent boil, as anyone could see who encountered him face to face. His theological ideas were actually very vague; he was quite unable to defend them competently under Clarence Darrow’s cross-examination. What moved him was simply his colossal lust for revenge upon those he held to be responsible for his downfall as a politician. He wanted to hurt them, proscribe them; if possible, destroy them. To that end he was willing to sacrifice everything else, including the public tranquillity and the whole system of public education. He passed out of life at last at a temperature of 110 degrees, his eyes rolling horribly toward 1600 Pennsylvania avenue, N.W. and its leaky copper roof. In the suffering South his fever lives after him. The damage he did was greater than that done by Sherman’s army.
Countries under the hoof of despotism escape such lamentable exhibitions of human frailty.Unsuccessful aspirants for the crown are either butchered out of hand or exiled to Paris, where tertiary lues quickly disposes of them. The Crown Prince, of course, has his secret thoughts, and no doubt they are sometimes homicidal, but he is forced by etiquette to keep them to himself, and so the people are not annoyed and injured by them. He cannot go about praying publicly that the King, his father, come down with endocarditis, nor can he denounce the old gentleman as an idiot and advocate his confinement in amaison de santé. Everyone, of course, knows what his hopes and yearnings are, but no one has to listen to them. If he voices them at all it is only to friendly and discreet members of the diplomatic corps and to the ladies of the half and quarter worlds. Under democracy, they are bellowed from every stump.