The fact that amateurs, at least transiently, so often defeat the professional politicians is due simply to the fact that an amateur, when he becomes a candidate, is nearly always brought into the combat by indignation—that he seeks office because he is violently against something. But it is just as hard to hold an amateur status in politics as it is in sports. The moment an amateur gets into office his indignation is diluted by solicitude, to wit, solicitude for his own job. He then begins to slide down the chute navigated by the late Bonaparte.
2
From the same
It is often urged, as a remedy for the obvious evils of democracy, that the citizens who now eschew politics should spit on their hands and horn in. But would this remedy really afford a cure? I can scarcely imagine anyone believing that it would. The moment the present outsiders became public-spirited they would begin to seek public office, and the moment they began to seek public office they would face the necessity of exposing themselves to the mob, and of trying to dance to its taste. In brief, the moment they become public-spirited they would become precisely the same flatterers and mountebanks that the existing politicians are.
3
From the same
To advocate free speech is quite useless: the thing itself would be fatal to democracy. But in advocating it one at least enjoys the satisfaction of exposing the hypocrisy and swinishness of those who oppose it.
4
From the Baltimore Evening Sun, Nov. 18, 1929
The danger in free speech does not lie in the menace of ideas, but in the menace of emotions. If words were merely logical devices no one would fear them. But when they impinge upon a moron they set off his hormones, and so they are justifiably feared. Complete free speech, under democracy, is possible only in a foreign language. Perhaps that is what we shall come to in the end. Anyone will be free to say what he pleases in Latin, but everything in English will be censored by prudent job-holders.
5
From the Baltimore Evening Sun, March 5, 1923
The seasick passenger on an ocean liner detests the “good sailor” who stalks past him on deck 100 times a day, ostentatiously smoking a large, greasy, ammoniacal cigar. In precisely the same way the good democrat hates the man who is having a better time in the world. This is the origin of democracy—the long and short of democracy. It is also the long and short of Puritanism.
The True Immortal
From the Smart Set, Oct., 1919, pp. 84–85
If, in the course of long years, the great masses of the plain people gradually lose their old faiths, it is only to fill the gaps with new faiths that restate the old ones in new terms. Nothing, in fact, could be more commonplace than the observation that the crazes which periodically ravage the proletariat are, in the main, no more than distorted echoes of delusions cherished centuries ago. The fundamental religious ideas of the lower orders of Christendom have not changed materially in 2,000 years, and they were old when they were first borrowed from the heathen of Asia Minor and Northern Africa. The Iowa Methodist of today, imagining him able to understand them at all, would be able to accept the tenets of Augustine without changing more than a few accents and punctuation marks. Every Sunday his raucous ecclesiastics batter his ears with diluted and debased filches from “De Civitate Dei,” and almost every article of his practical ethics may be found clearly stated in the eminent bishop’s Ninety-third Epistle. And so in politics. The Bolsheviki of today not only poll-parrot the balderdash of the French demagogues of 1789; they also mouth what was gospel to every bête blonde in the Teutonic forests of the Fifth Century. Truth shifts and changes like a cataract of diamonds; its aspect is never precisely the same at two successive instants. But error flows down the channel of history like some great stream of lava or infinitely lethargic glacier. It is the one relatively fixed thing in a world of chaos. It is, perhaps, the one thing that gives human society the stability needed to save it from the wreck that ever menaces. Without their dreams men would have fallen upon and devoured one another long ago—and yet every dream is an illusion, and every illusion is a falsehood.
The Same Old Gang
From the Smart Set, July, 1923, pp. 142–44.
A review of THE DECAY OF CAPITALIST CIVILIZATION, by Sidney and Beatrice Webb; New York, 1923
This is a book that is far too optimistically named—that is, considering that the authors are Socialists, and go to bed every night hoping that the millennium will come before dawn. What they describe as the “decay” of the “civilization” which now surrounds and kisses us, and whose speedy destruction they pray for, is nothing but a catalogue of imperfections, none of them fatal, nor even very painful. The worst, perhaps, are the ferocity with which war is waged under capitalism and the facility with which the more elemental varieties of producers, such as farmers and workingmen, are robbed and exploited by their masters. But it must be obvious to every calm man that neither has gone far enough to be unendurable.
The horrors of war, as I have often argued, are always greatly exaggerated by sentimentalists. Even in the actual trenches, as everyone who has been there knows, they are intermittent, and life in the intervals, to most of the men living it, is relatively easy and even amusing. After all, every conscript who is forced to go there is not killed, nor is every one wounded, nor is every one who is wounded hurt in any very forbidding manner. The killed simply anticipate the inevitable arrival of cancer, diabetes, pneumonia or syphilis, and in a swift and relatively painless fashion; the wounded, save for a small minority, are not seriously damaged, and have something to boast about all the rest of their lives. If the service were really as terrifying as stay-at-home romanticists say it is, then nine-tenths of the morons who face it would go crazy. Nor is war one-half as awful to non-combatants as it is made out to be, even in invaded nations. Think of the oceans of tears shed over the Belgians during the German invasion. And then recall the fact that the actual death-rate among them was less than the average death-rate in such paradises of peace as Lawrence, Mass., and Shamokin, Pa., and that large numbers of them got rich preying upon their oppressors, and that those who filtered out of the country, after a year or so of slavery, turned out to be so badly damaged by their lives of ease that they were quite unfit for regular industry. I do not indulge in paradox here; there are British government reports upon the subject. As for the effects of war upon persons further removed from the front, we had a good chance to study them in the United States between 1917 and 1919. For the vast majority of such persons, war is not a hardship at all, but a lark.
The fact that capitalistic government facilitates the exploitation of the inferior masses is no argument against capitalism; it is simply an argument against all civilized government, which, as Prof. Dr. Franz Oppenheimer has amply demonstrated, is always and inevitably no more than a vast machine for furthering such exploitation. Oppenheimer, true enough, dreams of a time when the exploiters will shut up shop, but that is only a dream, and of a piece with the one of Mr. and Mrs. Webb. We are living among realities, and one of the most salient of them is the fact that the inferior masses appear to have a congenital incapacity for self-government. They must be bossed in order to survive at all, and if kings do not boss them then they are bossed by priests, and if priests are kicked out then they submit to oligarchies of demagogues and capitalists, as now. It would not do them much good to get rid of either half of this combination, or of both halves.
What Mr. and Mrs. Webb seem to visualize for the future is a sort of superior bureaucracy of experts, like the bureaucracy that has long run the American railroad. But what reason is there for believing that it would refrain from exploiting its vast mob of incompetent and ignorant employers? I can see none whatever. The railroad bureaucracy of today, facing a relatively small group of employers, always including a number of highly-trained specialists in the safeguarding of money, nevertheless manages to butter its own parsnips very neatly. Railroad presidents and other such high officials, of course, receive large salaries, but
it is rare for one to die without devising to his heirs a sum greatly in excess of his whole professional income since puberty; the rest is the lagniappe that goes with his office. There is absolutely no indication that such experts would throw off their intelligent self-interest if they ceased working for their stockholders and began working for the great masses of the plain people. There is still less indication that the labor leaders who now live by petty graft and blackmail would suddenly become honest if turned into Senators, Ambassadors and Cabinet ministers; on the contrary, it is extremely likely that they would become worse sharks than they are today, and that it would be much harder to keep them within bounds.
I am surely no fanatical advocate of the capitalistic system, which has defects so patent that they must be visible even to the most abject worshippers of money. When the control of Christendom passed from kings and priests and nobles to pawnbrokers and note-shavers it was a step downward, if only because kings and priests and nobles cherished concepts of professional honor, which are always as incomprehensible to pawnbrokers and note-shavers, i.e., to the bankers who now rule us, as they would be to pickpockets and policemen. There were things that a king would not do, even to shake down the faithful for a good collection; there were things that a noble would not do, even to save his life. But there is absolutely nothing that a banker will not do to augment his products, short of going to jail. It is only fear of the law that restrains him. In other words, the thing that keeps him relatively in order is the thing that keeps a streetwalker relatively in order, and not at all the thing that keeps a gentleman in order. But what of the Socialist “expert” nominated to follow him on the throne? Is this candidate, then, a man of honor? To ask the question is to answer it.
However, we need not even ask it, for there is absolutely no sign in the world today that capitalism is on its deathbed, as Mr. and Mrs. Webb hope, and, hoping, think. The example of Russia proves nothing. Capitalism went broke in Russia, and is now in the hands of the Jews, but it is by no means dead; once the country begins to accumulate new wealth, it will come out of hiding and begin to exploit the Russian masses once more; already, indeed, it ventures upon a few discreet experiments. France, Italy, Germany, the various component parts of Austria-Hungary, and all of the new republics save one or two are solidly capitalistic, despite occasional flares of communistic red fire. In England one hears doleful prognostications that the next government will be dominated by Labor, but that is but one more proof of the sad way in which words supplant realities in the thinking of man. Labor, in England, is now as tame as a tabby cat; capitalism has adopted it and put it out at nurse, as it has adopted Liberalism in the United States. The Labor party, if it ever gets into power, will be run by the same old gang of millionaires and professional politicians which now runs the Liberal party and the Tory party. There will be a change in the label, but none at all in the substance; Englishmen will continue to be exploited as they have been exploited ever since the first Norman hoof-print appeared on an English beach.
But it is in the United States that capitalism really enters into Heaven. Here alone does belief in it take on the virulence of a state religion; here alone are men jailed, beaten and done to death for merely meditating against it, as they used to be burned for “imagining the king’s death.” I doubt that in the whole country there are 50,000 native-born citizens who have so much as permitted their minds to dwell upon the theoretical possibility of ever supplanting it. That form of fancy, so instinctively abhorrent to the right-thinking Americano, is confined almost exclusively to foreigners—and, as every one knows, a foreigner has no rights, even of cogitation in camera, by American law, and whatever he is in favor of is ipso facto felonious, immoral and against God. Nay, capitalism is planted as firmly in These States as the belief in democracy. It will never be shaken down while you and I breathe and hope and sweat and pray. Long before it feels the first shooting pains down the legs there will be nothing left of us save the glorious immortality of heroes.
For these reasons, though I have read the work of Mr. and Mrs. Webb with unflagging attention and great interest, I beg to suggest again that their title is unduly optimistic.
Reflections on Government
From the Chicago Tribune, Sept. 18, 1927
Those earnest, and, in the main, quite honest ladies and gentlemen who were lately deafening the world with their uproar about the Sacco and Vanzetti case fell into an ancient error: they assumed that the gross unfairness which showed itself in the prosecution was peculiar to the capitalistic system of government, and that under some other system it would have been avoided. This I presume to doubt. No government is ever fair in its dealings with men suspected of enmity to it. One of the principal functions of all government, indeed, is to put down such men, and it is one of the few governmental functions that are always performed diligently and con amore. If Sacco and Vanzetti had been oil millionaires, or coal magnates, or archbishops, or men of any similar training and prejudice, and if the scene of their trial had been Moscow instead of Boston, they would have been sent to bliss eternal quite as enthusiastically, and to the tune of precisely the same whoops and gloats.
I incline to think that in this business a capitalistic democracy is apt to be rather slacker than either a strong monarchy or a communistic state. The reason is not far to seek. It lies in the fact that under democracy the reigning plutocracy must execute its mandates through juries, which is to say, through the small bourgeoisie. The judges are easy to control, but the juries are sometimes very recalcitrant. Is it so soon forgotten that at least half of the men the American Department of Justice tried to send to prison during the late war for political heresies were acquitted by juries? The case of poor Debs is remembered, as the case of Sacco and Vanzetti will be remembered, but no one seems to recall the scores of imaginary “communists,” “anarchists,” “German spies” and other hell-cats who, despite the best efforts of professional witnesses in the employ of the government, i.e., of the plutocracy, were turned loose. The fact is that it is dangerous for the plutocracy and its agents to push juries too far. The men in the box must be handled discreetly, else they will run amok. If Judge Webster Thayer had denounced Sacco and Vanzetti to the jury in the terms he is said to have used in private, enough of the twelve would have revolted to make a mistrial. For the natural sympathy of humble men is with other humble men, and they sometimes show it unexpectedly and very resolutely. The moment it becomes possible for them to imagine themselves in the prisoner’s place—that moment they become skittish, and are no longer to be relied upon to serve God and country with due docility.
In the Sacco and Vanzetti case it was naturally hard for the jury to do any such imagining, for the two men were brought into court in a steel cage, and for weeks the local newspapers had been depicting them as dangerous anarchists, with a bomb in one hand and a stiletto in the other. They were, of course, nothing of the sort, but “philosophical” anarchists of the uplifting and sentimental variety—in brief, dreamers whose Utopia was scarcely to be distinguished from that of the Quakers. However, I am not so sure that the truth would have done them much good with the jury. For plain men dislike uplifters almost as much as they dislike bomb-throwers, and at the time of the trial there was a revulsion against the uplift throughout the United States. Thus, barring accident, it was pretty certain that Sacco and Vanzetti would be convicted, regardless of the actual evidence against them. They were, according to the ideas then prevailing, unpleasant and subversive men, and any stick was good enough to beat them with. They must tarry in Gehennah a long while before they get their revenge, but get it they will. At some time or other in the future there will be a Socialist government in one of the American States, and it will engage in the usual gaudy efforts to put down its enemies. Then the world will see a pair of stock-brokers go on trial for burning down a Labor Lyceum, and presently it will be horrified by their execution, and mobs of bank cashiers, butlers, newspaper editorial writers, clergymen, lawyers and other friends o
f the plutocracy will stone the American consulates at Barcelona, Lille and Montevideo.
Such are the ways of governments at all times and everywhere. I am surely no admirer of democracy, and so it pains me to have to say it, but I remain convinced that a democratic-capitalistic state is apt to be more humane in this department than any other kind of state. The cause of its relative mildness lies in its dual nature, which makes for weakness. Whenever a state is strong it is intolerant of dissent; when it is strong enough it puts down dissent with relentless violence. Here one state is as bad as another, or, at all events, potentially as bad. The Puritan theocracy of early New England hanged dissenters as gaily as they are now being hanged by the atheistic Union of Soviet Republics; the Prussian, Russian, Austrian, French and English monarchies were as alert against heresy as the militaristic-capitalistic bloc which now runs Italy or the plutocracy which runs Pennsylvania, California and Massachusetts.
The only way to make a government tolerant, and hence genuinely free, is to keep it weak. The Liberals of the United States, after years of bitter experience, are beginning to grasp that elemental fact, and so one finds them abandoning their old demands for more and more laws, and greater and greater hordes of job-holders. But they learn slowly, as is the habit of earnest and indignant men at all times and everywhere. In the face of the obscenity of Law Enforcement they have ceased to believe in Prohibition, but most of them, blind to the fact that the Postoffice is already one of the most sinister agents of oppression in the United States, still talk sentimentally of government ownership. Some day some realist on their General Staff, suddenly barred from the mails for violating the delicate pruderies of a tender bureaucrat, will begin to figure out what he would do for telephone service if the telephones were controlled by a docile political hack from Indiana, and how he would get from Chicago to New York if another of the same sort had the power to refuse tickets to “Reds.”
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