Part 8

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, he threw 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 he would 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 any other 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--perhaps the 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 a _maison 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.

DEMOCRACY AND LIBERTY

III

DEMOCRACY AND LIBERTY

1.

_The Will to Peace_

Whenever the liberties of _Homo vulgaris_ are invaded and made a mock of in a gross and contemptuous manner, as happened, for example, in the United States during the reign of Wilson, Palmer, Burleson and company, there are always observers who marvel that he bears the outrage with so little murmuring. Such observers only display their unfamiliarity with the elements of democratic science. The truth is that the common man’s love of liberty, like his love of sense, justice and truth, is almost wholly imaginary. As I have argued, he is not actually happy when free; he is uncomfortable, a bit alarmed, and intolerably lonely. He longs for the warm, reassuring smell of the herd, and is willing to take the herdsman with it. Liberty is not a thing for such as he. He cannot enjoy it rationally himself, and he can think of it in others only as something to be taken away from them. It is, when it becomes a reality, the exclusive possession of a small and disreputable minority of men, like knowledge, courage and honour. A special sort of man is needed to understand it, nay, to stand it--and he is inevitably an outlaw in democratic societies. The average man doesn’t want to be free. He simply wants to be safe.

Nietzsche, with his usual clarity of vision, saw the point clearly. Liberty, he used to say, was something that, to the general, was too cold to be borne. Nevertheless, he apparently believed that there was an unnatural, drug-store sort of yearning for it in _all_ men, and so he changed Schopenhauer’s will-to-live into a will-to-power, _i. e._, a will-to-free-function. Here he went too far, and in the wrong direction: he should have made it, on the lower levels, a will-to-peace. What the common man longs for in this world, before and above all his other longings, is the simplest and most ignominious sort of peace--the peace of a trusty in a well-managed penitentiary. He is willing to sacrifice everything else to it. He puts it above his dignity and he puts it above his pride. Above all, he puts it above his liberty. The fact, perhaps, explains his veneration for policemen, in all the forms they take--his belief that there is a mysterious sanctity in law, however absurd it may be in fact. A policeman is a charlatan who offers, in return for obedience, to protect him (_a_) from his superiors, (_b_) from his equals, and (_c_) from himself. This last service, under democracy, is commonly the most esteemed of them all. In the United States, at least theoretically, it is the only thing that keeps ice-wagon drivers, Y. M. C. A. secretaries, insurance collectors and other such human camels from smoking opium, ruining themselves in the night clubs, and going to Palm Beach with Follies girls. It is a democratic invention.

Here, though the common man is deceived, he starts from a sound premiss: to wit, that liberty is something too hot for his hands--or, as Nietzsche put it, too cold for his spine. Worse, he sees in it something that is a weapon against him in the hands of his enemy, the man of superior kidney. Be true to your nature, and follow its teachings: this Emersonian counsel, it must be manifest, offers an embarrassing support to every variety of the _droit de seigneur_. The history of democracy is a history of efforts to force successive minorities to be _un_true to their nature. Democracy, in fact, stands in greater peril of the free spirit than any sort of despotism ever heard of. The despot, at least, is always safe in one respect: his own belief in himself cannot be shaken. But democracies may be demoralized and run amok, and so they are in vast dread of heresy, as a Sunday-school superintendent is in dread of scarlet women, light wines and beer, and the unreadable works of Charles Darwin. It would be unimaginable for a democracy to submit serenely to such gross dissents as Frederick the Great not only permitted, but even encouraged. Once the mob is on the loose, there is no holding it. So the subversive minority must be reduced to impotence; the heretic must be put down.

If, as they say, one of the main purposes of all civilized government is to preserve and augment the liberty of the individual, then surely democracy accomplishes it less efficiently than any other form. Is the individual worth thinking of at all? Then the superior individual is worth more thought than his inferiors. But it is precisely the superior individual who is the chief victim of the democratic process. It not only tries to regulate his acts; it also tries to delimit his thoughts; it is constantly inventing new forms of the old crime of imagining the King’s death. The Roman _lex de majestate_ was put upon the books, not by an emperor, nor even by a consul, but by Saturninus, a tribune of the people. Its aim was to protect the state against aristocrats, _i. e._, against free spirits, each holding himself answerable only to his own notions. The aim of democracy is to break all such free spirits to the common harness. It tries to iron them out, to pump them dry of self-respect, to make docile John Does of them. The measure of its success is the extent to which such men are brought down, and made common. The measure of civilization is the extent to which they resist and survive. Thus the only sort of liberty that is real under democracy is the liberty of the have-nots to destroy the liberty of the haves.

This liberty is supposed, in some occult way, to enhance human dignity. Perhaps, in one of its aspects, it actually does. The have-not gains something valuable when he acquires the delusion that he is the equal of his betters. It may not be true--but even a delusion, if it augments the dignity of man, is something. Certain apparent realities grow out of it: the peasant no longer pulls his forelock when he meets the baron, he is free to sue and be sued, he may denounce Huxley as a quack. But the thing, alas, works both ways. As one pan of the scale goes up, the other comes down. If democracy really loves the dignity of man, then it kills the thing it loves. Where it prevails, not even the King can be dignified in any rational sense: he becomes Harding, jabbering of normalcy, or Coolidge, communing with his preposterous _Tabakparlement_ around the stove. Nor the Pope: he becomes a Methodist bishop in a natty business-suit, and with a toothbrush moustache. Nor the Generalissimo: he becomes Pershing, haranguing Rotary, and slapping the backs of his fellow Elks.

2.

_The Democrat as Moralist_

Liberty gone, there remains the majestic phenomenon of democratic law. A glance at it is sufficient to show the identity of democracy and Puritanism. The two, indeed, are but different facets of the same gem. In the psyche they are one. For both get their primal essence out of the inferior man’s fear and hatred of his betters, born of his observation that, for all his fine theories, they are stronger and of more courage than he is, and that as they go through this dreadful world they have a far better time. Thus envy comes in; if you overlook it you will never understand democracy, and you will never understand Puritanism. It is not, of course, a speciality of democratic man. It is the common possession of all men of the ignoble and incompetent sort, at all times and everywhere. But it is only under democracy that it is liberated; it is only under democracy that it becomes the philosophy of the state. What the human race owes to the old autocracies, and how little, in these democratic days, it is disposed to remember the debt! Their service, perhaps, was a by-product of a purpose far afield, but it was a service none the less: they held the green fury of the mob in check, and so set free the spirit of superior man. Their collapse under Flavius Honorius left Europe in chaos for four hundred years. Their revival under Charlemagne made the Renaissance possible, and the modern age. What the thing was that they kept from the throat of civilization has been shown more than once in these later days, by the failure of their enfeebled successors. I point to the only too obvious examples of the French and Russian Revolutions. The instant such a catastrophe liberates the mob, it begins a war to the death upon superiority of every kind--not only upon the kind that naturally attaches to autocracy, but even upon the kind that stands in opposition to it. The day after a successful revolution is a blue day for the late autocrat, but it is also a blue day for every other superior man. The murder of Lavoisier was a phenomenon quite as significant as the murder of Louis XVI. We need no scientists in France, shouted MM. of the Revolutionary Tribunal. Wat Tyler, four centuries before, reduced it to an even greater frankness and simplicity: he hanged every man who confessed to being able to read and write.

Democracy, as a political scheme, may be defined as a device for releasing this hatred born of envy, and for giving it the force and dignity of law. Tyler, in the end, was dispatched by Walworth; under democracy he becomes almost the ideal Good Man. It is very difficult to disentangle the political ideas of this anthropoid Good Man from his theological ideas: they constantly overlap and coalesce, and the democratic state, despite the contrary example of France, almost always shows a strong tendency to be also a Puritan state. Puritan legislation, especially in the field of public law, is a thing of many grandiose pretensions and a few simple and ignoble realities. The Puritan, discussing it voluptuously, always tries to convince himself (and the rest of us) that it is grounded upon altruistic and evangelical motives--that its aim is to work the other fellow’s benefit against the other fellow’s will. Such is the theory behind Prohibition, comstockery, vice crusading, and all its other familiar devices of oppression. That theory, of course, is false. The Puritan’s actual motives are (_a_) to punish the other fellow for having a better time in the world, and (_b_) to bring the other fellow down to his own unhappy level. Such are his punitive and remedial purposes. Primarily, he is against every human act that he is incapable of himself--safely. The adverb tells the whole story. The Puritan is surely no ascetic. Even in the great days of the New England theocracy it was impossible to restrain his libidinousness: his eyes rolled sideways at buxom wenches quite as often as they rolled upward to God. But he is incapable of sexual experience upon what may be called a civilized plane; it is impossible for him to manage the thing as a romantic adventure; in his hands it reduces itself to the terms of the barnyard. Hence the Mann Act. So with dalliance with the grape. He can have experience of it only as a furtive transaction behind the door, with a dreadful headache to follow. Hence Prohibition. So, again, with the joys that come out of the fine arts. Looking at a picture, he sees only the model’s pudenda. Reading a book, he misses the ordeals and exaltations of the spirit, and remembers only the natural functions. Hence comstockery.

His delight in his own rectitude is grounded upon a facile assumption that it is difficult to maintain--that the other fellow, being deficient in God’s grace, is incapable of it. So he venerates himself, in the moral department, as an artist of unusual talents, a virtuoso of virtue. His error consists in mistaking a weakness for a merit, an inferiority for a superiority. It is not actually a sign of spiritual eminence to be moral in the Puritan sense: it is simply a sign of docility, of lack of enterprise and originality, of cowardice. The Puritan, once his mainly imaginary triumphs over the flesh and the devil are forgotten, always turns out to be a poor stick of a man--in brief, a natural democrat. His triumphs in the field of government are as illusory as his triumphs as metaphysician and artist. No Puritan has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a poem worth reading--and I am not forgetting John Milton, who was not a Puritan at all, but a libertarian, which is the exact opposite. The whole Puritan literature is comprised in “The Pilgrim’s Progress.” Even in the department wherein the Puritan is most proud of himself, _i. e._, that of moral legislation, he has done only second and third rate work. His fine schemes for bringing his betters down to his own depressing level always turn out badly. In the whole history of human law-making there is no record of a failure worse than that of Prohibition in the United States. Since the first uprising of the lower orders, the modern age has seen but one genuinely valuable contribution to moral legislation: I allude, of course, to the Code Napoléon. It was concocted by a committee of violent anti-Puritans, and in the full tide of a bitter reaction against democracy.

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.