Part 9

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.

3.

_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.

4.

_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.