Part 25

To _prove_ that exaggeration and distortion and misleading presentation abound in the reform literature of our time is not the purpose of this paper; even if fifty examples were adduced, it would prove nothing. What I am endeavoring to do is to cite a very few illustrations, which I believe that intelligent readers will recognize as typical, and to bring out their significance as bearing on a widespread state of mind. In this regard, the next instance is peculiarly instructive. In the _Atlantic Monthly_ for March, 1910, there is an article by E. A. Ross, entitled _The Suppression of Important News_. The _Atlantic_ is not a "muckraking" magazine, and the writer is not a "muckraker;" he is a man of national note, and a professor in the Department of Economics in the University of Wisconsin. Much that he says about the shortcomings of newspapers is true; but the article gives a preposterously false impression of the conduct of the press of this country as a whole. However, I do not ask the readers of this REVIEW to take my word for this; neither can I enter upon what would be the very considerable task of proving my assertion. I wish only to call attention to a single short paragraph in Prof. Ross's article:

The party system is a "sacred cow." When a county district court declared that the Initiative and Referendum amendment to the Oregon Constitution was invalid, the item was spread broadcast. But when later the Supreme Court of Oregon reversed that decision, the fact was too trivial to be put on the wires.

Now, if this means anything, it means that it is the policy of the Associated Press, in regard to such a matter as the Initiative and Referendum system in Oregon, to endeavor to conceal from the American public the fact that the attempt to overthrow it in the courts of the State had failed. To characterize such a notion as silly would be to place it on far too high a plane. That a person of Prof. Ross's training, and position in the country, should find it possible to believe such a thing is melancholy to think of; and, what is more to the purpose, it betrays a state of mind that is fraught with all manner of evil possibilities. For it is a state of mind in which probability, that indispensable guide of sane thinking, is dismissed from its place; in which whatever seems to point toward a preconceived thesis is accepted without scrutiny and carefully treasured up, and whatever points the other way gets scant attention; in which the sense of the true proportions of things is hopelessly lost. What the actual facts were about the transmission of that news from Oregon makes no difference; the failure "to put it on the wires," which Professor Ross alleges, may possibly have taken place. But no intelligent human being waits to find out whether Beiliss actually did or did not murder a child in order to reject with scorn and contempt the idea that the blood of murdered Christian children forms part in the ritual of the Jewish Passover; we need no evidence on the subject--it is disposed of by its intrinsic absurdity. That Prof. Ross should have failed to see the intrinsic absurdity of such a notion of the newspaper press of the United States as is implied in the paragraph above quoted--that others who talk about the suppression of news should betray similar want of sane perception--is, to my mind, one of the most significant illustrations of the general phenomenon that I am discussing.

If these illustrations have served to bring out some of the chief aspects of the state of mind which underlies the exaggeration that disfigures the reform agitations of our time, the purpose for which they have been cited has been fulfilled. As evidence of the fact that such exaggeration is widely current they of course amount to nothing; nor, as I have already said, would the piling up of a large number of examples have any probative force. There is a great deal of sober and responsible writing in reform quarters, and there is a great deal of the opposite kind. It would be idle to attempt to form any estimate of the ratio between the one kind and the other. But every reader must recognize that the type of thing which I have been discussing is abundant, and that it plays an important part in influencing the opinions of large bodies of well-meaning people. It may not be amiss, however, to make brief mention of a few more examples illustrating various phases of the phenomenon.

In the report of the first of a series of lectures on sex hygiene recently given to fathers and mothers in the public school buildings of Chicago, we find the lecturer saying: "The American mothers are unable to nurse their children for the necessary nine months. This is the cause of all the infant mortality we hear so much about." And it is to the economic conditions of "the last fifty years" that this deplorable state of things is ascribed. Now persons who are conversant with mortality statistics, either at first hand or through the columns of the newspapers, know that while it is true that "we hear so much about" infant mortality, what we hear is not that it is increasing but that it is declining--declining in the City of New York especially, at a rate so steady and so rapid as would have been pronounced incredible a quarter of a century ago. But the mothers who were drinking in the lecturer's words were led to believe that our modern society is responsible for an ever-increasing slaughter of the innocents. Nor is this an isolated case, either in regard to the particular subject concerned, or to questions of social welfare generally. The mere fact that the evil of avoidable infant mortality is dwelt upon in our time as never before was taken by this lecturer--and has been taken by others--as meaning that that evil is growing ever worse; whereas the real reason of its prominence is precisely that it is now for the first time being hopefully and successfully attacked by comprehensive and systematic efforts. And this substitution of the assertion that an evil is growing worse for the mere fact that it exists, so far from being uncommon, is met with in connection with almost every branch of social-betterment agitation.

One of the most striking manifestations of this was furnished by Alfred Russel Wallace in his book, _Social Environment and Moral Progress_, which appeared shortly before his death. "It is not too much to say," he declares, "that our whole system of society is rotten from top to bottom, and the social environment as a whole, in relation to our possibilities and claims, is the worst that the world has ever seen." In support of this assertion the book as a whole does nothing but present in eloquent language various deplorable features of our existing civilization; apparently the idea that in order to justify his conclusion comparison with former states of the world is essential hardly crosses Mr. Wallace's mind. That it did obtrude itself in a measure appears, however, from the devotion of one little chapter to the subject of "Indications of Increasing Moral Degradation." These indications are three in number; and not only are they pitifully inadequate for the support of his statement, but his interpretation of the statistics cited, in regard to the matter to which he gives most prominence, can be easily shown to be utterly superficial and inconclusive. The three matters to which the statistics relate are deaths from alcoholism, suicide, and deaths of infants soon after birth. The increase of deaths from alcoholism in the past half-century is given the leading place. This increase has been, roughly, 25 per million inhabitants--from 40 per million annually to 65 per million annually; and it does not occur to Mr. Wallace that modern advances in medicine and sanitation may account for far more than 25 drunkards per million inhabitants who in former times would have been carried off by all sorts of diseases but who now survive long enough to die of "alcoholism." The temper of the man of science wholly fails to assert itself in the weighing of facts which his zeal as a reformer impels him to view in the light of a preconceived judgment.

Some recent phenomena in the field of public discussion in our country have shown on a large scale the kind of loose thinking in regard to facts which is at the bottom of the exaggerating spirit. When the McNamara dynamitings were revealed, a wave of excitement swept off their feet a large part of our whole humanitarian army. They had been so filled with the idea that we are living in a strange and awful time, that this series of crimes, committed in secret by members of a single trade union, was acclaimed as something new under the sun, a fearful sign and portent. The tremendous railroad riots and burnings of 1877; the anarchist troubles at Chicago, culminating in the Haymarket massacre; the widespread and ominous railroad labor struggle of 1894, which took on an aspect bordering upon civil war--all these things were forgotten, and it was solemnly asserted that we were confronted with a crisis quite without precedent or parallel, which demanded a new and radical examination of the very foundations of the social order. The swift spread over the country a year ago of the notion that starvation wages for women were, if not the sole, at least incomparably the chief, cause of female vice and degradation, was a somewhat similar phenomenon. One that at first sight presents no resemblance to it, but which strikes me as a peculiarly interesting manifestation of the same thing, is to be found in the domain of ordinary politics. A leading feature of the Progressive crusade was the identification of the "reactionaries"--the business world and the conservative newspaper press--with bossism and the corruption of politics generally. Mr. Roosevelt continually talked as though there were a cynical alliance between all the leading New York newspapers on the one hand, and Murphy and Barnes and the whole system of political corruption on the other; and doubtless there were millions of good people who completely forgot not only that a large proportion of these papers had persistently fought for civil service reform and tariff reform and election reform, but that they were waging an uncompromising war against the whole brood of bosses, whether Republican or Democratic, for many years during which Mr. Roosevelt was an excellent friend of Quay, got along very fairly with Platt, and did not find it in his heart even to lift a finger against the unspeakable Addicks.

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Now all these various forms of exaggeration, distortion and misrepresentation converge in our time upon one object, contribute toward one common effect. Whatever be the purpose held in view by any particular reformer or exhorter, however far from his desire it may be to foment dangerous unrest or to promote a revolutionary propaganda, every extravagant picture that he draws of the depravity or the wretchedness of our time inevitably does produce these effects, and that upon a large scale. There are a great number of people of all ages, and especially of young people, who, without having thought deeply upon the problems of society, feel about them very deeply indeed. Many of them attest the sincerity of their interest by useful and noble work; the world has certainly never seen anything like so widespread a devotion of the energies of young men and women among the fortunate classes to the betterment of the lot of the unfortunate. A far greater number, without devoting themselves to such work, are stirred by the same emotions of sympathy and good-will. Upon these minds and hearts the depiction of evils associated with the existing economic order produces more than a mere transient pang of distress or regret. What is wrong in the world they do not merely deplore; they wish to set it right. And if the wrong is so pervasive, the evil so deep-seated, the depravity so general, as these manifold presentments make it out, what more natural than that they should sum up the whole case in the conviction that the existing order of society is a failure, and be ready to welcome almost any experiment that holds out the promise of something better?

It is for this reason, above all others, that he who recklessly or thoughtlessly distorts or exaggerates the facts of our time assumes a grievous responsibility. Even in regard to each particular question, the element of degree may be of vital consequence: what measures ought to be taken, what objections ought to be weighed, what collateral consequences ought to be ignored, in regard to such a matter as the minimum wage, or unemployment insurance, or child labor, may depend essentially both upon the present extent of the evil and upon the influences already acting upon it. But it is the larger question that is most deeply involved, the question whether the institutions and traditions which have been slowly built up by ages of human effort and trial and struggle are to be thrown aside as worthless. To the reformer bent upon his own specific purpose it may seem a venial offense to depict poverty as increasing, when it is really diminishing, so long as there _is_ poverty; to represent the press of the country in general as deliberately suppressing ordinary news of public affairs, so long as there are some newspapers which suppress some kinds of news; to talk of two millions of children linked to the belts of factories and mills or pining underground in mines, so long as there is child labor; to speak of avoidable infant mortality as an evil peculiar to our time though the reverse is the truth, so long as there is infant mortality which is avoidable. But between seeing these things as they are and seeing them as they are not, the difference is not trifling, but fundamental. For upon that difference turns the whole issue between conservative improvement and reckless innovation. The world is full of persons who are eager enough to prove all things, but who seem to forget the other half of the injunction. If we apply the probe carelessly, if we report what we find untruthfully, how can we hope to hold fast that which is good?

NATURAL ARISTOCRACY

One evening not long since, in a certain New York club of authors and scholars, the conversation turned, as it is so accustomed to turn, on the politics of the day; and we were astonished when one of the circle, a distinguished student of sociology well-known for his radical opinions, said with conviction and emphasis that we were talking of little things and that the one great question of the day was whether a democratic society could develop a natural aristocracy. By chance I had with me that night an excellent new book on _The Political Philosophy of Burke_, by Prof. John MacCunn, late of the University of Liverpool, and as we left the club I showed it to one of my fellow writers with a word of commendation. "Ah," he said, handing it back unopened, "Burke! he's dead, isn't he?" Well, Burke, I dare say, is dead for us, as so many other great memories have perished, and Lord Morley (plain John Morley then, a fairly practical statesman) was indulging in the usual illusion of the biographer when, just twenty-five years ago, he closed his luminous volume with the prophecy that "the historic method, fitting in with certain dominant conceptions in the region of natural science, is bringing men round to a way of looking at society for which Burke's maxims are exactly suited; and it seems probable that he will be more frequently and more seriously referred to within the next twenty years than he has been within the whole of the last eighty." The historic method has an odd way of discrediting the authority of history, and certainly in the lustrum since Lord Morley's predicted score of years the world of Lloyd George and Mr. Roosevelt has not been referring abundantly to Burke's maxims. Yet, with the words of my radical sociological friend in my ears, I could not help reflecting on the coincidence that Professor MacCunn, a writer thoroughly imbued with modern ideas, should have led the whole of Burke's political philosophy up to the same question of natural aristocracy. "For Burke's feet," he says, "were never on surer ground than when, as we have seen, he argued that a civil society, by the very conditions of social struggle and growth, must needs evolve 'a natural aristocracy, without which there is no nation.'" And then, being sufficiently trained in the historic method, he proceeds to show how Burke entirely missed the real problem that faces society to-day in its effort to create such a leadership--as if human nature had first sprung into existence with the Reform Bill.

Of the urgency of the problem a reflective man will scarcely doubt. The only thing, in fact, that might lead him to question its urgency is its hoary antiquity. Plato wrestled with it when he undertook to outline the ideal republic, and many of his pages on the range of government through its five forms--aristocracy, timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny--sound as if he had been reading yesterday's newspapers of London and New York. In the orgy of misrule that brought Athens to humiliation in the last years of the Peloponnesian war he had seen oligarchs and democrats tearing at each other's throats like mad dogs; he had seen the disastrous triumph of the democratic party, and, knowing its instability, he had composed the long dialogue of _The Republic_ to show how, if possible, it might be saved from impending tyranny. He wrote, so far as the public was concerned, in a spirit of despair, almost as if foreseeing the domination of an Alexander and the cold despotism of Rome; and in that saddened scepticism he was thinking more of holding up the aristocratic principle of balance and restraint before the happier individual soul, and establishing the idea of justice for any pious seeker of the future, than of creating an actual commonwealth. Yet, however his application of the law of the individual to the machinery of politics may appear at times fantastic, his argument never really gets far from the everlasting questions of government.

The oligarchy which he knew and described was what we should rather call a plutocracy. He had in mind a State in which, "instead of loving contention and honor [as under a timocracy], men become lovers of money and business, and they praise and admire the rich man and confer office upon him, but despise the poor man." "And such a State," he adds, "will necessarily be not one but two States, one of the poor, the other of the rich, who are living in the same place and always plotting against each other." And when in such a society the disposers of wealth proceed from privilege to insolence and folly, and on their side the many have lost the sense of reverence and at the same time have become aware of the sheer power of numbers, then the plutocratic State is converted to the true democracy, the unbridled sway of the majority. The change is like that which comes to a rich young man who, forgetting the discipline of necessity, passes into the libertinism of indulgence. He will hearken to no word of advice; and if anyone tells him there is a distinction among pleasures, that some are the satisfaction of gross and ignoble desires and others are the satisfaction of good and useful desires, he shakes his head in superiority, and swears that all pleasures are alike. So the oligarchical faction loses its power and position; and the democracy in its turn follows the same path, despising the constraint of authority and the guidance of experience, caught by the lure of indiscriminate pleasure. "The father comes down to the level of the son, being afraid of his children, and the son is on a level with his father, having no shame or fear of his parents.... So the schoolmaster fears and flatters his scholars, and the scholars despise their masters and tutors; and, in general, young and old are alike, the young competing with the old in speech and action, and the old men condescending to the young in their gay and easy manners, from dread of being thought morose and dictatorial."

Then arises the problem which confronted the State in Plato's day, as it did in Burke's, and which may not seem entirely irrelevant to the watcher of to-day: How shall the people be saved from themselves? How, indeed? To Plato, who beheld the future as in a vision, the actual historic answer was a gloomy picture of the change from license to tyranny. His account of the impending fall can never lose its fresh interest:--

When a democracy which is thirsting for freedom has evil cup-bearers presiding over the feast, then, unless her rulers are very amenable and give a plentiful draft, she calls them to account and punishes them, and says that they are cursed oligarchs. And loyal citizens are insultingly termed by her slaves who hug their chains; she would have subjects who are like rulers, and rulers who are like subjects: these are the men whom she praises and honors both in private and public.

By degrees the anarchy finds a way into private houses, and ends by getting among the animals and infecting them. Nor must I forget to tell of the liberty and equality of the two sexes in relation to each other. And I must add that no one who does not know would believe, how much greater is the liberty which the animals who are under the dominion of man have in a democracy than in any other State: for truly, the she-dogs, as the proverb says, are as good as their she-mistresses, and the horses and asses have a way of marching along with all the rights and dignities of freemen; and they will run at anybody who comes in their way if he does not leave the road clear for them: and all things are just ready to burst with liberty.

The ruin of oligarchy is the ruin of democracy; the same desire magnified and intensified by liberty overmasters democracy--the truth being that the excessive increase of anything often causes a reaction in the opposite direction; and this is the case not only in the seasons and in vegetable and animal life, but above all in forms of government. The excess of liberty, whether in States or individuals, seems only to pass into excess of slavery. And so tyranny naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme form of liberty.

Then come impeachments and judgments and trials of one another. The people have always some champion whom they set over them and nurse into greatness. This is he who begins to make a party against the rich. After a while he is driven out, but comes back, in spite of his enemies, a tyrant full grown. Then comes the famous request for a body-guard--"Let not the people's friend," as they say, "be lost to them." (Jowett, condensed.)