Chapter 2 of 7 · The Freeman Book by Albert Jay Nock
I. Current Comment
ACCORDING to the chief of police of Waterbury, Connecticut, and also according to the New York Times, certain aliens whom Mr. Louis F. Post would not allow deported, have returned to their haunts in Waterbury; which is press-glossary for the mild and unexhilarating statement that they went home. When Mr. Rockefeller or Mr. Gary or even some more obscure member of the God-fearing middle class, leaves his place of business for his place of residence, he goes home; but when one of Mr. Palmer’s best assorted is somehow seined out of the unwarranted jurisdiction of the Department of Justice, he slinks back to his haunt. “Wide is the range of words,” says Homer, “words can make this way or that way.” At what stage in political coloration, between a liberal mauve and a communistic red, does a person cease to go and begin to slink; at what stage does his residence cease to be his home and become his haunt?
S. L. F. 16. vi. 20.
THE remark of a newspaper-correspondent that the work of the Democratic Convention was being guided by a well-balanced mind, reminded this paper of Artemus Ward’s old partner in the show-business, whose name was Billson:
“Billson,” says I, “You hain’t got a well-balanced mind.” “Yes, I have, old hoss-fly,” he says (he was a low cuss), “Yes, I have. I’ve got a mind that balances in any direction the public rekwires, and that’s what I calls a well-balanced mind.”
Artemus adds:
The mis’rable man played “Hamlet” once in a theatre where there wasn’t any orkestry, and wishin’ to perish to slow music, he died playin’ on to a claironette himself, interspersed with hart-rendin’ groans.
There is something about this, too, that somehow makes one think of the Democratic Convention, though perhaps one could not say just why.
A. J. N. 7. vii. 20.
THESE are the days that try the stoutest burlap in which cats were ever bagged. Hardly a day passes but some awkward little truth slips out into the air and is caught by industrious pencils and then, after many hazardous adventures, ending up in a linotype machine, is born again; this time on fresh clean strips of paper which go out into all the ways of the world. Those precious moments when we meet face to face these wandering bits of truth, are fit to be treasured through a long life. Thus at Butte, Montana, a few days ago, the hills must have rejoiced and the mountains and valleys been exceeding glad when Mr. Franklin D. Roosevelt said:
The Republicans are playing a shell game on the American people. They are still busy circulating the story that [in the League of Nations] England has six votes to America’s one. It is just the other way. As a matter of fact, the United States has about twelve votes in the Assembly. Until last week I had two of them myself, and now Secretary Daniels has them. You know I have had something to do with the running of a couple of little republics. The facts are that I wrote Haiti’s Constitution myself, and, if I do say it, I think it is a pretty good Constitution.
Mr. Roosevelt went on to say that Haiti, Santo Domingo, Panama, Cuba, and the other Central American countries, which have at least twelve votes in the League’s Assembly, all regarded Uncle Sam as a guardian and big brother, and that this country practically would have their votes in the League. Now why, in the name of goodness, didn’t President Wilson tell us that himself long ago, and so have saved us all this bother?
Think now for a moment of how it will be when the League of Nations holds its first meeting with Uncle Sam joining in. All the nations will be there. The representatives of England and her five self-governing dominions enter the great hall together (the Labour premier of Australia and the Nationalist premier of South Africa casting sinister glances at the gentleman from Downing Street). Suddenly just outside the Assembly-hall the sound of a sharp military command is heard. It is Captain W. W. Gilmer, of the United States Marines, until lately Governor of Guam, calling to attention the round dozen of diplomats representing Mr. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s little Republics. “Now, then,” he says briskly, “you fellows have got to do as you’re told and don’t you forget it. No whistling here, you from Guam! Attention!—forward march!” And with fine military precision the little company walks in to take its place in the great Assembly of the Nations.
W. G. F. I. ix. 20.
IF this paper could get its readers to sit down in front of this one proposition—that the costs of war can not be shifted sidewise—we should have done a thing or two for the cause of international peace. Indeed, we despair of doing very much in any other fashion. We do not believe that the war-spirit is a kind of free balloon that can be readily shot down with argument. To our way of thinking, militarism is a very substantial and well-foundationed structure, built by three sorts of men; men who know their business and who profit roundly by the work, men who enjoy the work for its own sake, and men who are fooled or forced into helping the professional profiteers and patriots with their little job. There is no use trying to prove that war is always unprofitable and unpleasant for all the parties concerned. Anyone who attempts such a proof will get tangled up with the wartime record of new limousine-licenses, the applications of monopolists for concessions in conquered territory, the militant resolutions of American Legionaries who wanted to hurry back from the Rhine in order to “jump off” once again at the Rio Grande. For our own part, we have nothing to say to these people who have had a try at war and found it suited to their taste or serviceable to their pocketbooks.
It is to the lesser folk who are decoyed or drafted into the military proletariat that we should like to talk; and here we interest ourselves rather in showing what war costs, than in showing what it is. Artists like Tolstoy, Garshin, Latzko and Barbusse have developed the moral method to perfection, sometimes with no conscious purpose other than that of literary creation, often with the full intention of painting the screaming horrors of the battlefield so vividly that anyone who reads will recoil from the reality of war. We are bound to believe that this realistic treatment of war has accomplished something; and yet we can not forget that the very men who actually witness these horrors are often little affected by them. Indeed most people learn easily to look with indifference upon the agonies of others, and there is always a consoling chance that the individual himself will escape injury. The economic effects of war are a different matter. They are more widespread and more persistent than the physical dangers of the conflict can be under any circumstances; and more important still, the economic burdens outlast the conflict, and have to be lugged along through years of peace-time disillusionment and hard work, when war itself has taken on a tint of romance in spite of the best efforts of the realists. In the present instance, the educational value of this economic burden-bearing can be neutralized only by the persistence of the belief that by some kind of jugglery German colonies and German credits can be made to give substantial relief to the Allied peoples. Armies can no longer live off the enemy’s country, or conquerors live at the expense of the conquered. Modern warfare imposes burdens which all the participants together can hardly carry; any smoke-screen thrown up around this fact reeks of a militarism more dangerous than all the old sword-rattling of Potsdam.
G. T. R. 23. iii. 21.
GREAT as a teacher, great as a citizen, great as a friend, great as a Christian, above all, great as a man; such was James, Cardinal Gibbons. He had in his person the talent that Joubert acutely pointed out as inhering in the Church he served, the talent for making himself loved. He recommended the religion of Jesus Christ to men in the only way it can be effectively recommended to them, by treating them as Jesus would have treated them if He had been in his place; by pureness, by kindness, by love unfeigned. He was one of the most simple-hearted, pious and Christian men that ever filled an episcopal chair. In the midst of a careless and perverse generation, he walked worthily; when all about him was at the utmost variance with the principles of true religion, he remained sincere and humble and patient. By living the life of the righteous, he earned the death of the righteous; his life manifested the beauty of holiness and his death the peace of perfect assurance. Expectat resurrectionem mortuorum et vitam venturi sœculi.
A. J. N. 6. iv. 21.
AT the review of the Grand Fleet at Hampton Roads the other day, the breaking waves dashed high, and President Harding rode upon the crest of them, singing a song of sea-power. We can hardly blame the President for having felt uplifted. With submarines nosing up out of the ocean, and dirigibles hiding the sun; with seaplanes zooming past the Mayflower’s mast-head, and the continuous cannonading of the dreadnaughts fairly drowning the strains of the “Star-Spangled Banner,” it must have been a fine business altogether, and enough to upset anybody. Maybe Mr. Harding did not mean anything at all, then, when he addressed the following immortal words to the officers of the fleet: “The United States does not want anything on earth not rightfully our own—no territories, no payment of tribute; but we want that which is righteously our own, and, by the eternal, we mean to have that.” If this really does mean something, then, by the eternal, we should like to know what it is that is righteously our own, and is yet so much some one else’s that we have to have the biggest navy on earth to haul it home for us.
G. T. R. 11. v. 21.
THERE is a sharp and pungent quality that is very pleasing to our taste in the recent protest of the British Association of Schoolmasters against the continuance of the teaching profession in England as a sweated trade. The Association’s statement points out that the latest scale of salaries awarded to schoolmasters in government schools “gave men of nineteen years’ service about £2.15.0 per week in pre-war values.” The Government is now proposing a further twenty per cent cut on all educational expenditures, and this at a time, the Association points out, when the Government is spending £170,000 to pay for the decking out in scarlet uniforms of the five regiments of the Guards, to say nothing of £24,000,000 for a military expedition in Mesopotamia. One result of the British Government’s policy of starving education is that men are no longer becoming schoolteachers. Last year, in all England, only 803 young men entered the Government’s service as schoolmasters. But perhaps, after all, there is a method in the general preference of all governments for military rather than educational expenditures, for what is the use, our rulers may well ask, of spending money to develop a child’s brains when at the same time you are spending so much to blow them out.
W. G. F. 17. viii. 21.
WE wish some one would do for this people what Mr. Edgar Crammond did for the English the other day, when before the Bankers’ Institute he figured out that the British people had to work four months out of the year to support their Government. This statistical scheme of reducing governmental costs to an expression in terms of a labour-equivalent, is striking and effective. Perhaps something like it has been done in this country, but if so, it has escaped us. The American citizen is, as far as his Government is concerned, about as spiritless a drudge as Canning’s needy knife-grinder; still, we believe if he were shown that he works one-sixth of his time or even one-twelfth—let alone one-third, as the Englishman does—to support such government as he gets, he might decide that it ain’t worth it. We might figure it out for him ourselves, perhaps, but we are not good at figures, and it would be a laborious job, so we will content ourselves with remarking that it should be done. This sufficiently vindicates our character and our reputation for public spirit, and is much easier than doing all that dismal arithmetic.
A. J. N. 14. ix. 121.
SOME zealous patrioteer or patriotrine, it appears, recently criticized the Orpheus Choir of Glasgow for not singing the English national anthem at its concerts. The conductor had enough Scots pluck to get his back up and make an extremely spirited reply, saying that it would be just as suitable to charge the choir with anti-Socialism because it did not sing “The Red Flag.” As a matter of fact, he declared, neither the national anthem nor “The Red Flag” are great songs, and, therefore, however much one may agree with the sentiment of either, neither one has any place in a concert. “Thus we sing the music of the Greek and Roman churches because it is great music; no one suggests that we subscribe to their tenets. . . . Music knows no frontiers and no politics.” This is something like! If a few orchestra-conductors in this country had possessed this worthy Scotsman’s grit and gumption, the music-loving ones among us might fortunately have been spared one of the minor horrors of the late war.
A. J. N. 28. ix. 21.
THE Brooklyn Eagle reports that Senator Knox, on his arrival in Paris, 11 September, said that our next war, a war of commercial competition with England, has already begun. He remarked that we have handed our rival ten billion dollars to insure an even start, and that all America now asks is fair play. It is reassuring to hear from some one in our public life a frank statement of our situation. Most people seem to imagine that the war is over; the fact is, however, as Senator Knox says, it has just begun. The war of blood and iron was a mere episode, which had only the effect, as this paper has long been pointing out, of shifting the world’s centre of economic rivalry. It has put the United States in the place of Germany as England’s chief economic competitor. The sooner we all become aware of this, the better; the more coolly and frankly we measure its implications and consequences, the better. There is precious little importance attaching to opinions about “the next war”; the important thing is that we are in it at this moment, up to our necks, and can not possibly get out until one side or the other succumbs to a good sound whaling—or the present system of privilege and exploitation is blown to atoms like the horse and cart in the Wall Street explosion.
We do not see how anyone in his right mind can doubt this fact, and we urge merely that our fellow-citizens should recognize it as candidly as Senator Knox does. A conflict of imperialist nationalism may be justifiable, and again it may not. The one unjustifiable thing is that of going into any conflict with one’s eyes shut. Senator Knox further remarked that “peoples don’t fight peoples; Governments fight Governments.” Precisely. It may be worth while for the people of this country to be dragged into the battle of imperialism with the people of England, and again it may not. For our part, we think it is not worth while. But we insist that this is not a debatable question. What we insist upon is the arrant folly of humbugging oneself about the facts of our status. For years the people of England humbugged themselves royally with the idea that they could dance to the tune of economic imperialism without ever paying the piper, and it is highly important that the people of this country should not succumb to a similar notion. Since our feet have already begun to fly to the same attractive tune, well and good; but let us not pretend that we are having all this fun gratis and that there will be no bill.
A. J. N. 28. ix. 21.
REPEATEDLY and eloquently, Mr. H. G. Wells has called his readers’ attention to the fact that during the last century and a half, man’s ingenuity in the invention of machines has far outrun his spiritual ability to control and use these machines for his own good. The idea is at least as old as the early writings of Robert Owen, and the demonstrations of it are renewed each day with the rising of the sun and the going down thereof. A particularly striking example is that to which the country is to be treated on Armistice Day, when President Harding delivers at Arlington Cemetery an oration which will be heard by an audience in the amphitheatre there, and by thousands of other Americans gathered about amplifying telephones in various halls in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and other cities. Such an impressive magnification of the trivial reminds us of a statement that we heard lately—that chewing-gum is the most permanent substance that our society produces.
G. T. R. 26. x. 21.
WE are in receipt of some remonstrances from friends abroad who themselves cautiously favour the Irish cause, saying that we do not understand conditions in Ireland and that if we did understand them, we would be less partisan. The complaint against our ignorance is probably just. We are a long way from Ireland and can not pretend, never have pretended, to native knowledge of conditions there. We assume that our readers are aware of this, and aware also that we do the best we can in the matter of the dependability of what we print. We take leave to think, further, that our mistakes, if any, are extremely few and unimportant.
Against the rest of the complaint, however, we must enter a vigorous caveat. We can see freedom in only one light; that is, as something not to be compromised with or watered down. We firmly decline to enter into the devious and slippery ways of casuistry upon this point. For us, freedom is freedom, absolutely and world without end; and we refuse to be distracted by the contemplation of any sort of Ersatz or Brummagem freedom that may be recommended as working quite as well as the genuine and serving no end of wholesome collateral purposes besides. We are suspicious and pessimistic, incorrigibly so, towards anything of the kind. We see the Irish simply as a body of men and women, probably much like ourselves, and like folks generally, neither better no worse, but who want to be free; and we are unalterably for them, as we are for any similar body of men and women anywhere in the world. What they will do with their freedom is no concern of ours; it is no concern, in our judgment, of anybody. We have no roseate illusions on the subject. If the South ever oppresses Ulster, we shall be for Ulster. If Dail Eireann grows imperialistic and grabs the Isle of Man or Iceland, we shall be uncompromisingly for the Manxmen or the Icelanders. At present, however, we see Ireland only as demanding freedom from political domination by an alien race; and wherever freedom is demanded, be it political, social or economic, we are there unreservedly, and without asking any questions, to back that demand to the utmost of our slender abilities.
A. J. N. 26. x. 21.
ONCE more, say the head-lines, the senators of Cambridge University have “grappled with the woman problem,” and once more they have denied the wisdom of certain principles to which the Lord adhered when the world was in the making. That is to say, they have decided to maintain at the University a degree of exclusiveness which has no counterpart anywhere in the world of organic matter, except where man has set up some kind of a barrier against nature. It is this sort of meddling that makes woman a problem, just as discrimination always makes a problem of the group against which it is enforced. If the University at Cambridge would accept the world as the Lord made it, women would be rated as plain, ordinary, human beings, and would eventually come to be regarded as such by undergraduates of the male persuasion.
As it is, the youthful collegian is taught to look upon woman as a queer confection, with qualities quite distinct from those which one expects to discover in one’s male acquaintances and friends. He simply does not expect to find her companionable, in the sense that his male associates are companionable; and thus his relations with women are distorted from the very beginning by a wholly artificial emphasis on sex, and he is prepared for a grand affair with some young woman who would bore him intolerably if the element of biological attraction were lacking. In the case of women, the result of artificial segregation is likely to be very much the same; nor is there any final safeguard against resultant difficulties. However, it seems to us that the environment in which men and women are most likely to develop a semi-rational attitude towards each other as individual human beings, and not as mass-problems, is an environment in which association is as free and casual as nature seems to have intended it to be.
G. T. R. 2. xi. 21.
THE rage for amending the Constitution will presently leave the poor old document hardly enough of the original fabric to hold the darns. The National Woman’s party is now out for another amendment which shall sweep away all remaining vestiges of legal discrimination against women, leaving them free, among other things, to enjoy the same conditions of labour in which the more favoured sex now so joyfully rollicks. For once, these ladies will have the glad surprise of finding every conscienceless and unprincipled employer in the country on their side. State laws now in some measure restrain such employers from exploiting the labour of women to the utmost; and now, if this amendment goes through, these laws will be nullified. We wish that this vigorous sisterhood could find another outlet for its energies; one which, if it led to no more good, would at all events end in less harm. Federal judges find the Constitution accommodating enough as it is.
It takes a great deal of temerity to suggest such a thing, but we can not see that the National Woman’s party is likely to work out a much better world for us through its peculiar variant of the class-struggle. To exchange a man’s world for a woman’s, or a woman’s world for a man’s, seems hardly worth the trouble. To bring in a human world, on the other hand, is worth any amount of trouble. This paper is always for the under dog, in a general way and ipso facto; but to be for the under dog with the sheer resentful purpose of some day making him top dog, is not to the purpose. We do not say, indeed we do not believe, that the National Woman’s party has deliberately set itself to this purpose; yet in all its works and ways, it shows itself a little, one may say, class-conscious. Yet if this is so, one must ask oneself in shame and mortification, whose fault is it?
To be heart and soul for labour wherever labour is exploited, which, under the present economic system, is everywhere, but to be dead against a dictatorship of the proletariat; to be strong for capital wherever it is bled by monopoly, which again is everywhere, but to repudiate and reprehend every advantage which capital gains through association with monopoly; to be for men’s rights or women’s rights, not in virtue of their being men’s or women’s, but in virtue of their being human rights; to be for women or for men wherever women or men get in any way the worst of it, but to withstand their encroachments wherever they do not; to resist class-consciousness as one would the devil, whether that consciousness be determined by sex, colour, birth, race or economic status: this probably is the ideal of the human life, and in recommending it to the National Woman’s party, we are sadly aware of our own distance from it. Yet our recommendation is a sincere expression of faith, which we hope these ladies will as sincerely accept as such, since one would not waste breath in recommending an unattainable ideal.
A. J. N. 9. xi. 21.
HORACE GREELEY, the venerable founder of the New York Tribune, wrote a scandalously bad hand. There is a story that whenever the Tribune’s compositors came to a word that they could not decipher, they would simply shovel in “reconstruction” or “the impending crisis,” and when the paper came out, no one, not even Mr. Greeley, knew the difference. It seems to us that statesmen must keep the word “moral” up their sleeve, after the fashion of these compositors, and pepper it in wherever they are short of a cliché. For instance, Brother Aristide Briand, in his brilliant speech at the arms-conference the other day, had much to say about “moral disarmament.” While the listeners were scratching their heads over this, Brother Hughes, not to be outdone in resonant vacuity by any debonair Frenchman that ever crossed the pond, assured Aristide that “there is no moral isolation for the defenders of right and justice.” This, according to a correspondent, is “construed to mean that morally, at least, America could be depended upon to resound to the call of France for aid whenever that country was fighting for liberty and justice.” Then, finally, Brother Balfour made it unanimous by remarking that “the moral isolation of France would be a tragedy indeed.”
These phrases reminded us of the “centres of moral self-possession” that one of our liberal contemporaries once brought forward as a desideratum, which indeed they may be, if only one knows what they are; and thus by easy stages we are led to ruminate upon the extraordinary and uncanny power of the word moral, and upon the extraordinary fondness which statesmen have for it. Its use has long been a part of the technique of what Mr. Henry L. Mencken calls boob-bumping, i. e., hoodwinking the public; and in spite of hard wear and tear in recent years, it seems as good as ever. Our British brethren, for instance, who really ought to have copyright on it, are urging their aversion to the submarine on moral grounds, and their plea is still taken seriously in some quarters, instead of being roared down at once with shouts of ribald laughter. How marvellously well Artemus Ward knew his public!—how marvellously well he satirized its insatiable gullibility! His letter to an editor, fishing for puffs for his Grate Show, will remain for ever, probably, a model for the statesman. “My show at present consists of three moral Bares, a kangaroo . . . besides several miscellanyus moral wax statoots of celebrated piruts and murderers, etc., ekalled by few and exceld by none.” He then urges the editor to “git up a tremenjus excitement in yr. paper ’bowt my onparaleld Show. We must fetch the public sum-how. We must work on their feelins. Cum the moral on ’em strong.” There, in half a dozen lines, is the statesman’s whole stock in trade, and his complete technique of publicity.
A. J. N. 7. xii. 21.
NOT long ago, chance brought before us a melancholy prospect which we have since endeavoured unsuccessfully to forget. We remember it as a veritable panorama of ruin—a low-lying, sandy shore bordering a great expanse of water that carried upon its surface an infinite weight of dead things, steel ships, anchored side by side in pairs and half-dozens and scores, so many that we did not strain our eyes to count them, locked together and rotting into the sea. If any of our readers is disposed to refresh himself by looking upon this picture, he will find it framed by the shores of Jamaica Bay, on the south shore of Long Island, where, there is every reason to suppose, conditions are still very much what they were not many months ago, when we last blundered down in that direction.
Lacking the leisure or the taste for this adventure, the reader may have recourse to a recent issue of the Literary Digest, where he will discover a picture almost as impressive. This time, if our memory serves, the harbour is that of Seattle, and the ships are of an embryonic sort; wooden hulls, with no masts, never finished, but lashed together and left to encumber the waters until they melt into them and disappear. Or, again, the reader may prefer to seek out in the illustrated supplement of the New York Times of Sunday, 4 December, a photograph recently come from France of innumerable fine sailing-ships, anchored together end to end in the River Loire, so many of them, indeed, that in the far distance their naked masts and spars lace together in a web that finally fades into invisibility.
Somehow all this show of abundance and decay reminds us of something that Gogol says in “Dead Souls,” about the wealth of a certain landed proprietor named Pliushkin. “One might have searched a long while for a person having so much wheat, flour and so forth, in his storehouse, or possessing so many storerooms, barns, and drying-houses, filled with sheep-skins, dressed and tanned; and having such quantities of linen, cloth, dried fish and dried vegetables at his disposal. . . . But what was the use of all these things to Pliushkin? . . . his hay and grain rotted; his ricks and stores of all sorts turned into manure, pure and simple, so that cabbages might have been grown upon them; the flour in his vaults turned to stone, and had to be chopped up; it was terrible to touch the linen, the cloth and other materials of domestic manufacture; they turned to dust under the hand. He himself had already forgotten what he possessed of any given article. . . . Everything finally was piled away in storerooms and rotted, and he himself became at last scarcely human.” In short Pliushkin was mad: the inference is inevitable, and our readers may apply it as they will to the Governments that have turned the harbours of the several continents into sink-holes where good ships rot away.
G. T. R. 14. xii. 21.
THE four-Power treaty has been ratified; and now the Powers concerned may proceed to do precisely what they would do if it had not been ratified.
A. J. N. 5. iv. 22.
IN “Erewhon” Samuel Butler portrayed a society that had achieved a measure of freedom and graciousness by smashing all its machines. The rapid invasion of radio is giving new significance to his fantastic tale. We are informed that one may purchase a radio set for a few dollars, hitch it to the battery of one’s flivver, and distinctly hear London, Paris and Berlin, to say nothing of Newark and Arlington, screaming their various propagandas across the ether. This new mechanism, it would seem, opens to us a life of endless and appalling horrors. One enters what appears to be an innocent and quiet restaurant, and suddenly at one’s ear a tube in the wall begins to emit vapid arguments for a new alliance with some group of international yeggmen, the adoption of the goose-step in common-school curricula, the invasion of Patagonia, the abolition of tobacco, the necessity for a consortium-government for the city of New York, run by altruistic bankers, a proposal for a national bonus of ten billions for railway-magnates and shipowners, or some other enormity. Probably a big factor in the ability of the Russian people to throw off the Tsarist tyranny, was that over four-fifths of them were insulated by illiteracy from the steady current of flim-flam, buncombe, misrepresentation and mendacity that emanates from political government and privilege everywhere. Radio overcomes this insulation, and even illiteracy and physical remoteness no longer protect one. The time is at hand when the most ignorant and isolated peasant will be supplied with as much misinformation on political and economic matters as the ardent reader of the city newspapers.
H. K. 5. iv. 22.
WHEN once an idea is really liberated upon the world, it will make its way without let or help. Its advocates and adversaries alike might about as well put on their coats and go home, for there is precious little that one can do either to promote or retard its progress. The Santissimo Salvatore, who himself liberated the greatest of all ideas upon the world, put it exactly when he said that “the spirit breathes where it will.” An idea can not be shot out of existence, or starved out or jailed out, neither can it be knaved out by the technique of political intrigue. That is the point that was consistently overlooked by the brethren who assembled in Paris, Washington, and now at Genoa; that was their little misunderstanding. When they have armies and navies, diplomatic policies, and such-like to deal with, they are quite at home; but when they are confronted with an idea, they are unseeing, helpless and imbecile.
The revolutions of the last century liberated the idea of the individual’s right to self-expression in politics; and it prevailed in the long run so powerfully that this right came to be regarded as the foundation-stone of democracy, until in practice it was proven to have very little indeed to do with democracy. The Russian revolution liberated the idea that democracy is an affair of economics and not of politics; that as long as economic opportunity is controlled by one class, or stratum of society, at the expense of another, there can be no such thing as democracy. Under whatever political system, republican, autocratic or constitutional-monarchist—and under whatever extension of the franchise—those who own, rule, and they rule because they own. They rule in virtue of their control of economic opportunity. Hence, democracy is not promoted, or in any way affected, by a change from one political system to another, but only by a diffusion of ownership. The antithesis of democracy is not autocracy or monarchy, but absolutism. This was the idea which the Russian revolution projected upon the mind of the world, and it entails a wholesale revision of the accepted doctrine of property.
Believers in the omnipotent power of the idea—those few souls who, the world over, have come to learn that in human affairs the Idea is once and for ever the Fact—perceived in 1917 that the Rusian revolution had liberated that idea upon the world; and from that time to this, they have never given themselves a moment’s anxiety about any of the transitory phases of the political struggle. They did not worry about the fate of the Soviet Government, the reactionary temper of the Allied Powers, or about the outcome of this or that political powwow. They were aware that nothing depended upon these things; that whether they went this way or that way, their motion could not affect the progress of the idea. Now, after nearly five years, they see that they were right. Politics have run their appointed course so swiftly that now hardly any country has a Government that is either effective at home or respected abroad; and meanwhile the idea has been silently spreading over the face of the whole earth, and striking its roots deeper and deeper into the consciousness of mankind.
A. J. N. 17. v. 22.
AS we read the news of another lynching, it occurs to us that the violent attack of race upon race is perhaps the supreme futility of life. When the slave assails the master, or the non-possessor takes up arms against the plutocrat, there is always a chance, however slight, that some good will come out of the contest. The weak can perhaps make themselves stronger; the poor, richer. Power and property can be transferred from man to man, but race can not be so transferred; the race that is attacked and defeated is more race-conscious than ever before. In Texas, white men recently burned three Negroes at the stake for an alleged attack upon a white girl. In Georgia, Negro men discovered that a white man and a Negro woman were maintaining what are known as “improper relations.” The Negroes did not dare to touch the white man, but they lectured the woman on “race purity,” and gave her a sound thrashing. In both cases, the emphasis is on race; but race-difference is a thing that can not be eliminated by any attack that stops short of extermination.
G. T. R. 24. v. 22.
WHEN President Hopkins of Dartmouth remarked the other day that “too many men are going to college,” he might with equal propriety have said that there are too many human beings on the face of the earth. The opportunities offered by our institutions of higher learning are of a piece with the other opportunities of life, and like these other opportunities, they are of course abused by a considerable proportion of the people who enjoy them. For our own part, we do not in the least sympathize with anyone who laments the loss of pearls cast before swine; we lament only the scarcity of pearls. Instead of assuming that cultural “goods” are necessarily limited in quantity, and should therefore be rationed out (as President Hopkins says of the higher education) to “the aristocracy of brains,” we assume that such goods can and should be multiplied indefinitely, and distributed freely to every one who wants them, with no questions asked. If the economic revolution holds our interest, it is chiefly because we believe that it will open the opportunities of a rich and adventurous cultural life to all sorts and conditions of men, who have, as human beings, a right to share these opportunities and to make of them what use they please.
G. T. R. 4. x. 22.
WE say, and are prepared to maintain against all argument or cavil, that woman is the superior sex, and that in doing things the right way, the everlastingly fit and appropriate way, she can take the shine out of man every time, and leave him looking like Confederate money. Think, for instance, how long man has been in politics, how long he has been sending his own sex to Congress, how long he has been skirmishing for just the right kind of “senatorial timber.” Now comes the very first woman senator, and she is a paragon. She has, apparently, all the essential qualifications, and has them in that degree of pre-eminence, which makes her the ideal and pattern of senatorship for which the blundering male has been looking ever since the august Upper House was established. Thus handily does the superior sex win out in her very first dig for the senatorial woodchuck. The lady in question is the junior senator from Georgia, Mrs. W. H. Felton, appointed to succeed the lamented Tom Watson, and her qualities are set forth in a news-dispatch of 6 October from Cartersville, Georgia, in the New York Globe.
To begin with, she is eighty-seven years old. Second, it appears that old age has so freshened and vivified her faculties that “she is still optimistic over the outlook for governmental control in America,” quite as a senator should be. Her faith is such that she “believes that we already have good laws and good lawmakers”; and this should abundantly sustain her in the primary senatorial duty of keeping up the barrier against irrational and mischievous discontent. She holds that “the legislation the United States needs most to-day is that gained at the knees of the mothers of America—laws that are greater laws.” This phraseology is reminiscent of President Harding, and it rather oversizes our hand—let’s have four cards. She is “not exciting herself over such questions as the tariff, the bonus, and the fast-disappearing flapper type of girl,” so she may presumably be depended upon to vote right. “Her political creed,” says the dispatch, “is stated in these words: ‘If only I can aid in making men and women live cleaner, sweeter and more wholesome lives, I shall be well satisfied.’” Georgia has furnished us, at last, the real thing in senators. Georgia henceforth will be the Mother of Senators as Virginia, sah, is the Mother of Presidents. There is no manner of doubt about it.
A. J. N. 18. x. 22.
THERE seems to be a general superstition that people who have once enjoyed the privilege of exploiting the labour of their fellows, and themselves have neither toiled nor spun, have somehow a valid claim to be supported in the style to which they are accustomed. This is evident, for instance, in the case of deposed monarchs, who, if they escape beheading at the hands of their people, are likely to be generously supported by them; as though, through having battened upon their people for so long, they had thereby earned the right to continue to batten upon them. After every revolution a great amount of sympathy is lavished upon the dislodged privilegees who are forced to turn to and earn an honest living. We have lately seen something of this sort of thing in press-dispatches from Paris telling how titled Russians have been forced to become taxi-drivers or to take jobs in dressmakers’ shops. It would be more reasonable, it seems to us, for these aristocrats and their sympathizers to recognize that they had a good steal while it lasted, and a long steal; that it was a bit unfortunate, perhaps, that the deluge should come during their lifetime, but that it was bound to come sometime, and therefore might as well be taken philosophically. We do not doubt that these people deserve sympathy; but we think they deserve it not because they are no longer able to appropriate the labour of others but because, never having been taught to be useful, they find themselves handicapped in competition with people who are better schooled in the business of looking out for themselves.
S. L. F. 15. xi. 22.
LATELY we have heard it said several times that “Russia” brought on the great war, and we have been wondering what idea lies back of this expression. If “Russia” ever existed, then surely “Russia” still exists; but no one believes that the East-European economic and political organization which helped to bring on the war still exists. A new economic and political organization has replaced the old one, and yet the term “Russia” is still employed as though it had some specific and definable content. As a matter of fact, such terms as this defy any attempt at definition, and yet they are regularly employed as the highest of all categories, and all the manifold phases of human activity are bracketed under them. “Russia” is reactionary—or revolutionary; “Russia” looks towards the East—or the West; “Russia” is matter-of-fact—or mystical; and so on, and so on everlastingly, as our generalizes attempt, in their easy, breezy way, to simplify a world of a thousand interplaying and overlapping categories, and to lump together as an economic, social, political and intellectual entity, a great number of individuals who represent, among them, every variety of economic, social, political and intellectual life.
G. T. R. 24. i. 23.
NEW YORK is in the throes of one of its periodical ebullitions of the unco’ guid. Blue crusaders of various shades are raiding Sunday theatrical performances and perpetrating other meddlesome antics, with the idea, apparently, of making the Sabbath as unlivable as possible. In parts of the city one can not dine at a restaurant without suffering the attentions of rum-hunting policemen. Finally, a committee of citizens headed by a Justice of the Supreme Court has organized to force through the State Legislature a law which, as presented in the public prints, would make it a crime to have on one’s bookshelf such things as the poems of William Shakespeare or almost any other of the greater British bards from Chaucer to Swinburne; the works of Rabelais, Cervantes and their followers down to M. Anatole France; much of the classical literature of Greece or Rome; or even the Old Testament.
In our humble opinion, if there is one thing more obscene than printed indecency, it is the uproar of the professional moralists, whether they are flaunting under the noses of their fellow-citizens some exhibit of salacity, or whether they are essaying to extract a filthy significance from something that they have neither the wit nor the cleanliness to understand. It may be that as a result of all this disturbance, the publishing and circulation of classical or European literature will be reduced to the status of bootlegging, and the heady liquors of the Pierian spring will have to be put up in containers that can be carried on the hip.
H. K. 21. iii. 23.
“GOVERNMENT,” remarked the New York World recently, in the course of a reproof directed at this paper for its scepticism concerning the League of Nations, “will continue on this earth whether there is capitalism, communism or the single tax.” This may be true or it may not. There is no way of telling, so far as we know, unless one have the gift of prophecy and understand all mysteries and all knowledge; for this earth has still, presumably, a good many thousand years of life before it, in the course of which even stranger things may happen than the disappearance of government. Whether or not government shall continue to exist, however, seems to this paper a relatively unimportant matter. It is the kind of government that shall continue to exist that really interests us; and we are hopeful enough to believe that the time will come when political government—government which exists to promote the exploitation of the many by the few—will altogether perish from the earth.
During the known period of history, political government has passed through about all of its conceivable forms; and it is clear that the more it has changed the more it has been the same thing, The reason is simple: any political Government is, by its very nature, merely an instrument in the hands of a privileged class, by which that class enforces the expropriation and exploitation of the masses, for its own benefit. For many hundreds of years during the present era, ownership was vested in an aristocracy. During the last hundred years or so, it has largely shifted to the bourgeoisie; and the effect of this shift upon the underlying population was well expressed by Ruskin when he said (we quote from memory), “Bags are on the crags, but it is all the same to Rags, in the valley below.” It is just this that people are beginning dimly to perceive. They are, we think, coming through bitter experience to see that, so long as they are to be mulcted, persecuted, and sent to war, in the interest of a small privileged class, it is really immaterial whether they suffer these things through the agency of an autocrat, a constitutional monarch, or a group of liberal politicians. The days of autocrats and kingly figureheads are about over; and from the prevailing disrespect in which they are held, we are inclined to deduce that the days of politicians of any persuasion are numbered.
The fact is, as this paper has remarked before, that the political game is about played out. Rome perished because its industry could no longer meet the exactions of monopoly and still continue to pay interest and wages. The present civilization will perish of the same cause unless it is able to affect, without a complete break-down, the transition from a system of monopoly to one of free opportunity. If it is able to effect this transition; if it is able, through whatever means, to abolish private monopoly of natural opportunities; then the political State will disappear with those inequalities which it exists to perpetuate, and such government as is left will be administrative—that is, it will exist solely for the purpose of supervising those activities which can most conveniently be carried on by the community. As we remarked above, we are optimistic enough to believe that such a transition can be effected; that administrative government will supersede political government; that the idea of Society will supersede that of the State. Since this is our hope and belief, we are not unduly depressed over our neighbour’s warning that government is bound to continue on this earth.
S. L. F. 2. v. 23.
SPEAKING of imperialism, we note that Admiral Chester is somewhat aroused about the marked lack of enthusiasm displayed by the American people over his fat concession in Asia Minor, which has engendered such hostility among British and French privilegees interested in the same territory. “Do you want to see European Governments get it away from us?” demanded the Admiral of a reporter of the New York Globe. “My interests are American interests. I am fighting for my country.” It would be interesting to know just what Admiral Chester means when he says “my country” and “American interests.” We wish he would give us an estimate of how many of the no million of his fellow-citizens will benefit, and in what manner, if he and his mysterious financial associates, rather than some British or French group, are permitted to exploit the natural resources and the Turkish population in Asia Minor. If he is fighting for his country in this matter, it is relevant to inquire how many American farm-mortgages will be lifted because of his efforts, and to what extent the general standard of living will be raised. If his concession promises nothing in this line we do not see why his fellow-citizens should be particularly interested in it, especially since they will have to pay for policing the Near East for him, and, in the event of war, will be compelled to pour out their blood and treasure to defend his enterprises in that quarter of the world.
H. K. 16. v. 23.
THE salvaging of the country newspaper is much on the conscience of college professors who attempt to give instruction in journalism, and certainly it is high time that attention were drawn to the job. The encroachment of metropolitan papers, with their elaborate news-service, has restricted the field of the rural reporter until it is hardly wider than his own community. In this situation, the local paper is faced with two possibilities. It may give itself over entirely to the publication of local news and gossip, or its editor may accept the opportunity created by the inflow of general news through novel channels, and devote more space than formerly, rather than less, to the interpretation of this news. The rural paper can not compete with the metropolitan daily as a collector and distributor of information and misinformation; but then, on the other hand, the increase in the amount of general news read by the rural population will give the local editor a larger opportunity than he has ever had to discuss the topics of the day with an interested audience. The seasoning of a little horse-sense is exactly what the news requires, and horse-sense, if we are not mistaken, is exactly what our rural brother should be able to contribute.
G. T. R. 26. ix. 23.
The Freeman Book
Read the whole book online · Book details
Free to read online and to download from this archive.