DestinyMen of

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With a new introduction byPaul Roazen

DestinyWalter Lippmann

Transaction PublishersNew Brunswick (U.S.A.) and London (U.K.)

Menofof

New material this edition copyright © 2003 by Transaction Publishers, NewBrunswick, New Jersey. Originally published in 1927 by the Macmillan Com-pany, New York.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conven-tions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or byany means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or anyinformation storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writingfrom the publisher. All inquiries should be addressed to Transaction Publishers,Rutgers—The State University, 35 Berrue Circle, Piscataway, New Jersey 08854-8042.

This book is printed on acid-free paper that meets the American National Stan-dard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials.

Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2003042637ISBN: 0-7658-0514-6Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lippmann, Walter, 1889-1974.Men of destiny / Walter Lippmann ; with a new introduction by Paul

Roazen.p. cm.

Originally published: New York : Macmillian, 1927.Includes bibliographical references (p. ).ISBN 0-7658-0514-6 (acid-free paper)

1. United States—History—1919-1933—Biography. 2. Politicians—United States—Biography. 3. United States—Politics and government—1919-1933. I. Title.

E747 . L76 2003920.073'09'04—dc21

2003042637

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION TO THE TRANSACTION EDITION viiI. AL SMITH: A MAN OF DESTINY ... I

II. CALVIN COOLIDGE: PURITANISM DE LUXE I0III. THE CAUSES OF POLITICAL INDIFFERENCE

TO-DAY I8IV. THE CATHOLICISM OF AL SMITH ... 35V. BRYAN AND THE DOGMA OF MAJORITY

RULE 45VI. H. L. MENCKEN 6I

VII. SINCLAIR LEWIS 7IVIII. THE NATURE OF THE BATTLE OVER CEN-

SORSHIP 93IX. AN ANTICIPATION OF HARDING . . . 107X. AN EARLY ESTIMATE OF MR. McADoo . II2

XL WILSON AND HOUSE I20XII. BORAH I40

XIII. "THE OUTLAWRY OF WAR" . . . . I62XIV. THE GREATNESS OF MR. MELLON . . I84

XV. THE KELLOGG DOCTRINE: VESTED RIGHTSAND NATIONALISM IN LATIN AMERICA I96

XVI. EMPIRE: THE DAYS OF OUR NONAGE AREOVER 2I5

XVII. SECOND BEST STATESMEN 223XVIII. To JUSTICE HOLMES 242

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INTRODUCTION TO THETRANSACTION EDITION

W alter Lippmann's reputation is now in theprocess of being rehabilitated. Following

Lippmann's death in 1974, his authorized biogra-pher, Ronald Steel, composed a lengthy book1 whoseinitial appearance in 1980 provided, perhaps un-intentionally, abundant ammunition for devaluingLippmann's achievements. Not only did Steel'sLippmann come across as a draft dodger in WorldWar I, but as someone intensely ambivalent abouthis Jewishness and also capable of wooing awaythe wife of his best friend. Most damaging of all, inmy opinion, was the biographer's neglect of an ad-equate assessment of the seriousness of Lippmann'smany books. While Steel's concluding his volume byfocusing on Lippmann's opposition to the VietnamWar might seem to some a way of rescuingLippmann's moral standing, I think it only helped

vii

viii Transaction Introductionunderscore Lippmann's status as a journalistrather than a serious political thinker. Attention tohis books should be the real justification for a de-tailed account of his life. Even though Lippmann'scolumns became syndicated around the world, hehad always insisted that his books were every bitas significant as his occasional pieces, and he con-sidered it impossible to separate one line of en-deavor from the other.

Men of Destiny, which originally appeared in 1927and was almost immediately reprinted a couple oftimes that year, helps bridge the gap between thetwo most characteristic kinds of Lippmann's writ-ings. Some of these pieces had originally appearedin the old Vanity Fair, although Steel somehow ig-nored Lippmann's note in Men of Destiny also ac-knowledging permission to reprint from the AtlanticMonthly, Foreign Affairs, Harper's Magazine, the NewRepublic, the Saturday Review of Literature, Yale Re-view, as well as Vanity Fair. Steel correctly describedsome of the essential qualities of Lippmann's spiritin Men of Destiny, even if it was hardly all attribut-able to the forum of Vanity Fain

"Rather than diluting his style, the magazinebrought out a side of his character - irony, a giftfor character analysis, intellectual playfulness, andeven a romantic idealism - that had been damp-ened at the ponderous New Republic. He did some

Transaction Introduction ixof his freest and most engaging writing for VanityFair, and in 1927 put together a selection of hisfavorite pieces, mostly portraits, in...Men of Des-tiny. Among the least known of Lippmann's books,it contains some of his sharpest insights and offers arevealing glimpse of the social conflict and politicalturmoil of the misnamed Jazz Age. In these articlesLippmann enjoyed himself, and in them one can seehis gift for making abstract ideas alive and for pull-ing readers into subjects that might normally makethem yawn."

Steel reports that in reaction to Men Of Destiny,Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. wrote "a friend"(who turns out to have been the British politicaltheorist Harold Laski) that Lippmann's "writing isflypaper to me; if I touch it, I am stuck till I finishit."2 But a double-check of the actual Holmes Laskicorrespondence reveals that it was another bookof Lippmann's that Holmes was writing Laski aboutin 1928:

"I have read almost nothing - W. Lippmann'slittle book of course - American Inquisitors. His writ-ing is fly paper to me - if I touch it I am stuck till Ifinish it. He writes so well - and sees so much thatit is difficult to put into words -I think he talks aswisely as possible about our fundamentalism andmodernism."3

x Transaction IntroductionDespite Steel's not uncharacteristic slip about

which Lippmann book Holmes was referring to, ithas to be noteworthy that people like Holmes andLaski had both been for years keeping up with allof Lippmann's writings. Lippmann chose to con-clude Men of Destiny with a 1916 piece of his writ-ten as a tribute to Justice Holmes on his seventy-fifth birthday. In contrast to how Lippmannthought "the country's business at Washington" got"conducted in an odor of dead and dying cigars sus-pended in steam heat," the house Justice Holmesoccupied stood out for Lippmann in contrast to thepervasive "thick, tepid, tired air. . .in which visionsdie." For in Holmes Lippmann found that "wisdomhas lost its austerity and becomes a tumbling suc-cession of imagery and laughter and outrage."Steel's mixing up Men of Destiny with American In-quisitors may be small potatoes compared to the gen-eral anti- historical tendency of our time, in which acontemporary professor of law writing on Holmescan ignore the merits of the memorable tributeLippmann had once paid Holmes:

"At seventy five, a justice of the Supreme Courtand a scholar known wherever the common law isstudied, his heart is with the laughing sad men,who have mixed bitterness and beauty, and stakedtheir souls on a gamble with life. He fought in theCivil War and was wounded; he has looked at death

Transaction Introduction xilightly, and known what it is to live dangerously.A sage with the bearing of a cavalier, his presenceis an incitement to high risks for the sake of theenterprise and its memories. He wears wisdom likea gorgeous plume, and likes to stick the sanctitiesbetween the ribs.

He has lost nothing that young men have, andhe has gained what a fine palate can take from theworld. If it is true that one generation after an-other has depended upon its young to equip it withgayety and enthusiasm, it is no less true that eachgeneration of the young depends upon those whohave lived to illustrate what can be done with ex-perience. They need to know that not all life with-ers in bad air. That is why young men feel them-selves very close to Justice Holmes. He never failsto tell them what they want to hear, or to showthem what they would wish men to be."4

Instead of appreciating what Holmes could meanto youngsters like Lippmann in 1916, it is possiblefor a legal scholar recently to denounce Holmes inthe course of penning an anachronistic chaptertellingly asking the rhetorical question: "Would YouHave Wanted Justice Holmes as a Friend?"5

Television's C-Span had a program aboutLippmann in 2002, and Ben Bradlee of the Wash-

xii Transaction Introductionington Post as well as Steel appeared on it; althoughSteel has now apparently mellowed aboutLippmann, when a questioner called in to inquireabout the possible relationship between Lippmannand H. L. Mencken, Steel somehow managed todeny that there was one. Yet in Men of DestinyLippmann chose to include a memorable essayabout Mencken, in which Lippmann declared, inreviewing Mencken's Notes on Democracy:

"Here in two hundred pages is Mr. Mencken'sphilosophy. Here are the premises of that gargan-tuan attack on the habits of the American nationwhich has made Mr. Mencken the most powerfulinfluence on this whole generation of educatedpeople. I say personal influence, for one thing thisbook makes clear, and that is that the man is big-ger than his ideas."6

In the course of reading Men of Destiny, one willfind, I think, that to this day no one has writtenmore powerfully than Lippmann about Al Smith andwhat he represented, the triumph as well as whatbecame the tragedy of his life. Lippmann also wroteunforgettable pieces here about Calvin Coolidge,William Jennings Bryan, Sinclair Lewis, SenatorBorah, and The Greatness of Andrew Mellon."Lippmann had started off a 1920 article on WarrenHarding with the words, "If an optimist is a man

Transaction Introduction xiiiwho makes lemonade out of all the lemons that arehanded to him, then Senator Harding is the great-est of all optimists."7 (One could suspect thatLippmann's imagery might have had a subtle pointof its own to make.)

In Men of Destiny, Lippmann included a 1927essay on "The Causes of Political Indifference To-day," and in writing about Bryan, Lippmann wasspecifically dissecting "the dogma of majority rule";Lippmann also put in a 1927 piece on 'The Natureof the Battle Over Censorship." Although not manytoday may remember that Woodrow Wilson's son-in-law William McAdoo was a possibility for theDemocratic presidential nomination in 1920, the"early estimate" of McAdoo that Lippmann offeredhere is telling about what sort of leadershipLippmann thought America should be looking for.The powerful separate essay on Wilson and Colo-nel House, both of whom Lippmann knew, repaysthe closest scrutiny, and foretold many of the gen-eral points about diplomacy and democracy thatLippmann would be making not just during WorldWar II, but at the heights of both the Cold War andVietnam as well. In the era of Prohibition, Lippmannwrote an article on "The Outlawry of War," and if hewere alive today I think he would be similarly in-trigued by the notion of so-called zero-tolerance.

Lippmann's 1927 essay on the "Kellogg Doctrine,"and what it meant for our relationships with Latin

xiv Transaction IntroductionAmerica, is as pertinent now as when he was thenexploring the link between vested rights and na-tionalism. (Lippmann's 1915 The Stakes of Diplo-macy had pioneered in describing some of the im-plications for democratic government of America'shaving to confront foreign policy issues.) In his 1922"Second Best Statesmen," Lippmann, once a studentof William James and Graham Wallas as well as anearly exponent of Freud's significance, was devel-oping the key intersection between psychology andpolitics:

The cult of instinct has turned out to be an illu-sion. And if we read more carefully what modernpsychology actually teaches, we can see readilyenough why it is an illusion. The instincts are notstimulated to activity, as perhaps they were in primi-tive ages, by a true picture of the relevant environ-ment in which they must find their satisfaction,but oftener than not in our civilization by quite falsefictions, accidentally encountered or deliberatelydevised."8

Lippmann's great Public Opinion (1922) wouldnotably expand on that whole original line of think-ing. And it would be difficult for any reader todaynot to pause thoughtfully at the opening line toLippmann's 1927 discussion entitled "Empire: TheDays of Our Nonage Are Over": "All the world thinks

Transaction Introduction xvof the United States today as an empire, except thepeople of the United States."9

This new reprint of Lippmann's Men of Destinyshould help remind us not just of the secure stat-ure his thinking deserves, but of the richness to begained from preserving the intellectual heritage hehad participated in so notably. For all his clear-sightedness about what was amiss with our politi-cal institutions as well as our thinking on democ-racy, his whole career can be seen as having beensingularly devoted to enlightening the public aboutthe highest matters of state.

Paul RoazenNotes

1. Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the Ameri-can Century (Boston, Little Brown, 1980).

2. Ibid., pp. 174-75.3. Holmes Laski Letters: The Correspondence of

Mr. Justice Holmes and Harold J. Laski, ed.Mark DeWolfe Howe (Cambridge, Harvard Uni-versity Press, 1953), p. 1055.

4. Walter Lippmann, Men of Destiny (New York,The Macmillan Company, 1927), pp. 242-44.

5. Albert W. Alschuler, Law Without Values: TheLife, Work, and Legacy of Justice Holmes (Chi-cago, University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp.31-40.

6. Lippmann, Men of Destiny, p. 61.

xvi Transaction Introduction7. Ibid., p. 107.8. Ibid., pp. 239-40.9. Ibid., p. 215.

AL SMITH: A MAN OF DESTINY

R ECENTLY New York celebrated another ofAl Smith's triumphs. Yet the cheering was notaltogether light-hearted, for this time even the

deaf could hear the rumble of thunder in the distancewhich grows louder and more threatening the morevictories he wins. It is impossible any longer toignore the signs of an impending fate. For witheach new proof of his power in New York the ten-sion throughout the country becomes more ominous.His victories have ceased to be victories merely;they are premonitions. When he wins nowadays hedoes not merely survive a Democratic disaster, orbend a hostile legislature to his will, or defeat apower like Hearst's. These victories, which provehis mettle and increase his stature, cast long shadowsahead of them. They have come to portend atragic conflict in which he seems destined to be thecentral figure.

I call it tragic not because it is bound to end inmisery, but because the forces at work are beyond

2 Al Smiththe control of the human will. One cannot say thatthe new urban civilization which is pushing Al Smithforward into national affairs is better or worse thanthat older American civilization of town and countrywhich dreads him and will resist him. But one cansay that they do not understand each other, and thatneither has yet learned that to live it must let live.The conflict is the inevitable consequence of our his-tory. It seems, however, to be the fate of this genialman to deepen that conflict and to hasten it, and tomake us face the conflict sooner than we are ready.I think this is his destiny, not because he pursues it,or perhaps even wholly understands it, but becausehis undeniable virtues make issues clear that havelong been blurred and postponed.

Governor Smith is the first man of the new immi-gration who by every professed standard of Ameri-can politics is completely available as a candidate forPresident. The new immigrants began to comeabout 1850. For seventy-five years, in spite of theirvast influence in local politics, they have producednobody who could fairly be considered for the Presi-dency. Now from their midst has come such a man.They have put forward a man whose record in pub-lic office both as legislator and as executive is dis-tinguished. They have produced a political managerof the first order. They have produced a votegetter who seems to possess a kind of magic. Theyhave produced a man whom his opponents at homenot only respect but like. And they have pro-

A Man of Destiny 3duced him in New York, which is the state aboveall others that the Democratic Party must win ifit is to defeat the Republican Party in a straightcontest.

The availability of Al Smith is glaring, indisput-able, overwhelming. And yet he is unavailable. Bythe unspoken and unwritten law of the UnitedStates, as it stands to-day, he cannot be nominatedby any national party.

Thus, because of his virtues, he brings to openissue the conflict between the tradition which Ameri-cans have professed and the tradition upon whichthey really intend to act. As long as there wasnobody in sight among the newer immigrant peoplewho could seriously be considered for President, thefiction could persist that all careers were open totalent, and that a man was a man for all that. Itwas not necessary to inquire whether the fiction wasseriously meant since there was nobody to challengeit. But Al Smith does challenge it in the most down-right sort of way by the sheer fact of his power andhis success. His advent has seemed to mark the endof the Age of Innocence. It has put to the test ourmost ancient boasts, and waked us to wonder whetherafter all the old faith in human equality was anillusion. Are the castes and the schisms of theOld World native also to our soil? Are we afterall not the New World of which we talk but the OldWorld extended on fresh lands? These questionshang upon the progress of Al Smith. For with him

4 Al Smiththe millions of half-enfranchised Americans are mak-ing their first bid for power.

Perhaps I should say rather that they are mak-ing their first tangible bid for recognition. For AlSmith is not the leader of a political movement whichseeks to impose a new policy upon the United States.He has not promised the city people who follow hima new heaven and a new earth. His people have notbeen promised anything, unless it be relief from theVolstead Act, and that hope of relief is only anincidental element of their devotion to him. He hasno program such as the Labor Party in Englandoffers to the unprivileged classes of England. Nordoes he seem to believe that a reconstruction ofAmerican society is necessary or desirable. He isreally a perfectly conservative man about property,American political institutions, and American ideals.He believes in the soundness of the established orderand in the honesty of its ideals. He knows how toplay according to the rules. The principal reformshe has advocated are wholly respectable; they arethe reforms of Elihu Root. The brilliancy of Gov-ernor Smith's administration has not been due to itsradicalism, but to a kind of supremely good-humoredintelligence and practical imagination about the ordi-nary run of affairs. He has made his Republicanopponents at Albany look silly, not because he wasso progressive and they were so reactionary, butbecause he knew what he was doing and they didnot. He is a glutton for detail and a master of it.

A Man of Destiny 5He is a politician who deals with persons and factsand ideas so concretely and so simply that he canpreach the eternal verities without sounding staleor trite or verbose. He is what a conservative oughtto be always if he knew his business. He can operatewith extraordinary skill, with fine deference to expertopinion, and with a sure instinct for realities, theinstitutions on which most conservatives expend somuch rhetoric and fear.

The essential conservatism of Governor Smithmakes it difficult to conceal the actual objection tohim. He cannot be attacked as an alien bent ondestroying American institutions, or even as a revolu-tionist, like the elder LaFollette, for example, whowould undermine the rights of property and thepower of the courts. Al Smith is not identified withany of the radicalism which causes the AmericanDefense Society to shiver so volubly. He is not apacifist, and not what the more ignorant members ofthe Senate call an internationalist; he has no designson the institution of matrimony, he does not readfree verse, he probably never heard of Freud, andif you inquired closely you would find, I think, thathe did not accept the revelation according to Darwin.He is against prohibition and for free speech, butso are Elihu Root and Nicholas Murray Butler. Theworst that can be said against him politically is thathe belongs to Tammany Hall, and that can't be saidvery fiercely or very sincerely in this generation whichknows that Tammany is a political machine, no

6 Al Smithworse certainly and in some respects much betterthan other political machines. Al Smith, in short,would be one hundred percent except for the accidentof birth.

In fact, one can go further and assert thatGovernor Smith is the most powerful conservativein urban America. Great cities with their violentcontrasts of riches and poverty have produced classhatred the world over. They have done so inAmerica. Politicians, of course, have sought tocapitalize this hatred, and if you look at the bigcities you will find in almost every one either Hearsthimself or an imitator of Hearst. His henchmenrepresent the nearest thing to a bolshevist spiritwhich the comparatively benign American scene hasproduced.

The spirit is denatured, clownish and bereft bothof the intellectual dignity of the hard dogmas ofLenin and of the personal courage which Leninismimplies. It is a kind of a squalid, shuffling meannessof envy and ambition. In New York City thespokesman of this spirit was Mayor Hylan. Forseven years he conducted a dull, suspicious, hystericaland foolish kind of class war. There was no powerin New York that could stop him until Smith tookthe field. Smith alone could reach the people Hylancould reach; Smith alone could face and return thefire of the Hearst press. That he chose to do sowas a supreme test of his quality. It was proofthat. he does not represent a barbarian uprising,

A Man of Destiny 7but a social movement that is reputable in its ownright.

He holds these crowds as no man can hold them.He holds them without the promise of a millennium,without a radical program, without appeal to theirhatreds, without bribes and doles and circuses. Howdoes he do it? It is no answer to say that he hasmagnetism, for then you must ask what there isabout Al Smith that magnetizes the people of all thecities. The answer, I think, is that they feel he hasbecome the incarnation of their own hope and pride;he is the man who has gone, as they would like butdo not quite dare to go, out into the great world tolift from them the secret sense of inferiority. Theyhave belonged for seventy-five years to a secondaryorder of citizenship. Perhaps he will breach thewalls. They have been tolerated but they are notaccepted. Perhaps he, who is one of them, will beaccepted.

They have no particular notions about what AlSmith might do as President of the United States.But they have a very deep sense that their ownself-respect depends in some measure on the admis-sion that Al Smith might be President of the UnitedStates. It is his nomination, more than his election,which matters here. Democratic candidates are usedto being defeated, and the defeat of Al Smith wouldnot constitute a reflection upon his people. But therefusal to nominate Al Smith when, by every politicaltest but that of race and religion, he is easily the

8 Al Smithstrongest Democrat in the United States, that refusalis taken by all the newer peoples of the cities as adenial that they have been fully admitted to America.Just as the pride of the Japanese is unbearably hurtby the refusal to admit a quota of 146 Japanese ayear, so the pride of the whole new population isinvolved now in the treatment which the Demo-cratic Party accords to Alfred E. Smith.

And yet I should have made melodrama out oftragedy if I left the impression that the conflict ismerely between liberty and intolerance, betweenmerit and prejudice. The older American stocks inthe South and the West, and in the East, too, are notall Ku Kluxers, and the Governor's more hastyfriends show an intolerance when they believe thatAl Smith is the victim of purely religious prejudice.Quite apart even from the sincere opposition ofthe prohibitionists, the objection to Tammany, thesectional objection to New York, there is an oppo-sition to Smith which is as authentic and, it seems tome, as poignant as his support. It is inspired by thefeeling that the clamorous life of the city shouldnot be acknowledged as the American ideal.

In spite of the frantic efforts of every backwatertown to make itself a bright metropolis, in spite ofrealtors and boosters, in spite of the mania for sizeand the delusions of grandeur which are known asprogress, there is still an attachment to village life.The attachment is sometimes as vague as the religionpreached at a liberal church forum, but it is just

A Man of Destiny 9strong enough to justify the fear that strange anddangerous things will come out of Babylon. Thecities exist, but they are still felt to be alien, and inthis uncertainty as to what the cities might yieldup, men turn to the old scenes from which the leadersthey always trusted have come. The farmhouse atPlymouth with old Colonel Coolidge doing thechores is an inestimable part of President Coolidge'sstrength. The older Americans feel that in such aplace as that American virtue was bred, a cool,calm, shrewd virtue, with none of the red sins of thesidewalks of New York.

That, at bottom, is the opposition to Al Smith,and not the nonsense about setting up the Pope inthe East Wing of the White House. The Ku Kluxersmay talk about the Pope to the lunatic fringe, butthe main mass of the opposition is governed by aninstinct that to accept Al Smith is to certify andsanctify a way of life that does not belong to theAmerica they love. Here is no trivial conflict. Hereare the new people, clamoring to be admitted toAmerica, and there are the older people defendingtheir household gods. The rise of Al Smith hasmade the conflict plain, and his career has come toinvolve a major aspect of the destiny of Americancivilization.

December, 1925.

CALVIN COOLIDGE: PURITANISMDE LUXE

C BASCOM SLEMP, who was once Secretaryto the President, has recently published a

• book called "The Mind of the President."Most of it is an anthology of Mr. Coolidge'sutterances; but the first fifteen pages were writtenby Mr. Slemp. They are not exactly a blindingillumination. They contain the standard eulogywhich is applied to all Presidents by their loudestadmirers. For the President, no matter who he is,is always like Washington and like Lincoln in oneor more respects, and it transpires that Mr. Coolidgeis no exception to the rule. We learn that he is alsolike Andrew Jackson.

As a biographical device there are great, unex-ploited possibilities in this method. A man mightwrite an analysis of Jack Dempsey in terms of

10

Puritanism de Luxe IIJulius Caesar, Mark Antony, and Buddha. Para-phrasing Mr. Slemp he would say of Jack Dempseythat "in this respect his chief forerunner" was JuliusCaesar who for a time was champion of the world.Adverting to Mr. Dempsey's private affairs he wouldsay, "I think Jack Dempsey is like Mark Antony inthis respect." In discussing the hero's disinclinationto meet an opponent whom he might injure, thebiographer would then compare him to Buddha whojumped into a fire in the guise of a rabbit to cookhimself as a meal for a starving beggar, but firstcarefully shook off the fleas on his hide so as notto hurt them. Jack Dempsey could be described inthis fashion, I insist, just as Mr. Coolidge can bedescribed as combining certain of the better featuresof Washington, Lincoln, and Andrew Jackson.

But it is just as well to admit that in additionto the similarities there are striking differences.Washington, for example, was a rebel against con-stituted authority; he assisted at the creation of agovernment which had not existed before, and hepresided over the government when it was necessaryto make precedents instead of following them.Andrew Jackson led and consummated a social revo-lution; Lincoln fought and won a civil war. Tocompare Mr. Coolidge with these men is like sayingthat the contented captain of a houseboat on aninland river is in many respects like the captain of aship at sea.

Mr. Coolidge may be a great captain but he has

12 Calvin Coolidgenever been to sea. He came into office after thegreat postwar deflation had run its course, and thepostwar scandals had run theirs. He inherited awar-time system of taxation which his predecessorshad had the pain of imposing. He had the delightfulproblem of dealing with a surplus and not a deficit,and the pleasure of reducing taxes. A foolish manmight have squandered the surplus and not reducedthe taxes. Mr. Coolidge took good care of the sur-plus. Except for the inter-Allied debts, Mr. Cool-idge has fortunately not had a single problem instatesmanship of the first order to deal with. As Iwrite it is still uncertain whether he has settled thedebts; it is very certain that he has failed to convinceany one in Europe that the United States is generous,although the terms of the Italian debt settlementare very generous indeed.

For the rest, he has approached but done nothingabout coal, agriculture or shipping, the threedomestic questions which trouble the placid waters.There is no great insistence anywhere that he doanything. These problems produce a certain amountof local inconvenience, but no widespread distress anddiscontent. It is not imperative that anything shouldbe done. On the contrary, a widespread distaste ofpolitical activity is the controlling mood of publiclife in this country to-day.

Mr. Coolidge's genius for inactivity is developedto a very high point. It is far from being an indolentinactivity. It is a grim, determined, alert inactivity

Puritanism de Luxe 13which keeps Mr. Coolidge occupied constantly.Nobody has ever worked harder at inactivity, withsuch force of character, with such unremitting atten-tion to detail, with such conscientious devotion tothe task. Inactivity is a political philosophy and aparty program with Mr. Coolidge, and nobodyshould mistake his unflinching adherence to it for asoft and easy desire to let things slide. Mr.Coolidge's inactivity is not merely the absence ofactivity. It is on the contrary a steady applicationto the task of neutralizing and thwarting politicalactivity wherever there are signs of life.

The White House is extremely sensitive to thefirst symptoms of any desire on the part of Congressor of the executive departments to do something,and the skill with which Mr. Coolidge can apply awet blanket to an enthusiast is technically marvelous.There have been Presidents in our time who knewhow to whip up popular enthusiasm. There hasnever been Mr. Coolidge's equal in the art of deflat-ing interest. This mastery of what might be calledthe technique of anti-propaganda is worthy of pro-longed and profound study by students of publicopinion. The na'ive statesmen of the pre-Coolidge eraimagined that it was desirable to interest the peoplein their government, that public discussion was agood thing, that indignation at evil was useful. Mr.Coolidge is more sophisticated. He has discoveredthe value of diverting attention from the govern-ment, and with an exquisite subtlety that amounts

14 Calvin Coolidgeto genius, he has used dullness and boredom aspolitical devices.

I do not know whether Mr. Coolidge was bornwith this gift or whether he developed it by neces-sity in the absence of certain other political gifts.But I do know that in its present development it isno mean gift. The Democratic Party has goodreason to know this, for the Democrats have beenflabbergasted and routed by Mr. Coolidge's skillin destroying issues. The Democrats are simplefolks used to heating themselves up to a terrifictemperature over any issue. They only feel at peacewith themselves when they are in an ecstatic broil.They simply do not know what to do with Mr.Coolidge. They hit his party an awful blow. Theyknocked three members out of his Cabinet and cov-ered them with disgrace. And what happened ? DidMr. Coolidge defend his Cabinet? He did not. Didhe denounce the grafters? He did not. Did heprosecute the grafters? Not very fiercely. Hemanaged to get the public so bored that theycould bear it no longer, and to make the Democratsthoroughly disliked for raising such a dull row. Itwas superb. To every yawp Mr. Coolidge can matcha yawn. He has had the country yawning over theoutcry against relieving the super-rich of taxes,yawning over Colonel Mitchell, yawning over theWorld Court, yawning over the coal strike. He hasbrought his technique to such perfection that one

Puritanism de Luxe 15paper announced the conclusion of the coal strike instreamer headlines, saying "Coolidge Wins CoalVictory; Denies He Interfered."

This active inactivity suits the mood and certainof the needs of the country admirably. It suits allthe business interests which want to be let alone. Itsuits everybody who is making money who wants toJet well enough alone. And it suits all those who havebecome convinced that government in this countryhas become dangerously complicated and top-heavy,and that it is important to reduce and decentralizethe Federal power. Mr. Coolidge, though a Repub-lican, is no Hamiltonian Federalist. Mr. Slemp isright in saying that he has stopped, if not reversed,the Republican nationalizing tendency which runsfrom Hamilton to Roosevelt. He has just stoppedit, mind you. He has not replaced it with any-thing. He has just stopped it while business isgood.

The politicians in Washington do not like Mr.Coolidge very much, for they thrive on issues, andhe destroys their business. But the people like him,not only because they like the present prosperity,and because at the moment they like politicaldo-nothingism, but because they trust and like theplainness and nearness of Calvin Coolidge himself.This is one of the most interesting conjunctions ofour age.

As a nation we have never spent so much money

16 Calvin Coolidgeon luxury and pleasure as we are spending now.There has never in all history been such a widespreadpursuit of expensive pleasure by a whole people.The American people can afford luxury and they arebuying it furiously, largely on the instalment plan.And in the White House they have installed afrugal little man who in his personal life is the veryantithesis of the flamboyant ideal that everybody isfrantically pursuing. They have not only installedhim in the White House, but they trust him utterlyas they hear his voice on expensive radio sets; theypraise him as they ride in expensive motor cars; theytoast him at banquets where there is more food thancan be eaten. At a time when Puritanism as a wayof life is at its lowest ebb among the people, thepeople are delighted with a Puritan as their nationalsymbol.

They are delighted with the oil lamps in the farm-house at Plymouth, and with fine old ColonelCoolidge and his chores and his antique grandeur.They haven't any of them the slightest intention ofliving in such a farmhouse if they can escape fromit, or of doing the chores if they can buy a machineto do them, or of holding themselves aloof likeColonel Coolidge. But they are delighted that thePresident comes of such stock, and they even feel,I think, that they are stern, ascetic, and devoted toplain living because they vote for a man who is. TheCoolidges are really virtuous people in the oldAmerican sense, and they have provided this genera-

Puritanism de Luxe 17tion, which is not virtuous in that sense, with animmense opportunity for vicarious virtue.

Thus we have attained a Puritanism de luxe inwhich it is possible to praise the classic virtues whilecontinuing to enjoy all the modern conveniences.

May, 1926.

THE CAUSES OF POLITICAL INDIFFER-ENCE TO-DAY

A s one contemplates the activities of politiciansit seems likely that, if only there werevoters somewhere who wanted it, Republican

and Democratic principles could be accommodatedlocally to polygamy, foot binding, or voodooism.The rule is simply this: anything which helps you tocarry your state is an immortal principle sanctionedby Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson.

It is not surprising, then, that national partisanpolitics should have come to mean so little to theordinary voter. There are no parties, there are noleaders, there are no issues. There are parties onlyin the states, there are leaders only of sections,there are issues, but they are either evaded by

18

Causes of Political Indifference 19national public men or carefully confined to thelocalities. There is nobody in American publiclife to-day who, like Roosevelt or Wilson, isreally a leader in all parts of the country. Mr.Coolidge has enjoyed popularity and confidencefor two years, but the record of his leadershipof Congress shows that he is essentially therepresentative of the Eastern tariff-protected inter-ests. Neither Western agriculture nor the Easternexporting interests have ever laid much holdon his mind. Mr. Lowden, undoubtedly themost powerful figure in the background of Repub-lican politics, is devoting himself wholly to thatagricultural interest which Mr. Coolidge hasignored. Senator Borah has touched almost everyquestion and has come to grips with none; with allhis great promise and immense personal opportunityhe has failed to transform an attractive provincialinsurgency into any sort of coherent national policy.There is no need to dwell upon Messrs. Dawes,Watson, or Johnson. On the Democratic side there isGovernor Smith, idol of the urban Democrats of theNortheast, but as yet wholly unknown, untried, andunexpressed on national questions. There is Gover-nor Ritchie in Maryland, who may fairly claim tohave a set of Democratic national principles, but whohas not as yet a Democratic national following. Andthere is Senator Reed of Missouri, who has at leastgot this far nationally: he has made himself a holyterror to Republicans and Democrats alike.

20 Causes of Political Indifference

IIThe effect of these political disharmonies is to

bewilder the electorate and to make the voters feelthat politics is an elaborate game which has no seri-ous and immediate consequences. This bewildermentmanifests itself as complacency or as cynicism. Since1920 the country has witnessed brazen and expen-sive corruption. In the amount of money involvedthe corruption is without parallel in our history.In its sordidness it is surely aa bad and probably alittle worse than the scandals of the Grant adminis-tration. This generation has known nothing sodisgraceful as the carryings-on of Fall, Daugherty,and Forbes, nor anything like the Smith primary inIllinois and the Pepper-Vare primary in Pennsyl-vania. Fall has just been brought to trial; Daughertywas brought to trial only three or four months agobecause of the exceptional energy of United StatesAttorney Buckner; the primary scandals were neverrebuked by the leader of the Republican Party. Intheir public speech public men have been as com-placent as possible about it all, and privately theyhave been prepared to explain that "Well—oh, well,you know, politics is a dirty game." Maybe it is.But only a few years ago the country was still naiveenough, was still sentimental enough, to have becomeviolently indignant over a Cabinet officer accused ofbribery. Indignation of this sort we have not knownduring these last few years. That, too, perhaps helps

Causes of Political Indifference 21to explain why the interest in politics is at such lowebb, and why voting is not looked upon as such avery high duty. The impression has gone out fromthe White House that there is no use caring toomuch whether public officials are honest or whetherelections are bought.

This persistent dampening down of popularinterest in popular government has been the calcu-lated policy of Mr. Coolidge ever since he becamePresident. The reason given for it is that nothingmust be done to distract business. The other reasonfor it, not given, but perfectly well understood, isthat it is good politics when you are in power todiscourage all manifestations of discontent. Mr.Coolidge is not exactly an ardent spirit. He iscontented with little things; he is hardly suited tolarge thoughts and large deeds. He has notattempted them. On the contrary he has devotedhimself to encouraging the people to turn their eyesaway from the government. In peaceful, prosperoustimes not much encouragement is needed. Publicspirit is at best a fragile thing when it comes intocompetition with the urgent demands of our privatelives for money, for power, and for pleasure. Soit has not been difficult for Mr. Coolidge to persuadethe country that it need not take a vivid interest inpublic affairs.

III

Yet neither the personality of Mr. Coolidge nor

22 Causes of Political Indifferencethe very special political strategy which he adoptedwill by itself account for the lethargy of spiritwhich has prevailed during his administration.Under different circumstances the virtues of Mr.Coolidge would almost certainly have been lookedupon as vices. Mr. Coolidge has been praised forfailing to lead Congress, for failing to lead hisparty, for refusing to become indignant at abuses,for not having a positive policy and a constructiveprogram. He would not have received this praisehad the country not been in the mood for a negativeadministration.

It is the fashion to explain this mood by sayingthat after all the tall talk heard under Rooseveltand Wilson the country was exhausted emotionallyand needed a rest. It had had its fill of idealism, ofprophecy, of adventure, and of public action. Itneeded to forget Washington and the White Houseand the President, and tend to its private affairs.There is something in this explanation, of course,as there is also in the theory that the war broughta deep disenchantment with politicians, policies, andwith what used to be called "progressivism." Butall these explanations are obviously incomplete. Forwhen you have said that men were tired of publicaffairs you have still to explain why, being tired ofpublic affairs, they are able to indulge themselvesby neglecting public affairs.

With this question we come, I think, nearer to theroot of the matter. The American people, since the

Causes of Political Indifference 23industrial recovery of 1922, have enjoyed an amazingprosperity. Except here and there in a few spotsthere has been such a surplus of wealth that prac-tically the whole people have raised their standard oflife. It was obvious that the opportunities to makemoney were so ample that it was a waste of time tothink about politics. Nothing a man could hope togain by voting for politicians, and by agitating forlaws, was likely to be half so profitable as what hecould make by participating in the boom.

The interested motives which are the driving forceof political agitation were diverted to direct profitmaking. Now progressivism, as we have known it inthe past, has arisen out of the belief of the debtors,the employees, the consumers, the farmers, thatthey could by changing the laws obtain a largershare of the national income. With the stupendoussurplus available these last years, it has seemed tomost men quicker and easier to go out and makemoney than to work through the cumbersome,indirect processes of political action. Thus therehas been no political discontent, except in a fewfarming states where the new surplus of wealth wasnot available, and where in consequence the old pro-gressive motives and traditions survived. Thecommon people looked to Roosevelt and to Wilson(before 1914) for relief from poverty and economicservitude. They did not look to Mr. Coolidge forrelief because they were finding it by themselves. Iam not attempting to say, of course, how real or how

24 Causes of Political Indifferencepermanent is this relief; the fact which counts isthat from about 1922 on almost everybody has hadthe feeling that he had a lot of money in his pocket,and would soon have more. It was this feelingwhich robbed progressive idealism of its urgency,and made it appear abstract and unimportant.

Together with this diffused prosperity, I shouldset down as a fundamental cause of political indif-ference the rise of what may be called the NewCapitalism. There is no doubt that the large cor-porations are now under the control of a verydifferent kind of man than they were when Rooseveltand Bryan and LaFollette were on the warpath.The new executive has learned a great deal that hispredecessor would have thought was tommyrot. Hisattitude toward labor, toward the public, towardhis customers and his stockholders, is different. Hisbehavior is different. His manner is different.His press agents are different. I am far fromthinking he is perfect even now, but I am cer-tain that he is vastly more enlightened and thathe will take ever so much more trouble to please.He is no doubt as powerful as he ever was, but hisbearing is less autocratic. He does not arouse theold antagonism, the old bitter-end fury, the oldfeeling that he has to be clubbed into a sense ofpublic responsibility. He will listen to an argumentwhere formerly he was deaf to an agitation.

Whatever may be the intrinsic good and evil ofsuch things as the wide distribution of securities,

Causes of Political Indifference 25however questionable may be some of the practicesto which Professor Ripley has called attention,the net result of the new attitude on the partof capital has been to create a new attitude onthe part of the public. The press agents of thecorporations have been told to woo the public,and their wooing has been successful. Suspicion hasdied down. Yet here again we must recognize thatit would not have died down if capitalism as weknow it were not making most people feel quitecomfortably well off.

During the last four years the actual prosperityof the people, combined with the greater enlighten-ment of the industrial leaders, has removed frompolitics all serious economic causes of agitation.There has been no pressing reason for an alignmentof 'haves' and of 'have nots,' and no reader ofhistory needs to be told that when you removeeconomic discontent you remove what is certainlythe greatest cause, if it is not the mainspring, ofpolitical activity. Politics carried on for justice, forliberty, for prestige, is never more than the affair ofa minority. For the great majority of men politicalideals are almost always based upon and inspiredby some kind of economic necessity and ambition.

These circumstances account for the striking dif-ferences between European and American politics.The European finance ministers have had to strugglewith deficits, ours with a surplus; they have had toimpose taxes, ours to reduce taxes. The European

26 Causes of Political Indifferencenations have had to borrow, we to lend; they todevise means of payment, we to find ways of receiv-ing payments. They have had to struggle to raisea low standard of living, and we to protect a highstandard. They have had to reconstruct and restore;we have had only to perfect and expand. To Euro-peans, therefore, the American situation has seemedalmost idyllic, and there has appeared a great litera-ture in Europe which discusses the Americaneconomic system, often with admiration, sometimeswith envy, always with the implication that it is oneof the most extraordinary phenomena in history.Here in the United States during the last few yearscapitalism has worked in a way which confoundsthose who, like most educated Europeans, werebrought up to think of it according to the socialisticformula, as an industrial system destined soon tobe superseded by some kind of collectivism. Eventshave taken a wholly unexpected turn in the UnitedStates, and the advanced thinker here and abroadsuddenly finds that he is no longer advanced. Hisdescriptions, his analyses, his programs — allassume a different course of evolution. The moreor less unconscious and unplanned activities of busi-ness men are for once more novel, more daring, andin a sense more revolutionary, than the theories ofthe progressives. Action has moved faster thanthought in these last few years, and practice is aheadof the programs.

This lag in the development of theory has had

Causes of Political Indifference 27a curious effect on political discussion. Publicspeakers, if they are conservative, will usually befound defending practices that their supposed clientsare rapidly abandoning; if they are progressive, theywill be found rather wearily and half-heartedlyrepeating the charges and the idealisms that werecurrent a decade ago. The real industrial develop-ment of the day, with its momentous social conse-quences, hardly figures at all in public discussion. Thephilosophy of it is not yet understood; we have notyet learned how to talk about it. The good and theevil it contains have not yet been registered andassayed. And as a result most public controversyseems not so much like hot air as stale air. Withoutknowing just why, most of us feel, I think, that thecurrent conservatism and progressivism are irrele-vant. They do not satisfy our minds or grip ouremotions.

IV

The questions which really engage the emotions ofthe masses of the people are of a quite differentorder. They manifest themselves in the controversiesover prohibition, the Ku Klux Klan, Romanism,fundamentalism, immigration. These, rather thanthe tariff, taxation, credit, and corporate control,are the issues which divide the American people.These are the issues they care about. They are justbeneath the surface of political discussion. In theorythey are not supposed to be issues. The party plat-

28 Causes of Political Indifferenceforms and the official pronouncements deal withthem obliquely, if at all. But they are the issuesmen talk about privately, and they are the issuesabout which people have deep personal feelings.

These questions are diverse, but they all arise outof the same general circumstances. They arise outof the great migration of the last fifty years, out ofthe growth of cities, and out of the spread of thatrationalism and of the deepening of that breach withtradition which invariably accompany the develop-ment of a metropolitan civilization. Prohibition,the Ku Klux Klan, fundamentalism, and xenophobiaare an extreme but authentic expression of thepolitics, the social outlook, and the religion of theolder American village civilization making its laststand against what looks to it like an alien invasion.The alien invasion is in fact the new America pro-duced by the growth and the prosperity of America.

The evil which the old-fashioned preachers ascribeto the Pope, to Babylon, to atheists, and to thedevil, is simply the new urban civilization, with itsirresistible economic and scientific and mass power.The Pope, the devil, jazz, the bootleggers, are amythology which expresses symbolically the impactof a vast and dreaded social change. The changeis real enough. The language in which it is dis-cussed is preposterous only as all mythology ispreposterous if you accept it literally. The myth-ology of the Ku Klux Klan is a kind of primitivescience, an animistic and dramatized projection of

Causes of Political Indifference 29the fears of a large section of our people who haveyet to accommodate themselves to the strange newsocial order which has arisen among them.

This new social order is dominated by metro-politan cities of which New York is the largest andmost highly developed. Therefore New York hasbecome the symbol of all that is most wicked andof all that is most alluring in modern America. ButNew York to-day is only what Chicago, St. Louis,Detroit, Cleveland, Jacksonville, and Miami expectto be to-morrow. It is the seat of a vast population,mixed in its origins, uncertain of its social status,rather vague about the moral code. In these metro-politan centers the ancient social bonds are loosened.The patriarchal family, the well-established socialhierarchy, the old roots of belief, and the groovesof custom are all obscured by new human relation-ships based on a certain kind of personal independ-ence, on individual experiment and adventure, whichare yet somehow deeply controlled by fads andfashions and great mass movements.

The campaign in certain localities to forbid theteaching of "Darwinism" is an attempt to stem thetide of the metropolitan spirit, to erect a spiritualtariff against an alien rationalism which threatensto dissolve the mores of the village civilization. Tomany of us the effort seems quixotic, as indeed it is,judged by the intellectual standards of metropolitanlife. But if we look at the matter objectively, dis-regarding the petty mannerisms of the movement,

3O Causes of Political Indifferencethere is a pathos about it which always adheres tothe last struggle of an authentic type of humanliving. The anti-evolutionists are usually less charm-ing than Don Quixote. Perhaps that is becausethey have not been transfigured by an artist. Theyare at any rate fighting for the memory of a civiliza-tion which in its own heyday, and by its own criteria,was as valid as any other.

The anti-evolution bills are, of course, a compara-tively trivial symptom of this profound maladjust-ment. The overt struggle turns politically on twoquestions: on the Eighteenth Amendment and on thenomination of Governor Alfred E. Smith. Thestruggle over these two issues implicates all theantagonisms between the older America and the new.The Eighteenth Amendment is a piece of legislationembodied in the Constitution which attempts toimpose the moral ideals of the villages upon thewhole nation. The force behind the EighteenthAmendment is the Anti-Saloon League, which is thepolitical arm of the evangelical churches in the smallcommunities. The financial and political strength ofthe Anti-Saloon League is derived from the membersof these churches, chiefly Methodist and Baptist,with other denominations divided but followingthese militant sects. And the strength of these sectsin the last analysis arises from the spiritual isolationof communities which have not yet been radicallyinvaded by the metropolitan spirit.

The defense of the Eighteenth Amendment has,

Causes of Political Indifference 31therefore, become much more than a mere questionof regulating the liquor traffic. It involves a testof strength between social orders, and when thattest is concluded, and if, as seems probable, theAmendment breaks down, the fall will bring downwith it the dominion of the older civilization. TheEighteenth Amendment is the rock on which theevangelical church militant is founded, and with itare involved a whole way of life and an ancienttradition. The overcoming of the EighteenthAmendment would mean the emergence of the citiesas the dominant force in America, dominant politi-cally and socially as they are already dominanteconomically.

V

The alignment of the new cities against the oldervillages traverses the nominal political alignment ofthe two great parties. In New York State, forexample, the Republican Party as a state organiza-tion is divided and broken. There is much morecommunity of thought and feeling between Repub-licans and Democrats in New York City, in Buffalo,Rochester, Syracuse, and Albany, than there isbetween the urban and the rural Republicans. Theunity of the Republican Party in New York is likethe unity of the Democrats in the nation: a unity ofpoliticians interested in offices supplemented by theprestige of a name and a tradition. There is nounity of interest, of principle, or of program.

32 Causes of Political IndifferenceA similar condition exists in almost every state

where there are powerful cities—in Massachusettsfor Boston, in Pennsylvania for Pittsburgh andPhiladelphia, in Ohio for Cleveland and Cincinnati,in Illinois for Chicago, in New Jersey for that urbanconglomeration known as Hudson County, in Mis-souri for St. Louis. Both parties are cracking underthe strain. Both maintain the appearance of unityby political deals and the compromise of principles.The well-known fact that parties have become mean-ingless is due to this internal division. They darenot take definite positions for fear of alienating oneor the other of their irreconcilable factions.

For reasons which are not altogether clear theconflict has first become overt in the DemocraticParty. The convention of 1924 was the scene of thefirst great, though inconclusive, phase of the struggle.All the signs indicate that the next phase, in 1928,will be at least as sharp and perhaps more decisive.In 1924 the urban democracy rallied around Gover-nor Smith of New York, the village democracyaround Mr. McAdoo. The urban Democrats in1924 controlled a little more than one third of thatconvention. Since 1924 they have gained instrength and by 1928 they should control at leasthalf of the convention. This change of their posi-tion from a minority to a majority faction is not dueto the personality or to the leadership of GovernorSmith. It is due to a growth of self-consciousnesswhich is developing the latent strength of the city

Causes of Political Indifference 33electorates. They are beginning to feel their oats.They are throwing off their sense of inferiority.They are beginning to demand the recognition whichis due their intrinsic importance.

The outcome of the struggle within the Demo-cratic Party is, of course, obscure. One can becertain of nothing except that the rapid growth ofthe cities at the expense of the countryside is boundat last to result in the political domination of thecities. This may come soon. It may be somewhatdelayed. It will come. The first great result maybe the disunion of the Democratic Party and perhapseven the rupture of the Solid South. If that is theresult the ascendancy of the Republicans may betemporarily confirmed, but it will be followed almostcertainly by a realignment of Republicans as well asof Democrats.

For the two parties live by taking in each other'swashing. The unity of the one is dependent uponthe unity of the other. The grip of the Easternindustrial Republicans on the national organizationrests at last on the fact that in the South there is aRepublican machine but no Republican electorate.If ever the South should break away from the Demo-crats, a Republican Party would appear in the South.The appearance of a Republican Party in the Southwould make the South as unmanageable to theRepublicans of the Northeast as the RepublicanParty of the West now is.

These prospects are not alluring to men whose

34 Causes of Political Indifferencelives arc bound up with the existing party system.They promise nothing but trouble for them person-ally. They call for an effort of thought which isdistressing, and they open up issues for whichpolitical leaders, trained between 1890 and 1910,are not prepared. It is not surprising, then, thatour political leaders are greatly occupied in dampen-ing down interest, in obscuring issues, and inattempting to distract attention from the realities ofAmerican life.

February, 1927.

THE CATHOLICISM OF AL SMITH

I

F OR more than a century most Americans havebelieved both that a religion was no test ofa man's fitness for public office and that only a

Protestant should be elected President of the UnitedStates. This paradox has often been noticed, butuntil about the year 1923 it was a merely theoreticaldifficulty without practical importance. For untilafter the second election of Governor Smith therehad never been a serious contender for the Presi-dency who was not a Protestant.

Since the rise of Smith, desperate efforts have beenmade by Democratic politicians to find some way ofavoiding a direct test of the question whether aCatholic is eligible to be President. They havepointed out that he is a wet, that he belongs to Tam-many Hall, that he is a cockney. But these objec-tions however sincere and weighty have beenregarded by the mass of people as unreal. Protes-tants and Catholics alike have felt in their bones thatany Democrat who can be elected Governor of NewYork four times would under ordinary circumstances

35

36 The Catholicism of Al Smithhave an irresistible attraction for the politicians.They may cross their hearts and say that they haveno objection to Governor Smith's Catholicism, andthey may even think they mean it, and yet they willnot be believed. Governor Smith is so clearly avail-able by every conventional test, except that of hisreligion, that the conviction has now become set,among the newer Americans of the cities, and isnow, I think, irremovable that his Catholicism alonestands in the way of his nomination. They maymisunderstand the deeper sources of the oppositionto Smith as an incarnation of the city, but their mis-understanding is nevertheless a fact of dominatingimportance.

Since the Catholic voters are a predominant partof the Democratic Party outside of the South, thequestion of Smith's nomination has become one oflife and death to the party. He cannot be rejectedwithout alienating an absolutely essential part of thevotes on which the only possible chance of a Demo-cratic victory depends. There are now some twentymillion Catholics in the United States. They areno longer, as they were a generation ago, largelyconfined to a class who do the menial work and donot have to be taken into account in the governmentof the country. They are a substantial and powerfulpart of the electorate, and few of them are in amood to acquiesce under a concrete test in theunwritten law that they are second-class citizens whocannot aspire, no matter what their other qualifica-tions, to the highest office in the land.

The Catholicism of Al Smith 37These are the circumstances, roughly, which have

made Mr. Marshall's open letter in the AtlanticMonthly, and Governor Smith's reply, an event ofsuch historic importance. Mr. Marshall on hisside formulated in the shape of a documented argu-ment the inarticulate fear which inspires the oldAmerican tradition against allowing a Catholic tobecome President. In effect he summarized whatremains in the modern world of the medieval claimof the Church to temporal power. The Governor onhis side made a declaration of belief as an AmericanCatholic which amounts to a complete disavowal ofthe medieval theory of the Church's power. In thisdisavowal he claimed to speak for American Catho-lics, and prelates qualified to speak for the Americanhierarchy have publicly approved his utterances. Thenet result of the correspondence, therefore, has beento make articulate, definite, and formal the separa-tion, in questions of polity, between the mass ofAmerican Catholics and the historic claims of theRoman Church. There are precedents in the historyof American Catholicism for the position which theGovernor has taken. But never has the distinctionbetween Catholicism in twentieth century Americaand the Catholicism of the Middle Ages been statedwith such unqualified clearness.

II

The momentous character of Governor Smith'sdeclaration can be understood only by realizing

38 The Catholicism of Al Smithexactly what was the question Mr. Marshall putto him and exactly what was his answer. Mr.Marshall's argument can be compressed into verysimple form. The Roman Catholic Church teachesin the words of Pope Leo XIII that "the Almightyhas appointed the charge of the human race betweentwo powers, the ecclesiastical and the civil, the onebeing set over divine, the other over human things."But who, asks Mr. Marshall, shall decide what arethe divine and what the human things? He thencites Pope Pius IX who said "to say in the case ofconflicting laws enacted by Two Powers (i.e. civiland ecclesiastical), the civil law prevails, is error."Against this he cites the decision of the SupremeCourt (Watson vs. Jones) that religious liberty inAmerica is qualified because religious "practicesinconsistent with the peace and safety of the Stateshall not be justified." And from this he argues thatsince the Roman Church claims the right to decidewhat things are within its jurisdiction, whereas theAmerican theory makes the civil power the judgeof its own jurisdiction, no faithful Catholic cangive unreserved allegiance to the civil power inAmerica.

The argument comes down then to this crucialpoint: suppose the Church claimed that a questionaffecting education or marriage or foreign affairswas to be determined by the principles of the RomanChurch, and suppose the executive, legislature, andcourts of the United States claimed that the question

The Catholicism of Al Smith 39was to be determined by them, which authority, theecclesiastical or the civil, would Governor Smith orany other good Catholic recognize as final?

Governor Smith's reply, which avowedly wasmade after consultation with priests of his Church,is as follows:

". . . In the wildest dreams of your imaginationyou cannot conjure up a possible conflict betweenreligious principle and political duty in the UnitedStates, except on the unthinkable hypothesis thatsome law were to be passed which violated the com-mon morality of all God-fearing men. If youconjure up such a conflict how would a Protestantresolve it? Obviously by the dictates of his con-science. That is exactly what a Catholic would do.There is no ecclesiastical tribunal which would havethe slightest claim upon the obedience of Catholiccommunicants in the resolution of such a conflict."

Governor Smith's answer to the fundamental ques-tion as to which jurisdiction he would recognize asfinal is that he would follow the dictates of his ownconscience in each particular case. This is a veryfar-reaching declaration. It amounts to saying thatthere is an authority higher than the utterances ofthe Church or the law of the land, namely "thecommon morality of all God-fearing men," and thatthe conscience of Alfred E. Smith, and of everyother individual, is the final interpreter of whetherthat common morality has been violated.

4O The Catholicism of Al SmithIf Governor Smith were not a Catholic in good

standing, if the reply had not been made with theapproval of members in good standing of theCatholic hierarchy, one would be tempted to say thathe has avowed the essential Protestant doctrine ofthe right of private judgment in all matters whereany secular interest was involved. But said by him,under these extraordinary circumstances, buttressedwith citations from American Catholic prelates,there is only one possible conclusion which can bereached: it is that for American Catholics there isabsolutely no distinction between their attitude andthe attitude of Protestants. The ultimate authority,says Governor Smith, is conscience. He makes noqualifications. He does not say conscience asauthoritatively guided by the Pope; on the con-trary, he says, quite explicitly, that the guidance ofthe Pope is to be judged, wherever a secular interestis affected, by the determinations of conscience.Citing Archbishop Ireland on "the Church's attitudetoward the State," he affirms that "both American-ism and Catholicism bow to the sway of personalconscience."

If any form of words could put an end to soancient and deep-seated a controversy as that betweenProtestantism and Catholicism, this avowal woulddo it. For the deep Protestant fear that Catholicssubmit their consciences to an alien power with itsseat in Rome is here answered by the radical asser-tion that for American Catholics their consciences

The Catholicism of Al Smith 41are a higher authority than their Catholicism. I callit a radical assertion, for there is little doubt thatGovernor Smith in adopting Archbishop Ireland'sstatement has aligned himself unqualifiedly with thatwing of his Church which is furthest removed fromthe medieval ideal of a truly catholic and whollyauthoritative synthesis of all human interests.Governor Smith is the latest, and by no means theleast, of a long line of Catholics who have whollyforgotten, indeed may never even have heard of,what the Church conceived itself to be in the days ofits greatest worldly splendor and ambitions. Cer-tainly one detects in him no lingering trace of theidea, speculatively at least so magnificent even tothose who, like this writer, were not reared in theCatholic tradition—the idea of Catholicism not asa religious sect but as a civilization. The Catholi-cism of Governor Smith is the typical modernpost-reformation nationalistic religious loyalty inwhich the Church occupies a distinct and closelycompartmented section of an otherwise secular life.

The position of American Catholics like GovernorSmith is very close to being what J. N. Figgis calls"the final stage in that transposition of the spheresof Church and State which is, roughly speaking, thenet result of the Reformation." For "in the MiddleAges the Church was not a State, it was the State;the State or rather the civil authority [for a separatesociety was not recognized] was merely the policedepartment of the Church. The latter took over

42 The Catholicism of Al Smithfrom the Roman Empire its theory of the absoluteand universal jurisdiction of the supreme authority,and developed it into the doctrine of the plenitudopotestatis of the Pope, who was the supreme dis-penser of law, the fountain of honor, including regalhonor, and the sole legitimate earthly source ofpower . . . the supreme 'judge and divider' amongnations, the guardian of international right, theavenger of Christian blood. All these functionshave passed elsewhere, and the theory of omnipo-tence, which the Popes held on the plea that anyaction might come under their cognizance so far as itconcerned morality, has now been assumed by theState on the analogous theory that any action, reli-gious or otherwise, so far as it becomes a matter ofmoney, or contract, must be matter for the courts."

I said that the position occupied by GovernorSmith came very close to being that of this "finalstage" in modern development where the omnipo-tence of the State is substituted for the medievalomnipotence of the Church. It is not quite clearjust what is Mr. Marshall's position, although itseems to me to imply that "Americanism" means theabsolute supremacy of the civil power in all matterswhich the civil power chooses to consider as withinits jurisdiction. If this is what Mr. Marshall reallythinks, it is not what Governor Smith thinks. Forthe Governor puts his personal conscience above thesecular claims both of Church and State, and deniesthe absolute jurisdiction of both.

This, I venture to believe, is not only a sounder

The Catholicism of Al Smith 43Americanism in the historic meaning of that term,but a more truly enlightened and civilized doctrinethan that which is now so widely preached to justifythe idolatry of the political state. For it is allvery well to argue that the Church of Rome shallnot have the last word in deciding what things menshall render unto Caesar, and what to God. But itwould be a sinister philosophy indeed which went onto say that Caesar must have the last word as towhat things belong to Caesar, and what to God. Thisis just as real a dilemma, in many ways it is a morepractical dilemma, than any with which Mr. Mar-shall confronts Catholics. Does Mr. Marshall claimthat the political state must be as absolute to-day asthe Church claimed to be in the Middle Ages ? Hissilence implies that he is not disposed to examinethe credentials of Caesar. Yet I doubt whetherafter consideration Mr. Marshall would finally saythat Americanism requires that a man shall sur-render to Caesar, acting through popular and legisla-tive majorities, through proletarian dictatorships orplutocracies, dominion over all the interests of life.

III

For this idolatry of the political state is merely abarbarous Machiavellianism which afflicts the mod-ern world and finds its ultimate logical expressionin communism and in fascism. The founders ofthe American Republic had seen all they cared to seeof the absolute civil power. When they founded agovernment they conceived its powers as limited and

44 The Catholicism of Al Smithderived, and they would have been horrified at thenotion, now so common that it is apparently a com-monplace to Mr. Marshall, that the United StatesGovernment had a jurisdiction so absolute that itcould define the extent of its jurisdiction.

Governor Smith in pointing out that "conscience"is superior both to Catholicism and Americanism iscloser to the spirit of the founders of the Republicthan Mr. Marshall who assumes, at least by implica-tion, that Americanism must mean the superiority ofAmericanism to any religious teaching, and to anyconception of morals. Governor Smith is not onlymore truly American in the historic sense of theword, but he is more enlightened in his premises.For in denying the temporal power of the Pope, hedoes not fall into the very easy error of attributinguniversal power to the State. He leaves the questionof civil obedience where it must always remain in acomplicated world for any man who is neither afanatic nor a theorist; to adjustment in specific casesby the conscience of the individual acting upon theevidence before it. And by leaving it there he putsupon the civil power and the ecclesiastical alike theburden, which ought always to be theirs, of justifyingthemselves continually in practice to whatever wis-dom there may be in the consciences of men.

May, 1927.

BRYAN AND THE DOGMA OF MAJORITYRULE

D URING the Dayton trial there was much dis-cussion about what had happened to Mr.Bryan. How had a progressive democrat

become so illiberal? How did it happen that theleader of the hosts of progress in 1896 was theleader of the hosts of darkness in 1925 ?

It was said that he had grown old. It was saidthat he was running for President. It was said thathe had the ambition to lead an uprising of funda-mentalists and prohibitionists. It was said that hewas a beaten orator who had found his last applaud-ing audience in the backwoods. And it was saidthat he had undergone a passionate religious con-version.

No matter whether the comment was charitableor malicious, it was always an explanation. There

45

46 Bryanwas always the assumption that Mr. Bryan hadchanged, and that, in changing, he had departed fromthe cardinal tenets of his political faith. Mr. Bryanvehemently denied this and, on reflection, I am nowinclined to think he was right. We were too hasty.Mr. Bryan's career was more logical and of a piecethan it looked. There was no such contradiction,as most of us assumed, in the spectacle of the GreatCommoner fighting for the legal suppression ofscientific teaching.

He argued that a majority of the voters in Ten-nessee had the right to decide what should be taughtin their schools. He had always argued that amajority had the right to decide. He had insisted ontheir right to decide on war and peace, on their rightto regulate morals, on their right to make andunmake laws and lawmakers and executives andjudges. He had fought to extend the suffrage sothat the largest possible majority might help todecide; he had fought for the direct election of sen-ators, for the initiative and referendum and directprimary, and for every other device which wouldpermit the people to rule. He had always insistedthat the people should rule. And he had neverqualified this faith by saying what they should ruleand how. It was no great transformation ofthought, and certainly it was not for him an aban-donment of principle to say that, if a majority inTennessee was fundamentalist, then the public

Dogma of Majority Rule 47schools in Tennessee should be conducted on funda-mentalist principles.

To question this right of the majority would haveseemed to him as heretical as to question the funda-mentalist creed. Mr. Bryan was as true to hispolitical as he was to his religious faith. He hadalways believed in the sanctity of the text of theBible. He had always believed that a majority ofthe people should rule. Here in Tennessee was amajority which believed in the sanctity of the text.To lead this majority was the logical climax of hiscareer, and he died fighting for a cause in which thetwo great dogmas of his life were both at stake.

Given his two premises, I do not see how it ispossible to escape his conclusions. If every word ofthe first chapter of Genesis is directly inspired by anomniscient and omnipotent God, then there is nohonest way of accepting what scientists teach aboutthe origin of man. And if the doctrine of majorityrule is based on the eternal and inherent rights ofman, then it is the only true basis of government,and there can be no fair objections to the moral basisof a law made by a fundamentalist majority inTennessee. It is no answer to Mr. Bryan to say thatthe law is absurd, obscurantist, and reactionary. Itfollows from his premises, and it can be attackedradically only by attacking his premises.

This first premise—that the text of the Bible waswritten, as John Donne put it, by the Secretaries of

48 Bryanthe Holy Ghost—I shall not attempt to discuss here.There exists a vast literature of criticism. I aminterested in his second premise: that the majority isof right sovereign in all things. And here the posi-tion is quite different. There is a literature ofdissent and of satire and denunciation. But thereexists no carefully worked-out higher criticism of adogma which, in theory at least, constitutes thefundamental principle of nearly every governmentin the Western World. On the contrary, the maineffort of political thinkers during the last few genera-tions has been devoted to vindicating the rights ofmasses of men against the vested rights of clerics andkings and nobles and men of property. There hasbeen a running counter attack from those who dis-trusted the people, or had some interest in opposingtheir enfranchisement, but I do not know of anyserious attempt to reach a clear understanding ofwhere and when the majority principle applies.

Mr. Bryan applied it absolutely at Dayton, andthereby did a service to democratic thinking. For hereduced to absurdity a dogma which had been heldcarelessly but almost universally, and thus demon-strated that it was time to reconsider the premisesof the democratic faith. Those who believed indemocracy have always assumed that the majorityshould rule. They have assumed that, even if themajority is not wise, it is on the road to wisdom,and that with sufficient education the people wouldlearn how to rule. But in Tennessee the people

Dogma of Majority Rule 49used their power to prevent their own children fromlearning, not merely the doctrine of evolution, butthe spirit and method by which learning is possible.They had used their right to rule in order to weakenthe agency which they had set up in order that theymight learn how to rule. They had founded populargovernment on the faith in popular education, andthey had used the prerogatives of democracy todestroy the hopes of democracy.

After this demonstration in Tennessee it was nolonger possible to doubt that the dogma of majorityrule contains within it some sort of deep and destruc-tive confusion.

II

In exploring this dogma it will be best to begin atthe very beginning with the primitive intuition fromwhich the whole democratic view of life is derived.It is a feeling of ultimate equality and fellowshipwith all other creatures.

There is no worldly sense in this feeling, for it isreasoned from the heart: "there you are, sir, andthere is your neighbor. You are better born than he,you are richer, you are stronger, you are handsomer,nay, you are better, wiser, kinder, more likable; youhave given more to your fellow men and taken lessthan he. By any and every test of intelligence, ofvirtue, of usefulness, you are demonstrably a betterman than he, and yet—absurd as it sounds—thesedifferences do not matter, for the last part of him

50 Bryanis untouchable and incomparable and unique anduniversal." Either you feel this or you do not;when you do not feel it, the superiorities that theworld acknowledges seem like mountainous waves atsea; when you do feel it they are slight and imperma-nent ripples upon a vast ocean. Men were possessedby this feeling long before they had imagined thepossibility of democratic government. They spokeof it in many ways, but the essential quality of feelingis the same from Buddha to St. Francis to Whitman.

There is no way of proving the doctrine that allsouls are precious in the eyes of God, or, as DeanInge recently put it, that "the personality of everyman and woman is sacred and inviolable." The doc-trine proceeds from a mystical intuition. There isfelt to be a spiritual reality behind and independentof the visible character and behavior of a man. Wehave no scientific evidence that this reality exists, andin the nature of things we can have none. But weknow, each of us, in a way too certain for doubting,that, after all the weighing and comparing and judg-ing of us is done, there is something left over whichis the heart of the matter. Hence our convictionwhen we ourselves are judged that mercy is morejust than justice. When we know the facts as wecan know only the facts about ourselves, there issomething too coarse in all the concepts of theintelligence and something too rough in all thestandards of morality. The judgments of men fallupon behavior. They may be necessary judgments,

Dogma of Majority Rule 51but we do not believe they are final. There is some-thing else, which is inadmissible, perhaps, asevidence in this world, which would weigh mightilybefore divine justice.

Each of us knows that of himself, and some attrib-ute the same reserved value to others. Somenatures with a genius for sympathy extend it toevery one they know and can imagine; others canbarely project it to their wives and children. Buteven though few really have this sympathy with allmen, there is enough of it abroad, reenforced per-haps with each man's dread of his fate in theunknown, to establish the doctrine rather generally.So we execute the murderer, but out of respect for aninviolable part of him we allow him the consola-tion of a priest and we bury him respectfully whenhe is dead. For we believe that, however terriblewas his conduct, there is in him, nevertheless, thoughno human mind can detect it, a final quality whichmakes him part of our own destiny in the universe.

I can think of no inherent reason why men shouldentertain this mystical respect for other men. But itis easy to show how much that we find best in theworld would be lost if the sense of equality and fel-lowship were lost. If we judged and were judged byour visible behavior alone, the inner defenses ofcivility and friendship and enduring love would bebreached. Outward conduct is not good enough toendure a cold and steady analysis. Only an animalaffection becomes habitual and reflected in mystical

52 Bryanrespect can blind people sufficiently to our faults.They would not like us enough to pardon us if allthey had to go on was a strict behaviorist account ofour conduct. They must reach deeper, blindly andconfidently, to something which they know is likablealthough they do not know why. Otherwise theinequalities of men would be intolerable. Thestrong, the clever, the beautiful, the competent, andthe good would make life miserable for theirneighbors. They would be unbearable with theirsuperiorities, and they would find unbearable thesense of inferiority they implanted in others. Therewould be no term upon the arrogance of the success-ful and the envy of the defeated. For without themystic sense of equality the obvious inequalitieswould seem unalterable.

These temporal differences are seen in perspectiveby the doctrine that in the light of eternity there areno differences at all.

III

It is not possible for most of us, however, toconsider anything very clearly or steadily in the lightof eternity. The doctrine of ultimate human equalitycannot be tested in human experience; it rests on afaith which transcends experience. That is why thosewho understood the doctrine have always beenascetic; they ignored or renounced worldly goodsand worldly standards. These things belonged to

Dogma of Majority Rule 53Caesar. The mystical democrat did not say thatthey should not belong to Caesar; he said that theywould be of no use to Caesar ultimately, and that,therefore, they were not to be taken seriouslynow.

But in the reception of this subtle argument theessential reservation was soon obscured. The mys-tics were preaching equality only to those men whohad renounced their carnal appetites; they were wel-comed as preachers of equality in this world. Thusthe doctrine that I am as good as you in eternity,because all the standards of goodness are finite andtemporary, was converted into the doctrine that Iam as good as you are in this world by this world'sstandards. The mystics had attained a sense ofequality by transcending and renouncing all thestandards with which we measure inequality. Thepopulace retained its appetites and its standards andthen sought to deny the inequalities which they pro-duced and revealed.

The mystical democrat had said, "gold andprecious stones are of no account"; the literaldemocrat understood him to say that everybodyought to have gold and precious stones. The mys-tical democrat had said, "beauty is only skin deep";and the literal democrat preened himself and said, "Ialways suspected I was as handsome as you."Reason, intelligence, learning, wisdom, dealt for themystic only with passing events in a temporal world

54 Bryanand could help men little to fathom the ultimatemeaning of creation; to the literal democrat thisincapacity of reason was evidence that one man'snotion was intrinsically as good as another's.

Thus the primitive intuition of democracy becamethe animus of a philosophy which denied that therecould be an order of values among men. Anyopinion, any taste, any action was intrinsically asgood as any other. Each stands on its own bottomand guarantees itself. If I feel strongly about it,it is right; there is no other test. It is right not onlyas against your opinion, but against my own opinions,about which I no longer feel so strongly. Thereis no arbitrament by which the relative value ofopinions is determined. They are all free, they areall equal, all have the same rights and powers.

Since no value can be placed upon an opinion,there is no way in this philosophy of decidingbetween opinions except to count them. Thus themystical sense of equality was translated to mean inpractice that two minds are better than one mindand two souls better than one soul. Your truemystic would be horrified at the notion that you canadd up souls and that the greater number is superiorto the lesser. To him souls are imponderable andincommensurable; that is the only sense in whichthey are truly equal. And yet in the name of thatsense of equality which he attains by denying thatthe worth of a soul can be measured, the worldlydemocrats have made the mere counting of souls

Dogma of Majority Rule 55the final arbiter of all worth. It is a curious mis-understanding; Mr. Bryan brought it into high reliefduring the Tennessee case. The spiritual doctrinethat all men will stand at last equal before the throneof God meant to him that all men are equally goodbiologists before the ballot box of Tennessee. Thatkind of democracy is quite evidently a gross material-ization of an idea that in essence cannot bematerialized. It is a confusing interchange of twoworlds that are not interchangeable.

IV

Although the principle of majority rule derives acertain sanctity from the mystical sense of equality,it is really quite unrelated to it. There is nothing inthe teachings of Jesus or St. Francis which justifiesus in thinking that the opinions of fifty-one percentof a group are better than the opinions of forty-ninepercent. The mystical doctrine of equality ignoresthe standards of the world and recognizes each soulas unique; the principle of majority rule is a devicefor establishing standards of action in this world bythe crude and obvious device of adding up voters.Yet owing to a confusion between the two, themystical doctrine has been brutalized and madeabsurd, and the principle of majority rule hasacquired an unction that protects it from criticism.A mere political expedient, worth using only when itis necessary or demonstrably useful to the conduct

56 Bryanof affairs, has been hallowed by an altogether adven-titious sanctity due to an association of ideas with areligious hope of salvation.

Once we succeed in disentangling this confusion ofideas, it becomes apparent that the principle ofmajority rule is wholly alien to what the humanemystic feels. The rule of the majority is the rule offorce. For while nobody can seriously maintain thatthe greatest number must have the greatest wisdomor the greatest virtue, there is no denying that undermodern social conditions they are likely to have themost power. I say likely to have, for we arereminded by the recent history of Russia and of Italythat organized and armed minorities can under cer-tain circumstances disfranchise the majority. Never-theless, it is a good working premise that in the longrun the greater force resides in the greater number,and what we call a democratic society might bedefined for certain purposes as one in which themajority is always prepared to put down a revolu-tionary minority.

The apologists of democracy have done their bestto dissemble the true nature of majority rule. Theyhave argued that by some mysterious process theopinion to which a majority subscribes is true andrighteous. They have even attempted to endow thesovereign majority with the inspiration of an infalli-ble church and of kings by the grace of God. It wasa natural mistake. Although they saw clearlyenough that the utterances of the church were the

Dogma of Majority Rule 57decisions of the ruling clergy, and that the divineguidance of the king was exercised by his courtiers,they were not prepared to admit that the new sover-eign was a purely temporal ruler. They felt certainthey must ascribe to the majority of the voters thesame supernatural excellence which had alwaysadhered to the traditional rulers. Throughout thenineteenth century, therefore, the people wereflattered and mystified by hearing that deep withina fixed percentage of them there lay the same divineinspiration and the same gifts of revelation whichmen had attributed previously to the establishedauthorities.

And then just as in the past men had invented amythical ancestry for their king, tracing his line backto David or AEneas or Zeus himself, so the min-nesingers of democracy have invented their ownaccount of the rise of popular government. Theclassic legend is to be found in the theory of theSocial Contract, and few nai've democrats are with-out traces of belief in this legend. They imaginethat somehow "the people" got together and estab-lished nations and governments and institutions.Yet the historic record plainly shows that the prog-ress of democracy has consisted in an increasingparticipation of an increasing number of people inthe management of institutions they neither creatednor willed. And the record shows, too, that newnumbers were allowed to participate when they werepowerful enough to force their way in; they were

58 Bryanenfranchised not because "society" sought the bene-fits of their wisdom, and not because "society"wished them to have power; they were enfranchisedbecause they had power, and giving them the votewas the least disturbing way of letting them exercisetheir power. For the principle of majority rule isthe mildest form in which the force of numbers canbe exercised. It is a pacific substitute for civil warin which the opposing armies are counted and thevictory is awarded to the larger before any blood isshed.

Except in the sacred tests of democracy and inthe incantations of the orators, we hardly take thetrouble to pretend that the rule of the majority isnot at bottom a rule of force. What other virtuecan there be in fifty-one percent except the brute factthat fifty-one is more than forty-nine? The rule offifty-one percent is a convenience; it Is for certainmatters a satisfactory political device, it is for othersthe lesser of two evils, and for still others it isacceptable because we do not know any less trouble-some method of obtaining a political decision. Butit may easily become an absurd tyranny if we regardit worshipfully, as though it were more than a polit-ical device. We have lost all sense of its true mean-ing when we imagine that the opinion of fifty-onepercent is in some high fashion the true opinion ofthe whole hundred percent, or indulge in thesophistry that the rule of a majority is based uponthe ultimate equality of man.

Dogma of Majority Rule 59

VAt Dayton Mr. Bryan contended that in schools

supported by the state the majority of the votershad a right to determine what should be taught. Ifmy analysis is correct, there is no fact from whichthat right can be derived except the fact that themajority is stronger than the minority. It cannotbe argued that the majority in Tennessee representedthe whole people of Tennessee; nor that fifty-oneTennesseeans are better than forty-nine Tennessee-ans; nor that they were better biologists, or betterChristians, or better parents, or better Americans.It cannot be said they are necessarily more in tunewith the ultimate judgments of God. All that can besaid for them is that there are more of them, andthat in a world ruled by force it may be necessary todefer to the force they exercise.

When the majority exercises that force to destroythe public schools, the minority may have to yieldfor a time to this force, but there is no reason whythey should accept the result. For the votes of amajority have no intrinsic bearing on the conduct ofa school. They are external facts to be taken intoconsideration like the weather or the hazard of fire.Guidance for a school can come ultimately only fromeducators, and the question of what shall be taughtas biology can be determined only by biologists. Thevotes of a majority do not settle anything here andthey are entitled to no respect whatever. They may

60 Bryanbe right or they may be wrong; there is nothing inthe majority principle which will make them eitherright or wrong. In the conduct of schools, and espe-cially as to the details of the curriculum, the majorityprinciple is an obvious irrelevance. It is not even aconvenient device as it is in the determination say ofwho shall pay the taxes.

VI

But what good is it to deny the competence of themajority when you have admitted that it has thepower to enforce its decisions? I enter this denialmyself because I prefer clarity to confusion, and theascription of wisdom to fifty-one percent seems tome a pernicious confusion. But I do it also becauseI have some hope that the exorcising of the super-stition which has become attached to majority rulewill weaken its hold upon the popular imagination,and tend therefore to keep it within convenientlimits. Mr. Bryan would not have won the logicalvictory he won at Dayton if educated people had notbeen caught in a tangle of ideas which made it seemas if the acknowledgment of the absolutism of themajority was necessary to faith in the final value ofthe human soul. It seems to me that a rigorousuntangling of this confusion might help to arm theminority for a more effective resistance in the future.

March, 1926.

H. L. MENCKEN

A review of his "Notes on Democracy"

HERE in two hundred pages is Mr. Mencken's

philosophy. Here are the premises of thatgargantuan attack upon the habits of the

American nation which has made Mr. Mencken themost powerful personal influence on this whole gen-eration of educated people. I say personal influence,for one thing this book makes clear, and that is thatthe man is bigger than his ideas.

If you subtract from this book the personality ofH. L. Mencken, if you attempt to restate his ideasin simple, unexcited prose, there remains only a col-lection of trite and somewhat confused ideas. Todiscuss it as one might discuss the ideas of first-ratethinkers like Russell, Dewey, Whitehead, or San-tayana would be to destroy the book and to miss itsimportance. Though it purports to be the outlineof a social philosophy, it is really the highly rhetori-cal expression of a mood which has often in the pastand may again in the future be translated intothought. In the best sense of the word the book

61

62 H. L. Menckenis sub-rational: it is addressed to those vital prefer-ences which lie deeper than coherent thinking.

The most important political books are oftenof this sort. Rousseau's Social Contract and TomPaine's Rights of Man were far inferior as worksof the mind to the best thought of the eighteenthcentury, but they exerted an incalculably greatinfluence because they altered men's prejudices. Mr.Mencken's book is of the same sort. The demo-cratic phase which began in the eighteenth centuryhas about run its course. Its assumptions no longerexplain the facts of the modern world and its idealsare no longer congenial to modern men. There isnow taking place a radical change of attitude notmerely toward parliamentary government but towardthe whole conception of popular sovereignty andmajority rule. This change is as radical in its wayas that which took place, say between 1776 and1848.

In the United States Mr. Mencken's is the mostpowerful voice announcing the change. The effectof his tremendous polemic is to destroy, by renderingit ridiculous and unfashionable, the democratic tradi-tion of the American pioneers. This attack on thedivine right of demos is an almost exact equivalentof the earlier attacks on the kings, the nobles, andthe priests. He strikes at the sovereign power,which in America to-day consists of the evangelicalchurches in the small communities, the proletarianmasses in the cities, and the organized smaller busi-

H. L. Mencken 63ness men everywhere. The Baptist and Methodistsects, the city mobs, and the Chamber of Commerceare in power. They are the villains of the piece.Mr. Mencken does not argue with them. He laysviolent hands upon them in the conviction, probablycorrect, that you accomplish results quicker by mak-ing your opponent's back teeth rattle than bylaboriously addressing his reason. Mr. Mencken,moreover, being an old newspaper man, has ratherstrong notions about the capacity of mankind toreason. He knows that the established scheme isnot supported by reason but by prejudice, prestige,and reverence, and that a good joke is more devas-tating than a sound argument. He is an eminentlypractical journalist, and so he devotes himself todogmatic and explosive vituperation. The effect isa massacre of sacred cows, a holocaust of idols, andthe poor boobs are no longer on their knees.

Mr. Mencken is so effective just because hisappeal is not from mind to mind but from viscerato viscera. If you analyze his arguments you destroytheir effect. You cannot take them in detail andexamine their implications. You have to judge himtotally, roughly, approximately, without definition,as you would a barrage of artillery, for the generaldestruction rather than for the accuracy of the indi-vidual shots. He presents an experience, and if hegets you, he gets you not by reasoned conviction, butby a conversion which you may or may not be ableto dress up later as a philosophy. If he succeeds

64 H. L. Menckenwith you, he implants in you a sense of sin, and thenhe revives you with grace, and disposes you to anew and somewhat fierce pride in a non-gregariousexcellence.

One example will show what happens if you pauseto analyze his ideas. The thesis of this whole bookis that we must cease to be governed by "the inferiorfour-fifths of mankind." Here surely is a conceptwhich a thinker would have paused to define. Mr.Mencken never does define it, and, what is more, hequite evidently has no clear idea of what he means.Sometimes he seems to think that the differencebetween the inferior four-fifths and the superior one-fifth is the difference between the "haves" and the"have nots." At other times he seems to think itis the difference between the swells and the nobodies,between the well born and those who come "out ofthe gutter." At other times he abandons theseworldly distinctions and talks and thinks about "freespirits," a spiritual elite, who have no relation eitherto income or to a family tree. This vagueness as towhether the superior one-fifth are the PrussianJunkers or the Pittsburgh millionaires, or the peoplewho can appreciate Bach and Beethoven, persiststhroughout the book.

This confusion is due, I think, to the fact that heis an outraged sentimentalist. Fate and his owncuriosity have made him a connoisseur of humanignorance. Most educated men are so preoccupied

H. L. Mencken 65with what they conceive to be the best thought inthe field of their interest, that they ignore the folliesof uneducated men. A Jacques Loeb would spendvery little of his time on biology as taught in anOklahoma high school. Even William James, whowas more interested in the common man than anygreat philosopher of our time, was looking alwaysfor grains of wisdom in the heaps of folly. But Mr.Mencken is overwhelmingly preoccupied with popu-lar culture. He collects examples of it. He goes intoa rage about it. He cares so much about it that hecannot detach himself from it. And he measuresit not by relative standards, but by the standardswhich most educated men reserve for a culture ofthe first order. He succeeds, of course, in establish-ing a reductio ad absurdum of the shibboleths ofliberals. That is worth doing. But it is well toknow what you are doing, and when Mr. Menckenmeasures the culture of the mass by the culturalstandards of the elite, he is not throwing any reallight on the modern problem. He is merely smash-ing a delusion by means of an effective rhetoricaldevice.

I doubt, however, if he is aware that he is usinga rhetorical device. When he measures the popularculture by the standards of the elite, the humor isall on the surface. The undertone is earnest andintensely sincere. One feels that Mr. Mencken isdeeply outraged because he does not live in a worldwhere all men love truth and excellence and honor.

66 H. L. MenckenI feel it because I detect in this book many signs ofyearning for the good old days. When Mr.Mencken refers to feudalism, to kings, to the Prus-sian aristocracy, to any ordered society of the ancientregime, he adopts a different tone of voice. I don'tmean to say that he talks like an emigre or like awriter for the Action Francaise, but it is evident tome that his revolt against modern democratic societyexhausts his realism, and that the historic alterna-tives are touched for him with a romantic glamour.The older aristocratic societies exist only in hisimagination; they are idealized sufficiently to inhibitthat drastic plainness of perception which he appliesto the democratic society all about him.

The chief weakness of the book, as a book ofideas, arises out of this nai've contrast in Mr.Mencken's mind between the sordid reality he knowsand the splendid society he imagines. He neverseems to have grasped the truth that the thing hehates is the direct result of the thing he most admires.This modern democracy meddling in great affairscould not be what it is but for that freedom ofthought which Mr. Mencken, to his everlastingcredit, cares more about than about anything else. Itis freedom of speech and freedom of thought whichhave made all questions popular questions. Whatsense is there then in shouting on one page for aparty of "liberty," and on another bewailing thehideous consequences? The old aristocracies whichMr. Mencken admires did not delude themselves

H. L. Mencken 67with any nonsense about liberty. They reservedwhat liberty there was for a privileged elite, knowingperfectly well that if you granted liberty to everyone you would have sooner or later everything thatMr. Mencken deplores. But he seems to think thatyou can have a privileged, ordered, aristocraticsociety with complete liberty of speech. That is asthoroughgoing a piece of Utopian sentimentalism asanything could be. You might as well proclaim your-self a Roman Catholic and then ask that excerptsfrom The American Mercury and the works ofCharles Darwin be read from the altar on the firstSunday of each month. If Mr. Mencken reallywishes an aristocracy he will have to give up libertyas he understands it; and if he wishes liberty he willhave to resign himself to hearing homo boobiensspeak his mind.

What Mr. Mencken desires is in substance thedistinction, the sense of honor, the chivalry, andthe competence of an ideal aristocracy combinedwith the liberty of an ideal democracy. This is anexcellent wish, but like most attempts to make thebest of both worlds, it results in an evasion of theproblem. The main difficulty in democratic societyarises out of the increasing practice of liberty. Thedestruction of authority, of moral values, of culturalstandards is the result of using the liberty whichhas been won during the last three or four centuries.Mr. Mencken is foremost among those why cry formore liberty, and who use that liberty to destroy

68 H. L. Menckenwhat is left of the older tradition. I do not quarrelwith him for that. But I am amazed that he doesnot see how fundamentally the spiritual disorder hefights against is the effect of that regime of libertyhe fights for. Because he fails to see that, I thinkhe claims too much when he says that he is engagedin a diagnosis of the democratic disease. He hasmerely described with great emphasis the awful painit gives him.

In the net result these confusions of thought area small matter. It is no crime not to be a philoso-pher. What Mr. Mencken has created is a personalforce in American life which has an extraordinarilycleansing and vitalizing effect. How else can youexplain the paradox of his popularity, and the cer-tainty that before he dies he will find himself, likeBernard Shaw to-day, one of the grand old men,one of the beloved patriarchs of his time? How inthis land where all politicians, pedagogues, peasants,etc., etc., are preposterous, has Henry L. Mencken,not yet aged fifty, become the pope of popes ? Theanswer is that he has the gift of life. His humoris so full of animal well-being that he acts upon hispublic like an elixir. The wounds he inflicts healquickly. His blows have the clean brutality of anatural phenomenon. They are directed by a warmand violent but an unusually healthy mind which isnot divided, as most minds are, by envy and fearand ambition and anxiety. When you can explainthe heightening effect of a spirited horse, of a swift

H. L. Mencken 69athlete, of a dancer really in control of his own body,when you can explain why watching them you feelmore alive yourself, you can explain the quality ofhis influence.

For this reason the Mencken manner can beparodied, but the effect is ludicrous when it isimitated. The same prejudices and the same tricksof phrase employed by others are usually cheapand often nasty. I never feel that in Mr. Menckenhimself even when he calls quite harmless peoplecockroaches and lice. I do not care greatly forphrases like that. They seem to me like spitting onthe carpet to emphasize an argument. They aresigns that Mr. Mencken writes too much and hasoccasionally to reach for the effect without workingfor it. I think he is sometimes lazy, and when he islazy he is often unfair, not in the grand mannerbut in the small manner. And yet his wounds areclean wounds and they do not fester. I know,because I have fragments of his shellfire in my ownskin. The man is admirable. He writes terriblyunjust tirades, and yet I know of nobody who writesfor his living who will stay up so late or get up soearly to untangle an injustice. He often violatesnot merely good taste according to the genteel tradi-tion, but that superior kind of good taste accordingto which a man refuses to hurt those who cannotdefend themselves.

Nevertheless I feel certain that in so far as hehas influenced the tone of public controversy he has

70 H. L. Menckenelevated it. The Mencken attack is always a frontalattack. It is always explicit. The charge is allthere. He does not leave the worst unsaid. He saysit. And when you have encountered him, you do nothave to wonder whether you are going to be stabbedin the back when you start to leave and are thinkingof something else.

I have not written this as a eulogy, but as anexplanation which to me at least answers the ques-tion why Henry L. Mencken is as popular as he isin a country in which he professes to dislike most ofthe population. I lay it to the subtle but none theless sure sense of those who read him that here isnothing sinister that smells of decay, but that on thecontrary this holy terror from Baltimore is splen-didly and exultantly and contagiously alive. He callsyou a swine and an imbecile, and he increases yourwill to live.

December, 1926.

SINCLAIR LEWIS

I

T HE career of Mr. Lewis is usually divided intotwo periods: an earlier in which he wrotepopular fiction without much success, and a

later, beginning with "Main Street," in which hetried only to please himself and had a huge success.Roughly speaking, this second period began with theinauguration of Warren Harding. Mr. Lewis hascontinued to flourish under Calvin Coolidge.

This is not, I imagine, a mere coincidence. Theelection of 1920 marked the close of that period ofdemocratic idealism and of optimism about theperfectibility of American society, which began inits modern phase with Bryan, was expressed for awhile by Roosevelt, and culminated in the exaltationand the spiritual disaster under Wilson. By 1920the American people were thoroughly weary of their

72 Sinclair Lewisold faith that happiness could be found by publicwork, and very dubious about the wisdom of thepeople. They had found out that the problem ofliving is deeper and more complex than they hadbeen accustomed to think it was. They had, more-over, become rich. They were ready for anexamination of themselves.

Mr. Lewis was in a position to supply the demand.For he too had outlived his political illusions, havingpassed beyond the socialist idealism of Helicon Hall.At the moment when he sat down to please himselfby writing "Main Street," in the heroic mood of onewho abandons the quest of money and applause, avast multitude was waiting for him with more moneyand applause than he had ever dreamed about.

In this first success there was apparently noelement of calculation. It so happened that thepersonal mood of Sinclair Lewis suited exactly themood of a very large part of the American people.Very quickly he became a national figure. "MainStreet," "Babbitt," and, in a certain measure,"Arrowsmith," became source books for the newprejudices and rubber stamps with which we of theHarding-Coolidge era examined ourselves.

II

Although we are all endowed with eyes, few of ussee very well. We see what we are accustomed tosee, and what we are told to see. To the rest of

Sinclair Lewis 73what is about us we are largely anesthetic, for welive in a kind of hazy dream bent on our purposes.For the apprehension of the external world, and ofthat larger environment which is invisible, we arealmost helpless until we are supplied with patternsof seeing which enable us to fix objects clearlyamidst the illegible confusion of experience. Whenwe find a pattern which works well, in that it allowsus to feel that we have made a large area of realityour own, we are grateful, and we use that patternuntil it is threadbare. For to invent new patternsrequires more genius than most of us have, and todeal with life freshly in all its variety is much toomuch trouble for preoccupied men. As a merematter of economy in time and trouble, we demandsimple and apparently universal stereotypes withwhich to see the world.

Mr. Lewis has an extraordinary talent for invent-ing stereotypes. This talent is uninhibited, for heis wholly without that radical skepticism which mightmake a man of equal, or even greater, genius hesitateat substituting new prejudices for old. "This isAmerica," he says in an italicized foreword; "thisMain Street is the continuation of Main Streetseverywhere." Now a writer without this dogmatismof the practical man, and with a greater instinct forreality, could not have written these words. Hewould have remembered that the world is not sosimple. But what he would have gained in truthful-ness, he would have lost in influence. He would

74 Sinclair Lewisprobably not have induced a large part of the nationto adopt his line of stereotypes as a practical con-venience for daily use along with the telephone, theradio, the syndicated newspaper, and similarmechanical contrivances for communicating withother men.

Mr. Lewis has prospered by inventing and mar-keting useful devices for seeing the American scenequickly. His psychological inventions are beingused by millions of Americans to perceive andexpress their new, disillusioned sense of America.They are wholly mechanical and they are completelystandardized now that they have passed into commonuse. Because of Mr. Lewis's success in fixing theconception of Main Street, it is now very difficultto see any particular Main Street with an innocenteye. A Babbitt is no longer a man; he is aprejudice.

The art of creating these prejudices consists, inMr. Lewis's case, of an ability to assemble in onepicture a collection of extraordinarily neat imitationsof lifelike details. Had his gift been in a differentmedium he could have manufactured wax flowersthat would make a man with hay fever sneeze; hecould have crowed so much like a rooster that thehens would palpitate. He has a photo- and phono-graphic memory with an irresistible gift of mimicry.But since his business is the creation of types ratherthan of living characters, he does not photographand mimic individuals. Babbitt is not a man; he is

Sinclair Lewis 75assembled out of many actual Babbitts. The effectis at once lifelike and weird. As with an almostperfect scarecrow the thing is so much like life thatit nearly lives. Yet it is altogether dead. It is likean anatomical model of an average man, a purelytheoretical concept which has no actual existence.For in any living man the average qualities arealways found in some unique combination.

But just because Mr. Lewis's creations are com-posed of skillful imitations of details, they areextraordinarily successful as stereotypes. The Bab-bitt pattern covers no actual Babbitt perfectly, but itcovers so many details in so many Babbitts that itis highly serviceable for practical purposes. Theveracity in detail is so striking that there is no dispo-sition to question the verity of the whole.

III

It is not going too far to say that Mr. Lewis hasimposed his conception of America on a very con-siderable part of the reading and writing public.To-day they see what he has selected out of the wholevast scene. Now Mr. Lewis is a reformer. Hedoes not assemble his collection of details with thedisinterested desire to hold a mirror up to nature.He wishes to destroy what he dislikes and to putsomething better in its place; he is rarely relievedof an overpowering compulsion to make or breaksomething. Yet this particular zeal is no necessary

76 Sinclair Lewispart of his great talent for mimicry. For he mightconceivably have loved life more than his own pur-poses, and have written a human comedy. Or hemight have felt that sense of their destiny whichmakes all human creatures tragic. Or he might havebeen filled with a feeling for the mystery thatenshrouds so temporary a thing as man, and thenhe would have confessed that after you have studiedtheir behavior no matter how accurately from theoutside, there is much in all human souls that remainsto be known. But Mr. Lewis is not a great artist.He has a great skill. He himself is a practical manwith the practical man's illusion that by bendingtruth to your purposes, you can make life better.

There was a moment, I think, when Mr. Lewiswas tempted to use his talent with that serene disin-terestedness by which alone wisdom comes. I referto that passage in one of the early chapters of"Main Street" when for the first time Mr. Lewisdescribes Main Street. Until I reread the bookrecently I had forgotten that in this early stage Mr.Lewis presents the reader with two quite contrastingversions of the same scene. One is the version weall remember, a dull, fly-specked, timidly gaudyspectacle of human vacuity. The other version,which he soon allows the reader to forget, isromantic, exciting, and full of promise. There is nodoubt that at this juncture Mr. Lewis meant to say:What you see in Main Street will depend on whatyou are; it all depends on who is looking at it. In

Sinclair Lewis 77order to emphasize this notion he gives you firstthe Main Street which Carol Kennicott sees on herfirst walk in Gopher Prairie, and then immediatelyfollowing the identical aspects of Main Street asseen by Bea Sorenson who is just off a lonely farm.

Carol is a comparatively sophisticated person; atleast she does not belong to the prairies but to atown which with "its garden-sheltered streets andaisles of elms is white and green New Englandreborn." Carol, moreover, came from a cultivatedhome with a "brown library" in which she"absorbed" Balzac and Rabelais and Thoreau andMax Mueller. It might reasonably be objected,I know, that Carol never absorbed anything, letalone such heady stuff as Rabelais. But what Mr.Lewis meant to say is plain enough. It is that Carolcame from a background which predisposed her todislike the raw ugliness of Main Street civilization.And having said that, he introduced Bea by wayof contrast and justice to show how delightful MainStreet would look to a peasant mind.

"It chanced that Carol Kennicott and Bea Soren-son were viewing Main Street at the same time."Carol looks through the fly-specked windows of theMinniemashie House and sees only the row ofrickety chairs with the brass cuspidors; Bea isthrilled by the swell traveling man in there—prob-ably been to Chicago lots of times. At Dyer's drugstore Carol sees a greasy marble soda fountain withan electric lamp of red and green and curdled-yellow

78 Sinclair Lewismosaic shade; to Bea the soda fountain is all lovelymarble with the biggest shade you ever saw—alldifferent kinds of colored glass stuck together.

There is a humility in this passage which mighthave become the seed of a much richer wisdom thanhis regular practice exhibits. Here for a momentMr. Lewis used his gift without self-righteousness.Here in this interlude he was willing to show somecourtesy to the souls of other people. He was willingeven to admit that their feelings are authentic. Inthis mood, had he been able to retain it, he mighthave risen above the irritations of his time andhis clique, have given even the devil his due, andbecome the creator of a great American comedy ofmanners instead of the mere inventor of newprejudices.

But to have done that he would have had to caremore about human beings than about his own attitudetoward them. Apparently that was impossible forhim. He cannot for long detach himself from thenotion that what Sinclair Lewis feels about MainStreet, about Babbittry, about the Protestantchurches is of primary importance. What he feelswould have more importance if he had great insightas well as great sight, if he had fine taste instead ofsharp distastes, if he had salient intuition as towhat moves people as well as an astounding memoryof how they look to him when they move. Then hisfigures might have come alive, and been somethingmore than a synthetic mass of detail which serves as

Sinclair Lewis 79the butt for the uncritical, rebellious yearning of theauthor.

Had he a real interest in character, and not sucha preoccupation with behavior, he would haveexpressed his view of the world through all hischaracters, and not merely through one mouthpiece.He would have given you Main Street through Dr.Kennicott and Bea and Vida and Percy Bresnahan,instead of giving you Kennicott, Bea, Vida, andBresnahan through Carol. For that young womanstaggers under the burden of the weighty messageshe is forced to carry. "There—she meditated—isthe newest empire of the world; the NorthernMiddle West ... an empire which feeds a quarterof the world—yet its work is merely begun. Theyare pioneers, these sweaty wayfarers, for all theirtelephones and bank accounts and automatic pianosand cooperative leagues. And for all its fat richness,theirs is a pioneer land. What is its future? shewondered."

She meditated ! She wondered ! Did she really,or did Sinclair Lewis? I ask the question in nocaptious spirit. This uncertainty as to who is talkingand who is seeing the detail he reports pervades allof Mr. Lewis's books, and prevents him fromachieving that "more conscious life" for which Carolyearns in phrases that are borrowed from H. G.Wells. When Mr. Lewis described Bea's walk onMain Street, he remembered for a moment what heusually forgets, that a more conscious life is one in

8o Sinclair Lewiswhich a man is conscious not only of what he sees,but of the prejudices with which he sees it.

IV

Though he is absorbed in his own vision of things,Mr. Lewis is curiously unaware of himself. He isaware only of the object out there. Carol, Babbitt,Arrowsmith and Frank Shallard have sharp eyesbut vague spirits. Mr. Lewis is sophisticated enoughto realize how they flounder about, and he laughs atthem. But this laughter is not comic, it is protective.It is a gesture of defense by a man who knows thatsome mature reader, say Mr. Mencken, is goingto laugh, and it is better to laugh first. It is not thecarefree laughter of a man who is detached from therather adolescent rebellion which he is describing.On the contrary, he is absorbed by it. Underneaththeir sardonic and brutal tone, these, novels areextraordinarily earnest and striving. "Main Street,""Babbitt" and "Arrowsmith" are stories of an indi-vidual who is trying to reform the world, or to findsalvation by escaping it.

Carol fusses with "fanlights and Galsworthy"brightly painted furniture, and a separate bedroom.She runs away to Washington but returns to GopherPrairie, saying: "I may not have fought the goodfight but I have kept the faith." Babbitt on hissleeping porch dreams of the fairy child, frets with"veiled rebellions," escapes to the Maine woods,

Sinclair Lewis 81thinks he has been "converted to serenity," isn't,returns to Zenith, and, like Carol, at the end makesa speech: "Tell 'em to go to the devil." MartinArrowsmith also takes to the woods, escaping fromhis wife's blue and gold velvet limousine, and at theend says: "We'll plug along for two or three years,and maybe we'll get something permanent—andprobably we'll fail."

Dr. Arrowsmith is the only one who may havefound what he, wanted. He has fled from thebarbarians and their gauds, he has left "a softbed for a shanty bunk in order to be pure. For hehad perceived the horror of the shrieking, bawdything called Success."

"I am sorry," says Gottlieb when he has to tellArrowsmith that his great discovery belongs to someone else. "I am sorry you are not to have the funof being pretentious and successful—for a while.. . . Martin, it is nice that you will corroborateD'Herelle. This is science: to work and not to care—too much—if somebody else gets the credit."

Arrowsmith is saved by embracing the religion ofscience. But for Carol and for Babbitt and forShallard there is no religion available which theycan embrace, and therefore, there is no salvation.Mr. Lewis knew what to do with Arrowsmith. Forthere is an ideal in science to which a modern mancan give himself and find peace. But there is noideal for Carol or Babbitt. They would not behelped by "believing in" science, no matter how

82 Sinclair Lewisdevoutly. Only Arrowsmith who can do scientificwork can be saved by it. Only Arrowsmith finds agod to love whom no man can possess and no mancan cajole.

This is the point of Mr. Lewis's greatest insightinto the human predicament. There is an uncon-scious pathos about it, for obviously the religionwhich Arrowsmith embraces, ascetic, disinterested,purified, is for Mr. Lewis like some fine mystery seenat a distance. That there might be a path of salva-tion like it for his ordinary characters, though inother ways, is too difficult for him to believe. Itwould be hard for me to believe. But it would havebeen possible to put the rebellion of Carol and theyearning of Babbitt in the perspective of an under-standing of how, as Spinoza says, all things excellentare as difficult as they are rare. They might havefailed, but their failure would have been measuredagainst a spiritual insight as fine as Arrowsmith's.Then at least the author would have understood thefailure of his characters to understand themselves.

That degree of insight Mr. Lewis does not attain.He can report what he sees; having known aboutthe religion of science, he was able to report it inArrowsmith. But in Carol and in Babbitt he wasprojecting only his own spirit, and when he attemptsto make it articulate, he becomes literary and fum-bling: "It was mystery which Carol had mostlacked in Gopher Prairie . . . where there wereno secret gates opening upon moors over which one

Sinclair Lewis 83might walk by moss-deadened paths to strange, highadventures in an ancient garden." Babbitt escapesfrom Zenith only when he is asleep, when he isdrunk, and vicariously when his son tells the familyto go to the devil. For Carol and Babbitt areworldlings, and for the worldling there is no personalsalvation. He must either conquer the world andremake it, though in that he will almost surely fail,or he must escape into his dreams.

The America of Mr. Lewis is dominated by theprosperous descendants of the Puritan pioneers.He has fixed them at a moment when they have lostthe civilized traditions their ancestors brought fromEurope, and are groping to find new ways of life.Carol is the daughter of a New Englander whowent west taking with him an English culture. InCarol that culture is little more than a dim memoryof a more fastidious society; it merely confuses herwhen she tries to live by it in Gopher Prairie.Babbitt is the descendant of a pioneer; he is com-pletely stripped of all association with an orderedand civilized life. He has no manners, no coherentcode of morals, no religion, no piety, no patriotism,no knowledge of truth and no love of beauty. He isalmost completely decivilized, if by civilization youmean an understanding of what is good, better andbest in the satisfaction of desire, and a knowledge

84 Sinclair Lewisof the customs, the arts, and the objects which cangive these satisfactions.

Carol and Babbitt inherit the culture of thepioneers who were preoccupied with the business ofestablishing themselves in a new world. But forthem there is no wilderness to subdue, there are noIndians to fight, they have houses and sanitation andincomes. They have the leisure to be troubled; forthey really have very little to do. They have nothingto do which exhausts them sufficiently to distractthem when they ask themselves: What is it all about?Is is worth while? Their ancestors came as emi-grants, and they divested themselves for the voyageof that burden of ancient customs which, with all itsoppressions, made life a rite, and gave it shape andsignificance. For Carol and Babbitt this Europeanheritage has been liquidated until all that remains ofit is a series of prohibitions called morality, and ahabit of church attendance without a god they adoreor an ideal of holiness with which they can commune.Their religion has become a creed which they do notunderstand; it has ceased to be, as it was in CatholicEurope, or even in theocratic New England, a wayof life, a channel of their hopes, an order with mean-ing. They are creatures of the passing moment whoare vaguely unhappy in a boring and senseless exist-ence that is without dignity, without grace, withoutpurpose. They are driven by they know not whatcompulsions, they are ungoverned and yet unfree,the sap of life does not reach them, their taproots

Sinclair Lewis 85having been cut. In that great transplantation ofpeoples which has made America, not many haveas yet struck down deep into the nourishing earth.And those who have not are only dimly alive, likeCarol, like Babbitt, who are weedy and strugglingto bloom.

The "splendid indefinite freedoms" for whichCarol yearns are an emancipation from the frayedremnants of the heritage her Yankee forefathersbrought with them to America. That stern culturenerved the pioneers to hardship. It merely makesCarol nervous. She will, however, soon be free ofthis bondage. In the big city, where her creatorhas preceded her, she will be bothered no longer.She will be a free metropolitan spirit, like Mr.Lewis, free to do anything, free to disbelieve, freeto scorn her past, free to be free.

VI

The prophet of this metropolitan spirit, towardwhich Carol reaches out, is Mr. Mencken. NowMr. Mencken is a true metropolitan. Mr. Lewis isa half-baked metropolitan. He has just arrived inthe big city. He has the new sophistication of onewho is bursting to write to the folks back home andlet them know what tremendous fellows we are wholive in the great capitals. There is more than atouch of the ex-naif in Mr. Lewis, not a little of thesnobbery of the newly arrived. For he has as yet

86 Sinclair Lewisnone of the radical skepticism of the true metro-politan. His iconoclasm is merely a way of beingcocksure that the household gods of Gopher Prairieare a joke. There is no evidence in his writing thathe knows or cares much about the good things whichthe world city contains, as Mr. Mencken does withhis German music, his fine sense of learning, and histaste for speculation about genus homo apart fromhis manifestations on Main Street. Mr. Lewis isproud to belong to the great city, he enjoys the free-dom from the Main Street tabus. But he is asrestless in the big city as he is in Gopher Prairie.Unlike Mr. Mencken who is quite comfortable,happy, and well settled, as he shells the outer bar-barians from his fastness at Baltimore, Mr. Lewis isforever running about the world and giving outinterviews about how Main Street is to be foundeverywhere. He is probably right for he takes itwith him wherever he goes.

The terrible judgments which he pronounces uponthe provincial civilization of America flow from thebitterness of a revolted provincial. Mr. Menckenis savage at times, but there is a disinfectant on hisbattle-ax, because he is in no way turned mor-bidly in upon himself. Mr. Mencken is not arevolted Puritan. He is a happy mixture of Germangemuethlichkeit and Maryland cavalier. But Mr.Lewis is still so enmeshed with the thing he is fight-ing that he can never quite strike at it gallantly andwith a light heart. He is too much a part of the

Sinclair Lewis 87revolt he describes ever for long to understand it.That, it seems to me, is why he cannot distinguishbetween a sample of human ignorance and the deep-seated evil which is part of this world. Everythingis in the foreground and in the same focus, uglyfurniture and hypocrisy, dull talk and greed, sillymannerisms and treachery. This makes his books somonotonously clever. He will take the trouble tobe as minutely devastating about poor Babbitt'sfondness for a trick cigarette lighter as about thevillainies of Elmer Gantry. He puts everything inthe same perspective, because he has no perspective.Like Carol, he is annoyed by almost everything hesees in the provinces, and all his annoyances areabout equally unpleasant to him.

For he is still in that phase of rebellion where thestruggle to get free is all-absorbing. Of the strugglethat comes after, of the infinitely subtler and morebewildering problems of mature men, he has writtennothing, and not, I think, thought much. It cannotbe an accident that in his whole picture gallery thereis not the portrait of one wholly mature personality,of one man or woman who has either found his wayin the new world, or knows clearly why he has not.There are such personalities in America, and Mr.Lewis is not a writer who tells less than he knows,or would fail to draw such a character if he had everactually realized his existence. But Mr. Lewis'scharacters are all adolescent, and they express anadolescent rebellion.

Sinclair Lewis

VIIMr. Lewis's revolt against the Puritan civilization

had of course to include an attack on the evangelicalchurches. "That small pasty-white Baptist Churchhad been the center of all his emotions, aside fromhell-raising, hunger, sleepiness, and love. . . . Hehad, in fact, got everything from the Church andSunday School, except, perhaps any longing whateverfor decency and kindness and reason." This is Mr.Lewis's conclusion at the beginning of "Elmer Gan-try," and the rest of the book is a sockdologer toprove it.

Had Mr. Lewis followed the pattern of the earliernovels he would have taken as his theme the struggleof an increasingly liberal clergyman to square hisreal faith with his creed. He would have made aclerical Arrowsmith. There is, in fact, such acharacter in the book, Frank Shallard, who sym-bolizes the central confusion of the churches. ButMr. Lewis merely sketches him in, and then lyncheshim with the help of the Ku Klux Klan. He wasnot greatly interested in Shallard. His hatred ofthe Protestant churches was too hot for any patientand sympathetic interest in the men who are some-what vaguely trying to make organized religion suitthe needs and doubts of modern men. He is notconscious as yet that somewhere in the ferment ofreligious discussion, Carol and Babbitt will have tofind an equivalent for the salvation which Arrow-

Sinclair Lewis 89smith achieves. All that, which is after all the mainquestion, Mr. Lewis ignores completely. For hiscentral character he has chosen an absolute villain.And so "Elmer Gantry," instead of being the storyof a fundamentalist like Babbitt beset by doubts, orof a liberal like Carol, who has more impulse thandirection, the book is a synthesis of all the villainies,short of murder, which the most villainous villaincould commit.

Elmer Gantry is not, however, the portrait of avillain as such. It is the study of a fundamentalistclergyman in the United States, portrayed as utterlyevil in order to injure the fundamentalists. Thecalumny is elaborate and deliberate. Mr. Lewishates fundamentalists, and in his hatred he describesthem as villains. This was, I believe, a mostintolerant thing to do. It is intellectually of a piecewith the sort of propaganda which says that JohnSmith is an atheist, and that he beats his wife; thatJones is a radical, and that he cheats at cards; thatRobinson is a free trader, and that he robs the till.

Mr. Lewis is a maker of stereotypes. He hadsuccessfully fixed his versions of Main Street andof Babbittry on the American mind. Then, quiteunscrupulously, it seems to me, he set out to stereo-type the fundamentalist as an Elmer Gantry. Hismethod was his old device of assembling details,but in his choice of details he was interested only inthose which were utterly damning. It is as if hehad gone to the clipping files of an atheist society,

90 Sinclair Lewispored over the considerable collection of reportsabout preachers "arrested for selling fake stock, forseducing fourteen-year-old girls in orphanages undertheir care, for arson, for murder" (p. 378) and outof this material had then concocted the portrait ofa clergyman. This is a stock method of the propa-gandist, and one of the least admirable. There isno truth in it. There is no human dignity in it.It is utterly irrational. If it succeeds it merelycreates new prejudices for old, and if it fails it leavesa nasty smell behind it.

I have seen "Elmer Gantry" described as thegreatest blow ever struck in America at religioushypocrisy. It may be a great blow. It may, for allI know, be another "Uncle Tom's Cabin." But it isnone the less a foul blow, and I do not think thecause of "decency, kindness and reason," which Mr.Lewis espouses on page 28, is greatly helped byadapting toward fundamentalists the essential spiritof the Ku Klux Klan. The practice of describingyour opponent as a criminal ought to be reservedfor low disordered minds with white sheets overtheir heads. A novelist who pretends to be writingin behalf of a civilized life ought not himself tobehave like a barbarian.

The animating spirit of "Elmer Gantry" is thebigotry of the anti-religious, a bigotry which is cleverbut as blind as any other. Were it not that the dis-cussion of religion seems always to stir up excep-tional passions, the quality of this book might well

Sinclair Lewis 91alarm Mr. Lewis's friends. For until he wrote it,he had his hatred under control. "Main Street" is arather sentimental book at bottom. "Babbitt" is per-vaded by an almost serene kindliness. "Arrowsmith"reaches moments of spiritual understanding. But"Elmer Gantry" is written with a compulsion to mal-ice as if the author could hardly hold himself. Theindustriousness of his hatred is extraordinary. Hegives himself to an abandoned fury which is fasci-nating as a mere spectacle of sustained ferocity.You say to yourself: What endurance! What volup-tuous delight this fellow takes in beating and kickingthis effigy, and then beating him and kicking himagain! If only he keeps it up, the sawdust in Gantrywill be spilled all over the ground!

For in "Elmer Gantry" the revolted Puritan hasbecome fanatical. The book is a witch-burning tomake an atheist holiday.

VIII

There has been some curiosity as to what Mr.Lewis would tackle next. Bets have been laid, Ihear, on the politician, the editor, the lawyer, theprofessor, the business executive. It is a fairlyimportant question because Mr. Lewis is a veryimportant man. But what interests me is whetherMr. Lewis will reach maturity, or remain arrestedin his adolescent rebellion. After "Arrowsmith" onewould have said that he was beginning to be free of

92 Sinclair Lewisthat shapeless irritation and yearning which CarolKennicott typifies. But after "Elmer Gantry" onecannot be so sure. The hatreds are turned inward,as if the effort to escape had failed and becomemorbid. There is some sort of crisis in this aston-ishing career, which is not yet resolved.

June, 1927.

THE NATURE OF THE BATTLE OVERCENSORSHIP

I

N OT long ago I was at work in my study writing,when, as was her custom, the lady across theway burst into song. There was something

about that lady's voice which prevented the use ofa human intelligence, and I called upon the janitorto give her my compliments and then silence her.She replied with a good deal of conviction that thiswas a free country and she would sing when thespirit moved her; if I did not like it, I could retireto the great open spaces.

The lady and I both love liberty, I think. But sheloves her liberty whereas I love mine. There doesnot seem to be a theory of liberty which can be usedto decide between us. Lord Acton, for example,was a great historian of the problem of liberty, butas between the lady and myself, I see no help

93

94 The Battle Over Censorshipfrom him when he says that "by liberty I mean theassurance that every man shall be protected in doingwhat he believes his duty against the influence ofauthority and majorities, custom and opinion." Itwas the lady's custom to feel it her duty to practiceher singing at the precise moment when I felt it myduty to write an article. The janitor never seemedso completely convinced as I was that mine was muchthe higher form of duty until he had had a chanceon the day after Christmas to compare the lady'sgift with mine. Then apparently he read JohnStuart Mill, learned that "the sole end for whichmankind are warranted, individuals or collectively,in interfering with the liberty of action of any oftheir number, is self-protection." I got protectionand it cost me a box of Corona Coronas, twenty-fivedollars, and an old overcoat.

I am somewhat persuaded that no one has eversucceeded in defining the area of liberty more pre-cisely than I did in this case. The classic attemptsby Milton and Mill end, if you examine them, invagueness and compromise. Milton, for example,would have granted freedom of opinion to every onebut the Papists and the Atheists; Mill was preparedto suppress any one who did "evil" to "others/*leaving it to the others, it would seem, to decidewhat was evil. Had Milton been asked why Papistsand Atheists should be denied the freedom he askedfor Dissenters, he would probably have said thatthey would abuse their freedom. Mill argued that

The Battle Over Censorship 95if you gave too much liberty to some men therewould be none left for other men. He may havebeen right, but when you admit this to be true youhave disposed of the claim that there is a clear anduniversal doctrine of liberty.

A theory of liberty is usually stated in generalterms, but in fact its real meaning in concrete casesis derived from the nature of these cases themselves.Milton worked out his doctrine of liberty as aweapon which the Puritans could use against theStuarts; Mill wrote for Victorian England duringthe ascendancy of the middle class, in that shortinterval between the downfall of the squirearchy andbefore the rise of the great corporations. Headdressed himself to a section of the English peoplewhich did not then contemplate the possibility ofreally serious divisions of opinion.

The history of Luther's ideas shows how closelyrelated is a theory of liberty to the specific needs ofthe man who preaches it. When Luther first cameinto conflict with the Holy See he stood very muchalone. There was at that time no Protestant Church,the German princes had not taken him up, he hadnot worked out a Protestant theology. At thisjuncture he made his famous utterance on behalfof liberty, saying that "Princes are not to be obeyedwhen they command submission to superstitiouserrors, but their aid is not to be invoked in supportof the word of God." Facing a bull of excommuni-cation, living in fear of assassination, he preached

96 The Battle Over Censorshipthat heretics must be converted by Scripture andnot by fire, otherwise the hangman would be thegreatest doctor. But later when the religious revo-lution had won in Germany, it developed, like allrevolutions, beyond anything that Luther haddesired. In the name of that right of private judg-ment and dissent which he had proclaimed againstLeo X, there arose heresies within the heresy, thesects of Zwingli and the Anabaptists, and the redjacobinism of the Peasants' War. Luther was hor-rified at these threats against the security of theChurch he had founded. "Out of the gospel anddivine truth come devilish lies," he cried, "from theblood in our body comes corruption." The devil, hesaid, having failed to put him down by the help ofthe Pope, was seeking his destruction through thepreachers of treason and blood. He exhorted thenobles to crush the rebels without mercy. "If thereare innocent persons among them, God will surelysave and preserve them as He did with Lot andJeremiah."

Lord Acton, from whom I have taken thisaccount, says that in appealing to the sword Lutherhad in reality reverted to his original teaching, andthat the notion of liberty, whether civil or religious,was hateful to his despotic nature and contrary tohis interpretation of Scripture. It remains a factthat Luther had at one time preached the revolu-tionary doctrine of the right of private judgment,

The Battle Over Censorship 97and that this doctrine was worked out to justify hisown rebellion against Rome.

II

Heywood Broun and Margaret Leech say in theirbook on Anthony Comstock that "anything remotelybearing upon sex was to his mind obscene." Thishelps to explain Comstock, but it is quite misleadingif it is meant as an account of Comstockery. Thiscrusading is not a one-man affair, and the psycho-pathology of the vice crusader does not, I think,give a convincing explanation of his success in enlist-ing the support of the community. ObviouslyAmerican society from the Civil War to the WorldWar was not composed entirely or even largely ofAnthony Comstocks. Yet for forty years the vicecrusade was carried on with the consent of the com-munity punctuated only here and there by the jeers ofa minority. Comstock got his support not becauseof what he believed about the uncleanness of sexbut because of what he did toward suppressing thoseparticular manifestations of sex which respectablepeople wished to have suppressed.

The patrons of his society, the public officials, theclergy, and the fathers and mothers who backed himwere not much interested in, and many were no doubtembarrassed by, his idiotic assaults on SeptemberMorn and the nude classics. They were thinking of

98 The Battle Over Censorshipthe tons of plainly indecent books and pictures hedestroyed rather than the occasional masterpiecewhich he insulted.

A realistic study of censorship will show, I believe,that it is almost wholly directed against the unad-justed outsiders. It is not the idea as such which thecensor attacks, whether it be heresy or radicalismor obscenity. He attacks the circulation of the ideaamong the classes which in his judgment are not tobe trusted with the idea.

The censor himself may be cited as proof of thisassertion that the danger is believed to be not inthe idea itself but in the peculiar corruptibility of acertain part of the community. The censor exposeshimself daily to every corrupting influence. I do notknow, of course, what goes on in the dreams ofthose who compile the Index Expurgatorius, spendtheir days reading bolshevik pamphlets in theDepartment of Justice, see all the prohibited filmsand read all the dirty books. They may in theirunconscious minds come to doubt God, insult the flag,and despise chastity. But whatever the private con-sequences may be, outwardly the censors remaindoubly convinced of the sanctity of the institutionthey are protecting. No one has ever been knownto decline to serve on a committee to investigateradicals on the ground that so much exposure totheir doctrines would weaken his patriotism, nor ona vice commission on the ground that it would impairhis morals. Anything may happen inside the censor,

The Battle Over Censorship 99but what counts is that in his outward appearancesafter his ordeal by temptation he is more than ever aparagon of the conforming virtues. Perhaps hisappetites are satisfied by an inverted indulgence, butto a clear-sighted conservative that does not reallymatter. The conservative is not interested in inno-cent thoughts. He is interested in loyal behavior.

Apart from certain residual tabus which havethe power to cause irrational fear, the essence ofcensorship has always been, not to suppress subver-sive ideas as such, but to withhold them from thosewho are young or unprivileged or otherwise unde-pendable. The purpose of censorship is to preventovert rebellion against the state, the church, thefamily, and the economic system. Where there isno danger of overt action there is rarely any inter-ference with freedom.

That is why there has so often been amazingfreedom of opinion within an aristocratic class whichat the same time sanctioned the ruthless suppressionof heterodox opinion among the common people.When the Inquisition was operating most effectivelyagainst the bourgeois who had lapsed into heresy, theprinces of the Church and the nobles enjoyed thefreedom of the Renaissance. There are indeed his-torians who point out that the Inquisition was notconcerned with Jews, Mohammedans and infidelsbut almost entirely with Christians who had lapsed.For the evil which the Inquisition attacked was notdisbelief as such but disloyalty to the Church.

I00 The Battle Over CensorshipAn old Roman maxim said: de internis non iudicat

praetor, the judge is not concerned with subjectivethings. Neither is the censor. He does not botherabout the internal freedom of an aristocracy, thefree speculation which has long been practiced withinthe Jesuit order, the private candor of politiciansand journalists, the unimpressed realism of bankersabout business men. Opinions in such a medium arefree because they are safe. There is no organicdisposition to run wild because the mind is free.

For purposes of argument the advocates of cen-sorship will often pretend that they are worriedabout the intrinsic viciousness of an idea. Advocatesof censorship are often muddle-headed and thereforenot clear as to why they are doing what they aredoing. But actions speak louder than, words, andwhen you look at censorship as a whole it is plainthat it is actually applied in proportion to the vivid-ness, the directness, and the intelligibility of themedium which circulates the subversive idea. Themoving picture is perhaps the most popular mediumof expression there is; it speaks clearly to the lowestand the most immature intelligence. It is thereforeforbidden to present many scenes which the theateris free to present. There are less theaters and theseats cost more. In America, at least, the theater isnow largely confined to the metropolitan centers,and it is patronized by a well-to-do, comparativelymature, and sophisticated audience. It is only whena play goes into a long run and begins to be seen by

The Battle Over Censorship 101the very general public, as was "The Captive," forexample, that the authorities are compelled to paymuch attention to protests from the guardians ofmorality. The scandal about "The Captive" was atbottom its success. Had it been played for a limitedrun in a theater attended by the sophisticated, itwould not have been clubbed to death. But when"The Captive" had run four months on Broadwayit had exhausted its mature audience; it was thenbeing patronized by much simpler people, and it wasfrom them and from those who heard from themthat the demand for suppression arose and graduallybecame irresistible.

The newspapers and magazines of general circu-lation are much freer than the stage. They discussregularly matters which if presented on the stagewould bring out the police reserves. Men are muchless moved by what they read than by what theysee, and literacy is a recent and uncertain accom-plishment of the human race. The proprietors ofthe tabloids found this out a few years ago and ithas been a very profitable discovery. They haveproduced a new type of paper which is consciouslyadapted to a low and hurried intelligence. But theessence of tabloid journalism is that it caters withextreme skill to the unadjusted and unprivileged partof the community. It offers them not rebellion butvicarious satisfaction, and therefore it is a kind ofnarcotic bolshevism as distinguished from the stimu-lant bolshevism that Lenin preached. There is some

102 The Battle Over Censorshipprotest against the tabloids, but it is not as yet verysevere, because the tabloids are in effect a substitutefor rebellion rather than a cause of it. Neverthelessthey are suspect because, like the moving picture, theyreach the suspect classes, and one may confidentlypredict that if censorship is ever applied to Americannewspapers it will be due to some breach of the peacewhich is ascribed to the tabloids. Unless they turnrespectable, as some of them show signs of doing,the logic of their formula will compel them toexplore newer and newer excitements. They willexperiment until at last they bring down upon them-selves the wrath of the established community.

The novel is even freer than the press to-daybecause it is an even denser medium of expression.And in the jargon of a learned treatise a man mayif he likes discuss with equanimity the advantagesand disadvantages of incest among the EgyptianPharaohs, or assassination as a method of socialreform. For the practical limitations on the free-dom of thought and speech are fixed by the estimateof those who have the power to suppress as to howeffectively a dangerous idea is being presented tothose who might be disposed to rebel.

III

Any one who with a moderately objective mindexamines our own great controversies about freedomand suppression cannot fail, I think, to realize how

The Battle Over Censorship 103little their avowed theory has to do with the attitudemen take. The arguments which men used to justifythe nullification of the Fifteenth Amendment inGeorgia are now heard in Massachusetts to justifythe nullification of the Eighteenth Amendment. Thesame corporate interests which object to regulationat home as an intolerable form of paternalism insistwhen they go abroad that the government shall pro-tect them as if they were helpless children. Theword "liberty" as used to-day may mean the openshop if an employer is speaking, a closed shop if alabor leader is speaking. There is no commonlyaccepted definition of liberty. The government ofhuman affairs consists in finding a compromise amongconflicting interests: liberty is the watchword used byan interest to justify it in doing what it would like todo, and authority is the watchword of an interestthat does not wish to be interfered with by someother interest while it is doing what it wishes to do.

In concrete questions the verbal encounter throwslittle light on the issue. Suppression through someform of censorship is a means of defense, and, speak-ing broadly, suppression is practiced by the guardiansof the state, the church, the family, and property.The support of censorship is to be found amongthose who feel themselves to be in harmony with thepurposes of the institution that is attacked—that isto say, among officials and party workers and theclasses who depend most upon the protection of thestate, among churchmen and the devout, among

104 The Battle Over Censorshipparents, teachers, the guardians of the young, amongthe elderly and the sexually settled, and also amongthe impotent and inhibited—all those in short whosemanner of life would become confused if the par-ticular institution were radically altered. They arethe reserves of conservatism from which aremobilized the legions of defense against the irregu-lar forces of the outsiders—the immature, theunprivileged, the unsettled, and the unadjusted, bywhom rebellions are made.

The defenders of authority assume that a con-siderable part of the people, including all children,are not attached by fixed and reliable habits to theexisting order. Being unattached they are impres-sionable, and might therefore be seduced byagitators. They do not have within themselves,inherent in their characters, that interested loyaltyto things as they are which makes men immune tosubversive influences. In matters of this sort wemust remember that the words "right" and "wrong"mean simply friendly or hostile to the purposes ofthe institution in question; that is why it is said thatthe outsiders do not have the interest of the institu-tion sufficiently at heart to feel instinctively thedifference between right and wrong. They cannotbe allowed to judge for themselves because they arewithout the premises of sound judgment. They arenot unconsciously loyal, and their impressions haveto be controlled by the insiders who are intuitivelyright-minded.

The Battle Over Censorship 105The rationalist argument for liberty, as stated

for example by Mill, does not meet this powerfuldogma squarely. That, it seems to me, is why thestock theories of liberty are persuasive only to theparty which is in rebellion and to a few neutralswho are not vitally concerned with the quarrel. Thedoctrinaires of liberty base their theory on theassumption that almost all men have the ability toweigh evidence and choose reasonably. Whetheralmost all men have the ability or not, they certainlydo not use it. They are governed by their interestsas they conceive them by consulting their feelingsabout them. The men who ever reach a conclusionwhich is contrary to their bias and their convenienceare too few to make any important difference in thecourse of events. I have taken into account the factthat some men will sacrifice their lives, their for-tunes, and their reputations in the pursuit of an idealor under the compulsion of some deep necessity ofwhich they may not be wholly aware. The hero andthe saint would not be so distinguished if theirconduct were normal. For the run of men andwomen, who make up human society, the thing whichdecides their attitude in a concrete and critical issueis not evidence, argument and repartee, but whetherthey are attached to or repelled by the institutionwhich is under fire.

The neutrally-minded person with a somewhatliberal disposition often misunderstands this conflictbecause it does not really touch him. He merely

106 The Battle Over Censorshipapprehends it as he apprehends the news that fortyminers have been trapped in a mine. But your rebelknows his side of the conflict as the doomed minersknow their anguish, in a way that a disinterestedmind can never know it. The rebel feels his rebellionnot as a plea for this or that reform but as anunbearable tension in his viscera. He must breakdown the cause of his frustration or jump out ofhis own skin. The true conservative has the samesort of organic need: his institution is to him a main-stay of his being; it exists not as an idea but in thevery structure of his character, and the threat todestroy it fills him with anxiety and with fury.

The battles of liberty are organic conflicts betweenthe adjusted and the unadjusted.

March, 1927.

AN ANTICIPATION OF HARDING

I F an optimist is a man who makes lemonade outof all the lemons that are handed to him, thenSenator Harding is the greatest of all optimists.

He has been told by his friends and his critics that heis colorless and without sap, commonplace and dull,weak and servile. Right you are, says the Senator.You have described exactly the kind of man thiscountry needs. It has tried Roosevelt and Wilson,and look !—it can't stand the gaff. I am nothing thatthey were. I am no superman like Roosevelt andno superthinker like Wilson. Therefore, I am justthe man you are looking for. How do I know that ?I am distinguished by the fact that nothing dis-tinguishes me. I am marked for leadership becauseI have no marks upon me. I am just the man because

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108 An Anticipation of Hardingno one can think of a single reason why I am theman. If any one happens to think of a reason, thenI shall cease to be that normal man which theseabnormal times demand.

Just what is Mr. Harding trying to say anyway ?Presumably some idea is lodged in his brain andpanting for utterance beyond the normal humanimpulse to find a good reason for his own candidacy.For the sake of good appearances in history, I sup-pose that Mr. Harding is not exalting his defects asdo the preternaturally wise animals in ClarenceDay's "This Simian World." He can't just be theone-eyed man who is against two-eyed men, or thetortoise who thinks the hare leads too fast a life.Some other idea is sprouting on that front lawn inMarion, Ohio.

That idea, probably, is that the Presidency hasgrown too big for any man, and that the time hascome for decentralizing its power. There are con-ceivably two ways this might be done. One waywould be to think out a plan for adapting responsiblecabinet government to the congressional system. Itis a way that would require an abnormal lot ofthinking. It would require also a quarrel with Con-gress. For until Congress disgorges its petty controlover the details of administration, Congress will notbe fit to take upon itself major control of executivepolicy. But Congress at present is so much con-cerned with the things that do not belong to it, thatit has no opportunity to be concerned with the things

An Anticipation of Harding 109that do. The relation of Congress to administrationis like that of a general staff so tremendouslyinterested in the second lieutenants that it ignoresthe lieutenant generals. The result is that thegenerals can't command the lieutenants, and thelieutenants' hair is forever standing on end whilethey try to obey the swivel chairs. Mr. Harding'sremedy for this is to sack the general and find someone who will be content with his four stars and keephis mouth shut.

There is something in it. If you can't think of anyway to redistribute the functions of government,then all you have to do is to find a President whowill be so weak that power will leave him. That isthe inner meaning of Mr. Harding's nomination.He was put there by the Senators for the solepurpose of abdicating in their favor. The GrandDukes have chosen their weak Tsar in order toincrease the power of the Grand Dukes. And if heis elected the period will be known in our constitu-tional history as the Regency of the Senate.

What will this accomplish? It will reduce theprestige and the power of the White House. Willit create a better balance of prestige and power inthe whole government? Hardly. The gentlemenwho intend to benefit by Mr. Harding's abnormalnormality are a group tiny enough to meet in ahotel bedroom. They are not the elected Congressof the United States. Their rise to power wouldmean not the restoration of a balance between

110 An Anticipation of Hardingexecutive and legislature but the substitution ofgovernment by a clique for the lonely majesty of thePresident. Dangerous as is the plight we are in,it has at least the advantage of visibility. ThePresident may be an autocrat, yet every one knowswhere that autocrat lives. But the government of aclique, an invisible, self-invited collection of friends,would be just nothing but the return of exactlywhat every decent person has fought against for ageneration.

That the glory of the normal should be presentedto a weary nation as the purest Republican doctrineaccording to the Fathers is one of those paradoxeswhich, Mr. Chesterton says, always sit beside thewells of truth. It is in fact primitive Democraticdoctrine. That doctrine has always been that any-body could govern, that leadership was dangerous,excellence somewhat un-American, and specializedknowledge somewhat sinister. The Republicansfrom Hamilton's time on have always professed abelief that ability mattered, and that no system ofgovernment could succeed in which the best men werenot preeminent. They may have had some queernotions about what constituted the best men, butthey have at least done this republic the service ofrefusing to accept the idea that anybody could doanything. They have not in theory at least stoopedto encourage the democratic vices. Mr. Hardingdoes. I hate to say it, but he is in ultimate theorya great deal closer to Mr. Bryan than he is to any

An Anticipation of Harding 111great Republican from Hamilton to Root. ForMr. Bryan has the same simple faith that anydeserving fellow can do anything, which Mr.Harding has now brought forth from the cavernsof his mind.

July, 1920.

AN EARLY ESTIMATE OF MR. McADOO

I F the Republicans do not nominate a man whocan interest the people now voting for Johnson,and if the Democrats nominate McAdoo, it will

be a hot summer for the Republican candidates; andabout September fifteenth Mr. Will Hays will beginto sleep badly. For McAdoo is a little like LloydGeorge. He knows not only what the owners ofvotes are thinking now, but what they will be excitedabout a few weeks from now. He has the politicalsense: he mobilized his war psychology before mostpeople, and he demobilized it before the rest. Hehas ,the gift, which Roosevelt had and Wood lacks,of feeling with, but just ahead, of the mass of thevoters; in short, the gift of popular sympathy. Heis possessed by what he feels, and men possessedin politics are infectious. Of all candidates he hasincomparably the greatest sensibility to the prevail-ing winds of public opinion. Johnson, who is no

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Early Estimate of Mr. McAdoo 113mean politician himself, is by comparison immov-able because more elemental; Wood is torpid andLowden contracted and Hoover detached and de-ductive, but McAdoo is swift to note and swift tomove.

He picks his course quickly, moves fast upon itand with great audacity. It may not be quite true,as one interviewer claims, that Secretary McAdoomade eight or nine important decisions one day goingdown in the elevator of a building in Washington,but it is in the general direction of the truth. Heis an agile man. He does not hesitate or brood orprocrastinate or reflect at length. Instinctively heprefers the bold and the decisive to the prudent andtepid course, for he is a statesman grafted upon apromoter. The man described as the entrepreneurin the economic textbooks is, I think, the basicMcAdoo, the kind of man who really likes enter-prises more than profit, organizes ideas, and antici-pates wants. That kind of man is first "sold" him-self on an idea and then "sells" others. What he isdetermined to do he is passionately determined todo, once he falls into his stride. He said in 1915,when addressing the Chamber of Commerce of theUnited States at Washington in advocacy of theShipping Bill:

"Since I have come to Washington there is oneword in the English language with which I havebecome more familiar than any other, because it is

114 Early Estimate of Mr. McAdoothe one word that is used most. I say that advisedly.I use it myself too much, and every time I use it Iget ashamed of myself. You can talk to any manabout anything and the first thing he says is, Tmafraid of so-and-so and so-and-so.' He is afraid ofsomething. Where is the courage of the Ameri-can nation? Where is that virile power that hasmade this American nation great? Has it disap-peared? I do not believe it. We are not afraid ofanything, my friends, so long as we walk the path ofrectitude and justice as a nation, and we intend todo that; and if this shipping bill passes all this talkabout getting into international difficulties is meretwaddle."

There are, I imagine, things of which McAdoo isafraid but they are not the usual spooks whichterrify public officials. He is not afraid of respon-sibility, nor of dinner-table gossip, nor of congres-sional investigation, nor of private talk, nor ofeditorial writers, nor of experiment. Above all heis not afraid of words. He is remarkably free ofthe clatter made by rusty old tin-can words likereactionary, radical, socialist.

"I believe there is no intelligent banker, businessman or citizen of this country, who understands theFederal Reserve system and its workings, who doesnot thank God for the great law which created that

Early Estimate of Mr. McAdoo 115system whether it be socialistic or whether it putsthe government into the banking business or not."(October I3, I9I5, before the Chamber of Com-merce of Indianapolis.)

He had fought for that system and had helped tomake it, he was for it, he was "sold," and he wasprepared to thank God for it, and make a monkeyof any one from Senator Root down who hadopposed it. When McAdoo is under way he treatsthem rough, as almost any Republican candidatewould quickly discover. He will not stand on cere-mony. If he thinks miners are underpaid, if he seesthe government muddling, he will not hesitate to callthe public's attention to the statistics of profits whichexist for public use in Senate document No. 259,65th Congress, 2d Session.

In that famous instance he did no more than quotefigures which over a year and a quarter had beenpublic property, but he will not play an insider'sgame as the insider plays it. He has not the normalreticence and inhibitions of finance and politics. Byexperience as well as temperament he is an outsiderwho knows the inside wires. He is disposed atcritical moments to tell more than is usually told,even at the risk of inconveniencing a few people andof scandalizing many. McAdoo is distinctly not asafe person in the ordinary sense of the word. Heis less safe than most devout progressives because

116 Early Estimate of Mr. McAdoohe is so clever and so sophisticated. He has adevilish knowledge of the tender spots, and a will-ingness to touch them occasionally.

What restrains him is not etiquette, nor the senti-ments of the best people, nor fear of novelty, northe compulsions of routine and tradition. He is notorganized by a class feeling, nor by a set of pro-foundly imbedded general principles. He is organ-ized by a remarkable sense of what a governingmajority of voters wants and will receive. He isaware of himself and of the political possibilities.He is bold to seize the possibilities, but prudent notto overstep them. He is not a gambler and not afanatic and not an evangelical reformer. He is aprojector of concrete programs, and a promoter whocan reveal to people that those programs embodywhat they already desire. He is an administrator ofthe first order. McAdoo is a man who makes hisway in the world, not by conformity but by initiative,not by pull or by regularity or even by genius, but byhis wits. He is the kind of man who is self-madeseveral times over. He is big, at any rate, in twodimensions. He has length and breadth if notdepth.

The defects of his virtues are revealed ratherclearly in the statements he issued some months agoabout the finances of the government. There wasa cry at that time to the effect that posterity shouldpay a larger portion of the costs of the war. Thecry has served as General Wood's financial religion

Early Estimate of Mr. McAdoo 117ever since, although on second thought people arebeginning to think differently. McAdoo was caughtby the gust.

"I think the present generation could with perfectpropriety hand on to posterity the ultimate settle-ment of that part of our debt which remainsunliquidated."

And therefore he proposed a highly ingeniousscheme of funding and postponing, coupled with aplan to buy Jamaica, the Bahamas, Barbados,Nassau, British Honduras, and the Bermudas, withthe British obligations. In public office such a stuntwould probably not emanate from McAdoo, for hehas the faculty of surrounding himself with excellentmen. The proposal was prestidigitated out ofprivate life, but it illustrates one aspect of the freeplay of his mind. It originated in a superficial publicopinion of which he was acutely aware, and it wasfertilized by a clever imagination. But it was notgoverned by sustained conviction about the enduringobligations and needs of a democratic people. Itwas facile and it was bold, but not calculated toproduce the profoundest confidence.

I have deliberately selected what seems to me theworst example I can find. It is probably not typical,but it is an exaggerated symptom to be noted. Mr.McAdoo has been a truly distinguished public serv-ant. When the smoke of manufactured opinions

118 Early Estimate of Mr. McAdooclears away, his administration of the railroads willprobably be regarded as a piece of heroic and suc-cessful intervention in one of the worst crises of thewar. There are not many who can estimate thework of any Secretary of the Treasury, and I amnot one of them. But I have heard observers whowere detached, had a chance to know, and knewhow to know, rate McAdoo very high among Treas-ury officials. There is really no question of thepractical competence of McAdoo. There is no morequestion of it than there is of Hoover's. Both areremarkable organizers and remarkable executives.

The doubt about McAdoo is really the obverseof the doubt about Hoover. Personally Hoover isextraordinarily fine and sensitive, but politically hehas shown himself to be secluded and unaware.Lacking stimulation from the mass, he deducesopinions from a few stock ideas in any political sit-uation where his energy is not focused by a specifictask. McAdoo is less intricate personally, butinfinitely more sensitive to the stimulus of popularfeeling. When he misjudges that feeling, as ofcourse he must occasionally, or when the importantthing is not popular feeling but the governing ideaof a situation beyond the scope of immediate prac-tical application, then McAdoo is likely to be quiteconventional and rhetorical, and flat, and catering.His speeches on foreign affairs, especially in theearly stages of the Treaty debate, are of this order.On the Fourth of July, I9I9, for example, he was

Early Estimate of Mr. McAdoo 119arguing for the Treaty: "Separate the League ofNations from the Treaty and it would be utterlyimpossible to enforce the Treaty. . . ." That wasthe time, July, I9I9, when nobody had read theTreaty and everybody liked it because it was hardon the Huns. A year later Mr. McAdoo was sayingsomething to the effect that God won the war butthe devil won the peace. There had been the begin-ning of a radical change in public opinion. Abeginning was enough. A hint is enough forMcAdoo, but he needs the hint.

Thus in recent interviews he has been courageousand straightforward on contentious questions affect-ing civil liberty, Russia, the Palmer injunction, andthe whole paraphernalia of the Red hysteria. Hehas talked the way free men are supposed to talkabout these things. But he was not among the firstto protest, because he is not fundamentally movedby the simple moralities. He is liberal but worldly,he is bold but immediate, he is brave but not selfless.He would win many skirmishes, and make brilliantdashes, and achieve some victories, but for the longstrategic campaigning of democracy, it is hard to tellabout him.

June, I920.

WILSON AND HOUSE

T HESE two volumes 1 tell Colonel House'sstory of his association with WoodrowWilson through the period of American

neutrality. They end with a scene at the WhiteHouse after the delivery of the war message; thePresident, his family, and the Colonel are alonetogether.

The two friends had spent the day doing nothingexcept kill time until the President was called to theCapitol. House set down in his diary that he couldsee signs of nervousness beneath the President'sapparent calm. "In the morning he told me he wasdetermined not to speak after three o'clock, believ-ing it would make a bad impression—an impressionthat he was unduly pressing matters. I thoughtdifferently and persuaded him that he should hold

1 "The Intimate Papers of Colonel House." Arranged as anarrative by Charles Seymour. Vol. I. Behind the Political Cur-tain, I9I2-I9I5.

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Vol. II. From Neutrality to War, I9I5-I9I7.

Wilson and House 121himself ready to address Congress whenever thatbody indicated their readiness to hear him. Itturned out that he began to speak at twenty minutesto nine and finished in about thirty-two minutes. Itimed him carefully." ... It was like the two men,the one in such an agony of doubt over the awfulresponsibility of the decision into which he had beenpushed that he snatched at a pretext that might allowhim to delay; the other imperturbable and awareof the immediate requirements of the occasion evento setting down in his diary that he had timed thePresident carefully and that he spoke about thirty-two minutes. Colonel House did not put down inhis diary that night how he felt about the entry ofthe United States into a great European war, exceptto say that it seemed to him that "Wilson did nothave a true conception of the path he was blazing."It was House's business to be calm and so he simplywrote that they had dined early, at half past six,and that they talked of everything except the matterin hand, that when they returned from the Capitolthe family gathered in the Oval Room, where Houseshowed Wilson a clipping from some paper, and saidto Wilson he was like Mazzini. "I could see thePresident was relieved that the tension was over andthe die cast. I knew this would happen."

Even if the two men had not had such differenttemperaments, they would have felt differently onthat fateful day. To Wilson the declaration of warwas the tragic failure of his own hopes; to House

122 Wilson and Houseit was a step to which he was thoroughly adjusted,for he had long regarded war as probable, as neces-sary, and as a great opportunity. Wilson hated thedecision with all his soul; for about two weeks hefought the matter out in his own mind, absolutelyalone. As late as the day before he went to Con-gress he told Frank Cobb of his horror and criedout to him: "If there is any alternative, for God'ssake, let's take it 1" House, on the other hand, wasnot beset by these doubts. He remained in NewYork during Wilson's agony, and did not go toWashington till the decision was made. He foundwhen Wilson showed him the text of the messagethat "no address he has yet made pleases me morethan this one."

Although they were associated so closely, it isevident that these two men felt very differently aboutthe war. Wilson, in spite of the complexity of hischaracter and his mind, was moved by the old Ameri-can feeling that America is a new land which mustnot be entangled with Europe. The sympathy of hismind was pro-Allies though chastened by a certainirony about their moral pretensions, a suspicion oftheir motives, and a conviction that unfortunatelythey too were mad; in this period his heart wasalways neutral and non-European. His real judg-ment he expressed several times, to the horror notonly of the Allied spokesmen but of Colonel House;it was that the war arose out of obscure causes thatwere hatched in a sinister system and a tortuous

Wilson and House 123diplomacy. Wilson never accepted the official prop-aganda even when it blew the hottest; he neverrespected it, and could hardly bear to listen to it.What he wanted above all things was to keep outof the hideous mess. House, on the other hand, wasmuch too practical a politician to permit himself tostray into such a wilderness of unusable truth, evenif he had not really wanted the Allies to win. Housewanted those very things to which Wilson ultimatelygave his official consent and about half his soul'sdesire. He did not share Wilson's reluctance andforeboding, and he appears in these volumes, per-haps a little more consistently than he was in fact,as the protagonist of what might be called theBritish liberal imperialist view as against theinstinctive American isolationist view of WoodrowWilson.

Unfortunately this record does not contain Wil-son's side of the correspondence with House, nor ofcourse any account of Wilson's feelings about theirrelationship. It is like listening to one side of abroken conversation on the telephone, and not quiteeven that, for the record we have is what House putdown and Mr. Seymour selected. It is plain to me,however, from House's letters that he did not pressvery hard on their differences, and that their asso-ciation was friendly but careful. There are hintsoccasionally which lead one to think that Wilsonwould not have tolerated urgency from House orfrom any one else. Thus in these papers Mr. Scy-

124 Wilson and Housemour gives great weight to a letter written byHouse to Wilson on July 19, 1915, in which he says:"If war comes with Germany, it will be because ofour unpreparedness and her belief that we are moreor less impotent to do her harm." But there is noevidence that House ever made an issue of thiscrucial matter, nor that he gave it the emphasis atthe time which Mr. Seymour gives it by quoting thesentence at the head of Chapter I of the secondvolume.

I am inclined to believe, therefore, that althoughthis was the closest political friendship of WoodrowWilson's life, it was a friendship at some distanceand always of a certain fragility. Wilson toldHouse more than he told his Cabinet, and certainlyno other adviser in this period had so much of hisconfidence. But there were reservations, and theredoes not seem ever to have been the intimacy of twofriends who can say anything to each other withoutmisunderstanding. The letters are friendly, but theyare the letters of one statesman to another. Theyleave me feeling that House had to consider care-fully how he would approach Wilson.

House had a more coherent, even if it was asimpler, view of the war and of the part he wishedWilson to play; he was not tormented by Wilson'shatred of war, by his dreadful sense that victory is asnare, by his desire to wrench himself free from theencompassing of a tragic fate. House was business-like about the business at hand, and did not look long

Wilson and House 125into the bottomless pit; thought and feeling and theaction he recommended were worldly and of a piece.But in Wilson there was an unworldliness of pity anddoubt and high contempt that prevented him fromagreeing wholly with much that circumstances forcedhim to do. The figure of Wilson is dim in thesepages, but here and there we catch a glimpse of himas he struggles very much alone against the advanc-ing chaos. Now and then the real future isilluminated for him by a flash of insight. But theseprophecies only cause him anguish, for they showhim how different is the path he is compelled to takefrom that which he thinks he ought to take.

II

Colonel House served the President in manydifferent roles—as friend, adviser, scout, observer,secret agent, political manipulator, negotiator, andsifter of information and opinion. But his main taskwas to accommodate the personal attitude of Wilsonto the exigencies of the war. For Wilson stoodaloof not only from its detail but from the officialpremises and official criteria of his time. He wishedto keep the country out of the war. For that reasonhe wished to end the war. He did not wish to fightin order merely to vindicate that part of our neutralrights which Germany was violating. If he had tofight, he wished to justify war by some objectivewhich was greater than the war aims of the Allies.

126 Wilson and HouseThe aloofness of Wilson from the pressure of thosewho usually surround the head of a state helpedhim to his uncanny understanding of what the massof American people really believed about the war.It is no wonder they reelected him in 1916 in thebelief that he had kept the country out of the war inEurope, nor that they elected the Republicans in1920 because they promised to keep the country outof Europe and another war in Europe. In theperiod of neutrality Wilson saw more clearly thanany living man what the country really wanted. Hewas in sympathy with the country. He was verymuch alone, and yet his intuitions were those of themass of unseen and non-vocal Americans, once youlooked below the views which were acquired andimposed by German frightfulness and Allied prop-aganda and the personal and social connections ofthe upper classes on the Eastern seaboard.

Colonel House, too, had a certain initial Americansuspicion of Europe, but he was a much more sociableman than Wilson, and he was at once more trustfulof, and more sensitive to, the upper officializedopinion. He became in a sense the honest brokerbetween Wilson, who longed for peace withoutentanglement, and the people on both sides of theAtlantic who had set themselves to draw the UnitedStates into the war. The formula which Houseevolved first during his negotiations with Grey inLondon early in 1916 became later the Wilsonpolicy of a war to found a League of Nations; it

Wilson and House 127was at bottom a compromise formula to satisfy bothWilson's instincts and the demands of the pro-Allies.House proposed to buy the assent of the Allies to aconference to end the war by offering to enter thewar on the side of the Allies if Germany refused theconference or insisted upon a victorious peace. As Iread the record, Wilson never fully agreed to thisproposal in so far as it involved a promise to enterthe war. But he did take from it the principle thatAmerican influence should be used as a makeweightagainst aggression and a stabilizer of peace. Thus itcame about that when he entered the war, he didnot think of himself as primarily engaged in a waragainst Germany on the side of the Allies. Hethought he was using the force of the United Statesto tame Germany and to restrain the Allies in orderthat there might be established a permanent con-ference to prevent war.

In these volumes we see the origins of what cameto be known as the Wilson policy. We can see howthe President began to formulate an ideal future asthe pressure of events forced him into a course ofaction which he detested. And in it all ColonelHouse appears as the man who suggested to Wilsonhow he could do, in a way which nearly satisfied hisconscience, what immeasurably great events werecompelling him against his will to do. A psychol-ogist might say that House supplied Wilson with therationalizations by means of which Wilson was ableto bow to a destiny that was overbearing him, and

128 Wilson and Houseeven ultimately to sow the seed of a triumph thatmay make him immortal.

III

The machinery by which Colonel House kept intouch with the war was so simple that it might becalled primitive. He had direct contact with Greyat the British Foreign Office and with Bernstorff.He had only a casual contact with the FrenchGovernment or with the Italian or the Russian. Hehad access, of course, to what the State Departmentcould learn about the war, but that was admittedlynot much from the point of view of high politics.He had a useful and illuminating correspondencewith Gerard at Berlin, and much less illuminatingcorrespondence with other American Ambassadors.He went to England, Germany, and France severaltimes and had interviews with the leading statesmen.But when all is said and done, it was with the Britishalone, and then only with a certain section of theBritish, and with this section not in fullest con-fidence, that he had a continuous discussion.

With Grey at the British Foreign Office he useda secret code; he had the closest personal contactwith the head of the British Secret Service inAmerica, and by this means a channel of communica-tion was opened which passed by the BritishEmbassy in Washington, the State Department, andthe American Embassy in London. He had no

Wilson and House 129comparable relations with any of the other Allies,and with the Germans he had only a friendly butcautious contact with Bernstorff, who was himselfconsiderably an outsider in the conduct of foreignpolicy. His friendships in Britain were with menlike Grey, Bryce, Plunkett, and to a certain extentBalfour, but there is no evidence that they told himall they knew, or all that he had under the circum-stances perhaps a fair right to know. And it isplain that the imperial statesmen like Curzon, andLloyd George himself, and Milner, and the per-manent but dominating Foreign Office, were outsidethe orbit of House, and quite content to leave thepersuasion of Wilson and House to those Britishliberals who most nearly talked the language thatAmericans understand.

The objective proof of this is to be found in thefact that although House negotiated with Grey in1916, making a tentative offer to enter the war onthe side of the Allies, Grey never explained to Housethat the Allies were bound to each other by a seriesof secret treaties that made acceptance of Wilson'sconditions impossible. Grey's letter to Houseexplaining his moral scruples about considering theoffer is one of the least informing documents thatany one could have written under the circumstances.There is no doubt that the negotiations of 1916were conducted in the dark, and that neither Wilsonnor House seems to have known fully the innerdiplomatic history of those days. Mr. Seymour in a

130 Wilson and Housefootnote (Vol. I, p. 443) states that Mr. Balfourexplained the details of the Italian Treaty to Presi-dent Wilson on April 30, 1917. That was ratherlate in the day. Nobody explained that treaty orany other to House when he was in London discuss-ing so important a matter as the entrance of theUnited States into the war. It is impossible, there-fore, to feel that even so able a man as House, withso great a gift as his for friendships, is even apartially adequate substitute for an effective diplo-matic service.

IV

The secret negotiations of February, 1916, werethe most important diplomatic effort that Houseundertook in the period covered by these volumes.The conclusions of a conference on February 14were embodied in a memorandum written by SirEdward Grey which is dated February 22. Thesubstance of the proposal as made by House is asfollows:

"Colonel House told me that President Wilsonwas ready, on hearing from France and Englandthat the moment was opportune, to propose that aconference should be summoned to put an end to thewar. Should the Allies accept this proposal andshould Germany refuse it, the United States wouldenter the war against Germany.

"Colonel House expressed the opinion that, if

Wilson and House 131such a conference met, it would secure peace on termsnot unfavorable to the Allies; and if it failed tosecure peace, the United States would leave the con-ference as a belligerent on the side of the Allies, ifGermany was unreasonable. . . . "

That is the way the proposal read when Houseleft London. On March 6, he arrived in Wash-ington and went over the memorandum withPresident Wilson. Two days later, on March 8,Wilson wrote a telegram to Grey for House tosign which read as follows:

"I reported to the President the general con-clusions of our conference of the 14th of February,and in the light of those conclusions he authorizesme to say that, so far as he can speak for the futureactions of the United States, he agrees to the memo-randum with which you have furnished me, withonly this correction: that the word 'probably' beadded after the word 'would' and before the word'leave' in line number nine."

Thus, after Wilson had amended it, the proposalread that "the United States would probably enterthe war against Germany," and not that "the UnitedStates would enter the war against Germany"; that"the United States would probably leave the con-ference as a belligerent" and not that "the UnitedStates would leave it as a belligerent/' In a foot-

132 Wilson and Housenote to the account of this incident (Vol. II, p. 21)Mr. Seymour says that:

"The value of the offer was in no way lessened bythe use of the word 'probably,' which was a con-ventional covering expression common in diplomaticdocuments. Since the power to declare war residesin Congress and since the President shares with theSenate the control of foreign policy, it would havebeen impossible for Wilson to give a categoricalguaranty of the future actions of the United States.As a matter of practice, however, the President candetermine the question of peace and war, and theexpression of his intention appears here in thestrongest permissible form."

It is hard for me to believe that the British For-eign Office in 1916 interpreted the insertion of theword "probably" as Mr. Seymour interprets it in1925. Assuming that British statesmen understoodthe subtleties of our constitutional system, it seemsto me that they must nevertheless have regarded thePresident's use of the word ""probably" as a reserva-tion on the President's own action as well as on thatof Congress. The President did not say categori-cally: "I will recommend to Congress that theUnited States enter the war," as he might havedone if that was what he was intending to do. Theuse of the word "probably" reserved liberty of actionfor Wilson, and so the Allies must have understood

Wilson and House 133it. It must be remembered that at the very timethese secret negotiations were in progress, thePresident was being reviled in the pro-Allied pressof America and Europe as pro-German, pacifist andspineless; and that just before House talked to Grey,the State Department accepted publicly, thoughtemporarily, the German position on the arming ofmerchant vessels. I do not see how it is possible tosuppose that the Allies took the word "probably"as a "conventional covering expression," and not asa weasel word which radically altered the sense ofthe House proposal.

Once you reject Mr. Seymour's explanation andtake the Wilson amendment as meaning what itappears to say, you arrive at this result: House pro-posed a conference which would either obtainmoderate terms for the Allies or American assistancein the war; Wilson, on the other hand, proposed aconference to end the war with no commitment thathe would even try to enter the war if the conferencefailed. I do not believe that House and Wilsonclearly understood each other here; in this inci-dent we can see that in spite of their apparentagreement they started from different premises aboutthe war, and that their minds worked differently asto the American objective. It is necessary to addthat there is every reason to think that the Allieshad a truer realization of Wilson's attitude thanHouse who, in the stress of working for a great plan,did not distinguish sharply between what he hoped

134 Wilson and Housewould happen and what President Wilson wished tohave happen.

If Mr. Seymour's interpretation were correct theincident would be a crucial one in the history of thewar and in the history of American politics. As yetwe have only two versions, that of Colonel House,and the gracious but highly officialized account ofLord Grey's "Twenty-Five Years." (Vol. II, p. 126et seq.) We do not know Wilson's version, and wedo not know what the Allied statesmen thought of itall. We do know enough to be wary of Mr. Sey-mour's definite verdict that "House had shown themhow, by merely raising a beckoning hand, they mighthave the assurance either of a peace of justice or avictory won with American assistance." (Vol. II,p. 203.) The implied charge against the Alliedstatesmen is a very grave one, and no doubt in thecourse of time they will answer it.

If Mr. Seymour were right, the matter would beno less grave from the point of view of America.For he insists that a President of the United Statesoffered in secret to commit this country to enter awar in order to achieve a certain diplomatic settle-ment in Europe. For myself I do not believe thatthere is any evidence that Woodrow Wilson did any-thing of the kind, and I am personally convincedthat the incident is much simpler to interpret thanMr. Seymour's version implies. I give my own inter-pretation for what it is worth, recalling again thatwe do not know the whole story. I think Wilson

Wilson and House 135wished above all to avoid war. I think he wouldhave been willing to have almost any peace in Europeif he could keep America out of war. I think hesaw that if once he could induce the belligerents tobegin talking that they never could resume fighting.He was willing to try any device, including theHouse negotiations, that might bring on a confer-ence, provided it did not commit him to entering thewar. And I think that is exactly the sense in whichthe Allies understood it, and that is exactly why theyignored it. They had no promise from Wilson thatreally counted. And in a conference at that timetheir divergence of aims would have come to thesurface, the secret treaties would have seriouslydamaged their moral standing, and the coalitionmight have broken up. Finally and above all theyknew that if they maintained their blockade, Ger-many would either starve or resume submarine war-fare. If Germany starved, Wilson's restraininginfluence would be eliminated in the peace confer-ence ; if Germany resumed warfare, Wilson would bedriven to enter the war without conditions.

If this interpretation is correct, the negotiationswere a failure not because the Allies were too stupidto seize a great opportunity, as Mr. Seymour sug-gests, or too high-minded, as Lord Grey suggests.The negotiations failed because Wilson had nothingto negotiate with: he would promise nothing and hewould threaten nothing. He would not promise togo to war with Germany and he would not threaten

136 Wilson and Houseto enforce American rights against the Allies. Theoffer inspired neither hope nor fear. And whenempires are at war it is not possible to deflect themwith insubstantial proposals.

And yet out of these same negotiations grew thatadvocacy of a League of Nations which may yetcause Woodrow Wilson to be numbered among thegreat benefactors of mankind. As Wilson under-stood the House-Grey negotiations they were anattempt to provoke a conference, end the war, andthus extricate the United States from an otherwiseinsoluble difficulty. The failure of these negotiationsseems to have made clear to Wilson that the UnitedStates was caught in circumstances which allowedit no escape from the fate of the rest of the world.During the spring which followed the winter'sfailure he seems finally to have concluded that neu-trality was untenable for the United States in a greatwar, and that the philosophy of isolation would haveto be revised. He still fought against the practicalconsequences and hoped that he might avoid partici-pation in this war. But he realized that as the worldgrew more and more interdependent no succeedingPresident would be able to maintain neutrality evenas long as he had.

It was with a foreboding that even he might notbe able to escape that he publicly espoused the idea

Wilson and House 137of a League of Nations in his great speech ofMay 27, 1916. He had then come to the conclusionthat if he was forced into the war all he could hopeto obtain as compensation for such immeasurableevil was an organized peace. Wilson was determinednot to fight a war merely for American neutral rightsas against the submarine. For he realized that thoserights could not be vindicated by war, and the eventhas fully borne him out. The treaty of peace doesnot in any way mention the rights of neutrals againstsubmarines and the submarine to-day is exactly thesame instrument of frightfulness as it was in 1917.When the victory was won and peace was made, thevictorious Allies did not trouble even to pass a reso-lution against submarines. Wilson felt that to enterthe war merely for the sake of our rights would notbe worth the suffering and the cost.

He set himself, therefore, the noble task of estab-lishing some permanent benefit as the objective incase the United States was forced into the war. Itwas in that way, if I read the record rightly, thathe turned to the League of Nations. Other menbefore him had advocated the idea. The greatnessof Wilson lay in his prophetic understanding thatthis was the one good he might be able to promoteand defend in the face of the oncoming disaster. Itwas the one compensation, it was the one reasonableideal, it was the one moral justification, it was theone balm to his conscience for the plunging of agreat people into the red madness of Europe.

138 Wilson and HouseIf Wilson had prepared for the ordeal of war

in practice as he prepared for it in principle, hisclaim to supreme greatness among statesmen wouldnot be open to dispute. But the record of thesememoirs shows that he and House up to 1917 weredependent for their knowledge of the war largelyupon what belligerent statesmen chose to tell them.They had no secret service and no diplomatic servicewhich could inform them either as to the secretengagements or the secret purposes of the Europeangovernments. And they never learned before thedeclaration of war that there were in existencesolemn and binding agreements which were bound inlarge measure to prevent the making of such a justand conciliatory settlement as they needed for thefoundation of a successful League of Nations.Therefore, they missed the golden opportunity ofexacting pledges from the Allies for an Americanpeace. The Allies had to buy the help of Rumaniaand of Italy. But they got American help for noth-ing, and by that disastrous oversight the whole grandpurpose of Wilson was almost wrecked at Paris.

VI

The fame of House will depend of course uponthe fame of Wilson, just as Wilson's fame willdepend upon the success of the League of Nations.House, it seems to me, is bound to share in whateverfame Wilson finally achieves, for it is evident even

Wilson and House 139from the scanty records available that he helpedmore than any other man, and that he helped deci-sively, to commit Wilson to the cause of the League.It seems to me of slight consequence whether or notthe fulsome judgments of his biographer areaccepted by posterity. Even the claims of thebiographer which are bound to embarrass theColonel's friends are of little permanent importance.

Time, and a sense of reality, and a fuller knowl-edge, will change the perspective in which theseletters and diaries are set, and there will emerge, Ifeel sure, in place of the picture of a man whodirected destiny, the picture of a man who stoodfaithfully at Wilson's side against a destiny thatoverwhelmed them both, but in that vain and oftenblind resistance did help to kindle a light for thegenerations to come.

April, 1926.

BORAH

I

IN due course Senator Borah has been made

Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Rela-tions. He has come into this high estate not

by election of the people or by choice of his ownparty but under the rule of seniority. He has out-lasted his predecessors. I mention this fact becauseit establishes his independence at the outset. A manwho has attained an office because he is alive andbecause he continues to be elected by the people of

140

Borah 141Idaho is under no great compulsion to regard him-self as the mere mouthpiece of a President or of aSecretary of State. Deo volente, he will survivethem both. If only he continues to eat moderately,to exercise regularly, to sleep well, and to keepabout half the voters in the State of Idaho on hisside, he can look with cool detachment on any sug-gestion that issues from the White House.

The ordinary inducements to conformity count forlittle in Mr. Borah's case. There are many morevoters on the island of Manhattan alone than in thewhole State of Idaho; with such a small constituencyto nurse Senator Borah does not have to worry aboutthe favors and threats of the national administra-tion. His constituency is manageable. He can reallytalk to it and make a direct personal contact withthe local leaders who dispose of votes. No wonderhis faith in an appeal to the people is unshaken,for there are so few people to whom he has to makehis appeal. A loyal following of less than seventy-five thousand voters in Idaho is enough to make hisreelection certain. Mr. Borah does not need toworry. A national administration cannot help orhurt him much.

But he can help or hurt the administration. Heis the greatest figure in the Northwest, and theNorthwest is about as warmly attached to theRepublican Party as the Irish Free State is to theUnited Kingdom. The Northwest votes Republicanin presidential years, and then forms a coalition with

142 Borahthe Democrats against almost all major Republicanpolicies. President Coolidge and the Republicans ofthe East know that there are good reasons for beingvery kind to Senator Borah. For although hehas never actually run away as Roosevelt did in1912, there is something about him which suggeststhat he might. He is allowed to go his own way,therefore, in the reasonable hope that if he is givenenough space in which to roam about within theparty, he will find it convenient to stay inside theparty.

Thus it has come to pass that wholly domesticconsiderations have given Mr. Borah a peculiarindependence in international affairs.

II

He exercises the power of protest and of veto. Itis a power exactly suited to his temperament. ForSenator Borah has little interest in what is usuallycalled constructive statesmanship. He is not pos-sessed by a desire to make two institutions growwhere one grew before. He does not like and hedoes not trust officials and committees and adminis-trative hierarchies and executive orders and largepayrolls and pensions. When some one comes tohim with a proposal for elaborating the machineryof society, be it to maintain peace, to protect chil-dren, or to pension and instruct mothers, it is nolack of interest in the object but a congenital dislike

Borah 143of the machinery which brings him finally into oppo-sition. Borah was born and bred on the frontierfar from the complexity of modern civilization; itis in his bones to distrust formality and collectivered tape, and to rely upon direct speech, commonknowledge, individual salvation and his own con-ception of the sovereign power of the moral law.The strain of Jefferson, and of Rousseau, of theReformers before them, runs strongly in Borah.He believes in the natural goodness of man, and,when that goodness is deficient, in the natural rightof man to be damned in his own way. Thus recentlyhe wrote to me, quoting Buckle, that "the mostvaluable additions made to legislation have beenenactments destructive of preceding legislation."The real business of the statesman, in his philosophy,is not to construct institutions for the regimentationof men but to tear down those vested follies of theages which thwart the natural goodness of mankind.Therefore, when Borah considers a new proposalhe does not ask himself: What does this add to themachinery of living? Borah asks himself: Doesit subtract from a machinery which is already top-heavy? Thus, the word "constructive" casts no spellupon him; he has read history with a deeplyprotestant mind and has concluded that what states-men have usually constructed is a prison house forthe soul.

It follows inevitably that the career of Borah isbuilt upon opposition. He has been against the

144 BorahLeague, and against the Court, and against thePacific Pact, and against the British funding arrange-ments, and against the Wilson-Hughes Russianpolicy, and against the Caribbean policy, and againstthe Isle of Pines Treaty, and against the exclusionof Count Karolyi and Mr. Saklatvala, and againstthe alien property administration, and against thebonus, and against the Child Labor Amendment,and against Coolidge Republicanism, and againstLaFollette insurgency. He is an instinctive con-scientious objector, and his mind seizes swiftly uponthe reasons why anything that is about to be doneshould not be done. His passion is to expose, toventilate, to protest, to prevent and to destroy.Since he does not have a hankering to create institu-tions, pass laws, or facilitate agreements, he has nouse for the reticences and frustrations that arerequired in public affairs. Thus, for example, hewas once arguing with Senator Brandegee thattreaties should be discussed publicly in the Senate,and Mr. Brandegee had made the point that toomuch plain speech might give offense to foreigncountries. "What are these delicate questions,"retorted Senator Borah, "which may offend foreignpowers? These delicate questions are too oftenquestions of dubious righteousness." Only a manwho has risen by appealing to audiences rather thanby making executive decisions would, I think, havesaid that.

Borah 145

IIINow ordinarily such a man would find himself

extremely unpopular in a country where the passionfor doing something, or even anything, is so highlyregarded. He would be labeled a chronic kickerand dismissed from the society of the righteous andthe efficient.

That has not been Senator Borah's fate. It maybe that he has lost a little in prestige since he becamethe Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Rela-tions. Many people say he has, but I am not sosure they are right. For they are the same peoplewho think that the whole term of Mr. Coolidge willbe like the present honeymoon when nobody is seri-ously dissatisfied with anything. It is in the natureof things that a great protestant like Borah shouldlose lustre in a time of fabulous complacency andcontentment. But as surely as there will be newcauses for discontent, so there will be a revival ofBorah's influence. For in the existing confusion andparalysis of the Democratic Party he is the naturalrallying point of the opposition.

In America to-day any one who is out of sorts withanything thinks first of Mr. Borah. That is whyhe has grown great on opposition rather than weakby his chronic objecting. Within the last few yearsmost of the large blocs of voters have been moredeeply opposed to something than they have been

146 Boraheager for anything. The internationally mindedwanted the League and the Court but Borah touchedtheir hearts by his outspoken oppostion to the Ruhr,his attitude toward Russia, Haiti, and China. Thestrong nationalists deplored Borah's affection for theunder-dog nations, but where could they find achampion comparable to him in their fight againstcooperation with Europe? He delighted theupper classes in the East with his attack on thebonus, and he delighted the people of the West byhis attack on the international bankers who desirean easy settlement of the debts. He opposed theChild Labor Amendment and pleased the conserva-tives, and he opposed the suppression of free speechand pleased the liberals. Mr. Borah has not becomean outcast like most objectors because he has madecommon cause at one time or another with everyinfluential group.

On whichever side he fights he is a host in himself,and those who have had him as their champion inone cause readily forgive him for all the pet projectsof theirs which he has brought to nothing. Borah isa very inspiring man to have on one's own side ofthe argument. He knows what is theatrically effec-tive, he has an air of common sense, a resourceful-ness, and an eloquence, which have made him themost successful debater in the Senate. He has astill greater quality than these. Borah's oppositionhas no poison in it. For some subtle reason, Borahdoes not make enemies of his opponents. One would

Borah 147expect that a man who had fought everybody'sdearest project at one time or another would behated throughout the land. Borah is not hated any-where. On the contrary there is not a gatheringfrom a bankers' convention to a communist meetingwhere Borah is not respected. He was the oneirreconcilable enemy of the League with whom thefriends of the League were on friendly terms. Hehas opposed almost everybody and has embitterednobody.

This is due in part to the liking which every onefeels for a man who is known to be brave, in partalso to his vitality and his poise, and to the sensethat he is not bitten and driven by jealousies andanimosities. There is a natural well-ventilatedhealth in Borah which distinguishes him from therun of overfed, tobacco-laden, anecdotal indoorpoliticians. But there is also a deeper ground ofconfidence. Borah's opposition has nothing exoticabout it. He is not against this or that because hebelieves in strange doctrines. When a man denieshe also affirms, and Borah always affirms the oldestAmerican traditions and the simplest popular preju-dices. He believes in helping the under-dog, indistrusting powerful foreigners, in distrusting poli-ticians, in preserving the Constitution, and in holdingon to the taxpayers' money. When Borah is inopposition to the Child Labor Amendment nobodythinks he wishes to exploit children; when he opposesthe League nobody thinks he is a militarist and a

148 Borahjingo; when he opposes the Haitian occupationnobody supposes he has fallen in love with the Hai-tians ; and when he pleads for Russia, mirabile dictu,nobody, not even the most furious patrioteer, thinkshe is in the pay of Moscow. He has fought thebattle of the jingo and the pacifist, the reactionaryand the radical, and yet he has not merged hisidentity with any of them.

IV

It would not occur to Senator Borah, I think, thathe must sacrifice any of his liberty of action becausehe had become Chairman of the Committee onForeign Relations. He has always spoken his mindon all subjects, and he continues to speak it. If hedoes not like French policy in Morocco, or Britishpolicy in China, he says so just as plainly as if hewere still a mere Senator. If he does not like whathe hears about the intentions of the President inrespect to the French debt, he says so loudly andpublicly. He feels perfectly free to indulge in run-ning comment on the acts of foreign powers, on thedomestic affairs of other nations, on their statesmenand their national habits, on their ambitions andsupposed purposes, and on any and all negotiationshowever delicate at any time while they are inprogress. He is not concerned apparently aboutthe difficulty which foreigners experience becausethey do not know whether they are being lectured by

Borah 149William E. Borah of Idaho or by the Senate of theUnited States as a coordinate part of the treaty-making power.

He feels himself privileged to use the prestige ofhis office to promote the influence of his opinions.The ensuing troubles of the Executive do not breakhis heart, and the demands of all institutions thatmen suppress themselves and conform mean verylittle to him. Mr. Borah is a confirmed bachelorwho somehow finds himself married to the Executive.I do not say he will be unfaithful, but Heaven pitythe Executive if it expects Borah to worry about thewhole damn family.

As a matter of fact he regards it as his high dutyto watch the Executive with the utmost suspicion.The history of secret diplomacy in Europe has madea deep impression on him and he believes that thewars and miseries of mankind are due chiefly tothe irresponsible intrigues of diplomats. He hasalso a sublime faith that legislatures and popularmajorities are in the nature of things pacific andjust. It is the very essence of his philosophy thatbad deeds are done in the dark, and that light bringsrighteousness. I have never detected the quiver ofa doubt on his part that this is one of the eternalverities, but also I do not recall any attempt onhis part to consider the weight of popular prejudicewhich beats upon a statesman who might wish toappease the Japanese, or to deal rationally withdebts and reparations. It is a fundamental fact

150 Borahabout Borah that he accepts the dogma of opendiplomacy at face value.

It will be a decisive fact in the immediate futureof our foreign relations that Senator Borah looksupon the ancient prerogatives of the Senate as suitedto the practice of open diplomacy. Other chairmenof the Committee, Senator Lodge for example, havebeen jealous to maintain the rights of the Senateagainst the President, but they have been moved, ifI read them correctly, by the inveterate desire of allmen to hold and extend a vested right. But Mr.Borah is moved by a passion to thwart evil by pub-licity, and the powers of the Senate are for him ameans to that end. He is more determined thanMr. Lodge ever was to make the Senate a majorpartner in diplomatic affairs, for Mr. Borah playsno favorites and cares nothing, where Mr. Lodgecared much, for the unity and the glory of theRepublican Party. Mr. Borah's insistence on therole of the Senate is inspired, therefore, by a faiththat meant little to Mr. Lodge. It is a faith in theultimate righteousness of an appeal to the people.If the Senators were consulted and if the Senatorsadvised, Mr. Lodge was satisfied. He insisted thatthe President recognize the Senators. Mr. Borah,on the other hand, conceives it to be the duty of

Borah 151the Senate to force the President to consult thewhole electorate.

Thus Senator Borah is engaged in trying to turnthe treaty-making powers of the Senate into themeans to a very open popular diplomacy. Theexperiment will be well worth watching becausesurely there can be no doubt that with the increaseof contact across frontiers various interests withineach nation are bound to play a larger part in theconduct of foreign policy. It has ceased to be pos-sible for diplomacy to be in the sole keeping of thehead of the state. The Executive must obtain theadvice and consent of many people if his engage-ments with a foreign nation are to be binding. Thequestion is whether the constitutional powers of theSenate under Article 2, Section 2, can be stretchedto cover this new need.

They were not designed to make possible an opendiplomacy. The authors of the Constitution cer-tainly did not suppose that they were compellingthe President to open up the whole conduct offoreign policy to popular discussion. The Federalistcommends Article 2, Section 2, because it "providesthat our negotiations for treaties shall have everyadvantage which can be derived from talents, infor-mation, integrity and deliberate investigation on theone hand, and from secrecy and dispatch on theother." In another place the writers of TheFederalist argue that the House of Representatives

152 Borahis not fit to participate because "decision, secrecy anddispatch are incompatible with the genius of a bodyso variable and so numerous." It is plain that theauthors of the Constitution thought that the Presi-dent would consult in secret with a small body ofmen; there were only twenty-six Senators at thattime, and the President needed only to convinceabout eighteen of them. The House which theFathers rejected as too variable and too numerouswas then smaller than the present Senate. It con-sisted of only sixty-five members. President Wash-ington himself tried once to consult the small Senateof that day about the treaty with the Creek Indians,and had such an unpleasant time that he never triedit again. Later when the House asked him forinformation about the Jay Treaty he refused, sayingthat "the nature of foreign relations requires cautionand their success must often depend on secrecy."

While it is clear enough what the authors of theConstitution meant, they did not state what theymeant very clearly. The phrase, "advice and con-sent," was so vague that it left room for a largedevelopment of our constitutional practice. Thusby the beginning of the twentieth century the powersof the Senate had, at least in the opinion of SenatorLodge, grown to the point where the Senate virtu-ally had the right to negotiate independently with aforeign power. The doctrine of Lodge is worthlooking at here, for our hero, Mr. Borah, hasadopted it and is making the fullest possible use of it.

Borah 153The doctrine was enunciated by Mr. Lodge in an

article written for Scribner's Magazine in 1902 andreprinted by the Senate in 1921. Mr. Lodge feltthat a little lecture on American constitutional lawwas in order, for Lord Landsdowne, then Secretaryof State for Foreign Affairs, had evinced a regret-table inability to understand the Senate. The noblelord said he was puzzled by the behavior of theSenate in amending the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty; hecomplained that contrary to well-established inter-national usage His Majesty's Government, "withoutany previous attempts to ascertain their views," hadsuddenly been confronted with a new proposal.Lord Lansdowne was used to dealing with foreignoffices, but he had never yet been asked to conducta diplomatic negotiation with a branch of thelegislature.

Mr. Lodge proceeded, icily and firmly, to set himright:

"Mr. Hay and Lord Pauncefote open a negotia-tion for the modification of the Clayton-BulwerTreaty. . . . After due discussion they agree uponand sign a treaty. That agreement, so far as GreatBritain is concerned, requires only the approval ofthe King for its completion, but with the UnitedStates it is very different, because no treaty can beratified by the President of the United States with-out the consent of the Senate. . . . But he (LordLansdowne) does not seem to have realized that

154 Borahthe Senate could properly continue the negotiationsbegun by Mr. Hay and Lord Pauncefote by offeringnew or modified propositions to His Majesty'sGovernment.'' (Italics mine.)

A treaty drawn by the President in agreementwith a foreign power is still "inchoate," said Mr.Lodge; it is "a mere project for a treaty." And soa foreign power which sets out to make a treaty withthe United States must deal first with the StateDepartment at one end of Pennsylvania Avenue andthen with another State Department at the otherend. Lord Lansdowne must have found that verystrange. He had not yet learned that a diplomaticaffair with the United States is like a two-volumenovel in which the hero marries the heroine at theend of the first volume and divorces her triumphantlyat the end of the second.

In asserting these powers of the Senate, Mr.Lodge planted himself on the meaning of the Con-stitution. In the interpretation of this clause it is acase of each man his own oracle, for if one thing isclear it is that the Fathers had no very propheticidea of how they meant Article 2, Section 2, to work.Hamilton wrote a paper on the subject for TheFederalist, and the paper is one of the least illumi-nating he ever wrote. But in one clause of a sen-tence devoted to a very different subject he speaksof obtaining "sanction in the progressive stages ofa treaty." Although this does not bear out Senator

Borah 155Lodge's notion that the Senate could "continue thenegotiations" by itself, it does seem to say that theSenate was to advise and consent not merely on thecompleted treaty, but step by step in the negotiations.

VI

The moral of it all is that the Constitution itselfis so ambiguous that it could be stretched to coverany workable arrangement. The real difficulty forMr. Borah or for any one else who wishes to seethe legislature play a serious part in diplomacy isthat large bodies of men cannot conduct a negotia-tion or initiate a policy. As a general rule they canonly approve or disapprove propositions presentedto them. The Senate can accept or reject a treaty;it can occasionally even adopt amendments proposedby Senators; it can make reservations. The Con-gress can declare war; it can appropriate money orrefuse to appropriate money to carry out an inter-national obligation. Yet these powers, great as theyare, control only a very small area of diplomaticaction. At the most they may be sufficient to compelthe President to consider whether he can enlist thesupport of the legislature for the policies he is pur-suing. The President is like a general with a some-what mutinous army on his hands; he cannot be surehis troops will follow him. Occasionally his troopswill run away from him. But whether his troopsobey or disobey they do not determine the strategy

156 Borahof the campaign. He determines the strategy inthe light of the support he can muster.

The attempt of a legislature to control foreignpolicy is in the nature of things an attempt to makethe tail wag the dog. Congress alone, for example,has the power to declare war. But the President hasthe power to make war and to put Congress in theposition where it must either back him up or hauldown the flag. The Executive who believes a waris necessary can create a situation where Congressreally has no choice. He can occupy ports, shootoff the cannon, and get himself embroiled so that nopatriotic legislature will refuse to help him out. Itis something of a fiction to say that Congress alonecan declare war. It is nearer the truth to say thatCongress has a theoretical right to decide whethera war which has already begun shall be continued.But Congress has no power to say how long the warshall be continued; for the President can make anarmistice when he chooses.

The power of the Senate over treaties is no lesselusive. In theory no covenant binding the action ofthe United States can be made without its consent;in fact every President makes decisions which arebinding without the consent of the Senate. He maydo this by exchange of notes, by gentlemen's agree-ments, by the mere fact that when the President doesone thing something else follows by the logic ofnecessity. The intervention of the Senate whenformal treaties are presented to it occurs in the

Borah 157presence of a mountain of accomplished facts. TheSenate can tinker a little with the text, but as ageneral practice it must take it or leave it. Andeven if the Senate takes the treaty, the real meaningof the treaty eludes the Senate because the power ofinterpretation and administration remains with theExecutive. "Whoever hath an absolute authorityto interpret any written or spoken laws," said BishopHoadley, "it is he who is truly the law-giver to allintents and purposes."

How very elusive is the legislative control offoreign affairs may be seen by a remarkable memo-randum in the Roosevelt papers.2 On July 29, 1905,the Japanese Premier, Count Katsura, had a "con-versation" with a personal representative of Presi-dent Roosevelt. This spokesman, who remainsanonymous to this day, was not a member of theState Department. The conversation was secret,and the agreed memorandum of it was confirmed bya telegram from the President. It is a statementof Roosevelt's Far Eastern policy, and contains thefollowing passage:

"The Count well understands the traditionalpolicy of the United States . . . and perceivesfully the impossibility of their entering into a formalalliance . . . with foreign nations, but in view ofour common interests he could (not) see why some

1 For text, cf. Tyler Dennett, "Roosevelt and the Russo-JapaneseWar," p. 112.

158 Borahgood understanding, or an alliance in practice if notin name, should not be made between these three(Britain, Japan, and the United States) nations,in so far as respects affairs in the Far East. Withsuch understanding firmly formed, general peacein these regions would be easily maintained to thegreat benefit of all concerned.

"(The American spokesman) said that it wasdifficult, indeed impossible, for the President of theUnited States to enter even to an understandingamounting in effect to a confidential informal agree-ment, without the consent of the Senate, but that hefelt sure that without any agreement at all the peopleof the United States was so fully in accord with thepeople of Japan and Great Britain in the mainte-nance of peace in the Far East that whatever occa-sion arose appropriate action of the Government ofthe United States, in conjunction with Japan andGreat Britain, for such a purpose could be countedon by them quite as confidently as if the UnitedStates were under treaty obligations to take (it)."

All this was quite correct, no doubt, for it explicitlydisclaims a formal alliance. But it was none the lessa secret understanding about a great internationalquestion, and the Senate was not consulted. This isnot an isolated case. One could duplicate it, Ibelieve, many times in the administrations of otherPresidents because the necessity of reaching agree-ments with foreign powers overrides all theory.

Borah 159President Roosevelt at the time wrote to GeorgeKennan, who had proposed an open alliance withJapan and Britain, that he was "talking academically.... I might just as well strive for the moon asfor such a policy as you indicate. Mind you, I per-sonally entirely agree with you." And yet he gaveCount Katsura fairly definite assurances, much inthe spirit of a man who obeys the Volstead Act buthas a refined bootlegger.

The effort of the Senate to control the conductof foreign affairs is bound to be spasmodic, to befeeble as a general rule, but now and then powerfullyobstructive. A continuous control in the presentstate of the world is out of the question. As longas the relations between great states remain essen-tially combative, until, if ever, their relations arereduced to established law and a formal, orderly,and leisurely procedure, the open, popular controlof diplomacy which Mr. Borah desires will remainlargely an aspiration. It is incompatible with theprevailing anarchy of heavily armed sovereign states.It is suited only to a pacific world in which there areno dangerous decisions to be made, in which anyquestion can be debated and bungled without fataldamage in the rough and tumble of legislatures andelections. The internal peace of the United Statesis so profound that the methods of Congress are atthe worst an inconvenience. But the peace of theworld is so fragile that those same methods wouldconvulse it in an unending agitation.

160 BorahIt is the fundamental paradox of Mr. Borah's

career that he combines a passion for open diplomacywith a passionate objection to every step towardthat world organization under which open diplomacymight ultimately become feasible. Unless he changesmore than most men of his eminence change at hisage, it is too much to expect that he will resolvethat paradox. Mr. Borah is not the kind of manto subject himself to the labor of following throughin a patient way the implications of his own ideal.He is a self-sufficient man with great confidence inthe promptings of his own conscience. He shrinksinstinctively from a train of thought which mightcompel him to revise certain of his passionatenegations, and from a course of action which itwould be difficult to explain to large audiences. Thedefinite pursuit of the ideal of open diplomacywould carry him into regions where he is not athome, into fields of cooperation which are unsuitedto his temperament.

For he is a virtuoso who plays by ear. He is apowerful obstructor of good and of evil, alwaysgallant and sometimes perverse. Amidst trimmersand place warmers he is a gadfly to the bureaucraticand the toplofty. He is an immense advertisementfor the idea of open diplomacy. Like the universeand like the weather the only thing to do aboutBorah is to accept him. You will find him veryuseful to-morrow, and you should not complain, then,if he leaves the confused relationship of the Presi-

Borah 161dent and the Senate no less confused, and theanarchic relations of sovereign states no lessanarchic. A man, e'ven when by accident he becomesChairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations,does not change his character.

January, 1926.

"THE OUTLAWRY OF WAR"

I

DURING the war it was generally believedthat the way to prevent war in the futurewas to make war swiftly and unitedly on all

future Germanys. Theodore Roosevelt, as earlyas September, 1914) had urged the formation ofwhat he called an international posse comitatusagainst "outlaw" nations. This same suggestion wasadopted subsequently, under the name of a Leagueto Enforce Peace, by Mr. Taft, Senator Lodge, andothers. In the spring of 1916 President Wilson waspublicly converted to the idea that a war of aggres-sion was the concern not merely of the attackingnation and its victim, but of all civilized nations,that an attack on one was an attack on all, that abreach of the peace should in the future be answeredby united enforcement of peace. It was in this con-text of thought and feeling that a Chicago lawyer,

162

"The Outlawry of War" 163Mr. S. O. Levinson, launched his proposal for "theoutlawry of war." 1

Political leaders had not yet divided alongpartisan lines, and with two million American menon their way to French battlefields none expressedany dislike of European entanglements. Mr.Levinson was safe in assuming that what the UnitedStates was then doing, in March, 1918, it would inthe event of another aggression do again. There-fore, it was naturally in the current of public opinionfor Mr. Levinson to argue that the Roosevelt-Taft-Lodge-Wilson theory of a League to EnforcePeace would be strengthened and clarified if waritself were declared a punishable crime in interna-tional law. There would then be no hesitantneutrality, no doubt about the right and duty of allnations to join in the war against a nation likeGermany. Mr. Levinson's phrase, therefore, seemedless novel then than it does now. For in the moodof those days he had merely found a rather pictur-esque name for the generally accepted theory of awar against war.

The same idea was, of course, taken to Paris byPresident Wilson. But of Mr. Levinson's phrasenothing much was heard until a year afterward whenthe first draft of the Covenant of the League ofNations was printed. Then the phrase reappeared

1 S. O. LEVINSON: "The Legal Status of War," in The New Repub-lic, March 9, 1918; cf. also JOHN DEWEY: "Morals and the Conducto£ Status," in The New Republic, March 23, 1918.

164 "The Outlawry of War"in a speech delivered by the late Senator PhilanderC. Knox. But there had begun a radical change ofmeaning. The phrase which Mr. Levinson hadcoined to clarify the purposes of a League to EnforcePeace was now the name of a substitute for theLeague of Nations. For Mr. Knox, who was theacknowledged leader of the irreconcilables in theSenate, their most courageous guide and theirshrewdest counselor, was not content with a purelydestructive attack on President Wilson's project.He acknowledged the need of a substitute, and hestarted out with Mr. Levinson's help to construct anew plan for peace.

In Senator Knox's first speech, delivered the firstof March, 1919, the "outlawry of war" is still asso-ciated with the idea of a League to Enforce Peace.Mr. Knox is definitely opposed to the League ofNations, but he continues to discuss "a league," basedupon a "constitution" which is to call upon "the pow-ers signatory to enforce" the decrees and awards ofan international court, "as against unwilling states,by force, economic pressure, or otherwise." How-ever, within a few months, concurrently with the ris-ing tide of American opinion against the Leagueand all covenants to use force, Mr. Knox andMr. Levinson changed their minds. In formulat-ing their "plan to outlaw war," they cast aside notonly the League, but a league as well, and deprivedtheir international court of any power to enforce itsdecrees.

"The Outlawry of War" 165After the death of Senator Knox the outlawry

of war seemed for a time to be forgotten. PresidentHarding alluded to it at the opening of the Wash-ington Conference, but nothing was done with hissuggestion. Then early in 1923 Senator Borahadopted the slogan and the idea, and became thepolitical leader of what is now an organized cam-paign. Mr. Borah is advocating the "outlawry ofwar" and the defeat of the Permanent Court ofInternational Justice.

We find then that the phrase was first employedin order to strengthen a league before there wasa League. It was used to defeat the League afterthere was a League, and to advocate an internationalcourt before there was a Court. Now that theCourt has been created, it is being used to defeat theCourt, and to advocate another court which doesnot exist.

II

The phrase is associated, then, as a matter ofpolitical history, with a perfect record of irreconcila-bility. But this association is, I think, personal andaccidental. It was a chance happening that SenatorKnox adopted the phrase in his attack on the League.It is a chance happening that Senator Borah usesthe phrase in his attack on the Court. For there aremany devoted adherents to the League, beginningwith Lord Robert Cecil, who would like to find away to define war and outlaw it. There are many

166 "The Outlawry of War"who support the existing Court, beginning with Mr.Elihu Root, who also would like to outlaw war. Thephrase is as appropriate in Lord Robert Cecil'smouth as it was in Mr. Knox's, in Mr. Root's as inMr. Borah's. It is only an accident of irreconcilablepolitics in the United States Senate which has iden-tified "the outlawry of war" with active oppositionto every established institution for the prevention ofwar.

How accidental is this association may be judgedfrom the position of Senator Borah. Not once, butmany times, Mr. Borah is on record against theLeague because it is alleged to be a superstate whichwill destroy our national sovereignty. But this beliefabout the League does not deter Mr. Borah fromemploying his eloquence to deride the existing WorldCourt because it has no power to take jurisdictionin all international disputes I Because there has notbeen formulated by world conference an authorita-tive code of law covering the matters about whichnations dispute I Mr. Borah's confirmed objectionsto a superstate sleep comfortably in the same mindwith his demand for a Supreme Court of the World,modeled on our Federal Supreme Court, having itsgigantic powers in conflicts between states, including,if Mr. Borah's analogy means anything, the powerto annul acts of parliaments, including acts of ourown Congress I

A position so illogical must be a political accident.

"The Outlawry of War" 167There can be no necessary connection between theoutlawry of war and the orthodox philosophy of theirreconcilables. There is, rather, a deep contradic-tion between them, a contradiction so deep that ithas produced the extraordinary spectacle of Mr.Borah objecting to a superstate and at the same timedemanding a supercourt, and a superconference tolegislate a supercode. We have nevertheless to dis-cuss the outlawry of war in this setting, as a projectfor world peace offered by the irreconcilable oppo-nents of the existing League and the existing Court.With proposals to work for the outlawry of warthrough existing international organizations, suchas Lord Robert Cecil and Mr. Root have enter-tained, we are not here concerned. We are facedwith the fact that the American campaign for theoutlawry of war is led by men who have fought andwill continue to fight not only the League and theCourt, but even such conventions as were reached atthe Washington Conference.

Narrow is the path and straight is the gate forthose who wish to join Mr. Borah's campaign forthe outlawry of war. The idea of attempting tomake war a crime still belongs to men of all shadesof opinion. But the "outlawry of war," as a politicallabel, is now the name of what purports to be acomprehensive plan of world peace, fundamentallydifferent from any yet attempted, and in the testof action, antagonistic to all.

168 "The Outlawry of War"

IIIThe Borah plan for abolishing war is embodied in

Senate Resolution 441, introduced on February 14,1923. The plan has three parts: first there is to bea universal treaty making war "a public crime underthe law of nations" and "a solemn agreement ortreaty to bind" every nation "to indict and punishits own international war breeders or instigators andwar profiteers";

Second, there is to be "created and adopted . . .a code of international law of peace based uponequality and justice between nations, amplified andexpanded and adapted and brought down to date";

Third, there is to be created "a judicial substitutefor war" or (if existing, in part adapted andadjusted) in the form or nature of an internationalcourt, modeled on our Federal Supreme Court inits jurisdiction over controversies between oursovereign states, such court to possess affirmativejurisdiction to hear and decide all purely interna-tional controversies as defined by the code, or arisingunder treaties."

This is the scheme which in Mr. Borah's opinionis to abolish war. This is the scheme which is todo what the League and Court, in his opinion, cannotdo. This is the scheme which has such promise ofeffectiveness, in the minds of the advocates of theoutlawry of war, that they are determined to defeatnot only American adherence to the League, but the

"The Outlawry of War" 169modest proposal of President Harding to adhere tothe Court. It is this scheme, they say, or none.There is no other way to end war.

What they are relying upon fundamentally is nottheir court and their code, but the treaty "outlawingwar." They believe that this slogan has the powerto arouse and then to crystallize mankind's abhor-rence of war. They believe a declaration that waris a crime would legalize pacifism throughout theworld, and deprive the war spirit of its legality andauthority. The war-maker would then have to bethe conscientious objector, the pacifist would beunder the shelter of law and order and conservatism.Once this radical reversal of patriotic and legalvalues had taken place, war would be almost unor-ganizable, because pacifism would be the authori-tative morality of the nations.

We are dealing then primarily with a moralcrusade in favor of complete moral disarmament.If the propaganda were successful, machinery forkeeping the peace would not be very necessary,because the propaganda itself, so its sponsors argue,would destroy the will to war. Once nations hadlearned not to wish to fight, keeping the peace wouldbe an easy matter. Therefore, the advocates ofthe plan, except for controversial purposes, havegiven little thought to, and place little emphasisupon, their project for a new court and a new code.

Nevertheless, before men commit themselves uni-versally to a pacifism so radical that it destroys the

170 "The Outlawry of War"patriotic code which they are accustomed to associatewith their security and their national destiny, it islikely that they will inquire very closely into Mr.Borah's machinery for keeping the peace. He willhave to prove, I think, that his court and his codeeffectively promise to prevent war, if he is to inducemankind to disarm, first morally and then physically.Men will scrutinize rather closely this new code andthis new court under which, having rendered them-selves militarily impotent, they are to live.

IV

It is clearly easier to arouse large audiences toa denunciation of war in general than it is to per-suade them to agree on the principles of a code.Men agree that war is a horror and a crime. Theydo not agree easily on the fixing of boundaries, theright to secede, the right of revolution, the controlof raw materials, access to the sea, the rights ofminorities, tariffs, immigration, the status of colo-nies, the rights of property. They do not agreeeasily about what constitute, in Mr. Borah's words,"purely international controversies." People arefairly unanimous against war. They are whollyunanimous in their professions of love for "equalityand justice." But they quarrel fearfully about whatis just and what is equal. They are divided overthe general principles which ought to decide greatissues. They are even more divided over the inter-

"The Outlawry of War" 171pretation of the facts in specific cases under generalprinciples.

Shall boundaries be determined by nationality orby economic geography? May Ireland secede fromthe Empire, may Ulster secede from Ireland, maythree counties secede from Ulster? Is revolutionpermitted? Is revolution assisted by a foreignpower permitted? Are the natural resources ofundeveloped countries the property of the nativesto have and to hold as they see fit, or have Europeanand American nations rights in them, and how arethose rights to be apportioned? Do nations whichhappen to block the access of other nations to thesea owe any duty to landlocked peoples, which oughtto limit their sovereign rights over their own portsand railroads? Are national and religious minori-ties, whether they be Germans in Poland or Negroesin Mississippi, to be protected by any rule of inter-national law? Is the tariff a "purely" domestic ques-tion? Is prohibition "applied to foreign ships" adomestic question? Is discrimination against immi-grants a domestic question ? Have colonies the rightto revolt? May Mexico confiscate American oilproperty? May the United States confiscate sealedliquor on foreign ships?

Now when Senator Borah proposes to create acode of international law as a substitute for war hemust mean, if he means anything, a code which estab-lishes legal rules covering such questions. But whois to make such a code? Mr. Borah's resolution

172 "The Outlawry of War"does not tell us. The Knox-Levinson plan calls fora world conference to perform the feat, and otheradvocates speak of a convention of experts andjurists. Little attempt is ever made to describe howthis code is to be made. The point is passed overlightly with some reference to the codification andcreation of international law.

But the word "creation" is perhaps the biggestword in the English language. To create a code"based on equality and justice" is to legislate authori-tatively on all the major classes of disputes in whichnations engage. Nothing like it is attempted underthe existing League. For his plan involves, whetherMr. Borah likes the name or not, the setting-up ofa world legislature. The conference which was tomake the code would have to lay down laws affectingthe very existence of governments and the destiny ofnations. It would have to legislate on questionstouching their political independence, their liberties,their power, their prestige, their economic oppor-tunities, and their pride.

To talk easily about a conference to create aninternational code is either idle talk, or it is asstupendous a proposal as can be conceived in politics.It requires for the first time in human history thecreation of a genuine world legislature. For, if thecode was to be anything more than a set of piousevasions, no one world conference could conceivablycreate it. One might as well have expected the firstUnited States Congress to create in its first session

" The Outlawry of War" 173a code of American national law. No: this worldconference would have to convene and reconvene,and keep on, in the words of Mr. Borah's resolution,amplifying the code, and expanding it, and adaptingit, and bringing it down to date.

This world legislature would unavoidably repre-sent the cabinets and foreign offices of the day. Canany one imagine a government which did not keep adeath grip on a delegation which was legislating ona rule affecting, let us say, the national boundaries?And thus there vanishes wholly the hope that theworld can be governed, to use Mr. John Dewey'sterms, by "legal cooperation" without "political com-bination." If there is to be law for the court toapply, there must be lawmakers. And lawmakersare politicians, guided for the most part by thepressures of their constituents upon their own ambi-tions and habits and personal ideals. Let Mr. Borahask himself, then, whether he is prepared to entrustthe creation of such a code to Lord Curzon, Mr.Hughes, M. Poincare, and Baron Kato, or to anyother men he knows. And then let him ask himselfwhether he thinks the United States Senate willratify a code that all the other parliaments of theworld will also ratify.

It requires no gift of prophecy to see that if hecould induce the world to establish such a code, Mr.Borah and his most devoted followers would belined up against ratification as irreconcilable oppo-nents. They would hate the result if and when they

174 "The Outlawry of War"achieved it. For any code created within thisgeneration would have to legalize the status quo atthe time the code was formulated. It is unthinkablethat Great Britain, France, Japan, or the UnitedStates would agree on any specific set of principleswhich impaired their empires, their Monroe Doc-trines, or their alleged strategic requirements. Lestthere be any doubt on this point I quote from SenatorKnox's original speech of March I, 1919, pro-posing the outlawry of war: "Under such a codewe would not be called upon to arbitrate the policyinvolved in our Monroe Doctrine, our conservationpolicy, our immigration policy, our right to expelaliens, our right to repel invasion, our right to main-tain military and naval establishments, or coaling-stations, within our borders or elsewhere as theprotection and development of this country mightdemand, our right to make necessary fortificationsof the Panama Canal or on our frontiers, our rightto discriminate between natives and foreigners inrespect to right of property and citizenship, andother matters of like character."

We must not be called upon, said Senator Knox,to arbitrate these questions. In other words, wewould go to war rather than yield our position.

One may call this the outlawry of war if one likes,but I suspect that a foreigner would call it theoutlawry of those wars which might interfere withSenator Knox's conception of the interests, needs,and manifest destiny of the United States. Let fifty

'The Outlawry of War" 175other nations also draw up a catalogue of questionsover which they would rather fight than submit to atribunal, and the amount of war you will have out-lawed will not be noticeable.

The advocates of this plan are fond of saying thatthe "war system," consisting of armaments, alliances,and the diplomacy of prestige and strategic advan-tages, rests upon the fact that war is "legalized."Whether this be a correct analysis is not importantin view of the fact that the advocates of the outlawryof war propose to continue to legalize all kinds ofwars. "War shall be defined in the code," says theKnox-Levinson plan, "and the right of defenseagainst actual or imminent attack shall be pre-served." Senator Borah's resolution seems to justify,in addition, wars of liberation. Now if you have theright to go to war for what you call your liberty, andthe right to go to war because you think an attack isimminent, it would be a stupid Foreign Office indeedwhich could not legalize any war it thought necessaryor desirable. The only war outlawed under this planis a war openly announced to be a war of aggression.There are no such wars.

The wars permitted under the outlawry of warare not confined to the defense of frontiers againstinvasion. If that were the case the advocates ofthe plan would agree to submit every international

176 "The Outlawry of War"dispute to an international tribunal. We have seenthat Senator Knox has no idea of doing any suchthing. His list of disputes that may not be arbitratedcovered all the really vital disputes in which theUnited States is likely to be involved. It coveredall the main contentions with Japan, the whole fieldof Latin-American relations, our whole economicpolicy, our whole strategic and military system, andfor good measure everything that "the protectionand development of the country might demand."Senator Borah, though less specific, is no less defi-nitely against arbitrating vital questions. His wayof excluding them from judicial processes is to denythat they are "purely international controversies."But of course controversies between nations are nonethe less controversies because you choose not to callthem international controversies. If you feel I amhurting you badly, you are not pacified by my tellingyou to mind your own business.

The Borah plan to outlaw war consists of a codewhich, in theory, outlaws war and lays down rulesgoverning all the relations among governments. Butit consists also of a set of reservations which with-draw from the scope of the code and the competenceof the court many, if not most, of the major policieswhich cause disputes. Finally it disembowels theoutlawry of war by legalizing wars in defense ofthose major policies which are excluded from thecompetence of the court and the code.

Mr. Borah, in other words, is proposing to outlaw

"The Outlawry of War" 177those wars which can be described as "purely inter-national." He is proposing to outlaw theoreticalwars which nobody wishes to wage, since all actualwars result out of the conflict of sovereign, domesticinterests. A "purely international controversy" whichdoes not involve, or appear to involve, the domesticsafety, domestic interests, or the domestic pride ofthe disputants is not worth worrying about. Evenin this wicked and pugnacious world such a harmlessand uninteresting controversy does not often leadto war. To outlaw war simply in respect to suchcontroversies is a lot of trouble for nothing. For,until a man is willing to say that he is ready tosubmit any and every dispute affecting the peace ofthe world to adjudication, he has not made up hismind to outlaw war. An irreconcilable senator, whois jealous of American sovereignty, can play with theidea. He cannot really understand it and stillbelieve in it.

VIIt is illuminating to inquire how an idea like the

outlawry of war, which expresses so deep an aspira-tion, should have become so confused and sterile.The answer is to be found, I think, in Mr. Borah'sresolution, where he says that "the genius of civili-zation has discovered but two methods of compellingthe settlement of human disputes; namely, law andwar." Mr. Borah means by law the judicial process,and in my opinion his generalization is utterly untrue.

178 "The Outlawry of War"The genius of civilization has invented, besides lawand war, countless other methods of settling dis-putes. It has invented diplomacy, representativegovernment, federalism, mediation, conciliation,friendly intervention, compromise, and conference.The notion that the judicial process in a court isthe only method of peace is fantastic. Mr. Borah,every day of his life, is engaged in adjusting disputesbetween the state of Idaho and other states, betweencapital and labor, between the farm bloc and themanufacturers and bankers. If he believed that theonly alternative to war was resort to the courts, hewould not be wasting his talents in a nonjudicial bodylike the United States Senate. He would either bea judge or be arguing before judges.

Nevertheless he believes, and many admirablepeople believe with him, that the only method ofinternational peace is "to create a judicial substitutefor war." It is on this belief that the outlawry ofwar has foundered. For when you come to theactual task of creating this judicial substitute, youfind, as Mr. Knox found and as Mr. Borah hasfound, that you cannot, or will not, devise a codeof international law covering all disputes, and thatyou will not give to any court jurisdiction over alldisputes. Therefore, in the pinch, you find yourselfwishing to outlaw war but not to outlaw the warsyou may feel compelled to wage.

You find a large class of disputes which yourjudicial substitute will not cover. They are the most

"The Outlawry of War" 179important disputes of all, because they involve pre-cisely those vital interests about which people aremost ready to fight. The difficulty is fundamentaland inescapable in any plan to outlaw war by apurely judicial substitute. And, if you are really inearnest about minimizing or abolishing war, it isthese marginal, nonjusticiable disputes which mustoccupy the center of attention.

By the growth of international law some of thesedisputes can be made justiciable. But, for as longa future as we can foresee, there will remain wholeclasses of the most dangerous disputes which nocode and no court can deal with. For them diplo-macy is required, diplomacy working by conference,compromise, bargaining, good offices, and also, inthe last analysis, I believe, by the threat of force.One may admit the role of force in diplomacy with-out embarrassment, considering how thoroughly theright to wage war is actually reserved by the advo-cates of the outlawry of war.

The central fallacy of their argument is thisrefusal to acknowledge the necessity of diplomacyfor just those war-breeding disputes which are notwithin the competence of their code and their court.For, if diplomacy is a necessary method of maintain-ing peace, then no plan which does not provide forit can be an effective plan to abolish war. And ifthe method of diplomacy is necessary, then thereform of that method is one of the most urgentof human needs.

180 "The Outlawry of War"For "the diplomatic method," as Mr. Root has

pointed out, "is the necessary method of dealing withimmediate exigencies and dangerous crises in affairs.Under such circumstances there is no other way toprevent disaster. Argument and persuasion andexplanation, the removal of misapprehensions, thesuggestion of obstacles and advantages, conciliation,concession, stipulations for the future, and the stillmore serious considerations to which diplomacy mayfinally resort—all these are employed to deal withimmediate and acute situations. The slow processesof judicial procedure are not adapted to deal withsuch exigencies."

Mr. Root might have added that the judicialprocedure inevitably is corrupted if it is burdenedwith the making of major political decisions. For,if the judges of Mr. Borah's Court are asked todecide questions for which no rule of law exists, theymust either invent a law and thus legislate, or, inthe guise of law, they must make political deals.Mr. Borah, therefore, is not eliminating politicalentanglements. He is entangling his proposed courtin the politics of the world. The result would bea court with all the vices of politics and a diplomacyas cumbersome as a lawsuit.

This conclusion may be tested by consideringanother remarkable statement in Mr. Borah's reso-lution. It is a pronouncement to the effect that ourSupreme Court has maintained peace between thestates. If that is true, what has been the function of

"The Outlawry of War" 181the Executive and the Congress these last onehundred and thirty-five years ? Does Senator Borahseriously think our Supreme Court, existing in apolitical vacuum, could have adjusted the sectional,group, and class conflicts of American history? Hecannot think that, and therefore, when he hasstopped to consider the matter, he cannot continueto think that an international court, in vacuo, canmaintain the peace of the world.

But Mr. Borah has not fully considered the mat-ter. He speaks in his resolution of conferring upona "real" international court jurisdiction modeledupon that of our Supreme Court. Mr. Borah has nosmallest intention of doing any such thing. We maydogmatically assert this because we shall as soon be-hold the sun stand still in the sky as see the irrecon-cilable Senator from Idaho argue that nine judgesat the Hague should have the same power to annula law passed by Parliament or Congress as ourSupreme Court has to annul the acts of a statelegislature.

VIIMr. Borah is not really promoting a practicable

project that will stand up under analysis. He isgiving currency to a metaphor, and a somewhat in-accurate metaphor at that, which, like its predeces-sor, "the war to end war," condenses and expresses,but does not direct toward any organized result,the hatred of war. Incidentally, though that is no

182 "The Outlawry of War"part of this discussion, he is exploiting the senti-ment which the metaphor evokes in order to preventour adherence to the only world court which exists,or in this generation is likely to exist. Once morewe witness the tragic futility of noble sentimentsfrustrated by confused ideas.

Once more a fine aspiration, which must be uni-versal in order to prevail, has become entangled inthe prejudices and politics of a faction. Once morewe behold the spectacle, so delightful to Satan, ofmen who wish to establish universal confidence andcooperation on earth, refusing in the smallest meas-ure to cooperate among themselves. It is a pity.For if Mr. Borah and his friends took the ideal ofworld cooperation seriously, and understood its dif-ficulties, they would count it no slight matter thatfifty sovereign nations have actually agreed on some-thing, even though that something is as defective asthe existing League and the existing Court. If Mr.Borah loved his ideal of cooperation as constantlyas he yields to his habit of irreconcilability, he wouldwish to promote, rather than to destroy, whatcooperation there is. For only by practice cancooperation become a habit. And only whencooperation is a powerful habit, will peoples be will-ing to make the enormous sacrifices which the out-lawry of war must finally involve. But to say to theworld, as Mr. Borah's associates have in effect donefrom the start, that mankind must meet our termsor none, and cooperate on our principles or none,

"The Outlawry of War" 183is to perpetuate precisely that temper of mind whichthe outlawry of war will most need to outlaw.

Nor can we say to mankind: "Under the leader-ship of an American President we led you into aLeague of Nations, and under the intellectual leader-ship of an American lawyer we led you, with theapparent blessing of both political parties, into thePermanent Court of International Justice. Nowthat you are in, and we are outside, it occurs to usto lead you out of the League and out of the Court.When you are out of the League and out of theCourt we led you into, we promise to lead you intoa much better court and perhaps even into anotherassociation of nations."

Were the Senate now to reject the existing Court,we should establish our reputation as a diplomaticphilanderer. Prudent foreign governments whenwe made our next periodic proposal would have toask bluntly whether the young man's intentions wereserious and honorable.

August, 1923.

THE GREATNESS OF MR. MELLON

I

I T is often a puzzle to know just how a popularidea goes into circulation. There is, for exam-ple, the idea that Andrew W. Mellon is a very

great Secretary of the Treasury. Where did that ideacome from? Not, I venture to suggest, from anyclose popular appreciation of the conduct of theTreasury, for the work of the Treasury is for themost part too technical to be appreciated by morethan a few members of Congress and a small circleof financial experts. The man in the smoking car

184

The Greatness of Mr. Mellon 185who says Mr. Mellon is the greatest Secretary sinceAlexander Hamilton would find it hard to describeeither the greatness of Alexander Hamilton or thegreatness of Andrew W. Mellon. The idea ofgreatness has been put into such extensive circula-tion, however, that it has now become one of thesacred cows of American public thinking.

Once you have seen Mr. Mellon it is easy tothink of him as a great man. He has a kind of leanelegance which distinguishes him at once in anylarge gathering of officials. There is none of thatbleary and pudgy look which public men take on byeating too much and smoking too much and listeningtoo much and talking too much. He has the air ofquiet command; a dignity and reserve which makehim seem remote, like the portrait of an ancestor,from the contemporary scene. But since he is themaker and owner of one of the largest private for-tunes ever known, his competence in this world doesnot have to be proved by the usual sonorouscajolery.

I do not pretend to know very much about all themen who have been Secretary of the Treasury, oreven to know anything about most of them. Per-haps there are a few others who are equally igno-rant. But I have read a good many books aboutHamilton, and I can see why Mr. Mellon can justlybe compared with Hamilton, although the com-parison is very unflattering to Mr. Mellon. Bothmen believe that the salvation of the country was

186 The Greatness of Mr. Mellonin government by the rich, especially by rich manu-facturers and creditors. Between the times of Ham-ilton and of Mr. Mellon this philosophy was oftenpracticed, but it was rarely avowed. For the cen-tury and more which separates the two Secretariespublic discussion in this country was Jeffersonianin tone. It was the farmer, the debtor, the con-sumer who was appealed to and flattered. Butwith the advent of Andrew W. Mellon the prem-ises of Hamilton were revived. The RepublicanParty ceased to hide its rich men under a bushel; itfrankly asserted its belief in them once more as therulers of the country.

Here to my mind the similarity between Hamiltonand Mr. Mellon ends, and the radical differencebegins. The difference is that Hamilton believed inplutocracy as the means to an end; Mr. Mellon be-lieves in plutocracy as an end in itself. Hamiltonturned toward the plutocracy because he knew itwas then the strongest possible foundation on whichto construct an independent and stable government.He used the rich for a purpose that was greaterthan their riches. But Mr. Mellon; so far as onecan ascertain his ideas, is not building up theplutocracy for any purpose that transcends theaccumulation of wealth.

It may be said that prosperity is a good purpose,and that Mr. Mellon believes that by encouragingthe rich he is helping to maintain prosperity. I amnot denying that prosperity is pleasant and desirable.

The Greatness of Mr. Mellon 187But if Hamilton were alive today, facing the prob-lems that come to Mr. Mellon for solution, I am in-clined to think that he would not rest content withprosperity as an end in itself.

Both Hamilton and Mr. Mellon have had to dealwith the funding of great debts. In Hamilton's timethe debt was owed by the poorer Americans to thericher Americans. In Mr. Mellon's time the debt-is owed by foreign countries which are comparativelypoor to this country which is comparatively rich.Both Secretaries insisted that the debt be paid.Hamilton insisted because the way to establish thecredit of the Federal Government was to unite thefortunes of the moneyed classes with the fortunesof the young Republic. What purpose has Mr.Mellon had in mind in his debt-funding operations?What is he trying to do that is comparable withthe purposes of Hamilton? In the answer to thatquestion lies, I think, the test of whether Mr. Mel-lon is even remotely a great Secretary of theTreasury.

I say this because the funding of the internationaldebts is by every consideration the most criticalaffair with which Mr. Mellon has had to deal.Nothing else in his Administration of the Treasuryis of more than passing importance. I am told thathe has dealt skilfully with the domestic floating debtof the United States and has taken good advantageof the money market. That is excellent, but anyfirst-rate banker could have done it. Mr. Mellon

188 The Greatness of Mr. Mellonadvocated a reduction of taxes. That is popularand most welcome to those of us who pay an incometax. But nobody, I suppose, would argue that it isgreatness in a Secretary of the Treasury to reducetaxes when there is a surplus of money in the bank.Mr. Mellon's plan was worked out by his twoDemocratic predecessors at the Treasury. Mr.Mellon has also had some odd jobs like ProhibitionEnforcement. If he had handled that job well itwould not make him a great Secretary of the Treas-ury, although it would make him a very great man.As a matter of fact Prohibition Enforcement underMr. Mellon's titular leadership has been just whateverybody knows it is: a dismal failure surroundedby foolish promises that nobody any longer believes.

The test of Mr. Mellon's greatness as a Secre-tary of the Treasury must certainly lie in his policyon the international debts. The consequences ofthat policy touch every great power in the westernworld. Theoretically that policy will remain forsixty-two years a considerable factor in the domes-tic budget and taxation of every great power inEurope, and a considerable, if not a dominating,factor in the relations between the Old World andthe New. Whatever any one may think about thewisdom of the present arrangements, no one canquestion their importance.

Mr. Mellon has at times suggested that he wasacting as the "trustee" for the American creditorsof Europe. If this means that he considers him-

The Greatness of Mr. Mellon 189self a collecting agent, and that the internationalconsequences are no concern of his, then all onecan say is: What price greatness? What pricestatesmanship? If it is true that Mr. Mellon isnot the author of the debt policy, if he was onlycarrying out what Congress and the country in itspresent state of mind wanted, if he does not regardthis policy as the wisest policy for the long future,then there is no use of talking about him in thesame breath with Alexander Hamilton. If the pol-icy of debt collection is not Mr. Mellon's policy byconviction, if he is not responsible for it, then he isnot even associated vitally with the one decisiveevent of his administration. Imagine Hamilton ex-plaining away responsibility for his debt policy!Imagine Hamilton evading the unpopularity whichhis own conception of a sound policy involved!

Mr. Mellon has never yet made it clear whetherhe is convinced that the debt policy is wise. Who-ever writes about Mr. Mellon must therefore chooseone of two theories. Either he must say that Mr.Mellon had to bow to the will of Congress, andthen he must dismiss all claims to statesmanship;or he must say that in essentials at least the debtpolicy is Mr. Mellon's, and in that case the politicalsagacity of Mr. Mellon can be measured by thequality of the debt settlements. I shall choose thesecond alternative as the more flattering of the two,and assume that the debt policy represents Mr.Mellon's honest conviction.

190 The Greatness of Mr. Mellon

IILet us look at this policy. Mr. Mellon has

obtained agreements that the United States Govern-ment shall collect 22 billion dollars. He has pro-posed that the United States collect it from thefour strongest nations in Europe, as well as fromseveral smaller ones. He has proposed that thebusiness of collecting this sum shall go on year afteryear, and shall end only fifteen years before thebeginning of the twenty-first century.

About fifteen Presidents of the United States oneafter the other are to take part in this collection ofmoney. Sixty-two British Parliaments, sixty-twoFrench Chambers of Deputies, sixty-two ItalianParliaments, sixty-two Reichstags are to vote taxesto raise this money. Before it is all paid boys whowere twenty years old when the war started will beover ninety years old. Their children, if they wereborn say a year after the Armistice, will be menseventy years of age. Their grandchildren will benearly forty-five years old. Their great grandchil-dren will be about ready to vote. The last paymentwill be made in part by the great great grandchildrenof the men who ruled Europe and America whenthe war began. They will be paying for a war asfar away from them as the Civil War is from usto-day.

The sum Mr. Mellon is proposing to collect dur-ing the remainder of the century is no insignificant

The Greatness of Mr. Mellon 191burden on the debtor countries. Mr. Snowden, aformer Chancellor of the Exchequer, has statedthat the sum paid by Britain to America costs"1,500,000 hours of labour by British workmenevery day."

It is well understood that great payments fromone nation to another can be made ultimately onlyin goods. The policy of Mr. Mellon is thereforea demand that ultimately the European debtorsshall import into the United States goods valued at22 billion dollars. Having made this demand, onewould suppose that Mr. Mellon would try to finda way of getting those billions of dollars of goodsout of Europe and into the United States. Nothingis further from his mind. He is a Pittsburgh manu-facturer. He is a Pennsylvania Republican. He isa high protectionist by birth, by principle, and forbusiness. He stands valiantly by his party indemanding all this wealth from Europe, andvaliantly by his party's tariff in his determination tokeep out all the foreign goods he can.

Now when one sits down and looks coldly at thispolicy, at the sums involved, at the time it is to taketo collect them, at the desire both to be paid andnot to be paid, it seems perfectly fantastic. So faras I know no government has ever in modern timesattempted to collect money from another govern-ment for over sixty years. There have been someharsh indemnities imposed by conquerors on theconquered, but none so interminable as this one.

192 The Greatness of Mr. MellonNever, I think, has one nation attempted to collectfrom all the great powers of a continent. Andnever has one nation charged its associates a sumcomparable with this one for goods furnished in acommon war. Mr. Mellon's policy is unique in his-tory. It is something brand new. It is somethingnobody ever attempted before.

Yet the United States is not the first nation thatloaned a great deal of money to its allies during awar. Other nations have contributed money. Othernations must, like ourselves, have wished they hadthe money back. But nobody until the era of Mr.Mellon has set himself grimly to such a task ofdebt collecting. This may be greatness. It may beoriginality. And then again it may be ignorance ofhistoric experience, and a certain failure to appre-ciate the ways of the world.

One thing certainly Mr. Mellon has utterly failedto appreciate. That is the nature of these debts,and the necessity of convincing the debtors not onlythat they must be paid but that they ought to bepaid. Mr. Coolidge is said to have summed uphis wisdom on the subject by stating that "they hiredthe money, didn't they?" Mr. Mellon, or somebodyspeaking for him, has said repeatedly that the debtsmust be paid to vindicate the sanctity of contracts.Well, how much of a contract were they? TheEuropean Allies signed the notes. There is nodoubt about that. But what did we give them forthe notes ? Did we give them money ? We did not.

The Greatness of Mr. Mellon 193We gave them the right to buy guns, shells, uni-forms, food, tobacco, and other necessities of warfrom American manufacturers and American farm-ers at war prices. A part of the money paid forthese munitions the United States Treasury has longsince recovered through excess profit and incometaxes. The goods themselves were shipped toEurope. They were used to keep the civilian pop-ulation alive while the American army was beingprepared to fight. They were used to clothe andarm and feed French and British soldiers while theAmericans were training behind the lines. Theywere used immediately after the Armistice to keepour victory from degenerating into chaos, despair,and riot.

The theory on which Mr. Mellon has proceededmeans this: if a gun was made in the United Statesand carried by a Frenchman, that gun must be paidfor with interest. But if the same kind of gun wascarried by a doughboy, we pay for it ourselves. Ifwe armed Frenchmen to hold the line while theAmericans were drilling in camp, the grandsons ofthe Frenchmen must pay in addition to the liveslost and the wounds suffered the price plus intereston their guns. But when the Americans were readyto carry the guns themselves, and to be shot them-selves, it was not necessary to pay us. Now itseems to me evident that it cost us less in every wayto have a Frenchman carry the gun through 1917.I cannot see, and I am sure no Frenchman will

194 The Greatness of Mr. Mellonever see, why he should pay for that gun withinterest.

This practice adopted during the war of chargingFrenchmen for guns they used and Americans forguns they used was a bookkeeping device. It isonly lately that the distinction has become so im-portant that it is made the foundation of an inter-national policy which has brought us the ill will ofmost of the civilized world. In 1918 when peoplewere rejoicing that at last unity of command hadbeen achieved, Mr. Mellon would probably havebeen arrested as a pro-German if he had suggestedto Marshal Foch that shells shot off by Frenchmenwould cost France more than shells shot off byAmericans. It would have been a pretty scene: Mr.Mellon arriving at G. H. Q. looking very elegant,and saying: "My dear Marshal, please remember... if you get those uniforms all torn and muddyyou'll have nothing to show for the money you bor-rowed." And Marshal Foch replying: "Thank you,my dear Mr. Mellon, for reminding me. I'll sendan extra division of Americans into the line. It willbe cheaper for France."

III

When I consider that this is the kind of policyMr. Mellon has made his own on the biggest ques-tion of his administration, I do not detect any traceof greatness. A great secretary, with Mr. Mel-

The Greatness of Mr. Mellon 195Ion's philosophy that the rightful rulers of thiscountry are its big business men, would, I think,have acted quite differently. He would have seenthat in the long run American business must expandall over the world or burst, and he would haveused these debts, as Hamilton used the debts hefunded, as bonds of tranquillity instead of as wedgesof disunion throughout the world. Handled skil-fully and imaginatively these debts could have beenused to liquidate rapidly all the reparations and occu-pations and other inheritances from the war, andto set business going hopefully in Europe; handledwith foresight they could have been used to furtherthat policy of the Open Door for which Mr. Mel-Ion's predecessors had always contended; handledwith tact and sympathy they could have been usedto create a fund of good will for America, worthmore in cash and more in human happiness thanthese billions of phantom dollars.

Let no one say it could not have been done. GreatBritain, too, is a creditor of the Continent, and GreatBritain, with a finesse and a diplomatic insight thatput our blunderers to shame, has shown how it mighthave been done. But only a Secretary of the Treas-ury with a touch of greatness could have done it, andMr. Mellon is only a Pittsburgh millionaire.

December, 1926.

THE KELLOGG DOCTRINE: VESTEDRIGHTS AND NATIONALISM IN

LATIN-AMERICA

I

T HE advance of American business interestsinto Central and South America has nowreached a point where it may soon become

necessary to formulate a policy as momentous asthe Monroe Doctrine itself. This new policy isnow in the making. The problem which it is meantto solve is the conflict between the vested rights ofAmericans in the natural resources of the Caribbeancountries and the rising nationalism of their peoples.The problem could not have arisen before Americanshad acquired titles to important properties and hadinvested large sums of money in developing them;nor could the problem have arisen while governmentof these countries was in the hands of a ruling classwhich conceived its interests to be those of the for-

196

Vested Rights and Nationalism 197eign owners of natural resources. The establish-ment of large American interests at a time whennationalist feeling has begun to run high has createdthe situation which now perplexes us in Mexico andmay perplex us to-morrow in Venezuela, Colombiaand elsewhere.

This is not a simple problem. We have becomeexporters of capital, and we are called upon to de-tide what is to be the attitude of the United StatesGovernment toward that exported capital when aforeign government subjects the property of Amer-ican citizens to new and drastic social regulation.

II

Until quite recently the clear and dominating pur-pose of American policy has been to find nationalsecurity. The declaration of President Monroe inhis message of December 2, 1823, was a develop-ment of the original rule laid down by Washingtonthat "in extending our commercial relations (withforeign nations) we have with them as little politicalconnection as possible." When in May, 1823,France, acting under a commission from the Con-gress of Verona, put Ferdinand back upon thethrone of Spain, and when Russia at the same timewas advancing from Alaska down the western coastof this continent, the United States was threatenedon two sides by an entanglement with the Europe ofMetternich. It was threatened with a Russian Em-

198 The Kellogg Doctrinepire extending down to what is now California, andwith a war to the south for the reconquest of therevolted Spanish colonies. These two threats, hadthey been successful, would have encircled the UnitedStates with the forces of the Quadruple Alliance,and would almost certainly have embroiled it in thedynastic politics of Europe.

Fortunately the interests of Britain, as Canningconceived them, coincided with those of the UnitedStates, and President Monroe was therefore ableto state the epoch-making doctrine that bears hisname. In this, its original form, the United Statesdeclared that it would resist future colonization (ofEuropean powers) in this hemisphere, and that itwould "consider any attempt on their part to extendtheir system (i.e. the system of Metternich, pop-ularly known as the Holy Alliance) to any portionof this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace andsafety." This is the policy which the United Statesmaintained with some difficulty, but in the endtriumphantly, from Monroe to Roosevelt. Its pur-pose was American security; its method was to pre-vent European political intervention in this hem-isphere.

The important events in the history of the Mon-roe Doctrine between 1823 and the beginning of thiscentury were inspired by a determination to resistEuropean expansion. So Clay protested in 1823against the sale of Cuba to France, and the Frenchwithdrew their fleet. In 1843 the United Statesprotested against the British naval occupation of

Vested Rights and Nationalism 199Hawaii. In 1848 Polk warned Spain and Britainagainst listening to the appeal of the white popula-tion of Yucatan, then engaged in a war with theIndians. Sewardin 1861 protested to Spain againstthe occupation of Santo Domingo. And in spite ofthe extreme difficulties of the situation, Lincoln neverrecognized Maximilian in Mexico and continuedto recognize Juarez. In 1895 Cleveland actuallythreatened war against Great Britain if the disputedboundary between Venezuela and British Guianawere not submitted to arbitration. The last and latestphase in; what might be called the evolution ofthe simple Monroe Doctrine was the Lodge Reso-lution of 1912 arising out of the Magdalena Bayincident.

I have called this line of policy the simple Mon-roe Doctrine because it was confined to resistanceto the acquisition of new territory. Thus for manyyears after 1823 the United States did not opposeEuropean naval blockades of the Latin republicsprovided the acquisition of new territory was dis-claimed. In 1825 Clay told Argentina and Brazilthat they would not be protected from an "obliga-tion the performance of which foreign nations havea right to demand." The United States did notattempt to interfere with British blockades of Nic-aragua in 1842 and 1844, of Buenos Ayres in 1845,of Salvador in 1851, nor with the Spanish bombard-ment of Valparaiso and Callao in 1866. But whenin 1902 Britain, Italy, and Germany blockaded Vene-zuela as a result of certain property claims, Presi-

200 The Kellogg Doctrinedent Roosevelt became active and insistent, andaccording to his account had actually ordered Ad-miral Dewey to assemble the battle fleet at PortoRico if the Germans did not withdraw their squad-ron within a certain number of days.

This was a new phase, not so much in the prin-ciple as in the practice of the American policy, andout of this incident emerged the Roosevelt corollaryto the Monroe Doctrine. Two years elapsed, how-ever, before President Roosevelt actually announcedthe new doctrine. Then, in connection with theoccupation of Santo Domingo, he said:

"This country would certainly decline to go towar to prevent a foreign government from collect-ing" on defaulted debts; and since a temporary occu-pation by a European Power might turn into a per-manent occupation, "the only escape from thesealternatives may at some time be that we must our-selves undertake to bring about some arrangementby which so much as possible of a just obligationshall be paid."

In the meantime the Panama Canal route hadbeen decided upon, and the treaty signed with theRepublic of Panama, and in his message of 1904President Roosevelt stated his corollary to theMonroe Doctrine:

"Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which re-sults in a general loosening of the ties of civilized

Vested Rights and Nationalism 201society, may in America as elsewhere ultimately re-quire intervention by some civilized power, and inthe Western Hemisphere the adherence of theUnited States to the Monroe Doctrine may forcethe United States, however reluctantly, in flagrantcases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exer-cise of an international police power."

Whatever may have been the actual circumstancesand the contributing motives, it was under thisRoosevelt corollary of the international police powerthat there took place the intervention of 1905 inSanto Domingo, and the interventions by SecretaryKnox in Nicaragua and Haiti which culminated inthe treaties of 1911.

This assumption of the right to police the Carib-bean grew out of the vital national interest createdin that region by the construction of the PanamaCanal. The American system of defense was basedon the Canal, and it followed from this new fact thatthe United States could no longer tolerate Europeannaval activity in that strategic area. There fol-lowed from this same fact the establishment of aseries of naval bases at Key West, Guantanamo,Samana Bay, Mole St. Nicholas, in Porto Rico, inthe Virgin Islands, in the Corn Islands of Nicaragua,and in Fonseca Bay on the Pacific side. With thisdevelopment the United States could no longer tol-erate political disorder in the countries involved inits naval defense. It could not tolerate the threat of

202 The Kellogg DoctrineEuropean intervention in case of disorder, and itcould not tolerate disorder which threatened thesecurity of its own strategic system. From this pointit was but a short step to the theory that the UnitedStates must insure itself in the Caribbean regionagainst supposedly unfriendly governments. It wasthis point which was reached apparently in the pres-ent affair in Nicaragua.

Thus in a hundred years the Monroe Doctrineevolved from the simple prohibition of further colo-nization through the assumption of an internationalpolice power in the Caribbean to an insistence thatgovernments in that region shall be, not only orderly,but friendly to the interests of the United States.This growth of American policy is however anevolution out of the principle of national security,and each new phase of it is consistent with thatprinciple. That other motives played their part,that private interests may at times have created thesituation, or made themselves the instruments andthe beneficiaries, need not be denied. I shall notdiscuss here this aspect of what is popularly knownas "Dollar Diplomacy," because when in these dis-puted cases the United States Government acted, itappealed always, and I believe sincerely, to the prin-ciple of national security.

It is important to bear this in mind because inthe present dispute with Mexico the governmentis appealing to a new and radically different prin-ciple. What that principle is, what its acceptance

Vested Rights and Nationalism 203may imply, is a matter of real concern to the UnitedStates and to the rest of the world.

III

After the fall of Porfirio Diaz there was a revolu-tion in Mexico which was essentially different fromthe ordinary Latin-American civil commotion. Itwas not a mere brawl between the Ins and the Outs,but a national upheaval against the landed gentry,against clericalism, and against the foreign conces-sionaire who was rapidly acquiring the richest nat-ural resources of the country. An ancien regimewas violently overturned amidst considerable dis-order, much irregularity, plenty of selfishnessand dishonesty and inefficiency and floods of revolu-tionary rhetoric. This revolution, which is looselycalled bolshevik and is often ascribed by carelesswriters to the Russian Communists, was fought outand consummated while the Tsar was still on thethrone of Russia. The new Mexican Constitutionwhich embodies the results of the revolution wentinto effect on May I, 1917, over six months beforeLenin seized the government in Russia.

Whatever name is to be given to it, the fact isindisputable that the Mexican revolution arose outof Mexican conditions in an effort to correct Mexi-can evils, and that it takes its place historically withthat series of nationalist uprisings which from Chinato India, from Egypt to Morocco, offer so profound

2O4 The Kellogg Doctrinea challenge to the supremacy of the Western Em-pires, and so deep a riddle to their statesmanship.One persistent motive in these uprisings is the de-sire to assert the national independence and the dig-nity of an inferior race. The whole spirit of extra-territorial privileges in all its forms is thereforeunder attack—the whole system of special courts,codes, concessions which give the foreigner a statusin these countries superior to that of the native.

This nationalism inevitably comes into conflictwith the vested rights of foreigners. These rightshave a varied history. Most of them were probablyacquired legitimately, or at least in good faith underthe old regime; some of them, enough of them per-haps to stand out as horrible examples, may not havebeen so legitimately acquired even under the old sys-tem. Yet no matter how they were acquired theyrepresent after the lapse of years a large invest-ment of honest capital, much hard work, and in thecase of rare and essential natural resources, a con-siderable national interest to the people at home.There is then a real conflict between the nationalismof the country and the acquired rights of the for-eigner.

It is this conflict which the United States Govern-ment has been trying to deal with ever since theMexican Constitution was established in 1917, andeven earlier. There is a long record of diplomaticnotes on the subject extending back to the time whenthe Convention of Queretaro was still drafting the

Vested Rights and Nationalism 205Constitution. The fundamental point of protest isArticle XXVII, which declared the subsoil of Mex-ico the property of the nation. This famous articleembodies the purposes and the slogans of the revolu-tion; in the eyes of Mexicans it represents a recov-ery by the nation of property that belonged to it,except for a brief period under President Diaz andthen only in respect to some minerals, ever sincethe title passed from the King of Spain to the Statesof the independent Republic of Mexico.

The Mexican revolutionists, however, have hadthe prudence to recognize that the acquired rightsof foreigners could not be wiped out. Their courtshave declared that Article XXVII is not retroactive,and in their legislation which enacts Article XXVIIthey have made provision for the continued use ofsuch property in the subsoil as was legitimatelyacquired before 1917. Whether this provision issubstantially just or not, and whether the Mexicancourts fairly interpret former Mexican law, isfiercely disputed by most of the American oil com-panies, and their claim is supported by the StateDepartment. Into the merits of that dispute I shallriot attempt to enter here. My concern is with thedoctrine upon which the American contention isbased. That is much more important in the longrun than the immediate dispute about the oil prop-erties, for the doctrine we now announce, and mayin the end establish, will govern our future relationsnot only with Mexico but with any country in which

206 The Kellogg Doctrineacquired rights are affected by a radical change ofsocial policy.

Mr. Hughes, when he was Secretary of State, laiddown the following rule in relation to Latin-America :

"Each state may have its code of laws in accord-ance with its conception of domestic policy, butrights acquired under its laws by citizens of anotherstate it is under an international obligation appro-priately to recognize."

Under Secretary Kellogg this doctrine seems tohave lost whatever qualification there may havebeen in Mr. Hughes's mind when he used the word"appropriately." Mr. Kellogg's doctrine as laiddown in the series of notes between July and No-vember, 1926, was that Mexico did not have thepower to diminish in any way a legal title acquiredbefore 1917 whether or not the change of title in-flicted a substantial loss upon the owner. Mr. Kel-logg, if I understand him correctly, contends that atitle to property once acquired must be left intact inletter, in spirit, and in substance for all time to come.And President Coolidge, if I understand the OfficialSpokesman correctly, has added that the rights ofa vested interest to an unchangeable title againstacts of the sovereign are so clear under internationallaw that it is not even an arbitrable question. Thisis a radical and unqualified position, allowing noroom for compromise, as does Mr. Hughes's prin-

Vested Rights and Nationalism 207ciple qualified by the word "appropriately.'* TheKellogg doctrine does not, in principle at least, allowMexico to confirm the oil companies in the use oftheir lands while maintaining the theory or the fic-tion that the title vests in the nation.

Whether or not Secretary Kellogg would adhereto so strict a dogma if Mexico offered a better bar-gain to the oil companies, I do not know. But it iscertain that the rigorous form in which the Americanclaim has been formulated has produced a head-oncollision between two irreconcilable principles. Theyare the principle of national sovereignty and theprinciple of acquired rights. The doctrine for whichSecretary Kellogg is now contending is in effect thata right to property is an inalienable right which nogovernment can ever impair, that it is superior underinternational law to the right of sovereignty, andthat when the acts of the sovereign conflict withthe vested rights of foreign property holders theseacts of the sovereign are null and void under inter-national law. Mr. Kellogg has argued that thewrong done by the legislation which carries theMexican Constitution into effect is such that it can-not be righted by reparation for the material dam-age suffered by American property holders in specificcases. He has rejected the Mexican offer to makereparation if damages could be proved. He hasargued that the wrong is too deep to be remediedby the payment of damages, even assuming thatMexico would or could pay the damages which might

2o8 The Kellogg Doctrinebe assessed against her. For an act of the sovereignwhich diminishes a title to property inflicts aninjury for which no compensation after the fact canbe sufficient. The act itself is confiscatory andstrikes at the root of international law as Mr. Kel-logg understands the law of nations.

Just where or when it became the law of nationsthat the sovereign has not the power to affect theestablished title to property has never been explainedby the State Department. For if this were the lawof nations then legislation anywhere in the world,including the United States, is subject to reviewnot only by the highest domestic courts, but by theForeign Offices of aliens whose rights are affected.The United States Supreme Court has for genera-tions been deciding cases in which the question waswhether an act of Congress or of one of the statelegislatures was "confiscatory." In a long seriesof decisions it has sanctioned legislation which dras-tically diminished the free use of legitimatelyacquired property. Under these decisions the rail-roads and other public utilities have been regulated,the use of real estate has been hedged with restric-tions like the rent laws and the zoning laws, employ-ers have been subjected to all kinds of "welfare"legislation. Americans have differed greatly amongthemselves as to whether these laws were wise, andimmense lawsuits have been carried through thecourts to determine whether they were confiscatory.But I doubt whether any American ever dreamed

Vested Rights and Nationalism 209that after the Supreme Court had rendered its deci-sion, a British subject who owned railway securitiesor New York City real estate could carry the caseto the British Foreign Office for an ultimate re-view and decision.

If this were the law of nations it would meanthat each nation possessed a veto on the legislatureand courts of every other nation in so far as itsnationals had rights that were affected. This theorythat the vested rights of aliens are immutable, andsuperior to the acts of the sovereign, would mean,if it were accepted, that in proportion to the sizeof alien holdings, a nation's social developmentswould be frozen in statu quo. If this were the lawof nations then no people which cherished its in-dependence could ever again permit foreigners toacquire property. For such property, once acquired,would be forever removed from national control.The foreigner with his property would be above thelaw of the country, and his rights would be deter-mined not by the sovereign power but by an alienForeign Office.

IV

It is altogether unlikely that Secretary Kelloggwould wish to commit this country to the full im-plication of his doctrine. It would lead us into greatdifficulties. Against a strong power the doctrinewould be unenforceable except by resort to war. If,for example, in the course of the next few years the

210 The Kellogg DoctrineBritish Government decides to nationalize the coalindustry, it will not ask the consent of our StateDepartment. American owners of coal properties inEngland will have to accept the same terms whichare offered to English owners, and the terms willnot be, I venture to suggest, a matter even for dip-lomatic discussion. The terms offered to landlordsin Ireland were not reviewed by alien Foreign Offices,nor would the terms laid down by Congress be sub-ject to review in case some day it decided to reorgan-ize our chaotic coal industry. Any strong nationwould take the position that where there was nodiscrimination against the foreigner or between for-eigners, where there was no taking of property fromaliens and giving it to its own nationals, where theaction arose from a considered policy in the nationalinterest, where in fact there was no intention toexpropriate without some practicable substitute,where its own courts (or even an international tri-bunal) were open to hear proof of damages, therecould be no ground for diplomatic interference. Mr.Kellogg has taken the contrary position in relationto Mexico. The seriousness of his position is notmerely that it constitutes a threat to good relationswith Mexico, but that it portends the possibility thaton this continent at least the United States may setitself up as the opponent of national aspiration andsocial development.

No one can quarrel with the State Department forgiving the oil companies every assistance in making

Vested Rights and Nationalism 211a good bargain with the Mexican Government, norin seeing to it that they are dealt with reasonablyand without prejudice. But there is a very realdanger in setting up as an unqualified dogma thetheory that American investments in Latin-Americaare in fact extra-territorial, and that the State De-partment may on its own authority exercise the pow-ers of the Supreme Court under the FourteenthAmendment over all the governments of this hem-isphere. The responsibilities we should incur undersuch a doctrine would be infinite. For as our invest-ments grew the State Department would find itselfacting both as attorney for interests affected bylegislation in Latin-America, and as final court ofreview as well.

With this doctrine established in our foreign policywe could hardly expect to win the good will of theawakening nationalists of the Latin countries. Theywould find us confronting them whenever they con-templated a change in their social policy. Andunless the State Department chose to play favorites,giving to the oil companies in Mexico a kind of sup-port which it was not willing to give other Americaninterests elsewhere, it would have to entangle itselfin every political conflict which had economic con-sequences, anywhere south of the Rio Grande.

Rightly or wrongly the Latin peoples wouldregard this intimate interference as a threat to theirindependence, and we might expect anti-American-ism to become part of the creed of all Latin patriots,

212 The Kellogg Doctrineprofessional and otherwise. Nor would Europeantraders in South America be above the temptationto point out the implications of this Kellogg Doc-trine, assuming that the Latin peoples, already suffi-ciently suspicious, should somehow miss the impli-cations. Nor is it unlikely, were we to deal withLatin-America in too heavy-handed a way, that thelarger nations there would feel impelled to turnonce more toward Europe, seeking a support therewhich would eventually restore some kind of balanceof power in this hemisphere. . . .

To these more remote and imponderable consider-ations men will give weight in accordance with theirtemperaments and their wisdom. The immediatequestion before the American people is whether theywish to erect the doctrine of immutability of vestedrights into a cardinal principle of their foreign pol-icy. This is the great question which overshadowsthe Mexican dispute. It arises, as has been pointedout, from the conflict between the growth of capitalinvestment in backward countries and the awakeningof a national spirit in these countries. The KelloggDoctrine, taken as it has been stated in thecorrespondence with Mexico, holds that vestedrights are unchangeable in the face of a nation'sdevelopment. Such a doctrine, applied so abso-lutely, means an irreconcilable collision between

Vested Rights and Nationalism 213the power of this country and the will of itsneighbors.

The task of statesmanship is to avert irrecon-cilable collisions and to find ways of adjusting con-flicting interests. That ought not to be beyond thebounds of possibility. It ought not to be impossibleto protect the substantial interests of Americancapital abroad without challenging the right of othernations to adopt such social regulation as seems goodto them. Business is a much more flexible thing thanthe conservative theorist is ready to believe. It can-not be irreparably injured without injury to thenation which attacks it. If Mexico really tried toinjure the oil business, the worst damage would recoilupon Mexico herself. There are considerations towhich the statesman can afford to pay attention, andthey suggest that the solution of the problem, whichis as real as it is delicate, will probably be foundbest by seeking a modus vivendi, respecting thenational pride of sensitive peoples, and refraining, sofar as it is humanly possible to avoid so great atemptation, from enunciating great general prin-ciples.

In the last analysis the security of American in-vestments abroad must rest, as Mr. Dwight Mor-row has pointed out, on the faith of the borrowingnations. They must believe that American capitalprofits them, and is consistent with their own nationalinterest. If they do not believe this, pressure whichforces them to act contrary to their convictions can

214 The Kellogg Doctrinegive only temporary advantages to American busi-ness men. The victory on one point can be wononly at the cost of arousing a general ill will againstAmerican capital and the American Government.Such a general ill will is more threatening to thesecurity not only of capital but of the nation thanany one Latin policy however inconvenient, howeverill-considered. And nothing would be so certain toarouse still further this ill will as the realization inLatin-America that the United States had adopteda policy, conceived in the spirit of Metternich, whichwould attempt to guarantee vested rights againstsocial progress as the Latin peoples conceive it.

April, 1927.

EMPIRE: THE DAYS OF OUR NONAGEARE OVER

AXL the world thinks of the United States to-day as an empire, except the people of theUnited States. We shrink from the word

"empire," and insist that it should not be used todescribe the dominion we exercise from Alaska to thePhilippines, from Cuba to Panama, and beyond. Wefeel that there ought to be some other name for the

215

216 Empirecivilizing work which we do so reluctantly in thesebackward countries. I think the reluctance is genu-ine. I feel morally certain that an overwhelmingmajority of our citizens do not wish to rule otherpeoples, and that there is no hypocrisy in the painedprotest which rises whenever a Latin-American or aEuropean speaks of us as imperialistic. We do notfeel ourselves to be imperialists as we understandthat word. We are not conscious of any such desirefor expansion as the Fascists, for example, pro-claim every day. We have learned to think of em-pires as troublesome and as immoral, and to admitthat we have an empire still seems to most Amer-icans like admitting that they have gone out into awicked world and there lost their political chastity.

Our sensitiveness on this point can be seen byan incident which happened recently in connectionwith that venerable book of reference, the "Alma-nach de Gotha.'* Here, in this social register of theroyal and princely families of Europe, there appears,as of 1924, a list of American "protectorates." Theyare Cuba, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Liberia, andPanama. Now there can be no doubt that Wash-ington exercises as much real authority in these coun-tries, with the possible exception of Liberia, as Lon-don does in many parts of the dependent empire.Yet the "Almanach de Gotha's" innocent use of theword "protectorates" was immediately protested byMr. James Brown Scott, Director of the Divisionof International Law of the Carnegie Endowment

The Days of Our Nonage are Over 217for International Peace. Mr. Scott pointed out,quite accurately, that the United States had neverofficially admitted the existence of any protectorates,and that Secretaries of State had again and againannounced, as Mr. Hughes did in 1923, that "werecognize the equality of the American Republics,their equal rights under the law of nations."

I do not know what the "Almanach de Gotha" isgoing to do about this, but it is certain that the restof the world will continue to think of us as an empire.Foreigners pay little attention to what we say. Theyobserve what we do. We on the other hand think ofwhat we feel. And the result is that we go on creat-ing what mankind calls an empire while we continueto believe quite sincerely that it is not an empire be-cause it does not feel to us the way we imagine anempire ought to feel.

What the rest of the world sees is that after wehad, in the years from 1803 to 1853, rounded outthe territory of continental United States by pur-chase and by conquest, there was a pause in ourexpansion; that this was followed by the purchase ofAlaska in 1867, the annexation of Hawaii in 1898,the obtaining possession of the Philippines and PortoRico, and, in a different form, of Cuba as a result ofthe Spanish War. From that time on the expansionof American influence in the Caribbean and the WestIndies has widened until there is hardly a countryin that whole region which has not seen an Americanintervention. In an article which was printed in The

218 EmpireNew Republic Professor Shephard of Columbia Uni-versity has counted the following separate militaryinterventions in the Caribbean between 1898 and1927. In Cuba, four; in Panama, five; in the Domin-ican Republic, five; in Nicaragua, six (the last stillin progress) ; Haiti, one, still in progress; Mexico,two; Honduras, six; Costa Rica, one; Colombia,one. Scattered all over the Caribbean are AmericanHigh Commissioners and other officials, workingunder treaties, loan agreements and the like.

For all practical purposes, we control the foreignrelations of all the Caribbean countries; not one ofthem could enter into serious relations abroad with-out our consent. We control their relations witheach other, as was shown recently when the StateDepartment thought it an outrage because Mexicorecognized one President of Nicaragua when we hadrecognized another. We exercise the power of lifeand death over their governments in that no govern-ment can survive if we refuse it recognition. Wehelp in many of these countries to decide what theycall their elections, and we do not hesitate, aswe have done recently in Mexico, to tell themwhat kind of constitution we think they ought tohave.

Whatever we may choose to call it, this is whatthe world at large calls an empire, or at least anempire in the making. Admitting that the wordhas an unpleasant connotation, nevertheless it doesseem as if the time had come for us to look the whole

The Days of Our Nonage are Over 219thing squarely in the face and to stop trying todeceive ourselves. We shall persuade nobody abroadby our words. We shall merely acquire a reputationfor hypocrisy while we stumble unconsciously intothe cares and the perils of empire. Now an uncon-scious empire has dangers that may be even greaterthan a conscious one. There is nothing to be gainedby talking about one thing and doing another.

The only effect of this refusal to admit that weare assuming imperial responsibilities is to turn overthe management of our empire to business men witha personal share in it, and to our second-rate andleast experienced diplomats. We have men in thediplomatic service who have had some experience inLatin-America, but as soon as they have learnedenough to be any good they manage to have them-selves promoted to a European capital where theplumbing is better. Look at the result. There isno more important post in the State Departmentto-day than that of the Chief of the Division ofMexican Affairs. It is filled by a gentleman whosename I shall suppress because there is no need touse it. Now note the diplomatic career of this offi-cial (as given by Who's Who) and see how carefullyhe has been trained for his responsibilities in regardto Mexico:

Private secretary, American Ambassador to Japan,1908-1909;

Third secretary, American Embassy at Paris, 1909-1910;

220 EmpireWith the Division of Latin-American Affairs, Washing-

ton, 1910-1911;Secretary of the American Legation, Managua, Charge

d* Affaires, 1911-1912;Lisbon, secretary of Legation and Charge d' Affaires,

1912;Second secretary of the Embassy, Rio de Janeiro, 1912-

I9H;Secretary of the Legation, Christiania, February, 1914

(Charge d' Affaires);Secretary to the American delegation to the International

Conference, Spitsbergen, June, 1914;Second secretary of the Embassy, London, 1914-1917, first

secretary, 1917-1919;First secretary of the Legation, The Hague and Charge

d' Affaires, 1919-1920;Counsellor of the American Embassy at Rome, 1920-1924;And Chief of the Mexican Affairs since 1924.

Here is a trained diplomat as we understand theterm, but for what has he been trained ? The nearesthe ever got to a post in Mexico was to be in Nicara-gua in 1911-1912, and on the basis of this intensiveand intimate knowledge of Mexico, her people andher problems, he acts as adviser on, and interpreterof, dispatches from Mexico for the enlightenmentof Secretary Kellogg, who has never had a post inMexico, and to President Coolidge, who has cer-tainly never had one either. There may be someone in the State Department who knows Mexicointimately and at firsthand, but if there is such aperson he is not Chief of the Mexican Division.

I have not described this situation in order to cast

The Days of Our Nonage are Over 221aspersions upon this official who may be a usefulmember of the service. But the situation in whichhe finds himself is preposterous. It is preposterousthat at a critical time the Chief of the Mexican Divi-sion should be a man who never had a post in Mex-ico, and has apparently spent only two years of abusy life, and then fifteen years ago, in any Carib-bean country. It is not his fault. It is the fault ofa system under which the Caribbean countries, thetheater of our empire, are dealt with absent-mindedly, in a left-handed way, without realizationof the responsibilities involved.

The refusal to recognize what we are doing inthe Caribbean, the persistent use of meaningless,high-sounding generalities about "equality" in lieuof direct discussion of our increasing penetration andcontrol, has prevented the formation of a body ofintelligent and disinterested opinion. When some-thing happens in the Caribbean, the only voices heardare those of the oil men, the fruit men, mining men,bankers on one side, and the outraged voices of theGladstone liberals on the other. The debate is con-ducted by the hard-boiled and soft-hearted. Thereis no opinion which is both hard-headed and far-seeing. The effect on policy is bad: the hard-boiledinterest works continuously, and the rather amateur-ish officials in the State Department who areassigned to these duties are unable to cope with it.They do not know enough. They are not strongenough. They have no sufficient incentive to set

222 Empirethemselves up against the powerful interests whichare telling them what they ought to do. So usuallythe situation is developed without the check of pub-lic criticism until it reaches a climax where marineshave to be used. Then the soft-hearted people rollover in bed and wake up. There is a great outcryabout imperialism, and the policy of the govern-ment becomes confused and vacillating. After awhile the soft-hearted clamor subsides, the normalrelations are resumed between the hard-boiled in-terests and the ambitious young diplomats with acareer to be made.

There can be no remedy for this until Americansmake up their minds to recognize the fact that theyare no longer a virginal republic in a wicked world,but they are themselves a world power, and one ofthe most portentous which has appeared in the his-tory of mankind. When they have let that truth sinkin, have digested it, and appraised it, they will castaside the old phrases which conceal the reality, andas a fully adult nation, they will begin to preparethemselves for the part that their power and theirposition compel them to play.

April, 1927.

SECOND BEST STATESMEN

I

M R. BERNARD SHAW has convinced himselfthat the art of civilization is too long forshort-lived men. What can be expected, he

asks, from a breed of novices and flappers who dieoff when they are still politically adolescent, andtemporize with every great issue because they willnot live long enough to care whether is is settled

223

224 Second Best Statesmenor not? Is it true, as Mr. Shaw says, that we areruled by freshmen who will never mature ?

My own opinion is that we do not know whetherit is true or not. We have not any conception, Ibelieve, of the present powers of man, short-livedas he is. We have a hint of his enormous mechan-ical ingenuity, of his astounding physical courage, ofhis unbelievable patience. But of his latent capac-ity for bringing order out of the tohubohu of humanrelations we know very little because he is not seri-ously trying. We have learned almost to think thatsatisfaction with the second best is a mark of goodhumor and wisdom, that it is gauche not to discountthe pretensions of 'all public characters, not to con-clude almost any discussion of public affairs withan uAh, well! they're pretty good fellows, I suppose,and doing the best they know.'*

Now, we may all be pretty good fellows, but inthe art of civilization we are emphatically not doingthe best we know how. Our public men are in factquite dismayed, when they have the leisure and can-dor to stop and think. Again and again, in criticalmatters, they find themselves doing what they knowto be foolish. As they reflect they are amazed whenthey watch themselves upholding policies they knowwill not work, making promises they know they can-not keep, purveying cheap and second-rate goodswhich privately they despise, and evading to-day orpostponing for posterity what should be dealt withat once. For real criticism of the statesman you do

Second Best Statesmen 225not need to go to Mr. Shaw's Burge and Lubin;you have only to go to the statesmen themselves,when they are off duty and are not talking for pub-lication.

You may come away from such a talk still con-vinced that man is congenitally incapable of civiliza-tion. But you are just as likely to come away feelingelated at the candor of which men are capable inprivate, and depressed by their apparent inabilityto let their best insight govern their public life.That, at least, is the feeling I have brought awaywith me from many journalistic interviews. Andonly, I think, by recalling that public men lead thisdouble life, can you account for some of the inex-plicable devotion they so often arouse. The thick-and-thin followers see the private character ratherthan the public personage. Did they see only thecarefully constructed facades they, too, would be dis-couraged. For public men, in spite of their pressagents, usually put their worst foot forward in pub-lic life. But those who are behind the facade canlike the man for the possibilities he really possesses.Those out front have to judge by his display. Aftera while, perhaps after prolonged contemplation ofa performance like that of Congress with the bonus,they are bound to think with Mr. Shaw that allpublic characters are a total loss and no insurance.

And yet, what if it were possible, taking men asthey are, to liberate the possibilities that in momentsof candor are revealed to the devoted ? We do not

226 Second Best Statesmenknow what would happen. We know a little ofwhat has happened in the conquest of nature whenthis liberation took place—when men shook them-selves free of their own tabus. In the physicalsciences little remains of the disproportion betweenwhat a discoverer really thinks and what in theinterests of his reputation he sees fit to tell the world.There it is not considered wiser and better formand more mellow to be rather inaccurate anddecently secretive. Why, then, should there be a cultof the second-rate in our public relations?

II

Mr. Shaw thinks that man practices this cultbecause he has not a sufficient stake in the world.According to what he calls, in "Back to Methuselah,"the Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas, man's atti-tude toward civilization is that of a transient anduntidy tenant without interest in the upkeep or im-provement of the property. Others think that theroot of the trouble lies in "capitalism"; some thinkit lies in commercialism; some in Puritanism; somein the great tide of immigration; some in the primi-tive state of our knowledge; some in the inherentdifficulty of the subject matter of the social sciences.

I think the argument can be pursued for a whileon different lines. For grant that it is desirable tobreed and educate and select better men, grant every-thing the eugenicist and educator and creative evolu-

Second Best Statesmen 227tionist demand; still it is possible to argue from thefact that there is such a gap between public andprivate character, that this world would soon be abetter place to live in if every one who exercisesauthority or helps to shape public opinion actedaccording to such lights as he now has. It is pos-sible to argue that the improvement following theclosing of the gap would be cumulative.

Very easily one can talk nonsense in these matters,but personally I am convinced that almost no one to-day who deals with large electorates, with great cir-culations, with anonymous publics, is wholly with-out a kind of inner stultification. Something itseems has obtruded between the individual and thepublic which acts as a depressant and self-censorupon a candid first-rate relationship. In their pub-lic dealings, most men are much less than them-selves. They assume that a certain insincerity isnecessary to success, that a little less than commonsense is appropriate, that the best is the enemy ofthe better. They have the attitude of a nurse toa patient. They involve themselves deeply in con-siderations of manner and tact. They become sopreoccupied with the eternal question of how to"put something across," and how much to ladle outat one dose, and how good is the digestion of thepublic, that their own interest in the subject matteris diverted and distracted. In their anxiety aboutthe sugar-coating, they forget the pill. Their ownpowers of invention and judgment are starved

228 Second Best Statesmenthrough disuse, while their powers of promotionand salesmanship grow constantly more elaborate.

The fashionable thing to do in this connectionis to pronounce the phrase "herd instinct" with asense of finality. At the moment, these are magicwords yielding glamour and ironical relief. Theleaders huddle with the herd. They are afraid tobe alone as the crowd is afraid of people who aredifferent. There is nothing to do about it butrepeat "herd instinct" whenever your feelings needexpression.

Or if you do not share this biological fatalism, youcan insist with good three-dimensional invective thatman is naturally timid and lazy, and that he willalways take the easiest way. If the quickest way tofame and fortune is to catch votes, collect audiences,and increase the circulation by saying faintly insin-cere and second-rate things, Adam will indulge. Manwill take that way. You can preach against it.You can exhort him to "the search and expectationof greatest and exactest things," but your successwill in the main be negative. You may put a brakeon the deterioration of standards. You may stirup that conscience in the community which doessomehow manage to set a lowest limit for the pan-derer. You can do little more because the conscienceof the community deals with the minimum. Whenit comes to setting standards of excellence, preach-ing is likely to be feeble, rhetorical, and ineffective.

For there is something that conflicts with an

Second Best Statesmen 229unexamined premise of our culture in a sermonaimed to incite men to pursue their highest good.We ought to look for that premise. I believe that thetrouble can be located: that what some call the herdinstinct, and others natural laziness and timidity,has surreptitiously acquired the sanction of con-science in democracy; and that the older conceptionsof duty, honor, and excellence are undercut by amyth that passes for the latest science and the mostmodern conception of democracy. I believe thismyth is partly a survival from the days when democ-racy was fighting for existence and improvising acreed, and partly confusion due to the absence of areally friendly and drastic criticism of democraticideas; that it has no more to do with tEe intrinsicvirtues of democracy than Alexandrine speculationhad to do with the teachings of Jesus; and that ithas no more to do with the substance of populargovernment than the medieval picture of the heav-ens had with the Gospels.

A distracting error has worked itself into thedemocratic tradition which is corrupting to the willbecause it sanctifies the cult of the second best.

Ill

The man who in a roomful of up-to-the-minutepeople ventured to use the word "reason" in connec-tion with public affairs would soon discover that hewas naively endangering his reputation. There

230 Second Best Statesmenwould be an embarrassed silence, almost as awkwardas if he had smuggled himself into a congress ofscientists and was asserting that the earth is flat.Savvy Barnabas, who is Mr. Shaw's incarnation ofan advanced intellect, would probably bounce outof the room choking with laughter. Or if she stayedlong enough to argue, she would tell the apostleof reason that apparently his brain is upholsteredwith red plush, and, therefore, he does not knowthat the function of reason in politics is to find pre-texts for realizing the wishes of men. She wouldinsist that a wish clothed in a reason constitutes aninterest, and that interests are the only guide inpublic affairs.

Savvy is proud of this discovery. She regards itas a touchstone for telling fossils from freemen.It seems to work well. She can employ it withdevastating effect upon academicians whose habits ofthought hardened before the discovery was generallyknown. And since there are still many of theseacademicians left, and since there is even a renewalof the supply from certain centers of learning, andsince these unemancipated people write a greater per-centage of the books and make a greater percentageof the speeches than they are entitled to makeaccording to the population statistics, Savvy is underthe impression that they speak the accepted doctrineof the great mass of the people. Because her battle-ground is among the books and the reviews, shedoes not know that the real intellectual battleground

Second Best Statesmen 231has shifted, that fact has run far ahead of theory,and that she is a good half turn behind in the cycleof thought. Observing that the conservative acad-emicians arrive at much the same conclusions aboutthe Republican Party as her uncles, Savvy thinksthese academicians do the thinking for the com-munity, and goes for them head on.

But Savvy is mistaken. Her own doctrine is farmore popular as a working philosophy than thatof this older generation. She is, without knowingit, rushing eagerly to the support of the victors.For, except among a few authors and professors,the doctrine of interests is triumphant in everydaylife.

Modern teaching about the role of the interestshas been transfigured much as was the theory ofevolution two generations ago. What was intendedas a mere statement of probable fact has beentwisted into an absolute moral precept. In the caseof evolution, the idea that change is unending washastily moralized into the belief that change for thebetter was inevitable. Then it followed that to-morrow was inevitably better than yesterday. Andmerely to come after was an improvement on whathad gone before. All the generations since Aristotlestood on each others1 shoulders, and he who wouldstand on ours could almost touch the sky.

The theory of interests was at first as neutral, asmuch beyond good and evil, as evolution. The dis-coverers claimed nothing for it but that they had

232 Second Best Statesmenobserved in somewhat greater detail than peoplehad ever observed it before that a wish was father tomost thoughts. They taught that most of the timewhen men imagined they were acting on reason theywere in truth finding reasons for acting as theydesired. Few of them claimed that men could neveract on reason, for such an admission would havetainted their own inquiries. Certainly they did notsay that men could not, or ought not to try to followreason, but only that, more often than was currentlybelieved, reason was an apologist and an advocaterather than a counsellor and a judge.

The new technique for going under the otherfellow's skin, and exposing him in the act of ration-alizing his impulses, satisfied Savvy's lust of battle.The technique came to her at first or second handfrom the writings of James, Bergson, and Freud;and their heresy became her orthodoxy. Becausethe anti-intellectualists had been fighting men, as wellas scientists, all of them wrote with an eye on theiracademic colleagues, and they stated their positionin a series of polemics against opponents who weredogmatic rationalists. Savvy has inherited thepolemics along with the doctrine. And, if the truthbe told, it is the polemics that she likes best. Sheimagines, anyhow, that she is championing thenewest truth by brandishing the sticks which menold enough to be her grandfather used in order tobeat their grandfathers. She has not realized thatshe is thrashing a straw man. She has not waked

Second Best Statesmen 233up to the fact that, however hard-shelled the oppo-sition of scholars may have been, the new knowledgespread like a prairie fire. Often it assumed strangeshapes that would have horrified the pioneers; butit passed quickly into usage, and was acclaimed withshouts of joy by every one who was glad he couldnow believe that to be timid and timeserving wasto be at once ultra-modern and scientific and anadvanced democrat.

IV

For by a twist in the association of ideas, thetheory of interests coalesced with that of govern-ment by consent of the governed. The statementin scientific jargon that the wish is father to thethought amalgamated with the faith that the willof the people should be supreme. Out of this con-fusion emerged the conviction that the wish whichis father to the thought should be supreme in politics,the newspapers, the movies, and the theater. Inconsequence, the people who take the doctrine veryliterally go about by day, and make sure they havepencil and pad within reach when they are in bedat night, so that they may listen in for their impulses,and obey them. They move on tiptoe so that theymay overhear the voice of the unconscious. Poli-ticians speak their real thoughts in whispers for fearof creating commotion in the ether that might inter-fere with their deciphering the wishes of the public.The final answer to any proposal is that the people

234 Second Best Statesmendo not want it; the final excuse for anything is thatthe people want what they want when they want it.

In our world this has become the chief substitutefor the old architecture of heaven and hell, theancient springs of revelation, the oracles and thesacred books, and the authoritative code of moralswhich they sanctioned. To a limited extent the olderviews survive, but they seem clearly archaic and arethreatened with extinction. For behind this newattitude there is a great pride, a great sense of eman-cipation from ancient error. So great a pride is it, sogreat a sense of freedom, that the faults of the oldare sufficient to float the new. The doctrine of watch-ful waiting, of mysterious popular guidance, ofpurely receptive and purely passive leadership, hasan air about it of democratic humility, of unpreten-tiousness, of nobly serving great things. What isman on the scale of time? A mere spokesman, atransmitter, a dictograph.

It is quite easy to become mystical on the subject.You can say that out of the vasty deeps of ourmodern minds, out of the eternal caverns of theunconscious, out of the collective super-soul andover-soul, profounder than reason, impregnated withthe everlasting memories of the race, instinctive withprimal knowledge and heavy laden with immemorialwisdom, comes the will of the people. Not yourhalf-hearted views and mine, not our compound ofprejudices and headlines and inattention, but some-thing other and utter. And all the politician or

Second Best Statesmen 235the editor has to do is to wait and listen and strainhis ear, and he will know just what to do about thesales tax and the bonus, ship subsidies and the tariff,reparations and the integrity of China.

Thus, by sleight-of-hand, popular governmentembraced a mythology. Beginning with a theorybased on the vision of a very simple village com-munity where every one knew everybody else's char-acter and affairs, and inspired by a high sense ofhuman equality, the democrat found himself in anunmanageable civilization. No man's wisdomseemed to be great enough for the task. A some-what more mystical wisdom was necessary. Butabout the steadiness of the supply of that wisdomhe still had inner doubt. Then came the doctrineof interests to relieve the tension. It was said,apparently on the highest scientific authority, thatall men instinctively pursued their interests; thattheir reason need not be dealt with because it was amere pretext for their wishes; and that all you hadto do was to probe for the interests of the people,and you were in touch with reality.

But as a practical matter, it was not at all easyto tell offhand what were the interests which the willof the people expressed. The popular will had away of formulating itself in abstract nouns likeJustice, Right, Honor, Americanism. It proved tobe rather a puzzle, therefore, just how the leaderswere to detect the interests which the unconsciouscollective soul was uttering. At that critical moment

236 Second Best Statesmenthe sophists stepped in, and by manipulating thedouble meaning of "interest" they laid to rest thescruples of conscience.

It happens that "interest" may mean either thefeeling of concern or the fact of being concerned.The difference is often very great. A child has,for example, a very great interest in his father'sbusiness affairs. They will determine many of hisopportunities in life. But the child is not in theleast interested in any discussion of his father'sbusiness. Similarly, the people of the United Stateshave an enormous interest in the settlement of Ger-man reparations, but they were far more interestedin reading about the wedding gown of the PrincessMary. When the Reparations Commission makesa decision, no courier takes an airplane for thenearest ocean greyhound, carrying the full text ina water-tight packet specially designed to float, andcasts it overboard where a fast destroyer can pickit up, and rush it to Boston Harbor twenty-fourhours and eighteen minutes before the ocean grey-hound docks in New York. We are not sufficientlyinterested in some of our biggest interests to takethat much trouble.

But by confusing the two meanings of the word"interest," the sophists could satisfy themselves thatthe degree of interest felt was a true index in ademocracy of the amount of interest at stake. Theycould pose as servants of the public by identifyinginterest subjectively felt with interest as an objective

Second Best Statesmen 237reality. They could confuse what the public seemsto demand now with what the public in the longrun needs. It is a deep and corrupting ambiguity.It is to say that a taste for marshmallows is theclue to a diet.

V

No such grossly obvious play upon words would,of course, have found wide acceptance, were therenot in the background 3. powerful will to believe.The desire to think that our wishes are instinctivelydirected to the satisfaction of our own best interests,and of society's, has grown as the older systems ofauthority in government, religion, and morals havedisintegrated. In a world complicated beyond theirpowers, men who were deprived of external guidancehave had to fall back upon themselves. But on whatselves were they to fall back ? The traditional HigherSelf, consisting of a code of Duty and Rights andPurposes, had disintegrated with the institutions ofwhich it was a part.

For a brief time, the individual reason actingdeductively on its own premises was elected to carrythe burden. But it did not take long to discoverthat individual reason working on accidentalpremises in people's minds was more often than nota mere intellectualization of their hopes and fears.Its authority collapsed at the approach of theanalytical psychologists. But there remained thesheer human necessity of believing in something that

238 Second Best Statesmencould be trusted as a guide to conduct. What wasthat something to be? It could not be a revealedreligion nor a revealed political system; it could notbe the individual reason acting alone, for that wasnow understood to take its direction not from thefacts of the environment but from the stresses andurgencies of each person. Apparently, the instinctiveneeds and appetites were the governing forces ofhuman life.

And then, because we all have a tendency toworship whatever is powerful and certain, the cultof instinct was taken up by nineteenth-centuryliberalism. Since it had been demonstrated moreor less convincingly that most of our reasoning andmost of our beliefs were dominated by desire, menproclaimed that desire was the utimate reality.Being ultimate, it must be ultimately right. Beingultimately right, it must be intelligent. Being intel-ligent, it must be capable of expressing itself. Andtherefore in reverse order, the intensity and quantityof whatever was expressed was the sign of anintelligent pursuit of what was ultimately right.

This is, I think, a true statement of the prevailingbelief about human nature. Few hold it in a pureform or act upon it all the time. The older ideassurvive to modify it somewhat in practice, and thereis also a check upon it in certain of the newer schoolsof thought. But the realm over which the doctrinepresides is, nevertheless, immense. It determines

Second Best Statesmen 239the characteristically "modern" attitude in innumer-able fields of activity.

The popular modern theory of the instincts isa vestibule to several different conflicting schools ofthought. It leads, for example, to many naivetheories about the economic interpretation of poli-tics. Usually, these theories assume that men groupthemselves more or less infallibly by economicclasses, and that the programs they adopt expresstheir economic interests. But is there any evidencefor thinking that this rule holds ? Do people nevervote foolishly, do they never vote for laws that injurethem? Is the fact that a group asks for a measureany evidence that a measure is really to its advan-tage? It seems to me clear that it is no evidenceat all. And if it is no evidence, it follows that theword "self-interest," which has such an air of realityabout it, has no reality. It is used with assuranceonly by people who are confused by the two mean-ings of the word "interest," and who imagine thatthe measures in which a group of workingmen, or afarmers* bloc, or a manufacturers' associationhappen to be interested, are equivalent to a policywhich will in fact further their economic interests.

VI

The cult of instinct has turned out to be anillusion. And if we read more carefully what modern

240 Second Best Statesmenpsychology actually teaches, we can see readilyenough why it is an illusion. The instincts are notstimulated to activity, as perhaps they were in primi-tive ages, by a true picture of the relevant environ-ment in which they must find their satisfaction,but oftener than not in our civilization by quitefalse fictions, accidentally encountered or deliberatelydevised. They are not set in motion by obvioustruth, and the action to which they are habituatedhas no necessary connection with the end desired.For this reason it is impossible in the modern worldto trust instinct alone, once it is seen that ourinstincts are not in gear with the facts, and thatthey are not equipped by habit with a knowledgeof ways and means.

Perhaps it will be denied that any one proposes totrust instinct in the way I have described the culthere. It is true that no one does wholly trust it inpractice, not even the most pagan of the anti-Puritans. Practice is often better than the theory.But I insist that this theory is central in our modernliberal culture, and that it has very seriousconsequences.

The most serious is that the theory underminesthe intellectual resistance of those who see the evilof trying to run modern civilization on the notionthat what happens to be interesting is, therefore, themeasure of the public interest, and a guide to theconduct of the politician, the editor, the popularartist, and the teacher. In every one of the popular-

Second Best Statesmen 241izing professions you will find among the ablest afeeling of frustration and a vein of cynicism. Theirpride of craft and their love of excellence encounternot only the inevitable resistances which are part ofthe game, but a certain moralized and highfalutindoubt about whether it is not undemocratic, unpleas-antly superior, and almost sinful to do what theyfeel to be the first-rate thing.

They lack, in other words, the support of theauthoritative dogma of their time, the dogma ofinstinct, when they seek the highest good. It is asif the intellect of mankind had conspired againstitself and had lamed its right arm in the eternal warof light against darkness. It is the business ofcriticism to destroy this cult of the second best.Destroying it will not, of course, insure the victory,or suddenly transform the timid and timeserving—the Burges and the Lubins—into courageous andcandid men. But at least it will deprive the tempterof his scripture when he whispers seductively inmen's ears that by drifting idly with the eddies ofpopular interest they are serving the interests ofa free people.

July, 1922.

TO JUSTICE HOLMES ON HIS SEVENTY-FIFTH BIRTHDAY

T HE country's business at Washington is con-ducted in an odor of dead and dying cigarssuspended in steam heat. Out-of-doors

Washington is widely planned and men might moveabout it thinking for a nation. But in the halls ofCongress, in the committee rooms, the air is warmand foul. It drags upon you till you wilt and yourhead swims, and the faces of men testifying growhazy. In that mean atmosphere, so like the corridorof a cheap hotel, there is an invitation to relax andgrow bored and cease to care. You slouch in yourseat, you dawdle through your business, compressedand dull and discouraged. Thick, tepid, tired air itis, in which visions die.

But there is at least one place in Washingtonwhere things have an altogether different quality,and no one, I think, comes away from it unmoved.It is the house of Mr. Justice Holmes. When you

242

To Justice Holmes 243enter, it is as if you had come into the living streamof high romance. You meet the gay soldier who cantalk of Falstaff and eternity in one breath, and teasethe universe with a quip. "When I read absolutephilosophy," he said once, "I feel as if I were sittingalone in a shadowy room. Every once in a while amouse skips across the floor, and I catch glimpsesof him as he darts into his hole. Then a wee voiceseems to say, 'Lo I I am in the bosom of God.' " Inhim wisdom has lost its austerity and becomes atumbling succession of imagery and laughter andoutrage. There is always a window open to thenight, but the perspective is that of the natural world."I believe that we're in the belly of the universe,not that it is in us."

At seventy-five, a justice of the Supreme Courtand a scholar known wherever the common law isstudied, his heart is with the laughing sad men, whohave mixed bitterness and beauty, and staked theirsouls on a gamble with life. He fought in the CivilWar and was wounded; he has looked at deathlightly, and known what it is to live dangerously. Asage with the bearing of a cavalier, his presenceis an incitement to high risks for the sake of theenterprise and its memories. He wears wisdom likea gorgeous plume, and likes to stick the sanctitiesbetween the ribs.

He has lost nothing that young men have, andhe has gained what a fine palate can take from theworld. If it is true that one generation after another

244 To Justice Holmeshas depended upon its young to equip it with gayetyand enthusiasm, it is no less true that each generationof the young depends upon those who have lived toillustrate what can be done with experience. Theyneed to know that not all life withers in bad air.That is why young men feel themselves very closeto Justice Holmes. He never fails to tell them whatthey want to hear, or to show them what they wouldwish men to be.

March 8, 1916.