seeks so fatuously to hold in check. Let us not forget the fatuity of the effort. Let us not forget that man, under peace, is just as much urged and bedeviled by his will to power as man in war. The only difference is that war makes him admit the fact and take pride in it, whereas peace seduces him into lying denials of it. And out of that difference grow all the evils that a long peace nourishes—too much moralizing, petty and meticulous fault-finding, a childish belief in soothsayers, a sentimental reverence for poverty and inefficiency, a cult of self-sacrifice, a universal fear, suspiciousness, over-niceness, prudishness and hypochondria. In brief, a nation too long at peace becomes a sort of gigantic old maid. It grows weak in body and aberrant in mind. The energies that should be turned against its foes and rivals are turned against itself. It seeks escape for its will to power by flogging its own hide.
No need to dredge up examples out of history. We have a capital one under our very noses. The American people, too secure in their isolation and grown too fat in their security, show all the signs of deteriorating national health. The very qualities which won a great empire from the wilderness are the qualities which they now seek to deny and punish. Once a race of ruthless and light-hearted men, putting the overt act above any metaphysical significance of it, they now become introspective and conscience-stricken, and devote their chief endeavors to penalizing one another for artificial crimes, and to brooding maudlinly over dangers and “wrongs” that their healthier fathers never gave a thought to. In every evidence of superabundant energy, in every manifestation of sound wind and quick blood, they see only the spectre of disaster. They become afraid of everything, including even themselves. They are afraid of women, they are afraid of alcohol, they are afraid of money. And their fear, playing upon their sick will to power, arouses them to that abominable orgy of spying and hypocrisy, that disgusting mutual pursuit and persecution, which is fast becoming the chief mark of American civilization in the eyes of other peoples.
A war would do us good. It would make us healthier in body, cleaner in mind. It would put an end to our puerile brooding over petty “wrongs” and ills, our old-womanish devotion to neighborhood gossip and scandal-monging, our imbecile following of snide messiahs. No race can long hold a respectable place in the world which shrinks from the hazards amd sacrifices of honorable, stand-up combat, and hangs instead upon the empty words of fact-denying platitudinarians. At this moment the peoples of Europe are preparing to fight out the great fight that must inevitably select and determine, in man no less than among the protozoa, the fittest to survive. And at this moment our ranking officer of state, taking his place between the performing dogs and the Swiss bell-ringers, is wooing the ears of marveling hinds with his grotesque repeal and re-enactment of the law of natural selection.4 [4 August 1914]
THE CASE AGAINST DEMOCRACY
The Hon. S. Broughton Tail, the Walbrook thinker, continues to fill the Letter Column with his solemn proofs that the German Kaiser is not a democrat. When this great labor is over let us hope that the Hon. Mr. Tail will present his reasons for holding that the Hon. Tom McNulty is not a Jewish rabbi, and that the Hon. Jack Johnson is not an albino, and that Sir Almroth Wright is not a militant suffragist, and that I myself am not a bishop in the A. M. E. Church. A man of such gifts for convincing argumentation owes the human race a high duty: he must exercise them constantly if he would go to Heaven when he dies. Let us all rejoice that one so suave and sapient is in our fevered midst.
Seriously, it is as vain to argue that the Kaiser is not a democrat as it would be to argue that dogs have fleas. If it means anything at all, democracy means government by men in the mass, without any regard whatever for the personal fitness of the individuals composing the mass for that difficult and highly technical business. It is grounded firmly and immovably upon the doctrine that, in the voting booth at least, all men are equal—that the opinion of a corner loafer or a farm hand is just as good as the opinion of a Lincoln, a Bismarck or a Huxley. The Kaiser is wholly opposed to that doctrine. He regards it as windy nonsense, as utter puerility and damphoolishness. And what is more, the overwhelming majority of intelligent men, not only in Germany but everywhere else, agree with him.
I know a great many Americans of position and influence, but save for professional politicians and a few sentimentalists I do not know three who even make a pretense of believing in anything approaching genuine democracy. Not many of them, true enough, argue against it publicly. They look upon the question as a closed one in the United States, at least for the present, just as the question of a state church is a closed one, and the question of free education. But though they thus dodge the empty and thankless job of bucking the enraptured rabble, they by no means confess thereby that they are in accord with it. On the contrary, they are opposed to it, and they will remain opposed to it until the last galoot’s ashore.
The very theory of democracy, in fact, is unintelligible to men accustomed to reflection, just as the theory of Christian Science is unintelligible. And the cause thereof is as plain as day: it is because democracy is not founded upon an idea at all, but merely upon an emotion. That emotion is the lowly one of envy, perhaps the most degraded in the whole human repertoire. Democracy is a device for giving to the relatively inefficient and unsuccessful (and hence, bitterly envious) majority, by the artificial and dishonest device of the ballot, that preponderance of power and influence which belongs rightfully to the minority by reason of its superior efficiency, honesty and intelligence. In brief, democracy is an attempt to wreak punishment upon successful men for the crime of being successful, and its charm lies in its promise of loot. The one thing that may be said in favor of it is that it seldom works.
Here in the United States, for example, we have had to dilute and modify genuine democracy over and over again in order to save the nation from utter destruction and ruin. The enfranchisement of the negro was a device of genuine democracy: it set up the frank doctrine that the opinion of a Georgia field hand, but three generations removed from cannibalism, was as good as the opinion of Gen. Robert E. Lee—that his desires and ideals were just as respectable, that his notions of civilized government were just as sound. Lincoln and other sane men stood against that doctrine, but it was forced upon the country by a typically democratic process, i. e., emotionally, unintelligently, in a villainous spirit of revenge.
But it had no sooner been adopted than everyone saw that it would not work. The States south of the Potomac begin to suffer from it even more than they had suffered from the Civil War and some of the Northern States also found it an unmitigated curse. The result was an organized attack upon it, resulting in the gradual pulling of its teeth. To abandon it bodily, of course, was beyond the American imagination, but hypocrisy, as is usual in democratic nations, did the work that honesty was unequal to. Today there is not a Southern State in which the Fifteenth Amendment is actually in force. Self-preservation demanded that this supreme masterpiece of democracy be reduced to a mere shell of words.
What is more, very few professed democrats advocate its restoration. Not a word in favor of that folly ever comes from the Hon. William Jennings Bryan, or from the Hon. Theodore Roosevelt, or from the Hon. Bob La Follette, or from the Hon. Woodrow Wilson, or from any other great apostle of the plain people. What is still more, the few lingering impossibilists who yet weep and argue for it are open opponents of democracy in other directions. I cite the Hon. C. J. Bonaparte as an example. This eminent statesman looses a tear ever and anon for the stolen “rights” of the virtuous niggero—but let us not forget that he was against local option,5 and that he devotes himself ardently to opposing self-government at Back River.6 The persons who make Back River an inhabited place are almost unanimously in a favor of an open Sunday, but Mr. Bonaparte and his friends frankly endeavor to block their attainment of it by arousing the passions and prejudices of remote yokels who have never been nearer to Back River than Watson street and the Monumental Theatre. [21 October 1914]
MORALITY AND IMMORALITY
The Hon. James A. Dunham, in the long-suffering Letter Column:
THE SUN has ideals and standards, while [the Hon.] Mr. Mencken apparently has neither.
The
