Memoirs of a Superfluous Man

Le monde est inepte à se guarir. Il est si impatient de ce que le presse qu’il ne vise qu’ à s’en desfaire sans regarder à quel prix|... le bien ne succede pas necessairement au mal; un autre mal luy peult succeder, et pire.

—MONTAIGNE.

HAVING a good deal of leisure at this time, I employed some of it in looking over the various projects that were on foot for political and social reform. There seemed no end of them. Counting in the smaller schemes for reform in city and county politics, they came to a bewildering lot. Some of the larger schemes were aimed at corrupt state legislatures; but the projects which interested me most were those having a national scope, like the movements for direct Federal taxation, popular election of senators, women’s suffrage, control of commerce, and control of trust-monopoly.

What first attracted my attention was the astonishing extent to which these latter were animated by hatred of the rich. There was some ground for this. These great fortunes were made by means which were outrageously unfair, and were felt to be so. Their owners were in control of the State’s machinery, and were using it to their own advantage by way of land-grants, tariffs, concessions, franchises and every other known form of law-made privilege. In the view of simple justice, this was shocking bad. Yet I could not help seeing that it was in full accord with the dominant social philosophy. Economism, which interprets the whole sum of human life in terms of the production, acquisition and distribution of wealth, must necessarily fashion its gods after its own likeness. Economism must not conceive of the State as an instrument of justice, a social device set up, as the Declaration says, “to secure these rights.” On the contrary, it must be what Voltaire called it, “a device for taking money out of one set of pockets and putting it into another.” With this conception of the State and its functions accepted everywhere, prevailing everywhere, what could be expected but a continuous struggle to get at the State’s machinery and work it to one’s own advantage?

Then too, the owners of these great fortunes flaunted their allegiance to economism in ways so brazen and assertive as to amount almost to savagery. Their porcine insensitiveness made them easy targets for those who had marked them out for spoliation. Not long ago I noticed in the bar-room of one of New York’s older hotels a line of forty-two cabinet photographs of representative rich men of that generation. They ran all the way from Daniel Drew and Jay Gould down to Henry Ford, the only one of the lot now living. In their totality, those pictures tell an impressive story; a student of physiognomy would be well repaid for giving them careful scrutiny. Such were the men of whom Charles Francis Adams left record that he had known them, many of them tolerably well, “and a less interesting crowd I do not care to encounter. Not one that I have ever known would I care to meet again, either in this world or the next; nor is one of them associated in my mind with the idea of humour, thought or refinement.” So, while hatred may be never justifiable, perhaps seldom reasonable, a great popular hatred of such men, under such circumstances, is at least understandable.

The reformers of the period put me off, in the first instance, by their careless superficial use of abstract terms. They talked about the oppressiveness of capital, the evils of the capitalist system, the iniquities of finance-capitalism, and so on, apparently with no idea of what those terms mean. To me, therefore, most of what they said was sheer nonsense. I knew that no society ever did or could exist without employing capital, and my notion was that wherever capital is at work, there of necessity is capitalism and a capitalist system. As I saw it, there was nothing in the nature of capital that was unjust or oppressive, but quite the contrary. I could see that injustice and oppression were likely to follow when great capitalists were in a position of State-created economic advantage, like Mr. Carnegie with his tariffs or the “railway-magnates” with their land-grants; but the same results seemed as likely to follow where small capitalists or non-capitalists were in a similarly privileged position. Spencer’s Social Statics, published in 1851, had shown me that under such a government as he contemplated,—a government divested of all power to traffic in economic advantage,— injustice and oppression would tend to disappear. As long as the State stood as an approachable huckster of privilege, however, there seemed no chance but that they must persist, and that the consequent social disorder must persist also.

The measures of the reformers took no account of all this which seemed to me so obvious. The reformers themselves apparently did not see that the State, as an arbiter of economic advantage, must necessarily be a potential instrument of economic exploitation. In fact, these are but two ways of saying the same thing, for, as Voltaire saw so clearly, advantage to the State’s beneficiaries means disadvantage to those who are not its beneficiaries. By putting a tariff on steel, for example, the State simply took a great deal of money out of the pockets of American purchasers of steel, and put it in Mr. Carnegie’s; it acted ad hoc as Mr. Carnegie’s instrument of exploitation. Neither did the reformers see that those who would profit most by State-enforced exploitation must always be, and would be, those to whom nature has given the largest endowment of that peculiar, instinctive, and unerring sagacity for finding the best ways of access to the State’s machinery and the most fruitful ways of operating it. They would personify the highest aims and ideals of economism. In other words, they would be exactly like those Mr. C. F. Adams knew, the very ones whom the reformers were proposing to hamstring and despoil.

The actual situation confronting the reformers, as I saw it, was nothing new or strange. The sum of it was that the American State had always been controlled by those whom I learned shortly afterwards when I came to read Nietzsche, to call mass-men. It was so controlled throughout the colonial period, so in 1789, so in 1890. In sharp contrast with the doctrine of the Declaration, the doctrine of the Constitution was mass-man’s doctrine; the document itself was a lawyer’s digest and charter of economism. The men of the forty-two photographs were rich mass-men, to be sure, but mass-men, every mother’s son of them; unintelligent, ignorant, myopic, incapable of psychical development, but prodigiously sagacious and prehensile. If I had been asked for a definition at that time, measuring by the standards of civilised man,—the standards set by a Plato, a Dante, a Marcus Aurelius,—I should have put it that the mass-man is a digestive and reproductive mechanism, gifted with a certain low sagacity employable upon anything which bears upon the conduct of those two functions. If he is overgifted with this sagacity and has a measure of luck, he becomes a rich mass-man; if not, he becomes a poor mass-man; but in either case he remains a mass-man.

None of the reformers proposed reducing the State’s power to distribute economic advantage; on the contrary, every one of their principal measures tended to increase it. Therefore, when all came to all, I could not see that these measures ultimately contemplated anything more than prying the State’s machinery out of the rich mass-man’s control, and turning it over to the poor mass-man. I could imagine no benefit accruing to society from that. The control would again be taken over by the most sagacious among the poor mass-men, they would become rich, the same abuses, jealousies and dissatisfactions would recur, the same contest would again take place, with the same result. I was immensely interested in reading John Adams’s clear forecast of the scrimmage I was witnessing, and his prophecy that “the struggle will end only in a change of impostors.” One afternoon in 1900 I listened while a young Jewish Socialist was breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the rich. I had asked him just what it was that he proposed to do when he had got them all properly killed off. “We have been oppressed,” he said, “and now we shall oppress.” I thought he put the matter very well, for I could see no other prospect.

When one brushed aside the reformers’ verbiage, the situation was perfectly clear. I was not witnessing a “revolt of the masses” against an alien power; nor yet a war between labour and capital; nor yet a struggle to break up big business; nor yet an attempt to abolish capitalism. What I was looking at was simply a tussle between two groups of mass-men, one large and poor, the other small and rich, and as judged by the standards of a civilised society, neither of them any more meritorious or promising than the other. The object of the tussle was the material gains accruing from control of the State’s machinery. It is easier to seize wealth than to produce it; and as long as the State makes the seizure of wealth a matter of legalised privilege, so long will the squabble for that privilege go on. As John Adams had so correctly foreseen, the few more sagacious mass-men will be continually trying to outwit the many who are less sagacious, and the many will in turn be trying to overpower the few by sheer force of numbers.

So I was sceptical about the reformers’ projects, and the more they were trumpeted as “democratic,” the less good to society I thought they boded. Now and then I was asked to lend a hand with some of them, but I knew I should be out of place or even worse, a mere wet blanket. I knew many of their promoters, some very well; the elder Lafollette, Lincoln Steffens, Newton Baker, Joseph Fels, Frederic Howe. Some of them died in the faith of reform, while others seemed finally to slack off into a vague consciousness that something had somehow gone wrong, and that the realisation of their visions was farther off than they had thought it was. All those I knew, perhaps twenty-five or more, showed less power of detachment and reflection than I should have looked for, and very little sense of history. Their acceptance of the State as a social institution amazed me, since its anti-social character was so plainly visible, and their idea of mankind’s leading qualities and motives seemed as unrealistic as Juvenal’s observations on boars and tigers. I used to ask one after another to tell me just what reason he had for supposing that a society or an individual could be improved through political action. History was against it, observation and common sense were against it,— just what made him think he was not putting the cart before the horse? I never got an answer; they all took it as if the question had never occurred to them, as I dare say it never had. Once I said I thought that in his sense of statesmanship and his sense of history Thoreau was miles ahead of the whole tribe of reformers, and had proved it by his one saying that the State had never yet done anything to help a good cause along, except by the alacrity with which it got out of the way.

Thus I never quite understood these men, nor they me, though they were always kind, true friends. I think they regarded me as a more or less agreeable person who had been altogether born in sin and could not be expected to do much about it; and as I recall the spirit and temper of my ancestry, I wouldn’t go so far as to say they might not be right. But they were always kind, tolerant, lovable. Once when I complimented Robert Lafollette on some coup that he had brought off at the “Thyesteän banquet of clap-trap” in the Senate, he said with a rather sad expression, “Yes, but the trouble is, you don’t believe what I’m doing amounts to a damn.” It was true enough, and I was sorry; yet I was not obstinate, I had no pride of opinion, and certainly no prejudices, but quite the contrary. Aware that I was but a youngster, green as grass, trying only to get my bearings on a straight course of thought, all that moved me was the old Platonist desire to “see things as they are.” I could not, nor can I now, make out that these friends ever brought themselves to see the State as it is, or mankind as it is; and the event has abundantly proved that they did not.

There were two exceptions, hardly to be called reformers, Herbert Quick and Brand Whitlock. Quick was always, I believe, on the extreme outer fringe of the reforming party, and centrifugal force soon threw Whitlock as far out. Quick clearly saw the State as an anti-social institution; he saw that as primarily the arbiter of economic advantage and a potential instrument of exploitation, both its initial intent and function are anti-social. He was the only person I knew in that period who drew the line of distinction sharply between the idea of government, as set forth by Mr. Jefferson in the Declaration and amplified by Paine and Spencer, and the idea of the State as demonstrated in the historical researches of Gumplowicz and Franz Oppenheimer. I owe him a great deal, for our conversations helped me vastly to arrange my thought in an orderly way. One recollection of him, however, is annoying. We used to talk for a while after dinner, and then play billiards. I was no end a better player than he was, and yet the wretched man always beat me, I don’t know how. He used to say that when I took him on he played ten times better than he could, which seemed to be so. Once at the Cosmos Club in Washington I vowed I would stick at him until I beat him, if it took a week. We did play nearly all night, but he always managed to nose me out, and I finally quit in disgust. I get hot all through whenever I think of it.

Whitlock had made a tentative start on the path of reform in the days of Altgeld, Eugene Debs, Pingree, Golden Rule Jones. His education and early influences had done little to help him towards a quick and accurate judgement on the worth of their endeavours, but having a reflective mind and a true Platonist instinct towards “the reason of the thing,” he soon found his bearings. The war confirmed his worst suspicions; he had felt some “vague forebodings of a Dusk of the Nations,” but had not expected this particular prelude to calamity to come on so soon. He was greatly depressed. I remember well one forlorn grey Sunday afternoon in the winter of 1914 when he and I were walking on the deserted outer boulevards of Brussels. Suddenly he stopped and faced me with the question, “Have you any hope at all of the human race?” I replied cannily, “As much as I ever had, no less, no more.” As we walked on, I told him I was like the darky nurse-girl who had never seen a railway-train until she and her mistress boarded one that presently went into a tremendous smash-up. When her mistress pulled herself together, she looked around for the girl, and saw her sitting where she had evidently been thrown, some fifty feet from the track, unhurt and composedly crooning to the baby in her arms. “Weren’t you terribly frightened?” her mistress asked. “No, ma’am,” the girl replied, “I thought it done had to stop dat way.” Whitlock smiled a little mournfully, and said he wished he might have had half that darky’s foresight.

II

Herbert Spencer’s essays, published in 1884, on The New Toryism and The Coming Slavery left me with an extremely bad impression of British Liberalism. Since 1860, Liberals had been foremost in loading up the statute-book with one coercive measure of “social legislation” after another in hot succession, each of which had the effect of diminishing social power and increasing State power. In so doing, the Liberals were manifestly going dead against their traditional principles. They had abandoned the principle of voluntary social coöperation, and embraced the old-line Tory principle of enforced coöperation. Not only so, but they had transformed themselves into a band of political Frankensteins. By busily cutting down the liberty of the individual piecemeal, and extending the scope of the State’s coercive control, their work was reaching the point where a few easy finishing-touches would reduce the individual to a condition of complete State-servitude; thus bringing forth the monster of collectivism, ravenous and rampant.

When I saw what American Liberals (for so they called themselves) were doing in this line,—chiefly in their support of the movement for an income-tax and an inheritance-tax,—I got up a distaste for Liberals which soon ripened into horror. For years I have “sweat with agony” at the sight of a Liberal, as Commodore Trunnion did at the sight of an attorney. I had rather encounter rattlesnakes,—far rather,—for the rattlesnake is a gentlemanly fellow who can be relied on to do the right thing, if you give him half a chance. I have had dealings with him in my time, and also with the Liberals, and I speak from knowledge.

I have respect for the old-style Tory, and could always get on with him, because I knew what he would do in a given situation, and above all, I knew what he would not do. There were some things to which he would not condescend even for the Larger Good. Once in a conversation with Chief Justice Taft, he mentioned pressure put on him while President, in behalf of something legal enough and probably ethical, but smelling of sharp practice,—”dam’ low, in any case,” as an old-school Englishman would say. I so well remember the almost childlike look of embarrassment on Mr. Taft’s face as he said, “Why, I couldn’t do that.” Speaking after the manner of men, you got a play for your money with the old-crusted Tory, as at the other end of the scale I think you would with the honest outright uncompromising radical. But one never knew what Liberals would do, and their power of self-persuasion is such that only God knows what they would not do. As casuists, they make Gury and St. Alfonso dei Liguori look like bush-leaguers. On every point of conventional morality, all the Liberals I have personally known were very trustworthy. They were great fellows for the Larger Good, but it would have to be pretty large before they would alienate your wife’s affections or steal your watch. But on any point of intellectual integrity, there is not one of them whom I would trust for ten minutes alone in a room with a red-hot stove, unless the stove were comparatively valueless.

Liberals generally,—there may have been exceptions, but I do not know who they were,—joined in the agitation for an income-tax, in utter disregard of the fact that it meant writing the principle of absolutism into the Constitution. Nor did they give a moment’s thought to the appalling social effects of an income-tax; I never once heard this aspect of the matter discussed. Liberals were also active in promoting the “democratic” movement for the popular election of senators. It certainly took no great perspicacity to see that these two measures would straightway ease our political system into collectivism as soon as some Eubulus, some mass-man overgifted with sagacity, should manoeuvre himself into popular leadership; and in the nature of things, this would not be long.

Liberals were also prominent in the fast-growing movement for women’s suffrage. I could see that in this they had logic with them; the women’s contention was valid. I never read a counter-argument that I thought was worth the paper it was printed on. If you are going to have universal suffrage, it should include women, since,—at least presumably,—women are folks, as men are. Practically, I thought it would turn out as it has done; I thought it would do no good and no harm. The only effect it could have would be to increase the preponderance of the mass-vote, and that preponderance was already so overwhelming that doubling it, or even trebling it, counted for nothing in a practical way. So, if all the mass-men were voting, I saw no reason why the mass-women should not. I was beginning to have grave doubts about universal suffrage, however. A political system which, as Dean Inge says, merely counts votes instead of weighing them, began to seem unpromising. Hence I remained inactive in the women’s-suffrage movement, regarding its comical antics as a source of diversion. Still, on occasion when I was asked for an opinion, I always declared myself in favour of it, though I was minded to hold my nose when I did so.

One reformer of the period presented himself in a double capacity. He was a very great social philosopher who had trained himself into a first-class polemist, crusader, campaigner; a strange combination, the strangest imaginable. I do not recall another instance of it. This was Henry George. I never saw him, though I might easily have done so, but his days were ending just as I was emerging from the academic shades. C. J. once spoke to me of his philosophy, saying with a nod of his wise head, “That’s the real thing.” He never mentioned it again. Undoubtedly, as I discovered later on, it was the real thing. As Robert Lafollette said to me, George’s social philosophy and his fiscal method, taken together, made a system “against which nothing rational has ever been said, or can be said.” As a social philosopher, George interested me profoundly; as a reformer and publicist, he did not interest me, though I tried hard to make the best of him in that capacity.

George and his followers carried on a tremendous countrywide campaign to force George’s fiscal method into politics. I knew many of his disciples, some of them quite well; among them were Louis F. Post, C. B. Fillebrown, Bolton Hall, Daniel Kiefer, Charles D. Williams, George Record, A. C. Pleydell. Outside the movement, or on the fringes of it, some of the ablest men in the country were “under conviction,” as the old-time Methodists used to say. Newton Baker and Whitlock were in this group; also Lawson Purdy and William Jay Gaynor, who impressed me as by far the ablest man in our public life. Few know that he might have had the Presidency instead of Wilson if he had consented; he was mayor of New York at the time. The story of the approach to him is most amusing, but it would be out of place in this narrative, like so many other amusing matters which I am always being tempted to drag in. I have often wondered what course the country would have taken after 1914 if he had been in Wilson’s place.

Socialism and one or two other variants of collectivist Statism were making considerable political progress at the time. When I met some of their proponents, as I did now and then, I would put the one question to them that I always put to George’s campaigners. Suppose by some miracle you have your system all installed, complete and perfect, it will still have to be administered,—very well, what kind of people can you get to administer it except the kind of people you’ve got? I never had an answer to that question. In a society of just men made perfect, George’s system would be administered admirably and would work like clockwork. So would Socialism. So would any other form of collectivism. In such a society “the dictatorship of the proletariat” would be a splendid success for everybody all round. The trouble is, we have no such society,—far from it. Although I was,—and am,—a firm believer in George’s philosophy and fiscal method, I decided that if progressive evolution was to make them practicable in fifty thousand years, it would have to step a great deal livelier than there was any sign of its doing.

So in the ranks of the militant single-taxers, as they were called, I knew I should make a poor soldier. Convinced that the surest way to lose that war, like all other wars, was to win it, I should be a superfluous man. Now and then I published a line or two by way of showing that I was on the side of the angels, but took no further part. To console myself for my shortcomings I pondered the example of the great social philosophers of the past who had never crusaded for their doctrines or presumed upon mankind’s capacity for receiving them; not Socrates, not Jesus, not Lao-Tze, of whom Chi-Yen had said that “he was a superior man who liked to keep in obscurity.” What wisdom! “If any man have ears to hear,” said the Santissimo Salvatore, “let him hear.” That was all there was to be expected. I admired the reformers, George in particular, for the splendid intrepidity which one admires in the leader of a forlorn hope. Yet I could not resist reminding myself of Montaigne’s great saying, that “human society goes very incompetently about healing its ills. It is so impatient under the immediate irritation which is chafing it that it thinks only of getting rid of this, careless of the cost.... Good does not necessarily ensue upon evil; another evil may ensue upon it, and a worse one.”

Taking stock of my disorderly array of political and social ideas, I saw that I was becoming a poor sort of republican. As far as the individual was concerned, all State systems seemed to tend about equally towards the same end of State-slavery. In rich countries, as Mr. Jefferson had noticed, they reached that end a little faster than in poor countries, but I could make out no other difference. I was much impressed by France’s remarkable experience; it seemed to me one of the most exhibitory experiences in history, though I did not find any one who was taking it as such. In a single century after 1789, France had tried every known kind of State-system, some two or three times over; three republics, a couple of monarchies, two empires, now and then a dictatorship, a directory, a commune—every system one could think of. Each shift brought about the same consequences to the individual, and they all alike bore testimony to the truth of Paine’s saying, that “the trade of governing has always been a monopoly of the most ignorant and the most vicious of mankind.” I often wondered why this sequence of systems in France had not given rise to more speculation about the actual net value of any one political system over another. If it had given rise to any, I did not hear of it.

I began to think there was a good deal in William Penn’s observation that “when all is said, there is hardly any frame of government so ill designed by its first founders that in good hands it would not do well enough; and story [i.e., history] tells us the best, in ill ones, can do nothing that is great or good.” The triumph of republicanism was supposed to be a tremendous achievement, yet the republican State, or “democratic,” as Americans had begun to call it, (perhaps Andrew Carnegie set the fashion with his Icarian flight of genius in Triumphant Democracy) was giving no better account of itself than the autocratic or monarchical State had given. Like theirs, its coercive incursions upon the individual, its progressive confiscations of social power, were limited only by close calculation of what the traffic would bear. Like theirs, its controlling mass-men never lost a chance at what James Madison contemptuously called “the old trick of turning every contingency into a resource for accumulating force in the government.” Looking at it from the individual’s point of view, I could not see that the republican system had much to commend it over any other. In theory, the republican State existed for man; in practice, man existed for the republican State.

While I was wondering whether progressive evolution had as yet brought mankind within gun-range of a practicable republican system, I ran across Horace Vernet’s witty observation made when the revolution of 1848 had ousted the July Monarchy and brought in the Second Republic. “A la bonne heure” he cried gaily, “give me a republic such as we understand it in France, all rulers, all natural-born kings, gods in mortals’ disguise who dance to the piping of the devil. There have been two such since I was born; there may be another half-dozen like them within the next two centuries, because before you can have an ideal republic you must have ideal republicans, and nature can’t afford to fool away her most precious gifts on a pack of jack-leg lawyers and hobnail-booted riffraff. She condescends to make an ideal tyrant now and then, but she will never make a nation of ideal republicans. You might as well ask her to make a nation of Raphaels, Michelangelos, Shakespeares or Molières.”

There it was, precisely. I could see how “democracy” might do very well in a society of saints and sages led by an Alfred or an Antoninus Pius. Short of that, I was unable to see how it could come to anything but an ochlocracy of mass-men led by a sagacious knave. The collective capacity for bringing forth any other outcome seemed simply not there. To my eyes the incident of Aristides and the Athenian mass-man was perfectly exhibitory of “democracy” in practice. Socrates could not have got votes enough out of the Athenian mass-men to be worth counting, but Eubulus easily could, and did, wangle enough to keep himself in office as long as the corrupt fabric of the Athenian State held together. As against a Jesus, the historic choice of the mass-man goes regularly to some Barabbas.

III

I have said that my ideas about all these matters were disorderly, fragmentary, for so they were. In trying to make a very long story short, I must have given the impression of having put in a great deal more serious sustained work on forming them than was actually the case. All I did in that way was quite casual and planless. For one thing, I was having too good a time, and had too many pleasanter trivialities to attend to. What actually happened was that some turn in public affairs would attract my notice, and I would “see it as it was,” more or less by a kind of reflex;—the Platonist habit of looking for “the reason of the thing” had become almost automatic. Often I let it go at that, and thought no more about it. Sometimes I would be reminded of something apposite which I had read, and I would look that up. Sometimes I got a suggestion that would set me at reading something which was new to me. Sometimes I would follow through to a provisional generalisation, but usually not. In these ways the raw material of ideas gradually got itself together in rough shapes, like a scattered mess of fagots, which I seldom took the trouble to put in order.

In such circumstances, one of the most animating experiences one can have is to come suddenly on something which acts as a binder, putting an armful of these fagots together and tying them in a neat, tight, orderly bundle. One is exhilarated beyond measure at seeing how big the bundle is, how beautifully the fagots are matched and fitted,—and all so unexpectedly. Sometimes it is a chance word or two in a book which does this, sometimes a chance word or two which one hears or overhears. Several times in the course of my life this has happened to me, and twice it has happened with such profound effect as to influence the whole course of my thought. In the one instance, this effect was due to a casual sentence dropped by a friend at a lunch-table; in the other, it was due to an article in a popular magazine which I had idly leafed over while waiting for something somewhere, I have forgotten what or where. I might as soon have expected to find a Koh-i-noor in a limestone-quarry as an article of that character in that publication.

The first incident was this: I was at lunch in the Uptown Club of New York with an old friend, Edward Epstean, a retired man of affairs. I do not remember what subject was under discussion at the moment; but whatever it was, it led to Mr. Epstean’s shaking a forefinger at me, and saying with great emphasis, “I tell you, if self-preservation is the first law of human conduct, exploitation is the second.”

This remark instantly touched off a tremendous flashlight in my mind. I saw the generalisation which had been staring me in the face for years without my having sense enough to recognise and identify it. Spencer and Henry George had familiarised me with the formula that man tends always to satisfy his needs and desires with the least possible exertion; but they had given me no idea of its immense scope, its almost illimitable range of action. If this formula were sound, as unquestionably it is, then certainly exploitation would be an inescapable corollary, because the easiest way to satisfy one’s needs and desires is by exploitation. Indeed, if one wished to split hairs, one might say that exploitation is the first law of conduct, since even in self-preservation one tends always to take the easiest way; but the question of precedence is a small matter.

In an essay which I published some time ago, having occasion to refer to this formula, I gave it the name of Epstean’s law, which by every precedent I think it should have. In their observations on the phenomena of gravitation, Huyghens and Kepler anticipated Newton closely. It was left for Newton to show the universal scope of an extremely simple formula, already well understood in limine, and hence this formula is known as Newton’s law. As a phenomenon of finance, it had long been observed that “bad money drives out good,” but Sir Thomas Gresham reduced these observations to order under a formula as simple as Newton’s, and this formula is known as Gresham’s law. So for an analogous service, more important than Gresham’s and, as far as this planet is concerned, as comprehensive as Newton’s, I thought that the formula, Man tends always to satisfy his needs and desires with the least possible exertion, should bear the name of Epstean’s law.

I was indescribably fortunate in getting, as early as I did, a clear sense of the bearing which three great laws of the type known as “natural” have on human conduct. I say fortunate, for it was by good fortune alone, and not my own deserving, that I got this sense. By luck I stumbled on the discovery that Epstean’s law, Gresham’s law, and the law of diminishing returns operate as inexorably in the realm of culture; of politics; of social organisation, religious and secular; as they do in the realm of economics. This understanding enabled me at once to get the hang of many matters which far better men than I have found hopelessly puzzling, and to answer questions for which otherwise I could have found no answer.

For example, I have already shown in these pages how the current value of literature is determined by the worst type of literature in circulation—Gresham’s law. Is not the value of education determined in the same way? I think there can be no doubt of it. Why did the projects of the reformers fail? Why did George’s air-tight proposals fall by the wayside? What brought ruin and desolation in the wake of the “social legislation” championed by the recreant Liberals? Why was it impossible to improve society or the individual through political action? Simply because all such well-meant enterprises ran hard aground on Epstean’s law. Something like republicanism or “democracy” will work after a fashion in a village or even a township, where everybody knows everybody and keeps an eye on what goes on. Why not, then, in a county, a state, a nation? Simply because the law of diminishing returns is against it. Will political nationalism, as we understand it, ever be made satisfactory or permanently practicable? Not as long as Epstean’s law and the law of diminishing returns remain in force, for no one yet has ciphered out a way to beat them.

Once in the early nineteen-twenties some influential Russian friends who knew I had seen Russia to the best advantage under the old régime, quite pressed me to go there again and see what the new government was doing. They would make my way easy, get me every facility, introduce me to everybody, and so on. I vamped up some sort of excuse, and declined. My notion was that any one who knew the course of our republic’s political history, and knew the incidence of the laws which turned us into that course and kept us to it, had no need to go to Russia to see the same laws in operation there. I may say that subsequent events in Russia have given me no reason to change my mind or regret my decision.

A week or so ago I spent the best part of a day with an extremely clever, interesting and delightful man who said he had put in two years of work on a plan for a political redistribution of power and territory after the present war. He described his plan in full detail; it took him about three hours. At each successive point he asked if I agreed; I said I did ex animo. When he ended, I told him I could find no flaw in his plan; it was complete, perfect, unassailable, as far as it went. “There is only one more little matter,” I added. “If you can find some way to suspend the operation of Epstean’s law, the whole thing is in your hands, and your plan will give us a magnificent new world. I hope you won’t ask me how to do that, however, for truly I don’t know.”

With the exception of John Adams, who was the most profound student of government that this country ever produced, Chief Justice Jay always seemed to me the soundest and most far-sighted statesman of his time. Ten years after the Constitution was drafted, he wrote this (the italics are his):

I do not expect that mankind will, before the millennium, be what they ought to be; and therefore, in my opinion, every political theory which does not regard them as being what they are, will prove abortive.

IV

All this upset me frightfully. In my view of man’s place in nature I was still a good disciple of Mr. Jefferson. I still believed that the masses of mankind are indefinitely improvable. Yet all the time I could see clearly that this view presented difficulties with which I could do nothing. How was it, for example, that I could find no shred of respectable evidence that psychically the masses of mankind had budged a single peg in six thousand years? Again, what about the enormous psychical “spread” between Socrates, Confucius, Marcus Aurelius, on the one hand, and on the other hand the Akka, the Australian bushman? This spread was prodigiously, almost infinitely, greater than the spread between the Akka and the anthropoid. What about those borderline forms whose classification either as Homo sapiens or as anthropoids is debatable? I still stuck to my view more or less mechanically, but I could not help thinking that progressive evolution had the devil’s own job on its hands to straighten up matters like these, even granting its postulate of indefinite time.

What was one to do? When somebody comes along with a theory which accounts for everything otherwise unaccountable and answers all questions otherwise unanswerable, the chances are that he has the right pig by the ear. I held to my Jeffersonian doctrine for a long time, meanwhile trying my best to pick holes in Mr. Cram’s theory, but with no success. I even published two essays, a year or so apart, one in Harper’s and the other in the Atlantic, telling my troubles to the anthropologists and asking for help, but I had no answer. This seemed strange, for Dr. Carrel was just then bringing out his remarkable book called Man, the Unknown, and Mr. Hooton was making the welkin ring with demands for a closer study of the animal man. Left in the lurch as I was, I ended by striking my colours as gracefully as possible, parted company with the theologians, with Mr. Jefferson, with Price, Priestley, Condorcet, Rousseau, Mme. de Staël, and went over to the opposition with head unbowed and withers still unwrung.

My change of philosophical base had one curious and wholly unforeseen effect, though it followed logically enough. Since then I have found myself quite unable either to hate anybody or to lose patience with anybody; whereas up to that time I had always been a pretty doughty hater, and none too patient with people. So my change of base certainly brought me into a much more philosophical temper, and I suppose I might even say it brought me nearer to some sort of ramshackle Christian spirit. One can hate human beings, at least I could,—I hated a lot of them when that is what I thought they were,—but one can’t hate sub-human creatures or be contemptuous of them, wish them ill, regard them unkindly. If an animal is treacherous, you avoid him but can’t hate him, for that is the way he is. If cattle tramp down your garden, you drive them away but can’t hate them, because you know they are acting up to the measure of their psychical capacity. If the mass-men of the forty-two photographs were not human beings, you couldn’t hate them for not behaving like human beings. The mass-men who are princes, presidents, politicians, legislators, can no more transcend their psychical capacities than any wolf, fox or polecat in the land. How, then, is one to hate them, notwithstanding the appalling evil that they do?

My acceptance of Mr. Cram’s theory also caused me for the first time really to like people-at-large. Before that I had frankly disliked people in the mass, though never unkindly. I was often amused by their doings, often interested, but with no feeling of affection. Now I find myself liking them, sometimes to a degree which I should have thought impossible. Flaubert found that le seul moyen de rester tranquille dans son assiette, c’est de regarder le genre humain comme une vaste association de crétins et de canailles. Unquestionably so; they are all of that. But when one gets it firmly fixed in one’s head that they are living up to the measure of their own capacities and can not by any conjuration increase those capacities to the point of marking themselves as human beings, one comes at once to like them. At least, to my great surprise, I found myself doing so.

One has great affection for one’s dogs, even when one sees them revelling in tastes and smells which to us are unspeakably odious. That is the way dogs are, one does not try to change their peculiar penchant, one knows the attempt would be futile, yet one likes them. The other day I saw a group of handsomely-dressed, well-kept women, most of them I think older than I am, in a huddle over a loathsome spread of “news from the front.” At the moment of my glancing at them they were gloating with expressions of keen delight over some lurid account of the “huge piles of enemy dead” left by some dust-up in Russia. I did not dislike them, indeed I dare say I should have found the bloodthirsty old harpies quite likable if I had known them. That is the way they were, and they were living up to the best they knew. I thought of the women of Paris in October, 1789, I thought of Deborah and Jael, and of Fulvia driving her hairpin through the dead Cicero’s tongue. I might have found them quite likable creatures if I had once for all consciously accepted them for what they were.

Of course, what the soldier said isn’t evidence. No amount of sentiment goes any way at all in establishing Mr. Cram’s theory of man’s place in nature. Nevertheless, the fact does remain that on any other theory than his it is impossible for a reflective mind to regard our species otherwise than with disgust and loathing and contempt.

1 True at the time. As will be seen hereafter, I have since given up the environmentalist postulate that the masses of mankind are indefinitely improvable. This does not invalidate George’s reasoning for me, however, for his method would enable them, if they cared to do so, to improve themselves up to the limit of their psychical capacity, whatever that may be; which now they are unable to do.

2 Published by William Morrow and Co., New York, 1936.

3 Published by the Marshall Jones Co., Boston.

4 With a poet’s insight, the late Don Marquis had a glimpse of this theory. In his delightful Chapters For the Orthodox, he suggests as an analogy that in the days of Pleiohippus there may have been now and then a horse or two wandering around, regarded with distrust and disfavour by the sub-equine masses. The late Dr. S. D. McConnell, in his Immortability also brushed elbows with Mr. Cram’s theory, but did not work it out in full.

• 1I did not follow George’s campaign attentively, and was neither astonished nor disappointed when it came to nothing. George’s philosophy was the philosophy of human freedom. Like Mr. Jefferson, Condorcet, Rousseau, and the believers in progressive evolution, he believed that all mankind are indefinitely improvable, and that the freer they are, the more they will improve. He saw also that they can never become politically or socially free until they have become economically free, but if they gained economic freedom, the other freedoms would follow automatically; and he offered his fiscal method as the most natural, simple, and effective means of securing them in economic freedom. All this appeared to me sound enough, but the attempt to realise it through political action seemed the acme of absurdity. The only result one could expect was that the philosophy would be utterly lost sight of, and the method utterly discredited; and precisely this was the result.
• 2But a theory which regards men as being what they are must surely take into account the three laws which so largely determine their thought and conduct. No political theory does this. Beyond any peradventure it seemed to me that the theory of republicanism which overspread Western society after 1789 was about as far away from the Chief Justice’s sensible requirement as it is possible to get. Hence I saw nothing for it but that a republican society must follow the historic pattern of gradual rise to a fairly high level of power and prestige, and then a rather sudden lapse into dissolution and displacement in favour of some other society which in turn would follow the same pattern. And so it was that at the age of thirty-five or so I dismissed all interest in public affairs, and have regarded them ever since as a mere spectacle, mostly a comedy, rather squalid, rather hackneyed, whereof I already knew the plot from beginning to end. I have written a little about them now and then, but from the standpoint only of a critical spectator, and as far as possible from any controversial or propagandist intent. Seven years ago I gathered up the substance of what I had to say, and published it under the title, Our Enemy, the State. As for the predictions which I made at the end of this volume, I did not expect to live long enough to see them realised. In the short space of seven years, however, they all came true except the final one which seems even now to be in course of realisation.
• 3My adventure with the magazine-article was this: The article in question was an essay by the eminent architect Ralph Adams Cram, whose professional reputation is so great that it has unfortunately obscured his merits as a philosopher and man of letters. The essay’s title, Why We Do Not Behave Like Human Beings, attracted me at once. This was just what had mystified me all my life; it was the one thing above all others that I wanted to know. I had read a good many theological disquisitions on the rationâle of human conduct, and had found them dissatisfying. If Mr. Cram had anything better to offer, if he could throw any light on that egregious problem, he was distinctly the man I wanted to see. The essay has been reprinted in his excellent book called Convictions and Controversies, which deserves the highest recommendation to careful readers.
• 4Mr. Cram’s thesis is that we do not behave like human beings because the great majority of us, the masses of mankind, are not human beings. We have all along assumed that the zoölogical classification of man is also a competent psychical classification; that all creatures having the physical attributes which put them in the category of Homo sapiens also have the psychical attributes which put them in the category of human beings; and this, Mr. Cram says, is wholly unwarranted and an error of the first magnitude. Consequently we have all along been putting expectations upon the masses of Homo sapiens which they are utterly incapable of meeting. We have accepted them as psychically-human, dealt with them on that assumption, and expected a corresponding psychical reaction, when actually nothing of the sort is possible. They are merely the sub-human raw material out of which the occasional human being is produced by an evolutionary process as yet unexplained, but no doubt catastrophic in character, certainly not progressive. Hence, inasmuch as they are the raw material of humanity, they are inestimably precious.