Memoirs of a Superfluous Man

“Niebuhr was right,” said Goethe, “when he saw a barbarous age coming. It is already here, we are in it, for in what does barbarism consist, if not in the failure to appreciate what is excellent?”

—ECKERMANN, 1831.

Great things may be accomplished in our days; great discoveries, for example, great enterprises; but these do not give greatness to our epoch. Greatness makes itself appear notably by its point of departure, by its flexibility, by its thought.

—SAINTE-BEUVE.

In one institution where I spent a full year and more, I formed a close friendship with four fellow-students; and this association was the means of my getting my first clear view of the society in which my little academic world was encysted. It also gave me a lively interest in finding out what the actual collective character of that society was, how it got that character, and what reasonable expectations might be put upon a society which bore that character. We five always ended our evenings, after our routine of work was done, in a sort of cénacle, a forgathering for a couple of hours of philosophical discussion helped out by Bass’s ale. One of our number, C. J., was the most nearly complete person I have ever seen. He had great ability; like Posidonius, according to Strabo, he was τῶν καθ’ ἡμãς φιλοσὄφων πολυμαθέστατος combining sound scholarship with a vast deal of general knowledge and information. His ability and attainments were balanced by a splendid integrity, kindness, equanimity and unfailing humour. His tastes were simple in the extreme, and the gentle sincerity of his manner made his conversation most attractive. As Bishop Burnet said of Lord Rochester, “he loved to talk and write of speculative matters, and did it with so fine a thread that even those who hated the subjects that his fancy ran upon, yet could not but be charmed with his way of treating them.” His interests and accomplishments and mine were complementary. He had gone far in ways which I had not even entered upon; for example, he not only knew modern history, especially American history, quite well, but he also bent all the powers of his mind towards understanding it, towards making interpretations of it which were thoroughgoing, competent, reasonable. I, on the other hand, had been well drilled to an understanding of ancient peoples and their collective doings, and when he would expound this-or-that modern incident or tendency in public life, I could match it with parallels, elucidations, interpretations, drawn from earlier sources. We met at what was, for me, precisely the right time; my debt to him is incalculable. After a very few years of unambitious, undemanding, innocent life, he suddenly died, carried off by some unsuspected affection of the heart. His end was strange and shocking, for he was a man of uncommonly strong physique, a great fisherman, hunter, sailor, and never known to be out of health. The world has not seemed quite the same to me since his death; I have not looked upon his like again.

II

When in my mid-twenties my eyes first opened on the American scene, I surveyed it with the naïve astonishment of Rip van Winkle. One would hardly believe that a boy could grow up to manhood in such complete unconsciousness of the social and political movements going on around him. My only experience of politics had been with the unpleasant doings generated in the Wigwam, when we lived in Brooklyn, which now seemed long ago; they had prompted a few childish questions, and then their memory had become overlaid. Since then I had heard no mention of politics; nor do I think I was exceptional in this. My notion is that the honest and decent among our elders had pretty generally thrown over any concern with public affairs, and given them up as a hopeless bad job. They had lived through the Civil War, seen the unconscionable knaveries practiced on all sides during the post-war period, frauds on a scale so colossal that they amazed a world which had presumably become pretty well used to such exhibitions of business enterprise. They had seen the fraudful looting of the public domain, the abject villainies of “reconstruction,” the Crédit Mobilier, the star-route frauds, the wholesale raiding and looting of railway-properties, the operations of the South Improvement Company, and so on. Not only had they seen this alliance of business with politics in the general government, but they had seen it also as busily at work in state and local governments throughout the country; they had watched the Tweed Ring making hay in New York City and Albany, and the Pennsylvania Railway’s field-hands diligently harvesting in Harrisburg. As I said, my belief is that seeing no chance of any practicable improvement, they had simply lost interest, and their children had grown up, more or less as I had, in ignorance of politics; or when not quite so ignorant as I, regarding politics as something remote, disreputable and infamous, like slave-trading or brothel-keeping. There is much to be said for our elders’ attitude, if I am right in supposing that such was their attitude; their instinct was sound, though their interpretation of that instinct was doubtless uninformed and superficial. The view communicated to their children was also correct in principle, as I came to learn much later; at this time I noticed only that such was pretty generally their view. In our own little coterie of graduate students, for example, three were probably as ignorant of public affairs as I, and certainly quite as incurious. C. J., with his bent for philosophy, his passion for “the reason of the thing,” was the one exception.

My first observations put me into the way of working backward through American political history instead of forward; and from that to working through the history of other modern nations in the same way. I am not sure but that for the nonprofessional person, the amateur of history, it is a good procedure. Observing some turn in public affairs which is before one’s eyes, then going back through accounts of antecedent turns apparently related, reasoning out one’s inferences, conclusions and generalisations as one goes along,—perhaps in this way one gets the clearest perception of history’s force and continuity. On the other hand, perhaps this way came easiest to me because all the history I knew was ancient history, and many commonplace incidents in modern life would suggest some similar happening in the ancient world. Today, for example, I never think of the tremendous fires we used to have in our northern lumber-town without recalling Plutarch’s most amusing account of the way Marcus Crassus founded his fortune. But whether the habit I gravitated into be good or bad, there it was, and there it still is.

In the period I speak of, the Spanish War and its consequences in the Caribbean, the mid-Pacific and the Far East were before the public. I was looking at our first full-blown adventure in overseas imperialism, and a most amazing and repulsive sight it was. To my unaccustomed eyes the war itself seemed a dastardly affair, and the attendant hypocrisies indulged in by those who were promoting it, from the President down, seemed utterly contemptible. I could make nothing of the seizure of the Philippines but an unprovoked act of particularly brutal highwaymanry. Years afterward, during our next military adventure, when I saw Americans in hysterics of pious horror over “enemy atrocities,” I marvelled at the convenience of a memory which had so quickly granted oblivion to Hell-roaring Jake Smith and the “water-cure.” The great doctrine of Manifest Destiny reappeared, freshened up by a well-earned rest from hard service in the decade 1840-1850. Now it was our manifest destiny not only to exercise a hegemony over the whole hemisphere, but also to raid and steal whatever desirable possessions we could wrest with impunity from poor and weak peoples anywhere in the world.

Newspapers especially, and popular literature generally, served up this doctrine with a snuffy sanctimony, wholly Kiplingese, which made a most disagreeable impression on me. We were out to take up the white man’s burden in a conspicuously large and exemplary way; we would free the oppressed, lift up the fallen, and distribute the blessings of a higher civilisation with a prodigal hand. Mark Twain wrote a scorching satire on these loathsome pretensions, addressing it To the Person Sitting in Darkness; but his voice, like that of Howells and those of many other distinguished men who were outraged by the whole disgraceful performance, was lost in the clamour of a synthetic patriotism. In the country’s journalism, led by Hearst and Pulitzer, I found a most plausible reason why I had never seen a newspaper in my parents’ home. Like their successors today, the papers of that period had undergone changes in style and manner from those which Dickens described in Martin Chuzzlewit, but none in essential character; they were very filthy. I often thought of Sir Henry Wotton, back in the sixteenth century, saying that “an ambassador is a man of virtue sent to lie abroad for his country; a news-writer is a man without virtue who lies at home for himself.” For many years I wondered how people could be got to serve the trade of journalism, but never really understood it until some eighteen or twenty years ago I read Count Tolstoy’s analysis of the prostitute Máslova’s view of her trade, in the novel called Resurrection. I have known a few journalists, not many, and have regarded their attitude attentively, finding them curiously like other folk in general, just as Máslova was astonishingly like other women; and their view of their execrable profession was precisely like Máslova’s view of hers.

My observation of the Spanish War and the rape of the Philippines led me to consider the character of our minor adventures in Samoa and Hawaii; and there I found the same record of chicanery and fraud, implemented by violence. In both instances the United States had acquired possession through revolutions made to order by its official agents. Then I went on to take stock of our continental adventures in the same line. I knew what imperialism meant in former times, what its springs of action were, and what its customary modes of procedure were. My classical studies had thoroughly acquainted me with these phenomena of the old days around the Mediterranean, and I had as yet seen nothing to suggest any essential difference between modern imperialism and the imperialism which I had studied and understood. Thus I was able to read between the lines of standard American historical writing, even such as was dished up for the young in our educational institutions. It was clear to me that our acquisition of Texas was a matter of sheer brigandage, and that force and fraud played approximately equal parts in our acquisition of California. I carried on my survey of American imperialism through the Mexican War, our systematic extermination of the Indians, and so on back into the colonial period; and I emerged with the conviction that at least on this one item of imperialism, our political history from first to last was utterly disgraceful.

The last decade of the century gave one an extraordinary opportunity for studying national imperialist activities in all parts of the world. In 1895 Japan gathered in tremendous profits from a raid on China; in the following year Italy came off second best in an attempt to seize Abyssinia. While the United States was consolidating its territorial gains in the Philippines, England was taking over South Africa, the Sudan, and was also acquiring highwayman’s rights of various kinds in China, as Russia, France and Germany were likewise doing. No such enormous burst of imperialist energy had ever before been set off in so many divergent directions at once; but, as far as I could see, the only thing that differentiated it was its volume. Other than that it showed me nothing new or strange. I could discern no feature of the imperialism of London or Paris, Berlin or Tokyo, at the end of the nineteenth century, which I could not find exactly reproduced in miniature in that of Corinth in the fifth century B.C., or for that matter, in the imperialism of the great empire-builder Sargon’s Akkad, in the thirty-seventh century B.C. It was mainly this unvarying persistence of pattern that gave me such keen interest in studying the phenomena of latter-day imperialism. Here were alliances made and repudiated, federations formed and dissolved, all on precisely the same basis of Realpolitik which underlay the Delian League or the Peloponnesian League of the sixth century B.C. or the almost prehistoric coalescence of wild shepherd raiders in Egypt. Moreover, it seemed to me that any one who understood the collisions of imperialist interest which took place between Rome and Carthage twenty-three centuries ago could have no trouble about foreseeing those which were being generated by identical conditions in Africa and the Far East. I soon came to see that all such collisions are reducible to their lowest terms under one and the same formula, the formula of Count Tolstoy’s peasant-proprietor Yashvin: “He is after my shirt, and I am after his shirt.” Stripping off the sleazy pretexts knaved up by what Ernest Renan so well calls la bassesse de l’homme intéressé,—pretexts of religion, morality, humanity, civilisation, democracy, or what-not,—stripping these off, I have examined the actual ground of a great many such collisions of interest, in the hope of some day finding one which Yashvin’s formula would not fit as neatly as if made to order; but I have as yet found none.

The foreign policy of McKinley and Secretary Hay was the means of my making some instructive observations on statesmanship. I had already got it through my head that all sound political practice is Realpolitik. Ancient practice attested this without exception,—I was sure of that,—and modern practice, as far as I had gone with its history, bore witness to the same effect. This being so, it seemed to follow that the two luxuries which a good statesman must rigorously deny himself during business hours are conscience and sentiment; and the incident of the Philippines impressed this on me with peculiar force.

Our seizure of the Philippines did not by any means command unanimous approval in America. Certain special interests, with no eye for anything beyond a prospect of immediate money, were in favour of it; and, as always, the medley of ignorance and prejudice which goes by the name of public sentiment was all for keeping the spoils of war. I observed with satisfaction, however, that wiser minds were looking below the surface of things and perceiving that in the long run the adventure, with its attendant commitments, was likely to cost a great deal more than it could ever possibly come to. They thought that as far as American participation was concerned, Mr. Chamberlain’s Anglo-Saxon alliance was nothing but an eleemosynary receivership in bankruptcy for British imperialism; and moreover, as a matter of settled British policy, it was meant to be just that. They believed, therefore, that Mr. Hay’s statesmanship was almost treasonably bad, and they made no bones of saying so.

I could not be quite sure of that. I was sure that the outcome would be ruinously bad, but whether as the result of bad statesmanship or a bad gamble, I was not sure. In the matter of alliances, a good statesman will think twice about leaving a bone for a shadow. As a diplomatist, Mr. Hay was a rank amateur, easily impressible, and during his year of ambassadorship in London, no doubt the official set had put its best foot forward. He may therefore have plumped a gamble on the chance of British imperialism having a longer lease of life than it actually had. One hardly sees how this could be, for there were plenty among the best unofficial minds in England who could have set him straight. Aside from that, moreover, the historical pattern invariably traced by the rise and decline of national imperialisms would have been enough in itself to suggest serious doubt. A Metternich would not have risked a brass farthing on any such gamble, nor yet would a Bismarck, a Cavour, or a Leo XIII; but Mr. Hay was no Metternich.

I took it as axiomatic that when a good statesman,—a sound Realpolitiker who kept his conscience and his sentiment securely locked up in the safe until the day’s work was done,— when he confronted a forced choice between two rival imperialisms he would make terms with the one which was on its way in rather than with the one which was on its way out. In 1898 it had looked for some time as if England’s was certainly going out and Germany’s quite possibly, but as yet by no means certainly, coming in. Good statesmanship on Mr. Hay’s part therefore, it seemed to me, would have handsomely accepted Spain’s amends, which were ample and sincere, abstained from war, and let the Anglo-German rivalry mull along for another ten years or so until it became more clear which way the imperialist cat would jump. A Jefferson or a John Adams would instantly have reminded Mr. Hay of Prince Kutusov’s maxim, Dans le doute, abstiens-toi; but Mr. McKinley was no Jefferson. As for the other energetic young imperialism on the Pacific, the situation was still more unclear. No one thought much about Japan, notwithstanding its foray in China in 1895; it attracted little attention until nine years later when it gave so startling an account of itself in the Russo-Japanese war of 1904; and even then it was regarded as weak enough to be rather easily manageable in a diplomatic way. In the Far East as well as on the Continent, therefore, another ten years of salutary self-imposed isolation would have enabled American statesmanship to see its way more clearly and to far better purpose.

But whether Mr. Hay botched his statesmanship through a precipitate and unwarranted commitment, or merely made an unfortunate gamble through being led up the garden by those whom he termed “our English friends,”—and either view is admissible,—the consequences were the same. If the Philippine Islands were made of gold sown broadcast with diamonds, our seizure of them could never meet its cost, whether that cost be measured in terms of blood or of money or of civilisation, let alone of all three together.

So ended my first lesson in modern imperialist statecraft. It was an invaluable aid in constructing the criteria which I was ever afterwards to apply to the conduct of public affairs in general. Yet it was a disappointment, in that it represented no essential advance whatever on what I already knew. Reincarnate any first-class Realpolitiker of the ancient world, from 3800 B.C. to 1500 A.D., put him in charge of the foreign office in any modern imperialist capital, and he would have hard work to convince himself that he was not still doing business at the old stand.

III

A strange spirit of uneasiness and depression was abroad in the Western world at the turn of the century. Apparently it affected all peoples and classes alike, though not all in the same way. Three months after I had left college with my bachelor’s degree, and had gone forth into the outer world looking for what I might find there, I read a remarkable work called Degeneration, written by the able Hungarian Jew, Max Nordau. In it he described this contemporary spirit as “a mixture of febrile restlessness and defeatist discouragement, of fear for the future and sulking resignation. The prevalent sense is one of impending destruction and extinction.... In our time the more highly-developed minds have been visited with vague forebodings of a Dusk of the Nations, in which the sunlight and starlight are gradually fading, and the human race with all its institutions and achievements is dying out amidst a dying world.”

This put the spirit of the period very well, very correctly. The one description of it which is incomparable in its perfection, however, was accidental; its application was not intentional. It is found in the dream of Aratov, in Clara Militch, Tourgueniev’s last and greatest work:

He dreamed that he was in a rich manor-house, of which he was the owner. He had lately bought both the house and the estate attached to it. And he kept thinking, ‘It’s nice, very nice now, but evil is coming!’ Beside him moved to and fro a little tiny man, his steward; he kept laughing, bowing, and trying to show Aratov how admirably everything was arranged in his house and his estate. ‘This way, pray, this way, pray,’ he kept repeating, chuckling at every word; ‘kindly look how prosperous everything is with you! Look at the horses; what splendid horses!’ And Aratov saw a row of immense horses. They were standing in their stalls with their backs to him. Their manes and tails were magnificent; but as soon as Aratov went near, the horses’ heads turned towards him, and they showed their teeth viciously. ‘It’s very nice,’ Aratov thought, ‘but evil is coming!’ ‘This way, pray, this way,’ the steward repeated again, ‘pray come into the garden; look, what fine apples you have.’ The apples certainly were fine, red and round, but as soon as Aratov looked at them they withered and fell. ‘Evil is coming!’ he thought. ‘And here is the lake,’ lisped the steward. ‘Isn’t it blue and smooth? And here’s a little boat of gold,—will you get into it?—it floats of itself.’ ‘I won’t get into it,’ thought Aratov; ‘evil is coming!’ but for all that he got into the boat. At the bottom lay huddled up a little creature like a monkey; it was holding in its paws a glass full of a dark liquid. ‘Pray don’t be uneasy,’ the steward shouted from the bank. ‘It’s of no consequence. It’s death. Good luck to you!’

For the great majority, the last decade of the century seemed to offer every encouragement to complacent hopefulness. All the institutional voices of society were blended to form the sycophantic reassurances of Aratov’s steward. Indeed, what more could one ask? Everywhere there was steady progress in all departments of science, in invention, in improving the mechanics of existence, and in the production of wealth. The ancient doctrine of progressive evolution, brought out and refurbished by Darwin,—and run into the ground by Darwin’s more adventurous disciples,—copper-riveted the comfortable confidence that progress would go on indefinitely, harmoniously, automatically. Man himself had risen from the primeval slime in a straight line to his present place in nature as Homo sapiens, thus giving earnest of his ultimate perfectibility; and now progressive evolution, helped on by science, might be trusted to bring forth in not too long a time a race of saints and sages to dwell together in a society truly perfect.

There was ground for high hopefulness, too, about the more immediate future. The business of the nineteenth century had been to establish the individual’s right to liberty and to self-expression in politics. This now, presumably, had been done. A great measure of personal liberty had been effected, and republicanism had gone far enough to call its future assured. The business of the twentieth century would be to create circumstances for improving the emancipated and enfranchised masses, and everything was ripe and ready for that. The applications of science were so many, so easy and practical and so prodigally fruitful, that the new century’s task seemed simple. With schools, colleges, universities, free for all; with libraries, technical institutes, museums, and countless other means of self-improvement standing wide open; with fatigue and monotony decreased, labour lightened, and leisure for self-improvement enlarged,—with all this, the twentieth century seemed to have the most brilliant prospects of any since the world began.

Moreover, international affairs appeared to be fairly stable, and peace was in the air. The sensational calling of a peace-conference in 1899 by Nicholas II had produced a great effect, even though the gesture was obviously not made in good faith and the conference itself came to nothing. In 1906, not to be outdone by a Muscovite autocrat, Andrew Carnegie gave ten million dollars towards forwarding the cause of peace by way of a “foundation,” and five years later a rich Bostonese publisher followed suit with another foundation of the same order. In the wake of these, innumerable international peace-societies appeared everywhere. These manifestations all fell in with the prevailing temper of the peoples in both hemispheres; they bolstered their shaky optimism and therefore were acceptable at their face value.

So, what with progressive evolution approved as de fide; with new wonders of science being disclosed and put in service every day; with the production of wealth going on at top speed; with new comforts, conveniences and pleasures steadily multiplying, and their accessibility steadily increasing; with a fair prospect of peace predominating, perhaps permanently;—with all these assets in hand, one might regard the future with complacency. The Western world’s estate was rich and prosperous. The horses’ manes and tails were magnificent, the apples were fine, red and round. “It’s nice, very nice now”; and yet,—and yet,—the vague undefined sense of impermanence and instability persisted. The civilisation wrought out by the application of these assets was felt to be somehow incomplete, dissatisfying, untrustworthy. “The more highly-developed minds” in all countries were saying plainly that the social product of these forces was utterly unworthy to be called civilisation; and they were predicting that soon, very soon, the passenger in the golden boat would hear the perfidious steward shouting, “Pray don’t be uneasy. It’s of no consequence. It’s death. Good luck to you!”

When in those days or a little later I had been considering, more or less idly and fitfully, what I should do with myself through life, what life had to give me, and what demands I should make upon it, I sometimes thought of the rich lumbermen whom I had known so well, and on the whole had rather liked. Now I was looking at the great avatars of their practical philosophy, the Carnegies, Rockefellers, Fricks, Hills, Huntingtons, of the period. I asked myself whether any amount of wealth would be worth having if,—as one most evidently must,—if one had to become just like these men in order to get it. To me, at least, decidedly it would not; I should be a superfluous man in the scuffle for riches. I observed their qualities and practices closely, considered the furniture of their minds, remarked their scale of values, and could come to no other conclusion. Well, then, could a society built to a complete realisation of every ideal of the economism they represented be permanently satisfactory to the best reason and spirit of man? Could it be called a civilised society? The thing seemed preposterous, absurd; I recalled Teufelsdröckh’s simile of “an Egyptian pitcher of tamed vipers, each struggling to get its head above the others.” After wealth, science, invention, had done all for such a society that they could do, it would remain without savour, without depth, uninteresting, and withal horrifying.

I found that the few “more highly-developed minds” in America were well aware of this. Thoreau was; and Emerson, Lowell; C. F. Adams and his sons, Brooks and Henry; Curtis, Mark Twain, Howells; all these made record of their apprehension and repugnance. Whitman lapsed from his “barbaric yawp” of faith in economism to the desponding observation that the type of civilisation which economism had produced was, “so far, an almost complete failure in its social aspects, and in really grand religious, moral, literary, and aesthetic results,... It is as if we were somehow being endowed with a vast and thoroughly appointed body, and then left with little or no soul.” Even Henry Cabot Lodge, who did some good service to economism, said in real distress, apparently, that society’s exclusive acceptance of it as a practical philosophy was “the darkest sign of all.” Even John Hay, who had incontinently dumped a moribund alien imperialism into the lap of the United States to be nursed and pap-fed there indefinitely, and who had glorified the extreme of economism as a practical philosophy by writing The Breadwinners, languidly complained of “the restless haste and hunger which is the source of much that is good and most that is evil in American life.”

Turning to French literature, I found that the Goncourts, Mérimée, Halévy, de Nerval, Chevalier, Flaubert, de Musset and many others had marked the direction which French society was taking under the spur of economism, and had declared their fixed conviction that “evil is coming.” Their writings also reflected the great general feeling of uneasiness. Mérimée, in his last days, testified that “everybody is afraid, though nobody knows of what.” In Germany, two giants of the century saw what was coming; these were Goethe and Niebuhr. I found that in England also the most highly-developed minds had long been obsessed by a like apprehension. As far back as 1811 Mrs. Barbauld seems to have seen the approaching cloud of economism, then no bigger than a man’s hand, and to have anticipated Macaulay in drawing the gloomy picture of an outlander surveying a scene of lifeless desolation from the ruins of London Bridge. It is all very well for economism to boast of progress and enlightenment; so said Wordsworth, Carlyle, Kingsley, Arnold,—his Friendship’s Garland is as fresh today as if written yesterday,—Butler, Ruskin, FitzGerald, Morris, Hardy; it is all very well, it’s nice, very nice now, but evil is coming!

There was good reason for this, and the reason was clearly visible even on the surface of things; there was nothing recondite about it. The outbreak of the Spanish War had caused me to doubt that the century’s net gains from republicanism were substantial, or that its achievement of personal liberty was at all valid. If two men, one an abject political hack and the other a jobholder of dubious quality,—if these, with the power of patronage in their hands, could manoeuvre a nation of eighty million people into an imperialist war, I should take it as pretty good evidence that absolutism can flourish about as luxuriantly under republicanism as under an autocracy. Thus, while considering the phenomena of economism and modern imperialism, I was also led to observe the concurrent growth of what long afterward I learned to call Statism. Within the last half-century in England, France and Germany, the State had been continually absorbing through taxation more and more of the national wealth, continually assuming one new coercive, regulative or directive function after another. In the United States the same process had begun to be speeded up to a headlong rapidity. Everywhere these wholesale confiscations of social power were going on; everywhere social power was being depleted, and everywhere State power being increased at its expense.

Along with this tendency went a curious tacit rationalisation of it, under the dogma of Statism as propounded by the German idealist philosophers of the eighteenth century. C. J. introduced me to the basic political theory of these gentry, and the closeness of its correspondence with the popular belief now everywhere prevailing rather took my breath away. In brief, what it came to was that the State is everything; the individual, nothing. The individual has no rights that the State is bound to respect; no rights at all, in fact, except those which the State may choose to give him, subject to revocation at its own pleasure, with or without notice. There is no such thing as natural rights; the fundamental doctrine of the American Declaration of Independence, the doctrine underlying the Bill of Rights, is all moonshine. Moreover, since the State creates all rights, since the only valid and authoritative ethics are State ethics, then by obvious inference the State can do no wrong.

Such was the view with which the peoples of the Western world had become indoctrinated. To save my life I could not see a shilling’s worth of practical difference between this and the old theory of jure divino rulership which republicanism plumed itself on having ousted. I saw no reason why John Cowell and Sir Robert Filmer might not shake hands cordially with Hegel over the latter’s dictum that “the State incarnates the Divine Idea upon earth,” or forsooth with Fichte over his declaration that “the State is the superior power, ultimate and beyond appeal, absolutely independent.” Given a people imbued with this idea, the republicanism of the nineteenth century seemed to me only what the Scots call “cauld kail made het again,”—absolutism warmed up and rebaptised. In France, the strong common sense of many like Horace Vernet and Halévy had openly scorned it, and the far-seeing Guizot contemptuously called it the kind of republicanism “which begins with Plato and necessarily ends with a policeman.” In England, Herbert Spencer had written the immortal essays subsequently put together in a volume called The Man vs. the State, in which he demolished the doctrine of the omnipotent State, and predicted accurately what would take place if that doctrine continued to prevail; but his work, like that of Stuart Mill and others, had little effect. In July, 1898, he wrote in a letter to Grant Allen, “... I said, just as you say, that we are in course of re-barbarisation, and that there is no prospect but that of military despotisms, which we are rapidly approaching.”

One could hardly wonder that the more highly-developed minds of Europe had been “visited with vague forebodings of a Dusk of the Nations.” I was in Europe for a long time at the turn of the century, visiting Italy, Russia, France, Germany and England, and it was plain that for all the talk of peace and liberty, no other upshot was consistent with the general acceptance of Statism as a philosophy, and the consequent prodigious growth of State power at the expense of social power. Any economic dislocation, natural or fabricated, any collision of State interest, actual or pretended, would at once everywhere open the way for a sharking political adventurer, a modern Cleon, to come forward and under some demagogic pretext of “emergency, the tyrant’s plea” to commandeer all social power, reduce the people to unconditional State-servitude, and use them for his own purposes.

I was reminded of these observations one day in the autumn of 1940, when I unexpectedly met an old friend whom I had not seen for years, a very wise and experienced man of about my own age, Mr. Darwin J. Meserole. Some one had just approached him in a great state of mind, saying that the world had gone clean crazy. Mr. Meserole replied, “You have watched this coming for forty years, and now that it’s here, you say the world has gone crazy!”

1 Students nicknamed their professors then as now. This was a students’ nickname for Robert Irland, a Scotsman, for nearly sixty years professor of law at Poitiers.

2 J. W. Mackail: introductory essay on the Greek Anthology.

3 I have been interested to hear lately that highly-placed Englishry now speak openly of these two gonfaloniers as “that wretch, Chamberlain” and “that archvillain, Rhodes.” Sic transit. Yet Matthew Arnold, who died ten years before the Boer War was launched, prophesied that the dissolution of the British Empire would begin in South Africa. Arnold, however, was a man of letters, with no pretensions to statesmanship, and therefore could not be presumed to know what he was talking about.

4 This word is not in any dictionary, as far as I know. I use it because my only alternative is materialism, which is ambiguous and inexact.

• 1AFTER leaving college I did graduate work for the best part of three years in different institutions, shopping around irregularly like the vagantes, the wandering scholars of the Middle Ages, from one man to another who had something on foot that interested me and who would let me sit under him. Not being in quest of an advanced degree, (though finally I did qualify for one, more by accident than intention), I could do this. It still seems to me that the vagantes had the right idea for getting the best out of graduate study. When a notable man appeared anywhere on their horizon they would go where he was and camp out with him until they had pretty well got what he had to give them, and then they would “move on to the next pub.” Abraham Flexner once remarked to me that getting education is like getting measles; you have to go where measles is. If you go where it is, unless you are by nature immune, you will get it,—no need to worry about that,—but if you don’t go where it is, you will never get it. An effective distribution of educational germs, moreover, is a matter of individual persons rather than of institutions. Rabelais has Pantagruel making the rounds of the French universities, as in all probability Rabelais himself had done, and the chapter shows that in itself this might mean very little; but when Bridlegoose says that he had studied law at Poitiers under Brocadium Juris, or when Panurge speaks of having dipped into the Decretals with “the most decretalipotent Scots doctor,” that really meant something.
• 2It is a vain and superficial reflection that such a man would have fared but ill against the blighting east wind of the twentieth century, and that he was therefore fortunate in escaping it. This is not so; he would have fared well, for he was beyond the reach of disappointment or injury. His immense wisdom and penetrating humour, untouched by any taint of cynicism, would have kept him in the spirit which appears throughout all Greek literature; the spirit which finds its noblest expression in the Phaedo, and its more special and restricted expression in the verse of the later elegiac poets. He would have had Aeschylus and Sophocles always at hand to remind him that the order fixed by human destiny is not to be coerced or dissuaded, and he would have watched the hopeful little meddlings and strivings of the human comedy with an eye of amused tolerance, even as they ran off into inevitable tragedy. Omnia orta cadunt. His was the lucid Greek sense, “born of considering the flux of things and the tyranny of time, that man plays a losing game, and that his only success is in refusing to play. For the busy and idle, for the fortunate and unhappy alike, the sun rises one morning for the last time; he only is to be congratulated who is done with hope and fear. How short-lived soever he be in comparison with the world through which he passes, yet no less through time Fate dries up the holy springs, and the mighty cities of the old days are undecipherable under the green turf. It is the only wisdom to acquiesce in the forces, however ignorant or malign in their working, that listen to no protest and admit no appeal; that no strength can check, no subtlety elude, no calculation predetermine.”
• 3British imperialism did not want either French imperialism or the newer imperialism of Germany to get into a stronger position in the southwestern Pacific by taking the Philippines. At the moment, however, England had its hands full with preparations for plundering the Boers, and could not very well do much about it; so the architects of our foreign policy obligingly put themselves at England’s convenience. They declared war against Spain, took the Philippines; and thereby, for all that one could see, committed the United States to follow the fortunes of British imperialism in perpetuity. Joseph Chamberlain, who, with Cecil Rhodes, represented the ultimate in militant British imperialism at that time, said in a public speech which was reported at large in this country, that the Spanish War was well worth while “if in a great and noble cause, the Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack should wave together over an Anglo-Saxon alliance.”
• 4My course of reading, initiated by Nordau’s work and supplemented by observation of current affairs as well as by my conversations with C. J., impressed on me the basic fact that western society was entirely given over to economism. It had no other philosophy; apparently it did not know there was any other. It interpreted the whole of human life in terms of the production, acquisition and distribution of wealth. Like certain Philippians in the time of St. Paul, its god was its belly, and it had no mind for anything beyond the ἐπίγεια. I learned that as far as American society was concerned, this had been so ever since the days of Columbus. Michel Chevalier, the most acute observer among the many who had visited America in its youth, said that American society had the morale of an army on the march. It had the morale of the looter, the plunderer. In my boyhood, those who had made the best success with it were held up in the schools, the press, and even in the pulpit, as prototypal of all that was making America great, and hence as par excellence the proper examples for well-ordered youth to follow. Go and get it! was the sum of the practical philosophy presented to America’s young manhood by all the voices of the age.