Chapter II: Part 2

The fact is that what is supposed to be and what is true of American history are two very different things. Because as a people we have instinctively craved some things and have written it into a Constitution that man is inalienably entitled to them, it does not follow that we have them; although most Americans, I am inclined to fear, think so. If I read American history aright, the men who drew up the Declaration of Independence and framed our Constitution were men who, like ourselves today, were in the grip of an ideal which had very little to do with their own condition or the actual working necessities and conditions of life as seen about them. Far from being democratic at that time America was quite the reverse, a most stratified and nobility-aping nation with feudal servants and thralls at the bottom and landed and all but titled proprietors at the top (“History of the Great American Fortunes,” Myers). But those same leaders and many followers appear to have been in the grip of a time-spirit or movement which had its roots as far back in time as the thirteenth century, when Europe seemed to give new birth or breath to the pagan spirit and to revolt at the mummery and flummery of kings and the gorgeous paraphernalia of a religious idea run completely to seed. Hess and Bruno were but the fore-steppers of Luther. Bacon, Locke, Voltaire, de Tocqueville, Rousseau and Paine, had much to do with the spirit of our American Constitution. Indeed, it is a question whether the latter six, and especially Rousseau with his “Social Contract,” his dream of a new social arrangement in which the State should do so much more than it had ever before attempted to do for its constituent units, are not the makers of the Declaration of Independence. Yet nothing that Paine, Voltaire, Locke or Rousseau dreamed or believed concerning the essential capacity of man to govern himself is absolutely true. What is true is that autocracy or single-headed government without genius and a love of humanity is closely allied, or very likely to be, to tyranny; whereas democracy or multiple-headed rotation in control is likely to prove even more dangerous where it is merely dull. It has not even the advantage of being spectacular and interesting. Whether the individual, thus protected against tyranny, is likely to prove a greater and more useful engine or mechanism for the development of more and better thought, more beautiful dreams and ideals than the world ever had before, remains to be seen. Dominant America, now in the saddle of the world, has an opportunity to prove this.

But does history provide a single analogy? Scarcely. The older nations were not built so much for the individual, that he might have life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness guaranteed him, as for the perpetuation and glory of the State itself, or the King thereof. This was true of Athens and Sparta as well as the Roman Republic, and more recently of Germany. It is very doubtful whether the modern republic is made any more for the humble, single individual than the old-time kingdom. Is not the modern trust-magnate or money-baron who taxes and drives him by his wage arrangements and food extortion as much of a King, or at least a medieval baron, as any such that ever lived? Take Rockefeller, for example. How different is he, or others like him--Morgan, for instance--to the Dons who in combination ruled Spain, laughing at its King, or the money-lords who direct the policy of England today, as did their equivalents in Russia and Germany before the late war?

The truth is that it is given to few, if any, individuals of a nation to understand it. By some it is assumed that the individual must rule. By others the mass. Neither is true. The mass at times must be pitted against the individual, and vice versa. But neither must disappear entirely. That would spell death or slumber. It is also a question whether any nation at any time ever collectively understands itself. Do not some portions of its units always misunderstand other portions? Take our part in the late great war. Sentimentally, a fair portion of America’s integral units assumed that we entered the war to “free humanity from slavery” and “to make the world safe for democracy,” a very large order; but, to quote one of President Wilson’s later utterances, it was for a somewhat different purpose, namely, “the destruction of every arbitrary power anywhere that can separately and secretly and of single choice disturb the peace of the world.” Well, that is not exactly the same as making it safe for democracy--but still--. The truth probably is that the nation, propelled by its instinct for self-preservation, entered the war to make America safe. It is not at all unlikely that sooner or later we should have gone to war with Germany had there been no European war. Germany was known to regard with avid eye many phases of this Western hemisphere, its resources, institutions, pretensions; so America very practically, however sentimental the reasons given may be, engaged herself on the side of four or five powers of the first rank (some long friendly, others not uniformly so) to protect her future interests.

From a practical point of view there were, and of course were sure to be, many who disagreed with the somewhat sentimental interpretation of all this. More than one person of authority at the time privately ventured the opinion that in giving so much to aid Europe something should have been done to secure for America its future integrity in the Western hemisphere. “In so far as Mexico, Canada, the West Indies and the Pacific are concerned,” wrote one authority, “should not everything be done to further our interests there?” Canada, one would say, thinking of a nation that should be looking reasonably well after its own welfare, should be made at least sovereign--that is, independent of Great Britain--and compelled to enter into commercial and definite offensive and defensive alliances with us; the forts along our borders dismantled and all plans to oppose us at any future time set aside. Again, all of the West Indies, so it was argued, now controlled by European powers, should have been exacted or made independent under our protection so as not to fall into the hands of our enemies in the future. Should not, asked some, a halt have been called to European aggression in China, the open door insisted upon?... The seas should have been made absolutely neutral--policed by America, along with others. A great, even dominant, merchant marine should have been built up. Why the expenditure of endless blood and treasure, with no definite strength added to the point of view--which the United States represents--the right of her ideas as well as those of other people to prosper and grow strong?

But witness what was actually done, where our chief interests lay: Belgium, a country that had never been a completely sovereign State with rights which were inalienable, but a State which was the product of the fears of Europe, commanding our sympathies as though it had been individual and free throughout history. It was torn from Holland by England and France only as recently as 1830. England and France chose its reigning house--the English Queen’s uncle, who was speedily married to the daughter of the King of France. Yet with Ireland, India, Egypt, the Philippines, the Boer Republic and other violated lands and nationalities before us, the woes of this one country developed our greatest interest. Japan guaranteed the neutrality of Korea, but annexed it with the consent of the powers. England, before our very eyes, suppressed attempts at “self-determination by smaller nations of their rights” in Egypt, Ireland, India, the Boer Republic. Yet we thought nothing, or at least did nothing. Yet the Balkans, for some peculiar reason not easily to be explained, aroused another sentimental emotion in us. Although one would have said the interest of America in the question of what should become of Russia, Turkey and the Balkans was not direct, and from an old-time practical and political point of view never could be, yet America interfered there as elsewhere, laying down, or attempting to, a rule for the future organization of Europe (self-determination of nations!), and that without any referendum to the American voter, any definite constitutional inquiry as to what _he_ thought of all this.

Yet the neglect of the latter, most important in a self-determining democracy or republic, one would suppose, was passed over as nothing, while it was assumed or preached by those in the lead, and in the face of much repressed grumbling, that we were engaged unquestionably with those who were nearest to and best for us intellectually, spiritually and in every other way, nations which would seek, or had invariably sought our welfare in the past. But history, of course, demonstrated that this was not true and that such alliances were only momentarily beneficial, if at all, and later were broken without so much as a by-your-leave or a farewell. But did this serve to alter the state of public feeling or illusion? By no means. In so far as England was concerned it appeared to strengthen it, although this was the first time she had ever been on our side (1776, 1812, 1865, 1896); (1897-8, the Boer War). In all those instances we were anything but pro-British. So again with France in 1788 and 1815, when we practically declared war on her in favor of England, although she had reason to expect our sympathy and aid. Our attitude toward Italy has varied, as it has toward Russia: now friendly, now the reverse. Taking into consideration the brevity of all international alliances one would have supposed that it would have been the imperative duty of American statesmen to make sure that in the course of a temporary alliance with European powers the best interests of the American nation would not have been imperiled, but being powerful and optimistic we assumed that our interests were safe enough, or, if not, that we could make them so, and let it go at that. But supposing we had not been so powerful? Would God, Justice, Mercy, Truth, Progress and a number of other things invoked during the great argument, have been on our side? All failure, some one has said, is due to but two things: weakness and error. Suppose we had been weak? Or foolish?

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A singular thing in connection with this same great war and the American people, their history, is the attitude of this nation toward the French, at this time and earlier. At the beginning of the war America--Christian America--was decidedly opposed to the French, on moral and intellectual grounds, their literature, their art, their stage, their vile tendencies to naturalism in thought and deed. Even before this, at the beginning of our history, the original Colonists, although of various nationalities--English, French, Dutch, Swedish, Spanish--were finally consolidated under English rule and a fairly systematic warfare waged against the French and the Indians, whom both the French and the English were employing by turns in their contest for supremacy. Yet later, at the time of the dispute between the English and the American Colonies, which ended in the Revolutionary War, French sympathy, due to ancient antipathy to England as well as the intense opposition to autocratic oppression in France, drew the Americans and the French together in a bond of sympathy. The French sent various Generals and Admirals (Rochambeau, Lafayette, Count d’Estaing, Count de Grasse) to help the Americans on land and sea. Yet in 1788-9, when France and Spain declared war on England, and especially later (after the French Revolution in 1789) when the French were struggling to maintain their democratic independence and England was seeking to put the Bourbon rulers back on the throne of France, do you believe that American sympathy was with the French? If you do, you don’t know American history. Under the offensive and defensive agreement or treaty entered into between France and the Colonies in 1778, when the latter were struggling for their independence, it was confidently expected by the French that the Americans would help them against England, but nothing of the sort followed. When, in the belief that America must sympathize with France, “democratic” societies, after the French model, were organized throughout the States, and later Genet, the French Minister to America, attempted to fit our privateers on American soil and to establish admiralty ports for the condemnation of prizes, there was great opposition to this. Only read the history of that period (Burgess: “The Middle Period”; Babcock: “American Nationality”; Hart: “American History Told by Contemporaries”). America, according to this new attitude, was now to look out for itself, and in consonance with this in 1793 Washington issued his famous Neutrality Proclamation, leaving France to take care of herself. After the issuance of the Proclamation, Genet, still believing that American sympathy must be with France, appealed to the people and openly defied the Government. His recall followed, of course.

Then followed a very curious state of affairs. The French Revolutionists, angered by the official attitude of America, fell to attacking American shipping, looking upon it as a hostile power aiding England. American commissionaires, sent to adjust our relations with France, were ignored and representatives of the Revolutionists (or so it was claimed), using the initials “X Y Z,” demanded tribute and a bribe. Hence the famous comment of William Pinckney, the American lawyer and statesman, who said “Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute.” And that against our late ally, France!

President Adams laid the correspondence before Congress, and the whole country was aroused. War with France was thought to be inevitable and (1798) Washington was reappointed Commander-in-Chief of the Army. Owing to the activity of French sympathizers in America and rabid criticisms in the newspapers of the Government’s stand in this matter, the Federalists, who were then in power and who had no sympathy for France, secured the passage (1798) of the famous Alien and Sedition Laws. These laws gave the Government power to banish “foreigners” (meaning the French) from the country and to suppress obnoxious newspapers. Actual warfare with France went on upon the sea! But these laws, being against the then “fundamental ideas” of Americans in regard to free speech and the right of asylum to immigrants, were regarded by enough of the people as proving all the charges of tyranny urged against the Federalists, and at the next election (1800) they were defeated. In the meantime Virginia and Kentucky had resolved, owing to these same Alien and Sedition Laws, that a State might nullify a law of the United States. Congress, because of French attacks on our shipping, formulated the “Spoliation Claims,” and it was not until Napoleon (1800), as First Consul of France, agreed to abandon the French Claim that America was still bound by the treaty of 1778 to aid her that these latter were abandoned and peace reached. In other words, we refused France aid in her most trying hour. Yet twelve years later, because of England’s continuous attacks upon our ships and seamen, trying to prevent our dealing with France in any way, we went to war with her--only she did not quit until the victory over Napoleon removed the cause of her alleged grievances. One hundred years later, as we have just seen (1914-19), although opposition to France on moral grounds had been steadily growing in America, still in the contest with Germany all the refused sympathy and gratitude of 1800 was revived and France became once more the object of our tenderest solicitude. So much for national moods and gratitudes.

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Another curious phase of the late great war, as of all countries and wars perhaps, but one which illustrates the American temperament rather clearly, was the attitude of America to one and another phase of it, the psychologic flounderings and back somersaults, as it were, concerning one problem and another. For one thing, as we all perhaps remember, the preliminary internal contest was for peace at any price practically, and any one who suggested mobilizing a large army for self-defense (if nothing more) was, if not a traitor, something of an undesirable citizen. Mr. Wilson, if you will recall, was elected the second time on the slogan “He Kept Us Out of War”; also before we entered the war we were told what a blessing it was in one way, commercially at least. Later, as Germany appeared to be winning and America was actually threatened, the whole world had to be made “safe for democracy,” an order so large that publicity was quietly refused it in all countries outside the United States. But that was the sweet milk fed to Americans. Later still, when it came to actually declaring war, although this is a republic and the people are supposed to have a voice in deciding that which they do, no willingness on the part of the authorities, executive or legislative, to refer the matter back to the people for a vote, was in evidence.

And once war was declared, the people were allowed or compelled to “take out” whatever opposition they might feel in private thought, not public or open opposition. It was openly admitted that a referendum might have prevented a declaration of war, yet afterwards public complaint was ruggedly suppressed--by the courts and officials, if not by the whole people, astounding farces by way of law being perpetrated. Still later on, when it came to “raising” troops, money and supplies (controlling food), volunteer service in the first of these fields was swiftly abandoned, and conscription, with all which that implied in the way of force and putting down opposition to it, free speech as well as free action, was used. “Public sentiment,” as fostered by an administrative press bureau, to say nothing of much foreign propaganda, controlled or overawed the papers. Overawing sentences, such as forty years in the penitentiary, for circulating a pamphlet in opposition to the current will of the Government, were uniformly handed down in all parts of the nation by a judiciary whose independence, sanctity and what not were supposed to be the bulwark of American liberty. But at whose request? By what authority? The necessity of strict and impartial justice?

I am not quarreling with the process; I am showing the thin line of difference between autocracy and democracy where necessity or passing opinion favors one course of conduct or another. Later on, when suggestions in regard to food-saving were rather freely ignored, the “suggestions” became not only suggestions but restrictions and, to quote the food administrator, “the restrictions will be voluntary, _but_ any evasion will result in compulsory enforcement.” Similarly in connection with bond-selling; the people were to lend and lend and lend because they loved their country, but (I am quoting a leading administrative organ) “the period has arrived (October, 1918) to discontinue wooing and soft-soaping. God help the man who is found with filled pockets if the war goes on because of a financial failure here.”

And it was not alone in such matters where some independence or at least latitude might have been presupposed, but it extended to a press censorship and an intolerance of opposing opinion which compared rather favorably to darkest days of Russian autocracy. Although America is always naïve and “free,” its innumerable blessings of tolerance and the like prated of, still there was but one _publicly endured_ opinion in relation to the conduct of the war, and that was pro-war. Any other form of thought was rigidly put down, although in England and France one might say one’s say with all but destructive freedom. One woman in New York was actually fined for saying that “Ireland was as good as England any day!” A booklet entitled “Shall Morgan Own the Earth?” and intended to show how the war was profiting some individuals, was first investigated by the Department of Justice and pronounced immune, then later the author was urged “as a patriotic duty” to change the title; still later, even under the milder title, it was refused the privilege of the mails by the Postoffice Department and the author warned that “to circulate it would subject you to ten years in prison. You know it violates the Espionage Law.”

And to what astounding fol-de-rol in regard to the conduct of all wars in the future, if not in the past, were we not treated! There were to be no more brutal wars of any kind anywhere. Ever! Oddly enough, the horrors of the Civil War, especially the part of the Northern soldiers in it, were entirely forgotten; also the “water cure” and “Hell Roaring Jake Smith” of the Philippine campaign were forgotten--those natives, for instance, who were stood up in rows and shot down one after another by an officer with a revolver or who had water poured down their throats and into their noses until they died of strangulation, because they could not, or did not choose to, reveal that which possibly they did not even know. Nations as well as individuals have short memories. Before we entered the war it really looked as though a great war must necessarily be fought with tooth-brushes, so great was the opposition to brutality. Later we were never to fight any more wars at all, or if we did it was all to be ended by one war. A little later one of our greatest agonies was that we could not visit on the enemy something much more terrible than they were visiting on us--national annihilation, no less. We could not live in peace with autocracy--although, forsooth, we could live in peace with the Japanese, the Chinese, the Imperial Russian Government before it fell, England in India, England in Egypt--anything and everything, indeed, save with a nation that did not fight as we did. Never again were the erring nations to be restored to their old place in the world. Between chortles over an immense trade increase, a finally united railway system, new and better methods of food control, intensive agriculture, lessons in self-denial and thought, still, and idiotic as it may seem, the war was an unmixed evil; the Germans were all wrong. “The passage of a thousand years will not obliterate the memory of Germany’s crime. She will get her good name back when Judas does.” (I am quoting from the Cincinnati Enquirer of March, 1918.) And this in the face of the above-recited blessings pointed out in this very paper! What are you to say for such a ragbag point of view, a national intelligence that can blow hot and cold with the same breath?

Actually, it looked for a time as though America were suffering from pernicious mental anemia. Its whole original significance as a forward-pushing, clear-thinking nation appeared to have been clouded over, and, not unlike the bee and the coral insect which apparently serve only one or two purposes in life--the one to gather honey and pollenize the flowers, the other to build a coral island--that it had been invented by Nature to devise and manufacture machinery which it should never have the courage or brains to apply to the limits of their possibilities. It was as though the Germans and the English and the Japanese, seeing the peculiar gifts and mental limitations of the American, were to be permitted to use his gifts, quite as we use the stored labor of the bee or the coral insect, and leave him to go on moiling in his brainless mechanistic way. For the average American, who could so easily invent a flying machine, a submarine, a range-finder for guns, a revolving turret, a steel-protected battleship, a steamboat, and what not, was being urged to believe, at first, that he had no heart for their use and that he was “too proud to fight” or lacked the courage to face the horrible grinding necessities of life; later that he was the greatest fighter of all. Only, having proved that, he was still to believe that he was here only to save the world, never by any chance to further his own interests. His great inventions were to be put aside like toys or sold to others or reserved for moral purposes only.

For note, up to the hour of sheer tragic compulsion, everything was, and no doubt still is, to the average American, a matter of morality, and morality, take note, in the limited sense in which he understood and appreciated morals up to that time. You might invent a battleship wherewith to defend yourself and kill other people, but if you used it for any but a Christian or moral purpose, or the enemy who was non-Christian got it (and used it) it was terrible, shameful, a moral crime, not to be blotted out by a thousand years of expiation. To an American, a machine, however deadly in intention, or its method of slaying, was not to be used unless some distinctly moral end was to be achieved by it. And he was to judge as to the moral end involved. But, to his horror, he was finding and did find that the savage and the pagan could get hold of his machine gun or his flying machine, or submarine, or his battleship, or chemic invention of any kind, and turn it on him without any moral compunction whatsoever--and to his still further Christian horror it worked just as well for the savage or the pagan as it did for him. Nature, or God, did not prevent the submarine from discharging a torpedo at an unarmed merchantman any more than it aided the firing of one from a Christian submarine at a pagan battleship. In short, Nature seemed to be without Christianity or Christian morals, and this shocked the American terribly. He found that he had to lay aside, for the time being anyhow, his fine-spun theories and fight in any way that he could, and he proceeded to do so. Whereupon, he won. But to the American, nevertheless, and in spite of all this, Nature was and is still strictly moral. She has fixed, definite and Christian ways by which she works. Whenever the good American by any chance discovers that Nature is betraying him in any way, not working according to the code as handed down at Sinai, or the Mount in Palestine, he is horror-stricken! What! Nature not working according to the Ten Commandments? The weak do not inherit the earth? “Thou shalt not kill” not a universal law? “Thou shalt not steal or commit adultery” not chemic or psychic truth running through all nature? Who says so? Where is our God who told us these things? Why does he not act in our behalf? Why does he not confound the enemy in his blasphemies, destroy him, for flouting these fundamental religious truths?

But behold, God does not, or did not act until the Americans, bestirring themselves and laying aside their theorizing, proceeded to fight as do the heathen. Then and then only, with the moral and exegetic rust rubbed off and the good American, standing up vital and dangerous, did the tide turn. Up to that hour the tide was indifferently going against him. The heathen, noting his mood, had picked up the American’s subtle inventions where he laid them down--fine, powerful, complete but immoral instruments--and had used them for “immoral” purposes. And the machines and the schemes of the American, moral though he thought they were, worked just as well for the unmoral heathen as for himself. To his pathetic horror and utter Christian decay he found that if he was to succeed at all he must not only invent subtle and deadly things, but apply them in the same spirit in which he invented them or other people would--horrific Nature, working through other non-Christian nations quite as effectively as it worked through good Christian Americans. In other words, Nature was not Christian, not moral, in the sense that a race or an organized society working to protect its selfish internal arrangements and comforts may be, and no amount of energetic spouting on this score helped him in the least. Nature, or God, or what you will, showed that it cared no whit, not a snap of her or his fingers, what becomes of man or an American with his theories, religious or otherwise, unless he was able to protect himself. A man or a nation had to have wealth and power to survive, and if the Germans had had more power they would have survived, methods or means to the contrary notwithstanding. Ten thousand pagan shrines did not save Rome from the pacifist destruction which Christianity involved. Ten million Christian churches spouting peace and non-warlike ways could not and did not save America or any other country from a nation which put its faith in war and the ruthless forces of Nature herself. Only greater war on our part could do that, and did.

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But let us consider some of America’s other equally potent and definite moods or opinions in regard to some other things: the negro for one. By the year 1700 slavery, which up to that time had been more or less a matter of individual preference or taste, there being no general Colonial agreement in regard to it, had become an economic institution in Colonial life. A legalized status of Indian, white and negro servants had preceded slavery in almost all, if not all, the English-maintained colonies; but apparently it paid to make them slaves, and they were so made in spite of the legal fact that they were not. Later the difference in the industries of the several States made slavery more desirable in some States than in others, and then the natural boundary lines of the slave territory began to develop. Georgia and South Carolina especially were clamoring for slave-labor on the tobacco, cotton and rice plantations; whereas in the North it was found to be an unsatisfactory system, and so there was early developed in those Colonies a sentiment against a negro population and the institution of slavery in general. It cannot be said that this was due entirely to the economic disadvantage of keeping slaves in the North--there always existed some opposition to slavery in the minds of individuals--but would it have been effective if slave labor had been profitable--as profitable, say, as it was in the South? Jefferson, for instance, wrote a denunciation of slavery into his draft of the Declaration of Independence, but later, owing to its probable effect on slave-holding Colonies, erased it. And negroes were freely lynched and burned in New York City in 1712 and 1741 because they were suspected of a desire to rebel against slavery. A public slave-market was established in New York City as early as 1709!

Yet to hear the average Christian American of today or earlier talk of slavery and its horrors and the great war fought to free the negro, you might assume that he liked him. Far from it. Although a Northern Congress (March 2d, 1867) attempted to impose universal manhood suffrage on the South and (1875) passed a law forbidding discrimination against negroes in inns, public conveyances, theaters and other places, aimed principally at the South, still the negro has never been accepted in the spirit of these laws either in the North or South. In any residence neighborhood anywhere in America, when the black man begins to come in the whites move out. Excellent as he may be, and I have known many who were wholly admirable, he is not even wanted in the same churches or schools. And the feeling, instead of growing less, becomes stronger. Almost daily he is burned alive somewhere in America, and for all but indifferent crimes. America may have fought and bled for his physical freedom, but she does not want him about; and when, as in 1917 in East St. Louis, employers attempted to use him to break a strike, he was murdered (117 of him in that instance), his homes burned, his wives and children driven out of the region; and in the far South, where one of him has even so much as insulted a deputy sheriff, he has been done to death, he and his entire family. Yet the American has no plan for the negro--his threatening future here. He merely allows the question to go begging, trusting to luck, no doubt. Puzzle: does the American citizen want the negro, or doesn’t he?

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Take once more the matter of the American and the idle, greedy or predatory rich, as you please, and their attitude toward America, all being citizens of the same land. Because a Colonial American once wrote it down in our Declaration of Independence that men are created free and equal, that they are, and _of right_ ought to be, entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness at the hands of their fellow-citizens and the world, the American ever since has been amazed and troubled by the curious human or chemic contradictions of and oppositions to this, not only in others but himself. Struggling along trying to be free and happy he finds that he is constantly interfered with by others who are doing the same thing, and that, Declaration of Independence or no Declaration of Independence, the curious fact remains that the strong, the ruthless, the shrewd get along as well here as they do anywhere and that they are constantly developing ways and means of undermining him and foreshortening his peace and happiness in favor of their own.

Thus, in illustration: (1) A Federal judge (1919) ruled that although Congress (1918) had forbidden any one to compel children of ten or more years of age to labor in cotton mills, still it was unconstitutional for Congress so to forbid and those who wished could so employ children. Result, hundreds of thousands of children returned to eleven hours per day factory labor.

(2) A New Jersey judge, one Gumere by name, ruled (1900) that a child’s life, lost in an accident on a railroad or other public conveyance, was not worth more than one dollar, the child not being as yet a source of profit to its parents.

(3) An Ohio circuit judge (William H. Taft, afterwards President of the United States) ruled (1893) that quitting work without the consent of the employer was a criminal offense on the part of an employee.

(4) The Federal Supreme Court ruled (1908) that arbitration in labor disputes is unconstitutional, therefore something which an employer may not even enter upon with his employees.

(5) The Oregon Supreme Court decided (1903) that a citizen might be legally held in duress (jailed) for one month without trial--this in the face of explicit prohibition on the part of the American Constitution.

(6) The Massachusetts Supreme Court held in one dispute (1906) that where conditions are unsatisfactory there is no remedy open to labor save by individual and personal suit; union or combined action being illegal or unconstitutional.

(7) Four magnates, two of them controlling the production and two the distribution of milk for and in New York City, decided (January 10, 1919) that since they could not agree as to how the profits of the sale of milk in New York City were to be divided among them, New York was to have no milk until they could agree. Time of city without milk, one month.

(8) One Barnet Baff, wholesale chicken merchant in New York City, was murdered because he would not enter upon a scheme with other chicken-wholesalers to fix prices and extort a higher profit from the public. Secondary executors, but not primary instigators or murderers, were caught and electrocuted.

(9) In Lachnor vs. New York (198 U. S. 45) a majority of the judges of the New York Court of Appeals held unconstitutional a law limiting the hours of labor of bakers, many of whom (women) were forced to toil twelve hours daily in cellars to earn wages barely sufficient to keep them alive. The Court held that this law was void because it interfered with freedom of contract.

(10) In Ives vs. South Buffalo Ry. Co. (94 N. E. R. 431), a case in which a railroad employee, crippled for life while at work and without “contributory negligence,” sued for recompense, the New York Court of Appeals unanimously decided that the law under which the suit was brought was unconstitutional. The judges admitted the injustice, since the man was helpless, but held the Constitution responsible.

... One might thus go forward for pages. I merely cite these in order to present a few definite instances. The truth is that while the average American imagines he is better looked after and more free here than he would be elsewhere, it is more a matter of thought than anything else. As to his daily earning and living capacity, while it is true that he gets more pay he also pays more for what he buys. A rising scale of wages has so regularly been accompanied by a lowering of the purchasing power of the dollar that he has not been much comforted by higher wages. In fact, the National Department of Labor (February, 1919), after studying family budgets in various cities of the country, announced that the then exorbitant cost of necessities bore heaviest on incomes of one thousand dollars or _less_, although five per cent of the population controlled ninety-five per cent of the wealth of the nation. And one should further note the rising Protection policy of a hundred years, under which the trusts flourished without any notable increase of wages to the local consumer, and the local consumer paid uniformly higher prices than those paid by foreigners for the same grade of goods, often the very same goods made here and shipped abroad. This protection explains the American multi-millionaire; also the American beggar and his slum. It also explains the profiteer. If the average American has had a little more of food and clothes than the men of some other countries, he has also been confronted by the very irritating spectacle of thousands upon thousands who have so much more than he has or can get. He has been made to appear as poor as any churchmouse anywhere, and, worst of all, his woes get but small attention from those who, financially able to control his only medium of expression, the newspapers, insist upon telling him that he is well and happy. If any one should doubt this, let him consult, for one thing, the report of the Federal Trade Commission appointed by Congress (Report handed down June, 1918), wherein it was charged and proved that large exactions and safe profiteering permitted more than one giant concern to double, treble, even quintuple, its capitalization and still earn from 100 to 227 per cent in one instance. Coal, valued at five cents a ton in the ground, was being sold for twenty-two dollars a ton in New York--not over two hundred and fifty miles away. Milk was shoved up rapidly from seven to seventeen-and-one-half cents a quart, and with no interference on the part of any one and no effort to pool the wasteful competition and duplication of systems which, on the other hand, were offered as an excuse for the necessity of the more than 100 per cent increase. Wheat, potatoes, meat, oil, sugar rose in proportion. There was no corresponding increase in the wages, save to unionized labor (which was the only form of labor in a position to demand a just share, and which constituted but ten per cent of all employed). And these had to indulge in three hundred and sixty-seven strikes in the first three years of the war to effect even so much as a twenty per cent increase. (I am quoting figures furnished by the United States Bureau of Labor.) When complaint was made, one enthusiastic retort on the part of a corporation press was that the natural law of supply and demand must be allowed to work, that interference with exhorbitant prices meant curtailment of production at the source. The poor producer, robbed of his just right to high prices under a strenuous demand, would become discouraged and quit! On the other hand, the producer was constantly complaining that he was getting little more than before, while the rapidly increasing cost of labor was cited as proving the need of a from 100 to a 1000 per cent increase on everything--shoes, clothes, food, rent.

That is all simple and interesting enough when one accepts human nature for what it is: a thing of rough balances and equations only or a catch-as-catch-can struggle in which the strong or the shrewd survive and the weak go under. But when, in the same land in which these things occur, the air is full of a huge hubbub over the extreme merits of democracy, and when at the same time any one who says anything against profiteering or intimates that democracy as such may be subject to at least some of the faults of autocracy is looked upon as an enemy, if not an enemy alien, it becomes slightly anachronistic, to say the least.

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It is also a matter of pride with most of us, frequently expressed in disparagement of our European contemporaries, that we are a nation of workers. To hold a position in any American community, so the thought runs, a man must have a job. We do not conceal our contempt for the chap who fails to go down to an office or a business every day. Often, of course, our ostentatious _workers_ do go down but do very little work. Still, somehow it is felt by the public at large that every man owes it to the community or the nation to put in from six to ten hours outside of the residential district doing something, if no more than twiddling his thumbs. Hence the huge commuting armies oscillating to and fro, between home and office or factory. And yet can it be said that American commercial activity is so immensely more profitable than that of any other nation? Or even as much so? During the late great war it was actually proved that both Germany and England had shrewder and more profitable business schemes and methods. The German plan for national co-operative buying was one. Again, the superior efficiency of the Germans and even the English was one of the facts which burst like a flash of lightning out of a clear sky upon the astonished American, the instantaneous skill with which all national resources--food, clothing, transportation, man-power--were mobilized and put at the services of the nation, the relative cheapness of it all, the efficiency with which it was maneuvered once it was in the hands of the Government. Yet the American business man as well as the American executive, while English and French Commissionaires were instructing our factory masters and “Captains of Industry,” had been bustling down to his desk each day, his telephone to his ear, or racing from one directors’ meeting to another--and the result to America was the largest war debt per capita for time of service in the war and number of men involved of any nation in the world, not even excepting Russia. Question: Is the American business man as efficient as we think he is? As honest? As patriotic? Is he?

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Another curiosity of American character is, or was before the war, its adoration of all things foreign. Everything abroad was, if it is not now, excellent, priceless, beyond all praise or blame; whereas anything native, or even occidental, was more or less worthless or inconsiderable--even such things as the Andes and Amazon, as contrasted with the Alps and the Nile; Brazil and Argentina, Mexico and the Canadian snows were as nothing compared to Belgium or Turkey, the Riviera, Asia, Africa. One cannot help smiling a little at times at the grand manner with which the only moderately equipped foreigner, intellectually or otherwise, has been permitted to walk abroad in America and either sniff at or patronize all with which he comes in contact as though it were nothing. And the pathetic desire of the American to live up to what foreigners expected of him--even the waiters of France or the middle class or gentry of England. And as for the English lord, the French or Italian count, the Austrian or even German baron, the Spanish grandee, the Russian prince or Turkish pasha--it is folly to deny that he was--may be even yet, for all one knows--overcome by his attentions. To the American they were inherently better, in some strange sense, more versed in the ways of that great world which he longed to explore. Let a restaurant advertise a French cuisine or cook; a tailor say he is English; a beauty-parlor or dressmaker that it or she or he is of Paris; a writer or artist that he is of French, Russian, Italian, English extraction--creak goes the American knee and instanter your native American is down on his marrowbones, his eyes rolled heavenward. Of Paris! Of London! Of Rome! Of St. Petersburg! Of Vienna! Ah! How many American fortunes have been re-banked in Europe to the order of the thinnest of noble pretensions! What millions have not been expended in an all but useless effort to take on the color and surface veneer of European manners and culture! To this day a foreign make of car, watch, cloth, is inherently better than that of any American manufacture. Formerly foreign plays practically excluded the American product--and rightly enough, in my judgment. We have been “raised” on the foreign book, the foreign picture, the foreign object of art. The Swiss, French or Austrian Alps--how for a hundred years at least have they not outrivaled everything America has to offer!

And well enough, perhaps, since as yet America has no intellectual atmosphere, no native art force wherewith to present its claim, even to itself. A drab, and in places narrowly ignorant, people, imagining that it is religious, moral, conservative--a thousand things that really it is not. Since it is mental capacity that makes a country interesting to itself and others, perhaps it is the drab attitude of the American toward what he has and is which makes his land so uninteresting to himself and others. Give him a different mental attitude, more perspective, “punch,” daring in regard to life itself, and America would soon take on a luster not outrivaled by that of any other land.

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Let us contemplate in this connection another and, in so far as this essay is concerned, final phase of the American mind--for I have elsewhere dealt with moral narrowness--and that is his serious and, were it not so pathetic and at times tragic, one might say, amusing, faith in the ballot and what it will or can accomplish for him. Always, always he is voting for some one--a mayor or a State legislator every year; a congressman every two years, a senator every four or six; a governor every two and a President every four years--and he is under the illusion that thereby, by his vote, his choice of a candidate, he is running the Government and maintaining his so-called liberties. The futility of his vote in the late great war might have taught him something, if only he were to be taught. To this day he has not discovered that, in the main, he is merely voting for individuals thrust upon him by interests and forces over which he has no control, never has had, and apparently never can have, and the election or defeat of whom does not depend upon him or the individuals about whom he is so excited. Mayors, governors, state legislators, congressmen, senators, and even judges and presidents, come and go, but the powerful interests at the top remain; and however much the former may be imbued with a desire to do something for the rank and file, the latter are there to revise or repress their emotions or opinions, and the ordinary voter finds himself about where he was before--of small force or weight in the vast welter of American politics. In short, keen money-masters at the top long since learned that a bare majority of votes anywhere, in or out of congress or a state legislature, is sufficient to confer rule and that, apart from convincing the intellect by sound argument, there were many, many ways of bending the representatives of the people to their will. If this is not true, how is it that five per cent of them have ninety-five per cent of the wealth and the other ninety-five only five?

Those who have made a study of the history of the American judiciary have stood in amaze before the evidence that nonelective branches of the Government could so consistently, so openly and so contemptuously undo the work of the elective branches (The Dred Scott decision; the first nullification of the income tax; to cite only two). In what American city would an outside corporation desiring real facilities or privileges not deem itself lunatic not to see the individual local boss, who holds no office of any kind but who is nevertheless the last authority and can tell the local mayor and the local council, often the local governor, what and how? And to whom does the local boss bow--the local governor or national president? Not at all. He makes them, or helps. He bows to but one force: money, the great national monied interests, and none other. It is only when the financial powers at the top fall out among themselves that the least of benefits accrue to the people. It is always so, and has always been so. Equation--equation. The monied individual against the mass; the mass against the monied individual.

In what American city or state, pray, would a popular vote for any franchise or improvement, however needful, be of any avail unless the consent of the financial oligarchs at the top (in Wall Street principally) were first obtained? So much is this a commonplace that even the voters themselves would laugh at the suggestion of any power lying in them to obtain any such thing. Before the Government temporarily took over the railroads during the period of the great war, Lucius Tuttle (a mere single illustration, this), president of the Boston & Maine Railroad, controlled the political life of Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont and lifted up or cast down, at his personal whim, members of legislatures, governors, and United States senators. This is a matter of record, not of rumor. The quondam Senator Chandler of New Hampshire, one of the foremost senators of the nation of his day, was thrown out of office on orders from Mr. Tuttle for the most inconsequential exhibition of independence. And Mr. Tuttle took his orders from Charles S. Mellen, president of the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad; Mr. Mellen took his orders from J. Pierpont Morgan, the elder, financial master of Wall Street. And Mr. Morgan took his orders--from whom? God?

Is it not a commonplace of fact, recorded in every newspaper file in America as well as every history worthy the name, that the Goulds, Hills, Harrimans, Rockefellers, Vanderbilts and such great banking houses as Kuhn, Loeb & Company, absolutely ruled--via agents, attorneys, lobbyists, paid legislators, governors and the like--the politics of the states through which their roads passed? The little minnow voters running here and there in schools might amuse themselves as they would by voting for this, that or the other unimportant thing--a mayor, say, or a governor or a president--but let any vital question appear, something affecting the purse or privileges of the money-lords, and the votes of the voters were cast out or miscounted, their elected representatives suborned and made false to their oaths and pledges, the judiciary ruled as the money interests dictated, the newspapers made to cloud the issue with specious or false arguments, and even presidents and parties faced about, leaving the dreaming, ambitious, hopeful voter to dream on or to seek his so-called constitutional rights in some other vain or ridiculous way. Money has always ruled America, and apparently always will. As well ask five cents to contend with five billion dollars as to ask an ordinary voter or business man of minor import to maintain or obtain his so-called rights, privileges, hopes, dreams via the ballot, or any other way. Even decent consideration for him or his affairs from those above him financially has not in the main been granted. He has been whipped and harried by the very rich as they chose; and still, because he has the ballot and can go to the polls every once in so often and cast it--and at such times as he is not whimpering over his defeats--he imagines he rules!

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