MEN . vs. THE MAN 
 
 XA MONTE AND MENCKEN 
 
 
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MEN versus THE MAN 
 
 A CORRESPONDENCE 
 
 BETWEEN 
 ROBERT RIVES LA MONTE, Socialist 
 
 AND 
 
 H. L. MENCKEN, Individualist 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
 1910 
 
Copyright, 1910 
 
 BY 
 
 HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
 Published March, tgio 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 This book is precisely what it pretends to be : a 
 series of letters between friends. They were writ- 
 ten because the general subject of the organization 
 of society was one which vastly attracted both of 
 us, and because a space of three hundred miles 
 made a more intimate discussion impossible. Into 
 them there went, not so much a learned review of 
 the evidence and the prophets, as a record of per- 
 sonal, and often transient opinions and impressions. 
 Changes of position are to be noticed in more than 
 one place, but inasmuch as the purpose of each 
 disputant was to shake the stand of the other, this 
 proof of occasional success may be accepted, it is 
 hoped, without impatience. It was thought best 
 to print the letters without attempting to trans- 
 form their epistolary freedom into a more sedate 
 dialectic manner. They offer few new contribu- 
 tions of either fact or theory to the great questions 
 they presume to discuss, but it is possible that they 
 may be of some interest as showing how variously 
 the accepted facts and theories appear and appeal 
 to two somewhat eager inquirers. 
 
 La Monte. 
 Mencken. 
 
MEN VS. THE MAN 
 
 LA MONTE'S FIRST LETTER 
 
 My Dear Mencken : 
 
 You and I are fairly typical of the hosts of edit- 
 cated young men and women of upper and midcjle 
 class antecedents who are so far from satisfied with 
 life as it is that the man in the street who stylos us 
 " knockers " does not come very wide of the mark. 
 But yet we differ, and differ widely; you, in spite 
 of your sturdy independence of mind, are in the 
 main a disciple of Nietzsche, or, in other words, 
 you are an Individualist whose ideal is a splendid 
 aristocratic oligarchy of Beyond Men ruling over 
 a hopelessly submerged rabble; I am a Socialist 
 and a faithful disciple of Marx — not that I believe 
 Marx to have been superhuman or infallible, but 
 simply that I have found him to be right in so many 
 cases, that I feel that there is a strong presump- 
 tion that he is right even where I cannot clearly 
 see that he is. 
 
 Let us first examine the grounds of our basic 
 agreement, and then it will be easier to recognize 
 the reason for the very wide divergence of our con- 
 
2 Men vs. the Man 
 
 elusions. We are both idealists in the sense that 
 Don Quixote and Jesus Christ and Thomas Jeffer- 
 son were idealists, but there are idealists and ideal- 
 ists. The difference depends upon the nature of 
 the ideal. If the ideal be one capable of attain- 
 ment or at least of reasonably close approxima- 
 tion, the idealist is what we call a practical man 
 ■ — he may even be a scientist, a materialist, or an 
 atheist, as are many of the most effective and 
 determined fighters for Socialism. If the ideal be 
 one hopelessly beyond reach of attainment, if the 
 idealist hitches his wagon to a star without having 
 studied astronomy sufficiently to ascertain whether 
 the orbit of the star is along a road over which his 
 poor man-made wagon may pass in safety, then we 
 call him a dreamer, a visionary, a Utopian, or a 
 madman. It is probable that in our secret hearts 
 this is the view each of us takes of the other. 
 
 You, recognizing that within historical times 
 there has ever been a rabble of well-nigh sub-human 
 men and women, believe that the only ideal that 
 you, as a practical man, can accept is one including 
 such a rabble. To you the man who proposes 
 the abolition of this sub-human herd is a mystical 
 dreamer who ignores the stern teachings of his- 
 tory. It must be admitted that much of the cur- 
 rent Socialist literature^-H. G. Wells' " New 
 Worlds for Old," for instance — ^which presents So- 
 cialism as a scheme for human amelioration which 
 Society is free to adopt or reject as it will, as a 
 
Men vs. the Man 3 
 
 sort of patent panacea for human ills which the 
 patient may or may not elect to imbibe; it must 
 be admitted that the great bulk of this literature 
 of polite propaganda goes far toward justifying 
 your view. 
 
 But the typical Socialist of Germany, France, 
 England, and America, the man or woman who 
 gives his or her energies to educating and organiz- 
 ing and disciplining the wonderful, world-wide 
 army, ever growing, ever marching forward, un- 
 dismayed by defeat, sure of ultimate victory, al- 
 ready thirty million strong — the largest army under 
 a single banner the world has ever seen — this typ- 
 ical, work-a-day, militant Socialist does not look 
 upon himself or herself as a patent medicine ven- 
 der, but as a John the Baptist proclaiming with no 
 uncertain sound the advent of a New Order. Such 
 an army inspired by a common faith, even though 
 the faith be a delusion, animated by a common 
 purpose, even though the purpose be incapable of 
 realization, is a force that you as a practical man 
 must reckon with. 
 
 But is the faith a delusion? Is the purpose in- 
 capable of realization? Let us see. If it is im- 
 possible for the Old Order to persist, then it fol- 
 lows that a New Order must come. I will post- 
 pone for the present discussing what that New 
 Order is to be, and will proceed to show you that 
 the Old Order cannot continue. I will give you 
 as little history, political economy, and statistics 
 
4 Men vs. the Man 
 
 as may be for two reasons ; first, I know very little 
 of such things myself; second, I wish to be agree- 
 able to you, and I have found by experience that 
 practical people have an extreme distaste for exact 
 facts. 
 
 In a broad way the great difference between the 
 economy of the Middle Ages and the economy of 
 to-day, is that then production was chiefly for use 
 — for local use — while to-day production is almost 
 solely for sale. So that the smooth working of 
 our modem industrial and commercial complexus 
 depends upon the possibility of an adequate and un- 
 interrupted sale of goods. Whenever the sale of 
 goods is interrupted, as it was signally in 1873, 
 1893, ^"d ipo?) wc have great panics. 
 
 Since the latter part of the eighteenth century 
 we have had a continuous series of great mechan- 
 ical inventions which have revolutionized and are 
 day by day revolutionizing ever more rapidly our 
 mode of production. The great net result of these 
 changes is that the productive power of man has 
 been hugely multiplied. I think I am well within 
 the mark in saying that one hour's work to-day 
 produces as much as one hundred hours' work in 
 Adam Smith's day. Let us see what the concrete 
 effect of this is. If we turn to the statistics gath- 
 ered by our government at Washington, we find 
 that in 1900 the average annual product per worker 
 employed was in round numbers $2,000, while 
 the average wages were about $400. The diffi- 
 
Men vs. the Man 5 
 
 culty of disposing of the product is already begin- 
 ning to appear. It is obvious that a man with 
 $400 cannot purchase $2,000 worth of goods. 
 Over fifty per cent, of our population actually be- 
 long to the working class. Add to them the 
 farmers, whose purchasing power is not propor- 
 tionally much greater, and you have all but a 
 handful of our people. It is obvious that if our 
 total product were composed of articles of personal 
 consumption, and if we were limited to the home 
 or domestic market, the disposition of the product 
 by sale would be impossible. But we have for- 
 eign markets, and we produce pig-iron as well as 
 pig-meat. The dependence of the first great manu- 
 facturing country, England, upon her foreign sales 
 was recognized in her proud boast that England 
 was the workshop of the world. But to-day in 
 every market in the world England is meeting the 
 ever-fiercer competition of Germany and America, 
 while Japan is wresting the markets of the Orient 
 from both Europe and America, and the coming 
 industrial development of China — the true Yellow 
 Peril — is already the nightmare of every far-seeing 
 European and American conservative. The for- 
 eign market has been an immensely serviceable 
 safety-valve, but inexorable economic develop- 
 ment — or Fate or Kismet, if you will — is rapidly 
 screwing it shut. 
 
 The other safety-valve — the application of cap- 
 ital and labor to the production of pig-iron instead 
 
6 Men vs. the Man 
 
 of pig-meat — ^has been greatly developed in the 
 past decade, and as a means of partial relief prom- 
 ises to outlast the foreign market safety-valve. 
 The more capital and labor can be withdrawn 
 from the production of articles of common every- 
 day consumption, and employed in producing 
 permanent industrial or transportation plant, the 
 less becomes the immediate difficulty in disposing of 
 our annual product. There can be no doubt that 
 our recent period of prosperity was prolonged 
 and the panic of 1907 postponed by the wholesale 
 employment of capital and labor in such vast un- 
 dertakings as the tunnels under the East and North 
 rivers. But once such works are completed, they 
 facilitate the production and distribution of goods, 
 or save time or labor in some way, and thus in 
 the long run accentuate the difficulty they tem- 
 porarily relieve. 
 
 In our separate productive establishments a part 
 of the capital employed must always be invested in 
 permanent plant and a part paid out for wages 
 day by day and week by week. Competition be- 
 tween rival plants has always compelled the con- 
 stant improvement and development of machinery, 
 and has thus compelled the owners constantly to 
 invest larger and larger portions of their total 
 capital in permanent plant. This change in what 
 economists call the composition of capital has been 
 forced upon the captains of industry irrespective 
 of their wishes, and its effect has been to in- 
 
Men vs. the Man 7 
 
 crease steadily and tremendously the disproportion 
 between the value of the product and the purchas- 
 ing-power of the wage-earners employed. Alike in 
 the separate industrial plant and in the nation as 
 a whole the constantly progressing change in the 
 composition of capital — a change necessitated by 
 the process itself and that must go on — in the long 
 run makes ever more difficult the sale of the total 
 product. 
 
 We are thus confronted by a condition, not a 
 theory. The masses of the people are unable to 
 purchase more than about one-fifth of the annual 
 product, and this fatal lack of purchasing power 
 is destined to increase steadily irrespective of any 
 human will. 
 
 Are we not forced, my dear Mencken, to the 
 conclusion that we are upon the threshold of 
 economic changes so vast that no word short of 
 Revolution is adequate to describe them? I sin- 
 cerely believe that purely as a matter of economics 
 the progressive and inexorable change in the tech- 
 nical composition of capital makes a Social Revolu- 
 tion inevitable, and further that this revolution is 
 so close upon us that it behooves you and me, as 
 prudent men, to prepare for it. 
 
 What sort of a revolution is it to be? Will it 
 place in power an oligarchy of Nietzschean Im- 
 moralists — ancestors of the Beyond Men to-be? 
 Something of this sort was predicted a few years 
 ago by W. J. Ghent in his " Our Benevolent Feu- 
 
8 Men vs. the Man 
 
 dalism," and has just been far more vividly de- 
 scribed as a possibility by Jack London in that 
 vigorous and brilliant, if depressing book, " The 
 Iron Heel." 
 
 Or will it make the means of life the common 
 possession of all, and thus abolish poverty forever, 
 and usher in the era of fellowship so long fore- 
 told by bards and seers ? 
 
 To answer these questions we must make a slight 
 excursion into the field of psychology. Econom- 
 ics tell us that with all our male population be- 
 tween the ages of twenty-five and forty-five work- 
 ing three or four hours daily, we could produce 
 enough to keep our whole population in such com- 
 fort as to-day requires an income of $5,000 a 
 year. 
 
 If this is possible, and no statistician or econ- 
 omist is foolhardy enough to deny it, whether or 
 not the coming Social Revolution will bring it to 
 pass depends upon the Intelligence or desires of 
 the masses. Let us see how these are determined. 
 A man's mode of thought depends upon his mode 
 of life. The man who depends largely upon 
 changes In weather or climate, which seem to him 
 to be utterly beyond the power of the human will 
 to control, will be superstitious, whether he be a 
 red Maori savage in New Zealand, or a bar- 
 barian tan-tinted grower of vegetables on Long 
 Island or in Connecticut. But the man who works 
 with machinery which runs with uniform regular- 
 
Men vs. the Man 9 
 
 ity and is almost absolutely under human control 
 and direction, ceases to be superstitious, reasons 
 straight from cause to effect or from effect back to 
 cause, ceases to go to church or chapel to pray to 
 God for daily bread, and grows rudely and om- 
 inously unwilling to go barefooted because of an 
 over-production of shoes, or hungry because of a 
 plethora of beef and corn. 
 
 Now, as Professor Veblen has pointed out, the 
 Machine Process is dominating directly and af- 
 fecting indirectly ever more and more of our pop- 
 ulation, and the significant point is that these are 
 just the people who suffer most from the continu- 
 ance of the present system and who have every- 
 thing to gain by making the factories and railroads 
 and farms the common property of all the people. 
 The factory worker is disciplined in co-operation 
 in his daily work in the factory, he lives gregari- 
 ously in tenements, and Is accustomed to collective 
 bargaining through the medium of his union. If 
 he thinks at all, he must think toward Socialism. 
 Often for years he hardly thinks at all, but panics 
 come and bring unemployment. Unemployment 
 is a powerful mental stimulus. When the panic 
 passes and the unemployed man gets work, he is 
 very likely to become a dues-paying member of the 
 Socialist party. 
 
 Our argument has thus far brought us to the 
 conclusion that a Social Revolution is imminent, 
 and that the very conditions of their lives are com- 
 
lo Men vs. the Man 
 
 pelling to socialistic thought and desires that ever 
 growing host of the population employed in con- 
 nection with machinery — the very part of the pop- 
 ulation who have nothing to fear from a revolu- 
 tion, who, in the words of Marx, " have nothing 
 to lose but their chains, and a whole world to 
 gain." But to-day no one wholly escapes the per- 
 vasive psychological effects of the Machine Process. 
 Every twentieth century man and woman thinks 
 more or less after the fashion of the factory worker 
 of the nineteenth century. The thought-life of 
 our time is day by day more and more affected by 
 proletarian ideals and proletarian modes of ratioci- 
 nation. Here and there individuals shielded by 
 a favorable economic situation from direct contact 
 with the hard facts of contemporary bread-win- 
 ning are but little affected by the new tendencies, 
 but no one wholly escapes this influence. Thus 
 the economic and social forces which are organiz- 
 ing and drilling a mighty host of militant Socialists 
 are at the same time making the rest of the pop- 
 ulation more or less mentally indisposed to combat 
 with zeal and earnestness the forces making for a 
 new social order. 
 
 Of the active components of our population the 
 group which most nearly escapes the revolutionary 
 psychological influences we have been considering, 
 is the class of independent small producers and 
 traders. But this class Is fast disappearing before 
 the advance of the trust and the department 
 
Men vs. the Man ii 
 
 store. Where here and there we still find sur- 
 vivals of this formerly dominant typical American 
 group, we find they have lost their sturdy inde- 
 pendence of mind and character. They live in 
 daily and hourly fear of economic extinction; they 
 dread to open their daily papers lest they see in 
 them that the manipulations of a Morgan or the 
 enterprise of a Strauss shall have doomed them to 
 bankruptcy. It is quite true that this little dying 
 group is psychologically the bulwark of con- 
 servatism, but they are no longer a self-reliant 
 militant group, and within a decade, as a social 
 force or factor, they will be negligible. 
 
 The educated professional classes formerly could 
 be relied on to think and write and speak in de- 
 fense of the established order, but what of them 
 to-day and to-morrow? The constant enlarge- 
 ment and growth of our facilities for higher edu- 
 cation are overcrowding all the liberal professions, 
 and are causing unemployment to be at least as 
 common in professional life as it is in proletarian 
 life. This difficulty is aggravated by the decreas- 
 ing power of the middle classes to employ and 
 support the professional men and women. Most 
 of the ephemeral reform movements of the last 
 two decades have been inspired and led by men 
 of this class, but with the ever extending psycho- 
 logical influence of the Machine Process more and 
 more of these discontented intellectuals will adopt 
 the proletarian point of view, and place their 
 
12 Men vs. the Man 
 
 trained minds at the disposal of the revolutionary 
 forces. 
 
 We have surveyed very briefly the forces mak- 
 ing for collectivism. What of the opposition? 
 The number of those who have any real interest 
 in opposing a Social Revolution is constantly grow- 
 ing, and must constantly grow, relatively smaller. 
 But their political incompetence is even more strik- 
 ing than their numerical weakness. This surely 
 needs no further illustration than a reference to 
 the recent Congressional debates on railway rebate 
 legislation and on the panic currency bill. The 
 nearer the Social Revolution approaches, the 
 smaller the body of its active opponents becomes, 
 so that it seems likely that before the final struggle 
 is begun the forces of reaction will number little 
 more than the small group of the multi-millionaires 
 and the cowardly slum-proletariat. 
 
 My conclusion, as you will have already seen, 
 my dear Mencken, is that we are hard up against 
 the Day of Judgment, and that the only issue pos- 
 sible is some form of collectivism or communism. 
 Even if you and I felt that this outcome were de- 
 plorable, would it not be our duty, if we recog- 
 nized its inevitability, to do our part toward pre- 
 paring the public mind for the coming change? 
 To oppose a change that we cannot prevent is but 
 to dam up the mighty social forces and thus make 
 violence and incendiarism and bloodshed the more 
 likely. To work with the current of progress i§ 
 
Men vs. the Man 13 
 
 to facilitate a peaceful revolution which will pre- 
 serve for posterity unimpaired the priceless her- 
 itage we have received from the culture of the 
 ages. In the words of Karl Marx, the Socialist 
 is merely a sort of midwife helping the Old Order 
 to give birth to the New with as little pain as 
 may be. 
 
 But is the coming Social Revolution to be de- 
 plored? Is the present state of affairs so perfect 
 that educated men such as you should give of their 
 talent and energy to prolong it artificially ? Is the 
 socialistic ideal so abhorrent that it is to be post- 
 poned at any cost ? 
 
 I feel that it is useless to quote to you from Rob- 
 ert Hunter's " Poverty " the dreadful statistics of 
 the hosts who every year go to fill paupers' graves, 
 or from H. G. Wells' " New Worlds for Old " 
 the still more appalling statistics of the number 
 of English school children who are underfed, 
 diseased, and verminous. You would but repeat 
 Nietzsche's commandment, "Be hard!" and say 
 " These are the weak; let them go to the wall! " 
 But surely even you would be unable to deafen 
 your ears to " The Bitter Cry of the Children," so 
 brilliantly made articulate by John Spargo. But 
 I do confidently appeal to you in the name of aris- 
 tocracy, of art, literature, and the drama. You 
 believe that the aristocrats should rule because 
 you deem them worthy to rule; you believe the 
 mob should be abandoned to its lot because it is fit 
 
14 Men vs. the Man 
 
 for nothing better. Go beneath the surface, my 
 friend. To what do the aristocrats owe the noble 
 and refined traits I freely admit and even rejoice 
 that they possess? To the facts that they and 
 their ancestors for several generations have had 
 ample food and leisure. I do not say that a full 
 stomach and time for idleness are all that is needed 
 to make a gentleman or lady. But I do say that a 
 gentleman or lady cannot be made without three 
 generations of stomachs that have not suffered from 
 innutrition, and three generations of hands that 
 have not been so worn with toil as to make them 
 unfitted for other occupations. The Socialist ideal 
 would mean full stomachs and ample leisure for all. 
 I do not say that with a Presto, Change! the So- 
 cial Revolution will make the Bowery tough a 
 Chesterfield. But I do say that it will give to all 
 mankind the material foundation upon which alone 
 aristocratic character can be built. I am a So- 
 cialist, not because I am an enemy of aristocracy, 
 or because I undervalue it, but because I wish the 
 proportion of aristocrats to reach the highest pos- 
 sible maximum. 
 
 Surely it is needless for me to point out to you 
 that to-day commercialism has so tainted and pol- 
 luted art, literature, and the drama, that most 
 of our artists, fiction-writers, and playwrights are 
 mental prostitutes, and, saddest of all, some of 
 them are so degraded that they do not even know 
 they are prostitutes, but seriously talk of their art I 
 
Men vs. the Man 15 
 
 I feel as though I were indulging in a platitude 
 when I venture to remind you that it was because 
 every Athenian freeman was a cultured and com- 
 petent critic that sculpture and painting and the 
 drama attained to such perfection in the days of 
 Pericles. The socialistic ideal is that no man or 
 woman, to say the least, shall be less cultivated than 
 the average citizen of the Athens of Pericles. To- 
 day, as you know but too well, a play of the better 
 sort can only be put on for an occasional matinee 
 at an hour when our commercialized men cannot 
 attend the theater, for to-day the only appreciable 
 portion of the American community that has 
 leisure to attain anything worthy of the name of 
 culture is made up of the women of the upper 
 classes. 
 
 If you wish to see better manners, more worthy 
 fiction, higher art, and nobler drama, as I know 
 you do, your only course is to become a Socialist 
 comrade, and give us your aid in hastening the 
 advent of the Social Revolution. 
 
 Will you do it? 
 
 Yours faithfully, 
 Robert Rives La Monte. 
 
MENCKEN'S REPLY TO LA MONTE'S 
 FIRST LETTER 
 
 My Dear La Monte : 
 
 In one thing, at least, you and I are in agree- 
 ment, and that is in our common belief that the 
 world is by no means perfect. This, at first glance, 
 seems to convict us of pessimism, but, as a matter 
 of fact, we are thoroughgoing optimists, for both 
 of us are firmly convinced that, however lamentable 
 its present degree of imperfection, the world may, 
 should, and will grow better. So far, indeed, we 
 agree fully, but when we come to discuss the pre- 
 cise method and manner of this betterment, and to 
 define the goal which lies ahead — when we strive, 
 in brief, to lay bare the anatomy of human progress 
 — our divergence, it quickly appears, is abysmal. 
 Your ideal picture of the best possible world seems 
 to me a very fair picture of the worst possible 
 world, and I have no doubt that, until I convert 
 you and lead you up to grace, my ideal picture, 
 as I have sketched it elsewhere in the past, and as 
 I shall try to draw it, bit by bit, once more, bears 
 and will bear to you much the same aspect. 
 
 But before I go into an exposition of my own 
 theory of progress, I want to point out to you a 
 
 i6 
 
Men vs. the Man 17 
 
 certain fault in the argument of your letter — a cer- 
 tain fault which seems to me to reach its max- 
 imum virulence to-day in the writings of Socialists, 
 just as it reached a maximum sixty years ago in the 
 writings of Christian theologians. It may be 
 called, for want of a better label, a magnificent 
 faith in incredible evidence. At its worst, it leads 
 to a ready acceptance of generalizations that are 
 supported by nothing more logical than a wish 
 that they were true. At its best, it seems to infect 
 you Socialists with a willingness to adopt and de- 
 fend any alleged fact or group of facts, however 
 dubious, so long as it seems to prove your 
 case. 
 
 This fault, my dear La Monte, is not peculiar to 
 you, and I am firmly convinced that, if you are ever 
 hanged, it will be for some other offense. As a 
 matter of fact, I have found it in far more glorious 
 flower in the compositions of those older and 
 more enraptured Sociahsts whose works you have 
 sent me, for the good of my soul, from time to 
 time. But you are guilty, too, if only in the sec- 
 ond or third degree, and this I hope to prove to 
 you. 
 
 You begin the argument of your letter, for ex- 
 ample, by quoting a government report, by which 
 it appears that the average American workingman 
 turns out $2,000 worth of goods a year, and gets 
 $400 for his labor. I am utterly unable to verify 
 these figures (in which embarrassment I am ex- 
 
1 8 Men vs. the Man 
 
 actly on a footing with the statistician who fathers 
 them) , but they seem very plausible, and so I shall 
 join you in accepting them. Your own belief in 
 their accuracy is plainly without reservation, for 
 you proceed to make them the foundation of your 
 argument. " It is obvious," you say at the start, 
 " that a man with $400 cannot purchase $2,000 
 worth of goods," and then you go on to examine 
 this fact in the light of the Socialist philosophy, 
 and to demonstrate its immorality. Setting aside, 
 for the present, your final conclusions, I am per- 
 fectly willing to admit that you are right about 
 the man with $400. His money will buy but $400 
 worth of goods, and this leaves $1,600 worth to be 
 sold to someone else. Two interesting questions 
 now arise. The one is, What other man buys 
 this $1,600 worth? and the other is. What does 
 this sum of $1,600 represent? 
 
 The second question is the more important, since 
 a consideration of it reveals the answer to the 
 first. Your answer to it, if I understand you 
 rightly, is that the $1,600 represents the individual 
 workingman's annual contribution to the nation's 
 store of goods, over and above the amount he is 
 able to buy back with his $400 and consume. 
 This is what Karl Marx calls " surplus produce," 
 and its value he calls " surplus value." You very 
 properly observed that a surplus of $1,600 in every 
 $2,000 is a very large one, and point out that, 
 lacking a ready market, the accumulation of such 
 
Men vs. the Man 19 
 
 surpluses is bound to get the nation into the un- 
 enviable position of a merchant with an enormous 
 and unsaleable stock. In all of this your logic is 
 sound enough, but you start out, unfortunately, 
 from fallacious premises, for the surplus of $1,600 
 about which you and the government statisticians 
 discourse in such alarm is almost entirely an aca- 
 demic myth. In a word, it has no actual existence, 
 save in small part. Outside of books on political 
 economy it is never heard of. 
 
 As a matter of sober fact — and I speak here 
 from experience in one very typical line of manu- 
 facturing, as I shall show — the value of the aver- 
 age workman's contribution to the nation's store of 
 goods, over and above the amount he buys back 
 with his wages, is seldom equal to the value of the 
 goods he thus buys back and consumes. The $400 
 man's contribution to the national surplus, far from 
 being- $1,600 a year, is probably little more than 
 $160, and certainly a good deal less than $400. 
 You assume that, by the mere exercise of his 
 necromancy upon an empty void, he creates a value 
 of $2,000, but here you assume altogether too 
 much. What he really does do is this: he takes 
 $1,200 worth, more or less, of raw material, adds 
 to It (let us be generous and say) $800 worth of 
 skill, and takes back $400 for his labor. His em- 
 ployer now owns a lot of goods which has cost him 
 $1,600 — $1,200 for raw material and $400 paid 
 to the workman — and he offers it for sale at 
 
20 Men vs. the Man 
 
 $2,000. The difference — $400— covers the inter- 
 est upon the employer's capital, the cost of selling 
 the goods, the cost of light, heat, and taxes, and 
 the cost of rent. Whatever is left over represents 
 the employer's reasonable wage for his enterprise, 
 industry, and skill. As I hope to show you later 
 on, this wage is as much a true wage as the work- 
 man's, no matter how large it may be. But of this 
 more anon. 
 
 What we have to consider here is the $1,200 
 worth of raw material. You may argue, I fear, that 
 this is a preposterously excessive valuation, but let 
 me assure you that it is not. It so happens that I 
 once enjoyed, for three years, a rather intimate ac- 
 quaintance with the workings of a successful cigar 
 factory — a very typical example of the American 
 manufacturing plant of moderate capital. Well, 
 in that factory at the time, let us say, there was be- 
 ing produced a brand of cigars which cost about 
 $22 a thousand to manufacture — I say " to manu- 
 facture " and not " to sell," — and the workmen 
 who made them were getting $6 a thousand for 
 their labor. What did the balance of $16 repre- 
 sent? Was it the profit of the employer? Was 
 it the workman's free contribution to the hoard 
 of capital? Not at all! What it actually did 
 represent was the cost of the material used by the 
 workman in making cigars — of the raw material 
 brought to the factory and made ready for the 
 tables, with all duties, taxes, transportation, and 
 
Men vs. the Man 21 
 
 insurance charges paid. It represented almost ex- 
 actly the cost of producing the cigars, packed, 
 stamped, and ready for the selling department — 
 less the wages paid to the cigar-maker! This 
 sum, you will note, was almost thrice the amount 
 paid to the cigar-maker for the actual rolling of 
 the cigars. Therefore, my assumption of a ratio 
 of $400 to $1,200 in the preceding paragraphs 
 was not without some justification in fact. 
 
 But what did the cost of the raw material, of the 
 taxes, and of the packing represent? My answer 
 is simple: it represented labor. The money paid 
 for the actual tobacco represented the labor of the 
 farmers who had wrung it from a reluctant earth, 
 and the labor of the handlers and experts who had 
 sorted it and cured it, and of the trainmen and mar- 
 iners who had transported it. Without this labor, 
 the tobacco would have had no existence ; it was, lit- 
 erally, the incarnation of hours of toil. The money 
 paid for it by the manufacturer went, in great part, 
 straight back to these laborers. Putting the profits 
 of landowners, of brokers, and of stockholders In 
 transportation companies at the maximum, the la- 
 borers got at least a half. And the tale of the 
 wood used in the boxes, of the labels pasted upon 
 them, of the gum used to fasten the labels was 
 the same. Again, it was the same with the money 
 paid as taxes. It went directly into the hands of 
 the government's employees, who were engaged, 
 day and night, in producing that one commodity 
 
22 Men vs. the Man 
 
 without which all other commodities cease to be — 
 civilized security. 
 
 Therefore, let us assume that of all the $1,200 
 paid for raw material, $600 goes to workingmen 
 as wages, and $600 goes to middlemen and cap- 
 italists as profits. We have yet to account for 
 $800 of the $2,000, but of this, as we have seen, 
 $400 goes to the workingman principally under 
 consideration. There remains, then, after all else 
 has been accounted for, the sum of $400. What is 
 this? Are we to regard it as the profit of the 
 manufacturer? In part, yes; but in part — no ! It 
 is profit, true enough, but it is gross profit, and 
 out of it must come the cost of selling and of up- 
 keep. 
 
 To get some notion of this cost, let us go back 
 to our cigar factory. We saw there, you will re- 
 call, that a cigar-maker got $6 a thousand for 
 making cigars, and that the raw material, brought 
 to his table, together with the work of sorting and 
 packing his cigars afterward, cost $16. This 
 made the cost of the cigars, so far, $22 a thou- 
 sand. The employer, let us say, got $30 a thou- 
 sand for these cigars In his market, and his gross 
 profit was thus $8 a thousand. But was his actual 
 profit $8? By no means! It cost him, to begin, 
 fully $3 a thousand to maintain his office and sell 
 his goods, and he had to write off $1.50 more for 
 bad bills, and another dollar or so for those ex- 
 penses and hazards Which no man can foresee. 
 
Men vs. the Man 23 
 
 Who got the $3 charged to upkeep and selling 
 costs? Practically every cent, I believe, went to 
 workingmen — to coal miners for digging coal for 
 his furnaces, to clerks for keeping his books, to 
 salesmen for visiting his customers, to locomotive 
 engineers for hauling his salesmen, to hotel cooks 
 for cooking their meals, and so on ad infinitum. 
 And the net profit that remained — ^what of that? 
 I shall show you some day, I hope, that this was 
 wages, too — the wages of the employer him- 
 self, paid to him for his skill at managing his 
 capital, for his skill at buying raw material 
 cheaply, and at inducing customers to buy his 
 product, and for his skill, finally, at cajoling and 
 coercing his workingmen into laboring for the $6 
 he paid them. 
 
 Now, to what have all of our figures brought us ? 
 Simply to this fact: that the $2,000 worth of goods 
 produced by the $400 workman of your parable 
 represents, not $400 worth of labor plus $1,600 
 worth of inflatipn, but $400 worth of labor plus 
 at least $1,000 worth of other labor. The $400 
 man may be the principal actor in the drama, and 
 his skill may be the principal factor in the con- 
 version of sunlight and human energy into market- 
 able commodities, but the men whose toil pre- 
 pares his raw material and the men whose toil 
 makes it possible for him to work at peace and 
 sell his product have had their share, too. What 
 remains over, after all of them have been paid, is 
 
24 Men vs. the Man 
 
 very little. And so we come to a conclusion which 
 makes all of your argument about panics, crises, 
 and changing social orders vain, and it is this : that, 
 while your $400 workman can buy back but $400 
 worth of the $2,000 worth of goods, all of the 
 workmen who have had a hand in producing it are 
 perfectly able to buy back, with their collective 
 wages, nearly all of it. I am not much of a hand 
 at statistics, but I venture the guess that in every 
 $1,000 worth of goods produced under normal 
 conditions in America to-day, fully $800 represents 
 the wages of workmen. Thus your original sur- 
 plus value of $1,600, which you regard with such 
 trembling and in which you see such staggering 
 portents, shrinks, on cold inspection, to $400 1 
 
 No doubt you will say at once, as a good Marx- 
 ian, that this surplus value, whether large or small, 
 stands for capitalistic exploitation of the working- 
 man, and that as such it is an evil. You may even 
 argue, with Marx, that its evil lies, not in its actual 
 size, but In its very existence — that any surplus 
 value is immoral, and that the workingman should 
 get all he produces. I shall try to answer this in 
 a future letter, but meanwhile it may be well for 
 me to record my earnest and enthusiastic dissent. 
 As a matter of fact, the possibility of exploiting 
 the workingman seems to me to be the one thing 
 that justifies an optimistic view of human progress. 
 It is this thing that gives existence a goal and a 
 zest. It is this that insures to the human race all 
 
Men vs. the Man 25 
 
 of those comforts and privileges which make it (at 
 least in all save its lowest orders) superior to the 
 race of milch cows. It is this that gives us the 
 agreeable assurance that, however passionately we 
 may occasionally embrace altruism, either as a 
 religious creed or as a political doctrine, we are 
 still being driven forward and upward, unceasingly 
 and willy-nilly, by the irresistible operation of the 
 law of natural selection. 
 
 Your facts and figures puzzle me in places other 
 than the one we have been considering, not be- 
 cause they seem to me to prove anything, but be- 
 cause I find it utterly impossible to put any faith in 
 their accuracy. You say in one paragraph, for in- 
 stance: " Economics tell us that with all our male 
 population between the ages of twenty-five and 
 forty-five working three to four hours a day, we 
 could produce enough to keep our whole population 
 in such comfort as to-day requires an income of 
 $5,000 a year." Let us look into this a bit, and 
 see what it means. You have already laid it down, 
 you will recall, that the average American workman 
 earns $400 a year, and you say in your letter that 
 " over fifty per cent, of our population actually be- 
 long to the working class." Let us suppose that 
 the number is exactly fifty per cent., and that each 
 man produces $2,000 worth of goods a year, as 
 you say. 
 
 Well, then, you propose to restrict labor to those 
 between twenty-five and forty-five, and so cut our 
 
26 Men vs. the Man 
 
 working force in two by making idlers of those 
 under twenty-five and those over forty-five. But 
 at the same time you propose to double the force 
 that remains by requiring every able-bodied per- 
 son of the fifty per cent, now idle, between twenty- 
 five and forty-five years old, to join the workers. 
 Thus your working force will be substantially the 
 same as it is at present. 
 
 But you then propose to reduce its working hours 
 to " three or four " a day, and so divide its pro- 
 ducing capacity by two. What will be the result? 
 Simply that your workman's yearly output will be 
 $i,ooo worth of goods, instead of $2,000 worth, 
 as at present, and that his income, even supposing 
 him to get every cent of it back, will be but $1,000. 
 On $1,000 a year how is he to obtain " such com- 
 fort as to-day requires an income of $5,000? " 
 
 In this I have given you the benefit of the doubt 
 at every step. I have assumed, for instance, that 
 fifty per cent, of the population is now made up of 
 idlers, even though you yourself admit, in one 
 place, that these idlers make up " but a handful of 
 our people." I have assumed, too, that Socialism 
 could achieve the impossible feat of paying for the 
 same thing twice — of paying the farmer, that is, 
 for raising tobacco, and then paying the cigar- 
 maker for raising it. I have assumed everything 
 you could desire, and yet I come to an absurdity at 
 the end. 
 
 " Economics tell us," you say, and therein I see 
 
Men vs. the Man 27 
 
 your fundamental error. You have too much faith 
 in the so-called science of economics, and you ac- 
 cept the wildest notions of its most extravagant 
 sages as gospel truth. If " economics tell us " 
 that our present army of workers, working half 
 time, will be able, under Socialism, to earn twelve 
 and a half times as much as at present — well, then, 
 it is high time to demand proofs. My personal 
 view is that no such proofs exist. The whole 
 idea, in a word, is sheer nonsense. There is no 
 more ground for it, in the actual facts of existence, 
 than for the doctrine that, if I had brown eyes in- 
 stead of blue, I would be a Methodist bishop at 
 $8,000 a year. 
 
 The science of economics, as I understand it, is 
 based upon a series of deductions from human 
 experience. These deductions vary with the econ- 
 omist's education, environment, religion, and poli- 
 tics, and are often irreconcilable. In those de- 
 partments of the science, indeed, in which the most 
 distinguished professors have exercised their in- 
 tellects, the divergence is most marked. I need 
 only refer, in support of this, to the appalling 
 debates regarding the currency which break forth 
 every now and then. The conclusion a layman 
 must necessarily derive from these debates is that 
 the vast majority of experts are wrong. This con- 
 clusion grows firmer on reflection, for it is apparent 
 that each economist's fiscal theory is but the deduc- 
 tion he has personally drawn from facts open to 
 
28 Men vs. the Man 
 
 all. Therefore, why pay too much heed to him? 
 Why not examine the facts themselves and evolve 
 your own theories? 
 
 You may reply to this that my argument is 
 foolish, and that its application to any other 
 science — say pathology, for instance — ^will reveal 
 its fatuity. My answer is that I am not applying 
 it to pathology, for the facts of pathology are, in a 
 sense, available only to the man specially trained 
 to observe accurately. The facts of political econ- 
 omy, on the other hand, are the facts of every- 
 day life. If my meaning is not clear, let me direct 
 your attention to Adam Smith's Theory of Rents 
 and Ehrlich's Theory of Immunity. If you will 
 find me one man, of average intelligence and edu- 
 cation, who fails to understand Smith at his first 
 reading, I will give you a doUar. If, on the other 
 hand, you find me one man, of average intelligence 
 and education, who understands Ehrlich on a first 
 reading, I will give you another dollar. The one 
 requires only a reasonable degree of sanity; the 
 other requires special training and a wealth of 
 actual experience. 
 
 For these reasons I am chary of accepting 
 economic theories, and much prefer the evidence to 
 the verdict. I have no doubt that the gentleman 
 who prepared the government report you quote was 
 an expert hired at enormous expense, and yet I 
 can't rid myself of the notion that the money paid 
 to him was wasted. 
 
Men vs. the Man 29 
 
 But I must have done with this series of ob- 
 jections to your authorities, else this letter will have 
 exhausted you without any statement of the creed 
 I propose to offer in opposition to Socialism. This 
 creed consists, first and last, in a firm belief in 
 the beneficence and permanence of the evolutionary 
 process. I believe, in other words, that the human 
 race is incomparably the highest race of beings at 
 present existing in the world, and I believe further 
 that, as the years come and go, its superiority to 
 the lower races of animals is growing constantly 
 greater. I believe that you and I are far superior 
 men, in many ways, to our great-grandfathers, and 
 that our superiority over Christopher Columbus, 
 Julius Caesar, and Moses, In many more ways, is in- 
 finite. 
 
 But what do I mean by superiority? What, In 
 other words, is my definition of progress ? Natur- 
 ally enough, it is hard to frame such a definition 
 in a few words, but I may throw some light upon 
 my notion of the thing itself by showing how it is 
 to be measured. Progress, then, as I see It, is 
 to be measured by the accuracy of man's knowledge 
 of nature's forces. If you examine this sentence 
 carefully you will observe that I conceive progress 
 as a sort of process of disillusion. Man gets 
 ahead, in other words, by discarding the theory of 
 to-day for the fact of to-morrow. Moses believed 
 that the earth was flat, Caesar believed that his 
 family doctor could cure pneumonia, and Columbus 
 
30 Men vs. the Man 
 
 believed that devils often entered into harmless 
 old women and turned them into witches, and 
 that the lightning was a bomb hurled by a wrath- 
 ful God at sinful man. You and I, knowing 
 that all three of these distinguished men were 
 wrong in their beliefs, are their superiors to that 
 extent. 
 
 Now, all the illusions which have afflicted the 
 human race since its days of nonage may be divided 
 into two classes. First come those which have 
 arisen out of the imperfection of our powers of 
 perception; and secondly come those that have 
 arisen out of errors made in the interpretation of 
 facts accurately observed. An excellent example 
 of the first class is the familiar doctrine, held to- 
 day by the ignorant, and until very recently by 
 all, that the disease called malaria is caused by 
 breathing impure air. Tested by the evidence of 
 the naked eye, this doctrine seemed entirely sound. 
 But by and by men began to use microscopes to aid 
 their eyes, and one day, seized by a happy thought, 
 an enterprising man took the trouble to place a 
 drop of blood from a malaria patient's veins be- 
 neath his glass. Since then the old doctrine has 
 been put aside forever by all whose beliefs are 
 worth hearing, and we know that malaria is caused, 
 not by impure air, but by various minute parasites 
 of the class of sporozoa. The human race, within 
 historic times, has rejected thousands of delusions 
 of this class, but many yet remain. As we perfect 
 
Men vs. the Man 31 
 
 apparatus to reinforce our dull senses they will go 
 overboard, one by one. 
 
 The delusions and illusions of the second class 
 resolve themselves into two grand, or king delu- 
 sions. One of them is the notion that a human 
 being, by his words or acts, is capable of suspend- 
 ing or modifying the immutable laws which govern 
 the universe. The other is the notion that a human 
 being is able to make laws for himself which shall 
 have the force of the immutable laws aforesaid. 
 Out of the first of these delusions springs the 
 doctrine of the efficacy of prayer, and with it all of 
 the world's vast and bizarre stock of religions. 
 Out of the second springs the ancient science of 
 morality, with all its multitude of efforts to com- 
 bat the eternal and inexorable law that the strong 
 shall prevail over the weak. The latest of such 
 efforts is comprehended in the political theory 
 called Socialism. It is the most fatuous of 
 the whole lot, for it proposes, not only to make 
 human laws as immutable as natural laws, but actu- 
 ally to make them supersede and nullify those 
 natural laws. Here, indeed, we behold human be- 
 ings on the topmost pinnacle of bombastic folly. I 
 can imagine no more stupendous egotism. 
 
 In this you may perceive, though perhaps only 
 dimly, for my ex;position may be none too clear, 
 the reasons which impel me to decline your in- 
 vitation to join your crusade. I am no apologist 
 for the existing order of things. Like Huxley, I 
 
32 Men vs. the Man 
 
 believe that the management of the universe is by 
 no means perfect, but such as it is, we must ac- 
 cept it. If you point out that human progress, as 
 I have defined it, involves the practical enslavement 
 of two-thirds of the human race, my answer is 
 that I can't help it. If you point out that a slave 
 always runs the risk of being oppressed by a par- 
 ticularly cruel master, I answer that a master al- 
 ways runs the risk of having his brains knocked 
 out by a particularly enterprising slave. If you 
 point out that, by my scheme of progress, it is 
 only the upper stratum that actually progresses, I 
 answer that only the upper stratum is capable of 
 progressing unaided. 
 
 The mob is inert and moves ahead only when it 
 is dragged or driven. It clings to its delusions with 
 a pertinacity that is appalling. A geological epoch 
 is required to rid it of a single error, and it is so 
 helpless and cowardly that every fresh boon it re- 
 ceives, every lift upon its slow journey upward, 
 must come to it as a free gift from its betters — 
 as a gift not only free, but also forced. Great men 
 have fought and died for the truth for a thousand 
 years, and yet the average low-caste white man of 
 to-day, throughout Christendom, still believes that 
 Friday is an unlucky day, still believes that ghosts 
 walk the earth, and still holds to an immovable 
 faith in signs, portents, resurrections, redemptions, 
 miracles, prophecies, hells, gehennas, and political 
 panaceas. 
 
Men vs. the Man 33 
 
 It may be true that the existing order of things 
 demands bloody human sacrifices, but, so far as I 
 am able to see it, the thing is inevitable. What- 
 ever you may say against it, you cannot deny that 
 the existing order of things at least produces prog- 
 ress. It produced, for instance, a Pasteur, and if, 
 directly and indirectly, in the course of long ages, 
 a million serfs had to be used up to make this 
 Pasteur possible, I, for one, believe that the result 
 was worth the cost. The work that Pasteur did 
 in the world put the clock of time ahead a hundred 
 years, and conferred a permanent and constantly 
 cumulative benefit upon the whole human race, 
 freeman and slave alike, now and forevermore. 
 Would the lives of a million serfs have been of 
 equal value ? Not at all ! They would have 
 given to the world only the matter and energy that 
 they took out of it, and their influence on progress, 
 if they exerted any influence at all, would have 
 been reactionary. 
 
 You latter-day Socialists have all sorts of ex- 
 cuses and compromises to offer. You say, for 
 instance, that under Socialism the Pasteurs of the 
 world would be cherished and encouraged just as 
 much as under the law of natural selection. But 
 the objection to this is that, after two generations 
 of Socialism, there would be no more Pasteurs. 
 To produce the things the world needs to-day and 
 to-morrow we must have workmen who toil. But 
 to produce the things that will make the world a 
 
34 Men vs. the Man 
 
 hundred years hence a better place to live in than 
 the world of to-day we must have men who, by ex- 
 ploiting, either directly or indirectly, the work of 
 these toilers, may have the ease and leisure to 
 make great plannings and to find out great truths. 
 Yours sincerely, 
 
 H. L. Mencken. 
 
LA MONTE'S SECOND LETTER 
 
 My Dear Mencken: 
 
 I have derived infinite delight from your 
 sanguine letter. Although your statistics have 
 confused me where they have not amused me, the 
 latter part of your letter has made my future task 
 far easier by helping me to place your mental posi- 
 tion chronologically. I have no intention of being 
 offensive when I tell you that you appear to me to 
 belong in part to the Greece of Pericles and in 
 part to the France of Diderot. 
 
 When you assert that it is necessary to exploit 
 and dehumanize millions of proletarians In order 
 to produce here and there a Pasteur or two, you 
 merely paraphrase the defense of human slavery 
 that we find again and again, now explicit and 
 now implicit, in the works of Aristotle, Plato, and 
 Xenophon. In their mouths the argument was a 
 good one, for in their times the productivity of 
 human labor was so pitifully small that only by 
 keeping hordes in slavery was it possible for any 
 to enjoy the leisure requisite for the attainment of 
 culture. But, though you, my dear Mencken, live 
 in an age when steam and electricity have been 
 harnessed by man, you still repeat arguments that 
 
 35 
 
36 Men vs. the Man 
 
 were obsolescent in the days of Cicero; for Antip- 
 aros, a Greek poet of that era, saw in the inven- 
 tion of the water-mill the promise that humanity 
 might be freed from the curse of slavery, and sang 
 thus in praise of the leisure that gracious Demeter 
 was bestowing upon mankind : — 
 
 " Spare the arm which turns the mill, O millers, 
 and sleep peacefully. Let the cock warn you in 
 vain that the day is breaking. Demeter has im- 
 posed upon the nymphs the labor of the slaves, 
 and behold them leaping merrily over the wheel, 
 and behold the axle-tree, shaken, turning with its 
 spokes and making the heavy-rolling stone revolve. 
 Let us live the life of our fathers, and let us re- 
 joice in idleness over the gifts that the Goddess 
 grants us." 
 
 How many eons does it take for a Mencken 
 to catch up to an Antlparos? 
 
 When you measure progress by the increase of 
 accurate knowledge, and thus apotheosize human 
 reason, you reproduce perfectly the spirit that 
 animated Rousseau and Diderot and the great 
 French Encyclopedists. In the words of Engels, 
 " the French philosophers of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury, the forerunners of the Revolution, appealed 
 to reason as the sole judge of all that is. A ra- 
 tional government, rational society, were to be 
 founded; everything that ran counter to eternal 
 reason was to be remorselessly done away with." 
 When once this was done, all would be for the 
 
Men vs. the Man 37 
 
 best in the best of all possible worlds. This was 
 an entirely justifiable conception in their day. But 
 since then the experiment has been tried ; the French 
 Revolution has turned Christendom upside down, 
 and the Third Estate has been enthroned in every 
 civilized land; but the reality attained is far from 
 corresponding to the noble dreams of the great 
 French materialists of the eighteenth century. 
 Most of us have learned something from this ex- 
 perience, and have begun to suspect that human 
 progress is more dependent upon the development 
 of the processes whereby human stomachs are filled 
 and human backs are covered than it is upon the 
 increase of academic knowledge. But you, dear 
 child of the eighteenth century, continue to com- 
 pose in unruffled serenity your charming odes to 
 Eternal Reason. 
 
 Possibly you will understand now why I smile 
 when I read your profession of faith, " that you 
 and I are far superior men, in many ways, to our 
 great-grandfathers, and that our superiority over 
 Christopher Columbus, Julius Caesar, and Moses, 
 in many more ways, is infinite." 
 
 Do you think I am unreasonable in asking this 
 superior twentieth century man to produce some 
 arguments against Socialism, not borrowed bodily 
 from the Greece of Pericles and the France of 
 Rousseau ? 
 
 In my first letter I introduced a few figures 
 merely to illustrate and make plain my argument. 
 
38 Men vs. the Man 
 
 Your letter leads me to believe that instead of 
 serving the purpose I had intended, they have on 
 the contrary confused you and obscured my argu- 
 ment. This is not to be wondered at, as I am no 
 statistician and have always found figures a burden. 
 In order to make my position quite clear, I hope 
 you will permit me to recapitulate my argument 
 without figures. 
 
 The object of introducing improved methods 
 of production, such as machinery, is, as Antiparos 
 clearly saw two thousand years ago, to save labor. 
 If the work done by any given machine does not 
 cost its owner less than it would cost him to have 
 the same labor done by men and women by the 
 former methods, the machine will not be used. 
 But, in a society where the different producers of 
 goods sell competitively on the market, each in- 
 dividual owner of a productive plant is driven, 
 whether he likes or not, to make continuous im- 
 provements in his machinery. If he does not he 
 will be undersold and driven into bankruptcy. 
 Every such improvement means an increase in the 
 product relatively to the wages paid out in that 
 establishment, so that the proportion of the total 
 product in society at large, that is in excess of the 
 quantity that the wage-earners are able to pur- 
 chase for their own consumption, is growing and 
 must continue to grow until it eventually reaches 
 such proportions as to compel a Social Revolution. 
 The more developed is the mechanical equipment, 
 
Men vs. the Man 39 
 
 the industrial technique of a country, the larger 
 becomes the proportion of the national produce 
 that the working-class are unable to purchase; in 
 other words, the smaller becomes the fraction of 
 their own product that the workers receive. For 
 this reason the workers of England and Germany 
 receive a far smaller fraction of the product of 
 their labor than do the workers of the compara- 
 tively backward countries, such as Italy, Spain, and 
 Portugal; and the American workers of 1908 are 
 able to buy a much smaller fraction of the product 
 of their labor than could the American workers 
 of 1850. You will kindly note that I did not ad- 
 vance in my former letter, and I do not advance 
 now, any argument based on the immorality of 
 such an arrangement. I would think as readily of 
 questioning the morality of the law of gravitation. 
 It matters very little to my argument just what 
 the exact share of the workers may be at any given 
 time, but what my argument is based on is the 
 constant decrease In the ratio between the pur- 
 chasing power of the working-class and the value 
 of the total national product; and this ratio 
 must decrease as long as we continue to im- 
 prove our machinery, and competition makes such 
 improvement of our industrial technique impera- 
 tive. As I said in my first letter, it is the " pro- 
 gressive and inexorable change in the technical 
 composition of capital that makes a Social Rev- 
 olution inevitable." 
 
40 Men vs. the Man 
 
 The figures as to average wages and product 
 per worker that I used for illustrative purposes 
 in my former letter were quoted by memory from 
 Tables i and 2 in Census Bulletin No. 150 (Sec- 
 ond edition, September 15, 1902). This Bulletin 
 No. 150 is based on manufactures alone, and shows 
 the average wages to be $432, and the product per 
 worker to be something in excess of $2,000. The 
 figures in these census bulletins are gathered 
 chiefly to show the growth of industry, and for 
 other commercial purposes, and not to meet the 
 needs of economic study, so that it is somewhat 
 difficult, if not impossible, to ascertain just what 
 elements other than the new value added by the 
 worker this $2,000 contains. Lucien Sanial, of 
 Northport, Long Island, one of our ablest statisti- 
 cians, has made a careful study of the census of 
 1900 in connection with Bradstreet's and Dun's 
 reports, and other sources, and his conclu- 
 sion is that our total product in 1900 was 
 $24,500,000,000, and the total value of the labor- 
 power used in its production, $5,815,000,000, and 
 that the portion of the product that Labor was in 
 a position to purchase was 23.74 per centum. 
 
 It should be remembered that the workers pur- 
 chase everything at the very highest retail prices, 
 while the value of product given in the census is 
 based on factory prices; so that in order to ascer- 
 tain how much of the product the workers can 
 purchase, one must add to the census valuation 
 
Men vs. the Man 41 
 
 of the product a certain percentage to cover the 
 cost of transporting the product to market and 
 the costs of distribution in the form of wholesale 
 and retail profits. I have found by calculation 
 that the percentage thus added by Mr. Sanial was 
 forty-two per cent. Using this percentage, I have 
 figured from Census Bulletin No. 150 the work- 
 ers' share of the total value of our manufactured 
 product at every decade from 1850 to 1900. 
 Even if this percentage is not accurate, it does 
 not vitiate my conclusion that the share of the 
 workers is decreasing, for the calculation for each 
 tenth year is made on exactly the same basis. 
 Here are my results tabulated : — 
 
 Percentage of product workers could purchase in 1850. . 36.1 
 
 i860. 
 
 31.2 
 
 1870. 
 
 31 -3 
 
 1880. 
 
 33-7 
 
 1890. 
 
 30.5 
 
 " " 1900. 
 
 27.0 
 
 You will of course at once note that the work- 
 ers' share rose 2.4 per centum in the decade from 
 1870 to 1880, but if we turn to the figures for 
 capital invested in manufacture, we will find that 
 in that decade the capital invested only rose from 
 $2,118,208,769 to $2,790,272,606, which was 
 scarcely enough to keep abreast of the growth of 
 population, so that as a matter of fact there was 
 little, if any, advance in industrial technique dur- 
 
42 Men vs. the Man 
 
 ing that decade, while in the decade from 1850 to 
 i860, when Labor's share decreased nearly five 
 per centum, the capital invested nearly doubled, 
 growing from $533,245,351 to $1,009,855,715, 
 showing a tremendous improvement in machinery. 
 I have no idea that these figures are strictly cor- 
 rect, but I think that they do show beyond cavil 
 that the purchasing power of the working-class 
 is, to say the least, growing constantly more in- 
 adequate to perform its economic function in a 
 society based on private ownership of the means of 
 production. If we take the figures for particular 
 industries, the same result is more strikingly 
 brought out. Fred D. Warren of Girard, Kansas, 
 has extracted from the " Eighteenth Annual Re- 
 port of the Commissioner of Labor " the follow- 
 ing information in regard to the pig-iron industry : 
 
 1870 
 
 1880 
 
 i8go 
 
 1900 
 
 66 
 
 81 
 
 260 
 
 395 
 
 $453 
 
 $304 
 
 $460 
 
 $So6 
 
 Product per man (in tons) . . . 
 
 Average wages 
 
 Average profit made from 
 
 each worker $322 $360 $405 $900 
 
 I take it that pig-iron is a far more typical mod- 
 ern industry than is the cigar-making industry, 
 which you discuss, as the latter has been far less 
 revolutionized by machinery and chemistry. At 
 any rate, I do not feel competent to enter upon 
 a discussion of the cigar business, as my only con- 
 nection with it has been that of a consumer — 
 
Men vs. the Man 43 
 
 when Fortune smiled — and you give no source of 
 your statistics save your own experience; so that I 
 am compelled to leave this field to you. 
 
 You will, I think, admit that by the methods of 
 economists and statisticians I have shown that 
 there is a growing surplus of goods, and that the 
 disposition of this surplus constitutes a very real 
 difficulty, even if you are not ready to admit that 
 it is of itself sufficient to compel a Social Revolu- 
 tion. But, curiously enough, you, the panegyrist 
 of Eternal Reason, who measure progress by the 
 growth of accurate knowledge, distrust this same 
 human intelligence when it is applied to economics 
 and sociology, and would appear to hold that in 
 this one domain more credence is to be given to the 
 man in the street than to the man with trained in- 
 telligence who has devoted years to the study of 
 these very questions. I am free to admit that it 
 is rather disconcerting for an opponent of Social- 
 ism who looks for the increase of knowledge to 
 bring about a Nietzschean millennium to find that 
 knowledge of economics is in inverse ratio to 
 prejudice against Socialism — that as the former 
 rises, the latter melts away. But this seems to 
 be the sad fact. Listen to this tale of woe poured 
 out not long ago by Leslie M. Shaw, ex-Secre- 
 tary of the Treasury, at an alumni dinner of 
 Dickinson College at the Hotel Saint Denis in 
 New York. 
 
 " Socialism Is being taught on every hand, and 
 
44 Men vs. the Man 
 
 I am alarmed by the general trend of things in 
 this connection. At our Chautauquas the lecturers 
 are all preaching the doctrine. Teachers of So- 
 ciology in our schools and colleges are doing the 
 same thing. With a few exceptions, they are So- 
 cialists, as you can find out by a few moments of 
 conversation with them; and the exceptions are 
 anarchists. 
 
 " Our public libraries are full of socialistic lit- 
 erature. Why, in a large city recently, where 
 there was a strike, the reading-room was packed 
 day after day with all kinds of people. When the 
 librarian was asked what they were reading, he 
 replied : ' Socialism, every one of them. There is 
 not a book on Socialism in any language that is not 
 here.' 
 
 " Sociology, as it is taught in our colleges, is 
 nothing more than a fad — and a dangerous one, 
 too. You cannot build up men's minds with fads. 
 Mr. Wilshire, the socialistic editor, recently asked 
 a friend of mine if he would arrange for a joint 
 debate on Socialism with a professor in one of our 
 large universities. When my friend went to the 
 professor, the latter said: 
 
 " ' No, I won't debate on Socialism, because 
 Wilshire and I agree.' 
 
 " Even the pulpit nowadays reflects some so- 
 cialistic doctrines, and it is too bad." 
 
 No doubt Mr. Shaw would agree with you 
 that the troublesome " surplus " of goods about 
 
Men vs. the Man 45 
 
 which I " and the government statisticians dis- 
 course in such alarm is almost entirely an academic 
 myth"; that, in a word, "it has no actual ex- 
 istence, save in small part," that " outside of books 
 on political economy it is never heard of." But 
 both you and he would have to admit that Chaun- 
 cey M. Depew's reputation for virginal ignorance 
 of economics is spotless, and yet Senator Depew 
 in what many of his fellow-citizens call " his great 
 speech " at the Republican Convention of 1900 in 
 Philadelphia, that renominated President McKin- 
 ley, said : " We produce in this great country of 
 ours every year $2,500,000,000 more of goods 
 than we can consume." It seems that knowledge 
 of the existence of that surplus had leaked out- 
 side of purely academic circles eight years ago. 
 And the New York Sun of December 20, 1908, 
 contained a long letter from Berlin, explaining 
 that the reason there had been at that time so 
 much adverse criticism of the Kaiser was that Ger- 
 many had been passing through a severe business 
 crisis, and that therefore many indiscreet acts of 
 his majesty that would have been passed over 
 lightly in prosperous times had been the target 
 for the most venomous attacks. Here is one 
 sentence from this letter which I commend to your 
 careful attention: "Existing markets are crowded 
 with wares for which there are no profitable 
 buyers." 
 
 In Germany it would appear that even news- 
 
46 Men vs. the Man 
 
 papermen had heard of this troublesome surplus, 
 which, in the opinion of the writer of the Sun let- 
 ter, must sooner or later drive Germany into a 
 war with England in her desperate struggle to 
 find an outlet into which she can pour this plethora 
 of commodities. 
 
 I think it is now evident that knowledge of this 
 pestilential superabundance is not confined to 
 economists, statisticians, and Socialists. I think 
 that the figures I have already given you prove it 
 to be a most pregnant reahty. It may be well for 
 me to say that in preparing my figures of the 
 workers' share of the product of our manufactur- 
 ing industries for 1850, i860, 1870, 1880, 1890, 
 and 1900, I, in every instance, deducted from the 
 total value of the product as given in the Census, 
 first, the value of the partially manufactured goods 
 used as materials in those industries, and, second, 
 the value of the true raw materials used in them, 
 so that my figures represented as nearly as possible 
 nothing but the new value added by the workers in 
 the process of manufacture. But, if you will still 
 remain skeptical about the real existence of this 
 " academic myth," permit me to quote to you a 
 few figures from the " Fifth Annual Report of the 
 United States Steel Corporation for the Fiscal 
 Year ended December 31, 1906," which, thanks 
 to the kindness of Fred D. Warren, is lying be- 
 fore me as I write. 
 
 From page 5, I quote: 
 
Men vs. the Man 47 
 
 " The total net earnings of all properties after 
 deducting expenditures for ordinary repairs and 
 maintenance (approximately $28,000,000), em- 
 ployees' bonus funds, and also interest on bonds 
 and fixed charges of the subsidiary companies, 
 amounted to — $156,624,273.18." 
 
 On page 24 the average number of employees 
 for the same year (1906) on all the properties 
 of the Corporation is given as 202,457, ^"d the 
 total annual salaries and wages as $147,765,540. 
 
 If you add together the net profits ( from which 
 you will note all possible deductions have been 
 made), and the wages (which include the princely 
 salaries of the Steel Trust officials), you will find 
 that the profits are 51.46 per cent, of the whole 
 and the wages are 48.54 per cent. 
 
 Of course the Steel Trust profits are figured 
 on the basis of factory prices for the product, 
 which accounts for this apparently high ratio of 
 the workers' share to the total. Allowing for this 
 fact, these figures agree fairly closely with those 
 for our manufactures in general which I have 
 made above from Bulletin 150. 
 
 But I care not what the exact percentage may 
 be. The fact that this Steel Trust report estab- 
 lishes beyond a peradventure is that there is a tre- 
 mendous surplus to be marketed. 
 
 In discussing the cigar business, after allowing 
 for " interest upon the employer's capital, the 
 cost of selling the goods, the cost of light, heat, 
 
48 Men vs. the Man 
 
 taxes, and the cost of rent " and various other 
 items you say: " Whatever is left over represents 
 the employer's reasonable wage for his enterprise, 
 industry, and skill. As I hope to show you later 
 on, this wage is as much a true wage as the work- 
 man's, no matter how large it may be." 
 
 Let me call your attention to the fact that 
 every particle of " enterprise, industry, and skill " 
 used in managing and superintending the vast busi- 
 ness of the Steel Trust is furnished by salaried 
 employees, and that those salaries for " enterprise, 
 industry, and skill " are included in the wage ac- 
 count I have quoted, and that after this " true 
 wage," as you call it, has been paid in full and 
 most liberally, our old friend " the Troublesome 
 Surplus " still stands there, with undiminished 
 girth, smiling at us, and asking, " Well, and what 
 are you going to do with me?" Do you not 
 think he is entitled to a serious answer? 
 
 The answer our captains of industry have been 
 making for the past few years, as I pointed out in 
 my former letter, has been to devote capital more 
 and more to the improvement and enlargement of 
 what we may call our permanent industrial and 
 transportation plant, but while this effectively re- 
 lieves the symptoms of distress for the time being, 
 it unfortunately aggravates the disease in the long 
 run by facilitating production and transportation. 
 There are two other answers you may be tempted 
 to make: one is that it is possible for the leisure 
 
Men vs. the Man 49 
 
 class to increase its wasteful expenditure suffi- 
 ciently to meet the requirements of the case, the 
 other is that war and calamity may Intervene 
 and cause an adequate destruction of goods. Pro- 
 fessor Thorstein Veblen has discussed both of these 
 possible remedies very interestingly in his remark- 
 able book, " The Theory of Business Enterprise " 
 (Scribners', New York, 1904). His conclusions 
 are that it is out of the question for private ex- 
 travagance and waste to be raised to an adequate 
 pitch, but that we may look hopefully to war and 
 calamity as palliatives. 
 
 " The persistent defection of reasonable profits," 
 he says, in discussing the former point, " calls for 
 a remedy. The remedy may be sought in one or 
 the other of two directions : ( i ) in an increased un- 
 productive consumption of goods; or (2) in an 
 elimination of that ' cutthroat ' competition that 
 keeps profits below the ' reasonable ' level. If 
 enough of the work or of the output is turned to 
 wasteful expenditures, so as to admit of but a 
 relatively slight aggregate saving, as counted by 
 weight and tale, profitable prices can be main- 
 tained on the old basis of capitalization. If the 
 waste is sufficiently large, the current investment 
 in industrial equipment will not be sufficient to 
 lower prices appreciably through competition. 
 
 " Wasteful expenditure on a scale adequate to 
 offset the surplus productivity of modern industry 
 is nearly out of the question. Private Initiative 
 
50 Men vs. the Man 
 
 cannot carry the waste of goods and services to 
 nearly the point required by the business situation. 
 Private waste is no doubt large, but business prin- 
 ciples, leading to saving and shrewd investment, 
 are too ingrained in the habits of modern men to 
 admit an effective retardation of the rate of saving. 
 Something more to the point can be done, and in- 
 deed is being done, by the civilized governments 
 in the way of effectual waste. Armaments, pub- 
 lic edifices, courtly and diplomatic establishments, 
 and the like, are almost altogether wasteful, so far 
 as bears on the present question. 
 
 " The waste of time and effort that goes into 
 military service, as well as the employment of the 
 courtly, diplomatic, and ecclesiastical personnel, 
 counts effectually in the same direction. But how- 
 ever extraordinary this public waste of substance 
 latterly has been, it is apparently altogether in- 
 adequate to offset the surplus productivity of the 
 machine industry, particularly when this productiv- 
 ity is seconded by the great facility which the mod- 
 ern business organization affords for the accumula- 
 tion of savings in relatively few hands. There is 
 also the drawback that the waste of time involved 
 in military service reduces the purchasing power of 
 the classes that are drawn into the service, and so 
 reduces the amount of wasteful consumption which 
 these classes might otherwise accomplish. 
 
 " So long as industry remains at its present level 
 of efficiency, and especially so long as incomes con- 
 
Men vs. the Man 51 
 
 tinue to be distributed somewhat after the present 
 scheme, waste cannot be expected to overtake pro- 
 duction, and can therefore not check the untoward 
 tendency to depression." (Pages 255-258.) 
 
 But what waste is unable to do for us, war 
 fortunately has proved itself able to accomplish. 
 But is the present generation of men, who, you 
 tell us, are infinitely superior to Christopher Co- 
 lumbus, Julius Caesar, and Moses, going to re- 
 main long contented with a system that depends 
 for its perpetuation on the frequent recurrence of 
 war, fire, earthquake, and calamity? 
 
 What war has done for us of late is well brought 
 out by Veblen in the following passage : — 
 
 " Since the seventies as an approximate date 
 and as applying particularly to America and in a 
 less degree to Great Britain, the course of affairs 
 in business has apparently taken a permanent 
 change as regards crises and depression. 'During 
 this recent period, and with increasing persistency, 
 chronic depression has been the rule rather than 
 the exception in business. Seasons of easy times, 
 ' ordinary prosperity,' during this period are pretty 
 uniformly traceable to specific causes extraneous 
 to the process of industrial business proper. In 
 one case, the early nineties, it seems to have been 
 a peculiar crop situation, and in the most notable 
 case of a speculative inflation, the one now 
 (1904) apparently drawing to a close, it was the 
 Spanish-American War, co'Jtpled with the ex- 
 
52 Men vs. the Man 
 
 penditures for stores, munitions, and services 
 incident to placing the country on a war footing, 
 that lifted the depression and brought prosperity 
 to the business community. If the outside 
 stimulus from which the present prosperity takes 
 its impulse be continued at an adequate pitch, the 
 season of prosperity may be prolonged; otherwise 
 there seems little reason to expect any other out- 
 come than a more or less abrupt and searching 
 liquidation." (Pages 250-251.) 
 
 This was written in 1904. We were soon 
 blessed with the Russo-Japanese War, the San 
 Francisco Earthquake, and the Baltimore Fire, so 
 that the " stimulus " was " continued at an ade- 
 quate pitch," and the " season of prosperity " was 
 "prolonged" until November, 1907, when there 
 occurred " a more or less abrupt and searching 
 liquidation." In spite of his unfortunate handi- 
 cap of an unusually thorough knowledge of politi- 
 cal economy, do you not think Professor Veblen 
 was able to make a fairly accurate analysis of the 
 situation? 
 
 Relying upon my own far more limited knowl- 
 edge of economics, I have no hesitation in predict- 
 ing that the present period of depression will last 
 at least seven years unless ( i ) in the meantime 
 the " increase of accurate knowledge " or the hard 
 facts of adversity lead us to establish the Co- 
 operative Commonwealth, or (2) unless a great 
 war, such as the Sun (N. Y.) Berlin correspond- 
 
Men vs. the Man 53 
 
 ent suggests between Germany and England, breaks 
 out. I confess the second akernatlve appears to 
 me to be far the more probable. 
 
 This letter is already so unconscionably long that 
 I can but touch upon the question of the prob- 
 able hours of labor and the standard of comfort 
 In the society of the future. In my former let- 
 ter I suggested that from three to four hours a 
 day with all the male population between the ages 
 of twenty-five and forty-five working usefully 
 would suffice to keep all our people in such com- 
 fort as to-day requires an income of $5,000 a 
 year. This arouses your incredulity, naturally 
 enough, and you devote several pages to proving 
 its impossibility. Perhaps I should have made it 
 plainer that I had in mind the income per family, 
 and not per capita. But, had I done so, I doubt 
 not my statement would have appeared scarcely 
 less incredible to you. One fundamental difficulty 
 is that the life of the future — such a life as is 
 pictured in William Morris' " News from No- 
 where " — is in all respects so different from life 
 
 " In the days of the years we dwell in, 
 that wear our lives away," 
 
 that the two quantities are really incommensurable, 
 but I can think of no feasible way of giving you 
 an idea of the standard of comfort that I believe 
 will be universal in " the wonderful days a-coming 
 
54 Men vs. the Man 
 
 when all shall be better than well " save by suggest- 
 ing in dollars an income that enables an American 
 family to-day to approach a similar standard of 
 comfort and well-being — I say " approach," be- 
 cause I do not believe any income, however large, 
 will to-day make possible the joy of living that 
 will be world-wide in the wonderful days to be. 
 My own opinion is that in my former letter I 
 named too low a figure. In many of our cities to- 
 day it takes $5,000 a year to pay the rent of 
 such a house as every family ought to demand. 
 
 The trouble with your mathematical demonstra- 
 tion of my folly is that you make no allowance for 
 the amount of labor that is now wasted by the 
 anarchy of our competitive system. The simplest 
 illustration of this is the oft-used milk-business. 
 Count the number of wagons delivering milk on 
 your block some morning, and compare it with the 
 number of postmen delivering letters, and you will 
 begin to form some faint idea of the vast aggregate 
 of unnecessary labor that is being done to-day. I 
 believe it impossible to estimate exactly the quan- 
 tity of this wasted labor that could be eliminated 
 under a co-operative system. Sidney A. Reeve, 
 in his book " The Cost of Competition " (New 
 York: McClure, Phillips & Co., 1906), states that 
 the amount of labor thus wasted is at least double 
 that actually usefully employed in production. I 
 do not vouch for the accuracy of this calculation, 
 but I am sure you will feel the more inclined to 
 
Men vs. the Man 55 
 
 give it credence when I gladly assure you that Mr. 
 Reeve is not an economist. I have ascertained by 
 reference to " Who's Who " that he was Professor 
 of Steam and Hydraulic Engineering at Wor- 
 cester Polytechnic Institute from 1896 to 1906, 
 and Lecturer on Steam Engineering at Har- 
 vard University in 1907. These subjects would 
 seem to me to require an aptitude for acquiring 
 your sunimum bonum, accurate knowledge. 
 
 Another vast economy we will make, and that 
 you did not take into consideration, is to close up 
 all the smaller and more poorly equipped plants, 
 and do all our work in the most perfect plants that 
 science can devise. The trusts have already be- 
 gun this process for us. The Sugar Trust closed 
 up about seventy-five per cent, of the plants it con- 
 trolled a few years ago, and the Whiskey Trust 
 put out of operation sixty-eight distilleries out of 
 eighty. It is impossible to set a limit to the econ- 
 omy possible in this direction. 
 
 I believe it impossible to prove my estimate ac- 
 curate, but I feel sure that a very little thought 
 along the hnes I have suggested will convince you 
 that it is distinctly moderate. 
 
 Professor Hertzka of Austria some years ago 
 In his " Laws of Social Evolution " calculated 
 what the (then) 22,000,000 people of Austria 
 might do, If properly organized. 
 
 " It takes," he estimates, " 26,250,000 acres of 
 agricultural land, and 7,500,000 of pasturage, for 
 
56 Men vs. the Man 
 
 all agricultural products. Then I allowed a house 
 to be built for every family, consisting of five 
 rooms. I found that all Industries, agriculture, 
 architecture, building, flour, sugar, coal, Iron, ma- 
 chine-building, and chemical production, need 
 615,000 laborers employed eleven hours per day, 
 300 days a year, to satisfy every imaginable want 
 for 22,000,000 inhabitants. 
 
 "These 615,000 laborers are only 12.3 per 
 cent, of the population able to do work, excluding 
 women and all persons under sixteen or over fifty 
 years of age; all these latter to be considered as 
 not able. 
 
 " Should all the 5,000,000 able-bodied men in 
 the country be engaged in work. Instead of 615,000, 
 they need only to work 36.9 days every year to 
 produce everything needed for the support of the 
 population of Austria. But should the 5,000,000 
 work all the year, say 300 days — ^which they would 
 probably have to do to keep the supply fresh in 
 every department — each one would only work one 
 hour and twenty-two and a half minutes per day. 
 
 " But to engage to produce all the luxuries, in 
 addition, would take, In round figures, 1,000,000 
 workers, classed and assorted as above, or only 
 twenty per cent, of all those able, excluding every 
 woman, or every person under sixteen or over 
 fifty, as before. The 5,000,000 able, strong male 
 members could produce everything imaginable for 
 the whole nation of 22,000,000 in two hours and 
 
Men vs. the Man 57 
 
 twelve minutes per day, working 300 days a 
 year." 
 
 It is nearly impossible to judge of the accuracy 
 of such an estimate, but there are some accurate 
 data forthcoming to show what we could do in 
 this country. J. L. Franz has shown by figures 
 taken from the " Thirteenth Annual Report of the 
 Commissioner of Labor " for 1898 (Washington, 
 1899) that by using the methods actually used 
 on the big western wheat farms in 1898, to pro- 
 duce the wheat (350,000,000 bushels) actually 
 used for home consumption in 1898, would have 
 required only the labor of 1,000,000 persons work- 
 ing one hour a day on every week-day of the 
 year. (See International Socialist Review, Vol. I, 
 
 P-357-) 
 
 Work to-day is such a curse that it is very 
 natural and pardonable to hail extremely short 
 hours of labor as the chiefest of blessings, but we 
 err in doing so, for, as my good friend, Henry L. 
 Slobodin of New York, reminded me in a letter 
 the other day, " those who emphasize the short 
 hours of labor which will be necessary in future 
 society as a great advantage miss the point of the 
 Socialist position. The modern Socialist's position 
 is that whereas labor is and is considered at present 
 a hardship and almost a calamity, in the future 
 it will be a glad and joyous exercise of natural 
 functions. The tendencies which may be perceived 
 now in a very weak form are to make labor pleas- 
 
58 Men vs. the Man 
 
 ant and attractive. On the other hand, there is a 
 tendency to make pleasures useful. These two 
 tendencies converge and will meet in the society of 
 the future. So that generally speaking in the 
 future all labor will be more of a pleasure than the 
 pleasures are now, and the pleasures of the future 
 will be more productive than the labor is now. 
 From that point of view, to discuss how short the 
 hours of labor will be in the future is unneces- 
 sary." 
 
 Space will not permit me to take up here your 
 startling assertion that " after two generations of 
 Socialism, there would be no more Pasteurs." 
 Surely you do not mean to contend that adversity 
 and penury are favorable to the development of 
 scientific genius, and that by abolishing poverty we 
 will make the genesis of genius impossible ? But I 
 am comforted by the thought that, even if you 
 are right, and we are to produce no more Pasteurs 
 in the society of the future, at any rate we shall 
 have far less need for them than we have to-day. 
 When we shall have definitely abolished poverty 
 from the earth those medical and chemical savants 
 who have hitherto found their chief occupation in 
 devising means of fighting or curing diseases that 
 are in large part the products, direct or indirect, 
 of poverty and the filth caused by poverty, will 
 have leisure to devote to devising chemical 
 processes for performing the dirty work which Is 
 to-day done by cheap and dirty men and women. 
 
Men vs. the Man 59 
 
 They will also find a fertile field in discovering 
 chemical methods of producing nutritive sub- 
 stances. 
 
 How the abolition of poverty will compel our 
 Pasteurs to change their occupations was strik- 
 ingly brought home to his hearers by Dr. Linsly 
 Williams of the Vanderbilt Clinic In a speech he 
 made before the delegates of the Brooklyn Central 
 Labor Union in the Auditorium Hall of the Mu- 
 seum of Natural History. The occasion was 
 Brooklyn Labor Union Day of the International 
 Tuberculosis Exhibition. I quote briefly from 
 the newspaper account of his speech : 
 
 " Dr. Williams began by saying that although 
 everybody was more or less affected by the rav- 
 ages of tuberculosis, the working class suffered 
 particularly, as thirty-three per cent, of the work- 
 ers died from the dread disease. . . . Then, 
 striking the keynote of his discourse, the doctor de- 
 clared that the greatest predisposing cause of the 
 white plague was low wages and working under 
 unsanitary conditions. He told of the unhealthful 
 way in which a great deal of the work of the 
 world was done, and as a proof of his statements 
 said that while the average annual death rate per 
 thousand from tuberculosis was two and a half for 
 the general public, the rate for stone-cutters was 
 5.4, for cigar-makers 5.3, and for printers, 4.3, 
 with the majority of the workers in the other 
 trades also above the average rate. On the other 
 
6o Men vs. the Man 
 
 hand, the death rate for doctors was 1.6, and for 
 farmers only i.i. 
 
 " In conclusion Dr. Williams made an impressive 
 plea for cleanliness and concerted effort in the work 
 of fighting the white plague, and also took occa- 
 sion to score those ' superior ' individuals who 
 calmly assert that everybody can be clean and have 
 fresh air if they want to. ' It is easy to tell people 
 to be clean,' said he, ' but when one has to work 
 long hours for low wages I tell you it is almost 
 impossible to be clean and have plenty of fresh 
 air. When people are huddled together in the 
 crowded tenements it is no easy thing to take a 
 bath, and if one opens the windows for air, 
 instead of real air, a volume of smoke and dirt 
 makes one close them again. The main thing in 
 this fight is to get better pay for your labor so that 
 you can live in better houses and have better food 
 and thus be enabled to resist the attacks of the 
 disease.' " 
 
 There are several other things I would like to 
 say to you in regard to this Pasteur argument of 
 yours, but they will have to wait for another letter, 
 as this one is already far too long. I hope you 
 will pardon its excessive length and believe me 
 when I promise not to sin in this particular way 
 again. 
 
 Let me hear from you soon. 
 
 Faithfully, 
 
 R. R. La Monte. 
 
MENCKEN'S REPLY TO LA MONTE'S 
 SECOND LETTER 
 
 My Dear La Monte : 
 
 When I dropped my last epistle into the letter 
 box there went with it a pious hope that the mod- 
 est reductio ad absurdum I had attempted might 
 rescue you from your maze of fantastic statistics, 
 or, at least, that it might implant in you a certain 
 salutary distrust of statisticians. But I see now 
 that this hope was a vain thing, and doomed to an 
 early death, for you return to the attack with fig- 
 ures that are even more fantastic than those you 
 discharged in your first salvo. Perhaps, however, 
 I have no right to dispute these figures in such an 
 offhand manner, for I have no doubt that, at bot- 
 tom, there may be a good deal of truth in them. 
 But I am on the safe side, I believe, when I main- 
 tain that, whatever their degree of accuracy may 
 be, you and your Socialist friends demand no proof 
 of it, but take it on trust, and that the deductions 
 you draw from them show a great deal more en- 
 thusiasm than logic. 
 
 You begin, for instance, by summoning to the 
 witness stand a professor from faraway Austria, 
 and he, in turn, starts out by announcing a discov- 
 
 6i 
 
62 Men vs. the Man 
 
 ery. He has found, he says, that a lot of energy 
 is wasted in Austria, and that the work of that 
 country, which now engages all but a small minor- 
 ity of its inhabitants, might be done very well by 
 comparatively few of them. Following the cus- 
 tom of statisticians, he does not offer us the facts 
 upon which this conclusion is based, but as for the 
 conclusion itself, he is very sure of its truth. Given 
 an eleven-hour work-day, he says, and 300 work- 
 days a year, and it would be possible for 615,000 
 Austrians to provide all the necessities of life 
 for the 22,000,000 inhabitants of the empire. 
 From this he reaches the conclusion that, if 
 5,000,000 men lent a hand (there are just about 
 5,000,000 able-bodied men of working age in the 
 empire), instead of but 615,000, each man would 
 have to labor but one hour and twenty-two and a 
 half minutes a day. 
 
 All of this makes an interesting experiment in 
 simple arithmetic, but when you cite it, in all seri- 
 ousness, as proof of your argument that, under So- 
 cialism, the average workingman of America, 
 working but three or four hours a day, would earn 
 $5,000 a year, you exhibit a lamentable inability to 
 differentiate between the possible and the probable, 
 the abstract and the actual, the conceivable and the 
 ponderable. Your Austrian professor discourses so 
 glibly, not of real human beings, but of algebraic 
 x's of his own creation, and you follow him in mis- 
 taking these x^s for men and women. He sets 
 
Men vs. the Man 63 
 
 aside, as of no account whatever, almost every one 
 of the multitude of yearnings, ambitions, desires, 
 and appetites which distinguish man from the red 
 ant, and you follow him in holding them to be 
 negligible. He draws figures on a slate — and you 
 assume they are alive. 
 
 It would take a long letter to show, in detail, 
 how widely your professor's elaborate syllogism 
 varies from the facts of existence. I need only 
 point out here the absurdity of supposing that it 
 would be possible to find 5,000,000 men who would 
 be at once capable of doing their work efficiently, 
 and willing to do it, day after day, even for but 
 an hour and a half a day, without some effort to 
 rid themselves of the necessity for doing it at all. 
 To make this clear, let me recall to you the strong 
 human impulse which Friedrich Nietzsche (whom 
 you despise) denominated " the will to power." 
 This will to power is more than a mere emotion 
 or idea, for it exists in practically every man, even 
 the most degraded, and the mere fact that a man 
 makes some effort to keep alive shows that he pos- 
 sesses it. It is, indeed, the primal life instinct, 
 which Arthur Schopenhauer, long before Nietzsche 
 was born, called " the will to live." 
 
 But how does this " will to power " or " will 
 to live " manifest itself? In civilized human so- 
 cieties, I believe, it shows itself chiefly in a sort of 
 constant emulation and rivalry, which, beginning 
 as a lowly effort to exchange the minimum of 
 
64 Men vs. the Man 
 
 muscular effort for the maximum of food, expands, 
 higher up, into the complex and powerful thing 
 called ambition. That is to say, there lies, deep 
 down in the soul of every man who deserves to 
 be regarded as human, an irresistible and never- 
 failing impulse to sell his energy and ability as 
 dearly as he can. The more he gets in payment, 
 the more consideration and comforts he will en- 
 joy, and the more desirable his position will appear 
 when compared to the condition of other men. 
 Herein we perceive Nietzsche's reason for chang- 
 ing Schopenhauer's " will to live " into " will to 
 power," for he saw clearly that the only way a 
 man may accurately measure his success in this ef- 
 fort is by observing the extent of his mastery of 
 his environment — which includes, as one of its prin- 
 cipal factors, his fellow-men. No matter how 
 slight the degree of a man's victory over the 
 natural and social forces which work for his de- 
 struction or enslavement, he is to that extent the 
 superior of the man who has been destroyed or en- 
 slaved. It is the constant effort of every man to 
 gain such victories — to increase his comparative 
 safety and importance. Even the saint whose cult 
 is self-sacrifice has a yearning to be, to some ap- 
 preciable extent, more sacrificing than his rival on 
 the next pillar. Even the Pope, at the very pin- 
 nacle of human eminence, would be glad, no doubt, 
 to exchange places with an archangel. 
 
 Well, you will find, on looking into the matter. 
 
Men vs. the Man 65 
 
 that the average workingman has before him two 
 practicable methods for satisfying his will to power. 
 By the first method he enters into a conspiracy 
 with other workingmen which has for its object an 
 artificial " bulling " of the market wherein their 
 skill is sold. That is to say, they endeavor to 
 raise the market value of their skill without offering 
 any corresponding improvement in its quality. By 
 the second method, the individual workman seeks 
 so to improve his own skill that it shall bring more 
 than the average price. 
 
 The second method would seem to be the more 
 attractive, for experience shows that it frequently 
 has the result of lifting the man who adopts it 
 out of the ranks of workingmen altogether, since 
 a man who is wise enough to sacrifice imminent 
 ease for permanent benefit is a man of forethought, 
 and forethought is a quality so valuable and so 
 rare that its possessor rises in the world almost 
 automatically. But as a matter of fact, compara- 
 tively few workmen adopt this method of making 
 secure their livelihood and safety. The vast 
 majority adopt the first method. Instead of seek- 
 ing to increase their efficiency, they try to force 
 their employer (who is but the spokesman or rep- 
 resentative of the rest of humanity) to take it for 
 granted. In other words, they try to do as little 
 as they can for their wages, and to do that little 
 with the least possible expenditure of skill and at- 
 tention. 
 
66 Men vs. the Man 
 
 The average workingman, indeed, particularly 
 in America, is notable chiefly for his firm faith 
 that his need for working is an intolerable evil, 
 which has been laid upon him by diabolical task- 
 masters, and which he is justified in shirking as 
 much as possible. It is his constant effort to give 
 less energy to his work to-day than he gave to it 
 yesterday, and he forces society to condone and 
 even encourage this effort by a sort of permanent 
 threat to cease working altogether. Search the 
 whole history of trades-unionism in America, and 
 yoii will find scarcely half a dozen attempts, 
 ,by unions, to increase the efficiency of their 
 members. But you will find a million attempts 
 to penalize society for calling that efficiency in 
 question. 
 
 And so, after a long journey, we come upon one 
 very serious difficulty in your professor's maze of 
 figures. He has brought forward his proofs 
 mathematical — and he has forgotten the objections 
 psychological. He has shown that 5,000,000 
 faithful and efficient workingmen could do all the 
 work of Austria in less than two hours a day — 
 and he has overlooked the fact that there are not 
 5,000,000 faithful and efficient workingmen in the 
 country. He has, in a word, made the colossal 
 mistake of assuming that, during one hour of work, 
 the workingman does all the work that it is pos- 
 sible to do in an hour. He has made no allow- 
 ance for Inefficiency, for shirking, for laziness, for 
 
Men vs. the Man 67 
 
 drunkenness, for illness. He has made no allow- 
 ance for the fact that, in a large number of neces- 
 sary industries, seasonal and climatic variations 
 make long and unavoidable periods of inactivity. 
 He has forgotten the ineradicable tendency of the 
 workingman to go on strikes and holidays. He 
 has wasted all of his fine logic upon a purely 
 theoretical workman, who never was on land or 
 sea. Putting the efficiency of this monster at 100, 
 I think I am safe in assuming that the efficiency 
 of the real workman of flesh and blood may be 
 set down at fifteen. And if this is true, the pro- 
 fessor's theoretical workday of one hour and 
 twenty-two and a half minutes becomes a real 
 workday of more than nine hours. 
 
 But anticipating all this, you answer in one place 
 that, under Socialism, men will look upon work as 
 a pleasure, and hint that the present effort to shirk 
 will disappear. If I were convinced, my dear La 
 Monte, that you actually held to any such belief, 
 I would certainly not give over my scant leisure 
 to this correspondence. As a matter of fact, you 
 must be well aware that the traits and weaknesses 
 which make the workman of to-day an unwilling 
 and inefficient laborer are ingrained character- 
 istics of all low-caste men — as plainly so, indeed, 
 as their superstitiousness, grossness, emotional sug- 
 gestibihty (particularly in political matters), and 
 fear of hell — and that no social cataclysm, how- 
 ever appalling, will convert them at one stroke 
 
68 Men vs. the Man 
 
 into new beings. That they will improve in the 
 course of time, I am firmly convinced, for they have 
 improved steadily in the past, but their progress 
 toward perfect efficiency, like their progress toward 
 perfect knowledge, will always be behind that of 
 the classes above them. The average working- 
 man of to-day is a better man than Moses in at 
 least one respect, for he is far less superstitious, 
 but the Pasteurs of to-day are still as far ahead 
 of him as Moses was ahead of the slaves who built 
 the pyramids. 
 
 Herein you will discern my first and last ob- 
 jection to Socialism. I believe, in a word, that it 
 overlooks certain ineradicable characteristics of the 
 human animal, and certain immutable laws of the 
 biological process. Going further, I believe that 
 these characteristics and laws deserve to be fostered 
 and obeyed rather than opposed, for to their in- 
 fluence we owe all that we have of progress. 
 Every comfort that we have to-day was devised 
 by some man who yearned to get more out of life 
 than the men about him; every great truth that 
 helps us face existence bravely and confidently was 
 unearthed by some philosopher who yearned to be 
 honored above all other philosophers; every law 
 that gives us safety and order was written by some 
 law-maker who yearned to see his own notion of 
 security and order prevail over the notions of 
 others. Just as every micro-organism in the sea 
 ooze fights for that pin point of space which will 
 
Men vs. the Man 69 
 
 give it life while its fellows die, just so every 
 man fights for that microscopic degree of superi- 
 ority which gives him eminence over his fellow- 
 man — better food, a better coat, more leisure, 
 greater honor, respect and love, and a more poign- 
 ant and widespread feeling of something lacking 
 after he is gone. You Socialists, seeing part of 
 this dimly, talk of a " materialistic conception of 
 history," and say Karl Marx invented it. But you 
 are wrong, for it was invented for all time on the 
 day that the first living cells began to fight over 
 their first meal. 
 
 Such is the law of the survival of the fittest, and 
 so it stands immutable. Socialism is only one of 
 a hundred plans for ameliorating it, and since all 
 of the others have failed, I believe that Socialism 
 will fail too. That Antiparos whose maunderings 
 you quote against me thought the invention of the 
 water-wheel would turn all of the mill-slaves of 
 Greece into gentlemen of leisure, lolling all day in 
 ease and idleness, but Antiparos was wrong, for, 
 like all the Greeks, he was entirely ignorant of the 
 laws which govern living organisms. Had he 
 lived after Malthus, instead of thousands of years 
 before him, he would have known that the water- 
 wheel, by making bread cheaper, would soon de- 
 crease the death-rate and increase the birth-rate 
 of Greece, and that this increased population, 
 needing other things beside bread, would quickly 
 turn the idle millers to profitable industry. This 
 
yo Men vs. the Man 
 
 process has been repeated over and over again 
 ever since. 
 
 You SociaHsts make a somewhat similar mistake. 
 You propose to wipe out competition, with its frank 
 acceptance of the law of natural selection, and to 
 put co-operation in its place. By this plan, you 
 say, life will be relieved of most of its present haz- 
 ards, and every man in the world will enjoy per- 
 fect security, peace, and comfort. Well, supposing 
 all this to be true, what will be the result? First 
 and foremost, I believe, an enormous increase in 
 population. Even admitting the possibility of 
 curbing the actual birth-rate, it is apparent that 
 the concerted efforts to put an end to the struggle 
 for existence will, for a time at least, reduce the 
 death-rate among what are now the lowest orders 
 toward that of what is now the highest, and that 
 this reduction will quickly swell the population of 
 the world. 
 
 For a time, perhaps, things will go on serenely, 
 for these extra people, let us assume, will all do 
 their share of the work of the world. But soon 
 or late, I take it, the human race will make the 
 startling discovery that the satisfaction of human 
 desires is limited, not only by the finiteness of 
 human energy, but also by the finiteness of the 
 earth in size and resources. That is to say, there 
 will come a time when the wheat fields of the world 
 will be too small to raise all the wheat needed by 
 the race. And when that time comes a struggle 
 
Men vs. the Man 71 
 
 for the wheat that they can raise will come with 
 it, and your Socialist state will disappear. You 
 may say that the same impasse will be reached 
 eventually with things as they are, but a moment's 
 reflection will show you that that is no answer at 
 all. I am not trying to prove that this is the best 
 of all possible worlds ; I am merely trying to show 
 you that Socialism cannot hope to change it. 
 Whether we adopt Socialism or accept things as 
 they are, we must come eternally upon periods of 
 stress and storm, and during these periods the 
 strong will prevail over the weak, and every man- 
 made law that seeks to stay them will be swept 
 away. 
 
 This happened after the French Revolution, as 
 you yourself point out. You seem to think that 
 the fact constitutes a criticism of my argument, but 
 in reality it supports me. The French Revolution, 
 as you know, had its seed back In the Middle Ages, 
 when certain citizens of France, by reason of their 
 superior intelligence and craft, began to acquire 
 a vast power over the rest of the population. The 
 sons of these medieval lords of the soil maintained 
 their supremacy after them, and it was maintained 
 by so many succeeding generations that, after 
 awhile, It came to be regarded as a matter of 
 course. Even after the race of barons began to 
 degenerate, no one thought of disputing their sway. 
 Meanwhile, they kept going downhill, and by the 
 beginning of the eighteenth century they were a 
 
72 Men vs. the Man 
 
 race of incompetent, helpless parasites, whose 
 power over the masses rested, not upon any superi- 
 ority of their own, but upon the eternal fact that 
 the common people are ever thick of wit, ever long- 
 suffering, and ever slow to advocate a change. The 
 aristocracy of France was so ineiEcient in the time 
 of Louis XIV that the peasants of France might 
 have overthrown it with ease, but it took a long 
 series of outrages and the urging of many men to 
 make them act, and so it was not until the reign 
 of Louis XVI that they declared open war. 
 
 Well, this old race of overlords proved an easy 
 foe, and the victorious commoners, staggered by 
 their almost instantaneous conquest, at once jumped 
 to the conclusion that there was no such thing as 
 aristocracy — that because this one had turned out 
 to be a hollow sham, all were shams. The im- 
 mediate result was the grotesque mob-rule of the 
 few months following the murder of Louis XVI. 
 Here was an actual experiment in Socialism, for 
 all advantages of birth, wealth, and rank were 
 swept away. Every citizen of France was the 
 equal of every other citizen, and each was ex- 
 pected to serve the state according to his particular 
 talents and training. 
 
 Well, did this mob-rule last? Not at alll It 
 was soon found that a populace, as a populace, 
 could no more govern itself than a drunken man 
 could drag himself home, or a sober man could 
 pull his own teeth. Strong men were needed to 
 
Men vs. the Man 73 
 
 make laws and enforce them, to deal with matters 
 above the comprehension of the rabble, to decide 
 between parties and factions — and in a very short 
 while these strong men began to move toward the 
 top, while the weak went back to their old station 
 underfoot. In place of the artificial aristocracy of 
 strong men's great-grandsons, there arose a new 
 and actual aristocracy of strong men. In the end, 
 the strongest of them lorded it over all France, 
 and nearly all of Europe. 
 
 Napoleon Bonaparte, under the influence of the 
 old order of things, tried to perpetuate his su- 
 premacy in his descendants, but here he overlooked 
 a new idea which had come into the world. That 
 idea was this: that an aristocracy must constantly 
 justify its existence. In other words, there must 
 be no artificial conversion of its present strength 
 into perpetual rights. The way must be always 
 open for the admission of strong men from the 
 lower orders, and the way must be always open, 
 too, for the automatic expulsion of men whose 
 strength fails. Our governmental hierarchy, here 
 in the United States, partially satisfies this descrip- 
 tion of a sound aristocracy. That is to say, it is 
 a despotism so long as it rules at all, but it must 
 constantly prove its right to rule. Some day in 
 the future, I am convinced, there will arise a man 
 strong enough to hold the supreme power as long 
 as he lives, just as Senor Diaz seems likely to 
 do in Mexico at present. In the department of 
 
74 Men vs. the Man 
 
 commercial enterprise we have plenty of such men. 
 James J. Hill, I suppose, will be able to keep his 
 immense power until he dies, for It Is unlikely 
 that, In the course of the few years remaining to 
 him, he will encounter a foe efficient enough to 
 wrest it from him, but, for all his potency, he can 
 do nothing whatever to safeguard it against the 
 inefficiency of his descendants after he Is gone. 
 
 The word aristocracy, to an American, always 
 suggests the European nobility, with its peculiar 
 system of titles and its peculiar privileges in the 
 affairs of government. But there are aristocrats 
 of many other sorts, and aristocracy. In itself, by 
 no means presupposes a patent of nobility and a 
 seat In the House of Lords. As a matter of fact, 
 I have shown that these things are evidences, not of 
 real aristocracy, but of that old, artificial aristoc- 
 racy which, in some countries, has managed to sur- 
 vive — ^though always with lessened powers. The 
 aristocrats of social rank and governmental Influ- 
 ence are by no means omnipotent. In their own 
 field they constitute the first estate, but in some 
 other field they may be slaves. 
 
 The French Encyclopedists who spurred the 
 peasants of France on to the massacre of the old 
 nobility did the world a service by wiping out a 
 sham, but at the same stroke they gave It a new 
 sham to take the place of the old one. This new 
 sham was the theory that all men were equal before 
 the Lord. Voltaire, Diderot, and the others called 
 
Men vs. the Man 75 
 
 themselves materialists, and I have no doubt that 
 they were sincere in saying that they couldn't ac- 
 cept the absurdities of Christian theology, but all 
 the same they accepted, whether openly or tacitly, 
 the corner-stone of that theology, which is the 
 doctrine that every man has a soul. Their whole 
 philosophy, indeed, was based upon a belief in 
 the sacredness of that soul. Every man, they 
 argued, had a soul, and since every soul was of 
 infinite sacredness, each one was as good as any 
 other. Upon this they erected the theory of 
 human equality. 
 
 These men were bold and ingenious, but, as I 
 have tried to show in another place, they were 
 vastly handicapped by their ignorance. They could 
 scoff at Christianity all they pleased, but in the end 
 they had to admit that they couldn't disprove it. 
 This was because they lived a hundred years too 
 soon. Had they written their books after in- 
 stead of before the day of Charles Darwin, they 
 would have been free from that anthropomorph- 
 ism, which, despite their great powers of ratiocina- 
 tion, constantly colored their thoughts. Before 
 Darwin it was easy enough for anyone to main- 
 tain that the fundamental Christian doctrines were 
 incapable of proof, but it was only after his life- 
 work gave us a wholly new view of the universe, 
 and set men, for the first time, to exploring its 
 mysteries in an orderly fashion, that it became pos- 
 sible for anyone to argue of Christianity not only 
 
76 Men vs. the Man 
 
 that it was unreasonable, but also that it was actu- 
 ally impossible. 
 
 I have wandered into this reference to Chris- 
 tianity not by accident, but intentionally, and be- 
 cause it seems to me that, as schemes of civilization, 
 Christianity and Socialism are identical. You So- 
 cialists call yourselves agnostics, but you still main- 
 tain the fundamental tenet of Christian theology, 
 which is the notion that all men are God's chil- 
 dren, and equal in his sight ; and you still advocate 
 the primary rule of Christian ethics, which is the 
 command that every man shall love his neighbor as 
 himself. My objection, then, to Socialism, is my 
 objection to Christianity. It starts out with an 
 incredible assumption and it ends with a command 
 that no human being, so long as he remains a hu- 
 man being, can possibly obey. 
 
 That Christianity is impossible is shown by the 
 fact that the world has never beheld a single real 
 Christian. Even Christ himself fell short, for 
 there is abundant proof that, whatever the degree 
 of his love for humanity in general, he had a 
 strong and quite human dislike of the money- 
 changers in the Temple, and that he gave way to 
 this dislike and tried to do them Injury. Like 
 Christianity, Socialism suffers from this irreconcil- 
 able difference between its doctrines and the nature 
 of man. Every human being comes into the world, 
 indeed, with instincts which both Christianity and 
 Socialism denounce as sinful. But as all moralists 
 
Men vs. the Man 77 
 
 discover to their horror, soon or late, it is one thing 
 to invent and denounce a sin, and quite another 
 thing to destroy it. 
 
 This letter is already very long, and so there is 
 very little space left to deal with your mass of 
 statistics regarding surplus values and other such 
 socialistic scarecrows. All you manage to prove is 
 this: that under our present free competition and 
 with our efficient machines, we Americans produce 
 a great deal more than we can use. Well, is this 
 to be lamented? For my part, I think not. On 
 the contrary, it seems to me to be a good cause 
 for congratulation, for it is indubitable proof that, 
 in the struggle for existence, we Americans are 
 measurably superior to certain other races. As we 
 forge ahead in productiveness, these other races 
 will become more and more dependent upon us 
 for the necessities of life, and in the end they will 
 become our serfs. That is to say, practically all 
 of their energy will be devoted to earning the 
 money we demand for the things they need. 
 
 You may say that this can never happen, since 
 tariff walls and national pride will always stand 
 in the way. If that is your answer, I advise you to 
 go to your history books and see what becomes of 
 national pride and tariff walls when a strong, rich 
 nation looks about for an outlet for its over-produc- 
 tion. If the poorer, less efficient nations do not, at 
 once and without resistance, open their gates and 
 begin to buy, as China has but recently done, they 
 
78 Men vs. the Man 
 
 are forced to do so by the sword, and reduced, as 
 security for their future complaisance, to the posi- 
 tion of vassals, as has been the case in India. If 
 it is true, as you say, that Germany is showing 
 super-efficiency, I venture to predict that some day 
 Germany will conquer England, for in England 
 the whole social fabric has been made rotten by 
 Christian sentimentality, with its accompanying 
 coddling of the inefficient and parasitical. 
 
 Your proof that the profits of the United States 
 Steel Corporation exceed the amount paid out as 
 wages to its workmen is interesting, but far from 
 portentous. You seem to regard the Steel Cor- 
 poration as a mysterious, gigantic ogre which sucks 
 the blood of the people, and does no public service 
 whatever. As a matter of fact, it is no ogre at 
 all, but a collection- of quite human persons, such 
 as you and I, and many of these persons belong to 
 the class whose wrongs you deplore. That is to 
 say, a great deal of the Corporation's stock is 
 owned by its employees, who are thus doubly paid 
 for their labor — first in wages and then in profits. 
 No law prevents an employee from buying more 
 stock. You yourself must admit that his wages 
 are commonly more than sufficient to keep him 
 alive, and that, in consequence, he should have a 
 surplus for investment at the end of each year. 
 Why doesn't he buy stock with it ? Well, in many 
 cases he does — but in other cases he invests his 
 money in crayon portraits of his parents, or kegs 
 
Men vs. the Man 79 
 
 of beer. He is, in brief, an ignorant and improv- 
 ident man — and yet you weep over his wrongs. 
 
 That share of the Steel Corporation profits 
 which goes to the very rich men — and this is the 
 share, I have no doubt, which you regard as the 
 worst menace to humanity — is not lost to the 
 world forever, for these rich men, like poor men, 
 have to die in the end, and even while they live 
 they commonly give back, either willingly or un- 
 willingly, most of the money they thus acquire. 
 In a republic, it is impossible to devote much pub- 
 lic money to those large but not immediately 
 profitable enterprises which advance culture and 
 civilization — such things, for instance, as the estab- 
 lishment of libraries and museums, the erection of 
 monuments, the cleansing of cities, and the sys- 
 tematic study of the higher scientific (and partic- 
 ularly medical) problems. This is because the 
 common people, and their elected representatives, 
 being entirely ignorant of human history, see 
 nothing in these things but idle vanities. 
 
 Well, here is where the predatory rich pay back 
 their debt to humanity in general. They know the 
 vast value of such enterprises, and their money 
 goes into them. In this way the common people 
 profit by the forced taxes they must pay to men of 
 superior ingenuity and foresight. In this way the 
 millions so feloniously acquired by Mr. Rockefeller 
 paid for the Rockefeller Institute, which squared 
 the account by giving the world a specific for 
 
8o Men vs. the Man 
 
 cerebro-spinal meningitis. It seems to me that, 
 before this old planet vanishes into empty air, the 
 value of that one specific, to the human race, will 
 be a hundred thousand times the value of all the 
 securities a hundred Rockefellers could possibly 
 amass in a lifetime. 
 
 You seem to fancy that the money acquired by a 
 single rich man is value lost to the race in general 
 for all time. Nothing could be more erroneous. 
 The millions of Mr. Carnegie are going back to 
 the public even while he lives, and a hundred years 
 hence, perhaps, there will not be a single rich man 
 of his blood in the world. When George Wash- 
 ington died he was the richest man in the New 
 World, and yet to-day the head of the Washington 
 clan is a small-fry druggist in a one-horse country 
 town. The whole clan, indeed, has been so quickly 
 absorbed into the commonalty that few Americans 
 have ever even heard of this man. 
 
 Such is the law of evolution, which works back- 
 ward as well as forward, for in order that one may 
 gain, another must lose. Say what you will 
 against it, you must at least admit that it has 
 worked for human progress. And say what you 
 will against it, you can never hope to set it aside. 
 
 Wherefore, my dear La Monte, I must again 
 decline your courteous invitation to call you 
 comrade. 
 
 Sincerely, 
 
 Mencken. 
 
LA MONTE'S THIRD LETTER 
 
 My Dear Mencken: 
 
 I was very glad to receive your entertaining let- 
 ter, and hasten to congratulate you on your com- 
 plete freedom from that weakness of small minds 
 ■ — consistency. But I regret to see that you are 
 growing old before your time. When Tennyson 
 was your age he 
 
 dipt into the future, far as human eye could see, 
 Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonders 
 that would be; 
 
 Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies 
 
 of magic sails; 
 Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down 
 
 with costly bales; 
 
 Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there 
 
 rain'd a ghastly dew 
 From the nations' airy navies grappling in the 
 
 central blue; 
 
 Far along the world-wide whisper of the south- 
 wind rushing warm; 
 
 With the standards of the peoples plunging 
 through the thunder storm; 
 
 8i 
 
82 Men vs. the Man 
 
 Till the war-drum throbb'd no longer, and the 
 
 battle-flags were furl'd 
 In the Parliament of man, the Federation of 
 
 the world. 
 
 There the common sense of most shall hold a 
 
 fretful realm in awe, 
 And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in 
 
 universal law. 
 
 There you have the sublime optimism that is the 
 glory of the youthful mind. It was not until 
 forty-four years later in his extreme old age that 
 Tennyson allowed himself to be frightened by the 
 Malthusian bogey of over-population which so per- 
 turbs your soul, and even then he himself half sus- 
 pected that the change of view was due to his fast- 
 coming dotage, " for," he tells us, 
 
 doubtless I am old, and think gray 
 
 thoughts, for I am gray; 
 After all the stormy changes shall we find a 
 changeless May? 
 
 After madness, after massacre. Jacobinism and 
 
 Jacquerie, 
 Some diviner force to guide us thro' the days I 
 
 shall not see? 
 
 When the schemes and all the systems, king- 
 doms and republics fall. 
 
 Something kindlier, higher, holier — all for each 
 and each for all? 
 
Men vs. the Man 83 
 
 All the full-brain, half-brain races, led by Jus- 
 tice, Love, and Truth; 
 
 All the millions one at length with all the 
 visions of my youth? 
 
 All diseases quench'd by Science, no man halt, 
 
 or deaf, or blind. 
 Stronger ever born of weaker, lustier body, 
 
 larger mind? 
 
 Earth at last a warless world, a single race, a 
 
 single tongue — 
 I have seen her far away — for is not Earth as 
 
 yet so young? — 
 
 Every tiger madness muzzled, every serpent 
 
 passion kill'd. 
 Every grim ravine a garden, every blazing desert 
 
 till'd. 
 
 Robed in universal harvest up to either pole 
 
 she smiles. 
 Universal ocean softly washing all her warless 
 
 isles. 
 
 Warless? when her tens are thousands, and 
 
 her thousands millions, then — 
 All her harvest all too narrow — ^who can fancy 
 
 warless men? 
 
 Warless? war will die out late then. Will it 
 
 ever? late or soon? 
 Can it, till this outworn earth be dead as yon 
 
 dead earth, the moon? 
 
84 Men vs. the Man 
 
 But, in spite of your nightmare of over-pop- 
 ulation, and your fear that we Socialists in our 
 blindness will " reduce the death-rate among what 
 are now the lowest orders toward that of what is 
 now the highest, and that this reduction will quickly 
 swell the population of the world," you lavish the 
 most extravagant eulogy upon the scientists and 
 their capitalist patrons for discoveries that make 
 possible just this very reduction of the death-rate 
 at which you stand aghast 1 "The work that 
 Pasteur did in the world," you tell us, " put the 
 clock of time ahead a hundred years, and conferred 
 a permanent and constantly cumulative benefit upon 
 the whole human race, freeman and slave alike, 
 now and forevermore." Your conscience evidently 
 troubled you over the mildness of this praise, for 
 in your second letter you went it one better by 
 telling us that the Rockefeller Institute had squared 
 Mr. Rockefeller's account with mankind " by giv- 
 ing the world a specific for cerebro-spinal menin- 
 gitis. It seems to me," you add, " that, before 
 this old planet vanishes into empty air, the value 
 of that one specific, to the human race, will be a 
 hundred thousand times the value of all the securi- 
 ties a hundred Rockefellers could possibly amass 
 in a lifetime." 
 
 Were yours a smaller nature — and therefore 
 more cursed with consistency — I would expect to 
 find you using your influence with that Seiior Diaz, 
 who, you tell us, is one day to be our Dictator, to 
 
Men vs. the Man 85 
 
 induce him to punish with death any doctor who 
 should give to the rabble the benefit of any of these 
 discoveries. But, knowing you as I do, I know 
 that in spite of all your invective hurled at the mob 
 you would be the first to put your hand into your 
 pocket to help a poor printer threatened with 
 rabies to get to the nearest Pasteur Institute. 
 
 Speaking of Pasteur reminds me of your fear 
 that after two generations of Socialism there will 
 be no more Pasteurs. How many boys who might 
 develop into Pasteurs ever get the chance to? By 
 good luck the wealthy Cimabue chanced to come 
 along and look over the shoulder of the poor little 
 shepherd lad, Giotto, and see the picture of a 
 sheep the lad had drawn on a stone. Cimabue 
 took Giotto to Florence, and Giotto's paintings 
 still delight the race. How many Giottos, do you 
 suppose, have drawn pictures equally good that no 
 Cimabue chanced to see ? I still fail to understand 
 what you meant by your startling assertion that 
 Pasteurs would fail us. It must be that you think 
 a bitter struggle for bare existence necessary to the 
 development of talent or genius, or that you think 
 the necessary productive work that will be de- 
 manded of every one in the future will prevent 
 the devotion of the necessary time to science. 
 
 In regard to the first point, Lester F. Ward, 
 who is the only sociologist America has produced 
 (except the late Lewis H. Morgan) whom Con- 
 tinental scholars quote with respect, in his " Ap- 
 
86 Men vs. the Man 
 
 plied Sociology " tells us that " about eleven times 
 as many talented persons belong to the wealthy or 
 well-to-do classes as to the poor or laboring classes, 
 although the latter are about five times as numer- 
 ous as the former. The chances of success for the 
 same degree of talent are fifty-five for the former 
 class to one for the latter. The extremes, of 
 course, are very much greater, and for absolute 
 poverty or uninterrupted labor at long hours the 
 chance of success is necessarily zero, no matter how 
 great may be the native talent or even genius. In- 
 digence is an effective bar to achievement. On the 
 other hand, the resources of society may be enor- 
 mously increased by abolishing poverty, by reduc- 
 ing the hours of labor, and by making all its mem- 
 bers comfortable and secure in their economic rela- 
 tions. Any sacrifice that society might make in 
 securing these ends would be many times repaid by 
 the actual contributions that the few really talented 
 among the hundreds of thousands thus benefited 
 would make to the social welfare. For talent is 
 distributed all through this great mass in the same 
 proportions as it exists in the much smaller well- 
 to-do or wealthy class, and the only reason why 
 the latter contribute more is because their economic 
 condition affords them opportunity." (Page 
 228.) ^ 
 
 'This calculation of Lester Ward's is based on data taken 
 from Professor A. Odin's monumental work, " Genkse des 
 Grands Hommes," Paris, 1895. See especially Vol. I. page 
 529- 
 
Men vs. the Man 87 
 
 As examples of talented persons who did not 
 have to struggle for an existence, he names Tasso, 
 Petrarch, Boccaccio, Cervantes, Dante, Chaucer, 
 Hegel, Fichte, Kant, Buckle, Bacon, Milton, 
 Hobbes, Galileo, Adam Smith, Harvey, Darwin, 
 Newton, Descartes, Byron, Shelley, Macaulay, 
 Comte, Herbert Spencer, Gibbon, Disraeli, Rob- 
 ert Browning, John Ruskin, Victor Hugo, and 
 many others." ^ 
 
 In regard to the second point, an hour or two 
 of productive labor will keep our savants in the 
 pink of physical condition for their intellectual 
 labors, and their experiences of real, practical life 
 will make their studies far more fruitful for hu- 
 manity. 
 
 Is your bogey of over-population any more sub- 
 stantial than a phantom? I will not say posi- 
 tively that it is not; but I do say confidently that 
 that bridge is so far ahead that we need not be 
 preparing to cross it now. What reason have I 
 for saying that this Is an extremely remote danger? 
 Compare the number of offspring a single pair of 
 codfish are responsible for in a year with the 
 number a single pair of rabbits bestow upon the 
 earth in a like time; and then compare the rabbit 
 from this point of view with the higher apes or the 
 elephants or man. What do you find ? Is It not 
 
 ' Ward takes this list from " Genius, Fame, and the Com- 
 parison of Races," by Charles H. Cooley. Annals of the Am. 
 Acad. Pol. and Soc. Science, Philadelphia. Vol. IX. May, 
 1897, PP- 317-358. 
 
88 Men vs. the Man 
 
 that the higher the type, the lower the rate of 
 increase? Again compare different races and 
 classes of men. Do you not find that highly civ- 
 ilized countries such as France have extremely low 
 birth-rates? If you will go to the Antipodes, 
 where the average standard of comfort Is the high- 
 est in the world, you wIU find a birth-rate almost 
 as low as that of France. I well remember that 
 Mr. Kelley, the able editor of the New Zealand 
 Times, was as much of an alarmist on this sub- 
 ject as our own Roosevelt, and seldom let a day 
 go by without an editorial warning on the subject, 
 but his warnings were in vain, for the people were 
 far too comfortable to breed as prolificly as Irish 
 and Hungarian peasants. The historical fact, my 
 dear Mencken, is that comfort and education de- 
 crease the birth-rate. Socialism will give comfort 
 and education to all. Surely, you can draw the 
 conclusion for yourself. 
 
 Chemistry and intensive agriculture promise to 
 enable us to defy Malthus by an almost unlimited 
 multiplication of the food supply. And Mr. Gif- 
 ford PInchot, In a speech recently reported In the 
 Sun, told of an amount of preventable waste 
 now going on so vast, that if we should stop 
 It, it is difficult to say how enormous would 
 be our Increased capacity for sustaining popu- 
 lation. 
 
 I have so many things that I want to say to you, 
 that I grudge every bit of space and time given to 
 
Men vs. the Man 89 
 
 commenting on your arguments. But I must note 
 in passing your assumption that because many 
 Austrian workingmen now are drunken, lazy, and 
 inefficient, therefore Professor Hertzka's hypo- 
 thetical 5,000,000 in the future would suffer from 
 the same vices. Do you really think they would? 
 What hope for the future has the average Austrian 
 workingman now? What inducement has he to 
 be anything but lazy and drunken? What gives 
 me my firm and unshakeable faith in his high po- 
 tentialities as an efficient worker in the future, is 
 the very fact that he has sense and manhood enough 
 to be discontented with the conditions under which 
 he works now, and his laziness, inefficiency, and 
 drunkenness are the very best possible proofs of 
 that discontent, so pregnant with hope for hu- 
 manity. 
 
 Your statement that I despise Friedrich 
 Nietzsche can scarcely be called ingenuous, and it 
 pains me because I am sure you cannot be ig- 
 norant that in the International Socialist Review 
 for July, 1908, I, writing as a Socialist to Social- 
 ists, said: 
 
 " I do not see how any of us can help feeling 
 that Nietzsche, the magnificently assured prophet 
 of BEYOND-MAN, is our Comrade, though we 
 cannot but grieve that his ideal included a vast 
 mass of suffering and exploited humanity, a ' herd ' 
 or ' rabble ' over which his beyond-men were to 
 reign in glory and dionysian joy." 
 
90 Men vs. the Man 
 
 I submit that this is scarcely the language of 
 contempt. 
 
 You say that we Socialists " propose to wipe out 
 competition," and later on in the same letter you 
 admit that Mr. Hill has so effectually wiped out 
 competition in the railway business, that " he will 
 be able to keep his immense power until he dies." 
 How are we Socialists to destroy that which Cap- 
 italism has already destroyed? 
 
 I cannot allow to pass unchallenged your state- 
 ment that we Socialists " still advocate the primary 
 rule of Christian ethics, which is the command that 
 every man shall love his neighbor as himself." On 
 the contrary we know only too well that the only 
 practical ethics in a society based on the produc- 
 tion of goods for profit are the tooth, fang, and 
 claw ethics of the jungle. You have but strength- 
 ened the Socialist argument by showing that even 
 Christ himself could not practise the Golden Rule. 
 We know that ethics are relative and changing, 
 that every stage of economic development has its 
 own code of ethics, and we are revolutionists be- 
 cause we believe the Social Revolution will lay the 
 economic foundation on which all men will practise 
 the Golden Rule as naturally and with as little 
 thought of duty as they now breathe. 
 
 I am sorry that I should once more have to re- 
 peat that I have never made any moral argument 
 against the existence of surplus-value per se. I 
 did not represent the " Steel Corporation as a 
 
Men vs. the Man 91 
 
 mysterious, gigantic ogre which sucks the blood of 
 the people, and does no public service whatever." 
 But I did prove right up to the hilt from their own 
 figures that after every bit of what you and Mal- 
 lock would call " ability " had been paid for at 
 the highest market rates, the profits from owner- 
 ship alone were far in excess of the wages for both 
 muscle and " ability," and that this excess of pro- 
 duction over purchasing power as represented by 
 wages made a Social Revolution inevitable. 
 
 But now that you have suggested it I am entirely 
 willing to admit that drawing profit from owner- 
 ship without service rendered may be called, with 
 perfect propriety, " sucking the blood of the 
 people." 
 
 I can scarcely restrain a smile when you tell me 
 that all is well with the Steel Trust employees be- 
 cause they are given the opportunity to become 
 minority stock-holders in the Trust. Ask those 
 who were minority stock-holders in the Erie Rail- 
 road when Jay Gould got control of it what this 
 privilege is worth? Or, if that is ancient history, 
 ask those who were minority stock-holders in the 
 Chicago and Alton when it was captured by Harri- 
 man. If one fact stands out above another in 
 modern financial history it is that stock companies 
 are the most efficient means ever devised to trans- 
 fer the savings of the middle and working classes 
 to the pockets of the lords of finance. 
 
 When you say that rich men in the long run pay 
 
92 Men vs. the Man 
 
 back to the community all the wealth they have 
 drawn from it, you do not bear in mind that the 
 great bulk of real wealth has to be reproduced 
 every year. It cannot be paid back " in the long 
 run." Its physical nature forbids it. Moreover, 
 intelligent workingmen (which is merely another 
 way of saying Socialists or Revolutionists) do not 
 ask or expect rich men to give or pay them back 
 anything, but they are irrevocably determined to 
 prevent rich men or any men in the future from 
 taking from them the lion's share of the wealth 
 that their labor produces and reproduces every 
 year. 
 
 What vast wealth in practice consists of are 
 certain legal papers that give their holders the 
 power to compel other men to work for them ; and 
 in the case of fortunes such as those of the Astors 
 and the Vanderbilts and the great landlords of 
 England this power is handed down from genera- 
 tion to generation, so that no sane man looks for- 
 ward to the day when the head of the Rockefeller 
 clan shall be nothing more than " a small- fry drug- 
 gist in a one-horse country town " — unless per- 
 chance that is the occupation he happens to prefer 
 in the Co-operative Commonwealth, and in that 
 case I think I am safe in promising you that no 
 Socialist shall say him, Nay. 
 
 I hope you will pardon me for saying that I 
 have thus far written nothing in this letter that 
 need have been written had you read my former 
 
Men vs. the Man 93 
 
 letters more carefully. And now I would gladly 
 enter more fruitful fields, but, alas, I cannot yet 
 do so, for I have not yet touched upon your 
 gracious intimation that you would refuse to give 
 over your scant leisure to this correspondence if 
 you were convinced that I actually believed that 
 " under Socialism " (by the way. Socialism is not 
 an umbrella or an awning) " men will look upon 
 work as a pleasure," and that " the present effort to 
 shirk will disappear." 
 
 Much as I should regret to see this correspond- 
 ence cut short (and I would regret it most deeply), 
 I am compelled to assure you that I do most 
 sanguinely expect work to become a pleasure, nay, 
 I hold that all work that has been worth the doing 
 has always given pleasure to the worker, and I 
 do expect that the worker in the days when " all 
 shall be better than well " will fear the imputation 
 of shirking even more than most women do to-day 
 the imputation of unchastity. But, in spite of my 
 firm faith that work of the right kind should give 
 a normal being pleasure, I am wholly willing to 
 concede with William Morris that " whatever 
 pleasure there is in some work, there is certainly 
 some pain in all work, the beast-like pain of stirring 
 up our slumbering energies to action, the beast-like 
 dread of change when things are pretty well with 
 us." And here I am going to depart from my 
 regular custom and ask you to do a little reading 
 for yourself. I am sure you will get a far better 
 
94 Men vs. the Man 
 
 comprehension of the Socialist point of view on 
 this subject of work from reading William Mor- 
 ris's Lecture on " Useful Work versus Useless 
 Toil " than it is possible for me to give you in the 
 limits of a letter. You will find this lecture in the 
 volume entitled " Signs of Change," published by 
 Longmans, Green & Company. 
 
 William Morris discriminates between " two 
 kinds of work — one good, the other bad, one not 
 far removed from a blessing, a lightening of life; 
 the other a mere curse, a burden to life. 
 
 " What is the difference between them, then ? 
 This : one has hope in it, the other has not. It is 
 manly to do one kind of work, and manly also to 
 refuse to do the other. 
 
 " What is the nature of the hope which, when it 
 is present in work, makes it worth doing? 
 
 " It is threefold, I think — hope of rest, hope of 
 product, hope of pleasure in the work itself; and 
 hope of these also in some abundance and of good 
 quality; rest enough and good enough to be worth 
 having; product worth having by one who Is neither 
 a fool nor an ascetic; pleasure enough for all for 
 us to be conscious of it while we are at work; not a 
 mere habit, the loss of which we shall feel as a 
 fidgety man feels the loss of the bit of string he 
 fidgets with." 
 
 William Morris anticipated that the idea of 
 pleasure in work would come as a shock to men 
 like yourself, for he added: 
 
Men vs. the Man 95 
 
 " The hope of pleasure in the work itself, how 
 strange that hope must seem to some of my read- 
 ers — to most of them. Yet I think that to all liv- 
 ing things there is a pleasure in the exercise of 
 their energies, and that even beasts rejoice in be- 
 ing lithe and swift and strong. But a man at 
 work, making something which he feels will exist 
 because he is working at it and wills it, is exer- 
 cising the energies of his mind and soul as well as 
 of his body. Memory and imagination help him 
 as he works. Not only his own thoughts, but 
 the thoughts of the men of past ages guide his 
 hands; and, as a part of the human race, he 
 creates. If we work thus we shall be men, and 
 our days will be happy and eventful." 
 
 I rejoice with you in the conquests of Science 
 over Nature, but I hold with Morris that " Nature 
 will not be finally conquered till our work becomes 
 a part of the pleasure of our lives." And I hold 
 with Morris that " if there be any work which can- 
 not be made other than repulsive, either by the 
 shortness of its duration or the intermittency of its 
 recurrence, or by the sense of special and peculiar 
 usefulness (and therefore honor) in the mind of 
 the man who performs it freely, — if there be any 
 work which cannot be but a torment to the 
 worker," it were better to " leave it undone." 
 " The produce of such work cannot be worth the 
 price of it." 
 
 But you go on to say that I " must be well 
 
96 Men vs. the Man 
 
 aware that the traits and weaknesses which make 
 the workman of to-day an unwilHng and inefficient 
 laborer are ingrained characteristics of all low- 
 caste men." I am aware of nothing of the kind; 
 what I am aware of is that all men in a state of 
 nature have an almost ineradicable hatred of toil 
 without hope, and that in what you would call 
 high-caste men this hatred is never wholly rooted 
 out, but that in what you would call low-caste men 
 centuries and centuries of discipline have made even 
 hopeless toil a habit, the loss of which they " feel 
 as a fidgety man feels the loss of the bit of string 
 he fidgets with." 
 
 It is precisely among the working class (whom 
 you describe as "low-caste men") that work for 
 work's sake has become a true nervous disease, 
 and the great task before us is to cure the prole- 
 tariat of its diseased and depraved appetite for 
 work. 
 
 The free citizens of Greece and Rome in the 
 days of their glory had a most healthy hatred for 
 work. " I could not affirm," says Herodotus, 
 " whether the Greeks derived from the Egyptians 
 the contempt which they have for work, because 
 I find the same contempt established among the 
 Thracians, the Scythians, the Persians, the 
 Lydlans; in a word, because among most bar- 
 barians, those who learn mechanical arts and even 
 their children are regarded as the meanest of 
 their citizens. All the Greeks have been nur- 
 
Men vs. the Man 97 
 
 tured in this principle, particularly the Lace- 
 daemonians." 
 
 " Nature," said Plato in his noble * Republic ' 
 (Book V), "has made no shoemaker nor smith. 
 Such occupations degrade the people who exercise 
 them. Vile mercenaries, nameless wretches, who 
 are by their very condition excluded from political 
 rights. As for the merchants accustomed to lying 
 and deceiving, they will be allowed in the city only 
 as a necessary evil. The citizen who shall have 
 degraded himself by the commerce of the shop 
 shall be prosecuted for this offense. If he is con- 
 victed, he shall be condemned to a year in prison; 
 the punishment shall be doubled for each repeated 
 offense." 
 
 In his " Economics " Xenophon writes, " The 
 people who give themselves up to manual labor 
 are never promoted to public offices, and with good 
 reason. The greater part of them, condemned to 
 be seated the whole day long, some even to endure 
 the heat of the fire continually, cannot fail to be 
 changed in body, and it is almost inevitable that 
 the mind be affected." 
 
 " What honorable thing can come out of a 
 shop? " asks Cicero. " What can commerce pro- 
 duce in the way of honor ? Everything called shop 
 is unworthy an honorable man. Merchants can 
 gain no profit without lying, and what is more 
 shameful than falsehood ? Again, we must regard 
 as something base and vile the trade of those who 
 
98 Men vs. the Man 
 
 sell their toil and industry, for whoever gives his 
 labor for money sells himself and puts himself in 
 the rank of slaves." 
 
 There is no use in multiplying these quotations, 
 which Paul Lafargue has collected from the 
 classics, to show you that just those traits which 
 you regard as the special attributes of low-caste 
 men were in fact the characteristic traits of high- 
 caste men in ancient Greece and Rome, just as they 
 are in Europe and America to-day. 
 
 But I deny the validity of " high-caste " and 
 " low-caste " as divisions of humanity. I recog- 
 nize not high-caste men and low-caste men, but 
 men who have had a chance to live human lives, 
 and men who have been condemned to live the 
 lives of beasts. If the term " low-caste " 
 can properly be applied to any human beings it is 
 surely to those pitiable members of the upper 
 classes who have been so cut off from all contact 
 with the masses of humanity that in their breasts 
 the broad human sympathies, the sense of human 
 fellowship and solidarity, of racial oneness, have 
 atrophied and died out until in their relations 
 with all mankind outside their narrow social cir- 
 cles they are able to obey the great command of 
 your master, Nietzsche, "Be Hard!" 
 
 I have no doubt that you would classify the pri- 
 vate soldiers in the Italian Army as " low-caste 
 men." Let us judge them by their actions. Right 
 after the Messina Earthquake the New York Sun 
 
Men vs. the Man 99 
 
 sent its London correspondent to the scene, and his 
 letter (the best piece of newspaper work I have 
 ever seen) appeared in the issue of January 17, 
 1909. 
 
 " I stopped for half an hour on Monday after- 
 noon," he writes, " to watch the dramatic climax 
 of a rescue operation which had been going on for 
 forty-eight hours. It was in the ruins piled forty 
 feet high adjoining the principal theater in Gari- 
 baldi street. On Saturday morning a faint re- 
 sponse was heard deep down in the debris to the 
 constant cry of the rescue parties, ' Is any one 
 there ? ' The original building had been a very 
 solid one of six stories of stone and mortar. Its 
 destruction had been as complete as if a rock the 
 size of a house had been dropped upon it from 
 the sky and then rolled away. It seemed impos- 
 sible that anything could remain alive beneath that 
 apparently solid mass of pulverized walls, blocks 
 of granite, and a few splinters of wood. 
 
 " But the cry was human and fifty men set to 
 work. They dug valiantly for hours above where 
 the voice came. They seemed to get no nearer 
 and night came. Searchlights were brought and 
 the work went on. On Sunday morning the loca- 
 tion of the sufferer was fixed more definitely. They 
 could talk with him, and he told them he was not 
 much hurt, there were a few inches of space 
 about his head, and his hands were free. He 
 pleaded not so much for release as for drink and 
 
100 Men vs. the Man 
 
 food. The dust was suffocating and he feared he 
 would choke if they came closer. The soldiers 
 forced a pipe down through the debris and the im- 
 prisoned man succeeded in reaching the end of it. 
 Beef tea and brandy were poured down in suc- 
 cession. 
 
 " The gratitude that came in response was as 
 heartfelt as if the poor fellow was already in the 
 free light and air instead of crushed down beneath 
 twenty feet of ruins. That additional twenty feet 
 amid material impossible to excavate by ordinary 
 methods required another thirty hours to conquer. 
 The impalpable powder which filled every crevice 
 of the more solid material slipped back almost as 
 fast as it was taken out. Besides, it was necessary 
 to proceed with the utmost caution for the victim's 
 sake. It was just as the rescuers had come in 
 sight of the poor fellow that I happened to climb 
 over that section of debris. A few moments ap- 
 parently would effect his release, and a stretcher 
 was hastily brought to the entrance of a little tun- 
 nel which had been driven through the side of the 
 excavation. And then, when safety was in sight, 
 the treacherous sides of the great hole began to 
 slip, and in a few seconds the man was buried anew. 
 There was a cry of horror on all sides. A dozen 
 soldiers buried their faces in their hands and wept. 
 The downpour of powdered lime and stones 
 stopped for a moment. Suddenly the officer in 
 charge cried: 
 
Men vs. the Man loi 
 
 " ' Who will go in with this rope and fasten it 
 beneath his arms underneath the dirt? It may 
 mean death, for if the dust comes down again it 
 will mean suffocation for whoever goes ? ' 
 
 " ' Let me go ! Let me go ! I don't mind 
 what happens to me ! ' were the cries from almost 
 every man in the detachment. 
 
 " A noose was quickly made in a stout rope 
 and a lithe young private went quickly into the 
 bottom of that suffocating funnel. He dug away 
 with his hands around the head of the victim. He 
 found, fortunately, that a small arch had protected 
 him from the worst of the last dust slide. In a 
 few moments the rope was fixed and a dozen men 
 dragged the poor creatures into freedom." 
 
 If those soldiers were " low-caste " men, then 
 so were Jesus Christ and Saint Francis of Assisi. 
 
 It is but too obvious, my dear Mencken, that 
 you cherish what Dr. Lester F. Ward calls "the 
 great sullen stubborn error, so universal and in- 
 grained as to constitute a world view, that the dif- 
 ference between the upper and lower classes of 
 society is due to a difference in their intellectual 
 capacity, something existing in the nature of things, 
 something preordained and inherently inevitable." 
 (" Applied Sociology," page 96.) 
 
 On page 100 of the same work he tells us: 
 
 " The essential fact, however, is that there is 
 no vahd reason why not only the other partially 
 emerged eight-tenths but the completely submerged 
 
I02 Men vs. the Man 
 
 tenth should not completely emerge. They are all 
 equally capable of it. This does not at all imply 
 that all men are equal intellectually. It only in- 
 sists that intellectual inequality is common to all 
 classes, and is as great among the members of the 
 completely emerged tenth as it is between that 
 class and the completely submerged tenth. Or, 
 to state it more clearly, if the individuals who con- 
 stitute the intelligent class at any time or place had 
 been surrounded from their birth by exactly the 
 same conditions that have surrounded the lowest 
 stratum of society, they would inevitably have 
 found themselves in that stratum; and if an equal 
 number taken at random of the lowest stratum of 
 society had been surrounded from their birth by 
 exactly the same conditions by which the intelligent 
 class has been surrounded, they would in fact have 
 constituted the intelligent class instead of the par- 
 ticular individuals who happen actually to consti- 
 tute it. In other words, class distinctions in soci- 
 ety are wholly artificial, depend entirely on environ- 
 ing conditions, and are in no sense due to differ- 
 ences in native capacity. Differences in native 
 capacity exist, and are as great as they have ever 
 been pictured, but they exist in all classes alike." 
 
 " The proposition that the lower classes of soci- 
 ety are the intellectual equals of the upper classes," 
 he says in another place, " will probably shock 
 most minds. At least it will be almost unanimously 
 rejected as false. Yet I do not hesitate to main- 
 
Men vs. the Man 103 
 
 tain and defend it as an abstract proposition." 
 (Page 95.) 
 
 Ferdinand Lassalle long ago pointed out that 
 the upper classes in order to defend their class 
 privileges were obliged to oppose human progress. 
 It is true that, here and there, there shines out like 
 a beacon-light on the tragic pages of human his- 
 tory the name of a truly noble noble who rose above 
 his petty class interests and gave his life and talents 
 freely to humanity; but it is but too true that the 
 majority of the upper classes in all times have been 
 led, consciously sometimes, but far more often un- 
 consciously, by their class interests to oppose the 
 forward march of humanity. Fortunately for 
 those whom you describe as " low-caste men " they 
 are free from this demoralizing influence, for, to 
 quote Lassalle, " the working class is the last and 
 outside of all, the disinterested class of the com- 
 munity, which sets up and can set up no further ex- 
 clusive condition, either legal or actual, neither no- 
 bility nor landed possessions nor the possession of 
 capital, which it could make into a new privilege 
 and force upon the arrangements of society. 
 
 " We are all workingmen in so far as we have 
 even the mil to make ourselves useful in any way 
 to the community. 
 
 " This working class in whose heart therefore 
 no germ of a new privilege is contained, is for this 
 very reason synonymous with the whole human 
 race. Its interest is in truth the interest of the 
 
I04 Men vs. the Man 
 
 whole of humanity, its freedom is the freedom of 
 humanity itself, and its domination is the domina- 
 tion of all. 
 
 " Whoever therefore invokes the idea of the 
 working class as the ruling principle of society, in 
 the sense in which I have explained it to you, does 
 not put forth a cry that divides and separates the 
 classes of society. On the contrary, he utters a 
 cry of reconciliation, a cry which embraces the 
 whole of the community, a cry for doing away with 
 all the contradictions in every circle of society, a 
 cry of union in which all should join who do not 
 wish for privileges, and the oppression of the peo- 
 ple by privileged classes ; a cry of love which, 
 having once gone up from the heart of the people, 
 will forever remain the true cry of the people, and 
 whose meaning will make it still a cry of love, even 
 when it sounds the war cry of the people." 
 
 Weismann pointed out the biological reasons for 
 the sociological facts stated by Lester F. Ward 
 in the passages I have quoted when he tried to show 
 that acquired characteristics were not inherited, 
 but Weismann's theories have always been dis- 
 puted, though unquestionably the majority of mod- 
 ern scientists have inclined to agree with him. 
 But it was left for Gregor Mendel to establish by 
 proof almost as clear as a demonstration in Euclid 
 that the characteristics, talents, aptitudes, and 
 graces acquired by education and environment can- 
 not be transmitted by heredity. But, as Mendel 
 
Men vs. the Man 105 
 
 was both an Austrian and a Christian monk, I shall 
 expect you to give but scant attention to the re- 
 markable results of his biological studies. At any 
 rate I shall not prolong this letter to tell you more 
 about him here. 
 
 In my next letter I may tell you more abdut 
 him, and I shall certainly admit your charge that 
 Socialists are prone to accept evidence and theories 
 that tend to help their side of the argument, and I 
 shall show you that this peculiarity is not confined 
 to Socialists, and I shall draw some interesting de- 
 ductions from these facts. 
 
 In closing permit me to commend to your prayer- 
 ful consideration the following excerpt from the 
 editorial columns of the esteemed Boston Tran- 
 script: 
 
 " Whatever the outcome of the Socialist move- 
 ment in this country, ill-considered opinions on the 
 subject are likely to be less frequent in the future 
 than they have been. President Roosevelt, ac- 
 cording to an apparently well authenticated story, 
 recently wrote a paper on Socialism, severely ar- 
 raigning what he supposed to be its fundamental 
 propositions. His article was submitted for 
 criticism to two sociologists, neither of them pro- 
 fessed Socialists, as it happened, but both con- 
 versant with the literature of the subject. So ad- 
 verse was their judgment regarding the Presidential 
 effort that Mr. Roosevelt tore it up, against the 
 time when he could more thoroughly investigate 
 
io6 Men vs. the Man 
 
 the actual status of present-day Soclahst doc- 
 trine." 
 
 While I know that you greatly admire Mr. 
 Roosevelt for his insistent and incessant preaching 
 of the Nietzschean doctrine of the strenuous life, 
 I sincerely trust that in this instance you will not 
 permit yourself to be tempted to follow his il- 
 lustrious example. 
 
 Ever, 
 
 La Monte. 
 
MENCKEN'S REPLY TO LA MONTE'S 
 THIRD LETTER 
 
 My Dear La Monte : 
 
 Your letter, like the book of Leviticus, deals 
 with a multitude of subjects, and I cannot hope to 
 make a comprehensive reply to all the propositions 
 it lays down. In this emergency I shall have to 
 adopt the method known to professors of wrestling 
 as catch-as-catch-can. That is to say, I shall be- 
 gin at the beginning and proceed, as gracefully as 
 possible, to the end; maintaining, all the while, a 
 careful look-out, and dealing, from time to time, 
 deft wallops at such of your arguments, theories, 
 and ideas as may appear to stand in greatest need 
 of chastisement and controversion. 
 
 At the very start you accuse me of a violent, 
 and even vile, inconsistency, and by all the rules of 
 evidence, in such cases made and provided, you 
 also convict me. But I shall show you, I believe 
 (and if you have ever sat in a court of justice and 
 listened to its endless comedy, you will scarcely 
 need this proof), that the rules of evidence have 
 nothing whatever to do with the laws of logic and 
 common sense. 
 
 Specifically, you make allegation that I have 
 107 
 
io8 Men vs. the Man 
 
 been blowing both hot and cold. In one place, 
 you point out, I maintain that a sudden and rapid 
 increase of population, among the lower orders, 
 would be a menace to human progress ; and in some 
 other place I pay eloquent tribute to Pasteur and 
 his ilk, whose delving into culture-tubes has re- 
 duced the death-rate of all orders, high and low. 
 On the face of the thing, I seem to argue here, (a) 
 that it is well to let the ape-men die; and (b) that 
 we should encourage pathologists to save them. 
 But this seeming, my dear La Monte, is only 
 seeming. 
 
 Your error lies in your neglect of the vast dif- 
 ference between an increase in population in which 
 the lowest caste makes the greatest strides, and an 
 increase in population in which, if there is any rela- 
 tive advantage at all, the highest caste enjoys it. 
 It is an fticrease of the first sort that would appear 
 if all the wealth in the world to-day were dis- 
 tributed among the loafers and incompetents. But 
 it is an increase of the second sort that appears 
 when the doctors happen upon some new antitoxin, 
 vaccine, rule of clean living or health resort. 
 
 It must be plain to you, I am sure, that the 
 epoch-making medical discoveries of the last half- 
 century have benefited the lowest caste far less 
 than they have benefited the highest caste. If you 
 have never given the matter thought, just consider, 
 for a moment, the case of tuberculosis. Fifty 
 years ago the mortality in this wide-spread disease, 
 
Men vs. the Man 109 
 
 among all who developed the secondary symptoms, 
 high and low, rich and poor alike, was probably 
 not far from sixty per cent. To-day, among in- 
 telligent persons of the higher castes, the mortality 
 is not much above twenty per cent.; but among 
 the lowest caste of negroes and foreigners it is still 
 well over fifty per cent. 
 
 And why? The ready answer is that the treat- 
 ment of tuberculosis is a tedious and exceedingly 
 expensive business, and that those patients who are 
 poor and friendless must perforce die. This is a 
 fair enough answer, so far as it goes, but it does not 
 go very far. In place of it I wish to offer an- 
 other answer, and it is this: that the majority of 
 persons who succumb to preventable and curable 
 diseases to-day go down to their graves, not so 
 much because they are poor, as because they are 
 ignorant — ^because they are handicapped by the 
 low-caste man's chronic and ineradicable suspi- 
 ciousness, orthodoxy, stupidity, lack of foresight, 
 and inability to learn. 
 
 My own city of Baltimore, on account of its 
 wealth of hospitals and clinics, has been called the 
 medical capital of the New World. Its hospitals 
 are open to all, and those who cannot pay are given 
 treatment free. It is possible for a man without 
 a cent In his pocket to profit by the skill of the 
 greatest physicians and surgeons in America. Be- 
 yond the city boundaries are free sanitoria for the 
 treatment of tuberculosis and other infectious dis- 
 
no Men vs. the Man 
 
 eases. Medicines and nursing are free. Those 
 too ill to move are treated and nursed in their 
 homes. The attentions for which visitors from 
 all parts of the country pay thousands of dollars 
 are free to every indigent citizen. And yet the 
 death-rate of Baltimore is higher than that of any 
 other city of its size in the United States. 
 
 The Christian Scientists, of course, say that this 
 is because there are so many hospitals, but the real 
 reason lies in the fact that among Baltimore's 
 600,000 inhabitants there are 100,000 negroes 
 and 200,000 ignorant and superstitious foreigners. 
 The negroes, when they grow ill, take patent medi- 
 cines or send for some frowsy quack of their own 
 race. When they grow worse, they summon a 
 filthy black ecclesiastic and begin to pray to God. 
 The result is that the death-rate among the lowest 
 classes of these semi-human savages is fully sixty 
 per thousand per annum. This is just about five 
 times the normal death-rate among civilized white 
 men. 
 
 Is the negro — or low-caste white man — to blame 
 for his poverty and ignorance ? No more, I think, 
 than he is to blame for his filthiness and dishonesty. 
 He can't help being lazy and he can't help being 
 stupid, for he is a low-caste man, and he has a 
 low-caste mind. That mind is unable to grasp any 
 but the most elemental concepts. Tell him, as his 
 pastors tell him, that if he gives five cents to the 
 church he will be saved from hell, and he can un- 
 
Men vs. the Man in 
 
 derstand it. But try to make him grasp the com- 
 phcated chains of ratiocination whereby civihzed 
 man has determined that vaccination will almost 
 infallibly prevent smallpox and rabies, that quinine 
 will cure malaria, and that a long and complex 
 treatment will arrest tuberculosis — and he is as 
 pitifully helpless as the average college professor 
 in the presence of a problem not solved in the text- 
 books. 
 
 I think you perceive, by now, that I do not 
 regard Pasteur and his fellow-explorers as saviours 
 of the great masses. Their work, true enough, 
 has perceptibly alleviated the sufferings of even the 
 lowest castes, but its chief value, by long odds, has 
 been to the higher castes. It is only, indeed, by 
 reason of the despotic intimidation of these higher 
 castes — an intimidation, it may be said, which al- 
 ways has its chief spring in notions of self-defense 
 — that the lower castes have been compelled, willy 
 nilly, to enjoy any benefit at all. We vaccinate 
 negroes, not because they want to be vaccinated or 
 because we harbor a yearning to preserve their 
 useless lives, but because we don't want them, to 
 fall ill of smallpox in our kitchens and stables, and 
 so expose us to inconvenience, danger, and ex- 
 pense. With few exceptions, they are piously op- 
 posed to baring their arms, and regard the neces- 
 sity for so doing as proof positive that they are 
 down-trodden and oppressed. Let them choose 
 for themselves, and they would be dying of small- 
 
112 Men vs. the Man 
 
 pox to-day just as copiously as they are dying of 
 tuberculosis. 
 
 In their vain rebellion against the very things 
 which make Hfe bearable for them, they reveal the 
 eternal philosophy of the low-caste man. He is 
 forever down-trodden and oppressed. He is for- 
 ever opposed to a surrender of his immemorial 
 superstitions, prejudices, swinishness, and inertia. 
 He is forever certain that, if only some god would 
 lend him a hand and give him his just rights, he 
 would be rich, happy, and care-free. And he is 
 forever and utterly wrong. 
 
 I am glad you made necessary all this explana- 
 tion of my apparent inconsistency, for it gives me 
 a chance to explain another matter in which you 
 probably misunderstand me. The thing I refer 
 to may be best indicated, perhaps, by the question, 
 what factors determine the caste of a man? You 
 Socialists are prone to assume that all who stand 
 without your ranks subscribe to what you call the 
 capitalistic or bourgeois theory of civilization, and 
 I have no doubt that you regard me as one of its 
 advocates. That is to say, you probably believe 
 that I judge a man's importance by his material 
 success in life — that I look upon all poor men 
 as men of low caste, ipso facto, and all million- 
 aires, nobles, and governmental functionaries 
 as men of high caste. But that is by no means 
 true. 
 
 As a matter of fact, the standards I should like 
 
Men vs. the Man 113 
 
 to set up are far more complicated than this bour- 
 geois test. They admit many a relatively poor 
 man to the highest of all castes, and they place 
 many a very rich man in that nadir caste which 
 offers a refuge for the congenital idiot, the scrofu- 
 lous, the faith-curist, and the believer in signs, 
 hunches and St. Anthony of Padua. They are 
 standards, as I have said, of a certain complexity, 
 and if, at times, they seem to admit one and the 
 same man to both a very high caste and a very low 
 one, I have only to urge in their defense that human 
 existence is a very complex and puzzling thing, 
 and that I have no faith whatever in the socialistic 
 idea that it will be possible, some day, to solve all 
 of its riddles with one master-equation. 
 
 Well, then, what virtues do I demand in the 
 man who claims enrollment in the highest caste? 
 Briefly, I demand that he possess, to an unusual and 
 striking degree, all of those qualities, or most of 
 them, which most obviously distinguish the average 
 man from the average baboon. If you look into 
 the matter, you will find that the chief of these 
 qualities is a sort of restless impatience with things 
 as they are — a sort of insatiable desire to help along 
 the evolutionary process. The man who possesses 
 this quality is ceaselessly eager to increase and 
 fortify his mastery of his environment. He has a 
 vast curiosity and a vast passion for solving the 
 problems it unfolds before him. His happiness 
 lies in the consciousness that he has made some 
 
114 Men vs. the Man 
 
 progress to-day in comprehending and turning to 
 his uses those forces which menaced him yesterday. 
 His eye is fixed, not upon heaven, but upon earth; 
 not upon eternity, but upon to-morrow. He enters 
 the world infinitely superior to a mere brute, and 
 when he leaves it his superiority may be expressed 
 (in bad algebra) by infinity plus x. By his life 
 and labors, the human race, or some part of it, 
 makes some measurable progress, however small, 
 upward from the ape. 
 
 You will observe that this fine frenzy for im- 
 provement, for change, for progress, is entirely 
 absent in even the highest of the lower animals. 
 It is also absent, perhaps, in the very lowest types 
 of human beings ; but here, at least, it certainly be- 
 gins to appear far down the scale. The most ig- 
 norant and miserable slave in central Asia is able, 
 I take it, to formulate some idea of a state of 
 being preferable to his own; just as the most de- 
 graded American negro is equal to the concept of a 
 land flowing with milk and honey. But here we 
 begin to note a distinction which differentiates the 
 merely sentient man from the unmistakably higher 
 man. The one dreams chaotic dreams, without 
 working out practicable plans for their realiza- 
 tion. The other, having efficiency as well as 
 imagination, makes the thing itself arise out of the 
 idea of it. The one pins his faith to Christianity, 
 Socialism, or some other vaporous miracle-cult. 
 The other peers through microscopes, builds great 
 
Men vs. the Man 115 
 
 steamships, reclaims deserts, makes laws, and over- 
 turns the gods. 
 
 And so I arrive at my definition of the first- 
 caste man. He is one whose work in the world 
 increases, to some measurable extent, that ever- 
 widening gap which separates civilized man from 
 the protozoon in the sea ooze. It is possible, you 
 will note, for a man to amass billions, and yet 
 lend no hand in this progress; and it is possible, 
 again, for a man to live in poverty, and yet set 
 the clock ahead a thousand years. It is possible, 
 once more, for a man to aid progress in one way 
 and aid reaction in some other way. And so, to 
 sum up, it is possible for a poor man to belong to 
 the highest caste of men, and for a rich man to 
 belong to the lowest; and it is possible, again, 
 for one and the same man to belong, at different 
 times or even at the same time, to both castes. If 
 you think this last idea an absurdity, let me cite 
 John D. Rockefeller as an example. His vast im- 
 provements in the interchange of commodities en- 
 title him to a place in the front rank of those whose 
 lives have made for human progress; and yet his 
 belief, as a good Baptist, that total immersion in 
 water is a necessary prerequisite for entry into 
 heaven, places him, quite unmistakably, in the low- 
 est caste of superstitious barbarians. 
 
 Now, what I want to insist upon, in all this, is 
 that the distinction I have described is the product, 
 not so much of varying environment as of inborn 
 
ii6 Men vs. the Man 
 
 differences. I admit freely enough that, by care- 
 ful breeding, supervision of environment and edu- 
 cation, extending over many generations, it might 
 be possible to make an appreciable improvement 
 in the stock of the American negro, for example, 
 but I must maintain that this enterprise would be 
 a ridiculous waste of energy, for there is a high- 
 caste white stock ready to hand, and it is inconceiv- 
 able that the negro stock, however carefully it 
 might be nurtured, could ever even remotely ap- 
 proach it. The educated negro of to-day is a 
 failure, not because he meets insuperable diffi- 
 culties in life, but because he is a negro. His brain 
 is not fitted for the higher forms of mental effort; 
 his ideals, no matter how laboriously he is trained 
 and sheltered, remain those of the clown. He is, 
 in brief, a low-caste man, to the manner born, and 
 he will remain inert and inefficient until fifty gen- 
 erations of him have lived in civilization. And 
 even then, the superior white race will be fifty gen- 
 erations ahead of him. 
 
 I have used the negro as an example because in 
 him the inherited marks of the low-caste man are 
 peculiarly conspicuous. In some of the European 
 peasants who are now coming to America — and 
 particularly in those from Russia — the same marks 
 are to be seen. These peasants differ as much 
 from the high-caste white man as a mustang differs 
 from a Kentucky stallion, and this difference is the 
 product, not of their actual environment, but of 
 
Men vs. the Man 117 
 
 their forefathers' environment through innumer- 
 able generations. They represent a step in the lad- 
 der of evolution below that of the civilized white 
 man, and no conceivable change of environment 
 could lift them to the top en masse, in a lifetime. 
 Individuals of extraordinary capacity occasionally 
 appear among them — the naturalists call such ab- 
 normal individuals " sports " — and pass over auto- 
 matically and at once into some higher caste. But 
 they can get no higher than a caste in which in- 
 dividuals fully equal to them are the rule instead 
 of the exception; and the generality of their race 
 must forever remain below. 
 
 Castes are not made by man, but by nature. 
 They will be inevitable so long as every genus of 
 living beings in the world is divided into species, 
 and every species is made up of individuals whose 
 resemblance to one another, however close it may 
 be, never reaches identity. It is this variation 
 which makes progress possible, for it gives certain 
 individuals an advantage in the struggle for ex- 
 istence, and these individuals tend to crowd out 
 their weaker brothers, and to make their own 
 heartier qualities dominant in the general racial 
 strain. Among the lower animals the struggle for 
 existence is frankly a matter of dog eat dog. 
 Among men. It is more elusive, and the alert, curi- 
 ous, intelligent man I have described has an even 
 greater advantage, perhaps, than the man of mere 
 physical vigor. But whether the weapons in the 
 
ii8 Men vs. the Man 
 
 struggle be sharp teeth or efficient brains, there 
 must always be a caste of victors and a caste of 
 vanquished. Any effort to suspend the struggle is 
 empty vanity — and I here use the word in both of 
 its common meanings. 
 
 But Professor Ward dissents. He holds that 
 " class distinctions in society are wholly artificial, 
 depend entirely upon environing conditions, and 
 are in no sense due to differences in native capacity." 
 At first sight this sentence seems to be an un- 
 qualified denial of the law of natural selection — a 
 thesis, I fancy, that not even a Socialist would care 
 to maintain — but, as a matter of fact. Professor 
 Ward is merely trying to argue that congenital 
 differences, while actually existing, are counter- 
 balanced by class privileges and vested rights. In 
 other words, he believes that a man's place in the 
 world is determined, not by the intelligence and 
 capacity he brings into the world, but by the for- 
 tuitous circumstances, opportunities, and surround- 
 ings he encounters after his arrival. A man with 
 the intellect of a Huxley, born to a family of 
 Baptist farm laborers, may remain ignorant, super- 
 stitious, and degraded until the end of his days. 
 And a man but a hair's breadth removed from 
 imbecility, born to a noble house, may square the 
 circle or change the map of the world. 
 
 This theory, as I have before indicated, is the 
 favorite fallacy and chief solace of all degenerate 
 and inefficient races of men. " If I had a million 
 
Men vs. the Man 119 
 
 dollars " — ^but you know the rest of it as well as I. 
 It is one of the multitude of sophistries that meet 
 the pragmatic test of truth, for it plainly makes 
 life more bearable. The man who formulates it 
 enjoys a comforting glow of relief, of conscious 
 virtue, of martyrdom. He has found a scapegoat 
 to bear the blame for his inability to rise above 
 the morass in which he wallows, and that scape- 
 goat he variously denominates fate, luck, civiliza- 
 tion, plutocracy, privilege, the protective tariff, civil 
 service reform, or the devil. 
 
 If, as the pragmatists and supernaturalists would 
 have us believe, the mere persistence and agreeable- 
 ness of an idea were proofs of its truth, this 
 one would be perpetually and indubitably true. 
 But I cannot bring myself to accept so ingenuous a 
 gnosiology. As a matter of fact, I am firmly 
 convinced that the idea we are discussing tends to 
 become, not true, but false, in exact ratio to its per- 
 sistence and agreeableness. That is to say, in the 
 case of a man to whom it occurs but occasionally 
 and then only in moments of emotional weakness, 
 it may be true very often. But in the case of the 
 man who adopts it as his working philosophy of 
 life, it is not true more than once in ten million 
 times. 
 
 The efficient man of highest caste makes it his 
 rule to accept the world as he finds it, and to work 
 out his own salvation with a light heart. His joy 
 is in effort, in work, in progress. A difficulty over- 
 
I20 Men vs. the Man 
 
 come, a riddle solved, an enemy vanquished, a fact 
 proved, an error destroyed — in such things he 
 finds the meaning of life and surcease from its 
 sorrows. But the inefficient man, unable by his 
 own hand and brain to cope with the conditions 
 which beset and menace him, seeks refuge, soon or 
 late, in the notion that the world is out of joint. 
 Sometimes he concludes, finally, that the horrors of 
 existence are irremediable, and then he is ripe for 
 rehgion, with Its promises of repayment in some 
 gaseous paradise beyond the grave. At other 
 times he arrives at the idea that all would be well 
 if there were some abysmal reconstruction of the 
 scheme of things — some new deal of the cards, with 
 four aces pushed his way. When this madness 
 falls upon him he gropes about for a ready guide 
 to the Utopia that arises nebulously In his brain. 
 And thus it is that discontented, ignorant, helpless 
 men subscribe to the poetical fancies of Imaginative 
 dreamers, and become single-taxers. Christian 
 Scientists, Anarchists, or Socialists. 
 
 The great objections to Socialism, as a philoso- 
 phy, are that it encourages and aggravates the feel- 
 ing of martyrdom which burns in the breasts of 
 all such incompetents, and that it inflames them, at 
 the same time, with the idea that their discomfort 
 is due, not to the operation of natural laws, which 
 benefit the world by ridding it automatically and 
 harshly of the unfit, but to the deliberate and devil- 
 ish cruelty of their betters. Your true Socialist is 
 
Men vs. the Man 121 
 
 firmly convinced, before everything else, that his 
 personal existence is of vast and undoubted value 
 to the world, and that the world, if it were not a 
 swindling felon, would reward him handsomely 
 for remaining alive. 
 
 Now, since the majority of all Socialists belong 
 to the laboring class, and get their living by join- 
 ing their muscle-power to the natural forces which 
 man has harnessed — ^because of this circumstance, 
 the general idea I have set forth is transformed, 
 by Socialists, into the specific doctrine that the only 
 truly valuable man is the " producer." That is to 
 say, the only human service which fully earns and 
 deserves the reward provided by the law of sup- 
 ply and demand, is that sort of service which re- 
 sults in the production of some commodity neces- 
 sary to the actual day-to-day existence of mankind. 
 Such a service deserves, not some definite reward, 
 but all the reward that those who require it may 
 be bludgeoned into paying for it. Thus the 
 farmer who hoes a cabbage patch, and by taking 
 advantage of the hunger of his fellow-men, makes 
 them pay for his cabbages, is, by the socialistic 
 philosophy, a virtuous man. His fellow-men have 
 less cabbages than they need and the farmer him- 
 self has more than he needs. Very well, then, let 
 them pay his price ! But the man who has a sur- 
 plus of some other valuable thing, say shrewdness, 
 capital, forethought, intelligence, or cunning, and 
 demands a fair profit on the exchange from those 
 
122 Men vs. the Man 
 
 who have less than they need, and desire to buy of 
 him — this man, by the socialistic philosophy, is a 
 criminal. 
 
 You Socialists, my dear La Monte, here over- 
 look the fact that no man worthy of the name is 
 content to stand still. He wants to be richer, more 
 learned or more powerful to-morrow than he was 
 yesterday. In other words, he looks, not only for 
 a fair equivalent, but also for a profit, in all of his 
 exchanges with his fellow-men. Your laboring 
 brothers are demanding that profit to-day. They 
 want, not only fair wages, but the whole value 
 of the things they produce. Well, the same selfish 
 weakness afflicts their masters, too. The latter, 
 when they buy muscle-power, want enough to bal- 
 ance the money they pay for it — and a profit be- 
 side. The laboring man has nothing to give ex- 
 cept muscle-power, and so, after he has given 
 enough of it to balance his pay, he must give a lit- 
 tle more to make up his master's profit. As I have 
 told you in the past, I think you greatly exagger- 
 ate the actual percentage of profit, in all such trans- 
 actions; but that there always is a profit, and a 
 distinctly appreciable one, I admit very readily. 
 If there were none at all, no efficient, high-caste 
 man would engage in industrial enterprises; for 
 no man of that sort could possibly rest content 
 with standing still. 
 
 Sincerely, 
 
 Mencken. 
 
LA MONTE'S FOURTH LETTER 
 
 Dear Mencken: 
 
 I must apologize for some slight delay in an- 
 swering your last very interesting letter. The fact 
 is that your great and good friend, Mr. Roosevelt, 
 did not take the advice of his sociological friends 
 and destroy his anti-socialist manuscripts, but in- 
 stead unloaded them on the Outlook, with the 
 result that on the very day I had set apart to 
 write to you I received a hurry-up call for a reply 
 to that eminent Nietzschean, our ex-President. 
 
 And now, when I should be planting potatoes 
 and peas, I must devote a few hours to your en- 
 lightenment, but my little encounter with Mr. 
 Roosevelt has vastly increased my respect for you. 
 In your three letters thus far you have not made 
 as many blunders as Mr. Roosevelt perpetrated in 
 the first Outlook article alone, and you have never 
 shown a tithe of the bitterness. 
 
 After reading your letter there arose in my 
 mind a picture of you which, had I the pencil of a 
 Ryan Walker or a McCutcheon, I should draw 
 for you. In this picture you are hotly pursued by 
 hostile and malevolent Socialists, and seeing no 
 escape elsewhere you have sought rescue and shel- 
 
 123 
 
124 Men vs. the Man 
 
 ter by throwing yourself into the arms of a good 
 old Baltimore colored " mammy." Really, this pic- 
 ture has so captivated my imagination that I have 
 not the heart at once to tear you from her pro- 
 tecting arms. For the present, I shall content 
 myself by warning you that even there you are not 
 safe from the terrible Socialists. 
 
 I should never have guessed from the appear- 
 ance of the Baltimore darky that he (or she) was 
 the Palladium of our sacred institutions. But, in 
 the language of Bernard Shaw, " You never can 
 tell." This important role has, by most critics of 
 Socialism, been forced upon that humble and use- 
 ful person, the scavenger. 
 
 " I have seldom," says Robert Blatchford in 
 " Merrie England," " heard an argument or read 
 an adverse letter or speech against the claims of 
 justice in social matters, but our friend the 
 scavenger played a prominent part therein. Truly 
 this scavenger is a most important person. Yet 
 one would not suppose that the whole cosmic 
 scheme revolved on him as on an axis; one would 
 not imagine him to be the keystone of European 
 society — at least his appearance and his wages 
 would not justify such an assumption. But I begin 
 to believe that the fear of the scavenger is really 
 the source and fountain head, the life and blood 
 and breath of all conservatism. Good old 
 scavenger! His ash-pan is the bulwark of cap- 
 itahsm, and his besom the standard around which 
 
Men vs. the Man 125 
 
 rally the pride and the culture and the opulence 
 of British society." 
 
 Poor old scavenger ! His occupation has gone ; 
 you have given his job of " saving society " to the 
 Baltimore darky. 
 
 But we shall return to the " colored man and 
 brother " later. At present I want to express my 
 gratification at having at last discovered what you 
 mean by your favorite phrase, " high-caste men." 
 It is now obvious to me that the perfect type of 
 your first-caste man is the Christian priest or 
 clergyman. 
 
 You say that his distinguishing characteristic is 
 " a sort of insatiable desire to help along the evolu- 
 tionary process." In other words he shows primi- 
 tive animistic habits of thought by exhibiting what 
 I described in " Socialism : Positive and Nega- 
 tive " (page 97) as "the tendency to give a tele- 
 ological interpretation to evolution, to attribute a 
 meliorative trend to the cosmic process, as in Ten- 
 nyson's ' through the ages one increasing purpose 
 runs.' " 
 
 That this cropping out of a semi-theological 
 habit of thought in your last letter is not a mere 
 fortuitous phrase, but is on the contrary part and 
 parcel of your habitual view of the universe, is 
 shown by your statement in your first letter that 
 your " creed consists, first and last, in a firm belief 
 in the beneficence and permanence of the evolu- 
 tionary process." 
 
126 Men vs. the Man 
 
 Thorstein Veblen has this to say of the origin 
 of this habit of attributing ethical purposes or ef- 
 fects to " natural laws " : 
 
 " Along with the habits of thought peculiar to 
 the technology of handicraft, modern science also 
 took over and assimilated much of the institutional 
 preconceptions of the era of handicraft and petty 
 trade. The ' natural laws,' with the formulation 
 of which this early modern science is occupied, are 
 the rules governing natural ' uniformities of se- 
 quence,' and they punctiliously formulate the due 
 procedure of any given cause creatively working 
 out the achievement of a given effect, very much 
 as the craft rules sagaciously specified the due 
 routine for turning out a staple article of merchant- 
 able goods. But these ' natural laws ' of science 
 are also felt to have something of that integrity 
 and prescriptive moral force that belongs to the 
 principles of the system of ' natural rights ' which 
 the era of handicraft has contributed to the insti- 
 tutional scheme of later times. The natural laws 
 were not only held to be true to fact, but they were 
 also felt to be right and good. They were looked 
 upon as intrinsically meritorious and beneficent, 
 and were held to carry a sanction of their own. 
 This habit of uncritically Imputing merit and 
 equity to the ' natural laws ' of science continued 
 in force through much of the nineteenth century; 
 very much as the habitual acceptance of the prin- 
 ciples of ' natural rights ' has held on by force of 
 
Men vs. the Man 127 
 
 tradition long after the exigencies of experience out 
 of which these ' rights ' sprang ceased to shape 
 men's habits of life. This traditional attitude of 
 submissive approval toward the * natural laws ' of 
 science has not yet been wholly lost, even among 
 the scientists of the passing generation, many of 
 whom have uncritically invested these ' laws ' with 
 a prescriptive rectitude and excellence; but so far, 
 at least, has this animus progressed toward disuse 
 that it is now chiefly a matter for expatiation in 
 the pulpit, the accredited vent for the exudation of 
 efete matter from the cultural organism." ^ 
 
 You, my dear Mencken, do not appear to be yet 
 wholly free from anthropomorphic habits of 
 thought, as it is obvious you give the clergy no in- 
 considerable aid in their onerous task of exuding 
 effete matter from the cultural organism. 
 
 My own ideal man would be a man wholly de- 
 voted to promoting human happiness (and mind 
 I have said human happiness, not a hog's concep- 
 tion of happiness), and who would be entirely pre- 
 pared, in case it should be necessary to achieve his 
 goal, to strive manfully to modify, avert, or de- 
 feat the ' natural ' results of the evolutionary 
 process. The man who feels " a sort of insatiable 
 desire to help along the evolutionary process " is 
 still fast enmeshed in the bonds of superstition, and 
 
 'Thorstein Veblen. "The Evolution of the Scientific 
 Point of View." University of California Chronicle, Vol. X, 
 pp. 413-414- 
 
128 Men vs. the Man 
 
 has merely made a fetish of " the evolutionary 
 process " to erect upon the altar from which he has 
 hurled the old gods. 
 
 If the hypotheses of Mr. Percival Lowell in his 
 recent brilliant book on Mars are correct, the 
 " evolutionary process " there, had it not been 
 modified and interfered with by intelligence, would 
 by this time have almost wholly exterminated both 
 vegetable and animal life on that interesting planet. 
 But whether his hypotheses be right or wrong, this 
 illustration will enable you to conceive that circum- 
 stances may arise that will make the opposing of 
 the " evolutionary process " the highest function 
 of the " high-caste man." 
 
 But, although it would be difficult to find many 
 educated and intelligent men to-day outside the 
 ranks of the clergy who could give in an unquali- 
 fied allegiance to your creed — the creed of your 
 " men of the first caste " — I know well enough 
 that it is not your belief that the whole scheme of 
 things should be shaped with a view to producing 
 the maximum number of clergymen. For you, in- 
 deed, increase of the priesthood is synonymous with 
 retrogression. 
 
 By " high-caste men " you really mean men of 
 intelligence and energy — truly emancipated men, 
 and if the increase of such men is to produce the 
 effects you expect, you must also impute to them 
 kindly emotions. 
 
 But will not your " high-caste man " of the 
 
Men vs. the Man 129 
 
 future be terribly lonesome amid the "rabble"? 
 Without insulting the good people of Baltimore, 
 may I ask if you do not at times feel impelled to 
 imitate Bernard Shaw's Eugene Marchbanks in 
 " Candida " and talk to yourself out loud? " That 
 is what all poets do," Marchbanks said, " they 
 talk to themselves out loud; and the world over- 
 hears them. But it's horribly lonely not to hear 
 someone else talk sometimes." 
 
 That remark pierces the fundamental weak spot 
 in your ideal and Nietzsche's; could you realize 
 fully your ideal to-morrow, loneliness would turn 
 your paradise for Supermen into a veritable 
 hell. 
 
 Any ideal that does not include the closest pos- 
 sible approximation to economic equality suffers 
 from this same vice. Without economic equality, 
 you may mitigate but you cannot eradicate the hell 
 of loneliness which to-day makes discontented per- 
 sons of you and me and hosts of others. " A 
 wholly emancipated person," says Lester F. Ward, 
 " finds himself almost completely alone in the 
 world. There is not one perhaps in a whole city 
 in which he lives with whom he can converse five 
 minutes, because the moment anyone begins to talk 
 he reveals the fact that his mind is a bundle of er- 
 rors, of false conceits, of superstitions, and of 
 prejudices that render him utterly uninteresting. 
 The great majority are running off after some pop- 
 ular fad. Of course the most have already abro- 
 
130 Men vs. the Man 
 
 gated their reasoning powers entirely by accepting 
 some creed. The few that have begun to doubt 
 their creed are looking for another. They may 
 think they are progressing, but their credulity is 
 as complete as ever, and they are utterly devoid 
 of any knowledge by which to test the credibility 
 of their beliefs." ("Applied Sociology," page 
 81. Boston, 1906.) 
 
 And here we come back for a minute or two to 
 the " colored man and brother." As long as you 
 are compelled to live in the same city with some 
 thousands of negroes, whom you appear to find 
 more or less uninteresting as fellow-citizens, would 
 it not be wise to see if by increased opportunities 
 they might not be made more interesting? If 
 poverty-stricken, drunken negroes spreading ver- 
 min and syphilis and other contagion throughout 
 your city are, as they undoubtedly are, a perpetual 
 menace to your peace and happiness, would it not 
 be wise to make a brave and honest attempt to free 
 the negroes from poverty and syphilis and 
 drunkenness? Would not Baltimore then be a 
 pleasanter city in which to dwell ? 
 
 Unless you have the courage to go to the 
 Nietzschean extreme and boldly advocate the ex- 
 termination of the negro (and the Russian peas- 
 ant, whom you place in the same category) you 
 must join the Socialists in their efforts to enable 
 the negroes to live human lives under human con- 
 ditions. For the people of Baltimore this is 
 
Men vs. the Man 131 
 
 merely a question of self-defense or rather self- 
 preservation. 
 
 To demand for the negro a chance to live a truly 
 human life is not to assert his equality in all re- 
 spects with the white race. Says Enrico Ferri, 
 " Socialism says : Men are unequal, but they are all 
 men. 
 
 " And, in fact, although each individual is born 
 and develops in a fashion more or less different 
 from that of all other individuals, — ^just as there 
 are not in a forest two leaves identically alike, so 
 in the whole world there are not two men in all re- 
 spects equals, the one of the other, — nevertheless 
 every man, simply because he is a human being, has 
 a right to the existence of a man, and not of a 
 slave or a beast of burden." ( " Socialism and 
 Modern Science," pages 20, 21. New York, 
 1904.) 
 
 But as a matter of fact up to the present time 
 negroes as a race have enjoyed so few opportuni- 
 ties that it is utterly unscientific to dogmatize about 
 their potentialities. It is just as unwarranted to 
 deny their potential future equality as it is to 
 deny their present inequality. 
 
 Lester F. Ward, after reviewing the evidence 
 for and against racial inequality, sums up the 
 matter as follows : 
 
 " It is not therefore proved that intellectual in- 
 equality, which can be safely predicated of all 
 classes in the white race, in the yellow race, or in 
 
132 Men vs. the Man 
 
 the black race, each taken by Itself, cannot also be 
 predicated of all races taken together, and It is 
 still more clear that there is no race and no class 
 of human beings who are incapable of assimilating 
 the social achievement of mankind and of profita- 
 bly employing the social heritage." ("Applied 
 Sociology," page no.) 
 
 That is all that Soclahsm demands for the 
 negro, and the South will never be a desirable 
 place of residence till that demand is granted. 
 
 That is my honest belief, and I probably im- 
 bibed in my youth as much prejudice on the negro 
 question as you did, for I passed three years at a 
 Southern boarding school and at the University of 
 Virginia. 
 
 In closing my last letter, I promised in this to 
 admit your charge that Socialists are prone to ac- 
 cept evidence and theories that tend to help their 
 side of the argument, and to show you that this 
 peculiarity was not confined to Socialists, and to 
 draw some deductions of importance from these 
 facts. 
 
 The fact is that all beliefs that have been held 
 by considerable bodies of people have been be- 
 gotten by desires, and that these desires are the 
 emotional expressions of economic interests. Al- 
 though I would not blame you if you should be 
 growing weary of my frequent quotations from 
 Lester F. Ward, I cannot refrain from quoting his 
 admirable exposition of this point. 
 
Men vs. the Man 133 
 
 " It may be said," he writes, " that the uni- 
 versal world ideas which are said to lead or rule 
 the world are simply beliefs. This is very nearly 
 true, and therefore we need to inquire specially into 
 the nature of beliefs. The difference between be- 
 lief and opinion is shght, at least in popular usage. 
 Belief might be defined as fixed or settled opinion, 
 but there is also embraced in it a certain disre- 
 gard of the evidence upon which it rests, while in 
 opinion a certain amount of evidence is implied. 
 Opinions admit of comparison as regards their 
 strength depending upon the evidence, and may be 
 very feebly held, the ' weight ' of evidence in their 
 favor being nearly balanced by that against them. 
 This cannot be said of beliefs. In these the evi- 
 dence is not thought of. They are absolute and 
 independent of all proof. Upon what, then, do 
 they rest? Here we reach the kernel of our 
 problem. Beliefs rest on interest. But what is 
 interest? It is feeling. World views grow out 
 of feelings. They are the bulwarks of race safety. 
 You cannot argue men out of them. They are the 
 conditions to group as well as to individual salva- 
 tion. 
 
 " Now it is just this element of interest that 
 links beliefs to desires and reconciles the ideological 
 and economic interpretations of history; for 
 economics, by its very definition of value, is based 
 on desires and their satisfaction. Every belief 
 embodies a desire, or rather a great mass of de- 
 
134 Men vs. the Man 
 
 sires. In this lies the secret of its power to pro- 
 duce effects. The belief or idea, considered as a 
 purely intellectual phenomenon, is not a force. 
 The force lies in the desire. And here we must 
 be careful not to invert the terms. The belief 
 does not cause the desire. The reverse is much 
 nearer the truth. Desires are economic demands 
 arising out of the nature of man and the condi- 
 tions of existence. They are demands for satis- 
 faction, and the sum total of the influences, in- 
 ternal and external, acting upon a group or an in- 
 dividual, leads to the conclusion, belief, or idea 
 that a certain proposition is true. That proposi- 
 tion, though always reducible to the indicative 
 form, is essentially an imperative, and prompts 
 certain actions regarded as essential to the preserva- 
 tion of the individual or the group. The fact that 
 the interests involved are sometimes transcendental 
 interests and become increasingly so with the in- 
 tellectual development of the race, does not affect 
 the truth of all this. All interest Is essentially 
 economic, and seen in their true light religious in- 
 terests are as completely economic as the so-called 
 material interests. All conduct enjoined by reli- 
 gion — not only the most primitive but also the 
 most highly developed religions — aims at the satis- 
 faction of desire, of which the avoidance of pun- 
 ishment is only a form, for economic considera- 
 tions are always both positive and negative In this 
 sense. And If In the higher religions the positive 
 
Men vs. the Man 135 
 
 interests come to predominate over the negative 
 ones, this only renders them more typically eco- 
 nomic in their character." (" Applied Sociology," 
 pages 45-46.) 
 
 This idea that religious ideals have economic 
 roots cannot be unfamiliar to such a student of 
 Friedrich Nietzsche as yourself. Do you not re- 
 call that wonderful passage in " A Genealogy of 
 Morals " in which he tells us how " ideals are 
 manufactured" on earth? He shows how the 
 early converts to Christianity, being weak, and 
 slaves and helpless, falsified " weakness into 
 desert," and " impotence which requiteth not into 
 ' goodness ' ; timorous meanness into ' humility,' " 
 and called " not-to-be-able-to-take-revenge " " not- 
 to-will-revenge, perhaps even forgiveness." 
 
 But while the idea that religious beliefs have 
 been moulded by economic conditions is familiar 
 to you, you will probably be startled when I assert 
 that this is equally true of scientific beliefs. I de- 
 veloped this thesis very inadequately in a paper on 
 " Science and Revolution " in the Social-Demo- 
 crat (London) for March 15, 1909, and after I 
 had mailed the manuscript I received from Pro- 
 fessor Veblen a copy of his paper on " The Evo- 
 lution of the Scientific Point of View " (from 
 which I have already quoted in this letter) , which 
 develops the same thesis with far greater clearness 
 and ability. 
 
 In the former paper I wrote : 
 
136 Men vs. the Man 
 
 I have no disposition to deny the essential truth of 
 Modern Science and the great potential benefits it has 
 conferred upon humanity, when I assert that the form of 
 scientific theories has been largely determined by the 
 economic conditions amid which they arose, and that — 
 this is the important point — their acceptance by large 
 bodies of adherents has depended upon their fitness to 
 meet the desires — desires produced by economic needs — 
 of those adherents. 
 
 This general position was assumed by Karl Kautsky 
 in his " Social Revolution," and, with more facts at 
 his disposal, Arthur Morrow Lewis has elaborated it 
 still further in his lecture on De Vries' " Mutation " in 
 his excellent little handbook " Evolution : Social and 
 Organic" (Chicago, 1908); but even since those books 
 were written the development of scientific theory has 
 overwhelmingly reenforced the view that science responds 
 to economic stimuli. 
 
 Space will not permit me to give here any save the 
 briefest sketch of scientific theory during the last century 
 and a quarter. 
 
 When the bourgeoisie were fresh from their revolu- 
 tionary conflict with feudalism — the great French Revo- 
 lution — and were still extending their dominion, they 
 were iconoclastic and revolutionary in spirit. It was 
 precisely then that the cataclysmic theories of Cuvier 
 in geology and biology became the generally accepted 
 theories of science. Cuvier accounted for the existence 
 of fossil remains of animals different from any living 
 species by assuming that from time to time in the past 
 great cataclysms (earthquakes and eruptions) had oc- 
 curred and wiped out all living forms of life, and that 
 
Men vs. the Man 137 
 
 fresh creations had filled the vacancies. This theory 
 at the same time accounted for the conformation of 
 the earth's surface. The same cataclysms had dug oceans 
 and lakes and piled up mountains. 
 
 Contemporary with Cuvier was Lamarck, and Lamarck 
 proclaimed the true theory that animals had descended 
 from ancestors unlike themselves, but there was no large 
 class of people to whom this doctrine was acceptable, 
 and Lamarck died disgraced, and Cuvier in the height 
 of his glory was called upon to pronounce his eulogy, 
 and took advantage of the opportunity to malign him. 
 
 By the middle of the nineteenth century, the bourgeoisie 
 were firmly seated in the saddle; the last vestige of 
 feudalism and the restrictions of the guild system (and 
 in England of protective tariffs) had been wiped out; 
 the bourgeoisie had the proletariat just where they wanted 
 them. In a word, they had no more use for revolutionary 
 theories in their business; if changes must come, let 
 them come a step at a time. Thus the conditions for 
 the wide acceptance of evolutionary theories in biology 
 and geology were ripe, so that in spite of the rage of the 
 clergy nothing could prevent the general conquest of 
 the scientific world by the natural selection of Darwin 
 and Wallace, and the uniformitarian geology of Sir 
 Charles Lyell. So true is this that on last Firiday 
 (February 12, 1909), the centenary of the births of 
 Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin, many of the 
 clergy who had been called upon to deliver Lincoln ora- 
 tions were unable to restrain themselves from adding a 
 word of tribute to Charles Darwin. 
 
 Darwin, like Lamarck, taught that animals had de- 
 scended from ancestors unlike themselves, and that the 
 
138 Men vs. the Man 
 
 changes in animals leading to new species had been 
 very slow and gradual. It is true that Darwin and 
 Lamarck differed as to the means by which these changes 
 had been brought about, but in the particulars I have 
 named they were at one. Yet Lamarck was dishonored, 
 and to-day most men look upon Darwin as the greatest 
 genius of the nineteenth century. Why this difference? 
 Economic conditions is the only possible answer. 
 
 Sir Charles Lyell laid great stress upon the minute 
 changes in the earth's surface that are always in progress, 
 and reduced the role of cataclysms to an extremely in- 
 significant one — and he became the recognized father 
 of modern geology. Sir Charles Lyell taught us much 
 and valuable truth; the small changes he noted are 
 actually constantly going on, and their accumulated 
 effects are tremendous, and before Lyell's day they had 
 been unnoticed and neglected. But his great reputation 
 raised to a sacred dogma the utterly indefensible doctrine 
 that (to translate the pedantic Latin) "Nature makes 
 no leaps." 
 
 Darwin taught that natural selection seizes upon the 
 minutest variation that gives the individual even the 
 slightest imaginable advantage in the struggle for exist- 
 ence, and that the fixing and accumulation of these in- 
 finitesimal variations in time brings about the introduc- 
 tion of new species. At the very time when Darwin 
 was pursuing his researches, the laws of heredity were 
 being experimentally worked out in a monastery garden 
 in Briinn, Austria, by a monk who had previously studied 
 natural science in Vienna. This monk was Gregor 
 Mendel, the discoverer and formulator of the laws of 
 heredity. His studies have enabled us to predict mathe- 
 
Men vs. the Man 139 
 
 matically the results of almost any conceivable experiment 
 in hybridization. Incidentally, his studies showed that 
 slight variations in height, etc., that might be of marked 
 advantage to the individual in whom they occurred, were 
 no more likely to appear again in his progeny than they 
 were in the progeny of less favored individuals. The 
 remarkable results of Mendel's studies were published 
 in the " Proceedings of the Natural History Society of 
 Briinn " in 1865, just six years after the publication 
 of Darwin's famous " Origin of Species." It is only fair 
 to note that, so far as we know, Darwin never knew 
 anything of the work of Mendel. But the important 
 point for us is that there was at that time, as it were, 
 no market for the discovery that the raw material for 
 natural selection to work upon must consist of " leaps " 
 or, in other words, of much more marked and considerable 
 variations than Darwin and Wallace had worked so hard 
 to prove the adequacy of. And the fact is that Mendel's 
 remarkable paper was forgotten and buried, and was not 
 exhumed and resurrected until the dawn of the twentieth 
 century by some earnest scientific workers at the Uni- 
 versity of Cambridge. 
 
 What had happened in the meantime to bring about 
 a readiness in the minds of large bodies of intelligent 
 men and women to accept cataclysmic theories in the 
 natural sciences? There can be but one answer — the 
 appearance of the ever-growing International Social De- 
 mocracy. Economic conditions had created an army of 
 30,000,000 or 40,000,000 earnest men and women stead- 
 fastly striving for revolution, and among them were 
 to be numbered the cream of the intellectuals of both 
 hemispheres. Here was the " demand " for cataclysmic 
 
140 Men vs. the Man 
 
 theories, and with the closing decade of the nineteenth 
 century science began to furnish the " supply." This 
 supply is now increasing so rapidly that the task of 
 keeping abreast of the new theories is bewildering, and 
 the danger appears to be that by the close of this, the 
 first decade of the twentieth century, our most advanced 
 scientists will be teaching that nature makes nothing 
 but leaps, that all development is by cataclysms or revo- 
 lutions. At all events, we are reasonably sure that the 
 charge of being unscientific will not much longer be 
 hurled at the revolutionists in the Socialist ranks. In the 
 second decade of the twentieth century we may expect 
 to see the opportunists and reformers using their utmost 
 ingenuity to answer the very charge they have so often 
 hurled at our heads. 
 
 Toward the close of the nineteenth century a Dutch 
 botanist, Hugo De Vries, noticed some new varieties of 
 evening primroses in his garden near Amsterdam. They 
 came from some self-sown plants of the common American 
 Lamarckiana. " In the test condition of De Vries' own 
 garden," Mr. Lewis tells us, " in an experiment covering 
 thirteen years, he observed over fifty thousand of the 
 Lamarckiana spread over eight generations, and of these 
 eight hundred were mutations divided among seven new 
 elementary species. These mutations when self-fertilized, 
 or fertilized from plants like themselves, bred true to 
 themselves, thus answering the test of a real species. 
 De Vries also watched the field from which his original 
 forms were taken, and saw that similar mutations occurred 
 there, so that they were not in any way due to cultivation." 
 
 That was the main contribution of the nineteenth 
 century to cataclysmic biology, De Vries held that 
 
Men vs. the Man 141 
 
 Darwin admitted the possibility of such mutations in addi- 
 tion to the ordinary lesser variations or " fluctuations " 
 which Wallace and most Darwinians have held to be 
 the only raw material that Nature provides for natural 
 selection to work upon, and in this he is probably correct, 
 though it is beyond question that Darwin devoted most 
 of his life to proving the adequacy of " fluctuations." 
 
 Mr. Punnett, of Cambridge, who is the leading ex- 
 ponent of Mendelism, in his book on that subject, " Men- 
 delism " (Cambridge, 1907), says that where fluctuations 
 appear to be inherited they are probably " in reality small 
 mutations." He summarizes the case in this way: "Of 
 the inheritance of mutations there is no doubt. Of the 
 transmission of fluctuations there is no very strong evi- 
 dence. It is therefore reasonable to regard the mutation 
 as the main, if not the only, basis of evolution." 
 
 Remember, this is the extreme swing of the pendulum. 
 He really admits that natural selection preserves some 
 small changes, too, but he re-christens such changes " small 
 mutations." But it would be just as fair for a revolu- 
 tionist to infer from this that Nature works only by 
 revolutions, as it ever was for an opportunist reformer 
 to infer from Darwin's teaching that Nature works only 
 by evolution. As a matter of fact, in neither case is 
 there any justification for transferring a law of biology 
 to a totally different science, sociology. 
 
 Space will not permit me to give more than a glimpse 
 at similar changes in other sciences. Professor T. J. J. 
 See, who has been in charge of the United States Astro- 
 nomical Observatory at Mare Island, near San Francisco, 
 has made a profound study of earthquakes, and published 
 his results in the " Proceedings of the American Philosoph- 
 
142 Men vs. the Man 
 
 ical Society" at Philadelphia. He has also summarized 
 them in more popular form in the September (1908) 
 number of the Pacific Monthly. His conclusion is that all 
 mountains have been formed by earthquakes caused by 
 the secular leakage of the ocean bottom. Is not that 
 cataclysmic enough for you? Is it true? I do not 
 know, but it appears to have the indorsement of such 
 scientists as the Swedish physicist, Arrhenius, and the 
 French astronomer, Camille Flammarion. At least, it 
 seems beyond question that some mountains are formed 
 in that way, so we must bid a long farewell to the old 
 uniformitarian geology. 
 
 Astronomy has shown itself equally unable to resist 
 the cataclysmic tendency of the day. In Harper's Mag- 
 azine for January, 1909, Professor Robert Kennedy 
 Duncan, of the University of Kansas, tells us that " the 
 nebular hypothesis of Laplace is no longer tenable," 
 that its place has been taken by the " planetesimal hy- 
 pothesis " of Professor T. C. Chamberlain, of the Univer- 
 sity of Chicago. This means that astronomers now be- 
 lieve that our solar system has been formed, not by the 
 infinitely slow cooling down of a vast sphere of fiery 
 vapor, forming one ring and then one planet after another 
 during almost an infinity of time, but by a sudden ex- 
 plosion in our ancestral sun which formed all our planets 
 at once by a single cataclysmic stroke! To describe the 
 character of their production Professor Duncan uses the 
 word " catastrophic." 
 
 . . . It is difficult to name a branch of science in 
 which the cataclysmic theory is not triumphant to-day. 
 
 Hegel's maxim that "Nothing is; everything is be- 
 coming " has become the fundamental assumption of all 
 
Men vs. the Man 143 
 
 science. The chemists who have investigated the radio- 
 active bodies have shown us one chemical element turning 
 into another in a fashion to make rejoice the heart of an 
 old-time alchemist. Discussing this point, M. Lucien 
 Poincare says: "We shall have to abandon the idea 
 so instinctively dear to us that matter is the most stable 
 thing in the universe, and to admit, on the contrary, 
 that all bodies whatever are a kind of explosive decom- 
 posing with extreme slowness." ("The New Physics," 
 Appleton, 1908.) 
 
 Let us be careful not to go to extremes and deny the 
 fact and the fruitfulness of slow evolution, but let us 
 with equal determination assert the necessity and efficacy 
 of cataclysmic revolution! 
 
 You see, my dear Mencken, I freely admit that 
 we Socialists believe in the theories and arguments 
 making for Socialism because we want to believe 
 in them, because we believe it is to our interest or to 
 the interest of humanity for us to believe in them. 
 But those who oppose Socialism do so because they 
 believe it to their interest to do so. 
 
 I believe I have demonstrated the economic 
 foundation of beliefs in the field in which such a 
 foundation would have been least suspected — that 
 of the natural sciences — so that I think we may 
 regard Lester Ward's view of beliefs as holding 
 good universally. 
 
 But while the beliefs of both the friends and 
 foes of Socialism rest on economic foundations, 
 there is this prime difference between them: — the 
 
144 Men vs. the Man 
 
 Socialist foundation is steadily spreading in area 
 and growing in strength and solidity, while the 
 anti-Socialist foundation is disintegrating and 
 crumbling away. The pervasive influence of the 
 Machine Process is extending ever farther and 
 deeper and making more thoroughgoing the 
 standardization of life, and is thus ever multiplying 
 and invigorating the desires that make for So- 
 cialism at the same time that it is sapping the 
 strength of the desires that stand in the way of 
 Sociahsm. Unless you can point to some new 
 force that will intervene and retard the spread of 
 the influence of the Machine Process, you are 
 compelled to admit that the time when the vast 
 majority of mankind will be Socialists is not far 
 distant. This is the sort of an " evolutionary 
 process " that I and my comrades (whether you 
 regard them as "high-caste" or "low-caste") 
 have " a sort of insatiable desire to help along." 
 
 But though I saw plainly enough the effect of 
 economic conditions upon scientific theory when I 
 wrote the paper from which I have quoted so lib- 
 erally, it was not until I read the illumining paper 
 by Thorstein Veblen on " The Evolution of the 
 Scientific Point of View " that I saw that so long 
 as science was a mere shuttlecock tossed hither and 
 thither by varying class interests nothing worthy 
 of the name of science was so much as possible. 
 Not until the Social Revolution shall have wiped 
 out class lines forever, will a true science, that 
 
Men vs. the Man 145 
 
 is a broadly human, instead of a class, science, 
 arise. 
 
 Literature too awaits the vivifying breath of 
 the Social Revolution. " Under class civiliza- 
 tion," says Marcus Hitch, " all literature as well 
 as all science may be called toy work; it does not 
 make for human progress directly but only inci- 
 dentally. The sciences and inventions are ex- 
 ploited by corporations primarily for profit, and 
 all new discoveries merely broaden the field of ex- 
 ploitation and give rise to larger corporations. 
 The toy literature and arts merely serve for the 
 diversion of the same class; they affect the upper 
 surface of society only and do not rise to the dig- 
 nity of really human productions, because they are 
 not participated in by humanity, nor is it intended 
 that they should be." (Goethe's " Faust." Chi- 
 cago, 1908, pages 38-39.) 
 
 The same point is possibly more clearly brought 
 out by M. Alfred Odin, Professor in the University 
 of Sofia, in his great work, Genese des grand 
 hommes, gens de lettres franqais moderns. (Paris, 
 
 1895.) 
 
 " Literature then is not," he writes, " in its 
 origin, and hence in its essence, that vague, ethereal, 
 spontaneous thing whose phantom so many his- 
 torians and literary critics have been pleased to 
 evoke. It is in the full force of the term an arti- 
 ficial creation, since it is derived essentially from 
 causes due to the intentional intervention of man, 
 
146 Men vs. the Man 
 
 and has not resulted from the simple natural evo- 
 lution of mankind. It is a natural phenomenon 
 only as it faithfully reflects the inner mental work- 
 ings of certain social strata. It possesses nothing 
 national or popular. Literature can only be na- 
 tional when it springs from the very bosom of the 
 people, when it serves to express with equal ardor 
 the interests and the passions of the whole world. 
 French literature does not do this. With rare 
 exceptions it is only the mouthpiece of a few priv- 
 ileged circles. And this explains why, in spite of 
 so many efforts of every kind to spread it among 
 the people, it has remained upon the whole so un- 
 attractive and so foreign to the masses. Born in 
 the atmosphere of the hotbed it cannot bear the 
 open air. Not until, from some cause or other, 
 the whole population shall be brought to interest 
 itself actively in intellectual affairs will it be pos- 
 sible for a truly national literature to come forth 
 which shall become the common property of all 
 classes of society." (Page 564.) 
 
 The same story is to be told of art as of Htera- 
 ture and science. But this letter is already over- 
 long, so I shall content myself by giving William 
 Morris's reason why to-day we can have no true 
 art. " In one word," he says, " slavery lies be- 
 tween us and art." 
 
 Do you wish to live to see a true science flour- 
 ish ? Then, become a soldier of the Social Revolu- 
 tion! 
 
Men vs. the Man 147 
 
 Do you wish to see a great human literature 
 blossom? Then, become a soldier of the Social 
 Revolution ! 
 
 Do you wish to see all life made beautiful by 
 noble art? Then, become a soldier of the So- 
 cial Revolution! 
 
 The recruiting office is always open. 
 Yours, &c., 
 
 R. R. La M. 
 
MENCKEN'S REPLY TO LA MONTE'S 
 FOURTH LETTER 
 
 My Dear La Monte: 
 
 You begin your letter by discoursing of 
 scavengers, and I shall imitate your example. 
 The scavenger, you point out quite accurately, is 
 the favorite bugaboo and Exhibit A of many of 
 the principal opponents of Socialism. They won- 
 der who will volunteer to do the scavenging in the 
 Socialist state, and their wonderment is soon 
 transformed Into a denial that any scavenging will 
 be done at all. So pictured, the socialistic land- 
 scape takes on a disagreeable aspect. Heaps of 
 garbage disfigure the highroads; there are dead 
 cats in the reservoirs, and the Louvre is full of 
 tomato cans. The nose cries out aloud for mercy 
 and the human race falls prey to zymotic disease. 
 
 This seems to be the idea at the bottom of the 
 Rev. Thomas Dixon's anti-socialist novel, " Com- 
 rades." The comrades of his socialistic Island, 
 when the time comes to choose avocations, forget 
 entirely the daily drudgery of the world. More 
 than half of the women want to be chorus girls, 
 college professors, and wealthy widows, and ten 
 per cent, of the men Immolate themselves upon the 
 
 148 
 
Men vs. the Man 149 
 
 altar of national banking. Not a hero asks an 
 option on the ash-cart. Not a soul offers to look 
 after the plumbing. 
 
 There is humor in the scene, but not a great 
 deal of truth. As a matter of fact the scavenger 
 is by no means the most ignoble of men, and his 
 profession never lacks willing recruits. His so- 
 cial position, indeed, is palpably higher than that 
 of the prostitute, male or female, the pickpocket 
 or the mendicant. The undertaker, a scavenger 
 with a touch of poetry, is a respected citizen in 
 every American village, and even in so large a 
 town as Philadelphia the freemen once chose an 
 undertaker for mayor. The scavengers who have 
 rid the Canal Zone of mosquitoes will live in his- 
 tory, and not many years hence their effigies will 
 grace the public places of Colon. The trained 
 nurse spends half of her waking hours in scaveng- 
 ing, and so do the doctor, the sailor, the dairyman 
 — all honorable men. The housewife's eternal 
 foe, so the soap advertisements tell us, is dirt. 
 You and I are scavengers, too — ^you, when you ap- 
 ply the whisk-broom to your raiment, and I when 
 I flick my cigar ashes out of the window, instead 
 of behind the piano. 
 
 No, there is no prejudice against scavenging, 
 but rather, among the fastidious, a passion for it; 
 and so far as I have been able to observe, no very 
 active ostracism of scavengers. The man who 
 calls each morning to empty my garbage can is a 
 
150 Men vs. the Man 
 
 high dignitary in the Patriotic Order Sons of 
 America, and has ten times as much political in- 
 fluence as I have. On election day he ceases from 
 his labors and devotes himself to inoculating the 
 great masses of the plain people — of whom I have 
 the honor to be one — with enthusiasm. At public 
 gatherings of the electorate he bears a torch and 
 howls like a wolf. On election day I find that he 
 has already voted when I reach the polling-place, 
 and I enjoy the soothing consciousness that his bal- 
 lot has nullified mine. Later on, perhaps, he will 
 vote again, for he has nothing else to do all day. 
 As for me, I must get back to my desk and finish 
 my article on " The Republic versus Despotism." 
 
 Considering all this, I agree with you that the 
 reverend, but fanciful Dixon, and all those other 
 critics of Socialism who hail the scavenger as their 
 deliverer, are trusting themselves to a far from 
 triumphant hero. 
 
 But all the same, I am forced to appear, if un- 
 willingly and as a traitor, in the camp of these 
 critics, for I, too, fasten an argument against So- 
 cialism upon the scavenging gentleman. My argu- 
 ment, however, differs materially from theirs, for 
 while they see in Socialism a scheme of things that 
 would annihilate him, I see in it a scheme that 
 would elevate him to the high estate and dignity 
 of the gods. Under our present democracy the 
 scavenger. If he have ambition in him, may become 
 the equal of an Edison or a Cyrus Field — on cer- 
 
Men vs. the Man 151 
 
 tain limited occasions and in certain limited re- 
 spects. Under Socialism he would be the peer of 
 these infinitely superior men at all times and in all 
 respects I 
 
 In other words, Socialism is indissolubly linked 
 with the doctrine that a man, merely by virtue of 
 being a man, is fitted to take a hand in the ad- 
 judication of all the world's most solemn and dif- 
 ficult causes. It insists that the voice of the ig- 
 norant shall be heard as respectfully as the voice 
 of the learned. It contends that the yearning of 
 the hod-carrier for a high hat and a keg of beer 
 shall receive as much consideration as the yearning 
 of an Ehrlich for the secret of cancer. It main- 
 tains that the Russian-born tailor, filthy to his finger 
 tips and the devotee of an outlandish, incompre- 
 hensible creed of nonsensical text-searching, shall 
 be the equal of the men who conquer the wilder- 
 ness and harness the lightning. It sees some- 
 thing portentous and holy in the trivial accident 
 that the negro loafer, drowsing in his wallow, was 
 born without a tail. It fastens a transcendental 
 importance upon the word " human " and con- 
 verts it into a synonym for " intelligent," " honest," 
 " wise " — for every adjective that distinguishes 
 one caste of men from the caste below it. You 
 may protest all you please, and qualify your mean- 
 ing of " equality " however you please, but the 
 fact remains that if this notion that one man is as 
 good as another — " before God," or " as a citl- 
 
1^2 Men vs. the Man 
 
 zen " — ^be taken away, Socialism ceases to be in- 
 telligible to rational creatures. 
 
 But am I arguing, I hear you ask, against gov- 
 ernment by the consent of the governed? Do I 
 propose the overthrow of our democracy and the 
 erection in its place of some form of absolute 
 monarchy or oligarchy? Not at all. All things 
 considered, I am convinced, as you are, that the 
 republican form of government in vogue in the 
 United States and England to-day is the best, 
 safest, and most efficient government ever set up 
 in the world. But its comparative safety and ef- 
 ficiency he, not in the eternal truth of the some- 
 what florid strophes of the Declaration of Inde- 
 pendence, but in the fact that those strophes must 
 ever remain mere poetry. That is to say, its prac- 
 tice is beneficent because its theory is happily im- 
 possible. Once a year we reaffirm the doctrine 
 that all men are free and equal. All the rest of 
 the twelvemonth we devote our energies to prov- 
 ing that they are not. 
 
 It is lucky for civilization that democracy must 
 ever remain a phantasm, to entertain and hearten 
 the lowly like the hope of heaven, but to fall short 
 eternally of realization. If it were actually pos- 
 sible to give every citizen an equal voice in the 
 management of the world — if it were practicable to 
 provide machinery whereby the collective will of 
 the majority could be registered accurately, and 
 made eifective automatically and immediately — 
 
Men vs. the Man 153 
 
 the democratic ideal would reduce itself to an ab- 
 surdity in six months. There would be an end 
 to all progress. Emotion would take the place 
 of reason. It would be impossible to achieve 
 coherent governmental policies. The mind of the 
 government, as a government, would be the mind 
 of the average citizen of the nether majority — a 
 mind necessarily incapable of grasping the com- 
 plex concepts formulated by the progressive 
 minority. The more childish the idea the more 
 eagerly it would be adopted and put into execu- 
 tion. The more unreasoning the prejudice, the 
 more desperately it would be cherished and the 
 longer it would survive. 
 
 An example may make this somewhat more clear. 
 You are familiar, I suppose, with the enormous 
 value of the work done by the national Depart- 
 ment of Agriculture. It has multiplied our na- 
 tional wealth, it has reduced the labor of our 
 farmers and increased their leisure, and it has 
 greatly elevated our standards of living. And yet, 
 as you know, its efforts were ridiculed and opposed 
 by nine-tenths of the farmers in the United States 
 when it began, and even to-day the majority of 
 them look upon it as their officious enemy. But 
 a few months ago, when experts went through 
 Maryland showing the peasants how to increase 
 the yield of their cornfields, a howl of objurga- 
 tion went up. 
 
 Let us suppose that the project of establishing a 
 
154 Men vs. the Man 
 
 Department of Agriculture had been referred to a 
 universal manhood plebiscite, and that all the votes 
 had been counted fairly. Do you believe that the 
 farmers of the country, with their seven-tenths 
 majority, would have said aye ? I think not. And 
 supposing the Department established, do you be- 
 lieve that a referendum would have supported it 
 in its infinitely useful, but iconoclastic, and hence 
 obnoxious, work? Again, I think not. 
 
 Fortunately, it is impossible, under our exist- 
 ing system of denaturized democracy, for the 
 freemen of the land to record their judgment upon 
 all the countless administrative issues that arise — 
 or even upon the major issues of general policy. 
 Theoretically, true enough, they determine the lat- 
 ter by their votes, but actually, it is always possi- 
 ble for the intelligent minority to drive them, buy 
 them, or lead them by the nose. The use of brute 
 force against the mob is a constant, but seldom 
 recognized expedient of civilized government. A 
 President of honesty and intelligence sacrifices his 
 chance of re-election in order to execute some plan 
 for the national benefit. The electors will cast 
 him out on that impending November day, but 
 meanwhile he has the power of the State behind 
 him, and so his plan is put through. Again, there 
 comes a crisis, in some division of the State, in the 
 conflict between the intelligent minority and the 
 lowest caste of the majority. The latter attempts 
 to assert its god-given " rights " — to substitute 
 
Men vs. the Man 155 
 
 barbarism for civilization. Well, the shot-gun 
 does a solemn work — and disfranchisement appears 
 as a foot-note to the Declaration of Independence. 
 Marcus Brutus and the Ku Klux Klan were of a 
 piece. In despotism it is assassination that stands 
 between the slave and his ultimate, unbearable 
 wrong, and in republics it is despotism that saves 
 civilization from the slave. 
 
 The lesser weapons that I have mentioned are 
 bribery and sophistry. You know, as well as I, 
 how each is wielded, and you know, too, that each, 
 in the long run, works as much good as harm. 
 If it were not possible for politicians to hoodwink 
 and bamboozle the electorate, the Secretary of 
 State at Washington would practise the statecraft 
 of the village grocery store. Luckily for all of 
 us, the truly vital problems of government are sel- 
 dom left to the decision of the majority. If, by 
 chance, they enter into a campaign, it is always 
 possible to drag a herring across the trail, and so 
 send the plain people galloping after it. Their 
 actual choosing, when it is done, narrows down to 
 a choice between a fat man and a lean man, a 
 platitude and a fallacy, tweedledum and tweedle- 
 dee. One candidate proposes to curb the trusts, 
 and his opponent proposes to curb the trusts. 
 There is a noisy wrangle over Identities — and the 
 luckier of the two aspirants gets his chance. Once 
 he is in office, the actual issues of the campaign en- 
 gage him no more. Instead, he devotes his time 
 
156 Men vs. the Man 
 
 to the execution of ideas which he has scarcely 
 mentioned, perhaps, in his canvass, but which he 
 knows to be of importance and value. The plati- 
 tudes of the platforms have served their purpose, 
 and no one will hear of them again until the next 
 campaign. 
 
 Bribery, I believe, is often more efficient, in com- 
 bating the eternal running amuck of the Chan- 
 dala caste, than either brute force or sophistry. 
 Certainly, it is more subtile than the former and 
 more honorable than the latter. The minority de- 
 cides what it wants and what it can afford to pay 
 — and the majority gratefully accepts its money. 
 In my own glorious State of Maryland fifty per 
 cent, of the voters expect — nay, demand — to be 
 paid for their votes. If, by any accident, there 
 were no competitive bids on election day, it would 
 puzzle them sorely to decide how to vote. In 
 some of the counties, I am told, fully ninety per 
 cent, accept honorariums from the party disburs- 
 ing officers. Horrible? Not at all. Just sup- 
 pose that these swine actually recorded their own 
 thoughts in the ballot-box! Just suppose that the 
 honest opinions of the Eastern Shore of Maryland, 
 white and black, were transformed into laws upon 
 the statute-books of the State! If they were, it 
 would be a misdemeanor to call a Baptist clergy- 
 man an ass, and a felony to put a lock on a hen- 
 house door. 
 
 And yet you Socialists, whether you are disposed 
 
Men vs. the Man 157 
 
 to admit it or not, propose to wipe out the just 
 and providential disabihties which now differ- 
 entiate all such vermin from their betters. You 
 tell the whining, inefficient man, with his constant 
 cry of injustice and oppression, that he must get 
 the things he wants through the ballot-box. " Vote 
 for Debs," you say to him, " and you will be paid, 
 not only your fair wage, but your employer's profit 
 also. Vote for Debs, and you will be able to live 
 at the rate of $5,000 a year. Vote for Debs, and 
 your hours of labor will be cut to two a day. Vote 
 for Debs, and the by-laws of your trades-union 
 will become the constitution of the Republic." 
 
 Well, suppose he does it, and gets all that he 
 now seeks. Will he be content, then, to loll con- 
 tentedly in his new luxury, with his $5,000 a year, 
 his twenty-two hours of idleness, his crayon por- 
 trait of his grandmother, his automatic piano, his 
 diamond shirt studs, his automobile, and his half- 
 hourly can of beer? I think not. Once he be- 
 comes the economic and political equal of his 
 former employer he will proceed to enforce his 
 equality, politically as well as economically. He 
 will become, in brief, a statesman, a disputant, a 
 philosopher — and after that, God help us! His 
 heroes will be the men who think as he thinks. 
 He will send the intellectual giant in the next ditch 
 to Congress. The boss of his union will aspire 
 to the Presidency. The secretary of the scene- 
 shifters will go to the Court of St. James. 
 
158 Men vs. the Man 
 
 This picture, my dear La Monte, is not fan- 
 tastic. The clod-hopper's distrust of his betters 
 will be accentuated, rather than ameliorated by So- 
 cialism. Our scavenger, even after he is the 
 political and economic equal of Dr. Eliot and Mr. 
 Rockefeller, will still view such men with suspicion 
 — if there be, indeed, any men of their sort in the 
 socialistic state — ^because it is an inherent and In- 
 eradicable characteristic of all low-caste men to 
 look with suspicion upon those whose ambitions, 
 ethics, and Ideals are more complex than theirs. 
 The old hatred of the man who would rather read 
 a book than bask In the sun has not died out In 
 the world. The old cry of sorcery is still raised. 
 And the low-caste man, whenever he has the chance, 
 still prefers to trust himself to a delegate from his 
 own caste, whose yearnings are his, and whose 
 mental processes he can follow. Socialism can 
 never change this. It is a matter of anatomy 
 more than of economics. 
 
 At the present time, when an election district 
 peopled In overwhelming majority by low-caste 
 men, sends one of them to a state legislature, his 
 power for evil is obscured and neutralized by two 
 things. In the first place, he meets few of his fel- 
 lows there, for the average low-caste electoral body 
 Is so corrupt that its class-feeling is easily overcome 
 by money, and in consequence he cannot make him- 
 self felt. In the second place, he is commonly 
 corrupt himself. If you have any practical ac- 
 
Men vs. the Man 159 
 
 quaintance with politics in any American state, you 
 must be well aware that the legislators who are 
 most easily purchased are those who come from 
 the ranks of the workingmen and farmers. The 
 bucolic statesman, when he gets to the state cap- 
 ital, makes his fight for the trivial local laws that 
 his own self-interest demands, and after that he 
 is for sale to the highest bidder. The more im- 
 portant matters before the law-making body are 
 entirely beyond his comprehension. He doesn't 
 understand them, and he doesn't want to under- 
 stand them. I know, indeed, of a case wherein a 
 large city, seeking authority from the state legis- 
 lature to make improvements demanded urgently 
 by the public safety, was unable to get that author- 
 ity because it was impossible, under its charter, for 
 it to pay certain county members for their votes. 
 If there had been time, I have no doubt, these 
 county members would have obligingly amended 
 the charter to make the payments legal. 
 
 Socialism will not convert such simple bar- 
 barians into civilized men. Despite their $5,000 
 a year and their twenty-two hours of leisure, they 
 will still cling to their rag-time, their yellow jour- 
 nals, their medicated flannels, and their fear of 
 hell, learning, and the bath-tub. But under So- 
 cialism, you say, they will have leisure for educa- 
 tion. Even supposing they still hold to their pres- 
 ent custom of devoting an hour a day to pinochle, 
 they will yet devote some other hour to John Stuart 
 
i6o Men vs. the Man 
 
 Mill and August Weismann. It is a beautiful 
 theory, but the facts, I fear, do not point to its 
 truth. Education, considered in its broad sense, 
 and not as a mere piling up of special knowledge, 
 is not a matter of leisure and money, but of in- 
 clination and capacity. It is perfectly possible in 
 the United States to-day for the average boy, 
 white or black, to obtain, without cost to his par- 
 ents, just as much education as Herbert Spencer 
 ever had from others from beginning to end of 
 his life. In many states it is compulsory. But 
 for all that, we produce very few men comparable 
 to Spencer. 
 
 As a matter of fact, the typical low-caste man 
 is entirely unable to acquire that power of ordered 
 and independent reasoning which distinguishes the 
 man of higher caste. You may, by dint of heroic 
 endeavors, instil into him a parrotlike knowledge 
 of certain elemental facts, and he may even make 
 a shift to be a schoolmaster himself, but he will 
 remain a stupid and ignorant man, none the less. 
 More likely, you will find that he is utterly un- 
 able to assimilate even the simplest concepts. The 
 binomial theorem is as far beyond his comprehen- 
 sion as an epigram in Persian. And this inability 
 to understand the concepts formulated by others is 
 commonly but the symptom of a more marked in- 
 capacity for formulating new concepts of his own. 
 In the true sense, such a being cannot think. With- 
 in well-defined limits, he may be trained, just as 
 
Men vs. the Man i6i 
 
 any other sentient creature may be trained, but 
 beyond that he cannot go. 
 
 The public school can never hope to raise him 
 out of his caste. It can fill him to the brim — ^but 
 then it must stop. He is congenitally unteachable. 
 A year after he has left school, he has forgotten 
 nearly all that he learnt there. At twenty-one, 
 when the republic formally takes him into its coun- 
 cils, he is laboring with pick and shovel in his pre- 
 destined ditch, a glad glow in his heart and a 
 strap around his wrist to keep off rheumatism. 
 
 The barriers of caste are not artificial, my dear 
 La Monte, but natural. Sitting in school beside 
 the Sudra I have been discussing is a boy whose 
 future will rise above ditches. He is from the 
 lowest caste, too, but he is a variation, a mutation. 
 He has a thirst for learning, and a capacity for it. 
 He may be the Galileo of to-morrow, and then 
 again he may be only a nascent Napoleon of ditch- 
 ing — a dealer in the toil of ditch-diggers. But 
 whether his progress beyond the actual toilers be 
 great or small, he must forever stand as a living 
 proof that there is a caste of men higher than 
 theirs — a caste of men more intelligent than they, 
 and more nearly approaching the maximum of 
 human efliciency. His superiority owes nothing to 
 vested rights, and nothing to special privileges. 
 It is based entirely upon the eternal biological 
 truth that, in all the more complex varieties of liv- 
 ing beings, there are enormous differences between 
 
1 62 Men vs. the Man 
 
 individuals, and that these differences, at their ex- 
 tremities, produce a caste barely entitled to life 
 and a caste far advanced upon the upward path 
 which the species seems to follow. 
 
 The negro loafer is not a victim of restricted 
 opportunity and oppression. There are schools 
 for him, and there is work for him, and he dis- 
 dains both. That his forty-odd years of freedom 
 have given him too little opportunity to show his 
 mettle is a mere theory of the chair. As a mat- 
 ter of fact, the negro, in the mass, seems to be 
 going backward. The most complimentary thing 
 that can be said of an individual of the race to- 
 day is that he is as industrious and honest a man 
 as his grandfather, who was a slave. There are 
 exceptional negroes of intelligence and ability, I 
 am well aware, just as there are miraculous Rus- 
 sian Jews who do not live in filth; but the great 
 bulk of the race is made up of inefficients. In the 
 biological phrase, the negro runs true to type. 
 There are few variations, except downward. I 
 have known, I should say, at least five hundred 
 negroes in my time, and of all these not more than 
 ten have displayed any inchnation whatever to 
 rise above their racial level. 
 
 Sociahsm, as I understand it, proposes to let 
 these savages plunder civilization. It holds that 
 they should get more pay for their loafing; that 
 the comforts and luxuries which represent the ideals 
 and ingenuity of the highest caste of human be- 
 
Men vs. the Man 163 
 
 ings should be handed over, gratuitously, to these 
 parasites. It proposes to heed and satisfy their 
 yearnings, to take account of their opinions, to 
 give them a hand in the government of the state, 
 to dignify their laziness with sounding names, to 
 hail them as brothers. I am unable, my dear La 
 Monte, to subscribe to this scheme. I am far from 
 a Southerner in prejudice and sympathies, though 
 born on the borders of the South, but it seems to 
 me that, so long as we refrain, in the case of the 
 negro loafer, from the measures of extermination 
 we have adopted in the case of parasites further 
 down the scale, we are being amply and even 
 excessively faithful to an ethical ideal which 
 makes constant war upon expediency and common 
 sense. 
 
 And now let me return to your letter. In one 
 part of it, I note, you accuse me of harboring an- 
 thropomorphic ideas, and proceed to elect me a 
 member of some Methodist synod. Herein, my 
 ingenuous friend, you juggle with words, for you 
 are certainly well aware of the meaning of an- 
 thropomorphism, and if you are, you are certainly 
 well aware that my belief in " the beneficence and 
 permanence of the evolutionary process " does not 
 make me an anthropomorphist. But I shall as- 
 sume that you are actually in error regarding the 
 meaning of the word, and so expound it. 
 
 Anthropomorphism, then, is a name for a the- 
 ological theory which assumes that the universe is 
 
164 Men vs. the Man 
 
 managed by a definite being or beings whose men- 
 tal processes and emotions are similar to those of 
 human beings. That is to say the anthropomor- 
 phic god is merely an omnipotent and omniscient 
 man. The Greeks believed that there was a whole 
 race of such gods, and that they spent their time 
 on Olympus much as the Athenians spent their time 
 in Athens — carousing, drabbing, playing politics, 
 fighting, intriguing, and indulging in all sorts of 
 outbreaks of passion. The modern soldier of the 
 Salvation Army believes there is only one god, 
 and this god he pictures as an enlarged and 
 gaseous simulacrum of General William Booth — 
 as a venerable but somewhat dictatorial and re- 
 vengeful old man with a white beard and a large 
 corps of favorites and assistants. The Salvation- 
 ist believes that this god manages the world just 
 as General Booth manages the Army — rewarding 
 the faithful, denouncing the traitor, and watching 
 eternally for fidelity and treason. 
 
 The other anthropomorphic sects draw pictures, 
 more or less fantastic and incredible, of other man- 
 made gods, and there are endless differences in de- 
 tail. One holds that its god sometime enters the 
 body of an actual man — that he has done so in the 
 past or will do so in the future. Apostolic Chris- 
 tianity and Mohammedanism are examples. 
 Others hold that he elevates favored human be- 
 ings to his own rank, and places them at his right 
 hand. Of such are Mormonism and Catholicism. 
 
Men vs. the Man 165 
 
 Yet another sect maintains that its god is a sort 
 of glorified chief of its own race, and that all 
 other races are inferior in consequence. This 
 comforting doctrine is taught by Judaism. 
 
 As you will notice, the central fact in anthropo- 
 morphism is that the god is given essentially human 
 attributes. He is not only inteUigent, but also 
 extremely emotional. He has fits of temper, pas- 
 sions, prejudices, even superstitions. He is bland 
 and forgiving to those he holds in affection, and 
 furiously vengeful upon those he dislikes. It is 
 necessary, in order to get a favor, or even com- 
 mon justice from him, that he be put in a good 
 humor — by abasing one's self before him, by mak- 
 ing some sort of sacrifice to him, or by actually 
 bribing him. He has hordes of spies, agents, and 
 emissaries, who collect his fees, denounce his ene- 
 mies, and manage his business. He is, in a word, 
 an exceedingly inflammatory being, with the hot 
 passions, arbitrary likes and dislikes, and violent 
 rages of a medieval bishop. 
 
 Now, it seems to me that the cosmic process 
 shows no traces at all of this human emotionalism. 
 It is, indeed, utterly unemotional, and its lack of 
 emotion is its principal characteristic. Since the 
 dawn of history men have been trying to read into 
 it some notion of right and wrong — some anthropo- 
 morphic ideal — but they have always failed. 
 Judged by those human standards which we ap- 
 ply to sociological processes — the operation of the 
 
1 66 Men vs. the Man 
 
 state laws, for example — it is utterly immoral and 
 meaningless. Try as we may, we can never show 
 that our particular god punishes the guilty and 
 rewards the righteous, or even that he compre- 
 hends the concepts represented by these words. 
 We may assume it, but all the evidence is against 
 it. No Huxley was needed to point out that the 
 weather, for one thing, is managed, humanly speak- 
 ing, in an ignorant and outrageous manner. No 
 Johan Bojer was needed to prove that the wicked 
 often triumph in the world, and the righteous often 
 perish. And no Joseph Conrad was needed to 
 show us that human destiny is one with the fall 
 of the die. 
 
 Fortunately, it is not necessary for a civilized 
 human being of the twentieth century to believe 
 in a man-like god. I may observe and study the 
 workings of the universe, and still make no at- 
 tempt to explain them in terms of passion and 
 emotion. It would interest me immensely to learn 
 how and why the globes are kept spinning, but in 
 view of the limits which hedge in my perceptions, I 
 doubt that I shall ever find out. Meanwhile, how- 
 ever, I can make note of the fact that they always 
 spin in a certain way, and that they have done so 
 ever since the first human observers began to 
 study them, and from this I can deduce the not 
 unreasonable idea that they will continue to spin 
 in that way for a good while to come. Thus, very 
 simply, I may arrive at my notion of the perma- 
 
Men vs. the Man 167 
 
 nence of the cosmic process. And, going further, 
 I can note that the spinning of these globes, how- 
 ever much it has inconvenienced and tortured in- 
 dividual men, from time to time, has at least re- 
 sulted in the gradual development of a race which 
 seems to me to be measurably superior, in its higher 
 ranks, to the asexual cell from which it has sprung. 
 And so I may come to the notion that the cosmic 
 process, considered broadly, is beneficent. Yet I 
 have not touched anthropomorphism, directly or 
 indirectly, at any place. 
 
 You yourself are the anthropomorphist; not I. 
 You still hold to the ancient theological doctrine 
 that the human race is a race apart — that because 
 it is molded " in the image of God " it is superior 
 to natural laws which govern other races. In the 
 days when men believed that Jerusalem was the 
 capital of the universe this was a credible 
 doctrine; but the history of all exact knowledge is 
 the history of its gradual decay. When ad- 
 venturers proved, despite St. Augustine's masterly 
 logic, that the earth was a sphere, it received a 
 telling blow. When they proved, despite Moses, 
 that the earth was but one of countless worlds, it 
 received another. And when Darwin came, and 
 his like. It ceased to be a living doctrine, and be- 
 came a mere empty shell upon the garbage-pile of 
 dead ideas. But you Socialists want to resurrect 
 it. You ask us all to believe it, as John the Baptist 
 believed it — despite a mass of evidence so enormous 
 
1 68 Men vs. the Man 
 
 that one man can scarcely hope to master even its 
 daily accretions. 
 
 And so I find myself at the end of my letter 
 with many of the arguments in your last epistle 
 unanswered. One or two brief notes must suf- 
 fice. You say in one place, for example, that your 
 ideal man is one " wholly devoted to promoting 
 human happiness," and then proceed to explain, 
 with somewhat unparliamentary innuendo, that 
 you mean " human happiness, and not a hog's hap- 
 piness." My answer here must be the " You're 
 another," of the small boy, for it is your scheme 
 of things, and not mine, that considers the yearn- 
 ings of the hog. My own philosophy disregards 
 the hog entirely. Its concern is with the aims 
 and aspirations of the higher man, and with those 
 expedients which permit him to widen the gap 
 which separates him from the hog. But you are 
 for the nether swine. Their desire for forty acres 
 and a mule, for ten hours of pinochle instead of 
 one, for leisure to be hoggish, for a chance to 
 plunder their betters — this desire appears to you 
 as a holy thing. You want to strike an average 
 between the topmost man and the hog, and to 
 achieve a level of civilization in which intelligence 
 and hoggishness shall be blended in equal portions. 
 Let us have no more talk of hogs. 
 
 Your argument that the individualist must suffer 
 agonizing loneliness demands a more extensive an- 
 swer than I can give. For the present, I can only 
 
Men vs. the Man 169 
 
 point out that you are assuming too much when you 
 assume that soHtude is inevitably painful. The 
 low-caste man's insatiable desire for company, for 
 fraternity, for brotherhood, is a proof of his 
 low caste. He has no resources within himself. 
 Save in association with his fellows he has no 
 means of defending himself, or amusing himself. 
 Even in his own sight, he is inconceivable save as 
 an undifferentiated molecule in a larger mass. So 
 he joins fraternal orders, goes to church, and af- 
 filiates with a political party. A man of greater 
 complexity is in better case. Human intercourse 
 is open to him when he desires it, but it is not the 
 only thing that stands between him and unbearable 
 ennui. When he is alone, it is because he wants 
 to be alone, and he is not lonely. 
 
 The long argument of Lester F. Ward, that all 
 human behefs are grounded upon the appetites 
 and emotions, is entirely unconvincing, and so is 
 your dissertation in support of it. The progress 
 of such exact sciences as astronomy and biology is 
 due, in the main, to the fortuitous collocation 
 (humanly speaking) of apparently disconnected 
 observations and discoveries, and has nothing 
 whatever to do with the food supply of the state or 
 the political theories of the people. The discovery 
 of the bacillus of tuberculosis was made possible by 
 the microscope, and not by the French Revolution. 
 As for your argument that the present age is 
 " catastrophic " and that, in consequence, " cata- 
 
ijo Men vs. the Man 
 
 clysmic " theories are dominant in all departments 
 of science, I am unable to offer a serious answer to 
 it, because it seems to me to be utterly gratuitous 
 and ridiculous. What is the " cataclysmic " ele- 
 ment in Metchnikoff's theory of phagocytes, or in 
 Wright's theory of opsonins ? What had political 
 economy to do with Dr. Remsen's discovery of 
 saccharin? And what had the war on the bour- 
 geoisie to do with the rise of abdominal surgery? 
 I fear you are joking. If you are not, you have 
 been sadly led astray by the sound of words. 
 As always, 
 
 H. L. M. 
 
LA MONTE'S FIFTH LETTER 
 
 My Dear Mencken : 
 
 Permit me to grovel before you in apologizing 
 for my long delay in replying to your last very 
 interesting denunciation of the herd. The fact 
 is my garden has absorbed my energies so com- 
 pletely I have had no time to write. 
 
 Much of what you say in your last letter is un- 
 deniably true. Were our legislation to become the 
 crystallization of the cultural stage reached by the 
 majority of the denizens of the Eastern Shore of 
 Maryland, it would be well-nigh fatal to such civ- 
 ilization as we have. That is why we Sociahsts 
 are so eager to raise the cultural level of, not only 
 the Eastern Shore, but of America and the World. 
 It is also true that in a society divided into classes 
 democracy must be tempered by bribery and cor- 
 ruption or perish. We prefer to put an end to the 
 class-divisions that necessitate bribery, sophistry, 
 and intimidation rather than to give up democracy 
 on account of evils that spring not from its nature, 
 but from its incompleteness. Make our democ- 
 racy industrial as well as political, and corruption, 
 bribery, and sophistry will disappear. That is the 
 way the thing looks to me, and I fear I shall be 
 
 171 
 
172 Men vs. the Man 
 
 unable to rid myself of that point of view even if 
 you hurl at me your favorite and somewhat over- 
 worked javelin by branding my reasoning as that of 
 a " low-caste man." Incidentally let me remind 
 you that on your own showing there is a large 
 majority of low-caste men in the country and that 
 we still have the simulacrum of democracy, so that 
 it seems entirely possible that the country may yet 
 be ruled by that low-caste reasoning that avers that 
 all men by virtue of their humanity ought to have 
 a chance to lead human lives. 
 
 In your last letter you conjure up a bogey and 
 tremble before it like good Doctor Faust before 
 Mephistopheles. You draw a grotesque picture 
 of the emancipated proletariat sending ditch- 
 diggers to Congress. (Do you really think ditch- 
 diggers would be less intelligent and honest than 
 some of the millionaires who now adorn the Sen- 
 ate?) "The boss of the union," you tell me, 
 " will aspire to the Presidency. The secretary of 
 the scene-shifters will go to the Court of Saint 
 James." 
 
 I feel tempted to drop into slang to express the 
 horror with which this picture thrills my bosom, 
 but I will refrain, and instead inquire how much 
 truth there is in it? For a quarter of a century 
 the working-class Socialists have been sending their 
 chosen representatives to the Parliaments of Ger- 
 many, France, and Belgium. Have they chosen 
 *' low-caste men " ? Have they shown what you 
 
Men vs. the Man 173 
 
 term the " inherent and ineradicable character- 
 istics of all low-caste men to look with suspicion 
 upon those whose ambitions, ethics, and ideals are 
 more complex than theirs " ? The facts are 
 against you, my dear Mencken. No greater ora- 
 tors or abler parliamentarians than Liebknecht, 
 Bebel, and Singer have ever sat in the German 
 Reichstag. Vandervelde is the greatest statesman 
 Belgium has yet produced, and Jaures in France is 
 probably the greatest living orator. These are the 
 men my " low-caste " comrades have freely chosen 
 to represent them. When the Clemenceau Cab- 
 inet fell, upon whom did the President of the 
 French Republic call to form a cabinet? Upon 
 that great statesman, Briand, to whom more than 
 to any other one man is due the accomplishment 
 of the separation of Church and State in France; 
 and Briand was originally sent to the French 
 Chamber by the votes of Socialist workingmen. 
 
 In the face of these facts you solemnly assure 
 me that your picture " is not fantastic." It is to 
 smile. 
 
 In my second letter I essayed the role of the 
 prophet, and fell into error by failing to take into 
 account all of the factors in the problem. I pre- 
 dicted " that the present period of depression will 
 last at least seven years unless ( i ) in the mean- 
 time ' the increase of accurate knowledge ' or the 
 hard facts of adversity lead us to establish the Co- 
 operative Commonwealth, or (2) unless a great 
 
174 Men vs. the Man 
 
 war breaks out." Shortly after I had written 
 that prediction my good friend, Gaylord Wilshire, 
 suggested to me in conversation that the costs of 
 preparation for war might rise so tremendously 
 as to be quite as adequate as actual war in caus- 
 ing business revival. This is precisely what has 
 happened, and we have now started on another 
 great boom. Germany's need for an outlet for 
 her surplus production was fast driving her toward 
 war with England. This caused a great war 
 scare, and the result has been an unprecedented and 
 almost Incredible increase in military and more 
 especially naval expenditure. Incredible as it ap- 
 pears the excess of the world's military and naval 
 expenditure in 1909 over that of 1906 is more 
 than equal to what Russia and Japan both spent in 
 the year of the Russo-Japanese War. The exact 
 figures with their sources are given in a leading 
 article In a recent issue of Wilshire's Magazine. 
 I frankly confess my error — an error due to in- 
 excusable Ignorance, for I ought to have been keep- 
 ing track of the Increase in military and naval ex- 
 penditure — and I must now revise my prophecy. 
 We are now launched on as wild an era of inflated 
 prosperity as that of 1905 and 1906 which 
 brought us to the collapse of 1907 and 1908. How 
 long it will last I cannot tell. It is certain that 
 an Industrial boom such as we are now having will 
 lead to the introduction of much improved machin- 
 ery and methods, and thus the more rapid widen- 
 
Men vs. the Man 175 
 
 ing of the ever growing gulf between annual prod- 
 uct and annual wage-account, and that this must 
 sooner or later lead to a more disastrous crisis than 
 that through which we recently passed. But it is 
 also true that this crisis could be almost in- 
 definitely postponed could we go on indefinitely 
 constantly increasing the stimulus by ever larger 
 military and naval expenditures. Here is the ele- 
 ment of uncertainty. How much increased taxa- 
 tion will the ruling classes of Europe and Amer- 
 ica permit? 
 
 These taxes must be paid by the propertied 
 classes, for the propertiless have nothing to pay 
 them with, and in every parliament in Christendom 
 we have recently witnessed the most frantic op- 
 position to the increase in taxation made necessary 
 by the new naval programmes. It appears fairly 
 certain that under representative government it will 
 be impossible to keep the stimulus to business at an 
 adequate pitch. So that it is safe to say that after 
 a somewhat prolonged boom we will have the most 
 disastrous panic the world has ever known, and 
 that the middle classes will be so weakened by the 
 taxation necessary in the meantime that they will 
 be even worse prepared for the next panic than 
 they were for the last one. 
 
 As a good Nietzschean this crushing of the 
 middle classes is a most vital matter to you. 
 Where are you going to breed your Immoralists or 
 Supermen after the middle class is annihilated? 
 
176 Men vs. the Man 
 
 They cannot come from the gutter. The condi- 
 tions of working-class hfe are, I feel sure you will 
 agree, not favorable for their production. Our 
 billionaires may be immoral enough to breed Im- 
 moralists, but unfortunately there are not enough 
 of them to answer your purpose. Besides I suspect 
 they have not the right brand of immorality. 
 Where can you find more conventional and ortho- 
 dox people than John D. Rockefeller and J. Pier- 
 pont Morgan? Surely you are not sanguine 
 enough to expect to breed Supermen from such 
 sires? 
 
 If your Nietzschean philosophy of aristocracy 
 is to be a workable philosophy, and you have often 
 assured me that therein lay its vast superiority over 
 Socialism, then its workableness is absolutely de- 
 pendent upon the preservation of the middle class, 
 for from that class alone can you hope to breed the 
 progenitors of your Supermen. 
 
 America was formerly the paradise of the mid- 
 dle class. Our typical American ideals are mid- 
 dle class ideals. Our great achievements in his- 
 tory were the work of the middle class. But even 
 to-day it requires a careful search to find here and 
 there a survival of the sturdy middle class who 
 made American history. The railway, the trust, 
 and the department store have either annihilated 
 or transformed beyond recognition that sturdy, 
 admirable class among whom you and I grew up. 
 As independent producers or traders they can only 
 
Men vs. the Man 177 
 
 exist to-day by exceeding the rate of exploitation 
 of employees practised by the trust and the de- 
 partment store. They exist economically only by 
 the contemptuous sufferance of their more powerful 
 rivals. Whether they wish it or not the condi- 
 tions of their economic existence compel them to be 
 either sycophants or vampires or more often both. 
 This is a far cry from the men who elected Jack- 
 son and Lincoln to carry out their will at Wash- 
 ington. 
 
 Do you think that this change in their character 
 makes them more or less fit to be the ancestors 
 of Supermen ? 
 
 But the worst is yet to come. Within a decade 
 a new and ominous figure has loomed upon the 
 economic horizon. He as yet has no accepted 
 name, but I will use the name that Professor Veb- 
 len has bestowed upon him in his brilliant paper, 
 " On the Nature of Capital." Veblen calls him 
 the Pecuniary Magnate. 
 
 The difference between Marx's Capitalist and 
 Veblen's Pecuniary Magnate is this : they are both 
 owners of factories and railways, etc., and ac- 
 cumulate money by taking the surplus-value pro- 
 duced by the workers, but the Pecuniary Magnate 
 is more than a capitalist. Besides the money that 
 he makes as a capitalist (a la Marx) he makes 
 far more tremendous profits as a dealer in capital 
 securities. What he makes as a capitalist comes 
 from the workers and In most cases has no per- 
 
178 Men vs. the Man 
 
 ceptible relation to his business abihty. He makes 
 just as much if he is in Europe or confined in an 
 asylum. What he makes on the market as a 
 Pecuniary Magnate comes from the middle class 
 (up to and including the lesser millionaires, and 
 at times including his brother Magnates), and the 
 amount of this profit depends very directly and 
 perceptibly on his abihty, or on that of his brokers 
 and lawyers. It is not infrequently to his interest 
 as a Pecuniary Magnate to wreck an industry from 
 which he draws revenue as a capitalist. 
 
 Such Pecuniary Magnates as we have yet had, 
 Veblen points out, have spent their years of 
 strength and virility in amassing sufficient capital 
 to make them formidable as Pecuniary Magnates, 
 and by the time the accumulation has reached the 
 requisite dimensions, they have lost the vigor to 
 use this vast power energetically. We have yet to 
 see the power of the typical Pecuniary Magnate 
 wielded by a young man of Napoleonic grasp and 
 energy. But Harriman has given us a hint or 
 two of what we may expect in the not distant 
 future. 
 
 From the time that Jay Gould wrecked the Erie 
 up to the time that Harriman wrecked the Chi- 
 cago and Alton, most of our railway stocks and 
 bonds were fairly safe investments for middle 
 class people. Since the Alton coup few investors 
 have been wholly free from insomnia. 
 
 Sooner or later there is bound to appear a Pe- 
 
Men vs. the Man 179 
 
 cunlary Magnate who will combine the energy and 
 brutality of a Roosevelt with the Napoleonic grasp 
 and Nietzschean hardness of a Harriman and the 
 sagacity of a Jim Hill. With his advent insomnia 
 will become epidemic in all classes save the work- 
 ing class. Men will seek for safe investments, 
 and they shall not find one. 
 
 The feeling of utter insecurity among the lesser 
 millionaires will become wholly unbearable. All 
 intelligent men and women will become Socialists, 
 and the Social Revolution will be accomplished so 
 peaceably that few will know till years afterward 
 that a revolution has taken place. 
 
 This is my creed, my philosophy, and it seems 
 to me both workable and inevitable. Given the 
 Napoleonic Pecuniary Magnate, and denying the 
 socialistic denoument, your philosophy of Aristoc- 
 racy seems to me not only unworkable but utterly 
 impossible. Again I ask, where will you breed 
 your Immoralists? 
 
 But it is not merely on economics that we differ. 
 Ethically and philosophically we are as far asunder 
 as the poles. I hold that it is profoundly true that 
 " No man lives unto himself alone," and that the 
 most insane sentence that was ever penned is Max 
 Stirner's " Nothing is more to me than myself." 
 I hold that Nietzsche taught an insane philosophy, 
 and that the most logical thing he ever did was to 
 go insane himself. The most sacred thing we 
 know is the individual, but the individual can never 
 
i8o Men vs. the Man 
 
 reach a high or noble development by tramphng 
 upon his infinitely complex obligations to other in- 
 dividuals. The whole cosmos and all that therein 
 is, is dialectically interrelated throughout all time 
 and space. You and I are bound by countless ties 
 to all the men and women, aye, and apes and mon- 
 keys and reptiles and fishes, who have lived on the 
 earth before us, and we have just as close and in- 
 escapable ties with all those who shall follow us, 
 and with equal firmness are we bound up with all 
 the men and women and beasts and birds and trees 
 and flowers now on earth. Disregard of human 
 solidarity and of cosmical inter-relation ends 
 logically in insanity. 
 
 The introduction of the Machine Process tended 
 to standardize all life and thus to cramp Individu- 
 ality just as a Chinawoman's feet are deformed in 
 her shoes. The revolt, the movement to assert 
 individuality, found noble expression in literature. 
 Byron and Shelley and Goethe are full of it. But 
 it was not carried to a false and insane extreme 
 until the middle of the last century by Max 
 Stirner. Nietzsche has done little more than re- 
 peat the extravagances of Stirner, though he has 
 clothed them In more poetic beauty in his " Thus 
 Spake Zarathustra." Curiously enough the ex- 
 treme Individualists always claim Ibsen as one of 
 their prophets. They forget that while he en- 
 riched the world with " A Doll's House " — the 
 noblest expression of the right and even the duty 
 
Men vs. the Man i8i 
 
 of the individual to be herself and live out her own 
 life— he also gave us " Little Eyolf " and " The 
 Lady from the Sea " to complement " A Doll's 
 House " by showing us that happiness was only to 
 be found in love and work for others. 
 
 Ibsen should have been safe from the misunder- 
 standing of his teaching that is so wide-spread, for 
 long before he preached his gospel of healthy In- 
 dividualism in " A Doll's House," he had given 
 us in " Peer Gynt " the deepest, truest, and most 
 delicious satire upon the absurd attempt to " be 
 oneself " at all costs. He had shown that it led 
 to moral instability (if not degeneration) and to 
 mental insanity. 
 
 Surely you remember how Peer with his mania 
 for " being himself " was greeted by Professor 
 Begriffenfeldt, the Director of the Mad-house at 
 Cairo, as the Kaiser of the lunatics. 
 
 "Kaiser?" says Peer. "Of course!" replies 
 the professor. 
 
 Peer. 
 But the honor's so great, so entirely excessive 
 
 Begriffenfeldt. 
 
 Oh, do not let any false modesty sway you 
 At an hour such as this. 
 
 Peer. 
 
 But at least give me time 
 
 No, indeed, I'm not fit; I'm completely dumbfounded! 
 
1 82 Men vs. the Man 
 
 Begriffenfeldt. 
 
 A man who has fathomed the Sphinx's meaning, 
 A man who's himself ! 
 
 Peer. 
 
 Ay, but that's just the rub. 
 It's true that in everything I am myself; 
 But here the point is, if I follow your meaning, 
 To be, so to phrase it, beside oneself. 
 
 Begriffenfeldt. 
 
 Beside? No, there you are strangely mistaken; 
 
 It's here, sir, that one is oneself with a vengeance. 
 
 Oneself and nothing whatever besides. 
 
 We go, full sail, as our very selves. 
 
 Each one shuts himself up in the barrel of self. 
 
 In the self-fermentation he dives to the bottom, — 
 
 With the self-bung he seals it hermetically. 
 
 And seasons the staves in the well of self. 
 
 No one has tears for the other's woes ; 
 
 No one has mind for the other's ideas. 
 
 We're our very selves, both in thought and tone. 
 
 Ourselves to the spring-board's uttermost verge, — 
 
 And so, if a Kaiser's to fill the Throne, 
 
 It is clear that you are the very man. 
 
 The same philosophy made both Peer Gynt and 
 Friedrich Nietzsche kings of the lunatics. 
 
 You will also, no doubt, remember that when 
 the Button-Molder came to fetch Peer's soul and 
 
Men vs. the Man 183 
 
 melt it up in the casting-ladle, Peer insisted upon 
 his answering the question : 
 
 " What is it, at bottom, this ' being oneself ' ? " 
 The Button-Molder's answer was: 
 " To be oneself is : to slay oneself." 
 
 This is the highest word of wisdom of the 
 greatest and sanest Individualist of modern times, 
 and it is but a paraphrase of the words of Jesus : 
 
 " For whosoever will save his life shall lose it ; 
 and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall 
 find it." 
 
 By writing " Peer Gynt " and " Little Eyolf " 
 the author of " A Doll's House " has shown us 
 that he realized as fully as Jesus that love was 
 the only soil upon which true and noble Individu- 
 ality could flourish. 
 
 Marx and Engels expressed the same thought 
 with equal clearness, though with less warmth, in 
 that classic of the Socialist movement, the Com- 
 munist Manifesto, when, in describing the society 
 of the future, they said : 
 
 " In place of the old bourgeois society, with its 
 classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an as- 
 sociation, in which the free development of each is 
 the condition for the free development of all." 
 
 Solidarity is the condition precedent for the 
 
184 Men vs. the Man 
 
 blossoming of individuality. Jesus, Ibsen, Marx, 
 and Engels were all Individualists, but they were 
 sane enough to recognize that Love is the highest 
 and noblest expression of Individuality. Nietzsche 
 and Peer Gynt were blind to this simple truth and 
 they became Princes in Bedlam. 
 
 Many a Giotto to-day has no chance to develop 
 his individuality, because he has not the luck to 
 be discovered by a Cimabue. The Socialist aim 
 is not to provide a Cimabue for every Giotto, but 
 to make the conditions of life so equal that no 
 Giotto shall need a Cimabue. We do not hold 
 that every boy and girl has the genius of a Giotto, 
 but we do hold that every human being has an 
 individuality worth developing, and that every 
 stunted, dwarfed, or atrophied individuality makes 
 the world measurably poorer. The present reck- 
 less sacrifice of individuality robs life of Interest 
 and distinction. 
 
 So that, my dear Mencken, it Is in the name of 
 Individualism, strange as it may appear to you, 
 that I call upon you once more to become the com- 
 rade of 
 
 Yours faithfully, 
 
 R. R. La M. 
 
MENCKEN'S REPLY TO LA MONTE'S 
 FIFTH LETTER 
 
 My Dear La Monte : 
 
 Saving only psychical research, no modern cult 
 seems to be so well outfitted with college professors 
 as Socialism. Early in this correspondence, if I 
 remember rightly, you began to set them at my 
 heels — Prof. What's-His-Name, the assassin of the 
 doctrine of inherited traits; Prof. This-and-That, 
 the Austrian statistician, rhapsodist and seventh 
 son of a seventh son, half Diophantus of Alex- 
 andria and half Tom Lawson, with his crusade 
 for $5,000 plowboys and a workday of one 
 hour, twenty-two minutes and thirty seconds; and 
 sundry other instructors of 'rah-'rah boys, first and 
 last, specified and anonymous, whiskered and aston- 
 ishing, cocksure and preposterous. Now, near the 
 end, comes Prof. Veblen, with his discovery of the 
 Pecuniary Magnate, a fantastic and apparently 
 novel beast of prey, gorged to the gullet with bleed- 
 ing hearts. 
 
 The name of Prof. Veblen is familiar; I have 
 encountered his speculations more than once. And 
 his Pecuniary Magnate is no stranger, either, for 
 Col. Henry Watterson, the last of the Jeffersoni- 
 
 185 
 
1 86 Men vs. the Man 
 
 ans, whose compositions I read dihgently, has long 
 excoriated him under the style or appellation of 
 the Hell Hound of Plutocracy. Col. Watter- 
 son, I beheve, is a man of quite respectable an- 
 tiquity, but his Hell Hound was ancient long be- 
 fore he was born. In medieval Venice they called 
 him Shylock, and there he preyed upon Antonio, 
 the merchant, who preyed, in turn, upon the 
 groundlings of that fair city. Shylock was not a 
 captain of industry, for the Jews, in his time, 
 had not yet invented ready-made clothing. . He 
 was, on the contrary, a purely Pecuniary Magnate 
 — a gambler in credits, a fattener upon panics, a 
 star performer at financial inquests and autopsies. 
 Your description of the Magnate of Veblen would 
 have fitted him exactly, as the paper fits the wall. 
 When Antonio's " argosies with portly sail " 
 were posted as overdue, the gods seemed to smile 
 upon Shylock, for it was out of just such mis- 
 fortunes that his potency arose. Antonio, the 
 honest ship-owner, who deprecated speculation and 
 tried to put an end to it by lending money, when 
 he had it, without interest, was now in hard case, 
 and had to make terms with the Jew. And, hav- 
 ing the advantage, the Jew drove it home. Nothing 
 less than the complete annihilation of his victim 
 would content him. The lust for mere money 
 was transcended and forgotten: the thing that 
 moved him now was a yearning to achieve a stag- 
 gering and unprecedented coup. He wanted to 
 
Men vs. the Man 187 
 
 wreck a great merchant, as Jay Gould, years after, 
 was to wreck a great railroad, for thereby It would 
 be proclaimed to all Venice that he, Shylock, was 
 a financial czar of czars. He had the " Napole- 
 onic grasp and energy " of which you speak. He 
 had not only money, but also Imagination. 
 
 But Shylock came a cropper, and I rather fancy 
 that any Pecuniary Magnate who tries to Imitate 
 him In his plan will also imitate him In his failure. 
 The reason for this Is not far to seek. It Hes in 
 the fact that a Pecuniary Magnate, no matter how 
 enormous his resources and how magnificent his 
 Immorality, Is still a merely mortal man, whose 
 life, like yours and mine, hangs by a single hair. 
 Cut that hair, and he is no longer worth fearing 
 as an Antichrist, for, as you have yourself pointed 
 out, the might and menace of capital, when all Is 
 said and done, are not so much in the capital It- 
 self as In the ambition and cunning behind it. 
 Shylock made that discovery when he demanded 
 his pound of flesh. The laws of Venice ordered 
 that he have it, but the laws of Venice, reflecting 
 the public opinion of that republic, ordered also 
 that It be the last entry upon his cashbook. Thus 
 Shylock faced a perfectly simple situation: either 
 he could give up his pound of flesh or he could 
 give up his life. He chose the latter alternative. 
 
 Strange as It may seem, I believe that much the 
 same choice will confront the Pecuniary Magnate 
 of the future who essays to achieve the cosmic lar- 
 
1 88 Men vs. the Man 
 
 cenies of Prof. Veblen's nightmare. He will go 
 on gobbling lesser millionaires until he has sent 
 them all back to work, and then he will proceed to 
 inoculate the middle classes with those insomnia 
 germs you mention, and then he will push up the 
 price of a wheaten loaf to six cents, to eight, to 
 ten, and the price of a can of beer to twenty-five 
 cents, to $1, to $io, to $ioo — and then, one fine 
 morning, a nickel-tipped bullet, proceeding from a 
 Mauser pistol " in the hands of some party or 
 parties unknown to this jury " will go whistling 
 through his viscera, and he will cease to trouble this 
 harassed world. Sic semper tyrannis! Men will 
 triumph over the man ! 
 
 I see you shudder. You are a philosopher and 
 detest melodrama and bloodshed. You are an ag- 
 nostic and have none of the demonologist's flair 
 for executions and butchery. You believe that the 
 sorrows of the world are to find their surcease, not 
 in assassinations, but in laws. Like the lamented 
 William J. Bryan, and other prophets of the new 
 order, you put your faith in legislation. You pro- 
 pose to abolish castes by an amendment to the Con- 
 stitution. You propose to perform sanguinary 
 major operations upon the body politic, using one 
 Act of Congress as saw, sponge, and scalpel, and 
 another Act of Congress as anesthetic. 
 
 This sweet faith in whereases and therefore-be- 
 it-resolveds, my dear La Monte, seems to me to 
 be as magnificently fatuous as the old faith in 
 
Men vs. the Man 189 
 
 divine revelations, holy shrines, and all the other 
 gimcrackery of Christian sorcery. In a large 
 sense, I am convinced, legislation is always an ef- 
 fect rather than a cause, and as such, it can play 
 but a minor role in the reformation of the world. 
 It is inevitably a good distance behind the event, 
 and very often it is shockingly inaccurate in in- 
 terpreting the event. Witness, for example, the 
 Fifteenth Amendment. Witness, again, the ef- 
 forts of the Liberal Party in England to overcome, 
 by bills in Parliament, the operation of the law of 
 natural selection in the lower orders. The pos- 
 session of the franchise did not make the American 
 negro a civilized man, though every one knows that 
 the franchise is an important part of every civilized 
 man's heritage. And by the same token, the 
 state's effort to keep England's loafers and incom- 
 petents from starving to death has certainly not 
 transformed them into efficient men, with palpable 
 claims upon life and happiness, though every one 
 knows that efficient men are principally notable for 
 the fact that they never starve to death. 
 
 But here I go sky-hooting into the interstellar 
 spaces of political quasi-science when my actual 
 purpose is merely to show that, by virtue of his 
 very mortality, the ultimate Pecuniary Magnate of 
 Prof. Veblen's dreams must ever remain more 
 phantom than actual felon. It is undoubtedly 
 true, I suppose, that men who combine his enor- 
 mous wealth and his epic immorality will be bom 
 
190 Men vs. the Man 
 
 into the world in days to come, but that they will 
 ever find it possible to realize their anthropoph- 
 agous ambitions is more than I am willing to 
 admit. Human existence is not a solo a capella, 
 but a battle, and even the under-dog can inflict 
 dangerous wounds. Given certain changes in the 
 time, place, conditions or weapons of the contest 
 and the under-dog, in truth, may suddenly become 
 the upper-dog. I may best explain what I mean, 
 perhaps, by dropping dogs and going back to Pe- 
 cuniary Magnates. In a struggle for money, let 
 us say, between a Pecuniary Magnate and the great 
 masses of the plain people, it is obvious that the 
 Magnate has enormous advantages, for struggling 
 for money is his profession, and he has not only 
 acquired extraordinary skill in it, but he has also 
 attained to a monopoly of the necessary materials 
 and apparatus. But suppose the efforts of this 
 Magnate are suddenly shifted from the struggle 
 for money to a struggle to remain alive, or to keep 
 out of jail. Has he any advantages now? Not 
 at all. On the contrary, he suffers enormous dis- 
 advantages — so enormous that they place him com- 
 pletely at the mercy of his foes. If more than half 
 of them decide, for instance, that he must go to jail 
 for the rest of his life, or that he must pay a half 
 or all of his fortune Into the common treasury in ex- 
 piation of his misdeeds, he must Inevitably do these 
 things. Nothing In the world can save him then, 
 for once in jail, his stock market generalship be- 
 
Men vs. the Man 191 
 
 comes as useless as his automobile, and once his 
 money is gone, it can no longer buy him liberty. 
 Going further, it is demonstrable, I think, that if 
 but one solitary man in all his host of foes decides 
 firmly that he must die for the public good, he will 
 inevitably die on schedule time. And once dead, 
 he is no longer a Pecuniary Magnate. 
 
 The easy answer to all this is that the experi- 
 ence of the past and present proves the Magnate 
 to stand in no such perils. There is John D. 
 Rockefeller, for example. Has he been sent to 
 jail? Has anyone tried to kill him, or even ad- 
 vocated killing him? When that $32,000,000 
 fine was assessed against him did anyone save 
 Judge Landis believe seriously that he would ever 
 have to pay it? As a sincere friend, my dear La 
 Monte, I warn you to steer clear of this easy an- 
 swer, for lurking beneath it there is a very serious 
 criticism of Socialism, which criticism, I may as 
 well explain at once, lies in the fact that the vast 
 majority of sane persons hold all of your socialistic 
 scarecrows and bugaboos to be harmless. The 
 American people, in a word, permit John D. 
 Rockefeller to live because, after giving a great 
 deal of attention to him and listening to all of 
 the pleas for his extinction, they have decided (that 
 is, through the medium of their regular staff of 
 leaders, bosses, and law-makers) that it would be 
 childish and useless to kill him, or even to send him 
 to jail, or to confiscate his millions- True enough, 
 
192 Men vs. the Man 
 
 he makes an excellent profit on the oil he sells, but 
 it is hard to convince a nation of traders that such 
 an accomplishment, in itself, is felonious, or even in 
 bad taste. True enough, he devotes a good deal 
 of money to evangelistic futilities, but what tax- 
 payer, paying policeman and fireman to guard un- 
 taxed convents, mosques, and mission houses, will 
 throw the first stone? No; John will never do 
 as a Hell Hound. He is valuable as a herring, to 
 drag across the trail in political campaigns, and 
 he provides a livelihood, as Immoralist, to a few 
 dozen Juniuses of the uplift magazines, but the 
 only permanent emotion that his life and deeds 
 nourish in the breast of the average healthy Amer- 
 ican is that of envy. There, but for the unfair- 
 ness of God, go I. So says the ultimate con- 
 sumer. He envies John, but does not hate him. 
 
 Do I hear you say that John is not the worst — 
 that his industrial enterprise and wise spending 
 in some measure mitigate his money-changing — 
 that he is not, at bottom, true to the Pecuniary 
 Magnate type ? Shame on you ! The spectacle 
 of a good Socialist defending Rockefeller, even 
 with reservations and apologies, is indecent. I 
 shall save you the threatened disgrace by defend- 
 ing him myself. That is to say, I shall concede 
 that Rockefeller is not a fair specimen of the 
 Veblenian Magnate, for his principal business is 
 that of selling oil, and not that of raiding the 
 stock market. Such raiding as he has essayed has 
 
Men vs. the Man 193 
 
 been prompted, indeed, chiefly by lawful, and even 
 laudable, notions of self-defense. He is not a 
 speculator and his activities have seldom pro- 
 duced the insomnia of which you speak in the re- 
 tired shop-keepers, widows, and superannuated 
 clergymen who invest their all in the securities of 
 Mexican mines and other rosy enterprises. 
 
 But John's disqualification need not halt us. He 
 fails to meet Prof. Veblen's specifications, but that 
 does not prove the Pecuniary Magnate to be a 
 mere John Doe of the Socialist indictment. This 
 Magnate, you may argue, actually does exist, 
 healthy, happy, and immoral, with his atrophied 
 conscience, his exaggerated ego, and his sneer upon 
 his face. One day we find him cornering the 
 wheat market in Chicago ; and next day he is bear- 
 ing Coppers in New York. In legitimate com- 
 merce and industry he has no interest whatever. 
 His business is to sell, at famine prices, commodi- 
 ties that he does not own ; to lend at usurious rates 
 money that he doesn't possess ; to prey, in a word, 
 upon fear, poverty, hunger, and sore need ; to profit 
 inhumanly by droughts, catastrophes, and acts of 
 God. His name, in the wheat pit or on the curb, 
 is Joe Leiter, or Curtis Jadwin, or Charlie Morse. 
 He is as nefariously useless as an archbishop, and 
 as indecently unpatriotic as a politician. 
 
 Is there anything to be said for this man? Does 
 any extant system of political economy, ethics, or 
 theology defend him? Does anyone propose a 
 
194 Men vs. the Man 
 
 vote of thanks to him for his perilous and painful 
 labors ? I think not. Not even the church, which 
 has room on its roll of honor for witch-burners, 
 tyrants, and cut-throats unspeakable, for the sav- 
 ages who killed Bruno and drove Galileo to his 
 knees — not even the church undertakes to clasp 
 this adventurer to its bosom. It will take his 
 money, true enough, and it will even point out to 
 him the prudence of being liberal, but it will not 
 guarantee him safe conduct beyond the Styx. In 
 a word, the whole world is this man's foe — but 
 only when it sits down calmly, as moralist, to pon- 
 der his misdeeds. 
 
 You catch my meaning, of course. It is this: 
 that the world seldom sits down calmly, as moral- 
 ist, to ponder anything ; that the world, as a world, 
 finds any serious meditation a toilsome and fever- 
 ish business. Its acts, like those of a woman, are 
 the product, not of ratiocination, but of emotion. 
 Now and then, a gust of violent anger strikes it, 
 and then it is for stamping out this Pecuniary Mag- 
 nate on the instant, as one stamps out a spider, and 
 without paying any regard whatever to the laws 
 it has made in the past, or to the rights that may 
 belong to its victim as criminal. At such times he 
 appears in but one aspect ; he is a villain undiluted, 
 a wretch beyond mercy, a felon unpardonable. The 
 fact that he may also bear other aspects — that he 
 may be a freeman and a tax-payer, guaranteed by 
 Law in the enjoyment of his property; that he 
 
Men vs. the Man 195 
 
 may have a wife or wives and innumerable children 
 depending upon him for support, that he may hold 
 excellent views regarding total immersion, the glory 
 of the Stars and Stripes, and the curse of rum — 
 all of this is forgotten. He appears merely as a 
 captured outlaw, waiting to be lynched, and while 
 the public anger flames, nothing is thought of but 
 the rope. 
 
 But the emotion of anger, luckily for all such 
 gentlemen, is short-lived. You and I, for all our 
 self-indulgence and lack of piety, find it impossible 
 to be thoroughly angry for more than the fraction 
 of an hour. Ten minutes after the drum ceases to 
 thunder beneath my window I cease to damn the 
 Salvation Army and the laws which permit it to 
 torture me. Ten minutes after the first spurt of 
 blood you rescue your offending razor from its 
 exile in the ash-barrel. The public sticks to anger 
 longer, but not much longer. By dint of heroic 
 effort, it sometimes manages to remain desperately 
 enraged for a month, but that is the limit of its 
 capacity. Before the chance assassin can summon 
 up his courage, or the slow-moving court can get to 
 No. 2367, or the conservative committee is ready 
 to report H. B. 6667, the public's temperature is 
 back at 98.5, its pulse has sunk to 75, and the re- 
 action has set in. By that time, as a rule, the 
 Pecuniary Magnate has gone broke. His widowed 
 mother, to save him from ignominious toil, must 
 give him alms from her scanty millions. 
 
196 Men vs. the Man 
 
 No; the public's anger doesn't last long, and is 
 seldom very violent while it lasts. Nine times out 
 of ten, indeed, the Pecuniary Magnate doesn't 
 anger it at all. To the farmers whose wheat he 
 doubles in value, he appears in the light of an 
 economic Messiah; and to the consumers whose 
 bread he fills with gases — ^well, setting aside the 
 Socialists and other connoisseurs of outrage among 
 them, how do these consumers actually regard their 
 oppressor? Do they denounce him as a criminal 
 and demand his banishment? I think not. Do 
 they call upon their representatives to make laws 
 against him, or even to enforce the laws already 
 existing? Seldom. Do they bum him in effigy, 
 sack his palaces, guillotine his morganatic wives, 
 and teach the young to loathe him? I fear they 
 do not. And the reason for their doing not, my 
 dear La Monte, lies in the fact that they are too 
 busy cheering the sport. It is the king of all 
 games, this cornering of the wheat market. It is 
 made brilliant by stroke and counter-stroke, thrust, 
 parry, and surprise. It has the dramatic grip of 
 a colossal melodrama, with a hero twelve feet tall, 
 and as strong as an aurochs. It is better than a 
 battle for the heavy-weight championship, or a 
 minor war. It has suspense, action, climax. It is 
 sport made sublime. 
 
 This, I presume to maintain, is the customary at- 
 titude of the public toward the Pecuniary Mag- 
 nate's most ruthless rapines. When it gives seri- 
 
Men vs. the Man 197 
 
 ous and thoughtful consideration to him, and at- 
 tempts to estimate the morality, utility, and ulti- 
 mate effect of his activity, it is apt, as I have ad- 
 mitted, to advocate his demolition; but it is quite 
 extraordinary, you must grant, for the public, as 
 a public, to undertake any such elaborate medita- 
 tions. To the common man, reflection is a pain- 
 ful and uninviting business. There is, indeed, 
 some flavor of the sinister about it. Its natural 
 fruit seems to be paradox, predicament, doubt. 
 His inclination is to get his emotional thrill out of 
 the event itself, and to let its inner significance 
 go hang. He has found, by experience, that any 
 inquiry into causes is bound to engender a feeling 
 of discomfort as acute as that which accompanies 
 his Sunday clothes. It is an enterprise as tedious 
 as standing on one leg. What ho! the band brays 
 and the clowns are in the ring! Away to the big 
 show ! Who cares ? 
 
 But the Pecuniary Magnate — ^what of him? 
 Does all of this prove him harmless ? Not at all. 
 It merely proves that, taking one year with an- 
 other, the great masses of the plain people choose 
 to treat him as if he were so. When he is a Mor- 
 gan, gobbling trusts by the dozen, and disgorging 
 them again, after absorbing their proteids, as 
 super-trusts and trust-trusts, he is a hero, pure and 
 simple. The drama of it overcomes them; they 
 pass into a state of emotional ecstasy, as at the 
 apotheosis of Little Eva or at Monte Cristo's 
 
198 Men vs. the Man 
 
 blood-curdling " One ! " If he is a young Chicago 
 gambler, staking his millions upon the price of 
 wheat next month, he becomes a sort of glorified 
 Sharkey, with a flavor, too, of Dr.Cook and the 
 Wright Brothers. Some hold that he will win, 
 and others hold that he will lose, but all hope for 
 a hot fight. If he wins he remains a public char- 
 acter until the next prodigy appears. If he loses, 
 he is mourned for a day as a David foully mur- 
 dered by an army corps of Goliaths. 
 
 So much for the public. But what of your 
 " lesser millionaires," racked by their epidemic of 
 insomnia ? Are they equally fascinated by the rat- 
 tle and the roar, and equally forgetful of morals 
 and balance-sheets? Experience proves that they 
 are not. So long as the performing Magnate ob- 
 serves the rules made and provided, and leaves 
 enough openings for reprisals, their attention is 
 concentrated upon plans for fattening, to-morrow 
 or next day, upon his accumulated winnings. But 
 if he presumes to play unfairly, or to put an end 
 to the game by laying about him with a bludgeon 
 — then his undoing comes swiftly and certainly. 
 Beginning as a stimulating antagonist, he ends as 
 an outlaw, with a posse at his heels. If he is a 
 James J. Hill, he is relieved of his Illinois Central 
 and provided with a few gray hairs. If he is a 
 Charlie Morse, he is railroaded to the Tombs. 
 
 I once enjoyed the acquaintance — to my cost, 
 alas! — of a Pecuniary Magnate who flourished in 
 
Men vs. the Man 199 
 
 a provincial city. The father of this magnate left 
 him a comfortable fortune, and some more remote 
 ancestor — a pirate, perhaps, or a militant evangel- 
 ist — left him a powerful thirst for dominion. Out- 
 wardly he was a sober, home-loving, god-fearing 
 man of strict chastity and Methodist principles, but 
 within the fires of ambition raged. The result 
 was one of the most fascinating characters imag- 
 inable. He had no vices — and no virtues. Profan- 
 ity made him shudder, and yet in matters of busi- 
 ness he was so appallingly ruthless that he made 
 all other persons shudder. Still the man was not 
 merely avaricious, for it was not money, but power, 
 that he craved. He wanted to fix prices, juggle 
 stocks, nominate senators. He yearned for im- 
 measurable might, not only in business, but also In 
 politics and society. 
 
 Well, this Pecuniary Magnate began by getting 
 control of a commodity without which life would 
 be unendurable. The plain people simply had to 
 have It, and In a short while they had to buy it of 
 him. He forced up the price slowly and scien- 
 tifically. When competition arose he crushed It 
 out. When protests came from the consumer, and 
 sociologists and muck-rakers began to denounce 
 him, he was ready with mazes of statistics In his 
 defense. Meanwhile, he grew rich and eminent. 
 The plain people were angry with him now and 
 then, but taking one day with another, the emotion 
 that he most steadily inspired in them was that of 
 
200 Men vs. the Man 
 
 envy. He became a Prominent Citizen. He was 
 turned to for advice when public improvements 
 were planned, or a mayor was to be elected. He 
 was himself pressed to accept high office. The 
 public, in a word, licked his hand. 
 
 Having achieved this eminence, he sought to 
 take a step still higher. That is to say, he pro- 
 posed to reduce the " lesser millionaires " of his 
 city to that same vassalage which the masses had 
 accepted so amicably. No easier said than done. 
 He bought a bank, he began promoting stock com- 
 panies; he went into the stock market and began 
 to prey upon less astute operators. At the start 
 there was much ill-natured opposition, for the 
 financiers of this city were an old-fashioned lot, 
 and their methods and ideals, like their actual bank 
 accounts, were three or four generations old. But 
 before long, the more ambitious came to the conclu- 
 sion that it would be better to join the rising Mag- 
 nate than to fight him. He needed their capital 
 and he let them in. An inspiring journey to the 
 pink clouds of illimitable opulence was an- 
 nounced, and the airship was crowded to the 
 guards. Venerable bankers hung upon the ropes. 
 Brisk young stock-brokers begged to be taken 
 along, if only as ballast. Small investors went as 
 stowaways. 
 
 And then, with the journey just begun, the gas- 
 bag burst and the airship came tumbling down. 
 With what result? Did the " lesser millionaires " 
 
Men vs. the Man 201 
 
 blame It all on fate, as the groundlings had done? 
 Not at all. They began howling for revenge be- 
 fore the first gust of gas was out of their lungs, 
 and by the time they reached the ground they were 
 at the luckless Magnate's throat. It was all against 
 one. They took his bank away from him, they 
 forced some of his other enterprises into bank- 
 ruptcy, they gave him his first gray hairs. He is 
 to-day but the melancholy shell of a Pecuniary 
 Magnate. No doubt he still dreams his old 
 dreams, and plans epoch-making coups for the 
 future ; but no one fears him any more. He made 
 the epic mistake of trying to enslave his own kind. 
 Had he confined his efforts to the plain people he 
 might have been a billionaire by now — a billionaire 
 snoozing comfortably in a Senate cloak-room, with 
 a horde of press agents inventing a log-cabin biog- 
 raphy for him and whispering aloud that he 
 would make an excellent President. 
 
 I confess that I am not prepared to deduce a 
 hard and fast moral from all this. Does the cos- 
 mic process prove that the millionaire is necessary, 
 or beneficent? I am sure I don't know. But it 
 does prove, I think, that he is inevitable — at least, 
 at our present stage of progress. He is one of the 
 concrete facts which inevitably arise to visualize 
 world-ideas. He is the incarnation of the dom- 
 inant concept of mankind to-day, the palpable sym- 
 bol of the race's current philosophy of life. He is 
 as authentic, I believe, as any other god, past or 
 
202 Men vs. the Man 
 
 future. Legislation can injure him no more than 
 papal bulls injured Luther. He will live and 
 flourish until the ideals of humanity are changed 
 — as changed they must be, over and over again, 
 so long as nature knows no standing still, but only 
 progress and retrogression. 
 
 Time was when the race of white men had other 
 ideals and yielded to other gods. Once the ideal 
 was an eternity of bliss at the right hand of the 
 Lord Jehovah. At that time the material prizes 
 of the earth seemed paltry, and men were esteemed 
 in proportion to the extent of their renunciation. 
 This was the hey-day of Christianity, for Jesus 
 Christ was then a perfectly comprehensible char- 
 acter, and men actually tried to follow him. Some 
 left homes and families and went to live in caves 
 and on pillars. Others sought to slay the Mes- 
 siah's enemies, at home and abroad. Still others 
 had to be content with imitating his humility in 
 the face of outrage and persecution. 
 
 At that time, the gods of to-day, had anyone 
 sought to preach them, would have seemed gro- 
 tesquely obscene. The Pecuniary Magnate, as we 
 know him now, was then well-nigh unthinkable, 
 not only because the laws of the land scourged him 
 with dire penalties and forfeitures, but also because 
 the sacred laws pronounced him anathema for all 
 eternity. If it were true that a rich man could 
 never hope to enter heaven — and few men, in that 
 day, doubted its truth — what invitation could pos- 
 
Men vs. the Man 203 
 
 sibly lurk In usury? Heaven was every man's 
 goal, and the man shut out suffered a punishment 
 which no worldly prosperity, however magnificent, 
 could quite make him forget. The Jews, being 
 accomplished sophists, invented excuses for them- 
 selves. They could not escape the penalties of the 
 law of the land, but their rabbis found means 
 whereby, despite their usury, they might evade the 
 plain law of heaven. These quibbles gave them 
 such a great advantage over the races surrounding 
 them that they managed to survive the most earnest 
 efforts to stamp them out. That advantage they 
 have never lost. They are still a bit more firm 
 than the rest of us in their grip upon reality. 
 
 After the age of faith, there followed an age of 
 military endeavor, brought on by the gradual 
 crowding of western Europe. Then came the dis- 
 covery of America, and the submergence of the 
 military ideal in commercial ideas. Columbus 
 showed the marks of all three ages. He was at 
 once evangelist, military conqueror, and gold- 
 seeker. 
 
 To-day we have lost our old faith, and there 
 are no more hemispheres to explore. The whole 
 energy of the race is thus directed toward complet- 
 ing its mastery over the habitable lands it pos- 
 sesses. It seeks to increase its profits from the 
 soil, to improve its devices for exchanging com- 
 modities, to organize and systematize the business 
 of living. The effort is one which produces Rocke- 
 
204 Men vs. the Man 
 
 fellers, Havemeyers, and Harrimans as inevitably 
 as it produces airships, canned vegetables, tele- 
 phones, and antitoxins. These latter-day barons 
 are merely men who are able to do more efficiently 
 than the average man the things that the race, as 
 a race, is trying to do. They are as truly race- 
 heroes, in twentieth century America, as Ulysses 
 was a race-hero in military Greece, or Jesus of 
 Nazareth in dreaming, hopeful, down-trodden 
 Judea. They visualize the aspirations of their fel- 
 low-men. 
 
 That the commercial idea will rule mankind 
 forever I by no means assert. How long it will 
 remain more powerful than all other ideas I don't 
 know, and neither do I know what other idea will 
 take its place. It is constantly conditioned and 
 modified by lesser concepts, any or all of which 
 may one day conquer it. The military idea, for 
 example, often rises to rivalry with it. For a few 
 brief weeks in the summer of 1898, most Amer- 
 icans envied Dewey more than Rockefeller, and 
 thought him a more useful and honorable citizen. 
 Even the old religious idea of sacrifice and post 
 mortem reward occasionally has its meager innings. 
 Millionaires, longing for heaven, disgorge their 
 gold. Whole nations, sunk into Christian bathos, 
 pension their doddering inefficients, and encourage 
 the nether swine, with orphan asylum, hospital, and 
 almshouse, to beget copiously and riotously, to the 
 extreme limit of sub-human capacity. 
 
Men vs. the Man 205 
 
 My own private view (the child, I must admit, 
 of a very ardent wish) is that the idea of truth- 
 seeking will one day take the place of the idea 
 of money-making. That is to say, I believe that 
 the Huxleys and Behrings of the world will one 
 day loom up, in the eye of the race, as greater 
 heroes than the St. Pauls and Augustines, the Will- 
 iam Conquerors and Alexanders, the Rockefellers, 
 Cecil Rhodeses, Krupps, and Morgans. But that 
 day is far distant. As yet there is scarcely a sign 
 of its dawn. The name of Huxley is still as 
 strange, to the common people, as that of Duns 
 Scotus. His influence upon their daily thought is 
 still infinitely remote and infinitesimal. They still 
 pay numbskulls to mount pulpits and preach down 
 at them the dead fallacies of a primeval necro- 
 mancy. They still insist that Friday is an unlucky 
 day, that blasphemy is a crime, that the Book of 
 Revelation is authentic. The race is yet in its 
 childhood. Its yearning for the truth is yet swal- 
 lowed up by its yearning for a rock and a refuge. 
 
 Meanwhile the commercial idea is doing its best. 
 It is, indeed, a necessary forerunner of that truth 
 ideal I have mentioned. Before we may seek the 
 ultimate verities with any hope of success, we must 
 first put our house in order. We must complete 
 our mastery of those natural forces which will help 
 us, being enchained, just as readily as they now 
 destroy us, being free. We must solve the prob- 
 lems of food-supply, of transportation, of govern- 
 
2o6 Men vs. the Man 
 
 ment. We must so organize the business of living 
 that it will adapt itself, constantly and auto- 
 matically, to the vicissitudes of terrestrial life. At 
 present, if I may be permitted a metaphor, the 
 body politic suffers from stiff knees, a bad stom- 
 ach, and a disordered mind. It is our present ef- 
 fort to give it clean, red blood, flowing freely — 
 clean, red blood, hard muscles, an alert brain, and 
 a sound digestion. 
 
 Would Socialism lend a hand in this gigantic 
 therapy ? I think not. It would merely make the 
 cure more difficult. To-day the law of natural 
 selection is aiding the man-made laws of artificial 
 selection. Under Socialism the unfit would sur- 
 vive. Under Socialism the efficient man would 
 have a price upon his head. 
 
 Faithfully, 
 
 H. L. M. 
 
LA MONTE'S SIXTH LETTER 
 
 My Dear Mencken : 
 
 I have been highly entertained by your vivacious 
 trituration of the hapless Pecuniary Magnate, 
 though I was greatly surprised that you so mag- 
 nified his importance as to devote over six thou- 
 sand words to replying to an argument that I pre- 
 sented in six hundred. 
 
 But, before commenting briefly on your argu- 
 ment on this subject, will you permit me to remind 
 you that your promise in your first letter " to draw, 
 bit by bit, once more," your " ideal picture " 
 (of future society) is still unfulfilled? It may be 
 that I am obtuse, but certainly I have no more 
 definite idea of your ideal than I had before this 
 correspondence began. I hope that you will de- 
 vote your next letter to enlightening me on this 
 point. 
 
 I will anticipate your reply that I have given 
 you no definite picture of my own ideal, by re- 
 minding you that the Socialist ideal has been so 
 frequently sketched by master hands that I have 
 felt it unnecessary and a waste of space once again 
 to draw it here. But, while it is absurd to attempt 
 to give a detailed description of a future stage of 
 
 207 
 
2o8 Men vs. the Man 
 
 social evolution, and, while no ideal is to be consid- 
 ered ultimate or final, but rather as the starting 
 point for new and indefinite progress, it is still 
 entirely reasonable for the opponents of Socialism 
 to demand some sort of concrete picture of the sort 
 of society Socialists expect to see succeed Capital- 
 ism. The picture drawn by William Morris in 
 " News from Nowhere " seems to me so infinitely 
 preferable in every way to the conditions surround- 
 ing us, that I, for one, would be delighted to see it 
 realized to-morrow. 
 
 But, let me repeat, this is not my ultimate ideal, 
 for I have no ultimate ideal, as I do not expect 
 social evolution to come to a standstill till this old 
 world shall be, in the words of Tennyson, " as dead 
 as yon dead earth, the moon." 
 
 Let me guard against a probable misapprehen- 
 sion. By reading " News from Nowhere " you 
 might not unnaturally get the idea that in my ideal 
 society but little use would be made of machinery. 
 On the contrary, as I have said elsewhere, I believe 
 the Machine Age to be still in its infancy. I be- 
 lieve that after the Social Revolution machinery 
 will be so developed that practically all the un- 
 attractive and toilsome work of the world will be 
 done by machinery, and that the work that will be 
 left for manual labor will all come under the 
 category of Art, using that word in a broad and 
 true sense. 
 
 I believe that this was also not very far from 
 
Men vs. the Man 209 
 
 the expectation of William Morris, for, writing 
 of machinery in " Signs of Change," he said: 
 
 " In a true society these miracles of ingenuity 
 would be for the first time used for minimizing 
 the amount of time spent in unattractive labor, 
 which by their means might be so reduced as to 
 be but a very light burden on each individual. All 
 the more as these machines would most certainly 
 be very much improved when it was no longer a 
 question as to whether their improvement would 
 ' pay ' the individual, but rather whether it would 
 benefit the community." 
 
 So much for my ideal; will you give me an 
 equally definite idea of your own ? 
 
 Now, to return to the Pecuniary Magnate, if I 
 have analyzed your somewhat rambling (pardon 
 me) remarks correctly, they amount in substance to 
 this. You do not deny that sooner or later he is 
 bound to appear; neither do you dispute the 
 economic effects that Prof. Veblen and I have 
 ascribed to him. But you do say, first, if his 
 career proves too devastating, assassination will 
 remove him. This does not meet the question, 
 for his successor will have equal power. 
 
 Secondly, and somewhat inconsistently, you say 
 he does not alarm the people, but that on the con- 
 trary they admire and envy him, and are conse- 
 quently unlikely to interfere with him. If this 
 be true, and I will not dispute it here, he will have 
 precisely the annihilating effects upon the middle 
 
2IO Men vs. the Man 
 
 class (the progenitors of your Supermen) that I 
 predicted. 
 
 Thirdly, you say that while the masses admire 
 him and will not impede his mad career, the lesser 
 millionaires will turn and rend him. Did the 
 lesser millionaires enjoy a cannibal orgy with 
 the late Mr. Rogers of Standard Oil and the late 
 Mr. Harriman of the Pacific Roads as victims? 
 Ask Mr. Lawson of Boston and Mr. Fish of New 
 York. 
 
 You imply that Mr. James J. Hill once fell a 
 victim to the direful wrath of the lesser million- 
 aires. I wish you had been more explicit. The 
 obituary notices of Mr. Harriman led me to be- 
 lieve that it was that prince of Pecuniary Mag- 
 nates, and not the small-fry millionaires, who oc- 
 casionally defeated the able plans of Mr. Hill. But 
 I stand open to correction on this point. 
 
 You also say that Mr. Rockefeller's activities 
 have seldom caused insomnia among investors. 
 Permit me to commend to you the history of 
 Amalgamated Copper. 
 
 Finally, you say the Pecuniary Magnates are 
 *' truly race-heroes in twentieth century America. 
 They visualize the aspirations of their fellow-men. 
 That the commercial idea will rule mankind for- 
 ever I by no means assert. How long it will re- 
 main more powerful than all other ideas I don't 
 know, and neither do I know what other idea will 
 take its place." 
 
Men vs. the Man 211 
 
 Here, we Socialists have the advantage of you, 
 for we do know, in the language of Friedrich 
 Nietzsche, " how ideals are manufactured on 
 earth." We do know that human ideals are deter- 
 mined by the modes of production and exchange; 
 and, therefore, we know that the commercial ideal 
 of boundless wealth will persist just as long as 
 the means of production and distribution remain 
 private property, and we do know that the Social 
 Revolution, now close at hand, which will trans- 
 form these into common or collective property will 
 usher in the new and glorious ideal of social 
 service — an ideal that includes your ideal of 
 " truth-seeking," just as it includes the Hellenic 
 ideal of beauty and the Dionysian ideal of joy. 
 
 Only by becoming a soldier in the comrade- 
 hosts, can you hasten the realization of your own 
 ideal. It is because you feel the imperious 
 strength of this inward urge toward Socialism that 
 you argue so desperately against it. I rejoice at 
 this unconscious testimony to the resistless might of 
 the lure of Socialism. 
 
 In attempting to cure what you conceive to be 
 my boundless faith in the omnipotence of legisla- 
 tion you tell me that " legislation is always an ef- 
 fect rather than a cause " and that " it is inevitably 
 a good distance behind the event." You are mak- 
 ing progress, my dear Mencken, and I venture to 
 hope that it will not be long before you are able 
 to comprehend the meaning of Marx's pregnant 
 
212 Men vs. the Man 
 
 statement that " the economic structure of society 
 is the real foundation, on which rise legal and 
 political superstructures and to which correspond 
 definite forms of social consciousness." But, let 
 me remind you that every effect is also a cause, and 
 that while the roots of legislation are to be delved 
 for in the economic soil, legislation also exercises 
 a potent influence upon the course of economic de- 
 velopment. 
 
 We Socialists do not put our whole faith in 
 legislation. Our eggs are not all in one basket. 
 We want the Co-operative Commonwealth, and we 
 want it soon, and we do not scorn or disdain any 
 weapon that may be of service in the struggle to at- 
 tain our goal. We regard the ballot as one of our 
 most important weapons ; we even think it might be 
 almost our sole weapon if our adversaries would 
 play the game of political democracy fairly. But 
 we are not so naive as to expect this. Accordingly 
 we shall use every weapon that the evolution of the 
 struggle develops. The recent history of Russia, 
 Sweden, and the Latin countries of Europe has 
 shown that the strike, in its later forms, is capable 
 of rivaling, if not surpassing, the ballot as a means 
 of Social Revolution. We shall certainly use both 
 ballot and strike, and I have no doubt that other 
 and equally powerful weapons will be evolved in 
 the future. 
 
 But the ballot has this distinct advantage: by 
 using it we demonstrate our strength, and the 
 
Men vs. the Man 213 
 
 mightier the power we show at the ballot-box, the 
 less likely are our opponents to force us to make 
 use of our auxiliary methods. So that it is true 
 that we do lay great stress upon the ballot as a 
 means to Social Revolution. But we are quite 
 sure that after the Social Revolution there will be 
 little room or need for legislation in the sense in 
 which that term is now used. 
 
 In the struggle for Socialism, as in all other 
 struggles, the victory must go to the stronger of 
 the contesting parties. From this point of view 
 both the ballot and the strike are crude ther- 
 mometers for registering our rising strength. 
 When either of these thermometers shows that we 
 possess the superior social force, there will be need, 
 not so much for legislation, as for a parley to ar- 
 range the terms of surrender of the Capitalist 
 Class. 
 
 For, blink it, as we Americans try to, this 
 struggle in which we are engaged is and must re- 
 main a class-struggle until the Social Revolution 
 wipes out class antagonisms forever. 
 
 The greatest contribution that America has made 
 to anthropology and sociology was made by the 
 late Lewis H. Morgan of Rochester, New York. 
 Unfortunately, the biography of this transcendent 
 scientific genius is yet unwritten. His more im- 
 portant works were published over thirty years ago 
 by Henry Holt .and Company. Chiefest among 
 them stands out " Ancient Society." In this raonu- 
 
214 Men vs. the Man 
 
 mental work Morgan through his study of the gens 
 and the marriage systems of the Iroquois Indians 
 and the Kanakas of Hawaii for the first time en- 
 abled us to understand the social organization of 
 the Greeks of Homeric and pre-Homeric times. 
 
 He broadly sketched the development of human 
 institutions through three stages of savagery and 
 three stages of barbarism up to civilization, and 
 thus enabled us to forecast the future. How did 
 he differentiate the divers stages of advance? By 
 the tools that men had invented and employed, 
 and the animals they had domesticated and made 
 subservient to human ends. He demonstrated that 
 these were the most important determining factors 
 of all social institutions. Man makes tools, and 
 the sort of tools that man has made determines 
 what sort of a society man shall live in. Since 
 this great discovery of Morgan's it is possible for 
 us when we know the tools in use at any given era, 
 to draw in broad outline the whole cultural scheme 
 of life of that era, just as Owen could reconstruct 
 the skeleton of an extinct species from a single 
 fossil bone. 
 
 Given small hand tools and no motor power, and 
 there inevitably result handicraft production, an- 
 thropomorphic religion, and the natural rights 
 philosophy of seventeenth century England and 
 eighteenth century France. 
 
 When the technique of production reaches its 
 present titanic development, the very nature of the 
 
Men vs. the Man 215 
 
 tools (huge plants that can only be run by vast 
 armies of co-operating men and women) makes 
 the social ownership of those plants necessary and 
 inevitable. " Private property In the instruments 
 of production," says Kautsky, " has its roots in 
 small production. Individual production makes 
 individual ownership necessary. Large produc- 
 tion on the contrary denotes co-operative, social 
 production. In large production each individual 
 does not work alone, but a large number of work- 
 ers, a whole commonwealth, work together to pro- 
 duce a whole. Accordingly, the modern Instru- 
 ments of production are extensive and gigantic. 
 With them it is wholly impossible that every single 
 worker should own his own instruments of pro- 
 duction. Once the present stage is reached by 
 large production. It admits but of two systems of 
 ownership : 
 
 " First, private ownership by the individual in 
 the Instruments of production used by co-opera- 
 tive labor; that means the existing system of cap- 
 italist production, with its train of misery and ex- 
 ploitation as the portion of the workers, Idleness 
 and excessive abundance as the portion of the cap- 
 italist; and 
 
 " Second, ownership by the workers in the com- 
 mon instruments of production; that means a co- 
 operative system of production, and the extinction 
 of the exploitation of the workers, who become 
 masters of their own products, and who themselves 
 
2i6 Men vs. the Man 
 
 appropriate the surplus of which, under our sys- 
 tem, they are deprived by the capitalists. 
 
 " To substitute common for private ownership 
 in the means of production, this it is that the 
 economic development is urging upon us with ever 
 increasing force." 
 
 This substitution, my dear Mencken, is inevi- 
 table, and it cannot be much longer deferred. But, 
 as Kautsky says elsewhere, " when the Socialist de- 
 clares the abolition of private property in the in- 
 struments of production to be unavoidable, he does 
 not mean that some fine morning, without their 
 helping themselves, the exploited classes will find 
 the ravens feeding them. The Socialist considers 
 the breakdown of the present social system to be 
 unavoidable, because he knows that the economic 
 evolution inevitably brings on those conditions 
 that will compel the exploited classes to rise against 
 this system of private ownership; that this system 
 multiplies the number and the strength of the ex- 
 ploited, and diminishes the number and strength of 
 the exploiting classes, both of whom are still ad- 
 hering to it; and that it will finally lead to such 
 unbearable conditions for the masses of the pop- 
 ulation that they will have no alternative but 
 either to go down in silence, or to overthrow that 
 system of property." 
 
 This is what Marx and Engels meant when 
 they wrote in the Communist Manifesto, " What 
 the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are 
 
Men vs. the Man 217 
 
 its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of 
 the proletariat are equally inevitable." 
 
 Our present ethics and our present jurisprudence 
 are both legacies from the era of handicraft. Un- 
 der handicraft it seemed wholly right and natural 
 that the laborer who owned his own tools and 
 worked with his own hands should own absolutely 
 his own product. Property rested, as it were, on 
 the right of creation. But to-day the great mass 
 of property has not been created by its owners, but 
 by the labor of others. But we still adhere to the 
 old ethics and jurisprudence begotten by handi- 
 craft. " Political economy," said Marx, " con- 
 fuses on principle two very different kinds of pri- 
 vate property, of which one rests on the producer's 
 own labor, the other on the employment of the 
 labor of others. It forgets that the latter not only 
 is the direct antithesis of the former, but absolutely 
 grows on its tomb only." 
 
 The economic history of the seventeenth, 
 eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries is simply the 
 story of the divorce of the peasant from the 
 land and the artisan from his tools. This di- 
 vorce was accomplished with much violence and 
 suffering, but it was absolutely necessary for the 
 development of the highly productive powers of 
 modern industry. When this process neared com- 
 pletion, there began the divorce of the middle 
 class capitalist from his capital — a process that 
 is still rapidly proceeding. " This expropria- 
 
21 8 Men vs. the Man 
 
 tion," Marx tells us in " Capital," 
 plished by the action of the immanent laws of cap- 
 italistic production itself, by the centrahzation of 
 capital. One capitahst always kills many." I 
 have dwelt so often upon this tendency of our mod- 
 ern commercial life, and all American business men 
 are so painfully familiar with it, that no more need 
 be said of it here. 
 
 Here in America these two processes — the di- 
 vorce of the worker from the means of produc- 
 tion and the divorce of the smaller capitalists from 
 their capital — have proceeded so far that the 
 further development of our productive powers is 
 seriously impeded. The limited purchasing power 
 of the proletarians who have been freed from their 
 petty property compels the pecuniary magnates who 
 control our great industrial trusts to curtail produc- 
 tion, while the fear of the crushing competition of 
 the trusts prevents our lesser capitalists from ven- 
 turing upon new productive enterprises. We are 
 indeed hard up against the day of judgment. We 
 have reached here in America to-day the condition 
 that Marx predicted over forty years ago in these 
 memorable words : " The monopoly of capital be- 
 comes a fetter upon the mode of production, 
 which has sprung up and flourished along with it, 
 and under it. Centralization of the means of 
 production and socialization of labor at last reach 
 a point where they become incompatible with their 
 capitalist integument. This integument is burst 
 
Men vs. the Man 219 
 
 asunder. The knell of capitalist private property 
 sounds. The expropriators are expropriated. 
 
 " The transformation of scattered private prop- 
 erty, arising from individual labor, into capitalist 
 private property is, naturally, a process incom- 
 parably more protracted, violent, and difficult than 
 the transformation of capitalistic private property, 
 already practically resting on socialized production, 
 into socialized property. In the former case, we had 
 the expropriation of the mass of the people by a 
 few usurpers ; in the latter, we have the expropria- 
 tion of a few usurpers by the mass of the people." 
 
 But besides showing us the tremendous im- 
 portance of the nature of man's tools, Lewis H. 
 Morgan, in " Ancient Society," also shed a flood of 
 light on the nature of political government. The 
 two distinguishing marks of political government, 
 or the State, as we moderns conceive it, are, first, 
 the power to levy and collect taxes, and, second, 
 the power to make and enforce laws. Morgan 
 showed that among the Iroquois Indians and other 
 primitive societies in which the institution of pri- 
 vate property was not developed, while there was 
 a fairly elaborate social organization, the two dis- 
 tinguishing marks of the modern State were ut- 
 terly lacking. The public power of coercion was 
 only developed after the powers of production were 
 so developed as to enable the worker to produce 
 more than his own subsistence and thus to make 
 
220 Men vs. the Man 
 
 it more expedient to enslave the prisoners of war 
 than to kill or eat them, and after the breeding on 
 a large scale of domestic animals had given rise to 
 large private property in flocks and herds. 
 
 Political government has its genesis in the divi- 
 sion of society into privileged classes and non- 
 privileged classes. As Deville puts it, " for the 
 security of a social order involving the division of 
 the population into classes, a public power cal- 
 culated to compel the respect of the non-privileged 
 is necessary." Political government, in the mod- 
 ern sense, does not exist so long as there are no 
 classes in society; it makes its appearance in a 
 more or less developed form with the emergence of 
 classes and the antagonisms they - involve. The 
 product of a definite social order, it will last as 
 long as the conditions that have rendered it in- 
 evitable. 
 
 " When, in the course of development," says the 
 Communist Manifesto, " class distinctions have 
 disappeared, and all production has been concen- 
 trated in the hands of a vast association of the 
 whole nation, the public power will lose its political 
 character. Political power, properly so called, is 
 merely the organized power of one class for op- 
 pressing another. If the proletariat during its 
 contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the 
 force of circumstances, to organize itself as a class, 
 if, by means of a revolution, it makes Itself the 
 ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force 
 
Men vs. the Man 221 
 
 the old conditions of production, then it will, along 
 with these conditions, have swept away the condi- 
 tions for the existence of class antagonisms, and 
 of classes generally, and will thereby have abol- 
 ished its own supremacy as a class. 
 
 " In place of the old bourgeois society, with its 
 classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an as- 
 sociation, in which the free development of each 
 is the condition for the free development of all." 
 
 Since political government is in essence an organ 
 of conservation whose chief function has been to 
 defend economic privilege, it follows that we can- 
 not destroy economic privilege without first cap- 
 turing the powers of political government. Here 
 you have the key to the political tactics of the So- 
 cialist movement. We despise no reform that 
 makes more tolerable the life-conditions of the 
 masses, but we know also that we cannot remove 
 the source of poverty and misery — ^private owner- 
 ship of tools and machinery — so long as we leave 
 the powers of political government in the control 
 of the propertied classes. Hence, the immediate 
 goal of the Socialist party in every country is the 
 conquest of political power. 
 
 We aim to capture political government that we 
 may compel political government to commit sui- 
 cide. As I have written elsewhere, " the state is 
 destined, when it becomes the state of the work- 
 ing-class, to remove its own foundation — economic 
 inequality — and thus, to commit suicide." In the 
 
222 Men vs. the Man 
 
 words of Friedrich Engels, " the government of 
 persons will be replaced by the administration of 
 things." 
 
 I hope I have now made it clear that we urge 
 the workers to vote for Debs, not for the sake of 
 such crumbs of reform as we may attain by im- 
 mediate legislation (though I repeat we do not 
 despise or spurn such reforms) , but because we 
 know the powers of government in the hands of 
 our opponents constitute an insurmountable bar- 
 rier between us and our goal. 
 
 But, I repeat, the fundamental difference be- 
 tween your position and mine is ethical rather than 
 economic. You hold that the individual can reach 
 a high development and happiness by making high 
 individual development and happiness his conscious 
 goals. I hold that the individual man can only 
 reach a high and worthy, a noble, development, 
 not by conscious self-sacrifice (which I agree with 
 you and Nietzsche is morbid and pathological), 
 but by such whole-souled devotion to the welfare 
 of others as leads to forgetfulness of one's own 
 interests. 
 
 Socialist ethics, as I conceive them, are well ex- 
 pressed in what W. D. Howells tells us was the 
 lesson Ibsen taught in " Little Eyolf " : " that you 
 must not and you cannot be happy except through 
 the welfare of others, and that to seek your bliss 
 outside of this is to sin against reason and right- 
 eousness both." 
 
Men vs. the Man 223 
 
 I hold that, even if the goal of Socialism should 
 prove an iridescent dream, it has already enriched 
 the world immeasurably by the nobility of char- 
 acter it has so abundantly brought forth. It is 
 because it leads individuals to forget themselves in 
 their complete devotion to a great cause and a 
 noble ideal, that it is to-day the most vital regen- 
 erating religious force in the world. 
 
 Socialism will abolish poverty and satiety, and 
 make joyousness the dominant note of humanity; 
 it will make It impossible for self-interest to clash 
 with social welfare, and will thus make the Golden 
 Rule work universally and automatically. " May 
 we not expect," asks Kautsky, " that under such 
 conditions a new type of mankind will arise which 
 will be far superior to the highest type which cul- 
 ture has hitherto created? An Over-man (Ueber- 
 mensch), if you will, not as an exception but as a 
 rule, an Over-man compared with his predecessors, 
 but not as opposed to his comrades, a noble man 
 who seeks his satisfaction not by being great among 
 crippled dwarfs, but great among the great, happy 
 among the happy — who does not draw his feehng 
 of strength from the fact that he raises himself 
 upon the bodies of the down-trodden, but because 
 a union with his fellow-workers gives him courage 
 to dare the attainment of the highest tasks." 
 
 Awaiting with serene confidence the soon-com- 
 ing day when I can sign myself " your comrade," 
 Yours as ever. La Monte. 
 
MENCKEN'S REPLY TO LA MONTE'S 
 SIXTH LETTER 
 
 My Dear La Monte : 
 
 In the matter of the Pecuniary Magnate I am 
 well content to leave you in possession of the field. 
 This is not because I think you have disposed of 
 the few modest suggestions I ventured to put forth 
 in my last letter, but because I see no hope of 
 rescuing you from your errors by the ordinary 
 processes of disputation. You Socialists, when you 
 come to discuss the magnates, surplus values, bour- 
 geoisie, and other fantastic fowl in your aviary of 
 horrors, too often borrow a dialectic device from 
 your blood brothers, the Christian Scientists. That 
 is to say, you insist upon using private brands of 
 epistemology and logic, unknown and incompre- 
 hensible to mere human beings, in the conduct of 
 your philosophical feuds. Point out to a Christian 
 Scientist that the influence of the mind upon the 
 liver is infinitely less powerful than the influence 
 of the liver upon the mind, and he will bowl you 
 over with the staggering answer that the liver is a 
 mere delusion of the mind. It seems to me en- 
 tirely impossible for an everyday disputant, handi- 
 capped by a reverence for Aristotle, to controvert, 
 
 224 
 
Men vs. the Man 225 
 
 or even to denounce such a theory. How are you 
 going to lay hold of it? How are you going to 
 measure or weigh it ? It wipes out the whole uni- 
 verse, as you know that universe, and suspends all 
 the laws of evidence, logic, and causation. It 
 leaves you, in a word, gasping in an empty void. 
 The only thing to do is to steal away in silence. 
 
 The same fate, I fear, sometimes overtakes the 
 controversialist who engages a Socialist in debate. 
 My own case offers sorry proof of it. In my last 
 letter, for instance, I pointed out that the Pecuniary 
 Magnate's capacity for evil, while boundless in 
 theory, would be ever limited in practice, for not 
 even class legislation could afford him absolute 
 safety from some groaning hero's bullet. This 
 argument, I flattered myself, would give you pause, 
 but I was wrong. In the single paragraph that 
 you take to answer it, you wipe it completely from 
 the record, just as a Christian Scientist, with one 
 shattering denial, wipes out the whole science of 
 physiology. My argument, you maintain, is vain 
 and futile, for it is not an argument at all. As- 
 sassination a remedy? Pooh! What's the use? 
 As soon as one Magnate is assassinated, " his suc- 
 cessor will have equal power." 
 
 Well, let us look into this a bit. Let us suppose 
 a horde of potential Magnates, all eager to feast 
 upon the public. Many of them have the will and 
 many of them have the means, but the combination 
 of will and means is comparatively rare. But by 
 
226 Men vs. the Man 
 
 and by, one of them with the will, by dint of toil- 
 some effort, achieves the means also, and in his face 
 we at once behold the lineaments of the true Veb- 
 lenian monster. He loses no time; he is at the 
 throat of the great masses instanter. A period of 
 barbarous pillage ensues. The price of beer goes 
 up to twenty-five cents a can. The unemployed 
 stalk the earth in tragic misery. Many of them, 
 facing despair, are forced to accept work from 
 their conqueror. Others, more idealistic, starve. 
 Desperate men murder and rob. Children are 
 eaten. Socialism grows popular. . . . One day 
 a bomb explodes beneath the private train of the 
 Nameless One, and he rolls a thousand feet down 
 the Alleghany Mountains. A month after his 
 funeral, his wealth is divided into two parts. One 
 swells the endowment of a Baptist " university " in 
 Arkansas, and the other goes to his son — a young 
 man whose wildest dream is to be the lover of a 
 prima donna. Thus passeth the means. The will 
 is already moldering in its grave. 
 
 But another Magnate springs into the saddle. 
 He is even worse than the first one. He rowels 
 the proletariat mercilessly. The cries of starving 
 children are music to his ears. He delights in 
 human misery, in unmentionable horrors, in un- 
 namable suffering. . . . One day his fore- 
 ordained bullet reaches him, and he troubles no 
 more. 
 
 A third! He has "equal power." ... So 
 
Men vs. tlie Man 227 
 
 has the bullet that finds him. ... A fourth I A 
 fifth! A one-hundredth! A five-hundredth! 
 . . . We come to large numbers. Four hun- 
 dred million Magnates have been slain. The earth 
 is littered with their carcasses. By their wills they 
 have established 5,000,000 Baptist " universities," 
 sent out 50,000,000 missionaries to the heathen, 
 and founded the fortunes of a whole race of show 
 girls, shyster lawyers, head waiters, and alienists. 
 What a fate ! What a taste of ashes in the mouth 1 
 And yet the four-hundred-million-and-first Mag- 
 nate, by your astonishing theory of infinite series, 
 is ready and willing to face the same fate and 
 taste the same ashes. That monster who at the 
 moment you introduced him was rare to the point 
 of actual non-existence, is now as common as 
 heresy. Once crafty and selfish beyond expression, 
 he is now willing to face certain death for an idea. 
 Frankly, my dear La Monte, I do not think 
 that you have disposed of my contention. Unless 
 I am vastly mistaken, a very real fear of death 
 (made real by practical examples) is apt to shake 
 the determination of even the most determined 
 man. And unless I am mistaken again, a public 
 execution, whether official or unofficial, is certain 
 to end the activity of even the most active, and to 
 make his particular form of activity lose its lure 
 for others. The case of General Trepoff may oc- 
 cur to you. General Trepoff, true enough, has a 
 successor in the office of Chief of the Russian 
 
228 Men vs. the Man 
 
 Secret Police, but I fancy that even the most rabid 
 Russian patriot will admit that the administration 
 of his successor, while still leaving much to be de- 
 sired, is measurably less murderous than that of 
 Trepoff himself. If you maintain, in answer, that 
 there is but one Chief of the Secret Police in 
 Russia, while the United States offers pasturage 
 for a large number of Pecuniary Magnates, of 
 varying ambitions and degrees of evil, I need only 
 remind you that in the cemetery of Picpus In Paris 
 you will find the headless skeletons of 1,306 French 
 nobles of the Terror year, who were also of vary- 
 ing ambitions and degrees of evil. Bullets are 
 cheap to-day. One or ten thousand — what are 
 the odds ? 
 
 And yet the Terror did not turn France into 
 Paradise. Of course not! No more would So- 
 cialism. The French peasants got rid of their 
 feudal masters, and it was good riddance, but new 
 masters appeared next day. The name of the 
 thing was changed, but the thing itself remained. 
 The same phenomenon would be observed if there 
 were a wholesale slaughter of millionaires in the 
 United States to-morrow, followed by a grand in- 
 auguration of Socialism. In that case, my dear 
 La Monte, you yourself would become a Magnate. 
 You edit a Socialist paper to-day and write Socialist 
 books, and the high privates and corporals of the 
 Socialist army quite naturally attach a good deal 
 of value to your technical skill and judgment as 
 
Men vs. the Man 229 
 
 a virtuoso and connoisseur of economic disgust. 
 In the Socialist state they would still look to you 
 for guidance, for they would still be common 
 men and as such still in need of counselors, leaders, 
 and masters. You would be, we will say. Secre- 
 tary of the Treasury or Governor of the State of 
 New York — ^with a presidential bee buzzing in your 
 ears. . . . Let me confess it candidly; the pros- 
 pect does not please me. Between communism 
 dominated by Robert Rives La Monte and a 
 democracy tempered by John D. Rockefeller I am 
 constrained to choose the latter — ^not because I 
 hate you, but because a patient and painful inquiry 
 has convinced me that, on the whole, the philosophy 
 lived by John is safer, saner, and more wholesome 
 for the human race than the philosophy preached 
 by you. . . . The average American, I take it, 
 agrees with me. Maybe that is why a proposal 
 that Rockefeller be assassinated would seem a joke 
 to him — a joke in bad taste, perhaps, but still a 
 harmless one. Do not worry: John is safe. So 
 long as we proletarians can laugh we are an in- 
 offensive lot. 
 
 Your other objections in rebuttal, in the matter of 
 Veblen and his Magnates, I must submit to pos- 
 terity and a just God without further argument, for 
 this correspondence is already o'er-long, and be- 
 fore closing this letter I must try to answer your 
 charge that I have no philosophy of life to offer in 
 place of Socialism. This charge, at least in part, 
 
230 Men vs. the Man 
 
 is true enough, for I must confess that I have no 
 infallible formula, like your " materialistic concep- 
 tion of history," to solve all the problems of human 
 existence. Life impresses me, most of all, by its 
 appalling complexity. It is not static but dynamic ; 
 not a being, but an eternal becoming. The con- 
 stant reaction of diversified individuals upon a fluent 
 environment produces a series of phenomena which 
 seems to me, at times, to be beyond all ordering 
 and ticketing. When one attempts to interpret 
 these phenomena, and to reduce them to ordered 
 chains and classes, the result Is too often a futile 
 waste of words. Unlike things are given the same 
 name, and their possession of that name in com- 
 mon is taken to be a proof of their identity. Again, 
 the same thing is given two names, x and y, and 
 elaborate equations are built up from them, with- 
 out anyone noticing the fallacies that fairly bristle 
 in both members. Most of the absurdities of the 
 quack-science of sociology, as it Is taught by vapid 
 college professors, and of the quasl-sclence of 
 political economy, as it Is taught by professors, la- 
 bor leaders, editorial writers, and rhapsodists, arise 
 out of just such errors. 
 
 You Socialists often blunder into the trap. In 
 your last letter, for example, you say that, " given 
 small hand tools and no motive power, and there 
 Inevitably results handicraft production." On the 
 surface, this seems to be a sound enough generali- 
 zation, but a moment's inspection will show that its 
 
Men vs. the Man 231 
 
 soundness is a mere appearance. What you actu- 
 ally say, in fact, is this : that given hand tools and 
 nothing else, there must inevitably result the use 
 of hand tools. There is just as much intelligibil- 
 ity in that statement, and no more, as you will find 
 in the statement that all one-eyed men must see 
 out of one eye. 
 
 But you are not alone in your errors. Others 
 just as gross are made by all other men who seek 
 to reduce the complex and disorderly phenomena 
 of Hfe to rigid rules. I fall into them myself 
 whenever I set pen to paper — as you have noticed 
 full often in these letters of mine — and only the 
 soothing knowledge that I am not alone in my blun- 
 dering — that even the Huxleys, the Newtons, and 
 the Darwins are sometimes with me — keeps me 
 from abandoning controversy as an art impos- 
 sible by the very nature of things. Generaliza- 
 tions, indeed, all have their limits — even this one. 
 Apply them often enough, and you will come in- 
 evitably upon some disconcerting exception, some 
 radioactive anarchist. The cosmic process is made 
 up of innumerable acts, and the more we ex- 
 amine any of them, the more we become convinced 
 that, in many respects, it is unique. But because 
 philosophy is long and life is short we must as- 
 sume, even when we can't entirely believe, that 
 they fall into groups and classes, else we could 
 never hope to study them at all. In Prof. James' 
 phrase, we must use short cuts in our reasoning. 
 
232 Men vs. the Man 
 
 But we may still take care, in using them, that 
 they are not needlessly short. 
 
 And now for the philosophy which I choose to 
 regard as more accurate and more satisfactory than 
 Socialism. You complain that I have failed to 
 state it in my letters, simply and unequivocably, 
 but you must admit that I have given you more 
 than one glimpse of its outlines. These glimpses, 
 I make no doubt, have long ago informed you 
 that it is, in the rough, a square denial of 
 practically all the doctrines and ideals at the bot- 
 tom of Christianity and Socialism. Whenever and 
 however Christianity and Socialism differ, my vote 
 is for Socialism, and to that extent, perhaps, I may 
 claim membership in your fraternity. Like you, I 
 hold in abhorrence the false promise that " the 
 meek shall inherit the earth " — the one ingredient 
 which effectually separates Christian morality from 
 all other moralities — and like you, I hold that life 
 upon the earth is a very agreeable thing, and that 
 men should concentrate their greatest efforts upon 
 making it more agreeable — a notion which no hon- 
 est Christian, with his belief in the ineradicable 
 vileness of humanity, and the futility of human ef- 
 fort, can harbor without a feeling of guilt. In 
 all this we are one, but when it comes to the doc- 
 trines, which Christianity and Socialism hold in 
 common, we are two. I refer here, of course, to 
 the doctrines that all men are equal " before the 
 Lord," that a man's duty to his brother is greater 
 
Men vs. the Man 233 
 
 than his duty to himself, that the hopeless yearn- 
 ings of a stupid, helpless, and inefficient man are, 
 in some recondite manner, more pleasing to the 
 Master of the universe than the well-ordered, in- 
 telligible plans and achievements of an efficient 
 man. I cannot believe these things. It seems to 
 me, indeed, that they are palpably untrue, and that, 
 by reason of their untruth, they are dangerous foes 
 to human progress. 
 
 You Socialists, in the very first paragraph of 
 your philosophy, make one of the errors that I 
 have mentioned in a preceding paragraph. That 
 is to say, you give very unlike things the same 
 name, and then assume that they are like. As ex- 
 amples of these unlike things, I can do no better 
 than mention Thomas Henry Huxley and a man 
 whom we may call the Rev. Jasper Johnson. On 
 the surface you will find many points of resem- 
 blance between the two. Huxley was a male of 
 the genus homo, and so is Johnson; Huxley had 
 five fingers on each hand, and so has Johnson; 
 Huxley expressed his ideas in the English language, 
 and so does Johnson ; Huxley was carnivorous and 
 so is Johnson. Reckon up all these points of re- 
 semblance and you will find them almost infinite in 
 number. But, reckon up, then, the points of dif- 
 ference between the two men, and you will find 
 them equal to x'' plus a million. In every char- 
 acteristic, instinct, habit, and quality which serves 
 to differentiate any man from any ape, Huxley 
 
234 Men vs. the Man 
 
 was more lavishly endowed, perhaps, than any 
 other individual man that ever lived; but in John- 
 son these characteristics, instinct, habits, and qual- 
 ities, when they appear at all, are so faint that 
 it is well-nigh impossible to detect them. Huxley, 
 in a word, was an intellectual colossus ; while John- 
 son, intellectually, scarcely exists at all. The one 
 pushed the clock of progress ahead a hundred 
 years ; the other is a foul, ignorant, thieving, super- 
 stitious, self-appointed negro preacher of the Black 
 Belt, whose mental life is made up of three ambi- 
 tions — to eat a whole hog at one meal, to be a 
 white man in heaven, and to meet a white woman, 
 some day, in a lonely wood. 
 
 And yet, by the socialistic and Christian philoso- 
 phies, these men are equal. According to the 
 Christian seers, they will kneel before the throne 
 of God side by side, and spend eternity as brothers. 
 According to the Socialist seers, they are equally 
 fitted to deal with the great problems of society and 
 the state, equally worthy of ease, protection, and 
 leisure, and equally entitled to have the aid of their 
 fellow-men in the achievement of their ambitions. 
 
 I am unable, my dear La Monte, to grant this 
 much. It seems to me, indeed, that the man who 
 attempts to prove merely that Huxley and Johnson 
 belong to the same order of living creatures has 
 a staggering task ahead of him. The gap be- 
 tween them, I am convinced, is greater than that 
 between Johnson and the anthropoid apes. Phys- 
 
Men vs. the Man 235 
 
 ically, true enough, there is probably only a dif- 
 ference in degree, but mentally there is an abysmal 
 difference in kind. No conceivable course of train- 
 ing, however protracted, could convert Johnson 
 into an imitation of Huxley. The one came into 
 the world with certain inherited traits, certain in- 
 valuable forms of congenital efficiency, which the 
 other can never hope to acquire. The one be- 
 longed to a caste of men whose value to the human 
 race, and whose consequent right to life, no sane 
 person would venture to deny; the other belongs 
 to a caste whose value is obviously nil, and whose 
 right to life, in consequence, must be proved be- 
 fore it is admitted. 
 
 Here, then, I arrive at that doctrine of human 
 rights which seems to me to be most in accord with 
 the inflexible and beneficent laws of nature which 
 rule man in his complex communities just as rigidly 
 as they rule staphylococci in their culture tubes. 
 Of these rights there are two classes — first, those 
 which a man (or a class of men) wrests from his 
 environment by force; and secondly, those which 
 he obtains by an exchange of values. A man is 
 exercising rights of the first class when he kills the 
 wolf that seeks to devour him, or wrings a living 
 directly from the earth; he is exercising a right 
 of the second class when he takes his skill and in- 
 dustry into the open market and sells them for 
 whatever they will bring. If the service that he 
 offers is of small value to his fellow-men, he must 
 
236 Men vs. the Man 
 
 be content with a small return for it. And if, per- 
 chance, it has no value, he must accept nothing as 
 his reward. There is, in a word, no irreducible 
 minimum of compensation, due to every man by 
 virtue of his mere existence as a human being. 
 No man has any right to life, save that which he 
 proves by mastering his environment. 
 
 This view of the world and its people is not 
 quite so anthropophagous as my bald statement of 
 it may make it seem. It does not exclude those 
 feelings of pity, charity, and good-will which grow 
 out of habit and association, nor does it exclude 
 that wise foresight which sometimes prompts the 
 strong man to aid the weak man, that the latter, 
 perchance, may shake off his weakness and become 
 a helper instead of a pensioner. But it does ex- 
 clude that sentimental reverence for the human be- 
 ing, per se, which credits him with a long cata- 
 logue of gratuitous and complex rights, all 
 grounded upon the ancient theological notion that 
 he is, in some sense, divine. This notion, I be- 
 lieve, is to blame for nine-tenths of the wretched- 
 ness in the world to-day. It is to blame for that 
 unhealthy charity which coddles the degenerate, 
 half-human pauper of England, and encourages 
 him, in the name of God, to beget more of his 
 kind; it is to blame for that maudlin theory of 
 liberty which, in the United States, makes the vote 
 of a negro loafer as potent as that of a Charles 
 Eliot or a Thomas Edison; and it is to blame, 
 
Men vs. the Man 237 
 
 finally, for that insidious and paralyzing unrest 
 which, as Socialism or what not, is making the in- 
 efficient man still more Inefficient by convincing him 
 that efficiency is valueless and even criminal. No 
 great eloquence is needed to make a roustabout be- 
 lieve that he Is as good a man as the governor of 
 his state, but his belief in that absurdity is no proof 
 of its truth, and in the process of instilling it into 
 his foggy mind you have ruined him as a roust- 
 about. 
 
 In order that the human race may go forward, it 
 seems to me desirable that the rewards of extraor- 
 dinary efficiency should be magnificently alluring, 
 and that the penalties of complete inefficiency 
 should be swift, merciless, and terrible. It is not 
 sufficient that the unusual man be given enough to 
 eat, and a roof to shelter him from the weather, 
 for such things are within the easy reach of prac- 
 tically all men. He must have, In addition, a re- 
 ward which effectively marks him off from the 
 common man. It is for him to nominate the qual- 
 ity of that reward, and it is for his fellow-men to 
 determine its quantity. If he wants money, let 
 him have money. If he wants power, honor, 
 glory, worship, let him have what he wants. Per- 
 haps that Incomparable — but, to the common man, 
 incomprehensible — joy which comes with the con- 
 sciousness of work well done will suffice him. Per- 
 haps, on the contrary, he will demand, not only 
 riches for himself, but also a guarantee that his 
 
238 Men vs. the Man 
 
 children shall be rich for generations. What- 
 ever he desires, he proves title to it by getting 
 it. In the free market of the world he finds his 
 price. 
 
 The man of less efficiency makes a less splendid 
 bargain, for the things that he offers for sale have 
 less value. If he is at the bottom of the scale 
 his wares have scarcely any value at all, since they 
 are within the reach of nearly every one. There 
 is no art at which he is appreciably more skilful 
 than any other man. Therefore, he must seek his 
 living at drudgery, at which all men of normal 
 health are equally efficient. Men who desire to 
 escape their share of the world's drudgery, because 
 more agreeable and more profitable work invites 
 their skill, give it over to him. The thing that he 
 offers for sale, in a word, is exactly that elemental 
 functional energy which a draught horse offers for 
 sale, and nothing more; and the price that he 
 gets for it, as Adam Smith showed long ago, is the 
 same price paid to the horse — food and shelter, 
 and nothing more. If he superimposes upon that 
 functional energy the slightest skill, his pay begins 
 to include something beside the bare means of ex- 
 istence, and as his skill increases, his pay in- 
 evitably follows It. 
 
 It seems to me that this is an admirable arrange- 
 ment. If I had the power to change it, I should 
 not make the slightest alteration. If I were told 
 off to create a new universe, I should adopt the 
 
Men vs. the Man 239 
 
 whole plan bodily. We human beings may well 
 offer our thanks to it for our emergence from the 
 dumb brutes. It has lifted us up in the past, and 
 it will lift us up for all time to come. It stamps 
 out, automatically and certainly, not only the in- 
 efficient individual but also the useless class and 
 the weakling race. Its tendency is to accentuate 
 and make more conspicuous all of those traits and 
 forms of skill which best differentiate the human 
 being from all other beings. It offers enormous 
 premiums to the man who can do well the things 
 which all other men can do only badly, or not at 
 all. It reduces to slavery the man who has only 
 the strength of a weak ox to sell. And in its deal- 
 ings with the countless individuals between this 
 master-man and this slave-man, it determines every 
 man's value, not by his yearnings or his intentions, 
 but by the immediate value of his acts. 
 
 Dealing thus with countless individuals, it sets 
 them off, roughly, into castes, but there are no 
 palpable barriers about these castes. A man born 
 into the lowest may die in the highest. A race as 
 generally inefficient as the African may produce 
 an occasional Hannibal or Dumas, and a race at 
 the top of the scale may have its hordes of idiots. 
 In one century, when the general environment of 
 humanity puts a premium upon a certain kind of 
 skill, the race best displaying it may rule the world, 
 and two centuries later, when changes in environ- 
 ment make some other kind of skill more valuable, 
 
240 Men vs. the Man 
 
 that same race may sink to practical slavery. The 
 great reward is always to the race, as to the in- 
 dividual, which best masters the present difficulty 
 and meets the present need. 
 
 Civilization, growing conscious of the natural 
 castes, erects them into classes, and then seeks to 
 make their prerogatives and disabilities permanent. 
 But this effort, in the long run, inevitably fails. 
 There was a time in the history of the world, for 
 example, when its priest class possessed absolute 
 power over all other classes — power infinitely 
 greater than that wielded by the military class in 
 the middle ages, or by the commercial class to-day. 
 It seemed utterly incredible, at that time, that 
 the priest class would one day become a rabble of 
 scarcely tolerated parasites, and yet that thing has 
 come to pass. The military class, in the same 
 way, has lost its old kingship, and to-day its very 
 existence depends upon the good-will of the com- 
 mercial class. Perhaps the latter, too, will be de- 
 throned in time. I am sure I don't know. It is 
 even possible that the " producer " class may have 
 its innings. Again, I don't know. 
 
 But this I do know: that the plan of Socialism 
 to lift up the " producer " class to sovereignty by 
 an act of human volition is as absurd as the old 
 ecclesiastical plan to solve the riddles of the uni- 
 verse by revelation and anathema. If the thing 
 ever comes to pass at all, it must come by slow 
 stages and as a symptom of changes in the needs 
 
Men vs. the Man 241 
 
 and desires of the human race. At present the 
 race seems to stand most in need of improvements 
 in the art of hfe. To the man who offers it a 
 secret password to heaven, it gives little, for it is 
 little interested in heaven, but for him who offers it 
 some new scheme to attain ease and comfort — some 
 improvement in marketing petroleum, some device 
 for making travel safer, some new food, some 
 new plan of investing savings — it has rewards as 
 large as those that once went to popes and em- 
 perors. And in this favored class of services, it 
 esteems most the unique service. To the man 
 who makes shoes which, whatever their excellence, 
 are no more comfortable than the shoes made at 
 the next bench, it gives a comparatively small re- 
 ward. And so, too, it has no prize for the man 
 who raises wheat in the old, old way, and stores 
 it in his bin. But to the man who, by inventing 
 new machinery or by better organizing the work, 
 improves the comfort of shoes, and to the man 
 who buys the wheat of the farmers and hauls it 
 craftily to where it is most needed — to these men 
 it gives extraordinary rewards. 
 
 The effort to lift the man of common service 
 to the level of the man of uncommon service seems 
 to me not only pernicious, but also, in the long run, 
 inevitably futile. When the workingman, going 
 into the market to sell his skill, attempts, by fair 
 means, to strike the best bargain he may, he has 
 my unfeigned sympathy. But when, as a man 
 
242 Men vs. the Man 
 
 of common skill, he demands the rewards and con- 
 sideration due only to the man of uncommon skill, 
 it seems to me that the more efficient men on the 
 other side of the counter are within their rights 
 when they use their power and cunning to oppose 
 his exactions. His notion that in addition to his 
 just wages he deserves a definite reward for the 
 mere act of remaining alive is one to which I can- 
 not subscribe. And his further notion that his 
 mere condition of aliveness makes him as fit to 
 solve the most diflicult problems of existence as 
 those men whose extraordinary efficiency has lifted 
 them up — in this matter, too, I must diverge from 
 him. No one, I am sure, regards it as an act of 
 tyranny that bricklayers have no vote in the deter- 
 mination of the treatment of pneumonia. In the 
 same way it seems to me equally natural that negro 
 farm hands should have no voice in the determina- 
 tion of those great questions of government, com- 
 merce, and the art of living which sorely tax even 
 the highest men. 
 
 But do the great rewards always go to the most 
 efficient and worthy? How about the idle rich. 
 And how about luck and brute strength ? Is there 
 any excuse for the besotted master of inherited 
 millions, dragging out his useless days in self- 
 indulgence? And isn't it a fact that the bitter 
 struggle for existence, in destroying a weak body, 
 may also destroy an incomparable mind? And 
 finally, isn't it true that the sole difference between 
 
Men vs. the Man 243 
 
 master and slave is sometimes a mere difference in 
 opportunity ? 
 
 The idle rich first. What of them? Does my 
 scheme of things justify them? To be sure it 
 does not — but neither does it demand their im- 
 mediate and melodramatic extinction. Admitting 
 them to be as sinister as you Socialists accuse them 
 of being, two factors, it seems to me, tend to dilute 
 their capacity for actual evil-doing. One is the 
 fact that they are few in number, and the other is 
 the fact that their hold upon their opulence is al- 
 ways precarious. In other words, the utterly idle 
 man, who, despite his idleness, retains his riches, 
 is an excessively rare individual. You must go to 
 the stage and the uplift magazines to find him in 
 force. In real life he is met with as seldom as a 
 married philosopher or the horrid behemoth of 
 Holy Writ. 
 
 The vast majority of our millionaires are not 
 idle parasites, but simply well-paid workmen. 
 The money that rolls in upon them is their wage 
 for devoting extraordinary talents to extraordinary 
 acts. That these acts are sometimes judged to be 
 immoral by eminent (though self-appointed) ex- 
 perts has nothing to do with the case, for in the 
 struggle for existence an act is never actually moral 
 or immoral, but only (in the broadest sense of the 
 words) profitable or unprofitable, worth doing or 
 not worth doing. The view of it taken by a 
 moralist, however accomplished he may be, is al- 
 
244 M^"^ ^^- *^^ ^^'^ 
 
 ways a mere opinion, and you can always find some 
 other moralist to contradict it. To show you how 
 nearly this is true, I need only recall to you that 
 practically every act possible to human beings has 
 been the storm-center of furious moral debates. 
 To one man the act of eating flesh seems indecent, 
 while to another it appears as the most agreeable 
 operation imaginable. To one man the habit of 
 taking money from ignorant folk, on the promise 
 of getting them into heaven, seems the most dig- 
 nified and honorable of human avocations, while to 
 me it bears the aspect of a peculiarly heartless and 
 nefarious form of fraud. To one man the soldier 
 is a hero; to another, he is a vile loafer and 
 chronic criminal. To one, marriage is a holy 
 sacrament; to another, it is a dangerous vice. In 
 view of all this, is it for you or me to determine, 
 once and for all time, that the manner in which a 
 particular millionaire makes his money is im- 
 moral? I think not. So long as the millionaire 
 himself thinks he earns it honestly, it is probably 
 best to give him the benefit of the doubt. For all 
 I know, even the cornering of the wheat market 
 may have some recondite value; and whether in- 
 trinsically valuable or not, it is certainly valued, 
 for the public pays for it lavishly. 
 
 No; the average millionaire is no inert leech, 
 but a busy toiler. Even when his wealth comes 
 to him as a free gift from his father, he must 
 work hard to retain it. If you have ever had the 
 
Men vs. the Man 245 
 
 care of any amount of capital, however small, you 
 will have to admit that this is true. A further 
 and familiar proof is offered by the fact that great 
 fortunes seldom remain intact for more than a 
 few generations. The rich man can be entirely 
 idle only at enormous expense. It sometimes costs 
 him a million dollars to nurse a bad cold, for 
 while he is incommunicado all the rest of humanity 
 joins in a desperate effort to relieve him of his 
 fiscal burdens. The noble families of England, 
 protected in their properties by the most cunning 
 laws ever devised by man, are yet far from secure. 
 According to one painstaking Investigator, not 
 more than five per cent, of the great fortunes of 
 that country's peerage have come down unbroken 
 for two generations. Noble and rich clans, as a 
 rule, are quickly absorbed into the proletariat. 
 The great-grandson of a duke may be a barber. 
 
 But even admitting the idle and rich son of a 
 millionaire to be entirely and perniciously useless, I 
 fail to see what can be fairly done about it. His 
 father received from the public certain enormous 
 sums for certain services, which, by the law of 
 supply and demand, bore a high market value, and, 
 as I have shown before, they went to him upon the 
 distinct understanding that he was to have the free 
 use of them. If he had chosen to devote them to 
 useful public purposes, no one would have objected; 
 and if he had chosen to pay them, on his deathbed, 
 into the public treasury, even you Socialists would 
 
246 Men vs. the Man 
 
 have hailed him as moral. Why should he be de- 
 nounced, then, because he chose to hand them over 
 to his dissolute and half-imbecile son? Would it 
 be fair or honest, after making a definite treaty 
 with him, to abrogate it without his consent? 
 And would it be even expedient? Isn't it plain 
 enough that his idle son is the worst of all possible 
 foes to impregnable wealth? 
 
 And now for the other objections. Do the 
 greatest rewards really go to the most efficient and 
 worthy? Doesn't the struggle for existence, by 
 warring upon weak bodies, sometimes rob the 
 world of incomparable minds? And doesn't luck 
 play the principal part in the struggle? I an- 
 swered most of these questions, I believe, in a 
 former letter, but it may be well to repeat my gen- 
 eral answer here. It is this: that I am concerned 
 in this discussion with the world as it is, and not 
 with the world as it might or should be. If it 
 were possible, by a human act, to nullify the law 
 that the fittest shall survive. Socialism and all other 
 schemes of that sort would become reasonable — 
 I grant only their reasonableness, mind you, and 
 not their truth — but as things stand it seems to me 
 that they are almost beyond the pale of debatable 
 ideas. Whether for woe or weal, nature pro- 
 vides that the strong shall have an advantage over 
 the weak, and that the fortunate shall outrun the 
 luckless in the race. It is scarcely worth while 
 for us to attempt to judge nature here. All we 
 
Men vs. the Man 247 
 
 may safely do is to make a note of the fact that 
 this scheme of things, whatever its horrors, at least 
 makes for progress; and to thank whatever gods 
 there be that we, personally, are measurably re- 
 moved from the bottom of the scale. 
 
 I am not a religious man, but I cannot think 
 upon my own good fortune in life without a feeling 
 that my thanks should go forth, somewhere and to 
 someone. Wealth and eminence and power are 
 beyond my poor strength and skill, but on the side 
 of sheer chance I am favored beyond all computa- 
 tion. My day's work is not an affliction, but a 
 pleasure; my labor, selling in the open market, 
 brings me the comforts that I desire; I am assured 
 against all but a remote danger of starvation in 
 my old age. Outside my window, in the street, a 
 man labors in the rain with pick and shovel, and 
 his reward is merely a roof for to-night and to- 
 morrow's three meals. Contemplating the differ- 
 ence between his luck and mine, I cannot fail to 
 wonder at the eternal meaninglessness of life. I 
 wonder thus and pity his lot, and then, after 
 awhile, perhaps, I begin to reflect that in many 
 ways he is probably luckier than I. 
 
 But I wouldn't change places with him. 
 Sincerely, 
 
 Mencken. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Ability, reward of, 48, 91, 
 
 237. 238, 241 
 Altruism, 25, 222 
 Anarchists, 44, 120 
 Animism, 125 
 Anthropomorphism, 75, 127, 
 
 163-167 
 Antiparos, 36, 38, 69 
 Aristocracy, 13, 14, 72, ^^, 
 
 74, 176, 179 
 Aristotle, 35, 224 
 Army (see Militarism), 50 
 Arrhenius, 142 
 Art, 14, 146, 208 
 Astronomy, 128, 142 
 Athens, 15 
 
 Ballot (see SufFrage) 
 Baltimore, 109, 129, 130 
 Bebel, August, 173 
 Beliefs, economic basis of, 
 
 133-135, 143, 169 
 Beyond-man, i, 7, 89, 129, 
 
 17s. 176, 177. 223 
 Biology, 141 
 Birth-rate, 70, 87 
 Blatchford, Robert, 124 
 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 73 
 Briand, Aristide, 173 
 Bribery, 155, 156, IS9. I7i 
 Bryan, W. J., 188 
 
 Caesar, Julius, 29, 37, 51 
 Capital, composition of, 6, 7, 
 
 39 
 " Capital," Karl Marx, 
 
 quoted, 217, 218, 219 
 Carnegie, Andrew, 80 
 Caste, 98, loi, no, 112, 113, 
 
 115, 116, 117, 125, 128, 161, 
 
 162, 240 
 
 Catastrophism, 140, 142, 170 
 Centralization, 55, 218 
 Chamberlain, T. C, 142 
 Child-labor, 13 
 Christianity, 75, 76, 114, 135, 
 
 232 
 Cicero, 36, 97 
 
 Cigar manufacture, 20-23, 42 
 Cimabue, 85, 184 
 Class struggle, 213 
 Collectivism, 12 
 Columbus, Christopher, 29, 
 
 37. SI. 203 
 Communism, 12 
 "Communist Manif esto,"Marx 
 
 and Engels, quoted, 10, 183, 
 
 216, 217, 220, 221 
 Competition, 38, 49, 54, 70, 77, 
 
 go 
 Cooley, Charles H., 87 
 Co-operation, 70 
 Co-operative Commonwealth, 
 
 92 
 Culture, 13, 15 
 Cuvier, 136, 137 
 
 Darwin, Charles, 75, 137, 138, 
 
 139, 141, 167, 231 
 Death-rate, 84, 108 
 Debs, E. v., 157 
 Demeter, 36 
 Democracy, 152, 171 
 Department store, 10, 176 
 Depew, C. M., 45 
 Deville, Gabriel, 220 
 De Vries, Hugo, 136, 140 
 Diaz, Porfirio, 73, 84 
 Diderot, 35, 36, 74 
 Disease, due to poverty, 58 
 Dixon, Rev. Thomas, 148, 150 
 Don Quixote, 2 
 
 249 
 
250 
 
 Index 
 
 Drama, The, 14 
 
 Duncan, Robert Kennedy, 142 
 
 Earthquakes, 142 
 
 Economic determinism, 8, 37, 
 86, IDS, 133, 135, 212, 214 
 
 Economics, 8, 27, 43 
 
 Education, 11, 88, 160 
 
 Ehrlich, 28, 151 
 
 Eliot, Charles W., 158 
 
 Employees as share-holders, 
 78, 91 
 
 Emulation, 64, 68 
 
 Engels, Friedrich, 36, 183, 
 184, 216, 221, 222 
 
 Equality, 75, 131, 151; eco- 
 nomic, 129 ; intellectual, 
 loi, 102; racial, 131, 132 
 
 Ethics, 76, 232; of capital- 
 ism, go, 243, 244; of So- 
 cialism, 222; economic basis 
 of, 90, 135 
 
 Evolution, 29, 80, 113, 127, 
 128, 141, 143, 167 
 
 Exploitation, 4, 7, 24, 34, 122, 
 177, 215, 216, 238 
 
 Expropriation, 217, 219 
 
 Factories, 9, 215 
 Ferri, Enrico, 131 
 Feudal economy, 4 
 Flammarion, Camille, 142 
 Foreign markets, 5, 77, 78 
 France, 35, 37 
 
 Francis, Saint, of Assisi, loi 
 French Revolution, 37, 71, 
 136, 169 
 
 Genius, waste of under capi- 
 talism, 86 
 Geology, 142 
 Ghent, W. j., 7 
 Giotto, 85, 184 
 Golden Rule, The, 90 
 Gould, Jay, 91, 178, 187 
 Greece, 35, 37, 69 
 
 Harriman, E. H., 91, 178, 
 
 179, 210 
 Hegel, 142 
 Heredity, 104, 138 
 Herodotus, 96 
 Hertzka, Prof., 55, 89 
 Hill, James J., 74, 90, 179, 198 
 Hitch, Marcus, 145 
 Housing, in the future, 54 
 Hunter, Robert, 13 
 Huxley, T. H., 31, 118, 166, 
 
 205, 231, 233, 234 
 
 Ibsen, Henrik, 180-184, 222 
 
 Ideals, 2, 89, 202, 204, 205, 
 207, 208, 209, 211 
 
 Immoralists, 7, 175, 179 
 
 Incentive, 89, 239 
 
 Individualism, 179, 180, 184 
 222 
 
 Inevitability, of Socialism, 7, 
 38, 91, 216 
 
 Intellectuals, 11, 139 
 
 Intemperance, 67, 89, 130 
 
 International Socialist Re- 
 view, S7, 89 
 
 Intimidation, 154, 171 
 
 Jaures, Jean, 173 
 
 Jefferson, Thomas, 2 
 
 Jesus Christ, 2, 76, loi, 184, 
 
 202 
 Jews, The, 203 
 
 Kautsky, Karl, 136, 215, 223 
 
 Labor, its share of product, 
 40-42; hours of, 8, 25, 26, 
 S3. 56, 57. 62; pleasure in, 
 58, 67, 93, 95 
 Lafargue, Paul, 98 
 Lamarck, 137, 138 
 Lassalle, Ferdinand, 103 
 Legislation, 189, 211, 212 
 Lewis, Arthur Morrow, 136, 
 
 140 
 Lincoln, Abraham, 137, 177 
 Literature, 14, 145, 146 
 
Index 
 
 251 
 
 London, Jack, 8 
 Lonesomeness, 129, 168, 169 
 Louis XIV., 72 
 Louis XVL, 72 
 Lowell, Percival, 128 
 Lyell, Sir Charles, 137, 138 
 
 Machine Process, 9, 10, 11, 
 
 144, 180 
 Machinery, economic effects 
 
 of, 4, 36, 38, 69, 208 
 Mallock, W. H., 91 
 Malthus, 69, 88 
 Manufacture, capital invested 
 
 in, 41 
 Mars, 128 
 Marx, Karl, i, 10, 13, 18, 24, 
 
 69, 177, 183, 184, 211 
 Materialist Conception of 
 
 history, 69, 230 (see Eco- 
 nomic determinism) 
 
 Mendel, Gregor, 104, 138, 139 
 
 Messina earthquake, 98-101 
 
 Middle ages, 4 
 
 Middle classes, 10, 11, 175, 
 176 
 
 Militarism, 174 
 
 Morality, 243 (see Ethics) 
 
 Morgan, J. P., 11, 176, 205 
 
 Morgan, Lewis H., 85, 213, 
 214, 219 
 
 Morris, William, 93, 94, 95, 
 146, 208 
 
 Moses, 29, 37, SI, 68, 167 
 
 Mutations, 141, 161 
 
 Natural Selection, 25, 33, 69, 
 
 70, 117, 118, 206, 246 
 Naval expenditures, 174-S 
 Negro, The, no, 116, 124, 
 
 130, 132, 151, 162, 234 
 Nietzsche, Friedrich, i, 43, 
 63, 64, 89, 98, 129, 13s, 179. 
 180, 211 
 
 Odin, A., 86, 14S 
 Over-man, 223 (see Beyond- 
 man) 
 
 Ovtr-population, 70, 82, 87, 
 108 
 
 Panics, 4, 24, 51, 175 
 Pasteur, 33, 35, 58, 60, 68, 84, 
 
 8s, 108, III 
 Peasant, The Russian, 116, 
 
 130 
 Pecuniary Magnates, 177-179, 
 
 i8s-2Qi, 207, 209, 210, 224- 
 
 229 
 Pericles, is, 3S> 37 
 Pig-iron, production and 
 
 wages, 42 
 Pinchot, Gifford, 88 
 Planetesimal hypothesis, 142 
 Plato, 35, 97 
 Poincare, Lucien, 143 
 Politics, Socialist, 221 
 Pragmatism, 119 
 Productive powers, growth 
 
 Progress, 12, 16, 29, 32, 80, 
 
 114, 247 
 Proletariat, 12, 96, 103, 172, 
 
 220 
 Punnett, R. C, 141 
 Purchasing power, S, 7, 18, 
 
 38, 39 
 
 Rabble, The, 2, 89, 129 
 Race suicide, 88 
 Reason, Eternal, 36, 37. 43 
 Reeve, Sidney A., 54 
 Reform, 222 
 
 Representative government, 
 limits of taxation under, 
 
 175 
 Rockefeller, John D., 79, 84, 
 
 IIS, 158, 176, 191, 203, 20s, 
 
 210, 229 
 Rogers, H. H., 210 
 Roosevelt, Theodore, 88, 105, 
 
 106, 123 
 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 36, 
 
 37 
 
252 
 
 Index 
 
 School children, under-fed, 
 
 13 
 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 63,64 
 Science and economics, 136- 
 
 143 
 See, T. J. J., 141 
 Shaw, G. Bernard, 124, 129 
 Shaw, Leslie M., 43 
 Shylock, 186 
 Slavery, 35 
 
 Slobodin, Henry L., 57 
 Smith, Adam, 4, 28 
 Social Democracy, 139 
 Social development, 214 
 Socialist Party, 9 
 Social Revolution, The, 7, 8, 
 
 9, 12, 13, IS, 38, 39, 43. 
 
 90, 91, 144, 14s, 147, 179, 
 
 211 
 Social Utopias, 120, 208 
 Solidarity, 180 
 Spargo, John, 13 
 Spencer, Herbert, 160 
 State, The, 219 
 Steel Corporation, U. S., 46, 
 
 78, 90 
 Stirner, Max, 179, 180 
 Strauss, N., 11 
 Strike, The, 212, 213 
 Suffrage, 154, 189, 212, 242 
 Super-man (see Beyond- 
 
 man) 
 Surplus produce, 18, 43, 44, 
 
 47 
 Surplus, Troublesome, 44, 46, 
 
 48 
 Surplus value, 24, 77, 90 
 
 Tennyson, Alfred, 81-83, 208 
 Third Estate, The, 37 
 Trades-unionism, 9, 66 
 Trusts, 10, iSS, 176 
 Tuberculosis, death-rate in, 
 59. 109 
 
 Unemployment, 9 
 University of Virginia, 132 
 
 Vandervelde, E., 173 
 Veblen, Thorstein, 9, 49, 51, 
 
 126, 13s, 144, 177, i8s, 188, 
 
 189, 193, 209, 229 
 Voltaire, 74 
 
 Wages, 4, 17, 40, 47, 91, 238; 
 
 of employer, 20 
 Wallace, Alfred R., 137, 139, 
 
 141 
 War, 49, 52, 174 
 Ward, Lester F., 85, loi, 104, 
 
 118, 129, 131, 132, 143, 169 
 Warren, Fred D., 46 
 Washington, George, 80 
 Waste, 49, 50, 54, 88 
 Wealth, as an ideal, 201, 202, 
 
 210; dissipation of, 80, 92, 
 
 245 
 Weismann, August, 104, 160 
 Wells, H. G., 2, 13 
 Wheat, labor necessary to 
 
 produce, 57 
 Williams, Dr. Linsly, 59 
 Wilshire, Gaylord, 44, 174 
 Work, contempt for, 96-98 
 
 Xenophon, 35, 97 
 
THE MIRAGE OF THE MANY 
 
 By WILLIAM T. WALSH 
 
 A novel placed in a large American city during a supposed 
 Socialistic regime, and showing results inevitable in the present 
 state of human nature. It is hard to tell whether the greater 
 interest is in the story or the problems. The characters are 
 from all classes of society and cover a wide range of occupations. 
 
 STUDIES IN AMERICAN TRADE-UNIONISM 
 
 J. H. HOLLANDER and G. E. BARNETT (Editors) 
 
 Twelve papers by graduate students and officers of Johns 
 Hopkins University, the results of original investigations of 
 representative Trade Unions. There are also chapters on 
 Employers* Associations, the Knights of Labor, and the 
 American Federation of Labor. (380 pp., 8vo, $2.75 net. By 
 mail, $2.98.) 
 
 " A study of trade-unions in the concrete. Impartial and thorough . . . 
 expertly written.'^—JVewVotk Times Review, 
 
 "Though confined to particular features of particular trade unions, the 
 data dealt with are comprehensive and typical; so that the result is a sub- 
 stantial contribution to our knowledge of trade-union structure and func- 
 tion. . . . Excellent studies.'"— iyiezf York Evening Post. 
 
 " It is doubtful if anything approaching it in breadth and co-ordination 
 has yet found its way into print. ... A very useful book,"— 5a« Francisco 
 Chronicle* 
 
 THE FATE OF ICIODORUM 
 
 By DAVID STARR JORDAN, President of Stanford 
 University 
 
 90c. net ; by mail 96c. 
 
 The story of a city made rich by taxation. 
 
 " After reading this book, no man who wishes to get at the fundamental 
 theory of protection can plead ignorance."— TVezt' York Evening Post. 
 
 HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
 
 PUBLISHERS NEW YORK 
 
McPherson's Railroad Freight Rates 
 
 In Their Relation to the Industry and Commerce of the United 
 States. 
 
 By Logan G. McPherson, author of " The Working of the Rail- 
 roads," 8vo. With maps, tables, and a full index. $2.25 net, by 
 mail, $2.42. 
 
 This study of the freight rate structure is so comprehensive and 
 thorough as not only to be exceedingly valuable to anyone having to 
 do with railroad freight traffic either as a. railroad official or as a. 
 shipper, but it is also a most fascinating exposition for the general 
 reader of a subject which has not hitherto received a popularly in- 
 telligible presentation. It offers to younger men the only means of 
 knowing how the present freight rate system has been evolved 
 
 "An exceedingly important boolc. . . . Not only clie best existing account, 
 but it is easily the best book on American railway traific. . . . We have 
 little hesitation in expressing the opinion that it will stand as the standard 
 reference work for a good many years, and from the standpoint of public 
 policy we are exceedingly glad that the book has been written. The country 
 -would be better governed if the legislator, state and national, had to pass an 
 examination upon it before taldng nis oath of o&ee.'"— Railroad Age Gaittlt. 
 
 **A book the nation has Deeded.*' — New York Suu, 
 
 McPherson's The Working of the Railroads 
 
 By Logan G. McPherson, Lecturer on Transportation at Johns 
 Hopkins. i2mo. ^1.50 net ; By mail $1.63. 
 
 ** Simply and lucidly tells what a railroad company is, what it does, and 
 how it does it. Cannot fail to be of use to the voter. Of exceeding value to 
 the young and ambitious in railroad service* — TAe Travelers* Oj^ial Rail* 
 vtay Guide. 
 
 " The most important contribution to its branch of the subject that has 
 yet been made.** — The Dial, 
 
 **The author's connection with practical service gives this a value which no 
 other book quite equals. Up-to-date, informiog, ... an excellent piece 
 cf work." — Wall Street Journal, 
 
 Carter's When Railroads Were New 
 
 By Charles Frederick Carter, with an Introductory Note by 
 Logan G. McPherson. 16 full-page illustrations, 8vo, 312 pp. $2.00 
 met, by mail $2. 16. 
 
 A history of the every-day difficulties, discouragements and 
 triumphs of the pioneers who built and ran the early railroads. With 
 many anecdotes that add to the abundant human interest. 
 
 "Full of interest. Besides the general chapter on the beginnings, it gives 
 the early history of the Erie, the Pennsylvania, and the Baltimore and Ohio, 
 of the VanderDuilt lines, the first Pacific railroad, and of the Canadian 
 Pacific. Very readable. — N. Y. Suu, 
 
 "Invaluable. It gathers the floating fragments of railroad history, weaving 
 a human interest into a coherent record ofevery day trials and triumphs. A 
 buman and personal document, not a dry historical treatise or a batch of 
 anecdotes," — Baltimore Sun. 
 
 **No book of adventure contains more exciting episodes or more varied^ in- 
 terest. Every page is of live interest. So replete with curious information, 
 thoroughly entertaining and instructive." — Brooklyn Eagle. 
 
 HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
 
 FUBLISHEKS NEW YORK 
 
WILUAM R. HEREFORD'S THE DEMAGOG 
 
 An absorbing romance of newspaper and political life of 
 to-day. The main figure aspires to the presidency. In a 
 vigorous campaign his chief opponent is an eloquent and 
 forceful district attorney. There is a strong love interest. 
 i2mo, $1.50. 
 
 " Instinct with the life of to-day, and parts of this story are re- 
 counted with a verve and power that fairly sweep the reader off his 
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 ture . . . worthy to stand by itself as a human vignette portrayed 
 with remarkable poetic insight. The Convention chapter is another 
 tour de force" — The Bookman. 
 
 " Distinctly a tale for the times. As a discussion of current politics 
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 ■field Republican. 
 
 " Interesting incidents in a tale well worth reading." — New York 
 Sun. 
 
 *' Memorable novel. . . . Throughout it is an engrossing tale . . . 
 it is a master hand that has traced the gradual retrogression of David 
 Holman." — Chicago Record-Herald. 
 
 " Well written and should take its place among those forces which 
 tend to heighten the standard of political honesty.'" — Living Age. 
 
 " Told with compelling force. The scene at the convention is 
 described with graphic power and the characters are well drawn . , • 
 a virile novel." — San Francisco Bulletin. 
 
 WILSON VANCE'S BIG JOHN BALDWIN 
 
 A historical romance with peculiarly engaging characters, 
 stirring incidents, and a big, lovable, and unconsciously 
 humorous Cromwellian soldier as hero. i2mo, $1.50. 
 
 " His splendid sister, Betty. Mr. Vance gives his book an atmosphere 
 of the times . . . the love story is charming with its intimate analysis 
 of the big fellow's emotions and honest awkwardness, never folly. His 
 wit is clumsy . . . but it is wit, and, slowly perhaps, it gets there." — 
 Hartford Courant. 
 
 " A book to read leisurely, as one sips and enjoys good wine." — 
 Detroit Free Press. 
 
 " A rattling romance. The action is quick and spirited.'* — Chicago 
 Record-Herald. 
 
 " Incident is piled upon incident, with abundance of familiarity with 
 the life, conditions, happenings, thoughts, convictions, and speech of 
 the period." — The Outlook. 
 
 " Is an admirable historical romance, full of interest and charm, 
 and bubbling with genuine humor." — William Lyon Phelps, Pro- 
 fessor of English Literature at Yale. 
 
 HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
 
 34 WEST 33D STREET NEW YORK 
 
A POUTICAL HISTORY OF THE STATE 
 
 OF NEW YORK (1774-1882) 
 
 De Alva Stanwood Alexander, A.M. 
 
 Voh.l. &U. (1774-1861). 840 pp.. avo.$S. 00 net (carriage 40c. extra) 
 VoL III. (.1861-1882). S61 pp., 8vo. $2. SO net (carriage 28c. extra) 
 
 A history of the movements of political parties In New York 
 State from 1774 to 1882, and embraces a series of brilliant char- 
 acter studies of the leaders, most of them of national importance, 
 who, from the days of George Clinton, have drawn the attention of 
 the nation to New York. The astute methods and sources of power 
 by which George Clinton, Hamilton, Burr, DeWltt Clinton, Van 
 Buren, Seymour and Thurlow Weed each successively controlled the 
 political destiny of the State are clearly and picturesquely set forth. 
 The third volume narrates, fully and entertainingly, the futile 
 efforts of Weed and Dean Richmond to reorganize existing parties, 
 the rise and fall of the Tweed Ring, Conkling's punishment of 
 Greeley and defeat of Fenton, Tllden's defiance of Tammany and 
 struggle with Kelly, and the overthrow of the Stalwart regime by 
 the crushing victory of Grover Cleveland. Throughout it is char- 
 acterized, too, with a fairness which must appeal to the strongest 
 partisan. (Circular with sample pages on application.) 
 
 " It meets a want widely felt and repeatedly expressed during 
 the past hundred years. ... It would be impossible in a dozen 
 notices to render any sort of justice to the extensive scope of this 
 work and to the multiplicity of its interesting details." — From two 
 leading articles, aggregating over ten columns, in the New York 
 Bun. 
 
 " Will undoubtedly take its place as the authoritative work upon 
 the subject." — Boston Transcript. 
 
 " The most entertaining story of state politics in American 
 history." — Review o} Reviews. 
 
 " Will be read with great interest and profit outside the Empire 
 State." — Cleveland Plain Dealer. 
 
 JOHN DAVIS' TRAVELS OF FOUR YEARS AND A HALF 
 IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (1798-1802) 
 
 Dedicated by permission to Thomas Jefferson, Esq. First Pub- 
 lished, London, 1803. With Introduction and Notes by Alfred J. 
 Morrison. 8vo, 429 pps. $2.50 net, by mail $2.65. 
 
 The only book of the period written by a traveller in the United 
 States the object of which is not so much statistical narrative as 
 narrative purely. It is a story of wanderings from New York to 
 South Carolina, and as such affords a most interesting picture of 
 the greater part of the United States at the beginning of the 
 nineteenth century. The author was a novelist and shows it in his 
 book. A necessary book for even an exclusive collection of Amer- 
 icana. Measured by any standard an unusual book of travel. 
 
 Trevelyan In his " American Revolution " says of this book : 
 ■■ Among accounts of such voyages, none are more life-like ; an ex- 
 quisitely absurd book, which the world, to the diminution of its 
 gaiety, has forgotten." 
 
 If the reader will send his name and address, the publishers will 
 send, from time to time, information regarding their new books. 
 
 HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
 
 PUBLISHERS NEW YORK 
 
JANE G. PERKINS'S 
 THE UFE OF THE HONOURABLE MRS. NORTON 
 
 With portraits, 8vo. $3.50 net ; by mail, $3.68. 
 
 Mrs. Norton was the great Sheridan's grand-daughter, 
 beautiful and witty, the author of novels, poems and songs, 
 contesting contemporary popularity with Mrs. Browning; her 
 influence was potent in politics ; Meredith undoubtedly laad 
 her in mind when he drew "Diana of the Crossways." 
 
 " Reads like a novel . . . seems like the page from an old romance, and 
 Miss Perkins has preserved all its romantic charm. . . . Miss Perkins has 
 let letters, and letters unusually interesting, tell much ol the story. ... In- 
 deed her biography has all the sustained interest of the novel, almost the 
 irresistible march of fate of the Greek drama. It is eminently reliable."— 
 Boston Transcript. 
 
 *' Brilliant, beautiful, unhappy, vehement Caroline Norton. . . . Her 
 story is told here with sympathy, but yet fairly enough . . . interesting 
 glimpses ... of the many men and women of note with whom Mrs. Norton 
 was brought into more or less intimate association.*'— Providence Journal. 
 
 "The generous space allowed her to tell her;own story in the form of 
 intimate letters is a striking and admirable feature of the book."— 7%^ Viai. 
 
 " She was an uncommonly interesting personage, and the memoir . . . 
 has no dull spots and speedily wins its way to a welcome."— iWz*^ Vork 
 Tribune. 
 
 " So exceptional and vivid a personality ... of unusual quality . . . very 
 well written."— 7%^ Outlook. 
 
 YUNG WING'S MY UFE IN CHINA AND AMERICA 
 
 With portrait, 8vo. $2.50 net ; by mail, $2.65, 
 
 The author's account of his early life in China, his education at 
 Yale, where he graduated in 1854 (LL.D., 1876), his return 
 to China and adventures during the Taiping rebellion, his 
 intimate association withTsang Kwoh Fan and Li Hung Chang, 
 and finally his great work for the ' ' Chinese Educational Move- 
 ment *' furnish highly interesting and good reading, 
 
 " It is his native land that is always the great heroic character on the stage 
 his mind surveys ; and his mental grasp is as wide as his domiciliation. A 
 great life of action and reflection and the experiences of two hemispheres. 
 It is not so much a knowledge of isolated facts that is to be got from the 
 book as an understanding of the character of the Chinese race?' —Hartford 
 Courant. 
 
 " There is'not a dull line in this simply told but fascinating biography."— 
 Literary Digest. 
 
 " He has given Occidental readers an opportunity to behold the machinery 
 of Chinese custom and the substance of Chinese character in action. No 
 foreigner could possibly have written a work so instructive, and no un- 
 travelled native could have made it intelligible to the West ... a most in- 
 teresting story both in the telling and in the acting. . . . Mr. Yung presents 
 each of his readers with a fragment of China herself." — Living Age. 
 
 HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
 
 PUBLISHERS NEW YORK 
 
Bmertcan ipubltc {Problems Secies 
 
 Edited by Ralph Curtis Ringwalt 
 
 Chinese Immigration 
 
 By Mary Roberts Coolidge, Formerly Associate Professor 
 of Sociology in Stanford University. 531 pp., $1.75 net; by 
 mail, $1.90. {Just issued.) 
 
 Presents the most comprehensive record of the Chinaman in 
 the United States that has yet been attempted. 
 
 "Scholarly. Covers every_ important phase, economic, social, and 
 political, of the Chinese question in America down to the San Francisco 
 tire in 1906."— iVew York Sun. 
 
 " Statesmanlike. 0£ intense interest."— Hart/ord Courant. 
 
 " A remarkably thorough historical study. Timely and useful. En- 
 hanced by the abundant array of documentary facts and evidence." — 
 Chicago Record-Herald. 
 
 Immigration: And Its Effects Upon the United 
 
 States 
 
 By Prescott P. Hall, A.B., LL.B, Secretary of the Immi- 
 gration Restriction League. 393 pp. $1.50 net; by mail, $1.65. 
 
 " Should prove interesting" to everyone. Very readable, forceful and 
 convincing. Mr. Hall considers every possible phase of this great 
 question and does it in a masterly way that shows not only that he 
 thoroughly understands it, but that he is deeply interested in it and has 
 studied everything bearing upon it.'* — Boston Transcript. 
 
 " A readable work containing a vast amount of valuable information. 
 Especially to be commended is the discussion of the racial effects. As a 
 trustworthy general guide it should prove a god-send." — Ne-w York 
 Evening Post. 
 
 The Election of Senators 
 
 By Professor George H. Haynes, Author of " Representation 
 in State Legislatures." 300 pp. $1.50 net; by mail, $1.65. 
 
 Shows the historical reasons for the present method, and 
 
 its effect on the Senate and Senators, and on state and local 
 
 government, with a detailed review of the arguments for and 
 
 against direct election. 
 
 '*A timely book. . . . Prof. Haynes is qualified for a historical and 
 analytical treatise on the subject of the Senate."— ^fw York Evening; Sun, 
 
 HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
 
 84 WEST 33d STREET NEW YORK 
 
THE THEORY OF THE THEATRE 
 
 And Other Principles of Dramatic Criticism 
 
 By Clayton Hamilton. Author of " Materials and Methods 
 of Fiction." Probable Price, $1.50 net. 
 
 CONTENTS : 
 
 The Theory of the Theatre. — What is a Play? — The Psychology 
 of Theatre Audiences. — The Actor and the Dramatist. — Stage Con- 
 ventions in Modern Times. — Economy of Attention in Theatrical Per- 
 formances. — Emphasis in the Drama. — The Four Leading Types of 
 Drama: Tragedy and Melodrama; Comedy and Farce. — The Modern 
 Social Drama. 
 
 Other Principles of Dramatic Criticism. — The Public and the 
 Dramatist. — Dramatic Art and the Theatre Business. — The Happy End- 
 ings in the Theatre. — The Boundaries of Approbation. — Imitation and 
 Suggestion in the Drama. — Holding the Mirror up to Nature. — Blank 
 Verse on the Contemporary Stage. — Dramatic Literature and Theatric 
 Journalism. — The Intention of Performance. — The Quality of New 
 Endeavor. — The Effect of Plays upon the Public. — Pleasant and Un- 
 pleasant Plays. — Themes in the Theatre. — The Function of Imagination. 
 
 DRAMATISTS OF TO-DAY 
 
 Rostand, Hauptmann, Sudermann, 
 PiNERO, Shaw, Phillips, Maeterlinck 
 
 By Prof. Edward Everett Hale, Jr., of Union College. With 
 gilt top, $1.50 net. (By mail, $1.60.) 
 
 An informal discussion of their principal plays and of the perform- 
 ances of some of them. The volume opens with a paper '* On Stand- 
 ards of Criticism," and concludes with " Our Idea of Tragedy,'* and 
 an appendix of all the plays of each author, with dates of their first 
 performance or publication. 
 
 New York Evening Post: "It is not often nowadays that a theat- 
 rical book can be met with so free from gush and mere eulogy, or so 
 weighted by common sense ... an excellent chronological appendix 
 and full index . . . uncommonly useful for reference." 
 
 Dial: " Noteworthy example of literary criticism in one of the 
 most interesting of literary fields. . . . Well worth reading a second 
 time." 
 
 THE GERMAN DRAMA OF THE 
 NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 By Georg Witkowski. Translated by Prof. L. E. Horning. 
 i2mo. $1.00. 
 
 Kleist, Grillparzer, Hebbel, Ludwig, Wildenbruch, Sudermann, Haupt- 
 mann, and minor dramatists receive attention- 
 
 New York Times Review : " The translation of this brief, clear, and 
 logical account was an extremely happy idea. Nothing at the same time 
 so comprehensive and terse has appeared on the subject, and it is a 
 subject of increasing interest to the English-speaking public." 
 
 HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
 
 PUBLISHERS NEW YORK 
 
By R. M. JOHNSTON 
 Assistant Professor in Harvard University 
 
 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 
 
 A Short History. i2mo. 278 pp., with special bibliographies 
 following each chapter, and index. $1.25 net; by mail, ^1.37. 
 
 "An almost ideal book of its kind and within its scope ... a. clear 
 idea of the development and of the really signi6cant men of events of that 
 cardinal epoch in the history of France and Europe is conveyed to readers, 
 many of whom will have been bewildered by the anecdotal fulness or the 
 rhetorical romancing' of Professor Johnston's most conspicuous predecessors." 
 — Ch u rch man. 
 
 "Deserves to take rank as a little classic and as such to be given a place 
 in all libraries. Not only is this admirably written, but it singles out the 
 persons and events best worth understanding, viewing the great social up- 
 heaval from a long perspective."— .?«« Francisco Chronicle, 
 
 NAPOLEON 
 
 A Short Biography. i2mo. 248 pp., with special bibliographies 
 following each chapter, and index. $1.25 net ; by mail, $1.37. 
 
 "Scholarly, readable, and acute." — Nation. 
 
 "It is difficult to speak with moderation of a work so pleasant to read, so 
 lucid, so skillful," — Boston Transcript. 
 
 "A quite admirable hooV."*^— London Spectator. 
 
 "The style is clear, concise and readable."— Xowrfow Atkenaum, 
 
 "In a small volume of less than 250 pages he gives us a valuable key to 
 the history of the European Continent from the Reign of Terror to the 
 present day."— io«rf(»» Morning Post. 
 
 LEADING AMERICAN SOLDIERS 
 
 Biographies of Washington, Greene, Taylor, Scott, Andrew 
 Jackson, Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, McClellan, Meade, Lee, 
 "Stonewall" Jackson, Joseph E. Johnston. With portraits. I vol. 
 $1.75 "6t ; by mail $1.88. 
 
 In the "Leading Americans " series. Prospectus of the series 
 on request. 
 
 "Performs a real service in preserving the essentials."— J?<wi«ai of 
 Reviews. 
 
 "Very interesting. . . . Much sound originality of treatment, and 
 the style is clear." — Springfield Republican. 
 
 .*. If the reader will send his name and address, the publishers will send, from 
 time to time, information regarding their new books. 
 
 HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
 
 PUBLISHERS NEW YORI? 
 
WIILLAM DE MORGAN'S IT NEVER CAN HAPPEN AGAIN 
 
 The story of the great love of "Blind Jim" and his little girl, 
 and of the affairs of a successful novelist. Fourth printing. 
 $i-75- 
 
 "William De Morgan at his very best."— Independent. 
 
 "Another long delightful voyage with the best English company. The 
 story of a child certainly not less appealing to our generation than Little 
 Nell was to hers."— iVezw York Times Saturday Review. 
 
 WILLIAM DE MORGAN'S SOMEHOW GOOD 
 
 The dramatic story of some modern English people in a 
 strange situation. Fourth printing. $1.75. 
 
 "A book as sound, as sweet, as wholesome, as wise, as any in the range of 
 fiction,"— The Nation. 
 
 "Our older novelists (Dickens and Thackeray) will have to look to their 
 laurels, for the new one is fast proving himself their equal. A higher quality 
 of enjoyment than is derivable from the work of any other novelist now liv- 
 ing and active in either England or America."— 7%tf Dial. 
 
 WILLIAM DE MORGAN'S AUCE-FOR-SHORT 
 
 The story of a London waif, a friendly artist, his friends and 
 family. Seventh printing. $1.75. 
 
 " Really worth reading and praising . . . will be hailed as a masterpiece. 
 If any writer of the present era is read a half century hence, a quarter 
 century, or even a decade, that writer is William De Morgan."— ^w/o« 
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 " It is the Victorian age itself that speaks in those rich, interesting, over- 
 crowded books. . . . Will be remembered as Dickens's novels are 
 remembered." —Sprin£- field Republican. 
 
 WILLIAM DE MORGAN'S JOSEPH VANCE 
 
 A novel of life near London in the 50's. Tenth printing. 
 $1.75- 
 
 " The book of the last decade ; the best thing in fiction since Mr. Meredith 
 and Mr. Hardy ; must take its place as the first great English novel that has 
 appeared in the twentieth century."— Lewis Melville in New York Times 
 Saturday Review. 
 
 "If the reader likes both 'David Copperfield' and 'Peter Ibbetson,' he 
 can find the two books in this one."— 7%c Independent. 
 
 #** A twenty-four page illustrated leaflet about Mr. De Morgan, with 
 complete reviews of his books, sent on request. 
 
 HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
 
 PUBLISHERS NEW YORK 
 
RECENT VOLUMES IN 
 
 THE AMERICAN NATURE SERIES 
 
 (Prospectus on request) 
 SHELL.FISH INDUSTRIES ^y J^^^^^. L.^Kello^J;^^^ 
 
 Large i2mo. Illustrated by half-tones and original draw- 
 ings. Just published. $1.75 net. 
 
 Covers classification, propagation and distribution. For the person 
 who eats oysters, clams or scallops, there is information on their 
 structure, life-histories and habits. A chapter is devoted to shell-fish 
 as collectors and carriers of disease organisms. The oyster culturist 
 will find the life history of bivalves, a comparison of various culture 
 methods, and a description of oyster fields in various parts of the 
 world. Several facts concerning the habits of bivalves, here presented 
 for the first time, will be of interest to naturalists. 
 
 FISH STORIES: Alleged and Experienced, with a Little 
 
 History, Natural and Unnatural 
 
 By Charles F. Holder, Author of " The Log of a Sea 
 Angler," etc., and David Starr Jordan, Author of " A Guide 
 to the Study of Fishes," etc. With colored plates and many 
 illustrations from photographs. $1.75 net. 
 
 *' A delightful miscellany, telling about fish of the strangest kind, 
 with scientific description melting into accounts of personal adventure. 
 Nearly everything that is entertaining in the fish world is touched upon 
 and science and fishing are made very readable." — New York Sun. 
 
 INSECT STORIES By Vernon L. Kellogg. 
 
 Illustrated, $1.50 net. 
 
 Strange, true stories, primarily for children, but certainly 
 for those grown-ups who like to read discriminatingly to their 
 children. 
 
 '* The author is among a few scientific writers of distinction who 
 can interest the popular mind. No intelligent youth can fail to read 
 it with delight and profit." — The Nation. 
 
 THE UFE OF A FOSSIL HUNTER Charles I^'^Sternberg, 
 
 With introduction by Prof. H. F. Osborn, 48 Illustrations, 
 
 $1.60 net. 
 
 The most interesting autobiography of the oldest and best 
 known explorer in this field. 
 
 " One of the most interesting books to be found anywhere." — William 
 Allen White. 
 
 THE FRESH WATER AQUARIUM By Otto Eggeling and 
 AND ITS INHABITANTS Frederick Ehrenberg. 
 
 A Guide for the Amateur Aquarist. With 100 illustrations, 
 large l2mo, $2.00 net. 
 " The best guide to the aquarium." — The Independent. 
 
 HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
 
 PUBLISHERS NEW YORK