-                 I:  ",,,?P 
I
"MD                      1,
I'   -,,T,   I:t,
 1,IFI, - 4L




Ak -1 -'Iqmmr                          'ML -                                           A          -..W
I&
V
AW                                     AV
AW                             L
mom
t
I
l
-Minowl            AIF               I
%a,
mom
U -




R
I                                                                       X;
L
i
Alw
ED HARVEY
SHOP
ION STATIO$




PR*OtIITY  oS,  I
#4kgui
11&uJ~~fr
ARV     IA  V




PREJUDICES
SIXTH SERIES




i


Il-sun~llrollllBpllll-mlnr31~nlr
laull*N — — *r — - "L~ --- n-un~l —^rtaltunan~l~l~p


THE WORKS OF H. L. MENCKEN


PREJUDICES:
PREJUDICES:
PREJUDICES:
PREJUDICES:
PREJUDICES:
PREJUDICES:


FIRST SERIES
SECOND SERIES
THIRD SERIES
FOURTH SERIES
FIFTH SERIES
SIXTH SERIES


SELECTED PREJUDICES
A BOOK OF BURLESQUES
A BOOK OF PREFACES
IN DEFENSE OF WOMEN
THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE
NOTES ON DEMOCRACY
TRANSLATIONS
THE ANTICHRIST, BY F. W. NIETZSCHE
BOOKS ABOUT MR. MENCKEN
H. L. MENCKEN, BY ERNEST BOYD
[Robert M. McBride & Company]
THE MAN MENCKEN, BY ISAAC GOLDBERG
[Simon & Schustner






NEW YORK: ALFRED ~ A * KNOPF


WM-qII-~l ~ ~ ~ L~(P R~~IUI-Y~~~l~I-Y I~~ ~ YMMI




PREJUDICES
SIXTH       SERIES
B y H. L. M E N C K E N
it;i'  ~  l  OFt;'  '  AN
liME LOUIS A. STR #c
MEMORIAL Lr" ',"
W~EST giADR,, LE
F.' MEN'S.iO:;.  t f HALLS
/c


PUBLISHED AT THE BORZOI * NEW YORK- BY
ALFRED ~ A ~ KNOPF




0A or *
(^ 'COPYRIGHT 1927 BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
PUBLISHED OCTOBER, I927
NV
I4  '
^A 


MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA




CONTENTS
I JOURNALISM IN AMERICA, 9
II FROM THE MEMOIRS OF A SUBJECT OF THE UNITED
STATES, 38
1. Government by Bounder, 38
III THE HUMAN MIND, 79
1. On Metaphysicians, 79
2. On Suicide, 85
3. On Controversy, 91
16. On Faith, 97
IV CLARION CALL TO POETS, 103
V SOUVENIRS OF A BOOK REVIEWER, 113
1. The Emperor of Wowsers, 113
2. Thwacks from the Motherland, 120
3. The Powers of the Air, 125
4. To the Glory of an Artist, 131
5. God Help the South! 136
6. The Immortal Democrat, 145
7. Fides Ante Intellectum, 150
8. Speech Day in the Greisenheim, 155
9. Professors of English, 159
VI FIVE LITTLE EXCURSIONS, 163
1. Brahms, 163
v




vi                 CONTENTS
2. Johann Strauss, 169
3. Poetry in America, 174
4. Victualry as a Fine Art, 181
5. The Libido for the Ugly, 187
VII HYMN TO THE TRUTH, 194
VIII THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX, 202
IX METROPOLIS, 209
X DIVES INTO QUACKERY, 217
1. Chiropractic, 217
2. Criminology, 227
3. Eugenics, 233
XI LIFE UNDER BUREAUCRACY, 240
XII IN THE ROLLING MILLS, 248
XIII AMBROSE BIERCE, 259
XIV  THE EXECUTIVE SECRETARY, 266
XV INVITATION TO THE DANCE, 273
XVI AUBADE, 281
XVII APPENDIX FROM MORONIA, 290
1. Note on Technic, 290
2. Interlude in the Socratic Manner, 297
3. Valentino, 305
INDEX, 313




PREJUDICES
SIXTH SERIES
ERRATA
The contents of Section II should read as
follows:
II FROM THE MEMOIRS OF A SUBJECT OF THE UNITED
STATES 38
1. Government by Bounder, 38
2. Constructive Proposal, 45
3. The Nature of Government, 53
4. Freudian Footnote, 61
5. Bach to Bach!, 70








PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
I. JOURNALISM IN AMERICA
1
O        NE of the agreeable spiritual phenomena of
the great age in which we live is the soulsearching now going on among American
journalists. Fifteen years ago, or even ten years ago,
there was scarcely a sign of it. The working newspaper men of the Republic, of whom I have had the
honor to be one since the last century, were then almost as complacent as so many Federal judges, movie
magnates, or major-generals in the army. When they
discussed their puissant craft at all, it was only to
smack their chests proudly, boasting of their vast
power in public matters, of their adamantine resistance to all the less tempting varieties of bribes, and
of the fact that a politician of enlightened self-interest, giving them important but inaccurate news confidently, could rely upon them to mangle it beyond
recognition before publishing it. I describe a sort of
9




10      PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
Golden Age, and confess frankly that I can't do so
without a certain yielding to emotion. Salaries had
been going up since the dawn of the new century, and
the journalist, however humble, was beginning to feel
his oats. For the first time in history he was paid as
well as the human cranes and steam-shovels slinging
rolls of paper in the cellar. He began to own two hats,
two suits of clothes, two pairs of shoes, two walking.
sticks, even two belts. He ceased to feed horribly in
one-arm lunch-rooms and began to dine in places with
fumigated waitresses, some of a considerable pulchritude and amiability, and red-shaded table lamps.
He was, as such things are reckoned, happy. But at
the heart of his happiness, alas, there yet gnawed a
canker-worm. One enemy remained in his world, unscotched and apparently unscotchable, to wit, the business manager. The business manager, at will, could
send up a blue slip and order him fired. In the face of
that menace from below-stairs his literary superiors
were helpless, up to and including the editor-in-chief.
All of them were under the hoof of the business manager, and all the business manager ever thought of
was advertising. Let an advertiser complain that his
honor had been impugned or his clavi abraded, and
off went a head.
It was the great war for human freedom, I suspect
and allege, that brought the journalist deliverance
from that last and most abominable hazard: he was,




JOURNALISM    IN AMERICA           11
perhaps, one of the few real beneficiaries of all the
carnage. As the struggle grew more savage on Flanders fields and business grew better and better at
home, reporters of any capacity whatever got to be
far too scarce to fire loosely. Moreover, the business
manager, with copy pouring over his desk almost un.
solicited, began to lose his old dread of advertisers,
and then even some of his natural respect for them.
It was a sellers' market, in journalism as in the pants
business. Customers were no longer kissed; the lesser
among them actually began to stand in line. The new
spirit, so strange and so exhilarating, spread like a
benign pestilence, and presently it began to invade
even the editorial rooms. In almost every American
city, large or small, some flabbergasted advertiser, his
money in his hand, sweat pouring from him as if he
had seen a ghost, was kicked out with spectacular ceremonies. All the principal papers, suddenly grown
rich, began also to grow independent, virtuous,
touchy, sniffish. No-A-     could dictate to them,
God damn! So the old free reading notices of the Bon
Marche and the Palais Royal disappeared, salaries
continued to climb, and the liberated journalist, taking huge breaths of thrilling air, began to think of
himself as a professional man.
Upon that cogitation he is still engaged, and all the
weeklies that print the news of the craft are full of its
fruits. He elects representatives and they meet in




12      PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
lugubrious conclave to draw up codes of ethics. He begins to read books dealing with professional questions
of other sorts even books not dealing with professional questions. He changes his old cynical view of
schools of journalism, and is lured, now and then,
into lecturing in them himself. He no longer thinks of
his calling as a business, like the haberdasher's or
tallow chandler's, or as a game, like.the stockbroker's or faro-dealer's, but as a profession, like the
jurisconsult's or gynecologist's. His purpose is to set
it on its legs as such-to inject plausible theories into
its practise, and rid it of its old casualness and opportunism. He no longer sees it as a craft to be mastered in four days, and abandoned at the first sign of
a better job. He begins to talk darkly of the long apprenticeship necessary to master its technic, of the
wide information and sagacity needed to adorn it, of
the high rewards that it offers-or may offer later on
-to the man of true talent and devotion. Once he
thought of himself, whenever he thought at all, as
what Beethoven called a free artist-a gay adventurer
careening down the charming highways of the world,
the gutter ahead of him but ecstasy in his heart. Now
he thinks of himself as a fellow of weight and responsibility, a beginning publicist and public man, sworn
to the service of the born and unborn, heavy with
duties to the Republic and to his profession.
In all this, I fear, there is some illusion, as there




JOURNALISM    IN AMERICA           13
always is in human thinking. The journalist can no
more see himself realistically than a bishop can see
himself realistically. He gilds and engauds the picture, unconsciously and irresistibly. For one thing,
and a most important one, he is probably somewhat
in error about his professional status. He remains, for
all his dreams, a hired man-the owner downstairs,
or even the business manager, though he doesn't do
it very often now, is still free to demand his head-,
and a hired man is not a professional man. The essence of a professional man is that he is answerable
for his professional conduct only to his professional
peers. A physician cannot be fired by any one, save
when he has voluntarily converted himself into a jobholder; he is secure in his livelihood so long as he
keeps his health, and can render service, or what they
regard as service, to his patients. A lawyer is in the
same boat. So is a dentist. So, even, is a horse-doctor.
But a journalist still lingers in the twilight zone, along
with the trained nurse, the embalmer, the rev. clergy
and the great majority of engineers. He cannot sell
his services directly to the consumer, but only to entrepreneurs, and so those entrepreneurs have the
power of veto over all his soaring fancies. His codes
of ethics are all right so long as they do not menace
newspaper profits; the moment they do so the business manager, now quiescent, will begin to growl
again. Nor has he the same freedom that the lawyers




14      PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
and the physicians have when it comes to fixing his
own compensation; what he faces is not a client but a
boss. Above all, he is unable, as yet, to control admission to his craft. It is constantly recruited, on its
lowest levels, from men who have little professional
training or none at all, and some of these men master
its chief mysteries very quickly. Thus even the most
competent journalist faces at all times a severe competition, easily expanded at need, and cannot afford
to be too saucy. When a managing editor is fired
there is always another one waiting to take his place,
but there is seldom another place waiting for the
managing editor.
All these things plainly diminish the autonomy of
the journalist, and hamper his effort to lift his trade
to professional rank and dignity. When he talks of
codes of ethics, indeed, he only too often falls into
mere tall talk, for he cannot enforce the rules he so
solemnly draws up-that is, in the face of dissent
from above. Nevertheless, his discussion of the subject is still not wholly absurd, for there remain plenty
of rules that he can enforce, and I incline to think
that there are more of them than of the other kind.
Most of the evils that continue to beset American journalism to-day, in truth, are not due to the rascality of
owners nor even to the Kiwanian bombast of business managers, but simply and solely to the stupidity,
cowardice and Philistinism of working newspaper




JOURNALISM IN AMERICA             15
men. The majority of them, in almost every American city, are still ignoramuses, and proud of it. All
the knowledge that they pack into their brains is, in
every reasonable cultural sense, useless; it is the sort
of knowledge that belongs, not to a professional man,
but to a police captain, a railway mail-clerk, or a
board-boy in a brokerage house. It is a mass of trivialities and puerilities; to recite it would be to make
even a barber beg for mercy. What is missing from
it, in brief, is everything worth knowing —everything
that enters into the common knowledge of educated
men. There are managing editors in the United States,
and scores of them, who have never heard of Kant or
Johannes Miiller and never read the Constitution of
the United States; there are city editors who do not
know what a symphony is, or a streptococcus, or the
Statute of Frauds; there are reporters by the thousand
who could not pass the entrance examination for
Harvard or Tuskegee, or even Yale. It is this vast
and militant ignorance, this wide-spread and fathomless prejudice against intelligence, that makes American journalism so pathetically feeble and vulgar, and
so generally disreputable. A man with so little intellectual enterprise that, dealing with news daily, he
can go through life without taking in any news that
is worth knowing-such a man, you may be sure, is
lacking in professional dignity quite as much as he
is lacking in curiosity. The delicate thing called honor




16      PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
can never be a function of stupidity. If it belongs to
those men who are genuinely professional men, it belongs to them because they have lifted themselves
to the plane of a true aristocracy, in learning as well
as in liberty-because they have deliberately and successfully separated themselves from the great masses
of men, to whom learning is an insult and liberty an
agony. The journalists, in seeking to acquire that
status, put the cart before the horse.
2
The facts that I here set forth are well known to
every American newspaper man who rises above the
ice-wagon driver level, and in those sad conferences
which mark every gathering of the craft they do not
go undiscussed. Even the American Society of Newspaper Editors, i. e., of those journalists who have got
into golf clubs and become minor Babbitts, has dealt
with them at some of its annual pow-wows, albeit very
gingerly and with many uneasy glances behind the
door. But in general journalism suffers from a lack
of alert and competent professional criticism; its
slaves, afflicted by a natural inferiority complex, discountenance free speaking as a sort of treason; I
have myself been damned as a public enemy for calling attention, ever and anon, to the intolerable incompetence and quackery of all save a small minority




JOURNALISM    IN AMERICA           17
of the Washington correspondents. This struthion fear
of the light is surely not to be noted in any of the actual professions. The medical men, in their trade journals, criticise one another frankly and sharply, and
so do the lawyers in theirs: the latter, indeed, are not
above taking occasional hacks at the very judges, their
lawful fathers and patterns of grace. As for the
clergy, every one knows that they devote a large part
of their professional energy to refuting and damning their brethren, and that not a few of them do it
on public stumps, with the laity invited. So, also, in
the fine arts. It is impossible for an architect to affront humanity with a blotch without hearing from
other architects, and it is impossible for a poet to print
anything at all without tasting the clubs of other
poets. Even dramatists, movie actors, chiropractors
and politicians criticise one another, and so keep
themselves on tiptoe. But not journalists. If a Heywood Broun is exasperated into telling the truth about
the manhandling of a Snyder trial, or a Walter Lippmann exposes the imbecility of the Russian "news"
in a New York Times, or an Oswald Garrison Villard
turns his searchlight on a Boston Herald or a Washington Star, it is a rarity and an indecorum. The organs
of the craft-and there are journals for journalists,
just as there are doctors for doctors-are all filled
with bilge borrowed from Rotary and Kiwanis. Reading them, one gathers the impression that every news



18       PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
paper proprietor in the United States is a distinguished public figure, and every circulation manager
a wizard. The editorial boys, it appears, never fall
down on their jobs; they are not only geniuses, but
also heroes. Some time ago, having read all such
journals assiduously for years, I stopped my subscriptions to them. I found that I preferred the clipsheet of the Methodist Board of Temperance, Prohibition and Public Morals.
But if there is thus little or no frank and open discussion of the evils that beset journalism in the Republic, there is a great deal of private discontent and
soul-searching, and it shows itself in all the fantastic codes of ethics that issue from embattled professors of journalism in the great rolling-mills of learning, and from editorial associations in the cow States.
In such codes, I am sorry to have to repeat, I take no
stock. Most of them are the handiwork of journalists
of no professional importance whatever, and, what
is worse, of no apparent sense. They run the scale
from metaphysical principia worthy of Rotary to sets
of rules fit only for the government of a Y. M. C. A.
lamasery or a State's prison. They concern themselves
furiously with abuses which are not peculiar to journalism but run through the whole of American life,
and they are delicately silent about abuses that are
wholly journalistic, and could be remedied quickly
and without the slightest difficulty. Their purpose, I




JOURNALISM IN AMERICA              19
believe, is largely rhetorical. They give a certain ease
and comfort to the laboring patient without letting
any of his blood. Nevertheless, I am glad to see them
multiply, for though most of them may be hollow today, there is always a chance that some solid substance may get into them to-morrow. If they accomplish nothing else at the moment, they at least accustom the journalist to the notion that his craft needs an
overhauling. His old romantic optimism oozes out of
him. He is no longer quite happy. Out of his rising
discomforts, I believe, there will issue eventually a
more realistic attitude toward the problems that confront him, and on some bright day in the future he
may address himself rationally to the hard business
of solving them. Most of them, I believe, are clearly
soluble. More, most of them can be solved by working newspaper men, without any help from experts in
ethics. What they call for is not any transcendental
gift for righteousness, but simply ordinary professional competence and common sense.
For example, the problem of false news. How does
so much of it get into the American newspapers, even
the good ones? Is it because journalists, as a class,
are habitual liars, and prefer what is not true to what
is true? I don't think it is. Rather, it is because journalists are, in the main, extremely stupid, sentimental
and credulous fellows-because nothing is easier
than to fool them-because the majority of them lack




20       PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
the sharp intelligence that the proper discharge of
their duties demands. The New York Times did not
print all its famous blather and balderdash about
Russia because the Hon. Mr. Ochs desired to deceive
his customers, or because his slaves were in the pay of
Russian reactionaries, but simply and solely because
his slaves, facing the elemental professional problem
of distinguishing between true news and false, turned
out to be incompetent. All around the borders of Russia sat propagandists hired to fool them. In many
cases, I have no doubt, they detected that purpose,
and foiled it; we only know what they printed, not
what they threw into their wastebaskets. But in many
other cases they succumbed easily, and even ridiculously, and the result was the vast mass of puerile
rubbish that Mr. Lippmann later made a show of. In
other words, the editors of the American newspaper
most brilliantly distinguished above its fellows for its
news-gathering enterprise turned out to be unequal to
a job of news-gathering presenting special but surely
not insuperable difficulties. It was not an ethical failure, but a purely technical failure. And so was the
same eminent newspaper's idiotic misreporting of the
news from China in the early part of 1927, and the
grotesque paralysis of the whole American press in
the face of the Miami hurricane in 1926.
Obviously, the way to diminish such failures in future is not to adopt sonorous platitudes borrowed




JOURNALISM    IN AMERICA           21
from the realtors, the morticians, the sanitary plumbers and Kiwanis, but to undertake an overhauling of
the faulty technic, and of the incompetent personnel
responsible for it. This overhauling, of course, will
take some intelligence, but I don't think it will make
demands that are impossible. The bootlegging, legal
or delicatessen professions, confronted by like demands, would quickly furnish the talent necessary
to meet them; I see no reason why the profession of
journalism should not measure up as well. What lies
in the way of it is simply the profound, maudlin sentimentality of the average American journalist-his
ingenuous and almost automatic belief in everything
that comes to him in writing. One would think that his
daily experience with the written word would make
him suspicious of it; he himself, in fact, believes
fondly that he is proof against it. But the truth is
that he swallows it far more often than he rejects it,
and that his most eager swallowing is done in the
face of the plainest evidence of its falsity. Let it come
in by telegraph, and his mouth flies open. Let it come
in by telegraph from a press association and down it
goes at once. I do not say, of course, that all press association news is thus swallowed by news editors.
When the means are readily at hand, he often attempts to check it, and sometimes even rejects it. But
when such checking presents difficulties-in other
words, when deceit is especially easy, and hence




22       PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
should be guarded most vigilantly-he succumbs
nine times out of ten, and without a struggle. It was
precisely by this process that the editors of the Times,
otherwise men of extraordinary professional alertness, were victimized by the Russian "news" that
made that paper ridiculous. In the face of great improbabilities, they interpreted their inability to dispose of them as a license to accept them as truth.
Journalism will be a sounder and more dignified profession when a directly contrary interpretation of the
journalist's duty prevails. There will then be less
news in the papers, but it will at least have the merit
of being true.
Nor is the typical American journalist's credulity
confined to such canards and roorbacks from far
places. He is often victimized just as easily at home,
despite his lofty belief that he is superior to the wiles
of press agents. The plain fact is that most of the
stuff he prints now emanates from press agents, and
that his machinery for scrutinizing it is lamentably
defective. True enough, the bold, gay liars employed
by theatrical managers and opera singers no longer
fool him as they used to; he has grown so suspicious
of them that he often turns them out when they have
real news. But what of the press agents of such organizations as the Red Cross, the Prohibition Unit, the
Near-East Relief, the Chamber of Commerce of the
United States, the Department of Justice, the Y. M.




JOURNALISM IN AMERICA              23
C. A., and the various bands of professional patriots?
I do not say that the press agents of such bodies are
always or necessarily liars; all I say is that, nine
times out of ten, their statements are accepted as true
by the newspapers without any attempt to determine
accurately whether they are true or not. They may be
simple statements of plain fact; they may, on the
contrary, conceal highly dubious purposes, of organizations and individuals. In both cases they are set
forth in the same way-solemnly and without comel
ment. Who, ordinarily, would believe a Prohibition
agent? Perhaps a Federal judge in his robes of office 8
and full of seized evidence; I can think of no one else. 
Yet the American newspapers are filled every day 
with the dreadful boasts and threats of such frauds:
it is set before the people, not as lies, but as news. 
What is the purpose of such rubbish? Its purpose, ob- 
viously, is to make it appear that the authors are 
actually enforcing Prohibition-in other words, to
make them secure in their jobs. Every newspaper man
in America knows that Prohibition is not being enforced-and yet it is rarely that an American newspaper comes out in these days without a gaudy story
on its first page, rehearsing all the old lies under new
and blacker headlines.
I do not argue here, of course, that only demonstrable facts are news. There are times and occasions
when rumor is almost as important as the truth



24      PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
when a newspaper's duty to its readers requires it to
tell them not only what has happened, but also what is
reported, what is threatened, what is merely said.
What I contend is simply that such quasi-news, such
half-baked and still dubious news, should be printed
for exactly what it is-that it ought to be clearly differentiated from news that, by an overwhelming
probability, is true. That differentiation is made easily and as a matter of course by most European newspapers of any dignity. When they print a dispatch
from the Russian border they indicate its source, and
not infrequently follow it with a cynical comment. If
they had Prohibition agents on their hands, they
would print the fulminations of those gentlemen in
the same way-with plain warnings to stop, look and
listen. In brief, they make every reasonable effort
to make up for their own technical limitations as newsgatherers-they do the best they can, and say so
frankly when it is not very good. I believe that American newspapers might imitate them profitably. If it
were done, then the public's justifiable distrust of all
newspapers, now rising, would tend to ebb. They
would have to throw off their present affectation of
omniscience, but they would gain a new repute for
honesty and candor; they would begin to seem more
reliable when they failed than they now seem when
they succeed. The scheme I propose would cost nothing; on the contrary, it would probably save ex



JOURNALISM IN AMERICA             25
pense. It would throw no unbearable burden upon the
journalistic mind; it would simply make it more cautious and alert. Best of it, it would increase the dignity of journalism without resort to flapdoodlish and
unenforceable codes of ethics, by Mush out of Tosh.
3
In their private communions, though seldom in
public, the more conscientious and unhappy variety of
journalists commonly blame the woes of the craft
upon the entrance into newspaper ownership of such
opulent vacuums as Cyrus H. K. Curtis and the late
Frank A. Munsey. As a result of the application of
chain-store methods to journalism by these amiable
Vandals there are fewer papers than there used to be,
and the individual journalist is less important. All
the multitudinous Hearst papers are substantially
identical, and so are all the Scripps-Howard papers,
and all the Curtis papers, and so were the Munsey
papers in the great days of that pathetic man. There
is little room, on the papers of such chains, for the
young man who aspires to shine. Two-thirds of their
contents are produced in great factories, and what
remains is chiefly a highly standardized bilge. In the
early days of Hearst, when he had only a few widelyscattered papers, his staffs were manned by men of
great professional enterprise and cunning, and some




26       PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
of them became celebrated in the craft, and even generally. But now a Hearst paper, however inflammatory, is no more than a single unit in a long row of filling-stations, and so it tends to attract only the duller
and less picturesque sort of men. There is scarcely a
Hearst managing editor to-day who amounts to anything professionally, or is heard of outside his own
dung-hill. The platitudes of Brisbane and Dr. Frank
Crane serve as pabulum for all of them. What they
think is what the machines at the central factory think;
what they do is determined by men they have never
seen. So with the Scripps-Howard slaves, and the
slaves of Cox, and those of Curtis, and all the rest.
Their predecessors of a generation ago were gaudy
adventurers, experimenters, artists; they themselves
are golf-players, which is to say, blanks. They are
well paid, but effectively knee-haltered. The rewards
of their trade used to come in freedom, opportunity,
the incomparable delights of self-expression; now they
come in money.
But the sweet goes with the bitter. The newspapers
of to-day, though they may be as rigidly standardized
as Uneeda biscuits, are at least solvent: they are no
longer the paltry freebooters that they used to be. A
Munsey, perhaps, is a jackass, but he is at least honest; no one seriously alleges that his papers are for
sale; even the sinister Wall Street powers that Liberals see in the background must get what they want out




JOURNALISM IN AMERICA             27
of him by being polite to him, not by simply sending
him orders. The old-timers, contemplating the ghastly
spectacle of a New York Sun submerged in the Munsey swamp and an Evening Post descending from a
Villard to a Curtis, forget conveniently how bad most
of the papers they once worked for really were. In
the town where I began there were five papers, and
four of them were cheap, trashy, stupid and corrupt.
They all played politics for what there was in it, and
leaped obscenely every time an advertiser blew his
nose. Every other American city of that era was full
of such papers-dreadful little rags, venal, vulnerable and vile. Not a few of them made great pretensions, and were accepted by a naive public as organs
of the enlightenment. To-day, I believe, such journalistic street-walkers are very rare. The consolidations
that every old-timer deplores have accomplished at
least one good thing: they have got the newspapers,
in the main, out of the hands of needy men. When orders come from a Curtis or a Munsey to-day the man
who gets them, though he may regard them as illadvised and even as idiotic, is seldom in any doubt
as to their good faith. He may execute them without
feeling that he has been made an unwilling party to
an ignominious barter. He is not condemned daily to
acts whose true purpose he would not dare to put into
words, even to himself. His predecessor, I believe,
often suffered that dismaying necessity: he seldom




28      PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
had any illusions about the bona fides of his boss. It
took the whole force of his characteristic sentimentality to make him believe in his paper, and not infrequently even that sentimentality was impotent
without the aid of ethyl alcohol.
Thus there is something to be said for the new
newspaper Babbitts, as reluctant as every self-respecting journalist must be to say it. And in what is commonly said against them there is not infrequently a
certain palpable exaggeration and injustice. Are they
responsible for the imbecile editorial policies of their
papers, for the grotesque lathering of such mountebanks as Coolidge and Mellon, for the general smugness and lack of intellectual enterprise that pervades
American journalism? Perhaps they are. But do they
issue orders that their papers shall be printed in
blowsy, clumsy English? That they shall stand against
every decent thing, and in favor of everything that is
meretricious and ignoble? That they shall wallow in
trivialities, and manhandle important news? That
their view of learning shall be that of a bartender?
Has any newspaper proprietor ever issued orders that
the funeral orgies of a Harding should be described
in the language of a Tennessee revival? Or that helpless men, with the mob against them, should be pursued without fairness, decency or sense? I doubt it.
I doubt, even, that the Babbitts turned Greeleys are
responsible, in the last analysis, for the political rub



JOURNALISM     IN AMERICA           29
bish that fills their papers-the preposterous anointing of Coolidge, the craven yielding to such sinister
forces as the Ku Klux Klan and the Anti-Saloon
League, the incessant, humorless, degrading hymning
of all sorts of rogues and charlatans. The average
newspaper proprietor, I suspect, gets nine-tenths of his
political ideas from his own men. In other words, he
is such an ass that he believes political reporters, and
especially his own political reporters. They have, he
fancies, wide and confidential sources of information:
their wisdom is a function of their prestige as his
agents. What they tell him is, in the long run, what
he believes, with certain inconsiderable corrections
by professionals trying to work him. If only because
they have confidential access to him day in and day
out, they are able to introduce their own notions into
his head. He may have their jobs in his hands, but
they have his ears and eyes, so to speak, in theirs.
Even the political garbage that emanates from
Washington, and especially from the typewriters of
the more eminent and puissant correspondents there
resident, is seldom inspired, I am convinced, by orders from the Curtis or Munsey at home: its sources
are rather to be sought in the professional deficiencies
of the correspondents themselves-a class of men of
almost incredible credulity. In other words, they are
to be sought, not in the corruption and enslavement
of the press, but in the incompetence of the press. The




30      PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
average Washington correspondent, I believe, is honest enough, as honesty goes in the United States,
though his willingness to do press work for the National Committees in campaign time and for other
highly dubious agencies at other times is not to be forgotten. What ails him mainly is that he is a man
without sufficient force of character to resist the blandishments that surround him from the moment he
sets foot in Washington. A few men, true enough, resist, and their papers, getting the benefit of it, become
notable for their independence and intelligence, but
the great majority succumb almost at once. A few
months of associating with the gaudy magnificoes of
the town, and they pick up its meretricious values,
and are unable to distinguish men of sense and dignity from mountebanks. A few clumsy overtures from
the White House, and they are rattled and undone.
They come in as newspaper men, trained to get the
news and eager to get it; they end as tin-horn statesmen, full of dark secrets and unable to write the
truth if they tried. Here I spread no scandal and violate no confidence. The facts are familiar to every
newspaper man in the United States. A few of the
more intelligent managing editors, cynical of ever
counteracting the effects of the Washington miasma,
seek to evade them by frequently changing their men.
But the average managing editor is too stupid to deal
with such difficulties. He prints balderdash because




JOURNALISM IN AMERICA              31
he doesn't know how to get anything better-perhaps,
in many cases, because he doesn't know that anything
better exists. Drenched with propaganda at home, he
is quite content to take more propaganda from Washington. It is not that he is dishonest, but that he is
stupid-and, being stupid, a coward. The resourcefulness, enterprise and bellicosity that his job demands
are simply not in him. He doesn't wear himself out
trying to get the news, as romance has it; he slides
supinely into the estate and dignity of a golf-player.
American journalism suffers from too many golfplayers. They swarm in the Washington Press Gallery. They, and not their bosses, are responsible for
most of the imbecilities that now afflict their trade.
4
The journalists of the United States will never get
rid of those afflictions by putting the blame on Dives,
and never by making speeches at one another in annual conventions, and never by drawing up codes of
ethics that most of their brethren will infallibly laugh
at, as a Congressman laughs at a gentleman. The job
before them-that is, before the civilized minority of
them-is to purge their trade before they seek to dignify it-to clean house before they paint the roof and
raise a flag. Can the thing be done? It not only can be
done; it has been done. There are at least a dozen




32      PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
newspapers in the United States that already show a
determined effort to get out of the old slough. Any
managing editor in the land, if he has the will, can
carry his own paper with them. He is under no compulsion, save rarely, to employ this or that hand; it is
not often that owners, or even business managers, take
any interest in that business, save to watch the payroll. Is his paper trifling, ill-informed, petty and unfair? Is its news full of transparent absurdities? Are
its editorials ignorant and without sense? Is it written
in English full of cliches and vulgarities-English
that would disgrace a manager of prize-fighters or a
county superintendent of schools? Then the fault belongs plainly, not to some remote man, but to the
proximate man-to the man who lets such drivel go
by. He could get better if he wanted it, you may be
sure. There is in all history no record of a newspaper
owner who complained because his paper was welledited. And I know of no business manager who objected when the complaints pouring in upon him, of
misrepresentations, invasions of privacy, gross inaccuracies and other such nuisances, began to lighten.
Not a few managing editors, as I say, are moving
in the right direction. There has been an appreciable
improvement, during the past dozen years, in the
general tone of American newspapers. They are still
full of preposterous blather, but they are measurably
more accurate, I believe, than they used to be, and




JOURNALISM     IN AMERICA          33
some of them are better written. A number of them
are less absurdly partisan, particularly in the smaller
cities. Save in the South and in the remoter fastnesses
of New England the old-time party organ has gone
out of fashion. In the big cities the faithful hacks of
the New York Tribune type have begun to vanish.
With them has gone the old-time drunken reporter,
and in his place is appearing a young fellow of better
education, and generally finer metal. The uplifters
of the craft try to make him increase, and to that end
encourage schools of journalism. But these seminaries, so far, show two palpable defects. On the one
hand, they are seldom manned by men of any genuine professional standing, or of any firm notion of
what journalism is about. On the other hand, they
are nearly all too easy in their requirements for admission. Probably half of them, indeed, are simply
refuges for students too stupid to tackle the other professions. They offer snap courses, and they promise
quick jobs. The result is that the graduates coming
out of them are mainly second-raters-that young
men and women issuing from the general arts courses
make better journalistic material.
What ails these schools of journalism is that they
are not yet professional schools, but simply trade
schools. Their like is to be found, not in the schools
of medicine and law, but in the institutions that teach
barbering, bookkeeping and scenario-writing. Obvi



34      PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
ously, the remedy for their general failure is to borrow a leaf from the book of the medical men, and
weed out the incompetents, not after they have finished, but before they have begun. Twenty-five years
ago any yokel who had got through the three R's was
free to study medicine in the United States. In three
years, and sometimes in two years, he was turned out
to practice upon his fellow hinds, and once he had
his license it was a practical impossibility to challenge
him. But now there is scarcely a medical school in
the United States that does not demand a bachelor's
degree or its equivalent as a prerequisite to entrance,
and the term of study in all of them is four years, and
it must be followed by at least one year of hospital
service. This reform was not achieved by passing
laws against the old hedge schools: it was achieved
simply by setting up the competition of good schools.
The latter gradually elbowed the former out. Their
graduates had immense advantages. They had professional prestige from the moment of their entrance
into practice. The public quickly detected the difference between them and their competitors from the
surviving hedge schools. Soon the latter began to disintegrate, and now all save a few of them have disappeared. The medical men improved their profession
by making it more difficult to become a medical man.
To-day the thing is a practical impossibility to any
young man who is not of genuine intelligence.




JOURNALISM    IN AMERICA          35
But at least two-thirds of the so-called schools of
journalism still admit any aspirant who can make
shift to read and write. The pedagogues who run them
cannot be expected to devote much thought or money
to improving them; they are in the position of the
quacks who used to run the hedge medical schools.
The impulse toward improvement, if it ever comes at
all,.must come from the profession they presume to
serve. Here is a chance for the editorial committees
and societies of journalists that now spring up on all
sides. Let them abandon their vain effort to frame
codes of ethics and devote themselves to the nursery.
If they can get together a committee on schools of
journalism as wise and as bold as the Council on
Medical Education of the American Medical Association they will accomplish more in a few years than
they can hope to accomplish with academic codes of
ethics in half a century.
All the rest will follow. The old fond theory, still
surviving in many a newspaper office, that it is somehow discreditable for a reporter to show any sign of
education and culture, that he is most competent and
laudable when his intellectual baggage most closely
approaches that of a bootlegger-this theory will fall
before the competition of novices who have been adequately trained, and have more in their heads than
their mere training. Journalism, compared to the
other trades of literate men, is surely not unattrac



36      PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
tive, even to-day. It is more amusing than the army or
the cloth, and it offers a better living at the start than
either medicine or the law. There is a career in it for
the young man of original mind and forceful personality-a career leading to power and even to a sort of
wealth. In point of fact, it has always attracted such
young men, else it would be in an even lower state
than it is now. It would attract a great many more of
them if its public opinion were more favorable to
them-if they were less harassed by the commands
of professional superiors of no dignity, and the dislike of fellows of no sense. Every time two of them
are drawn in they draw another. The problem is to
keep them. That is the central problem of journalism
in the United States to-day.
I seem to be in a mood for constructive criticism.
Let me add one more pearl of wisdom before I withdraw. I put it in the form of a question. Suppose the
shyster lawyers of every town organized a third-rate
club, called it the Bar Association, took in any Prohibition agent or precinct politician who could raise
the dues, and then announced publicly, from the
Courthouse steps, that it represented the whole bar,
and that membership in it was an excellent form of
insurance-that any member who paid his dues would
get very friendly consideration, if he ever got into
trouble, from the town's judges and district attorney.
And suppose the decent lawyers of the town per



JOURNALISM IN AMERICA


37


mitted this preposterous pretension to go unchallenged-and some of them even gave countenance to
it by joining the club. How long would the legal profession in that town retain its professional honor and
dignity? How many laymen, after two or three years,
would have any respect left for any lawyer, even a
judge?
Yet the journalists of the United States permit that
precise thing to go on under their noses. In almost
every city of the country there is a so-called Press
Club, and at least three-fourths of them are exactly
like the hypothetical Bar Association that I have described. They are run by newspaper men of the worst
type-many of them so incompetent and disreputable
that they cannot even get jobs on newspapers. They
take the money of all the town grafters and rascals
on the pretense that newspaper favors go with its receipt. They are the resorts of idlers and blackmailers.
They are nuisances and disgraces. Yet in how many
towns have they been put down? In how many towns
do the decent newspaper men take any overt action
against them? My proposal is very simple. I propose
that they be shut up, East, West, North and South, be.
fore anything more is said about codes of newspaper
ethics.




II. FROM THE MEMOIRS OF A SUB.
JECT OF THE UNITED STATES
1
Government by Bounder
O        F government, at least in democratic states, it
may be said.briefly that it is an agency engaged wholesale, and as a matter of solemn
duty, in the performance of acts which all selfrespecting individuals refrain from as a matter of
common decency. The American newspapers supply
examples every day, chiefly issuing out of Federal
tribunals, judicial and 'administrative. The whole
process of the Federal law, indeed, becomes a process
of bounderism. Its catchpolls are not policemen, in
any rational and ordinary sense, but simply sneaks
and scoundrels with their eyes glued eternally to
knot-holes. Imagine a man of ordinary decency discovering his son reading an account of the proceedings against the once celebrated Lady Catlhcart, now
happily forgotten? Would his exposition of the case
take the form of patriotic hallelujahs, or would he
caution the boy that such things are not done by gen38




MEMOIRS OF A SUBJECT             39
tlemen? No wonder the teaching of patriotism in the
Republic is being handed over to virgin schoolma'ms,
who know of honor only as an anatomical matter! The
business becomes too difficult for men who must face
their fellow-men daily, and therewith the ancient
prejudices of the race. Those prejudices, for unnumbered centuries, have run against the man who mouths
the frailties of a fair one in the market-place. But
the commission of Uncle Sam, it appears, repeals that
obligation of elemental honor, as it repeals every
other. One sworn to uphold the Constitution becomes
straightway a licentiate in swinishness, with a mandate to examine the female guests of the nation publicly, and to denounce all who are not virgo intacta.
This mandate covers not only the lowly ruffians told
off to guard the ports, but also magnificoes of ministerial rank. The Cabinet of a great Christian nation
meets behind locked doors to perform a business
which, if done by an honest Elk, would bring his
board of governors together to kick him out.
If such obscenities were rare one might set them
down to moral profit and loss, and so try to forget
them. But they happen every day. If a Cathcart case
is not on the front pages, then a Whitney case or a
Kollontai case is there. And day in and day out the
newspapers are filled with the revolting muckeries of
Prohibition agents, and their attendant district attorneys and judges. The whole trend of American leg



40      PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
islation, and with it of jurisprudence, seems to be toward such ideas of dignity and decency as prevail in
remote and forlorn country villages, among the human debris of Puritanism. A court of justice, once a
place where the state intervened to curb the savagery
of the strong, is now an arena of savagery both cruel
and cynical. The notion seems to be that any device
of deceit or brutality is fair, so long as it helps to fill
the jails. The government, through its authorized
agents, sets itself deliberately to lure men into socalled crime, and then punishes them mercilessly for
succumbing. Is there such a thing as a contrat social? Then certainly it is getting heavy blows in the
Federal Union. For if it is not based upon the expectation that one citizen will treat another with common decency, it is based upon nothing more than a
shadow-and that expectation is fast becoming vain
among us. The natural confidence that every man
should have in his fellows-that they will not hit below the belt, that they will not abuse his natural trust,
that he may rely upon them, in a given situation, to
act according to the principles of fair-play prevailing
immemorially among civilized men-this confidence,
when it touches American officialdom, has no longer
any basis in fact. The government, under the Volstead
Act, is a spy and a snitcher, just as, under the Immigration Act, it is a brute and blackguard, and under
the Alien Property Act, a common thief.




MEMOIRS OF A SUBJECT              41
Obviously, such things cannot go on without having profound effects upon the general American character. A government, though it may be worse than the
average man it governs, is still made up of just such
average men. If, by some process of legal decay, it is
set to disgusting acts, then the consequence must be
that, in the long run, they will become less disgusting.
How the business has worked in other lands has been
displayed with much snuffling by specialists in Americanism; unfortunately, they seem to show no interest
in the phenomena when it is repeated at home. I have
spoken of the father with a son ripe for instruction in
the traditional decencies. Unfecund myself, I can
only imagine his difficulties, but it must be obvious
that they are serious. How, indeed, is he to interpret
such an inescapable transaction as the Cathcart uproar? Is it his duty to tell his son that gentlemen set
their dogs upon loose women? Or is it his duty to say
that the United States is not a gentleman-nay, not
even a decent thug?
Such doings, it seems to me, flow quite naturally out
of the democratic theory. It holds, imprimis, that cads
make just as good governors as civilized and selfrespecting men, and it holds, secundo, that the notions of propriety and decency held by the mob are
good enough for the state, and ought, in fact, to have
the force of law. Thus it becomes increasingly difficult
to be a good American, as the thing is officially de



42      PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
fined, and remain what all the other peoples of the
world regard as a good citizen-that is, one who
views the acts and ideas of his fellows with a tolerant
and charitable eye, and wishes them to be free and
happy. The whole tendency of American law, in this
day, is to put down happiness wherever it is encountered, and the mores of the land march with the law.
The doctrine seems to be that it is the highest duty
of the citizen to police his fellows. What they naturally want to do is precisely what they must be kept
from doing. To this business a large and increasing
class of professional snouters and smellers addresses
itself. How many noses it can muster, God only
knows, but the number must be immensely large. In
the single State of Ohio, with the Anti-Saloon
League in the saddle, there are certainly at least five
thousand, and every prowling village deacon and
petty urban blackmailer is free to join the force as
a volunteer. And in more civilized regions, where public opinion, even in the mob, runs against such putridities, the Federal government supplies the scoundrels.
This antagonism between democratic Puritanism
and common decency is inherent in the nature of the
two things, and leads to conflicts in all so-called "free"
countries, but it is only in the United States that it has
reached the stage of open and continuous war, with
Puritanism sweeping the field and common decency
in flight. Thus life in the Republic grows increasingly




MEMOIRS OF A SUBJECT              43
uncomfortable to men of the more urbane and seemly
sort, and, despite the great material prosperity of the
country, the general stock of happiness probably diminishes steadily. For the thing that makes us enjoy the society of our fellows is not admiration of
their inner virtues but delight in their outward manners. It is not enough that they are headed for heaven,
and will sit upon the right hand of God through all
eternity; it is also necessary that they be polite, generous, and, above all, trustworthy. We must have confidence in them in order to get any pleasure out of
associating with them. We must be sure that they will
not do unto us as we should refuse, even for cash in
hand, to do unto them. It is the tragedy of the Puritan that he can never inspire this confidence in his.
fellow-men. He is by nature a pedant in ethics, and
hence he is by nature a mucker. With the best of intentions he cannot rid himself of the belief that it is
his duty to save us from our follies-i. e., from all
the non-puritanical acts and whimsies that make life
charming. His duty to let us be happy takes second,
third or fourth place. A Puritan cannot be tolerantand with tolerance goes magnanimity. The late Dr.
Woodrow Wilson was a typical Puritan-of the better sort, perhaps, for he at least toyed with the ambition to appear as a gentleman, but nevertheless a
true Puritan. Magnanimity was simply beyond him.
Confronted, on his death-bed, with the case of poor




44       PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
old Debs, all his instincts compelled him to keep Debs
in jail. I daresay that, as a purely logical matter, he
saw clearly that the old fellow ought to be turned
loose; certainly he must have known that Washington would not have hesitated, or Lincoln. But Calvinism triumphed as his intellectual faculties decayed. In the full bloom of health, with a plug hat
on his head, he aped the gentry of his wistful adoration very cleverly, but lying in bed, stripped like
Thackeray's Louis XIV, he reverted to his congenital
Puritanism, which is to say, bounderism.
Of such sort are the grand seigneurs of the nation-the custodians of its dignity and honor. They
speak for it to the world. They set the tone of the national life at home. Is there any widespread murmuring against them? I wish I could report that there
was, but I see no sign of it. Instead, there seems to be
only a resigned sort of feeling that nothing can be
done about it-that the swinishness of government lies
in the very nature of things, and so cannot be changed.
Even the popular discontent with Prohibition is not a
discontent with its sneaking and knavishness-its
wholesale turning loose of licensed blacklegs and
blackmailers, its appalling degradation of the judiciary, its corruption of Congress, its disingenuous invasion of the Bill of Rights. What is complained of is
simply the fact that Scotch is dubious and costs too
much. As bootlegging grows more efficient, I suppose,




MEMOIRS OF A SUBJECT              45
even that complaint will sink to a whisper, perhaps in
the form of a snigger. Of any forthright grappling
with the underlying indecency there is little show. It
would be difficult, in most American communities, to
get signers for even the most academic protest against
it..The American, played upon for years by a stream
of jackass legislation, takes refuge in frank skulking.
He first dodges the laws, and then he dodges the duty
of protesting against them. His life becomes a process
of sneaking through back-alleys, watching over one
shoulder for the cop and over the other for his neighbor. Thus a-tremble (and with a weather eye open
for Bolsheviks, atheists and loose women), he serves
the high oath that government of the people, by the
people, and for the people shall not perish from the
earth.
2
Constructive Proposal
A mood of constructive criticism being upon me, I
propose forthwith that the method of choosing legislators now prevailing in the United States be abandoned and that the method used in choosing juries be
substituted. That is to say, I propose that the men who
make our laws be chosen by chance and against their
will, instead of by fraud and against the will of all




46      PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
the rest of us, as now. But isn't the jury system itself
imperfect? Isn't it occasionally disgraced by gross
abuse and scandal? Then so is the system of justice
devised and ordained by the Lord God Himself.
Didn't He assume that the Noachian Deluge would be
a lasting lesson to sinful humanity-that it would
put an end to all manner of crime and wickedness,
and convert mankind into a race of Methodists? And
wasn't Noah himself its chief beneficiary, lying
drunk, naked and uproarious within a year after the
ark landed,on Ararat? All I argue for the jury system, invented by man, is that it is measurably better
than the scheme invented by God. It has its failures
and its absurdities, its abuses and its corruptions, but
taking one day with another it manifestly works. It is
not the fault of juries that so many murderers go unwhipped of justice, and it is not the fault of juries
that so many honest men are harassed by preposterous laws. The juries find the gunmen guilty: it is the
judges higher up who deliver them from the noose,
and turn them out to resume their butcheries. It is
from judges again, and not from juries, that Volsteadian padlocks issue, and all the other devices for
making a mock of the Bill of Rights. Are juries occasionally sentimental? Then let us not forget that it
was their sentimentality, in the Eighteenth Century,
that gradually forced a measure of decency and justice into the English Criminal Law. It was a jury that




MEMOIRS OF A SUBJECT               47
blocked the effort of the Department of Justice to railroad Senator Wheeler to prison on false charges. It
was another jury that detected and baffled the same
Department's perjurers in the O'Leary case, during
the late war. And it was yet another jury that delivered the eminent Fatty Arbuckle from what was, perhaps, the most disingenuous and outrageous persecution ever witnessed in a civilized land.
Would any American Legislature, or Congress itself, have resisted the vast pressure of the bureaucracy in these cases? To ask the question is to answer
it. The dominant character of every legislative body
ever heard of, at least in this great free Republic, is
precisely its susceptibility to such pressure. It not
only leaps when the bureaucracy cracks the whip; it
also leaps to the whip-cracking of scores of extralegal (and often, indeed, illegal) agencies. The AntiSaloon League, despite its frequent disasters, is still
so powerful everywhere that four legislators out of
five obey it almost instinctively. When it is flouted,
as has happened in a few States under an adverse
pressure yet more powerful, the thing is marvelled at
as a sort of miracle. The bureaucracy itself is seldom flouted at all. When it is in a moral mood, and
heaving with altruistic sobs, the thing simply never
happens. Is it argued that Congress has nevertheless
defied it, and Dr. Coolidge with it? Then the argument comes from persons whose studies of Washing



48      PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
ton pathology have been very superficial. At least
nine-tenths of the idiocies advocated by Dr. Coolidge
and his highly dubious friends have been swallowed
by both Houses with no more than a few reflex gags.
Even the celebrated Warren appointment was defeated in the Senate by only a few votes-and the
few votes were delivered, as connoisseurs will recall,
by a process indistinguishable from an act of God.
It is my contention that a jury of plain men, issuing
unwilling from their plumbing-shops and grocerystores and eager to get back to work, would have rejected Warren without leaving their box, and that the
same jury, confronted by such things as the World
Court imbecility, would dispose of them just as
quickly.
Why were the learned Senators so much less intelligent and so much less resolute? For a plain reason.
Fully two-thirds of them were not thinking of Warren
as they voted; they were thinking of their jobs. The
problem before them was not whether elevating the
preposterous Warren was a reasonable and laudable
measure, likely to benefit and glorify the United
States, but whether voting for Warren would augment or diminish their chance of reelection. In other
words, they were not free agents, and in consequence
not honest men. They had sought their jobs on their
bellies, and they were eager to keep them, even at the
cost of groveling on their bellies again. Say the worst




MEMOIRS OF A SUBJECT


49


you can say against a box of twelve jurymen, and you
can never say that. Not one among them sought his
job. Not one among them wants to keep it. The business before them presents itself as a public duty to
be done, not as an opportunity for private advantage.
They are eager only to get it done decently, and go
home.
So my proposal is that our Legislatures be chosen
as our juries are now chosen-that the names of all
the men eligible in each assembly district be put into
a hat (or, if no hat can be found that is large enough,
into a bathtub), and that a blind moron, preferably of
tender years, be delegated to draw out one. Let the
constituted catchpolls then proceed swiftly to this
man's house, and take him before he can get away.
Let him be brought into court forthwith, and put under a stupendous bond to serve as elected, and if he
cannot furnish the bond, let him be kept until the appointed day in the nearest jail.
The advantages that this system would offer are so
vast and so obvious that I hesitate to venture into the
banality of rehearsing them. It would, in the first
place, save the commonwealth the present excessive
cost of elections, and make political campaigns unnecessary. It would, in the second place, get rid of all
the heart-burnings that now flow out of every contest
at the polls, and block the reprisals and charges of
fraud that now issue from the heart-burnings. It




50      PREJUDICES: SIYTH SERIES
would, in the third place, fill all the State Legislatures
with men of a peculiar and unprecedented cast of
mind-men actually convinced that public service is
a public burden, and not merely a private snap. And
it would, in the fourth and most important place, completely dispose of the present degrading knee-bending
and trading in votes, for nine-tenths of the legislators,
having got into office unwillingly, would be eager only
to finish their duties and go home, and even those
who acquired a taste for the life would be unable to
do anything to increase the probability, even by one
chance in a million, of their reelection.
The disadvantages of the plan are very few, and
most of them, I believe, yield readily to analysis. Do
I hear argument that a miscellaneous gang of tinroofers, delicatessen dealers and retired bookkeepers, chosen by hazard, would lack the vast knowledge
of public affairs needed by makers of laws? Then I
can only answer (a) that no such knowledge is actually necessary, and (b) that few, if any, of the existing legislators possess it. The great majority of
public problems, indeed, are quite simple, and any
man may be trusted to grasp their elements in ten
days who may be-and is-trusted to unravel the obfuscations of two gangs of lawyers in the same time.
In this department the so-called expertness of socalled experts is largely imaginary. The masters of
the tariff who sit at Washington know little about the




MEMOIRS OF A SUBJECT              51
fundamental philosophy of protection, and care less;
the subject, if discussed on the floor, would send the
whole House flying to the Capitol bootleggers. The
knowledge that these frauds are full of is simply
knowledge of how many votes an extra ten cents on
aluminum dishpans may be counted on producing, and
how much the National Association of Brass Cuspidor Manufacturers deserves to be given for its campaign contribution of $10,000. Such is the science of
the tariff as it is practiced by the professors who now
flourish. It is my contention that a House of malt-andhop dealers, garage mechanics and trolley conductors,
brought in by the common hangman, would deal with
the question with quite as much knowledge, and with
a great deal more honesty. It might make mistakes,
but it would not, at least, be pledged to them in advance. Some of its members might sell out, but
there would remain, at worst, a workable minority of
honest men.
The tariff, in any case, is no longer an issue.
Neither are most of the other great politico-economical puzzles that harassed the statesmen of an elder
day. They have all been solved; the two great parties
agree upon them, with a few wild fellows dissenting.
But as economics and finance go out, morals come in.
The legislation of to-day is chiefly made up of quack
cure-alls, invented by fanatics and supported by the
bureaucracy. Well, I ask you what sort of Legislature




52       PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
is the more likely to swallow these cure-alls: one
made up of professionals eager to hold their jobs, or
one made up of amateurs eager only to get rid of
their jobs?
My scheme would have the capital merit, if it had
no other, of barring the professionals from the game.
They would lose their present enormous advantages
as a class, and so their class would tend to disappear.
Would that be a disservice to the state? Certainly
not. On the contrary, it would be a service of the first
magnitude, for the worst curse of democracy, as we
suffer under it to-day, is that it makes public office a
monopoly of a palpably inferior and ignoble group
of men. They have to abase themselves in order to get
it, and they have to keep on abasing themselves in
order to hold it. The fact reflects itself in their general character, which is obviously low. They are men
congenitally capable of ignoble acts, else they would
not have got into public life at all. There are, of
course, exceptions to that rule among them, but how
many? What I contend is simply that the number of
such exceptions is bound to be smaller in the class of
professional job-seekers than it is in any other class,
or in the population in general. What I contend, second, is that choosing legislators from that population,
by chance, would reduce immensely the proportion
of such crawling, slimy men in the halls of legislation,
and that the effects would be instantly visible in a




MEMOIRS OF A SUBJECT


53


great improvement in the justice and reasonableness
of the laws.
Are juries ignorant? Then they are still intelligent
enough to be entrusted with your life and mine. Are
they venal? Then they are still honest enough to take
our fortunes into their hands. Such is the fundamental
law of the Germanic peoples, and it has worked for
nearly a thousand years. I have launched my proposal that it be extended upward and onward, and
the mood of constructive criticism passes from me.
My plan belongs to any reformer who cares to lift it.
3
The Nature of Government
What ails the world mainly, at least in the political
sense, is that its governments are too strong. It has
been a recurrent pest since the dawn of civilization.
Government is always depicted, in the orthodox texts,
as the creation of the people governed; the theory is
that they created it in order to secure their own safety
and promote their daily business. But no Professor
Oppenheimer was needed to demonstrate that it is
really something imposed from without, or, at all
events, the heir and assign of something imposed
from without. Its interests and those of the people it
governs are the same only occasionally, and then usually accidentally. True enough, it must sometimes




54      PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
throw them bones, and even whole beefsteaks, lest
they grow desperate and attempt to destroy it, but
such concessions are always made grudgingly, and
withdrawn very promptly the moment it looks safe.
The history of the United States would make all
this plain enough, if that history were studied realistically. Consider, for example, the matter of liberty.
The American people profess to esteem liberty very
highly —so highly, in fact, that their common talk
about it seems somewhat lyrical and excessive to the
people of most other nations. They seem to believe
that there is more of it on tap in the Republic than
anywhere else on earth-that the Republic was actually founded for the sole purpose of giving it to them.
Yet it must be obvious that their hold upon it is always precarious, and that their government tries to
take it away from them whenever possible-not completely, perhaps, but always substantially. That government resisted their demand for it at the very start,
and yielded only after a very severe struggle. The Bill
of Rights was not in the original Constitution; it got
in only as amendments. Ever since then, at every opportunity, the government has tried to weaken it. Here
parties and personalities count for very little. The
most successful raids upon the Bill of Rights so far
recorded were made by Abraham Lincoln, a Republican and the spokesmen (in theory) of the inferior
man, and by Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat and the




MEMOIRS OF A SUBJECT              55
agent of what passes, in the United States, for an aristocracy.
The men who constitute the government always try
to make it appear, of course, that they carry on their
activities in a patriotic and altruistic way-in brief,
that they are full of public spirit. But that pretension deceives no one, not even Homo boobiens. The
average man, whatever his errors otherwise, at least
sees clearly that the government is something lying
outside him and outside the generality of his fellow
men-that it is a separate, independent and often
hostile power, only partly under his control, and capable, on occasion, of doing him great harm. In his
romantic moments, he may think of it as a benevolent
father or even as a sort of jinn or god, but he never
thinks of it as part of himself. In times of trouble he
looks to it to perform miracles for his benefit; at
other times he sees it as an enemy with which he must
do constant battle. Is it a fact of no significance that
robbing the government is everywhere regarded as a
crime of less magnitude than robbing an individual,
or even a corporation? In the United States to-day it
is punished only when it is complicated by some secondary, and, in the public judgment, worse offense
for example, depriving crippled war veterans of their
lawful relief. Otherwise, it carries a smaller penalty
and infinitely less odium than acts that are intrinsically trivial-for example, spitting on the sidewalk or




56      PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
marrying two wives. None of the thieves who robbed
the government at Hog Island during the war has ever
gone to jail. The airship contractors, though they
made off with nearly a billion dollars, are still all
at large. So are all the camp contractors. More, the
man who broke up the feeble and abortive effort to
punish these scoundrels-who denounced that effort
as, in some mysterious way, an attentat against public morality —that man is now first in succession to the
presidency of the Republic. His indignation plainly
had public sentiment behind it. He was and is an accomplished professor of the mind of man under
democracy.
Other politicians, less gifted in that science, often
take the other side, and so come to grief. They assume absurdly that the public conscience is opposed
to robbing the government, and try to climb into popularity and high office by pursuing the gay fellows
who do it. The attempt almost always fails. The great
masses of the plain people, true enough, enjoy the
chase, as they enjoy, indeed, any chase. The damning evidence, as it unrolls, delights them; they devour
every accusation, however ill supported. But it usually turns out in the end that they do not care to eat
the game. The minute the evidence is all in they lose
interest; there is no demand from them for the jailing of the accused. On the contrary, they sympathize
with the accused, and show it actively when the time




MEMOIRS OF A SUBJECT              57
comes to supply conscripts for the trial jury. Perhaps
the safest men in the whole United States to-day are
the gentlemen who have been indicted for robbing the
government. Every such indictment is a sort of policy
of insurance against going to jail.
What lies behind all this, I believe, is a deep sense
of the fundamental antagonism between the government and the people it governs. It is apprehended, not
as a committee of citizens chosen to carry on the communal business of the whole population, but as a
separate and autonomous corporation, mainly devoted to exploiting the population for the benefit of
its own members. Robbing it is thus an act almost devoid of infamy-an exploit rather resembling those
of Robin Hood and the eminent pirates of tradition.
When a private citizen is robbed a worthy man is deprived of the fruits of his industry and thrift; when
the government is robbed the worst that happens is
that certain rogues and loafers have less money to
play with than they had before. The notion that they
have earned that money is never entertained; to most
men it would seem extremely ludicrous. They are
simply rascals who, by accidents of law, have a somewhat dubious right to a share in the earnings of their
fellowmen. When that share is diminished by private
enterprise the business is, on the whole, far more
laudable than not.
The average man, when he pays taxes, certainly




58      PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
does not believe that he is making a prudent and productive investment of his money; on the contrary, he
feels that he is being muleted in an excessive amount
for services that, in the main, are useless to him, and
that, in substantial part, are downright inimical to
him. He may be convinced that a police force, say,
is necessary for the protection of his life and property, and that an army and navy safeguard him from
being reduced to slavery by some vague foreign
kaiser, but even so he views these things as extravagantly expensive-he sees in even the most essential
of them an agency for making it easier for the exploiters constituting the government to rob him. The
policeman, in fact, is his symbol for a thief. The army
and navy, as he sees them, are blankets for mere display, ostentation and waste of his hard-earned
money. The rest of the government is purely predatory and useless; he believes that he gets no more
benefit from its vast and costly operations than he
gets from the money he lends to his wife's brother. It
is a power that stands over him constantly, ever alert
for new chances to squeeze him. If it could do so
safely it would strip him to his hide. If it leaves him
anything at all, it is simply prudentially, as a farmer
leaves a hen some of her eggs.
Thus he sees nothing wrong, in the sense that robbing a neighbor is wrong to him, in turning the tables
upon it whenever the opportunity offers. When he




MEMOIRS OF A SUBJECT             59
steals anything from it he is only recovering his own,
with fair interest and a decent profit. Two gangs thus
stand confronted: on the one hand the gang of drones
and exploiters constituting the government, and on
the other hand the body of prehensile and enterprising citizens. The latter is certainly not made up exclusively, as the Liberals and other such romantics
seem to think, of bankers, railroad stockholders, great
industrialists and other such magnificoes. There is
plenty of room in it for more lowly men, if only they
have the courage to horn in. During the late war all
the union men of the nation, by pooling their strength
and so dispersing the risk, made.a magnificent and
successful effort to get their share: they stole almost
as much, in all probability, as the dollar-a-year men.
And when the war was over the soldiers, deprived of
their chance while the going was good, demanded it
belatedly. The chief argument for the bonus was not
that the veterans of the war had leaped gallantly to
the defense of democracy, for at least two-thirds of
them, as everyone knows, tried their best to evade
service. The chief argument was that they were forced
into the army against their will and in violation of
their private interests-that they didn't get their fair
chance at the loot. They did not demand the punishment of those who looted while they served; they only
demanded a rectification of the injustice which kept
them honest themselves.




60       PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
The difference between the two gangs-of professionals and of amateurs-is that the former has law
on its side, and so enjoys an unfair advantage. Worse,
it makes the very laws it profits by. Yet worse, it controls all the agencies which execute them, including
the courts. The other gang is almost unarmored. The
government is always able, when it happens to be so
disposed, to single out a few of its ring-leaders and
clap them into jail. Such proceedings, of course, are
unpopular, but they are nevertheless possible. But the
government gang is well-nigh immune to punishment.
Its worst extortions, even when they are baldly for
private profit, carry no certain penalties under our
laws. Since the first days of the Republic less than a
dozen of its members have been impeached, and only
a few obscure understrappers have ever been put
into prison. The number of men sitting at Atlanta
and Leavenworth for revolting against the extortions
of the government is always ten times as great as the
number of government officials condemned for oppressing the tax-payers to their own gain. Thus the
Ncombat which goes on is not unlike that between the
Anti-Saloon League and the bootleggers. The AntiSaloon League, it must be manifest, is quite as criminal as the bootleggers; it devotes itself professionally
to violating the Bill of Rights; its kept judges have
pretty well disposed of all the constitutional guarantees of the citizen. But its control of the govern



MEMOIRS OF A SUBJECT              61
ment puts it above the law. Its agents, on and off the
bench, commit their crimes almost unmolested; only
one of them, in fact, has ever got into jail-and that
was by a sort of accident.
But public opinion is mainly on the side of the
bootleggers. They represent, in the combat, the plain
man, eternally oppressed and robbed by his overlords. In their popularity is to be seen the first glimmers of a revolt that must one day shake the world
-a revolt, not against this or that form of government, but against the tyranny at the bottom of all
government. Government, to-day, is growing too strong
to be safe. There are no longer any citizens in the
world; there are only subjects. They work day in and
day out for their masters; they are bound to die for
their masters at call. Out of this working and dying
they tend to get less and less. On some bright tomorrow, a geological epoch or two hence, they will
come to the end of their endurance, and then such
newspapers as survive will have a first-page story well
worth its black headlines.
4
Freudian Footnote
That the life of man is a struggle and an agony
was remarked by the Brisbanes and Dr. Frank Cranes




62      PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
of the remotest antiquity. The earliest philosophers
busied themselves with the fact, and so did the earliest
poets. It runs like a Leitmotif through the literature
of the Greeks and the Jews alike. "Vanity of vanities," saith the Preacher, "vanity of vanities; all is
vanity!" "0 ye deathward-going tribes of men,"
chants Sophocles, "what do your lives mean except
that they go to nothingness?" But not placidly, not
unresistingly, not without horrible groans and gurgles. Man is never honestly the fatalist, nor even the
stoic. He fights his fate, often desperately. He is forever entering bold exceptions to the rulings of the
bench of gods. This fighting, no doubt, makes for human progress, for it favors the strong and the brave.
It also makes for beauty, for lesser men try to escape from a hopeless and intolerable world by creating a more lovely one of their own. Poetry, as every
one knows, is a means to that end-facile, and hence
popular. The aim of poetry is to give a high and
voluptuous plausibility to what is palpably not true.
I offer the Twenty-third Psalm as an example: "The
Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want." It is immensely esteemed by the inmates of almshouses, and
by gentlemen waiting to be hanged. I have to limit my
own reading of it, avoiding soft and yielding moods,
for I too, in my way, am a gentleman waiting to be
hanged, as you are. If the air were impregnated with
poetry, as it is with carbon in Pittsburgh, and alcohol




MEMOIRS OF A SUBJECT              63
in Hoboken, N. J., and stale incense in Boston, the
world would be a more comfortable and caressing
place, but the service of the truth would be neglected.
The truth is served by prose. The aim of prose is not
to conceal the facts, but to display them. It is thus
apt to be harsh and painful. All that the philosophers
and metaphysicians of the world have accomplished,
grinding away in their damp cells since man became
cryptococcygeal, is to prove that Homo sapiens and
Equus asinus are brothers under their skins. As for
the more imaginative prosateurs, they have pretty
well confined themselves, since the earliest beginnings
of their craft, to the lugubrious chronicle of man's
struggle and defeat. I know of no first-rate novel that
hasn't this theme. In all of them, from "Don Quixote" to "The Brothers Karamazov" and from "Vanity
Fair" to "McTeague," we are made privy to the
agonies of a man resisting his destiny, and getting
badly beaten.
The struggle is always the same, but in its details
it differs in different ages. There was a time, I believe, when it was mainly a combat between the natural instincts of the individual and his yearning to
~get into Heaven. That was an unhealthy time, for
throttling the instincts is almost as deleterious as
breathing bad air: it makes for an unpleasant clamminess. The Age of Faith, seen in retrospect, looks
somehow pale and puffy: one admires its saints and




64      PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
anchorites without being conscious of any very active desire to shake hands with them and smell them.
To-day the yearning to get into Heaven is in abeyance,
at least among the vast majority of humankind, and
so the ancient struggle takes a new form. In the main,
it is a struggle of man with society-a conflict between his desire to be respected and his impulse to
follow his own bent. It seems to me that society usually wins. There are, to be sure, free spirits in the
world, but their freedom, in the last analysis, is not
much greater than that of a canary in a cage. They
may leap from perch to perch; they may bathe and
guzzle at their will; they may flap their wings and
sing. But they are still in the cage, and soon or late
it conquers them. What was once a great itch for long
flights and the open spaces is gradually converted into
a fading memory and nostalgia, sometimes stimulating but more often merely blushful. The free man,
made in God's image, is converted into a Freudian
case.
Such Freudian cases swarm in modern society;
they are hidden in all sorts of unexpected places. Observing a Congressman, one sees only a gross and revolting shape, with dull eyes and prehensile hands.
But under that preposterous mask there may be yearnings, and some of them may be of high voltage and
laudable delicacy. There are Congressmen, I have no
doubt, who regret their lost honor, as women often




MEMOIRS OF A SUBJECT               65
do in the films. Tossing in their beds on hot, sticky
Washington nights, their gizzards devoured by bad
liquor, they may lament the ruin that the service of
Demos has brought to their souls. For Congressmen,
despite their dishonorable trade, are exactly like the
rest of us at bottom, and respond to the same biogenetic laws. In infancy they go to Sunday-school.
Passing through adolescence, they are idealists, and
dream of saving the world. Come to young manhood,
they suffer the purifying pangs of love. The impulse
to seek political preferment, when it arises in them,
is not always, nor primarily, an impulse to grab something, to victimize and exploit the rest of us. That
comes later: even Penrose and Roosevelt started out
as altruists and reformers. But the rules of the game
run one way, and common honesty and common decency run another. There comes a time when the candidate must surrender either his ideals or his aspirations. If he is in Congress it is a sign that he has
preserved the latter.
Democracy produces swarms of such men, in politics and on other planes, and their secret shames and
sorrows, I believe, are largely responsible for the generally depressing tone of democratic society. Old
Freud, living in a more urbane and civilized world,
paid too little heed to that sort of repression. He assumed fatuously that what was repressed was always,
or nearly always, something intrinsically discredi



66      PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
table, or, at all events, anti-social-for example, the
natural impulse to neck a pretty woman, regardless
of her husband's protests. But under democracy that
is only half the story. The democrat with a yearning
to shine before his fellows must not only repress all
the common varieties of natural wickedness; he must
also repress many of the varieties of natural decency. His impulse to speak his mind freely, to tell
the truth as he sees it, to be his own man, comes into
early and painful collision with the democratic dogma
that such things are not nice-that the most worthy
and laudable citizen is that one who is most like all
the rest. In youth, as every one knows, this dogma is
frequently challenged, and sometimes with great asperity, but the rebellion, taking one case with another, is not of long duration. The campus Nietzsche,
at thirty, begins to feel the suction of Rotary; at forty
he is a sound Mellon man; at fifty he is fit for Congress.
But his early yearning for freedom and its natural
concomitants is still not dead; it is merely imprisoned
in the depths of his subconscious. Down there it drags
out its weary and intolerable years, protesting silently
but relentlessly against its durance. We know, by Dr.
Freud's appalling evidence, what the suppression of
the common wickednesses can do to the individualhow it can shake his reason on its throne, and even
give him such things as gastritis, migraine and angina




MEMOIRS OF A SUBJECT              67
pectoris. Every Sunday-school in the land is full of
such wrecks; they recruit the endless brigades of
lady policemen and male wowsers. A vice-crusader
is simply an unfortunate who goes about with a
brothel in his own cellar; a Prohibitionist is one who
has buried rum, but would have been safer drinking
it. All this is now a commonplace of knowledge to
every American school-girl. The wowsers themselves
give the facts a universal dispersion by trying to suppress them. But so far no psychoanalyst has done a
tome on the complexes that issue out of moral struggles against common decency, though they are commoner under democracy than the other kind, and infinitely more ferocious. A man who has throttled a
bad impulse has at least some consolation in his
agonies, but a man who has throttled a good one is
in a bad way indeed. Yet this great Republic swarms
with such men, and their sufferings are under every
eye. We have more of them, perhaps, than all the rest
of Christendom, with heathendom thrown in to make
it unanimous.
I marvel that no corn-fed Freud or Adler has ever
investigated the case of the learned judges among us,
and especially those of the Federal rite. Prohibition,
I suspect, has filled them with such repressions that
even a psychoanalyst, plowing into the matter, would
be shocked Enforcing its savage and anti-social mandates, with fanatics pulling them and blacklegs push



68      PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
ing them, has obviously compelled them to make away
with all the pruderies that are natural to men of their
class and condition. There may be individuals among
them, to be sure, who were born without any pruderies and hence do not suffer, just as there are individuals who were born without any capacity for affection and hence show no trace of the CEdipus complex, but such men must be very rare, even among politicians, even among lawyers. The average judge, I
take it, is much like the rest of us. When he is free
to do it, he does the decent thing. His natural impulse
is to speak the truth as he sees it, to challenge error
and imposture, to frown upon fraud. What, now, if
his high and solemn duties compel him to treat fraud
as if it were divine revelation? What if he must
spend his days prospering rogues and oppressing honest men? What if his oath wars horribly with his conscience? No Freud was needed to argue that the effect
upon him must be very evil. He cannot perform his
work without assassinating his inner integrity. Putting on his black gown, he must simultaneously cram
his unconscious with all the sound impulses and natural decencies that make him the noble fellow that
he is.
The clinical effects are certainly not occult. One
hears constantly of judges coming down with symptoms which, in ordinary men, would be accepted as
proofs of inner turmoils, insusceptible to correction




MEMOIRS OF A SUBJECT


69


by the pharmacopoeia. They break into hysterical
tirades from the bench; they speak in unintelligible
language; they deliver judgments that upset the laws
of logic; they complain of buzzings in the ears, flashes
before the eyes, and vague bellyaches. Two Federal
judges, of late, have committed suicide. One climbed
a high mountain in his motor-car, and then leaped
into space: a monstrous act, and no doubt of plain
significance to a Freudian adept. The other left a note
saying frankly that Prohibition had wrecked him.
The faculty has at such disturbances of the psyche
by hunting for focal infections and pulling teeth: the
whole judiciary tends to become toothless. But it
would be easier and cheaper and more effective, I am
convinced, to send for a psychoanalyst. The stricken
judge would come out of the room cured, and the
psychoanalyst would come out with a new outfit of
complexes.
I speak of the judges because their sufferings are
palpable. But there must be swarms of other victims
in this eminent free nation. Every one of us has been
under the steam-roller; every one of us, in this way
or that, conforms unwillingly, and has the corpse of
a good impulse belowstairs. There are probably no
exceptions. Psychoanalyze a Methodist bishop, and
you'll probably find him stuffed with good impulses,
all of them repressed. On blue afternoons, perhaps,
there sneaks out of his unconscious a civilized yearn



70      PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
ing for a decent drink; in the dark watches of the
night he remembers a Catholic girl of his youth, and
weeps that she was so fair; he may even, passing a
public library, feel a sudden, goatish inclination to
go in and read a good book. Suppressed, such appetites make him uncomfortable, unhappy, desperate,
an enemy to society. Dredged up by some superFreud, and dissipated in the sunlight, they would
leave him an honest and happy man.
5
Bach to Bach!
Ah, at evening, to be drinking from the glassy pond, to
have-oh, better than all marrow-bones!-the fresh illusion
of lapping up the stars!
I take the thought from Patou, the forwardlooking hound-dog in Rostand's "Chantecler." Let
him stand as a symbol of the whole melancholy company of crib-haltered but aspiring Americans, their
hands doomed to go-getting but their hearts leaping
into interstellar space. Patou, lifted to his hind legs
and outfitted with pantaloons, would have made a
capital Rotarian. Condemned by destiny to a kennel
in a barnyard, he yet had that soaring, humorless
Vision which is the essence of Rotary, and the secret,
no doubt, of its firm hold upon otherwise unpoetical
men. For even in the paradise of Babbitt, Babbitt




MEMOIRS OF A SUBJECT             71
is vaguely uneasy and unhappy. He needs something
more, he finds, than is to be found in bulging orderbooks, in innumerable caravans of prospects, and in
belching chimneys and laden trains. He needs something more than is to be got out of blowing spitballs
and playing golf. So he searches for that something
in the realms of the fancy, where the husks of things
fall and their inner sap is revealed. He reads the
dithyrambs of Edgar Albert Guest, Arthur Brisbane,
and Dr. Frank Crane. He listens to the exhortations of
itinerant rhetoricians, gifted and eloquent men, specialists in what it is all about. He intones "Sweet
Adeline," and is not ashamed of the tear that babbles down his nose. Thus Babbitt, too, is tantalized by
a Grail; he seeks it up and down the gorgeous corridors of his Statler Hotel, past the cigar-stand and
the lair of the hat-check gal, and on to the perfumed
catacombs of the lovely manicurist and the whiterobed chirotonsor. Non in solo pane vivit homo. Man
cannot live by bread alone. He must hope also. He
must dream. He must yearn.
The fact explains the Rotarian and his humble
brother, the Kiwanian; more, it strips them of not a
little of their superficial obnoxiousness. They are
fools, but they are not quite damned. If their quest
is carried on in motley, they at least trail after better
men. And so do all their brethren of Service, great
and small-the Americanizers, the Law Enforcers,




72       PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
the boosters and boomers, and the endless others after
their kind. At first glance, one sees in these visionaries
only noisy and preposterous fellows, disturbing the
peace of their betters. But a closer examination is
more favorable to them. They are tortured, in their
odd, clumsy fashion, by the same ringing in the ears
that maddened Ludwig van Beethoven. They suffer
from the same optical delusions, painful and not due
to sin, that set the prophets of antiquity to howling:
they look at a Harding or a Coolidge and see a Man.
What lures them to their bizarre cavortings-and it is
surely not to be sniffed at per se-is a dim and disturbing mirage of a world more lovely and serene
than the one the Lord God has doomed them to live
in. What they lack in common, thus diverging from
the prophets, is a rational conception of what it ought
to be, and might be.
It is somewhat astonishing that 100%  Americans
should wander so helplessly in this wilderness. For
there is a well-paved road across the whole waste, and
it issues, at its place of beginning, from the tombs of
the Fathers, and their sacred and immemorial dust.
Straight as a pistol shot it runs, until at the other end
it sweeps up a glittering slope to a shrine upon a high
hill. This shrine may be seen on fair days for many
leagues, and presents a magnificent spectacle. Its base
is confected of the bones of Revolutionary heroes,
and out of them rises an heroic effigy of George Wash



MEMOIRS OF A SUBJECT              73
ington, in alabaster. Surrounding this effigy, and on a
slightly smaller scale, are graven images of Jefferson,
Franklin, Nathan Hale, old Sam Adams, John Hancock and Paul Revere, each with a Bible under his
arm and the Stars and Stripes fluttering over his
shoulder. A bit to the rear, and without the Bible, is a
statue of Thomas Paine. Over the whole structure
stretch great bands of the tricolor, in silk, satin and
other precious fabrics. Red and white stripes run up
and down the legs of Washington, and his waistcoat
is spattered with stars. The effect is the grandiose one
of a Democratic national convention. At night, in the
American manner, spotlights play upon the shrine.
Hot dogs are on sale nearby, that pilgrims may not
hunger, and there is a free park for Fords, with running water and booths for the sale of spare parts. It
is the shrine of Liberty!
But where are the pilgrims? One observes the immense parking space and the huge pyramids of hot
dogs, and one looks for great hordes of worshipers,
fighting their way to the altar-steps. But they are non
est. Now and then a honeymoon couple wanders in
from the rural South or Middle West, to gape at the
splendors hand in hand, and now and then a schoolma'm arrives with a flock of her pupils, and lectures
them solemnly out of a book. More often, perhaps, a
foreign visitor is to be seen, with a couronne of tin
bay-leaves under his arm. He deposits the couronne




74      PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
at the foot of Washington, crosses himself lugubriously, and retires to the nearest hot dog stand. But
where are the Americanos? Where are the he-men,
heirs to the heroes whose gilded skulls here wait the
Judgment Day? Where are the Americanizers? Where
are the boosters and boomers? Where are the sturdy
Coolidge men? Where are the Rotarians, Kiwanians,
Lions? Where are the authors of newspaper editorials? The visionaries of Chautauqua? The keepers of
the national idealism? Go search for them, if you
don't trust the first report of your eyes! Go search for
honest men in Congress! They are simply not present.
For among all the visions that now inflame forwardlooking and up-and-coming men in this great Republic, there is no sign any more of the one that is older
than all the rest, and that is the vision of Liberty. The
Fathers saw it, and the devotion they gave to it went
far beyond three cheers a week. It survived into Jackson's time, and its glow was renewed in Lincoln's.
But now it is no more.
The phenomenon is curious, and deserves far more
study by eminent psychologists than it has got. I may
undertake that study as an amateur in a work reserved for my senility; at the moment I can only
point to the fact. Liberty, to-day, not only lacks its
old hot partisans and romantic fanatics in America;
it has grown so disreputable that even to mention it,
save in terms of a fossilized and hollow rhetoric, be



MEMOIRS OF A SUBJECT              75
comes a sort of indecorum. I know of but one national organization that advocates it with any genuine
heartiness, and that organization, not long ago, was
rewarded with a violent denunciation on the floor of
the House of Representatives: only the lone Socialist,
once in jail himself for the same offense, made bold
to defend it. From the chosen elders of the nation, legislative, executive and judicial, one hears only that
demanding it is treason. It is the first duty of the free
citizen, it appears, to make a willing sacrifice of the
Bill of Rights. He must leap to the business gladly,
and with no mental reservations. If he pauses, then he
is a Bolshevik.
I venture to argue that this doctrine is evil, and
that renouncing it would yield a sweeter usufruct to
the American people than all the varieties of Service
that now prevail. Of what use is it for Kiwanis to buy
wooden legs for one-legged boys if they must grow
up as slaves to the Anti-Saloon League? What is the
net gain to a boomed and boosted town if its people,
coincidentally, lose their right to trial by jury and
their inviolability of domicile? Who gives a damn
for the Coolidge idealism if its chief agent and executor, even above the Cabinet, is the Board of Temperance, Prohibition and Public Morals of the Methodist Episcopal Church, i. e., a gang of snooty ecclesiastics, committed unanimously to the doctrines
that Christ should have been jailed for the business at




76      PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
Cana, that God sent she bears to "tare" forty-two
little children because they had made fun of Elisha's
bald head, and that Jonah swallowed the whale?
Imagine an immigrant studying the new science of
Americanism, and coming to the eighteen amendments to the Constitution. What will he make of the
discovery that only the Eighteenth embodies a categorical imperative-that all the others must yield to
it when they conflict with it-that the Fourteenth and
Fifteenth are not binding upon the Prohibitionists of
the South and that the First, Fourth, Fifth and Sixth
are not binding upon Prohibitionists anywhere?
I preach reaction. Bach to Bach! I can't find the
word Service in the Constitution, but what is there
is sounder and nobler than anything ever heard of
where Regular Fellows meet to slap backs and blow
spitballs-or, at all events, it was there before January 16, 1920. The Fathers, too, had a Vision. They
were, in their way, forward-lookers; they were even
go-getters. What they dreamed of and fought for was
a civilization based upon a body of simple, equitable
and reasonable laws-a code designed to break the
chains of lingering mediavalism, and set the individual free. The thing they imagined was a commonwealth of free men, all equal before the law. Some
of them had grave doubts about it, and put off making it a reality as long as possible, but in the end the
optimists won over the doubters, and they all made




MEMOIRS OF A SUBJECT              77
the venture together. I am myself no partisan of their
scheme. It seems to me that there were fundamental
defects in it-that some of their primary assumptions
were false. But in their intention, at least, there was
something exhilarating, and in it there was also something sound. That something was the premiss that the
first aim of civilization is to augment and safeguard
the dignity of man-that it is worth nothing to be a
citizen of a commonwealth which holds the humblest
citizen cheaply and uses him ill.
This is what we have lost, and not all the whooping
and yelling of new messiahs can cover the fact. The
government, as I have shown, becomes the common
enemy of all well-disposed and decent men. It commandeers and wastes their money, it assaults and in.
sults them with outrageous and extravagant laws, and
it turns loose upon them a horde of professional
blackguards, bent only upon destroying their liberties.
The individual, facing this pestilence of tyranny and
corruption, finds himself quite helpless. If he goes to
the agents of the government itself with his protest,
he gets only stupid reviling. If he turns to his fellow
victims for support, he is lucky to escape jail. Worse,
he is lucky to escape lynching. For the thing has gone
so far that the great majority of dull and unimaginative men have begun to take it as a matter of course
-almost as the order of nature. The Bill of Rights
becomes a mere series of romantic dithyrambs, with



78      PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
out solid substance or meaning-say, like the Sermon
on the Mount. The schoolbooks of the next generation will omit it. The few fanatics who remember it
will keep it on the top shelf, along with the Family
Doctor Book, the scientific works of Dr. Marie Scopes,
and "Only a Boy."
Against all this I protest, feebly and too late. The
land swarms with Men of Vision, all pining for Service. What I propose is that they forget their brummagem Grails for one week, and concentrate their pep
upon a chase that really leads uphill. Let us have a
Bill of Rights Week. Let us have a Common Decency
Week.




III. THE HUMAN MIND


1
On Metaphysicians
I N the Summer of the year, when the weather on
my estates in the Maryland jungles is too
hot for serious mental activity, I always give
over a couple of weeks to a re-reading of the so-called
philosophical classics, with a glance or two at the
latest compositions of the extant philosophers. It is a
far from agreeable job, and I undertake it sadly, as
a surgeon, after an untoward and fatal hemorrhage,
brushes up on anatomy; there is, somewhere down in
my recesses, an obscure conviction that I owe a duty
to my customers, who look to me to flatter them with
occasional dark references to Aristotle, Spinoza and
the categorical imperative. Out of the business,
despite its high austerity, I always carry away the
feeling that I have had a hell of a time. That is, I
carry away the feeling that the art and mystery of
philosophy, as it is practiced in the world by professional philosophers, is largely moonshine and windmusic-or, to borrow Henry Ford's searching term,
bunk.
79




80      PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
Is this anarchy and atheism? Has Russian gold got
to me at last? Am I in training for the abattoir of the
Department of Justice? In stay of execution I can
only point to the philosophy books themselves. For
three millenniums their authors have been searching
the world and its suburbs for the truth-and they
have yet to agree upon so much as the rules of the
search. Since the dawn of time they have been trying to get order and method into the thinking of Homo
sapiens-and Homo sapiens, when he thinks at all,
is still a brother to the lowly ass (Equus africanus),
even to the ears and the bray. I include the philosophers themselves, unanimously and especially. True
enough, one arises now and then who somehow manages to be charming and even plausible. I point to
Plato, to Nietzsche, to Schopenhauer. But it is always
as poet or politician, not as philosopher. The genuine
professional, sticking to his gloomy speculations, is
as dull as a table of logarithms. What man in human
history ever wrote worse than Kant? Was it, perhaps,
Hegel? My own candidate, if I were pushed, would
be found among the so-called Critical Realists of today. They achieve the truly astounding feats of writing worse than the New Thoughters, whom they also
resemble otherwise-nay, even worse than the late
Warren Gamaliel Harding.
What reduces all philosophers to incoherence and
folly, soon or late, is the lure of the absolute. It tor



THE HUMAN MIND                 81
tures them as the dream of Law Enforcement tortures Prohibitionists. Now and then, when they forget
it transiently, they grow relatively rational and even
ingratiating, but in the long run they always resume
their chase of it, and that chase carries them inevitably into the intellectual Bad Lands. For the absolute, of course, is a mere banshee, a concept without substance or reality. No such thing exists. When,
by logical devices, it is triumphantly established, the
feat is exactly on all fours with that of the mathematician who proved that twice two was double once two.
Who believes in Kant's categorical imperatives today? Certainly not any student of psychology who
has got beyond the first page of his horn-book. There
is, in fact, no idea in any man that may be found
certainly in all men. Only the philosophers seem to
cling to the doctrine that there is. Functioning as
theologians, for example, they still argue for the immortality of the soul on the ground that a yearning
for immortal life is in all of us. But that is simply
nonsense. I know scores of men in whom no such
yearning is apparent, either outwardly or in their consciousness. I have seen such men die, and they passed
into what they held to be oblivion without showing
the slightest sign of wishing that it was something
else. All the other absolutes, whether theological, ethical or philosophical in the strict sense, are likewise
chimeras. On inspection it always turns out that they




82       PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
are no more the same to all men than a woman A or
a cocktail B is the same to all men. They are even
different to the same man at different times. I cherished ethical postulates at the age of twenty-one that
seem puerile to me to-day, and to-day I am cherishing postulates that would have shocked me then.
Quod est veritas? Simply something that seems to me
to be so-now, and to me. It has no more objective
character than the sweet and dreadful passion of love.
It is as tenderly personal and private as a gallstone.
The common sense of mankind, which is immensely superior to the anaemic, camphor-smelling
wisdom of philosophers, long ago revolted against
the quest of the absolute. Men found back in Mousterian days that it got them nowhere, but left them,
intellectually speaking, with one leg up and one leg
down. So they began to set up arbitrary values, if only
to get some peace. Religion is a series of such arbitrary values. Most of them are dubious, and many
of them are palpably false, but the experience of the
race has shown that, for certain types of mind and in
certain situations, they work. So they are accepted as,
if not quite true, then as true enough, and the gloomy
business of rectifying them, when they need it, is
turned over to theologians, who are enemies of mankind anyhow, and thus deserve and get no sympathy
when they suffer. Arbitrary values of the same sort
are made use of every day in all the fields of human




THE HUMAN MIND                83
speculation and activity. They are brilliantly visible
in the field of politics and government. Here they are
rammed into children in the little red schoolhouse,
and questioning them later in life becomes a crime
against the Holy Ghost. Is it therefore to be assumed
that they are true? Not at all. Many of them are so
transparently dubious that even patriots, preparing to
mumble them, have to make ready for it by closing
their eyes and taking long breaths. But they at least
work. They at least get some semblance of order into
the complicated and dangerous business of living together in society. They at least relieve the mind. And
so they are cherished.
Unfortunately, human existence is not static but
dynamic, and in consequence the axioms that work
well to-day tend to work less well to-morrow. Now
and then, as the social organization changes, certain
ancient and honorable ones have to be abandoned.
This is always a perilous business, and usually it is
accomplished only by a letting of blood. The fact is
not without its significance. In the long run, I believe,
it will be found that (as the Behaviorists argue even
now) human ideas come out of the liver far more
often than they come out of the soul, and that changing them is a job for surgeons rather than for metaphysicians. The thought leads at once to a constructive
suggestion, and in the exalted field of pedagogy. What
is the present aim of education, as the professors




84      PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
thereof expound it? To make good citizens. And what
is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does
or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the
highest possible point. A school is a hopper into which
children are heaved while they are still young and
tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard
shapes and covered from head to heels with official
rubber-stamps. Unluckily, it is a very inefficient machine. Many children, though squeezed diligently,
do not take the standard shapes. Others have hides so
oily that the most indelible of rubber-stamps is
washed from them by the first rain, or even blown
from them by the first wind.
It is my notion that surgery will one day find a
remedy for this unpleasant and dangerous state of
affairs. It will first perfect means of detecting such
aberrant children in their early youth, and then it
will devise means of curing them. The child who
laughs when the Bill of Rights is read will not be
stood in a corner and deprived of chewing-gum, as
now; it will be sent to the operating-table, and the
offending convolution, or gland, or tumor, or whatever it is will be cut out. While it is lying open all
other suspicious excrescences will be removed, and
so it will be returned to the class-room a normal
100% American. This scheme, if it turns out to be
practicable, will add a great deal to the happiness of




THE HUMAN MIND                 85
the American people. It will not only protect those of
us who are naturally respectable from the menace of
strange and disturbing ideas; it will also relieve the
present agonies of those who cherish them. For the
search for imaginary absolutes-i. e., for the truth,
that ghost-is not pleasant, as poets allege, but intensely painful. There is no record in human history
of a happy philosopher: they exist only in romantic
legend. Many of them have committed suicide; practically all of them have turned their children out
of doors and beaten their wives. And no wonder! If
you want to find out how a philosopher feels when
he is engaged in the practice of his profession, go to
the nearest zoo and watch a chimpanzee at the wearying and hopeless job of chasing fleas. Both suffer
damnably, and neither can win.
2
On Suicide
The suicide rate, so I am told by an intelligent
mortician, is going up everywhere on earth. It is good
news to his profession, which has been badly used
of late by the progress of medical science, and
scarcely less so by the rise of cut-throat, go-getting
competition within its own ranks. It is also good news
to those romantic optimists who like to believe that




86       PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
the human race is capable of rational acts. What
could be more logical than suicide? What could be
more preposterous than keeping alive? Yet nearly all
of us cling to life with desperate devotion, even when
the length of it remaining is palpably slight, and
filled with agony. Half the time of all medical men
is wasted keeping life in human wrecks who have no
more intelligible reason for hanging on than a cow
has for mooing.
In part, no doubt, this absurd frenzy has its springs
in the human imagination, or, as it is more poetically
called, the human reason. Man, having acquired the
high faculty of visualizing death, visualizes it as
something painful and dreadful. It is, of course, seldom anything of the sort. The proceedings anterior
to it are sometimes (though surely not always) painful, but death itself appears to be almost devoid of
sensation, either psychic or physical. The candidate,
facing it at last, simply loses his faculties. Death is
no more to him than it is to a coccus. The dreadful,
like the painful, is not in it. It is far more likely to
show elements of the grotesque. I speak here, of
course, of natural death. Suicide is plainly more unpleasant, if only because there is some uncertainty
about it. The candidate hesitates to shoot himself be.
cause he fears, with some show of reason, that he
may fail to kill himself, and only hurt himself. Moreover, this shooting, along with most of the other more




THE HUMAN MIND                  87
common aids to an artificial exitus, involves a kind
of affront to his dignity: it is apt to make a mess.
But that objection, it seems to me, is one that is bound
to disappear with the progress of science. Safe, sure,
easy and sanitary methods of departing this life will
be invented. Some, in truth, are already known, and
perhaps the fact explains the steady increase in suicides, so satisfactory to my mortician friend.
I pass over the theological objections to selfdestruction as too transparently sophistical to be
worth a serious answer. From the earliest days Christianity has depicted life on this earth as so sad and
vain that its value is indistinguishable from that of
a damn. Then why cling to it? Simply because its
vanity and unpleasantness are parts of the will of a
Creator whose love for His creatures takes the form
of torturing them. If they revolt in this world they
will be tortured a million times worse in the next. I
present the argument as a typical specimen of theological reasoning, and proceed to more engaging themes.
Specifically, to my original thesis: that it is difficult,
if not impossible, to discover any evidential or logical reason, not instantly observed to be full of fallacy, for keeping alive. The fact that we nevertheless
do it is no more than proof that reason is mainly only
a sort of afterthought. I enjoy the effects of alcohol
when I am sad. Ergo, all Prohibitionists are fools and
most of them are scoundrels. Alcohol makes me ill




88      PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
and killed my Uncle Emil. Ergo, it ought to be prohibited by law, as it is by the Holy Scriptures, though
in a passage that, at the moment, I can't recall. I admire and enjoy Americans, particularly when they
make asses of themselves. Ergo, any foreigner who
essays to butcher them is a fiend from Hell. Americans fatigue me. Ergo, the same foreigner is a charming fellow.
But sometimes these second thoughts-and all
thoughts are second thoughts-are unanimous, and
then they become what is called universal wisdom.
The universal wisdom of the world long ago concluded that life is mainly a curse. Turn to the proverbial philosophy of any race, and you will find it full
of a sense of the futility of the mundane struggle.
Anticipation is better than realization. Disappointment is the lot of man. We are born in pain and die
in sorrow. The lucky man died a' Wednesday. He
giveth His beloved sleep. I could run the list to pages.
If you disdain folk-wisdom, secular or sacred, then
turn to the immortal works of William Shakespeare.
They drip with such pessimism from end to end. If
there is any general idea in them, it is the idea that
human existence is a painful futility. Out, out, brief
candle!
Yet we cling to it in a muddl-ed physiological sort
of way-or, perhaps more accurately, in a pathological way-and even try to fill it with a gaudy hocus



THE HUMAN MIND                 89
pocus. All men who, in any true sense, are sentient strive mightily for distinction and power, i. e.,
for the respect and envy of their fellowmen, i. e., for
the ill-natured admiration of an endless series of
miserable and ridiculous bags of rapidly disintegrating amino acids. Why? If I knew, I'd certainly not
be writing books in this infernal American climate;
I'd be sitting in state in a hall of crystal and gold,
and people would be paying $10 a head to gape at
me through peepholes. But though the central mystery remains, it is possible, perhaps, to investigate the
superficial symptoms to some profit. I offer myself
as a laboratory animal. Why have I worked so hard
for thirty years, desperately striving to accomplish
something that remains impenetrable to me to this
day? Is it because I desire money? Bosh! I can't recall ever desiring it for an instant: I have always
found it easy to get all I wanted. Is it, then, notoriety
that I am after? Again the answer must be no. The attention of strangers is unpleasant to me, and I avoid
it as much as possible. Then is it a yearning to Do
Good that moves me? Bosh and blah! If I am convinced of anything, it is that Doing Good is in bad
taste.
Once I ventured the guess that men worked in response to a vague inner urge for self-expression. But
that was probably a feeble theory, for some men who
work the hardest have nothing to express. An hypothe



90       PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
sis with rather more plausibility in it now suggests
itself. It is that men work simply in order to escape
the depressing agony of contemplating life-that
their work, like their play, is a mumbo-jumbo that
serves them by permitting them to escape from reality. Both work and play, ordinarily, are illusions.
Neither serves any solid and permanent purpose. If
work has what is called value, then it only condemns
more human beings to work. But life, stripped of
such illusions, instantly becomes unbearable. Man
cannot sit still, contemplating his destiny in this
world, without going frantic. So he invents ways to
take his mind off the horror. He works. He plays. He
accumulates the preposterous nothing called property.
He strives for the coy eye-wink called fame. He
founds a family, and spreads his curse over others.
All the while the thing that moves him is simply the
yearning to lose himself, to forget himself, to escape
the tragi-comedy that is himself. Life, fundamentally,
is not worth living. So he confects artificialities to
make it so. So he erects a gaudy structure to conceal
the fact that it is not so.
Perhaps my talk of agonies and tragi-comedies may
be a bit misleading. The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore.
It is not so much a war as an endless standing in
line. The objection to it is not that it is predominantly
painful, but that it is lacking in sense. What is ahead




THE HUMAN MIND                91
for the race? Even theologians, to whom devils are
easily visible, can see nothing but a gray emptiness,
with a burst of irrational fireworks at the end. But
there is such a thing as human progress. True. It is
the progress that a felon makes from the watch-house
to the jail, and from the jail to the death-house.
Every generation faces the same intolerable boredom.
I speak as one who has had what must be regarded,
speaking statistically, as a happy life. I work a great
deal, but working is more agreeable to me than anything else I can imagine. I am conscious of no vast,
overwhelming and unattainable desires. I want nothing that I can't get. But it remains my conclusion, at
the gate of senility, that the whole thing is a grandiose futility, and not even amusing. The end is always
a vanity, and usually a sordid one, without any noble
touch of the pathetic. The means remain. In them lies
the secret of what is called contentment, i.e., the
capacity to postpone suicide for at least another day.
They are themselves without meaning, but at all
events they offer a way of escape from the paralyzing
reality. The central aim of life is to simulate extinction. We have been yelling up the wrong rain-spout.
3
On Controversy
Any man engaged habitually in controversy, as I




92      PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
have been for twenty years past, must enter upon
his declining days with a melancholy sense of its
hollowness and futility. Especially in this great Republic, where all ideas are suspect, it tends almost
inevitably to degenerate into a mere exchange of
nonsense. Have you ever examined carefully the
speeches made by the candidates in a Presidential
campaign? If so, you know that they are of bilge
and blather all compact. Now and then, true enough,
one of the august aspirants to the Washingtonian
breeches is goaded or misled into saying something
pungent and even apposite, but not often, not deliberately. His daily stint is simply balderdash.
It is rare, indeed, to encounter a controversialist
who states his own case clearly, or who shows any
sign of understanding his opponent's. Turn, for example, to the current combat between the Fundamentalists and the Modernists-an academic and
puerile duel in our great Sodoms and Ninevehs, but
raging like an oil fire in the Bible and Hookworm
Belt, where men are he and Hell yawns. Both sides
wallow in pishposh. The Fundamentalists, claiming a
monopoly of faith, allege that they believe the whole
Bible verbatim et literatim, which is not true, for at
least 99 % of them reject Exodus xxii, 18, to say
nothing of I Timothy v, 23. And the Modernists argue
that there is no conflict between science and Holy
Writ, which is even less true. This controversy, in




THE HUMAN MIND


93


fact, is almost classical in character. Neither side is
able to stick to the question at issue. Each tries to
dispose of the other by delivering mighty wallops
below the belt-the Fundamentalists by passing laws
converting the Modernists into criminals (that is, as
criminality is now defined by American jurisprudence), and the Modernists by depicting the Fundamentalists as a horde of gibbering baboons, sworn to
uproot civilization and not above suspicion of cannibalism.
I have had a hand in this great battle of scattered
wits myself, striving in an austere and lofty manner
to introduce the sublime principles of Aristotle's
"Organon" into it. I have got the traditional reward
of one stopping to preach in front of a house afire.
The more extreme Modernists-which is to say, the
professional atheists,-discontented because I haven't
advocated hanging the Fundamentalists, denounce
me as a Crypto-Calvinist, and hold me up to obloquy
in their papers. The Fundamentalists, suspecting
me of a partiality for Darwin, accuse me of trying
to upset the Ten Commandments, and one of the
most eminent of them lately hinted that I have personally had a bout with No. 7, and come to grief
in the manner described by the late Dr. Sylvanus
Stall, in his well-known work on pathology, "What
Every Boy of Fourteen Should Know." This last accusation was novel, but, as they run in such affairs,




94      PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
very mild. The usual charge against an opponent,
in the America of to-day, is that he is a Bolshevist,
and in receipt of traitor's gold. It has been leveled
at me so often that probably a majority of the persons
who have heard of me at all believe it, and there are
even dismal days when I half believe it myself,
though I have been denouncing Socialism publicly
for twenty years, and am, in fact, an incurable Tory
in politics. A short while ago a Boston critic, becoming aware of the latter fact by some miracle, at once
proceeded to denounce me because my radicalism, as
he thought he had discovered, was bogus.
During the decade 1910-1920 I was chiefly engaged in literary controversies, and so my politics
were aside from the issue. But when the great wave
of idealism engulfed the United States in 1917, I
was at once bawled out as a German spy, and open
demands were made that my purely aesthetic heresies
be put down by the Polizei. One of my opponents,
in those days, was an eminent college professor, now
unhappily deceased. He not only attempted to dispose of my literary judgments by arguing that they
were inspired by the Kaiser; he even made the same
charge against the works of the writers I was currently whooping up. And so did many of his learned
colleagues. It was not easy to meet this onslaught by
logical devices; logic, in those days, was completely
adjourned, along with the Bill of Rights. Moreover,




THE HUMAN MIND                95
there was a considerable plausibility in the general
charge. So I attempted no defense; it is, indeed,
against my nature to take the defensive. Instead, I
launched into an elaborate effort to prove that all
college professors, regardless of their politics, were
hollow and preposterous asses, and to this business
I brought up all the ancient and horrifying devices of
the art of rhetoric.
The issue of the controversy was characteristic:
thus all combats in the realm of so-called ideas end.
The moment the War to End War was over there
came a revulsion against its blather, and so it was
no longer damaging to me to be accused of taking
the money of the Hohenzollern. Thus the professor
I have mentioned suddenly found his principal ammunition gone, and in an effort to unearth more he began
reading the books I had been advocating. To his
surprise he found that many of them were works of
high merit, whereupon he began whooping for them
himself, and even going beyond my loudest hurrahs.
In the end he was actually searching them for evidences of Teutonic influence, and hailing it with
enthusiasm when found! His poor fellow-professors,
meanwhile, were the goats. I ceased to revile them,
once the war was over, and devoted myself mainly
to political and moral concerns, but various other
controversialists took up the jehad where I left off,
and in a short time it was raging from coast to coast.




96      PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
It got far beyond anything I had myself dreamed
of. Indignant publicists, quite unknown to me, began
grouping all professors with chiropractors, Congressmen and spiritualists. In dozens of colleges large and
small, North, East, South and West, the students
began holding meetings and flinging insults at their
tutors. Scores of college papers, for flouting them in
contumacious terms, had to be suppressed. In several
great institutions of learning the thing actually
reached the form of physical assault. When the smoke
cleared away the professor, once so highly respected
by every one, found himself a sort of questionable
character, and he remains so to this day. In many
cases, I believe, he actually is, but surely not in all.
The point is that the virtuous have suffered with the
guilty. Many an honest and God-fearing professor,
laboriously striving to ram his dismal nonsense into
the progeny of Babbitts, is bombarded with ribald
spit-balls as a result of a controversy which begun
quite outside his ken and speedily got far beyond the
issue between the original combatants.
Such are the ways of war in the psychic field.
Why they should be so I don't know, but so they are.
No controversy to my knowledge has ever ended on
the ground where it began. Even the historic one
between Huxley and Wilberforce, two of the most
eminent men of their time in England, ranged all
over the landscape before the contestants had enough.




THE HUMAN MIND                97
It began with Huxley trying to prove that Darwin's
"Origin of Species" was a sound book; it ended with
Bishop Wilberforce trTying to prove that Huxley's
grandfather was a gorilla, What was its issue? Did
Huxley convert Wilberforce? Did Wilberforce make
any dent in the armor of Huxley? I apologize for
wasting your time with silly rhetorical questions. Did
Luther convert Leo X? Did Grant convert Lee?
16
On Faith
Some time ago I received a letter from a learned
Socialist, once very active in the movement, but long
since retired. It was stuffed with circulars advertising a new sure cure for all human ills, from bellyache to cancer. This invention, the Socialist assured
me, was no fake. He had personally seen it snatch
back men and women from the brink of the grave.
It would be in use everywhere, he said, and saving
hundreds of thousands of lives a year, if it were not
for the hellish conspiracies of the American Medical
Association.
It all seemed familiar. More, it all seemed quite
natural. For who has ever heard of a Socialist who
did not also believe in some other quackery? I have
known all of the principal gladiators of the move



98       PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
ment in my time, at least in America; I have yet to
meet one who was not as gullible as a Mississippi
darkey, nay, even a Mississippi white man. Didn't
Karl Marx himself carry a madstone and believe in
astrology? If not, then it was strange indeed. Didn't
Debs believe that quinine would cure a cold? If
not, then he was not a genuine Socialist.
The leading living Socialist of this great Republic
is Upton Sinclair. Perhaps, indeed, he is the only
leader the movement has left, for Debs is dead, and
most of the rest leaped down the sewers during the
late war. Well, Sinclair believes in so many different
kinds of nonsense that he needs two thick volumes
to record them. He was one of the earliest believers
in the fasting cure for catarrh, and he was one of
the first dupes to be roped in by the late Dr. Albert
Abrams, the San Francisco swindler. I do not hold
all this against Sinclair: he is a charming fellow
otherwise. I merely say that such credulity is natural
to Socialists. Turn to England, where one of the late
heroes of the movement is young Oliver Baldwin,
son of the Prime Minister. Some time ago the Associated Press was reporting from London that Oliver
had taken to spiritualism and was hearing "spirit
voices coming from all parts of the room in no fewer
than five languages."
As I have said, practically all of the more eminent
Socialists of the United States took to the sewers in




THE HUMAN MIND                99
1917. When the gun-men of the Hon. A. Mitchell
Palmer began rounding up the lesser comrades, and
pliant Federal judges began sending them to Atlanta
for five, ten and twenty years, the high-toned members of the movement saw a great light, and began
to bawl and sob for the flag. Now, with the danger
over, they can't get back: the surviving comrades
won't have anything to do with them, and even denounce them bitterly as scabs. But if the Marxian
grove is thus closed to them, there is plenty of room
for them around other flambeaux, and all of them
seem to be crowding up. A considerable number, in
1920, became violent Prohibitionists, and began predicting that the country would be bone-dry in two
years. Others became chiropractors. Yet others announced that they were converted to the League of
Nations. Many became spiritualists, and a few, I
believe, followed Sinclair in succumbing to Dr.
Abrams. The rest went in for free love, Fundamentalism, mental telepathy, the Harding idealism,
Texas oil stocks, numerology, the poetry of T. S.
Eliot, the music of Eric Satie, or the ouija board.
One or two became professional sorcerers. The point
is that every last one of them found some sort of
satisfaction and solace for the imperative need of
his nature-every one found something outlandish
and preposterous to believe in. For all of them, as
ex-Socialists, had believing minds. They could get




100     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
rid of their Socialism, especially when helped by the
Polizei, but they could no more get rid of their believing minds than they could get rid of the shapes
of their heads. A Socialist, in brief, is simply a man
suffering from an overwhelming compulsion to believe what is not true. He yearns for it as a cow
yearns for the milkmaid, lowing in the cool of the
evening. He pines for it as a dry Congressman pines
for a drink.
Of all the things that are palpably not true Socialism is one of the most satisfying to men of that romantic kidney, and so nine-tenths of them, at one
time or another in their lives, are Socialists, or, if
not Socialists, then at least Progressives, or Single
Taxers, or evangelists of Farm Relief. But Socialism,
though it is sweet, is never enough for them, and
neither is the Single Tax. They always reach out for
something else. They always succumb to some other
and worse Marx, with longer whiskers and dirtier
finger-nails. Years ago, when the Single Taxers were
still making a noise in the land, I made a roster of
the princes of the movement, setting down beside
each name the varieties of balderdash that its owner
believed in. There was not a single name without
two entries and some of them had a dozen. One of
the leading Single Taxers was also president of the
League for Medical Freedom, a verein of quacks
organized to oppose vaccination. Another was a




THE HUMAN MIND               101
militant anti-vivisectionist, and proposed that the
Johns Hopkins Medical School be closed by the police. A third was an anthropophagous atheist of the
kind that proselytes, especially among peaceable old
ladies. A third was a table-tapper, and a fourth got
messages from the ghosts of Martin Luther, Lucy
Stone and Sitting Bull. A fifth deserted his wife for
a cutie with pansy eyes, and lost, in consequence,
his job as a college professor. A sixth, believing that
he was Millard Fillmore, was put away by his family.
What lies beneath all this is simply an ancient
fact, noted long ago by William James, and before
him by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, and before him
by the Greeks, and before the Greeks by the first
human politicians. It is the fact that the race of men
is divided sharply into two classes: those who are
what James called tough-minded, and demand proofs
before they will believe, and those who are what he
called tender-minded, and are willing to believe
anything that seems to be pleasant. It is the tenderminded who keep quacks of all sorts well-fed and
active, and hence vastly augment the charm of this
world. They find it wholly impossible to distinguish
between what is subjectively agreeable and what is
objectively true. Would it be nice if the whole world
turned sober overnight, and even flappers put away
the jug? If so, then there must be a quick and sure
way to accomplish it. Does Prohibition promise to




102     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
do so? If so, then Prohibition must be true. This is
precisely the route by which Sinclair became a Prohibitionist-one of his follies that I forgot to mention
above. And this is the route by which multitudes of
his tender-hearted brethren and sistren followed him
into the jaws of the Anti-Saloon League.
Socialism, while it was still vague and untested,
appealed powerfully to all such persons. Fifteen or
twenty years ago it was making immense progress
in the United States, vice Free Silver, deceased. All
the young college professors, in those days, were
Socialists, as they are now eugenists and birth controllers. It swept and enchanted the tender-minded.
Fat women wept over it, as they now weep over the
Armenians. But one day it collided slambang with
the harsh and horrible facts. One day it was put to
the test in Russia,-and promptly blew up. Even the
tender-minded could not dodge the appalling proofs.
So they fled in this direction and that. Some took to
spiritualism, some to chiropractic, some to Genesis.
Some, like Sinclair, took to Prohibition, the Single
Tax, fasting, and the electronic vibrations of Dr.
Abrams. But not one, so far as I can make out, took
to sense.




IV. CLARION CALL TO POETS


O        NE of the crying needs of the time in this
incomparable Republic-the goal and despair of all other and hence lesser statesis for a suitable Burial Service for the admittedly
damned. I speak as one who has of late attended the
funeral orgies of several such gentlemen, each time
to my aesthetic distress. The first of these gentlemen,
having a great abhorrence of rhetoric in all its
branches, left strict orders that not a word was to be
said at his obsequies. The result was two extremely
chilly and uncomfortable moments: when six of us
walked into his house in utter silence and carried
out his clay, and when we shoved it, in the same
crawling silence, into the yawning fire-box of the
crematory. The whole business was somehow unnatural and even a shade indecent: it violated one
of the most ancient sentiments of Homo sapiens to
dispatch so charming a fellow in so cavalier a fashion. One felt almost irresistibly impelled to say
good-by to him in some manner or other, if only,
soldier fashion, by blowing a bugle and rolling a
drum. Even the mortician, an eminent star of one of
103




104     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
the most self-possessed of professions, looked a bit
uneasy and ashamed.
The second funeral was even worse. The deceased
had been a Socialist of the militantly anti-clerical
variety, and threatened, on his death-bed, to lea,
from his coffin with roars if a clergyman were hired
to snuffle over him. His widow accordingly asked
two of his Socialist colleagues to address the mourners. They prepared for the business by resorting to
a bootlegger, and in consequence both of them were
garrulous and injudicious. One of them traced the
career of Karl Marx in immense detail, and deduced
from it a long series of lessons for ambitious American boys. The other, after first denouncing the New
York Times, read twenty or thirty cantos of execrable
poetry from the Freethinker. If the widow had not per.
formed a series of very realistic sobs-leaning for
support, I may add, upon a comrade who soon afterward succeeded to the rights of the deceased in her
person and real estate-the ceremony would have
been indistinguishable from a session of the House
of Representatives.
The third funeral was conducted by Freemasons,
who came in plug hats and with white aprons over
their cow-catchers. They entered the house of mourning in a long file, with their hats held over their left
breasts in the manner of a President reviewing an
inaugural parade, and filed past the open coffin at a




CLARION CALL TO POETS            105
brisk parade march. As each passed he gave a swift,
mechanical glance at the fallen brother: there was in
it the somewhat metallic efficiency of an old hand.
These Freemasons brought their own limousines and
took a place in the funeral procession ahead of the
hearse. At the cemetery they deployed around the
grave, and as soon as the clergyman had finished
his mumbo-jumbo, began a ceremonial of their own.
Their leader, standing at the head of the grave with
his plug hat on, first read a long series of quasitheological generalities-Lto the general effect, so far
as I could make out, that Freemasons are immune to
Hell, as they are notoriously immune to hanging-,
and then a brother at the foot of the grave replied.
After that there was a slight pause, and in rather
ragged chorus the rest of the brethren said "So mote
it be!" This went on almost endlessly; I was heartily
glad when it was over. The whole ceremony, in fact,
was tedious and trashy. As for me, I'd rather have
been planted by a Swedenborgian, whiskers and all.
Or even by a grand goblin of the Ethical Culture
Society.
What is needed, and what I bawl for politely, is
a service that is free from the pious but unsupported
asseverations that revolt so many of our best minds,
and yet remains happily graceful and consoling. It
will be very hard, I grant you, to concoct anything
as lasciviously beautiful as the dithyrambs in the




106     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
Book of Common Prayer. Who wrote them originally I don't know, but whoever did it was a poet.
They put the highly improbable into amazingly
luscious words, and the palpably not-true into words
even more caressing and disarming. It is impossible
to listen to them, when they are intoned by a High
Church rector of sepulchral gifts, without harboring
a sneaking wish that, by some transcendental magic,
they could throw off their lowly poetical character
and take on the dignity and reliability of prose
in other words, that the departed could be actually
imagined as leaping out of the grave on the Last
Morn, his split colloids all restored to their pristine
complexity, his clothes neatly scoured and pressed,
and every molecule of him thrilling with a wild surmise. I have felt this wish at the funerals of many
virtuous and earnest brethren, whose sole sin was
their refusal to swallow such anecdotes as the one
in II Kings ii, 23-24. It seems a pity that men of
that sort should be doomed to Hell, and it seems an
even greater pity that they should be laid away to
the banal chin-music of humorless Freemasons and
stewed Socialists.
But, so far as I know, no suitable last rites for
them have ever been drawn up. Between the service
in the Book of Common Prayer (and its various analogues, nearly all of them greatly inferior) and the
maudlin mortuary dialogues of the Freemasons, Ku




CLARION CALL TO POETS             107
Kluxers, Knights of Pythias and other such assassins
of beauty there is absolutely nothing. Even the professional agnostics, who are violently literary, have never
produced anything worthy to be considered; their best
is indistinguishable from the text of a flag-drill or
high-school pageant. Thus the average American
skeptic, when his time comes to return to earth, is
commonly turned off with what, considering his prejudices, may be best described as a razzing. His
widow, disinclined to risk scandal by burying him
without any ceremonies at all, calls in the nearest
clergyman, and the result is a lamentable comedy,
creditable neither to honest faith nor to honest doubt.
More than once, in attendance upon such an affair,
I have observed a sardonic glitter in the eye of the
pastor, especially when he came to the unequivocal
statement that the deceased would infallibly rise
again. Did he secretly doubt it? Or was he poking
fun at a dead opponent, now persuaded of the truth
of revelation at last? In either case there was something unpleasant in the spectacle. A suitable funeral
for doubters, full of lovely poetry but devoid of
any specific pronouncement on the subject of a future
life, would make such unpleasantness unnecessary.
We have the poets for the job, and I incline to
suspect that their private theological ideas fit them
for it. Skepticism, in fact, runs with their cynical
trade. Most Americans, as every one knows, give their




108     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
ecclesiastical affiliations in "Who's Who in America"
-especially Congressmen, pedagogues, bank presidents and uplifters. But not the poets. The sole exception, so far as I can make out, is Vachel Lindsay,
who reports that he is a member of the "Christian
(Disciples) Church," a powerful sect in the No-MoreScrub-Bulls Belt, with a private Hell of its own, deep
and hot. Even Edgar Albert Guest is silent on the
subject, though he mentions the fact that he is a 330
Mason. Frost, Robinson, Sandburg and Masters keep
suspiciously mum. I suggest that they meet in some
quiet saloon and draw up the ritual I advocate. Let
Masters be chairman of the committee: he is a lawyer
as well as a poet, and may be trusted to keep within
the statutes. And let Edna St. Vincent Millay be
added to give the thing a refined voluptuousness,
and James Weldon Johnson to put music into it,
that it may be intoned without getting the celebrant
out of breath. Here Holy Church shows the way. Its
funeral service is a great deal less forensic than
operatic.
There is some need, too, for a Marriage Service
for the damned, and at different times attempts have
been made to supply it. But all such works seem to
emanate from radicals showing a characteristic lack
of humor-and humor is as necessary to a Marriage
Service as poetry is to a Funeral Service: a fact that
the astute authors of the Book of Common Prayer




CLARION CALL TO POETS             109
did not overlook. However, the need here is not pressing, for in most American States civil marriage is
sufficient, and heretics may be safely united without
going before a sorcerer at all. Court clerks and police
magistrates perform the job, mumbling unintelligibly out of a mysterious book, perhaps only a
stolen Gideon Bible, excavated to hold cigarettes. The
main thing is to pay the fee. Marriages after midnight cost double, and if the bridegroom has the
fumes of wine in his head, he is apt to lose his watch
as well as his liberty.
As I say, the Marriage Services drawn up by
antinomians for the use of unbelievers lack humor.
Worse, they are full of indignation-against the common theory that a wife is bound to give some care to
her husband's goods, against the convention that she
shall adopt his surname, and so on. It is hard to
give serious attention to such grim notions at a time
immemorially viewed as festive and jocose. One
hears frequently of wedding guests getting drunk
and fighting-not long argo a Methodist pastor in
Missouri was protesting against it publicly-, but
when they are drawn into sociological controversy
it is too much. Such revolutionary Marriage Services,
in point of fact, have never gained much popularity.
Now and then a pair of Socialists resorts to one,
but even Socialists appear to prefer the harsh, mechanical offices of a court clerk.




110     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
Nor is there any active demand for a nontheological Baptismal Service. I am constantly
amazed, as a bachelor, by the number of children
growing up, in these iconoclastic modern days, without any formal naming at all. Not only do heretics
spurn the ceremony; even professing Christians often
neglect it. In my own nonage practically all babies,
at least of the more respectable tribes of the race,
were christened. There was a general feeling.that failing to put them through the sacrament was, in some
obscure way, a tort against them-that it would bring
them bad luck, and perhaps lead to difficulties in after
life. It is so believed to this day nearly everywhere
in Europe, and for sound reasons. Whenever a citizen in those decaying lands comes into contact with
the state, which is very often, its agents demand his
baptismal certificate as well as his birth certificate.
So far, the imbeciles at Washington have not come to
that, but it must be plain that they will come to it
soon or late, and when the time is finally upon us
there will be trouble for all those Americanos whose
naming is now trusted to acclamation. They will have
to dig up senile aunts and uncles, and produce affidavits that they were known to every one as so-and-so
at some date far in the past, just as they now have to
get such affidavits, more often than not, when they
want passports. The bureaucracy grinds slowly, but it
grinds exceeding fine. Recruited from the mentally




CLARION CALL TO POETS             111
deficient, it runs to circular insanities. Let it be
proved to-morrow that some John Doe, suspected of
favoring the recognition of Russia, was actually baptized Johannes, and it will be sufficient excuse for a
regulation requiring all of us to prove that we are
legally entitled to the names we sign to checks.
But all these are side issues. The main thing is that
the poets, though most of them seem to have departed from the precincts and protection of Holy
Church and her schismatic colonies-since when has
a first-rate American poet written a hymn?-have
failed, so far, to rise to the occasion when, even
among heretics, poets are most pressingly needed. I
have suggested that they meet in some convenient
speak-easy and remedy the lack gloriously, but I
don't insist, of course, that their service for the doubting dead be wholly original. The authors of the Book
of Common Prayer, though they were poets of great
talent, certainly did not trust only to their private inspiration. They borrowed copiously from the old
missals, and they borrowed, too, directly from Holy
Writ. What they concocted finally was a composite,
but it was very discreetly and delicately put together,
and remains impregnable to this day, despite many
furious efforts to undo it.
All I propose is that the committee of poets imitate them, but with an avoidance of strophes objectionable in doctrine. Isn't there material enough in the




112     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
books? There is enough, and to spare. I point to the
works of Walt Whitman, now at last passing freely
through the mails-to those parts, of course, of a nonerotic and non-political nature. I point to certain memorable stanzas of William Cullen Bryant. I point to
Blake, Tennyson, Milton, Shelley, Keats, even Swinburne; what gaudy stuff for the purpose is in "Ave
Atque Vale," "Tristram of Lyonesse" and "Atalanta
in Calydon!" There is here a sweet soothing, a healing
reassurance, a divine booziness-in brief, all the stuff
of A No. 1 poetry. It would bring comfort, I believe,
to many a poor widow who now groans as the Freemasons intone their balderdash, or flounces her veil,
fidgets and blushes as a Socialist orator denounces
Omnipotence for permitting stock dividends-it
would bring her a great deal more comfort, certainly,
than the positive statement, made defiantly by the
unwilling rector of the parish, that her departed John,
having been colloidal and as the beasts, has now become gaseous and immortal. Such a libretto for the
inescapable last act would be humane and valuable.
I renew my suggestion that the poets spit upon their
hands and confect it at once.




V. SOUVENIRS OF A BOOK
REVIEWER
I
The Emperor of Wowsers
ANTHONY COMSTOCK: ROUNDSMAN OF THE LORD, by Heywood
Broun and Margaret Leech. New York: Albert & Charles Boni.
[Books, March 6, 1927.3
IN an appendix to this amusing and instructive
work, Mr. Broun states the case against comstockery in a neat, realistic and unanswerable
manner, but the book itself is by no means a philippic
against old Anthony. On the contrary, it deals with
him in a very humane and even ingratiating way. And
why not? He was, in point of fact, a man of manifold virtues, and even his faults showed a rugged,
Berserker quality that was sneakingly charming. It is
quite impossible, at this distance, to doubt his bona
fides, and almost as difficult, despite his notorious
extravagances, to question his essential sanity. Like
all the rest of us in our several ways, he was simply
a damned fool. Starting out in life with an idea lying
well within the bounds of what most men would call
113




114     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
the rational, he gradually pumped it up until it
bulged over all four borders. But he never departed
from it altogether; he never let go his hold upon
logic; he never abandoned reason for mere intuition.
Once his premisses were granted, the only way to escape his conclusions was to forsake Aristotle for
Epicurus. Such logical impeccability, as all connoisseurs must know, is very common among theologians;
they hold, indeed, almost a monopoly of it. The rest
of us, finding that our ratiocination is leading us into
uncomfortable waters, give it the slip and return to
dry land. But not the theologians. They have horribly literal minds; they are less men than intellectual
machines. I defy any one to find a logical flaw in their
proofs of the existence of Hell. They demonstrate it
magnificently and irrefutably. Do multitudes of wise
men nevertheless deny it? Then that is only because
very few wise men have any honest belief in the
reality of the thing that the theologians and other
logicians call truth.
Mr. Broun, in his appendix, tries to find holes in
Anthony's logic, but it turns out to be far from easy:
what he arrives at, in the end, is mainly only proof
that a logician is an immensely unpleasant fellow.
Turn, for example, to a typical and very familiar
comstockian syllogism. First premiss: The effect of
sexual images, upon the young, is to induce autoerotism. Second premiss: the effects of auto-erotism




SOUVENIRS OF A BOOK REVIEWER 115
are idiocy, epilepsy and locomotor ataxia. Ergo, now
is the time for all good men to put down every book
or picture likely to evoke sexual images. What is
wrong with all this? Simply that Mr. Broun and you
and I belong to a later generation than Anthony's, and
are thus skeptical of his premisses. But let us not forget that they were true for him. His first came out of
the hard, incontrovertible experience of a Puritan
farm-boy, in executive session behind the barn. His
second was supported, when he was getting his education, by the almost unanimous medical opinion of
Christendom. And so his conclusion was perfect. We
have made no progress in logic since his time; we
have simply made progress in skepticism. All his
grand truths are now dubious, and most of them are
laughed at even by sucklings.
I think that he himself had a great deal to do with
upsetting them. The service that he performed, in his
grandiose way, was no more than a magnification of
the service that is performed every day by multitudes
of humble Y. M. C. A. secretaries, evangelical clergymen, and other such lowly fauna. It is their function
in the world to ruin their ideas by believing in them
and living them. Striving sincerely to be patterns to
the young, they suffer the ironical fate of becoming
horrible examples. I remember very well, how, as a
boy of ten, I was articled to the Y. M. C. A.: the aim
was to improve my taste for respectability, and so




116     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
curb my apparently natural flair for the art and mystery of the highwayman. But a few months of contact
with the official representatives of that great organization filled me with a vast loathing, not only for the
men themselves, but also for all the ideas they stood
for. Thus, at the age of eleven, I abandoned Christian Endeavor forevermore, and have been an antinomian ever since, contumacious to holy men and resigned to Hell. Old Anthony, I believe, accomplished
much the same thing that the Y. M. C. A. achieved
with me, but on an immeasurably larger scale. He
did more than any other man to ruin Puritanism
in the United States. When he began his long and
brilliant career of unwitting sabotage, the essential principles of comstockery were believed in by
practically every reputable American. Half a century later, when he went upon the shelf, comstockery enjoyed a degree of public esteem, at least
in the big cities, half way between that enjoyed
by phrenology and that enjoyed by homosexuality.
It was, at best, laughable. It was, at worst, revolting.
So much did one consecrated man achieve in the
short span of his life. I believe that it was no mean
accomplishment. Anthony managed it, not because
there was any unusual ability in him, but simply because he had a congenital talent for giving shows. The
fellow, in his way, was a sort of Barnum. A band




SOUVENIRS OF A BOOK REVIEWER 117
naturally followed him, playing in time to his yells.
He could not undertake even so banal a business as
raiding a dealer in abortifacient pills without giving
it the melodramatic air of a battle with a brontosaurus. So a crowd always followed him, and when
he made a colossal ass of himself, which was very
frequently, the fact was bruited about. Years of such
gargantuan endeavor made him one of the national
clowns-and his cause one of the national jokes. In
precisely the same way, I believe, such gaudy zanies
as the Rev. Dr. Billy Sunday and the Rev. John
Roach Straton are ruining the evangelical demonology in the Bible Belt. They make so much uproar
that no one can fail to notice them. The young peasants, observing them, are gradually enlightened by
them-unintentionally, but none the less surely. The
men themselves are obviously charlatans; ergo, their
ideas must be fraudulent too. What has been the net
effect of the Scopes trial, with its solemn martyrdom
of William Jennings Bryan? Its chief effect seems to
be that societies of young atheists are now flourishing
in all the Southern colleges. Has the study of Darwin
been put down? Far from it. Darwin is now being
read below the Potomac, and by the flower of Christian youth, as assiduously as "Only a Boy" used to
be read in New York in the great days of Anthony's
historic offensive against it.
Comstockery, of course, still lives, but it must be




118     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
manifest that its glories have greatly faded. There is,
anon, a series of raids and uproars, but they soon
pass, and the work of the Devil goes on. It would be
hard to imagine Anthony taking orders from district
attorneys, or going into amicable conference with his
enemies (and God's), or consenting to the appointment of joint committees (mainly made up of obvious
anti-Puritans) to discover and protect the least dirty
among the dirty plays of Broadway; he would have
raided them all, single-handed and alone. His heirs
and assigns are far milder men, and hence, I sometimes fear, more dangerous. Their sweet reasonableness is disarming; it tends to conceal the fact that they
are nevertheless blue-noses at heart, and quite as
eager to harry and harass the rest of us as Anthony
was. Those opponents who now parley with them had
better remember the warning against making truces
with Adam-Zad. They may end by restoring to comstockery some of its old respectability, and so throw
us back to where we were during the Grant administration. I sound the warning and pass on. It will take,
at best, a long time, and I'll be beyond all hope or
caring before it is accomplished. For Anthony's ghost
still stalks the scenes of his old endeavors, to plague
and palsy his successors. His name has given a term
of opprobrium to the common tongue. Dead, and-as
Mr. Broun and Miss Leech so beautifully suggest, an
angel with harp, wings and muttonchops-he is yet




SOUVENIRS OF A BOOK REVIEWER 119
as alive as Pecksniff, Chadband or Elmer Gantry.
Well, here is his story, done fully, competently,
and with excellent manners. There is much in it that
you will not find in the earlier biography by Charles
Gallaudet Trumbull, for Trumbull wrote for the
Sunday-schools, and so had to do a lot of pious dodging and snuffling. The additional facts that Mr. Broun
and Miss Leech set forth are often very amusing, but I
must add at once that they are seldom discreditable.
Old Anthony was preposterous, but not dishonest. He
believed in his idiotic postulates as devotedly as a Ten.
nessee Baptist believes that a horse-hair put into a
bottle of water will turn into a snake. His life, as he
saw it, was one of sacrifice for righteousness. Born
with a natural gift for the wholesale drygoods trade,
he might have wrung a fortune from its practice, and
so won an heroic equestrian statue in the Cathedral of
St. John the Divine. Perhaps there were blue days
when regret crept over him, shaking his Christian
resolution. His muttonchop whiskers, the stigma and
trademark of the merchant princes of his era, had a
pathetic, Freudian smack. But I don't think he wobbled often. The Lord was always back of him, guiding and stimulating his fighting arm. So he was content to live in a drab suburb on the revenues of a
second-rate lawyer, with his elderly, terrified wife
and his half-witted foster-daughter. There was never
any hint, in that humble home, of the gaudy connu



120     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
bial debaucheries that the modern sex hygienists describe so eloquently. Anthony had to go outside for his
fun. Comstockery was his corner saloon.
I confess to a great liking for the old imbecile. He
is one of my favorite characters in American history,
along with Frances E. Willard, Daniel Drew and
Brigham Young. He added a great deal to the joys of
life in the Federal Republic. More than any other
man, he liberated American letters from the blight
of Puritanism.
2
Thwacks From the Motherland
THE BABBITT WARREN, by C. E. M. Joad. New York: Harper &
Brothers. [The Nation, April 20, 1927.]
Mr. Joad, who is a philosopher by trade, prefaces
his thunderous philippic against all things Yankee
and accursed with a disarming quotation from the
late Filippo G. Bruno, of Nola, Italy: "Se non e vero,
e ben trovato." He needs this plea in confession and
avoidance, and very badly, for he admits frankly
that he "has not had the privilege of visiting the
United States," and the fact is visible on almost every
page of his book. Much of the evidence he relies on,
indeed, seems to have been derived from the travelers'
tales of returning English actors and the confidences




SOUVENIRS OF A BOOK REVIEWER 121
of the more humorous and ingenious members of the
corps of cabin-stewards of the Cunard line. Thus, on
page 83, he begins a long diatribe with the postulate
that "the films are the literature of America"-which
is to say, the only literature —and on page 89 he permits himself the grave announcement that the lamented J. Gordon Cooglar was "the one famous
Southern American poet." The one criterion of eminence in the Republic, according to the agents he
appears to trust, is money. "The artist, the scientist,
the musician, the statesman, and the author are held
of no account unless their claims to consideration are
backed by money." A rich man, regardless of his
private virtue, "is king of any company he chooses to
enter." This preeminence, it seems, takes on a transcendental character, and so works miracles. "Thus a
rich man who had lost his eye recently purchased
another from a poor man, the transfer of optics being hailed as a marvel of medical science." And no
wonder!
But it is not necessary to swallow all of Mr. Joad's
evidence in order to discuss his conclusions. They are,
in brief, that the machine civilization which now
threatens the whole world has reached its highest
development in the United States, that the influence
of American gold is rapidly extending it, and that
if its proliferation is not checked it will destroy most
of the values that men have cherished for ten thou



122     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
sand years. I see nothing against reason here. The
facts, in truth, are apparent to every one, and even
some of the most startling testimony that Mr. Joad
introduces, though it is not true, is at least consonant
with what is. Wie have surely not yet come to the pass
that "a rich man is king of any company he chooses
to enter," but we have certainly developed a respect
for bare money which goes far beyond the bounds of
the seemly and ordinate. I know of no other country
in which the hollow imbecilities of a Judge Gary
would get the respect they got here, nor in which so
preposterous a vacuum as Andy Mellon would be
venerated as a great statesman. The English also
bend the knee to men of money, and so do the Germans and the French, but they have not yet come to
the point of mistaking them for philosophers. The
English had a fair chance to venerate Otto H. Kahn,
but seem to have muffed him. The Germans, I fear,
if Charlie Schwab went to live and make speeches
among them, would regard him as a comic character.
Even the Portuguese, Serbs, Rumanians, and Greeks
would probably laugh at Cal.
Thus Mr. Joad is often right in essence, even when
he is wrong in his specification. It is not true, literally,
that J. Gordon Cooglar was "the one famous Southern
American poet," but nevertheless there is an inner
plausibility in the dictum that makes it somehow disconcerting: if the majority of Southern fanciers had




SOUVENIRS OF A BOOK REVIEWER            123
their way it would be true. Similarly, it is not true,
literally, that the dreadful bilge of the movie-parlors
is the only American literature now in being, but
there remains an uncomfortable possibility that it
may be true on some not distant to-morrow. Try to
put together a list of American imaginative authors,
all of the first chop, who have never taken the film
shilling. I can think of Cabell and Sherwood Anderson, but there I begin to wabble; the complete roster
is surely not long. The rest of the scrivening boys and
girls have all submitted to the loathsome embraces
of the Hollywood art-fosterers. The effects of this
psychic fornication are not concealed from Mr.
Joad's eyes. The movie rubber-stamp, he observes, begins to show itself upon even the swellest varieties of
our national swell letters. The self-same novelists who,
but a decade and a half ago, swore upon Alps of
Bibles (and meant it) that they'd never yield to the
foul caresses of Hamilton Wright Mabie and Anthony
Comstock-these same novelists, planning their masterpieces to-day, find it a sheer impossibility to rid
themselves of sneaking, Freudian thoughts of Gloria
Swanson and Jack Gilbert. It is sad, but it is vero.
Such sadnesses fill Mr. Joad's tome ---an instructive
work, but extremely depressing. Purge it of all its
errors of fact-some of them really shocking-and
its general thesis remains defensible. More, its general thesis remains a fair statement of the view of the




124     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
Republic held by civilized Europeans. That view is
not only critical; it is downright indignant. We are, it
appears, not only a nation of barbarians; we are actually hard to distinguish from criminals. Unless we
are dissuaded from our course by remonstrance, and,
if remonstrance fails, by a resort to force majeure,
the civilization that men have been struggling for
since the dawn of history will go to pot. The wisdom
of the late Gary will supplant that of Plato and Aristotle; Henry Ford will displace Thucydides; Luther
and St. Francis will be shelved.for the Rev. Dr. Billy
Sunday and the beauteous Aime'e Semple McPherson; the epic and the sonnet will be alike engulfed
by the scenario; and the whole world will read the
Saturday Evening Post. I do not argue that these
transformations would ruin humanity, or that they
are sure to come to pass; I merely report that a fear
of them is widespread in the world. Mr. Joad simply
puts into a convenient book, weighing exactly one
pound (it is printed on feather-weight paper), what
gnaws at the hearts of hundreds of thousands of the
European intelligentsia. One cannot pick up an English newspaper without getting some flavor of that
dread and indignation. It is an ironical situation, and
no doubt full of lessons for specialists in the historical and ethical sciences. The Yankee saved civilization, and now civilization damns him to Hell. He
put down the accursed Hun, and now the Hun, com



SOUVENIRS OF A BOOK REVIEWER 125
pared to him, becomes an archangel. As a professional patriot I resent all this. But on days when
my patriotism passes a dividend I confess that
I am consoled by certain pizzicato snickers, or, as
they say in the Motherland, sniggers.
3
The Powers of the Air
THE HISTORY OF WITrcHCRAFT AND DEMONOLOGY, by Montague
Summers. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. [The American Mercury,
May, 1927.]
This tome is learned, honest and amusing. Its author, an English clergyman-his full name is the
Rev. Alphonsus Joseph-Mary Augustus Montague,
M.A.-wastes no time trying to reconcile religion and
science, a folly that has brought so many American
scientists, including the eminent but mushy Dr. Robert Andrews Millikan, to grief. He is in favor of religion, not of science, and with it, in the manner of
a true believer, he goes the whole hog. Does Exodus
xxII, 18, say flatly that witches exist, and that it is
the duty of every righteous man to butcher them when
found? Then Dr. Summers accepts the fact and the
duty without evasion, and proceeds to elaborate on
both. He can't imagine a Christian who refuses to believe in demoniacal possession, and no more can I.
Marshaling an array of proofs that must shake even




126     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
an atheistic archbishop, he demonstrates with fine eloquence and impeccable logic that the air is full of
sinister spirits, and that it is their constant effort to
enter into the bodies of men and women, and so convert good Christians, made in God's image, into
witches, sorcerers, spiritualists, biologists, and other
such revolting shapes. The Bible is the rock of his
argument, but he also makes frequent and very effective use of the revelations vouchsafed to Holy
Church. There has never been a time in Christian
history, he shows, when its chief experts and wiseacres did not believe in demons. The Roman rite, accepting their existence as indubitable, provides elaborate machinery for their scotching to this day. That
machinery, to be sure, is not put into effect lightly. So
long as the medical faculty is convinced that the patient is suffering from nothing worse than a leaping
tapeworm or delirium tremens, and hope of his cure
by chemical and mechanical means is thus held out,
he is resigned to the secular arm. But once it becomes
manifest that a fiend or goblin has got into him, the
business becomes a matter for supernatural intervention, and the subsequent proceedings must be carried on by an ordained pastor, and according to a
formula set forth in the "Rituale Romanum" and in
use since the pontificate of Peter I.
This formula is extremely complicated, and I suspect that using it must be somewhat fatiguing to the




SOUVENIRS OF A BOOK REVIEWER 127
officiating clergyman. He must be himself a man of
mature years, guiltless of anything even approaching loose living, and, according to Mr. Summers, "a
systematic student, and well versed in the latest
trends and developments of psychological science."
He is required to make himself quite sure, before he
begins his exorcism, that the patient before him is
actually possessed by a demon-that he is not confronting a mere case of insanity, or, worse still, imposture. Once convinced, he proceeds with the utmost
heat and diligence, never relenting until the unclean
spirit takes wing, and so returns to Hell. Mr. Summers gives the words of the exorcism, translated into
English; they are so terrifying that I hesitate to reprint them in a volume designed for reading aloud
at the domestic hearth. The demon is denounced in
words that sting like scorpions: no Baptist pastor,
damning Clarence Darrow, ever scorched the air
with worse. And if, at the first attack, they fail to
dislodge him, they are to be used again, and then
again, and so on until the exorcism is completed. The
patient, it appears, is apt to fall asleep while they
are being intoned: making him do so is one of the
Devil's favorite tricks. If it happens, then the exorcist
must awaken him, and by any device that seems
workable, including smart blows a posteriori. Ordinarily, all this must be done in a church, but if the
patient is too ill to leave his bed the exorcist may




128     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
visit him in his own boarding-house. Idle spectators
are forbidden, but the canon requires that, as at a
baptism or electrocution, a number of official witnesses, of known piety and sober mien, shall be present. No unnecessary conversation with the demon is
permitted. If he speaks through the mouth of the
patient, he is to be heard politely, but when he has
had a sufficient say he is to be shut off. In particular,
he is not to be permitted to indulge in ribaldries.
It is commonly believed that Protestantism questions the actuality of demoniacal possession, but this
is not so. True enough, the Unitarians and Universalists have doubts about it, but so far as I am aware
no other Protestant sect has ever formally repudiated
it. There is a canon of the Church of England which
forbids a priest to exorcise demons without the "license or direction (mandatum)" of his Bishop, but
there is nothing to prevent a Bishop issuing such a
mandatum. If Bishop Manning became convinced tomorrow that Sinclair Lewis or any other such antinomian was possessed, he could, I believe, give Dr.
William N. Guthrie a mandatum to exorcise the invading gaseous organism. I do not allege that Dr.
Manning would do it or that Dr. Guthrie would take
advantage of the license; all I argue is that the
transaction would lie within the confines of canon
law. The Lutherans, who are very orthodox, all believe in demoniacal possession, and hence, by a neces



SOUVENIRS OF A BOOK REVIEWER 129
sary inference, in witches; if they did not they would
have to put Martin Luther down as a liar. As for
the Methodists, the Baptists and other such proletarians of the Lord, it must be obvious that doubts
among them are confined to a few advanced intellectuals, debauched by reading the epicurean poetry
of Edgar A. Guest. The Baptists, at least in the South,
even believe in ghosts, especially the colored brethren. The. colored pastors have an elaborate ceremonial for exorcising all varieties of spirits, good
or evil; an important part of it is the free-will offering just before the curative anathema is launched.
In my own native republic, the Saorstat Maryland,
I once made an attempt to ascertain the number of
people, regardless of creed, who believed in ghosts
and witches. After elaborate inquiries through prudent agents, I came to the conclusion that 92 % of
the population believed in ghosts, and that 74 % also
believed in witches. In the latter group was the then
Governor of the State. He believed that rheumatism
was caused by witchcraft, and wore a string around
his middle to ward it off. The Marylanders are a
gay and liberty-loving people, and drink and drab,
perhaps, somewhat more than is good for them, but
atheism has never made much progress among them.
At least one of the eminent professors in the Johns
Hopkins Medical School, at Baltimore, has been
publicly accused of believing in witches, and has




130     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
never, so far as I know, made a categorical denial
of it.
Dr. Summers is equally honest, and I think he
deserves all praise for being so. Most ecclesiastics,
when they write upon such subjects, try to evade the
clear issue. They seem to be convinced-on what
ground I don't know-that the old belief in demons
is now dying out in the world, and to be afraid that
they will be laughed at if they confess to it. All I can
say is that that is a poor way to get into Heaven post
mortem. Such duckers and skulkers, you may be sure,
will have extremely unpleasant sessions with St. Peter
when they reach the Gates, and Peter will be well
justified in razzing them. Either the Christian religion
involves a belief in disembodied powers, good and
evil, or it doesn't. If it doesn't, then its Sacred Scriptures are a mass of nonsense, and even its Founder
was grossly misinformed. If it does, then every one
adhering to it ought to confess the fact frankly, and
without ignominious equivocation. This is what Dr.
Summers does. In detail, his colleagues in theology
may sometimes reasonably challenge him, as when,
for example, he lays down the doctrine that the
heaving of tables at spiritualist seances is performed
by demons from Hell. But his fundamental postulates stand beyond refutation. If he is wrong, then
the whole science of Christian theology is a degraded
imposture-something which no right-thinking, law



SOUVENIRS OF A BOOK REVIEWER              131
abiding, home-loving American, I am sure, will want
to allege. I rejoice to find a holy man so forthright
and courageous, and so irresistibly convincing. He
has rescued demonology from its long neglect, and
restored it to its old high place among the sacred
sciences. What a knock-out he would be on an American lecture tour! I offer him $1,000 in advance for
his Jackson, Miss., house, with an offer of the fattest
pastorate in the town thrown in.
4
To the Glory of an Artist
LIEE AND LETTERS OF HENRY WILLIAM THOMAS, MIXOLOGIST, by
Various Hands. Washington: Privately Printed. [The American
Mercury, February, 1927.]
This entertaining and instructive work is, in form,
a Festschrift in honor of Mr. Thomas, for many
years one of the most eminent of Washington bartenders. He pontificated, in the closing days of the
Bill of Rights (selig!), in various celebrated Washington bars, including Loehl's, Shoomaker's, Arman's, and George Driver's, and those of the Shoreham, Willard, Raleigh and Metropolitan Hotels. His
longest term of service was at Driver's, which was
the first really high-toned saloon encountered in
Pennsylvania avenue as one left the halls of Congress. Here his clients included all the most dis



132     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
tinguished statesmen of the Republic, and many of
its heroic warriors, gifted publicists and opulent men
of affairs. His acquaintance among such men was
wide and intimate: he lived in an atmosphere of
greatness that was denser and more exhilarating,
even, than that surrounding Col. George B. M. Harvey
or Dr. Otto H. Kahn. His professional or bedside
manner, like that of every other salient man of his
craft, was delicate, discreet and judicious. If a Congressman, coming in from a committee meeting, raced
his metabolism by drirking too fast and so began to
blab high matters of state, Mr. Thomas would knock
him off with a reliable silencer, and save him from
ruin. If a Senator came in with a constituent who
seemed suspiciously Christian, Mr. Thomas would
express regret at not having seen him (the Senator)
for a long, long time. If even higher dignitaries began
to sway dizzily and clutch the bar-rail, Mr. Thomas
would summon a pair of trustworthy Negroes and
have them carted home. Such thoughtfulness and humanity, when combined with a high professional
competence, naturally made him popular in the town,
and when the Methodist Board of Temperance, Prohibition and Public Morals supplanted Congress in
the government of the District, and all the saloons
were closed, and Mr. Thomas moved out to Chevy
Chase, and began serving limeade and coca-cola at
what was once the bar of the club there-when these




SOUVENIRS OF A BOOK REVIEWER 133
events fell like thunderclaps there was widespread
woe in the highest circles, and congressional funerals
began to multiply. Now his surviving friends, to
honor him in his declining years, print the present
Festschrift.
It is a mellow and charming volume, and the pity
is that it is printed for private circulation only, and
will thus not get into the public libraries, for the
instruction of future generations. Prohibition, as
every one knows, has not actually cut off the supply
of strong drink, nor has it diminished the consumption. On the contrary, it has made drinking more
common than ever before, especially among the
young. But the young miss something that their
fathers enjoyed: the privilege of contact with amiable
and accomplished bartenders. They drink in washrooms, surrounded by bootblacks, busboys and subway tiles; their fathers drank in front of mahogany
bars, with men of the world serving them. In the more
high-toned of the old-time saloons American civilization, such as it is, probably reached its highest
point. The society was of the best. The most obscure
man, if he were decently clad, could meet United
States Senators, the Governors of great States, men
distinguished in all the arts and sciences, and the
principal industrial and financial heads of the nation.
It was a charming and admirable school for youngsters just coming to maturity, not only in manners




134     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
but also in all the ideas and fancies that engrossed
the superior minority. They heard the great problems
of statecraft discussed in an offhand and confidential
way. They saw notable men in mufti, so to speak,
with their cares laid off, and their minds functioning
brilliantly. They came into contact with every class
making up the world of affairs, from members of
the Cabinet to champion pugilists, and from scientific
men of the first caliber to the greatest artists and
manufacturers of the nation. All this was especially
true in Washington. The saloons of that town, during
the half century before Prohibition, were the true
centers of its intellectual activity. Its great men frequented them incessantly. They entertained all its
eminent guests. Naturally enough, such customers
would shrink from being served by roughnecks: they
demanded bartenders of the highest skill and most
delicate prudence. Such a bartender was Henry
William Thomas. The statesmen and others who have
collaborated in the Festschrift in his honor do honor
to themselves.
The volume is small, as befits the modesty of the
man whose virtues it celebrates, but it is packed with
good things. It opens with a series of quotations from
the greatest authors of all time-Homer, Shakespeare, Cervantes, and so on-, every one of them a
conscientious wet. Lesser men are also includedLongfellow, Sheridan, Villon, Irving, Pepys, Omar,




SOUVENIRS OF A BOOK REVIEWER            135
Horace, Ben Jonson and company-all of them
equally wet. There follows a series of original toasts
by some of the collaborators in the Festschrift, and
after that comes a page of music and a sketch of the
life and times of Mr. Thomas. Some curious details
are in it, and not a few of them are pathetic. In the
days of his service at Driver's, it appears, the common price of French and Italian vermouth, in case
lots, was $6 a case. Absinthe cost $15 a case, and
the best gins were obtainable at from $10 to $18.
Scotch ran from $14 to $30, and rye from $6 to $16.
Fourteen-year-old brandy cost $20, and sixty-yearold brandy $50. The booticians of to-day, though
they gradually perfect their art, will never be able
to offer sound goods at such prices. If, by the end
of the fifth or sixth Coolidge administration, Scotch
drops to $50 a case, as the public relations counsel
of the New York booters lately predicted, it will
still cost four times as much as the average Scotch
of Mr. Thomas' prime. Moreover, it will be inferior
in quality. Such bars as Driver's served only the
choicest goods. They didn't buy labels, but Scotch.
To-day it runs the other way. The last part of the
Festschrift is given over to a long and voluptuous discussion of the drinks that Mr. Thomas used to compound. Many of the materials mentioned are almost
unobtainable to-day. The booters bring in plenty of
so-called Scotch whiskey and English gin, and im



136     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
mense supplies of highly dubious champagne, but
it would be hard, I believe, to find one able to furnish
a plausible Sloe gin, or a sound Hollands, or a
genuine St. Croix rum. Such delicatessen have simply
gone out of the repertoire. They have gone out with
the old-time bartenders-men of fine feelings and
high gifts, their lives consecrated to an art that made
men happy. Of these great craftsmen Mr. Thomas
was one of the best. The frontispiece of the Festschrift
shows him as he is to-day, still vigorous and handsome, but with the light of tragedy in his eyes. He
looks as Shakespeare would have looked had he
(Shakespeare) lived into the bleak, sour days of the
Commonwealth. He looks as Washington would have
looked if he had lived to see Coolidge.
5
God Help the South!
THE ADVANCING SOUTH, by Edwin Mims. Garden City, L. I.:
Doubleday, Page & Company [The American Mercury, August, 1926.1
Dr. Mims, who hails from Arkansas, is professor
of English at Vanderbilt University, in the great
Christian Polizeistaat of Tennessee, and a member
of the Joint Hymn-Book Committee of the Methodist
Episcopal Church. He has lectured at Chautauqua,
N. Y., and is secretary of the Tennessee Law and




SOUVENIRS OF A BOOK REVIEWER 137
Order League. He thus makes the grade, by Southern
standards, as a critic of literature and life. But in
the less Christian North, I suspect, there will be scoffers to cavil at him, especially when it is noted that
he is very suspicious of James Branch Cabell, and
in fact puts Ellen Glasgow above him. And even in
the South there will -be heretics to repine that a more
competent and sympathetic historian was not found
to tell the story of their heroic (and perhaps vain)
struggle to haul the Confederacy out of its wallow.
For the good Dr. Mims, despite a laudable diligence
and a high degree of uplifting enthusiasm, constantly
gives one the impression of a scrivener laboring valiantly with a theme that he doesn't quite understand.
Perhaps I may throw some light upon his equipment by observing that, when he comes to discuss
Southern journalists, he has high and sweet praises
for the late Mooney of Memphis, the most passionate
defender of the Bryan theological imbecilities ever
heard of even in Tennessee, and not a word for Hall
of Montgomery, Wright of Columbia, S. C., Jaffe of
Norfolk, Dabney of Richmond, or Sanders of Mooney's own town. In brief, Dr. Mims seems to know
little more about the current journalistic situation in
the South, and hence about the political and cultural
situation, than a somewhat advanced village schoolma'm. He has heard of Johnson of Greensboro, now
that Johnson has left the South, and of Harris of




138     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
Columbus, Ga., now that Harris has the Pulitzer prize,
and of such women as Miss Frances Newman, Miss
Nell Battle Lewis and Miss Sara Haardt, now that
the North has discovered them, but one cannot escape
the suspicion that they were outside his ken in the
days of their first and hardest labors, as their heirs
and assigns are outside his ken to-day. Call me a
Union spy if you will, but I give you my solemn
word that in his book of 319 pages, devoted largely,
if not principally, to the renaissance of literary endeavor below the Potomac, there is absolutely no
mention of Emily Clark, of Richmond, founder of
the Reviewer! Or of Mrs. Julia Peterkin! Or of T. S.
Stribling! Or of Clement Wood! Or of J. W. Krutch!
It is, perhaps, the worst of all the curses of the
South that it is interpreted for the nation by just
such depressing obfuscators. They love it as no Scotsman ever loved his smoky crags, and their yearning
to see it go forward has all the violent passion of an
evangelical religion, but they are seldom clear as to
what is the matter with it, and they seldom differentiate accurately between its genuinely enlightened
leaders-mainly young and extremely unpopularand its mere windjammers. Dr. Mims, I should say in
all fairness, is better than most, but he is still far too
much the orthodox Southerner to see what is the matter with the South. A resident of Tennessee for a
generation, he shows all the peculiar Tennessee prej



SOUVENIRS OF A BOOK REVIEWER 139
udices and puerilities. For the pious Mooney, bawling for Genesis, he has high praises; for the intelligent and courageous John R. Neal he has only sneers.
Where was he himself when Bryan marched in, and
the hill-billies came down to drive all sense and decency out of the State? Was he in the forefront of the
fray? Was he heard at Dayton, on the side of educated and self-respecting men? If so, his voice was
small indeed, for I got no echo of it in the courtroom.
Like all the other so-called intellectuals of the State,
journalistic, legal and pedagogical, he left the heavy
burden of the fight to Dr. Neal, and now all he can
say of Neal is that he is "a local attorney" and "an
often defeated politician" It is the tragedy of Tennessee that such men as Neal are defeated and such
men as the mountebank Peay are kept in high office.
It is the greater tragedy of the South that when, by
some act of God, a Neal springs out of the land all the
Mimses combine to cry him down.
That they succeed only too well is proved by Mims'
own evidence. His book is strewn with the names of
Southerners who have been forced to come North for
air-Walter Hines Page, William E. Dodd, John
Spencer Bassett, W. P. Trent, Woodrow Wilson,
Ashby Jones. Of some of these men, especially on the
political side, I am surely no romantic admirer, but
they were the best that the South could produce, and
the South obviously needed them. All came North



140     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
and the younger men and women of to-day are following them. Perhaps the best newspaper editorial
writer that the South has produced in my time is
Gerald W. Johnson: he is now in Baltimore. The best
newspaper reporter is Paul Y. Anderson: he is now
in St. Louis. The most promising critic of letters and
life is Joseph W. Krutch: he is now in New York. The
list might be lengthened almost endlessly. In particular, the names of many women are on it, for the
South, despite its gabble of chivalry, still knows how
to be unpleasant to a woman who is intelligent. True
enough, a few hard-boiled and heroic men, their veins
filled with manganese, manage to hold out: for example, W. L. Poteat, John D. Wade, Paul Green, and
Howard W. Odum. But Poteet is of such years that
his mere antiquity now begins to protect him, and
Wade, Green and Odum, though they remain in the
South to-day, will probably be on their way tomorrow. The kind of "leader" who survives down
there is mainly the yellow dog kind. The Underwoods
pass out and the Peays and Bleases come in. The
South loses Johnson and keeps Clark Howell, Douglas Freeman, and the incredible Sullen, of Mississippi; it lets the Reviewer die and reads and admires
the Manufacturers' Record. The enlightened Pastor
Jones departs for Kansas City and the preposterous
Bishop Candler, with his coca-cola theology, holds the
fort. Who goes South? I recall two salient emigrants:




SOUVENIRS OF A BOOK REVIEWER 141
William Jennings Bryan and the Rev. Dr. John Roach
Straton.
What is to be noted in all this is that the South is
by no means sterile. It still produces a very respectable annual crop of bright young men and women.
Considering its backwardness in education, indeed, it
probably produces more of them, relatively, than
some of the States of the North-for example, New
Jersey, Ohio and Vermont. The best blood of the
South, I am inclined to think, is the best in the whole
Republic-that is, taking account only of so-called
Anglo-Saxons. But that best blood, save in a few
areas, mainly along tide-water, is no longer dominant.
The lower orders of Southerners, having been lifted
out of poverty by the general economic rise of the
region, have got the reins of political power into their
hands, and through the medium of politics they are
trying to force their ignorance upon their betters.
Every emerging leader must pass their tests-and
their tests are scarcely to be distinguished from those
of the savages in the Borneo jungle. Culturally, indeed, they are precisely on the level of the anthropoid
blacks surrounding them. They share the same suspicion of knowledge, they show the same primitive
emotionality, and they practice the same barbaric
and revolting religion. This religion, as is always the
case with people only superficially civilized, colors
their whole lives. The shaman is the principal func



142     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
tionary among them, and his fiats have the force of
divine revelation. Nothing can be undertaken that
does not meet his approval; nothing is regarded as
sound, or even as decent, that violates the tenets of his
hog-wallow theology. The troubles of the South, it
seems to me, all revolve around that simple fact.
The shaman, who has been reduced to innocuousness
in more civilized regions, is still too powerful down
there. All the Southern politicians flatter and cajole
him, and he is treated with elaborate respect by
practically all the Southern newspapers. No wonder
he believes in his own magic! And no wonder it is
difficult, in the face of his ignorance and his power,
to launch a sound idea!
It seems to me that the more intelligent Southerners, rising one by one out of the general darkness,
are all doomed to failure until they concentrate upon
this chartered enemy of every intellectual dignity
and decency, and clear him off the scene. Their error,
at the moment, consists in trying to compromise with
him. They are all too eager to avoid violating the
pious pruderies of his victims. It is an error that is
not new in the world, and wherever it has been followed it has greatly prospered shamans. In its final
form it converts itself into the doctrine that any and
every theological notion, however insane and outrageous, deserves respect. I can imagine nothing more
unsound. If the men of past ages had cherished that




SOUVENIRS OF A BOOK REVIEWER 143
delusion we'd still be sweating under the Inquisition
-nay, we'd be consulting oracles and trembling before sorcerers. In other words, the whole human race
would still be on the level of the Haitian voodooworshipers and the Georgia Baptists. The way to get
rid of such ideas is not to walk softly before them, but
to attack them vigorously and with clubs. If Mims
and his fellow pussyfooters had done that in Tennessee, there would have been no Scopes trial, and no
ensuing disgrace of the State. I don't think the yokels
themselves were to blame for that obscenity. Such of
them as I met during the trial seemed to me to be
decidedly above the general level of American peasants. They were not noticeably stupid; they were
simply grossly misinformed. The rubbish that was
preached to them four times a week by their pastors
went unchallenged. The Mimses hesitated to attack
it, I daresay, for fear of being accused of attacking
religion. Well, why should religion not be attacked
when it is idiotic? What gives a theological imbecility superiority over any other imbecility? Why
should a moron dressed up as a Methodist preacher
get any more respect than a moron behind a plow?
The doctrine that there are differences here greatly
burdens the South. If it is ever to have a general intellectual awakening, and not merely a series of gallant but unimportant one-man revolts, it must first
get rid of its superstitious reverence or sacerdotal




144     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
mountebanks. They are the common enemies of every
enlightened Southerner, including such liberal but
faithful churchmen as Dr. Jones and Dr. Poteat quite
as much as such skeptics as Miss Newman and Cabell.
No tolerant and progressive civilization will ever rise
in the South with their consent.
Thus the fundamental struggle there is a Kulturkampf in the strictest Bismarckian sense, and soon or
late its challenge must be squarely met. The question
is whether the South is to be run by its educated and
intelligent men, or by a rabble of hedge theologians,
led by blood-sweating fanatics and followed by a
docile tail of crooked politicians and boot-licking editors. As I have said, it produces plenty of admirable
candidates for leadership-perhaps more, relatively,
than any other American section save the Northeastern seaboard. But they are driven out almost as fast
as they arise. The village pastors flush them instantly, and they are soon in full flight, with a baying
pack of Ku Kluxers, Methodist bishops, Fundamentalist legislators, Daughters of the Confederacy, and
professional wowsers after them. Suppose that, by
some miracle, a competent biologist were produced at
Vanderbilt University, at Nashville, which Dr. Mims
serves as a professor. Where could he pass on his
learning in Tennessee, save at Vanderbilt University?
Suppose a competent journalist arose in Mississippi.
What paper in that State would employ him? Cer



SOUVENIRS OF A BOOK REVIEWER 145
tainly the same questions could not be asked in Illinois, say, or in Wisconsin, or in Maryland, or even
in Pennsylvania, as dull and degraded as it is. Such
States utilize their own good men. They welcome the
free play of ideas. They have got beyond that elemental stage of civilization in which all questions are
questions of faith. They have thrown off the tyranny
of the shaman. The South, I believe, will some day follow them. But the road is long and full of perils, and
many a head will be cracked before the end of it is
reached.
6
The Immortal Democrat
JEFFERSON, by Albert Jay Nock. New York: iHarcourt, Brace &
Company. [The American Mercury, September, 1926.]
This book has a fine surface: it is the work of a
subtle and highly dexterous craftsman. What publicist among us, indeed, writes better than Nock? His
editorials during the three brief years of the Freeman set a mark that no other man of his trade has
ever quite managed to reach. They were well-informed
and sometimes even learned, but there was never
the slightest trace of pedantry in them. In even the
least of them there were sound writing and solid structure. Nock has an excellent ear. Thinking in English,




146      PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
he thinks in charming rhythms. There is never any
cacophony in his sentences, as there is never any muddling in his ideas. One may reject his doctrines as
evil and against God, but one never finds any flaws
in his actual syllogisms. In the present volume he is
completely at home. Jefferson has been his Baal since
his nonage, and he is soaked in Jeffersoniana as the
late Dr. Harding was soaked in the idealism of the
Elks.
What emerges here is in no sense a formal biography, nor even a political history. It is, rather, an
elaborate psychological study of the man-an attempt
to search out the origins of his chief ideas, to discern and delimit the forms that they finally took in
his mind, and to estimate them in the light of the
problems to which they were applied, and of the experience that has accumulated in the century since
Jefferson's death. In brief, the book is a sort of critical analysis of Jeffersonism, done with constant sympathy and yet with a sharp outlook for fallacy and
folly. It is accurate, it is shrewd, it is well ordered,
and above all it is charming. I know of no other book
on Jefferson that penetrates so persuasively to the essential substance of the man. There are no weak
spots in it, and no false notes. It is overwhelmingly
convincing as polemic and it is unfailingly caressing
as work of art.
It goes without saying that much of Nock's atten



SOUVENIRS OF A BOOK REVIEWER 147
tion is directed toward clearing off the vast mountain
of doctrinaire rubbish that has risen above Jefferson's bones. In that Hell where politicians go the
Sage of Monticello, I daresay, has suffered far more
than most. Imagine his ghost contemplating Bryan,
Alton B. Parker, Jimmie Cox, Al Smith, Jimmie
Walker, W. G. McAdoo, Cole Blease, Ma and Pa
Ferguson, John W. Davis, Tom Taggart, even Woodrow Wilson and Grover Cleveland! It is, indeed, one
of the fine ironies of history that the party which professes to follow him has been led almost exclusively,
for a hundred years, by leaders wholly unable to
grasp the elements of his political philosophy. It
stands as far from him to-day as the Methodist Board
of Temperance, Prohibition and Public Morals stands
from Christ. That is to say, it stands as far off as it
is humanly possible to get. Its titular leader, in 1924,
was the preposterous Davis: he led it to disaster, but
nevertheless he led it. Well, this Davis was, and is, the
perfect embodiment of everything that Jefferson distrusted and disliked. He is precisely the sort of man
whose oblique doings, in the years between 1810 and
1825, tortured old Tom with his dreams of monocrats. The rest are even worse: McAdoo and his Ku
Kluxers, Al Smith and his Tammany gorillas, the
Southern State bosses and their tatterdemalion hordes
of boozy Prohibitionists. In the whole outfit there is
but one man, I suspect, who would get any politeness




148     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
from Jefferson, imagining him come back to earth.
That man, by a coincidence that is surely not strange,
was long in formal exile from the Democratic party.
He was excommunicated by the late Woodrow; in the
Cox convention he was denied a seat; in the Davis
convention he took no part. But he remains nearer to
Jefferson than all the rest.
Of the Jeffersonian system Mr. Nock offers a clear
and comprehensive account, disentangling it from
the trivialities that party history has thrown about it.
The essence of it, he says, is to be found in what
would be called, to-day, Jefferson's class consciousness. He divided all mankind into two classes, the producers and the exploiters, and he was for the former
first, last and all the time. But there is no consolation
in the fact for the Marxians who now rage in the
world, for to Jefferson producers meant far more than
mere handworkers. A manufacturer, if he made some
useful thing, was also a producer; so was a large
landowner, if only he worked his land; Jefferson regarded himself as a producer, and his friend Jimmie
Madison as another. Living in our own time, no
doubt, he would put Henry Ford in that category;
Henry, in fact, puts himself there, and with no little
show of reason. The only genuine non-producer, in
the Jefferson lexicon, was the speculator-that is to
say, the banker, the promoter, the usurer, the jobber.
It was against this class that he launched all his most




SOUVENIRS OF A BOOK REVIEWER 149
awful thunderbolts of invective; it was this class that
he sought to upset and destroy in the ferocious and
memorable campaign of 1800. His failure was colossal. Driving that class out of the executive offices and
making life very warm for it in the halls of legislation, he only shoved it into the courts, and there it has
survived gloriously ever since, gradually extending
and consolidating its power. Since Marshall's day the
American courts have suffered many vicissitudes and
entertained many heresies, but in one department, at
least they have kept the faith heroically: they have
always protected the virtuous and patriotic bondholder.
Jefferson has come down in legend as the most
adroit of all the early American politicians-that is,
after Sam Adams. He is credited with having conjured up, almost out of the air, the party which still
disgraces him. He is accused of almost fabulous feats
of demagogy. I see little evidence for all this in his
actual history. He was, in fact, far less the practical
politician than the political philosopher. Office seems
to have had few attractions for him, and he was quite
devoid of the sense of party regularity. His so-called
demagogy turns out, on inspection, to have been
simply a realistic statement of fundamental democratic theory. There is little in even his most startling
pronouncements that is not implicit in the Bill of
Rights. He was far less the foe of the Federalists than




150      PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
of government in general. He believed that it tended
inevitably to become corrupt-that it was the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men. The less there was of it, the better he liked
it, and the more he trusted it. Well, that was a century
ago, and wild doctrines from the barricades were
still in the air. Government has now gone far beyond
anything dreamed of in Jefferson's day. It has taken
on a vast mass of new duties and responsibilities; it
has spread out its powers until they penetrate to every
act of the citizen, however secret; it has begun to
throw around its operations the high dignity and impeccability of a state religion; its agents become a
separate and superior caste, with authority to bind
and loose, and their thumbs in every pot. But it still
remains, as it was in the beginning, the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men.
7
Fides Ante Intellectum
A SCIENTIFIC MAN AND THE BIBLE, by Howard A. Kelly. Philadelphia: The Sunday-School Times Company. [The American Mercury,
February, 1926.]
The author of this astounding and depressing book
is professor emeritus of gynecological surgery at the
Johns Hopkins, and one of the most celebrated sur



SOUVENIRS OF A BOOK REVIEWER 151
geons in the United States. This is what his own university says of him in an official document:
His contribution to the development of genito-urinary
surgery for women has been unparalleled. Step by step he
unraveled the diseases of the bladder, ureter and kidney.... His methods of examination revolutionized gynecological diagnosis.
And much more to the same effect. In brief, a medical man of the first caliber: when he speaks of himself as a scientist, as he does very often in his book,
he has every right to use the word. His life has been
devoted to exact observation, and that observation has
been made so competently and interpreted so logically that the result has been a series of immensely
valuable improvements in the healing art and craft.
And yet-and yet-   How am I to make you believe
that such a man has actually written such a volume
as this one? How am I to convince you that one of
the four men who laid the foundations of the Johns
Hopkins Medical School-the daily associate and peer
of Osler, Welch and Halsted-is here on exhibition
as a Fundamentalist of the most extreme wing, compared to whom Judge Raulston, of Dayton, Tenn.,
seems almost an atheist?
Yet it is so-and I go, for the appalling proof,
behind the book and to the man himself. I have known
Dr. Kelly for twenty years, and at different times




152     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
have seen a great deal of him. Hours on end I have
discussed his theological ideas with him, and heard
his reasons for cherishing them. They seem to me
now, as they seemed when I first heard them, to be
completely insane-yet Kelly himself is surely not
insane. Nor is there the remotest suspicion of insincerity about him. It would be of vast benefit to him
professionally to throw over his great cargo of supernatural rubbish, and trim his course as his colleagues
trim theirs. If he did so, the Johns Hopkins would be
illuminated with Roman candles, star shells and incandescent bock beer signs, and the very cadavers in
the deadhouse would have their backs slapped. But
he will not budge. He believes that God created the
world in six calendar days, and rested on the seventh.
He believes that God caused forty-two little children
to be devoured by she-bears because they made fun
of Elijah's bald head. He believes that Jonah was
three days and three nights in the belly of a whale
(Physeter macrocephalus), and then came out alive.
Medicine doctor though he be, he believes that the
hallucinations of John on the island of Patmos were
real. An LL.D. of Aberdeen, he believes (Exodus
XXII, 18) that witches exist and should be put to
death. An honorary member of learned societies in
Paris, Vienna, Rome, Berlin, Leipzig, Bucharest and
Moscow, he believes in both the Virgin Birth (Matthew i, 18-25), and in the descent of Jesus from




SOUVENIRS OF A BOOK REVIEWER 153
David through Joseph (Matthew i, 1-17). All this,
and much more, he believes absolutely without reservation, as a Tennessee hind believes it. "I accept the
whole Bible," he says, "as God's Word." And he adds
something that even the hind balks at: he believes
in the Second Coming-"at any moment"!
In his book Dr. Kelly offers powerful argument
for his amazing credo, but I can only report that, in
cold type as viva voce, it leaves me full of what the
lawyers call reasonable doubt. His logic has a curious
habit of going halfway to a plausible conclusion, and
then blowing up completely. For example, he starts
off, in one place, by showing how the early criticism
of the Gospel of John has broken down-and then
proceeds gaily to the assumption that proving an error in criticism is identical with proving the complete authenticity of the thing criticized. Again, he
denounces the effort to raise up doubts of the Mosaic
authorship and divine inspiration of the Pentateuch
-and then clinches his case by showing that the Bible
itself "claims in all its parts"' that it is "the very
literal Word of God."' But the record of a personal
experience exhibits the workings of his mind even
more beautifully. Early in manhood he had to give
up his medical studies on account of ill-health, and
went West to recuperate. In Colorado, during a blizzard, he was beset by snow blindness, and had to take
to his bed. Suddenly there came upon him "an over



154     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
whelming sense of a great light in the room." How
would any ordinary medical student interpret that
great light? How would any ordinary ice-wagon
driver, or chiropractor, or Methodist bishop, or even
catfish interpret it? Obviously, he would refer it to
the violent conjunctivitis from which he was suffering-in other words, to a purely physical cause. But
not Kelly. After nearly fifty years of active medical
practice he still believes that the glare was due to the
presence of God! This divine visitation he speaks of
very simply as "the chief event" of his life! It surely
was-if it was real!
What I'd like to read is a scientific review, by a
scientific psychologist-if any exists-of "A Scientific Man and the Bible." By what route do otherwise
sane men come to believe such inconceivable nonsense? How is it possible for a human brain to be
divided into two insulated halves, one functioning
normally, naturally and even brilliantly, and the
other capable only of the ghastly balderdash which
issues from the minds of Baptist evangelists? Such
balderdash takes various forms, but it is at its worst
when it is religious. Why should this be so? What is
there in religion that completely flabbergasts the wits
of those who believe in it? I see no logical necessity
for that flabbergasting. Religion, after all, is nothing
but an hypothesis framed to account for what is evidentially unaccounted for. In other fields such hypoth



SOUVENIRS OF A BOOK REVIEWER 155
eses are common, and yet they do no apparent damage
to those who incline to them. But in the religious field
they quickly rush the believer to the intellectual Bad
Lands. He not only becomes anesthetic to objective
fact; he becomes a violent enemy of objective fact.
It annoys and irritates him. He sweeps it away as
something somehow evil.
This little book I commend to all persons interested
in the mysteries of the so-called mind of man. It is
a document full of fascination, especially to the infidel and damned. There is a frankness about it that
is refreshing and commendable. The author does not
apologize for his notions, nor does he try to bring
them into grotesque and incredible harmony with
scientific facts. He believes the Bible from cover to
cover, fly-specks and all, and he says so (considering
his station in life) with great courage.
8
Speech Day in the Greisenheim
ACADEMY PAPERS: ADDRESSES ON LANGUAGE, by Members of the
American Academy of Arts and Letters. New York: Charles Scribners' Sons. [The American Mercury, January, 1926.1
The contributors to this volume, with their academic dignities, and their ages at the time it was pub.
lished, are as follows:




156      PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
Paul Elmer More, A.B., A.M., LL.D., 3(Litt.D.) 61 years
Bliss Perry, A.B., 2(A.M.), 3(L.H.D.), Litt.D.,
2(LL.D.)                              64 "
Paul Shorey, A.B., Ph.D., 7(LL.D.), 2(Litt.D.) 69  "
Brander Matthews, A.B., A.M., LL.B., D.C.L.,
Litt.D., LL.D.                        73 "
Henry van Dyke, A.M., 3(D.D.), 3(LL.D.),
D.C.L.                                73 "
Robert Underwood Johnson, B.S., A.M., Ph.D.,
L.H.D.                                73 "
William M. Sloane, A.B., A.M., Ph.D., L.H.D.,
2 (LL.D.)                             75  "
William Crary Brownell, A.B., L.H.D., Litt.D.,
LL.D.                                 75"
This works out to an average of a little more than
seventy-the age, according to Psalms xc, 10, of extreme unction. Is it surprising that the dullness of the
different papers runs in almost direct ratio to the
years of their authors? Surprising or not, it is a fact.
Dr. More, though he has nothing to say, and seems to
have noticed little about the language he writes save
that the English also use it, nevertheless offers a paper
that has a certain stealthy liveliness, and even a touch
of sauciness. He opens it, indeed, with a quotation
from "The Merchant of Venice" which, flung at them
by a barbarian, would have caused the most potent,
grave and reverend signiors of the Academy to wince.
But youth must kick up its legs, and Dr. More of the
time of his cavorting, was only sixty-one. Ten years
will mellow him, and give him a softer patina.




SOUVENIRS OF A BOOK REVIEWER           157
Dr. Perry, who is three years older and has been in
cold storage at Harvard for years, is also somewhat
goatish. He even goes to the length of presenting three
ideas, one of which is actually new. The first, apparently borrowed from the philologians of the Invisible
Empire, is that the secular arm should be summoned
to safeguard the mother-tongue in the Republic-that
is, that the process of Americanization should be
pushed by law. The second is that the Academy
should establish a grand prize for diction-to be
given annually, it would seem, to some English
cabotin, for the only virtuosi of "distinguished diction" that Dr. Perry mentions are George Arliss and
Edith Wynne Matthison. The third suggestion, and
the only one that is original, is that the Academy
should also set up rewards for those authors, apparently American in this case, whose books "4are characterized by distinction of style." A good idea, but
full of dynamite. How would the old boys dodge giving an occasional gold medal, or India-paper Bible,
or basket of Moat et Chandon, or silk American flag,
or whatever the prize was, to James Branch Cabell?
And what would they do with Cabell's blistering
reply, having received and read it?
Dr. Shorey comes next-and with an unfair advantage. He is not a bad author and no more, like the
rest, but a professor of Greek, and devoted all his life
to Plato geb. Aristocles. (The rest, I venture, know




158     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
so little Greek that they can scarcely shine their own
shoes.) His paper is that of an innocent but amiable
bystander. He denies that there is an American dialect of English, and then proves very charmingly that
there is. He is full of amusing anecdotes and shrewd
observations. He closes with an engaging, but, I regret to have to add, far from convincing plea for the
study of Latin. The day he read his paper before the
Academy must have been a pleasant one for the janitor, staff surgeon, newspaper reporters, wheel-chair
motormen, trained nurses and embalmers in attendance. But I guess that more than one immortal blew
his nose sadly as wheeze followed wheeze, and-cackles
rippled through the audience. Shorey was then only
sixty-nine and had lived at Bonn, Leipzig, Munich
and Athens.
Over seventy Academicians jell. Dr. Matthews' paper is heavy and hollow stuff-the sort of thing he
used to write for Munsey's Magazine in the days when
he and it were ornaments of the national letters, and
the Kaiser had not yet sent in such men as Cabell,
Lewis and Dreiser to annoy him. Dr. Brownell contributes two dull papers in his baroque and tedious
style, with occasional descents to dubious English.
(See, for example, the first two lines of page 42.)
Pastor van Dyke, turning aside from his combat of
Golden Texts with Dr. Frank Crane, offers an essay




SOUVENIRS OF A BOOK REVIEWER 159
in which he denounces Carl Sandburg and says of
"The Spoon River Anthology" that "to call it poetry
is to manhandle a sacred word." (Has the rev. gentleman ever come to the page containing "Ann Rutledge"?) Finally, Dr. Johnson, after joining in the
butchery of Sandburg, delivers a whoop for the oldstyle poetry-by which, on his own showing, he
means poetry full of moral purpose-and then ends
with a tart reference, in execrable taste, to the poetry
printed by the Century Magazine since his retirement
as its editor.
Thus the ancients of the American Academy of
Arts and Letters. Eight of them join forces to write
a book of 282 pages-and the result is sheer emptiness, signifying nothing. Their subject is the language
all of them are supposed to wrote, not merely well but
better than any other eight men in the country-and
what seven of them have to say of it is simply what
one would expect from a baker's half-dozen of schoolma'ms, chosen at random.
9
Professors of English
THE STANDARDS OF AMERICAN SPEECH, AND OTrHER PAPERS, by
Fred Newton Scott. Boston: Allyn & Bacon. How TO DESCRIBE AND
NARRATE VISUALLY, by L. A. Sherman. New York: The George H.
Dordn Company. [The American Mercury, October, 1926.]




160     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
Scott is an A.B., an A.M. and a Ph.D.; he has professed at the University of Michigan since 1887 and
is now professor of rhetoric and journalism there and
university editor; he has been president of the Modern Language Association, of the National Council
of Teachers of English, of the North Central Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools, and of the
American Association of Teachers of Journalism; he
is a member of the Modern Language Research Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the British Association, and represented the literati of the Republic at the Conference
of American and British Professors of English at
London in 1920; he is the author of many works, including an English grammar, a treatise on literary
criticism and another on aesthetics, and the editor of
many more, including two volumes of gems from
Holy Writ. Sherman is an A.B., a Ph.D. and an
LL.D.; he has professed English at the University of
Nebraska since 1882, and is now dean of the graduate
college there; he is a member of Phi Beta Kappa,
Alpha Delta Phi and other learned lodges; he has
composed a book called "What is Shakespeare?" and
another called "Analytics of Literature"'; his textbooks are in wide use.
Well, what have these powerfully learned and eminent men to say in their present volumes? Scott de



SOUVENIRS OF A BOOK REVIEWER 161
votes a chapter to proving that "of the 10,565 lines
of 'Paradise Lost,' 670, or 6.3%, contain each two
or more accented alliterating vowels," another proving that in such word-groups as "rough and ready,"
68% put the monosyllable first and the dissyllable
second, and 42%o put the dissyllable first and the
monosyllable second, and a third (very long) to developing John Stuart Mill's well-known saying that
"eloquence is heard; poetry is overheard," i. e., that
the primary aim of prose is persuasion, whereas that
of poetry is simply self-expression. So much for Scott.
Sherman fills 364 pages with windy platitudes on the
writing of English, and lays chief stress on the revolutionary discovery that visual images are very
effective. At the end of each chapter he sets a
dozen or more tests for students. I offer a few specimens:
Detail the points of exposition as gathered from some
recent sermon.
Draw a character by the use of imaginative appeals of
degree.
From some outgrown or discarded theme, find what sentences are not of the first or second grade of value.
Describe, by form-types, the safety chain.
Devise a new system of ten points, five of matter, five
of manner, and by it evaluate three debates prepared on
the same side of some live question of the hour.
Find or recall an example of summarizing narration that




162      PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
seems to you worthy of being told in the consecutive manner, and give reasons for your criticism.
Such are two of the great whales of literary science among us. God help the poor yokels who have
to sweat through their books! God help the national
letters!




VI. FIVE LITTLE EXCURSIONS
I
Brahms
sM t  }  Y excuse for writing of the above gentleman
is simply that, at the moment, I can think of
nothing else. A week or so ago, on a Baltimore Summer evening of furious heat, I heard his sextette for strings, opus 18, and ever since then it has
been sliding and pirouetting through my head. I have
gone to bed with it and I have got up with it. Not, of
course, with the whole sextette, nor even with any principal tune of it, but with the modest and fragile little
episode at the end of the first section of the first movement-a lowly thing of nine measures, thrown off like
a perfume, so to speak, from the second subject:


N_~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~F I I-F
a, ~,  ~   - e- -~-,~  i -eL X  I
L V, f![~....-.Z. _]-=  I1"  '.........  ~ ']....-q  '.


163




164     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
What is the magic in such sublime trivialities?
Here is a tune so slight and unassuming that it runs
to but eight measures and uses but six of the twelve
tones in the octave, and yet it rides an elderly and
unromantic man, weighing 180 pounds and with a
liver far beyond pills or prayer, as if it were the very
queen of the succubi. Is it because I have a delicately
sensitive ear? Bosh! I am almost tone-deaf. Or a
tender and impressionable heart? Bosh again! Or a
beautiful soul? Dreimal bosh! No theologian not in
his cups would insure me against Hell for cent per
cent. No, the answer is to be found in the tune, not
in the man. Trivial in seeming, there is yet in it the
power of a thousand horses. Modest, it speaks with a
clarion voice, and having spoken, it is remembered.
Brahms made many another like it. There is one at the
beginning of the trio for violin, 'cello and piano,
opus 8-the loveliest tune, perhaps, in the whole
range of music. There is another in the slow movement of the quintette for piano and strings, opus 34.
There is yet another in the double concerto for violin
and 'cello, opus 102-the first subject of the slow
movement. There is one in the coda of the Third
Symphony. There is an exquisite one in the Fourth
Symphony. But if you know Brahms, you know all of
them quite as well as I do. Hearing him is as dangerous as hearing Schubert. One does not go away filled
and satisfied, to resume business as usual in the morn.




FIVE LITTLE EXCURSIONS           165
ing. One goes away charged with a something that
remains in the blood a long while, like the toxins of
love or the pneumococcus. If I had a heavy job of
work to do on the morrow, with all hands on deck
and the cerebrum thrown into high, I'd certainly not
risk hearing any of the Schubert string quartettes, or
the incomparable quintette with the extra 'cello, or the
Tragic Symphony. And I'd hesitate a long time before
risking Brahms.
It seems an astounding thing that there was once a
war over him, and that certain competent musicians,
otherwise sane, argued that he was dull. As well
imagine a war over Beauvais Cathedral or the
Hundred-and-third Psalm! The contention of these
foolish fellows, if I recall it aright, was that Brahms
was dull in his development sections-that he flogged
his tunes to death. I can think of nothing more magnificently idiotic. Turn to the sextette that I have mentioned, written in the early '60's of the last century,
when the composer was barely thirty. The development section of the first movement is not only fluent
and workmanlike: it is a downright masterpiece. There
is a magnificent battle of moods in it, from the
fieriest to the tenderest, and it ends with a coda that is
sheer perfection. True enough, Brahms had to learnand it is in the handling of thematic material, not in
its invention, that learning counts. When he wrote his
first piano trio, at twenty-five or thereabout, he started




166     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
off, as I have said, with one of the most lovely tunes
ever put on paper, but when he came to develop it
his inexperience showed itself, and the result was
such that years later he rewrote the whole work. But
by the time he came to his piano concerto in D he was
the complete master of his materials, and ever thereafter he showed a quality of workmanship that no
other composer has ever surpassed, not even Beethoven. The first movement of the Eroica, I grant you,
is sui generis: it will never be matched until the
time two great geniuses collide again. But what is
in the rest of the first eight symphonies, even including the Fifth and Ninth, that is clearly better than
what is in the four of Brahms? The first performance
of his First, indeed, was as memorable an event in
the history of music as the first performance of the
Eroica. Both were furiously denounced, and yet both
were instantaneous successes. I'd rather have been
present at Karlruhe on November 6, 1876, I think,
than at the initiation of General Pershing into the Elks,
or even than at the baptism of Coolidge. And I'd
rather have been present at Vienna on April 7, 1805,
than at the landing of Columbus.
In music, as in all the other arts, the dignity of the
work is simply a reflection of the dignity of the man.
The notion that shallow and trivial men can write
masterpieces is one of the follies that flow out of
the common human taste for scandalous anecdote.




FIVE LITTLE EXCURSIONS            167
Wagner wore a velvet cap and stole another man's
wife; ergo, nothing is needed to write great music
save the talents of a movie actor. What could be more
preposterous? More than any other art, perhaps,
music demands brains. It is full of technical complexities. It calls for a capacity to do a dozen things at
once. But most of all it is revelatory of what is called
character. When a trashy man writes it, it is trashy
music.
Here is where the immense superiority of such a
man as Brahms becomes manifest. There is less trashiness in his music than there is in the music of any
other man ever heard of, with the sole exception,
perhaps, of Johann Sebastian Bach. It was simply
impossible for him, at least after he had learned his
trade, to be obvious or banal. He could not write even
the baldest tune without getting into it something of
his own high dignity and profound seriousness; he
could not play with that tune, however light his mood,
without putting an austere and noble stateliness into
it. Hearing Brahms, one never gets any sense of being
entertained by a clever mountebank. One is facing a
superior man, and the fact is evident from the first
note. I give you his "Deutsches Requiem" as an example. There is no hint of what is commonly regarded
as religious feeling in it. Brahms, so far as I know,
was not a religious man. Nor is there the slightest sign
of the cheap fustian of conventional patriotism, Never



168     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
theless, a superb emotion is there-nay, an overwhelming emotion. The thing is irresistibly moving.
It is moving because a man of the highest intellectual dignity, a man of exalted feelings, a man of
brains, put into it his love for and pride in his country.
Lucky the country which produces such men!
But in music emotion is only half the story. Men.
delssohn had it, and yet he belongs to the second table.
Nor is it a matter of mere beauty-that is, of mere
sensuous loveliness. If it were, then Dvorak would be
greater than Beethoven, whose tunes are seldom inspired, and who not infrequently does without them
altogether. What makes great music is the thing I have
mentioned: brains. The greatest musician is a man
whose thoughts and feelings are above the common
level, and whose language matches them. What he
has to say comes out of a wisdom that is not ordinary.
Platitude is impossible to him. He is the precise
antithesis of Mr. Babbitt. Above all, he is a master
of his craft, as opposed to his art. He gets his effects
in new, difficult and ingenious ways-and they convince one instantly that they are inevitable. One can
easily imagine improvements in the human eye, and
in the Alps, and in the art of love, and even in the
Constitution, but one cannot imagine improvements in
the first movement of the Eroica. The thing is completely perfect, even at the places where the composer
halts to draw breath. Any change in it would damage




FIVE LITTLE EXCURSIONS           169
it. But what is inevitable is never obvious. John Doe
would not and could not write thus. The immovable
truths that are there-and there are truths in the arts
as well as in theology-became truths when Beethoven formulated them. They did not exist before.
They cannot perish hereafter.
So with Brahms. There are plenty of composers of
more romantic appeal. I need mention only Schubert.
Schubert, had he lived, might have been the greatest
of them all, but he died before any patina had formed
on him; he was still going to school in his last days.
But Brahms seems to have come into the world fullblown. A few experiments, brilliant even when they
failed, and he was a master beside Beethoven and
Bach. In all his music done after his beard had
sprouted, there is not the slightest sign of bewilderment and confusion, of trial and error, of uncertainty
and irresolution. He knew precisely what he wanted
to say, and he said it colossally.
2
Johann Strauss
The centenary of John Strauss the Younger passed
almost unnoticed in the United States. In Berlin and
in Vienna it was celebrated with imposing ceremonies,
and all the German radio stations put "Wein, Weib




170     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
und Gesang" and "Rosen aus dem Siiden" on the air.
Why wasn't it done in this great country? Was the
pestilence of jazz to blame-or was it due to the
scarcity of sound beer? I incline to Answer No. 2. Any
music is difficult on well-water, but the waltz is a
sheer impossibility. "Man Lebt Nur Einmal" would
be as dreadful in a dry town as a Sousa march at a
hanging.
For the essence of a Viennese waltz, and especially
of a Strauss waltz, is merriment, good humor, happiness, Gemiitlichkeit. It reflects brilliantly the spirits
of a people who are eternally gay, war or no war.
Sad music, to be sure, has been written in Viennabut chiefly by foreigners: Haydn, who was a Croat;
Beethoven, whose pap had been a sour Rhine wine;
Brahms, who came from the bleak Baltic coast. I
come upon Schubert-but all rules go to pot when
he appears. As for Strauss, he was a 100%o Viennese,
and could no more be sad than he could be indignant.
The waltz wandered into the minor keys in Paris, in
the hands of the sardonic Alsatian Jew, Waldteufel. At
home old Johann kept it in golden major, and so did
young Johann after him. The two, taking it from Schubert and the folk, lifted it to imperial splendor. No
other dance-form, not even the minuet, has ever
brought forth more lovely music. And none other has
preserved so perfectly the divine beeriness of the peasant dance. The best of the Strauss waltzes were written




FIVE LITTLE EXCURSIONS            171
for the most stilted and ceremonious court in Europe,
but in every one of them, great and little, there remains the boggy, expansive flavor of the village green.
Even the stately "Kaiser" waltz, with its preliminary
heel-clicks and saber-rattling, is soon swinging jocosely to the measures of the rustic Springtanz.
It is a curious, melancholy and gruesome fact that
Johann Strauss II was brought up to the variety of
thieving known as the banking business. His father
planned that he should be what in our time is called
a bond salesman. What asses fathers are! This one
was himself a great master of the waltz, and yet he
believed that he could save all three of his sons from
its lascivious allurements! Young Johann was dedicated to investment banking, Josef to architecture,
and Eduard, the baby, to the law. The old man died on
September 25, 1849. On September 26 all three were
writing waltzes. Johann, it quickly appeared, was the
best of the trio. In fact, he was the best musician who
ever wrote waltzes for dancing, and one of the really
first-rate musicians of his time. He took the waltz
as his father left it, and gradually built it up into
a form almost symphonic. He developed the introduction, which had been little more than an opening fanfare, into a complex and beautiful thing, almost an
overture, and he elaborated the coda until it began to
demand every resource of the composer's art, including even counterpoint. And into the waltz itself he




172     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
threw such lush melodic riches, so vastly a rhythmic
inventiveness and so adept a mastery of instrumentation that the effect was overwhelming. The Strauss
waltzes, it seems to me, have never been sufficiently
studied. That other Strauss, Richard, knows what is
in them, you may be sure, for the first act of "Der
Rosenkavalier" proves it, but the musical pedants and
pedagogues have kept aloof. What they miss! Consider, for example, the astonishing skill with which
Johann manages his procession of keys-the inevitable air which he always gets into his choice! And the
immense ingenuity with which he puts variety into
his bass-so monotonous in Waldteufel, and even in
Lanner and Gung'l! And the endless resourcefulness
which marks his orchestration-never formal and
obvious for an instant, but always with some new
quirk in it, some fresh and charming beauty! And his
codas-how simple they are, and yet how ravishing!
Johann certainly did not blush unseen. He was an
important figure at the Austrian court, and when he
passed necks were craned as if at an ambassador. He
traveled widely and was received with honor everywhere. His waltzes swept the world. His operettas,
following them, offered formidable rivalry to the
pieces of Gilbert and Sullivan. He was plastered with
orders like a Doug Fairbanks or an Otto Kahn. He
took in, in his time, a great deal of money, and left
all his wives well provided for. More, he had the




FIVE LITTLE EXCURSIONS            173
respect and a little of the envy of all his musical
contemporaries. Wagner delighted in his waltzes and
so did Brahms. Brahms once gave the score of one of
them to a fair admirer with the inscription, "Leider
nicht von Johannes Brahms"-Unfortunately, not by
Johannes Brahms. Coming from so reserved a man,
it was a tremendous compliment indeed,-perhaps the
most tremendous recorded in history-nor was there
any mere politeness in it, for Brahms had written
plenty of waltzes himself, and knew that it was not as
easy as it looked. The lesser fish followed the whales.
There was never any clash of debate over Strauss. It
was unanimously agreed that he was first-rate. His
field was not wide, but within that field he was the unchallenged master. He became, in the end, the dean of
a sort of college of waltz writers, centering at Vienna.
The waltz, as he had brought it up to perfection,
became the standard ball-room dance of the civilized
world, and though it had to meet rivals constantly, it
held its own for two generations, and even now, despite
the murrain of jazz, it threatens to come back once
more. Disciples of great skill began to appear in the
Straussian wake-Ziehrer, with the beautiful "Weaner
Mad'l," Lincke with "Ach, Friihling, Wie Bist Du So
Schon," and many another. But old Johann never
lost his primacy. Down to the very day of his death
in 1899 he was primus inter omnes. Vienna wept
oceans of beery tears into his grave. A great Vien



174     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
nese-perhaps the ultimate flower of old Viennawas gone.
Now he is dead a hundred years. But surely not
forgotten, despite shadows over the moon here and
there. The man who makes lovely tunes has the laugh
on Father Time. Oblivion never quite fetches him.
He goes out of fashion now and then, but he always
returns. There was a time when even Bach seemed
to be forgotten. What a joke! Bach will last as long
as human beings are born with ears; in the end,
perhaps, he will be all that the world remembers of the
Eighteenth Century. And Strauss, I suspect, will keep
on bobbing up in the memory of the race so long as
men have legs and can leap in 3-4 time,-at all
events, so long as there is good malt liquor anywhere
in the world. World-wide Prohibition, it is conceivable, may eventually kill him; in a dry universe he
would be contra bonus mores. But jazz can do him
no more permanent damage than a dog visiting his
grave.
3
Poetry in America
The New Poetry Movement in America, so full of
life and even of malicious animal magnetism a dozen
years ago, is now obviously down with cholelithiasis,
and no literary pathologist of genuine gifts would be




FIVE LITTLE EXCURSIONS            175
surprised to hear, at any moment, of its death. Most
of its former ornaments, indeed, begin to flee its
bedside. Miss Lowell, in her last years, devoted herself to prose, and Masters goes the same way. Vachel
Lindsay and Robert Frost take to college professing.
Carl Sandburg has joined the minstrels. All the
principal Greenwich Village poets, harassed by the
morals squad, fled long ago to Paris, where landlords
are less prying, and even artists may lead their own
lives.
This slackening of effort is visible in all the little
poetry magazines. Most of them continue to come out,
and in the backwaters of the Republic, where all varieties of human progress are behind schedule, there
are even occasional appearances of new ones, but there
is little in any of them that is worth reading, and
almost no actual poetry. What they print, in the main,
is simply a series of exercises in the new prosody.
It turns out, on examination, to be quite as tight and
arbitrary as the old kind. For one thing that a poet
of 1885 could not do there are ten things that a poet
of 1927 cannot do. Thus the revolt against form expires in a new and worse formalism. The fact is most
visible, of course, on the edges of the movement-that
is, among the poets of Greenwich Village. What one
observes in the advanced and atrabilious magazines
which they publish is simply a sort of organized
imbecility. The poet is strictly forbidden to make use




176      PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
of any of the traditional materials of his craft, or to
concede anything to its traditional idioms. He must
eschew all rhyme that really rhymes, he must eschew
all the orthodox rhythms, and he must eschew all
direct attack upon the emotions. In other words, he
must eschew poetry. What he writes, it must be confessed, is sometimes very interesting, in its bizarre,
unearthly way-just as a college yell, say, is interesting, or an act of Congress. But it is no more poetry
than the college yell is music or the act of Congress
wisdom.
The trouble with most of the new poets, whether in
or out of Greenwich Village, is that they are too
cerebral-that they attack the problems of a fine art
with the methods of science. That error runs through
all their public discussions of the business. Those
discussions are full of theories, by the new psychology
out of the cant of the studios, that do not work and are
not true. The old-time poet did not bother with theoories. When the urge to write was upon him, he simply
got himself into a lather, tied a towel around his head,
and then tried to reduce his feelings to paper. If he
had any skill the result was poetry; if he lacked skill
it was nonsense. But even his worst failure still had
something natural and excusable about it-it was the
failure of a man admittedly somewhat feverish, with
purple paint on his nose and vine-leaves in his hair.
The failure of the new poet is the far more grotesque




FIVE LITTLE EXCURSIONS            177
failure of a scientist who turns out to be a quackof a mathematician who divides 20 by 4 and gets 6, of
a chiropractor who looks in the vertebrae for the cause
of cross-eyes, of a cook who tries to make an omelette
of china doorknobs. Poetry can never be concocted
by any purely intellectual process. It has nothing to
do with the intellect; it is, in fact, a violent and irreconcilable enemy to the intellect. Its purpose is not
to establish facts, but to evade and deny them.
What it essays to do is to make life more bearable in
an intolerable world by concealing and obliterating
all the harsher realities. Its message is that all will be
well to-morrow, or, at the latest, next Tuesday, that the
grave is not cold and damp but steam-heated and lined
with roses, that serving in the trenches is far more
amusing and comfortable than serving in the United
States Senate, that a girl is not a viviparous mammal,
full of pathogenic organisms and enlightened selfinterest, but an angel with bobbed wings and a heart
of gold. Take this denial of the bald and dreadful
facts out of poetry-make it scientific and sensibleand it simply ceases to be what it pretends to be. It
may remain good prose; it may even remain beautiful
prose. But it cannot stir the blood as true poetry does;
it cannot offer that soothing consolation, that escape
from reality, that sovereign balm for every spiritual
itch and twinge which is the great gift of poetry to
man. The best poetry is always palpably untrue; it is




178     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
its eloquent untruth that makes it so lovely. The other
day I read of a gentleman, condemned to death in
one of the Southern States, who went to the electric
chair reciting the Twenty-third Psalm. It is a pity he
had to die; he would have made an excellent critic,
for he understood perfectly the nature and purpose of
poetry.
The new poets, now passing into the shadows, not
only made the mistake of trying to rationalize poetry,
an enterprise comparable to trying to rationalize
necking, drunkenness or the use of hasheesh; they also
tried to detach themselves from the ordinary flow of
American ideas, and to convert themselves into an intellectual aristocracy. Some of them, true enough,
quickly found the thing impossible, and so turned
back, notably Sandburg and Lindsay, but nearly all
at least made the attempt. Miss Lowell, perhaps, went
furthest; there was a time when even Boston felt
bucolic and loutish, and hence very uneasy, in her
presence. The result was that nine-tenths of the compositions the fraternity produced simply shot into
space. The great heart of the folk reacted to them as
feebly as it might have reacted to polemics between
astronomers. When poetry fails in this way it fails all
over. I do not argue that it ought to reach and soothe
the nether herd, though some of the very best poetry
ever written actually does-for example, the poetry
in the Bible. All I contend is that it ought to reach




FIVE LITTLE EXCURSIONS            179
the generality of the literate. If literary pastors are
not moved by it, if it fails to supply phrases for
editorial writers, if it is not quoted by stewed Congressmen at the endless memorial services on Capitol
Hill, then it has obviously missed fire. Of all the stuff
produced by the new poets precious little has ever
gone that far. I can recall a few poems by Sandburg
and Lindsay, perhaps one or two by Frost, and none
other. The whole body of verse of Miss Lowell is as
dead as if it had been written in Choctaw. Meanwhile,
certain old-fashioned poets, notably Miss Reese and
Miss Teasdale, have written things that will probably
live. They will live because they are alive.
I sometimes think, indeed, that the real poetry of
our era has been written, not by poets at all, but by
men who would be as indignant, if you called them
poets, as if you called them kidnapers, violoncellists
or Socialists. I allude to the earnest rhetoricians who
roam the chautauquas and the Kiwanis Clubs, waving
the banner of idealism. What these fellows say is
almost always nonsense, but it is at least the sort of
nonsense that the American people yearn to cherish
and believe in —it somehow fills their need. I point,
for example, to their gabble about Service —already
the source of phrases that Congressmen, clergymen,
editorial writers and so on mouth every day. Here is
the essential poetry of the Americano: his life is sordid, but he tries to escape from the fact by leering




180     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
at the stars. It is a comprehensible impulse, and even
worthy. The poets of his country have not helped him
to attain his heart's desire. He has had to turn to traveling go-getters and forward-lookers.
Alas, whenever one thus discusses the nature and
function of poetry-that is, whenever one tries to be
realistic about it-one is sure to be accused of being
an enemy to the art itself. But does this necessarily
follow? I am sure it does not. The social value of
poetry is not diminished in the slightest by looking
at it without illusion. It still offers its old escape from
reality; it still offers consolation to Homo sapiens in
his woeful journey through this inclement vale. To
denounce it out of hand would be as absurd as to denounce religion or anesthetics. The purpose of anesthetics is to get rid of the harsh torture of pain and
substitute the sweet peace of sleep. The purpose of
even the highest poetry is almost precisely the same.
Chloroform tells a man that he is not having his leg
cut off, but lying drunk on a feather-bed, with fireworks to entertain him. Poetry tells him that his girl
is as beautiful as Venus and is marrying him without
a single thought of his tenements and hereditaments,
that his country is a Galahad among the nations and
wholly devoid of the rascality prevailing everywhere
else, that he himself is a noble fellow and will go to
Heaven when he dies. All these things, I suspect, are
false. But all of them make life more bearable. Poets




FIVE LITTLE EXCURSIONS           181
are simply men who devote themselves to spreading
them, often at great sacrifice of income. They are
liars, but their lies, I believe, will be viewed very
generously on the Resurrection Morn.
4
Victualry As A Fine Art
Some time ago, functioning as a magazine editor, I
essayed to get hold of some articles on the American
cuisine. At once I discovered that the number of
American authors capable of writing upon the subject,
charmingly and at first hand, was so small as to be
substantially equal to the number of honest Prohibition agents. After six months search, in fact, I found
but three, and one of them had been living abroad
for years and the other had lived there since childhood. Even the third was scarcely a 100% American,
for he had traveled extensively in heathen lands, and
though he was holding a public office in Washington
when I found him, he confessed in the first sentence
of his article that he wished the Volstead Act were
repealed and the Hon. Mr. Volstead himself in Hell.
I speak here, of course, of authors competent to
write of victualing as a fine art. Of cooking-school
ma'ms, of course, we have a plenty, and we also have
a vast and cocksure rabble of dietitians, some of
them more or less scientific. But it must be obvious




182     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
that the cooking-school ma'm knows very little about
voluptuous eating, and that the dietition is its enemy.
The ma'm, indeed, seldom shows any sign that the
flavor of victuals interests her. The thing she is
primarily interested in, to borrow a term from surgery, is the cosmetic effect. In the women's magazines
she prints pretty pictures of her masterpieces, often
in full color. They look precisely like the dreadful
tit-bits one encounters in the more high-toned sort of
tea-rooms, and at wedding breakfasts. One admires
them as spectacles, but eating them is something else
again. Moreover, the ma'm is primarily a cook, not
an epicure. She is interested in materials and processes, not in gustatory effects. When she invents a
new way to utilize the hard heel of a ham, she believes
that she has achieved something, though even the
house-cat may gag at it. Her efforts are to the art of
the cordon bleu what those of a house-painter are to
those of a Cezanne. She is a pedagogue, not an artist.
The fact that she is heeded in the land, and her depressing concoctions solemnly devoured, is sufficient
proof, if any were needed, that Americans do not respect the dignity of their palates.
Why this should be so I don't know, for here in
this great Republic we have the materials for the most
superb victualry the world has ever seen, and our
people have the money to pay for it. Even the poorest
Americano, indeed, eats relatively expensive food:




FIVE LITTLE EXCURSIONS            183
his wife knows nothing of the hard pinching that entertains her French sister. He has meat in abundance
and in considerable variety, and a great wealth of
fruits and vegetables. Yet he eats badly, gets very
little enjoyment out of his meals, and is constantly taking pills. The hot dog is the reductio ad absurdium of
American eating. The Sicilian in the ditch, though he
can never be President, knows better: he puts a slice
of onion between his slabs of bread, not a cartridge
filled with the sweepings of the abattoir. This national taste for bad food seems all the more remarkable when one recalls that the United States, more
than any other country of the modern world, has been
enriched by immigrant cuisines. Every fresh wave
of newcomers has brought in new dishes, and many of
them have been of the highest merit. But very few of
them have been adopted by the natives, and the few
have been mainly inferior. From the Italians, for example, we have got only spaghetti; it is now so American that it is to be had in cans. But spaghetti is to the
Italian cuisine simply what eggs are to the Spanish:
a raw material. We eat it as only those Italians eat
it who are on the verge of ceasing to eat at all. Of the
multitudinous ways in which it may be cooked and
garnished we have learned but one, and that one is
undoubtedly the worst. So with the German sauerkraut-a superb victual when properly prepared for
the table. But how often, in America, is it properly




184     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
prepared? Perhaps once in 100,000 times. Even the
Germans, coming here, lose the art of handling it
as its inner nature deserves. It becomes in their hands,
as in the hands of American cooks, simply a sort of
stewed hay, with overtones of the dishpan. To encounter a decent dish of it in an American eatinghouse would be as startling as to encounter a decent
soup.
What ails our victualry, principally, is the depressing standardization that ails everything else American.
There was a time when every American eating-house
had its specialties, and many of them were excellent.
One did not expect to find the same things everywhere.
One went to one place for roast goose, and to another
for broiled soft crabs, and to another for oysters, and
to yet another for mutton chops. Rolls made the old
Parker House in Boston famous, and terrapin a la
Maryland did the same for Barnum's and Guy's Hotels
in Baltimore. This specialization still prevails in Europe. The best restaurants in Paris-that is, the best in
the epicurean, not in the fashionable sense-do not
profess to offer the whole range of the French cuisine.
Each has its specialty, and upon that specialty the art
of the chef is lavished, aided by prayer and fasting.
His rivals in other places do not try to meet and best
him on his own ground. They let him have his masterpiece, and devote themselves to perfecting masterpieces of their own. Thus victualing in France con



FIVE LITTLE EXCURSIONS            185
tinues to show a great variety, and a never-failing
charm. One may eat superbly every day, and never encounter a dish that is merely eatable. The Parisians
look forward to dinner as a Mississippian looks forward to his evening necking of the Scriptures. But in
America the public cooks have all abandoned speciali.
zation, and every one of them seems bent upon cooking
as nearly as possible like all the rest. The American
hotel meal is as rigidly standardized as the parts of a
Ford, and so is the American restaurant meal. The local dishes, in all eating-houses pretending to any tone,
are banned as low. So one hunts in vain in Boston for
a decent plate of beans, and in Baltimore for a decent
mess of steamed hard crabs, and in St. Louis for a decent rasher of catfish. They are obtainable, perhaps,
but only along the wharves. One must take a squad of
police along to enjoy them in safety.
What remains? A series of dishes fit only for diners
who are hurrying to catch trains-tasteless roasts,
banal beefsteaks, cremated chops, fish drenched in unintelligible sauces, greasy potatoes, and a long repertoire of vegetables with no more taste than baled shavings. The bill-of-fare is the same everywhere, and nowhere is it interesting. Within the past year I have
been in the heart of New England and in the heart of
the South. In both places the hotels offered the same
standardized cuisine. In neither was there any culinary sign that I was not in Chicago or New York. In




186     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
New England the brown bread was indistinguishable
from the stuff served on railway dining-cars, and in
the South there was no corn-bread at all.
I daresay that the railway diner has done much to
bring in this standardization. Distances are so great in
the Federal Union that the man who does much traveling eats most of his meals on trains. So he gets used to
dishes that all taste alike, whatever their ostensible
contents, and ends by being unable to distinguish
one from another. Thus he is indifferent to novelty,
and perhaps hostile to it. The hotels give him what
he wants. If he protested often enough and loudly
enough, they would turn out their present crews of
street-railway curve-greasers and locomotive firemen
and put in cooks.
I leave the meals served on railway diners for a
separate treatise, to be undertaken later in life. They
are botched by the effect to give them the delusive
variety of the appalling meals served in American
hotels. In a kitchen two feet wide and eleven feet long,
four or five honest but uninspired Aframericans try to
concoct fifteen or twenty different dishes. They naturally spoil all of them. On the Continent of Europe all
meals served on trains are table d'hoIte. Their principal dishes are cooked, not on the train, but at the
terminals. They are always appetizing and often excellent. Light wines and beers wash them down. The
dining-cars are hideous with gaudy advertisements



FIVE LITTLE EXCURSIONS            187
one sees inside what one sees outside in America-but
the chow does not insult the palate. At home I have
to eat many meals in railway diners. I always order
the same thing. It is impossible for even a cook traveling seventy miles an hour to spoil ham and eggs.
5
The Libido For the Ugly
On a Winter day, not long ago, coming out of Pittsburgh on one of the swift, luxurious expresses of the
eminent Pennsylvania Railroad, I rolled eastward for
an hour through the coal and steel towns of Westmoreland county. It was familiar ground; boy and man, I
had been through it often before. But somehow I had
never quite sensed its appalling desolation. Here was
the very heart of industrial America, the center of
its most lucrative and characteristic activity, the
boast and pride of the richest and grandest nation
ever seen on earth-and here was a scene so dreadfully hideous, so intolerably bleak and forlorn that
it reduced the whole aspiration of man to a macabre
and depressing joke. Here was wealth beyond computation, almost beyond imagination-and here were
human habitations so abominable that they would have
disgraced a race of alley cats.
I am not speaking of mere filth. One expects steel
towns to beUirity.)Wat I0alJ4  t9i;Ch4 j   ken
THE LOUIS A. STR AJS3
MEMORIAL Li"      '.
WEST QUADRiLdLE
OF MEN'S RW     IDENCE HALLS




188     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
and agonizing ugliness, the sheer revolting monstrousness, of every house in sight. From East Liberty to
Greensburg, a distance of twenty-five miles, there was
not one in sight from the train that did not insult and
lacerate the eye. So-me were so bad, and they were
among the most pretentious-churches, stores, warehouses, and the like-that they were downright startling: one blinked before them as one blinks before a
man with his face shot away. It was as if all the more
advanced Expressionist architects of Berlin had been
got drunk on Schnapps, and put to matching aberrations. A few masterpieces linger in memory, horrible
even there: a crazy little church just west of Jeannette,
set like a dormer-window on the side of a bare, leprous
hill; the headquarters of the Veterans of Foreign Wars
at Irwin; a steel stadium like a huge rat-trap somewhere further down the line. But most of all I recall
the general effect-of hideousness without a break.
There was not a single decent house within eye-range
from the Pittsburgh suburbs to the Greensburg yards.
There was not one that was not misshapen, and there
was not one that was not shabby.
The country itself is not uncomely, despite the
grime of the endless mills. It is, in form, a narrow
river valley, with deep gullies running up into the
hills. It is thickly settled but not noticeably overcrowded. There is still plenty of room for building,
even in the larger towns, and there are very few solid




FIVE LITTLE EXCURSIONS           189
blocks. Nearly every house, big and little, has space
on all four sides. Obviously, if there were architects
of any professional sense or dignity in the region,
they would have perfected a chalet to hug the hillsides
-a chalet with a high-pitched roof, to throw off
the heavy Winter snows, but still essentially a low
and clinging building, wider than it was tall. But
what have they done? They have taken as their
model a brick set on end. This they have converted into a thing of dingy clapboards, with a narrow, low-pitched roof. And the whole they have set
upon thin, preposterous brick piers. What could be
more appalling? By the hundreds and thousands these
abominable houses cover the bare hillsides, like gravestones in some gigantic and decaying cemetery. On
their deep sides they are three, four and even five
stories high; on their low sides they bury themselves
swinishly in the mud. Not a fifth of them are per.
pendicular. They lean this way and that, hanging on to
their bases precariously. And one and all they are
streaked in grime, with dead and eczematous patches
of paint peeping through the streaks.
Now and then there is a house of brick. But what
brick! When it is new it is the color of a fried egg.
When it has taken on the patina of the mills it is the
color of an egg long past all hope or caring. Was it
necessary to adopt that shocking color? No more than
it was necessary to set all of the houses on end. Red




190     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
brick, even in a steel town, ages with some dignity.
Let it become downright black, and it is still sightly,
especially if its trimmings are of white stone, with
soot in the depths and the high spots washed by the
rain. But in Westmoreland they prefer that uremic yellow, and so they have the most loathsome towns and
villages ever seen by mortal eye.
I award this championship only after laborious research and incessant prayer. I have seen, I believe, all
of the most unlovely towns of the world; they are all
to be found in the United States. I have seen the mill
towns of decomposing New England and the desert
towns of Utah, Arizona and Texas. I am familiar with
the back streets of Newark, Brooklyn, Chicago and
Pittsburgh, and have made bold scientific explorations
to Camden, N. J. and Newport News, Va. Safe in a
Pullman, I have whirled through the gloomy, Godforsaken villages of Iowa and Kansas, and the malarious tide-water hamlets of Georgia. I have been to
Bridgeport, Conn., and to Los Angeles. But nowhere
on this earth, at home or abroad, have I seen anything to compare to the villages that huddle along the
line of the Pennsylvania from the Pittsburgh yards to
Greensburg. They are incomparable in color, and
they are incomparable in design. It is as if some
titanic and aberrant genius, uncompromisingly inimical to man, had devoted all the ingenuity of Hell
to the making of them. They show grotesqueries of




FIVE LITTLE EXCURSIONS           191
ugliness that, in retrospect, become almost diabolical.
One cannot imagine mere human beings concocting
such dreadful things, and one can scarcely imagine
human beings bearing life in them.
Are they so frightful because the valley is full of
foreigners-dull, insensate brutes, with no love of
beauty in them? Then why didn't these foreigners
set up similar abominations in the countries that they
came from? You will, in fact, find nothing of the
sort in Europe-save perhaps in a few putrefying
parts of England. There is scarcely an ugly village on
the whole Continent. The peasants, however poor,
somehow manage to make themselves graceful and
charming habitations, even in Italy and Spain. But in
the American village and small town the pull is always
toward ugliness, and in that Westmoreland valley it
has been yielded to with an eagerness bordering upon
passion. It is incredible that mere ignorance should
have achieved such masterpieces of horror. There is
a voluptuous quality in them-the same quality that
one finds in a Methodist sermon or an editorial in the
New York Herald-Tribune. They look deliberate.
On certain levels of the human race, indeed, there
seems to be a positive libido for the ugly, as on other
and less Christian levels there is a libido for the beautiful. It is impossible to put down the wallpaper that
defaces the average American home of the lower
middle class to mere inadvertence, or to the obscene




192     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
humor of the manufacturers. Such ghastly designs, it
must be obvious, give a genuine delight to a certain
type of mind. They meet, in some unfathomable way,
its obscure and unintelligible demands. They caress it
as "The Palms" caresses it, or the art of Landseer,
or the ecclesiastical architecture of the United Brethren. The taste for them is as enigmatical and yet as
common as the taste for vaudeville, dogmatic theology, sentimental movies, and the poetry of Edgar A.
Guest. Or for the metaphysical speculations of Arthur
Brisbane. Thus I suspect (though confessedly without
knowing) that the vast majority of the honest folk of
Westmoreland county, and especially the 100%
Americans among them, actually admire the houses
they live in, and are proud of them. For the same
money they could get vastly better ones, but they prefer what they have got. Certainly there was no pressure upon the Veterans of Foreign Wars at Irwin to
choose the dreadful edifice that bears their banner, for
there are plenty of vacant buildings along the trackside, and some of them are appreciably better. They
might, indeed, have built a better one of their own.
But they chose that clapboarded horror with their eyes
open, and having chosen it, they let it mellow into its
present shocking depravity. They like it as it is: beside it, the Parthenon would no doubt offend them. In
precisely the same way the authors of the rat-trap
stadium that I have mentioned made a deliberate




FIVE LITTLE EXCURSIONS            193
choice. After painfully designing and erecting it, they
made it perfect in their own sight by putting a completely impossible pent-house, painted a staring yellow, on top of it. The effect is truly appalling. It is
that of a fat woman with a black eye. It is that of a
Presbyterian grinning. But they like it.
Here is something that the psychologists have so far
neglected: the love of ugliness for its own sake, the
lust to make the world intolerable. Its habitat is the
United States. Out of the melting pot emerges a race
which hates beauty as it hates truth. The etiology of
this madness deserves a great deal more study than it
has got. There must be causes behind it; it arises and
flourishes in obedience to biological laws, and not as
a mere act of God. What, precisely, are the terms of
those laws? And why do they run stronger in America
than elsewhere? Let some honest Privat Dozent apply
himself to the problem.




VII. HYMN TO THE TRUTH


N December 28, 1917, in the midst of war's
alarums, I printed in the New York Evening
Mail, a journal now happily extinct, an
article purporting to give the history of the bathtub.
This article, I may say at once, was a tissue of somewhat heavy absurdities, all of them deliberate and
most of them obvious. I alleged that the bathtub was
unknown in the world until the '40's of the last century, and that it was then invented in Cincinnati by a
contemporary of Stammvater Longworth. I described
how the inventor, in the absence of running water in
the town, employed Aframericans to haul it in buckets
from the adjacent Ohio river. I told how a bathtub
was put into the White House in the '50's, and how
the intrepid Millard Fillmore, of Cayuga, N. Y., took
the first presidential bath. I ended by saying that the
medical faculty of the Republic opposed the new invention as dangerous to health, and that laws against
it were passed by the legislators of Virginia, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts.
This article, plainly enough, was of spoofing all
compact. I composed it, in fact, to sublimate and so
194




HYMN TO THE TRUTH               195
make bearable the intolerable libido of the war for
democracy, and I confess that I regarded it, when it
came out in the Mail, with a certain professional satisfaction. It was promptly reprinted by various other
great organs of the enlightenment, sometimes with
credit, and after a while a stream of letters began to
reach me from persons who had read it. Then, of a
sudden, all my satisfaction turned to consternation.
For it quickly appeared that at least nine-tenths of
these readers took my idle jocosities with complete
seriousness! Some of them, of antiquarian tastes,
asked for further light upon this or that phase of the
subject. Others offered corrections in detail. Yet
others offered me corroboration! But the worst was
to come. Soon I began to discover my preposterous
"facts" in the writings of other men, some of them immensely earnest. The chiropractors and other such
quacks collared them for use as evidence of the stupidity of medical men. They were cited by medical
men as proof of the progress of public hygiene. They
got into learned journals and the transactions of
learned societies. They were alluded to on the floor of
Congress. The editorial writers of the land, borrowing them in toto and without mentioning my begetting
of them, began to labor them in their dull, indignant
way. They crossed the dreadful wastes of the North
Atlantic, and were discussed horribly by English uplifters and German professors. Finally, they got into




196     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
the standard works of reference, and began to be
taught to the young.
For a while I was alarmed; then I was amused; then
I began to be alarmed again. In the early part of 1926,
having undergone a spiritual rebirth and put off sin, I
resolved to confess, and so put an end to the imposture. This I did formally on May 23. I admitted
categorically that I had invented the whole tale, and
that there was not a word of truth in it. I pointed out
its obvious and multitudinous absurdities. I called
upon the pedagogues of the land to cease teaching such
appalling nonsense to the young, and upon the historians to take it out of their books. This confession
and appeal were printed simultaneously in thirty
great American newspapers, with a combined circulation, according to their sworn claims, of more than
250,000,000. One of them, and perhaps the greatest
of them all, was the eminent Boston Herald, organ of
the New England illuminati. The Herald, on that
bright May Sunday, printed my article on a leading
page of its so-called Editorial Section, under a black
and beetling four-column head, and with a two-column
cartoon labeled satirically "The American Public
Will Swallow Anything." And then, three weeks later,
on June 13, in the same Editorial Section, but pro.
moted to page one, the same Herald reprinted my tenyear-old fake soberly and as a piece of news!
Do not misunderstand me: I am not seeking to cast




HYMN TO THE TRUTH               197
a stone at the Herald, or at its talented and patriotic
editors. It is, as every one knows, one of the glories of
American journalism, and is awarded Pulitzer prizes
almost as often as the Pulitzer papers themselves. It
labors unceasingly for public morality, the Andy
Mellon idealism, and the flag. If it were suppressed
by the Watch and Ward Society to-morrow New England would revert instantly to savagery, wolves and
catamounts would roam in Boylston Street, and the
Harvard Law School would be engulfed by Bolshe.
vism. Little does the public reck what great sums such
journals expend to establish and disseminate the truth.
It may cost $10,000 and a reporter's leg to get a full
and accurate list of the guests at a Roxbury wake, with
their injuries. My point is that, despite all this extravagant frenzy for the truth, there is something in the
human mind that turns instinctively to fiction, and that
even the most gifted journalists succumb to it. A German philosopher, Dr. Hans Vaihinger, has put the
thing into a formal theory, and you will find it expounded at length in his book, "The Philosophy of As
If." It is a sheer impossibility, sass Dr. Vaihinger, for
human beings to think exclusively in terms of the
truth. For one thing, the stock of indubitable truths is
too scanty. For another thing, there is the instinctive
aversion to them that I have mentioned. All of our
thinking, according to Vaihinger, is in terms of assumptions, many of them plainly not true. Into our




198     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
most solemn and serious reflections fictions enterand three times out of four they quickly crowd out all
the facts.
That this truth about the so-called truth is true needs
no argument. Every man, thinking of his wife, has to
assume that she is beautiful and amiable, else despair
will seize him and he will be unable to think at all.
Every 100% American, contemplating Dr. Coolidge,
is psychically bound to admire him: the alternative is
anarchy. Every Christian, viewing the clergy, is forced
into a bold theorizing to save himself from Darwinism
and Hell. And all of us, taking stock of ourselves, must
resort to hypothesis to escape the river. What ails the
bald truth is that it is mainly uncomfortable, and
never caressing. What the actual history of the bathtub may be I don't know: digging it out would be an
endless job, and the result, after all the labor, would
probably be only a string of banalities. The fiction I
concocted back in 1917 was at least better than that.
It lacked sense, but it was certainly not without a certain charm. There were heroes in it, and villains. It
revealed a conflict, with virtue winning. So it was embraced by mankind, precisely as the story of George
Washington and the cherry-tree was embraced, and it
will live, I daresay, until it is displaced by something
worse-and hence better.
In other words, it was poetry, which is to say, a
mellifluous and caressing statement of the certainly




HYMN TO THE TRUTH               199
not true. The two elements, of untruth and of beauty,
are both important, and perhaps equally. It is not sufficient that the thing said in poetry be untrue: it must
also be said with a certain grace-it must soothe the
ear while it debauches the mind. And it is not sufficient
that it be voluptuous: it must also offer a rock and a
refuge from the harsh facts of everyday. Poets, of
course, protest against this doctrine. They argue that
they actually deal in the truth, and that their brand of
truth is of a peculiarly profound and esoteric quality-in other words, that their compositions add to the
sum of human wisdom. It is sufficient answer to them
to say that the chiropractors make precisely the same
claim, and with exactly the same plausibility. Both
actually deal in fictions. Those fictions are not truths;
they are not even truths in decay. They are simply
better-than-truths. They make life more comfortable
and happy. They turn and dull the sharp edge of
reality.
It is commonly held that the vast majority of men
are anaesthetic to the poetry, as they are alleged to be
anesthetic to other forms of beauty, but this is itself
a fiction, devised by poets to dignify their trade, and
make it seem high-toned and mysterious. The fact is
that the love of poetry is one of the most primitive of
human traits, and that it appears in children almost
as soon as they learn to speak and steal. I do not refer
here to the love of verbal jingles, but to the love of




200      PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
poetry properly-so-called-that is, to the love of the
agreeably not-so. A little girl who nurses a rag-doll is
a poet, and so is a boy who plays at soldiers with a
box of clothes-pins. Their ma is another poet when
she brags about them to the neighbors, and their pa
when he praises the cooking of their ma. The more
simple-minded the individual, indeed, the greater his
need of poetry, and hence the more steady his demand for it. No poet approved by the intelligentsia
ever had so many customers as Edgar A. Guest. Are
Guest's dithyrambs laughed at by the intelligentsia?
Then it is not because the things they say are not so,
but because the fiction in them is of a kind not satisfying to sniffish and snooty men. It is fiction suitable to
persons of a less critical habit. It preaches the joys
open to the humble. It glorifies their dire necessities. It
cries down their lacks. It promises them happiness,
and if not happiness, then at least contentment. No
wonder it is popular! No wonder it is intoned every
time Kiwanians get together, and the reassuring slapping of backs begins. It is itself a sort of backslapping. And so is all other poetry. The strophes of
Robert Browning elude the Kiwanian, but they are
full of soothing for the young college professor, for
they tell him that it is a marvelous and exhilarating
thing to be as intellectual as he is. This, of course, is
not true-which is the chief reason why it is pleasant.
No normal human being wants to hear the truth. It




HYMN TO THE TRUTH              201
is the passion of a small and aberrant minority of
men, most of them pathological. They are hated for
telling it while they live, and when they die they are
swiftly forgotten. What remains to the world, in the
field of wisdom, is a series of long-tested and solidly
agreeable lies. It is out of such lies that most of the
so-called knowledge of humanity flows. What begins as
poetry ends as fact, and is embalmed in the history
books. One recalls the gaudy days of 1914-1918.
But I am forgetting the coda to my story. On July
25, six weeks after the Herald's astounding faux pas
and nine weeks after my exposure of the original
fraud, I printed another article on the subject, disclosing the complete facts once more, and cackling
over the joke at the Herald's expense. This second
article got a great deal of attention: it was reprinted
from end to end of the Republic, and discussed in such
remote and barbarous places as Liverpool, Melbourne
and Cape Town. And then, early in 1927, the distinguished Scribner's Magazine printed a learned
article on the history of bathing, and in it all my stale
nonsense was once more set forth as fact!




VIII. THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX


IT is a curious and instructive fact that in all the
vast literature of so-called sex hygiene emitted
from the American presses for twenty years past
there is scarcely a book of any sound and practical
value. I have been through, I should say, at least a
hundred such volumes, and I can recall but one that
was even completely honest. That one was a little pamphlet called "The Sex Side of Life," by Mrs. Mary
Ware Dennett, a birth controller but an intelligent
woman. Naturally enough, it was suppressed by the
wowsers of the Postoflice, and is now contraband. All
the rest of the expository and hortatory manuals, large
and small, are full of evasions, with many descents to
downright false pretenses. It is difficult to imagine
such prissy rubbish deceiving the adolescents to whom
it is ostensibly addressed. For youth, though it may
lack knowledge, is certainly not devoid of intelligence: it sees through shams with sharp and terrible
eyes. When a schoolmaster is an ass, which happens
in Christendom more often than not, you may be sure
that even the dullest of his pupils is well aware of it.
The teachers of sex hygiene fall almost unani202




THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX             203
mously into that melancholy category. Very few such
books appear to be written by adults of worldly ex.
perience and sound sense. They are, like the school
physiology books, mainly the product of authors
cursed with the furor pedagogicus-which is to say, of
authors whose yearning to teach is unaccompanied by
anything properly describable as useful knowledge or
civilized discretion. I have read such books that were
downright idiotic, and I have read others that were
palpably dangerous. What ails most of them is simply
the fact that their composers, as pedagogues, are moralists first, and scientists only afterward. Dealing with
a subject in which only the plain and unequivocal
facts can be of any imaginable value, they swathe
those facts in such endless yards of pious platitude
that not even a modern puella, appalling keen though
her wits may be, can be expected to penetrate to the
core of wisdom that is theoretically concealed within
them.
Several common defects run through these lamentable tomes. One is the thumping non sequitur that is
in them-the gross disparity between their premisses
and their conclusions. They start off with attempts to
show that the phenomena of sex in the lower organisms
-usually dahlias, herring or frogs-are beautiful
and instructive, and they close with horrible warnings
that the phenomena of sex in man are ugly and not to
be mentioned. I do not forget, of course, their fre



204      PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
quent high praise of maternity, their florid descriptions of the ineffable joys of philoprogenitiveness. But
maternity, as they picture it, is scarcely more sexual
than playing the piano. It is, in fact, set up as something definitely anti-sexual, and virtuous thereby,as a sweet boon that must be forfeited if sex is yielded
to. I do not know how this logical swamp is to be got
around. It may present, indeed, a difficulty that no
one will ever resolve. All I presume to do is to point
out that the authors of the sex hygiene books have certainly not disposed of it, and that most of them seem
to be happily unaware that it exists. First they describe romantically the mating of the calla-lilies and
the June bugs, and then they plunge furiously into
their revolting treatises upon ophthalmia neonatorumwn,
lues, prostatitis, female weakness, and the fires of
Hell. First they paint a picture fit for a Christmas
card, and then they turn it around and show a panorama of jails, gutters and dissecting-rooms. It is the
old juristic error of trying to put down crime by converting trivial misdemeanors into thumping felonies,
with capital punishment. I don't believe that it works.
Personally, I do not frequent adolescent society, but
if those who do so are to be believed it is looser to-day
than it ever was before. That is to say, the era of sex
hygiene books-pouring from the presses by the million-is an era of rapidly increasing sexual recklessness. Is there any relation of cause and effect here? I




THE PEDAGOGY, OF SEX            205
incline to think that there may be. Youth, with its
highly efficient eyes, sees plainly that many, at least,
of the dangers described are enormously exaggerated.
What more natural than for it to conclude that the
rest are exaggerated, too?
There is another defect common to most of these
books, and it is quite as serious as the first. It lies in
their evasion of the plain fact that sex would be unimportant if it were not for its capacity to produce
an overwhelming ecstasy-that the average human
being seldom thinks of it in any other aspect, and almost never hears of it. This ecstasy, of course, does
not have to be taught; it is known by every flapper who
has been kissed by her first beau. But when, in a treatise upon the subject, it is not mentioned at all-or,
if mentioned, passed over gingerly-, then it is certainly not surprising if the young reader drops the
book as ignorant and fraudulent, and is lost to the
moral lessons it inculcates. Only Mrs. Dennett, of all
the sexual pedagogues I have read, so much as hints
that the exercise of the reproductive faculty is immensely agreeable-and Mrs. Dennett, as I have said,
is under the ban of the Postoffice. The rest of the sex
hygienists depict it either as something inert and
banal, like having one's hair cut, or as something painful and dangerous, like having one's appendix out.
There is, on the one hand, the chaste and arctic
philandering of the rose, and there is on the other




206      PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
hand a complex of pathological horrors. The average
youngster, male or female, is deceived by neither picture. It is well known, even in the primary grades, that
kissing is far more pleasant than gargling or sneezing,
and it is unanimously suspected that what instinct
suggests ought to follow is more pleasant still. Those
ensuing proceedings constitute the fundamental mystery of sex, as the young confront it-and yet it is precisely there that the sex hygiene books are least illuminating. They are full of alarming news about the remotest and most improbable consequences of a phenomenon, and leave the phenomenon itself undescribed. Thus they fail to satisfy the very curiosity
that ostensibly brought them into being-the very curiosity they so ineptly inflame. Is it any wonder that
intelligent young readers-and even a moron, at
twelve, is still intelligent-cast them aside as buncombe, and carry away nothing from them save the notion that what is so dangerous must be immensely fascinating, else the human race would have committed
suicide long ago by avoiding the risk?
As I have hinted, it may be that these defects in the
sex hygiene books-and I could list many more-are
inescapable. It may be that the subject is inherently
and incurably resistent to pedagogical science. But I
prefer to take a more optimistic view. The human
mind is a pliant and puissant organ. It has solved




THE PEDACOGY OF SEX             207
many occult and vexatious problems. Perhaps, in the
long run, it will solve this one too. Perhaps, indeed,
the solution would be possible to-morrow-if the
higher powers of the mind were applied to it. In the
sex hygiene books, so far as I can make out, only
the lower powers are in action. Such books, it appears,
are not ordinarily written by persons of sound information and ordinary sense. On the contrary, they seem
to be mainly the product of Freudian cripples who
know very little about the subject they discuss, and
have nothing to say about it that is apposite and worth
hearing. They are moral exhorters, not seekers of the
truth. Their aim is hortatory, not scientific. They apply
themselves to what ought to be, not to what is.
I believe that the remedy lies in trying to enlist performers of a better grade-that is, performers who
have taken the trouble to investigate the matters they
deal with, calmly and thoroughly, and who have the
degree of common sense that one ordinarily looks for
in a railroad conductor or an ice-man. There must be
plenty of such men, not to mention women. Their writings, indeed, are already available —pursued by the
wowsers, but not yet quite scotched. I have mentioned
Mrs. Dennett and offer Havelock Ellis as another example. But most such authors, of course, address
adults-what is more, highly sophisticated adults.
What remains is for them to bring their knowledge




208     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
down to the comprehension of the young. I believe that
it can be done, and that on some near to-morrow it will
be done. When the day comes at least nine-tenths of
the sex hygiene books that now stand in the book-shops
will be thrown out as rubbish.




IX. METROPOLIS


IT is astonishing how little New York figures in
current American literature. Think of the best
dozen American novels of the last ten years. No
matter which way your taste and prejudice carry you,
you will find, I believe, that Manhattan Island is completely missing from at least ten of them., and that
in the other two it 'is little more than a passing scene,
unimportant to the main action. Perhaps the explanation i's to be sought in the fact that very few authors
of any capacity live 'in the town. It attracts all the
young aspirants powerfully, and hundreds of them,
lingering on, develop into very proficient hacks and
quacks, and so eventually adorn the Authors' League,
the Poetry Society, and the National Institute of Arts
and Letters. But not many remain who have anything
worth hearing to say. They may keep quarters on the
island, but they do their writing somewhere else.
Primarily, I suppose, it is too expensive for them:
in order to live decently they must grind through so
much hack work for the cheap magazines, the movies
and the Broadway theaters that there is no time left
for their serious concerns. But there is also something
209




210     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
else. The town is too full of distractions to be comfortable to artists; it is comfortable only to performers. Its machinery of dissipation is so vastly developed that no man can escape it-not even an author
laboring in his lonely room, the blinds down and
chewing-gum plugging his ears. He hears the swish of
skirts through the key-hole; down the area-way comes
the clink of ice in tall glasses; some one sends him a
pair of tickets to a show which whisper promises will
be the dirtiest seen since the time of the Twelve
Apostles. It is a sheer impossibility in New York to
escape such appeals to the ductless glands. They are in
the very air. The town is no longer a place of work;
it is a place of pleasure. Even the up-State Baptist,
coming down to hear the Rev. Dr. John Roach Straton
tear into sin, must feel the pull of temptation. He
wanders along Broadway to shiver dutifully before
the Metropolitan Opera House, with its black record
of lascivious music dramas and adulterous tenors,
but before he knows what has struck him he is lured
into a movie house even gaudier and wickeder, to
sweat before a film of carnal love with the lewd music
of Tschaikowsky dinning in his ears, or into a grindshop auction house to buy an ormolu clock disgraceful
to a Christian, or into Childs' to debauch himself with
such victuals as are seen in Herkimer county only on
days of great ceremonial.
Such is the effect of organized badness, operating




METROPOLIS                211
upon imperfect man. But what is bad is also commonly amusing, and so I continue to marvel that the
authors of the Republic, and especially the novelists,
do not more often reduce it to words. Is there anything more charming and instructive in the scenes
that actually engage them? I presume to doubt it.
There are more frauds and scoundrels, more quacks
and cony-catchers, more suckers and visionaries in
New York than in all the country west of the Union
Hill, N. J., breweries. In other words, there are more
interesting people. They pour in from all four points
of the compass, and on the hard rocks of Manhattan
they do their incomparable stuff, day and night, year
in and year out, ever hopeful and ever hot for more.
Is it drama if Jens Jensen, out in Nebraska, pauses
in his furrow to yearn heavily that he were a chiropractor? Then why isn't it drama if John Doe, prancing in a New York night club, pauses to wonder who
the fellow was who just left in a taxi with Mrs. Doe?
Is it tragedy that Nils Nilsen, in South Dakota, wastes
his substance trying to horn into a mythical Heaven?
Then why isn't it tragedy when J. Eustace Garfunkel,
after years of effort, fails to make the steep grade of
St. Bartholomew's Church?
New York is not all bricks and steel. There are
hearts there, too, and if they do not break, then they
at least know how to leap. It is the place where all
the aspirations of the Western World meet to form




212      PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
one vast master aspiration, as powerful as the suction
of a steam dredge. It is the icing on the pie called
Christian civilization. That it may have buildings
higher than any ever heard of, and gin enough to keep
it gay, and bawdy shows enough, and door-openers
enough, and noise and confusion enough-that these
imperial ends may be achieved, uncounted millions
sweat and slave on all the forlorn farms of the earth,
and in all the miserable slums, including its own. It
pays more for a meal than an Italian or a Pole pays
for a wife, and the meal is better than the wife. It gets
the best of everything, and especially of what, by all
reputable ethical systems, is the worst. It has passed
beyond all fear of Hell or hope of Heaven. The primary postulates of all the rest of the world are its
familiar jokes. A city apart, it is breeding a race apart.
Is that race American? Then so is a bashi-bazouk
American. Is it decent? Then so is a street-walker decent. But I don't think that it may be reasonably denounced as dull.
What I marvel at is that the gorgeous, voluptuous
color of this greatest of world capitals makes so little
showing in the lovely letters of the United States. I am
not forgetting such things as John Dos Passos' "Manhattan Transfer" and Felix Riesenberg's "East Side,
West Side"-but neither am I admitting that they fill
my bill. If only as spectacle, the city is superb. It has
a glitter like that of the Constantinople of the Comneni.




METROPOLIS                 213
It roars with life like the Bagdad of the Sassanians.
These great capitals of antiquity, in fact, were squalid
villages compared to it, as Rome was after their kind,
and Paris, Berlin and London are to-day. There is
little in New York that does not issue out of money.
It is not a town of ideas; it is not even a town of*:auses. But what issues out of money is often extremely
brilliant, and I believe that it is more brilliant in New
York than it has ever been anywhere else. A truly
overwhelming opulence envelops the whole place, even
the slums. The slaves who keep it going may dwell in
vile cubicles, but they are hauled to and from their
work by machinery that costs hundreds of millions,
and when they fare forth to recreate themselves for
to-morrow's tasks they are felled and made dumb by
a gaudiness that would have floored John Paleologus
himself. Has any one ever figured out, in hard cash,
the value of the objects of art stored upon Manhattan
Island? I narrow it to paintings, and bar out all the
good ones. What would it cost to replace even the bad
ones? Or all the statuary, bronzes, hangings, pottery,
and bogus antiques? Or the tons of bangles, chains of
pearls, stomachers, necklaces, and other baubles? Assemble all the diamonds into one colossal stone, and
you will have a weapon to slay Behemoth. The crowds
pour in daily, bringing the gold wrung from iron and
coal, hog and cow. It is invisible, for they carry it in
checks, but it is real for all that. Every dollar earned




214     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
in Kansas or Montana finds its way, soon or late, to
New York, and if there is a part of it that goes back,
there is also a part of it that sticks.
What I contend is that this spectacle, lush and barbaric in its every detail, offers the material for a great
imaginative literature. There is not only gaudiness in
it; there is also a hint of strangeness; it has overtones
of the fabulous and even of the diabolical. The thing
simply cannot last. If it does not end by catastrophe,
then it will end by becoming stale, which is to say,
dull. But while it is in full blast it certainly holds out
every sort of stimulation that the gifted literatus may
plausibly demand. The shocking imbecility of Main
Street is there and the macabre touch of Spoon River.
But though Main Street and Spoon River have both
found their poets, Manhattan is still to be adequately
sung. How will the historian of the future get at it,
imagining a future and assuming that it will have historians? The story is not written anywhere in official
records. It is not in the files of the newspapers, which
reflect only the surface, and not even all of that. It
will not go into memoirs, for the actors in the melodramatic comedy have no taste for prose, and moreover they are all afraid to tell what they know. What
it needs, obviously, is an imaginative artist. We have
them in this bursting, stall-fed land-not many of
them, perhaps-not as many as our supply of quacks
-but nevertheless we have them. The trouble is that




METROPOLIS                 215
they either hate Manhattan too much to do its portrait,
or are so bedazzled by it that their hands are palsied
and their parts of speech demoralized. Thus we have
dithyrambs of Manhattan-but no prose.
I hymn the town without loving it. It is immensely
amusing, but I see nothing in it to inspire the fragile
and shy thing called affection. I can imagine an Iowan
loving the black, fecund stretches of his native State,
or a New Englander loving the wreck of Boston, or
even a Chicagoan loving Chicago, poets, Loop, stockyards and all, but it is hard for me to fancy any rational human being loving New York. Does one love
bartenders? Or interior decorators? Or elevator starters? Or the head-waiters of night clubs? No, one delights in such functionaries, and perhaps one respects
them and even reveres them, but one does not love
them. They are as palpably cold and artificial as the
Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Like it, they are mere
functions of solvency. When the sheriff comes in they
flutter away. One invests affection in places where it
will be safe when the winds blow.
But I am speaking now of spectacles, not of love
affairs. The spectacle of New York remains-infinitely
grand and gorgeous, stimulating like the best that
comes out of goblets, and none the worse for its sinister smack. The town seizes upon all the more facile
and agreeable emotions like band music. It is immensely trashy-but it remains immense. Is it a mere




216      PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
Utopia of rogues, a vast and complicated machine for
rooking honest men? I don't think so. The honest man,
going to its market, gets sound value for his money.
It offers him luxury of a kind never dreamed of in
the world before-the luxury of being served by perfect and unobtrusive slaves, human and mechanical.
It permits him to wallow regally-nay, almost celestially. The Heaven of the Moslems is open to any one
who can pay the convert charge and honorarium of the
hat-check girl-and there is a door, too, leading into
the Heaven of the Christians, or, at all events, into
every part of it save that devoted to praise and prayer.
Nor is all this luxury purely physiological. There is
entertainment also for the spirit, or for what passes
for the spirit when men are happy. There were more
orchestral concerts in New York last Winter than there
were in Berlin. The town has more theaters, and far
better ones, than a dozen Londons. It is, as I have said,
loaded with art to the gunwales, and steadily piling
more on deck. Is it unfecund of ideas? Perhaps. But
surely it is not hostile to them. There is far more to
the show it offers than watching a pretty gal oscillate
her hips; one may also hear some other gal, only a
shade less sightly, babble the latest discoveries in antinomianism. All kinds, in brief, come in. There are
parts for all in the Totentanz, even for moralists to
call the figures. But there is, as yet, no recorder to put
it on paper.




X. DIVES INTO QUACKERY


I
Chiropractic
T       HIS preposterous quackery is now all the rage
in the back reaches of the Republic, and even
begins to conquer the less civilized of the big
cities. As the old-time family doctor dies out in the
country towns, with no trained successor willing to
take over his dismal business, he is followed by some
hearty blacksmith or ice-wagon driver, turned into a
chiropractor in six months, often by correspondence.
In Los Angeles the damned there are more chiropractors than actual physicians, and they are far more
generally esteemed. Proceeding from the Ambassador
Hotel to the heart of the town, along Wilshire boulevard, one passes scores of their gaudy signs; there are
even many chiropractic "hospitals." The morons who
pour in from the prairies and deserts, most of them
ailing, patronize these "hospitals" copiously, and give
to the chiropractic pathology the same high respect
that they accord to the theology of Aimee McPherson
and the art of Cecil De Mille. That pathology is
217




218     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
grounded upon the doctrine that all human ills are
caused by the pressure of misplaced vertebrae upon the
nerves which come out of the spinal cord-in other
words, that every disease is the result of a pinch. This,
plainly enough, is buncombe. The chiropractic therapeutics rest upon the doctrine that the way to get rid of
such pinches is to climb upon a table and submit to an
heroic pummeling by a retired piano mover. This, obviously, is buncombe doubly damned.
Both doctrines were launched upon the world by an
old quack named Andrew T. Still, the father of osteopathy. For years his followers merchanted them, and
made a lot of money at the trade. But as they grew
opulent they grew ambitious, i. e., they began to study
anatomy and physiology. The result was a gradual
abandonment of Papa Still's ideas. The high-toned
osteopath of to-day is a sort of eclectic. He tries anything that promises to work, from tonsillectomy to the
vibrations of the late Dr. Abrams. With four years
training behind him, he probably knows more anatomy
than the average graduate of the Johns Hopkins Medical School, or, at all events, more osteology. Thus enlightened, he seldom has much to say about pinched
nerves in the back. But as he abandoned the Still revelation it was seized by the chiropractors, led by another quack, one Palmer. This Palmer grabbed the
pinched nerve nonsense and began teaching it to ambitious farm-hands and out-at-elbow Baptist preachers




DIVES INTO QUACKERY             219
in a few easy lessons. To-day the backwoods swarm
with chiropractors, and in most States they have been
able to exert enough pressure on the rural politicians
to get themselves licensed. Any lout with strong hands
and arms is perfectly equipped to become a chiropractor. No education beyond the elements is necessary. The whole art and mystery may be imparted in
a few months, and the graduate is then free to practice
upon God's images. The takings are often high, and so
the profession has attracted thousands of recruitsretired baseball players, plumbers, truck-drivers, longshoremen, bogus dentists, dubious preachers, village
school superintendents. Now and then a quack doctor
of some other school-say homeopathy-plunges into
it. Hundreds of promising students come from the intellectual ranks of hospital orderlies.
In certain States efforts have been made, sometimes
by the medical fraternity, to make the practice of chiropractic unlawful. I am glad to be able to report that
practically all of them have failed. Why should it be
prohibited? I believe that every free-born man has a
clear right, when he is ill, to seek any sort of treatment
that he yearns for. If his mental processes are of such
a character that the theory of chiropractic seems plausible to him, then he should be permitted to try chiropractic. And if it be granted that he has a right to do
so, then it follows clearly that any stevedore privy to
the technique of chiropractic has a right to treat him.




220     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
To preach any contrary doctrine is to advocate despotism and slavery. The arguments for such despotism are
all full of holes, and especially those that come from
medical men who have been bitten by the public hygiene madness, i. e., by the messianic delusion. Such
fanatics infest every health department in the land.
They assume glibly that the whole aim of civilization
is to cut down the death-rate, and to attain that end
they are willing to make a sacrifice of everything else
imaginable, including their own sense of humor. There
is, as a matter of fact, not the slightest reason to believe that cutting down the death-rate, in itself, is of
much benefit to the human race. A people with an annual rate of 40 a thousand might still produce many
Huxleys and Darwins, and one with a rate of but 8 or
9 might produce nothing but Coolidges and Billy Sundays. The former probability, in truth, is greater than
the latter, for a low rate does not necessarily mean
that more superior individuals are surviving; it may
mean only that more of the inferior are surviving,
and that the next generation will be burdened by their
get.
Such quackeries as Christian Science, osteopathy
and chiropractic work against the false humanitarianism of the hygienists and to excellent effect. They suck
in the botched, and help them on to bliss eternal. When
these botched fall into the hands of competent medical
men they are very likely to be patched up and turned




DIVES INTO QUACKERY             221
loose upon the world, to beget their kind. But massaged along the backbone to cure their lues, they
quickly pass into the last stages, and so their pathogenic heritage perishes with them. What is too often
forgotten is that nature obviously intends the botched
to die, and that every interference with that benign
process is full of dangers. Moreover, it is, like birth
control, profoundly immoral. The chiropractors are
innocent in both departments. That their labors tend
to propagate epidemics and so menace the lives of all
of us, as is alleged by their medical opponents-this
I doubt. The fact is that most infectious diseases of
any seriousness throw out such alarming symptoms
and so quickly that no sane chiropractor is likely to
monkey with them. Seeing his patient breaking out in
pustules, or choking, or falling into a stupor, he takes
to the woods at once, and leaves the business to the
nearest medical man. His trade is mainly with ambulent patients; they must come to his studio for treatment. Most of them have lingering diseases; they tour
all the neighborhood doctors before they reach him.
His treatment, being entirely nonsensical, is in accord
with the divine plan. It is seldom, perhaps, that he actually kills a patient, but at all events he keeps many a
worthy soul from getting well.
Thus the multiplication of chiropractors in the Republic gives me a great deal of pleasure. It is agreeable to see so many morons getting slaughtered, and it




222      PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
is equally agreeable to see so many other morons getting rich. The art and mystery of scientific medicine,
for a decade or more past, has been closed to all save
the sons of wealthy men. It takes a small fortune to go
through a Class A medical college, and by the time
the graduate is able to make a living for himself he is
entering upon middle age, and is commonly so disillusioned that he is unfit for practice. Worse, his fees for
looking at tongues and feeling pulses tend to be cruelly
high. His predecessors charged fifty cents and threw in
the pills; his own charges approach those of divorce
lawyers, consulting engineers and the higher hetaxraT.
Even general practice, in our great Babylons, has become a sort of specialty, with corresponding emoluments. But the chiropractor, having no such investment
in his training, can afford to work for more humane
wages, and so he is getting more and more of the trade.
Six weeks after he leaves his job at the filling-station
or abandons the steering-wheel of his motor-truck he
knows all the anatomy and physiology that he will ever
learn in this world. Six weeks more, and he is an adept
at all the half-Nelsons and left hooks that constitute
the essence of chiropractic therapy. Soon afterward,
having taken post-graduate courses in advertising,
salesmanship and mental mastery, he is ready for
practice. A sufficiency of patients, it appears, is always
ready, too. I hear of no complaint from chiropractors
of bad business. New ones are being turned out at a




DIVES INTO QUACKERY             223
dizzy rate, but they all seem to find the pickings easy.
Some time ago I heard of a chiropractor who, having
once been a cornet-player, had abandoned chiropractic in despair, and gone back to cornet-playing. But
investigation showed that he was really not a chiropractor at all, but an osteopath.
The osteopaths, I fear, are finding this new competition serious and unpleasant. As I have said, it was
their Hippocrates, the late Dr. Still, who invented all
of the thrusts, lunges, yanks, hooks and bounces that
the lowly chiropractors now employ with such vast
effect, and for years the osteopaths had a monopoly
of them. But when they began to grow scientific and
ambitious their course of training was lengthened until
it took in all sorts of tricks and dodges borrowed from
the regular doctors, or resurrection men, including
the plucking of tonsils, adenoids and appendices, the
use of the stomach-pump, and even some of the legerdemain of psychiatry. They now harry their students
furiously, and turn them out ready for anything from
growing hair on a bald head to frying a patient with
the x-rays. All this new striving, of course, quickly
brought its inevitable penalties. The osteopathic grad.
uate, having sweated so long, was no longer willing to
take a case of sarcoma for $2, and in consequence
he lost patients. Worse, very few aspirants could make
the long grade. The essence of osteopathy itself could
be grasped by any lively farm-hand or night watch.




224     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
man in a few weeks, but the borrowed magic baffled
him. Confronted by the phenomenon of gastrulation,
or by the curious behavior of heart muscle, or by any
of the current theories of immunity, he commonly took
refuge, like his brother of the orthodox faculty, in a
gulp of laboratory alcohol, or fled the premises altogether. Thus he was lost to osteopathic science, and the
chiropractors took him in; nay, they welcomed him.
He was their meat. Borrowing that primitive part of
osteopathy which was comprehensible to the meanest
understanding, they threw the rest overboard, at the
same time denouncing it as a sorcery invented by the
Medical Trust. Thus they gathered in the garage mechanics, ash-men and decayed welter-weights, and the
land began to fill with their graduates. Now there is a
chiropractor at every cross-roads, and in such sinks
of imbecility as Los Angeles they are as thick as bootleggers.
I repeat that it eases and soothes me to see them so
prosperous, for they counteract the evil work of the
so-called science of public hygiene, which now seeks
to make morons immortal. Ifa man, being ill of a pus
appendix, resorts to a shaved and fumigated longshoreman to have it disposed of, and submits willingly
to a treatment involved balancing him on McBurney's
spot and playing on his vertebrae as on a concertina,
then I am willing, for one, to believe that he is badly
wanted in Heaven. And if that same man, having




DIVES INTO QUACKERY             225
achieved lawfully a lovely babe, hires a blacksmith
to cure its diphtheria by pulling its neck, then I do
not resist the divine will that there shall be one less
radio fan in 1967. In such matters, I am convinced,
the laws of nature are far better guides than the fiats
and machinations of the medical busybodies who now
try to run us. If the latter gentlemen had their way,
death, save at the hands of hangmen, Prohibition
agents and other such legalized assassins, would be
abolished altogether, and so the present differential
in favor of the enlightened would disappear. I can't
convince myself that that would work any good to the
world. On the contrary, it seems to me that the current
coddling of the half-witted should be stopped before
it goes too far-if, indeed, it has not gone too far already. To that end nothing operates more cheaply and
effectively than the prosperity of quacks. Every time a
bottle of cancer specific goes through the mails Homo
americanus is improved to that extent. And every time
a chiropractor spits on his hands and proceeds to treat
a gastric ulcer by stretching the backbone the same
high end is achieved.
But chiropractic, of course, is not perfect. It has
superb potentialities, but only too often they are not
converted into concrete cadavers. The hygienists rescue many of its foreordained customers, and, turning
them over to agents of the Medical Trust, maintained
at the public expense, get them cured. Moreover, chi



226     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
ropractic itself is not certainly fatal: even an Iowan
with diabetes may survive its embraces. Yet worse, I
have a suspicion that it sometimes actually cures. For
all I know (or any orthodox pathologist seems to
know) it may be true that certain malaises are caused
by the pressure of vagrom vertebrae upon the spinal
nerves. And it may be true that a hearty ex-boilermaker, by a vigorous yanking and kneading, may be
able to relieve that pressure. What is needed is a scientific inquiry into the matter, under rigid test conditions, by a committee of men learned in the architecture and plumbing of the body, and of a high and incorruptible sagacity. Let a thousand patients be selected, let a gang of selected chiropractors examine
their backbones and determine what is the matter with
them, and then let these diagnoses be checked up by
the exact methods of scientific medicine. Then let the
same chiropractors essay to cure the patients whose
maladies have been determined. My guess is that the
chiropractors' errors in diagnosis will run to at least
95 % and that their failures in treatment will push
99 %o. But I am willing to be convinced.
Where is such a committee to be found? I undertake
to nominate it at ten minutes' notice. The land swarms
with men competent in anatomy and pathology, and
yet not engaged as doctors. There are hundreds of
roomy and well-heated hospitals, with endless clinical
material. I offer to supply the committee with cigars




DIVES INTO QUACKERY             227
and music during the test. I offer, further, to supply
both the committee and the chiropractors with sound
pre-war wet goods. I offer, finally, to give a bawdy
banquet to the whole Medical Trust at the conclusion
of the proceedings.
2
Criminology
The more I read the hand-books of the new criminology, the more I am convinced that it stands on a
level with dogmatic theology, chiropractic and the
New Thought-in brief, that it is mainly buncombe.
That it has materially civilized punishment I do not,
of course, deny; what I question is its doctrine as to
the primary causes of crime. The average man, as
every one knows, puts those causes in the domain of
free will. The criminal, in his view, is simply a scoundrel who has deliberately chosen to break the law and
injure his fellow-men. Ergo, he deserves to be punished swiftly and mercilessly. The new criminologists,
in swinging away from that naive view, have obviously
gone too far in the other direction. They find themselves, in the end, embracing a determinism that is as
childlike as the free will of the man in the street.
Crime, as they depict it, becomes a sort of disease,
either inherited or acquired by contagion, and as de



228     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
void of moral content or significance as smallpox. The
criminal is no longer a black-hearted villain, to be put
down by force, but a poor brother who has succumbed
to the laws of Mendel and the swinish stupidity of society. The aim of punishment is not to make him
sweat, but to dissuade and rehabilitate him. In every
pickpocket there is a potential Good Man. All this,
gradually gaining credit, has greatly ameliorated punishments. They have not only lost their old barbaric
quality; they have also diminished quantitatively. Men
do not sit in prison as long as they used to; the parole
boards turn them out almost as fast as the cops shove
them in. The result is a public discontent that must be
manifest. Whenever a criminal of any eminence comes
to trial there are loud bellows against any show of
mercy to him, and demands that he be punished to the
limit. One never hears complaints any more that the
courts are too savage; one hears only complaints that
they are too soft and sentimental.
I am a congenital disbeliever in laws, and have only
the most formal respect for the juridic process and its
learned protagonists; nevertheless, it seems to me that
there is a certain reasonableness in this unhappiness.
For what it indicates, basically, is simply the inability
of the average man to grasp the determinism of the
new criminologists. He cannot imagine an apparently
voluntary act that is determined, or even materially




DIVES INTO QUACKERY             229
conditioned, from without. He can think of crime only
in terms of free will, and so thinking of it, he believes
that it ought to be punished in the ancient Christian
manner, i. e., according to the damage flowing out of
it, and not according to the temptations behind it.
Certainly this is not an illogical ground to take. In all
the other relations of life the average man sees free
will accepted as axiomatic: he could not imagine a
world in which it was denied. His religion is based
squarely upon it: he knows, by the oath of his pastor,
that his free acts can lift him to Heaven or cast him
down to Hell. He works as a matter of free will, and
is punished inevitably if he lags. His marriage, as he
sees it, was a free will compact, and though he has
some secret doubt, perhaps, that its issue came that
way, he nevertheless orders his relations with his children on the same basis, and assumes it in judging
them. In other words, he lives in a world in which free
will is apparently omnipotent, and in which it is presumed even when there is no direct evidence for it.
All his daily concerns are free will concerns. Well,
what the criminologists ask him to do is to separate
one special concern from the rest, and hand it over to
determinism. They damn legislators for passing harsh
laws, and judges and jailers for executing them-free
will. They denounce society for "coercing" morons
into crime-free will again. And then they argue that




230     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
the criminals are no more than helpless victims of circumstance, like motes dancing along a sunbeam-determinism in its purest and sweetest form.
No wonder the plain man baulks! Suppose an analogous suspension of the usual rules were attempted in
some other field. Suppose it were argued seriously that
free will had nothing to do with, say, the execution of
contracts. Suppose an employer who failed to pay his
workmen on Saturday were excused on the ground that
he was the helpless victim of an evil heredity or of
the stupidity of society, and thus not to be blamed for
dissipating his money on Ford parts, women, foreign
missions, or drink? Suppose the workman who had
got out a mechanic's lien against him and sought to
levy on his assets were denounced as a cruel and
medieval fellow, and at odds with human progress?
Certainly there would be a horrible hullabaloo, and
equally certainly it would be justified. For whatever
the theoretical arguments for determinism-and I am
prepared to go even further in granting them than the
criminologists go-, it must be plain that the everyday
affairs of the world are ordered on an assumption of
free will, and that it is impossible, practically speaking, to get rid of it. Society itself, indeed, is grounded
upon that assumption. Imagining it as determined is
possible only to professional philosophers, whose
other imaginings are surely not such as to give any
authority to this one. The plain man simply gives up




DIVES INTO QUACKERY             231
the effort as hopeless-and perhaps as also a bit anarchistic and un-Christian. So he is sniffish when the new
criminologists begin to prattle their facile determinism, and when he observes it getting credit from the
regular agents of the law he lets a loud whoop of protest. I do not believe he is naturally cruel and vindictive; on the contrary, he is very apt to be maudlingly
sentimental. But sentiment is one thing, and what
seems to him to be a palpably false philosophy is
quite another. He no more favors letting criminals go
on the ground that they can't help themselves than he
favors giving money to foreign missions, or the Red
Cross, or the Y. M. C. A. on the ground that it is his
inescapable duty. In all of these cases he is willing to
be persuaded, but in none of them is he willing to be
dragooned.
Thus I fear that the criminologists of the new school
only pile up trouble for themselves, and indirectly for
their pets, when they attempt to revise so radically the
immemorial human view of crime. If they kept quiet
in the department of responsibility, they would be
heard with far more attention and respect in the department of punishment, where they really have something apposite and useful to say. Their influence here,
in fact, is already immense, and it works much good.
Our prisons are no longer quite as sordid and demoralizing as they used to be. They are still bad enough,
in all conscience, but they are not as bad as they were.




232     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
Here there i's room for yet more improvement, and it
cries aloud to be made. The men to work out its details
are the criminologists. They have studied the effects
of the prevailing punishments, and know where those
punishments succeed or fail. They are happily devoid
of that proud ignorance which is one of the boasts of
the average judge, and they lack the unpleasant zeal of
district attorneys, jail wardens and other such professional blood-letters. They need only offer the proofs
that this or that punishment is ineffective to see it
abandoned for something better, or, at all events, less
obviously bad. But when they begin to talk of criminals in terms of pathology, even of social pathology,
they speak a language that the plain man cannot understand and doesn't want to hear. He believes that
crime,. in the overwhelming majority of cases, is a
voluntary matter, and that it ought to pay its own way
and bury its own dead. He is not bothered about curing criminals, or otherwise redeeming them. He is
intent only upon punishing them, and the more swiftly
and certainly that business is achieved the better he is
satisfied. Every time it is delayed by theorizing about
the criminal's heredity and environment, and the duty
that society owes to him, the plain man breaks into
indignation. Only too often that indignation has been
wrecked upon criminology and the criminologists.
More American States, of late, have gone back to capital punishment than have abandoned it. What set the




DIVES INTO QUACKERY


233


tide to running that way was surely not mere bloodlust. It was simply a natural reaction against the doctrine that murder is mainly an accidental and unfortunate matter, and devoid of moral content, like slipping on an icy sidewalk or becoming the father of
twins.
3
Eugenics
This great moral cause, like that of the criminologists, is much corrupted by blather. In none of the
books of its master minds is there a clear definition
of the superiority they talk about so copiously. At one
time they seem to identify it with high intelligence, at
another time with character, i. e., moral stability, and
at yet another time with mere fame, i. e., luck. Was
Napoleon I a superior man, as I am privately inclined
to believe, along with many of the eugenists? Then so
was Aaron Burr, if in less measure. Was Paul of Tarsus? Then so was Brigham Young. Were the Gracchi?
Then so were Karl Marx and William Jennings Bryan.
This matter of superiority, indeed, presents cruel
and ineradicable difficulties. If it is made to run with
service to the human race, the eugenist is soon mired,
for many men held to be highly useful are obviously
second-rate, and leave third-rate progeny behind
them, for example, General Grant. And if it is made




234     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
to run with intellectual brilliance and originality the
troubles that loom up are just as serious, for men of
that rare quality are generally felt to be dangerous,
and sometimes they undoubtedly are. The case of
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche is in point. I suppose
that no rational person to-day, not even an uncured
Liberty Loan orator or dollar-a-year man, would argue seriously that Nietzsche was inferior. On the contrary, his extraordinary gifts are now unanimously
admitted, save perhaps by the rev. clergy. But what of
his value to the human race? And what of his eugenic fitness? It is not easy to answer these questions. Nietzsche, in fact, preached a gospel that to
most human beings remains unbearable, and it will
probably continue unbearable for centuries to come.
Its adoption by Dr. Coolidge, by and with the advice
and consent of the Senate, would plunge this Republic
into dreadful woe. And Nietzsche himself was a
chronic invalid who died insane-the sort of wreck
who, had he lived into our time, would have been a
customer of chiropractors. Worse, he suffered from a
malady of a scandalous nature, and of evil effects
upon the sufferer's offspring. Was it good or bad luck
for the world, eugenically speaking, that he died a
bachelor?
But their vagueness about the exact nature of superiority is not the only thing that corrupts the fine
fury of the eugenists. Even more dismaying is their




DIVES INTO QUACKERY             235
gratuitous assumption that all of the socially useful
and laudable qualities (whatever they may be) are
the exclusive possession of one class of men, and that
the other classes lack them altogether. This is plainly
not true. All that may be truthfully said of such qualities is that they appear rather more frequently in one
class than in another. But they are rare in all classes,
and the difference in the frequency of their occurrence
between this class and that one is not very great, and
of little genuine importance. If all the biologists in
the United States were hanged to-morrow (as has been
proposed by the pastors and newspaper editors of
Mississippi) and their children with them, we'd probably still have a sufficiency of biologists in the next
generation. There might not be as many as we have
to-day, but there would be enough. They would come
out of the families of bricklayers and politicians,
bootleggers and bond salesmen. Some of them, indeed,
might even come out of the families of Mississippi
editors and ecclesiastics. For the supply of such men,
like the supply of synthetic gin, always tends to ran
with the demand. Whenever it is short, the demand
almost automatically augments it. Every one knows
that this is true on the lower levels. Before baseball
was invented there were no Ty Cobbs and Babe Ruths;
now they appear in an apparently endless series. Before the Wright brothers made their first flight there
were no men skilled at aviation; now there are multi



236      PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
tudes of highly competent experts. The eugenists forget that the same thing happens also on the higher
levels. Whenever the world has stood in absolute need
of a genius he has appeared. And though it is true
that he has usually come out of the better half of
humanity, it is also true that he has sometimes come
out of the worse half. Beethoven was the grandson
of a cook and the son of a drunkard, and Lincoln's
forebears never lifted themselves above the level of
village prominenti.
The fact is that the difference between the better
sort of human beings and the lesser sort, biologically
speaking, is very slight. There may be, at the very top,
a small class of persons whose blood is decidedly
superior and distinguished, and there may be, at the
bottom, another class whose blood is almost wholly debased, but both are very small. The folks between are
all pretty much alike. The baron has a great deal of
peasant blood in him, and the peasant has some blood
that is blue. The natural sinfulness of man is enough
to make sure of that. No man in this world can ever
be quite sure that he is the actual great-great-grandson
of the great-great-grandfather whose memory he venerates. Thus, when the relatively superior and distinguished class ceases to be fecund (a phenomenon
now visible everywhere in the world), natural selection comes to the rescue by selecting out and promoting individuals from the classes below. These indi



DIVES INTO QUACKERY


237


viduals, in the main, are just as sound in blood as
any one in the class they enter. Their sound blood has
been concealed, perhaps for generations, but it has
been there all the time. If Abraham Lincoln's ancestry
were known with any certainty, it would probably be
found to run back to manifestly able men. There are
many more such hidden family-trees in the folk: the
eugenists simply overlook them. They are also singularly blind to many familiar biological phenomena
-for example, the appearance of mutations or sports.
It is not likely that a commonplace family will produce a genius, but nevertheless it is by no means impossible: the thing has probably happened more than
once. They forget, too, the influence of environment
in human society. Mere environment, to be sure, cannot produce a genius, but it can certainly help him
enormously after he is born. If a potential Wagner
were born to a Greek bootblack in New York City tomorrow, the chances of his coming to fruition and
fame would be at least even. But if he were born to
an Arab in the Libyan desert or to a Fundamentalist
in Rhea county, Tennessee, the chances are that he
would be a total loss.
The eugenists constantly make the false assumption that a healthy degree of human progress demands
a large and steady supply of absolutely first-rate men.
Here they succumb to the modern craze for mass production. Because a hundred policemen, or garbage




238     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
men, or bootleggers are manifestly better than one
they conclude absurdly that a hundred Beethovens
would be better than one. But this is not true. The
actual value of a genius often lies in his very singularity. If there had been a hundred Beethovens, the
music of all of them would probably be very little
known to-day, and so its civilizing effect would be appreciably less than it is. The number of first-rate men
necessary to make a high civilization is really very
small. If the United States could produce one Shakespeare or Newton or Bach or Michelangelo or Vesalius
a century it would be doing better than any nation
has ever done in history. Such culture as we have is
due to a group of men so small that all of them alive
at one time could be hauled in a single Pullman train.
Once I went through "Who's Who in America," hunting for the really first-rate men among its 27,000
names-that is, for the men who had really done
something unique and difficult, and of unquestionable
value to the human race. I found 200. The rest of the
27,000 were simply respectable blanks. Many of them
(though certainly not all) were creditable members of
society, but only the 200 had ever done anything useful that had not been done before.
An over-production of geniuses, indeed, would be
very dangerous, for though they make for progress
they also tend to disturb the peace. Imagine a country
housing 100 head of Aristotles! It would be as un



DIVES INTO QUACKERY            239
happy as a city housing 100 head of Jesse Jameses.
Even quasi-geniuses are a great burden upon society.
There are, in the United States to-day, 1500 professional philosophers-that is, men who make their livings at the trade. The country would be far better off if
all save two or three of them were driving taxicabs or
serving with the Rum Fleet.




XI. LIFE UNDER BUREAUCRACY


A        S the bureaucracy under which we all sweat
and suffer gradually swells and proliferates
in the Republic, life will become intolerable
to every man save the one who has what is called influence, i. e., the one who has access to the very privilege which the Fathers of the Republic hoped to abolish. It is, in fact, almost so already. The obscure and
friendless man can exist unmolested in the United
States only by being so obscure and friendless that
the bureaucracy is quite unaware of him. The moment
he emerges from complete anonymity its agents have
at him with all the complex and insane laws and regulations that now crowd the statute-books, and unless he
can find some more powerful person to aid him, either
for cash in hand or in return for his vote, he may as
well surrender himself at once to ruin and infamy.
For if the job-holders don't fetch him with one law
they will fetch him with another. Their one permanent
purpose in life is to fetch him-by the heels if possible, and if not by the heels then at least by the ears.
Suppose, for example, he is one of the millions of
Americans of foreign birth, duly naturalized but still
240




LIFE UNDER BUREAUCRACY             241
unaccepted socially as a full-fledged citizen. He saves
his money, and decides after awhile to make a visit
to his birthplace, to show off his American watch and
contemplate the tombs of his anthropoid ancestors. He
must have, obviously, a passport, first to get out of the
United States and then to get back. Well, procuring
this passport is now so onerous and complicated a
matter that to such a man, with no friendly 100%
American to help him, it has become practically impossible. It takes him weeks, and in the end the
chances are at least 10 to 1 that he will fail. Where
does the blame lie, upon the laws or upon the bureaucracy? It lies upon the bureaucracy. The laws simply
say that no man who is not actually a citizen shall
have the passport. But the bureaucracy goes much
further: it assumes that no man at all is a citizen. The
moment he is heard of he is put down as an impostor,
and thereafter the burden of proving that he is not is
upon him. As a practical matter, it is often impossible
for him to furnish the proof. Long before the bureaucracy is satisfied, he is worn out and in despair. Unless he can find some person of influence to help him
he may as well give up before he begins.
It is the invariable habit of bureaucracies, at all
times and everywhere, to assume in this way that
every citizen is a criminal. Their one apparent purpose, pursued with a relentless and furious diligence,
is to convert the assumption into a fact. They hunt




242     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
endlessly for proofs, and, when proofs are lacking,
for mere suspicions. The moment they become aware
of a definite citizen, John Doe, seeking what is his
right under the law, they begin searching feverishly
for an excuse for withholding it from him. A successful bureaucrat is simply one who is skilled at such
withholdings. A failure is one who gives Mr. Doe
what he is entitled to, without resistance and at once.
I have spoken of the poor hyphenate, the special
mark and victim of our American bureaucracy. But
the 100%o Nordic, in his different way, suffers almost
as cruelly. Consider, for example, his typical adventures with the bureaucrats of the Income Tax
Bureau. To begin with, they give him a blank to fill out
that not one man in a hundred, assuming that he has
not had long training as an accountant, can under.
stand. Its very complexity is a triumph of bureaucracy. It is made unintelligible deliberately, and by
bureaucrats of the highest professional genius, expressly hired for the business. No ordinary man, filling it out, can conceivably avoid errors. Well, the
minute it is deposited in the bureaucratic machine
the taxpayer is assumed officially to be a criminal.
His slightest slip is proof that he has tried to swindle
the government. And how do the bureaucrats deal with
him? By framing a definite accusation against him,
and giving him his day in court, as provided by Articles V and VI of the Bill of Rights? Not at all. That




LIFE UNDER BUREAUCRACY             243
would not be bureaucratic. They proceed by levying
an additional (and often grossly excessive) tax upon
him, and demanding that he pay it forthwith. He is
now wholly in their net. The charge against him is no
longer that he has deliberately falsified his return,
which would be difficult to prove, but simply that he
has failed to pay a tax lawfully levied, which is easy
to prove. So he pays, and thereafter, for five or six
years, he struggles to get his money back.
Not infrequently, it must be said, the bureaucrats
finally give it to him. But only after a desperate resistance, made brilliant by innumerable demands for
affidavits and endless conferences and hearings. All
this hocus-pocus is of the very essence of the bureaucratic art and mystery. The bureaucrat, whatever his
imbecilities otherwise, at least grasps clearly the central fact about government: he knows that it is the
eternal enemy of the citizen. In his own eye he is an
attorney employed to represent it in combats with
citizens, and as a conscientious man he naturally tries
to do the best he can for his client-legally if possible, but if not, then in any way feasible. His professional standing runs with his success. If he permits too
many citizens to prevail against him, and so recover
and preserve their rights, he loses caste, just as a surgeon loses caste when too many patients die upon the
table, and his career is imperilled. The ideal bureaucrat is the one who beats the citizen every time.




244     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
Obviously, the realization of this ideal would make
life almost impossible. We move steadily toward it,
but so far we have not actually reached it. Many citizens, getting into the clutches of the bureaucracy,
manage to escape. They achieve the business, commonly, by mustering up what is called influence. That
is, they either demonstrate to the bureaucrats that
they are themselves of such power and importance
that oppressing them unduly would be dangerous, or
they get the help of some other person of that sort. The
fact explains the continued prosperity of political machines, despite the long effort to put them down. They
offer even the humblest citizen an avenue of escape
from the bureaucracy. In return for his vote they protect him. When the bureaucrats discover him and proceed to practice their art upon him, the machine brings
pressure to bear upon their political superiors, and
so hauls them off. This hauling off, as every one
knows, is now the principal occupation of the inferior
order of political hacks called Congressmen, and is
fast becoming a crushing burden to them. In the early
days of the Republic they spent their time at Washington (when not engaged in the bar-rooms and stews) debating the great problems of statecraft, often eloquently, and sometimes with what, on such modest
levels of the human mind, passed for sense. But today, with the Federal laws enormously multiplied and
the Federal bureaucracy glowing with professional




LIFE UNDER BUREAUCRACY             245
skill and enterprise, they are forced to devote practically all of their energies to protecting their constituents. If a Congressman failed in that duty he
would return home to find half of his constituents in
jail and the rest fugitives from justice. So he has had
to resign statecraft to a few leaders, mainly from remote and sparsely settled States. While they carry on
the business of Congress he busies himself in the departments and bureaux, rescuing his customers from
the clutches of the bureaucracy.
In this benign enterprise, alas, he fails far oftener
than he succeeds. Only too often, indeed, his heart is
not really in it, for as a professional feeder at the
public crib he is something of a bureaucrat himself,
and so his sympathies naturally run with the bureaucracy rather than with its victims. Here we come upon
esprit de corps: there is a lot of it among the scoundrels who constitute the government of the United
States: whatever their stupidities otherwise, they are
at least bright enough to recognize the plain fact that
they form a class separate from the general run of
men, with interests opposed to those of the latter, and
so they stand together resolutely whenever their common advantages are menaced. In a clash, before Congress, between the aspirations of the job-holders
and the common weal, the aspirations of the jobholders nearly always prevail. And in a combat before
the courts between a public official and a private citi



246      PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
zen, the advantages of the public official are numerous
and obvious. These advantages, rising beyond those lying naturally in friendly feeling and fellow interest,
often show themselves, of late, in positive law. It was
not by chance that Congress passed a statute providing
that, when a Prohibition agent or other such chartered
assassin is accused of murdering a citizen, the Federal district attorney of the district shall not prosecute
him, but defend him. Here the job-holders of the legislative arm deliberately violated the ancient principle
of equality before the law in order to give job-holders
of the executive arm the full benefit of the natural
prejudice in their favor among the district attorneys
and judges of the judicial arm-appointees, as likely
as not, of the same Anti-Saloon League which put them
in their own jobs. In countless other ways the members of the prehensile oligarchy help one another to
violate the common rights of the plain citizen. At
every session of Congress there is a legislative assault
upon the Bill of Rights for the benefit of some group
or other of administrative bureaucrats, and save on
very rare occasions the Federal courts always conjure
up some sophistry to justify it It causes considerable
surprise, indeed, when they fail to do so. For whatever the adumbrations of theorists, the plain man is
well aware that the interests of the shifting but compact group of self-seeking men constituting the socalled government of the nation are opposed, in the




LIFE UNDER BUREAUCRACY            247
main, to his own interests-in brief, that the government, in its essence, is no more and no less than a
gigantic conspiracy against his well-being.
Thus democracy turns upon and devours itself.
Launched upon the world as a scheme for putting
down privilege, it ends by making privilege absolutely essential to a safe and peaceful existence. The
citizen who is too obscure to make a Congressman or
some other such professional dealer in privilege want
to help him, and too weak to help himself-this citizen, under our bureaucratic jurisprudence, now has no
rights at all. He is, indeed, no longer a citizen; he is a
subject, and his lord is the bureaucrat. He must do
whatever he is ordered to do, or face dire and devastating penalties. All of his natural daily acts become
converted into crimes. It is even a crime to-day, in
certain situations, for him to criticize his oppressors.
If, writhing under their oppressions, he appeals to
their official superiors, he usually only makes his case
worse, for one bureaucrat always supports all other
bureaucrats. The only man who escapes is the man
with a pull. The aim of every enlightened American
is to get that pull.




XII. IN THE ROLLING MILLS


A        LMOST the only thing I believe in with a
childlike and unquestioning faith, in this
world of doubts and delusions, is free
speech; nevertheless, I find it increasingly difficult to
sympathize with the pedagogues who, ever and anon,
are heaved out of some fresh-water college for trying
to exercise it. Why? Mainly, perhaps, because I can't
get rid of the suspicion that nothing a pedagogue ever
says, as pedagogue, is worth hearing-that his avocation is as fatal to sense as that of an archbishop, a
Federal judge, or one of the automata in Mr. Ford's
great squirrel-cage at Detroit. But also, no doubt, because I am obsessed by the superstition that, assuming him miraculously to have sense, he is as much
out of place in any ordinary American college as an
archbishop would be in a bordello.
What ails all these bogus martyrs is a false theory
of education. They seem to believe that its aim is to
fill the pupil's head with a mass of provocative and
conflicting ideas, to arouse his curiosity to incandescence and inspire him to inquiry and speculationin the common phrase, to teach him how to think. But
248




IN THE ROLLING MILLS             249
this is surely nonsense. If education really had any
such aim its inevitable effect would be to reduce ninetenths of its victims to insanity, and to convert most
of the rest into anarchists. What it seeks to do is something quite different-something, in fact, almost the
opposite. It is financed by the state and by private
philanthropists, not to make lunatics and anarchists,
but to make good citizens —in other words, to make
citizens who are as nearly like all other citizens as possible. Its ideal product is not a boy or a girl full of
novel ideas but one full of lawful and correct ideasnot one who thinks, but one who believes. If it actually
graduated hordes of Platos and Nietzsches it would
be closed by the Department of Justice, and quite
properly.
One of the most amusing things in life to a bachelor
is the horror that overcomes his married friends whenever one of their children turns out to be intelligent.
They feel instinctively that the phenomenon offers a
challenge to their parental dignity and authority, and
when the child they suspect actually is intelligent it
certainly does. For the first thing the youngster who
has succumbed to the un-Christian vice of thinking
attempts is a critical examination of its surroundings,
and directly in the forefront of those surroundings
stand the unfortunate composers of its being. The result, only too frequently, is turmoil and disaster at
the domestic hearth. Children, as every one knows, are




250     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
".ungrateful." So, argue judges and hangmen, are
messieurs the condemned. Even the most intelligent
agents and instruments of the Life Force are thus full
of alarms when their progeny respond to Mendel's
law: the very vigor and independence of judgment
which they regard as their own most precious possession affrights them when it appears in their issue. I
could tell some curious tales in point, but had better
refrain. Suffice it to mention an old friend, extremely
shrewd and realistic in all of his thinking, who was
happily proud of his very intelligent daughter until,
at the age of sixteen, she threatened to get a job in a
shop if he sent her, as he proposed, to a finishingschool. Then he collapsed in horror, despite the plain
fact that her ultimatum was an excellent proof of the
intelligence that he was proud of. As man, he admired
her differentiation from the mass. But as father he
was made uneasy by her sharp departure from normalcy.
ITe great majority of American fathers, of course,
have a great deal less fundamental sense than this one,
who quickly recovered from his instinctive reaction,
and ended, indeed, by boasting that his daughter had
spurned the finishing-school at his advice. To this majority education can only mean the inculcation, by
intensive torture, of all the superstitions and prejudices that they cherish themselves. When little Felix
comes home to his patriotic and Christian home with




IN THE ROLLING MILLS            251
the news that the Fathers of 1776 were a gang of
smugglers and profiteers, and when his sister Flora
follows with the news that Moses did not write his
own obituary and that the baby, Gustave, was but recently indistinguishable from a tadpole, and later on
from a nascent gorilla-when such subversive and astounding doctrines are brought home from the groves
of learning there ensues inevitably a ringing of firebells, with a posse on the march against some poor
pedagogue.
What I maintain is simply that the vigilantes are
right and the pedagogue wrong. His error lies in assuming that taxpayers lay out their hard-earned
money for the breeding of traitors and atheists; taxpayers actually lay out their money for the breeding
of more taxpayers like themselves. And their natural
desire that this program be followed strictly is
supported by the overwhelming force of the state,
which loses strength and authority in direct ratio as
its citizens become heretics. What holds it up is not
primarily brute force, as so many theorists argue;
what holds it up is the fact that, on all really essential
questions, the vast majority of its citizens think exactly alike-that there is never any general doubt of
the fundamental communal superstitions. Once those
superstitions are seriously challenged, the whole fabric of the state begins to crumble. The true function
of the pedagogue is not to attack them, but to propa



252      PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
gate them. His is a sort of priestly office. He is not paid
to marshal doubts and weigh probabilities; he is paid
to expound revelation. If he finds himself temperamentally unable to discharge that solemn and awful
duty, then he should quit pedagogy and go into bootlegging or some other free craft. So long as he is publicly consecrated to the birch, he can no more depart
from his text-book with seemliness than a Christian
clergyman could depart from his sworn belief in
witches.
Most of the current uproar in the colleges of the nation, I suspect, is due to a curse that I have often denounced in the past: the pestilential multiplication of
Ph. D.'s. There was a time, before all the American
universities began vomiting them forth by the thousand, when the whole annual produce of Ph. D.'s
could be absorbed by the graduate-schools. In these
graduate-schools, with all of the pupils of mature
years and most of them already resolved to devote
their lives to non-utilitarian and hence, by the national mores, subversive enterprises, it was safe
enough to abandon the normal teaching process for a
more or less free exchange of ideas. The teacher in
such a school, having no authority to rattan his
students, naturally had to submit to their crossquestioning and criticism-sometimes, when they
were intelligent, an embarrassing thing. In this atmosphere the Ph. D. could function unrestrained. Be



IN THE ROLLING MILLS            253
ing compelled to suffer the doubts and even the derision of his students, he was free on his side to
bombard them with all his vagaries, however unearthly and offensive. The result was not teaching, in
any true sense, but a sort of learning in common. But
when the yearly production of Ph. D.'s grew so large
that the graduate-schools became glutted with them,
and the profiteers who support all the higher institutions of learning began to yell "Enough!7, many
of them had to seek other situations. Some, as every
one knows, took to the chautauquas. Others sat on
public commissions, and drew up reports, or set up
as executive secretaries or wowsers. Yet others began
practice as experts in law-suits, i. e., as professional
perjurers. But great hordes remained, and these
presently began to filter into the undergraduateschools. In the old days the highest academic rank
that a teacher in an undergraduate-school ever aspired to was that of M. A., but to-day most of them
are Ph. D.'s, and an excess of Ph. D.'s, naturally of
inferior quality, has emptied into the high-schools,
business colleges, correspondence schools and even
grammar-schools.
It is these sick and wounded of the army of learning, I suspect, who are responsible for most of the
academic Bolshevism that now fills the newspapers.
Having been purged, by their superior education, of
the fundamental communal superstitions-or, at all




254     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
events, of a few of them-they get revenge upon the
society that ill-uses them by inoculating the children of
honest Rotarians with their own odd and often nonsensical heresies. These are the fellows who, at frequent intervals, commit scandalumn magnatum by
teaching that the American patriot infantry, at Bunker
Hill, ran all the way down the hill, or that General
Grant was a heavy lusher, or that the Bolsheviki have
not really nationalized women, or that the world is
older than the Bible says, or that the Nordic Blond,
biologically, is no more than a bald chimpanzee. And
these are the fellows who yell that they are undone
when indignant trustees give them the gate.
It seems to me that those who protest against their
thus getting the gate fall into the elemental error of
assuming, only too often, that an American college
is the exact equivalent of a European university. It is
called a university, and so they accept it as one in
fact. But it is really nothing of the kind. There has
been but one genuine university in the United States
in our time-the Johns Hopkins under Gilman-and
it turned itself into a college with frantic haste the
moment he died. The college student differs from a
university student in a most important way: his formal
education, when he matriculates, is not completed, but
simply entering upon its last stage. That is to say, he
has not yet taken in the whole of that body of correct and respectable ideas which all of us must some



IN THE ROLLING MILLS            255
how absorb before we are competent to think for ourselves-at all events, to any rational purpose and
effect.
Only too often the fact is overlooked that even the
most bold and talented of philosophers must suffer
that stuffing before he is ready to go it alone. Aristotle, you may be sure, had the Greek alphabet
rammed into him like any other Greek of his time,
and studied the multiplication table, and learned the
elements of Greek civics, and all that was then accepted about the nature of the Persians, the functions
of the liver, and the aorist. Kant was grounded in
Prussian history, the humoral pathology, and the
Leibnitzian law of preestablished harmony. Even
Nietzsche had to master the grammar-book, the catechism and the Lutheran psalm-book, that he might be
a good German and keep out of jail. Such training
takes time, for children naturally resist it; it takes
more time in America than elsewhere because our
elementary-schools, in late years, devote themselves
mainly to fol-de-rols borrowed from the Boy Scouts,
Greenwich Village and Bernarr Macfadden. Thus the
young American, when he enters college, is still only
half-educated in the conventional sense. At least three
of his four years are consumed in completing the
lowly business of making him fit to vote, keep a checkbook accurately, and understand what is in his newspaper. Every now and then some humorist subjects a




256     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
class of freshmen to what is called a general information test. Four-fifths of them invariably turn out to be
as ignorant as so many European schoolboys of ten
or eleven.
Obviously, it is as imprudent to parade political
heresies before such infants as it would be to lecture
on obstetrics before girls of thirteen. When they are
graduated at last, they are perhaps ripe for it, but
when they are graduated they commonly depart the
halls of learning for the bond business. The relatively
few who remain seem to suffer no damage from such
ideas as they encounter in the graduate-schools. At all
events, there is never any complaint that they are
being ruined, nor do they themselves complain that
the notions of the salient anarchists are being withheld from them. Most of them, having no desire save
to get their Ph. D.'s and settle down as pedagogues,
are probably anaesthetic to whatever play of ideas
goes on about them. A few, taking fire, afterward
lecture scandalously in the prairie "universities"
to which they are doomed, stir up the students to revolt against their colleagues, and so get themselves
cashiered. But not many. Nor is the practical damage serious. There is always room enough for
the minority of genuinely intelligent fellows in the
graduate-schools whence they came. The spotlights
of Babbitt do not bathe these schools, for his sons are
not in them; thus they are quite free to monkey with




IN THE ROLLING MILLS             257
ideas all they please, even with red-hot ones. What I
have heard in my time from eminent ornaments of this
higher faculty would make interesting news for both
the Comstock Society and the Department of Justice.
Antinomianism is rife among them, and seems to go
unchallenged. So hands remain to carry on the torch.
I don't think the boy of lively mind is hurt much
by going to college. If he encounters mainly jackasses, then he learns the useful lesson that this is a
jackass world. The complaints come from fellows
of small humor, which is to say, from fellows whose
intelligence is like a glass of beer without foam. Nor,
as I have hinted, am I greatly affected-certainly not
to tears-by the grievance of the young professors.
Do they complain bitterly that their superiors hobble
the free play of their minds, and force them to teach
doctrines that they don't believe in? Then examine,
some day, the doctrines that they do believe in. You
will find chiefly bilge-Liberalism and dish-water, the
puerile heresies of the farm bloc, all the fly-blown fallacies of yesteryear. It is the dream of every such rambunctious Dr. Birch to crash the high gates of the Atlantic Monthly with a devilish essay entitled "A Plea
for Necking." His goatishness passes with his youth.
At forty he is lecturing docilely on the Lake School.
I am unable to discern any actual passion for the
truth in such victims of the educational industrial
system. What moves them more often, I suspect, is




258      PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
simply a desire to make a scandal and annoy their
elders. The same martyr who argues that forbidding
him to eulogize Lenin in class is an assault upon his
sacred integrity-this same martyr is usually willing
enough to teach that the late war was fought to save
democracy, and that the United States played a chivalrous and honorable role in it. Is he heard against
Fundamentalism to-day? Then why wasn't he heard
against Prohibition eight or ten years ago-he or his
predecessor? I don't cry him down; in his revolt, as
in all revolts, there is something stimulating; he is
at least not quite a clod. But his error, like that of his
students, lies in mistaking the nature of the business
he is engaged upon. It is a business that has very
little, if anything, to do with the free play of ideas
in this world. That goes on otherwhere, and on a different level. His business is to polish the rough casts
turned out by an inept and humorous God, that they
may be as smooth and uniform as possible, and rub
one another as little as possible.




XIII. AMBROSE BIERCE


T       HE reputation of Ambrose Bierce, like that of
Edgar Saltus, has always had an occult,
artificial drug-store flavor. He has been
hymned in a passionate, voluptuous, inordinate way
by a small band of disciples, and he has been passed
over altogether by the great majority of American
critics, and no less by the great majority of American
readers. Certainly it would be absurd to say that he
is generally read, even by the intelligentsia. Most of
his books, in fact, are out of print and almost unobtainable, and there is little evidence that his massive
Collected Works, printed in twelve volumes between
1909 and 1912, have gone into anything even remotely approaching a wide circulation. I have a suspicion, indeed, that Bierce did a serious disservice to
himself when he put those twelve volumes together.
Already an old man at the time, he permitted his
nostalgia for his lost youth to get the better of his
critical faculty, never very powerful at best, and the
result was a depressing assemblage of worn-out and
fly-blown stuff, much of it quite unreadable. If he
had boiled the collection down to four volumes, or
259




260      PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
even to six, it might have got him somewhere, but as
it is, his good work is lost in a morass of bad and indifferent work. I doubt that any one save the Bierce
fanatics aforesaid has ever plowed through the whole
twelve volumes. They are filled with epigrams against
frauds long dead and forgotten, and echoes of old
and puerile newspaper controversies, and experiments in fiction that belong to a dark and expired
age. But in the midst of all this blather there are some
pearls-more accurately, there are two of them. One
consists of the series of epigrams called "The Devil's
Dictionary"; the other consists of the war stories,
commonly called "Tales of Soldiers and Civilians."
Among the latter are some of the best war stories ever
written-things fully worthy to be ranged beside
Zola's "L'Attaque du Moulin," Kipling's "The Taking of Lungtungpen," or Ludwig Thoma's "Ein Bayrischer Soldat." And among the former are some of
the most gorgeous witticisms in the English language.
Bierce, I believe, was the first writer of fiction ever
to treat war realistically. He antedated even Zola. It
is common to say that he came out of the Civil War
with a deep and abiding loathing of slaughter-that
he wrote his war stories in disillusion, and as a sort
of pacifist. But this is certainly not believed by any
one who knew him, as I did in his last years. What he
got out of his services in the field was not a sentimental horror of it, but a cynical delight in it. It ap



AMBROSE BIERCE              261
peared to him as a sort of magnificent reductio ad absurdurn of all romance. The world viewed war as
something heroic, glorious, idealistic. Very well, he
would show how sordid and filthy it was-how stupid,
savage and degrading. But to say this is not to say
that he disapproved it. On the contrary, he vastly enjoyed the chance its discussion gave him to set forth
dramatically what he was always talking about and
gloating over: the infinite imbecility of man. There
was nothing of the milk of human kindness in old
Ambrose; he did not get the nickname of Bitter Bierce
for nothing. What delighted him most in this life was
the spectacle of human cowardice and folly. He put
man, intellectually, somewhere between the sheep and
the horned cattle, and as a hero somewhere below the
rats. His war stories, even when they deal with the
heroic, do not depict soldiers as heroes; they depict
them as bewildered fools, doing things without sense,
submitting to torture and outrage without resistance,
dying at last like hogs in Chicago, the former literary
capital of the United States. So far in this life, indeed, I have encountered no more thorough-going
cynic than Bierce was. His disbelief in man went even
further than Mark Twain's; he was quite unable to
imagine the heroic, in any ordinary sense. Nor, for
that matter, the wise. Man to him, was the most stupid
and ignoble of animals. But at the same time the most
amusing. Out of the spectacle of life about him he




262     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
got an unflagging and Gargantuan joy. The obscene
farce of politics delighted him. He was an almost
amorous connoisseur of theology and theologians. He
howled with mirth whenever he thought of a professor, a doctor or a husband. His favorites among his
contemporaries were such zanies as Bryan, Roosevelt
and Hearst.
Another character that marked him, perhaps flowing out of this same cynicism, was his curious taste
for the macabre. All of his stories show it. He delighted in hangings, autopsies, dissecting-rooms.
Death to him was not something repulsive, but a sort
of low comedy -the last act of a squalid and ribrocking buffoonery. When, grown old and weary, he
departed for Mexico, and there-if legend is to be believed-marched into the revolution then going on,
and had himself shot, there was certainly nothing in
the transaction to surprise his acquaintances. The
whole thing was typically Biercian. He died happy,
one may be sure, if his executioners made a botch
of dispatching him-if there was a flash of the grotesque at the end. Once I enjoyed the curious experience of going to a funeral with him. His conversation to and from the crematory was superb-a
long series of gruesome but highly amusing witticisms. He had tales to tell of crematories that had
caught fire and singed the mourners, of dead bibuli
whose mortal remains had exploded, of widows




AMBROSE BIERCE               263
guarding the fires all night to make sure that their
dead husbands did not escape. The gentleman whose
carcass we were burning had been a literary critic.
Bierce suggested that his ashes be molded into bullets
and shot at publishers, that they be presented to the
library of the New York Lodge of Elks, that they be
mailed anonymously to Ella Wheeler Wilcox. Later
on, when he heard that they had been buried in Iowa,
he exploded in colossal mirth. The last time I saw
him he predicted that the Christians out there would
dig them up and throw them over the State line. On
his own writing desk, he once told me, he kept the
ashes of his son. I suggested idly that the ceremental
urn must be a formidable ornament. "Urn hell!" he
answered. "I keep them in a cigar-box!"
There is no adequate life of Bierce, and I doubt
if any will ever be written. His daughter, with some asperity, has forbidden the publication of his letters,
and shows little hospitality to volunteer biographers.
One of his disciples, the late George Sterling, wrote
about him with great insight and affection, and another, Herman George Scheffauer, has greatly extended his fame abroad, especially in Germany. But
Sterling is dead and Scheffauer seems indisposed to
do him in the grand manner, and I know of no one
else competent to do so. He liked mystification, and
there are whole stretches of his long life that are
unaccounted for. His end had mystery in it too. It




264     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
is assumed that he was killed in Mexico, but no eyewitness has ever come forward, and so the fact, if it
is a fact, remains hanging in the air.
Bierce followed Poe in most of his short stories,
but it is only a platitude to say that he wrote much
better than Poe. His English was less tight and
artificial; he had a far firmer grasp upon character;
he was less literary and more observant. Unluckily,
his stories seem destined to go the way of Poe's.
Their influence upon the modern American short
story, at least upon its higher levels, is almost nil.
When they are imitated at all, it is by the lowly
hacks who manufacture thrillers for the cheap magazines. Even his chief disciples, Sterling and Scheffauer, did not follow him. Sterling became a poet
whose glowing romanticism was at the opposite pole
to Bierce's cold realism, and Scheffauer, interested
passionately in experiment, and strongly influenced
by German example, has departed completely from
the classicism of the master. Meanwhile, it remains
astonishing that his wit is so little remembered. In
"The Devil's Dictionary" are some of the most devastating epigrams ever written. "Ab, that we could fall
into women's arms without falling into their hands":
it is hard to find a match for that in Oscar himself. I
recall another: "Opportunity: a favorable occasion
for grasping a disappointment." Another: "Once:
enough." A third: "Husband: one who, having dined,




AMBROSE BIERCE               265
is charged with the care of the plate." A fourth: "Our
vocabulary is defective: we give the same name to
woman's lack of temptation and man's lack of opportunity." A fifth: ""Slang is the speech of him who robs
the literary garbage cans on their way to the dump."
But I leave the rest to your own exploration-if you
can find a copy of "The Devil's Dictionary." It was
never printed in full, save in the ghastly Collected
Works that I have mentioned. A part of it, under the
title of "The Cynic's Word-Book," was first published
as a separate volume, but it is long out of print. The
other first editions of Bierce are scarce, and begin to
command high premiums. Three-fourths of his books
were published by obscure publishers, some of them
not too reputable. He spent his last quarter of a century in voluntary immolation on a sort of burning
ghat, worshiped by his small band of zealots, but almost unnoticed by the rest of the human race. His life
was a long sequence of bitter ironies. I believe that he
enjoyed it.




XIV. THE EXECUTIVE
SECRETARY
S    OME time ago, encountering an eminent bishop
of my acquaintance, I found him suffering
from a bad cold and what used to be called a
fit of the vapors. The cause of his dual disorder soon
became manifest. He was smarting under the slings
and arrows of executive secretaries. By virtue of his
lofty and transcendental office, he was naturally a man
of wide influence in the land, and so they tried to enlist his interest in their multitudinous and often nefarious schemes. Every morning at 8 o'clock, just as he
was rolling over for a last brief dream of Heaven, he
was dragged to the telephone to hear their eloquent
and lascivious night-letters, and there, on unlucky
days, he stood for as much as half an hour, with his
episcopal feet bare, and rage gradually mounting in
his episcopal heart. Thus, on a cold morning, he had
caught his cold, and thus he had acquired his bad humor.
This holy man, normally a most amiable fellow,
told me that he believed the number of executive secretaries in the United States was increasing at the rate
266




THE EXECUTIVE SECRETARY           267
of at least a thousand a week. He said that he knew
of 30,000 in the field of Christian and moral endeavor
alone. There were, he told me, 8000 more engaged
in running various pacifist societies, and more than
10,000 operating organizations for the detection and
scotching of Bolsheviki. He estimated that the average
number of dues-paying members behind each one did
not run beyond half a dozen. Nine-tenths of them, he
said, were supported by two or three well-heeled fanatics. These fanatics, mainly retired Babbitts and
their wives, longed to make a noise in the world, and
so escape oblivion. It was the essence of the executive
secretary's art and mystery to show them how to do
it. Chiefly it was done by discovering bugaboos and
giving chase to them. But secondarily it was done by
hauling poor ecclesiastics out of bed on frosty mornings, and making them listen to endless night-letters
about the woes of the Armenians, the need of intensive
missionary effort in Siam, the plot of Moscow to set
up soviets in Lowell, Mass., the high ideals of the
Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the absolute necessity of deeper waterways from the Lakes to the Atlantic.
The executive secretary is relatively new in the
world. Like his colleague in well-paid good works, the
Y. M. C. A. secretary, he has come into being since
the Civil War. Compared to him, his predecessor of
ante-bellum days was an amateur and an idiot. That




268      PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
predecessor had no comfortable office in a gaudy skyscraper, he got no lavish salary, and he had no juicy
expense-account. On the contrary, he paid his own
way, and, especially when he worked for Abolition,
which was usually, he sometimes had to take a beating
into the bargain. The executive secretary of to-day, as
Perlmutter would say, is something else again. He
belongs to the order of live wires. He speaks the language of up-and-coming men, and is not sparing with
it at the sessions of Rotary and Kiwanis. In origin,
not uncommonly, a shady and unsuccessful newspaper
reporter or a press-agent out of a job, he quickly becomes, by virtue of his craft, a Man of Vision. The
cause that he represents for cash in hand is not merely
virtuous; it is, nine times out of ten, divinely inspired.
If it fails, then civilization will also fail, and the
heroic doings at Chateau Thierry and Hog Island will
have been in vain.
It is a good job that he has-far better than legging
it on the street for some gorilla of a city editorfar, far better than traversing the sticks ahead of a
No. 4 company. There is no need to get up at 7 A. M.
and there is no need to fume and strain after getting
up. Once three or four-or maybe even only one or
two-easy marks with sound bank accounts have been
snared, the new "national"-or perhaps it is "international"-association is on its legs, and all that remains is to have brilliant stationary printed, put in




THE EXECUTIVE SECRETARY            269
an amiable and sightly stenographer, and begin deluging bishops, editors and the gullible generally with
literature. The executive secretary, if he has any
literary passion in him, may prepare this literature
himself, but more often he employs experts to do it.
Once a year he launches a drive. But it is only for
publicity. The original suckers pay the freight. When
they wear out the executive secretary starts a new
"international" association.
Such sharks now swarm in every American city.
The office-buildings are full of them. Their prosperity
depends very largely upon the singular complaisance
of the newspapers. The average American managing
editor went through so dreadful a bath of propaganda
during the late war, and was so thoroughly convinced
that resisting it was a form of treason, that he is now
almost unable to detect it from genuine news. Some
time ago Mr. Stanley Walker, a New York journalist
of sense and experience, examined a typical copy of
one of the great New York dailies. He found that there
were sixty-four items of local news in it-and that
forty-two of them could be plainly traced to executive
secretaries, and other such space-grabbers. The executive secretary, of course, does not have at his editors
crudely. He seldom accompanies his item of "news"
with any intimation that he is paid a good salary for
planting it, and he discourages all inquiries into the
actual size, aims and personnel of his organization.




270     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
Instead he commonly postures as the mere agent of
men and women known to be earnest and altruistic
philanthropists. These philanthropists are the suckers
upon whom he feeds. They pay his salary, maintain
his office, and keep up his respectability in newspaper
offices. What do they get out of it themselves? In part,
no doubt, an honest feeling that they are doing good:
the executive secretary, in fact, has to convince them
of it before he is in a position to tackle the newspapers
at all. But in part, also, they enjoy the publicityand maybe other usufructs too. In the United States,
indeed, doing good has come to be, like patriotism,
a favorite device of persons with something to sell.
More than one great national organization for lifting
up the fallen, especially in foreign lands, might be
investigated to advantage. In such cases charity not
infrequently gets its reward in the form of concessions.
Some time ago, sweating under this assault of
executive secretaries, the editors of a great American
newspaper hit upon a scheme of relief. It took the
form of a questionnaire-something not seldom used,
and to vast effect, by executive secretaries themselves.
This questionnaire had a blank in which the executive
secretary was asked to write his full name and address, and the amount of his annual salary. In other
blanks there was room for putting down the total income and outgo of his association, with details of
every item amounting to more than one per cent. of




THE EXECUTIVE SECRETARY           271
the whole, and for a full list of its contributors and
employees, with the amount given by every one of the
former contributing more than one per cent. and the
salary received by every one of the latter getting more
than one per cent. This simple questionnaire cut down
the mail received from executive secretaries by at
least one half. Many of them did not answer at all.
Many others, answering, revealed the not surprising
fact that their high-sounding national and international organizations were actually small clubs of a few
men and women, and that they themselves consumed
most of the revenues. It is a device that might be
employed effectively by other American newspapers.
When the executive secretaries return their answers
by mail, which is usually the case, they are under
pressure to answer truthfully, for answering otherwise is using the mails to obtain money by fraud, and
many worthy men are jugged at Atlanta and Leavenworth for that offense.
I suggest this plan as a means of cutting down the
present baleful activity of executive secretaries, but
I am not so optimistic as to believe that it could conceivably dispose of them altogether. In the higher
ranks of the profession are gentlemen so skillful that
they no longer send out press-matter: they make actual
news. To that aristocracy belong the adept executive
secretaries who run such organizations as the Anti.
Saloon League. These masters of the art do not beg




272      PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
for good-will in newspaper offices: they thrive upon
ill-will quite as well as upon good-will. How are they
to be got rid of? I am sure I don't know. In all
probability the American people are doomed to suffer
them forever, as they seem to be doomed to suffer
Prohibition agents, revivalists, the radio and Congress.




XV. INVITATION TO THE
DANCE
W          x  rHAT this grand, gaudy, unapproachable
country needs and lacks is an Ingersoll.
It is, indeed, a wonder that the chautauquas do not spew one forth. Certainly there must be
many a jitney Demosthenes on these lonely, dyspeptic
circuits who tires mightily of the standard balderdash
of his trade, and longs with a great longing to throw
off the white chemise of Service and give the rustics a
genuinely hot show. The old tricks begin to tire the
steady customers, even in the heart of the Bible Belt.
What made the rural Methodists of Iowa and South
Carolina breathe hard and fast at the dawn of the
century now only makes them shuffle their feet and
yawn behind their hands. I have spies in all such horrible regions, and their reports all agree. The yokels
no longer turn out to the last paralytic to gape at
stereopticon pictures of the Holy Sepulchre and the
Mount of Olives, or to see a genuine Hindu from
Benares in his obscene native costume, or to listen to
a sweating rhetorician flog "The Future of America."
They sicken of the old stuff; more, they sicken of
273




274     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
Service, Idealism, Vision. What ails them is that the
village movie-parlor, the radio, the Ford sedan and the
Ku Klux Klan have spoiled their primeval taste for
simple, wholesome fare. They must have it hot now,
or they don't want it at all. The master-minds of
chautauqua try to meet the new demand, but cannot go
all the way. They experiment gingerly with lectures on
eugenics, the divorce evil, women in politics, and
other such pornographic subjects, but that is not
enough. They put on plays "direct from Broadway"but have to omit the really tart ones. The horticulturists and their wives and issue pant for something more
dreadful and shocking-something comparable, on
the plane of ideas, to the tarring and feathering of the
village fancy woman on the plane of manly sports.
Their ears lie back and they hearken expectantly, and
even somewhat impatiently. What they long for is a
bomb.
My guess is that the one that would blow them
highest, and shake the most money out of them going
up and coming down, is the big black bomb of Atheism. It has not been set off in the Federal Union, formally and with dramatic effect, since July 21, 1899,
when Bob Ingersoll descended into Hell. Now it is
loaded again, and ready to be fired, and the chautauquan who discovers it and fires it will be the luckiest
mountebank heard of in these latitudes since Col.
George B. M. Harvey thrust the halo on Woodrow's




INVITATION TO THE DANCE           275
brow. For this favorite of fortune, unlike his fellows
of the rustic big tops, will not have to drudge out all
his days on the lonesome steppes, wrecking his stomach with fried beefsteak and saleratus biscuit and his
limbs with travel on slow and bumpy trains. He will
be able almost at once, like Ingersoll before him and
the Rev. Billy Sunday in the last Golden Age, to horn
into the big towns, or, at all events, into the towns, and
there he will snore at ease of nights upon clean sheets,
with his roll in his pantaloons pocket and a Schluck
of genuine Scotch under his belt. The yokels, if they
want to hear him, will have to come to Babylon in
their Fords; he will be too busy and too prosperous to
waste himself upon the cow-stable miasmas of the
open spaces. Ingersoll, in one month, sometimes took
in $50,000. It can be done again; it can be bettered. I
believe that Dr. Jennings Bryan, if he had sold out
God and gone over to Darwin and Pongo pygmamus,
could have filled the largest hall in Nashville or
Little Rock a month on end: he would have made the
most profound sensation the country has known since
the Breckenridge-Pollard case, nay, since Hannah and
her amazing glands. And what Bryan could have
done, any other chautauquan may now do, if not exactly in the same grand manner, then at least in a
grand manner.
But this in a Christian country! Soit! But it was
doubly a Christian country in the days of Bob the




276     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
Hell-Cat. Bob faced a Babbittry that still went to
church on Sunday as automatically as a Prohibition
enforcement agent holds out his hand. No machinery
for distracting it from that ancient practice had yet
been invented. There was no baseball. There were
no automobiles to take the whole family to green
fields and wet road-houses: the roads were too bad
even for buggy-riding. There was no radio. There
were no movies. There was no jazz. There were no
Sunday comic supplements. There was no homebrewing. Moreover, a high tide of evangelistic passion
was running: it was the day of Dwight L. Moody, of
the Salvation Army, of prayer-meetings in the White
House, of eager chapel-building on every suburban
dump. Nevertheless, Bob hurled his challenge at the
whole hierarchy of heaven, and within a few short
years he had the Babbitts all agog, and after them
the city proletariat, and then finally the yokels on the
farms. He drew immense crowds; be became eminent;
he planted seeds of infidelity that still sprout in
Harvard and Yale. Thousands abandoned their accustomed places of worship to listen to his appalling
heresies, and great numbers of them never went back.
The evangelical churches, fifty years ago, were all
prosperous and full of pious enterprise; the soulsnatching business was booming. Since then, despite
the uproars that come from the Bible Belt, it has
been declining steadily, in prosperity and in repute.




INVITATION TO THE DANCE            277
The typical American ecclesiastic of 1880 was Henry
Ward Beecher, a pet of Presidents and merchant
princes. The typical American ecclesiastic of 1927
is the Rev. Dr. John Roach Straton, an inmate of
the stable of Hearst.
In brief, the United States, despite its gallant
resistance, has been swept along, to some extent at
least, in the general current of human progress and
increasing enlightenment. The proofs that it resists
are only too often mistaken for proofs that it hasn't
moved at all. For example, there is the matter of
the Klan. Superficially, its appearance appears to
indicate that whole areas of the Republic have gone
over to Methodist voodooism with a bang, and that
civilization has been barred out of them as effectively
as the Bill of Rights is barred out of a Federal court.
But actually all it indicates is that the remoter and
more forlorn yokels have risen against their betters —
and that their uprising is as hopeless as it is idiotic.
Whenever the Klan wins, the fact is smeared all over
the front pages of the great organs of intelligence:
when it loses, which is at least three times as often,
the news gets only a few lines. The truth is that the
strength of the Klan, like the strength of the AntiSaloon League, and that of the Methodist-Baptist bloc
of moron churches, the pa of both of them, has always
been greatly overestimated. Even in the most barbarous reaches of the South, where every vilrage is




278      PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
bossed by a Baptist dervish, it met with vigorous challenge from the start, and there are not three Confederate States to-day in which, on a fair plebiscite, it
could hope to prevail. The fact that huge hordes of
Southern politicians jumped into night-shirts when it
began is no proof that it was actually mighty; it is
only proof that politicians are cowards and idiots. Of
late all of them have been seeking to rid themselves
of the tell-tale tar and feathers; they try to ride the
very genuine wave of aversion and disgust as they
tried to ride the illusory wave of popularity. As the
Klan falls everywhere, the Anti-Saloon League tends
to fall with it-and the evangelical churches are
strapped tightly to both corpses.
This connection, when it was first denounced, was
violently denied by the Baptist and Methodist ecclesiastics, but now every one knows that it was and is
real. These ecclesiastics are responsible for the AntiSaloon League and its swineries, and they are responsible no less for the Klan. In other words, they are
responsible, directly and certainly, for all the turmoils
and black hatreds that now rage in the bleak regions
between the State roads-they are to blame for every
witches' pot that now brews in the backwoods of the
Union. They have sowed enmities that will last for
years. They have divided neighbors, debauched local
governments, and enormously multiplied lawlessness.
They are responsible for more crime than even the




INVITATION TO THE DANCE            279
wildest foes of the saloon ever laid to its discredit,
and it is crime, in the main, that is infinitely more
anti-social and dangerous. They have opposed every
honest effort to compose the natural differences between man and man, and they have opposed every
attempt to meet ignorance and prejudice with enlightenment. Alike in the name of God, they had advocated
murder and they have murdered sense. Where they
flourish no intelligent and well-disposed man is safe,
and no sound and useful idea is safe. They have
preached not only the bitter, savage morality of the
Old Testament; they have also preached its childish
contempt of obvious facts. Hordes of poor creatures
have followed these appalling rogues and vagabonds
of the cloth down their Gadarene hill: the result, in
immense areas, is the conversion of Christianity into
a machine for making civilized living impossible. It
is wholly corrupt, rotten and abominable. It deserves
no more respect than a pile of garbage.
What I contend is that hundreds of thousands of
poor simpletons are beginning to be acutely aware of
the fact-that they are not quite as stupid as they
usually appear to be. In other words, I believe that
they tire of the obscenity. One glances at such a State
as Arkansas or such a town as Jackson, Miss., and
sees only a swarm of bawling Methodists; only too
easily one overlooks the fact that the bawling is far
from unanimous. Logic is possible, in its rudiments,




280     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
even to the Simiide. On the next step of the scale, in
the suburbs, so to speak, of Homo sapiens, it flourishes
intermittently and explosively. All that is needed to set
it off is a suitable yell. The first chautauquan who
looses such a yell against the True Faith will shake
the Bible Belt like an earthquake, and, as they say,
mop up. Half his work is already done for him. The
True Faith, the only variety of the True Faith known
to those hinds, is already under their rising distrust
and suspicion. They look for the Ambassador of
Christ, and they behold a Baptist elder in a mail-order
suit, describing voluptuously the Harlot of Babylon.
They yearn for consolation, and they are invited to
a raid on bootleggers. Their souls reach out to the
eternal mystery, and the evening's entertainment is
the clubbing of a fancy woman. All they need is a
leader. Christianity is sick all over this pious land,
even in the South. The Christians have killed it. One
blast upon a bugle horn, and the mob will be ready
for the wake.




XVI. AUBADE


HE name of the man who first made a slave of
fire, like the name of the original Franklin
Pierce man, is unknown to historians: burrow
and sweat as they will, their efforts to unearth it are
always baffled. And no wonder! For isn't it easy to
imagine how infamous that name must have been
while it was still remembered, and how diligent and
impassioned the endeavor to erase it from the tablets
of the race? One pictures the indignation of the
clergy when so vast an improvement upon their immemorial magic confronted them, and their herculean
and unanimous struggle, first to put it down as unlawful and against God, and then to collar it for
themselves. Bonfires were surely not unknown in the
morning of the Pleistocene, for there were lightnings
then as now, but the first one kindled by mortal hands
must have shocked humanity. One pictures the news
flashing from cave to cave and from tribe to tribe ---
out of Central Asia and then across the grasslands,
and then around the feet of the glaciers into the
gloomy, spook-haunted wilderness that is now Western
Europe, and so across into Africa. Something new and
281




282     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
dreadful was upon the human race, and by the time
the Ur-Mississippians of the Neander Valley heard of
it, you may be sure, the discoverer had sprouted horns
and was in the pay of the Devil.
His fate at home, though his name is unknown, presents no difficulties to adepts at public psychology.
The bad boys of the neighborhood, one may safely
assume, got to the scene first of all and were delighted
by the show, but upon their heels came the local pastor,
and in two minutes he was bawling for the Polizei.
The ensuing trial attracted such crowds that for weeks
the saber-toothed tiger (Machwrodus neogteus) and the
woolly rhinoceros (R. antiquitatus) roamed the wilds
unmolested, feasting upon colporteurs and wandering
flint peddlers. The fellow stood confronted by his unspeakable and unparalleled felony, and could only
beg for mercy. Publicly and without shame, he had
performed a feat never performed by man before:
ergo, it was as plain as day that he had engaged,
anteriorly, in commerce with the powers of the air.
So much, indeed, was elemental logic: even a lawyer
could grasp it. But what powers? There the clergy
certainly had something to say, and what they said
must have been instantly damning. They were themselves the daily familiars of all reputable powers of
the air, great and small. They knew precisely what
could be done and what could not be done. Their
professional skill and knowledge were admitted every



AUBADE                  283
where and by all. What they could not do was thus
clearly irregular and disreputable: it issued out of an
unlawful transaction with fiends. Any other theory
would be laughable, and in plain contempt of court.
One pictures the learned judge summing up, and one
pictures the headsman spitting on his hands. That
night there was a head on a pole in front of the episcopal cave of the ordinary of the diocese, and more than
one ambitious cave hyena (H. spelcea) wore himself
out trying to shin up.
But the secret did not pass with the criminal. He was
dead, his relatives to the third degree were sold into
slavery to the Chellean heathen down the river, and
it was a capital offense, with preliminary tortures, to
so much as mention his name. But in his last hours,
one must bear in mind, he had a spiritual adviser, to
hear his confession and give him absolution for his
sorcery, and that spiritual adviser, it is reasonable to
assume, had just as much natural curiosity as any
other clergyman. So it is not hard to imagine that he
wormed the trick out of the condemned, and later on,
as in duty bound, conveyed it privately to his bishop.
Nor is it hard to imagine its plans and specifications
becoming generally known, sotto voce, to the adjacent
clergy, nor some ingenious holy clerk presently discovering that they could be carried out without bringing any fiends into the business. The lawful and laudable powers of the air, already sworn to the service




284     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
of Holy Church, were quite as potent: a hint from the
bishop was sufficient to set them to work. And so, if
there is no flaw in my reasoning, the making of fire
soon became one of the high privileges and prerogatives of the sacred office, forbidden to the laity upon
penalty of the stone ax, and reserved in practice for
high ceremonial uses and occasions. The ordination of
a new rector, I suppose, was such an occasion. The
consecration of a new cave was another. And among
the uses were the laying of demons, the pursuit and
scotching of dragons and other monsters, the abatement of floods and cyclones, the refutation of heresies,
and the management of the sun, so that day always
followed night and Spring came after Winter. I daresay fees were charged, for the clergy must live, but
there was never any degradation of the new magic
to sordid, secular uses. No one was allowed a fire
to keep warm, and no one was allowed one to boil
a bone.
It would be interesting to try to figure out, by the
doctrine of probabilities, how long fire was thus reserved for sacramental purposes. The weather being, at this writing, too hot for mathematical exercises,
I content myself with a guess, to wit, 10,000 years.
It is probably over-moderate. The obvious usefulness
of fire was certainly not enough to bring it into general
use; it had to wait for the slow, tedious, extremely
bloody growth of skepticism. No doubt there were




AUBADE                 285
heretics, even during the first two or three millennia,
who set off piles of leaves far back in the woods,
gingerly, cautiously and half expecting to be potted by
thunderbolts. Perhaps there were even renegade clergymen who, unsettled in their faith by contemplation of
Pithecanthropus erectus (the remote grandfather of
the P. biblicus of our present Christian age), threw
off the sacerdotal chemise, took to flight, and started
forest fires. But the odds against such antinomians,
for many centuries, must have been almost as heavy
as the odds against a Unitarian in Tennessee to-day.
They existed, but only as outlaws, with the ax waiting for them, and Hell beyond the ax. The unanimous
sentiment of decent people was against them. It was
plain to every one that a world in which they went unscotched would be a world resigned to sin and shame.
Nevertheless, they continued to exist, and what is
worse, to increase gradually in numbers. Even when
the regular force of police was augmented by bands
of volunteer snouters, organized to search out unlawful fires in the deep woods and remote deserts, there
were heretics who persisted in their contumacy, and
even undertook to defend it with all the devices of
sophistry. At intervals great crusades were launched
against them, and they were rounded up and butchered
by the hundred, and even by the thousand. The ordinary method of capital punishment prevailing in those
times-to wit, decapitation with fifteen or twenty




286      PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
strokes of a stone ax-was found to be ineffective
against such agents of the Devil, and so other and
more rigorous methods were devised-chief among
them, boiling to death in a huge pot set over a temple
fire. More, the ordinary criminal procedure had to be
changed to facilitate convictions, for the heretics were
highly skilled at turning the safeguards of the law to
their baleful uses. First, it was provided that a man
accused of making fire should be tried, not before
the judges who sat in common criminal cases, but
before judges especially nominated for the purpose
by the priests, or by the Anti-Fire League, an organization of citizens pledged to law and order. Then it
was provided that no such prisoner should be permitted to consult counsel, or to enjoy the privilege of
bail, or to call witnesses in his behalf. Finally, after
all these half measures had failed, it was decided to
abandon the whole sorry hocus-pocus of trial and
judgment, and to hand the accused over to the public
executioner at once, without any frivolous inquiry into
the degree of his guilt.
This device seemed to work very well for a time.
It worked very well, indeed, for nearly 5000 years.
There were times during that long period when contraband fire-making seemed to be practically extinct
in the world. Children grew up who had never seen
a fire save in its proper place: a place of worship.
Come to maturity, they begat children equally in



AUBADE                  287
nocent, and so the thing went on for generations. But
always, just as the fire heresy seemed about to disappear from human memory, some outlaw in the wilds
revived it. These revivals sometimes spread as rapidly
as their own flames. One year there would be complete peace everywhere and a spirit of obedience to
the law; the next year bonfires would suddenly
sparkle in the hills, and blasphemous whispers would
go round. The heretics, at such times, made great
play at the young. They would lure boys into the
groves along the river-bottoms and teach them how
to roast chestnuts. They would send in spies disguised
as Chellean serving-maids to show little girls how
much easier it was to do the family washing with hot
water than with cold. The constituted authorities answered such defiances with vigorous campaigns of
law enforcement. Fireleggers were taken by the thousand, and put to death at great public ceremonials.
But always some escaped.
In the end (or, at all events, so I work it out by the
devices brought in by the new science of biometrics)
enough escaped to make further proceedings against
them dangerous and even impossible. No doubt it happened in what is now Southern France, in the region
called the Dordogne. The fireleggers, taking to the
hills, there organized a sort of outlaw state, and presently began passing laws of their own. The first of such
laws, no doubt, converted fire-making from a crime




288     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
into a patriotic act: it became the principal duty of
every right-thinking citizen to keep a fire burning in
front of his cave. Amendments soon followed. It
became a felony to eat uncooked food, or to do the
family washing in cold water. It became another to
put out a fire, or to advocate putting it out, or to
imagine putting it out.
Thus priests were barred from that outlaw state,
and it became necessary to develop a new class of men
skilled in public affairs, and privy to the desires of
the gods. Nature responded with politicians. Anon
these politicians became adept at all the arts that
have distinguished them ever since. They invented new
and more rigorous laws, they imposed taxes, they
broke the fireleggers to military service. One day,
having drilled a large army, they marched down into
the plains, tackled the hosts of the orthodox, and
overcame them. The next day the priests who had led
these hosts were given a simple choice: either they
could admit formally that fire-making for secular
purposes was now lawful and even laudable, or they
could submit to being burned alive upon their own
sacramental pyres. Great numbers of them went
heroically to the stake, firm in the hope of a glorious
resurrection. The rest, retiring to their crypts and seeking divine guidance, emerged with the news that the
gods were now in favor of universal fire-making. That
night there was a cheerful blaze in front of every cave




AUBADE                  289
for miles around, and the priests themselves sat down
to a hearty banquet of roast megatherium (M. cuvieri). Eight thousand years later a heretic who revived the primeval pagan habit of eating raw oysters
was put to death for atheism.




XVII. APPENDIX FROM
MORONIA
1
Note on Technic
H       T AVING made of late, after a longish hiatus,
two separate attempts to sit through movie
shows, I can only report that the so-called
art of the film still eludes me. I was not chased out
either time by the low intellectual content of the pictures on display. For one thing, I am anything but
intellectual in my tastes, and for another thing the
films I saw were not noticeably deficient in that direction. The ideas in them were simply the common and
familiar ideas of the inferior nine-tenths of mankind.
They were hollow and obvious, but they were not
more hollow and obvious than the ideas one encounters
in the theater every day, or in the ordinary run of
popular novels, or, for that matter, in the discourses
of the average American statesman or divine. Rotary,
hearing worse once a week, still manages to preserve
its idealism and digest carbohydrates.
What afflicts the movies is not an unpalatable idea290




APPENDIX FROM MORONIA              291
tional content so much as an idiotic and irritating
technic. The first moving-pictures, as I remember
them thirty years ago, presented more or less continuous scenes. They were played like ordinary plays,
and so one could follow them lazily and at ease. But
the modern movie is no such organic whole; it is
simply a maddening chaos of discrete fragments. The
average scene, if the two shows I attempted were
typical, cannot run for more than six or seven seconds.
Many are far shorter, and very few are appreciably
longer. The result is confusion horribly confounded.
How can one work up any rational interest in a fable
that changes its locale and its characters ten times a
minute? Worse, this dizzy jumping about is plainly unnecessary: all it shows is the professional incompetence of the gilded pants-pressers, decayed actors and
other such half-wits to whom the making of movies
seems to be entrusted. Unable to imagine a sequence
of coherent scenes, and unprovided with a sufficiency
of performers capable of playing them if they were
imagined, these preposterous mountebanks are reduced to the childish device of avoiding action altogether. Instead of it they present what is at bottom
nothing but a poorly articulated series of meaningless
postures and grimaces. One sees a ham cutting a face,
and then one sees his lady co-star squeezing a tearand so on, endlessly. These mummers cannot be said,
in any true sense, to act at all. They merely strike




292      PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
attitudes-and are then whisked off. If, at the first
attempt upon a scene, the right attitude is not struck,
then all they have to do is to keep on trying until they
strike it. On those terms a chimpanzee could play
Hamlet, or even Juliet.
To most of the so-called actors engaged in the
movies, I daresay, no other course would be possible.
They are such obvious incompetents that they could no
more play a rational scene, especially one involving
any subtlety, than a cow could jump over the moon.
They are engaged, not for their histrionic skill, but
simply for their capacity to fill the heads of romantic
virgins and neglected wives with the sort of sentiments
that the Christian religion tries so hard to put down.
It is, no doubt, a useful office, assuming that the
human race must, should and will go on, but it has
no more to do with acting, as an art, than being a
Federal judge has with preserving the Constitution.
The worst of it is that the occasional good actor, venturing into the movies, is brought down to the common
level by the devices thus invented to conceal the incompetence of his inferiors. It is quite as impossible
to present a plausible impersonation in a series of
unrelated (and often meaningless) postures as it
would be to make a sensible speech in a series of college yells. So the good actor, appearing in the films,
appears to be almost as bad as the natural movie ham.
One sees him only as one sees a row of telegraph




APPENDIX FROM MORONIA             293
poles, riding in a train. However skillful he may be,
he is always cut off before, by any intelligible use
of the devices of his trade, he can make the fact evident.
In one of the pictures I saw lately a principal actor
was George Bernard Shaw. The first scene showed him
for fifteen or twenty seconds continuously, and it was
at once plain that he had a great deal of histrionic skill
-far more, indeed, than the average professional
actor. He was seen engaged in a friendly argument
with several other dramatists, among them Sir James
M. Barrie and Sir Arthur Wing Pinero. Having admired all these notorious men for many years, and
never having had the honor of meeting or even witnessing them, I naturally settled down with a grateful grunt
to the pleasure of feasting my eyes upon them. But
after that first scene all I saw of Shaw was a series of
fifteen or twenty maddening flashes, none of them more
than five seconds long. He would spring into view, leap
upon Barrie or Pinero-and then disappear. Then
he would spring back, his whiskers bristling-and
disappear again. It was as maddening as the ring of
the telephone.
There is, of course, a legitimate use for this offagain-on-again device in the movies: it may be used,
at times, very effectively and even intelligently. The
beautiful heroine, say, is powdering her nose, preparing to go out to her fatal dinner with her libidinous




294      PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
boss. Suddenly there flashes through her mind a prophylactic memory of the Sunday-school in her home
town far away. An actress on the stage, with such a
scene to play, faces serious technical difficulties: it
is very hard for her-that is, it has been hard since
Ibsen abolished the soliloquy-to convey the exact
revolutions of her conscience to her audience. But
the technic of the movies makes it very easy-in
fact, so easy that it requires no skill at all. The director simply prepares a series of scenes showing what
is going through the heroine's mind. There is the
church on the hill, with the horde of unhappy children being driven into its basement by the town constable. There is the old maid teacher expounding the
day's Golden Text, II Kings, I, 23-24. There is a flash
of the two she-bears "taring" the "forty and two" little
children. There is the heroine, in ringlets, clapping
her hands in dutiful Presbyterian glee. There is a
flash of the Sunday-school superintendent, his bald
head shining, warning the scholars against the sins
of simony, barratry and adultery. There is the collection, with the bad boy putting in the suspenders'
button. There is the flash showing him, years later, as
a bank president.
All this is ingenious. More, it is humane, for it
prevents the star trying to act, and so saves the spectators pain. But it is manifestly a poor substitute for




APPENDIX FROM MORONIA             295
acting on the occasions when acting is actually demanded by the plot-that is, on the occasions when
there must be cumulative action, and not merely a
series of postures. Such occasions give rise to what
the old-time dramatic theorists called scenes a faire,
which is to say, scenes of action, crucial scenes, necessary scenes. In the movies they are dismembered, and
so spoiled. Try to imagine the balcony scene from
"Romeo and Juliet" in a string of fifty flashes-first
Romeo taking his station and spitting on his hands,
then Juliet with her head as big as a hay-wagon, then
the two locked in a greasy kiss, then the Nurse taking
a drink of gin, then Romeo rolling his eyes, and so
on. If you can imagine it, then you ought to be in
Hollywood, dodging bullets and amassing wealth.
If I were in a constructive mood I'd probably propose reforms, but that mood, I regret to say, is not
on me. In any case, I doubt that proposing reforms
would do any good. For this idiotic movie technic,
as I have shown, has its origin in the incompetence of
the clowns who perform in the great majority of
movies, and it would probably be impossible to displace them with competent actors, for the customers
of the movie:parlors appear to love them, and even
to admire them. It is hard to believe, but it is obviously
so. A successful movie mime is probably the most
admired human being ever seen in the world. He is




296     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
admired more than Napoleon, Lincoln or Beethoven;
more, even, than Coolidge. The effects of this adulation, upon the mime himself and especially upon his
clients, ought to be given serious study by competent
psychiatrists, if any can be found. For there is nothing
more corrupting to the human psyche, I believe, than
the mean admiration of mean things. It produces a
double demoralization, intellectual and spiritual. Its
victim becomes not only a jackass, but also a bounder.
The movie-parlors, I suspect, are turning out such
victims by the million: they will, in the long run, so
debauch the American proletariat that it will begin to
put Coolidge above Washington, and Peaches Browning above Coolidge.
Meanwhile, they are ruining the ancient and noble
art of the dramatist-an art that has engaged the
talents of some of the greatest men the world has ever
seen. And they are, at the same time, ruining the
lesser but by no means contemptible art of the actor.
It is no advantage to a movie ham to be a competent
actor; on the contrary, it is a handicap. If he tried to
act, as acting has been understood since the days of
2Eschylus, his director would shut him off instanter:
what is wanted is simply aphrodisiacal posturing. And
if, by any chance, his director were drunk and let him
run on, the vast majority of movie morons would
probably rush out of the house, bawling that the film
was dull and cheap, and that they had been swindled.




APPENDIX FROM MORONIA


297


2
Interlude in the Socratic Manner
Having completed your aesthetic researches at Hollywood, what is your view of the film art now?
I made no researches at Hollywood, and was within
the corporate bounds of the town, in fact, only on a few
occasions, and then for only a few hours. I spent my
time in Los Angeles, studying the Christian pathology
of that great city. When not so engaged I mainly devoted myself to quiet guzzling with Joe HerEpsheimer,
Jim Quirk, Johnny Hemphill, Jim Tully, Walter
Wanger and other such literati. For the rest, I visited
friends in the adjacent deserts, some of them employed
in the pictures and some not. They treated me with
immense politeness. With murderers as thick in the
town as evangelists, nothing would have been easier
than to have had me killed, but they let me go.
Did any of them introduce you to the wild nightlife of the town?
The wildest night-life I encountered was at Sister
Aimee McPherson's tabernacle. I saw no wildness
among the movie-folk. They seemed to me, in the
main, to be very serious and even gloomy people.
And no wonder, for they are worked like Pullman
porters or magazine editors. When they are engaged
in posturing for a film and have finished their day's




298     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
labor they are far too tired for any recreation requiring stamina. I encountered but two authentic
souses in three weeks. One was a cowboy and
the other was an author. I heard of a lady getting
tight at a party, but I was not present. The news was
a sensation in the town. Such are the sorrows of poor
mummers: their most banal peccadilloes are magnified
into horrors. Regard the unfortunate Chaplin. If he
were a lime and cement dealer his latest divorce case
would not have got two lines in the newspapers. But, as
it was, he was placarded all over the front pages because he had had a banal disagreement with one of
his wives. The world hears of such wild, frenzied
fellows as Tully, and puts them down as typical of
Hollywood. But Tully is not an actor; he eats actors.
I saw him devour half a dozen of them on the halfshell in an hour. He wears a No. 30 collar and has a
colossal capacity for wine-bibbing; I had to call up
my last reserves to keep up with him. But the typical
actor is a slim and tender fellow. What would be a
mere aperitif for Tully or me would put him under
the table, yelling for his pastor.
So you caught no glimpses of immorality?
Immorality? Oh, my God! Hollywood, despite the
smell of patchouli and rattle of revolver fire, seemed
to me to be one of the most respectable towns in
America. Even Baltimore can't beat it. The notion that




APPENDIX FROM       MORONIA         299
actors are immoral fellows is a delusion that comes
down to us from Puritan days, just as the delusion that
rum is a viper will go down to posterity from our
days. There is no truth 'in it. The typical actor, at
least 'in America, is the most upright of men: he
always marries the girl. How many actors are bachelors? Not one 'in a thousand. The divorce rate is high
among them simply because the marriage rate is so
high. An actor, encountering a worthy girl, leaps from
the couch to the altar almost as fast as a Baptist leaps
from the altar to the couch. It i's his incurable sentimentality that fetches him: if he was not born a
romantic he is not an actor. Worse, his profession
supports his natural weakness. In plays and movies he
always marries the girl in the end, and so it seems
to him to be the decent thing to do 'it 'in his private life.
Actors always copy the doings of the characters they
impersonate: no Oscar was needed to point out that
nature always imitates art. I heard, of course, a great
deal of gossip in Los Angeles, but all save a trivial
part of it was excessively romantic. Nearly every
great female star, it appeared, was desperately in love,
either with her husband or with some pretty and wellheeled fellow, usually not an actor. And every male
star was mooning over some coy and lovely miss. I
heard more sweet love stories in three weeks than I
had heard in New York in the previous thirty years.




300     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
The whole place stank of orange-blossoms. Is honest
love conducive to vice? Then one may argue that it is
conducive to delirium tremens to be a Presbyterian
elder. One of the largest industries in Hollywood is
that of the florists. Next comes that of the traffickers
in wedding silver. One beautiful lady star told me
that buying such presents cost her $11,000 last year.
But the tales go round. Is there no truth in them
at all?
To the best of my knowledge and belief, none.
They are believed because the great masses of the
plain people, though they admire movie actors, also
envy them, and hence hate them. It is the old human
story. Why am I hated by theologians? It is because
I am an almost unparalleled expert in all branches of
theology. Whenever they tackle me, my superior
knowledge and talent floor them. In precisely the
same way I hate such fellows as the movie Salvini,
Jack Gilbert. Gilbert is an amiable and tactful young
man, and treats me with the politeness properly due to
my years and learning. But I heard in Culver City
that no less than two thousand head of women, many
of them rich, were mashed on him. Well, I can recall
but fifteen or twenty women who have ever showed
any sign of being flustered by me, and not one of
them, at a forced sale, would have realized $200.
Hence I hate Gilbert, and would rejoice unaffectedly
to see him taken in some scandal that would stagger




APPENDIX FROM MORONIA            301
humanity. If he is accused of anything less than murdering his wife and eight children I shall be disappointed.
Then why do you speak for Mr. Chaplin?
Simply because he is not a handsome dog, as
Gilbert is. The people who hate him do so because
he is rich. It is the thought that his trouble will bust
him that gives them delight. But I have no desire for
money and so his prosperity does not offend me. I
always have too much money; it is easy to get in
New York, provided one is not a professing Christian.
Gilbert, I suppose, is rich too; he wears very natty
clothes. But it is not his wealth that bothers me:
it is those two thousand head of women.
So, failing researches, you continue ignorant of the
film art?
Ignorant? What a question! How could any man
remain ignorant of the movies after three weeks in
Los Angeles? As well continue ignorant of laparotomy
after three weeks in a hospital sun-parlor! No, I am
full of information about them, some of it accurate,
for I heard them talked day and night, and by people
who actually knew something about them. There was
but one refuge from that talk, and that was La McPherson's basilica. Moreover, I have hatched some
ideas of my own.
As for example?
That the movie folks, in so far as they are sentient




302     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
at all, are on the hooks of a distressing dilemma.
They have built their business upon a foundation of
morons, and now they are paying for it. They seem to
be unable to make a presentable picture without pouring out tons of money, and when they have made it
they must either sell it to immense audiences of halfwits, or go broke. There seems to be very little ingenuity and resourcefulness in them. They are apparently quite unable, despite their melodramatic
announcements of salary cuts, to solve the problem of
making movies cheaply, and yet intelligently, so that
civilized persons may visit the movie-parlors without
pain. But soon or late some one will have to solve it.
Soon or late the movies will have to split into two
halves. There will be movies for the present mob, and
there will be movies for the relatively enlightened
minority. The former will continue idiotic; the latter,
if competent men to make them are unearthed, will
show sense and beauty.
Have you caught the scent of any such men?
Not yet. There are some respectable craftsmen in
Hollywood. (I judged them by their talk: I have not
seen many of their actual pictures.) They tackle the
problems of their business in a more or less sensible
manner. They have learned a lot from the Germans.
But I think it would be stretching a point to say that
there are any artists among them-as yet. They are
adept, but not inspired. The movies need a first-rate




APPENDIX FROM MORONIA            303
artist-a man of genuine competence and originality.
If he is in Hollywood to-day, he is probably bootlegging, running a pants pressing parlor, or grinding
a camera crank. The movie magnates seek him in
literary directions. They pin their faith to novelists
and playwrights. I presume to believe that this is bad
medicine. The fact that a man can write a competent
novel is absolutely no reason for assuming that he
can write a competent film. The two things are as
unlike as Pilsner and coca-cola. Even a sound dramatist is not necessarily a competent scenario-writer.
What the movies need is a school of authors who will
forget all dialogue and description, and try to set
forth their ideas in terms of pure motion. It can be
done, and it will be done. The German, Dr. Murnau,
showed the way in certain scenes of "The Last Laugh."
But the American magnates continue to buy bad novels
and worse plays, and then put over-worked hacks to
the sorry job of translating them into movies. It is like
hiring men to translate college yells into riddles.
lEschylus himself would have been stumped by such
a task.
When do you think the Shakespeare of the movies
will appear? And where will he come from?
God knows. He may even be an American, as improbable as it may seem. One thing, only, I am sure
of: he will not get much for his masterpieces. He will
have to give them away, and the first manager who




304     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
puts them on will lose money. The movies to-day are
too rich to have any room for genuine artists. They
produce a few passable craftsmen, but no artists. Can
you imagine a Beethoven making $100,000 a year?
If so, then you have a better imagination than Beethoven himself. No, the present movie folk, I fear,
will never quite solve the problem, save by some act
of God. They are too much under the heel of the East
Side gorillas who own them. They think too much
about money. They have allowed it to become too important to them, and believe they couldn't get along
without it. This is an unfortunate delusion. Money
is important to mountebanks, but not to artists. The
first really great movie, when it comes at last, will
probably cost less than $5000. A true artist is always
a romantic. He doesn't ask what the job will pay; he
asks if it will be interesting. In this way all the loveliest treasures of the human race have been fashioned
-by careless and perhaps somewhat foolish men. The
late Johann Sebastian Bach, compared to a movie
star with nine automobiles, was simply a damned
fool. But I cherish the feeling that a scientific inquiry would also develop other differences between
them.
Are you against the star system?
I am neither for it nor against it. A star is simply
a performer who pleases the generality of morons
better than the average. Certainly I see no reason why




APPENDIX FROM MORONIA             305
such a performer should not be paid a larger salary
than the average. The objection to swollen salaries
should come from the stars themselves-that is, assuming them to be artists. The system diverts them
from their proper business of trying to produce charming and amusing movies, and converts them into bogus
society folk. What could be more ridiculous? And
pathetic? I go further: it is tragic. As I have said in
another place, nothing is more tragic in this world
than for otherwise worthy people to meanly admire
and imitate mean things. One may have some respect
for the movie lady who buys books and sets up as an
intellectual, for it is a creditable thing to want to be
(or even simply to want to appear) well-informed
and intelligent. But I can see nothing worthy in wanting to be mistaken for the president of a bank. Artists
should sniff at such dull drudges, not imitate them.
The movies will leap ahead the day some star in Hollywood organizes a string quartette and begins to study
Mozart.
3
Valentino
By one of the chances that relieve the dullness of
life and make it instructive, I had the honor of dining
with this celebrated gentleman in New York, a week
or so before his fatal illness. I had never met him be



306     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
fore, nor seen him on the screen; the meeting was at
his instance, and, when it was proposed, vaguely
puzzled me. But soon its purpose became clear enough.
Valentino was in trouble, and wanted advice. More,
he wanted advice from an elder and disinterested
man, wholly removed from the movies and all their
works. Something that I had written, falling under
his eye, had given him the notion that I was a judicious fellow. So he requested one of his colleagues, a
lady of the films, to ask me to dinner at her hotel.
The night being infernally warm, we stripped off
our coats, and came to terms at once. I recall that he
wore suspenders of extraordinary width and thickness-suspenders almost strong enough to hold up the
pantaloons of Chief Justice Taft. On so slim a young
man they seemed somehow absurd, especially on a
hot Summer night. We perspired horribly for an hour,
mopping our faces with our handkerchiefs, the table
napkins, the corners of the table-cloth, and a couple
of towels brought in by the humane waiter. Then there
came a thunder-storm, and we began to breathe. The
hostess, a woman as tactful as she is charming, disappeared mysteriously and left us to commune.
The trouble that was agitating Valentino turned out
to be very simple. The ribald New York papers were
full of it, and that was what was agitating him. Some
time before, out in Chicago, a wandering reporter
had discovered, in the men's wash-room of a gaudy




APPENDIX FROM MORONIA            307
hotel, a slot-machine selling talcum-powder. That, of
course, was not unusual, but the color of the talcumpowder was. It was pink. The news made the town
giggle for a day, and inspired an editorial writer on
the eminent Chicago Tribune to compose a hot weather
editorial. In it he protested humorously against the
effeminization of the American man, and laid it lightheartedly to the influence of Valentino and his sheik
movies. Well, it so happened that Valentino, passing
through Chicago that day on his way east from the
Coast, ran full tilt into the editorial, and into a gang
of reporters who wanted to know what he had to say
about it. What he had to say was full of fire. Throwing off his 100% Americanism and reverting to the
mores of his fatherland, he challenged the editorial
writer to a duel, and, when no answer came, to a fist
fight. His masculine honor, it appeared, had been outraged. To the hint that he was less than he, even to
the extent of one half of one per cent., there could be
no answer save a bath of blood.
Unluckily, all this took place in the United States,
where the word honor, save when it is applied to the
structural integrity of women, has only a comic significance. One hears of the honor of politicians, of
bankers, of lawyers, even of the honor of the United
States itself. Everyone naturally laughs. So New York
laughed at Valentino. More, it ascribed his high dudgeon to mere publicity-seeking: he seemed a vulgar




308     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
movie ham seeking space. The poor fellow, thus
doubly beset, rose to dudgeons higher still. His Italian
mind was simply unequal to the situation. So he sought
counsel from the neutral, aloof and aged. Unluckily,
I could only name the disease, and confem frankly
that there was no remedy-none, that is, known to any
therapeutics within my ken. He should have passed
over the gibe of the Chicago journalist, I suggested,
with a lofty snort-perhaps, better still, with a counter gibe. He should have kept away from the reporters
in New York. But now, alas, the mischief was done.
He was both insulted and ridiculous, but there was
nothing to do about it. I advised him to let the dreadful farce roll along to exhaustion. He protested.that
it was infamous. Infamous? Nothing, I argued, is infamous that is not true. A man still has his inner integrity. Can he still look into the shaving-glass of a
morning? Then he is still on his two legs in this
world, and ready even for the Devil. We sweated a
great deal, discussing these lofty matters. We seemed
to get nowhere.
Suddenly it dawned upon me-I was too dull or it
was too hot for me to see it sooner-that what we were
talking about was really not what we were talking
about at all. I began to observe Valentino more
closely. A curiously naive and boyish young fellow,
certainly not much beyond thirty, and with a disarming air of inexperience. To my eye, at least, not hand



APPENDIX FROM MORONIA             309
some, but nevertheless rather attractive. There was
an obvious fineness in him; even his clothes were not
precisely those of his horrible trade. He began talking of his home, his people, his early youth. His words
were simple and yet somehow very eloquent. I could
still see the mime before me, but now and then, briefly
and darkly, there was a flash of something else. That
something else, I concluded, was what is commonly
called, for want of a better name, a gentleman. In
brief, Valentino's agony was the agony of a man of
relatively civilized feelings thrown into a situation of
intolerable vulgarity, destructive alike to his peace
and to his dignity-nay, into a whole series of such
situations. It was not that trifling Chicago episode that
was riding him; it was the whole grotesque futility of
his life. Had he achieved, out of nothing, a vast and
dizzy success? Then that success was hollow as well
as vast-a colossal and preposterous nothing. Was
he acclaimed by yelling multitudes? Then every time
the multitudes yelled he felt himself blushing inside.
The old story of Diego Valdez once more, but with a
new poignancy in it. Valdez, at all events, was High
Admiral of Spain. But Valentino, with his touch of
fineness in him-he had his commonness, too, but
there was that touch of fineness-Valentino was only
the hero of the rabble. Imbeciles surrounded him in a
dense herd. He was pursued by women-but what
women! (Consider the sordid comedy of his two mar



310     PREJUDICES: SIXTH SERIES
riages-the brummagem, star-spangled passion that
invaded his very death-bed!) The thing, at the start,
must have only bewildered him. But in those last days,
unless I am a worse psychologist than even the professors of psychology, it was revolting him. Worse, it
was making him afraid.
I incline to think that the inscrutable gods, in taking
him off so soon and at a moment of fiery revolt, were
very kind to him. Living, he would have tried inevitably to change his fame-if such it is to be calledinto something closer to his heart's desire. That is to
say, he would have gone the way of many another
actor-the way of increasing pretension, of solemn
artiness, of hollow hocus-pocus, deceptive only to himself. I believe he would have failed, for there was little
sign of the genuine artist in him. He was essentially a
highly respectable young man, which is the sort that
never metamorphoses into an artist. But suppose he
had succeeded? Then his tragedy, I believe, would
have only become the more acrid and intolerable. For
he would have discovered, after vast heavings and
yearnings, that what he had come to was indistinguishable from what he had left. Was the fame of Beethoven any more caressing and splendid than the fame
of Valentino? To you and me, of course, the question
seems to answer itself. But what of Beethoven? He was
heard upon the subject, viva voce, while he lived, and
his answer survives, in all the freshness of its profane




APPENDIX FROM MORONIA


311


eloquence, in his music. Beethoven, too, knew what it
meant to be applauded. Walking with Goethe, he
heard something that was not unlike the murmur that
reached Valentino through his hospital window. Beethoven walked away briskly. Valentino turned his face
to the wall.
Here, after all, is the chiefest joke of the gods: that
man must remain alone and lonely in this world, even
with crowds surging about him. Does he crave approbation, with a sort of furious, instinctive lust? Then it
is only to discover, when it comes, that it is somehow
disconcerting-that its springs and motives offer an
affront to his dignity. But do I sentimentalize the perhaps transparent story of a simple mummer? Then
substitute Coolidge, or Mussolini, or any other poor
devil that you can think of. Substitute Shakespeare, or
Lincoln, or Goethe, or Beethoven, as I have. Sentimental or not, I confess that the predicament of poor
Valentino touched me. It provided grist for my mill,
but I couldn't quite enjoy it. Here was a young man
who was living daily the dream of millions of other
young men. Here was one who was catnip to women.
Here was one who had wealth and fame. And here was
one who was very unhappy.








INDEX
(For Prejudices: Sixth Series, by H. L. Mencken)


Abrams, Albert, 98
Adams, Samuel, 73, 149
Age of Faith, 63
Alien Property Act, 40
American Academy of Arts and
Letters, 155 ff.
American Medical Association,
35
American Society of Newspaper
Editors, 16
Anderson, Paul Y., 140
Anderson, Sherwood, 123
Anti-Saloon League, 29, 42, 47,
60, 102, 246, 271, 277, 278
Arbuckle, Fatty, 47
Aristotle, 93, 114, 238, 255
Arliss, George, 157
Atlantic Monthly, 257
Authors' League, 209
Bach, Johann Sebastian, 167,
304
Baldwin, Oliver, 98
Baptismal Service, 110
Baptists, 129
Barrie, James M., 293
Bassett, John Spencer, 139
Beecher, Henry Ward, 277
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 12, 166,
168, 296, 304, 310, 311
Behaviorism, 81
Bible, 62, 92, 106, 125, 126, 152,
254, 294


Bierce, Ambrose, 259 ff.
Bill of Rights, 44, 46, 54, 60, 77,
84, 94, 149, 242, 246, 277
Bill of Rights Week, 78
Blake, William, 112
Blease, Cole, 147
Bolsheviki, 45, 254
Book of Common Prayer, 105,
111
Boston, 63
Boston Herald, 17, 196ff.
Brahms, Johannes, 163 ff., 173
Brisbane, Arthur, 26, 61, 71, 192
Brothers Karamazov, The, 63
Broun, Heywood, 17, 113 f
Brownell, William Crary, 156,
158
Browning, Robert, 200
Bruno, Guido, 120
Bryan, William Jennings, 117,
141, 147, 233, 262, 275
Bryant, William Cullen, 112
Burial Service, 103 f.
Burr, Aaron, 233
Cabell, James Branch, 123, 137,
144, 157, 158
Candler, Warren A., 140
Cathcart, Lady, 38
Century Magazine, 159
Chamber of Commerce of the
United States, 22


313




314


INDEX


Chantecler, 70
Chaplin, Charles S., 298, 301
Chicago Tribune, 307
Chiropractic, 217f.
Christian Science, 220
Clark, Emily, 138
Cleveland, Grover, 147
Common Decency Week, 78
Comstock, Anthony, 113 ff., 123
Congress, 44, 47, 65, 66, 74, 246,
272
Congressmen, 64, 244
Constitution, United States, 15,
39, 54, 76, 292
Controversy, 91 ff.
Cooglar, J. Gordon, 121, 122
Coolidge, Calvin, 28, 47, 72, 122,
136, 166, 198, 220, 296, 311
Cox, James M., 147
Crane, Frank, 26, 61, 71, 158
Criminology, 227 ff.
Curtis, Cyrus H. K., 25, 27, 29
Dabney, Virginius, 137
Darrow, Clarence, 127
Darwin, Charles, 97, 117, 220,
275
Debs, Eugene, 44, 98
Dennett, Mary Ware, 202, 205
Department of Justice, 22, 249,
257
Dodd, William E., 139
Don Quixote, 63
Drew, Daniel, 120
East Side, West Side, 210
Education, medical, 34
Elisha, 76
Epicurus, 114
Ethical Culture Society, 105
Eugenics, 233 ff.
Ferguson, Ma and Pa, 147


Fillmore, Millard, 194
Ford, Henry, 79, 125, 148, 248
Freeman, Douglas, 140
Freemasons, 104, 112
Freethinker, 104
Frost, Robert, 108, 175, 179
Fundamentalism, 92, 258
Gary, Elbert H., 122, 125
Gilbert, Jack, 300, 301
Glasgow, Ellen, 137
Government, 38 ff.
Grant, U. S., 97, 233, 254
Green, Paul, 140
Guest, Edgar Albert, 71, 108,
129, 192, 200
Guthrie, William N., 128
Haardt, Sara, 138
Hale, Nathan, 73
Hall, Grover C., 137
Hancock, John, 73
Harding, Warren Gamaliel, 72,
80, 146
Harris, Julian, 137
Harvard University, 15
Harvey, G. B. M., 132, 274
Hearst papers, 25, 26
Hegel, G. W. F., 80
Hergesheimer, Joseph, 297
Hoboken, 63
Hog Island, 56, 268
Hollywood, 297 ff.
Homo boobiens, 55
Howell, Clark, 140
Huxley, T. H., 96, 220
Immigration Act, 40
Income Tax Bureau, 242#.
Ingersoll, Robert G., 273, 275,
276


Jaffe, L. I., 137




INDEX


315


James, William, 101
Jefferson, Thomas, 73, 145ff.
Jesus Christ, 75
Joad, C. E. M., 120
Johns Hopkins Medical School,
101, 139, 150, 218
Johnson, Gerald W., 137, 140
Johnson, James Weldon, 108
Johnson,  Robert   Underwood,
156, 159
Jones, Ashby, 139
Journalism, 9 1.
Judges, Federal, 9, 23, 67, 68,
69, 99, 292
Jury system, 45ff.
Kahn, Otto H., 122, 132, 172
Kant, Immanuel, 15, 80, 81, 255
Keats, John, 112
Kelly, Howard A., 150
Kiwanis, 14, 17, 21, 71, 74, 179,
200, 268
Knights of Pythias, 107
Krutch, J. W., 138, 140
Ku Klux Klan, 29, 107, 144, 147,
277, 278
League for Medical Freedom,
100
Lee, Robert E., 97
Leech, Margaret, 113
Leo X, 97
Lewis, Nell Battle, 138
Lewis, Sinclair, 128, 158
Liberty, 73 ff.
Lincoln, Abraham, 44, 54, 237,
296, 311
Lindsey, Vachel, 108, 175, 178,
179
Lippmann, Walter, 17, 20
Lowell, Amy, 175, 178, 179
Luther, Martin, 97, 125, 129
Lutherans, 128


Mabie, Hamilton Wright, 123
McAdoo, William G., 147
McPherson, Aimee Semple, 124,
297, 301
McTeague, 63
Manhattan Transfer, 212
Manning, William T., 128
Marriage Service, 109
Marx, Karl, 98, 104, 233
Maryland Free State, 129
Masters, Edgar Lee, 108, 159,
175
Matthews, Brander, 156, 158
Matthison, Edith Wynne, 157
Mellon, Andrew W., 28, 122
Metaphysics, 79 ff.
Methodist Board of Temperance,
Prohibition and Public Morals, 18, 75, 132, 147
Methodists, 46, 69, 129, 147, 279
Mill, John Stuart, 161
Millay, Edna St. Vincent, 108
Millikan, Robert A., 125
Milton, John, 112
Mims, Edwin, 136 ff.
Modernists, 92
Mooney, C. P. J., 137, 139
More, Paul Elmer, 156
Movies, 290 #.
Miiller, Johannes, 15
Munsey, Frank A., 25, 26, 27,
29
Murnau, Hans, 303
National Institute of Arts and
Letters, 209
Neal, John R., 139
Near-East Relief, 22
Newman, Frances, 138
New Thought, 80
New York, 209 #.
New York Evening Mail, 194
New York Evening Post, 27




316


INDEX


New York Herald-Tribune, 33,
191
New York Sun, 27
New York Times, 17, 20, 22, 104
Nietzsche, F. W., 80, 101, 234,
255
Noah, 46
Nock, Albert Jay, 145
Ochs, Adolph S., 20
Odum, Howard W., 140
Ohio, civilization in, 42
Oppenheimer, Franz, 53
Origin of Species, The, 97
Osteopathy, 220
Page, Walter Hines, 139
Painc, Thomas, 73
Palmer, A. Mitchell, 99
Parker, Alton B., 147
Penrose, Boise, 65
Perry, Bliss, 156, 157
Peterkin, Julia, 138
Pinero, Arthur Wing, 293
Pittsburgh, 62
Plato, 80
Poe, Edgar Allan, 264
Poetry Society, 209
Poteet, W. L., 140
Press clubs, 37
Prohibition, 44, 67, 69, 76, 81,
87, 99, 147, 174, 258
Prohibition agents, 23, 44, 272
Puritanism, 40, 42, 43
Red Cross, 22, 231
Reese, Lizette Woodworth, 179
Revere, Paul, 73
Reviewer, 138, 140
Rituale Romanum, 126
Roosevelt, Theodore, 65, 262
Rostand, Edmond, 70
Rotary, 17, 66, 70, 74, 268


Saltus, Edgar, 259
Sandburg, Carl, 1091, 158, 159,
175, 178, 179
Saturday Evening Post, 124
Scheffauer, Herman George, 263
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 80
Schubert, Franz, 164, 165
Schwab, Charles, 122
Scopes, Marie, 78
Scopes trial, 117, 143
Scott, Fred Newton, 159
Scribner's Magazine, 201
Scripps-Howard papers, 25
Sermon on the Mount, 78
Service, 71, 179
Shakespeare, William, 881, 134,
136, 238, 311
Shaw, George Bernard, 293
Shelley, P. B., 112
Sherman, L. A., 159
Shorey, Paul, 156, 157
Sinclair, Upton, 98
Single Tax, 100
Sloane, William M., 156
Socialists, 98, 104, 109
Sophocles, 62
Stall, Sylvanus, 93
Sterling, George, 263
Still, Andrew T., 218, 223
Straton, John Roach, 117, 141,
210, 220, 277
Strauss, Johann, 169 ff.
Strauss, Richard, 172
Stribling, T. S., 133
Suicide, 85 ff.
Summers, Montague, 125
Sunday, Billy, 117, 125, 275
Sunday-school, 65, 67, 119
Swinburne, A. C., 112
Taggart, Thomas, 147
Teasdale, Sara, 179
Tennyson, Alfred, 112




INDEX


317


Thomas, William Henry, 131
Thucydides, 124
Trent, W. P., 139
Trumbull, C. G., 119
Tuskegee Normal and Industrial
Institute, 15
Unitarians, 128, 285
Vaihinger, Hans, 197
Valentino, Rudolph, 305 ff.
Vanderbilt University, 136, 144
Van Dyke, Henry, 156, 158
Vanity Fair, 63
Villard, Oswald Garrison, 17, 27
Volstead Act, 40, 181
Wade, John D., 140
Waldteufel, Emil, 170
Walker, James, 147


Walker, Stanley, 269
War, World, 10, 95
Warren, Charles Beecher, 48
Washington, George, 44, 72, 136,
198, 296
Washington, saloons in, 131 ff.
Washington Star, 17
Wheeler, Burton K., 47
Whitman, Walt, 112
Wilberforce, Samuel, 96
Willard, Frances E., 120
Wilson, Woodrow, 43, 54, 147,
274
Witchcraft, 125 #.
Wood, Clement, 138
Wright, Charlton, 137
Yale University, 15
Young, Brigham, 120, 233
Y. M. C. A., 18, 22, 115, 231




A NOTE ON THE TYPE IN
WHICH THIS BOOK IS SET
This book is composed on the Linotype in Bodoni, so-called
after its designer, Giambattista Bodoni (1740-1813) a
celebrated Italian scholar andprinter. Bodoni planned his
type especially for use on the more smoothly finishedpapers
that came into vogue late in the eighteenth century and
drew his letters with a mechanical regularity that is readily
apparent on comparison with the less formal old style.
Other characteristics that will be noted are the square serifs
without fillet and the marked contrast between
the light and heavy strokes.
SET UP AND ELECTROTYPED BY THE
VAIL-BALLOU PRESS, INC., BINGHAMTON, N. Y. * PRINTED             AND
BOUND BY THE PLIMPTON PRESS,
NORWOOD, MASS. * ESPARTO
PAPER MANUFACTURED IN
SCOTLAND AND FURNISHED
BY   W. F. ETHERINGTON
& CO., NEW     YORK












t   NIVERSITY  ~~OF MICIA
3 9015 00480 0119 ),SI
Reviewed by Preservati6)- -K %3   -
DO NOT REMOVED
OR9
MU~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ILAECR




I
0
g'.., .
*1
i,.
I
I                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         i,,,                                                                                     I
L;




i
I...
f
L—., "I                                  MW      IP]




8