Part 5

The American people, true enough, are sheep. Worse, they are donkeys. Yet worse, to borrow from their own dialect, they are goats. They are thus constantly bamboozled and exploited by small minorities of their own number, by determined and ambitious individuals, and even by exterior groups. The business of victimizing them is a lucrative profession, an exact science, and a delicate and lofty art. It has its masters and it has its quacks. Its lowest reward is a seat in Congress or a job as a Prohibition agent, _i. e._, a licensed blackleg; its highest reward is immortality. The adept practitioner is not only rewarded; he is also thanked. The victims delight in his ministrations, as an hypochondriacal woman delights in the flayings of the surgeon. But all the while they have the means in their hands to halt the obscenity whenever it becomes intolerable, and now and then, raised transiently to a sort of intelligence, they do put a stop to it. There are no legal or other bars to the free functioning of their will, once it emerges into consciousness, save only such bars as they themselves have erected, and these they may remove whenever they so desire. No external or super-legal power stands beyond their reach, exercising pressure upon them; they recognize no personal sovereign with inalienable rights and no class with privileges above the common law; they are even kept free, by a tradition as old as the Republic itself, of foreign alliances which would condition their autonomy. Thus their sovereignty, though it is limited in its everyday exercise by self-imposed constitutional checks and still more by restraints which lie in the very nature of government, whatever its form, is probably just as complete in essence as that of the most absolute monarch who ever hanged a peasant or defied the Pope.

What is too often forgotten, in discussing the matter, is the fact that no such monarch was ever actually free, at all times and under all conditions. In the midst of his most charming tyrannies he had still to bear it in mind that his people, oppressed too much, could always rise against him, and that he himself, though a king _von Gottes Gnaden_, was yet biologically only a man, with but one gullet to slit; and if the people were feeble or too craven to be dangerous, then there was always His Holiness of Rome to fear or other agents of the King of Kings; and if these ghostly mentors, too, were silent, then he had to reckon with his ministers, his courtiers, his soldiers, his doctors, and his women. The Merovingian kings were certainly absolute, if absolutism has ever existed outside the dreams of historians; nevertheless, as every schoolboy knows, their sovereignty was gradually undermined by the mayors of the palace, and finally taken from them altogether. So with the emperors of Japan, who succumbed to the shoguns, who succumbed in their turn to a combination of territorial nobles and city capitalists, not unlike that which brought King John to bay at Runnymede. It seems to me that the common people, under such a democracy as that which now prevails in the United States, are more completely sovereign, in fact as well as in law, than any of these ancient despots. They may be seduced and enchained by a great variety of prehensile soothsayers, just as Henry VIII was seduced and enchained by his wives, but, like Henry again, they are quite free to throw off their chains whenever they please, and to chop off the heads of their seducers. They could hang Dr. Coolidge to-morrow if they really wanted to do it, or even Bishop Manning. They could do it by the simple device of intimidating Congress, which never fails to leap when their growl is palpably in earnest. And if Congress stood out against them, they could do it anyhow, under protection of the jury system. The executioners, once acquitted, could not be molested more, save by illegal processes. Similar executioners walk the land to-day, especially in the South, and no one dares to challenge them. They are visible symbols of the powers that lie in the mob, once it makes up its mind.

Nor is there much force or relevancy in the contention that democracy is incomplete in the United States (as in England, France, Germany and all other democratic countries) because certain classes of persons are barred from full citizenship, sometimes for reasons that appear to be unsound. To argue thus is to argue against democracy itself, for if the majority has not the right to decide what qualifications shall be necessary to participate in its sovereignty, then it has no sovereignty at all. What one usually finds, on examining any given case of class disfranchisement, is that the class disfranchised is not actively eager, as a whole, for the ballot, and that its lack of interest in the matter is at least presumptive evidence of its general political incompetence. The three-class system of voting survived so long in Belgium and Prussia, not because the masses victimized had no means at hand to put an end to it, but simply because they were so inept at politics, and so indifferent to the rights involved, that they made no genuine effort to do so. The agitation against the system was carried on mainly by a small minority, and many of its leaders were not even members of the class transgressed. Here we have a reminder of the process whereby democracy itself came in: it was forced upon its beneficiaries by a small group of visionaries, all of them standing outside the class benefited. So again, in our own time, with the extension of the franchise to women. The great masses of women in all countries were indifferent to the boon, and there was a considerable body that was cynically hostile. Perhaps a majority of the more ardent suffragists belonged biologically to neither sex.

Since the abolition of the three-class system in Prussia there has been absolutely no improvement in the government of that country; on the contrary, there has been a vast falling off in its honesty and efficiency, and it has even slackened energy in what was formerly one of its most laudable specialties: the development of legislation for the protection of the working class, _i. e._, the very class that benefited politically by the change. Giving women the ballot, as everyone knows, has brought in none of the great reforms promised by the suffragists. It has substituted adultery for drunkenness as the principal divertissement at political conventions, but it has accomplished little else. The majority of women, when they vote at all, seem to vote unwillingly and without clear purpose; they are, perhaps, relatively too intelligent to have any faith in purely political remedies for the sorrows of the world. The minorities that show partisan keenness are chiefly made up of fat women with inattentive husbands; they are victimized easily by the male politicians, especially those who dress well, and are thus swallowed up by the great parties, and lose all separate effectiveness. Certainly it is usually difficult to discover, in the election returns, any division along anatomical lines. Now and then, true enough, a sentimentality appealing especially to the more stupid sort of women causes a transient differentiation, as when, for example, thousands of newly-enfranchised farm-wives in the United States voted against Cox, the Democratic presidential candidate, in 1920, on the double ground (_a_) that he was a divorcé and hence an antinomian, and (_b_) that the titular chief of his party, Dr. Wilson, had married again too soon after the death of his first wife. But such fantastic sentimentalities, after all, rarely enter into practical politics. When they are lacking the women voters simply succumb to the sentimentalities that happen to be engaging their lords and masters. The extension of the franchise has not changed the general nature of the political clown-show in the slightest. Campaigns are still made upon the same old issues, and offices go to the same old mountebanks, with a few Jezebels added to the corps to give it refinement.

There is little reason for believing that the extension of the franchise to the classes that still remain in the dark would make government more delicately responsive to the general will. Such classes, as a matter of fact, are now so few and so small in numbers in all of the Western nations that they may be very conveniently disregarded. It is as if doctors of philosophy, members of the Society of the Cincinnati or men who could move their ears were disfranchised. In the United States, true enough, there is one disfranchised group that is much larger, to wit, that group of Americans whose African descent is visible to the naked eye and at a glance. But even in this case, the reality falls much below the appearance. The more intelligent American Negroes vote in spite of the opposition of the poor whites, their theological brothers and economic rivals, and not a few of them actually make their livings as professional politicians, even in the South. At the Republican National Convention at Chicago, in 1920, such a swart statesman gave an inspiring exhibition of his powers, and in the presence of a vast multitude. His name was Henry Lincoln Johnson, and he has since gone to that bourn where black is white. When he died Dr. Coolidge sent a long and flirtatious telegram of condolence to his widow. The widow of Jacques Loeb got no such telegram. This Johnson was chairman of the Georgia delegation, and his colleagues were all of the Nordic race. But though they came from the very citadel of the Ku Klux Klan, he herded them in a public and lordly manner, and voted them as if they had been stuffed chemises. As Nordics, no doubt, they viewed him with a bitter loathing, but as politicians yearning for jobs they had to be polite to him, and even fawning. He has his peers and successors in all the American States. In many a proud city, North and South, the Aframericans hold the balance of power, and know it.

Moreover, even those who are actually disfranchised, say in the rural wastes of the South, may remove their disability by the simple device of moving away, as, in fact, hundreds of thousands have done. Their disfranchisement is thus not intrinsic and complete, but merely a function of their residence, like that of all persons, white or black, who live in the District of Columbia, and so it takes on a secondary and trivial character, as hay-fever, in the pathological categories, takes on a secondary and trivial character by yielding to a change of climate. Moreover, it is always extra-legal, and thus remains dubious: the theory of the fundamental law is that the coloured folk may and do vote. This theory they could convert into a fact at any time by determined mass action. The Nordics might resist that action, but they could not halt it: there would be another Civil War if they tried to do so, and they would be beaten a second time. If the blacks in the backwaters of the South keep away from the polls to-day it is only because they do not esteem the ballot highly enough to risk the dangers that go with trying to use it. That fact, it seems to me, convicts them of unfitness for citizenship in a democratic state, for the loftiest of all the rights of the citizen, by the democratic dogma, is that of the franchise, and whoever is not willing to fight for it, even at the cost of his last drop of gore, is surely not likely to exercise it with a proper sense of consecration after getting it. No one argues that democracy is destroyed in the United States by the fact that millions of white citizens, perfectly free under the law and the local _mores_ of their communities to vote, nevertheless fail to do so. The difference between these negligent whites and the disfranchised Negroes is only superficial. Both have a clear legal right to the ballot; if they neglect to exercise it, it is only because they do not esteem it sufficiently. In New York City thousands of freeborn Caucasians surrender it in order to avoid jury duty; in the South thousands of Negroes surrender it in order to avoid having their homes burned and their heads broken. The two motives are fundamentally identical; in each case the potential voter values his peace and security more than he values the boon for which the Fathers bled. He certainly has a right to choose.

3.

_Disproportional Representation_

The matter of disproportional representation, already alluded to in connection with the Prussian-Belgian voting system, is intimately bound up with this question of disfranchised classes, for it must be plain that a community whose votes, man for man, count for only half as much as the votes of another community is one in which half of the citizens are, to every practical intent, unable to vote at all. As everyone knows, the United States Senate is constituted upon a disproportional plan. Each State, regardless of population, has two Senators and no more, and the votes of the two representing so small and measly a State as Delaware or Nevada count for precisely as much as the votes of the Senators from Pennsylvania or New York. The same sophistication of the one-man-one-vote formula extends into the States themselves. There is hardly a large city in the United States that has completely proportional representation in the State Legislature. In almost every State, sometimes with slight ameliorative differences, the upper house of the Legislature is constituted upon the plan of the Federal Senate--that is, the divisions run according to geographical boundaries rather than according to population, and the congested urban centres tend to be grossly under-represented. Moreover, the lower house commonly shows something of the same disharmony, even when it is ostensibly based upon proportional representation, for the cities grow in population much faster than the country districts, and reapportionment always lags behind that growth.

These facts fever certain romantic fuglemen of so-called pure democracy, and they come forward with complicated remedies, all of which have been tried somewhere or other and failed miserably. The truth is that disproportional representation is not a device to nullify democracy, but simply a device to make it more workable. All it indicates, at least in the United States, is that the sovereign people have voluntarily sacrificed a moiety of the democratic theory in order to attain to a safer and more efficient practice. If they so desired they could sweep all of the existing inequalities out of existence--not instantly, perhaps, but nevertheless surely. Every such inequality is founded upon their free will, and nearly every one enjoys their complete approval. What lies under most of them is not a wish to give one voter an advantage over another, but a wish to counter-balance an advantage lying in the very nature of things. The voters of a large urban centre, for example, are able to act together far more promptly and effectively than their colleagues of the wide-flung farms. They live in close contact both physically and mentally; opinions form among them quickly, and are maintained with solid front. In brief, they show all of the characters of men in a compact mob, and the voters of the rural regions, dispersed and largely inarticulate, cannot hope to prevail against them by ordinary means. So the yokels are given disproportionally heavy representation by way of make-weight: it enables them to withstand the city stampede. There are frequent protests from the cities when, taking advantage of their strength in the State Legislatures, the yokels dodge their fair share of the burden of taxation, but it is perhaps significant that there is seldom any serious protest against the plan of organization of the United States Senate, despite the fact that it has cursed the country with such bucolic imbecilities as Prohibition. In both cases, genuine discontent would make itself felt, for the majority under democracy remains the majority, whatever laws and constitutions may say to the contrary, and when its blood is up it can get anything it wants.

Most of the so-called constitutional checks, in fact, have yielded, at one time or other, to its pressure. No one familiar with the history of the Supreme Court, for example, need be told that its vast and singular power to curb legislation has always been exercised with one eye on the election returns. Practically all of its most celebrated decisions, from that in the Dred Scott case to that in the Northern Securities case, have reflected popular rages of the hour, and many of them have been modified, or even completely reversed afterward, as the second thought of the plain people has differed from their first thought. This responsiveness to the shifts of popular opinion and passion is not alone due to the fact that the personnel of the court, owing to the high incidence of senile deterioration among its members, is constantly changing, and that the President and the Senators, in filling vacancies, are bound as practical politicians to consider the doctrines that happen to be fashionable in the cross-roads grocery-stores and barber-shops. It is also due, and in no small measure, to the fact that the learned and puissant justices are, in the main, practical politicians themselves, and hence used to keeping their ears close to the grass-roots. Most of them, before they were elevated to the ermine, spent years struggling desperately for less exalted honours, and so, like Representatives, Senators and Presidents, they show a fine limberness of the _biceps femoris_, _semitendinosus_ and _semimembranosus_, and a beautiful talent for reconciling the ideally just with the privately profitable. If their general tendency, in late years, has been to put the rights of property above the rights of man then it must be obvious that they have not lost any popularity thereby. In boom times, indeed, democracy is always very impatient of what used to be called natural rights. The typical democrat is quite willing to exchange any of the theoretical boons of freedom for something that he can use. In most cases, perhaps, he is averse to selling his vote for cash in hand, but that is mainly because the price offered is usually too low. He will sell it very willingly for a good job or for some advantage in his business. Offering him such bribes, in fact, is the chief occupation of all political parties under democracy, and of all professional politicians.

For all these reasons I esteem it a vanity to discuss the question whether the democracy on tap in the United States is really ideal. Ideal or not, it works, and the people are actually sovereign. The governmental process, perhaps, could be made more quickly responsive to the public will, but that is merely a temporal detail; it is responsive enough for all practical purposes. Any conceivable change in the laws could be effected without tampering with the fundamental scheme. The fact, no doubt, largely explains the hostility of the inferior American to the thing called direct action--the darling of his equals in most other countries. He is against it, not merely because he is a coward and distrusts liberty, but also, and maybe mainly, because he believes that revolution, in the United States, is unnecessary--that any reform advocated by a respectable majority, or even by a determined minority, may be achieved peacefully and by constitutional means. In this belief he is right. The American people, keeping strictly within the Constitution, could do anything that the most soaring fancy suggested. They could, by a simple amendment of that hoary scripture, expropriate all the private property in the land, or they could expropriate parts of it and leave the rest in private hands; they have already, in fact, by tariff juggling, by Prohibition and by other devices, destroyed billions of dollars of property without compensation and even without common politeness, and the Constitution still survives. They could enfranchise aliens if they so desired, or children not taxed, or idiots, or the kine in the byres. They could disfranchise whole classes, _e. g._, metaphysicians or adulterers, or the entire population of given regions. They have done such things. They could abolish the Federal and State Legislatures, as they have already abolished the city councils in hundreds of municipalities. They could extend the term of the President to life, or they could reduce it to one year, or even to one day. They could provide that he must shave his head, or that he must sleep in his underclothes. They could legalize his assassination for malfeasance, and the assassination of all other recreant public officers, as I myself once proposed, entirely within my rights as a citizen and a patriot. They could introduce burning at the stake, flogging, castration, ducking and tar-and-feathering into our system of legal punishment; they have already done so in the South by acclamation, regardless of the law and the courts, and, as the phrase is, have got away with it. They could abolish the jury system, abandon the writ of _habeas corpus_, authorize unreasonable searches and seizures, legalize murder by public officers and provide that all Federal judges be appointed by the Anti-Saloon League: a beginning has been made in all these fields by the Volstead Act. They could make war without constitutional authority and refuse to engage in it in the face of a constitutional declaration. They could proscribe individuals or classes, and deny them the protection of the laws. They could convert arson into a laudable act, provide a bounty for persons skilled at mayhem and make it a crime to drink coffee or eat meat. They have already, either by Federal action or by State action, made crimes of such intrinsically harmless acts as drinking wine at meals, smoking cigarettes on the street, teaching the elements of biology, wearing a red necktie on the street, and reading “Das Kapital” and “The Inestimable Life of the Great Gargantua.” They could, with equal facility, make it criminal to refuse to do these things. Finally, they could, if they would, abandon the republican form of government altogether, and set up a monarchy in place of it; during the late war they actually did so in fact, though refraining from saying so frankly. They could do all of these things freely and even legally, without departing in the slightest from the principles of their fundamental compact, and no exterior agency could make them do any of them unwillingly.