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Page 2
It is not only that we have had to "subdue the wilderness"; our
educational conditions are adverse otherwise. Our political system is
unfavorable. Our fortunes, accumulated in one generation, are dispersed
in the next. If it takes three generations to make a gentleman one will
not make a thinker. Instruction is acquired, but capacity for
instruction is transmitted. The brain that is to contain a trained
intellect is not the result of a haphazard marriage between a clown and
a wench, nor does it get its tractable tissues from a hard-headed farmer
and a soft-headed milliner. If you confess the importance of race and
pedigree in a horse and a dog how dare you deny it in a man?
I do not hold that the political and social system that creates an
aristocracy of leisure is the best possible kind of human organization;
I perceive its disadvantages clearly enough. But I do hold that a system
under which most important public trusts, political and professional,
civil and military ecclesiastical and secular, are held by educated
men--that is, men of trained faculties and disciplined judgment--is
not an altogether faulty system.
It is a universal human weakness to disparage the knowledge that we do
not ourselves possess, but it is only my own beloved country that can
justly boast herself the last refuge and asylum of the impotents and
incapables who deny the advantage of all knowledge whatsoever. It was an
American senator who declared that he had devoted a couple of weeks to
the study of finance, and found the accepted authorities all wrong. It
was another American senator who, confronted with certain hostile facts
in the history of another country, proposed "to brush away all facts,
and argue the question on consideration of plain common sense."
Republican institutions have this disadvantage: by incessant changes in
the _personnel_ of government--to say nothing of the manner of men that
ignorant constituencies elect; and all constituencies are ignorant--we
attain to no fixed principles and standards. There is no such thing here
as a science of politics, because it is not to any one's interest to
make politics the study of his life. Nothing is settled; no truth finds
general acceptance. What we do one year we undo the next, and do over
again the year following. Our energy is wasted in, and our prosperity
suffers from, experiments endlessly repeated.
Every patriot believes his country better than any other country. Now,
they cannot all be the best; indeed, only one can be the best, and it
follows that the patriots of all the others have suffered themselves to
be misled by a mere sentiment into blind unreason. In its active
manifestation--it is fond of killing--patriotism would be well if it
were simply defensive; but it is also aggressive, and the same feeling
that prompts us to strike for our altars and our fires impels us over
the border to quench the fires and overturn the altars of our neighbors.
It is all very pretty and spirited, what the poets tell us about
Thermopyl�, but there was as much patriotism at one end of that pass as
there was at the other.
Patriotism deliberately and with folly aforethought subordinates the
interests of a whole to the interests of a part. Worse still, the
fraction so favored is determined by an accident of birth or residence.
The Western hoodlum who cuts the tail from a Chinaman's nowl, and would
cut the nowl from the body, if he dared, is simply a patriot with a
logical mind, having the courage of his opinions. Patriotism is fierce
as a fever, pitiless as the grave and blind as a stone.
III
There are two ways of clarifying liquids--ebullition and precipitation;
one forces the impurities to the surface as scum, the other sends them
to the bottom as dregs. The former is the more offensive, and that seems
to be our way; but neither is useful if the impurities are merely
separated but not removed. We are told with tiresome iteration that our
social and political systems are clarifying; but when is the skimmer to
appear? If the purpose of free institutions is good government where is
the good government?--when may it be expected to begin?--how is it to
come about? Systems of government have no sanctity; they are practical
means to a simple end--the public welfare; worthy of no respect if they
fail of its accomplishment. The tree is known by its fruit. Ours is
bearing crab-apples. If the body politic is constitutionally diseased,
as I verily believe; if the disorder inheres in the system; there is no
remedy. The fever must burn itself out, and then Nature will do the
rest. One does not prescribe what time alone can administer. We have put
our criminals and dunces into power; do we suppose they will efface
themselves? Will they restore to _us_ the power of governing _them_?
They must have their way and go their length. The natural and immemorial
sequence is: tyranny, insurrection, combat. In combat everything that
wears a sword has a chance--even the right. History does not forbid us
to hope. But it forbids us to rely upon numbers; they will be against
us. If history teaches anything worth learning it teaches that the
majority of mankind is neither good nor wise. When government is founded
upon the public conscience and the public intelligence the stability of
states is a dream.
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