Second Mencken Chrestomathy (11 page)

The Fathers of the Republic, who seem to have been men of suspicious minds, apparently foresaw that the theory of democracy might develop along such lines, and they went to some trouble to prevent it. Their chief device to that end was the scheme of limited powers. Rejecting the old concept of government as a kind of primal entity, ordained of God and beyond human control, they tried to make it a mere creature of the people. So far it could go, but no further. Within its proper province it had all the prerogatives that were necessary to its existence, but beyond that province it had none at all. It could do what it was specifically authorized to do, but nothing else. The Constitution was simply a record specifying its bounds. The Fathers, taught by their own long debates, knew that efforts would be made, from time to time, to change the Constitution as they had framed it, so they made the process as difficult as possible, and hoped that they had prevented frequent resort to it. Unhappily, they did not foresee the possibility of making changes, not by formal act, but by mere political intimidation—not by recasting its terms, but by distorting their meaning. If they were alive today, they would be painfully aware of their oversight. The formal revisions of the Constitution have been relatively few, but at this moment it is completely at the mercy of a gang of demagogues consecrated to reading into it governmental powers that are not only wholly foreign to its spirit, but categorically repugnant to its terms.

Such is the net effect of the Hon. Mr. Roosevelt’s court-packing scheme—a failure in law but a dizzy success in fact. On matters which do not impinge upon the New Deal programme, his sardines of the Supreme Court still stick, more or less, to the Constitution
as written, but when questions of policy come up they go with the politicians who made them, leaving the Constitution to lick its wounds. In brief, they reject the fundamental theory that governmental powers are strictly limited, and align themselves with the doctrine that the mountebanks who happen, at any moment, to be in office are quite free, within very wide limits, to attempt any experiment and inflict any injustice that will get them votes and safeguard their jobs.

A good many thoughtful men, I suppose, have been asking themselves of late a natural question: how are we to get rid of this nefarious imbecility? By what means are we to restore government to its constitutional functions, and put an end to its crazy and costly invasions of forbidden fields? I must say that I have no answer to offer. The Fathers, though they were well aware of the infamy of politicians, devised no really effective way to curb them. By resigning matters, in the last analysis, to a count of noses, they opened the door to demagogues, and after a century and a half of ardent practise those demagogues have attained to a magnificent virtuosity, and all of us are now under their hooves.

Whether or not they can be curbed by constitutional means remains to be seen. As for me, I begin to doubt it. There is obviously no way to get rid of Roosevelt and company so long as they are free to buy votes out of the public treasury, and there is no apparent way to prevent that buying of votes so long as they and their client-judges remain in office. Thus democracy turns upon and devours itself. Universal suffrage, in theory the palladium of our liberties, becomes the assurance of our slavery. And that slavery will grow more and more abject and ignoble as the differential birth rate, the deliberate encouragement of mendicancy and the failure of popular education produce a larger and larger mass of prehensile half-wits, and so make the demagogues more and more secure.

The alternatives all look unpleasant enough, God knows. No rational man can fail to see that the totalitarianisms so far invented abroad, if translated here, would be even worse, in many important ways, than Rooseveltian democracy, swinish though it may be. Perhaps we’ll gradually work out something better than either. Or it may come by catastrophe. But, however it comes, come it must,
for a series of Roosevelts stretching over fifty years, or even over twenty-five years, would plainly reduce the country to chaos, with the Chandala in the saddle and all decent people in the status of
ferae naturae
. Democracy may not be actually dying here, as it only too plainly is in Europe, but it is certainly very sick.

From the Baltimore
Evening Sun
, April 2, 1923

It seems to me that monarchy, even of the most absolute and intransigent kind, is appreciably superior to democracy here. A monarch elected and inaugurated by God, having no need to play the clown to the mob, can devote himself whole-heartedly to the business of his office, and no matter how stupid he may be he is at least in a better position to give effective service than a President who is likely to be quite as stupid as he is, and certain to be ten times as dishonest. It is not to the monarch’s self-interest to be dishonest; he is more comfortable, like any other man, when he does what he genuinely wants to do. Moreover, the subordinate officers of the state, working under him, share his advantages. They do not have to grimace and cavort before the mob in order to get and hold their offices; the only person they have to please is the monarch himself, who is, at all events, a relatively educated man, with some notion of family honor and tradition in him, and uncorrupted by the habit of abasement.

A hitherto unpublished note

A Liberal is one who is willing to believe anything twice.

From the Chicago
Tribune
, July 24, 1927

O
F ALL
the varieties of uplifters who now sob and moan through the land, the most idiotic, I begin to suspect, are the pacifists. Not even the sex hygienists, the movie censors, or the reconcilers of science and religion show a more romantic and fantoddish spirit. At least half the devices they propose for ending war appear to have been borrowed from the gaseous armamentarium of the New Thought, that pink and spongy nonsense. Worse, they seem to have an unpleasant capacity for corrupting the logic and scattering the wits of otherwise sensible men. Here, for example, is Ambassador Houghton, our eminent agent at London, arguing solemnly that the way to end war is to resort to the referendum—that is, to put it to a vote every time it threatens. What could be more nonsensical? Call the scheme a scheme to make war certain, and you have very accurately described it. For it must be plain that a referendum would take time, and it must be equally plain that during that time the warlocks would have everything their own way. Imagine their gaudy tales about the prospective enemy’s preparations. Imagine their pious, inflammatory talk about protecting the home from his hordes. And then try to imagine a referendum going for peace.

I am surely no admirer of politicians. Least of all do I admire the puerile, paltry shysters who constitute the majority of Congress. But I confess frankly that these shysters, whatever their defects, are at least appreciably superior to the mob. They are restrained in their excesses, if for no other reason, because they fear the sober second thought of the mob. But the mob itself is in
no terror of its own second thought. Once it is on the loose, it slashes around like a wild animal. It cannot be stopped until it is exhausted.

Next to the referendumeers, the most absurd of the pacifists now in practice among us are those who propose to put an end to war by setting up ironclad agreements between the principal predatory nations. To this lodge belongs another American ambassador, Monsieur Herrick, though it is somewhat difficult to determine, in the present negotiations, whether he represents the United States or France. His plan is for the two countries to agree to keep the peace forever hereafter, whatever the temptation to go to war. As I understand him, he is willing to go the whole hog. Even in the event that the French
gendarmerie
round up all the American drunks in Paris and chop off their heads, the United States is to refrain from doing anything beyond writing a sharp note.

To state this scheme is to provide a sufficient answer to it. No man who has read history can have any confidence in such grandiose agreements. They last until there is a good excuse for war, and then they blow up. In the late World War every participating nation, absolutely without exception, broke some treaty or other; most of them broke dozens. Even the United States, which, as every one knows, is extremely virtuous, engaged in this time-honored sport. It had a treaty with the Germans, honored by more than a century of life, which protected the merchant shipping of the two high contracting parties in case of war between them. It repudiated that treaty in order to grab the German ships interned in American harbors. No agreement with France would be worth a depreciated franc if that country and the United States ever came to a serious clash of interests. If the United States didn’t repudiate it, then the French would repudiate it. Naturally enough, the party doing the repudiating would swathe the business in a great deal of moral rhetoric. All the blame would be unloaded on the other fellow. But it would be a repudiation nonetheless, and it would be followed by a grand attempt, in the ancient Christian manner, to let the other fellow’s blood and grab his goods.

But must we have wars forever? I greatly fear so. Nevertheless, it should be possible to diminish their number, and even abate some of their ferocity. How? By a device that is as simple as mud,
and has been tried often in the past, and with excellent success. In brief, by the device of the
Pax Romana.
Let the United States, which is now richer and stronger than any other nation, and perhaps richer and stronger than all of them put together, prepare such vast and horrible armaments that they are irresistible. Then let it launch them against France, or some other chronic trouble-maker, and proceed to give the victim a sound beating. And then let it announce quietly that war is adjourned, and that the next nation which prepares for it will get another and worse dose of the same medicine.

This scheme would more nearly approximate the course of justice within civilized states than any of the world courts, leagues of nations, and other such phantasms that now entertain sentimentalists—many of them with something to sell. The courts are obeyed among us, not because there is any solemn pact among litigants to respect their fiats, but simply and solely because they have force behind them. No individual—save he be, of course, a Prohibition agent or a heavy contributor to the funds of the Republican National Committee—is strong enough to defy them. If he loses he has no recourse: he must submit. Let him refuse and he is instantly laid by the heels and punished with great barbarity.

It seems to me that there can be no permanent peace among nations until some such system is set up among them. Of what avail are the mandates of a world court unable to enforce them—a world court that must seek help, when help is needed, among the body of litigants standing before it? Many of these litigants will inevitably sympathize with the worsted party; others will see no profit in tackling him. The effects of that lack of adequate police power, if a world court were actually in operation, would simply be to make the whole process of international justice ridiculous. Every powerful litigant would be free to defy the court, and so would every weak litigant with powerful friends.

I believe that the United States could put an end to this unpleasant situation and at no great cost or risk. If it started tomorrow to arm in earnest, no other nation could hope to keep up with it: they’d all be bankrupt in two years if they tried to hold the pace. This fact became obvious at the close of the world war, when even England, the richest of the contestants and the one that had
profited most by the war, saw clearly that she could not keep up with Uncle Sam on the seas. So she had her agents in Washington root hard for the disarmament conference that silly American pacifists had already proposed, and the result was that the United States agreed to keep the American fleet down to the level of the English fleet. This was a great folly. It left England still able to dream of tackling and butchering the accursed Yankee, and so opened the way for more wars. If the United States had built twenty or thirty battleships and then employed them to sink all the English and Japanese battleships there would be peace in the world today, and it would be genuine. True enough, the English would have yelled blue murder and called upon God to witness that they were being undone by an international criminal, but they’d have got over it quickly, and by this time they’d have become used to keeping the peace. As it is, they remain free to start another war whenever they please, and it seems very likely that, unless France undergoes a transformation little short of miraculous, they will do so very soon. The United States will be drawn into it and will have to pay for it.

My scheme, to be sure, would exact force and put the whole world at the mercy of the United States. But that would be nothing new. The world is at the mercy of force today, and it is exerted by powers that, in the main, are even less reputable than the United States. Our own stealings are in Latin America, where no one ventures to oppose us. The others scramble for the loot elsewhere and constantly threaten war. The way to make them stop is not to get them to sign a vast mass of puerile and meaningless agreements, but to sharpen a terrible swift sword and let them feel its edge.