Such frenzied inordinateness is obviously empty, and perhaps almost maniacal. Morgan’s actual taste was probably that of any other rich banker; there are hints of its true dignity in the fact that he bought the original manuscript of Dickens’s “Christmas Carol,” and regarded it as a lofty work, and had it read aloud to him every Christmas. Had he been poorer he would have collected, I daresay, gaudy sets of Bulwer Lytton, Guy de Maupassant and Balzac, or Denby Sadler etchings, or Rogers groups. He was simply a Philistine with an unlimited bank account. His services to art were scarcely greater than those of a moderately intelligent dealer.
I need not call a further roll. You will think of other examples yourself, and you will see at once how little ingenuity they have brought to the spending of their money. The trouble with nearly all of them is simple. Their primary motive in pouring out millions is to gain the good will and adulation of the general public, which is to say, of the general mass of dolts and noodles, and so they are restricted to enterprises which fall within the comprehension of such noodles, and excite their admiration. This bars out at once all schemes that are likely to appeal to a civilized man, for it is a peculiarity of such a man that he is usually in favor of whatever the mob is against, and against whatever it is in favor of. The millionaire who would make a genuine splash with his money must reject this common motive and adopt a contrary motive. That is to say, he must set himself to do, not what is popular, but precisely what is most unpopular. So far not one of the fraternity has shown imagination enough for that business.
Meanwhile, the opportunities are so numerous and so inviting that they bring tears to the eyes. Even old ideas may be improved, embellished, made mellow. Think, for example, of the scheme of the late D. O. Mills. He erected the two so-called Mills hotels in New York—and was canonized as a great philanthropist. But suppose he had built them, not in New York, but at Newport, Palm Beach or the Virginia Hot Springs. Suppose he had set them down in the very midst of American snobdom, and then invited all his decayed mechanics, unsuccessful peddlers and gentlemen out of work to come in and make themselves at home. As things stand, Mills is remembered by one American in 2,000,000; even many of his guests have scarcely heard of him. Had he been a man of originality his name would be as immortal as that of Lorenzo Borgia.
On the theological side many stimulating enterprises invite. I often think of the noble divertissement that John D. Rockefeller could have got by giving $100,000,000 to the Mormons, first to finance a nation-wide campaign in favor of polygamy, then to buy legislation authorizing it from the State Legislatures, and then to pay for a fight to a finish before the Supreme Court of the United States, with all the leading barristers of the nation for the defense. The combat would have been gaudy, thrilling, incomparable. Millions of Americans would have been converted; the newspapers would have fallen one by one; in the end it might have been possible to put through a constitutional amendment not only authorizing polygamy, but even making it obligatory. John got no such fun out of the Rockefeller Institute, nor out of his gifts to Baptist missions in Cochin-China. Carnegie got no such fun out of his libraries. Morgan got no such fun out of his squirrel-like hoarding up of dingy paintings and moth-eaten old sofas.
A still more gorgeous opportunity offers itself in the South. Among the native fauna down there are 10,000,000 colored folk of defective culture and inflammable habits. Theoretically, these Moors are all Christians, but as a matter of fact their faith is still adulterated by many ideas inherited from their African ancestors. The average religious ceremony among them is wild and vociferous. Not infrequently, indeed, the gendarmes have to shut off their deafening supplications, that the adjacent gentry may be able to get some sleep. These facts have often suggested to the judicious that Christianity, in its authentic form, is a cult not quite suited to the genius of the darker races. In Africa, where it has had to meet the competition of Moslemism, it has, in fact, usually succumbed. Hundreds of thousands of native Africans, converted by the gallant efforts of our own missionaries, have later gone over to the Crescent with a whoop, and sometimes butchered their late pastors in celebration of their apostacy. From end to end of the Dark Continent, indeed, Mohammedanism has swept like a whirlwind. No other known faith appeals so eloquently to the untutored Ethiop.
What I here hint at is the millionaire who imported a shipload of Moslem evangelists from Arabia, schooled them in English by intensive cultivation, and then turned them loose in Georgia—that such a millionaire, at all events, would suffer little from boredom during the ensuing carnage, and that his name would have an assured place in the history of the Confederate States. I am a poor man, but if the hat is passed I shall be glad to contribute to the project $1,000,000 in Mississippi bonds of the issue of 1838.
The Malevolent Jobholder
From the American Mercury, June, 1924, pp. 156–59. This was written long before the New Deal afflicted the country with a great mass of new administrative law and a huge horde of new and extra-tyrannical jobholders. I am more than ever convinced that it embodied a good idea
IN the immoral monarchies of the continent of Europe, now happily abolished by God’s will, there was, in the old days of sin, an intelligent and effective way of dealing with delinquent officials. Not only were they subject, when taken in downright corruption, to the ordinary processes of the criminal laws; in addition they were liable to prosecution in special courts for such offenses as were peculiar to their offices. In this business the abominable Prussian state, though founded by Satan, took the lead. It maintained a tribunal in Berlin that devoted itself wholly to the trial of officials accused of malfeasance, corruption, tyranny and incompetence, and any citizen was free to lodge a complaint with the learned judges. The trial was public and in accord with rules fixed by law. An official found guilty could be punished summarily and in a dozen different ways. He could be reprimanded, reduced in rank, suspended from office for a definite period, transferred to a less desirable job, removed from the rolls altogether, fined, or sent to jail. If he was removed from office he could be deprived of his right to a pension in addition, or fined or jailed in addition. He could be made to pay damages to any citizen he had injured, or to apologize publicly.
All this, remember, was in addition to his liability under the ordinary law, and the statutes specifically provided that he could be punished twice for the same offense, once in the ordinary courts and once in the administrative court. Thus, a Prussian official who assaulted a citizen, invaded his house without a warrant, or seized his property without process of law, could be deprived of his office and fined heavily by the administrative court, sent to jail by an ordinary court, and forced to pay damages to his victim by either or both. Had a Prussian judge in those far-off days of despotism, overcome by a brain-storm of kaiserliche passion, done any of the high-handed and irrational things that our own judges, Federal and State, do almost every day, an aggrieved citizen might have haled him before the administrative court and recovered heavy damages from him, besides enjoying the felicity of seeing him transferred to some dismal swamp in East Prussia, to listen all day to the unintelligible perjury of anthropoid Poles. The law specifically provided that responsible officials should be punished, not more leniently than subordinate or ordinary offenders, but more severely. If a corrupt policeman got six months a corrupt chief of police got two years. More, these statutes were enforced with Prussian barbarity, and the jails were constantly full of errant officials.
I do not propose, of course, that such medieval laws be set up in the United States. We have, indeed, gone far enough in imitating the Prussians already; if we go much further the moral and enlightened nations of the world will have to unite in a crusade to put us down. As a matter of fact, the Prussian scheme would probably prove ineffective in the Republic, if only because it involved setting up one gang of jobholders to judge and punish another gang. It worked very well in Prussia before the country was civilized by force of arms because, as everyone knows, a Prussian official was tr
ained in ferocity from infancy, and regarded every man arraigned before him, whether a fellow official or not, as guilty ipso facto; in fact, any thought of a prisoner’s possible innocence was abhorrent to him as a reflection upon the Polizei, and by inference, upon the Throne, the whole monarchical idea, and God. But in America, even if they had no other sentiment in common, which would be rarely, judge and prisoner would often be fellow Democrats or fellow Republicans, and hence jointly interested in protecting their party against scandal and its members against the loss of their jobs. Moreover, the Prussian system had another plain defect: the punishments it provided were, in the main, platitudinous and banal. They lacked dramatic quality, and they lacked ingenuity and appropriateness. To punish a judge taken in judicial crim. con. by fining him or sending him to jail is a bit too facile and obvious. What is needed is a system (a) that does not depend for its execution upon the good-will of fellow jobholders, and (b) that provides swift, certain and unpedantic punishments, each fitted neatly to its crime.
I announce without further ado that such a system, after due prayer, I have devised. It is simple, it is unhackneyed, and I believe that it would work. It is divided into two halves. The first half takes the detection and punishment of the crimes of jobholders away from courts of impeachment, congressional smelling committees, and all the other existing agencies – i.e., away from other jobholders—and vests it in the whole body of free citizens, male and female. The second half provides that any member of that body, having looked into the acts of a jobholder and found him delinquent, may punish him instantly and on the spot, and in any manner that seems appropriate and convenient—and that, in case this punishment involves physical damage to the jobholder, the ensuing inquiry by the grand jury or coroner shall confine itself strictly to the question whether the jobholder deserved what he got. In other words, I propose that it shall be no longer malum in se for a citizen to pummel, cowhide, kick, gouge, cut, wound, bruise, maim, burn, club, bastinado, flay or even lynch a jobholder, and that it shall be malum prohibitum only to the extent that the punishment exceeds the jobholder’s deserts. The amount of this excess, if any, may be determined very conveniently by a petit jury, as other questions of guilt are now determined. The flogged judge, or Congressman, or other jobholder, on being discharged from hospital—or his chief heir, in case he has perished—goes before a grand jury and makes complaint, and, if a true bill is found, a petit jury is empaneled and all the evidence is put before it. If it decides that the jobholder deserves the punishment inflicted upon him, the citizen who inflicted it is acquitted with honor. If, on the contrary, it decides that this punishment was excessive, then the citizen is adjudged guilty of assault, mayhem, murder, or whatever it is, in a degree apportioned to the difference between what the jobholder deserved and what he got, and punishment for that excess follows in the usual course.
The advantages of this plan, I believe, are too patent to need argument. At one stroke it removes all the legal impediments which now make the punishment of a recreant jobholder so hopeless a process, and enormously widens the range of possible penalties. They are now stiff and, in large measure, illogical; under the system I propose they could be made to fit the crime precisely. Say a citizen today becomes convinced that a certain judge is a jackass—that his legal learning is defective, his sense of justice atrophied and his conduct of cases before him tyrannical and against decency. As things stand, it is impossible to do anything about it. A judge cannot be impeached on the mere ground that he is a jackass; the process is far too costly and cumbersome, and there are too many judges liable to the charge. Nor is anything to be gained by denouncing him publicly and urging all good citizens to vote against him when he comes up for reëlection, for his term may run for ten or fifteen years, and even if it expires tomorrow and he is defeated the chances are good that his successor will be quite as bad, and maybe even worse. Moreover, if he is a Federal judge he never comes up for reëlection at all, for once he has been appointed by the President of the United States, on the advice of his more influential clients and with the consent of their agents in the Senate, he is safe until he is so far gone in senility that he has to be propped on the bench with pillows.
But now imagine any citizen free to approach him in open court and pull his nose. Or even, in aggravated cases, to cut off his ears, throw him out of the window, or knock him in the head with an ax. How vastly more attentive he would be to his duties! How diligently he would apply himself to the study of the law! How careful he would be about the rights of litigants before him! How polite and even suave he would become! For judges, like all the rest of us, are vain fellows: they do not enjoy having their noses pulled. The ignominy resident in the operation would not be abated by the subsequent trial of the puller, even if he should be convicted and jailed. The fact would still be brilliantly remembered that at least one citizen had deemed the judge sufficiently a malefactor to punish him publicly, and to risk going to jail for it. A dozen such episodes, and the career of any judge would be ruined and his heart broken, even though the jails bulged with his critics. He could not maintain his air of aloof dignity on the bench; even his catchpolls would snicker at him behind their hands, especially if he showed a cauliflower ear, a black eye or a scar over his bald head. Moreover, soon or late some citizen who had at him would be acquitted by a petit jury, and then, obviously, he would have to retire. It might be provided by law, indeed, that he should be compelled to retire in that case—that an acquittal would automatically vacate the office of the offending jobholder.
Portrait of an Ideal World
From PREJUDICES: FOURTH SERIES, 1924, pp. 173–79.
First printed in the American Mercury, Feb., 1924, pp. 201–03
THAT alcohol in dilute aqueous solution, when taken into the human organism, acts as a depressant, not as a stimulant, is now so much a commonplace of knowledge that even the more advanced varieties of physiologists are beginning to be aware of it. The intelligent layman no longer resorts to the jug when he has important business before him, whether intellectual or manual; he resorts to it after his business is done, and he desires to release his taut nerves and reduce the steam-pressure in his spleen. Alcohol, so to speak, unwinds us. It raises the threshold of sensation and makes us less sensitive to external stimuli, and particularly to those that are unpleasant. Putting a brake upon all the qualities which enable us to get on in the world and shine before our fellows—for example, combativeness, shrewdness, diligence, ambition –, it releases the qualities which mellow us and make our fellows love us—for example, amiability, generosity, toleration, humor, sympathy. A man who has taken aboard two or three cocktails is less competent than he was before to steer a battleship down the Ambrose Channel, or to cut off a leg, or to draw up a deed of trust, or to conduct Bach’s B minor mass, but he is immensely more competent to entertain a dinner party, or to admire a pretty girl, or to hear Bach’s B minor mass. The harsh, useful things of the world, from pulling teeth to digging potatoes, are best done by men who are as starkly sober as so many convicts in the death-house, but the lovely and useless things, the charming and exhilarating things, are best done by men with, as the phrase is, a few sheets in the wind. Pithecanthropus erectus was a teetotaler, but the angels, you may be sure, know what is proper at 5 p.m.
All this is so obvious that I marvel that no utopian has ever proposed to abolish all the sorrows of the world by the simple device of getting and keeping the whole human race gently stewed. I do not say drunk, remember; I say simply gently stewed—and apologize, as in duty bound, for not knowing how to describe the state in a more seemly phrase. The man who is in it is a man who has put all of his best qualities into his showcase. He is not only immensely more amiable than the cold sober man; he is immeasurably more decent. He reacts to all situations in an expansive, generous and humane manner. He has become more liberal, more tolerant, more kind. He is a better citizen, husband, father, friend. The enterprises that make human life on this earth uncomfortable and unsa
fe are never launched by such men. They are not makers of wars; they do not rob and oppress anyone. All the great villainies of history have been perpetrated by sober men, and chiefly by teetotalers. But all the charming and beautiful things, from the Song of Songs to terrapin à la Maryland, and from the nine Beethoven symphonies to the Martini cocktail, have been given to humanity by men who, when the hour came, turned from well water to something with color to it, and more in it than mere oxygen and hydrogen.
I am well aware, of course, that getting the whole human race stewed and keeping it stewed, year in and year out, would present formidable technical difficulties. It would be hard to make the daily dose of each individual conform exactly to his private needs, and hard to get it to him at precisely the right time. On the one hand there would be the constant danger that large minorities might occasionally become cold sober, and so start wars, theological disputes, moral reforms, and other such unpleasantnesses. On the other hand, there would be danger that other minorities might proceed to actual intoxication, and so annoy us all with their fatuous bawling or maudlin tears. But such technical obstacles, of course, are by no means insurmountable. Perhaps they might be got around by abandoning the administration of alcohol per ora and distributing it instead by impregnating the air with it. I throw out the suggestion, and pass on. Such questions are for men skilled in therapeutics, government and business efficiency. They exist today and their enterprises often show a high ingenuity, but, being chiefly sober, they devote too much of their time to harassing the rest of us. Half-stewed, they would be ten times as genial, and perhaps at least half as efficient. Thousands of them, relieved of their present anti-social duties, would be idle, and eager for occupation. I trust to them in this small matter. If they didn’t succeed completely, they would at least succeed partially.
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