A Saturnalia of Bunk. H. L. Mencken
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Seriously, it is as vain to argue that the Kaiser is not a democrat as it would be to argue that dogs have fleas. If it means anything at all, democracy means government by men in the mass, without any regard whatever for the personal fitness of the individuals composing the mass for that difficult and highly technical business. It is grounded firmly and immovably upon the doctrine that, in the voting booth at least, all men are equal—that the opinion of a corner loafer or a farm hand is just as good as the opinion of a Lincoln, a Bismarck or a Huxley. The Kaiser is wholly opposed to that doctrine. He regards it as windy nonsense, as utter puerility and damphoolishness. And what is more, the overwhelming majority of intelligent men, not only in Germany but everywhere else, agree with him.
I know a great many Americans of position and influence, but save for professional politicians and a few sentimentalists I do not know three who even make a pretense of believing in anything approaching genuine democracy. Not many of them, true enough, argue against it publicly. They look upon the question as a closed one in the United States, at least for the present, just as the question of a state church is a closed one, and the question of free education. But though they thus dodge the empty and thankless job of bucking the enraptured rabble, they by no means confess thereby that they are in accord with it. On the contrary, they are opposed to it, and they will remain opposed to it until the last galoot’s ashore.
The very theory of democracy, in fact, is unintelligible to men accustomed to reflection, just as the theory of Christian Science is unintelligible. And the cause thereof is as plain as day: it is because democracy is not founded upon an idea at all, but merely upon an emotion. That emotion is the lowly one of envy, perhaps the most degraded in the whole human repertoire. Democracy is a device for giving to the relatively inefficient and unsuccessful (and hence, bitterly envious) majority, by the artificial and dishonest device of the ballot, that preponderance of power and influence which belongs rightfully to the minority by reason of its superior efficiency, honesty and intelligence. In brief, democracy is an attempt to wreak punishment upon successful men for the crime of being successful, and its charm lies in its promise of loot. The one thing that may be said in favor of it is that it seldom works.
Here in the United States, for example, we have had to dilute and modify genuine democracy over and over again in order to save the nation from utter destruction and ruin. The enfranchisement of the negro was a device of genuine democracy: it set up the frank doctrine that the opinion of a Georgia field hand, but three generations removed from cannibalism, was as good as the opinion of Gen. Robert E. Lee—that his desires and ideals were just as respectable, that his notions of civilized government were just as sound. Lincoln and other sane men stood against that doctrine, but it was forced upon the country by a typically democratic process, i. e., emotionally, unintelligently, in a villainous spirit of revenge.
But it had no sooner been adopted than everyone saw that it would not work. The States south of the Potomac begin to suffer from it even more than they had suffered from the Civil War and some of the Northern States also found it an unmitigated curse. The result was an organized attack upon it, resulting in the gradual pulling of its teeth. To abandon it bodily, of course, was beyond the American imagination, but hypocrisy, as is usual in democratic nations, did the work that honesty was unequal to. Today there is not a Southern State in which the Fifteenth Amendment is actually in force. Self-preservation demanded that this supreme masterpiece of democracy be reduced to a mere shell of words.
What is more, very few professed democrats advocate its restoration. Not a word in favor of that folly ever comes from the Hon. William Jennings Bryan, or from the Hon. Theodore Roosevelt, or from the Hon. Bob La Follette, or from the Hon. Woodrow Wilson, or from any other great apostle of the plain people. What is still more, the few lingering impossibilists who yet weep and argue for it are open opponents of democracy in other directions. I cite the Hon. C. J. Bonaparte as an example. This eminent statesman looses a tear ever and anon for the stolen “rights” of the virtuous niggero—but let us not forget that he was against local option,5 and that he devotes himself ardently to opposing self-government at Back River.6 The persons who make Back River an inhabited place are almost unanimously in a favor of an open Sunday, but Mr. Bonaparte and his friends frankly endeavor to block their attainment of it by arousing the passions and prejudices of remote yokels who have never been nearer to Back River than Watson street and the Monumental Theatre. [21 October 1914]
MORALITY AND IMMORALITY
The Hon. James A. Dunham, in the long-suffering Letter Column:
THE SUN has ideals and standards, while [the Hon.] Mr. Mencken apparently has neither.
The traditional verdict of stupidity upon the unfamiliar. Because, forsooth, the ideals and standards to which I adhere are not the sweet and soothing ones to which the Hon. Mr. Dunham himself adheres, he comes to the solomonic judgment that I have no ideals and standards at all! But do not laugh. The absurdity into which this virtuous and well-meaning, if somewhat naif and unreflective, gentleman falls is one which occasionally engulfs the best of men. The most difficult of all mental processes, indeed, is that of grasping the other fellow’s point of view, particularly with sympathy. And when we enter the domain of morals that difficulty becomes a practical impossibility. It is a first article of faith with all of us that those whose morals differ from our own have no morals at all. We habitually denominate them, indeed, by the simple word “immoral.”
Nine times out of ten, of course, this use of the word is idiotic, for very few persons, in point of fact, are wholly immoral. Even those persons whose immorality is assumed by an almost unanimous public opinion are often devotees of a rigid and austere moral code. For example, the unfortunate women whose pursuit and persecution are so significantly attractive to a certain type of “moral” man. These women, true enough, habitually violate one of the Ten Commandments, and are thus immoral by our prevalent standards, but it would vastly surprise some of their pursuers to know how sternly moral they are in other respects—for example, how honorable they are in their dealings with one another, how violently they disapprove the man who seeks to bring other women to their plight, and how unyieldingly they frown upon that snivelling hypocrisy which sometimes offers them a way out. Ask one of these women what she thinks of any conspicuous moralist of our vicinage, and it is a safe bet that she will tell you he is cruel and mendacious—i. e., that he is immoral.
So much for the morality of a class generally admitted to be sub-moral. What is constantly forgotten is that there are also classes which properly deserve to be called super-moral. That is to say, there are classes which accept all, or at least nearly all, of the restrictions imposed by the current popular morality, and then add restrictions that the popular morality does not demand. The gentlemen of the monastic orders offer a familiar example: some of them reach a degree of morality quite impossible, and even unimaginable, to the average man, or even to the average professional moralist. And one finds something of the same sort, though in less degree, among prohibitionists, vegetarians, Sabbatarians, Moslem dervishes, and the breed of kill-joys and uplifters in general.
No need to say that all of these super-moral persons have been, and are today, regarded as atrociously immoral by other persons of sound mind. The doctrine that asceticism is immoral once attained to such wide acceptance that it contributed very largely to an epoch-making schism in the Christian church, and it is still held today, I believe, by fully eight Protestants out of ten. (Even among those who approve of ascetism some of its earlier manifestations are now regarded as immoral; for example, self-mutilation, flagellation and immersion in filth, all of which had countenance, popularly if not officially, in the first centuries of our era.) And one need not walk 20 steps to find a man who believes the prohibitionists to be tyrannical and dishonest, and hence immoral, or another man to denounce the Blue Laws, or animal-worship, or the Moslem holy war.
Thus it appears that morality, considered broadly, is a gem of many facets, and that the man who clings to one of them gets a sadly distorted view of the men clinging to the others. On some rules of morality, true enough, most civilized men agree, for example: on the rule against punching out the eyes of sleeping babies with tack pullers. But on the vast majority of rules opinion is anything but unanimous, even among persons who regard themselves as conventionally moral. I know hundreds of men who would rather starve than steal, and yet most of them