Books: Nonsenseorship

G >> G. G. Putnam >> Nonsenseorship

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Gradually the true social morality has been evolved--that one citizen
should be so like all other citizens that his only distinguishing
characteristic is his number; that the right ideal of citizenship,
plain for all to follow, and ensuring the stability of society, is to
be so loyal to the Holy State that an expression of a man's views in a
gathering of his fellows will rouse no more curiosity than a glass of
water. Obviously so desirable a similarity of mind and character,
making disputation impossible, and preventing all dislike of the
ordinances of the Sacred Entity, or Cabal of Inviolable Dispensers, a
uniformity in which war and peace become merely the national output of
a vast machine controlled by the Central Will, has been developed only
through ages of Press Suggestion, popular education with a bias that
was designed but was scarcely noticeable, the seizing and retaining of
opportunities by legislators whenever public opinion was sufficiently
diverted, and a development of chemical science and aeronautics which
has been encouraged by the enlightened directors of the major
industries.

The war which began in 1914 showed quite clearly, for example, the
value of the Censorship. The instituting of this office was never
questioned, for it was based on man's first impulse of obedience to
superiors when faced by a sudden danger, caused by his fear of the
unknown. More than that, the English were in a lucky state of
exaltation at the time, and were ready to sacrifice everything to save
from destruction what they were told was the ancient, exquisite, and
priceless civilization of France. They did save it; but in the
prolonged and costly process they learned more than they had known
before of that civilization, as well as of their own; and so much of
their fear of losing either was evaporated. By that time, anyhow,
criticism was useless, because the Censorship then was empowered to
deal even with a derisive cough when Authority was solemnly giving
orders. Once the office of the Censor was set in its place unnoticed
in a time of public nervousness and excitement, the rest was easy, for
it became possible to bring all criticism within a law which was
elastic enough to be extended even to those figments which merely
worked on the timidity of unbalanced minds.

It became unpatriotic to express a dislike for margarine, when butter
was prohibited. It was unpatriotic for a blind hunchback with heart
disease to protest that he was no soldier, if he were ordered to the
Front. For though the Censor, in the early period of that war, dealt
merely with news and opinions which might aid the enemy, yet, as the
value of adding to a nation's enemies became apparent to Authority, it
became necessary to turn into enemies of the State those who denounced
profiteers for turning blood into money, those who denounced generals
for wasting the lives of boys in purposeless actions, those who spoke
against the spending of the nation's resources to succor needy
contractors, and those who asked whether the war was to go on till all
were dead, or whether it might be stopped profitably at any time by
using a little common sense. Luckily for the welfare of the community,
this need for recognizing as enemies all, at home and abroad, who
differed from the decision of the Central Will, a need which was the
natural flower of that confidence which Authority acquired through
discovering the ease of control, put within the power of the Censor by
the time of the Peace Conference every possible form of protest, every
call for light, every cry of pain, every demand that such a "horrible
nonsense" as war should cease from human affairs, every plea for
compassion and generosity.

Thus the problem of perfect government was engendered and simplified.
It was at last possible to ensure, at least outwardly, a semblance of
uniformity. The rest was a matter of evolution, till today only a
particular enquiry will determine a man from a woman, though it may
fail to determine a fool from a man. All are alike, all agree with
what is officially announced by the Sacred Entity, and the nation is
as loyal and homogeneous, as contented, as stable and industrious, as
a reef of actinozoal plasm. Thus the Perfect State has been built like
a rock. The City of God has at last arisen; and in each of the uniform
homes of its neuters, or workers, there is to be found the Patriotic
Symbol--a portrait of a Sheep, enjoined by law to hang in a principal
place, and bearing the legend "God Bless this Loyal Face."

Here, however, we see at once that such a right condition of the
public mind could never have been acquired by a Censorship, by a mere
prohibition, that is, of individual thinking and acting. That ensures
merely a simulacrum of homogeneity. The appearance of general
acquiescence may exist, though not the real thing. It is easy to
compel men to do what they would not do freely if allowed an
opportunity for their reason to work. The problem was to prevent the
working of reason. Today, as we know, an order is issued by The
Chosen, and is followed by a campaign in the Press, and by revivals
exhorted from the Pulpit. There is no chance for the intrusion of
reason.--No facts are ever issued for reason to work upon, no
questioning is ever allowed. The suggestions of the Press and Pulpit
prompt loyalty and obedience, and what might, in early times, have
been resented as ridiculous, becomes the mode; and thus, if any rebels
exist, it is but briefly, for they are denounced as solitary and
repugnant independents. A suggestion becomes public opinion because
the majority of people accept it without knowing there is reason to
question the suggestion; and the minority also accept it in the end
through weariness of an unpleasant and even dangerous distinction.

Yet not, observe, all the minority. It was the experience of our
forefathers that unsuspected centres of infection always remained, and
were not discovered till they had poisoned large areas of the country.
Some bold fellow, here and there, had withstood all efforts at
intimidation, and in time made others as courageous as himself. A
means had to be found to eliminate the possibility of infection by
original minds, or clearly the Holy State could not consider itself
safe. Here, indeed, we see the hardest of the problems statesmen of
the past had to solve. From the mere negation of the Censorship, a
positive advance had to be made to the obliteration of original
thought. This at first, necessarily, was but tentative, and only the
confidence gained through successful experiment enabled governments at
last to find where the real trouble lay.

It was supposed, at first, that the destruction of subversive
political tracts and the persecution of radical views would be enough.
Yet, of course, it was learned that as fast as these were cropped,
growth elsewhere had become vigorous. The human intelligence is
natively prone to look towards new things. Then it was that, after a
long suspicion of the origin of ideals, great statesmen were led to an
examination of classic literature and a study of the arts. Then they
saw, what they might have known sooner, that in the very institutions
supported by the State, the Public Libraries and Art Galleries, were
actually preserved the potent ideals which demeaned that general
opinion which the State was laboring to establish.

The famous Day of Release was ordered. This was ordained to free
mankind from its heritage of the spirit. A test was made, and by that
test any book or picture or poem which could not be approved or
understood by native deacons of Solomon Island missions (who were
imported for the purpose) was at once extirpated. This checked a great
deal of the troublesome growth of the mind. Music, however, was
strangely forgotten; and it was proved that the great revolution which
burst out in Europe 120 years after the "Great War" began in the
emotion occasioned by the continued playing of the compositions of one
Beethoven, whose work is now fortunately lost, and other music which
remained in favor in spite of the official insistence on the use of
the steam saxophone for public concerts. Men, wherever they dared,
insisted on having the best. And though the records were at length
destroyed, the tenacious memories of a few fanatics and cranks
preserved much of the old music, and that usually of the worst and
most disloyal.

Here we see another step had to be taken by men in control of the
State. The memory of what was classical was kept though in an
ever-fading condition, and now and again some point of memory
fructified to almost its original suggestive beauty in the
fortuitously abnormal brain of a genius, and thus the state work of
hygiene had to be done over again; for curiously enough people
everywhere rose like a tide, and moved spontaneously towards these
manifestations of liberty and beauty, and away from their loyalty to
the God-State. A method, therefore, had to be discovered, first for
obliterating what remained in the public memory of what was magical
and rebellious, and then for the elimination of any possibility of
original genius arising; and genius was, it was seen, first and last,
the cause of all the trouble.

The destruction of all great works of art was followed, fifty years
later, by the Period of Purging. All who were denounced for having
quoted forbidden poetry, or for humming forbidden music, were
executed. Such malefactors, who refused to forget, obviously could not
be allowed to live. This gave a long period of peace, in which the
Sacred Entity, the Unassailable Authority, took concrete form. Even
so, the destruction of the treasures of the past, and of all memory of
them, did not prevent the spontaneous appearance, now and then, of
extraordinary men who, by divination it would seem, perceived a
flatness and monotony in society, a sameness of common thought, and
who laughed at the estimable uniform flocks; often, indeed, stampeding
them.

Now science had its turn. It was more than a century since the works
of Darwin and other philosophers had been burned. Young students who
showed an aptitude for science, and so were potentially dangerous,
were taken early within the Sacred Precincts, initiated into the
mysteries of the Priests, and were given work and safety under the
shadow of the Entity. They rarely went wrong; and when they did they
went further or were heard of no more.

These men of science were set the problem of finding a method of
sterilizing the unfit, that is, people who showed any decadent
tendency to originality. All the increase of population by that time
was occasioned under the direction of the High Priests, so that the
Holy State had not only the power of dealing death, but of bringing
new life. The new life, it is evident, had to be determined, as far as
possible, by a scientific specification of a perfect citizen; and in
the course of a century or two, through the destruction of
intelligence wherever it inadvertently appeared, through the selection
of parents sufficiently loyal and docile to accept marriage
immediately when ordered by officials, and by certain signs, such as
lustiness, by which, at a birth, the skilled Public Watchers who
accompanied midwives were made suspicious of the new-born as possible
enemies of the State, at last mankind arrived at its present
perfection, content, and happiness, with hardly an intellectual doubt
or a sign of suspicious joy to mar the whole serene horizon of the
Holy State's exactitude.

Yet, we dare ask, had it not been for that little "War to End War" of
1914-1918, so innocently named by our forefathers who had too much
liberty to know what they were talking about, would the possibility of
our present social tranquility have arisen? It is hardly likely. The
freedom we enjoy from all criticism, from all interruptions of mind
and spirit, an internal peace which is indeed never broken except by
the lethal germs of our modern wars that, in the due course of nature,
obliterate every week or so a few of our cities, was a lucky chance
that was seized upon by public-spirited legislators who had the
prescience to know its value.

IN VINO DEMI-TASSE

[Illustration: Charles Hanson Towne and the Law.]

CHARLES HANSON TOWNE

The Young-Old Philosopher and I were sitting in one of the innumerable
restaurants in New York where the sanctity of the law is about as much
considered as a bicycle ride up Mt. Etna. At the next table--indeed,
all around us--rich red wine was being poured into little cups.

"The new motto of America should be '_In vino demi-tasse_,'" my
friend said, smiling. And I quite agreed with him. For it is being
done everywhere; in the most exalted circles, and in the lowest. Poor
old human nature, which an organized minority are so bent upon
changing overnight, cannot be altered; and, all the emphasis in a
supposedly free country having been placed upon not drinking, the
prohibitionists are wondering why so many of us care for liquid
refreshment.

There is too much _verboten_ in America today. I can remember the
time, not so long ago, when no dinner-party was counted a success
unless four or five cocktails were served before we sat down at the
table. But that era passed. It was soon evident that such foolishness
would lead to grave disaster--if not to the grave; and the young
business man who was seen to consume even one glass of beer at
luncheon was frowned upon, catalogued as unsteady, even in the face of
the fact that perhaps the most efficient people in the world were
automatic beer-drinkers.

As to drinking, in America we had other ideas. Big Business, which has
become such a potent factor among us, and more a part of our national
consciousness than Art and Letters ever will be, of its own volition
placed a ban upon immoderate drinking; and the sane among us--of whom
there were still many--gladly fell in line, and either went
periodically upon the water-wagon or took a nip only occasionally when
the cares of life weighed too heavily and insistently upon us.

Why, then, the Reformers? Why the Uplift Workers? Why the Extremists?
Not content with a great and wise people working out their own
salvation from within, they must step forth in solemn battalions, and
make us pure and holy--from without.

We resent them. There is no reason why an entire nation should be
indicted for the sins and failings of a few. It would be quite as
sensible to forbid connubial bliss because there are a handful of
libertines in the world.

The cry goes up, however, that the next generation will be so much
better because of our enforced good behavior now. I am afraid that I
am not enough of an altruist to care so definitely about the morals of
a race unborn. I feel that my children, looking over the files of our
newspapers, as they sip their light wine and beer, may smile and say,
"Poor grandpa! He had so little self-control that the Government had
to put the screws on him and his friends. Too bad! They must have been
a fast set in his day. And yet--he left us a pretty good heritage of
health and strength. We wonder if he was such an awful devil as
history makes out."

The truth is that nothing, in moderation, ever hurt anybody. That is
why the wise among us are against Prohibition and strongly for
Temperance. Normal men do not like to be coddled. If coddling is done,
however, they like to pick their coddlers. We don't like a lean and
sour-visaged Prohibitionist making a fuss over us, feeling our pulse,
taking our temperature, smoothing our brow. The whole trouble with the
world today, as a sane man views it, is that there has been altogether
too much coddling of the physically and mentally unfit.

We have become, through drifting, a nation of hypocrites. We make laws
so fast that the bewildered citizen cannot follow them. We add
amendment after amendment to our Constitution, and then laugh at what
we have done, the while we secretly rebel. We have few convictions,
and we refuse to face issues squarely and honestly. We pretend to be
virtuous before the rest of the world; but we are like the ostrich
which hides its head in the sands. We pretend that, just as the
eugenists think of the physical attributes of the coming generation,
we consider the mental attributes--and we turn around and raise a race
of bootleggers. We permit our enormous foreign population to see us at
our legislative work; and then we go proudly and sanctimoniously to
restaurants and allow Italian, German and French waiters to pour red
wine into our demi-tasses.

Oh, we are not in our cups--only in our half-cups. It would all be
very amusing were it not so terribly serious. For we are rapidly
floating toward trouble; and, hypocritically enough, we will not admit
it. When it is said, since the tragedy of Prohibition, that the
reformers will next snatch our cigars and cigarettes out of our
mouths, we shrug our shoulders, smile and pass on, saying, "Oh, no!
_that_ would be going _too_ far!"--in the face of what already
has been accomplished in this land of the spree and the home of
the grave.

Yes, we have become grave indeed. For there can be no doubt that there
is a feeling of great unhappiness and unrest in America now. One hears
the most solid citizens saying, "I do not try to save any more; I
merely live from day to day, hoping against hope that things will
right themselves, and that the old order will somehow return."

Who gets a long-term lease nowadays? Those of us who are old enough to
remember the simplicity and peace of the golden 'Eighties and
'Nineties are appalled at the nervous tension and complexities of this
hour. We are all catalogued and tagged, just as they are in that
Prussia we so recently and fervently despised; and we are hounded by
income-tax investigators, surrounded by a horde of spies who search
our luggage, pry into our kitchens to see if we are making home brew,
raided in restaurants--and laughed at by king-ridden and shackled
Europeans.

It isn't pleasant to realize that you are burdened with taxes partly
to cover the salaries of Federal Officers whose delicate duty it is to
spy upon you. And then when you walk out and talk to the police-man on
your street, he will whisper in your ear that he knows where he can
get you some delicious ale, and see to it that it is safely delivered
at your door. This is the America, deny it as we will, that we are
living in today. I confess that I hang my head a bit, and am ashamed
to look a Frenchman in the face.

Not long ago, at a dinner, I asked a certain politician--I refuse to
grace him with the name of statesman, though he has ambitions to be
known as such--why, if he believed in the Volstead Act, he still
consumed whiskey. His answer was intended to be amusing; to me it was
disgraceful. Said he: "I am drinking as much as I can in order to
lessen the supply for the other fellow."

And just a while back I went to a banquet at a country club near New
York. Two policemen in uniform were sent by the local authorities to
"guard the place" while much liquor was poured. These minions of the
sacred law were openly served with highballs, and laughed at the
Constitution of the United States, the while they drank. Everyone at
that party was loud in denunciation of Prohibition and what has come
in its wake, yet went on dancing with the casual remark that it was of
no consequence that they broke the law, since everyone was doing
it--and everyone always would.

Uphold the law, no matter what is injected into it, I have heard
people cry. That, it seems to me, is mere Teutonic stupidity, and has
no part in the attitude of thinking men and women in a land like
America. I suppose, arguing thus, that if a law were passed tomorrow
prohibiting the carrying of, say, hand-bags or canes, they would feel
it incumbent upon themselves, as good Americans, to fall into line,
bow the knee and whisper meekly, "All right, O most beloved country! I
obey!"

A good American, as I understand it, is not one who ignorantly stands
for the letter of the law, no matter what that law may be. A good
American is one who tries to set his country right; one who looks
beyond the present ungenerous attitude of the fanatics; one who
visualizes the future and prays that our liberty may not be further
jeopardized, for the good of the generations that are to follow us.

We fought to rid the world of autocracy, yet we have suddenly become
the most autocratic nation on earth. Prohibition is a symbol of the
death of freedom. The issue at stake is as clear-cut as taxation
without representation; and our legislators should remember a certain
well-known Boston tea-party. There would have been no United States of
America unless a few honest men with sound convictions had rebelled
and protested against tyranny. The right kind of rebel makes the right
kind of citizen.

I have heard a few people liken one's duty in the matter of the draft
to the Prohibition law. If we obeyed a summons to fight, whether we
liked fighting or not, we should likewise obey the law regarding
drinking, they contend. The two things are as separated as the Poles.
In 1914, and thereafter, civilization itself was at stake; and that
man would have been blind indeed who did not see the stern and
clear-cut issues before us all. We leaped to arms because we wanted to
protect humanity, because the death-knell of democracy was sounding.
Prohibition, these same people would tell us, should be enforced to
save poor, weak humanity and civilization again, and we should fight
to that end. Yet as long as the world has been moving, civilized man
has been consuming a certain amount of alcohol, and has been in no
serious danger of going down to disaster. We have progressed through
the ages, despite our cheerful cups of wine; and though of course a
few imbeciles have dropped from the line, the rest of us have been
none the worse--in fact, sometimes a little better--for our occasional
libations. Let anyone deny this who has ever, for a moment even, been
in Arcady! And the dreadful and incontrovertible fact remains that the
sober nations have not proved themselves superior to those who drink
in moderation.

Who are happy over Prohibition? First, the Prohibitionists themselves,
and, secondly, the bootleggers. The more the lid is clamped on in our
great cities, the more rejoicing goes on in that mysterious inner and
under circle which dispenses liquor, and will continue to dispense it,
I fear, until the end of time. Whenever there is a "drive" on in New
York to "mop up the place," prices soar to the skies, and the illicit
trade waxes brisker than ever. No wonder the bootleggers grow
happy--and rich; and evade the income tax which the rest of us must
pay.

I am not sympathetic toward those who say that they have been driven
to excessive drinking because a certain obnoxious law has been passed.
The only way to fight Prohibition is to fight it soberly; it is the
jingled and jangled arguments of bar-room bores that hurt the cause of
the men and women who are moderate drinkers, and who wish with all
their hearts to see a return to common sense in our country.

We Americans never do anything piecemeal. Probably at the root of all
our strange fanaticism about drink was the thought that the saloon had
better go; that it was time for such foul places to disappear. The
pendulum had to swing all the way. If it would swing back a little; if
the Government would step in and control the liquor traffic, do away
with spirits, except for medicinal purposes, and give the people light
wine and beer, a truce could be declared over night. Drunkenness
should be made a prison offence. No matter who the offender against
public decency is he should be lodged in jail. Whether one is a
so-called gentleman coming out of his club, or the meanest tramp in
the streets, he should be punished. There would be no visible
drunkenness if a law like this were passed and rigorously enforced.

I am afraid that so long as grapes grow on vines and apples on trees;
so long as fermentation is one of Nature's processes, there can be no
such thing as Prohibition. And the Biblical justification for drinking
is pleasant reading for those who like, now and then, a little wine at
their dinner tables. Yet there are fanatics who rise up and shout that
the wine Christ caused to appear at the marriage feast of Cana was not
intoxicating. What divination is theirs which makes them so positive?
If water was just as good, why did not water remain in the casks?

If we would spend more time making laws that worked for good, rather
than for evil--and Graft is a great evil; if we would realize that it
is not so much our concern to make the other fellow good as to make
him happy, as Stevenson so beautifully puts it--then, I say, we would
be better employed than we are today with our foolish, fussy bills and
acts, mandates, precepts and restrictions.

I believe firmly in local option in all things; but there is no reason
why New York, or any other great city, should live as Kansas and Idaho
live. I prefer New York because a big city gives me a spiritual uplift
that a prairie town does not. It is my privilege to live where I
desire. I like to hear fine music, to come in contact with
intellectuals; to go to plays that are worth while; to read books that
satisfy my soul. I find such a life in New York. I have no quarrel
with the man who prefers the silence and loneliness of forests and
plains. He may be far happier than I. But I do insist that if I let
him alone, he also should let me alone. Throbbing cities thrill me:
cities with their glamour, their wonder, their enchantment, their
dreams of agate and stone, their lofty towers that plunge to the very
skies and kiss the clouds. I happen to like the innocent laughter in a
glass of champagne. You may call it wicked hilarity. But the
Continental manner of living appeals to me. I like the color and
warmth and fervor of life; and people who drink red wine with their
meals seem to me to be more cosmopolitan than those who do not. All
this seems part of the pageant of life to me. I am not provincial, and
I do not care to be made provincial by unintelligent and unimaginative
law-makers.

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