II
The other night, when every prospect divulged by the moon’s soft radiance was pleasing and only the thought of man’s clumsy handiwork was vile, Smith shocked me by remarking:
“This patter of both parties about the dear people makes me sick. That vox populi vox Dei stuff was always a fake. We think we’re hearing an echo from heaven when it’s only a few bosses in the back room of a hotel somewhere telling us what we ought to want.” We descanted upon this at length, and he adduced much evidence in support of his contention. “What we’ve got in this country,” he snorted, when I tried to reason him out of his impious attitude, “is government of the people by the bosses—for the bosses’ good. The people are like a flock of silly sheep fattening for the wolf, and too stupid to lift their eyes from the grass to see him galloping down the hill. They’ve got to be driven to the hole in the wall and pushed through!”
He was mightily pleased when I told him he had been anticipated by many eminent authorities running back to Isaiah and Plato.
“Saving remnant” was a phrase to his liking, and he kept turning it over and investing it with modern meanings. Before we blew out the candles we were in accord on the proposition that while we have government by parties the parties have got to be run by some one; what is everybody’s business being, very truly, nobody’s business. Hence the development of party organizations and their domination by groups, with the groups themselves deriving inspiration usually from a single head. Under the soothing influence of these bromides Smith fell to sleep denouncing the direct primary.
“Instead of giving the power to the people,” he muttered drowsily, “the bloomin’ thing has commercialized office-seeking. We’re selling nominations to the highest bidder. If I were ass enough to chase a United States senatorship, I wouldn’t waste any time on the people until I’d been underwritten by a few strong banks. And if I won, I’d be like the Dutchman who said he was getting along all right, only he was worried because he had to die and go to hell yet. It would be my luck to be pinched as a common felon, and to have my toga changed for a prison suit at Leavenworth.”
Some candidate for the doctorate, hard put for a subject, might find it profitable to produce a thesis on American political phraseology. As a people we are much addicted to felicitous combinations of words that express large ideas in the smallest possible compass. Not only does political wisdom lend itself well to condensation, but the silliest fallacy will carry far if knocked into a fetching phrase. How rich in its connotations even to-day is the old slogan, “Tippecanoe and Tyler too”! and many others equally illuminative of a period might be dug out of the records from the beginning of our history, including “the tariff is a tax,” “the full dinner-pail,” down to “he kept us out of war.” A telling phrase or a catchword is enormously persuasive and convincing—the shrewdest possible advertisement.
There is no way of knowing how many of our hundred millions ever read a national platform, but I will hazard the guess that not more than twenty-five per cent have perused the platforms of 1920 or will do so before election day. The average voter is content to accept the interpretations and laudatory comment of his party paper, with its assurance that the declaration of principles and purposes is in keeping with the great traditions of the grand old party. It is straining Smith’s patriotism pretty far to ask him to read a solid page of small type, particularly when he knows that much of it is untrue and most of it sheer bunk. Editorial writers and campaign orators read platforms perforce; but to Smith they are fatiguing to the eye and a weariness to the spirit. The primary qualification for membership on a platform committee is an utter lack—there must be no question about it—of a sense of humor. The League of Nations plank of the Republican platform is a refutation of the fallacy that we are a people singularly blessed with humor. We could ask no more striking proof of the hypnotic power of a party name than the acceptance of this plank, solemnly sawed, trimmed, and painted red, white, and blue, in the committee-room, and received by the delegates with joyous acclamation.