Forty Years of It

by Brand Whitlock

“Four days, and it’ll all be over. That’s the life of a newspaper sensation.”

I believe that newspaper editors themselves place the limit of the effectiveness of a sensation at about that time, though some of them are so shrewd that they drop the sensation the day before the people begin to lose interest in it, instead of waiting for the day on which they actually tire of it. Which may be an explanation of the fact that the beginnings of things are always treated so much more fully in the press than their endings; one always reads of the opening of the trial, and the awful charge, but is never told how it all came out in the end, unless the end was catastrophic. The theory of the press is, I believe, that good news is no news.

I do not know that poor Governor Pattison ever had any intention of raising the issue of local self-government, and of raising it in such a direct and positive way as by attempting to remove all the mayors of Ohio towns and cities in which it could be shown that some little enactment of the legislature had failed of absolute enforcement; I suppose he had no such intention, since the law gave him no such power, though that made no difference to the professional reverencers and enforcers of law. The poor man never saw the governor’s office after that night of his brilliant inauguration, when he stood, very dark and weary, with features drawn, but resolutely smiling, at his levee in the senate chamber, a tragic figure in a way, the first Democratic governor in a long while, and the fates treating him with their customary irony and indignity by setting their seal upon him in the very hour of his triumph. He died in a few months, but there remained many of course who could prophesy in his name and cast out devils with each extra edition of the newspapers, and the discussion of law enforcement has gone on pretty steadily from that time to this.

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I suppose the discussion is one which must go on always in any land where the people of our race and tradition dwell. A more objective, natural and naïve people would not be so interested in sin, and when the late Mayor Gaynor of New York spoke of the difficulty of administering the affairs of a modern city according to “the standard of exquisite morals” held aloft by some persons for others, he designated in his clear and clever way a class of citizens familiar to every mayor by the curiously doctrinaire order of indurated mind with which they are endowed. They begin with the naïve assumption that their standard is the one and only correct standard, and that since men have repeatedly refused to adopt it on mere inspection they must be forced to do so by the use of violence, a process which they call maintaining “law and order.” They believe that any wrong, any abuse, may be stopped instantly by the passage of a law, and if one venture to question the efficacy of any plan they propose, he is said at once to be opposed to morality and to religion, and is set down as a profane and sacrilegious person.

It is, of course, inconvenient to argue with a person who has the supreme refuge of the irrelevant conclusion; as inconvenient as it would be were one to be offered carbolic acid as a toilet article, and, upon refusal, be accused of not believing in cleanliness. This order of mind imagines that every phase of human conduct can be ordered and regulated by the enactment of statutes; that the industries, occupations, clothing, amusements, appetites, passions, prejudices, opinions, ambitions, aspirations and devotions of man can be changed, moulded and regulated by city councils and state legislatures. Every inconvenience, every difficulty, every disagreeable feature of modern life, is to be done away by the passage of a law.

That our race is saturated with this curious and amazing superstition of the power of written enactments is shown by the common terminology. The mental reactions of a large portion of mankind against the irritation of opposing opinion and conduct habitually express themselves in the phrase, “There ought to be a law.” It is heard as often every day as the stereotyped references to the weather. Not a disagreeable incident in life is complained of without that expression; no one has a pet aversion or a darling prejudice that he does not cherish the desire of having a law passed to bring the rest of the world around to his way of feeling. And when a trust is formed, or a strike interrupts business, or the sheets on the hotel bed are too short, or the hatpin of a woman in a crowded street car is too long, or a new dance is introduced, or a boor preëmpts a seat in a train, or a cat howls on the back-yard fence in the night time, or a waiter is impertinent, or the cook leaves, the indignant citizen lifts his eyes hopefully toward that annual calamity known as the session of the state legislature, and repeats the formula: “There ought to be a law.” And when the legislature assembles, a whole body of foolish bills is introduced regulating everything in the earth, and some things that are outside of the earth. If a deed is disapproved of by a group of people, an agitation is begun to make it a criminal offense; by means of pains and penalties the whole of life is to be regulated, and government is to become a vast bureaucracy of policemen, catch-polls, inspectors, beadles, censors, mentors, monitors and spies. As the session draws toward its close, the haste to enact all these measures becomes frantic. I shall never forget those scenes of riot, the howling and drunkenness and confusion and worse I have witnessed in the legislatures of Illinois and of Ohio the last night of the session. And all this delirium goes on in every state of the Union, every winter—and all these enactments must be revered. It is the phase of the apotheosis of the policeman, who is to replace nurse and parent and teacher and pastor, and, relieving all these of their responsibilities, undertake to remould man into a being of absolute perfection, in whom character may be dispensed with, since he is to dwell forever under the crystal dome of a moral vacuum from which temptation has been scientifically exhausted.

The reason is simple, and obvious; it inheres in the belief in the absolute. Your true reformer is not only without humor, without pity, without mercy, but he is without knowledge of life or of human nature, and without very much of any sort of sweetness and light. The more moral he is, the harder he is, and the more amazingly ready with cruel judgments; and he seldom smiles except with the unction that comes with the thought of his own moral superiority. He thinks there is an absolute good and an absolute bad, and hence absolutely good people and absolutely bad people.

The peculiar and distinguishing feature of his mind is that life is presented to it in stark and rigid outline. He is blandly unconscious of distinctions; he has no perception of proportions, no knowledge of values, in a word, no sense of humor. His world is made up of wholly unrelated antitheses. There are no shades or shadows, no gradations, no delicate and subtle relativities. A thing is either black or white, good or bad. A deed is either moral or immoral, a virtue or a crime. It is all very simple. All acts of which he does not himself approve are evil; all who do not think and act as he thinks and acts, are bad. If you do not know when a deed, or an opinion is wrong, he will tell you; and if you doubt him or differ with him, you are bad, and it is time to call in the police. “Whenever the Commons has nothing else to do,” said the wise old member of Parliament, “it can always make a new crime.” Statutes are thus enacted, as the saying is, against all evils, great and small, and the greater the evil, of course, the greater the moral triumph expressed by the mere enactment. But because of certain contrarieties in nature and a certain obstreperous quality in human nature and a general complexity in life as a whole these legal fulminations are frequently triumphs only in theory, and in practice often intensify the very ills they seek to cure. As the witty Remy de Gourmont says: Quand la morale triomphe il se passes des choses très vilaines.

The more intensively developed specimen of the type will not overtly sin himself, but he loves to inspect those who do, and to peer at them, and to wonder how they could ever have the courage to do it; he likes to imagine their sensations, and to note each one of them as it was developed in the interesting experience. And hence the psychic lasciviousness of those who are constantly reporting plays and pictures as fit for the censor they are always clamoring for. Sometimes they go slumming as students of the evils of society. They are like pious uncles who never swear themselves under any circumstances, but relate stories of other men who do, recite their delightful experiences and roll out the awful oaths with which the profane gave vent to their feelings with a relish that is no doubt a relief to their own.