You and I walk along the streets and see a man suddenly stricken. A crowd quickly gathers about his pitiful form, stares into his countenance. A policeman calls an ambulance. A gong rings, and he is carried off to a hospital. You and I go our way, with perhaps a momentary tug at our heart. But it never occurs to us that the man in the street might have been ourselves. Such things happen to others—no, they could never, never happen to us. The lightning may strike a neighbor’s house or barn—but not our own. Death or disaster may come to the other fellow—never to us.
“It never can happen” might be our national slogan. Thus has a stupid Pollyanna optimism penetrated our civic thought, our political consciousness, our spiritual being; and the false doctrine is screamed from every housetop from Manhattan to Gopher Prairie. Pretty little poems, printed in neat frames, greet us wherever we turn. They urge us to cheer up, that it is not raining rain, but only flowers, and that God’s in His heaven and all’s right with the world—forgetting that Browning, when he penned his immortal line, referred to a particular morning for a particular man of vision, and by no means intended to be quoted out of his context, as a basis for the silly “gladness” of hoards of people who think they think. Our music-halls are crammed with comedians who sing, in loud voices, something about what’s the use of worrying, it never was worth while, and bidding us smile, smile, smile. And we clap and giggle and stamp our easy-going feet, and go out into the night, and are shoved and pushed into an over-crowded subway train, and still fondly cherish the delusion that we should keep on smiling, though a brutal train-guard’s boot is jammed into our reluctant back, so that we may become one more sardine in the steel box he is so expert in packing.
It would all be very amusing were it not so serious. Sinclair Lewis, who is becoming the best photographer this country ever produced, has not given us a false picture of our towns and cities. He tells the brutal truth, bravely. But we read him, smile, and say that of course it’s all very well, and such localities may exist, but they are not those in which we dwell. And all the while, about us, are the very folk his deft pen has drawn. Babbitt—what a stupid old fool he is, and we may have seen him in smoking-compartments; but we never will admit that he is our next-door neighbor.
The day may come when we will have to admit that he is our very self. We have the superiority complex. Which of course is nothing but a confession that we are inferior. And in allowing restriction after restriction to be put upon us, how, in the name of common sense and in the words of the man in the street, do we get that way? We are the most governed people in the world today. There are plenty of laws, but little order; and the millennium that the Prohibitionists promised with the adoption of the Eighteenth Amendment is farther away than ever.
Let us wake up, and face conditions as they are. Let us not try to delude ourselves into a state of false happiness, when, at heart, we are the most unhappy nation now breathing the celebrated air. It is high time we did some solemn thinking. The writing is on the wall. It is our business to read the words inscribed there in letters of fire.
CHAPTER II
OUR GREAT UNHAPPINESS
Are the American people any worse than other people, that they should be put en masse upon the water-wagon? Who is it that sits in judgment over them? What unseen Kaiser, Czar, autocrat passes sentence upon their morals? We fought a War to get rid of such leaders and rulers; and now, ironically enough, we find ourselves under the domination of far stronger task-masters.
I have recently been traveling through a great portion of this great country. Everywhere I found a curious unhappiness. People may not be articulate about their sorrows, just as the poor may not speak of their poverty; yet the canker is there, the worm i’ the bud is eating away the heart of the flower. Perhaps I should use the word discontent rather than unhappiness. Or restlessness. Or resentment. At any rate, the feeling, whatever it is, exists; and there is a new menace over our days. The placid reformers, resting between reforms, smack their lips in sadistic glee. In the face of repeated and open violations of the law, they give out interviews to the effect that all is moving serenely; that the people are under beautiful control—though they have to admit that they squirm once in a while. Here again it is a case of stupid optimism. They want all to be well, and they fondly imagine that all is well. They will have a great awakening; for this smoldering discontent and anger is bound to rise in a great tide one of these days.
