I have based my minorities upon self-interest, thus introducing into our government the selfish interests banished therefrom twenty years ago. Their banishment was an achievement of virtue. Their reintroduction is the accomplishment of good sense. They are the great reality while the world thinks as it does.
Since someone somewhere, in a treatise on economics probably, penned the phrase "enlightened self-interest," we have all more or less become enamored of the idea that wisdom—enlightenment—reposes in the bosom of selfishness. Justice requires that wisdom should be somewhere. The reasoning runs like this. The world cannot get on without wisdom. Justice demands that the world should get on. Therefore there is wisdom in the world. We know it is not in ourselves or in our neighbors. We feel, therefore, that it must be in the bosom of perfect selfishness. And as we cast our eyes about us we think we know where the bosom of perfect selfishness is, and we feel assured.
Sometimes, of course, we place it in the heads of all mankind, it being a thing that no one man has and no few men have, but which is one of those mysterious properties of the aggregate which does not inhere in the individuals composing the aggregate; a sort of colloidal element that comes from shaking men up together, though all are without it before the mixing and shaking.
Some would place it, as Mr. Wilson seems to in a famous passage on minorities, in the breasts of the enlightened few. When the few disagreed with him, he threw them and their wisdom in jail.
But wherever it is, it is sure to be found in a system which preserved the old parties representing the general mind of the country along with the new vertical political organizations, representing the minorities, thrusting up like volcanoes upon the placid plane of politics that Mr. Harding once delighted to survey.
You have in this combination the spontaneous wisdom of the masses, if that is where wisdom generates. You have the wisdom of the few, if you believe in impregnation from above, and you have the wisdom of selfishness, if you believe as most of us do in the enlightenment of self-interest. And no one ever located wisdom anywhere else than in these three places, for the first, as I might easily demonstrate, is the modern democratic name for the wisdom of God; the second is the wisdom of men; and the third is the wisdom of the serpent; beside which there are no other wisdoms.
This you will admit is moving rapidly and without reserve toward the happy ending. But I think every writer of a novel has stuck his tongue in his cheek as he wrote those benedictory words, "And they lived happy ever after." And I stick my tongue in my cheek as I think of Mr. Gray Silver, the effective director of the farmers' vertical political trust sitting in the Senate, leading it perhaps in place of Senator Lodge of Massachusetts.
To Mr. Lodge's petulant, imperious gesture—the sharp handclap for the pages—would succeed Mr. Silver's fixing gesture, that of a country merchant smoothing out a piece of silk before a customer at a counter. Mr. Silver as he talks performs one constant motion, a gentle slow moving of both hands horizontally, palms down.
Mr. Silver is a lobbyist with the powers of a dictator, or a dictator with the habits of a lobbyist, whichever way you wish to look at it. A former farmer, member of the West Virginia legislature, representative of farm organizations at Washington, he rules the Senate with more power than Mr. Lodge has or Mr. Harding has, but always with the gentle touch of a general-storekeeper, spreading the wrinkles out of a yard of satin.
But even this little lobbyist has a certain definiteness which public men generally lack. His feet are firmly placed upon reality. He speaks for a solid body of opinion. He is a positive rather than a negative force. He represents a fairly united minority which knows what it wants, and men are strong or weak according as they are or are not spokesmen of a cause; and the selfish interest of a group easily takes on the pious aspect of a cause.