It is always better to deal with principals than with agents. Gray Silver, Colonel John H. Taylor, the Apollo of the soldiers' bonus lobby, perfect ladies' man in appearance, who is full of zeal also for a cause, that of those who did not make money out of the war and who should in common justice make it all the rest of their lives out of the peace, and Wayne B. Wheeler, the fanatic leader of the drys, are all more real men than those who do their bidding in the Senate and the House.
No, if I put my tongue in my cheek as I write the words "lived happy ever after," it is because I see only a measure of improvement in the freeing of men from existing political conventions which will come from the effective emergence of minorities. A richer public life will result from increased vitality of the legislative branch. But a rich public life, no; for that requires men. You cannot fashion it out of Lodges, Watsons, Curtises, Gillettes, Mondells, Hardings, Hugheses, and Hoovers, or even Gray Silvers, Taylors, or Wheelers.
And we do not breed men in this country. If the test of a civilization is an unusually high average of national comfort, achieved in a land of unparalleled resources, whose exploitation was cut off from interruption by foreign enemies, then this experiment in living which we have been conducting in America has been a great success; if it is a further freeing of the human spirit, such as finds its expression in the rare individuals who make up the bright spots in all past human history, then its success is still to be achieved.
Many blame the dullness and general averageness which afflicts us upon democracy. There is democracy and there is timidity and stupidity; there is the appeal to low intelligence; the compulsion to be a best seller rests upon us all. Post hoc propter hoc.
I am going to blame it upon the mistake Euclid made in his theorem about two parallel lines. This was an error of Euclid's, modern mathematics proves, unless you assume space to be infinite. Having committed ourselves to Euclid, we committed ourselves to a space that was infinite. Space being regarded as infinite, man was little, relatively.
Euclid having made his mistake about the parallels, it followed inevitably that Mr. Harding should be little.
I use Mr. Harding only by way of illustration. You may fill any other name you like of the Washington gallery into that statement of inevitability and do it no violence. And this very interchangeability of names suggests that you must go further back than democracy to find the cause of today's sterility.
Besides, we have had infinite space, in our minds; but have we ever had democracy there? De Gourmont writes that no religion ever dies, but it rather lives on in its successor. Similarly, no form of government ever dies; it survives in its successor. A nation does not become a democracy by writing on a bit of paper, "resolved that we are a democracy, with a government consisting of executive, legislative, and judicial branches chosen by majority vote."
Government, however organized, is what exists in the minds of the people, and in that mind is stored up a dozen superstitions, handed down from primitive days, gathering force from time to time as new names are given to them and new "scientific" bases are found for them.
We laugh at the divine right of kings, but we could not accept self-government without bestowing on it an element of divinity. We have the divine right of Public Opinion. We can hardly print these words without the reverence of capital letters. The founders of modern democracy knew there could be no government without a miraculous quality. Formerly one mere man by virtue of ruling became something divine. The miracle grew difficult to swallow. You could regard this one man and see that he was a fool and had too many mistresses. He was the least divine-looking thing that could be imagined. Very well then, put the divine quality into something remote. All men by virtue of ruling themselves became divine.