I am at that point in my life when traditions fall away; when a man, educated as I have been, suddenly finds himself alone, wandering through a vast valley of doubt, seeking, with the instinct that is in men for order, to recreate in stone the house of cards which has just fallen about him.
What do I really believe? What of my education remains after the test of experience? I was taught certain principles of morality, certain judgments on conduct, given certain standards of right and wrong. Virtue must bring its own reward and the wages of sin is death.
After a few years’ contact with the world, I find myself completely mystified. Perhaps I have been too often behind the scenes and must pay the penalty of disillusionment. I was given certain principles of common honesty,—and I have seen great criminals exalted because they either stole on a grandiose scale or procured others to steal for them. True, I have heard many unflattering judgments passed on these financiers, privately, but these criticisms seemed to proceed more from an instinctive envy, and I seldom found that they interfered in the least with the successful rogue’s power in the community. I was given certain sharp distinctions between good women and bad. In the cosmopolitan society which I knew in Paris, I saw those who were surest of their position flagrantly and insolently defying all public criticism. I have never found, in my occasional contact with women of the demimonde, the libertinage that I have met with in certain of the most exalted spheres of society.
My grandfather was Senator and a member of the National Cabinet. My great-grandfather was one of the founders of the nation. My father, as judge of the Circuit Court, has been in intimate touch with public men and party politics. The ideal of public leadership I have always regarded reverently and yet, on closer contact, I have discovered that the leaders who were like demigods to my young imagination were capable of underhand trafficking for office and midnight deals with repellant political tricksters that seemed to me to place them on a level with political fences,—receivers of stolen political goods. Puritan I am and shall always be, so long as the heart of a child, which abides in every man, remains open. Yet I have been wandering along pagan roads, seeking new readjustments, which do not satisfy me, as I at first believed.
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There may be a deeper truth than I have uncovered below the shallow surface of my experience. There must be, though I have not yet had the vision to perceive it,—unless it be by renouncing the class into which I was born and seeking new elements of faith in closer contact with the great simple mass of humanity which remains vitally significant and predestined, through the saving grace of struggle.
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Yet do I believe, whole-heartedly and without reservation, in Democracy? I am not sure. Certainly, not in the demoralization into which I see it now wandering. Not if it means Democracy at the price of inefficiency, rejection of self-discipline, and the negation of real leadership. The vital principle, to me, is the equalization of opportunity. Yet with it there must be an aristocracy of achievement and an ability to recognize the quality of leadership in exceptional men,—without which Democracy is no better than a rabble.
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