Be that as it may, my mood was not belligerent and not pro-moral or pro-anything. I am too doubtful of life and its tendencies to enthuse over theories. With nations, as with individuals, the strongest or most desired win, and in the crisis which was then the Germans seemed to me the strongest. I merely hoped that America might keep out of it, in order that she might attain sufficient strength and judgment to battle for her own ideals in the future. For battle she must, never doubt it, and that from city to city and state to state. If she survives the ultimate maelstrom, with her romantic ideals of faith and love and truth, it will be a miracle.
This matter of manufacture and enormous industries is always a fascinating thing to me, and careening along this lake shore at breakneck speed, I could not help marveling at it. It seems to point so clearly to a lordship in life, a hierarchy of powers, against which the common man is always struggling, but which he never quite overcomes, anywhere. The world is always palavering about the brotherhood of man and the freedom and independence of the individual; yet when you go through a city like Buffalo or Cleveland and see all its energy practically devoted to great factories and corporations and their interests, and when you see the common man, of whom there is so much talk as to his interests and superiority, living in cottages or long streets of flats without a vestige of charm or beauty, his labor fixed in price and his ideas circumscribed in part (else he would never be content with so meager and grimy a world), you can scarcely believe in the equality or even the brotherhood of man, however much you may believe in the sympathy or good intentions of some people.
These regions around Buffalo were most suggestive of the great division that has arisen between the common man and the man of executive ability and ideas here in America,—a division as old and as deep as life itself. I have no least complaint against the common man toiling for anybody with ideas and superior brains—who could have?—if it were not for the fact that the superior man inevitably seeks to arrange a dynasty of his blood, that his children and his children’s children need never to turn a hand, whereas it is he only who is deserving, and not his children. Wealth tends to aristocracy, and your strong man comes almost inevitably to the conclusion that not only he but all that relates to him is of superior fiber. This may be and sometimes is true, no doubt, but not always, and it is the exception which causes all the trouble. The ordinary mortal should not be compelled to moil and delve for a fool. I refuse to think that it is either necessary or inevitable that I, or any other man, should work for a few dollars a day, skimping and longing, while another, a dunce, who never did anything but come into the world as the heir of a strong man, should take the heavy profits of my work and stuff them into his pockets. It has always been so, I’ll admit, and it seems that there is an actual tendency in nature to continue it; but I would just as lief contend with nature on this subject, if possible, as any other. We are not sure that nature inevitably wills it at that. Kings have been slain and parasitic dynasties trampled into the earth.
Why not here and now?
CHAPTER XXIII
THE APPROACH TO ERIE
Beyond the Tackawanna Steel Works there was a lake beach with thousands of people bathing and sausage and lemonade venders hawking their wares (I couldn’t resist buying one “hot dog”); and after that a long line, miles it seemed to me, of sumptuous country places facing the lake, their roofs and gables showing through the trees; then the lake proper with not much interruption of view for a while; and then a detour, and then a flat, open country road, oiled until it was black, and then a white macadam road. Now that we were out of the hill and mountain country, I was missing those splendid rises and falls of earth which had so diverted me for days; but one cannot have hill country everywhere, and so as we sped along we endeavored to make the best of what was to be seen. These small white and grey wooden towns, with their white wooden churches and Sabbath ambling citizens, began to interest me. What a life, I said to myself, and what beliefs these people entertain! One could discern their creeds by the number of wooden and brick churches and the sense of a Sabbath stillness and propriety investing everything. At dusk, tiny church bells began to ring, church doors, revealing lighted interiors, stood open, and the people began to come forth from their homes and enter. I have no deadly opposition to religion. The weak and troubled mind must have something on which to rest. It is only when in the form of priestcraft and ministerial conniving it becomes puffed up and arrogant and decides that all the world must think as it thinks, and do as it does, and that if one does not one is a heretic and an outcast, that I resent it.
The effrontery of these theorists anyhow, with their sacraments and their catechisms! Think of that mad dog Torquemada bestriding Spain like a Colossus, driving out eight hundred thousand innocent Jews, burning at the stake two thousand innocent doubters, stirring up all the ignorant animal prejudice of the masses, and leaving Spain the bleak and hungry land it is today! Think of it!—a priest, a theorist, a damned speculator in monastic abstrusities, being able to do anything like that! And then the Inquisition as a whole, the burning of poor John Huss, the sale of indulgences and the driving out of Luther. Beware of the enthusiastic religionist and his priestly servitors and leaders! Let not the theorist become too secure! Think of those who, in the name of a mystic unproven God, would seize on all your liberties and privileges, and put them in leash to a wild-eyed exorcist romancer of the type of Peter the Hermit, for instance. Do not Asia and Africa show almost daily the insane uprising of some crack-brained Messiah? Beware! Look with suspicion upon all Billy Sundays and their ilk generally. Let not the uplifter and the reformer become too bold. They inflame the ignorant passions of the mob, who never think and never will. Already America is being too freely tramped over by liquor reformers, magazine and book and picture censors, dreamers and cranks and lunatics who think that mob judgment is better than individual judgment, that the welfare of the ignorant mass should guide and regulate the spiritual inspiration of the individual. Think of one million, or one billion, factory hands, led by priests and preachers, able to dictate to a Spencer whether or not he should compile a synthetic philosophy—or to a Synge, whether he should write a “Play Boy of the Western World,” or to a Voltaire, whether he should publish a “Candide.”
Out on them for a swinish mass! Shut up the churches, knock down the steeples! Harry them until they know the true place of religion,—a weak man’s shield! Let us have no more balderdash concerning the duty of man to respect any theory. He can if he chooses. That is his business. But when he seeks to dictate to his neighbor what he shall think, then it is a different matter.
As I rode through this region this evening, I could not help feeling and seeing still operating here all the conditions which years ago I put safely behind me. Here were the people who still believed that God gave the Ten Commandments to Moses on Sinai and that Joshua made the sun to stand still in Avalon. They would hound you out of their midst for lack of faith in beliefs which otherwhere are silly children’s tales,—or their leaders would.
About seven o’clock, or a little later, we reached the town of Fredonia, still in New York State but near its extreme western boundary. We came very near attending church here, Franklin and I, because a church door on the square stood open and the congregation were singing. Instead, after strolling about for a time, we compromised on a washup in a charming oldfashioned white, square, colonnaded hotel facing the park. We went to the only restaurant, the hotel diningroom being closed, and after that, while Speed took on a supply of gas and oil, we jested with an old Scotchman who had struck up a friendship with Speed and was telling him the history of his youth in Edinburgh, and how and why he wanted America to keep out of the war. He, too, had a mechanical laugh, like that odd creature in the square at Bath, a kind of wild jackalesque grimace, which was kindly and cheerfully meant, however. Finally he grew so gay, having someone to talk to, that he executed a Jack-knife-ish automaton dance which amused me greatly. When Speed was ready we were off again, passing hamlet after hamlet and town after town, and entering Pennsylvania again a few miles west (that small bit which cuts northward between Ohio and New York at Erie and interferes with the natural continuation of New York).