A Cynic Looks at Life

Transplanted institutions grow slowly; civilization can not be put into a ship and carried across an ocean.  The history of this country is a sequence of illustrations of these truths.  It was settled by civilized men and women from civilized countries, yet after two and a half centuries, with unbroken communication with the mother systems, it is still imperfectly civilized.  In learning and letters, in art and the science of government, America is but a faint and stammering echo of Europe.

For nearly all that is good in our American civilization we are indebted to the Old World; the errors and mischiefs are of our own creation.  We have originated little, because there is little to originate, but we have unconsciously reproduced many of the discredited systems of former ages and other countries—­receiving them at second hand, but making them ours by the sheer strength and immobility of the national belief in their novelty.  Novelty!  Why, it is not possible to make an experiment in government, in art, in literature, in sociology, or in morals, that has not been made over, and over, and over again.

The glories of England are our glories.  She can achieve nothing that our fathers did not help to make possible to her.  The learning, the power, the refinement of a great nation, are not the growth of a century, but of many centuries; each generation builds upon the work of the preceding.  For untold ages our ancestors wrought to rear that “reverend pile,” the civilization of England.  And shall we now try to belittle the mighty structure because other though kindred hands are laying the top courses while we have elected to found a new tower in another land?  The American eulogist of civilization who is not proud of his heritage in England’s glory is unworthy to enjoy his lesser heritage in the lesser glory of his own country.

The English, are undoubtedly our intellectual superiors; and as the virtues are solely the product of intelligence and cultivation—­a rogue being only a dunce considered from another point of view—­they are our moral superiors likewise.  Why should they not be?  Theirs is a land, not of ugly schoolhouses grudgingly erected, containing schools supported by such niggardly tax levies as a sparse and hard-handed population will consent to pay, but of ancient institutions splendidly endowed by the state and by centuries of private benefaction.  As a means of dispensing formulated ignorance our boasted public school system is not without merit; it spreads out education sufficiently thin to give everyone enough to make him a more competent fool than he would have been without it; but to compare it with that which is not the creature of legislation acting with malice aforethought, but the unnoted out-growth of ages, is to be ridiculous.  It is like comparing the laid-out town of a western prairie, its right-angled streets, prim cottages, and wooden a-b-c shops, with the grand old town of Oxford, topped with the clustered domes and towers of its twenty-odd great colleges, the very names of many of whose founders have perished from human record, as have the chronicles of the times in which they lived.

It is not only that we have had to “subdue the wilderness”; our educational conditions are adverse otherwise.  Our political system is unfavorable.  Our fortunes, accumulated in one generation, are dispersed in the next.  If it takes three generations to make a gentleman one will not make a thinker.  Instruction is acquired, but capacity for instruction is transmitted.  The brain that is to contain a trained intellect is not the result of a haphazard marriage between a clown and a wench, nor does it get its tractable tissues from a hard-headed farmer and a soft-headed milliner.  If you confess the importance of race and pedigree in a horse and a dog how dare you deny it in a man?

I do not hold that the political and social system that creates an aristocracy of leisure is the best possible kind of human organization; I perceive its disadvantages clearly enough.  But I do hold that a system under which most important public trusts, political and professional, civil and military ecclesiastical and secular, are held by educated men—­that is, men of trained faculties and disciplined judgment—­is not an altogether faulty system.

It is a universal human weakness to disparage the knowledge that we do not ourselves possess, but it is only my own beloved country that can justly boast herself the last refuge and asylum of the impotents and incapables who deny the advantage of all knowledge whatsoever.  It was an American senator who declared that he had devoted a couple of weeks to the study of finance, and found the accepted authorities all wrong.  It was another American senator who, confronted with certain hostile facts in the history of another country, proposed “to brush away all facts, and argue the question on consideration of plain common sense.”

Republican institutions have this disadvantage:  by incessant changes in the personnel of government—­to say nothing of the manner of men that ignorant constituencies elect; and all constituencies are ignorant—­we attain to no fixed principles and standards.  There is no such thing here as a science of politics, because it is not to any one’s interest to make politics the study of his life.  Nothing is settled; no truth finds general acceptance.  What we do one year we undo the next, and do over again the year following.  Our energy is wasted in, and our prosperity suffers from, experiments endlessly repeated.

Every patriot believes his country better than any other country.  Now, they cannot all be the best; indeed, only one can be the best, and it follows that the patriots of all the others have suffered themselves to be misled by a mere sentiment into blind unreason.  In its active manifestation—­it is fond of killing—­patriotism would be well if it were simply defensive; but it is also aggressive, and the same feeling that prompts us to strike for our altars and our fires impels us over the border to quench the fires and overturn the altars of our neighbors.  It is all very pretty and spirited, what the poets tell us about Thermopylæ, but there was as much patriotism at one end of that pass as there was at the other.

Patriotism deliberately and with folly aforethought subordinates the interests of a whole to the interests of a part.  Worse still, the fraction so favored is determined by an accident of birth or residence.  The Western hoodlum who cuts the tail from a Chinaman’s nowl, and would cut the nowl from the body, if he dared, is simply a patriot with a logical mind, having the courage of his opinions.  Patriotism is fierce as a fever, pitiless as the grave and blind as a stone.