A Cynic Looks at Life

There are two ways of clarifying liquids—­ebullition and precipitation; one forces the impurities to the surface as scum, the other sends them to the bottom as dregs.  The former is the more offensive, and that seems to be our way; but neither is useful if the impurities are merely separated but not removed.  We are told with tiresome iteration that our social and political systems are clarifying; but when is the skimmer to appear?  If the purpose of free institutions is good government where is the good government?—­when may it be expected to begin?—­how is it to come about?  Systems of government have no sanctity; they are practical means to a simple end—­the public welfare; worthy of no respect if they fail of its accomplishment.  The tree is known by its fruit.  Ours is bearing crab-apples.  If the body politic is constitutionally diseased, as I verily believe; if the disorder inheres in the system; there is no remedy.  The fever must burn itself out, and then Nature will do the rest.  One does not prescribe what time alone can administer.  We have put our criminals and dunces into power; do we suppose they will efface themselves?  Will they restore to us the power of governing them?  They must have their way and go their length.  The natural and immemorial sequence is:  tyranny, insurrection, combat.  In combat everything that wears a sword has a chance—­even the right.  History does not forbid us to hope.  But it forbids us to rely upon numbers; they will be against us.  If history teaches anything worth learning it teaches that the majority of mankind is neither good nor wise.  When government is founded upon the public conscience and the public intelligence the stability of states is a dream.

In that moment of time that is covered by historical records we have abundant evidence that each generation has believed itself wiser and better than any of its predecessors; that each people has believed itself to have the secret of national perpetuity.  In support of this universal delusion there is nothing to be said; the desolate places of the earth cry out against it.  Vestiges of obliterated civilizations cover the earth; no savage but has camped upon the sites of proud and populous cities; no desert but has heard the statesman’s boast of national stability.  Our nation, our laws, our history—­all shall go down to everlasting oblivion with the others, and by the same road.  But I submit that we are traveling it with needless haste.

It can be spared—­this Jonah’s gourd civilization of ours.  We have hardly the rudiments of a true one; compared with the splendors of which we catch dim glimpses in the fading past, ours are as an illumination of tallow candles.  We know no more than the ancients; we only know other things, but nothing in which is an assurance of perpetuity, and little that is truly wisdom.  Our vaunted elixir vitae is the art of printing.  What good will that do when posterity, struck by the inevitable intellectual blight, shall have ceased to read what is printed?  Our libraries will become its stables, our books its fuel.

Ours is a civilization that might be heard from afar in space as a scolding and a riot; a civilization in which the race has so differentiated as to have no longer a community of interest and feeling; which shows as a ripe result of the principles underlying it a reasonless and rascally feud between rich and poor; in which one is offered a choice (if one have the means to take it) between American plutocracy and European militocracy, with an imminent chance of renouncing either for a stultocratic republic with a headsman in the presidential chair and every laundress in exile.

I have not a “solution” to the “labor problem.”  I have only a story.  Many and many years ago lived a man who was so good and wise that none in all the world was so good and wise as he.  He was one of those few whose goodness and wisdom are such that after some time has passed their foolish fellowmen begin to think them gods and treasure their words as divine law; and by millions they are worshiped through centuries of time.  Amongst the utterances of this man was one command—­not a new nor perfect one—­which has seemed to his adorers so preeminently wise that they have given it a name by which it is known over half the world.  One of the sovereign virtues of this famous law is its simplicity, which is such that all hearing must understand; and obedience is so easy that any nation refusing is unfit to exist except in the turbulence and adversity that will surely come to it.  When a people would avert want and strife, or, having them, would restore plenty and peace, this noble commandment offers the only means—­all other plans for safety or relief are as vain as dreams, as empty as the crooning of hags.  And behold, here is it:  “All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.”

What! you unappeasable rich, coining the sweat and blood of your workmen into drachmas, understanding the law of supply and demand as mandatory and justifying your cruel greed by the senseless dictum that “business is business”; you lazy workmen, railing at the capitalist by whose desertion, when you have frightened away his capital, you starve—­rioting and shedding blood and torturing and poisoning by way of answer to exaction and by way of exaction; you foul anarchists, applauding with untidy palms when one of your coward kind hurls a bomb amongst powerless and helpless women and children; you imbecile politicians with a plague of remedial legislation for the irremediable; you writers and thinkers unread in history, with as many “solutions to the labor problem” as there are among you those who can not coherently define it—­do you really think yourselves wiser than Jesus of Nazareth?  Do you seriously suppose yourselves competent to amend his plan for dealing with evils besetting nations and souls?  Have you the effrontery to believe that those who spurn his Golden Rule you can bind to obedience of an act entitled an act to amend an act?  Bah! you fatigue the spirit.  Go get ye to your scoundrel lockouts, your villain strikes, your blacklisting, your boycotting, your speeching, marching and maundering; but if ye do not to others as ye would that they do to you it shall occur, and that right soon, that ye be drowned in your own blood and your pick-pocket civilization quenched as a star that falls into the sea.