I

One of the unpleasant byproducts of the democratic form of Government is that it fills the land with disappointed and embittered men, savagely gnawing their finger nails. A salient specimen is the Hon. Hiram W. Johnson, Senator in Congress from the great State of California and an eminent member of the knights Templar and the Native Sons of the Golden West. Hiram was baffled of the Presidency in 1924, and has been full of psychic staphylococci ever since. When he arises in the Senate it is only to radiate malicious animal magnetism. Not long ago he even went to the length of denouncing a Federal judge — an act almost verging upon Bolshevism under our jurisprudence.

Countries under the hoof of monarchism escape such lamentable exhibitions. Unsuccessful aspirants for the crown are either executed out of hand or exiled to Paris, where tertiary lues quickly disposes of them. The crown prince, of course, has his secret thoughts, but he is forced by etiquette to keep them to himself and so the public is not annoyed by them. He cannot go about praying publicly that the King, his father, come down with endocarditis, nor can he denounce the old gentleman as an idiot and advocate his confinement in a home for the feebleminded. Everyone, of course, knows what his hopes are, but not one has to listen to them. If he voices them at all it is only to friendly and discreet foreign ambassadors and the ladies of the half and quarter worlds.

Under democracy such reticence is unknown. The land swarms with open and undisguised candidates for the highest office, and they urge their claims without disguise. One may laugh at them, but one has to listen to them. Worse, one also has to listen to their repinings when they are defeated. A few of them, more high toned than the rest, may retire pianissimo to the sewers, but the rest remain on deck, exhibiting their ghastly wounds and bellowing for justice until the mortician knocks them off.

II

That the presence of such soreheads upon the public stage constitutes a public nuisance must be obvious. That they offer a menace to the common welfare must also be plain, at all events to attentive students of history. The names of Clay and Calhoun bob up at once. Clay, like William Jennings Bryan after him, was three times a candidate for the Presidency. Defeated in 1824, 1832 and 1840, he turned his back upon democracy, and because the first public agent and attorney for what we now call the interests. When he died he was the darling of the Mellons of his time. He believed in centralization and in the blessings of the protective tariff. Those blessings yet remain with us.

Calhoun, deprived of the high plum of an unappreciative country, went even further. He seems to have come to the conclusion that its high crime made it deserve capital punishment. At all events, he threw all his strength into the plan to break up the Union. The doctrine of Nullification owed more to him than it owed to any one else, and after 1832, when his hopes of getting in the White House were finally extinguished, he devoted himself wholeheartedly to preparing the way for the Civil War. He was more to blame for the war, in all probability, than any other man. But if he had succeeded Jackson, the chances are very good that he would have sung a far different tune.

There are plenty of other examples. One is so plain that is has actually got into the school history books. It is that of Aaron Burr. If he had beaten Jefferson in 1800 there would have been no duel with Hamilton, no conspiracy with Blennerhassett, no trial for treason, and no long exile and venomous repining. Burr was an able man and his talents were of great value to the young republic. But his failure to succeed Adams made a misanthrope of him, and his misanthropy more than once brought it close to disaster. I add a few lesser names: Greeley, Frémont, Hancock, Blaine. All these men were soured and made useless by defeat. If Blaine had been elected in 1876 he would have ceased to wave the bloody shirt. As it was, he was still waving it in 1884.

III

But there is no need to go back into history. In our own time we have seen what biliousness consumes the defeated and what damage they can do. The case of Roosevelt is typical. His debacle in 1912 converted him into a sort of political killer, and until the end of his life he was continually on the warpath. The outbreak of the war in 1914 brought him great embarrassment, for he had been the most ardent American spokesman for years past of what was then generally regarded as the German scheme of things. But in order to damage Wilson he swallowed his convictions of a lifetime and took the other side, and thereafter he became the most violent of the war hawks. Some of the fruits of his reckless bellowing are still with us.

Bryan was even worse. His third defeat in 1908 convinced even so vain a fellow that the White House was beyond his reach, and so he consecrated himself to reprisals upon his enemies. He saw very clearly who they were: the superior minority of his countrymen. It was their almost unanimous opposition that had thrown the balance against him. Well, he would now make them infamous. He would raise the mob against everything they regarded as sound sense and intellectual decency. He would post them as sworn foes to all true virtue and all true religion, and try, if possible, to put them down by law. There ensued the frenzied campaign against the teaching of evolution.

Those who regarded Bryan in his last years as a mere religious fanatic were far in error. It was not religious enthusiasm that moved him but hatred. He was a walking boil, as anyone could quickly see who encountered him face to face. His one aim was to get revenge upon the class he held to be responsible for his own disaster. He wanted to hurt it, proscribe it, is possible destroy it. To that end he was willing to sacrifice everything else. He passed out of life at last at a temperature of 110 degrees, his eyes turned horribly upon 1600 Pennsylvania avenue northwest and its leaky copper roof. In the suffering South his fever lives after him.

IV

Bryan was perhaps the worst. Going beyond Calhoun and even beyond Burr, he was willing to slaughter civilization itself in order to get a poultice for his wounds. Put into the White House he would have mellowed; with every deserving Democrat in a job and grape juice on the table, his dreams of international peace would have sufficed to entertain him. But barred out, he suffered publicly and damnably, and his sufferings resolved themselves into a serious menace to public order and public decency.

Even a McAdoo, absurd as he is, can be dangerous. McAdoo, safe in a good job, is a competent and useful man. But baffled of a job, he resorts instantly to the worst sort of demagogy. At the last Democratic National Convention he was quite willing to march with the klan; in fact, he wooed it openly and unashamed. Now that the klan is in decay, and the chances of his nomination seem more remote than ever, he shows all the classical symptoms of a statesman with a very sore head. What remains of his old strength converts itself into what the lawyers call a nuisance value. He can’t win, but he can at least punish those responsible for the fact. You may be sure he will try to do it. They always do it if they can.

The damage, of course, falls upon the country. It has to pay the cost of all these grotesque and indecent wars of revenge. It is damaged when a Hiram Johnson, boiling inwardly, becomes useless as a Senator. It is damaged far worse when a Bryan hoists the black flag and declares a holy war upon all intelligence and decorum. That damage goes with the Democratic system. But is it inevitable? Is there no way of escape? I offer one at once. Let us have a Constitutional amendment providing that every unsuccessful aspirant for the Presidency, on the day his triumphant rival is inaugurated, shall be hauled to the top of the Washington Monument and there shot, poisoned, stabbed, strangled, and disemboweled and his carcass thrown into the Potomac. What we’d have gained if that amendment had been on the books in 1896! and in 1912!

When I was a youngster, in the closing decades of the last century, two horrible plagues afflicted the American people. The first was the plague of flies and the second was that of corns. No one, in those days, knew how to get rid of either. We used to sleep under canopies of netting on Summer nights, but they were worse than useless, for on the one hand they kept out the air, and on the other they were no impediment to flies, which wriggled through their meshes and feasted on our carcasses within. By day these same flies gave their show on our dinner-tables, leaving us with cholera morbus or typhoid fever. On Sunday mornings they performed massively on clergy and laity; on weekends they specialized in pedagogues and pupils. Save in the extreme North their season ran from Easter to Thanksgiving. While they raged, every American spent half his time dodging them, banging away at them, and damning them.

The curse of corns was almost as bad. Every man, woman and child in the country had them. There was no such thing as walking off in comfort in a new pair of shoes. The shoemakers shaped their lasts to rub and hurt, and rub and hurt they did. All through the ’80s they grew narrower and narrower, until in the ’90s the so-called toothpick toe came in, and the whole nation began to limp. Does it seem comic looking back? Then believe me, friends, it was not comic to the sufferers. Every drug-store window was full of corn-cures, but none of them really worked. Corn-doctors practised in every American community, gouging, gashing and spreading streptococci. Desperate men cut off their own toes. Children at play stopped to hop around on one foot, holding the other and yelling.

No one seemed to be able to imagine release from either plague. The flies were looked upon as quite as natural and necessary as the sunshine, and the corns seemed to be as inevitable as death or taxes. Yet they were got rid of in the end, and very easily. In the first case it was the automobile that did the trick. When it drove out the horse, it shut down hundreds of thousands of stables, and with the stables went the flies that bred in them. Simultaneously, some one invented the copper-mesh window-screen, and the tale was told. There had been window-screens in my youth, but they were made of iron wire, and rusted quickly, and the flies got through them. When the plan was tried of painting them — mainly with florid alpine scenes —, it did no good. But then came the copper-mesh screen, and the last fly, staggering in from the livery-stable, gave up the ghost. Today, in any well-regulated American home or hotel, it would be as startling to see one as to see a buzzard.

Who invented the copper-mesh screen I don’t know, but whoever he was, he deserves far better of his country than the inventor of the telephone, which is a boon but also a nuisance, or of the automobile, which is handy in its way but otherwise has taken the place of the sabre-toothed tiger and the wolf. The man who abolished corns remains almost as elusive, but nevertheless he may be tracked down and identified. He was a brigadier-general of the Army Medical Corps, by name Edward Lyman Munson. In 1912 he designed a last that really followed the shape of the human foot, and during the World War it was used in making shoes for the Army. After the war the secular shoemakers began imitating it, and corns began to disappear. A little while longer, and they will be as rare as smallpox. Any shoe-dealer who knows his business can now supply a shoe that makes them next to impossible.

These two inventors — General Munson and the unknown who hit on the copper flyscreen — deserve far more from their country than they have got. They furthered human progress immensely, and without any drawbacks. Every other great invention seems to carry an affliction with it, but not theirs. The automobile kills its thousands, the telephone and the radio drive their thousands frantic, and the electric light has not only made the country bright, but also hideous. But the disappearance of the fly is pure velvet, and so is that of the corn.

Discussing in the place a few months ago the sorrows roweling the great Republic we live in, I ventured to throw out a double-headed suggestion. The first part of it was to the effect that an easy way to reduce those sorrows today, and almost obliterate them tomorrow, would be to sterilize large numbers of American freemen, both white and black, to the end that they could no longer beget their kind. The second part was that the readiest way to induce them to submit would be to indemnify them in cash.

The suggestion failed to fetch any appreciable faction of Uplifters, but it nevertheless had merit, and I accordingly renew it, with variations, by these presents. Not much argument is needed, I believe, the establish the prudence of the first half. We have far too many client of the New Deal in this country, and they multiply at a rate that must disquiet every solvent lover of the flag. In the sharecropper areas of the South, to cite a salient example, there is probably not a women between the ages of fourteen and forty-five who is not laboring, at this very moment, in one stage or another of the sorry physiological process whereby human souls acquire a habitation and a name. The birth rate down in those pious and malarious wastes is precisely what the traffic will bear, and if it were not for the fact that the death rate, especially among children, is also inordinate, the region would swarm like a nest of maggots.

The same mad rush to reproduce goes on in all the other backwaters of the nation, including the slums of the cities. The midwives, in such places, are worked as hard as the sommeliers at a college reunion, and huge gangs of clergy are kept busy baptizing the young. No one, so far as I am aware, argues that this excessive fecundity is a good thing, whether for the high contracting parties, for the poor children they are unable to feed, or for the community in general. Even the moral theologians of the Holy Church, though they still denounce birth control as accursed, have been monkeying of late with schemes to get round their own prohibition of it. The generality of jail wardens, police captains, mental hygienists, coroners, truant officers, and other such experts agree unanimously that it would be a good thing if we could reduce the statistical differential that now runs so heavily in favor of the unfit. If it is maintained indefinitely, there will be a wholesale degeneration of the American stock, and the average of sense and competence in the whole nation will sink to what it is now in the forlorn valleys of Appalachia.

There are, plainly enough, only two ways to get rid of this differential. One is for the people of the upper I.Q. brackets to develop a birth rate higher, or at least as high, as that prevailing among the economically and intellectually undernourished; the other is for the undernourished to reduce their birth rate to something approximating the smart and swell. The first device, for reasons only too apparent, is quite unfeasible. Putting aside the fact that people of active intelligence has too many things on their minds to devote all their leisure to multiplying, there is the further fact, supported by plenty of biological evidence, that easy living reduces fertility, and that, in consequence, the women of the upper classes, even assuming that they tried their damnedest, could not hope to match the records of their underprivileged sisters. The mechanism of this reduction is as yet not understood, but there can be no doubt that it exists. Whenever and wherever the standard of living rises, the birth rate declines, even in the complete absence of contraceptive enterprise. It may be because vitamins are poisonous to the germ plasm, or because soap and water suffocate it, or for some other unpleasant reason. So far, no one can say; but the statisticians are all sure that the decline is a reality, not only in Christendom but also among simple savages. Thus it is counsel of despair to urge the upper classes to exert themselves more assiduously. As well urge them to jump over the moon. Take away all the mechanical and chemical contrivances with which they now flout the mandate of Genesis I, xxii, and they would still lag behind the lowly.

We are therefore thrown back upon the device of bringing down the birth rate among the latter, if any rational equilibrium is ever to be established. How is it to be done? One way, as we have just seen, would be to raise the standard of living among them, and that way has been suggested, in fact, by more than one Uplifter, though not for the reason that we are here considering. There are many practical impediments to its execution. For one thing, it would cost an enormous amount of money — indeed, an amount so vast that even the non-Euclidean mathematicians now doing miracles at Washington would probably be unable to raise it. For another thing, there is some doubt that a lift sufficient to achieve the business would be endurable to its ostensible beneficiaries. Even assuming that it would make them less fecund, it might do it by wiping them out altogether. This is not hollow theorizing, but a deduction from actual experience. There is plenty of reason to believe that the sharecroppers of the South, if provided with decent food to eat, could not eat it and survive. They have been bred on hog meat and corn pone for so long that their systems have lost the capacity for assimilating better victuals. Whenever one of them lands in a Southern hospital with pellagra, which is very often indeed, the doctors teach him the use of those better victuals, and send him home with a diet list. But though it calls for only such foodstuffs as are easily obtainable in his native wildwood, he almost always goes back to his hog meat and corn pone, and in a year or two he is down with pellagra again. It may be, in fact, that the disease has become natural to him, and even necessary to his metabolism, as gout was natural and necessary to the five-bottle men of a century ago.

Moreover, the other changes in habit that go with becoming civilized are almost as unpleasant to the victim, and maybe almost as dangerous. It is the theory of the Uplift that everyone would be healthier and more comfortable in a better house, but experience proves that it is by no means invariably so. Some years ago a gang of wizards established a colony of model farms in Western Tennessee, and stocked it with bumpkins recruited from the adjacent wilderness. Every farm was seated on good land, and in every farmhouse there were all the conveniences of civilization, including electric lights, a telephone, a washing machine, a mayonnaise mixer, a bathtub, and a full set of annual reports of the Secretary of Agriculture. The idea was that these bumpkins, so outfitted, would gradually metamorphose into high-toned subsistence farmers, and become a credit to their country and one of its glories. What actually happened was that they quickly returned to their native barbarism. In a few years the hogs were rooting under every farmhouse, all the machinery in it was out of whack, the fields were given over to scrub corn and Jimpson weeds, and the annual family wash was being done again in the crick. It was a terrible experience for all concerned. The wizards saw one of their noblest enterprises knocked galley west, and its beneficiaries suffered a kind of torture comparable to that of going through a stone crusher. The more faint-hearted fled to the mountains at once, and there resumed their tribal way of life; the more resolute hung on until the colony had been reduced to something that met their ineradicable notions of the seemly, the comfortable and the beautiful.

In brief, trying to change the mores of morons is just as hazardous as trying to change the mores of actual savages. Every schoolboy knows what missionarying has done to the poor anthropophagi of Central Africa and the islands of the South Seas. By the power of the Gospel they have been dissuaded, in most cases, from going naked and devouring one another, but only at the cost of wrecking them. Once healthy and happy in their flimsy breech clouts, they now groan and pine away in the flannel union suits. Once well-fed upon a diet to their brutish taste, they now starve upon banal canned goods. The birth rate among them continues high, but the death rate equals it everywhere, and in most places exceeds it. Their souls have been saved, but their miserable carcasses will soon vanish from this earth.

II

Civilizing the sharecropper, white or black, would probably have the same effect on him, just as it has had the same effect on the Indian. But the process would not only be immensely costly, as I have argued, but also revoltingly cruel, as I have demonstrated. It would involve the slow and painful deaths of hundreds of thousands of poor persons who, however stupid they may be and however mephitic, are nevertheless God’s creatures, and what is more, free citizens of the United States. To have at them with machine-guns would be far more merciful, besides being cheaper. But having at them with machine-guns would shock the moral sensibilities of the whole human race, including Hitler and Stalin. Tender-hearted persons would rush into the courts asking for injunctions against it, and judges delicate enough to grant them would be readily found. Thus the enterprise would be tied up, and its discussion corrupted and made insane by politicians, theologians, labor leaders, and other such rogues.

The easy way out, and at the same time the humane way, would be to sterilize the males of the present generation, and so cut off the flow of their congenital and incurable inferiority. If a beginning were made with all the adults now alive, there would be an immediate and immense decrease in the production of subnormal children, and if the males now in infancy were tackled as they reached years of virility, there would be another decrease, amounting almost to 100 per cent. No damage, within their own definition of damage, would be done to these martyrs to elementary eugenics. The operation that is favored by the overwhelming preponderance of genito-urinary opinion would not give them any pain, it would not affect their potency in any degree, it would not incapacitate them for work, and it would carry no more risk of death or serious injury than the operation of pulling a milk tooth. Most important of all, it would not unfit them in the slightest for the exercise of their marital rights under the Corpus Juris Canonici and the Constitution of the United States. On the contrary, that exercise would be facilitated, if only be removing the fears which now harass and dissuade the parties of the second part.

That these fears are very real and very unpleasant must be well known to everyone who has taken the trouble to make discreet inquiries. The fact that the wives of the hillbillies of Appalachia are incessantly gravid is certainly not to be accepted as proof that they have an insatiable appetite for children. Their lives, in truth, are made miserable by the dread of pregnancy, and they devote a large part of their small ingenuity to trying to ward it off. To that end they resort to all sorts of dangerous practices, mostly of small effect. Every drugstore in the Bible and hookworm countries carries a heavy stock of abortificients, and the midwives of the region do as brisk trade in interfering with delivery as furthering it. The notion that only women who read Proust and drink vermouth try to evade maternity is sheer nonsense. There is quite as much effort in that direction, and perhaps a great deal harder effort, among women on the dole. More intelligent than their men, as all women are more intelligent than their men, the wives of Moronia shrink alike from the agonies of parturition without competent assistance, and from the brutality of bringing more and more children into a world that can only use them badly. If they had their way their contributions to the birth rate would be no greater than those of the graduates of Vassar, and maybe much less.

Unfortunately, there is no convenient and certain way for the to reduce their output. Abstinence is as difficult in Moronia as it is in Miami or Hollywood, and, despite the tall talk of the birth-controllers, there is no known contraceptive that will work every time, even in skillful hands. In the Southern mountains the favorite device is the prolongation of lactation, but there is a natural limit to it, and beside, it shows a high percentage of flat failures. There remains only sterilization. Should the women submit to it? For one, I think not. They have suffered enough already, without being exposed to laparotomies, with attendant pain and danger. In the male, sterilization is a simple and harmless operation, but in the female it is serious, and may produce very unpleasant results. Moreover, there is a biological — even, indeed, a eugenic — objection to any such wholesale obliteration of fecundity at its source, for the women of the lower orders, as every historian knows, occasionally benefit the human race by departing from the strict letter of their marriage vows. At least one very eminent President of the United States is said to have owed his existence to such a false step by one of his own grandmothers, and it is possible that, if the whole truth could be unearthed, he would be found to have colleagues. Adultery, in fact, has probably done the human race quite as much good as harm, despite the abhorrence with which it is necessarily viewed by all husbands and other chaste persons.

No, the extinguishing of the moronic strain should be confined to the males. Their potentiality for harm is vastly greater than that for the females, as anyone may discover by a resort to third-grade arithmetic. They escape all the unpleasantness ordained by Genesis III, xvi, they have only a small share in the nurture and policing of their children, and, as the law now begins to run, they even unload the support of their families upon the taxpayer. It would be impossible to imagine creatures whose cares and responsibilities were smaller; even a tomcat is hardly more free. Too stupid to make their way in the world, and having nothing to give in return for life save a heritage of incompetence and misery for endless generations, they may surely be called on without injustice to yield up their one indubitable talent. Surrendering it will leave them precisely as happy as they are today, and perhaps a great deal happier. And their betters will be relieved for all time of the burden of their diseased, stupid, wretched, and hopeless get.

III

In some of the States, laws have been passed providing for the sterilization of such polluters of the race, and those laws have been upheld by the Nine Old Villains of Capitol Hill. Unfortunately, they all fall short of disposing of the evil they are aimed at. In general, they apply only to persons who are defective in some gross and melodramatic way — idiots, the insane, habitual criminals, Communists, and so on; the vast majority of the inferior are beyond their reach. Plainly enough, they do little good. Idiots and criminals do not issue only from idiots and criminals; they issue also, and on a much larger scale, from the common run of nitwits. In California the authorities have sterilized thousands of the former, but the number of the latter appears to be undiminished; in truth, there is good reason for holding that it is larger than ever before. If all the lunatics in all the asylums of the country were sterilized hereafter, or even electrocuted, the sharecroppers of Mississippi alone would produce enough more in twenty-five years to fill every asylum to bursting. The one and only remedy is to strike at the source of all incompetence, whether social or economic, metal or physical. Let a resolute attack be made upon the fecundity of all the males of the lowest rungs of the racial ladder, and there will be a gradual and permanent improvement. It may not be noticed at once, for it will take some time to work off the damage they have already done, but in the course of two generations it will be brilliantly manifest.

Here, unluckily, we collide with another difficulty. What I have argued so far is subscribed by virtually all intelligent persons, though many of them, for one reason or another hesitate to say so. But when it comes to applying the obvious remedy, a large number of the discover impediments. We live, at least in theory, in a free country, and its people have a healthy aversion to laying violent hands on the citizen. The sharecropper, though he may appear to the scientist to be hardly human, is yet as much under the protection of the Bill of Rights as the president of Harvard. He may not be jailed unless he has perpetrated some overt act forbidden by law, and he may not be gelded unless his continuance at stud is plainly and undoubtedly dangerous to society. To grab him on the bald ground that he is an incurable jackass would be revolting the moral sensibilities of the American people. The theological doctrine of the equality of souls before God has been bred into them, and it would be impossible to induce a majority of them, or even any considerable minority, to repudiate all its implications today. In the long run they may do so, but certainly the time is not yet.

To get round this difficulty I have proposed that candidates for the scalpel be rounded up, not by sending sheriffs, United States marshals, or other such catchpolls after them, but by posting rewards for their voluntary submission. To be specific, I have suggested that the Federal government offer to pay $1000 to every adult American who will swear that, to the best of his knowledge and belief, God and Wall Street are both implacably against him, and that is willing to climb on the table under his own steam. Thus duress is avoided, and no customer will ever be able to complain that he was taken by chicanery or in violation of his inalienable rights under the last two strophes of the Fifth Amendment. What he does he will do as a free agent, and every attention will be given to due process and just compensation.

The one error I made was in setting the ante too high. I have since been informed by reliable correspondents in the sharecropper areas that an honorarium of as much as $1000 would cause riots and bloodshed in those parts. So many candidates would rush up, howling for the money, that the government surgeons would be swamped. Worse, the sudden appearance of so much cash in a region unaccustomed to it would dislocate all the normal processes of trade, and probably cause a local inflation of dangerous proportions. Yet worse, all the crooks in the country would flock down to practice their art on the beneficiaries, and in six weeks the latter would be stone broke and demanding more. In brief, I am told that to give a sharecropper $1000 in a single lump would be almost as hazardous as giving him a machine-gun. While it lasted, he would be on a lunatic jamboree, and when it was gone he would be incurably anti-social, and a menace to all orderly government. Even his pastors, so I am told, could not be trusted to keep him from engaging in disorders approaching the revolutionary, Indeed, most of his pastors would go to the barricades with him, bellowing for more and bigger operations, and in general kicking up a general mess.

I accordingly reduce the honorarium to $100, and am willing to reduce it further to $50 or even to $25 if the consensus of local opinion so advises. In Mississippi, where the annual cash income of a sharecropper is said to be but $32, $50 is a large sum, and will suffice to recruit many thousands. But it is not so large that it will certainly demoralize and ruin its recipient. Making him rich for the nonce, it will still leave him under the necessity of working, and after he has spent it he will return to the plow. Best of all, it will not so bedazzle him and his friends that they will overlook the real benefits flowing from his acquiescence. His popularity socially will not a function of his wealth only, but will be grounded also on his disappearance from the ranks of disease and sorrow carriers. His wife, in particular, will be relieved of her present uneasiness in his presence, and his family life will thus increase in peace and dignity. And if he has no wife he will find himself regarded with less fear and more respect by the generality of females. All in all, there will be a psychological gain to the community that will go far beyond the monetary benefit to the individual, and in that gain, of course, the individual will have a larger share. As the population gradually diminishes, the whole aspect of life will improve, and a happier people will not need the powerful stimulants — for example, lynchings, Holy Rolling, and the consumption of white mule — which now serve to take their minds of their troubles.

I add one more amendment. There is no reason why the cost of this great moral enterprise, at least while it remains experimental, should be thrown on the taxpayer. It is a proper subject for private philanthropy, and no legal impediment, so far as I know, stands in the way. Any American citizen is free at the minute to destroy his fecundity at will, and any other citizen is free to aid and encourage him to do so. I therefore suggest that some well-heeled lover of humanity come forward with a donation to start the campaign. Let him put up $50,000 to spread the news from end to end of the Bible country, and another $50,000 to indemnify the first 1000 or 2000 candidates. The birth-controllers already have an effective propaganda in operation, and it is possible that they may be induced to lend it for the purpose. All that is needed is a beginning. Once the first brave squad of bounty-men returns home, and reports begin to circulate through the Frauenzimmer, the pressure upon the laggards will become so enormous that only a few irreconcilables will be able to hold out. The experimental fund will suffice to purge and uplift half a county; ten or fifteen million dollars would be enough to rescue the whole of Arkansas.

Here is a constructive suggestion that meets the exacting standards of both Rotary and the Brain Trust. It promises to bring the blessings of the More Abundant Life to thousands of unhappy and despondent people, and the head off an infinitude of even worse unhappiness and despondency hereafter. Certainly it is cheap at the price — immensely cheaper on all counts than supporting an ever-increasing herd of morons for all eternity. I dedicate it to my country.

The joke is on those confiding folk who turned on their radios last Monday night, expecting to hear a trenchant discussion of the issues of the hour. Let them be warned against the next time. Nothing but hooey will issue from the Hon. Mr. Roosevelt for the balance of the campaign. He will make vague and gaudy promises in plenty, first to this group of horse-leech’s daughters and then to that one, but if he ever descends to cases it will be a miracle indeed. The plain fact is that his mind does not run to facts and figures. He is not a scientist, but a sort of mixture of poet and evangelist, with overtones of the opera singer.

Certainly a statesman who sought to fetch the higher cerebral centers would not come out on a public platform with Hopkins on one side of him and Ickes on the other. The support of such comic characters gives away the true nature of the entertainment. It is not addressed to the cortex at all, but to the midriff; not to sensible men and women, but to boobs. Its one and only aim is to fill those boobs with such high and glistening hopes that they will flock to the polls in November, and keep the evangelical party at the trough. Once they have discharged that patriotic function, they will be handed over, as they have been handed over since time immemorial, to statistics and the devil.

I often wonder that no one has ever undertaken a formal history of demagogy. If I had the time I think I’d take on the job myself, but too many other jobs stand in the way, some spiritual and some secular. The notion that the thing is a modern imposture seems to be widely held, but is in error. It actually arose in the dark backward and abysm of history, and it has been throwing off renowned and even immortal practitioners for many, many centuries. Indeed, the thing we call history is to a large extent only a serial biography of such charlatans. But it would be a mistake to dismiss them as mere swindlers. Like the inventors of bogus religion, they have often convinced themselves of their own inspiration, and not a few of them have suffered martyrdom. The last to go to the stake, as connoisseurs will recall, was William Jennings Bryan, LL.D. He needed no executioner to set him afire. He was consumed by the natural heat of his own dreadful fury against his betters.

Aside from that fury, there is precious little to be discovered in the New Deal metaphysic. It is a puerile amalgam of exploded imbecilities, many of them in flat contradiction to the rest. It proposes to give people more to eat by destroying food, to lift the burden of debt by encouraging fools to incur more debt, and to husband the depleted capital of the nation by outlawing what is left of it. It heads in all directions at once, and gets precisely nowhere. No two of the Brain Trust wizards appear to agree, save of course upon the constant need for more money. They give at least as much time to brawling among themselves as they give to the actual promotion of their discordant and preposterous Utopias.

With a change of a few words, a large part of Dr. Roosevelt’s harangue to the local come-ons might have been converted in the spiel of a quack doctor addressing yokels at a county fair. Its obvious purpose was to scare them into believing that something awful ailed them, and then to offer them an infinite series of sure cures. “If the first bottle doesn’t relieve you, come back and try another” — of course, for another 25 cents. Show me anything else in the speech, and I’ll eat a copy of it soaked in one-hundred-proof strychnine. It was not only silly; it was shameless. There was no pretense of rational discussion. It was pure and unadulterated demagogy.

Consider, for example, the sonorous gabble about taking all persons below the age of 18 or above the age of 65 out of productive industry. The first part of this, I suppose, was a bone flung to the pedagogues and uplifters, who yearn to collar the whole population up to the age of 21, and even beyond. And the second part was only too palpably a bone for the Townsend racketeers, who still control plenty of votes along the lunatic fringe. How much sense was in either half? None whatever. If all the wage-earners below 18 were handed over to the gogues and uplifters, to be converted into incurable mendicants, and all those above 65 were handed over to the Townsend grafters, to be starved to death, the net increase in jobs at living wages for workers between 18 and 65 would not be five per cent.

There is, in fact, only one intelligible idea in the whole More Abundant Life rumble-bumble, and that is the idea that whatever A earns really belongs to B. A is any honest and industrious man or woman; B is any drone or jackass. On this proposition all the quacks clustered about the Greatest President Since Hoover are agreed, and on this proposition alone. Each and every one of their schemes, from the AAA to the TVA, is a scheme to convert the lubricious imaginings of the incompetent and unhappy into blissful realities — in brief, to put envy on a gold basis, substantially higher than that of the boloney dollar. There is nothing in the New Deal save that, and there never will be.

All demagogy rests upon the same beautiful foundation. It is a device to organize the discontent of all those, who, under the prevailing rules of the game, are getting on less well than they think their talents and virtues deserve, and who spend most of the time yearning for the usufructs of those who seem to be getting on better. The demagogue argues (a) that the rules were made by wicked men, and (b), that if enough nickels are dropped into his hat he will be able to change them. The first part is false pretenses and the second part is fraud. There is nothing else whatsoever. To be sure, a given demagogue may sometimes convince himself that he is honest and even that he is a hero, but what he thinks is of no more validity than what he says.

His actual purpose is never concealed from the judicious. He is always after a job for himself, and if he talks loudly enough and foolishly enough he not infrequently gets it. There then begins an inevitable cycle of disillusion. His poor victims, reaching out for the moon, find to their disquiet that what he has really handed to them is only a cabbage. He must then begin to promise two moons, three moons, a dozen moons, with clusters of other gauds thrown in for good measure. They turn out to be onions, potatoes, wads of reconditioned chewing-gum, wet sponges. Presently the demagogue is chased away — and another rises to fill his room. This has been going on in the world since Hector was a blastocyte. It will go on until the last galoot’s ashore.

The More Abundant Life brethren now face the first stirring of serious doubt in their customers. They have been assailed by naughty skeptics since the day of their emergence from primeval chaos, but persons of a congenitally believing turn of mind, which is to say, persons of normal human stupidity, have hitherto gone along with them pretty docilely. But now they find themselves confronted by rising dubieties, and it is necessary for them to do something to hold on to their soft and glorious jobs. The half of what they do consists in shoveling out more and more billions of the taxpayers’ money. The other half consists in beating the woods for new coveys and classifications of suckers.

Dr. Roosevelt, in his Baltimore speech, made several separate and distinct attempts in that direction. His somewhat crude overture to the Townsend halfwits I have already mentioned. They are his natural game, but Dr. Townsend has so far managed to keep them penned in a private preserve, and is apparently not eager to let out shooting rights to other huntsmen. But mainly Dr. Roosevelt leveled his artillery at the large and uncertain class of first voters. It may be that many of them are suckers, too, so it seemed worth while to spread some bait for them, and thus round up enough of them to make up for the old-timers snared by Dr. Townsend.

In this theory there was and is a considerable plausibility. The youngsters of this year’s crop have passed through some very demoralizing years, and it will not be surprising if large numbers of them turn out to be mashuggah. Their woes, of course, were considerably exaggerated by the right hon. gentleman in his harangue. It is not a fact that the door of hope is wholly closed to them, and that they face a unanimously black future. The smart fellows among them will really get on just as smart fellows have always got on, and a generation hence they will be running the world in the same old way, and basking and frying in the envy of the dubs.

But to the dubs the outlook is surely not very bright. Belabored for years by pedagogues gradually passing from panic to hysteria, they enter upon adult age with their wits sadly addled. Some of them, as everyone knows, have already gone Red, and begin to argue boldly that their fathers ought to be hanged, drawn and quartered. There must be many more who are equally upset, but do not venture to go so far. Properly wooed with more and more of the idiotic, alarming sort of rhetoric that they heard every day at school and college, they may be induced to cast their first votes for Hopkins and Tugwell, Ickes and Mother Perkins, Morgenthau and Wallace, the New Deal and glory hallelujah. But not, I fear, their second. By 1940 they will be in the full tide of Katzenjammer. And perhaps even in 1936 many of them will retain a sufficiency of faculty to refuse the cup of bathtub Peruna.

In more than one American State, I gather, a Christian Science practitioner is forbidden to accept fees from the faithful. That is, he may not accept fees as fees. If a grateful patient, cured of cancer or hydrophobia by his sorcery, tips him $5 or $10, it is apparently all right, but if he sends in a bill he may be jailed for it. What could be more idiotic? Either the citizen in this great Republic is a free man or he is not a free man. If he is, then he has a plain right, when he is ill, to consult any medicine man he fancies, and quite as plain a right to pay that medicine man for his services — openly, without impediment, and according to a scale satisfactory to him. If that right be taken away, then one of his essential liberties is taken away — and the moment a Christian Scientist begins to lose an essential liberty, then all the rest of us begin to lose ours.

The fact that a certain section of medical opinion supports the existing laws is surely no argument for their justice and reasonableness. A certain section of medical opinion, in late years, has succumbed to the messianic delusion. Its spokesmen are not content to deal with the patients who come to them for advice; they conceive it to be their duty to force their advice upon everyone, including especially those who don’t want it. That duty is purely imaginary. It is born of vanity, not of public spirit. The impulse behind it is not altruism, but a mere yearning to run things. A physician, however learned, has no more right to intrude his advice upon persons who prefer the advice of a Christian Scientist, a chiropractor or a pow-wow doctor than he has to intrude it upon persons who prefer the advice of some other physician.

Here, I hope, I shall not be suspected of inclining toward the Eddyan buncombe. It seems to me to be pure balderdash. I believe that the services a Christian Science practitioner offers to his customers are no more valuable than the service a foot-wash evangelist offers to a herd of country jakes. But the right to freedom obviously involves the right to be foolish. If what I say must be passed on for its sagacity by censors, however wise and prudent, then I have no free speech. And if what I may believe — about gall-stones, the Constitution, castor-oil, or God — is conditioned by law, then I am not a free man.

It is constantly argued by the proponents of legislation against quacks that it is necessary for the public safety — that if it is not put upon the books, the land will be ravaged by plagues, and that the death-rate will greatly increase, to the immense damage of the nation. But in all this there are a great many more assumptions than facts, and even more false inferences than assumptions. What reason is there for believing that a high death-rate, in itself, is undesirable? To my knowledge none whatever. The plain fact is that, if it be suitably selective, it is extremely salubrious. Suppose that it could be so arranged that it ran to 100% a year among politicians, executive secretaries, drive chairmen, and the homicidally insane? What rational man would object?

I believe that the quack healing cults set up a selection that is almost as benign and laudable. They attract, in the main, two classes: first, persons who are incurably ill, and hence beyond the reach of scientific medicine, and second, persons of congenitally defective reasoning powers. They slaughter these unfortunates by the thousand — even more swiftly and surely than scientific medicine (say, as practised by the average neighborhood doctor) could slaughter them. Does anyone seriously contend that this butchery is anti-social? It seems to me to be quite the reverse. The race is improved as its misfits and halfwits are knocked off. And life is thereby made safer and cheaper for the rest of us.

The section of medical opinion that I have mentioned stands against these obvious facts. It contends that the botched and incompetent should be kept alive against their will, and in the face of their violent protests. To what end? To the end, first, that the rest of us may go on carrying them on our backs. To the end, second, that they may multiply gloriously, and so burden our children and grandchildren. But to the end, mainly, that hordes of medical busybodies, unequal to the strain of practise, may be kept in comfort.

Every now and then one of these busybodies, discovering that some imbecile woman is having her child treated for a fractured skull or appendicitis by a Christian Scientist, fills the newspapers with clamor and tries to rush the poor woman to jail. A great sobbing ensues: it appears at once that it is the duty of the government (i.e., of certain jobholders) to rescue children from the follies of their parents. Is that duty real? If so, then let us extend it a bit. If it arises when a foolish mother tries to cure her child of diabetes by calling in a healer to read nonsense out of “Science and Health,” then doesn’t it arise equally when another foolish mother feeds her darling indigestible victuals? And if bad food is sufficient reason to summon the Polizei, then what of bad ideas?

The truth is that the inhumanity of Christian Science mothers is grossly exaggerated. They are, in the main, exactly like other mothers. So long as little Otto is able to yell they try home remedies — whether castor oil or Christian Science is all one. But when it becomes plain that he is seriously ill, they send for the doctor — and the ensuing hocus-pocus is surely not to be laid at their doors. What is the actual death-rate among the offspring of Christian Scientists? If it can be proved to be more than 5% above the death-rate among the infant patrons of free clinics I shall be glad to enter a monastery and renounce the world.

As a lifelong patriot and fan for human progress I should rejoice if it were five times what it is. Is it desirable to preserve the lives of children whose parents read and take seriously such dreadful bilge as is in “Science and Health”? If so, then it is also desirable to cherish the children of parents who believe that a horse-hair put into a bottle of water will turn into a snake. Such strains are manifestly dysgenic. Their persistence unchecked would quickly bring the whole human race down to an average IQ of 10 or 15. Being intelligent would become a criminal offense everywhere, as it already is in Mississippi and Tennessee. Thus a genuinely enlightened State would endow Christian Science and chiropractic on eugenic principles, as our great universities already endow football. Failing that, it is the plain duty of statesmanship to let nature take its course.

If men will not, from a recognition of social necessity, voluntarily do what must be done if society is to be maintained and general well-being advanced, no one can lead them to the right path by any cunning stratagem or artifice. If they err and go astray, then one must endeavor to enlighten them by instruction. But if they cannot be enlightened, if they persist in error, then nothing can be done to prevent catastrophe. All the tricks and lies of demagogic politicians may well be suited to promote the cause of those who, whether in good faith or bad, work for the destruction of society. But the cause of social progress, the cause of the further development and intensification of social bonds, cannot be advanced by lies and demagogy. No power on earth, no crafty stratagem or clever deception could succeed in duping mankind into accepting a social doctrine that it not only does not acknowledge, but openly spurns. …

The liberals were of the opinion that all men have the intellectual capacity to reason correctly about the difficult problems of social cooperation and to act accordingly. They were so impressed with the clarity and self-evidence of the reasoning by which they had arrived at their political ideas that they were quite unable to understand how anyone could fail to comprehend it. They never grasped two facts: first, that the masses lack the capacity to think logically and secondly, that in the eyes of most people, even when they are able to recognize the truth, a momentary, special advantage that may be enjoyed immediately appears more important than a lasting greater gain that must be deferred. Most people do not have even the intellectual endowments required to think through the – after all very complicated – problems of social cooperation, and they certainly do not have the will power necessary to make those provisional sacrifices that all social action demands. The slogans of interventionism and of socialism, especially proposals for the partial expropriation of private property, always find ready and enthusiastic approval with the masses, who expect to profit directly and immediately from them.¹

The issue for activism is how to attract statists to the libertarian position so that they may “expect to profit directly and immediately” from it. I have an idea that is a “crafty stratagem”, but does not require government do anything, so is probably not what Mises was writing against. Indeed, I don’t think Mises ever thought of this scheme, and I think it may have a slightly better chance of success than those tried previously.

Instead of putting so much money towards another libertarian electoral drive, another libertarian advertising campaign, another libertarian position paper, another libertarian journal, another libertarian conference, another libertarian group, another revival of a neglected libertarian thinker, another better-worded and better-reasoned libertarian essay, another libertarian essay contest, or another lecture tour of an illustrious libertarian, why not do something different? I am not saying that the aforementioned activities should stop. Indeed, I am currently working on many libertarian essays, and making more accessible the work of many neglected libertarian thinkers, and will continue to do so. I am only saying that they are unlikely to have a positive libertarian outcome, since they have barely ever done so before. Of course, there may be a very slim chance that it will happen, and those who are romantic — that is, are emotionally needy — may be fuelled by this, but does that mean that those who are financially needy should buy lottery tickets, and spend much time trying to convince the lottery organisers why they should be the winner?

So, what else is there? How do we get those unfamiliar with libertarian ideas to pay attention to us? Is there any strategy for libertarian reform that hasn’t been tried yet?

Libertarians have tried to show that, in a free market, society would be freer and more prosperous, trying to appeal to people’s self-interest. This has not worked, because, the connection of libertarian ideas, through economic reasoning, to one’s self-interest, is too distant for most people. What they want and appreciate is direct short-term rewards and handouts. Only then will they be interested. So my proposal is this: Why don’t libertarian philanthropists pay people to read up on libertarian ideas and point out where they’re wrong? Don’t pay people to rewrite the same old libertarian arguments; pay people to read and criticise them. Here’s a possible press release:

$??? to sincerely and thoughtfully criticise the libertarian position that government is bad for the economy and tax is theft.

Earn money by emailing us your criticism of libertarianism. The only catch is that you must not merely state, for example, that you think we need government because of the public goods problem, you must also explain why you believe the criticism of the public goods problem here [make available libertarian writing on it and hyperlink] is incorrect.

The competition is not in any way approved, overseen or verified by any authority. You will have to rely on the honesty of [judge or organisation name] instead. We do not need to be convinced by your criticisms (although we will try), but if they show you made some effort to comprehend and contemplate the libertarian arguments, then you will receive the money. We admit that some people may think the judging to be idiosyncratic and arbitrary, but we will try to be consistent, fair and forgivingly generous. We will have the right to publish the criticisms and any correspondence entered into, and will be glad to. You are also welcome to donate your criticisms to us, for which we will be forever thankful. After all, being libertarian is very unpopular, and if only someone would show us the error of our ways, then we would live more contentedly, get on better with our fellows and fit in better to the community.

This press release should be put on a web page that includes almost all objections to libertarianism and easy to understand libertarian responses to them.

If the web page is good enough, no money need ever change hands at all, since any criticism will just show that the reader has not read through the libertarian arguments sincerely and thoughtfully enough. The arrogance to hold the competition, attract many entries and not pay anyone, would attract attention. So would the arrogance of paying. I think it would be good to pay a great many of the entrants, but in addition, publish their criticism and libertarian responses to them. Government might give many handouts, but their handouts often mean lots of paperwork and bureaucracy to get through. That people prefer rewards sooner rather than later is one of the axioms of praxeology, so why are praxeologists always advocating futile schemes ignoring the fact? Can’t libertarians do a better job of giving handouts than government? Is that what the success of libertarian ideas comes down to? Could there be a more cynical example of romanticism, and vice versa? And what if, as is likely, it doesn’t work — what then? Well, for one thing, libertarian philanthropists won’t have as much tax to pay.

1. Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism, trans. Ralph Raico (New York: Foundation for Economic Education, 1985), pp. 156-58.

Mises on Inflationary Pride and Deflationary Blame

Mencken’s low opinion of humanity and their prospects for improvement is further supported by Ludwig von Mises’s summary of the world economy:

The boom produces impoverishment. But still more disastrous are its moral ravages. It makes people despondent and dispirited. The more optimistic they were under the illusory prosperity of the boom, the greater is their despair and their feeling of frustration. The individual is always ready to ascribe his good luck to his own efficiency and to take it as a well-deserved reward for his talent, application, and probity. But reverses of fortune he always charges to other people, and most of all to the absurdity of social and political institutions. He does not blame the authorities for having fostered the boom. He reviles them for the inevitable collapse. In the opinion of the public, more inflation and more credit expansion are the only remedy against the evils which inflation and credit expansion have brought about.¹

The entire passage, especially the last sentence, is very Menckenian.

Hayek on the Success of Socialist Ideas

F.A. Hayek’s “The Intellectuals and Socialism” explores why socialists were so successful in communicating their ideas. Hayek said it is because the socialist experts remained radical and utopian, had long-term aims, and left the compromising to others. They did not have a “naive view of mass democracy” and try “directly to reach and to persuade the individual voter.” Rather, they “directed their main effort toward gaining the support of [the intellectual] ‘elite.’”² The definition of “elite,” “expert” and “intellectual” that Hayek uses may not be the most intuitive definitions, and perhaps that alone explains why some think tanks erroneously think they are following Hayek’s strategy when they gain the ear of ambitious present and future politicians. Many self-proclaimed free market think tanks quote Hayek’s flowery call to action and ultimatum from the end of that essay prominently on their mission statements:

Unless we can make the philosophic foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue, and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds, the prospects of freedom are indeed dark. But if we can regain that belief in the power of ideas which was the mark of liberalism at its best, the battle is not lost.³

The passage is found at the conclusion of the essay. It is a concluding statement that had many reasons behind it, but the passage itself does not emphasise them clearly, probably because it is meant more as a signing-off than a summary. In the paragraph immediately above the previous quote, Hayek is as plainspoken and content-strong as can be:

What we lack is a liberal Utopia, a program which seems neither a mere defense of things as they are nor a diluted kind of socialism, but a truly liberal radicalism which does not spare the susceptibilities of the mighty (including the trade unions), which is not too severely practical, and which does not confine itself to what appears today as politically possible. We need intellectual leaders who are prepared to resist the blandishments of power and influence and who are willing to work for an ideal, however small the prospects of its early realization. They must be men who are willing to stick to principles and to fight for their full realization, however remote. The practical compromises they must leave to the politicians. Free trade and freedom of opportunity are ideals which still may arouse the imaginations of large numbers, but a mere “reasonable freedom of trade” or a mere “relaxation of controls” is neither intellectually respectable nor likely to inspire any enthusiasm.⁴

Most think tanks that use the first block-quote in this subsection, ignore the second. They avoid utopian thought, and, seemingly as a result, have utopian expectations for their strategy of compromising to the current intellectual climate and espousing a mere “reasonable freedom of trade” and “relaxation of controls.”

Ignoring the Austrian school of economics is bad enough, but quoting Hayek on strategy misleadingly, that’s a different dimension of debasement. Perhaps no one in those think tanks has read the essay, and just repeat the quote they found elsewhere. That Hayek himself did not always follow his own instructions may also be to blame.

Hayek displays a more polite and “constructive” tone in his writing compared to Mencken. Hayek believed “it is neither selfish interests nor evil intentions but mostly honest convictions and good intentions”⁵ that determine the views of political apologists, and that what is needed is for them to be shown the error of their ways. It is interesting to note how perfectly compatible Hayek and Mencken are on strategy, despite having different reasons for being so.

Block’s “Is There an ‘Anomalous’ Section of the Laffer Curve?”

Walter Block’s “Is There an ‘Anomalous’ Section of the Laffer Curve?” explains why lower taxes, drug legalisation and a voluntary rather than drafted military may not result in libertarian outcomes.⁶ Lower taxes, with the Laffer Curve, may result in the enrichment and enlargement of government through taxes. Drug legalisation may result in government taxing drugs and enriching and englarging itself from it. And a voluntary military may mean that wars are not as unpopular and rare as they would be with a draft.

Block explores what this means from the perspective of enforcing law and punishing law-breakers. Applying the same arguments to the question of activism strategy raises an even larger difficulty for the libertarian movement. For example, consider Hayek’s comment:

It may be that a free society as we have known it carries in itself the forces of its own destruction, that once freedom has been achieved it is taken for granted and ceases to be valued, and that the free growth of ideas which is the essence of a free society will bring about the destruction of the foundations on which it depends.⁷

As the saying goes, “he who endeavors to conquer more efficiently the passing over of a ditch sometimes reduces the difficulty by stepping back eight or ten paces.”⁸ Libertarians often find that taking things to their logical extremes with verbal argumentation is a good way to get the message across. Surely, taking things to their logical extremes with real world occurrences would serve the same purpose. And when all is calm it may make sense to stick to the straight and narrow, but rarely are people calm and considerate when it comes to politics, so sailing in a crooked zig-zag manner, depending on which way the winds of sentiment are blowing, may make political sense and be less precarious than trying to stick to the straight and narrow.

Given these arguments, Mencken’s attitude, beliefs and choices are further vindicated. Writing to persuade can leave you with many peculiar stances. But writing to express your libertarian beliefs is a much more straightforward enterprise, and your writing is then relevant forever and won’t come back to haunt you.

“Grounding Political Debate”

Lastly, in my essay, “Grounding Political Debate,”⁹ I address some common errors by libertarians that mislead them into believing: that libertarian reform would be easier than it is; that it would please and benefit as many people as they claim; and that pleasing and benefiting others is such a worthwhile aim.

1. Ludwig von Mises, Human Action (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 1998), p. 574.
2. F.A. Hayek, The Intellectuals and Socialism (California: Institute for Humane Studies, 1971), p. 6.
3. Ibid., p. 26.
4. Ibid., pp. 25-26. The emboldening is my own.
5. Ibid., p. 12.
6. Walter E. Block, “Is There an ‘Anomalous’ Section of the Laffer Curve?“ Libertarian Papers 2, 8 (2010).
7. The Intellectuals and Socialism, p. 25. That the opposite may also be true, see Alexis de Tocqueville, The State of Society in France Before the Revolution of 1789, trans. Henry Reeve (London: John Murray, 1888), p. 152:

   [T]he French found their position the more intolerable the better it became … It is not always by going from bad to worse that a country falls into revolution. It happens most frequently that a people, which had supported the most crushing laws without complaint, and apparently as if they were unfelt, throws them off with violence as soon as the burden begins to be diminished. The state of things destroyed by a revolution is always slightly better than that which had immediately preceded it; and experience has shown that the most dangerous moment for a bad government is usually that when it enters upon the work of reform. Nothing short of a great political genius can save the sovereign who undertakes to relieve his subjects after a long period of oppression.  The evils which were endured with patience so long as they were inevitable seem intolerable as soon as hope can be entertained about escaping from them. The abuses which are removed seem to lay bare those which remain, and to render the sense of them more acute; the evil has decreased, it is true, but the perception of the evil is more keen.

8. Giordano Bruno, The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, trans. and ed. Arthur D. Imerti (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), p. 91. I don’t know if this is where the phrase originated. I’d appreciate being informed of earlier occurrences.
9. Benjamin Marks, “Grounding Political Debate,” Libertarian Papers 1, 18 (2009).

The fact is that some of the things that men and women have desired most ardently for thousands of years are not nearer realization to-day than they were in the time of Rameses, and that there is not the slightest reason for believing that they will lose their coyness on any near to-morrow. Plans for hurrying them on have been tried since the beginning; plans for forcing them overnight are in copious and antagonistic operation to-day; and yet they continue to hold off and elude us, and the chances are that they will keep on holding off and eluding us.¹

Most libertarians I have come across have not attempted to comprehend Mencken. They claim to have read him, profess to be a fan and often repeat their favourite passages; but they do not understand his conservatism. (These same libertarians often criticise non-libertarian fans of Mencken for not understanding his libertarianism.)

Mencken was one of the most popular libertarians ever. Even those who disagreed with his ideas praised his prose. For example, during WW2, when his politics were silenced, he wrote and got published, among many other things, two volumes of autobiographical memoirs. These were allowed to be printed by the wartime censors, and even had good sales during the war. In addition, pocket-sized but full-length Armed Services Editions were printed in massive numbers and distributed freely to soldiers at the expense of the government, who paid Mencken.

His influence was felt in a variety of places, from the study of the American language to the history of the bathtub, criticism to censorship, summariser of popular opinion to exemplar of minority opinion, editor to essayist, talent scout to publishing advisor, and much more, including romances ranging from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which he inspired by his example and helped to get published, to Ask the Dust, which was written to impress him and the recent (2006) film of which stars him, to Elmer Gantry, which was dedicated to him. He was considered worthy of being the only speaker alongside FDR at an event during FDR’s Presidency. He successfully rejected a Pulitzer Prize that wasn’t even his; however, he was not so successful with the Nobel Prize.²

Despite all this, Mencken’s libertarian ideas never caught on and he never thought they would. Today, most libertarians — all of whom are inferior writers in inferior positions to Mencken — fail to speculate how to improve upon him, yet generally expect superior results. This is inexcusable, since, as Mencken said of his own archiving and writing, “Not many American authors will ever leave a more complete record … There is, indeed, probably no trace in history of a writer who left more careful accounts of himself and his contemporaries.”³ Even so, one need not read much Mencken to understand him, for he was as consistent as can be⁴ and quite repetititive. Besides, he was hardly the only libertarian who failed to popularise libertarianism; he was just very honest, humble and self-aware in admitting it without hesitation, cessation or shame.⁵

Occasionally Mencken did have “a romantic moment,”⁶ a fit of optimistic supposedly constructive advice. One example is worth addressing to prevent any false hope. He once said, “it is quite impossible to kill a passion by arguing against it. The way to kill it is to give rein under unfavorable and dispiriting conditions — to bring it down, by slow stages, to the estate of an absurdity and a horror.”⁷ But absurdities and horrors of governments — including broken promises, wars, inflations, depressions and elections — have mostly reinforced popular misconceptions, and made the truth appear even more absurd to the ignorant.⁸ So his remark is incorrect. Also, showing the absurdity of something somewhat resembles an argument, yet he said that argument cannot kill passion. So his remark is also tautological or oxymoronic.

Increased familiarity with Mencken’s conservatism may lead to fewer libertarians, for many are emotionally committed to the success of activism — they live in hope. But because activism is so rarely successful this is not such a loss, as perhaps more focus will be put into writing as an art, which will last longer than any more emotionally-fuelled shorter-term activism. But that is probably misleading, since conservative libertarians often rush their writings and non-conservative libertarians have written many impressive and lasting pieces, both in the heat of the moment and in a calm calculated way for long-term deliverance.

Simply put (with less speculative empirical wrangling): the advantage of conservatism is that there is no real disappointment; the disadvantage of it, in terms of popularity, is that most people want to be in a situation where they can be disappointed, because they have the kind of mind that is currently disappointed and with the same mindset hope to escape it — disappointment fuels them. As Mencken said of those who remain optimists, “A man who has throttled a bad impulse has at least some consolation in his agonies, but a man who has throttled a good one is in a bad way indeed.”⁹

But this, obviously, only applies to one who believes that “goodness”, especially in the form of activism, can actually count, in the sense that being helpful to others will be considered so in the opinion of these same others also. This is not to say that good people do things for approval, but rather that if they are trying to help someone who does not feel helped by their action, then perhaps no help has taken place.

I’m not saying that much of Mencken’s work is incompatible with indignation; only that he was not indignant personally. In fact, as he could see, “the man who is able to think things out for himself … even if he is not romantic personally … is very apt to spread discontent among those who are.”¹⁰ The same aptness to spread discontent applies when independent thinking takes the form of an argument against romanticism, or at least suggests the viability of an alternative – however, such “formerly romantic” minds will probably revert soon after.

There is nothing stopping conservatives from being activists. Successful communication of ideas and inducing change may not be a primary incentive of conservatives, but there are plenty of others reasons for activism, even if activism is not the best word for it. The conservative libertarian is not an enemy of the romantic libertarian. They may not share the same dreams and nightmares, but they do have a Platonic relationship. It is unlikely they would ever be hung alongside each other, but the conservative would definitely be nearby, enjoying the puppet-show.

And the indignant activism of libertarians is quite different to that of statists. In a passage written ostensibly to criticise indignant activists, Mencken’s does not fully differentiate between indignant libertarian activists and conservative libertarian non-activists like himself:

What I admire most in any man is a serene spirit, a steady freedom from moral indignation, an all-embracing tolerance — in brief, what is commonly called good sportsmanship. Such a man is not to be mistaken for one who shirks the hard knocks of life. On the contrary, he is frequently an eager gladiator, vastly enjoying opposition. But when he fights he fights in the manner of a gentleman fighting a duel, not that of a longshoreman clearing out a waterfront saloon.¹¹

Mencken’s prose was often harsh, but he always defending the rights of his ideological opponents to put forward their case. He was so tolerant of people criticising him that he organised the publication of a book of such criticisms without any counterargument defending himself.¹² His tolerance, which was melded with his understanding that value is subjective, is also shown in the following passage. When asked to give advice to someone who doubted the truth of received opinion, but worried that continued doubting would never provide the kind of satisfaction experienced as a believer, Mencken commented:

[Are the thrills of the conservative] equal, as a maker of anything rationally describable as happiness, to the comfort and security of the man of faith? … The skeptic … will say yes; the believer will say no. There you have it.¹³

In any case, Mencken’s honest negativity provides libertarians with the strongest defence — short of imprisoning, maiming or killing their accusers and not believing that will make any difference anyway — against being derided as optimistic, romantic, uncritical, utopian, and having an overgenerously positive view of man. Instead of merely claiming that government is non-existent, impossible, criminal and destructive, it allows libertarians to take the extra step and become truly radical, by showing government as empty romanticism, and libertarianism, not as a competing romanticism, but as something distinct.

1. Prejudices: Second Series, pp. 213-14. Similarly, George Jean Nathan said, in his The House of Satan (London: Knopf, 1926), p. 99:

   Over a period of eighty years, hundreds of critics have been laboring to improve the taste of the American people in music, literature, drama and politics. And today, as a result, Nevin, Tobani and Tosti are program favorites over Brahms, Beethoven and Bach; James Oliver Curwood is thirty thousand times more popular than James Branch Cabell; Anne Nichols is fifty thousand times more popular than Hauptmann; and Calvin Coolidge is President of the United States.

2. A Second Mencken Chrestomathy, p. 367.
3. Diary of H.L. Mencken, pp. 207, 382.
4. Mencken was so consistent that his arguments occasionally overlapped — that is, his attitude was consistent even when his interpretations were inconsistent. In other words, whatever the method, the results were always the same. There are some examples where “cf.” is mentioned in the footnotes of this essay.
5. As was Ludwig von Mises, who said in his Memoirs, trans. Arlene Oost-Zinner (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2009), p. 98:

   From time to time I entertained the hope that my writings would bear practical fruit and show the way for policy. I have always looked for evidence of a change in ideology. But I never actually deceived myself; my theories explain, but cannot slow the decline of a great civilization. I set out to be a reformer, but only became the historian of decline.

   It is amusing to compare this passage with the yearly reports, fundraising paraphernalia and written histories of many think tanks. For more on Mises’s conservatism, see also the two appendices of this essay.

6. For an instance of where Mencken admits having a romantic moment that he wished to correct, see A Mencken Chrestomathy, p. 432-33.
7. Ibid., p. 33. Ludwig von Mises argued the opposite in Bureaucracy (Grove City, PA: Libertarian Press, 1983), pp. 118-19:

   [S]atirical books [have failed to change "the socialists"]. Some of the most eminent writers of the nineteenth century — Balzac, Dickens, Gogol, de Maupassant, Courteline — have struck devastating blows against bureaucratism. Alduous Huxley was even courageous enough to make socialism’s dreamed paradise the target of his sardonic irony. The public was delighted. But his readers rushed nonetheless to apply for government jobs.

8. Even when poor policies have been identified, it still does not necessarily make a difference. For example, Andrew Dickson White, Fiat Money Inflation in France (New York: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1933), pp. 5-7:

   It would be a great mistake to suppose that the statesmen of France, or the French people, were ignorant of the dangers in issuing irredeemable paper money. No matter how skillfully the bright side of such a currency was exhibited, all thoughtful men in France remembered its dark side. They knew too well, from that ruinous experience, seventy years before, in John Law’s time, the difficulties and dangers of a currency not well based and controlled. They had then learned how easy it is to issue it; how difficult it is to check its overissue; how seductively it leads to the absorption of the means of the workingmen and men of small fortunes; how heavily it falls on all those living on fixed incomes, salaries or wages; how securely it creates on the ruins of the prosperity of all men of meagre means a class of debauched speculators, the most injurious class that a nation can harbor, — more injurious, indeed, than professional criminals whom the law recognizes and can throttle; how it stimulates overproduction at first and leaves every industry flaccid afterward; how it breaks down thrift and develops political and social immorality. All this France had been thoroughly taught by experience. Many then living had felt the result of such an experiment — the issues of paper money under John Law …; and there were then sitting in the National Assembly of France many who owed the poverty of their families to those issues of paper. Hardly a man in the country who had not heard those who issued it cursed as the authors of the most frightful catastrophe France had then experienced. …

   It was no mere attempt at theatrical display, but a natural impulse, which led a thoughtful statesman, during the debate, to hold up a piece of that old paper money and to declare that it was stained with the blood and tears of their fathers …

   And it would also be a mistake to suppose that the National Assembly, which discussed this matter, was composed of mere wild revolutionists; no inference could be more wide of the fact. Whatever may have been the character of the men who legislated for France afterward, no thoughtful student of history can deny, despite all the arguments and sneers of reactionary statesmen and historians, that few more keen-sighted legislative bodies have ever met than this first French Constitutional Assembly. In it were such men as Sieyès, Bailly, Necker, Mirabeau, Talleyrand, DuPont de Nemours and a multitude of others who, in various sciences and in the political world, had already shown and were destined afterward to show themselves among the strongest and shrewdest men that Europe has yet seen. …

   Oratory prevailed over science and experience. In April, 1790, came the final decree to issue four hundred millions of livres in paper money …”

9. A Mencken Chrestomathy, p. 162.
10. Ibid., p. 145. To believe otherwise is to say that readers agree with everything they read, and authors always say the same as their readers. Similarly, George Jean Nathan said, “To argue … that this or that critic is purely destructive is to imply that all his reading adherents are also of purely destructive tendencies.” [From his Testament of a Critic (New York: Knopf, 1931), p. 19; see also pp. 50-53.] And Bernard Shaw said,

    Just as reading about crime does not make us criminals, but rather causes any propensities we may have had in that direction to waste themselves harmlessly through the imagination, so reading about high virtues does not make us heroes and heroines; it wastes our heroic impulse in precisely the same manner. Therefore it is very questionable whether reading rooms should contain any good books. Rather they should be stocked with the Newgate Calendar, detective stories, lives of Cartouche, Lacenaire, Charles Peace, Moll Flanders and all the most infamous characters in fact or fiction. And when the readers, in the disgust and satiety produced by such literature, go to the reading-room librarian and say “For heaven’s sake give me a book about a saint or a hero: I am sick to death of these stupid malefactors,” it should be the duty of that librarian to say, “No my son (or my daughter, as the case may be): the proper sphere of virtue is the living world. Go out and do good until you feel wicked again. Then come back to me; and I will discharge all your evil impulses for you without hurting anyone by a batch of thoroughly bad books.” Moral: do not listen to the people who wish to purify public bookshelves: they are sitters on safety valves.

    [Bernard Shaw, "Neglected Aspects of Public Libraries," The New Republic, vol. XXIX, no. 368 (December 21, 1921), p. 97.]

11. Ibid., p. 163.
12. H.L. Mencken, Menckeniana: A Schimpflexikon (New York: Octagon Books, 1977).
13. H.L. Mencken on Religion, p. 37. See also, Minority Report, p. 141: “It seems to me that the gain to truth that [the loss of faith] involves is trivial when set beside the damage to the individual. To be sure, he is also improved, but he is almost wrecked in the process.”

Far from rejecting the world, Mencken enjoyed it. He was not an accomplice to its crimes, but an expert witness. He did not consent to it; he acquiesced sarcastically.

Mencken thought of the flag, not as some great symbol of high and mighty ideals, but realistically as a handkerchief. After all, he struggled to work when he had hay fever, which he succumbed to seasonally, much like most citizens do to symbols — which they are peppered with by the picky pecksniffian bluenoses running society, like they knows what’s what and what’s not. He believed that the flag represents the very fabric of civilisation, and that civilisation unravels as the flag unfurls. As he said, “The moral order of the world runs aground on hay fever.”¹ Consider, for example, the unflaggingly feverish religiosity of the typical response to a sneeze.

1. H.L. Mencken, Damn! A Book of Calumny (New York: Philip Goodman Company, 1918), p. 52.

How are we to account for it? My question, of course, is purely rhetorical. Explanations exist; they have existed for all times, for there is always an easy solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.¹

So here’s a messy, slightly fanciful and more descriptive than explanatory attempt:

Mencken’s criticism was not due solely to his cynicism, but to a changing symbiosis or mishmash of alertness (actually seeing things), bravery (saying unpopular things), honesty (choosing to say his own beliefs), humour, aesthetic taste, knowledge (having theories, facts and vocabulary to draw from), intelligence (interpreting history and his surroundings correctly), luck (with infinite variables coming together, including many not mentioned in this list, and talent alone insufficient), generosity (sharing his skills), and malice (sharing his views with people who didn’t want to hear it and would be humiliated by others hearing it). It was brought on, reinforced, or shaped by: what he witnessed, read,² and learnt from his father.³ Or, as he put it, “laborious research … long experience, profound pondering and incessant prayer.”⁴

Mencken’s cynicism was largely a secondary thing: a reaction to the world more than a way of looking at it. His cynicism is not contrariness except in result; it is the result of reasoning inductively — assuming that what has happened in the past, will happen in the future — and deductively — finding what an espoused position entails. He may have been arrogant, cruel and pessimistic, but he was also right. He was both idealist and realist, and, since they were both accurate and therefore mutually supporting, never compromised either position. He did not lack faith; he lacked deserving locations for it. He believed that death was very popular, seeing that few people ever returned from it.

Mencken was not shallow, cheap or dismissive. He made fun of things because he took them more seriously than their most avid supporters. He was able to make light of things, because he was not in the dark about them. His criticisms were not shots in the dark. He took frauds like government so seriously that, rather than accept the jests of its defenders, he worked out where its policies and principles led. Many self-professed and so-called emulators of Mencken fail to realise this. Sometimes they get close, but no cigar. They stand for nothing and sneer or joke about everything, which is different to Mencken and often less forceful. Instead of being incisive and provocative, they attract attention to, distract from or trivialise the issue. This is not necessarily a bad thing, and it may even be fierce. But without Mencken’s principled approach (a conservative libertarianism), those hoping to emulate him will find their work lacks his consistent fierceness — as Mencken said, “Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.”⁵ Also, because facts date whereas principles are timeless, their humour and force rarely lasts long. As Mencken said, they are:

engaged endlessly upon a laborious and furious discussion of transient futilities … wholly unconscious of the underlying political currents … [T]he puerile combats of parties and candidates [are] scarcely … distinguished from a mere combat for jobs … What is printed in the newspapers … acres and acres of it every day, is dead the day after it is printed.⁶

It was because Mencken could see so clearly what was happening that he was amused by it. It was not because he was easily amused, had a fertile imagination or was a talented entertainer.

1. A Mencken Chrestomathy, p. 443.
2. For example, Letters of H.L. Mencken, p. 337: “The books of your old chief, Dr. Sumner, made a powerful impression on me when I was young, and their influence has survived. I only wish that such things as ‘The Forgotten Man’ could be printed as circulars in editions of millions.”
3. On the influence of Mencken’s father, see H.L. Mencken, Happy Days (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1996), pp. 188, 251-52: e.g., “I [Mencken] picked up the idea [‘that reform was mainly only a conspiracy of prehensile charlatans to mulct taxpayers’] from him [Mencken senior] … He [Mencken senior] believed that political corruption was inevitable under democracy, and even argued, out of his own experience, that it had its uses.”
4. A Mencken Chrestomathy, p. 575; and H.L. Mencken, Mencken’s Last Campaign, ed. Joseph C. Goulden (Washington, D.C.: The New Republic Book Company, 1978), p. 112.
5. A Mencken Chrestomathy, p. 439.
6. A Second Mencken Chrestomathy, pp. 373-74.