Chapter VII: Part 7

We are passing through a period of socialization. All signs point to the establishment of some sort of social state or industrial commonwealth. No one can foresee the extent, to which capital now privately owned is to be transferred to the public. It is doubtful if anything can be done to check this process. The tendency is no sooner blocked along one channel than it begins to seep through another. In itself there need be nothing alarming about this transition. If industry could be better co-ordinated and more wisely administered by non-crowd men for the common good, the change might work out to our national advantage.

It is possible to conceive of a society in which a high degree of social democracy, even communism, might exist along with a maximum of freedom and practical achievement. But we should first have to get over our crowd-ways of thinking and acting. People would have to regard the state as a purely administrative affair. They would have to organize for definite practical ends, and select their leaders and administrators very much as certain corporations now do, strictly on the basis of their competency. Political institutions would have to be made such that they could not be seized by special groups to enhance themselves at the expense of the rest. Partisanship would have to cease. Every effort would have to be made to loosen the social control over the individual's personal habits. The kind of people who have an inner gnawing to regulate their neighbors, the kind who cannot accept the fact of their psychic inferiority and must consequently make crowds by way of compensation, would have to be content to mind their own business. Police power would have to be reduced to the minimum necessary to protect life and keep the industries running. People would have to become much more capable of self-direction as well as of voluntary co-operation than they are now. They would have to be more resentful of petty official tyranny, more independent in their judgments and at the same time more willing to accept the advice and authority of experts. They would have to place the control of affairs in the hands of the type of man against whose dominance the weaker brethren have in all ages waged war--that is, the free spirits and natural masters of men. All pet dogmas and cult ideas that clashed with practical considerations would have to be swept away.

Such a conception of society is, of course, wholly utopian. It could not possibly be realized by people behaving and thinking as crowds. With our present crowd-making habits, the process of greater socialization of industry means only increased opportunities for crowd-tyranny. In the hands of a dominant crowd an industrial state would be indeed what Herbert Spencer called the "coming slavery."

As it is, the state has become overgrown and bureaucratic. Commissions of all sorts are being multiplied year by year. Public debts are piled up till they approach the point of bankruptcy. Taxes are increasing in the same degree. Statutes are increased in number until one can hardly breathe without violating some decree, ordinance, or bit of sumptuary legislation. Every legislative assembly is constantly besieged by the professional lobbyists of a swarm of reformist crowds. Busybodies of every description twist the making and the enforcement of law into conformity with their peculiar prejudices. Censorships of various kinds are growing in number and effrontery. Prohibition is insincerely put forth as a war measure. Ignorant societies for the "suppression of vice" maul over our literature and our art. Parents of already more children than they can support may not be permitted lawfully to possess scientific knowledge of the means of the prevention of conception. The government, both state and national, takes advantage of the war for freedom to pass again the hated sort of "alien and sedition" laws from which the country thought it had freed itself a century ago. A host of secret agents and volunteer "guardians of public safety" are ready to place every citizen under suspicion of disloyalty to the government. Any advocacy of significant change in established political practices is regarded as sedition. An inquisition is set up for the purpose of inquiring into people's private political opinions. Reputable citizens are, on the flimsiest hearsay evidence or rumor that they entertain nonconformist views, subjected to public censure by notoriety-seeking "investigation commissions"--and by an irresponsible press. Only members of an established political party in good standing are permitted to criticize the acts of the President of the United States. Newspapers and magazines are suppressed and denied the privilege of the mails at the whim of opinionated post-office officers or of ignorant employees of the Department of Justice. An intensely patriotic weekly paper in New York, which happened to hold unconventional views on the subject of religion, has had certain issues of its paper suppressed for the offense of publishing accounts of the alleged misconduct of the Y. M. C. A.

The stupidity and irresponsibility of the Russian spy-system which has grown up in this country along with our overweening state is illustrated by an amusing little experience which happened to myself several months after the signing of the armistice with Germany. All through the trying months of the war the great audience at Cooper Union had followed me with a loyalty and tolerance which was truly wonderful. Though I knew that many had not always been in hearty accord with my rather spontaneous and outspoken Americanism, the Cooper Union Forum was one of the few places in America where foreign and labor elements were present in large numbers in which there was no outbreak or demonstration of any kind which could possibly be interpreted as un-American. We all felt that perhaps the People's Institute with its record of twenty years' work behind it had been of some real service to the nation in adhering strictly to its educational method and keeping its discussions wholly above the level of any sort of crowd-propaganda.

However, in the course of our educational work, it became my task to give to a selected group of advanced students a course of lectures upon the Theory of Knowledge. The course was announced with the title, "How Free Men Think," and the little folder contained the statement that it was to be a study of the Humanist logic, with Professor F. C. S. Schiller's philosophical writings to be used as textbooks. The publication of this folder announcing the course was held up by the printer, and we learned that he had been told not to print it by some official personage whose identity was not revealed. Notwithstanding the fact that Schiller is professor of philosophy in Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and is one of the best-known philosophical writers in the English-speaking world, and holds views practically identical with what is called the "American School," led by the late William James, it developed that the government agents--or whoever they were--objected to the publication of the announcement on the ground that they _thought Schiller was a German_. Such is our intellectual freedom regarding matters which have no political significance whatever, in a world made "safe for democracy." But we must not permit ourselves to despair or grow weary of life in this "safety first" world--waves of pseudo-patriotic panic often follow on the heels of easily won victory. Crowd-phenomena of such intensity are usually of short duration, as these very excesses soon produce the inevitable reaction.

The question, however, arises, is democracy more conducive to freedom than other forms of political organization? To most minds the terms "liberty" and "democracy" are almost synonymous. Those who consider that liberty consists in having a vote, in giving everyone a voice regardless of whether he has anything to say, will have no doubts in the matter. But to those whose thinking means more than the mere repetition of eighteenth-century crowd-ideas, the question will reduce itself to this: Is democracy more conducive to crowd-behavior than other forms of government? Le Bon and those who identify the crowd with the masses would answer with an _a priori_ affirmative. I do not believe the question may be answered in any such off-hand manner. It is a question of fact rather than of theory. Theoretically, since we have demonstrated I think that the crowd is not the common people as such, but is a peculiar form of psychic behavior, it would seem that there is no logical necessity for holding that democracy must always and everywhere be the rule of the mob. And we have seen that other forms of society may also suffer from crowd-rule. I suspect that the repugnance which certain aristocratic, and bourgeois writers also, show for democracy is less the horror of crowd-rule as such, than dislike of seeing control pass over to a crowd other than their own. Theoretically at least, democracy calls for a maximum of self-government and personal freedom. The fact that democracy is rapidly degenerating into tyranny of all over each may be due, not to the democratic ideal itself, but the growing tendency to crowd-behavior in modern times. It may be that certain democratic ideals are not so much causes as effects of crowd-thinking and action. It cannot be denied that such ideals come in very handy these days in the way of furnishing crowds with effective catchwords for their propaganda and of providing them with ready-made justifications for their will to power. I should say that democracy has _indirectly permitted_, rather than directly caused, an extension in the range of thought and behavior over which the crowd assumes dictatorship.

In comparing democracy with more autocratic forms of government, this extent or range of crowd-control over the individual is important. Of course, human beings will never permit to one another a very large degree of personal freedom. It is to the advantage of everyone in the struggle for existence to reduce his neighbors as much as possible to automatons. In this way one's own adjustment to the behavior of others is made easier. If we can induce or compel all about us to confine their actions to perfect routine, then we may predict with a fair degree of accuracy their future behavior, and be prepared in advance to meet it. We all dread the element of the unexpected, and nowhere so much as in the conduct of our neighbors. If we could only get rid of the humanly unexpected, society would be almost fool-proof. Hence the resistance to new truths, social change, progress, nonconformity of any sort; hence our orthodoxies and conventions; hence our incessant preaching to our neighbors to "be good"; hence the fanaticism with which every crowd strives to keep its believers in line. Much of this insistence on regularity is positively necessary. Without it there could be no social or moral order at all. It is in fact the source and security of the accepted values of civilization, as Schiller has shown.

But the process of keeping one another in line is carried much farther than is necessary to preserve the social order. It is insisted upon to the extent that will guarantee the survival, even the dominance, of the spiritually sick, the morally timid, the trained-animal men, those who would revert to savagery, or stand utterly helpless the moment a new situation demanded that they do some original thinking in the place of performing the few stereotyped tricks which they have acquired; the dog-in-the-manger people, who because they can eat no meat insist that all play the dyspeptic lest the well-fed outdistance them in the race of life or set them an example in following which they get the stomach ache; the people who, because they cannot pass a saloon door without going in and getting drunk, cannot see a moving-picture, or read a modern book, or visit a bathing beach without being tormented with their gnawing promiscuous eroticism, insist upon setting up their own perverted dilemmas as the moral standard for everybody.

Such people exist in great numbers in every society. They are always strong for "brotherly love," for keeping up appearances, for removing temptation from the path of life, for uniform standards of belief and conduct. Each crowd, in its desire to become the majority, to hold the weaker brethren within its fold, and especially as everyone of us has a certain amount of this "little brother" weakness in his own nature, which longs to be pampered if only the pampering can be done without hurting our pride--the crowd invariably plays to this sort of thing and bids for its support. As the little brother always expresses his survival-values in terms of accepted crowd-ideas, no crowd can really turn him down without repudiating its abstract principles. In fact, it is just this weakness in our nature which, as we have seen, leads us to become crowd-men in the first place. Furthermore, we have seen that any assertion of personal independence is resented by the crowd because it weakens the crowd-faith of all.

The measure of freedom granted to men will depend, therefore, upon how many things the crowd attempts to consider its business. There is a law of inertia at work here. In monarchical forms of government, where the crowd-will is exercised through a single human agent, the monarch may be absolute in regard to certain things which are necessary to his own and his crowd's survival. In such matters "he can do no wrong"; there is little or no appeal from his decisions. But the very thoroughness with which he hunts down nonconformity in matters which directly concern his authority, leaves him little energy for other things. Arbitrary power is therefore usually limited to relatively few things, since the autocrat cannot busy himself with everything that is going on. Within the radius of the things which the monarch attempts to regulate he may be an intolerable tyrant, but so long as he is obeyed in these matters, so long as things run on smoothly on the surface, there are all sorts of things which he would prefer not to have brought to his attention, as witness, for instance, the letter of Trajan to the younger Pliny.

With a democracy it is different. While the exercise of authority is never so inexorable--indeed democratic states frequently pass laws for the purpose of placing the community on record "for righteousness," rather than with the intention of enforcing such laws--the number of things which a democracy will presume to regulate is vastly greater than in monarchical states. As sovereignty is universal, everybody becomes lawmaker and regulator of his neighbors. As the lawmaking power is present everywhere, nothing can escape its multieyed scrutiny. All sorts of foibles, sectional interests, group demands, class prejudices become part of the law of the land. A democracy is no respecter of persons and can, under its dogma of equality before the law, admit of no exceptions. The whole body politic is weighed down with all the several bits of legislation which may be demanded by any of the various groups within it. An unusual inducement and opportunity are thus provided for every crowd to force its own crowd-dilemmas upon all.

The majority not only usurps the place of the king, but it tends to subject the whole range of human thought and behavior to its authority--everything, in fact, that anyone, disliking in his neighbors or finding himself tempted to do, may wish to "pass a law against." Every personal habit and private opinion becomes a matter for public concern. Custom no longer regulates; all is rationalized according to the logic of the crowd-mind. Public policy sits on the doorstep of every man's personal conscience. The citizen in us eats up the man. Not the tiniest personal comfort may yet be left us in private enjoyment. All that cannot be translated into propaganda or hold its own in a legislative lobby succumbs. If we are to preserve anything of our personal independence, we must organize ourselves into a crowd like the rest and get out in the streets and set up a public howl. Unless some one pretty soon starts a pro-tobacco crusade and proves to the newspaper-reading public that the use of nicotine by everybody in equal amount is absolutely necessary for the preservation of the American home, for economic efficiency and future military supremacy, we shall doubtless all soon be obliged to sneak down into the cellar and smoke our pipes in the dark.

Here we see the true argument for a written constitution, and also, I think, a psychological principle which helps us to decide what should be in a constitution and what should not. The aim of a constitution is to put a limit to the number of things concerning which a majority-crowd may lord it over the individual. I am aware that the appeal to the Constitution is often abused by predatory interests which skulk behind its phraseology in their defense of special economic privilege. But, nevertheless, people in a democracy may be free only so long as they submit to the dictation of the majority in _just and only those few interests concerning which a monarch, were he in existence, would take advantage of them for his personal ends_. There are certain political and economic relations which cannot be left to the chance exploitation of any individual or group that happens to come along. Some one is sure to come along, for you may be sure that if there is a possible opportunity to take advantage, some one will do it sooner or later.

Now because people have discovered that there is no possible individual freedom in respect to certain definite phases of their common life which are always exposed to seizure by exploiters, democrats have substituted a tyranny of the majority for the tyranny of the one or the favored few which would otherwise be erected at these points. Since it is necessary to give up freedom in these regions anyway, there is some compensation in spreading the tyrannizing around so that each gets a little share of it. But every effort should be made to _limit the tyranny of the majority to just these points_. And the line limiting the number of things that the majority may meddle with must be drawn as hard and fast as possible, since every dominant crowd, as we have seen, will squeeze the life out of everything human it can get its hands on. The minute a majority finds that it can extend its tyranny beyond this strictly constitutionally limited sphere, nothing remains to stop it; it becomes worse than an autocracy. Tyranny is no less abhorrent just because the number of tyrants is increased. A nation composed of a hundred million little tyrants snooping and prying into every corner may be democratic, but, personally, if that ever comes to be the choice I think I should prefer one tyrant. He might occasionally look the other way and leave me a free man, long enough at least for me to light my pipe.

True democrats will be very jealous of government. Necessary as it is, there is no magic about government, no saving grace. Government cannot redeem us from our sins; it will always require all the decency we possess to redeem the government. Government always represents the moral dilemmas of the worst people, not the best. It cannot give us freedom; it can give or grant us nothing but what it first takes from us. It is we who grant to the government certain powers and privileges necessary for its proper functioning. We do not exist for the government; it exists for us. We are not its servants; it is our servant. Government at best is a useful and necessary machine, a mechanism by which we protect ourselves from one another. It has no more rights and dignities of its own than are possessed by any other machine. Its laws should be obeyed, for the same reason that the laws of mechanics should be obeyed--otherwise the machine will not run.

As a matter of fact it is not so much government itself against which the democrat must be on guard, but the various crowds which are always seeking to make use of the machinery of government in order to impose their peculiar tyranny upon all and invade the privacy of everyone. By widening the radius of governmental control, the crowd thus pinches down the individuality of everyone with the same restrictions as are imposed by the crowd upon its own members.

Conway says:

Present-day Democracy rests on a few organized parties. What
would a democracy be like if based on millions of independent
Joneses each of whom decided to vote this or that way as he
pleased? The dominion of the crowd would be at an end, both for
better and for worse. We shall not behold any such revolution in
the world as we know it....

Thus we must conclude that the crowd by its very nature tends,
and always must tend, to diminish (if possible, to the vanishing
point) the freedom of its members, and not in one or two
respects alone, but in all. The crowd's desire is to swallow up
the individuality of its members and reduce them one and all to
the condition of crowd units whose whole life is lived according
to the crowd-pattern and is sacrificed and devoted to
crowd-interests....

An excellent illustration of this crowd-dominance crops up in my
afternoon paper.... It appears that in certain parts of the
country artisans, by drinking too much alcohol, are reducing
their capacity of doing their proper work, which happens at the
moment to be of great importance to the country at war. Many
interferences with liberty are permitted in war time by general
consent. It is accordingly proposed to put difficulties in the
way of these drinkers by executive orders. One would suppose
that the just way to do this would be to make a list of the
drinkers and prohibit their indulgence. But this is not the way
the crowd works. To it everyone of its constituent members is
like another, and all must be drilled and controlled alike....
Whatever measure is adopted must fall evenly on all classes,
upon club, restaurant and hotel as upon public house. Could
anything be more absurd? Lest a gunmaker or a shipbuilder in
Glasgow should drink too much, Mr. Asquith must not take a glass
of sherry with his lunch at the Athenæum!...

We live in days when crowd dominion over individuals has been
advancing at a headlong pace.... If he is not to drink in London
lest a Glasgow engineer should get drunk, why should not his
eating be alike limited? Why not the style and cut of his
clothes? Why not the size and character of his house? He must
cause his children to be taught at least the minimum of muddled
information which the government calls education. He must insure
for his dependents the attention of an all-educated physician,
and the administration of drugs known to be useless. If the
crowd had its way every mother and infant would be under the
orders of inspectors, regardless of the capacity of the parent.
We should all be ordered about in every relation of life from
infancy to manhood.... Freedom would utterly vanish, and this,
not because the crowd can arrange things better than the
individual. It cannot. It lacks the individual's brains. The
ultimate reason for all this interference is the crowd's desire
to swallow up and control the unit. The instinct of all crowds
is to dominate, to capture and overwhelm the individual, to make
him their slave, to absorb all his life for their service.

The criticism has often been made of democracy that it permits too much freedom; the reverse of this is nearer the truth. It was de Tocqueville, I think, who first called attention to the "tyranny of the majority" in democratic America. Probably one of the most comprehensive and discriminating studies that have ever been made of the habits and institutions of any nation may be found in the work of this observing young Frenchman who visited our country at the close of its first half century of political independence. De Tocqueville's account of Democracy in America is still good reading, much of it being applicable to the present. This writer was in no sense an unfriendly critic. He praised much that he saw, but even in those days (the period of 1830) he was not taken in by the fiction that, because the American people live under laws of their own making, they are therefore free. Much of the following passages taken here and there from Chapters XIV and XV is as true today as it was when it was written:

America is therefore a free country in which, lest anybody be
hurt by your remarks, you are not allowed to speak freely of
private individuals, of the State, or the citizens, or the
authorities, of public or private undertakings, in short of
anything at all, except perhaps the climate and the soil, and
even then Americans will be found ready to defend both as if
they had concurred in producing them.

The American submits without a murmur to the authority of the
pettiest magistrate. This truth prevails even in the trivial
details of national life. An American cannot converse--he speaks
to you as if he were addressing a meeting. If an American were
condemned to confine himself to his own affairs, he would be
robbed of one-half of his existence; his wretchedness would be
unbearable....

The moral authority of the majority in America is based on the
notion that there is more intelligence and wisdom in a number of
men united than in a single individual.... The theory of
equality is thus applied to the intellects of men.

The French, under the old regime, held it for a maxim that the
King could do no wrong. The Americans entertain the same opinion
with regard to the majority.

In the United States, all parties are willing to recognize the
rights of the majority, because they all hope at some time to be
able to exercise them to their own advantage. The majority
therefore in that country exercises a prodigious actual
authority and a power of opinion which is nearly as great (as
that of the absolute autocrat). No obstacles exist which can
impair or even retard its progress so as to make it heed the
complaints of those whom it crushes upon its path. This state of
things is harmful in itself and dangerous for the future.

As the majority is the only power which it is important to
court, all its projects are taken up with the greatest ardor;
but no sooner is its attention distracted than all this ardor
ceases.

There is no power on earth so worthy of honor in itself, or
clothed with rights so sacred, that I would admit its
uncontrolled and all-predominant authority.

In my opinion the main evil of the present democratic
institutions of the United States does not arise, as is so often
asserted in Europe, from their weakness, but from their
irresistible strength.... I am not so much alarmed by the
excessive liberty which reigns in that country, as by the
inadequate securities which one finds against tyranny. When an
individual or party is wronged in the United States, to whom can
he apply for redress?

It is in the examination of the exercise of thought in the
United States that we clearly perceive how far the power of the
majority surpasses all the powers with which we are acquainted
in Europe. At the present time the most absolute monarchs in
Europe cannot prevent certain opinions hostile to their
authority from circulating in secret through their dominions and
even in their courts.

It is not so in America. So long as the majority is undecided,
discussion is carried on, but as soon as its decision is
announced everyone is silent....

I know of no country in which there is so little independence of
mind and real freedom of discussion as in America. In America
the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of
opinion. Within these barriers an author may write what he
pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them. Not that he is
in danger of an _auto-da-fe_, but he is exposed to continued
obloquy and persecution. His political career is closed for
ever. Every sort of compensation, even that of celebrity, is
refused him. Those who think like him have not the courage to
speak out, and abandon him to silence. He yields at length,
overcome by the daily effort which he has to make, and subsides
into silence as if he felt remorse for having spoken the truth.

Fetters and headsmen were coarse instruments ... but
civilization has perfected despotism itself. Under absolute
despotism of one man, the body was attacked to subdue the soul,
but the soul escaped the blows and rose superior. Such is not
the course adopted in democratic republics; there the body is
left free, but the soul is enslaved....

The ruling power in the United States is not to be made game of.
The smallest reproach irritates its sensibilities. The slightest
joke which has any foundation in truth renders it indignant.
Everything must be the subject of encomium. No writer, whatever
his eminence, can escape paying his tribute of adoration to his
fellow citizens.

The majority lives in the perpetual utterance of self-applause,
and there are certain truths which Americans can only learn from
strangers, or from experience. If America has not yet had any
great writers, the reason is given in these facts--there can be
no literary genius without freedom of opinion, and freedom of
opinion does not exist in America.

Such passages as the above, quoted from the words of a friendly student of American democracy, show the impression which, notwithstanding our popular prattle about freedom, thoughtful foreigners have since the beginning received. And de Tocqueville wrote long before crowd-thinking had reached anything like the development we see at present. To-day the tyrannizing is not confined to the majority-crowd. All sorts of minority-crowds, impatient of waiting until they can by fair means persuade the majority to agree with them, begin to practice coercion upon everyone within reach the minute they fall into possession of some slight advantage which may be used as a weapon. From the industrial side we were first menaced by the "invisible government" of organized vested interests; now, by a growing tendency to government by strikes. Organized gangs of all sorts have at last learned the amusing trick of pointing a pistol at the public's head and threatening it with starvation, and up go its hands, and the gang gains whatever it wants for itself, regardless of anyone else. But this "hold-up game" is by no means confined to labor. Capitalistic soviets have since the beginning of the war taken advantage of situations to enhance their special crowd-interests. The following, quoted from a letter written during the war to the _Atlantic Monthly_, by a thoroughly American writer, Charles D. Stewart, describes a type of mob rule which existed in almost every part of the nation while we were fighting for freedom abroad:

Carlyle said that "Of all forms of government, a government of
busybodies is the worst." This is true. It is worse than
Prussianism, because that is one form of government, at least;
and worse than Socialism, because Socialism would be run by law,
anyway. But government by busybodies has neither head nor tail;
working outside the law, it becomes lawless; and having no law
to support it, it finally depends for its enforcement upon
hoodlums and mob rule. When the respectable and wealthy elements
are resorting to this sort of government, abetted by the
newspapers and by all sorts of busybody societies intent upon
"government by public sentiment," we finally have a new thing in
the world and a most obnoxious one--mob rule by the rich; with
the able assistance of the hoodlums--always looking for a
chance.

It starts as follows:

The government wishes a certain amount of money. It therefore
appeals to local pride; it sets a "quota," which has been
apportioned to each locality, and promises of a fine
"over-the-top" flag to be hoisted over the courthouse. All well
and good; local pride is a very fine thing, competition is
wholesome.

But the struggle that ensues is not so much local pride as it
looks to be.

Milwaukee, for instance, a big manufacturing center, is noted
for its German population. This, the local proprietors fear, may
affect its trade. It may be boycotted to some extent. A
traveling man comes back and says that a certain dealer in
stoves refuses to buy stoves made in Milwaukee!

Ha!--Milwaukee must redeem its reputation; it must always go
over the top: it must be able to affix this stamp to all its
letters.

Now, as the state has a quota, and the county and city has each
its quota, so each individual must have his quota. Each
individual must be "assessed" to buy a certain quota [government
war loan] of bonds. Success must be made sure: the manufacturers
must see the honor of Milwaukee, and Wisconsin, maintained.

It is not compulsory to give a certain "assessed" amount to the
Y. M. C. A.; and the government does not make a certain quota of
bonds compulsory on citizens--oh, no! it is not compulsory, only
you must abide by your assessment. And we will see that you do.
No excuse accepted....

Picture to yourself the following "collection committee"
traveling out of the highly civilized, "kultured" city of
Milwaukee.

Twenty-five automobiles containing sixty to seventy respectable
citizens of Milwaukee.

One color guard (a flag at the head) with two home guardsmen in
citizens' clothes.

Two deputy sheriffs.

One "official" photographer.

One "official" stenographer.

One banker (this personage to make arrangements to lend a farmer
the money in case he protests that he has subscribed too much
already).

This phalanx, entirely lawless, moves down upon a farmer who is
urging two horses along a cloddy furrow, doing his fall plowing.

They form a semicircle about him; the speechmaker says, "Let us
salute the flag" (watching him to see that he does it promptly);
and while his horses stand there the speechmaker delivers a
speech. He must subscribe his "assessed" amount--no excuses
accepted. If he owes for the farm, and has just paid his
interest, and has only fifteen dollars to go on with, it makes
no difference. He must subscribe the amount of his "assessment,"
and "sign here."

If not, what happens? The farmer all the time, of course, is
probably scared out of his wits, or does not know what to make
of this delegation of notables bearing down upon his solitary
task in the fields. But if he argues too much, he finds this.
They have a large package of yellow placards reading:

THE OCCUPANT OF THESE PREMISES HAS REFUSED TO TAKE
HIS JUST SHARE OF LIBERTY BONDS.

And they put them all over his place. He probably signs.

Now bear in mind that this method is not practiced merely
against farmers who have made unpatriotic remarks, or have
refused to support the war. It is practiced against a farmer who
has taken only one hundred dollars when he was assessed a
hundred and fifty--and this is to make him "come across" with
the remainder.

You might ask, Is this comic opera or is it government?

And now we come to the conclusion. Imagine yourself either a
workman in Milwaukee, or a farmer out in the country. You are
dealt with in this entirely Prussian manner--possibly the
committee, which knows little of your financial difficulties in
your home, has just assessed you arbitrarily.

Your constitutional rights do not count. There is no remedy. If
you are painted yellow, the District Attorney will pass the
buck--he knows what the manufacturer expects of him, and the
financier. The state officers of these drives, Federal
representatives, are always Milwaukee bankers.

But for you there is no remedy if you are "assessed" too high.

With the Y. M. C. A., and other religious society drives, the
same assessment scheme is worked. You cannot give to the
Y. M. C. A. You are told right off how much you are to pay.

It would seem that in our democracy freedom consists first of freedom to vote; second, of freedom to make commercial profit; third, of freedom to make propaganda; fourth, of freedom from intellectual and moral responsibility. Each of these "liberties" is little more than a characteristic form of crowd-behavior. The vote, our most highly prized modern right, is nearly always so determined by crowd-thinking that as an exercise of individual choice it is a joke. Men are herded in droves and delivered by counties in almost solid blocks by professional traders of political influence. Before each election a campaign of crowd-making is conducted in which every sort of vulgarity and insincerity has survival value, in which real issues are so lost in partisan propaganda as to become unrecognizable. When the vote is cast it is commonly a choice between professional crowd-leaders whose competency consists in their ability to Billy Sundayize the mob rather than in any marked fitness for the office to which they aspire--also between the horns of a dilemma which wholly misstates the issue involved and is trumped up chiefly for purposes of political advertising. Time and again the franchise thus becomes an agency by which rival crowds may fasten their own tyrannies upon one another.

Freedom to make commercial profit, to get ahead of others in the race for dollars, is what democracy generally means by "opportunity." Nothing is such a give-away of the modern man as the popular use of the word "individualism." It is no longer a philosophy of _becoming_ something genuine and unique, but of _getting_ something and using it according to your own whims and for personal ends regardless of the effect upon others. This pseudo-individualism encourages the rankest selfishness and exploitation to go hand in hand with the most deadly spiritual conformity and inanity. Such "individualism" is, as I have pointed out, a crowd-idea, for it is motivated by a cheaply disguised ideal of personal superiority through the mere fact of possessing things. Paradoxical as it may appear at first sight, this is really the old crowd notion of "equality," for, great as are the differences of wealth which result, every man may cherish the fiction that he possesses the sort of ability necessary for this kind of social distinction. Such superiority thus has little to do with personal excellence; it is the result of the external accident of success. One man may still be "as good as another."

Against this competitive struggle now there has grown up a counter-crowd ideal of collectivism. But here also the fiction of universal spiritual equality is maintained; the competitive struggle is changed from an individual to a gang struggle, while the notion that personal worth is the result of the environment and may be achieved by anyone whose belly is filled still persists. Proletarians for the most part wish, chinch-bug fashion, to crawl into the Elysian fields now occupied by the hated capitalists. The growing tendency to industrial democracy will probably in the near future cut off this freedom to make money, which has been the chief "liberty" of political democracy until now, but whether liberty in general will be the gainer thereby remains to be seen. One rather prominent Socialist in New York declares that liberty is a "myth." He is correct, in so far as the democratic movement, either political or social, is a crowd-phenomenon. Socialist agitators are always demanding "liberty" nevertheless, but the liberty which they demand is little more than freedom to make their own propaganda. And this leads us to the third liberty permitted by modern democracy.

The "freedom of speech" which is everywhere demanded in the name of democracy is not at all freedom in the expression of individual opinion. It is only the demand for advertising space on the part of various crowds for the publication of their shibboleths and propaganda. Each crowd, while demanding this freedom for itself, seeks to deny it to other crowds, and all unite in denying it to the non-crowd man wherever possible. The Puritan's "right to worship according to the dictates of a man's own conscience" did not apply to Quakers, Deists, or Catholics. When Republicans were "black abolitionists" they would have regarded any attempt to suppress _The Liberator_, as edited by William Lloyd Garrison, as an assault upon the constitutional liberties of the whole nation. But they are not now particularly interested in preserving the constitutional liberties of the nation as represented in the right of circulation of _The Liberator_, edited by Max Eastman. In Jefferson's time, when Democrats were accused of "Jacobinism," they invoked the "spirit of 1776" in opposition to the alien and sedition laws under which their partisan propaganda suffered limitation. To-day, when they are striving to outdo the Republicans in "Americanization propaganda," they actually stand sponsor for an espionage law which would have made Jefferson or Andrew Jackson froth at the mouth. Socialists are convinced that liberty is dead because Berger and Debs are convicted of uttering opinions out of harmony with temporarily dominant crowd-ideas of patriotism. But when Theodore Dreiser was put under the ban for the crime of writing one of the few good novels produced in America, I do not recall that Socialists held any meetings of protest in Madison Square Garden. I have myself struggled in vain for three hours or more on a street corner in Green Point trying to tell liberty-loving Socialists the truth about the Gary schools. When the politicians in our legislative assemblies were tricked into passing the obviously unliberal Eighteenth Amendment, I was much interested in learning how the bulk of the Socialists in the Cooper Union audiences felt about it. As I had expected, they regarded it as an unpardonable infringement of personal freedom, as a typical piece of American Puritan hypocrisy and pharisaism. But they were, on the whole, in favor of it because they thought it would be an aid to Bolshevist propaganda, since it would make the working class still more discontented! Such is liberty in a crowd-governed democracy.... It is nothing but the _liberty of crowds to be crowds_.

The fourth liberty in democratic society to-day is freedom from moral and intellectual responsibility. This is accomplished by the magic of substituting the machinery of the law for self-government, bureaucratic meddlesomeness for conscience, crowd-tyranny for personal decency. Professor Faguet has called democracy the "cult of incompetence" and the "dread of responsibility." He is not far wrong, but these epithets apply not so much to democracy as such as to democracy under the heel of the crowd. The original aim of democracy, so far as its philosophical thinkers conceived of it, was to set genius free from the trammels of tradition, realize a maximum of self-government, and make living something of an adventure. But crowds do not so understand democracy. Every crowd looks upon democracy simply as a scheme whereby it may have its own way. We have seen that the crowd-mind as such is a device for "kidding" ourselves, for representing the easiest path to the enhancement of our self-feeling as something highly moral, for making our personal right appear like universal righteousness, for dressing up our will to lord it over others, as if it were devotion to impersonal principle. As we have seen, the crowd therefore insists upon universal conformity; goodness means only making everyone alike. By taking refuge in the abstract and ready-made system of crowd-ideas, the unconscious will to power is made to appear what it is not; the burden of responsibility is transferred to the group with its fiction of absolute truth. Le Bon noted the fact of the irresponsibility of crowds, but thought that such irresponsibility was due to the fact that the crowd, being an anonymous gathering, the individual could lose his identity in the multitude. The psychology of the unconscious has provided us with what I think is a better explanation, but the fact of irresponsibility remains and is evident in all the influence of crowd-thinking upon democratic institutions. The crowd-ideal of society is one in which every individual is protected not only against exploitation, but against temptation--protected therefore _against himself_. The whole tendency of democracy in our times is toward just such inanity. Without the least critical analysis of accepted moral dilemmas, we are all to be made moral in spite of ourselves, regardless of our worth, without effort on our part, moral in the same way that machines are moral, by reducing the will to mere automatic action, leaving no place for choice and uncertainty, having everyone wound up and oiled and regulated to run at the same speed. Each crowd therefore strives to make its own moral ideas the law of the land. Law becomes thus a sort of anthology of various existing crowd-hobbies. In the end moral responsibility is passed over to legislatures, commissions, detectives, inspectors, and bureaucrats. Anything that "gets by" the public censor, however rotten, we may wallow in with a perfect feeling of respectability. The right and necessity of choosing our way is superseded by a system of statutory taboos, which as often as not represent the survival values of the meanest little people in the community--the kind who cannot look upon a nude picture without a struggle with their perverted eroticism, or entertain a significant idea without losing their faith.

The effect of all this upon the intellectual progress and the freedom of art in democratic society is obvious, and is just what, to one who understands the mechanisms of the crowd-mind, might be expected. No wonder de Tocqueville said he found less freedom of opinion in America than elsewhere. Explain it as you will, the fact is here staring us in the face. Genius in our democracy is not free. It must beg the permission of little crowd-men for its right to exist. It must stand, hat in hand, at the window of the commissioner of licenses and may gain a permit for only so much of its inspiration as happens to be of use-value to the uninspired. It must play the conformist, pretend to be hydra-headed rather than unique, useful rather than genuine, a servant of the "least of these" rather than their natural master. It must advertise, but it may not prophesy. It may flatter and patronize the stupid, but it may not stand up taller than they. In short, democracy everywhere puts out the eyes of its Samson, cuts off his golden-rayed locks, and makes him grind corn to fill the bellies of the Philistines.

From the beginning of the nineteenth century until now it has been chiefly the business man, the political charlatan, the organizer of trade, the rediscoverer of popular prejudices who have been preferred in our free modern societies. Keats died of a broken heart; Shelley and Wagner were exiled; Beethoven and Schubert were left to starve; Darwin was condemned to hell fire; Huxley was denied his professorship; Schopenhauer was ostracized by the élite; Nietzsche ate his heart out in solitude; Walt Whitman had to be fed by a few English admirers, while his poems were prohibited as obscene in free America; Emerson was for the greater part of his life _persona non grata_ at his own college; Ingersoll was denied the political career which his genius merited; Poe lived and died in poverty; Theodore Parker was consigned to perdition; Percival Lowell and Simon Newcomb lived and died almost unrecognized by the American public. Nearly every artist and writer and public teacher is made to understand from the beginning that he will be popular in just the degree that he strangles his genius and becomes a vulgar, commonplace, insincere clown.

On the other hand steel manufacturers and railroad kings, whose business record will often scarcely stand the light, are rewarded with fabulous millions and everyone grovels before them. When one turns from the "commercialism," which everywhere seems to be the dominant and most sincere interest in democratic society, when one seeks for spiritual values to counterbalance this weight of materialism, one finds in the prevailing spirit little more than a cult of naïve sentimentality.

It can hardly be denied that if Shakespeare, Boccaccio, Rabelais, Montaigne, Cassanova, Goethe, Dostoievsky, Ibsen, Tolstoi, Rousseau, St. Augustine, Milton, Nietzsche, Swinburne, Rossetti, or even Flaubert, were alive and writing his masterpiece in America to-day, he would be instantly silenced by some sort of society for the prevention of vice, and held up to the public scorn and ridicule as a destroyer of our innocence and a corrupter of public morals. The guardians of our characters are ceaselessly expurgating the classics lest we come to harm reading them. I often think that the only reason why the Bible is permitted to pass through our mails is because hardly anyone ever reads it.

It is this same habit of crowd-thinking which accounts to a great extent for the dearth of intellectual curiosity in this country. From what we have seen to be the nature of the crowd-mind, it is to be expected that in a democracy in which crowds play an important part the condition described by de Tocqueville will generally prevail. There is much truth in his statement that it seems at first as if the minds of all the Americans "were formed upon the same model." Spiritual variation will be encouraged only in respect to matters in which one crowd differs from another. The conformist spirit will prevail in all. Intellectual leadership will inevitably pass to the "tight-minded." There will be violent conflicts of ideas, but they will be crowd ideas.

The opinions about which people differ are for the most part ready-made. They are concerned with the choice of social mechanisms, but hardly with valuations. With nearly all alike, there is a notion that mankind may be redeemed by the magic of externally manipulating the social environment. There is a wearisome monotony of professions of optimism, idealism, humanitarianism, with little knowledge of what these terms mean.

I am thinking of all those young people who, in the decade and a half which preceded the war, represented the finished product of our colleges and universities. What a stretch of imagination is needed before one may call these young people educated! How little of intellectual interest they have brought back from school to their respective communities! How little cerebral activity they have stirred up! Habits of study, of independent thinking, have seldom been acquired. The "educated" have possibly gained a little in social grace; they have in some cases learned things which are of advantage to them in the struggle for position. Out of the confused mass of unassimilated information which they dimly remember as the education which they "got," a sum of knowledge doubtless remains which is greater in extent than that possessed by the average man, but, though greater in extent, this knowledge is seldom different in kind. There is the same superficiality, the same susceptibility to crowd-thinking on every subject. The mental habits of American democracy are probably best reflected to-day by the "best-seller" novel, the _Saturday Evening Post_, the Chautauqua, the Victrola, the moving picture.

Nearly everyone in America can read, for the "schoolhouse is the bulwark of democratic freedom." However, with the decrease in illiteracy there has gone a corresponding lowering of literary and intellectual standards, a growing timidity in telling the truth, and a passion for the sensationally commonplace. If it be true that before people may be politically free they must be free to function mentally, one wonders how much of an aid to liberty the public schools in this country have been, or if, with their colossal impersonal systems and stereotyped methods of instruction, they have not rather on the whole succeeded chiefly in making learning uninteresting, dulling curiosity and killing habits of independent thinking. There is probably no public institution where the spirit of the crowd reigns to the extent that it does in the public school. The aim seems to be to mold the child to type, make him the good, plodding citizen, teaching him only so much as some one thinks it is to the public's interest that he should know. I am sure that everyone who is familiar with the actions of the school authorities in New York City during the two years, 1918 and 1919, will be impelled to look elsewhere for much of that liberty which is supposed to go with democracy.