Chapter XVIII: Drifting

Our country is not lacking in incurable optimists, more commonly known as fools. Do we not always hear, they repeat, the cry of "Wolf, wolf" by night, and do we not always wake up in the morning quite safe and sound? I maintain that these poor words of mine are no mere warning of the wolf. Yesterday he was in close pursuit. To-day his jaws are closing upon our flesh. This outcry wrung from pain and fear is due to no imaginary ills.

We are drifting on every hand. The stupendous national problems which beset our country internally can not be counted off on the fingers of both hands. The exploitation of our farmers is leaving our countryside, the cradle of our national character and well-being, depleted of population. The Great War is over, but high prices largely remain. We have not even approached a solution of the problem of both safeguarding and properly controlling the nation's greater industries. Labor strikes take on the nature of social revolutions. The advocacy of Bolshevism arouses mighty crowds to wild enthusiasm. The children of the rich and poor alike grow up without proper normal training, not to speak of spiritual vision. With millions of people lacking houses to live in, we find ourselves with millions of people unemployed. The problem of the Negro is no nearer permanent solution than it was forty years ago. I might go on adding to this list indefinitely.

Throughout the length and breadth of the land our political life draws ever weaker character and poorer mind to political leadership. Strength, purposefulness and astuteness, when united together, are used mostly to win riches. The weaker brethren are more and more being drawn into the public service, into the pulpit and into the profession of teaching. If we really wanted, as in the past, our first-class men to preach to us, to teach us, and to direct our government, we could easily enough secure their services.

A century ago our national problems were exceedingly simple. Their full meaning and purport could be quickly explained and grasped. To-day our economic and social problems are infinitely complex. Keeping the trains running between New York and San Francisco in the year 1921 is a vastly different piece of business than keeping the stage coaches running between New York and Boston in 1787. But the average of intelligence and character in both our state legislatures and in Congress is far lower than it was in 1787. If any be disposed to deny this, let him make a comparison between the debates of the Federal Convention of 1787 and the debates of our Federal Congress or the average state legislature of to-day. Our political mind, in so far as we have any, is still living on the contributions of our national past. The last quarter of the century, especially, has registered failure with reference to almost every internal national problem presented by our time.

Reflect, for a moment, upon the present colossal issues of municipal government. A hundred thousand, a million, or five millions of persons are forced, for better or for worse, for good or for evil, to live together. In the recent municipal elections, the great city of New York continued the domination of Tammany Hall, by a vote of more than two to one. The people of Buffalo elected a mayor who received a majority of votes because he promised upon election to throw the Eighteenth Amendment of the Federal Constitution into the waste basket. Youngstown, Ohio, and Indianapolis, Indiana, elected "freak" mayors, ignorant and inexperienced, whose campaigns for office both they and those who heard them treated as huge practical jokes. The great city of Cleveland, Ohio, containing nearly a million inhabitants, elected as mayor a man who was expelled from the position of Chief of Police because of proved irregularities and unfitness to hold office. In the midst of our war with Germany, Chicago re-elected as mayor a man who, throughout the war, was an outspoken enemy of his country. In the outright venality of every sort, the government of the city of Chicago, I am informed, exceeds any in the country, even New York. Through the South we have not been able to secure since the War Between the States, as a general thing, that fine type of political leader who did such honor to our section in the earlier period. Our country is not receiving from the South that contribution of leadership which history might lead us to expect. The industrial North and East should naturally lead the nation in the solution of the peculiar problems of industrialism. Its remnant of American population readily admit their utter failure. We of the South can offer no help.

A full generation of so-called reforms have ended largely in failure. Even seats in the United States Senate now go to the highest bidder like old furniture at an auction sale. The minority which is decent, honest, and informed, is giving up the fight. The ballot in the hands of ignorant and untrained immigrants, of Negroes, and of illiterate native whites, has proven to be a terrible flare-back, burning our hope of progress to ashes. Again force the ballot upon the southern Negro and we of the South will outdo the North in political failure and decay.

Our greater internal public problems, only a few of which I have enumerated at the beginning of this article, will ever grow more complex in character, more threatening in aspect. Who can expect men with neither work nor property to take an idealistic attitude toward our government and the public service? Their vote must express their meanest immediate interests. He who stands in the bread line votes for sugar in his coffee and a bigger slice of bread. Every unemployed man is a prospective Bolshevist. Every illiterate man who votes inevitably supports bossism and graft rule. With such an electorate how can we move safely and intelligently into the uncharted and terrifying future? Soon we must rule the great industrial organizations by law, or they will rule us ignoring the law. Meanwhile the efficiency of the individual wage-worker is decreasing. His joy in his work becomes less and less. His loyalty to his task has almost struck the zero point. Ignore the problem of the white small farming class yet a little longer, and we shall be driven into farming on a great scale, with armies of stolid peasants doing the work. We already have agricultural communities where a score or a hundred small farms have recently been joined together in one estate. What a sign post of our times to see the old farm house made to serve as the dwellings for the immigrant serfs who till the land! So "Wealth accumulates and men decay." It is with a shudder that any patriot foresees the time when the countryside, like the city, shall have lost its free, independent population. In our South this small, free, white farming class requires special consideration. The danger of its submergence and total loss here is greater than in any other part of the country.

As an American, ardent alike for Americanism and the Americanization of our foreign born, I have often enough been accused of narrowness. I saw others burning with enthusiasm over the hope of the League of Nations, but I felt my own heart chilled by the sense of the shortcomings of my own country. With the majority I was hesitant. The map of the world to-day, in all its parts, strikes suffering into the heart that feels. The blood lines in every direction indicate that the world as a whole is drifting from failure unto failure. Europe is struggling helplessly in the midst of storm and crying piteously for help which never comes. With the German financial system broken down, France, denied the reparation she expected, is immersed in gloomy despair. The smaller nations East and Southeast of Germany are collapsing, if not already fallen down, starving and diseased; their peoples are becoming every day more helpless and hopeless. Italy, wasted by the war, is now in the throes of civil strife and revolution. Russia, the first white nation of the world, continues to rot in her insane orgies. With the passing months and years hope for the early salvation of Russia no longer deceives us. The battle lines of the Greek army, facing the Turks in Asia Minor, are awaiting reinforcements and supplies in order to resume the offensive. The four hundred millions of China, torn from without for a generation, lacerated by revolution and civil wars for ten years, have merely proven to us their incapacity for self-help. India is in revolution and Egypt cut adrift. All the world is more decadent to-day than when America entered the war. Again and again the nations come to us begging for the strong arm of leadership. Again and again they go from us, broken hearted and bowed down by the weak words of our indecision and failure. Yet again they come because elsewhere there is no help to ask.

Such is the world which our times have given so largely into our keeping. This world demands a leadership such as gave our country unity under the Constitution of 1787. The giants of those days--a full dozen strong, loom large over the succeeding generations, and like Titans of old, their deeds illuminate our whole history. Much accursed as we are to-day by petty minds and selfish hearts in high places, we read the history of our heroic period with deepest yearning that the mighty dead might rise up and speak to us the living words we need to hear. We feel so helpless, so lost, and gone astray. What mind and character we may still have has ceased to function normally. From now on we may expect a steady drift toward monarchy. In a decadent republic monarchicalism is a natural growth. First comes a great class of the rich on the one hand and a great class of poor on the other. Both tend, because of their conditions, toward corruption. Both corrupt the state. The one will barter the ten commandments to keep what it has; the other to get what it wants. For a time the proletariat is oppressed with free corn and the circus, with organized charities, baseball and the movies. No republic can long endure on that regimen. Gold has already paved the way that leads to the United States Senate. All that is needed is more gold and the way will be smoothly paved to the throne of Caesar or Belshazzar.

It has always seemed to me that our stupendous national sacrifices during the War Between the States have never been recovered. We lost a million of the sturdiest and best men who ever grew to manhood in the world. So did that generation lose a million homes. We have to-day, instead of the ten millions of their descendants, equally divided between the city and country, some twenty millions of unskilled foreign workers crowded into the cities alone. With the close of the War Between the States we ceased, in every section, to produce first class national leaders. To-day Charles Murphy has replaced Alexander Hamilton. In Illinois, Lincoln the Great gives way to William Hale Thompson the Little. The passing of Woodrow Wilson from the public life leaves the South searching, perhaps in vain, for a leader to present to the service of the republic. Into our Southern political life, as into that of the North a generation ago, there is creeping the hireling of special interests. Only the ignorant can say that we have not fallen on times that are weak and evil and failing at every point.

So we drift--on and on; when to drift at all is to drift toward the abyss. With each setting sun we become less capable of doing well the great task assigned to us. We are deceived by the superficial results of mechanical progress. Hence we do not care to know that each waning summer marks a loss for us in all the fundamental determinants of blood, of character, of all the elemental forces. These basic elements of our peculiar civilization can be maintained only through the most watchful care. A single careless deed done to-day by the nation and countless ages must pay an ever increasing price of failure and misery. Our English-speaking peoples are as a ship of democracy struggling in the sea of unfaith,--an ocean of the world's failure and despair. We are driven before a furious gale; great waves wash over our decks. We drug ourselves into believing the theory that somehow Divine Providence always has cared for, and always will care for, the children, the lunatics and the United States. Of course this theory is trash. The Almighty helps only those that help themselves.

You millions of the middle classes of America, living in comfortable ease--upon your conscience is the greater burden placed! Will you continue to fiddle while the common weal is in flames? The future throughout your country and the world will hold you responsible! "BE NOT DECEIVED, GOD IS NOT MOCKED. WHATSOEVER A MAN SOWETH, THAT ALSO SHALL HE REAP."