THE AMERICAN CREDO

A Contribution Toward the Interpretationof the National Mind

BY

GEORGE JEAN NATHAN and H. L. MENCKEN

NEW YORKALFRED A. KNOPF1920

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_BY H. L. MENCKEN AND GEORGE JEAN NATHAN_

HELIOGABALUS: A BUFFOONERY

 _BY H. L. MENCKEN_ _BY GEORGE JEAN NATHAN_

THE PHILOSOPHY OF FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE ANOTHER BOOK ON THE THEATRE

A BOOK OF BURLESQUES MR. GEORGE JEAN NATHAN PRESENTS

IN DEFENSE OF WOMEN A BOOK WITHOUT A TITLE

A BOOK OF PREFACES THE POPULAR THEATRE

PREJUDICES: FIRST SERIES COMEDIANS ALL

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PREFACE

I

The superficial, no doubt, will mistake this little book for a somewhatlaborious attempt at jocosity. Because, incidentally to its mainpurpose, it unveils occasional ideas of so inordinate an erroneousnessthat they verge upon the ludicrous, it will be set down a piece ofspoofing, and perhaps denounced as in bad taste. But all the while thatmain purpose will remain clear enough to the judicious. It is, in brief, the purpose of clarifying the current exchange of rhetorical gas bombsupon the subject of American ideals and the American character, socopious, so cocksure and withal so ill-informed and inconclusive, byputting into plain propositions some of the notions that lie at theheart of those ideals and enter into the very substance of thatcharacter. "For as he thinketh in his heart, " said Solomon, "so _is_he. " It is a saying, obviously, that one may easily fill with fantasticmeanings, as the prevailing gabble of the mental healers, NewThoughters, efficiency engineers, professors of scientific salesmanshipand other such mountebanks demonstrates, but nevertheless it is onegrounded, at bottom, upon an indubitable fact. Deep down in every manthere is a body of congenital attitudes, a corpus of ineradicabledoctrines and ways of thinking, that determines his reactions to hisideational environment as surely as his physical activity is determinedby the length of his _tibiæ_ and the capacity of his lungs. Theseprimary attitudes, in fact, constitute the essential man. It is byrecognition of them that one arrives at an accurate understanding of hisplace and function as a member of human society; it is by a shrewdreckoning and balancing of them, one against another, that one forecastshis probable behaviour in the face of unaccustomed stimuli. 

All the arts and sciences that have to do with the management of men inthe mass are founded upon a proficient practice of that sort ofreckoning. The practical politician, as every connoisseur of ochlocracyknows, is not a man who seeks to inoculate the innumerable caravan ofvoters with new ideas; he is a man who seeks to search out and prickinto energy the basic ideas that are already in them, and to turn theresultant effervescence of emotion to his own uses. And so with thereligious teacher, the social and economic reformer, and every othervariety of popular educator, down to and including the humblestpress-agent of a fifth assistant Secretary of State, moving-pictureactor, or Y. M. C. A. Boob-squeezing committee. Such adept professors ofconviction and enthusiasm, in the true sense, never actually teachanything new; all they do is to give new forms to beliefs already inbeing, to arrange the bits of glass, onyx, horn, ivory, porphyry andcorundum in the mental kaleidoscope of the populace into novelpermutations. To change the figure, they may give the medulla oblongata, the cerebral organ of the great masses of simple men, a powerfuldiuretic or emetic, but they seldom, if ever, add anything to itsprimary supply of fats, proteids and carbohydrates. 

One speaks of the great masses of simple men, and it is of them, ofcourse, that the ensuing treatise chiefly has to say. The higher andmore delicately organized tribes and sects of men are susceptible to nosuch ready anatomizing, for the body of beliefs upon which theirratiocination grounds itself is not fixed but changing, and not artlessand crystal-clear but excessively complex and obscure. It is, indeed, the chief mark of a man emerged from the general that he has lost mostof his original certainties, and is full of a scepticism which playslike a spray of acid upon all the ideas that come within his purview, including especially his own. One does not become surer as one advancesin knowledge, but less sure. No article of faith is proof against thedisintegrating effects of increasing information; one might almostdescribe the acquirement of knowledge as a process of disillusion. Butamong the humbler ranks of men who make up the great bulk of everycivilized people the increase of information is so slow and so arduousthat this effect is scarcely to be discerned. If, in the course of longyears, they gradually lose their old faiths, it is only to fill the gapswith new faiths that restate the old ones in new terms. Nothing, infact, could be more commonplace than the observation that the crazeswhich periodically ravage the proletariat today are, in the main, nomore than distorted echoes of delusions cherished centuries ago. Thefundamental religious ideas of the lower orders of Christendom have notchanged materially in two thousand years, and they were old when theywere first borrowed from the heathen of northern Africa and Asia Minor. The Iowa Methodist of today, imagining him competent to understand themat all, would be able to accept the tenets of Augustine without changingmore than a few accents and punctuation marks. Every Sunday his raucousecclesiastics batter his ears with diluted and debased filches from _DeCivitate Dei_, and almost every article of his practical ethics may befound clearly stated in the eminent bishop's Ninety-third Epistle. Andso in politics. The Bolsheviki of the present not only poll-parrot thebalderdash of the French demagogues of 1789; they also mouth what wasgospel to every _bête blonde_ in the Teutonic forest of the fifthcentury. Truth shifts and changes like a cataract of diamonds; itsaspect is never precisely the same at two successive instants. But errorflows down the channel of history like some great stream of lava orinfinitely lethargic glacier. It is the one relatively fixed thing in aworld of chaos. It is, perhaps, the one thing that gives human societythe small stability that it needs, amid all the oscillation of agelatinous cosmos, to save it from the wreck that ever menaces. Withouttheir dreams men would have fallen upon and devoured one another longago--and yet every dream is an illusion, and every illusion is a lie. 

Nevertheless, this immutability of popular ideas is not quite perfect. The main current, no doubt, goes on unbrokenly, but there are manyeddies along the edges and many small tempests on the surface. Thus theaspect changes, if not the substance. What men believe in one century isapparently abandoned in some other century, and perhaps supplanted bysomething quite to the contrary. Or, at all events, to the contrary inappearance. Off goes the head of the king, and tyranny gives way tofreedom. The change seems abysmal. Then, bit by bit, the face of freedomhardens, and by and by it is the old face of tyranny. Then anothercycle, and another. But under the play of all these opposites there issomething fundamental and permanent--the basic delusion that men may begoverned and yet be free. It is only on the surface that there aretransformations--and these we must study and make the most of, for ofwhat is underneath men are mainly unconscious. The thing that coloursthe upper levels is largely the instinctive functioning of race andnationality, the ineradicable rivalry of tribe and tribe, the primarystruggle for existence. At bottom, no doubt, the plain men of the wholeworld are almost indistinguishably alike; a learned anthropologist, Prof. Dr. Boas, has written a book to prove it. But, collected intoherds, they gather delusions that are special to herds. Beside theunderlying mass thinking there is a superimposed group thinking--a sortof unintelligent class consciousness. This we may prod into. This, inthe case of the _Homo americanus_, is what is prodded into in thepresent work. We perform, it seems to us, a useful pioneering. Incomplete though our data may be, it is at least grounded upon aresolute avoidance of _a priori_ methods, an absolutely open-mindedeffort to get at the facts. We pounce upon them as they bob up, convinced that even the most inconsiderable of them may have itsprofound significance--that the essential may be hidden in the trivial. All we aim at is a first marshalling of materials, an initial running oflines. We are not architects, but furnishers of bricks, nails and laths. But it is our hope that what we thus rake up and pile into a rough heapmay yet serve the purposes of an organizer, and so help toward theestablishment of the dim and vacillating truth, and rid the scene of, atall events, the worst and most obvious of its present accumulation oferrors. 

II

In the case of the American of the multitude that accumulation of errorsis of astounding bulk and consequence. His ideas are not only grosslymisapprehended by all foreigners; they are often misapprehended by hisown countrymen of superior education, and even by himself. 

This last, at first blush, may seem a mere effort at paradox, butits literal truth becomes patent on brief inspection. Ask theaverage American what is the salient passion in his emotionalarmamentarium--what is the idea that lies at the bottom of all his otherideas--and it is very probable that, nine times out of ten, he willnominate his hot and unquenchable rage for liberty. He regards himself, indeed, as the chief exponent of liberty in the whole world, and all itsother advocates as no more than his followers, half timorous and halfenvious. To question his ardour is to insult him as grievously as if onequestioned the honour of the republic or the chastity of his wife. Andyet it must be plain to any dispassionate observer that this ardour, inthe course of a century and a half, has lost a large part of its oldburning reality and descended to the estate of a mere phosphorescentsuperstition. The American of today, in fact, probably enjoys lesspersonal liberty than any other man of Christendom, and even hispolitical liberty is fast succumbing to the new dogma that certaintheories of government are virtuous and lawful and others abhorrent andfelonious. Laws limiting the radius of his free activity multiply yearby year: it is now practically impossible for him to exhibit anythingdescribable as genuine individuality, either in action or in thought, without running afoul of some harsh and unintelligible penalty. It wouldsurprise no impartial observer if the motto, _In God we trust_, were oneday expunged from the coins of the republic by the Junkers atWashington, and the far more appropriate word, _Verboten_, substituted. Nor would it astound any save the most romantic if, at the same time, the goddess of liberty were taken off the silver dollars to make roomfor a bas relief of a policeman in a spiked helmet. 

Moreover, this gradual (and, of late, rapidly progressive) decay offreedom goes almost without challenge; the American has grown soaccustomed to the denial of his constitutional rights and to the minuteregulation of his conduct by swarms of spies, letter-openers, informersand _agents provocateurs_ that he no longer makes any serious protest. It is surely a significant fact that, in the face of the late almostincredible proceedings under the so-called Espionage Act and other suchlaws, the only objections heard of came either from the persons directlyaffected--nine-tenths of them Socialists, pacifists, or citizens accusedof German sympathies, and hence without any rights whatever in Americanlaw and equity--or from a small group of professional libertarians, chiefly naturalized aliens. The American people, as a people, acquiesceddocilely in all these tyrannies, both during the war and after the war, just as they acquiesced in the invasion of their common rights by theProhibition Amendment. Worse, they not only acquiesced docilely; theyapproved actively; they were quite as hotly against the few protestantsas they were against the original victims, and gave their heartyapprobation to every proposal that the former be punished too. Thereally startling phenomenon of the war, indeed, was not the grotesqueabolition of liberty in the name of liberty, but the failure of thatusurpation to arouse anything approaching public indignation. It isimpossible to imagine the men of Jackson's army or even of Grant's armysubmitting to any such absolutism without a furious struggle, but inthese latter days it is viewed with the utmost complacency. Thedescendants of the Americans who punished John Adams so melodramaticallyfor the Alien and Seditions Acts of 1789 failed to raise a voice againstthe far more drastic legislation of 1917. What is more, they failed toraise a voice against its execution upon the innocent as well as uponthe guilty, in gross violation of the most elemental principles ofjustice and rules of law. 

Thus the Americano, put to the test, gave the lie to what is probablyhis proudest boast, and revealed the chronic human incapacity foraccurate self-analysis. But if he thereby misjudged and misjudgeshimself, he may find some consolation for his error in the lavishnesswith which even worse misjudgment is heaped upon him by foreigners. Tothis day, despite the intimate contact of five long years of joint war, the French and the English are ignorant of his true character, and showit in their every discussion of him, particularly when they discuss himin camera. It is the secret but general view of the French, we areinformed by confidential agents, that he is a fellow of loose life andnot to be trusted with either a wine-pot, a virgin or a domesticfowl--an absurdly inaccurate generalization from the aberrations ofsoldiers in a far land, cut off from the moral repressions that lie uponthem and colour all their acts at home. It is the view of the English, so we hear upon equally reliable authority, that he is an earnest butextremely inefficient oaf, incapable of either the finer technic of waror of its machine-like discipline--another thumping error, for theAmerican is actually extraordinarily adept and ingenious in the veryarts that modern war chiefly makes use of, and there is, since therevolt of the Prussian, no other such rigidly regimented man in theworld. He has, indeed, reached such a pass in the latter department thatit has become almost impossible for him to think of himself save as anobedient member of some vast, powerful and unintelligibly despoticorganization--a church, a trades-union, a political party, a tin-potfraternal order, or what not--, and often he is a member of more thanone, and impartially faithful to all. Moreover, as we have seen, helives under laws which dictate almost every detail of his public andprivate conduct, and punish every sign of bad discipline with the mostappalling rigour; and these laws are enforced by police who supply thechance gaps in them extempore, and exercise that authority in the bestmanner of prison guards, animal trainers and drill sergeants. 

The English and the French, beside these special errors, have a fullshare in an error that is also embraced by practically every otherforeign people. This is the error of assuming, almost as an axiom beyondquestion, that the Americans are a sordid, money-grubbing people, withno thought above the dollar. You will find it prevailing everywhere onthe Continent of Europe. To the German the United States is Dollarica, and the salient American personality, next to the policeman who takesbribes and the snuffling moralist in office, is the Dollarprinzessin. Tothe Italian the country is a sort of savage wilderness in whicheverything else, from religion to beauty and from decent repose tohuman life, is sacrificed to profit. Italians cross the ocean in muchthe same spirit that our runaway school-boys used to go off to fight theIndians. Some, lucky, return home in a few years with fortunes and gaudytales; others, succumbing to the natives, are butchered at their labourand buried beneath the cinders of hideous and God-forsaken mining towns. All carry the thought of escape from beginning to end; every Italianhopes to get away with his takings as soon as possible, to enjoy them onsome hillside where life and property are reasonably safe from greed. Sowith the Russian, the Scandinavian, the Balkan hillman, even the Greekand Armenian. The picture of America that they conjure up is a pictureof a titanic and merciless struggle for gold, with the stakes high andthe contestants correspondingly ferocious. They see the American as oneto whom nothing under the sun has any value save the dollar--not truth, or beauty, or philosophical ease, or the common decencies between manand man. 

This view, of course, is full of distortion and misunderstanding, despite the fact that even Americans, by hearing it stated so often, have come to allow it a good deal of soundness. The American's conceptof himself, as we have seen, is sometimes anything but accurate; in thiscase he errs almost as greatly as when he venerates himself as theprince of freemen, with gyveless wrists and flashing eyes. As for theforeigner, what he falls into is the typically Freudian blunder ofprojecting his own worst weakness into another. The fact is that it ishe, and not the native American, who is the incorrigible andunimaginative money-grubber. He comes to the United States in search ofmoney, and in search of money alone, and pursuing that single purposewithout deviation he makes the mistake of assuming that the American isat the same business, and in the same fanatical manner. From all thecomplex and colourful life of the country, save only the one enterpriseof money-making, he is shut off almost hermetically, and so he concludesthat that one enterprise embraces the whole show. Here the unreliablepromptings of his sub-conscious passion are helped out by observationsthat are more logical. Unfamiliar with the language, excluded from allfree social intercourse with the native, and regarded as, if actuallyhuman at all, then at least a distinctly inferior member of the species, he is forced into the harshest and most ill-paid labour, and so heinevitably sees the American as a pitiless task-master and ascribes theexploitation he is made a victim of to a fabulous exaggeration of hisown avarice. 

Moreover, the greater success and higher position of the native seem tobear out this notion. In a struggle that is free for all and to thedeath, the native grabs all the shiniest stakes. _Ergo_, he must lovemoney even more than the immigrant. This logic we do not defend, butthere is--and out of it grows the prevailing foreign view of America andthe Americans, for the foreigner who stays at home does not derive hisideas from the glittering, lascivious phrases of Dr. Wilson or from thepassionate idealism of such superior Americans as Otto H. Kahn, AdolphS. Ochs, S. Stanwood Menken, Jacob H. Schiff, Marcus Loew, HenryMorgenthau, Abram Elkus, Samuel Goldfish, Louis D. Brandeis, JuliusRosenwald, Paul Warburg, Judge Otto Rosalsky, Adolph Zukor, the Hon. Julius Kahn, Simon Guggenheim, Stephen S. Wise and Barney Baruch, butfrom the hair-raising tales of returned "Americans, " _i. E. _, fellowpeasants who, having braved the dragons, have come back to thefatherland to enjoy their booty and exhibit their wounds. 

The native, as we say, has been so far influenced by this error that hecherishes it himself, or, more accurately, entertains it with shame. Most of his windy idealism is no more than a reaction against it--anevidence of an effort to confute it and live it down. He is never moresweetly flattered than when some politician eager for votes or someevangelist itching for a good plate tells him that he is actually asoaring altruist, and the only real one in the world. This is the surestway to fetch him; he never fails to swell out his chest when he hearsthat buncombe. In point of fact, of course, he is no more an altruistthan any other healthy mammal. His ideals, one and all, are groundedupon self-interest, or upon the fear that is at the bottom of it; hisbenevolence always has a string tied to it; he could no more formulate acourse of action to his certain disadvantage than an Englishman could, or a Frenchman, or an Italian, or a German. But to say that theadvantage he pursues is always, or even usually, a monetary one--toargue that he is avaricious, or even, in these later years, a sharptrader--is to spit directly into the eye of the truth. There isprobably, indeed, no country in the world in which mere money is heldin less esteem than in these United States. Even more than the RussianBolshevik the American democrat regards wealth with suspicion, and itstoo eager amassment with a bilious eye. Here alone, west of the Dvina, rich men are _ipso facto_ scoundrels and _feræ naturæ_, with no rightsthat any slanderer is bound to respect. Here alone, the possession of afortune puts a man automatically upon the defensive, and exposes him tospecial legislation of a rough and inquisitorial character and to thespecial animosity of judges, district attorneys and juries. It would bea literal impossibility for an Englishman worth $100, 000, 000 to avoidpublic office and public honour; it would be equally impossible for anAmerican worth $100, 000, 000 to obtain either. 

Americans, true enough, enjoy an average of prosperity that is abovethat witnessed in any other country. Their land, with less labour, yields a greater usufruct than other land; they get more money for theirindustry; they jingle more coin in their pockets than other peoples. Butit is a grievous error to mistake that superior opulence for a sign ofmoney-hunger, for they actually hold money very lightly, and spend agreat deal more of it than any other race of men and with far lessthought of values. The normal French family, it is often said, couldlive very comfortably for a week upon what the normal American familywastes in a week. There is, among Americans, not the slightest sign ofthe unanimous French habit of biting every franc, of calculating thecost of every luxury to five places of decimals, of utilizing everyscrap, of sleeping with the bankbook under the pillow. Whatever is showygets their dollars, whether they need it or not, even whether they canafford it or not. They are, so to speak, constantly on a bust, theireyes alert for chances to get rid of their small change. 

Consider, for example, the amazing readiness with which they succumb tothe imbecile bait of advertising! An American manufacturer, findinghimself with a stock of unsalable goods or encountering otherwise ademand that is less than his production, does not have to look, like hisEnglish or German colleague, for foreign dumping grounds. He simplypacks his surplus in gaudy packages, sends for an advertising agent, joins an Honest-Advertising club, fills the newspapers and magazineswith lying advertisements, and sits down in peace while his countrymenfight their way to his counters. That they will come is almostabsolutely sure; no matter how valueless the goods, they will leap tothe advertisements; their one desire seems to be to get rid of theirmoney. As a consequence of this almost pathological eagerness, theadvertising bill of the American people is greater than that of allother peoples taken together. There is scarcely an article within therange of their desires that does not carry a heavy load of advertising;they actually pay out millions every year to be sold such commonplacenecessities as sugar, towels, collars, lead-pencils and corn-meal. Thebusiness of thus bamboozling them and picking their pockets enliststhousands and thousands of artists, writers, printers, sign-painters andother such parasites. Their towns are bedaubed with chromatic eye-soresand made hideous with flashing lights; their countryside is polluted;their newspapers and magazines become mere advertising sheets; idioticslogans and apothegms are invented to enchant them; in some cities theyare actually taxed to advertise the local makers of wooden nutmegs. Multitudes of swindlers are naturally induced to adopt advertising as atrade, and some of them make great fortunes at it. Like all other menwho live by their wits, they regard themselves as superior fellows, andevery year they hold great conventions, bore each other with learnedpapers upon the psychology of their victims, speak of one another as menof genius, have themselves photographed by the photographers ofnewspapers eager to curry favour with them, denounce the government fornot spending the public funds for advertising, and summon United StatesSenators, eminent chautauquans and distinguished vaudeville stars toentertain them. For all this the plain people pay the bill, and never aprotest comes out of them. 

As a matter of fact, the only genuinely thrifty folks among us, in thesense that a Frenchman, a Scot or an Italian is thrifty, are theimmigrants of the most recent invasions. That is why they oust thenative wherever the two come into contact--say in New England and in theMiddle West. They acquire, bit by bit, the best lands, the best stock, the best barns, not because they have the secret of _making_ more money, but because they have the resolution to _spend_ less. As soon as theybecome thoroughly Americanized they begin to show the nationalprodigality. The old folks wear home-made clothes and stick to thefarm; the native-born children order their garments from mail-ordertailors and expose themselves in the chautauquas and at the great orgiesof Calvinism and Wesleyanism. The old folks put every dollar they canwring from a reluctant environment into real property or the banks; theyoung folks put their inheritance into phonographs, Fords, boiledshirts, yellow shoes, cuckoo clocks, lithographs of the currentmountebanks, oil stock, automatic pianos and the works of Harold BellWright, Gerald Stanley Lee and O. Henry. 

III

But what, then, is the character that actually marks the American--thatis, in chief? If he is not the exalted monopolist of liberty that hethinks he is nor the noble altruist and idealist he slaps upon the chestwhen he is full of rhetoric, nor the degraded dollar-chaser of Europeanlegend, then what is he? We offer an answer in all humility, for theproblem is complex and there is but little illumination of it in theliterature; nevertheless, we offer it in the firm conviction, born oftwenty years' incessant meditation, that it is substantially correct. It is, in brief, this: that the thing which sets off the American fromall other men, and gives a peculiar colour not only to the pattern ofhis daily life but also to the play of his inner ideas, is what, forwant of a more exact term, may be called social aspiration. That is tosay, his dominant passion is a passion to lift himself by at least astep or two in the society that he is a part of--a passion to improvehis position, to break down some shadowy barrier of caste, to achievethe countenance of what, for all his talk of equality, he recognizes andaccepts as his betters. The American is a pusher. His eyes are everfixed upon some round of the ladder that is just beyond his reach, andall his secret ambitions, all his extraordinary energies, groupthemselves about the yearning to grasp it. Here we have an explanationof the curious restlessness that educated foreigners, as opposed to mereimmigrants, always make a note of in the country; it is half aspirationand half impatience, with overtones of dread and timorousness. TheAmerican is violently eager to get on, and thoroughly convinced that hismerits entitle him to try and to succeed, but by the same token he issickeningly fearful of slipping back, and out of the second fact, as weshall see, spring some of his most characteristic traits. He is a manvexed, at one and the same time, by delusions of grandeur and aninferiority complex; he is both egotistical and subservient, assertiveand politic, blatant and shy. Most of the errors about him are made byseeing one side of him and being blind to the other. 

Such a thing as a secure position is practically unknown among us. Thereis no American who cannot hope to lift himself another notch or two, ifhe is good; there is absolutely no hard and fast impediment to hisprogress. But neither is there any American who doesn't have to keep onfighting for whatever position he has; no wall of caste is there toprotect him if he slips. One observes every day the movement ofindividuals, families, whole groups, in both directions. All of ourcities are full of brummagem aristocrats--aristocrats, at all events, inthe view of their neighbours--whose grandfathers, or even fathers, wereday labourers; and working for them, supported by them, heavilypatronized by them, are clerks whose grandfathers were lords of thesoil. The older societies of Europe, as every one knows, protect theircaste lines a great deal more resolutely. It is as impossible for awealthy pork packer or company promoter to enter the _noblesse_ ofAustria, even today, as it would be for him to enter the boudoir of aqueen; he is barred out absolutely and even his grandchildren are underthe ban. And in precisely the same way it is as impossible for a countof the old Holy Roman Empire to lose caste as it would be for the DalaiLama; he may sink to unutterable depths within his order, but he cannotget himself out of it, nor can he lose the peculiar advantages that gowith membership; he is still a _Graf_, and, as such, above the herd. Once, in a Madrid café, the two of us encountered a Spanish marquis whowore celluloid cuffs, suffered from pediculosis and had been drunk forsixteen years. Yet he remained a marquis in good standing, and alllesser Spaniards, including Socialists, envied him and deferred to him;none would have dreamed of slapping him on the back. Knowing that he wasquite as safe within his ancient order as a dog among the _canidæ_, hegave no thought to appearances. But in the same way he knew that he hadreached his limit--that no conceivable effort could lift him higher. Hewas a grandee of Spain and that was all; above glimmered royalty andthe hierarchy of the saints, and both royalty and the hierarchy of thesaints were as much beyond him as grandeeism was beyond the polite andwell-educated head-waiter who laved him with ice-water, when he had_mania-a-potu_. 

No American is ever so securely lodged. There is always something justahead of him, beckoning him and tantalizing him, and there is alwayssomething just behind him, menacing him and causing him to sweat. Evenwhen he attains to what may seem to be security, that security is veryfragile. The English soap-boiler, brewer, shyster attorney orstock-jobber, once he has got into the House of Lords, is reasonablysafe, and his children after him; the possession of a peerage connotes adefinite rank, and it is as permanent as anything can be in this world. But in America there is no such harbour; the ship is eternally at sea. Money vanishes, official dignity is forgotten, caste lines are as fullof gaps as an ill-kept hedge. The grandfather of the Vanderbilts was abounder; the last of the Washingtons is a petty employé in the Libraryof Congress. 

It is this constant possibility of rising, this constant risk offalling, that gives a barbaric picturesqueness to the panorama of whatis called fashionable society in America. The chief character of thatsociety is to be found in its shameless self-assertion, its almostobscene display of its importance and of the shadowy privileges andacceptances on which that importance is based. It is assertive for thesimple reason that, immediately it ceased to be assertive, it wouldcease to exist. Structurally, it is composed in every town of a nucleusof those who have laboriously arrived and a chaotic mass of those whoare straining every effort to get on. The effort must be made againstgreat odds. Those who have arrived are eager to keep down thecompetition of newcomers; on their exclusiveness, as the phrase is, rests the whole of their social advantage. Thus the candidate frombelow, before horning in at last, must put up with an infinity of rebuffand humiliation; he must sacrifice his self-respect today in order togain the hope of destroying the self-respect of other aspirantstomorrow. The result is that the whole edifice is based upon fears andabasements, and that every device which promises to protect theindividual against them is seized upon eagerly. Fashionable society inAmerica therefore has no room for intelligence; within its fold anoriginal idea is dangerous; it carries regimentation, in dress, insocial customs and in political and even religious doctrines, to thelast degree. In the American cities the fashionable man or woman mustnot only maintain the decorum seen among civilized folks everywhere; heor she must also be interested in precisely the right sports, theatricalshows and opera singers, show the right political credulities andindignations, and have some sort of connection with the right church. Nearly always, because of the apeing of English custom that prevailseverywhere in America, it must be the so-called Protestant EpiscopalChurch, a sort of outhouse of the Church of England, with ecclesiasticswho imitate the English sacerdotal manner much as small boys imitate themanner of eminent baseball players. Every fashionable ProtestantEpiscopal congregation in the land is full of ex-Baptists andex-Methodists who have shed Calvinism, total immersion and thehallelujah hymns on their way up the ladder. The same impulse leads theJews, whenever the possibility of invading the citadel of the Christiansbegins to bemuse them (as happened during the late war, for example, when patriotism temporarily adjourned the usual taboos), to embraceChristian Science--as a sort of halfway station, so to speak, moremedical than Christian, and hence secure against ordinary derisions. Andit is an impulse but little different which lies at the bottom of themuch-discussed title-hunt. 

A title, however paltry, is of genuine social value, more especially inAmerica; it represents a status that cannot be changed overnight by therise of rivals, or by personal dereliction, or by mere accident. It is apolicy of insurance against dangers that are not to be countered aseffectively in any other manner. Miss G----, the daughter of anenormously wealthy scoundrel, may be accepted everywhere, but all thewhile she is insecure. Her father may lose his fortune tomorrow, or bejailed by newspaper outcry, or marry a prostitute and so commit socialsuicide himself and murder his daughter, or she herself may fall avictim to some rival's superior machinations, or stoop to fornication ofsome forbidden variety, or otherwise get herself under the ban. But onceshe is a duchess, she is safe. No catastrophe short of divorce can takeaway her coronet, and even divorce will leave the purple marks of itupon her brow. Most valuable boon of all, she is now free to beherself, --a rare, rare experience for an American. She may, if shelikes, go about in a Mother Hubbard, or join the Seventh Day Adventists, or declare for the Bolsheviki, or wash her own lingerie, or have herhair bobbed, and still she will remain a duchess, and, as a duchess, irremovably superior to the gaping herd of her political equals. 

This social aspiration, of course, is most vividly violent and idioticon its higher and more gaudy levels, but it is scarcely less earnestbelow. Every American, however obscure, has formulated within his secretrecesses some concept of advancement, however meagre; if he doesn'taspire to be what is called fashionable, then he at least aspires tolift himself in some less gorgeous way. There is not a socialorganization in this land of innumerable associations that hasn't itswaiting list of candidates who are eager to get in, but have not yetdemonstrated their fitness for the honour. One can scarcely go lowenough to find that pressure absent. Even the tin-pot fraternal orders, which are constantly cadging for members and seem to accept any one nota downright felon, are exclusive in their fantastic way, and no doubtthere are hundreds of thousands of proud American freemen, the heirs ofWashington and Jefferson, their liberty safeguarded by a million guns, who pine in secret because they are ineligible to membership in theMasons, the Odd Fellows or even the Knights of Pythias. On the distaffside, the thing is too obvious to need exposition. The patrioticsocieties among women are all machines for the resuscitation of lostsuperiorities. The plutocracy has shouldered out the old gentry fromactual social leadership--that gentry, indeed, presents a prodigiousclinical picture of the insecurity of social rank in America--but thereremains at least the possibility of insisting upon a dignity whichplutocrats cannot boast and may not even buy. Thus the county judge'swife in Smithville or the Methodist pastor's daughter in Jonestownconsoles herself for the lack of an opera box with the thought(constantly asserted by badge and resolution) that she had a noblergrandfather, or, at all events, a decenter one, than the Astors, theVanderbilts and the Goulds. 

IV

It seems to us that the genuine characters of the normal American, thecharacters which set him off most saliently from the men of othernations, are the fruits of all this risk of and capacity for change instatus that we have described, and of the dreads and hesitations that gotherewith. The American is marked, in fact, by precisely the habits ofmind and act that one would look for in a man insatiably ambitious andyet incurably fearful, to wit, the habits, on the one hand, ofunpleasant assertiveness, of somewhat boisterous braggardism, ofincessant pushing, and, on the other hand, of conformity, caution andsubservience. He is forever talking of his rights as if he stood readyto defend them with his last drop of blood, and forever yielding them upat the first demand. Under both the pretension and the fact is thecommon motive of fear--in brief, the common motive of the insecure anduncertain man, the _average_ man, at all times and everywhere, butespecially the motive of the average man in a social system so crude andunstable as ours. 

"More than any other people, " said Wendell Phillips one blue day, "weAmericans are afraid of one another. " The saying seems harsh. It goescounter to the national delusion of uncompromising courage and limitlesstruculence. It wars upon the national vanity. But all the same there istruth in it. Here, more than anywhere else on earth, the status of anindividual is determined by the general consent of the general body ofhis fellows; here, as we have seen, there are no artificial barriers toprotect him against their disapproval, or even against their envy. Andhere, more than anywhere else, the general consent of that general bodyof men is coloured by the ideas and prejudices of the inferior majority;here, there is the nearest approach to genuine democracy, the mostdirect and accurate response to mob emotions. Facing that infinitelypowerful but inevitably ignorant and cruel corpus of opinion, theindividual must needs adopt caution and fall into timorousness. Thedesire within him may be bold and forthright, but its satisfactiondemands discretion, prudence, a politic and ingratiating habit. Thewalls are not to be stormed; they must be wooed to a sort of Jerichoanfall. Success thus takes the form of a series of waves of protectivecolouration; failure is a succession of unmaskings. The aspirant mustfirst learn to imitate exactly the aspect and behaviour of the group heseeks to penetrate. There follows notice. There follows toleration. There follows acceptance. 

Thus the hog-murderer's wife picks her way into the society of Chicago, the proud aristocracy of the abbatoir. And thus, no less, the formerwhiskey drummer insinuates himself into the Elks, and the risingretailer wins the _imprimatur_ of wholesalers, and the rich peasantbecomes a planter and the father of doctors of philosophy, and theservant girl enters the movies and acquires the status of a princess ofthe blood, and the petty attorney becomes a legislator and statesman, and Schmidt turns into Smith, and the newspaper reporter becomes a_littérateur_ on the staff of the _Saturday Evening Post_, and all of usYankees creep up, up, up. The business is never to be accomplished byheadlong assault. It must be done circumspectly, insidiously, a bitapologetically, _pianissimo_; there must be no flaunting of unusualideas, no bold prancing of an unaccustomed personality. Above all, itmust be done without exciting fear, lest the portcullis fall and thewhole enterprise go to pot. Above all, the manner of a Jenkins must begot into it. 

That manner, of course, is not incompatible with a certain superficialboldness, nor even with an appearance of truculence. But what liesbeneath the boldness is not really an independent spirit, but merely atalent for crying with the pack. When the American is most dashinglyassertive it is a sure sign that he feels the pack behind him, and hearsits comforting baying, and is well aware that his doctrine is approved. He is not a joiner for nothing. He joins something, whether it be apolitical party, a church, a fraternal order or one of the idioticmovements that incessantly ravage the land, because joining gives him afeeling of security, because it makes him a part of something larger andsafer than he is himself, because it gives him a chance to work offsteam without running any risk. The whole thinking of the country thusruns down the channel of mob emotion; there is no actual conflict ofideas, but only a succession of crazes. It is inconvenient to standaloof from these crazes, and it is dangerous to oppose them. In no othercountry in the world is there so ferocious a short way with dissenters;in none other is it socially so costly to heed the inner voice and tobe one's own man. 

Thus encircled by taboos, the American shows an extraordinarytimorousness in all his dealings with fundamentals, and the fact thatmany of these taboos are self-imposed only adds to their rigour. Whatevery observant foreigner first notices, canvassing the intellectuallife of the land, is the shy and gingery manner in which all the largerproblems of existence are dealt with. We have, for example, positivelaws which make it practically impossible to discuss the sex questionwith anything approaching honesty. The literature of the subject isenormous, and the general notion of its importance is thereby mademanifest, but all save a very small part of that literature is producedby quacks and addressed to an audience that is afraid to hear the truth. So in politics. Almost alone among the civilized nations of the world, the United States pursues critics of the dominant political theory withmediaeval ferocity, condemning them to interminable periods in prison, proceeding against them by clamour and perjury, treating them worse thancommon blacklegs, and at times conniving at their actual murder by thepolice. And so, above all, in religion. This is the only country ofChristendom in which there is no anti-clerical party, and hence noconstant and effective criticism of clerical pretension and corruption. The result is that all of the churches reach out for tyranny among us, and that most of them that show any numerical strength already exerciseit. In half a dozen of our largest cities the Catholic Church isactually a good deal more powerful than it is in Spain, or even inAustria. Its acts are wholly above public discussion; it makes andbreaks public officials; it holds the newspapers in terror; itinfluences the police and the courts; it is strong enough to destroy andsilence any man who objects to its polity. But this is not all. TheCatholic Church, at worst, is an organization largely devoted toperfectly legitimate and even laudable purposes, and it is controlled bya class of men who are largely above popular passion, and intelligentenough to see beyond the immediate advantage. More important still, itsinternational character gives it a detached and superior point of view, and so makes it stand aloof from some of the common weaknesses of thenative mob. This is constantly revealed by its opposition toProhibition, vice-crusading and other such crazes of the disinheritedand unhappy. The rank and file of its members are ignorant and emotionaland are thus almost ideal cannon-fodder for the bogus reformers whooperate upon the proletariat, but they are held back by their clergy, towhose superior interest in genuine religion is added a centuries-oldheritage of worldly wisdom. Thus the Church of Rome, in America atleast, is a civilizing agency, and we may well overlook its cynicalalliance with political corruption in view of its steady enmity to thatgreater corruption which destroys the very elements of liberty, peaceand human dignity. It may be a bit too intelligently selfish and harshlyrealistic, but it is assuredly not swinish. 

This adjective, however, fits the opposition as snugly as a coat ofvarnish--and by the opposition we mean the group of Protestant churchescommonly called evangelical, to wit, the Methodist, the Baptist, thePresbyterian and their attendant imitators and inferiors. It is out ofthis group that the dominating religious attitude of the American peoplearises, and, in particular is from this group that we get our doctrinethat religious activity is not to be challenged, however flagrantly itmay stand in opposition to common honesty and common sense. Under coverof that artificial toleration--the product, not of a genuine liberalism, but simply of a mob distrust of dissent--there goes on a tyranny that itwould be difficult to match in modern history. Save in a few largecities, every American community lies under a sacerdotal despotism whosedevices are disingenuous and dishonourable, and whose power wasmagnificently displayed in the campaign for Prohibition--a despotismexercised by a body of ignorant, superstitious, self-seeking andthoroughly dishonest men. One may, without prejudice, reasonably defendthe Catholic clergy. They are men who, at worst, pursue an intelligibleideal and dignify it with a real sacrifice. But in the presence of theMethodist clergy it is difficult to avoid giving way to the weakness ofindignation. What one observes is a horde of uneducated and inflammatorydunderheads, eager for power, intolerant of opposition and full of achildish vanity--a mob of holy clerks but little raised, in intelligenceand dignity, above the forlorn half-wits whose souls they chronicallyrack. In the whole United States there is scarcely one among them whostands forth as a man of sense and information. Illiterate in all savethe elementals, untouched by the larger currents of thought, drunk withtheir power over dolts, crazed by their immunity to challenge by theirbetters, they carry over into the professional class of the country thespirit of the most stupid peasantry, and degrade religion to the estateof an idiotic phobia. There is not a village in America in which somesuch preposterous jackass is not in eruption. Worse, he is commonly theleader of its opinion--its pattern in reason, morals and good taste. Yetworse, he is ruler as well as pattern. Wrapped in his sacerdotal cloak, he stands above any effective criticism. To question his imbecile ideasis to stand in contumacy of the revelation of God. 

A number of years ago, while engaged in journalism in a large Americancity, one of us violated all journalistic precedents by printing anarticle denouncing the local evangelical clergy as, with few exceptions, a pack of scoundrels, and offered in proof their brisk and constanttrade in contraband marriages, especially the marriages of girls underthe age of consent. He showed that the offer of a two dollar fee wassufficient to induce the majority of these ambassadors of Christ tomarry a girl of fourteen or fifteen to a boy a few years older. Therefollowed a great outcry from the accused, with the usual demands thatthe offending paper print a retraction and discharge the guilty writerfrom its staff. He thereupon engaged a clipping bureau to furnish himwith clippings from the newspapers of the whole country, showing thecommon activities of the evangelical clergy elsewhere. The result wasthat he received and reprinted an amazing mass of putrid scandal, greatly to the joy of that moral community. It appeared that theseeminent Christian leaders were steadily engaged, North, East, South andWest, in doings that would have disgraced so many ward heelers oroyster-shuckers--shady financial transactions, gross sexualirregularities, all sorts of minor crimes. The publication of thisevidence from day to day gave the chronicler the advantage of theoffensive, and so got him out of a tight place. In the end, as iftickled by his assault, the hierarchy of heaven came to his aid. That isto say, the Lord God Jehovah arranged it that one of the leadingMethodist clergymen of the city--in fact, the chronicler's chiefopponent--should be taken in an unmentionable sexual perversion at theheadquarters of the Young Men's Christian Association, and so be forcedto leave town between days. This catastrophe, as we say, the chroniclerascribes to divine intervention. It was entirely unexpected; he knewthat the fellow was a liar and a rogue, but he had never suspected thathe was also a hog. The episode demoralized the defence to such an extentthat it was impossible, in decency, to go on with the war. Thechronicler was at once, in fact, forced into hypocritical efforts toprevent the fugitive ecclesiastic's pursuit, extradition, trial andimprisonment, and these efforts, despite their disingenuous character, succeeded. Under another name, he now preaches Christ and Him crucifiedin the far West, and is, we daresay, a leading advocate of Prohibition, vice-crusading and the other Methodist reforms. 

But here we depart from the point. It is not that an eminent Wesleyanshould be taken in crim. Con. With a member of the Y. M. C. A. ; it is thatthe whole Wesleyan scheme of things, despite the enormous multiplicationof such incidents, should still stand above all direct and devastatingcriticism in America. It is an ignorant and dishonest cult of ignorantand dishonest men, and yet no one has ever had at it from the front. All the newspaper clippings that we have mentioned were extraordinarilydiscreet. Every offence of a clergyman was presented as if it were anisolated phenomenon, and of no general significance; there was never anychallenge of an ecclesiastical organization which bred and shelteredsuch men, and carried over their curious ethics into its social andpolitical activities. That careful avoidance of the main issue is alwaysobservable in These States. Prohibition was saddled upon the country, against the expressed wish of at least two-thirds of the people, by thepolitical chicanery of the same organization, and yet no one, during thelong fight, thought to attack it directly; to have done so would havebeen to violate the taboo described. So when the returning soldiersbegan to reveal the astounding chicaneries of the Young Men's ChristianAssociation, it was marvelled at for a few weeks, as Americans alwaysmarvel at successful pocket-squeezings, but no one sought the cause inthe character of the pious brethren primarily responsible. And so, again, when what is called liberal opinion began to revolt against theforeign politics of Dr. Wilson, and in particular, against his apparentrepudiation of his most solemn engagements, and his completeinsensibility, in the presence of a moral passion, to the mostelementary principles of private and public honour. A thousand critics, friendly and unfriendly, sought to account for his amazing shifts andevasions on unintelligible logical grounds, but no one, so far as weknow, ventured to point out that his course could be accounted for inevery detail, and without any mauling of the facts whatsoever, upon thesimple ground that he was a Presbyterian. 

We sincerely hope that no one will mistake us here for anarchists whoseek to hold the Presbyterian code of ethics, or the Presbyteriansthemselves, up to derision. We confess frankly that, as privateindividuals, we are inclined against that code and that all ourprejudices run against those who subscribe to it--which is to say, inthe direction of toleration, of open dealing, and even of a certain mildsnobbishness. We are both opposed to moral enthusiasm, and never drinkwith a moral man if it can be avoided. The taboos that we personallysubscribe to are taboos upon the very things that Presbyterians holdmost dear--for example, moral certainty, the proselyting appetite, andwhat may be described as the passion of the policeman. But we aresurely not fatuous enough to cherish our ideas to the point of fondness. In the long run, we freely grant, it may turn out that the Presbyteriansare right and we are wrong--in brief, that God loves a moral man morethan he loves an amiable and honourable one. Stranger things, indeed, have happened; one might even argue without absurdity that God isactually a Presbyterian Himself. Whether He is or is not we do notpresume to say; we simply record the fact that it is our presentimpression that He is not--and then straightway admit that our view isworth no more than that of any other pair of men. 

Meanwhile, however, it is certainly not going too far to notice thecircumstance that there is an irreconcilable antithesis between the twosorts of men that we have described--that a great moral passion is fatalto the gentler and more caressing amenities of life, and _vice versa_. The man of morals has a certain character, and the man of honour has aquite different character. No one not an idiot fails to differentiatebetween the two, or to order his intercourse with them upon anassumption of their disparity. What we know in the United States as aPresbyterian is pre-eminently of the moral type. Perhaps more than anyother man among us he regulates his life, and the lives of all who fallunder his influence, upon a purely moral plan. In the main, he gets theprinciples underlying that plan from the Old Testament; if he is to bedescribed succinctly, it is as one who carries over into modern life, with its superior complexity of sin, the simple and rigid ethicalconcepts of the ancient Jews. And in particular, he subscribes to theirtheory that it is virtuous to make things hot for the sinner, by whichword he designates any person whose conduct violates the ordinances ofGod as he himself is aware of them and interprets them. Sin is to thePresbyterian the salient phenomenon of this wobbling and nefariousworld, and the pursuit and chastisement of sinners the one avocationthat is permanently worth while. The product of that simple doctrine isa character of no little vigour and austerity, and one much esteemed bythe great masses of men, who are always uneasily conscious of their ownweakness in the face of temptation and thus have a sneaking venerationfor the man apparently firm, and who are always ready to believe, furthermore, that any man who seems to be having a pleasant time is arascal and deserving of the fire. 

The Presbyterian likewise harbours this latter suspicion. More, hecommonly erects it into a certainty. Every single human act, he holds, must be either right or wrong--and the overwhelming majority of them arewrong. He knows exactly what these wrong ones are; he recognizes theminstantly and infallibly, by a sort of inspired intuition; and hebelieves that they should all be punished automatically and with theutmost severity. No one ever heard of a Presbyterian overlooking afault, or pleading for mercy for the erring. He would regard such an actas the weakness of one ridden by the Devil. From such harsh judgmentsand retributions, it must be added in fairness, he does not excepthimself. He detects his own aberration almost as quickly as he detectsthe aberration of the other fellow, and though he may sometimesseek--being, after all, only human--to escape its consequences, he by nomeans condones it. Nothing, indeed, could exceed the mental anguish of aPresbyterian who has been betrayed, by the foul arts of some lasciviouswench, into any form of adultery, or, by the treason of his senses insome other way, into a voluptuous yielding to the lure of the other_beaux arts_. It has been our fortune, at various times, to be in theconfidence of Presbyterians thus seduced from their native virtue, andwe bear willing testimony to their sincere horror. Even the least piousof them was as greatly shaken up by what to us, on our lower plane, seemed a mere peccadillo, perhaps in bad taste but certainly not worthgetting into a sweat about, as we ourselves would have been by a grossbreach of faith. 

But, as has been before remarked, the bitter must go with the sweet. Inthe face of so exalted a moral passion it would be absurd to look forthat urbane habit which seeks the well-being of one's self and the otherfellow, not in exact obedience to harsh statutes, but in ease, dignityand the more delicate sort of self-respect. That is to say, it would beabsurd to ask a thoroughly moral man to be also a man of honour. Thetwo, in fact, are eternal enemies; their endless struggle achieves thathappy mean of philosophies which we call civilization. The man of moralskeeps order in the world, regimenting its lawless hordes and organizingits governments; the man of honour mellows and embellishes what is thusachieved, giving to duty the aspect of a privilege and making humanintercourse a thing of fine faiths and understandings. We trust theformer to do what is righteous; we trust the latter to do what isseemly. It is seldom that a man can do both. The man of honourinevitably exalts the punctilio above the law of God; one may trust him, if he has eaten one's salt, to respect one's daughter as he would hisown, but if he happens to be under no such special obligation it may behazardous to trust him with even one's charwoman or one's mother-in-law. And the man of morals, confronted by a moral situation, is usuallywholly without honour. Put him on the stand to testify against a woman, and he will tell all he knows about her, even including what he haslearned in the purple privacy of her boudoir. More, he will not tell itreluctantly, shame-facedly, apologetically, but proudly and willingly, in response to his high sense of moral duty. It is simply impossible forsuch a man to lie like a gentleman. He lies, of course, like all of us, and perhaps more often than most of us on the other side, but he doesit, not to protect sinners from the moral law, but to make theirpunishment under the moral law more certain, swift, facile andspectacular. 

By this long route we get at our _apologia_ for Dr. Wilson, a man fromwhom we both differ in politics, in theology, in ethics and inepistemology, but one whose great gifts, particularly for moralendeavour in the grand manner, excite our sincere admiration. Both hisfoes and his friends, it seems to us, do him a good deal of injustice. The former, carried away by that sense of unlikeness which lies at thebottom of most of the prejudices of uncritical men, denounce him out ofhand because he is not as they are. A good many of these foes, ofcourse, are not actually men of honour themselves; some of them, infact, belong to sects and professions--for example, that of intellectualSocialist and that of member of Congress--in which no authentic man ofhonour could imaginably have a place. But it may be accurately said ofthem, nevertheless, that if actual honour is not in them, then at leastthey have something of the manner of honour--that they are moving in thedirection of honour, though not yet arrived. Few men, indeed, may besaid to belong certainly and irrevocably in either category, that of themen of honour or that of the men of morals. Dr. Wilson, perhaps, is onesuch man. He is as palpably and exclusively a man of morals as, say, George Washington was a man of honour. He is, in the one category, agreat beacon, burning almost blindingly; he is, in the other, no morethan a tallow dip, guttering asthmatically. But the majority of menoccupy a sort of twilight zone, and the most that may be said of them isthat their faces turn this way or that. Such is the case with Dr. Wilson's chief foes. Their eyes are upon honour, as upon some new andsuperlatively sweet enchantment, and, bemused to starboard, they viewthe scene to port with somewhat extravagant biliousness. Thus, when theycontemplate His Excellency's long and perhaps unmatchable series ofviolations of his troth--in the matter of "keeping us out of the war, "in the matter of his solemn promises to China, in the matter of hisstatement of war aims and purposes, in the matter of his shifty dealingwith the Russian question, in the matter of his repudiation of thearmistice terms offered to the Germans, in the matter of his stupendouslying to the Senate committee on foreign relations, and so on, _adinfinitum_--when they contemplate all that series of evasions, dodgings, hypocrisies, double-dealings and plain mendacities, they succumb to anindignation that is still more than half moral, and denounce himbitterly as a Pecksniff, a Tartuffe and a Pinto. In that judgment, as weshall show, there is naught save a stupid incapacity to understand anunlike man--in brief, no more than the dunderheadedness which makes aGerman regard every Englishman as a snuffling poltroon, hiding behindhis vassals, and causes an Englishman to look upon every German as afiend in human form, up to his hips in blood. 

But one expects a man's foes to misjudge him, and even to libel himdeliberately; a good deal of their enmity, in fact, is often no morethan a product of their uneasy consciousness that they have dealtunfairly with him; one is always most bitter, not toward the author ofone's wrongs, but toward the victim of one's wrongs. Unluckily, Dr. Wilson's friends have had at him even more cruelly. When, seeking todefend what they regard as his honour, they account for his incessantviolation of his pledges--to the voters in 1916, to the soldiers draftedfor the war, to the Chinese on their entrance, to the Austrians when hesought to get them out, to the Germans when he offered them hisfourteen points, to the country in the matter of secret diplomacy--whenhis friends attempt to explain his cavalier repudiation of all thesepledges on the ground that he could not have kept them without violatinglater pledges, they achieve, of course, only an imbecility, obvious anddamning, for it must be plain that no man is permitted, in honour, tomake antagonistic engagements, or to urge his private tranquillity oreven the public welfare as an excuse for changing their terms withoutthe consent of the parties of the second part. A man of honour is onewho simply does whatever he says he will do, provided the other partyholds to the compact too. One cannot imagine him shifting, trimming andmaking excuses; it is his peculiar mark that he never makesexcuses--that the need of making them would fill him with unbearablehumiliation. The moment a man of honour faces the question of hishonour, he is done for; it can no more stand investigation than thechastity of a woman can stand investigation. In such a character, Dr. Wilson would have been bound irrevocably by all his long series ofsolemn engagements, from the first to the last, without the slightestpossibility of dotting an "i" or of cutting off the tail of a comma. Itwould have been as impossible for him to have repudiated a single oneof them at the desire of his friends or in the interest of hisidealistic enterprises as it would have been for him to have repudiatedit to his own private profit. 

But here is where both foes and friends go aground; both attempt toinject concepts of honour into transactions predominatingly, and perhapsexclusively, coloured by concepts of morals. The two things are quitedistinct, as the two sorts of men are quite distinct. Beside theobligation of honour there is the obligation of morals, entirelyindependent and often directly antagonistic. And beside the man whoyields to the punctilio--the man of honour, the man who keeps hisword--there is the man who submits himself, regardless of his personalengagements and the penalties that go therewith, to the clarion call ofthe moral law. Dr. Wilson is such a man. He is, as has been remarked, aPresbyterian, a Calvinist, a militant moralist. In that rôle, devoted tothat high cause, clad in that white garment, he was purged of allobligations of honour to any merely earthly power. His one obligationwas to the moral law--in brief, to the ordinance of God, as determinedby Christian pastors. Under that moral law, specifically, he wascharged to search out and determine its violations by the accused in thedock, to wit, by the German nation, according to the teaching of thosepastors and the light within, and to fix and execute a punishment thatshould be swift, terrible and overwhelming. 

To this business, it must be granted by even his most extravagantopponents, he addressed himself with the loftiest resolution andsingleness of purpose, excluding all puerile questions of ways andmeans. He was, by the moral law, no more bound to take into account theprocess whereby the accused was brought to book and the weight ofretribution brought to bear than a detective is bound to remember howany ordinary prisoner is snared for the mill of justice. The detectivehimself may have been an important factor in that process; he may havetaken the prisoner by some stratagem involving the most gross falsepretences; he may have even played the _agent provocateur_ and soactually suggested, planned and supervised the crime. But surely thatwould be a ridiculous critic who would argue thereby that the detectiveshould forthwith forget the law violated and the punishment justlyprovided for it, and go over to the side of the defence on the groundthat his dealings with the prisoner involved him in obligations ofhonour. The world would laugh at such a moral moron, if it did notactually destroy him as an enemy of society. It recognizes the two codesthat we have described, and it knows that they are antagonistic. Itexpects a man sworn to the service of morality to discharge his duty atany cost to his honour, just as it expects a man publicly devoted tohonour to keep his word at any cost to his or to the public morals. Moreover, it inclines, when there is a conflict, toward the side ofmorals; the overwhelming majority of men are men of morals, not men ofhonour. They believe that it is vastly more important that the guiltyshould be detected, taken into custody and exposed to the rigour of thelaw than that the honour of this or that man should be preserved. Intruth, there are frequent circumstances under which they positivelyesteem a man who thus sacrifices his honour, or even their own honour. The man of _dis_honour may actually take on the character of a publichero. Thus, in 1903, when the late Major General Roosevelt, thenPresident, tore up the treaty of 1846, whereby the United Statesguaranteed the sovereignty of Columbia in the Isthmus of Panama, thegreat masses of the American plain people not only at once condoned thisgrave breach of honour, but actually applauded Dr. Roosevelt because hisact furthered the great moral enterprise of digging the canal. 

These distinctions, of course, are familiar to all men who devotethemselves to the study of the human psyche; that morals and honour arenot one and the same thing, but two very distinct and even antitheticalthings, is surely no news to the judicious. But what is thus merely anaxiom of ethics, politics or psychology is often kept strangely secretin the United States. We have acquired the habit of evading all thefacts of life save those that are most superficial; by long disuse wehave almost lost the capacity for thinking analytically and accurately. A thing may be universally known among us, and yet never get itself somuch as mentioned. Around scores of elementary platitudes there hangs ashuddering silence as complete as that which hedges in the sacred nameof a Polynesian chief. At every election time, in our large cities, mostof the fundamental issues are concealed, particularly when they happento take on a theological colour, which is very often. It is, forexample, the timorous public theory, born of this fear of the forthrightfact, that when a man sets up as a candidate for, say, a judgeship, thequestion of his private religious faith is of no practicalimportance--that it makes no difference whether he is a Catholic or aMethodist. The truth is, of course, that his faith is often of the veryfirst importance--that it will colour his conduct of the forensiccombats before him even more than his politics, his capacity to digestproteids or the social aspirations of his wife. One constantly notes, inAmerican jurisprudence, the effects of theological prejudices on thebench; there are at least a dozen controlling decisions, coveringespecially the new moral legislation, which might almost be mistaken bya layman for sermons by the Rev. Dr. Billy Sunday. The Prohibitionists, during their long and very adroit campaign, shrewdly recognized theimportance of controlling the judiciary; in particular, they threw alltheir power against the election of candidates who were known to beCatholics, or Jews, or free-thinkers. As a result they packed the benchof nearly every state with Methodist, Baptist and Presbyterian judges, and these gentlemen at once upheld all their maze of outrageousstatutes. That they would do so if elected was known in advance, andyet, so far as the record shows, it was a rare thing for any one toattack them on the ground of their religion, and rarer still for anysuch attack to influence many votes. The taboo was working. The majorityof voters were eager to avoid that issue. They felt, in some vague andunintelligible way, that it was improper to raise it. 

So with all other primary issues. There is surely no country in theworld in which the marriage relation is discussed more copiously than inthe United States, and yet there is no country in which its essentialsare more diligently avoided. Some years ago, seeking to let somesagacity into the prevailing exchange of platitudes, one of us wrote abook upon the subject, grounding it upon the obvious doctrine that womenhave much more to gain by marriage than men, and that the majority ofmen are aware of it, and would never marry at all if it were not forwomen's relentless effort to bring them to it. This banality the writersupported, by dint of great painstaking, in a somewhat novel way. Thatis to say, he put upon himself the limitation of employing no theory, statement of fact or argument in the book that was not already embodiedin a common proverb in some civilized language. Now and then it was abit hard to find the proverb, but in most cases it was very easy, and insome cases he found, not one, but dozens. Well, this laborious_pastiche_ of the obvious made such a sensation that it sold better thanany other book that the author had ever written--and the reviewsunanimously described it, either with praise or with blame, as anextraordinary collection of heresies, most of them almost too acrid tobe bruited about. In other words, this mass of platitudes took Americansby surprise, and somehow shocked them. What was commonplace to even thepeasants of the European Continent was so unfamiliar to even theliterate minority over here that the book acquired a sort of sinisterrepute, and the writer himself came to be discussed as a fellow with thehabit of arising in decorous society and indelicately blowing his nose. 

There is, of course, something of the same shrinking from the elementalfacts of life in England; it seems to run with the Anglo-Saxon. Thisaccounts for the shuddering attitude of the English to suchplatitude-monging foreigners as George Bernard Shaw, the Scotsmandisguised as an Irishman, and G. K. Chesterton, who shows all thephysical and mental stigmata of a Bavarian. Shaw's plays, which once hadall England by the ears, were set down as compendiums of theself-evident by the French, a realistic and plain-spoken people, andwere sniffed at in Germany by all save the middle classes, whocorrespond to the _intelligentsia_ of Anglo-Saxondom. But in America, even more than in England, they were viewed as genuinely satanic. Weshall never forget, indeed, the tremulous manner in which Americanaudiences first listened to the feeble rattling of the palpable in suchpieces as "Man and Superman" and "You Never Can Tell. " It was preciselythe manner of an old maid devouring "What Every Girl of Forty-FiveShould Know" behind the door. As for Chesterton, his banal arguments infavour of alcohol shocked the country so greatly that his previous highservices to religious superstition were forgotten, and today he isseldom mentioned by respectable Americans. 

V

It is necessary to repeat that we rehearse all these facts, not inindignation, nor indeed in any spirit of carping whatever, but inperfect serenity and simply as descriptive sociologists. This attitudeof mind is but little comprehended in America, where the emotionsdominate all human reactions, and even such dismal sciences aspaleontology, pathology and comparative philology are gaudily colouredby patriotic and other passions. The typical American learned mansuffers horribly from the national disease; he is eternally afraid ofsomething. If it is not that some cheese-monger among his trustees willhave him cashiered for receiving a picture post-card from Prof. Dr. Scott Nearing, it is that some sweating and scoundrelly German orFrenchman will discover and denounce his cribs, and if it is not thatthe foreigner will have at him, it is that he will be robbed of his stepfrom associate to full professor by some rival whose wife is moreamiable to the president of the university, or who is himself morepopular with the college athletes. Thus surrounded by fears, hetranslates them, by a familiar psychological process, into indignations. He announces what he has to say in terms of raucous dudgeon, as a negro, having to go past a medical college at night, intones some bellicosegospel-hymn. He is, in brief, vociferously correct. During the latewar, at a time of unusual suspicions and hence of unusual hazards, thiseagerness to prove orthodoxy by choler was copiously on exhibition. Thusone of the leading American zoölogists printed a work in which, afterstarting off by denouncing the German naming of new species as ignorant, dishonest and against God, he gradually worked himself up to thedoctrine that any American who put a tooth into a slab of _Rinderbrustmit Meerrettig_, or peeped at _Simplicissimus_ with the blinds down, orbought his children German-made jumping-jacks, was a traitor to theConstitution and a secret agent of the Wilhelmstrasse. And thus therewere American pathologists and bacteriologists who denounced Prof. Dr. Paul Ehrlich as little better than a quack hired by the Krupps to poisonAmericans, and who displayed their pious horror of the late Prof. Dr. Robert Koch by omitting all acknowledgment of obligation to him fromtheir monographs. And finally there was the posse of "two thousandAmerican Historians" assembled by Mr. Creel to instruct the plain peoplein the new theory of American history, whereby the Revolution wasrepresented as a lamentable row in an otherwise happy family, deliberately instigated by German intrigue--a posse which reached itsgreatest height of correct indignation in its approval of the celebratedSisson documents, to the obscene delight of the British authors thereof. 

As we say, we are devoid of all such lofty passions, and hence mustpresent our observations in the flat, unimaginative, unemotional mannerof a dentist pulling a tooth. It would not be going too far, in fact, tocall us emotional idiots. What ails us is a constitutional suspicionthat the other fellow, after all, may be right, or, in any event, partlyright. In the present case we by no means reprehend the avoidance ofissues that we have described; we merely record it. The fact is that ithas certain very obvious uses, and is probably inevitable in ademocratic society. It is commonly argued that free speech is necessaryto the prosperity of a democracy, but in this doctrine we take no stock. On the contrary, there are plain reasons for holding that free speech ismore dangerous to a democracy than to any other form of government, andno doubt these reasons, if only unconsciously, were at the bottom of theextraordinary body of repressive legislation put upon the books duringthe late war. The essential thing about a democracy is that the men atthe head of the state are wholly dependent, for a continuance of theirpower, upon the good opinion of the popular majority. While they areactually in office, true enough, they are theoretically almostcompletely irresponsible, but their terms of office are usually so shortthat they must give constant thought to the imminent canvassing of theiracts, and this threat of being judged and turned out commonly greatlyconditions their exercise of their power, even while they hold it to thefull. Of late, indeed, there has actually arisen the doctrine that theyare responsible at all times and must respond to every shift in publicsentiment, regardless of their own inclinations, and there has evengrown up the custom of subjecting them to formal discipline, as by whatis called the recall. The net result is that a public officer under ademocracy is bound to regard the popular will during the whole of histerm in office, and cannot hope to carry out any intelligible plan ofhis own if the mob has been set against it. 

Now, the trouble with this scheme is that the mob reaches itsconclusions, not by logical steps but by emotional steps, and that itsinformation upon all save a very small minority of the questionspublicly at issue is always scant and inaccurate. It is thus constantlyliable to inflammation by adroit demagogues, or rabble-rousers, andinasmuch as these rabble-rousers are animated as a sole motive by thehope of turning out the existing officers of state and getting theoffices for themselves, the man in office must inevitably regard them ashis enemies and the doctrines they preach as subversive of goodgovernment. This view is not altogether selfish. There is, in fact, sound logic in it, for it is a peculiarity of the mob mind that italways takes in most hospitably what is intrinsically most idiotic--thatbetween two antagonistic leaders it always follows the one who islongest on vague and brilliant words and shortest on sense. Thus the manin office, if he would be free to carry on his duties in anythingapproaching freedom and comfort, must adopt measures against thattendency to run amuck. 

Three devices at once present themselves. One is to take steps againstthe rabble-rousers by seeking to make it appear that they are traitors, and so arousing the mob against them--in brief, to deny them theirconstitutional right to free speech under colour of criminal statutes. The second is to combine this plan with that of flooding the countrywith official news by a corps of press-agents, chautauquans and othersuch professors of deception. The third is to meet the rabble-rousers ontheir own ground, matching their appeals to the emotions with appealseven more powerful, and out-doing their vague and soothing words withwords even more vague and soothing. All three plans have been inoperation since the first days of the republic; the early Federalistsemployed the first two with such assiduity that the mob of that timefinally revolted. All three have been brought to the highest conceivablepoint of perfection by Dr. Wilson, a man whose resolute fidelity to hismoral ideas is matched only by his magnificent skill at playing uponevery prejudice and weakness of the plain people. 

But men of such exalted and varied gifts are not common. The averagehead of a democratic state is not _ipso facto_ the best rabble-rouserwithin that state, but merely one of the best. He may be able, on fairterms, to meet any individual rival, but it is rare for him to be ableto meet the whole pack, or even any considerable group. To relieve himfrom that difficulty, and so prevent the incessant running amuck of thepopulace, it is necessary to handicap all the remaining rabble-rousers, and this is most effectively done by limitations upon free speech whichoriginate as statutes and gradually take on the form and potency ofnational customs. Such limitations arose in the United States byprecisely that process. They began in the first years of the republic asdefinite laws. Some of those laws were afterward abandoned, but what wasfundamentally sound in them remained in force as custom. 

It must be obvious that even Dr. Wilson, despite his tremendous gift forthe third of the devices that we have named, would have been in sorecase during his second administration if it had not been for hisemployment of the other two. Imagine the United States during the Summerof 1917 with absolute free speech the order of the day! The mails wouldhave been flooded with Socialist and pacifist documents, everystreet-corner would have had its screaming soap-box orator, thenewspapers would have shaken the very heavens with colossal alarms, andconscientious objection would have taken on the proportions of anational frenzy. In the face of such an avalanche of fears andbalderdash, there would have been no work at all for the Germanpropagandists; in fact, it is likely that a great many of them, undersuspicion on account of their relative moderation, would have beenlynched as agents of the American munitions patriots. For the mob, itmust be remembered, infallibly inclines, not to the side of the soundestlogic and loftiest purpose, but to the side of the loudest noise, andwithout the artificial aid of a large and complex organization ofpress-agents and the power to jail any especially effective opponentforthwith, even a President of the United States would be unable to bawldown the whole fraternity. That it is matter of the utmost importance, in time of war, to avoid any such internal reign of terror must beobvious to even the most fanatical advocate of free speech. There mustbe, in such emergencies, a resolute pursuit of coherent policies, andthat would be obviously impossible with the populace turningdistractedly to one bogus messiah after another, and always seeking toforce its latest craze upon the government. Thus, while one mayperchance drop a tear or two upon the Socialists jailed by a sort oflynch law for trying to exercise their plain constitutional rights, andupon the pacifists tarred and feathered by mobs led by governmentagents, and upon the conscientious objectors starved and clubbed todeath in military dungeons, it must still be plain that such barbarouspenalties were essentially necessary. The victims, in the main, werehalf-wits suffering from the martyr complex; it was their admitteddesire to sacrifice themselves for the Larger Good. This desire wasgratified--not in the way they hoped for, of course, but nevertheless ina way that must have given any impartial observer a feeling of profound, if discreditable, satisfaction. 

What a republic has to fear especially is the rabble-rouser whoadvocates giving an objective reality to the gaudy theories which lie atthe foundations of the prevailing scheme of government. He is far moredangerous than a genuine revolutionist, for the latter comes with ideasthat are actually new, or, at all events, new to the mob, and so he hasto overcome its congenital hostility to novelty. But the reformer who, under a democracy, bases his case upon the principles upon whichdemocracy is founded has an easy road, for the populace is familiarwith those principles and eager to see them put into practical effect. The late Cecil Chesterton, in his penetrating "History of the UnitedStates, " showed how Andrew Jackson came to power by that route. Jackson, he said, was simply a man so naïve that he accepted the lofty doctrinesof the Declaration of Independence without any critical questioningwhatever, and "really acted as if they were true. " The appearance ofsuch a man, he goes on, was "appalling" to the political aristocrats of1825. They themselves, of course, enunciated those doctrines daily andbased their whole politics upon them--but not to the point of reallyexecuting them. So when Jackson came down from the mountains with thesame sonorous words upon his lips, but with the addition of a solemnpromise to carry them out--when he thus descended upon them, he stoletheir thunder and spiked their guns, and after a brief strugglehe had disposed of them. The Socialists, free-speech fanatics, anti-conscriptionists, anti-militarists and other such democraticmaximalists of 1917 and 1918 were, in essence, nothing but a new andformidable horde of Jacksons. Their case rested upon principles held tobe true by all good Americans, and constantly reaffirmed by the highestofficers of state. It was thus extremely likely that, if they werepermitted to woo the public ear, they would quickly amass a majority ofsuffrages, and so get the conduct of things into their own hands. So itbecame necessary, in order that the great enterprises then under waymight be pushed to a successful issue, that all these marplots besilenced, and it was accordingly done. This proceeding, of course, wastheoretically violative of their common rights, and hence theoreticallyun-American. All the theory, in fact, was on the side of the victims. But war time is no time for theories, and a man with war powers in hishands is not one to parley with them. 

As we have said, the menace presented by such unintelligent literalistsis probably a good deal more dangerous to a democracy than to agovernment of any other form. Under an aristocracy, for example, such asprevailed, in one form or another, in England, Germany, Italy and Francebefore the war, it is possible to give doctrinaires a relatively freerein, for even if they succeed in converting the mob to their whim-wham, there remain insuperable impediments to its adoption and execution aslaw. In England, as every one knows, the impediment was a ruling castehighly skilled in the governmental function and generally trusted by amajority of the populace--a ruling caste firmly intrenched in the Houseof Lords and scarcely less powerful in the House of Commons. In Franceit was a bureaucracy so securely protected by law and custom thatnothing short of a political cataclysm could shake it. In Germany andItaly it was an aristocracy buttressed by laws cunningly designed tonullify the numerical superiority of the mob, and by a monarchicaltheory that set up a heavy counterweight to public opinion. 

In the face of such adroit checks and balances it is a matter ofrelative indifference whether the mob blows scalding hot or freezingcold. Whatever the extravagance of its crazes, there remains effectivemachinery for holding them in check until they spend themselves, whichis usually soon enough. Thus the English government, thoughtheoretically as much opposed to anarchists as the American government, gave them cheerful asylum before the war and permitted them to preachtheir lamentable notions almost without check, whereas in America theyearly aroused great fears and were presently put under suchdisabilities that their propaganda became almost impossible. Even inFrance, where they had many converts and were frequently in eruption, there was far more hospitality in the Germany of Bismarck's day, theSocialists, after a brief and aberrant attempt to suppress them, wereallowed to run free, despite the fact that their doctrine was quite asabhorrent to German official doctrine as anarchism was to Americanofficial doctrine. The German ruling caste of those days was shelteredbehind laws and customs which enabled it to pull the teeth of Socialism, even in the face of enormous Socialist majorities. But under a democracyit is difficult, and often downright impossible, to oppose the popularcraze of the moment with any effect, and so there must be artificialmeans of disciplining the jake-fetchers who seek to set such enthusiasmsin motion. The shivering fear of Bolshevism, visible of late among thecapitalists of America, is based upon a real danger. These capitalistshave passed through the burning fires of Rooseveltian trust-busting andBryanistic populism, and they know very well that half a dozen Leninesand Trotskis, turned loose upon the plain people, would quickly recruita majority of them for a holy war upon capital, and that they have thepolitical power to make such a holy war devastating. 

The amateur of popular psychology may wonder why it is that the mob, inthe face of the repressions constantly practised in the United States, does not occasionally rise in revolt, and so get back its right to bewooed and ravished by all sorts of mountebanks. Theoretically it hasthat right, and what is more, it has the means of regaining it; nothingcould resist it if it made absolute free speech an issue in a nationalcampaign and voted for the candidate advocating it. But something isoverlooked here, and that is the fact that the mob has no liking forfree speech _per se_. Some of the grounds of its animosity we haverehearsed. Others are not far to seek. One of them lies in the mob'schronic suspicion of all advocates of ideas, born of its distaste forideas themselves. The mob-man cannot imagine himself throwing up his joband deserting his home, his lodge and his speakeasy to carry a newgospel to his fellows, and so he is inclined to examine the motives ofany other man who does so. The one motive that is intelligible to him isthe desire for profit, and he commonly concludes at once that this iswhat moves the propagandist before him. His reasoning is defective, buthis conclusion is usually not far from wrong. In point of fact, idealismis not a passion in America, but a trade; all the salient idealists makea living at it, and some of them, for example, Dr. Bryan and the Rev. Dr. Sunday, are commonly believed to have amassed large fortunes. For anAmerican to advocate a cause without any hope of private usufruct isalmost unheard of; it would be difficult to find such a man who was notplainly insane. The most eloquent and impassioned of American idealistsare candidates for public office; on the lower levels idealism is nomore than a hand-maiden of business, like advertising or belonging tothe Men and Religion Forward Movement. 

Another and very important cause of the proletarian's failure to whoopfor free speech is to be found in his barbarous delight in persecution, regardless of the merits of the cause. The spectacle of a man exercisingthe right of free speech yields, intrinsically, no joy, for there isseldom anything dramatic about it. But the spectacle of a man beingmobbed, jailed, beaten and perhaps murdered for trying to exercise it isa good show like any other good show, and the populace is thus not onlyeager to witness it but even willing to help it along. It is thereforequite easy to set the mob upon, say, the Bolsheviki, despite the factthat the Bolsheviki have the professed aim of doing the mob anincomparable service. During the late high jinks of the Postoffice andthe Department of Justice, popular opinion was always on the side of theraiding parties. It applauded every descent upon a Socialist or pacifistmeeting, not because it was very hotly in favour of war--in fact, it waslukewarm about war, and resisted all efforts to heat it up untiloverwhelming swarms of yokel-yankers were turned upon it--but because itwas in favour of a safe and stimulating form of rough-house, with thepolice helping instead of hindering. It never stopped to inquire aboutthe merits of the matter. All it asked for was a melodramatic raid, followed by a noisy trial of the accused in the newspapers, and thedaily publication of sensational (and usually bogus) evidence about thediscovery of compromising literature in his wife's stockings, includingrecords of his receipt of $100, 000 from von Bernstorff, Carranza or someother transient hobgoblin. The celebrated O'Leary trial was typical. After months of blood-curdling charges in the press, it turned out whenthe accused got before a court that the evidence against him, on whichit was sought to convict him of a capital offence, was so feeble that itwould have scarcely sufficed to convict him of an ordinary misdemeanor, and that most of this feeble testimony was palpably perjured. Nevertheless, public opinion was nearly unanimously against him fromfirst to last, and the jury which acquitted him was almost apologeticabout its inability to give the populace the crowning happiness of astate hanging. 

Under cover of the war, of course, the business of providing such showsprospered extraordinarily, but it is very active even in time of peace. The surest way to get on in politics in America is to play the leadingpart in a prosecution which attracts public notice. The list ofstatesmen who have risen in that fashion includes the names of many ofthe highest dignity, _e. G. _, Hughes, Folk, Whitman, Heney, Baker andPalmer. Every district attorney in America prays nightly that God willdeliver into his hands some Thaw, or Becker, or O'Leary, that he may getupon the front pages and so become a governor, a United States senator, or a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. The latecrusade against W. R. Hearst, which appeared to the public as a greatpatriotic movement, was actually chiefly managed by a subordinateprosecuting officer who hoped to get high office out of it. 

This last aspirant failed in his enterprise largely because he hadtackled a man who was himself of superb talents as a rouser of theproletariat, but nine times out of ten the thing succeeds. Its successis due almost entirely to the factor that we have mentioned, to wit, tothe circumstance that the sympathy of the public is always on the sideof the prosecution. This sympathy goes so far that it is ready tocondone the most outrageous conduct in judges and prosecuting officers, providing only they give good shows. During the late war uponSocialists, pacifists, anti-conscriptionists and other such heretics, judges theoretically employed to insure fair trials engaged in the mostamazing attacks upon prisoners before them, denouncing them withouthearing them, shutting out evidence on their side and making stumpspeeches to the jury against them. That conduct aroused no publicindignation; on the contrary, such judges were frequently praised in thenewspapers and a good many of them were promoted to higher courts. Evenin time of peace there is no general antipathy to that sort of thing. At least two-thirds of our judges, federal, state and municipal, colourtheir decisions with the newspaper gabble of the moment; even theSupreme Court has shown itself delicately responsive to the successivemanias of the Uplift, which is, at bottom, no more than an organizedscheme for inventing new crimes and making noisy pursuit of newcategories of criminals. Some time ago an intelligent Mexican, afterstudying our courts, told us that he was surprised that, in a landostensibly of liberty, so few of the notorious newspaper-wooers andblacklegs upon the bench were assassinated. It is, in fact, rathercurious. The thing happens very seldom, and then it is usually in theSouth, where the motive is not altruistic but political. That is to say, the assassin merely desires to remove one blackleg in order to make aplace for some other blackleg. He has no objection to systematizedinjustice; all he desires is that it be dispensed in favour of his ownside. 

VI

The mob delight in melodramatic and cruel spectacles, thus constantlyfed and fostered by the judicial arm in the United States, is also atthe bottom of another familiar American phenomenon, to wit, lynching. Agood part of the enormous literature of lynching is devoted to adiscussion of its causes, but most of that discussion is ignorant andsome of it is deliberately mendacious. The majority of Southerncommentators argue that the motive of the lynchers is a laudableyearning to "protect Southern womanhood, " despite the plain fact thatonly a very small proportion of the blackamoors hanged and burned areeven so much as accused of molesting Southern womanhood. On the otherhand, some of the negro intellectuals of the North ascribe the recurrentbutcheries to the Southern white man's economic jealousy of the Southernblack, who is fast acquiring property and reaching out for theprerogatives that go therewith. Finally, certain white Northerners seeka cause in mere political animosity, arguing that the Southern whitehates the negro because the latter is his theoretical equal at thepolls, though actually not permitted to vote. 

All of these notions seem to us to be fanciful. Lynching is popular inthe South simply because the Southern populace, like any otherpopulace, delights in thrilling shows, and because no other sort ofshow is provided by the backward culture of the region. The introductionof prize-fighting down there, or baseball on a large scale, or amusementplaces like Coney Island, or amateur athletic contests, or picnics likethose held by the more truculent Irish fraternal organizations, or anyother such wholesale devices for shocking and diverting the proletariatwould undoubtedly cause a great decline in lynching. The art ispractised, in the overwhelming main, in remote and God-forsaken regions, in which the only rival entertainment is offered by one-sided politicalcampaigns, third-rate chautauquas and Methodist revivals. When it isimitated in the North, it is always in some drab factory or mining town. Genuine race riots, of course, sometimes occur in the larger cities, butthese are always economic in origin, and have nothing to do withlynching, properly so-called. One could not imagine an actual lynchingat, say, Atlantic City, with ten or fifteen bands playing, blind pigs inoperation up every alley, a theatre in every block or two, and theboardwalk swarming with ladies of joy. Even a Mississippian, transportedto such scenes, succumbs to the atmosphere of pleasure, and so has noseizures of moral rage against the poor darkey. Lynching, in brief, is aphenomenon of isolated and stupid communities, a mark of imperfectcivilization; it follows the hookworm and malaria belt; it shows itselfin inverse proportion to the number of shoot-the-chutes, symphonyorchestras, roof gardens, theatres, horse races, yellow journals andautomatic pianos. No one ever heard of a lynching in Paris, at Newport, or in London. But there are incessant lynchings in the remoter parts ofRussia, in the backwoods of Serbia, Bulgaria and Herzegovina, in Mexicoand Nicaragua, and in such barbarous American states as Alabama, Georgiaand South Carolina. 

The notion that lynching in the South is countenanced by the gentry orthat they take an actual hand in it is libelous and idiotic. Thewell-born and well-bred Southerner is no more a savage than any otherman of condition. He may live among savages, but that no more makes hima savage than an English gentleman is made one by having a place inWales, or a Russian by living on his estate in the Ukraine. WhatNorthern observers mistake for the gentry of the South, when they reportthe participation of "leading citizens" in a lynching, is simply theoffice-holding and commercial bourgeoisie--the offspring of the poorwhite trash who skulked at home during the Civil War, robbing the widowsand orphans of the soldiers at the front, and so laying the foundationsof the present "industrial prosperity" of the section, _i. E. _, itsconversion from a region of large landed estates and urbane life into aregion of stinking factories, filthy mining and oil towns, child-killingcotton mills, vociferous chambers of commerce and other such swineries. It is, of course, a fact that the average lynching party in Mississippior Alabama is led by the mayor and that the town judge climbs down fromhis bench to give it his official support, but it is surely not a factthat these persons are of the line of such earlier public functionariesas Pickens, Troup and Pettus. On the contrary, they correspond to thelesser sort of Tammany office-holders and to the vermin who monopolizethe public functions in such cities as Boston and Philadelphia. Thegentry, with few exceptions, have been forced out of the public serviceeverywhere south of the Potomac, if not out of politics. The Democraticvictory in 1912 flooded all the governmental posts at Washington withSoutherners, and they remain in power to this day, and some of them areamong the chief officers of the nation. But in the whole vast corpsthere are, we believe, but ten who would be accepted as gentlemen bySouthern standards, and only three of these are in posts of anyimportance. In the two houses of Congress there is but one. 

It is thus absurd to drag the gentry of the South--the Bourbons of NewEngland legend--into a discussion of the lynching problem. Theyrepresent, in fact, what remains of the only genuine aristocracy evervisible in the United States, and lynching, on the theoretical side, isfar too moral a matter ever to engage an aristocracy. The true lynchersare the plain people, and at the bottom of the sport there is nothingmore noble than the mob man's chronic and ineradicable poltroonery. Cruel by nature, delighting in sanguinary spectacles, and here broughtto hatred of the negro by the latter's increasing industrial, (_not_political, capitalistic or social) rivalry, he naturally diverts himselfin his moments of musing with visions of what he would do to this orthat Moor if he had the courage. Unluckily, he hasn't, and so he isunable to execute his dream _a cappella_. If, inflamed by liquor, heattempts it, the Moor commonly gives him a beating, or even murders him. But what thus lies beyond his talents as an individual at once becomesfeasible when he joins himself with other men in a like situation. Thisis the genesis of a mob of lynchers. It is composed primarily of a fewmen with definite grievances, sometimes against the negro lynched butoften against quite different negroes. It is composed secondarily of alarge number of fifth-rate men eager for a thrilling show, involving nopersonal danger. It is composed in the third place of a fewrabble-rousers and politicians, all of them hot to exhibit themselvesbefore the populace at a moment of public excitement and in an attitudeof leadership. It is the second element that gives life to the generalimpulse. Without its ardent appetite for a rough and shocking spectaclethere would be no lynching. Its influence is plainly shown by thefrequent unintelligibility of the whole proceeding; all its indignationover the crime alleged to be punished is an afterthought; any crime willanswer, once its blood is up. Thus the most characteristic lynchings inthe South are not those in which a confessed criminal is done to deathfor a definite crime, but those in which, in sheer high spirits, someconvenient African is taken at random and lynched, as the newspaperssay, "on general principles. " That sort of lynching is the most honestand normal, and we are also inclined to think that it is also the mostenjoyable, for the other sort brings moral indignation with it, andmoral indignation is disagreeable. No man can be both indignant andhappy. 

But here, seeking to throw a feeble beam or two of light into the mentalprocesses of the American proletarian, we find ourselves entering upon adiscussion that grows narrow and perhaps also dull. Lynching, after all, is not an American institution, but a peculiarly Southern institution, and even in the South it will die out as other more seemly recreationsare introduced. It would be quite easy, we believe, for any Southerncommunity to get rid of it by establishing a good brass band and havingconcerts every evening. It would be even easier to get rid of it byborrowing a few professional scoundrels from the Department of Justice, having them raid the "study" of the local Methodist archdeacon, andforthwith trying him publicly--with a candidate for governor asprosecuting officer--for seduction under promise of salvation. Thetrouble down there is not a special viciousness. The Southern poorwhite, taking him by and large, is probably no worse and no better thanthe anthropoid proletarian of the North. What ails the whole region isPhilistinism. It has lost its old aristocracy of the soil and has notyet developed an aristocracy of money. The result is that its culturalideas are set by stupid and unimaginative men--Southern equivalents ofthe retired Iowa steer staffers and grain sharks who pollute LosAngeles, American equivalents of the rich English nonconformists. Thesemen, though they have accumulated wealth, have not yet acquired thecapacity to enjoy civilized recreations. Worse, most of them are stillso barbarous that they regard such recreations as immoral. Thedominating opinion of the South is thus against most of the devices thatwould diminish lynching by providing substitutes for it. In everySouthern town some noisy clown of a Methodist or Presbyterian clergymanexercises a local tyranny. These men are firmly against all thedivertissements of more cultured regions. They oppose prize-fighting, horse-racing, Sunday baseball and games of chance. They are bitterprohibitionists. By their incessant vice-crusades they reduce theromance of sex to furtiveness and piggishness. They know nothing ofmusic or the drama, and view a public library merely as something to berigorously censored. We are convinced that their ignorant moralenthusiasm is largely to blame for the prevalence of lynching. No doubtthey themselves are sneakingly conscious of the fact, or at least awareof it subconsciously, for lynching is the only public amusement thatthey never denounce. 

Their influence reveals strikingly the readiness of the inferiorAmerican to accept ready-made opinions. He seems to be patheticallyeager to be told what to think, and he is apparently willing to acceptany instructor who takes the trouble to tackle him. This, also, wasbrilliantly revealed during the late war. The powers which controlledthe press during that fevered time swayed the populace as they pleased. So long as the course of Dr. Wilson was satisfactory to them he wasdepicted as a second Lincoln, and the plain people accepted the estimatewithout question. To help reinforce it the country was actually floodedwith lithographs showing Lincoln and Wilson wreathed by the same branchof laurel, and copies of the print got into millions of humble homes. But immediately Dr. Wilson gave offence to his superiors, he began to bedepicted as an idiot and a scoundrel, and this judgment promptlydisplaced the other one in the popular mind. The late Major GeneralRoosevelt was often a victim of that sort of boob-bumping. A man ofmercurial temperament, constantly shifting his position on all largepublic questions, he alternately gave great joy and great alarm to thelittle group of sagaciously wilful men which exercises genuinesovereignty over the country, and this alternation of emotions showeditself, by way of the newspapers and other such bawdy agencies, in thevacillation of public opinion. The fundamental platitudes of the nationwere used both for him and against him, and always with immense effect. One year he was the last living defender of the liberties fought for bythe Fathers; the next year he was an anarchist. Roosevelt himself wasmuch annoyed by this unreliability of the mob. Now and then he sought toovercome it by direct appeals, but in the long run he was usuallybeaten. Toward the end of his life he resigned himself to a policy ofgreat discretion, and so withheld his voice until he was sure what hymnwas being lined out. 

The newspapers and press associations, of course, do not impart theofficial doctrine of the moment in terms of forthright instructions;they get it over, as the phrase is, in the form of delicate suggestions, most of them under cover of the fundamental platitudes aforesaid. Theirjob is not to inspire and inform public discussion, but simply to colourit, and the task most frequently before them is that of giving apatriotic and virtuous appearance to whatever the proletariat is tobelieve. They do this, of course, to the tune of deafening protestationsof their own honesty and altruism. But there is really no such thing asan honest newspaper in America; if it were set up tomorrow it wouldperish within a month. Every journal, however rich and powerful, is thetrembling slave of higher powers, some financial, some religious andsome political. It faces a multitude of censorships, all of them verypotent. It is censored by the Postoffice, by the Jewish advertisers, bythe Catholic Church, by the Methodists, by the Prohibitionists, by thebanking oligarchy of its town, and often by even more astoundingauthorities, including the Sinn Fein. Now and then a newspaper makes avaliant gesture of revolt, but it is only a gesture. There is not asingle daily in the United States that would dare to discuss the problemof Jewish immigration honestly. Nine tenths of them, under the lash ofsnobbish Jewish advertisers, are even afraid to call a Jew a Jew; theirorders are to call him a Hebrew, which is regarded as sweeter. Duringthe height of the Bolshevist scare not one American paper ventured todirect attention to the plain and obtrusive fact that the majority ofBolshevists in Russia and Germany and at least two-thirds of those takenin the United States were of the faith of Moses, Mendelssohn and Gimbel. But the Jews are perhaps not the worst. The Methodists, in all save afew big cities, exercise a control over the press that is far more rigidand baleful. In the Anti-Saloon League they have developed a machine forterrorizing office-holders and the newspapers that is remarkablyeffective, and they employed it during the long fight for Prohibition tothrottle all opposition save the most formal. 

In this last case, of course, the idealists who thus forced thespeakeasy upon the country had an easy task, for all of the prevailingassumptions and prejudices of the mob were in their favour. No doubt itis true, as has been alleged, that a majority of the voters of thecountry were against Prohibition and would have defeated it at aplebiscite, but equally without doubt a majority of them were againstthe politicians so brutally clubbed by the Anti-Saloon League, and readyto believe anything evil of them, and eager to see them manhandled. Moreover, the League had another thing in its favour: it was operated bystrictly moral men, oblivious to any notion of honour. Thus it advocatedand procured the abolition of legalized liquor selling without theslightest compensation to the men who had invested their money in thebusiness under cover of and even at the invitation of the law--a form ofrepudiation and confiscation unheard of in any other civilized country. Again, it got through the constitutional amendment by promising theliquor men to give them one year to dispose of their lawfullyaccumulated stocks--and then broke its promise under cover of allegedwar necessity, despite the fact that the war was actually over. Bothproceedings, so abhorrent to any man of honour, failed to arouse anyindignation among the plain people. On the contrary the plain peopleviewed them as, in some vague way, smart and creditable, and as, in anycase, thoroughly justified by the superior moral obligation that we havehitherto discussed. 

Thus the _Boobus americanus_ is lead and watched over by zealous men, all of them highly skilled at training him in the way that he shouldthink and act. The Constitution of his country guarantees that he shallbe a free man and assumes that he is intelligent, but the laws andcustoms that have grown up under that Constitution give the lie to boththe guarantee and the assumption. It is the fundamental theory of allthe more recent American law, in fact, that the average citizen ishalf-witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices orhis own thoughts. If there were not regulations against the saloon (itseems to say) he would get drunk every day, dissipate his means, undermine his health and beggar his family. If there were not postalregulations as to his reading matter, he would divide his time betweenBolshevist literature and pornographic literature and so become at oncean anarchist and a guinea pig. If he were not forbidden under heavypenalties to cross a state line with a wench, he would be chronicallyunfaithful to his wife. Worse, if his daughter were not protected bystatutes of the most draconian severity, she would succumb to the firstItalian she encountered, yield up her person to him, enroll herself uponhis staff and go upon the streets. So runs the course of legislation inthis land of freemen. We could pile up example upon example, but willdefer the business for the present. Perhaps it may be resumed in a workone of us is now engaged upon--a full length study of the popular mindunder the republic. But that work will take years.... 

VII

No doubt we should apologize for writing, even so, so long a preface toso succinct a book. The one excuse we can think of is that, having readit, one need not read the book. That book, as we have said, may strikethe superficial as jocular, but in actual fact it is a very serious andeven profound composition, not addressed to the casual reader, but tothe scholar. Its preparation involved a great diligence, and its studyis not to be undertaken lightly. What the psychologist will find toadmire in it, however, is not its learning and painstaking, itslaborious erudition, but its compression. It establishes, we believe, anew and clearer method for a science long run to turgidity andflatulence. Perhaps it may be even said to set up an entirely newscience, to wit, that of descriptive sociological psychology. We believethat this field will attract many men of inquiring mind hereafter andyield a valuable crop of important facts. The experimental method, intrinsically so sound and useful, has been much abused by orthodoxpsychologists; it inevitably leads them into a trackless maze ofmeaningless tables and diagrams; they keep their eyes so resolutely uponthe intellectual process that they pay no heed to the primaryintellectual materials. Nevertheless, it must be obvious that theconclusions that a man comes to, the emotions that he harbours and thecrazes that sway him are of much less significance than the fundamentalassumptions upon which they are all based. 

There has been, indeed, some discussion of those fundamental assumptionsof late. We have heard, for example, many acute discourses upon theeffects produced upon the whole thinking of the German people, peasantsand professors alike, by the underlying German assumption that the lateKaiser was anointed of God and hence above all ordinary humanresponsibility. We have heard talk, too, of the curious Irish axiomthat there is a mysterious something in the nature of things, giving theIrish people an indefeasible right to govern Ireland as they please, regardless of the safety of their next-door neighbours. And we haveheard many outlandish principles of the same sort from politicaltheorists, _e. G. _, regarding the inalienable right of democracy toprevail over all other forms of government and the inalienable right ofall national groups, however small, to self-determination. Well, here isan attempt to assemble in convenient form, without comment orinterpretation, some of the fundamental beliefs of the largest body ofhuman beings now under one flag in Christendom. It is but a beginning. The field is barely platted. It must be explored to the last furlong andall its fantastic and fascinating treasures unearthed and examinedbefore ever there can be any accurate understanding of the mind of theAmerican people. 

 GEORGE JEAN NATHAN H. L. MENCKEN_New York, 1920. _

THE AMERICAN CREDO

§1

That the philoprogenitive instinct in rabbits is so intense that thealliance of two normally assiduous rabbits is productive of 265offspring in one year. 

§2

That there are hundreds of letters in the Dead Letter Office whosefailure to arrive at their intended destinations was instrumental inseparating as many lovers. 

§3

That the Italian who sells bananas on a push-cart always takes thebananas home at night and sleeps with them under his bed. 

§4

That a man's stability in the community and reliability in business maybe measured by the number of children he has. 

§5

That in Japan an American can buy a beautiful geisha for two dollars andthat, upon being bought, she will promptly fall madly in love with himand will run his house for him in a scrupulously clean manner. 

§6

That all sailors are gifted with an extraordinary propensity for amour, but that on their first night of shore leave they hang around thewater-front saloons and are given knock-out drops. 

§7

That when a comedian, just before the rise of the curtain, is handed atelegram announcing the death of his mother or only child, he goes outon the stage and gives a more comic performance than ever. 

§8

That the lions in the cage which a lion-tamer enters are always sixtyyears old and have had all their teeth pulled. 

§9

That the Siamese Twins were joined together by gutta percha moulded andpainted to look like a shoulder blade. 

§10

That if a woman about to become a mother plays the piano every day, herbaby will be born a Victor Herbert. 

§11

That all excursion boats are so old that if they ran into a driftingbeer-keg they would sink. 

§12

That a doctor knows so much about women that he can no longer fall inlove with one of them. 

§13

That when one takes one's best girl to see the monkeys in the zoo, themonkeys invariably do something that is very embarrassing. 

§14

That firemen, awakened suddenly in the middle of the night, go to firesin their stocking feet. 

§15

That something mysterious goes on in the rooms back of chop sueyrestaurants. 

§16

That oil of pennyroyal will drive away mosquitoes. 

§17

That the old ladies on summer hotel verandas devote themselves entirelyto the discussion of scandals. 

§18

That a bachelor, expecting a feminine visitor, by way of subtlepreliminary strategy smells up his rooms with Japanese punk. 

§19

That all one has to do to gather a large crowd in New York is to standon the curb a few moments and gaze intently at the sky. 

§20

That one can get an excellent bottle of wine in France for a franc. 

21

That it is dangerous to drink out of a garden hose, since if one doesone is likely to swallow a snake. 

§22

That all male negroes can sing. 

§23

That when a girl enters a hospital as a nurse, her primary object isalways to catch one of the doctors. 

§24

That the postmasters in small towns read all the postcards. 

§25

That a young girl ought to devote herself sedulously to her pianolessons since, when she is married, her playing will be a great comfortto her husband. 

§26

That all theater box-office employés are very impolite and hate to sella prospective patron a ticket. 

§27

That all great men have illegible signatures. 

§28

That all iron-moulders and steam-fitters, back in the days of freedom, used to get drunk every Saturday night. 

§29

That if a man takes a cold bath regularly every morning of his life hewill never be ill. 

§30

That ginger snaps are made of the sweepings of the floor in the bakery. 

§31

That every circus clown's heart is breaking for one reason or another. 

§32

That a bull-fighter always has so many women in love with him that hedoesn't know what to do. 

§33

That George M. Cohan spends all his time hanging around Broadway cafésand street-corners making flip remarks. 

§34

That one can never tell accurately what the public wants. 

§35

That every time one sat upon an old-fashioned horse-hair sofa one of theprotruding sharp hairs would stab one through the union suit. 

§36

That when an ocean vessel collides with another vessel or hits aniceberg and starts to sink, the ship's band promptly rushes up to thetop deck and begins playing "Nearer, My God, to Thee. "

§37

That in no town in America where it has played has "Uncle Tom's Cabin"ever failed to make money. 

§38

That the tenement districts are the unhealthy places they are becausethe dwellers hang their bed-clothing out on the fire-escapes. 

§39

That, in small town hotels, the tap marked "hot water" always givesforth cold water and that the tap marked "cold" always gives forth hot. 

§40

That every lieutenant in the American army who went to France had anaffair with a French comtesse. 

§41

That when cousins marry, their children are born blind, deformed, orimbecile. 

§42

That a cat falling from the twentieth story of the Singer Building willland upon the pavement below on its feet, uninjured and as frisky asever. 

§43

That the accumulation of great wealth always brings with it greatunhappiness. 

§44

That it is unlucky to count the carriages in a funeral. 

§45

That the roulette wheel at Monte Carlo is controlled by a wire as thinas a hair which is controlled in turn by a button hidden beneath the rugnear the operator's great toe. 

§46

That Polish women are so little human that one of them can have a babyat 8 A. M. And cook her husband's dinner at noon. 

§47

That Henry James never wrote a short sentence. 

§48

That it is bad luck to kill a spider. 

§49

That German peasants are possessed of a profound knowledge of music. 

§50

That every coloured cook has a lover who never works, and that she feedshim by stealing the best part of every dish she cooks. 

§51

That George Bernard Shaw doesn't really believe anything he writes. 

§52

That the music of Richard Wagner is all played _fortissimo_, and bycornets. 

§53

That the Masonic order goes back to the days of King Solomon. 

§54

That swearing is forbidden by the Bible. 

§55

That all newspaper reporters carry notebooks. 

§56

That whiskey is good for snake-bite. 

§57

That surgeons often kill patients for the sheer pleasure of it. 

§58

That ten drops of camphor in half a glass of water will prevent a cold. 

§59

That the first thing a country jake does when he comes to New York is tomake a bee line for Grant's Tomb and the Aquarium. 

§60

That if one's nose tickles it is a sign that one is going to meet astranger or kiss a fool. 

§61

That if one's right ear burns, it is a sign that some one is saying nicethings about one. 

§62

That if one's left ear burns, it is a sign that some one is saying meanthings about one. 

§63

That French women use great quantities of perfume in lieu of taking abath. 

§64

That a six-footer is invariably a virtuoso of amour superior to a manof, say, five feet seven. 

§65

That a soubrette is always fifteen or twenty years older than she looks. 

§66

That what impels most men to have their finger-nails manicured is avanity for having manicured finger-nails. 

§67

That water rots the hair and thus causes baldness. 

§68

That when one twin dies, the other twin becomes exceedingly melancholyand soon also dies. 

§69

That one may always successfully get a cinder out of the eye by nottouching the eye, but by rolling it in an outward direction andsimultaneously blowing the nose. 

§70

That if one wears light weight underwear winter and summer the year'round, one will never catch a cold. 

§71

That a drunken man is invariably more bellicose than a sober man. 

§72

That all prize-fighters and baseball players have their hair cut roundin the back. 

§73

That the work of a detective calls for exceptionally high sagacity andcunning. 

§74

That on the first day of the season in the pleasure parks many persons, owing to insufficiently tested apparatus, are regularly killed on theroller-coasters. 

§75

That a play, a novel, or a short story with a happy ending isnecessarily a commercialized and inartistic piece of work. 

§76

That a person who follows up a cucumber salad with a dish of ice-creamwill inevitably be the victim of cholera morbus. 

§77

That a Sunday School superintendent is always carrying on an intriguewith one of the girls in the choir. 

§78

That it is one of the marks of a gentleman that he never speaks evil ofa woman. 

§79

That a member of the Masons cannot be hanged. 

§80

That a policeman can eat _gratis_ as much fruit and as many peanuts offthe street-corner stands as he wants. 

§81

That the real President of the United States is J. P. Morgan. 

§82

That onion breath may be promptly removed by drinking a little milk. 

§83

That onion breath may be promptly removed by eating a little parsley. 

§84

That Catholic priests conduct their private conversations in Latin. 

§85

That John Drew is a great society man. 

§86

That all Swedes are stupid fellows, and have very thick skulls. 

§87

That all the posthumously printed stories of David Graham Phillips andJack London have been written by hacks hired by the magazine editors andpublishers. 

§88

That a man like Charles Schwab, who has made a great success of thesteel business, could in the same way easily have become a greatcomposer like Bach or Mozart had he been minded thus to devote histalents. 

§89

That the man who doesn't hop promptly to his feet when the orchestraplays "The Star Spangled Banner" as an overture to Hurtig and Seamon's"Hurly-Burly Girlies" must have either rheumatism or pro-Germansympathies. 

§90

That every workman in Henry Ford's factory owns a pretty house in thesuburbs and has a rose-garden in the back-yard. 

§91

That all circus people are very pure and lead domestic lives. 

§92

That if a spark hits a celluloid collar, the collar will explode. 

§93

That when a bachelor who has hated children for twenty years getsmarried and discovers he is about to become a father, he is delighted. 

§94

That drinking three drinks of whiskey a day will prevent pneumonia. 

§95

That every negro who went to France with the army had a liaison with awhite woman and won't look at a nigger wench any more. 

§96

That all Russians have unpronounceable names. 

§97

That awnings keep rooms cool. 

§98

That it is very difficult to decipher a railroad time-table. 

§99

That gamblers may always be identified by their habit of wearing largediamonds. 

§100

That when a man embarks in a canoe with a girl, the chances are two toone that the girl will move around when the boat is in mid-stream andupset it. 

§101

That German babies are brought up on beer in place of milk. 

§102

That a man with two shots of cocaine in him could lick Jack Dempsey. 

§103

That fully one half the repertoire of physical ailments is due to uricacid. 

§104

That a woman, when buying a cravat for a man, always picks out one ofgreen and purple with red polka-dots. 

§105

That a negro's vote may always be readily bought for a dollar. 

§106

That cripples always have very sunny dispositions. 

§107

That if one drops a crust of bread into one's glass of champagne, onecan drink indefinitely without getting drunk. 

§108

That a brass band always makes one feel like marching. 

§109

That, when shaving on a railway train, a man invariably cuts himself. 

§110

That the male Spaniard is generally a handsome, flashing-eyed fellow, possessed of fiery temper. 

§111

That after drinking a glass of absinthe one has peculiar hallucinationsand nightmares. 

§112

That since the Indians were never bald, baldness comes from wearingtight hats. 

§113

That all wine-agents are very loose men. 

§114

That the editor of a woman's magazine is always a lizzie. 

§115

That what is contained in the pitcher on the speakers' platform isalways ice-water. 

§116

That all Senators from Texas wear sombreros, chew tobacco, expectorateprofusely, and frequently employ the word "maverick. "

§117

That the meters on taxicabs are covertly manipulated by the chauffeursby means of wires hidden under the latters' seats. 

§118

That Lillian Russell is as beautiful today as she was thirty-five yearsago. 

§119

That if a young woman can hold a lighted match in her fingers until itcompletely burns up, it is a sign that her young man really loves her. 

§120

That if a young woman accidentally puts on her lingerie wrong side out, it is a sign that she will be married before the end of the year. 

§121

That if a bride wears an old garter with her new finery, she will have ahappy married life. 

§122

That a sudden chill is a sign that somebody is walking over one's grave. 

§123

That some ignoble Italian is at the bottom of every Dorothy Arnold_fugax_. 

§124

That a tarantula will not crawl over a piece of rope. 

§125

That millionaires always go to sleep at the opera. 

§126

That Paderewski can get all the pianos he wants for nothing. 

§127

That a bloodhound never makes a mistake. 

§128

That celery is good for the nerves. 

§129

That the jokes in _Punch_ are never funny. 

§130

That the Mohammedans are heathens. 

§131

That a sudden shock may cause the hair to turn grey over night. 

§132

That the farmer is an honest man, and greatly imposed upon. 

§133

That all the antique furniture sold in America is made in Grand Rapids, Mich. , and that the holes testifying to its age are made either withgimlets or by trained worms. 

§134

That if a dog is fond of a man it is an infallible sign that the man isa good sort, and one to be trusted. 

§135

That blondes are flightier than brunettes. 

§136

That a nurse, however ugly, always looks beautiful to the sick man. 

§137

That book-keepers are always round-shouldered. 

§138

That if one touches a hop-toad, one will get warts. 

§139

That a collar-button that drops to the floor when one is dressinginvariably rolls into an obscure and inaccessible spot and eludes theexplorations of its owner. 

§140

That an American ambassador has the French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian and Japanese languages at his finger tips, and ischummy with royalty. 

§141

That the ready-made mail order blue serge suits for men are put togetherwith mucilage, and turn green after they have been in the sunlight for aday or two. 

§142

That if one has only three matches left, the first two will invariablygo out, but that the third and last will remain lighted. 

§143

That all Chinamen smoke opium. 

§144

That every country girl who falls has been seduced by a man from thecity. 

§145

That an intelligent prize-fighter always triumphs over an ignorantprize-fighter, however superior the latter in agility and strength. 

§146

That a doctor's family never gets sick. 

§147

That nature designed a horse's tail primarily as a flicker-off of flies. 

§148

That nicotine keeps the teeth in a sound condition. 

§149

That when an Odd Fellow dies he is always given a magnificent funeral byhis lodge, including a band and a parade. 

§150

That the man who is elected president of the Senior Class in a collegeis always the most popular man in his class. 

§151

That a minor actress in a theatrical company always considers theleading man a superb creature, and loves him at a distance. 

§152

That a Southern levee is a gay place. 

§153

That when a dog whines in the middle of the night, it is a sure signthat some one is going to die. 

§154

That the stenographer in a business house is always coveted by heremployer, who invites her to luncheon frequently, gradually worms hisway into her confidence, keeps her after office hours one day, accomplishes her ruin, and then sets her up in a magnificently furnishedapartment in Riverside Drive and appeases her old mother by paying thelatter's expenses for a summer holiday with her daughter at theseashore. 

§155

That the extinction of the Indian has been a deplorable thing. 

§156

That everybody has a stomach-ache after Thanksgiving dinner. 

§157

That, in summer, tan shoes are much cooler on the feet than black shoes. 

§158

That every man who calls himself Redmond is a Jew whose real name isRosenberg. 

§159

That General Grant never directed a battle save with a cigar in hismouth. 

§160

That there is something slightly peculiar about a man who wears spats. 

§161

That the more modest a young girl is, the more innocent she is. 

§162

That what a woman admires above everything else in a man is an uprightcharacter. 

§163

That seafaring men drink nothing but rum. 

§164

That no family in the slums has less than six children. 

§165

That a piece of camphor worn on a string around the neck will ward offdisease. 

§166

That a saloon with a sign reading "Family Entrance" on its side doorinvariably has a bawdy house upstairs. 

§167

That the wife of a rich man always wistfully looks back into the pastand wishes she had married a poor man. 

§168

That all persons prominent in smart society are very dull. 

§169

That when ordering a drink of whiskey at a bar, a man always used toinstruct the bartender as to the size of the drink he desired by saying"two fingers" or "three fingers. "

§170

That all the wine formerly served in Italian restaurants was made in thecellar, and was artificially coloured with some sort of dye that wasvery harmful to the stomach. 

§171

That bootblacks whistle because they are so happy. 

§172

That stokers on ocean liners are from long service so used to the heatof the furnaces that they don't notice it. 

§173

That what draws men to horse races is love of the sport. 

§174

That tarantulas often come from the tropics in bunches of bananas, andthat when one of them stings a negro on the wharf he swells up, turnsgreen and dies within three hours. 

§175

That a man will do anything for the woman he loves. 

§176

That the reason William Gillette, who has been acting for over fortyyears, always smokes cigars in the parts he plays is because he is verynervous when on the stage. 

§177

That the doughnut is an exceptionally indigestible article. 

§178

That one captive balloon in every two containing persons on pleasurebent breaks away from its moorings, and drifts out to sea. 

§179

That a workingman always eats what is in his dinnerpail with greatrelish. 

§180

That children were much better behaved twenty years ago than they aretoday. 

§181

That the cashier of a restaurant in adding up a customer's cheque alwaysadds a dollar which is subsequently split between himself and thewaiter. 

§182

That it is impossible to pronounce the word "statistics" withoutstuttering. 

§183

That the profession of white slaving, in 1900 controlled exclusively byChinamen, has since passed entirely under the control of Italians. 

§184

That every person in the Riviera lives in a "villa. "

§185

That the chief form of headgear among the Swiss is the Alpine hat. 

§186

That each year a man volunteers to take his children to the circusmerely as a subterfuge to go himself. 

§187

That all marriages with actresses turn out badly. 

§188

That San Francisco is a very gay place, and full of opium joints. 

§189

That an elevator operator never succeeds in stopping his car on a levelwith the floor. 

§190

That they don't make any pianos today as good as the old square ones. 

§191

That a man who habitually clears his throat before he speaks isgenerally a self-important hypocrite and a bluffer. 

§192

That Maurice Maeterlinck, the Belgian Dr. Frank Crane, leads a monasticlife. 

§193

That whenever a vaudeville comedian quotes a familiar commercial slogan, such as "His Master's Voice, " or "Eventually, why not now?", he is paid$50 a performance for doing so. 

§194

That all Asiatic idols have large precious rubies in their foreheads. 

§195

That when the foe beheld Joan of Arc leading the French army againstthem, a look of terror froze their features and that, casting their armsfrom them, they broke into a frenzied and precipitate flight. 

§196

That the late King Edward VII as Prince of Wales easily got every girlhe wanted. 

§197

That the penitentiaries of the United States contain a great number ofhapless prisoners possessed of a genuine gift for poetry. 

§198

That if a cat gets into a room where a baby is sleeping, the cat willsuck the baby's breath and kill it. 

§199

That all men named Clarence, Claude or Percy are sissies. 

§200

That a street car conductor steals every fifth nickel. 

§201

That the security of a bank is to be estimated in proportion to thesolidity of the bank building. 

§202

That seventy-five per cent of all taxicab drivers have at one time oranother been in Sing Sing. 

§203

That one can buy a fine suit of clothes in London for twelve dollars. 

§204

That the chicken salad served in restaurants is always made of veal. 

§205

That a play without a bed in it never makes any money in Paris. 

§206

That Conan Doyle would have made a wonderful detective. 

§207

That an oyster-shucker every month or so discovers a pearl which he goesout and sells for five hundred dollars. 

§208

That a napkin is always wrapped around a champagne bottle for thepurpose of hiding the label, and that the quality of the champagne maybe judged by the amount of noise the cork makes when it is popped. 

§209

That because a married woman remains loyal to her husband she loves him. 

§210

That every time one blows oneself to a particularly expensive cigar andleans back to enjoy oneself with a good smoke after a hearty andsatisfying dinner, the cigar proceeds to burn down the side. 

§211

That when a police captain goes on a holiday he always gets boilinglydrunk. 

§212

That an Italian puts garlic in everything he eats, including coffee. 

§213

That if one hits a negro on the head with a cobblestone, the cobblestonewill break. 

§214

That all nuns have entered convents because of unfortunate loveaffairs. 

§215

That, being surrounded by alcoholic beverages and believing thetemptation would be irresistible once he began, a bartender in the olddays never took a drink. 

§216

That all millionaires are born in small ramshackle houses situated nearrailroad tracks. 

§217

That farmers afford particularly easy prey for book-agents and are thelargest purchasers of cheap sets of Guy de Maupassant, Rudyard Kiplingand O. Henry. 

§218

That George Washington never told a lie. 

§219

That a dark cigar is always a strong one. 

§220

That the night air is poisonous. 

§221

That a hair from a horse's tail, if put into a bottle of water, willturn into a snake. 

§222

That champagne is the best of all wines. 

§223

That it snowed every Christmas down to fifteen years ago. 

§224

That if a young woman finds a piece of tea leaf floating around the topof her tea cup, it is a sign that she will be married before the end ofthe year. 

§225

That if, after one lusty blow, a girl's birthday cake reveals ninecandles still burning, it is a sign that it will be nine years beforeshe gets married. 

§226

That if, while promenading, a girl and her escort walk on either side ofa water hydrant or other obstruction instead of both walking 'round iton the same side, they will have a misunderstanding before the month isover. 

§227

That it is unlikely that a man and woman who enter a hotel withoutbaggage after 10 P. M. And register are man and wife. 

§228

That all country girls have clear, fresh, rosy complexions. 

§229

That chorus girls spend the time during the entr'-actes sitting aroundnaked in their dressing-rooms telling naughty stories. 

§230

That many soldiers' lives have been saved in battle by bullets lodgingin Bibles which they have carried in their breast pockets. 

§231

That each year the Fourth of July exodus to the bathing beaches on thepart of persons from the city establishes a new record. 

§232

That women with red hair or wide nostrils are possessed of especiallypassionate natures. 

§233

That three-fourths of the inhabitants of Denver are lungers who havegone there for the mountain air. 

§234

That, when sojourning in Italy, one always feels very lazy. 

§235

That the people of Johnstown, Pa. , still talk of nothing but the flood. 

§236

That there is no finer smell in the world than that of burning autumnleaves. 

§237

That Jules Verne anticipated all the great modern inventions. 

§238

That a man is always a much heartier eater than a woman. 

§239

That all the girls in Mr. Ziegfeld's "Follies" are extraordinarilyseductive, and that at least 40 head of bank cashiers are annuallyguilty of tapping the till in order to buy them diamonds and Russiansables. 

§240

That a college sophomore is always a complete ignoramus. 

§241

That rubbers in wet weather are a preventive of colds. 

§242

That if one eats oysters in a month not containing an "r, " one iscertain to get ptomaine poisoning. 

§243

That a woman with a 7-1/2-C foot always tries to squeeze it into a4-1/2-A shoe. 

§244

That no shop girl ever reads anything but Laura Jean Libbey and thecheap sex magazines. 

§245

That there is something peculiar about a man who wears a red tie. 

§246

That all Bolsheviki and Anarchists have whiskers. 

§247

That all the millionaires of Pittsburgh are very loud fellows, and raisemerry hell with the chorus girls every time they go to New York. 

§248

That a man of fifty-five is always more experienced than a man ofthirty-five. 

§249

That new Bermuda potatoes come from Bermuda. 

§250

That the boy who regularly stands at the foot of his class in schoolalways turns out in later life to be very successful. 

§251

That the ornamental daggers fashioned out of one hundred dollars' worthof Chinese coins strung together, which one buys in Pekin or Hong Kongfor three dollars and a quarter, are fashioned out of one hundreddollars' worth of Chinese coins. 

§252

That it is hard to find any one in Hoboken, N. J. , who can speak English. 

§253

That the head-waiter in a fashionable restaurant has better manners thanany other man in the place. 

§254

That a girl always likes best the man who is possessed of a cavalierpoliteness. 

§255

That the most comfortable room conceivable is one containing a great bigopen fireplace. 

§256

That brunettes are more likely to grow stout in later years thanblondes. 

§257

That a sepia photograph of the Coliseum, framed, is a work of art. 

§258

That every time one crosses the English Channel one encounters roughweather and is very sea-sick. 

§259

That the Navajo blankets sold to trans-continental tourists by theIndians on the station platform at Albuquerque, New Mexico, are made bythe Elite Novelty M'f'g. Co. Of Passaic, N. J. , and are bought by theIndians in lots of 1, 000. 

§260

That appendicitis is an ailment invented by surgeons twelve years agofor money-making purposes and that, in the century before that time, noone was ever troubled with it. 

§261

That a theatrical matinée performance is always inferior to an eveningperformance, the star being always eager to hurry up the show in orderto get a longer period for rest before the night performance. 

§262

That John D. Rockefeller would give his whole fortune for a digestiongood enough to digest a cruller. 

§263

That a clergyman leads an easy and lazy life, and spends most of histime visiting women parishioners while their husbands are at work. 

§264

That it is almost sure death to eat cucumbers and drink milk at the samemeal. 

§265

That all bank cashiers, soon or late, tap the till. 

§266

That the members of fashionable church choirs, during the sermon, engage in kissing and hugging behind the pipe-organ. 

§267

That women who are in society never pay any attention to their children, and wish that they would die. 

§268

That if one gets one's feet wet, one is sure to catch cold. 

§269

That all French women are very passionate, and will sacrifice everythingto love. 

§270

That when a drunken man falls he never hurts himself. 

§271

That all Chinese laundrymen sprinkle their laundry by taking a mouthfulof water and squirting it out at their wash in a fine spray; and that, whatever the cost of living to a white man, the Chinese laundrymanalways lives on eight cents a day. 

§272

That if one fixes a savage beast with one's eye, the beast will remainrooted to the spot and presently slink away. 

§273

That if one eats cucumbers and then goes in swimming, one will be seizedwith a cramp. 

§274

That hiccoughs may be stopped by counting slowly up to one hundred. 

§275

That newspaper reporters hear, every day, a great many thumping scandalsthat they fail to print, and that they refrain through considerations ofhonour. 

§276

That the young East Side fellow who plays violin solos at themoving-picture theatre around the corner is so talented that, if he hadthe money to go to Europe to study, he would be a rival to Kreislerwithin three years. 

§277

That Paderewski, during the piano-playing days, wore a wig, and wasactually as bald as a coot. 

§278

That lightning never strikes twice in the same place. 

§279

That when a doctor finds there is nothing the matter with a man who hascome to consult him, he never frankly tells the man there's nothingwrong with him, but always gives him bread pills. 

§280

That, in a family crisis, the son always sticks to the mother and thedaughter to the father. 

§281

That beer is very fattening. 

§282

That no man of first-rate mental attainments ever goes in for dancing. 

§283

That a woman can't sharpen a lead pencil. 

§284

That on every trans-Atlantic steamer there are two smooth gamblers who, the moment the ship docks, sneak over the side with the large sum ofmoney they have won from the passengers. 

§285

That if one gets out of bed on the left side in the morning, one has amean disposition for the rest of the day. 

§286

That a woman who has led a loose life is so grateful for the respectshown her by the man who asks her to marry him that she makes the bestkind of wife. 

§287

That fish is a brain food. 

§288

That street-corner beggars have a great deal of money hidden away athome under the kitchen floor. 

§289

That it is advisable for a young woman who takes gas when having a toothpulled to be accompanied by some one, by way of precaution against thedentist. 

§290

That all girls educated in convents turn out in later life to behell-raisers. 

§291

That a young girl may always safely be trusted with the kind of man whospeaks of his mother. 

§292

That a nine-year-old boy who likes to play with toy steam engines isprobably a born mechanical genius and should be educated to be anengineer. 

§293

That all celebrated professional humourists are in private life heavyand witless fellows. 

§294

That when one stands close to the edge of a dizzy altitude, one isseized peculiarly with an impulse to jump off. 

§295

That if one eats an apple every night before retiring, one will never beill. 

§296

That all negroes born south of the Potomac can play the banjo and areexcellent dancers. 

§297

That whenever a negro is educated he refuses to work and becomes acriminal. 

§298

That whenever an Italian begins to dress like an American and to drive aDodge car, it is a sign he has taken to black-handing or has acquired aninterest in the white-slave trust. 

§299

That, in the days when there were breweries, the men who drovebeer-wagons drank 65 glasses of beer a head a day, and that it didn'thurt them because it came direct from the wood. 

§300

That, until the time of American intervention, the people of thePhilippines were all cannibals, and displayed the heads of their fallenenemies on poles in front of their houses. 

§301

That whenever a crowd of boys goes camping in summer two or three ofthem are drowned, and the rest come home suffering from poison ivy. 

§302

That whenever a will case gets into the courts, the lawyers gobble allthe money, and the heirs come out penniless. 

§303

That every female moving-picture star carries on an intrigue with herleading man, and will marry him as soon as he can get rid of his poorfirst wife, who took in washing in order to pay for his education in theart of acting. 

§304

That all theatrical managers are Jews, and that most of them canscarcely speak English. 

§305

That a great many of women's serious diseases are due to high Frenchheels. 

§306

That if one does not scratch a mosquito bite, it will stop itching. 

§307

That when a girl gives a man a pen-knife for a present, their friendshipwill come to an unhappy end unless he exercises the precaution to wardoff bad luck by giving her a penny. 

§308

That whenever one takes an umbrella with one, it doesn't rain. 

§309

That the cloth used in suits made in England is so good that it neverwears out. 

§310

That cinnamon drops are coloured red with a dye-stuff manufactured outof the dried bodies of cochineal insects. 

§311

That the missionaries in China and Africa make fortunes robbing thenatives they are sent out to convert. 

§312

That there is a revolution in Central America every morning beforebreakfast, and that the sole object of all the revolutionary chiefs isto seize the money in the public treasury and make off to Paris. 

§313

That whenever there is a funeral in an Irish family the mourners all getdrunk and proceed to assault one another with clubs. 

§314

That all immigrants come to America in search of liberty, and that whenthey attempt to exercise it they should be immediately sent back. 

§315

That whenever a rich American girl marries a foreign nobleman, he atonce gets hold of all her money, then beats her and then runs away withan actress. 

§316

That if one begins eating peanuts one cannot stop. 

§317

That a bachelor never has any one to sew the buttons on his clothes. 

§318

That whenever a dog wags his tail it is a sign that he is particularlyhappy. 

§319

That an Italian street labourer can do a hard day's work on one largeplate of spaghetti a day. 

§320

That if one breaks a mirror one will have bad luck for seven years. 

§321

That two men seldom agree that the same girl is good-looking. 

§322

That in the infinitesimal space of time between the springing of thetrap-door and his dropping through it, a hanged man sees his entire lifepass in panorama before him. 

§323

That when Washington crossed the Delaware, he stood up in the bow of theboat holding aloft a large American flag. 

§324

That whereas a man always hopes his first child will be a boy, his wifealways hopes that it will be a girl. 

§325

That the first time a boy smokes a cigar he always becomes deathly sick. 

§326

That a woman always makes a practice of being deliberately late inkeeping an appointment with a man. 

§327

That if, encountering a savage beast in the jungle, one falls upon theground, lies still and pretends that one is dead, the savage beast willpromptly make off and not hurt one. 

§328

That if one sits in front of the Café de la Paix, in Paris, one willsoon or late see everybody in the world that one knows. 

§329

That it is always twice as hard to get rid of a summer cold as to getrid of a winter cold. 

§330

That a soft speaking voice is the invariable mark of a well-bred man. 

§331

That the persons who most vociferously applaud the playing of "Dixie" inrestaurants are all Northerners who have never been further South thanAllentown, Pa. 

§332

That the larger the dog, the safer he is for children. 

§333

That Catholic priests never solicit money from their parishioners, butmerely assess them so much a head, and make them pay up instantly. 

§334

That nine times in ten when one is in pain, and a doctor assures onethat he is squirting morphine into one's arm, what he is reallysquirting in is only warm water. 

§335

That a German civilian, before the war, had to get off the sidewalkwhenever an army lieutenant approached him on the street, and that, ifhe failed to do so instantly, the lieutenant was free to run him throughwith his sword. 

§336

That while it may be possible, in every individual case of spiritualistcommunication with the dead, to prove fraud by the medium, theaccumulated effect of such communications is to demonstrate theimmortality of the soul. 

§337

That an Italian who earns and saves $1, 000 in America can take the moneyhome, invest it in an estate, and live like a rich man thereafter. 

§338

That all Mormons, despite the laws against it, still practise polygamy, and that they have agents all over the world recruiting cuties for theirharems. 

§339

That when a man goes to a photographer's to have his picture taken, theknowledge that he is having his picture taken always makes him veryself-conscious, thus causing him to assume an expression which resultsin the photograph being an inaccurate likeness. 

§340

That if the lower line on the palm of one's hand is a long one, it is asign that one is going to live to a ripe old age. 

§341

That Italian counts, before the war, always used to make their expenseswhen they came to America by acting as wine agents. 

§342

That a Russian peasant, in the days of the czar, drank two quarts ofvodka a day. 

§343

That a German farmer can raise more produce on one acre of land than anAmerican can raise on a hundred. 

§344

That a boil on the neck purifies the blood and is worth $1, 000. 

§345

That whenever a Frenchman comes home unexpectedly, some friend of thefamily makes a quick sneak out of the back door. 

§346

That every negro servant girl spends at least half of her wages onpreparations for taking the kink out of her hair. 

§347

That the licorice candy sold in cheap candy stores is made of old rubberboots. 

§348

That if a boy is given all he wants to drink at home he will not drinkwhen he is away from home. 

§349

That the second-class passengers on a trans-Atlantic steamship alwayshave more fun than the first-class passengers. 

§350

That a drunken man always pronounces every "s" as "sh. "

§351

That champagne will prevent seasickness. 

§352

That thin wrists and slender ankles are unmistakable signs ofaristocratic breeding. 

§353

That when one asks a girl to go canoeing she always brings along abright red or yellow sofa cushion. 

§354

That when a woman buys cigars for a man she always judges the quality ofthe cigars by the magnificence of the cigar-bands. 

§355

That candle light makes a woman forty-five years old look fifteen yearsyounger. 

§356

That the winters in the United States are a good deal less cold thanthey used to be, and that the change has been caused by the Gulf Stream. 

§357

That the Thursday matinées given by Chauncey Olcott are attended only byIrish servant girls. 

§358

That the reason the British authorities didn't lock up Bernard Shawduring the war was because they were afraid of his mind. 

§359

That Professor Garner is able to carry on long and intimateconversations with monkeys in their own language. 

§360

That oysters are a great aphrodisiac. 

§361

That if one sleeps with one's head on a high pillow one will beround-shouldered. 

§362

That coal miners get so dirty that they have to wash so often that theyare the cleanest working-men in the world. 

§363

That the average French housewife can make such a soup out of thecontents of a garbage-can that the eater will think he is at the Ritz. 

§364

That such authors as Dr. Frank Crane and Herbert Kaufman do not reallybelieve what they write, but print it simply for the money that is init. 

§365

That the average newspaper cartoonist makes $100, 000 a year. 

§366

That when a play is given in an insane asylum the inmates always laughat the tragic moments and cry at the humorous moments. 

§367

That if a girl takes the last cake off a plate she will die an old maid. 

§368

That men high in public affairs always read detective stories fordiversion. 

§369

That the wireless news bulletins posted daily on ocean liners are madeup on board. 

§370

That the Swiss, when they sing, always yodel. 

§371

That all German housewives are very frugal. 

§372

That if one holds a buttercup under a person's chin and a yellow lightis reflected upon that person's chin, it is a sign that he likes butter. 

§373

That all penny-in-the-slot weighing machines make a fat woman lighterand a thin woman heavier. 

§374

That in the period just before a woman's baby is born the woman's facetakes on a peculiar spiritual and holy look. 

§375

That when a Chinese laundryman hands one a slip for one's laundry, theChinese letters which he writes on the slip have nothing to do with thelaundry but are in reality a derogatory description of the owner. 

§376

That an old woman with rheumatism in her leg can infallibly predict whenit is going to rain. 

§377

That Philadelphia is a very sleepy town. 

§378

That it is impossible for a man to learn how to thread a needle. 

§379

That there is something unmanly about a grown man playing the piano, save only when he plays it in a bordello. 

§380

That a couple of quinine pills, with a chaser of rye whiskey, will curea cold. 

§381

That all Congressmen who voted for Prohibition are secret lushers andhave heavy stocks of all sorts of liquors in their cellars. 

§382

That a certain Exalted Personage in Washington is a gay dog with theladies and used to cut up with a stock company actress. 

§383

That all the best cooks are men. 

§384

That all Japanese butlers are lieutenants in the Japanese Navy and thatthey read and copy all letters received by the folks they work for. 

§385

That the best way to stop nose-bleed is to drop a door-key down thepatient's back. 

§386

That a thunder-storm will cause milk to turn sour. 

§387

That if a man drinks three glasses of buttermilk every day he will neverbe ill. 

§388

That whenever two Indians meet they greet each other with the word"How!"

§389

That the Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States all chewtobacco while hearing cases, but that they are very serious menotherwise, and never laugh, or look at a pretty girl, or get tight. 

§390

That all negro prize-fighters marry white women, and that they afterwardbeat them. 

§391

That New Orleans is a very gay town and full of beautiful Frenchcreoles. 

§392

That gin is good for the kidneys. 

§393

That the English lower classes are so servile that they say "Thank you, sir, " if one kicks them in the pantaloons. 

§394

That the gipsies who go about the country are all horse-thieves, andthat they will put a spell upon the cattle of any farmer who has themarrested for stealing his mare. 

§395

That every bachelor of easy means has an illicit affair with a grasswidow in a near-by city and is the father of several illegitimatechildren. 

§396

That a country editor receives so many presents of potatoes, corn, rutabagas, asparagus, country ham, carrots, turnips, etc. , that he neverhas to buy any food. 

§397

That whenever news reached him of another Federal disaster AbrahamLincoln would laugh it off with a very funny and often somewhat smuttystory, made up on the spot. 

§398

That George Washington died of a heavy cold brought on by swimming thePotomac in the heart of winter to visit a yellow girl on the Marylandshore. 

§399

That all negroes who show any intelligence whatever are actuallytwo-thirds white, and the sons of United States Senators. 

§400

That the late King Leopold of Belgium left 350 illegitimate children. 

§401

That Senator Henry Cabot Lodge is a very brainy man, though somewhatstuck up. 

§402

That if one eats ice-cream after lobster one will be doubled up bybelly-ache. 

§403

That Quakers, for all their religion, are always very sharp traders andhave a great deal of money hidden away in banks. 

§404

That old baseball players always take to booze, and so end their dayseither as panhandlers, as night watchmen or as janitors of Odd Fellows'halls. 

§405

That the object of the players, in college football, is to gouge out oneanother's eyes and pull off one another's ears. 

§406

That the sort of woman who carries around a Pomeranian dog, if sheshould ever have a child inadvertently, would give the midwife $500 tomake away with it. 

§407

That a woman likes to go to a bargain sale, fight her way to thecounter, and have pins stuck into her and her feet mashed by otherwomen. 

§408

That, if one swallows an ounce of olive oil before going to a banquet, one will not get drunk. 

§409

That a mud-turtle is so tenacious of life that if one cuts off his heada new one will grow in its place. 

§410

That the only things farmers read are government documents andpatent-medicine almanacs. 

§411

That if one's ear itches it is a sign that some one is talking of one. 

§412

That Italian children, immediately they leave the cradle, are sewed intotheir underclothes, and that they never get a bath thereafter until theyare confirmed. 

§413

That all Catholic priests are very hearty eaters, and have good winecellars. 

§414

That politics in America would be improved by turning all the publicoffices over to business men. 

§415

That department store sales are always fakes, and that they mark down afew things to attract the women and then swindle them by lifting theprices on things they actually want. 

§416

That 100, 000 abortions are performed in Chicago every year. 

§417

That John D. Rockefeller has a great mind, and would make a finePresident if it were not for his craze for money. 

§418

That all the Jews who were drafted during the late war were put into theQuartermaster's Department on account of their extraordinary businessacumen. 

§419

That a jury never convicts a pretty woman. 

§420

That chorus girls in the old days got so tired of drinking champagnethat the sound of a cork popping made them shudder. 

§421

That the Massachusetts troops, after the first battle of Bull Run, didn't stop running until they reached Harrisburg, Pa. 

§422

That General Grant was always soused during a battle, and that on thefew occasions when he was sober he got licked. 

§423

That the late King Edward used to carry on in Paris at such a gait thathe shocked even the Parisians. 

§424

That it takes an Englishman two days to see a joke, and that he alwaysgets it backward even then. 

§425

That headwaiters in fashionable hotels make $100 a day. 

§426

That if a bat flies into a woman's hair, the hair must be cut off to getit out. 

§427

That all the women in Chicago have very large feet. 

§428

That on cold nights policemen always sneak into stables on their beatsand go to sleep. 

§429

That all the school-boys in Boston have bulged brows, wear largespectacles and can read Greek. 

§430

That all dachshunds come from Germany. 

§431

That nine out of every ten Frenchmen have syphilis. 

§432

That the frankfurters sold at circuses and pleasure parks are made ofdog meat. 

§433

That all the cheaper brands of cigarettes are sophisticated with drugs, and in time cause those who smoke them to get softening of the brain. 

§434

That rock-and-rye will cure a cold. 

§435

That a country boy armed with a bent pin can catch more fish than a cityangler with the latest and most expensive tackle. 

§436

That red-haired girls are especially virulent. 

§437

That all gamblers eventually go broke. 

§438

That the worst actress in the company is always the manager's wife. 

§439

That an elephant in a circus never forgets a person who gives him achew of tobacco or a rotten peanut, but will single him out from a crowdyears afterward and bash in his head with one colossal blow. 

§440

That it is unlucky to put your hat on a bed. 

§441

That an old sock makes the best wrapping for a sore throat. 

§442

That lighting three cigarettes with one match will bring some terriblecalamity upon one or other of the three smokers. 

§443

That milking a cow is an operation demanding a special talent that ispossessed only by yokels, and that a person born in a large city cannever hope to acquire it. 

§444

That whenever there is a rough-house during a strike, it is caused byforeign anarchists who are trying to knock out American idealism. 

§445

That, whatever the demerits of Jews otherwise, they are always very kindto their old parents. 

§446

That the Swiss army, though small, is so strong that not even the Germanarmy in its palmy days could have invaded Switzerland, and that it isstrong because all Swiss are patriots to the death. 

§447

That when two Frenchmen fight a duel, whether with pistols or withswords, neither of them is ever hurt half so much as he would have beenhad he fought an honest American wearing boxing-gloves. 

§448

That whenever Prohibition is enforced in a region populated by negroes, they take to morphine, heroin and other powerful drugs, and beginmurdering all of the white inhabitants. 

§449

That all the great writers of the world now use typewriters. 

§450

That all Presidents of the United States get many hot tips on thestock-market, but that they are too honourable to play them, and so turnthem over to their wives, who make fortunes out of them. 

§451

That Elihu Root is an intellectual giant, and that it is a pity thesuspicion of him among farmers makes it impossible to elect himPresident. 

§452

That no man not a sissy can ever learn to thread a needle or darn asock. 

§453

That all glass blowers soon or late die of consumption. 

§454

That all women who go in bathing at the French seaside resorts affectvery naughty one-piece bathing suits. 

§455

That George M. Cohan and Irving Berlin can only play the piano with onefinger. 

§456

That farmers always go into gold mine swindles because of themagnificently embossed stock certificates. 

§457

That the Germans eat six regular meals a day, and between times staveoff their appetite with numerous Schweitzer cheese sandwiches, blutwurstand beer. 

§458

That David Belasco teaches his actresses how to express emotion byknocking them down and pulling them around the stage by the hair. 

§459

That only Americans travel in the first class carriages of foreignrailway trains, and that fashionable Englishmen always travel thirdclass. 

§460

That the whiskey sold in blind pigs contains wood alcohol and causesthose who drink it to go blind. 

§461

That wealthy society women never wear their pearl necklaces in public, but always keep them at home in safes and wear indistinguishableimitations instead. 

§462

That the late Charles Yerkes had no less than twenty girls, for each ofwhom he provided a Fifth Avenue mansion and a yearly income of $50, 000. 

§463

That when one goes to a railroad station to meet some one, the train isnever on time. 

§464

That the theatregoers in the Scandinavian countries care for nothing butIbsen and Strindberg. 

§465

That all doctors write prescriptions illegibly. 

§466

That Englishwomen are very cold. 

§467

That when the weather man predicts rain it always turns out fair, andthat when he predicts fair it always rains. 

§468

That lemon juice will remove freckles. 

§469

That if a woman wears a string of amber beads she will never get a sorethroat. 

§470

That no well-bred person ever chews gum. 

§471

That all actors sleep till noon, and spend the afternoon calling onwomen. 

§472

That the men who make sauerkraut press it into barrels by jumping on itwith their bare feet. 

§473

That the moment a nigger gets eight dollars, he goes to a dentist andhas one of his front teeth filled with gold. 

§474

That one never sees a Frenchman drunk, all the souses whom one sees inParis being Americans. 

§475

That a daughter is always a much greater comfort to a mother in afterlife than a son. 

§476

That a man with a weak, receding chin is always a nincompoop. 

§477

That English butlers always look down on their American employers, andfrequently have to leave the room to keep from laughing out loud. 

§478

That the most faithful and loving of all dogs is the Newfoundland. 

§479

That a man always dislikes his mother-in-law, and goes half-crazy everytime she visits him. 

§480

That if one doesn't scratch a mosquito bite it will stop itching. 

§481

That all the men in the moving picture business were formerly cloak andsuit merchants, and that they are now all millionaires. 

§482

That the accumulation of money makes a man hard, and robs him of all hisfiner qualities. 

§483

That, in an elevator, it is always a man who usurps the looking-glass. 

§484

That it is very unlucky to wear an opal. 

§485

That if a man's eyebrows meet, it is a sign that he has a veryunpleasant nature. 

§486

That a negro ball always ends up in a grand free-for-all fight, in whichseveral coons are mortally slashed with razors. 

§487

That if Houdini were locked up in Sing Sing, he would manage to make hisget-away in less than half an hour's time. 

§488

That Bob Ingersoll is in hell. 

THE END