VI POLITICS

My calling does not seem nowadays to inspire respect. Folks hoot at lawyers, declaring with much reiteration that law has ceased to be a profession and become a business. They vary that by pointing out that all the best talent in it is bought up day by day by the corporations and the rich. Even the judges—look at them! The current disposition is, when you don’t like a decision of a court, to take the judge’s number and write to the management to have him fired. It is to laugh at decisions and the feeling about them. The other day the United States Supreme Court decided something thus and so by four to three. Justices 1, 3, and 5 protested vigorously. Personally I sustained the dissenting opinion, and thought the decision left the law in a bad condition. That could be cured by Congress, which is perhaps the best way, but the popular method would be to dock Justices 2, 4, 6, and 7 a month’s pay, and try the case again with a full court. That’s how folks seem to feel, and perhaps some of them would act on their feelings.

Some of them! Stars above! What some of us would do is past guessing. What some of us are thought capable of doing quite outruns belief, but that is because the air is charged with politics and with plans and specifications for making over the world, and with a perceptible leaning, as I have intimated, toward beginning with the legal profession.

Oh, well, let ’em! I’m not afraid. A man who can make a living by law can make a living at something else if necessary. It is the understanding when they put young fellows to learn the law that they will be qualified, more or less, if they learn it, not only to be lawyers, but to be bankers, brokers, railroad officers, editors, milliners, grocers, contractors, and nurses-general to ailing industries, and undertakers. Accordingly they usually appoint lawyers to receiverships, and usually the appointees go ahead and bury the patient. No doubt it is a natural consequence of this theory that lawyers shall know and do everybody’s business that there is this prevalence of impressions that everybody ought to be able to beat the lawyers at law. Of course there ought to be reciprocity in omniscience. Of course the lawyer trade can be overdone, but there’s more to it than these recall people think. I guess it will last my time. It’s the science of keeping order in the world. I admit that it needs assistance from cops and sometimes from soldiers, and cannon and warships, and that too much of the time it keeps a sort of crystallized disorder that has to be smashed occasionally and rearranged. But when it comes to rearrangement, back they come to the lawyers, professors of the science of keeping order in the world.

It is interesting how people divide in politics. All the decent people seem to be after the same thing, more or less, but differ according to knowledge, temperament, circumstances, and affiliations as to methods of getting it. And the differences last so wonderfully! There’s free trade and protection, or high and low protection—we’ve been discussing those matters in this country voluminously and insistently for from fifty to a hundred years, and by far the most of us don’t know now precisely where we stand. We are, reasonably enough, for as much improvement as will do us good, and not for any more than is helpful at the price. But tariff-improvement isn’t to be had in quarter-yard lengths. Congress makes a rough effort to please customers, and when it has finished it is take it or leave it, and the customers usually go off grumbling.

And the other things that people want—restraint of corporations, restraint of labor-unions, restraint of political bosses, changes in the machinery of politics, hand-made government by the people, single taxes, income taxes, minimum wages, municipal ownership of public utilities, votes for women—my gracious—there’s a new remedy every day.

Not but that many of them are good and some of them timely. The world seems to be progressive nowadays, and I suppose its progress is upward, and not to the bow-wows. But it is to wonder about every proposed change whether it is really improvement or merely change, and about every novelty that people clamor for whether their true need is not something else—a change in themselves, rather than any practicable change in the regulations of life. For one need not be very old to observe that different people make out very differently in the same circumstances, and that folks affect circumstances much more than circumstances affect folks. Yet circumstances do affect folks very much, crush them sometimes, and stunt or warp them often; and certainly there is an obligation in the folks who have it in them to affect circumstances to improve them for the benefit of all hands, and provide reasonable access to opportunity.

Do I get in with the cart-tail orators this campaign? Why not, to be sure? Politics has been an early crop this year, sprouting hard in March, and working overtime ever since, with an enormous profusion of discourse and a vast expenditure of time and money in a general public effort to get somewhere. But that’s all right. The crop is going to be worth the labor. This is really the first time the political school has been run wide open since Bryan’s first campaign, and that was sixteen years ago, a period that carries me clear back to Eton collars. Alas for me! I suppose I’m a sort of conservative. They ought to examine the blood and find out where people belong, and save us some of our mental struggles to discover it by cerebral analysis. I don’t know what’s in my blood, but when people are for scuttling the ship so as to get the boats out easier I always seem to be for some other plan. Now and then it’s necessary to scuttle. There was the everlasting French Revolution, where they blew up their ship, and in the long run made a good thing out of it. But that was an exceptionally rotten ship, and they had things fixed aboard so that the crew were too successfully separated from the grub—a feat that a large share of human ability seems always at work to accomplish, and which, when it is successfully pulled off, achieves a very penetrating and comprehensive quality of ruin. Perhaps it is the conservative molecules in my blood that makes me as much adverse to this detachment of the crew from the grub as I am to blowing up the ship. No true friend of navigation wants either of them.

I guess it’s more fun to be a meat-ax radical than a conservative. The ax-handle is a simple implement, and probably blisters the hands less than this eternal pulling on the sheets and throwing the wheel over. But we don’t really choose our line in politics. We take the steer we get from our inside, and which comes down to us, no doubt, from our forebears, along with the tendency to fat or lean, and variations in the adherence of hairs to our scalps. I dare say we are not as grateful as we should be to other persons whose molecular inheritance is different from ours for going their way and following their hereditary propensities, so that we can better and more helpfully follow ours. If we all got the same steer I dare say the ship would run aground. To avoid that there comes this variety of propensity, and also the great principle of reaction on inherited inclinations, which has always raised up from time to time such valuable and efficient revolutionaries. The pinch for the natural conservatives comes at times when conservatism has outrun its license and crystallized into a do-nothingness which is more dangerous than radicalism. Then the real conservatives like me, who always want to let things down easy, have to flop, and it is always a very nice matter to know just when to do it and what to flop to.

This is a pretty floppy year, no doubt about it. I’d give a penny to know whose cart-tail, if any, I should aspire to mount. Great din at this writing, and a handsome field of candidates, with leaders whom we have been contemplating for months, and putting on the scales and pulling off, and whose points we have reckoned and re-reckoned. And as it comes to the choice, how prevalent is dubiety of mind as to whether we shall get candidates for whom we want to vote! Was there ever such a lot of men put up for office? I read the papers, all varieties of them, and have been studying candidates hard now for three or four months, and begin to wonder how so many incompetent or unprincipled citizens have contrived to cheat the gallows and avoid all places of detention all these years. Not one of them has so much as been to jail as yet. I dare say they would pass even now as half-way decent men if they were not candidates. Perhaps we are too particular. I notice that a large proportion of the important work in the world has been done by pretty bad men: men, some of them, who would have been insufferable if they had not been indispensable. When things are in a bad-enough hole, the indispensable man has to be taken whether he is insufferable or not. But luckily we’re not up against it so hard as that. Nobody seems indispensable this year. Our world seems to me less tippy nowadays, blowing as it is at all its blow-holes, than it did six or seven years ago, when stocks were kiting and being kited, and everybody was consolidating, and every active person who wasn’t a syndicate or an underwriter of something was asking the way to those fashionable employments. We have blown off a lot of steam since then, and our safety-valves are all working pretty well; and, though they’re noisy, to me they don’t look dangerous. We must be patient with the candidates, and look sometimes on their bright sides. When we regard them all with discontent, it is too much like that common saying, “Why do women marry such men?” They marry the best in sight, and that’s all we can do about candidates. But, by George! the light that beats upon a throne is mere moonshine to the light that beats upon a candidate.

We shall see about the candidates, but just what we shall see beats me.