Read Ebook: Keeping Up with William In which the Honorable Socrates Potter Talks of the Relative Merits of Sense Common and Preferred by Bacheller Irving Williams Gaar Illustrator

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Illustrator: Gaar Williams

KEEPING UP WITH WILLIAM

In Which the Honorable Socrates Potter Talks of the Relative Merits of Sense Common and Preferred

With Cartoons by Gaar Williams

TO THE CHILDREN OF FRANCE AND BELGIUM--MADE FATHERLESS BY WILLIAMISM--WHOSE WRONGS HAVE ENLISTED THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN AGAINST THE MISLED HOSTS OF GERMANY, I DEDICATE THIS BOOK AND THE PROCEEDS OF ITS SALE.

KEEPING UP WITH WILLIAM

The new year of 1918 was not a month old the day I went up to Connecticut to see the Honorable Socrates Potter. I found the famous country lawyer sitting in the very same chair from which, seven years ago, he had told me the story of keeping up with Lizzie. His feet rested peacefully on a table in front of him as he sat reading a law book. Logs were burning in the fireplace. A spaniel dog lay dozing on a rug in front of it. What a delightful flavor of old times and good tobacco was in that inner office of his--with its portraits of Lincoln and his war cabinet, of Silas Wright and Daniel Webster and Rufus Choate and Charles Sumner, with its old rifle and powder horn hanging above the modest mantel and its cases of worn law books! Beyond the closed door were busy clerks and clicking typewriters, for Mr. Potter's business had grown to large proportions, but here was peace and the atmosphere of deliberation. There was never any haste in this small factory of opinions.

"Hello! Have you come for another book?" he asked.

"Always looking for another book," I answered. "It's about time that you got into this big fight between Democracy and--"

"You can do more good with some conversation than you could with a sword or a gun," I urged. "I've come up here to touch the button and now you're expected to say something for the boys at the front and the folks at home. Just turn your search-light on the general situation."

"Well, I have quite a stock of shrapnel and liquid fire for the rear line of the Germans," he began. "My searchlight is a modest kind of a lantern but we'll see what we can do with it.

"This time we'll talk on the subject of keeping up with William.

"The other day, in the rooms of the Connecticut Historical Society, I was reading the diary of one Abigail Foote written in 1775. This, as I remember it, was an average day in her life: Mended mother's hood, set a red dye, hetchelled flax with Hannah, spun four pounds of whole wool, spun thread for harness twine, worked on a cheese basket, read a sermon of Doddridge's, scoured the pewter, milked the cows, carded wool, got supper ready, went to bed at nine.

"I wish you to note that she went to bed at nine. Do you think that a modern girl would knock off at nine? Not at all. She sticks to her task until midnight and even longer. Abigail had only to be an ordinary human being with nothing to do but work. The modern girl must have the beauty of a goddess, the grace of a gazelle, the digestion of an ostrich, the endurance of a horse and the remorse of a human being. It is a large contract. "We are all familiar with the diary of a modern girl. Its average day would be about as follows: Got up. Neck felt like a string on a toy balloon. Had some toast and coffee. Had my hair dressed and nails manicured. Put a new ribbon on my dog and walked him around the block. Went to meeting of the charity committee. Learned that there were many people out of work. Went to see the doctor who warned me about overeating and late hours. Same old chestnut! Lunched with Mabel. Ate half a pound of chocolates and so much cake that the butler had a frightened look. Home again. Dressed. Went with mama to a lecture on the insane. Mama woke me at five. It was all over. Went to Gladys's tea. Danced half an hour. Home again. Dressed. Spent fifteen minutes with papa and my dog. Went with Harry and mama to Gwendolyn's party. Danced until midnight. Home at one. Nearly frozen. Talk about long hours and poor pay and insufficient clothing; this reminds one of the story of Washington's army in the worst winter of the revolution.

"Now, both of these girls toiled.

"The one in productive work with the wool and the flax. It was done mostly for the comfort of others. The modern girl wears herself out supering. Do you know what it means to super? It is to follow the exacting industry of being superior."

"Superior to what?" I asked.

"To productive work," he went on. "Their toil is all in the service of themselves and in pursuit of their own pleasure.

"That's what's the matter with this old earth. For many years more than half its people have been supering--wasting their time in busy idleness--on the high road to deviltry. You don't have to think twice to decide that it is about the most dangerous of all crimes, my friend, because it is the straight way to all crime. It leads direct to deceit, theft, adultery and murder. It kills the sense of brotherhood in the heart of man. It kills the spirit of Democracy. The world is being strafed for it, in my opinion.

"Now the center and headquarters of all supering is Prussia--the home of the superman--and Bill Hohenzollern, the Godful, is the head and front of the whole push.

"There are two kinds of superiority--real and assumed. Real superiority is largely unconscious of itself. It can never be inherited--there's the important fact about it. You will recall that there are only three cases on record of a great father begetting a great son. The son is apt to have a sense of inherited superiority. It destroys everything worth while in him.

"Of all the defects that flesh is heir to, a sense of inherited superiority is the most deplorable. It is worse than insanity or idiocy or curvature of the spine. There are millions of acres of land in Europe occupied by nothing but a sense of inherited superiority; there are millions of hands and intellects in Europe occupied by nothing but a sense of inherited superiority, while billions of wealth have been devoted to its service and embellishment. A man who has even a small amount of it needs a force of porters and footmen to help him tote it around, and a guard to keep watch for fear that some one will grab his superiority and run off with it when his back is turned.

"A full equipment of inherited superiority, decorated with a title, a special dialect, a lot of old armor and university junk, stuck out so that there wasn't room for more than one outfit in a township. Most of the bloodshed has been caused by the blunders or the hoggishness of inherited superiority. It is the nursing bottle of insanity and the Mellin's Food of crime.

"Now hot air has been the favorite dissipation of kings. James the First was one of the world's greatest consumers of hot air; enough to put him into business with the Almighty. To be sure, it was not a full partnership. It was no absolute Hohenzollern monopoly of mortal participation.

"There are two kinds of sense in men--common and preferred, plain and fancy. The common has become the great asset of mankind; the preferred its great liability. Our forefathers had large holdings of the common, certain kings and their favorites of the preferred. The preferred represented an immense bulk of inherited superiority and an alleged pipe line leading from the king's throne to Paradise, and connected with the fount of every blessing by the best religious plumbers. It always drew dividends, whether the common got anything or not. The preferred holders ran the plant and insisted that they held a first mortgage on it. When they tried to foreclose with military power to back them, some of our forefathers got out.

"We, their sons, are now crossing the seas to take up that ancient issue between sense common and preferred and to determine the rights of each. We are fighting for the foundations of Democracy--the dictates of common sense.

"For the sake of saving time, I hope you will grant me license to resort to the economy of slang. A man might do worse these days. There is one great destroyer of common sense. It is hot air. I remember how scared of it the Yankees used to be. They were most economical with their praise. I never heard a word of it in my youth. It came to me after some travel now and then--never to my face. They knew the deadly power of it--those Yankees.

"Now hot air has been the favorite dissipation of kings. James the First was one of the world's' great consumers of hot air. He and his family and friends took all that Great Britain could produce--never, I am glad to say, a large amount, but enough to put James into business with the Almighty. To be sure, it was not a full partnership. It was no absolute Hohenzollern monopoly of mortal participation. It was comparatively modest, but it was enough to outrage the common sense of the English. After all, divine partnerships were not for the land of Fielding and Smollett and Swift and Dickens and Thackeray. Too much humor there. Too much liberty of the tongue and pen. Too great a gift for ridicule. Where there is ridicule there can be no self-appointed counselors of God, and handmade halos of divinity find their way to the garbage heap.

"Solemnity is often wedded to Conceit, and their children have committed all the crimes on record. You may always look for the devil in the neighborhood of some solemn and conceited ass who has inherited power and who, like the one that Balaam rode, speaks for the Almighty. So, when the devil came back, he steered for the most solemn and perfect ass on the face of the earth--Bill Hohenzollern.

"In his soul the devil began to destroy the common sense of a race with the atmosphere of hell--hot air. We have seen its effect. It inflates the intellect. It produces the pneumatic, rubber brain--the brain that keeps its friends busy with the pump of adulation; the brain stretched to hold its conceit, out of which we can hear the hot air leaking in streams of boastfulness. The divine afflatus of an emperor is apt to make as much disturbance as a leaky steam-pipe. When the pumpers cease because they are weary, it becomes irritated. Then all hands to the pumps again. Soon there is no illusion of grandeur too absurd to be real, no indictment of idiotic presumption which it is unwilling to admit.

"Hohenzollern and Krupp had taken the Lord into partnership and begun to give Him lessons in efficiency. Moreover, they were not to be free lessons. The lessons were to be paid for, but they were willing to give Him easy terms, for which they were to show Him how to hasten the slow process of evolution. Evolution was hindered and delayed by sentiment and emotion.

"Sentiment and emotion were a needless inheritance. Hohenzollern and Krupp proposed to cut them out of life and abolish tears. Tears consumed the time and strength of the people. They were factors of inefficiency. What was the use of crying over spilled milk and dead people? Tears were in the nature of a luxury. The poor could not afford them. Life was not going to be lived any longer--it was to be conducted. It was to be a kind of a hurried Cook's tour. Nobody would have to think or feel. All that would be attended to by the proper official. Life was to be reduced to a merciless iron plan like that of the beehive--the most perfect example of efficiency in nature, with its two purposes of storage and race perpetuation.

"No one ever saw a bee shedding tears or worrying about the murder of a drone.

"You may think that this endangered the national morals, but do not be hasty. The morals were being looked after.

"Every school, every pulpit, every newspaper, every book, became a pumping-station for hot air impregnated with the new morals. Poets, philosophers, orators, teachers, statesmen, romancers, were summoned to the pumps: Rivers of beer and wine flowed into the national abdomen and were converted into mental and moral flatulency.

"For thirty years Germany had been on a steady dream diet. Every school, every pulpit, every newspaper, every book, became a pumping-station for hot air impregnated with the new morals. Poets, philosophers, orators, teachers, states' men, romancers, were summoned to the pumps.

"Morning hate with its coffee and prayers, its hourly self-contentment with its toil, its evening superiority with its beer and frankfurters. History was falsified, philosophy bribed, religion coerced and corrupted, conscience silenced--at first by sophistry, then by the iron hand. Hot air was blowing from all sides. It was no gentle breeze. It was a simoom, a tornado. No one could stand before it--not even a sturdy Liebknecht or an unsullied Harden.

"I don't blame than at all. How would any one know that they had it if they did not advertise it?

"It is easy to accept the hot-air treatment for common sense--easy even for sober-minded men. The cocaine habit is not more swiftly acquired and brings a like sense of comfort and exhilaration. Slowly the Germans yielded to its sweet inducement. They began to believe that they were supermen--the chosen people; they thanked God that they were not like other men. Their first crime was that of grabbing everything in the heaven of holy promise. It would appear that those clever Prussians had arranged with St. Peter for all the reserved seats--nothing but standing room left Heaven was to be a place exclusively for the lovers of frankfurters and sauerkraut and Limburger cheese.

"God was altogether their God. Of course! Was He not a member of the firm of Hohenzollern & Krupp? And, being so, other races were a bore and an embarrassment. Would He not gladly be rid of them? Certainly. Other races were God's enemies, and therefore German enemies. So it became the right and duty of the Germans to reach out and possess the earth and its fulness. The day had arrived. There was nothing in the world but Germans and enemies and loot.

"Their great leader, in their name, had claimed a swinish monopoly of God's favor. His was not the contention of James the First, that all true kings enjoy divine-right--oh, not at all! Bill had grown rather husky and had got his feet in the trough, and was going to crowd the others out of it. He was the one and only. And as he crowded, he began to pray, and his prayers came out of lips which had confessed robbery and violated good faith and inspired deeds of inhuman frightfulness. His prayers were therefore nothing more nor less than hot air aimed at the ear of the Almighty and carrying with them the flavor of the swine-yard. In all this Church and people stood by him. It would seem that the devil had taken both unto a high mountain and showed them the kingdoms of the earth and their glory, and that they had yielded to his blandishments.

"Now the thing that has happened to the criminal is this. In one way or another, he loses his common sense. He ceases to see things in their just relations and proportions. The difference between right and wrong dwindles and disappears from his vision. He convinces himself that he has a right to at least a part of the property of other people. Often he acquires a comic sense of righteousness.

"I have lately been in the devastated regions of northern France. I have seen whole cities of no strategic value which the German armies had destroyed by dynamite before leaving them to a silence like that of the grave--the slow-wrought walls of old cathedrals and public buildings tumbled into hopeless ruin; the ch?teaux, the villas, the little houses of the poor, shaken into heaps of moldering rubbish. And I see in it a sign of that greater devastation which covers the land of William II--the devastation of the spirit of the German people; for where is that moral grandeur of which Heine and Goethe and Schiller and Luther were the far-heard compelling voices? I tell you it has all been leveled into heaps of moldering rubbish--a thousand times more melancholy than any in France.

"Behold the common sense of Germany become the sense that is common only among criminals! The sooner we recognize that, the better. They are really burglars in this great house of God we inhabit, seeking to rob it of its best possessions--Hindenburglars! In this war we must give them the consideration due a burglar, and only that. We must hit them how and where we may. We are bound by no nice regard for fair play. We must kill the burglar or the burglar will kill us.

"When I went away to the battle-front, a friend said to me:

"'Try to learn how this incredible thing came about and why it continues. That is what every one wishes to know.'

"Well, hot air was the cause of it. Now why does it continue? My answer is, bone-head--mostly plumed bone-head.

"Think of those diplomats who were twenty years in Germany and yet knew nothing of what was going on around them and of its implications! You say that they did know, and that they warned their peoples? Well, then, you may shift the bone-heads on to other shoulders. Think of the diplomatic failures that have followed!

"I bow my head to the people of England and to the incomparable valor of her armies and fleets. My friendly criticism is aimed at the one and only point in which she could be said to resemble Germany, viz., in a certain limited encouragement of supermen.

"Now, if the last three years have taught us anything, it is this: the superman is going to be unsupered. Considering the high cost of up-keep and continuous adulation, he does not pay. He is in the nature of a needless tax upon human life and security. His mistakes, even, to use no harsher word, have slaughtered more human beings than there are in the world. The born gentleman and professional aristocrat, with a hot-air receiver on his name, who lives in a tower of inherited superiority and looks down at life through hazy distance with a telescope, has and can have no common sense. He is a good soldier, he knows the habits of the grouse and the stag, he can give an admirable dinner, he understands the principles of international law, but when international law turns into international anarchy he is not big enough to find the way of common sense through the emergency. He has not that intimate knowledge of human nature which comes only of a long and close contact with human, beings. Without that knowledge he will know no more of what is in the other fellow's mind and the bluff that covers it in a critical clash of wits than a baby sucking its bottle in a perambulator. He fails, and the cost of his failure no man can estimate. He stands discredited. As a public servant he is going into disuse and his going vindicates the judgment of our forefathers as to like holders of sense preferred.

"Now is the time when all men must choose between two ideals: Behold the common sense of Germany become the sense that is common only among criminals! The sooner we recognize that, the better. They are really burglars in this great house of God we inhabit, seeking to rob it of its best possessions--Hindenburglars! the proud and merciless heart on the one hand, that of the humble and contrite heart on the other; between the Hun and the Anglo-Saxon, between evil and good. Faced by such an issue I declare myself ready to lay all that I have or may have on the old altar of our common faith.

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