Read Ebook: The Unpopular Review Vol. 2 No. 4 October-December 1914 including Vol. 2 Index by Various Holt Henry Editor

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SOME FREE-SPEECH DELUSIONS Fabian Franklin 223

IS SOCIALISM COMING? Preston W. Slosson 236

THE REPUBLIC OF MEGAPHON Grant Showerman 248

THE CURSE OF ADAM AND THE CURSE OF EVE F. P. Powers 266

TABU AND TEMPERAMENT Katharine F. Gerould 280

ON HAVING THE BLUES The Editor 301

THE PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICE OF KICKING William T. Brewster 318

THE GENTLEMAN-SPORTSMAN Dorothy Canfield Fisher 334

TRADE UNIONISM IN A UNIVERSITY H. C. Bumpus 347

MONARCHY AND DEMOCRACY IN EDUCATION 356

OUR DEBT TO PSYCHICAL RESEARCH H. Addington Bruce 372

THE WAR BY A HISTORIAN F. J. Mather, Jr. 392

THE WAR BY AN ECONOMIST A. S. Johnson 411

THE WAR BY A MAN IN THE STREET The Editor 429

EN CASSEROLE: Special to Our Readers, Academic Courtesy , Simplified Spelling 440

INDEX THE UNPOPULAR REVIEW VOL. II 445

SOME FREE-SPEECH DELUSIONS

But it is in the hunger strike that the new martyrdom is seen full-fledged, and in its true character. Here we have the fiction of persecution raised to the second power. The use of it by the free-speech anarchists is of course only one instance of its exploitation, but it is the one that specially concerns us here. Whether from its small beginnings it will develop into a serious nuisance, or perhaps even take on the dimensions of a grave problem, remains to be seen. But men of sense should be prepared for the possible spread of a great deal of foolish and muddled thinking on the subject, and should from the outset see the thing exactly as it is. In a land of free discussion, and where the right to vote is exercised without distinction of class, a certain number of persons are actively engaged in the agitation of radical or revolutionary changes affecting the whole social order. No impediment is put in the way of this propaganda in the shape either of censorship, of hindrance to publicity, or of personal proscription. They are free to make as many converts as they can, either by oral persuasion or by the printed word; and when they have won over a sufficient number, the government is theirs. Of one instrument, it is true, they are deprived the use; and it happens that that instrument is the one most to their liking. They are not allowed to create turbulence or disorder, or to persecute individuals who have incurred their hostility. In this, they are treated no otherwise than advocates of the most innocent or orthodox of causes would be under like circumstances. If there should arise a Puritan agitation against the theatre, its leaders would be allowed to denounce the stage to their heart's content as a device of the Devil for the corruption and damnation of mankind; but they would not be permitted to harangue excited crowds that were ready to mob the actors and actresses or to burn down the theatres. They would have to content themselves with bringing over to their way of thinking as many persons as could be won by orderly methods. It is of this kind of restraint that the anarchists, and other pretended champions of so-called free speech, complain; it is against this imaginary grievance that the fraudulent martyrdom of the hunger strike is a protest.

And it is the fraudulence of the hunger strike, the affront that is offered to human reason, first in the thing itself, and still more in the silly cry of "torture" that is raised about it, that every sane man must most deeply resent. Here is a handful of cheap revolutionists making themselves more or less of a menace, but certainly very much of a nuisance, to the constituted authorities. This they do, in general, without a particle of molestation from the government or of inconvenience to themselves. Once in a while, when, in these proceedings, they pass, or are thought to pass, beyond a certain line, marked out by considerations of public safety or comfort, they are arrested and subjected to the mild punishment of imprisonment for a short term, such as is meted out to thousands of petty offenders. Then they proceed to set themselves up as judges in their own case; they demand that the law shall surrender to their will. And when this preposterous demand is met by the application to them of the most humane methods which professional skill can devise for securing the accomplishment of their sentence, they rend the air with shrieks of "torture." If the sentence itself was unjust, let them make all possible to-do about it by all means; nobody would begrudge them that. But they know only too well how little could be made of any real grievance they could lay claim to; and they count on a combination of soft-heartedness and soft-headedness in a considerable part of the public to make a self-inflicted stage-play torture pass current as the equivalent of the thumb-screw and the rack. Precisely what the penal authorities had best do if this foolishness should prove persistent in our country, it may not be easy to say. The one thing certain is that it cannot be trifled with. It is an impudent challenge, not only of the law, but of reason and humanity; and, unless we have quite lost our grip on the realities of life and government, whatever measures it may be found necessary to take in order to meet the challenge effectively will receive the emphatic approval of the American people.

To what extent the fantastic notions of the nature of the right of free speech that we have been discussing are shared by men of intelligence and culture, it is difficult to say. They are to be found distinctly among a certain small and fairly well-defined class of socialist or semi-socialist clergymen and other humanitarians. In a wider circle, these notions, if not distinctly embraced, are at all events given a considerable amount of sympathetic toleration. In either case, it is not too harsh a judgment to say that the attitude is due to want of thought or to shallowness of mind. The true doctrine of free speech is a broad principle of civic conduct, having its foundations in reason and experience, and its justification in the highest public expediency; these people appear to think of it as a simple and absolute dogma, whose sanction transcends all considerations of expediency, and any violation of which is a sin against the divine order. Such a view can be entertained only by a shallow thinker or a one-ideaed fanatic; and it is the former class, unquestionably, to which nearly all of the "free speech" extremists are to be assigned. The contrast between their crude and childish notions and that conception of the doctrine of free speech which is alone worthy of respect or of serious consideration cannot be better shown than by quoting the words of one of the greatest champions of individual liberty the world has ever known. It will hardly be claimed by even the most effervescent of our sentimental apostles of free speech that his own convictions on the subject are more profound, or his courage more uncompromising, than that of John Stuart Mill. In his noble tractate "On Liberty," Mill goes as far as anyone can go--farther no doubt in some respects than many of these same emotional humanitarians would go--in demanding complete freedom of public expression, so far as the substance of the opinions or doctrines in question is concerned. He does not draw the line at immorality; he does not draw the line at the advocacy of tyrannicide. But the ardor of his devotion to this principle is that of a rational thinker, not that of the blind slave of a fetish. That freedom of speech is made for man, not man for freedom of speech, is to him so obvious as to require no insisting on. A single brief passage--introduced at the beginning of his discussion of the question whether "the same reasons" which prescribe freedom of opinion and of speech "do not require that men should be free to act upon their opinions"--will suffice to show this:

No one pretends that actions should be as free as opinions. On the contrary, even opinions lose their immunity when the circumstances in which they are expressed are such as to constitute their expression a positive instigation to some mischievous act. An opinion that corn-dealers are starvers of the poor, or that private property is robbery, ought to be unmolested when simply circulated through the press, but may justly incur punishment when delivered orally to an excited mob assembled before the house of a corn-dealer, or when handed about among the same mob in the form of a placard.

When we note the remark, a little further on, that "the liberty of the individual must be thus far limited: he must not make himself a nuisance to other people;" and when we observe that after maintaining the right of an advocate of the doctrine of tyrannicide freely to express his opinions, Mill adds that the instigation to it in a specific case may be a proper subject of punishment, provided "an overt act has followed, and at least a probable connection can be established between the act and the instigation,"--we see plainly enough the difference between the working of a profound and rational conviction like Mill's, and that of the shallow-pated emotionalism which rallies to the support of a Berkman or a Bouck White.

The confusion of thought which is at the bottom of these vagaries has been strikingly illustrated in connection with two matters upon which it may be profitable to dwell at some length. In both instances, the trouble is in part due to misinformation, or misconception of the facts; but in both instances the misinformation, or misconception, is inextricably bound up with the confusion of thought.

Closely allied to the false notion we have been discussing of what constitutes suppression of free speech by the authorities is the false notion, even more prevalent, of what constitutes suppression of the news by the newspapers. That there are some items of news that do not get the degree of publicity to which they are entitled may be quite true; and as regards the treatment by some newspapers of some whole classes of items, the accusation may be entirely justified. But that there exists anything like wholesale suppression of news, among the newspapers of the country generally, and especially by the Associated Press, is a charge absolutely without foundation. Regarded as a matter of large and fundamental public interest--not as a mere matter of ordinary criticism, dealing with imperfections of execution rather than with wrongfulness of intent--the question simply lapses for want of body to the accusation. The things charged as suppressions are so trivial in amount, in comparison with the vast mass of matter of precisely the same, or graver, nature carried in the papers, that the idea of the so-called suppression being anything more than defect in execution--even though sometimes due to the dishonesty of individuals and not always to accident or want of adequate equipment--should be peremptorily dismissed by any man who is accessible to ordinary argument on the subject.

But in the minds of its chief exponents, the idea that there exists a wholesale and systematic suppression of news in the interest of conservatism does not rest upon the omission, or the misrepresentation, of specific items in the record of what are generally regarded as the day's happenings. Their conviction that the newspapers are guilty of a great and systematic crime against the truth cannot be overcome by any such comparison as I have indicated; simply because the scale of values which they habitually use is fundamentally different from the scale which is current in the community at large. To their minds, the one absorbing concern of mankind is to end the iniquities of the existing economic order; and accordingly, the ordinary news of the day is utterly trivial in comparison with anything that bears upon the social revolution which they are sure is impending. Now it would be perfectly possible to fill many columns of a newspaper every day with matter of this kind--indeed there would be no difficulty in making up an entire newspaper of nothing else. The world is very big--even the United States, even New York city, is very big; and a diligent search for tales of evil, of hardship, of injustice, of rapacity, of poverty, would be amply rewarded any day in the year. Moreover, there are strikes, little and big, in the thousands of industrial and mining centres; there is every now and then the formation of a Socialist club or the starting of a little Socialist newspaper; and then there are speeches, and meetings, and what not. From the point of view of the man who is convinced that the present order of society is on its last legs, and that the supreme duty of the journalist is to expose its rottenness, these are the things with which our papers ought to be filled, instead of the idle chatter about politics and business. This opinion they are, of course, fully entitled to entertain; but their charge that the newspapers suppress the news is essentially based on the notion that the owners or editors of the papers are themselves of that opinion, but have not the honesty or the courage to act upon it. And this is too absurd to call for denial.

The other illustration that I have in mind arises out of the history of the Chicago Anarchists of 1886. There has gradually spread throughout the country a notion that the execution of the four anarchist agitators who were hanged for instigation of the slaughter of the policemen in Haymarket Square was little better than a judicial murder. This opinion is expressed in only a little more extreme form than that which is widely current, by Charles Edward Russell when he says:

The eight men were convicted, nominally by the jury, in reality by a misinformed public opinion resolutely bent upon having a hanging. Anything more like the spirit of a lynching I have never known under the forms of law.

That a man of Mr. Russell's type should talk in this way is natural enough; but it is truly regrettable that an impression approximating this should be widely entertained among persons of intelligence and soberness, and having no sympathy at all with the Socialist, not to speak of the Anarchist, movement. The explanation of this phenomenon is to be found in part in the absence of knowledge of the actual facts; but it is to be found in at least equal measure in the failure to grasp the essential character, and the natural and rational limits, of the right of free speech.

IS SOCIALISM COMING?

And when the pedants bade us mark What cold mechanic happenings Must come; our souls said in the dark, "Belike; but there are likelier things."

G. K. CHESTERTON.

Every historian today owes much to Karl Marx for his development of the "Economic Interpretation of History." Whatever that theory may fail to explain, it certainly succeeds in explaining the nature and growth of the Socialist movement. When the great attempt at real political and economic democracy made by the French people in their great Revolution had failed and left behind it as a legacy the memory of the Terror and the wars of Napoleon, every nation in Europe felt the reaction. Russia, Austria, Spain and non-industrial Europe generally reacted towards simple absolutism, noble against peasant. But in the countries within the boundary marked out by the industrial revolution, the wealth created by the new machines placed the balance of economic power in the hands of the commercial classes, and so forced the old landed aristocracy to admit them to political power as well. In the meanwhile the first shock of large scale production had widened the gap between the industrial workers and the employing class. Independent artisans were ruined or forced into factories, and in the wake of the new industry there trailed a network of industrial oligarchies which spread until they covered the civilized world. The already enfranchised classes refused to use their power to moderate the harshness of the competitive struggle, honestly believing that any interference with "economic law" could work nothing but ruin and hardship in the end.

The first objection I would make to the positing of this dilemma is to the assumption that the farmer can be safely ignored. Socialists admit that concentration is proceeding more slowly in agriculture than in any other branch of production, but they say that as industry develops, the movement toward the city which is so strong today will become stronger than ever, until the manufacturing population will outnumber the agricultural many times. But there is a balance in these things. We must have food, and every person who leaves the country for the city subtracts one from the number of food producers, and adds a customer for other farmers to supply. Hence the growth of a large population divorced from the land means a continually augmenting profit for the agriculturist, and a growing inducement to go "back to the land." Agriculture must then remain a cardinal factor in our economic life. To be sure, in the past the great estate has often triumphed over the small farm, and the Socialists maintain that it will again. If the causes which produced the "latifundia" of Rome, the feudal land ownership of the middle ages, the sheep farms of sixteenth century England, the capitalist farming of the early nineteenth century and the cotton plantations and "bonanza" wheat farms of America, were operative today, this contention would be right. But just the contrary is the case. The vast estates of eastern Prussia, heavily mortgaged and hard pressed for labor, are being rapidly alienated by the landlords themselves, who are encouraging the government they dominate to establish a system of peasant proprietorships in their place. In France the small holder is triumphant economically, and he controls by his vote the political destinies of the Republic. In Australia and New Zealand, the squatters' sheep farms have receded before the advance of selectors' holdings, which in turn are being parcelled out under "Closer Settlement Acts." In Ireland most of the landlords have already been bought out under the Wyndham act, and even in England, where the custom of primogeniture has tended to keep estates together, the Conservative or landlords' party has promised to establish small holdings by a policy of government purchase from the present owners.

These changes will make small production a possibility; there must be other causes to make it the general rule of industry. As wealth increases and the standard of living rises, quality in commodities will come to be considered as well as quantity. If the small productive unit cannot compete on even terms with the large in wholesale production, it may more than do so in retail production for an exacting market. "Finishing" industries, "assembling" industries and the like will absorb an ever increasing proportion of the industrial population. The future will have use for the expert, and only the expert; the mere laborer will be eliminated by the advance of education and the specialization of machinery. There will yet come a time when it will pay the manufacturer better to keep "cheap labor" in opulent idleness than to let its unskillful fingers touch the machines. Mere routine duties in commerce can be left in large measure to calculating and recording machinery. The great concerns will then run with a small office force and a staff of engineers, and release a host of supernumerary clerks and laborers for individual industry. The only "proletariat" will be one of cogs and wires and dynamos.

It is of the first importance to realize that each perceptible social change involves many other perceptible changes, that, in Spencer's happy analogy, the social constitution is a web, no strand of which can be moved without moving others. The changes we have tried to forecast cannot come effectively before the subsidence of the wave of fierce competition which was partly smoothed down by the trusts. In many businesses, competition in drumming and advertising is still at the point where it costs more to sell goods than to make them and hosts of men accomplish only the neutralizing of each other's efforts. The rationalizing of competition and the growth of a co?perative spirit would release men for other pursuits; and the growth of intelligence in learning what is to be had and discriminating what is best, must diminish the billions spent on advertising. These additions to productive labor and capital must diminish the ills which have made Socialism seem desirable as well as inevitable.

FOOTNOTES:

THE REPUBLIC OF MEGAPHON

SCENE: At first a street in the Metropolis, and afterward the house of Megaphon.

TIME: Year 4 of Olympiad 25 after American Independence.

The narrator and leading person of the dialogue is Socrates.

And not long afterward Chaerephon came.

"Socrates," he said, "you seem to be returning from the city."

"You guess not badly," I replied.

We continued on our way, and soon came near the crossing of two streets. Here, a boy was standing at the curb, calling loudly to all who passed.

"What are the words he cries?" I said to Chaerephon.

"Yes," I said, "and I have thought about it much. Henceforth we shall have the news every day, and in a different way."

We had now come to the boy, and were passing him.

"Here, boy," I said, "give me your paper."

He gave it to me, still crying as before.

"And how much must I pay you for it?" I asked.

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