A Cynic Looks at Life | Page 3

and

wooden a-b-c shops, with the grand old town of Oxford, topped with
the clustered domes and towers of its twenty-odd great colleges, the
very names of many of whose founders have perished from human
record, as have the chronicles of the times in which they lived.
It is not only that we have had to "subdue the wilderness"; our
educational conditions are adverse otherwise. Our political system is
unfavorable. Our fortunes, accumulated in one generation, are
dispersed in the next. If it takes three generations to make a gentleman
one will not make a thinker. Instruction is acquired, but capacity for
instruction is transmitted. The brain that is to contain a trained intellect
is not the result of a haphazard marriage between a clown and a wench,
nor does it get its tractable tissues from a hard-headed farmer and a
soft-headed milliner. If you confess the importance of race and
pedigree in a horse and a dog how dare you deny it in a man?
I do not hold that the political and social system that creates an
aristocracy of leisure is the best possible kind of human organization; I
perceive its disadvantages clearly enough. But I do hold that a system
under which most important public trusts, political and professional,
civil and military ecclesiastical and secular, are held by educated
men--that is, men of trained faculties and disciplined judgment--is not
an altogether faulty system.
It is a universal human weakness to disparage the knowledge that we
do not ourselves possess, but it is only my own beloved country that
can justly boast herself the last refuge and asylum of the impotents and
incapables who deny the advantage of all knowledge whatsoever. It
was an American senator who declared that he had devoted a couple of
weeks to the study of finance, and found the accepted authorities all
wrong. It was another American senator who, confronted with certain
hostile facts in the history of another country, proposed "to brush away
all facts, and argue the question on consideration of plain common
sense."
Republican institutions have this disadvantage: by incessant changes in
the personnel of government--to say nothing of the manner of men that
ignorant constituencies elect; and all constituencies are ignorant--we

attain to no fixed principles and standards. There is no such thing here
as a science of politics, because it is not to any one's interest to make
politics the study of his life. Nothing is settled; no truth finds general
acceptance. What we do one year we undo the next, and do over again
the year following. Our energy is wasted in, and our prosperity suffers
from, experiments endlessly repeated.
Every patriot believes his country better than any other country. Now,
they cannot all be the best; indeed, only one can be the best, and it
follows that the patriots of all the others have suffered themselves to be
misled by a mere sentiment into blind unreason. In its active
manifestation--it is fond of killing--patriotism would be well if it were
simply defensive; but it is also aggressive, and the same feeling that
prompts us to strike for our altars and our fires impels us over the
border to quench the fires and overturn the altars of our neighbors. It is
all very pretty and spirited, what the poets tell us about Thermopylæ,
but there was as much patriotism at one end of that pass as there was at
the other.
Patriotism deliberately and with folly aforethought subordinates the
interests of a whole to the interests of a part. Worse still, the fraction so
favored is determined by an accident of birth or residence. The Western
hoodlum who cuts the tail from a Chinaman's nowl, and would cut the
nowl from the body, if he dared, is simply a patriot with a logical mind,
having the courage of his opinions. Patriotism is fierce as a fever,
pitiless as the grave and blind as a stone.
III
There are two ways of clarifying liquids--ebullition and precipitation;
one forces the impurities to the surface as scum, the other sends them to
the bottom as dregs. The former is the more offensive, and that seems
to be our way; but neither is useful if the impurities are merely
separated but not removed. We are told with tiresome iteration that our
social and political systems are clarifying; but when is the skimmer to
appear? If the purpose of free institutions is good government where is
the good government?--when may it be expected to begin?--how is it to
come about? Systems of government have no sanctity; they are

practical means to a simple end--the public welfare; worthy of no
respect if they fail of its accomplishment. The tree is known by its fruit.
Ours is bearing crab-apples. If the body politic is constitutionally
diseased, as