A Cynic Looks at Life | Page 4

I verily believe; if the disorder inheres in the system; there
is no remedy. The fever must burn itself out, and then Nature will do
the rest. One does not prescribe what time alone can administer. We
have put our criminals and dunces into power; do we suppose they will
efface themselves? Will they restore to us the power of governing
_them_? They must have their way and go their length. The natural and
immemorial sequence is: tyranny, insurrection, combat. In combat
everything that wears a sword has a chance--even the right. History
does not forbid us to hope. But it forbids us to rely upon numbers; they
will be against us. If history teaches anything worth learning it teaches
that the majority of mankind is neither good nor wise. When
government is founded upon the public conscience and the public
intelligence the stability of states is a dream.
In that moment of time that is covered by historical records we have
abundant evidence that each generation has believed itself wiser and
better than any of its predecessors; that each people has believed itself
to have the secret of national perpetuity. In support of this universal
delusion there is nothing to be said; the desolate places of the earth cry
out against it. Vestiges of obliterated civilizations cover the earth; no
savage but has camped upon the sites of proud and populous cities; no
desert but has heard the statesman's boast of national stability. Our
nation, our laws, our history--all shall go down to everlasting oblivion
with the others, and by the same road. But I submit that we are
traveling it with needless haste.
It can be spared--this Jonah's gourd civilization of ours. We have hardly
the rudiments of a true one; compared with the splendors of which we
catch dim glimpses in the fading past, ours are as an illumination of
tallow candles. We know no more than the ancients; we only know
other things, but nothing in which is an assurance of perpetuity, and
little that is truly wisdom. Our vaunted elixir vitae is the art of printing.
What good will that do when posterity, struck by the inevitable
intellectual blight, shall have ceased to read what is printed? Our

libraries will become its stables, our books its fuel.
Ours is a civilization that might be heard from afar in space as a
scolding and a riot; a civilization in which the race has so differentiated
as to have no longer a community of interest and feeling; which shows
as a ripe result of the principles underlying it a reasonless and rascally
feud between rich and poor; in which one is offered a choice (if one
have the means to take it) between American plutocracy and European
militocracy, with an imminent chance of renouncing either for a
stultocratic republic with a headsman in the presidential chair and every
laundress in exile.
I have not a "solution" to the "labor problem." I have only a story.
Many and many years ago lived a man who was so good and wise that
none in all the world was so good and wise as he. He was one of those
few whose goodness and wisdom are such that after some time has
passed their foolish fellowmen begin to think them gods and treasure
their words as divine law; and by millions they are worshiped through
centuries of time. Amongst the utterances of this man was one
command--not a new nor perfect one--which has seemed to his adorers
so preeminently wise that they have given it a name by which it is
known over half the world. One of the sovereign virtues of this famous
law is its simplicity, which is such that all hearing must understand;
and obedience is so easy that any nation refusing is unfit to exist except
in the turbulence and adversity that will surely come to it. When a
people would avert want and strife, or, having them, would restore
plenty and peace, this noble commandment offers the only means--all
other plans for safety or relief are as vain as dreams, as empty as the
crooning of hags. And behold, here is it: "All things whatsoever ye
would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them."
What! you unappeasable rich, coining the sweat and blood of your
workmen into drachmas, understanding the law of supply and demand
as mandatory and justifying your cruel greed by the senseless dictum
that "business is business"; you lazy workmen, railing at the capitalist
by whose desertion, when you have frightened away his capital, you
starve--rioting and shedding blood and torturing and poisoning by way

of answer to exaction and by way of exaction; you foul anarchists,
applauding with untidy palms when one of your coward kind hurls a