A Rebuke to Democracy

Dominion, Volume 30, Issue 249, 17 July 1937, Page 1 (Supplement)

A Rebuke to Democracy

IN 1912. the finest and safest vessel that had ever been built, the unsinkable Titantic, struck an iceberg and sank with nearly everyone on board. “The staggering fact,” an editorial commented, “is not that the ship went down, but that she went down after fifteen hours

of radio warnings, tier engines at full speed, her band playing, her passengers dancing, and, apparently, nobody caring a damn that there was ice ahead.” And that is the staggering fact about contemporary America—warnings everywhere, engines at full speed, bands playing, passengers dancing, and nobody caring a damn.

We have penalised initiative, ability and industry to the point at which wisdom dictates that they lie down and play dead. And, as Charles Francis Coe says, “If we plough under initiative and ability, as we did the bounties of nature, what shall we do when the drought comes? Dollars are only dollars. They can be replaced. But character may not be imported.” With respect to our changed view of attainment. Dr. Butler sums up the situation comprehensively when he writes: “Our whole historic conception of civil, economic and political liberty, which involves the right to work, to save and to co-operate with others in using our savings for economic and social advancement and development, is now denounced as a form, not of freedom, but of privilege.”

Booth Tarkington once observed that by the time our children were ten years old you couldn’t give ’em a thrill, except by blowing up Brooklyn Bridge. And thrills have become our neurotic necessity; the “kick” directed at the customary anatomical region, advertised with liquor and literature, essential in every national avocation from movies to murder. All this, of course, does not make for stability, sober thought or self-discipline. Other discipline, always difficult where every man is as good as his neighbour, is lost in any country that begins turning to the Left. This is one of the clear reasons for the spread of Fascism. Discipline is essential to individual well-being and national progress, and discipline is impossible where the rule of a union or the law’ of a state intervenes.

In America almost nobody lias ever conceived of education as anything but a means to make money. As many of our best scholastic minds have pointed out, our universities are not really universities at all, but training schools, in which the superstructure of professional proficiency is attempted without any foundation whatever. For years this system has been flooding the country with incompetents and materialists. The man who had acquired knowledge of, or interest in, literature, or the fine arts, or even of and in chipmunks and trees, would not have been among those to enter the struggle for gadgets as the beginning and end of the More Abundant Life. He would have been intellectually curious, and eager to be informed in all matters affecting the general good. He would have been an ethical anchorage to defy shifting winds. Instead, hundreds of thousands of him add yearly to the sum of our ignorance, profligacy and inertia.

If all this sounds like a diatribe, reflection may convince the few still capable of reflection that the facts justify and the dangers compel it. The time has come to stop, look and listen. We have reached the end of blundering through. Few Democracies have survived more than two hundred years, and this is not a propitious time for Democracy. A Democracy militant may survive, a Democracy alert, simple and Spartan—but not a Democracy more interested in golf than in government, in lotteries than in learning, in Bill I’owell than in the Bill of Rights. America can slide easily into Communism, Fascism, or a combination of both. If it doesn’t, soon or late it must face a Fascist world in an armed conflict for which it is mentally, physically and morally unprepared; in which it won’t last as long as the proverbial dog with tallow legs chasing an asbestos cat through hell.

There is ice ahead, and aboard, and behind, and on every side of us. Are we going down, like the Titanic, with bands playing and passengers dancing, or are we ready to clear our minds and roll up our shirt sleeves, “that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”—Channing Pollock, in the “American Mercury.”