All of these men belong to a party and are limited by that party's weakness, its lack of principles, the caution which it has to use in avoiding the alienation of its loosely held supporters. The party program is something on which all kinds of people can stand. Necessarily the party men in the Senate are tied down to a cause that is largely negative. They can not be other than feeble and ineffective figures.

The weakness of parties has led to the emergence of a few outstanding individual Senators who must be examined to see whether around them the new Senate which will come with the shift of power and responsibility to the legislative branch can be built. The most brilliant and interesting of them is Senator Borah, but it is significant that the farm bloc looking for a leader did not turn to him, but chose rather much less significant and effective men.

Yet the Idaho Senator seems the natural rallying point for any movement which will give new life and force to the Senate. He is established. He is the most potent single individual in the upper house. So far as there is any opposition to President Harding and his friends, Mr. Borah is that opposition. His is the intelligence which inspires the Democratic party when it consents to be inspired by intelligence. He believes that the revolution has come, not one of street fighting and bomb throwing but a peaceful change which has made the old parties meaningless, destroyed the old authorities and set men free for the new grouping that is to take place. Others in the Senate see this and are frightened. Borah sees it and is glad. His bonds are loosed and he is a vastly braver, sincerer and more effective Senator than ever before.

It is absurd to use the word radical of Borah, Johnson, or LaFollette, for none of them is truly radical; but if one must do so for the lack of any better term, then Borah is the conservatives' radical. The angriest reactionary remains calm when his name is mentioned, perhaps because Borah never gets into a passion himself and never addresses himself to popular prejudice. He is not a mob orator. He is impersonal in his appeals. No one any longer suspects him of an ambition to be President. He seems, like a hermit, to have divorced himself from the earthly passions of politics and to have become pure intellect operating in the range of public affairs. He is almost a sage while still a Senator.

If we had the custom of electing our Ex-Presidents to the Senate, you can imagine one of them, beyond the average of intelligence, freed from ambition through having filled the highest office, occupying a place like that of Borah.

Borah perhaps likes it too well ever to descend into the market place and become a leader. His is an enviable lot, for he is the most nearly free man in Washington; why should he exchange the immunity he possesses for a small group of followers? Besides he believes in the power of oratory rather than in the power of organization. He said to me at the Republican Convention of 1916, "I could stampede this crowd for Roosevelt." The crowd was thoroughly organized against Roosevelt.

Nature made him an orator, one of the greatest in the country. And he has come to be satisfied with the gift he has. The unimportance of his state, Idaho, has freed him from any illusions about himself with respect to the Presidency. The habit of carrying a comb in his vest pocket marks him as free from the social ambitions which number more victims in the Senate than the ambition for the presidency. He is almost a disembodied spirit politically, of the revolution he discerns he will be a spectator.

Hiram Johnson is a declining figure. I see no reason to modify the conclusion which was reached about him in the Mirrors of Washington, that he thought more of men than of principles and especially of one man, Johnson. The test of his sincerity came when the vote was reached on the unseating of Senator Newberry for spending too much money in the Michigan primaries.

Johnson's great issue a year before had been sanctity of popular nominations. Yet when he had an opportunity to speak and act against a brazen even though foolish attempt to buy a nomination, he was rushing wildly across the continent, arriving after the vote had been taken.

On reaching Washington, he called his newspaper friends before him to explain the difficulties and delays that had made him late. When he had finished a nasal voice from the press remarked, "Senator, there will be great public sympathy with you as a victim of the railroads. But the people will only know how great their loss has been if you will tell them now how you would have voted if you had been here." Johnson adjourned the meeting hastily without a reply.

The absence from the roll call and the theatrical attempt to make it appear accidental were typical. Johnson had won the Michigan primaries in the national campaign of 1920. The delegates were in control of Newberry's political friends. They remained firm for Johnson throughout the balloting. Johnson avoided voting against their leader although his principles required that he should lead the fight for his unseating.

Johnson has always over-emphasized Johnson. At the Progressive convention in 1912 when Roosevelt was nominated for the Presidency and Johnson for the Vice-Presidency, it was proposed, since both were in attendance, to bring both on the stage and introduce them to the delegates. The natural order was Roosevelt first, since he was the nominee for President and since he was, moreover, one of the most distinguished figures in the world, and Johnson, since he had second place, second. But Johnson would go second to no man. Either he must show himself on the stage first or not at all. Finally it was compromised by presenting them together at the same moment, holding hands upon the platform.

Johnson can never see himself in proper perspective. At the Progressive convention he was more important than Roosevelt. In the Newberry case his political fortunes were more important than honest primaries.

Senator Reed of Missouri is possessed of a devil. He is a satirist turned politician. He has the saeva indignatio of Swift. American life with its stupidity, its facile optimism, its gullibility, its easy compromises, its hypocrisy, fills him with rage. His face is shot red with passion. His voice is angry. He is a defeated idealist left in this barren generation without an ideal. He might have been led away by the war as so many were, as Wilson was, into the belief that out of its sufferings would come a purified and elevated humanity. But Reed is hard to lead away. Where other men see beauty and hope he searches furiously for sham. Where other men say cheerfully half a loaf is better than no bread he puts the half loaf on the scales and proves that it is short weight.

An old prosecuting attorney, he believes that guilt is everywhere. He is always out for a conviction. If the evidence is insufficient he uses all the arts, disingenuous presentations, appeals to prejudice, not because he is indifferent to justice but because the accused ought to be hanged anyway, and he is not going to let lack of evidence stand in the way of that salutary consummation.

He conducts a lifelong and passionate fight against the American practice of "getting away with it." Shall Hoover get away with it as a great and pure man, the benefactor of the race! Not while Jim Reed has breath in his body! Here is an American idol, tear it down, exhibit its clay feet! Shall Wilson "get away with it," with his League of Nations and his sublimated world set free from all the baser passions of the past? Not while any acid remains on Jim Reed's tongue!

Reed is sincere. He hates sham. He nevertheless himself uses sham to fight sham. He is the nearest thing to a great satirist this country has developed. And the amazing consideration is that in a nation which dislikes satire a satirist should be elected by the suffrage of his fellows.

Probably it is only in politics that we tolerate satire. In self-government we only half believe. We are divided in our own minds. We make laws furiously and laugh at the laws we make. We pretend that the little men of politics are great and then privately we indicate our real perception of the truth by telling how small they are. Politics is suspect and it stamps you as a person of penetration to show that you are aware what sham and dishonesty there is in them. It is almost as good an evidence of a superior mind as to say, "Of course I don't believe what I read in the newspapers." Now satire is enjoyed by superior minds, and it is only with regard to politics that we as a people have superior minds, politics not being like business the pursuit of honest everyday folk.

Jim Reed is then that part of ourselves which tells us that self-government is a good deal of a sham, in the hands of amusing charlatans. We tolerate him in perhaps the only place where we would tolerate a satirist, in the Senate. And in the Senate they fear him.

He was attacking the Four Power Pact. "People say," he declared, "that this ends the Anglo-Japanese alliance. I do not find it in the pact. I do not find it nominated in the bond," he shouted. And the friends of the pact sat silent afraid of Reed's power as a debater, until Senator Lenroot having studied the document several minutes in the cloakroom read the plain language of the agreement to end the alliance. Reed almost "got away with it" himself. But this is not leadership. One does not follow a satirist. One makes him a privileged character at most.

Reed and Borah are privileged characters each in his own way. The privilege of being "queer" is as old as the herd itself. The harmless insane man was almost sacred in primitive society. The "fool" was the only man whose disrespect did not amount to lése majesté. The wisdom of the "fool" was regarded with a certain awe and admiration. But the death rate among those who sought this franchise must have been high. It must be personality which decides who survives and achieves this license and who does not, a nice capacity for adjustment, a rare sense of what the crowd will endure. Borah and Reed have it, LaFollette has not or has not chosen to exercise it.

George Moore somewhere says that if you can convince a woman that it is all play, all Pan and nymph, between you and her, you have the perfect way of a man with a maid, when his aim is something short of matrimony. But if you are too serious about it—! LaFollette is perhaps too serious about it. If he could have said what he had to say with a laugh and so as to raise a laugh he might have been privileged like Reed, or, if he had to be serious, he should have been serious like Borah, in a detached and impersonal fashion; then perhaps he might still have been something less than the public enemy that he is. But LaFollette is serious, terribly serious, terribly in earnest. He has had convictions, clung to them, and probably suffered more for them than any man in Washington.

The Wisconsin Senator is one of the least understood men in public life. In the Senate he speaks violently, with a harsh voice and an excess of manner. He is small and some of this loudness and emphasis is no doubt that compensation for lack of stature and presence to which men unconsciously resort; some of it is an exterior which has been cultivated to cover up an unusually shy and sensitive heart. The character in history and fiction which most intrigues him is Hamlet, that gentle soul unfit for life. He has spent years studying the shy Dane. He himself is a Hamlet who has taken up arms against a sea of troubles. The "queer" man who would gain a franchise for his "queerness" must not be sensitive. The crowd likes better to persecute than to tolerate.

Then too LaFollette entered the Senate when minorities were less tolerable than they are today. He got the stamp of impossible when Roosevelt led a movement in his direction and he refused to be a part of it. Thus he became isolated, neither Progressive nor Old Guard. You can not safely be too uncompromising, too serious. It makes no difference if you were right in rejecting both wings of the party as reactionary which they speedily proved to be. It makes no difference if you were right in opposing the war, and no one is so sure today that LaFollette was wrong in doing so as men were when it was proposed to expel him from the Senate. Justification after the fact does no good. It is not your wrongness that they hate; it's your uncompromising quality, and that remains more unbreakable than ever.

An unusual loyalty explains the unwillingness to compromise. LaFollette attaches himself deeply. A characteristic act was his leaving the Senate for months to nurse a sick son back to health. It sets him apart from most men, who do not let sickness in the family interfere with their business and perform their full duty when they hire a trained nurse. People think of LaFollette, the public man, as an egoist but this nursing of his son showed the utmost absence of egoism. And so it is with all his intimate relations, which are unusually sweet and tender.

Whatever he is like privately, publicly he is placed, rated, catalogued; the general mind is made up. The farm bloc no more turned to him than to Borah for leadership. He will always remain isolated.

Now that party discipline has been broken down, what nonconformist Senators suffer most from is the tyranny of the teapot. Senator Kenyon referred to it when he said Newberry on trial for fitness for his seat "floated back into the Senate on an ocean of tea." An unparliamentary version of the same reference to the social influence is: "The Senate is one long procession of dinners and hootch."

If you are regular politically you are regular socially. Given the habit of voting with the crowd, of putting others at ease by a not too great display of intellect, a good cook, a pre-war cellar, and a not impossible wife, and you belong to the Senatorial middle class, the new rich insurance agents, lawyers, miners, and manufacturers who control the fate of the socially ambitious. You may not be invited to the Wadsworths', or may be seldom asked there. But you are accepted by what Mencken might call the wealthy "booboisie," the circle Mr. Harding frequented before he was advanced to the White House.

If you don't you are of the Senatorial proletariat. You are invited out seldom or not at all. You have to organize a little set of intellectuals, not found in the Senate, for your wife's tea parties.

Senator Kenyon was a moderate nonconformist. Intellectually he was honest, but not strong, so that an outsider might have thought that his honesty and independence would be overlooked. But he was never accepted by the "booboisie." He was virtually cold shouldered out of the Senate, for it was with immense relief that he escaped from teapot ostracism to the securer social area of the Federal bench.

I repeat a bit of gossip about the Iowa Senator without vouching for it. When he was retiring, it is said, a reporter asked, "What can be done with the Senate?" "Nothing," replied the Iowan, "The only thing to do is to destroy it." If he said this he really flattered the "booboisie." Destruction is reserved for wicked things like Sodom and Gomorrah. But the Senate is not wicked. It is good, honest in the sense of not stealing, well-meaning, timid, petty, tea-drinking, human, commonplace. You can't destroy it unless you have something to put in its place, and there is nothing. Much better turn it over to the blocs and see what they will do with it.

CHAPTER XI

A Chief of an Industrial Workers of the World Longshoremans' Union was sentenced for twenty years because he was an I. W. W., although under his direction his organization handled efficiently all the munitions of war shipped from Philadelphia. He "obstructed the war" by his thoughts as an I. W. W., even though his actions as a citizen contributed to success in the war.

One may tolerate during a national emergency the oppression that results from the crushing of minorities, but in time of peace it is only in the balance of political forces that political existence may go on.

All freedom is the work of minorities and so is all change. Respect for opinion is dearly bought by them. Majority views were all once minority views. Some political theorists even go so far as to say that all governments, no matter what apparent precautions are taken to represent majorities, are really conducted by minorities. Without the effective resistance of minorities the general will may become tyrannous or without the stimulus they afford it may become inert.

The blocs and minorities that are appearing in American public life are accomplishing a measure of decentralization. The highly centralized government which we recently built up is itself passing into the control of the various economic subdivisions of society. In them rather than in it is coming to be final authority.

Take freight rates for an illustration. Originally they were localized, in the unrestricted control of the railroad managers. Then they were slightly centralized in the partial control of state and partial control of national authorities. Then control was wholly centralized in the Inter-State Commerce Commission at Washington, the States being denied effective authority even over rates within their own borders.

There you have bureaucracy at its worst, authority in the hands of an appointive commission, thousands of miles, in many cases, from the place where it was applied, and a public feeling its impotence, which is the negation of self-government.

Then comes the first step in decentralization. No locality, no State was big enough to reach out and get back the authority over its own railroad service that it once had. But the organized farmers of the whole country were able to take into their hands the power over the railroads as it affected them. Nominally the Inter-State Commerce Commission still makes rates. Practically the farmers, having the balance of power in the House and Senate, say what rates they want on agricultural products and get them. That is decentralization.

The division into States which the jealous colonists preserved in forming the Union has largely lost its significance. Men divide now according to their interests, not according to boundaries that may be learned in the school geographies. As the States weakened many of their powers gradually tended to be centralized in the national government. As the newer economic subdivisions of society become organized and self-assertive some of the power thus centralized in Washington devolves upon them, not legally or formally, but actually and in practice. They constitute minorities too large to be denied.

It is only through decentralization that popular institutions can be kept alive, only through it that government remains near enough to the people to hold their interest and only through it that freedom from an oppressive State is preserved.

Why should minorities be regarded with such aversion? Why should President Harding declaim against them so persistently? Our Federal Constitution is written full of safeguards for minorities. The reservoir of power is in the minorities, the States, the local subdivisions which feared the loss of their identity and independence through the central government they were creating.

Only powers expressly yielded by the local units may be assumed by the Republic. The States were the minorities; they felt when they joined the Union that their rights as minorities had to be jealously guarded, in order that they might have the realities of self-government.

You have in the rule that the small State must have as many Senators as the large State a sharp assertion of the right of geographical minorities. If the larger States had not accepted this principle the smaller States would never have joined the Union.

Gradually these geographical minorities lost their importance in the public consciousness. Our people had come and kept coming to this country from the ends of the earth. Arriving here they continued to be nomads, sweeping over the West in search of new pasture lands or more fertile soil, moving from the farm to the city and thrusting their roots in nowhere. No difference of language or customs set up arbitrary frontiers.

Moreover we were the first people to settle a land where modern methods of locomotion destroyed the use and wont of limited localities. Instead of being citizens of New York united with the citizens of New Jersey, Connecticut, and the rest of them for the common defense, as our forefathers imagined, we became citizens of the United States, which was divided into New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and the rest for purposes of policing, road-making, and other functions that could be better managed at home than from Washington.

A State began to assume about the same place in the Union that a county does in a State.

The basic reality for our forefathers was the State, the Union existing for the convenience of the States. The basic reality for us is the Union, the States existing for the convenience of the Union, which is too vast to administer everything from a central point.

As the geographical subdivisions lost their significance economic subdivisions rose to take their place. The farmer of Kansas began to have more in common with the farmer of Iowa than he had with the coal miner of his own State. The nationwide organization of farmers resulted, and it is a more real unit in the political consciousness than is that unit on which the Fathers laid such stress, the State. It is a minority that has no reserve rights under the Constitution but which achieves its rights by force of numbers and organization.

These economic subdivisions are the reality today. The United States is a union of the State of Agriculture, the State of Labor, the State of Manufacturing, and a dozen other occupational States of greater or less importance. And after all why should not Agriculture, Manufacturing, Labor, Foreign, and Domestic Commerce form a union for the national defense, carefully reserving essential powers to themselves as States, just as the thirteen original colonies did? Why should we let this new political organism keep us awake nights?

Nationally we have a complex on the subject of disunion. Fortunate perhaps is the country which is subject to the pressure of a foreign enemy on its border, as France is, for example, to that of Germany. If you have a convenient foe to be afraid of you do not have to be afraid of yourselves. It seems to be the rule that nations like individuals must have fears and the American phobia is that this country will proceed amœba-wise by scission, into several countries. When we feel a weakening at the center we feel a horror in the peripheries.

We fought one great war to prevent a breaking up of the Union and whenever we hear the word "section," we become apprehensive. And just as "section" fills our minds with fear of cleavage upon geographical lines, so "class" arouses anxiety over cleavage upon social lines. "Class" calls up the spectre of socialism. "Bloc" moreover is a word of unhappy associations. It brings into the imagination Europe with all its turmoil and its final catastrophe.

The Civil War left us with one complex. The European War left us with another. The agricultural bloc touches both, suggesting division and upon European lines. Being agricultural it is vaguely sectional; being the projection of a single interest into national politics so as to cut across parties, it follows European precedents. It moreover derives its name from abroad.

Call it log-rolling by the farmers, however, and it relates to the habitual method of American legislation. It conforms to our best traditions. We never spoke of the groups which filled pork barrels of the past as blocs, but every river and harbor bill was the work of minorities uniting to raid the treasury. The two recent amendments to the Constitution, granting the suffrage to women and prohibiting the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages, were also achieved minorities.

The organized minorities of the past dissolved when their end was obtained. They had a specific rather than a general purpose. Usually it was a moral purpose, the prohibition of alcoholic drinks, or political justice for woman. Never until recently did a minority raise the economic interests of one section of society against those of the rest of society and promise to keep on raising them. The farm bloc is the first permanent economic minority to organize itself effectively for political action.

The phenomenon is not that the bloc impairs our political system; it does not; majority rule is always tempered by minority rule or it becomes either a tyranny or a dead thing. It is that it threatens our pocketbooks. It obtains low railroad rates on farm products. It shifts taxes from farmers to the rest of us. It secures for farmers special aid in the form of government credits.

Nevertheless its appearance is the most hopeful sign in Washington that we may emerge from the governmental bog into which we have sunk. We had centralized to the point of creating an immense and dull bureaucracy headed by a weak Executive and equally weak Congress. Interest in self-government was being destroyed by the mere remoteness and irresponsiveness of the mechanism. "The parties are exactly alike. What difference does it make which is in power?"

We had created an organization too vast for any one to take it in hand. And the only remedy in that case is to break the organization down. Decentralization into States was impossible, for men never go back to outworn forms, and State boundaries had ceased to be the real lines of division in American society. A way out of this difficulty has been found through the seizing of power by occupational organizations, of which the farm bloc is the most famous and most successful.

We could not go on as we are, with an enfeebled Executive and an enfeebled Congress. And, if I have analyzed the situation correctly, we shall have no more strong Executives, until some national emergency unites the people temporarily for the accomplishment of some single purpose. The Executive is the greatest common divisor of a diverse society. Congress, equally, is weak so long as it remains a Congress based upon the present theory of party government, for the party has to be stretched out too thin, has to represent too many different views to have character and purpose. Steadily parties are being driven more and more to pure negation. Wilson was elected the first time on the negative issue, "No more Roosevelt and his radicalism," and the second time on the negative issue, "He kept us out of war," and Harding upon the negative issue, "No more Wilson."

If the two existing parties cannot be positive and constructive, "Why not scrap them both?" asks Mr. Samuel G. Blythe. Why not, indeed? except for the fact that you can find no principle upon which to found a third party. If there were a positive principle upon which a majority of the voters would agree the existing parties would grab for it. They are colorless and negative not by choice but by necessity.

Let us look at the situation. The public is disgusted with the existing parties and becoming indifferent to the possibilities of the suffrage and of popular government, an unhealthy sign. A new party is out of the question, for to succeed any new party must be broad enough to cover all sorts and conditions of men, divergent groups and interests. It must at once have the defects of the old parties.

So long as parties "must be careful," to quote Mr. Harding, executives must "be careful" and Congress organized on the party basis "must be careful." We gravitate toward negation.

We face in government perhaps what it is said we face in industry and in war, organization on such a scale that men are no longer masters of it. Under such circumstances there is nothing to do but to break it up into its component parts. That is what the group or bloc system is, a resolution into component parts.

It is precisely what will happen in the industrial field if the great combinations of twenty years ago prove too unwieldy. The vertical trust, the single industry, organized like the Stinnes group or like the Henry Ford industry from the raw material to the finished product but seeking no monopoly, promises to take the place of the horizontal trust of monopolistic tendency. The bloc is a vertical organization appearing in the field of politics, which hitherto has been dominated by the horizontal organization of the parties.

A vertical organization, like everything vertical in this world, tends to rest upon the solid earth. It has its base in reality. The bloc introduces reality into public life. It will be represented by men who are not ashamed to stand frankly for the selfish interests of their group.

When we banished selfish interests from the government a few years ago we banished all interests—and even all interest, too—leaving very little but hypocrisy and timidity. The representatives of a group will not have to be all things to all men as our party men are, but only one thing to one kind of men.

If we cannot get our present parties to stand for anything, if for the same reason we cannot form a new party to stand for anything, we can at least introduce principles into politics through the force of group support. Blocs will be positive, not merely negative as the parties have become. They do not have to please everybody. They can and must be constructive.

The clash of ideas which we miss between parties may take place between blocs. I am assuming, as everyone in Washington does, that the farm bloc is only a forerunner of other similar political efforts, for every economic interest which is organized among the voters may extend itself vertically into Congress.

There will be a gain in decentralization, there will be a gain in honesty, there will be a gain in constructive political effort through the direct representation of the real interests of society in Congress.

Nor does there appear any danger of the break up into utterly unrelated minorities such as has taken place, let us say, in France and Germany. We have what most European countries has not, an elected Executive who plays an important part in legislation, the President with his veto power. So long as the presidential office retains this function, and it is always likely to retain it, there must be national parties within which the minorities, interests, or occupational groups, must coöperate.

Groups will not be able in this country as in Europe to elect members of the national legislature independently, then form a combination and pick their own Executive. They are under compulsion to elect the Executive at large by the votes of the whole people; they must hold together enough for that purpose.

The centrifugal tendency of minorities in the American system is thus effectively restrained. Groups must work within the parties, as the agricultural bloc has done and as the proposed liberal workers bloc promises to do. A handful of seats in Congress alone is not worth fighting for: that is why all third party movements have failed. A handful of seats in a European parliament is worth having; it may dictate the choice of the Executive; that is why parties are numerous abroad. In other words "bloc" is a useful name as indicating a radical departure in our political system but it contains no threat for this country of the political disintegration prevailing in Europe.

The names Republican and Democrat are likely to last as convenient designations of the accord reached for national purposes between the vertical organizations which represent economic or other group interests of the people. Unity is thus preserved as well as diversity, which is what upon geographical lines, the Father of the Constitution sought.

You have only to regard the agricultural bloc to perceive the truth of this analysis. Primarily its members are Republicans or Democrats and only secondarily representatives of agriculture. They have rejected leadership of a separatist tendency, choosing the moderate guidance of Mr. Kenyon and Mr. Capper rather than the more individualistic generalship of Mr. Borah or Mr. La Follette. Some day their successors may be primarily representatives of agriculture and only secondarily Republicans or Democrats, but in one of the two big parties they must retain their standing, or share the fate of third parties, a fate made inevitable by the necessity electing of a chief executive at large.

Mr. Henry Ford, a lesser person, started at the other end and organized downward to the raw material. He now owns his own mines, his railroads for shipping, his raw material and products, his steel foundries, the factories which turn out his finished products, his weekly newspaper, and he is himself a political figure of no one yet knows how much importance.

The farmers are organized for social purposes, for the distribution of information among themselves, for coöperation in buying and selling, for maintaining a lobby at Washington and finally for political action. Political action crowns an organization which serves all the purposes for which union is required.

Practically every other interest is organized to the point of maintaining a lobby at Washington. Only the farmers have developed organization in Congress. Only they have adapted their organization to all their needs, social and political. Only they have the perfect vertical trust running straight up from the weekly entertainment in the union or bureau to the Senate in Washington, where their Senators do the bidding of their agent, Mr. Gray Silver.

Indispensable to effective special interest representation seems to be an organization for other than political purposes which brings the voters of a class or occupation together. Labor has such an organization in its unions. Business has it perhaps in its Chambers of Commerce and Boards of Trade. Either of them has the means at its disposal for imitating the farmers and developing a bloc in the national legislature.

It is natural that the farm interest should be the first to push its way beyond the lobby or propaganda stage at Washington to that of organized representation on the floor of Congress. Agriculture is the single interest or the immensely predominating interest in many States. A Senator or Representative from such a state may safely consider himself a representative of agriculture. But in a more fully developed community there is a diversity of interests. Where there is capital there is also labor. Moreover most of the industrial States have also their agricultural interest. It is not safe for an Eastern Senator or Representative, as the situation now stands, to identify himself with any minority. He must at least pretend to "represent the whole people."

If the vertical movement in politics proceeds, as it almost inevitably must, it will manifest itself effectively first in the lower house. Congress districts are small units. In an industrial State one district may be prevailingly agricultural, another prevailingly labor, another prevailingly commercial. Groups operating within a party will tend to parcel out the districts among themselves holding their support of each other's candidates, as the Liberal and Labor parties have often done in England.

The Senate will be less responsive. States are large units and, except in farming regions, are not prevailingly of one interest. But a division may be effected like that which now gives one Senator to the eastern and another to the western, or one to the urban and another to the rural part of the State. One Senator may go to business and another to agriculture or to labor as the case may be.

What I have just written is by way of illustration. I have spoken of agricultural, labor and business blocs not because these are the only divisions of society that may be organized for political purpose but because they already have the basic machinery and seem certain to thrust upwards till they are prominently represented in Congress. Other minority interests are already showing themselves, as for example the soldiers of the late war and the inland waterways group. These and others like them, some permanent and some temporary, will cut across the main subdivisions, so that men who are divided on one interest will be united on another and thus furnish a further cement in the body politic in addition to the necessity of joint action upon the presidency.

Thus there is less danger of our being ruled by minorities than there is of minorities having to surrender too much of their purposes for the sake of unity among themselves and of our thus being in spite of their organization little better off than we are now, reduced by the sheer mass that has to be moved to a policy of inaction and negation.

In an earlier chapter I analyzed the Senate to show how weak and will-less it is and how inferior is its personnel, how prostrate it lies before any powerful minority which has a purpose and the will to carry it out. I used the Senate as typical of Congress; a desire to save space and to avoid repetitions kept me from a similar study of the House. In the same way the parties lie ready for the uses of minorities. They are will-less. They have no aim and express no unity because when the old pioneer will to exploit as quickly as possible the national resources without regard to waste, physical or social, ceased to operate, there was no unity, except, as I have explained, for temporary purposes, for social defense under Roosevelt and for national defense under Wilson, two essentially negative ends.

Mr. Will H. Hays trying to tell the Republican senate how to vote on the League covenant, was a less powerful figure than was Mr. Wayne B. Wheeler ordering it to vote that more than one half of one per cent of alcohol in a beverage was intoxicating, or Mr. Gray Silver forcing it to extend credits to farmers, or Colonel Taylor frightening it into voting for a soldiers' bonus.

The old party bosses are dead. No machine leader will control as many delegates in the next national convention as will Mr. Gray Silver. So far as delegates are now led they are led by Senators and Representatives. A Senate group chose Mr. Harding at Chicago. And Senators and Representatives lie at the mercy of organized minorities.

The Republican party in 1920 was an agglomeration of minorities, held together by no better binder than the negation of Wilsonism. There were the German vote, the Irish vote and the other foreign votes; the farmer vote, the business vote, the old American vote, the frightened vote, the herd vote and every conceivable kind of vote. It was in effect a bloc, in the European sense of that word, a combination of small parties. These minorities were mostly unorganized in 1920 or imperfectly organized; their development vertically is now going on. Some of them will appear as definitely upon the floor of the 1924 convention as the agricultural group has upon the floor of Congress.

With the organization of minorities Congress becomes important, for it is in Congress that the Fathers in their wisdom provided for the expression of minorities. The Presidency, according to the argument used before in this book, dwindles to a charming embodiment of that great American negative—nationwide public opinion. The only ordinarily available positive—group opinion—finds its play in the Legislature. There will be determined upon whose shoulders the taxes will be shifted, who shall have effective rebates in freight rates, and more important still, who shall use for his group interests the government control of credit. Where these questions are being decided there public attention will concentrate. There will be the stress upon government.

We put our faith in the jack-of-all-trades and the amateur. We have the cheerful notion that the "crisis produces the man." This is nothing more than the justice illusion which is lodged in the minds of men, an idea, religious in its origin, that no time of trial would arrive unless the man to meet it were benignantly sent along with it, a denial of human responsibility, an encouragement to the happy-go-lucky notion that everything always comes out right in the end.

The world, in going through the greatest crisis in history has controverted this cheerful belief, for it has not produced "the man" either here or elsewhere. No one appeared big enough to prevent the war. No one appeared big enough to shorten the war. No one appeared big enough to effect a real peace. And no one appeared big enough to guide this country wisely either in the war or in the making of peace, which is still going on.

Only in parliamentary life is there enough permanency and enough opportunity for the breeding of statesmen. We shall never have them while the Presidency with its hazards and its wastes is stressed as it has been in recent years.

And Congress itself must be reformed before it will encourage and develop ability. The seniority rule, to which reference has been made before, must be abolished before talent will have its opportunity in the legislative branch.

One of the first things that aggressive minorities would be likely to do is to reach out for the important committee chairmanships. Already the seniority rule has been broken in the House, when Martin Madden was made Chairman of the Appropriations Committee instead of the senior Republican, an inadequate person from Minnesota.

And in any case the seniority rule will be severely tested in the Senate. If Senator McCumber is defeated in North Dakota and Senator Lodge is defeated or dies, Senator Borah will be in line to be chairman of the important Foreign Relations Committee. When Senator Cummins, who is sick, dies or retires and Senator Townsend is defeated, which now seems likely, Senator LaFollette will be in line to be chairman of the Senate Committee on Interstate Commerce. Both irregulars will then attain places of vast power unless the seniority rule is abrogated.

Thus even the machine in the Senate will soon be under pressure to do away with the absurd method of awarding mere length of service with power and place.

Minorities when they determine to take the Senate and the House out of the enfeebled grasp of incompetent regularity will inevitably find precedents already established for them.

A richer public life will come from the breakdown of the safeguards of mediocrity and from the stressing of the legislative at the expense of the executive branch of the government. Both these results are likely to follow from the effective appearance of minority interests in Congress.

CHAPTER XII

At least we shall fill a place in history alongside Greece and Rome; we feel it as the imaginative young man feels in himself the stirrings of a future Shakespeare, Napoleon, or Lincoln.

The human mind refuses to conceive of so much power coming to ordinary ends. The justice illusion which men have found so indispensable a companion on their way through time requires the happy ending. As it is only right and fair that when the forces send us a crisis they should send us a man equal to it, so it is only right and fair that when they put so great a people as ourselves in the world they should prepare for it a splendid destiny.

I subscribe heartily to this doctrine. It is as convincing as any I have ever seen based on the theory which we all cheerfully accept, that man is not master of his own fate, that he does not need to be, that he had better not be, that he reaps where he does not sow, reaps, indeed, abundant crops.

In the preceding chapter, working toward the happy ending, I have brought my characters to the verge of felicity: the perfect union between minorities and majorities, which is the aim of all social order, is in sight.

I have based my minorities upon self-interest, thus introducing into our government the selfish interests banished therefrom twenty years ago. Their banishment was an achievement of virtue. Their reintroduction is the accomplishment of good sense. They are the great reality while the world thinks as it does.

Since someone somewhere, in a treatise on economics probably, penned the phrase "enlightened self-interest," we have all more or less become enamored of the idea that wisdom—enlightenment—reposes in the bosom of selfishness. Justice requires that wisdom should be somewhere. The reasoning runs like this. The world cannot get on without wisdom. Justice demands that the world should get on. Therefore there is wisdom in the world. We know it is not in ourselves or in our neighbors. We feel, therefore, that it must be in the bosom of perfect selfishness. And as we cast our eyes about us we think we know where the bosom of perfect selfishness is, and we feel assured.

Sometimes, of course, we place it in the heads of all mankind, it being a thing that no one man has and no few men have, but which is one of those mysterious properties of the aggregate which does not inhere in the individuals composing the aggregate; a sort of colloidal element that comes from shaking men up together, though all are without it before the mixing and shaking.

Some would place it, as Mr. Wilson seems to in a famous passage on minorities, in the breasts of the enlightened few. When the few disagreed with him, he threw them and their wisdom in jail.

But wherever it is, it is sure to be found in a system which preserved the old parties representing the general mind of the country along with the new vertical political organizations, representing the minorities, thrusting up like volcanoes upon the placid plane of politics that Mr. Harding once delighted to survey.

You have in this combination the spontaneous wisdom of the masses, if that is where wisdom generates. You have the wisdom of the few, if you believe in impregnation from above, and you have the wisdom of selfishness, if you believe as most of us do in the enlightenment of self-interest. And no one ever located wisdom anywhere else than in these three places, for the first, as I might easily demonstrate, is the modern democratic name for the wisdom of God; the second is the wisdom of men; and the third is the wisdom of the serpent; beside which there are no other wisdoms.

This you will admit is moving rapidly and without reserve toward the happy ending. But I think every writer of a novel has stuck his tongue in his cheek as he wrote those benedictory words, "And they lived happy ever after." And I stick my tongue in my cheek as I think of Mr. Gray Silver, the effective director of the farmers' vertical political trust sitting in the Senate, leading it perhaps in place of Senator Lodge of Massachusetts.

To Mr. Lodge's petulant, imperious gesture—the sharp handclap for the pages—would succeed Mr. Silver's fixing gesture, that of a country merchant smoothing out a piece of silk before a customer at a counter. Mr. Silver as he talks performs one constant motion, a gentle slow moving of both hands horizontally, palms down.

Mr. Silver is a lobbyist with the powers of a dictator, or a dictator with the habits of a lobbyist, whichever way you wish to look at it. A former farmer, member of the West Virginia legislature, representative of farm organizations at Washington, he rules the Senate with more power than Mr. Lodge has or Mr. Harding has, but always with the gentle touch of a general-storekeeper, spreading the wrinkles out of a yard of satin.

But even this little lobbyist has a certain definiteness which public men generally lack. His feet are firmly placed upon reality. He speaks for a solid body of opinion. He is a positive rather than a negative force. He represents a fairly united minority which knows what it wants, and men are strong or weak according as they are or are not spokesmen of a cause; and the selfish interest of a group easily takes on the pious aspect of a cause.

It is always better to deal with principals than with agents. Gray Silver, Colonel John H. Taylor, the Apollo of the soldiers' bonus lobby, perfect ladies' man in appearance, who is full of zeal also for a cause, that of those who did not make money out of the war and who should in common justice make it all the rest of their lives out of the peace, and Wayne B. Wheeler, the fanatic leader of the drys, are all more real men than those who do their bidding in the Senate and the House.

No, if I put my tongue in my cheek as I write the words "lived happy ever after," it is because I see only a measure of improvement in the freeing of men from existing political conventions which will come from the effective emergence of minorities. A richer public life will result from increased vitality of the legislative branch. But a rich public life, no; for that requires men. You cannot fashion it out of Lodges, Watsons, Curtises, Gillettes, Mondells, Hardings, Hugheses, and Hoovers, or even Gray Silvers, Taylors, or Wheelers.

And we do not breed men in this country. If the test of a civilization is an unusually high average of national comfort, achieved in a land of unparalleled resources, whose exploitation was cut off from interruption by foreign enemies, then this experiment in living which we have been conducting in America has been a great success; if it is a further freeing of the human spirit, such as finds its expression in the rare individuals who make up the bright spots in all past human history, then its success is still to be achieved.

Many blame the dullness and general averageness which afflicts us upon democracy. There is democracy and there is timidity and stupidity; there is the appeal to low intelligence; the compulsion to be a best seller rests upon us all. Post hoc propter hoc.

I am going to blame it upon the mistake Euclid made in his theorem about two parallel lines. This was an error of Euclid's, modern mathematics proves, unless you assume space to be infinite. Having committed ourselves to Euclid, we committed ourselves to a space that was infinite. Space being regarded as infinite, man was little, relatively.

Euclid having made his mistake about the parallels, it followed inevitably that Mr. Harding should be little.

I use Mr. Harding only by way of illustration. You may fill any other name you like of the Washington gallery into that statement of inevitability and do it no violence. And this very interchangeability of names suggests that you must go further back than democracy to find the cause of today's sterility.

Besides, we have had infinite space, in our minds; but have we ever had democracy there? De Gourmont writes that no religion ever dies, but it rather lives on in its successor. Similarly, no form of government ever dies; it survives in its successor. A nation does not become a democracy by writing on a bit of paper, "resolved that we are a democracy, with a government consisting of executive, legislative, and judicial branches chosen by majority vote."

Government, however organized, is what exists in the minds of the people, and in that mind is stored up a dozen superstitions, handed down from primitive days, gathering force from time to time as new names are given to them and new "scientific" bases are found for them.

We laugh at the divine right of kings, but we could not accept self-government without bestowing on it an element of divinity. We have the divine right of Public Opinion. We can hardly print these words without the reverence of capital letters. The founders of modern democracy knew there could be no government without a miraculous quality. Formerly one mere man by virtue of ruling became something divine. The miracle grew difficult to swallow. You could regard this one man and see that he was a fool and had too many mistresses. He was the least divine-looking thing that could be imagined. Very well then, put the divine quality into something remote. All men by virtue of ruling themselves became divine.

An immense inertia develops between theoretical self-government and the practical reluctance of humanity to be governed by anything short of the heavenly hosts. I don't know whether this reluctance springs from racial modesty, the feeling that man is not good enough to govern himself, or from racial egotism, the belief that nothing is too good to govern him; but it is a great reality. The little men at Washington are will-less in the conflict.

To overcome this inertia, minorities whose interests cannot wait upon the slow benevolent processes of determinism or upon the divine rightness of public opinion, form to prod the constitutional organs of government into action. Mr. Gray Silver, the silk smoother, and Mr. Wayne B. Wheeler, the Puritan fanatic, are both just as much parts of the government as is Mr. Harding. So, too, is every one of the hundred and more lobbies which issue publicity at Washington. We recognize this plurality of our institutions in our common speech. We refer habitually to the "invisible government," to "government by business," to "party government," to "government by public opinion." We have little but inertia, except as outside pressure is applied to it.

The little men at Washington live in all this confusion of an excessively plural government. They are pushed hither and yon by all these forces, organized and unorganized, mental and physical, real and imaginary, that inhibit and impel self-government. They lean heavily upon parties only to find parties bending beneath their weight. They yield to blocs and lobbies. They watch publicity and put out their own publicity to counteract it.

Like the ministers of crowned fools, they gull the present embodiment of divine right and cringe before it. They are everything but the effective realization of a democratic will.

All this sounds as if I were getting far from my happy ending, and you begin to see me asking the old question, "Is democracy a failure?" But no, it is too soon to ask it. Wait a thousand years until democracy has had a real chance. A revolution—no really optimistic prognosis can be written which does not have the world revolution in it—a revolution will have to take place in men's minds before this is a democracy.

I would absolve myself from the taboo of this word. Property is a grand form of clothes. A property revolution, such as the Socialists recommend, would be little more important in setting men's minds free for self-government, than would putting women in trousers be in setting women's minds free for the achievement of sex equality.

Some German—I think it was Spengler—writing about some "Niedergang," I think it was of western civilization—all Germans like to write about Niedergangs—demonstrated that every new civilization starts with a new theory of the universe, of space and time. That is, it starts with a real revolution.

Well, then, here is the true happy ending; Einstein is giving us a new theory of the universe, knocking the mathematical props from under infinity, teaching us that man largely fashions the world out of his own mind.

Man again tends to become what the old Greek radical called him, "The measure of all things." Once he is, and it will take a long time for him to admit that he is, there may be a real chance for democracy and for the emergence of great individuals, who are after all the best evidence of civilization.

You see the happy ending is Einstein and not the farm bloc.

Meanwhile we have the farm bloc, one sign of vitality amid much deadness, a reassertion of the principle which the Fathers of the Constitution held, that there must be room for the play of minorities in our political system.