Men versus the man; a correspondence between Robert Rives La Monte, socialist, and H.L. Mencken, individualist

L

MEN versus THE MAN

A CORRESPONDENCE

BETWEEN
ROBERT RIVES LA MONTE, Socialist

»»•

AND

H. L. MENCKEN, Individualist

NEW YORK

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
1910

COPYRIGHT, zgio

BY
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

BY

IT

Published March, iqio

INTRODUCTION

THIS book is precisely what it pretends to be : a
series of letters between friends. They were writ-
ten because the general subject of the organization
of society was one which vastly attracted both of
us, and because a space of three hundred miles
made a more intimate discussion impossible. Into
them there went, not so much a learned review of
the evidence and the prophets, as a record of per-
sonal, and often transient opinions and impressions.
Changes of position are to be noticed in more than
one place, but inasmuch as the purpose of each
disputant was to shake the stand of the other, this
proof of occasional success may be accepted, it is
hoped, without impatience. It was thought best
to print the letters without attempting to trans-
form their epistolary freedom into a more sedate
dialectic manner. They offer few new contribu-
tions of either fact or theory to the great questions
they presume to discuss, but it is possible that they
may be of some interest as showing how variously
the accepted facts and theories appear and appeal
to two somewhat eager inquirers.

LA MONTE.
MENCKEN.

MEN VS. THE MAN

LA MONTE'S FIRST LETTER

MY DEAR MENCKEN:

You and I are fairly typical of the hosts of edu-
cated young men and women of upper and middle
class antecedents who are so far from satisfied with
life as it is that the man in the street who styles us
" knockers " does not come very wide of the mark.
But yet we differ, and differ widely; you, in spite
of your sturdy independence of mind, are in the
main a disciple of Nietzsche, or, in other words,
you are an Individualist whose ideal is a splendid
aristocratic oligarchy of Beyond Men ruling over
a hopelessly submerged rabble; I am a Socialist
and a faithful disciple of Marx — not that I believe
Marx to have been superhuman or infallible, but
simply that I have found him to be right in so many
cases, that I feel that there is a strong presump-
tion that he is right even where I cannot clearly
see that he is.

Let us first examine the grounds of our basic
agreement, and then it will be easier to recognize
the reason for the very wide divergence of our con-

2 Men vs. the Man

elusions. We are both idealists in the sense that
Don Quixote and Jesus Christ and Thomas Jeffer-
son were idealists, but there are idealists and ideal-
ists. The difference depends upon the nature of
the ideal. If the ideal be one capable of attain-
ment or at least of reasonably close approxima-
tion, the idealist is what we call a practical man
— he may even be a scientist, a materialist, or an
atheist, as are many of the most effective and
determined fighters for Socialism. If the ideal be
one hopelessly beyond reach of attainment, if the
idealist hitches his wagon to a star without having
studied astronomy sufficiently to ascertain whether
the orbit of the star is along a road over which his
poor man-made wagon may pass in safety, then we
call him a dreamer, a visionary, a Utopian, or a
madman. It is probable that in our secret hearts
this is the view each of us takes of the other.

You, recognizing that within historical times
there has ever been a rabble of well-nigh sub-human
men and women, believe that the only ideal that
you, as a practical man, can accept is one including
such a rabble. To you the man who proposes
the abolition of this sub-human herd is a mystical
dreamer who ignores the stern teachings of his-
tory. It must be admitted that much of the cur-
rent Socialist literature— H. G. Wells' "New
Worlds for Old,11 for instance — which presents So-
cialism as a scheme for human amelioration which
Society is free to adopt or reject as it will, as a

Men vs. the Man 3

sort of patent panacea for human ills which the
patient may or may not elect to imbibe; it must
be admitted that the great bulk of this literature
of polite propaganda goes far toward justifying
your view.

But the typical Socialist of Germany, France,
England, and America, the man or woman who
gives his or her energies to educating and organiz-
ing and disciplining the wonderful, world-wide
army, ever growing, ever marching forward, un-
dismayed by defeat, sure of ultimate victory, al-
ready thirty million strong — the largest army under
a single banner the world has ever seen — this typ-
ical, work-a-day, militant Socialist does not look
upon himself or herself as a patent medicine ven-
der, but as a John the Baptist proclaiming with no
uncertain sound the advent of a New Order. Such
an army inspired by a common faith, even though
the faith be a delusion, animated by a common
purpose, even though the purpose be incapable of
realization, is a force that you as a practical man
must reckon with.

But is the faith a delusion? Is the purpose in-
capable of realization? Let us see. If it is im-
possible for the Old Order to persist, then it fol-
lows that a New Order must come. I will post-
pone for the present discussing what that New
Order is to be, and will proceed to show you that
the Old Order cannot continue. I will give you
as little history, political economy, and statistics

4 Men vs. the Man

as may be for two reasons ; first, I know very little
of such things myself; second, I wish to be agree-
able to you, and I have found by experience that
practical people have an extreme distaste for exact
facts.

In a broad way the great difference between the
economy of the Middle Ages and the economy of
to-day, is that then production was chiefly for use
— for local use — while to-day production is almost
solely for sale. So that the smooth working of
our modern industrial and commercial complexus
depends upon the possibility of an adequate and un-
interrupted sale of goods. Whenever the sale of
goods is interrupted, as it was signally in 1873,
1893, and 1907, we have great panics.

Since the latter part of the eighteenth century
we have had a continuous series of great mechan-
ical inventions which have revolutionized and are
day by day revolutionizing ever more rapidly our
mode of production. The great net result of these
changes is that the productive power of man has
been hugely multiplied. I think I am well within
the mark in saying that one hour's work to-day
produces as much as one hundred hours' work in
Adam Smith's day. Let us see what the concrete
effect of this is. If we turn to the statistics gath-
ered by our government at Washington, we find
that in 1900 the average annual product per worker
employed was in round numbers $2,000, while
the average wages were about $400. The diffi-

Men vs. the Man 5

culty of disposing of the product is already begin-
ning to appear. It is obvious that a man with
$400 cannot purchase $2,000 worth of goods.
Over fifty per cent, of our population actually be-
long to the working class. Add to them the
farmers, whose purchasing power is not propor-
tionally much greater, and you have all but a
handful of our people. It is obvious that if our
total product were composed of articles of personal
consumption, and if we were limited to the home
or domestic market, the disposition of the product
by sale would be impossible. But we have for-
eign markets, and we produce pig-iron as well as
pig-meat. The dependence of the first great manu-
facturing country, England, upon her foreign sales
was recognized in her proud boast that England
was the workshop of the world. But to-day in
every market in the world England is meeting the
ever-fiercer competition of Germany and America,
while Japan is wresting the markets of the Orient
from both Europe and America, and the coming
industrial development of China — the true Yellow
Peril — is already the nightmare of every far-seeing
European and American conservative. The for-
eign market has been an immensely serviceable
safety-valve, but inexorable economic develop-
ment— or Fate or Kismet, if you will — is rapidly
screwing it shut.

The other safety-valve — the application of cap-
ital and labor to the production of pig-iron instead

6 Men vs. the Man

of pig-meat — has been greatly developed in the
past decade, and as a means of partial relief prom-
ises to outlast the foreign market safety-valve.
The more capital and labor can be withdrawn
from the production of articles of common every-
day consumption, and employed in producing
permanent industrial or transportation plant, the
less becomes the immediate difficulty in disposing of
our annual product. There can be no doubt that
our recent period of prosperity was prolonged
and the panic of 1907 postponed by the wholesale
employment of capital and labor in such vast un-
dertakings as the tunnels under the East and North
rivers. But once such works are completed, they
facilitate the production and distribution of goods,
or save time or labor in some way, and thus in
the long run accentuate the difficulty they tem-
porarily relieve.

In our separate productive establishments a part
of the capital employed must always be invested in
permanent plant and a part paid out for wages
day by day and week by week. Competition be-
tween rival plants has always compelled the con-
stant improvement and development of machinery,
and has thus compelled the owners constantly to
invest larger and larger portions of their total
capital in permanent plant. This change in what
economists call the composition of capital has been
forced upon the captains of industry irrespective
of their wishes, and its effect has been to in-

Men vs. the Man 7

crease steadily and tremendously the disproportion
between the value of the product and the purchas-
ing-power of the wage-earners employed. Alike in
the separate industrial plant and in the nation as
a whole the constantly progressing change in the
composition of capital — a change necessitated by
the process itself and that must go on — in the long
run makes ever more difficult the sale of the total
product.

We are thus confronted by a condition, not a
theory. The masses of the people are unable to
purchase more than about one-fifth of the annual
product, and this fatal lack of purchasing power
is destined to increase steadily irrespective of any
human will.

Are we not forced, my dear Mencken, to the
conclusion that we are upon the threshold of
economic changes so vast that no word short of
Revolution is adequate to describe them? I sin-
cerely believe that purely as a matter of economics
the progressive and inexorable change in the tech-
nical composition of capital makes a Social Revolu-
tion inevitable, and further that this revolution is
so close upon us that it behooves you and me, as
prudent men, to prepare for it.

What sort of a revolution is it to be? Will it
place in power an oligarchy of Nietzschean Im-
moralists — ancestors of the Beyond Men to-be?
Something of this sort was predicted a few years
ago by W. J. Ghent in his " Our Benevolent Feu-

8 Men vs. the Man

dalism," and has just been far more vividly de-
scribed as a possibility by Jack London in that
vigorous and brilliant, if depressing book, " The
Iron Heel."

Or will it make the means of life the common
possession of all, and thus abolish poverty forever,
and usher in the era of fellowship so long fore-
told by bards and seers ?

To answer these questions we must make a slight
excursion into the field of psychology. Econom-
ics tell us that with all our male population be-
tween the ages of twenty-five and forty-five work-
ing three or four hours daily, we could produce
enough to keep our whole population in such com-
fort as to-day requires an income of $5,000 a
year.

If this is possible, and no statistician or econ-
omist is foolhardy enough to deny it, whether or
not the coming Social Revolution will bring it to
pass depends upon the intelligence or desires of
the masses. Let us see how these are determined.
A man's mode of thought depends upon his mode
of life. The man who depends largely upon
changes in weather or climate, which seem to him
to be utterly beyond the power of the human will
to control, will be superstitious, whether he be a
red Maori savage in New Zealand, or a bar-
barian tan-tinted grower of vegetables on Long
Island or in Connecticut. But the man who works
with machinery which runs with uniform regular-

Men vs. the Man 9

ity and is almost absolutely under human control
and direction, ceases to be superstitious, reasons
straight from cause to effect or from effect back to
cause, ceases to go to church or chapel to pray to
God for daily bread, and grows rudely and om-
inously unwilling to go barefooted because of an
over-production of shoes, or hungry because of a
plethora of beef and corn.

Now, as Professor Veblen has pointed out, the
Machine Process is dominating directly and af-
fecting indirectly ever more and more of our pop-
ulation, and the significant point is that these are
just the people who suffer most from the continu-
ance of the present system and who have every-
thing to gain by making the factories and railroads
and farms the common property of all the people.
The factory worker is disciplined in co-operation
in his daily work in the factory, he lives gregari-
ously in tenements, and is accustomed to collective
bargaining through the medium of his union. If
he thinks at all, he must think toward Socialism.
Often for years he hardly thinks at all, but panics
come and bring unemployment. Unemployment
is a powerful mental stimulus. When the panic
passes and the unemployed man gets work, he is
very likely to become a dues-paying member of the
Socialist party.

Our argument has thus far brought us to the
conclusion that a Social Revolution is imminent,
and that the very conditions of their lives are com-

io Men vs. the Man

pelling to socialistic thought and desires that ever
growing host of the population employed in con-
nection with machinery — the very part of the pop-
ulation who have nothing to fear from a revolu-
tion, who, in the words of Marx, " have nothing
to lose but their chains, and a whole world to
gain." But to-day no one wholly escapes the per-
vasive psychological effects of the Machine Process.
Every twentieth century man and woman thinks
more or less after the fashion of the factory worker
of the nineteenth century. The thought-life of
our time is day by day more and more affected by
proletarian ideals and proletarian modes of ratioci-
nation. Here and there individuals shielded by
a favorable economic situation from direct contact
with the hard facts of contemporary bread-win-
ning are but little affected by the new tendencies,
but no one wholly escapes this influence. Thus
the economic and social forces which are organiz-
ing and drilling a mighty host of militant Socialists
are at the same time making the rest of the pop-
ulation more or less mentally indisposed to combat
with zeal and earnestness the forces making for a
new social order.

Of the active components of our population the
group which most nearly escapes the revolutionary
psychological influences we have been considering,
is the class of independent small producers and
traders. But this class is fast disappearing before
the advance of the trust and the department

Men vs. the Man n

store. Where here and there we still find sur-
vivals of this formerly dominant typical American
group, we find they have lost their sturdy inde-
pendence of mind and character. They live in
daily and hourly fear of economic extinction; they
dread to open their daily papers lest they see in
them that the manipulations of a Morgan or the
enterprise of a Strauss shall have doomed them to
bankruptcy. It is quite true that this little dying
group is psychologically the bulwark of con-
servatism, but they are no longer a self-reliant
militant group, and within a decade, as a social
force or factor, they will be negligible.

The educated professional classes formerly could
be relied on to think and write and speak in de-
fense of the established order, but what of them
to-day and to-morrow? The constant enlarge-
ment and growth of our facilities for higher edu-
cation are overcrowding all the liberal professions,
and are causing unemployment to be at least as
common in professional life as it is in proletarian
life. This difficulty is aggravated by the decreas-
ing power of the middle classes to employ and
support the professional men and women. Most
of the ephemeral reform movements of the last
two decades have been inspired and led by men
of this class, but with the ever extending psycho-
logical influence of the Machine Process more and
more of these discontented intellectuals will adopt
the proletarian point of view, and place their

12 Men vs. the Man

trained minds at the disposal of the revolutionary
forces.

We have surveyed very briefly the forces mak-
ing for collectivism. What of the opposition?
The number of those who have any real interest
in opposing a Social Revolution is constantly grow-
ing, and must constantly grow, relatively smaller.
But their political incompetence is even more strik-
ing than their numerical weakness. This surely
needs no further illustration than a reference to
the recent Congressional debates on railway rebate
legislation and on the panic currency bill. The
nearer the Social Revolution approaches, the
smaller the body of its active opponents becomes,
so that it seems likely that before the final struggle
is begun the forces of reaction will number little
more than the small group of the multi-millionaires
and the cowardly slum-proletariat.

My conclusion, as you will have already seen,
my dear Mencken, is that we are hard up against
the Day of Judgment, and that the only issue pos-
sible is some form of collectivism or communism.
Even if you and I felt that this outcome were de-
plorable, would it not be our duty, if we recog-
nized its inevitability, to do our part toward pre-
paring the public mind for the coming change?
To oppose a change that we cannot prevent is but
to dam up the mighty social forces and thus make
violence and incendiarism and bloodshed the more
likely. To work with the current of progress is

Men vs. the Man 13

to facilitate a peaceful revolution which will pre-
serve for posterity unimpaired the priceless her-
itage we have received from the culture of the
ages. In the words of Karl Marx, the Socialist
is merely a sort of midwife helping the Old Order
to give birth to the New with as little pain as
may be.

But is the coming Social Revolution to be de-
plored? Is the present state of affairs so perfect
that educated men such as you should give of their
talent and energy to prolong it artificially? Is the
socialistic ideal so abhorrent that it is to be post-
poned at any cost?

I feel that it is useless to quote to you from Rob-
ert Hunter's " Poverty " the dreadful statistics of
the hosts who every year go to fill paupers' graves,
or from H. G. Wells' " New Worlds for Old "
the still more appalling statistics of the number
of English school children who are underfed,
diseased, and verminous. You would but repeat
Nietzsche's commandment, " Be hard ! " and say
4 These are the weak; let them go to the wall! "
But surely even you would be unable to deafen
your ears to " The Bitter Cry of the Children," so
brilliantly made articulate by John Spargo. But
I do confidently appeal to you in the name of aris-
tocracy, of art, literature, and the drama. You
believe that the aristocrats should rule because
you deem them worthy to rule; you believe the
mob should be abandoned to its lot because it is fit

14 Men vs. the Man

for nothing better. Go beneath the surface, my
friend. To what do the aristocrats owe the noble
and refined traits I freely admit and even rejoice
that they possess? To the facts that they and
their ancestors for several generations have had
ample food and leisure. I do not say that a full
stomach and time for idleness are all that is needed
to make a gentleman or lady. But I do say that a
gentleman or lady cannot be made without three
generations of stomachs that have not suffered from
innutrition, and three generations of hands that
have not been so worn with toil as to make them
unfitted for other occupations. The Socialist ideal
would mean full stomachs and ample leisure for all.
I do not say that with a Presto, Change ! the So-
cial Revolution will make the Bowery tough a
Chesterfield. But I do say that it will give to all
mankind the material foundation upon which alone
aristocratic character can be built. I am a So-
cialist, not because I am an enemy of aristocracy,
or because I undervalue it, but because I wish the
proportion of aristocrats to reach the highest pos-
sible maximum.

Surely it is needless for me to point out to you
that to-day commercialism has so tainted and pol-
luted art, literature, and the drama, that most
of our artists, fiction-writers, and playwrights are
mental prostitutes, and, saddest of all, some of
them are so degraded that they do not even know
they are prostitutes, but seriously talk of their art!

Men vs. the Man 15

I feel as though I were indulging in a platitude
when I venture to remind you that it was because
every Athenian freeman was a cultured and com-
petent critic that sculpture and painting and the
drama attained to such perfection in the days of
Pericles. The socialistic ideal is that no man or
woman, to say the least, shall be less cultivated than
the average citizen of the Athens of Pericles. To-
day, as you know but too well, a play of the better
sort can only be put on for an occasional matinee
at an hour when our commercialized men cannot
attend the theater, for to-day the only appreciable
portion of the American community that has
leisure to attain anything worthy of the name of
culture is made up of the women of the upper
classes.

If you wish to see better manners, more worthy
fiction, higher art, and nobler drama, as I know
you do, your only course is to become a Socialist
comrade, and give us your aid in hastening the
advent of the Social Revolution.

Will you do it?

Yours faithfully,
ROBERT RIVES LA MONTE.

MENCKEN'S REPLY TO LA MONTE'S
FIRST LETTER

MY DEAR LA MONTE :

In one thing, at least, you and I are in agree-
ment, and that is in our common belief that the
world is by no means perfect. This, at first glance,
seems to convict us of pessimism, but, as a matter
of fact, we are thoroughgoing optimists, for both
of us are firmly convinced that, however lamentable
its present degree of imperfection, the world may,
should, and will grow better. So far, indeed, we
agree fully, but when we come to discuss the pre-
cise method and manner of this betterment, and to
define the goal which lies ahead — when we strive,
in brief, to lay bare the anatomy of human progress
— our divergence, it quickly appears, is abysmal.
Your ideal picture of the best possible world seems
to me a very fair picture of the worst possible
world, and I have no doubt that, until I convert
you and lead you up to grace, my ideal picture,
as I have sketched it elsewhere in the past, and as
I shall try to draw it, bit by bit, once more, bears
and will bear to you much the same aspect.

But before I go into an exposition of my own
theory of progress, I want to point out to you a

16

Men vs. the Man 17

certain fault in the argument of your letter — a cer-
tain fault which seems to me to reach its max-
imum virulence to-day in the writings of Socialists,
just as it reached a maximum sixty years ago in the
writings of Christian theologians. It may be
called, for want of a better label, a magnificent
faith in incredible evidence. At its worst, it leads
to a ready acceptance of generalizations that are
supported by nothing more logical than a wish
that they were true. At its best, it seems to infect
you Socialists with a willingness to adopt and de-
fend any alleged fact or group of facts, however
dubious, so long as it seems to prove your
case.

This fault, my dear La Monte, is not peculiar to
you, and I am firmly convinced that, if you are ever
hanged, it will be for some other offense. As a
matter of fact, I have found it in far more glorious
flower in the compositions of those older and
more enraptured Socialists whose works you have
sent me, for the good of my soul, from time to
time. But you are guilty, too, if only in the sec-
ond or third degree, and this I hope to prove to
you.

You begin the argument of your letter, for ex-
ample, by quoting a government report, by which
it appears that the average American workingman
turns out $2,000 worth of goods a year, and gets
$400 for his labor. I am utterly unable to verify
these figures (in which embarrassment I am ex-

1 8 Men vs. the Man

actly on a footing with the statistician who fathers
them), but they seem very plausible, and so I shall
join you in accepting them. Your own belief in
their accuracy is plainly without reservation, for
you proceed to make them the foundation of your
argument. " It is obvious," you say at the start,
" that a man with $400 cannot purchase $2,000
worth of goods," and then you go on to examine
this fact in the light of the Socialist philosophy,
and to demonstrate its immorality. Setting aside,
for the present, your final conclusions, I am per-
fectly willing to admit that you are right about
the man with $400. His money will buy but $400
worth of goods, and this leaves $1,600 worth to be
sold to someone else. Two interesting questions
now arise. The one is, What other man buys
this $1,600 worth? and the other is, What does
this sum of $1,600 represent?

The second question is the more important, since
a consideration of it reveals the answer to the
first. Your answer to it, if I understand you
rightly, is that the $1,600 represents the individual
workingman's annual contribution to the nation's
store of goods, over and above the amount he is
able to buy back with his $400 and consume.
This is what Karl Marx calls " surplus produce,"
and its value he calls " surplus value." You very
properly observed that a surplus of $1,600 in every
$2,000 is a very large one, and point out that,
lacking a ready market, the accumulation of such

Men vs. the Man 19

surpluses is bound to get the nation into the un-
enviable position of a merchant with an enormous
and unsaleable stock. In all of this your logic is
sound enough, but you start out, unfortunately,
from fallacious premises, for the surplus of $1,600
about which you and the government statisticians
discourse in such alarm is almost entirely an aca-
demic myth. In a word, it has no actual existence,
save in small part. Outside of books on political
economy it is never heard of.

As a matter of sober fact — and I speak here
from experience in one very typical line of manu-
facturing, as I shall show — the value of the aver-
age workman's contribution to the nation's store of
goods, over and above the amount he buys back
with his wages, is seldom equal to the value of the
goods he thus buys back and consumes. The $400
man's contribution to the national surplus, far from
being $1,600 a year, is probably little more than
$160, and certainly a good deal less than $400.
You assume that, by the mere exercise of his
necromancy upon an empty void, he creates a value
of $2,000, but here you assume altogether too
much. What he really does do is this: he takes
$1,200 worth, more or less, of raw material, adds
to it (let us be generous and say) $800 worth of
skill, and takes back $400 for his labor. His em-
ployer now owns a lot of goods which has cost him
$1,600 — $1,200 for raw material and $400 paid
to the workman — and he offers it for sale at

2O Men vs. the Man

$2,000. The difference — $400 — covers the inter-
est upon the employer's capital, the cost of selling
the goods, the cost of light, heat, and taxes, and
the cost of rent. Whatever is left over represents
the employer's reasonable wage for his enterprise,
industry, and skill. As I hope to show you later
on, this wage is as much a true wage as the work-
man's, no matter how large it may be. But of this
more anon.

What we have to consider here is the $1,200
worth of raw material. You may argue, I fear, that
this is a preposterously excessive valuation, but let
me assure you that it is not. It so happens that I
once enjoyed, for three years, a rather intimate ac-
quaintance with the workings of a successful cigar
factory — a very typical example of the American
manufacturing plant of moderate capital. Well,
in that factory at the time, let us say, there was be-
ing produced a brand of cigars which cost about
$22 a thousand to manufacture — I say " to manu-
facture " and not " to sell," — and the workmen
who made them were getting $6 a thousand for
their labor. What did the balance of $16 repre-
sent? Was it the profit of the employer? Was
it the workman's free contribution to the hoard
of capital? Not at all! What it actually did
represent was the cost of the material used by the
workman in making cigars — of the raw material
brought to the factory and made ready for the
tables, with all duties, taxes, transportation, and

Men vs. the Man 21

insurance charges paid. It represented almost ex-
actly the cost of producing the cigars, packed,
stamped, and ready for the selling department —
less the wages paid to the cigar-maker! This
sum, you will note, was almost thrice the amount
paid to the cigar-maker for the actual rolling of
the cigars. Therefore, my assumption of a ratio
of $400 to $1,200 in the preceding paragraphs
was not without some justification in fact.

But what did the cost of the raw material, of the
taxes, and of the packing represent? My answer
is simple: it represented labor. The money paid
for the actual tobacco represented the labor of the
farmers who had wrung it from a reluctant earth,
and the labor of the handlers and experts who had
sorted it and cured it, and of the trainmen and mar-
iners who had transported it. Without this labor,
the tobacco would have had no existence; it was, lit-
erally, the incarnation of hours of toil. The money
paid for it by the manufacturer went, in great part,
straight back to these laborers. Putting the profits
of landowners, of brokers, and of stockholders in
transportation companies at the maximum, the la-
borers got at least a half. And the tale of the
wood used in the boxes, of the labels pasted upon
them, of the gum used to fasten the labels was
the same. Again, it was the same with the money
paid as taxes. It went directly into the hands of
the government's employees, who were engaged,
day and night, in producing that one commodity

22 Men vs. the Man

without which all other commodities cease to be —
civilized security.

Therefore, let us assume that of all the $1,200
paid for raw material, $600 goes to workingmen
as wages, and $600 goes to middlemen and cap-
italists as profits. We have yet to account for
$800 of the $2,000, but of this, as we have seen,
$400 goes to the workingman principally under
consideration. There remains, then, after all else
has been accounted for, the sum of $400. What is
this? Are we to regard it as the profit of the
manufacturer? In part, yes; but in part — no ! It
is profit, true enough, but it is gross profit, and
out of it must come the cost of selling and of up-
keep.

To get some notion of this cost, let us go back
to our cigar factory. We saw there, you will re-
call, that a cigar-maker got $6 a thousand for
making cigars, and that the raw material, brought
to his table, together with the work of sorting and
packing his cigars afterward, cost $16. This
made the cost of the cigars, so far, $22 a thou-
sand. The employer, let us say, got $30 a thou-
sand for these cigars in his market, and his gross
profit was thus $8 a thousand. But was his actual
profit $8 ? By no means ! It cost him, to begin,
fully $3 a thousand to maintain his office and sell
his goods, and he had to write off $1.50 more for
bad bills, and another dollar or so for those ex-
penses and hazards which no man can foresee.

Men vs. the Man 23

Who got the $3 charged to upkeep and selling
costs? Practically every cent, I believe, went to
workingmen — to coal miners for digging coal for
his furnaces, to clerks for keeping his books, to
salesmen for visiting his customers, to locomotive
engineers for hauling his salesmen, to hotel cooks
for cooking their meals, and so on ad infinitum.
And the net profit that remained — what of that?
I shall show you some day, I hope, that this was
wages, too — the wages of the employer him-
self, paid to him for his skill at managing his
capital, for his skill at buying raw material
cheaply, and at inducing customers to buy his
product, and for his skill, finally, at cajoling and
coercing his workingmen into laboring for the $6
he paid them.

Now, to what have all of our figures brought us?
Simply to this fact : that the $2,000 worth of goods
produced by the $400 workman of your parable
represents, not $400 worth of labor plus $1,600
worth of inflation, but $400 worth of labor plus
at least $1,000 worth of other labor. The $400
man may be the principal actor in the drama, and
his skill may be the principal factor in the con-
version of sunlight and human energy into market-
able commodities, but the men whose toil pre-
pares his raw material and the men whose toil
makes it possible for him to work at peace and
sell his product have had their share, too. What
remains over, after all of them have been paid, is

24 Men vs. the Man

very little. And so we come to a conclusion which
makes all of your argument about panics, crises,
and changing social orders vain, and it is this : that,
while your $400 workman can buy back but $400
worth of the $2,000 worth of goods, all of the
workmen who have had a hand in producing it are
perfectly able to buy back, with their collective
wages, nearly all of it. I am not much of a hand
at statistics, but I venture the guess that in every
$1,000 worth of goods produced under normal
conditions in America to-day, fully $800 represents
the wages of workmen. Thus your original sur-
plus value of $1,600, which you regard with such
trembling and in which you see such staggering
portents, shrinks, on cold inspection, to $400 !

No doubt you will say at once, as a good Marx-
ian, that this surplus value, whether large or small,
stands for capitalistic exploitation of the working-
man, and that as such it is an evil. You may even
argue, with Marx, that its evil lies, not in its actual
size, bu* in its very existence — that any surplus
value is immoral, and that the workingman should
get all he produces. I shall try to answer this in
a future letter, but meanwhile it may be well for
me to record my earnest and enthusiastic dissent.
As a matter of fact, the possibility of exploiting
the workingman seems to me to be the one thing
that justifies an optimistic view of human progress.
It is this thing that gives existence a goal and a
zest. It is this that insures to the human race all

Men vs. the Man 25

of those comforts and privileges which make it (at
least in all save its lowest orders) superior to the
race of milch cows. It is this that gives us the
agreeable assurance that, however passionately we
may occasionally embrace altruism, either as a
religious creed or as a political doctrine, we are
still being driven forward and upward, unceasingly
and willy-nilly, by the irresistible operation of the
law of natural selection.

Your facts and figures puzzle me in places other
than the one we have been considering, not be-
cause they seem to me to prove anything, but be-
cause I find it utterly impossible to put any faith in
their accuracy. You say in one paragraph, for in-
stance: " Economics tell us that with all our male
population between the ages of twenty-five and
forty-five working three to four hours a day, we
could produce enough to keep our whole population
in such comfort as to-day requires an income of
$5,000 a year." Let us look into this a bit, and
see what it means. You have already laid it down,
you will recall, that the average American workman
earns $400 a year, and you say in your letter that
" over fifty per cent, of our population actually be-
long to the working class." Let us suppose that
the number is exactly fifty per cent, and that each
man produces $2,000 worth of goods a year, as
you say.

Well, then, you propose to restrict labor to those
between twenty-five and forty-five, and so cut our

26 Men vs. the Man

working force in two by making idlers of those
under twenty-five and those over forty-five. But
at the same time you propose to double the force
that remains by requiring every able-bodied per-
son of the fifty per cent, now idle, between twenty-
five and forty-five years old, to join the workers.
Thus your working force will be substantially the
same as it is at present.

But you then propose to reduce its working hours
to " three or four " a day, and so divide its pro-
ducing capacity by two. What will be the result?
Simply that your workman's yearly output will be
$1,000 worth of goods, instead of $2,000 worth,
as at present, and that his income, even supposing
him to get every cent of it back, will be but $1,000.
On $1,000 a year how is he to obtain " such com-
fort as to-day requires an income of $5,000? "

In this I have given you the benefit of the doubt
at every step. I have assumed, for instance, that
fifty per cent, of the population is now made up of
idlers, even though you yourself admit, in one
place, that these idlers make up " but a handful of
our people." I have assumed, too, that Socialism
could achieve the impossible feat of paying for the
same thing twice — of paying the farmer, that is,
for raising tobacco, and then paying the cigar-
maker for raising it. I have assumed everything
you could desire, and yet I come to an absurdity at
the end.

" Economics tell us," you say, and therein I see

Men vs. the Man 27

your fundamental error. You have too much faith
in the so-called science of economics, and you ac-
cept the wildest notions of its most extravagant
sages as gospel truth. If " economics tell us "
that our present army of workers, working half
time, will be able, under Socialism, to earn twelve
and a half times as much as at present — well, then,
it is high time to demand proofs. My personal
view is that no such proofs exist. The whole
idea, in a word, is sheer nonsense. There is no
more ground for it, in the actual facts of existence,
than for the doctrine that, if I had brown eyes in-
stead of blue, I would be a Methodist bishop at
$8,000 a year.

The science of economics, as I understand it, is
based upon a series of deductions from human
experience. These deductions vary with the econ-
omist's education, environment, religion, and poli-
tics, and are often irreconcilable. In those de-
partments of the science, indeed, in which the most
distinguished professors have exercised their in-
tellects, the divergence is most marked. I need
only refer, in support of this, to the appalling
debates regarding the currency which break forth
every now and then. The conclusion a layman
must necessarily derive from these debates is that
the vast majority of experts are wrong. This con-
clusion grows firmer on reflection, for it is apparent
that each economist's fiscal theory is but the deduc-
tion he has personally drawn from facts open to

28 Men vs. the Man

all. Therefore, why pay too much heed to him ?
Why not examine the facts themselves and evolve
your own theories?

You may reply to this that my argument is
foolish, and that its application to any other
science — say pathology, for instance — will reveal
its fatuity. My answer is that I am not applying
it to pathology, for the facts of pathology are, in a
sense, available only to the man specially trained
to observe accurately. The facts of political econ-
omy, on the other hand, are the facts of every-
day life. If my meaning is not clear, let me direct
your attention to Adam Smith's Theory of Rents
and Ehrlich's Theory of Immunity. If you will
find me one man, of average intelligence and edu-
cation, who fails to understand Smith at his first
reading, I will give you a dollar. If, on the other
hand, you find me one man, of average intelligence
and education, who understands Ehrlich on a first
reading, I will give you another dollar. The one
requires only a reasonable degree of sanity; the
other requires special training and a wealth of
actual experience.

For these reasons I am chary of accepting
economic theories, and much prefer the evidence to
the verdict. I have no doubt that the gentleman
who prepared the government report you quote was
an expert hired at enormous expense, and yet I
can't rid myself of the notion that the money paid
to him was wasted.

Men vs. the Man 29

But I must have done with this series of ob-
jections to your authorities, else this letter will have
exhausted you without any statement of the creed
I propose to offer in opposition to Socialism. This
creed consists, first and last, in a firm belief in
the beneficence and permanence of the evolutionary
process. I believe, in other words, that the human
race is incomparably the highest race of beings at
present existing in the world, and I believe further
that, as the years come and go, its superiority to
the lower races of animals is growing constantly
greater. I believe that you and I are far superior
men, in many ways, to our great-grandfathers, and
that our superiority over Christopher Columbus,
Julius Caesar, and Moses, in many more ways, is in-
finite.

But what do I mean by superiority? What, in
other words, is my definition of progress ? Natur-
ally enough, it is hard to frame such a definition
in a few words, but I may throw some light upon
my notion of the thing itself by showing how it is
to be measured. Progress, then, as I see it, is
to be measured by the accuracy of man's knowledge
of nature's forces. If you examine this sentence
carefully you will observe that I conceive progress
as a sort of process of disillusion. Man gets
ahead, in other words, by discarding the theory of
to-day for the fact of to-morrow. Moses believed
that the earth was flat, Caesar believed that his
family doctor could cure pneumonia, and Columbus

30 Men vs. the Man

believed that devils often entered into harmless
old women and turned them into witches, and
that the lightning was a bomb hurled by a wrath-
ful God at sinful man. You and I, knowing
that all three of these distinguished men were
wrong in their beliefs, are their superiors to that
extent.

Now, all the illusions which have afflicted the
human race since its days of nonage may be divided
into two classes. First come those which have
arisen out of the imperfection of our powers of
perception; and secondly come those that have
arisen out of errors made in the interpretation of
facts accurately observed. An excellent example
of the first class is the familiar doctrine, held to-
day by the ignorant, and until very recently by
all, that the disease called malaria is caused by
breathing impure air. Tested by the evidence of
the naked eye, this doctrine seemed entirely sound.
But by and by men began to use microscopes to aid
their eyes, and one day, seized by a happy thought,
an enterprising man took the trouble to place a
drop of blood from a malaria patient's veins be-
neath his glass. Since then the old doctrine has
been put aside forever by all whose beliefs are
worth hearing, and we know that malaria is caused,
not by impure air, but by various minute parasites
of the class of sporozoa. The human race, within
historic times, has rejected thousands of delusions
of this class, but many yet remain. As we perfect

Men vs. the Man 31

apparatus to reinforce our dull senses they will go
overboard, one by one.

The delusions and illusions of the second class
resolve themselves into two grand, or king delu-
sions. One of them is the notion that a human
being, by his words or acts, is capable of suspend-
ing or modifying the immutable laws which govern
the universe. The other is the notion that a human
being is able to make laws for himself which shall
have the force of the immutable laws aforesaid.
Out of the first of these delusions springs the
doctrine of the efficacy of prayer, and with it all of
the world's vast and bizarre stock of religions.
Out of the second springs the ancient science of
morality, with all its multitude of efforts to com-
bat the eternal and inexorable law that the strong
shall prevail over the weak. The latest of such
efforts is comprehended in the political theory
called Socialism. It is the most fatuous of
the whole lot, for it proposes, not only to make
human laws as immutable as natural laws, but actu-
ally to make them supersede and nullify those
natural laws. Here, indeed, we behold human be-
ings on the topmost pinnacle of bombastic folly. I
can imagine no more stupendous egotism.

In this you may perceive, though perhaps only
dimly, for my exposition may be none too clear,
the reasons which impel me to decline your in-
vitation to join your crusade. I am no apologist
for the existing order of things. Like Huxley, I

32 Men vs. the Man

believe that the management of the universe is by
no means perfect, but such as it is, we must ac-
cept it. If you point out that human progress, as
I have defined it, involves the practical enslavement
of two-thirds of the human race, my answer is
that I can't help it. If you point out that a slave
always runs the risk of being oppressed by a par-
ticularly cruel master, I answer that a master al-
ways runs the risk of having his brains knocked
out by a particularly enterprising slave. If you
point out that, by my scheme of progress, it is
only the upper stratum that actually progresses, I
answer that only the upper stratum is capable of
progressing unaided.

The mob is inert and moves ahead only when it
is dragged or driven. It clings to its delusions with
a pertinacity that is appalling. A geological epoch
is required to rid it of a single error, and it is so
helpless and cowardly that every fresh boon it re-
ceives, every lift upon its slow journey upward,
must come to it as a free gift from its betters —
as a gift not only free, but also forced. Great men
have fought and died for the truth for a thousand
years, and yet the average low-caste white man of
to-day, throughout Christendom, still believes that
Friday is an unlucky day, still believes that ghosts
walk the earth, and still holds to an immovable
faith in signs, portents, resurrections, redemptions,
miracles, prophecies, hells, gehennas, and political
panaceas.

Men vs. the Man 33

It may be true that the existing order of things
demands bloody human sacrifices, but, so far as I
am able to see it, the thing is inevitable. What-
ever you may say against it, you cannot deny that
the existing order of things at least produces prog-
ress. It produced, for instance, a Pasteur, and if,
directly and indirectly, in the course of long ages,
a million serfs had to be used up to make this
Pasteur possible, I, for one, believe that the result
was worth the cost. The work that Pasteur did
in the world put the clock of time ahead a hundred
years, and conferred a permanent and constantly
cumulative benefit upon the whole human race,
freeman and slave alike, now and forevermore.
Would the lives of a million serfs have been of
equal value? Not at all! They would have
given to the world only the matter and energy that
they took out of it, and their influence on progress,
if they exerted any influence at all, would have
been reactionary.

You latter-day Socialists have all sorts of ex-
cuses and compromises to offer. You say, for
instance, that under Socialism the Pasteurs of the
world would be cherished and encouraged just as
much as under the law of natural selection. But
the objection to this is that, after two generations
of Socialism, there would be no more Pasteurs.
To produce the things the world needs to-day and
to-morrow we must have workmen who toil. But
to produce the things that will make the world a

34 Men vs. the Man

hundred years hence a better place to live in than
the world of to-day we must have men who, by ex-
ploiting, either directly or indirectly, the work of
these toilers, may have the ease and leisure to
make great plannings and to find out great truths.
Yours sincerely,

H. L. MENCKEN.

LA MONTE'S SECOND LETTER

MY DEAR MENCKEN:

I have derived infinite delight from your
sanguine letter. Although your statistics have
confused me where they have not amused me, the
latter part of your letter has made my future task
far easier by helping me to place your mental posi-
tion chronologically. I have no intention of being
offensive when I tell you that you appear to me to
belong in part to the Greece of Pericles and in
part to the France of Diderot.

When you assert that it is necessary to exploit
and dehumanize millions of proletarians in order
to produce here and there a Pasteur or two, you
merely paraphrase the defense of human slavery
that we find again and again, now explicit and
now implicit, in the works of Aristotle, Plato, and
Xenophon. In their mouths the argument was a
good one, for in their times the productivity of
human labor was so pitifully small that only by
keeping hordes in slavery was it possible for any
to enjoy the leisure requisite for the attainment of
culture. But, though you, my dear Mencken, live
in an age when steam and electricity have been
harnessed by man, you still repeat arguments that

35

36 Men vs. the Man

were obsolescent in the days of Cicero; for Antip-
aros, a Greek poet of that era, saw in the inven-
tion of the water-mill the promise that humanity
might be freed from the curse of slavery, and sang
thus in praise of the leisure that gracious Demeter
was bestowing upon mankind : —

" Spare the arm which turns the mill, O millers,
and sleep peacefully. Let the cock warn you in
vain that the day is breaking. Demeter has im-
posed upon the nymphs the labor of the slaves,
and behold them leaping merrily over the wheel,
and behold the axle-tree, shaken, turning with its
spokes and making the heavy-rolling stone revolve.
Let us live the life of our fathers, and let us re-
joice in idleness over the gifts that the Goddess
grants us."

How many eons does it take for a Mencken
to catch up to an Antiparos?

When you measure progress by the increase of
accurate knowledge, and thus apotheosize human
reason, you reproduce perfectly the spirit that
animated Rousseau and Diderot and the great
French Encyclopedists. In the words of Engels,
" the French philosophers of the eighteenth cen-
tury, the forerunners of the Revolution, appealed
to reason as the sole judge of all that is. A ra-
tional government, rational society, were to be
founded; everything that ran counter to eternal
reason was to be remorselessly done away with."
When once this was done, all would be for the

Men vs. the Man 37

best in the best of all possible worlds. This was
an entirely justifiable conception in their day. But
since then the experiment has been tried ; the French
Revolution has turned Christendom upside down,
and the Third Estate has been enthroned in every
civilized land; but the reality attained is far from
corresponding to the noble dreams of the great
French materialists of the eighteenth century.
Most of us have learned something from this ex-
perience, and have begun to suspect that human
progress is more dependent upon the development
of the processes whereby human stomachs are filled
and human backs are covered than it is upon the
increase of academic knowledge. But you, dear
child of the eighteenth century, continue to com-
pose in unruffled serenity your charming odes to
Eternal Reason.

Possibly you will understand now why I smile
when I read your profession of faith, " that you
and I are far superior men, in many ways, to our
great-grandfathers, and that our superiority over
Christopher Columbus, Julius Caesar, and Moses,
in many more ways, is infinite."

Do you think I am unreasonable in asking this
superior twentieth century man to produce some
arguments against Socialism, not borrowed bodily
from the Greece of Pericles and the France of
Rousseau?

In my first letter I introduced a few figures
merely to illustrate and make plain my argument.

38 Men vs. the Man

Your letter leads me to believe that instead of
serving the purpose I had intended, they have on
the contrary confused you and obscured my argu-
ment. This is not to be wondered at, as I am no
statistician and have always found figures a burden.
In order to make my position quite clear, I hope
you will permit me to recapitulate my argument
without figures.

The object of introducing improved methods
of production, such as machinery, is, as Antiparos
clearly saw two thousand years ago, to save labor.
If the work done by any given machine does not
cost its owner less than it would cost him to have
the same labor done by men and women by the
former methods, the machine will not be used.
But, in a society where the different producers of
goods sell competitively on the market, each in-
dividual owner of a productive plant is driven,
whether he likes or not, to make continuous im-
provements in his machinery. If he does not he
will be undersold and driven into bankruptcy.
Every such improvement means an increase in the
product relatively to the wages paid out in that
establishment, so that the proportion of the total
product in society at large, that is in excess of the
quantity that the wage-earners are able to pur-
chase for their own consumption, is growing and
must continue to grow until it eventually reaches
such proportions as to compel a Social Revolution.
The more developed is the mechanical equipment,

Men vs. the Man 39

the industrial technique of a country, the larger
becomes the proportion of the national produce
that the working-class are unable to purchase; in
other words, the smaller becomes the fraction of
their own product that the workers receive. For
this reason the workers of England and Germany
receive a far smaller fraction of the product of
their labor than do the workers of the compara-
tively backward countries, such as Italy, Spain, and
Portugal; and the American workers of 1908 are
able to buy a much smaller fraction of the product
of their labor than could the American workers
of 1850. You will kindly note that I did not ad-
vance in my former letter, and I do not advance
now, any argument based on the immorality of
such an arrangement. I would think as readily of
questioning the morality of the law of gravitation.
It matters very little to my argument just what
the exact share of the workers may be at any given
time, but what my argument is based on is the
constant decrease in the ratio between the pur-
chasing power of the working-class and the value
of the total national product; and this ratio
must decrease as long as we continue to im-
prove our machinery, and competition makes such
improvement of our industrial technique impera-
tive. As I said in my first letter, it is the " pro-
gressive and inexorable change in the technical
composition of capital that makes a Social Rev-
olution inevitable."

40 Men vs. the Man

The figures as to average wages and product
per worker that I used for illustrative purposes
in my former letter were quoted by memory from
Tables i and 2 in Census Bulletin No. 150 (Sec-
ond edition, September 15, 1902). This Bulletin
No. 150 is based on manufactures alone, and shows
the average wages to be $432, and the product per
worker to be something in excess of $2,000. The
figures in these census bulletins are gathered
chiefly to show the growth of industry, and for
other commercial purposes, and not to meet the
needs of economic study, so that it is somewhat
difficult, if not impossible, to ascertain just what
elements other than the new value added by the
worker this $2,000 contains. Lucien Sanial, of
Northport, Long Island, one of our ablest statisti-
cians, has made a careful study of the census of
1900 in connection with Bradstreet's and Dun's
reports, and other sources, and his conclu-
sion is that our total product in 1900 was
$24,500,000,000, and the total value of the labor-
power used in its production, $5,815,000,000, and
that the portion of the product that Labor was in
a position to purchase was 23.74 per centum.

It should be remembered that the workers pur-
chase everything at the very highest retail prices,
while the value of product given in the census is
based on factory prices; so that in order to ascer-
tain how much of the product the workers can
purchase, one must add to the census valuation

Men vs. the Man 41

of the product a certain percentage to cover the
cost of transporting the product to market and
the costs of distribution in the form of wholesale
and retail profits. I have found by calculation
that the percentage thus added by Mr. Sanial was
forty-two per cent. Using this percentage, I have
figured from Census Bulletin No. 150 the work-
ers' share of the total value of our manufactured
product at every decade from 1850 to 1900.
Even if this percentage is not accurate, it does
not vitiate my conclusion that the share of the
workers is decreasing, for the calculation for each
tenth year is made on exactly the same basis.
Here are my results tabulated : —

Percentage of product workers could purchase in 1850. . 36.1

1860.. 31.2

1870.. 31.3

1880.. 33-7

1800.. 30.5

1900.. 27.0

You will of course at once note that the work-
ers' share rose 2.4 per centum in the decade from
1870 to 1880, but if we turn to the figures for
capital invested in manufacture, we will find that
in that decade the capital invested only rose from
$2,118,208,769 to $2,790,272,606, which was
scarcely enough to keep abreast of the growth of
population, so that as a matter of fact there was
little, if any, advance in industrial technique dur-

42 Men vs. the Man

ing that decade, while in the decade from 1850 to
1860, when Labor's share decreased nearly five
per centum, the capital invested nearly doubled,
growing from $533>245»35I to $1,009,855,715,
showing a tremendous improvement in machinery.
I have no idea that these figures are strictly cor-
rect, but I think that they do show beyond cavil
that the purchasing power of the working-class
is, to say the least, growing constantly more in-
adequate to perform its economic function in a
society based on private ownership of the means of
production. If we take the figures for particular
industries, the same result is more strikingly
brought out. Fred D. Warren of Girard, Kansas,
has extracted from the " Eighteenth Annual Re-
port of the Commissioner of Labor " the follow-
ing information in regard to the pig-iron industry :

1870 1880 1890 1900

Product per man (in tons) ... 66 81 260 395

Average wages $453 $304 $460 $506

Average profit made from

each worker $322 $360 $405 $900

I take it that pig-iron is a far more typical mod-
ern industry than is the cigar-making industry,
which you discuss, as the latter has been far less
revolutionized by machinery and chemistry. At
any rate, I do not feel competent to enter upon
a discussion of the cigar business, as my only con-
nection with it has been that of a consumer —

Men vs. the Man 43

when Fortune smiled — and you give no source of
your statistics save your own experience; so that I
am compelled to leave this field to you.

You will, I think, admit that by the methods of
economists and statisticians I have shown that
there is a growing surplus of goods, and that the
disposition of this surplus constitutes a very real
difficulty, even if you are not ready to admit that
it is of itself sufficient to compel a Social Revolu-
tion. But, curiously enough, you, the panegyrist
of Eternal Reason, who measure progress by the
growth of accurate knowledge, distrust this same
human intelligence when it is applied to economics
and sociology, and would appear to hold that in
this one domain more credence is to be given to the
man in the street than to the man with trained in-
telligence who has devoted years to the study of
these very questions. I am free to admit that it
is rather disconcerting for an opponent of Social-
ism who looks for the increase of knowledge to
bring about a Nietzschean millennium to find that
knowledge of economics is in inverse ratio to
prejudice against Socialism — that as the former
rises, the latter melts away. But this seems to
be the sad fact. Listen to this tale of woe poured
out not long ago by Leslie M. Shaw, ex-Secre-
tary of the Treasury, at an alumni dinner of
Dickinson College at the Hotel Saint Denis in
New York.

" Socialism is being taught on every hand, and

44 Men vs. the Man

I am alarmed by the general trend of things in
this connection. At our Chautauquas the lecturers
are all preaching the doctrine. Teachers of So-
ciology in our schools and colleges are doing the
same thing. With a few exceptions, they are So-
cialists, as you can find out by a few moments of
conversation with them; and the exceptions are
anarchists.

" Our public libraries are full of socialistic lit-
erature. Why, in a large city recently, where
there was a strike, the reading-room was packed
day after day with all kinds of people. When the
librarian was asked what they were reading, he
replied : * Socialism, every one of them. There is
not a book on Socialism in any language that is not
here.'

" Sociology, as it is taught in our colleges, is
nothing more than a fad — and a dangerous one,
too. You cannot build up men's minds with fads.
Mr. Wilshire, the socialistic editor, recently asked
a friend of mine if he would arrange for a joint
debate on Socialism with a professor in one of our
large universities. When my friend went to the
professor, the latter said:

" * No, I won't debate on Socialism, because
Wilshire and I agree.'

" Even the pulpit nowadays reflects some so-
cialistic doctrines, and it is too bad."

No doubt Mr. Shaw would agree with you
that the troublesome " surplus " of goods about

Men vs. the Man 45

which I " and the government statisticians dis-
course in such alarm is almost entirely an academic
myth " ; that, in a word, " it has no actual ex-
istence, save in small part," that " outside of books
on political economy it is never heard of." But
both you and he would have to admit that Chaun-
cey M. Depew's reputation for virginal ignorance
of economics is spotless, and yet Senator Depew
in what many of his fellow-citizens call " his great
speech " at the Republican Convention of 1900 in
Philadelphia, that renominated President McKin-
ley, said: "We produce in this great country of
ours every year $2,500,000,000 more of goods
than we can consume." It seems that knowledge
of the existence of that surplus had leaked out-
side of purely academic circles eight years ago.
And the New York Sun of December 20, 1908,
contained a long letter from Berlin, explaining
that the reason there had been at that time so
much adverse criticism of the Kaiser was that Ger-
many had been passing through a severe business
crisis, and that therefore many indiscreet acts of
his majesty that would have been passed over
lightly in prosperous times had been the target
for the most venomous attacks. Here is one
sentence from this letter which I commend to your
careful attention : " Existing markets are crowded
with wares for which there are no profitable
buyers."

In Germany it would appear that even news-

46 Men vs. the Man

papermen had heard of this troublesome surplus,
which, in the opinion of the writer of the Sun let-
ter, must sooner or later drive Germany into a
war with England in her desperate struggle to
find an outlet into which she can pour this plethora
of commodities.

I think it is now evident that knowledge of this
pestilential superabundance is not confined to
economists, statisticians, and Socialists. I think
that the figures I have already given you prove it
to be a most pregnant reality. It may be well for
me to say that in preparing my figures of the
workers' share of the product of our manufactur-
ing industries for 1850, 1860, 1870, 1880, 1890,
and 1900, I, in every instance, deducted from the
total value of the product as given in the Census,
first, the value of the partially manufactured goods
used as materials in those industries, and, second,
the value of the true raw materials used in them,
so that my figures represented as nearly as possible
nothing but the new value added by the workers in
the process of manufacture. But, if you will still
remain skeptical about the real existence of this
" academic myth," permit me to quote to you a
few figures from the " Fifth Annual Report of the
United States Steel Corporation for the Fiscal
Year ended December 31, 1906," which, thanks
to the kindness of Fred D. Warren, is lying be-
fore me as I write.

From page 5, I quote:

Men vs. the Man 47

" The total net earnings of all properties after
deducting expenditures for ordinary repairs and
maintenance (approximately $28,000,000), em-
ployees1 bonus funds, and also interest on bonds
and fixed charges of the subsidiary companies,
amounted to — $156,624,273. 18."

On page 24 the average number of employees
for the same year (1906) on all the properties
of the Corporation is given as 202,457, and the
total annual salaries and wages as $147,765,540.

If you add together the net profits (from which
you will note all possible deductions have been
made), and the wages (which include the princely
salaries of the Steel Trust officials), you will find
that the profits are 51.46 per cent, of the whole
and the wages are 48.54 per cent.

Of course the Steel Trust profits are figured
on the basis of factory prices for the product,
which accounts for this apparently high ratio of
the workers' share to the total. Allowing for this
fact, these figures agree fairly closely with those
for our manufactures in general which I have
made above from Bulletin 150.

But I care not what the exact percentage may
be. The fact that this Steel Trust report estab-
lishes beyond a peradventure is that there is a tre-
mendous surplus to be marketed.

In discussing the cigar business, after allowing
for " interest upon the employer's capital, the
cost of selling the goods, the cost of light, heat,

48 Men vs. the Man

taxes, and the cost of rent " and various other
items you say: "Whatever is left over represents
the employer's reasonable wage for his enterprise,
industry, and skill. As I hope to show you later
on, this wage is as much a true wage as the work-
man's, no matter how large it may be."

Let me call your attention to the fact that
every particle of " enterprise, industry, and skill "
used in managing and superintending the vast busi-
ness of the Steel Trust is furnished by salaried
employees, and that those salaries for " enterprise,
industry, and skill " are included in the wage ac-
count I have quoted, and that after this " true
wage," as you call it, has been paid in full and
most liberally, our old friend " the Troublesome
Surplus " still stands there, with undiminished
girth, smiling at us, and asking, " Well, and what
are you going to do with me?" Do you not
think he is entitled to a serious answer?

The answer our captains of industry have been
making for the past few years, as I pointed out in
my former letter, has been to devote capital more
and more to the improvement and enlargement of
what we may call our permanent industrial and
transportation plant, but while this effectively re-
lieves the symptoms of distress for the time being,
it unfortunately aggravates the disease in the long
run by facilitating production and transportation.
There are two other answers you may be tempted
to make: one is that it is possible for the leisure

Men vs. the Man 49

class to increase its wasteful expenditure suffi-
ciently to meet the requirements of the case, the
other is that war and calamity may intervene
and cause an adequate destruction of goods. Pro-
fessor Thorstein Veblen has discussed both of these
possible remedies very interestingly in his remark-
able book, " The Theory of Business Enterprise "
(Scribners', New York, 1904). His conclusions
are that it is out of the question for private ex-
travagance and waste to be raised to an adequate
pitch, but that we may look hopefully to war and
calamity as palliatives.

" The persistent defection of reasonable profits,"
he says, in discussing the former point, " calls for
a remedy. The remedy may be sought in one or
the other of two directions : ( i ) in an increased un-
productive consumption of goods; or (2) in an
elimination of that ' cutthroat ' competition that
keeps profits below the * reasonable ' level. If
enough of the work or of the output is turned to
wasteful expenditures, so as to admit of but a
relatively slight aggregate saving, as counted by
weight and tale, profitable prices can be main-
tained on the old basis of capitalization. If the
waste is sufficiently large, the current investment
in industrial equipment will not be sufficient to
lower prices appreciably through competition.

" Wasteful expenditure on a scale adequate to
offset the surplus productivity of modern industry
is nearly out of the question. Private initiative

50 Men vs. the Man

cannot carry the waste of goods and services to
nearly the point required by the business situation.
Private waste is no doubt large, but business prin-
ciples, leading to saving and shrewd investment,
are too ingrained in the habits of modern men to
admit an effective retardation of the rate of saving.
Something more to the point can be done, and in-
deed is being done, by the civilized governments
in the way of effectual waste. Armaments, pub-
lic edifices, courtly and diplomatic establishments,
and the like, are almost altogether wasteful, so far
as bears on the present question.

" The waste of time and effort that goes into
military service, as well as the employment of the
courtly, diplomatic, and ecclesiastical personnel,
counts effectually in the same direction. But how-
ever extraordinary this public waste of substance
latterly has been, it is apparently altogether in-
adequate to offset the surplus productivity of the
machine industry, particularly when this productiv-
ity is seconded by the great facility which the mod-
ern business organization affords for the accumula-
tion of savings in relatively few hands. There is
also the drawback that the waste of time involved
in military service reduces the purchasing power of
the classes that are drawn into the service, and so
reduces the amount of wasteful consumption which
these classes might otherwise accomplish.

" So long as industry remains at its present level
of efficiency, and especially so long as incomes con-

Men vs. the Man 51

tinue to be distributed somewhat after the present
scheme, waste cannot be expected to overtake pro-
duction, and can therefore not check the untoward
tendency to depression." (Pages 255-258.)

But what waste is unable to do for us, war
fortunately has proved itself able to accomplish.
But is the present generation of men, who, you
tell us, are infinitely superior to Christopher Co-
lumbus, Julius Caesar, and Moses, going to re-
main long contented with a system that depends
for its perpetuation on the frequent recurrence of
war, fire, earthquake, and calamity?

What war has done for us of late is well brought
out by Veblen in the following passage :—

" Since the seventies as an approximate date
and as applying particularly to America and in a
less degree to Great Britain, the course of affairs
in business has apparently taken a permanent
change as regards crises and depression. iDuring
this recent period, and with increasing persistency,
chronic depression has been the rule rather than
the exception in business. Seasons of easy times,
* ordinary prosperity,' during this period are pretty
uniformly traceable to specific causes extraneous
to the process of industrial business proper. In
one case, the early nineties, it seems to have been
a peculiar crop situation, and in the most notable
case of a speculative inflation, the one now
(1904) apparently drawing to a close, it was the
Spanish-American War, coupled with the ex-

52 Men vs. the Man

penditures for stores, munitions, and services
incident to placing the country on a war footing,
that lifted the depression and brought prosperity
to the business community. If the outside
stimulus from which the present prosperity takes
its impulse be continued at an adequate pitch, the
season of prosperity may be prolonged; otherwise
there seems little reason to expect any other out-
come than a more or less abrupt and searching
liquidation." (Pages 250-251.)

This was written in 1904. We were soon
blessed with the Russo-Japanese War, the San
Francisco Earthquake, and the Baltimore Fire, so
that the " stimulus " was " continued at an ade-
quate pitch," and the " season of prosperity " was
"prolonged" until November, 1907, when there
occurred " a more or less abrupt and searching
liquidation." In spite of his unfortunate handi-
cap of an unusually thorough knowledge of politi-
cal economy, do you not think Professor Veblen
was able to make a fairly accurate analysis of the
situation?

Relying upon my own far more limited knowl-
edge of economics, I have no hesitation in predict-
ing that the present period of depression will last
at least seven years unless (i) in the meantime
the " increase of accurate knowledge " or the hard
facts of adversity lead us to establish the Co-
operative Commonwealth, or (2) unless a great
war, such as the Sun (N. Y.) Berlin correspond-

Men vs. the Man 53

ent suggests between Germany and England, breaks
out. I confess the second alternative appears to
me to be far the more probable.

This letter is already so unconscionably long that
I can but touch upon the question of the prob-
able hours of labor and the standard of comfort
in the society of the future. In my former let-
ter I suggested that from three to four hours a
day with all the male population between the ages
of twenty-five and forty-five working usefully
would suffice to keep all our people in such com-
fort as to-day requires an income of $5,000 a
year. This arouses your incredulity, naturally
enough, and you devote several pages to proving
its impossibility. Perhaps I should have made it
plainer that I had in mind the income per family,
and not per capita. But, had I done so, I doubt
not my statement would have appeared scarcely
less incredible to you. One fundamental difficulty
is that the life of the future — such a life as is
pictured in William Morris' " News from No-
where " —is in all respects so different from life

" In the days of the years we dwell in,
that wear our lives away,"

that the two quantities are really incommensurable,
but I can think of no feasible way of giving you
an idea of the standard of comfort that I believe
will be universal in " the wonderful days a-coming

54 Men vs. the Man

when all shall be better than well " save by suggest-
ing in dollars an income that enables an American
family to-day to approach a similar standard of
comfort and well-being — I say " approach," be-
cause I do not believe any income, however large,
will to-day make possible the joy of living that
will be world-wide in the wonderful days to be.
My own opinion is that in my former letter I
named too low a figure. In many of our cities to-
day it takes $5,000 a year to pay the rent of
such a house as every family ought to demand.

The trouble with your mathematical demonstra-
tion of my folly is that you make no allowance for
the amount of labor that is now wasted by the
anarchy of our competitive system. The simplest
illustration of this is the oft-used milk-business.
Count the number of wagons delivering milk on
your block some morning, and compare it with the
number of postmen delivering letters, and you will
begin to form some faint idea of the vast aggregate
of unnecessary labor that is being done to-day. I
believe it impossible to estimate exactly the quan-
tity of this wasted labor that could be eliminated
under a co-operative system. Sidney A. Reeve,
in his book "The Cost of Competition " (New
York: McClure, Phillips & Co., 1906), states that
the amount of labor thus wasted is at least double
that actually usefully employed in production. I
do not vouch for the accuracy of this calculation,
but I am sure you will feel the more inclined to

Men vs. the Man 55

give it credence when I gladly assure you that Mr.
Reeve is not an economist. I have ascertained by
reference to " Who's Who " that he was Professor
of Steam and Hydraulic Engineering at Wor-
cester Polytechnic Institute from 1896 to 1906,
and Lecturer on Steam Engineering at Har-
vard University in 1907. These subjects would
seem to me to require an aptitude for acquiring
your summum bonum, accurate knowledge.

Another vast economy we will make, and that
you did not take into consideration, is to close up
all the smaller and more poorly equipped plants,
and do all our work in the most perfect plants that
science can devise. The trusts have already be-
gun this process for us. The Sugar Trust closed
up about seventy-five per cent, of the plants it con-
trolled a few years ago, and the Whiskey Trust
put out of operation sixty-eight distilleries out of
eighty. It is impossible to set a limit to the econ-
omy possible in this direction.

I believe it impossible to prove my estimate ac-
curate, but I feel sure that a very little thought
along the lines I have suggested will convince you
that it is distinctly moderate.

Professor Hertzka of Austria some years ago
in his " Laws of Social Evolution " calculated
what the (then) 22,000,000 people of Austria
might do, if properly organized.

" It takes," he estimates, " 26,250,000 acres of
agricultural land, and 7,500,000 of pasturage, for

56 Men vs. the Man

all agricultural products. Then I allowed a house
to be built for every family, consisting of five
rooms. I found that all industries, agriculture,
architecture, building, flour, sugar, coal, iron, ma-
chine-building, and chemical production, need
615,000 laborers employed eleven hours per day,
300 days a year, to satisfy every imaginable want
for 22,000,000 inhabitants.

"These 615,000 laborers are only 12.3 per
cent, of the population able to do work, excluding
women and all persons under sixteen or over fifty
years of age; all these latter to be considered as
not able.

" Should all the 5,000,000 able-bodied men in
the country be engaged in work, instead of 615,000,
they need only to work 36.9 days every year to
produce everything needed for the support of the
population of Austria. But should the 5,000,000
work all the year, say 300 days — which they would
probably have to do to keep the supply fresh in
every department — each one would only work one
hour and twenty-two and a half minutes per day.

" But to engage to produce all the luxuries, in
addition, would take, in round figures, 1,000,000
workers, classed and assorted as above, or only
twenty per cent, of all those able, excluding every
woman, or every person under sixteen or over
fifty, as before. The 5,000,000 able, strong male
members could produce everything imaginable for
the whole nation of 22,000,000 in two hours and

Men vs. the Man 57

twelve minutes per day, working 300 days a
year."

It is nearly impossible to judge of the accuracy
of such an estimate, but there are some accurate
data forthcoming to show what we could do in
this country. J. L. Franz has shown by figures
taken from the " Thirteenth Annual Report of the
Commissioner of Labor " for 1898 (Washington,
1899) that by using the methods actually used
on the big western wheat farms in 1898, to pro-
duce the wheat (350,000,000 bushels) actually
used for home consumption in 1898, would have
required only the labor of 1,000,000 persons work-
ing one hour a day on every week-day of the
year. (See International Socialist Review, Vol. I,

P-357-)

Work to-day is such a curse that it is very
natural and pardonable to hail extremely short
hours of labor as the chiefest of blessings, but we
err in doing so, for, as my good friend, Henry L.
Slobodin of New York, reminded me in a letter
the other day, " those who emphasize the short
hours of labor which will be necessary in future
society as a great advantage miss the point of the
Socialist position. The modern Socialist's position
is that whereas labor is and is considered at present
a hardship and almost a calamity, in the future
it will be a glad and joyous exercise of natural
functions. The tendencies which may be perceived
now in a very weak form are to make labor pleas-

58 Men vs. the Man

ant and attractive. On the other hand, there is a
tendency to make pleasures useful. These two
tendencies converge and will meet in the society of
the future. So that generally speaking in the
future all labor will be more of a pleasure than the
pleasures are now, and the pleasures of the future
will be more productive than the labor is now.
From that point of view, to discuss how short the
hours of labor will be in the future is unneces-
sary."

Space will not permit me to take up here your
startling assertion that " after two generations of
Socialism, there would be no more Pasteurs."
Surely you do not mean to contend that adversity
and penury are favorable to the development of
scientific genius, and that by abolishing poverty we
will make the genesis of genius impossible ? But I
am comforted by the thought that, even if you
are right, and we are to produce no more Pasteurs
in the society of the future, at any rate we shall
have far less need for them than we have to-day.
When we shall have definitely abolished poverty
from the earth those medical and chemical savants
who have hitherto found their chief occupation in
devising means of fighting or curing diseases that
are in large part the products, direct or indirect,
of poverty and the filth caused by poverty, will
have leisure to devote to devising chemical
processes for performing the dirty work which is
to-day done by cheap and dirty men and women.

Men vs. the Man 59

They will also find a fertile field in discovering
chemical methods of producing nutritive sub-
stances.

How the abolition of poverty will compel our
Pasteurs to change their occupations was strik-
ingly brought home to his hearers by Dr. Linsly
Williams of the Vanderbilt Clinic in a speech he
made before the delegates of the Brooklyn Central
Labor Union in the Auditorium Hall of the Mu-
seum of Natural History. The occasion was
Brooklyn Labor Union Day of the International
Tuberculosis Exhibition. I quote briefly from
the newspaper account of his speech:

" Dr. Williams began by saying that although
everybody was more or less affected by the rav-
ages of tuberculosis, the working class suffered
particularly, as thirty-three per cent, of the work-
ers died from the dread disease. . . . Then,
striking the keynote of his discourse, the doctor de-
clared that the greatest predisposing cause of the
white plague was low wages and working under
unsanitary conditions. He told of the unhealthful
way in which a great deal of the work of the
world was done, and as a proof of his statements
said that while the average annual death rate per
thousand from tuberculosis was two and a half for
the general public, the rate for stone-cutters was
5.4, for cigar-makers 5.3, and for printers, 4.3,
with the majority of the workers in the other
trades also above the average rate. On the other

60 Men vs. the Man

hand, the death rate for doctors was 1.6, and for
farmers only i.i.

" In conclusion Dr. Williams made an impressive
plea for cleanliness and concerted effort in the work
of fighting the white plague, and also took occa-
sion to score those * superior ' individuals who
calmly assert that everybody can be clean and have
fresh air if they want to. ' It is easy to tell people
to be clean/ said he, * but when one has to work
long hours for low wages I tell you it is almost
impossible to be clean and have plenty of fresh
air. When people are huddled together in the
crowded tenements it is no easy thing to take a
bath, and if one opens the windows for air,
instead of real air, a volume of smoke and dirt
makes one close them again. The main thing in
this fight is to get better pay for your labor so that
you can live in better houses and have better food
and thus be enabled to resist the attacks of the
disease.1 "

There are several other things I would like to
say to you in regard to this Pasteur argument of
yours, but they will have to wait for another letter,
as this one is already far too long. I hope you
will pardon its excessive length and believe me
when I promise not to sin in this particular way
again.

Let me hear from you soon.

Faithfully,

R. R. LA MONTE.

MENCKEN'S REPLY TO LA MONTE'S
SECOND LETTER

MY DEAR LA MONTE :

When I dropped my last epistle into the letter
box there went with it a pious hope that the mod-
est reductio ad absurdum I had attempted might
rescue you from your maze of fantastic statistics,
or, at least, that it might implant in you a certain
salutary distrust of statisticians. But I see now
that this hope was a vain thing, and doomed to an
early death, for you return to the attack with fig-
ures that are even more fantastic than those you
discharged in your first salvo. Perhaps, however,
I have no right to dispute these figures in such an
offhand manner, for I have no doubt that, at bot-
tom, there may be a good deal of truth in them.
But I am on the safe side, I believe, when I main-
tain that, whatever their degree of accuracy may
be, you and your Socialist friends demand no proof
of it, but take it on trust, and that the deductions
you draw from them show a great deal more en-
thusiasm than logic.

You begin, for instance, by summoning to the
witness stand a professor from faraway Austria,
and he, in turn, starts out by announcing a discov-

61

62 Men vs. the Man

ery. He has found, he says, that a lot of energy
is wasted in Austria, and that the work of that
country, which now engages all but a small minor-
ity of its inhabitants, might be done very well by
comparatively few of them. Following the cus-
tom of statisticians, he does not offer us the facts
upon which this conclusion is based, but as for the
conclusion itself, he is very sure of its truth. Given
an eleven-hour work-day, he says, and 300 work-
days a year, and it would be possible for 615,000
Austrians to provide all the necessities of life
for the 22,000,000 inhabitants of the empire.
From this he reaches the conclusion that, if
5,000,000 men lent a hand (there are just about
5,000,000 able-bodied men of working age in the
empire), instead of but 615,000, each man would
have to labor but one hour and twenty-two and a
half minutes a day.

All of this makes an interesting experiment in
simple arithmetic, but when you cite it, in all seri-
ousness, as proof of your argument that, under So-
cialism, the average workingman of America,
working but three or four hours a day, would earn
$5,000 a year, you exhibit a lamentable inability to
differentiate between the possible and the probable,
the abstract and the actual, the conceivable and the
ponderable. Your Austrian professor discourses so
glibly, not of real human beings, but of algebraic
#'s of his own creation, and you follow him in mis-
taking these #'s for men and women. He sets

Men vs. the Man 63

aside, as of no account whatever, almost every one
of the multitude of yearnings, ambitions, desires,
and appetites which distinguish man from the red
ant, and you follow him in holding them to be
negligible. He draws figures on a slate — and you
assume they are alive.

It would take a long letter to show, in detail,
how widely your professor's elaborate syllogism
varies from the facts of existence. I need only
point out here the absurdity of supposing that it
would be possible to find 5,000,000 men who would
be at once capable of doing their work efficiently,
and willing to do it, day after day, even for but
an hour and a half a day, without some effort to
rid themselves of the necessity for doing it at all.
To make this clear, let me recall to you the strong
human impulse which Friedrich Nietzsche (whom
you despise) denominated " the will to power."
This will to power is more than a mere emotion
or idea, for it exists in practically every man, even
the most degraded, and the mere fact that a man
makes some effort to keep alive shows that he pos-
sesses it. It is, indeed, the primal life instinct,
which Arthur Schopenhauer, long before Nietzsche
was born, called " the will to live."

But how does this " will to power " or " will
to live" manifest itself? In civilized human so-
cieties, I believe, it shows itself chiefly in a sort of
constant emulation and rivalry, which, beginning
as a lowly effort to exchange the minimum of

64 Men vs. the Man

muscular effort for the maximum of food, expands,
higher up, into the complex and powerful thing
called ambition. That is to say, there lies, deep
down in the soul of every man who deserves to
be regarded as human, an irresistible and never-
failing impulse to sell his energy and ability as
dearly as he can. The more he gets in payment,
the more consideration and comforts he will en-
joy, and the more desirable his position will appear
when compared to the condition of other men.
Herein we perceive Nietzsche's reason for chang-
ing Schopenhauer's " will to live " into " will to
power," for he saw clearly that the only way a
man may accurately measure his success in this ef-
fort is by observing the extent of his mastery of
his environment — which includes, as one of its prin-
cipal factors, his fellow-men. No matter how
slight the degree of a man's victory over the
natural and social forces which work for his de-
struction or enslavement, he is to that extent the
superior of the man who has been destroyed or en-
slaved. It is the constant effort of every man to
gain such victories — to increase his comparative
safety and importance. Even the saint whose cult
is self-sacrifice has a yearning to be, to some ap-
preciable extent, more sacrificing than his rival on
the next pillar. Even the Pope, at the very pin-
nacle of human eminence, would be glad, no doubt,
to exchange places with an archangel.

Well, you will find, on looking into the matter,

Men vs. the Man 65

that the average workingman has before him two
practicable methods for satisfying his will to power.
By the first method he enters into a conspiracy
with other workingmen which has for its object an
artificial " bulling " of the market wherein their
skill is sold. That is to say, they endeavor to
raise the market value of their skill without offering
any corresponding improvement in its quality. By
the second method, the individual workman seeks
so to improve his own skill that it shall bring more
than the average price.

The second method would seem to be the more
attractive, for experience shows that it frequently
has the result of lifting the man who adopts it
out of the ranks of workingmen altogether, since
a man who is wise enough to sacrifice imminent
ease for permanent benefit is a man of forethought,
and forethought is a quality so valuable and so
rare that its possessor rises in the world almost
automatically. But as a matter of fact, compara-
tively few workmen adopt this method of making
secure their livelihood and safety. The vast
majority adopt the first method. Instead of seek-
ing to increase their efficiency, they try to force
their employer (who is but the spokesman or rep-
resentative of the rest of humanity) to take it for
granted. In other words, they try to do as little
as they can for their wages, and to do that little
with the least possible expenditure of skill and at-
tention.

66 Men vs. the Man

The average workingman, indeed, particularly
in America, is notable chiefly for his firm faith
that his need for working is an intolerable evil,
which has been laid upon him by diabolical task-
masters, and which he is justified in shirking as
much as possible. It is his constant effort to give
less energy to his work to-day than he gave to it
yesterday, and he forces society to condone and
even encourage this effort by a sort of permanent
threat to cease working altogether. Search the
whole history of trades-unionism in America, and
you will find scarcely half a dozen attempts,
by unions, to increase the efficiency of their
members. But you will find a million attempts
to penalize society for calling that efficiency in
question.

And so, after a long journey, we come upon one
very serious difficulty in your professor's maze of
figures. He has brought forward his proofs
mathematical — and he has forgotten the objections
psychological. He has shown that 5,000,000
faithful and efficient workingmen could do all the
work of Austria in less than two hours a day —
and he has overlooked the fact that there are not
5,000,000 faithful and efficient workingmen in the
country. He has, in a word, made the colossal
mistake of assuming that, during one hour of work,
the workingman does all the work that it is pos-
sible to do in an hour. He has made no allow-
ance for inefficiency, for shirking, for laziness, for

Men vs. the Man 67

drunkenness, for illness. He has made no allow-,
ance for the fact that, in a large number of neces-
sary industries, seasonal and climatic variations
make long and unavoidable periods of inactivity.
He has forgotten the ineradicable tendency of the
workingman to go on strikes and holidays. He
has wasted all of his fine logic upon a purely
theoretical workman, who never was on land or
sea. Putting the efficiency of this monster at 100,
I think I am safe in assuming that the efficiency
of the real workman of flesh and blood may be
set down at fifteen. And if this is true, the pro-
fessor's theoretical workday of one hour and
twenty-two and a half minutes becomes a real
workday of more than nine hours.

But anticipating all this, you answer in one place
that, under Socialism, men will look upon work as
a pleasure, and hint that the present effort to shirk
will disappear. If I were convinced, my dear La
Monte, that you actually held to any such belief,
I would certainly not give over my scant leisure
to this correspondence. As a matter of fact, you
must be well aware that the traits and weaknesses
which make the workman of to-day an unwilling
and inefficient laborer are ingrained character-
istics of all low-caste men — as plainly so, indeed,
as their superstitiousness, grossness, emotional sug-
gestibility (particularly in political matters), and
fear of hell — and that no social cataclysm, how-
ever appalling, will convert them at one stroke

68 Men vs. the Man

into new beings. That they will improve in the
course of time, I am firmly convinced, for they have
improved steadily in the past, but their progress
toward perfect efficiency, like their progress toward
perfect knowledge, will always be behind that of
the classes above them. The average working-
man of to-day is a better man than Moses in at
least one respect, for he is far less superstitious,
but the Pasteurs of to-day are still as far ahead
of him as Moses was ahead of the slaves who built
the pyramids.

Herein you will discern my first and last ob-
jection to Socialism. I believe, in a word, that it
overlooks certain ineradicable characteristics of the
human animal, and certain immutable laws of the
biological process. Going further, I believe that
these characteristics and laws deserve to be fostered
and obeyed rather than opposed, for to their in-
fluence we owe all that we have of progress.
Every comfort that we have to-day was devised
by some man who yearned to get more out of life
than the men about him; every great truth that
helps us face existence bravely and confidently was
unearthed by some philosopher who yearned to be
honored above all other philosophers; every law
that gives us safety and order was written by some
law-maker who yearned to see his own notion of
security and order prevail over the notions of
others. Just as every micro-organism in the sea
ooze fights for that pin point of space which will

Men vs. the Man 69

give it life while its fellows die, just so every
man fights for that microscopic degree of superi-
ority which gives him eminence over his fellow-
man — better food, a better coat, more leisure,
greater honor, respect and love, and a more poign-
ant and widespread feeling of something lacking
after he is gone. You Socialists, seeing part of
this dimly, talk of a " materialistic conception of
history," and say Karl Marx invented it. But you
are wrong, for it was invented for all time on the
day that the first living cells began to fight over
their first meal.

Such is the law of the survival of the fittest, and
so it stands immutable. Socialism is only one of
a hundred plans for ameliorating it, and since all
of the others have failed, I believe that Socialism
will fail too. That Antiparos whose maunderings
you quote against me thought the invention of the
water-wheel would turn all of the mill-slaves of
Greece into gentlemen of leisure, lolling all day in
ease and idleness, but Antiparos was wrong, for,
like all the Greeks, he was entirely ignorant of the
laws which govern living organisms. Had he
lived after Malthus, instead of thousands of years
before him, he would have known that the water-
wheel, by making bread cheaper, would soon de-
crease the death-rate and increase the birth-rate
of Greece, and that this increased population,
needing other things beside bread, would quickly
turn the idle millers to profitable industry. This

70 Men vs. the Man

process has been repeated over and over again
ever since.

You Socialists make a somewhat similar mistake.
You propose to wipe out competition, with its frank
acceptance of the law of natural selection, and to
put co-operation in its place. By this plan, you
say, life will be relieved of most of its present haz-
ards, and every man in the world will enjoy per-
fect security, peace, and comfort. Well, supposing
all this to be true, what will be the result ? First
and foremost, I believe, an enormous increase in
population. Even admitting the possibility of
curbing the actual birth-rate, it is apparent that
the concerted efforts to put an end to the struggle
for existence will, for a time at least, reduce the
death-rate among what are now the lowest orders
toward that of what is now the highest, and that
this reduction will quickly swell the population of
the world.

For a time, perhaps, things will go on serenely,
for these extra people, let us assume, will all do
their share of the work of the world. But soon
or late, I take it, the human race will make the
startling discovery that the satisfaction of human
desires is limited, not only by the finiteness of
human energy, but also by the finiteness of the
earth in size and resources. That is to say, there
will come a time when the wheat fields of the world
will be too small to raise all the wheat needed by
the race. And when that time comes a struggle

Men vs. the Man 71

for the wheat that they can raise will come with
it, and your Socialist state will disappear. You
may say that the same impasse will be reached
eventually with things as they are, but a moment's
reflection will show you that that is no answer at
all. I am not trying to prove that this is the best
of all possible worlds ; I am merely trying to show
you that Socialism cannot hope to change it.
Whether we adopt Socialism or accept things as
they are, we must come eternally upon periods of
stress and storm, and during these periods the
strong will prevail over the weak, and every man-
made law that seeks to stay them will be swept
away.

This happened after the French Revolution, as
you yourself point out. You seem to think that
the fact constitutes a criticism of my argument, but
in reality it supports me. The French Revolution,
as you know, had its seed back in the Middle Ages,
when certain citizens of France, by reason of their
superior intelligence and craft, began to acquire
a vast power over the rest of the population. The
sons of these medieval lords of the soil maintained
their supremacy after them, and it was maintained
by so many succeeding generations that, after
awhile, it came to be regarded as a matter of
course. Even after the race of barons began to
degenerate, no one thought of disputing their sway.
Meanwhile, they kept going downhill, and by the
beginning of the eighteenth century they were a

72 Men vs. the Man

race of incompetent, helpless parasites, whose
power over the masses rested, not upon any superi-
ority of their own, but upon the eternal fact that
the common people are ever thick of wit, ever long-
suffering, and ever slow to advocate a change. The
aristocracy of France was so inefficient in the time
of Louis XIV that the peasants of France might
have overthrown it with ease, but it took a long
series of outrages and the urging of many men to
make them act, and so it was not until the reign
of Louis XVI that they declared open war.

Well, this old race of overlords proved an easy
foe, and the victorious commoners, staggered by
their almost instantaneous conquest, at once jumped
to the conclusion that there was no such thing as
aristocracy — that because this one had turned out
to be a hollow sham, all were shams. The im-
mediate result was the grotesque mob-rule of the
few months following the murder of Louis XVI.
Here was an actual experiment in Socialism, for
all advantages of birth, wealth, and rank were
swept away. Every citizen of France was the
equal of every other citizen, and each was ex-
pected to serve the state according to his particular
talents and training.

Well, did this mob-rule last? Not at all! It
was soon found that a populace, as a populace,
could no more govern itself than a drunken man
could drag himself home, or a sober man could
pull his own teeth. Strong men were needed to

Men vs. the Man 73

make laws and enforce them, to deal with matters
above the comprehension of the rabble, to decide
between parties and factions — and in a very short
while these strong men began to move toward the
top, while the weak went back to their old station
underfoot. In place of the artificial aristocracy of
strong men's great-grandsons, there arose a new
and actual aristocracy of strong men. In the end,
the strongest of them lorded it over all France,
and nearly all of Europe.

Napoleon Bonaparte, under the influence of the
old order of things, tried to perpetuate his su-
premacy in his descendants, but here he overlooked
a new idea which had come into the world. That
idea was this: that an aristocracy must constantly
justify its existence. In other words, there must
be no artificial conversion of its present strength
into perpetual rights. The way must be always
open for the admission of strong men from the
lower orders, and the way must be always open,
too, for the automatic expulsion of men whose
strength fails. Our governmental hierarchy, here
in the United States, partially satisfies this descrip-
tion of a sound aristocracy. That is to say, it is
a despotism so long as it rules at all, but it must
constantly prove its right to rule. Some day in
the future, I am convinced, there will arise a man
strong enough to hold the supreme power as long
as he lives, just as Sefior Diaz seems likely to
do in Mexico at present. In the department of

74 Men vs. the Man

commercial enterprise we have plenty of such men.
James J. Hill, I suppose, will be able to keep his
immense power until he dies, for it is unlikely
that, in the course of the few years remaining to
him, he will encounter a foe efficient enough to
wrest it from him, but, for all his potency, he can
do nothing whatever to safeguard it against the
inefficiency of his descendants after he is gone.

The word aristocracy, to an American, always
suggests the European nobility, with its peculiar
system of titles and its peculiar privileges in the
affairs of government. But there are aristocrats
of many other sorts, and aristocracy, in itself, by
no means presupposes a patent of nobility and a
seat in the House of Lords. As a matter of fact,
I have shown that these things are evidences, not of
real aristocracy, but of that old, artificial aristoc-
racy which, in some countries, has managed to sur-
vive— though always with lessened powers. The
aristocrats of social rank and governmental influ-
ence are by no means omnipotent. In their own
field they constitute the first estate, but in some
other field they may be slaves.

The French Encyclopedists who spurred the
peasants of France on to the massacre of the old
nobility did the world a service by wiping out a
sham, but at the same stroke they gave it a new
sham to take the place of the old one. This new
sham was the theory that all men were equal before
the Lord. Voltaire, Diderot, and the others called

Men vs. the Man 75

themselves materialists, and I have no doubt that
they were sincere in saying that they couldn't ac-
cept the absurdities of Christian theology, but all
the same they accepted, whether openly or tacitly,
the corner-stone of that theology, which is the
doctrine that every man has a soul. Their whole
philosophy, indeed, was based upon a belief in
the sacredness of that soul. Every man, they
argued, had a soul, and since every soul was of
infinite sacredness, each one was as good as any
other. Upon this they erected the theory of
human equality.

These men were bold and ingenious, but, as I
have tried to show in another place, they were
vastly handicapped by their ignorance. They could
scoff at Christianity all they pleased, but in the end
they had to admit that they couldn't disprove it.
This was because they lived a hundred years too
soon. Had they written their books after in-
stead of before the day of Charles Darwin, they
would have been free from that anthropomorph-
ism, which, despite their great powers of ratiocina-
tion, constantly colored their thoughts. Before
Darwin it was easy enough for anyone to main-
tain that the fundamental Christian doctrines were
incapable of proof, but it was only after his life-
work gave us a wholly new view of the universe,
and set men, for the first time, to exploring its
mysteries in an orderly fashion, that it became pos-
sible for anyone to argue of Christianity not only

76 Men vs. the Man

that it was unreasonable, but also that it was actu-
ally impossible.

I have wandered into this reference to Chris-
tianity not by accident, but intentionally, and be-
cause it seems to me that, as schemes of civilization,
Christianity and Socialism are identical. You So-
cialists call yourselves agnostics, but you still main-
tain the fundamental tenet of Christian theology,
which is the notion that all men are God's chil-
dren, and equal in his sight ; and you still advocate
the primary rule of Christian ethics, which is the
command that every man shall love his neighbor as
himself. My objection, then, to Socialism, is my
objection to Christianity. It starts out with an
incredible assumption and it ends with a command
that no human being, so long as he remains a hu-
man being, can possibly obey.

That Christianity is impossible is shown by the
fact that the world has never beheld a single real
Christian. Even Christ himself fell short, for
there is abundant proof that, whatever the degree
of his love for humanity in general, he had a
strong and quite human dislike of the money-
changers in the Temple, and that he gave way to
this dislike and tried to do them injury. Like
Christianity, Socialism suffers from this irreconcil-
able difference between its doctrines and the nature
of man. Every human being comes into the world,
indeed, with instincts which both Christianity and
Socialism denounce as sinful But as all moralists

Men vs. the Man 77

discover to their horror, soon or late, it is one thing
to invent and denounce a sin, and quite another
thing to destroy it.

This letter is already very long, and so there is
very little space left to deal with your mass of
statistics regarding surplus values and other such
socialistic scarecrows. All you manage to prove is
this: that under our present free competition and
with our efficient machines, we Americans produce
a great deal more than we can use. Well, is this
to be lamented? For my part, I think not. On
the contrary, it seems to me to be a good cause
for congratulation, for it is indubitable proof that,
in the struggle for existence, we Americans are
measurably superior to certain other races. As we
forge ahead in productiveness, these other races
will become more and more dependent upon us
for the necessities of life, and in the end they will
become our serfs. That is to say, practically all
of their energy will be devoted to earning the
money we demand for the things they need

You may say that this can never happen, since
tariff walls and national pride will always stand
in the way. If that is your answer, I advise you to
go to your history books and see what becomes of
national pride and tariff walls when a strong, rich
nation looks about for an outlet for its over-produc-
tion. If the poorer, less efficient nations do not, at
once and without resistance, open their gates and
begin to buy, as China has but recently done, they

78 Men vs. the Man

are forced to do so by the sword, and reduced, as
security for their future complaisance, to the posi-
tion of vassals, as has been the case in India. If
it is true, as you say, that Germany is showing
super-efficiency, I venture to predict that some day
Germany will conquer England, for in England
the whole social fabric has been made rotten by
Christian sentimentality, with its accompanying
coddling of the inefficient and parasitical.

Your proof that the profits of the United States
Steel Corporation exceed the amount paid out as
wages to its workmen is interesting, but far from
portentous. You seem to regard the Steel Cor-
poration as a mysterious, gigantic ogre which sucks
the blood of the people, and does no public service
whatever. As a matter of fact, it is no ogre at
all, but a collection of quite human persons, such
as you and I, and many of these persons belong to
the class whose wrongs you deplore. That is to
say, a great deal of the Corporation's stock is
owned by its employees, who are thus doubly paid
for their labor — first in wages and then in profits.
No law prevents an employee from buying more
stock. You yourself must admit that his wages
are commonly more than sufficient to keep him
alive, and that, in consequence, he should have a
surplus for investment at the end of each year.
Why doesn't he buy stock with it? Well, in many
cases he does — but in other cases he invests his
money in crayon portraits of his parents, or kegs

Men vs. the Man 79

of beer. He is, in brief, an ignorant and improv-
ident man — and yet you weep over his wrongs.

That share of the Steel Corporation profits
which goes to the very rich men — and this is the
share, I have no doubt, which you regard as the
worst menace to humanity — is not lost to the
world forever, for these rich men, like poor men,
have to die in the end, and even while they live
they commonly give back, either willingly or un-
willingly, most of the money they thus acquire.
In a republic, it is impossible to devote much pub-
lic money to those large but not immediately
profitable enterprises which advance culture and
civilization — such things, for instance, as the estab-
lishment of libraries and museums, the erection of
monuments, the cleansing of cities, and the sys-
tematic study of the higher scientific (and partic-
ularly medical) problems. This is because the
common people, and their elected representatives,
being entirely ignorant of human history, see
nothing in these things but idle vanities.

Well, here is where the predatory rich pay back
their debt to humanity in general. They know the
vast value of such enterprises, and their money
goes into them. In this way the common people
profit by the forced taxes they must pay to men of
superior ingenuity and foresight. In this way the
millions so feloniously acquired by Mr. Rockefeller
paid for the Rockefeller Institute, which squared
the account by giving the world a specific for

80 Men vs. the Man

cerebro-spinal meningitis. It seems to me that,
before this old planet vanishes into empty air, the
value of that one specific, to the human race, will
be a hundred thousand times the value of all the
securities a hundred Rockefellers could possibly
amass in a lifetime.

You seem to fancy that the money acquired by a
single rich man is value lost to the race in general
for all time. Nothing could be more erroneous.
The millions of Mr. Carnegie are going back to
the public even while he lives, and a hundred years
hence, perhaps, there will not be a single rich man
of his blood in the world. When George Wash-
ington died he was the richest man in the New
World, and yet to-day the head of the Washington
clan is a small-fry druggist in a one-horse country
town. The whole clan, indeed, has been so quickly
absorbed into the commonalty that few Americans
have ever even heard of this man.

Such is the law of evolution, which works back-
ward as well as forward, for in order that one may
gain, another must lose. Say what you will
against it, you must at least admit that it has
worked for human progress. And say what you
will against it, you can never hope to set it aside.

Wherefore, my dear La Monte, I must again
decline your courteous invitation to call you
comrade.

Sincerely,

MENCKEN.

LA MONTE'S THIRD LETTER

MY DEAR MENCKEN:

I was very glad to receive your entertaining let-
ter, and hasten to congratulate you on your com-
plete freedom from that weakness of small minds
• — consistency. But I regret to see that you are
growing old before your time. When Tennyson
was your age he

dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonders
that would be;

Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies

of magic sails;
Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down

with costly bales;

Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there

rain'd a ghastly dew
From the nations' airy navies grappling in the

central blue;

Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-
wind rushing warm;

With the standards of the peoples plunging
through the thunder storm;
81

82 Men vs. the Man

Till the war-drum throbb'd no longer, and the

battle-flags were furl'd
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of

the world.

There the common sense of most shall hold a

fretful realm in awe,
And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in

universal law.

There you have the sublime optimism that is the
glory of the youthful mind. It was not until
forty-four years later in his extreme old age that
Tennyson allowed himself to be frightened by the
Malthusian bogey of over-population which so per-
turbs your soul, and even then he himself half sus-
pected that the change of view was due to his fast-
coming dotage, " for," he tells us,

doubtless I am old, and think gray

thoughts, for I am gray;
After all the stormy changes shall we find a
changeless May?

After madness, after massacre, Jacobinism and

Jacquerie,
Some diviner force to guide us thro' the days I

shall not see?

When the schemes and all the systems, king-
doms and republics fall,

Something kindlier, higher, holier — all for each
and each for all?

Men vs. the Man 83

All the full-brain, half-brain races, led by Jus-
tice, Love, and Truth;

All the millions one at length with all the
visions of my youth?

All diseases quench'd by Science, no man halt,

or deaf, or blind,
Stronger ever born of weaker, lustier body,

larger mind?

Earth at last a warless world, a single race, a

single tongue —
I have seen her far away — for is not Earth as

yet so young? —

Every tiger madness muzzled, every serpent

passion kill'd,
Every grim ravine a garden, every blazing desert

till'd,

Robed in universal harvest up to either pole

she smiles,
Universal ocean softly washing all her warless

isles.

Warless? when her tens are thousands, and

her thousands millions, then —
All her harvest all too narrow — who can fancy

warless men?

Warless? war will die out late then. Will it

ever? late or soon?
Can it, till this outworn earth be dead as yon

dead earth, the moon?

84 Men vs. the Man

But, in spite of your nightmare of over-pop-
ulation, and your fear that we Socialists in our
blindness will " reduce the death-rate among what
are now the lowest orders toward that of what is
now the highest, and that this reduction will quickly
swell the population of the world," you lavish the
most extravagant eulogy upon the scientists and
their capitalist patrons for discoveries that make
possible just this very reduction of the death-rate
at which you stand aghast ! " The work that
Pasteur did in the world," you tell us, " put the
clock of time ahead a hundred years, and conferred
a permanent and constantly cumulative benefit upon
the whole human race, freeman and slave alike,
now and forevermore." Your conscience evidently
troubled you over the mildness of this praise, for
in your second letter you went it one better by
telling us that the Rockefeller Institute had squared
Mr. Rockefeller's account with mankind " by giv-
ing the world a specific for cerebro-spinal menin-
gitis. It seems to me," you add, " that, before
this old planet vanishes into empty air, the value
of that one specific, to the human race, will be a
hundred thousand times the value of all the securi-
ties a hundred Rockefellers could possibly amass
in a lifetime."

Were yours a smaller nature — and therefore
more cursed with consistency — I would expect to
find you using your influence with that Senor Diaz,
who, you tell us, is one day to be our Dictator, to

Men vs. the Man 85

induce him to punish with death any doctor who
should give to the rabble the benefit of any of these
discoveries. But, knowing you as I do, I know
that in spite of all your invective hurled at the mob
you would be the first to put your hand into your
pocket to help a poor printer threatened with
rabies to get to the nearest Pasteur Institute.

Speaking of Pasteur reminds me of your fear
that after two generations of Socialism there will
be no more Pasteurs. How many boys who might
develop into Pasteurs ever get the chance to? By
good luck the wealthy Cimabue chanced to come
along and look over the shoulder of the poor little
shepherd lad, Giotto, and see the picture of a
sheep the lad had drawn on a stone. Cimabue
took Giotto to Florence, and Giotto's paintings
still delight the race. How many Giottos, do you
suppose, have drawn pictures equally good that no
Cimabue chanced to see ? I still fail to understand
what you meant by your startling assertion that
Pasteurs would fail us. It must be that you think
a bitter struggle for bare existence necessary to the
development of talent or genius, or that you think
the necessary productive work that will be de-
manded of every one in the future will prevent
the devotion of the necessary time to science.

In regard to the first point, Lester F. Ward,
who is the only sociologist America has produced
(except the late Lewis H. Morgan) whom Con-
tinental scholars quote with respect, in his " Ap-

86 Men vs. the Man

plied Sociology " tells us that " about eleven times
as many talented persons belong to the wealthy or
well-to-do classes as to the poor or laboring classes,
although the latter are about five times as numer-
ous as the former. The chances of success for the
same degree of talent are fifty-five for the former
class to one for the latter. The extremes, of
course, are very much greater, and for absolute
poverty or uninterrupted labor at long hours the
chance of success is necessarily zero, no matter how
great may be the native talent or even genius. In-
digence is an effective bar to achievement. On the
other hand, the resources of society may be enor-
mously increased by abolishing poverty, by reduc-
ing the hours of labor, and by making all its mem-
bers comfortable and secure in their economic rela-
tions. Any sacrifice that society might make in
securing these ends would be many times repaid by
the actual contributions that the few really talented
among the hundreds of thousands thus benefited
would make to the social welfare. For talent is
distributed all through this great mass in the same
proportions as it exists in the much smaller well-
to-do or wealthy class, and the only reason why
the latter contribute more is because their economic
condition affords them opportunity." (Page
228.) *

*This calculation of Lester Ward's is based on data taken
from Professor A. Odin's monumental work, " Gentsc des
Grands Hommes" Paris, 1895. See especially Vol. I. page
529-

Men vs. the Man 87

As examples of talented persons who did not
have to struggle for an existence, he names Tasso,
Petrarch, Boccaccio, Cervantes, Dante, Chaucer,
Hegel, Fichte, Kant, Buckle, Bacon, Milton,
Hobbes, Galileo, Adam Smith, Harvey, Darwin,
Newton, Descartes, Byron, Shelley, Macaulay,
Comte, Herbert Spencer, Gibbon, Disraeli, Rob-
ert Browning, John Ruskin, Victor Hugo, and
many others." *

In regard to the second point, an hour or two
of productive labor will keep our savants in the
pink of physical condition for their intellectual
labors, and their experiences of real, practical life
will make their studies far more fruitful for hu-
manity.

Is your bogey of over-population any more sub-
stantial than a phantom? I will not say posi-
tively that it is not; but I do say confidently that
that bridge is so far ahead that we need not be
preparing to cross it now. What reason have I
for saying that this is an extremely remote danger?
Compare the number of offspring a single pair of
codfish are responsible for in a year with the
number a single pair of rabbits bestow upon the
earth in a like time; and then compare the rabbit
from this point of view with the higher apes or the
elephants or man. What do you find? Is it not

1 Ward takes this list from " Genius, Fame, and the Com-
parison of Races," by Charles H. Cooley. Annals of the Am.
Acad. Pol and Soc. Science, Philadelphia. Vol. IX. May,
1897, PP. 317-358.

88 Men vs. the Man

that the higher the type, the lower the rate of
increase? Again compare different races and
classes of men. Do you not find that highly civ-
ilized countries such as France have extremely low
birth-rates? If you will go to the Antipodes,
where the average standard of comfort is the high-
est in the world, you will find a birth-rate almost
as low as that of France. I well remember that
Mr. Kelley, the able editor of the New Zealand
Times, was as much of an alarmist on this sub-
ject as our own Roosevelt, and seldom let a day
go by without an editorial warning on the subject,
but his warnings were in vain, for the people were
far too comfortable to breed as prolificly as Irish
and Hungarian peasants. The historical fact, my
dear Mencken, is that comfort and education de-
crease the birth-rate. Socialism will give comfort
and education to all. Surely, you can draw the
conclusion for yourself.

Chemistry and intensive agriculture promise to
enable us to defy Malthus by an almost unlimited
multiplication of the food supply. And Mr. Gif-
ford Pinchot, in a speech recently reported in the
Sun, told of an amount of preventable waste
now going on so vast, that if we should stop
it, it is difficult to say how enormous would
be our increased capacity for sustaining popu-
lation.

I have so many things that I want to say to you,
that I grudge every bit of space and time given to

Men vs. the Man 89

commenting on your arguments. But I must note
in passing your assumption that because many
Austrian workingmen now are drunken, lazy, and
inefficient, therefore Professor Hertzka's hypo-
thetical 5,000,000 in the future would suffer from
the same vices. Do you really think they would?
What hope for the future has the average Austrian
workingman now? What inducement has he to
be anything but lazy and drunken? What gives
me my firm and unshakeable faith in his high po-
tentialities as an efficient worker in the future, is
the very fact that he has sense and manhood enough
to be discontented with the conditions under which
he works now, and his laziness, inefficiency, and
drunkenness are the very best possible proofs of
that discontent, so pregnant with hope for hu-
manity.

Your statement that I despise Friedrich
Nietzsche can scarcely be called ingenuous, and it
pains me because I am sure you cannot be ig-
norant that in the International Socialist Review
for July, 1908, I, writing as a Socialist to Social-
ists, said:

11 I do not see how any of us can help feeling
that Nietzsche, the magnificently assured prophet
of BEYOND-MAN, is our Comrade, though we
cannot but grieve that his ideal included a vast
mass of suffering and exploited humanity, a * herd '
or ' rabble ' over which his beyond-men were to
reign in glory and dionysian joy."

9O Men vs. the Man

I submit that this is scarcely the language of
contempt.

You say that we Socialists " propose to wipe out
competition," and later on in the same letter you
admit that Mr. Hill has so effectually wiped out
competition in the railway business, that " he will
be able to keep his immense power until he dies."
How are we Socialists to destroy that which Cap-
italism has already destroyed?

I cannot allow to pass unchallenged your state-
ment that we Socialists " still advocate the primary
rule of Christian ethics, which is the command that
every man shall love his neighbor as himself." On
the contrary we know only too well that the only
practical ethics in a society based on the produc-
tion of goods for profit are the tooth, fang, and
claw ethics of the jungle. You have but strength-
ened the Socialist argument by showing that even
Christ himself could not practise the Golden Rule.
We know that ethics are relative and changing,
that every stage of economic development has its
own code of ethics, and we are revolutionists be-
cause we believe the Social Revolution will lay the
economic foundation on which all men will practise
the Golden Rule as naturally and with as little
thought of duty as they now breathe.

I am sorry that I should once more have to re-
peat that I have never made any moral argument
against the existence of surplus-value per se. I
did not represent the " Steel Corporation as a

Men vs. the Man 91

mysterious, gigantic ogre which sucks the blood of
the people, and does no public service whatever."
But I did prove right up to the hilt from their own
figures that after every bit of what you and Mai-
lock would call " ability " had been paid for at
the highest market rates, the profits from owner-
ship alone were far in excess of the wages for both
muscle and " ability," and that this excess of pro-
duction over purchasing power as represented by
wages made a Social Revolution inevitable.

But now that you have suggested it I am entirely
willing to admit that drawing profit from owner-
ship without service rendered may be called, with
perfect propriety, " sucking the blood of the
people."

I can scarcely restrain a smile when you tell me
that all is well with the Steel Trust employees be-
cause they are given the opportunity to become
minority stock-holders in the Trust. Ask those
who were minority stock-holders in the Erie Rail-
road when Jay Gould got control of it what this
privilege is worth? Or, if that is ancient history,
ask those who were minority stock-holders in the
Chicago and Alton when it was captured by Harri-
man. If one fact stands out above another in
modern financial history it is that stock companies
are the most efficient means ever devised to trans-
fer the savings of the middle and working classes
to the pockets of the lords of finance.

When you say that rich men in the long run pay

92 Men vs. the Man

back to the community all the wealth they have
drawn from it, you do not bear in mind that the
great bulk of real wealth has to be reproduced
every year. It cannot be paid back " in the long
run." Its physical nature forbids it. Moreover,
intelligent workingmen (which is merely another
way of saying Socialists or Revolutionists) do not
ask or expect rich men to give or pay them back
anything, but they are irrevocably determined to
prevent rich men or any men in the future from
taking from them the lion's share of the wealth
that their labor produces and reproduces every
year.

What vast wealth in practice consists of are
certain legal papers that give their holders the
power to compel other men to work for them ; and
in the case of fortunes such as those of the Astors
and the Vanderbilts and the great landlords of
England this power is handed down from genera-
tion to generation, so that no sane man looks for-
ward to the day when the head of the Rockefeller
clan shall be nothing more than " a small-fry drug-
gist in a one-horse country town " — unless per-
chance that is the occupation he happens to prefer
in the Co-operative Commonwealth, and in that
case I think I am safe in promising you that no
Socialist shall say him, Nay.

I hope you will pardon me for saying that I
have thus far written nothing in this letter that
need have been written had you read my former

Men vs. the Man 93

letters more carefully. And now I would gladly
enter more fruitful fields, but, alas, I cannot yet
do so, for I have not yet touched upon your
gracious intimation that you would refuse to give
over your scant leisure to this correspondence if
you were convinced that I actually believed that
" under Socialism " (by the way, Socialism is not
an umbrella or an awning) " men will look upon
work as a pleasure," and that " the present effort to
shirk will disappear."

Much as I should regret to see this correspond-
ence cut short (and I would regret it most deeply),
I am compelled to assure you that I do most
sanguinely expect work to become a pleasure, nay,
I hold that all work that has been worth the doing
has always given pleasure to the worker, and I
do expect that the worker in the days when " all
shall be better than well " will fear the imputation
of shirking even more than most women do to-day
the imputation of unchastity. But, in spite of my
firm faith that work of the right kind should give
a normal being pleasure, I am wholly willing to
concede with William Morris that " whatever
pleasure there is in some work, there is certainly
some pain in all work, the beast-like pain of stirring
up our slumbering energies to action, the beast-like
dread of change when things are pretty well with
us." And here I am going to depart from my
regular custom and ask you to do a little reading
for yourself. I am sure you will get a far better

94 Men vs. the Man

comprehension of the Socialist point of view on
this subject of work from reading William Mor-
ris's Lecture on " Useful Work versus Useless
Toil " than it is possible for me to give you in the
limits of a letter. You will find this lecture in the
volume entitled " Signs of Change," published by
Longmans, Green & Company.

William Morris discriminates between "two
kinds of work — one good, the other bad, one not
far removed from a blessing, a lightening of life;
the other a mere curse, a burden to life.

"What is the difference between them, then?
This: one has hope in it, the other has not. It is
manly to do one kind of work, and manly also to
refuse to do the other.

" What is the nature of the hope which, when it
is present in work, makes it worth doing?

" It is threefold, I think — hope of rest, hope of
product, hope of pleasure in the work itself; and
hope of these also in some abundance and of good
quality; rest enough and good enough to be worth
having; product worth having by one who is neither
a fool nor an ascetic; pleasure enough for all for
us to be conscious of it while we are at work; not a
mere habit, the loss of which we shall feel as a
fidgety man feels the loss of the bit of string he
fidgets with."

William Morris anticipated that the idea of
pleasure in work would come as a shock to men
like yourself, for he added:

Men vs. the Man 95

" The hope of pleasure in the work itself, how
strange that hope must seem to some of my read-
ers— to most of them. Yet I think that to all liv-
ing things there is a pleasure in the exercise of
their energies, and that even beasts rejoice in be-
ing lithe and swift and strong. But a man at
work, making something which he feels will exist
because he is working at it and wills it, is exer-
cising the energies of his mind and soul as well as
of his body. Memory and imagination help him
as he works. Not only his own thoughts, but
the thoughts of the men of past ages guide his
hands; and, as a part of the human race, he
creates. If we work thus we shall be men, and
our days will be happy and eventful."

I rejoice with you in the conquests of Science
over Nature, but I hold with Morris that " Nature
will not be finally conquered till our work becomes
a part of the pleasure of our lives." And I hold
with Morris that " if there be any work which can-
not be made other than repulsive, either by the
shortness of its duration or the intermittency of its
recurrence, or by the sense of special and peculiar
usefulness (and therefore honor) in the mind of
the man who performs it freely, — if there be any
work which cannot be but a torment to the
worker," it were better to " leave it undone."
1 The produce of such work cannot be worth the
price of it."

But you go on to say that I " must be well

96 Men vs. the Man

aware that the traits and weaknesses which make
the workman of to-day an unwilling and inefficient
laborer are ingrained characteristics of all low-
caste men." I am aware of nothing of the kind;
what I am aware of is that all men in a state of
nature have an almost ineradicable hatred of toil
without hope, and that in what you would call
high-caste men this hatred is never wholly rooted
out, but that in what you would call low-caste men
centuries and centuries of discipline have made even
hopeless toil a habit, the loss of which they " feel
as a fidgety man feels the loss of the bit of string
he fidgets with."

It is precisely among the working class (whom
you describe as " low-caste men") that work for
work's sake has become a true nervous disease,
and the great task before us is to cure the prole-
tariat of its diseased and depraved appetite for
work.

The free citizens of Greece and Rome in the
days of their glory had a most healthy hatred for
work. " I could not affirm," says Herodotus,
" whether the Greeks derived from the Egyptians
the contempt which they have for work, because
I find the same contempt established among the
Thracians, the Scythians, the Persians, the
Lydians; in a word, because among most bar-
barians, those who learn mechanical arts and even
their children are regarded as the meanest of
their citizens. All the Greeks have been nur-

Men vs. the Man 97

tured in this principle, particularly the Lace-
daemonians."

" Nature," said Plato in his noble * Republic '
(Book V), "has made no shoemaker nor smith.
Such occupations degrade the people who exercise
them. Vile mercenaries, nameless wretches, who
are by their very condition excluded from political
rights. As for the merchants accustomed to lying
and deceiving, they will be allowed in the city only
as a necessary evil. The citizen who shall have
degraded himself by the commerce of the shop
shall be prosecuted for this offense. If he is con-
victed, he shall be condemned to a year in prison;
the punishment shall be doubled for each repeated
offense."

In his " Economics " Xenophon writes, " The
people who give themselves up to manual labor
are never promoted to public offices, and with good
reason. The greater part of them, condemned to
be seated the whole day long, some even to endure
the heat of the fire continually, cannot fail to be
changed in body, and it is almost inevitable that
the mind be affected."

* What honorable thing can come out of a
shop? " asks Cicero. " What can commerce pro-
duce in the way of honor ? Everything called shop
is unworthy an honorable man. Merchants can
gain no profit without lying, and what is more
shameful than falsehood? Again, we must regard
as something base and vile the trade of those who

98 Men vs. the Man

sell their toil and industry, for whoever gives his
labor for money sells himself and puts himself in
the rank of slaves."

There is no use in multiplying these quotations,
which Paul Lafargue has collected from the
classics, to show you that just those traits which
you regard as the special attributes of low-caste
men were in fact the characteristic traits of high-
caste men in ancient Greece and Rome, just as they
are in Europe and America to-day.

But I deny the validity of " high-caste " and
" low-caste " as divisions of humanity. I recog-
nize not high-caste men and low-caste men, but
men who have had a chance to live human lives,
and men who have been condemned to live the
lives of beasts. If the term " low-caste n
can properly be applied to any human beings it is
surely to those pitiable members of the upper
classes who have been so cut off from all contact
with the masses of humanity that in their breasts
the broad human sympathies, the sense of human
fellowship and solidarity, of racial oneness, have
atrophied and died out until in their relations
with all mankind outside their narrow social cir-
cles they are able to obey the great command of
your master, Nietzsche, uBe Hard!"

I have no doubt that you would classify the pri-
vate soldiers in the Italian Army as " low-caste
men." Let us judge them by their actions. Right
after the Messina Earthquake the New York Sun

Men vs. the Man 99

sent its London correspondent to the scene, and his
letter (the best piece of newspaper work I have
ever seen) appeared in the issue of January 17,
1909.

" I stopped for half an hour on Monday after-
noon," he writes, " to watch the dramatic climax
of a rescue operation which had been going on for
forty-eight hours. It was in the ruins piled forty
feet high adjoining the principal theater in Gari-
baldi street. On Saturday morning a faint re-
sponse was heard deep down in the debris to the
constant cry of the rescue parties, ' Is any one
there?' The original building had been a very
solid one of six stories of stone and mortar. Its
destruction had been as complete as if a rock the
size of a house had been dropped upon it from
the sky and then rolled away. It seemed impos-
sible that anything could remain alive beneath that
apparently solid mass of pulverized walls, blocks
of granite, and a few splinters of wood.

" But the cry was human and fifty men set to
work. They dug valiantly for hours above where
the voice came. They seemed to get no nearer
and night came. Searchlights were brought and
the work went on. On Sunday morning the loca-
tion of the sufferer was fixed more definitely. They
could talk with him, and he told them he was not
much hurt, there were a few inches of space
about his head, and his hands were free. He
pleaded not so much for release as for drink and

ioo Men vs. the Man

food. The dust was suffocating and he feared he
would choke if they came closer. The soldiers
forced a pipe down through the debris and the im-
prisoned man succeeded in reaching the end of it.
Beef tea and brandy were poured down in suc-
cession.

" The gratitude that came in response was as
heartfelt as if the poor fellow was already in the
free light and air instead of crushed down beneath
twenty feet of ruins. That additional twenty feet
amid material impossible to excavate by ordinary
methods required another thirty hours to conquer.
The impalpable powder which filled every crevice
of the more solid material slipped back almost as
fast as it was taken out. Besides, it was necessary
to proceed with the utmost caution for the victim's
sake. It was just as the rescuers had come in
sight of the poor fellow that I happened to climb
over that section of debris. A few moments ap-
parently would effect his release, and a stretcher
was hastily brought to the entrance of a little tun-
nel which had been driven through the side of the
excavation. And then, when safety was in sight,
the treacherous sides of the great hole began to
slip, and in a few seconds the man was buried anew.
There was a cry of horror on all sides. A dozen
soldiers buried their faces in their hands and wept.
The downpour of powdered lime and stones
stopped for a moment. Suddenly the officer in
charge cried:

Men vs. the Man 101

" ' Who will go in with this rope and fasten it
beneath his arms underneath the dirt? It may
mean death, for if the dust comes down again it
will mean suffocation for whoever goes? '

" ' Let me go ! Let me go ! I don't mind
what happens to me ! ' were the cries from almost
every man in the detachment.

" A noose was quickly made in a stout rope
and a lithe young private went quickly into the
bottom of that suffocating funnel. He dug away
with his hands around the head of the victim. He
found, fortunately, that a small arch had protected
him from the worst of the last dust slide. In a
few moments the rope was fixed and a dozen men
dragged the poor creatures into freedom."

If those soldiers were " low-caste " men, then
so were Jesus Christ and Saint Francis of Assisi.

It is but too obvious, my dear Mencken, that
you cherish what Dr. Lester F. Ward calls uthe
great sullen stubborn error, so universal and in-
grained as to constitute a world view, that the dif-
ference between the upper and lower classes of
society is due to a difference in their intellectual
capacity, something existing in the nature of things,
something preordained and inherently inevitable."
("Applied Sociology," page 96.)

On page 100 of the same work he tells us:

" The essential fact, however, is that there is
no valid reason why not only the other partially
emerged eight-tenths but the completely submerged

102 Men vs. the Man

tenth should not completely emerge. They are all
equally capable of it. This does not at all imply
that all men are equal intellectually. It only in-
sists that intellectual inequality is common to all
classes, and is as great among the members of the
completely emerged tenth as it is between that
class and the completely submerged tenth. Or,
to state it more clearly, if the individuals who con-
stitute the intelligent class at any time or place had
been surrounded from their birth by exactly the
same conditions that have surrounded the lowest
stratum of society, they would inevitably have
found themselves in that stratum; and if an equal
number taken at random of the lowest stratum of
society had been surrounded from their birth by
exactly the same conditions by which the intelligent
class has been surrounded, they would in fact have
constituted the intelligent class instead of the par-
ticular individuals who happen actually to consti-
tute it. In other words, class distinctions in soci-
ety are wholly artificial, depend entirely on environ-
ing conditions, and are in no sense due to differ-
ences in native capacity. Differences in native
capacity exist, and are as great as they have ever
been pictured, but they exist in all classes alike."

" The proposition that the lower classes of soci-
ety are the intellectual equals of the upper classes,"
he says in another place, " will probably shock
most minds. At least it will be almost unanimously
rejected as false. Yet I do not hesitate to main-

Men vs. the Man 103

tain and defend it as an abstract proposition."
(Page 95.)

Ferdinand Lassalle long ago pointed out that
the upper classes in order to defend their class
privileges were obliged to oppose human progress.
It is true that, here and there, there shines out like
a beacon-light on the tragic pages of human his-
tory the name of a truly noble noble who rose above
his petty class interests and gave his life and talents
freely to humanity; but it is but too true that the
majority of the upper classes in all times have been
led, consciously sometimes, but far more often un-
consciously, by their class interests to oppose the
forward march of humanity. Fortunately for
those whom you describe as " low-caste men " they
are free from this demoralizing influence, for, to
quote Lassalle, " the working class is the last and
outside of all, the disinterested class of the com-
munity, which sets up and can set up no further ex-
clusive condition, either legal or actual, neither no-
bility nor landed possessions nor the possession of
capital, which it could make into a new privilege
and force upon the arrangements of society.

" We are all workingmen in so far as we have
even the will to make ourselves useful in any way
to the community.

" This working class in whose heart therefore
no germ of a new privilege is contained, is for this
very reason synonymous with the whole human
race. Its interest is in truth the interest of the

IO4 Men vs. the Man

whole of humanity, its freedom is the freedom of
humanity itself, and its domination is the domina-
tion of all.

" Whoever therefore invokes the idea of the
working class as the ruling principle of society, in
the sense in which I have explained it to you, does
not put forth a cry that divides and separates the
classes of society. On the contrary, he utters a
cry of reconciliation, a cry which embraces the
whole of the community, a cry for doing away with
all the contradictions in every circle of society, a
cry of union in which all should join who do not
wish for privileges, and the oppression of the peo-
ple by privileged classes; a cry of love which,
having once gone up from the heart of the people,
will forever remain the true cry of the people, and
whose meaning will make it still a cry of love, even
when it sounds the war cry of the people."

Weismann pointed out the biological reasons for
the sociological facts stated by Lester F. Ward
in the passages I have quoted when he tried to show
that acquired characteristics were not inherited,
but Weismann's theories have always been dis-
puted, though unquestionably the majority of mod-
ern scientists have inclined to agree with him.
But it was left for Gregor Mendel to establish by
proof almost as clear as a demonstration in Euclid
that the characteristics, talents, aptitudes, and
graces acquired by education and environment can-
not be transmitted by heredity. But, as Mendel

Men vs. the Man 105

was both an Austrian and a Christian monk, I shall
expect you to give but scant attention to the re-
markable results of his biological studies. At any
rate I shall not prolong this letter to tell you more
about him here.

In my next letter I may tell you more about
him, and I shall certainly admit your charge that
Socialists are prone to accept evidence and theories
that tend to help their side of the argument, and I
shall show you that this peculiarity is not confined
to Socialists, and I shall draw some interesting de-
ductions from these facts.

In closing permit me to commend to your prayer-
ful consideration the following excerpt from the
editorial columns of the esteemed Boston Tran-
script:

11 Whatever the outcome of the Socialist move-
ment in this country, ill-considered opinions on the
subject are likely to be less frequent in the future
than they have been. President Roosevelt, ac-
cording to an apparently well authenticated story,
recently wrote a paper on Socialism, severely ar-
raigning what he supposed to be its fundamental
propositions. His article was submitted for
criticism to two sociologists, neither of them pro-
fessed Socialists, as it happened, but both con-
versant with the literature of the subject. So ad-
verse was their judgment regarding the Presidential
effort that Mr. Roosevelt tore it up, against the
time when he could more thoroughly investigate

io6 Men vs. the Man

the actual status of present-day Socialist doc-
trine."

While I know that you greatly admire Mr.
Roosevelt for his insistent and incessant preaching
of the Nietzschean doctrine of the strenuous life,
I sincerely trust that in this instance you will not
permit yourself to be tempted to follow his il-
lustrious example.

Ever,

LA MONTE.

MENCKEN'S REPLY TO LA MONTE'S
THIRD LETTER

MY DEAR LA MONTE :

Your letter, like the book of Leviticus, deals
with a multitude of subjects, and I cannot hope to
make a comprehensive reply to all the propositions
it lays down. In this emergency I shall have to
adopt the method known to professors of wrestling
as catch-as-catch-can. That is to say, I shall be-
gin at the beginning and proceed, as gracefully as
possible, to the end; maintaining, all the while, a
careful look-out, and dealing, from time to time,
deft wallops at such of your arguments, theories,
and ideas as may appear to stand in greatest need
of chastisement and controversion.

At the very start you accuse me of a violent,
and even vile, inconsistency, and by all the rules of
evidence, in such cases made and provided, you
also convict me. But I shall show you, I believe
(and if you have ever sat in a court of justice and
listened to its endless comedy, you will scarcely
need this proof) , that the rules of evidence have
nothing whatever to do with the laws of logic and
common sense.

Specifically, you make allegation that I have
107

io8 Men vs. the Man

been blowing both hot and cold. In one place,
you point out, I maintain that a sudden and rapid
increase of population, among the lower orders,
would be a menace to human progress ; and in some
other place I pay eloquent tribute to Pasteur and
his ilk, whose delving into culture-tubes has re-
duced the death-rate of all orders, high and low.
On the face of the thing, I seem to argue here, (a)
that it is well to let the ape-men die; and (b) that
we should encourage pathologists to save them.
But this seeming, my dear La Monte, is only
seeming.

Your error lies in your neglect of the vast dif-
ference between an increase in population in which
the lowest caste makes the greatest strides, and an
increase in population in which, if there is any rela-
tive advantage at all, the highest caste enjoys it.
It is an increase of the first sort that would appear
if all the wealth in the world to-day were dis-
tributed among the loafers and incompetents. But
it is an increase of the second sort that appears
when the doctors happen upon some new antitoxin,
vaccine, rule of clean living or health resort.

It must be plain to you, I am sure, that the
epoch-making medical discoveries of the last half-
century have benefited the lowest caste far less
than they have benefited the highest caste. If you
have never given the matter thought, just consider,
for a moment, the case of tuberculosis. Fifty
years ago the mortality in this wide-spread disease,

Men vs. the Man 109

among all who developed the secondary symptoms,
high and low, rich and poor alike, was probably
not far from sixty per cent. To-day, among in-
telligent persons of the higher castes, the mortality
is not much above twenty per cent.; but among
the lowest caste of negroes and foreigners it is still
well over fifty per cent.

And why ? The ready answer is that the treat-
ment of tuberculosis is a tedious and exceedingly
expensive business, and that those patients who are
poor and friendless must perforce die. This is a
fair enough answer, so far as it goes, but it does not
go very far. In place of it I wish to offer an-
other answer, and it is this: that the majority of
persons who succumb to preventable and curable
diseases to-day go down to their graves, not so
much because they are poor, as because they are
ignorant — because they are handicapped by the
low-caste man's chronic and ineradicable suspi-
ciousness, orthodoxy, stupidity, lack of foresight,
and inability to learn.

My own city of Baltimore, on account of its
wealth of hospitals and clinics, has been called the
medical capital of the New World. Its hospitals
are open to all, and those who cannot pay are given
treatment free. It is possible for a man without
a cent in his pocket to profit by the skill of the
greatest physicians and surgeons in America. Be-
yond the city boundaries are free sanitoria for the
treatment of tuberculosis and other infectious dis-

no Men vs. the Man

eases. Medicines and nursing are free. Those
too ill to move are treated and nursed in their
homes. The attentions for which visitors from
all parts of the country pay thousands of dollars
are free to every indigent citizen. And yet the
death-rate of Baltimore is higher than that of any
other city of its size in the United States.

The Christian Scientists, of course, say that this
is because there are so many hospitals, but the real
reason lies in the fact that among Baltimore's
600,000 inhabitants there are 100,000 negroes
and 200,000 ignorant and superstitious foreigners.
The negroes, when they grow ill, take patent medi-
cines or send for some frowsy quack of their own
race. When they grow worse, they summon a
filthy black ecclesiastic and begin to pray to God.
The result is that the death-rate among the lowest
classes of these semi-human savages is fully sixty
per thousand per annum. This is just about five
times the normal death-rate among civilized white
men.

Is the negro — or low-caste white man — to blame
for his poverty and ignorance ? No more, I think,
than he is to blame for his filthiness and dishonesty.
He can't help being lazy and he can't help being
stupid, for he is a low-caste man, and he has a
low-caste mind. That mind is unable to grasp any
but the most elemental concepts. Tell him, as his
pastors tell him, that if he gives five cents to the
church he will be saved from hell, and he can un-

Men vs. the Man in

derstand it. But try to make him grasp the com-
plicated chains of ratiocination whereby civilized
man has determined that vaccination will almost
infallibly prevent smallpox and rabies, that quinine
will cure malaria, and that a long and complex
treatment will arrest tuberculosis — and he is as
pitifully helpless as the average college professor
in the presence of a problem not solved in the text-
books.

I think you perceive, by now, that I do not
regard Pasteur and his fellow-explorers as saviours
of the great masses. Their work, true enough,
has perceptibly alleviated the sufferings of even the
lowest castes, but its chief value, by long odds, has
been to the higher castes. It is only, indeed, by
reason of the despotic intimidation of these higher
castes — an intimidation, it may be said, which al-
ways has its chief spring in notions of self-defense
—that the lower castes have been compelled, willy
nilly, to enjoy any benefit at all. We vaccinate
negroes, not because they want to be vaccinated or
because we harbor a yearning to preserve their
useless lives, but because we don't want them to
fall ill of smallpox in our kitchens and stables, and
so expose us to inconvenience, danger, and ex-
pense. With few exceptions, they are piously op-
posed to baring their arms, and regard the neces-
sity for so doing as proof positive that they are
down-trodden and oppressed. Let them choose
for themselves, and they would be dying of small-

ii2 Men vs. the Man

pox to-day just as copiously as they are dying of
tuberculosis.

In their vain rebellion against the very things
which make life bearable for them, they reveal the
eternal philosophy of the low-caste man. He is
forever down-trodden and oppressed. He is for-
ever opposed to a surrender of his immemorial
superstitions, prejudices, swinishness, and inertia.
He is forever certain that, if only some god would
lend him a hand and give him his just rights, he
would be rich, happy, and care-free. And he is
forever and utterly wrong.

I am glad you made necessary all this explana-
tion of my apparent inconsistency, for it gives me
a chance to explain another matter in which you
probably misunderstand me. The thing I refer
to may be best indicated, perhaps, by the question,
what factors determine the caste of a man? You
Socialists are prone to assume that all who stand
without your ranks subscribe to what you call the
capitalistic or bourgeois theory of civilization, and
I have no doubt that you regard me as one of its
advocates. That is to say, you probably believe
that I judge a man's importance by his material
success in life — that I look upon all poor men
as men of low caste, ipso facto, and all million-
aires, nobles, and governmental functionaries
as men of high caste. But that is by no means
true.

As a matter of fact, the standards I should like

Men vs. the Man 113

to set up are far more complicated than this bour-
geois test. They admit many a relatively poor
man to the highest of all castes, and they place
many a very rich man in that nadir caste which
offers a refuge for the congenital idiot, the scrofu-
lous, the faith-curist, and the believer in signs,
hunches and St. Anthony of Padua. They are
standards, as I have said, of a certain complexity,
and if, at times, they seem to admit one and the
same man to both a very high caste and a very low
one, I have only to urge in their defense that human
existence is a very complex and puzzling thing,
and that I have no faith whatever in the socialistic
idea that it will be possible, some day, to solve all
of its riddles with one master-equation.

Well, then, what virtues do I demand in the
man who claims enrollment in the highest caste?
Briefly, I demand that he possess, to an unusual and
striking degree, all of those qualities, or most of
them, which most obviously distinguish the average
man from the average baboon. If you look into
the matter, you will find that the chief of these
qualities is a sort of restless impatience with things
as they are — a sort of insatiable desire to help along
the evolutionary process. The man who possesses
this quality is ceaselessly eager to increase and
fortify his mastery of his environment. He has a
vast curiosity and a vast passion for solving the
problems it unfolds before him. His happiness
lies in the consciousness that he has made some

ii4 Men vs. the Man

progress to-day in comprehending and turning to
his uses those forces which menaced him yesterday.
His eye is fixed, not upon heaven, but upon earth;
not upon eternity, but upon to-morrow. He enters
the world infinitely superior to a mere brute, and
when he leaves it his superiority may be expressed
(in bad algebra) by infinity plus x. By his life
and labors, the human race, or some part of it,
makes some measurable progress, however small,
upward from the ape.

You will observe that this fine frenzy for im-
provement, for change, for progress, is entirely
absent in even the highest of the lower animals.
It is also absent, perhaps, in the very lowest types
of human beings ; but here, at least, it certainly be-
gins to appear far down the scale. The most ig-
norant and miserable slave in central Asia is able,
I take it, to formulate some idea of a state of
being preferable to his own; just as the most de-
graded American negro is equal to the concept of a
land flowing with milk and honey. But here we
begin to note a distinction which differentiates the
merely sentient man from the unmistakably higher
man. The one dreams chaotic dreams, without
working out practicable plans for their realiza-
tion. The other, having efficiency as well as
imagination, makes the thing itself arise out of the
idea of it. The one pins his faith to Christianity,
Socialism, or some other vaporous miracle-cult.
The other peers through microscopes, builds great

Men vs. the Man 115

steamships, reclaims deserts, makes laws, and over-
turns the gods.

And so I arrive at my definition of the first-
caste man. He is one whose work in the world
increases, to some measurable extent, that ever-
widening gap which separates civilized man from
the protozoon in the sea ooze. It is possible, you
will note, for a man to amass billions, and yet
lend no hand in this progress; and it is possible,
again, for a man to live in poverty, and yet set
the clock ahead a thousand years. It is possible,
once more, for a man to aid progress in one way
and aid reaction in some other way. And so, to
sum up, it is possible for a poor man to belong to
the highest caste of men, and for a rich man to
belong to the lowest; and it is possible, again,
for one and the same man to belong, at different
times or even at the same time, to both castes. If
you think this last idea an absurdity, let me cite
John D. Rockefeller as an example. His vast im-
provements in the interchange of commodities en-
title him to a place in the front rank of those whose
lives have made for human progress; and yet his
belief, as a good Baptist, that total immersion in
water is a necessary prerequisite for entry into
heaven, places him, quite unmistakably, in the low-
est caste of superstitious barbarians.

Now, what I want to insist upon, in all this, is
that the distinction I have described is the product,
not so much of varying environment as of inborn

n6 Men vs. the Man

differences. I admit freely enough that, by care-
ful breeding, supervision of environment and edu-
cation, extending over many generations, it might
be possible to make an appreciable improvement
in the stock of the American negro, for example,
but I must maintain that this enterprise would be
a ridiculous waste of energy, for there is a high-
caste white stock ready to hand, and it is inconceiv-
able that the negro stock, however carefully it
might be nurtured, could ever even remotely ap-
proach it. The educated negro of to-day is a
failure, not because he meets insuperable diffi-
culties in life, but because he is a negro. His brain
is not fitted for the higher forms of mental effort;
his ideals, no matter how laboriously he is trained
and sheltered, remain those of the clown. He is,
in brief, a low-caste man, to the manner born, and
he will remain inert and inefficient until fifty gen-
erations of him have lived in civilization. And
even then, the superior white race will be fifty gen-
erations ahead of him.

I have used the negro as an example because in
him the inherited marks of the low-caste man are
peculiarly conspicuous. In some of the European
peasants who are now coming to America — and
particularly in those from Russia — the same marks
are to be seen. These peasants differ as much
from the high-caste white man as a mustang differs
from a Kentucky stallion, and this difference is the
product, not of their actual environment, but of

Men vs. the Man 117

their forefathers' environment through innumer-
able generations. They represent a step in the lad-
der of evolution below that of the civilized white
man, and no conceivable change of environment
could lift them to the top en masse, in a lifetime.
Individuals of extraordinary capacity occasionally
appear among them — the naturalists call such ab-
normal individuals " sports " —and pass over auto-
matically and at once into some higher caste. But
they can get no higher than a caste in which in-
dividuals fully equal to them are the rule instead
of the exception; and the generality of their race
must forever remain below.

Castes are not made by man, but by nature.
They will be inevitable so long as every genus of
living beings in the world is divided into species,
and every species is made up of individuals whose
resemblance to one another, however close it may
be, never reaches identity. It is this variation
which makes progress possible, for it gives certain
individuals an advantage in the struggle for ex-
istence, and these individuals tend to crowd out
their weaker brothers, and to make their own
heartier qualities dominant in the general racial
strain. Among the lower animals the struggle for
existence is frankly a matter of dog eat dog.
Among men, it is more elusive, and the alert, curi-
ous, intelligent man I have described has an even
greater advantage, perhaps, than the man of mere
physical vigor. But whether the weapons in the

n8 Men vs. the Man

struggle be sharp teeth or efficient brains, there
must always be a caste of victors and a caste of
vanquished. Any effort to suspend the struggle is
empty vanity — and I here use the word in both of
its common meanings.

But Professor Ward dissents. He holds that
" class distinctions in society are wholly artificial,
depend entirely upon environing conditions, and
are in no sense due to differences in native capacity."
At first sight this sentence seems to be an un-
qualified denial of the law of natural selection — a
thesis, I fancy, that not even a Socialist would care
to maintain — but, as a matter of fact, Professor
Ward is merely trying to argue that congenital
differences, while actually existing, are counter-
balanced by class privileges and vested rights. In
other words, he believes that a man's place in the
world is determined, not by the intelligence and
capacity he brings into the world, but by the for-
tuitous circumstances, opportunities, and surround-
ings he encounters after his arrival. A man with
the intellect of a Huxley, born to a family of
Baptist farm laborers, may remain ignorant, super-
stitious, and degraded until the end of his days.
And a man but a hair's breadth removed from
imbecility, born to a noble house, may square the
circle or change the map of the world.

This theory, as I have before indicated, is the
favorite fallacy and chief solace of all degenerate
and inefficient races of men. " If I had a million

Men vs. the Man 119

dollars " — but you know the rest of it as well as I.
It is one of the multitude of sophistries that meet
the pragmatic test of truth, for it plainly makes
life more bearable. The man who formulates it
enjoys a comforting glow of relief, of conscious
virtue, of martyrdom. He has found a scapegoat
to bear the blame for his inability to rise above
the morass in which he wallows, and that scape-
goat he variously denominates fate, luck, civiliza-
tion, plutocracy, privilege, the protective tariff, civil
service reform, or the devil.

If, as the pragmatists and supernaturalists would
have us believe, the mere persistence and agreeable-
ness of an idea were proofs of its truth, this
one would be perpetually and indubitably true.
But I cannot bring myself to accept so ingenuous a
gnosiology. As a matter of fact, I am firmly
convinced that the idea we are discussing tends to
become, not true, but false, in exact ratio to its per-
sistence and agreeableness. That is to say, in the
case of a man to whom it occurs but occasionally
and then only in moments of emotional weakness,
it may be true very often. But in the case of the
man who adopts it as his working philosophy of
life, it is not true more than once in ten million
times.

The efficient man of highest caste makes it his
rule to accept the world as he finds it, and to work
out his own salvation with a light heart. His joy
is in effort, in work, in progress. A difficulty over-

Men vs. the Man

come, a riddle solved, an enemy vanquished, a fact
proved, an error destroyed — in such things he
finds the meaning of life and surcease from its
sorrows. But the inefficient man, unable by his
own hand and brain to cope with the conditions
which beset and menace him, seeks refuge, soon or
late, in the notion that the world is out of joint.
Sometimes he concludes, finally, that the horrors of
existence are irremediable, and then he is ripe for
religion, with its promises of repayment in some
gaseous paradise beyond the grave. At other
times he arrives at the idea that all would be well
if there were some abysmal reconstruction of the
scheme of things — some new deal of the cards, with
four aces pushed his way. When this madness
falls upon him he gropes about for a ready guide
to the Utopia that arises nebulously in his brain.
And thus it is that discontented, ignorant, helpless
men subscribe to the poetical fancies of imaginative
dreamers, and become single-taxers, Christian
Scientists, Anarchists, or Socialists.

The great objections to Socialism, as a philoso-
phy, are that it encourages and aggravates the feel-
ing of martyrdom which burns in the breasts of
all such incompetents, and that it inflames them, at
the same time, with the idea that their discomfort
is due, not to the operation of natural laws, which
benefit the world by ridding it automatically and
harshly of the unfit, but to the deliberate and devil-
ish cruelty of their betters. Your true Socialist is

Men vs. the Man 121

firmly convinced, before everything else, that his
personal existence is of vast and undoubted value
to the world, and that the world, if it were not a
swindling felon, would reward him handsomely
for remaining alive.

Now, since the majority of all Socialists belong
to the laboring class, and get their living by join-
ing their muscle-power to the natural forces which
man has harnessed — because of this circumstance,
the general idea I have set forth is transformed,
by Socialists, into the specific doctrine that the only
truly valuable man is the " producer." That is to
say, the only human service which fully earns and
deserves the reward provided by the law of sup-
ply and demand, is that sort of service which re-
sults in the production of some commodity neces-
sary to the actual day-to-day existence of mankind.
Such a service deserves, not some definite reward,
but all the reward that those who require it may
be bludgeoned into paying for it. Thus the
farmer who hoes a cabbage patch, and by taking
advantage of the hunger of his fellow-men, makes
them pay for his cabbages, is, by the socialistic
philosophy, a virtuous man. His fellow-men have
less cabbages than they need and the farmer him-
self has more than he needs. Very well, then, let
them pay his price ! But the man who has a sur-
plus of some other valuable thing, say shrewdness,
capital, forethought, intelligence, or cunning, and
demands a fair profit on the exchange from those

122 Men vs. the Man

who have less than they need, and desire to buy of
him — this man, by the socialistic philosophy, is a
criminal.

You Socialists, my dear La Monte, here over-
look the fact that no man worthy of the name is
content to stand still. He wants to be richer, more
learned or more powerful to-morrow than he was
yesterday. In other words, he looks, not only for
a fair equivalent, but also for a profit, in all of his
exchanges with his fellow-men. Your laboring
brothers are demanding that profit to-day. They
want, not only fair wages, but the whole value
of the things they produce. Well, the same selfish
weakness afflicts their masters, too. The latter,
when they buy muscle-power, want enough to bal-
ance the money they pay for it — and a profit be-
side. The laboring man has nothing to give ex-
cept muscle-power, and so, after he has given
enough of it to balance his pay, he must give a lit-
tle more to make up his master's profit. As I have
told you in the past, I think you greatly exagger-
ate the actual percentage of profit, in all such trans-
actions; but that there always is a profit, and a
distinctly appreciable one, I admit very readily.
If there were none at all, no efficient, high-caste
man would engage in industrial enterprises; for
no man of that sort could possibly rest content
with standing still.

Sincerely,

MENCKEN.

LA MONTE'S FOURTH LETTER

DEAR MENCKEN :

I must apologize for some slight delay in an-
swering your last very interesting letter. The fact
is that your great and good friend, Mr. Roosevelt,
did not take the advice of his sociological friends
and destroy his anti-socialist manuscripts, but in-
stead unloaded them on the Outlook, with the
result that on the very day I had set apart to
write to you I received a hurry-up call for a reply
to that eminent Nietzschean, our ex-President.

And now, when I should be planting potatoes
and peas, I must devote a few hours to your en-
lightenment, but my little encounter with Mr.
Roosevelt has vastly increased my respect for you.
In your three letters thus far you have not made
as many blunders as Mr. Roosevelt perpetrated in
the first Outlook article alone, and you have never
shown a tithe of the bitterness.

After reading your letter there arose in my
mind a picture of you which, had I the pencil of a
Ryan Walker or a McCutcheon, I should draw
for you. In this picture you are hotly pursued by
hostile and malevolent Socialists, and seeing no
escape elsewhere you have sought rescue and shel-

"3

124 Men vs. the Man

ter by throwing yourself into the arms of a good
old Baltimore colored " mammy." Really, this pic-
ture has so captivated my imagination that I have
not the heart at once to tear you from her pro-
tecting arms. For the present, I shall content
myself by warning you that even there you are not
safe from the terrible Socialists.

I should never have guessed from the appear-
ance of the Baltimore darky that he (or she) was
the Palladium of our sacred institutions. But, in
the language of Bernard Shaw, " You never can
tell." This important role has, by most critics of
Socialism, been forced upon that humble and use-
ful person, the scavenger.

" I have seldom," says Robert Blatchford in
" Merrie England," " heard an argument or read
an adverse letter or speech against the claims of
justice in social matters, but our friend the
scavenger played a prominent part therein. Truly
this scavenger is a most important person. Yet
one would not suppose that the whole cosmic
scheme revolved on him as on an axis; one would
not imagine him to be the keystone of European
society — at least his appearance and his wages
would not justify such an assumption. But I begin
to believe that the fear of the scavenger is really
the source and fountain head, the life and blood
and breath of all conservatism. Good old
scavenger! His ash-pan is the bulwark of cap-
italism, and his besom the standard around which

Men vs. the Man 125

rally the pride and the culture and the opulence
of British society."

Poor old scavenger ! His occupation has gone ;
you have given his job of " saving society " to the
Baltimore darky.

But we shall return to the " colored man and
brother " later. At present I want to express my
gratification at having at last discovered what you
mean by your favorite phrase, " high-caste men."
It is now obvious to me that the perfect type of
your first-caste man is the Christian priest or
clergyman.

You say that his distinguishing characteristic is
" a sort of insatiable desire to help along the evolu-
tionary process." In other words he shows primi-
tive animistic habits of thought by exhibiting what
I described in " Socialism : Positive and Nega-
tive " (page 97) as "the tendency to give a tele-
ological interpretation to evolution, to attribute a
meliorative trend to the cosmic process, as in Ten-
nyson's ' through the ages one increasing purpose

runs.'

That this cropping out of a semi-theological
habit of thought in your last letter is not a mere
fortuitous phrase, but is on the contrary part and
parcel of your habitual view of the universe, is
shown by your statement in your first letter that
your " creed consists, first and last, in a firm belief
in the beneficence and permanence of the evolu-
tionary process."

126 Men vs. the Man

Thorstein Veblen has this to say of the origin
of this habit of attributing ethical purposes or ef-
fects to " natural laws " :

" Along with the habits of thought peculiar to
the technology of handicraft, modern science also
took over and assimilated much of the institutional
preconceptions of the era of handicraft and petty
trade. The ' natural laws,' with the formulation
of which this early modern science is occupied, are
the rules governing natural ' uniformities of se-
quence/ and they punctiliously formulate the due
procedure of any given cause creatively working
out the achievement of a given effect, very much
as the craft rules sagaciously specified the due
routine for turning out a staple article of merchant-
able goods. But these * natural laws ' of science
are also felt to have something of that integrity
and prescriptive moral force that belongs to the
principles of the system of ' natural rights ' which
the era of handicraft has contributed to the insti-
tutional scheme of later times. The natural laws
were not only held to be true to fact, but they were
also felt to be right and good. They were looked
upon as intrinsically meritorious and beneficent,
and were held to carry a sanction of their own.
This habit of uncritically imputing merit and
equity to the 4 natural laws ' of science continued
in force through much of the nineteenth century;
very much as the habitual acceptance of the prin-
ciples of * natural rights ' has held on by force of

Men vs. the Man 127

tradition long after the exigencies of experience out
of which these ' rights ' sprang ceased to shape
men's habits of life. This traditional attitude of
submissive approval toward the ' natural laws ' of
science has not yet been wholly lost, even among
the scientists of the passing generation, many of
whom have uncritically invested these ' laws ' with
a prescriptive rectitude and excellence; but so far,
at least, has this animus progressed toward disuse
that it is now chiefly a matter for expatiation in
the pulpit, the accredited vent for the exudation of
effete matter from the cultural organism." *

You, my dear Mencken, do not appear to be yet
wholly free from anthropomorphic habits of
thought, as it is obvious you give the clergy no in-
considerable aid in their onerous task of exuding
effete matter from the cultural organism.

My own ideal man would be a man wholly de-
voted to promoting human happiness (and mind
I have said human happiness, not a hog's concep-
tion of happiness), and who would be entirely pre-
pared, in case it should be necessary to achieve his
goal, to strive manfully to modify, avert, or de-
feat the * natural ' results of the evolutionary
process. The man who feels " a sort of insatiable
desire to help along the evolutionary process " is
still fast enmeshed in the bonds of superstition, and

'THORSTEIN VEBLEN. "The Evolution of the Scientific
Point of View." University of California Chronicle, Vol. X,
pp. 4U-4I4.

ia8 Men vs. the Man

has merely made a fetish of " the evolutionary
process " to erect upon the altar from which he has
hurled the old gods.

If the hypotheses of Mr. Percival Lowell in his
recent brilliant book on Mars are correct, the
u evolutionary process " there, had it not been
modified and interfered with by intelligence, would
by this time have almost wholly exterminated both
vegetable and animal life on that interesting planet.
But whether his hypotheses be right or wrong, this
illustration will enable you to conceive that circum-
stances may arise that will make the opposing of
the " evolutionary process " the highest function
of the " high-caste man."

But, although it would be difficult to find many
educated and intelligent men to-day outside the
ranks of the clergy who could give in an unquali-
fied allegiance to your creed — the creed of your
" men of the first caste " —I know well enough
that it is not your belief that the whole scheme of
things should be shaped with a view to producing
the maximum number of clergymen. For you, in-
deed, increase of the priesthood is synonymous with
retrogression.

By " high-caste men " you really mean men of
intelligence and energy — truly emancipated men,
and if the increase of such men is to produce the
effects you expect, you must also impute to them
kindly emotions.

But will not your " high-caste man " of the

Men vs. the Man 129

future be terribly lonesome amid the " rabble " ?
Without insulting the good people of Baltimore,
may I ask if you do not at times feel impelled to
imitate Bernard Shaw's Eugene Marchbanks in
" Candida " and talk to yourself out loud? " That
is what all poets do," Marchbanks said, " they
talk to themselves out loud; and the world over-
hears them. But it's horribly lonely not to hear
someone else talk sometimes."

That remark pierces the fundamental weak spot
in your ideal and Nietzsche's; could you realize
fully your ideal to-morrow, loneliness would turn
your paradise for Supermen into a veritable
hell.

Any ideal that does not include the closest pos-
sible approximation to economic equality suffers
from this same vice. Without economic equality,
you may mitigate but you cannot eradicate the hell
of loneliness which to-day makes discontented per-
sons of you and me and hosts of others. " A
wholly emancipated person," says Lester F. Ward,
" finds himself almost completely alone in the
world. There is not one perhaps in a whole city
in which he lives with whom he can converse five
minutes, because the moment anyone begins to talk
he reveals the fact that his mind is a bundle of er-
rors, of false conceits, of superstitions, and of
prejudices that render him utterly uninteresting.
The great majority are running off after some pop-
ular fad. Of course the most have already abro-

130 Men vs. the Man

gated their reasoning powers entirely by accepting
some creed. The few that have begun to doubt
their creed are looking for another. They may
think they are progressing, but their credulity is
as complete as ever, and they are utterly devoid
of any knowledge by which to test the credibility
of their beliefs." ("Applied Sociology," page
8 1. Boston, 1906.)

And here we come back for a minute or two to
the " colored man and brother." As long as you
are compelled to live in the same city with some
thousands of negroes, whom you appear to find
more or less uninteresting as fellow-citizens, would
it not be wise to see if by increased opportunities
they might not be made more interesting? If
poverty-stricken, drunken negroes spreading ver-
min and syphilis and other contagion throughout
your city are, as they undoubtedly are, a perpetual
menace to your peace and happiness, would it not
be wise to make a brave and honest attempt to free
the negroes from poverty and syphilis and
drunkenness? Would not Baltimore then be a
pleasanter city in which to dwell ?

Unless you have the courage to go to the
Nietzschean extreme and boldly advocate the ex-
termination of the negro (and the Russian peas-
ant, whom you place in the same category) you
must join the Socialists in their efforts to enable
the negroes to live human lives under human con-
ditions. For the people of Baltimore this is

Men vs. the Man 131

merely a question of self-defense or rather self-
preservation.

To demand for the negro a chance to live a truly
human life is not to assert his equality in all re-
spects with the white race. Says Enrico Ferri,
" Socialism says: Men are unequal, but they are all
men.

" And, in fact, although each individual is born
and develops in a fashion more or less different
from that of all other individuals, — just as there
are not in a forest two leaves identically alike, so
in the whole world there are not two men in all re-
spects equals, the one of the other, — nevertheless
every man, simply because he is a human being, has
a right to the existence of a man, and not of a
slave or a beast of burden." ("Socialism and
Modern Science," pages 20, 21. New York,
1904.)

But as a matter of fact up to the present time
negroes as a race have enjoyed so few opportuni-
ties that it is utterly unscientific to dogmatize about
their potentialities. It is just as unwarranted to
deny their potential future equality as it is to
deny their present inequality.

Lester F. Ward, after reviewing the evidence
for and against racial inequality, sums up the
matter as follows :

" It is not therefore proved that intellectual in-
equality, which can be safely predicated of all
classes in the white race, in the yellow race, or in

132 Men vs. the Man

the black race, each taken by itself, cannot also be
predicated of all races taken together, and it is
still more clear that there is no race and no class
of human beings who are incapable of assimilating
the social achievement of mankind and of profita-
bly employing the social heritage. " ("Applied
Sociology," page no.)

That is all that Socialism demands for the
negro, and the South will never be a desirable
place of residence till that demand is granted.

That is my honest belief, and I probably im-
bibed in my youth as much prejudice on the negro
question as you did, for I passed three years at a
Southern boarding school and at the University of
Virginia.

In closing my last letter, I promised in this to
admit your charge that Socialists are prone to ac-
cept evidence and theories that tend to help their
side of the argument, and to show you that this
peculiarity was not confined to Socialists, and to
draw some deductions of importance from these
facts.

The fact is that all beliefs that have been held
by considerable bodies of people have been be-
gotten by desires, and that these desires are the
emotional expressions of economic interests. Al-
though I would not blame you if you should be
growing weary of my frequent quotations from
Lester F. Ward, I cannot refrain from quoting his
admirable exposition of this point.

Men vs. the Man 133

" It may be said," he writes, " that the uni-
versal world ideas which are said to lead or rule
the world are simply beliefs. This is very nearly
true, and therefore we need to inquire specially into
the nature of beliefs. The difference between be-
lief and opinion is slight, at least in popular usage.
Belief might be defined as fixed or settled opinion,
but there is also embraced in it a certain disre-
gard of the evidence upon which it rests, while in
opinion a certain amount of evidence is implied.
Opinions admit of comparison as regards their
strength depending upon the evidence, and may be
very feebly held, the ' weight ' of evidence in their
favor being nearly balanced by that against them.
This cannot be said of beliefs. In these the evi-
dence is not thought of. They are absolute and
independent of all proof. Upon what, then, do
they rest? Here we reach the kernel of our
problem. Beliefs rest on interest. But what is
interest? It is feeling. World views grow out
of feelings. They are the bulwarks of race safety.
You cannot argue men out of them. They are the
conditions to group as well as to individual salva-
tion.

" Now it is just this element of interest that
links beliefs to desires and reconciles the ideological
and economic interpretations of history; for
economics, by its very definition of value, is based
on desires and their satisfaction. Every belief
embodies a desire, or rather a great mass of de-

134 Men vs. the Man

sires. In this lies the secret of its power to pro-
duce effects. The belief or idea, considered as a
purely intellectual phenomenon, is not a force.
The force lies in the desire. And here we must
be careful not to invert the terms. The belief
does not cause the desire. The reverse is much
nearer the truth. Desires are economic demands
arising out of the nature of man and the condi-
tions of existence. They are demands for satis-
faction, and the sum total of the influences, in-
ternal and external, acting upon a group or an in-
dividual, leads to the conclusion, belief, or idea
that a certain proposition is true. That proposi-
tion, though always reducible to the indicative
form, is essentially an imperative, and prompts
certain actions regarded as essential to the preserva-
tion of the individual or the group. The fact that
the interests involved are sometimes transcendental
interests and become increasingly so with the in-
tellectual development of the race, does not affect
the truth of all this. All interest is essentially
economic, and seen in their true light religious in-
terests are as completely economic as the so-called
material interests. All conduct enjoined by reli-
gion— not only the most primitive but also the
most highly developed religions — aims at the satis-
faction of desire, of which the avoidance of pun-
ishment is only a form, for economic considera-
tions are always both positive and negative in this
sense. And if in the higher religions the positive

Men vs. the Man 135

interests come to predominate over the negative
ones, this only renders them more typically eco-
nomic in their character." (" Applied Sociology/'
pages 45;46.)

This idea that religious ideals have economic
roots cannot be unfamiliar to such a student of
Friedrich Nietzsche as yourself. Do you not re-
call that wonderful passage in " A Genealogy of
Morals " in which he tells us how " ideals are
manufactured" on earth? He shows how the
early converts to Christianity, being weak and
slaves and helpless, falsified " weakness into
desert" and " impotence which requiteth not into
* goodness ' ; timorous meanness into ' humility,' '
and called " not-to-be-able-to-take-revenge " " not-
to-will-revenge, perhaps even forgiveness."

But while the idea that religious beliefs have
been moulded by economic conditions is familiar
to you, you will probably be startled when I assert
that this is equally true of scientific beliefs. I de-
veloped this thesis very inadequately in a paper on
" Science and Revolution " in the Social-Demo-
crat (London) for March 15, 1909, and after I
had mailed the manuscript I received from Pro-
fessor Veblen a copy of his paper on " The Evo-
lution of the Scientific Point of View" (from
which I have already quoted in this letter) , which
develops the same thesis with far greater clearness
and ability.

In the former paper I wrote :

136 Men vs. the Man

I have no disposition to deny the essential truth of
Modern Science and the great potential benefits it has
conferred upon humanity, when I assert that the form of
scientific theories has been largely determined by the
economic conditions amid which they arose, and that —
this is the important point — their acceptance by large
bodies of adherents has depended upon their fitness to
meet the desires — desires produced by economic needs —
of those adherents.

This general position was assumed by Karl Kautsky
in his " Social Revolution," and, with more facts at
his disposal, Arthur Morrow Lewis has elaborated it
still further in his lecture on De Vries' " Mutation " in
his excellent little handbook " Evolution : Social and
Organic" (Chicago, 1908); but even since those books
were written the development of scientific theory has
overwhelmingly reenforced the view that science responds
to economic stimuli.

Space will not permit me to give here any save the
briefest sketch of scientific theory during the last century
and a quarter.

When the bourgeoisie were fresh from their revolu-
tionary conflict with feudalism — the great French Revo-
lution— and were still extending their dominion, they
were iconoclastic and revolutionary in spirit. It was
precisely then that the cataclysmic theories of Cuvier
in geology and biology became the generally accepted
theories of science. Cuvier accounted for the existence
of fossil remains of animals different from any living
species by assuming that from time to time in the past
great cataclysms (earthquakes and eruptions) had oc-
curred and wiped out all living forms of life, and that

Men vs. the Man 137

fresh creations had filled the vacancies. This theory
at the same time accounted for the conformation of
the earth's surface. The same cataclysms had dug oceans
and lakes and piled up mountains.

Contemporary with Cuvier was Lamarck, and Lamarck
proclaimed the true theory that animals had descended
from ancestors unlike themselves, but there was no large
class of people to whom this doctrine was acceptable,
and Lamarck died disgraced, and Cuvier in the height
of his glory was called upon to pronounce his eulogy,
and took advantage of the opportunity to malign him.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the bourgeoisie
were firmly seated in the saddle; the last vestige of
feudalism and the restrictions of the guild system (and
in England of protective tariffs) had been wiped out;
the bourgeoisie had the proletariat just where they wanted
them. In a word, they had no more use for revolutionary
theories in their business; if changes must come, let
them come a step at a time. Thus the conditions for
the wide acceptance of evolutionary theories in biology
and geology were ripe, so that in spite of the rage of the
clergy nothing could prevent the general conquest of
the scientific world by the natural selection of Darwin
and Wallace, and the uniformitarian geology of Sir
Charles Lyell. So true is this that on last Fpriday
(February 12, 1909), the centenary of the births of
Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin, many of the
clergy who had been called upon to deliver Lincoln ora-
tions were unable to restrain themselves from adding a
word of tribute to Charles Darwin.

Darwin, like Lamarck, taught that animals had de-
scended from ancestors unlike themselves, and that the

138 Men vs. the Man

changes in animals leading to new species had been
very slow and gradual. It is true that Darwin and
Lamarck differed as to the means by which these changes
had been brought about, but in the particulars I have
named they were at one. Yet Lamarck was dishonored,
and to-day most men look upon Darwin as the greatest
genius of the nineteenth century. Why this difference?
Economic conditions is the only possible answer.

Sir Charles Lyell laid great stress upon the minute
changes in the earth's surface that are always in progress,
and reduced the role of cataclysms to an extremely in-
significant one — and he became the recognized father
of modern geology. Sir Charles Lyell taught us much
and valuable truth; the small changes he noted are
actually constantly going on, and their accumulated
effects are tremendous, and before Lyell's day they had
been unnoticed and neglected. But his great reputation
raised to a sacred dogma the utterly indefensible doctrine
that (to translate the pedantic Latin) " Nature makes
no leaps."

Darwin taught that natural selection seizes upon the
minutest variation that gives the individual even the
slightest imaginable advantage in the struggle for exist-
ence, and that the fixing and accumulation of these in-
finitesimal variations in time brings about the introduc-
tion of new species. At the very time when Darwin
was pursuing his researches, the laws of heredity were
being experimentally worked out in a monastery garden
in Briinn, Austria, by a monk who had previously studied
natural science in Vienna. This monk was Gregor
Mendel, the discoverer and formulator of the laws of
heredity. His studies have enabled us to predict mathe-

Men vs. the Man 139

matically the results of almost any conceivable experiment
in hybridization. Incidentally, his studies showed that
slight variations in height, etc., that might be of marked
advantage to the individual in whom they occurred, were
no more likely to appear again in his progeny than they
were in the progeny of less favored individuals. The
remarkable results of Mendel's studies were published
in the " Proceedings of the Natural History Society of
Briinn " in 1865, just six years after the publication
of Darwin's famous " Origin of Species." It is only fair
to note that, so far as we know, Darwin never knew
anything of the work of Mendel. But the important
point for us is that there was at that time, as it were,
no market for the discovery that the raw material for
natural selection to work upon must consist of " leaps "
or, in other words, of much more marked and considerable
variations than Darwin and Wallace had worked so hard
to prove the adequacy of. And the fact is that Mendel's
remarkable paper was forgotten and buried, and was not
exhumed and resurrected until the dawn of the twentieth
century by some earnest scientific workers at the Uni-
versity of Cambridge.

What had happened in the meantime to bring about
a readiness in the minds of large bodies of intelligent
men and women to accept cataclysmic theories in the
natural sciences? There can be but one answer — the
appearance of the ever-growing International Social De-
mocracy. Economic conditions had created an army of
30,000,000 or 40,000,000 earnest men and women stead-
fastly striving for revolution, and among them were
to be numbered the cream of the intellectuals of both
hemispheres. Here was the " demand " for cataclysmic

140 Men vs. the Man

theories, and with the closing decade of the nineteenth
century science began to furnish the " supply." This
supply is now increasing so rapidly that the task of
keeping abreast of the new theories is bewildering, and
the danger appears to be that by the close of this, the
first decade of the twentieth century, our most advanced
scientists will be teaching that nature makes nothing
but leaps, that all development is by cataclysms or revo-
lutions. At all events, we are reasonably sure that the
charge of being unscientific will not much longer be
hurled at the revolutionists in the Socialist ranks. In the
second decade of the twentieth century we may expect
to see the opportunists and reformers using their utmost
ingenuity to answer the very charge they have so often
hurled at our heads.

Toward the close of the nineteenth century a Dutch
botanist, Hugo De Vries, noticed some new varieties of
evening primroses in his garden near Amsterdam. They
came from some self-sown plants of the common American
Lamarckiana. " In the test condition of De Vries' own
garden," Mr. Lewis tells us, " in an experiment covering
thirteen years, he observed over fifty thousand of the
Lamarckiana spread over eight generations, and of these
eight hundred were mutations divided among seven new
elementary species. These mutations when self-fertilized,
or fertilized from plants like themselves, bred true to
themselves, thus answering the test of a real species.
De Vries also watched the field from which his original
forms were taken, and saw that similar mutations occurred
there, so that they were not in any way due to cultivation."

That was the main contribution of the nineteenth
century to cataclysmic biology. De Vries held that

Men vs. the Man 141

Darwin admitted the possibility of such mutations in addi-
tion to the ordinary lesser variations or " fluctuations "
which Wallace and most Darwinians have held to be
the only raw material that Nature provides for natural
selection to work upon, and in this he is probably correct,
though it is beyond question that Darwin devoted most
of his life to proving the adequacy of " fluctuations."

Mr. Punnett, of Cambridge, who is the leading ex-
ponent of Mendelism, in his book on that subject, " Men-
delism " (Cambridge, 1907), says that where fluctuations
appear to be inherited they are probably " in reality small
mutations." He summarizes the case in this way: "Of
the inheritance of mutations there is no doubt. Of the
transmission of fluctuations there is no very strong evi-
dence. It is therefore reasonable to regard the mutation
as the main, if not the only, basis of evolution."

Remember, this is the extreme swing of the pendulum.
He really admits that natural selection preserves some
small changes, too, but he re-christens such changes " small
mutations." But it would be just as fair for a revolu-
tionist to infer from this that Nature works only by
revolutions, as it ever was for an opportunist reformer
to infer from Darwin's teaching that Nature works only
by evolution. As a matter of fact, in neither case is
there any justification for transferring a law of biology
to a totally different science, sociology.

Space will not permit me to give more than a glimpse
at similar changes in other sciences. Professor T. J. J.
See, who has been in charge of the United States Astro-
nomical Observatory at Mare Island, near San Francisco,
has made a profound study of earthquakes, and published
his results in the " Proceedings of the American Philosoph-

142 Men vs. the Man

ical Society" at Philadelphia. He has also summarized
them in more popular form in the September (1908)
number of the Pacific Monthly. His conclusion is that all
mountains have been formed by earthquakes caused by
the secular leakage of the ocean bottom. Is not that
cataclysmic enough for you? Is it true? I do not
know, but it appears to have the indorsement of such
scientists as the Swedish physicist, Arrhenius, and the
French astronomer, Camille Flammarion. At least, it
seems beyond question that s^me mountains are formed
in that way, so we must bid a long farewell to the old
uniformitarian geology.

Astronomy has shown itself equally unable to resist
the cataclysmic tendency of the day. In Harper's Mag-
azine for January, 1909, Professor Robert Kennedy
Duncan, of the University of Kansas, tells us that " the
nebular hypothesis of Laplace is no longer tenable,"
that its place has been taken by the " planetesimal hy-
pothesis " of Professor T. C. Chamberlain, of the Univer-
sity of Chicago. This means that astronomers now be-
lieve that our solar system has been formed, not by the
infinitely slow cooling down of a vast sphere of fiery
vapor, forming one ring and then one planet after another
during almost an infinity of time, but by a sudden ex-
plosion in our ancestral sun which formed all our planets
at once by a single cataclysmic stroke! To describe the
character of their production Professor Duncan uses the
word " catastrophic."

. . . It is difficult to name a branch of science in
which the cataclysmic theory is not triumphant to-day.

Hegel's maxim that "Nothing is; everything is be-
coming " has become the fundamental assumption of all

Men vs. the Man 143

science. The chemists who have investigated the radio-
active bodies have shown us one chemical element turning
into another in a fashion to make rejoice the heart of an
old-time alchemist. Discussing this point, M. Lucien
Poincare says: "We shall have to abandon the idea
so instinctively dear to us that matter is the most stable
thing in the universe, and to admit, on the contrary,
that all bodies whatever are a kind of explosive decom-
posing with extreme slowness." ("The New Physics,"
Appleton, 1908.)

Let us be careful not to go to extremes and deny the
fact and the fruitfulness of slow evolution, but let us
with equal determination assert the necessity and efficacy
of cataclysmic revolution!

You see, my dear Mencken, I freely admit that
we Socialists believe in the theories and arguments
making for Socialism because we want to believe
in them, because we believe it is to our interest or to
the interest of humanity for us to believe in them.
But those who oppose Socialism do so because they
believe it to their interest to do so.

I believe I have demonstrated the economic
foundation of beliefs in the field in which such a
foundation would have been least suspected — that
of the natural sciences — so that I think we may
regard Lester Ward's view of beliefs as holding
good universally.

But while the beliefs of both the friends and
foes of Socialism rest on economic foundations,
there is this prime difference between them: — the

144 Men vs. the Man

Socialist foundation is steadily spreading in area
and growing in strength and solidity, while the
anti-Socialist foundation is disintegrating and
crumbling away. The pervasive influence of the
Machine Process is extending ever farther and
deeper and making more thoroughgoing the
standardization of life, and is thus ever multiplying
and invigorating the desires that make for So-
cialism at the same time that it is sapping the
strength of the desires that stand in the way of
Socialism. Unless you can point to some new
force that will intervene and retard the spread of
the influence of the Machine Process, you are
compelled to admit that the time when the vast
majority of mankind will be Socialists is not far
distant. This is the sort of an " evolutionary
process " that I and my comrades (whether you
regard them as "high-caste" or "low-caste")
have " a sort of insatiable desire to help along."

But though I saw plainly enough the effect of
economic conditions upon scientific theory when I
wrote the paper from which I have quoted so lib-
erally, it was not until I read the illumining paper
by Thorstein Veblen on " The Evolution of the
Scientific Point of View " that I saw that so long
as science was a mere shuttlecock tossed hither and
thither by varying class interests nothing worthy
of the name of science was so much as possible.
Not until the Social Revolution shall have wiped
out class lines forever, will a true science, that

Men vs. the Man 145

is a broadly human, instead of a class, science,
arise.

Literature too awaits the vivifying breath of
the Social Revolution. " Under class civiliza-
tion," says Marcus Hitch, " all literature as well
as all science may be called toy work; it does not
make for human progress directly but only inci-
dentally. The sciences and inventions are ex-
ploited by corporations primarily for profit, and
all new discoveries merely broaden the field of ex-
ploitation and give rise to larger corporations.
The toy literature and arts merely serve for the
diversion of the same class; they affect the upper
surface of society only and do not rise to the dig-
nity of really human productions, because they are
not participated in by humanity, nor is it intended
that they should be." (Goethe's " Faust." Chi-
cago, 1908, pages 38-39.)

The same point is possibly more clearly brought
out by M. Alfred Odin, Professor in the University
of Sofia, in his great work, Genese des grand
hommes,gens de lettres frangais moderns. (Paris,
1895.)

" Literature then is not," he writes, " in its
origin, and hence in its essence, that vague, ethereal,
spontaneous thing whose phantom so many his-
torians and literary critics have been pleased to
evoke. It is in the full force of the term an arti-
ficial creation, since it is derived essentially from
causes due to the intentional intervention of man,

146 Men vs. the Man

and has not resulted from the simple natural evo-
lution of mankind. It is a natural phenomenon
only as it faithfully reflects the inner mental work-
ings of certain social strata. It possesses nothing
national or popular. Literature can only be na-
tional when it springs from the very bosom of the
people, when it serves to express with equal ardor
the interests and the passions of the whole world.
French literature does not do this. With rare
exceptions it is only the mouthpiece of a few priv-
ileged circles. And this explains why, in spite of
so many efforts of every kind to spread it among
the people, it has remained upon the whole so un-
attractive and so foreign to the masses. Born in
the atmosphere of the hotbed it cannot bear the
open air. Not until, from some cause or other,
the whole population shall be brought to interest
itself actively in intellectual affairs will it be pos-
sible for a truly national literature to come forth
which shall become the common property of all
classes of society." (Page 564.)

The same story is to be told of art as of litera-
ture and science. But this letter is already over-
long, so I shall content myself by giving William
Morris's reason why to-day we can have no true
art. " In one word," he says, " slavery lies be-
tween us and art."

Do you wish to live to see a true science flour-
ish? Then, become a soldier of the Social Revolu-
tion!

Men vs. the Man 147

Do you wish to see a great human literature
blossom? Then, become a soldier of the Social
Revolution !

Do you wish to see all life made beautiful by
noble art? Then, become a soldier of the So-
cial Revolution!

The recruiting office is always open.
Yours, &c.,

R. R. LA M.

MENCKEN'S REPLY TO LA MONTE'S
FOURTH LETTER

MY DEAR LA MONTE:

You begin your letter by discoursing of
scavengers, and I shall imitate your example.
The scavenger, you point out quite accurately, is
the favorite bugaboo and Exhibit A of many of
the principal opponents of Socialism. They won-
der who will volunteer to do the scavenging in the
Socialist state, and their wonderment is soon
transformed into a denial that any scavenging will
be done at all. So pictured, the socialistic land-
scape takes on a disagreeable aspect. Heaps of
garbage disfigure the highroads; there are dead
cats in the reservoirs, and the Louvre is full of
tomato cans. The nose cries out aloud for mercy
and the human race falls prey to zymotic disease.

This seems to be the idea at the bottom of the
Rev. Thomas Dixon's anti-socialist novel, " Com-
rades." The comrades of his socialistic island,
when the time comes to choose avocations, forget
entirely the daily drudgery of the world. More
than half of the women want to be chorus girls,
college professors, and wealthy widows, and ten
per cent, of the men immolate themselves upon the

148

Men vs. the Man 149

altar of national banking. Not a hero asks an
option on the ash-cart. Not a soul offers to look
after the plumbing.

There is humor in the scene, but not a great
deal of truth. As a matter of fact the scavenger
is by no means the most ignoble of men, and his
profession never lacks willing recruits. His so-
cial position, indeed, is palpably higher than that
of the prostitute, male or female, the pickpocket
or the mendicant. The undertaker, a scavenger
with a touch of poetry, is a respected citizen in
every American village, and even in so large a
town as Philadelphia the freemen once chose an
undertaker for mayor. The scavengers who have
rid the Canal Zone of mosquitoes will live in his-
tory, and not many years hence their effigies will
grace the public places of Colon. The trained
nurse spends half of her waking hours in scaveng-
ing, and so do the doctor, the sailor, the dairyman
— all honorable men. The housewife's eternal
foe, so the soap advertisements tell us, is dirt.
You and I are scavengers, too — you, when you ap-
ply the whisk-broom to your raiment, and I when
I flick my cigar ashes out of the window, instead
of behind the piano.

No, there is no prejudice against scavenging,
but rather, among the fastidious, a passion for it;
and so far as I have been able to observe, no very
active ostracism of scavengers. The man who
calls each morning to empty my garbage can is a

150 Men vs. the Man

high dignitary in the Patriotic Order Sons of
America, and has ten times as much political in-
fluence as I have. On election day he ceases from
his labors and devotes himself to inoculating the
great masses of the plain people — of whom I have
the honor to be one — with enthusiasm. At public
gatherings of the electorate he bears a torch and
howls like a wolf. On election day I find that he
has already voted when I reach the polling-place,
and I enjoy the soothing consciousness that his bal-
lot has nullified mine. Later on, perhaps, he will
vote again, for he has nothing else to do all day.
As for me, I must get back to my desk and finish
my article on " The Republic versus Despotism."

Considering all this, I agree with you that the
reverend, but fanciful Dixon, and all those other
critics of Socialism who hail the scavenger as their
deliverer, are trusting themselves to a far from
triumphant hero.

But all the same, I am forced to appear, if un-
willingly and as a traitor, in the camp of these
critics, for I, too, fasten an argument against So-
cialism upon the scavenging gentleman. My argu-
ment, however, differs materially from theirs, for
while they see in Socialism a scheme of things that
would annihilate him, I see in it a scheme that
would elevate him to the high estate and dignity
of the gods. Under our present democracy the
scavenger, if he have ambition in him, may become
the equal of an Edison or a Cyrus Field — on cer-

Men vs. the Man 151

tain limited occasions and in certain limited re-
spects. Under Socialism he would be the peer of
these infinitely superior men at all times and in all
respects !

In other words, Socialism is indissolubly linked
with the doctrine that a man, merely by virtue of
being a man, is fitted to take a hand in the ad-
judication of all the world's most solemn and dif-
ficult causes. It insists that the voice of the ig-
norant shall be heard as respectfully as the voice
of the learned. It contends that the yearning of
the hod-carrier for a high hat and a keg of beer
shall receive as much consideration as the yearning
of an Ehrlich for the secret of cancer. It main-
tains that the Russian-born tailor, filthy to his finger
tips and the devotee of an outlandish, incompre-
hensible creed of nonsensical text-searching, shall
be the equal of the men who conquer the wilder-
ness and harness the lightning. It sees some-
thing portentous and holy in the trivial accident
that the negro loafer, drowsing in his wallow, was
born without a tail. It fastens a transcendental
importance upon the word " human " and con-
verts it into a synonym for " intelligent," " honest,"
" wise " —for every adjective that distinguishes
one caste of men from the caste below it. You
may protest all you please, and qualify your mean-
ing of " equality " however you please, but the
fact remains that if this notion that one man is as
good as another — " before God," or " as a citi-

Men vs. the Man

zen " — be taken away, Socialism ceases to be in-
telligible to rational creatures.

But am I arguing, I hear you ask, against gov-
ernment by the consent of the governed? Do I
propose the overthrow of our democracy and the
erection in its place of some form of absolute
monarchy or oligarchy? Not at all. All things
considered, I am convinced, as you are, that the
republican form of government in vogue in the
United States and England to-day is the best,
safest, and most efficient government ever set up
in the world. But its comparative safety and ef-
ficiency lie, not in the eternal truth of the some-
what florid strophes of the Declaration of Inde-
pendence, but in the fact that those strophes must
ever remain mere poetry. That is to say, its prac-
tice is beneficent because its theory is happily im-
possible. Once a year we reaffirm the doctrine
that all men are free and equal. All the rest of
the twelvemonth we devote our energies to prov-
ing that they are not.

It is lucky for civilization that democracy must
ever remain a phantasm, to entertain and hearten
the lowly like the hope of heaven, but to fall short
eternally of realization. If it were actually pos-
sible to give every citizen an equal voice in the
management of the world — if it were practicable to
provide machinery whereby the collective will of
the majority could be registered accurately, and
made effective automatically and immediately —

Men vs. the Man 153

the democratic ideal would reduce itself to an ab-
surdity in six months. There would be an end
to all progress. Emotion would take the place
of reason. It would be impossible to achieve
coherent governmental policies. The mind of the
government, as a government, would be the mind
of the average citizen of the nether majority — a
mind necessarily incapable of grasping the com-
plex concepts formulated by the progressive
minority. The more childish the idea the more
eagerly it would be adopted and put into execu-
tion. The more unreasoning the prejudice, the
more desperately it would be cherished and the
longer it would survive.

An example may make this somewhat more clear.
You are familiar, I suppose, with the enormous
value of the work done by the national Depart-
ment of Agriculture. It has multiplied our na-
tional wealth, it has reduced the labor of our
farmers and increased their leisure, and it has
greatly elevated our standards of living. And yet,
as you know, its efforts were ridiculed and opposed
by nine-tenths of the farmers in the United States
when it began, and even to-day the majority of
them look upon it as their officious enemy. But
a few months ago, when experts went through
Maryland showing the peasants how to increase
the yield of their cornfields, a howl of objurga-
tion went up.

Let us suppose that the project of establishing a

154 Men vs. the Man

Department of Agriculture had been referred to a
universal manhood plebiscite, and that all the votes
had been counted fairly. Do you believe that the
farmers of the country, with their seven-tenths
majority, would have said aye? I think not. And
supposing the Department established, do you be-
lieve that a referendum would have supported it
in its infinitely useful, but iconoclastic, and hence
obnoxious, work? Again, I think not.

Fortunately, it is impossible, under our exist-
ing system of denaturized democracy, for the
freemen of the land to record their judgment upon
all the countless administrative issues that arise —
or even upon the major issues of general policy.
Theoretically, true enough, they determine the lat-
ter by their votes, but actually, it is always possi-
ble for the intelligent minority to drive them, buy
them, or lead them by the nose. The use of brute
force against the mob is a constant, but seldom
recognized expedient of civilized government. A
President of honesty and intelligence sacrifices his
chance of re-election in order to execute some plan
for the national benefit. The electors will cast
him out on that impending November day, but
meanwhile he has the power of the State behind
him, and so his plan is put through. Again, there
comes a crisis, in some division of the State, in the
conflict between the intelligent minority and the
lowest caste of the majority. The latter attempts
to assert its god-given " rights " — to substitute

Men vs. the Man 155

barbarism for civilization. Well, the shot-gun
does a solemn work — and disfranchisement appears
as a foot-note to the Declaration of Independence.
Marcus Brutus and the Ku Klux Klan were of a
piece. In despotism it is assassination that stands
between the slave and his ultimate, unbearable
wrong, and in republics it is despotism that saves
civilization from the slave.

The lesser weapons that I have mentioned are
bribery and sophistry. You know, as well as I,
how each is wielded, and you know, too, that each,
in the long run, works as much good as harm.
If it were not possible for politicians to hoodwink
and bamboozle the electorate, the Secretary of
State at Washington would practise the statecraft
of the village grocery store. Luckily for all of
us, the truly vital problems of government are sel-
dom left to the decision of the majority. If, by
chance, they enter into a campaign, it is always
possible to drag a herring across the trail, and so
send the plain people galloping after it. Their
actual choosing, when it is done, narrows down to
a choice between a fat man and a lean man, a
platitude and a fallacy, tweedledum and tweedle-
dee. One candidate proposes to curb the trusts,
and his opponent proposes to curb the trusts.
There is a noisy wrangle over identities — and the
luckier of the two aspirants gets his chance. Once
he is in office, the actual issues of the campaign en-
gage him no more. Instead, he devotes his time

156 Men vs. the Man

to the execution of ideas which he has scarcely
mentioned, perhaps, in his canvass, but which he
knows to be of importance and value. The plati-
tudes of the platforms have served their purpose,
and no one will hear of them again until the next
campaign.

Bribery, I believe, is often more efficient, in com-
bating the eternal running amuck of the Chan-
dala caste, than either brute force or sophistry.
Certainly, it is more subtile than the former and
more honorable than the latter. The minority de-
cides what it wants and what it can afford to pay
— and the majority gratefully accepts its money.
In my own glorious State of Maryland fifty per
cent, of the voters expect — nay, demand — to be
paid for their votes. If, by any accident, there
were no competitive bids on election day, it would
puzzle them sorely to decide how to vote. In
some of the counties, I am told, fully ninety per
cent, accept honorariums from the party disburs-
ing officers. Horrible? Not at all. Just sup-
pose that these swine actually recorded their own
thoughts in the ballot-box! Just suppose that the
honest opinions of the Eastern Shore of Maryland,
white and black, were transformed into laws upon
the statute-books of the State 1 If they were, it
would be a misdemeanor to call a Baptist clergy-
man an ass, and a felony to put a lock on a hen-
house door.

And yet you Socialists, whether you are disposed

Men vs. the Man 157

to admit it or not, propose to wipe out the just
and providential disabilities which now differ-
entiate all such vermin from their betters. You
tell the whining, inefficient man, with his constant
cry of injustice and oppression, that he must get
the things he wants through the ballot-box. " Vote
for Debs," you say to him, " and you will be paid,
not only your fair wage, but your employer's profit
also. Vote for Debs, and you will be able to live
at the rate of $5,000 a year. Vote for Debs, and
your hours of labor will be cut to two a day. Vote
for Debs, and the by-laws of your trades-union
will become the constitution of the Republic."

Well, suppose he does it, and gets all that he
now seeks. Will he be content, then, to loll con-
tentedly in his new luxury, with his $5,000 a year,
his twenty-two hours of idleness, his crayon por-
trait of his grandmother, his automatic piano, his
diamond shirt studs, his automobile, and his half-
hourly can of beer? I think not. Once he be-
comes the economic and political equal of his
former employer he will proceed to enforce his
equality, politically as well as economically. He
will become, in brief, a statesman, a disputant, a
philosopher — and after that, God help us! His
heroes will be the men who think as he thinks.
He will send the intellectual giant in the next ditch
to Congress. The boss of his union will aspire
to the Presidency. The secretary of the scene-
shifters will go to the Court of St. James.

158 Men vs. the Man

This picture, my dear La Monte, is not fan-
tastic. The clod-hopper's distrust of his betters
will be accentuated, rather than ameliorated by So-
cialism. Our scavenger, even after he is the
political and economic equal of Dr. Eliot and Mr.
Rockefeller, will still view such men with suspicion
— if there be, indeed, any men of their sort in the
socialistic state — because it is an inherent and in-
eradicable characteristic of all low-caste men to
look with suspicion upon those whose ambitions,
ethics, and ideals are more complex than theirs.
The old hatred of the man who would rather read
a book than bask in the sun has not died out in
the world. The old cry of sorcery is still raised.
And the low-caste man, whenever he has the chance,
still prefers to trust himself to a delegate from his
own caste, whose yearnings are his, and whose
mental processes he can follow. Socialism can
never change this. It is a matter of anatomy
more than of economics.

At the present time, when an election district
peopled in overwhelming majority by low-caste
men, sends one of them to a state legislature, his
power for evil is obscured and neutralized by two
things. In the first place, he meets few of his fel-
lows there, for the average low-caste electoral body
is so corrupt that its class-feeling is easily overcome
by money, and in consequence he cannot make him-
self felt. In the second place, he is commonly
corrupt himself. If you have any practical ac-

Men vs. the Man 159

quaintance with politics in any American state, you
must be well aware that the legislators who are
most easily purchased are those who come from
the ranks of the workingmen and farmers. The
bucolic statesman, when he gets to the state cap-
ital, makes his fight for the trivial local laws that
his own self-interest demands, and after that he
is for sale to the highest bidder. The more im-
portant matters before the law-making body are
entirely beyond his comprehension. He doesn't
understand them, and he doesn't want to under-
stand them. I know, indeed, of a case wherein a
large city, seeking authority from the state legis-
lature to make improvements demanded urgently
by the public safety, was unable to get that author-
ity because it was impossible, under its charter, for
it to pay certain county members for their votes.
If there had been time, I have no doubt, these
county members would have obligingly amended
the charter to make the payments legal.

Socialism will not convert such simple bar-
barians into civilized men. Despite their $5,000
a year and their twenty-two hours of leisure, they
will still cling to their rag-time, their yellow jour-
nals, their medicated flannels, and their fear of
hell, learning, and the bath-tub. But under So-
cialism, you say, they will have leisure for educa-
tion. Even supposing they still hold to their pres-
ent custom of devoting an hour a day to pinochle,
they will yet devote some other hour to John Stuart

160 Men vs. the Man

Mill and August Weismann. It is a beautiful
theory, but the facts, I fear, do not point to its
truth. Education, considered in its broad sense,
and not as a mere piling up of special knowledge,
is not a matter of leisure and money, but of in-
clination and capacity. It is perfectly possible in
the United States to-day for the average boy,
white or black, to obtain, without cost to his par-
ents, just as much education as Herbert Spencer
ever had from others from beginning to end of
his life. In many states it is compulsory. But
for all that, we produce very few men comparable
to Spencer.

As a matter of fact, the typical low-caste man
is entirely unable to acquire that power of ordered
and independent reasoning which distinguishes the
man of higher caste. You may, by dint of heroic
endeavors, instil into him a parrotlike knowledge
of certain elemental facts, and he may even make
a shift to be a schoolmaster himself, but he will
remain a stupid and ignorant man, none the less.
More likely, you will find that he is utterly un-
able to assimilate even the simplest concepts. The
binomial theorem is as far beyond his comprehen-
sion as an epigram in Persian. And this inability
to understand the concepts formulated by others is
commonly but the symptom of a more marked in-
capacity for formulating new concepts of his own.
In the true sense, such a being cannot think. With-
in well-defined limits, he may be trained, just as

Men vs. the Man 161

any other sentient creature may be trained, but
beyond that he cannot go.

The public school can never hope to raise him
out of his caste. It can fill him to the brim — but
then it must stop. He is congenitally unteachable.
A year after he has left school, he has forgotten
nearly all that he learnt there. At twenty-one,
when the republic formally takes him into its coun-
cils, he is laboring with pick and shovel in his pre-
destined ditch, a glad glow in his heart and a
strap around his wrist to keep off rheumatism.

The barriers of caste are not artificial, my dear
La Monte, but natural. Sitting in school beside
the Sudra I have been discussing is a boy whose
future will rise above ditches. He is from the
lowest caste, too, but he is a variation, a mutation.
He has a thirst for learning, and a capacity for it.
He may be the Galileo of to-morrow, and then
again he may be only a nascent Napoleon of ditch-
ing— a dealer in the toil of ditch-diggers. But
whether his progress beyond the actual toilers be
great or small, he must forever stand as a living
proof that there is a caste of men higher than
theirs — a caste of men more intelligent than they,
and more nearly approaching the maximum of
human efficiency. His superiority owes nothing to
vested rights, and nothing to special privileges.
It is based entirely upon the eternal biological
truth that, in all the more complex varieties of liv-
ing beings, there are enormous differences between

1 62 Men vs. the Man

individuals, and that these differences, at their ex-
tremities, produce a caste barely entitled to life
and a caste far advanced upon the upward path
which the species seems to follow.

The negro loafer is not a victim of restricted
opportunity and oppression. There are schools
for him, and there is work for him, and he dis-
dains both. That his forty-odd years of freedom
have given him too little opportunity to show his
mettle is a mere theory of the chair. As a mat-
ter of fact, the negro, in the mass, seems to be
going backward. The most complimentary thing
that can be said of an individual of the race to-
day is that he is as industrious and honest a man
as his grandfather, who was a slave. There are
exceptional negroes of intelligence and ability, I
am well aware, just as there are miraculous Rus-
sian Jews who do not live in filth; but the great
bulk of the race is made up of inefficients. In the
biological phrase, the negro runs true to type.
There are few variations, except downward. I
have known, I should say, at least five hundred
negroes in my time, and of all these not more than
ten have displayed any inclination whatever to
rise above their racial level.

Socialism, as I understand it, proposes to let
these savages plunder civilization. It holds that
they should get more pay for their loafing; that
the comforts and luxuries which represent the ideals
and ingenuity of the highest caste of human be-

Men vs. the Man 163

ings should be handed over, gratuitously, to these
parasites. It proposes to heed and satisfy their
yearnings, to take account of their opinions, to
give them a hand in the government of the state,
to dignify their laziness with sounding names, to
hail them as brothers. I am unable, my dear La
Monte, to subscribe to this scheme. I am far from
a Southerner in prejudice and sympathies, though
born on the borders of the South, but it seems to
me that, so long as we refrain, in the case of the
negro loafer, from the measures of extermination
we have adopted in the case of parasites further
down the scale, we are being amply and even
excessively faithful to an ethical ideal which
makes constant war upon expediency and common
sense.

And now let me return to your letter. In one
part of it, I note, you accuse me of harboring an-
thropomorphic ideas, and proceed to elect me a
member of some Methodist synod. Herein, my
ingenuous friend, you juggle with words, for you
are certainly well aware of the meaning of an-
thropomorphism, and if you are, you are certainly
well aware that my belief in " the beneficence and
permanence of the evolutionary process " does not
make me an anthropomorphist. But I shall as-
sume that you are actually in error regarding the
meaning of the word, and so expound it.

Anthropomorphism, then, is a name for a the-
ological theory which assumes that the universe is

164 Men vs. the Man

managed by a definite being or beings whose men-
tal processes and emotions are similar to those of
human beings. That is to say the anthropomor-
phic god is merely an omnipotent and omniscient
man. The Greeks believed that there was a whole
race of such gods, and that they spent their time
on Olympus much as the Athenians spent their time
in Athens — carousing, drabbing, playing politics,
fighting, intriguing, and indulging in all sorts of
outbreaks of passion. The modern soldier of the
Salvation Army believes there is only one god,
and this god he pictures as an enlarged and
gaseous simulacrum of General William Booth —
as a venerable but somewhat dictatorial and re-
vengeful old man with a white beard and a large
corps of favorites and assistants. The Salvation-
ist believes that this god manages the world just
as General Booth manages the Army — rewarding
the faithful, denouncing the traitor, and watching
eternally for fidelity and treason.

The other anthropomorphic sects draw pictures,
more or less fantastic and incredible, of other man-
made gods, and there are endless differences in de-
tail. One holds that its god sometime enters the
body of an actual man — that he has done so in the
past or will do so in the future. Apostolic Chris-
tianity and Mohammedanism are examples.
Others hold that he elevates favored human be-
ings to his own rank, and places them at his right
hand. Of such are Mormonism and Catholicism.

Men vs. the Man 165

Yet another sect maintains that its god is a sort
of glorified chief of its own race, and that all
other races are inferior in consequence. This
comforting doctrine is taught by Judaism.

As you will notice, the central fact in anthropo-
morphism is that the god is given essentially human
attributes. He is not only intelligent, but also
extremely emotional. He has fits of temper, pas-
sions, prejudices, even superstitions. He is bland
and forgiving to those he holds in affection, and
furiously vengeful upon those he dislikes. It is
necessary, in order to get a favor, or even com-
mon justice from him, that he be put in a good
humor — by abasing one's self before him, by mak-
ing some sort of sacrifice to him, or by actually
bribing him. He has hordes of spies, agents, and
emissaries, who collect his fees, denounce his ene-
mies, and manage his business. He is, in a word,
an exceedingly inflammatory being, with the hot
passions, arbitrary likes and dislikes, and violent
rages of a medieval bishop.

Now, it seems to me that the cosmic process
shows no traces at all of this human emotionalism.
It is, indeed, utterly unemotional, and its lack of
emotion is its principal characteristic. Since the
dawn of history men have been trying to read into
it some notion of right and wrong — some anthropo-
morphic ideal — but they have always failed.
Judged by those human standards which we ap-
ply to sociological processes — the operation of the

1 66 Men vs. the Man

state laws, for example — it is utterly immoral and
meaningless. Try as we may, we can never show
that our particular god punishes the guilty and
rewards the righteous, or even that he compre-
hends the concepts represented by these words.
We may assume it, but all the evidence is against
it. No Huxley was needed to point out that the
weather, for one thing, is managed, humanly speak-
ing, in an ignorant and outrageous manner. No
Johan Bojer was needed to prove that the wicked
often triumph in the world, and the righteous often
perish. And no Joseph Conrad was needed to
show us that human destiny is one with the fall
of the die.

Fortunately, it is not necessary for a civilized
human being of the twentieth century to believe
in a man-like god. I may observe and study the
workings of the universe, and still make no at-
tempt to explain them in terms of passion and
emotion. It would interest me immensely to learn
how and why the globes are kept spinning, but in
view of the limits which hedge in my perceptions, I
doubt that I shall ever find out. Meanwhile, how-
ever, I can make note of the fact that they always
spin in a certain way, and that they have done so
ever since the first human observers began to
study them, and from this I can deduce the not
unreasonable idea that they will continue to spin
in that way for a good while to come. Thus, very
simply, I may arrive at my notion of the perma-

Men vs. the Man 167

nence of the cosmic process. And, going further,
I can note that the spinning of these globes, how-
ever much it has inconvenienced and tortured in-
dividual men, from time to time, has at least re-
sulted in the gradual development of a race which
seems to me to be measurably superior, in its higher
ranks, to the asexual cell from which it has sprung.
And so I may come to the notion that the cosmic
process, considered broadly, is beneficent. Yet I
have not touched anthropomorphism, directly or
indirectly, at any place.

You yourself are the anthropomorphist ; not I.
You still hold to the ancient theological doctrine
that the human race is a race apart — that because
it is molded " in the image of God " it is superior
to natural laws which govern other races. In the
days when men believed that Jerusalem was the
capital of the universe this was a credible
doctrine; but the history of all exact knowledge is
the history of its gradual decay. When ad-
venturers proved, despite St. Augustine's masterly
logic, that the earth was a sphere, it received a
telling blow. When they proved, despite Moses,
that the earth was but one of countless worlds, it
received another. And when Darwin came, and
his like, it ceased to be a living doctrine, and be-
came a mere empty shell upon the garbage-pile of
dead ideas. But you Socialists want to resurrect
it. You ask us all to believe it, as John the Baptist
believed it — despite a mass of evidence so enormous

1 68 Men vs. the Man

that one man can scarcely hope to master even its
daily accretions.

And so I find myself at the end of my letter
with many of the arguments in your last epistle
unanswered. One or two brief notes must suf-
fice. You say in one place, for example, that your
ideal man is one " wholly devoted to promoting
human happiness," and then proceed to explain,
with somewhat unparliamentary innuendo, that
you mean " human happiness, and not a hog's hap-
piness." My answer here must be the " You're
another," of the small boy, for it is your scheme
of things, and not mine, that considers the yearn-
ings of the hog. My own philosophy disregards
the hog entirely. Its concern is with the aims
and aspirations of the higher man, and with those
expedients which permit him to widen the gap
which separates him from the hog. But you are
for the nether swine. Their desire for forty acres
and a mule, for ten hours of pinochle instead of
one, for leisure to be hoggish, for a chance to
plunder their betters — this desire appears to you
as a holy thing. You want to strike an average
between the topmost man and the hog, and to
achieve a level of civilization in which intelligence
and hoggishness shall be blended in equal portions.
Let us have no more talk of hogs.

Your argument that the individualist must suffer
agonizing loneliness demands a more extensive an-
swer than I can give. For the present, I can only

Men vs. the Man 169

point out that you are assuming too much when you
assume that solitude is inevitably painful. The
low-caste man's insatiable desire for company, for
fraternity, for brotherhood, is a proof of his
low caste. He has no resources within himself.
Save in association with his fellows he has no
means of defending himself, or amusing himself.
Even in his own sight, he is inconceivable save as
an undifferentiated molecule in a larger mass. So
he joins fraternal orders, goes to church, and af-
filiates with a political party. A man of greater
complexity is in better case. Human intercourse
is open to him when he desires it, but it is not the
only thing that stands between him and unbearable
ennui. When he is alone, it is because he wants
to be alone, and he is not lonely.

The long argument of Lester F. Ward, that all
human beliefs are grounded upon the appetites
and emotions, is entirely unconvincing, and so is
your dissertation in support of it. The progress
of such exact sciences as astronomy and biology is
due, in the main, to the fortuitous collocation
(humanly speaking) of apparently disconnected
observations and discoveries, and has nothing
whatever to do with the food supply of the state or
the political theories of the people. The discovery
of the bacillus of tuberculosis was made possible by
the microscope, and not by the French Revolution.
As for your argument that the present age is
" catastrophic " and that, in consequence, " cata-

1 70 Men vs. the Man

clysmic " theories are dominant in all departments
of science, I am unable to offer a serious answer to
it, because it seems to me to be utterly gratuitous
and ridiculous. What is the " cataclysmic " ele-
ment in Metchnikoff's theory of phagocytes, or in
Wright's theory of opsonins ? What had political
economy to do with Dr. Remsen's discovery of
saccharin? And what had the war on the bour-
geoisie to do with the rise of abdominal surgery?
I fear you are joking. If you are not, you have
been sadly led astray by the sound of words.
As always,

H. L. M.

LA MONTE'S FIFTH LETTER

MY DEAR MENCKEN :

Permit me to grovel before you in apologizing
for my long delay in replying to your last very
interesting denunciation of the herd. The fact
is my garden has absorbed my energies so com-
pletely I have had no time to write.

Much of what you say in your last letter is un-
deniably true. Were our legislation to become the
crystallization of the cultural stage reached by the
majority of the denizens of the Eastern Shore of
Maryland, it would be well-nigh fatal to such civ-
ilization as we have. That is why we Socialists
are so eager to raise the cultural level of, not only
the Eastern Shore, but of America and the World.
It is also true that in a society divided into classes
democracy must be tempered by bribery and cor-
ruption or perish. We prefer to put an end to the
class-divisions that necessitate bribery, sophistry,
and intimidation rather than to give up democracy
on account of evils that spring not from its nature,
but from its incompleteness. Make our democ-
racy industrial as well as political, and corruption,
bribery, and sophistry will disappear. That is the
way the thing looks to me, and I fear I shall be

171

172 Men vs. the Man

unable to rid myself of that point of view even if
you hurl at me your favorite and somewhat over-
worked javelin by branding my reasoning as that of
a " low-caste man." Incidentally let me remind
you that on your own showing there is a large
majority of low-caste men in the country and that
we still have the simulacrum of democracy, so that
it seems entirely possible that the country may yet
be ruled by that low-caste reasoning that avers that
all men by virtue of their humanity ought to have
a chance to lead human lives.

In your last letter you conjure up a bogey and
tremble before it like good Doctor Faust before
Mephistopheles. You draw a grotesque picture
of the emancipated proletariat sending ditch-
diggers to Congress. (Do you really think ditch-
diggers would be less intelligent and honest than
some of the millionaires who now adorn the Sen-
ate?) "The boss of the union," you tell me,
" will aspire to the Presidency. The secretary of
the scene-shifters will go to the Court of Saint
James."

I feel tempted to drop into slang to express the
horror with which this picture thrills my bosom,
but I will refrain, and instead inquire how much
truth there is in it? For a quarter of a century
the working-class Socialists have been sending their
chosen representatives to the Parliaments of Ger-
many, France, and Belgium. Have they chosen
" low-caste men " ? Have they shown what you

Men vs. the Man 173

term the " inherent and ineradicable character-
istics of all low-caste men to look with suspicion
upon those whose ambitions, ethics, and ideals are
more complex than theirs"? The facts are
against you, my dear Mencken. No greater ora-
tors or abler parliamentarians than Liebknecht,
Bebel, and Singer have ever sat in the German
Reichstag. Vandervelde is the greatest statesman
Belgium has yet produced, and Jaures in France is
probably the greatest living orator. These are the
men my " low-caste " comrades have freely chosen
to represent them. When the Clemenceau Cab-
inet fell, upon whom did the President of the
French Republic call to form a cabinet? Upon
that great statesman, Briand, to whom more than
to any other one man is due the accomplishment
of the separation of Church and State in France;
and Briand was originally sent to the French
Chamber by the votes of Socialist workingmen.

In the face of these facts you solemnly assure
me that your picture " is not fantastic." It is to
smile.

In my second letter I essayed the role of the
prophet, and fell into error by failing to take into
account all of the factors in the problem. I pre-
dicted " that the present period of depression will
last at least seven years unless (i) in the mean-
time * the increase of accurate knowledge ' or the
hard facts of adversity lead us to establish the Co-
operative Commonwealth, or (2) unless a great

174 Men vs. the Man

war breaks out." Shortly after I had written
that prediction my good friend, Gaylord Wilshire,
suggested to me in conversation that the costs of
preparation for war might rise so tremendously
as to be quite as adequate as actual war in caus-
ing business revival. This is precisely what has
happened, and we have now started on another
great boom. Germany's need for an outlet for
her surplus production was fast driving her toward
war with England. This caused a great war
scare, and the result has been an unprecedented and
almost incredible increase in military and more
especially naval expenditure. Incredible as it ap-
pears the excess of the world's military and naval
expenditure in 1909 over that of 1906 is more
than equal to what Russia and Japan both spent in
the year of the Russo-Japanese War. The exact
figures with their sources are given in a leading
article in a recent issue of Wilshire' s Magazine.
I frankly confess my error — an error due to in-
excusable ignorance, for I ought to have been keep-
ing track of the increase in military and naval ex-
penditure— and I must now revise my prophecy.
We are now launched on as wild an era of inflated
prosperity as that of 1905 and 1906 which
brought us to the collapse of 1907 and 1908. How
long it will last I cannot tell. It is certain that
an industrial boom such as we are now having will
lead to the introduction of much improved machin-
ery and methods, and thus the more rapid widen-

Men vs. the Man 175

ing of the ever growing gulf between annual prod-
uct and annual wage-account, and that this must
sooner or later lead to a more disastrous crisis than
that through which we recently passed. But it is
also true that this crisis could be almost in-
definitely postponed could we go on indefinitely
constantly increasing the stimulus by ever larger
military and naval expenditures. Here is the ele-
ment of uncertainty. How much increased taxa-
tion will the ruling classes of Europe and Amer-
ica permit?

These taxes must be paid by the propertied
classes, for the propertiless have nothing to pay
them with, and in every parliament in Christendom
we have recently witnessed the most frantic op-
position to the increase in taxation made necessary
by the new naval programmes. It appears fairly
certain that under representative government it will
be impossible to keep the stimulus to business at an
adequate pitch. So that it is safe to say that after
a somewhat prolonged boom we will have the most
disastrous panic the world has ever known, and
that the middle classes will be so weakened by the
taxation necessary in the meantime that they will
be even worse prepared for the next panic than
they were for the last one.

As a good Nietzschean this crushing of the
middle classes is a most vital matter to you.
Where are you going to breed your Immoralists or
Supermen after the middle class is annihilated?

176 Men vs. the Man

They cannot come from the gutter. The condi-
tions of working-class life are, I feel sure you will
agree, not favorable for their production. Our
billionaires may be immoral enough to breed Im-
moralists, but unfortunately there are not enough
of them to answer your purpose. Besides I suspect
they have not the right brand of immorality.
Where can you find more conventional and ortho-
dox people than John D. Rockefeller and J. Pier-
pont Morgan? Surely you are not sanguine
enough to expect to breed Supermen from such
sires ?

If your Nietzschean philosophy of aristocracy
is to be a workable philosophy, and you have often
assured me that therein lay its vast superiority over
Socialism, then its workableness is absolutely de-
pendent upon the preservation of the middle class,
for from that class alone can you hope to breed the
progenitors of your Supermen.

America was formerly the paradise of the mid-
dle class. Our typical American ideals are mid-
dle class ideals. Our great achievements in his-
tory were the work of the middle class. But even
to-day it requires a careful search to find here and
there a survival of the sturdy middle class who
made American history. The railway, the trust,
and the department store have either annihilated
or transformed beyond recognition that sturdy,
admirable class among whom you and I grew up.
As independent producers or traders they can only

Men vs. the Man 177

exist to-day by exceeding the rate of exploitation
of employees practised by the trust and the de-
partment store. They exist economically only by
the contemptuous sufferance of their more powerful
rivals. Whether they wish it or not the condi-
tions of their economic existence compel them to be
either sycophants or vampires or more often both.
This is a far cry from the men who elected Jack-
son and Lincoln to carry out their will at Wash-
ington.

Do you think that this change in their character
makes them more or less fit to be the ancestors
of Supermen?

But the worst is yet to come. Within a decade
a new and ominous figure has loomed upon the
economic horizon. He as yet has no accepted
name, but I will use the name that Professor Veb-
len has bestowed upon him in his brilliant paper,
" On the Nature of Capital." Veblen calls him
the Pecuniary Magnate.

The difference between Marx's Capitalist and
Veblen's Pecuniary Magnate is this : they are both
owners of factories and railways, etc., and ac-
cumulate money by taking the surplus-value pro-
duced by the workers, but the Pecuniary Magnate
is more than a capitalist. Besides the money that
he makes as a capitalist (a la Marx) he makes
far more tremendous profits as a dealer in capital
securities. What he makes as a capitalist comes
from the workers and in most cases has no per-

178 Men vs. the Man

ceptible relation to his business ability. He makes
just as much if he is in Europe or confined in an
asylum. What he makes on the market as a
Pecuniary Magnate comes from the middle class
(up to and including the lesser millionaires, and
at times including his brother Magnates), and the
amount of this profit depends very directly and
perceptibly on his ability, or on that of his brokers
and lawyers. It is not infrequently to his interest
as a Pecuniary Magnate to wreck an industry from
which he draws revenue as a capitalist.

Such Pecuniary Magnates as we have yet had,
Veblen points out, have spent their years of
strength and virility in amassing sufficient capital
to make them formidable as Pecuniary Magnates,
and by the time the accumulation has reached the
requisite dimensions, they have lost the vigor to
use this vast power energetically. We have yet to
see the power of the typical Pecuniary Magnate
wielded by a young man of Napoleonic grasp and
energy. But Harriman has given us a hint or
two of what we may expect in the not distant
future.

From the time that Jay Gould wrecked the Erie
up to the time that Harriman wrecked the Chi-
cago and Alton, most of our railway stocks and
bonds were fairly safe investments for middle
class people. Since the Alton coup few investors
have been wholly free from insomnia.

Sooner or later there is bound to appear a Pe-

Men vs. the Man 179

cuniary Magnate who will combine the energy and
brutality of a Roosevelt with the Napoleonic grasp
and Nietzschean hardness of a Harriman and the
sagacity of a Jim Hill. With his advent insomnia
will become epidemic in all classes save the work-
ing class. Men will seek for safe investments,
and they shall not find one.

The feeling of utter insecurity among the lesser
millionaires will become wholly unbearable. All
intelligent men and women will become Socialists,
and the Social Revolution will be accomplished so
peaceably that few will know till years afterward
that a revolution has taken place.

This is my creed, my philosophy, and it seems
to me both workable and inevitable. Given the
Napoleonic Pecuniary Magnate, and denying the
socialistic denoument, your philosophy of Aristoc-
racy seems to me not only unworkable but utterly
impossible. Again I ask, where will you breed
your Immoralists?

But it is not merely on economics that we differ.
Ethically and philosophically we are as far asunder
as the poles. I hold that it is profoundly true that
" No man lives unto himself alone," and that the
most insane sentence that was ever penned is Max
Stirner's " Nothing is more to me than myself."
I hold that Nietzsche taught an insane philosophy,
and that the most logical thing he ever did was to
go insane himself. The most sacred thing we
know is the individual, but the individual can never

180 Men vs. the Man

reach a high or noble development by trampling
upon his infinitely complex obligations to other in-
dividuals. The whole cosmos and all that therein
is, is dialectically interrelated throughout all time
and space. You and I are bound by countless ties
to all the men and women, aye, and apes and mon-
keys and reptiles and fishes, who have lived on the
earth before us, and we have just as close and in-
escapable ties with all those who shall follow us,
and with equal firmness are we bound up with all
the men and women and beasts and birds and trees
and flowers now on earth. Disregard of human
solidarity and of cosmical inter-relation ends
logically in insanity.

The introduction of the Machine Process tended
to standardize all life and thus to cramp Individu-
ality just as a Chinawoman's feet are deformed in
her shoes. The revolt, the movement to assert
individuality, found noble expression in literature.
Byron and Shelley and Goethe are full of it. But
it was not carried to a false and insane extreme
until the middle of the last century by Max
Stirner. Nietzsche has done little more than re-
peat the extravagances of Stirner, though he has
clothed them in more poetic beauty in his " Thus
Spake Zarathustra." Curiously enough the ex-
treme Individualists always claim Ibsen as one of
their prophets. They forget that while he en-
riched the world with " A Doll's House " — the
noblest expression of the right and even the duty

Men vs. the Man 181

of the individual to be herself and live out her own
life— he also gave us " Little Eyolf " and " The
Lady from the Sea " to complement " A Doll's
House " by showing us that happiness was only to
be found in love and work for others.

Ibsen should have been safe from the misunder-
standing of his teaching that is so wide-spread, for
long before he preached his gospel of healthy In-
dividualism in " A Doll's House," he had given
us in " Peer Gynt " the deepest, truest, and most
delicious satire upon the absurd attempt to " be
oneself " at all costs. He had shown that it led
to moral instability (if not degeneration) and to
mental insanity.

Surely you remember how Peer with his mania
for " being himself " was greeted by Professor
Begriffenfeldt, the Director of the Mad-house at
Cairo, as the Kaiser of the lunatics.

"Kaiser?" says Peer. "Of course!" replies
the professor.

PEER.
But the honor's so great, so entirely excessive

BEGRIFFENFELDT.

Oh, do not let any false modesty sway you
At an hour such as this.

PEER.

But at least give me time

No, indeed, I'm not fit; I'm completely dumbfounded!

1 82 Men vs. the Man

BEGRIFFENFELDT.

A man who has fathomed the Sphinx's meaning,
A man who's himself !

PEER.

Ay, but that's just the rub.
It's true that in everything I am myself;
But here the point is, if I follow your meaning,
To be, so to phrase it, beside oneself.

BEGRIFFENFELDT.

Beside ? No, there you are strangely mistaken ;

It's here, sir, that one is oneself with a vengeance.

Oneself and nothing whatever besides.

We go, full sail, as our very selves.

Each one shuts himself up in the barrel of self,

In the self-fermentation he dives to the bottom, —

With the self-bung he seals it hermetically,

And seasons the staves in the well of self.

No one has tears for the other's woes ;

No one has mind for the other's ideas.

We're our very selves, both in thought and tone,

Ourselves to the spring-board's uttermost verge, —

And so, if a Kaiser's to fill the Throne,

It is clear that you are the very man.

The same philosophy made both Peer Gynt and
Friedrich Nietzsche kings of the lunatics.

You will also, no doubt, remember that when
the Button-Molder came to fetch Peer's soul and

Men vs. the Man 183

melt it up in the casting-ladle, Peer insisted upon
his answering the question :

" What is it, at bottom, this ' being oneself ' ? "
The Button-Molder's answer was:
"To be oneself is: to slay oneself."

This is the highest word of wisdom of the
greatest and sanest Individualist of modern times,
and it is but a paraphrase of the words of Jesus:

" For whosoever will save his life shall lose it;
and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall
find it."

By writing " Peer Gynt " and " Little Eyolf "
the author of " A Doll's House " has shown us
that he realized as fully as Jesus that love was
the only soil upon which true and noble Individu-
ality could flourish.

Marx and Engels expressed the same thought
with equal clearness, though with less warmth, in
that classic of the Socialist movement, the Com-
munist Manifesto, when, in describing the society
of the future, they said :

" In place of the old bourgeois society, with its
classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an as-
sociation, in which the free development of each is
the condition for the free development of all."

Solidarity is the condition precedent for the

184 Men vs. the Man

blossoming of individuality. Jesus, Ibsen, Marx,
and Engels were all Individualists, but they were
sane enough to recognize that Love is the highest
and noblest expression of Individuality. Nietzsche
and Peer Gynt were blind to this simple truth and
they became Princes in Bedlam.

Many a Giotto to-day has no chance to develop
his individuality, because he has not the luck to
be discovered by a Cimabue. The Socialist aim
is not to provide a Cimabue for every Giotto, but
to make the conditions of life so equal that no
Giotto shall need a Cimabue. We do not hold
that every boy and girl has the genius of a Giotto,
but we do hold that every human being has an
individuality worth developing, and that every
stunted, dwarfed, or atrophied individuality makes
the world measurably poorer. The present reck-
less sacrifice of individuality robs life of interest
and distinction.

So that, my dear Mencken, it is in the name of
Individualism, strange as it may appear to you,
that I call upon you once more to become the com-
rade of

Yours faithfully,

R. R. LA M.

MENCKEN'S REPLY TO LA MONTE'S
FIFTH LETTER

MY DEAR LA MONTE :

Saving only psychical research, no modern cult
seems to be so well outfitted with college professors
as Socialism. Early in this correspondence, if I
remember rightly, you began to set them at my
heels — Prof. What's-His-Name, the assassin of the
doctrine of inherited traits; Prof. This-and-That,
the Austrian statistician, rhapsodist and seventh
son of a seventh son, half Diophantus of Alex-
andria and half Tom Lawson, with his crusade
for $5,000 plowboys and a workday of one
hour, twenty-two minutes and thirty seconds; and
sundry other instructors of 'rah-' rah boys, first and
last, specified and anonymous, whiskered and aston-
ishing, cocksure and preposterous. Now, near the
end, comes Prof. Veblen, with his discovery of the
Pecuniary Magnate, a fantastic and apparently
novel beast of prey, gorged to the gullet with bleed-
ing hearts.

The name of Prof. Veblen is familiar; I have
encountered his speculations more than once. And
his Pecuniary Magnate is no stranger, either, for
Col. Henry Watterson, the last of the Jeffersoni-

185

1 86 Men vs. the Man

ans, whose compositions I read diligently, has long
excoriated him under the style or appellation of
the Hell Hound of Plutocracy. Col. Watter-
son, I believe, is a man of quite respectable an-
tiquity, but his Hell Hound was ancient long be-
fore he was born. In medieval Venice they called
him Shylock, and there he preyed upon Antonio,
the merchant, who preyed, in turn, upon the
groundlings of that fair city. Shylock was not a
captain of industry, for the Jews, in his time,
had not yet invented ready-made clothing. He
was, on the contrary, a purely Pecuniary Magnate
— a gambler in credits, a fattener upon panics, a
star performer at financial inquests and autopsies.
Your description of the Magnate of Veblen would
have fitted him exactly, as the paper fits the wall.
When Antonio's " argosies with portly sail "
were posted as overdue, the gods seemed to smile
upon Shylock, for it was out of just such mis-
fortunes that his potency arose. Antonio, the
honest ship-owner, who deprecated speculation and
tried to put an end to it by lending money, when
he had it, without interest, was now in hard case,
and had to make terms with the Jew. And, hav-
ing the advantage, the Jew drove it home. Nothing
less than the complete annihilation of his victim
would content him. The lust for mere money
was transcended and forgotten: the thing that
moved him now was a yearning to achieve a stag-
gering and unprecedented coup. He wanted to

Men vs. the Man 187

wreck a great merchant, as Jay Gould, years after,
was to wreck a great railroad, for thereby it would
be proclaimed to all Venice that he, Shylock, was
a financial czar of czars. He had the " Napole-
onic grasp and energy " of which you speak. He
had not only money, but also imagination.

But Shylock came a cropper, and I rather fancy
that any Pecuniary Magnate who tries to imitate
him in his plan will also imitate him in his failure.
The reason for this is not far to seek. It lies in
the fact that a Pecuniary Magnate, no matter how
enormous his resources and how magnificent his
immorality, is still a merely mortal man, whose
life, like yours and mine, hangs by a single hair.
Cut that hair, and he is no longer worth fearing
as an Antichrist, for, as you have yourself pointed
out, the might and menace of capital, when all is
said and done, are not so much in the capital it-
self as in the ambition and cunning behind it.
Shylock made that discovery when he demanded
his pound of flesh. The laws of Venice ordered
that he have it, but the laws of Venice, reflecting
the public opinion of that republic, ordered also
that it be the last entry upon his cashbook. Thus
Shylock faced a perfectly simple situation: either
he could give up his pound of flesh or he could
give up his life. He chose the latter alternative.

Strange as it may seem, I believe that much the
same choice will confront the Pecuniary Magnate
of the future who essays to achieve the cosmic lar-

1 88 Men vs. the Man

cenies of Prof. Veblen's nightmare. He will go
on gobbling lesser millionaires until he has sent
them all back to work, and then he will proceed to
inoculate the middle classes with those insomnia
germs you mention, and then he will push up the
price of a wheaten loaf to six cents, to eight, to
ten, and the price of a can of beer to twenty-five
cents, to $i, to $10, to $100 — and then, one fine
morning, a nickel-tipped bullet, proceeding from a
Mauser pistol " in the hands of some party or
parties unknown to this jury" will go whistling
through his viscera, and he will cease to trouble this
harassed world. Sic semper tyrannis! Men will
triumph over the man !

I see you shudder. You are a philosopher and
detest melodrama and bloodshed. You are an ag-
nostic and have none of the demonologist's flair
for executions and butchery. You believe that the
sorrows of the world are to find their surcease, not
in assassinations, but in laws. Like the lamented
William J. Bryan, and other prophets of the new
order, you put your faith in legislation. You pro-
pose to abolish castes by an amendment to the Con-
stitution. You propose to perform sanguinary
major operations upon the body politic, using one
Act of Congress as saw, sponge, and scalpel, and
another Act of Congress as anaesthetic.

This sweet faith in whereases and therefore-be-
it-resolveds, my dear La Monte, seems to me to
be as magnificently fatuous as the old faith in

Men vs. the Man 189

divine revelations, holy shrines, and all the other
gimcrackery of Christian sorcery. In a large
sense, I am convinced, legislation is always an ef-
fect rather than a cause, and as such, it can play
but a minor role in the reformation of the world.
It is inevitably a good distance behind the event,
and very often it is shockingly inaccurate in in-
terpreting the event. Witness, for example, the
Fifteenth Amendment. Witness, again, the ef-
forts of the Liberal Party in England to overcome,
by bills in Parliament, the operation of the law of
natural selection in the lower orders. The pos-
session of the franchise did not make the American
negro a civilized man, though every one knows that
the franchise is an important part of every civilized
man's heritage. And by the same token, the
state's effort to keep England's loafers and incom-
petents from starving to death has certainly not
transformed them into efficient men, with palpable
claims upon life and happiness, though every one
knows that efficient men are principally notable for
the fact that they never starve to death.

But here I go sky-hooting into the interstellar
spaces of political quasi-science when my actual
purpose is merely to show that, by virtue of his
very mortality, the ultimate Pecuniary Magnate of
Prof. Veblen's dreams must ever remain more
phantom than actual felon. It is undoubtedly
true, I suppose, that men who combine his enor-
mous wealth and his epic immorality will be born

190 Men vs. the Man

into the world in days to come, but that they will
ever find it possible to realize their anthropoph-
agous ambitions is more than I am willing to
admit. Human existence is not a solo a capella,
but a battle, and even the under-dog can inflict
dangerous wounds. Given certain changes in the
time, place, conditions or weapons of the contest
and the under-dog, in truth, may suddenly become
the upper-dog. I may best explain what I mean,
perhaps, by dropping dogs and going back to Pe-
cuniary Magnates. In a struggle for money, let
us say, between a Pecuniary Magnate and the great
masses of the plain people, it is obvious that the
Magnate has enormous advantages, for struggling
for money is his profession, and he has not only
acquired extraordinary skill in it, but he has also
attained to a monopoly of the necessary materials
and apparatus. But suppose the efforts of this
Magnate are suddenly shifted from the struggle
for money to a struggle to remain alive, or to keep
out of jail. Has he any advantages now? Not
at all. On the contrary, he suffers enormous dis-
advantages— so enormous that they place him com-
pletely at the mercy of his foes. If more than half
of them decide, for instance, that he must go to jail
for the rest of his life, or that he must pay a half
or all of his fortune into the common treasury in ex-
piation of his misdeeds, he must inevitably do these
things. Nothing in the world can save him then,
for once in jail, his stock market generalship be-

Men vs. the Man 191

comes as useless as his automobile, arid once his
money is gone, it can no longer buy him liberty.
Going further, it is demonstrable, I think, that if
but one solitary man in all his host of foes decides
firmly that he must die for the public good, he will
inevitably die on schedule time. And once dead,
he is no longer a Pecuniary Magnate.

The easy answer to all this is that the experi-
ence of the past and present proves the Magnate
to stand in no such perils. There is John D.
Rockefeller, for example. Has he been sent to
jail? Has anyone tried to kill him, or even ad-
vocated killing him? When that $32,000,000
fine was assessed against him did anyone save
Judge Landis believe seriously that he would ever
have to pay it? As a sincere friend, my dear La
Monte, I warn you to steer clear of this easy an-
swer, for lurking beneath it there is a very serious
criticism of Socialism, which criticism, I may as
well explain at once, lies in the fact that the vast
majority of sane persons hold all of your socialistic
scarecrows and bugaboos to be harmless. The
American people, in a word, permit John D.
Rockefeller to live because, after giving a great
deal of attention to him and listening to all of
the pleas for his extinction, they have decided (that
is, through the medium of their regular staff of
leaders, bosses, and law-makers) that it would be
childish and useless to kill him, or even to send him
to jail, or to confiscate his millions. True enough,

192 Men vs. the Man

he makes an excellent profit on the oil he sells, but
it is hard to convince a nation of traders that such
an accomplishment, in itself, is felonious, or even in
bad taste. True enough, he devotes a good deal
of money to evangelistic futilities, but what tax-
payer, paying policeman and fireman to guard un-
taxed convents, mosques, and mission houses, will
throw the first stone? No; John will never do
as a Hell Hound. He is valuable as a herring, to
drag across the trail in political campaigns, and
he provides a livelihood, as Immoralist, to a few
dozen Juniuses of the uplift magazines, but the
only permanent emotion that his life and deeds
nourish in the breast of the average healthy Amer-
ican is that of envy. There, but for the unfair-
ness of God, go I. So says the ultimate con-
sumer. He envies John, but does not hate him.

Do I hear you say that John is not the worst —
that his industrial enterprise and wise spending
in some measure mitigate his money-changing —
that he is not, at bottom, true to the Pecuniary
Magnate type? Shame on you! The spectacle
of a good Socialist defending Rockefeller, even
with reservations and apologies, is indecent. I
shall save you the threatened disgrace by defend-
ing him myself. That is to say, I shall concede
that Rockefeller is not a fair specimen of the
Veblenian Magnate, for his principal business is
that of selling oil, and not that of raiding the
stock market. Such raiding as he has essayed has

Men vs. the Man 193

been prompted, indeed, chiefly by lawful, and even
laudable, notions of self-defense. He is not a
speculator and his activities have seldom pro-
duced the insomnia of which you speak in the re-
tired shop-keepers, widows, and superannuated
clergymen who invest their all in the securities of
Mexican mines and other rosy enterprises.

But John's disqualification need not halt us. He
fails to meet Prof. Veblen's specifications, but that
does not prove the Pecuniary Magnate to be a
mere John Doe of the Socialist indictment. This
Magnate, you may argue, actually does exist,
healthy, happy, and immoral, with his atrophied
conscience, his exaggerated ego, and his sneer upon
his face. One day we find him cornering the
wheat market in Chicago; and next day he is bear-
ing Coppers in New York. In legitimate com-
merce and industry he has no interest whatever.
His business is to sell, at famine prices, commodi-
ties that he does not own ; to lend at usurious rates
money that he doesn't possess ; to prey, in a word,
upon fear, poverty, hunger, and sore need; to profit
inhumanly by droughts, catastrophes, and acts of
God. His name, in the wheat pit or on the curb,
is Joe Leiter, or Curtis Jadwin, or Charlie Morse.
He is as nefariously useless as an archbishop, and
as indecently unpatriotic as a politician.

Is there anything to be said for this man? Does
any extant system of political economy, ethics, or
theology defend him? Does anyone propose a

194 Men vs. the Man

vote of thanks to him for his perilous and painful
labors ? I think not. Not even the church, which
has room on its roll of honor for witch-burners,
tyrants, and cut-throats unspeakable, for the sav-
ages who killed Bruno and drove Galileo to his
knees — not even the church undertakes to clasp
this adventurer to its bosom. It will take his
money, true enough, and it will even point out to
him the prudence of being liberal, but it will not
guarantee him safe conduct beyond the Styx. In
a word, the whole world is this man's foe — but
only when it sits down calmly f as moralist, to pon-
der his misdeeds.

You catch my meaning, of course. It is this:
that the world seldom sits down calmly, as moral-
ist, to ponder anything ; that the world, as a world,
finds any serious meditation a toilsome and fever-
ish business. Its acts, like those of a woman, are
the product, not of ratiocination, but of emotion.
Now and then, a gust of violent anger strikes it,
and then it is for stamping out this Pecuniary Mag-
nate on the instant, as one stamps out a spider, and
without paying any regard whatever to the laws
it has made in the past, or to the rights that may
belong to its victim as criminal. At such times he
appears in but one aspect; he is a villain undiluted,
a wretch beyond mercy, a felon unpardonable. The
fact that he may also bear other aspects — that he
may be a freeman and a tax-payer, guaranteed by
law in the enjoyment of his property; that he

Men vs. the Man 195

may have a wife or wives and innumerable children
depending upon him for support, that he may hold
excellent views regarding total immersion, the glory
of the Stars and Stripes, and the curse of rum —
all of this is forgotten. He appears merely as a
captured outlaw, waiting to be lynched, and while
the public anger flames, nothing is thought of but
the rope.

But the emotion of anger, luckily for all such
gentlemen, is short-lived. You and I, for all our
self-indulgence and lack of piety, find it impossible
to be thoroughly angry for more than the fraction
of an hour. Ten minutes after the drum ceases to
thunder beneath my window I cease to damn the
Salvation Army and the laws which permit it to
torture me. Ten minutes after the first spurt of
blood you rescue your offending razor from its
exile in the ash-barrel. The public sticks to anger
longer, but not much longer. By dint of heroic
effort, it sometimes manages to remain desperately
enraged for a month, but that is the limit of its
capacity. Before the chance assassin can summon
up his courage, or the slow-moving court can get to
No. 2367, or the conservative committee is ready
to report H. B. 6667, the public's temperature is
back at 98.5, its pulse has sunk to 75, and the re-
action has set in. By that time, as a rule, the
Pecuniary Magnate has gone broke. His widowed
mother, to save him from ignominious toil, must
give him alms from her scanty millions.

196 Men vs. the Man

No; the public's anger doesn't last long, and is
seldom very violent while it lasts. Nine times out
of ten, indeed, the Pecuniary Magnate doesn't
anger it at all. To the farmers whose wheat he
doubles in value, he appears in the light of an
economic Messiah; and to the consumers whose
bread he fills with gases — well, setting aside the
Socialists and other connoisseurs of outrage among
them, how do these consumers actually regard their
oppressor? Do they denounce him as a criminal
and demand his banishment? I think not. Do
they call upon their representatives to make laws
against him, or even to enforce the laws already
existing? Seldom. Do they burn him in effigy,
sack his palaces, guillotine his morganatic wives,
and teach the young to loathe him? I fear they
do not. And the reason for their doing not, my
dear La Monte, lies in the fact that they are too
busy cheering the sport. It is the king of all
games, this cornering of the wheat market. It is
made brilliant by stroke and counter-stroke, thrust,
parry, and surprise. It has the dramatic grip of
a colossal melodrama, with a hero twelve feet tall,
and as strong as an aurochs. It is better than a
battle for the heavy-weight championship, or a
minor war. It has suspense, action, climax. It is
sport made sublime.

This, I presume to maintain, is the customary at-
titude of the public toward the Pecuniary Mag-
nate's most ruthless rapines. When it gives seri-

Men vs. the Man

197

ous and thoughtful consideration to him, and at-
tempts to estimate the morality, utility, and ulti-
mate effect of his activity, it is apt, as I have ad-
mitted, to advocate his demolition; but it is quite
extraordinary, you must grant, for the public, as
a public, to undertake any such elaborate medita-
tions. To the common man, reflection is a pain-
ful and uninviting business. There is, indeed,
some flavor of the sinister about it. Its natural
fruit seems to be paradox, predicament, doubt.
His inclination is to get his emotional thrill out of
the event itself, and to let its inner significance
go hang. He has found, by experience, that any
inquiry into causes is bound to engender a feeling
of discomfort as acute as that which accompanies
his Sunday clothes. It is an enterprise as tedious
as standing on one leg. What ho ! the band brays
and the clowns are in the ring ! Away to the big
show ! Who cares ?

But the Pecuniary Magnate — what of him?
Does all of this prove him harmless? Not at all.
It merely proves that, taking one year with an-
other, the great masses of the plain people choose
to treat him as if he were so. When he is a Mor-
gan, gobbling trusts by the dozen, and disgorging
them again, after absorbing their proteids, as
super-trusts and trust-trusts, he is a hero, pure and
simple. The drama of it overcomes them; they
pass into a state of emotional ecstasy, as at the
apotheosis of Little Eva or at Monte Cristo's

198 Men vs. the Man

blood-curdling " One 1 " If he is a young Chicago
gambler, staking his millions upon the price of
wheat next month, he becomes a sort of glorified
Sharkey, with a flavor, too, of Dr. Cook and the
Wright Brothers. Some hold that he will win,
and others hold that he will lose, but all hope for
a hot fight. If he wins he remains a public char-
acter until the next prodigy appears. If he loses,
he is mourned for a day as a David foully mur-
dered by an army corps of Goliaths.

So much for the public. But what of your
" lesser millionaires," racked by their epidemic of
insomnia ? Are they equally fascinated by the rat-
tle and the roar, and equally forgetful of morals
and balance-sheets? Experience proves that they
are not. So long as the performing Magnate ob-
serves the rules made and provided, and leaves
enough openings for reprisals, their attention is
concentrated upon plans for fattening, to-morrow
or next day, upon his accumulated winnings. But
if he presumes to play unfairly, or to put an end
to the game by laying about him with a bludgeon
— then his undoing comes swiftly and certainly.
Beginning as a stimulating antagonist, he ends as
an outlaw, with a posse at his heels. If he is a
James J. Hill, he is relieved of his Illinois Central
and provided with a few gray hairs. If he is a
Charlie Morse, he is railroaded to the Tombs.

I once enjoyed the acquaintance — to my cost,
alas ! — of a Pecuniary Magnate who flourished in

Men vs. the Man 199

a provincial city. The father of this magnate left
him a comfortable fortune, and some more remote
ancestor — a pirate, perhaps, or a militant evangel-
ist— left him a powerful thirst for dominion. Out-
wardly he was a sober, home-loving, god-fearing
man of strict chastity and Methodist principles, but
within the fires of ambition raged. The result
was one of the most fascinating characters imag-
inable. He had no vices — and no virtues. Profan-
ity made him shudder, and yet in matters of busi-
ness he was so appallingly ruthless that he made
all other persons shudder. Still the man was not
merely avaricious, for it was not money, but power,
that he craved. He wanted to fix prices, juggle
stocks, nominate senators. He yearned for im-
measurable might, not only in business, but also in
politics and society.

Well, this Pecuniary Magnate began by getting
control of a commodity without which life would
be unendurable. The plain people simply had to
have it, and in a short while they had to buy it of
him. He forced up the price slowly and scien-
tifically. When competition arose he crushed it
out. When protests came from the consumer, and
sociologists and muck-rakers began to denounce
him, he was ready with mazes of statistics in his
defense. Meanwhile, he grew rich and eminent.
The plain people were angry with him now and
then, but taking one day with another, the emotion
that he most steadily inspired in them was that of

2OO Men vs. the Man

envy. He became a Prominent Citizen. He was
turned to for advice when public improvements
were planned, or a mayor was to be elected. He
was himself pressed to accept high office. The
public, in a word, licked his hand.

Having achieved this eminence, he sought to
take a step still higher. That is to say, he pro-
posed to reduce the " lesser millionaires " of his
city to that same vassalage which the masses had
accepted so amicably. No easier said than done.
He bought a bank, he began promoting stock com-
panies; he went into the stock market and began
to prey upon less astute operators. At the start
there was much ill-natured opposition, for the
financiers of this city were an old-fashioned lot,
and their methods and ideals, like their actual bank
accounts, were three or four generations old. But
before long, the more ambitious came to the conclu-
sion that it would be better to join the rising Mag-
nate than to fight him. He needed their capital
and he let them in. An inspiring journey to the
pink clouds of illimitable opulence was an-
nounced, and the airship was crowded to the
guards. Venerable bankers hung upon the ropes.
Brisk young stock-brokers begged to be taken
along, if only as ballast. Small investors went as
stowaways.

And then, with the journey just begun, the gas-
bag burst and the airship came tumbling down.
With what result? Did the " lesser millionaires "

Men vs. the Man 201

blame it all on fate, as the groundlings had done?
Not at all. They began howling for revenge be-
fore the first gust of gas was out of their lungs,
and by the time they reached the ground they were
at the luckless Magnate's throat. It was all against
one. They took his bank away from him, they
forced some of his other enterprises into bank-
ruptcy, they gave him his first gray hairs. He is
to-day but the melancholy shell of a Pecuniary
Magnate. No doubt he still dreams his old
dreams, and plans epoch-making coups for the
future ; but no one fears him any more. He made
the epic mistake of trying to enslave his own kind.
Had he confined his efforts to the plain people he
might have been a billionaire by now — a billionaire
snoozing comfortably in a Senate cloak-room, with
a horde of press agents inventing a log-cabin biog-
raphy for him and whispering aloud that he
would make an excellent President.

I confess that I am not prepared to deduce a
hard and fast moral from all this. Does the cos-
mic process prove that the millionaire is necessary,
or beneficent? I am sure I don't know. But it
does prove, I think, that he is inevitable — at least,
at our present stage of progress. He is one of the
concrete facts which inevitably arise to visualize
world-ideas. He is the incarnation of the dom-
inant concept of mankind to-day, the palpable sym-
bol of the race's current philosophy of life. He is
as authentic, I believe, as any other god, past or

2O2 Men vs. the Man

future. Legislation can injure him no more than
papal bulls injured Luther. He will live and
flourish until the ideals of humanity are changed
— as changed they must be, over and over again,
so long as nature knows no standing still, but only
progress and retrogression.

Time was when the race of white men had other
ideals and yielded to other gods. Once the ideal
was an eternity of bliss at the right hand of the
Lord Jehovah. At that time the material prizes
of the earth seemed paltry, and men were esteemed
in proportion to the extent of their renunciation.
This was the hey-day of Christianity, for Jesus
Christ was then a perfectly comprehensible char-
acter, and men actually tried to follow him. Some
left homes and families and went to live in caves
and on pillars. Others sought to slay the Mes-
siah's enemies, at home and abroad. Still others
had to be content with imitating his humility in
the face of outrage and persecution.

At that time, the gods of to-day, had anyone
sought to preach them, would have seemed gro-
tesquely obscene. The Pecuniary Magnate, as we
know him now, was then well-nigh unthinkable,
not only because the laws of the land scourged him
with dire penalties and forfeitures, but also because
the sacred laws pronounced him anathema for all
eternity. If it were true that a rich man could
never hope to enter heaven — and few men, in that
day, doubted its truth — what invitation could pos-

Men vs. the Man 203

sibly lurk in usury? Heaven was every man's
goal, and the man shut out suffered a punishment
which no worldly prosperity, however magnificent,
could quite make him forget. The Jews, being
accomplished sophists, invented excuses for them-
selves. They could not escape the penalties of the
law of the land, but their rabbis found means
whereby, despite their usury, they might evade the
plain law of heaven. These quibbles gave them
such a great advantage over the races surrounding
them that they managed to survive the most earnest
efforts to stamp them out. That advantage they
have never lost. They are still a bit more firm
than the rest of us in their grip upon reality.

After the age of faith, there followed an age of
military endeavor, brought on by the gradual
crowding of western Europe. Then came the dis-
covery of America, and the submergence of the
military ideal in commercial ideas. Columbus
showed the marks of all three ages. He was at
once evangelist, military conqueror, and gold-
seeker.

To-day we have lost our old faith, and there
are no more hemispheres to explore. The whole
energy of the race is thus directed toward complet-
ing its mastery over the habitable lands it pos-
sesses. It seeks to increase its profits from the
soil, to improve its devices for exchanging com-
modities, to organize and systematize the business
of living. The effort is one which produces Rocke-

2O4 Men vs. the Man

fellers, Havemeyers, and Harrimans as inevitably
as it produces airships, canned vegetables, tele-
phones, and antitoxins. These latter-day barons
are merely men who are able to do more efficiently
than the average man the things that the race, as
a race, is trying to do. They are as truly race-
heroes, in twentieth century America, as Ulysses
was a race-hero in military Greece, or Jesus of
Nazareth in dreaming, hopeful, down-trodden
Judea. They visualize the aspirations of their fel-
low-men.

That the commercial idea will rule mankind
forever I by no means assert. How long it will
remain more powerful than all other ideas I don't
know, and neither do I know what other idea will
take its place. It is constantly conditioned and
modified by lesser concepts, any or all of which
may one day conquer it. The military idea, for
example, often rises to rivalry with it. For a few
brief weeks in the summer of 1898, most Amer-
icans envied Dewey more than Rockefeller, and
thought him a more useful and honorable citizen.
Even the old religious idea of sacrifice and post
mortem reward occasionally has its meager innings.
Millionaires, longing for heaven, disgorge their
gold. Whole nations, sunk into Christian bathos,
pension their doddering inefficients, and encourage
the nether swine, with orphan asylum, hospital, and
almshouse, to beget copiously and riotously, to the
extreme limit of sub-human capacity.

Men vs. the Man 205

My own private view (the child, I must admit,
of a very ardent wish) is that the idea of truth-
seeking will one day take the place of the idea
of money-making. That is to say, I believe that
the Huxleys and Behrings of the world will one
day loom up, in the eye of the race, as greater
heroes than the St. Pauls and Augustines, the Will-
iam Conquerors and Alexanders, the Rockefellers,
Cecil Rhodeses, Krupps, and Morgans. But that
day is far distant. As yet there is scarcely a sign
of its dawn. The name of Huxley is still as
strange, to the common people, as that of Duns
Scotus. His influence upon their daily thought is
still infinitely remote and infinitesimal. They still
pay numbskulls to mount pulpits and preach down
at them the dead fallacies of a primeval necro-
mancy. They still insist that Friday is an unlucky
day, that blasphemy is a crime, that the Book of
Revelation is authentic. The race is yet in its
childhood. Its yearning for the truth is yet swal-
lowed up by its yearning for a rock and a refuge.

Meanwhile the commercial idea is doing its best.
It is, indeed, a necessary forerunner of that truth
ideal I have mentioned. Before we may seek the
ultimate verities with any hope of success, we must
first put our house in order. We must complete
our mastery of those natural forces which will help
us, being enchained, just as readily as they now
destroy us, being free. We must solve the prob-
lems of food-supply, of transportation, of govern-

206 Men vs. the Man

ment. We must so organize the business of living
that it will adapt itself, constantly and auto-
matically, to the vicissitudes of terrestrial life. At
present, if I may be permitted a metaphor, the
body politic suffers from stiff knees, a bad stom-
ach, and a disordered mind. It is our present ef-
fort to give it clean, red blood, flowing freely —
clean, red blood, hard muscles, an alert brain, and
a sound digestion.

Would Socialism lend a hand in this gigantic
therapy ? I think not. It would merely make the
cure more difficult. To-day the law of natural
selection is aiding the man-made laws of artificial
selection. Under Socialism the unfit would sur-
vive. Under Socialism the efficient man would
have a price upon his head.

Faithfully,

H. L. M.

LA MONTE'S SIXTH LETTER

MY DEAR MENCKEN:

I have been highly entertained by your vivacious
trituration of the hapless Pecuniary Magnate,
though I was greatly surprised that you so mag-
nified his importance as to devote over six thou-
sand words to replying to an argument that I pre-
sented in six hundred.

But, before commenting briefly on your argu-
ment on this subject, will you permit me to remind
you that your promise in your first letter " to draw,
bit by bit, once more," your " ideal picture "
(of future society) is still unfulfilled? It may be
that I am obtuse, but certainly I have no more
definite idea of your ideal than I had before this
correspondence began. I hope that you will de-
vote your next letter to enlightening me on this
point.

I will anticipate your reply that I have given
you no definite picture of my own ideal, by re-
minding you that the Socialist ideal has been so
frequently sketched by master hands that I have
felt it unnecessary and a waste of space once again
to draw it here. But, while it is absurd to attempt
to give a detailed description of a future stage of

207

2o8 Men vs. the Man

social evolution, and, while no ideal is to be consid-
ered ultimate or final, but rather as the starting
point for new and indefinite progress, it is still
entirely reasonable for the opponents of Socialism
to demand some sort of concrete picture of the sort
of society Socialists expect to see succeed Capital-
ism. The picture drawn by William Morris in
" News from Nowhere " seems to me so infinitely
preferable in every way to the conditions surround-
ing us, that I, for one, would be delighted to see it
realized to-morrow.

But, let me repeat, this is not my ultimate ideal,
for I have no ultimate ideal, as I do not expect
social evolution to come to a standstill till this old
world shall be, in the words of Tennyson, " as dead
as yon dead earth, the moon."

Let me guard against a probable misapprehen-
sion. By reading " News from Nowhere " you
might not unnaturally get the idea that in my ideal
society but little use would be made of machinery.
On the contrary, as I have said elsewhere, I believe
the Machine Age to be still in its infancy. I be-
lieve that after the Social Revolution machinery
will be so developed that practically all the un-
attractive and toilsome work of the world will be
'done by machinery, and that the work that will be
left for manual labor will all come under the
category of Art, using that word in a broad and
true sense.

J believe that this was also not very far from

Men vs. the Man 209

the expectation of William Morris, for, writing
of machinery in "Signs of Change," he said:

" In a true society these miracles of ingenuity
would be for the first time used for minimizing
the amount of time spent in unattractive labor,
which by their means might be so reduced as to
be but a very light burden on each individual. All
the more as these machines would most certainly
be very much improved when it was no longer a
question as to whether their improvement would
4 pay ' the individual, but rather whether it would
benefit the community."

So much for my ideal; will you give me an
equally definite idea of your own?

Now, to return to the Pecuniary Magnate, if I
have analyzed your somewhat rambling (pardon
me) remarks correctly, they amount in substance to
this. You do not deny that sooner or later he is
bound to appear; neither do you dispute the
economic effects that Prof. Veblen and I have
ascribed to him. But you do say, first, if his
career proves too devastating, assassination will
remove him. This does not meet the question,
for his successor will have equal power.

Secondly, and somewhat inconsistently, you say
he does not alarm the people, but that on the con-
trary they admire and envy him, and are conse-
quently unlikely to interfere with him. If this
be true, and I will not dispute it here, he will have
precisely the annihilating effects upon the middle

2io Men vs. the Man

class (the progenitors of your Supermen) that I
predicted.

Thirdly, you say that while the masses admire
him and will not impede his mad career, the lesser
millionaires will turn and rend him. Did the
lesser millionaires enjoy a cannibal orgy with
the late Mr. Rogers of Standard Oil and the late
Mr. Harriman of the Pacific Roads as victims?
Ask Mr. Lawson of Boston and Mr. Fish of New
York.

You imply that Mr. James J. Hill once fell a
victim to the direful wrath of the lesser million-
aires. I wish you had been more explicit. The
obituary notices of Mr. Harriman led me to be-
lieve that it was that prince of Pecuniary Mag-
nates, and not the small-fry millionaires, who oc-
casionally defeated the able plans of Mr. Hill. But
I stand open to correction on this point.

You also say that Mr. Rockefeller's activities
have seldom caused insomnia among investors.
Permit me to commend to you the history of
Amalgamated Copper.

Finally, you say the Pecuniary Magnates are
" truly race-heroes in twentieth century America.
They visualize the aspirations of their fellow-men.
That the commercial idea will rule mankind for-
ever I by no means assert. How long it will re-
main more powerful than all other ideas I don't
know, and neither do I know what other idea will
take its place."

Men vs. the Man 211

Here, we Socialists have the advantage of you,
for we do know, in the language of Friedrich
Nietzsche, " how ideals are manufactured on
earth." We do know that human ideals are deter-
mined by the modes of production and exchange;
and, therefore, we know that the commercial ideal
of boundless wealth will persist just as long as
the means of production and distribution remain
private property, and we do know that the Social
Revolution, now close at hand, which will trans-
form these into common or collective property will
usher in the new and glorious ideal of social
service — an ideal that includes your ideal of
" truth-seeking," just as it includes the Hellenic
ideal of beauty and the Dionysian ideal of joy.

Only by becoming a soldier in the comrade-
hosts, can you hasten the realization of your own
ideal. It is because you feel the imperious
strength of this inward urge toward Socialism that
you argue so desperately against it. I rejoice at
this unconscious testimony to the resistless might of
the lure of Socialism.

In attempting to cure what you conceive to be
my boundless faith in the omnipotence of legisla-
tion you tell me that " legislation is always an ef-
fect rather than a cause " and that " it is inevitably
a good distance behind the event." You are mak-
ing progress, my dear Mencken, and I venture to
hope that it will not be long before you are able
to comprehend the meaning of Marx's pregnant

212 Men vs. the Man

statement that " the economic structure of society
is the real foundation, on which rise legal and
political superstructures and to which correspond
definite forms of social consciousness." But, let
me remind you that every effect is also a cause, and
that while the roots of legislation are to be delved
for in the economic soil, legislation also exercises
a potent influence upon the course of economic de-
velopment.

We Socialists do not put our whole faith in
legislation. Our eggs are not all in one basket.
We want the Co-operative Commonwealth, and we
want it soon, and we do not scorn or disdain any
weapon that may be of service in the struggle to at-
tain our goal. We regard the ballot as one of our
most important weapons ; we even think it might be
almost our sole weapon if our adversaries would
play the game of political democracy fairly. But
we are not so naive as to expect this. Accordingly
we shall use every weapon that the evolution of the
struggle develops. The recent history of Russia,
Sweden, and the Latin countries of Europe has
shown that the strike, in its later forms, is capable
of rivaling, if not surpassing, the ballot as a means
of Social Revolution. We shall certainly use both
ballot and strike, and I have no doubt that other
and equally powerful weapons will be evolved in
the future.

But the ballot has this distinct advantage: by
using it we demonstrate our strength, and the

Men vs. the Man 213

mightier the power we show at the ballot-box, the
less likely are our opponents to force us to make
use of our auxiliary methods. So that it is true
that we do lay great stress upon the ballot as a
means to Social Revolution. But we are quite
sure that after the Social Revolution there will be
little room or need for legislation in the sense in
which that term is now used.

In the struggle for Socialism, as in all other
struggles, the victory must go to the stronger of
the contesting parties. From this point of view
both the ballot and the strike are crude ther-
mometers for registering our rising strength.
When either of these thermometers shows that we
possess the superior social force, there will be need,
not so much for legislation, as for a parley to ar-
range the terms of surrender of the Capitalist
Class.

For, blink it, as we Americans try to, this
struggle in which we are engaged is and must re-
main a class-struggle until the Social Revolution
wipes out class antagonisms forever.

The greatest contribution that America has made
to anthropology and sociology was made by the
late Lewis H. Morgan of Rochester, New York.
Unfortunately, the biography of this transcendent
scientific genius is yet unwritten. His more im-
portant works were published over thirty years ago
by Henry Holt and Company. Chiefest among
them stands out " Ancient Society." In this monu-

214 Men vs. the Man

mental work Morgan through his study of the gens
and the marriage systems of the Iroquois Indians
and the Kanakas of Hawaii for the first time en-
abled us to understand the social organization of
the Greeks of Homeric and pre-Homeric times.

He broadly sketched the development of human
institutions through three stages of savagery and
three stages of barbarism up to civilization, and
thus enabled us to forecast the future. How did
he differentiate the divers stages of advance? By
the tools that men had invented and employed,
and the animals they had domesticated and made
subservient to human ends. He demonstrated that
these were the most important determining factors
of all social institutions. Man makes tools, and
the sort of tools that man has made determines
what sort of a society man shall live in. Since
this great discovery of Morgan's it is possible for
us when we know the tools in use at any given era,
to draw in broad outline the whole cultural scheme
of life of that era, just as Owen could reconstruct
the skeleton of an extinct species from a single
fossil bone.

Given small hand tools and no motor power, and
there inevitably result handicraft production, an-
thropomorphic religion, and the natural rights
philosophy of seventeenth century England and
eighteenth century France.

When the technique of production reaches its
present titanic development, the very nature of the

Men vs. the Man 215

tools (huge plants that can only be run by vast
armies of co-operating men and women) makes
the social ownership of those plants necessary and
inevitable. " Private property in the instruments
of production," says Kautsky, " has its roots in
small production. Individual production makes
individual ownership necessary. Large produc-
tion on the contrary denotes co-operative, social
production. In large production each individual
does not work alone, but a large number of work-
ers, a whole commonwealth, work together to pro-
duce a whole. Accordingly, the modern instru-
ments of production are extensive and gigantic.
With them it is wholly impossible that every single
worker should own his own instruments of pro-
duction. Once the present stage is reached by
large production, it admits but of two systems of
ownership :

" First, private ownership by the individual in
the instruments of production used by co-opera-
tive labor; that means the existing system of cap-
italist production, with its train of misery and ex-
ploitation as the portion of the workers, idleness
and excessive abundance as the portion of the cap-
italist; and

" Second, ownership by the workers in the com-
mon instruments of production; that means a co-
operative system of production, and the extinction
of the exploitation of the workers, who become
masters of their own products, and who themselves

216 Men vs. the Man

appropriate the surplus of which, under our sys-
tem, they are deprived by the capitalists.

" To substitute common for private ownership
in the means of production, this it is that the
economic development is urging upon us with ever
increasing force."

This substitution, my dear Mencken, is inevi-
table, and it cannot be much longer deferred. But,
as Kautsky says elsewhere, " when the Socialist de-
clares the abolition of private property in the in-
struments of production to be unavoidable, he does
not mean that some fine morning, without their
helping themselves, the exploited classes will find
the ravens feeding them. The Socialist considers
the breakdown of the present social system to be
unavoidable, because he knows that the economic
evolution inevitably brings on those conditions
that will compel the exploited classes to rise against
this system of private ownership; that this system
multiplies the number and the strength of the ex-
ploited, and diminishes the number and strength of
the exploiting classes, both of whom are still ad-
hering to it; and that it will finally lead to such
unbearable conditions for the masses of the pop-
ulation that they will have no alternative but
either to go down in silence, or to overthrow that
system of property."

This is what Marx and Engels meant when
they wrote in the Communist Manifesto, " What
the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are

Men vs. the Man 217

its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of
the proletariat are equally inevitable."

Our present ethics and our present jurisprudence
are both legacies from the era of handicraft. Un-
der handicraft it seemed wholly right and natural
that the laborer who owned his own tools and
worked with his own hands should own absolutely
his own product. Property rested, as it were, on
the right of creation. But to-day the great mass
of property has not been created by its owners, but
by the labor of others. But we still adhere to the
old ethics and jurisprudence begotten by handi-
craft. " Political economy," said Marx, " con-
fuses on principle two very different kinds of pri-
vate property, of which one rests on the producer's
own labor, the other on the employment of the
labor of others. It forgets that the latter not only
is the direct antithesis of the former, but absolutely
grows on its tomb only."

The economic history of the seventeenth,
eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries is simply the
story of the divorce of the peasant from the
land and the artisan from his tools. This di-
vorce was accomplished with much violence and
suffering, but it was absolutely necessary for the
development of the highly productive powers of
modern industry. When this process neared com-
pletion, there began the divorce of the middle
class capitalist from his capital — a process that
is still rapidly proceeding. " This expropria-

2i 8 Men vs. the Man

tion," Marx tells us in " Capital," " is accom-
plished by the action of the immanent laws of cap-
italistic production itself, by the centralization of
capital. One capitalist always kills many." I
have dwelt so often upon this tendency of our mod-
ern commercial life, and all American business men
are so painfully familiar with it, that no more need
be said of it here.

Here in America these two processes — the di-
vorce of the worker from the means of produc-
tion and the divorce of the smaller capitalists from
their capital — have proceeded so far that the
further development of our productive powers is
seriously impeded. The limited purchasing power
of the proletarians who have been freed from their
petty property compels the pecuniary magnates who
control our great industrial trusts to curtail produc-
tion, while the fear of the crushing competition of
the trusts prevents our lesser capitalists from ven-
turing upon new productive enterprises. We are
indeed hard up against the day of judgment. We
have reached here in America to-day the condition
that Marx predicted over forty years ago in these
memorable words : " The monopoly of capital be-
comes a fetter upon the mode of production,
which has sprung up and flourished along with it,
and under it. Centralization of the means of
production and socialization of labor at last reach
a point where they become incompatible with their
capitalist integument. This integument is burst

Men vs. the Man 219

asunder. The knell of capitalist private property
sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.

" The transformation of scattered private prop-
erty, arising from individual labor, into capitalist
private property is, naturally, a process incom-
parably more protracted, violent, and difficult than
the transformation of capitalistic private property,
already practically resting on socialized production,
into socialized property. In the former case, we had
the expropriation of the mass of the people by a
few usurpers; in the latter, we have the expropria-
tion of a few usurpers by the mass of the people."

But besides showing us the tremendous im-
portance of the nature of man's tools, Lewis H.
Morgan, in " Ancient Society," also shed a flood of
light on the nature of political government. The
two distinguishing marks of political government,
or the State, as we moderns conceive it, are, first,
the power to levy and collect taxes, and, second,
the power to make and enforce laws. Morgan
showed that among the Iroquois Indians and other
primitive societies in which the institution of pri-
vate property was not developed, while there was
a fairly elaborate social organization, the two dis-
tinguishing marks of the modern State were ut-
terly lacking. The public power of coercion was
only developed after the powers of production were
so developed as to enable the worker to produce
more than his own subsistence and thus to make

220 Men vs. the Man

it more expedient to enslave the prisoners of war
than to kill or eat them, and after the breeding on
a large scale of domestic animals had given rise to
large private property in flocks and herds.

Political government has its genesis in the divi-
sion of society into privileged classes and non-
privileged classes. As Deville puts it, " for the
security of a social order involving the division of
the population into classes, a public power cal-
culated to compel the respect of the non-privileged
is necessary." Political government, in the mod-
ern sense, does not exist so long as there are no
classes in society; it makes its appearance in a
more or less developed form with the emergence of
classes and the antagonisms they involve. The
product of a definite social order, it will last as
long as the conditions that have rendered it in-
evitable.

" When, in the course of development," says the
Communist Manifesto, " class distinctions have
disappeared, and all production has been concen-
trated in the hands of a vast association of the
whole nation, the public power will lose its political
character. Political power, properly so called, is
merely the organized power of one class for op-
pressing another. If the proletariat during its
contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the
force of circumstances, to organize itself as a class,
if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the
ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force

Men vs. the Man 221

the old conditions of production, then it will, along
with these conditions, have swept away the condi-
tions for the existence of class antagonisms, and
of classes generally, and will thereby have abol-
ished its own supremacy as a class.

" In place of the old bourgeois society, with its
classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an as-
sociation, in which the free development of each
is the condition for the free development of all."

Since political government is in essence an organ
of conservation whose chief function has been to
defend economic privilege, it follows that we can-
not destroy economic privilege without first cap-
turing the powers of political government. Here
you have the key to the political tactics of the So-
cialist movement. We despise no reform that
makes more tolerable the life-conditions of the
masses, but we know also that we cannot remove
the source of poverty and misery — private owner-
ship of tools and machinery — so long as we leave
the powers of political government in the control
of the propertied classes. Hence, the immediate
goal of the Socialist party in every country is the
conquest of political power.

We aim to capture political government that we
may compel political government to commit sui-
cide. As I have written elsewhere, " the state is
destined, when it becomes the state of the work-
ing-class, to remove its own foundation — economic
inequality — and thus, to commit suicide." In the

222 Men vs. the Man

words of Friedrich Engels, " the government of
persons will be replaced by the administration of
things."

I hope I have now made it clear that we urge
the workers to vote for Debs, not for the sake of
such crumbs of reform as we may attain by im-
mediate legislation (though I repeat we do not
despise or spurn such reforms), but because we
know the powers of government in the hands of
our opponents constitute an insurmountable bar-
rier between us and our goal.

But, I repeat, the fundamental difference be-
tween your position and mine is ethical rather than
economic. You hold that the individual can reach
a high development and happiness by making high
individual development and happiness his conscious
goals. I hold that the individual man can only
reach a high and worthy, a noble, development,
not by conscious self-sacrifice (which I agree with
you and Nietzsche is morbid and pathological),
but by such whole-souled devotion to the welfare
of others as leads to forgetfulness of one's own
interests.

Socialist ethics, as I conceive them, are well ex-
pressed in what W. D. Howells tells us was the
lesson Ibsen taught in " Little Eyolf " : " that you
must not and you cannot be happy except through
the welfare of others, and that to seek your bliss
outside of this is to sin against reason and right-
eousness both."

Men vs. the Man 223

I hold that, even if the goal of Socialism should
prove an iridescent dream, it has already enriched
the world immeasurably by the nobility of char-
acter it has so abundantly brought forth. It is
because it leads individuals to forget themselves in
their complete devotion to a great cause and a
noble ideal, that it is to-day the most vital regen-
erating religious force in the world.

Socialism will abolish poverty and satiety, and
make joyousness the dominant note of humanity;
it will make it impossible for self-interest to clash
with social welfare, and will thus make the Golden
Rule work universally and automatically. " May
we not expect," asks Kautsky, " that under such
conditions a new type of mankind will arise which
will be far superior to the highest type which cul-
ture has hitherto created? An Over-man (Ueber-
mensch), if you will, not as an exception but as a
rule, an Over-man compared with his predecessors,
but not as opposed to his comrades, a noble man
who seeks his satisfaction not by being great among
crippled dwarfs, but great among the great, happy
among the happy — who does not draw his feeling
of strength from the fact that he raises himself
upon the bodies of the down-trodden, but because
a union with his fellow-workers gives him courage
to dare the attainment of the highest tasks."

Awaiting with serene confidence the soon-com-
ing day when I can sign myself " your comrade,"
Yours as ever, LA MONTE.

MENCKEN'S REPLY TO LA MONTE'S
SIXTH LETTER

MY DEAR LA MONTE :

In the matter of the Pecuniary Magnate I am
well content to leave you in possession of the field.
This is not because I think you have disposed of
the few modest suggestions I ventured to put forth
in my last letter, but because I see no hope of
rescuing you from your errors by the ordinary
processes of disputation. You Socialists, when you
come to discuss the magnates, surplus values, bour-
geoisie, and other fantastic fowl in your aviary of
horrors, too often borrow a dialectic device from
your blood brothers, the Christian Scientists. That
is to say, you insist upon using private brands of
epistemology and logic, unknown and incompre-
hensible to mere human beings, in the conduct of
your philosophical feuds. Point out to a Christian
Scientist that the influence of the mind upon the
liver is infinitely less powerful than the influence
of the liver upon the mind, and he will bowl you
over with the staggering answer that the liver is a
mere delusion of the mind. It seems to me en-
tirely impossible for an everyday disputant, handi-
capped by a reverence for Aristotle, to controvert,

224

Men vs. the Man 225

or even to denounce such a theory. How are you
going to lay hold of it? How are you going to
measure or weigh it? It wipes out the whole uni-
verse, as you know that universe, and suspends all
the laws of evidence, logic, and causation. It
leaves you, in a word, gasping in an empty void.
The only thing to do is to steal away in silence.

The same fate, I fear, sometimes overtakes the
controversialist who engages a Socialist in debate.
My own case offers sorry proof of it. In my last
letter, for instance, I pointed out that the Pecuniary
Magnate's capacity for evil, while boundless in
theory, would be ever limited in practice, for not
even class legislation could afford him absolute
safety from some groaning hero's bullet. This
argument, I flattered myself, would give you pause,
but I was wrong. In the single paragraph that
you take to answer it, you wipe it completely from
the record, just as a Christian Scientist, with one
shattering denial, wipes out the whole science of
physiology. My argument, you maintain, is vain
and futile, for it is not an argument at all. As-
sassination a remedy? Pooh! What's the use?
As soon as one Magnate is assassinated, " his suc-
cessor will have equal power."

Well, let us look into this a bit. Let us suppose
a horde of potential Magnates, all eager to feast
upon the public. Many of them have the will and
many of them have the means, but the combination
of will and means is comparatively rare. But by

226 Men vs. the Man

and by, one of them with the will, by dint of toil-
some effort, achieves the means also, and in his face
we at once behold the lineaments of the true Veb-
lenian monster. He loses no time; he is at the
throat of the great masses instanter. A period of
barbarous pillage ensues. The price of beer goes
up to twenty-five cents a can. The unemployed
stalk the earth in tragic misery. Many of them,
facing despair, are forced to accept work from
their conqueror. Others, more idealistic, starve.
Desperate men murder and rob. Children are
eaten. Socialism grows popular. . . . One day
a bomb explodes beneath the private train of the
Nameless One, and he rolls a thousand feet down
the Alleghany Mountains. A month after his
funeral, his wealth is divided into two parts. One
swells the endowment of a Baptist u university " in
Arkansas, and the other goes to his son — a young
man whose wildest dream is to be the lover of a
prima donna. Thus passeth the means. The will
is already moldering in its grave.

But another Magnate springs into the saddle.
He is even worse than the first one. He rowels
the proletariat mercilessly. The cries of starving
children are music to his ears. He delights in
human misery, in unmentionable horrors, in un-
namable suffering. . . . One day his fore-
ordained bullet reaches him, and he troubles no
more.

A third! He has "equal power." ... So

Men vs. the Man 227

has the bullet that finds him. ... A fourth ! A
fifth! A one-hundredth! A five-hundredth!
. . . We come to large numbers. Four hun-
dred million Magnates have been slain. The earth
is littered with their carcasses. By their wills they
have established 5,000,000 Baptist " universities,"
sent out 50,000,000 missionaries to the heathen,
and founded the fortunes of a whole race of show
girls, shyster lawyers, head waiters, and alienists.
What a fate ! What a taste of ashes in the mouth !
And yet the four-hundred-million-and-first Mag-
nate, by your astonishing theory of infinite series,
is ready and willing to face the same fate and
taste the same ashes. That monster who at the
moment you introduced him was rare to the point
of actual non-existence, is now as common as
heresy. Once crafty and selfish beyond expression,
he is now willing to face certain death for an idea.
Frankly, my dear La Monte, I do not think
that you have disposed of my contention. Unless
I am vastly mistaken, a very real fear of death
(made real by practical examples) is apt to shake
the determination of even the most determined
man. And unless I am mistaken again, a public
execution, whether official or unofficial, is certain
to end the activity of even the most active, and to
make his particular form of activity lose its lure
for others. The case of General Trepoff may oc-
cur to you. General Trepoff, true enough, has a
successor in the office of Chief of the Russian

228 Men vs. the Man

Secret Police, but I fancy that even the most rabid
Russian patriot will admit that the administration
of his successor, while still leaving much to be de-
sired, is measurably less murderous than that of
Trepoff himself. If you maintain, in answer, that
there is but one Chief of the Secret Police in
Russia, while the United States offers pasturage
for a large number of Pecuniary Magnates, of
varying ambitions and degrees of evil, I need only
remind you that in the cemetery of Picpus in Paris
you will find the headless skeletons of 1,306 French
nobles of the Terror year, who were also of vary-
ing ambitions and degrees of evil. Bullets are
cheap to-day. One or ten thousand — what are
the odds?

And yet the Terror did not turn France into
Paradise. Of course not! No more would So-
cialism. The French peasants got rid of their
feudal masters, and it was good riddance, but new
masters appeared next day. The name of the
thing was changed, but the thing itself remained.
The same phenomenon would be observed if there
were a wholesale slaughter of millionaires in the
United States to-morrow, followed by a grand in-
auguration of Socialism. In that case, my dear
La Monte, you yourself would become a Magnate.
You edit a Socialist paper to-day and write Socialist
books, and the high privates and corporals of the
Socialist army quite naturally attach a good deal
of value to your technical skill and judgment as

Men vs. the Man 229

a virtuoso and connoisseur of economic disgust.
In the Socialist state they would still look to you
for guidance, for they would still be common
men and as such still in need of counselors, leaders,
and masters. You would be, we will say, Secre-
tary of the Treasury or Governor of the State of
New York — with a presidential bee buzzing in your
ears. . . . Let me confess it candidly; the pros-
pect does not please me. Between communism
dominated by Robert Rives La Monte and a
democracy tempered by John D. Rockefeller I am
constrained to choose the latter — not because I
hate you, but because a patient and painful inquiry
has convinced me that, on the whole, the philosophy
lived by John is safer, saner, and more wholesome
for the human race than the philosophy preached
by you. . . . The average American, I take it,
agrees with me. Maybe that is why a proposal
that Rockefeller be assassinated would seem a joke
to him — a joke in bad taste, perhaps, but still a
harmless one. Do not worry: John is safe. So
long as we proletarians can laugh we are an in-
offensive lot.

Your other objections in rebuttal, in the matter of
Veblen and his Magnates, I must submit to pos-
terity and a just God without further argument, for
this correspondence is already o'er-long, and be-
fore closing this letter I must try to answer your
charge that I have no philosophy of life to offer in
place of Socialism. This charge, at least in part,

230 Men vs. the Man

is true enough, for I must confess that I have no
infallible formula, like your " materialistic concep-
tion of history," to solve all the problems of human
existence. Life impresses me, most of all, by its
appalling complexity. It is not static but dynamic ;
not a being, but an eternal becoming. The con-
stant reaction of diversified individuals upon a fluent
environment produces a series of phenomena which
seems to me, at times, to be beyond all ordering
and ticketing. When one attempts to interpret
these phenomena, and to reduce them to ordered
chains and classes, the result is too often a futile
waste of words. Unlike things are given the same
name, and their possession of that name in com-
mon is taken to be a proof of their identity. Again,
the same thing is given two names, x and y, and
elaborate equations are built up from them, with-
out anyone noticing the fallacies that fairly bristle
in both members. Most of the absurdities of the
quack-science of sociology, as it is taught by vapid
college professors, and of the quasi-science of
political economy, as it is taught by professors, la-
bor leaders, editorial writers, and rhapsodists, arise
out of just such errors.

You Socialists often blunder into the trap. In
your last letter, for example, you say that, " given
small hand tools and no motive power, and there
inevitably results handicraft production." On the
surface, this seems to be a sound enough generali-
zation, but a moment's inspection will show that its

Men vs. the Man 231

soundness is a mere appearance. What you actu-
ally say, in fact, is this : that given hand tools and
nothing else, there must inevitably result the use
of hand tools. There is just as much intelligibil-
ity in that statement, and no more, as you will find
in the statement that all one-eyed men must see
out of one eye.

But you are not alone in your errors. Others
just as gross are made by all other men who seek
to reduce the complex and disorderly phenomena
of life to rigid rules. I fall into them myself
whenever I set pen to paper — as you have noticed
full often in these letters of mine — and only the
soothing knowledge that I am not alone in my blun-
dering— that even the Huxleys, the Newtons, and
the Darwins are sometimes with me — keeps me
from abandoning controversy as an art impos-
sible by the very nature of things. Generaliza-
tions, indeed, all have their limits — even this one.
Apply them often enough, and you will come in-
evitably upon some disconcerting exception, some
radioactive anarchist. The cosmic process is made
up of innumerable acts, and the more we ex-
amine any of them, the more we become convinced
that, in many respects, it is unique. But because
philosophy is long and life is short we must as-
sume, even when we can't entirely believe, that
they fall into groups and classes, else we could
never hope to study them at all. In Prof. James'
phrase, we must use short cuts in our reasoning.

232 Men vs. the Man

But we may still take care, in using them, that
they are not needlessly short.

And now for the philosophy which I choose to
regard as more accurate and more satisfactory than
Socialism. You complain that I have failed to
state it in my letters, simply and unequivocably,
but you must admit that I have given you more
than one glimpse of its outlines. These glimpses,
I make no doubt, have long ago informed you
that it is, in the rough, a square denial of
practically all the doctrines and ideals at the bot-
tom of Christianity and Socialism. Whenever and
however Christianity and Socialism differ, my vote
is for Socialism, and to that extent, perhaps, I may
claim membership in your fraternity. Like you, I
hold in abhorrence the false promise that " the
meek shall inherit the earth " — the one ingredient
which effectually separates Christian morality from
all other moralities — and like you, I hold that life
upon the earth is a very agreeable thing, and that
men should concentrate their greatest efforts upon
making it more agreeable — a notion which no hon-
est Christian, with his belief in the ineradicable
vileness of humanity, and the futility of human ef-
fort, can harbor without a feeling of guilt. In
all this we are one, but when it comes to the doc-
trines, which Christianity and Socialism hold in
common, we are two. I refer here, of course, to
the doctrines that all men are equal " before the
Lord," that a man's duty to his brother is greater

Men vs. the Man 233

than his duty to himself, that the hopeless yearn-
ings of a stupid, helpless, and inefficient man are,
in some recondite manner, more pleasing to the
Master of the universe than the well-ordered, in-
telligible plans and achievements of an efficient
man. I cannot believe these things. It seems to
me, indeed, that they are palpably untrue, and that,
by reason of their untruth, they are dangerous foes
to human progress.

You Socialists, in the very first paragraph of
your philosophy, make one of the errors that I
have mentioned in a preceding paragraph. That
is to say, you give very unlike things the same
name, and then assume that they are like. As ex-
amples of these unlike things, I can do no better
than mention Thomas Henry Huxley and a man
whom we may call the Rev. Jasper Johnson. On
the surface you will find many points of resem-
blance between the two. Huxley was a male of
the genus homo, and so is Johnson; Huxley had
five fingers on each hand, and so has Johnson;
Huxley expressed his ideas in the English language,
and so does Johnson ; Huxley was carnivorous and
so is Johnson. Reckon up all these points of re-
semblance and you will find them almost infinite in
number. But, reckon up, then, the points of dif-
ference between the two men, and you will find
them equal to #n plus a million. In every char-
acteristic, instinct, habit, and quality which serves
to differentiate any man from any ape, Huxley

234 Men vs. the Man

was more lavishly endowed, perhaps, than any
other individual man that ever lived; but in John-
son these characteristics, instinct, habits, and qual-
ities, when they appear at all, are so faint that
it is well-nigh impossible to detect them. Huxley,
in a word, was an intellectual colossus ; while John-
son, intellectually, scarcely exists at all. The one
pushed the clock of progress ahead a hundred
years ; the other is a foul, ignorant, thieving, super-
stitious, self-appointed negro preacher of the Black
Belt, whose mental life is made up of three ambi-
tions— to eat a whole hog at one meal, to be a
white man in heaven, and to meet a white woman,
some day, in a lonely wood.

And yet, by the socialistic and Christian philoso-
phies, these men are equal. According to the
Christian seers, they will kneel before the throne
of God side by side, and spend eternity as brothers.
According to the Socialist seers, they are equally
fitted to deal with the great problems of society and
the state, equally worthy of ease, protection, and
leisure, and equally entitled to have the aid of their
fellow-men in the achievement of their ambitions.

I am unable, my dear La Monte, to grant this
much. It seems to me, indeed, that the man who
attempts to prove merely that Huxley and Johnson
belong to the same order of living creatures has
a staggering task ahead of him. The gap be-
tween them, I am convinced, is greater than that
between Johnson and the anthropoid apes. Phys-

Men vs. the Man 235

ically, true enough, there is probably only a dif-
ference in degree, but mentally there is an abysmal
difference in kind. No conceivable course of train-
ing, however protracted, could convert Johnson
into an imitation of Huxley. The one came into
the world with certain inherited traits, certain in-
valuable forms of congenital efficiency, which the
other can never hope to acquire. The one be-
longed to a caste of men whose value to the human
race, and whose consequent right to life, no sane
person would venture to deny; the other belongs
to a caste whose value is obviously nil, and whose
right to life, in consequence, must be proved be-
fore it is admitted.

Here, then, I arrive at that doctrine of human
rights which seems to me to be most in accord with
the inflexible and beneficent laws of nature which
rule man in his complex communities just as rigidly
as they rule staphylococci in their culture tubes.
Of these rights there are two classes — first, those
which a man (or a class of men) wrests from his
environment by force; and secondly, those which
he obtains by an exchange of values. A man is
exercising rights of the first class when he kills the
wolf that seeks to devour him, or wrings a living
directly from the earth; he is exercising a right
of the second class when he takes his skill and in-
dustry into the open market and sells them for
whatever they will bring. If the service that he
offers is of small value to his fellow-men, he must

236 Men vs. the Man

be content with a small return for it. And if, per-
chance, it has no value, he must accept nothing as
his reward. There is, in a word, no irreducible
minimum of compensation, due to every man by
virtue of his mere existence as a human being.
No man has any right to life, save that which he
proves by mastering his environment.

This view of the world and its people is not
quite so anthropophagous as my bald statement of
it may make it seem. It does not exclude those
feelings of pity, charity, and good-will which grow
out of habit and association, nor does it exclude
that wise foresight which sometimes prompts the
strong man to aid the weak man, that the latter,
perchance, may shake off his weakness and become
a helper instead of a pensioner. But it does ex-
clude that sentimental reverence for the human be-
ing, per se, which credits him with a long cata-
logue of gratuitous and complex rights, all
grounded upon the ancient theological notion that
he is, in some sense, divine. This notion, I be-
lieve, is to blame for nine-tenths of the wretched-
ness in the world to-day. It is to blame for that
unhealthy charity which coddles the degenerate,
half-human pauper of England, and encourages
him, in the name of God, to beget more of his
kind; it is to blame for that maudlin theory of
liberty which, in the United States, makes the vote
of a negro loafer as potent as that of a Charles
Eliot or a Thomas Edison; and it is to blame,

Men vs. the Man 237

finally, for that insidious and paralyzing unrest
which, as Socialism or what not, is making the in-
efficient man still more inefficient by convincing him
that efficiency is valueless and even criminal. No
great eloquence is needed to make a roustabout be-
lieve that he is as good a man as the governor of
his state, but his belief in that absurdity is no proof
of its truth, and in the process of instilling it into
his foggy mind you have ruined him as a roust-
about.

In order that the human race may go forward, it
seems to me desirable that the rewards of extraor-
dinary efficiency should be magnificently alluring,
and that the penalties of complete inefficiency
should be swift, merciless, and terrible. It is not
sufficient that the unusual man be given enough to
eat, and a roof to shelter him from the weather,
for such things are within the easy reach of prac-
tically all men. He must have, in addition, a re-
ward which effectively marks him off from the
common man. It is for him to nominate the qual-
ity of that reward, and it is for his fellow-men to
determine its quantity. If he wants money, let
him have money. If he wants power, honor,
glory, worship, let him have what he wants. Per-
haps that incomparable — but, to the common man,
incomprehensible — joy which comes with the con-
sciousness of work well done will suffice him. Per-
haps, on the contrary, he will demand, not only
riches for himself, but also a guarantee that his

238 Men vs. the Man

children shall be rich for generations. What-
ever he desires, he proves title to it by getting
it. In the free market of the world he finds his
price.

The man of less efficiency makes a less splendid
bargain, for the things that he offers for sale have
less value. If he is at the bottom of the scale
his wares have scarcely any value at all, since they
are within the reach of nearly every one: There
is no art at which he is appreciably more skilful
than any other man. Therefore, he must seek his
living at drudgery, at which all men of normal
health are equally efficient. Men who desire to
escape their share of the world's drudgery, because
more agreeable and more profitable work invites
their skill, give it over to him. The thing that he
offers for sale, in a word, is exactly that elemental
functional energy which a draught horse offers for
sale, and nothing more; and the price that he
gets for it, as Adam Smith showed long ago, is the
same price paid to the horse — food and shelter,
and nothing more. If he superimposes upon that
functional energy the slightest skill, his pay begins
to include something beside the bare means of ex-
istence, and as his skill increases, his pay in-
evitably follows it.

It seems to me that this is an admirable arrange-
ment. If I had the power to change it, I should
not make the slightest alteration. If I were told
off to create a new universe, I should adopt the

Men vs. the Man 239

whole plan bodily. We human beings may well
offer our thanks to it for our emergence from the
dumb brutes. It has lifted us up in the past, and
it will lift us up for all time to come. It stamps
out, automatically and certainly, not only the in-
efficient individual but also the useless class and
the weakling race. Its tendency is to accentuate
and make more conspicuous all of those traits and
forms of skill which best differentiate the human
being from all other beings. It offers enormous
premiums to the man who can do well the things
which all other men can do only badly, or not at
all. It reduces to slavery the man who has only
the strength of a weak ox to sell. And in its deal-
ings with the countless individuals between this
master-man and this slave-man, it determines every
man's value, not by his yearnings or his intentions,
but by the immediate value of his acts.

Dealing thus with countless individuals, it sets
them off, roughly, into castes, but there are no
palpable barriers about these castes. A man born
into the lowest may die in the highest. A race as
generally inefficient as the African may produce
an occasional Hannibal or Dumas, and a race at
the top of the scale may have its hordes of idiots.
In one century, when the general environment of
humanity puts a premium upon a certain kind of
skill, the race best displaying it may rule the world,
and two centuries later, when changes in environ-
ment make some other kind of skill more valuable,

240 Men vs. the Man

that same race may sink to practical slavery. The
great reward is always to the race, as to the in-
dividual, which best masters the present difficulty
and meets the present need.

Civilization, growing conscious of the natural
castes, erects them into classes, and then seeks to
make their prerogatives and disabilities permanent.
But this effort, in the long run, inevitably fails.
There was a time in the history of the world, for
example, when its priest class possessed absolute
power over all other classes — power infinitely
greater than that wielded by the military class in
the middle ages, or by the commercial class to-day.
It seemed utterly incredible, at that time, that
the priest class would one day become a rabble of
scarcely tolerated parasites, and yet that thing has
come to pass. The military class, in the same
way, has lost its old kingship, and to-day its very
existence depends upon the good-will of the com-
mercial class. Perhaps the latter, too, will be de-
throned in time. I am sure I don't know. It is
even possible that the " producer " class may have
its innings. Again, I don't know.

But this I do know: that the plan of Socialism
to lift up the " producer " class to sovereignty by
an act of human volition is as absurd as the old
ecclesiastical plan to solve the riddles of the uni-
verse by revelation and anathema. If the thing
ever comes to pass at all, it must come by slow
stages and as a symptom of changes in the needs

Men vs. the Man 241

and desires of the human race. At present the
race seems to stand most in need of improvements
in the art of life. To the man who offers it a
secret password to heaven, it gives little, for it is
little interested in heaven, but for him who offers it
some new scheme to attain ease and comfort — some
improvement in marketing petroleum, some device
for making travel safer, some new food, some
new plan of investing savings — it has rewards as
large as those that once went to popes and em-
perors. And in this favored class of services, it
esteems most the unique service. To the man
who makes shoes which, whatever their excellence,
are no more comfortable than the shoes made at
the next bench, it gives a comparatively small re-
ward. And so, too, it has no prize for the man
who raises wheat in the old, old way, and stores
it in his bin. But to the man who, by inventing
new machinery or by better organizing the work,
improves the comfort of shoes, and to the man
who buys the wheat of the farmers and hauls it
craftily to where it is most needed — to these men
it gives extraordinary rewards.

The effort to lift the man of common service
to the level of the man of uncommon service seems
to me not only pernicious, but also, in the long run,
inevitably futile. When the workingman, going
into the market to sell his skill, attempts, by fair
means, to strike the best bargain he may, he has
my unfeigned sympathy. But when, as a man

242 Men vs. the Man

of common skill, he demands the rewards and con-
sideration due only to the man of uncommon skill,
it seems to me that the more efficient men on the
other side of the counter are within their rights
when they use their power and cunning to oppose
his exactions. His notion that in addition to his
just wages he deserves a definite reward for the
mere act of remaining alive is one to which I can-
not subscribe. And his further notion that his
mere condition of aliveness makes him as fit to
solve the most difficult problems of existence as
those men whose extraordinary efficiency has lifted
them up — in this matter, too, I must diverge from
him. No one, I am sure, regards it as an act of
tyranny that bricklayers have no vote in the deter-
mination of the treatment of pneumonia. In the
same way it seems to me equally natural that negro
farm hands should have no voice in the determina-
tion of those great questions of government, com-
merce, and the art of living which sorely tax even
the highest men.

But do the great rewards always go to the most
efficient and worthy? How about the idle rich.
And how about luck and brute strength? Is there
any excuse for the besotted master of inherited
millions, dragging out his useless days in self-
indulgence? And isn't it a fact that the bitter
struggle for existence, in destroying a weak body,
may also destroy an incomparable mind? And
finally, isn't it true that the sole difference between

Men vs. the Man 243

master and slave is sometimes a mere difference in
opportunity ?

The idle rich first. What of them? Does my
scheme of things justify them? To be sure it
does not — but neither does it demand their im-
mediate and melodramatic extinction. Admitting
them to be as sinister as you Socialists accuse them
of being, two factors, it seems to me, tend to dilute
their capacity for actual evil-doing. One is the
fact that they are few in number, and the other is
the fact that their hold upon their opulence is al-
ways precarious. In other words, the utterly idle
man, who, despite his idleness, retains his riches,
is an excessively rare individual. You must go to
the stage and the uplift magazines to find him in
force. In real life he is met with as seldom as a
married philosopher or the horrid behemoth of
Holy Writ.

The vast majority of our millionaires are not
idle parasites, but simply well-paid workmen.
The money that rolls in upon them is their wage
for devoting extraordinary talents to extraordinary
acts. That these acts are sometimes judged to be
immoral by eminent (though self-appointed) ex-
perts has nothing to do with the case, for in the
struggle for existence an act is never actually moral
or immoral, but only (in the broadest sense of the
words) profitable or unprofitable, worth doing or
not worth doing. The view of it taken by a
moralist, however accomplished he may be, is al-

244 Men vs. the Man

ways a mere opinion, and you can always find some
other moralist to contradict it. To show you how
nearly this is true, I need only recall to you that
practically every act possible to human beings has
been the storm-center of furious moral debates.
To one man the act of eating flesh seems indecent,
while to another it appears as the most agreeable
operation imaginable. To one man the habit of
taking money from ignorant folk, on the promise
of getting them into heaven, seems the most dig-
nified and honorable of human avocations, while to
me it bears the aspect of a peculiarly heartless and
nefarious form of fraud. To one man the soldier
is a hero; to another, he is a vile loafer and
chronic criminal. To one, marriage is a holy
sacrament; to another, it is a dangerous vice. In
view of all this, is it for you or me to determine,
once and for all time, that the manner in which a
particular millionaire makes his money is im-
moral? I think not. So long as the millionaire
himself thinks he earns it honestly, it is probably
best to give him the benefit of the doubt. For all
I know, even the cornering of the wheat market
may have some recondite value; and whether in-
trinsically valuable or not, it is certainly valued,
for the public pays for it lavishly.

No; the average millionaire is no inert leech,
but a busy toiler. Even when his wealth comes
to him as a free gift from his father, he must
work hard to retain it. If you have ever had the

Men vs. the Man 245

care of any amount of capital, however small, you
will have to admit that this is true. A further
and familiar proof is offered by the fact that great
fortunes seldom remain intact for more than a
few generations. The rich man can be entirely
idle only at enormous expense. It sometimes costs
him a million dollars to nurse a bad cold, for
while he is incommunicado all the rest of humanity
joins in a desperate effort to relieve him of his
fiscal burdens. The noble families of England,
protected in their properties by the most cunning
laws ever devised by man, are yet far from secure.
According to one painstaking investigator, not
more than five per cent, of the great fortunes of
that country's peerage have come down unbroken
for two generations. Noble and rich clans, as a
rule, are quickly absorbed into the proletariat.
The great-grandson of a duke may be a barber.

But even admitting the idle and rich son of a
millionaire to be entirely and perniciously useless, I
fail to see what can be fairly done about it. His
father received from the public certain enormous
sums for certain services, which, by the law of
supply and demand, bore a high market value, and,
as I have shown before, they went to him upon the
distinct understanding that he was to have the free
use of them. If he had chosen to devote them to
useful public purposes, no one would have objected;
and if he had chosen to pay them, on his deathbed,
into the public treasury, even you Socialists would

246 Men vs. the Man

have hailed him as moral. Why should he be de-
nounced, then, because he chose to hand them over
to his dissolute and half-imbecile son? Would it
be fair or honest, after making a definite treaty
with him, to abrogate it without his consent?
And would it be even expedient? Isn't it plain
enough that his idle son is the worst of all possible
foes to impregnable wealth ?

And now for the other objections. Do the
greatest rewards really go to the most efficient and
worthy? Doesn't the struggle for existence, by
warring upon weak bodies, sometimes rob the
world of incomparable minds? And doesn't luck
play the principal part in the struggle? I an-
swered most of these questions, I believe, in a
former letter, but it may be well to repeat my gen-
eral answer here. It is this : that I am concerned
in this discussion with the world as it is, and not
with the world as it might or should be. If it
were possible, by a human act, to nullify the law
that the fittest shall survive, Socialism and all other
schemes of that sort would become reasonable —
I grant only their reasonableness, mind you, and
not their truth — but as things stand it seems to me
that they are almost beyond the pale of debatable
ideas. Whether for woe or weal, nature pro-
vides that the strong shall have an advantage over
the weak, and that the fortunate shall outrun the
luckless in the race. It is scarcely worth while
for us to attempt to judge nature here. All we

Men vs. the Man 247

may safely do is to make a note of the fact that
this scheme of things, whatever its horrors, at least
makes for progress; and to thank whatever gods
there be that we, personally, are measurably re-
moved from the bottom of the scale.

I am not a religious man, but I cannot think
upon my own good fortune in life without a feeling
that my thanks should go forth, somewhere and to
someone. Wealth and eminence and power are
beyond my poor strength and skill, but on the side
of sheer chance I am favored beyond all computa-
tion. My day's work is not an affliction, but a
pleasure; my labor, selling in the open market,
brings me the comforts that I desire; I am assured
against all but a remote danger of starvation in
my old age. Outside my window, in the street, a
man labors in the rain with pick and shovel, and
his reward is merely a roof for to-night and to-
morrow's three meals. Contemplating the differ-
ence between his luck and mine, I cannot fail to
wonder at the eternal meaninglessness of life. I
wonder thus and pity his lot, and then, after
awhile, perhaps, I begin to reflect that in many
ways he is probably luckier than I.

But I wouldn't change places with him.
Sincerely,

MENCKEN.

INDEX

Ability, reward of, 48, 91,

237, 238, 241
Altruism, 25, 222
Anarchists, 44, 120
Animism, 125
Anthropomorphism, 75, 127,

163-167

Antiparos, 36, 38, 69
Aristocracy, 13, 14, 72, 73,

74, 176, 179
Aristotle, 35, 224
Army (see Militarism), 50
Arrhenius, 142
Art, 14, 146, 208
Astronomy, 128, 142
Athens, 15

Ballot (see Suffrage)
Baltimore, 109, 129, 130
Bebel, August, 173
Beliefs, economic basis -of,

133-135, 143, 169
Beyond-man, I, 7, 89, 129,

175, 176, 177, 223
Biology, 141
Birth-rate, 70, 87
Blatchford, Robert, 124
Bonaparte, Napoleon, 73
Briand, Aristide, 173
Bribery, 155, 156, 159, 171
Bryan, W. J., 188

Caesar, Julius, 29, 37, 51
Capital, composition of, 6, 7,

"Capital," Karl Marx,

quoted, 217, 218, 219
Carnegie, Andrew, 80
Caste, 98, 101, no, 112, 113,
115, 116, 117, 125, 128, 161,
162, 240

Catastrophism, 140, 142, 170
Centralization, 55, 218
Chamberlain, T. C, 142
Child-labor, 13
Christianity, 75, 76, 114, 135,

232

Cicero, 36, 97

Cigar manufacture, 20-23, 42
Cimabue, 85, 184
Class struggle, 213
Collectivism, 12
Columbus, Christopher, 29,

37, 5i,. 203
Communism, 12
"Communist Manifesto," Marx

and Engels, quoted, 10, 183,

216, 217, 220, 221
Competition, 38, 49, 54, 70, 77,

90

Cooley, Charles H., 87
Co-operation, 70
Co-operative Commonwealth,

92

Culture, 13, 15
Cuvier, 136, 137

Darwin, Charles, 75, 137, 138,

139, 141, 167, 231
Death-rate, 84, 108
Debs, E. V., 157
Demeter, 36
Democracy, 152, 171
Department store, 10, 176
Depew, C. M., 45
Deville, Gabriel, 220
De Vries, Hugo, 136, 140
Diaz, Porfirio, 73, 84
Diderot, 35, 36, 74
Disease, due to poverty, 58
Dixon, Rev. Thomas, 148, 150
Don Quixote, 2

249

250

Index

Drama, The, 14

Duncan, Robert Kennedy, 142

Earthquakes, 142

Economic determinism, 8, 37,
86, 105, 133, 135, 212, 214

Economics, 8, 27, 43

Education, u, 88, 160

Ehrlich, 28, 151

Eliot, Charles W., 158

Employees as share-holders,
78, 91

Emulation, 64, 68

Engels, Friedrich, 36, 183,
184, 216, 221, 222

Equality, 75, 131, 151; eco-
nomic, 129 ; intellectual,
iqi, 102; racial, 131, 132

Ethics, 76, 232; of capital-
ism, 90, 243, 244; of So-
cialism, 222; economic basis
of, 90, 135

Evolution, 29, 80, 113, 127,
128, 141, 143, 167

Exploitation, 4, 7, 24, 34, 122,
177, 215, 216, 238

Expropriation, 217, 219

Factories, 9, 215
Ferri, Enrico, 131
Feudal economy, 4
Flammarion, Camille, 142
Foreign markets, 5, 77, 78
France, 35, 37

Francis, Saint, of Assisi, 101
French Revolution, 37, 71,
136, 169

Genius, waste of under capi-
talism, 86
Geology, 142
Ghent, W. J., 7
Giotto, 85, 184
Golden Rule, The, 90
Gould, Jay, 91, 178, 187
Greece, 35, 37, 69

Harriman, E. H., 91, 178,

179, 210
Hegel, 142
Heredity, 104, 138
Herodotus, 96
Hertzka, Prof., 55, 89
Hill, James J., 74, 90, 179, 108
Hitch, Marcus, 145
Housing, in the future, 54
Hunter, Robert, 13
Huxley, T. H., 31, 118, 166,

205, 231, 233, 234

Ibsen, Henrik, 180-184, 222
Ideals, 2, 89, 202, 204, 205,

207, 208, 209, 211
Immoralists, 7, 175, 179
Incentive, 89, 239
Individualism, 179, 180, 184

222

Inevitability, of Socialism, 7,

38, 91, 216
Intellectuals, n, 139
Intemperance, 67, 89, 130
International Socialist Re-
view, 57, 89
Intimidation, 154, 171

Jaures, Jean, 173

Jefferson, Thomas, 2

Jesus Christ, 2, 76, 101, 184,

202
Jews, The, 203

Kautsky, Karl, 136, 215, 223

Labor, its share of product,
40-42; hours of, 8, 25, 26,
53, 56, 57, 62; pleasure in,
58, 67, 93, 95
Lafargue, Paul, 98
Lamarck, 137, 138
Lassalle, Ferdinand, 103
Legislation, 189, 211, 212
Lewis, Arthur Morrow, 136,

140

Lincoln, Abraham, 137, 177
Literature, 14, 145, 146

Index

251

London, Jack, 8
Lonesomeness, 129, 168, 169
Louis XIV., 72
Louis XVI., 72
Lowell, Percival, 128
Lyell, Sir Charles, 137, 138

Machine Process, 9, 10, n,

144, 180
Machinery, economic effects

of, 4, 36, 38, 69, 208
Mallock, W. H., 91
Malthus, 69, 88
Manufacture, capital invested

in, 41
Mars, 128
Marx, Karl, i, 10, 13, 18, 24,

69, 177, 183, 184, 2ii
Materialist Conception of

history, 69, 230 (see Eco-
nomic determinism)

Mendel, Gregor, 104, 138, 139

Messina earthquake, 98-101

Middle ages, 4

Middle classes, 10, n, 175,
176

Militarism, 174

Morality, 243 (see Ethics)

Morgan, J. P., n, 176, 205

Morgan, Lewis H., 85, 213,
214, 219

Morris, William, 93, 94, 95,
146, 208

Moses, 29, 37, 51, 68, 167

Mutations, 141, 161

Natural Selection, 25, 33, 69,

70, 117, 118, 206, 246
Naval expenditures, 174-5
Negro, The, no, 116, 124,

130, 132, 151, 162, 234
Nietzsche, Friedrich, I, 43,
63, 64, 89, 98, 129, 135, 179,
180, 211

Odin, A., 86, 145
Over-man, 223 (see Beyond-
man)

Ovtr-population, 70, 82, 87,
108

Panics, 4, 24, 51, 175
Pasteur, 33, 35, 58, 60, 68, 84,

85, 108, in
Peasant, The Russian, 116,

130
Pecuniary Magnates, 177-179,

185-201, 207, 209, 210, 224-

229

Pericles, 15, 35, 37
Pig-iron, production and

wages, 42

Pinchot, Gifford, 88
Planetesimal hypothesis, 142
Plato, 35, 97
Poincare, Lucien, 143
Politics, Socialist, 221
Pragmatism, 119
Productive powers, growth

of, 4
Progress, 12, 16, 29, 32, 80,

114, 247
Proletariat, 12, 96, 103, 172,

220

Punnett, R. C, 141
Purchasing power, 5, 7, 18,

38, 39

Rabble, The, 2, 89, 129
Race suicide, 88
Reason, Eternal, 36, 37, 43
Reeve, Sidney A., 54
Reform, 222

Representative government,
limits of taxation under,

Rockefeller, John D., 79, 84,

115, 158, 176, 191, 203, 205,

210, 229

Rogers, H. H., 210
Roosevelt, Theodore, 88, 105,

106, 123
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 36,

37

252

Index

School children, under-fed,

13

Schopenhauer, Arthur, 63,64
Science and economics, 136-

143

See, T. J. J., 141
Shaw, G. Bernard, 124, 129
Shaw, Leslie M., 43
Shylock, 186
Slavery, 35

Slobodin, Henry L., 57
Smith, Adam, 4, 28
Social Democracy, 139
Social development, 214
Socialist Party, 9
Social Revolution, The, 7, 8,

9, 12, 13, 15, 38, 39, 43,

90, 91, 144, 145, 147, 179,

211

Social Utopias, 120, 208

Solidarity, 180

Spargo, John, 13

Spencer, Herbert, 160

State, The, 219

Steel Corporation, U. S., 46,

78, 90

Stirner, Max, 179, 180
Strauss, N., n
Strike, The, 212, 213
Suffrage, 154, 189, 212, 242
Super-man (see Beyond-

man)
Surplus produce, 18, 43, 44,

47
Surplus, Troublesome, 44, 46,

48
Surplus value, 24, 77, 90

Tennyson, Alfred, 81-83, 208
Third Estate, The, 37
Trades-unionism, 9, 66
Trusts, 10, 155, 176
Tuberculosis, death-rate in,
59, 109

Unemployment, 9
University of Virginia, 132

Vandervelde, E., 173
Veblen, Thorstein, 9, 49, 51,

126, 135, 144, 177, 185, 188,

189, 193, 209, 229
Voltaire, 74

Wages, 4, 17, 40, 47, 9L 238;

of employer, 20
Wallace, Alfred R., 137, 139,

141

War, 49, 52, 174
Ward, Lester R, 85, 101, 104,

118, 129, 131, 132, 143, 169
Warren, Fred D., 46
Washington, George, 80
Waste, 49, 50, 54, 88
Wealth, as an ideal, 201, 202,

210; dissipation of, 80, 92,

245

Weismann, August, 104, 160
Wells, H. G., 2, 13
Wheat, labor necessary to

produce, 57

Williams, Dr. Linsly, 59
Wilshire, Gaylord, 44, 174
Work, contempt for, 96-98

Xenophon, 35, 97

THE MIRAGE OF THE MANY

BY WILLIAM T. WALSH

A novel placed in a large American city during a supposed
Socialistic regime, and showing results inevitable in the present
state of human nature. It is hard to tell whether the greater
interest is in the story or the problems. The characters are
from all classes of society and cover a wide range of occupations.

STUDIES IN AMERICAN TRADE-UNIONISM

J. H. HOLLANDER and G. E. BARNETT (Editors)

Twelve papers by graduate students and officers of Johns
Hopkins University, the results of original investigations of
representative Trade Unions. There are also chapters on
Employers' Associations, the Knights of Labor, and the
American Federation of Labor. (380 pp., 8vo, $2.75 net. By
mail, $2.98.)

" A study of trade-unions in the concrete. Impartial and thorough . . .
expertly written."— New York Times Review.

"Though confined to particular features of particular trade unions, the
data dealt with are comprehensive and typical; so that the result is a sub-
stantial contribution to our knowledge of trade-union structure and func-
tion. . . . Excellent studies.''— New York Evening Post.

" It is doubtful if anything approaching it in breadth and co-ordination
has yet found its way into print. ... A very useful book."— San Francisco
Chronicle.

THE FATE OF ICIODORUM

By DAVID STARR JORDAN, President of Stanford
University

goc. net ; by mail g6c.
The story of a city made rich by taxation.

" After reading this book, no man who wishes to get at the fundamental
theory of protection can plead ignorance."— New York Evening Post.

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

PUBLISHERS NEW YORK

McPherson's Railroad Freight Rates

In Their Relation to the Industry and Commerce of the United
States.

By LOGAN G. MCPHERSON, author of "The Working of the Rail-
roads." 8vo. With maps, tables, and a full index. $2.25 net, by
mail, $2.42.

This study of the freight rate structure is so comprehensive and
thorough as not only to be exceedingly valuable to anyone having to
do with railroad freight traffic either as a railroad official or as a
shipper, but it is also a most fascinating exposition for the general
reader of a subject which has not hitherto received a popularly in-
telligible presentation. It offers to younger men the only means of
knowing how the present freight rate system has been evolved

"An exceedingly important book. . . . Not only the best existing account,
but it is easily the best book on American railway traffic. . . . We have
little hesitation in expressing the opinion that it will stand as the standard
reference work for a good many years, and from the standpoint of public
policy we are exceedingly glad that the book has been written. The country
if

would be better governed if the legislator, state and national, had to pass an
examination upon it before taking his oath of office."— -Railroad Age Gaff tie.
"A book the nation has needed." — New York Suu.

McPherson's The Working of the Railroads

By LOGAN G. MCPHERSON, Lecturer on Transportation at Johns
Hopkins. I2mo. #1.50 net ; By mail $1.63.

" Simply and lucidly tells what a railroad company is. what it does, and
how it does it. Cannot fail to be of use to the voter. Of exceeding value to
the young and ambitious in railroad service. — The Travelers' Official Rail-
way Guide.

" The most important contribution to its branch of the subject that has
yet been made." — The Dial.

"The author's connection with practical service gives this a value which no
other book quite equals. Up-to-date, informing. ... an excellent piece
of work."— Wall Street Journal.

Carter's When Railroads Were New

By CHARLES FREDERICK CARTER, with an Introductory Note by
Logan G. McPherson. 16 full-page illustrations, 8vo, 312 pp. $2.00
net, by mail $2. 16.

A history of the every-day difficulties, discouragements and
triumphs of the pioneers who built and ran the early railroads. With
many anecdotes that add to the abundant human interest.

"Full of interest. Besides the general chapter on the beginnings, it gives
the early history of the Erie, the Pennsylvania, and the Baltimore and Ohio,
of the Vanderbuilt lines, the first Pacific railroad, and of the Canadian
Pacific. Very readable.— N. Y. Suu.

"Invaluable. o
a human interest into
human and personal document, not a dry
anecdotes." — Baltimore Sun.

"No book of adventure contains more exciting episodes or more varied in-
terest. Every page is of live interest. So replete with curious information,
thoroughly entertaining and instructive." — Brooklyn Eagle.

It gathers the floating fragments of railroad history, weaving
into a coherent record of every day trials and triumphs. A
>nnl document, not a dry historical treatise or a batch of

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

PUBLISHERS NEW YORK

WILLIAM R. HEREFORD'S THE DEMAGOG

An absorbing romance of newspaper and political life of
to-day. The main figure aspires to the presidency. In a
vigorous campaign his chief opponent is an eloquent and
forceful district attorney. There is a strong love interest.
I2mo, $1.50.

" Instinct with the life of to-day, and parts of this story are re-
counted with a verve and power that fairly sweep the reader off his
feet. . . . The chapter entitled ' Wormwood ' is a remarkable pic-
ture . . . worthy to stand by itself as a human vignette portrayed
with remarkable poetic insight. The Convention chapter is another
tour de force." — The Bookman.

" Distinctly a tale for the times. As a discussion of current politics
the book makes something the same appeal as ' The Honorable Peter
Stirling.' Substantial and meritorious and repays a reading." — Spring-
field Republican.

" Interesting incidents in a tale well worth reading." — New York
Sun.

" Memorable novel. . . . Throughout it is an engrossing tale . . .
it is a master hand that has traced the gradual retrogression of David
Holman." — Chicago Record-Herald.

" Well written and should take its place among those forces which
tend to heighten the standard of political honesty." — Living Age.

" Told with compelling force. The scene at the convention is
described with graphic power and the characters are well drawn . . •
a virile novel." — San Francisco Bulletin.

WILSON VANCE'S BIG JOHN BALDWIN

A historical romance with peculiarly engaging characters,
stirring incidents, and a big, lovable, and unconsciously
humorous Cromwellian soldier as hero. I2mo, $1.50.

" His splendid sister, Betty. Mr. Vance gives his book an atmosphere
of the times . . . the love story is charming with its intimate analysis
of the big fellow's emotions and honest awkwardness, never folly. His
wit is clumsy . . . but it is wit, and, slowly perhaps, it gets there." —
Hartford Courant.

" A book to read leisurely, as one sips and enjoys good wine." —
Detroit Free Press.

" A rattling romance. The action is quick and spirited." — Chicago
Record-Herald.

" Incident is piled upon incident, with abundance of familiarity with
the life, conditions, happenings, thoughts, convictions, and speech of
the period." — The Outlook.

" Is an admirable historical romance, full of interest and charm,
and bubbling with genuine humor."— WILLIAM LYON PHELPS, Pro-
fessor of English Literature at Yale.

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

34 WEST 33D STREET NEW YORK

A POLITICAL HISTORY OF THE STATE

OF NEW YORK (1774-1882)
De Alva Stanwood Alexander, A.M.

£°{*'f « f /L U7J4'*861). 840 pp. , 8vo. $5. OO net (carriage 4Oc. extra)
VoL III. (1861-1882). 56 1pp.. 8 vo. $2.50 net (carriage 28c. extra)

A history of the movements of political parties in New York
State from 1774 to 1882, and embraces a series of brilliant char-
acter studies of the leaders, most of them of national importance,
who, from the days of George Clinton, have drawn the attention of
the nation to New York. The astute methods and sources of power
by which George Clinton, Hamilton, Burr, DeWitt Clinton, Van
Buren, Seymour and Thurlow Weed each successively controlled the
political destiny of the State are clearly and picturesquely set forth.
The third volume narrates, fully and entertainingly, the futile
efforts of Weed and Dean Richmond to reorganize existing parties,
the rise and fall of the Tweed Ring, Conkling's punishment of
Greeley and defeat of Fenton, Tilden's defiance of Tammany and
struggle with Kelly, and the overthrow of the Stalwart regime by
the crushing victory of Grover Cleveland. Throughout it is char-
acterized, too, with a fairness which must appeal to the strongest
partisan. (Circular with sample pages on application.)

" It meets a want widely felt and repeatedly expressed during
the past hundred years. ... It would be impossible in a dozen
notices to render any sort of justice to the extensive scope of this
work and to the multiplicity of its interesting details." — From two
leading articles, aggregating over ten columns, in the New York
Sun.

" Will undoubtedly take its place as the authoritative work upon
the subject." — Boston Transcript.

" The most entertaining story of state politics in American
history." — Review of Reviews.

" Will be read with great interest and profit outside the Empire
State."— Cleveland Plain Dealer.

JOHN DAVIS' TRAVELS OF FOUR YEARS AND A HALF
IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (1798-1802)

Dedicated by permission to Thomas Jefferson, Esq. First Pub-
lished, London, 1803. With Introduction and Notes by Alfred J.
Morrison. 8vo, 429 pps. $2.50 net, by mail $2.65.

The only book of the period written by a traveller in the United
States the object of which is not so much statistical narrative as
narrative purely. It is a story of wanderings from New York to
South Carolina, and as such affords a most interesting picture of
the greater part of the United States at the beginning of the
nineteenth century. The author was a novelist and shows it in his
book. A necessary book for even an exclusive collection of Amer-
icana. Measured by any standard an unusual book of travel.

Trevelyan in his " American Revolution " says of this book :
" Among accounts of such voyages, none are more life-like ; an ex-
quisitely absurd book, which the world, to the diminution of itg
gaiety, has forgotten." ^^^^^

If the reader will send his name and address, the publishers will
Bend, from time to time, information regarding their new books.

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

PUBLISHERS NEW YORK

JANE G. PERKINS'S
THE LIFE OF THE HONOURABLE MRS. NORTON

With portraits, 8vo. $3.50 net ; by mail, $3.68.

Mrs. Norton was the great Sheridan's grand-daughter,
beautiful and witty, the author of novels, poems and songs,
contesting contemporary popularity with Mrs. Browning ; her
influence was potent in politics ; Meredith undoubtedly had
her in mind when he drew " Diana of the Crossways."

" Reads like a novel . . . seems like the page from an old romance, and
Miss Perkins has preserved all its romantic charm. . . . Miss Perkins has
let letters, and letters unusually interesting, tell much of the story. ... In-
deed her biography has all the sustained interest of the novel, almost the
irresistible march of fate of the Greek drama. It is eminently reliable."—
Boston Transcript.

Brilliant, beautiful, unhappy, vehement Caroline Norton. . . . Her
story is told here with sympathy, but yet fairly enough . . . interesting
glimpses ... of the many men and women of note with whom Mrs. Norton
was brought into more or less intimate association."— Providence Journal.

" The generous space allowed her to tell her [own story in the form of
intimate letters is a striking and admirable feature of the book."— The Dial.

" She was an uncommonly interesting personage, and the memoir . . .
has no dull spots and speedily wins its way to a welcome."— New York
Tribune.

" So exceptional and vivid a personality ... of unusual quality . . . very
well written."- The Outlook.

YUNG WING'S MY LIFE IN CHINA AND AMERICA

With portrait, 8vo. $2.50 net ; by mail, $2.65.

The author's account of his early life in China, his education at
Yale, where he graduated in 1854 (LL.D., 1876), his return
to China and adventures during the Taiping rebellion, his
intimate association withTsang Kwoh Fan and Li HungChang,
and finally his great work for the ' ' Chinese Educational Move-
ment " furnish highly interesting and good reading.

" It is his native land that is always the great heroic character on the stage
his mind surveys ; and his mental grasp is as wide as his domiciliation. A

freat life of action and reflection and the experiences of two hemispheres,
t is not so much a knowledge of isolated facts that is to be got from the
book as an understanding of the character of the Chinese race. '—Hartford
Courant.

"There is 'not a dull line in this simply told but fascinating biography."—
Literary Digest.

" He has given Occidental readers an opportunity to behold the machinery
of Chinese custom and the substance of Chinese character in action. No
foreigner could possibly have written a work so instructive, and no un-
travelled native could have made it intelligible to the West ... a most in-
teresting story both in the telling and in the acting. . . . Mr. Yung presents
each of his readers with a fragment of China herself." — Living Age.

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

PUBLISHERS NEW YORK

Bmerican public problems Series

Edited by RALPH CUETIS RINGWALT

Chinese Immigration

By MARY ROBERTS COOLIDGE, Formerly Associate Professor
of Sociology in Stanford University. 531 pp., $1.75 net; by
mail, $1.90. (Just issued.}

Presents the most comprehensive record of the Chinaman in
the United States that has yet been attempted.

"Scholarly. Covers every important phase, economic, social, and
political, of the Chinese question in America down to the San Francisco
fire in 1906."— New York Sun.

"Statesmanlike. Of intense interest. "—Hartford Courant.

"A remarkably thorough historical study. Timely and useful. En-
hanced by the abundant array of documentary facts and evidence." —
Chicago Record- Herald.

Immigration: And Its Effects Upon the United
States

By PRESCOTT F. HALL, A.B., LL.B, Secretary of the Immi-
gration Restriction League. 393 pp. $1.50 net; by mail, $1.65.

" Should prove interesting to everyone. Very readable, forceful and
convincing. Mr. Hall considers every possible phase of this great
question and does it in a masterly way that shows not only that he
thoroughly understands it, but that he is deeply interested in it and has
studied everything bearing upon it."— Boston Transcript.

"A readable work containing a vast amount of valuable information.
Especially to be commended is the discussion of the racial effects. As a
trustworthy general guide it should prove a god-send."— New York
Evening Post.

The Election of Senators

By Professor GEORGE H. HAYNES, Author of '• Representation
in State Legislatures." 300 pp. $1.50 net; by mail, $1.65.

Shows the historical reasons for the present method, and
its effect on the Senate and Senators, and on state and local
government, with a detailed review of the arguments for and
against direct election.

" A timely book. . . . Prof. Haynes is qualified for a historical and
analytical treatise on the subject of the Senate."— Nrw York Evening Sun.

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

84 WEST 83D STREET NEW YORK

THE THEORY OF THE THEATRE

And Other Principles of Dramatic Criticism

By CLAYTON HAMILTON. Author of " Materials and Methods
of Fiction." Probable Price, $1.50 net.

CONTENTS :

THE THEORY OF THE THEATRE. — What is a Play? — The Psychology
of Theatre Audiences. — The Actor and the Dramatist. — Stage Con-
ventions in Modern Times. — Economy of Attention in Theatrical Per-
formances.— Emphasis in the Drama. — The Four Leading Types of
Drama: Tragedy and Melodrama; Comedy and Farce. — The Modern
Social Drama.

OTHER PRINCIPLES OF DRAMATIC CRITICISM. — The Public and the
Dramatist. — Dramatic Art and the Theatre Business. — The Happy End-
ings in the Theatre. — The Boundaries of Approbation. — Imitation and
Suggestion in the Drama. — Holding the Mirror up to Nature. — Blank
Verse on the Contemporary Stage. — Dramatic Literature and Theatric
Journalism. — The Intention of Performance. — The Quality of New
Endeavor. — The Effect of Plays upon the Public. — Pleasant and Un-
pleasant Plays. — Themes in the Theatre. — The Function of Imagination.

DRAMATISTS OF TO-DAY

ROSTAND, HAUPTMANN, SUDERMANN,
PINERO, SHAW, PHILLIPS, MAETERLINCK

By PROF. EDWARD EVERETT HALE, JR., of Union College. With
gilt top, $1.50 net. (By mail, $1.60.)

An informal discussion of their principal plays and of the perform-
ances of some of them. The volume opens with a paper " On Stand-
ards of Criticism," and concludes with " Our Idea of Tragedy," and
an appendix of all the plays of each author, with dates of their first
performance or publication.

New York Evening Post: " It is not often nowadays that a theat-
rical book can be met with so free from gush and mere eulogy, or so
weighted by common sense ... an excellent chronological appendix
and full index . . . uncommonly useful for reference."

Dial: " Noteworthy example of literary criticism in one of the
most interesting of literary fields. . . . Well worth reading a second
time."

THE GERMAN DRAMA OF THE
NINETEENTH CENTURY

By GEORG WITKOWSKI. Translated by PROF. L. E. HORNING.
I2mo. $1.00.

Kleist, Grillparzer, Hebbel, Ludwig, Wildenbruch, Sudermann, Haupt-
mann, and minor dramatists receive attention.

New York Times Review: "The translation of this brief, clear, and
logical account was an extremely happy idea. Nothing at the same time
so comprehensive and terse has appeared on the subject, and it is a
subject of increasing interest to the English-speaking public."

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

PUBLISHERS NEW YORK

By R. M. JOHNSTON

Assistant Professor in Harvard University

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

A Short History. I2mo. 278 pp., with special bibliographies
following each chapter, and index. $1.25 net; by mail, $1.37.

"An almost ideal book of its kind and within its scope ... a clear
idea of the development and of the really significant men of events of that
cardinal epoch in the history of France and Europe is conveyed to readers,
many of whom will have been bewildered by the anecdotal fulness or the
rhetorical romancing of Professor Johnston's most conspicuous predecessors."
— Churchman.

"Deserves to take rank as a little classic and as such to be given a place
in all libraries. Not only is this admirably written, but it singles out the
persons and events best worth understanding, viewing the great social up-
heaval from a long perspective." — San Francisco Chronicle.

NAPOLEON

A Short Biography. I2mo. 248 pp., with special bibliographies
following each chapter, and index. $1.25 net ; by mail, $1.37.

"Scholarly, readable, and acute." — Nation.

"It is difficult to speak with moderation of a work so pleasant to read, so
lucid, so skillful."— Boston Transcript.

"A quite admirable book."— London Spectator.

"The style is clear, concise and readable." — London Athenaeum.

"In a small volume of less than 250 pages he gives us a valuable key to
the history of the European Continent from the Reign of Terror to the
present day." — London Morning Post.

LEADING AMERICAN SOLDIERS

Biographies of Washington, Greene, Taylor, Scott, Andrew
Jackson, Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, McClellan, Meade, Lee,
"Stonewall" Jackson, Joseph E. Johnston. With portraits. I vol.
$1.75 net ; by mail $1.88.

In the "Leading Americans" series. Prospectus of the series
on request.

"Performs a real service in preserving the essentials." — Review of
Reviews.

"Very interesting. . . . Much sound originality of treatment, and
the style is clear."— Springfield Republican.

»** If the reader will send his name and address, the publisher* will send, from
time to time, information regarding their new books.

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

PUBLISHERS FEW YORK

WIILLAM DE MORGAN'S IT NEVER CAN HAPPEN AGAIN

The story of the great love of " Blind Jim" and his little girl,
and of the affairs of a successful novelist. Fourth printing.
$1.75-

"William De Morgan at his very best."— Independent.

"Another long delightful voyage with the best English company. The
story of a child certainly not less appealing to our generation than Little
Nell was to hers."— New York Times Saturday Review.

WILLIAM DE MORGAN'S SOMEHOW GOOD

The dramatic story of some modern English people in a
strange situation. Fourth printing. $1.75.

" A book as sound, as sweet, as wholesome, as wise, as any in the range of
fiction."— The Nation.

"Our older novelists (Dickens and Thackeray) will have to look to their
laurels, for the new one is fast proving himself their equal. A higher quality
of enjoyment than is derivable from the work of any other novelist now liv-
ing and active in either England or America."— The Dial.

WILLIAM DE MORGAN'S ALICE-FOR-SHORT

The story of a London waif, a friendly artist, his friends and
family. Seventh printing. $1.75.

" Really worth reading and praising . . . will be hailed as a masterpiece.
If any writer of the present era is read a half century hence, a quarter
century, or even a decade, that writer is William De Morgan."— Boston
Transcript.

" It is the Victorian age itself that speaks in those rich, interesting, over-
crowded books. . . . Will be remembered as Dickens's novels are
remembered."— Springfield Republican.

WILLIAM DE MORGAN'S JOSEPH VANCE

A novel of life near London in the 5o's. Tenth printing.
$1.75-

" The book of the last decade ; the best thing in fiction since Mr. Meredith
and Mr. Hardy ; must take its place as the first great English novel that has
appeared in the twentieth century."— LEWIS MELVILLE in New York Times
Saturday Review.

" If the reader likes both ' David Copperfield ' and ' Peter Ibbetson,' he
can find the two books in this one."— The Independent.

*** A twenty-four page illustrated leaflet about Mr. De Morgan, with
complete reviews of his books, sent on request.

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

PUBLISHERS NEW YORK

RECENT VOLUMES IN

THE AMERICAN NATURE SERIES

(Prospectus on request)

SHELL-FISH INDUSTRIES By

Large I2mo. Illustrated by half-tones and original draw-
ings. Just published. $1.75 net.

Covers classification, propagation and distribution. For the person
who eats oysters, clams or scallops, there is information on their
structure, life-histories and habits. A chapter is devoted to shell-fish
as collectors and carriers of disease organisms. The oyster culturist
will find the life history of bivalves, a comparison of various culture
methods, and a description of oyster fields in various parts of the
world. Several facts concerning the habits of bivalves, here presented
for the first time, will be of interest to naturalists.

FISH STORIES: Alleged and Experienced, with a Little
History, Natural and Unnatural

By CHARLES F. HOLDER, Author of "The Log of a Sea
Angler," etc., and DAVID STARR JORDAN, Author of " A Guide
to the Study of Fishes," etc. With colored plates and many
illustrations from photographs. $1.75 net.

" A delightful miscellany, telling about fish of the strangest kind,
with scientific description melting into accounts of personal adventure.
Nearly everything that is entertaining in the fish world is touched upon
and science and fishing are made very readable." — New York Sun.

INSECT STORIES By VERNON L. KELLOGG.

Illustrated, $1.50 net.

Strange, true stories, primarily for children, but certainly
for those grown-ups who like to read discriminatingly to their
children.

" The author is among a few scientific writers of distinction who
can interest the popular mind. No intelligent youth can fail to read
it with delight and profit."— The Nation.

THE LIFE OF A FOSSIL HUNTER CHARLES H^STERNBERG,

With introduction by PROF. H. F. OSBORN. 48 Illustrations,

$1.60 net.

The most interesting autobiography of the oldest and best
known explorer in this field.

" One of the most interesting books to be found anywhere." — William
Allen White.

THE FRESH WATER AQUARIUM By OTTO EGGELING and
AND ITS INHABITANTS FREDERICK EHRENBERG.

A Guide for the Amateur Aquarist. With 100 illustrations,
large I2mo, $2.00 net.

" The best guide to the aquarium." — The Independent.

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

PUBLISHERS NEW YORK

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