Verbal
composition
is committed, " ut doceat, ut moveat, ut delectet.
Pound-Jefferson-and-or-Mussolini
JEFFERSON a.
ndfor MUSSOLINI 87
is not argued, I take it, that these fortifications are intended for offensive purposes, or that they con- stitute a menace of war against any neighbouring state. The most that can be said, so far as these particular armaments are concerned, is that they represent a gigantic waste of the French tax- payer's money. That is too bad for the French taxpayer, but seems no reason for alarm in other countries.
"On the contrary, holding as I do that the success (such as it is) of our present system of production and distribution is based upon waste, I cannot avoid concluding that the more waste the better, and that nothing could possibly be so beneficial to humanity as a whole (within the limits of our existing economic system) as the undertaking by all countries to build a ring of solid steel forts around their frontiers. It would provide work for the workless and huge profits for everybody concerned, with the consequence that we should have a wave of world prosperity alongside which the boom years of 1928-9 would look like a panic.
" You may say that the same result might be accomplished by building a great pumping system to . pump the water out of the Indian Ocean and carry it by steamers (or perhaps pipe lines) into the Atlantic. I agree. In fact this latter plan would have the advantage. The work would never be finished and therefore ? the pro- sperity would be endless.
" The trouble is that most people would think the latter scheme was foolish. "
I send? this to A. R. Orage as encouragement,
and as sign of the progress of enlightenment. I get a further communique from the sender, and he falls
? 88 JEFFERSON
flop into catalogued fallacy, possibly from haste, confusion of office work, etc. From a discussion of effects . which of necessity follow certain causes he falls into a des<;ription of what has been, without apparently perceiving the difference in the nature of the two cases.
So far as political economy is concerned the modern world contains the work of Lenin and Henry Ford, of C. H. . Douglas and Mussolini, the somewhat confused results of Veblen and the technocrats, this latter, as I have indicated, is con- fused because it has been in large part surreptitious. Done under or near a subsidy it either has not had any moral force and direction, or the individuals who had any have had to conceal it and profess to be concerned WHOLL Y with mechanical pro- blems.
Ford professed to be concerned wholly with commercial and manufacturing problems, though he has recently mentioned human rights in a garbled outbreak against technocracy.
I suppose the term means to him merely putting an incompetent professor in control of his (Ford's) business.
Genius, as I had recently occasion to say apropos Francisci's work with a cine-camera, is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one, and where the man of talent sees two or three, PLUS the ability to register that multiple perception in the material of his art.
When the nit-wits complained of Jefferson's superficiality it merely amounted to their non- perception of the multitude of elements needed to start any decent civilization in the American wilder- ness: learning, architecture, art that registered con-
? andfor MUSSOLINI
temporary phenomena instead of merely distorting them into received convention, seed of the right sort, transportation, responsibility, resilience in the individual and in the local group.
Washington could see mathematics from the ground end, geometry in its initial sense, measuring of the earth. Quincy Adams took it as astronomy, furthest possible remove from all human contact or human " pollution," as I suppose all human quality may appear to a man suffering from puritan- ids.
Jefferson was polumetis, many-minded, and as literature wasn't his main job, this multiplicity is now recorded item by item in his letters, one interest at a time, and the unreflective reader gets simply the sense of leisure without perceiving the essential dynamism of the man who did get things DONE.
Suppose Jefferson had had to be both Jefferson and Pat Henry, or both John Adams and Jas. Otis? In the first place he probably couldn't have, and in the second, my phrase is only an attempt to make the far-distant reader understand at least some part of what Mussolini's job is and has been.
America had the luck to start with Sam and J. Adams, Franklin, etc. The liberation and the creation all occurred more or less in unbroken sequence. Italy had a risorgimento, a shaking from lethargy, a partial unification, then a forty-year sleep, from which the next heave has been the work of one man, pre-eminently, with only here and there a notable, perhaps a very temporary, assis- tance. -
There is an analogy, from 1 Soo onward America was Jefferson's work, Madison had been and con-
? 90 JEFFERSON andfor MUSSOLINI
tinued to be very useful, Gallatin was helpful in his way, Van Buren went on in the ,3o,s.
Theodore Dentatus Roosevelt might have made up twenty per cent. of a fair Mussolini, but I can,t believe anybody was quite ready to go out and die for dear Theodore.
? XXIV
A . GOOD government is one that operates according to the best that is known and thought. And the best government is that which translates
the best thought most speedily into action.
Such translation is undoubtedly more swift and dramatic when a nation has slipped behind and has merely to catch up with the pacemakers. Thus the leaps of Russia and Italy in many matters of detail. Nevertheless 11ussolini has a more responsive instrument than any other I can think of, something does appear, to get started with "bewildering frequency," grain, swamps, birds, yes, gentle reader, birds, there are more birds in the olive-yards, "birds friendly to agriculture. " W. H. Hudson wrote a lot about the subject, the aged 11unthe wrote a book about Capri, but the BOSS does
something about it.
That is what makes him so simpatico. He is
simpatico as Picabia was simpatico, though Francis had apparently no sense of responsibility (which merely means that his sense of? responsibility was far far, oh very far, from normal human percep- tions, but at any rate Picabia had no sense of immediate social responsibility). .
I am now trying to get a personal point of departure. ?
I am not talking about Picabia's last show of paintings or about any exposition of painting but of a personal impression of the whole man whom I
91
? 92 JEFFERSON andfor MUSSOLINI
knew in I 9zz and along then, a man intellectually dangerous, so that it was exhilarating to talk to him, as it would be exhilarating to be in a cage full of leopards. As he is not initially either a writer or a painter this has often been hard to explain. He was the first man I ever met who seemed to me to have ANY capacity for dealing with abstract ideas, or, still better, his mind moved instantly from a given phenomenon to the general equation under which one would ultimately have to group it.
You do not wonder where a thing is when you can see it.
All genius worries the dud, I think, by reason of the overplus. You will not get another Gaudier- Brzeska because such a sculptor can not exist save when the lively general intelligence and the formal perception are combined with the drive to ceaseless animal action.
I think sitting still or reclining, and relax playing tennis. The sculptor concentrates all his intelligence WHILE in physical action. The mere stone-cutter, or worse, the modeller, hasn't any intelligence to
concentrate, and so forth.
Spectamur agendo. We know what the artist
does, we are, or at any rfl,te the author . is, fairly familiar with a good deal of plastic and verbal mani- festation.
Transpose such sense of plasticity or transpose your criteria to ten years of fascismo in Italy. And to the artifex. If you are engaged seriously in judgment or measurement.
We still respect the Code Napoleon and the architecture of Monticello, and those of us who know it probably respect the constitution of the University of Virginia, as it was before some of T. J. 's provisions were deleted.
? XXV
DuRING ten years I have heard attacks on fascismo, violent at first and then with continuing diminuendos, nearly always on what seemed to me irrelevant details, though occasionally I have met with a raking broadside, as for example the Russian's " BUT it belongs to them," meaning that the Russian state belongs to the people.
Only it don't, it belongs to the bolsheviki, and in any case I don't see the effect of such ownership. Secondly, Orage's admission that Italy was better run or more efficiently run than any other country, but he followed this by a claim that it was just being neatly tied up in a bag for delivery to the inter-
national sonzov.
Which I simply do not believe. Y ou can't prove
by Euclid what 1-fussolini intends to do the year after the year af'ter next but you can use some sort of common sense or general intuition. I see? no basis whatsoever for Orage's prediction. Everything perceptible to me appears to indicate the diametrical opposite. ?
In 192. 0 I saw nothing in Europe save unscrupu- lous bankers, a few gangs of munitions vendors, and their implements (human).
Such things have happened before: I didn't then know so much about it, and the history of the American ? 183o's is not a popular subject. Italy was perhaps more openly menaced. Her peril may have been, ? probably was, greater than that of the
93
? ? 94
JEFFERSON
" stronger " countries where the infamy could pull with silk threads.
The first act of the fascio was to save Italy from people too stupid to govern, I mean the Italian communists, the Lenin-less communists. The second act was to free it from parliamentarians, possibly worse, though probably no more dishonest than various other gangs of parliamentarians, but at any rate from groups too politically immoral to govern.
As far as financial morals are concerned, I should say that from being a country where practically everything and anything was for sale, Mussolini has in ten years transformed it into a country where it would even be dangerous to try to buy out the government.
In other countries they excuse inexplicable per- fidies by saying " These men are personally honest. " I am now quoting an admiral: " All I know is that all these men are my personal friends and I assure you that they are personallY honest. " The implica- tion being that they play the super-crooks' game because they are stupid and hoodwinked.
A capacity for being hoodwinked is not in itself a qualification for ruling.
It is, let us admit, often a means of getting office in countries where office is elective.
Jefferson thought the live men would beat out the cat's-paws.
The fascist hate of demo-liberal governments is based on the empiric observation that in many cases they don't and have not.
My next analogy is very technical. The real life in regular verse is an irregular movement under- lying. Jefferson thought the formal features of the American system would work, and they did work till the time of General Grant but the condition of
? ? andjor MUSSOLINI
95
their working was that inside them there should be a de facto government composed of sincere men willing the national good. When the men ofunder- standing are too lazy to impart the results of their understanding, and when the nucleus of the national mind hasn't the moral for~e to translate knowledge into action I don't bdieve it matters a damn what legal forms or what administrative forms there are in a government. The nation will get the staggers.
? And any means are the right means which will remagnetize the will and the knowledge.
THE CIVIL WAR drove everything out of the American mind. Perhaps the worst_ bit o f damage was that it drove out of mind the first serious anti- slavery candidate, not because he was an anti- slavery candidate, but because he saved the nation and freed the American trea,sury. Jackson had the glory, let us say he got the glory because he already had a good deal, the aureole of New Orleans, and Van Buren caught the reaction. His autobiography didn't get printed until 1918 or 1920.
Whether by reason of villainy I know not. I suspect it was due more to stupidity and to the laziness and ineptitude of professors. You can't expect history professors to be connoisseurs of economic significance, at least they weren't to be trusted for it from 186o t0 1930. '
I have already started to put the bank war into a canto. I don't know whether to leave it at that, or to quote sixty pages of" Van's " ~utobiography.
" I suppose they'll blame it on Van," said General Jackson. ?
Mr. -Van Buren pointed out the discrepancy between the funds at the president's disposal, and thefundsatthebank'sdisposal. Hepointedoutthe
? JEFFERSON
discrepancies of Dan'l Webster. And when he had really finished that job he quit writing.
A lot of economics that mankind (the tiny advance guard of mankind) has learned in the last twenty years with toil, sorrow, and persistence, they might have lapped up from that unprinted manuscript of Van Buren's.
(Autobiography of Martin Van Buren. Annual report of the American Historical Association, 19I 8, Vol. 2, Washington, Government Printing Office,
I920. )
" Forty millions had been the average amount
of the loans of the bank. In October I 830 they stood at S4o,527,532. Between January I 83I and May 1832 they were increased to S7o,428,oo7; the highest figure ever reached. The amount of its qutstanding discounts between the periods men- tioned was thus increased about 30 millions, saying nothing of the increase which took place between May, the date to which the report of the Bank was extended, and July when the veto was interposed. This extraordinary and reckless step was taken without even a pretence of a change in the business of the country to justify, much less to require, so great a change in the extent of its credits. "
There is a good deal of such statement in the autobiography, all Chaldaic to the man in the street, but taken in its place, context, relations, very good reading to the modern economist, and marvellously convincing testimony to the clear-headedness of Jefferson's most notable pupil.
Step by step the story of the recent American crisis can be read in last century's story, simple transposition serving mosdy for parallel. Read "land" where you now read "industry," the finance is the same. Inflation, deflation, boobs
? andfor MUSSOLINI 97
buying on the inflate and getting crunched by the deflate.
In one sense American history or the history of American development runs from Jefferson through Van Buren and then takes a holiday; or is broken by a vast parenthesis, getting rid of the black chattel slavery, and then plunging fairly into unconscious- ness.
We were diddled out of the heritage Jackson and Van Buren left us. The real power just oozed away fromtheelectorate. Thedefactogovernmentbecame secret, nobody cared a damn about the dejure. The people grovelled under Wilson and Harding, then came the nit-wit and the fat-face.
Wilson betrayed whatever was left of the original ideals of our government. The most typical story of the Woodrovian spirit as it permeated from the chief stench through the lesser crannies of adminis- tration is the tale ofVan Dine, a long Hollander who had drifted into Chicago a bit before I9I7, and had applied for American citizenship ; he got a tax form, describing him as an alien, subject to certain im- posts, and he got called up for army service. He said to the judge: " I am perfectly willing to serve in the army, but if I am citizen enough to serve in the army I've got a right not to be taxed as a foreigner. "
The judge (or jedge) leaned over his desk and whinnied: "Seay, yeng feller, deon't yew know thet in THIS KENTRY there ain't naowbody that'z got enny garr' DAMN rights whotsoever1"
Is it a crisis IN the system, or is the svstem in crisis? ?
How does the Jeffersonian answer the fascist in a. d. 1933, I57ofAmericanindependence, I44ofthe republic, XI of the era fascista?
? 98 JEFFERSON andfor MUSSOUNI
This is not to say I " advocate " fascism in and for . America, or that I think fascism is possible in America without Mussolini, any more than I or any enlightened bolshevik thinks communism is possible in America without Lenin.
I think the American system de jure is probably quite good enough, if there were only 5oo men with guts and the sense to USE it, or even with the capacity for answering letters, or printing a paper.
? XXVI
POWER
T H E millenniar habit of slavery and the impulse toward enslaving others is very strong in the race. By the time chattel-slavery was driven out by the American Civil War, it had been discovered that paid labour probably cost less to the employer.
Some men are now struggling to convince the mob that the machine is ready to replace the slave. The greatest obstacle may? well be just simple bossiness, bos, bovis, the bull, likes to order some
fellow-human about.
The " will to power " (admired and touted by the
generation before my own) was literatureifyed by an ? ill-balanced hysterical teuto-pollak. Nothing more vulgar, in the worst sense of the word, has ever been sprung on a dallying intelligentsia.
Power is necessary to some acts, but neither Lenin nor Mussolini show themselves primarily as men thirsting for power.
The great man is filled wth? a very different passion, the will toward order.
Hence the mysteries and the muddles in inferior minds.
The superior passion is incompatible with Dog- berry and the local bully. The second line of inferiority? complex (professorial) toddles . in with its twaddle about insanity and genius, and "the man must be mad. "
99
? 1 0 0 JEFFERSON
Five or six years ago the Roman barflies and social idiots were waiting for Mussolini to go mad.
The brittle mind, living on prejudice or privilege, as a last refuge plays ostrich. Something is N O T what it's mamma or schoolmarm told it, and it simply can't readjust itself.
When Mussolini has expressed any satisfaction it has been with the definite act performed, the art- work in the civic sense, the leading the Romans back to the sea, for example, by the wide new road into Ostia.
So Shu, king of Soku, built roads. What sort of shouting would the Chinese have raised for the release of the Lake of Abano, an exhilaration that might perfectly well have upset a considerable equanimity?
FREUD OR
As one of the Bloomsbury weepers once re- marked, "Freud's writings may not shed much light on human psychology but they tell one a good deal about the private life of the Viennese. "
They are flower of a deliquescent society ? going to pot. The average human head is less in need of having something removed from it, than of having something inserted.
The freudized ex-neurasthenic, oh well, pass it for the neurasthenic, but the general results of Freud are Dostoievskian duds, worrying about their own unimportant innards with the deep attention of Jim drunk occupied with the crumb on his weskit.
I see no advantage in this system over the ancient Roman legion, NO individual worth saving is likely to be wrecked by a reasonable and limited obedience practised to given ends and for limited
? andfor MUSSOLINI IOI
periods. So much for commandments to the militia as superior to psychic sessions for the debilitated.
That which makes a man forget his bellyache (physical or psychic) is probably as healthy as con- centration of his attention on the analysis of the products or educts of a stomach-pump.
Modern ignorance, fostered and intensified by practically all university systems has succeeded in obliterating or in dimming the old distinction in Rodolpho Agricola's. De Dialectica.
Verbal composition is committed, " ut doceat, ut moveat, ut delectet. "
Verbal composition exists to three ends, to teach, to move and to please. You do not aid either literary or philosophical discussion by criticizing one sort with criteria properly applied to the other.
\Y/e know that the German university system was perverted from the search for truth (material truth in natural research) into a vast machine for conduct- ing the mental segment of the nation A W A Y from actual problems, getting them embedded and out of the way of the tyrants.
American subsidized universities have become anodyne in the departments that " don't matter," i. e. those where the subject has not or need not have any direct incidence on life.
\Y/hen it comes to economic study the interference of the controllers is less covered.
I am no longer " in touch. " I know that pro- fessors are occasionally " fired. " I have heard that the ladies' Vassar once had a curiosity in the form of a heavy endowment " for as long as nothing con- trary to protective tariffwas taught there. "
The instinct of self-preservation, obviously THE great passion in the bureaucratic booZUM, leads
? 1 0 2 JEFFERSON
often towards the anodyne. Such is the nature of bureaucracy. Once IN, it is hardly possible to b~ ousted for incompetence. So long as you aren't noticed you STAY there, promotion is in any case slow. Soft paws, quiet steps, look and listen.
This has even bred the careerist in scholarship, the man who carefully studies WHAT KIND of anodyne bunk will lead him upward in the system, or best assure hi& income.
I have met various specimens, one definitely pro- ducing bunk to " get ahead," another mildly dis- contented with the dullness of work which was at any rate safe, and couldn't by any stretch of fancy lead one into an opinion on anything save its own dullness and, by comparison with any intellectual pursuit, its lack of use. Naturally he felt the need of his income.
Thus ultimately the makers of catalogues, etc. , undeniably useful but undeniably giving a very low YIELD in intellectual life, or to the intellectual life of the nation.
In fact the idea of intellectual life IN an American University is usually presented as a joke by people with what is called a sense of humour.
When an experiment is made or advocated it is usually attributed (often correctly) to "cranks. "
A crank in " this pragmatical pig of a world '' as Wm. Yeats has ultimately come to designate the Celto-Saxon segments of the planet, is any rpan having ANY other ambition save that of saving his own skin from the tanners.
An inventor stops being a crank when he has made, i. e. acquired, money, or when he has been exploited by someone who has.
Henry Ford is the best possible type of crank (taken in hisfort interie~~r),Henry himsdf was visible
? andfor MUSSOLINI 10}
in his early days, but once inside the caterpillared tank of success his mental make-up is forgotten.
The fact that it often takes a series of two, three, or four cranks to get a thing done blinds the general reader to the utility of the successive com- ponents. .
"C'est beau. " said Fernand Leger in the best defence of the French republic I have ever heard. "C'est beau, it is good to look at because it works without there being anyone of interest or import- ance, any ' great man ' necessary to make it func- tion. "
It's " beau " a1I right, but dear old Fernand wasn't looking at the Comite des Forge$, which might appear to come nearer to being the real government of France than the gents in the Deputes and the figurehead at the Elysees. The Comite has got its dictatorship and its one-party system.
All without? public responsibility. ? Our own country when finally betrayed by Wilson also showed from its secret internal workings, not only the financiers who had some sort of responsibility, private if not public, but the lo~~the figure of State Militia " Colonel " House skulking from here to there with no responsibility whatsodamn- ever.
Disgust with Wilson, unimpeached, bred a re- action against having " a strong? man in the White House " and we suffered the three deficients, and Heaven knows what the present (as H. Mencken defines him) " weak sister " will offer us.
The problem of democracy is whether its alleged system, its dejure system, ? can still be handled by the men of good will; whether real issues as distinct from red herrings CAN be forced into the legislatures (House and Senate), and whether a sufficiently active
? 1 0 4 JEFFERSON
segment of the public can be still persuaded to combine and compel its elected delegates to act decently in an even moderately intelligent manner.
Damn the bolsheviki as much as you like, the Russian projects have served as stimuli BOTH to Italy and to America. Our democratic system is, for the first time, on trial against systems professing greater care for national welfare.
It becomes increasingly difficult to show WHY great schemes, Muscle Shoals etc. , should be ex- ploited for the benefit of someone in particular instead of for the nation as a whole.
It becomes, in fact it has become, utterly im- possible to show that the personal resilience of the individual is less, or the scope of individual action, his fields of initiative, is any more limited, under Mussolini than under our pretendedly: republican system.
The challenge of Mussolini to America is simply:
Do the driving ideas of Jefferson, Quincy Adams, Van Buren, or whoever else there is in the creditable pages of our history, FUNCTION actt~ai! J in the America ofthis decade to the extent that theyfunction in Ita{y under
the DUCE?
The writer's opinion is that they DON'T, and that nothing but vigorous realignment will make them, and that if, or when, they are made so to function, Mussolini will have acted as stimulus, will have entered into American history, as Lenin has entered into world history.
That don't, or don't necessarily, mean an importa- tion of the details of mechanisms and forms more adapted to Italy or to Russia than to the desert of Arizona or to the temperament of farms back of
? andfor MUSSOLINI xo,
Baaaston. Butitdoesdefinitelymeananorientation of will.
The power lust of Wilson was that of a diseased and unbalanced man who before arriving at the White House had had little experience of the world. The job of being a college president in a fresh- water town, the petty hypocrisies necessary to being an example to the young, are about as good pre- paration for political life as that of being abbot in
a monastery.
? XXVII
P AIDEUMA
I AM not laying pretence to impartiality, neither do I believe a certain kind of impartiality makes the best record. I know of no more unpleasant figure inhistorythanthelateFranzJosef. Usuallyapublic detestable has some private offset. But of this nullity there is not even record of private pleasant- ness. And if there's anything in Frobenius' mode of thinking, a people who could tolerate such an emperor and an emperor who could put up with such furniture we~e well ready for the ash-can.
Brancusi is not an Italian, nor have the Italians a Brancusi. It would be difficult to defend the contemporary pubk. muniments in ANY country. Germany is wholly avenged on France by the American marble atrocity at . . . A bile specialist would be puzzled by the stone slop in the Luxem- bourg Garden.
I do not think the best men are excluded in Italy, some of the sane principles are already accepted, the idea o f steel, aluminium, glass, contemporary material, is accepted.
St. Ella died before the new era, but it is per- fectly on the cards that IF he has left any designs suitable for public construction they might any day be used, not only as architect's plans but as memorial to St. Ella.
xo6
? JEFFERSON andfor MUSSOLINI 107
Any smart schoolboy can make fun of some detail or other in Marinetti's campaigns, but the same clever sneer-sprouter would find it much more difficult to match the mass record of Marinetti's life, even if you limit it to his campaigning for public education in resthetics and omit the political ges- tures,whichanygoodwritermightenvy. Youmust judge the whole man by the mass of the man's results.
As with d'Annunzio, anyone can repeat jokes about hairwash, but until the dilettante writer has ? held up the combined rascals of Europe, he had best confine his criticism of Gabriele to questions
of stylistic embroidery.
. I do not believe I am any more impressed by
rhetoric than is Mr. Hemingway, I may have a greater capacity for, or sympathy with, general ideas (prq_vided they have a bearing on what I consider good action) but Gabriele as aviator has shown just as much nerve as any of dear Hem's pet bull- bashers.
? XXVIII
" OF BEING RULED "
T H E last state of degradation whether of a democratized or of a non-democratized people is that in which they begin to wail to be dominated. DISTINGUISH between fascism which is organ- ization, with the organizer at its head, to whom the power has not been GIVEN, but who has organized the power, and the state of America, where the Press howls that we should GIVE power to Roose- velt, i. e. , to a weak man, or a man generally sup- posed to be weak, a man who has shown NO UNDERSTANDING whatsoever, and no know- ledge whatsoever of contemporary actuality. One can't tell whether this howl proceeds from terror- ized banderlog, or from pimps paid so to howl in the interests of the hidden coup d'etat-ists' but this will to give up one's rights is at the opposite pole from the action of the fascio in 192. 1-2. when their drive was precisely to maintain order and a state of civilization and NOT to have it overridden by one party or diddled into nonentity by corruption.
The degradation in America is phenomenal in that legally the machinery for local resilience EXISTS, all the cadres, frames for local organization are nicely plotted out, many of them have functioned, but the populace AND the intelligentsia are now too lazy, cowardly or ignorant to make any use of them.
108
? JEFFERSON andfor MUSSOLINI 109
Occasionally South Dakota or some incult western state informs the world that it has its own legislature, but the efforts of this kind are neither coherent nor very enlightened.
Why it should be supposed that a " soviet " would function where extant deliberative bodies do not is somewhat beyond me. Simply: the soviet is not the direct line for the U. S. A. Half the energy required to change a state legislature into a soviet would recharge the extant form and make it function IF there were the prerequisite skill and knowledge.
And in any case you can't GIVE power. Give authority to a nincompoop and you merely step into chaos. Which is presumably what the fishers in troubled waters desire, ever and always desire.
The extent to which you can even DELEGA TE power is probably limited by laws as definite as those which govern the strength of current you can send through an electric wire of given thickness and texture.
Democracy is composed one-third of peasant pessimism, one-third of laissez-aller, of utter in- difference.
You do not give power to a soft-head like Harding by making him president, any more than you could make Coolidge into an intellect. " Al," who as a journalist demonstrates once a week his unfitness for a place even in the cabinet, gave a touching tribute to Coolidge, on the lines of " Vaaal, he vas a goot schmoker. " Cal wasn't a demagogue, how noble of him to avoid that pitfall and confute the detractors of democracy. Cal got' on by a very simple predestined process. He never aroused ANY one's inferiority complex. Ditto Harding.
Ditto,presumably,Rooseveltthesecond. Nothing is more frequent in committee work and in demo-
? IIO JEFFERSON
cratic wangles and even in choosing editors than for a man who is strongish but not strong enough, to boost up some wobbler whom he thinks he can ~ide. Wilson was a great disappointment to some of his backers, as Taft to Theodore.
As I learned from my meeting with Griffiths: A leader who is not supported by legal machinery is more bound by the general will o f his party than an elected official who has legal forms to fall back on.
Mussolini has steadily refused to be called any- thing save " Leader , (Duce) or " Head of the Government," the term dictator has been applied by foreign envy, as the Tories were called catde- stealers. It does not represent the Duce's funda- mental conception of his role.
His authority comes, as Eirugina proclaimed authority comes, " from right reason , and. from the general fascist conviction that he is more likely to be right than anyone else is.
In the commandments to the militia this phrase is no more than the President being Supreme Chief of the American Armies in war time or any general on the field having full commanding powers. Or rather, it is more, in the sense that the militia are given a reason for their obedience.
? XXIX KUNG
As to the mysteries of genius, I am reproved for citing Confucius, though the Ta Hio is only thirty- two pages long. I am told the reader won't have a copy and that I ought to print it in an appendix, OR tell the reader what it means. Truly, people desire a great deal for very little.
The doctrine of Confucius is:
That you bring order into your surroundings by
bringing it first into yourself; by knowing the
motives of your acts.
That you can bring about better world govern-
ment by amelioration of the internal govern-
ment of your nation.
That private gain is not prosperity, but that the
treasure of a nation is its equity.
That hoarding is not prosperity and that people
should employ their resources.
One should respect intelligence, " the luminous
principle of reason," the faculties of others, one should look to a constant renovation.
" Make it new, make it new as the young grass shoot. "
One should not be content with the second-rate, applying in all of these the first principle, namely the beginning with what is nearest to hand, that is, one's own motives and intelligence. You could further assert that Kung taught that organization is
II. Z
? JEFFERSON andfor MUSSOLIN! I I 3
not forced on to things or on to a nation from the outside inward, but that the centre holds by attrac- tion.
" The humane ruler acquires respect by his spP. nd- ing, the inhumane, disrespect, by his taking. "
Shallow critics fail to understand ideas because they look on ideas as a stasis, a statement in a given position, and fail to look where it leads. The people who fail to take interest in Kung fail, I think, because they never observe WHA T Confucian thinking leads to.
For 2,500 years, whenever there has been order in China or in any part of China, you can look for a Confucian at the root of it.
Conf~<<ill. t on "La rivoiJ~Zione fonlin~~a. "
King Tfhing T'ang on Government. Pari of the in. tfriplion on the king'r bath-tub filed by K1111g in the Ta Hio II. I.
The first ideogr11111 (on the right) sho111. t tht fauisl axe for the dearing a111ay o f rubbi. th (left half) tht tr11, organit vegtlable rtntlllal. The . tt(()nd ideograph i. t tht . t1111sign, day,
"renovate, day by day rene111. "
. The verb is ll. ftd in phrases: to p111 a111ay old habit, the daily intrtase ofplanl. t, tmprolle the stale of, restor1.
? XXX
JEFFERSON has a reputation for having made excessive statements, which might happen to any voluble man i f a few o f his remarks were perpetually considered apart from their context, and apart from the occasions when they were published and the contrary excess they were designed to correct.
The " free and equal " is limited by the passive verb "born," it was directed against special privi- leges of those " first-born " and to those whose legal fathers were Dukes, Earls, etc.
There is not the least shadow of suspicion that T. J. ever supposed that men remained equal or were biologically equal, or had a right to equality save in opportunity and before the law.
Like every leader and constructor in human history he tried to bring a certain number of men up to a certain level, by elimination of certain defects.
The so-called intellectual or spiritual leader guns after defects at long range, the political constructor goes for those which are the worst damned im- mediate nuisances.
Apart from the Declaration of Independence to which T. J. gave the final form, Jefferson's doctrines might be divided into.
A. WhathethoughtgoodforthenewAmerican republic.
B. What he considered sound principles for the state.
II4
? JEFFERSON andfor MUSSOLINI I I,
As to this second division.
I. He disbelieved in hereditary privilege, i. e.
he thought men should govern by reason of their inherent qualities and not because they were sons of papa.
" 0 poca digna nobilta di sangue," as Dante had once, and some time previously, remarked.
2. He thought that a nation had no right to con- tract debts that couldn't be reasonably paid within the lifetime of the parties contracting.
Which is part of. his main contention that THE EARTH BELONGS TO THE LIVING. 3. That everything that can be done by informal and individual effort should be so done and that the state should govern only where and when
necessary. .
4? He was the? champion of " free speech " but
suggested that newspapers be printed in three sections, the first and VERY BRIEF section to be headed "FACTS," the second to be headed " Probabilities," and the third part to be headed " Lies. "
Given this limitation I think the Duce might be inclined to agree with him.
? 5? He believed in peace, but he believed still more strongly in maintaining peace UNTIL America was strong enough to stand a war without disaster, and when war came in I 8u he expected the Ameri- can army to win it. Though the frigates did most of the work. .
6. His fight for the " constitution " was a fight against John Marshall, and against the reactionaries who believed in the British Constitution.
is not argued, I take it, that these fortifications are intended for offensive purposes, or that they con- stitute a menace of war against any neighbouring state. The most that can be said, so far as these particular armaments are concerned, is that they represent a gigantic waste of the French tax- payer's money. That is too bad for the French taxpayer, but seems no reason for alarm in other countries.
"On the contrary, holding as I do that the success (such as it is) of our present system of production and distribution is based upon waste, I cannot avoid concluding that the more waste the better, and that nothing could possibly be so beneficial to humanity as a whole (within the limits of our existing economic system) as the undertaking by all countries to build a ring of solid steel forts around their frontiers. It would provide work for the workless and huge profits for everybody concerned, with the consequence that we should have a wave of world prosperity alongside which the boom years of 1928-9 would look like a panic.
" You may say that the same result might be accomplished by building a great pumping system to . pump the water out of the Indian Ocean and carry it by steamers (or perhaps pipe lines) into the Atlantic. I agree. In fact this latter plan would have the advantage. The work would never be finished and therefore ? the pro- sperity would be endless.
" The trouble is that most people would think the latter scheme was foolish. "
I send? this to A. R. Orage as encouragement,
and as sign of the progress of enlightenment. I get a further communique from the sender, and he falls
? 88 JEFFERSON
flop into catalogued fallacy, possibly from haste, confusion of office work, etc. From a discussion of effects . which of necessity follow certain causes he falls into a des<;ription of what has been, without apparently perceiving the difference in the nature of the two cases.
So far as political economy is concerned the modern world contains the work of Lenin and Henry Ford, of C. H. . Douglas and Mussolini, the somewhat confused results of Veblen and the technocrats, this latter, as I have indicated, is con- fused because it has been in large part surreptitious. Done under or near a subsidy it either has not had any moral force and direction, or the individuals who had any have had to conceal it and profess to be concerned WHOLL Y with mechanical pro- blems.
Ford professed to be concerned wholly with commercial and manufacturing problems, though he has recently mentioned human rights in a garbled outbreak against technocracy.
I suppose the term means to him merely putting an incompetent professor in control of his (Ford's) business.
Genius, as I had recently occasion to say apropos Francisci's work with a cine-camera, is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one, and where the man of talent sees two or three, PLUS the ability to register that multiple perception in the material of his art.
When the nit-wits complained of Jefferson's superficiality it merely amounted to their non- perception of the multitude of elements needed to start any decent civilization in the American wilder- ness: learning, architecture, art that registered con-
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temporary phenomena instead of merely distorting them into received convention, seed of the right sort, transportation, responsibility, resilience in the individual and in the local group.
Washington could see mathematics from the ground end, geometry in its initial sense, measuring of the earth. Quincy Adams took it as astronomy, furthest possible remove from all human contact or human " pollution," as I suppose all human quality may appear to a man suffering from puritan- ids.
Jefferson was polumetis, many-minded, and as literature wasn't his main job, this multiplicity is now recorded item by item in his letters, one interest at a time, and the unreflective reader gets simply the sense of leisure without perceiving the essential dynamism of the man who did get things DONE.
Suppose Jefferson had had to be both Jefferson and Pat Henry, or both John Adams and Jas. Otis? In the first place he probably couldn't have, and in the second, my phrase is only an attempt to make the far-distant reader understand at least some part of what Mussolini's job is and has been.
America had the luck to start with Sam and J. Adams, Franklin, etc. The liberation and the creation all occurred more or less in unbroken sequence. Italy had a risorgimento, a shaking from lethargy, a partial unification, then a forty-year sleep, from which the next heave has been the work of one man, pre-eminently, with only here and there a notable, perhaps a very temporary, assis- tance. -
There is an analogy, from 1 Soo onward America was Jefferson's work, Madison had been and con-
? 90 JEFFERSON andfor MUSSOLINI
tinued to be very useful, Gallatin was helpful in his way, Van Buren went on in the ,3o,s.
Theodore Dentatus Roosevelt might have made up twenty per cent. of a fair Mussolini, but I can,t believe anybody was quite ready to go out and die for dear Theodore.
? XXIV
A . GOOD government is one that operates according to the best that is known and thought. And the best government is that which translates
the best thought most speedily into action.
Such translation is undoubtedly more swift and dramatic when a nation has slipped behind and has merely to catch up with the pacemakers. Thus the leaps of Russia and Italy in many matters of detail. Nevertheless 11ussolini has a more responsive instrument than any other I can think of, something does appear, to get started with "bewildering frequency," grain, swamps, birds, yes, gentle reader, birds, there are more birds in the olive-yards, "birds friendly to agriculture. " W. H. Hudson wrote a lot about the subject, the aged 11unthe wrote a book about Capri, but the BOSS does
something about it.
That is what makes him so simpatico. He is
simpatico as Picabia was simpatico, though Francis had apparently no sense of responsibility (which merely means that his sense of? responsibility was far far, oh very far, from normal human percep- tions, but at any rate Picabia had no sense of immediate social responsibility). .
I am now trying to get a personal point of departure. ?
I am not talking about Picabia's last show of paintings or about any exposition of painting but of a personal impression of the whole man whom I
91
? 92 JEFFERSON andfor MUSSOLINI
knew in I 9zz and along then, a man intellectually dangerous, so that it was exhilarating to talk to him, as it would be exhilarating to be in a cage full of leopards. As he is not initially either a writer or a painter this has often been hard to explain. He was the first man I ever met who seemed to me to have ANY capacity for dealing with abstract ideas, or, still better, his mind moved instantly from a given phenomenon to the general equation under which one would ultimately have to group it.
You do not wonder where a thing is when you can see it.
All genius worries the dud, I think, by reason of the overplus. You will not get another Gaudier- Brzeska because such a sculptor can not exist save when the lively general intelligence and the formal perception are combined with the drive to ceaseless animal action.
I think sitting still or reclining, and relax playing tennis. The sculptor concentrates all his intelligence WHILE in physical action. The mere stone-cutter, or worse, the modeller, hasn't any intelligence to
concentrate, and so forth.
Spectamur agendo. We know what the artist
does, we are, or at any rfl,te the author . is, fairly familiar with a good deal of plastic and verbal mani- festation.
Transpose such sense of plasticity or transpose your criteria to ten years of fascismo in Italy. And to the artifex. If you are engaged seriously in judgment or measurement.
We still respect the Code Napoleon and the architecture of Monticello, and those of us who know it probably respect the constitution of the University of Virginia, as it was before some of T. J. 's provisions were deleted.
? XXV
DuRING ten years I have heard attacks on fascismo, violent at first and then with continuing diminuendos, nearly always on what seemed to me irrelevant details, though occasionally I have met with a raking broadside, as for example the Russian's " BUT it belongs to them," meaning that the Russian state belongs to the people.
Only it don't, it belongs to the bolsheviki, and in any case I don't see the effect of such ownership. Secondly, Orage's admission that Italy was better run or more efficiently run than any other country, but he followed this by a claim that it was just being neatly tied up in a bag for delivery to the inter-
national sonzov.
Which I simply do not believe. Y ou can't prove
by Euclid what 1-fussolini intends to do the year after the year af'ter next but you can use some sort of common sense or general intuition. I see? no basis whatsoever for Orage's prediction. Everything perceptible to me appears to indicate the diametrical opposite. ?
In 192. 0 I saw nothing in Europe save unscrupu- lous bankers, a few gangs of munitions vendors, and their implements (human).
Such things have happened before: I didn't then know so much about it, and the history of the American ? 183o's is not a popular subject. Italy was perhaps more openly menaced. Her peril may have been, ? probably was, greater than that of the
93
? ? 94
JEFFERSON
" stronger " countries where the infamy could pull with silk threads.
The first act of the fascio was to save Italy from people too stupid to govern, I mean the Italian communists, the Lenin-less communists. The second act was to free it from parliamentarians, possibly worse, though probably no more dishonest than various other gangs of parliamentarians, but at any rate from groups too politically immoral to govern.
As far as financial morals are concerned, I should say that from being a country where practically everything and anything was for sale, Mussolini has in ten years transformed it into a country where it would even be dangerous to try to buy out the government.
In other countries they excuse inexplicable per- fidies by saying " These men are personally honest. " I am now quoting an admiral: " All I know is that all these men are my personal friends and I assure you that they are personallY honest. " The implica- tion being that they play the super-crooks' game because they are stupid and hoodwinked.
A capacity for being hoodwinked is not in itself a qualification for ruling.
It is, let us admit, often a means of getting office in countries where office is elective.
Jefferson thought the live men would beat out the cat's-paws.
The fascist hate of demo-liberal governments is based on the empiric observation that in many cases they don't and have not.
My next analogy is very technical. The real life in regular verse is an irregular movement under- lying. Jefferson thought the formal features of the American system would work, and they did work till the time of General Grant but the condition of
? ? andjor MUSSOLINI
95
their working was that inside them there should be a de facto government composed of sincere men willing the national good. When the men ofunder- standing are too lazy to impart the results of their understanding, and when the nucleus of the national mind hasn't the moral for~e to translate knowledge into action I don't bdieve it matters a damn what legal forms or what administrative forms there are in a government. The nation will get the staggers.
? And any means are the right means which will remagnetize the will and the knowledge.
THE CIVIL WAR drove everything out of the American mind. Perhaps the worst_ bit o f damage was that it drove out of mind the first serious anti- slavery candidate, not because he was an anti- slavery candidate, but because he saved the nation and freed the American trea,sury. Jackson had the glory, let us say he got the glory because he already had a good deal, the aureole of New Orleans, and Van Buren caught the reaction. His autobiography didn't get printed until 1918 or 1920.
Whether by reason of villainy I know not. I suspect it was due more to stupidity and to the laziness and ineptitude of professors. You can't expect history professors to be connoisseurs of economic significance, at least they weren't to be trusted for it from 186o t0 1930. '
I have already started to put the bank war into a canto. I don't know whether to leave it at that, or to quote sixty pages of" Van's " ~utobiography.
" I suppose they'll blame it on Van," said General Jackson. ?
Mr. -Van Buren pointed out the discrepancy between the funds at the president's disposal, and thefundsatthebank'sdisposal. Hepointedoutthe
? JEFFERSON
discrepancies of Dan'l Webster. And when he had really finished that job he quit writing.
A lot of economics that mankind (the tiny advance guard of mankind) has learned in the last twenty years with toil, sorrow, and persistence, they might have lapped up from that unprinted manuscript of Van Buren's.
(Autobiography of Martin Van Buren. Annual report of the American Historical Association, 19I 8, Vol. 2, Washington, Government Printing Office,
I920. )
" Forty millions had been the average amount
of the loans of the bank. In October I 830 they stood at S4o,527,532. Between January I 83I and May 1832 they were increased to S7o,428,oo7; the highest figure ever reached. The amount of its qutstanding discounts between the periods men- tioned was thus increased about 30 millions, saying nothing of the increase which took place between May, the date to which the report of the Bank was extended, and July when the veto was interposed. This extraordinary and reckless step was taken without even a pretence of a change in the business of the country to justify, much less to require, so great a change in the extent of its credits. "
There is a good deal of such statement in the autobiography, all Chaldaic to the man in the street, but taken in its place, context, relations, very good reading to the modern economist, and marvellously convincing testimony to the clear-headedness of Jefferson's most notable pupil.
Step by step the story of the recent American crisis can be read in last century's story, simple transposition serving mosdy for parallel. Read "land" where you now read "industry," the finance is the same. Inflation, deflation, boobs
? andfor MUSSOLINI 97
buying on the inflate and getting crunched by the deflate.
In one sense American history or the history of American development runs from Jefferson through Van Buren and then takes a holiday; or is broken by a vast parenthesis, getting rid of the black chattel slavery, and then plunging fairly into unconscious- ness.
We were diddled out of the heritage Jackson and Van Buren left us. The real power just oozed away fromtheelectorate. Thedefactogovernmentbecame secret, nobody cared a damn about the dejure. The people grovelled under Wilson and Harding, then came the nit-wit and the fat-face.
Wilson betrayed whatever was left of the original ideals of our government. The most typical story of the Woodrovian spirit as it permeated from the chief stench through the lesser crannies of adminis- tration is the tale ofVan Dine, a long Hollander who had drifted into Chicago a bit before I9I7, and had applied for American citizenship ; he got a tax form, describing him as an alien, subject to certain im- posts, and he got called up for army service. He said to the judge: " I am perfectly willing to serve in the army, but if I am citizen enough to serve in the army I've got a right not to be taxed as a foreigner. "
The judge (or jedge) leaned over his desk and whinnied: "Seay, yeng feller, deon't yew know thet in THIS KENTRY there ain't naowbody that'z got enny garr' DAMN rights whotsoever1"
Is it a crisis IN the system, or is the svstem in crisis? ?
How does the Jeffersonian answer the fascist in a. d. 1933, I57ofAmericanindependence, I44ofthe republic, XI of the era fascista?
? 98 JEFFERSON andfor MUSSOUNI
This is not to say I " advocate " fascism in and for . America, or that I think fascism is possible in America without Mussolini, any more than I or any enlightened bolshevik thinks communism is possible in America without Lenin.
I think the American system de jure is probably quite good enough, if there were only 5oo men with guts and the sense to USE it, or even with the capacity for answering letters, or printing a paper.
? XXVI
POWER
T H E millenniar habit of slavery and the impulse toward enslaving others is very strong in the race. By the time chattel-slavery was driven out by the American Civil War, it had been discovered that paid labour probably cost less to the employer.
Some men are now struggling to convince the mob that the machine is ready to replace the slave. The greatest obstacle may? well be just simple bossiness, bos, bovis, the bull, likes to order some
fellow-human about.
The " will to power " (admired and touted by the
generation before my own) was literatureifyed by an ? ill-balanced hysterical teuto-pollak. Nothing more vulgar, in the worst sense of the word, has ever been sprung on a dallying intelligentsia.
Power is necessary to some acts, but neither Lenin nor Mussolini show themselves primarily as men thirsting for power.
The great man is filled wth? a very different passion, the will toward order.
Hence the mysteries and the muddles in inferior minds.
The superior passion is incompatible with Dog- berry and the local bully. The second line of inferiority? complex (professorial) toddles . in with its twaddle about insanity and genius, and "the man must be mad. "
99
? 1 0 0 JEFFERSON
Five or six years ago the Roman barflies and social idiots were waiting for Mussolini to go mad.
The brittle mind, living on prejudice or privilege, as a last refuge plays ostrich. Something is N O T what it's mamma or schoolmarm told it, and it simply can't readjust itself.
When Mussolini has expressed any satisfaction it has been with the definite act performed, the art- work in the civic sense, the leading the Romans back to the sea, for example, by the wide new road into Ostia.
So Shu, king of Soku, built roads. What sort of shouting would the Chinese have raised for the release of the Lake of Abano, an exhilaration that might perfectly well have upset a considerable equanimity?
FREUD OR
As one of the Bloomsbury weepers once re- marked, "Freud's writings may not shed much light on human psychology but they tell one a good deal about the private life of the Viennese. "
They are flower of a deliquescent society ? going to pot. The average human head is less in need of having something removed from it, than of having something inserted.
The freudized ex-neurasthenic, oh well, pass it for the neurasthenic, but the general results of Freud are Dostoievskian duds, worrying about their own unimportant innards with the deep attention of Jim drunk occupied with the crumb on his weskit.
I see no advantage in this system over the ancient Roman legion, NO individual worth saving is likely to be wrecked by a reasonable and limited obedience practised to given ends and for limited
? andfor MUSSOLINI IOI
periods. So much for commandments to the militia as superior to psychic sessions for the debilitated.
That which makes a man forget his bellyache (physical or psychic) is probably as healthy as con- centration of his attention on the analysis of the products or educts of a stomach-pump.
Modern ignorance, fostered and intensified by practically all university systems has succeeded in obliterating or in dimming the old distinction in Rodolpho Agricola's. De Dialectica.
Verbal composition is committed, " ut doceat, ut moveat, ut delectet. "
Verbal composition exists to three ends, to teach, to move and to please. You do not aid either literary or philosophical discussion by criticizing one sort with criteria properly applied to the other.
\Y/e know that the German university system was perverted from the search for truth (material truth in natural research) into a vast machine for conduct- ing the mental segment of the nation A W A Y from actual problems, getting them embedded and out of the way of the tyrants.
American subsidized universities have become anodyne in the departments that " don't matter," i. e. those where the subject has not or need not have any direct incidence on life.
\Y/hen it comes to economic study the interference of the controllers is less covered.
I am no longer " in touch. " I know that pro- fessors are occasionally " fired. " I have heard that the ladies' Vassar once had a curiosity in the form of a heavy endowment " for as long as nothing con- trary to protective tariffwas taught there. "
The instinct of self-preservation, obviously THE great passion in the bureaucratic booZUM, leads
? 1 0 2 JEFFERSON
often towards the anodyne. Such is the nature of bureaucracy. Once IN, it is hardly possible to b~ ousted for incompetence. So long as you aren't noticed you STAY there, promotion is in any case slow. Soft paws, quiet steps, look and listen.
This has even bred the careerist in scholarship, the man who carefully studies WHAT KIND of anodyne bunk will lead him upward in the system, or best assure hi& income.
I have met various specimens, one definitely pro- ducing bunk to " get ahead," another mildly dis- contented with the dullness of work which was at any rate safe, and couldn't by any stretch of fancy lead one into an opinion on anything save its own dullness and, by comparison with any intellectual pursuit, its lack of use. Naturally he felt the need of his income.
Thus ultimately the makers of catalogues, etc. , undeniably useful but undeniably giving a very low YIELD in intellectual life, or to the intellectual life of the nation.
In fact the idea of intellectual life IN an American University is usually presented as a joke by people with what is called a sense of humour.
When an experiment is made or advocated it is usually attributed (often correctly) to "cranks. "
A crank in " this pragmatical pig of a world '' as Wm. Yeats has ultimately come to designate the Celto-Saxon segments of the planet, is any rpan having ANY other ambition save that of saving his own skin from the tanners.
An inventor stops being a crank when he has made, i. e. acquired, money, or when he has been exploited by someone who has.
Henry Ford is the best possible type of crank (taken in hisfort interie~~r),Henry himsdf was visible
? andfor MUSSOLINI 10}
in his early days, but once inside the caterpillared tank of success his mental make-up is forgotten.
The fact that it often takes a series of two, three, or four cranks to get a thing done blinds the general reader to the utility of the successive com- ponents. .
"C'est beau. " said Fernand Leger in the best defence of the French republic I have ever heard. "C'est beau, it is good to look at because it works without there being anyone of interest or import- ance, any ' great man ' necessary to make it func- tion. "
It's " beau " a1I right, but dear old Fernand wasn't looking at the Comite des Forge$, which might appear to come nearer to being the real government of France than the gents in the Deputes and the figurehead at the Elysees. The Comite has got its dictatorship and its one-party system.
All without? public responsibility. ? Our own country when finally betrayed by Wilson also showed from its secret internal workings, not only the financiers who had some sort of responsibility, private if not public, but the lo~~the figure of State Militia " Colonel " House skulking from here to there with no responsibility whatsodamn- ever.
Disgust with Wilson, unimpeached, bred a re- action against having " a strong? man in the White House " and we suffered the three deficients, and Heaven knows what the present (as H. Mencken defines him) " weak sister " will offer us.
The problem of democracy is whether its alleged system, its dejure system, ? can still be handled by the men of good will; whether real issues as distinct from red herrings CAN be forced into the legislatures (House and Senate), and whether a sufficiently active
? 1 0 4 JEFFERSON
segment of the public can be still persuaded to combine and compel its elected delegates to act decently in an even moderately intelligent manner.
Damn the bolsheviki as much as you like, the Russian projects have served as stimuli BOTH to Italy and to America. Our democratic system is, for the first time, on trial against systems professing greater care for national welfare.
It becomes increasingly difficult to show WHY great schemes, Muscle Shoals etc. , should be ex- ploited for the benefit of someone in particular instead of for the nation as a whole.
It becomes, in fact it has become, utterly im- possible to show that the personal resilience of the individual is less, or the scope of individual action, his fields of initiative, is any more limited, under Mussolini than under our pretendedly: republican system.
The challenge of Mussolini to America is simply:
Do the driving ideas of Jefferson, Quincy Adams, Van Buren, or whoever else there is in the creditable pages of our history, FUNCTION actt~ai! J in the America ofthis decade to the extent that theyfunction in Ita{y under
the DUCE?
The writer's opinion is that they DON'T, and that nothing but vigorous realignment will make them, and that if, or when, they are made so to function, Mussolini will have acted as stimulus, will have entered into American history, as Lenin has entered into world history.
That don't, or don't necessarily, mean an importa- tion of the details of mechanisms and forms more adapted to Italy or to Russia than to the desert of Arizona or to the temperament of farms back of
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Baaaston. Butitdoesdefinitelymeananorientation of will.
The power lust of Wilson was that of a diseased and unbalanced man who before arriving at the White House had had little experience of the world. The job of being a college president in a fresh- water town, the petty hypocrisies necessary to being an example to the young, are about as good pre- paration for political life as that of being abbot in
a monastery.
? XXVII
P AIDEUMA
I AM not laying pretence to impartiality, neither do I believe a certain kind of impartiality makes the best record. I know of no more unpleasant figure inhistorythanthelateFranzJosef. Usuallyapublic detestable has some private offset. But of this nullity there is not even record of private pleasant- ness. And if there's anything in Frobenius' mode of thinking, a people who could tolerate such an emperor and an emperor who could put up with such furniture we~e well ready for the ash-can.
Brancusi is not an Italian, nor have the Italians a Brancusi. It would be difficult to defend the contemporary pubk. muniments in ANY country. Germany is wholly avenged on France by the American marble atrocity at . . . A bile specialist would be puzzled by the stone slop in the Luxem- bourg Garden.
I do not think the best men are excluded in Italy, some of the sane principles are already accepted, the idea o f steel, aluminium, glass, contemporary material, is accepted.
St. Ella died before the new era, but it is per- fectly on the cards that IF he has left any designs suitable for public construction they might any day be used, not only as architect's plans but as memorial to St. Ella.
xo6
? JEFFERSON andfor MUSSOLINI 107
Any smart schoolboy can make fun of some detail or other in Marinetti's campaigns, but the same clever sneer-sprouter would find it much more difficult to match the mass record of Marinetti's life, even if you limit it to his campaigning for public education in resthetics and omit the political ges- tures,whichanygoodwritermightenvy. Youmust judge the whole man by the mass of the man's results.
As with d'Annunzio, anyone can repeat jokes about hairwash, but until the dilettante writer has ? held up the combined rascals of Europe, he had best confine his criticism of Gabriele to questions
of stylistic embroidery.
. I do not believe I am any more impressed by
rhetoric than is Mr. Hemingway, I may have a greater capacity for, or sympathy with, general ideas (prq_vided they have a bearing on what I consider good action) but Gabriele as aviator has shown just as much nerve as any of dear Hem's pet bull- bashers.
? XXVIII
" OF BEING RULED "
T H E last state of degradation whether of a democratized or of a non-democratized people is that in which they begin to wail to be dominated. DISTINGUISH between fascism which is organ- ization, with the organizer at its head, to whom the power has not been GIVEN, but who has organized the power, and the state of America, where the Press howls that we should GIVE power to Roose- velt, i. e. , to a weak man, or a man generally sup- posed to be weak, a man who has shown NO UNDERSTANDING whatsoever, and no know- ledge whatsoever of contemporary actuality. One can't tell whether this howl proceeds from terror- ized banderlog, or from pimps paid so to howl in the interests of the hidden coup d'etat-ists' but this will to give up one's rights is at the opposite pole from the action of the fascio in 192. 1-2. when their drive was precisely to maintain order and a state of civilization and NOT to have it overridden by one party or diddled into nonentity by corruption.
The degradation in America is phenomenal in that legally the machinery for local resilience EXISTS, all the cadres, frames for local organization are nicely plotted out, many of them have functioned, but the populace AND the intelligentsia are now too lazy, cowardly or ignorant to make any use of them.
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? JEFFERSON andfor MUSSOLINI 109
Occasionally South Dakota or some incult western state informs the world that it has its own legislature, but the efforts of this kind are neither coherent nor very enlightened.
Why it should be supposed that a " soviet " would function where extant deliberative bodies do not is somewhat beyond me. Simply: the soviet is not the direct line for the U. S. A. Half the energy required to change a state legislature into a soviet would recharge the extant form and make it function IF there were the prerequisite skill and knowledge.
And in any case you can't GIVE power. Give authority to a nincompoop and you merely step into chaos. Which is presumably what the fishers in troubled waters desire, ever and always desire.
The extent to which you can even DELEGA TE power is probably limited by laws as definite as those which govern the strength of current you can send through an electric wire of given thickness and texture.
Democracy is composed one-third of peasant pessimism, one-third of laissez-aller, of utter in- difference.
You do not give power to a soft-head like Harding by making him president, any more than you could make Coolidge into an intellect. " Al," who as a journalist demonstrates once a week his unfitness for a place even in the cabinet, gave a touching tribute to Coolidge, on the lines of " Vaaal, he vas a goot schmoker. " Cal wasn't a demagogue, how noble of him to avoid that pitfall and confute the detractors of democracy. Cal got' on by a very simple predestined process. He never aroused ANY one's inferiority complex. Ditto Harding.
Ditto,presumably,Rooseveltthesecond. Nothing is more frequent in committee work and in demo-
? IIO JEFFERSON
cratic wangles and even in choosing editors than for a man who is strongish but not strong enough, to boost up some wobbler whom he thinks he can ~ide. Wilson was a great disappointment to some of his backers, as Taft to Theodore.
As I learned from my meeting with Griffiths: A leader who is not supported by legal machinery is more bound by the general will o f his party than an elected official who has legal forms to fall back on.
Mussolini has steadily refused to be called any- thing save " Leader , (Duce) or " Head of the Government," the term dictator has been applied by foreign envy, as the Tories were called catde- stealers. It does not represent the Duce's funda- mental conception of his role.
His authority comes, as Eirugina proclaimed authority comes, " from right reason , and. from the general fascist conviction that he is more likely to be right than anyone else is.
In the commandments to the militia this phrase is no more than the President being Supreme Chief of the American Armies in war time or any general on the field having full commanding powers. Or rather, it is more, in the sense that the militia are given a reason for their obedience.
? XXIX KUNG
As to the mysteries of genius, I am reproved for citing Confucius, though the Ta Hio is only thirty- two pages long. I am told the reader won't have a copy and that I ought to print it in an appendix, OR tell the reader what it means. Truly, people desire a great deal for very little.
The doctrine of Confucius is:
That you bring order into your surroundings by
bringing it first into yourself; by knowing the
motives of your acts.
That you can bring about better world govern-
ment by amelioration of the internal govern-
ment of your nation.
That private gain is not prosperity, but that the
treasure of a nation is its equity.
That hoarding is not prosperity and that people
should employ their resources.
One should respect intelligence, " the luminous
principle of reason," the faculties of others, one should look to a constant renovation.
" Make it new, make it new as the young grass shoot. "
One should not be content with the second-rate, applying in all of these the first principle, namely the beginning with what is nearest to hand, that is, one's own motives and intelligence. You could further assert that Kung taught that organization is
II. Z
? JEFFERSON andfor MUSSOLIN! I I 3
not forced on to things or on to a nation from the outside inward, but that the centre holds by attrac- tion.
" The humane ruler acquires respect by his spP. nd- ing, the inhumane, disrespect, by his taking. "
Shallow critics fail to understand ideas because they look on ideas as a stasis, a statement in a given position, and fail to look where it leads. The people who fail to take interest in Kung fail, I think, because they never observe WHA T Confucian thinking leads to.
For 2,500 years, whenever there has been order in China or in any part of China, you can look for a Confucian at the root of it.
Conf~<<ill. t on "La rivoiJ~Zione fonlin~~a. "
King Tfhing T'ang on Government. Pari of the in. tfriplion on the king'r bath-tub filed by K1111g in the Ta Hio II. I.
The first ideogr11111 (on the right) sho111. t tht fauisl axe for the dearing a111ay o f rubbi. th (left half) tht tr11, organit vegtlable rtntlllal. The . tt(()nd ideograph i. t tht . t1111sign, day,
"renovate, day by day rene111. "
. The verb is ll. ftd in phrases: to p111 a111ay old habit, the daily intrtase ofplanl. t, tmprolle the stale of, restor1.
? XXX
JEFFERSON has a reputation for having made excessive statements, which might happen to any voluble man i f a few o f his remarks were perpetually considered apart from their context, and apart from the occasions when they were published and the contrary excess they were designed to correct.
The " free and equal " is limited by the passive verb "born," it was directed against special privi- leges of those " first-born " and to those whose legal fathers were Dukes, Earls, etc.
There is not the least shadow of suspicion that T. J. ever supposed that men remained equal or were biologically equal, or had a right to equality save in opportunity and before the law.
Like every leader and constructor in human history he tried to bring a certain number of men up to a certain level, by elimination of certain defects.
The so-called intellectual or spiritual leader guns after defects at long range, the political constructor goes for those which are the worst damned im- mediate nuisances.
Apart from the Declaration of Independence to which T. J. gave the final form, Jefferson's doctrines might be divided into.
A. WhathethoughtgoodforthenewAmerican republic.
B. What he considered sound principles for the state.
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? JEFFERSON andfor MUSSOLINI I I,
As to this second division.
I. He disbelieved in hereditary privilege, i. e.
he thought men should govern by reason of their inherent qualities and not because they were sons of papa.
" 0 poca digna nobilta di sangue," as Dante had once, and some time previously, remarked.
2. He thought that a nation had no right to con- tract debts that couldn't be reasonably paid within the lifetime of the parties contracting.
Which is part of. his main contention that THE EARTH BELONGS TO THE LIVING. 3. That everything that can be done by informal and individual effort should be so done and that the state should govern only where and when
necessary. .
4? He was the? champion of " free speech " but
suggested that newspapers be printed in three sections, the first and VERY BRIEF section to be headed "FACTS," the second to be headed " Probabilities," and the third part to be headed " Lies. "
Given this limitation I think the Duce might be inclined to agree with him.
? 5? He believed in peace, but he believed still more strongly in maintaining peace UNTIL America was strong enough to stand a war without disaster, and when war came in I 8u he expected the Ameri- can army to win it. Though the frigates did most of the work. .
6. His fight for the " constitution " was a fight against John Marshall, and against the reactionaries who believed in the British Constitution.
