Drift and Mastery

13. Poverty, Chastity, Obedience

13 Poverty, Chastity, Obedience Poverty, chastity, and obedience are not the ideals of a self-governing people. Occasionally, however, some well-fed old gentleman announces that it would be wrong to abolish want because poverty is such an excellent training ground for character. The sentiment does not attract the poor, of course, and even the friends of the old gentleman wish that he had not made an ass of himself. And of course, there are not many modern people who could agree with the medireval theory that celibacy is more blessed than marriage. They prefer a father and a mother to a monk and a nun, and St. Paul's dictum that it is better to marry than burn will not seem to them a very noble tribute to the family. As to obedience, they continue to like it pretty well in other people, no doubt, and yet their greatest admiration goes out to those who stand on their own feet. These medireval vows are the true discipline of authority. In their absolute form they were meant only for those who sought absolute perfection. But to ordinary mortals, who could accept them only in moderation, they were still the best atmosphere for a world in which democracy was impossible. I do not mean to imply that the Church deliberately created an ideal which sapped the possibility of self-government. That would be to endow the Church with an inconceivably deliberate intelligence. All I mean is that in the undemocratic world which the Church dominated, ideals grew up which expressed the truth about that world. The desire for self-government has become vivid with the 140 POVERTY, CHASTITY, OBEDIENCE accumulation of a great surplus of wealth. Man to-day has at last seen the possibility of freeing himself from his supreme difficulty. It wasn't easy to think much of the possibilities of this world while he lived on the edge of starvation. Resignation to hardship was a much more natural outlook. But in the midst of plenty, the imagination becomes ambitious, rebellion against misery is at last justified, and dreams have a basis in fact. Of course, there are immense sections of the globe where the hard conditions of the older life still prevail, and there the ideal of democracy is still a very ineffective phrase. But the United States has for the most part lifted itself out of primitive hardship, and that fact, more than our supposedly democratic constitution, is what has justified in some measure the hope which inspires our history. We have been far from wise with the great treasure we possessed, and no nation has such cause for shame at the existence of poverty. We have only our short-sighted selves to blame. But the blunders are not fatal: American wealth has hardly been tapped. And that is why America still oilers the greatest promise to democracy. The first item in the program of self-government is to drag the whole population well above the misery line. To create a minimum standard of life below which no human being can fall is the most elementary duty of the democratic state. For those who go below the line of civilized decency not only suffer wretchedly: they breed the poisons of self-government. They form the famous slum proletariat about whom even the socialists despair. Occasionally some dramatic figure rises out of them, occasionally they mutter and rebel and send the newspapers into a panic. But for the purposes of constructive revolution this submerged mass is of little use, for it is harassed, beaten, helpless. These last will not be first. They may scare the rest of us into a little reform. But out of sheer wretchedness will come little of the material or the power of democracy , for as Walter Weyll has said, "A man or a class, crushed to earth-is crushed to earth." Unfit for self-government, they are the most easily led, the most easily fooled, and the most easily corrupted. You can't build a modern nation out of Georgia crackers, poverty-stricken negroes, 1 The progressive theorist, Walter Weyl, was the author of The New Democracy (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1912). 141 POVERTY, CHASTITY, OBEDIENCE the homeless and helpless of the great cities. They make a governing class essential. They are used by the forces of reaction. Once in a while they are used by revolutionists for agitation, but...