SUNDAY IN BRUSSELS

To Munson Havens

MY DEAR FRIEND:

You are a charming correspondent, fully entitled to a leather medal, because you never ask any fool questions. You have never even asked me what I think about the international situation and the chance of war, which is Fool Question No. I. Just for that, I am now going to uncork all the inside information which I have been picking up at great expense in the various European chancelleries these last six months, and much good may it do you.

You probably remember the story of the sea-captain who told a fussy old woman that the best time of year for her to cross the North Atlantic was when she had the money and wanted to go. There you have my best guess on the chance of war. There is a chance of war whenever someone wants to grab something and thinks he can get away with it. That is the international situation at the moment, exactly as it has always been ever since nations existed. The chance of war is precisely what it was when the planet was first infested by what old Frederick called “this damned human race,” diese verdammte Rasse. A hundred and fifty years ago Chief Justice Jay said that “nations in general will go to war whenever there is a prospect of getting something by it”; and that is all any Foreign Office can tell you now, or could ever tell you.

It is not very definite information, maybe, but it is all there is, and there isn’t any more. How do I know, how does anyone know, when somebody is going to gamble on a net gain out of starting a dust-up, or who that somebody will be? But while I can’t say much that is definite about the international situation or the chance of war, I can say a whole lot that is definite about the International Situation and the Chance Of War, and I shall be pleased to do so. You may take the tip straight from the horse’s mouth that the Chance Of War is the Big Out nowadays, and the International Situation is that infernal scoundrels are working it to the limit everywhere in Europe, just as they are in the United States, according to what I read and hear.

Governments (which is to say, being interpreted, jobholders) are looting, terrorizing and brutalizing whole populations without let or hindrance, all on the Chance Of War. They are perpetrating the vilest swineries against human rights, liberties and decencies, all on the Chance Of War. Everywhere here the Chance Of War is tightening the grip of Nietzsche’s “coldest of cold monsters, the State” on the individual’s neck. The Chance Of War covers every device that a despicable ingenuity can invent for reducing human beings to the loathsome condition of State-servitude. The Chance Of War justifies every means of breaking the human spirit, mechanizing conscience, prostituting ideals, and debauching conduct to the level of savagery.

You see I am describing the International Situation objectively and in a general way. I should like to give you three or four volumes of my opinion about it, but I thought you would probably rather have the unvarnished facts. If you were here I don’t believe the thought of war would cross your mind once a week—it doesn’t mine—because you would see so much going on that is worse than war. I always thought the old-line pacifists were barking up the wrong tree when they laid so much stress on the horrors of war. I confess I can’t get up any tootle about slaughter, pillaging, bombing, stinking people to death with gas, and all that sort of muck, though I have been closer to a goodish bit of it than I care to be again. To my notion, the real horror of war is what happens to people when the war is over, and the greatest horror is when the Chance Of War begins to get in its work. I was in Europe during the last war, and most of the time since, and for a choice of horrors give me war every time.

Mr. Jefferson said that the spirit and manners of a people are what really counts, and so they are. They are pretty nearly all that counts, and their destruction is the real horror of war. Think of the incredible degeneration which set in on our people after the last war, and ran on through the twenty-year period which was such a fine curtain-raiser for the revolting mess we are now in. It was not peculiar to us; it hit us harder, but one can see its boils, blains and pestiferous botches sticking out everywhere here in Europe also. In a word, that war took twenty years out of the life of every civilized person in the world, and no one knows how much more it will take before it gets through.

Compare those twenty years with four years of actual war, and the sum-total of bombings and shootings seems pretty middling trivial. True, you and I are alive and the bombed fellows are dead, so as a matter of sheer animal instinct we might put ourselves down on the lucky side, but how about it, really? Pyrrhus was right, βιος βίος, βίος ảβίωτος, which we might construe as meaning that a sickly spiritual life is just no life at all. If you and I had not accumulated enough spiritual capital out of the older culture to see us through, albeit in an exiguous and rather lonesome fashion, should we not have been glad to call it a day twenty years ago? I think so; and how many people who have dragged through these twenty years have had our advantages? Precious few. Besides, what right has any contemporary civilization to make a person live on his capital instead of chipping it into the general cultural pot to help produce and distribute a bigger general fund of spiritual wealth?

Seeing what goes on, I sometimes think that, as a principle of political organization, nationalism is pretty well on its last legs. It is a fairly new doctrine, running back only to the beginning of the sixteenth century, when there were but four national organizations in Europe, and rather loose ones, at that. Its fuller development has taken place within the last twenty-five years, following the breakup of the three great non-national empires into the national Succession States. Hence you might say it has been an experiment, so far, and like the experiments with artificial diamonds, or getting gold out of sea-water, the thing does not seem “commercially practicable.” It costs too darn much. The overhead eats up all the profits, and the business will either have to be given up or go bust.

Look at the cost of National Defense, which politicians insist is necessary on account of the Chance Of War. Look at the prodigious cost of “social legislation” and all the other rapidly-mounting costs of maintaining nationalism. They must all come out of production, and there is no longer enough production to pay them and keep itself going. That is the trouble in every country where jobholders can make their people believe that the sacred ark of nationalism is in danger. They are facing the homely facts of fundamental economics which cannot be dodged or bulldozed. National organization is a great principle, if you don’t weaken. It is all very fine and grand and puts up a wonderful show on dress-parade, but if you have nothing left to go on with after the bills come in, where are you?

When I was in England lately, I saw how remarkably successful the British jobholders have been in putting the wind up their people about the Chance Of War, and in consequence, how they are rifling their people’s pockets with both hands. An English merchant told me (not by way of complaint, I hasten to say) that by careful calculation he was working nine months a year for his king and three months for himself. Of course I made no comment on this, but I could not help thinking that the mediæval feudal lord would probably not have pried much more out of him. It appears also that his king is going to raise the ante on him a little, for I was told that, what with five billion dollars’ worth of National Defense and all, maintaining the principle of nationalism in England would come to something like twenty-five billion dollars next year.

Without exception, however, every Englishman I talked with told me that on a hard pinch the country might stand the national taxation, but the local taxation is the thing that is killing it. Two of them got out their tax bills and showed me figures which took my breath away. This was news to me. It seems that the local boards and councils are infested by uplifters and social-service zealots who are bung-full of schemes for succoring the downtrodden with schools, doles, pensions, free lunches, shorter hours, housing, playgrounds and the devil only knows what-all of other devices for running up the general overhead on nationalism. They are doing so well with these that when I left England the impression on my mind was that national defense and “social security” between them are cross-lifting the country’s prospects into the Promised Land.

The worst thing old Bismarck did for the world, and he did a plenty, was to launch the idea that the State is a proper agency for social welfare. He was in trouble with his Socialists, so to take the wind out of their sails he cribbed the main items out of their “social security” programme, and worked them himself as a State enterprise. He had only an electioneering interest in the thing; it was merely a matter of putting off the evil day, like throwing out caps and boots to wolves. Later on, in the face of powerful Laborite agitation egged on by feather-brained and windy reformers, the British State thought to lengthen its lease of life by the same means; and I don’t imagine you need to be told anything about what the American State has done and is doing in that line, or why it does it.

The idea, however, is now so deeply rooted almost everywhere that nothing short of an appalling calamity could kill it; yet see how preposterous it is. The State is no proper agency for social welfare, and never will be, for exactly the same reason that an ivory paper-knife is nothing to shave with. The interests of society and of the State do not coincide, and any pretense that they can be made to coincide is sheer nonsense. Society gets on best when people are most happy and contented, which they are when freest to do as they please and what they please; hence society’s interest is in having as little government as possible, and in keeping it as decentralized as possible. The State, on the other hand, is administered by jobholders; hence its interest is in having as much government as possible, and in keeping it as highly centralized as possible. It is hard to imagine two sets of interests more directly opposed than these.

This opposition of interest is what fully accounts for Paine’s excellent observation that “the trade of governing has always been monopolized by the most ignorant and most rascally individuals of mankind.” Society has a primary interest in social welfare. The State has not; its primary interest is the interest of jobholders; and therefore nothing could be worse done than what it undertakes to do for social welfare. Politicians leap with joy on this-or-that proposed advance in “social legislation,” not out of any primary interest in social welfare, but because it means more government, more jobs, more patronage, more diversions of public money to their own use and behoof; and what but a flagrant disservice to society can accrue from that?

If you think these are only my own disordered notions, let me tell you they are not. Not one of them is mine. I am taking them straight from Benjamin Franklin, so if you have any comment to make you should see Ben about it. But why care whose notions they are; why not put them to the test of experience? Let me tell you what to do. Blow the dust off your copy of Ben’s Autobiography and turn to his observations on the reading of history, written May 19, 17 31. There is only half a page of them. Make a large copy, frame it and hang it up where you can see it while you are reading your morning paper of any day when Congress or any other turba atque colluvio of politicians is in the news. That’s all—except that it will be a handy thing to point to when some enthusiast comes along to get you interested in some new piece of “social legislation.” You won’t have to say a word; just call his attention to it and walk out.

The thing I can’t make out, however, is what this great new dispensation is supposed to lead to, aside from what it does for politicians. I see how the More Abundant Life is a good talking-point for jobholders, but what else, exactly, is it supposed to be? Does it mean a rise in the general average of happiness? If so, that is a laudable object, for all the authorities from Saint Augustine down to Bentham agree that the attainment of happiness is the end and aim of human existence. Some say, though, that the More Abundant Life does not mean this. When Camille Mauclair was here in Brussels last winter, he reported a conversation he had been having with a reformer, which touched on this point. “Am I to understand,” he asked, “that your idea is to make everybody happy?” The agitator replied, “Not at all. What we intend to do is to make the happy people unhappy.”

If this be in fact the idea of the More Abundant Life, one must say it seems to be succeeding admirably, for the erstwhile happy people give every evidence of being none too happy now. The contrast here, for example, is striking. Thirty years ago, when Brussels was Brussels, there was no central heating to speak of, no gadgets, bathtubs were scarce and plumbing mostly didn’t work, and people made their own amusements; there were no movies, radios, motorcars, cheap excursions. Moreover, the whole social scheme was dead wrong. As Mr. Dooley’s anarchist friend said, th’ government was in th’ hands iv th’ mon-nopolists, and they were cr-rushin’ th’ life out iv th’ prolotoorios. Perversely, though, the people as a whole were the gayest I had ever seen, and if the underprivileged and exploited prolotoorios themselves were not happy, they were certainly putting up a first-class imitation of it.

To-day I don’t see anybody putting up any imitation at all. The mon-nopolists look unhappy, as probably they are,—M. Mauclair’s friend has no doubt been attending to that,—but the prolotoorios also look unhappy, notwithstanding thirty years of effort to usher them into the More Abundant Life. All the gadgets in Christendom are here now; two huge department-stores are full of them. Socialism has long been top dog in the government, and pledges to hoist the suffering prolotoorios out of the Slough of Despond have been a commonplace of every election in thirty years. The people have more useless leisure and every sort of deteriorating commercial amusement to fill it; movie-houses abound, and while radios do not abound, neither are they scarce. Nevertheless no one, be he mon-nopolist or be he prolo-toorio, looks or acts or sounds as happy as in the bad old times.

So all I can make out of the situation is that the general average of happiness has gone down a peg or two; but I may be wrong, at that. Perhaps the people are like the Irishman’s wriggling snake, which he said was dead, “but he isn’t sinsible iv it yet.” Perhaps they are brimming with happiness, but have set up a fashion of imitating the English, who are said to take all their joys sadly. I somehow doubt this, but it is possible, of course. At all events the contrast between appearances now and appearances thirty years ago is distinctly appreciable, and appearances are all I have to go by.

I am in a bad frame of mind here. It fairly puts my dander up to see Belgium swamped under a steady stream of pauper refugees from Germany; not all of them Jews either, y’ understand, not by a good many. These poor souls, after being maltreated and robbed of all they have, somehow make their way across the border with nothing in their hands but their lives, and this country is at its wits’ end to know what to do with them. To close the frontier against them seems inhuman, for after all, they have “done got to be somewhere.” They can’t very well be driven into the North Sea, or treated like tramps or sturdy beggars. Belgium has always had a great tradition of liberty, and the people respect it and are proud of it. As you know, this is chiefly what has made Belgium the most attractive dwelling-place in the world for a person of my type of mind. So far, I believe, the government has done nothing to stop the influx of refugees, and the people certainly do not want it to do anything, but the situation is fast becoming so acute that the authorities will have to take some sort of action, however reluctantly, as Holland, which has the same tradition, has already done.

It strikes me that this is an outrage which is everybody’s business wherever German refugees seek shelter, and I think my countrymen ought to take on their share of the business, and get properly hot about it. Don’t misunderstand me. I would be the very last to encourage the great American lust for messing in on another country’s domestic policies. But this is not a matter of domestic policy. Germany’s policy may be what it may be, but when it Utters up the whole face of the earth with paupers it is no longer a domestic policy. It is foreign policy of a most provocative character, and the nations that are embarrassed by it—of whom ours is one—are pretty tame cats, in my opinion, if they stand for it.

I observe that when we Americans get into one of our hot fits against the German government’s treatment of its undesirables we are most properly twitted with having done the same thing ourselves. So we did. When our revolutionary party came into power, it had on its hands a similar problem and took a similar course with it. We robbed and maltreated the loyalists, and harried them out of the country. We lost by it, too, for by and large they were the best people we had.

Quite so; but there was this important difference: we did not make ourselves a nuisance to the neighbors. I don’t for a moment imagine we would have cared if we had, any more than the National Socialists care now; but as a matter of fact, we did not. Our refugees had a hard time of it, most of them, but they put no strain on any other country’s hospitality or resources, as the German refugees are doing everywhere. Here is a perfectly valid ground of blistering resentment against the National Socialists, and I wish our citizens would take note of it.

Our old friend Frank Warrin tries hard to make me believe that America is ripe and ready for another Voltaire or Rabelais. It isn’t. There would have to be about five centuries of intensive spade-work put in on American intelligence before either of those two worthies could do a dollar’s worth of business in America. I do think, though, that another Socrates might come handy, and I know that at least he could have a world of fun in our glorious republic until the Senate Investigating Committee clapped him in quod.

Socrates knew nothing, and was proud of it. He carried the magnificent art of Not-Knowing to the legal limit, and oh, my dear friend, what an incomparably great and splendid art that is! He never formulated or organized anything, not even a science of semantics, and was also proud of that. Apparently he never wrote anything, unless the few fragments of playful verse which have come down to us under his name are really his. He did nothing but hunt out people who were cracked up to know a tremendous lot, and ask them questions about their specialties. When they used terms like Democracy, Justice, Planned Economy, Liberty, Individualism, Republican Institutions and so on, he would scratch his head and say naïvely that he wasn’t quite sure what those meant; he hadn’t it quite straight in his mind; he would have to have some more information about it. Then with one guileless question after another he would let the wind out of the wise man’s wisdom until he had him looking like a deflated soap-bubble.

What a man for our time! How he would make hay of our politicians, economists, sociologists, and above all, our journalist-publicists! I have three of these last particularly in mind at the moment, whose papal tone is most exasperating—how one would rejoice to see a Socrates blandly chasing them up the chimney and out the top! I fear, though, that having got their science so neatly formulated, the seman-tickers will lose no time about organizing it, and then, goodbye to the chance of a Socrates.

Good-bye to you also, dear friend, for the time being. Write me when the mood is on. Nothing is minutiæ to me which you write or think.

ALBERT