ing physicians tried to make the inmates "as comfortable as possible, regardless of their respected moral deserts." Doctors understood that it was a waste of time to "argue with the insane as to the soundness or unsoundness of their ideas." They considered those ideas "only in the light of their effect on conduct," just as the "government which civilized nations impose on savage tribes" sought to make use of taboos instead of trying to stamp them out. With a studied provocation worthy of Mencken, Arnold added that "the advantage of such a theory of government"—one that treated the governed as inmates or "little brown brothers"—lay in its escape from the "troublesome assumption that the human race is rational." Humanitarian imperialism, as he called it, enabled administrators to pursue vigorous measures without having to answer moral objections. "We need not delay such social undertakings as public relief because we are worried about their effect on the character of the recipients." A dispassionate observer, as distinguished from an "orator," "preacher," or "theologian," could easily see that practical results, especially in an economic emergency, were preferable to arguments about abstract principles or the warfare that so often grew out of those arguments. Thus "a man from Mars might be of the opinion that an orderly government should not permit pitched battles over wages, to the loss and suffering of entire communities." Unfortunately those closer to the ground seldom attained the view from Mars, and "the notion of compulsory arbitration was as uncongenial to labor as it was to capital."

The Soviet Union provided Arnold with a third example of the subordination of ethical disputation to practical results. The Bolsheviks, he noted, "were able to look at the distribution of goods as a purely mechanical problem of production and transportation, without connecting with it the moral problem of the preservation of national character." The Soviet Union offered a "spectacle of internal cooperation" normally seen only in wartime. Such tributes were commonplace in the I930s. American admirers of the "Soviet experiment," however, usually tried to deny the undemocratic features of the Bolshevik regime or else excused them as a temporary expedient forced on Stalin by economic adversity and Western hostility. Arnold did not have to engage in this kind of self-deception, since he held no brief for democracy in the first place. Insofar as the idea of democracy had any substance, it was simply another name for "humanitarian imperialism," in his view. It meant the universalization of

-434-