Behind the Mirrors Part 9

Or this: "The Cabinet spent an hour and a half today discussing what to do with the property left in the government's hands by the war. There are millions of dollars' worth of such property." A mere detail of administration, but it came before the Cabinet as a whole because more than one department was left in control of the property.

Moreover, you may estimate the importance of cabinets from the fact that, after all, every administration takes its color from the President. Mr. Wilson's administration was precisely Mr. Wilson. Mr.

Harding's is precisely Mr. Harding.

Listen to the experience of a Cabinet adviser. One of the most important Secretaries was explaining to some friends a critical situation. "But,"

interjected one of the listeners, "does President Harding understand that?" "The President," replied the Secretary, "never has time really to understand anything."

And remember how Secretary Hughes told the President that the Four Power Pact covered with its guarantees the home islands of j.a.pan, and how a couple of days later Mr. Harding informed the press that it did not cover the home islands of j.a.pan; when it transpired that the information of Mr. Hughes on this point had effected no lodgement in the President's mind.

The Presidential mind; that is the bottle neck through which everything has to pa.s.s.

Suppose we had today the greatest statesman that this country has ever produced as Secretary of State. Let us say Alexander Hamilton, for example. What could Alexander Hamilton do as the head of Mr. Harding's Cabinet? We shall a.s.sume that Alexander Hamilton had the mind to grasp the problem of this country's relations to the world and of its interest in the world's recovery from the havoc and the hatreds of the war, and the constructive imagination to reach a solution of it. What could Alexander Hamilton do? His avenue of approach to world problems would be Mr. Harding. All that was in the mind of Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of State, would have to pa.s.s through the mind of Warren G. Harding, President, before it would become effective.

The pa.s.sage through would be blocked by many obstacles, for Mr. Harding has a perfectly conventional mind; that is why he is President. One of the pictures in Mr. Harding's head is the mechanistic, the G.o.d's Time picture. "Things left to themselves will somehow come out all right."

Another is the racial inferiority complex. "Man is inadequate to attempt control of his own destiny. There are the forces to be considered." A third is the great business-man illusion. Mr. Morgan going abroad to consider reparations may accomplish the wonders which mere statesmen can not. All these induce avoidance of responsibility, and Mr. Harding has the human liking for avoiding responsibility. Pressed by Mr. Hamilton, Mr. Harding would say: "But I can not move the Senate." Pressed further, he would say: "There is Public Opinion. We shall lose the election if we become involved in European affairs. You and I know those Allied war debts are worthless, but how can we make the people realize that they are worthless?"

Like the rest of us, Mr. Harding perhaps has none of these pictures so firmly in his head as before the war; but the damage to the pictures only makes him more vacillating. I am a.s.suming in all this that Mr.

Hamilton has a free mind, which he had, relatively, when he operated a century and a half ago. At that time he had not to think much of Public Opinion or of parties. And the mechanistic theory of Progress, that things come out all right with the least possible human intervention or only the intervention of the business man, had not then a.s.sumed its present importance.

"Mind," says a nameless writer in the _London Nation_, "is incorrigibly creative." It has created so many vast illusions like those above in the last century and a half that like the American spirit in Kipling's poem:

"Elbowed out by sloven friends, It camps, at sufferance, on the stoop."

Where our actual Secretary's mind falls short of our supposit.i.tious Secretary's mind is in the valuable quality of common sense. I am even prepared to maintain that as a measure of reality Mr. Hughes's mind is distinctly inferior to Mr. Harding's, which is one reason why he never did become President and Mr. Harding did. I can not better explain what I mean than on the basis of this quotation from a recent book of Mr.

Orage, the British critic:

"Common sense is the community of the senses or faculties; in its outcome it is the agreement of their reports. A thing is said to be common sense when it satisfies the heart, the mind, the emotion and all the senses; when, in fact, it satisfies all our various criteria of reality."

Mr. Hughes has only one criterion of reality, his mind, which has been developed at the expense of all his other means of approach to the truth. He lives in a region of facts, principles, and logical deductions. He does not sense anything. And only men who sense reality have common sense. For Mr. Hughes facts are solid; you can make two nice, orderly little piles of them and build a logical bridge over the interval between them. A true statesman builds a bridge resting on nothing palpable, and nevertheless he crosses over it.

Mr. Hughes's mind operates in a region of perfect demonstration; he even demonstrates things to himself. A true statesman never succeeds in demonstrating anything to himself; he uses demonstration only in dealing with others. Yet he arrives in other than logical ways at a sureness for himself which is never Mr. Hughes's. For the Secretary of State statesmanship is an intellectual exercise, for the true statesman it is the exercise of a dozen other faculties. An extraordinary but limited mind, Mr. Hughes impresses us as the boy lightning calculator does, and leaves us unsatisfied.

Take Mr. Hughes's handling of Mexican relations as an example of what I have called statesmanship made a purely intellectual exercise. The practical result which was to be desired when Mr. Hughes took office was stability and order in Mexico, the safety of American property there, and a restoration of diplomatic intercourse.

Mr. Hughes does not seek to obtain these results. Instead he works out the following problem: _a_ + _b_ = _c_, in which _a_ is the fact that Carranza had issued a decree making possible the confiscation of American property in Mexico, _b_ is the principle of international law that at the basis of relations between peoples must be safety of alien property, and _c_ is a note to Mexico.

Mr. Hughes was excited over the perfection of this intellectual operation. He read his note with all the jubilance of the Greek philosopher who, having discovered an important principle of physics, exclaimed: "Eureka." Mr. Hughes's Eureka is always a piece of paper. He is a lawyer whose triumphs are briefs and contracts.

Now the facts were not merely that Carranza had made an offensive gesture, issuing the famous decree; but that Mexico had not confiscated American property and lived in such fear of her strong neighbor that she was never likely to do so, that the Mexican supreme court had ruled confiscation to be illegal, that the Obregon government was as stable and as good a government as Mexico was likely to have, and that it was to our interest to support it morally rather than encourage further revolution there. They all pointed to recognition.

The validity of the piece of paper that Mr. Hughes demanded of Obregon would rest upon international law. But so did the validity of our right to have our property in Mexico respected. We should not be in any stronger legal position to intervene in Mexico if she violated the contract Mr. Hughes wanted, than if she violated our property rights there unfortified by such a piece of paper. Both rested on one and the same law.

Furthermore, Mexico being weak and sensitive, an arbitrary demand that she "take the pledge," such as Mr. Hughes made, was sure to offend her pride, and delay the consummation everyone wished--stability across the border and a restoration of good relations. Yet Mr. Hughes was immensely satisfied with his intellectual exercise _a_ + _b_ = _c_, _c_ being not a solution of the Mexican problem, which at this writing is still afar off, but a piece of paper, a note to Mexico. The sheer logical triumph of the deduction of _c_ from _a_ and _b_ is to Mr. Hughes an end in itself.

Now, of course, it is not wholly overdevelopment of mind at the expense of the other criteria of reality which leads Mr. Hughes to vain exercises like _a_ + _b_ = _c_. He has what a recent writer has described as "an inflamed legal sense." He has, moreover, by an a.s.sociation of ideas all his own oddly transferred to law that sacredness with which he was brought up to regard the Bible. "Sanct.i.ty of contracts," is his favorite phrase, the word "sanct.i.ty" being highly significant. He has, besides, Mr. Harding over him, and the Senate to reckon with. And in the case of Mexico he has as a fellow Cabinet member, Mr. Fall, the picture in whose head is of a "white man" teaching a "greaser" to respect him. He has to think of winning elections, of his own political ambitions. All these inhibitory influences which generally produce negation do not estop Mr. Hughes. His mind is too vigorous for that. It pursues its way energetically to results, such as _a_ + _b_ = _c_.

Now, of course, the handling of Mexican relations is not Mr. Hughes's major achievement. But even his major achievement, the Washington conference with its resultant nine pieces of paper, was more or less a lawyer's plea in avoidance.

The major problem which confronted Mr. Hughes was this: The Great War had been followed, as Mr. H. G. Wells aptly says, by the Petty Peace. It was threatening, and still threatens, to flame up again. The problem of a real peace confronted Mr. Hughes, because Mr. Wilson had sought to establish one and failed, and had thus set a certain standard of effort for his successor. Moreover, Mr. Hughes had said that every man, woman, and child in the United States was vitally interested in the economic recovery of Europe.

Mr. Hughes had either to face this task or divert the mind of the court to some other issue. He chose to find his _a_ + _b_ = _c_ elsewhere. The problem of establishing peace where there was war was difficult; perhaps it was too hard for any man, but has not humanity--I say humanity because it is Mr. Harding's favorite word--has not humanity the right to ask of its statesmen something more than timidity and avoidance? The problem of establishing peace where there was peace, in the Orient, was relatively easy.

The war had left the great sea powers with excessive navies and insupportable naval budgets. All wanted naval limitation. It was only necessary to propose an agreement for reduction to have it accepted.

Even the dramatic method of making the proposal, with details of the tonnage to be sc.r.a.pped, was not Mr. Hughes's idea. Let us do the man in the White House justice. He conceived it on the _Mayflower_; read it to Senator James Watson who was with him, and wirelessed it to the State Department.

There was the further problem, the Anglo-j.a.panese Alliance. Mr. Hughes wanted it ended. j.a.pan and England wanted it subst.i.tuted by a compact which should be signed by its two signatories and the United States.

All that Mr. Hughes had to do to establish peace where there was peace was to offer an agreement upon naval armament and accept the Anglo-j.a.panese plan for a wider pact in the Pacific. The details would involve discussion, but the success of the general program was a.s.sured in advance.

The conference was called, hurriedly, because, as Mr. Harding once explained, if he had not hastened someone else would have antic.i.p.ated him in calling it. This shows how obvious was the expedient. The idea of naval limitation was no more original than the idea of the conference.

Mr. Borah had proposed it. Lord Lee had proposed it, in the British Parliament. The idea of the Four Power Pact was made in England--it had long been discussed there--and brought over by Mr., now Lord, Balfour.

He laid it at Mr. Hughes's feet.

Mr. Balfour sought no triumphs. They should all go to Mr. Hughes. He has the art of inconspicuousness, the result of many generations of fine breeding. As you saw him in the plenary sessions clutching the lapels of his coat with both hands and modestly struggling for utterance after an immense flow of words from our chief delegate, you could not help feeling patriotic pride in the contrast.

Besides, Mr. Balfour was captivated. He became, for the nonce, perfectly American. Mr. H. Wickham Steed said to me, hearing the chief British delegate speak: "It is a new Balfour at this conference." Certainly as you heard the voice, moved and moving, emotional perhaps for the first time in his life, you realized that it was not Mr. Balfour, "proceeding on his faded way" as the _London Nation_ expressed it, who was speaking.

It was Mr. Balfour as he might be at a great revival meeting, such as Mr. Hughes in his youth must have often attended.

On the Four Power Pact the best comment ever made was Mr. Frank Simonds's, "It was invented to save the British Empire from committing bigamy."

[Ill.u.s.tration: ARTHUR BALFOUR]

The results of the Washington conference were substantial. They put off war where none was threatening. Perhaps in the longer future they will be seen to be no more than a prolongation of the intent of the Versailles treaty, confirming the dichotomy of powers which that instrument created. Germany, Russia, and China were treated as outsiders in both conferences.

But the great _a_ + _b_ = _c_ of last winter left peace where there is war still unwritten. The problem which "humanity" posed to Mr. Hughes is as yet unattempted. It is as exigent as ever. Immensely plausible as he is, events have a way of overtaking him. Remembering what happened on election night in 1916, I think one cannot sum him up better than by saying that he has the habit of always being elected in the early returns. As in the case of the lightning calculator, after you have recovered from your first surprise at his mental exhibition you are inclined to ask, "But what is the good of it all?"

The two most important advisers to the President in the existing Cabinet are Mr. Hughes and Mr. Hoover. The limitations of the Secretary of State are the limitations of a legalistic mind. The limitations of Mr. Hoover are the limitations of a scientific mind. Men, considered politically, do not behave like mathematical factors nor like chemical elements.

Someone asked Mr. Hoover recently why he sent corn to Russia instead of wheat. "Because," replied the Secretary of Commerce without a moment's hesitation, "for one dollar I can buy so many calories"--carrying it out to the third decimal place--"in corn, and only so many"--again to the third decimal place--"in wheat. I get about twice as many in corn as in wheat."

Mr. Hoover is at his best in feeding a famished population. He then has men where he wants them--I say this without meaning to reflect upon Mr.

Hoover's humanitarian impulses; perhaps I should better say he then has men where for the free operation of his scientific mind he requires to have them. For in a famine men become mere chemical retorts. You pour into them a certain number of calories. Oxidization produces a certain energy. And the exact energy necessary to sustain life is calculable.

In a famine men cease to be individuals. They can not say, "I never ate corn. I do not know how to cook corn. I do not like corn." They behave in perfectly calculable ways. So many calories, oxidization; so much energy.

Conceive a society in which results were always calculable: so many men, so much fuel, so much consequent horsepower, and Mr. Hoover would make for it an admirable benevolent dictator; for he is benevolent. If Bolshevism at its most complete exemplification had been a success and become the order of the world, Mr. Hoover might have made a great head of a state; with labor conscripted and food conscripted, all you would have to do would be to apply the food, counted in calories, to the labor, and production in a readily estimable quant.i.ty would ensue. I am not trying to suggest that this represents Mr. Hoover's ideal of society; it surely does not. I am only saying that this is the kind of society in which Mr. Hoover would develop his fullest utility.

Science inevitably reduces man to the calculable automaton, otherwise it can deduce no laws about him;--such as, for example, the legal man, a fiction that haunts Mr. Hughes's brain; the chemical retort man, of Mr.

Hoover's mind; the economic man, another convenient fiction; the scientific socialism man, another pure fiction, derived from the economic man and forming the basis for Bolshevism at its fullest development.

Now if Chemistry should somehow acquire eccentricity, so that two elements combined in a retort would sometimes produce one result and sometimes another totally different, the chemist would be no more unsure in his mind than is Mr. Hoover, operating for the first time in a society of free, self-governing men. Or perhaps it would be a better a.n.a.logy to say that if the chemist when he put an agent into a retort could not be sure what other elements were already in it, and could not tell whether the result would be an explosion or a pleasant and useful recombination, he would be somewhat in the position of Mr. Hoover.

You will observe that I am trying to dissociate the real Hoover from the myth Hoover, always a difficult process, which may require years for its accomplishment. I do not pretend that this is the final dissociation. All we know with certainty of the real Hoover is that when he has society at the starvation line and can say "so many calories, so much energy," he works with extraordinary sureness.

When he operates in a normal society he takes his chemical agent in hand and consults Mr. Harding, Mr. Daugherty, or Mr. Weeks as to what agents there are in the political retort, and whether the placing of his agent in with them will produce an explosion or a profitable recombination.

So you see the practical utility of his mind is conditioned upon the minds of Mr. Harding, Mr. Weeks, and Mr. Daugherty. It is a fertile mind, which invents, however, only minor chemical reactions, neither he nor Mr. Harding being sure enough about the dirty and incalculable vessel of politics to know when an explosion may result, and neither of them being bold enough to take chances.