Philip Wylie - The Other Horseman

“After the Tausand Yahr Reich,” Jimmie said bitterly.

The old man’s eyes shone. “Thousand years? Horse manure! And God everlastingly damn the Germans, the Reds, the New Dealers, and every and any other group or individual that has gone solid-headed with the idea that you can plan a system for the generations to come! Seems to me the last twenty years have been spent in discussing the long-range ideas of self-appointed intellectuals and leaders. It’s a dumb American habit, by now. The Germans think they have a social system that’ll last for ten centuries. The Reds think they have something that’ll go on unchanged forever. But look how Fascism and Communism have changed already! The New Dealers are busy trying to figure out a perpetual system of their own. The Catholics and Protestants are trying, as they have tried for ages, to lay down an unchangeable gambit of religious law and moral code for the aeons ahead. Everybody, these days, is busy to pieces trying to impose his notions, his will, and his prejudices on the future. What a thing! Men pick their kids’ colleges before they’re born—and enter ’em there. People leave wills with instructions that presume to carry down to the forth and fifth generation! Every legislative body in the country is trying to decide, not what to do now, but what people as yet unborn ought to do! The political cockroaches won’t change themselves, but, boy! will they legislate for the people ahead! Remember what I said about time? It’s another time problem. The present is. Nobody knows what the future will be. Trying to estimate it and arrange it is not only dodging the screaming present, it’s a psychological statement of failure. Every son of Adam and daughter of Eve, who doesn’t like the way things are going these days, wants to set up some kind of pet new machinery that will change them in the days to come!”

“Some of those efforts are expressions of ideals, hopes—”

“Oh, sure.” Mr. Corinth ruffled his hair. “Look. About economic systems, debts, prejudices, religions, people’s wills—the whole kaboodle of orders which we intend to hand the future! The future always has ignored them and always will ignore them! Which any ass can see if he stops daydreaming. But that’s exactly what democracy was built to take care of! People think democracy is a system. An economic-social-political system. A thing that has books you can go back over and check. A thing with a code and a creed and laws. So that when a Hitler pops up, people go back to Jefferson or Washington to see what to do. God A’mighty! Did Washington or Jefferson ever run across Hitler? I lave we any direct information from those birds on what to do in case of a world-Fascism threat?

We have not! Quoting them today is pure medicine-man stuff—at least it can be, because they didn’t foresee these days and these problems. What they did foresee was that the people ought to have a continuing say-so in their government—and that’s all, so help me.”

Jimmie grinned. “Wish you’d tell that to my old man.”

“I did,” Mr. Corinth said. “I made a speech a few weeks ago at a meeting of a bunch of gabby women and earnest men. I told ’em what democracy is. Not a form of government—but a way of maintaining almost any damned form of government. A fair way. An enlightened way. A way that gives the most people a chance, and government the most chance to do for the people. The wise men who founded this democracy fixed it up at the start so that nearly any solitary principle or law could be changed in any way. Excepting, you might say, the main principle that, in whatever is done, the majority should be the ones to pick the doers. That is absolutely all democracy is—and a hell of a lot, even so!

“It’s—to put it another way—the only fair and fluid system by which people can evolve together. Change and grow. Washington’s eyes would pop if he could see what we call democracy today. No slavery. Women voting. The central government stronger than the squabbling states—and able to assert its strength, thank God. Drink prohibited and restored. A war to keep together the union behind us. An industrial civilization, with a thing called Labor, that Washington never heard of. All those things weren’t here when he died; but he helped set up a constitution by which, one way or another, they could be.

“Democracy is a way of governing, designed to promote and encourage change. It’s not static. That’s the reason people who lose it always fight back to it. It’s the only possible permanent system. Naturally, it’s no better than people are. And people aren’t so good. I wish I could show everybody in every spot—high and low—the great simple, self-evident, unavoidable, natural fact that there never will be a gang, a group, a government, a state, or anything that is one solitary damned bit better than the people in it! Communism is no better than the Russians—a statement of fairly low degree in many departments. Fascism is no better than the Germans—a compelling argument to demonstrate its future possibilities—and lack of ’em. Muskogewan is no better than its citizens—impress upon it what economic and social systems and ideas you may. <���…>

wrong end of the stick. Everybody’s trying to improve the rules and neglecting the character of the players. That, Jimmie, is all backwards. And you can only switch it around rightwise again, in a democracy—where every individual’s character counts, and if things get too sour it shows, and people have to do something to save themselves—something they have the set-up to do! In any other kind of government they have to stick to some damn’ plan—even in an opportunistic one like Hitler’s. And whenever a new, present fact shows a past plan is in error, a Fascist, a Commie, a bigot, a standpatter suddenly becomes a fool and a liar for all to see. So does his drop-forged form of government. Only a democracy, in other words, can go right on changing its mind, without collapsing. As soon as we Americans remember that what we’ve got is a way to live together and do things—instead of a hard and fast system we can’! tinker with—we’ll go to work on the changes that lie ahead and we’ll put ’em in effect. Changes, I mean, like earned capital versus lucky capital. Those businessmen who are going around bellowing that you can’t do this and you gotta do that because of the Constitution, are nuts. If they wanted alterations in their favor, they wouldn’t hesitate to hack at the law! That’s what the Constitution is essentially—a blank order for changing itself. That’s about all it is. That—and a starting point—is all! A democratic constitution is merely a springboard.”

Jimmie thought about the people of England—the easy, corrupt, short-sighted ways into which they had fallen. He thought of the prewar schism between the classes, of the sympathy the ruling class had entertained for Fascism, in the belief that Fascism and Naziism were strong dams against Bolshevism. They’d had a dread of Bolshevism—a just dread—but no less just than the dread of Fascism, which they had been too property—panicked to feel. He thought about the grim, grinning game they were playing now, as democrats, as men and women devoted to the clear purpose of saving the sum of those things that were most important to them. He thought about the changes that would have to come in England out of this new association of all the people. He wondered how much tumult, how much wanton greed, how much reasserted selfishness would rise in England after the war, when the settlement came. Not as much, he was sure—not a hundredth as much—as there was before the war. Not a tenth as much as there was now in America.