Behind the Mirrors: The Psychology of Disintegration at Washington

y characteristic way, perfectly characteristic of himself and of our present political division and unsureness. He ruled that the city should go

o be so careful," as he once pathetically said-but that it is symptomatic

at War, one of the innumerable problems thus left to u

e could lay a presumptuous hand upon God's Time. But in peace shall he go on thus boldly? Or shall he revert to the good old days, the days of McKinley, when the clock was sa

l, to the Sun in its courses, to progress, to inevitability? After all the clock was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be-unless we meddle with it-and before its cheerful face America was

rty speaks with no clear voice about clocks or about anything else. To business? Business has only one rule-more clocks in government and less government in clocks. But business bows to the public. To public op

o, a double saving, a most happy compromise. If all questions touching M

ame; why was it to end suddenly and without reason? He had gone through the Great War a follower of Mr. Wilson's, to see the world scoffing at the passionate faith it had professed a few months before and sneering at the leaders it had then exalted. He had echoing in his mind the fine war phrases, "Brotherhood of Man," "War to End War," "We must

thing to do is to laugh. You have trouble laughing? Look about you and you will find plenty to laugh at. Look at your President and laugh. Look at your Supreme Court and laugh. Not one of them knows whether he is coming or goi

Ku Klux Klan is the unconscious and serviceable parody, that instinctive rush of a people with the world breaking up about it, to seek safety in the past. Men always shrink thus backward when facing an uncertain future, just as in moments of great peril they become children again, call "Mother!" and revert to early practices at her knee. It is

garment which evokes the assured past, the blessed nineties, the long white night shirt; the

hief Justice of the Supreme Court, at once a regard for the past and an eye for the future. Can anyone tell whether Mr. Justice Taft is coming or going, as this Fourth of Jul

while on on

s a while

h one he fe

t tell yo

of Armageddon. Again you find him standing on his future foot beside Mr. Frank P. Walsh in the War Labor Board, ranging himself with Mr. Walsh in practically all the close decisions. Again you see him when all the fine forward looking of the war w

selection of Mr. Harding and Mr. Taft. As we shrink back into the past we are aware that it is for the tak

nd secure to be permanently cautious, with too much well-being to be permanently bold, thinking, but with a certain restraining contempt for thought, instinctive

ajority, are only manifestations. The reality is the man, many millions strong, whose mental state produces the symptoms at Washington. It will be profitable to examine the content of his mind as it

ernment of the clock-winders, and the government of those who lived by the clock as religiously minded by the clock-winders. It was an orderly age, bea

of the clock as the government of Progress, and the government of the clock-winders as

n. It never turned backward or rested. Its mechanical process relieved man of many responsibilities. No one would think of touching the mechanism; turning b

to believe in progress. The visible evidences of it were on every hand. His father had been a poor immigrant seeking the mere chance to live; he was a farmer possessed of ma

measure how far he had come and to guess how far moving forward at a geometrical ra

ago were beyond control, whose existence even was unsuspected, were harnessed to everyday uses. He saw progress in statistics. Things which were reckoned in millions began to be reckoned in hundreds of millions, began to be rec

should employ them like the waters of Niagara Falls, to turn the wheels of machinery by day and to light soap and automobile signs on Broadway by night. We should split atoms

ing only the instruments of a Fate which went steadily forward to the accomplishment of its beneficent purposes. At t

aw, the law of evolution, the law by which once the monocellular organism had acquired the mysterious gift of life out of combinatio

God, instead of making Adam and Eve his wife, fashioned a grain of star dust and gave it a grain of star dust to wife, leaving the rest to Progress. Man who had been a little lower than the angels became, by an immense act of faith, a little high

know what it was until evolution explained his unregenerate character so satisfactorily. Still the thought that Man did not move

classics and excluding all allusion to them in the oratory of our Congress. And Mr. Wells in his History has since justified us by proving that the Greeks were after all only the common run of small-t

ng belle," and responded only weakly to the caress of the Sun, when its oceans dried up and only a trickle of water came down through its valleys from the melting ice at its poles, we should not, like the fancied inha

periments in the government of men at a period when Man has been at a greater discount than usu

timepiece on which is recorded God's Time; whose ticking is the forward march of progress. Clocks as they touch our

church. The winding of it was a function. No other hand but father's touched the key; if one had, the whole institution of family life would have be

orkers in one vast countrywide workshop. The workshop touches us more directly and more importantly than does the nation. Ou

. What we have to eat and to wear, what we may put in the bank, what real freedom we enjoy, our position in the eyes of men, o

ts larger and more permanent aspects-that was ours through the beneficence of Progre

conception of it. It was a thing of gods and demigods, with legends of golden fleeces and of Hercules holding up the skies. I

er so many years of fatness it must produce a famine. At such times men, demigods, stepped

nquestioningly to its periodic eccentricity as part of the Fate that fell upon the original sinner,

empt for human intelligence which relates somehow to the religious precept against questioning the wisdom of God. Whatever ordinary men did in the field of economics was sure to be wrong and to check the f

consciousness a government of laws and sometimes a government of men. In any primitive faith priests played a large part, and probably the primitive wo

omic panics came it was because we had sinned against economic law; when they were averted it was because men had averted them, men who l

rnment than with the government at Washington. Besides, we were mostly business men, o

government at Washington reared its head. Self-government is a new thing; no myth has gathered about it. It was established among men who believed in the doctrine of the original sin, and it had been carried by their succ

if we only let them alone and that the more we let them alone the better they would take care of themselves, under eternal and immutable laws. Ah, the ha

ectively for the general weal. The future was in the hands of a force that made the world richer and better. The present, in all that conc

was no sorry scheme of things to be seized entire. Life was a sort of tropics w

e clock-winders. We were not divided in our minds as to whether we should turn back its hands. The les

s increase; of some superior men having semi-sacred relations with the will who acted as intermediaries between the will and the rest

ety's effort to compensate for the evolution complex; man wanted to show what he could do, in spite of his slimy origin. Anyway, it broke the picture in our heads. Being economical, li

reason for our present inadequacy. You could not form much of a se