Sometimes the most interesting and profound of statements come from some of the unlikeliest places, and this is one of them: it was reprinted in the January 1919 edition of Crane Valve World, the periodical of the Crane Company, the Chicago based company that makes valves and other fittings for piping of air, steam, water and other substances. (My great-great-grandfather was its CFO in his later years.) With a little editing I’ll reproduce it in its entirety. The four main European continental monarchies that went into World War I–Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia and the Ottoman Empire–were gone. But what to replace them? As is the case today, democracies, of course! But there are pitfalls, and this article points out a number of them. It also speaks out against the lynchings of black people, something that may surprise some people given the date. But Union monuments, then and now, dot the landscape in and around Chicago, so…maybe not.
When the absolute monarchs have been put away and their estates have been probated it will be necessary to turn attention to the other absolutism.
Of the two absolutisms the other one is on the whole the stupider and the wickeder. If monarchical absolutism learned little from the days of Nero to those of William II, the other absolutism has learned nothing since the days of Cain. Both absolutisms have been murderers from the beginning, but the other one has taken the greater relish in butchery for the animal excitement of it.
The other absolutism is the insensate power of the amorphous many, otherwise known as the mob or rabble. The amorphous many is ignorant be yond belief. Three thousand years of enlightenment have sent hardly a ray into its instinctive mind. It is cruel beyond imagination. Two thou sand years of Christianity have not awakened within it a pulsation of sympathy. It bawled “Crucify him” thru the alleys of Jerusalem, and it bawls “Hang him” in the streets of Petrograd. It yelped in pandemonium when Brutus, the megalomaniac, struck down Caesar, and it leered impartially at Marie Antoinette and Robespierre on their way to the guillotine. In England a century and a half ago it burned and looted “papistical edifices” in the name of the Protestant religion, and in the United States in the twentieth century it burns negroes in the name of civilization.
A peril to life and liberty since the beginning of history, the absolutism of the amorphous many has become a menace to the human race. Extended beyond bounds by the aggregating percussion of modern communication, and frenzied by the brain storms of revolution, it now imagines itself to be humanity. It proclaims itself “the people,” and announces its creation of “a new social order.”
On what has this monster fed? On what is it feeding now; and wherewithal is it arrayed?
It is barbarically arrayed in countless strings of pearls that a bastard sentiment which has stolen the name of Christianity has been busily casting before swine. This sentiment insists that all human beings are by nature good until they are exploited. Destroy discipline, credulous sentiment says, compel no one to obey, give everybody “freedom” to “realize” himself, and the millennium will be at hand. An environment of ancient social injustices multiplied and magnified by modern capitalism is the cause of all badness: this is the irresponsible teaching. These beads of imbecility are the necklace with which the amorphous many accentuates its intellectual nakedness.
And the food on which it subsists, by which it grows and ravens and gathers absolute power, is the self-same dogma on which monarchic absolutism was nourished: the dogma, to wit, that the end justifies the means. Must a throne be strengthened? Assassinate all rival claimants. Must the state expand? Make scraps of paper of covenants and treaties. Must democracy triumph? Destroy the fruits of industry and thrift. Must the white man rule? Burn the “n—-r.” For “the king can do no wrong.” The state “makes its own moral law.” The “higher race” is its own justification. And “the people”? What is the people but a majority? And is a majority, forsooth, to be balked in its triumphant progress?
These are plain words. The time for plain speaking has come. The danger is real, and it is imminent. If the blood and treasure that have been poured forth to destroy the absolutism of the monarchs has been expended only to create and usher in the absolutism of an amorphous many, undisciplined in thought and uncontrolled in conduct, bitter with envy, and taking over from the older social system only its dogma of unscrupulous method, and its sentimental gurgle-song of the inherent goodness of human nature, what shall the travail of civilization have profited us?
Positive Infinity 