H.L. Mencken

Baltimore Evening Sun/November 2, 1931

I

No one, I suppose, was surprised by the result of last Tuesday’s general election in England. It was, in fact, quite classical in its outlines—a masterpiece, so to speak, of the democratic method. Fooled beyond endurance by one gang of swindlers, the suffering people of the United Kingdom arose in their might, threw that gang out with loud hosannas, and put in another and worse one. The latter will now embark upon a programme of tall promises, all of them palpably absurd and most of them downright dishonest. Bit by bit they will turn out to be moonshine, and bit by bit the plain people will gather indignation against their sponsors. In the end there will be another great massacre at the polls, the Tory charlatans will be rooted out of their jobs, and either the Labor brethren will be restored or some third and even worse outfit will be given a trial. And so on ad infinitum. 

With few exceptions the American newspapers, echoing docilely the London papers, which are all Tory, depict the election as a great triumph for wisdom and righteousness. The new rulers of the realm, it appears, are patriots to a man, including even the turncoat MacDonald. Their one and only desire is to save England from woe and lamentation. Moreover, they are not only excessively virtuous, but also incomparably judicious, and so they are certain to achieve their high objective in a swift and dazzling manner. In brief, the troubles of the Empire are over. The pound will go back to par, unemployment will cease, the Treasury will bulge with money, and there will be a large joint on every English table, with the usual two vegetables and bit of Stilton. 

All this, I fear, is only what Al calls baloney. The new government, in point of fact, differs from the old one by no more than tweedledum differs from tweedledee. It is composed, like the other, chiefly of professional politicians, and its bosses, if anything, are even less competent than MacDonald, Snowden, Henderson, Thomas and company. Chief among them are the two wild bulls of yellow journalism, Beaverbrook and Rothermere—neither a member of the House, but both infinitely more powerful than any man who is. And in the background lurks the usual Tory gang of so-called bankers, i.e., speculators with other people’s money. 

II

What is chiefly noticeable about the returns, in truth, is the almost complete absence of reassuring names from the list of winners. Great numbers of discredited and unconscionable professional politicians have been elected—Lloyd George, Winston Churchill, the two Chamberlains, Stanley Baldwin, and so on—but on the rolls so far printed I have been unable to find the name of a single man who is really both intelligent and trustworthy. The roll of Congress is scarcely worse; in fact, it is commonly much better. Facing the most appalling difficulties that have menaced her since the close of the Napoleonic wars, England has thrown herself into the hands of a camorra of political plugs, all of them tried before and all of them found wanting.

This would be tragic enough if they were the best the country could provide, but they are by no means the best. England, today as in the past, is full of enlightened and patriotic men—men who could, if they were allowed, bring sound information, high intelligence and the best sort of public spirit to the solution of the nation’s troubles. I need only point, for an example, to John Maynard Keynes, whose warnings in 1919 and 1925, though they were disregarded, have been brilliantly borne out by events. But such men get into Parliament very seldom, and when they do so they are borne down by professionals. Over there, as in this country, government is the exclusive prerogative of persons whose ignorance is matched only by their effrontery, and whose passion for service is always subordinated discreetly to their self- seeking.

Consider, for example, the women members the new House. There are fourteen of them altogether, headed by the ex-American, Lady Astor—a hollow demagogue, almost comparable to Ma Willebrandt. The rest are all nonentities—daughters of professional politicians, fashionable idlers who tire of for-hunting, and so on. There are perhaps 15,000,000 women of voting age in the United Kingdom, and among them are thousands who are of high intelligence and notable public spirit. But not one of them is in the new Parliament. The sex is represented there, as it is represented in Congress, only by a grotesque platoon of puerile busybodies.

III

This sort of thing, I fear, can’t go on. However sound civilization may be and it seems to me that it is sound enough for all practical purposes—it can’t remain so if the government of all the principal nations of the world continue to be handed over to the most incompetent people in them. In all other fields of human enterprise there is some colorable relation between authority on the one side and capacity and integrity on the other.

No sane person would consult a medical man who was a notorious quack, or a lawyer known to be both ignorant of the law and neglectful of his clients’ interests. Yet something precisely like that is done every day in politics. The highest offices of state go to persons whose unfitness should be manifest to a child. And when they fail at their jobs, as fail they must, the only remedy ever thought of is to heave them out and put in men who are worse. 

Last week two statesmen held a conference in Washington. They were the heads of the two richest and most powerful of modern states, and the business before them meant life or death to millions of their fellow men. It would be impossible to imagine a meeting of greater gravity—of more profound consequence to the human race. If solved the complicated and difficult problem before them, then the relations between the nations would take a fresh start, in peace, amity and justice. And if they failed, then we’d go back to where we were in 1914, with nothing ahead save strife, waste and witless hatred. 

Well, who were these gentlemen? Who were these chosen spokesmen of two great peoples—nay, of civilization itself? One was shabby French politician who started out in life as a radical of the extreme Left, and then gradually moved toward the Right, always along the job line. And the other was a former promoter of mining schemes who later took to politics, and has been distinguished ever since for his grotesque incapacity to deal effectively with even the most elemental duties of his office. These were the champions that France and the United States put up. These were the champions that democracy put up. 

IV

Certainly the world has had enough of such folly. There are hundreds of thousands of better men available for the public business, and there are very few worse men. Why should England, facing problems that would test the skill of even her noblest and best, turn them over to a rabble of self-seeking demagogues? Why should the United States be ruled by men whose first thought, even in great national and international emergencies, is not the public good but only their own jobs? And why should France expose herself and the world to the manœuvres of a politician whose career has been one long record of principle sacrificed to private interest? 

The remedy that democracy offers is obviously no remedy at all. The mob cannot be trusted to distinguish accurately between an honest man and a mountebank, even when such a choice is plainly before it, which is not often. The normal choice is between two mountebanks, or two gangs of them. That is what the electors of England faced last Tuesday. On the one side were the brummagem messiahs of Labor, and on the other side were the even more dubious messiahs of Capital. There was no third choice of truly competent and unselfish men, for in England, as in the United States, there is no machinery for nominating them and electing them: all the professional politicians, regardless of so-called party, are massed against them. The mob, fooled by Labor, flopped to Capital—with the discredited Labor boss, MacDonald, hidden in Capital’s pocket. Four or five years hence, fooled still worse by Capital, it will flop back to Labor. 

My reach is pathology, not therapeuties, and so I hesitate to suggest a remedy. Two have been proposed and tried—Bolshevism and Fascism. Both proceed by making intelligence and integrity not only impotent, but also criminal. Both propose to save the world by outlawing the only man who could conceivably save it. It may be that the problem is intrinsically insoluble—as so many great human problems have a way of being. But whether it is or it isn’t, it must be very plain that it is completely insoluble to those who are now chosen to solve it.