Keeping Up with William In which the Honorable Socrates Potter Talks of the Relative Merits of Sense Common and Preferred

The new year of 1918 was not a month old the day I went up to Connecticut to see the Honorable Socrates Potter. I found the famous country lawyer sitting in the very same chair from which, seven years ago, he had told me the story of keeping up with Lizzie. His feet rested peacefully on a table in front of him as he sat reading a law book. Logs were burning in the fireplace. A spaniel dog lay dozing on a rug in front of it. What a delightful flavor of old times and good tobacco was in that inner office of his--with its portraits of Lincoln and his war cabinet, of Silas Wright and Daniel Webster and Rufus Choate and Charles Sumner, with its old rifle and powder horn hanging above the modest mantel and its cases of worn law books! Beyond the closed door were busy clerks and clicking typewriters, for Mr. Potter's business had grown to large proportions, but here was peace and the atmosphere of deliberation. There was never any haste in this small factory of opinions.

“Hello! Have you come for another book?” he asked.

“Always looking for another book,” I answered. “It's about time that you got into this big fight between Democracy and--”

“Deviltry,” he interrupted with a stern look. “By thunder I've offered to take up the sword but they say I'm too old to fight. I don't believe it. My great grandfather fought at Lexington when he was sixty-four.”

“You can do more good with some conversation than you could with a sword or a gun,” I urged. “I've come up here to touch the button and now you're expected to say something for the boys at the front and the folks at home. Just turn your search-light on the general situation.”

“Well, I have quite a stock of shrapnel and liquid fire for the rear line of the Germans,” he began. “My searchlight is a modest kind of a lantern but we'll see what we can do with it.

“This time we'll talk on the subject of keeping up with William.

“The other day, in the rooms of the Connecticut Historical Society, I was reading the diary of one Abigail Foote written in 1775. This, as I remember it, was an average day in her life: Mended mother's hood, set a red dye, hetchelled flax with Hannah, spun four pounds of whole wool, spun thread for harness twine, worked on a cheese basket, read a sermon of Doddridge's, scoured the pewter, milked the cows, carded wool, got supper ready, went to bed at nine.

“I wish you to note that she went to bed at nine. Do you think that a modern girl would knock off at nine? Not at all. She sticks to her task until midnight and even longer. Abigail had only to be an ordinary human being with nothing to do but work. The modern girl must have the beauty of a goddess, the grace of a gazelle, the digestion of an ostrich, the endurance of a horse and the remorse of a human being. It is a large contract. “We are all familiar with the diary of a modern girl. Its average day would be about as follows: Got up. Neck felt like a string on a toy balloon. Had some toast and coffee. Had my hair dressed and nails manicured. Put a new ribbon on my dog and walked him around the block. Went to meeting of the charity committee. Learned that there were many people out of work. Went to see the doctor who warned me about overeating and late hours. Same old chestnut! Lunched with Mabel. Ate half a pound of chocolates and so much cake that the butler had a frightened look. Home again. Dressed. Went with mama to a lecture on the insane. Mama woke me at five. It was all over. Went to Gladys's tea. Danced half an hour. Home again. Dressed. Spent fifteen minutes with papa and my dog. Went with Harry and mama to Gwendolyn's party. Danced until midnight. Home at one. Nearly frozen. Talk about long hours and poor pay and insufficient clothing; this reminds one of the story of Washington's army in the worst winter of the revolution.

“Now, both of these girls toiled.

“The one in productive work with the wool and the flax. It was done mostly for the comfort of others. The modern girl wears herself out supering. Do you know what it means to super? It is to follow the exacting industry of being superior.”

“Superior to what?” I asked.

“To productive work,” he went on. “Their toil is all in the service of themselves and in pursuit of their own pleasure.

“That's what's the matter with this old earth. For many years more than half its people have been supering--wasting their time in busy idleness--on the high road to deviltry. You don't have to think twice to decide that it is about the most dangerous of all crimes, my friend, because it is the straight way to all crime. It leads direct to deceit, theft, adultery and murder. It kills the sense of brotherhood in the heart of man. It kills the spirit of Democracy. The world is being strafed for it, in my opinion.

“Now the center and headquarters of all supering is Prussia--the home of the superman--and Bill Hohenzollern, the Godful, is the head and front of the whole push.

“There are two kinds of superiority--real and assumed. Real superiority is largely unconscious of itself. It can never be inherited--there's the important fact about it. You will recall that there are only three cases on record of a great father begetting a great son. The son is apt to have a sense of inherited superiority. It destroys everything worth while in him.

“Of all the defects that flesh is heir to, a sense of inherited superiority is the most deplorable. It is worse than insanity or idiocy or curvature of the spine. There are millions of acres of land in Europe occupied by nothing but a sense of inherited superiority; there are millions of hands and intellects in Europe occupied by nothing but a sense of inherited superiority, while billions of wealth have been devoted to its service and embellishment. A man who has even a small amount of it needs a force of porters and footmen to help him tote it around, and a guard to keep watch for fear that some one will grab his superiority and run off with it when his back is turned.

“A full equipment of inherited superiority, decorated with a title, a special dialect, a lot of old armor and university junk, stuck out so that there wasn't room for more than one outfit in a township. Most of the bloodshed has been caused by the blunders or the hoggishness of inherited superiority. It is the nursing bottle of insanity and the Mellin's Food of crime.

“Now hot air has been the favorite dissipation of kings. James the First was one of the world's greatest consumers of hot air; enough to put him into business with the Almighty. To be sure, it was not a full partnership. It was no absolute Hohenzollern monopoly of mortal participation.

“There are two kinds of sense in men--common and preferred, plain and fancy. The common has become the great asset of mankind; the preferred its great liability. Our forefathers had large holdings of the common, certain kings and their favorites of the preferred. The preferred represented an immense bulk of inherited superiority and an alleged pipe line leading from the king's throne to Paradise, and connected with the fount of every blessing by the best religious plumbers. It always drew dividends, whether the common got anything or not. The preferred holders ran the plant and insisted that they held a first mortgage on it. When they tried to foreclose with military power to back them, some of our forefathers got out.

“We, their sons, are now crossing the seas to take up that ancient issue between sense common and preferred and to determine the rights of each. We are fighting for the foundations of Democracy--the dictates of common sense.

“For the sake of saving time, I hope you will grant me license to resort to the economy of slang. A man might do worse these days. There is one great destroyer of common sense. It is hot air. I remember how scared of it the Yankees used to be. They were most economical with their praise. I never heard a word of it in my youth. It came to me after some travel now and then--never to my face. They knew the deadly power of it--those Yankees.

“Now hot air has been the favorite dissipation of kings. James the First was one of the world's' great consumers of hot air. He and his family and friends took all that Great Britain could produce--never, I am glad to say, a large amount, but enough to put James into business with the Almighty. To be sure, it was not a full partnership. It was no absolute Hohenzollern monopoly of mortal participation. It was comparatively modest, but it was enough to outrage the common sense of the English. After all, divine partnerships were not for the land of Fielding and Smollett and Swift and Dickens and Thackeray. Too much humor there. Too much liberty of the tongue and pen. Too great a gift for ridicule. Where there is ridicule there can be no self-appointed counselors of God, and handmade halos of divinity find their way to the garbage heap.

“Now, if we are to have sound common sense, we must have humor, and if we are to have humor we must have liberty. There can be no crowned or mitered knave, no sacred, fawning idiot, who is immune from ridicule; no little tin deities who can safely slash you with a sword unless you give them the whole of the sidewalk. Humor would take care of them; not the exuberance that is born in the wine-press or the beer-vat--humor is no by-product of the brewery---but the merriment that comes when common sense has been vindicated by ridicule.

“Solemnity is often wedded to Conceit, and their children have committed all the crimes on record. You may always look for the devil in the neighborhood of some solemn and conceited ass who has inherited power and who, like the one that Balaam rode, speaks for the Almighty. So, when the devil came back, he steered for the most solemn and perfect ass on the face of the earth--Bill Hohenzollern.

“In his soul the devil began to destroy the common sense of a race with the atmosphere of hell--hot air. We have seen its effect. It inflates the intellect. It produces the pneumatic, rubber brain--the brain that keeps its friends busy with the pump of adulation; the brain stretched to hold its conceit, out of which we can hear the hot air leaking in streams of boastfulness. The divine afflatus of an emperor is apt to make as much disturbance as a leaky steam-pipe. When the pumpers cease because they are weary, it becomes irritated. Then all hands to the pumps again. Soon there is no illusion of grandeur too absurd to be real, no indictment of idiotic presumption which it is unwilling to admit.

“By and by it breaks into the realm of the infinite and hastens to the succor of God, for, to the pneumatic brain, God is slow and old-fashioned. Thereafter it infests the heavenly throne and seeks to turn it into a plant for the manufacture of improved morals, and, so as to insure their popularity, every agent for these morals is to carry a sword and a gun and a license to use them. The alleged improvement consists in taking all the nots out of the ten commandments. Nots are irritating to certain people who have plans for murder, rape, arson, and piracy.