GOLIAH

In 1924—­to be precise, on the morning of January 3—­the city of San Francisco awoke to read in one of its daily papers a curious letter, which had been received by Walter Bassett and which had evidently been written by some crank.  Walter Bassett was the greatest captain of industry west of the Rockies, and was one of the small group that controlled the nation in everything but name.  As such, he was the recipient of lucubrations from countless cranks; but this particular lucubration was so different from the average ruck of similar letters that, instead of putting it into the waste-basket, he had turned it over to a reporter.  It was signed “Goliah,” and the superscription gave his address as “Palgrave Island.”  The letter was as follows: 

“Mr. Walter Bassett,
“Dear sir: 

“I am inviting you, with nine of your fellow-captains of industry, to visit me here on my island for the purpose of considering plans for the reconstruction of society upon a more rational basis.  Up to the present, social evolution has been a blind and aimless, blundering thing.  The time has come for a change.  Man has risen from the vitalized slime of the primeval sea to the mastery of matter; but he has not yet mastered society.  Man is to-day as much the slave to his collective stupidity, as a hundred thousand generations ago he was a slave to matter.

“There are two theoretical methods whereby man may become the master of society, and make of society an intelligent and efficacious device for the pursuit and capture of happiness and laughter.  The first theory advances the proposition that no government can be wiser or better than the people that compose that government; that reform and development must spring from the individual; that in so far as the individuals become wiser and better, by that much will their government become wiser and better; in short, that the majority of individuals must become wiser and better, before their government becomes wiser and better.  The mob, the political convention, the abysmal brutality and stupid ignorance of all concourses of people, give the lie to this theory.  In a mob the collective intelligence and mercy is that of the least intelligent and most brutal members that compose the mob.  On the other hand, a thousand passengers will surrender themselves to the wisdom and discretion of the captain, when their ship is in a storm on the sea.  In such matter, he is the wisest and most experienced among them.

“The second theory advances the proposition that the majority of the people are not pioneers, that they are weighted down by the inertia of the established; that the government that is representative of them represents only their feebleness, and futility, and brutishness; that this blind thing called government is not the serf of their wills, but that they are the serfs of it; in short, speaking always of the great mass, that they do not make government, but that government makes them, and that government is and has been a stupid and awful monster, misbegotten of the glimmerings of intelligence that come from the inertia-crushed mass.