Thinking and Feeling
8 THE COMMONWEAL May 12, 1926 adorning the poor cinema people with showers of "holds, imprimis,...
...No catastrophe more horrible miads upon the decay of personal liberties and minorthan that could be visited upon Europe...
...Were national destinies in sole charge of the the Bohemian dramatist, "that the United States will thinker, there might be some warrant for the jereteach Europe to work...
...Hershey has a neighbor in the Mary- been found at fault...
...Few gether...
...But he admits it quite duct of his daily life, to feel at his throat the restrainfrankly and assigns a reason for it that is not very ing hand of groups whose authority, so long as perdifferent from Capek's...
...Political thinking has gone out of men or women, amid the preoccupations of their busy fashion...
...The emotional centre of the modern world lives, have more than a distracted ear to lend to the is no longer in the forum: it is mostly in the market warnings of political prophets that vigilance is the place...
...and it holds, a serious blow to the tendency, evident from statistics, secundo, that the notions of propriety and decency to disregard films which really offend seriously against held by the mob are good enough for the state, and morals and the sense of decency...
...Hershey, "but Homo Americanus un- And it is just at this point, we believe, that the evil doubtedly grows more and more non-political...
...Those who draw its His fear is that it is being carried to a pitch which comforting moral forget that the wolf came at last, threatens "to destroy all capacity for thinking...
...One and did thorough work...
...Communities which showed no land capital whose habit is to be incisive at all costs, energy at all in preserving their liberties when they but his conclusions do not differ greatly from those of were threatened, will often evince considerable enterhis more urbane fellow-citizen...
...has no need to frequent the more advanced circles in Happily or unhappily, whichever way you take it, Czecho-Slovakia to know that his misgivings are far the cliques and coteries that make the regulation of from being his alone...
...The thinker, from his very isolalightly as one more of those intellectual capers for tion and in the advanced line of defense, holds a posiwhich Bernard Shaw so successfully set the pattern tion particularly liable to surprise and "rush...
...But there is something dangerous, too...
...But there are millions who will stop, trained experts, engineers, chemists, scientists, and we look, and listen when a concrete lesson, grown familiar get them and reward them lavishly...
...Such autocratic control would mean nors as civilized and self-respecting men...
...The democratic the- prise in recovering them when daily experience has ory," Mr...
...Mencken believes, or affects to believe, convinced them that they have been filched away...
...ity rights so greatly in vogue as small groups of deCapek's paradox, frivolous as it appears when its termined men attempt to make one conquest the justiimplications are not studied, need not be dismissed too fication for another...
...Too two decades ago...
...8 THE COMMONWEAL May 12, 1926 adorning the poor cinema people with showers of "holds, imprimis, that cads make just as good goversympathetic roses...
...Irritation often avails where vigilance has side wins...
...The triumph over thought, however comone of the most prominent members of the Baltimore plete, is not to be compared an instant to the thrill bar, and who, it is pretty safe to say, stands at an that comes from the control of habit and custom...
...The picture is dark...
...For those who, like the editor THINKING AND FEELING of the American Mercury, have lost, or claim to have lost, faith in democracy, it is of a darkness relieved IN an interview which reaches us, strangely enough, only by the horrible relish of having been prophets of by way of the Irish Tribune, published at Cork, depths of inkiness as yet unrealized...
...suasion alone was its weapon, he had questioned and "Man may be a political animal, as Aristotle said," flouted...
...But there are Karel Capek, original inventor and patentee of the gleams and glimpses of brighter things-something, Robot, has been voicing an alarm that is, perhaps, even at what seems to be,the nadir of abdication, of more generally felt than international courtesy allows that "budding morrow in midnight" of which the poet it to be known...
...There is something tangible, something that conveys a "Some decay" in American political thinking is all Mr...
...I am horribly frightened," declares sang...
...He begins to work out its own cure...
...Wolf 1 Wolf 1" is the most of efficiency and volume is seemingly unattainable...
...ought, in fact, to have the force of law...
...The "work" to which he refers often the cries of alarm by which he strives to arouse (Capek makes this quite plain) is the minute division the sluggish and preoccupied mass behind him are and specialization of labor without which the peak stifled or misunderstood...
...declares Mr...
...In business we demand great leaders, price of liberty...
...In politics we through the very monotony of its recurrence, is bringset up no such standard, offer no such rewards, and ing home the lesson in a way they cannot avoid nor are satisfied with whatever we get, provided only our ignore...
...consciousness of power, in the conviction that every Hershey is prepared to admit just at present, and he non-conformist or rebel has been forced, in the conconfines it to the political field...
...private liberties their life task, seldom are satisfied It is interesting, for instance, to see them appear- when the thinker has been mopped up and a lid ing in a speech, made at a recent dinner to Governor clamped on the outward expression of his inward unAlbert C. Ritchie, of Maryland, by Omer F. Hershey, orthodoxy...
...popular of all popular fables...
...Because, for one man shows signs of losing the art of political thinking alto- that thinks, there are ten thousand who feel...
...opposite pole of thought to the author of R.U.R...
Vol. 4 • May 1926 • No. 1
