Life — July 2, 1914 — page 12: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

‘LIP E * “Our Best People”: Are They Intelligent? RE “our best people” intelligent? Of course they are not, abso- lutely; but are they relatively intelli- gent; ise, that is, compared with professional hoboes like Leonard D. Abbott, Upton Sinclair, Max Eastman, Becky Edelson, “ Wild Joe” O’Carroll, Frank Tannenbaum and Pancho Villa? Almost everybody who has enough to eat longs, more or less, for peace and a quiet life. There is a natural and no doubt beneficent and useful hostility toward noisy people who want to tear things up. There is an immense prejudice in favor of things as they are, and of the people who are in possession of the things; a sentiment that their deserts are demonstrated by their possessions, and that the estab- lished order which they represent is the best order practicable, and that it is wicked to muss it up. A great deal of that prejudice is justified. Things as they are represent a lot of hard work and constructive ability. We know that after a fashion they work. We know that it is a great deal easier to tear down than it is to build up; that destruction immensely invites the inconsiderate as a work that they can perform, which requires only a mini- mum of direction or ability, which en- lists all the passions and all the rages, and makes the biggest showing of accomplishment in proportion to the brains and energy employed of any work that the hand of man can turn to, There are great movements in the world which recognize that the first step toward the achievement of what they want is to “bust up” things as they are. The militant suffrage agitation in England is such a move- ment. The socialist effort everywhere is largely such a moment. In so far as the socialists can demonstrate that the existing order is impossible they have made progress toward the kind of order that they think they want. Their method is to make the worst of everything; to persuade all women that they are cheated out of their fair share of life; to make the worst of strikes and persuade all strikers “MY DEAR, WHAT DOES ALL THIS FUSS ABOUT EUGENICS MEAN “IT MEANS, JACK, THAT MAN HAS JUST DISCOVERED THE NECESSITY OF APPLYING TO HIMSELF THE THEORIES OF DEVELOPMENT HE HAS PRACTICED ON OUR FAMILY FOR GENERATIONS.” PORTRAIT OF A FIRE-CRACKER that they are victims of a brutal tyranny; to make armies and navies unpopular ; to demonstrate that all the churches are entirely detached from the principles of the religion they pro fess; that the schools teach nothing right; that the colleges are strongholds of privilege, of snobbery, of resistance to truth and subversion of liberty. The first principle of the I. W. W. is that whatever is is bad, and will have to go before there can be any- thing better, and the I. W. W. is so- cialism on the firing-line. THESE are terrible doings these people are busy about, terrible and obviously fantastic. How do they get along with them at all? How do they get any countenance or toleration from people of any intelligence what- ever? What is it that makes fairly normal people, who appreciate the wastefulness of destruction, and the preposterous folly of persons who would raze the existing structure of business and civilization in order to experiment on its ruins with things