The Crater, James Fenimore Cooper [good book club books TXT] 📗

marvellous unction, "It must be true, for it's in print," are now very apt to say, "Oh! it's only a newspaper account !" The foulest pool has been furnished by a beneficent Providence with the means of cleansing its own waters.

But the "Crater Truth-Teller" could utter its lies, as a privileged publication, at the period of this narrative. Types still had a sanctity; and it is surprising how much they deceived, and how many were their dupes. The journal did not even take the ordinary pains to mystify its readers, and to conceal its own cupidity, as are practised in communities more advanced in civilization. We dare say that journals are to be found in London and Paris, that take just as great liberties with the fact as the Crater Truth-Teller; but they treat their readers with a little more outward respect, however much they may mislead them with falsehoods. Your London and Paris publics are not to be dealt with as if composed of credulous old women, but require something like a plausible mystification to throw dust in their eyes. They have a remarkable proneness to believe that which they wish, it is true; but, beyond that weakness, some limits are placed to their faith and appearances must be a good deal consulted.

But at the crater no such precaution seemed to be necessary. It is true that the editor did use the pronoun "we," in speaking of himself; but he took all other occasions to assert his individuality, and to use his journal diligently in its behalf. Thus, whenever he got into the law, his columns were devoted to publicly maintaining his own side of the question, although such a course was not only opposed to every man's sense of propriety, but was directly flying into the teeth of the laws of the land; but little did he care for that. He was a public servant, and of course all he did was right. To be sure, other public servants were in the same category, all they did being wrong; but he had the means of telling his own story, and a large number of gaping dunces were ever ready to believe him. His manner of filling his larder is particularly worthy of being mentioned. Quite as often as once a week, his journal had some such elegant article as this, viz:--"Our esteemed friend, Peter Snooks"--perhaps it was Peter Snooks, Esquire --"has just brought us a fair specimen of his cocoa-nuts, which we do not hesitate in recommending to the housekeepers of the crater, as among the choicest of the group." Of course, Squire Snooks was grateful for this puff, and often brought more cocoa-nuts. The same great supervision was extended to the bananas, the bread-fruit, the cucumbers, the melons, and even the squashes, and always with the same results to the editorial larder. Once, however, this worthy did get himself in a quandary with his use of the imperial pronoun. A mate of one of the vessels inflicted personal chastisement on him, for some impertinent comments he saw fit to make on the honest tar's vessel; and, this being matter of intense interest to the public mind, he went into a detail of all the evolutions of the combat. Other men may pull each other's noses, and inflict kicks and blows, without the world's caring a straw about it; but the editorial interest is too intense to be overlooked in this manner. A bulletin of the battle was published; the editor speaking of himself always in the plural, out of excess of modesty, and to avoid egotism(!) in three columns which were all about himself, using such expressions as these:--" We now struck our antagonist a blow with our fist, and followed this up with a kick of our foot, and otherwise we made an assault on him that he will have reason to remember to his dying day." Now, these expressions, for a time, set all the old women in the colony against the editor, until he went into an elaborate explanation, showing that his modesty was so painfully sensitive that he could not say I on any account, though he occupied three more columns of his paper in explaining the state of our feelings. But, at first, the cry went forth that the battle had been of two against one ; and that even the simple-minded colonists set down as somewhat cowardly. So much for talking about we in the bulletin of a single combat!

The political, effects produced by this paper, however, were much the most material part of its results. Whenever it offended and disgusted its readers by its dishonesty, selfishness, vulgarity, and lies--and it did this every week, being a hebdomadal--it recovered the ground it had lost by beginning to talk of 'the people' and their rights. This the colonists could not withstand. All their sympathies were enlisted in behalf of him who thought so much of their rights; and, at the very moment he was trampling on these rights, to advance his own personal views, and even treating them with contempt by uttering the trash he did, they imagined that he and his paper in particular, and its doctrines in general, were a sort of gift from Heaven to form the palladium of their precious liberties!

The great theory advanced by this editorial tyro, was, that a majority of any community had a right to do as it pleased. The governor early saw, not only the fallacies, but the danger of this doctrine; and he wrote several communications himself, in order to prove that it was false. If true, he contended it was true altogether; and that it must be taken, if taken as an axiom at all, with its largest consequences. Now, if a majority has a right to rule, in this arbitrary manner, it has a right to set its dogmas above the commandments, and to legalize theft, murder, adultery, and all the other sins denounced in the twentieth chapter of Exodus. This was a poser to the demagogue, but he made an effort to get rid of it, by excepting the laws of God, which he allowed that even majorities were bound to respect. Thereupon, the governor replied that the laws of God were nothing but the great principles which ought to govern human conduct, and that his concession was an avowal that there was a power to which majorities should defer. Now, this was just as true of minorities as it was of majorities, and the amount of it all was that men, in establishing governments, merely set up a standard of principles which they pledged themselves to respect; and that, even in the most democratical communities, all that majorities could legally effect was to decide certain minor questions which, being necessarily referred to some tribunal for decision, was of preference referred to them. If there was a power superior to the will of the majority, in the management of human affairs, then majorities were not supreme; and it behooved the citizen to regard the last as only what they really are, and what they were probably designed to be--tribunals subject to the control of certain just principles.

Constitutions, or the fundamental law, the governor went on to say, were meant to be the expression of those just and general principles which should control human society, and as such should prevail over majorities. Constitutions were expressly intended to defend the rights of minorities; since without them, each question, or interest, might be settled by the majority, as it arose. It was but a truism to say that the oppression of the majority was the worst sort of oppression; since the parties injured not only endured the burthen imposed by many, but were cut off from the sympathy of their kind, which can alleviate much suffering, by the inherent character of the tyranny.

There was a great deal of good sense, and much truth in what the governor wrote, on this occasion; but of what avail could it prove with the ignorant and short-sighted, who put more trust in one honeyed phrase of the journal, that flourished about the 'people' and their 'rights,' than in all the arguments that reason, sustained even by revelation, could offer to show the fallacies and dangers of this new doctrine, As a matter of course, the wiles of the demagogue were not without fruits. Although every man in the colony, either in his own person, or in that of his parent or guardian, had directly entered into the covenants of the fundamental law, as that law then existed, they now began to quarrel with its provisions, and to advance doctrines that would subvert everything as established, in order to put something new and untried in its place. Progress was the great desideratum; and change was the hand-maiden of progress. A sort of 'puss in the corner' game was started, which was to enable those who had no places to run into the seats of those who had. This is a favourite pursuit of man, all over the world, in monarchies as well as in democracies; for, after all that institutions can effect, there is little change in men by putting on, or in taking off ermine and robes, or in wearing 'republican simplicity,' in office or out of office; but the demagogue is nothing but the courtier, pouring out his homage in the gutters, instead of in an ante-chamber.

Nor did the governor run into extremes in his attempts to restrain the false reasoning and exaggerations of the demagogue and his deluded, or selfish followers. Nothing would be easier than to demonstrate that their notions of the rights of numbers was wrong, to demonstrate that were their theories carried out in practice, there could be, and would be nothing permanent or settled in human affairs; yet not only did each lustrum, but each year, each month, each week, each hour, each minute demand its reform. Society must be periodically reduced to its elements, in order to redress grievances. The governor did not deny that men had their natural rights, at the very moment he insisted that these rights were just as much a portion of the minority as of the majority. He was perfectly willing that equal laws should prevail, as equal laws did prevail in the colony, though he was not disposed to throw everything into confusion merely to satisfy a theory. For a long time, therefore, he opposed the designs of the new-school, and insisted on his vested rights, as established in the fundamental law, which had made him ruler for life. But "it is hard to kick against the pricks." Although the claim of the governor was in every sense connected with justice, perfectly sacred, it could not resist the throes of cupidity, selfishness, and envy. By this time, the newspaper, that palladium of liberty, had worked the minds of the masses to a state in which the naked pretension of possessing rights that were not common to everybody else was, to the last degree, "tolerable and not to be endured." To such a height did the fever of liberty rise, that men assumed a right to quarrel with the private habits of the governor and his family, some pronouncing him proud because he did not neglect his teeth, as the majority did, eat when they ate, and otherwise presumed to be of different habits from those around him. Some even objected to him because he spat in his pocket-handkerchief, and did not blow his nose with his fingers.

All this time, religion was running riot, as well as politics. The next-door neighbours hated each other most sincerely, because they took different views of regeneration, justification, predestination and all the