mencken: the nature of liberty

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IX.The Nature of Liberty

Everytime an officer of the constabulary, in the executionof his just and awful powers under American law, producesa compound fracture of the occiput of some citizen in his cus-tody, with hemorrhage, shock, coma and death, there comes afeeble, falsetto protest from specialists in human liberty. Is it afact without significance that this protest is never supported bythe great body of American freemen, setting aside the actualheirs and creditors of the victim? I think not. Here, as usual,public opinion is very realistic. It does not rise against thepoliceman for the plain and simple reason that it does not

question his right to do what he has done. Policemen are notgiven night-sticks for ornament. They are given them for thepurpose of cracking the skulls of the recalcitrant plain people,Democrats and Republicans alike. When they execute thathigh duty they are palpably within their rights.

The specialists aforesaid are the same fanatics who shake theair with sobs every time the Postmaster-General of the UnitedStates bars a periodical from the mails because its ideas do notplease him, and every time some poor Russian is deported forreading Karl Marx, and every time a Prohibition enforcementofficer murders a bootlegger who resists his levies, and everytime agents of the Department of Justice throw an Italian outof the window, and every time the Ku Klux Klan or the Amer-ican Legion tars and feathers a Socialist evangelist. In brief,they are Radicals, and to scratch one with a pitchfork is to ex-

pose a Bolshevik. They are men standing in contempt of Amer-ican institutions and in enmity to American idealism. And theirevil principles are no less offensive to right-thinking and red-blooded Americans when they are United States Senators oreditors of wealthy newspapers than when they are degradedI.W.W.s throwing dead cats and infernal machines into meet-ings of the Rotary Club.

What ails them primarily is the ignorant and uncritical

monomania that afflicts every sort of fanatic, at all times and

The Library of America Story of the WeekReprinted from H. L. Mencken: Prejudices: First, Second, and Third Series

(The Library of America, 2010), pages 41115. All rights reserved.

Originally appeared in Prejudices: Second Series(Knopf, 1920).
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everywhere. Having mastered with their limited faculties thetheoretical principles set forth in the Bill of Rights, they work

themselves into a passionate conviction that those principlesare identical with the rules of law and justice, and ought to beenforced literally, and without the slightest regard for circum-stance and expediency. It is precisely as if a High Church rec-tor, accidentally looking into the Book of Chronicles, andespecially Chapter II, should suddenly issue a mandate fromhis pulpit ordering his parishioners, on penalty of excommuni-cation and the fires of hell, to follow exactly the example set

forth, to wit: And Jesse begat his first born Eliab, and Abi-nadab the second, and Shimma the third, Netheneel thefourth, Raddai the fifth, Ozen the sixth, David the seventh,and so on. It might be very sound theoretical theology, but itwould surely be out of harmony with modern ideas, and therev. gentleman would be extremely lucky if the bishop did notgive him 10 days in the diocesan hoosegow.

So with the Bill of Rights. As adopted by the Fathers of the

Republic, it was gross, crude, inelastic, a bit fanciful and tran-scendental. It specified the rights of a citizen, but it saidnothing whatever about his duties. Since then, by the orderlyprocesses of legislative science and by the even more subtleand beautiful devices of juridic art, it has been kneaded andmellowed into a far greater pliability and reasonableness. Onthe one hand, the citizen still retains the great privilege of

membership in the most superb free nation ever witnessed onthis earth. On the other hand, as a result of countless shrewdenactments and sagacious decisions, his natural lusts and ap-petites are held in laudable check, and he is thus kept in orderand decorum. No artificial impediment stands in the way of hishighest aspiration. He may become anything, including even apoliceman. But once a policeman, he is protected by the leg-islative and judicial arms in the peculiar rights and prerogatives

that go with his high office, including especially the right tojug the laity at his will, to sweat and mug them, to subjectthem to the third degree, and to subdue their resistance bybeating out their brains. Those who are unaware of this aresimply ignorant of the basic principles of American jurispru-dence, as they have been exposed times without number bythe courts of first instance and ratified in lofty terms by the

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Supreme Court of the United States. The one aim of the con-trolling decisions, magnificently attained, is to safeguard pub-

lic order and the public security, and to substitute a judicialprocess for the inchoate and dangerous interaction of discor-dant egos.

Let us imagine an example. You are, say, a peaceable citizenon your way home from your place of employment. A policesergeant, detecting you in the crowd, approaches you, lays hishand on your collar, and informs you that you are under arrestfor killing a trolley conductor in Altoona, Pa., in 1917. Amazed

by the accusation, you decide hastily that the officer has losthis wits, and take to your heels. He pursues you. You continueto run. He draws his revolver and fires at you. He misses you.He fires again and fetches you in the leg. You fall and he isupon you. You prepare to resist his apparently maniacal as-sault. He beats you into insensibility with his espantoon, anddrags you to the patrol box.

Arrived at the watch house you are locked in a room with

five detectives, and for six hours they question you with subtleart. You grow angryperhaps robbed of your customary po-liteness by the throbbing in your head and legand answertartly. They knock you down. Having failed to wring a confes-sion from you, they lock you in a cell, and leave you there allnight. The next day you are taken to police headquarters, yourphotograph is made for the Rogues Gallery, and a print is duly

deposited in the section labeled Murderers. You are thencarted to jail and locked up again. There you remain until thetrolley conductors wife comes down from Altoona to identifyyou. She astonishes the police by saying that you are not theman. The actual murderer, it appears, was an Italian. Afterholding you a day or two longer, to search your house forstills, audit your income tax returns, and investigate the pre-marital chastity of your wife, they let you go.

You are naturally somewhat irritated by your experience andperhaps your wife urges you to seek redress. Well, what areyour remedies? If you are a firebrand, you reach out absurdlyfor those of a preposterous nature: the instant jailing of thesergeant, the dismissal of the Police Commissioner, the releaseof Mooney, a fair trial for Sacco and Vanzetti, free trade withRussia, One Big Union. But if you are a 100 per cent. American

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and respect the laws and institutions of your country, you sendfor your solicitorand at once he shows you just how far your

rights go, and where they end. You cannot cause the arrest ofthe sergeant, for you resisted him when he attempted to arrestyou, and when you resisted him he acquired an instant right totake you by force. You cannot proceed against him for accus-ing you falsely, for he has a right to make summary arrests forfelony, and the courts have many times decided that a publicofficer, so long as he cannot be charged with corruption ormalice, is not liable for errors of judgment made in the execu-

tion of his sworn duty. You cannot get the detectives on themat, for when they questioned you you were a prisoner ac-cused of murder, and it was their duty and their right to do so.You cannot sue the turnkey at the watch house or the wardenat the jail for locking you up, for they received your body, asthe law says, in a lawful and regular manner, and would havebeen liable to penalty if they had turned you loose.

But have you no redress whatever, no rights at all? Certainly

you have a right, and the courts have jealously guarded it. Youhave a clear right, guaranteed to you under the Constitution,to go into a court of equity and apply for a mandamus requir-ing the Polizeito cease forthwith to expose your portrait in theRogues Gallery among the murderers. This is your inalienableright, and no man or men on earth can take it away from you.You cannot prevent them cherishing your portrait in their se-

cret files, but you can get an order commanding them to re-frain forever from exposing it to the gaze of idle visitors, and ifyou can introduce yourself unseen into their studio and provethat they disregard that order, you can have them haled intocourt for contempt and fined by the learned judge.

Thus the law, statute, common and case, protects the freeAmerican against injustice. It is ignorance of that subtle andperfect process and not any special love of libertyper se that

causes radicals of anti-American kidney to rage every time anofficer of thegendarmerie, in the simple execution of his duty,knocks a citizen in the head. The gendarmeplainly has an in-herent and inalienable right to knock him in the head: it is anessential part of his general prerogative as a sworn officer ofthe public peace and a representative of the sovereign power ofthe state. He may, true enough, exercise that prerogative in a

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manner liable to challenge on the ground that it is imprudentand lacking in sound judgment. On such questions reasonable

men may differ. But it must be obvious that the sane and deco-rous way to settle differences of opinion of that sort is not bypublic outcry and florid appeals to sentimentality, not by ill-disguised playing to class consciousness and antisocial preju-dice, but by an orderly resort to the checks and remediessuperimposed upon the Bill of Rights by the calm deliberationand austere logic of the courts of equity.

The law protects the citizen. But to get its protection he

must show due respect for its wise and delicate processes.

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mencken: the nature of liberty

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