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Title: The Man On Horseback
Author: Ross Winn
Date: December 1903.
Language: en
Topics: essays, history
Source: Retrieved on June 21, 2012 from http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Man_On_Horseback
Notes: Originally appearing in *Winn’s Firebrand*, Vol. II No. 7, December 1903.

Ross Winn

The Man On Horseback

The hand that holds the sword rules the world.

The world worships the warrior and crowns with its veneration the

victorious conqueror, tho his path to fame and glory be drenched with

blood and tears. The shadow of the sword lies across every page of human

history, and the bayonet’s bright gleam and the cannon’s red glare have

lighted the path of national destiny from the Babylonian empire to the

American republic. The pen of the statesman is worthless unless it is

backed by the sword of the soldier. War has enslaved humanity, and by

war humanity has broken its chains and widened the horizon of freedom.

War is denounced. Physical force is decried. But in the last analysis

every civilization is the child of war and every social order is founded

on physical force. The sword and the pen have always been partners, and

together the statesman and the soldier have wrought; and thru all the

ages the bayonet has been the agent of the brain.

Vain, vain is the dream of him who dreams of universal peace. In the

very symphony of the Universe the tumultous strains are keyed to the

measure of battle, and the supreme triumphant note is war. Here, now, we

have a great genius, Tolstoy, a philosopher with the heart of a child,

dreaming the grandly beautiful dream of universal peace. And here, upon

a ballot-reared and bayonet-propped throne is a puny pygmy named

Roosevelt, the potency of whose pen is a thousandfold more powerful for

peace or war than a hundred volumes of Tolstoy’s genius. And is

Roosevelt therefore greater than Tolstoy? The genius of Voltaire,

assisted by five centuries of oppression, created the French Revolution.

Napoleon extinguished it in thirty minutes with a whiff of grapeshot.

Was Bonaparte greater than Voltaire? Voltaire was the genius of

intellect; Napoleon was the genius of action. Voltaire represented

social progress; Napoleon was the agent of catastrophy. You cannot

measure Voltaire by Napoleon, any more than you can measure Napoleon by

Voltaire. You can only judge them both, as you judge all other men, by

the single standard of achievement. And so history passes over Voltaire

and crowns Bonaparte with the laurels of superior greatness. He held the

sword and he left the impress of his personality upon the plastic face

of human destiny.

It is proclaimed: “The pen is mightier than the sword.” And that’s all

bosh, my friends. The pen is impotent without the sword. The might of

the pen is greatly overrated. If I could marshal half a million muskets

behind my pen, every issue of the Firebrand would effect stock

quotations and create more anxiety in international cabinets than the

Panama revolution. The pen can plead for justice, but unless the

pleading has a Gatling gun attachment or a political graft annex, the

net total of realizable results wouldn’t materialize a microscopic

visibility of pin-point proportions. The intellectual ink-slinger

without a platoon of police behind him can no more change the order of

events than a politician can eliminate the acquired propensity for

roundabout lying. And when we come to analyze the world’s last word on

social ethics and political morals, all the chatter about equity, and

the conception of right and justice, is nothing but the puril palaver of

babbling balderdash, which, summed up and boiled down, amounts to about

half a pint of humbug. There is not a “wrong” named in the conventional

code that does not immediately become “right” the moment it is

sanctioned by a pin-head officialdom. There is no crime so dark and

damnable that it cannot by transformed into the sanctified and glorified

achievement of a national virtue, if it be but covered by the painted

folds of a national flag. A man who should take by armed force his

neighbor’s farm, butcher the helpless victim for defending his property,

and apply the torch to everything in sight, would be denominated a

brutal criminal, a hyena of infamy, a fiend of wanton wickedness. But a

great and powerful government, with battle-ships enough to challenge

querry or quibble, can seize the land of a friendly people, burn, murder

and pillage and otherwise make a howling wilderness of a land of smiling

peace, and that is “benevolent assimilation,” and “manifest destiny.”

That is simply “expansion.”

The man on horseback is the predominant figure of history. In the final

analysis it is cold, brutal physical force that gives vitality to ideas.

As long as Christianity was purely an intellectual force, the chief

activity of its exponents was directed to getting out of the way of the

gaoler and executioner. When the church got possession of the sword it

became a world-mover. Diogenes may have died in his tub, for all the

world remembers, but Alexander the Great, who had less intellect but

more troops, subdued the world. And the deeds of Alexander were of more

practical utility than the philosophy of Diogenes, even tho the

conqueror didn’t know what to do with the world after he had annexed it,

performed the baby act because there were no trusts for him to play

Roosevelt to, and ended his career in a jag caused by too much Kentucky

cocktail.

Ethics, like religion (and the two are very nearly allied), are useful

chiefly to keep the human sheep quiet for the shearers. The first moral

code was invented by the first grafter. When the priesthood had the

graft the code was religion. When the politician and the plutocrat

supplanted the priest, civil rights and duties as laid down by law

became the ethical standard. But in every case the code was for the

dupes to obey and the grifters to ignore. The end of all laws and moral

codes is graft. It is only in barbarian countries, where the ethics of

might are not disguised as a moral code, that the grafter is unknown.

There is no personality so pleasing to a tyrant as the non-resistant.

The czar permits even a Tolstoy to have being in his dominions, tho

Tolstoy proclaims himself a disbeliever in all human authority.

Kropotkin, who believes very much the same things that Tolstoy does, was

fired out of those same dominions p. d. q. Kropotkin is a non-resistant.

One “non” too many. That is a criminal offence. In this case the czar,

who is himself a typical “man on horseback,” demonstrates the relative

consequences of the non-resistant as compared with the non

non-resistant, in the estimation of the grafters. The parasites of

social order respect the non-resistants, even mention them by name in

their newspapers. If you had a fellow in a box and you were sitting

comfortably on the cover, you would naturally commend him for keeping

quiet. The political, financial and priestly parasites of our blessed

social order have the rest of humanity in a box. They are comfortable

seated on the lid. They esteem the non-resistants underneath very

highly. If everybody in the box were non-resistants, or even passive

resistants, all would be lovely for the sitters on the box cover.

Nothing would so much disturb them as the presence in the box of a man

on horseback.

It has been predicted that the man on horseback will put a final period

to the American republic. This, at least, is an optimistic view. Let us

hope that he will be the genuine article and not a fake rough rider with

opulent eyeglasses and mastodonic dental furnishing. I do not refer to

our heroic Theodore.