Editorial October 2, 1920 Issue

Right or Wrong

Frederick Dixon

There is a story of Lord Palmerston, which may or may not be apocryphal, to the effect that he once received a memorial from a certain number of his followers assuring him that they would support him in a case in which he was so obviously in the right. The irritation of the prime minister was beyond words. He intimated that anybody would support him if he was right, and that what he was looking for in his followers were those who would support him whether he was right or not. The anecdote, which was no doubt meant to express the fiery nature of the great Irishman, finds a parallel in a really historic saying of that famous American seaman, Stephen Decatur. It was in proposing a toast, at Norfolk, in the year after Waterloo, that Decatur gave utterance to that remarkable and often quoted saying, "Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong."

Now if Decatur had been told that he was giving utterance to the most preposterously unpatriotic sentiment for which he could be held responsible, he would no doubt have been quite as irritated as Lord Palmerston is reported to have been, and so no doubt would those who drank his toast, and all the patriotic associations of later years which have acclaimed it. Yet anybody, who will take the trouble to think, must see that the sentiment is not only an entirely immoral one, but is calculated to involve any country in disaster rather than in success. It is the support of just such ideals which has brought about the fall of the great empires of the past. The absence of fearless criticism which would tell the truth to rulers has been more responsible for national disasters than almost any other one thing. To approach a Roman emperor or a Turkish sultan with such a criticism would no doubt have been almost seeking extinction, yet if the emperors of Rome and the sultans of Turkey could have found truth-telling instead of sycophancy, the history of Rome and the history of the Ottoman Empire might have been very different from that which they are to-day. The Hebrew prophets did, indeed, deal faithfully with the kings of Israel and Judah in just this way, and they experienced extremely dangerous moments in doing so. Nevertheless, there can be no question at all that the story of the kings of Israel and that of the kings of Judah would have been even more unfortunate than they actually were, if it had not been for the fearless integrity of the prophets.

Now what is true of the king or the prime minister is true also of their subjects or supporters individually. Indeed, that a nation is only a collection of individuals is, of course, the tritest and most obvious of sayings. It is, therefore, the moral fiber of the individual which constitutes the character of a nation, and if this moral fiber is missing, the character of the nation spells disaster for the nation. Count Czernin points out, in his recent memoirs, how essentially this was the case in pre-war Germany, and just what it led to. The kaiser, he explains, lived in an absolutely exotic atmosphere in which the truth was never allowed to be mentioned. The disagreeable, that is to say, was always excluded, with the result that the unfortunate ruler of Germany drove in on his doom, without a suspicion of the realities with which he was surrounded. The reason for this was, the Count explains, to be traced to the parasitic nature of German society. The court of Vienna, he insists, was sufficiently docile in its attitude toward its own emperor, but in Vienna the scenes which he witnessed in Prussia would have been impossible, for never could a great Viennese merchant have been induced to cover the hand of the emperor with kisses because that hand had bestowed on the recipient a gold scarfpin.

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