You will say I am oversensitive to outside suggestion. Perhaps I am. The fact remains that the naval situation in the Pacific is what it is. And there are so many other national obligations. We do need a fifteen-foot channel from the lakes to the gulf. We do need free schools for the poor whites in the Tennessee mountains. We do need millions to rebuild our railroads. All these demands press upon me as I sit facing my wife across the table and timidly light my cigar. Yes, I smoke; but I look at my wife and wonder how she can live in unconscious proximity to such startling moral degradation.
Perhaps I am oversensitive, as you say, but these suggestions from the outside keep pouring in on one in an irresistible stream from many different directions. You simply cannot escape the logic of the comparative mathematicians. A naval officer of high rank shows that because of the wanton destruction of bird-life in the United States our farmers lose $800,000,000 a year from the ravages of insect pests; “so that good bird laws would enable us to sustain an enormous navy.” Not so big a navy as this distinguished officer imagines, of course, because the internal-waterways people will want a great deal of that bird money, and the Southern education people will ask for a handsome share. It does not matter that personally I have never slain birds either for their flesh or their plumage, but I share in the indirect responsibility. Instead of idling in my chair with a cigar, I ought to be writing to my congressman, demanding the enactment of adequate bird laws in the name of our naval supremacy in the Pacific and the defense of the Panama Canal.
Such is the established mode of procedure to-day. If one is planning the expenditure of a very large amount of public money, let him point out how easily the money may be saved or earned by somebody else. If I have seemed to harp too much on the man with the cigar, it is because he is the classic type of the victim in the case. Just consider what a trifling favor one is asked for--merely to give up a nasty, unsanitary habit, and not only be happier oneself, but bring happiness to the big-navy man, the internal-waterways man, the Association for the Encouragement of Grand Opera among the Masses, the Society for the Pensioning of Decayed Journalists, the Society for Damming the Arctic Current on the Banks of Newfoundland, the Society for the Construction of Municipal Airships. These enthusiastic gentry find no habit too hard for the other man to break, no economy too difficult for the other man to adopt, and no remedy too complicated for the other man to put into effect. Smith is amazed that any one could refuse him $200,000,000 for the navy.