href="@public@vhost@g@gutenberg@html@files@38819@[email protected]#CHAPTER_IX" class="pginternal" tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">Congress at Last with Something to Do has no one to Do it

ILLUSTRATIONS

BEHIND THE MIRRORS

CHAPTER I

PRESIDENT HARDING AND THE CLOCK. GOD'S TIME AS IT WAS IN THE AMERICAN POLITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS

President Harding had recently to decide the momentous question whether we should have daylight saving in Washington. He decided it in a perfectly characteristic way, perfectly characteristic of himself and of our present political division and unsureness. He ruled that the city should go to work and quit work an hour earlier, but that it should not turn back the hands of the clock, should not lay an impious finger upon God's Time.

That this straddle is typical of our President needs no argument—he "has to be so careful," as he once pathetically said—but that it is symptomatic of the present American political consciousness perhaps needs elucidation.

The clock is one of the problems left to us by the Great War, one of the innumerable problems thus left to us; it involves our whole attitude toward men and things.

It represents, rather literally, Mechanism. In the war we adopted perforce the creed that man was sufficiently master of his own destiny to adapt Mechanism to his own ends; he could lay a presumptuous hand upon God's Time. But in peace shall he go on thus boldly? Or shall he revert to the good old days, the days of McKinley, when the clock was sacred? Think of all the happiness, all the prosperity, that was ours, all the duty done and all the destiny abundantly realized, before man thought to lay a hand upon the clock!

The question what the limits to human government are is involved. What may man attempt for himself and what should he leave to the great Mechanism which has, upon the whole, run the world so well, to the Sun in its courses, to progress, to inevitability? After all the clock was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be—unless we meddle with it—and before its cheerful face America was built from a wilderness into a vast nation, creating wealth, so as to be the third historic wonder of the ages—the glory that was Greece, the grandeur that was Rome, the dollars that are America.

And not only are we divided as to the limits of government, but where shall Mr. Harding look for authority to guide him with respect to clocks? To his party? This is a party government, you remember. But his party speaks with no clear voice about clocks or