Congressmen Take Places of Soldiers When Ship Leaves Brest, June 6, 1919

From the editorial page of The Commonwealth, Scotland Neck, N.C., June 6, 1919

The Chivalry of Congressmen

We learn that when the Mount Vernon sailed from Brest there were certain congressmen on board who insisted on taking the places of soldiers. The congressmen had done no military duty, but they wanted to get home. So did the soldiers who had been through hell and out again that congressmen might lift to draw fat salaries and talk interminably in the comfortable upholstered council chamber.

The soldiers were left behind.

Some soldiers were allowed to come—after the congressmen had all been assured that room would be made for them. But the soldiers were not allowed to keep the quarters that had been assigned to them. Army officers who had been through the fiercest of the fighting were compelled to give up their staterooms to professional politicians who found Prince Alberts more comfortable than khaki. 

The officers were not eager to make the change, but the politicians insisted.

The matter is trivial, and yet it has its bearing on philosophy. It rarely pays to be a hero—in some one else’s behalf. The world has changed very little since the days of Sennacherib. We speak of the recent war as a holocaust, an Armageddon, an upheaval, a cataclysm. We give it several names that are common-place bromidic journalese. We declare that the world has been revolutionized—that human nature is now metamorphosed, transformed.

It isn’t much transformed. It will take us about a year to realize what a singular durability the more nauseous traits of human character have shown in surviving a purging process that should have eliminated them it will be chiefly noticeable in those who did not really go thru the keynote process at all. Any congressman whose natural vulgarity formed the keynote to his character before the war will continue to exhibit that vulgarity to the end of his political activities.