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Title: Practical Agitation
Author: John Jay Chapman
Release Date: October 24, 2021 [eBook #66610]
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PRACTICAL AGITATION ***
PRACTICAL AGITATION
_By the Same Author_
EMERSON AND OTHER ESSAYS. $1.25.
CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES. $1.25.
PRACTICAL AGITATION
BY
JOHN JAY CHAPMAN
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1900
_Copyright, 1900_,
BY CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS.
UNIVERSITY PRESS · JOHN WILSON
AND SON · CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A.
DEDICATED
TO
The Memory
OF
THEODORE BACON
PREFACE
This book is an attempt to follow the track of personal influence
across society. The first three chapters are taken up with discussions
of political reform, the fourth chapter with contemporary journalism.
The results of these discussions are then summarized in the chapters
called “Principles.”
I know that there are as many ways of stating the main idea of the
book as there are minds in the world. That idea is, that we can always
do more for mankind by following the good in a straight line than
we can by making concessions to evil. The illusion that it is wise
or necessary to suppress our instinctive love of truth comes from
an imperfect understanding of what that instinctive love of truth
represents, and of what damage happens both to ourselves and to
others when we suppress it. The more closely we look at the facts, the
more serious does this damage appear. And on the other hand, the more
closely we look at the facts, the more trifling, inconsequent, and
absurd do all those reasons appear which strive to make us accept, and
thereby sanctify and preserve, some portion of the conceded evil in the
world.
J. J. C.
NEW YORK, February 5, 1900.
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. ELECTION TIME 1
II. BETWEEN ELECTIONS 34
III. THE MASSES 67
IV. LITERATURE 83
V. PRINCIPLES 104
VI. PRINCIPLES (_continued_) 126
VII. CONCLUSION 135
PRACTICAL AGITATION
I
ELECTION TIME
It is the ambition of the agitator to use the machinery of government
to make men more unselfish. In so far as he succeeds in this, he is
creating a living church, the only sort of State church that would
be entirely at one with our system, because it would be merely a
representation in the formal government of a spirit abroad among the
people.
Campaign platforms are merely creeds. “I believe in Civil Service
Reform” is a way of saying “I do not believe in theft,” and the phrase
was a fragmentary and incomplete formulation of the greater truth. It
was the sign that a movement was beginning among the people due to
reawakening instinct, reawakening sensibility. It was the forerunner
of all those changes for the better that have been spreading over
our administrative government during the last thirty years. A quiet
revolution has been going forward under our eyes, recorded step by
step. It is only because our standards have been going up faster than
the reforms came in that we believe the evils are growing worse. Such
changes go on all the time all over the world, but the value and rarity
of this one come from its unity and coherence. Such a thing might
happen in Germany or in England, but you could not disentangle the
forces.
Thirty years ago politics was thought to be no occupation for a
gentleman. It was a matter of bar-rooms, ballot-box-stuffing, rolls of
dirty bills. You had as little to do with it as possible. You voted
your party ticket, you paid your taxes. You bribed the ashman and
the policeman at your uptown house, and the clerk of the court, the
inspector, the custom-house agent, and the commissioner of jurors at
your office.
That subtle change of attitude in the citizen towards his public duty
which is now in progress, has in it something of the religious. The
whole matter becomes comprehensible the moment we cease to think of it
as politics, and see in it a widespread and perfectly natural reaction
against an era of wickedness. Had our framework of government afforded
no outlet to the force, had our ills been irremediably crystallized
into formal tyranny, we should perhaps have witnessed great revivalist
upheavals, sacraments, saints, prophets, prostrations, and adoration.
As it is, we have seen deadly pamphlets, schedules, enactments,
documents which it required our whole attention and our whole time
to understand; and behind each of them a remorseless interrogator
with a white cravat and a face of iron. What motive drives them on?
What oil fills their lamps? Who feeds them? These horrid things they
bring, these instruments forged by unremitting toil, technical,
insufferable,--they are the cure. With such levers, and with them
only, can the stones be lifted off the hearts of men. They are the
alternatives of revolution.
“Reform” may have a thousand meanings, and be used to cover a thousand
projects of doubtful utility. But with us it has a definite meaning.
When the foreigner says, “Ah, but is your reform the right remedy?” he
thinks it is a question of policy, or of the incidence of a tax. He
supposes there is an intellectual question. But with us the problem is
how to protect an attorney against a dishonest judge; how to stop the
sheriff from stealing a fund, pending the litigation.
What we want to do, what we are doing, is to get rid of gross
malpractices, gross theft, gross abuse of public trust. It is waste of
time to expend learned argument on a judge who has been bought. The
litigants must join forces and get rid of that judge before they can
talk. Of course we know that the real trouble with our politics is
that these attorneys have themselves bribed the judge and share in the
division of their clients’ property. It is to questions of this kind
that the conscience of the country has been drawn.
There is nothing peculiarly sacred about politics, but the history of
reform movements during the last few years furnishes such striking and
wonderful illustrations of human nature that it is worth study.
A few men have a desire, a hope of improving some evil. They stagger
towards it and fall. The impulse is always good. The mistakes made are
progressive. They record the past; they outline the future. If you draw
an arrow through them, it will point north.
If you arrange the reform movements against Tammany Hall in a series,
and consider them minutely, you will find that the earlier ones
are comparatively corrupt, sporadic, disorganized, ignorant, and
shortsighted in purpose. They have steadily become more honest, more
frequent, more coherent, more intelligent and ambitious. If you examine
any one of them, it would be impossible to misplace it in the series.
Looking more closely, you see the reason. The earlier the movement, the
more zealously do its leaders imitate the methods of current politics.
Each movement represents the philosophy of its era. We have had: 1. The
frankly corrupt era (fighting the devil with fire). 2. The compromise
era (buying reform). 3. The educational era, which began two years
ago, after Low was defeated, when people said they were glad of the
movement, in spite of the defeat. Note this, that Low did not lead a
lost cause, nor was any belief in lost causes at the bottom of his
movement. But in making the best of his defeat, many minds stumbled
into philosophy. And this illustrates the progress of an idea. People
will accept it as an explanation of the past before they will take it
as a guide to the future. It glimmers before them at a moment when
they need comfort, and vanishes in the light of a comfortable habit or
prejudice. This apparition of the educational idea flitted across New
York and took root in many minds.
Now the smoky torch of reform has passed from hand to hand, and is
beginning to burn brighter. How could the original darkness give
forth more than a gleam? All progress is experimental. The architects
discovered by practice that the arch would support itself. Their
earlier efforts were tentative. You can see what notion they had in
mind, as they very gradually learned how to subserve the laws of
gravity and tension. Each improvement is qualified by its author’s
limitations, but shows a gain as toward the immediate past. You are
following the steps of the groping and fumbling mind of man, fettered
at every point by his own conceptions, moving each time towards a
bolder generalization, each stride forward exactly proportionate to the
breadth of thought on which it is calculated.
What other method is there? The men who fought the Tweed Ring did what
passed for “politics” in their day. “Votes must be paid for, of course;
but let the people vote right.”
The philosophy of the Strong movement in 1894 showed an advance. “The
plunder must be divided, of course; but let _us_ have it because
we are virtuous.”
The Low movement in 1897 appealed to voters on the ground of
self-interest. Labor had to be conciliated, local politicians of the
worst sort subsidized; $150,000 was spent, four-fifths of it in ways
that did more harm than good. But the methods were delicate.
The battle of the standards goes forward ceaselessly; but all standards
are going up. What the half-way reformer calls “politics,” the idealist
calls chicanery; what the idealist calls politics, the half-way
reformer calls Utopia. But in 1871 they are discussing whether or not
the reformers shall falsify the returns; in 1894 they are discussing
whether or not they shall expose fraud in their own camp.
The men engaged in all these struggles are in perfect ignorance that
they are really leading a religious reaction. They think that since
they are in politics the doctrines of compromise apply. They are
drawn into politics by conscience, but once there, they have only
their business training to guide them,--a training in the art of
subserving material interests. Now if a piece of your land has an
uncertain boundary, you have a right to compromise on any theory you
like, because you own the land. But if you start out with the sole
and avowed purpose of upholding honesty in politics, and you uphold
anything else or subserve any other interest whatever, you are a
deceiver. When you began you did not say “I stand for a readjustment
of political interests. There will be a continuation of many abuses
under my administration, to be sure; but I hope they will not be quite
so bad as heretofore. I shall not insist on the absolutely unselfish
conduct of my office. It is not practical.” If you had said this, you
might have got the friendly support of a few doctrinaires. But you
would never have got the support and approval of the great public. You
would not have been elected. And therefore you did not say it. On the
contrary, what our reformers do is this: They begin, before election,
by promising an absolutely pure administration. They make proclamations
of a new era, and after they have secured a certain following they
proceed to chaffer over how much honesty they will demand and how much
take, as if they were rescuing property.
These men are, then, in their desires a part of the future, and in
their practices of the past. Their desires move society forward, their
practices set it back; and so we have moved forward by jolts, until,
like a people emerging from the deep sea, the water looks clearer
above our heads and we can almost see the sky.
Every advance has cost great effort. It took as much courage for a
Mugwump to renounce his party allegiance in 1884 as it does now for
a man to denounce both national parties as dens of thieves. It took
as much hard thinking some years ago for the leaders of the Reform
Democrats to cut loose from Tammany Hall as it does now for the
Independent to see that there is in all our politics only one machine,
held together by all the bosses and their heelers, and that the whole
thing must be attacked at once.
How gradual has been the process of emancipation from intellectual
bondage! How inevitably people are limited by the terms in which
they think! A generation of men has been consumed by the shibboleth
“reform within the party,”--a generation of educated and right-minded
men, who accomplished in their day much good, and left the country
better than they found it, but are floating to-day like hulks in the
trough of the sea of politics, because all their mind and all their
energy were exhausted in discovering certain superficial evils and in
fighting them. Their analysis of political elements left the deeper
causes mysterious. They did not see mere human nature. They still
treated Republicanism and Democracy--empty superstitions--as ideas, and
they handled with reverence the bones of bogus saints, and the whole
apparatus of clap-trap by which they had been governed.
And yet it is owing to the activity of these men that the deeper
political conditions became visible. Men cannot transcend their own
analysis and see themselves under the microscope. The work we do
transforms us into social factors. We are a part of the changes we
bring in. Before we know it, we ourselves are the problem.
The Mugwumps revolt and defeat Blaine. They strengthen the Democratic
party. They again revolt and defeat Bryan, and strengthen the
Republican party. So in the little towns all over the country, on
local issues the Democrats are put out for being dishonest, or the
Republicans are put out for being dishonest. Through this process
the younger generation has been led to note one fact: both parties
are dishonest. “Ah! but,” says the parent, “I am a good Democrat. My
party is not dishonest all the time. It needs discipline.” It is too
late: the young man hates both parties equally. He now looks at his
father, and sees in him a sample of corrupted intelligence, a man able
to repeat meaningless phrases, and he draws hope from the conclusion.
It was natural that the father should have been boss-ridden all his
life, because he could be whistled back to support iniquity by an
appeal to party loyalty. He belonged to a race that had lost the power
of political initiative. They could not act alone. They must daub
themselves with party names or they would catch cold. They had not the
stomach to be merely men.
Thirty years ago one-half of society thought that every Democrat was a
rebel and a scoundrel. The world to that society was composed of two
classes,--Republicans (righteous men), Democrats (villains). Twenty
years of an almost steady growth in the power of self-government or of
what the Germans would call civic consciousness, has barely sufficed to
strike off the adjectives, but it has left mankind still divided, as
before.
Meanwhile there has emerged a group of men who see the whole problem
in a much simpler light. These men have carried forward the analysis
which their fathers, or let us say their elder brothers, had begun,
to such a point that there are no words in it which are meaningless,
no factors which are not reduced to terms of human nature. They did
nothing but add the last link to a chain of logic. Their predecessors
discovered The Machine, and spent their lives in trying to belong to a
party without strengthening its Machine. These latter men discovered
that both parties were ruled by the same Machine. They see one issue,
and only one issue in American politics, namely, the attack on that
Machine.
Moreover, these men have political initiative; that is to say, they
contemplate creating conditions, and not merely making transient use of
visible conditions. Their idea is so simple that any one whose mind is
not warped by the cant of party politics understands it at once.
“All this political corruption is a unity. Vote against it and you will
beat it. Vote for any part of it and you strengthen it.” This sounds
simple. But in practice the prejudices, the interests, the passions and
political temperament of the whole population are against it. Every
argument that the people understand is against this course. Everything
that either party fears or hates in the other party is passionately
pointed out as a reason against independent voting. According to
Republicans, independent voting involves “allowing Croker to extend his
rule over the entire State,” and “enabling Tammany Hall to control the
judiciary,” and “endangering the cause of sound money.” According to
Democrats, it involves the encouraging of Trusts, Tariffs, Pensions,
Expansion and foreign conquest. According to both Democrats and
Republicans, independent voting is “voting in the air,” and is at odds
with the spirit of our institutions, which contemplate two parties and
no more. And, finally, every one condemns the independent because he
violates that thumb rule which slovenly thinkers regard as a summary of
all political philosophy, “Between two evils choose the least.”
Now the answer to all these arguments is that they are the merest
mirage. It makes no difference which of the two evils, Platt or
Croker, has the name of ruling the State. At present they divide the
rule between them. They can do no more. There is no argument that can
be used against Tammany Hall which is powerful enough to make the
Republican Ring trustworthy. There is no argument against Expansion
so excessively convincing that it changes the moral character of the
Democratic Party. These learned arguments are useless, ludicrous,
pathetic, irrational, impotent, contemptible. They do but distract us
from the real issue--which is personal corruption. Where shall a man
cast his vote against it? If I turn out McKinley because he bleeds the
natives, I put in a Democrat to bleed the natives. If the whitewashing
of Alger arouses public indignation, Tammany Hall feeds at the trough.
If Croker’s control of the judiciary arouses popular indignation,
Platt’s pigs feed at the trough. As for sound money, we have already
elected one Congress on the issue in 1895, just as in 1892 we elected a
Congress on the tariff issue. What was done? Why, in each case that was
done which the ring wanted done,--nothing.
Which national party stands for an idea to-day? The only shadow of
reason for believing that either does, is that the Republicans cried
sound money and won. They have done nothing. Had Bryan won, he would
have done nothing, could have done nothing.
There are no issues in American politics save this one issue of common
honesty. You cannot throw an issue into this whirlpool of vice, for
your issue turns to cash by the contact. We need not waste our time
reading the platforms drawn by Platt and Croker. We must not vote for
any man who does not go into public life as their enemy, because we
know that in so far as he is not their enemy he is ours. As for these
dreadful consequences that are always about to follow from a refusal
to support one end of the iniquity, they do not follow. We have the
evils now. We are at the worst. The powers of darkness may conspire and
heap all in ruins, but they must not prevent us from beginning upon a
constructive line to draw together and build up the powers of light.
Nor is there the smallest distinction either in the evil or its cure,
between the case of a village, of a State, or of the whole nation.
Say you live in a town; you can only get a clean school-board by
running men against both the regular parties. There is no other way of
getting rid of Hanna and the Presidential Syndicate than by running
an independent candidate for the Presidency. No form of Bryanism will
oust it,--no rump Democracy nor any kind of Democracy. Democracy is
finished. Republicanism is finished.
This is the zero point of party loyalty. It has been reached very
slowly. It means open war. The citizen is now confronted with a third
ticket, which is a deliberate insult to both the others. No matter
what the conditions, it is an appeal which disintegrates the emotions
of the voter. This is the very elixir of reform. People are forced
to think. It hurts them. They cry out against those who create the
dilemma, but they cannot escape it. The vote you poll will vary. If the
party war-cries are intense and the party candidates promise fairly,
very few men will see the point of your movement. But no one escapes
its influence. Let us say that five thousand vote your ticket. These
are the only men whose response is scheduled. But the political vision
of five hundred thousand has been quickened. No atom of this influence
is lost. The work was done when the vote was cast. Even if it be not
counted at all, it will show in every political camp in the near future.
But do you ever have outward success? Does the time ever come when
the standards of every one are so high that the parties themselves
present candidates as good as your own, and there is no excuse for your
existence? That depends upon the trend of the age. One thing only is
certain, that by pursuing this course you are doing all that you can
do. You are wasting no power. No part of your force is helping the
enemy.
After all, the great discovery is a very simple thing. We have found,
after many experiments, that what we really want is, not the turning
out of officials, not the enactment of laws, but the raising of the
general standards. The way to do this is to set up a standard. Of
course nobody likes to find a foot rule laid against his shortage. Even
the vocabulary of the average man is attacked by such a system. Words
like “courage,” “honesty,” “independence,” “pledge,” “loyalty” pass
current like clipped coin in the language of politics; and the keying
up of words to their biblical value brings out one man a thief and the
next a hypocrite.
All these civic commotions, great and small, that surge up and are
scattered, that form and reform, the People’s Leagues and Citizens’
Unions, are the altruism of the community fighting its way to the
surface through the obstructions, the snares, and the oppressions
of the organized world. No discouragement sets it back. No betrayal
destroys it. The people come forward with ever new faith.
What ceaseless endeavor! What patient trial of various forms of
organization! We live in a society where egoism is so thoroughly
organized that there is hardly a flicker of faith that cannot be made
to heat the devil’s pot. The dragon stands ready to eat up the child
as soon as it shall be born. You cannot hitch your horse to anything
without helping drag the juggernaut. Before you know it, virtue is
pocketed. Take the most obvious case. The reformers imagine they are in
politics and must win at all costs. One enthusiast calls twenty friends
into a room and organizes a club--and the club ties his hands and sells
out to the nearest bidder. Before he knows it he has been organized
back into Tammany Hall. You begin with a call to arms and a plan of
organization. The men come to you in a moment of hope, showing every
shade of intelligence, every stage of opinion,--one because he believes
in your candidate; one because he hates Tammany Hall; one because he
wants prominence; all because they do not expect to be alone. The men
who volunteer have not a clear notion of what they are in for. They
thought it was a movement to clean the streets. In the course of their
campaign it develops into an attack on a bank. They thought it was
a town movement. Some stage of it affects national politics. They
thought it was a Roosevelt movement. It turns out to involve hostility
to Roosevelt. Your muster shows the vague hope of a lot of men who
are utterly incompetent, undisciplined, ignorant. They are merchants,
lawyers, doctors, professors, clergymen, the respectability and
intelligence of the town; and so far as self-government goes they are
the tattered children of tyranny. Good God, what an army! At the first
trumpet they scatter. One sells out, one recants, one disappears. They
are anywhere and nowhere, a ship of fools, a barnyard. The execution of
the one idea for which they were brought together has scattered them
like sheep.
Let us take another case. You think that what is needed is to raise a
standard. You call your twenty friends about you. They are not corrupt.
Nevertheless, let us see who they will be. We are not dealing with an
imaginary community, but with American citizens as they exist, with
men every one of whom trusts his instincts to a different extent. Each
man believes in principle in the abstract, but thinks it is sometimes
hopeless to be severely virtuous in politics. This “sometimes” is the
_crux_. “Is it the time? Is this the year? Can you do it this
way?” Now, of course, it is always the year. It is never hopeless.
Absolute honesty is always the way. But an age of corruption destroys
faith. This is the essential injury. This is the disease. You yourself
have a little stronger belief, a little more political enterprise than
your twenty friends. Otherwise it would be they who were summoning you
to a conference. It is certain that their joint wisdom will result in
action less radical than you believe in. They outvote you in council.
The standard they set up is not absolute. But this outcome will prevent
you from making your point at all. If you are to back your friends up
publicly and are honest yourself, all you can say will be, “Here’s
a makeshift.” Now, the public instinct understands this very well
already. Ten per cent of your own faith you have compromised. It has
cost you ninety per cent of your educational power; for the heart of
man will respond only to a true thing.
What is it that has led you to compromise? Why, the age you live in.
You yourself, being afraid to stand alone, have dipped your flag,
with the best intentions, because you cannot see that any other
course is practicable. Yet you yourself can keep your own intellectual
integrity only at the price of destroying your own handiwork. If you
do not destroy it, you are a hypocrite. Here in the room with you were
twenty men, the very flower of the idealism of the town, not chosen
by accident, but coming together by natural selection. Twenty more
like them do not exist in the community, for their activity would have
revealed them. And yet there was not found faith enough among these to
set up an absolute standard. Nay, they hang on your arms and prevent
you from raising one. If you are to do it, you must do it alone. Then
these men will be the first to denounce you; for your act damns them.
You can only be true to the public conscience by rebuking your friends.
If you fail to do this, your banner is submerged.
Let us consider the cause of this weakness in Reform organizations.
You wish to appeal to the people with as good a show of names as you
can. And so you get a lot of well-known men to indorse you. This is
considered practical. Let us see if it is.
We are fighting Tammany Hall. But no one will for an instant admit
that every Tammany man is dishonest. The corruption we started out to
correct was a corruption of the intelligence, a bad habit, a defect of
vision. The same defect keeps Republicans in line for Platt, because
he is the Party, a recognized agent of the community. The same defect
prevents a just man from joining a new movement unless Banker Jones is
leading it. The habit of the community is to rely on some one else to
govern them. No man trusts himself. The Machine, upon analysis, turns
out to be a lack of self-reliance. Wherever you see a man who gives
some one else’s corruption, some one else’s prejudice as a reason for
not taking action himself, you see a cog in The Machine that governs
us. The proof of it is that he will dissuade you from striking the
iniquity. He will explain that you can’t try it without doing more
harm than good. You will find that at every point of defence, from
the arguments of Mr. Croker himself to the arguments of some sainted
college president, the reasons given are identical. I cannot find
any one who defends stealing. They only deprecate action as being
inexpedient. Now, then, if I ask a voter to join my organization, and
use as a bait an appeal to this very weakness--his reliance upon other
men’s opinion--can I hope to make much headway? I am taking in just so
much of Tammany Hall. My whole body becomes an adjunct of Tammany, in
the same sense that Mr. Platt’s machine is an adjunct. I am Croker’s
last outpost. I stand there calling myself reform, and yet I do not
act. Some one else must now come forward and try his hand.
This process of ebullition, and thereupon stagnation, has happened
again and again. I suppose there are a dozen extant wrecks of reform
political organizations in the city. Many people have despaired
altogether. They think it is a law of God that political organizations
become corrupt in the second year. The experience is entirely due to
the persistent putting of new wine into old bottles. In their names
and hopes these bodies have stood for purity, but in their membership
they have, even in their inception, stood for prejudice. Then, too, the
bottles bore good labels, and bad wine was soon poured into them. A
political organization is a transferable commodity. You could not find
a better way of killing virtue than by packing it into one of these
contraptions which some gang of thieves is sure to find useful.
The short lesson that comes out of long experience in political
agitation is something like this: _all_ the motive power in
all of these movements is the instinct of religious feeling. All
the obstruction comes from attempting to rely on anything else.
Conciliation is the enemy. It is just as impossible to help reform
by conciliating prejudice as it is by buying votes. Prejudice is the
enemy. Whoever is not for you is against you.
What, then, must the enthusiast do in the way of organization? Let
him go ahead and do some particular thing, and ask the public to help
him do it. He will thus get behind him whatever force exists at that
especial time for that especial purpose. It may not be much; but no
amount of letterheads and great seals will increase it. Let him abandon
written constitutions. Let him not be bound by a vote nor seek to bind
others by a vote. If you have formal procedure, you are tied up, for
you will then have to convert six tailors into apostles before you can
get at the public. Content yourself more modestly. See a friend or two
and tell them what you intend to do. If they won’t help you, do it
alone. Do not think you are wasting your time, even if no one joins
you. The prejudice against the individual is part of the evil you are
fighting. If you keep on in a consistent line of action, people will
come to you one by one, and your group will grow into a sort of centre
of influence. There will result a unity of method as well as of aim,
which, as your purposes become understood, will enable you to act with
the speed of thought and the force of an avalanche. One great merit of
this method will be that your whole policy will remain an enigma to
every one except those who really want what you want, namely, to raise
the general standards. Only such men will seek you out. Any one else
is a danger. Thus your organization will grow slowly, but will remain
uncapturable, un-get-at-able, an influence, a menace, a standard.
As fast as adherents appear, you can set up centre after centre of
enlightenment, preparatory to your campaigns; debates, pamphlets,
correspondence, the battery of agitation. And in the mean time the
benefit done to the workers themselves is worth all the pains.
By adopting formal machinery you would not only organize the wrong
people in, but you would organize the right people out. New York
City is full of men whose passion for educating can find no vent in
politics, because politics are corrupt, and who run civic leagues,
night-schools, lyceums, and people’s institutes. They are at work in
your cause although they call it by different names. All this zeal is
at your disposal if you will only leave your office doors open and do
something to deserve its support. Do not adopt a scheme that excludes
these men. You cannot impress them into your army, but you do not need
to impress them,--only to know them personally. You cannot make them
district captains, but they are district captains already.
“But,” you say, “are not the votes of your twenty friends as valuable
as your own? Whence this egoism?” It is not egoism. I am ready to
follow any one who wants to do this particular thing, that is, make an
appeal to absolute unselfishness, at no point to conciliate any one.
“But this is anarchy: every man his own party.” On the contrary, it is
consolidation; for should two men arise, proposing this course, they
would coalesce at once.
“But,” you say, “who is to do all the work? How are you to get men
to come forward unless you give them tangible, formulated doctrines,
papers to sign, and words to mumble?” The answer is that the men who
do the work in reform campaigns do not need these things. Literature
and doctrines you will undoubtedly produce. It is not necessary for the
effective distribution of them, that you should adopt the parade of
American party discipline.
Organization, head-quarters, and a distribution of labor you must
develop. But you must not have them on paper faster than they exist in
reality. “But,” you say, “this is not representative government. Where
are your convention, your argument, your vote, your majority, your
loyalty? Our people must have these things.”
The answer is that, in spite of their views on representative
government, our people still remain human beings. As fast as they find
themselves spiritually represented by some person or body, they follow
that influence. It is representative government, but it represents
only the positive and aspiring part of the community,--the part which
never gets represented under your system, because that system insists
upon alloying it with other elements and ruining its power. It is
educational activity in the purest form. By what other means can you
speak to the whole people at once in the language of action? By what
other means can you reach the conscience of the unknown man, who has
not touched politics for twenty years because he could take no part in
it, because he did not understand it,--the disfranchised, scattered,
and dumb men on whose voice the future waits?
Consider what you are trying to do. A party under control of a
machine is held together by an appeal to self-interest. Its caucuses,
affiliations, resources, methods are constructed on that principle.
Your body, whose aim is to increase the unselfishness and intellect
of your fellow-citizens, must be held together at every point by
self-sacrifice.
If the reform body shall blindly do just the opposite of what a party
does, it will pursue practical politics. The regular party is in
theory representative of enrolled voters. You represent the sentiment
of undiscovered people. The party appeals to old forces and extant
conditions. You appeal to new feelings and new voters. The party offers
a gift to every adherent. You must offer him nothing but labor. That
is your protection against traitors. The party accords every man the
weight of his vote in its counsels. You must give him nothing but the
influence of his mind.
“But,” you shout, “this is not politics. You can never hold men
together without bonds.” The fact is otherwise. There is some force
at work in this town which, year after year, brings forward groups of
men who proclaim a new dispensation. They are, in so far as they have
any cohesion, held together without bonds now. All formal bonds will
chain them to the past. For electrical force you must adopt electrical
machinery; for moral force, moral bonds. All this political system
is the harness for the wrong passion. Every scrap of it imprisons
your power. The average American citizen is slow to see that you can
exercise political influence without the current machinery. This is a
part of The Machine in his brain. He cannot see the operation of law
by which virtue always tells. But his ignorance does not affect the
operation of that law, even upon himself.
This elaborate analysis of just how the force of feeling in yourself
can best be used politically, is, after all, only an instance of a
general law. The shortest path between two points always turns out to
be a straight line. People who believe in the complexity of life, and
have theories about crooked lines, want something else beside moral
influence. They want influence through office, or influence toward
special ends, or influence with particular persons. “Can’t you see
you are destroying your influence?” they cry, while every stroke is
telling. “A thinks you are a lunatic.” Praise God. “B has withdrawn his
subscription.” I had not hoped for this so soon. “But he has joined
Platt.” You misstate the case. He was always with Platt, but now he has
revealed it. These refractory molecules are breaking up. See the lines
of force begin to show a clean cleavage. Ten thousand intelligences now
see the man for what he is.
At what point in the progress of this movement will people begin to
see that it is practical politics of the most effective kind? Some
people see it now. The first people to feel the strain are the men
whose livelihood depends on the outcome. The last illustration of
this was given in Roosevelt’s campaign against Van Wyck in New York
State. In this case, as generally happens, the real battle was fought
in committee rooms before the forces were in the field. It was the
struggle for position. Roosevelt was to be Republican candidate for
governor, and was sure of election. The fight came over the minor
offices. Our New York form of ballot practically forces a man to
vote for a “straight” ticket, and half a dozen independents put up a
complete ticket with Roosevelt at the head of it. Their purpose was to
prevent the Republicans from using Roosevelt’s military popularity to
sweep into office a lot of henchmen. Within ten days the Republican
henchmen all over the State were taken with convulsions. Every crank
of the Machine trembled. It turned its awful power upon Roosevelt and
ordered him to get off the Independent ticket. He obeyed and protected
the henchmen. The episode illustrates the practical power of a few
independents who can act quickly. The panic in the Republican camp
was entirely justified. If three tickets had remained in the field
with Roosevelt at the head of two of them, thousands of Democrats and
thousands of Republicans would have voted for the Reform ticket. The
Republican ticket would have polled merely the dyed-in-the-wool machine
Republicans.
The rumpus among the Republican heelers--following so slight a cause
as the action of five or six citizens who took the field with a ticket
of their own--resembled the action of a geyser when a cake of soap is
thrown into it--rumbling--followed by terrific vomiting.
A little practical discipline among the reformers is all that is
required to make them formidable,--the discipline of experience, of
acting together, of personal trust. This is to be acquired only in the
field of action.
It is encouraging to find how small a body of men it takes--even at the
present moment--to upset the calculations of the politicians. The force
that made the Republicans afraid did not lie in the parcel of men who
threw in the soap. It came from the great public. The episode showed
that the Republicans were afraid to appeal to the country. They knew
that their cabal was almost as much hated as Tammany Hall.
There is always great difficulty in this world as to who shall bell the
cat; but conventions of mice do not further the matter. The way to do
it is for a parcel of mice to take their political lives in their hands
and proceed to do it.
* * * * *
The real meaning of all these movements will not be perceived till
their work has been done. As history, the cause and course of them will
be so plain that a word will suffice to explain them. In the light
of history it will be clear that the improvement in the personnel of
our public life was due to the demands of the public--expressed in
citizen’s movements. We have already reached a point where neither
party dares appeal to the public--as they did ten years ago--on purely
party grounds. Roosevelt and Van Wyck both claimed to be men superior
to the average partisan. The advance of political thought has already
made the dullest man perceive the Machine within his own party, and
every day spreads the news that there is only a single machine in all
our politics. The destruction of this machine will not be like the
destruction of the monasteries by Henry VIII., but it will consist in
the substitution of new timber for old in the parties themselves.
Any one who looks for an expulsion of Tammany Hall like the expulsion
of the Moors from Spain, will be disappointed. There will always be a
Tammany Hall. But it will be run by respectable men, who will look back
with wonder and disgust upon this period, and who will give the public
an honest administration because the public has demanded it.
II
BETWEEN ELECTIONS
An election is like a flash of lightning at midnight. You get an
instantaneous photograph of what every man is doing. You see his real
relation toward his government. But an election happens only once a
year. Government goes on day and night.
It is hard breaking down the popular fallacy that there is such a
thing as “politics,” governed by peculiar conditions, which must be
understood and respected; that the whole thing is a mystic avocation,
run as a trade by high priests and low priests, and is remote from
our daily life. Our system of party government has been developed
with the aim of keeping the control in the hands of professionals.
Technicalities have been multiplied, and the rules of the game
have become more and more complex. There exists, consequently, an
unformulated belief that the corruption of politics is something by
itself. Yet there probably never was a civilization where the mesh
of all powers and interests was so close. It is like the interlocking
of roots in a swamp. Such density and cohesion were never seen in any
epoch, such a mat and tangle of personalities, where every man is tied
up with the fibres of every other. If you take an axe or a saw, and
cut a clean piece out of it anywhere, you will maim every member of
society. How idle, then, even to think of politics as a subject by
itself, or of the corruptions of the times as localized!
Politics gives what the chemists call a “mirror,” and shows the
ingredients in the average man’s composition. But you must take your
mind off politics if you want to understand America. You must take up
the lives of individuals and follow them out, as they play against each
other in counterpoint. As soon as you do this you will not be able to
determine where politics begins and where it stops. It is all politics:
it is all social intercourse: it is all business. Any square foot of
this soil will give you the whole fauna and flora of the land. Where
will you put in your wedge of reform? There is not a cranny anywhere.
The mass is like crude copper ore that cannot be blasted. It blows out
the charge.
We think that political agitation must show political results. This is
like trying to alter the shape of a shadow without touching its object.
The hope is not only mistaken, it is absurd. The results to be obtained
from reform movements cannot show in the political field till they have
passed through the social world.
“But, after all, what you want is votes, is it not?” “It would be
so encouraging to see virtue win, that everybody would vote for you
thereafter. Why don’t you manage it somehow?” This sort of talk is the
best record of incompetence which corruption has imprinted. Enlighten
this class and you have saved the Republic. Why, my friend, you are so
lost, you are so much a mere product of tyranny that you do not know
what a vote is. True, we want votes, but the votes we want must be cast
spontaneously. We do not want them so badly as to buy them. A vote is
only important because it is an opinion. Even a dictator cannot force
opinions upon his subjects by six months of rule; and yet the complaint
is that decency gets few votes after a year of effort by a handful of
radicals who are despised by the community. We only enter the field of
politics because we can there get a hearing. The candidates in reform
movements are tools. They are like crowbars that break open the mind of
the age. They cannot be dodged, concealed, or laughed away. Every one
is aroused from his lethargy by seeing a real man walk on the scene,
amid all the stage properties and marionettes of conventional politics.
“No fair!” the people cry. They do not vote for him, of course, but
they talk about the portent with a vigor no mere doctrine could call
forth, and the discussion blossoms at a later date into a new public
spirit, a new and genuine demand for better things.
It is apparent that between the initial political activity of reformers
and their ultimate political accomplishments, there must intervene
the real agitation, the part that does the work, which goes on in the
brains and souls of individual men, and which can only be observed in
social life, in manners and conversation.
Now let us take up the steps by which, in practical life, the reaction
is set going. Enter the nearest coterie of radicals and listen to
the quarrel. Reformers proverbially disagree, and ‘their sects mince
themselves almost to atoms.’ With us the quarrel always arises over the
same point. “Can we afford, under these particular circumstances, to
tell the exact truth?” I have never known a reform movement in which
this discussion did not rage from start to finish, nor have I known one
where any other point was involved. You are a citizens’ committee. The
parties offer to give you half a loaf. Well and good. But this is not
their main object. They want you to call it a whole loaf. They want to
dissipate your agitation by getting you to tell the public that you are
satisfied. What they hate is the standard. The war between you and them
is a spiritual game of chess. They must get you to say they are right.
It is their only means of retaining their power.
Thus the apple of discord falls into the Reform camp. Half its members
take the bait. In New York City our politics have been so picturesque,
the pleas of the politician so shallow, the lies demanded from the
reformers so obvious, that the eternal principles of the situation have
been revealed in their elemental simplicity. It is just because the
impulse towards better things carries no material content--we do not
want any particular thing, but we want an improvement in everything--it
is just because the whole movement is purely moral, that the same
questions always arise.
We ought not to grieve over the discussion, over the heart-burn and
heated argument that start from a knot of radicals and run through the
community, setting men against each other. The quarrel in the executive
committee of this reform body is the initiative of much wholesome life.
They are no more responsible for it, they can no more avoid it, the
community can no more advance to higher standards before they have had
it, than a child can skate before it can walk.
The executive committee is discussing the schools. In consequence of
a recent agitation, the politicians have put up a candidate who will
give new plumbing, even if he does steal the books, and the question
is whether the School Association shall indorse this candidate. If it
does, he wins. If it does not, both plumbing and books are likely to
remain the prey of the other party, and the Lord knows how bad that is.
The fight rages in the committee, and some sincere old gentleman is
prophesying typhoid.
The practical question is: “Do you want good plumbing, or do you want
the truth?” You cannot have both this year. If the association goes
out and tells the public exactly what it knows, it will get itself
laughed at, insult the candidate, and elect his opponent. If it tells
the truth, it might as well run a candidate of its own as a protest
and an advertisement of that truth. It can buy good plumbing with a
lie, and the old gentleman thinks it ought to do so. The reformers are
going to endorse the candidate, and upon their heads will be visited
his theft of the books. They have sold out the little public confidence
they held. Had they stood out for another year, under the practical
régime which they had already endured for twenty, and had they devoted
themselves to augmenting the public interest in the school question,
both parties would have offered them plumbing and books to allay the
excitement. The parties might, perhaps, have relaxed their grip on the
whole school system rather than meet the issue.
But the Association does not understand this. It does not, as yet,
clearly know its own mind. All this procedure, this going forward and
back, is necessary. The community must pass through these experiences
before it discovers that the shortest road to good schools is truth.
A few men learn by each turn of the wheel, and these men tend to
consolidate. They become a sort of school of political thought. They
see that they do not care a whit more about the schools than they do
about the parks; that the school agitation is a handy way to make the
citizens take notice of maladministration in all departments; that
the parties may be left to reform themselves, and to choose the most
telling bid for popular favor; that the parties must do this and will
do this, in so far as the public demands it, and will not do it under
any other circumstances.
It is the very greatest folly in the world for an agitator to be
content with a partial success. It destroys his cause. He fades
instantly. You cannot see him. He is become part of the corrupt
and contented public. His business is to make others demand good
administration. He must never reap, but always sow. Let him leave the
reaping to others. There will be many of them, and their material
accomplishments will be the same whether he endorses them or not. If
by chance some party, some administration gives him one hundred per
cent of what he demands, let him acknowledge it handsomely; but he need
not thank them. They did it because they had to, or because their
conscience compelled them. In neither case was it done for him.
In other words, reform is an idea that must be taken up as a whole. You
do not want any specific thing. You use every issue as a symbol. Let
us give up the hope of finding any simpler way out of it. Let us take
up the burden at its heaviest end, and acknowledge that nothing but an
increase of personal force in every American can change our politics.
It is curious that this course, which is the shortest cut to the
millennium, should be met with the reproach that it puts off victory.
This is entirely due to a defect in the imagination of people who are
dealing with an unfamiliar subject. We have to learn its principles.
We know that what we really want is all of virtue; but it seems so
unreasonable to claim this, that we try to buy it piecemeal,--item, a
schoolhouse, item, four parks; and with each gain comes a sacrifice of
principle, disintegration, discouragement. Fools, if you had asked for
all, you would have had this and more. We are defeated by compromise
because, no matter how much we may deceive ourselves into thinking that
good government is an aggregate of laws and parks, it is not true.
Good government is the outcome of private virtue, and virtue is one
thing,--a unit, a force, a mode of motion. It cannot pass through a
non-conductor of casuistry at any point. Compromise is loss: first,
because it stops the movement, and kills energy; second, because it
encourages the illusion that the wooden schoolhouse is good government.
As against this, you have the fact that some hundreds of school
children do get housed six months before they would have been housed
otherwise. But this is like cashing a draft for a thousand pounds with
a dish of oatmeal.
We have, perhaps, followed in the wake of some little Reform movement,
and it has left us with an insight into the relation between private
opinion and public occurrences. We have really found out two things:
first, that in order to have better government, the talk and private
intelligence upon which it rests must be going forward all the time;
and second, that the individual conscience, intelligence, or private
will is always set free by the same process,--to wit, by the telling
of truth. The identity between public and private life reveals itself
the instant a man adopts the plan of indiscriminate truthtelling. He
unmasks batteries and discloses wires at every dinner-party; he sees
practical politics in every law office, and social influence in every
convention; and wherever he is, he suddenly finds himself, by his own
will or against it, a centre of forces. Let him blurt out his opinion.
Instantly there follows a little flash of reality. The shams drop,
and the lines of human influence, the vital currents of energy, are
disclosed. The only difference between a reform movement, so-called,
and the private act of any man who desires to better conditions, is
that the private man sets one drawing-room in a ferment by speaking his
mind or by cutting his friend, and the agitator sets ten thousand in a
ferment by attacking the age.
As a practical matter, the conduct of politics depends upon the
dinner-table talk of men who are not in politics at all. Government is
carried on from moment to moment by the people. The executive is a mere
hand and arm. For instance, there is a public excitement about Civil
Service Reform. A law is passed and is being evaded. If the governor
is to set it up again, he must be sustained by the public. They must
follow and understand the situation or the official is helpless. But do
we sustain him? We do not. We are half-hearted. To lend power to his
hand we shall have to be strong men. If we now stood ready to denounce
him for himself falling short by the breadth of a hair of his whole
duty, our support, when we gave it, would be worth having. But we are
starchless, and deserve a starchless service.
What did you find out at the last meeting of the Library Committee? You
found out that Commissioner Hopkins’s nephew was in the piano business;
hence the commissioner’s views on the music question. Repeat it to the
first man you meet in the street, and bring it up at the next meeting
of the committee. You did not think you had much influence in town
politics, and hardly knew how to step in. Yet the town seems to have
no time for any other subject than your attack on the commissioner.
From this point on you begin to understand conditions. Every man in
town reveals his real character, and his real relation to the town
wickedness and to the universe by the way he treats you. You are
beginning to get near to something real and something interesting.
There is no one in the United States, no matter how small a town he
lives in, or how inconspicuous he or she is, who does not have three
invitations a week to enter practical politics by such a door as this.
It makes no difference whether he regard himself as a scientific man
studying phenomena, or a saint purifying society; he will become both.
There is no way to study sociology but this. The books give no hint
of what the science is like. They are written by men who do not know
the world, but who go about gleaning information instead of trying
experiments.
The first discovery we make is that the worst enemy of good government
is not our ignorant foreign voter, but our educated domestic railroad
president, our prominent business man, our leading lawyer. If there is
any truth in the optimistic belief that our standards are now going
up, we shall soon see proofs of it in our homes. We shall not note
our increase of virtue so much by seeing more crooks in Sing Sing, as
by seeing fewer of them in the drawing-rooms. You can acquire more
knowledge of American politics by attacking, in open talk, a political
lawyer of social standing, than you can in a year of study. These
backstair men are in every Bar Association and every Reform Club.
They are the agents who supervise the details of corruption. They run
between the capitalist, the boss, and the public official. They know
as fact what every one else knows as inference. They are the priestly
class of commerce, and correspond to the intriguing ecclesiastics in
periods of church ascendency. Some want money, some office, some mere
power, others want social prominence; and their art is to play off
interest against interest and advance themselves.
As the president of a social club I have a power that I can use against
my party boss or for him. If he can count upon me to serve him at
need, it is a gain to him to have me establish myself as a reformer.
The most dependable of these confidence men (for they betray nobody,
and are universally used and trusted) can amass money and stand in
the forefront of social life; and now and then one of them is made an
archbishop or a foreign minister. They are, indeed, the figure-heads
of the age, the essence of all the wickedness and degradation of our
times. So long as such men enjoy public confidence we shall remain as
we are. They must be deposed in the public mind.
And yet these gentlemen are the weakest point in the serried ranks
of iniquity. They are weak because they have social ambition, and
the place to reach them is in their clubs. They are the best possible
object lessons, because everybody knows them. Social punishment is the
one cruel reality, the one terrible weapon, the one judgment against
which lawyers cannot protect a man. It is as silent as theft, and it
raises the cry of “Stop thief!” like a burglar alarm.
The general cowardice of this age covers itself with the illusion of
charity, and asks, in the name of Christ, that no one’s feelings be
hurt. But there is not in the New Testament any hint that hypocrites
are to be treated with charity. This class is so intrenched on all
sides that the enthusiasts cannot touch them. Their elbows are
interlocked; they sit cheek by jowl with virtue. They are rich; they
possess the earth. How shall we strike them? Very easily. They are so
soft with feeding on politic lies that they drop dead if you give them
a dose of ridicule in a drawing-room. Denunciation is well enough,
but laughter is the true ratsbane for hypocrites. If you set off a
few jests, the air is changed. The men themselves cannot laugh or be
laughed at; for nature’s revenge has given them masks for faces. You
may see a whole room full of them crack with pain because they cannot
laugh. They are angry, and do not speak.
Everybody in America is soft, and hates conflict. The cure for this,
both in politics and social life, is the same,--hardihood. Give them
raw truth. They think they will die. Their friends call you a murderer.
Four thousand ladies and eighty bank directors brought vinegar and
brown paper to Low when he was attacked, and Roosevelt posed as a
martyr because it was said, up and down, that he acted the part of
a selfish politician. What humbug! How is it that all these things
grow on the same root,--fraud, cowardice, formality, sentimentalism,
and a lack of humor? Why do people become so solemn when they are
making a deal, and so angry when they are defending it? The righteous
indignation expended in protecting Roosevelt would have founded a
church.
The whole problem of better government is a question of how to get
people to stop simpering and saying “After you” to cant. A is an
aristocrat. B is a boss. C is a candidate. D is a distiller. E is an
excellent citizen. They dine. Gloomy silence would be more respectable
than this chipper concern that all shall go well. Is not this
politics? Yes, and the very essence of it. Is not the exposure of it
practical reform? How easily the arrow goes in! A does not think you
should confound him with B, nor E with C. Each is a reformer when he
looks to the right, and a scamp as seen from the left. What is their
fault? Collusion. “But A means so well.” They all mean well. Let us not
confound the gradations of their virtue; but can we call any one an
honest man who knowingly consorts with thieves? This they all do. Let
us declare it. Their resentment at finding themselves classed together
drives the wedge into the clique.
Remember, too, that there is no such thing as abstract truth. You must
talk facts, you must name names, you must impute motives. You must say
what is in your mind. It is the only means you have of cutting yourself
free from the body of this death. Innuendo will not do. Nobody minds
innuendo. We live and breathe nothing else. If you are not strong
enough to face the issue in private life, do not dream that you can
do anything for public affairs. This, of course, means fight, not
to-morrow, but now. It is only in the course of conflict that any one
can come to understand the system, the habit of thought, the mental
condition, out of which all our evils arise. The first difficulty is
to see the evils clearly; and when we do see them it is like fighting
an atmosphere to contend against them. They are so universal and
omnipresent that you have no terms to name them by. You must burn a
disinfectant.
We have observed, thus far, that no question is ever involved in
practical agitation except truth-telling. So long as a man is trying to
tell the truth, his remarks will contain a margin which other people
will regard as mystifying and irritating exaggeration. It is this very
margin of controversy that does the work. The more accurate he is, the
less he exaggerates, the more he will excite people. It is only by the
true part of what is said that the interest is roused. No explosion
follows a lie.
The awaking of the better feelings of the individual man is not only
the immediate but the ultimate end of all politics. Nor need we be
alarmed at any collateral results. No one has ever succeeded in drawing
any valid distinction between positive and negative educational
work, except this: that in so far as a man is positive himself, he
does positive work. It is necessary to destroy reputations when
they are lies. Peace be to their ashes. But war and fire until they
be ashes. This is positive and constructive work. You cannot state
your case without using popular illustrations, and in clearing the
ground for justice and mercy, some little great man gets shown up as a
make-believe. This is constructive work.
It is impossible to do harm to reform, unless you are taking some
course that tends to put people to sleep. Strangely enough, the great
outcry is made upon occasions when men are refusing to take such a
course. This is due to the hypnotism of self-interest. “Don’t wake us
up!” they cry, “We cannot stand the agony of it;” and the rising energy
with which they speak wakes other sleepers. In the early stages of
any new idea the only advertising it gets is denunciation. This is so
much better than silence, that one may hail it as the dawn. You must
speak till you draw blood. The agitators have always understood this.
Such men as Wendell Phillips were not extravagant. They were practical
men. Their business was to get heard. They used vitriol, but they were
dealing with the hide of the rhinoceros.
If you look at the work of the anti-slavery people by the light
of what they were trying to do, you will find that they had a very
clear understanding of their task. The reason of some of them canted
a little from the strain and stress; but they were so much nearer
being right-minded than their contemporaries that we may claim them as
respectable human beings. They were the rock on which the old politics
split. They were a new force. As soon as they had gathered head enough
to affect political issues, they broke every public man at the North
by forcing him to take sides. There is not a man of the era whom they
did not shatter. Finally their own leaders got into public life, and it
was not till then that the new era began. The same thing is happening
to-day. It is the function of the reformer to crack up any public man
who dodges the issue of corruption, or who tries to ride two horses by
remaining a straight party man and shouting reform. This is no one’s
fault. It is a natural process. It is fate. Some fall on one side of
the line, and some on the other. One gets the office, and the next
loses it; but oblivion yawns for all of them. There is no cassia that
can embalm their deeds; they can do nothing interesting, nothing that
it lies in the power of the human mind to remember. Why is it that
Calhoun’s Speeches are unreadable? He had the earnestness of a prophet
and the strength almost of a Titan; but he was engaged in framing a
philosophy to protect an interest. He was maintaining something that
was not true. It was a fallacy. It was a pretence. It was a house built
on the sands of temporary conditions. Such are the ideas of those
middling good men, who profess honesty in just that degree which will
keep them in office. Honesty beyond this point is, in their philosophy,
incompatible with earthly conditions. These men must exist at present.
They are an organic product of the times; they are samples of
mediocrity. But they have nothing to offer to the curiosity of the next
generation. No, not though their talent was employed in protecting an
Empire--as it is now employed in eking out the supremacy of a disease
in a country whose deeper health is beginning to throw the poison off.
Our public men are confronted with two systems of politics. They
cannot hedge. If the question were suddenly to be lost in a riot,
no doubt a good administrator might win applause, even a Tammany
chief. But we have no riots. We have finished the war with Spain,
and, unless foreign complications shall set in, we are about to sit
down with the politicians over our domestic issue--theft. Are you for
theft or against it? You can’t be both; and your conversation, the
views you hold and express to your friends, are the test. It is only
because politics affect or reflect these views that politics have
any importance at all. Your agents--Croker, Hanna--are serving you
faithfully now. Nothing else is to be heard at the clubs but the sound
of little hammers riveting abuse.
* * * * *
There is another side to this shield that calls not for scorn but for
pity. Have you ever been in need of money? Almost every man who enters
our society joins it as a young man in need of money. His instincts are
unsullied, his intellect is fresh and strong, but he must live. How
comes it that the country is full of maimed human beings, of cynics
and feeble good men, and outside of this no form of life except the
diabolical intelligence of pure business?
How to make yourself needed,--it is the sycophant’s problem; and why
should we expect a young American to act differently from a young
Spaniard at the Court of Philip the Second? He must get on. He goes
into a law office, and if he is offended at its dishonest practices
he cannot speak. He soon accepts them. Thereafter he cannot see them.
He goes into a newspaper office, the same; a banker’s, a merchant’s,
a dry-goods’ shop. What has happened to these fellows at the end of
three years, that their minds seem to be drying up? I have seen many
men I knew in college grow more and more uninteresting from year to
year. Is there something in trade that desiccates and flattens out,
that turns men into dried leaves at the age of forty? Certainly there
is. It is not due to trade, but to intensity of self-seeking, combined
with narrowness of occupation. If I had to make my way at the court of
Queen Elizabeth, I should need more kinds of wits and more knowledge of
human nature than in the New York button trade. No doubt I should be a
preoccupied, cringing, and odious sort of person at a feudal festivity;
but I should be a fascinating man of genius compared to John H.
Painter, who at the age of thirty is making $15,000 a year by keeping
his mouth shut and attending to business. Put a pressure gauge into
Painter, and measure the business tension at New York in 1900. He is
passing his youth in a trance over a game of skill, and thereby earning
the respect and admiration of all men. Do not blame him. The great
current of business force that passes through the port of New York has
touched him, and he is rigid. There are hundreds of these fellows, and
they make us think of the well-meaning young man who has to support his
family, and who must compete against them for the confidence of his
business patrons. Our standard of commercial honesty is set by that
current. It is entirely the result of the competition that comes from
everybody’s wanting to do the same thing.
“But,” you say, “we are here dealing with a natural force. If you like,
it withers character, and preoccupies one part of a man for so long
that the rest of him becomes numb. He is hard and queer. He cannot
write because he cannot think; he cannot draw because he cannot think;
he cannot enter real politics because he cannot think. He is all the
wretch you depict him, but we must have him. Such are men.” This is the
biggest folly in the world, and shows as deep an intellectual injury
in the mind that thinks it as self-seeking can inflict. Business has
destroyed the very knowledge in us of all other natural forces except
business.
What shall we do to diminish this awful pressure that makes politics a
hell, and wrings out our manhood, till (you will find) the Americans
condone the death of their brothers and fathers who perished in home
camps during the Spanish war, because it all happened in the cause
of trade, it was business thrift, done by smart men in pursuance of
self-interest? You ask what you can do to diminish the tension of
selfishness, which is as cruel as superstition, and which is not in one
place, but everywhere in the United States. It runs a hot iron over
young intellect, and crushes character in the bud. It is blindness,
palsy, and hip disease. You can hardly find a man who has not got some
form of it. There is no newspaper which does not show signs of it. You
can hardly find a man who does not proclaim it to be the elixir of
life, the vade-mecum of civilization. What can you do? Why, you can
oppose it with other natural forces.
You yourself cannot turn Niagara; but there is not a town in America
where one single man cannot make his force felt against the whole
torrent. He takes a stand on a practical matter. He takes action
against some abuse. What does this accomplish? Everything. How many
people are there in your town? Well, every one of them gets a thrill
that strikes deeper than any sermon he ever heard. He may howl, but
he hears. The grocer’s boy, for the first time in his life, believes
that the whole outfit of morality has any place in the practical
world. Every class contributes its comment. Next year a new element
comes forward in politics, as if the franchise had been extended.
Remember this: you cannot, though you owned the world, do any good in
it except by devising new ways of manifesting the fact that you felt
in a particular way. It is the personal influence of example that is
the power. Nothing else counts. You can do harm by other methods, but
not good. This influence is a natural force, and works like steam
power. Why all this commotion over your protest? If you accuse the
mayor of being a thief, why does he not reply, in the words of modern
philosophy, “Of course I’m a thief, I’m made that way”? Instead of
that he resents it, and there ensues a discussion that takes people’s
attention off of trade, and qualifies the atmosphere of the place. You
have appreciably relieved the tension and checked the plague.
This whole subject must be looked at as a crusade in the cause of
humanity. You are making it easier for every young man in town to earn
his livelihood without paying out his soul and conscience. You cannot
help any one man. You are forced into helping them all at once. Every
time a man asserts himself he cuts a cord that is strangling somebody.
The first time that independent candidates for local office were run in
New York City, strong men cried in the street for rage. The supremacy
of commerce had been affronted. New York, in all that makes life worth
living, is a new city since the reform movements began to break up the
torpor of serfdom.
You asked how to fight force. It must be fought with force, and not
with arguments. Indeed, it is easier to start a reform and carry it
through, than it is to explain either why or how it is done. You can
only understand this after you have been three times ridiculed as a
reformer; and then you will begin to see that throughout the community,
running through every one, there are currents of beneficent power that
accomplish changes, sometimes visible, sometimes hard to see; that this
power is in its nature quite as strong, quite as real and reliable,
as that Wall Street current,--terrible forces both of them, forever
operative and struggling and contending together as they surge and
swell through the people. It is the sight of that power for good that
you need. I cannot give it to you. You must sink your own shaft for
it. It is this beneficent current passing from man to man that makes
the unity of all efforts for public betterment. You have a movement
and an excitement over bad water, and it leaves you with kindergartens
in your schools. It is this current that turns your remark at the club
(which every one repeated in order to injure you) into a piece of
encouragement to the banker’s clerk, who could not have made it himself
except at the cost of his livelihood. It is this current--not only the
fear of it, but the presence of it--in the heart of your merchants that
leaves them at your mercy. Cast anything into this current and it goes
everywhere, like aniline dye put into a reservoir; it tinges the whole
local life in twenty-four hours. It is to this current that all appeals
are made. All party platforms, all resolutions, all lies are dedicated
to it; all literature lives by it. The head of power is near and easy
if you strike directly for it.
There is an opinion abroad that good politics requires that every
man should give his whole time to politics. This is another of the
superstitions disseminated by the politicians who want us to go to
their primaries, and accepted by people so ignorant of life that they
believe that the temperature depends upon the thermometer.
Why, you are running those primaries now. If you were different, they
would become different. You need never go near them. Go into that camp
where your instinct leads you. The improvement in politics will not
be marked by any cyclonic overturn. There will always be two parties
competing for your vote. It takes no more time to vote for a good man
than for a bad man. There will be no more men in public life then
than now. There will be no overt change in conditions. A few leaders
will stand for the new forces. It is true that it requires a general
increase of interest on the part of every one, in order that these men
shall be found. Your personal duty is to support them in private and
public. That is all. The extent to which you yourself become involved
in public affairs depends upon chances with which you need not concern
yourself. Only try to understand what is happening under your eyes.
Every time you see a group of men advancing some cause that seems
sensible, and being denounced on all hands as “self-appointed,” see if
it was not something in yourself, after all, that appointed those men.
As we grow old, what have we to rely on as a touchstone for the times?
You once had your own causes and enthusiasms, but you cannot understand
these new ones. You had your certificate from the Almighty, but these
fellows are “self-appointed.” What you wanted was clear, but these men
want something unattainable, something that society, as you know it,
cannot supply. Calm yourself, my friend; perhaps they bring it.
Has the great Philosophy of Evolution done nothing for the mind of man,
that new developments, as they arrive, are received with the same stony
solemnity, are greeted with the same phrases as ever? How can you have
the ingenuousness to argue soberly against me, supplying me, by every
word you say, with new illustrations, new hope, new fuel? Until I heard
you repeat word by word the prayer-book of crumbling conservatism, I
was not sure I was right. You have placed the great seal of the world
upon new truth. Thus should it be received.
The radicals are really always saying the same thing. They do not
change; everybody else changes. They are accused of the most
incompatible crimes, of egoism and a mania for power, indifference to
the fate of their own cause, fanaticism, triviality, want of humor,
buffoonery and irreverence. But they sound a certain note. Hence the
great practical power of consistent radicals. To all appearance nobody
follows them, yet every one believes them. They hold a tuning-fork and
sound A, and everybody knows it really is A, though the time-honored
pitch is G flat. The community cannot get that A out of its head.
Nothing can prevent an upward tendency in the popular tone so long as
the real A is kept sounding. Every now and then the whole town strikes
it for a week, and all the bells ring, and then all sinks to suppressed
discord and denial.
The reason why we have not, of late years, had strong consistent
centres of influence, focuses of steady political power, has been that
the community has not developed men who could hold the note. It was
only when the note made a temporary concord with some heavy political
scheme that the reform leaders could hear it themselves. For the rest
of the time it threw the whole civilization out of tune. The terrible
clash of interests drowned it. The reformers themselves lost it, and
wandered up and down, guessing.
It is imagined that nature goes by jumps, and that a whole community
can suddenly sing in tune, after it has been caterwauling and murdering
the scale for twenty years. The truth is, we ought to thank God
when any man or body of men make the discovery that there is such a
thing as absolute pitch, or absolute honesty, or absolute personal
and intellectual integrity. A few years of this spirit will identify
certain men with the fundamental idea that truth is stronger than
consequences, and these men will become the most serious force and
the only truly political force in their community. Their ambition is
illimitable, for you cannot set bounds to personal influence. But it is
an ambition that cannot be abused. A departure from their own course
will ruin any one of them in a night, and undo twenty years of service.
It would be natural that such sets of men should arise all over
the country, men who “wanted” nothing, and should reveal the
inverse position of the Boss System; a set of moral bosses with no
organizations, no politics; men thrown into prominence by the operation
of all the forces of human nature now suppressed, and the suppression
of those now operative. It is obvious that one such man will suffice
for a town. In the competition of character, one man will be naturally
fixed upon, whom his competitors will be the first to honor; and
upon him will be condensed the public feeling, the confidence of the
community. If the extreme case do not arise, nevertheless it is certain
that the tendencies toward a destruction of the present system, will
reveal themselves as a tendency making for the weight of personal
character in practical politics.
Reform politics is, after all, a simple thing. It demands no great
attainments. You can play the game in the dark. A child can understand
it. There are no subtleties nor obscurities, no higher analysis or
mystery of any sort. If you want a compass at any moment in the midst
of some difficult situation, you have only to say to yourself, “Life
is larger than this little imbroglio. I shall follow my instinct.” As
you say this, your compass swings true. You may be surprised to find
what course it points to. But what it tells you to do will be practical
agitation.
III
THE MASSES
Let us examine current beliefs on popular education, and then
thereafter let us look very closely at the work done among the poor,
and see upon what lines it has been found possible to establish
influence.
Why is it that if you go down to the Bowery and set up a kindergarten
or give a course of lectures on the Duties of Citizenship, every one
commends you; whereas if you go into some abandoned district where a
Tammany thug is running for the State Assembly against a Republican
heeler, and if you put an honest man in the field against them both,
your friends call you a fool, and say that your reform consists of mere
negation?
Who asks to see the results upon the public welfare of a night school
in astronomy? Yet, if you get ten mechanics to labor for six months
with the fire of enthusiasm in them, building up a radical club, and as
a result, one hundred and fifty men cast for the first time in their
lives a vote that represents the heart and conscience of each, your
intelligent friends ask, “What have you done? You are howling against
the moon.”
Why is it that if you are a grocer and refuse to sand your sugar, you
are called honest? Yet, if a young politician takes this course, it is
supposed that life is not long enough for the world to discover his
value; he is a visionary. In the sugar trade, the man insisted upon
dealing with the community as a whole. He was not trying to sell sugar
to a club, or to benefit some district. He dealt with the public. Now,
if a politician deals directly with the public, we condemn him because
we cannot see the empire of confidence he is building up. The reason we
do not see it is entirely due to historical causes. We have had little
experience recently in the utility of large appeals. We forget their
power. Yet we are not without examples. Grover Cleveland dealt directly
with the people on a great scale. He established a personal relation
that was stronger than party bonds. This made him President, preserved
his character and gave reality to politics. It was a bit of education
to every man in the United States to see what riff-raff our political
arks were made of: a man laid his hand on the end of one of them and
tore off the roof.
We are rather more familiar with the power of public confidence as
seen in times of revolution. In the year of the Lexow investigation
the people of New York City believed that Dr. Parkhurst and John Goff
were in earnest. There was a period of a few weeks when Goff exercised
the powers of a dictator. The Police Commissioners had threatened to
discipline a subordinate who had testified before Goff’s committee.
He subpoenaed them all the next morning, and he browbeat them like
school-boys. They went back humbled. The revelations of the summer
had awakened the spirit of revolt in the masses of the people, and it
expressed itself directly as power. The machinery of government was
not in abeyance, but it was seen to be a mere vehicle. It could be
made to work justice. Here were two men, Goff and Parkhurst, rendered
all-powerful by the existence of popular confidence. The state of mind
of the community was unusual, and the indignation soon subsided; but it
subsided to a new level, and the abuses and inhumanity of Boss tyranny
have never since been so severe in New York.
Our people have seen several volcanic eruptions of this sort, and
therefore they believe in them. They believe in the moral power of the
community, but are afraid it can only act by convulsion. They think
that some new principle comes into play at such times, something which
is not a constant factor in daily government. On the other hand, we
have all been trained to respect plodding methods in common education,
and we know that much can be done by kindergartens, boys’ clubs, and
propaganda to change the standards of the community and make men trust
virtue. We believe in the boys’ club, and we believe in the earthquake;
we forget that the same principle underlies them both. When some one
applies this principle to the field of political education that lies
between them, we are cynical because we have no experience.
Apart from the lack of experience that prevents people from seeing the
use of this practical activity, there are two distressing elements that
make men not want to see it. In the first place, even if you work in
the Bowery and a friend votes in Harlem, you are apt to be hitting his
interests and prejudices. And in the second place your conduct is a
horrid appeal. If this work is useful, he ought to be doing it. He had
hoped that nothing could be done.
The real distinction between this particular sort of work and other
philanthropy is, that other philanthropy is preparatory drill; this
is war. The other is feeding, training, and preaching; this is
practice. Now, you may have your license to preach all you please in
the vineyard, but if you touch the soil with the spade, you find the
ground is pre-empted; you are fighting a railroad. And this condition
is openly recognized in cities where the evil forces are completely
dominant.
In lecturing before the University Extension in Pennsylvania, you
are not allowed to talk politics. It is against the policy of the
philanthropists who run the institution, and who are run by the
railroad. The situation in Philadelphia is merely illustrative of
the distinction between philanthropy and political reform, which is
always ready to become apparent. Of course, so long as the railroad
distributes the philanthropy, there will result nothing but tyranny.
The Roman Emperors gave shows to amuse the people, and we give them
talks on Botticelli and magic-lantern pictures of the Nile. There are,
then, real reasons why our people are slow to acknowledge the utility
of militant political reform, and why they clutch at any handle against
it.
But we have much more to learn from the philanthropists by a study of
what they have done than by dwelling on their shortcomings. They have
labored while the political reformers have slept; and after many trials
and many failures they have found certain working principles.
It was they who discovered that we cannot, as human nature is
constituted, give strength to any one except by helping the whole man
to develop at once. We must give him a chance to grow. The workers
among the poor have long ago seen the futility of any effort except
that of raising the general standards of living. They have established
Settlements, where the relation between the settlers and the
surrounding population is as natural as family life and as perennial
as Tammany Hall. After ten years of experiment this has been done in
many places. If you will go to one of these places and study exactly
what has happened in the line of benefit to the people, you will see
that it has resulted _wholly_ from personal influence,--that is
to say, from the effect of character upon character. “Two years ago we
established a boys’ club, and soon afterwards a kindergarten. The boys
returned one day, and out of jealousy smashed everything belonging to
the kindergarten, and piled the rubbish in the middle of the room.
Last week a barrel of fruit was sent here for the sick and weakly, and
we left the barrel open with a card on the outside to that effect. You
could not get the boys to touch the fruit. Now, if you ask me what
system or what part of the system has caused the change in these boys,
I don’t know.”
This is reform politics, but unless you and I go there and make a place
for these boys in practical politics, they will find waiting for them
nothing but the caucus and the job. They will relapse and forget. It is
throwing effort into the sea to train the young if you stop there. The
test comes when the scaffoldings of early life are taken down. Each man
meets the world alone. The tragedies of character occur at this period.
We must make a camp and standing ground for grown men. So far as the
hope of political purity goes, there are acres of this city that are in
a worse condition than health was in before the era of hospitals. Fly
over them as the crow flies, and you cannot find a centre of downright
antagonism to evil. The population does not know that such a thing
exists; and yet, if you propose to go there and set up a fight against
both parties,--that is to say, a fight against wickedness,--you are
told by patriots and doctors of divinity, “Don’t do it unless you can
win. You will disgust people with reform.”
It is awful and at the same time ludicrous to hear an educated person
maintain this doctrine and in the same breath mourn over the corruption
of the masses. The man throws his own dark shadow over them and bewails
their want of light. He doubts the power of personal influence; and yet
there is absolutely no other force for good in the world, and never has
been. Let us stick to facts. Take individual cases of improvement and
see what power has been at work. You will find that you disclose behind
any personal improvement, not a ballot law or an organization, but a
human being.
The movement for political reform goes into the Bowery in the wake of
the philanthropists. We go there knowing something about practical
politics. We know, for instance, that the Bowery is the geographical
name for a district which is really governed by the same forces as
Fifth Avenue. To think that the politics of the Bowery are controlled
by the Bowery is about as sensible as to believe that the politics of
Irkutsk are controlled at Irkutsk. We have got, first, to disclose the
machinery of evil and then to fight it wherever we find it, even though
it lead us into churches. Nothing is needed in any Tammany club on the
Bowery that is not needed ten times as much in the Union League Club on
Fifth Avenue--personal self-sacrifice for principle in a cause which is
apparently hopeless. Unless you go there displaying that, you are not
needed.
Our intercourse with the laboring man is a great teacher to ourselves.
That is its main use. It brings out, as nothing else can, the magnitude
and perfection of the system, whose visible top and little flag we
can always see, but whose dimensions and ramifications nothing but
experiment can reveal; philosophy could not guess it.
Here is a laborer on the street railroad. In order to get work he must
show a ticket from the party boss. It is his passport from the Czar,
countersigned by the proper official; otherwise he gets no job. Here
is a young notary whom you employ to carry about the certificate that
puts an independent candidate in nomination. You try to get him to sign
the thing himself and join your club. It is no use asking. His brother
did it once and lost his place; so close is the scrutiny, so rapid
the punishment. Examine the retail grocer, or the tobacconist, or
the cobbler; go into particulars with him, and you will find that his
unwillingness to join your movement does not spring so directly from
his inability to see the point of it, as from fear of the direct and
immediate consequences to himself.
We wanted to elevate the masses, but it turns out, as the
philanthropists discerned long ago, that there are no masses in
America, there are no masses in New York City. We can discover only
individuals, who are each controlled by individual interests, by
various and subtle considerations. These men are in chains to other
men, who often live in other parts of the city.
The attorneys and merchants, the business world in fact, is found to
be in league with abuse. The man who signs the laborer’s license to
work reports twice a day to a big contractor who is director in a bank
whose president owns the opera house and endowed the sailors’ home.
He built the yacht club, is vestryman in the biggest church, and is
revered by all men. The title-deeds and registry books of all visible
wealth, show the names of his intimate friends. All we can do in the
way of weakening the chains is to expose them; this cruelty is largely
ignorance. The beneficiaries must be made to see the sources of their
wealth. It is pre-occupation with business, not coldness of heart, that
conceals the conditions. The American business man is a warm-hearted
being. He does not even care for money, but for the game of business.
As matters now stand in America, we see this condition,--that it
is for the immediate interest of the dominant class, namely, the
politico-financial class, to keep the people as selfish as possible. We
have examined the subtle strains of influence and prejudice by which
this commercial interest has been extended, until, as a practical
matter, it is almost impossible for a man to get word to the laboring
classes that there exists such a thing as political morality. Some
professional philanthropist always stands ready to prevent the signal
of honesty from being raised; some set of Sunday citizens interposes to
stop the unwise, inexpedient, foolhardy attempt to be independent of
rascality.
And when you do succeed in reaching the mechanic, what can you do for
him? Tell him to be a man, and strike off the shackles that bind him.
Here we are, as helpless before the poor as before the rich, facing
both of them with the same query, “Can you not see that your own
concession, call it poverty, or call it poverty of will, is one element
of this oppression?”
The difference between the poor and the financial classes is one of
spiritual complexity. The promoters are well-to-do because their minds
have been able to grasp and utilize the complex forces made up of the
minds of their simpler fellow-beings. And this astuteness leaves them
less open to unselfish emotions than the laboring man. His nature is
more intact. He is a more emotional and instinctive being. It is for
this reason that moral reforms have come from the lower strata of
society. The people have as much to lose as the bankers, but they are
more ready to lose it.
The head of moral feeling in the community has got to grow strong
enough to force the financier to take his clutch off the laboring
man, before you can reach the laboring man. And yet labor itself will
contribute more than its share towards this head of moral feeling;
and therefore you must go among the laboring classes with your ideas
and your propaganda. But beware lest you give him a stone for bread.
You can do no more for a man because you call yourself a “politician”
than if you were a mere philanthropist. A man’s standards of political
thought are but a small fraction of his general standards, and unless
your sense of truth is as sharp as a sword you had better not come near
the laboring man.
The point here made is--and it is of great importance--that we candidly
acknowledge at every instant the nature of our undertaking and the
nature of our power, for in so far as we mistake them we weaken our
practical utility.
It is not as the agent of any institution that you are here, but as
the agent of conscience at the dictation of personal feeling. Do you
need proof that you yourself draw all your power from sheer moral
influence? Note what you do when you start your club. You go to the
nearest well-to-do person and ask for money for rent. He gives it to
you out of his fund of general benevolence. To whom do you really
want to distribute this benevolence? To every one. You feel that by
passing it on through a group and series of boys and young men you can
benefit the whole country. You use them as a mere vehicle. You know
that you can only help them by getting them to help others. Your appeal
for clients then goes out to the whole district. Your club puts you
in communication with every man in it. In teaching your club or in
exhorting any mortal to good behavior, what method, what stimulus, do
you use? Whether you know it or not, you are really drawing support
from every one who is following the same principle, all over the city,
all over the country, all over the world. Do you not ceaselessly appeal
to the examples of Washington and Lincoln, to the books and conduct of
men whose aims were your aims? Or take your own case. Why do you occupy
yourself with this thing? This activity satisfies your demands upon
life; nothing else does. You are the creature of a thousand influences,
and if you begin to trace them you find that you are fulfilling the
will of Toynbee, of John Stuart Mill, of Kant. You are a disciple of
Tolstoi. You were inspired by William Lloyd Garrison. It is they, as
much as you, who are doing this work. It is they who formulated the
ideas and impressed them upon you. Your great friends are the founders
of religions. Examine the actual persons who give you practical help.
You will find Moses, you will find Christ behind them. What you are
using is the world’s fund of unselfishness. It is necessary to employ
the whole of it in order to accomplish anything, however small. As a
practical matter, every one does employ the whole of it every time he
even thinks of reform.
Now, just as we can trace the sources of our power in the great
currents of human feeling that flow down to us out of the past; so we
can foresee the accomplishments of that power in enlarging the lives
of men who come after us. We are sinking the foundations of a new
politics. You cannot always see every stone, but it has gone to its
place. It is impossible to take a stand for what you think is a true
theory without thereby becoming an integral factor for good in every
man who hears of it. It is impossible to be that factor without taking
that stand.
What is the nature of the good you can do to the laboring man? His
mind analyzes you in a flash. If he is influenced by you, you may be
sure that it is by something in you that you had not intended to give
him. After the man has seen you, he has been moved by you; but how?
Consult your own remembrance. What incident of character impressed you
most when you were a child? Do you remember any act, any expression
or gesture or anecdote or speech, that had a lasting influence upon
you? Now I ask you this: Was it done for you? Were you the designed
beneficiary of it? Was it not rather the silent part of some one
else’s conduct, a thing you were perhaps not meant to see at all? And
this was no accident. This is the natural history of influence; it
passes unconsciously from life to life.
We must take the world as we find it. We must deal with human nature
according to the laws of human nature. Our politics are at present
so artificial that the average man thinks that the name “politics”
prevents the well established and familiar principles of human nature
from being operative. But he is wrong. Man has never yet succeeded in
inventing any system that could evade them or affect them in the least.
All the political organization of reform is already in existence, and
needs only strengthening and developing. It is all in use, and every
one understands its use and knows its headquarters and its agencies.
It is all individual character and courage, and with the growth of
character and courage it will become more defined and visible every
day.
IV
LITERATURE
There are feelings and views about life, there are conviction and
insight, which come from thinking at a high rate of speed, and vanish
when the machinery moves slowly and the blood ebbs. The world not only
accepts the intensity of the writer, but demands it. Nevertheless,
the world has an imperfect knowledge as to where this intensity comes
from, how it is produced, or what relation it bears to ugliness and
falsehood. “What a pleasure it must be to you,” said Rothschild to
Heine, “to be able to turn off those little songs!”
In our ordinary moods we regard the conclusions of the poets as both
true and untrue,--true to feeling, untrue to fact; true as intimations
of the next world or of some lost world; untrue here, because detached
from those portions of society that are perennially visible. Most men
have a duplicate philosophy which enables them to love the arts and
the wit of mankind, at the same time that they conveniently despise
them. Life is ugly and necessary; art is beautiful and impossible. “The
farther you go from the facts of life, the nearer you get to poetry.
The practical problem is to keep them in separate spheres, and to
enjoy both.” The hypothesis of a duplicity in the universe explains
everything, and staves off all claims and questionings.
Such are the convictions of the average cultivated man. His back is
broken, but he lives in the two halves comfortably enough. He has to be
protected at his weak spot, of course, and that spot is the present;
ten years from now, to-morrow, yesterday, the day of judgment, the
State of Pennsylvania,--all these you are welcome to. Every form of
idealism appeals to him, so long as it does not ask him to budge out of
his armchair. “Aha,” he says, “I understand this. It takes its place in
the realm of the Imagination.”
This man does not know, and has no means of knowing, that good books
are only written by men whose backs are not broken, and whose vital
energy circulates through their entire system in one sweep. They have
a unitary and not a duplicate philosophy. The present is their strong
point. The actualities of life are their passion. They lay a bold hand
upon everything within their reach, for they see it with new sight.
The glitter of the past makes us think of literature as embodied in
books; but to understand literature we must fix our minds on authors,
not on books. The men who write--what makes them write well or ill?
What are the conditions that breed poetry, or music, or architecture?
The current beliefs about art and letters are fatalistic. It is
supposed that poets and artists crop up now and then, and that nothing
can stop them; they need no aid, they conquer circumstances. I do not
believe it. We see no analogy to it in nature. Among the plants and the
fishes we see nothing but a wholesale and incredible destruction of
germs on all sides. It seems a miracle that any seed should fall upon
good ground, and be sheltered till it come to the flower. Why should
the percentage of germs that come to maturity be greater with genius
than it is with the eggs of the sturgeon? The enemies of each are
numerous. If it were not for the fecundity of nature, we should have
none of either of them. And how is it that the great man always happens
to be young at the very moment when some events are going forward that
ripen his powers; so that he grows up with his time, and does something
that is comprehensible to all time?
The answer is, that all eras are sown thick with the seeds of genius,
which for the most part die, but in a favoring age mature to greatness.
Must we resort to a theory of special creation to explain the great
talents of the world? And even this would not explain our own welcome
and our own comprehension of them when they come. If it were not for
the undeveloped powers, the seeds of genius, in ourselves, Plato and
Bach would be meaningless, and Christ would have died in vain.
It must be that thousands of good intellects perish annually. The men
do not die, but their powers wither, or rather never mature. Art, like
everything else, represents an escape, a survival. In any age that
lacks it, or is weak in it, we may look about for the enginery by which
it is crushed. In looking into a past age we are put to inference and
conjecture. We see the mark of fetters upon the Byzantine soul, and we
begin dredging the dark waters of history for a metaphysical cause. We
cannot walk into a Byzantine shop and watch the apprentice at work.
But in our own time we can see the whole process in action. We can
study our modern Inquisitions at leisure, and note every mark that is
made upon a soul that is passing through them.
It does not involve any indignity to the pretensions of literature if
we walk into that great bazaar, modern journalism, and see what is
going on there behind the counters. Here is a factory of popular art.
It is not the whole of letters; but it has an influence on the whole
of letters. The press fills the consciousness of the people. A modern
community breathes through its press. Journalism, to be sure, is a
region of letters, where all the factors for truth are at a special
and peculiar discount. Its attention is given to near and ugly things,
to mean quarrels, business interests, and special ends. Every country
shows up badly here. The hypocrisy of the press is the worst thing in
England. It is the worst exhibition of England’s worst fault. The press
of France gives you France at her weakest. The press of America gives
you America at her cheapest. Perhaps the study of journalism in any
country would illustrate the peculiar vices of that country; and it is
fair to remember this in examining our own press. But examine it we
must, for it is important.
The subject includes more than the daily newspapers. Those ephemeral
sheets that flutter from the table into the waste-paper basket, which
are something more than mere newspapers and less than magazines, and
the magazines themselves, which are more than budgets of gossip and
less than books, make up a perpetual rain of paper and ink. Thousands
of people are engaged in writing them, and millions in reading them.
This whole species of literature is typical of the age; let us see how
it is conducted.
A journal is a meeting-place between the forces of intellect and of
commerce. The men who become editors always bear some relation to the
intellectual interests of the country. They make money, but they make
it by understanding the minds of people who are not taking money, but
thought, from the exchanges that the editors set up. A magazine or a
newspaper is a shop. Each is an experiment and represents a new focus,
a new ratio between commerce and intellect. Even trade journals have
columns devoted to general information and jokes. The one thing a
journal must have in order to be a journal is circulation. It must be
carried into people’s houses, and this is brought about by an impulse
in the buyer. The buyer has many opinions and modes of thought that
he does not draw from the journal, and he is always ready to drop a
journal that offends him. An editor is thus constantly forced to choose
between affronting his public and placating his public. Now, whatever
arguments may be given for his taking one course or the other, it
remains clear that in so far as an editor is not publishing what he
himself thinks of interest for its own sake, he is encouraging in the
public something else besides intellect. He is subserving financial,
political, or religious bias, or, it may be, popular whim. He is, to
this extent at least, the custodian and protector of prejudice.
The thrift of an editor-owner, who is building up the circulation of
a paper, tends to keep him conservative. Repetition is safer than
innovation. An especially strong temptation is spread before the
American editor in the shape of an enormous reading public, made up
of people who have a common-school education, and who resemble each
other very closely in their traits of mind. There is money to be made
by any one who discerns a new way of reinforcing any prejudice of the
American people.
It has come about very naturally during the last thirty years, that
journalism has been developed in America as one of the branches in the
science of catering to the masses on a gigantic scale. The different
kinds of conservatism have been banked, consolidated, and, as it were,
marshalled under the banners of as many journals. Money and energy
have been expended in collecting these vast audiences, and sleepless
vigilance is needed to keep them together.
The great investments in the good will of millions are nursed by
editors who live by their talents, and who in another age would have
been intellectual men. The highest type of editor now extant in America
will as frankly regret his own obligation to cater to mediocrity, as
the business man will regret his obligation to pay blackmail, or as
the citizen will regret his obligation to vote for one of the parties.
“There is nothing else to do. I am dealing with the money of others.
There are not enough intelligent people to count.” He serves the times.
The influence thus exerted by the public (through the editor) upon the
writer tends to modify the writer and make him resemble the public. It
is a spiritual pressure exerted by the majority in favor of conformity.
This exists in all countries, but is peculiarly severe in countries and
ages where the majority is made up of individuals very similar to each
other. The tyranny of a uniform population always makes itself felt.
If any man doubt the hide-bound character of our journals to-day, let
him try this experiment. Let him write down what he thinks upon any
matter, write a story of any length, a poem, a prayer, a speech. Let
him assume, as he writes it, that it cannot be published, and let him
satisfy his individual taste in the subject, size, mood, and tenor of
the whole composition. Then let him begin his peregrinations to find in
which one of the ten thousand journals of America there is a place for
his ideas as they stand. We have more journals than any other country.
The whole field of ideas has been covered; every vehicle of opinion has
its policy, its methods, its precedents. A hundred will receive him if
he shaves this, pads that, cuts it in half; but not one of them will
trust him as he stands, “Good, but eccentric,” “Good, but too long,”
“Good, but new.”
Let us follow the steps of this withering influence. A young
illustrator does an etching that he likes. He is told to reduce it to
the conventional standard. This is easy, but what is happening in the
process? He blurs the fine edges of vision, not only on the plate,
but in his own mind. The real injury to intellect is not done in the
editorial sanctum. It is done in the mind of the writer who himself
attempts to cater to the prejudice of others. A man rewrites a scene
in a story to please a public. In order to do this he is obliged to
forget what his story was about. He is talking by rote; he is making
an imitation. Does this seem a small thing? Let any one do it once and
see where it leads him. The attitude of the whole human being towards
his whole life is changed by the experience. Do it twice, and you can
hardly shake off the practice. Write and publish six editorials for the
“Universalist,” and then sit down to write one not in the style of the
“Universalist.” You will find it, practically, an impossibility.
The notable lack in our literature is this: the prickles and
irregularities of personal feeling have been pumice-stoned away. It is
too smooth. There is an absence of individuality, of private opinion.
This is the same lack that curses our politics,--the absence of
private opinion.
The sacrifice in political life is honesty, in literary life is
intellect; but the closer you examine honesty and intellect the more
clearly they appear to be the same thing. Suppose that a judge, in
order to please a boss, awards Parson Jones’ cow to Deacon Brown;
does he boldly admit this even to himself? Never. He writes an able
opinion in which he befogs his intelligence, and convinces himself
that he has arrived at his award by logical steps. In like manner,
the revising editor who reads with the eyes of the farmer’s daughter
begins to lose his own. He is extinguishing some sparks of instructive
reality which would offend--and benefit--the farmer’s daughter; and he
is obliterating a part of his own mind with every stroke of his blue
pencil. He is devitalizing literature by erasing personality. He does
this in the money interests of a syndicate; but the debasing effect
upon character is the same as if it were done at the dictate of the
German Emperor. The harm done in either case is intellectual.
Take another example. A reporter writes up a public meeting, but colors
it with the creed of his journal. Can he do this acceptably without
abjuring his own senses? He is competing with men whose every energy is
bent on seeing the occasion as the newspaper wishes it seen. Consider
the immense difficulty of telling the truth on the witness stand, and
judge whether good reporting is easy. The newspaper trade, as now
conducted, is prostitution. It mows down the boys as they come from the
colleges. It defaces the very desire for truth, and leaves them without
a principle to set a clock by. They grow to disbelieve in the reality
of ideas. But these are our future literati, our poets and essayists,
our historians and publicists.
The experts who sit in the offices of the journals of the country
have so long used their minds as commercial instruments, that it
never occurs to them to publish or not publish anything, according to
their personal views. They do not know that every time they subserve
prejudice they are ruining intellect. If there were an editor who had
any suspicion of the way the world is put together, he would respect
talent as he respects honor. It would be impossible for him to make his
living by this traffic. If he knew what he was doing, he would prefer
penury.
These men, then, have not the least idea of the function they fulfil.
No more has the agent of the Insurance Company who corrupts a
legislature. The difference in degree between the two iniquities is
enormous, because one belongs to that region in the scale of morality
which is completely understood, and the other does not. We do not
excuse the insurance agent; we will not allow him to plead ignorance.
He commits a penal offence. We will not allow selfishness to trade upon
selfishness and steal from the public in this form. But what law can
protect the public interest in the higher faculties? What statute can
enforce artistic truth?
We actually forbid a man by statute to sell his vote, because a vote is
understood to be an opinion, a thing dependent on rational and moral
considerations. You cannot buy and sell it without turning it into
something else. The exercise of that infinitesimal fraction of public
power represented by one man’s vote is hedged about with penalties;
because the logic of practical government has forced us to see its
importance. But the harm done to a community by the sale of a vote
does not follow by virtue of the statute, but by virtue of a law of
influence of which the statute is the recognition. The same law governs
the sale of any opinion, whether it be conveyed in a book review or in
a political speech, in a picture of life and manners, a poem, a novel,
or an etching. There is no department of life in which you can lie
for private gain without doing harm. The grosser forms of it give us
the key to the subtler ones, and the jail becomes the symbol of that
condition into which the violation of truth will shut any mind.
So far as any man comes directly in contact with the agencies of
organized literature, let him remember that his mind is at stake.
They can change you, but you cannot change them, except by changing
the public they reflect. The faculties of man are as strong as steel
if properly used, but they are like the down on a peach if improperly
used. What shall a man take in exchange for his soul? No man has the
privilege upon this earth of being more than one person. In this matter
of expression, it is the last ten per cent of accuracy that saves or
sells you. Talent evaporates as easily as a delegate holds his tongue
or a lawyer smiles to a rich man; and the injury is irremediable. Let
a man not alter a line or cut a paragraph at the suggestion of an
editor. Those are the very words that are valuable. “Ah,” you say, “but
I need criticism.” Then go to a critic. Consult the man who is farthest
away from this influence, some one who cannot read the magazines, some
one who does not have to read them. Your public, when you get one,
will qualify the general public; but you must reach it as a whole man.
The writer’s course is easy compared to that of the reform politician,
because printing is cheap. He will get heard immediately. He covers
the whole of the United States while the other is canvassing a ward.
Literary self-assertion is as much needed as any of the virtue we pray
for in politics. A resonant and unvexed independence makes a man’s
words stir the fibres in other men; and it matters little whether you
label his words literature or politics.
The difficulty in any revolt against custom, the struggle a man
has in getting his mind free from the cobwebs of restraint, always
turns out to involve financial distress; and this holds true of the
writer’s attempt to override the senseless restrictions of the press.
The magazines pay handsomely, and pay at once. A writer must earn
his bread; a man must support his family. We accept this necessity
with such a hearty concurrence, and the necessity itself becomes so
sacred, that it seems to imply an answer to all ethical and artistic
questions. We almost think that nature will connive at malpractice
done in so good a cause as the support of a family. The subject must
be looked at more narrowly. The spur of poverty is popularly regarded
not only as an excuse for all bad work, but as a prerequisite to all
good work. There is a misconception in this wholesale appropriation of
a partial truth. The economic laws are valuable and suggestive, but
they are founded on the belief that a man will pursue his own business
interests exclusively. This is never entirely true even in trade, and
the doctrines of the economists become more and more misleading when
applied to fields of life where the money motive becomes incidental.
The law of supply and demand does not govern the production of sonnets.
Let us lay aside theory and observe the effects of want upon the artist
and his work. As a stimulus to the whole man, a prod to get him into
action and keep him active, the spur of poverty is a blessing. But if
it enter into the detail of his attention, while he is at work, it is
damnation.
A man at work is like a string that is vibrating. Touch it with a
feather and it is numb. A singer will sing flat if he sees a friend
in the audience. Even a trained and cold-blooded lawyer who is trying
a case, will not be at his best if he is watched by some one whom he
wants to impress.
The artist is the easiest of all men to upset. He is dealing with
subtle and fluid things,--memories, allusions, associations. It is all
gossamer and sunlight when he begins. It is to be gossamer and sunlight
when he is finished. But in the interim it is bricks and mortar, rubble
and white lead. And the writer--I do not say that he must be more free
from cares than the next man--but he must not let into the mint and
forge of his thought some immaterial and petty fact about himself,
for this will make him self-conscious. Consider how ingenuous, how
unexpected, how natural is good conversation. At one moment you have
nothing to say, at the next a vista of ideas has opened. They come
crowding in, and the telling of them reveals new vistas. It is the same
with the writer. In the process of writing the story is made. There is
really nothing to say or do in the world until you make your start, and
then the significance begins to steam out of the materials. And here,
in the act and heat of creation, to have the cold fear thrust in, “I
cannot use that phrase because the editor will think it too strong,” is
enough to chill the brain of Rabelais. Human nature cannot stand such
handling. Do this to a man and you break his spirit. He becomes tame,
calculating, and ingenious. His powers are frozen.
It is impossible not to see in contemporary journalism a
slaughter-house for mind. Here we have a great whale that browses on
the young and eats them by thousands. This is the seamy side of popular
education. The low level of the class at the dame’s school keeps the
bright boys back and makes dunces of them.
We have been dealing in all this matter with one of the deepest facts
of life, to wit, the influence that society at large has in cutting
down and narrowing the development of the individual. The newspaper
business displays the whole operation very vividly; but we may see the
same thing happening in the other walks of life. There arrives a time
in the career of most men when their powers become fixed. Men seem
to expand to definite shapes, like those Japanese cuttings that open
out into flowers and plants when you drop them into warm water. After
reaching his saturation point each man fills his niche in society and
changes little. He goes on doing whatever he was engaged upon at the
time he touched his limit.
We almost believe that every man has his predestinate size and shape,
and that some obscure law of growth arrests one man at thirty and
the next at forty years of age. This is partly true; but the law is
not obscure. It is not because the men stop growing that they repeat
themselves, but they stop growing because they repeat themselves. They
cease to experiment; they cease to search. The lawyer adopts routine
methods; the painter follows up his success with an imitation of his
success; the writer finds a recipe for style or plot. Every one saves
himself the trouble of re-examining the contents of his own mind.
He has the best possible reason for doing this. The public will not
pay for his experiments as well as it will for his routine work. But
the laws of nature are deaf to his reasons. Research is the price of
intellectual growth. If you face the problems of life freshly and
squarely each morning, you march. If you accept any solution as good
enough, you drop.
For there is no finality and ending place to intellect. Examine any
bit of politics, any law-case, or domestic complication, until you
understand your own reasons for feeling as you do about it. Then
write the matter down carefully and conclusively, and you will find
that you have done no more than restate the problem in a new form.
The more complete your exposition, the more loudly it calls for new
solution. The masterly analysis of Tolstoi, his accurate explanations,
his diagnosis and dissection of human life, leave us with a picture of
society that for unsolved mystery competes with the original. But the
point lies here. You must lay bare your whole soul in the statement you
make. You must resolutely set down everything that touches the matter.
Until you do this, the question refuses to assume its next shape. You
cannot flinch and qualify in your first book, and speak plainly in your
second.
It is the act of utterance that draws out the powers in a man and makes
him a master of his own mind. Without the actual experience of writing
Lohengrin, Wagner could not have discovered Parsifal. The works of
men who are great enough to get their whole thought uttered at each
deliverance, form a progression like the deductions of a mathematician.
These men are never satisfied with a past accomplishment. Their eyes
are on questions that beckon to them from the horizon. Their faculties
are replenished with new energy because they seek. They are driving
their ploughs through a sea of thought, intent, unresting, resourceful,
creative. They are discoverers, and just to the extent that lesser men
are worth anything they are discoverers too.
Beauty and elevation flash from the currents set up by intense
speculation. Beauty is not the aim of the writer. His aim must be
truth. But beauty and elevation shine out of him while he is on the
quest. His mind is on the problem; and as he unravels it and displays
it, he communicates his own spirit, as it were incidentally, as it were
unwittingly, and this is the part that goes out from him and does his
work in the world.
V
PRINCIPLES
Speech is a very small part of human intercourse. Indeed speech is
often not connected with the real currents of intercourse. A comic
actor has made you happy before he has uttered a word. This is by the
responsive vibration of your apparatus to his. The external speech
and gesture help the transfer of power, and that is all they do. The
communion, upon whatever plane of being it takes place, is a contagion,
and goes forward by leaps and darts, like the action of frost on a
window-pane. An angry friend comes into my room, and before he has
uttered a word I am in a blaze of anger. A baby too young to speak does
some naughty thing. I remonstrate with him in a rational way. Perhaps
I repeat to him Kant’s maxim from the Critique of Practical Reason.
The child understands at once and is grateful for the treatment. Now,
observe this, that if I said the same thing to a grown man in the same
tone, it would be to the tone and not to the argument that he would
respond.
The exchange of energy between man and man is so rapid that language
becomes a bystander. It is like the passage of the electrical
current,--we receive an impression or a message, or twenty messages at
once. All this is the result of suggestion and inference. No strange
phenomenon is here alluded to. The situation is the normal and constant
situation whenever two human beings meet. The only mystery about it is
that our senses should be so much more acute than we knew. Ask a man
to dinner and talk to him about the Suez Canal, and the next morning
your wife will be apt to give a truer account of him than you can give.
She has been knitting in the corner and thinking about the best place
to buy children’s shoes, but she knows which coils in her brain have
been played upon by the brain of the stranger. The reason your wife
knows that your Suez friend is no saint, is that she feels that certain
strings of the benevolent harp that is sounding in herself are not
being reinforced. There are dead notes in him.
The sensitiveness of children is so common a thing that we forget its
explanation. It is just because the child cannot follow the argument,
that he is free from the illusion that the argument is the main point.
The lobes of his brain get a shock and respond to it ingenuously.
These facts have been neglected by philosophers, because the facts defy
formulation. You cannot get them into a statement. They are life. But
in the practical, workaday world, they have always been understood.
Men of action owe their success to the habit of using their minds and
bodies in a direct way. Men in every profession rely upon the accuracy
of direct impressions. The great doctor, or the great general, or the
great business man uses the whole of his sensibilities in each act of
reading a man. There is no other way to read him correctly. People
whose brains are preoccupied with formulated knowledge are not apt to
be as good judges of character as spontaneous persons. Their thoughts
are on logic. They follow what is said. A very small fraction of them
is alive. They are like chess-players who are not listening to the
opera.
The answer to any question in psychology always lies under our hand. We
have only to ask what the normal man does. It will be found that he
uses his faculties according to their nature, though it may be, he is
embryonic and inarticulate. We speak of great men as “simple,” because
they retain a sensitiveness to immediate impressions very common
in uneducated persons and in children. Their thought subserves the
direct currents of suggestion. Their instincts rule them. Their minds
serve them. They are great because of this power to read the thoughts
of others through the pores of their skin, and answer blindfold to
unuttered appeals, whether of weakness or of strength. To do this means
intellect, whether in Napoleon or Gladstone. Every pianist and public
speaker, every actor and singer knows that his whole art consists in
getting his intellectual apparatus into focus, so that the vibrations
of his formulated thought shall correspond and fall in with the direct
and spontaneous vibrations of his audience. This is truth, this is the
discovery of law, this is art.
Men are profound and complicated creatures, and when any one of them
expresses the laws of his construction and reveals his own natural
history, he is called a genius. But he is a genius solely because
he is comprehensible, and others say of him, “I am like that.” His
suggestions carry. Their extreme subtlety baffles analysis, just as
the suggestions of real life baffle analysis. The miracle of reality
in art is due to refinement of suggestion. We cannot follow its steps
or say how it is done. We see only the idea. Shakespeare gives you all
the meaning, and none of the means. This is first-class artificial
communication. It almost competes with the every-day, commonplace,
familiar transfer of the incommunicable essence of life from man to man.
Our present problem is, how to influence people for their good. It is
clear that when you and another man meet, the personal equation is the
controlling thing. If you are more high-minded than he, the way to
influence him is to stick to your own beliefs; for they alone can keep
you high-minded. They alone can make you vibrate. It is they and not
you that will do the work. There you stand, and there he stands; and
you can only qualify him by the ideas that control you. It makes no
difference whether you are an emperor and he a peasant, or you a Good
Government Club man and he a merchant, the same forces are at work.
Shift your ground, and he feels the shift; you are encouraging him to
be shifty, like yourself. What can you do for him except to follow
your conscience? But this is equally true of every meeting of all men
everywhere. You address a labor meeting and talk about the Philippines.
You meet the Turkish Ambassador and talk about Kipling’s poems.
You talk to your son about kite-flying. To each of these contacts
with another’s mind you bring the same power. If you start with the
psychical value of 6, no matter what you do, a cross-section of your
whole activity in the world will at any instant of time read 6. It may
be that a page of ciphering cannot express the formula, but it will
mean 6.
The immense amount of thought that man has given, during the last few
thousand years, to his social arrangements and his destiny, has filled
our minds with tangled formulas, and has attached our affection to
particular matters. The pomp of preambles and the stress of language
stun us. There is so much of organized society. There are so many good
ends. If there were only one man in the world, we know that it would
be impossible to do good to him by suggesting evil. We know that if we
gave him a hint that contained both good and evil, the good would do
him good, and the evil, evil. If we were bent on nothing but benefit,
we should have to confine ourselves to suggestions of unalloyed
virtue. But the world is such a tangle of personalities, that we do not
hesitate to mix a little evil in the good we do, hoping that the evil
will not be operative. We half believe that there may, somewhere in the
community, be a hitch in the multiplication table that brings out good
for evil. Liberty and democracy are thought to be such worthy ends,
that we must obtain them by any means and all means, even by hiring
mercenaries. Can we wonder that in the past, men’s minds were staggered
by the importance of a papacy or of some dynastic succession? To-day
everybody jumps to shield vice because it is called republicanism or
democracy. The irony of history could go no further.
Let us consider our local reforms by the light of these views. Civil
service laws, ballot-reform, elections, taxation,--dissolve all these
into acts and impulses, and see whether the laws of human influence do
not make a short cut through them all, like X-rays. No matter what I
talk about to the Emperor, I am really conveying to him by suggestion
a tendency to become as good or as bad a man as I myself. Chinese
Gordon turned a dynamo of personal force upon the Orientals, and
they understood him. He was talking religion, and he gave it to them
straight. Now all religion, as everybody knows, is purely a matter of
suggestion. But so is all other intercourse. We want honesty. Well,
what makes people honest? Honesty. Does anything else spread the
influence of honesty, except honesty? Are we here facing a scientific
fact? Is this a law of the transference of human energy, or is it not?
If it is, you cannot beat it. You cannot imagine any situation where
your own total force, in favor of honesty, will consist of anything
else than honesty. Of course you may put a case where honesty will
result in somebody’s death. If in that case, you want his life, why,
lie. But what you will get will be his life, not the spread of honesty.
If the event is chronicled, you will find it used as a means of
justifying dishonesty forever afterwards.
We do not want any of these reforms except as a means of stimulating
character, and it is a law of nature that character can only be
stimulated directly. Sincerity is the only need, courage the
all-sufficing virtue. We can dump them into every occasion, and
sleep sound at night. What interest can any rational man have in our
municipal issues except as a grindstone on which to whet the people’s
moral sense? How is it possible to deceive ourselves into looking at
our own political activity from any other standpoint than this? You are
to make a speech at Cooper Union on ballot reform. Somebody says, “Do
not mention the liquor question or you will lose votes.” But some phase
of that question seems to you pertinent and important. Shall you omit
and submit? That would be an odd way of stimulating character. The need
of the times is not ballot laws but sincerity. The maximum that any man
can do toward the spread of sincerity is to display it himself.
All the virtues spread themselves by direct propagation; and the vices
likewise. Our people are deficient in righteous indignation. When you
see a man righteously indignant, rejoice; this is the seed, this the
force. Nothing else will arouse courage but courage, faith but faith.
You see, for instance, a knot of men who are really indignant at the
injustice of the times. But their indignation seems to you a danger;
because it is likely to defeat some candidate, some pet measure of
yours. You wish to allay it. You wish yourself well rid of this
sacred indignation; it is inconvenient. Open your eyes to the light of
science. Here is a spark of that fire with which everybody ought to
be filled. All your scheming was only for the purpose of getting this
fire. Then foment it.
Virtue then, is a mode of motion, or it is an attitude of mind in a
human organism, which enables that organism to transmit virtue to
others. But vice is also a mere attitude of mind by which vice is
transmitted. We know less about the natural history of vice than we do
of dipsomania and consumption; but we know this much, that the vices
are co-related, and breed one another _in transitu_; the tendency
being towards lighter forms in the later catchers. Avoid another’s
guilty side, and you reinforce it; sympathize with it, and you catch
his disease, or some disease. I have held hands with my friend (who
is in the wrong) over his family troubles, and it has given me the
distemper for a week. The German actor, Devrient, went mad while
studying the inmates of asylums, as a preparation to playing King
Lear. It was not the living in asylums that drove him mad, but his
sympathetic attitude toward the disease. This exposed him. Why is it
we commend the man whose antagonism to crooked work is so great that
he shows a tempter the door before he has finished his proposition?
Parleying is not only a danger; it is the beginning of the trouble
itself.
It is very difficult and very odious offending people, by forcing them
to see in which direction our wheels really go round; and yet the
alternative is to have our machinery forced back to a standstill. We
are interlocked with other people and cannot break free. We are held in
place by fate, and played upon against our will. When you see cruelty
going on before you, you are put to the alternative of interposing
to stop it, or of losing your sensibility. There is a law of growth
here involved. It is inexorable. You are at the mercy of it. You wish
yourself elsewhere, but you are here; you are a mere illustration of
pitiless and undying force. The part you take, may run through a fit of
bad temper or malice. It may turn to covetousness or conceit, who can
tell? Some poison has entered your eye because you looked negligently
upon corruption. It will cost you some part of your sense of smell.
“Use or lose,” says Nature when she gives us capacities. What you
condone, you support; what you neglect, you confirm.
It is true that your confirmation and support are managed through the
mechanism of blindness. All the evil in the world receives its chief
support from the people whose only connection with it is that they do
not fight it, nor see it. Where politics is involved scarcely a man in
America knows the difference between right and wrong. Our mayoralty
contest five years ago would have left Lot searching for a man who
could tell black from white. It was a clear moral issue. But it arose
in politics: we could not see it. That we have intellectual cataract is
entirely due to the habit of condoning embezzlement. It is a secondary
form of the endemic theft, caught by the by-standers. The best people
in town had it. If they had been lifting their hands against theft
during the preceding years, they never would have caught it.
Of course we support all the good in the world, as well as all the
evil; and the ratio in which we do both changes at every moment. It
radiates forth from us, and is read correctly by every baby as he
passes in his perambulator. Close thinking, and fresh observation of
things too familiar to be noticed, bring us to this point.
Now, just as no complexity of institutions affects the transfer of
virtue, so none affects the transfer and propagation of vice. Yesterday
you were all for virtue. You were for leading a revolution against
the bosses, and were ready to work and subscribe and vote. You were
a man with the heart of a man. But to-day you are chop-fallen. “The
thing cannot be done. It is not the year.” The degradation of your
character is seen in your low spirits, and in the jaded and sophistical
commonplaces you pour forth. I know the academical reasons for this
change in you. I can express it in terms of ballot-law and civil
service. But what is it that really has happened?
The power that has struck you was focalized the day before yesterday in
the office of some law-broking politicians; and the direct rays of base
passion have struck straight through stone walls and constitutions,
and, falling upon you, have stopped your wheels. In them it was avarice
and ambition. In you it is doubt. A drowsy inertia overcomes you, a
blindness of the will. That is what has really happened. The rest is
illusion and metaphysical talk. See, now, the real curse of injustice;
it takes away the sight from the eyes, and that in a night.
Is it not perfectly natural that Tammany Hall should be everywhere, at
all tables, in all churches, in all consciences, when these electrical
currents run between man and man and connect them so easily?
I read in the newspaper that a well-known man is at Albany in the
interests of a gas deal. He cannot get his way in the city, and
is putting up a job with the legislature. I see the thing going
through,--a thing utterly cynical, utterly corrupt. No paper will
explain it because it cannot be explained without names; besides, the
names own the papers. Everybody understands it; nobody minds it. Is any
statute here at fault? Will any legislation cure this? If the moral
sensibility of our people should become tensified by twenty per cent
in twenty-four hours, twenty per cent of all our iniquities in every
department would cease in forty-eight hours. Government is carried
on by the lightning of personal suggestion which flashes through the
community from day to day and from moment to moment. Those things are
done which are demanded or are tolerated at the instant they are done.
I read in a newspaper that a syndicate has been formed to light the
city. It is backed by the men who control the city administration,
and they are now blackmailing the existing company to its ruin. Can I
escape the knowledge of this thing? Alas, too easily: I own stock in it.
At first we think the legislature makes the laws, then we see it is
done by a cabal, then by people behind the cabal, finally by the
million bonds of popular prejudice which tie each man up with the times.
Look closely, take some particular man, and consider why it is that
he does not spend his whole time in fighting for virtue. It will
turn out, that in some form or other, he is a beneficiary of these
evils, and has not the energy to fight them. One man depends upon the
_status quo_ for his living, the next is held by affection for his
friends, by the ties of old prejudice, by inertia, by hopelessness.
Which of them is the more deeply injured victim of tyranny,--the active
self-seeker or the listless man, the Tammany boy or the American
gentleman?
Every man bears a direct and discoverable share in the responsibility.
A janitor keeps his place through Tammany influence, a young lawyer
gets business by keeping his mouth shut. Follow out the lines leading
from any man, no matter how obscure he is, and they will lead you to
the ante-chamber where gigantic business has its offices, where the
highest functionaries of commerce and politics meet. The business world
is all one organization. It is a sort of secret society, a great web.
No matter where you touch it, the same spiders come out.
The boss system, then, appears as the visible part of all the private
selfishness in America. It is a great religion of self-interest, with
its hierarchy, its chapels, its propaganda, and its confessors in
every home. You yourself support it. I saw last week, at your table,
a magnate whose business conduct you deplore, and to-day I heard a
young man make the comment, that there was no use fighting the current
so long as social influence could be bought. Do not accuse Tammany
Hall; you yourself have corrupted that young man. So long as you think
you can circumvent the laws of force, you will remain a pillar in the
temple of iniquity.
But look closer still at each of those individuals, and see just what
it is he is giving as the purchase money. One man gives $25,000 to
pay a president’s private debts, and goes as minister to England;
another gives merely his name to indorse a doubtful candidate for the
assembly, and receives prospective good will from the organization.
What is this great market overt where every one can get what he wants?
The syndicate can get the franchises, and the aldermen the cash. No
one is too small to be served, or so great as to require nothing.
Upon what principle is this monstrous bazaar, this clearing-house for
self-interest, conducted? It is as large as the United States--the
transcontinental railroads use it--and so well managed that I can get
my friend a job as the secretary of a reform movement. What is it
that makes this universal shop run so smoothly? It is hooked together
simply on business principles. The price you pay is always the rubbing
of somebody the right way; the thing you get is advancement or
personal comfort of some sort. It has happened, that by the operation
of commercial forces, the whole of America’s seventy million people
have been polarized into self-seekers; and our total condition is
visibly Vanity Fair. You can actually follow the rays of power from
the individual to the boss. All the evil in the world is seen to be
in league. Embezzlement and laziness, selfish ambition and prejudice,
cruelty and timidity here openly play into each other’s hands, support
and console each other. Nay, every atom of vice, every impulse of
malice or cupidity, can be shown up as a tendon or a sinew of the great
organization of selfish forces. It is as if a magic glass had been
superposed upon the continent, and, looking down through it, upon the
motives of men, all complexity vanished, and we saw all the evil forces
pulling one way.
The same thing has always been true in every society; but the names,
powers, superstitions have been so extremely complicated that no one
could follow the laws of interlocking motive, except by inference and
prophetic insight. Take the case of a very selfish man fighting his
way up through society in the reign of Louis XVIII. He meets a Bourbon
influence, an ecclesiastical influence, a Napoleonic influence, a
republican influence. He grapples with every man he meets, using the
hooks of self-interest in that man. The forces at work under Louis
XVIII. were as simple as with us. Only the nomenclature is different,
and more complex. It is easy in America to see the working of one man’s
selfishness upon another’s. Let alone the market overt, it is easy to
trace the subtle social relations, when they are for the bad. It was
easy to follow the effect of your conduct in asking the dishonest
business magnate to dinner, because the young man spoke of it. He was
shocked and injured. But we also found out by the episode that before
you did the thing, you were really a factor for good in his life,
holding up his conscience and his ideals.
The inexpressible subtlety in the mechanism of man makes the
transmission of the force for good as easy as that of the force for
evil. They are of the same character, and very often flow through the
same channels. There is no more mystery in the one case than in the
other.
Consider what is done in the course of any practical movement for
reform. A bad bill is pending at Albany. In order to beat it, a party
of men whose characters are trusted, get on a train, and the whole
State watches them proceed to Albany. This is often enough to defeat
a measure. The good their pilgrimage does, is done then and there
instantly, by example, by suggestion. If, when they get to Albany,
they sell out their cause, the harm they do is done then and there
by example, by suggestion. They make some concession which lessens
friction but suggests Tammany Hall. This is the only part of the
transaction that reaches the great public. Ask the laboring man
and he will give you a digest of the whole episode in a shrug. If a
reform candidate is running on the platform “Thou shalt not steal,”
and the boss desires to corrupt him, the boss asks him to drop in for
a chat. If he goes, every one hears of it the next day, and every one
is a little corrupted himself. A thousand well-meaning men say he did
right. Had he resisted, these same men would have cried “Bravo!” and
thereafter taken a higher view of human nature. It is by a succession
of such minute shocks of good or bad example that communities are
affected. The truth seems to be that our lives are ruled by laws of
influence which are in themselves exceedingly direct. But the operation
of them is concealed from us by our preoccupation over details.
It is impossible to regard these matters in too simple a light. Nothing
is ever involved except the contagious impulse that makes one man yawn
when he sees another man yawn. Both the good and the evil in the world
run upon the winds. Moses’ habit of falling upon his face before the
congregation, and calling God to witness that he could lead them no
longer, was not a political trick done to frighten the people into
submission by the threat of abandoning them. It was a sincere act of
devotion; but it was also the most powerful form of appeal. He did
the act; they followed in it, and thus made him absolute. Lincoln’s
anecdotes and fables consisted of nothing but suggestion. They were
one source of his power. The first thing a tyrant does is to suppress
cartoons. Here we have something that is often sheer pantomime, and yet
it is one of the most effective vehicles in the world. It was the only
thing Platt could not stand. Within two years he has tried to stop it
by legislation.
If you are to reach masses of people in this world, you must do it
by a sign language. Whether your vehicle be commerce, literature, or
politics, you can do nothing but raise signals, and make motions to
the people. In literature this is obvious. The more far-reaching any
truth is, the shorter grow its hieroglyphics. The great truths can
only be given in hints, phrases, and parables. They lie in universal
experience, and any comment belittles them. They are like the magnetic
poles that can only be pointed out with a needle. Take any profound
saying about life, and see if it does not imply short-hand, a sort of
telegraphy as the ordinary means of communication between men. “He
that loseth his life shall save it.” Here we have a poem, a system of
ethics and a psychology. Or take any bit of worldly wisdom, “Money
talks.” Here we have the whole philosophy of materialism. Does any one
imagine that political bargains are reduced to writing? It would be
injurious to the conscience. They are made by the merest hints on all
sides. Every one is left free.
The extreme case of the power of suggestion is seen in the
stock-market, where a rumor that Banker A has dined with Railroad
President B drives values up or down. Cleveland’s Venezuela message
makes a panic. The different parts of the financial world live, from
day to day, in instantaneous and throbbing communication. This is one
side of the popular life. Its thermometer is sensitive, and records one
thousandth of a degree as readily as the political thermometer records
a single degree. But the principle is the same. All the people run the
stock-market, and all the people run politics. There has never been any
difficulty in reaching the whole people with ideas. Even a private man
can do it. But he must act them out.
VI
PRINCIPLES (_continued_).
Suppose a small child steals jam in the pantry. So long as he pretends
that he did not do it, or did not know it was wrong, he suffers a
certain oppression.
You can explain to an intelligent child that if he tells the whole
truth about the thing, the telling will cost him pain and leave him
happy. But you cannot save him the pain. So long as he persists in
lying, some of his faculties lie under an inhibition; the vital
energies flow past them instead of through them. The first shock of a
through passage gives a spasm of pain, and then the child is happy. It
is one of the facts of the world that moral awakening is accompanied by
pain.
The quarrel that the world has with its agitators is that they do
really agitate. People express this by saying that the men are
dangerous or have bad taste. The epithets vary with the age. They are
intended to excite public contempt, and they embody the aversions of
society. In a martial age the reformer is called a molly-coddle; in a
commercial age an incompetent, a disturber of values; in a fanatical
age, a heretic. If an agitator is not reviled, he is a quack.
These epithets are mere figures of speech. What they really express
is suffering caused by the workings of conscience. And so in any
educational movement that runs across the country, there is always a
track of pain turning to happiness. When we get in the path of one of
these things, we find that the division between contending ideas passes
through the individual man. It does not fall between men. The struggle
is always the struggle of forces within an individual. A is trying to
convince B. The struggle in A’s mind is to make the matter clear, in
B’s mind to make the opposite clear. In the course of time one view
prevails; but the struggle continues, for B occupies A’s position and
is now struggling to convince C. It is in this way that a movement
runs through a community. The firing line passes through a series of
individuals, and as they succumb, through them to the next.
If you take any particular case of conflict, you will find that the
man is divided between two courses, one of which is disagreeable
because it involves effort and sacrifice and offence. The other is
agreeable because it involves personal ease or personal advancement.
The two motives in man result from the structure of his brain, whose
operations we are obliged to accept: we cannot amend them; they are the
facts of psychology.
It would seem as if the brain of man were so constituted that at
the moment of its full operation the man himself disappears. His
consciousness becomes wholly occupied with impersonal interests.
Thus, in the process of thought, a man begins to see his own personal
interests threatened. If he continues to think, they must vanish.
This is the struggle between right and wrong. It is really a struggle
between two attitudes of mind. It is the experience we suffer when
the mind is passing from the self-regardant to the non-self-regardant
attitude.
Perhaps the discomfort of doing one’s duty is an inseparable incident
of the storage of energy, and the pleasure of neglecting one’s duty,
an incident of the leakage of energy. When I get up and poke the
fire, because I see it will go out if I don’t, I return to my chair
a more energetic being than I was the moment before. At any rate, our
oscillation between two states of consciousness has preoccupied mankind
from the earliest times, and has given rise to all the dualistic
philosophies. The great fact as to the reality of the struggle is
proved to us, not merely by our own consciousness, but because we can
see the logical results of it everywhere in society.
A community is a collection of palpitating animals. Each of us is one
of them, and each of us receives and transmits millions of impressions
hourly. We get heard. We have our exact weight and force. There is no
difficulty about our power of intercourse. Indeed it is the thing we
cannot get away from. No man walks by himself. Between his feet and
the ground are invisible pedals that play upon, and are played upon by
other men. You cannot live or move except by transmitting influence.
The whole of practical life is made up of contact with the passions of
others. A lawyer or a broker is like an engineer who sits behind his
machine, managing its levers and its stopcocks. A trader, a writer, or
a philanthropist, a laborer or a clergyman, does nothing but open and
shut valves in other people. There is no other way of serving your
fellows; there is no other way of earning your living or of wasting
your substance.
We saw that in politics it was impossible to draw a dividing line
anywhere in that series of men whose joint activity and inactivity held
up what we call the evils of politics. Money interest shaded off into
prejudice, and that into mistaken loyalty, and that into indifference.
The striking truth about the whole series was that it showed different
shades of selfishness, lack of energy, and inability to use the mind
accurately. So also any unselfish or accurate use of his mind by the
laborer or by the journalist was, as we saw, apt to throw him out of
employment.
In politics and in morals, all that we condemn, turns out on inspection
to be mere selfishness. But anything in the world that we dislike,
turns out, on inspection, to be self-regardant effort or avoidance
of effort. Bad art may show the gross selfishness of the pot-boiler,
or the refined laziness of prejudice, or the mere weakness that was
unable to see the world for itself, and has been forced to see it
with some one else’s eyes. It is a makeshift. So of bad carpentry or
bad cooking. There is no such special province in life as morality.
Each man regards that thing as immoral which he sees to be selfish. A
proofreader will show the same indignation over a careless job, that a
musician shows over a weak phrasing.
The unimaginable subtlety of our comprehension enables us to detect
selfishness in arts of whose methods we know nothing; we read it like
large print. To speak accurately, all we get from any communication
is a transcript, an image, a picture of the author’s thought, the jar
of intellect and character. Is it supposed that communication between
men goes forward by ratiocination, or that education is a thing taken
in by linear measurement? Thought cannot creep, but only fly. It
proceeds by the magic of stimulation. A good judge can read a good
brief almost as fast as he can turn the pages. If a thing is well put,
it is almost our own before it is said. Ideas pass into us so quickly
that Plato thought we knew them in a former existence. This is due to
the subtlety of our apprehension. We are not satisfied except by an
appeal so refined that our only sensation is one of being made more
alive. “Rien ne me choque” was Chopin’s highest praise. What wonder,
then, that we resent the self-sufficiency of any inferior mind? The
whole of life is no more than a series of pulsations, and all the books
and Bibles, sign-boards, music-boxes, and telegraph wires are the
machinery by which in one way or another the mind of man touches the
mind of man. The world has been going on for so long that we have many
such devices, and out of the millions that have been made, all but the
very best get discarded as old lumber. These things are the language of
the unselfish force upon the globe. It is much nearer truth to think
of them as a single influence than as multifarious. Their origin and
tendency, their practical utility, the veneration in which they are
held, bind them together and make them one. For the world values the
seer above all men, and has always done so. Nay, it values all men
in proportion as they partake of the character of seers. The Elgin
Marbles and a decision of John Marshall are valued for the same reason.
What we feel in them is a painstaking submission to facts beyond the
author’s control, and to ideas imposed upon him by his vision. So with
Beethoven’s Symphonies, with Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations,”--with
any conceivable output of the human mind of which you approve. You love
them because you say, “These things were not made, they were seen.”
Thus the forces of an unselfish sort upon the globe are cumulative.
The dead heroes fight on forever, and the dead mathematicians expound
forever. It is true that the organization of the selfish forces is
overwhelmingly visible, and that of the unselfish ones invisible.
Napoleon is seen by his contemporaries; Spinoza is not seen. The reason
is simple. The man who wants something must have an office address.
But the man who wants nothing for himself, but spends his whole time
in so using his mind that he himself disappears, lives only as an
influence in the minds of others. He is a song, a theory, a proposition
in algebra. These two conflicting forms of force are then flashed up
and down, forward and back ceaselessly, through and across every social
meeting, through and across society. The novelists and playwrights
deal with this instantaneous interplay of motive; and the time-honored
analysis of self for self on the villain’s side, and sacrifice for
principle on the hero’s side is a true thing. It is a fair abstract of
the world.
You can illustrate in an instant the immediacy of these two hierarchies
of power under which we live and from which we cannot escape. The
selfish ones need not be named; they oppress us. But the unselfish
ones are equally near. If you take any bit of poetry or speech or
writing that you consider great, and examine it, you will find that it
illustrates the logical coherence of all the ideas and feelings that
make you happy; it is a digest of a law of influence. Or conversely,
if you set about to illustrate some experience, and if you can get it
profoundly and accurately stated as what you believe to be the bottom
truth, it will turn under your hands into something familiar. If you
are successful, it will be a kind of poetry.
VII
CONCLUSION
There is force enough in ordinary sunshine to turn all the mills in the
world; and there is beneficent energy enough in any community to make
the people perfectly happy. But it is cramped and deflected, poisoned
by misuse, and turned to hateful ends. The question is how to liberate
energy.
People are fond of thinking the millennium is impossible; but so long
as happiness is dependent on a right use of the faculties, there is
no reason why the millennium should not be reached, and that soon or
unexpectedly. We all know individuals so harmoniously framed that we
say, “If theirs were the common temper of mankind, we should be happy.”
None of the externals of life, about which there is so much buffeting,
control the question. Happiness is in a nutshell. Anybody can have it.
You are happy if you get out of bed on the right side. I can never stop
wondering at the awful simplicity of the principle on which mankind
is constructed. Little Alice in the Looking-Glass could not reach the
porch till she turned her back on it and walked straight into the door.
Renounce the search for happiness and you find the substance. There is
nothing else in the law and the prophets.
We see most men like tee-totums spinning to the left and leading a
dismal life. How shall we get their motive power to spin them to the
right, and make them happy? The practical question is: how to use the
power of sunlight to turn our mills. How can we hold up a prism to
the times that shall disintegrate these rays of complex force, and
then adjust a lens that shall focus the powers of good and make them
turn the wheels of society? The elements are before us, ceaselessly in
motion. πάντα ῥεῖ. The most adamantine institutions are cloud palaces.
There is no stability anywhere; and if you have a steady eye you will
see that the whole fabric is in a flux. Nor are the changes arbitrary.
The formations and re-formations are governed by laws as certain as
those of astronomy. Study the changes and you will find the laws.
Subserve the laws and you can affect the formations. Julius Cæsar did
no more.
The strands of prejudice and passion that bind people together pulsate
with life. All these fellow-citizens are human beings, and there is no
one of them whom we cannot understand, reach, influence. The ordinary
modes of intercourse are at hand. Chief among them you find the great
machinery of government. It dwarfs every other agency, whether for good
or ill. In America this machinery was designed to be at the service of
anybody. It is an advertising agency for ideas, and it is very much
more than this; since the fact that a man is to vote forces him to
think. You may preach to a congregation by the year and not affect its
thought because it is not called upon for definite action. But throw
your subject into a campaign and it becomes a challenge. You can get
assent to almost any proposition so long as you are not going to do
anything about it. And on the other hand, no amount of verbal proof
will justify a new thought until it has been put in practice.
Alas for ink and paper! There is in all speech and writing a
conventional presumption that human beings shall be logical, or fixed
quantities, or at least coherent creatures. For the purposes of an
essay or a speech, you prove your case, and carry weight accordingly.
If you are very cogent and conclusive, why, you win. Hurrah! the world
is saved. But in real life there are no fixed quantities; all the terms
are variables.
For example, everybody understands what is meant by the “Moral Law.”
People differ only as to the application of that law. Not long ago I
heard a sermon on this law, in which great stress was laid on the fact
that it was a discovered law whereby the truth prevailed. Any truce
with evil meant defeat for the cause of righteousness. This was the law
of God, tested by experience, and in constant operation like the law
of gravity, a thing you could not escape. The preacher pictured the
solitary struggle of the great man seeking truth, his proclamation of
the truth, the refusal of the world to receive it, and the prophet’s
isolation and apparent failure. Nevertheless what the prophet said had
always the same content. It was an appeal to the instincts of man upon
the question of right and wrong, and in the end it was accepted.
Now the man who made this exposition, and it was admirable, is in
regard to politics a believer in compromise. I think I have never known
him support the idealist cause in a campaign; and upon most occasions
of crisis he is found heartily throwing stones at the crusaders.
What words in any language can make this man understand that his
law--which he really does profoundly understand as a law--applies
to reform movements? Why, no words will do it, only example. New
statements about morality, however eloquent, add nothing to our
knowledge. Everything is known about the moral law, except how you
yourself will act under given circumstances. You have nothing but
example to contribute.
People interrogate force. They are unconvinced, and are carried,
still protesting, through the air and deposited in a new place. And
then, thereafter, they agree with you about the whole matter. Mere
intellectual assent to your proposition is, even when you can get it,
worth nothing. Your object is not to confute, but to stimulate. What
you really want is that every man you meet shall drop his business
and devote his entire life and energy to your cause. You will accept
nothing less than this. Is it not clear that people are not moved by
logic? Your conduct must ultimately square with reason and be justified
by the laws of the universe and the constitution of other people’s
minds; but you must value only that approval which comes from the
deeper fibres in men. You need not be concerned about the bickerings of
contemporary misunderstanding. Leave these for the historical society.
Act first--explain afterwards. That is the way to get heard. Must you
show your passport and certificate of birth and legitimacy to every
editor and every lackey? They’ll find out who you are by and by. It
is easier to knock a man down than to say why you do it. The act is
sometimes needed, and wisdom then approves it after the event. People
who love soft methods and hate iniquity forget this,--that reform
consists in taking a bone from a dog. Philosophy will not do it.
Such are the practical dictates of agitation. Their justification lies
always with events. It may be that you must wait seven centuries for an
audience, or it may be that in two years your voice will be heeded. If
you are really a forerunner of better times, the times will appear and
explain you. It will then turn out that your movement was the keynote
of the national life. You really differed from your neighbors only in
this,--that your mind had gone faster than theirs along the road all
were travelling.
We are all slaves of the age; we can only see such principles as
society reveals. The philosophy of other ages does us little good.
We repeat the old formulas and cry up the prophets; but we see
no connection between the truth we know so well in print and its
counterpart in real life. The moral commonplaces, as, for instance,
“Honesty is the best policy,” “A single just man can influence an
entire community,” “Never compromise a principle,” are social truths.
They are always true, but they are only obviously true in very virtuous
communities. In a vile community the influence of a just man is potent
but not visible. In a perfectly virtuous era it is clear that a cheat
could not drive a fraudulent trade.
A seer is a man with such sharp eyes for cause and effect that he sees
social truth, even under unfavorable conditions. And yet even the
seers generally had auspicious weather,--that is to say, storms of
moral passion. The whole race of Jews lived in fervent exaltation for
generations, and revealed to their sharp-sighted prophets deep glimpses
of social truth. Hence the Bible. “A prophet is not without honor save
in his own country.” What happy precision! What sound generalization!
But every township in Israel had its prophet, and the truth was a
commonplace.
All the world’s moral wisdom would turn into literal truth upon the
regeneration of society. It tends to become obvious in regenerative
eras. In dark ages it becomes paradox. Standards are multiplied, and
makeshift theories come in,--one rule for social conduct, another for
business, another for politics. Expedient supplants principle. Indeed
you may gauge the degradation of an age by the multiplicity of its
standards. It is the same with the fine arts. To the men that made
the statues and the pictures, these things were the shortest symbols
of truth, and required no explanation. In the dark ages that followed
they became a mystery and a paradox. But the traditions and objects
survived and had to be accounted for. An age that cannot produce them
requires a philosophy of æsthetics. Thus a thousand reasons are given
to explain their existence, and finally it is agreed that they are
something superfluous and fictitious,--conventional lies, like poetry,
like loving your neighbor.
Nothing but a general increase of interest in the aspect of common
things would explain to us the great masters. A revival of interest in
the way the world looks is the precursor of painting: the perceptions
of every one are quickening. And so we may be sure that we are upon the
edge of a better era when the old moral commonplaces begin to glow like
jewels and the stones to testify.
You cannot expect any one but a scientist to be startled at the
movement of a glacier. But if you distribute a few micrometric
instruments upon that gloomy ice-field, the American civic
consciousness, and if you take observations not oftener than once
in three years, you will be startled. The direction of the general
movement is absolutely right. But it all moves together. Special signs
of progress imply general progress, and hence comes the extraordinary
and scientific interest in the awakening of this community. It is like
a man lapsed into the deepest coma who is beginning to stir. Watch
him, take his pulse, surround him with every apparatus of experimental
physiology, and you will find the laws of health, the norm of progress.
Art and literature, and that moral atmosphere which makes a society
worth moving in, lie on the other side of the great reaction, the
spiritual revival which we see now faintly beginning; and it is
because these things can be got at only by stimulating American
character that these reform movements are of value. Here at least the
circulation throbs. Political reform--that is to say, a political life
in which men who are personally honest predominate, a politics run
by ideas--will come in as fast as the public develops ideas, and not
before. But an idea is something very different from what you who read
this think it is. An idea is a thing that governs your conduct all
the time. For instance, you assent to the notion of independence in
politics; you understand the lost-cause theory, but you won’t vote the
ticket. Why? You don’t want to get out of your class. The relations
between thought and action in you are not normal. Half of your brain
has never functioned, and the paralysis shows in your politics. You
have no idea. It is not this sort of idea that expels rascals or makes
books or music. What passes for political thought in your vocabulary
is like the phantasma in the brain of the Indian priest who is buried
with the corn growing above him. The average educated man in America
has about as much knowledge of what a political idea is as he has of
the principles of counterpoint. Each is a thing used in politics or
music which those fellows who practise politics or music manipulate
somehow. Show him one and he will deny that it is politics at all. It
must be corrupt or he will not recognize it. He has only seen dried
figs. He has only thought dried thoughts. A live thought or a real idea
is against the rules of his mind.
Imagine a tea-party of pre-Raphaelites discussing Dante; they dote on
his style, his passion, his force, his quality. In walks Dante, grim,
remorseless, harsh, powerful. The man represents everything they hate.
He is a horror and an outrage. The whole region of literature that
these men live in is not more fictitious than the region of political
thought in which the effete American--I mean your banker, your college
president, your writer of editorial leaders--lives. Exclude for the
moment those who are financially corrupt and consider only the men of
intellect, and in all that concerns politics they are as removed from
real ideas as Rossetti was removed from the real Dante.
Imagine a company of people on a voyage. They play whist with one
another for dimes, and they spend all their money on the steward and
continue to play with counters, and the ship goes to wreck, and they
sit on the beach and continue to play with pebbles. That is American
politics. The whole thing is one gigantic sham, one transcendent fraud.
It makes no difference which man is made president; it makes no
difference which is governor. There is no choice between McKinley and
Bryan, between Republicanism and Democracy. There is no difference
between them. They are one thing. They both and all of them are part
of the machinery by which the government of a most dishonest nation
is carried on, for the financial benefit of certain parties,--certain
thousands of men who have bank accounts and eat and drink and bring up
their families on the proceeds of this complicated swindle.
There is no reality in a single phrase uttered in politics, no meaning
in one single word of any of it. There is no man in public life who
stands for anything. They are shadows; they are phantasmagoria. At
best they cater to the better elements; at worst they frankly subserve
the worst. There is no one who stands for his own ideas himself, by
himself, a man. If American politics does not look to you like a joke,
a tragic dance; if you have enough blindness left in you, on any plea,
on any excuse, to vote for the Democratic party or the Republican
party (for at present machine and party are one), or for any candidate
who does not stand for a new era,--then you yourself pass into the
slide of the magic-lantern; you are an exhibit, a quaint product, a
curiosity of the American soil. You are part of the problem, and you
must be educated and drawn forward towards real life. This process is
going on. As the community returns to life, it sees the natural world
for a moment and then forgets it. The blood flushes the brain and then
recedes. You yourself voted once against both parties, when you thought
you could win, and when you were excited. You quoted Isaiah and I know
not what poetry, and were out and out committed to principle; but
to-day you are cold and hopeless. At present, hope is a mystery to you.
Nevertheless the utility of those early reform movements survives. They
heated the imagination of the people till the people had a momentary
vision of truths which not all of them forgot; and so each year the
temperature has been higher, the mind of the community clearer.
We must not regard those broken reeds, the renegade leaders of reform
movements, as villains; though the mere record of their words and
conduct might prove them such. They have been men emerging from a mist.
They see clearly for a moment, and then clouds sweep before them.
Vanity, selfishness, ambition, tradition, habit, intervene like a fog.
They have been betrayed, too, by the fickle public, that would not
stand by them when in trouble. In the recapture of any institution by
the forces of honesty there are trenches that get filled by slaughtered
honor.
This whole revolution means the invasion of politics by new men. At
first they are tyros, unstable, untried, well-meaning fellows. Half of
them crack in the baking. But there are more coming, and the fibre is
growing tougher and the eyes clearer; soon we shall have men. A great
passion is soon to replace the feeble conscientious motive that has
hitherto brought the new men forward: ambition,--the ambition to stand
for ideas, for ideas only, and to get heard. We have almost forgotten
that public life is the natural ambition of every young man. Conditions
have made it contemptible. But these struggles signify that a change in
those conditions has already begun. Your work and mine may be summed up
in one word. Make it possible for a young man to go into public life
untarnished, and as an enemy to every extant evil. You must have men
who will not go except on these terms. The times herald such men. They
will appear. We must prepare for them.
* * * * *
The reason for the slow progress of the world seems to lie in a
single fact. Every man is born under the yoke, and grows up beneath
the oppressions of his age. He can only get a vision of the unselfish
forces in the world by appealing to them, and every appeal is a call
to arms. If he fights he must fight, not one man, but a conspiracy.
He is always at war with a civilization. On his side is proverbial
philosophy, a galaxy of invisible saints and sages, and the
half-developed consciousness and professions of everybody. Against him
is the world, and every selfish passion in his own heart. The instant
he declares war, every inducement is offered to make him stop. “Toil,
envy, want, the patron, and the jail” intervene. The instant he stops
fighting he is allied with the enemy: he is bought up by prejudice or
by fatigue. He begins to realize the importance of particular visible
institutions, as if their sole value did not come from the fraction
of unselfishness they represent. He rushes headlong into trade, and
thenceforth can see his country only as a series of trade interests.
He gets into some church and begins to value its organization, or
into some party and begins to value its past, or into some club and
begins to value his friends’ feelings. The consequence is that you
may search Christendom and hardly find a man who is free. The advance
of the world, like the improvement of our local politics, has always
been the work of young men. It is done by men before their minds
have been worn into ruts by particular businesses, or their sight
shortened by the study of near things. What we love in the young is
not their youth, but their force. The energy that runs through them
makes them sensitive. They feel the importance of remote things, and
infer the relations of the present to the future more truly than their
elders. They are touched by hints. The direct language of humanity is
plain and native to them. The invisible waves of force which do as a
matter of fact rule the world, using its fictions and its phrases as
mere transmitting-plates, strike keenly upon the heart of the youth,
and the vibrations of instinctive passion that shake his frame are
the response of a strong creature to the laws of its universe. This
unlearned knowledge of good and evil is like the response of the
eyes to light or of the tongue to the taste of a fruit. It was not
indoctrinated; it is a reaction to a stimulus.
So long as the world shall last, men will be writing books in order to
explain and justify the instincts; inventing theologies and ethical
codes, and projecting political programs to advance and confirm them.
If you take up some particular matter and begin to trace out its
consequences upon mankind, you find yourself forced boldly to embrace
the sum of all human destiny. We cannot follow out this course in
detail. We see only tendency; we see only influence. Enlarge our
horizon as we will, we cannot live out the lives of all future
generations, and thus furnish an answer to the first caviller who
interrupts our argument with a “cui bono.” The generous impulses of
youth represent a vision of consequences. They take in more of the
future at one glance than a philosopher can state in a year.
Certainly, so far as we can follow out the threads of influence, the
lines seem to converge. They make a figure and point to a conclusion
exactly upon that spot in the firmament where instinct would place
it. If philosophy gives us a diagram, the rest of life fills it up,
and embellishes it with infinite illustration. The proofs multiply,
and are hurled in upon us from all quarters of life and all provinces
of endeavor. The anecdotes and fables of the world, its drama, its
poetry and fiction, its religion and piety, its domestic teaching and
its monuments support this instinct, and describe the same figure.
Further still, there is not a man who does not reveal it in his soul’s
anatomy: so much so that upon every occasion except where his interests
are touched, he is for virtue, and even where they are touched, it is
only a question of a few degrees more heat to dissolve the habits and
prejudices of a lifetime, and make him take off his coat and go into a
war or a political campaign.
A single man, as we see him in one of the great modern civilizations,
looks like a bit of machinery, a cog or a crank or an air-brake. The
business man is especially mechanical, his functions are so accurate,
so delimited and specialized. And yet any theory that dwells upon
these limitations is put to shame in five minutes, for the creature
eats and sheds tears before your eyes. All of the reasons for not
doing some particular act that you think wise to be done, turn out to
be founded on the idea that this man is a driving-wheel, and nothing
but a driving-wheel. You cannot change him, they say, you must take
him as he is. I have never heard any argument given against the wisdom
of righteousness, except the existence of evil. “It exists, therefore
subserve it.” Is it not clear that evil exists only because people
subserve it? It has no fixity. Withdraw your support and it begins
to perish. One man says, “Oh, let the world go. All the wickedness
and unhappiness in it are inevitable.” Another says, “Some little
concession to present conditions must be made.” Nothing can be said to
justify the second man that is not moral support to the first. Your
concession is always the acknowledgment of somebody’s weakness. Now
you may make allowances for a man who has not come up to the mark; but
if you make allowances for him beforehand, and assume that he is not
going to do right, you corrupt him. If these things are true, then we
are absolved from all complicity with vice. We need never take a course
that requires to be explained. We thus get rid of a great oppression
and can breathe freely. In the language of the old piety, Christian’s
pack falls from his back. That pack has, in all ages, been a perversion
of the conscience, a mistake as to the size of the universe.
We have seen all these ranks and armies of humanity pass in review
before us, each man with his eyes fixed in mesmeric intensity upon
some set of opinions, until he grew to be the thing he looked on.
These opinions of his are all we know of him. They are not our own
opinions. They often appear to us misguided and illusory; yet there
is always to be found in them the light of some benevolence. They are
like broken mirrors and give back fractions of a larger idea. The hope
and courage in each of these men bless and advance the world; but not
in the way that the men themselves expect. They seem all to be bent
over a game of chess, where every move has its real significance upon
another board which they do not see. Each man seems to be following
some will-o’-the-wisp across a landscape at night. No cannon can waken
these insensate sleepers. And yet they are tracing out patterns and
geometrical diagrams upon the sward; they are weaving a magical dance
that, for all its intricacy, has a planetary rhythm, and the sober
motion of a pendulum. Each individual in this unthinkable host gives
an instance of the same fatality; first, that he becomes the thing he
looks on, and second, that he accomplishes something that he does not
understand.
And both parts of this fatality must hold true of ourselves. Certainly,
our subjection to the thing we look on is almost pitiable. We cannot
even remember a righteous hatred without beginning to take color from
the thing we hate. Our goodness comes solely from thinking on goodness;
our wickedness from thinking on wickedness. We too are the victims of
our own contemplation.
As for the last half of that fatality, that keeps us forever ignorant
of the true meaning of our lives, it is not an absolute ignorance, like
our ignorance of how we came to exist. It is a qualified ignorance,
like our ignorance that we have hurt some one’s feelings. The elements
of understanding are within us: to-morrow the whole matter may become
clear. The borders of our understanding extend, as we push outward
our frontier of inquiry. This is both a frontier of scepticism, and
of faith. It is a bulwark of doubt as to the value of our last new
formula, and of faith as to the reality behind that formula. As we go
forward, bringing our lives down to date, holding our experience at
arm’s length and examining it with a merciless endeavor to wring the
truth out of it, we do, from day to day, get a clearer notion of the
actual world, a truer idea of our own place in it. This qualified and
modest understanding of life, that comes from putting things together
that seem to go together, is within the power of any one.
And we find this: the more unselfish men become, the more sensitive do
they become in understanding human relations. The gambler cannot see
that he is giving pain to his family; his self-indulgence has blunted
his sensibilities. The faith healer knows that he is curing a man in a
neighboring State; his love for mankind has refined his sensibilities.
Most of us stand somewhere between these two extremes in the scale of
understanding, and are moving towards one or the other. Education,
then, is the process by which we gradually discover both the real
nature of the human life about us, and our own relation to the whole of
it. The process is never complete. Even poets and great men are in the
dark about their own function; but they are less in the dark than the
rest of us. They speak from a knowledge that is greater than ours. They
have a wonderful power over us; for they help us in our struggle to see
the world as it is.
OTHER BOOKS BY JOHN JAY CHAPMAN
_EMERSON_ AND OTHER ESSAYS
12mo. $1.25.
Emerson. Walt Whitman. A Study of Romeo.
Michael Angelo’s Sonnets. Robert Browning.
R. L. Stevenson. The Fourth Canto of the Inferno.
Mr. Chapman brings to bear on his task a rare store of critical
perception and literary knowledge, while in his own style there is
nothing to be found of the obscure or the inflated. The interesting
part of Mr. Chapman’s work is that he has something new to say about
everything he touches.--_The Spectator._
❦ ❦ ❦
This Essay (Emerson) is the most effective critical attempt made in the
United States, or I should suppose anywhere, to get near the sage of
Concord.--HENRY JAMES.
❦ ❦ ❦
We shall hope to come across Mr. Chapman again. Few living critics go
so straight to the heart of their problem, or waste so little time in
writing “about it and about.”--_The Academy._
_CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES_
12mo. $1.25.
Politics. Society. Education.
Democracy. Government.
No one can read Mr. Chapman’s book without finding in it something
instructive and suggestive. The author is an enthusiast for humanity
converted by stress of circumstances into a preacher against
corruption. His book is a manly appeal to the rising generation,
for whom it has a message of courage and hope sadly wanting
nowadays.--_The Nation._
❦ ❦ ❦
This is a brilliant little book. Mr. Chapman wields a razor edge of
forcible statement, and he is inspired by a moral passion that makes
his utterance a breathing, vital thing.--_The Academy._
❦ ❦ ❦
The author is essentially a critic, clear and incisive, at times rather
sweeping in his generalities, yet always fresh and stimulating. His
attack on the corruption of American politics is as vigorous a piece of
writing as one could desire.--_The Outlook._
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS, Publishers
153-157 Fifth Ave., New York
Transcriber’s Notes:
Variations in hyphenation have been retained as published in the
original book. Punctuation has been standardised.
The following change has been made:
Page 17
surge up and are scatttered _changed to_
surge up and are scattered
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