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.