The Ideal in Public Life--Politicians, Statesmen and Philosophers--The
Disputed Presidency in 1876--The Personality and Character of Mr.
Tilden--His Election and Exclusion by a Partisan Tribunal
I
The soul of journalism is disinterestedness. But neither as a principle nor
an asset had this been generally discovered fifty years ago. Most of my
younger life I was accused of ulterior motives of political ambition,
whereas I had seen too much of preferment not to abhor it. To me, as to
my father, office has seemed ever a badge of servitude. For a long time,
indeed, I nursed the delusions of the ideal. The love of the ideal has not
in my old age quite deserted me. But I have seen the claim of it so much
abused that when a public man calls it for a witness I begin to suspect his
sincerity.
A virile old friend of mine--who lived in Texas, though he went there from
Rhode Island--used to declare with sententious emphasis that war is the
state of man. "Sir," he was wont to observe, addressing me as if I were
personally accountable, "you are emasculating the human species. You are
changing men into women and women into men. You are teaching everybody
to read, nobody to think; and do you know where you will end, sir?
Extermination, sir--extermination! On the north side of the North Pole
there is another world peopled by giants; ten thousand millions at the very
least; every giant of them a hundred feet high. Now about the time you have
reduced your universe to complete effeminacy some fool with a pick-axe will
break through the thin partition--the mere ice curtain--separating these
giants from us, and then they will sweep through and swoop down and swallow
you, sir, and the likes of you, with your topsy-turvy civilization, your
boasted literature and science and art!"
This old friend of mine had a sure recipe for success in public life.
"Whenever you get up to make a speech," said he, "begin by proclaiming
yourself the purest, the most disinterested of living men, and end
by intimating that you are the bravest;" and then with the charming
inconsistency of the dreamer he would add: "If there be anything on this
earth that I despise it is bluster."
Decidedly he was not a disciple of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Yet he, too, in
his way was an idealist, and for all his oddity a man of intellectual
integrity, a trifle exaggerated perhaps in its methods and illustrations,
but true to his convictions of right and duty, as Emerson would have had
him be. For was it not Emerson who exclaimed, "We will walk on our own
feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds?"