In spite of our good Woodrow and our lamented Theodore I have quite made up
my mind that there is no such thing as the ideal in public life, construing
public life to refer to political transactions. The ideal may exist in art
and letters, and sometimes very young men imagine that it exists in very
young women. But here we must draw the line. As society is constituted the
ideal has no place, not even standing room, in the arena of civics.
If we would make a place for it we must begin by realizing this.
The painter, like the lover, is a law unto himself, with his little
picture--the poet, also, with his little rhyme--his atelier his universe,
his attic his field of battle, his weapons the utensils of his craft--he
himself his own Providence. It is not so in the world of action, where the
conditions are directly reversed; where the one player contends against
many players, seen and unseen; where each move is met by some counter-move;
where the finest touches are often unnoted of men or rudely blotted out by
a mysterious hand stretched forth from the darkness.
"I wish I could be as sure of anything," said Melbourne, "as Tom Macaulay
is of everything." Melbourne was a man of affairs, Macaulay a man of books;
and so throughout the story the men of action have been fatalists, from
Cæsar to Napoleon and Bismarck, nothing certain except the invisible player
behind the screen.
Of all human contrivances the most imperfect is government. In spite of
the essays of Bentham and Mill the science of government has yet to be
discovered. The ideal statesman can only exist in the ideal state, which
has never existed.
The politician, like the poor, we have always with us. As long as men
delegate to other men the function of acting for them, of thinking for
them, we shall continue to have him.
He is a variable quantity. In the crowded centers his distinguishing
marks are short hair and cunning; upon the frontier, sentiment and the
six-shooter! In New York he becomes a boss; in Kentucky and Texas, a
fighter and an orator. But the statesman--the ideal statesman--in the
mind's eye, Horatio! Bound by practical limitations such an anomaly would
be a statesman minus a party, a statesman who never gets any votes or
anywhere--a statesman perpetually out of a job. We have had some imitation
ideal statesmen who have been more or less successful in palming off their
pinchbeck wares for the real; but looking backward over the history of
the country we shall find the greatest among our public men--measuring
greatness by real and useful service--to have been while they lived least
regarded as idealists; for they were men of flesh and blood, who amid the
rush of events and the calls to duty could not stop to paint pictures, to
consider sensibilities, to put forth the deft hand where life and death
hung upon the stroke of a bludgeon or the swinging of a club.
Washington was not an ideal statesman, nor Hamilton, nor Jefferson, nor
Lincoln, though each of them conceived grandly and executed nobly. They
loved truth for truth's sake, even as they loved their country. Yet no one
of them ever quite attained his conception of it.
Truth indeed is ideal. But when we come to adapt and apply it, how many
faces it shows us, what varying aspects, so that he is fortunate who is
able to catch and hold a single fleeting expression. To bridle this and
saddle it, and, as we say in Kentucky, to ride it a turn or two around the
paddock or, still better, down the home-stretch of things accomplished,
is another matter. The real statesman must often do as he can, not as he
would; the ideal statesman existing only in the credulity of those simple
souls who are captivated by appearances or deceived by professions.
The nearest approach to the ideal statesman I have known was most grossly
stigmatized while he lived. I have Mr. Tilden in mind. If ever man pursued
an ideal life he did. From youth to age he dwelt amid his fancies. He was
truly a man of the world among men of letters and a man of letters among
men of the world. A philosopher pure and simple--a lover of books, of
pictures, of all things beautiful and elevating--he yet attained great
riches, and being a doctrinaire and having a passion for affairs he was
able to gratify the aspirations to eminence and the yearning to be of
service to the State which had filled his heart.
He seemed a medley of contradiction. Without the artifices usual to the
practical politician he gradually rose to be a power in his party; thence
to become the leader of a vast following, his name a shibboleth to millions
of his countrymen, who enthusiastically supported him and who believed that
he was elected Chief Magistrate of the United States. He was an idealist;
he lost the White House because he was so, though represented while he
lived by his enemies as a scheming spider weaving his web amid the coil of
mystification in which he hid himself. For he was personally known to few
in the city where he had made his abode; a great lawyer and jurist who
rarely appeared in court; a great political leader to whom the hustings
were mainly a stranger; a thinker, and yet a dreamer, who lived his own
life a little apart, as a poet might; uncorrupting and incorruptible; least
of all were his political companions moved by the loss of the presidency,
which had seemed in his grasp. And finally he died--though a master of
legal lore--to have his last will and testament successfully assailed.
Except as news venders the newspapers--especially newspaper workers--should
give politics a wide berth. Certainly they should have no party politics.
True to say, journalism and literature and politics are as wide apart as
the poles. From Bolingbroke, the most splendid of the world's failures, to
Thackeray, one of its greatest masters of letters--who happily did not get
the chance he sought in parliamentary life to fall--both English history
and American history are full of illustrations to this effect. Except in
the comic opera of French politics the poet, the artist, invested with
power, seems to lose his efficiency in the ratio of his genius; the
literary gift, instead of aiding, actually antagonizing the aptitude for
public business.
The statesman may not be fastidious. The poet, the artist, must be always
so. If the party leader preserve his integrity--if he keep himself
disinterested and clean--if his public influence be inspiring to his
countrymen and his private influence obstructive of cheats and rogues among
his adherents--he will have done well.
We have left behind us the gibbet and the stake. No further need of the
Voltaires, the Rousseaus and the Diderots to declaim against kingcraft
and priestcraft. We have done something more than mark time. We report
progress. Yet despite the miracles of modern invention how far in the arts
of government has the world traveled from darkness to light since the old
tribal days, and what has it learned except to enlarge the area, to
amplify and augment the agencies, to multiply and complicate the forms and
processes of corruption? By corruption I mean the dishonest advantage of
the few over the many.
The dreams of yesterday, we are told, become the realities of to-morrow.
In these despites I am an optimist. Much truly there needs still to be
learned, much to be unlearned. Advanced as we consider ourselves we are yet
a long way from the most rudimentary perception of the civilization we are
so fond of parading. The eternal verities--where shall we seek them? Little
in religious affairs, less still in commercial affairs, hardly any at all
in political affairs, that being right which represents each organism.
Still we progress. The pulpit begins to turn from the sinister visage of
theology and to teach the simple lessons of Christ and Him crucified. The
press, which used to be omniscient, is now only indiscriminate--a clear
gain, emitting by force of publicity, if not of shine, a kind of light
through whose diverse rays and foggy luster we may now and then get a
glimpse of truth.