there are certain qualities which we in a democracy are prone to admire
in and of themselves, which ought by rights to be judged admirable
or the reverse solely from the standpoint of the use made of them.
Foremost among these I should include two very distinct gifts--the
gift of money-making and the gift of oratory. Money-making, the money
touch, I have spoken of above. It is a quality which in a moderate
degree is essential. It may be useful when developed to a very great
degree, but only if accompanied and controlled by other qualities; and
without such control the possessor tends to develop into one of the
least attractive types produced by a modern industrial democracy. So it
is with the orator. It is highly desirable that a leader of opinion in
a democracy should be able to state his views clearly and convincingly.
But all that the oratory can do of value to the community is to enable
the man thus to explain himself; if it enables the orator to persuade
his hearers to put false values on things, it merely makes him a
power for mischief. Some excellent public servants have not the gift
at all, and must rely upon their deeds to speak for them; and unless
the oratory does represent genuine conviction based on good common
sense and able to be translated into efficient performance, then the
better the oratory the greater the damage to the public it deceives.
Indeed, it is a sign of marked political weakness in any commonwealth
if the people tend to be carried away by mere oratory, if they tend
to value words in and for themselves, as divorced from the deeds for
which they are supposed to stand. The phrase-maker, the phrase-monger,
the ready talker, however great his power, whose speech does not make
for courage, sobriety, and right understanding, is simply a noxious
element in the body politic, and it speaks ill for the public if he
has influence over them. To admire the gift of oratory without regard
to the moral quality behind the gift is to do wrong to the republic.
Of course all that I say of the orator applies with even greater
force to the orator’s latter-day and more influential brother, the
journalist. The power of the journalist is great, but he is entitled
neither to respect nor admiration because of that power unless it is
used aright. He can do, and he often does, great good. He can do, and
he often does, infinite mischief. All journalists, all writers, for
the very reason that they appreciate the vast possibilities of their
profession, should bear testimony against those who deeply discredit
it. Offences against taste and morals, which are bad enough in a
private citizen, are infinitely worse if made into instruments for
debauching the community through a newspaper. Mendacity, slander,
sensationalism, inanity, vapid triviality, all are potent factors for
the debauchery of the public mind and conscience. The excuse advanced
for vicious writing, that the public demands it and that the demand
must be supplied, can no more be admitted than if it were advanced by
the purveyors of food who sell poisonous adulterations.
In short, the good citizen in a republic must realize that he ought
to possess two sets of qualities, and that neither avails without the
other. He must have those qualities which make for efficiency; and
he must also have those qualities which direct the efficiency into
channels for the public good. He is useless if he is inefficient. There
is nothing to be done with that type of citizen of whom all that can be
said is that he is harmless. Virtue which is dependent upon a sluggish
circulation is not impressive. There is little place in active life
for the timid good man. The man who is saved by weakness from robust
wickedness is likewise rendered immune from the robuster virtues. The
good citizen in a republic must first of all be able to hold his own.
He is no good citizen unless he has the ability which will make him
work hard and which at need will make him fight hard. The good citizen
is not a good citizen unless he is an efficient citizen.
But if a man’s efficiency is not guided and regulated by a moral sense,
then the more efficient he is the worse he is, the more dangerous to
the body politic. Courage, intellect, all the masterful qualities,
serve but to make a man more evil if they are used merely for that
man’s own advancement, with brutal indifference to the rights of
others. It speaks ill for the community if the community worships these
qualities and treats their possessors as heroes regardless of whether
the qualities are used rightly or wrongly. It makes no difference as to
the precise way in which this sinister efficiency is shown. It makes no
difference whether such a man’s force and ability betray themselves in
the career of money-maker or politician, soldier or orator, journalist
or popular leader. If the man works for evil, then the more successful
he is the more he should be despised and condemned by all upright and
farseeing men. To judge a man merely by success is an abhorrent wrong;
and if the people at large habitually so judge men, if they grow to
condone wickedness because the wicked man triumphs, they show their
inability to understand that in the last analysis free institutions
rest upon the character of citizenship, and that by such admiration of
evil they prove themselves unfit for liberty.
The homely virtues of the household, the ordinary workaday virtues
which make the woman a good housewife and housemother, which make
the man a hard worker, a good husband and father, a good soldier at
need, stand at the bottom of character. But of course many others must
be added thereto if a state is to be not only free but great. Good
citizenship is not good citizenship if exhibited only in the home.
There remain the duties of the individual in relation to the state, and
these duties are none too easy under the conditions which exist where
the effort is made to carry on free government in a complex, industrial
civilization. Perhaps the most important thing the ordinary citizen,
and, above all, the leader of ordinary citizens, has to remember in
political life is that he must not be a sheer doctrinaire. The closet
philosopher, the refined and cultured individual who from his library
tells how men ought to be governed under ideal conditions, is of no use
in actual governmental work; and the one-sided fanatic, and still more
the mob-leader, and the insincere man who to achieve power promises
what by no possibility can be performed, are not merely useless but
noxious.
The citizen must have high ideals, and yet he must be able to achieve
them in practical fashion. No permanent good comes from aspirations so
lofty that they have grown fantastic and have become impossible and
indeed undesirable to realize. The impracticable visionary is far less
often the guide and precursor than he is the imbittered foe of the real
reformer, of the man who, with stumblings and shortcomings, yet does in
some shape, in practical fashion, give effect to the hopes and desires
of those who strive for better things. Woe to the empty phrase-maker,
to the empty idealist, who, instead of making ready the ground for the
man of action, turns against him when he appears and hampers him as
he does the work! Moreover, the preacher of ideals must remember how
sorry and contemptible is the figure which he will cut, how great the
damage that he will do, if he does not himself, in his own life, strive
measurably to realize the ideals that he preaches for others. Let him
remember also that the worth of the ideal must be largely determined
by the success with which it can in practice be realized. We should
abhor the so-called “practical” men whose practicality assumes the
shape of that peculiar baseness which finds its expression in disbelief
in morality and decency, in disregard of high standards of living and
conduct. Such a creature is the worst enemy of the body politic. But
only less desirable as a citizen is his nominal opponent and real ally,
the man of fantastic vision who makes the impossible better forever the
enemy of the possible good.
We can just as little afford to follow the doctrinaires of an extreme
individualism as the doctrinaires of an extreme socialism. Individual
initiative, so far from being discouraged, should be stimulated;
and yet we should remember that, as society develops and grows more
complex, we continually find that things which once it was desirable to
leave to individual initiative can, under the changed conditions, be
performed with better results by common effort. It is quite impossible,
and equally undesirable, to draw in theory a hard-and-fast line which
shall always divide the two sets of cases. This every one who is not
cursed with the pride of the closet philosopher will see, if he will
only take the trouble to think about some of our commonest phenomena.
For instance, when people live on isolated farms or in little hamlets,
each house can be left to attend to its own drainage and water supply;
but the mere multiplication of families in a given area produces new
problems which, because they differ in size, are found to differ not
only in degree but in kind from the old; and the questions of drainage
and water supply have to be considered from the common standpoint. It
is not a matter for abstract dogmatizing to decide when this point
is reached; it is a matter to be tested by practical experiment.
Much of the discussion about socialism and individualism is entirely
pointless, because of failure to agree on terminology. It is not good
to be the slave of names. I am a strong individualist by personal
habit, inheritance, and conviction; but it is a mere matter of common
sense to recognize that the state, the community, the citizens acting
together, can do a number of things better than if they were left to
individual action. The individualism which finds its expression in
the abuse of physical force is checked very early in the growth of
civilization, and we of to-day should in our turn strive to shackle
or destroy that individualism which triumphs by greed and cunning,
which exploits the weak by craft instead of ruling them by brutality.
We ought to go with any man in the effort to bring about justice and
the equality of opportunity, to turn the tool-user more and more into
the tool-owner, to shift burdens so that they can be more equitably
borne. The deadening effect on any race of the adoption of a logical
and extreme socialistic system could not be overstated; it would spell
sheer destruction; it would produce grosser wrong and outrage, fouler
immorality, than any existing system. But this does not mean that we
may not with great advantage adopt certain of the principles professed
by some given set of men who happen to call themselves Socialists; to
be afraid to do so would be to make a mark of weakness on our part.
But we should not take part in acting a lie any more than in telling a
lie. We should not say that men are equal where they are not equal, nor
proceed upon the assumption that there is an equality where it does not
exist; but we should strive to bring about a measurable equality, at
least to the extent of preventing the inequality which is due to force
or fraud. Abraham Lincoln, a man of the plain people, blood of their
blood and bone of their bone, who all his life toiled and wrought and
suffered for them, and at the end died for them, who always strove
to represent them, who would never tell an untruth to or for them,
spoke of the doctrine of equality with his usual mixture of idealism
and sound common sense. He said (I omit what was of merely local
significance):
“I think the authors of the Declaration of Independence intended to
include all men, but that they did not mean to declare all men equal
_in all respects_. They did not mean to say all men were equal in
color, size, intellect, moral development, or social capacity. They
defined with tolerable distinctness in what they did consider all men
created equal--equal in certain inalienable rights, among which are
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This they said, and this
they meant. They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth that all
were then actually enjoying that equality, or yet that they were about
to confer it immediately upon them. They meant to set up a standard
maxim for free society which should be familiar to all--constantly
looked to, constantly labored for, and, even though never perfectly
attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and
deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life
to all people, everywhere.”
We are bound in honor to refuse to listen to those men who would make
us desist from the effort to do away with the inequality which means
injustice; the inequality of right, of opportunity, of privilege. We
are bound in honor to strive to bring ever nearer the day when, as far
as is humanly possible, we shall be able to realize the ideal that each
man shall have an equal opportunity to show the stuff that is in him by
the way in which he renders service. There should, so far as possible,
be equality of opportunity to render service; but just so long as there
is inequality of service there should and must be inequality of reward.
We may be sorry for the general, the painter, the artist, the worker in
any profession or of any kind, whose misfortune rather than whose fault
it is that he does his work ill. But the reward must go to the man who
does his work well; for any other course is to create a new kind of
privilege, the privilege of folly and weakness; and special privilege
is injustice, whatever form it takes.
To say that the thriftless, the lazy, the vicious, the incapable,
ought to have the reward given to those who are far-sighted, capable,
and upright, is to say what is not true and can not be true. Let us
try to level up, but let us beware of the evil of levelling down. If
a man stumbles, it is a good thing to help him to his feet. Every one
of us needs a helping hand now and then. But if a man lies down, it is
a waste of time to try to carry him; and it is a very bad thing for
every one if we make men feel that the same reward will come to those
who shirk their work and to those who do it.
Let us, then, take into account the actual facts of life, and not be
misled into following any proposal for achieving the millennium, for
re-creating the golden age, until we have subjected it to hardheaded
examination. On the other hand, it is foolish to reject a proposal
merely because it is advanced by visionaries. If a given scheme is
proposed, look at it on its merits, and, in considering it, disregard
formulas. It does not matter in the least who proposes it, or why. If
it seems good, try it. If it proves good, accept it; otherwise reject
it. There are plenty of men calling themselves Socialists with whom,
up to a certain point, it is quite possible to work. If the next step
is one which both we and they wish to take, why of course take it,
without any regard to the fact that our views as to the tenth step may
differ. But, on the other hand, keep clearly in mind that, though it
has been worth while to take one step, this does not in the least mean
that it may not be highly disadvantageous to take the next. It is just
as foolish to refuse all progress because people demanding it desire
at some points to go to absurd extremes, as it would be to go to these
absurd extremes simply because some of the measures advocated by the
extremists were wise.
The good citizen will demand liberty for himself, and as a matter of
pride he will see to it that others receive the liberty which he thus
claims as his own. Probably the best test of true love of liberty in
any country is the way in which minorities are treated in that country.
Not only should there be complete liberty in matters of religion and
opinion, but complete liberty for each man to lead his life as he
desires, provided only that in so doing he does not wrong his neighbor.
Persecution is bad because it is persecution, and without reference to
which side happens at the moment to be the persecutor and which the
persecuted. Class hatred is bad in just the same way, and without any
regard to the individual who, at a given time, substitutes loyalty to a
class for loyalty to the nation, or substitutes hatred of men because
they happen to come in a certain social category, for judgment awarded
them according to their conduct. Remember always that the same measure
of condemnation should be extended to the arrogance which would look
down upon or crush any man because he is poor and to the envy and
hatred which would destroy a man because he is wealthy. The overbearing
brutality of the man of wealth or power, and the envious and hateful
malice directed against wealth or power, are really at root merely
different manifestations of the same quality, merely the two sides of
the same shield. The man who, if born to wealth and power, exploits
and ruins his less fortunate brethren is at heart the same as the
greedy and violent demagogue who excites those who have not property to
plunder those who have. The gravest wrong upon his country is inflicted
by that man, whatever his station, who seeks to make his countrymen
divide primarily on the line that separates class from class,
occupation from occupation, men of more wealth from men of less wealth,
instead of remembering that the only safe standard is that which judges
each man on his worth as a man, whether he be rich or poor, without
regard to his profession or to his station in life. Such is the only
true democratic test, the only test that can with propriety be applied
in a republic. There have been many republics in the past, both in what
we call antiquity and in what we call the Middle Ages. They fell, and
the prime factor in their fall was the fact that the parties tended to
divide along the line that separates wealth from poverty. It made no
difference which side was successful; it made no difference whether
the republic fell under the rule of an oligarchy or the rule of a mob.
In either case, when once loyalty to a class had been substituted for
loyalty to the republic, the end of the republic was at hand. There is
no greater need to-day than the need to keep ever in mind the fact that
the cleavage between right and wrong, between good citizenship and bad
citizenship, runs at right angles to, and not parallel with, the lines
of cleavage between class and class, between occupation and occupation.
Ruin looks us in the face if we judge a man by his position instead of
judging him by his conduct in that position.
In a republic, to be successful we must learn to combine intensity
of conviction with a broad tolerance of difference of conviction.
Wide differences of opinion in matters of religious, political, and
social belief must exist if conscience and intellect alike are not
to be stunted, if there is to be room for healthy growth. Bitter
internecine hatreds, based on such differences, are signs, not of
earnestness of belief, but of that fanaticism which, whether religious
or anti-religious, democratic or anti-democratic, is itself but a
manifestation of the gloomy bigotry which has been the chief factor in
the downfall of so many, many nations.
Of one man in especial, beyond any one else, the citizens of a republic
should beware, and that is of the man who appeals to them to support
him on the ground that he is hostile to other citizens of the republic,
that he will secure for those who elect him, in one shape or another,
profit at the expense of other citizens of the republic. It makes no
difference whether he appeals to class hatred or class interest, to
religious or anti-religious prejudice. The man who makes such an appeal
should always be presumed to make it for the sake of furthering his own
interest. The very last thing that an intelligent and self-respecting
member of a democratic community should do is to reward any public man
because that public man says he will get the private citizen something
to which this private citizen is not entitled, or will gratify some
emotion or animosity which this private citizen ought not to possess.
Let me illustrate this by one anecdote from my own experience. A number
of years ago I was engaged in cattle-ranching on the great plains of
the western United States. There were no fences. The cattle wandered
free, the ownership of each being determined by the brand; the calves
were branded with the brand of the cows they followed. If on the
round-up an animal was passed by, the following year it would appear as
an unbranded yearling, and was then called a maverick. By the custom
of the country these mavericks were branded with the brand of the man
on whose range they were found. One day I was riding the range with a
newly hired cowboy, and we came upon a maverick. We roped and threw it;
then we built a little fire, took out a cinch-ring, heated it at the
fire; and the cowboy started to put on the brand. I said to him, “It
is So-and-so’s brand,” naming the man on whose range we happened to be.
He answered: “That’s all right, boss; I know my business.” In another
moment I said to him: “Hold on, you are putting on my brand!” To which
he answered: “That’s all right; I always put on the boss’s brand.” I
answered: “Oh, very well. Now you go straight back to the ranch and
get what is owing to you; I don’t need you any longer.” He jumped up
and said: “Why, what’s the matter? I was putting on your brand.” And
I answered: “Yes, my friend, and if you will steal _for_ me you will
steal _from_ me.”
Now, the same principle which applies in private life applies also in
public life. If a public man tries to get your vote by saying that
he will do something wrong _in_ your interest, you can be absolutely
certain that if ever it becomes worth his while he will do something
wrong _against_ your interest.
So much for the citizenship of the individual in his relations to
his family, to his neighbor, to the state. There remain duties of
citizenship which the state, the aggregation of all the individuals,
owes in connection with other states, with other nations. Let me say at
once that I am no advocate of a foolish cosmopolitanism. I believe that
a man must be a good patriot before he can be, and as the only possible
way of being, a good citizen of the world. Experience teaches us that
the average man who protests that his international feeling swamps his
national feeling, that he does not care for his country because he
cares so much for mankind, in actual practice proves himself the foe of
mankind; that the man who says that he does not care to be a citizen of
any one country, because he is a citizen of the world, is in very fact
usually an exceedingly undesirable citizen of whatever corner of the
world he happens at the moment to be in. In the dim future all moral
needs and moral standards may change; but at present, if a man can
view his own country and all other countries from the same level with
tepid indifference, it is wise to distrust him, just as it is wise to
distrust the man who can take the same dispassionate view of his wife
and his mother. However broad and deep a man’s sympathies, however
intense his activities, he need have no fear that they will be cramped
by love of his native land.
Now, this does not mean in the least that a man should not wish to do
good outside of his native land. On the contrary, just as I think that
the man who loves his family is more apt to be a good neighbor than
the man who does not, so I think that the most useful member of the
family of nations is normally a strongly patriotic nation. So far from
patriotism being inconsistent with a proper regard for the rights of
other nations, I hold that the true patriot, who is as jealous of the
national honor as a gentleman is of his own honor, will be careful
to see that the nation neither inflicts nor suffers wrong, just as a
gentleman scorns equally to wrong others or to suffer others to wrong
him. I do not for one moment admit that political morality is different
from private morality, that a promise made on the stump differs from a
promise made in private life. I do not for one moment admit that a man
should act deceitfully as a public servant in his dealings with other
nations, any more than that he should act deceitfully in his dealings
as a private citizen with other private citizens. I do not for one
moment admit that a nation should treat other nations in a different
spirit from that in which an honorable man would treat other men.