The history of democracy’s progress in a mid-Western city--so, to
introduce this book in specific terms, one perhaps inevitably must
call it. Yet in using the word _democracy_, one must plead for a
distinction, or, better, a reversion, indicated by the curious
anchylosis that, at a certain point in their maturity, usually sets in
upon words newly put in use to express some august and large spiritual
reality. We all know how this materializing tendency, if one may
call it that, has affected our notion and our use of the commonest
religious terms like _faith_, _grace_, _salvation_, for instance.
Their connotation, originally fluid, spiritual and subjective, has
become concrete, limited, partial, ignoble. So, too, in our common
speech, even above the catchpenny vocabulary of the demagogue or
politician, the word _democracy_ has taken on the limited, partial and
ignoble connotation of more or less incidental and provisional forms
of democracy’s practical outcome; or even of by-products not directly
traceable to the action of democracy itself. How often, for example, do
we see direct primaries, the single tax, the initiative and referendum
posed in a kind of sacramental relation to “fundamental democracy”; or
the “essential movement of democracy” measured, say, by the increased
returns on the Socialist ticket at some local election!
The permanent value of this book is that it proceeds out of a truly
adequate and philosophical conception of democracy. That the collective
human spirit should know itself, καταμαθεῖν τὴν φύσιν καὶ ταύτη
ἕπεσθαι, that the state, the communal unit, should be, in Mr. Arnold’s
phrase, “the expression of our best self, which is not manifold and
vulgar and unstable and contentious and ever varying, but one and noble
and secure and peaceful and the same for all mankind”; here we have
in outline the operation of democracy. One could not give this volume
higher praise than to say, as in justice one must say, that it clearly
discerns and abundantly conveys the spirit which works in human nature
toward this end.
How important it is to maintain this fluid, philosophical and spiritual
view of democracy may be seen when we look about us and consider
the plight of those--especially the many now concerned in politics,
whether professionally or as eager amateurs--who for lack of it confuse
various aspects of the political problem of liberty with the social
problem of equality. With political liberty or with self-expression
of the individual in politics, democracy has, and ever has had, very
little to do. It is our turbid thought about democracy that prevents
our seeing this. The aristocratic and truculent barons did more for
the political freedom of Englishmen than was ever done by democracy;
a selfish and sensual king did more to gain the individual Englishman
his freedom of self-expression in politics. In our own country it is
matter of open and notorious fact that a political party whose every
sentiment and tendency is aristocratic has been the one to bring about
the largest measures of political enfranchisement. Now, surely, one
may heartily welcome every enlargement of political liberty, but if
one attributes them to a parentage which is not theirs, if one relates
them under _democracy_, the penalty which nature inexorably imposes
upon error is sure to follow. If, therefore, in the following pages
the author seems occasionally lukewarm toward certain enfranchising
measures, I do not understand that he disparages them, but only that
he sees--as their advocates, firmly set in the confusion we speak
of, cannot see--that their connection with democracy is extremely
indistinct and remote. _Equality_--a social problem, not to be worked
out by the mechanics of politics, but appealing wholly to the best
self, the best reason and spirit of man,--this is democracy’s concern,
democracy’s chief interest. It is to our author’s praise, again, that
he sees this clearly and expresses it convincingly.
By far the most admirable and impressive picture in this book appears
to me to be that which the author has all unconsciously drawn of
himself. It reveals once more that tragedy--the most profound, most
common and most neglected of all the multitude of useless tragedies
that our weak and wasteful civilization by sheer indifference
permits--the tragedy of a richly gifted nature denied the opportunity
of congenial self-expression. What by comparison is the tragedy of
starvation, since so very many willingly starve, if haply they may find
this opportunity? The author is an artist, a born artist. His natural
place is in a world unknown and undreamed of by us children of an age
commissioned to carry out the great idea of industrial and political
development. He belongs by birthright in the eternal realm of divine
impossibilities, of sublime and delightful inconsistencies. Greatly
might he have fulfilled his destiny in music, in poetry, in painting
had he been born at one of those periods when spiritual activity was
all but universal, when spiritual ideas were popular and dominant,
_volitantes per ora virum_, part of the very air one breathed--in the
Greece of Pericles, the England of Elizabeth, or on the Tuscan hills
at the time of the Florentine Renaissance! But this was not to be. An
admirer, jealous of every possible qualification, reminds me that I
should call him at least a philosophical artist; yes, but not by nature
even that. The toga did not drop upon him readymade from a celestial
loom. It was woven and fitted laboriously by his own hands. He sought
philosophical consistency and found it and established himself in it;
but only as part of the difficult general discipline of an alien life.
What an iron discipline, and how thoroughly alien a life, stands
revealed to the eye of poetic insight and the spirit of sympathetic
delicacy, on every page of these memoirs. For the over-refined (as
we say), the oversensitive soul of a born artist--think of the
experience, think of the achievement! The very opposite of all that
makes a politician, appraising politics always at their precise value,
yet patiently spending all the formative years of his life in the
debilitating air of politics for the sake of what he might indirectly
accomplish. Not an executive, yet incessantly occupied with tedious
details of administrative work, for the satisfaction of knowing them
well done. Not a philosopher, yet laboriously making himself what
Glanvil quaintly calls “one of those larger souls who have traveled the
divers climates of opinion” until he acquired a social philosophy that
should meet his own exacting demands.
Is it too much, then, that I invite the reader’s forbearance with
these paragraphs to show why our author should himself take rank and
estimation with the great men whom he reverently pictures? He tells
the story of Altgeld and of Johnson, energetic champions of the newer
political freedom. He tells the story of Jones, the incomparable true
democrat, one of the children of light and sons of the Resurrection,
such as appear but once in an era. And in the telling of these men
and of himself as the alien and, in his own view, largely accidental
continuator of their work, it seems to me that he indicates the process
by which he too has worked out his own position among them as “one
of those consoling and hope-inspiring marks which stand forever to
remind our weak and easily discouraged race how high human goodness and
perseverance have once been carried and may be carried again.”