I say famous, and perhaps I mean only notorious, for in the beginning
many of his townsmen meant it as a reflection, and not a tribute. Some
of them said it was but an advertising dodge, a bit of demagogism, but
as Jones applied the rule to everybody, other explanations had soon to
be adopted, and after he had employed it about the City Hall for two
years the situation became so desperate that something had to be done.
Controversy was provoked, and for almost a decade, Toledo presented
the unique spectacle of a modern city in which this principle was
discussed as though it were something newly discovered. Some seemed
to think that Jones had invented it; they said it was absurd, that
it really would not work. Of course most regarded it, as most now
regard the Golden Rule, as a pretty sentiment merely, something for
the children in Sunday-school. It is considered, of course, as any
sophisticated person knows, as altogether impractical, and even silly
and absurd.
To be sure, the clergymen were under some sort of professional
necessity of treating it seriously, and they used to prepare profound
papers, arranged in heads and subheads, with titles and subtitles, and
after all the usual ostentatious preliminary examination of the grounds
and the authorities, and with the appearance of academic fairness,
in discussions that were formal, exact, redolent of the oil, bearing
the hallmark of the schools, they would show that Jesus meant there
were only certain exigencies in which, and certain persons to whom,
this rule was to be applied. It was all very learned and impressive,
but one was apt to develop a disturbing doubt as to whether one was
of those to whom it was to be applied. It was certainly not to be
applied to criminals, or perhaps even to politicians. It was not to be
applied to poor people, or to the working people, unless they were in
Sunday-school as conscious inferiors, in devout and penitent attitudes.
And as these people were so seldom in church or Sunday-school, and as
those who were there apparently needed no such consideration, these
discourses left one rather uncertain as to what to do with the Golden
Rule.
All men of course believe in the Golden Rule, or say they do, but they
believe in it only “up to a certain point,” and with each individual
this point differs; the moment in which to abandon the Rule and take
to “the shotgun and the club” comes to some soon, to others late, and
to some oftener than others; but to most, if not to all of us, it
inevitably arrives. That is why, no doubt, the world is no farther
along in the solution of the many distressing problems it has on its
mind.
According to the standards of conduct and of “honor” inherited from
the feudal ages, while personal violence may be conceded to be
illegal, one is, nevertheless, still generally taught that it is wrong
and unmanly not to resent an insult or an injury, by violence, if
necessary,--fighting and killing, by individuals, states and nations,
are thought to be not only honorable and worthy, but, in many cases,
indispensable. Society has an obsession similar to that strange
superstition of the feud, which affects the Kentucky mountaineers.
Generally we are less afraid to fight than we are not to fight. Our
system is based on force, our faith is placed in force, so that nearly
all of the proposals of reform, for the correction of abuses, involve
the use of violence in some form. We have erected a huge idol in the
figure of the beadle, who, assisted by the constable, is to make
society over, to make men “good.” Jones came upon the scene in America
at a time when there was undoubtedly a new and really splendid impetus
toward a better and higher conception of life and conduct, both in
public and private. Yet even then no other thought seemed to possess
the public mind than that someone should be put in prison and made to
suffer.
Men did not and do not see what Jones saw so much more clearly than
any other reformer of his time, namely that, above all the laws men
make with their political machines in their legislatures, there is a
higher law, and that the Golden Rule is a rule of conduct deduced from
that law. He saw that men, whether they knew it or not, liked it or
not, or were conscious of it or not, had in all times been living, and
must forever go on living, under the principle on which the Golden Rule
is based. That is, Jones saw that this great law had always existed
in the universe, just as the law of gravitation existed before Newton
discovered it. It is inherent in the very constitution of things, as
one of that body of laws which govern the universe and always act and
react equally among men. And Jones felt that men should for their
comfort, if for no higher motive, respect this law and get the best
out of life by observing it; and that it should be the business of men
through their governments to seek out this law and the rules that might
scientifically be deduced from it, instead of putting their faith in
their own contrivances of statutes, resolutions, orders, and decrees,
and, when these would not work, trying to make them effective through
grand juries and petit juries, and all the hideous machinery of jails
and prisons, and scaffolds and electric chairs. And because he had no
superstitious reverence for policemen or their clubs, or for soldiers
and their bayonets and machine guns, they said he had no reverence for
law.
He had, of course, been to the legislature; he had seen the midnight
sessions there, when statutes were enacted amid scenes of drunken
riot and confusion, and he saw no reason why he should have reverence
for the acts of these men. Perhaps he was wrong; I am only trying
to tell how it appeared to him. He was not a lawyer, but he knew
what many lawyers have never learned, that there is sometimes a vast
difference between a statute and a law. He saw that not all statutes
are laws; that they are laws only when, by accident or design, they
are in conformity with those rules by which the universe is governed,
whether in the physical or the spiritual world, and these laws, eternal
and immutable, are invariable, self-executing, instant in operation,
without judges to declare them, or executives to enforce them, or
courts to say whether they are unconstitutional or not.
He saw that the law on which the Golden Rule is founded, the law of
moral action and reaction, is the one most generally ignored. Its
principle he felt to be always at work, so that men lived by it whether
they wished to or not, whether they knew it or not. According to this
law, hate breeds hate and love produces love in return; and all force
begets resistance, and the result is the general disorder and anarchy
in which we live so much of the time.
It may be that in this view of life some dangerous apothegms are
involved; as we grow older we grow conservative, and conservatism is
a kind of cynicism, a kind of fear, the trembling distrust of age.
But I know that in the life concept to which Jones came in his study
of this principle, every act of his life, no matter how trifling and
insignificant it may have seemed, suddenly took on a vast and vital
significance; so that the hasty glance, the unkind word, the very
spirit in which a thing is said or done, were seen to have an effect
which may reach farther than the imagination can go, an effect not
only on one’s own life and character, but on the lives and characters
of all those about him. He was always human; I say that to prevent any
impression that he was solemn or priggish; he deliberately took up
smoking, for instance, toward the end of his days, because, he said
with a chuckle, one must have some vices. And sometimes when the Golden
Rule seemed not to “work,” he would truly say it was only because he
didn’t know how to work it. And he used to quote Walt Whitman:
The song is to the singer and comes back most to him;
* * * * *
The love is to the lover and comes back most to him;
The gift is to the giver, and comes back most to him--it cannot fail.