It had been an issue, as I have more than once said in Jones’s time and
in his campaigns, though the issues his tremendous personality raised
were so vast and so general and so fundamental that they included all
issues, as Emerson said his reform included all reforms. It ran like a
scarlet thread through the warp and woof of our communal life; it was
somehow associated with the ambitions of the meanest politician, it
affected the fortunes of every man in business, and it was the means
whereby the community came to have an ideal. The long story of it, like
the story of the same interest in any town, would include triumphs
and tragedies--and the way of politics through the town was strewn
with the pitiable wrecks of character and of life itself that had been
ruthlessly sacrificed to the insatiable greed of privilege. Only the
other day one such wreck, once in a position of honor and trust in the
municipality, was waiting in the outer office; he wanted half a dollar
and a place to sleep. And another like him, most desperate of all,
asked to be committed to a city hospital or even to the asylum for the
insane; he had no other refuge, and as for the poorhouse, he said, not
yet, not yet! And these were the sacrifices privilege demanded of its
parasites; though their case morally, at least, could be no worse than
that of privilege’s principal beneficiaries; not half so bad indeed,
since they had lost the power of appreciation of spiritual values.
I knew a reporter, an Irish lad, whom one of the attorneys of privilege
sought to “befriend.”
“You work pretty hard, don’t you?” asked the attorney.
“Yes,” said the Irish lad.
“And your salary is small?”
“Yes.”
“And a mortgage on your mother’s home?” The agents of privilege always
know a man’s necessities!
“Yes.”
“Well, now, I can tell you how things can be eased up a bit for you.
For instance----”
After the proposal had been artfully made, the Irish lad thought a
moment, and then he raised those blue eyes to the old lawyer.
“Your wife is prominent socially, isn’t she?”
“Why, yes.”
“President of--this and that, eh?”
“Yes.”
“And your daughters just home from a finishing school in Europe, aren’t
they?”
“Yes--but what----?”
“I was wondering,” said the Irish lad, rising, “how you dared go home
at night and look ’em in the face.”
Not all men though have the character, the moral resistance of that
Irish lad, and the scores of the weak and erring ones are the tragic
figures in the long drama of the traction company in the city, in any
city--the drama that cannot be written.