Meanwhile, the education of the general mind went on, and we were,
after all, tending somewhither. Our experience in the greatest of our
tasks demonstrated that, and in the change that gradually took place in
sentiment concerning the street railway problem, there was an evidence
of the development of a mass consciousness, a mass will, which some
time in these cities of ours will justify democracy. It is of course
the most difficult process in the world, for a mass of two hundred
thousand people to unite in the expression of a will concerning a
single abstract proposition. The mass to be sure can now and then as it
were rear its head and blaze forth wrath and accomplish some instant
work of destruction; even if it be nothing more than the destruction
of an individual reputation. That is why the recall is so popular and
so generously and frequently employed in those cities that have it.
In such elections, with their personal and human center of interest,
the people all turn out, while in a referendum involving some abstract
principle, the vote cast is always small. That is why the referendum is
so important, and the recall, relatively, so unimportant; the use of
the first in the long run will afford a fine schooling for the people.
The most familiar expression of this rage of course was the clamor
for the indictment and imprisonment of someone connected in sinister
ways with the company, a demand with which I never had the slightest
sympathy, to which I could never yield the slightest acquiescence. What
good, though all the poor and miserable servitors of privilege were put
in prison, while privilege itself remained? Such clamors have had their
results; a few more broken lives, a little more sorrow and shame in the
world, and the clamor ceases, and things go on the same as before.
It is this instability, this variableness, this weariness of the
public mind, on which privilege depends, with a cynical trust so often
justified that it might breed cynicism in all observant and reflective
natures. The street railway proprietors in Toledo expected each
election to demonstrate this weariness in the people, and to restore
them to, or at least confirm them in, the privileges they had enjoyed
under the old régime.
For a people to assume and for a decade consistently to maintain an
attitude toward a public question therefore was a triumph of the
democratic principle. That is what the people of Cleveland did; that is
what the people of Detroit did; that is what the people of Toledo did.
The successive stages of this process were most interesting to observe,
the more especially since they caught in the movement even some of the
street railway group and its political confreres themselves.
In its origin the public will was destructive no doubt, that was the
inarticulate disgust born of the long endurance of inadequate service,
all the miseries of that contemptuous exploitation of the people so
familiar in all the cities of America. To this, on the customary
revelations of a corrupt domination of the political machinery of the
city by the street railway company, there was added a moral rage--the
one element needed to provide the spark for the mine. At first this
rage against the company was such that any action taken by officials
was popular so long as it injured or harassed or was somehow inimical
to the company. And in consequence there was developed a kind of local
jingoism or chauvinism; whenever popularity slackened or it was felt
necessary to remind the electorate back in the ward of the sleepless
vigilance of their representative in the council, a councilman had
only to introduce some resolution that would be against the company’s
interest. It was unfortunate, and had its evil phase, as any suggestion
of intellectual dishonesty must ever have, and it made serious dealing
with the subject extremely difficult and hazardous. It was difficult to
recognize any of the company’s rights; and it was always at the risk
of misunderstanding, and with the certainty of misrepresentation that
this was done. But of course it was necessary to do this, in the course
of the long and complicated transaction, that constant and inflexible
opposition of the public with the private interest which now assumed
the aspect of a noisy and furious war, and now the softer phases of
diplomatic negotiations. Of course there were always those in town
who knew exactly what was to be done; they could settle the vexatious
problem with a facile gesture, between the whiffs of a cigarette on the
back platform of a street car, or in an after dinner speech between
the puffs of a cigar. The one was apt to advise that the “traction
company be brought to time at once,” the other that an “equitable”
settlement be “arranged” by conservative business men. Meanwhile the
problem obviously consisted in the necessity of recognizing the private
right in the proprietors and of securing the public right to the
people, and to do this it was necessary to search out, and isolate,
like some malignant organism, the injustice that somewhere lurked in
this complex and irritating association.
In my first campaign we proposed to grant no renewal of franchises at
a rate of fare higher than three cents. Jones had advised it, and I
had been committed to it long before. It was Tom Johnson’s old slogan,
and it was popular. I used to explain to the crowds my own conviction
that the problem never would be settled until we had municipal
ownership, but there was in Toledo in those days very little sentiment
for municipal ownership, and my conviction met with no applause, and
was received only with mild toleration. In the second campaign, there
was more indorsement; in the third there was a certain enthusiasm for
the principle, in the fourth it seemed to be almost unanimous, and
now the principle has become one of the cardinal articles of faith. I
do not wish it to appear that I had converted all these people to my
view; I had not tried to do that, and doubtless could not have done so
had I tried, but the conviction came by the very necessities of the
situation.