It was of the Free City they had dreamed and that they had not lived
to behold the fulfillment of their dream was, in its way, the final
certification of the validity of their services as pioneers. It is an
old rule of life, or an old trick of the fates that seem so casually
to govern life, that the dreams of mortals are seldom destined to
come true, though mortals sometimes thwart the fates by finding their
dreams in themselves sufficient. In this sense Jones and Johnson had
already been rewarded. It had been a dream of wonder and of beauty,
the vision of a city stately with towers, above which there hung the
glow which poor Jude used to see at evening when he climbed to the
roof of the Brown House on the ridgeway near Marygreen. It was a city
in which there were the living conceptions of justice, pity, mercy,
consideration, toleration, beauty, art, all those graces which mankind
so long has held noblest and most dear. It was a city wherein human
life was precious, and therefore gracious, a city which the citizen
loved as a graduate loves his alma mater, a city with a communal
spirit. There the old ideas of privilege had given way to the ideals of
service, public property was held as sacred as private property, power
was lightly wielded, the people’s voice was intelligent and omnipotent,
for they had learned the wisdom that confuses demagogues, and amid the
interplay of myriad forces, the democratic spirit was ever at work,
performing its noble functions. You might have said that the people
were inspired, since they united so readily in great constructive work,
reducing to order and scientific arrangement all the manifold needs and
expressions of the daily life, conquering in the old struggle against
nature, providing against all that casualty and accident which make
life to-day such a snarl of squalid tragedies and ridiculous comedies
that it well may seem to be ruled by none other than the most whimsical
and spiteful of irresponsible spirits. It was more than a city indeed,
it was a realm of reason, wherein the people at last in good will
were living a social life. The eternal negative, the everlasting no,
had given way to a new affirmation; each morning should ordain new
emancipations, and each evening behold new reconciliations among men.
It was a city wherein the people were achieving more and more of
leisure, that life in all her splendor and her beauty and her glory
might not pass by unhailed, unrecognized even, by so many toiling
thousands. It was the vision of a city set upon a hill, with happy
people singing in the streets.
These words I know but vaguely express the vision that had come to
those two men with the unpoetic names of Johnson and Jones. When I
speak of a city where people sing in the streets I am perfectly well
aware of the smile that touches the lips of sophistication, though the
smile would have been none the less cynical had I mentioned merely
a city in which there were happy people at all. I am perfectly well
aware that such a thing in all literalness is perhaps impossible to the
weary, preoccupied crowds in the streets of any of our cities; it would
be too absurd, too ridiculous, and probably against the law, if not
indeed quite wicked. In Mr. Housman’s somber lines:
These are not in plight to bear,
If they would, another’s care.
They have enough as ’tis: I see
In many an eye that measures me
The mortal sickness of a mind
Too unhappy to be kind.
Undone with misery, all they can
Is to hate their fellow man;
And till they drop they needs must still
Look at you and wish you ill.
And yet, it is not wholly impossible after all. One evening in
Brussels, hearing the strains of a band I looked out of my hotel
window, and saw a throng of youth and maidens dancing in a mist of rain
down an asphalt pavement that glistened under the electric lights. It
was a sight of such innocence, of such simple joy and gayety as one
could never behold in our cities, and it occasioned no more remark,
was considered no more out of place or unbecoming than it would be for
a man to sprawl on one of our sidewalks and look for a dime he had
dropped. But I happened to use that phrase about singing in the streets
simply because it was one Jones used to employ, just as Johnson used
forever to be talking about his city set on a hill. If Johnson’s phrase
was in an old poetic strain Jones meant literally what he said. He used
to talk of the crowds he had seen along the boulevards of Paris, and
the gayety, impossible to us, in which they had celebrated the 14th of
July, and he talked of all this to such purpose that Toledo became the
first city in America to have a “sane” Fourth of July.
Jones and Johnson, because they had vision, were thinking in sequences
far beyond the material conceptions of the communities about them, and
utterly impossible to skulking city politicians, with their miserable
little treacheries and contemptible and selfish ambitions. They were
imagining a spirit which might and perhaps some day will possess a
whole people. And when I intimated the pity it was that they had not
lived to see that silvery September day when the people of Ohio voted
for municipal autonomy, I did not mean in the least to aver that their
dream had been realized for us, simply because we had secured an
amendment to our fundamental law. Memoranda to this effect had been
noted on the roll of the constitution, but these after all were but the
cold, formal and unlovely terms that expressed concepts which had been
evolving slowly in the public consciousness.
They realized, what all intelligent men must ere long apprehend, that
too great stress has been laid on mere political activity. We have
counted it as of controlling force in human affairs, the energy behind
human activities, the cause, instead of the effect, the motive,
instead of a mere expression of our complex life. They saw more deeply
than politics, they recognized other and mightier influences at work,
affecting the interests and the emotions of men. They knew that there
is after all, an unconscious, subtle wisdom in the general neglect of
politics by the masses of citizens, who intuitively know that other
things are of more importance. They were but seeking to clear the way
for the more fundamental expressions of human interest, human emotions,
human fervors, human liberties. For of course it is not the city that
makes the people free, but the people that make the city free; and
the city cannot be free until the people have been freed from all
their various bondages, free above all from themselves, from their own
ignorances, littlenesses, superstitions, jealousies, envies, suspicions
and fears. And it is not laws that can set them free, nor political
parties, nor organizations, nor commissions, nor any sort of legalistic
machinery. They must themselves set themselves free, and themselves
indeed find out the way.
Nor is that freedom to be defined; its chief value lies, as does
that of any concept of truth, in the fact that it is largely
impressionistic, subject to the alterations and corrections of that
mysterious system of incessant change which is life itself. The value
and even the permanence of many ideals and many truths--for truths
are not always permanent, but are subject to the flux of life--lie in
the fact that they are impressionistic. Reduced to formal lines and
hardened into rigid detail they become something quite otherwise than
that which they were at first or were intended to be.
No, neither for them, nor for us, had the dream come true. But it had
come nearer. It had become possible. Many obstacles had been removed;
many purifications had been wrought, many deliverances achieved. To
Cleveland and to Toledo, those two cities by the lake, the years
had brought their changes. Not objectively, perhaps; outwardly they
were much the same--without form, inharmonious, ugly, with the awful
antitheses of our economic system, and what is worse, the vast welter
of mediocrity and banality between. But there had been ameliorations.
In each of them there were plans traced for beautiful civic centers
with groups of buildings and other public amenities, which, when
realized, would render them comparable in that respect to those old
cities of Europe where the benison of art has descended on the people
from the hands of kings. And these things were coming up out of the
people, despite provincialism and philistinism and politics; there
was a new understanding of sovereignty, not as a menace descending
from above, but as an aspiration coming up from below. And this new
aspiration in the people, pressing with the irresistible urge of
moral sentiment against old institutions will renovate the cities and
recreate the lives in them.
For after all the world grows better. Not as rapidly as we should
like, but yet, in a way, better. The immense sophistication of the
modern mood, to be sure, is apt to cast contemporary thought in the
mould of multifold negation; and sensibilities, long distressed by the
contemplation of life in aspects it would not wear were this more of a
realm of reason, find their only solace in that pessimism which makes
charming so much of modern poetry. Doubtless this is the mood most
congenial to the agnosticism of the reflective, contemplative mind in
the present phase of its philosophy. It has its undoubted fascinations,
its uses, and, indeed, its truth, part reaction though it be from
the excessive strain of contemporary life in cities, and the dull
orthodoxies of the Victorian age. To one, indeed, who, in eight years’
participation in municipal politics might in that respect have been
compared to that character in one of Anatole France’s novels who never
opened a door without coming upon some hitherto unsuspected depth of
infamy in mankind, it was difficult to avoid that strain. And yet, bad
as municipal government has been in this land, it is everywhere better
to-day. The level of moral sentiment, like the level of intelligence,
mounts slowly, in wide spirals, but it mounts steadily all the time. In
not every city has the advance been so marked, for not every city has
had such personalities as Johnson and Jones, and without personalities,
democracies seem unable to function. The old corruptions, once so
flagrant, are growing less and less, and there is left only the
residuum of meanness and pettiness and spite, the crimes that require
no courage and entail no fear of the law, committed by beings who
never could attain the robust stature of the old and brazen and robust
offenders. The strain is running out, attenuating, and ere long will
be extinct.
Those gentle pessimists of such congenial culture may indeed point
to other ages that excel ours, say in speculative thought, and all
the five arts, but I think it is demonstrable that upon the whole,
and employing long epochs for the comparison, things are growing
better. Notwithstanding all the ignorance and all the woe in the world
to-night, never before has there been such widespread opportunity for
enlightenment, never such widespread comfort, never so much kindness,
so much pity for animals, for children, and, above all, never have
women been shown such consideration. It needs no very powerful
imagination, peering into the shadowy background of human history,
to appreciate the tremendous implications of this fact. Indeed the
great feminist movement of our time, a movement which in the histories
of mankind centuries hence will be given the sectional mark of the
beginning of a new age, is in itself the proof of a great advance, in
which the ballot will be the very least important of all the liberties
to be won.
With all the complications of this vast and confusing interplay of
the forces of this age, the city is inextricably bound by its awful
responsibility for so much that is bad, for so much that is good, in
our time. And in the cities, now as always, the struggle for liberty
will go on. The old leaders will pass, and the new will pass, and pass
swiftly, for they are quickly consumed in the stress and heat of the
passionate and savage struggle. To them must ever come the fatigue of
long drawn opposition, of the repeated and unavailing assaults on the
cold, solid and impregnable walls of institutions. In this fatigue they
may grow conservative after a while, and they should pray to be spared
the acquiescence of the middle years, the base capitulation of age.
But always the people remain, pressing onward in a great stream up
the slopes, and always somehow toward the light. For the great dream
beckons, leads them on, the dream of social harmony always prefigured
in human thought as the city. This radiant vision of the city is the
oldest dream in the world. All literature is saturated with it. It
has been the ideal of human achievement since the day when the men on
the plains of Shinar sought to build a city whose towers should reach
unto heaven. It was the angelic vision of the mystic on Patmos, the
city descending out of heaven, and lying foursquare, the city where
there was to be no more sorrow nor crying. It has been the goal of
civilization down to this hour of the night, when, however vaguely and
dimly, the ideal stirs the thousands in this feverish town going about
their strange and various businesses, pleasures, devotions, sacrifices,
sins. It has been the everlasting dream of humanity. And humanity will
continue to struggle for it, to struggle toward it. And some day,
somewhere, to the sons of men the dream will come true.