must admit the need in our public life of those qualities which we
somewhat vaguely group together when we speak of “reform,” and all men
of sound mind must also admit the need of efficiency. There are, of
course, men of such low moral type, or of such ingrained cynicism, that
they do not believe in the possibility of making anything better, or
do not care to see things better. There are also men who are slightly
disordered mentally, or who are cursed with a moral twist which
makes them champion reforms less from a desire to do good to others
than as a kind of tribute to their own righteousness, for the sake
of emphasizing their own superiority. From neither of these classes
can we get any real help in the unending struggle for righteousness.
There remains the great body of the people, including the entire body
of those through whom the salvation of the people must ultimately be
worked out. All these men combine or seek to combine in varying degrees
the quality of striving after the ideal, that is, the quality which
makes men reformers, and the quality of so striving through practical
methods—the quality which makes men efficient. Both qualities are
absolutely essential. The absence of either makes the presence of the
other worthless or worse.
If there is one tendency of the day which more than any other
is unhealthy and undesirable, it is the tendency to deify mere
“smartness,” unaccompanied by a sense of moral accountability. We
shall never make our Republic what it should be until as a people we
thoroughly understand and put in practice the doctrine that success is
abhorrent if attained by the sacrifice of the fundamental principles
of morality. The successful man, whether in business or in politics,
who has risen by conscienceless swindling of his neighbors, by deceit
and chicanery, by unscrupulous boldness and unscrupulous cunning,
stands toward society as a dangerous wild beast. The mean and cringing
admiration which such a career commands among those who think crookedly
or not at all makes this kind of success perhaps the most dangerous of
all the influences that threaten our national life. Our standard of
public and private conduct will never be raised to the proper level
until we make the scoundrel who succeeds feel the weight of a hostile
public opinion even more strongly than the scoundrel who fails.
On the other hand, mere beating the air, mere visionary adherence to a
nebulous and possibly highly undesirable ideal, is utterly worthless.
The cloistered virtue which timidly shrinks from all contact with the
rough world of actual life, and the uneasy, self-conscious vanity which
misnames itself virtue, and which declines to co-operate with whatever
does not adopt its own fantastic standard, are rather worse than
valueless, because they tend to rob the forces of good of elements on
which they ought to be able to count in the ceaseless contest with the
forces of evil. It is true that the impracticable idealist differs from
the hard-working, sincere man who in practical fashion, and by deeds as
well as by words, strives in some sort actually to realize his ideal;
but the difference lies in the fact that the first is impracticable,
not in his having a high ideal, for the ideal of the other may be even
higher. At times a man must cut loose from his associates, and stand
alone for a great cause; but the necessity for such action is almost
as rare as the necessity for a revolution; and to take such ground
continually, in season and out of season, is the sign of an unhealthy
nature. It is not possible to lay down an inflexible rule as to when
compromise is right and when wrong; when it is a sign of the highest
statesmanship to temporize, and when it is merely a proof of weakness.
Now and then one can stand uncompromisingly for a naked principle and
force people up to it. This is always the attractive course; but in
certain great crises it may be a very wrong course. Compromise, in the
proper sense, merely means agreement; in the proper sense opportunism
should merely mean doing the best possible with actual conditions as
they exist. A compromise which results in a half-step toward evil is
all wrong, just as the opportunist who saves himself for the moment by
adopting a policy which is fraught with future disaster is all wrong;
but no less wrong is the attitude of those who will not come to an
agreement through which, or will not follow the course by which, it is
alone possible to accomplish practical results for good.
These two attitudes, the attitude of deifying mere efficiency, mere
success, without regard to the moral qualities lying behind it and the
attitude of disregarding efficiency, disregarding practical results,
are the Scylla and Charybdis between which every earnest reformer,
every politician who desires to make the name of his profession a term
of honor instead of shame, must steer. He must avoid both under penalty
of wreckage, and it avails him nothing to have avoided one, if he
founders on the other. People are apt to speak as if in political life,
public life, it ought to be a mere case of striving upward—striving
toward a high peak. The simile is inexact. Every man who is striving
to do good public work is traveling along a ridge crest, with the gulf
of failure on each side—the gulf of inefficiency on the one side,
the gulf of unrighteousness on the other. All kinds of forces are
continually playing on him, to shove him first into one gulf and then
into the other; and even a wise and good man, unless he braces himself
with uncommon firmness and foresight, as he is pushed this way and
that, will find that his course becomes a pronounced zigzag instead
of a straight line; and if it becomes too pronounced he is lost, no
matter to which side the zigzag may take him. Nor is he lost only as
regards his own career. What is far more serious, his power of doing
useful service to the public is at an end. He may still, if a mere
politician, have political place, or, if a make-believe reformer,
retain that notoriety upon which his vanity feeds. But, in either case,
his usefulness to the community has ceased.
The man who sacrifices everything to efficiency needs but a short
shrift in a discussion like this. The abler he is, the more dangerous
he is to the community. The master and typical representative of a
great municipal political organization recently stated under oath that
“he was in politics for his pocket every time.” This put in its baldest
and most cynically offensive shape the doctrine upon which certain
public men act. It is not necessary to argue its iniquity with those
who have advanced any great distance beyond the brigand theory of
political life. Some years ago another public man enunciated much the
same doctrine in the phrase, “The Decalogue and the Golden Rule have no
part in political life.” Such statements, openly made, imply a belief
that the public conscience is dull; and where the men who make them
continue to be political leaders, the public has itself to thank for
all shortcomings in public life.
The man who is constitutionally incapable of working for practical
results ought not to need a much longer shrift. In every community
there are little knots of fantastic extremists who loudly proclaim that
they are striving for righteousness, and who, in reality, do their
feeble best for unrighteousness. Just as the upright politician should
hold in peculiar scorn the man who makes the name of politician a
reproach and a shame, so the genuine reformer should realize that the
cause he champions is especially jeopardized by the mock reformer who
does what he can to make reform a laughing-stock among decent men.
A caustic observer once remarked that when Dr. Johnson spoke of
patriotism as the last refuge of a scoundrel, “he was ignorant of the
infinite possibilities contained in the word ‘reform.’” The sneer was
discreditable to the man who uttered it, for it is no more possible
to justify corruption by railing at those who by their conduct throw
scandal upon the cause of reform than it is to justify treason by
showing that men of shady character frequently try to cover their
misconduct by fervent protestations of love of country. Nevertheless,
the fact remains that exactly as true patriots should be especially
jealous of any appeal to what is base under the guise of patriotism, so
men who strive for honesty, and for the cleansing of what is corrupt
in the dark places of our politics, should emphatically disassociate
themselves from the men whose antics throw discredit upon the reforms
they profess to advocate.
These little knots of extremists are found everywhere, one type
flourishing chiefly in one locality and another type in another. In
the particular objects they severally profess to champion they are as
far asunder as the poles, for one of their characteristics is that
each little group has its own patent recipe for salvation and pays no
attention whatever to the other little groups; but in mental and moral
habit they are fundamentally alike. They may be socialists of twenty
different types, from the followers of Tolstoi down and up, or they may
ostensibly champion some cause in itself excellent, such as temperance
or municipal reform, or they may merely with comprehensive vagueness
announce themselves as the general enemies of what is bad, of corrupt,
machine politics, and the like. Their policies and principles are
usually mutually exclusive; but that does not alter the conviction,
which each feels or affects to feel, that his particular group is the
real vanguard of the army of reform. Of course, as the particular
groups are all marching in different directions, it is not possible for
more than one of them to be the vanguard. The others, at best, must
be off to one side, and may possibly be marching the wrong way in the
rear; and, as a matter of fact, it is only occasionally that any one of
them is in the front. There are in each group many entirely sincere and
honest men, and because of the presence of these men we are too apt to
pay some of their associates the unmerited compliment of speaking of
them also as honest but impracticable. As a matter of fact, the typical
extremist of this kind differs from the practical reformer, from the
public man who strives in practical fashion for decency, not at all
in superior morality, but in inferior sense. He is not more virtuous;
he is less virtuous. He is merely more foolish. When Wendell Phillips
denounced Abraham Lincoln as “the slave-hound of Illinois,” he did not
show himself more virtuous than Lincoln, but more foolish. Neither did
he advance the cause of human freedom. When the contest for the Union
and against slavery took on definite shape then he and his kind were
swept aside by the statesmen and soldiers, like Lincoln and Seward,
Grant and Farragut, who alone were able to ride the storm. Great as
is the superiority in efficiency of the men who do things over those
who do not, it may be no greater than their superiority in morality.
In addition to the simple and sincere men who have a twist in their
mental make-up, these knots of enthusiasts contain, especially among
their leaders, men of morbid vanity, who thirst for notoriety, men who
lack power to accomplish anything if they go in with their fellows to
fight for results, and who prefer to sit outside and attract momentary
attention by denouncing those who are really forces for good.
In every community in our land there are many hundreds of earnest and
sincere men, clergymen and laymen, reformers who strive for reform in
the field of politics, in the field of philanthropy, in the field of
social life; and we could count on the fingers of one hand the number
of times these men have been really aided in their efforts by the men
of the type referred to in the preceding paragraph. The socialist who
raves against the existing order is not the man who ever lifts his
hand practically to make our social life a little better, to make the
conditions that bear upon the unfortunate a little easier; the man who
demands the immediate impossible in temperance is not the man who ever
aids in an effort to minimize the evils caused by the saloon; and those
who work practically for political reform are hampered, so far as
they are affected at all, by the strutting vanity of the professional
impracticables.
It is not that these little knots of men accomplish much of a
positive nature that is objectionable, for their direct influence is
inconsiderable; but they do have an undoubted indirect effect for bad,
and this of a double kind. They affect for evil a certain number of
decent men in one way and a certain number of equally decent men in an
entirely different way. Some decent men, following their lead, withdraw
themselves from the active work of life, whether social, philanthropic,
or political, and by the amount they thus withdraw from the side of
the forces of good they strengthen the forces of evil, as, of course,
it makes no difference whether we lessen the numerator or increase the
denominator. Other decent men are so alienated by such conduct that
in their turn they abandon all effort to fight for reform, believing
reformers to be either hypocrites or fools. Both of these phenomena
are perfectly familiar to every active politician who has striven for
decency, and to every man who has studied history in an intelligent
way. Few things hurt a good cause more than the excesses of its nominal
friends.
Fortunately, most extremists lack the power to commit dangerous
excesses. Their action is normally as abortive as that of the queer
abolitionist who, in 1864, nominated a candidate against Abraham
Lincoln when he was running for re-election to the Presidency. The men
entering this movement represented all extremes, moral and mental.
Nominally they opposed Lincoln because they did not feel that he had
gone far enough in what they deemed the right direction,—had not
been sufficiently extreme,—and they objected to what they styled his
opportunism, his tendency to compromise, his temporizing conduct,
and his being a practical politician. In reality, of course, their
opposition to Lincoln was conditioned, not upon what Lincoln had
done, but upon their own natures. They were incapable of supporting
a great constructive statesman in a great crisis; and this, not
because they were too virtuous, but because they lacked the necessary
common-sense and power of subordination of self to enable them to
work disinterestedly with others for the common good. Their movement,
however, proved utterly abortive, and they had no effect even for evil.
The sound, wholesome common-sense of the American people fortunately
renders such movements, as a rule, innocuous; and this is, in reality,
the prime reason why republican government prospers in America, as it
does not prosper, for instance, in France. With us these little knots
of impracticables have an insignificant effect upon the national life,
and no representation to speak of in our governmental assemblies. In
France, where the nation has not the habit of self-government, and
where the national spirit is more volatile and less sane, each little
group grows until it becomes a power for evil, and, taken together, all
the little groups give to French political life its curious, and by no
means elevating, kaleidoscopic character.
Macaulay’s eminently sane and wholesome spirit and his knowledge
of practical affairs give him a peculiar value among historians
of political thought. In speaking of Scotland at the end of the
seventeenth century he writes as follows:
“It is a remarkable circumstance that the same country should have
produced in the same age the most wonderful specimens of both extremes
of human nature. Even in things indifferent the Scotch Puritan would
hear of no compromise; and he was but too ready to consider all who
recommended prudence and charity as traitors to the cause of truth. On
the other hand, the Scotchmen of that generation who made a figure in
Parliament were the most dishonest and unblushing time-servers that the
world has ever seen. Perhaps it is natural that the most callous and
impudent vice should be found in the near neighborhood of unreasonable
and impracticable virtue. Where enthusiasts are ready to destroy or
be destroyed for trifles magnified into importance by a squeamish
conscience, it is not strange that the very name of conscience should
become a byword of contempt to cool and shrewd men of business.”
What he says of Scotland in the time of King James and King William is
true, word for word, of civic life in New York two centuries later.
We see in New York sodden masses of voters manipulated by clever,
unscrupulous, and utterly selfish masters of machine politics. Against
them we see, it is true, masses of voters who both know how to, and
do, strive for righteousness; but we see also very many others in whom
the capacity for self-government seems to have atrophied. They have
lost the power to do practical work by ceasing to exercise it, by
confining themselves to criticism and theorizing, to intemperate abuse
and intemperate championship of what they but imperfectly understand.
The analogues of the men whom Macaulay condemns exist in numbers in
New York, and work evil in our public life for the very reason that
Macaulay gives. They do not do practical work, and the extreme folly
of their position makes them not infrequently the allies of scoundrels
who cynically practice corruption. Too often, indeed, they actually
alienate from the cause of decency keen and honest men, who grow to
regard all movements for reform with contemptuous dislike because
of the folly and vanity of the men who in the name of righteousness
preach unwisdom and practice uncharitableness. These men thus do
inestimable damage; for the reform spirit, the spirit of striving after
high ideals, is the breath of life in our political institutions; and
whatever weakens it by just so much lessens the chance of ultimate
success under democratic government.
Discarding the two extremes, the men who deliberately work for evil,
and the men who are unwilling or incapable of working for good, there
remains the great mass of men who do desire to be efficient, who do
desire to make this world a better place to live in, and to do what
they can toward achieving cleaner minds and more wholesome bodies. To
these, after all, we can only say: Strive manfully for righteousness,
and strive so as to make your efforts for good count. You are not to be
excused if you fail to try to make things better; and the very phrase
“trying to make things better” implies trying in practical fashion. One
man’s capacity is for one kind of work and another man’s capacity for
another kind of work. One affects certain methods and another affects
entirely different methods. All this is of little concern. What is of
really vital importance is that something should be accomplished, and
that this something should be worthy of accomplishment. The field is
of vast size, and the laborers are always too few. There is not the
slightest excuse for one sincere worker looking down upon another
because he chooses a different part of the field and different
implements. It is inexcusable to refuse to work, to work slackly or
perversely, or to mar the work of others.
No man is justified in doing evil on the ground of expediency. He is
bound to do all the good possible. Yet he must consider the question
of expediency, in order that he may do all the good possible, for
otherwise he will do none. As soon as a politician gets to the point
of thinking that in order to be “practical” he has got to be base,
he has become a noxious member of the body politic. That species of
practicability eats into the moral sense of the people like a cancer,
and he who practices it can no more be excused than an editor who
debauches public decency in order to sell his paper.
We need the worker in the fields of social and civic reform; the man
who is keenly interested in some university settlement, some civic club
or citizens’ association which is striving to elevate the standard of
life. We need clean, healthy newspapers, with clean, healthy criticism
which shall be fearless and truthful. We need upright politicians,
who will take the time and trouble, and who possess the capacity, to
manage caucuses, conventions, and public assemblies. We need men who
try to be their poorer brothers’ keepers to the extent of befriending
them and working with them so far as they are willing; men who work
in charitable associations, or, what is even better, strive to get
into touch with the wage-workers, to understand them, and to champion
their cause when it is just. We need the sound and healthy idealist;
the theoretic writer, preacher, or teacher; the Emerson or Phillips
Brooks, who helps to create the atmosphere of enthusiasm and practical
endeavor. In public life we need not only men who are able to work
in and through their parties, but also upright, fearless, rational
independents, who will deal impartial justice to all men and all
parties. We need men who are far-sighted and resolute; men who combine
sincerity with sanity. We need scholarly men, too—men who study all
the difficult questions of our political life from the standpoint both
of practice and of theory; men who thus study trusts, or municipal
government, or finance, or taxation, or civil-service reform, as the
authors of the “Federalist” studied the problems of federal government.
In closing, let me again dwell upon the point I am seeking to
emphasize, so that there shall be no chance of honest misunderstanding
of what I say. It is vital that every man who is in politics, as a man
ought to be, with a disinterested purpose to serve the public, should
strive steadily for reform; that he should have the highest ideals. He
must lead, only he must lead in the right direction, and normally he
must be in sight of his followers. Cynicism in public life is a curse,
and when a man has lost the power of enthusiasm for righteousness it
will be better for him and the country if he abandons public life.
Above all, the political reformer must not permit himself to be driven
from his duty of supporting what is right by any irritation at the men
who, while nominally supporting the same objects, and even ridiculing
him as a backslider or an “opportunist,” yet by their levity or
fanaticism do damage to the cause which he really serves, and which
they profess to serve. Let him disregard them; for though they are,
according to their ability, the foes of decent politics, yet, after
all, they are but weaklings, and the real and dangerous enemies of
the cause he holds dear are those sinister beings who batten on the
evil of our political system, and both profit by its existence, and
by their own existence tend to perpetuate and increase it. We must
not be diverted from our warfare with these powerful and efficient
corruptionists by irritation at the vain prattlers who think they are
at the head of the reform forces, whereas they are really wandering in
bypaths in the rear.