honest strivers after good, who sneers at the men who are following,
however humbly, in the footsteps of those who worked for and secured
practical results in the days of Washington, and again in the days
of Lincoln, who denounces them as time-servers and compromisers, is,
of course, an ally of corruption. But, after all, he can generally
be disregarded, whereas the real and dangerous foe is the corrupt
politician, whom we can not afford to disregard. When one of these
professional impracticables denounces the attitude of decent men as “a
hodge-podge of the ideal and the practicable,” he is amusingly unaware
that he is writing his own condemnation, showing his own inability to
do good work or to appreciate good work. The Constitutional Convention
over which Washington presided, and which made us a nation, represented
precisely and exactly this “hodge-podge,” and was frantically denounced
in its day by the men of the impracticable type. Lincoln’s career
throughout the Civil War was such a “hodge-podge,” and was in its
turn denounced in exactly the same way. Lincoln disregarded the jibes
of these men, who did their puny best to hurt the great cause for
which he battled; and they never, by their pin-pricks, succeeded in
diverting him from the real foe. The fanatical antislavery people
wished to hurry him into unwise, extreme, and premature action, and
denounced him as compromising with the forces of evil, as being a
practical politician—which he was, if practicality is held to include
wisdom and high purpose. He did not permit himself to be affected by
their position. He did not yield to what they advised when it was
impracticable, nor did he permit himself to become prejudiced against
so much of what they championed as was right and practicable. His
ideal was just as high as theirs. He did not lower it. He did not lose
his temper at their conduct, or cease to strive for the abolition of
slavery and the restoration of the Union; and whereas their conduct
foreboded disaster to both causes, his efforts secured the success
of both. So, in our turn, we of to-day are bound to try to tread in
the footsteps of those great Americans who in the past have held high
ideal and have striven mightily through practical methods to realize
that ideal. There must be many compromises; but we can not compromise
with dishonesty, with sin. We must not be misled at any time by the
cheap assertion that people get only what they want; that the editor
of a degraded newspaper is to be excused because the public want the
degradation; that the city officials who inaugurate a “wide-open”
policy are to be excused because a portion of the public likes vice;
that the men who jeer at philanthropy are to be excused because among
philanthropists there are hypocrites, and among unfortunates there are
vicious and unworthy people. To pander to depravity inevitably means
to increase the depravity. It is a dreadful thing that public sentiment
should condone misconduct in a public man; but this is no excuse for
the public man, if by his conduct he still further degrades public
sentiment. There can be no meddling with the laws of righteousness, of
decency, of morality. We are in honor bound to put into practice what
we preach; to remember that we are not to be excused if we do not; and
that in the last resort no material prosperity, no business acumen, no
intellectual development of any kind, can atone in the life of a nation
for the lack of the fundamental qualities of courage, honesty, and
common sense.
FELLOW-FEELING AS A POLITICAL FACTOR
PUBLISHED IN THE “CENTURY,” JANUARY, 1900
Fellow-feeling, sympathy in the broadest sense, is the most important
factor in producing a healthy political and social life. Neither our
national nor our local civil life can be what it should be unless it is
marked by the fellow-feeling, the mutual kindness, the mutual respect,
the sense of common duties and common interests, which arise when men
take the trouble to understand one another, and to associate together
for a common object. A very large share of the rancor of political
and social strife arises either from sheer misunderstanding by one
section, or by one class, of another, or else from the fact that the
two sections, or two classes, are so cut off from each other that
neither appreciates the other’s passions, prejudices, and, indeed,
point of view, while they are both entirely ignorant of their community
of feeling as regards the essentials of manhood and humanity.
This is one reason why the public school is so admirable an
institution. To it more than to any other among the many causes
which, in our American life, tell for religious toleration is due the
impossibility of persecution of a particular creed. When in their
earliest and most impressionable years Protestants, Catholics, and Jews
go to the same schools, learn the same lessons, play the same games,
and are forced, in the rough-and-ready democracy of boy life, to take
each at his true worth, it is impossible later to make the disciples
of one creed persecute those of another. From the evils of religious
persecution America is safe.
From the evils of sectional hostility we are, at any rate, far safer
than we were. The war with Spain was the most absolutely righteous
foreign war in which any nation has engaged during the nineteenth
century, and not the least of its many good features was the unity
it brought about between the sons of the men who wore the blue and
of those who wore the gray. This necessarily meant the dying out of
the old antipathy. Of course embers smoulder here and there; but the
country at large is growing more and more to take pride in the valor,
the self-devotion, the loyalty to an ideal, displayed alike by the
soldiers of both sides in the Civil War. We are all united now. We are
all glad that the Union was restored, and are one in our loyalty to it;
and hand in hand with this general recognition of the all-importance of
preserving the Union has gone the recognition of the fact that at the
outbreak of the Civil War men could not cut loose from the ingrained
habits and traditions of generations, and that the man from the North
and the man from the South each was loyal to his highest ideal of duty
when he drew sword or shouldered rifle to fight to the death for what
he believed to be right.
Nor is it only the North and the South that have struck hands. The
East and the West are fundamentally closer together than ever before.
Using the word “West” in the old sense, as meaning the country west
of the Alleghanies, it is of course perfectly obvious that it is the
West which will shape the destinies of this nation. The great group of
wealthy and powerful States about the Upper Mississippi, the Ohio, the
Missouri, and their tributaries, will have far more weight than any
other section in deciding the fate of the Republic in the centuries
that are opening. This is not in the least to be regretted by the East,
for the simple and excellent reason that the interests of the West
and the East are one. The West will shape our destinies because she
will have more people and a greater territory, and because the whole
development of the Western country is such as to make it peculiarly the
exponent of all that is most vigorously and characteristically American
in our national life.
So it is with the Pacific Slope, and the giant young States that are
there growing by leaps and bounds. The greater the share they have in
directing the national life, the better it will be for all of us.
I do not for a moment mean that mistakes will not be committed in
every section of the country; they certainly will be, and in whatever
section they are committed it will be our duty to protest against
them, and to try to overthrow those who are responsible for them: but
I do mean to say that in the long run each section is going to find
that its welfare, instead of being antagonistic to, is indissolubly
bound up in, the welfare of other sections; and the growth of means of
communication, the growth of education in its highest and finest sense,
means the growth in the sense of solidarity throughout the country, in
the feeling of patriotic pride of each American in the deeds of all
other Americans—of pride in the past history and present and future
greatness of the whole country.
Nobody is interested in the fact that Dewey comes from Vermont, Hobson
from Alabama, or Funston from Kansas. If all three came from the same
county it would make no difference to us. They are Americans, and every
American has an equal right to challenge his share of glory in their
deeds. As we read of the famous feats of our army in the Philippines,
it matters nothing to us whether the regiments come from Oregon, Idaho,
California, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, or Tennessee. What does matter
is that these splendid soldiers are all Americans; that they are our
heroes; that our blood runs in their veins; that the flag under which
we live is the flag for which they have fought, for which some of them
have died.
Danger from religious antipathy is dead, and from sectional antipathy
dying; but there are at times very ugly manifestations of antipathy
between class and class. It seems a pity to have to use the word
“class,” because there are really no classes in our American life in
the sense in which the word “class” is used in Europe. Our social and
political systems do not admit of them in theory, and in practice they
exist only in a very fluid state. In most European countries classes
are separated by rigid boundaries, which can be crossed but rarely,
and with the utmost difficulty and peril. Here the boundaries can
not properly be said to exist, and are certainly so fluctuating and
evasive, so indistinctly marked, that they can not be appreciated when
seen near by. Any American family which lasts a few generations will
be apt to have representatives in all the different classes. The great
business men, even the great professional men, and especially the
great statesmen and sailors and soldiers, are very apt to spring from
among the farmers or wage-workers, and their kinsfolk remain near the
old home or at the old trade. If ever there existed in the world a
community where the identity of interest, of habit, of principle, and
of ideals should be felt as a living force, ours is the one. Speaking
generally, it really is felt to a degree quite unknown in other
countries of our size. There are, doubtless, portions of Norway and
Switzerland where the social and political ideals, and their nearness
to realization, are not materially different from those of the most
essentially American portions of our own land; but this is not true
of any European country of considerable size. It is only in American
communities that we see the farmer, the hired man, the lawyer, and the
merchant, and possibly even the officer of the army or the navy, all
kinsmen, and all accepting their relations as perfectly natural and
simple. This is eminently healthy. This is just as it should be in our
Republic. It represents the ideal toward which it would be a good thing
to approximate everywhere. In the great industrial centres, with their
highly complex, highly specialized conditions, it is of course merely
an ideal. There are parts even of our oldest States, as, for example,
New York, where this ideal is actually realized; there are other parts,
particularly the great cities, where the life is so wholly different
that the attempt to live up precisely to the country conditions would
be artificial and impossible. Nevertheless, the fact remains that
the only true solution of our political and social problems lies in
cultivating everywhere the spirit of brotherhood, of fellow-feeling and
understanding between man and man, and the willingness to treat a man
as a man, which are the essential factors in American democracy as we
still see it in the country districts.
The chief factor in producing such sympathy is simply association on a
plane of equality, and for a common object. Any healthy-minded American
is bound to think well of his fellow-Americans if he only gets to know
them. The trouble is that he does not know them. If the banker and
the farmer never meet, or meet only in the most perfunctory business
way, if the banking is not done by men whom the farmer knows as his
friends and associates, a spirit of mistrust is almost sure to spring
up. If the merchant or the manufacturer, the lawyer or the clerk, never
meets the mechanic or the handicraftsman, save on rare occasions,
when the meeting may be of a hostile kind, each side feels that the
other is alien and naturally antagonistic. But if any one individual
of any group were to be thrown into natural association with another
group, the difficulties would be found to disappear so far as he was
concerned. Very possibly he would become the ardent champion of the
other group.
Perhaps I may be pardoned for quoting my own experience as an instance
in point. Outside of college boys and politicians my first intimate
associates were ranchmen, cow-punchers, and game-hunters, and I
speedily became convinced that there were no other men in the country
who were their equals. Then I was thrown much with farmers, and I
made up my mind that it was the farmer upon whom the foundations of
the commonwealth really rested—that the farmer was the archetypical
good American. Then I saw a good deal of railroad men, and after quite
an intimate acquaintance with them I grew to feel that, especially
in their higher ranks, they typified the very qualities of courage,
self-reliance, self-command, hardihood, capacity for work, power of
initiative, and power of obedience, which we like most to associate
with the American name. Then I happened to have dealings with certain
carpenters’ unions, and grew to have a great respect for the carpenter,
for the mechanic type. By this time it dawned upon me that they were
all pretty good fellows, and that my championship of each set in
succession above all other sets had sprung largely from the fact that
I was very familiar with the set I championed, and less familiar with
the remainder. In other words, I had grown into sympathy with, into
understanding of, group after group, with the effect that I invariably
found that they and I had common purposes and a common standpoint. We
differed among ourselves, or agreed among ourselves, not because we had
different occupations or the same occupation, but because of our ways
of looking at life.
It is this capacity for sympathy, for fellow-feeling and mutual
understanding, which must lie at the basis of all really successful
movements for good government and the betterment of social and
civic conditions. There is no patent device for bringing about good
government. Still less is there any patent device for remedying social
evils and doing away with social inequalities. Wise legislation can
help in each case, and crude, vicious, or demagogic legislation can
do an infinity of harm. But the betterment must come through the slow
workings of the same forces which always have tended for righteousness,
and always will.
The prime lesson to be taught is the lesson of treating each man on
his worth as a man, and of remembering that while sometimes it is
necessary, from both a legislative and social standpoint, to consider
men as a class, yet in the long run our safety lies in recognizing the
individual’s worth or lack of worth as the chief basis of action, and
in shaping our whole conduct, and especially our political conduct,
accordingly. It is impossible for a democracy to endure if the
political lines are drawn to coincide with class lines. The resulting
government, whether of the upper or of the lower class, is not a
government of the whole people, but a government of part of the people
at the expense of the rest. Where the lines of political division are
vertical, the men of each occupation and of every social standing
separating according to their vocations and principles, the result
is healthy and normal. Just so far, however, as the lines are drawn
horizontally, the result is unhealthy, and in the long run disastrous,
for such a division means that men are pitted against one another in
accordance with the blind and selfish interests of the moment. Each is
thus placed over against his neighbor in an attitude of greedy class
hostility, which becomes the mainspring of his conduct, instead of each
basing his political action upon his own convictions as to what is
advisable and what inadvisable, and upon his own disinterested sense
of devotion to the interests of the whole community as he sees them.
Republics have fallen in the past primarily because the parties that
controlled them divided along the lines of class, so that inevitably
the triumph of one or the other implied the supremacy of a part over
the whole. The result might be an oligarchy, or it might be mob rule;
it mattered little which, as regards the ultimate effect, for in both
cases tyranny and anarchy were sure to alternate. The failure of the
Greek and Italian republics was fundamentally due to this cause.
Switzerland has flourished because the divisions upon which her
political issues have been fought have not been primarily those of
mere caste or social class, and America will flourish and will become
greater than any empire because, in the long run, in this country, any
party which strives to found itself upon sectional or class jealousy
and hostility must go down before the good sense of the people.
The only way to provide against the evils of a horizontal cleavage in
politics is to encourage the growth of fellow-feeling, of a feeling
based on the relations of man to man, and not of class to class. In
the country districts this is not very difficult. In the neighborhood
where I live, on the Fourth of July the four Protestant ministers and
the Catholic priest speak from the same platform, the children of all
of us go to the same district school, and the landowner and the hired
man take the same views, not merely of politics, but of duck-shooting
and of international yacht races. Naturally in such a community there
is small chance for class division. There is a slight feeling against
the mere summer residents, precisely because there is not much sympathy
with them, and because they do not share in our local interests; but
otherwise there are enough objects in common to put all much on the
same plane of interest in various important particulars, and each man
has too much self-respect to feel particularly jealous of any other
man. Moreover, as the community is small and consists for the most part
of persons who have dwelt long in the land, while those of foreign
ancestry, instead of keeping by themselves, have intermarried with the
natives, there is still a realizing sense of kinship among the men
who follow the different occupations. The characteristic family names
are often borne by men of widely different fortunes, ranging from the
local bayman through the captain of the oyster-sloop, the sail-maker,
or the wheelright, to the owner of what the countryside may know as the
manor-house—which probably contains one of the innumerable rooms in
which Washington is said to have slept. We have sharp rivalries, and
our politics are by no means always what they should be, but at least
we do not divide on class lines, for the very good reason that there
has been no crystallization into classes.
This condition prevails in essentials throughout the country
districts of New York, which are politically very much the healthiest
districts. Any man who has served in the Legislature realizes that the
country members form, on the whole, a very sound and healthy body of
legislators. Any man who has gone about much to the county fairs in
New York—almost the only place where the farm folks gather in large
numbers—can not but have been struck by the high character of the
average countryman. He is a fine fellow, rugged, hard-working, shrewd,
and keenly alive to the fundamental virtues. He and his brethren of the
smaller towns and villages, in ordinary circumstances, take very little
account, indeed, of any caste difference; they greet each man strictly
on his merits as a man, and therefore form a community in which there
is singularly little caste spirit, and in which men associate on
a thoroughly healthy and American ground of common ideals, common
convictions, and common sympathies.
Unfortunately, this can not be said of the larger cities, where the
conditions of life are so complicated that there has been an extreme
differentiation and specialization in every species of occupation,
whether of business or pleasure. The people of a certain degree of
wealth and of a certain occupation may never come into any real contact
with the people of another occupation, of another social standing.
The tendency is for the relations always to be between class and
class instead of between individual and individual. This produces the
thoroughly unhealthy belief that it is for the interest of one class as
against another to have its class representatives dominant in public
life. The ills of any such system are obvious. As a matter of fact,
the enormous mass of our legislation and administration ought to be
concerned with matters that are strictly for the commonweal; and where
special legislation or administration is needed, as it often must be,
for a certain class, the need can be met primarily by mere honesty and
common sense. But if men are elected solely from any caste, or on any
caste theory, the voter gradually substitutes the theory of allegiance
to the caste for the theory of allegiance to the commonwealth as
a whole, and instead of demanding as fundamental the qualities of
probity and broad intelligence—which are the indispensable qualities
in securing the welfare of the whole—as the first consideration, he
demands, as a substitute, zeal in the service, or apparent service of
the class, which is quite compatible with gross corruption outside.
In short, we get back to the conditions which foredoomed democracy to
failure in the ancient Greek and mediæval republics, where party lines
were horizontal and class warred against class, each in consequence
necessarily substituting devotion to the interest of a class for
devotion to the interest of the state and to the elementary ideas of
morality.
The only way to avoid the growth of these evils is, so far as may
be, to help in the creation of conditions which will permit mutual
understanding and fellow-feeling between the members of different
classes. To do this it is absolutely necessary that there should be
natural association between the members for a common end or with a
common purpose. As long as men are separated by their caste lines,
each body having its own amusements, interests, and occupations, they
are certain to regard one another with that instinctive distrust which
they feel for foreigners. There are exceptions to the rule, but it is
a rule. The average man, when he has no means of being brought into
contact with another, or of gaining any insight into that other’s ideas
and aspirations, either ignores these ideas and aspirations completely,
or else feels toward them a more or less tepid dislike. The result
is a complete and perhaps fatal misunderstanding, due primarily to
the fact that the capacity for fellow-feeling is given no opportunity
to flourish. On the other hand, if the men can be mixed together in
some way that will loosen the class or caste bonds and put each on
his merits as an individual man, there is certain to be a regrouping
independent of caste lines. A tie may remain between the members of
a caste, based merely upon the similarity of their habits of life;
but this will be much less strong than the ties based on identity of
passion, of principle, or of ways of looking at life. Any man who has
ever, for his good fortune, been obliged to work with men in masses,
in some place or under some condition or in some association where
the dislocation of caste was complete, must recognize the truth of
this as apparent. Every mining-camp, every successful volunteer
regiment, proves it. In such cases there is always some object which
must be attained, and the men interested in its attainment have to
develop their own leaders and their own ties of association, while
the would-be leader can succeed only by selecting for assistants the
men whose peculiar capacities fit them to do the best work in the
various emergencies that arise. Under such circumstances the men who
work together for the achievement of a common result in which they are
intensely interested are very soon certain to disregard, and, indeed,
to forget, the creed or race origin or antecedent social standing or
class occupation of the man who is either their friend or their foe.
They get down to the naked bed-rock of character and capacity.
This is to a large extent true of the party organizations in a great
city, and, indeed, of all serious political organizations. If they are
to be successful they must necessarily be democratic, in the sense that
each man is treated strictly on his merits as a man. No one can succeed
who attempts to go in on any other basis; above all, no one can succeed
if he goes in feeling that, instead of merely doing his duty, he is
conferring a favor upon the community, and is therefore warranted in
adopting an attitude of condescension toward his fellows. It is often
quite as irritating to be patronized as to be plundered; as reformers
have more than once discovered when the mass of the voters stolidly
voted against them, and in favor of a gang of familiar scoundrels,
chiefly because they had no sense of fellow-feeling with their would-be
benefactors.