No amount of honesty will avail if he is not also brave and wise. The
weakling and the coward can not be saved by honesty alone; but without
honesty the brave and able man is merely a civic wild beast who should
be hunted down by every lover of righteousness. No man who is corrupt,
no man who condones corruption in others, can possibly do his duty
by the community. When this truth is accepted as axiomatic in our
politics, then, and not till then, shall we see such a moral uplifting
of the people as will render, for instance, Tammany rule in New York,
as Tammany rule now is, no more possible than it would be possible to
revive the robber baronage of the Middle Ages.
Great is the danger to our country from the failure among our public
men to live up to the eighth commandment, from the callousness in the
public which permits such shortcomings. Yet it is not exaggeration to
say that the danger is quite as great from those who year in and year
out violate the ninth commandment by bearing false witness against the
honest man, and who thereby degrade him and elevate the dishonest man
until they are both on the same level. The public is quite as much
harmed in the one case as in the other, by the one set of wrong-doers
as by the other. “Liar” is just as ugly a word as “thief,” because
it implies the presence of just as ugly a sin in one case as in the
other. If a man lies under oath or procures the lie of another under
oath, if he perjures himself or suborns perjury, he is guilty under
the statute law. Under the higher law, under the great law of morality
and righteousness, he is precisely as guilty if, instead of lying in a
court, he lies in a newspaper or on the stump; and in all probability
the evil effects of his conduct are infinitely more wide-spread and
more pernicious. The difference between perjury and mendacity is not
in the least one of morals or ethics. It is simply one of legal forms.
The same man may break both commandments, or one group of men may be
tempted to break one and another group of men the other. In our civic
life the worst offenders against the law of honesty owe no small
part of their immunity to those who sin against the law by bearing
false witness against their honest neighbors. The sin is, of course,
peculiarly revolting when coupled with hypocrisy, when it is committed
in the name of morality. Few politicians do as much harm as the
newspaper editor, the clergyman, or the lay reformer who, day in and
day out, by virulent and untruthful invective aimed at the upholders of
honesty, weakens them for the benefit of the frankly vicious. We need
fearless criticism of dishonest men, and of honest men on any point
where they go wrong; but even more do we need criticism which shall be
truthful both in what it says and in what it leaves unsaid—truthful
in words and truthful in the impression it designs to leave upon the
readers’ or hearers’ minds.
We need absolute honesty in public life; and we shall not get it until
we remember that truth-telling must go hand in hand with it, and that
it is quite as important not to tell an untruth about a decent man as
it is to tell the truth about one who is not decent.
THE BEST AND THE GOOD
PUBLISHED IN THE “CHURCHMAN,” MARCH 17, 1900
Among the people to whom we are all under a very real debt of
obligation for the help they give to those seeking for good government
at Albany is Bishop Doane. All of us who at the State capital have
been painfully striving to wrest, often from adverse conditions, the
best results obtainable, are strengthened and heartened in every way
by the active interest the bishop takes in every good cause, the keen
intelligence with which he sees “the instant need of things,” and the
sane and wholesome spirit, as remote from fanaticism as from cynicism,
in which he approaches all public questions.
Quite unconsciously the bishop the other day gave an admirable
summing up of his own attitude in quoting an extract from the “Life”
of Archbishop Benson. In a letter which the archbishop wrote to his
chancellor in regard to a bill regulating patronage in the Church of
England occurs the following passage:
“The bill does not, of course, represent my ideal, but it is a careful
collection of points which could be claimed, which it would be
indecent to refuse, and which would make a considerable difference
about our powers of dealing rightly with cases. Gain that platform, and
it would be a footing for more ideal measures. I do not want the best
to be any more the deadly enemy of the good. We climb through degrees
of comparison.”
This is really a description as excellent as it is epigrammatic of
the attitude which must be maintained by every public man, by every
leader and guide of public thought, who hopes to accomplish work of
real worth to the community. It is a melancholy fact that many of the
worst laws put upon the statute-books have been put there with the
best of intentions by thoroughly well-meaning people. Mere desire
to do right can no more by itself make a good statesman than it can
make a good general. Of course it is entirely unnecessary to say that
nothing atones for the lack of this desire to do right. Exactly as the
brilliant military ability of an Arnold merely makes his treason the
more abhorrent, so our statesmanship can not be put upon the proper
plane of purity and ability until the condemnation visited upon a
traitor like Arnold is visited with no less severity upon the statesman
who betrays the people by corruption. The one is as great an offence as
the other. Military power is at an end when the honor of the soldier
can no longer be trusted; and, in the right sense of the word, civic
greatness is at an end when civic righteousness is no longer its
foundation.
But, of course, every one knows that a soldier must be more than merely
honorable before he is fit to do credit to the country; and just the
same thing is true of a statesman. He must have high ideals, and the
leader of public opinion in the pulpit, in the press, on the platform,
or on the stump must preach high ideals. But the possession or
preaching of these high ideals may not only be useless, but a source of
positive harm, if unaccompanied by practical good sense, if they do not
lead to the effort to get the best possible when the perfect best is
not attainable—and in this life the perfect best rarely is attainable.
Every leader of a great reform has to contend, on the one hand, with
the open, avowed enemies of the reform, and, on the other hand, with
its extreme advocates, who wish the impossible, and who join hands with
their extreme opponents to defeat the rational friends of the reform.
Of course the typical instance of this kind of conduct was afforded by
Wendell Phillips when in 1864 he added his weight, slight though it
was, to the copperhead opposition to the re-election of Abraham Lincoln.
The alliance, between Blifil and Black George is world-old. Blifil
always acts in the name of morality. Often, of course, he is not
moral at all. It is a great mistake to think that the extremist is a
better man than the moderate. Usually the difference is not that he
is morally stronger, but that he is intellectually weaker. He is not
more virtuous. He is simply more foolish. This is notably true in our
American life of many of those who are most pessimistic in denouncing
the condition of our politics. Certainly there is infinite room for
improvement, infinite need of fearless and trenchant criticism; but
the improvement can only come through intelligent and straightforward
effort. It is set back by those extremists who by their action always
invite reaction, and, above all, by those worst enemies of our public
honesty who by their incessant attacks upon good men give the utmost
possible assistance to the bad.
Offenders of this type need but a short shrift. Though extremists
after a fashion; they are morally worse instead of better than the
moderates. There remains, however, a considerable group of men who
are really striving for the best, and who mistakenly, though in good
faith, permit the best to be the enemy of the good. Under very rare
conditions their attitude may be right, and because it is thus right
once in a hundred times they are apt to be blind to the harm they do
the other ninety-nine times. These men need, above all, to realize
that healthy growth can not normally come through revolution. A
revolution is sometimes necessary, but if revolutions become habitual
the country in which they take place is going down-hill. Hysteria in
any form is incompatible with sane and healthy endeavor. We must never
compromise in a way that means retrogression. But in moving forward
we must realize that normally the condition of sure progress is that
it shall not be so fast as to ensure a revolt and a stoppage of the
upward course. In this country especially, where what we have now to
contend with is not so much any one concrete evil as a general lowering
of the standards, we must remember that to keep these standards
high does not at all imply that they should be put upon impossible
positions—positions which must ultimately be abandoned. There can
be no compromise on the great fundamental principles of morality. A
public man who directly or indirectly breaks the eighth commandment is
just as guilty as an editor or a speaker who breaks the ninth, and it
matters little whether the fault be due to venality in the one case or
to morbid vanity and mean envy in the other. If a man is dishonest he
should be driven from public life. If a course of policy is vicious
and produces harm it should be reversed at any cost. But when we come
to the countless measures and efforts for doing good, let us keep ever
clearly in mind that while we must always strive for the utmost good
that can be obtained, and must be content with no less, yet that we
do only harm if, by intemperate championship of the impossible good,
we cut ourselves off from the opportunity to work a real abatement of
existing and menacing evil.
PROMISE AND PERFORMANCE
PUBLISHED IN THE “OUTLOOK,” JULY 28, 1900
It is customary to express wonder and horror at the cynical baseness
of the doctrines of Machiavelli. Both the wonder and the horror are
justified,—though it would perhaps be wiser to keep them for the
society which the Italian described rather than for the describer
himself,—but it is somewhat astonishing that there should be so little
insistence upon the fact that Machiavelli rests his whole system upon
his contemptuous belief in the folly and low civic morality of the
multitude, and their demand for fine promises and their indifference to
performance. Thus he says: “It is necessary to be a great deceiver and
hypocrite; for men are so simple and yield so readily to the wants of
the moment that he who will trick shall always find another who will
suffer himself to be tricked.... Therefore a ruler must take great care
that no word shall slip from his mouth that shall not be full of piety,
trust, humanity, religion, and simple faith, and he must appear to eye
and ear all compact of these, ... because the vulgar are always caught
by appearance and by the event, and in this world there are none but
the vulgar.”
It therefore appears that Machiavelli’s system is predicated partly on
the entire indifference to performance of promise by the prince and
partly upon a greedy demand for impossible promises among the people.
The infamy of the conduct championed by Machiavelli as proper for
public men is usually what rivets the attention, but the folly which
alone makes such infamy possible is quite as well worthy of study.
Hypocrisy is a peculiarly revolting vice alike in public and private
life; and in public life—at least in high position—it can only be
practiced on a large scale for any length of time in those places where
the people in mass really warrant Machiavelli’s description, and are
content with a complete divorce between promise and performance.
It would be difficult to say which is the surest way of bringing about
such a complete divorce: on the one hand, the tolerance in a public man
of the nonperformance of promises which can be kept; or, on the other
hand, the insistence by the public upon promises which they either know
or ought to know can not be kept. When in public speech or in a party
platform a policy is outlined which it is known can not or will not be
pursued, the fact is a reflection not only upon the speaker and the
platform-maker, but upon the public feeling to which they appeal. When
a section of the people demand from a candidate promises which he can
not believe that he will be able to fulfil and, on his refusal, support
some man who cheerfully guarantees an immediate millennium, why, under
such circumstances the people are striving to bring about in America
some of the conditions of public life which produced the profligacy and
tyranny of mediæval Italy. Such conduct means that the capacity for
self-government has atrophied; and the hard-headed common-sense with
which the American people, as a whole, refuse to sanction such conduct
is the best possible proof and guarantee of their capacity to perform
the high and difficult task of administering the greatest Republic upon
which the sun has ever shone.
There are always politicians willing, on the one hand, to promise
everything to the people, and, on the other, to perform everything
for the machine or the boss, with chuckling delight in the success of
their efforts to hoodwink the former and serve the latter. Now, not
only should such politicians be regarded as infamous, but the people
who are hoodwinked by them should share the blame. The man who is taken
in by, or demands, impossible promises is not much less culpable than
the politician who deliberately makes such promises and then breaks
faith. Thus when any public man says that he “will never compromise
under any conditions,” he is certain to receive the applause of a few
emotional people who do not think correctly, and the one fact about him
that can be instantly asserted as true beyond peradventure is that, if
he is a serious personage at all, he is deliberately lying, while it
is only less certain that he will be guilty of base and dishonorable
compromise when the opportunity arises. “Compromise” is so often used
in a bad sense that it is difficult to remember that properly it merely
describes the process of reaching an agreement. Naturally there are
certain subjects on which no man can compromise. For instance, there
must be no compromise under any circumstances with official corruption,
and of course no man should hesitate to say as much. Again, an honest
politician is entirely justified in promising on the stump that he will
make no compromise on any question of right and wrong. This promise he
can and ought to make good. But when questions of policy arise—and
most questions, from the tariff to municipal ownership of public
utilities and the franchise tax, are primarily questions of policy—he
will have to come to some kind of working agreement with his fellows,
and if he says that he will not, he either deliberately utters what he
knows to be false, or else he ensures for himself the humiliation of
being forced to break his word. No decent politician need compromise in
any way save as Washington and Lincoln did. He need not go nearly as
far as Hamilton, Jefferson, and Jackson went; but some distance he must
go if he expects to accomplish anything.
Again, take the case of those who promise an impossible good to the
community as a whole if a given course of legislation is adopted. The
man who makes such a promise may be a well-meaning but unbalanced
enthusiast, or he may be merely a designing demagogue. In either case
the people who listen to and believe him are not to be excused, though
they may be pitied. Softness of heart is an admirable quality, but when
it extends its area until it also becomes softness of head, its results
are anything but admirable. It is a good thing to combine a warm heart
with a cool head. People really fit for self-government will not be
misled by over-effusiveness in promise, and, on the other hand, they
will demand that every proper promise shall be made good.
Wise legislation and upright administration can undoubtedly work
very great good to a community, and, above all, can give to each
individual the chance to do the best work for himself. But ultimately
the individual’s own faculties must form the chief factor in working
out his own salvation. In the last analysis it is the thrift, energy,
self-mastery, and business intelligence of each man which have most
to do with deciding whether he rises or falls. It is easy enough
to devise a scheme of government which shall absolutely nullify all
these qualities and ensure failure to everybody, whether he deserves
success or not. But the best scheme of government can do little more
than provide against injustice, and then let the individual rise or
fall on his own merits. Of course something can be done by the State
acting in its collective capacity, and in certain instances such action
may be necessary to remedy real wrong. Gross misconduct of individuals
or corporations may make it necessary for the State or some of its
subdivisions to assume the charge of what are called public utilities.
But when all that can be done in this way has been done, when every
individual has been saved so far as the State can save him from the
tyranny of any other man or body of men, the individual’s own qualities
of body and mind, his own strength of heart and hand, will remain the
determining conditions in his career. The people who trust to or exact
promises that, if a certain political leader is followed or a certain
public policy adopted, this great truth will cease to operate, are not
merely leaning on a broken reed, but are working for their own undoing.
So much for the men who by their demands for the impossible encourage
the promise of the impossible, whether in the domain of economic
legislation or of legislation which has for its object the promotion
of morality. The other side is that no man should be held excusable
if he does not perform what he promises, unless for the best and most
sufficient reason. This should be especially true of every politician.
It shows a thoroughly unhealthy state of mind when the public pardons
with a laugh failure to keep a distinct pledge, on the ground that a
politician can not be expected to confine himself to the truth when on
the stump or the platform. A man should no more be excused for lying
on the stump than for lying off the stump. Of course matters may so
change that it may be impossible for him, or highly inadvisable for
the country, that he should try to do what he in good faith said he
was going to do. But the necessity for the change should be made very
evident, and it should be well understood that such a case is the
exception and not the rule. As a rule, and speaking with due regard
to the exceptions, it should be taken as axiomatic that when a man in
public life pledges himself to a certain course of action he shall as a
matter of course do what he said he would do, and shall not be held to
have acted honorably if he does otherwise.
All great fundamental truths are apt to sound rather trite, and yet
in spite of their triteness they need to be reiterated over and over
again. The visionary or the self-seeking knave who promises the golden
impossible, and the credulous dupe who is taken in by such a promise,
and who in clutching at the impossible loses the chance of securing the
real though lesser good, are as old as the political organizations of
mankind. Throughout the history of the world the nations who have done
best in self-government are those who have demanded from their public
men only the promise of what can actually be done for righteousness and
honesty, and who have sternly insisted that such promise must be kept
in letter and in spirit.
So it is with the general question of obtaining good government. We
can not trust the mere doctrinaire; we can not trust the mere closet
reformer, nor yet his acrid brother who himself does nothing, but who
rails at those who endure the heat and burden of the day. Yet we can
trust still less those base beings who treat politics only as a game
out of which to wrong a soiled livelihood, and in whose vocabulary the
word “practical” has come to be a synonym for whatever is mean and
corrupt. A man is worthless unless he has in him a lofty devotion to an
ideal, and he is worthless also unless he strives to realize this ideal
by practical methods. He must promise, both to himself and to others,
only what he can perform; but what really can be performed he must
promise, and such promise he must at all hazards make good.
The problems that confront us in this age are, after all, in
their essence the same as those that have always confronted free
peoples striving to secure and to keep free government. No political
philosopher of the present day can put the case more clearly than it
was put by the wonderful old Greeks. Says Aristotle: “Two principles
have to be kept in view: what is possible, what is becoming; at these
every man ought to aim.” Plato expresses precisely the same idea:
“Those who are not schooled and practiced in truth [who are not honest
and upright men] can never manage aright the government, nor yet can
those who spend their lives as closet philosophers; because the former
have no high purpose to guide their actions, while the latter keep
aloof from public life, having the idea that even while yet living they
have been translated to the Islands of the Blest.... [Men must] both
contemplate the good and try actually to achieve it. Thus the state
will be settled as a reality, and not as a dream, like most of those
inhabited by persons fighting about shadows.”[1]
[1] Translated freely and condensed.
THE AMERICAN BOY
PUBLISHED IN “ST. NICHOLAS,” MAY, 1900
Of course what we have a right to expect of the American boy is that he
shall turn out to be a good American man. Now, the chances are strong
that he won’t be much of a man unless he is a good deal of a boy. He
must not be a coward or a weakling, a bully, a shirk, or a prig. He
must work hard and play hard. He must be clean-minded and clean-lived,
and able to hold his own under all circumstances and against all
comers. It is only on these conditions that he will grow into the kind
of American man of whom America can be really proud.
There are always in life countless tendencies for good and for
evil, and each succeeding generation sees some of these tendencies
strengthened and some weakened; nor is it by any means always,
alas! that the tendencies for evil are weakened and those for good
strengthened. But during the last few decades there certainly have
been some notable changes for good in boy life. The great growth in
the love of athletic sports, for instance, while fraught with danger
if it becomes one-sided and unhealthy, has beyond all question had an
excellent effect in increased manliness. Forty or fifty years ago the
writer on American morals was sure to deplore the effeminacy and luxury
of young Americans who were born of rich parents. The boy who was well
off then, especially in the big Eastern cities, lived too luxuriously,
took to billiards as his chief innocent recreation, and felt small
shame in his inability to take part in rough pastimes and field-sports.
Nowadays, whatever other faults the son of rich parents may tend to
develop, he is at least forced by the opinion of all his associates of
his own age to bear himself well in manly exercises and to develop his
body—and therefore, to a certain extent, his character—in the rough
sports which call for pluck, endurance, and physical address.