“What we most need, to secure honest elections,” says a well-meaning
reformer, “is the voting machine.” Why, truly, here is a hopeful
spirit—a rare and radiant intelligence suffused with the conviction
that men can be made honest by machinery—that human character is a
matter of gearing, ratchets and dials! One would give something to
know how it feels to be like that. A mind so constituted must be happy
in its hope. It lives in rapturous contemplation of a world of its
own creation—a world where public morality and political good order
are to be had by purchase at the machine-shop. In that delectable
world, religion is superfluous; the true high priest is the mechanical
engineer; the minor clergy are the village blacksmiths. It is rather a
pity that so fine and fair a sphere should swim only in the attenuated
ether of a simpleton’s misunderstanding.
The voting-machines are doubtless well enough; they save labor and
enable the statesmen of the street to know the result within a few
minutes of the closing of the polls—whereby many are spared to their
country who would otherwise incur fatal disorders by exposure to the
night air while assisting in awaiting the returns. But a voting-machine
that human ingenuity can not pervert, human ingenuity can not invent.
Honesty has no monopoly of inspiration.
That is true, too, of laws. Your statesman of a mental stature
somewhat overtopping that of the machine-person puts his faith in law.
Providence has deigned to permit him to be persuaded of the efficacy of
statutes—good, stringent, carefully drawn statutes annulling all the
laws of nature in conflict with any of their provisions. So the poor
devil (I am writing of Mr. Legion) turns for relief from law to law,
ever on the rocks of repentance, yet ever unfouling the anchor of hope.
By no power on earth can his indurated understanding be penetrated by
the truth that his woful state is due, not to any laws of his own, nor
to any lack of them, but to his rascally refusal to obey the Golden
Rule. How long is it since we were all clamoring for the Australian
ballot law, which was to make a new Heaven and a new earth? We have the
Australian ballot law and the same old earth smelling to the same old
Heaven. Writhe upon the triangle as we may, groan out what new laws
we will, the pitiless thong will fall upon our bleeding backs as long
as we deserve it. If our sins, which are scarlet, are to be washed as
white as wool it must be in the tears of a genuine contrition: our
crocodile deliverances will profit us nothing. We must stop chasing
dollars, stop lying, stop cheating, stop ignoring art, literature
and all the refining agencies and instrumentalities of civilization.
We must subdue our detestable habit of shaking hands with prosperous
rascals and fawning upon the merely rich. It is not permitted to our
employers to plead in justification of low wages the law of supply
and demand when it is giving them high profits. It is not permitted
to discontented employees to break the bones of contented ones and
destroy the foundations of social order. It is dishonest to look upon
public office with the lust of possession; it is disgraceful to solicit
political preferment, to strive and compete for “honors” that are
sullied and tarnished by the touch of the reaching hand. Until we amend
our personal characters we shall amend our laws in vain. Though Paul
plant and Apollos water, the field of reform will grow nothing but the
figless thistle and the grapeless thorn.
The state is an aggregation of individuals. Its public character is the
expression of their personal ones. By no political prestidigitation can
it be made better and wiser than the sum of their goodness and wisdom.
To expect that men who do not honorably and intelligently conduct their
private affairs will honorably and intelligently conduct the affairs
of the community is to be a fool. We are told that out of nothing God
made the heavens and the earth; but out of nothing God never did, and
man never can, make a public sense of honor and a public conscience.
Miracles are now performed on only one day of the year—the twenty-ninth
of February; and in leap years God is forbidden to perform them.