persons who announce themselves as enemies of all society, we may call
the Philosophical Anarchists, thinkers who are entitled to respectful
consideration because their doctrine represents a protest that needs
to be made against the conception of an all-engulfing State in which
individual initiative and self-guided development might be merged and
lost. They desire to get rid of the defects of government by getting
rid of government itself; that is to say, by leaving men entirely
alone without any coercive control, trusting to their natural good
impulses to restrain them from harming one another. In such a state
of things there would be no Citizenship, properly so called, but only
the isolation of families, or perhaps of individuals--for it is not
quite clear how far the family is expected to remain in the Anarchist
paradise--an isolation more or less qualified by brotherly love. We are
so far at present from a prospect of reaching the conditions needed for
such an amelioration that it is enough to note this view and pass on.
A second and diametrically opposite cure for the evils of existing
society comes from those who are commonly termed Socialists or
Collectivists. It consists in so widely enlarging the functions of
government as to commit to it not merely all the work it now performs
of defending the country, maintaining order, enacting laws, and
enforcing justice between man and man, but also the further work of
producing and distributing all commodities, allotting to each man his
proper labour and proper remuneration, or possibly, instead of giving
any pecuniary remuneration, providing each man with what he needs for
life. Under this régime two of the hindrances to good citizenship would
be much reduced. There ought to be less indifference to politics when
everybody’s interest in the management of public concerns had been
immensely increased by the fact that he found himself dependent on
the public officials for everything. Nobody could plead that he was
occupied by his own private business, because his private business
would have vanished. So also selfish personal interest in making gains
out of government must needs disappear when private property itself
had ceased to exist. Whether, however, self-interest might not still
find means of influencing public administration in ways beneficial to
individual cupidity, and whether personal selfishness might not be even
more dangerous, under such conditions, in proportion to the extended
range and power of government,--this is another question which cannot
be discussed till some definite scheme for the allotment of work and of
remuneration (if any) shall have been propounded. Party Spirit would
evidently, in a Collectivistic State, pass into new forms. It might,
however, become more potent than ever before. But that again would
depend on the kind of scheme for the reshaping of economic society that
had been adopted.
We may pass from these suggestions for the extinction, or
reconstruction on new lines, of the existing social and political
system to certain minor devices for improving the structure and methods
of government which have been put forward as likely to help the citizen
to discharge his duties more efficiently.
One of these is the system of Proportional Representation. It is argued
that if electoral areas were created with more than two members
each, and if each elector was either allowed to vote for a number
of candidates less than the number to be chosen, or was allowed to
concentrate all his votes upon one candidate, or more, according to the
number to be chosen, two good results would follow. The will of the
electors would be more adequately and exactly expressed, because the
minority, or possibly more than one minority, as well as the majority,
would have everywhere its representative. The zeal of the electors
would be stimulated, because in each district a section of opinion not
large enough to have a chance of winning an election, if there were
but one member, and accordingly now apathetic, because without hope,
would then be roused to organize itself and to take a warmer interest
in public affairs. The Proportional system is, therefore, advocated
as one of those improvements in machinery which would react upon the
people by quickening the pulses of public life. Some experiments have
already been made in this direction. Those tried in England did not
win general approval and have been dropped. That which is still in
operation in the State of Illinois has not, if my informants are right,
given much satisfaction. But the plan is said to work well both in
Belgium and in some of the cantons of Switzerland; so one may hope that
further experiments will be attempted. It deserves your careful study,
but it is too complicated and opens too many side issues to be further
discussed now and here.[4]
[4] Since the above was written a Royal Commission has been
appointed in Britain to examine divers questions relating
to elections, and is investigating this, among other plans.
Attempts have been made in some places to overcome the indifference of
citizens to their duty by fining those who, without sufficient excuse,
fail to vote. This plan of Obligatory Voting, as it is called, finds
favour in some Swiss cantons and in Belgium, but is too uncongenial to
the habits of England or of the United States to be worth considering
as a practical measure in either country. Moreover, the neglect to vote
is no very serious evil in either country, at least as regards the more
important elections. Swiss legislation on the subject is evidence not
so much of indifference among the citizens of that country as of the
high standard of public duty they are expected to reach.
When we come to the proposals made both here and in England for the
reference of proposals to a direct popular vote, we come to a question
of real practical importance. I wish that I had time to state to
you and to examine the arguments both for and against this mode of
legislation, which has been practised for many years in Switzerland
with a virtually unanimous approval, and has been applied pretty freely
in some of your States. It has taken two forms. One is the so-called
Initiative, under which a section of the electors (being a number,
or a proportion, prescribed by law) may propose a law upon which the
people vote. This is being tried in Switzerland, but so far as I have
been able to gather, has not yet proved its utility. The balance of
skilled opinion seems to incline against it. The other is called the
Referendum, and consists in the submission to popular vote of measures
already passed by the legislative body. In this form the reference of
laws to the people undoubtedly sharpens the interest of the ordinary
citizen in the conduct of public affairs. The Swiss voters, at any
rate, take pains to inform themselves on the merits of the measures
submitted to them. These are widely and acutely canvassed at public
meetings, and in the press. A large vote is usually cast, and all,
whether or no they approve the result, agree that it is an intelligent,
not a heedless, vote. The Swiss do not seem to think that the power and
dignity of the legislature is weakened, as some might expect it to be,
when their final voice is thus superseded by that of the people. All I
need now ask you to note and remember is that the practice of bringing
political issues directly before the people, whatever its drawbacks,
does tend to diminish both that indolence and indifference which is
pretty common among European voters. It requires every citizen to think
for himself and deliver his vote upon all the more important measures,
and it also reduces the power of that Party Spirit which everywhere
distracts men’s minds from the real merits of the questions before
the country. When a law is submitted to the Swiss people for their
judgment, their decision nowise affects either the Executive or the
Legislature. The law may be rejected by the people, but the officials
who drafted the law continue to hold office. The party which brought it
in and carried it through the Legislature is not deemed to have been
censured or weakened by the fact of its ultimate rejection. That party
spirit is less strong in Switzerland than in any other free country
(except perhaps Norway) may be largely attributed to this disjunction
of the deciding voice in legislation from those governmental organs
which every political party seeks to control. The Swiss voter is to-day
an exceptionally intelligent and patriotic citizen, fitter to exercise
the function of direct legislation than perhaps any other citizen in
Europe, and the practice of directly legislating has doubtless helped
to train him for the function.
It must, however, be admitted that the circumstances of that little
republic and its cantons are too peculiar to make it safe to draw
inferences from Swiss experience to large countries like Britain and
France, the political life of which is highly centralized. The States
of your Union may appear to offer a better field, and the results
of the various experiments which some of them (such as Oklahoma) are
trying will be watched with interest by Europeans.
In considering the harm done to civic duty by selfish personal
interests we were led to observe that the fewer points of contact
between government and the pecuniary interests of private citizens,
the better both for the purity of government and for the conscience of
the private citizen. How far government ought to include within its
functions schemes for increasing national wealth, otherwise than by
such means (being means which a government alone can employ because
to be effective they must be done on a great scale) as the improving
of education, the diffusing of knowledge, the providing means of
transportation, the conservation of natural resources, and so forth,
may be matter for debate. But at any rate government ought to avoid
measures tending to enrich any one person or group of persons at the
expense of the citizens generally. Common justice requires that.
Accordingly, all contracts should be made on the terms best for the
public, and if possible by open bidding. Franchises, if not reserved
by the public authority for itself, should be granted only for limited
times and so as to secure the interests of the community, whether by
way of a rent payable to the city or county treasury or otherwise.
Public employees should not be made into a privileged class, to
which there is given larger pay than other workers of the same class
and capacity receive. All bills promoted by a private person, firm,
or company looking to his or their pecuniary advantage ought to be
closely scrutinized by some responsible public authority. In England
we draw a sharp distinction between such bills and general public
legislation, and we submit the former to a quasi-judicial examination
by a Parliamentary committee in order to avoid possible jobs or
scandals or losses to the public. As respects general legislation,
i. e., that which is not in its terms local or personal, it may be
difficult or impossible to prevent a law from incidentally benefiting
one group or class of men and injuring another. But everything that
can be done ought to be done to prevent any set of men from abusing
legislation to serve their own interest. If there be truth in what
one hears about the groups which in France, Belgium, and Germany have,
through political pressure, obtained by law bounties benefiting their
industries, or tariffs specially favourable to their own commercial
enterprises, the danger that the general taxpayer, or the consumer, may
be sacrificed to these private interests, is a real danger. To remove
the occasion and the opportunities for the exercise of such pressure,
which is likely to be often exerted in a covert way and to warp or
pervert the legislator’s mind, is to diminish a temptation and to
remove a stumbling block that lies in the path of civic duty. Whether
a man be in theory a Protectionist or a Free Trader, whether or not he
desires to nationalize public utilities, he must recognize the dangers
incident to the passing of laws which influential groups of wealthy
men may have a personal interest in promoting or resisting, because
they offer a prospect of gain sufficiently large to make it worth while
to “get at” legislatures and officials. Such dangers arise in all
governments. That which makes them formidable in democracies is the
fact that the interest of each individual citizen in protecting himself
and the public against the selfish groups may be so small an interest
that everybody neglects it, and the groups get their way.
As we have been considering improvements in the machinery of
government, this would be a fitting place for a discussion of what you
call Primary Election Laws, which are intended both to reduce the power
of party organizations and to stimulate the personal zeal of the voter
by making it easier for him to influence the selection of a candidate.
We have, however, in Europe, nothing corresponding to the Primary
Laws of American States, nothing which recognizes a political party
as a concrete body, nothing which deals with the mode of selecting
candidates; and many of you doubtless know better than I do what has
been the effect of these American enactments and whether they have
really roused the ordinary citizen to bestir himself and to assert
his independence of such party organizations as may have heretofore
interfered with it. Europeans do not take kindly to the notion of
giving statutory recognition to a Party, and they doubt whether the
astuteness of those whom you call “machine politicians” may not succeed
in getting hold of the new statutory Primaries as they did of the old
ones. Be the merits of the new legislation what they may, one must hope
that its existence will not induce the friends of reform to relax their
efforts to reduce in other ways the power of political “Machines.”
One obvious expedient to which good citizens may resort for keeping
other citizens up to the mark is to be found in the enactment and
enforcement of stringent laws against breaches of public trust. I
took occasion, in referring to the practices of bribery and treating
at elections, to note the wholesome effect of the statute passed in
England in 1883 for repressing those offences. Although St. Paul has
told us that he who is under grace does not need to be under the
law, Christianity has not yet gone far enough to enable any of us to
dispense with the moral force law can exert, both directly through
the penalties it imposes and indirectly through the type of conduct
which it exhorts the community to maintain. Laws may do much to raise
and sustain the tone of all the persons engaged in public affairs as
officials or as legislators, not only by appealing to their conscience,
but by giving them a quick and easy reply to those who seek improper
favours from them. A statute may express the best conscience of the
whole people and set the standard they approve, even where the practice
of most individuals falls short of the standard. If the prosecuting
authorities and the courts do their duty unflinchingly, without regard
to the social position of the offender, a statute may bring the
practice of ordinary men up to the level of that collective conscience
of the nation which it embodies.
In every walk of life a class of persons constantly subject to a
particular set of temptations is apt to form habits, due to the
pressure of those temptations, which are below what the conscience
of the better men in the community approves. The aim of legislation,
as expressing that best conscience of the whole community, ought to
be to correct or extirpate those habits and make each particular
class understand that it is not to be excused because it has special
temptations and thinks its own sins venial. Even the men who yield
to the temptations peculiar to their own class are willing to join
in condemning those who yield to some other kind of temptation. Thus
the “better conscience” may succeed in screwing up one class after
another to a higher level. But the enactment of a law is not enough.
It must be strictly enforced. Procedure must be prompt. Juries must
be firm. Technicalities must not be suffered to obstruct the march of
justice. Sentences must be carried out, else the statute will become,
as statutes often have become, a record of aspiration rather than of
accomplishment.
To contrive plans by which the interest of the citizen in public
affairs shall be aroused and sustained, is far easier than to induce
the citizen to use and to go on using, year in and year out, the
contrivances and opportunities provided for his benefit. Yet it is
from the heart and will of the citizen that all real and lasting
improvements must proceed. In the words of the Gospel, it is the inside
of the cup and platter that must be made clean. The central problem of
civic duty is the ethical problem. Indifference, selfish interests, the
excesses of party spirit, will all begin to disappear as civic life is
lifted on to a higher plane, and as the number of those who, standing
on that higher plane, will apply a strict test to their own conduct and
to that of their leaders, realizing and striving to discharge their
responsibilities, goes on steadily increasing until they come to form
the majority of the people. What we have called “the better conscience”
must be grafted on to the “wild stock” of the natural Average Man.
How is this to be done? The difficulty is the same as that which meets
the social reformer or the preacher of religion.
One must try to reach the Will through the Soul. The most obvious way
to begin is through the education of those who are to be citizens,
moral education combined with and made the foundation for instruction
in civic duty. This is a task which the Swiss alone among European
nations seem to have seriously undertaken. Here in America it has
become doubly important through the recent entrance into your
community of a vast mass of immigrants, most of them ignorant of our
language, still more of them ignorant, not only of your institutions,
but of the general principles and habits of free government. Most of
them doubtless belong to races of high natural intelligence, and many
of them have the simple virtues of the peasant. You are providing
for all of them good schools, and their children will soon become
Americans in speech and habits, quite patriotic enough so far as
flag-waving goes. But they will not so soon or so completely acquire
your intellectual and moral standard, or imbibe your historical and
religious traditions. There is no fear but what they will quickly learn
to vote. To some Europeans you seem to have been overconfident in
intrusting them with a power which most of them cannot yet have learned
to use wisely. That however you have done, and as you hold that it
cannot now be undone, your task must now be to teach them, if you can,
to understand your institutions, to think about the vote they have to
give, and to realize the responsibilities which the suffrage implies
as these were realized by your New England forefathers when they
planted free commonwealths in the wilderness nearly three centuries ago.
Valuable as instruction may be in fitting the citizen to comprehend and
judge upon the issues which his vote determines, there must also be the
will to apply his knowledge for the public good. What appeal shall be
made to him?
We--I say “we” because this is our task in Europe no less than it is
yours here--we may appeal to his enlightened self-interest, making
self-interest so enlightened that it loses its selfish quality. We can
remind him of all the useful work which governments may accomplish when
they are conducted by the right men in the right spirit. Take, for
instance, the work to be performed in those cities wherein so large and
increasing a part of the population now dwell. How much remains to be
done to make cities healthier, to secure better dwellings for the poor,
to root out nests of crime, to remove the temptations to intemperance
and gambling, to bring within the reach of the poorest all possible
facilities both for intellectual progress and for enjoying the
pleasures of art and music! How much may we do so to adorn the city
with parks and public buildings as to make its external aspect instil
the sense of beauty into its inhabitants and give them a fine pride
in it! These are some of the tasks which cannot safely be intrusted
to a municipality unless its government is above suspicion, unless
men of probity and capacity are placed in power, unless the whole
community extends its sympathy to the work and keeps a vigilant eye
upon all the officials. Municipal governments cannot be encouraged to
own public utilities so long as there is a risk that somebody may own
municipal governments. Have we not here a strong motive for securing
purity and efficiency in city administration? Is it not the personal
interest of every one of us that the city we dwell in should be such
as I have sought to describe? Nothing makes more for happiness than to
see others around one happy. The rich residents need not grudge--nor
indeed would your rich residents grudge, for there is less grumbling
among the rich tax payers here than in Europe--taxation which they
could see was being honestly spent for the benefit of the city. The
interest each one of us has as a member of a city or a nation in seeing
our fellow-citizens healthy, peaceful, and happy is a greater interest,
if it be measured in terms of our own real enjoyment of life, than is
that interest, of which we so constantly are reminded, which we have
in making the State either wealthy by the development of trade, or
formidable to foreign countries by its armaments.
We may also appeal to every citizen’s sense of dignity and
self-respect. We may bid him recollect that he is the heir of rights
and privileges which you and our ancestors fought for, and which
place him, whatever his birth or fortune, among the rulers of his
country. He is unworthy of himself, unmindful of what he owes to the
Constitution that has given him these functions, if he does not try to
discharge them worthily. These considerations are no doubt familiar to
us Englishmen and Americans, though we may not always feel their force
as deeply as we ought. To the new immigrants of whom I have already
spoken they are unfamiliar; yet to the best among these also they have
sometimes powerfully appealed. You had, in the last generation, no more
high-minded and patriotic citizen than the German exile of 1849, the
late Mr. Carl Schurz.
When every motive has been invoked, and every expedient applied that
can stimulate the sense of civic duty, one never can feel sure that
the desired result will follow. The moral reformer and the preacher
of religion have the same experience. The ebbs and flows of ethical
life are beyond the reach of scientific prediction. There are times
of awakening, “times of refreshing from the presence of the Lord,” as
your Puritan ancestors said, but we do not know when they will come nor
can we explain why they come just when they do. Every man can recall
moments in his own life when the sky seemed to open above him, and when
his vision was so quickened that all things stood transfigured in a
purer and brighter radiance, when duty, and even toil done for the sake
of duty, seemed beautiful and full of joy.
You remember Wordsworth’s lines--
“Hence, in a season of fair weather,
Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that celestial sea
That brought us hither.”
If we survey the wide field of European history, we shall find that
something like this happens with nations also. They, too, have moments
of exaltation, moments of depression. Their ideals rise and fall. They
are for a time filled with a spirit which seeks truth, which loves
honour, which is ready for self-sacrifice; and after a time the light
begins to fade from the hills and this spirit lingers only among the
best souls.