of Samuel’s quality. Ben likes life and does not care what happens. I
threatened him with universal prohibition and the total disappearance
of potable grog from Christendom. He said it would never happen so,
but if it did he didn’t care. He drank too much, anyhow, and if there
was nothing to drink it would be good for his health and save him lots
of money. I threatened him with woman suffrage. He refused even to
object; said checkers was still checkers after all the pieces had got
into the king-row, and as good a game as ever, though with differences
of detail. I threatened him with stagnation of all industrial activity
as the result of enforcing the Sherman law. He didn’t care; said he
worked too hard, anyway, and needed a rest; could eat very simple food
at a pinch; was too fat; was threatened with an unsuitable entanglement
of the affections, and might escape the bag if the times were hard
enough. Then we all talked about the Sherman law. I see in the papers
that the consumption of alcoholic drinks in the United States last year
was the greatest on record. No wonder, when you think how much the
Sherman law has been talked over: a dry subject on which you get no
further and sink into despondency unless buoyed up. It is funny to see
the sagacity of the country flunked, apparently, by that problem. What
Ben and I agree on is so, and we agreed that the Sherman law, grinding
out prosecutions and disorganizing business because public opinion
could not settle on any plan to improve or amend it, was not unlike
the silver-purchase law that kept loading silver into the Treasury and
scaring off gold until Cleveland finally got it repealed. We did not
agree that the Sherman law ought to be repealed, but did agree that it
might elect the next President. Also that neither party was satisfied
with any one who was running for nomination, though that is perhaps
not an unusual condition when nomination is still five or six months
off. But Ben did not care. He was attentive, interested, and amused,
but hoped to stay aboard, no matter what the weather was, and help in
navigation if his services were required. He and Samuel are reassuring.
Another thing I find reassuring is the glimpses I get now and then of
men who are at work providing government for the country; especially
unadvertised men whom few people ever hear of, who hold no office
and aspire to none; whose pictures are never in the papers, nor
their names in the reporter’s books or the mouths of the multitude.
I heard the other day about one such person (Brookfield told me), a
man of sufficient fortune--a million, I dare say--not a celibate like
Thompson, but married and with a few children; a shrewd, experienced,
thoughtful man, whose interest in life is and always has been politics,
to handle the machinery of it and get the best results compatible
with the material offered to pass laws and fill the offices, and the
prejudices and mental disabilities of the voters. “I have known that
man,” Brookfield said, “for eighteen years, and watched him play
politics all that time; plan and direct; weigh men and choose between
them; use their talents and abilities when they had them: put them in
places where they belonged when he could; put in the next-best man
when he couldn’t. He always played fair; always wanted the best man,
the best law, and the best principle that he could see, and never
wanted anything for himself except the fun of playing the game. You
couldn’t drive him into office. He never tried to make a penny out of
legislation. The less he was seen and heard of the better he liked
it, but he recognized politics as the great man’s game, and he liked
to play it. No doubt the sense of power was pleasant to him, but his
use of power was entirely conscientious, and the source of his power
was never money, but the confidence that men had in his sagacity and
his unselfishness. Back in him somewhere there was, of course, a sense
of duty and a belief in certain principles of government, and a sort
of unconscious consecration to the desire to see our experiment in
government go well and to see the country prosper. But the immediate
interest that kept his mind busy was just a delight in guiding the
political affairs of men.”
I dare say Brookfield’s man is an exceptional political boss; but I
dare say, also, that in so far as we have, or ever have had, or will
have, decent government, we owe it to somebody who has had a call to
provide it for us, and has had the talents necessary to make his call
effective. The rare thing about Brookfield’s man, as he described him,
was his self-effacement and superiority to vanity. He loved to play
the game, but not only never thought of the gate money, but never cared
to be a grandstand player. To do the job and do it well brought him
the joy of a true artist in his art. As I said, I have felt encouraged
about the future of politics in this country since I heard about him.
If he had been a saint I wouldn’t have been so much encouraged, but
Brookfield represented him as a mere human being, like any of us,
looking about for things that interested his mind and made life taste
good, and finding them supremely in politics. It is an encouragement
to find that our politics is so good a game that folks with money and
brains enough to experiment with pleasures will play at it purely for
their inward satisfaction, and without attention even to the applause.
Of course, men of that temperament and that high degree of sagacity and
self-control are rare, but we have our share of men with an insight
into cause and effect, and an understanding of the human mind both in
the individual and in the crowd, and with ability to hear what is going
on when they put their ears to the ground, and with a lively interest
in human affairs that must surely draw them into politics whenever
they see that politics is a paramount interest. We have no picturesque
Dukes of Devonshire drudging dutifully at government without vanity
or political ambition, as fathers drudge for their families, and as
Washington, maybe, drudged for us, but I believe we have a native
product of our own that does like work, and quite as often with
intelligence, because the work calls to them and because they not
only feel the responsibilities of civilization, but find delight in
undertaking them.
And why not, to be sure! What else is there in life that is so fruitful
in recompenses as a cheerful undertaking of the responsibilities of
civilization? Mine are represented mainly, as yet, by Cordelia and
Samuel, but I mean to undertake lots more. I see quantities of them
about waiting to be undertaken. So does Cordelia, who is one of the
most active and responsible of responsibilities, and, being less tied
up to wage-earning than I am, gives more attention to putting props
under civilization.
VI
POLITICS
My calling does not seem nowadays to inspire respect. Folks hoot at
lawyers, declaring with much reiteration that law has ceased to be a
profession and become a business. They vary that by pointing out that
all the best talent in it is bought up day by day by the corporations
and the rich. Even the judges--look at them! The current disposition
is, when you don’t like a decision of a court, to take the judge’s
number and write to the management to have him fired. It is to laugh at
decisions and the feeling about them. The other day the United States
Supreme Court decided something thus and so by four to three. Justices
1, 3, and 5 protested vigorously. Personally I sustained the dissenting
opinion, and thought the decision left the law in a bad condition.
That could be cured by Congress, which is perhaps the best way, but
the popular method would be to dock Justices 2, 4, 6, and 7 a month’s
pay, and try the case again with a full court. That’s how folks seem to
feel, and perhaps some of them would act on their feelings.
_Some_ of them! Stars above! What some of us would do is past guessing.
What some of us are thought capable of doing quite outruns belief,
but that is because the air is charged with politics and with plans
and specifications for making over the world, and with a perceptible
leaning, as I have intimated, toward beginning with the legal
profession.
Oh, well, let ’em! I’m not afraid. A man who can make a living by
law can make a living at something else if necessary. It is the
understanding when they put young fellows to learn the law that they
will be qualified, more or less, if they learn it, not only to be
lawyers, but to be bankers, brokers, railroad officers, editors,
milliners, grocers, contractors, and nurses-general to ailing
industries, and undertakers. Accordingly they usually appoint lawyers
to receiverships, and usually the appointees go ahead and bury the
patient. No doubt it is a natural consequence of this theory that
lawyers shall know and do everybody’s business that there is this
prevalence of impressions that everybody ought to be able to beat the
lawyers at law. Of course there ought to be reciprocity in omniscience.
Of course the lawyer trade can be overdone, but there’s more to it
than these recall people think. I guess it will last my time. It’s the
science of keeping order in the world. I admit that it needs assistance
from cops and sometimes from soldiers, and cannon and warships, and
that too much of the time it keeps a sort of crystallized disorder that
has to be smashed occasionally and rearranged. But when it comes to
rearrangement, back they come to the lawyers, professors of the science
of keeping order in the world.
It is interesting how people divide in politics. All the decent people
seem to be after the same thing, more or less, but differ according to
knowledge, temperament, circumstances, and affiliations as to methods
of getting it. And the differences last so wonderfully! There’s free
trade and protection, or high and low protection--we’ve been discussing
those matters in this country voluminously and insistently for from
fifty to a hundred years, and by far the most of us don’t know now
precisely where we stand. We are, reasonably enough, for as much
improvement as will do us good, and not for any more than is helpful
at the price. But tariff-improvement isn’t to be had in quarter-yard
lengths. Congress makes a rough effort to please customers, and when it
has finished it is take it or leave it, and the customers usually go
off grumbling.
And the other things that people want--restraint of corporations,
restraint of labor-unions, restraint of political bosses, changes in
the machinery of politics, hand-made government by the people, single
taxes, income taxes, minimum wages, municipal ownership of public
utilities, votes for women--my gracious--there’s a new remedy every day.
Not but that many of them are good and some of them timely. The world
seems to be progressive nowadays, and I suppose its progress is upward,
and not to the bow-wows. But it is to wonder about every proposed
change whether it is really improvement or merely change, and about
every novelty that people clamor for whether their true need is not
something else--a change in themselves, rather than any practicable
change in the regulations of life. For one need not be very old to
observe that different people make out very differently in the same
circumstances, and that folks affect circumstances much more than
circumstances affect folks. Yet circumstances do affect folks very
much, crush them sometimes, and stunt or warp them often; and certainly
there is an obligation in the folks who have it in them to affect
circumstances to improve them for the benefit of all hands, and provide
reasonable access to opportunity.
Do I get in with the cart-tail orators this campaign? Why not, to be
sure? Politics has been an early crop this year, sprouting hard in
March, and working overtime ever since, with an enormous profusion of
discourse and a vast expenditure of time and money in a general public
effort to get somewhere. But that’s all right. The crop is going to be
worth the labor. This is really the first time the political school has
been run wide open since Bryan’s first campaign, and that was sixteen
years ago, a period that carries me clear back to Eton collars. Alas
for me! I suppose I’m a sort of conservative. They ought to examine the
blood and find out where people belong, and save us some of our mental
struggles to discover it by cerebral analysis. I don’t know what’s in
my blood, but when people are for scuttling the ship so as to get the
boats out easier I always seem to be for some other plan. Now and then
it’s necessary to scuttle. There was the everlasting French Revolution,
where they blew up their ship, and in the long run made a good thing
out of it. But that was an exceptionally rotten ship, and they had
things fixed aboard so that the crew were too successfully separated
from the grub--a feat that a large share of human ability seems always
at work to accomplish, and which, when it is successfully pulled off,
achieves a very penetrating and comprehensive quality of ruin. Perhaps
it is the conservative molecules in my blood that makes me as much
adverse to this detachment of the crew from the grub as I am to blowing
up the ship. No true friend of navigation wants either of them.
I guess it’s more fun to be a meat-ax radical than a conservative.
The ax-handle is a simple implement, and probably blisters the hands
less than this eternal pulling on the sheets and throwing the wheel
over. But we don’t really choose our line in politics. We take the
steer we get from our inside, and which comes down to us, no doubt,
from our forebears, along with the tendency to fat or lean, and
variations in the adherence of hairs to our scalps. I dare say we
are not as grateful as we should be to other persons whose molecular
inheritance is different from ours for going their way and following
their hereditary propensities, so that we can better and more helpfully
follow ours. If we all got the same steer I dare say the ship would
run aground. To avoid that there comes this variety of propensity, and
also the great principle of reaction on inherited inclinations, which
has always raised up from time to time such valuable and efficient
revolutionaries. The pinch for the natural conservatives comes at
times when conservatism has outrun its license and crystallized into a
do-nothingness which is more dangerous than radicalism. Then the real
conservatives like me, who always want to let things down easy, have to
flop, and it is always a very nice matter to know just when to do it
and what to flop to.
This is a pretty floppy year, no doubt about it. I’d give a penny to
know whose cart-tail, if any, I should aspire to mount. Great din at
this writing, and a handsome field of candidates, with leaders whom
we have been contemplating for months, and putting on the scales and
pulling off, and whose points we have reckoned and re-reckoned. And as
it comes to the choice, how prevalent is dubiety of mind as to whether
we shall get candidates for whom we want to vote! Was there ever such
a lot of men put up for office? I read the papers, all varieties of
them, and have been studying candidates hard now for three or four
months, and begin to wonder how so many incompetent or unprincipled
citizens have contrived to cheat the gallows and avoid all places of
detention all these years. Not one of them has so much as been to
jail as yet. I dare say they would pass even now as half-way decent
men if they were not candidates. Perhaps we are too particular. I
notice that a large proportion of the important work in the world has
been done by pretty bad men: men, some of them, who would have been
insufferable if they had not been indispensable. When things are in
a bad-enough hole, the indispensable man has to be taken whether he
is insufferable or not. But luckily we’re not up against it so hard
as that. Nobody seems indispensable this year. Our world seems to me
less tippy nowadays, blowing as it is at all its blow-holes, than it
did six or seven years ago, when stocks were kiting and being kited,
and everybody was consolidating, and every active person who wasn’t a
syndicate or an underwriter of something was asking the way to those
fashionable employments. We have blown off a lot of steam since then,
and our safety-valves are all working pretty well; and, though they’re
noisy, to me they don’t look dangerous. We must be patient with the
candidates, and look sometimes on their bright sides. When we regard
them all with discontent, it is too much like that common saying, “Why
do women marry such men?” They marry the best in sight, and that’s all
we can do about candidates. But, by George! the light that beats upon a
throne is mere moonshine to the light that beats upon a candidate.
We shall see about the candidates, but just what we shall see beats me.
VII
WE DINE OUT AND DISCUSS EDUCATION
We want to ask people to dinner--at least _I_ do--and do ask a good
many, first and last, in spite of restricted space and our other
restrictions. About four besides ourselves is our limit, and that’s
a dinner-party. More often I bring home a man, or a married pair of
our generation come in and bring new topics and points of view, and
sometimes news, into our discourse. People seem willing enough to come
to dinner if you have something to eat in the house and something to
say. I sometimes wish we had more dinner-parties, but the doctrine of
compensation comes in on that, for, I suppose, if we were rich enough
to have people to dinner whenever we wanted, we would have to dine
out the rest of the time, and the upshot of it would be that we would
never have time to read up anything really good to say. But we do dine
out considerably as it is, not only with our cherished relatives who
regale us when occasion offers (and also when it doesn’t) with meat,
drink, and affection, but also with our friends, both those who live
somewhat near our economic plane and those who move and have beings in
planes much more exalted and profuse.
For example, we dine sometimes with Major and Mrs. Brace, indulgent
elders of whom I have so often spoken, and who, I think, are disposed
to assume some restricted but affectionate responsibility for our
successful progress through this vale of dues. We are on such terms
with that family that Mrs. Brace has a habit of telephoning to Cordelia
please to come and fill in at a dinner-party when a pair of guests give
out at the last moment, which we do, when we can, with cheerfulness of
spirit. Then the Major bestows little jobs of law business on me from
time to time, and is apt to say “Come to dinner, and talk it over, and
fetch Cordelia.” And then we talk other things over also, and maybe
play auction bridge for an hour.
The last one of Mrs. Brace’s dinners we filled in at was unusually
well stocked with persons apt at discussion, and the talk took a turn
toward the education of women, and more particularly the education of
daughters of well-to-do parents in New York. On the general subject I
don’t see that there is much to discuss. The prevailing practice is
to teach girls up to eighteen or nineteen years of age anything that
they will consent to learn, the same as boys. The girls don’t go to
college yet as generally as the boys do, but they go a good deal, and
more and more, I should say, all the time. The girls’ colleges prosper
and increase in number and in size, but the authorities seem to feel
that they have not yet fully struck their gait; not yet established
themselves as the best places for girls in general between eighteen and
twenty-two, and not yet demonstrated to the satisfaction of all the
observant and considerate that the training they give fulfils its aim,
and is better worth the time of girls who acquire it or might acquire
it than some other things that some of them are or might be doing in
those four years, if they were not doing that.
You may say that the same reluctance of unrestricted approval attaches
to the boys’ colleges. There was the New Haven lady who felt so
strongly that Yale was one of the more popular gates of hell, and
the late Mr. Crane, of Chicago, who maintained that our whole system
of college education was pernicious and a shocking waste of time,
and Dr. Wilson, late of Princeton, who felt so strongly that the
college side-shows, athletic and social, had diverted to themselves
the stronger currents of young life, to the great detriment of the
academic performance in the main tent, and who did what he could to
bring them back. Certainly the boys’ colleges are imperfect enough,
and are conceded both by their friends and their detractors to be so,
but at least they have won in the competition with home training. As a
rule, the boys who can, go to college. They may not get there what they
should, but they are not kept at home and put into business, or brought
out into society, for fear that what they may miss by not staying at
home will be more valuable than what they may gain by being in college.
All sorts of boys go to college; the rich and the poor, the fashionable
and the simple; the boys with a living to scramble for, and those with
cotton-wadded places and ready-made incomes waiting for them. It is
felt that boys must know one another if they know nothing else, and
that college is a good place to get that knowledge.
So it is felt about girls, that they must know one another, and also
boys, if nothing else, but college is not yet the place where the
more modish girls in the biggest cities can know the girls whom it
belongs to them to know. The American girls from the big cities who
are advantageously situated for experiments in polite society do not
yet go much to college. Their brothers go as matter of course. Their
brothers, like as not, are sent five or six years to boarding-school,
and then three or four years to college, and then perhaps kept away
several years longer learning the rudiments of some profession in which
they start to work at twenty-five or later. But to keep the girls off
in institutions away from their mothers, until they reach so ripe an
age as that, or even the maturity of twenty-two, is an experiment that
affectionate parents who have social aspirations for their daughters,
and some means of furthering them, are apt to look upon with hostility,
doubt, or, at best, with grudging and uncertain approval. The mass
of the college girls seems to be recruited from the lesser cities,
or from families whose daughters have a doubtful prospect, or worse,
of inheriting means of support, and must, as a matter of common
prudence, be qualified betimes for self-maintenance and all the kinds
of self-help, against a turn of fortune that may leave them without a
competent wage-earner to depend on.
These considerations all got due attention at Mrs. Brace’s
dinner-party. “Send Maria to college?” exclaimed Mrs. Van Pelt. “What
for? She’s eighteen, and has been to school as it is ever since she
was four years old, and to boarding-school three years, and knows an
enormous amount, and can read and spell fairly, speak some French, and
read German, and knows the English kings, and a few of the Presidents,
and whether Dryden or Milton wrote the ‘Fairy Queen.’ Mercy! The
child’s crammed with knowledge; what she needs to know is how to use
some of it. She can’t talk at a dinner-party. I want her to learn to
talk. I want her to have an acquaintance. It won’t hurt her to inspect
the young gentlemen. The colleges are nunneries, full of nuns whose
mothers I don’t know, busy learning unimportant things like how to cut
up frogs, and the pedigrees of the Saxon kings, and eschatology, and
neglecting all the important things like how to put on a hat, how to
cut up a lobster, how to keep hair attached to the scalp, how to talk
to a boy, how to help a mother, how to engage a cook, whom to ask to a
dinner-party. Why college? Maria’d come home in four years, forgotten
by all the girls she ought to know, qualified to be a school-teacher
and with a large acquaintance among young ladies similarly qualified,
and with a strong and reasonable impulse to put her acquirements to
practical use either by continuing her studies or getting a situation
and earning her living. I don’t want her to get a situation and earn
her living, I want her to get married.”
“Oh, come!” said the Major, who was sitting next to her. “It isn’t so
bad as that. I know Maria. She’ll get married anyhow, but give her
time. Does she want to go to college?”