Part 5

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There is another side to this shield that calls not for scorn but for pity. Have you ever been in need of money? Almost every man who enters our society joins it as a young man in need of money. His instincts are unsullied, his intellect is fresh and strong, but he must live. How comes it that the country is full of maimed human beings, of cynics and feeble good men, and outside of this no form of life except the diabolical intelligence of pure business?

How to make yourself needed,--it is the sycophant’s problem; and why should we expect a young American to act differently from a young Spaniard at the Court of Philip the Second? He must get on. He goes into a law office, and if he is offended at its dishonest practices he cannot speak. He soon accepts them. Thereafter he cannot see them. He goes into a newspaper office, the same; a banker’s, a merchant’s, a dry-goods’ shop. What has happened to these fellows at the end of three years, that their minds seem to be drying up? I have seen many men I knew in college grow more and more uninteresting from year to year. Is there something in trade that desiccates and flattens out, that turns men into dried leaves at the age of forty? Certainly there is. It is not due to trade, but to intensity of self-seeking, combined with narrowness of occupation. If I had to make my way at the court of Queen Elizabeth, I should need more kinds of wits and more knowledge of human nature than in the New York button trade. No doubt I should be a preoccupied, cringing, and odious sort of person at a feudal festivity; but I should be a fascinating man of genius compared to John H. Painter, who at the age of thirty is making $15,000 a year by keeping his mouth shut and attending to business. Put a pressure gauge into Painter, and measure the business tension at New York in 1900. He is passing his youth in a trance over a game of skill, and thereby earning the respect and admiration of all men. Do not blame him. The great current of business force that passes through the port of New York has touched him, and he is rigid. There are hundreds of these fellows, and they make us think of the well-meaning young man who has to support his family, and who must compete against them for the confidence of his business patrons. Our standard of commercial honesty is set by that current. It is entirely the result of the competition that comes from everybody’s wanting to do the same thing.

“But,” you say, “we are here dealing with a natural force. If you like, it withers character, and preoccupies one part of a man for so long that the rest of him becomes numb. He is hard and queer. He cannot write because he cannot think; he cannot draw because he cannot think; he cannot enter real politics because he cannot think. He is all the wretch you depict him, but we must have him. Such are men.” This is the biggest folly in the world, and shows as deep an intellectual injury in the mind that thinks it as self-seeking can inflict. Business has destroyed the very knowledge in us of all other natural forces except business.

What shall we do to diminish this awful pressure that makes politics a hell, and wrings out our manhood, till (you will find) the Americans condone the death of their brothers and fathers who perished in home camps during the Spanish war, because it all happened in the cause of trade, it was business thrift, done by smart men in pursuance of self-interest? You ask what you can do to diminish the tension of selfishness, which is as cruel as superstition, and which is not in one place, but everywhere in the United States. It runs a hot iron over young intellect, and crushes character in the bud. It is blindness, palsy, and hip disease. You can hardly find a man who has not got some form of it. There is no newspaper which does not show signs of it. You can hardly find a man who does not proclaim it to be the elixir of life, the vade-mecum of civilization. What can you do? Why, you can oppose it with other natural forces.

You yourself cannot turn Niagara; but there is not a town in America where one single man cannot make his force felt against the whole torrent. He takes a stand on a practical matter. He takes action against some abuse. What does this accomplish? Everything. How many people are there in your town? Well, every one of them gets a thrill that strikes deeper than any sermon he ever heard. He may howl, but he hears. The grocer’s boy, for the first time in his life, believes that the whole outfit of morality has any place in the practical world. Every class contributes its comment. Next year a new element comes forward in politics, as if the franchise had been extended. Remember this: you cannot, though you owned the world, do any good in it except by devising new ways of manifesting the fact that you felt in a particular way. It is the personal influence of example that is the power. Nothing else counts. You can do harm by other methods, but not good. This influence is a natural force, and works like steam power. Why all this commotion over your protest? If you accuse the mayor of being a thief, why does he not reply, in the words of modern philosophy, “Of course I’m a thief, I’m made that way”? Instead of that he resents it, and there ensues a discussion that takes people’s attention off of trade, and qualifies the atmosphere of the place. You have appreciably relieved the tension and checked the plague.

This whole subject must be looked at as a crusade in the cause of humanity. You are making it easier for every young man in town to earn his livelihood without paying out his soul and conscience. You cannot help any one man. You are forced into helping them all at once. Every time a man asserts himself he cuts a cord that is strangling somebody. The first time that independent candidates for local office were run in New York City, strong men cried in the street for rage. The supremacy of commerce had been affronted. New York, in all that makes life worth living, is a new city since the reform movements began to break up the torpor of serfdom.

You asked how to fight force. It must be fought with force, and not with arguments. Indeed, it is easier to start a reform and carry it through, than it is to explain either why or how it is done. You can only understand this after you have been three times ridiculed as a reformer; and then you will begin to see that throughout the community, running through every one, there are currents of beneficent power that accomplish changes, sometimes visible, sometimes hard to see; that this power is in its nature quite as strong, quite as real and reliable, as that Wall Street current,--terrible forces both of them, forever operative and struggling and contending together as they surge and swell through the people. It is the sight of that power for good that you need. I cannot give it to you. You must sink your own shaft for it. It is this beneficent current passing from man to man that makes the unity of all efforts for public betterment. You have a movement and an excitement over bad water, and it leaves you with kindergartens in your schools. It is this current that turns your remark at the club (which every one repeated in order to injure you) into a piece of encouragement to the banker’s clerk, who could not have made it himself except at the cost of his livelihood. It is this current--not only the fear of it, but the presence of it--in the heart of your merchants that leaves them at your mercy. Cast anything into this current and it goes everywhere, like aniline dye put into a reservoir; it tinges the whole local life in twenty-four hours. It is to this current that all appeals are made. All party platforms, all resolutions, all lies are dedicated to it; all literature lives by it. The head of power is near and easy if you strike directly for it.

There is an opinion abroad that good politics requires that every man should give his whole time to politics. This is another of the superstitions disseminated by the politicians who want us to go to their primaries, and accepted by people so ignorant of life that they believe that the temperature depends upon the thermometer.

Why, you are running those primaries now. If you were different, they would become different. You need never go near them. Go into that camp where your instinct leads you. The improvement in politics will not be marked by any cyclonic overturn. There will always be two parties competing for your vote. It takes no more time to vote for a good man than for a bad man. There will be no more men in public life then than now. There will be no overt change in conditions. A few leaders will stand for the new forces. It is true that it requires a general increase of interest on the part of every one, in order that these men shall be found. Your personal duty is to support them in private and public. That is all. The extent to which you yourself become involved in public affairs depends upon chances with which you need not concern yourself. Only try to understand what is happening under your eyes. Every time you see a group of men advancing some cause that seems sensible, and being denounced on all hands as “self-appointed,” see if it was not something in yourself, after all, that appointed those men.

As we grow old, what have we to rely on as a touchstone for the times? You once had your own causes and enthusiasms, but you cannot understand these new ones. You had your certificate from the Almighty, but these fellows are “self-appointed.” What you wanted was clear, but these men want something unattainable, something that society, as you know it, cannot supply. Calm yourself, my friend; perhaps they bring it.

Has the great Philosophy of Evolution done nothing for the mind of man, that new developments, as they arrive, are received with the same stony solemnity, are greeted with the same phrases as ever? How can you have the ingenuousness to argue soberly against me, supplying me, by every word you say, with new illustrations, new hope, new fuel? Until I heard you repeat word by word the prayer-book of crumbling conservatism, I was not sure I was right. You have placed the great seal of the world upon new truth. Thus should it be received.

The radicals are really always saying the same thing. They do not change; everybody else changes. They are accused of the most incompatible crimes, of egoism and a mania for power, indifference to the fate of their own cause, fanaticism, triviality, want of humor, buffoonery and irreverence. But they sound a certain note. Hence the great practical power of consistent radicals. To all appearance nobody follows them, yet every one believes them. They hold a tuning-fork and sound A, and everybody knows it really is A, though the time-honored pitch is G flat. The community cannot get that A out of its head. Nothing can prevent an upward tendency in the popular tone so long as the real A is kept sounding. Every now and then the whole town strikes it for a week, and all the bells ring, and then all sinks to suppressed discord and denial.

The reason why we have not, of late years, had strong consistent centres of influence, focuses of steady political power, has been that the community has not developed men who could hold the note. It was only when the note made a temporary concord with some heavy political scheme that the reform leaders could hear it themselves. For the rest of the time it threw the whole civilization out of tune. The terrible clash of interests drowned it. The reformers themselves lost it, and wandered up and down, guessing.

It is imagined that nature goes by jumps, and that a whole community can suddenly sing in tune, after it has been caterwauling and murdering the scale for twenty years. The truth is, we ought to thank God when any man or body of men make the discovery that there is such a thing as absolute pitch, or absolute honesty, or absolute personal and intellectual integrity. A few years of this spirit will identify certain men with the fundamental idea that truth is stronger than consequences, and these men will become the most serious force and the only truly political force in their community. Their ambition is illimitable, for you cannot set bounds to personal influence. But it is an ambition that cannot be abused. A departure from their own course will ruin any one of them in a night, and undo twenty years of service.

It would be natural that such sets of men should arise all over the country, men who “wanted” nothing, and should reveal the inverse position of the Boss System; a set of moral bosses with no organizations, no politics; men thrown into prominence by the operation of all the forces of human nature now suppressed, and the suppression of those now operative. It is obvious that one such man will suffice for a town. In the competition of character, one man will be naturally fixed upon, whom his competitors will be the first to honor; and upon him will be condensed the public feeling, the confidence of the community. If the extreme case do not arise, nevertheless it is certain that the tendencies toward a destruction of the present system, will reveal themselves as a tendency making for the weight of personal character in practical politics.

Reform politics is, after all, a simple thing. It demands no great attainments. You can play the game in the dark. A child can understand it. There are no subtleties nor obscurities, no higher analysis or mystery of any sort. If you want a compass at any moment in the midst of some difficult situation, you have only to say to yourself, “Life is larger than this little imbroglio. I shall follow my instinct.” As you say this, your compass swings true. You may be surprised to find what course it points to. But what it tells you to do will be practical agitation.

III

THE MASSES

Let us examine current beliefs on popular education, and then thereafter let us look very closely at the work done among the poor, and see upon what lines it has been found possible to establish influence.

Why is it that if you go down to the Bowery and set up a kindergarten or give a course of lectures on the Duties of Citizenship, every one commends you; whereas if you go into some abandoned district where a Tammany thug is running for the State Assembly against a Republican heeler, and if you put an honest man in the field against them both, your friends call you a fool, and say that your reform consists of mere negation?

Who asks to see the results upon the public welfare of a night school in astronomy? Yet, if you get ten mechanics to labor for six months with the fire of enthusiasm in them, building up a radical club, and as a result, one hundred and fifty men cast for the first time in their lives a vote that represents the heart and conscience of each, your intelligent friends ask, “What have you done? You are howling against the moon.”

Why is it that if you are a grocer and refuse to sand your sugar, you are called honest? Yet, if a young politician takes this course, it is supposed that life is not long enough for the world to discover his value; he is a visionary. In the sugar trade, the man insisted upon dealing with the community as a whole. He was not trying to sell sugar to a club, or to benefit some district. He dealt with the public. Now, if a politician deals directly with the public, we condemn him because we cannot see the empire of confidence he is building up. The reason we do not see it is entirely due to historical causes. We have had little experience recently in the utility of large appeals. We forget their power. Yet we are not without examples. Grover Cleveland dealt directly with the people on a great scale. He established a personal relation that was stronger than party bonds. This made him President, preserved his character and gave reality to politics. It was a bit of education to every man in the United States to see what riff-raff our political arks were made of: a man laid his hand on the end of one of them and tore off the roof.

We are rather more familiar with the power of public confidence as seen in times of revolution. In the year of the Lexow investigation the people of New York City believed that Dr. Parkhurst and John Goff were in earnest. There was a period of a few weeks when Goff exercised the powers of a dictator. The Police Commissioners had threatened to discipline a subordinate who had testified before Goff’s committee. He subpoenaed them all the next morning, and he browbeat them like school-boys. They went back humbled. The revelations of the summer had awakened the spirit of revolt in the masses of the people, and it expressed itself directly as power. The machinery of government was not in abeyance, but it was seen to be a mere vehicle. It could be made to work justice. Here were two men, Goff and Parkhurst, rendered all-powerful by the existence of popular confidence. The state of mind of the community was unusual, and the indignation soon subsided; but it subsided to a new level, and the abuses and inhumanity of Boss tyranny have never since been so severe in New York.

Our people have seen several volcanic eruptions of this sort, and therefore they believe in them. They believe in the moral power of the community, but are afraid it can only act by convulsion. They think that some new principle comes into play at such times, something which is not a constant factor in daily government. On the other hand, we have all been trained to respect plodding methods in common education, and we know that much can be done by kindergartens, boys’ clubs, and propaganda to change the standards of the community and make men trust virtue. We believe in the boys’ club, and we believe in the earthquake; we forget that the same principle underlies them both. When some one applies this principle to the field of political education that lies between them, we are cynical because we have no experience.

Apart from the lack of experience that prevents people from seeing the use of this practical activity, there are two distressing elements that make men not want to see it. In the first place, even if you work in the Bowery and a friend votes in Harlem, you are apt to be hitting his interests and prejudices. And in the second place your conduct is a horrid appeal. If this work is useful, he ought to be doing it. He had hoped that nothing could be done.

The real distinction between this particular sort of work and other philanthropy is, that other philanthropy is preparatory drill; this is war. The other is feeding, training, and preaching; this is practice. Now, you may have your license to preach all you please in the vineyard, but if you touch the soil with the spade, you find the ground is pre-empted; you are fighting a railroad. And this condition is openly recognized in cities where the evil forces are completely dominant.

In lecturing before the University Extension in Pennsylvania, you are not allowed to talk politics. It is against the policy of the philanthropists who run the institution, and who are run by the railroad. The situation in Philadelphia is merely illustrative of the distinction between philanthropy and political reform, which is always ready to become apparent. Of course, so long as the railroad distributes the philanthropy, there will result nothing but tyranny. The Roman Emperors gave shows to amuse the people, and we give them talks on Botticelli and magic-lantern pictures of the Nile. There are, then, real reasons why our people are slow to acknowledge the utility of militant political reform, and why they clutch at any handle against it.