Part 6

But we have much more to learn from the philanthropists by a study of what they have done than by dwelling on their shortcomings. They have labored while the political reformers have slept; and after many trials and many failures they have found certain working principles.

It was they who discovered that we cannot, as human nature is constituted, give strength to any one except by helping the whole man to develop at once. We must give him a chance to grow. The workers among the poor have long ago seen the futility of any effort except that of raising the general standards of living. They have established Settlements, where the relation between the settlers and the surrounding population is as natural as family life and as perennial as Tammany Hall. After ten years of experiment this has been done in many places. If you will go to one of these places and study exactly what has happened in the line of benefit to the people, you will see that it has resulted wholly from personal influence,--that is to say, from the effect of character upon character. “Two years ago we established a boys’ club, and soon afterwards a kindergarten. The boys returned one day, and out of jealousy smashed everything belonging to the kindergarten, and piled the rubbish in the middle of the room. Last week a barrel of fruit was sent here for the sick and weakly, and we left the barrel open with a card on the outside to that effect. You could not get the boys to touch the fruit. Now, if you ask me what system or what part of the system has caused the change in these boys, I don’t know.”

This is reform politics, but unless you and I go there and make a place for these boys in practical politics, they will find waiting for them nothing but the caucus and the job. They will relapse and forget. It is throwing effort into the sea to train the young if you stop there. The test comes when the scaffoldings of early life are taken down. Each man meets the world alone. The tragedies of character occur at this period. We must make a camp and standing ground for grown men. So far as the hope of political purity goes, there are acres of this city that are in a worse condition than health was in before the era of hospitals. Fly over them as the crow flies, and you cannot find a centre of downright antagonism to evil. The population does not know that such a thing exists; and yet, if you propose to go there and set up a fight against both parties,--that is to say, a fight against wickedness,--you are told by patriots and doctors of divinity, “Don’t do it unless you can win. You will disgust people with reform.”

It is awful and at the same time ludicrous to hear an educated person maintain this doctrine and in the same breath mourn over the corruption of the masses. The man throws his own dark shadow over them and bewails their want of light. He doubts the power of personal influence; and yet there is absolutely no other force for good in the world, and never has been. Let us stick to facts. Take individual cases of improvement and see what power has been at work. You will find that you disclose behind any personal improvement, not a ballot law or an organization, but a human being.

The movement for political reform goes into the Bowery in the wake of the philanthropists. We go there knowing something about practical politics. We know, for instance, that the Bowery is the geographical name for a district which is really governed by the same forces as Fifth Avenue. To think that the politics of the Bowery are controlled by the Bowery is about as sensible as to believe that the politics of Irkutsk are controlled at Irkutsk. We have got, first, to disclose the machinery of evil and then to fight it wherever we find it, even though it lead us into churches. Nothing is needed in any Tammany club on the Bowery that is not needed ten times as much in the Union League Club on Fifth Avenue--personal self-sacrifice for principle in a cause which is apparently hopeless. Unless you go there displaying that, you are not needed.

Our intercourse with the laboring man is a great teacher to ourselves. That is its main use. It brings out, as nothing else can, the magnitude and perfection of the system, whose visible top and little flag we can always see, but whose dimensions and ramifications nothing but experiment can reveal; philosophy could not guess it.

Here is a laborer on the street railroad. In order to get work he must show a ticket from the party boss. It is his passport from the Czar, countersigned by the proper official; otherwise he gets no job. Here is a young notary whom you employ to carry about the certificate that puts an independent candidate in nomination. You try to get him to sign the thing himself and join your club. It is no use asking. His brother did it once and lost his place; so close is the scrutiny, so rapid the punishment. Examine the retail grocer, or the tobacconist, or the cobbler; go into particulars with him, and you will find that his unwillingness to join your movement does not spring so directly from his inability to see the point of it, as from fear of the direct and immediate consequences to himself.

We wanted to elevate the masses, but it turns out, as the philanthropists discerned long ago, that there are no masses in America, there are no masses in New York City. We can discover only individuals, who are each controlled by individual interests, by various and subtle considerations. These men are in chains to other men, who often live in other parts of the city.

The attorneys and merchants, the business world in fact, is found to be in league with abuse. The man who signs the laborer’s license to work reports twice a day to a big contractor who is director in a bank whose president owns the opera house and endowed the sailors’ home. He built the yacht club, is vestryman in the biggest church, and is revered by all men. The title-deeds and registry books of all visible wealth, show the names of his intimate friends. All we can do in the way of weakening the chains is to expose them; this cruelty is largely ignorance. The beneficiaries must be made to see the sources of their wealth. It is pre-occupation with business, not coldness of heart, that conceals the conditions. The American business man is a warm-hearted being. He does not even care for money, but for the game of business.

As matters now stand in America, we see this condition,--that it is for the immediate interest of the dominant class, namely, the politico-financial class, to keep the people as selfish as possible. We have examined the subtle strains of influence and prejudice by which this commercial interest has been extended, until, as a practical matter, it is almost impossible for a man to get word to the laboring classes that there exists such a thing as political morality. Some professional philanthropist always stands ready to prevent the signal of honesty from being raised; some set of Sunday citizens interposes to stop the unwise, inexpedient, foolhardy attempt to be independent of rascality.

And when you do succeed in reaching the mechanic, what can you do for him? Tell him to be a man, and strike off the shackles that bind him.

Here we are, as helpless before the poor as before the rich, facing both of them with the same query, “Can you not see that your own concession, call it poverty, or call it poverty of will, is one element of this oppression?”

The difference between the poor and the financial classes is one of spiritual complexity. The promoters are well-to-do because their minds have been able to grasp and utilize the complex forces made up of the minds of their simpler fellow-beings. And this astuteness leaves them less open to unselfish emotions than the laboring man. His nature is more intact. He is a more emotional and instinctive being. It is for this reason that moral reforms have come from the lower strata of society. The people have as much to lose as the bankers, but they are more ready to lose it.

The head of moral feeling in the community has got to grow strong enough to force the financier to take his clutch off the laboring man, before you can reach the laboring man. And yet labor itself will contribute more than its share towards this head of moral feeling; and therefore you must go among the laboring classes with your ideas and your propaganda. But beware lest you give him a stone for bread. You can do no more for a man because you call yourself a “politician” than if you were a mere philanthropist. A man’s standards of political thought are but a small fraction of his general standards, and unless your sense of truth is as sharp as a sword you had better not come near the laboring man.

The point here made is--and it is of great importance--that we candidly acknowledge at every instant the nature of our undertaking and the nature of our power, for in so far as we mistake them we weaken our practical utility.

It is not as the agent of any institution that you are here, but as the agent of conscience at the dictation of personal feeling. Do you need proof that you yourself draw all your power from sheer moral influence? Note what you do when you start your club. You go to the nearest well-to-do person and ask for money for rent. He gives it to you out of his fund of general benevolence. To whom do you really want to distribute this benevolence? To every one. You feel that by passing it on through a group and series of boys and young men you can benefit the whole country. You use them as a mere vehicle. You know that you can only help them by getting them to help others. Your appeal for clients then goes out to the whole district. Your club puts you in communication with every man in it. In teaching your club or in exhorting any mortal to good behavior, what method, what stimulus, do you use? Whether you know it or not, you are really drawing support from every one who is following the same principle, all over the city, all over the country, all over the world. Do you not ceaselessly appeal to the examples of Washington and Lincoln, to the books and conduct of men whose aims were your aims? Or take your own case. Why do you occupy yourself with this thing? This activity satisfies your demands upon life; nothing else does. You are the creature of a thousand influences, and if you begin to trace them you find that you are fulfilling the will of Toynbee, of John Stuart Mill, of Kant. You are a disciple of Tolstoi. You were inspired by William Lloyd Garrison. It is they, as much as you, who are doing this work. It is they who formulated the ideas and impressed them upon you. Your great friends are the founders of religions. Examine the actual persons who give you practical help. You will find Moses, you will find Christ behind them. What you are using is the world’s fund of unselfishness. It is necessary to employ the whole of it in order to accomplish anything, however small. As a practical matter, every one does employ the whole of it every time he even thinks of reform.

Now, just as we can trace the sources of our power in the great currents of human feeling that flow down to us out of the past; so we can foresee the accomplishments of that power in enlarging the lives of men who come after us. We are sinking the foundations of a new politics. You cannot always see every stone, but it has gone to its place. It is impossible to take a stand for what you think is a true theory without thereby becoming an integral factor for good in every man who hears of it. It is impossible to be that factor without taking that stand.

What is the nature of the good you can do to the laboring man? His mind analyzes you in a flash. If he is influenced by you, you may be sure that it is by something in you that you had not intended to give him. After the man has seen you, he has been moved by you; but how? Consult your own remembrance. What incident of character impressed you most when you were a child? Do you remember any act, any expression or gesture or anecdote or speech, that had a lasting influence upon you? Now I ask you this: Was it done for you? Were you the designed beneficiary of it? Was it not rather the silent part of some one else’s conduct, a thing you were perhaps not meant to see at all? And this was no accident. This is the natural history of influence; it passes unconsciously from life to life.

We must take the world as we find it. We must deal with human nature according to the laws of human nature. Our politics are at present so artificial that the average man thinks that the name “politics” prevents the well established and familiar principles of human nature from being operative. But he is wrong. Man has never yet succeeded in inventing any system that could evade them or affect them in the least. All the political organization of reform is already in existence, and needs only strengthening and developing. It is all in use, and every one understands its use and knows its headquarters and its agencies. It is all individual character and courage, and with the growth of character and courage it will become more defined and visible every day.

LITERATURE

There are feelings and views about life, there are conviction and insight, which come from thinking at a high rate of speed, and vanish when the machinery moves slowly and the blood ebbs. The world not only accepts the intensity of the writer, but demands it. Nevertheless, the world has an imperfect knowledge as to where this intensity comes from, how it is produced, or what relation it bears to ugliness and falsehood. “What a pleasure it must be to you,” said Rothschild to Heine, “to be able to turn off those little songs!”

In our ordinary moods we regard the conclusions of the poets as both true and untrue,--true to feeling, untrue to fact; true as intimations of the next world or of some lost world; untrue here, because detached from those portions of society that are perennially visible. Most men have a duplicate philosophy which enables them to love the arts and the wit of mankind, at the same time that they conveniently despise them. Life is ugly and necessary; art is beautiful and impossible. “The farther you go from the facts of life, the nearer you get to poetry. The practical problem is to keep them in separate spheres, and to enjoy both.” The hypothesis of a duplicity in the universe explains everything, and staves off all claims and questionings.

Such are the convictions of the average cultivated man. His back is broken, but he lives in the two halves comfortably enough. He has to be protected at his weak spot, of course, and that spot is the present; ten years from now, to-morrow, yesterday, the day of judgment, the State of Pennsylvania,--all these you are welcome to. Every form of idealism appeals to him, so long as it does not ask him to budge out of his armchair. “Aha,” he says, “I understand this. It takes its place in the realm of the Imagination.”

This man does not know, and has no means of knowing, that good books are only written by men whose backs are not broken, and whose vital energy circulates through their entire system in one sweep. They have a unitary and not a duplicate philosophy. The present is their strong point. The actualities of life are their passion. They lay a bold hand upon everything within their reach, for they see it with new sight.

The glitter of the past makes us think of literature as embodied in books; but to understand literature we must fix our minds on authors, not on books. The men who write--what makes them write well or ill? What are the conditions that breed poetry, or music, or architecture? The current beliefs about art and letters are fatalistic. It is supposed that poets and artists crop up now and then, and that nothing can stop them; they need no aid, they conquer circumstances. I do not believe it. We see no analogy to it in nature. Among the plants and the fishes we see nothing but a wholesale and incredible destruction of germs on all sides. It seems a miracle that any seed should fall upon good ground, and be sheltered till it come to the flower. Why should the percentage of germs that come to maturity be greater with genius than it is with the eggs of the sturgeon? The enemies of each are numerous. If it were not for the fecundity of nature, we should have none of either of them. And how is it that the great man always happens to be young at the very moment when some events are going forward that ripen his powers; so that he grows up with his time, and does something that is comprehensible to all time?

The answer is, that all eras are sown thick with the seeds of genius, which for the most part die, but in a favoring age mature to greatness. Must we resort to a theory of special creation to explain the great talents of the world? And even this would not explain our own welcome and our own comprehension of them when they come. If it were not for the undeveloped powers, the seeds of genius, in ourselves, Plato and Bach would be meaningless, and Christ would have died in vain.

It must be that thousands of good intellects perish annually. The men do not die, but their powers wither, or rather never mature. Art, like everything else, represents an escape, a survival. In any age that lacks it, or is weak in it, we may look about for the enginery by which it is crushed. In looking into a past age we are put to inference and conjecture. We see the mark of fetters upon the Byzantine soul, and we begin dredging the dark waters of history for a metaphysical cause. We cannot walk into a Byzantine shop and watch the apprentice at work. But in our own time we can see the whole process in action. We can study our modern Inquisitions at leisure, and note every mark that is made upon a soul that is passing through them.

It does not involve any indignity to the pretensions of literature if we walk into that great bazaar, modern journalism, and see what is going on there behind the counters. Here is a factory of popular art. It is not the whole of letters; but it has an influence on the whole of letters. The press fills the consciousness of the people. A modern community breathes through its press. Journalism, to be sure, is a region of letters, where all the factors for truth are at a special and peculiar discount. Its attention is given to near and ugly things, to mean quarrels, business interests, and special ends. Every country shows up badly here. The hypocrisy of the press is the worst thing in England. It is the worst exhibition of England’s worst fault. The press of France gives you France at her weakest. The press of America gives you America at her cheapest. Perhaps the study of journalism in any country would illustrate the peculiar vices of that country; and it is fair to remember this in examining our own press. But examine it we must, for it is important.