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Title: Causes and Consequences

Author: John Jay Chapman

Release date: June 9, 2021 [eBook #65582]
                Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES ***

CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES

  _By the Same Author_
  EMERSON AND OTHER ESSAYS. 12mo. $1.25




CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES

  BY
  JOHN JAY CHAPMAN

  NEW YORK
  CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
  1899




  _Copyright, 1898_,
  BY CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

  University Press:
  JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A.




  _DEDICATED_
  TO THE
  MEMBERS OF CLUB C




PREFACE


As we unravel political knots, they resolve themselves into proverbs
and familiar truth, and thus our explanation becomes a treatise upon
human nature,--a profession of faith.

The idea that man is an unselfish animal has gradually been forced
upon me, by the course of reflection which I give in the following
chapters, in the order in which it occurred to me. The chapters are
little more than presentations from different points of view of this
one idea. The chapters on Politics and Society seem to show that our
political corruptions and social inferiorities can be traced to the
same source,--namely, temporary distortion of human character by the
forces of commerce. The chapter on Education is a study on the law of
intellectual growth, and shows that a normal and rounded development
can only come from a use of the faculties very different from that
practised by the average American since the discovery of the cotton
gin.

The chapter on Democracy is a review of that subject by the light of
the conclusions as to the Nature of Man, arrived at in the Essay on
Education; and it is seen that our frame of government is in accord
with sound philosophy, and is a constant influence tending to correct
the distortions described in the first two chapters. In the final
chapter on Government, some illustrations are drawn together, showing
that the whole course of reasoning of the book contains nothing novel,
but accords with the ideals and with the wisdom of the world.

The book itself arose out of an attempt to explain an election.

                                                            J. J. C.
  ROKEBY, June 10, 1898.




CONTENTS

                             PAGE

    I. POLITICS                 3

   II. SOCIETY                 49

  III. EDUCATION; FROEBEL      83

   IV. DEMOCRACY              115

    V. GOVERNMENT             137




POLITICS




I

POLITICS


Misgovernment in the United States is an incident in the history
of commerce. It is part of the triumph of industrial progress. Its
details are easier to understand if studied as a part of the commercial
development of the country than if studied as a part of government,
because many of the wheels and cranks in the complex machinery of
government are now performing functions so perverted as to be unmeaning
from the point of view of political theory, but which become perfectly
plain if looked at from the point of view of trade.

The growth and concentration of capital which the railroad and the
telegraph made possible is the salient fact in the history of the last
quarter-century. That fact is at the bottom of our political troubles.
It was inevitable that the enormous masses of wealth, springing out of
new conditions and requiring new laws, should strive to control the
legislation and the administration which touched them at every point.
At the present time, we cannot say just what changes were or were not
required by enlightened theory. It is enough to see that such changes
as came were inevitable; and nothing can blind us to the fact that the
methods by which they were obtained were subversive of free government.

Whatever form of government had been in force in America during
this era would have run the risk of being controlled by capital, of
being bought and run for revenue. It happened that the beginning of
the period found the machinery of our government in a particularly
purchasable state. The war had left the people divided into two
parties which were fanatically hostile to each other. The people were
party mad. Party name and party symbols were of an almost religious
importance.

At the very moment when the enthusiasm of the nation had been exhausted
in a heroic war which left the Republican party-managers in possession
of the ark of the covenant, the best intellect of the country was
withdrawn from public affairs and devoted to trade. During the
period of expansion which followed, the industrial forces called in
the ablest men of the nation to aid them in getting control of the
machinery of government. The name of king was never freighted with more
power than the name of party in the United States; whatever was done
in that name was right. It is the old story: there has never been a
despotism which did not rest upon superstition. The same spirit that
made the Republican name all powerful in the nation at large made the
Democratic name valuable in Democratic districts.

The situation as it existed was made to the hand of trade. Political
power had by the war been condensed and packed for delivery; and in
the natural course of things the political trademarks began to find
their way into the coffers of the capitalist. The change of motive
power behind the party organizations--from principles, to money--was
silently effected during the thirty years which followed the war. Like
all organic change, it was unconscious. It was understood by no one.
It is recorded only in a few names and phrases; as, for instance, that
part of the organization which was purchased was called the “machine,”
and the general manager of it became known as the “boss.” The external
political history of the country continued as before. It is true that
a steady degradation was to be seen in public life, a steady failure
of character, a steady decline of decency. But questions continued to
be discussed, and in form decided, on their merits, because it was in
the interest of commerce that they should in form be so decided. Only
quite recently has the control of money become complete; and there are
reasons for believing that the climax is past.

       *       *       *       *       *

Let us take a look at the change on a small scale. A railroad is to be
run through a country town or small city, in New York or Pennsylvania.
The railroad employs a local attorney, naturally the ablest attorney in
the place. As time goes on, various permits for street uses are needed;
and instead of relying solely upon popular demand, the attorney finds
it easier to bribe the proper officials. All goes well: the railroad
thrives, the town grows. But in the course of a year new permits of
various kinds are needed. The town ordinances interfere with the road
and require amendment. There is to be a town election; and it occurs
to the railroad’s attorney that he might be in alliance with the town
officers before they are elected. He goes to the managers of the
party which is likely to win; for instance, the Republican party.
Everything that the railroad wants is really called for by the economic
needs of the town. The railroad wants only fair play and no factious
obstruction. The attorney talks to the Republican leader, and has a
chance to look over the list of candidates, and perhaps even to select
some of them. The railroad makes the largest campaign subscription ever
made in that part of the country. The Republican leader can now employ
more workers to man the polls, and, if necessary, he can buy votes.
He must also retain some fraction of the contribution for his own
support, and distribute the rest in such manner as will best keep his
“organization” together.

The party wins, and the rights of the railroad are secured for a year.
It is true that the brother of the Republican leader is employed on the
road as a brakeman; but he is a competent man.

During the year, a very nice point of law arises as to the rights of
the railroad to certain valuable land claimed by the town. The city
attorney is an able man, and reasonable. In spite of his ability, he
manages somehow to state the city’s case on an untenable ground. A
decision follows in favor of the railroad. At the following election,
the city attorney has become the Republican candidate for judge, and
the railroad’s campaign subscription is trebled. In the conduct of
railroads, even under the best management, accidents are common; and
while it is true that important decisions are appealable, a trial judge
has enormous powers which are practically discretionary. Meanwhile,
there have arisen questions of local taxation of the railroad’s
property, questions as to grade crossings, as to the lighting of cars,
as to time schedules, and the like. The court calendars are becoming
crowded with railroad business; and that business is now more than
one attorney can attend to. In fact, the half dozen local lawyers of
prominence are railroad men; the rest of the lawyers would like to
be. Every one of the railroad lawyers receives deferential treatment,
and, when possible, legal advantage in all of the public offices. The
community is now in the control of a ring, held together by just one
thing, the railroad company’s subscription to the campaign fund.

By this time a serious scandal has occurred in the town,--nothing less
than the rumor of a deficit in the town treasurer’s accounts, and
the citizens are concerned about it. One of the railroad’s lawyers,
a strong party man, happens to be occupying the post of district
attorney; for the yearly campaign subscriptions continue. This district
attorney is, in fact, one of the committee on nominations who put the
town treasurer into office; and the Republican party is responsible
for both. No prosecution follows. The district attorney stands for
re-election.

An outsider comes to live in the town. He wants to reform things,
and proceeds to talk politics. He is not so inexperienced as to
seek aid from the rich and respectable classes. He knows that the
men who subscribed to the railroad’s stock are the same men who own
the local bank, and that the manufacturers and other business men
of the place rely on the bank for carrying on their business. He
knows that all trades which are specially touched by the law, such
as the liquor-dealers’ and hotel-keepers’, must “stand in” with the
administration; so also must the small shopkeepers, and those who have
to do with sidewalk privileges and town ordinances generally. The
newcomer talks to the leading hardware merchant, a man of stainless
reputation, who admits that the district attorney has been remiss;
but the merchant is a Republican, and says that so long as he lives
he will vote for the party that saved the country. To vote for a
Democrat is a crime. The reformer next approaches the druggist (whose
father-in-law is in the employ of the railroad), and receives the
same reply. He goes to the florist. But the florist owns a piece of
real estate, and has a theory that it is assessed too high. The time
for revising the assessment rolls is coming near, and he has to see
the authorities about that. The florist agrees that the town is a den
of thieves; but he must live; he has no time to go into theoretical
politics. The stranger next interviews a retired grocer. But the grocer
has lent money to his nephew, who is in the coal business, and is
getting special rates from the railroad, and is paying off the debt
rapidly. The grocer would be willing to help, but his name must not be
used.

It is needless to multiply instances of what every one knows. After
canvassing the whole community, the stranger finds five persons who are
willing to work to defeat the district attorney: a young doctor of good
education and small practice, a young lawyer who thinks he can make use
of the movement by betraying it, a retired anti-slavery preacher, a
maiden lady, and a piano-tuner. The district attorney is re-elected by
an overwhelming vote.

All this time the railroad desires only a quiet life. It takes no
interest in politics. It is making money, and does not want values
disturbed. It is conservative.

In the following year worse things happen. The town treasurer steals
more money, and the district attorney is openly accused of sharing
the profits. The Democrats are shouting for reform, and declare that
they will run the strongest man in town for district attorney. He is a
Democrat, but one who fought for the Union. He is no longer in active
practice, and is, on the whole, the most distinguished citizen of the
place. This suggestion is popular. The hardware merchant declares
that he will vote the Democratic ticket, and there is a sensation.
It appears that during all these years there has been a Democratic
organization in the town, and that the notorious corruption of the
Republicans makes a Democratic victory possible. The railroad company
therefore goes to the manager of the Democratic party, and explains
that it wants only to be let alone. It explains that it takes no
interest in politics, but that, if a change is to come, it desires only
that So-and-So shall be retained, and it leaves a subscription with
the Democratic manager. In short, it makes the best terms it can. The
Democratic leader, if he thinks that he can make a clean sweep, may
nominate the distinguished citizen, together with a group of his own
organization comrades. It obviously would be of no use to him to name a
full citizens’ ticket. That would be treason to his party. If he takes
this course and wins, we shall have ring rule of a slightly milder
type. The course begins anew, under a Democratic name; and it may be
several years before another malfeasance occurs.

But the Republican leader and the railroad company do not want war;
they want peace. They may agree to make it worth while for the
Democrats not to run the distinguished citizen. A few Democrats are let
into the Republican ring. They are promised certain minor appointive
offices, and some contracts and emoluments. Accordingly, the Democrats
do not nominate the distinguished citizen. The hardware man sees little
choice between the two nominees for district attorney; at any rate, he
will not vote for a machine Democrat, and he again votes for his party
nominee. All the reform talk simmers down to silence. The Republicans
are returned to power.

The town is now ruled by a Happy Family. Stable equilibrium has been
reached at last. Commercialism is in control. Henceforth, the railroad
company pays the bills for keeping up both party organizations, and it
receives care and protection from whichever side is nominally in power.

The party leaders have by this time become the general utility men of
the railroad; they are its agents and factotums. The boss is the handy
man of the capitalist. So long as the people of the town are content
to vote on party lines they cannot get away from the railroad. In
fact, there are no national parties in the town. A man may talk about
them, but he cannot vote for one of them, because they do not exist.
He can vote only for or against the railroad; and to do the latter, an
independent ticket must be nominated.

It must not be imagined that any part of the general public clearly
understands this situation. The state of mind of the Better Element
of the Republican side has been seen. The good Democrats are equally
distressed. The distinguished citizen ardently desires to oust the
Republican ring. He subscribes year after year to the campaign fund
of his own party, and declares that the defalcation of the town
treasurer has given it the opportunity of a generation. The Democratic
organization takes his money and accepts his moral support, and uses it
to build up one end of the machine. It cries, “Reform! Reform! Give us
back the principles of Jefferson and of Tilden!”

The Boss-out-of-Power must welcome all popular movements. He must
sometimes accept a candidate from a citizens’ committee, sometimes
refuse to do so. He must spread his mainsail to the national party
wind of the moment. His immense advantage is an intellectual one. He
alone knows the principles of the game. He alone sees that the power
of the bosses comes from party loyalty. Croker recently stated his
case frankly thus: “A man who would desert his party would desert his
country.”

It may be remarked, in passing, that New York city reached the Happy
Family stage many years ago. Tammany Hall is in power, being maintained
there by the great mercantile interests. The Republican party is out
of power, and its organization is kept going by the same interests. It
has always been the ear-mark of an enterprise of the first financial
magnitude in New York that it subscribed to both campaign funds. The
Republican function has been to prevent any one from disturbing Tammany
Hall. This has not been difficult; the Republicans have always been
in a hopeless minority, and the machine managers have understood this
perfectly. Now if, by the simple plan of denouncing Tammany Hall,
and appealing to the war record of the Republican party, they could
minimize the independent vote and hold their own constituency, Tammany
would be safe. The matter is actually more complex than this, but the
principle is obvious.

To return to our country town. It is easy to see that the railroad
is pouring out its money in the systematic corruption of the entire
community. Even the offices with which it has no contact will be
affected by this corruption. Men put in office because they are tools
will work as tools only. Voters once bribed will thereafter vote for
money only. The subscribing and the voting classes, whose state of mind
is outlined above, are not purely mercenary. The retired grocer, the
florist, the druggist, are all influenced by mixed motives, in which
personal interest bears a greater or a smaller share. Each of these men
belongs to a party, as a Brahmin is born into a caste. His spirit must
suffer an agony of conversion before he can get free, even if he is
poor. If he has property, he must pay for that conversion by the loss
of money, also.

Since 1865 the towns throughout the United States have been passing
through this stage. A ring was likely to spring up wherever there
was available capital. We hear a great talk about the failure of our
institutions as applied to cities, as if it were our incapacity to
deal with masses of people and with the problems of city expansion
that wrecked us. It is nothing of the sort. There is intellect and
business capacity enough in the country to run the Chinese Empire like
clockwork. Philosophers state broadly that our people “prefer to live
in towns,” and cite the rush to the cities during the last thirty
years. The truth is that the exploitation of the continent could be
done most conveniently by the assembling of business men in towns; and
hence it is that the worst rings are found in the larger cities. But
there are rings everywhere; and wherever you see one you will find a
factory behind it. If the population had remained scattered, commerce
would have pursued substantially the same course. We should have had
the rings just the same. It is perfectly true that the wonderful
and scientific concentration of business that we have seen in the
past thirty years gave the chance for the wonderful and scientific
concentration of its control over politics. The state machine could be
constructed easily, by consolidating local rings of the same party name.

       *       *       *       *       *

The boss _par excellence_ is a state boss. He is a comparatively
recent development. He could exist only in a society which had long
been preparing for him. He could operate only in a society where
almost every class and almost every individual was in a certain
sense corrupted. The exact moment of his omnipotence in the State
of New York, for instance, was recorded by the actions of the State
legislature. Less than ten years ago, the bribing of the legislature
was done piecemeal and at Albany; and the great corporations of the
State were accustomed to keep separate attorneys in the capitol, ready
for any emergency. But the economy of having the legislature corrupted
before election soon became apparent. If the party organizations
could furnish a man with whom the corporation managers could contract
directly, they and their directors could sleep at night. The state boss
sprang into existence to meet this need. He is a commercial agent,
like his little local prototype; but the scope of his activities is so
great and their directions are so various, the forces that he deals
with are so complex and his mastery over them is so complete, that a
kind of mystery envelops him. He appears in the newspapers like a demon
of unaccountable power. He is the man who gives his attention to aiding
in the election of the candidates for state office, and to retaining
his hold upon them after election. His knowledge of local politics
all over a State, and the handling of the very large sums of money
subscribed by sundry promoters and corporations, explain the miracle of
his control.

The government of a State is no more than a town government over a wide
area. The methods of bribery which work certain general results in a
town will work similar results in a State. But the scale of operations
is vastly greater. The State-controlled businesses, such as banking,
insurance, and the State public works, and the liquor traffic, involve
the expenditure of enormous sums of money.

The effect of commercialism on politics is best seen in the state
System. The manner of nominating candidates shows how easily the major
force in a community makes use of its old customs.

The American plan of party government provides for primaries, caucuses,
and town, county, and State conventions. It was devised on political
principles, and was intended to be a means of working out the will of
the majority, by a gradual delegation of power from bottom to top. The
exigencies of commerce required that this machinery should be made
to work backwards,--namely, from top to bottom. It was absolutely
necessary for commerce to have a political dictator; and this was found
to be perfectly easy. Every form and process of nomination is gravely
gone through with, the dictator merely standing by and designating the
officers and committee-men at every step. There is something positively
Egyptian in the formalism that has been kept up in practice, and in the
state of mind of men who are satisfied with the procedure.

The men who, in the course of a party convention, are doing this
marching and countermarching, this forming and dissolving into
committees and delegations, and who appear like acolytes going through
mystical rites and ceremonies, are only self-seeking men, without a
real political idea in their heads. Their evolutions are done to be
seen by the masses of the people, who will give them party support if
these forms are complied with.

We all know well another interesting perversion of function. A
legislator is by political theory a wise, enlightened man, pledged to
intellectual duties. He gives no bonds. He is responsible only under
the Constitution and to his own conscience. Therefore, if the place
is to be filled by a dummy, almost anybody will do. A town clerk must
be a competent man, even under boss rule; but a legislator will serve
the need so long as he is able to say “ay” and “no.” The boss, then,
governs the largest and the most complex business enterprise in the
State; and he is always a man of capacity. He is obliged to conduct it
in a cumbersome and antiquated manner, and to proceed at every step
according to precedent and by a series of fictions. When we consider
that the legislators and governors are, after all, not absolute
dummies; that among them are ambitious and rapacious men, with here
and there an enemy or a traitor to the boss and to his patrons, we see
that the boss must be well equipped with the intellect of intrigue. And
remember this: he must keep both himself and his patrons out of jail,
and so far as possible keep them clear of public reprobation.

We have not as yet had any national boss, because the necessity for
owning Congress has not as yet become continuous; and the interests
which have bought the national legislature at one time or another have
done it by bribing individuals, in the old-fashioned way.

Turning now to New York city, we find the political situation very
similar to that of the country town already described. The interests
which actually control the businesses of the city are managed by very
few individuals. It is only that the sums involved are different. One
of these men is president of an insurance company whose assets are
$130,000,000; another is president of a system of street railways
with a capital stock of $30,000,000; another is president of an
elevated road system with a capital of the same amount; a fourth is
vice-president of a paving company worth $10,000,000; a fifth owns
$50,000,000 worth of real estate; a sixth controls a great railroad
system; a seventh is president of a savings-bank in which $5,000,000
are deposited; and so on. The commercial ties which bind the community
together are as close in the city as in the country town. The great
magnates live in palaces, and the lesser ones in palaces, also.
The hardware-dealer of the small town is in New York the owner of
iron-works, a man of stainless reputation. The florist is the owner of
a large tract of land within the city limits, through which a boulevard
is about to be cut. The retired merchant has become a partner of his
nephew, and is developing one of the suburbs by means of an extension
of an electric road system. But the commercial hierarchy does not stop
here; it continues radiating, spreading downward. All businesses are
united by the instruments and usages which the genius of trade has
devised. All these interests together represent the railroad of the
country town. They take no real interest in politics, and they desire
only to be let alone.

For the twenty years before the Strong administration the government
of the city was almost continuously under the control of a ring, or,
accurately speaking, of a Happy Family. Special circumstances made
this ring well nigh indestructible. The Boss-out-of-Power of the
Happy Family happens to be also the boss of the State legislature.
He performs a double function. This is what has given Platt his
extraordinary power. It will have been noticed that some of the masses
of wealth above mentioned are peculiarly subject to State legislation:
they subscribe directly to the State boss’s fund. Some are subject to
interference from the city administration: they subscribe to the city
boss’s fund.

We see that by the receipt of his fund the State boss is rendered
independent of the people of the city. He can use the State legislature
to strengthen his hands in his dealings with the city boss. After
all, he does not need many votes. He can buy enough votes to hold his
minority together and keep Tammany safely in power, and by now and then
taking a candidate from the citizens he advertises himself as a friend
of reform.

As to the Tammany branch of the concern, the big money interests need
specific and often illegal advantages, and pay heavily over the Tammany
counter. But as we saw before, public officers, if once corrupted, will
work only for money. Every business that has to do with one or another
of the city offices must therefore now contribute for “protection.” A
foreign business that is started in this city subscribes to Tammany
Hall as a visitor writes his name in a book at a watering-place. It
gives him the run of the town. In the same way, the State-fearing
business man subscribes to Platt for “protection.” No secret is made of
these conditions. The business man regards the reformer as a monomaniac
who is not reasonable enough to see the necessity for his tribute. In
the conduct of any large business, this form of bribery is as regular
an item as rent. The machinery for such bribery is perfected. It is
only when some blundering attempt is made by a corporation to do the
bribing itself, when some unbusinesslike attempt is made to get rid of
the middleman, that the matter is discovered. A few boodle aldermen go
to jail, and every one is scandalized. The city and county officers
of the new city of New York will have to do with the disbursing
of $70,000,000 annually,--fully one half of it in the conduct of
administration. The power of these officers to affect or even control
values, by manipulation of one sort or another, is familiar to us all
from experience in the past.

       *       *       *       *       *

So much for business. Let us look at the law. The most lucrative
practice is that of an attorney who protects great corporate interests
among these breakers. He needs but one client; he gets hundreds. The
mind of the average lawyer makes the same unconscious allowance for
bribery as that of the business man. Moreover, we cannot overlook the
cases of simple old-fashioned bribery to which the masses of capital
give rise. In a political emergency any amount of money is forthcoming
immediately, and it is given from aggregations of capital so large that
the items are easily concealed in the accounts. Bribery, in one form or
another, is part of the unwritten law. It is atmospheric; it is felt by
no one. The most able men in the community believe that society would
drop to pieces without bribery. They do not express it in this way,
but they act upon the principle in an emergency. A leader of the bar,
at the behest of his Wall Street clients, begs the reform police board
not to remove Inspector Byrnes, who is the Jonathan Wild of the period.
The bench is fairly able. But many of the judges on the bench have paid
large campaign assessments in return for their nominations; others have
given notes to the bosses. This reveals the exact condition of things.
In a corrupt era the judges pay cash. Now they help their friends.
The son or the son-in-law of a judge is sure of a good practice, and
referees are appointed from lists which are largely dictated by the
professional politicians of both parties.

It would require an encyclopædia to state the various simple devices
by which the same principle runs through every department in the life
of the community. Such an encyclopædia for New York city would be the
best picture of municipal misgovernment in the United States during
the commercial era. But one main fact must again be noted: this great
complex ring is held together by the two campaign funds, the Tammany
Hall fund and the Republican fund. They are the two power houses which
run all this machinery.

So far as human suffering goes, the positive evils of the system
fall largely on the poor. The rich buy immunity, but the poor are
persecuted, and have no escape. This has always been the case
under a tyranny. What else could we expect in New York? The Lexow
investigation showed us the condition of the police force. The lower
courts, both criminal and civil, and the police department were used
for vote-getting and for money-getting purposes. They were serving
as instruments of extortion and of favoritism. But in the old police
courts the foreigner and the honest poor were actually attacked.
Process was issued against them, their business was destroyed, and they
were jailed unless they could buy off. This system still exists to some
extent in the lower civil courts.

It is obvious that all these things come to pass through the fault
of no one in particular. We have to-day reached the point where the
public is beginning to understand that the iniquity is accomplished
by means of the political boss. Every one is therefore abusing the
boss. But Platt and Croker are not worse than the men who continue to
employ them after understanding their function. These men stand for the
conservative morality of New York, and for standards but little lower
than the present standards.

Let us now see how those standards came to exist. Imagine a community
in which, for more than a generation, the government has been
completely under boss rule, so that the system has become part of the
habits and of the thought of the people, and consider what views we
might expect to find in the hearts of the citizens of such a community.
The masses will have been controlled by what is really bribery and
terrorism, but what appears in the form of a very plausible appeal to
the individual on the ground of self-interest. For forty years money
and place have been corrupting them. Their whole conception of politics
is that it is a matter of money and of place. The well-to-do will
have been apt to prosper in proportion as they have made themselves
serviceable to the dominant powers, and have become part and parcel
of the machinery of the system. It is not to be pretended that every
man in such a community is a rascal, but it is true that in so far as
his business brings him into contact with the administrative officers
every man will be put to the choice between lucrative malpractice and
thankless honesty. A conviction will spread throughout the community
that nothing can be done without a friend at court; that honesty does
not pay, and probably never has paid in the history of the world;
that a boss is part of the mechanism by which God governs mankind;
that property would not be safe without him; and, finally, that the
recognized bosses are not so bad as they are painted. The great masses
of corporate property have owners who really believe that the system
of government which enabled them to make money is the only safe
government. These people cling to abuses as to a life-preserver. They
fear that an honest police board will not be able to bribe the thieves
not to steal from them, that an honest State insurance department will
not be able to prevent the legislature from pillaging them. It is
absolutely certain that in the first struggles for reform the weight
of the mercantile classes will be thrown very largely on the side of
conservatism.

Now, in a great city like New York the mercantile _bourgeoisie_
will include almost every one who has an income of five thousand
dollars a year, or more. These men can be touched by the bosses, and
therefore, after forty years of tyranny, it is not to be expected
that many of those who wear black coats will have much enthusiasm
for reform. It is “impracticable;” it is “discredited;” it is
“expensive;” it is “advocated by unknown men;” it speaks ill of the
“respectable;” it “does harm” by exciting the poor against the rich; it
is “unbusinesslike” and “visionary;” it is “self-righteous.” We have
accordingly had, in New York city, a low and perverted moral tone, an
incapacity to think clearly or to tell the truth when we know it. This
is both the cause and the consequence of bondage. A generation of men
really believe that honesty is bad policy, and continue to be governed
by Tammany Hall.

       *       *       *       *       *

The world has wondered that New York could not get rid of its famous
incubus. The gross evils as they existed at the time of Tweed are
remembered. The great improvements are not generally known. Reform has
been slow, because its leaders have not seen that their work was purely
educational. They did not understand the political combination, and
they kept striking at Tammany Hall. Like a child with a toy, they did
not see that the same mechanism which caused Punch to strike caused
Judy’s face to disappear from the window.

It is not selfishness and treason that are mainly responsible for the
discredit which dogs “reform.” It is the inefficiency of upright and
patriotic men. The practical difficulty with reform movements in New
York has been that the leaders of such movements have clung to old
political methods. These men have thought that if they could hire or
imitate the regular party machinery, they could make it work for good.
They would fight banditti with bravi. They would expel Tammany Hall,
and lo, Tammany is within them.

Is it a failure of intellect or of morality which prevents the
reformers from seeing that idealism is the shortest road to their goal?
It is the failure of both. It is a legacy of the old tyranny. In one
sense it is corruption; in another it is stupidity; in every sense it
is incompetence. Political incompetence is only another name for moral
degradation, and both exist in New York for the same reason that they
exist in Turkey. They are the offspring of blackmail.

Well-meaning and public-spirited men, who have been engrossed in
business for the best part of their lives, are perhaps excusable
for not understanding the principles on which reform moves. Any one
can see that if what was wanted was merely a good school board, the
easiest way to get it would be to go to Croker, give him a hundred
thousand dollars, and offer to let him alone if he gave the good board.
But until very recently nobody could see that putting good school
commissioners on Platt’s ticket and giving Platt the hundred thousand
dollars was precisely the same thing.

In an enterprise whose sole aim is to raise the moral standard,
idealism always pays. A reverse following a fight for principle, like
the defeat of Low, is pure gain. It records the exact state of the
cause. It educates the masses on a gigantic scale. The results of that
education are immediately visible.

On the other hand, all compromise means delay. By compromise, the
awakened faith of the people is sold to the politicians for a mess of
reform. The failures and mistakes of Mayor Strong’s administration were
among the causes for Mr. Low’s defeat. People said, “If this be reform,
give us Tammany Hall.” Our reformers have always been in hot haste
to get results. They want a balance-sheet at the end of every year.
They think this will encourage the people. But the people recall only
their mistakes. The long line of reform leaders in New York city are
remembered with contempt. The evil that men do lives after them; the
good is oft interred with their bones.

That weakness of intellect which makes reformers love quick returns is
twin brother to a certain defect of character. Personal vanity is very
natural in men who figure as tribunes of the people. They say, “Look at
Abraham Lincoln, and how he led the people out of the wilderness; let
us go no faster than the people in pushing these reforms; let us accept
half-measures; let us be Abraham Lincoln.” The example of Lincoln has
wrecked many a promising young man; for really Lincoln has no more to
do with the case than Julius Cæsar. As soon as the reformers give up
trying to be statesmen, and perceive that their own function is purely
educational, and that they are mere anti-slavery agitators and persons
of no account whatever, they will succeed better.

As to the methods of work in reform,--whether it shall be by clubs or
by pamphlets, by caucus or by constitution,--they will be developed.
Executive capacity is simply that capacity which is always found in
people who really want something done.

       *       *       *       *       *

In New York, the problem is not to oust Tammany Hall; another would
arise in a year. It is to make the great public understand the boss
system, of which Tammany is only a part. As fast as the reformers
see that clearly themselves, they will find the right machinery to
do the work in hand. It may be that, like the Jews, we shall have to
spend forty years more in the wilderness, until the entire generation
that lived under Pharaoh has perished. But education nowadays marches
quickly. The progress that has been made during the last seven years in
the city of New York gives hope that within a decade a majority of the
voters will understand clearly that all the bosses are in league.

In 1890, this fact was so little understood by the managers of an
anti-Tammany movement which sprang up in that year that, after raising
a certain stir and outcry, they put in the field a ticket made up
exclusively of political hacks, whose election would have left matters
exactly where they stood. The people at large, led by the soundest
political instinct, re-elected Tammany Hall, and gave to sham reform
the rebuff it deserved. In 1894, after the Lexow investigation had
kept the town at fever-heat of indignation all summer, Mayor Strong
was nominated by the Committee of Seventy, under an arrangement with
Platt. The excitement was so great that the people at large did not
examine Mr. Strong’s credentials. He was a Republican merchant, and in
no way identified with the boss system. Mayor Strong’s administration
has been a distinct advance, in many ways encouraging. Its errors
and weaknesses have been so clearly traceable to the system which
helped elect him that it has been in the highest degree valuable as an
object-lesson. In 1895, only one year after Mayor Strong’s election,
the fruits of his administration could not yet be seen. In that year a
few judges and minor local officers were to be chosen. By this time the
“citizens’ movement” had become a regular part of a municipal election.
A group of radicals, the legatees of the Strong campaign, had for a
year been enrolled in clubs called Good Government Clubs. These men
took the novel course of nominating a complete ticket of their own.
This was considered a dangerous move by the moderate reformers, who
were headed by the Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber of Commerce and its
well-meaning supporters then took a step which, from an educational
standpoint, turned out to be most important. In their terror lest
Tammany Hall should gain the prestige of a by-election, they made an
arrangement with Platt, and were allowed to name some candidates on his
ticket. This was the famous “fusion,” which the Good Government men
attacked with as much energy as they might have expended on Tammany
Hall. A furious campaign of crimination between the two reform factions
followed, and of course Tammany was elected.

The difference between the Good Government men (the Goo-Goos, as
they were called) and the Fusionists was entirely one of political
education. The Goo-Goo mind had advanced to the point of seeing
that Platt was a confederate of Tammany and represented one wing
of the great machine. To give him money was useless; to lend him
respectability was infamous. These ideas were disseminated by the
press; and it was immaterial that they were disseminated in the form of
denunciations of the Good Government Clubs. The people at large began
to comprehend clearly what they had always instinctively believed.
There was now a nucleus of men in the town who preferred Tammany Hall
to any victory that would discredit reform.

It may be noted that the Good Government Clubs polled less than one
per cent of the vote cast in that election; and that in the recent
mayoralty campaign the Citizens’ Union ran Mr. Low on the Good
Government platform, and polled 150,000 votes. In this same election,
the straight Republican ticket, headed by Tracy, polled 100,000 votes,
and Tammany polled about as many as both its opponents together. A
total of about 40,000 votes were cast for George and other candidates.

Much surprise has been expressed that there should be 100,000
Republicans in New York whose loyalty to the party made them vote a
straight ticket with the certainty of electing Tammany Hall; but in
truth, when we consider the history of the city, we ought rather to be
surprised at the great size of the vote for Mr. Low. He was the man who
arranged the fusion of 1895. It was entirely due to a lack of clear
thinking and of political courage that such an arrangement was then
made. Two years ago the Chamber of Commerce did not clearly understand
the evils that it was fighting. Is it a wonder that 100,000 individual
voters are still backward in their education? If we discount the appeal
of self-interest, which determined many of them, there are probably
some 75,000 Republicans whose misguided party loyalty obscured their
view and deadened their feelings. They cannot be said to hate bad
government very much. They do not think Tammany Hall so very bad, after
all. As the London papers said, the dog has returned to his vomit. It
is unintelligent to abuse them. They are the children of the age. A few
years ago we were all such as they. Of Mr. Low’s 150,000 supporters,
on the other hand, there are probably at least 40,000 who would vote
through thick and thin for the principles which his campaign stood for.

Any one who is a little removed by time or by distance from New York
knows that the city cannot have permanent good government until a
clear majority of our 500,000 voters shall develop what the economists
call an “effective desire” for it. It is not enough merely to want
reform. The majority must know how to get it. For educational purposes,
the intelligent discussion throughout the recent campaign is worth
all the effort that it cost. The Low campaign was notable in another
particular. The banking and the mercantile classes subscribed liberally
to the citizens’ campaign fund. They are the men who have had the most
accurate knowledge of the boss system, because they support it. At last
they have dared to expose it. Indeed, there was a rent in Wall Street.
The great capitalists and the promoters backed Tammany and Platt, as a
matter of course; but many individuals of power and importance in the
street came out strongly for Low. They acted at personal risk, with
courage, out of conscience. The great pendulum of wealth has swung
toward decency. It is very difficult to use this or any money in the
cause of reform without doing more harm than good. But the money is
not the main point; the personal influence of the men who give it
operates more powerfully than the money. Hereafter reform will be
respectable. The professional classes are pouring into it. The young
men are re-entering politics. Its victory is absolutely certain, and
will not be distant.

       *       *       *       *       *

The effect of public-spirited activity on the character is very rapid.
Here again we cannot separate the cause from the consequence; but it is
certain that the moral tone of the community is changing very rapidly
for the better, and that the thousands of men who are at this moment
preparing to take part in the next citizens’ campaign, and who count
public activity as one of the regular occupations of their lives, are
affecting the social and commercial life of New York. The young men who
are working to reform politics find in it not only the satisfaction of
a religious instinct, but an excitement which business cannot provide.

One effect of the commercial supremacy has been to make social life
intolerably dull, by dividing people into cliques and trade unions. The
millionaire dines with the millionaire, the artist with the artist,
the hat-maker with the hat-maker, gentlefolk with gentlefolk. All of
these sets are equally uninspiring, equally frightened at a strange
face. The hierarchy of commerce is dull. The intelligent people in
America are dull, because they have no contact, no social experience.
Their intelligence is a clique and wears a badge. They think they are
not affected by the commercialism of the times; but their attitude of
mind is precisely that of a lettered class living under a tyranny. They
flock by themselves. It is certain that the cure for class feeling
is public activity. The young jeweller, the young printer, and the
golf-player, each, after a campaign in which they have been fighting
for a principle, finds that social enjoyment lies in working with
people unlike himself, for a common object. Reform movements bring men
into touch, into struggle with the powers that are really shaping our
destinies, and show them the sinews and bones of the social organism.
The absurd social prejudices which unman the rich and the poor alike
vanish in a six weeks’ campaign. Indeed, the exhilaration of real life
is too much for many of the reformers. Even bankers neglect their
business, and dare not meet their partners, and a dim thought crosses
their minds that perhaps the most enlightened way to spend money is,
not to make it, but to invest their energies directly in life.

       *       *       *       *       *

The reasons for believing that the boss system has reached its climax
are manifold. Some of them have been stated, others may be noted. In
the first place, the railroads are built. Business is growing more
settled. The sacking of the country’s natural resources goes on at
a slower pace. It is a matter of history, that economic laws did so
operate, that the New York Central Railroad controlled the State
legislature during the period of the building and consolidation of
the many small roads which make up the present great system. But
the conditions have changed. Bribery, like any other crime, may be
explained by an emergency; but everyone believes that bribery is not
a permanent necessity in the running of a railroad, and this general
belief will determine the practices of the future. Public opinion will
not stand the abuses; and without the abuse where is the profit? In
many places, the old system of bribery is still being continued out
of habit, and at a loss. The corporations can get what they want
more cheaply by legal methods, and they are discovering this. In the
second place, the boss system is now very generally understood. The
people are no longer deceived. The ratio between party feeling and
self-interest is changing rapidly, in the mind of the average man.
It was the mania of party feeling that supported the boss system and
rendered political progress impossible, and party feeling is dying out.
We have seen, for instance, that those men who, by the accident of the
war, were shaken in their party loyalty, have been the most politically
intelligent class in the nation. The Northern Democrats, who sided with
their opponents to save the Union, were the first men to be weaned of
party prejudice, and from their ranks, accordingly, came civil service
reformers, tariff reformers, etc.

It is noteworthy, also, that the Jewish mind is active in all reform
movements. The isolation of the race has saved it from party blindness,
and has given scope to its extraordinary intelligence. The Hebrew
prophet first put his finger on blackmail, as the curse of the world,
and boldly laid the charge at the door of those who profited by the
abuse. It was the Jew who perceived that, in the nature of things,
the rich and the powerful in a community will be trammelled up and
identified with the evils of the times. The wrath of the Hebrew
prophets and the arraignments of the New Testament owe part of their
eternal power to their recognition of that fact. They record an
economic law.

Moreover, time fights for reform. The old voters die off, and the young
men care little about party shibboleths. Hence these non-partisan
movements. Every election, local or national, which causes a body of
men to desert their party is a blow at the boss system. These movements
multiply annually. They are emancipating the small towns throughout the
Union, even as commerce was once disfranchising them. As party feeling
dies out in a man’s mind, it leaves him with a clearer vision. His
conscience begins to affect his conduct very seriously, when he sees
that a certain course is indefensible. It is from this source that the
reform will come.

The voter will see that it is wrong to support the subsidized boss,
just as the capitalist has already begun to recoil from the monster
which he created. He sees that it is wrong at the very moment when he
is beginning to find it unprofitable. The old trademark has lost its
value.

The citizens’ movement is, then, a purge to take the money out of
politics. The stronger the doses, the quicker the cure. If the citizens
maintain absolute standards, the old parties can regain their popular
support only by adopting those standards. All citizens’ movements are
destined to be temporary; they will vanish, to leave our politics
purified. But the work they do is as broad as the nation.

       *       *       *       *       *

The question of boss rule is of national importance. The future of the
country is at stake. Until this question is settled, all others are in
abeyance. The fight against money is a fight for permission to decide
questions on their merits. The last presidential election furnished an
illustration of this. At a private meeting of capitalists held in New
York City, to raise money for the McKinley campaign, a very important
man fervidly declared that he had already subscribed $5000 to “buy
Indiana,” and that if called on to do so he would subscribe $5000
more! He was greeted with cheers for his patriotism. Many of our best
citizens believe not only that money bought that election, but that
the money was well spent, because it averted a panic. These men do not
believe in republican institutions; they have found something better.

This is precisely the situation in New York city. The men who
subscribed to the McKinley campaign fund are the same men who support
Tammany Hall. In 1896 they cried, “We cannot afford Bryan and his
panic!” In 1897 the same men in New York cried, “We cannot afford Low
and reform!” That is what was decided in each case. Yet it is quite
possible that the quickest, wisest, and cheapest way of dealing with
Bryan would have been to allow him and his panic to come on,--fighting
them only with arguments, which immediate consequences would have
driven home very forcibly. That is the way to educate the masses and
fit them for self-government; and it is the only way.

In this last election the people of New York have crippled Platt.
It is a service done to the nation. Its consequences are as yet not
understood; for the public sees only the gross fact that Tammany is
again in power.

But the election is memorable. It is a sign of the times. The grip of
commerce is growing weaker, the voice of conscience louder. A phase
in our history is passing away. That phase was predestined from the
beginning.

       *       *       *       *       *

The war did no more than intensify existing conditions, both commercial
and political. It gave sharp outlines to certain economic phenomena,
and made them dramatic. It is due to the war that we are now able to
disentangle the threads and do justice to the nation.

The corruption that we used to denounce so fiercely and understand
so little was a phase of the morality of an era which is already
vanishing. It was as natural as the virtue which is replacing it; it
will be a curiosity almost before we have done studying it. We see
that our institutions were particularly susceptible to this disease of
commercialism, and that the sickness was acute, but that it was not
mortal. Our institutions survived.




SOCIETY




II

SOCIETY


Our institutions have survived, the perils of boss rule are past, and
we may look back upon the system with a kind of awe, and recognize how
easily the system might have overthrown our institutions and ushered
in a period which history would have recorded as the age of the State
Tyrants.

Let us imagine that some State like Pennsylvania, on which the boss
system had been so firmly fixed that a boss was able to bequeath
his seat in the United States Senate to his son, had shown forth an
ambitious man, a ruler who realized that his function was not one of
business, but one of government; let us imagine that a President of
the Pennsylvania Railroad, some man of great capacity, had undertaken
to rule the State. He would, by his position as State boss, have been
able gradually to do away with the petty bosses and petty abuses. He
would give the State a general cities law, good schools, clean streets,
speedy justice; every necessary municipal improvement. Gas, water,
boulevards would be supplied with an economy positively startling to a
generation accustomed to jobs. He would destroy the middlemen as Louis
XI. destroyed the nobles, and give to his State, for the first time in
the history of the country, good government. A benign tyranny, with
every department in the hands of experts, makes the strongest form of
government in the world. Every class is satisfied. Pennsylvania would
have been famous the world over. Its inhabitants would have been proud
of it; foreigners would have written books about it; other States would
have imitated it.

Meanwhile the power of self-government would have been lost.

Biennial sessions of the Legislature are already a favorite device
for minimizing the evils of Legislatures. But the dictator would have
desired to discourage popular assemblies. The whole business world
would have backed the boss, in his plan for quinquennial or decennial
sessions. Once give way to the laziness, once cater to the inertia and
selfishness of the citizen, and he sinks into slumber.

Our feeble and floundering citizens’ movements in New York during
the last ten years show us how hard it is to recover the power of
self-government when once lost; how gradual the gain, even under the
most stimulating conditions of misrule. Given thirty years of able
administration by a single man, and the boss system would have sunk
so deep into the popular mind, the arctic crust of prejudice and
incompetence would have frozen so deep, that it might easily take two
hundred years for the community to come to life. Recovery could only
come through the creeping in of abuses, through the decentralization of
the great tyranny. And as each abuse arose, the population would clamor
to the dictator and beg him to correct it. After a while a few thinkers
would arise who would see that the only way to revive our institutions
was by the painstaking education of the people. The stock in trade of
these teachers would be the practical abuses, and very often they would
be obliged to urge upon the people a course which would make the abuses
temporarily more acute.

We have escaped an age of tyrants, because the eyes of the bosses and
their masters were fixed on money. They were not ambitious. Government
was an annex to trade. To certain people the boss appears as a ruler
of men. If proof were needed that he is a hired man employed to do the
dirty work of others, what better proof could we have than this: No one
of all the hundreds of bosses thrown up during the last thirty years
has ever lifted himself out of his sphere, or even essayed to rule.

That devotion of the individual to his bank account which created
the boss and saved us from the dictator must now be traced back into
business.

       *       *       *       *       *

For the sake of analysis it is convenient now to separate and again not
to separate the influences of business proper from the influences of
dishonesty, but in real life they are one thing. Dishonesty is a mere
result of excessive devotion to money-making. The general and somewhat
indefinite body of rules which are considered “honest” change from
time to time. I call a thing dishonest when it offends my instinct.
The next man may call it honest. The question is settled by society
at large. “What can a man do and remain in his club?” That gives the
practical standards of a community. The devotion of the individual to
his bank account gives the reason why the financier and his agent, the
boss, could always find councilmen, legislators, judges, lawyers, to
be their jackals, or to put the equation with the other end first, it
is the reason why the legislators could always combine to blackmail the
capitalist: this political corruption is a mere spur and offshoot of
our business corruption. We know more about it, because politics cannot
be carried on wholly in the dark. Business can. The main facts are
known. Companies organize subsidiary companies to which they vote the
money of the larger company--cheating their stockholders. The railroad
men get up small roads and sell them to the great roads which they
control--cheating their stockholders. The purchasing agents of many
great enterprises cheat the companies as a matter of course, not by a
recognized system of commissions--like French cooks--but by stealth. So
in trade, you cannot sell goods to the retailers, unless you corrupt
the proper person. It is all politics. All our politics is business and
our business is politics.

There is something you want to do, and the “practical man” is the man
who knows the ropes, knows who is the proper person to be “seen.” The
slang word gives a picture of the times--to “see” a man means to bribe
him.

But let no one think that dishonesty or anything else begins at the
top. These big business men were once little business men.

To cut rates, to have a different price for each customer, to
substitute one article for another, are the prevailing policies of
the seller. To give uncollectible notes, to claim rebates, to make
assignments and compromises, to use one shift or another in order to
get possession of goods and pay less than the contract price, are the
prevailing aims of the buyer.

       *       *       *       *       *

It is unquestionably possible for an incorruptible man to succeed in
business. But his scruples are an embarrassment. Not everybody wants
such a man. He insists on reducing every reckoning to pounds sterling,
while the rest of the world is figuring in maravedis. He must make up
in ability what he lacks in moral obliquity.

He will no doubt find his nook in time. Honesty is the greatest luxury
in the world, and the American looks with awe on the man who can afford
it, or insists upon having it. It is right that he should pay for it.

The long and short of the matter is that the sudden creation of
wealth in the United States has been too much for our people. We are
personally dishonest. The people of the United States are notably and
peculiarly dishonest in financial matters.

The effect of this on government is but one of the forms in which the
ruling passion is manifest. “What is there in it for me?” is the state
of mind in which our people have been existing. Out of this come the
popular philosophy, the social life, the architecture, the letters, the
temper of the age; all tinged with the passion.

       *       *       *       *       *

Let us look at the popular philosophy of the day. An almost ludicrous
disbelief that any one can be really disinterested is met at once.
Any one who takes an intelligent interest in public affairs becomes
a “reformer.” He is liked, if it can be reasonably inferred that he
is advancing his own interests. Otherwise he is incomprehensible. He
is respected, because it is impossible not to respect him, but he is
regarded as a mistaken fellow, a man who interferes with things that
are not his business, a meddler.

The unspoken religion of all sensible men inculcates thrift as the
first virtue. Business thunders at the young man, “Thou shalt have
none other gods but me.” Nor is it a weak threat, for business,
when it speaks, means business. The young doctor in the small town
who advocates reform loses practice for two reasons: first, because
it is imagined that he is not a serious man, not a good doctor, if
he gives time to things outside his profession; second, because the
carriage-maker does not agree with him and regards it as a moral
duty to punish him. The newsdealer in the Arcade at Rector Street
lost custom because it was discovered that he was a Bryan man. The
bankers would not buy papers of him. Since the days of David, the
great luxury of the powerful has been to be free from the annoyance of
other persons’ opinions. The professional classes in any community are
parasites on the moneyed classes; they attend the distribution. They
cannot strike the hand that feeds them. In a country where economic
laws tend to throw the money into the hands of a certain type of men,
the morality of those men is bound to affect society very seriously.

The world-famous “timidity” of Americans in matters of opinion, is the
outward and visible sign of a mental preoccupation. Tocqueville thought
it was due to their democratic form of government. It is not due to
democracy, but to commercial conditions. In Tocqueville’s day it arose
out of the slavery question, solely because that question affected
trade.

In describing the social life of Boston, Josiah Quincy says of George
Ticknor’s hospitality: “There seemed to be a cosmopolitan spaciousness
about his very vestibule. He received company with great ease, and a
simple supper was always served to his evening visitors. Prescott,
Everett, Webster, Hillard, and other noted Bostonians well mixed with
the pick of such strangers as happened to be in the city, furnished a
social entertainment of the first quality. Politics, at least American
politics, were never mentioned.”

It was at such “entertainments” as this that the foreign publicists
received their impressions as to the extinction of free speech in
America. Politics could not be mentioned; but this was not due to our
democratic form of government, but to the fact that Beacon Street was
trading with South Carolina. “Politics” meant slavery, and Beacon
Street could not afford to have values disturbed--not even at a dinner
party.

We have seen that our more recent misgovernment has not been due to
democracy, and we now see that the most striking weakness of our social
life is not and never has been due to democracy.

Let us take an example: A party of men meet in a club, and the subject
of free trade is launched. Each of these men has been occupied all day
in an avocation where silence is golden. Shall he be the one to speak
first? Who knows but what some phase of the discussion may touch his
pocket? But the matter is deeper. Free speech is a habit. It cannot
be expected from such men, because a particular subject is free from
danger. Let the subject be dress reform, and the traders will be
equally politic.

This pressure of self-interest which prevents a man from speaking his
mind comes on top of that familiar moral terrorism of any majority,
even a majority of two persons against one, which is one of the
ultimate phenomena of human intercourse.

It is difficult to speak out a sentiment that your table companions
disapprove of. Even Don Quixote was afraid to confess that it was he
who had set the convicts at liberty, because he heard the barber and
curate denounce the thing as an outrage. Now the weight of this normal
social pressure in any particular case will depend on how closely
the individuals composing the majority resemble each other. But men,
lighted by the same passion, pursuing one object under the similar
conditions, of necessity grow alike. By a process of natural selection,
the self-seekers of Europe have for sixty years been poured into the
hopper of our great mill. The Suabian and the Pole each drops his
costume, his language, and his traditions as he goes in. They come out
American business men; and in the second generation they resemble each
other more closely in ideals, in aims, and in modes of thought than two
brothers who had been bred to different trades in Europe.

The uniformity of occupation, the uniformity of law, the absence of
institutions, like the church, the army, family pride, in fact, the
uniformity of the present and the sudden evaporation of all the past,
have ground the men to a standard.

America turns out only one kind of man. Listen to the conversation
of any two men in a street car. They are talking about the price of
something--building material, advertising, bonds, cigars.

We have, then, two distinct kinds of pressure, each at its maximum,
both due to commerce: the pressure of fear that any unpopular sentiment
a man utters will show in his bank account; the pressure of a unified
majority who are alike in their opinions, have no private opinions, nor
patience with the private opinions of others. Of these two pressures,
the latter is by far the more important.

       *       *       *       *       *

It cannot be denied that the catchwords of democracy have been used to
intensify this tyranny. If the individual must submit when outvoted in
politics, he ought to submit when outvoted in ethics, in opinion, or in
sentiment. Private opinion is a thing to be stamped out, like private
law. A prejudice is aroused by the very fact that a man thinks for
himself; he is dangerous; he is anarchistic.

But this misapplication of a dogma is not the cause but the cloak of
oppression. It is like the theory of the divine right of Kings--a
thing invoked by conservatism to keep itself in control, a shibboleth
muttered by men whose cause will not bear argument.

We must never expect to find in a dogma the explanation of the system
which it props up. That explanation must be sought for in history.
The dogma records but does not explain a supremacy. Therefore, when
we hear some one appeal to democratic principle for a justification
in suppressing the individual, we have to reflect how firmly must
this custom be established, upon what a strong basis of interest must
it rest, that it has power so to pervert the ideas of democracy. A
distrust of the individual running into something like hatred may
be seen reflected in the press of the United States. The main point
is that Americans have by business training been growing more alike
every day, and have seized upon any and every authority to aid them in
disciplining a recusant.

We have then a social life in which caution and formalism prevail, and
can see why it is that the gathering at the club was a dull affair.

       *       *       *       *       *

We must now add one dreadful fact: Many of these men at the club
are dishonest. The banker has come from a Directors’ meeting of a
large corporation, where he has voted to buy ten thousand shares of
railroad stock which he and his associates bought on foreclosure at
seventeen three weeks before, but which now stands at thirty, because
the quotations have been rigged. The attorney for the corporation is
here talking to Professor Scuddamore about the new citizens’ movement,
which the attorney has joined, for he is a great reformer, and lives
in horror of the wickedness of the times. Beyond him sits an important
man, whose corporation has just given a large sum to a political
organization. Next to him is a Judge, who is a Republican, but fond of
a chat with political opponents. With them is the editor of a reform
paper, whose financial articles are of much importance to the town.
A very eminent lawyer is in conversation with him. This lawyer has
just received a large fee from the city for work which would not have
brought him more than one-fifth of the amount if done for a private
client. He is, by the way, a law partner of the latest tribune of the
people, a man of stainless reputation. Here is also another type of
honor, the middle-aged practitioner of good family, who has one of the
best heads in town. He knows what all these other men are, and how
they make their money; yet he dines at their houses, and gets business
from them. On his left is a man much talked of ten years ago, a rare
man to be seen here. He was ambitious, and became the hope of reform.
But, unfortunately, he also had a talent for business. He became rich
and cynical, and you see that he is looking about, as if in search of
another disappointed man to talk to. There also is a great doctor,
visiting physician of three hospitals, one of which is in receipt
of city funds, and he knows the practice of packing the hospitals
before inspection day in order to increase the appropriation. The man
who endowed the hospital sits beyond. All these wires end in this
club-room. Now start your topic--jest about free silver, make a merry
sally on Mayor Jones. Start the question: “Why is not the last reform
commissioner of the gas works not in jail?” and see what a jovial crew
you are set down with.

You will find as to any new topic, that each one requires time to
adjust his cravat to it. You are in a company of men who are so anxious
to be reasonable, to be “just,” that it will require them till judgment
day to make up their minds on any point. Nor is it easy to say how any
one of them ought to behave. Is it dishonest to draw dividends from
a corporation which you believe to be corruptly managed; to wink at
bribery done in the interest of widows and of orphans? Must you cut a
client because he owns a judge? What proof have you of any of these
things? Do you demand of any one of these men that he shall offend or
denounce the rest, and, short of that, what course should he take?

The point here made is not an ethical one as to how any one of these
men ought to adjust himself to the corruption about him, but the
sociological point--that a civilization based upon a commerce which is
in all its parts corruptly managed will present a social life which is
unintelligent and mediocre, made up of people afraid of each other,
whose ideas are shopworn, whose manners are self-conscious.

The ill-concealed dependence of these men on each other is not
resentful. They are the most good-natured men in the world. But
they are unenlightened. Without free speech free thought can hardly
exist. Without free speech you cannot gather the fruits of the mind’s
spontaneous workings. When a man talks with absolute sincerity and
freedom he goes on a voyage of discovery. The whole company has shares
in the enterprise. He may strike out some idea which explains the
sphinx. The moral consequences of circumspect and affable reticence are
even worse than the intellectual ones. “Live and let live,” says our
genial prudence. Well enough, but mark the event. No one ever lost his
social standing merely because of his offences, but because of the talk
about them. As free speech goes out the rascals come in.

Speech is a great part of social life, but not the whole of it. Dress,
bearing, expression, betray a man, customs show character, all these
various utterances mingle and merge into the general tone which is the
voice of a national temperament; private motive is lost in it.

This tone penetrates and envelops everything in America. It is
impossible to condemn it altogether. This desire to please, which has
so much of the shopman’s smile in it, graduates at one end of the scale
into a general kindliness, into public benefactions, hospitals, and
college foundations; at the other end it is seen melting into a desire
to efface one’s self rather than give offence, to hide rather than be
noticed.

In Europe, the men in the pit at the theatre stand up between the acts,
face the house, and examine the audience at leisure. The American
dares not do this. He cannot stand the isolation, nor the publicity.
The American in a horse car can give his seat to a lady, but dares
not raise his voice while the conductor tramps over his toes. It
violates every instinct of his commercial body to thrust his private
concerns into prominence. The American addresses his equal, whom he
knows familiarly, as Mr. Jones, giving him the title with as much
subserviency as the Englishman pays to an unknown Earl.

Mere financial dishonesty is of very little importance in the history
of civilization. Who cares whether Cæsar stole or Cæsar Borgia cheated?
Their intellects stayed clear. The real evil that follows in the wake
of a commercial dishonesty so general as ours is the intellectual
dishonesty it generates. One need not mind stealing, but one must cry
out at people whose minds are so befuddled that they do not know theft
when they see it. Robert Walpole bought votes. He deceived others, but
he did not deceive himself.

We have seen that the retailer in the small town could not afford
to think clearly upon the political situation. But this was a mere
instance, a sample of his mental attitude. He dare not face any
question. He must shuffle, qualify, and defer. Here at last we
have the great characteristic which covers our continent like a
climate--intellectual dishonesty. This state of mind does not merely
prevent a man having positive opinions. The American is incapable
of taking a real interest in anything. The lack of passion in the
American--noticeable in his books and in himself--comes from the same
habitual mental distraction; for passion is concentration. Hence also
the flippancy, superficiality, and easy humor for which we are noted.
Nothing except the dollar is believed to be worthy the attention of a
serious man. People are even ashamed of their tastes. Until recently,
we thought it effeminate for a man to play on the piano. When a man
takes a living interest in anything, we call him a “crank.” There is
an element of self-sacrifice in any honest intellectual work which we
detect at once and score with contumely.

It was not solely commercial interest that made the biographers of
Lincoln so thrifty to extend and veneer their book. It was that they
themselves did not, could not, take an interest in the truth about
him. The second-rate quality of all our letters and verse is due to
the same cause. The intellectual integrity is undermined. The literary
man is concerned for what “will go,” like the reformer who is half
politician. The attention of every one in the United States is on some
one else’s opinion, not on truth.

The matter resolves itself at last into Pilate’s question: What is
truth? We do not know, and shall never know. But it seems to involve a
certain focussing and concentration of the attention that brings all
the life within us into harmony. When this happens to us, we discover
that truth is the only thing we had ever really cared about in the
world. The thing seems to be the same thing, no matter which avenue we
reach it by. At whatever point we are touched, we respond. A quartet, a
cathedral, a sonnet, an exhibition of juggling, anything well done--we
are at the mercy of it. But as the whole of us responds to it, so it
takes a whole man to do it. Whatever cracks men up and obliterates
parts of them, makes them powerless to give out this vibration. This is
about all we know of individualism and the integrity of the individual.
The sum of all the philosophies in the history of the world can be
packed back into it. All the tyrannies and abuses in the world are only
bad because they injure this integrity. We desire truth. It is the only
thing we desire. To have it, we must develop the individual. And there
are practical ways and means of doing this. We see that all our abuses
are only odious because they injure some individual man’s spirit. We
can trace the corruption of politics into business, and find private
selfishness at the bottom of it. We can see this spread out into a
network of invisible influence, in the form of intellectual dishonesty
blighting the minds of our people. We can look still closer and see
just why and how the temperament of the private man is expressed.

We study this first in social life; for social life is the source and
fountain of all things. The touchstone for any civilization is what one
man says to another man in the street. Everything else that happens
there bears a traceable relation to the tone of his voice. The press
reflects it, the pulpit echoes it, the literature reproduces it, the
architecture embodies it.

The rays of force which start in material prosperity pass through
the focus of social life, and extend out into literature, art,
architecture, religion, philosophy. All these things are but the
sparks thrown off the gestures and gaits, the records of the social
life of some civilization. That is the reason why it has been useful
to pause over a club-house and study its inmates. The ball-room, the
dinner-table, would have been equally instructive. The deference
to reigning convention is the same everywhere. The instinct of
self-concealment, the policy of classing like with like, leads to
the herding of the young with the young only, the sporting with the
sporting only, the rich with the rich only, which is the bane of our
society. The suffocation is mitigated here and there by the influence
of ambitious and educated women. They are doing their best to stem the
tide which they can neither control nor understand. The stratification
of our society, and its crystallization into social groups, is little
short of miraculous, considering the lightning changes of scene. The
_nouveaux riches_ of one decade are the old _noblesse_ of the
next decade, and yet any particular set, at any particular time, has
its exclusions, its code of hats and coats and small talk, which are
more rigid than those of London.

The only place in the country where society is not dull is Washington,
because in Washington politics have always forced the social elements
to mix; because in Washington, some embers of the old ante-bellum
society survived; because the place has no commerce, and because the
foreign diplomats have been a constant factor, educating the Americans
in social matters. But Washington is not the centre of American
civilization. The controlling force in American life is not in its
politics, but in commerce. New York is the head and heart of the United
States. Chicago is America. And the elements of this life must be
sought, as always, in the small towns. Find the social factors which
are common to New York, to Poughkeepsie, and to Newport, and you have
the keynote to the country. We began with a city club. But it would
have made no difference what gathering we entered--a drawing-room at
Newport, a labor union in Fifteenth Street--we should have found the
same phenomena,--formalism, suppression of the individual, intellectual
dishonesty.

The dandy at Newport who conscientiously follows his leaders and
observes the cab rule, the glove ordinance, and the mystery of the
oyster fork, is governed by the same law, is fettered by the same
force, as the labor man who fears to tell his fellows that he approves
of Waring’s clean streets. Each is a half-man, each is afraid of his
fellows, and for the same reason. Each is commercial, keeps his place
by conciliatory methods, and will be punished for contumacy by the
loss of his job. Neither of them has an independent opinion upon any
subject.

The charge brought against our millionaire society is that it is
vulgar. The houses are palaces, the taste is for the most part
excellent, the people are in every sense but the commercial sense more
virtuous than the rich of any other nation. Wealth is poured out in
avalanches.

Why is all this display not magnificent? The millionaire society is not
vulgar, but it is insignificant. The reason is, that you cannot have
splendor without personal and intellectual independence, and this does
not exist in America. The conversation on the Commodore’s steam yacht
is tedious. The talk at the weekly meeting of the amalgamated glaziers
is insipid, and impresses you with the selfishness of mankind.

Now what is at the bottom of this identity? We are passing through the
great age of distribution. It is not confined to America. It qualifies
European history. All the different kinds of Socialism are mere proofs
of it. Every one either wants to get something himself, or, if he is
a philosopher, wants to show other people how to get it. Even Henry
George thought that man lives by bread alone; at least, he thought
that if you only give every one lots of bread, that is all you need
provide for; the rest will follow. In America we are leading the world
in the intensity with which this phase of progress goes on, because in
America there is nothing else to occupy men’s minds. Let us return to
our social focus and its relation to the arts.

The world has groped for three thousand years to find the connection
between morality and the fine arts. It may be that we stand here on the
borderland of discovery. We can at least see that they are not likely
to arise in an era of subserviency and intellectual fog.

The fine arts are departments of science, and the attitude of mind of
the artist toward his work, or of the public toward his product, is
that of an interest in truth for its own sake. It is the attitude of
the scientific man toward his problems. The scientists do not waver or
cringe. They are the great bullies of this era. They draw their power
from their work. They seek, they proclaim, they monopolize truth. There
is in them the note of greatness, not because of their discoveries, but
because of their pursuit.

Commercial or sexual crime or violence, that does not unman the
artist, ought not to extinguish art, and it never has done so. Anything
that has made him time-serving or truthless ought to show in his work,
and it always has done so.

Any system of morality or conjunction of circumstances that tends to
make men tell the truth as they see it will tend to produce what the
world will call art. If the statement be accurate, the world will call
it beautiful. Put it as you will, art is self-assertion and beauty is
accuracy. Out of the fulness of the heart the mouth speaketh.

Anybody can see that fiction depends upon social conditions; for it is
nothing but a description of them.

Take his clubs and his routs away from Thackeray, his hunting away from
White-Melville, his peasantry away from Scott, his street life away
from Dickens, and where would their books be? Vigorous and picturesque
individuality must precede good fiction. The great American novel,
except as the outcome of a vigorous social life, is the dream of an
idiot. You must have an age of ebullition, where the spontaneous life
about the novelist forces itself into his books, before you can have
good fiction. Architecture depends so plainly upon social life, that
we have only to look at our country houses from Colonial times down,
to read the hearts of the inmates. And so with the other fine arts and
decorations, they are mere languages.

It is thought that our modern life is more complex than that of the
eighteenth century, because the machinery by which it is carried on is
expanded. Transportation, newspapers, corporations, oceans of books
and magazines, foreign cables, have changed the forms by which power
is transmitted. But the manifestations of humanity in government, in
social life, and in the arts proceed upon the same principles as ever.
Everything depends as completely on personal intercourse as it did in
Athens. The real struggle comes between two men across a table, my
force against your force. The devices which political philosophy has
always approved, are those which protect the spirit of the individual,
and enable it to grow strong. The struggles for English liberty have
been struggles over taxation. The rights of the sovereign to seize
a man’s property, or imprison his body without form of law, were
abolished. This comparative financial independence of the English
subject has been valued as the basis of spiritual independence. It
has no other claim to be thought important. Yet while we have been
praising our bills of rights and bulwarks of liberty, commerce in the
United States has been bringing power after power, battalion after
battalion, to bear upon the integrity of spirit of the individual man.
Here is a situation which no legislation can meet. Civil liberty has
been submerged in the boss system. But this is a mere symptom. It is
valuable only because it brings strikingly into view the intellectual
bondage it denotes. It is valuable only because it gives us a fighting
ground, an educational arena in which the fight for intellectual
liberty may be begun.

It is unnecessary to go over the steps of the argument backward, and to
show how our citizen movements are a mere sign that the individual is
becoming more unselfish. How, partly through the settling of commerce
into more stable conditions, partly through revulsion in the heart of
man against so much wickedness, a reign of better things is coming.
The Christian Endeavorers, the University Settlements, the innumerable
leagues and propaganda which bring no dogmas, but which stand for
faith--speak for multitudes, affect every one. Their influence can
already be traced into business, into social life, and out again into
every department of our existence. The revolution is going forward on a
great scale, and the demonstration is about to be worked out throughout
the continent as if it were a blackboard.

       *       *       *       *       *

The man who has subscribed $1,000 to the reform campaign, the man
who has worked for the cause, and the man who has voted the ticket,
have met. This personal meeting, this social focus, exists and is
indestructible. These people who have been kept apart by the old
political conditions, by the boss system, and the capitalist; these
men whom every element of selfishness and corruption fought with the
instinct of self-preservation to keep separate, have come together.
The downfall of the old social system, and the redistribution of every
force in the community, is inevitable. In the first place, every
individual in the community has talked about the movement with an
intensity proportionate to his power of good. Our form of government
throws the moral idea with terrible force, as a practical issue, into
the life of each man. “Thou art the man.” The extreme simplicity of
our social fabric makes it impossible for any one to get behind his
institution, his class, his prejudice. There is no one who cannot
be shown up. We are as defenceless before virtue as we were before
selfishness. Our politics can be worked as effectively by one passion
as by the other--but we are only just beginning to find this out.

Free speech and the grouping, classing, and mingling of men according
to intellect, and not according to income, have begun already. They
are not more the outcome than they are the cause of these citizens’
movements. They are the same elemental thing. The love of truth is the
same passion as the veneration for the individual. It is impossible
to really want reform and to remain socially exclusive or socially
deferential. And so, a social life is beginning to emerge in New York,
based on the noblest and the most natural passion that can stir in the
heart of man The results in the field of practical politics, will be
that “society”--at least such of our drawing-rooms and dinner tables
as any one, whether foreigner or native, knows or cares anything
about--will resume the political importance which such places have
always held in civilized times, and of which nothing but extraordinary
and transient conditions have deprived them. Let any one who doubts
this, compare the club talk and dinner table talk of to-day, with the
talk of ten years ago. It would be childish to guess the positive
results on the arts, theatres, novels, verse which will follow; but you
can no more keep the spirit of freedom out of these things than you can
keep it out of personal manners. These are changing daily. The decorums
and codes of behavior, the old self-consciousness and self-distrust
are dropping off. Steadily the flood of life advances, inspiring all
things.




EDUCATION: FROEBEL




III

EDUCATION: FROEBEL


I have two boys, aged seven and four. They required a governess and I
got one. After a couple of months during which the usual experiences
in the training of young children were gone through, I discovered that
it was I who was being educated. My mind was being swayed and drawn
to a point of view. I was in contact with a method so profound that
it seemed as if I were dealing with, or rather being dealt with by
the forces of nature. I was in the presence of great genius. What was
it? The text book on Froebel by Hughes in the International Series on
Education made the matter clear.

Froebel was an experimental psychologist who used the terms of the
German philosophy of his day. But the facts of life, the thing he was
studying, was never for a moment absent from his mind. He lived in an
age when the ideas of evolution were in the air, and before they had
received their conclusive proof by being applied to morphology.

This application has for a time killed philosophy, for it has
identified the new ideas with the physical sciences, and led men to
study the human mind in psychology and from without. Whereas the mind
and its laws can, in the nature of things, be studied only through
introspection. Froebel had a scientific intellect of the very first
calibre; he had the conception of flux, of change, of evolution to
start with; and he took up introspectively the study of the laws of the
human mind, choosing that province of the universe where they are most
visibly and typically exposed,--the mind of the growing child.

The “laws” which he states are little more than a description of the
phenomena that he observed. They are statements of the results of his
experiments, and the language he employs can be translated to suit
the education of almost any one. His attention was so concentrated
upon fact that his terminology does not mislead. It can be translated
into the language of metaphysics, of Christian theology, or of modern
science, and it remains incorruptibly coherent.

His method of study was the only method which can obtain results in
philosophy, self-study unconsciously carried on. He observed the
child, and guessed at what was going on in its mind by a comparison
with what he knew of himself. He was anxious to train young children
intelligently, and he found it necessary to describe and formulate
his knowledge of the operation of their minds. It turns out that he
made a statement of the universe more comprehensive, a philosophy more
universal, than any other of which we have any record.

But this is not the most important thing he did. He devised a method
based upon his experiments and set agoing the kindergarten upon
its course in conquest of the world. If it had not been for this,
he might never have been heard of, for the world has small use for
systems of philosophy, however profound, expressed in terms which have
been superseded and are become inexpressive. But Froebel started a
practice. He showed the way. He put in the hands of persons to whom his
philosophy must ever remain a mystery, the means of working out those
practical ends for which that philosophy was designed.

The greatness of Froebel lies in this, that he saw the essential. What
sort of an animal is man, asks the morphologist, for he is beginning
to reach this point in his studies, and before he has asked it, Froebel
has answered him.

‘Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength.’

It may be said at once that the substance of everything Froebel says
was known before. Solomon and Orpheus, Marcus Aurelius, Emerson, and
all of us have known it. Otherwise Froebel would be unimportant. It is
his correlation and his formulation of the main facts about human life
that make him important. It is as a summary of wisdom, as a focus of
idea, as a lens through which the rest of the ideas in the world can be
viewed, that he is great.

       *       *       *       *       *

The laws he discovered may be stated in a paragraph. The child is a
growing organism. It is a unity. It develops through creative activity.
It is benefited by contact with other children and is happy in
proportion as it is unselfishly employed.

Let us assume for a moment that these things are true, that they are
the most important truths about the child; and let us see how they
must affect our views of life, of politics, sociology, art, religion,
conduct. There is of course no moment at which the child ceases to be
a child. The laws of its growth and being are not at any discoverable
time superseded by any new laws. Man as a creature, as an organism, has
here by Froebel, and for the first time in history, been ingenuously
studied, and the main laws of him noted. With the discovery that he is
a unity, there vanishes every classification of science made since the
days of Aristotle. They are convenient dogmas, thumb rule distinctions,
useful as aids in the further pushing of our studies into the workings
of this unity. Take up now a book of political economy, a poem, a
history: this thought of Froebel’s runs through it like quicksilver.
The scheme of thought of the writer is by it dissolved at once into
human elements. You find you are studying the operation of the mind of
some one, whom you picture to yourself as a man, as a unit; you are
interpreting this by your own experience. It is all psychology, you are
pushing your analysis. The universe is receiving its interpretation
through you yourself. We are thus brought to the point of view of the
mystic, as the only conceivable point of view.

“That the organism develops by creative activity.” This might have
come as a deduction from Darwin. It is an expression in metaphysical
language of the “struggle for life.” Froebel discovered it
independently. The consequences of a belief in it are so tremendous,
that no man who is not prepared to spend the rest of his life
completely dominated by the idea, ought even to pause to consider it.

Your capacities, your beliefs, your development, your spiritual
existence are the result of what you do. Active creation of some sort,
occupation which takes your entire attention and calls upon you,
merely incidentally and as a matter of course, for thought, resource,
individual or original force; this will develop you and nothing else
will.

The connection between this thought and the previous one is apparent.
It is only by such creative activity that the organism as a unit gets
into play. If you set a man copying or memorizing, you have occupied
only a fraction of him. If you set him to making something, the minute
he begins, his attention is concentrated. Willy nilly he is trying to
make something significant, he is endeavoring to express himself, the
forces and powers within him begin coming to his succor, offering aid
and suggestion. Before he knows it, his whole being is in operation.
The result is a statement of some sort, and in the process of making
it the creature has developed. But when you say “significant” you have
already implied the existence of other organisms. He is not expressing
himself only, he is expressing them all, and here comes Froebel with
his third great discovery, that it is by constant personal intercourse
with others that the power to express is gained. And on top of this
comes the last law, so closely related to the third as to be merely
a new view of it, but discovered by experiment, tested by practice,
announced empirically and as a fact, that the child is unselfish and
only really happy when at work creatively and for the use and behoof of
others.

This conclusion throws back its rays over the course of the argument,
and we are compelled to see, what we have already known, that
unselfishness and intellectual development are one and the same thing,
that there is no failure of intellect which cannot be expressed in
terms of selfishness, and no selfishness that cannot be expressed as
intellectual shortcoming. Criminology has reached the same point by
another route.

The matter is really very simple, for anything self-regardant means
a return of the organism upon itself, a stepping on your own toes,
and brings self-consciousness, discomfort, pain. Self-sacrifice
on the other hand brings fulfilment. The self-sacrifice is always
illusory, and the development real. This becomes frightfully apparent
in ingenuous and unhappy love affairs, for the organism robbed of
fulfilment returns upon itself.

It makes little difference what province of thought we begin with in
applying these views to the world. They give results like a table of
logarithms. They do more than this, they unravel the most complex
situations, they give the key to conduct and put a compass in the hands
of progress. They explain history, they support religion, they justify
instinct, they interpret character. They give the formula for doing
consciously what mankind has been doing unconsciously in so far as it
has been doing what any one of us in his soul approves of or cares to
imitate.

Let us take up the most obvious deductions. If people develop according
to their activities, their opinions will be a mere reflex of their
conduct. What they see in the world comes out of what they do in the
world. Here in a mere niche of Froebel we find the whole of Emerson.

The power and permanence of Sainte Beuve are due to his having applied
this theory to the interpretation of literature. He is not content till
he has seen the relation between the conduct and the opinions, the
conduct and the art of a character.

Or take Emerson himself, why was it that being so much he was not
more? How came it that after his magnificent prologue in the Phi Beta
Kappa address, which is like the opening of a symphony, he relapsed
into iteration and brilliant but momentary visions of his own horizon?
He kept repeating his theme till he piped himself into fragmentary
inconsequence. The reason is that he had learned all he knew before he
retired to Concord and contemplation. Active life would have made him
blossom annually and last like Gladstone.

Or take Goethe: all that is questionable in him results from his
violation of two of Froebel’s laws of psychology. He fixed his
attention upon self-development and thereby gradually ossified. Every
moment of egotism was an intellectual loss. His contact with people,
meanwhile, became more and more formal as he grew older, and his work
more and more inexpressive.

Give me a man’s beliefs, and I will give you his occupation. What has
happened to that radical that he seems to have become so moderate and
reasonable? You find that for six months he has been clerk to the Civil
Service Reform Club. Why is the mystical poetry of this intellectual
man as vacant as the fashion print he edits for his daily bread? His
employment has tracked his mind to these unearthly regions. He is dead
here too.

There is no such thing as independent belief, based on evidence and
reflection. The thing we call belief is a mere record left by conduct.
If you sincerely go through the regimen of Loyola’s manual, you will
come out a Jesuit. You can no more resist it than you can resist the
operation of ether. This man is an optimist. It means that he has
struggled. That man is a pessimist. It means that he has shirked.
Here is one who has been in touch with all movements for good during
a dismal era of corruption, and yet he has no faith. It means that
the whole of him has not been enlisted. His conscience has drawn him
forward. It is not enough. There is compromise in him. He is not an
absolute fighter.

Here is the most excellent gentleman in America, an old idealist
untouchably transcendental, an educated man. To your amazement he
thinks that it is occasionally necessary to subsidize the powers of
evil. He was bred a banker.

Here is a village schoolma’am who from a rag of information in a county
paper has divined the true inwardness of a complicated controversy at
Washington which you happen to know all about. She has been reforming a
poorhouse.

A is a clergyman, good but ineffective. He relies on beneficence and
persuasion. He does not know the world better than a club loafer knows
it. The only entry to it is by attack, the only progress by action.

B is a good fellow, yet betrays a momentary want of delicacy which
gives you a shock, and which you forgive him, saying: “It is a
coarseness of natural fibre.” It is no such thing. There is in every
man a natural fibre as fine as a poet’s. His coarseness is the residuum
of an act.

You meet a man whom you have known as a court stenographer, and whom
you have supposed to be drowned in worldly cares. At a chop house he
gives you a discourse on Plato’s Phædrus which he interprets in a novel
way. The brains of the man surprise you. This man, though he looks
sordid, positively must have been sending a younger brother to college
during many years. There is no other explanation of him.

The nemesis of conduct then stalks about in the form of a natural law,
not as the pseudo science of fancy, but as a mode of growth, modestly
formulated by a great naturalist.

Take the matter up on its other side. You can only discover in the
universe, try how you will, strain your eyes how you please, you can
only see what you have lived. Out of our activity comes our character,
and it is with this that we see beauty or ugliness, hope or despair. It
is by this that we gauge the operation of economic law and of all other
spiritual forces. It is with this that we interpret all things. What we
see is only our own lives.

We are all more or less in contact with human life. We live in a
pandemonium, a paradise of illustrations, and if we have only eyes to
see, there is enough in any tenement house to-day to lay bare the heart
and progress of Greek art.

But the worst is to come--the horror that makes intellect a plaything.
By a double consequence the past fetters the future. Once take any
course and our eyes begin to see it as right, our hearts to justify it.
Only fighting can save us, and we see nothing to fight for. Thraldom
enters and night like death where no voice reaches. The eternal
struggle is for vision.

How idiotic are the compliments or the contempt of the inexperienced.
Nothing but life teaches. Hallam thinks Juliet immodest, and he had
read all the literatures of Europe. If you want to understand the Greek
civilization you have got to be Sophocles. If you want to understand
the New Testament you have got to be Christ. If you want to understand
that most complex and difficult of all things, the present, you must be
some or all of it, some of it any way. You must have it ground into you
by a contact so wrenchingly close, by a struggle so severe, that you
lose consciousness, and afterwards--next year--you will understand.

Here is the reaction familiar to all men since the dawn of history,
which makes the man of action the hero of all times. It goes in
courage, it comes out power.

This reaction, this transformation goes forward in the very stuff that
we are made of, and if we come to look at it closely, we are obliged
to speak of it in terms of consciousness. There are so many different
kinds of consciousness, that the best we can do is to remind some one
else of the kind we mean. The hand of the violinist is unconscious
to the extent that it is functioning properly, and as his command
over music develops, this unconsciousness creeps up his arm and
possesses his brain and being, until he, as he plays, is completely
unself-conscious and his music is the mere projection of an organism
which is functioning freely.

But this condition of complete concentration makes us in a
different sense of the word self-conscious in the highest degree,
self-comprehending, self-controlled, self-expressing. And it is in
this philosophical sense that the word self-conscious is used by the
Germans, and may sometimes be conveniently used by us, if we can do so
without foregoing the right to use the words conscious and unconscious
in their popular sense at other times.

The discovery of Froebel was that this mastery over our own powers was
to be obtained only through creative activity. The suggestion, it may
be noted, is destined to reorganize every school of violin playing in
Europe. For we have here the major canon of a rational criticism. We
find that in the old vocabulary such words as genius, temperament,
style, originality, etc., have always been fumblingly used to denote
different degrees in which some man’s brain was working freely and
with full self-consciousness. A deliverance of this kind has always
been designated as ‘creative,’ no matter in what field it was found.

Approaching the matter more closely, we see that the whole of the
man must have responded in real life to every particle of experience
which he uses in his work. An imitation means something which does not
represent an original unitary vibration.

Goethe puts in the mouth of the mad Gretchen a snatch of German song
in imitation of Ophelia. The treatment does not fit the character. It
has only been through that part of Goethe’s mind with which he read
Shakespeare. As a sequel to this suggestion, the peasant of the early
scenes has lavished upon her all the various reminiscences of the
pathetic that Goethe could muster. It is moving, but it is inorganic.
It is not true.

For note this, that while it takes the whole of a man to do anything
true, no matter how small, anything that the whole of him does is
right. Hence the inimitable grotesques of greatness, the puns in
tragedy. These things belong to the very arcana of nature. By and by,
when the reasons are understood, nature will be respected. No one will
attempt to imitate genius, or to reproduce an artistic effect of any
kind.

If we look at recent literature by the light of this canon, we find the
reason for its inferiority. It is the work of half minds, of men upon
whose intelligence the weight of a dogma is pressing.

The eclipse of philosophy was of course reflected in fiction. There is
the same trouble with Herbert Spencer as with Zola. Each of them thinks
to wrest the secrets of sociology from external observation. Their
books lack objectivity and are ephemeral. Kant and Balzac did better
because their method was truer.

Everything good that has been done in the last fifty years has been
done in the teeth of current science. The whole raft of English
scientists are children playing with Raphael’s brushes the moment they
leave some specialty. There never lived a set of men more blinded
by dogma, blinded to the meaning of the past, to the trend of the
future, by the belief that they had found new truth. Not one of them
can lift the stone and show what lies under Darwin’s demonstration.
They run about with little pamphlets and proclaim a New Universe like
Frenchmen. They bundle up all beliefs into a great Dogma of Unbelief,
and throw away the kernel of life with the shell. This was inevitable.
A generation or two was well sacrificed, in this last fusillade of the
Dogma of Science--the old guard dogma that dies but never surrenders.
Hereafter it will be plain that the whole matter is a matter of symbols
on the one hand, knowledge of human nature on the other.

Herbert Spencer has been a useful church-warden to science, but his
knowledge of life was so trifling, his own personal development so
one-sided, that his sociology is a farce.

This canon of criticism explains in a very simple manner the art ages,
times when apparently every one could paint, or speak, or compose. The
art which is lost is really the art of courageous action. Neither war
nor dogma nor revolution is necessary, for feeling can no more be lost
than force, and the power to express it depends upon an interest in
life. The past has enriched us with conventions, and whenever a man
or a group of men arises who uses them and is not subdued to them, we
have art. The thing is easy. To the doers it is a mere knack of the
attention.

We had almost thought that art was finished, and we find we are
standing at the beginning of all things. Froebel has found a formula
which fits every human activity.

Let us take the supreme case, the apogee of human development, and what
will it be?

The sum of all possible human knowledge is, as we have seen, an
expansion of our understanding of human nature, and this is got by
intercourse, by dealing with men, by getting them to do something. In
order to make them do it, in order to govern, you must understand, and
the rulers of mankind are the wisest of the species. They summarize
society. Solomon, Cæsar, Hildebrand, Lincoln, Bismarck, these men knew
their world.

But if a virtuous ruler be the prototype of all possible human
fulfilment, there is no other art or province of employment to which
the same views do not apply. When any man reaps some of the power
which his toil has sown, and throws it out as a note or a book or a
statue, it has an organic relation to the human soul and is valuable
forever. There is only one rule of art. Let a man work at a thing till
it looks right _to him_. Let him adjust and refine it till, as he
looks at it, it passes straight into him, and he grows for a moment
unconscious again, that the forces which produced it may be satisfied.
As it stands then, it is the best he can do. In so far as we completely
develop this power we become completely happy and completely useful,
for our acts, our statements, our notes, our books, our statues become
universally significant.

Once feel this truth, and you begin to lose the sense of your identity,
to know that your destiny, your self, is an organic part of all men.
It is they that speak. It is themselves that have been found and
expressed. It was this toward which we tended, this that we cared
for--action, art, intellect, unselfishness, are they not one thing?

The complete development of every individual is necessary to our
complete happiness. And there is no reason why any one who has ever
been to a dull dinner party should doubt this. Nay, history gives proof
that solitude is dangerous. Man cannot sing, nor write, nor paint, nor
reform, nor build, nor do anything except die, alone. The reasons for
this are showered upon us by the idea of Froebel, no matter which side
of it is turned toward us.

This philosophy which seemed so dry till we began to see what it
meant, begins now to circumscribe God and include everything. For
Christ himself was one whose thoughts were laws and whose deeds are
universal truth. Shakespeare’s plays are universal truth. They are the
projection of a completely developed and completely unconscious human
intellect. They educated Germany, and it is to the study of them that
Hegel’s view of life is due. The great educational forces in the world
are proportioned in power to the development of the individual man in
the epochs they date from. Here and there, out of a hotbed, arises
a personal influence which directs thought for a thousand years and
qualifies time forever.

The division of the old ethics into egoism and altruism receives the
sanction of science. The turning of the attention upon selfish ends,
no matter how remote nor how momentary, hurts the organism, contracts
the intellect, dries up the emotions, and is felt as unhappiness. The
turning of the attention toward public aims benefits the organism,
enlarges the intellect, and is felt as happiness. There is no
complexity possible, for any mixed motive is a selfish motive.

All the virtues are different names for the injunction of self-mastery,
by which the internal struggle is made more severe, and the force
cooped in and controlled until it is released in the functioning of the
whole man.

In any sincere struggle for right, then, no matter how petty, we are
fighting for mankind, and this is just what everybody has always known,
always believed.

It is thrown at us as a great paradox, that somebody must pay the
bills; that if you live upon charity and can succeed in getting
yourself crucified, you are still a mere product of thrift and
selfishness somewhere. But the paradox is the same if put the other
way, for selfishness would never support you.

The question is purely one of fact, what thing comes first, what thing
satisfies the heart of man. He may support himself merely as a means to
help others. A man may start a pauper and die a millionaire, and yet
never think a thought or do an act which does not add to the welfare of
man. It is a question of ultimate controlling intention.

Man the microcosm is a kingdom where reigns continual war. Now he is
a furnace of love, the next moment he is a mean scamp. We know very
little about the mechanism by which these microcosms communicate with
one another. It seems likely that every iota of feeling must be either
transmitted or transformed; that if a spasm of selfishness be conveyed,
or some part of it, even by a glimpse of the eye, it must leave a
record of injury and start on a career of injury, just so much loss to
the world. On the other hand it may be transformed into the other kind
of force and expended later in good.

The thing is governed by some simple law, although man has not yet
been able to reduce it to algebra. What is most curious is this, that
the tendency of any man to believe in the reaction as a law, is not
dependent upon his scientific training, but upon his moral experience.
The best heads in physics will still betray a belief that a man must
be able to afford to be unselfish, that selfishness often does good,
that it is a muddled up affair, and a thing outside of science which
they will get round to later. Everybody sees a few degrees in the arc
of this law. Read the index on the quadrant and you will have his
character. Now and then some saint swears he sees a circle.

Let us press the inquest. It is not likely that life itself is duplex
or consists of two kinds of force, one egoistic, one altruistic. The
likelihood is the other way. There is only one force which vibrates
through these organisms. It is absolutely beneficent only when it
completely controls one of them, so that the whole thing sings together.

This music is the highest, but the notes that go to make it up are
everywhere. Altruism does not arise, is not imposed from without, at
any period or by any crisis, by progress or by society. The spiral
unwinds with the unwinding life upon the globe. It is the form of
illusion under which all life proceeds. It is the law of mind. The
eye treats space and color as entities. It cannot see on any other
terms. The stomach digests food, but not its own lining. We are obliged
to think in terms of the objective universe. We are not wholesome
unless we are self-forgetting. There is no cranny in all the million
manifestations of nature where you can interfere between the organism
and its object without representing disease.

And man is more than a mere altruistic animal. At least the religions
of Humanity have never expressed him. At those times when he is
entirely unselfish and therefore entirely himself, when he feels
himself to be one single well-spring, all unselfishness, all love,
all reverence, all service to something not himself, yet something
personal, he has faith. The theologies are attempts to formulate this
state of mind in order that it may be preserved. It is clear enough
that every mind must speak in its own symbols, and that the symbols
of one must always appear to another as illusions. Yet each man for
himself knows he faces a reality. This is a psychological necessity.
Destroy the belief, and on the instant he changes. Show him that he is
the victim of an illusion, and he is divided, a half man. A man whose
mind is divided, as, for instance, by the consciousness of a personal
motive, cannot believe. He stands like the wicked king in the play of
Hamlet; unable to pray. It is a psychological impossibility.

The concern of mankind for their forms of doctrine is gratuitous. Faith
re-appears under new names. You cannot convince a lover that he is bent
on self-development, nor any decent man that he does not believe in, is
not controlled by something higher than himself. The question is not
one of words.

We may trace this reverent attitude of mind upward through the acts and
activities of the spirit, and it makes no difference whether we regard
religion as the source and origin of them all or as the summary of them
all.

In Shakespeare’s plays we see a cycle of human beings, the most living
that we have ever met with, and the absence of mystical or emotional
religion from many of the plays is one of the wonders of nature.
There is no God anywhere, and God is everywhere; we are not offended.
The reason may be that the element has been employed in the act of
creation. Religion has been consumed in the development of character.
It is felt in the relation of Shakespeare to the characters. It is here
seen as artistic perfection. The same is true of the Greek statues and
of the Sistine Sibyls, and of other work left by those two periods, the
only other periods in which the individual attained completion.

Observe that in all this philosophy there is no dogma anywhere, no term
whose definition you have to learn, no term which makes the lying claim
that it can be used twice with the same connotation. Froebel had the
instinct of a poet and knew his language was figurative. It was this
that freed him from the Middle Ages and gave him to the future. He took
theology as lightly as he took metaphysics. He did not impose them, he
evoked them. He lived and thought in the spirit.

If you turn from Froebel’s analysis of human nature to Goethe’s, there
seem to be a thousand years between them. The one is scientific, the
other is mediæval. The one has freed himself from the influences of the
revival of learning, the other has not. The one is open, the other is
closed. The one is free, the other is self-conscious. But Froebel has
not yet set free the rest of the race, and of course the literature
and practices of the kindergartners are full of dogmas. The terms of
Froebel are a snare to those whose interest in childhood came later
than their interest in education and whose attention is fixed upon the
terms rather than upon the child. He is easy reading to the other sort.

But more important than Froebel’s formulation of these great truths
was his formulation of subsidiary truths. I do not mean his labored
systems, but his practical suggestions born of experience as to how to
help another person to develop. It was these methods, this attitude
of the teacher towards the child, of the individual towards his
fellow, that came at me in my own house unexpectedly, emanating from
some unknown mind, which seemed so great as practically to include
Christianity.

“Do not imagine,” he says at every moment, “that you can do anything
for this creature except by getting it to move spontaneously. You have
not begun till you have done this, and remember that anything else you
do is just so much harm.”

He was never tired of suggesting devices for doing this. The following
passage gives in a few words the answer to the most important practical
question in life: how we ought to approach another human being. The
thing is said so simply, it seems almost commonplace, yet it comes from
one greater than Kant.

“Between educator and pupil, between request and obedience, there
should invisibly rule a third something to which educator and pupil
are equally subject. This third something is the _right_,
the _best_, necessarily conditioned and expressed without
arbitrariness in the circumstances. The calm recognition, the clear
knowledge, and the serene, cheerful obedience to the rule of this third
something, is the particular feature that should be constantly and
clearly manifest in the bearing and the conduct of the educator and
teacher, and often firmly and sternly emphasized by him.”

Beneath this statement there lies a law of reaction. The human
organism responds in kind. Strike a man and he strikes, sneer and he
sneers, forget and he forgets. If you wish to convince him that you
are right, concede that from his point of view he is right, then move
the point and he follows. If you keep your temper in teaching a child,
you teach him to keep his temper, and this is more important than his
lesson.

The difficulty we find is to resist the reaction in ourselves to
some one else’s initiative. The affair is outside the province of
reason, and results from a transfer of force by means which we do not
understand. The command to “turn the other cheek” is a picturesque
figure for the attitude which will enable you to prevail the quickest
and by the highest means, and which Froebel enables us to see in its
scientific aspect.

But it is unnecessary to illustrate further what any one who comes in
contact with a kindergarten will, through all the mists of dogma and
ignorance which overspread the place, discover for himself. We have a
science founded upon human nature, applied to education. Mr. Hughes in
his closing paragraph uses the language of theology, but he makes no
overstatement:--

“When Froebel’s ethical teaching has wrought its perfect work in the
homes, the schools, and the churches, then his complete ideal, which
is the gospel ideal in practice, will be the greatest controlling and
uplifting force in the world.”

One word more about the relation between Froebel’s thought and current
science.

The view of man as an active animal, a struggler, alive and happy
only in activity, falls in naturally with what we know of the animal
kingdom. The philosophers are at war over science and religion,
over the origin of the non-self-regarding instincts. By an external
consideration of the animal hierarchy they have come to certain
conclusions which they strive to apply to the highest animal, man.
There is great boggling over him; because these non-self-regarding
instincts, which are not very apparent from the outside, seem to
conflict with certain generalizations relative to the conservation
of species. The scientists look into a drop of water and see animals
eating each other up. What they have not seen is that all this ferocity
goes forward, subject to customs as rigid as a military code, and
that it is this code which conserves the species. The “struggle for
existence” as it is commonly conceived would exterminate in short
order any species that indulged in it.

Meanwhile Froebel, beginning at the other end of the scale and studying
life from the inside, has established certain facts, certain laws,
which have as great a weight, and deserve as much to be carried
downward in the scale, as the generalizations of the naturalists (very
likely imperfect) have to be carried upward.

The animal man is unselfish. It is impossible to make his organism
vibrate as a unity except by some emotion which can be shown to be
non-self-regarding. At what point in the scale of nature does this
quality begin to manifest itself? Is the dog happy when he is selfish;
do the laws of psychology outlined by Froebel apply, and to what
extent do they apply, to the horse or the monkey? These things must be
patiently studied, and the corrections must be made. In the mean time,
in dealing with man himself, we are obliged to rely upon the latest
scientific report of him, however imperfect, and until Froebel’s laws
are destroyed, we need not attempt to adjust our ideas of man to the
dogmas developed by the study of the lower animals.




DEMOCRACY




IV

DEMOCRACY


The system of choosing public officials by popular vote is properly
enough called Democracy. The terms of tenure and nomenclature,
etc., are matters of detail. If we are to seek any test as to what
constitutes a Democracy, we may as well take as a test the formal
setting up at a particular time of some scheme of government by the
popular will. England has been a democracy since the Act of Settlement,
and if it be said that universal suffrage was not then known, the
answer is that it is not known now, and never can be known. The
exclusions of women and non-naturalized residents or even of criminals
and lunatics are matters of convenience. It is a question of degree.

Again, it is impossible that all the officials should be elected, and
the assignment to the elected officials of the power to appoint the
others is a matter of convenience. The very simple expedients adopted
by the framers of the United States Constitution were the result of
English experience and French theory. The intellect of France had,
during the eighteenth century, put into portable form the ideas that
had been at work in England’s institutions. The theoretical part of
it, the division of government into three departments, had been worked
out from European experience going back to Greek times. The written
constitution was a mere expansion of the Bill of Rights. Our Framers
were men who had had personal experience in governing under the
English system in force in the colonies, where the power of practical
self-government had been developed by isolation. They received from the
French a scientific view of that system. They had learned by experience
that a confederacy was not a government, and they proceeded to bind the
country together by the grant of that power which defines government,
the power to tax. The extension to a large territory of a system which
was in practical operation in all its parts, was in one sense a miracle
of intelligence, in another sense it was the only conceivable solution
of the problem of unity. Philosophers speak of Democracy as if it were
the outcome of choice. It has been the outcome of events. No other
system would have endured, and every formula of government that did not
embody an old usage would have been transformed in ten years by the
popular will into something that did.

The reason the Constitution of the United States is the most remarkable
document in existence is that it contained so little of novelty. The
election of some officers and the appointment of the rest, that was
what the people were used to. That is democracy. There is of course no
such thing as a pure democracy, or a pure monarchy. Every government is
in practice the outcome of forces of which a very small fraction are
expressed in its constitution and laws.

A constitution is a profession of faith, a summary written on a
bulletin board, and so far good. The United States had this advantage
in starting upon her career, that the bulletin was a very accurate
summary of existing customs, and was in itself an inspiring proof of
the virtue of the people. We are driven into admiring the Colonists
as among the most enlightened of their kind. It is true that the
revolution was conducted, and the Constitution adopted by the activity
of a small minority. But this is true of all revolutions. The point is
that the leaders represented sense and virtue. The people followed.

The moment the scheme was launched it became the sport of the elements.
In the North a trading bourgeoisie grew up under it. In the South
a slave-holding oligarchy, a society so fantastically out of touch
with the modern world that it seems like something left over from the
times before Christ, found no difficulty in making use of the forms of
Democracy. During the half century that followed, these two societies
became so hostile to each other that conflict was inevitable, and there
ensued a death-grapple in four years of war, a war to extinction. At
the end of the war no trace of the oligarchy remained upon the face
of the earth. And yet these forms of government survived and began to
operate immediately, under new auspices of course, deflected by new
passions, showing new shapes of distortion, yet ideally the same. The
only common element between the north and the south was the reverence
for these forms of government.

Meanwhile civilization had been creeping westward in a margin of
frontier life, conducted under these forms. Behind this moved a belt of
farming and village life, at war with the backwoods ideals, but using
the same forms of government. Then arose the railroad era and tore
millions of money from the continent, heaped it in cities, obliterated
State lines, centralized everything, controlled everything, ruled
everybody--still under these forms.

Let us examine them.

The problem of government is to protect the individuals in a community
against each other, and to protect them all against the rest of the
world. The power to interfere and the power to represent must be
lodged somewhere, and the question is how to arrange it so that this
power shall not be turned against the people. Democracy solves it by
election. Let the people choose their rulers. Instantly every man is
turned into a custodian, a part of him is dedicated to the public.
He is prevented by fundamental theory of law from being absolutely
selfish. Corrupt him how you will, deflect him, play upon him, degrade,
deceive him, you cannot shut him off from this influence. The framework
of government makes continuous appeal to the highest within him. It
draws him as the moon draws the sea. This appeal is one to which
the organic nature of man responds, as we have seen. For man is an
unselfish animal. The law of his nature is expressed in the framework
of government. The arrangement shows a wisdom so profound that all
historical philosophy grows cheap before it.

If you jump from the study of psychology straight into the theory of
democracy, you see why it was that the allegiance to the ideas of
the United States Constitution endured through slavery, through the
carpetbag era, through the Tweed ring. It was not the letter, but the
spirit which was inextinguishable.

It has taken a century of pamphlets to break down the distinctions
between men based upon orders of nobility, property, creed, etc.
Fifteen minutes of psychology would have levelled men and set them upon
the same footing as that upon which they walk into a hospital.

The creature man is by this system dealt with so simply as he had not
been dealt with since the birth of Christ. It must be conceded that the
thing could not even have been tried, except with a people familiar
with the distinctions between legislative, executive, and judicial
power, criminal and civil law, etc. Altruistic impulse would not have
sufficed to execute itself. But the divisions and forms of thought
expressive of that altruism already existed, and were in operation, as
we have seen.

It is thought that the peculiar merit of Democracy lies in this: that
it gives to every man a chance to pursue his own ends. The reverse is
true. The merit lies in the assumption imposed upon every man that he
shall serve his fellow men. This is by the law of his being his only
chance for happiness. You cannot find a man who does not know this. If
you examine the consciousness of any typical minion of success, you
will find that his source of inward content lies in a belief that his
success has benefited somebody--his kindred, his townsfolk--mankind.

The concentration of every man on his own interests has been the danger
and not the safety of Democracy; for Democracy contemplates that every
man shall think first of the State and next of himself. This is its
only justification. In so far as it is operated by men who are thinking
first of their own interests and then of the State, its operation is
distorted.

Democracy assumes perfection in human nature. In so far as an official
or a voter is corrupt, you will have bad government. Or to put the
same thing in another way, all corruption is shown up as a loss of
the power of self-government. The framework of government lies there
exposed in all its parts like a vast and complex dial, recording with
the nicety of a scientific instrument every departure from virtue of
the human beings whose lives, whose standards, whose very thoughts are
registered against it. When selfishness reaches a certain point, the
machine stops. Government by force comes in. We have had railroad riots
and iron foundry riots. In Denver not many months ago thirty thousand
people, or about one-fifth of the population, engaged in a carnival of
destruction and raided a picnic given by the Cattle Association. These
ebullitions, which look like mania, are nothing but an acute form of
blind selfishness, due to the education of a period in which everything
has been settled by an appeal to the self-interest of the individual.
The Bryanism, with which we must all sympathize, is nothing but a
revolt on the part of the poorer classes against the exploitation of
the country by the capitalist, due to pension laws, tariffs, trusts,
etc. “Something must now be done for me,” says the laboring man, and
the mine owner says “Silver.” The appeal is by a little manipulation
worked up into a craze, with the result that property is unsafe.
The craze is a craze of mistaken selfishness. One of the weapons
with which the richer classes fought it was corruption. They fed the
element which was devouring them. There is talk of bayonets, and it is
true that either bayonets or public spirit must in such cases be the
issue. We cannot have property at the mercy of a mob, and if any single
state like Colorado were separated from the rest, and the spirit of
unreason should possess it utterly, government by force would ensue.
Elections would be superseded, and property would improvise some mode
of practical government which every intelligent man would back. The
danger of an episode of this sort is that it interrupts the course of
things. It is revolution. It is the breakdown of democracy, and tends
to perpetuate the conditions of incompetence out of which the crisis
arises. Fortunately the country is so large that one State holds up the
next. No community would tolerate a state of siege for more than six
months, and the State would return to educational methods, weaker but
alive.

A military imposition of order is then the extreme case. But the Boss
system is the halfway house in the breakdown of free government.
In the Boss system we have seen a lack of virtue in the people show
itself in the shape of a government, in fact autocratic, but in form
republican. Here again the loss in the power of self-government is
apparent.

But there is no departure from civic virtue which can get by unnoticed.
Take the case of a voter who submits to having his street kept
dirty because he fears that a protest would make him disagreeably
conspicuous. Here also the loss of power of self-government is
traceably recorded. So much selfishness--so much filth.

If we now recur for a moment to the state of things described in the
essay on politics, we see that our government in all its branches
has reflected the occupation and spiritual state of the people very
perfectly. But outside of the recurrent and regular political activity
of the country, there has grown up during the past few years a sort of
guerilla warfare of reform. This represents the conservative morality
of the community, the instinct of right government which resents the
treason to our institutions seen in their operation for private gain.
The reformers’ methods of work are necessarily democratic, and it is
here that the most delicate tests of self-seeking are to be found.
These reformers desire to increase the unselfishness in the world,
yet the moment they attempt a practical reform they are told that any
appeal to an unselfish motive in politics means sure failure. They
accordingly make every variety of endeavor to use the selfishness of
some one as a lever to increase the unselfishness of somebody else.
The thing is worked out in daylight time after time, year after year,
and the results are recorded in millegrams. No obscurity is possible
because every man stands on the same footing. Our minds are not
obscured by thinking that A must be sincere because he is a bishop, or
need not be sincere because he is a lord.

There is no landlord class with prejudices, no socialist class with
theories. There are no interests except money interests, and against
money the fight is made. If a man is a traitor it is because he has
been bought. The results, stated in terms of ethical theory, are simply
startling.

A reform movement employs a paid secretary. In so far as he gets
the place because of his reform principles he represents an appeal
to selfishness. This is instantly reflected in his associates, it
colors the movement. He himself is attracted partly by the pay. By
an operation as impossible to avoid as the law of gravity he enlists
others who are also partially self-seeking.

A Good Government Club is formed by X, and every member is called upon
for dues and work. It thrives. Another is founded by Y and supported
by him because of his belief that reform cannot support itself but
must be subsidized. Inside of three weeks the existence of X’s Club
is threatened, because its members hear that Y’s Club is charitably
supported and they themselves wish relief. They are turned from workers
into strikers by the mere report that there is money somewhere.
Spend $100 on the Club, and Tammany will be able to buy it when the
need arises. So frightfully accurate is the record of an appeal to
self-interest made in the course of reform, that no one who watches
such an attempt can ever thereafter hope to do evil that good may come.

The system lays bare the operation of forces hitherto merely suspected.
Democracy makes the bold cut across every man and divides him into a
public man and a private man. It is a man-ometer. You could by means of
it stand up in line every man in New York, grading them according to
the ratio of principle and self-interest in each.

In England a man takes office as the pay for services to the
government. In America he does the same. It is part of their system,
part of our corruption. This may seem a small point, but it will work
out large. An absolute standard is imposed. That our most pronounced
reformers are far from understanding their duties gives proof of the
degradation of the times, but it exalts the plan of government. These
men will lead a reform for four weeks, as a great favor, a great
sacrifice, under protest, apologizing to business. They say public
duties come first only in war time. They give, out of conscience and
with the left hand, what remains after a feast for themselves. And
these are the saints. Tell one of them that he has not set an honorable
standard of living for his contemporaries unless, having his wants
supplied, he makes public activity his first aim in life, and he will
reply he wishes he could do so. He hopes later to devote himself to
such things. He will give you a subscription. This man lives in a
Democracy but he denies its claims. He too is recorded.

The English, who gave us all we know of freedom, have been the first
to understand its meaning. They too have suffered during the last
century from the ravages of plutocracy, from the disease of commerce.
But they had behind them the intellectual heritage of the world. They
had bulwarks of education, philanthropy, thought, training, ambition,
enthusiasm, the ideals of man. It was these things, this reservoir of
spiritual power, that turned the tide of commercialism in England, and
not as we so cheaply imagine her “leisure class.” The men and women who
in the last ten years have taken hold of the Municipality of London,
and now work like beavers in its reform, are not rich. Some of them may
be rich, but the force that makes them toil comes neither out of riches
nor out of poverty, but out of a discovery as to the use of life. These
Englishmen have outlived the illusions of business. As towards them we
are like children. If it were a matter of mere riches we have wealth
enough to make their “leisure class” ridiculous. If there must be some
term in the heaping of money before the energies of our better burghers
are to be diverted toward public ends, we may wait till doomsday. But
the reaction is of another sort, and is very simple. Let us be just
to the conscience-givers. They dare not give more. The American is
ashamed to lose a dollar. He does not want the dollar half the time,
but he will lose caste if he foregoes it. Our merchant princes go on
special commissions for rapid transit, and receive $5000 apiece. They
must be paid. Out of custom they must receive pay because “their time
is valuable,” and thus the virtue and meaning of their office receives
a soil: they do not work. All this is, even at the present moment,
against the private instincts of many of them. It is apparent that they
stand without, shame-faced. It needs only example to give them courage.
A few more reform movements in which they see each other as citizens,
will knock the shackles from their imagination and make men of them.
And then we shall have reform in earnest. For with this enfranchisement
will come their great awakening to the fact that not they only but all
men are really unselfish. It is the obscure disbelief in this salvation
which has made reform so hard where it might be so easy. As soon as the
reformers shall have reformed themselves, they will avoid making any
appeal to self-interest as so much lost time, so much corruption, and
will walk boldly upon the waves of idealism which will hold them up.

If commerce has been our ruin, our form of government is our
salvation. Imagine a hereditary aristocracy, a State church, a
limited monarchy to have existed here during the last thirty years.
By this time it would have been owned hand and foot, tied up and
anchored in every abuse, engaged day and night in devising new yokes
for the people. The interests now dominant know the ropes and do
their best, but they cannot corrupt the sea. They cannot stop the
continual ferment of popular election and reform candidate. The whole
apparatus of government is a great educational machine which no one
can stop. The power of light is enlisted on the side of order. A
property qualification would have been an anchor to windward for the
unrighteous. At the bottom of the peculiarly hopeless condition of
Philadelphia lie the small house and lot of the laboring man. They
can be taxed. They can be cajoled and conjured with. Corruption is
entrenched.

       *       *       *       *       *

We find then in democracy a frame of government by which private
selfishness, the bane and terror of all government, is thrust brutally
to the front and kept there, staring in hideous openness.

Nothing except such an era as that which we have just come through,
during which we have grown used to absolute self-seeking as the normal
state of man, could so have glazed the eyes of men that they could not
see thrift even in a public official as a crime, or self-sacrifice even
in a public official except as a folly. And yet so sound is the heart
of man that in spite of this corruption and debauchery, the American
people, the masses of them, are the most promising people extant. We
have a special disease. It is our minds which have been injured. We
are cross-eyed with business selfishness and open to the heavens on
all other sides. For this openness we must thank Democracy. Here are
no warped beings, but sane and healthy creatures under a temporary
spell. The American citizen, by escaping the superstitions studded over
Europe since the days of the Roman empire, has a directer view of life
(when he shall open his eyes) than any people since the Elizabethans.
He will have no prejudices. He will be empirical. But he must forswear
thrift, and the calculating of interest in his sleep. No religious
revival will help us. We are religious enough already. It is our
relaxation. Only the painful unwinding of that intellectual knot into
which our minds are tied,--that state of intense selfishness during
which we see business advancement as our first duty, taught us at the
cradle, enforced by example, inculcated like a religion,--can make us
begin to operate our institutions upon the lines on which they alone
can run freely, and we ourselves develop normally. This unwinding will
come through a simple inspection of our condition. Let no one worry
about the forms and particular measures of betterment. They will flow
naturally from the public acknowledgment by the individual of facts
which he privately knows and has always known and always denied.

This goes on hourly. Those people who do not see it, look for it in
the wrong places. You cannot expect it to show itself in the public
offices. They are the strongholds of the enemy. You cannot expect it to
appear very often in the children of captivity, the upper bourgeoisie.
These men are easily put to sleep and will take the promise of a
politician any day as an excuse for non-activity. They give consent.
What we want is assertion, and it is coming like a murmur from the
poorer classes who desire the right and who need only leadership to
make them honest.

It is the recurrent tragedy in reform movements that the merchants put
forward something that the laboring man instantly nails for a lie. It
is not the loss of the election which does the harm, but this insult to
the souls of men.

Let no one expect the millennium, but let us play fair. We can see that
our standards, particularly among the well-to-do, are so low that mere
inspection of them causes indignant protest. But we must also know that
when we accepted democracy as our form of government we ranked the
political education of the individual as more important than the expert
administration of government. This last can come only as a result, not
as a precurser of the other.

The example of a whole people, mad with one passion, living under a
system which implies the abnegation of that passion, has laid bare
the heart of a community, has shown the interrelations between the
organs and functions of a society, in a way never before visible in
the history of the world. Everything is disturbed, but everything is
visible. We see Literature, a mere thread, yet betraying all things;
Architecture, still submerged in commerce but showing every year some
vital change; Social Life, the mere creature of abuses, like a child
covered with scars, but growing healthy; the Drama, a drudge to thrift
every way and yet palpably alive. By the light of these things and
their relation to each other we may view history.

The American is a typical being. He is a creature of a single passion.
In so far as Tyre was commercial she was American. You can reconstruct
much of Venetian politics from a town caucus. In so far as London is
commercial it is American. You can trace the thing in the shape of a
handbill in Moscow. Or to take the matter up from the other side: you
can, by taking up these correlated ganglia of American society, which
do nevertheless simply represent the heart of man, and are always
present in every society--by imagining the enlargement of one function,
and the disuse of the next, you can reconstruct the Greek period and
re-imagine Athens.

No wonder the sociologists study America. It seems as if the key and
cause of human progress might be clutched from her entrails.




GOVERNMENT




V

GOVERNMENT


When two men are fighting and agree that they will stop at sundown,
we have government. Their consent is government. Their memory of that
consent is an institution. There never was a government of any kind or
for any purpose that did not rest upon the consent of the governed; but
the means by which the consent is obtained have varied. The consent
records the extent to which the individuals are alike. It is only by
virtue of similarity in the governed that government exists. On a
ship, all men are alike in their danger of being drowned, and they
consent to dictation from the captain for the welfare of all. The aim
of the despot is to keep the population alike in their need of him
or their fear of him. After the French Revolution, the entire French
people were alike both in their desire for order and in their lack of
training in self-government. A dictator was inevitable. Gouverneur
Morris, whose experience in America qualified him to judge, saw the
matter clearly as early as 1791. Napoleon kept the people alike, by the
two opposite means of giving them social order and foreign war. Henry
V. kept himself on top in England by waging war in France. Seward in
1861 thought to unite the people of the United States by declaring war
against everybody in Europe. The German Emperor is sustained to-day
by the popular fear of France and Russia. It makes no difference what
foolishness he commits; so long as that fear predominates he will be
absolute.

For the converse proposition is also true, that in so far as people
are like-minded, they must be ruled by a single mind. A hundred Malays
cannot establish a representative government. They must have a boss.
The population of Russia can only be ruled by a Czar. So also whenever
under any form of government all the people want one thing, one man
does it. The reasons for it are invented afterwards, and “war powers”
are found to justify the proclamation setting the slaves free.

The extent to which people are similar to each other will be recorded
in their institutions; in fact, those institutions are nothing but
dials of similarity. For this reason any popular national institution
gives you the nation. Moreover any ruler, any system, any consent has
a tendency to modify the future because he or it is advertised and
established. It is a factor in the consciousness of every individual.
It is the conservative. It tends to affect the conduct and mind of
every one, for any one coming in contact with it must conform or
resist. It is a challenge to the individual. It impinges upon him.
The thing changes daily in his mind, and occupies now more, now less,
of his activities. In cases where his whole external conduct has
been absorbed by one such power we have absolute rule, religious or
military, and a uniform population. If there be a single predominating
power which has not yet completely conquered, we have in some form or
another a record of its growth by a tendency toward absolutism.

The American people have been growing strikingly uniform, owing to
their one occupation,--business, their one passion,--a desire for
money. They are divided by their system of politics into two great
categories, and hence we see the two opposing Bosses, little nodes of
power representing this identity of consciousness in each of the two
great categories of the population, Republicans and Democrats. If you
could cut open the consciousness of one thousand Americans and examine
it with a microscope, you could set up our government with great ease.

Let us concede for the sake of argument that the full development of
individual character and intellect is the aim of life.

Now in so far as individuals are developed, they differ from each
other. We ought then to be distressed by any identity whatever found in
the heads of individuals examined; and greatly distressed by the reign
of the same passion manifested in the one thousand American organisms.
You would say, ‘If this thing goes on, a dictator is absolutely
certain,’ and then you would remember that you had heard a business man
remark at the Club the evening before, that he would welcome a dictator
as a cheap practical way out of it.

Let us now suppose you to examine one thousand English heads. The first
thing you would notice would be that the number was not large enough
to give reliable results. Certain types would be manifest, but the
special variations would be so striking as to cloud your conclusions.
In all these heads there would be spots of a density nowhere found in
America, but the spontaneous variations outside and round about them
would be magnificent. You would say, “These spots represent different
kinds of conservatism. This one is reverence for the church, that one
for the army, a third for the judiciary. They represent prejudice, but
they also represent stability, a stability that is the resultant of a
thousand positive and various forces. These spots hold England together
and give scope to free government. The world never has done and never
can do better than this. These individuals are developed. The line of
force of one man passes through one institution, that of the next man
through the next. No force, no passion, can make them all alike at any
one time. They are anchored by the Middle Ages. They are fluid and free
in the present. The only hope for freedom in the individual lies in the
existence of different sorts of institutions.”

It is true that English society is like a menagerie, or rather like one
of those collections of different animals, all in one cage, seen at
the circus. Every one of these animals is trained to regard the rights
of the rest. Diversity is in itself a good. A college of Jesuits is a
protection to liberty if it is set down in Denver. The Jesuits are not
money-mad. It is an education for a Denver child to see a new kind of
man. You will conclude, as some philosophers are now concluding, that
to have free government you must encourage institutions--and you will
be wrong.

The fundamental reason why you are wrong is that these beneficent
institutions are what is left of the activity of people who believed in
them for their own sake. You can no more imitate one of them, or catch
the power of one of them, than you can set up a king here to repel an
invasion. You yourself believe in individualism. Go straight for that,
and leave it to erect its bulwarks in what form it may.

A multiplication of institutions then serves two contradictory
purposes. It limits the individual, creates black spots of prejudice
and unreason in him; but on the other hand it encourages a free
development of the individual outside of those spots. It creates types,
and types are mutually protective. This is only another way of saying
that free government results from a segregation of the government into
provinces, which cannot all be captured, at one time, by one force.

The highly intelligent and artificial separation of our government
into the branches of Executive, Legislative, and Judicial was in a
sense an attempt to get free government by the erection of independent
institutions. But these were never strong enough to create types (we
have hardly the type of judge among us); and certainly no attachment to
any part, but the sacredness of the entire system, has preserved it. It
was the sentiment attaching to the single idea of a central government.

It is to institutions that the consent to be governed is given. The
consent is always a highly complex affair. It implies a civilization.
It is qualified, limited, infinitely diversified, and is in every case
regulated by historic fact. For instance, under a limited monarchy,
it is a consent to be governed by a particular dynasty after special
ceremonies, tempered by some priesthood, subject to such and such
customs,--each and all existing in the imagination of the subject.
For government is entirely a matter of the imagination, and it is
inconceivable that it should ever be anything else. The English have
spent two centuries in impressing the imagination of India with the
vision of English power. A violation by the government, no matter
how strong, of the popular imagination, an assumption of power in a
field not yet subdued, always brings on riots. The Persians resented
furiously the creation of a tobacco monopoly. The Sultan had to rescind
it. The Americans threw the tea into the harbor.

The forms and modes by which government is carried on are the record
of things to which people have consented, and hence become important,
become symbols so identified with power that almost all historical
writing deals with them as entities. The power of the symbols in any
case varies inversely to the power of the people for self-government,
that is, to the average differentiation between individuals; or to put
the thing the other way, the extent to which a man will permit another
to rule him depends upon his incapacity to rule himself.

The great unifying forces have always been regarded as dangers to
free government. War makes a nation a unit. It cannot be conducted by
individualism. Religion condenses power. That is the reason why our
ancestors were so afraid of a State church. Commerce has generally
been thought a blessing because commerce gives scope to individualism.
It enriches and educates. Yet commerce itself may bring in tyranny.
Witness Venice. Commerce has centralized our government. Anything that
affects everybody’s mind with the same appeal strengthens government
and makes for unity. A nation only exists by virtue of such general
appeals. It is inside of and subordinate to this general unity of
feeling that individualism must go on. The rulers of mankind are
men who have got control of the symbols, of the institutions, which
stood in the imagination of the people as most important, and who by
manipulating them extended their range over the popular imagination.
Or to put the thing a little differently, the passions of the people
are reflected in ever-changing institutions. The people seize a man
and force him to do their bidding and rule them in such manner as to
assuage their passions. They make a saint out of Lincoln, and a devil
out of Torquemada.

If a man seems to be a great man, and seems to be leading the people,
it is because he knows the people better than they know themselves.
There was never a people yet that did not in this sense govern
themselves, being themselves governed by the resultant of their
dominant passions. The Southern Pacific Railroad has for years owned
the State of California as completely as if it had bought it from
a tyrant who ruled over a population of slaves. It was done by the
purchase of votes. In so far as virtue shall regain predominance in the
breast of the voter and set him free, virtue will replace money in the
voting, and set free the State.

Universal suffrage is a mode and a symbol. Under certain conditions
of education people must have it. Under others they cannot have it.
But whether they have it or not, they will be ruled by their ruling
passion, and if this renders them alike in character, their government
will be a tyranny. If the reign of the passion be tempered, the reign
of the tyrant will be tempered. Express the thing in terms of human
feeling (and what else is there?) and universal suffrage is seen as a
_quantité négligeable_.

It is thus apparent that there is no institution that cannot easily be
made to operate to a contradictory end. The criminal courts here have
been used to collect debt. There is no wickedness to which the enginery
of the Christian Church has not at one time or another been lent. The
passions of a period run its institutions as easily as a stream turns
any sort of a mill. To-day the United States Senate is a millionaires’
club. To-morrow the Stock Exchange may become a church.

Now what is an institution?

It is a custom which receives an assent because it is a custom. Man
has always been ruled by custom. The notion that there was a time when
disputes were settled by fighting, and that arbitration came in as a
matter of convenience, stands on the same sort of footing as Rousseau’s
social contract. It is an academic _jeu d’esprit_. In looking back
over history all we see is custom, and farther back, still custom. All
the fighting of savages is regulated by custom and always has been
regulated by custom. Nay, the bees and the ants are ruled by custom.
The idea of custom is the one idea that the genius of Kipling led him
to see in the jungle.

Now what is at the bottom of all this regard for custom? At the
bottom of custom is non-self-regarding impulse. Man is both selfish
and unselfish, but it makes a great difference whether we regard him
_primarily_ as one thing or the other. The scientists, owing
to their study of the lower animals, have tried to explain man on
the selfish hypothesis and have made a mystery of him. They say “He
must eat or die; therefore, he must be primarily egoistic.” And they
attempt to explain progress by the expanding of egoism to include,
first the family, then the tribe, then the nation, and finally mankind.
Society according to them is a convention of egoism, a compromise,
a joint-stock company. Religion is a matter of ghosts and ancestor
worship, not fully explained yet. Note that this whole view depends
upon a dogma that man _must_ be primarily selfish because he must
eat. It is fair enough to retort with a paradox. Man absolutely selfish
could not survive. Man absolutely unselfish would thrive splendidly.
The individuals would support each other.

But let us start square and remember that it is a question of science.
Take the other hypothesis. The horse runs in herds and propagates
his species because he is fond of the species. Incidentally he gets
protected. It is through the illusion that he loves his fellows that
his own welfare is secured. Non-self-regardant impulse is at the
bottom, self-protection the result.

It is the same with every human institution. Non-self-regardant impulse
is at the bottom of all regard for law. We have seen that Democracy
is organized altruism, but there was never a government that did not
profess to be organized altruism. You cannot bring men together on any
other plea, nor hold them together by any other tie. It is only in so
far as altruism in conduct exists that progress is possible. If the
men will not stop fighting at sundown, they have no institutions. They
perish.

The regard that every custom receives from the individual who
supports it is a non-self-regarding emotion. From the ceremonials of
savages, through the custom of the Frenchman who lifts his hat as a
funeral passes, to the feeling of Kant as he contemplated the moral
law, the element is the same. It is reverence. It is respect. It is
self-surrender.

But reverence may become intensified into fear. The imagination of the
worshipper curls over like a wave. It looks back at him and frightens
him, and when this happens we call it Superstition. The pain of it,
like all pain, like the distress of insanity, comes wholly from the
fact that it is a self-regarding emotion, it is a disease. Man in
every stage of his culture is liable to this disease. Want of food or
tyranny, bad water or bad government, brings on this trouble. Every
country and every age shows forms of it: and very naturally, the savage
who is subject by reason of hardships to many diseases, shows terrible
forms of this disease of superstition. This is the chief fact that the
scientists have seen in the savage. These savants, holding the egoism
of man as their major thought, have through their ignorance of human
nature been led to base their explanation of the religion of mankind
upon a disease of the savage.

The opposite explanation stares them in the face. We all know in a
general way that the New Testament civilized Europe. The book is a mere
cryptogram of all possible altruism, and therefore fits the soul of
man. Give two men the New Testament--and each man sees himself in it,
and it affects each one differently. By developing and unfolding the
character and emotions of each according to the law of his individual
growth, the book differentiates them at once. The more unhappy a man is
the more he needs it. Oppress a man or put him in jail, let him lead a
life of self-indulgence, or isolation, and he grows quasi-religious;
the altruistic emotion has not been expended in intercourse with his
fellows, and it accumulates. This book then, by focussing the altruism
in each individual of many generations of men, by being perpetually
rediscovered, by existing as a constant force differentiating
individuals and so undoing the tyranny of institution after institution
founded upon itself, gradually got itself enacted into international
law, into custom, into sentiment, and into municipal rule, and has been
on the whole the controlling force in Western Europe during the last
eighteen centuries. Its symbols express the constant factor in human
nature. It is only in so far as a book does this that it is remembered
at all.

Of course, when a custom arises it is turned on the instant into
something that can be used by egoism, and here comes the pivot of the
matter. Custom renders men similar to each other. The letter killeth.
But the letter does much more than kill. It educates, it trains, it
transmits. Hence the two contradictory functions of an institution
which we found at work in England, the one to educate, the other to
limit.

In studying the effect of institutions upon the individual, the whole
hierarchy of nature must be reviewed at once. We have nothing to guide
us in our study of the animals except our knowledge of man, but we have
much to find in that study which will enlarge and illustrate that
knowledge. Every naturalist and every sociologist should receive his
preliminary training in the political arena, and every politician in
the greenhouse and the menagerie.

Let us look at the social life of the ants.

The ant seems to show a stage of progress in which the individuals
have grown alike through a slavish observance of certain institutions.
It is certain that the ant is a ritualistic being, formal, narrow,
intolerant, incapable of new ideas or private enterprise. He hates any
one differing from himself, whether more or less virtuous. He would
regard any suggested improvement in the arrangement of his house as
a sacrilege. He works constantly for the public with a devotion that
nothing but religious zeal can explain, and is in his own limited way
completely happy. But the tyranny of public opinion, the subserviency
to a State church goes far to make him contemptible.

This is the worst that an institution can do. The individual is
crushed. The primeval reverence for custom seen in the ants has
crystallized without getting developed and specialized into its higher
form of reverence for the individual ant. He is a type of arrested
development.

The natural history of religion is then to be sought in a reverence
for custom that gradually specializes itself into a regard for
the individual. If these things are true, the advancement of any
civilization may be measured by the extent in which the rights of
individuals are held sacred. And this is what we have always been
taught.

Government was in its origin indistinguishable from religion, and down
to the latest day of time, the fluctuating institutions of man will
record this kinship between ritual and law.

The scientists, in trying to explain religion and progress as the
result of an egoism gradually expanding itself to a regard for mankind,
have been pulling at the wrong end of the cocoon. The thread unwound a
bit and then broke; unwound again and again broke. They were puzzling
themselves over a conception fundamentally unscientific and at war with
their own first principles.

The genesis of the emotions proceeds like other developments from the
simple towards the complex. The notion that the egoism of man gradually
expanded so as to include the whole human race in a love which was in
reality a love of himself, assumes that this large love is the sum of
lesser loves. It fixes the attention on the objects of human feeling,
and not upon the character of the feeling itself. This character is
the thing to be studied. When we contrast the religious and social
feelings of the civilized man with those of the savage we see the same
specialization and complexity in the emotions themselves which is
traceable in any higher development. The forms, arguments, theories,
customs by which the feeling is expressed, show an ever-increasing
refinement of sympathy. We are not approaching a general and vague
emotion built up out of lesser regards for particular people. We are
approaching a stage of differentiation, of analysis, a stage of the
personal application of that same altruism which appears in its lower
form as blind worship and self-abasement before some fetich. The
utility of this emotion, in whatever stage of its development, is a
consideration that may justify it to the philosopher, but which is not
the _primum mobile_ in the breast of him that has it. The whole
history of man shows that progress comes in the shape of an increasing
tender-heartedness which can give no lucid account of itself, because
it is an organic process.

The learned classes are apt to approach a problem in its most difficult
form. Out of travellers’ tales about man in the South Sea Islands,
the sociologist evolves a theory of religion. Take up a book on the
natural history of religion and you will find enough learned citations
about the Hurons and the Esquimaux and the Thibet tribes to furnish
the library of Pantagruel. Now the regard of a savage for his idol is
a very obscure question of psychology. Ten years of youth spent among
a tribe would not be too long a period in which to lay the foundations
for an intelligent guess at the facts, let alone their significance.

Meanwhile, the actual genealogy of our own religious feelings is
neglected as too familiar. Yet the spiritual history of that race which
gave Europe many of its religions, is better known than any other
history of a like antiquity. The point of view and feeling about life
which has given us our own experience of religion was developed in the
Jew. The Old Testament is the place in which to study the growth and
meaning of the only religious feeling that we are sure we understand.
The history of the Jews is the history of a single overpowering emotion
which appears in its two forms,--so identical in content that you
may often find them both in the same sentence, both in the same verse
of Isaiah or Psalm of David,--prostration before the Lord of Hosts,
compassion for the poor and the oppressed. This passion of altruism
which gave the prophets their terrible power is the legacy of the Jew
to the world. The emotion of self-abasement and self-sacrifice and
the emotion of love towards others, are one thing. This, in its lower
forms, leads to self-mutilation and incantations; in its higher forms,
it becomes embodied by the prophetic fury of great poets into the idea
of a Messiah who shall be both savior and sacrifice. There is only one
passion at work in all these great protagonists of human nature, in
Nathan, Elijah, Jeremiah and in the innumerable prophets who confronted
the arbitrary power of the kings. These men stood for righteousness
and showed an intensity of moral courage which nothing but compassion
has ever engendered, and nothing but faith has ever expressed. The
rags and the self surrender, the purity and the power, the belief
that they spoke not of themselves but for the Lord, have been the
same in all ages. It is impossible to feel compassion in this degree
and not express it in this manner. All just anger is compassion. The
terrible wrath of these men is as comprehensible as their hymns or
their triumph. There is no child that reads Isaiah whose nature does
not respond to him, because the course of feeling in him is true to
life. Between the Old Testament and the New we see a perfectly coherent
development of the same passion of the same race into its higher kind.
Both forms of it have changed. In the New Testament the love has
become specialized into that particular and especial regard for the
soul of each individual man for which we have no counterpart; and the
prostration, the adoration for God the Father, the identification of
the individual with God the Father, has received expression in forms
which one can refer to but not describe. The kingdom of heaven is
within you.

That modern philanthropy which has been overcoming the world during
the last century and has put a spirit of religion into politics, is
expressed in ten thousand dogmas and formulas. These things are the
hieroglyphics of the most complex period in history, but they all read
Love.

The love of man for his fellows is the substantial content of every
ideal, of every reform. In so far as any political cry is valuable,
it represents this and nothing more. Liberty, Equality and Fraternity,
The Declaration of Independence, Utilitarianism, Fourierism, Socialism,
Prohibition, Christian Science and the Salvation Army carry the same
message; and it is only because of this truth, and in spite of the
fact that it is always wrapped up in every kind of falsehood, that
they move the world forward. Take socialism. This thing is the logical
outcome of the passion of pity at work in men who believe that the
desire for property is the controlling factor in human arrangements.
The selfishness of the individual has been assumed as a fundamental law
in that school of thought, which has been dominating all our thought,
and which we habitually accept as final. It receives support from a
superficial view of human nature, and time out of mind has been the
belief of shallow people. But the great intellect and the great labor
of the socialists have been unable to make any impression upon the mind
of a man. We know that their reasoning is foolish. It is to the heart
that their appeal is made. Bellamy’s book sells by the hundred thousand
to tender-hearted people. It is a plea for humanity. It is Uncle Tom’s
Cabin. The function of Socialism is clear. It is a religious reaction
going on in an age which thinks in terms of money. We are very nearly
at the end of it, because we are very nearly at the end of the age.
Some people believe they hate the wealth of the millionaire. They
denounce corporations and trusts, as if these things had hurt them.
They strike at the symbol. What they really hate is the irresponsible
rapacity which these things typify, and which nothing but moral forces
will correct. In so far as people seek the cure in property-laws they
are victims of the plague. The cure will come entirely from the other
side; for as soon as the millionaires begin to exert and enjoy the
enormous power for good which they possess, everybody will be glad they
have the money.

Socialism was useful, but as a theory it was fated from the beginning,
because its prophets and saints are themselves spurred on by a
different motive from that which they evoke in others. They offer
us a religion that assumes that human nature is other than it is, a
religion not based upon self-sacrifice, and so not based upon an appeal
to primary passion, a religion beseeching us to make other people
comfortable. Now the only motive which will make men labor for the
comfort of others, is a belief that this is the quickest way of saving
their souls. If souls are to be saved only through their own unselfish
activity, then it is a lie to hold up property as a goal. The laboring
man can be made happy only by the same means as the merchant. They must
be saved together. The matter of the physical support of the individual
follows in the wake of a regard for his soul, but never precedes it.
The awakening of the spirit of individualism will bring support to the
artisan by bringing in hand work. The machine work with which we have
been content represents a loss of religion in the buyer proportionate
to the selfishness of the times. No system based on thrift will
displace it, but any movement based on self-sacrifice will tend to
correct it. While socialism is worrying out the proof that a wise
distribution of property will bring in virtue and happiness, other and
directer formulations of the truth will have seized the spirits of men
and saved the people.

The balance of altruism in the people of a country, preserved in the
form of practical self-control (no matter under what name), gives the
wealth and power of the country.

Good government then consists in customs which differentiate people.
They represent a permission to each man to be different from his
neighbor. They are the record of what once was love, and now is law.

Bad government consists in institutions which render men similar
through some self-interest, some superstition.

Let us take a few examples at random from history, and see whether
everything of permanent value to the race is not merely a different
form of expression for the same ideal.

Napoleon is a type of selfishness. The focus of his almost illimitable
intelligence fell within himself. He was so self-centred that he did
not precipitate all the passion which supported him upon an idea.
He did much, but he could not transcend the laws of psychology or
escape the insecurity they dealt him out. He was a great reactionary,
living in an age of progress, a great egoist in an age of altruism,
a great criminal. The whole of Europe had hardly strength enough to
shut him up. He went down finally, and yet before he went down, he had
stood for civilization in every country he touched by establishing
law. He gave France his code and his bureaux, things greater than
his dynasty. He made use of the enlightenment, the expert intellect
of France to establish order, and became a great educator through
his institutions, his genius for administration. His worshippers are
so struck with this side of his character that they forgive him his
crimes. For our admiration is chained to the educator. Every great man
is a great educator, and there is no greatness but this. The great man
represents, draws out, projects, and establishes the non-self-regarding
part, the intellectual apparatus of others, and those who do it by the
establishment of law and order receive their tribute as civilizers. The
saints serve the same end. They speak a language different from that of
the law-givers, yet their function is the same. The part a man plays in
the formal government of his times depends on circumstance. It seems to
be governed by the ratio of his altruism to that of his contemporaries.
People will not tolerate a man who is too good or too bad. Had Napoleon
lived in an age of retrogression, very likely he would have died upon
the throne. Had he been less self-seeking than he was, had he possessed
for instance the imagination of Washington, very likely the French
would have deposed him sooner, but in the end the memory of him would
have educated France.

For this is the work of heroes. Where a leader has ideas that are
more unselfish than those of his time, he is deposed, poisoned, or
ridiculed, and his value as an educational force may be increased by
any of these things. Socrates deliberately kept out of politics for
many years, knowing that if he took part, his sense of justice would
lead to his execution, and fearing to throw away his life; he finally
expended it with such ability as to make every atom count. The scholars
have not understood his Apology because they could not fathom the
instinct of the agitator. It is the same with the martyrs, with the
Quakers in Puritan New England, with the Anti-Slavery people. Their
conduct was governed by the truest understanding of how to draw out and
develop the conscience of others. The man who dies for his country does
no more.

Another gigantic educator was Bismarck. To have welded the squabbling
principalities of Germany into an Empire within a lifetime is one of
the achievements of history. But Bismarck held the trump card. He
had a cause to serve. His early work must have been his strongest;
for since the war with France, patriotism has become the curse of
Germany. It is caked into fanaticism, and is being used by autocracy
to ruin intellect. This is the mystical yet relentless punishment for
the element which was not patriotism but thrift in their conduct. The
Germans must be great and unified and recover Alsace for their honor.
But what did they want with the French milliards? They mulcted France
to spare their pockets, and fastened upon themselves the personal
hatred of the French peasant, which gives them William II. for a ruler.
They looked upon property as power. Had they seen clearly that power is
nothing but sentiment, they would have sown peace.

One reason why Holland lost her supremacy was because she came to
regard money as power. She grasped the symbol. For a decline sets in as
soon as selfishness has reached such a point that any of these symbols
are worshipped. Witness Spain, where the gold of Peru ruined the
Spaniards by making them individually selfish.

In the long run virtue and vice contend over national wealth, the first
collecting, the second dissipating. Witness Cuba. Witness Ireland.
China is wrecked by private greed. In the last analysis it is a matter
of personal virtue.

The magnificent intellect and self-control epitomized in Roman
Government, took centuries to perish. Is it a wonder these people
conquered the world?

The United States has been held together by English virtue, and there
was so much of it in the race, that a few generations of money-changers
could not ruin us. We had, not only the creed, but the beliefs of
English liberty. The future of England depends upon her perception of
this truth that power is sentiment. The Venezuela trouble showed her
that her selfish conduct in 1861 made her empire in 1896 insecure. The
spread of England’s empire has been due to a practice in dealing with
the imagination of others. Establish by force, develop by the organized
altruism of good government, protect by display of force.

This system will not apply here. We are the youngest nation and the
most naif. We are at the mercy of wise or unwise treatment. But we can
no more be fooled than a child. No display of force could touch our
imagination or do more than irritate us. Our feelings must be directly
engaged by means not known to diplomacy or to international law. Let
England take a high tone. She must not only seem but be unselfish
towards us, and she will master the globe.

There is one result from the fact that government is a matter of
imagination which is wholly satisfactory. Once set up a scheme of
things which people approve of and it remains. We shall not have good
government in the United States till the people get over their personal
dishonesty; but when we do get it, it will last without effort. It will
be harder to destroy than the spoils system. Vigilance will be needed
constantly, but action rarely. The mere announcement of an abuse will
correct it.




Transcriber’s Note:

Spelling, hyphenation and punctuation have been preserved as published
in the original book.



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