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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, A Preface to Politics, by Walter Lippmann
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: A Preface to Politics
+
+
+Author: Walter Lippmann
+
+
+
+Release Date: December 16, 2006  [eBook #20125]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A PREFACE TO POLITICS***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Matt Whittaker, Juliet Sutherland, and the Project
+Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net/)
+
+
+
+A PREFACE TO POLITICS
+
+by
+
+WALTER LIPPMANN
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+"A God wilt thou create for thyself
+out of thy seven devils."
+
+
+
+Mitchell Kennerley
+New York and London
+1914
+Copyright, 1913, by
+Mitchell Kennerley
+
+
+
+
+
+_Contents_
+
+
+CHAPTER                                                    PAGE
+
+       INTRODUCTION
+
+   I.  Routineer and Inventor                                 1
+
+  II. The Taboo                                              34
+
+ III.  The Changing Focus                                    53
+
+  IV.  The Golden Rule and After                             86
+
+   V. Well Meaning but Unmeaning: the Chicago Vice Report   122
+
+  VI. Some Necessary Iconoclasm                             159
+
+ VII. The Making of Creeds                                  204
+
+VIII. The Red Herring                                       247
+
+  IX.  Revolution and Culture                               273
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+The most incisive comment on politics to-day is indifference. When men
+and women begin to feel that elections and legislatures do not matter
+very much, that politics is a rather distant and unimportant exercise,
+the reformer might as well put to himself a few searching doubts.
+Indifference is a criticism that cuts beneath oppositions and wranglings
+by calling the political method itself into question. Leaders in public
+affairs recognize this. They know that no attack is so disastrous as
+silence, that no invective is so blasting as the wise and indulgent smile
+of the people who do not care. Eager to believe that all the world is as
+interested as they are, there comes a time when even the reformer is
+compelled to face the fairly widespread suspicion of the average man that
+politics is an exhibition in which there is much ado about nothing. But
+such moments of illumination are rare. They appear in writers who realize
+how large is the public that doesn't read their books, in reformers who
+venture to compare the membership list of their league with the census of
+the United States. Whoever has been granted such a moment of insight
+knows how exquisitely painful it is. To conquer it men turn generally to
+their ancient comforter, self-deception: they complain about the stolid,
+inert masses and the apathy of the people. In a more confidential tone
+they will tell you that the ordinary citizen is a "hopelessly private
+person."
+
+The reformer is himself not lacking in stolidity if he can believe such a
+fiction of a people that crowds about tickers and demands the news of the
+day before it happens, that trembles on the verge of a panic over the
+unguarded utterance of a financier, and founds a new religion every month
+or so. But after a while self-deception ceases to be a comfort. This is
+when the reformer notices how indifference to politics is settling upon
+some of the most alert minds of our generation, entering into the
+attitude of men as capable as any reformer of large and imaginative
+interests. For among the keenest minds, among artists, scientists and
+philosophers, there is a remarkable inclination to make a virtue of
+political indifference. Too passionate an absorption in public affairs is
+felt to be a somewhat shallow performance, and the reformer is patronized
+as a well-meaning but rather dull fellow. This is the criticism of men
+engaged in some genuinely creative labor. Often it is unexpressed, often
+as not the artist or scientist will join in a political movement. But in
+the depths of his soul there is, I suspect, some feeling which says to
+the politician, "Why so hot, my little sir?"
+
+Nothing, too, is more illuminating than the painful way in which many
+people cultivate a knowledge of public affairs because they have a
+conscience and wish to do a citizen's duty. Having read a number of
+articles on the tariff and ploughed through the metaphysics of the
+currency question, what do they do? They turn with all the more zest to
+some spontaneous human interest. Perhaps they follow, follow, follow
+Roosevelt everywhere, and live with him through the emotions of a great
+battle. But for the affairs of statecraft, for the very policies that a
+Roosevelt advocates, the interest is largely perfunctory, maintained out
+of a sense of duty and dropped with a sigh of relief.
+
+That reaction may not be as deplorable as it seems. Pick up your
+newspaper, read the Congressional Record, run over in your mind the
+"issues" of a campaign, and then ask yourself whether the average man is
+entirely to blame because he smiles a bit at Armageddon and refuses to
+take the politician at his own rhetorical valuation. If men find
+statecraft uninteresting, may it not be that statecraft _is_
+uninteresting? I have a more or less professional interest in public
+affairs; that is to say, I have had opportunity to look at politics from
+the point of view of the man who is trying to get the attention of people
+in order to carry through some reform. At first it was a hard confession
+to make, but the more I saw of politics at first-hand, the more I
+respected the indifference of the public. There was something
+monotonously trivial and irrelevant about our reformist enthusiasm, and
+an appalling justice in that half-conscious criticism which refuses to
+place politics among the genuine, creative activities of men. Science was
+valid, art was valid, the poorest grubber in a laboratory was engaged in
+a real labor, anyone who had found expression in some beautiful object
+was truly centered. But politics was a personal drama without meaning or
+a vague abstraction without substance.
+
+Yet there was the fact, just as indisputable as ever, that public affairs
+do have an enormous and intimate effect upon our lives. They make or
+unmake us. They are the foundation of that national vigor through which
+civilizations mature. City and countryside, factories and play, schools
+and the family are powerful influences in every life, and politics is
+directly concerned with them. If politics is irrelevant, it is certainly
+not because its subject matter is unimportant. Public affairs govern our
+thinking and doing with subtlety and persistence.
+
+The trouble, I figured, must be in the way politics is concerned with the
+nation's interests. If public business seems to drift aimlessly, its
+results are, nevertheless, of the highest consequence. In statecraft the
+penalties and rewards are tremendous. Perhaps the approach is distorted.
+Perhaps uncriticised assumptions have obscured the real uses of politics.
+Perhaps an attitude can be worked out which will engage a fresher
+attention. For there are, I believe, blunders in our political thinking
+which confuse fictitious activity with genuine achievement, and make it
+difficult for men to know where they should enlist. Perhaps if we can see
+politics in a different light, it will rivet our creative interests.
+
+These essays, then, are an attempt to sketch an attitude towards
+statecraft. I have tried to suggest an approach, to illustrate it
+concretely, to prepare a point of view. In selecting for the title "A
+Preface to Politics," I have wished to stamp upon the whole book my own
+sense that it is a beginning and not a conclusion. I have wished to
+emphasize that there is nothing in this book which can be drafted into a
+legislative proposal and presented to the legislature the day after
+to-morrow. It was not written with the notion that these pages would
+contain an adequate exposition of modern political method. Much less was
+it written to further a concrete program. There are, I hope, no
+assumptions put forward as dogmas.
+
+It is a preliminary sketch for a theory of politics, a preface to
+thinking. Like all speculation about human affairs, it is the result of a
+grapple with problems as they appear in the experience of one man. For
+though a personal vision may at times assume an eloquent and universal
+language, it is well never to forget that all philosophies are the
+language of particular men.
+
+                                                  W. L.
+
+46 East 80th Street, NEW YORK CITY, January 1913.
+
+
+
+
+A PREFACE TO POLITICS
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+ROUTINEER AND INVENTOR
+
+
+Politics does not exist for the sake of demonstrating the superior
+righteousness of anybody. It is not a competition in deportment. In fact,
+before you can begin to think about politics at all you have to abandon
+the notion that there is a war between good men and bad men. That is one
+of the great American superstitions. More than any other fetish it has
+ruined our sense of political values by glorifying the pharisee with his
+vain cruelty to individuals and his unfounded approval of himself. You
+have only to look at the Senate of the United States, to see how that
+body is capable of turning itself into a court of preliminary hearings
+for the Last Judgment, wasting its time and our time and absorbing public
+enthusiasm and newspaper scareheads. For a hundred needs of the nation it
+has no thought, but about the precise morality of an historical
+transaction eight years old there is a meticulous interest. Whether in
+the Presidential Campaign of 1904 Roosevelt was aware that the ancient
+tradition of corporate subscriptions had or had not been followed, and
+the exact and ultimate measure of the guilt that knowledge would have
+implied--this in the year 1912 is enough to start the Senate on a
+protracted man-hunt.
+
+Now if one half of the people is bent upon proving how wicked a man is
+and the other half is determined to show how good he is, neither half
+will think very much about the nation. An innocent paragraph in the New
+York Evening Post for August 27, 1912, gives the whole performance away.
+It shows as clearly as words could how disastrous the good-and-bad-man
+theory is to political thinking:
+
+"Provided the first hearing takes place on September 30, it is expected
+that the developments will be made with a view to keeping the Colonel on
+the defensive. After the beginning of October, it is pointed out, the
+evidence before the Committee should keep him so busy explaining and
+denying that the country will not hear much Bull Moose doctrine."
+
+Whether you like the Roosevelt doctrines or not, there can be no two
+opinions about such an abuse of morality. It is a flat public loss,
+another attempt to befuddle our thinking. For if politics is merely a
+guerilla war between the bribed and the unbribed, then statecraft is not
+a human service but a moral testing ground. It is a public amusement, a
+melodrama of real life, in which a few conspicuous characters are tried,
+and it resembles nothing so much as schoolboy hazing which we are told
+exists for the high purpose of detecting a "yellow streak." But even
+though we desired it there would be no way of establishing any clear-cut
+difference in politics between the angels and the imps. The angels are
+largely self-appointed, being somewhat more sensitive to other people's
+tar than their own.
+
+But if the issue is not between honesty and dishonesty, where is it?
+
+If you stare at a checkerboard you can see it as black on red, or red on
+black, as series of horizontal, vertical or diagonal steps which recede
+or protrude. The longer you look the more patterns you can trace, and the
+more certain it becomes that there is no single way of looking at the
+board. So with political issues. There is no obvious cleavage which
+everyone recognizes. Many patterns appear in the national life. The
+"progressives" say the issue is between "Privilege" and the "People"; the
+Socialists, that it is between the "working class" and the "master
+class." An apologist for dynamite told me once that society was divided
+into the weak and the strong, and there are people who draw a line
+between Philistia and Bohemia.
+
+When you rise up and announce that the conflict is between this and that,
+you mean that this particular conflict interests you. The issue of
+good-and-bad-men interests this nation to the exclusion of almost all
+others. But experience shows, I believe, that it is a fruitless conflict
+and a wasting enthusiasm. Yet some distinction must be drawn if we are to
+act at all in politics. With nothing we are for and nothing to oppose, we
+are merely neutral. This cleavage in public affairs is the most important
+choice we are called upon to make. In large measure it determines the
+rest of our thinking. Now some issues are fertile; some are not. Some
+lead to spacious results; others are blind alleys. With this in mind I
+wish to suggest that the distinction most worth emphasizing to-day is
+between those who regard government as a routine to be administered and
+those who regard it as a problem to be solved.
+
+The class of routineers is larger than the conservatives. The man who
+will follow precedent, but never create one, is merely an obvious example
+of the routineer. You find him desperately numerous in the civil service,
+in the official bureaus. To him government is something given as
+unconditionally, as absolutely as ocean or hill. He goes on winding the
+tape that he finds. His imagination has rarely extricated itself from
+under the administrative machine to gain any sense of what a human,
+temporary contraption the whole affair is. What he thinks is the heavens
+above him is nothing but the roof.
+
+He is the slave of routine. He can boast of somewhat more spiritual
+cousins in the men who reverence their ancestors' independence, who feel,
+as it were, that a disreputable great-grandfather is necessary to a
+family's respectability. These are the routineers gifted with historical
+sense. They take their forefathers with enormous solemnity. But one
+mistake is rarely avoided: they imitate the old-fashioned thing their
+grandfather did, and ignore the originality which enabled him to do it.
+
+If tradition were a reverent record of those crucial moments when men
+burst through their habits, a love of the past would not be the butt on
+which every sophomoric radical can practice his wit. But almost always
+tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made imitation of the
+habits that our ancestors created. The average conservative is a slave to
+the most incidental and trivial part of his forefathers' glory--to the
+archaic formula which happened to express their genius or the eighteenth
+century contrivance by which for a time it was served. To reverence
+Washington they wear a powdered wig; they do honor to Lincoln by
+cultivating awkward hands and ungainly feet.
+
+It is fascinating to watch this kind of conservative in action. From
+Senator Lodge, for example, we do not expect any new perception of
+popular need. We know that probably his deepest sincerity is an attempt
+to reproduce the atmosphere of the Senate a hundred years ago. The
+manners of Mr. Lodge have that immobility which comes from too much
+gazing at bad statues of dead statesmen.
+
+Yet just because a man is in opposition to Senator Lodge there is no
+guarantee that he has freed himself from the routineer's habit of mind. A
+prejudice against some mannerism or a dislike of pretensions may merely
+cloak some other kind of routine. Take the "good government" attitude. No
+fresh insight is behind that. It does not promise anything; it does not
+offer to contribute new values to human life. The machine which exists is
+accepted in all its essentials: the "goo-goo" yearns for a somewhat
+smoother rotation.
+
+Often as not the very effort to make the existing machine run more
+perfectly merely makes matters worse. For the tinkering reformer is
+frequently one of the worst of the routineers. Even machines are not
+altogether inflexible, and sometimes what the reformer regards as a sad
+deviation from the original plans is a poor rickety attempt to adapt the
+machine to changing conditions. Think what would have happened had we
+actually remained stolidly faithful to every intention of the Fathers.
+Think what would happen if every statute were enforced. By the sheer
+force of circumstances we have twisted constitutions and laws to some
+approximation of our needs. A changing country has managed to live in
+spite of a static government machine. Perhaps Bernard Shaw was right when
+he said that "the famous Constitution survives only because whenever any
+corner of it gets into the way of the accumulating dollar it is pettishly
+knocked off and thrown away. Every social development, however beneficial
+and inevitable from the public point of view, is met, not by an
+intelligent adaptation of the social structure to its novelties but by a
+panic and a cry of Go Back."
+
+I am tempted to go further and put into the same class all those radicals
+who wish simply to substitute some other kind of machine for the one we
+have. Though not all of them would accept the name, these reformers are
+simply utopia-makers in action. Their perceptions are more critical than
+the ordinary conservatives'. They do see that humanity is badly squeezed
+in the existing mould. They have enough imagination to conceive a
+different one. But they have an infinite faith in moulds. This routine
+they don't believe in, but they believe in their own: if you could put
+the country under a new "system," then human affairs would run
+automatically for the welfare of all. Some improvement there might be,
+but as almost all men are held in an iron devotion to their own
+creations, the routine reformers are simply working for another
+conservatism, and not for any continuing liberation.
+
+The type of statesman we must oppose to the routineer is one who regards
+all social organization as an instrument. Systems, institutions and
+mechanical contrivances have for him no virtue of their own: they are
+valuable only when they serve the purposes of men. He uses them, of
+course, but with a constant sense that men have made them, that new ones
+can be devised, that only an effort of the will can keep machinery in its
+place. He has no faith whatever in automatic governments. While the
+routineers see machinery and precedents revolving with mankind as
+puppets, he puts the deliberate, conscious, willing individual at the
+center of his philosophy. This reversal is pregnant with a new outlook
+for statecraft. I hope to show that it alone can keep step with life; it
+alone is humanly relevant; and it alone achieves valuable results.
+
+Call this man a political creator or a political inventor. The essential
+quality of him is that he makes that part of existence which has
+experience the master of it. He serves the ideals of human feelings, not
+the tendencies of mechanical things.
+
+The difference between a phonograph and the human voice is that the
+phonograph must sing the song which is stamped upon it. Now there are
+days--I suspect the vast majority of them in most of our lives--when we
+grind out the thing that is stamped upon us. It may be the governing of a
+city, or teaching school, or running a business. We do not get out of bed
+in the morning because we are eager for the day; something external--we
+often call it our duty--throws off the bed-clothes, complains that the
+shaving water isn't hot, puts us into the subway and lands us at our
+office in season for punching the time-check. We revolve with the
+business for three or four hours, signing letters, answering telephones,
+checking up lists, and perhaps towards twelve o'clock the prospect of
+lunch puts a touch of romance upon life. Then because our days are so
+unutterably the same, we turn to the newspapers, we go to the magazines
+and read only the "stuff with punch," we seek out a "show" and drive
+serious playwrights into the poorhouse. "You can go through contemporary
+life," writes Wells, "fudging and evading, indulging and slacking, never
+really hungry nor frightened nor passionately stirred, your highest
+moment a mere sentimental orgasm, and your first real contact with
+primary and elementary necessities the sweat of your death-bed."
+
+The world grinds on: we are a fly on the wheel. That sense of an
+impersonal machine going on with endless reiteration is an experience
+that imaginative politicians face. Often as not they disguise it under
+heroic phrases and still louder affirmation, just as most of us hide our
+cowardly submission to monotony under some word like duty, loyalty,
+conscience. If you have ever been an office-holder or been close to
+officials, you must surely have been appalled by the grim way in which
+committee-meetings, verbose reports, flamboyant speeches, requests, and
+delegations hold the statesman in a mind-destroying grasp. Perhaps this
+is the reason why it has been necessary to retire Theodore Roosevelt from
+public life every now and then in order to give him a chance to learn
+something new. Every statesman like every professor should have his
+sabbatical year.
+
+The revolt against the service of our own mechanical habits is well known
+to anyone who has followed modern thought. As a sharp example one might
+point to Thomas Davidson, whom William James called "individualist à
+outrance".... "Reprehending (mildly) a certain chapter of my own on
+'Habit,' he said that it was a fixed rule with him to form no regular
+habits. When he found himself in danger of settling into even a good one,
+he made a point of interrupting it."
+
+Such men are the sparkling streams that flow through the dusty stretches
+of a nation. They invigorate and emphasize those times in your own life
+when each day is new. Then you are alive, then you drive the world before
+you. The business, however difficult, shapes itself to your effort; you
+seem to manage detail with an inferior part of yourself, while the real
+soul of you is active, planning, light. "I wanted thought like an edge of
+steel and desire like a flame." Eager with sympathy, you and your work
+are reflected from many angles. You have become luminous.
+
+Some people are predominantly eager and wilful. The world does not huddle
+and bend them to a task. They are not, as we say, creatures of
+environment, but creators of it. Of other people's environment they
+become the most active part--the part which sets the fashion. What they
+initiate, others imitate. Theirs is a kind of intrinsic prestige. These
+are the natural leaders of men, whether it be as head of the gang or as
+founder of a religion.
+
+It is, I believe, this power of being aggressively active towards the
+world which gives man a miraculous assurance that the world is something
+he can make. In creative moments men always draw upon "some secret spring
+of certainty, some fundamental well into which no disturbing glimmers
+penetrate." But this is no slack philosophy, for the chance is denied by
+which we can lie back upon the perfection of some mechanical contrivance.
+Yet in the light of it government becomes alert to a process of continual
+creation, an unceasing invention of forms to meet constantly changing
+needs.
+
+This philosophy is not only difficult to practice: it is elusive when you
+come to state it. For our political language was made to express a
+routine conception of government. It comes to us from the Eighteenth
+Century. And no matter how much we talk about the infusion of the
+"evolutionary" point of view into all of modern thought, when the test is
+made political practice shows itself almost virgin to the idea. Our
+theories assume, and our language is fitted to thinking of government as
+a frame--Massachusetts, I believe, actually calls her fundamental law the
+Frame of Government. We picture political institutions as mechanically
+constructed contrivances within which the nation's life is contained and
+compelled to approximate some abstract idea of justice or liberty. These
+frames have very little elasticity, and we take it as an historical
+commonplace that sooner or later a revolution must come to burst the
+frame apart. Then a new one is constructed.
+
+Our own Federal Constitution is a striking example of this machine
+conception of government. It is probably the most important instance we
+have of the deliberate application of a mechanical philosophy to human
+affairs. Leaving out all question of the Fathers' ideals, looking simply
+at the bias which directed their thinking, is there in all the world a
+more plain-spoken attempt to contrive an automatic governor--a machine
+which would preserve its balance without the need of taking human nature
+into account? What other explanation is there for the naïve faith of the
+Fathers in the "symmetry" of executive, legislature, and judiciary; in
+the fantastic attempts to circumvent human folly by balancing it with
+vetoes and checks? No insight into the evident fact that power upsets all
+mechanical foresight and gravitates toward the natural leaders seems to
+have illuminated those historic deliberations. The Fathers had a rather
+pale god, they had only a speaking acquaintance with humanity, so they
+put their faith in a scaffold, and it has been part of our national piety
+to pretend that they succeeded.
+
+They worked with the philosophy of their age. Living in the Eighteenth
+Century, they thought in the images of Newton and Montesquieu. "The
+Government of the United States," writes Woodrow Wilson, "was constructed
+upon the Whig theory of political dynamics, which was a sort of
+unconscious copy of the Newtonian theory of the universe.... As
+Montesquieu pointed out to them (the English Whigs) in his lucid way,
+they had sought to balance executive, legislative and judiciary off
+against one another by a series of checks and counterpoises, which Newton
+might readily have recognized as suggestive of the mechanism of the
+heavens." No doubt this automatic and balanced theory of government
+suited admirably that distrust of the people which seems to have been a
+dominant feeling among the Fathers. For they were the conservatives of
+their day: between '76 and '89 they had gone the usual way of opportunist
+radicals. But had they written the Constitution in the fire of their
+youth, they might have made it more democratic,--I doubt whether they
+would have made it less mechanical. The rebellious spirit of Tom Paine
+expressed itself in logical formulæ as inflexible to the pace of life as
+did the more contented Hamilton's. This is a determinant which burrows
+beneath our ordinary classification of progressive and reactionary to the
+spiritual habits of a period.
+
+If you look into the early utopias of Fourier and Saint-Simon, or better
+still into the early trade unions, this same faith that a government can
+be made to work mechanically is predominant everywhere. All the devices
+of rotation in office, short terms, undelegated authority are simply
+attempts to defeat the half-perceived fact that power will not long stay
+diffused. It is characteristic of these primitive democracies that they
+worship Man and distrust men. They cling to some arrangement, hoping
+against experience that a government freed from human nature will
+automatically produce human benefits. To-day within the Socialist Party
+there is perhaps the greatest surviving example of the desire to offset
+natural leadership by artificial contrivance. It is an article of faith
+among orthodox socialists that personalities do not count, and I
+sincerely believe I am not exaggerating the case when I say that their
+ideal of government is like Gordon Craig's ideal of the theater--the
+acting is to be done by a row of supermarionettes. There is a myth among
+socialists to which all are expected to subscribe, that initiative
+springs anonymously out of the mass of the people,--that there are no
+"leaders," that the conspicuous figures are no more influential than the
+figurehead on the prow of a ship.
+
+This is one of the paradoxes of the democratic movement--that it loves a
+crowd and fears the individuals who compose it--that the religion of
+humanity should have had no faith in human beings. Jealous of all
+individuals, democracies have turned to machines. They have tried to blot
+out human prestige, to minimize the influence of personality. That there
+is historical justification for this fear is plain enough. To put it
+briefly, democracy is afraid of the tyrant. That explains, but does not
+justify. Governments have to be carried on by men, however much we
+distrust them. Nobody has yet invented a mechanically beneficent
+sovereign.
+
+Democracy has put an unfounded faith in automatic contrivances. Because
+it left personality out of its speculation, it rested in the empty faith
+that it had excluded it from reality. But in the actual stress of life
+these frictions do not survive ten minutes. Public officials do not
+become political marionettes, though people pretend that they are. When
+theory runs against the grain of living forces, the result is a deceptive
+theory of politics. If the real government of the United States "had, in
+fact," as Woodrow Wilson says, "been a machine governed by mechanically
+automatic balances, it would have had no history; but it was not, and its
+history has been rich with the influence and personalities of the men who
+have conducted it and made it a living reality." Only by violating the
+very spirit of the constitution have we been able to preserve the letter
+of it. For behind that balanced plan there grew up what Senator Beveridge
+has called so brilliantly the "invisible government," an empire of
+natural groups about natural leaders. Parties are such groups: they have
+had a power out of all proportion to the intentions of the Fathers.
+Behind the parties has grown up the "political machine"--falsely called a
+machine, the very opposite of one in fact, a natural sovereignty, I
+believe. The really rigid and mechanical thing is the charter behind
+which Tammany works. For Tammany is the real government that has defeated
+a mechanical foresight. Tammany is not a freak, a strange and monstrous
+excrescence. Its structure and the laws of its life are, I believe,
+typical of all real sovereignties. You can find Tammany duplicated
+wherever there is a social group to be governed--in trade unions, in
+clubs, in boys' gangs, in the Four Hundred, in the Socialist Party. It is
+an accretion of power around a center of influence, cemented by
+patronage, graft, favors, friendship, loyalties, habits,--a human
+grouping, a natural pyramid.
+
+Only recently have we begun to see that the "political ring" is not
+something confined to public life. It was Lincoln Steffens, I believe,
+who first perceived that fact. For a time it was my privilege to work
+under him on an investigation of the "Money Power." The leading idea was
+different from customary "muckraking." We were looking not for the evils
+of Big Business, but for its anatomy. Mr. Steffens came to the subject
+with a first-hand knowledge of politics. He knew the "invisible
+government" of cities, states, and the nation. He knew how the boss
+worked, how he organized his power. When Mr. Steffens approached the vast
+confusion and complication of big business, he needed some hypothesis to
+guide him through that maze of facts. He made a bold and brilliant guess,
+an hypothesis. To govern a life insurance company, Mr. Steffens argued,
+was just as much "government" as to run a city. What if political methods
+existed in the realm of business? The investigation was never carried
+through completely, but we did study the methods by which several life
+and fire insurance companies, banks, two or three railroads, and several
+industrials are controlled. We found that the anatomy of Big Business was
+strikingly like that of Tammany Hall: the same pyramiding of influence,
+the same tendency of power to center on individuals who did not
+necessarily sit in the official seats, the same effort of human
+organization to grow independently of legal arrangements. Thus in the
+life insurance companies, and the Hughes investigation supports this, the
+real power was held not by the president, not by the voters or
+policy-holders, but by men who were not even directors. After a while we
+took it as a matter of course that the head of a company was an
+administrative dummy, with a dependence on unofficial power similar to
+that of Governor Dix on Boss Murphy. That seems to be typical of the
+whole economic life of this country. It is controlled by groups of men
+whose influence extends like a web to smaller, tributary groups, cutting
+across all official boundaries and designations, making short work of all
+legal formulæ, and exercising sovereignty regardless of the little fences
+we erect to keep it in bounds.
+
+A glimpse into the labor world revealed very much the same condition. The
+boss, and the bosslet, the heeler--the men who are "it"--all are there
+exercising the real power, the power that independently of charters and
+elections decides what shall happen. I don't wish to have this regarded
+as necessarily malign. It seems so now because we put our faith in the
+ideal arrangements which it disturbs. But if we could come to face it
+squarely--to see that that is what sovereignty is--that if we are to use
+human power for human purposes we must turn to the realities of it, then
+we shall have gone far towards leaving behind us the futile hopes of
+mechanical perfection so constantly blasted by natural facts.
+
+The invisible government is malign. But the evil doesn't come from the
+fact that it plays horse with the Newtonian theory of the constitution.
+What is dangerous about it is that we do not see it, cannot use it, and
+are compelled to submit to it. The nature of political power we shall not
+change. If that is the way human societies organize sovereignty, the
+sooner we face that fact the better. For the object of democracy is not
+to imitate the rhythm of the stars but to harness political power to the
+nation's need. If corporations and governments have indeed gone on a joy
+ride the business of reform is not to set up fences, Sherman Acts and
+injunctions into which they can bump, but to take the wheel and to steer.
+
+The corruption of which we hear so much is certainly not accounted for
+when you have called it dishonesty. It is too widespread for any such
+glib explanation. When you see how business controls politics, it
+certainly is not very illuminating to call the successful business men of
+a nation criminals. Yet I suppose that all of them violate the law. May
+not this constant dodging or hurdling of statutes be a sign that there is
+something the matter with the statutes? Is it not possible that graft is
+the cracking and bursting of the receptacles in which we have tried to
+constrain the business of this country? It seems possible that business
+has had to control politics because its laws were so stupidly
+obstructive. In the trust agitation this is especially plausible. For
+there is every reason to believe that concentration is a world-wide
+tendency, made possible at first by mechanical inventions, fostered by
+the disastrous experiences of competition, and accepted by business men
+through contagion and imitation. Certainly the trusts increase. Wherever
+politics is rigid and hostile to that tendency, there is irritation and
+struggle, but the agglomeration goes on. Hindered by political
+conditions, the process becomes secretive and morbid. The trust is not
+checked, but it is perverted. In 1910 the "American Banker" estimated
+that there were 1,198 corporations with 8,110 subsidiaries liable to all
+the penalties of the Sherman Act. Now this concentration must represent a
+profound impetus in the business world--an impetus which certainly cannot
+be obliterated, even if anyone were foolish enough to wish it. I venture
+to suggest that much of what is called "corruption" is the odor of a
+decaying political system done to death by an economic growth.
+
+It is our desperate adherence to an old method that has produced the
+confusion of political life. Because we have insisted upon looking at
+government as a frame and governing as a routine, because in short we
+have been static in our theories, politics has such an unreal relation to
+actual conditions. Feckless--that is what our politics is. It is
+literally eccentric: it has been centered mechanically instead of
+vitally. We have, it seems, been seduced by a fictitious analogy: we have
+hoped for machine regularity when we needed human initiative and
+leadership, when life was crying that its inventive abilities should be
+freed.
+
+Roosevelt in his term did much to center government truly. For a time
+natural leadership and nominal position coincided, and the administration
+became in a measure a real sovereignty. The routine conception dwindled,
+and the Roosevelt appointees went at issues as problems to be solved.
+They may have been mistaken: Roosevelt may be uncritical in his
+judgments. But the fact remains that the Roosevelt régime gave a new
+prestige to the Presidency by effecting through it the greatest release
+of political invention in a generation. Contrast it with the Taft
+administration, and the quality is set in relief. Taft was the perfect
+routineer trying to run government as automatically as possible. His
+sincerity consisted in utter respect for form: he denied himself whatever
+leadership he was capable of, and outwardly at least he tried to
+"balance" the government. His greatest passions seem to be purely
+administrative and legal. The people did not like it. They said it was
+dead. They were right. They had grown accustomed to a humanly liberating
+atmosphere in which formality was an instrument instead of an idol. They
+had seen the Roosevelt influence adding to the resources of
+life--irrigation, and waterways, conservation, the Panama Canal, the
+"country life" movement. They knew these things were achieved through
+initiative that burst through formal restrictions, and they applauded
+wildly. It was only a taste, but it was a taste, a taste of what
+government might be like.
+
+The opposition was instructive. Apart from those who feared Roosevelt for
+selfish reasons, his enemies were men who loved an orderly adherence to
+traditional methods. They shivered in the emotional gale; they obstructed
+and the gale became destructive. They felt that, along with obviously
+good things, this sudden national fertility might breed a monster--that a
+leadership like Roosevelt's might indeed prove dangerous, as giving birth
+may lead to death.
+
+What the methodically-minded do not see is that the sterility of a
+routine is far more appalling. Not everyone may feel that to push out
+into the untried, and take risks for big prizes, is worth while. Men will
+tell you that government has no business to undertake an adventure, to
+make experiments. They think that safety lies in repetition, that if you
+do nothing, nothing will be done to you. It's a mistake due to poverty of
+imagination and inability to learn from experience. Even the timidest
+soul dare not "stand pat." The indictment against mere routine in
+government is a staggering one.
+
+For while statesmen are pottering along doing the same thing year in,
+year out, putting up the tariff one year and down the next, passing
+appropriation bills and recodifying laws, the real forces in the country
+do not stand still. Vast changes, economic and psychological, take place,
+and these changes demand new guidance. But the routineers are always
+unprepared. It has become one of the grim trade jokes of innovators that
+the one thing you can count upon is that the rulers will come to think
+that they are the apex of human development. For a queer effect of
+responsibility on men is that it makes them try to be as much like
+machines as possible. Tammany itself becomes rigid when it is too
+successful, and only defeat seems to give it new life. Success makes men
+rigid and they tend to exalt stability over all the other virtues; tired
+of the effort of willing they become fanatics about conservatism. But
+conditions change whether statesmen wish them to or not; society must
+have new institutions to fit new wants, and all that rigid conservatism
+can do is to make the transitions difficult. Violent revolutions may be
+charged up to the unreadiness of statesmen. It is because they will not
+see, or cannot see, that feudalism is dead, that chattel slavery is
+antiquated; it is because they have not the wisdom and the audacity to
+anticipate these great social changes; it is because they insist upon
+standing pat that we have French Revolutions and Civil Wars.
+
+But statesmen who had decided that at last men were to be the masters of
+their own history, instead of its victims, would face politics in a truly
+revolutionary manner. It would give a new outlook to statesmanship,
+turning it from the mere preservation of order, the administration of
+political machinery and the guarding of ancient privilege to the
+invention of new political forms, the prevision of social wants, and the
+preparation for new economic growths.
+
+Such a statesmanship would in the '80's have prepared for the trust
+movement. There would have been nothing miraculous in such foresight.
+Standard Oil was dominant by the beginning of the '80's, and
+concentration had begun in sugar, steel and other basic industries. Here
+was an economic tendency of revolutionary significance--the organization
+of business in a way that was bound to change the outlook of a whole
+nation. It had vast potentialities for good and evil--all it wanted was
+harnessing and directing. But the new thing did not fit into the little
+outlines and verbosities which served as a philosophy for our political
+hacks. So they gaped at it and let it run wild, called it names, and
+threw stones at it. And by that time the force was too big for them. An
+alert statesmanship would have facilitated the process of concentration;
+would have made provision for those who were cast aside; would have been
+an ally of trust building, and by that very fact it would have had an
+internal grip on the trust--it would have kept the trust's inner workings
+public; it could have bent the trust to social uses.
+
+This is not mere wisdom after the event. In the '80's there were hundreds
+of thousands of people in the world who understood that the trust was a
+natural economic growth. Karl Marx had proclaimed it some thirty years
+before, and it was a widely circulated idea. Is it asking too much of a
+statesman if we expect him to know political theory and to balance it
+with the facts he sees? By the '90's surely, the egregious folly of a
+Sherman Anti-Trust Law should have been evident to any man who pretended
+to political leadership. Yet here it is the year 1912 and that monument
+of economic ignorance and superstition is still worshiped with the lips
+by two out of the three big national parties.
+
+Another movement--like that of the trust--is gathering strength to-day.
+It is the unification of wage-workers. We stand in relation to it as the
+men of the '80's did to the trusts. It is the complement of that problem.
+It also has vast potentialities for good and evil. It, too, demands
+understanding and direction. It, too, will not be stopped by hard names
+or injunctions.
+
+What we loosely call "syndicalism" is a tendency that no statesman can
+overlook to-day without earning the jeers of his children. This labor
+movement has a destructive and constructive energy within it. On its
+beneficent side it promises a new professional interest in work,
+self-education, and the co-operative management of industry. But this
+creative power is constantly choked off because the unions are compelled
+to fight for their lives--the more opposition they meet the more you are
+likely to see of sabotage, direct action, the grève perlée--the less
+chance there is for the educative forces to show themselves. Then, the
+more violent syndicalism proves itself to be, the more hysterically we
+bait it in the usual vicious circle of ignorance.
+
+But who amongst us is optimistic enough to hope that the men who sit in
+the mighty positions are going to make a better show of themselves than
+their predecessors did over the trust problem? It strains hope a little
+too much. Those men in Washington, most of them lawyers, are so educated
+that they are practically incapable of meeting a new condition. All their
+training plus all their natural ossification of mind is hostile to
+invention. You cannot endow even the best machine with initiative; the
+jolliest steam-roller will not plant flowers.
+
+The thought-processes in Washington are too lumbering for the needs of
+this nation. Against that evil muckraking ought to be directed. Those
+senators and representatives are largely irrelevant; they are not
+concerned with realities. Their dishonesties are comparatively
+insignificant. The scorn of the public should be turned upon the
+emptiness of political thought, upon the fact that those men seem without
+even a conception of the nation's needs. And while they maunder along
+they stifle the forces of life which are trying to break through. It was
+nothing but the insolence of the routineer that forced Gifford Pinchot
+out of the Forest Service. Pinchot in respect to his subject was a fine
+political inventor. But routine forced him out--into what?--into the moil
+and toil of fighting for offices, and there he has cut a poor figure
+indeed. You may say that he has had to spend his energy trying to find a
+chance to use his power. What a wanton waste of talent is that for a
+civilized nation! Wiley is another case of the creative mind harassed by
+the routineers. Judge Lindsey is another--a fine, constructive children's
+judge compelled to be a politician. And of our misuse of the Rockefellers
+and Carnegies--the retrospect is appalling. Here was industrial genius
+unquestionably beyond the ordinary. What did this nation do with it? It
+found no public use for talent. It left that to operate in darkness--then
+opinion rose in an empty fury, made an outlaw of one and a platitudinous
+philanthropist of the other. It could lynch one as a moral monster, when
+as a matter of fact his ideals were commonplace; it could proclaim one a
+great benefactor when in truth he was a rather dull old gentleman. Abused
+out of all reason or praised irrelevantly--the one thing this nation has
+not been able to do with these men is to use their genius. It is this
+life-sapping quality of our politics that should be fought--its wanton
+waste of the initiatives we have--its stupid indifference.
+
+We need a new sense of political values. These times require a different
+order of thinking. We cannot expect to meet our problems with a few
+inherited ideas, uncriticised assumptions, a foggy vocabulary, and a
+machine philosophy. Our political thinking needs the infusion of
+contemporary insights. The enormous vitality that is regenerating other
+interests can be brought into the service of politics. Our primary care
+must be to keep the habits of the mind flexible and adapted to the
+movement of real life. The only way to control our destiny is to work
+with it. In politics, at least, we stoop to conquer. There is no use, no
+heroism, in butting against the inevitable, yet nothing is entirely
+inevitable. There is always some choice, some opportunity for human
+direction.
+
+It is not easy. It is far easier to treat life as if it were dead, men as
+if they were dolls. It is everlastingly difficult to keep the mind
+flexible and alert. The rule of thumb is not here. To follow the pace of
+living requires enormous vigilance and sympathy. No one can write
+conclusively about it. Compared with this creative statesmanship, the
+administering of a routine or the battle for a platitude is a very simple
+affair. But genuine politics is not an inhuman task. Part of the
+genuineness is its unpretentious humanity. I am not creating the figure
+of an ideal statesman out of some inner fancy. That is just the deepest
+error of our political thinking--to talk of politics without reference to
+human beings. The creative men appear in public life in spite of the cold
+blanket the politicians throw over them. Really statesmanlike things are
+done, inventions are made. But this real achievement comes to us
+confused, mixed with much that is contradictory. Political inventors are
+to-day largely unconscious of their purpose, and, so, defenceless against
+the distraction of their routineer enemies.
+
+Lacking a philosophy they are defenceless against their own inner
+tendency to sink into repetition. As a witty Frenchman remarked, many
+geniuses become their own disciples. This is true when the attention is
+slack, and effort has lost its direction. We have elaborate governmental
+mechanisms--like the tariff, for example, which we go on making more
+"scientific" year in, year out--having long since lost sight of their
+human purpose. They may be defeating the very ends they were meant to
+serve. We cling to constitutions out of "loyalty." We trudge in the
+treadmill and call it love of our ancient institutions. We emulate the
+mule, that greatest of all routineers.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE TABOO
+
+
+Our government has certainly not measured up to expectations. Even
+chronic admirers of the "balance" and "symmetry" of the Constitution
+admit either by word or deed that it did not foresee the whole history of
+the American people. Poor bewildered statesmen, unused to any notion of
+change, have seen the national life grow to a monstrous confusion and
+sprout monstrous evils by the way. Men and women clamored for remedies,
+vowed, shouted and insisted that their "official servants" do
+something--something statesmanlike--to abate so much evident wrong. But
+their representatives had very little more than a frock coat and a slogan
+as equipment for the task. Trained to interpret a constitution instead of
+life, these statesmen faced with historic helplessness the vociferations
+of ministers, muckrakers, labor leaders, women's clubs, granges and
+reformers' leagues. Out of a tumultuous medley appeared the common theme
+of public opinion--that the leaders should lead, that the governors
+should govern.
+
+The trusts had appeared, labor was restless, vice seemed to be corrupting
+the vitality of the nation. Statesmen had to do something. Their training
+was legal and therefore utterly inadequate, but it was all they had. They
+became panicky and reverted to an ancient superstition. They forbade the
+existence of evil by law. They made it anathema. They pronounced it
+damnable. They threatened to club it. They issued a legislative curse,
+and called upon the district attorney to do the rest. They started out to
+abolish human instincts, check economic tendencies and repress social
+changes by laws prohibiting them. They turned to this sanctified
+ignorance which is rampant in almost any nursery, which presides at
+family councils, flourishes among "reformers"; which from time immemorial
+has haunted legislatures and courts. Under the spell of it men try to
+stop drunkenness by closing the saloons; when poolrooms shock them they
+call a policeman; if Haywood becomes annoying, they procure an
+injunction. They meet the evils of dance halls by barricading them; they
+go forth to battle against vice by raiding brothels and fining
+prostitutes. For trusts there is a Sherman Act. In spite of all
+experience they cling desperately to these superstitions.
+
+It is the method of the taboo, as naïve as barbarism, as ancient as human
+failure.
+
+There is a law against suicide. It is illegal for a man to kill himself.
+What it means in practice, of course, is that there is punishment waiting
+for a man who doesn't succeed in killing himself. We say to the man who
+is tired of life that if he bungles we propose to make this world still
+less attractive by clapping him into jail. I know an economist who has a
+scheme for keeping down the population by refusing very poor people a
+marriage license. He used to teach Sunday school and deplore promiscuity.
+In the annual report of the president of a distilling company I once saw
+the statement that business had increased in the "dry" states. In a
+prohibition town where I lived you could drink all you wanted by
+belonging to a "club" or winking at the druggist. And in another city
+where Sunday closing was strictly enforced, a minister told me with
+painful surprise that the Monday police blotter showed less drunks and
+more wife-beaters.
+
+We pass a law against race-track gambling and add to the profits from
+faro. We raid the faro joints, and drive gambling into the home, where
+poker and bridge whist are taught to children who follow their parents'
+example. We deprive anarchists of free speech by the heavy hand of a
+police magistrate, and furnish them with a practical instead of a
+theoretical argument against government. We answer strikes with bayonets,
+and make treason one of the rights of man.
+
+Everybody knows that when you close the dance halls you fill the parks.
+Men who in their youth took part in "crusades" against the Tenderloin now
+admit in a crestfallen way that they succeeded merely in sprinkling the
+Tenderloin through the whole city. Over twenty years ago we formulated a
+sweeping taboo against trusts. Those same twenty years mark the
+centralization of industry.
+
+The routineer in a panic turns to the taboo. Whatever does not fit into
+his rigid little scheme of things must have its head chopped off. Now
+human nature and the changing social forces it generates are the very
+material which fit least well into most little schemes of things. A man
+cannot sleep in his cradle: whatever is useful must in the nature of life
+become useless. We employ our instruments and abandon them. But nothing
+so simply true as that prevails in politics. When a government routine
+conflicts with the nation's purposes--the statesman actually makes a
+virtue of his loyalty to the routine. His practice is to ignore human
+character and pay no attention to social forces. The shallow presumption
+is that undomesticated impulses can be obliterated; that world-wide
+economic inventions can be stamped out by jailing millionaires--and
+acting in the spirit of Mr. Chesterton's man Fipps "who went mad and ran
+about the country with an axe, hacking branches off the trees whenever
+there were not the same number on both sides." The routineer is, of
+course, the first to decry every radical proposal as "against human
+nature." But the stand-pat mind has forfeited all right to speak for
+human nature. It has devoted the centuries to torturing men's instincts,
+stamping on them, passing laws against them, lifting its eyebrows at the
+thought of them--doing everything but trying to understand them. The same
+people who with daily insistence say that innovators ignore facts are in
+the absurd predicament of trying to still human wants with petty taboos.
+Social systems like ours, which do not even feed and house men and women,
+which deny pleasure, cramp play, ban adventure, propose celibacy and
+grind out monotony, are a clear confession of sterility in statesmanship.
+And politics, however pretentiously rhetorical about ideals, is
+irrelevant if the only method it knows is to ostracize the desires it
+cannot manage.
+
+Suppose that statesmen transferred their reverence from the precedents
+and mistakes of their ancestors to the human material which they have set
+out to govern. Suppose they looked mankind in the face and asked
+themselves what was the result of answering evil with a prohibition. Such
+an exercise would, I fear, involve a considerable strain on what
+reformers call their moral sensibilities. For human nature is a rather
+shocking affair if you come to it with ordinary romantic optimism.
+Certainly the human nature that figures in most political thinking is a
+wraith that never was--not even in the souls of politicians. "Idealism"
+creates an abstraction and then shudders at a reality which does not
+answer to it. Now statesmen who have set out to deal with actual life
+must deal with actual people. They cannot afford an inclusive pessimism
+about mankind. Let them have the consistency and good sense to cease
+bothering about men if men's desires seem intrinsically evil. Moral
+judgment about the ultimate quality of character is dangerous to a
+politician. He is too constantly tempted to call a policeman when he
+disapproves.
+
+We must study our failures. Gambling and drink, for example, produce much
+misery. But what reformers have to learn is that men don't gamble just
+for the sake of violating the law. They do so because something within
+them is satisfied by betting or drinking. To erect a ban doesn't stop the
+want. It merely prevents its satisfaction. And since this desire for
+stimulants or taking a chance at a prize is older and far more deeply
+rooted in the nature of men than love of the Prohibition Party or
+reverence for laws made at Albany, people will contrive to drink and
+gamble in spite of the acts of a legislature.
+
+A man may take liquor for a variety of reasons: he may be thirsty; or
+depressed; or unusually happy; he may want the companionship of a saloon,
+or he may hope to forget a scolding wife. Perhaps he needs a "bracer" in
+a weary hunt for a job. Perhaps he has a terrible craving for alcohol. He
+does not take a drink so that he may become an habitual drunkard, or be
+locked up in jail, or get into a brawl, or lose his job, or go insane.
+These are what he might call the unfortunate by-products of his desire.
+If once he could find something which would do for him what liquor does,
+without hurting him as liquor does, there would be no problem of drink.
+Bernard Shaw says he has found that substitute in going to church when
+there's no service. Goethe wrote "The Sorrows of Werther" in order to get
+rid of his own. Many an unhappy lover has found peace by expressing his
+misery in sonnet form. The problem is to find something for the common
+man who is not interested in contemporary churches and who can't write
+sonnets.
+
+When the socialists in Milwaukee began to experiment with municipal
+dances they were greeted with indignant protests from the "anti-vice"
+element and with amused contempt by the newspaper paragraphers. The
+dances were discontinued, and so the belief in their failure is complete.
+I think, though, that Mayor Seidel's defense would by itself make this
+experiment memorable. He admitted freely the worst that can be said
+against the ordinary dance hall. So far he was with the petty reformers.
+Then he pointed out with considerable vehemence that dance halls were an
+urgent social necessity. At that point he had transcended the mind of the
+petty reformer completely. "We propose," said Seidel, "to go into
+competition with the devil."
+
+Nothing deeper has come from an American mayor in a long, long time. It
+is the point that Jane Addams makes in the opening pages of that wisely
+sweet book, "The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets." She calls
+attention to the fact that the modern state has failed to provide for
+pleasure. "This stupid experiment," she writes, "of organizing work and
+failing to organize play has, of course, brought about a fine revenge.
+The love of pleasure will not be denied, and when it has turned into all
+sorts of malignant and vicious appetites, then we, the middle-aged, grow
+quite distracted and resort to all sorts of restrictive measures."
+
+For human nature seems to have wants that must be filled. If nobody else
+supplies them, the devil will. The demand for pleasure, adventure,
+romance has been left to the devil's catering for so long a time that
+most people think he inspires the demand. He doesn't. Our neglect is the
+devil's opportunity. What we should use, we let him abuse, and the
+corruption of the best things, as Hume remarked, produces the worst.
+Pleasure in our cities has become tied to lobster palaces, adventure to
+exalted murderers, romance to silly, mooning novels. Like the flower girl
+in Galsworthy's play, we have made a very considerable confusion of the
+life of joy and the joy of life. The first impulse is to abolish all
+lobster palaces, melodramas, yellow newspapers, and sentimentally erotic
+novels. Why not abolish all the devil's works? the reformer wonders. The
+answer is in history. It can't be done that way. It is impossible to
+abolish either with a law or an axe the desires of men. It is dangerous,
+explosively dangerous, to thwart them for any length of time. The
+Puritans tried to choke the craving for pleasure in early New England.
+They had no theaters, no dances, no festivals. They burned witches
+instead.
+
+We rail a good deal against Tammany Hall. Reform tickets make periodic
+sallies against it, crying economy, efficiency, and a business
+administration. And we all pretend to be enormously surprised when the
+"ignorant foreign vote" prefers a corrupt political ring to a party of
+well-dressed, grammatical, and high-minded gentlemen. Some of us are even
+rather downcast about democracy because the Bowery doesn't take to heart
+the admonitions of the Evening Post.
+
+We forget completely the important wants supplied by Tammany Hall. We
+forget that this is a lonely country for an immigrant and that the Statue
+of Liberty doesn't shed her light with too much warmth. Possessing
+nothing but a statistical, inhuman conception of government, the average
+municipal reformer looks down contemptuously upon a man like Tim Sullivan
+with his clambakes and his dances; his warm and friendly saloons, his
+handshaking and funeral-going and baby-christening; his readiness to get
+coal for the family, and a job for the husband. But a Tim Sullivan is
+closer to the heart of statesmanship than five City Clubs full of people
+who want low taxes and orderly bookkeeping. He does things which have to
+be done. He humanizes a strange country; he is a friend at court; he
+represents the legitimate kindliness of government, standing between the
+poor and the impersonal, uninviting majesty of the law. Let no man wonder
+that Lorimer's people do not prefer an efficiency expert, that a Tim
+Sullivan has power, or that men are loyal to Hinky Dink. The cry raised
+against these men by the average reformer is a piece of cold, unreal,
+preposterous idealism compared to the solid warm facts of kindliness,
+clothes, food and fun.
+
+You cannot beat the bosses with the reformer's taboo. You will not get
+far on the Bowery with the cost unit system and low taxes. And I don't
+blame the Bowery. You can beat Tammany Hall permanently in one way--by
+making the government of a city as human, as kindly, as jolly as Tammany
+Hall. I am aware of the contract-grafts, the franchise-steals, the dirty
+streets, the bribing and the blackmail, the vice-and-crime partnerships,
+the Big Business alliances of Tammany Hall. And yet it seems to me that
+Tammany has a better perception of human need, and comes nearer to being
+what a government should be, than any scheme yet proposed by a group of
+"uptown good government" enthusiasts. Tammany is not a satanic instrument
+of deception, cleverly devised to thwart "the will of the people." It is
+a crude and largely unconscious answer to certain immediate needs, and
+without those needs its power would crumble. That is why I ventured in
+the preceding chapter to describe it as a natural sovereignty which had
+grown up behind a mechanical form of government. It is a poor weed
+compared to what government might be. But it is a real government that
+has power and serves a want, and not a frame imposed upon men from on
+top.
+
+The taboo--the merely negative law--is the emptiest of all the
+impositions from on top. In its long record of failure, in the
+comparative success of Tammany, those who are aiming at social changes
+can see a profound lesson; the impulses, cravings and wants of men must
+be employed. You can employ them well or ill, but you must employ them. A
+group of reformers lounging at a club cannot, dare not, decide to close
+up another man's club because it is called a saloon. Unless the reformer
+can invent something which substitutes attractive virtues for attractive
+vices, he will fail. He will fail because human nature abhors the vacuum
+created by the taboo.
+
+An incident in the international peace propaganda illuminates this point.
+Not long ago a meeting in Carnegie Hall, New York, to forward peace among
+nations broke up in great disorder. Thousands of people who hate the
+waste and futility of war as much as any of the orators of that evening
+were filled with an unholy glee. They chuckled with delight at the idea
+of a riot in a peace meeting. Though it would have seemed perverse to the
+ordinary pacificist, this sentiment sprang from a respectable source. It
+had the same ground as the instinctive feeling of nine men in ten that
+Roosevelt has more right to talk about peace than William Howard Taft.
+James made it articulate in his essay on "The Moral Equivalent of War."
+James was a great advocate of peace, but he understood Theodore Roosevelt
+and he spoke for the military man when he wrote of war that: "Its
+'horrors' are a cheap price to pay for rescue from the only alternative
+supposed, of a world of clerks and teachers, of co-education and
+zo-ophily, of 'consumers' leagues' and 'associated charities,' of
+industrialism unlimited, and feminism unabashed. No scorn, no hardness,
+no valor any more! Fie upon such a cattleyard of a planet!"
+
+And he added: "So far as the central essence of this feeling goes, no
+healthy minded person, it seems to me, can help to some degree partaking
+of it. Militarism is the great preserver of our ideals of hardihood, and
+human life with no use for hardihood would be contemptible. Without risks
+or prizes for the darer, history would be insipid indeed; and there is a
+type of military character which everyone feels that the race should
+never cease to breed, for everyone is sensitive to its superiority."
+
+So William James proposed not the abolition of war, but a moral
+equivalent for it. He dreamed of "a conscription of the whole youthful
+population to form for a certain number of years a part of the army
+enlisted against _Nature_.... The military ideals of hardihood and
+discipline would be wrought into the growing fibre of the people; no one
+would remain blind, as the luxurious classes now are blind, to man's
+relations to the globe he lives on, and to the permanently sour and hard
+foundations of his higher life." Now we are not concerned here over the
+question of this particular proposal. The telling point in my opinion is
+this: that when a wise man, a student of human nature, and a reformer met
+in the same person, the taboo was abandoned. James has given us a lasting
+phrase when he speaks of the "moral equivalent" of evil. We can use it, I
+believe, as a guide post to statesmanship. Rightly understood, the idea
+behind the words contains all that is valuable in conservatism, and, for
+the first time, gives a reputable meaning to that tortured epithet
+"constructive."
+
+"The military feelings," says James, "are too deeply grounded to abdicate
+their place among our ideals until better substitutes are offered ...
+such a conscription, with the state of public opinion that would have
+required it, and the many moral fruits it would bear, would preserve in
+the midst of a pacific civilization the manly virtues which the military
+party is so afraid of seeing disappear in peace.... So far, war has been
+the only force that can discipline a whole community, and until an
+equivalent discipline is organized I believe that war must have its way.
+But I have no serious doubt that the ordinary prides and shames of social
+man, once developed to a certain intensity, are capable of organizing
+such a moral equivalent as I have sketched, or some other just as
+effective for preserving manliness of type. It is but a question of time,
+of skilful propagandism, and of opinion-making men seizing historic
+opportunities. The martial type of character can be bred without war."
+
+To find for evil its moral equivalent is to be conservative about values
+and radical about forms, to turn to the establishment of positively good
+things instead of trying simply to check bad ones, to emphasize the
+additions to life, instead of the restrictions upon it, to substitute, if
+you like, the love of heaven for the fear of hell. Such a program means
+the dignified utilization of the whole nature of man. It will recognize
+as the first test of all political systems and moral codes whether or not
+they are "against human nature." It will insist that they be cut to fit
+the whole man, not merely a part of him. For there are utopian proposals
+made every day which cover about as much of a human being as a beautiful
+hat does.
+
+Instead of tabooing our impulses, we must redirect them. Instead of
+trying to crush badness we must turn the power behind it to good account.
+The assumption is that every lust is capable of some civilized
+expression.
+
+We say, in effect, that evil is a way by which desire expresses itself.
+The older moralists, the taboo philosophers believed that the desires
+themselves were inherently evil. To us they are the energies of the soul,
+neither good nor bad in themselves. Like dynamite, they are capable of
+all sorts of uses, and it is the business of civilization, through the
+family and the school, religion, art, science, and all institutions, to
+transmute these energies into fine values. Behind evil there is power,
+and it is folly,--wasting and disappointing folly,--to ignore this power
+because it has found an evil issue. All that is dynamic in human
+character is in these rooted lusts. The great error of the taboo has been
+just this: that it believed each desire had only one expression, that if
+that expression was evil the desire itself was evil. We know a little
+better to-day. We know that it is possible to harness desire to many
+interests, that evil is one form of a desire, and not the nature of it.
+
+This supplies us with a standard for judging reforms, and so makes clear
+what "constructive" action really is. When it was discovered recently
+that the boys' gang was not an unmitigated nuisance to be chased by a
+policeman, but a force that could be made valuable to civilization
+through the Boy Scouts, a really constructive reform was given to the
+world. The effervescence of boys on the street, wasted and perverted
+through neglect or persecution, was drained and applied to fine uses.
+When Percy MacKaye pleads for pageants in which the people themselves
+participate, he offers an opportunity for expressing some of the lusts of
+the city in the form of an art. The Freudian school of psychologists
+calls this "sublimation." They have brought forward a wealth of material
+which gives us every reason to believe that the theory of "moral
+equivalents" is soundly based, that much the same energies produce crime
+and civilization, art, vice, insanity, love, lust, and religion. In each
+individual the original differences are small. Training and opportunity
+decide in the main how men's lust shall emerge. Left to themselves, or
+ignorantly tabooed, they break forth in some barbaric or morbid form.
+Only by supplying our passions with civilized interests can we escape
+their destructive force.
+
+I have put it negatively, as a counsel of prudence. But he who has the
+courage of existence will put it triumphantly, crying "yea" as Nietzsche
+did, and recognizing that all the passions of men are the motive powers
+of a fine life.
+
+For the roads that lead to heaven and hell are one until they part.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE CHANGING FOCUS
+
+
+The taboo, however useless, is at least concrete. Although it achieves
+little besides mischief, it has all the appearance of practical action,
+and consequently enlists the enthusiasm of those people whom Wells
+describes as rushing about the country shouting: "For Gawd's sake let's
+_do_ something _now_." There are weight and solidity in a policeman's
+club, while a "moral equivalent" happens to be pale like the stuff of
+which dreams are made. To the politician whose daily life consists in
+dodging the thousand and one conflicting prejudices of his constituents,
+in bickering with committees, intriguing and playing for the vote; to the
+business man harassed on four sides by the trust, the union, the law, and
+public opinion,--distrustful of any wide scheme because the stupidity of
+his shipping clerk is the most vivid item in his mind, all this
+discussion about politics and the inner life will sound like so much
+fine-spun nonsense.
+
+I, for one, am not disposed to blame the politicians and the business
+men. They govern the nation, it is true, but they do it in a rather
+absentminded fashion. Those revolutionists who see the misery of the
+country as a deliberate and fiendish plot overestimate the bad will, the
+intelligence and the singleness of purpose in the ruling classes.
+Business and political leaders don't mean badly; the trouble with them is
+that most of the time they don't mean anything. They picture themselves
+as very "practical," which in practice amounts to saying that nothing
+makes them feel so spiritually homeless as the discussion of values and
+an invitation to examine first principles. Ideas, most of the time, cause
+them genuine distress, and are as disconcerting as an idle office boy, or
+a squeaky telephone.
+
+I do not underestimate the troubles of the man of affairs. I have lived
+with politicians,--with socialist politicians whose good-will was
+abundant and intentions constructive. The petty vexations pile up into
+mountains; the distracting details scatter the attention and break up
+thinking, while the mere problem of exercising power crowds out
+speculation about what to do with it. Personal jealousies interrupt
+co-ordinated effort; committee sessions wear out nerves by their aimless
+drifting; constant speech-making turns a man back upon a convenient
+little store of platitudes--misunderstanding and distortion dry up the
+imagination, make thought timid and expression flat, the atmosphere of
+publicity requires a mask which soon becomes the reality. Politicians
+tend to live "in character," and many a public figure has come to imitate
+the journalism which describes him. You cannot blame politicians if their
+perceptions are few and their thinking crude.
+
+Football strategy does not originate in a scrimmage: it is useless to
+expect solutions in a political campaign. Woodrow Wilson brought to
+public life an exceedingly flexible mind,--many of us when he first
+emerged rejoiced at the clean and athletic quality of his thinking. But
+even he under the stress of a campaign slackened into commonplace
+reiteration, accepting a futile and intellectually dishonest platform,
+closing his eyes to facts, misrepresenting his opponents, abandoning, in
+short, the very qualities which distinguished him. It is understandable.
+When a National Committee puts a megaphone to a man's mouth and tells him
+to yell, it is difficult for him to hear anything.
+
+If a nation's destiny were really bound up with the politics reported in
+newspapers, the impasse would be discouraging. If the important
+sovereignty of a country were in what is called its parliamentary life,
+then the day of Plato's philosopher-kings would be far off indeed.
+Certainly nobody expects our politicians to become philosophers. When
+they do they hide the fact. And when philosophers try to be politicians
+they generally cease to be philosophers. But the truth is that we
+overestimate enormously the importance of nominations, campaigns, and
+office-holding. If we are discouraged it is because we tend to identify
+statecraft with that official government which is merely one of its
+instruments. Vastly over-advertised, we have mistaken an inflated fragment
+for the real political life of the country.
+
+For if you think of men and their welfare, government appears at once as
+nothing but an agent among many others. The task of civilizing our
+impulses by creating fine opportunities for their expression cannot be
+accomplished through the City Hall alone. All the influences of social
+life are needed. The eggs do not lie in one basket. Thus the issues in
+the trade unions may be far more directly important to statecraft than
+the destiny of the Republican Party. The power that workingmen generate
+when they unite--the demands they will make and the tactics they will
+pursue--how they are educating themselves and the nation--these are
+genuine issues which bear upon the future. So with the policies of
+business men. Whether financiers are to be sullen and stupid like
+Archbold, defiant like Morgan, or well-intentioned like Perkins is a
+question that enters deeply into the industrial issues. The whole
+business problem takes on a new complexion if the representatives of
+capital are to be men with the temper of Louis Brandeis or William C.
+Redfield. For when business careers are made professional, new motives
+enter into the situation; it will make a world of difference if the
+leadership of industry is in the hands of men interested in production as
+a creative art instead of as a brute exploitation. The economic conflicts
+are at once raised to a plane of research, experiment and honest
+deliberation. For on the level of hate and mean-seeking no solution is
+possible. That subtle fact,--the change of business motives, the
+demonstration that industry can be conducted as medicine is,--may
+civilize the whole class conflict.
+
+Obviously statecraft is concerned with such a change, extra-political
+though it is. And wherever the politician through his prestige or the
+government through its universities can stimulate a revolution in
+business motives, it should do so. That is genuinely constructive work,
+and will do more to a humane solution of the class struggle than all the
+jails and state constabularies that ever betrayed the barbarism of the
+Twentieth Century. It is no wonder that business is such a sordid affair.
+We have done our best to exclude from it every passionate interest that
+is capable of lighting up activity with eagerness and joy.
+"Unbusinesslike" we have called the devotion of craftsmen and scientists.
+We have actually pretended that the work of extracting a living from
+nature could be done most successfully by short-sighted money-makers
+encouraged by their money-spending wives. We are learning better to-day.
+We are beginning to know that this nation for all its boasts has not
+touched the real possibilities of business success, that nature and good
+luck have done most of our work, that our achievements come in spite of
+our ignorance. And so no man can gauge the civilizing possibilities of a
+new set of motives in business. That it will add to the dignity and value
+of millions of careers is only one of its blessings. Given a nation of
+men trained to think scientifically about their work and feel about it as
+craftsmen, and you have a people released from a stupid fixation upon the
+silly little ideals of accumulating dollars and filling their neighbor's
+eye. We preach against commercialism but without great result. And the
+reason for our failure is: that we merely say "you ought not" instead of
+offering a new interest. Instead of telling business men not to be
+greedy, we should tell them to be industrial statesmen, applied
+scientists, and members of a craft. Politics can aid that revolution in a
+hundred Ways: by advocating it, by furnishing schools that teach,
+laboratories that demonstrate, by putting business on the same plane of
+interest as the Health Service.
+
+The indictment against politics to-day is not its corruption, but its
+lack of insight. I believe it is a fact which experience will sustain
+that men steal because they haven't anything better to do. You don't have
+to preach honesty to men with a creative purpose. Let a human being throw
+the energies of his soul into the making of something, and the instinct
+of workmanship will take care of his honesty. The writers who have
+nothing to say are the ones that you can buy: the others have too high a
+price. A genuine craftsman will not adulterate his product: the reason
+isn't because duty says he shouldn't, but because passion says he
+couldn't. I suggested in an earlier chapter that the issue of honesty and
+dishonesty was a futile one, and I placed faith in the creative men. They
+hate shams and the watering of goods on a more trustworthy basis than the
+mere routine moralist. To them dishonesty is a contradiction of their own
+lusts, and they ask no credit, need none, for being true. Creation is an
+emotional ascent, which makes the standard vices trivial, and turns all
+that is valuable in virtue to the service of desire.
+
+When politics revolves mechanically it ceases to use the real energies of
+a nation. Government is then at once irrelevant and mischievous--a mere
+obstructive nuisance. Not long ago a prominent senator remarked that he
+didn't know much about the country, because he had spent the last few
+months in Washington. It was a profound utterance as anyone can testify
+who reads, let us say, the Congressional Record. For that document,
+though replete with language, is singularly unacquainted with the forces
+that agitate the nation. Politics, as the contributors to the
+Congressional Record seem to understand it, is a very limited selection
+of well-worn debates on a few arbitrarily chosen "problems." Those
+questions have developed a technique and an interest in them for their
+own sake. They are handled with a dull solemnity quite out of proportion
+to their real interest. Labor receives only a perfunctory and largely
+disingenuous attention; even commerce is handled in a way that expresses
+neither its direction nor its public use. Congress has been ready enough
+to grant favors to corporations, but where in its wrangling from the
+Sherman Act to the Commerce Court has it shown any sympathetic
+understanding of the constructive purposes in the trust movement? It has
+either presented the business man with money or harassed him with
+bungling enthusiasm in the pretended interests of the consumer. The one
+thing Congress has not done is to use the talents of business men for the
+nation's advantage.
+
+If "politics" has been indifferent to forces like the union and the
+trust, it is no exaggeration to say that it has displayed a modest
+ignorance of women's problems, of educational conflicts and racial
+aspirations; of the control of newspapers and magazines, the book
+publishing world, socialist conventions and unofficial political groups
+like the single-taxers.
+
+Such genuine powers do not absorb our political interest because we are
+fooled by the regalia of office. But statesmanship, if it is to be
+relevant, would obtain a new perspective on these dynamic currents, would
+find out the wants they express and the energies they contain, would
+shape and direct and guide them. For unions and trusts, sects, clubs and
+voluntary associations stand for actual needs. The size of their
+following, the intensity of their demands are a fair index of what the
+statesman must think about. No lawyer created a trust though he drew up
+its charter; no logician made the labor movement or the feminist
+agitation. If you ask what for political purposes a nation is, a
+practical answer would be: it is its "movements." They are the social
+_life_. So far as the future is man-made it is made of them. They show
+their real vitality by a relentless growth in spite of all the little
+fences and obstacles that foolish politicians devise.
+
+There is, of course, much that is dead within the movements. Each one
+carries along a quantity of inert and outworn ideas,--not infrequently
+there is an internally contradictory current. Thus the very workingmen
+who agitate for a better diffusion of wealth display a marked hostility
+to improvements in the production of it. The feminists too have their
+atavisms: not a few who object to the patriarchal family seem inclined to
+cure it by going back still more--to the matriarchal. Constructive
+business has no end of reactionary moments----the most striking, perhaps,
+is when it buys up patents in order to suppress them. Yet these
+inversions, though discouraging, are not essential in the life of
+movements. They need to be expurgated by an unceasing criticism; yet in
+bulk the forces I have mentioned, and many others less important, carry
+with them the creative powers of our times.
+
+It is not surprising that so many political inventions have been made
+within these movements, fostered by them, and brought to a general public
+notice through their efforts. When some constructive proposal is being
+agitated before a legislative committee, it is customary to unite the
+"movements" in support of it. Trade unions and women's clubs have joined
+hands in many an agitation. There are proposals to-day, like the minimum
+wage, which seem sure of support from consumers' leagues, women's
+federations, trade unions and those far-sighted business men who may be
+called "State Socialists."
+
+In fact, unless a political invention is woven into a social movement it
+has no importance. Only when that is done is it imbued with life. But how
+among countless suggestions is a "cause" to know the difference between a
+true invention and a pipe-dream? There is, of course, no infallible
+touchstone by which we can tell offhand. No one need hope for an easy
+certainty either here or anywhere else in human affairs. No one is
+absolved from experiment and constant revision. Yet there are some
+hypotheses that prima facie deserve more attention than others.
+
+Those are the suggestions which come out of a recognized human need. If a
+man proposed that the judges of the Supreme Court be reduced from nine to
+seven because the number seven has mystical power, we could ignore him.
+But if he suggested that the number be reduced because seven men can
+deliberate more effectively than nine he ought to be given a hearing. Or
+let us suppose that the argument is about granting votes to women. The
+suffragist who bases a claim on the so-called "logic of democracy" is
+making the poorest possible showing for a good cause. I have heard people
+maintain that: "it makes no difference whether women want the ballot, or
+are fit for it, or can do any good with it,--this country is a democracy.
+Democracy means government by the votes of the people. Women are people.
+Therefore women should vote." That in a very simple form is the
+mechanical conception of government. For notice how it ignores human
+wants and human powers--how it subordinates people to a rigid formula. I
+use this crude example because it shows that even the most genuine and
+deeply grounded demands are as yet unable to free themselves entirely
+from a superficial manner of thinking. We are only partially emancipated
+from the mechanical and merely logical tradition of the Eighteenth
+Century. No end of illustrations could be adduced. In the Socialist party
+it has been the custom to denounce the "short ballot." Why? Because it
+reduces the number of elective offices. This is regarded as undemocratic
+for the reason that democracy has come to mean a series of elections.
+According to a logic, the more elections the more democratic. But
+experience has shown that a seven-foot ballot with a regiment of names is
+so bewildering that a real choice is impossible. So it is proposed to cut
+down the number of elective offices, focus the attention on a few
+alternatives, and turn voting into a fairly intelligent performance. Here
+is an attempt to fit political devices to the actual powers of the voter.
+The old, crude form of ballot forgot that finite beings had to operate
+it. But the "democrats" adhere to the multitude of choices because
+"logic" requires them to.
+
+This incident of the "short ballot" illustrates the cleavage between
+invention and routine. The socialists oppose it not because their
+intentions are bad but because on this issue their thinking is
+mechanical. Instead of applying the test of human need, they apply a
+verbal and logical consistency. The "short ballot" in itself is a slight
+affair, but the insight behind it seems to me capable of revolutionary
+development. It is one symptom of the effort to found institutions on
+human nature. There are many others. We might point to the first
+experiments aimed at remedying the helter-skelter of careers by
+vocational guidance. Carried through successfully, this invention of
+Prof. Parsons' is one whose significance in happiness can hardly be
+exaggerated. When you think of the misfits among your acquaintances--the
+lawyers who should be mechanics, the doctors who should be business men,
+the teachers who should have been clerks, and the executives who should
+be doing research in a laboratory--when you think of the talent that
+would be released by proper use, the imagination takes wing at the
+possibilities. What could we not make of the world if we employed its
+genius!
+
+Whoever is working to express special energies is part of a constructive
+revolution. Whoever is removing the stunting environments of our
+occupations is doing the fundamentals of reform. The studies of Miss
+Goldmark of industrial fatigue, recuperative power and maximum
+productivity are contributions toward that distant and desirable period
+when labor shall be a free and joyous activity. Every suggestion which
+turns work from a drudgery to a craft is worth our deepest interest. For
+until then the labor problem will never be solved. The socialist demand
+for a better distribution of wealth is of great consequence, but without
+a change in the very nature of labor society will not have achieved the
+happiness it expects. That is why imaginative socialists have shown so
+great an interest in "syndicalism." There at least in some of its forms,
+we can catch sight of a desire to make all labor a self-governing craft.
+
+The handling of crime has been touched by the modern impetus. The
+ancient, abstract and wholesale "justice" is breaking up into detailed
+and carefully adapted treatment of individual offenders. What this means
+for the child has become common knowledge in late years. Criminology (to
+use an awkward word) is finding a human center. So is education. Everyone
+knows how child study is revolutionizing the school room and the
+curriculum. Why, it seems that Mme. Montessori has had the audacity to
+sacrifice the sacred bench to the interests of the pupil! The traditional
+school seems to be vanishing--that place in which an ill-assorted band of
+youngsters was for a certain number of hours each day placed in the
+vicinity of a text-book and a maiden lady.
+
+I mention these experiments at random. It is not the specific reforms
+that I wish to emphasize but the great possibilities they foreshadow.
+Whether or not we adopt certain special bills, high tariff or low tariff,
+one banking system or another, this trust control or that, is a slight
+gain compared to a change of attitude toward all political problems. The
+reformer bound up in his special propaganda will, of course, object that
+"to get something done is worth more than any amount of talk about new
+ways of looking at political problems." What matters the method, he will
+cry, provided the reform be good? Well, the method matters more than any
+particular reform. A man who couldn't think straight might get the right
+answer to one problem, but how much faith would you have in his capacity
+to solve the next one? If you wanted to educate a child, would you teach
+him to read one play of Shakespeare, or would you teach him to _read_? If
+the world were going to remain frigidly set after next year, we might
+well thank our stars if we blundered into a few decent solutions right
+away. But as there is no prospect of a time when our life will be
+immutably fixed, as we shall, therefore, have to go on inventing, it is
+fair to say that what the world is aching for is not a special reform
+embodied in a particular statute, but a way of going at all problems. The
+lasting value of Darwin, for example, is not in any concrete conclusion
+he reached. His importance to the world lies in the new twist he gave to
+science. He lent it fruitful direction, a different impetus, and the
+results are beyond his imagining.
+
+In that spiritual autobiography of a searching mind, "The New
+Machiavelli," Wells describes his progress from a reformer of concrete
+abuses to a revolutionist in method. "You see," he says, "I began in my
+teens by wanting to plan and build cities and harbors for mankind; I
+ended in the middle thirties by desiring only to serve and increase a
+general process of thought, a process fearless, critical, real-spirited,
+that would in its own time give cities, harbors, air, happiness,
+everything at a scale and quality and in a light altogether beyond the
+match-striking imaginations of a contemporary mind...."
+
+This same veering of interest may be seen in the career of another
+Englishman. I refer to Mr. Graham Wallas. Back in the '80's he was
+working with the Webbs, Bernard Shaw, Sidney Olivier, Annie Besant and
+others in socialist propaganda. Readers of the Fabian Essays know Mr.
+Wallas and appreciate the work of his group. Perhaps more than anyone
+else, the Fabians are responsible for turning English socialist thought
+from the verbalism of the Marxian disciples to the actualities of English
+political life. Their appetite for the concrete was enormous; their
+knowledge of facts overpowering, as the tomes produced by Mr. and Mrs.
+Webb can testify. The socialism of the Fabians soon became a definite
+legislative program which the various political parties were to be
+bulldozed, cajoled and tricked into enacting. It was effective work, and
+few can question the value of it. Yet many admirers have been left with a
+sense of inadequacy.
+
+Unlike the orthodox socialists, the Fabians took an active part in
+immediate politics. "We permeated the party organizations," writes Shaw,
+"and pulled all the wires we could lay our hands on with our utmost
+adroitness and energy.... The generalship of this movement was undertaken
+chiefly by Sidney Webb, who played such bewildering conjuring tricks with
+the Liberal thimbles and the Fabian peas that to this day both the
+Liberals and the sectarian Socialists stand aghast at him." Few Americans
+know how great has been this influence on English political history for
+the last twenty years. The well-known Minority Report of the Poor Law
+Commission bears the Webb signature most conspicuously. Fabianism began
+to achieve a reputation for getting things done--for taking part in
+"practical affairs." Bernard Shaw has found time to do no end of
+campaigning and even the parochial politics of a vestryman has not seemed
+too insignificant for his Fabian enthusiasm. Graham Wallas was a
+candidate in five municipal elections, and has held an important office
+as member of the London County Council.
+
+But the original Fabian enthusiasm has slackened. One might ascribe it to
+a growing sense that concrete programs by themselves will not insure any
+profound regeneration of society. H. G. Wells has been savage and often
+unfair about the Fabian Society, but in "The New Machiavelli" he touched,
+I believe, the real disillusionment. Remington's history is in a way
+symbolic. Here was a successful political reformer, coming more and more
+to a disturbing recognition of his helplessness, perceiving the
+aimlessness and the unreality of political life, and announcing his
+contempt for the "crudification" of all issues. What Remington missed was
+what so many reformers are beginning to miss--an underlying philosophical
+habit.
+
+Mr. Wallas seems to have had much the same experience. In the midst of a
+bustle of activity, politics appeared to have no center to which its
+thinking and doing could be referred. The truth was driven home upon him
+that political science is a science of human relationship with the human
+beings left out. So he writes that "the thinkers of the past, from Plato
+to Bentham and Mill, had each his own view of human nature, and they made
+these views the basis of their speculations on government." But to-day
+"nearly all students of politics analyze institutions and avoid the
+analysis of man." Whoever has read the typical book on politics by a
+professor or a reformer will agree, I think, when he adds: "One feels
+that many of the more systematic books on politics by American University
+professors are useless, just because the writers dealt with abstract men,
+formed on assumptions of which they were unaware and which they have
+never tested either by experience or by study."
+
+An extreme example could be made of Nicholas Murray Butler, President of
+Columbia University. In the space of six months he wrote an impassioned
+defense of "constitutional government," beginning with the question, "Why
+is it that in the United States the words politics and politician have
+associations that are chiefly of evil omen," and then, to make irony
+complete, proceeded at the New York State Republican Convention to do the
+jobbery of Boss Barnes. What is there left but to gasp and wonder whether
+the words of the intellect have anything to do with the facts of life?
+What insight into reality can a man possess who is capable of discussing
+politics and ignoring politicians? What kind of naïveté was it that led
+this educator into asking such a question?
+
+President Butler is, I grant, a caricature of the typical professor. Yet
+what shall we say of the annual harvest of treatises on "labor problems"
+which make no analysis of the mental condition of laboring men; of the
+treatises on marriage and prostitution which gloss over the sexual life
+of the individual? "In the other sciences which deal with human affairs,"
+writes Mr. Wallas, referring to pedagogy and criminology, "this division
+between the study of the thing done and the study of the being who does
+it is not found."
+
+I have in my hands a text-book of six hundred pages which is used in the
+largest universities as a groundwork of political economy. This
+remarkable sentence strikes the eye: "The motives to business activity
+are too familiar to require analysis." But some sense that perhaps the
+"economic man" is not a self-evident creature seems to have touched our
+author. So we are treated to these sapient remarks: "To avoid this
+criticism we will begin with a characterization of the typical business
+man to be found to-day in the United States and other countries in the
+same stage of industrial development. _He has four traits which show
+themselves more or less clearly in all of his acts._" They are first
+"self-interest," but "this does not mean that he is steeped in
+selfishness ..."; secondly, "the larger self," the family, union, club,
+and "in times of emergency his country"; thirdly, "love of independence,"
+for "his ambition is to stand on his own feet"; fourthly, "business
+ethics" which "are not usually as high as the standards professed in
+churches, but they are much higher than current criticisms of business
+would lead one to think." Three-quarters of a page is sufficient for this
+penetrating analysis of motive and is followed by the remark that "these
+four characteristics of the economic man are readily explained by
+reference to the evolutionary process which has brought industrial
+society to its present stage of development."
+
+If those were the generalizations of a tired business man after a heavy
+dinner and a big cigar, they would still seem rather muddled and useless.
+But as the basis of an economic treatise in which "laws" are announced,
+"principles" laid down, reforms criticized as "impracticable," all for
+the benefit of thousands of college students, it is hardly possible to
+exaggerate the folly of such an exhibition. I have taken a book written
+by one eminent professor and evidently approved by others, for they use
+it as a text-book. It is no queer freak. I myself was supposed to read
+that book pretty nearly every week for a year. With hundreds of others I
+was supposed to found my economic understanding upon it. We were actually
+punished for not reading that book. It was given to us as wisdom, as
+modern political economy.
+
+But what goes by the name to-day is a potpourri in which one can
+distinguish descriptions of legal forms, charters and institutions;
+comparative studies of governmental and social machinery; the history of
+institutions, a few "principles" like the law of rent, some moral
+admonitions, a good deal of class feeling, not a little timidity--but
+almost no attempt to cut beneath these manifestations of social life to
+the creative impulses which produce them. The Economic Man--that lazy
+abstraction--is still paraded in the lecture room; the study of human
+nature has not advanced beyond the gossip of old wives.
+
+Graham Wallas touched the cause of the trouble when he pointed out that
+political science to-day discusses institutions and ignores the nature of
+the men who make and live under them. I have heard professors reply that
+it wasn't their business to discuss human nature but to record and
+interpret economic and political facts. Yet if you probe those
+"interpretations" there is no escaping the conclusion that they rest upon
+some notion of what man is like. "The student of politics," writes Mr.
+Wallas, "must, consciously or unconsciously, form a conception of human
+nature, and the less conscious he is of his conception the more likely he
+is to be dominated by it." For politics is an interest of men--a tool
+which they fabricate and use--and no comment has much value if it tries
+to get along without mankind. You might as well try to describe food by
+ignoring the digestion.
+
+Mr. Wallas has called a halt. I think we may say that his is the
+distinction of having turned the study of politics back to the humane
+tradition of Plato and Machiavelli--of having made man the center of
+political investigation. The very title of his book--"Human Nature in
+Politics"--is significant. Now in making that statement, I am aware that
+it is a sweeping one, and I do not mean to imply that Mr. Wallas is the
+only modern man who has tried to think about politics psychologically.
+Here in America alone we have two splendid critics, a man and a woman,
+whose thought flows from an interpretation of human character. Thorstein
+Veblen's brilliant descriptions penetrate deeply into our mental life,
+and Jane Addams has given new hope to many of us by her capacity for
+making ideals the goal of natural desire.
+
+Nor is it just to pass by such a suggestive thinker as Gabriel Tarde,
+even though we may feel that his psychology is too simple and his
+conclusions somewhat overdriven by a favorite theory. The work of Gustav
+Le Bon on "crowds" has, of course, passed into current thought, but I
+doubt whether anyone could say that he had even prepared a basis for a
+new political psychology. His own aversion to reform, his fondness for
+vast epochs and his contempt for current effort have left most of his
+"psychological laws" in the region of interesting literary comment. There
+are, too, any number of "social psychologies," such as those of Ross and
+McDougall. But the trouble with them is that the "psychology" is weak and
+uninformed, distorted by moral enthusiasms, and put out without any
+particular reference to the task of statesmanship. When you come to
+special problems, the literature of the subject picks up. Crime is
+receiving valuable attention, education is profoundly affected,
+alcoholism and sex have been handled for a good while on a psychological
+basis.
+
+But it remained for Mr. Wallas to state the philosophy of the matter--to
+say why the study of human nature must serve politics, and to point out
+how. He has not produced a political psychology, but he has written the
+manifesto for it. As a result, fragmentary investigations can be brought
+together and applied to the work of statecraft. Merely by making these
+researches self-conscious, he has made clearer their goal, given them
+direction, and kindled them to practical action. How necessary this work
+is can be seen in the writing of Miss Addams. Owing to keen insight and
+fine sympathy her thinking has generally been on a human basis. Yet Miss
+Addams is a reformer, and sympathy without an explicit philosophy may
+lead to a distorted enthusiasm. Her book on prostitution seems rather the
+product of her moral fervor than her human insight. Compare it with "The
+Spirit of Youth" or "Newer Ideals of Peace" or "Democracy and Social
+Ethics" and I think you will notice a very considerable willingness to
+gloss over human need in the interests of an unanalyzed reform. To put it
+bluntly, Miss Addams let her impatience get the better of her wisdom. She
+had written brilliantly about sex and its "sublimation," she had
+suggested notable "moral equivalents" for vice, but when she touched the
+white slave traffic its horrors were so great that she also put her faith
+in the policeman and the district attorney. "A New Conscience and an
+Ancient Evil" is an hysterical book, just because the real philosophical
+basis of Miss Addams' thinking was not deliberate enough to withstand the
+shock of a poignant horror.
+
+It is this weakness that Mr. Wallas comes to remedy. He has described
+what political science must be like, and anyone who has absorbed his
+insight has an intellectual groundwork for political observation. No one,
+least of all Mr. Wallas, would claim anything like finality for the
+essay. These labors are not done in a day. But he has deliberately
+brought the study of politics to the only focus which has any rational
+interest for mankind. He has made a plea, and sketched a plan which
+hundreds of investigators the world over must help to realize. If
+political science could travel in the direction suggested, its criticism
+would be relevant, its proposals practical. There would, for the first
+time, be a concerted effort to build a civilization around mankind, to
+use its talent and to satisfy its needs. There would be no more empty
+taboos, no erecting of institutions upon abstract and mechanical
+analogies. Politics would be like education--an effort to develop, train
+and nurture men's impulses. As Montessori is building the school around
+the child, so politics would build all of social life around the human
+being.
+
+That practical issues hang upon these investigations can be shown by an
+example from Mr. Wallas's book. Take the quarrel over socialism. You hear
+it said that without the private ownership of capital people will lose
+ambition and sink into sloth. Many men, just as well aware of present-day
+evils as the socialists, are unwilling to accept the collectivist remedy.
+G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc speak of the "magic of property" as
+the real obstacle to socialism. Now obviously this is a question of
+first-rate importance. If socialism will destroy initiative then only a
+doctrinaire would desire it. But how is the question to be solved? You
+cannot reason it out. Economics, as we know it to-day, is quite incapable
+of answering such a problem, for it is a matter that depends upon
+psychological investigation. When a professor says that socialism is
+impracticable he begs the question, for that amounts to assuming that the
+point at issue is already settled. If he tells you that socialism is
+against human nature, we have a perfect right to ask where he proved the
+possibilities of human nature.
+
+But note how Mr. Wallas approaches the debate: "Children quarrel
+furiously at a very early age over apparently worthless things, and
+collect and hide them long before they can have any clear notion of the
+advantages to be derived from individual possession. Those children who
+in certain charity schools are brought up entirely without personal
+property, even in their clothes or pocket handkerchiefs, show every sign
+of the bad effect on health and character which results from complete
+inability to satisfy a strong inherited instinct.... Some economist ought
+therefore to give us a treatise in which this property instinct is
+carefully and quantitatively examined.... How far can it be eliminated or
+modified by education? Is it satisfied by a leasehold or a life-interest,
+or by such an arrangement of corporate property as is offered by a
+collegiate foundation, or by the provision of a public park? Does it
+require for its satisfaction material and visible things such as land or
+houses, or is the holding, say, of colonial railway shares sufficient? Is
+the absence of unlimited proprietary rights felt more strongly in the
+case of personal chattels (such as furniture and ornaments) than in the
+case of land or machinery? Does the degree and direction of the instinct
+markedly differ among different individuals or races, or between the two
+sexes?"
+
+This puts the argument upon a plane where discussion is relevant. This is
+no trumped-up issue: it is asked by a politician and a socialist seeking
+for a real solution. We need to know whether the "magic of property"
+extends from a man's garden to Standard Oil stocks as anti-socialists
+say, and, conversely, we need to know what is happening to that mass of
+proletarians who own no property and cannot satisfy their instincts even
+with personal chattels.
+
+For if ownership is a human need, we certainly cannot taboo it as the
+extreme communists so dogmatically urge. "Pending ... an inquiry," writes
+Mr. Wallas, "my own provisional opinion is that, like a good many
+instincts of very early evolutionary origin, it can be satisfied by an
+avowed pretense; just as a kitten which is fed regularly on milk can be
+kept in good health if it is allowed to indulge its hunting instinct by
+playing with a bobbin, and a peaceful civil servant satisfies his
+instinct of combat and adventure at golf."
+
+Mr. Wallas takes exactly the same position as William James did when he
+planned a "moral equivalent" for war. Both men illustrate the changing
+focus of political thought. Both try to found statesmanship on human
+need. Both see that there are good and bad satisfactions of the same
+impulse. The routineer with his taboo does not see this, so he attempts
+the impossible task of obliterating the impulse. He differs fundamentally
+from the creative politician who devotes himself to inventing fine
+expressions for human needs, who recognizes that the work of
+statesmanship is in large measure the finding of good substitutes for the
+bad things we want.
+
+This is the heart of a political revolution. When we recognize that the
+focus of politics is shifting from a mechanical to a human center we
+shall have reached what is, I believe, the most essential idea in modern
+politics. More than any other generalization it illuminates the currents
+of our national life and explains the altering tasks of statesmanship.
+
+The old effort was to harness mankind to abstract principles--liberty,
+justice or equality--and to deduce institutions from these high-sounding
+words. It did not succeed because human nature was contrary and restive.
+The new effort proposes to fit creeds and institutions to the wants of
+men, to satisfy their impulses as fully and beneficially as possible.
+
+And yet we do not begin to know our desires or the art of their
+satisfaction. Mr. Wallas's book and the special literature of the subject
+leave no doubt that a precise political psychology is far off indeed. The
+human nature we must put at the center of our statesmanship is only
+partially understood. True, Mr. Wallas works with a psychology that is
+fairly well superseded. But not even the advance-guard to-day, what we
+may call the Freudian school, would claim that it had brought knowledge
+to a point where politics could use it in any very deep or comprehensive
+way. The subject is crude and fragmentary, though we are entitled to call
+it promising.
+
+Yet the fact had better be faced: psychology has not gone far enough, its
+results are still too vague for our purposes. We know very little, and
+what we know has hardly been applied to political problems. That the last
+few years have witnessed a revolution in the study of mental life is
+plain: the effects are felt not only in psychotherapy, but in education,
+morals, religion, and no end of cultural interests. The impetus of Freud
+is perhaps the greatest advance ever made towards the understanding and
+control of human character. But for the complexities of politics it is
+not yet ready. It will take time and endless labor for a detailed study
+of social problems in the light of this growing knowledge.
+
+What then shall we do now? Must we continue to muddle along in the old
+ruts, gazing rapturously at an impotent ideal, until the works of the
+scientists are matured?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE GOLDEN RULE AND AFTER
+
+
+It would indeed be an intolerably pedantic performance for a nation to
+sit still and wait for its scientists to report on their labors. The
+notion is typical of the pitfalls in the path of any theorist who does
+not correct his logic by a constant reference to the movement of life. It
+is true that statecraft must make human nature its basis. It is true that
+its chief task is the invention of forms and institutions which satisfy
+the inner needs of mankind. And it is true that our knowledge of those
+needs and the technique of their satisfaction is hazy, unorganized and
+blundering.
+
+But to suppose that the remedy lies in waiting for monographs from the
+research of the laboratory is to have lost a sense of the rhythm of
+actual affairs. That is not the way things come about: we grow into a new
+point of view: only afterwards, in looking back, do we see the landmarks
+of our progress. Thus it is customary to say that Adam Smith dates the
+change from the old mercantilist economy to the capitalistic economics of
+the nineteenth century. But that is a manner of speech. The old
+mercantilist policy was giving way to early industrialism: a thousand
+unconscious economic and social forces were compelling the change. Adam
+Smith expressed the process, named it, idealized it and made it
+self-conscious. Then because men were clearer about what they were doing,
+they could in a measure direct their destiny.
+
+That is but another way of saying that great revolutionary changes do not
+spring full-armed from anybody's brow. A genius usually becomes the
+luminous center of a nation's crisis,--men see better by the light of
+him. His bias deflects their actions. Unquestionably the doctrine-driven
+men who made the economics of the last century had much to do with the
+halo which encircled the smutted head of industrialism. They put the
+stamp of their genius on certain inhuman practices, and of course it has
+been the part of the academic mind to imitate them ever since. The
+orthodox economists are in the unenviable position of having taken their
+morals from the exploiter and of having translated them into the
+grandiloquent language of high public policy. They gave capitalism the
+sanction of the intellect. When later, Carlyle and Ruskin battered the
+economists into silence with invective and irony they were voicing the
+dumb protest of the humane people of England. They helped to organize a
+formless resentment by endowing it with intelligence and will.
+
+So it is to-day. If this nation did not show an unmistakable tendency to
+put men at the center of politics instead of machinery and things; if
+there were not evidence to prove that we are turning from the sterile
+taboo to the creation of finer environments; if the impetus for shaping
+our destiny were not present in our politics and our life, then essays
+like these would be so much baying at the moon, fantastic and unworthy
+pleas for some irrelevant paradise. But the gropings are there,--vastly
+confused in the tangled strains of the nation's interests. Clogged by the
+confusion, half-choked by stupid blockades, largely unaware of their own
+purposes, it is for criticism, organized research, and artistic
+expression to free and to use these creative energies. They are to be
+found in the aspirations of labor, among the awakened women, in the
+development of business, the diffusion of art and science, in the racial
+mixtures, and many lesser interests which cluster about these greater
+movements.
+
+The desire for a human politics is all about us. It rises to the surface
+in slogans like "human rights above property rights," "the man above the
+dollar." Some measure of its strength is given by the widespread
+imitation these expressions have compelled: politicians who haven't the
+slightest intention of putting men above the dollar, who if they had
+wouldn't know how, take off their hats to the sentiment because it seems
+a key to popular enthusiasm. It must be bewildering to men brought up,
+let us say, in the Hanna school of politics. For here is this nation
+which sixteen years ago vibrated ecstatically to that magic word
+"Prosperity"; to-day statistical rhetoric about size induces little but
+excessive boredom. If you wish to drive an audience out of the hall tell
+it how rich America is; if you wish to stamp yourself an echo of the past
+talk to us young men about the Republican Party's understanding with God
+in respect to bumper crops. But talk to us about "human rights," and
+though you talk rubbish, we'll listen. For our desire is bent that way,
+and anything which has the flavor of this new interest will rivet our
+attention. We are still uncritical. It is only a few years since we began
+to center our politics upon human beings. We have no training in that
+kind of thought. Our schools and colleges have helped us hardly at all.
+We still talk about "humanity" as if it were some strange and mystical
+creature which could not possibly be composed of the grocer, the
+street-car conductor and our aunts.
+
+That the opinion-making people of America are more interested in human
+welfare than in empire or abstract prosperity is an item that no
+statesman can disregard in his thinking. To-day it is no longer necessary
+to run against the grain of the deepest movements of our time. There is
+an ascendant feeling among the people that all achievement should be
+measured in human happiness. This feeling has not always existed.
+Historians tell us that the very idea of progress in well-being is not
+much older than, say, Shakespeare's plays. As a general belief it is
+still more recent. The nineteenth century may perhaps be said to mark its
+popularization. But as a fact of immediate politics, as a touchstone
+applied quickly to all the acts of statecraft in America it belongs to
+the Twentieth Century. There were any number of people who long before
+1900 saw that dollars and men could clash. But their insight had not won
+any general acceptance. It is only within the last few years that the
+human test has ceased to be the property of a small group and become the
+convention of a large majority. A study of magazines and newspapers would
+confirm this rather broad generalization. It would show, I believe, how
+the whole quality of our most impromptu thinking is being influenced by
+human values.
+
+The statesman must look to this largely unorganized drift of desire. He
+will find it clustering about certain big revolts--the unrest of women,
+for example, or the increasing demands of industrial workers. Rightly
+understood, these social currents would, I believe, lead to the central
+issues of life, the vital points upon which happiness depends. They come
+out of necessities. They express desire. They are power.
+
+Thus feminism, arising out of a crisis in sexual conditions, has
+liberated energies that are themselves the motors of any reform. In
+England and America voting has become the symbol of an aspiration as yet
+half-conscious and undefined. What women want is surely something a great
+deal deeper than the privilege of taking part in elections. They are
+looking for a readjustment of their relations to the home, to work, to
+children, to men, to the interests of civilized life. The vote has become
+a convenient peg upon which to hang aspirations that are not at all sure
+of their own meaning. In no insignificant number of cases the vote is a
+cover by which revolutionary demands can be given a conventional front.
+The ballot is at the utmost a beginning, as far-sighted conservatives
+have guessed. Certainly the elimination of "male" from the suffrage
+qualifications will not end the feminist agitation. From the angle of
+statecraft the future of the movement may be said to depend upon the wise
+use of this raw and scattered power. I do not pretend to know in detail
+how this can be done. But I am certain that the task of leadership is to
+organize aspiration in the service of the real interests of life. To-day
+women want--what? They are ready to want something: that describes fairly
+the condition of most suffragettes. Those who like Ellen Key and Olive
+Shreiner and Mrs. Gilman give them real problems to think about are
+drafting that energy into use. By real problems I mean problems of love,
+work, home, children. They are the real interests of feminism because
+they have produced it.
+
+The yearnings of to-day are the symptoms of needs, they point the course
+of invention, they are the energies which animate a social program. The
+most ideally conceived plan of the human mind has only a slight interest
+if it does not harness these instinctive forces. That is the great lesson
+which the utopias teach by their failure--that schemes, however nicely
+arranged, cannot be imposed upon human beings who are interested in other
+things. What ailed Don Quixote was that he and his contemporaries wanted
+different things; the only ideals that count are those which express the
+possible development of an existing force. Reformers must never forget
+that three legs are a Quixotic ideal; two good legs a genuine one.
+
+In actual life, yes, in the moil and toil of propaganda, "movements,"
+"causes" and agitations the statesman-inventor and the political
+psychologist find the raw material for their work. It is not the business
+of the politician to preserve an Olympian indifference to what stupid
+people call "popular whim." Being lofty about the "passing fad" and the
+ephemeral outcry is all very well in the biographies of dead men, but
+rank nonsense in the rulers of real ones. Oscar Wilde once remarked that
+only superficial people disliked the superficial. Nothing, for example,
+could on the surface be more trivial than an interest in baseball scores.
+Yet during the campaign of 1912 the excitement was so great that Woodrow
+Wilson said on the stump he felt like apologizing to the American people
+for daring to be a presidential candidate while the Giants and the Red
+Sox were playing for the championship. Baseball (not so much for those
+who play it), is a colossal phenomenon in American life. Watch the crowds
+in front of a bulletin board, finding a vicarious excitement and an
+abstract relief from the monotony of their own lives. What a second-hand
+civilization it is that grows passionate over a scoreboard with little
+electric lights! What a civilization it is that has learned to enjoy its
+sport without even seeing it! If ever there was a symptom that this
+nation needed leisure and direct participation in games, it is that poor
+scrawny substitute for joy--the baseball extra.
+
+It is as symptomatic as the labor union. It expresses need. And
+statesmanship would find an answer. It would not let that passion and
+loyalty be frittered away to drift like scum through the nation. It would
+see in it the opportunity of art, play, and religion. So with what looks
+very different--the "syndicalist movement." Perhaps it seems preposterous
+to discuss baseball and syndicalism in the same paragraph. But that is
+only because we have not accustomed ourselves to thinking of social
+events as answers to human needs. The statesman would ask, Why are there
+syndicalists? What are they driving at? What gift to civilization is in
+the impetus behind them? They are human beings, and they want human
+things. There is no reason to become terror-stricken about them. They
+seem to want things badly. Then ostriches disguised as judges cannot deal
+with them. Anarchism--men die for that, they undergo intolerable insults.
+They are tarred and feathered and spat upon. Is it possible that
+Republicans, Democrats and Socialists clip the wings more than free
+spirits can allow? Is civilization perhaps too tightly organized? Have
+the irreconcilables a soul audacious and less blunted than our
+domesticated ones? To put it mildly, is it ever safe to ignore them
+entirely in our thinking?
+
+We shall come, I think, to a different appraisal of agitations. Our
+present method is to discuss whether the proposals are right and
+feasible. We do this hastily and with prejudice. Generally we decide that
+any agitation foreign to our settled habits is wrong. And we bolster up
+our satisfaction by pointing to some mistake of logic or some puerility
+of statement. That done, we feel the agitation is deplorable and can be
+ignored unless it becomes so obstreperous that we have to put it in jail.
+But a genuine statecraft would go deeper. It would know that even God has
+been defended with nonsense. So it could be sympathetic to agitations. I
+use the word sympathetic literally. For it would try to understand the
+inner feeling which had generated what looks like a silly demand. To-day
+it is as if a hungry man asked for an indigestible food, and we let him
+go hungry because he was unwise. He isn't any the less hungry because he
+asks for the wrong food. So with agitations. Their specific plans may be
+silly, but their demands are real. The hungers and lusts of mankind have
+produced some stupendous follies, but the desires themselves are no less
+real and insistent.
+
+The important thing about a social movement is not its stated platform
+but the source from which it flows. The task of politics is to understand
+those deeper demands and to find civilized satisfactions for them. The
+meaning of this is that the statesman must be more than the leader of a
+party. Thus the socialist statesman is not complete if he is a good
+socialist. Only the delusion that his truth is the whole truth, his party
+the human race, and his program a panacea, will produce that singleness
+of vision.
+
+The moment a man takes office he has no right to be the representative of
+one group alone. He has assumed the burden of harmonizing particular
+agitations with the general welfare. That is why great agitators should
+not accept office. Men like Debs understand that. Their business is to
+make social demands so concrete and pressing that statesmen are forced to
+deal with them. Agitators who accept government positions are a
+disappointment to their followers. They can no longer be severely
+partisan. They have to look at affairs nationally. Now the agitator and
+the statesman are both needed. But they have different functions, and it
+is unjust to damn one because he hasn't the virtues of the other.
+
+The statesman to-day needs a large equipment. The man who comes forward
+to shape a country's policy has truly no end of things to consider. He
+must be aware of the condition of the people: no statesman must fall into
+the sincere but thoroughly upper class blunder that President Taft
+committed when he advised a three months' vacation. Realizing how men and
+women feel at all levels and at different places, he must speak their
+discontent and project their hopes. Through this he will get power.
+Standing upon the prestige which that gives he must guide and purify the
+social demands he finds at work. He is the translator of agitations. For
+this task he must be keenly sensitive to public opinion and capable of
+understanding the dynamics of it. Then, in order to fuse it into a
+civilized achievement, he will require much expert knowledge. Yet he need
+not be a specialist himself, if only he is expert in choosing experts. It
+is better indeed that the statesman should have a lay, and not a
+professional view. For the bogs of technical stupidity and empty
+formalism are always near and always dangerous. The real political genius
+stands between the actual life of men, their wishes and their needs, and
+all the windings of official caste and professional snobbery. It is his
+supreme business to see that the servants of life stay in their
+place--that government, industry, "causes," science, all the creatures of
+man do not succeed in their perpetual effort to become the masters.
+
+I have Roosevelt in mind. He haunts political thinking. And indeed, why
+shouldn't he? What reality could there be in comments upon American
+politics which ignored the colossal phenomenon of Roosevelt? If he is
+wholly evil, as many say he is, then the American democracy is
+preponderantly evil. For in the first years of the Twentieth Century,
+Roosevelt spoke for this nation, as few presidents have spoken in our
+history. And that he has spoken well, who in the perspective of time will
+deny? Sensitive to the original forces of public opinion, no man has had
+the same power of rounding up the laggards. Government under him was a
+throbbing human purpose. He succeeded, where Taft failed, in preventing
+that drought of invention which officialism brings. Many people say he
+has tried to be all things to all men--that his speeches are an attempt
+to corral all sorts of votes. That is a left-handed way of stating a
+truth. A more generous interpretation would be to say that he had tried
+to be inclusive, to attach a hundred sectional agitations to a national
+program. Crude: of course he was crude; he had a hemisphere for his
+canvas. Inconsistent: yes, he tried to be the leader of factions at war
+with one another. A late convert: he is a statesman and not an
+agitator--his business was to meet demands when they had grown to
+national proportions. No end of possibilities have slipped through the
+large meshes of his net. He has said some silly things. He has not been
+subtle, and he has been far from perfect. But his success should be
+judged by the size of his task, by the fierceness of the opposition, by
+the intellectual qualities of the nation he represented. When we remember
+that he was trained in the Republican politics of Hanna and Platt, that
+he was the first President who shared a new social vision, then I believe
+we need offer no apologies for making Mr. Roosevelt stand as the working
+model for a possible American statesman at the beginning of the Twentieth
+Century.
+
+Critics have often suggested that Roosevelt stole Bryan's clothes. That
+is perhaps true, and it suggests a comparison which illuminates both men.
+It would not be unfair to say that it is always the function of the
+Roosevelts to take from the Bryans. But it is a little silly for an
+agitator to cry thief when the success of his agitation has led to the
+adoption of his ideas. It is like the chagrin of the socialists because
+the National Progressive Party had "stolen twenty-three planks," and it
+makes a person wonder whether some agitators haven't an overdeveloped
+sense of private property.
+
+I do not see the statesman in Bryan. He has been something of a voice
+crying in the wilderness, but a voice that did not understand its own
+message. Many people talk of him as a prophet. There is a great deal of
+literal truth in that remark, for it has been the peculiar work of Bryan
+to express in politics some of that emotion which has made America the
+home of new religions. What we know as the scientific habit of mind is
+entirely lacking in his intellectual equipment. There is a vein of
+mysticism in American life, and Mr. Bryan is its uncritical prophet. His
+insights are those of the gifted evangelist, often profound and always
+narrow. It is absurd to debate his sincerity. Mr. Bryan talks with the
+intoxication of the man who has had a revelation: to skeptics that always
+seems theatrical. But far from being the scheming hypocrite his enemies
+say he is, Mr. Bryan is too simple for the task of statesmanship. No
+bracing critical atmosphere plays about his mind: there are no cleansing
+doubts and fruitful alternatives. The work of Bryan has been to express a
+certain feeling of unrest--to embody it in the traditional language of
+prophecy. But it is a shrewd turn of the American people that has kept
+him out of office. I say this not in disrespect of his qualities, but in
+definition of them. Bryan does not happen to have the naturalistic
+outlook, the complete humanity, or the deliberative habit which modern
+statecraft requires. He is the voice of a confused emotion.
+
+Woodrow Wilson has a talent which is Bryan's chief defect--the scientific
+habit of holding facts in solution. His mind is lucid and flexible, and
+he has the faculty of taking advice quickly, of stating something he has
+borrowed with more ease and subtlety than the specialist from whom he got
+it. Woodrow Wilson's is an elegant and highly refined intellect, nicely
+balanced and capable of fine adjustment. An urbane civilization produced
+it, leisure has given it spaciousness, ease has made it generous. A mind
+without tension, its roots are not in the somewhat barbarous
+under-currents of the nation. Woodrow Wilson understands easily, but he
+does not incarnate: he has never been a part of the protest he speaks.
+You think of him as a good counsellor, as an excellent presiding officer.
+Whether his imagination is fibrous enough to catch the inwardness of the
+mutterings of our age is something experience alone can show. Wilson has
+class feeling in the least offensive sense of that term: he likes a world
+of gentlemen. Occasionally he has exhibited a rather amateurish effort to
+be grimy and shirt-sleeved. But without much success: his contact with
+American life is not direct, and so he is capable of purely theoretical
+affirmations. Like all essentially contemplative men, the world has to be
+reflected in the medium of his intellect before he can grapple with it.
+
+Yet Wilson belongs among the statesmen, and it is fine that he should be
+in public life. The weakness I have suggested is one that all statesmen
+share in some degree: an inability to interpret adequately the world they
+govern. This is a difficulty which is common to conservative and radical,
+and if I have used three living men to illustrate the problem it is only
+because they seem to illuminate it. They have faced the task and we can
+take their measurement. It is no part of my purpose to make any judgment
+as to the value of particular policies they have advocated. I am
+attempting to suggest some of the essentials of a statesman's equipment
+for the work of a humanly centered politics. Roosevelt has seemed to me
+the most effective, the most nearly complete; Bryan I have ventured to
+class with the men who though important to politics should never hold
+high executive office; Wilson, less complete than Roosevelt, is worthy of
+our deepest interest because his judgment is subtle where Roosevelt's is
+crude. He is a foretaste of a more advanced statesmanship.
+
+Because he is self-conscious, Wilson has been able to see the problem
+that any finely adapted statecraft must meet. It is a problem that would
+hardly occur to an old-fashioned politician: "Though he (the statesman)
+cannot himself keep the life of the nation as a whole in his mind, he can
+at least make sure that he is taking counsel with those who know...." It
+is not important that Wilson in stating the difficulty should put it as
+if he had in a measure solved it. He hasn't, because taking counsel is a
+means to understanding the nation as a whole, and that understanding
+remains almost as arduous and requires just as fibrous an imagination, if
+it is gleaned from advisers.
+
+To think of the whole nation: surely the task of statesmanship is more
+difficult to-day than ever before in history. In the face of a clotted
+intricacy in the subject-matter of politics, improvements in knowledge
+seem meager indeed. The distance between what we know and what we need to
+know appears to be greater than ever. Plato and Aristotle thought in
+terms of ten thousand homogeneous villagers; we have to think in terms of
+a hundred million people of all races and all traditions, crossbred and
+inbred, subject to climates they have never lived in before, plumped down
+on a continent in the midst of a strange civilization. We have to deal
+with all grades of life from the frontier to the metropolis, with men who
+differ in sense of fact, in ideal, in the very groundwork of morals. And
+we have to take into account not the simple opposition of two classes,
+but the hostility of many,--the farmers and the factory workers and all
+the castes within their ranks, the small merchants, and the feudal
+organization of business. Ours is a problem in which deception has become
+organized and strong; where truth is poisoned at its source; one in which
+the skill of the shrewdest brains is devoted to misleading a bewildered
+people. Nor can we keep to the problem within our borders. Whether we
+wish it or not we are involved in the world's problems, and all the winds
+of heaven blow through our land.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is a great question whether our intellects can grasp the subject. Are
+we perhaps like a child whose hand is too small to span an octave on the
+piano? Not only are the facts inhumanly complicated, but the natural
+ideals of people are so varied and contradictory that action halts in
+despair. We are putting a tremendous strain upon the mind, and the
+results are all about us: everyone has known the neutral thinkers who
+stand forever undecided before the complications of life, who have, as it
+were, caught a glimpse of the possibilities of knowledge. The sight has
+paralyzed them. Unless they can act with certainty, they dare not act at
+all.
+
+That is merely one of the temptations of theory. In the real world,
+action and thought are so closely related that one cannot wait upon the
+other. We cannot wait in politics for any completed theoretical
+discussion of its method: it is a monstrous demand. There is no pausing
+until political psychology is more certain. We have to act on what we
+believe, on half-knowledge, illusion and error. Experience itself will
+reveal our mistakes; research and criticism may convert them into wisdom.
+But act we must, and act as if we knew the nature of man and proposed to
+satisfy his needs.
+
+In other words, we must put man at the center of politics, even though we
+are densely ignorant both of man and of politics. This has always been
+the method of great political thinkers from Plato to Bentham. But one
+difference we in this age must note: they made their political man a
+dogma--we must leave him an hypothesis. That is to say that our task is
+to temper speculation with scientific humility.
+
+A paradox there is here, but a paradox of language, and not of fact. Men
+made bridges before there was a science of bridge-building; they cured
+disease before they knew medicine. Art came before æsthetics, and
+righteousness before ethics. Conduct and theory react upon each other.
+Hypothesis is confirmed and modified by action, and action is guided by
+hypothesis. If it is a paradox to ask for a human politics before we
+understand humanity or politics, it is what Mr. Chesterton describes as
+one of those paradoxes that sit beside the wells of truth.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We make our picture of man, knowing that, though it is crude and unjust,
+we have to work with it. If we are wise we shall become experimental
+towards life: then every mistake will contribute towards knowledge. Let
+the exploration of human need and desire become a deliberate purpose of
+statecraft, and there is no present measure of its possibilities.
+
+In this work there are many guides. A vague common tradition is in the
+air about us--it expresses itself in journalism, in cheap novels, in the
+uncritical theater. Every merchant has his stock of assumptions about the
+mental habits of his customers and competitors; the prostitute hers; the
+newspaperman his; P. T. Barnum had a few; the vaudeville stage has a
+number. We test these notions by their results, and even "practical
+people" find that there is more variety in human nature than they had
+supposed.
+
+We forge gradually our greatest instrument for understanding the
+world--introspection. We discover that humanity may resemble us very
+considerably--that the best way of knowing the inwardness of our
+neighbors is to know ourselves. For after all, the only experience we
+really understand is our own. And that, in the least of us, is so rich
+that no one has yet exhausted its possibilities. It has been said that
+every genuine character an artist produces is one of the characters he
+might have been. By re-creating our own suppressed possibilities we
+multiply the number of lives that we can really know. That as I
+understand it is the psychology of the Golden Rule. For note that Jesus
+did not set up some external fetich: he did not say, make your neighbor
+righteous, or chaste, or respectable. He said do as you would be done by.
+Assume that you and he are alike, and you can found morals on humanity.
+
+But experience has enlarged our knowledge of differences. We realize now
+that our neighbor is not always like ourselves. Knowing how unjust other
+people's inferences are when they concern us, we have begun to guess that
+ours may be unjust to them. Any uniformity of conduct becomes at once an
+impossible ideal, and the willingness to live and let live assumes high
+place among the virtues. A puzzled wisdom remarks that "it takes all
+sorts of people to make a world," and half-protestingly men accept
+Bernard Shaw's amendment, "Do not do unto others as you would that they
+should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same."
+
+We learn perhaps that there is no contradiction in speaking of "human
+nature" while admitting that men are unique. For all deepening of our
+knowledge gives a greater sense of common likeness and individual
+variation. It is folly to ignore either insight. But it is done
+constantly, with no end of confusion as a result. Some men have got
+themselves into a state where the only view that interests them is the
+common humanity of us all. Their world is not populated by men and women,
+but by a Unity that is Permanent. You might as well refuse to see any
+differences between steam, water and ice because they have common
+elements. And I have seen some of these people trying to skate on steam.
+Their brothers, blind in the other eye, go about the world so sure that
+each person is entirely unique, that society becomes like a row of
+packing cases, each painted on the inside, and each containing one ego
+and its own.
+
+Art enlarges experience by admitting us to the inner life of others. That
+is not the only use of art, for its function is surely greater and more
+ultimate than to furnish us with a better knowledge of human nature. Nor
+is that its only use even to statecraft. I suggested earlier that art
+enters politics as a "moral equivalent" for evil, a medium by which
+barbarous lusts find civilized expression. It is, too, an ideal for
+labor. But my purpose here is not to attempt any adequate description of
+the services of art. It is enough to note that literature in particular
+elaborates our insight into human life, and, therefore, enables us to
+center our institutions more truly.
+
+Ibsen discovers a soul in Nora: the discovery is absorbed into the common
+knowledge of the age. Other Noras discover their own souls; the Helmers
+all about us begin to see the person in the doll. Plays and novels have
+indeed an overwhelming political importance, as the "moderns" have
+maintained. But it lies not in the preaching of a doctrine or the
+insistence on some particular change in conduct. That is a shallow and
+wasteful use of the resources of art. For art can open up the springs
+from which conduct flows. Its genuine influence is on what Wells calls
+the "hinterland," in a quickening of the sense of life.
+
+Art can really penetrate where most of us can only observe. "I look and I
+think I see," writes Bergson, "I listen and I think I hear, I examine
+myself and I think I am reading the very depths of my heart.... (But) my
+senses and my consciousness ... give me no more than a practical
+simplification of reality ... in short, we do not see the actual things
+themselves; in most cases we confine ourselves to reading the labels
+affixed to them." Who has not known this in thinking of politics? We talk
+of poverty and forget poor people; we make rules for vagrancy--we forget
+the vagrant. Some of our best-intentioned political schemes, like reform
+colonies and scientific jails, turn out to be inhuman tyrannies just
+because our imagination does not penetrate the sociological label. "We
+move amidst generalities and symbols ... we live in a zone midway between
+things and ourselves, external to things, external also to ourselves."
+This is what works of art help to correct: "Behind the commonplace,
+conventional expression that both reveals and conceals an individual
+mental state, it is the emotion, the original mood, to which they attain
+in its undefiled essence."
+
+This directness of vision fertilizes thought. Without a strong artistic
+tradition, the life and so the politics of a nation sink into a barren
+routine. A country populated by pure logicians and mathematical
+scientists would, I believe, produce few inventions. For creation, even
+of scientific truth, is no automatic product of logical thought or
+scientific method, and it has been well said that the greatest
+discoveries in science are brilliant guesses on insufficient evidence. A
+nation must, so to speak, live close to its own life, be intimate and
+sympathetic with natural events. That is what gives understanding, and
+justifies the observation that the intuitions of scientific discovery and
+the artist's perceptions are closely related. It is perhaps not
+altogether without significance for us that primitive science and poetry
+were indistinguishable. Nor is it strange that latter-day research should
+confirm so many sayings of the poets. In all great ages art and science
+have enriched each other. It is only eccentric poets and narrow
+specialists who lock the doors. The human spirit doesn't grow in
+sections.
+
+I shall not press the point for it would lead us far afield. It is enough
+that we remember the close alliance of art, science and politics in
+Athens, in Florence and Venice at their zenith. We in America have
+divorced them completely: both art and politics exist in a condition of
+unnatural celibacy. Is this not a contributing factor to the futility and
+opacity of our political thinking? We have handed over the government of
+a nation of people to a set of lawyers, to a class of men who deal in the
+most verbal and unreal of all human attainments.
+
+A lively artistic tradition is essential to the humanizing of politics.
+It is the soil in which invention flourishes and the organized knowledge
+of science attains its greatest reality. Let me illustrate from another
+field of interests. The religious investigations of William James were a
+study, not of ecclesiastical institutions or the history of creeds. They
+were concerned with religious experience, of which churches and rituals
+are nothing but the external satisfaction. As Graham Wallas is
+endeavoring to make human nature the center of politics, so James made it
+the center of religions. It was a work of genius, yet no one would claim
+that it is a mature psychology of the "Varieties of Religious
+Experience." It is rather a survey and a description, done with the eye
+of an artist and the method of a scientist. We know from it more of what
+religious feeling is like, even though we remain ignorant of its sources.
+And this intimacy humanizes religious controversy and brings
+ecclesiasticism back to men.
+
+Like most of James's psychology, it opens up investigation instead of
+concluding it. In the light even of our present knowledge we can see how
+primitive his treatment was. But James's services cannot be
+overestimated: if he did not lay even the foundations of a science, he
+did lay some of the foundations for research. It was an immense
+illumination and a warming of interest. It threw open the gates to the
+whole landscape of possibilities. It was a ventilation of thought.
+Something similar will have to be done for political psychology. We know
+how far off is the profound and precise knowledge we desire. But we know
+too that we have a right to hope for an increasing acquaintance with the
+varieties of political experience. It would, of course, be drawn from
+biography, from the human aspect of history and daily observation. We
+should begin to know what it is that we ought to know. Such a work would
+be stimulating to politician and psychologist. The statesman's
+imagination would be guided and organized; it would give him a
+starting-point for his own understanding of human beings in politics. To
+the scientists it would be a challenge--to bring these facts under the
+light of their researches, to extend these researches to the borders of
+those facts.
+
+The statesman has another way of strengthening his grip upon the
+complexity of life. Statistics help. This method is neither so conclusive
+as the devotees say, nor so bad as the people who are awed by it would
+like to believe. Voting, as Gabriel Tarde points out, is our most
+conspicuous use of statistics. Mystical democrats believe that an
+election expresses the will of the people, and that that will is wise.
+Mystical democrats are rare. Looked at closely an election shows the
+quantitative division of the people on several alternatives. That choice
+is not necessarily wise, but it is wise to heed that choice. For it is a
+rough estimate of an important part of the community's sentiment, and no
+statecraft can succeed that violates it. It is often immensely suggestive
+of what a large number of people are in the future going to wish.
+Democracy, because it registers popular feeling, is at least trying to
+build truly, and is for that reason an enlightened form of government. So
+we who are democrats need not believe that the people are necessarily
+right in their choice: some of us are always in the minority, and not a
+little proud of the distinction. Voting does not extract wisdom from
+multitudes: its real value is to furnish wisdom about multitudes. Our
+faith in democracy has this very solid foundation: that no leader's
+wisdom can be applied unless the democracy comes to approve of it. To
+govern a democracy you have to educate it: that contact with great masses
+of men reciprocates by educating the leader. "The consent of the
+governed" is more than a safeguard against ignorant tyrants: it is an
+insurance against benevolent despots as well. In a rough way and with
+many exceptions, democracy compels law to approximate human need. It is a
+little difficult to see this when you live right in the midst of one. But
+in perspective there can be little question that of all governments
+democracy is the most relevant. Only humane laws can be successfully
+enforced; and they are the only ones really worth enforcing. Voting is a
+formal method of registering consent.
+
+But all statistical devices are open to abuse and require constant
+correction. Bribery, false counting, disfranchisement are the cruder
+deceptions; they correspond to those enrolment statistics of a large
+university which are artificially fed by counting the same student
+several times if his courses happen to span two or three of the
+departments. Just as deceptive as plain fraud is the deceptive ballot. We
+all know how when the political tricksters were compelled to frame a
+direct primary law in New York they fixed the ballot so that it botched
+the election. Corporations have been known to do just that to their
+reports. Did not E. H. Harriman say of a well-known statistician that he
+could make an annual report tell any story you pleased? Still subtler is
+the seven-foot ballot of stupid, good intentions--the hyperdemocratic
+ballot in which you are asked to vote for the State Printer, and succeed
+only in voting under the party emblem.
+
+Statistics then is no automatic device for measuring facts. You and I are
+forever at the mercy of the census-taker and the census-maker. That
+impertinent fellow who goes from house to house is one of the real
+masters of the statistical situation. The other is the man who organizes
+the results. For all the conclusions in the end rest upon their accuracy,
+honesty, energy and insight. Of course, in an obvious census like that of
+the number of people personal bias counts for so little that it is lost
+in the grand total. But the moment you begin inquiries into subjects
+which people prefer to conceal, the weakness of statistics becomes
+obvious. All figures which touch upon sexual subjects are nothing but the
+roughest guesses. No one would take a census of prostitution,
+illegitimacy, adultery, or venereal disease for a statement of reliable
+facts. There are religious statistics, but who that has traveled among
+men would regard the number of professing Christians as any index of the
+strength of Christianity, or the church attendance as a measure of
+devotion? In the supremely important subject of literacy, what
+classification yet devised can weigh the culture of masses of people? We
+say that such a percentage of the population cannot read or write. But
+the test of reading and writing is crude and clumsy. It is often
+administered by men who are themselves half-educated, and it is shot
+through with racial and class prejudice.
+
+The statistical method is of use only to those who have found it out.
+This is achieved principally by absorbing into your thinking a lively
+doubt about all classifications and general terms, for they are the basis
+of statistical measurement. That done you are fairly proof against
+seduction. No better popular statement of this is to be found than H. G.
+Wells' little essay: "Skepticism of the Instrument." Wells has, of
+course, made no new discovery. The history of philosophy is crowded with
+quarrels as to how seriously we ought to take our classifications: a
+large part of the battle about Nominalism turns on this, the Empirical
+and Rational traditions divide on it; in our day the attacks of James,
+Bergson, and the "anti-intellectualists" are largely a continuation of
+this old struggle. Wells takes his stand very definitely with those who
+regard classification "as serviceable for the practical purposes of life"
+but nevertheless "a departure from the objective truth of things."
+
+"Take the word chair," he writes. "When one says chair, one thinks
+vaguely of an average chair. But collect individual instances, think of
+armchairs and reading-chairs, and dining-room chairs and kitchen chairs,
+chairs that pass into benches, chairs that cross the boundary and become
+settees, dentists' chairs, thrones, opera stalls, seats of all sorts,
+those miraculous fungoid growths that cumber the floor of the Arts and
+Crafts Exhibition, and you will perceive what a lax bundle in fact is
+this simple straightforward term. In co-operation with an intelligent
+joiner I would undertake to defeat any definition of chair or
+chairishness that you gave me." Think then of the glib way in which we
+speak of "the unemployed," "the unfit," "the criminal," "the
+unemployable," and how easily we forget that behind these general terms
+are unique individuals with personal histories and varying needs.
+
+Even the most refined statistics are nothing but an abstraction. But if
+that truth is held clearly before the mind, the polygons and curves of
+the statisticians can be used as a skeleton to which the imagination and
+our general sense of life give some flesh and blood reality. Human
+statistics are illuminating to those who know humanity. I would not trust
+a hermit's inferences about the statistics of anything.
+
+It is then no simple formula which answers our question. The problem of a
+human politics is not solved by a catch phrase. Criticism, of which these
+essays are a piece, can give the direction we must travel. But for the
+rest there is no smooth road built, no swift and sure conveyance at the
+door. We set out as if we knew; we act on the notions of man that we
+possess. Literature refines, science deepens, various devices extend it.
+Those who act on the knowledge at hand are the men of affairs. And all
+the while, research studies their results, artists express subtler
+perceptions, critics refine and adapt the general culture of the times.
+There is no other way but through this vast collaboration.
+
+There is no short cut to civilization. We say that the truth will make us
+free. Yes, but that truth is a thousand truths which grow and change. Nor
+do I see a final state of blessedness. The world's end will surely find
+us still engaged in answering riddles. This changing focus in politics is
+a tendency at work all through our lives. There are many experiments. But
+the effort is half-conscious; only here and there does it rise to a
+deliberate purpose. To make it an avowed ideal--a thing of will and
+intelligence--is to hasten its coming, to illumine its blunders, and, by
+giving it self-criticism, to convert mistakes into wisdom.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+WELL MEANING BUT UNMEANING: THE CHICAGO VICE REPORT
+
+
+In casting about for a concrete example to illustrate some of the points
+under discussion I hesitated a long time before the wealth of material.
+No age has produced such a multitude of elaborate studies, and any
+selection was, of course, a limiting one. The Minority Report of the
+English Poor Law Commission has striking merits and defects, but for our
+purposes it inheres too deeply in British conditions. American tariff and
+trust investigations are massive enough in all conscience, but they are
+so partisan in their origin and so pathetically unattached to any
+recognized ideal of public policy that it seemed better to look
+elsewhere. Conservation had the virtue of arising out of a provident
+statesmanship, but its problems were largely technical.
+
+The real choice narrowed itself finally to the Pittsburgh Survey and the
+Chicago Vice Report. Had I been looking for an example of the finest
+expert inquiry, there would have been little question that the vivid and
+intensive study of Pittsburgh's industrialism was the example to use. But
+I was looking for something more representative, and, therefore, more
+revealing. I did not want a detached study of some specially selected
+cross-section of what is after all not the typical economic life of
+America. The case demanded was one in which you could see representative
+American citizens trying to handle a problem which had touched their
+imaginations.
+
+Vice is such a problem. You can always get a hearing about it; there is
+no end of interest in the question. Rare indeed is that community which
+has not been "Lexowed," in which a district attorney or a minister has
+not led a crusade. Muckraking began with the exposure of vice; men like
+Heney, Lindsey, Folk founded their reputations on the fight against it.
+It would be interesting to know how much of the social conscience of our
+time had as its first insight the prostitute on the city pavement.
+
+We do not have to force an interest, as we do about the trusts, or even
+about the poor. For this problem lies close indeed to the dynamics of our
+own natures. Research is stimulated, actively aroused, and a passionate
+zeal suffuses what is perhaps the most spontaneous reform enthusiasm of
+our time. Looked at externally it is a curious focusing of attention. Nor
+is it explained by words like "chivalry," "conscience," "social
+compassion." Magazines that will condone a thousand cruelties to women
+gladly publish series of articles on the girl who goes wrong; merchants
+who sweat and rack their women employees serve gallantly on these
+commissions. These men are not conscious hypocrites. Perhaps like the
+rest of us they are impelled by forces they are not eager to examine. I
+do not press the point. It belongs to the analyst of motive.
+
+We need only note the vast interest in the subject--that it extends
+across class lines, and expresses itself as an immense good-will. Perhaps
+a largely unconscious absorption in a subject is itself a sign of great
+importance. Surely vice has a thousand implications that touch all of us
+directly. It is closely related to most of the interests of
+life--ramifying into industry, into the family, health, play, art,
+religion. The miseries it entails are genuine miseries--not points of
+etiquette or infringements of convention. Vice issues in pain. The world
+suffers for it. To attack it is to attack as far-reaching and real a
+problem as any that we human beings face.
+
+The Chicago Commission had no simple, easily measured problem before it.
+At the very outset the report confesses that an accurate count of the
+number of prostitutes in Chicago could not be reached. The police lists
+are obviously incomplete and perhaps corrupt. The whole amorphous field
+of clandestine vice will, of course, defeat any census. But even public
+prostitution is so varied that nobody can do better than estimate it
+roughly. This point is worth keeping in mind, for it lights up the
+remedies proposed. What the Commission advocates is the constant
+repression and the ultimate annihilation of a mode of life which refuses
+discovery and measurement.
+
+The report estimates that there are five thousand women in Chicago who
+devote their whole time to the traffic; that the annual profits in that
+one city alone are between fifteen and sixteen million dollars a year.
+These figures are admittedly low for they leave out all consideration of
+occasional, or seasonal, or hidden prostitution. It is only the nucleus
+that can be guessed at; the fringe which shades out into various degrees
+of respectability remains entirely unmeasured. Yet these suburbs of the
+Tenderloin must always be kept in mind; their population is shifting and
+very elastic; it includes the unsuspected; and I am inclined to believe
+that it is the natural refuge of the "suppressed" prostitute. Moreover it
+defies control.
+
+The 1012 women recognized on the police lists are of course the most
+easily studied. From them we can gather some hint of the enormous
+bewildering demand that prostitution answers. The Commission informs us
+that this small group alone receives over fifteen thousand visits a
+day--five million and a half in the year. Yet these 1012 women are only
+about one-fifth of the professional prostitutes in Chicago. If the
+average continues, then the figures mount to something over 27,000,000.
+The five thousand professionals do not begin to represent the whole
+illicit traffic of a city like Chicago. Clandestine and occasional vice
+is beyond all measurement.
+
+The figures I have given are taken from the report. They are said to be
+conservative. For the purposes of this discussion we could well lower the
+27,000,000 by half. All I am concerned about is in arriving at a sense of
+the enormity of the impulse behind the "social evil." For it is this that
+the Commission proposes to repress, and ultimately to annihilate.
+
+Lust has a thousand avenues. The brothel, the flat, the assignation
+house, the tenement, saloons, dance halls, steamers, ice-cream parlors,
+Turkish baths, massage parlors, street-walking--the thing has woven
+itself into the texture of city life. Like the hydra, it grows new heads,
+everywhere. It draws into its service the pleasures of the city.
+Entangled with the love of gaiety, organized as commerce, it is literally
+impossible to follow the myriad expressions it assumes.
+
+The Commission gives a very fair picture of these manifestations. A mass
+of material is offered which does in a way show where and how and to what
+extent lust finds its illicit expression. Deeper than this the report
+does not go. The human impulses which create these social conditions, the
+human needs to which they are a sad and degraded answer--this human
+center of the problem the commission passes by with a platitude.
+
+"So long as there is lust in the hearts of men," we are told, "it will
+seek out some method of expression. Until the hearts of men are changed
+we can hope for no absolute annihilation of the Social Evil." But at the
+head of the report in black-faced type we read:
+
+"Constant and persistent repression of prostitution the immediate method;
+absolute annihilation the ultimate ideal."
+
+I am not trying to catch the Commissioners in a verbal inconsistency. The
+inconsistency is real, out of a deep-seated confusion of mind. Lust will
+seek an expression, they say, until "the hearts of men are changed." All
+particular expressions are evil and must be constantly repressed. Yet
+though you repress one form of lust, it will seek some other. Now, says
+the Commission, in order to change the hearts of men, religion and
+education must step in. It is their business to eradicate an impulse
+which is constantly changing form by being "suppressed."
+
+There is only one meaning in this: the Commission realized vaguely that
+repression is not even the first step to a cure. For reasons worth
+analyzing later, these representative American citizens desired both the
+immediate taboo and an ultimate annihilation of vice. So they fell into
+the confusion of making immediate and detailed proposals that have
+nothing to do with the attainment of their ideal.
+
+What the commission saw and described were the particular forms which a
+great human impulse had assumed at a specific date in a certain city. The
+dynamic force which created these conditions, which will continue to
+create them--lust--they refer to in a few pious sentences. Their
+thinking, in short, is perfectly static and literally superficial. In
+outlining a ripple they have forgotten the tides.
+
+Had they faced the human sources of their problem, had they tried to
+think of the social evil as an answer to a human need, their researches
+would have been different, their remedies fruitful. Suppose they had kept
+in mind their own statement: "so long as there is lust in the hearts of
+men it will seek out some method of expression." Had they held fast to
+that, it would have ceased to be a platitude and have become a fertile
+idea. For a platitude is generally inert wisdom.
+
+In the sentence I quote the Commissioners had an idea which might have
+animated all their labors. But they left it in limbo, they reverenced it,
+and they passed by. Perhaps we can raise it again and follow the hints it
+unfolds.
+
+If lust will seek an expression, are all expressions of it necessarily
+evil? That the kind of expression which the Commission describes is evil
+no one will deny. But is it the only possible expression?
+
+If it is, then the taboo enforced by a Morals Police is, perhaps, as good
+a way as any of gaining a fictitious sense of activity. But the ideal of
+"annihilation" becomes an irrelevant and meaningless phrase. If lust is
+deeply rooted in men and its only expression is evil, I for one should
+recommend a faith in the millennium. You can put this Paradise at the
+beginning of the world or the end of it. Practical difference there is
+none.
+
+No one can read the report without coming to a definite conviction that
+the Commission regards lust itself as inherently evil. The members
+assumed without criticism the traditional dogma of Christianity that sex
+in any manifestation outside of marriage is sinful. But practical sense
+told them that sex cannot be confined within marriage. It will find
+expression--"some method of expression" they say. What never occurred to
+them was that it might find a good, a positively beneficent method. The
+utterly uncriticised assumption that all expressions not legalized are
+sinful shut them off from any constructive answer to their problem.
+Seeing prostitution or something equally bad as the only way sex can find
+an expression they really set before religion and education the
+impossible task of removing lust "from the hearts of men." So when their
+report puts at its head that absolute annihilation of prostitution is the
+ultimate ideal, we may well translate it into the real intent of the
+Commission. What is to be absolutely annihilated is not alone
+prostitution, not alone all the methods of expression which lust seeks
+out, but lust itself.
+
+That this is what the Commission had in mind is supported by plenty of
+"internal evidence." For example: one of the most curious recommendations
+made is about divorce--"The Commission condemns the ease with which
+divorces may be obtained in certain States, and recommends a stringent,
+uniform divorce law for all States."
+
+What did the Commission have in mind? I transcribe the paragraph which
+deals with divorce: "The Vice Commission, after exhaustive consideration
+of the vice question, records itself of the opinion that divorce to a
+large extent is a contributory factor to sexual vice. No study of this
+blight upon the social and moral life of the country would be
+comprehensive without consideration of the causes which lead to the
+application for divorce. These are too numerous to mention at length in
+such a report as this, but the Commission does wish to emphasize the
+great need of more safeguards against the marrying of persons physically,
+mentally and morally unfit to take up the responsibilities of family
+life, including the bearing of children."
+
+Now to be sure that paragraph leaves much to be desired so far as
+clearness goes. But I think the meaning can be extracted. Divorce is a
+contributory factor to sexual vice. One way presumably is that divorced
+women often become prostitutes. That is an evil contribution,
+unquestionably. The second sentence says that no study of the social evil
+is complete which leaves out the _causes_ of divorce. One of those causes
+is, I suppose, adultery with a prostitute. This evil is totally different
+from the first: in one case divorce contributes to prostitution, in the
+other, prostitution leads to divorce. The third sentence urges greater
+safeguards against undesirable marriages. This prudence would obviously
+reduce the need of divorce.
+
+How does the recommendation of a stringent and uniform law fit in with
+these three statements? A strict divorce law might be like New York's: it
+would recognize few grounds for a decree. One of those grounds, perhaps
+the chief one, would be adultery. I say this unhesitatingly for in
+another place the Commission informs us that marriage has in it "the
+elements of vested rights."
+
+A strict divorce law would, of course, diminish the number of "divorced
+women," and perhaps keep them out of prostitution. It does fit the first
+statement--in a helpless sort of way. But where does the difficulty of
+divorce affect the causes of it? If you bind a man tightly to a woman he
+does not love, and, possibly prevent him from marrying one he does love,
+how do you add to his virtue? And if the only way he can free himself is
+by adultery, does not your stringent divorce law put a premium upon vice?
+The third sentence would make it difficult for the unfit to marry. Better
+marriages would among other blessings require fewer divorces. But what of
+those who are forbidden to marry? They are unprovided for. And yet who
+more than they are likely to find desire uncontrollable and seek some
+other "method of expression"? With marriage prohibited and prostitution
+tabooed, the Commission has a choice between sterilization and--let us
+say--other methods of expression.
+
+Make marriage difficult, divorce stringent, prostitution impossible--is
+there any doubt that the leading idea is to confine the sex impulse
+within the marriage of healthy, intelligent, "moral," and monogamous
+couples? For all the other seekings of that impulse what has the
+Commission to offer? Nothing. That can be asserted flatly. The Commission
+hopes to wipe out prostitution. But it never hints that the success of
+its plan means vast alterations in our social life. The members give the
+impression that they think of prostitution as something that can be
+subtracted from our civilization without changing the essential character
+of its institutions. Yet who that has read the report itself and put
+himself into any imaginative understanding of conditions can escape
+seeing that prostitution to-day is organic to our industrial life, our
+marriage sanctions, and our social customs? Low wages, fatigue, and the
+wretched monotony of the factory--these must go before prostitution can
+go. And behind these stand the facts of woman's entrance into
+industry--facts that have one source at least in the general poverty of
+the family. And that poverty is deeply bound up with the economic system
+under which we live. In the man's problem, the growing impossibility of
+early marriages is directly related to the business situation. Nor can we
+speak of the degradation of religion and the arts, of amusement, of the
+general morale of the people without referring that degradation to
+industrial conditions.
+
+You cannot look at civilization as a row of institutions each external to
+the other. They interpenetrate and a change in one affects all the
+others. To abolish prostitution would involve a radical alteration of
+society. Vice in our cities is a form of the sexual impulse--one of the
+forms it has taken under prevailing social conditions. It is, if you
+please, like the crops of a rude and forbidding soil--a coarse, distorted
+thing though living.
+
+The Commission studied a human problem and left humanity out. I do not
+mean that the members weren't deeply touched by the misery of these
+thousands of women. You can pity the poor without understanding them; you
+can have compassion without insight. The Commissioners had a good deal of
+sympathy for the prostitute's condition, but for that "lust in the hearts
+of men," and women we may add, for that, they had no sympathetic
+understanding. They did not place themselves within the impulse.
+Officially they remained external to human desires. For what might be
+called the _élan vital_ of the problem they had no patience. Certain sad
+results of the particular "method of expression" it had sought out in
+Chicago called forth their pity and their horror.
+
+In short, the Commission did not face the sexual impulse squarely. The
+report is an attempt to deal with a sexual problem by disregarding its
+source. There are almost a hundred recommendations to various
+authorities--Federal, State, county, city, police, educational and
+others. I have attempted to classify these proposals under four headings.
+There are those which mean forcible repression of particular
+manifestations--the taboos; there are the recommendations which are
+purely palliative, which aim to abate some of the horrors of existing
+conditions; there are a few suggestions for further investigation; and,
+finally, there are the inventions, the plans which show some desire to
+find moral equivalents for evil--the really statesmanlike offerings.
+
+The palliative measures we may pass by quickly. So long as they do not
+blind people to the necessity for radical treatment, only a doctrinaire
+would object to them. Like all intelligent charities they are still a
+necessary evil. But nothing must be staked upon them, so let us turn at
+once to the constructive suggestions: The Commission proposes that the
+county establish a "Permanent Committee on Child Protection." It makes no
+attempt to say what that protection shall be, but I think it is only fair
+to let the wish father the thought, and regard this as an effort to give
+children a better start in life. The separation of delinquent from
+semi-delinquent girls is a somewhat similar attempt to guard the weak.
+Another is the recommendation to the city and the nation that it should
+protect arriving immigrants, and if necessary escort them to their homes.
+This surely is a constructive plan which might well be enlarged from mere
+protection to positive hospitality. How great a part the desolating
+loneliness of a city plays in seductions the individual histories in the
+report show. Municipal dance halls are a splendid proposal. Freed from a
+cold and over-chaperoned respectability they compete with the devil.
+There, at least, is one method of sexual expression which may have
+positively beneficent results. A municipal lodging house for women is
+something of a substitute for the wretched rented room. A little
+suggestion to the police that they send home children found on the
+streets after nine o'clock has varied possibilities. But there is the
+seed of an invention in it which might convert the police from mere
+agents of repression to kindly helpers in the mazes of a city. The
+educational proposals are all constructive: the teaching of sex hygiene
+is guardedly recommended for consideration. That is entirely justified,
+for no one can quarrel with a set of men for leaving a question open.
+That girls from fourteen to sixteen should receive vocational training in
+continuation schools; that social centers should be established in the
+public schools and that the grounds should be open for children--all of
+these are clearly additions to the positive resource of the community. So
+is the suggestion that church buildings be used for recreation. The call
+for greater parental responsibility is, I fear, a rather empty platitude,
+for it is not re-enforced with anything but an ancient fervor.
+
+How much of this really seeks to create a fine expression of the sexual
+impulse? How many of these recommendations see sex as an instinct which
+can be transmuted, and turned into one of the values of life? The dance
+halls, the social centers, the playgrounds, the reception of
+strangers--these can become instruments for civilizing sexual need. The
+educational proposals could become ways of directing it. They could, but
+will they? Without the habit of mind which sees substitution as the
+essence of statecraft, without a philosophy which makes the invention of
+moral equivalents its goal, I for one refuse to see in these
+recommendations anything more than a haphazard shooting which has
+accidentally hit the mark. Moreover, I have a deep suspicion that I have
+tried to read into the proposals more than the Commission intended.
+Certainly these constructions occupy an insignificant amount of space in
+the body of the report. On all sides of them is a mass of taboos. No
+emotional appeal is made for them as there is for the repressions. They
+stand largely unnoticed, and very much undefined--poor ghosts of the
+truth among the gibbets.
+
+An inadvertent platitude--that lust will seek an expression--and a few
+diffident proposals for a finer environment--the need and its
+satisfaction: had the Commission seen the relation of these incipient
+ideas, animated it, and made it the nerve center of the study, a genuine
+program might have resulted. But the two ideas never met and fertilized
+each other. Nothing dynamic holds the recommendations together--the mass
+of them are taboos, an attempt to kill each mosquito and ignore the
+marsh. The evils of prostitution are seen as a series of episodes, each
+of which must be clubbed, forbidden, raided and jailed.
+
+There is a special whack for each mosquito: the laws about excursion
+boats should be enforced; the owners should help to enforce them; there
+should be more officers with police power on these boats; the sale of
+liquor to minors should be forbidden; gambling devices should be
+suppressed; the midwives, doctors and maternity hospitals practicing
+abortions should be investigated; employment agencies should be watched
+and investigated; publishers should be warned against printing suspicious
+advertisements; the law against infamous crimes should be made more
+specific; any citizen should have the right to bring equity proceedings
+against a brothel as a public nuisance; there should be relentless
+prosecution of professional procurers; there should be constant
+prosecution of the keepers, inmates, and owners of bawdy houses; there
+should be prosecution of druggists who sells drugs and "certain
+appliances" illegally; there should be an identification system for
+prostitutes in the state courts; instead of fines, prostitutes should be
+visited with imprisonment or adult probation; there should be a penalty
+for sending messenger boys under twenty-one to a disorderly house or an
+unlicensed saloon; the law against prostitutes in saloons, against
+wine-rooms and stalls in saloons, against communication between saloons
+and brothels, against dancing in saloons--should be strictly enforced;
+the police who enforce these laws should be carefully watched, grafters
+amongst them should be discharged; complaints should be investigated at
+once by a man stationed outside the district; the pressure of publicity
+should be brought against the brewers to prevent them from doing business
+with saloons that violate the law; the Retail Liquor Association should
+discipline law-breaking saloon-keepers: licenses should be permanently
+revoked for violations; no women should be allowed in a saloon without a
+male escort; no professional or paid escorts should be permitted; no
+soliciting should be allowed in saloons; no immoral or vulgar dances
+should be permitted in saloons; no intoxicating liquor should be allowed
+at any public dance; there should be a municipal detention home for
+women, with probation officers; police inspectors who fail to report
+law-violations should be dismissed; assignation houses should be
+suppressed as soon as they are reported; there should be a "special
+morals police squad"; recommendation IX "to the Police" says they "should
+wage a relentless warfare against houses of prostitution, immoral flats,
+assignation rooms, call houses, and disorderly saloons in all sections of
+the city"; parks and playgrounds should be more thoroughly policed;
+dancing pavilions should exclude professional prostitutes; soliciting in
+parks should be suppressed; parks should be lighted with a search-light;
+there should be no seats in the shadows....
+
+To perform that staggering list of things that "should" be done you
+find--what?--the police power, federal, state, municipal. Note how vague
+and general are the chance constructive suggestions; how precise and
+definite the taboos. Surely I am not misstating its position when I say
+that forcible suppression was the creed of this Commission. Nor is there
+any need of insisting again that the ultimate ideal of annihilating
+prostitution has nothing to expect from the concrete proposals that were
+made. The millennial goal was one thing; the immediate method quite
+another. For ideals, a pious phrase; in practice, the police.
+
+Are we not told that "if the citizens cannot depend upon the men
+appointed to protect their property, and to maintain order, then chaos
+and disorganization resulting in vice and crime must follow?" Yet of all
+the reeds that civilization leans upon, surely the police is the
+frailest. Anyone who has had the smallest experience of municipal
+politics knows that the corruption of the police is directly
+proportionate to the severity of the taboos it is asked to enforce. Tom
+Johnson saw this as Mayor of Cleveland; he knew that strict law
+enforcement against saloons, brothels, and gambling houses would not stop
+vice, but would corrupt the police. I recommend the recent spectacle in
+New York where the most sensational raider of gambling houses has turned
+out to be in crooked alliance with the gamblers. And I suggest as a hint
+that the Commission's recommendations enforced for one year will lay the
+foundation of an organized system of blackmail and "protection," secrecy
+and underground chicanery, the like of which Chicago has not yet seen.
+But the Commission need only have read its own report, have studied its
+own cases. There is an illuminating chapter on "The Social Evil and the
+Police." In the summary, the Commission says that "officers on the beat
+are bold and open in their neglect of duty, drinking in saloons while in
+uniform, ignoring the solicitations by prostitutes in rear rooms and on
+the streets, selling tickets at dances frequented by professional and
+semi-professional prostitutes; protecting 'cadets,' prostitutes and
+saloon-keepers of disorderly places."
+
+Some suspicion that the police could not carry the burden of suppressing
+the social evil must have dawned on the Commission.
+
+It felt the need of re-enforcement. Hence the special morals police
+squad; hence the investigation of the police of one district by the
+police from another; and hence, in type as black as that of the ideal
+itself and directly beneath it, the call for "the appointment of a morals
+commission" and "the establishment of a morals court." Now this
+commission consists of the Health Officer, a physician and three citizens
+who serve without pay. It is appointed by the Mayor and approved by the
+City Council. Its business is to prosecute vice and to help enforce the
+law.
+
+Just what would happen if the Morals Commission didn't prosecute hard
+enough I do not know. Conceivably the Governor might be induced to
+appoint a Commission on Moral Commissions in Cities. But why the men and
+women who framed the report made this particular recommendation is an
+interesting question. With federal, state, and municipal authorities in
+existence, with courts, district attorneys, police all operating, they
+create another arm of prosecution. Possibly they were somewhat
+disillusioned about the present instruments of the taboo; perhaps
+they imagined that a new broom would sweep clean. But I suspect an
+inner reason. The Commission may have imagined that the four
+appointees--unpaid--would be four men like themselves--who knows, perhaps
+four men from among themselves? The whole tenor of their thinking is to
+set somebody watching everybody and somebody else to watching him. What
+is more natural than that they should be the Ultimate Watchers?
+
+Spying, informing, constant investigations of everybody and everything
+must become the rule where there is a forcible attempt to moralize
+society from the top. Nobody's heart is in the work very long; nobody's
+but those fanatical and morbid guardians of morality who make it a life's
+specialty. The aroused public opinion which the Commission asks for
+cannot be held if all it has to fix upon is an elaborate series of
+taboos. Sensational disclosures will often make the public flare up
+spasmodically; but the mass of men is soon bored by intricate rules and
+tangles of red tape; the "crusade" is looked upon as a melodrama of real
+life--interesting, but easily forgotten.
+
+The method proposed ignores the human source: by a kind of poetic justice
+the great crowd of men will ignore the method. If you want to impose a
+taboo upon a whole community, you must do it autocratically, you must
+make it part of the prevailing superstitions. You must never let it reach
+any public analysis. For it will fail, it will receive only a shallow
+support from what we call an "enlightened public opinion." That opinion
+is largely determined by the real impulses of men; and genuine character
+rejects or at least rebels against foreign, unnatural impositions. This
+is one of the great virtues of democracy--that it makes alien laws more
+and more difficult to enforce. The tyrant can use the taboo a thousand
+times more effectively than the citizens of a republic. When he speaks,
+it is with a prestige that dumbs questioning and makes obedience a habit.
+Let that infallibility come to be doubted, as in Russia to-day, and
+natural impulses reassert themselves, the great impositions begin to
+weaken. The methods of the Chicago Commission would require a tyranny, a
+powerful, centralized sovereignty which could command with majesty and
+silence the rebel. In our shirt-sleeved republic no such power exists.
+The strongest force we have is that of organized money, and that
+sovereignty is too closely connected with the social evil, too dependent
+upon it in a hundred different ways, to undertake the task of
+suppression.
+
+For the purposes of the Commission democracy is an inefficient weapon.
+Nothing but disappointment is in store for men who expect a people to
+outrage its own character. A large part of the unfaith in democracy, of
+the desire to ignore "the mob," limit the franchise, and confine power to
+the few is the result of an unsuccessful attempt to make republics act
+like old-fashioned monarchies. Almost every "crusade" leaves behind it a
+trail of yearning royalists; many "good-government" clubs are little
+would-be oligarchies.
+
+When the mass of men emerged from slavish obedience and made democracy
+inevitable, the taboo entered upon its final illness. For the more
+self-governing a people becomes, the less possible it is to prescribe
+external restrictions. The gap between want and ought, between nature and
+ideals cannot be maintained. The only practical ideals in a democracy are
+a fine expression of natural wants. This happens to be a thoroughly Greek
+attitude. But I learned it first from the Bowery. Chuck Connors is
+reported to have said that "a gentleman is a bloke as can do whatever he
+wants to do." If Chuck said that, he went straight to the heart of that
+democratic morality on which a new statecraft must ultimately rest. His
+gentleman is not the battlefield of wants and prohibitions; in him
+impulses flow freely through beneficent channels.
+
+The same notion lies imbedded in the phrase: "government must serve the
+people." That means a good deal more than that elected officials must
+rule for the majority. For the majority in these semi-democratic times is
+often as not a cloak for the ruling oligarchy. Representatives who
+"serve" some majorities may in reality order the nation about. To serve
+the people means to provide it with services--with clean streets and
+water, with education, with opportunity, with beneficent channels for its
+desires, with moral equivalents for evil. The task is turned from the
+damming and restricting of wants to the creation of fine environments for
+them. And the environment of an impulse extends all the way from the
+human body, through family life and education out into the streets of the
+city.
+
+Had the Commission worked along democratic lines, we should have had
+recommendations about the hygiene and early training of children, their
+education, the houses they live in and the streets in which they play;
+changes would have been suggested in the industrial conditions they face;
+plans would have been drawn for recreation; hints would have been
+collected for transmuting the sex impulse into art, into social endeavor,
+into religion. That is the constructive approach to the problem. I note
+that the Commission calls upon the churches for help. Its obvious
+intention was to down sex with religion. What was not realized, it seems,
+is that this very sex impulse, so largely degraded into vice, is the
+dynamic force in religious feeling. One need not call in the testimony of
+the psychologists, the students of religion, the æstheticians or even of
+Plato, who in the "Symposium" traced out the hierarchy of love from the
+body to the "whole sea of beauty." Jane Addams in Chicago has tested the
+truth by her own wide experience, and she has written what the Commission
+might easily have read,--that "in failing to diffuse and utilize this
+fundamental instinct of sex through the imagination, we not only
+inadvertently foster vice and enervation, but we throw away one of the
+most precious implements for ministering to life's highest needs. There
+is no doubt that this ill-adjusted function consumes quite unnecessarily
+vast stores of vital energy, even when we contemplate it in its immature
+manifestations which are infinitely more wholesome than the dumb swamping
+process. All high school boys and girls know the difference between the
+concentration and the diffusion of this impulse, although they would be
+hopelessly bewildered by the use of terms. They will declare one of their
+companions to be 'in love' if his fancy is occupied by the image of a
+single person about whom all the new-found values gather, and without
+whom his solitude is an eternal melancholy. But if the stimulus does not
+appear as a definite image, and the values evoked are dispensed over the
+world, the young person suddenly seems to have discovered a beauty and
+significance in many things--he responds to poetry, he becomes a lover of
+nature, he is filled with religious devotion or with philanthropic zeal.
+Experience, with young people, easily illustrates the possibility and
+value of diffusion."
+
+It is then not only impossible to confine sex to mere reproduction; it
+would be a stupid denial of the finest values of civilization. Having
+seen that the impulse is a necessary part of character, we must not hold
+to it grudgingly as a necessary evil. It is, on the contrary, the very
+source of good. Whoever has visited Hull House can see for himself the
+earnest effort Miss Addams has made to treat sex with dignity and joy.
+For Hull House differs from most settlements in that it is full of
+pictures, of color, and of curios. The atmosphere is light; you feel none
+of that moral oppression which hangs over the usual settlement as over a
+gathering of missionaries. Miss Addams has not only made Hull House a
+beautiful place; she has stocked it with curious and interesting objects.
+The theater, the museum, the crafts and the arts, games and dances--they
+are some of those "other methods of expression which lust can seek." It
+is no accident that Hull House is the most successful settlement in
+America.
+
+Yet who does not feel its isolation in that brutal city? A little Athens
+in a vast barbarism--you wonder how much of Chicago Hull House can
+civilize. As you walk those grim streets and look into the stifling
+houses, or picture the relentless stockyards, the conviction that vice
+and its misery cannot be transmuted by policemen and Morals Commissions,
+the feeling that spying and inspecting and prosecuting will not drain the
+marsh becomes a certainty. You want to shout at the forcible moralizer:
+"so long as you acquiesce in the degradation of your city, so long as
+work remains nothing but ill-paid drudgery and every instinct of joy is
+mocked by dirt and cheapness and brutality,--just so long will your
+efforts be fruitless, yes even though you raid and prosecute, even though
+you make Comstock the Czar of Chicago."
+
+But Hull House cannot remake Chicago. A few hundred lives can be changed,
+and for the rest it is a guide to the imagination. Like all utopias, it
+cannot succeed, but it may point the way to success. If Hull House is
+unable to civilize Chicago, it at least shows Chicago and America what a
+civilization might be like. Friendly, where our cities are friendless,
+beautiful, where they are ugly; sociable and open, where our daily life
+is furtive; work a craft; art a participation--it is in miniature the
+goal of statesmanship. If Chicago were like Hull House, we say to
+ourselves, then vice would be no problem--it would dwindle, what was left
+would be the Falstaff in us all, and only a spiritual anemia could worry
+over that jolly and redeeming coarseness.
+
+What stands between Chicago and civilization? No one can doubt that to
+abolish prostitution means to abolish the slum and the dirty alley, to
+stop overwork, underpay, the sweating and the torturing monotony of
+business, to breathe a new life into education, ventilate society with
+frankness, and fill life with play and art, with games, with passions
+which hold and suffuse the imagination.
+
+It is a revolutionary task, and like all real revolutions it will not be
+done in a day or a decade because someone orders it to be done. A change
+in the whole quality of life is something that neither the policeman's
+club nor an insurrectionary raid can achieve. If you want a revolution
+that shall really matter in human life--and what sane man can help
+desiring it?--you must look to the infinitely complicated results of the
+dynamic movements in society. These revolutions require a rare
+combination of personal audacity and social patience. The best agents of
+such a revolution are men who are bold in their plans because they
+realize how deep and enormous is the task.
+
+Many people have sought an analogy in our Civil War. They have said that
+as "black slavery" went, so must "white slavery." In the various
+agitations of vigilance committees and alliances for the suppression of
+the traffic they profess to see continued a work which the abolitionists
+began.
+
+In A. M. Simons' brilliant book on "Social Forces in American History"
+much help can be found. For example: "Massachusetts abolished slavery at
+an early date, and we have it on the authority of John Adams
+that:--'argument might have had some weight in the abolition of slavery
+in Massachusetts, but the real cause was the multiplication of laboring
+white people, who would not longer suffer the rich to employ these sable
+rivals so much to their injury.'" No one to-day doubts that white labor
+in the North and slavery in the South were not due to the moral
+superiority of the North. Yet just in the North we find the abolition
+sentiment strongest. That the Civil War was not a clash of good men and
+bad men is admitted by every reputable historian. The war did not come
+when moral fervor had risen to the exploding point; the moral fervor came
+rather when the economic interests of the South collided with those of
+the North. That the abolitionists clarified the economic interests of the
+North and gave them an ideal sanction is true enough. But the fact
+remains that by 1860 some of the aspirations of Phillips and Garrison had
+become the economic destiny of this country.
+
+You can have a Hull House established by private initiative and
+maintained by individual genius, just as you had planters who freed their
+slaves or as you have employers to-day who humanize their factories. But
+the fine example is not readily imitated when industrial forces fight
+against it. So even if the Commission had drawn splendid plans for
+housing, work conditions, education, and play it would have done only
+part of the task of statesmanship. We should then know what to do, but
+not how to get it done.
+
+An ideal suspended in a vacuum is ineffective: it must point a dynamic
+current. Only then does it gather power, only then does it enter into
+life. That forces exist to-day which carry with them solutions is evident
+to anyone who has watched the labor movement and the woman's awakening.
+Even the interests of business give power to the cause. The discovery of
+manufacturers that degradation spoils industrial efficiency must not be
+cast aside by the radical because the motive is larger profits. The
+discovery, whatever the motive, will inevitably humanize industry a good
+deal. For it happens that in this case the interests of capitalism and of
+humanity coincide. A propaganda like the single-tax will undoubtedly find
+increasing support among business men. They see in it a relief from the
+burden of rent imposed by that older tyrant--the landlord. But the
+taxation of unimproved property happens at the same time to be a splendid
+weapon against the slum.
+
+Only when the abolition of "white slavery" becomes part of the social
+currents of the time will it bear any interesting analogy to the
+so-called freeing of the slaves. Even then for many enthusiasts the
+comparison is misleading. They are likely to regard the Emancipation
+Proclamation as the end of chattel slavery. It wasn't. That historic
+document broke a legal bond but not a social one. The process of negro
+emancipation is infinitely slower and it is not accomplished yet.
+Likewise no statute can end "white slavery." Only vast and complicated
+changes in the whole texture of social life will achieve such an end. If
+by some magic every taboo of the commission could be enforced the
+abolition of sex slavery would not have come one step nearer to reality.
+Cities and factories, schools and homes, theaters and games, manners and
+thought will have to be transformed before sex can find a better
+expression. Living forces, not statutes or clubs, must work that change.
+The power of emancipation is in the social movements which alone can
+effect any deep reform in a nation. So it is and has been with the negro.
+I do not think the Abolitionists saw facts truly when they disbanded
+their organization a few years after the civil war. They found too much
+comfort in a change of legal status. Profound economic forces brought
+about the beginning of the end of chattel slavery. But the reality of
+freedom was not achieved by proclamation. For that the revolution had to
+go on: the industrial life of the nation had to change its character,
+social customs had to be replaced, the whole outlook of men had to be
+transformed. And whether it is negro slavery or a vicious sexual bondage,
+the actual advance comes from substitutions injected into society by
+dynamic social forces.
+
+I do not wish to press the analogy or over-emphasize the particular
+problems. I am not engaged in drawing up the plans for a reconstruction
+or in telling just what should be done. Only the co-operation of expert
+minds can do that. The place for a special propaganda is elsewhere. If
+these essays succeed in suggesting a method of looking at politics, if
+they draw attention to what is real in social reforms and make somewhat
+more evident the traps and the blind-alleys of an uncritical approach,
+they will have done their work. That the report of the Chicago Vice
+Commission figures so prominently in this chapter is not due to any
+preoccupation with Chicago, the Commission or with vice. It is a text and
+nothing else. The report happens to embody what I conceive to be most of
+the faults of a political method now decadent. Its failure to put human
+impulses at the center of thought produced remedies valueless to human
+nature; its false interest in a particular expression of
+sex--vice--caused it to taboo the civilizing power of sex; its inability
+to see that wants require fine satisfactions and not prohibitions drove
+it into an undemocratic tyranny; its blindness to the social forces of
+our age shut off the motive power for any reform.
+
+The Commission's method was poor, not its intentions. It was an average
+body of American citizens aroused to action by an obvious evil. But
+something slipped in to falsify vision. It was, I believe, an array of
+idols disguised as ideals. They are typical American idols, and they
+deserve some study.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+SOME NECESSARY ICONOCLASM
+
+     The Commission "has kept constantly in mind that to offer a
+     contribution of any value such an offering must be, first, moral;
+     second, reasonable and practical; third, possible under the
+     Constitutional powers of our Courts; fourth, that which will square
+     with the public conscience of the American people."--The Vice
+     Commission of Chicago--Introduction to Report on the Social Evil.
+
+
+Having adjusted such spectacles the Commission proceeded to look at "this
+curse which is more blasting than any plague or epidemic," at an evil
+"which spells only ruin to the race." In dealing with what it regards as
+the greatest calamity in the world, a calamity as old as civilization,
+the Commission lays it down beforehand that the remedy must be "moral,"
+constitutional, and satisfactory to the public conscience. I wonder in
+all seriousness what the Commission would have done had it discovered a
+genuine cure for prostitution which happened, let us say, to conflict
+with the constitutional powers of our courts. I wonder how the Commission
+would have acted if a humble following of the facts had led them to a
+conviction out of tune with the existing public conscience of America.
+Such a conflict is not only possible; it is highly probable. When you
+come to think of it, the conflict appears a certainty. For the
+Constitution is a legal expression of the conditions under which
+prostitution has flourished; the social evil is rooted in institutions
+and manners which have promoted it, in property relations and business
+practice which have gathered about them a halo of reason and
+practicality, of morality and conscience. Any change so vast as the
+abolition of vice is of necessity a change in morals, practice, law and
+conscience.
+
+A scientist who began an investigation by saying that his results must be
+moral or constitutional would be a joke. We have had scientists like
+that, men who insisted that research must confirm the Biblical theory of
+creation. We have had economists who set out with the preconceived idea
+of justifying the factory system. The world has recently begun to see
+through this kind of intellectual fraud. If a doctor should appear who
+offered a cure for tuberculosis on the ground that it was justified by
+the Bible and that it conformed to the opinions of that great mass of the
+American people who believe that fresh air is the devil, we should
+promptly lock up that doctor as a dangerous quack. When the negroes of
+Kansas were said to be taking pink pills to guard themselves against
+Halley's Comet, they were doing something which appeared to them as
+eminently practical and entirely reasonable. Not long ago we read of the
+savage way in which a leper was treated out West; his leprosy was not
+regarded as a disease, but as the curse of God, and, if I remember
+correctly, the Bible was quoted in court as an authority on leprosy. The
+treatment seemed entirely moral and squared very well with the conscience
+of that community.
+
+I have heard reputable physicians condemn a certain method of
+psychotherapy because it was "immoral." A woman once told me that she had
+let her son grow up ignorant of his sexual life because "a mother should
+never mention anything 'embarrassing' to her child." Many of us are still
+blushing for the way America treated Gorki when it found that Russian
+morals did not square with the public conscience of America. And the time
+is not yet passed when we punish the offspring of illicit love, and visit
+vengeance unto the third and fourth generations. One reads in the report
+of the Vice Commission that many public hospitals in Chicago refuse to
+care for venereal diseases. The examples are endless. They run from the
+absurd to the monstrous. But always the source is the same. Idols are set
+up to which all the living must bow; we decide beforehand that things
+must fit a few preconceived ideas. And when they don't, which is most of
+the time, we deny truth, falsify facts, and prefer the coddling of our
+theory to any deeper understanding of the real problem before us.
+
+It seems as if a theory were never so active as when the reality behind
+it has disappeared. The empty name, the ghostly phrase, exercise an
+authority that is appalling. When you think of the blood that has been
+shed in the name of Jesus, when you think of the Holy Roman Empire,
+"neither holy nor Roman nor imperial," of the constitutional phrases that
+cloak all sorts of thievery, of the common law precedents that tyrannize
+over us, history begins to look almost like the struggle of man to
+emancipate himself from phrase-worship. The devil can quote Scripture,
+and law, and morality and reason and practicality. The devil can use the
+public conscience of his time. He does in wars, in racial and religious
+persecutions; he did in the Spain of the Inquisition; he does in the
+American lynching.
+
+For there is nothing so bad but it can masquerade as moral. Conquerors
+have gone forth with the blessing of popes; a nation invokes its God
+before beginning a campaign of murder, rape and pillage. The ruthless
+exploitation of India becomes the civilizing fulfilment of the "white
+man's burden"; not infrequently the missionary, drummer, and prospector
+are embodied in one man. In the nineteenth century church, press and
+university devoted no inconsiderable part of their time to proving the
+high moral and scientific justice of child labor and human sweating. It
+is a matter of record that chattel slavery in this country was deduced
+from Biblical injunction, that the universities furnished brains for its
+defense. Surely Bernard Shaw was not describing the Englishman alone when
+he said in "The Man of Destiny" that "... you will never find an
+Englishman in the wrong. He does everything on principle. He fights you
+on patriotic principles; he robs you on business principles...."
+
+Liberty, equality, fraternity--what a grotesque career those words have
+had. Almost every attempt to mitigate the hardships of industrialism has
+had to deal with the bogey of liberty. Labor organization, factory laws,
+health regulations are still fought as infringements of liberty. And in
+the name of equality what fantasies of taxation have we not woven? what
+travesties of justice set up? "The law in its majestic equality," writes
+Anatole France, "forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep in the
+streets and to steal bread." Fraternity becomes the hypocritical slogan
+by which we refuse to enact what is called "class legislation"--a policy
+which in theory denies the existence of classes, in practice legislates
+in favor of the rich. The laws which go unchallenged are laws friendly to
+business; class legislation means working-class legislation.
+
+You have to go among lawyers to see this idolatrous process in its most
+perfect form. When a judge sets out to "interpret" the Constitution, what
+is it that he does? He takes a sentence written by a group of men more
+than a hundred years ago. That sentence expressed their policy about
+certain conditions which they had to deal with. In it was summed up what
+they intended to do about the problems they saw. That is all the sentence
+means. But in the course of a century new problems arise--problems the
+Fathers could no more have foreseen than we can foresee the problems of
+the year two thousand. Yet that sentence which contained their wisdom
+about particular events has acquired an emotional force which persists
+long after the events have passed away. Legends gather about the men who
+wrote it: those legends are absorbed by us almost with our mothers' milk.
+We never again read that sentence straight. It has a gravity out of all
+proportion to its use, and we call it a fundamental principle of
+government. Whatever we want to do is hallowed and justified, if it can
+be made to appear as a deduction from that sentence. To put new wine in
+old bottles is one of the aims of legal casuistry.
+
+Reformers practice it. You hear it said that the initiative and
+referendum are a return to the New England town meeting. That is supposed
+to be an argument for direct legislation. But surely the analogy is
+superficial; the difference profound. The infinitely greater complexity
+of legislation to-day, the vast confusion in the aims of the voting
+population, produce a difference of so great a degree that it amounts to
+a difference in kind. The naturalist may classify the dog and the fox,
+the house-cat and the tiger together for certain purposes. The historian
+of political forms may see in the town meeting a forerunner of direct
+legislation. But no housewife dare classify the cat and the tiger, the
+dog and the fox, as the same kind of animal. And no statesman can argue
+the virtues of the referendum from the successes of the town meeting.
+
+But the propagandists do it nevertheless, and their propaganda thrives
+upon it. The reason is simple. The town meeting is an obviously
+respectable institution, glorified by all the reverence men give to the
+dead. It has acquired the seal of an admired past, and any proposal that
+can borrow that seal can borrow that reverence too. A name trails behind
+it an army of associations. That army will fight in any cause that bears
+the name. So the reformers of California, the Lorimerites of Chicago, and
+the Barnes Republicans of Albany all use the name of Lincoln for their
+political associations. In the struggle that preceded the Republican
+Convention of 1912 it was rumored that the Taft reactionaries would put
+forward Lincoln's son as chairman of the convention in order to
+counteract Roosevelt's claim that he stood in Lincoln's shoes.
+
+Casuistry is nothing but the injection of your own meaning into an old
+name. At school when the teacher asked us whether we had studied the
+lesson, the invariable answer was Yes. We had indeed stared at the page
+for a few minutes, and that could be called studying. Sometimes the
+head-master would break into the room just in time to see the conclusion
+of a scuffle. Jimmy's clothes are white with dust. "Johnny, did you throw
+chalk at Jimmy?" "No, sir," says Johnny, and then under his breath to
+placate God's penchant for truth, "I threw the chalk-eraser." Once in
+Portland, Maine, I ordered iced tea at an hotel. The waitress brought me
+a glass of yellowish liquid with a two-inch collar of foam at the top. No
+tea I had ever seen outside of a prohibition state looked like that.
+Though it was tea, it might have been beer. Perhaps if I had smiled or
+winked in ordering the tea, it would have been beer. The two looked alike
+in Portland; they were interchangeable. You could drink tea and fool
+yourself into thinking it was beer. You could drink beer and pass for a
+tea-toper.
+
+It is rare, I think, that the fraud is so genial and so deliberate. The
+openness cleanses it. Advertising, for example, would be nothing but
+gigantic and systematic lying if almost everybody didn't know that it
+was. Yet it runs into the sinister all the time. The pure food agitation
+is largely an effort to make the label and the contents tell the same
+story. It was noteworthy that, following the discovery of salvarsan or
+"606" by Dr. Ehrlich, the quack doctors began to call their treatments
+"606." But the deliberate casuistry of lawyers, quacks, or politicians is
+not so difficult to deal with. The very deliberation makes it easier to
+detect, for it is generally awkward. What one man can consciously devise,
+other men can understand.
+
+But unconscious casuistry deceives us all. No one escapes it entirely. A
+wealth of evidence could be adduced to support this from the studies of
+dreams and fantasies made by the Freudian school of psychologists. They
+have shown how constantly the mind cloaks a deep meaning in a shallow
+incident--how the superficial is all the time being shoved into the light
+of consciousness in order to conceal a buried intention; how inveterate
+is our use of symbols.
+
+Between ourselves and our real natures we interpose that wax figure of
+idealizations and selections which we call our character. We extend this
+into all our thinking. Between us and the realities of social life we
+build up a mass of generalizations, abstract ideas, ancient glories, and
+personal wishes. They simplify and soften experience. It is so much
+easier to talk of poverty than to think of the poor, to argue the rights
+of capital than to see its results. Pretty soon we come to think of the
+theories and abstract ideas as things in themselves. We worry about their
+fate and forget their original content.
+
+For words, theories, symbols, slogans, abstractions of all kinds are
+nothing but the porous vessels into which life flows, is contained for a
+time, and then passes through. But our reverence clings to the vessels.
+The old meaning may have disappeared, a new one come in--no matter, we
+try to believe there has been no change. And when life's expansion
+demands some new container, nothing is more difficult than the
+realization that the old vessels cannot be stretched to the present need.
+
+It is interesting to notice how in the very act of analyzing it I have
+fallen into this curious and ancient habit. My point is that the metaphor
+is taken for the reality: I have used at least six metaphors to state it.
+Abstractions are not cloaks, nor wax figures, nor walls, nor vessels, and
+life doesn't flow like water. What they really are you and I know
+inwardly by using abstractions and living our lives. But once I attempt
+to give that inwardness expression, I must use the only weapons I
+have--abstractions, theories, phrases. By an effort of the sympathetic
+imagination you can revive within yourself something of my inward sense.
+As I have had to abstract from life in order to communicate, so you are
+compelled to animate my abstractions, in order to understand.
+
+I know of no other method of communication between two people. Language
+is always grossly inadequate. It is inadequate if the listener is merely
+passive, if he falls into the mistake of the literal-minded who expect
+words to contain a precise image of reality. They never do. All language
+can achieve is to act as a guidepost to the imagination enabling the
+reader to recreate the author's insight. The artist does that: he
+controls his medium so that we come most readily to the heart of his
+intention. In the lyric poet the control is often so delicate that the
+hearer lives over again the finely shaded mood of the poet. Take the
+words of a lyric for what they say, and they say nothing most of the
+time. And that is true of philosophers. You must penetrate the ponderous
+vocabulary, the professional cant to the insight beneath or you scoff at
+the mountain ranges of words and phrases. It is this that Bergson means
+when he tells us that a philosopher's intuition always outlasts his
+system. Unless you get at that you remain forever foreign to the thinker.
+
+That too is why debating is such a wretched amusement and most
+partisanship, most controversy, so degrading. The trick here is to argue
+from the opponent's language, never from his insight. You take him
+literally, you pick up his sentences, and you show what nonsense they
+are. You do not try to weigh what you see against what he sees; you
+contrast what you see with what he says. So debating becomes a way of
+confirming your own prejudices; it is never, never in any debate I have
+suffered through, a search for understanding from the angles of two
+differing insights.
+
+And, of course, in those more sinister forms of debating, court trials,
+where the stakes are so much bigger, the skill of a successful lawyer is
+to make the atmosphere as opaque as possible to the other lawyer's
+contention. Men have been hanged as a result. How often in a political
+campaign does a candidate suggest that behind the platforms and speeches
+of his opponents there might be some new and valuable understanding of
+the country's need?
+
+The fact is that we argue and quarrel an enormous lot over words. Our
+prevailing habit is to think about phrases, "ideals," theories, not about
+the realities they express. In controversy we do not try to find our
+opponent's meaning: we examine his vocabulary. And in our own efforts to
+shape policies we do not seek out what is worth doing: we seek out what
+will pass for moral, practical, popular or constitutional.
+
+In this the Vice Commission reflected our national habits. For those
+earnest men and women in Chicago did not set out to find a way of
+abolishing prostitution; they set out to find a way that would conform to
+four idols they worshiped. The only cure for prostitution might prove to
+be "immoral," "impractical," unconstitutional, and unpopular. I suspect
+that it is. But the honest thing to do would have been to look for that
+cure without preconceived notions. Having found it, the Commission could
+then have said to the public: "This is what will cure the social evil. It
+means these changes in industry, sex relations, law and public opinion.
+If you think it is worth the cost you can begin to deal with the problem.
+If you don't, then confess that you will not abolish prostitution, and
+turn your compassion to softening its effects."
+
+That would have left the issues clear and wholesome. But the procedure of
+the Commission is a blow to honest thinking. Its conclusions may "square
+with the public conscience of the American people" but they will not
+square with the intellectual conscience of anybody. To tell you at the
+top of the page that absolute annihilation of prostitution is the
+ultimate ideal and twenty lines further on that the method must be
+constitutional is nothing less than an insult to the intelligence.
+Calf-worship was never more idolatrous than this. Truth would have slept
+more comfortably in Procrustes' bed.
+
+Let no one imagine that I take the four preconceived ideas of the
+Commission too seriously. On the first reading of the report they aroused
+no more interest in me than the ordinary lip-honor we all do to
+conventionality--I had heard of the great fearlessness of this report,
+and I supposed that this bending of the knee was nothing but the innocent
+hypocrisy of the reformer who wants to make his proposal not too
+shocking. But it was a mistake. Those four idols really dominated the
+minds of the Commission, and without them the report cannot be
+understood. They are typical idols of the American people. This report
+offers an opportunity to see the concrete results of worshiping them.
+
+A valuable contribution, then, must be _moral_. There is no doubt that
+the Commission means sexually moral. We Americans always use the word in
+that limited sense. If you say that Jones is a moral man you mean that he
+is faithful to his wife. He may support her by selling pink pills; he is
+nevertheless moral if he is monogamous. The average American rarely
+speaks of industrial piracy as immoral. He may condemn it, but not with
+that word. If he extends the meaning of immoral at all, it is to the
+vices most closely allied to sex--drink and gambling.
+
+Now sexual morality is pretty clearly defined for the Commission. As we
+have seen, it means that sex must be confined to procreation by a
+healthy, intelligent and strictly monogamous couple. All other sexual
+expression would come under the ban of disapproval. I am sure I do the
+Commission no injustice. Now this limited conception of sex has had a
+disastrous effect: it has forced the Commission to ignore the sexual
+impulse in discussing a sexual problem. Any modification of the
+relationship of men and women was immediately put out of consideration.
+Such suggestions as Forel, Ellen Key, or Havelock Ellis make could, of
+course, not even get a hearing.
+
+With this moral ideal in mind, not only vice, but sex itself, becomes an
+evil thing. Hence the hysterical and minute application of the taboo
+wherever sex shows itself. Barred from any reform which would reabsorb
+the impulse into civilized life, the Commissioners had no other course
+but to hunt it, as an outlaw. And in doing this they were compelled to
+discard the precious values of art, religion and social life of which
+this superfluous energy is the creator. Driven to think of it as bad,
+except for certain particular functions, they could, of course, not see
+its possibilities. Hence the poverty of their suggestions along
+educational and artistic lines.
+
+A valuable contribution, we are told, must be _reasonable_ and
+_practical_. Here is a case where words cannot be taken literally.
+"Reasonable" in America certainly never even pretended to mean in
+accordance with a rational ideal, and "practical,"--well one thinks of
+"practical politics," "practical business men," and "unpractical
+reformers." Boiled down these words amount to something like this: the
+proposals must not be new or startling; must not involve any radical
+disturbance of any respectable person's selfishness; must not call forth
+any great opposition; must look definite and immediate; must be tangible
+like a raid, or a jail, or the paper of an ordinance, or a policeman's
+club. Above all a "reasonable and practical" proposal must not require
+any imaginative patience. The actual proposals have all these qualities:
+if they are "reasonable and practical" then we know by a good
+demonstration what these terms meant to that average body of citizens.
+
+To see that is to see exposed an important facet of the American
+temperament. Our dislike of "talk"; the frantic desire to "do something"
+without inquiring whether it is worth doing; the dollar standard; the
+unwillingness to cast any bread upon the waters; our preference for a
+sparrow in the hand to a forest of song-birds; the naïve inability to
+understand the inner satisfactions of bankrupt poets and the
+unworldliness of eccentric thinkers; success-mania; philistinism--they
+are pieces of the same cloth. They come from failure or unwillingness to
+project the mind beyond the daily routine of things, to play over the
+whole horizon of possibilities, and to recognize that all is not said
+when we have spoken. In those words "reasonable and practical" is the
+Chinese Wall of America, that narrow boundary which contracts our vision
+to the moment, cuts us off from the culture of the world, and makes us
+such provincial, unimaginative blunderers over our own problems. Fixation
+upon the immediate has made a rich country poor in leisure, has in a land
+meant for liberal living incited an insane struggle for existence. One
+suspects at times that our national cult of optimism is no real feeling
+that the world is good, but a fear that pessimism will produce panics.
+
+How this fascination of the obvious has balked the work of the Commission
+I need not elaborate. That the long process of civilizing sex received
+perfunctory attention; that the imaginative value of sex was lost in a
+dogma; that the implied changes in social life were dodged--all that has
+been pointed out. It was the inability to rise above the immediate that
+makes the report read as if the policeman were the only agent of
+civilization.
+
+For where in the report is any thorough discussion by sociologists of the
+relations of business and marriage to vice? Why is there no testimony by
+psychologists to show how sex can be affected by environment, by
+educators to show how it can be trained, by industrial experts to show
+how monotony and fatigue affect it? Where are the detailed proposals by
+specialists, for decent housing and working conditions, for educational
+reform, for play facilities? The Commission wasn't afraid of details:
+didn't it recommend searchlights in the parks as a weapon against vice?
+Why then isn't there a budget, a large, comprehensive budget, precise and
+informing, in which provision is made for beginning to civilize Chicago?
+That wouldn't have been "reasonable and practical," I presume, for it
+would have cost millions and millions of dollars. And where would the
+money have come from? Were the single-taxers, the Socialists consulted?
+But their proposals would require big changes in property interests, and
+would that be "reasonable and practical"? Evidently not: it is more
+reasonable and practical to keep park benches out of the shadows and to
+plague unescorted prostitutes.
+
+And where are the open questions: the issues that everybody should
+consider, the problems that scientists should study? I see almost no
+trace of them. Why are the sexual problems not even stated? Where are the
+doubts that should have honored these investigations, the frank statement
+of all the gaps in knowledge, and the obscurities in morals? Knowing
+perfectly well that vice will not be repressed within a year or
+prostitution absolutely annihilated in ten, it might, I should think,
+have seemed more important that the issues be made clear and the thought
+of the people fertilized than that the report should look very definite
+and precise. There are all sorts of things we do not understand about
+this problem. The opportunities for study which the Commissioners had
+must have made these empty spaces evident. Why then were we not taken
+into their confidence? Along what lines is investigation most needed? To
+what problems, what issues, shall we give our attention? What is the
+debatable ground in this territory? The Commission does not say, and I
+for one, ascribe the silence to the American preoccupation with
+immediate, definite, tangible interests.
+
+Wells has written penetratingly about this in "The New Machiavelli." I
+have called this fixation on the nearest object at hand an American
+habit. Perhaps as Mr. Wells shows it is an English one too. But in this
+country we have a philosophy to express it--the philosophy of the
+Reasonable and the Practical, and so I do not hesitate to import Mr.
+Wells's observations: "It has been the chronic mistake of statecraft and
+all organizing spirits to attempt immediately to scheme and arrange and
+achieve. Priests, schools of thought, political schemers, leaders of men,
+have always slipped into the error of assuming that they can think out
+the whole--or at any rate completely think out definite parts--of the
+purpose and future of man, clearly and finally; they have set themselves
+to legislate and construct on that assumption, and, experiencing the
+perplexing obduracy and evasions of reality, they have taken to dogma,
+persecution, training, pruning, secretive education; and all the
+stupidities of self-sufficient energy. In the passion of their good
+intentions they have not hesitated to conceal facts, suppress thought,
+crush disturbing initiatives and apparently detrimental desires. And so
+it is blunderingly and wastefully, destroying with the making, that any
+extension of social organization is at present achieved. Directly,
+however, this idea of an emancipation from immediacy is grasped, directly
+the dominating importance of this critical, less personal, mental
+hinterland in the individual and of the collective mind in the race is
+understood, the whole problem of the statesman and his attitude toward
+politics gains a new significance, and becomes accessible to a new series
+of solutions...."
+
+Let no one suppose that the unwillingness to cultivate what Mr. Wells
+calls the "mental hinterland" is a vice peculiar to the business man. The
+colleges submit to it whenever they concentrate their attention on the
+details of the student's vocation before they have built up some cultural
+background. The whole drift towards industrial training in schools has
+the germs of disaster within it--a preoccupation with the technique of a
+career. I am not a lover of the "cultural" activities of our schools and
+colleges, still less am I a lover of shallow specialists. The
+unquestioned need for experts in politics is full of the very real danger
+that detailed preparation may give us a bureaucracy--a government by men
+divorced from human tradition. The churches submit to the demand for
+immediacy with great alacrity. Look at the so-called "liberal" churches.
+Reacting against an empty formalism they are tumbling over themselves to
+prove how directly they touch daily life. You read glowing articles in
+magazines about preachers who devote their time to housing reforms, milk
+supplies, the purging of the civil service. If you lament the ugliness of
+their churches, the poverty of the ritual, and the political absorption
+of their sermons, you are told that the church must abandon forms and
+serve the common life of men. There are many ways of serving everyday
+needs,--turning churches into social reform organs and political rostra
+is, it seems to me, an obvious but shallow way of performing that
+service. When churches cease to paint the background of our lives, to
+nourish a Weltanschaung, strengthen men's ultimate purposes and reaffirm
+the deepest values of life, then churches have ceased to meet the needs
+for which they exist. That "hinterland" affects daily life, and the
+church which cannot get a leverage on it by any other method than
+entering into immediate political controversy is simply a church that is
+dead. It may be an admirable agent of reform, but it has ceased to be a
+church.
+
+A large wing of the Socialist Party is the slave of obvious success. It
+boasts that it has ceased to be "visionary" and has become "practical."
+Votes, winning campaigns, putting through reform measures seem a great
+achievement. It forgets the difference between voting the Socialist
+ticket and understanding Socialism. The vote is the tangible thing, and
+for that these Socialist politicians work. They get the votes, enough to
+elect them to office. In the City of Schenectady that happened as a
+result of the mayoralty campaign of 1911. I had an opportunity to observe
+the results. A few Socialists were in office set to govern a city with no
+Socialist "hinterland." It was a pathetic situation, for any reform
+proposal had to pass the judgment of men and women who did not see life
+as the officials did. On no important measure could the administration
+expect popular understanding. What was the result? In crucial issues,
+like taxation, the Socialists had to submit to the ideas,--the general
+state of mind of the community. They had to reverse their own theories
+and accept those that prevailed in that unconverted city. I wondered over
+our helplessness, for I was during a period one of those officials. The
+other members of the administration used to say at every opportunity that
+we were fighting "The Beast" or "Special Privilege." But to me it always
+seemed that we were like Peer Gynt struggling against the formless
+Boyg--invisible yet everywhere--we were struggling with the unwatered
+hinterland of the citizens of Schenectady. I understood then, I think,
+what Wells meant when he said that he wanted "no longer to 'fix up,' as
+people say, human affairs, but to devote his forces to the development of
+that needed intellectual life without which all his shallow attempts at
+fixing up are futile." For in the last analysis the practical and the
+reasonable are little idols of clay that thwart our efforts.
+
+The third requirement of a valuable contribution, says the Chicago
+Commission, is the constitutional sanction. This idol carries its own
+criticism with it. The worship of the constitution amounts, of course, to
+saying that men exist for the sake of the constitution. The person who
+holds fast to that idea is forever incapable of understanding either men
+or constitutions. It is a prime way of making laws ridiculous; if you
+want to cultivate _lèse-majesté_ in Germany get the Kaiser to proclaim
+his divine origin; if you want to promote disrespect of the courts,
+announce their infallibility.
+
+But in this case, the Commission is not representative of the dominant
+thought of our times. The vital part of the population has pretty well
+emerged from any dumb acquiescence in constitutions. Theodore Roosevelt,
+who reflects so much of America, has very definitely cast down this idol.
+Now since he stands generally some twenty years behind the pioneer and
+about six months ahead of the majority, we may rest assured that this
+much-needed iconoclasm is in process of achievement.
+
+Closely related to the constitution and just as decadent to-day are the
+Sanctity of Private Property, Vested Rights, Competition the Life of
+Trade, Prosperity (at any cost). Each one of these ideas was born of an
+original need, served its historical function and survived beyond its
+allotted time. Nowadays you still come across some of these ancient
+notions, especially in courts, where they do no little damage in
+perverting justice, but they are ghost-like and disreputable, gibbering
+and largely helpless. He who is watching the ascendant ideas of American
+life can afford to feel that the early maxims of capitalism are doomed.
+
+But the habit of mind which would turn an instrument of life into an
+immutable law of its existence--that habit is always with us. We may
+outgrow our adoration of the Constitution or Private Property only to
+establish some new totem pole. In the arts we call this inveterate
+tendency classicalism. It is, of course, a habit by no means confined to
+the arts. Politics, religion, science are subject to it,--in politics we
+call it conservative, in religion orthodox, in science we describe it as
+academic. Its manifestations are multiform but they have a common source.
+An original creative impulse of the mind expresses itself in a certain
+formula; posterity mistakes the formula for the impulse. A genius will
+use his medium in a particular way because it serves his need; this way
+becomes a fixed rule which the classicalist serves. It has been pointed
+out that because the first steam trains were run on roads built for carts
+and coaches, the railway gauge almost everywhere in the world became
+fixed at four feet eight and one-half inches.
+
+You might say that genius works inductively and finds a method; the
+conservative works deductively from the method and defeats whatever
+genius he may have. A friend of mine had written a very brilliant article
+on a play which had puzzled New York. Some time later I was discussing
+the article with another friend of a decidedly classicalist bent. "What
+is it?" he protested, "it isn't criticism for it's half rhapsody; it
+isn't rhapsody because it is analytical.... What is it? That's what I
+want to know." "But isn't it fine, and worth having, and aren't you glad
+it was written?" I pleaded. "Well, if I knew what it was...." And so the
+argument ran for hours. Until he had subsumed the article under certain
+categories he had come to accept, appreciation was impossible for him. I
+have many arguments with my classicalist friend. This time it was about
+George Moore's "Ave." I was trying to express my delight. "It isn't a
+novel, or an essay, or a real confession--it's nothing," said he. His
+well-ordered mind was compelled to throw out of doors any work for which
+he had no carefully prepared pocket. I thought of Aristotle, who denied
+the existence of a mule because it was neither a horse nor an ass.
+
+Dramatic critics follow Aristotle in more ways than one. A play is
+produced which fascinates an audience for weeks. It is published and read
+all over the world. Then you are treated to endless discussions by the
+critics trying to prove that "it is not a play." So-and-so-and-so
+constitute a play, they affirm,--this thing doesn't meet the
+requirements, so away with it. They forget that nobody would have had the
+slightest idea what a play was if plays hadn't been written; that the
+rules deduced from the plays that have already been written are no
+eternal law for the plays that will be.
+
+Classicalism and invention are irreconcilable enemies. Let it be
+understood that I am not decrying the great nourishment which a living
+tradition offers. The criticism I am making is of those who try to feed
+upon the husks alone. Without the slightest paradox one may say that the
+classicalist is most foreign to the classics. He does not put himself
+within the creative impulses of the past: he is blinded by their
+manifestations. It is perhaps no accident that two of the greatest
+classical scholars in England--Gilbert Murray and Alfred Zimmern--are
+political radicals. The man whom I call here the classicalist cannot
+possibly be creative, for the essence of his creed is that there must be
+nothing new under the sun.
+
+The United States, you imagine, would of all nations be the freest from
+classicalism. Settled as a great adventure and dedicated to an experiment
+in republicanism, the tradition of the country is of extending
+boundaries, obstacles overcome, and pioneering exploits in which a
+wilderness was subdued to human uses. The very air of America would seem
+to be a guarantee against formalism. You would think that self-government
+finds its surest footing here--that real autonomy of the spirit which
+makes human uses the goal of effort, denies all inhuman ideals, seeks out
+what men want, and proceeds to create it. With such a history how could a
+nation fail to see in its constitution anything but a tool of life, like
+the axe, the spade or the plough?
+
+The West has in a measure carried its freedom over into politics and
+social life generally. Formalism sets in as you move east and south into
+the older and more settled communities. There the pioneering impulse has
+passed out of life into stupid history books, and the inevitable
+classicalism, the fear of adventure, the superstition before social
+invention, have reasserted themselves. If I may turn for a moment from
+description to prophecy, it is to say that this equilibrium will not hold
+for very long. There are signs that the West after achieving the reforms
+which it needs to-day--reforms which will free its economic life from the
+credit monopolies of the East, and give it a greater fluidity in the
+marketing of its products--will follow the way of all agricultural
+communities to a rural and placid conservatism. The spirit of the pioneer
+does not survive forever: it is kept alive to-day, I believe, by certain
+unnatural irritants which may be summed up as absentee ownership. The
+West is suffering from foreignly owned railroads, power-resources, and an
+alien credit control. But once it recaptures these essentials of its
+economic life, once the "progressive" movement is victorious, I venture
+to predict that the agricultural West will become the heart of American
+complacency. The East, on the other hand, with its industrial problem
+must go to far more revolutionary measures for a solution. And the East
+is fertilized continually by European traditions: that stream of
+immigration brings with it a thousand unforeseeable possibilities. The
+great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the
+wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples. To-day perhaps,
+it is still predominantly a question for the East. But it means that
+America is turning from the contrast between her courage and nature's
+obstacles to a comparison of her civilization with Europe's. Immigration
+more than anything else is drawing us into world problems. Many people
+profess to see horrible dangers in the foreign invasion. Certainly no man
+is sure of its conclusion. It may swamp us, it may, if we seize the
+opportunity, mean the impregnation of our national life with a new
+brilliancy.
+
+I have said that the West is still moved by the tapering impulse of the
+pioneer, and I have ventured to predict that this would soon dwindle into
+an agricultural toryism. That prediction may very easily be upset.
+Far-reaching mechanical inventions already threaten to transform farming
+into an industry. I refer to those applications of power to agriculture
+which will inevitably divorce the farmer from the ownership of his tools.
+An industrial revolution analogous to that in manufacture during the
+nineteenth century is distinctly probable, and capitalistic agriculture
+may soon cease to be a contradiction in terms. Like all inventions it
+will disturb deeply the classicalist tendency, and this disturbance may
+generate a new impulse to replace the decadent one of the pioneer.
+
+Without some new dynamic force America, for all her tradition, is not
+immune to a hardening formalism. The psychological descent into
+classicalism is always a strong possibility. That is why we, the children
+of frontiersmen, city builders and immigrants, surprise Europe constantly
+with our worship of constitutions, our social and political timidity. In
+many ways we are more defenceless against these deadening habits than the
+people of Europe. Our geographical isolation preserves us from any vivid
+sense of national contrast: our imaginations are not stirred by different
+civilizations. We have almost no spiritual weapons against classicalism:
+universities, churches, newspapers are by-products of a commercial
+success; we have no tradition of intellectual revolt. The American
+college student has the gravity and mental habits of a Supreme Court
+judge; his "wild oats" are rarely spiritual; the critical, analytical
+habit of mind is distrusted. We say that "knocking" is a sign of the
+"sorehead" and we sublimate criticism by saying that "every knock is a
+boost." America does not play with ideas; generous speculation is
+regarded as insincere, and shunned as if it might endanger the optimism
+which underlies success. All this becomes such an insulation against new
+ideas that when the Yankee goes abroad he takes his environment with him.
+
+It seems at times as if our capacity for appreciating originality were
+absorbed in the trivial eccentricities of fads and fashions. The obvious
+novelties of machinery and locomotion, phonographs and yellow journalism
+slake the American thirst for creation pretty thoroughly. In serious
+matters we follow the Vice Commission's fourth essential of a valuable
+contribution--_that which will square with the public conscience of the
+American people_.
+
+I do not care to dilate upon the exploded pretensions of Mr. and Mrs.
+Grundy. They are a fairly disreputable couple by this time because we are
+beginning to know how much morbidity they represent. The Vice Commission,
+for example, bowed to what might be called the "instinctive conscience"
+of America when it balked at tracing vice to its source in the
+over-respected institutions of American life and the over-respected
+natures of American men and women. It bowed to the prevailing conscience
+when it proposed taboos instead of radical changes. It bowed to a
+traditional conscience when it confused the sins of sex with the
+possibilities of sex; and it paid tribute to a verbal conscience, to a
+lip morality, when, with extreme irrelevance to its beloved police, it
+proclaimed "absolute annihilation" the ultimate ideal. In brief, the
+commission failed to see that the working conscience of America is to-day
+bound up with the very evil it is supposed to eradicate by a relentless
+warfare.
+
+It was to be expected. Our conscience is not the vessel of eternal
+verities. It grows with our social life, and a new social condition means
+a radical change in conscience. In order to do away with vice America
+must live and think and feel differently. This is an old story. Because
+of it all innovators have been at war with the public conscience of their
+time. Yet there is nothing strange or particularly disheartening about
+this commonplace observation: to expect anything else is to hope that a
+nation will lift itself by its own bootstraps. Yet there is danger the
+moment leaders of the people make a virtue of homage to the unregenerate,
+public conscience.
+
+In La Follette's Magazine (Feb. 17, 1912) there is a leading article
+called "The Great Issue." You can read there that "the composite judgment
+is always safer and wiser and stronger and more unselfish than the
+judgment of any one individual mind. The people have been betrayed by
+their representatives again and again. The real danger to democracy lies
+not in the ignorance or want of patriotism of the people, but in the
+corrupting influence of powerful business organizations upon the
+representatives of the people...."
+
+I have only one quarrel with that philosophy--its negativity. With the
+belief that government is futile and mischievous unless supported by the
+mass of the people; with the undeniable fact that business has corrupted
+public officials--I have no complaint. What I object to is the emphasis
+which shifts the blame for our troubles from the shoulders of the people
+to those of the "corrupting interests." For this seems to me nothing but
+the resuscitation of the devil: when things go wrong it is somebody
+else's fault. We are peculiarly open to this kind of vanity in America.
+If some wise law is passed we say it is the will of the people showing
+its power of self-government. But if that will is so weak and timid that
+a great evil like child labor persists to our shame we turn the
+responsibility over to the devil personified as a "special interest." It
+is an old habit of the race which seems to have begun with the serpent in
+the Garden of Eden.
+
+The word demagogue has been frightfully maltreated in late years, but
+surely here is its real meaning--to flatter the people by telling them
+that their failures are somebody else's fault. For if a nation declares
+it has reached its majority by instituting self-government, then it
+cannot shirk responsibility.
+
+These "special interests"--big business, a corrupt press, crooked
+politics--grew up within the country, were promoted by American citizens,
+admired by millions of them, and acquiesced in by almost all of them.
+Whoever thinks that business corruption is the work of a few inhumanly
+cunning individuals with monstrous morals is self-righteous without
+excuse. Capitalists did not violate the public conscience of America;
+they expressed it. That conscience was inadequate and unintelligent. We
+are being pinched by the acts it nourished. A great outcry has arisen and
+a number of perfectly conventional men like Lorimer suffer an undeserved
+humiliation. We say it is a "moral awakening." That is another dodge by
+which we pretend that we were always wise and just, though a trifle
+sleepy. In reality we are witnessing a change of conscience, initiated by
+cranks and fanatics, sustained for a long time by minorities, which has
+at last infected the mass of the people.
+
+The danger I spoke of arises just here: the desire to infect at once the
+whole mass crowds out the courage of the innovator. No man can do his
+best work if he bows at every step to the public conscience of his age.
+The real service to democracy is the fullest, freest expression of
+talent. The best servants of the people, like the best valets, must
+whisper unpleasant truths in the master's ear. It is the court fool, not
+the foolish courtier, whom the king can least afford to lose.
+
+Hostile critics of democracy have long pointed out that mediocrity
+becomes the rule. They have not been without facts for their support. And
+I do not see why we who believe in democracy should not recognize this
+danger and trace it to its source. Certainly it is not answered with a
+sneer. I have worked in the editorial office of a popular magazine, a
+magazine that is known widely as a champion of popular rights. By
+personal experience, by intimate conversations, and by looking about, I
+think I am pretty well aware of what the influence of business upon
+journalism amounts to. I have seen the inside working of business
+pressure; articles of my own have been suppressed after they were in
+type; friends of mine have told me stories of expurgation, of the
+"morganization" of their editorial policy. And in the face of that I
+should like to record it as my sincere conviction that no financial power
+is one-tenth so corrupting, so insidious, so hostile to originality and
+frank statement as the fear of the public which reads the magazine. For
+one item suppressed out of respect for a railroad or a bank, nine are
+rejected because of the prejudices of the public. This will anger the
+farmers, that will arouse the Catholics, another will shock the summer
+girl. Anybody can take a fling at poor old Mr. Rockefeller, but the great
+mass of average citizens (to which none of us belongs) must be left in
+undisturbed possession of its prejudices. In that subservience, and not
+in the meddling of Mr. Morgan, is the reason why American journalism is
+so flaccid, so repetitious and so dull.
+
+The people should be supreme, yes, its will should be the law of the
+land. But it is a caricature of democracy to make it also the law of
+individual initiative. One thing it is to say that all proposals must
+ultimately win the acceptance of the majority; it is quite another to
+propose nothing which is not immediately acceptable. It is as true of the
+nation as of the body that one leg cannot go forward very far unless the
+whole body follows. That is a different thing from trying to move both
+legs forward at the same time. The one is democracy; the other
+is--demolatry.
+
+It is better to catch the idol-maker than to smash each idol. It would be
+an endless task to hunt down all the masks, the will-o'-the-wisps and the
+shadows which divert us from our real purpose. Each man carries within
+himself the cause of his own mirages. Whenever we accept an idea as
+authority instead of as instrument, an idol is set up. We worship the
+plough, and not the fruit. And from this habit there is no permanent
+escape. Only effort can keep the mind centered truly. Whenever criticism
+slackens, whenever we sink into acquiescence, the mind swerves aside and
+clings with the gratitude of the weary to some fixed idea. It is so much
+easier to follow a rule of thumb, and obey the constitution, than to find
+out what we really want and to do it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A great deal of political theory has been devoted to asking: what is the
+aim of government? Many readers may have wondered why that question has
+not figured in these pages. For the logical method would be to decide
+upon the ultimate ideal of statecraft and then elaborate the technique of
+its realization. I have not done that because this rational procedure
+inverts the natural order of things and develops all kinds of theoretical
+tangles and pseudo-problems. They come from an effort to state abstractly
+in intellectual terms qualities that can be known only by direct
+experience. You achieve nothing but confusion if you begin by announcing
+that politics must achieve "justice" or "liberty" or "happiness." Even
+though you are perfectly sure that you know exactly what these words mean
+translated into concrete experiences, it is very doubtful whether you can
+really convey your meaning to anyone else. "Plaisante justice qu'une
+rivière borne. Vérité, au deçà des Pyrénées, erreur au de là," says
+Pascal. If what is good in the world depended on our ability to define it
+we should be hopeless indeed.
+
+This is an old difficulty in ethics. Many men have remarked that we
+quarrel over the "problem of evil," never over the "problem of good."
+That comes from the fact that good is a quality of experience which does
+not demand an explanation. When we are thwarted we begin to ask why. It
+was the evil in the world that set Leibniz the task of justifying the
+ways of God to man. Nor is it an accident that in daily life misfortune
+turns men to philosophy. One might generalize and say that as soon as we
+begin to explain, it is because we have been made to complain.
+
+No moral judgment can decide the value of life. No ethical theory can
+announce any intrinsic good. The whole speculation about morality is an
+effort to find a way of living which men who live it will instinctively
+feel is good. No formula can express an ultimate experience; no axiom can
+ever be a substitute for what really makes life worth living. Plato may
+describe the objects which man rejoices over, he may guide them to good
+experiences, but each man in his inward life is a last judgment on all
+his values.
+
+This amounts to saying that the goal of action is in its final analysis
+æsthetic and not moral--a quality of feeling instead of conformity to
+rule. Words like justice, harmony, power, democracy are simply empirical
+suggestions which may produce the good life. If the practice of them does
+not produce it then we are under no obligation to follow them, we should
+be idolatrous fools to do so. Every abstraction, every rule of conduct,
+every constitution, every law and social arrangement, is an instrument
+that has no value in itself. Whatever credit it receives, whatever
+reverence we give it, is derived from its utility in ministering to those
+concrete experiences which are as obvious and as undefinable as color or
+sound. We can celebrate the positively good things, we can live them, we
+can create them, but we cannot philosophize about them. To the anæsthetic
+intellect we could not convey the meaning of joy. A creature that could
+reason but not feel would never know the value of life, for what is
+ultimate is in itself inexplicable.
+
+Politics is not concerned with prescribing the ultimate qualities of
+life. When it tries to do so by sumptuary legislation, nothing but
+mischief is invoked. Its business is to provide opportunities, not to
+announce ultimate values; to remove oppressive evil and to invent new
+resources for enjoyment. With the enjoyment itself it can have no
+concern. That must be lived by each individual. In a sense the politician
+can never know his own success, for it is registered in men's inner
+lives, and is largely incommunicable. An increasing harvest of rich
+personalities is the social reward for a fine statesmanship, but such
+personalities are free growths in a cordial environment. They cannot be
+cast in moulds or shaped by law. There is no need, therefore, to generate
+dialectical disputes about the final goal of politics. No definition can
+be just--too precise a one can only deceive us into thinking that our
+definition is true. Call ultimate values by any convenient name, it is of
+slight importance which you choose. If only men can keep their minds
+freed from formalism, idol worship, fixed ideas, and exalted
+abstractions, politicians need not worry about the language in which the
+end of our striving is expressed. For with the removal of distracting
+idols, man's experience becomes the center of thought. And if we think in
+terms of men, find out what really bothers them, seek to supply what they
+really want, hold only their experience sacred, we shall find our
+sanction obvious and unchallenged.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE MAKING OF CREEDS
+
+
+My first course in philosophy was nothing less than a summary of the
+important systems of thought put forward in Western Europe during the
+last twenty-six hundred years. Perhaps that is a slight exaggeration--we
+did gloss over a few centuries in the Middle Ages. For the rest we
+touched upon all the historic names from Thales to Nietzsche. After about
+nine weeks of this bewildering transit a friend approached me with a sour
+look on his face. "You know," he said, "I can't make head or tail out of
+this business. I agree with each philosopher as we study him. But when we
+get to the next one, I agree with him too. Yet he generally says the
+other one was wrong. They can't all be right. Can they now?" I was too
+much puzzled with the same difficulty to help him.
+
+Somewhat later I began to read the history of political theories. It was
+a less disinterested study than those sophomore speculations, for I had
+jumped into a profession which carried me through some of the underground
+passages of "practical politics" and reformist groups. The tangle of
+motives and facts and ideas was incredible. I began to feel the force of
+Mr. John Hobson's remark that "if practical workers for social and
+industrial reforms continue to ignore principles ... they will have to
+pay the price which short-sighted empiricism always pays; with slow,
+hesitant, and staggering steps, with innumerable false starts and
+backslidings, they will move in the dark along an unseen track toward an
+unseen goal." The political theorists laid some claim to lighting up both
+the track and the goal, and so I turned to them for help.
+
+Now whoever has followed political theory will have derived perhaps two
+convictions as a reward. Almost all the thinkers seem to regard their
+systems as true and binding, and none of these systems are. No matter
+which one you examine, it is inadequate. You cannot be a Platonist or a
+Benthamite in politics to-day. You cannot go to any of the great
+philosophers even for the outlines of a statecraft which shall be fairly
+complete, and relevant to American life. I returned to the sophomore
+mood: "Each of these thinkers has contributed something, has had some
+wisdom about events. Looked at in bulk the philosophers can't all be
+right or all wrong."
+
+But like so many theoretical riddles, this one rested on a very simple
+piece of ignorance. The trouble was that without realizing it I too had
+been in search of the philosopher's stone. I too was looking for
+something that could not be found. That happened in this case to be
+nothing less than an absolutely true philosophy of politics. It was the
+old indolence of hoping that somebody had done the world's thinking once
+and for all. I had conjured up the fantasy of a system which would
+contain the whole of life, be as reliable as a table of logarithms,
+foresee all possible emergencies and offer entirely trustworthy rules of
+action. When it seemed that no such system had ever been produced, I was
+on the point of damning the entire tribe of theorists from Plato to Marx.
+
+This is what one may call the naïveté of the intellect. Its hope is that
+some man living at one place on the globe in a particular epoch will,
+through the miracle of genius, be able to generalize his experience for
+all time and all space. It says in effect that there is never anything
+essentially new under the sun, that any moment of experience sufficiently
+understood would be seen to contain all history and all destiny--that the
+intellect reasoning on one piece of experience could know what all the
+rest of experience was like. Looked at more closely this philosophy means
+that novelty is an illusion of ignorance, that life is an endless
+repetition, that when you know one revolution of it, you know all the
+rest. In a very real sense the world has no history and no future, the
+race has no career. At any moment everything is given: our reason could
+know that moment so thoroughly that all the rest of life would be like
+the commuter's who travels back and forth on the same line every day.
+There would be no inventions and no discoveries, for in the instant that
+reason had found the key of experience everything would be unfolded. The
+present would not be the womb of the future: nothing would be embryonic,
+nothing would _grow_. Experience would cease to be an adventure in order
+to become the monotonous fulfilment of a perfect prophecy.
+
+This omniscience of the human intellect is one of the commonest
+assumptions in the world. Although when you state the belief as I have,
+it sounds absurdly pretentious, yet the boastfulness is closer to the
+child's who stretches out its hand for the moon than the romantic
+egotist's who thinks he has created the moon and all the stars. Whole
+systems of philosophy have claimed such an eternal and absolute validity;
+the nineteenth century produced a bumper crop of so-called atheists,
+materialists and determinists who believed in all sincerity that
+"Science" was capable of a complete truth and unfailing prediction. If
+you want to see this faith in all its naïveté go into those quaint
+rationalist circles where Herbert Spencer's ghost announces the "laws of
+life," with only a few inessential details omitted.
+
+Now, of course, no philosophy of this sort has ever realized such hopes.
+Mankind has certainly come nearer to justifying Mr. Chesterton's
+observation that one of its favorite games is called "Cheat the
+Prophet."... "The players listen very carefully and respectfully to all
+that the clever men have to say about what is to happen in the next
+generation. The players then wait until all the clever men are dead, and
+bury them nicely. They then go and do something else." Now this weakness
+is not, as Mr. Chesterton would like to believe, confined to the clever
+men. But it is a weakness, and many people have speculated about it. Why
+in the face of hundreds of philosophies wrecked on the rocks of the
+unexpected do men continue to believe that the intellect can transcend
+the vicissitudes of experience?
+
+For they certainly do believe it, and generally the more parochial their
+outlook, the more cosmic their pretensions. All of us at times yearn for
+the comfort of an absolute philosophy. We try to believe that, however
+finite we may be, our intellect is something apart from the cycle of our
+life, capable by an Olympian detachment from human interests of a divine
+thoroughness. Even our evolutionist philosophy, as Bergson shows, "begins
+by showing us in the intellect a local effect of evolution, a flame,
+perhaps accidental, which lights up the coming and going of living things
+in the narrow passage open to their action; and lo! forgetting what it
+has just told us, makes of this lantern glimmering in a tunnel a Sun
+which can illuminate the world."
+
+This is what most of us do in our search for a philosophy of politics. We
+forget that the big systems of theory are much more like village
+lamp-posts than they are like the sun, that they were made to light up a
+particular path, obviate certain dangers, and aid a peculiar mode of
+life. The understanding of the place of theory in life is a comparatively
+new one. We are just beginning to see how creeds are made. And the
+insight is enormously fertile. Thus Mr. Alfred Zimmern in his fine study
+of "The Greek Commonwealth" says of Plato and Aristotle that no
+interpretation can be satisfactory which does not take into account the
+impression left upon their minds by the social development which made the
+age of these philosophers a period of Athenian decline. Mr. Zimmern's
+approach is common enough in modern scholarship, but the full
+significance of it for the creeds we ourselves are making is still
+something of a novelty. When we are asked to think of the "Republic" as
+the reaction of decadent Greece upon the conservative temperament of
+Plato, the function of theory is given a new illumination. Political
+philosophy at once appears as a human invention in a particular
+crisis--an instrument to fit a need. The pretension to finality falls
+away.
+
+This is a great emancipation. Instead of clinging to the naïve belief
+that Plato was legislating for all mankind, you can discuss his plans as
+a temporary superstructure made for an historical purpose. You are free
+then to appreciate the more enduring portions of his work, to understand
+Santayana when he says of the Platonists, "their theories are so
+extravagant, yet their wisdom seems so great. Platonism is a very refined
+and beautiful expression of our natural instincts, it embodies conscience
+and utters our inmost hopes." This insight into the values of human life,
+partial though it be, is what constitutes the abiding monument of Plato's
+genius. His constructions, his formal creeds, his law-making and social
+arrangements are local and temporary--for us they can have only an
+antiquarian interest.
+
+In some such way as this the sophomoric riddle is answered: no thinker
+can lay down a course of action for all mankind--programs if they are
+useful at all are useful for some particular historical period. But if
+the thinker sees at all deeply into the life of his own time, his
+theoretical system will rest upon observation of human nature. That
+remains as a residue of wisdom long after his reasoning and his concrete
+program have passed into limbo. For human nature in all its profounder
+aspects changes very little in the few generations since our Western
+wisdom has come to be recorded. These _aperçus_ left over from the great
+speculations are the golden threads which successive thinkers weave into
+the pattern of their thought. Wisdom remains; theory passes.
+
+If that is true of Plato with his ample vision how much truer is it of
+the theories of the littler men--politicians, courtiers and propagandists
+who make up the academy of politics. Machiavelli will, of course, be
+remembered at once as a man, whose speculations were fitted to an
+historical crisis. His advice to the Prince was real advice, not a
+sermon. A boss was telling a governor how to extend his power. The wealth
+of Machiavelli's learning and the splendid penetration of his mind are
+used to interpret experience for a particular purpose. I have always
+thought that Machiavelli derives his bad name from a too transparent
+honesty. Less direct minds would have found high-sounding ethical
+sanctions in which to conceal the real intent. That was the nauseating
+method of nineteenth century economists when they tried to identify the
+brutal practices of capitalism with the beneficence of nature and the
+Will of God. Not so Machiavelli. He could write without a blush that "a
+prince, especially a new one, cannot observe all those things for which
+men are esteemed, being often forced, in order to maintain the state, to
+act contrary to fidelity, friendship, humanity, and religion." The
+apologists of business also justified a rupture with human decencies.
+They too fitted their theory to particular purposes, but they had not the
+courage to avow it even to themselves.
+
+The rare value of Machiavelli is just this lack of self-deception. You
+may think his morals devilish, but you cannot accuse him of quoting
+scripture. I certainly do not admire the end he serves: the extension of
+an autocrat's power is a frivolous perversion of government. His ideal
+happens, however, to be the aim of most foreign offices, politicians and
+"princes of finance." Machiavelli's morals are not one bit worse than the
+practices of the men who rule the world to-day. An American Senate tore
+up the Hay-Pauncefote treaty, and with the approval of the President
+acted "contrary to fidelity" and friendship too; Austria violated the
+Treaty of Berlin by annexing Bosnia and Herzegovina. Machiavelli's ethics
+are commonplace enough. His head is clearer than the average. He let the
+cat out of the bag and showed in the boldest terms how theory becomes an
+instrument of practice. You may take him as a symbol of the political
+theorist. You may say that all the thinkers of influence have been
+writing advice to the Prince. Machiavelli recognized Lorenzo the
+Magnificent; Marx, the proletariat of Europe.
+
+At first this sounds like standing the world on its head, denying reason
+and morality, and exalting practice over righteousness. That is neither
+here nor there. I am simply trying to point out an illuminating fact
+whose essential truth can hardly be disputed. The important social
+philosophies are consciously or otherwise the servants of men's purposes.
+Good or bad, that it seems to me is the way we work. We find reasons for
+what we want to do. The big men from Machiavelli through Rousseau to Karl
+Marx brought history, logic, science and philosophy to prop up and
+strengthen their deepest desires. The followers, the epigones, may accept
+the reasons of Rousseau and Marx and deduce rules of action from them.
+But the original genius sees the dynamic purpose first, finds reasons
+afterward. This amounts to saying that man when he is most creative is
+not a rational, but a wilful animal.
+
+The political thinker who to-day exercises the greatest influence on the
+Western World is, I suppose, Karl Marx. The socialist movement calls him
+its prophet, and, while many socialists say he is superseded, no one
+disputes his historical importance. Now Marx embalmed his thinking in the
+language of the Hegelian school. He founded it on a general philosophy of
+society which is known as the materialistic conception of history.
+Moreover, Marx put forth the claim that he had made socialism
+"scientific"--had shown that it was woven into the texture of natural
+phenomena. The Marxian paraphernalia crowds three heavy volumes, so
+elaborate and difficult that socialists rarely read them. I have known
+one socialist who lived leisurely on his country estate and claimed to
+have "looked" at every page of Marx. Most socialists, including the
+leaders, study selected passages and let it go at that. This is a wise
+economy based on a good instinct. For all the parade of learning and
+dialectic is an after-thought--an accident from the fact that the
+prophetic genius of Marx appeared in Germany under the incubus of Hegel.
+Marx saw what he wanted to do long before he wrote three volumes to
+justify it. Did not the Communist Manifesto appear many years before "Das
+Kapital"?
+
+Nothing is more instructive than a socialist "experience" meeting at
+which everyone tries to tell how he came to be converted. These
+gatherings are notoriously untruthful--in fact, there is a genial
+pleasure in not telling the truth about one's salad days in the socialist
+movement. The prevalent lie is to explain how the new convert, standing
+upon a mountain of facts, began to trace out the highways that led from
+hell to heaven. Everybody knows that no such process was actually lived
+through, and almost without exception the real story can be discerned: a
+man was dissatisfied, he wanted a new condition of life, he embraced a
+theory that would justify his hopes and his discontent. For once you
+touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs
+are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon. In the
+language of philosophers, socialism as a living force is a product of the
+will--a will to beauty, order, neighborliness, not infrequently a will to
+health. Men desire first, then they reason; fascinated by the future,
+they invent a "scientific socialism" to get there.
+
+Many people don't like to admit this. Or if they admit it, they do so
+with a sigh. Their minds construct a utopia--one in which all judgments
+are based on logical inference from syllogisms built on the law of
+mathematical probabilities. If you quote David Hume at them, and say that
+reason itself is an irrational impulse they think you are indulging in a
+silly paradox. I shall not pursue this point very far, but I believe it
+could be shown without too much difficulty that the rationalists are
+fascinated by a certain kind of thinking--logical and orderly
+thinking--and that it is their will to impose that method upon other men.
+
+For fear that somebody may regard this as a play on words drawn from some
+ultra-modern "anti-intellectualist" source, let me quote Santayana. This
+is what the author of that masterly series "The Life of Reason" wrote in
+one of his earlier books: "The ideal of rationality is itself as
+arbitrary, as much dependent on the needs of a finite organization, as
+any other ideal. Only as ultimately securing tranquillity of mind, which
+the philosopher instinctively pursues, has it for him any necessity. In
+spite of the verbal propriety of saying that reason demands rationality,
+what really demands rationality, what makes it a good and indispensable
+thing and gives it all its authority, is not its own nature, but our need
+of it both in safe and economical action and in the pleasures of
+comprehension." Because rationality itself is a wilful exercise one hears
+Hymns to Reason and sees it personified as an extremely dignified
+goddess. For all the light and shadow of sentiment and passion play even
+about the syllogism.
+
+The attempts of theorists to explain man's successes as rational acts and
+his failures as lapses of reason have always ended in a dismal and misty
+unreality. No genuine politician ever treats his constituents as
+reasoning animals. This is as true of the high politics of Isaiah as it
+is of the ward boss. Only the pathetic amateur deludes himself into
+thinking that, if he presents the major and minor premise, the voter will
+automatically draw the conclusion on election day. The successful
+politician--good or bad--deals with the dynamics--with the will, the
+hopes, the needs and the visions of men.
+
+It isn't sentimentality which says that where there is no vision the
+people perisheth. Every time Tammany Hall sets off fireworks and oratory
+on the Fourth of July; every time the picture of Lincoln is displayed at
+a political convention; every red bandanna of the Progressives and red
+flag of the socialists; every song from "The Battle Hymn of the Republic"
+to the "International"; every metrical conclusion to a great
+speech--whether we stand at Armageddon, refuse to press upon the brow of
+labor another crown of thorns, or call upon the workers of the world to
+unite--every one of these slogans is an incitement of the will--an effort
+to energize politics. They are attempts to harness blind impulses to
+particular purposes. They are tributes to the sound practical sense of a
+vision in politics. No cause can succeed without them: so long as you
+rely on the efficacy of "scientific" demonstration and logical proof you
+can hold your conventions in anybody's back parlor and have room to
+spare.
+
+I remember an observation that Lincoln Steffens made in a speech about
+Mayor Tom Johnson. "Tom failed," said Mr. Steffens, "because he was too
+practical." Coming from a man who had seen as much of actual politics as
+Mr. Steffens, it puzzled me a great deal. I taxed him with it later and
+he explained somewhat as follows: "Tom Johnson had a vision of Cleveland
+which he called The City on the Hill. He pictured the town emancipated
+from its ugliness and its cruelty--a beautiful city for free men and
+women. He used to talk of that vision to the 'cabinet' of political
+lieutenants which met every Sunday night at his house. He had all his
+appointees working for the City on the Hill. But when he went out
+campaigning before the people he talked only of three-cent fares and the
+tax outrages. Tom Johnson didn't show the people the City on the Hill. He
+didn't take them into his confidence. They never really saw what it was
+all about. And they went back on Tom Johnson."
+
+That is one of Mr. Steffens's most acute observations. What makes it
+doubly interesting is that Tom Johnson confirmed it a few months before
+he died. His friends were telling him that his defeat was temporary, that
+the work he had begun was unchecked. It was plain that in the midst of
+his suffering, with death close by, he found great comfort in that
+assurance. But his mind was so realistic, his integrity so great that he
+could not blink the fact that there had been a defeat. Steffens was
+pointing out the explanation: "you did not show the people what you saw,
+you gave them the details, you fought their battles, you started to
+build, but you left them in darkness as to the final goal."
+
+I wish I could recall the exact words in which Tom Johnson replied. For
+in them the greatest of the piecemeal reformers admitted the practical
+weakness of opportunist politics.
+
+There is a type of radical who has an idea that he can insinuate advanced
+ideas into legislation without being caught. His plan of action is to
+keep his real program well concealed and to dole out sections of it to
+the public from time to time. John A. Hobson in "The Crisis of
+Liberalism" describes the "practical reformer" so that anybody can
+recognize him: "This revolt against ideas is carried so far that able men
+have come seriously to look upon progress as a matter for the
+manipulation of wire-pullers, something to be 'jobbed' in committee by
+sophistical notions or other clever trickery." Lincoln Steffens calls
+these people "our damned rascals." Mr. Hobson continues, "The attraction
+of some obvious gain, the suppression of some scandalous abuse of
+monopolist power by a private company, some needed enlargement of
+existing Municipal or State enterprise by lateral expansion--such are the
+sole springs of action." Well may Mr. Hobson inquire, _"Now, what
+provision is made for generating the motor power of progress in
+Collectivism?"_
+
+No amount of architect's plans, bricks and mortar will build a house.
+Someone must have the wish to build it. So with the modern democratic
+state. Statesmanship cannot rest upon the good sense of its program. It
+must find popular feeling, organize it, and make that the motive power of
+government. If you study the success of Roosevelt the point is
+re-enforced. He is a man of will in whom millions of people have felt the
+embodiment of their own will. For a time Roosevelt was a man of destiny
+in the truest sense. He wanted what a nation wanted: his own power
+radiated power; he embodied a vision; Tom, Dick and Harry moved with his
+movement.
+
+No use to deplore the fact. You cannot stop a living body with nothing at
+all. I think we may picture society as a compound of forces that are
+always changing. Put a vision in front of one of these currents and you
+can magnetize it in that direction. For visions alone organize popular
+passions. Try to ignore them or box them up, and they will burst forth
+destructively. When Haywood dramatizes the class struggle he uses class
+resentment for a social purpose. You may not like his purpose, but unless
+you can gather proletarian power into some better vision, you have no
+grounds for resenting Haywood. I fancy that the demonstration of King
+Canute settled once and for all the stupid attempt to ignore a moving
+force.
+
+A dynamic conception of society always frightens a great number of
+people. It gives politics a restless and intractable quality. Pure reason
+is so gentlemanly, but will and the visions of a people--these are
+adventurous and incalculable forces. Most politicians living for the day
+prefer to ignore them. If only society will stand fairly still while
+their career is in the making they are content to avoid the actualities.
+But a politician with some imaginative interest in genuine affairs need
+not be seduced into the learned folly of pretending that reality is
+something else than it is. If he is to influence life he must deal with
+it. A deep respect is due the Schopenhauerian philosopher who looks upon
+the world, finds that its essence is evil, and turns towards insensitive
+calm. But no respect is due to anyone who sets out to reform the world by
+ignoring its quality. Whoever is bent upon shaping politics to better
+human uses must accept freely as his starting point the impulses that
+agitate human beings. If observation shows that reason is an instrument
+of will, then only confusion can result from pretending that it isn't.
+
+I have called this misplaced "rationality" a piece of learned folly,
+because it shows itself most dangerously among those thinkers about
+politics who are divorced from action. In the Universities political
+movements are generally regarded as essentially static, cut and dried
+solids to be judged by their logical consistency. It is as if the stream
+of life had to be frozen before it could be studied. The socialist
+movement was given a certain amount of attention when I was an
+undergraduate. The discussion turned principally on two points: were
+rent, interest and dividends _earned_? Was collective ownership of
+capital a feasible scheme? And when the professor, who was a good
+dialectician, had proved that interest was a payment for service
+("saving") and that public ownership was not practicable, it was assumed
+that socialism was disposed of. The passions, the needs, the hopes that
+generate this world-wide phenomenon were, I believe, pocketed and ignored
+under the pat saying: "Of course, socialism is not an economic policy,
+it's a religion." That was the end of the matter for the students of
+politics. It was then a matter for the divinity schools. If the same
+scholastic method is in force there, all that would be needed to crush
+socialism is to show its dogmatic inconsistencies.
+
+The theorist is incompetent when he deals with socialism just because he
+assumes that men are determined by logic and that a false conclusion will
+stop a moving, creative force. Occasionally he recognizes the wilful
+character of politics: then he shakes his head, climbs into an ivory
+tower and deplores the moonshine, the religious manias and the passions
+of the mob. Real life is beyond his control and influence because real
+life is largely agitated by impulses and habits, unconscious needs,
+faith, hope and desire. With all his learning he is ineffective because,
+instead of trying to use the energies of men, he deplores them.
+
+Suppose we recognize that creeds are instruments of the will, how would
+it alter the character of our thinking? Take an ancient quarrel like that
+over determinism. Whatever your philosophy, when you come to the test of
+actual facts you find, I think, all grades of freedom and determinism.
+For certain purposes you believe in free will, for others you do not.
+Thus, as Mr. Chesterton suggests, no determinist is prevented from saying
+"if you please" to the housemaid. In love, in your career, you have no
+doubt that "if" is a reality. But when you are engaged in scientific
+investigation, you try to reduce the spontaneous in life to a minimum.
+Mr. Arnold Bennett puts forth a rather curious hybrid when he advises us
+to treat ourselves as free agents and everyone else as an automaton. On
+the other hand Prof. Münsterberg has always insisted that in social
+relations we must always treat everyone as a purposeful, integrated
+character.
+
+Your doctrine, in short, depends on your purpose: a theory by itself is
+neither moral nor immoral, its value is conditioned by the purpose it
+serves. In any accurate sense theory is to be judged only as an effective
+or ineffective instrument of a desire: the discussion of doctrines is
+technical and not moral. A theory has no intrinsic value: that is why the
+devil can talk theology.
+
+No creed possesses any final sanction. Human beings have desires that are
+far more important than the tools and toys and churches they make to
+satisfy them. It is more penetrating, in my opinion, to ask of a creed
+whether it served than whether it was "true." Try to judge the great
+beliefs that have swayed mankind by their inner logic or their empirical
+solidity and you stand forever, a dull pedant, apart from the interests
+of men. The Christian tradition did not survive because of Aquinas or
+fall before the Higher Criticism, nor will it be revived because someone
+proves the scientific plausibility of its doctrine. What we need to know
+about the Christian epic is the effect it had on men--true or false, they
+have believed in it for nineteen centuries. Where has it helped them,
+where hindered? What needs did it answer? What energies did it transmute?
+And what part of mankind did it neglect? Where did it begin to do
+violence to human nature?
+
+Political creeds must receive the same treatment. The doctrine of the
+"social contract" formulated by Hobbes and made current by Rousseau can
+no longer be accepted as a true account of the origin of society.
+Jean-Jacques is in fact a supreme case--perhaps even a slight
+caricature--of the way in which formal creeds bolster up passionate
+wants. I quote from Prof. Walter's introduction in which he says that
+"The Social Contract _showed to those who were eager to be convinced_
+that no power was legitimate which was guilty of abuses. It is no wonder
+that its author was buried in the Pantheon with pompous procession, that
+the framers of the new Constitution, Thouret and Lièyes and La Fayette,
+did not forget and dared not forget its doctrines, that it was the
+text-book and the delight of Camille Desmoulins and Danton and St. Just,
+that Robespierre read it through once every day." In the perspective of
+history, no one feels that he has said the last word about a philosophy
+like Rousseau's after demonstrating its "untruth." Good or bad, it has
+meant too much for any such easy disposal. What shall we call an idea,
+objectively untrue, but practically of the highest importance?
+
+The thinker who has faced this difficulty most radically is Georges Sorel
+in the "Reflexions sur la Violence." His doctrine of the "social myth"
+has seemed to many commentators one of those silly paradoxes that only a
+revolutionary syndicalist and Frenchman could have put forward. M. Sorel
+is engaged in presenting the General Strike as the decisive battle of the
+class struggle and the core of the socialist movement. Now whatever else
+he may be, M. Sorel is not naïve: the sharp criticism of other socialists
+was something he could not peacefully ignore. They told him that the
+General Strike was an idle dream, that it could never take place, that,
+even if it could, the results would not be very significant. Sidney Webb,
+in the customary Fabian fashion, had dismissed the General Strike as a
+sign of socialist immaturity. There is no doubt that M. Sorel felt the
+force of these attacks. But he was not ready to abandon his favorite idea
+because it had been shown to be unreasonable and impossible. Just the
+opposite effect showed itself and he seized the opportunity of turning an
+intellectual defeat into a spiritual triumph. This performance must have
+delighted him to the very bottom of his soul, for he has boasted that his
+task in life is to aid in ruining "le prestige de la culture bourgeoise."
+
+M. Sorel's defence of the General Strike is very startling. He admits
+that it may never take place, that it is not a true picture of the goal
+of the socialist movement. Without a blush he informs us that this
+central gospel of the working class is simply a "myth." The admission
+frightens M. Sorel not at all. "It doesn't matter much," he remarks,
+"whether myths contain details actually destined to realization _in the
+scheme_ of an historical future; they are not astrological almanacks; it
+may even be that nothing of what they express will actually happen--as in
+the case of that catastrophe which the early Christians expected. Are we
+not accustomed in daily life to recognizing that the reality differs very
+greatly from the ideas of it that we made before we acted? Yet that
+doesn't hinder us from making resolutions.... Myths must be judged as
+instruments for acting upon present conditions; all discussion about the
+manner of applying them concretely to the course of history is senseless.
+_The entire myth is what counts...._ There is no use then in reasoning
+about details which might arise in the midst of the class struggle ...
+even though the revolutionists should be deceiving themselves through and
+through in making a fantastic picture of the general strike, this picture
+would still have been a power of the highest order in preparing for
+revolution, so long as it expressed completely all the aspirations of
+socialism and bound together revolutionary ideas with a precision and
+firmness that no other methods of thought could have given."
+
+It may well be imagined that this highly sophisticated doctrine was
+regarded as perverse. All the ordinary prejudices of thought are
+irritated by a thinker who frankly advises masses of his fellow-men to
+hold fast to a belief which by all the canons of common sense is nothing
+but an illusion. M. Sorel must have felt the need of closer statement,
+for in a letter to Daniel Halèvy, published in the second edition, he
+makes his position much clearer. "Revolutionary myths ..." we read,
+"enable us to understand the activity, the feelings, and the ideas of a
+populace preparing to enter into a decisive struggle; _they are not
+descriptions of things, but expressions of will_." The italics are mine:
+they set in relief the insight that makes M. Sorel so important to our
+discussion. I do not know whether a quotation torn from its context can
+possibly do justice to its author. I do know that for any real grasp of
+this point it is necessary to read M. Sorel with great sympathy.
+
+One must grant at least that he has made an accurate observation. The
+history of the world is full of great myths which have had the most
+concrete results. M. Sorel cites primitive Christianity, the Reformation,
+the French Revolution and the Mazzini campaign. The men who took part in
+those great social movements summed up their aspiration in pictures of
+decisive battles resulting in the ultimate triumph of their cause. We in
+America might add an example from our own political life. For it is
+Theodore Roosevelt who is actually attempting to make himself and his
+admirers the heroes of a new social myth. Did he not announce from the
+platform at Chicago--"we stand at Armageddon and we battle for the Lord"?
+
+Let no one dismiss M. Sorel then as an empty paradoxer. The myth is not
+one of the outgrown crudities of our pagan ancestors. We, in the midst of
+our science and our rationalism, are still making myths, and their force
+is felt in the actual affairs of life. They convey an impulse, not a
+program, nor a plan of reconstruction. Their practical value cannot be
+ignored, for they embody the motor currents in social life.
+
+Myths are to be judged, as M. Sorel says, by their ability to express
+aspiration. They stand or fall by that. In such a test the Christian
+myth, for example, would be valued for its power of incarnating human
+desire. That it did not do so completely is the cause of its decline.
+From Aucassin to Nietzsche men have resented it as a partial and stunting
+dream. It had too little room for profane love, and only by turning the
+Church of Christ into the Church Militant could the essential Christian
+passivity obtain the assent of aggressive and masculine races. To-day
+traditional Christianity has weakened in the face of man's interest in
+the conquest of this world. The liberal and advanced churches recognize
+this fact by exhibiting a great preoccupation with everyday affairs. Now
+they may be doing important service--I have no wish to deny that--but
+when the Christian Churches turn to civics, to reformism or socialism,
+they are in fact announcing that the Christian dream is dead. They may
+continue to practice some of its moral teachings and hold to some of its
+creed, but the Christian impulse is for them no longer active. A new
+dream, which they reverently call Christian, has sprung from their
+desires.
+
+During their life these social myths contain a nation's finest energy. It
+is just because they are "not descriptions of things, but expressions of
+will" that their influence is so great. Ignore what a man desires and you
+ignore the very source of his power; run against the grain of a nation's
+genius and see where you get with your laws. Robert Burns was right when
+he preferred poetry to charters. The recognition of this truth by Sorel
+is one of the most impressive events in the revolutionary movement.
+Standing as a spokesman of an actual social revolt, he has not lost his
+vision because he understands its function. If Machiavelli is a symbol of
+the political theorist making reason an instrument of purpose, we may
+take Sorel as a self-conscious representative of the impulses which
+generate purpose.
+
+It must not be supposed that respect for the myth is a discovery of
+Sorel's. He is but one of a number of contemporary thinkers who have
+reacted against a very stupid prejudice of nineteenth century science to
+the effect that the mental habits of human beings were not "facts."
+Unless ideas mirrored external nature they were regarded as beneath the
+notice of the scientific mind. But in more recent years we have come to
+realize that, in a world so full of ignorance and mistake, error itself
+is worthy of study. Our untrue ideas are significant because they
+influence our lives enormously. They are "facts" to be investigated. One
+might point to the great illumination that has resulted from Freud's
+analysis of the abracadabra of our dreams. No one can any longer dismiss
+the fantasy because it is logically inconsistent, superficially absurd,
+or objectively untrue. William James might also be cited for his defense
+of those beliefs that are beyond the realm of proof. His essay, "The Will
+to Believe," is a declaration of independence, which says in effect that
+scientific demonstration is not the only test of ideas. He stated the
+case for those beliefs which influence life so deeply, though they fail
+to describe it. James himself was very disconcerting to many scientists
+because he insisted on expressing his aspirations about the universe in
+what his colleague Santayana calls a "romantic cosmology": "I am far from
+wishing to suggest that such a view seems to me more probable than
+conventional idealism or the Christian Orthodoxy. All three are in the
+region of dramatic system-making and myth, to which probabilities are
+irrelevant."
+
+It is impossible to leave this point without quoting Nietzsche, who had
+this insight and stated it most provocatively. In "Beyond Good and Evil"
+Nietzsche says flatly that "the falseness of an opinion is not for us any
+objection to it: it is here, perhaps, that our new language sounds most
+strangely. The question is, how far an opinion is life-furthering,
+life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps species-rearing...." Then he
+comments on the philosophers. "They all pose as though their real
+opinions had been discovered and attained through the self-evolving of a
+cold, pure, divinely indifferent dialectic...; whereas, in fact, a
+prejudiced proposition, idea, or 'suggestion,' which is generally their
+heart's desire abstracted and refined, is defended by them with arguments
+sought out after the event. They are all advocates who do not wish to be
+regarded as such, generally astute defenders, also, of their prejudices,
+which they dub 'truths'--and _very_ far from having the conscience which
+bravely admits this to itself; very far from having the good taste or the
+courage which goes so far as to let this be understood, perhaps to warn
+friend or foe, or in cheerful confidence and self-ridicule.... It has
+gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy up till now has
+consisted of--namely, the confession of its originator, and a species of
+involuntary and unconscious autobiography, and, moreover, that the moral
+(or immoral) purpose in every philosophy has constituted the true vital
+germ out of which the entire plant has always grown.... Whoever considers
+the fundamental impulses of man with a view to determining how far they
+may have acted as _inspiring_ genii (or as demons and cobolds) will find
+that they have all practiced philosophy at one time or another, and that
+each one of them would have been only too glad to look upon itself as the
+ultimate end of existence and the legitimate _lord_ over all the other
+impulses. For every impulse is imperious, and, as _such_, attempts to
+philosophize."
+
+What Nietzsche has done here is, in his swashbuckling fashion, to cut
+under the abstract and final pretensions of creeds. Difficulties arise
+when we try to apply this wisdom in the present. That dogmas _were_
+instruments of human purposes is not so incredible; that they still _are_
+instruments is not so clear to everyone; and that they will be, that they
+should be--this seems a monstrous attack on the citadel of truth. It is
+possible to believe that other men's theories were temporary and merely
+useful; we like to believe that ours will have a greater authority.
+
+It seems like topsy-turvyland to make reason serve the irrational. Yet
+that is just what it has always done, and ought always to do. Many of us
+are ready to grant that in the past men's motives were deeper than their
+intellects: we forgive them with a kind of self-righteousness which says
+that they knew not what they did. But to follow the great tradition of
+human wisdom deliberately, with our eyes open in the manner of Sorel,
+that seems a crazy procedure. A notion of intellectual honor fights
+against it: we think we must aim at final truth, and not allow
+autobiography to creep into speculation.
+
+Now the trouble with such an idol is that autobiography creeps in anyway.
+The more we censor it, the more likely it is to appear disguised, to fool
+us subtly and perhaps dangerously. The men like Nietzsche and James who
+show the wilful origin of creeds are in reality the best watchers of the
+citadel of truth. For there is nothing disastrous in the temporary nature
+of our ideas. They are always that. But there may very easily be a train
+of evil in the self-deception which regards them as final. I think God
+will forgive us our skepticism sooner than our Inquisitions.
+
+From the political point of view, another observation is necessary. The
+creed of a Rousseau, for example, is active in politics, not for what it
+says, but for what people think it says. I have urged that Marx found
+scientific reasons for what he wanted to do. It is important to add that
+the people who adopted his reasons for what they wanted to do were not
+any too respectful of Marx's reasons. Thus the so-called materialistic
+philosophy of Karl Marx is not by any means identical with the theories
+one hears among Marxian socialists. There is a big distortion in the
+transmitting of ideas. A common purpose, far more than common ideas,
+binds Marx to his followers. And when a man comes to write about his
+philosophy he is confronted with a choice: shall the creed described be
+that of Marx or of the Marxians?
+
+For the study of politics I should say unhesitatingly that it is more
+important to know what socialist leaders, stump speakers, pamphleteers,
+think Marx meant, than to know what he said. For then you are dealing
+with living ideas: to search his text has its uses, but compared with the
+actual tradition of Marx it is the work of pedantry. I say this here for
+two reasons--because I hope to avoid the critical attack of the genuine
+Marxian specialist, and because the observation is, I believe, relevant
+to our subject.
+
+Relevant it is in that it suggests the importance of style, of
+propaganda, the popularization of ideas. The host of men who stand
+between a great thinker and the average man are not automatic
+transmitters. They work on the ideas; perhaps that is why a genius
+usually hates his disciples. It is interesting to notice the explanation
+given by Frau Förster-Nietzsche for her brother's quarrel with Wagner.
+She dates it from the time when Nietzsche, under the guise of Wagnerian
+propaganda, began to expound himself. The critics and interpreters are
+themselves creative. It is really unfair to speak of the Marxian
+philosophy as a political force. It is juster to speak of the Marxian
+tradition.
+
+So when I write of Marx's influence I have in mind what men and women in
+socialist meetings, in daily life here in America, hold as a faith and
+attribute to Marx. There is no pretension whatever to any critical study
+of "Das Kapital" itself. I am thinking rather of stuffy halls in which an
+earnest voice is expounding "the evolution of capitalism," of little
+groups, curious and bewildered, listening in the streets of New York to
+the story of the battle between the "master class" and the "working
+class," of little red pamphlets, of newspapers, and cartoons--awkward,
+badly printed and not very genial, a great stream of spellbinding and
+controversy through which the aspirations of millions are becoming
+articulate:
+
+The tradition is saying that "the system" and not the individual is at
+fault. It describes that system as one in which a small class owns the
+means of production and holds the rest of mankind in bondage. Arts,
+religions, laws, as well as vice and crime and degradation, have their
+source in this central economic condition. If you want to understand our
+life you must see that it is determined by the massing of capital in the
+hands of a few. All epochs are determined by economic arrangements. But a
+system of property always contains within itself "the seeds of its own
+destruction." Mechanical inventions suggest a change: a dispossessed
+class compels it. So mankind has progressed through savagery, chattel
+slavery, serfdom, to "wage slavery" or the capitalism of to-day. This age
+is pregnant with the socialism of to-morrow.
+
+So roughly the tradition is handed on. Two sets of idea seem to dominate
+it: we are creatures of economic conditions; a war of classes is being
+fought everywhere in which the proletariat will ultimately capture the
+industrial machinery and produce a sound economic life as the basis of
+peace and happiness for all. The emphasis on environment is insistent.
+Facts are marshaled, the news of the day is interpreted to show that men
+are determined by economic conditions. This fixation has brought down
+upon the socialists a torrent of abuse in which "atheism" and
+"materialism" are prevailing epithets. But the propaganda continues and
+the philosophy spreads, penetrating reform groups, social workers,
+historians, and sociologists.
+
+It has served the socialist purpose well. To the workingmen it has
+brought home the importance of capturing the control of industry.
+Economic determinism has been an antidote to mere preaching of goodness,
+to hero-worship and political quackery. Socialism to succeed had to
+concentrate attention on the ownership of capital: whenever any other
+interest like religion or patriotism threatened to diffuse that
+attention, socialist leaders have always been ready to show that the
+economic fact is more central. Dignity and prestige were supplied by
+making economics the key of history; passion was chained by building
+paradise upon it.
+
+In all the political philosophies there is none so adapted to its end.
+Every sanction that mankind respects has been grouped about this one
+purpose--the control of capital. It is as if all history converged upon
+the issue, and the workers in the cause feel that they carry within them
+the destiny of the race. Start anywhere, with an orthodox socialist and
+he will lead you to this supreme economic situation. Tyrannies and race
+hatred, national rivalries, sex problems, the difficulties of artistic
+endeavor, all failures, crimes, vices--there is not one which he will not
+relate to private capitalism. Nor is there anything disingenuous about
+this focusing of the attention: a real belief is there. Of course you
+will find plenty of socialists who see other issues and who smile a bit
+at the rigors of economic determinism. In these later days there is in
+fact, a decided loosening in the creed. But it is fair to say that the
+mass of socialists hold this philosophy with as much solemnity as a
+reformer held his when he wrote to me that the cure for obscenity was the
+taxation of land values and absolute free trade.
+
+Singlemindedness has done good service. It has bound the world together
+and has helped men to think socially. Turning their attention away from
+the romanticism of history, the materialistic philosophy has helped them
+to look at realities. It has engendered a fine concern about average
+people, about the voiceless multitudes who have been left to pass
+unnoticed. Not least among the blessings is a shattering of the
+good-and-bad-man theory: the assassination of tyrants or the adoration of
+saviors. A shallow and specious other-worldliness has been driven out: an
+other-worldliness which is really nothing but laziness about this one.
+And if from a speculative angle the Marxian tradition has shaded too
+heavily the economic facts, it was at least a plausible and practical
+exaggeration.
+
+But the drawbacks are becoming more and more evident as socialism
+approaches nearer to power and responsibility. The feeling that man is a
+creature and not a creator is disastrous as a personal creed when you
+come to act. If you insist upon being "determined by conditions" you do
+hesitate about saying "I shall." You are likely to wait for something to
+determine you. Personal initiative and individual genius are poorly
+regarded: many socialists are suspicious of originality. This philosophy,
+so useful in propaganda, is becoming a burden in action. That is another
+way of saying that the instrument has turned into an idol.
+
+For while it is illuminating to see how environment moulds men, it is
+absolutely essential that men regard themselves as moulders of their
+environment. A new philosophical basis is becoming increasingly necessary
+to socialism--one that may not be "truer" than the old materialism but
+that shall simply be more useful. Having learned for a long time what is
+done to us, we are now faced with the task of doing. With this changed
+purpose goes a change of instruments. All over the world socialists are
+breaking away from the stultifying influence of the outworn determinism.
+For the time is at hand when they must cease to look upon socialism as
+inevitable in order to make it so.
+
+Nor will the philosophy of class warfare serve this new need. That can be
+effective only so long as the working-class is without sovereignty. But
+no sooner has it achieved power than a new outlook is needed in order to
+know what to do with it. The tactics of the battlefield are of no use
+when the battle is won.
+
+I picture this philosophy as one of deliberate choices. The underlying
+tone of it is that society is made by man for man's uses, that reforms
+are inventions to be applied when by experiment they show their
+civilizing value. Emphasis is placed upon the devising, adapting,
+constructing faculties. There is no reason to believe that this view is
+any colder than that of the war of class against class. It will generate
+no less energy. Men to-day can feel almost as much zest in the building
+of the Panama Canal as they did in a military victory. Their domineering
+impulses find satisfaction in conquering things, in subjecting brute
+forces to human purposes. This sense of mastery in a winning battle
+against the conditions of our life is, I believe, the social myth that
+will inspire our reconstructions. We shall feel free to choose among
+alternatives--to take this much of socialism, insert so much syndicalism,
+leave standing what of capitalism seems worth conserving. We shall be
+making our own house for our own needs, cities to suit ourselves, and we
+shall believe ourselves capable of moving mountains, as engineers do,
+when mountains stand in their way.
+
+And history, science, philosophy will support our hopes. What will
+fascinate us in the past will be the records of inventions, of great
+choices, of those alternatives on which destiny seems to hang. The
+splendid epochs will be interpreted as monuments of man's creation, not
+of his propulsion. We shall be interested primarily in the way nations
+established their civilization in spite of hostile conditions. Admiration
+will go out to the men who did not submit, who bent things to human use.
+We may see the entire tragedy of life in being driven.
+
+Half-truths and illusions, if you like, but tonic. This view will suit
+our mood. For we shall be making and the makers of history will become
+more real to us. Instead of urging that issues are inevitable, instead of
+being swamped by problems that are unavoidable, we may stand up and
+affirm the issues we propose to handle. Perhaps we shall say with
+Nietzsche:
+
+     "Let the value of everything be determined afresh by you."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE RED HERRING
+
+
+At the beginning of every campaign the newspapers tell about secret
+conferences in which the candidate and his managers decide upon "the line
+of attack." The approach to issues, the way in which they shall be
+stressed, what shall be put forward in one part of the country and what
+in another, are discussed at these meetings. Here is where the real
+program of a party is worked out. The document produced at the convention
+is at its best nothing but a suggestive formality. It is not until the
+speakers and the publicity agents have actually begun to animate it that
+the country sees what the party is about. It is as if the convention
+adopted the Decalogue, while these secret conferences decided which of
+the Commandments was to be made the issue. Almost always, of course, the
+decision is entirely a "practical" one, which means that each section of
+people is exhorted to practice the commandment it likes the most. Thus
+for the burglars is selected, not the eighth tablet, but the one on which
+is recommended a day of rest from labor; to the happily married is
+preached the seventh commandment.
+
+These conferences are decisive. On them depends the educational value of
+a campaign, and the men who participate in them, being in a position to
+state the issues and point them, determine the political interests of the
+people for a considerable period of time. To-day in America, for example,
+no candidate can escape entirely that underlying irritation which
+socialists call poverty and some call the high cost of living. But the
+conspicuous candidates do decide what direction thought shall take about
+this condition. They can center it upon the tariff or the trusts or even
+the currency.
+
+Thus Mr. Roosevelt has always had a remarkable power of diverting the
+country from the tariff to the control of the trusts. His Democratic
+opponents, especially Woodrow Wilson, are, as I write, in the midst of
+the Presidential campaign of 1912, trying to focus attention on the
+tariff. In a way the battle resembles a tug-of-war in which each of the
+two leading candidates is trying to pull the nation over to his favorite
+issue. On the side you can see the Prohibitionists endeavoring to make
+the country see drink as a central problem; the emerging socialists
+insisting that not the tariff, or liquor, or the control of trusts, but
+the ownership of capital should be the heart of the discussion. Electoral
+campaigns do not resemble debates so much as they do competing amusement
+shows where, with bright lights, gaudy posters and persuasive, insistent
+voices, each booth is trying to collect a crowd; The victory in a
+campaign is far more likely to go to the most plausible diagnosis than to
+the most convincing method of cure. Once a party can induce the country
+to see its issue as supreme the greater part of its task is done.
+
+The clever choice of issues influences all politics from the petty
+manoeuvers of a ward leader to the most brilliant creative
+statesmanship. I remember an instance that happened at the beginning of
+the first socialist administration in Schenectady: The officials had out
+of the goodness of their hearts suspended a city ordinance which forbade
+coasting with bob-sleds on the hills of the city. A few days later one of
+the sleds ran into a wagon and a little girl was killed. The opposition
+papers put the accident into scareheads with the result that public
+opinion became very bitter. It looked like a bad crisis at the very
+beginning and the old ring politicians made the most of it. But they had
+reckoned without the political shrewdness of the socialists. For in the
+second day of excitement, the mayor made public a plan by which the main
+business street of the town was to be lighted with high-power lamps and
+turned into a "brilliant white way of Schenectady." The swiftness with
+which the papers displaced the gruesome details of the little girl's
+death by exultation over the business future of the city was a caution.
+Public attention was shifted and a political crisis avoided. I tell this
+story simply as a suggestive fact. The ethical considerations do not
+concern us here.
+
+There is nothing exceptional about the case. Whenever governments enter
+upon foreign invasions in order to avoid civil wars, the same trick is
+practiced. In the Southern States the race issue has been thrust forward
+persistently to prevent an economic alignment. Thus you hear from
+Southerners that unless socialism gives up its demand for racial
+equality, the propaganda cannot go forward. How often in great strikes
+have riots been started in order to prevent the public from listening to
+the workers' demands! It is an old story--the red herring dragged across
+the path in order to destroy the scent.
+
+Having seen the evil results we have come to detest a conscious choice of
+issues, to feel that it smacks of sinister plotting. The vile practice of
+yellow newspapers and chauvinistic politicians is almost the only
+experience of it we have. Religion, patriotism, race, and sex are the
+favorite red herrings of foul political method--they are the most
+successful because they explode so easily and flood the mind with those
+unconscious prejudices which make critical thinking difficult. Yet for
+all its abuse the deliberate choice of issues is one of the high
+selective arts of the statesman. In the debased form we know it there is
+little encouragement. But the devil is merely a fallen angel, and when
+God lost Satan he lost one of his best lieutenants. It is always a pretty
+good working rule that whatever is a great power of evil may become a
+great power for good. Certainly nothing so effective in the art of
+politics can be left out of the equipment of the statesman.
+
+Looked at closely, the deliberate making of issues is very nearly the
+core of the statesman's task. His greatest wisdom is required to select a
+policy that will fertilize the public mind. He fails when the issue he
+sets is sterile; he is incompetent if the issue does not lead to the
+human center of a problem; whenever the statesman allows the voters to
+trifle with taboos and by-products, to wander into blind alleys like "16
+to 1," his leadership is a public calamity. The newspaper or politician
+which tries to make an issue out of a supposed "prosperity" or out of
+admiration for the mere successes of our ancestors is doing its best to
+choke off the creative energies in politics. All the stultification of
+the stand-pat mind may be described as inability, and perhaps
+unwillingness, to nourish a fruitful choice of issues.
+
+That choice is altogether too limited in America, anyway. Political
+discussion, whether reactionary or radical, is monotonously confined to
+very few issues. It is as if social life were prevented from irrigating
+political thought. A subject like the tariff, for example, has absorbed
+an amount of attention which would justify an historian in calling it the
+incubus of American politics. Now the exaltation of one issue like that
+is obviously out of all proportion to its significance. A contributory
+factor it certainly is, but the country's destiny is not bound up finally
+with its solution. The everlasting reiterations about the tariff take up
+altogether too much time. To any government that was clear about values,
+that saw all problems in their relation to human life, the tariff would
+be an incident, a mechanical device and little else. High protectionist
+and free trader alike fall under the indictment--for a tariff wall is
+neither so high as heaven nor so broad as the earth. It may be necessary
+to have dykes on portions of the seashore; they may be superfluous
+elsewhere. But to concentrate nine-tenths of your attention on the
+subject of dykes is to forget the civilization they are supposed to
+protect. A wall is a wall: the presence of it will not do the work of
+civilization--the absence of it does not absolve anyone from the tasks of
+social life. That a statecraft might deal with the tariff as an aid to
+its purposes is evident. But anyone who makes the tariff the principal
+concern of statecraft is, I believe, mistaking the hedge for the house.
+
+The tariff controversy is almost as old as the nation. A more recent one
+is what Senator La Follette calls "The great issue before the American
+people to-day, ... the control of their own government." It has taken the
+form of an attack on corruption, on what is vaguely called "special
+privilege" and of a demand for a certain amount of political machinery
+such as direct primaries, the initiative, referendum, and recall. The
+agitation has a curious sterility: the people are exhorted to control
+their own government, but they are given very little advice as to what
+they are to do with it when they control it. Of course, the leaders who
+spend so much time demanding these mechanical changes undoubtedly see
+them as a safeguard against corrupt politicians and what Roosevelt calls
+"their respectable allies and figureheads, who have ruled and legislated
+and decided as if in some way the vested rights of privilege had a first
+mortgage on the whole United States." But look at the _way_ these
+innovations are presented and I think the feeling is unavoidable that the
+control of government is emphasized as an end in itself. Now an
+observation of this kind is immediately open to dispute: it is not a
+clear-cut distinction but a rather subtle matter of stress--an impression
+rather than a definite conviction.
+
+Yet when you look at the career of Judge Lindsey in Denver the impression
+is sharpened by contrast. What gave his exposure of corruption a peculiar
+vitality was that it rested on a very positive human ideal: the happiness
+of children in a big city. Lindsey's attack on vice and financial jobbery
+was perhaps the most convincing piece of muckraking ever done in this
+country for the very reason that it sprang from a concern about real
+human beings instead of abstractions about democracy or righteousness.
+From the point of view of the political hack, Judge Lindsey made a most
+distressing use of the red herring. He brought the happiness of childhood
+into political discussion, and this opened up a new source of political
+power. By touching something deeply instinctive in millions of people,
+Judge Lindsey animated dull proposals with human interest. The
+pettifogging objections to some social plan had very little chance of
+survival owing to the dynamic power of the reformers. It was an excellent
+example of the creative results that come from centering a political
+problem on human nature.
+
+If you move only from legality to legality, you halt and hesitate, each
+step is a monstrous task. If the reformer is a pure opportunist, and lays
+out only "the next step," that step will be very difficult. But if he
+aims at some real human end, at the genuine concerns of men, women, and
+children, if he can make the democracy see and feel that end, the little
+mechanical devices of suffrage and primaries and tariffs will be dealt
+with as a craftsman deals with his tools. But to say that we must make
+tools first, and then begin, is to invert the process of life. Men did
+not agree to refrain from travel until a railroad was built. To make the
+manufacture of instruments an ideal is to lose much of their ideal value.
+A nation bent upon a policy of social invention would make its tools an
+incident. But just this perception is lacking in many propagandists. That
+is why their issues are so sterile; that is why the absorption in "next
+steps" is a diversion from statesmanship.
+
+The narrowness of American political issues is a fixation upon
+instruments. Tradition has centered upon the tariff, the trusts, the
+currency, and electoral machinery as the items of consideration. It is
+the failure to go behind them--to see them as the pale servants of a
+vivid social life--that keeps our politics in bondage to a few problems.
+It is a common experience repeated in you and me. Once our profession
+becomes all absorbing it hardens into pedantry. "A human being," says
+Wells, "who is a philosopher in the first place, a teacher in the first
+place, or a statesman in the first place is thereby and inevitably,
+though he bring God-like gifts to the pretense--a quack."
+
+Reformers particularly resent the enlargement of political issues. I have
+heard socialists denounce other socialists for occupying themselves with
+the problems of sex. The claim was that these questions should be put
+aside so as not to disturb the immediate program. The socialists knew
+from experience that sex views cut across economic ones--that a new
+interest breaks up the alignment. Woodrow Wilson expressed this same fear
+in his views on the liquor question: after declaring for local option he
+went on to say that "the questions involved are social and moral and are
+not susceptible of being made part of a party program. Whenever they have
+been made the subject matter of party contests they have cut the lines of
+party organization and party action athwart, to the utter confusion of
+political action in every other field.... I do not believe party programs
+of the highest consequence to the political life of the State and of the
+nation ought to be thrust on one side and hopelessly embarrassed for long
+periods together by making a political issue of a great question which is
+essentially non-political, non-partisan, moral and social in its nature."
+
+That statement was issued at the beginning of a campaign in which Woodrow
+Wilson was the nominee of a party that has always been closely associated
+with the liquor interests. The bogey of the saloon had presented itself
+early: it was very clear that an affirmative position by the candidate
+was sure to alienate either the temperance or the "liquor vote." No doubt
+a sense of this dilemma is partly responsible for Wilson's earnest plea
+that the question of liquor be left out of the campaign. He saw the
+confusion and embarrassment he speaks of as an immediate danger. Like his
+views on immigration and Chinese labor it was a red herring across his
+path. It would, if brought into prominence, cut the lines of party action
+athwart.
+
+His theoretical grounds for ignoring the question in politics are very
+interesting just because they are vitalized by this practical difficulty
+which he faced. Like all party men Woodrow Wilson had thrust upon him
+here a danger that haunts every political program. The more issues a
+party meets the less votes it is likely to poll. And for a very simple
+reason: you cannot keep the citizenship of a nation like this bound in
+its allegiance to two large parties unless you make the grounds of
+allegiance very simple and very obvious. If you are to hold five or six
+million voters enlisted under one emblem the less specific you are and
+the fewer issues you raise the more probable it is that you can stop this
+host from quarreling within the ranks.
+
+No doubt this is a partial explanation of the bareness of American
+politics. The two big parties have had to preserve a superficial
+homogeneity; and a platitude is more potent than an issue. The minor
+parties--Populist, Prohibition, Independence League and Socialist--have
+shown a much greater willingness to face new problems. Their view of
+national policy has always been more inclusive, perhaps for the very
+reason that their membership is so much more exclusive. But if anyone
+wishes a smashing illustration of this paradox let him consider the rapid
+progress of Roosevelt's philosophy in the very short time between the
+Republican Convention in June to the Progressive Convention in August,
+1912. As soon as Roosevelt had thrown off the burden of preserving a
+false harmony among irreconcilable Republicans, he issued a platform full
+of definiteness and square dealing with many issues. He was talking to a
+minority party. But Roosevelt's genius is not that of group leadership.
+He longs for majorities. He set out to make the campaign a battle between
+the Progressives and the Democrats--the old discredited Republicans fell
+back into a rather dead conservative minority. No sooner did Roosevelt
+take the stump than the paradox loomed up before him. His speeches began
+to turn on platitudes--on the vague idealism and indisputable moralities
+of the Decalogue and the Sermon on the Mount. The fearlessness of the
+Chicago confession was melted down into a featureless alloy.
+
+The embarrassment from the liquor question which Woodrow Wilson feared
+does not arise because teetotaler and drunkard both become intoxicated
+when they discuss the saloon. It would come just as much from a radical
+program of land taxation, factory reform, or trust control. Let anyone of
+these issues be injected into his campaign and the lines of party action
+would be cut "athwart." For Woodrow Wilson was dealing with the
+inevitable embarrassment of a party system dependent on an inexpressive
+homogeneity. The grouping of the voters into two large herds costs a
+large price: it means that issues must be so simplified and selected that
+the real demands of the nation rise only now and then to the level of
+political discussion. The more people a party contains the less it
+expresses their needs.
+
+Woodrow Wilson's diagnosis of the red herring in politics is obviously
+correct. A new issue does embarrass a wholesale organization of the
+voters. His desire to avoid it in the midst of a campaign is
+understandable. His urgent plea that the liquor question be kept a local
+issue may be wise. But the general philosophy which says that the party
+system should not be cut athwart is at least open to serious dispute.
+Instead of an evil, it looks to me like progress towards greater
+responsiveness of parties to popular need. It is good to disturb
+alignments: to break up a superficial unanimity. The masses of people
+held together under the name Democratic are bound in an enervating
+communion. The real groups dare not speak their convictions for fear the
+crust will break. It is as if you had thrown a large sheet over a mass of
+men and made them anonymous.
+
+The man who raises new issues has always been distasteful to politicians.
+He musses up what had been so tidily arranged. I remember once speaking
+to a local boss about woman suffrage. His objections were very simple:
+"We've got the organization in fine shape now--we know where every voter
+in the district stands. But you let all the women vote and we'll be
+confused as the devil. It'll be an awful job keeping track of them." He
+felt what many a manufacturer feels when somebody has the impertinence to
+invent a process which disturbs the routine of business.
+
+Hard as it is upon the immediate plans of the politician, it is a
+national blessing when the lines of party action are cut athwart by new
+issues. I recognize that the red herring is more often frivolous and
+personal--a matter of misrepresentation and spite--than an honest attempt
+to enlarge the scope of politics. However, a fine thing must not be
+deplored because it is open to vicious caricature. To the party worker
+the petty and the honest issue are equally disturbing. The break-up of
+the parties into expressive groups would be a ventilation of our national
+life. No use to cry peace when there is no peace. The false bonds are
+best broken: with their collapse would come a release of social energy
+into political discussion. For every country is a mass of minorities
+which should find a voice in public affairs. Any device like proportional
+representation and preferential voting which facilitates the political
+expression of group interests is worth having. The objection that popular
+government cannot be conducted without the two party system is, I
+believe, refuted by the experience of Europe. If I had to choose between
+a Congressional caucus and a coalition ministry, I should not have to
+hesitate very long. But no one need go abroad for actual experience: in
+the United States Senate during the Taft administration there were really
+three parties--Republicans, Insurgents and Democrats. Public business
+went ahead with at least as much effectiveness as under the old Aldrich
+ring.
+
+There are deeper reasons for urging a break-up of herd-politics. It is
+not only desirable that groups should be able to contribute to public
+discussion: it is absolutely essential if the parliamentary method is not
+to be superseded by direct and violent action. The two party system
+chokes off the cry of a minority--perhaps the best way there is of
+precipitating an explosion. An Englishman once told me that the utter
+freedom of speech in Hyde Park was the best safeguard England had against
+the doctrines that were propounded there. An anarchist who was invited to
+address Congress would be a mild person compared to the man forbidden to
+speak in the streets of San Diego. For many a bomb has exploded into
+rhetoric.
+
+The rigidity of the two-party system is, I believe, disastrous: it
+ignores issues without settling them, dulls and wastes the energies of
+active groups, and chokes off the protests which should find a civilized
+expression in public life. A recognition of what an incubus it is should
+make us hospitable to all those devices which aim at making politics
+responsive by disturbing the alignments of habit. The initiative and
+referendum will help: they are a method of voting on definite issues
+instead of electing an administration in bulk. If cleverly handled these
+electoral devices should act as a check on a wholesale attitude toward
+politics. Men could agree on a candidate and disagree on a measure.
+Another device is the separation of municipal, state and national
+elections: to hold them all at the same time is an inducement to prevent
+the voter from splitting his allegiance. Proportional representation and
+preferential voting I have mentioned. The short ballot is a psychological
+principle which must be taken into account wherever there is voting: it
+will help the differentiation of political groups by concentrating the
+attention on essential choices. The recall of public officials is in part
+a policeman's club, in part a clumsy way of getting around the American
+prejudice for a fixed term of office. That rigidity which by the mere
+movement of the calendar throws an official out of office in the midst of
+his work or compels him to go campaigning is merely the crude method of a
+democracy without confidence in itself. The recall is a half-hearted and
+negative way of dealing with this difficulty. It does enable us to rid
+ourselves of an officer we don't like instead of having to wait until the
+earth has revolved to a certain place about the sun. But we still have to
+vote on a fixed date whether we have anything to vote upon or not. If a
+recall election is held when the people petition for it, why not all
+elections?
+
+In ways like these we shall go on inventing methods by which the
+fictitious party alignments can be dissolved. There is one device
+suggested now and then, tried, I believe, in a few places, and vaguely
+championed by some socialists. It is called in German an
+"Interessenvertrag"--a political representation by trade interests as
+well as by geographical districts. Perhaps this is the direction towards
+which the bi-cameral legislature will develop. One chamber would then
+represent a man's sectional interests as a consumer: the other his
+professional interests as a producer. The railway workers, the miners,
+the doctors, the teachers, the retail merchants would have direct
+representation in the "Interessenvertrag." You might call it a Chamber of
+Special Interests. I know how that phrase "Special Interests" hurts. In
+popular usage we apply it only to corrupting businesses. But our feeling
+against them should not blind us to the fact that every group in the
+community has its special interests. They will always exist until mankind
+becomes a homogeneous jelly. The problem is to find some social
+adjustment for all the special interests of a nation. That is best
+achieved by open recognition and clear representation. Let no one then
+confuse the "Interessenvertrag" with those existing legislatures which
+are secret Chambers of Special Privilege.
+
+The scheme is worth looking at for it does do away with the present
+dilemma of the citizen in which he wonders helplessly whether he ought to
+vote as a consumer or as a producer. I believe he should have both votes,
+and the "Interessenvertrag" is a way.
+
+These devices are mentioned here as illustrations and not as conclusions.
+You can think of them as arrangements by which the red herring is turned
+from a pest into a benefit. I grant that in the rigid political
+conditions prevailing to-day a new issue is an embarrassment, perhaps a
+hindrance to the procedure of political life. But instead of narrowing
+the scope of politics, to avoid it, the only sensible thing to do is to
+invent methods which will allow needs and problems and group interests
+avenues into politics.
+
+But a suggestion like this is sure to be met with the argument which
+Woodrow Wilson has in mind when he says that the "questions involved are
+social and moral and are not susceptible of being made parts of a party
+program." He voices a common belief when he insists that there are moral
+and social problems, "essentially non-political." Innocent as it looks at
+first sight this plea by Woodrow Wilson is weighted with the tradition of
+a century and a half. To my mind it symbolizes a view of the state which
+we are outgrowing, and throws into relief the view towards which we are
+struggling. Its implications are well worth tracing, for through them I
+think we can come to understand better the method of Twentieth Century
+politics.
+
+It is perfectly true that that government is best which governs least. It
+is equally true that that government is best which provides most. The
+first truth belongs to the Eighteenth Century: the second to the
+Twentieth. Neither of them can be neglected in our attitude towards the
+state. Without the Jeffersonian distrust of the police we might easily
+grow into an impertinent and tyrannous collectivism: without a vivid
+sense of the possibilities of the state we abandon the supreme instrument
+of civilization. The two theories need to be held together, yet clearly
+distinguished.
+
+Government has been an exalted policeman: it was there to guard property
+and to prevent us from quarreling too violently. That was about all it
+was good for. Yet society found problems on its hands--problems which
+Woodrow Wilson calls moral and social in their nature. Vice and crime,
+disease, and grinding poverty forced themselves on the attention of the
+community. A typical example is the way the social evil compelled the
+city of Chicago to begin an investigation. Yet when government was asked
+to handle the question it had for wisdom an ancient conception of itself
+as a policeman. Its only method was to forbid, to prosecute, to jail--in
+short, to use the taboo. But experience has shown that the taboo will not
+solve "moral and social questions"--that nine times out of ten it
+aggravates the disease. Political action becomes a petty, futile, mean
+little intrusion when its only method is prosecution.
+
+No wonder then that conservatively-minded men pray that moral and social
+questions be kept out of politics; no wonder that more daring souls begin
+to hate the whole idea of government and take to anarchism. So long as
+the state is conceived merely as an agent of repression, the less it
+interferes with our lives, the better. Much of the horror of socialism
+comes from a belief that by increasing the functions of government its
+regulating power over our daily lives will grow into a tyranny. I share
+this horror when certain socialists begin to propound their schemes.
+There is a dreadful amount of forcible scrubbing and arranging and
+pocketing implied in some socialisms. There is a wish to have the state
+use its position as general employer to become a censor of morals and
+arbiter of elegance, like the benevolent employers of the day who take an
+impertinent interest in the private lives of their workers. Without any
+doubt socialism has within it the germs of that great bureaucratic
+tyranny which Chesterton and Belloc have named the Servile State.
+
+So it is a wise instinct that makes men jealous of the policeman's power.
+Far better we may say that moral and social problems be left to private
+solution than that they be subjected to the clumsy method of the taboo.
+When Woodrow Wilson argues that social problems are not susceptible to
+treatment in a party program, he must mean only one thing: that they
+cannot be handled by the state as he conceives it. He is right. His
+attitude is far better than that of the Vice Commission: it too had only
+a policeman's view of government, but it proceeded to apply it to
+problems that are not susceptible to such treatment. Wilson, at least,
+knows the limitations of his philosophy.
+
+But once you see the state as a provider of civilizing opportunities, his
+whole objection collapses. As soon as government begins to supply
+services, it is turning away from the sterile tyranny of the taboo. The
+provision of schools, streets, plumbing, highways, libraries, parks,
+universities, medical attention, post-offices, a Panama Canal,
+agricultural information, fire protection--is a use of government totally
+different from the ideal of Jefferson. To furnish these opportunities is
+to add to the resources of life, and only a doctrinaire adherence to a
+misunderstood ideal will raise any objection to them.
+
+When an anarchist says that the state must be abolished he does not mean
+what he says. What he wants to abolish is the repressive, not the
+productive state. He cannot possibly object to being furnished with the
+opportunity of writing to his comrade three thousand miles away, of
+drinking pure water, or taking a walk in the park. Of course when he
+finds the post-office opening his mail, or a law saying that he must
+drink nothing but water, he begins to object even to the services of the
+government. But that is a confusion of thought, for these tyrannies are
+merely intrusions of the eighteenth century upon the twentieth. The
+postmaster is still something of a policeman.
+
+Once you realize that moral and social problems must be treated to fine
+opportunities, that the method of the future is to compete with the devil
+rather than to curse him; that the furnishing of civilized environments
+is the goal of statecraft, then there is no longer any reason for keeping
+social and moral questions out of politics. They are what politics must
+deal with essentially, now that it has found a way. The policeman with
+his taboo did make moral and social questions insusceptible to treatment
+in party platforms. He kept the issues of politics narrow and irrelevant,
+and just because these really interesting questions could not be handled,
+politics was an over-advertised hubbub. But the vision of the new
+statecraft in centering politics upon human interests becomes a creator
+of opportunities instead of a censor of morals, and deserves a fresh and
+heightened regard.
+
+The party platform will grow ever more and more into a program of
+services. In the past it has been an armory of platitudes or a forecast
+of punishments. It promised that it would stop this evil practice, drive
+out corruption here, and prosecute this-and-that offense. All that
+belongs to a moribund tradition. Abuse and disuse characterize the older
+view of the state: guardian and censor it has been, provider but
+grudgingly. The proclamations of so-called progressives that they will
+jail financiers, or "wage relentless warfare" upon social evils, are
+simply the reiterations of men who do not understand the uses of the
+state.
+
+A political revolution is in progress: the state as policeman is giving
+place to the state as producer.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+REVOLUTION AND CULTURE
+
+
+There is a legend of a peasant who lived near Paris through the whole
+Napoleonic era without ever having heard of the name of Bonaparte. A
+story of that kind is enough to make a man hesitate before he indulges in
+a flamboyant description of social changes. That peasant is more than a
+symbol of the privacy of human interest: he is a warning against the
+incurable romanticism which clings about the idea of a revolution.
+Popular history is deceptive if it is used to furnish a picture for
+coming events. Like drama which compresses the tragedy of a lifetime into
+a unity of time, place, and action, history foreshortens an epoch into an
+episode. It gains in poignancy, but loses reality. Men grew from infancy
+to old age, their children's children had married and loved and worked
+while the social change we speak of as the industrial revolution was
+being consummated. That is why it is so difficult for living people to
+believe that they too are in the midst of great transformations. What
+looks to us like an incredible rush of events sloping towards a great
+historical crisis was to our ancestors little else than the occasional
+punctuation of daily life with an exciting incident. Even to-day when we
+have begun to speak of our age as a transition, there are millions of
+people who live in an undisturbed routine. Even those of us who regard
+ourselves as active in mothering the process and alert in detecting its
+growth are by no means constantly aware of any great change. For even the
+fondest mother cannot watch her child grow.
+
+I remember how tremendously surprised I was in visiting Russia several
+years ago to find that in Moscow or St. Petersburg men were interested in
+all sorts of things besides the revolution. I had expected every Russian
+to be absorbed in the struggle. It seemed at first as if my notions of
+what a revolution ought to be were contradicted everywhere. And I assure
+you it wrenched the imagination to see tidy nursemaids wheeling
+perambulators and children playing diavolo on the very square where
+Bloody Sunday had gone into history. It takes a long perspective and no
+very vivid acquaintance with revolution to be melodramatic about it. So
+much is left out of history and biography which would spoil the effect.
+The anti-climax is almost always omitted.
+
+Perhaps that is the reason why Arnold Bennett's description of the siege
+of Paris in "The Old Wives' Tale" is so disconcerting to many people. It
+is hard to believe that daily life continues with its stretches of
+boredom and its personal interests even while the enemy is bombarding a
+city. How much more difficult is it to imagine a revolution that is to
+come--to space it properly through a long period of time, to conceive
+what it will be like to the people who live through it. Almost all social
+prediction is catastrophic and absurdly simplified. Even those who talk
+of the slow "evolution" of society are likely to think of it as a series
+of definite changes easily marked and well known to everybody. It is what
+Bernard Shaw calls the reformer's habit of mistaking his private emotions
+for a public movement.
+
+Even though the next century is full of dramatic episodes--the collapse
+of governments and labor wars--these events will be to the social
+revolution what the smashing of machines in Lancashire was to the
+industrial revolution. The reality that is worthy of attention is a
+change in the very texture and quality of millions of lives--a change
+that will be vividly perceptible only in the retrospect of history.
+
+The conservative often has a sharp sense of the complexity of revolution:
+not desiring change, he prefers to emphasize its difficulties, whereas
+the reformer is enticed into a faith that the intensity of desire is a
+measure of its social effect. Yet just because no reform is in itself a
+revolution, we must not jump to the assurance that no revolution can be
+accomplished. True as it is that great changes are imperceptible, it is
+no less true that they are constantly taking place. Moreover, for the
+very reason that human life changes its quality so slowly, the panic over
+political proposals is childish.
+
+It is obvious, for instance, that the recall of judges will not
+revolutionize the national life. That is why the opposition generated
+will seem superstitious to the next generation. As I write, a convention
+of the Populist Party has just taken place. Eight delegates attended the
+meeting, which was held in a parlor. Even the reactionary press speaks in
+a kindly way about these men. Twenty years ago the Populists were hated
+and feared as if they practiced black magic. What they wanted is on the
+point of realization. To some of us it looks like a drop in the bucket--a
+slight part of vastly greater plans. But how stupid was the fear of
+Populism, what unimaginative nonsense it was to suppose twenty years ago
+that the program was the road to the end of the world.
+
+One good deed or one bad one is no measure of a man's character: the Last
+Judgment let us hope will be no series of decisions as simple as that.
+"The soul survives its adventures," says Chesterton with a splendid sense
+of justice. A country survives its legislation. That truth should not
+comfort the conservative nor depress the radical. For it means that
+public policy can enlarge its scope and increase its audacity, can try
+big experiments without trembling too much over the result. This nation
+could enter upon the most radical experiments and could afford to fail in
+them. Mistakes do not affect us so deeply as we imagine. Our prophecies
+of change are subjective wishes or fears that never come to full
+realization.
+
+Those socialists are confused who think that a new era can begin by a
+general strike or an electoral victory. Their critics are just a bit more
+confused when they become hysterical over the prospect. Both of them
+over-emphasize the importance of single events. Yet I do not wish to
+furnish the impression that crises are negligible. They are extremely
+important as symptoms, as milestones, and as instruments. It is simply
+that the reality of a revolution is not in a political decree or the
+scarehead of a newspaper, but in the experiences, feelings, habits of
+myriads of men.
+
+No one who watched the textile strike at Lawrence, Massachusetts, in the
+winter of 1912 can forget the astounding effect it had on the complacency
+of the public. Very little was revealed that any well-informed social
+worker does not know as a commonplace about the mill population. The
+wretchedness and brutality of Lawrence conditions had been described in
+books and magazines and speeches until radicals had begun to wonder at
+times whether the power of language wasn't exhausted. The response was
+discouragingly weak--an occasional government investigation, an
+impassioned protest from a few individuals, a placid charity, were about
+all that the middle-class public had to say about factory life. The
+cynical indifference of legislatures and the hypocrisy of the dominant
+parties were all that politics had to offer. The Lawrence strike touched
+the most impervious: story after story came to our ears of hardened
+reporters who suddenly refused to misrepresent the strikers, of
+politicians aroused to action, of social workers become revolutionary.
+Daily conversation was shocked into some contact with realities--the
+newspapers actually printed facts about the situation of a working class
+population.
+
+And why? The reason is not far to seek. The Lawrence strikers did
+something more than insist upon their wrongs; they showed a disposition
+to right them. That is what scared public opinion into some kind of
+truth-telling. So long as the poor are docile in their poverty, the rest
+of us are only too willing to satisfy our consciences by pitying them.
+But when the downtrodden gather into a threat as they did at Lawrence,
+when they show that they have no stake in civilization and consequently
+no respect for its institutions, when the object of pity becomes the
+avenger of its own miseries, then the middle-class public begins to look
+at the problem more intelligently.
+
+We are not civilized enough to meet an issue before it becomes acute. We
+were not intelligent enough to free the slaves peacefully--we are not
+intelligent enough to-day to meet the industrial problem before it
+develops a crisis. That is the hard truth of the matter. And that is why
+no honest student of politics can plead that social movements should
+confine themselves to argument and debate, abandoning the militancy of
+the strike, the insurrection, the strategy of social conflict.
+
+Those who deplore the use of force in the labor struggle should ask
+themselves whether the ruling classes of a country could be depended upon
+to inaugurate a program of reconstruction which would abolish the
+barbarism that prevails in industry. Does anyone seriously believe that
+the business leaders, the makers of opinion and the politicians will, on
+their own initiative, bring social questions to a solution? If they do it
+will be for the first time in history. The trivial plans they are
+introducing to-day--profit-sharing and welfare work--are on their own
+admission an attempt to quiet the unrest and ward off the menace of
+socialism.
+
+No, paternalism is not dependable, granting that it is desirable. It will
+do very little more than it feels compelled to do. Those who to-day bear
+the brunt of our evils dare not throw themselves upon the mercy of their
+masters, not though there are bread and circuses as a reward. From the
+groups upon whom the pressure is most direct must come the power to deal
+with it. We are not all immediately interested in all problems: our
+attention wanders unless the people who are interested compel us to
+listen.
+
+Social movements are at once the symptoms and the instruments of
+progress. Ignore them and statesmanship is irrelevant; fail to use them
+and it is weak. Often in the course of these essays I have quoted from H.
+G. Wells. I must do so again: "Every party stands essentially for the
+interests and mental usages of some definite class or group of classes in
+the exciting community, and every party has its scientific minded and
+constructive leading section, with well defined hinterlands formulating
+its social functions in a public spirited form, and its
+superficial-minded following confessing its meannesses and vanities and
+prejudices. No class will abolish itself, materially alter its way of
+living, or drastically reconstruct itself, albeit no class is indisposed
+to co-operate in the unlimited socialization of any other class. In that
+capacity for aggression upon other classes lies the essential driving
+force of modern affairs."
+
+The truth of this can be tested in the socialist movement. There is a
+section among the socialists which regards the class movement of labor as
+a driving force in the socialization of industry. This group sees clearly
+that without the threat of aggression no settlement of the issues is
+possible. Ordinarily such socialists say that the class struggle is a
+movement which will end classes. They mean that the self-interest of
+labor is identical with the interests of a community--that it is a kind
+of social selfishness. But there are other socialists who speak
+constantly of "working-class government" and they mean just what they
+say. It is their intention to have the community ruled in the interests
+of labor. Probe their minds to find out what they mean by labor and in
+all honesty you cannot escape the admission that they mean industrial
+labor alone. These socialists think entirely in terms of the factory
+population of cities: the farmers, the small shop-keepers, the
+professional classes have only a perfunctory interest for them. I know
+that no end of phrases could be adduced to show the inclusiveness of the
+word labor. But their intention is what I have tried to describe: they
+are thinking of government by a factory population.
+
+They appeal to history for confirmation: have not all social changes,
+they ask, meant the emergence of a new economic class until it dominated
+society? Did not the French Revolution mean the conquest of the feudal
+landlord by the middle-class merchant? Why should not the Social
+Revolution mean the victory of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie? That
+may be true, but it is no reason for being bullied by it into a tame
+admission that what has always been must always be. I see no reason for
+exalting the unconscious failures of other revolutions into deliberate
+models for the next one. Just because the capacity of aggression in the
+middle class ran away with things, and failed to fuse into any decent
+social ideal, is not ground for trying as earnestly as possible to repeat
+the mistake.
+
+The lesson of it all, it seems to me, is this: that class interests are
+the driving forces which keep public life centered upon essentials. They
+become dangerous to a nation when it denies them, thwarts them and
+represses them so long that they burst out and become dominant. Then
+there is no limit to their aggression until another class appears with
+contrary interests. The situation might be compared to those hysterias in
+which a suppressed impulse flares up and rules the whole mental life.
+
+Social life has nothing whatever to fear from group interests so long as
+it doesn't try to play the ostrich in regard to them. So the burden of
+national crises is squarely upon the dominant classes who fight so
+foolishly against the emergent ones. That is what precipitates violence,
+that is what renders social co-operation impossible, that is what makes
+catastrophes the method of change.
+
+The wisest rulers see this. They know that the responsibility for
+insurrections rests in the last analysis upon the unimaginative greed and
+endless stupidity of the dominant classes. There is something pathetic in
+the blindness of powerful people when they face a social crisis. Fighting
+viciously every readjustment which a nation demands, they make their own
+overthrow inevitable. It is they who turn opposing interests into a class
+war. Confronted with the deep insurgency of labor what do capitalists and
+their spokesmen do? They resist every demand, submit only after a
+struggle, and prepare a condition of war to the death. When far-sighted
+men appear in the ruling classes--men who recognize the need of a
+civilized answer to this increasing restlessness, the rich and the
+powerful treat them to a scorn and a hatred that are incredibly bitter.
+The hostility against men like Roosevelt, La Follette, Bryan,
+Lloyd-George is enough to make an observer believe that the rich of
+to-day are as stupid as the nobles of France before the Revolution.
+
+It seems to me that Roosevelt never spoke more wisely or as a better
+friend of civilization than the time when he said at New York City on
+March 20, 1912, that "the woes of France for a century and a quarter have
+been due to the folly of her people in splitting into the two camps of
+unreasonable conservatism and unreasonable radicalism. Had
+pre-Revolutionary France listened to men like Turgot and backed them up
+all would have gone well. But the beneficiaries of privilege, the Bourbon
+reactionaries, the short-sighted ultra-conservatives, turned down Turgot;
+and then found that instead of him they had obtained Robespierre. They
+gained twenty years' freedom from all restraint and reform at the cost of
+the whirlwind of the red terror; and in their turn the unbridled
+extremists of the terror induced a blind reaction; and so, with
+convulsion and oscillation from one extreme to another, with alterations
+of violent radicalism and violent Bourbonism, the French people went
+through misery to a shattered goal."
+
+Profound changes are not only necessary, but highly desirable. Even if
+this country were comfortably well-off, healthy, prosperous, and
+educated, men would go on inventing and creating opportunities to amplify
+the possibilities of life. These inventions would mean radical
+transformations. For we are bent upon establishing more in this nation
+than a minimum of comfort. A liberal people would welcome social
+inventions as gladly as we do mechanical ones. What it would fear is a
+hard-shell resistance to change which brings it about explosively.
+
+Catastrophes are disastrous to radical and conservative alike: they do
+not preserve what was worth maintaining; they allow a deformed and often
+monstrous perversion of the original plan. The emancipation of the slaves
+might teach us the lesson that an explosion followed by reconstruction is
+satisfactory to nobody.
+
+Statesmanship would go out to meet a crisis before it had become acute.
+The thing it would emphatically not do is to dam up an insurgent current
+until it overflowed the countryside. Fight labor's demands to the last
+ditch and there will come a time when it seizes the whole of power, makes
+itself sovereign, and takes what it used to ask. That is a poor way for a
+nation to proceed. For the insurgent become master is a fanatic from the
+struggle, and as George Santayana says, he is only too likely to redouble
+his effort after he has forgotten his aim.
+
+Nobody need waste his time debating whether or not there are to be great
+changes. That is settled for us whether we like it or not. What is worth
+debating is the method by which change is to come about. Our choice, it
+seems to me, lies between a blind push and a deliberate leadership,
+between thwarting movements until they master us, and domesticating them
+until they are answered.
+
+When Roosevelt formed the Progressive Party on a platform of social
+reform he crystallized a deep unrest, brought it out of the cellars of
+resentment into the agora of political discussion. He performed the real
+task of a leader--a task which has essentially two dimensions. By
+becoming part of the dynamics of unrest he gathered a power of
+effectiveness: by formulating a program for insurgency he translated it
+into terms of public service.
+
+What Roosevelt did at the middle-class level, the socialists have done at
+the proletarian. The world has been slow to recognize the work of the
+Socialist Party in transmuting a dumb muttering into a civilized program.
+It has found an intelligent outlet for forces that would otherwise be
+purely cataclysmic. The truth of this has been tested recently in the
+appearance of the "direct actionists."
+
+They are men who have lost faith in political socialism. Why? Because,
+like all other groups, the socialists tend to become routineers, to slip
+into an easy reiteration. The direct actionists are a warning to the
+Socialist Party that its tactics and its program are not adequate to
+domesticating the deepest unrest of labor. Within that party, therefore,
+a leadership is required which will ride the forces of "syndicalism" and
+use them for a constructive purpose. The brilliant writer of the "Notes
+of the Week" in the English New Age has shown how this might be done. He
+has fused the insight of the syndicalist with the plans of the
+collectivists under the name of Guild Socialism.
+
+His plan calls for co-management of industry by the state and the labor
+union. It steers a course between exploitation by a bureaucracy in the
+interests of the consumer--the socialist danger--and oppressive
+monopolies by industrial unions--the syndicalist danger. I shall not
+attempt to argue here either for or against the scheme. My concern is
+with method rather than with special pleadings. The Guild Socialism of
+the "New Age" is merely an instance of statesmanlike dealing with a new
+social force. Instead of throwing up its hands in horror at one
+over-advertised tactical incident like sabotage, the "New Age" went
+straight to the creative impulse of the syndicalist movement.
+
+Every true craftsman, artist or professional man knows and sympathizes
+with that impulse: you may call it a desire for self-direction in labor.
+The deepest revolt implied in the term syndicalism is against the
+impersonal, driven quality of modern industry--against the destruction of
+that pride which alone distinguishes work from slavery. Some such impulse
+as that is what marks off syndicalism from the other revolts of labor.
+Our suspicion of the collectivist arrangement is aroused by the picture
+of a vast state machine so horribly well-regulated that human impulse is
+utterly subordinated. I believe too that the fighting qualities of
+syndicalism are kept at the boiling point by a greater sense of outraged
+human dignity than can be found among mere socialists or unionists. The
+imagination is more vivid: the horror of capitalism is not alone in the
+poverty and suffering it entails, but in its ruthless denial of life to
+millions of men. The most cruel of all denials is to deprive a human
+being of joyous activity. Syndicalism is shot through with the assertion
+that an imposed drudgery is intolerable--that labor at a subsistence wage
+as a cog in a meaningless machine is no condition upon which to found
+civilization. That is a new kind of revolt--more dangerous to capitalism
+than the demand for higher wages. You can not treat the syndicalists like
+cattle because forsooth they have ceased to be cattle. "The damned
+wantlessness of the poor," about which Oscar Wilde complained, the cry
+for a little more fodder, gives way to an insistence upon the chance to
+be interested in life.
+
+To shut the door in the face of such a current of feeling because it is
+occasionally exasperated into violence would be as futile as locking up
+children because they get into mischief. The mind which rejects
+syndicalism entirely because of the by-products of its despair has had
+pearls cast before it in vain. I know that syndicalism means a revision
+of some of our plans--that it is an intrusion upon many a glib prejudice.
+But a human impulse is more important than any existing theory. We must
+not throw an unexpected guest out of the window because no place is set
+for him at table. For we lose not only the charm of his company: he may
+in anger wreck the house.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Yet the whole nation can't sit at one table: the politician will object
+that all human interests can't be embodied in a party program. That is
+true, truer than most politicians would admit in public. No party can
+represent a whole nation, although, with the exception of the socialists,
+all of them pretend to do just that. The reason is very simple: a
+platform is a list of performances that are possible within a few years.
+It is concerned with more or less immediate proposals, and in a nation
+split up by class, sectional and racial interests, these proposals are
+sure to arouse hostility. No definite industrial and political platform,
+for example, can satisfy rich and poor, black and white, Eastern creditor
+and Western farmer. A party that tried to answer every conflicting
+interest would stand still because people were pulling in so many
+different directions. It would arouse the anger of every group and the
+approval of its framers. It would have no dynamic power because the
+forces would neutralize each other.
+
+One comprehensive party platform fusing every interest is impossible and
+undesirable. What is both possible and desirable is that every group
+interest should be represented in public life--that it should have
+spokesmen and influence in public affairs. This is almost impossible
+to-day. Our blundering political system is pachydermic in its
+irresponsiveness. The methods of securing representation are unfit
+instruments for any flexible use. But the United States is evidently not
+exceptional in this respect. England seems to suffer in the same way. In
+May, 1912, the "Daily Mail" published a series of articles by H. G. Wells
+on "The Labour Unrest." Is he not describing almost any session of
+Congress when he says that "to go into the House of Commons is to go
+aside out of the general stream of the community's vitality into a corner
+where little is learnt and much is concocted, into a specialized Assembly
+which is at once inattentive to and monstrously influential in our
+affairs?" Further on Wells remarks that "this diminishing actuality of
+our political life is a matter of almost universal comment to-day.... In
+Great Britain we do not have Elections any more; we have Rejections.
+What really happens at a general election is that the party
+organizations--obscure and secretive conclaves with entirely mysterious
+funds--appoint about 1200 men to be our rulers, and all that we, we
+so-called self-governing people, are permitted to do is, in a muddled
+angry way, to strike off the names of about half these selected
+gentlemen."
+
+A cynic might say that the people can't go far wrong in politics because
+they can't be very right. Our so-called representative system is
+unrepresentative in a deeper way than the reformers who talk about the
+money power imagine. It is empty and thin: a stifling of living currents
+in the interest of a mediocre regularity.
+
+But suppose that politics were made responsive--suppose that the forces
+of the community found avenues of expression into public life. Would not
+our legislatures be cut up into antagonistic parties, would not the
+conflicts of the nation be concentrated into one heated hall? If you
+really represented the country in its government, would you not get its
+partisanship in a quintessential form? After all group interests in the
+nation are diluted by space and time: the mere separation in cities and
+country prevents them from falling into the psychology of the crowd. But
+let them all be represented in one room by men who are professionally
+interested in their constituency's prejudices and what would you
+accomplish but a deepening of the cleavages? Would the session not become
+an interminable wrangle?
+
+Nobody can answer these questions with any certainty. Most prophecies are
+simply the masquerades of prejudice, and the people who love stability
+and prefer to let their own well-being alone will see in a sensitive
+political system little but an invitation to chaos. They will choose
+facts to adorn their fears. History can be all things to all men: nothing
+is easier than to summon the Terror, the Commune, lynchings in the
+Southern States, as witnesses to the excesses and hysterias of the mob.
+Those facts will prove the case conclusively to anyone who has already
+made up his mind on the subject. Absolute democrats can also line up
+their witnesses: the conservatism of the Swiss, Wisconsin's successful
+experiments, the patience and judgment of the Danes. Both sides are
+remarkably sure that the right is with them, whereas the only truth about
+which an observer can be entirely certain is that in some places and in
+certain instances democracy is admittedly successful.
+
+There is no absolute case one way or the other. It would be silly from
+the experience we have to make a simple judgment about the value of
+direct expression. You cannot lump such a mass of events together and
+come to a single conclusion about them. It is a crude habit of mind that
+would attempt it. You might as well talk abstractly about the goodness or
+badness of this universe which contains happiness, pain, exhilaration and
+indifference in a thousand varying grades and quantities. There is no
+such thing as Democracy; there are a number of more or less democratic
+experiments which are not subject to wholesale eulogy or condemnation.
+
+The questions about the success of a truly representative system are
+pseudo-questions. And for this reason: success is not due to the system;
+it does not flow from it automatically. The source of success is in the
+people who use the system: as an instrument it may help or hinder them,
+but they must operate it. Government is not a machine running on straight
+tracks to a desired goal. It is a human work which may be facilitated by
+good tools.
+
+That is why the achievements of the Swiss may mean nothing whatever when
+you come to prophesy about the people of New York. Because Wisconsin has
+made good use of the direct primary it does not follow that it will
+benefit the Filipino. It always seems curious to watch the satisfaction
+of some reform magazines when China or Turkey or Persia imitates the
+constitutional forms of Western democracies. Such enthusiasts postulate a
+uniformity of human ability which every fact of life contradicts.
+
+Present-day reform lays a great emphasis upon instruments and very little
+on the skilful use of them. It says that human nature is all right, that
+what is wrong is the "system." Now the effect of this has been to
+concentrate attention on institutions and to slight men. A small step
+further, institutions become an end in themselves. They may violate human
+nature as the taboo does. That does not disturb the interest in them very
+much, for by common consent reformers are to fix their minds upon the
+"system."
+
+A machine should be run by men for human uses. The preoccupation with the
+"system" lays altogether too little stress on the men who operate it and
+the men for whom it is run. It is as if you put all your effort into the
+working of a plough and forgot the farmer and the consumer. I state the
+case baldly and contradiction would be easy. The reformer might point to
+phrases like "human welfare" which appear in his writings. And yet the
+point stands, I believe. The emphasis which directs his thinking bears
+most heavily upon the mechanics of life--only perfunctorily upon the
+ability of the men who are to use them.
+
+Even an able reformer like Mr. Frederic C. Howe does not escape entirely.
+A recent book is devoted to a glowing eulogy of "Wisconsin, an Experiment
+in Democracy." In a concluding chapter Mr. Howe states the philosophy of
+the experiment. "What is the explanation of Wisconsin?" he asks. "Why has
+it been able to eliminate corruption, machine politics, and rid itself of
+the boss? What is the cause of the efficiency, the thoroughness, the
+desire to serve which animate the state? Why has Wisconsin succeeded
+where other states have uniformly failed? I think the explanation is
+simple. It is also perfectly natural. It is traceable to democracy, to
+the political freedom which had its beginning in the direct primary law,
+and which has been continuously strengthened by later laws"; some pages
+later, "Wisconsin assumed that the trouble with our politics is not with
+our people, but with the machinery with which the people work.... It has
+established a line of vision as direct as possible between the people and
+the expression of their will." The impression Mr. Howe evidently wishes
+to leave with his readers is that the success of the experiment is due to
+the instruments rather than to the talent of the people of Wisconsin.
+That would be a valuable and comforting assurance to propagandists, for
+it means that other states with the same instruments can achieve the same
+success. But the conclusion seems to me utterly unfounded. The reasoning
+is perilously like that of the gifted lady amateur who expects to achieve
+greatness by imitating the paint box and palette, oils and canvases of an
+artist.
+
+Mr. Howe's own book undermines his conclusions. He begins with an account
+of La Follette--of a man with initiative and a constructive bent. The
+forces La Follette set in motion are commented upon. The work of Van Hise
+is shown. What Wisconsin had was leadership and a people that responded,
+inventors, and constructive minds. They forged the direct primary and the
+State University out of the impetus within themselves. No doubt they were
+fortunate in their choice of instruments. They made the expression of the
+people's will direct, yet that will surely is the more primary thing. It
+makes and uses representative systems: but you cannot reverse the
+process. A man can manufacture a plough and operate it, but no amount of
+ploughs will create a man and endow him with skill.
+
+All sorts of observers have pointed out that the Western States adopt
+reform legislation more quickly than the Eastern. Yet no one would
+seriously maintain that the West is more progressive because it has
+progressive laws. The laws are a symptom and an aid but certainly not the
+cause. Constitutions do not make people; people make constitutions. So
+the task of reform consists not in presenting a state with progressive
+laws, but in getting the people to want them.
+
+The practical difference is extraordinary. I insist upon it so much
+because the tendency of political discussion is to regard government as
+automatic: a device that is sure to fail or sure to succeed. It is sure
+of nothing. Effort moves it, intelligence directs it; its fate is in
+human hands.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The politics I have urged in these chapters cannot be learned by rote.
+What can be taught by rule of thumb is the administration of precedents.
+That is at once the easiest and the most fruitless form of public
+activity. Only a low degree of intelligence is required and of effort
+merely a persistent repetition. Men fall into a routine when they are
+tired and slack: it has all the appearance of activity with few of its
+burdens. It was a profound observation when Bernard Shaw said that men
+dread liberty because of the bewildering responsibility it imposes and
+the uncommon alertness it demands. To do what has always been done, to
+think in well-cut channels, to give up "the intolerable disease of
+thought," is an almost constant demand of our natures. That is perhaps
+why so many of the romantic rebels of the Nineteenth Century sank at last
+into the comforting arms of Mother Church. That is perhaps the reason why
+most oldish men acquire information, but learn very little. The
+conservative who loves his routine is in nine cases out of ten a creature
+too lazy to change its habits.
+
+Confronted with a novelty, the first impulse is to snub it, and send it
+into exile. When it becomes too persistent to be ignored a taboo is
+erected and threats of fines and condign punishment are made if it
+doesn't cease to appear. This is the level of culture at which Sherman
+Anti-Trust acts are passed, brothels are raided, and labor agitators are
+thrown into jail. If the taboo is effective it drives the evil under
+cover, where it festers and emits a slow poison. This is the price we pay
+for the appearance of suppression. But if the problem is more heavily
+charged with power, the taboo irritates the force until it explodes. Not
+infrequently what was once simply a factor of life becomes the dominating
+part of it. At this point the whole routineer scheme of things collapses,
+there is a period of convulsion and Cæsarean births, and men weary of
+excitement sink back into a newer routine. Thus the cycle of futility is
+completed.
+
+The process bears as much resemblance to statecraft as sitting backward
+on a runaway horse does to horsemanship. The ordinary politician has no
+real control, no direction, no insight into the power he rides. What he
+has is an elevated, though temporary seat. Real statesmanship has a
+different ambition. It begins by accepting human nature. No routine has
+ever done that in spite of the conservative patter about "human nature";
+mechanical politics has usually begun by ignoring and ended by violating
+the nature of men.
+
+To accept that nature does not mean that we accept its present character.
+It is probably true that the impulses of men have changed very little
+within recorded history. What has changed enormously from epoch to epoch
+is the character in which these impulses appear. The impulses that at one
+period work themselves out into cruelty and lust may at another produce
+the richest values of civilized life. The statesman can affect that
+choice. His business is to provide fine opportunities for the expression
+of human impulses--to surround childhood, youth and age with homes and
+schools, cities and countryside that shall be stocked with interest and
+the chance for generous activity.
+
+Government can play a leading part in this work, for with the decadence
+of the church it has become the only truly catholic organization in the
+land. Its task is essentially to carry out programs of service, to add
+and build and increase the facilities of life. Repression is an
+insignificant part of its work; the use of the club can never be
+applauded, though it may be tolerated _faute de mieux_. Its use is a
+confession of ignorance.
+
+A sensitively representative machinery will probably serve such
+statesmanship best. For the easy expression of public opinion in
+government is a clue to what services are needed and a test of their
+success. It keeps the processes of politics well ventilated and reminds
+politicians of their excuse for existence.
+
+In that kind of statesmanship there will be a premium on inventiveness,
+on the ingenuity to devise and plan. There will be much less use for
+lawyers and a great deal more for scientists. The work requires
+industrial organizers, engineers, architects, educators, sanitists to
+achieve what leadership brings into the program of politics.
+
+This leadership is the distinctive fact about politics. The statesman
+acts in part as an intermediary between the experts and his constituency.
+He makes social movements conscious of themselves, expresses their needs,
+gathers their power and then thrusts them behind the inventor and the
+technician in the task of actual achievement. What Roosevelt did in the
+conservation movement was typical of the statesman's work. He recognized
+the need of attention to natural resources, made it public, crystallized
+its force and delegated the technical accomplishment to Pinchot and his
+subordinates.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But creative statesmanship requires a culture to support it. It can
+neither be taught by rule nor produced out of a vacuum. A community that
+clatters along with its rusty habits of thought unquestioned, making no
+distinction between instruments and idols, with a dull consumption of
+machine-made romantic fiction, no criticism, an empty pulpit and an
+unreliable press, will find itself faithfully mirrored in public affairs.
+The one thing that no democrat may assume is that the people are dear
+good souls, fully competent for their task. The most valuable leaders
+never assume that. No one, for example, would accuse Karl Marx of
+disloyalty to workingmen. Yet in 1850 he could write at the demagogues
+among his friends: "While we draw the attention of the German workman to
+the _undeveloped state_ of the proletariat in Germany, you flatter the
+national spirit and the guild prejudices of the German artisans in the
+grossest manner, a method of procedure without doubt the more popular of
+the two. Just as the democrats made a sort of fetich of the words, 'the
+people,' so you make one of the word 'proletariat.'" John Spargo quotes
+this statement in his "Life." Marx, we are told, could use phrases like
+"democratic miasma." He never seems to have made the mistake of confusing
+democracy with demolatry. Spargo is perfectly clear about this
+characteristic of Marx: "He admired most of all, perhaps, that fine
+devotion to truth as he understood it, and disregard of popularity which
+marked Owen's life. Contempt for popular opinion was one of his most
+strongly developed characteristics. He was fond, says Liebknecht, of
+quoting as his motto the defiant line of Dante, with which he afterwards
+concluded his preface to 'Das Kapital':
+
+'Segui il tuo corso e lascia dir le genti.'"
+
+It is to Marx's everlasting credit that he set the intellectual standard
+of socialism on the most vigorous intellectual basis he could find. He
+knew better than to be satisfied with loose thinking and fairly good
+intentions. He knew that the vast change he contemplated needed every
+ounce of intellectual power that the world possessed. A fine boast it was
+that socialism was equipped with all the culture of the age. I wonder
+what he would have thought of an enthusiastic socialist candidate for
+Governor of New York who could write that "until men are free the world
+has no need of any more literary efforts, of any more paintings, of any
+more poems. It is better to have said one word for the emancipation of
+the race than to have written the greatest novel of the times.... The
+world doesn't need any more literature."
+
+I will not venture a guess as to what Marx would have said, but I know
+what we must say: "Without a literature the people is dumb, without
+novels and poems, plays and criticism, without books of philosophy, there
+is neither the intelligence to plan, the imagination to conceive, nor the
+understanding of a common purpose. Without culture you can knock down
+governments, overturn property relations, you can create excitement, but
+you cannot create a genuine revolution in the lives of men." The reply of
+the workingmen in 1847 to Cabet's proposal that they found Icaria, "a new
+terrestrial Paradise," in Texas if you please, contains this interesting
+objection: "Because although those comrades who intend to emigrate with
+Cabet may be eager Communists, yet they still possess too many of the
+faults and prejudices of present-day society by reason of their past
+education to be able to get rid of them at once by joining Icaria."
+
+That simple statement might be taken to heart by all the reformers and
+socialists who insist that the people are all right, that only
+institutions are wrong. The politics of reconstruction require a nation
+vastly better educated, a nation freed from its slovenly ways of
+thinking, stimulated by wider interests, and jacked up constantly by the
+sharpest kind of criticism. It is puerile to say that institutions must
+be changed from top to bottom and then assume that their victims are
+prepared to make the change. No amount of charters, direct primaries, or
+short ballots make a democracy out of an illiterate people. Those
+portions of America where there are voting booths but no schools cannot
+possibly be described as democracies. Nor can the person who reads one
+corrupt newspaper and then goes out to vote make any claim to having
+registered his will. He may have a will, but he has not used it.
+
+For politics whose only ideal is the routine, it is just as well that men
+shouldn't know what they want or how to express it. Education has always
+been a considerable nuisance to the conservative intellect. In the
+Southern States, culture among the negroes is openly deplored, and I do
+not blame any patriarch for dreading the education of women. It is out of
+culture that the substance of real revolutions is made. If by some magic
+force you could grant women the vote and then keep them from schools and
+colleges, newspapers and lectures, the suffrage would be no more
+effective than a Blue Law against kissing your wife on Sunday. It is
+democratic machinery with an educated citizenship behind it that embodies
+all the fears of the conservative and the hopes of the radical.
+
+Culture is the name for what people are interested in, their thoughts,
+their models, the books they read and the speeches they hear, their
+table-talk, gossip, controversies, historical sense and scientific
+training, the values they appreciate, the quality of life they admire.
+All communities have a culture. It is the climate of their civilization.
+Without a favorable culture political schemes are a mere imposition. They
+will not work without a people to work them.
+
+The real preparation for a creative statesmanship lies deeper than
+parties and legislatures. It is the work of publicists and educators,
+scientists, preachers and artists. Through all the agents that make and
+popularize thought must come a bent of mind interested in invention and
+freed from the authority of ideas. The democratic culture must, with
+critical persistence, make man the measure of all things. I have tried
+again and again to point out the iconoclasm that is constantly necessary
+to avoid the distraction that comes of idolizing our own methods of
+thought. Without an unrelaxing effort to center the mind upon human uses,
+human purposes, and human results, it drops into idolatry and becomes
+hostile to creation.
+
+The democratic experiment is the only one that requires this wilful
+humanistic culture. An absolutism like Russia's is served better when the
+people accept their ideas as authoritative and piously sacrifice humanity
+to a non-human purpose. An aristocracy flourishes where the people find a
+vicarious enjoyment in admiring the successes of the ruling class. That
+prevents men from developing their own interests and looking for their
+own successes. No doubt Napoleon was well content with the philosophy of
+those guardsmen who drank his health before he executed them.
+
+But those excellent soldiers would make dismal citizens. A view of life
+in which man obediently allows himself to be made grist for somebody
+else's mill is the poorest kind of preparation for the work of
+self-government. You cannot long deny external authorities in government
+and hold to them for the rest of life, and it is no accident that the
+nineteenth century questioned a great deal more than the sovereignty of
+kings. The revolt went deeper and democracy in politics was only an
+aspect of it. The age might be compared to those years of a boy's life
+when he becomes an atheist and quarrels with his family. The nineteenth
+century was a bad time not only for kings, but for priests, the classics,
+parental autocrats, indissoluble marriage, Shakespeare, the Aristotelian
+Poetics and the validity of logic. If disobedience is man's original
+virtue, as Oscar Wilde suggested, it was an extraordinarily virtuous
+century. Not a little of the revolt was an exuberant rebellion for its
+own sake. There were also counter-revolutions, deliberate returns to
+orthodoxy, as in the case of Chesterton. The transvaluation of values was
+performed by many hands into all sorts of combinations.
+
+There have been other periods of revolution. Heresy is just a few hours
+younger than orthodoxy. Disobedience is certainly not the discovery of
+the nineteenth century. But the quality of it is. I believe Chesterton
+has hold of an essential truth when he says that this is the first time
+men have boasted of their heresy. The older rebels claimed to be more
+orthodox than the Church, to have gone back to the true authorities. The
+radicals of recent times proclaim that there is no orthodoxy, no doctrine
+that men must accept without question.
+
+Without doubt they deceive themselves mightily. They have their invisible
+popes, called Art, Nature, Science, with regalia and ritual and a
+catechism. But they don't mean to have them. They mean to be
+self-governing in their spiritual lives. And this intention is the
+half-perceived current which runs through our age and galvanizes so many
+queer revolts. It would be interesting to trace out the forms it has
+taken, the abortive cults it has tried and abandoned. In another
+connection I pointed to autonomy as the hope of syndicalism. It would not
+be difficult to find a similar assertion in the feminist agitation. From
+Mrs. Gilman's profound objections against a "man-made" world to the lady
+who would like to vote about her taxes, there is a feeling that woman
+must be something more than a passive creature. Walter Pater might be
+quoted in his conclusion to the effect that "the theory or idea or system
+which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of experience, in
+consideration of some interest into which we cannot enter, or some
+abstract theory we have not identified with ourselves, or what is only
+conventional, has no real claim upon us." The desire for self-direction
+has made a thousand philosophies as contradictory as the temperaments of
+the thinkers. A storehouse of illustration is at hand: Nietzsche advising
+the creative man to bite off the head of the serpent which is choking him
+and become "a transfigured being, a light-surrounded being, that
+_laughed_!" One might point to Stirner's absolute individualism or turn
+to Whitman's wholehearted acceptance of every man with his catalogue of
+defects and virtues. Some of these men have cursed each other roundly:
+Georges Sorel, for example, who urges workingmen to accept none of the
+bourgeois morality, and becomes most eloquent when he attacks other
+revolutionists.
+
+I do not wish to suggest too much unanimity in the hundreds of artists
+and thinkers that are making the thought of our times. There is a kind of
+"professional reconciler" of opposites who likes to lump all the
+prominent rebels together and refer to them affectionately as "us
+radicals." Yet that there is a common impulse in modern thought which
+strives towards autonomy is true and worth remarking. In some men it is
+half-conscious, in others a minor influence, but almost no one of weight
+escapes the contagion of it entirely. It is a new culture that is being
+prepared. Without it there would to-day be no demand for a creative
+statesmanship which turns its back upon the routine and the taboo, kings
+and idols, and non-human purposes. It does more. It is making the
+atmosphere in which a humanly centered politics can flourish. The fact
+that this culture is multiform and often contradictory is a sign that
+more and more of the interests of life are finding expression. We should
+rejoice at that, for profusion means fertility; where a dead uniformity
+ceases, invention and ingenuity flourish.
+
+Perhaps the insistence on the need of a culture in statecraft will seem
+to many people an old-fashioned delusion. Among the more rigid socialists
+and reformers it is not customary to spend much time discussing mental
+habits. That, they think, was made unnecessary by the discovery of an
+economic basis of civilization. The destinies of society are felt to be
+too solidly set in industrial conditions to allow any cultural direction.
+Where there is no choice, of what importance is opinion?
+
+All propaganda is, of course, a practical tribute to the value of
+culture. However inevitable the process may seem, all socialists agree
+that its inevitability should be fully realized. They teach at one time
+that men act from class interests: but they devote an enormous amount of
+energy to making men conscious of their class. It evidently matters to
+that supposedly inevitable progress whether men are aware of it. In
+short, the most hardened socialist admits choice and deliberation,
+culture and ideals into his working faith. He may talk as if there were
+an iron determinism, but his practice is better than his preachment.
+
+Yet there are necessities in social life. To all the purposes of politics
+it is settled, for instance, that the trust will never be "unscrambled"
+into small competing businesses. We say in our argument that a return to
+the days of the stage-coach is impossible or that "you cannot turn back
+the hands of the clock." Now man might return to the stage-coach if that
+seemed to him the supreme goal of all his effort, just as anyone can
+follow Chesterton's advice to turn back the hands of the clock if he
+pleases. But nobody can recover his yesterdays no matter how much he
+abuses the clock, and no man can expunge the memory of railroads though
+all the stations and engines were dismantled.
+
+"From this survival of the past," says Bergson, "it follows that
+consciousness cannot go through the same state twice." This is the real
+necessity that makes any return to the imagined glories of other days an
+idle dream. Graham Wallas remarks that those who have eaten of the tree
+of knowledge cannot forget--"Mr. Chesterton cries out, like the Cyclops
+in the play, against those who complicate the life of man, and tells us
+to eat 'caviare on impulse,' instead of 'grapenuts on principle.' But
+since we cannot unlearn our knowledge, Mr. Chesterton is only telling us
+to eat caviare on principle." The binding fact we must face in all our
+calculations, and so in politics too, is that you cannot recover what is
+passed. That is why educated people are not to be pressed into the
+customs of their ignorance, why women who have reached out for more than
+"Kirche, Kinder und Küche" can never again be entirely domestic and
+private in their lives. Once people have questioned an authority their
+faith has lost its naïveté. Once men have tasted inventions like the
+trust they have learned something which cannot be annihilated. I know of
+one reformer who devotes a good deal of his time to intimate talks with
+powerful conservatives. He explains them to themselves: never after do
+they exercise their power with the same unquestioning ruthlessness.
+
+Life is an irreversible process and for that reason its future can never
+be a repetition of the past. This insight we owe to Bergson. The
+application of it to politics is not difficult because politics is one of
+the interests of life. We can learn from him in what sense we are bound.
+"The finished portrait is explained by the features of the model, by the
+nature of the artist, by colors spread out on the palette; but even with
+the knowledge of what explains it, no one, not even the artist, could
+have foreseen exactly what the portrait would be, for to predict it would
+have been to produce it before it was produced...." The future is
+explained by the economic and social institutions which were present at
+its birth: the trust and the labor union, all the "movements" and
+institutions, will condition it. "Just as the talent of the painter is
+formed or deformed--in any case, is modified--under the very influence of
+the work he produces, so each of our states, at the moment of its issue,
+modifies our personality, being indeed the new form we are just assuming.
+It is then right to say that what we do depends on what we are; but it is
+necessary to add also, that we are, to a certain extent, what we do, and
+that we are creating ourselves continually."
+
+What I have called culture enters into political life as a very powerful
+condition. It is a way of creating ourselves. Make a blind struggle
+luminous, drag an unconscious impulse into the open day, see that men are
+aware of their necessities, and the future is in a measure controlled.
+The culture of to-day is for the future an historical condition. That is
+its political importance. The mental habits we are forming, our
+philosophies and magazines, theaters, debates, schools, pulpits and
+newspapers become part of an active past which as Bergson says "follows
+us at every instant; all that we have felt, thought, and willed from our
+earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to
+join it, pressing against the portals of consciousness that would fain
+leave it outside."
+
+Socialists claim that because the McNamara brothers had no
+"class-consciousness," because they were without a philosophy of society
+and an understanding of the labor movement their sense of wrong was bound
+to seek out dynamite. That is a profound truth backed by abundant
+evidence. If you turn, for example, to Spargo's Life of Karl Marx you see
+that all through his career Marx struggled with the mere
+insurrectionists. It was the men without the Marxian vision of growth and
+discipline who were forever trying to lead little marauding bands against
+the governments of Europe. The fact is worth pondering: the Marxian
+socialists, openly declaring that all authority is a temporary
+manifestation of social conditions, have waged what we must call a war of
+culture against the powers of the world. They have tried to arouse in
+workingmen the consciousness of an historical mission--the patience of
+that labor is one of the wonders of the age. But the McNamaras had a
+culture that could help them not at all. They were Catholics, Democrats
+and old-fashioned trade-unionists. Religion told them that authority was
+absolute and eternal, politics that Jefferson had said about all there
+was to say, economics insisted that the struggle between labor and
+capital was an everlasting see-saw. But life told them that society was
+brutal: an episode like the shirtwaist factory fire drove them to
+blasphemy and dynamite.
+
+Those bombs at Los Angeles, assassination and terrorism, are compounded
+of courage, indignation and ignorance. Civilization has much to fear from
+the blind class antagonisms it fosters; but the preaching of "class
+consciousness," far from being a fomenter of violence, must be recognized
+as the civilizing influence of culture upon economic interests.
+
+Thoughts and feelings count. We live in a revolutionary period and
+nothing is so important as to be aware of it. The measure of our
+self-consciousness will more or less determine whether we are to be the
+victims or the masters of change. Without philosophy we stumble along.
+The old routines and the old taboos are breaking up anyway, social forces
+are emerging which seek autonomy and struggle against slavery to
+non-human purposes. We seem to be moving towards some such statecraft as
+I have tried to suggest. But without knowledge of it that progress will
+be checkered and perhaps futile. The dynamics for a splendid human
+civilization are all about us. They need to be used. For that there must
+be a culture practiced in seeking the inwardness of impulses, competent
+to ward off the idols of its own thought, hospitable to novelty and
+sufficiently inventive to harness power.
+
+Why this age should have come to be what it is, why at this particular
+time the whole drift of thought should be from authority to autonomy
+would be an interesting speculation. It is one of the ultimate questions
+of politics. It is like asking why Athens in the Fifth Century B. C. was
+singled out as the luminous point of the Western World. We do not know
+enough to cut under such mysteries. We can only begin to guess why there
+was a Renaissance, why in certain centuries man seems extraordinarily
+creative. Perhaps the Modern Period with its flexibility, sense of
+change, and desire for self-direction is a liberation due to the great
+surplus of wealth. Perhaps the ease of travel, the popularizing of
+knowledge, the break-down of frontiers have given us a new interest in
+human life by showing how temporary are all its instruments. Certainly
+placid or morose acceptance is undermined. If men remain slaves either to
+ideas or to other men, it will be because they do not know they are
+slaves. Their intention is to be free. Their desire is for a full and
+expressive life and they do not relish a lop-sided and lamed humanity.
+For the age is rich with varied and generous passions.
+
+
+
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+<h1>The Project Gutenberg eBook, A Preface to Politics, by Walter Lippmann</h1>
+<pre>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at <a href = "http://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a></pre>
+<p>Title: A Preface to Politics</p>
+<p>Author: Walter Lippmann</p>
+<p>Release Date: December 16, 2006  [eBook #20125]</p>
+<p>Language: English</p>
+<p>Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1</p>
+<p>***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A PREFACE TO POLITICS***</p>
+<br><br><center><h3>E-text prepared by Matt Whittaker, Juliet Sutherland,<br>
+    and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team<br>
+    (http://www.pgdp.net/)</h3></center><br><br>
+
+<hr class="full" noshade>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+
+                           <h1>A PREFACE TO POLITICS</h1>
+<br><br>
+                                    <h3>BY</h3>
+<br><br>
+                              <h2>WALTER LIPPMANN</h2>
+
+<br><br><br>
+                    <h5>"A God wilt thou create for thyself<br />
+                         out of thy seven devils."</h5>
+<br><br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+
+                             <p class="center">MITCHELL KENNERLEY<br />
+                            NEW YORK AND LONDON<br />
+                                   1914</p>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+                            <p class="center">COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY<br />
+                             MITCHELL KENNERLEY</p>
+<br><br><br><br>
+
+
+
+<h2><i>Contents</i></h2>
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="Contents">
+<tr><td>
+<small>CHAPTER</small> </td><td>         </td><td> <small> PAGE</small></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td></td><td><a href="#intro"><span class="smcap">Introduction</span></a></td><td></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align='right'>I.</td><td> <a href="#ch1"> Routineer and Inventor</a>  </td><td align='right'>                           1</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align='right'>II.</td><td> <a href="#ch2">The Taboo</a>             </td><td align='right'>                              34</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align='right'>III.</td><td> <a href="#ch3">The Changing Focus</a>       </td><td align='right'>                        53</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align='right'>IV.</td><td> <a href="#ch4">The Golden Rule and After</a>   </td><td align='right'>           86</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align='right'>V.</td><td> <a href="#ch5">Well Meaning but Unmeaning: the Chicago Vice Report</a> </td><td align='right'>  122</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align='right'>VI.</td><td> <a href="#ch6">Some Necessary Iconoclasm</a>         </td><td align='right'>             159</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align='right'>VII.</td><td> <a href="#ch7">The Making of Creeds</a>       </td><td align='right'>               204</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align='right'>VIII.</td><td> <a href="#ch8">The Red Herring</a>             </td><td align='right'>               247</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align='right'>IX.</td><td> <a href="#ch9">Revolution and Culture</a>          </td><td align='right'>              273</td></tr>
+</table>
+</div>
+
+
+<br><br><br>
+
+<h2><a name="intro">INTRODUCTION</a></h2>
+<br><br>
+
+<p>The most incisive comment on politics to-day
+is indifference. When men and women begin
+to feel that elections and legislatures do not
+matter very much, that politics is a rather distant
+and unimportant exercise, the reformer might
+as well put to himself a few searching doubts.
+Indifference is a criticism that cuts beneath oppositions
+and wranglings by calling the political
+method itself into question. Leaders in public
+affairs recognize this. They know that no attack
+is so disastrous as silence, that no invective is
+so blasting as the wise and indulgent smile of
+the people who do not care. Eager to believe
+that all the world is as interested as they are,
+there comes a time when even the reformer is
+compelled to face the fairly widespread suspicion
+of the average man that politics is an exhibition
+in which there is much ado about nothing. But
+such moments of illumination are rare. They
+appear in writers who realize how large is the
+public that doesn't read their books, in reformers
+who venture to compare the membership list of
+their league with the census of the United States.
+Whoever has been granted such a moment of insight
+knows how exquisitely painful it is. To
+conquer it men turn generally to their ancient
+comforter, self-deception: they complain about
+the stolid, inert masses and the apathy of the
+people. In a more confidential tone they will
+tell you that the ordinary citizen is a "hopelessly
+private person."</p>
+
+<p>The reformer is himself not lacking in stolidity
+if he can believe such a fiction of a people that
+crowds about tickers and demands the news of
+the day before it happens, that trembles on the
+verge of a panic over the unguarded utterance
+of a financier, and founds a new religion every
+month or so. But after a while self-deception
+ceases to be a comfort. This is when the reformer
+notices how indifference to politics is settling
+upon some of the most alert minds of our
+generation, entering into the attitude of men as
+capable as any reformer of large and imaginative
+interests. For among the keenest minds, among
+artists, scientists and philosophers, there is a remarkable
+inclination to make a virtue of political
+indifference. Too passionate an absorption in
+public affairs is felt to be a somewhat shallow
+performance, and the reformer is patronized as
+a well-meaning but rather dull fellow. This is
+the criticism of men engaged in some genuinely
+creative labor. Often it is unexpressed, often as
+not the artist or scientist will join in a political
+movement. But in the depths of his soul there
+is, I suspect, some feeling which says to the
+politician, "Why so hot, my little sir?"</p>
+
+<p>Nothing, too, is more illuminating than the
+painful way in which many people cultivate a
+knowledge of public affairs because they have a
+conscience and wish to do a citizen's duty. Having
+read a number of articles on the tariff and
+ploughed through the metaphysics of the currency
+question, what do they do? They turn with all
+the more zest to some spontaneous human interest.
+Perhaps they follow, follow, follow
+Roosevelt everywhere, and live with him through
+the emotions of a great battle. But for the affairs
+of statecraft, for the very policies that a
+Roosevelt advocates, the interest is largely perfunctory,
+maintained out of a sense of duty and
+dropped with a sigh of relief.</p>
+
+<p>That reaction may not be as deplorable as it
+seems. Pick up your newspaper, read the Congressional
+Record, run over in your mind the
+"issues" of a campaign, and then ask yourself
+whether the average man is entirely to blame
+because he smiles a bit at Armageddon and refuses
+to take the politician at his own rhetorical
+valuation. If men find statecraft uninteresting,
+may it not be that statecraft <i>is</i> uninteresting?
+I have a more or less professional interest in
+public affairs; that is to say, I have had opportunity
+to look at politics from the point of view
+of the man who is trying to get the attention of
+people in order to carry through some reform.
+At first it was a hard confession to make, but the
+more I saw of politics at first-hand, the more I
+respected the indifference of the public. There
+was something monotonously trivial and irrelevant
+about our reformist enthusiasm, and an appalling
+justice in that half-conscious criticism
+which refuses to place politics among the genuine,
+creative activities of men. Science was valid, art
+was valid, the poorest grubber in a laboratory
+was engaged in a real labor, anyone who had
+found expression in some beautiful object was
+truly centered. But politics was a personal drama
+without meaning or a vague abstraction without
+substance.</p>
+
+<p>Yet there was the fact, just as indisputable
+as ever, that public affairs do have an enormous
+and intimate effect upon our lives. They make
+or unmake us. They are the foundation of that
+national vigor through which civilizations mature.
+City and countryside, factories and play, schools
+and the family are powerful influences in every
+life, and politics is directly concerned with them.
+If politics is irrelevant, it is certainly not because
+its subject matter is unimportant. Public
+affairs govern our thinking and doing with subtlety
+and persistence.</p>
+
+<p>The trouble, I figured, must be in the way
+politics is concerned with the nation's interests.
+If public business seems to drift aimlessly, its
+results are, nevertheless, of the highest consequence.
+In statecraft the penalties and rewards
+are tremendous. Perhaps the approach is distorted.
+Perhaps uncriticised assumptions have
+obscured the real uses of politics. Perhaps an
+attitude can be worked out which will engage
+a fresher attention. For there are, I believe,
+blunders in our political thinking which confuse
+fictitious activity with genuine achievement, and
+make it difficult for men to know where they
+should enlist. Perhaps if we can see politics in
+a different light, it will rivet our creative interests.</p>
+
+<p>These essays, then, are an attempt to sketch
+an attitude towards statecraft. I have tried to
+suggest an approach, to illustrate it concretely,
+to prepare a point of view. In selecting for the
+title "A Preface to Politics," I have wished to
+stamp upon the whole book my own sense that
+it is a beginning and not a conclusion. I have
+wished to emphasize that there is nothing in this
+book which can be drafted into a legislative proposal
+and presented to the legislature the day
+after to-morrow. It was not written with the
+notion that these pages would contain an adequate
+exposition of modern political method. Much
+less was it written to further a concrete program.
+There are, I hope, no assumptions put forward
+as dogmas.</p>
+
+<p>It is a preliminary sketch for a theory of
+politics, a preface to thinking. Like all speculation
+about human affairs, it is the result of a
+grapple with problems as they appear in the experience
+of one man. For though a personal
+vision may at times assume an eloquent and universal
+language, it is well never to forget that
+all philosophies are the language of particular
+men.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p align=right>W. L.</p>
+
+<p><small>46 East 80th Street, <span class="smcap">New York City</span>, January 1913.</small></p></div>
+
+<br><br><br>
+
+
+
+<h1>A PREFACE TO POLITICS</h1>
+
+<br><br><br>
+
+
+<h2><a name="ch1">CHAPTER I</a></h2>
+<h3>ROUTINEER AND INVENTOR</h3>
+
+<br>
+<p>Politics does not exist for the sake of
+demonstrating the superior righteousness
+of anybody. It is not a competition in deportment.
+In fact, before you can begin to think
+about politics at all you have to abandon the notion
+that there is a war between good men and bad
+men. That is one of the great American superstitions.
+More than any other fetish it has ruined
+our sense of political values by glorifying the
+pharisee with his vain cruelty to individuals and
+his unfounded approval of himself. You have
+only to look at the Senate of the United States, to
+see how that body is capable of turning itself into
+a court of preliminary hearings for the Last Judgment,
+wasting its time and our time and absorbing
+public enthusiasm and newspaper scareheads. For
+a hundred needs of the nation it has no thought,
+but about the precise morality of an historical
+transaction eight years old there is a meticulous
+interest. Whether in the Presidential Campaign
+of 1904 Roosevelt was aware that the ancient
+tradition of corporate subscriptions had or had
+not been followed, and the exact and ultimate
+measure of the guilt that knowledge would have
+implied--this in the year 1912 is enough to start
+the Senate on a protracted man-hunt.</p>
+
+<p>Now if one half of the people is bent upon
+proving how wicked a man is and the other half
+is determined to show how good he is, neither
+half will think very much about the nation. An
+innocent paragraph in the New York Evening
+Post for August 27, 1912, gives the whole performance
+away. It shows as clearly as words
+could how disastrous the good-and-bad-man theory
+is to political thinking:</p>
+
+<p>"Provided the first hearing takes place on September
+30, it is expected that the developments
+will be made with a view to keeping the Colonel
+on the defensive. After the beginning of October,
+it is pointed out, the evidence before the
+Committee should keep him so busy explaining
+and denying that the country will not hear much
+Bull Moose doctrine."</p>
+
+<p>Whether you like the Roosevelt doctrines or
+not, there can be no two opinions about such an
+abuse of morality. It is a flat public loss, another
+attempt to befuddle our thinking. For if
+politics is merely a guerilla war between the
+bribed and the unbribed, then statecraft is not a
+human service but a moral testing ground. It is
+a public amusement, a melodrama of real life, in
+which a few conspicuous characters are tried, and
+it resembles nothing so much as schoolboy hazing
+which we are told exists for the high purpose of
+detecting a "yellow streak." But even though we
+desired it there would be no way of establishing
+any clear-cut difference in politics between the
+angels and the imps. The angels are largely self-appointed,
+being somewhat more sensitive to
+other people's tar than their own.</p>
+
+<p>But if the issue is not between honesty and
+dishonesty, where is it?</p>
+
+<p>If you stare at a checkerboard you can see it
+as black on red, or red on black, as series of
+horizontal, vertical or diagonal steps which recede
+or protrude. The longer you look the more
+patterns you can trace, and the more certain it
+becomes that there is no single way of looking at
+the board. So with political issues. There is
+no obvious cleavage which everyone recognizes.
+Many patterns appear in the national life. The
+"progressives" say the issue is between "Privilege"
+and the "People"; the Socialists, that it is between
+the "working class" and the "master class." An
+apologist for dynamite told me once that society
+was divided into the weak and the strong, and
+there are people who draw a line between Philistia
+and Bohemia.</p>
+
+<p>When you rise up and announce that the conflict
+is between this and that, you mean that this
+particular conflict interests you. The issue of
+good-and-bad-men interests this nation to the exclusion
+of almost all others. But experience
+shows, I believe, that it is a fruitless conflict and
+a wasting enthusiasm. Yet some distinction must
+be drawn if we are to act at all in politics. With
+nothing we are for and nothing to oppose, we
+are merely neutral. This cleavage in public affairs
+is the most important choice we are called
+upon to make. In large measure it determines
+the rest of our thinking. Now some issues are
+fertile; some are not. Some lead to spacious
+results; others are blind alleys. With this in
+mind I wish to suggest that the distinction most
+worth emphasizing to-day is between those who
+regard government as a routine to be administered
+and those who regard it as a problem to be
+solved.</p>
+
+<p>The class of routineers is larger than the conservatives.
+The man who will follow precedent,
+but never create one, is merely an obvious example
+of the routineer. You find him desperately
+numerous in the civil service, in the official bureaus.
+To him government is something given
+as unconditionally, as absolutely as ocean or hill.
+He goes on winding the tape that he finds. His
+imagination has rarely extricated itself from under
+the administrative machine to gain any sense of
+what a human, temporary contraption the whole
+affair is. What he thinks is the heavens above
+him is nothing but the roof.</p>
+
+<p>He is the slave of routine. He can boast of
+somewhat more spiritual cousins in the men who
+reverence their ancestors' independence, who
+feel, as it were, that a disreputable great-grandfather
+is necessary to a family's respectability.
+These are the routineers gifted with historical
+sense. They take their forefathers with enormous
+solemnity. But one mistake is rarely
+avoided: they imitate the old-fashioned thing
+their grandfather did, and ignore the originality
+which enabled him to do it.</p>
+
+<p>If tradition were a reverent record of those
+crucial moments when men burst through their
+habits, a love of the past would not be the butt
+on which every sophomoric radical can practice
+his wit. But almost always tradition is nothing
+but a record and a machine-made imitation of
+the habits that our ancestors created. The average
+conservative is a slave to the most incidental
+and trivial part of his forefathers' glory--to the
+archaic formula which happened to express their
+genius or the eighteenth century contrivance by
+which for a time it was served. To reverence
+Washington they wear a powdered wig; they do
+honor to Lincoln by cultivating awkward hands
+and ungainly feet.</p>
+
+<p>It is fascinating to watch this kind of conservative
+in action. From Senator Lodge, for
+example, we do not expect any new perception
+of popular need. We know that probably his
+deepest sincerity is an attempt to reproduce the
+atmosphere of the Senate a hundred years ago.
+The manners of Mr. Lodge have that immobility
+which comes from too much gazing at bad statues
+of dead statesmen.</p>
+
+<p>Yet just because a man is in opposition to
+Senator Lodge there is no guarantee that he has
+freed himself from the routineer's habit of mind.
+A prejudice against some mannerism or a dislike
+of pretensions may merely cloak some other
+kind of routine. Take the "good government"
+attitude. No fresh insight is behind that. It
+does not promise anything; it does not offer to
+contribute new values to human life. The machine
+which exists is accepted in all its essentials:
+the "goo-goo" yearns for a somewhat smoother
+rotation.</p>
+
+<p>Often as not the very effort to make the existing
+machine run more perfectly merely makes
+matters worse. For the tinkering reformer is
+frequently one of the worst of the routineers.
+Even machines are not altogether inflexible, and
+sometimes what the reformer regards as a sad
+deviation from the original plans is a poor
+rickety attempt to adapt the machine to changing
+conditions. Think what would have happened
+had we actually remained stolidly faithful to
+every intention of the Fathers. Think what
+would happen if every statute were enforced. By
+the sheer force of circumstances we have twisted
+constitutions and laws to some approximation of
+our needs. A changing country has managed to
+live in spite of a static government machine. Perhaps
+Bernard Shaw was right when he said that
+"the famous Constitution survives only because
+whenever any corner of it gets into the way of
+the accumulating dollar it is pettishly knocked
+off and thrown away. Every social development,
+however beneficial and inevitable from the public
+point of view, is met, not by an intelligent adaptation
+of the social structure to its novelties but by
+a panic and a cry of Go Back."</p>
+
+<p>I am tempted to go further and put into the
+same class all those radicals who wish simply to
+substitute some other kind of machine for the
+one we have. Though not all of them would
+accept the name, these reformers are simply
+utopia-makers in action. Their perceptions are
+more critical than the ordinary conservatives'.
+They do see that humanity is badly squeezed in
+the existing mould. They have enough imagination
+to conceive a different one. But they have
+an infinite faith in moulds. This routine they
+don't believe in, but they believe in their own:
+if you could put the country under a new "system,"
+then human affairs would run automatically
+for the welfare of all. Some improvement
+there might be, but as almost all men are
+held in an iron devotion to their own creations,
+the routine reformers are simply working for
+another conservatism, and not for any continuing
+liberation.</p>
+
+<p>The type of statesman we must oppose to the
+routineer is one who regards all social organization
+as an instrument. Systems, institutions and
+mechanical contrivances have for him no virtue
+of their own: they are valuable only when they
+serve the purposes of men. He uses them, of
+course, but with a constant sense that men have
+made them, that new ones can be devised, that
+only an effort of the will can keep machinery in
+its place. He has no faith whatever in automatic
+governments. While the routineers see machinery
+and precedents revolving with mankind as puppets,
+he puts the deliberate, conscious, willing individual
+at the center of his philosophy. This
+reversal is pregnant with a new outlook for
+statecraft. I hope to show that it alone can keep
+step with life; it alone is humanly relevant; and
+it alone achieves valuable results.</p>
+
+<p>Call this man a political creator or a political
+inventor. The essential quality of him is that he
+makes that part of existence which has experience
+the master of it. He serves the ideals of human
+feelings, not the tendencies of mechanical things.</p>
+
+<p>The difference between a phonograph and the
+human voice is that the phonograph must sing
+the song which is stamped upon it. Now there
+are days--I suspect the vast majority of them in
+most of our lives--when we grind out the thing
+that is stamped upon us. It may be the governing
+of a city, or teaching school, or running a
+business. We do not get out of bed in the morning
+because we are eager for the day; something
+external--we often call it our duty--throws off
+the bed-clothes, complains that the shaving water
+isn't hot, puts us into the subway and lands us at
+our office in season for punching the time-check.
+We revolve with the business for three or four
+hours, signing letters, answering telephones,
+checking up lists, and perhaps towards twelve
+o'clock the prospect of lunch puts a touch of romance
+upon life. Then because our days are so
+unutterably the same, we turn to the newspapers,
+we go to the magazines and read only the "stuff
+with punch," we seek out a "show" and drive
+serious playwrights into the poorhouse. "You
+can go through contemporary life," writes Wells,
+"fudging and evading, indulging and slacking,
+never really hungry nor frightened nor passionately
+stirred, your highest moment a mere sentimental
+orgasm, and your first real contact with
+primary and elementary necessities the sweat of
+your death-bed."</p>
+
+<p>The world grinds on: we are a fly on the wheel.
+That sense of an impersonal machine going on
+with endless reiteration is an experience that
+imaginative politicians face. Often as not they
+disguise it under heroic phrases and still louder
+affirmation, just as most of us hide our cowardly
+submission to monotony under some word like
+duty, loyalty, conscience. If you have ever been
+an office-holder or been close to officials, you
+must surely have been appalled by the grim way
+in which committee-meetings, verbose reports,
+flamboyant speeches, requests, and delegations
+hold the statesman in a mind-destroying grasp.
+Perhaps this is the reason why it has been necessary
+to retire Theodore Roosevelt from public
+life every now and then in order to give him a
+chance to learn something new. Every statesman
+like every professor should have his sabbatical
+year.</p>
+
+<p>The revolt against the service of our own mechanical
+habits is well known to anyone who has
+followed modern thought. As a sharp example
+one might point to Thomas Davidson, whom William
+James called "individualist &agrave; outrance"....
+"Reprehending (mildly) a certain chapter of my
+own on 'Habit,' he said that it was a fixed rule
+with him to form no regular habits. When he
+found himself in danger of settling into even a
+good one, he made a point of interrupting it."</p>
+
+<p>Such men are the sparkling streams that flow
+through the dusty stretches of a nation. They
+invigorate and emphasize those times in your
+own life when each day is new. Then you
+are alive, then you drive the world before
+you. The business, however difficult, shapes itself
+to your effort; you seem to manage detail with an
+inferior part of yourself, while the real soul of
+you is active, planning, light. "I wanted thought
+like an edge of steel and desire like a flame."
+Eager with sympathy, you and your work are
+reflected from many angles. You have become
+luminous.</p>
+
+<p>Some people are predominantly eager and wilful.
+The world does not huddle and bend them
+to a task. They are not, as we say, creatures
+of environment, but creators of it. Of other
+people's environment they become the most active
+part--the part which sets the fashion. What
+they initiate, others imitate. Theirs is a kind of
+intrinsic prestige. These are the natural leaders
+of men, whether it be as head of the gang or as
+founder of a religion.</p>
+
+<p>It is, I believe, this power of being aggressively
+active towards the world which gives man a miraculous
+assurance that the world is something
+he can make. In creative moments men always
+draw upon "some secret spring of certainty, some
+fundamental well into which no disturbing glimmers
+penetrate." But this is no slack philosophy,
+for the chance is denied by which we can lie back
+upon the perfection of some mechanical contrivance.
+Yet in the light of it government becomes
+alert to a process of continual creation, an
+unceasing invention of forms to meet constantly
+changing needs.</p>
+
+<p>This philosophy is not only difficult to practice:
+it is elusive when you come to state it. For
+our political language was made to express a
+routine conception of government. It comes to
+us from the Eighteenth Century. And no matter
+how much we talk about the infusion of the
+"evolutionary" point of view into all of modern
+thought, when the test is made political practice
+shows itself almost virgin to the idea. Our
+theories assume, and our language is fitted to
+thinking of government as a frame--Massachusetts,
+I believe, actually calls her fundamental
+law the Frame of Government. We picture political
+institutions as mechanically constructed
+contrivances within which the nation's life is contained
+and compelled to approximate some abstract
+idea of justice or liberty. These frames
+have very little elasticity, and we take it as an
+historical commonplace that sooner or later a
+revolution must come to burst the frame apart.
+Then a new one is constructed.</p>
+
+<p>Our own Federal Constitution is a striking example
+of this machine conception of government.
+It is probably the most important instance we
+have of the deliberate application of a mechanical
+philosophy to human affairs. Leaving out all
+question of the Fathers' ideals, looking simply at
+the bias which directed their thinking, is there in
+all the world a more plain-spoken attempt to contrive
+an automatic governor--a machine which
+would preserve its balance without the need of
+taking human nature into account? What other
+explanation is there for the na&iuml;ve faith of the
+Fathers in the "symmetry" of executive, legislature,
+and judiciary; in the fantastic attempts to
+circumvent human folly by balancing it with vetoes
+and checks? No insight into the evident fact
+that power upsets all mechanical foresight and
+gravitates toward the natural leaders seems to
+have illuminated those historic deliberations.
+The Fathers had a rather pale god, they had
+only a speaking acquaintance with humanity, so
+they put their faith in a scaffold, and it has been
+part of our national piety to pretend that they
+succeeded.</p>
+
+<p>They worked with the philosophy of their age.
+Living in the Eighteenth Century, they thought
+in the images of Newton and Montesquieu.
+"The Government of the United States," writes
+Woodrow Wilson, "was constructed upon the
+Whig theory of political dynamics, which was a
+sort of unconscious copy of the Newtonian theory
+of the universe.... As Montesquieu pointed out
+to them (the English Whigs) in his lucid way,
+they had sought to balance executive, legislative
+and judiciary off against one another by a series
+of checks and counterpoises, which Newton might
+readily have recognized as suggestive of the
+mechanism of the heavens." No doubt this automatic
+and balanced theory of government suited
+admirably that distrust of the people which seems
+to have been a dominant feeling among the
+Fathers. For they were the conservatives of
+their day: between '76 and '89 they had gone the
+usual way of opportunist radicals. But had they
+written the Constitution in the fire of their youth,
+they might have made it more democratic,--I
+doubt whether they would have made it less mechanical.
+The rebellious spirit of Tom Paine expressed
+itself in logical formul&aelig; as inflexible to
+the pace of life as did the more contented Hamilton's.
+This is a determinant which burrows beneath
+our ordinary classification of progressive
+and reactionary to the spiritual habits of a
+period.</p>
+
+<p>If you look into the early utopias of Fourier
+and Saint-Simon, or better still into the early
+trade unions, this same faith that a government
+can be made to work mechanically is predominant
+everywhere. All the devices of rotation in
+office, short terms, undelegated authority are simply
+attempts to defeat the half-perceived fact that
+power will not long stay diffused. It is characteristic
+of these primitive democracies that
+they worship Man and distrust men. They cling
+to some arrangement, hoping against experience
+that a government freed from human nature will
+automatically produce human benefits. To-day
+within the Socialist Party there is perhaps the
+greatest surviving example of the desire to offset
+natural leadership by artificial contrivance. It is
+an article of faith among orthodox socialists that
+personalities do not count, and I sincerely believe
+I am not exaggerating the case when I say that
+their ideal of government is like Gordon Craig's
+ideal of the theater--the acting is to be done by
+a row of supermarionettes. There is a myth
+among socialists to which all are expected to subscribe,
+that initiative springs anonymously out of
+the mass of the people,--that there are no
+"leaders," that the conspicuous figures are no
+more influential than the figurehead on the prow
+of a ship.</p>
+
+<p>This is one of the paradoxes of the democratic
+movement--that it loves a crowd and fears
+the individuals who compose it--that the religion
+of humanity should have had no faith in human
+beings. Jealous of all individuals, democracies
+have turned to machines. They have tried to
+blot out human prestige, to minimize the influence
+of personality. That there is historical
+justification for this fear is plain enough. To
+put it briefly, democracy is afraid of the tyrant.
+That explains, but does not justify. Governments
+have to be carried on by men, however much we
+distrust them. Nobody has yet invented a mechanically
+beneficent sovereign.</p>
+
+<p>Democracy has put an unfounded faith in automatic
+contrivances. Because it left personality
+out of its speculation, it rested in the empty faith
+that it had excluded it from reality. But in the
+actual stress of life these frictions do not survive
+ten minutes. Public officials do not become political
+marionettes, though people pretend that they
+are. When theory runs against the grain of living
+forces, the result is a deceptive theory of politics.
+If the real government of the United States
+"had, in fact," as Woodrow Wilson says, "been
+a machine governed by mechanically automatic
+balances, it would have had no history; but it
+was not, and its history has been rich with the
+influence and personalities of the men who have
+conducted it and made it a living reality." Only
+by violating the very spirit of the constitution
+have we been able to preserve the letter of it.
+For behind that balanced plan there grew up
+what Senator Beveridge has called so brilliantly
+the "invisible government," an empire of natural
+groups about natural leaders. Parties are such
+groups: they have had a power out of all proportion
+to the intentions of the Fathers. Behind the
+parties has grown up the "political machine"--falsely
+called a machine, the very opposite of one
+in fact, a natural sovereignty, I believe. The
+really rigid and mechanical thing is the charter
+behind which Tammany works. For Tammany
+is the real government that has defeated a mechanical
+foresight. Tammany is not a freak, a
+strange and monstrous excrescence. Its structure
+and the laws of its life are, I believe, typical of
+all real sovereignties. You can find Tammany
+duplicated wherever there is a social group to be
+governed--in trade unions, in clubs, in boys'
+gangs, in the Four Hundred, in the Socialist
+Party. It is an accretion of power around a
+center of influence, cemented by patronage, graft,
+favors, friendship, loyalties, habits,--a human
+grouping, a natural pyramid.</p>
+
+<p>Only recently have we begun to see that the
+"political ring" is not something confined to public
+life. It was Lincoln Steffens, I believe, who
+first perceived that fact. For a time it was my
+privilege to work under him on an investigation
+of the "Money Power." The leading idea was
+different from customary "muckraking." We
+were looking not for the evils of Big Business,
+but for its anatomy. Mr. Steffens came to the
+subject with a first-hand knowledge of politics.
+He knew the "invisible government" of cities,
+states, and the nation. He knew how the boss
+worked, how he organized his power. When
+Mr. Steffens approached the vast confusion and
+complication of big business, he needed some
+hypothesis to guide him through that maze of
+facts. He made a bold and brilliant guess, an
+hypothesis. To govern a life insurance company,
+Mr. Steffens argued, was just as much "government"
+as to run a city. What if political methods
+existed in the realm of business? The investigation
+was never carried through completely,
+but we did study the methods by which several
+life and fire insurance companies, banks, two or
+three railroads, and several industrials are controlled.
+We found that the anatomy of Big
+Business was strikingly like that of Tammany
+Hall: the same pyramiding of influence, the same
+tendency of power to center on individuals who
+did not necessarily sit in the official seats, the
+same effort of human organization to grow independently
+of legal arrangements. Thus in the
+life insurance companies, and the Hughes investigation
+supports this, the real power was held not
+by the president, not by the voters or policy-holders,
+but by men who were not even directors.
+After a while we took it as a matter of course
+that the head of a company was an administrative
+dummy, with a dependence on unofficial
+power similar to that of Governor Dix on Boss
+Murphy. That seems to be typical of the whole
+economic life of this country. It is controlled by
+groups of men whose influence extends like a web
+to smaller, tributary groups, cutting across all
+official boundaries and designations, making short
+work of all legal formul&aelig;, and exercising sovereignty
+regardless of the little fences we erect to
+keep it in bounds.</p>
+
+<p>A glimpse into the labor world revealed very
+much the same condition. The boss, and the
+bosslet, the heeler--the men who are "it"--all
+are there exercising the real power, the power
+that independently of charters and elections decides
+what shall happen. I don't wish to have
+this regarded as necessarily malign. It seems so
+now because we put our faith in the ideal arrangements
+which it disturbs. But if we could
+come to face it squarely--to see that that is what
+sovereignty is--that if we are to use human
+power for human purposes we must turn to the
+realities of it, then we shall have gone far towards
+leaving behind us the futile hopes of mechanical
+perfection so constantly blasted by
+natural facts.</p>
+
+<p>The invisible government is malign. But the
+evil doesn't come from the fact that it plays horse
+with the Newtonian theory of the constitution.
+What is dangerous about it is that we do not see
+it, cannot use it, and are compelled to submit to
+it. The nature of political power we shall not
+change. If that is the way human societies organize
+sovereignty, the sooner we face that fact
+the better. For the object of democracy is not to
+imitate the rhythm of the stars but to harness
+political power to the nation's need. If corporations
+and governments have indeed gone on a joy
+ride the business of reform is not to set up fences,
+Sherman Acts and injunctions into which they can
+bump, but to take the wheel and to steer.</p>
+
+<p>The corruption of which we hear so much is
+certainly not accounted for when you have called
+it dishonesty. It is too widespread for any such
+glib explanation. When you see how business
+controls politics, it certainly is not very illuminating
+to call the successful business men of a nation
+criminals. Yet I suppose that all of them violate
+the law. May not this constant dodging or hurdling
+of statutes be a sign that there is something
+the matter with the statutes? Is it not possible
+that graft is the cracking and bursting of the receptacles
+in which we have tried to constrain the
+business of this country? It seems possible that
+business has had to control politics because its
+laws were so stupidly obstructive. In the trust
+agitation this is especially plausible. For there
+is every reason to believe that concentration is a
+world-wide tendency, made possible at first by
+mechanical inventions, fostered by the disastrous
+experiences of competition, and accepted by business
+men through contagion and imitation. Certainly
+the trusts increase. Wherever politics is
+rigid and hostile to that tendency, there is irritation
+and struggle, but the agglomeration goes on.
+Hindered by political conditions, the process becomes
+secretive and morbid. The trust is not
+checked, but it is perverted. In 1910 the "American
+Banker" estimated that there were 1,198
+corporations with 8,110 subsidiaries liable to all
+the penalties of the Sherman Act. Now this concentration
+must represent a profound impetus in
+the business world--an impetus which certainly
+cannot be obliterated, even if anyone were foolish
+enough to wish it. I venture to suggest that much
+of what is called "corruption" is the odor of a
+decaying political system done to death by an
+economic growth.</p>
+
+<p>It is our desperate adherence to an old method
+that has produced the confusion of political life.
+Because we have insisted upon looking at government
+as a frame and governing as a routine, because
+in short we have been static in our theories,
+politics has such an unreal relation to actual conditions.
+Feckless--that is what our politics is.
+It is literally eccentric: it has been centered mechanically
+instead of vitally. We have, it seems,
+been seduced by a fictitious analogy: we have
+hoped for machine regularity when we needed
+human initiative and leadership, when life was
+crying that its inventive abilities should be freed.</p>
+
+<p>Roosevelt in his term did much to center government
+truly. For a time natural leadership and
+nominal position coincided, and the administration
+became in a measure a real sovereignty. The
+routine conception dwindled, and the Roosevelt
+appointees went at issues as problems to be
+solved. They may have been mistaken: Roosevelt
+may be uncritical in his judgments. But the
+fact remains that the Roosevelt r&eacute;gime gave a
+new prestige to the Presidency by effecting
+through it the greatest release of political invention
+in a generation. Contrast it with the Taft
+administration, and the quality is set in relief.
+Taft was the perfect routineer trying to run government
+as automatically as possible. His sincerity
+consisted in utter respect for form: he denied
+himself whatever leadership he was capable
+of, and outwardly at least he tried to "balance"
+the government. His greatest passions seem to
+be purely administrative and legal. The people
+did not like it. They said it was dead. They
+were right. They had grown accustomed to a
+humanly liberating atmosphere in which formality
+was an instrument instead of an idol. They had
+seen the Roosevelt influence adding to the resources
+of life--irrigation, and waterways, conservation,
+the Panama Canal, the "country life"
+movement. They knew these things were
+achieved through initiative that burst through formal
+restrictions, and they applauded wildly. It
+was only a taste, but it was a taste, a taste of
+what government might be like.</p>
+
+<p>The opposition was instructive. Apart from
+those who feared Roosevelt for selfish reasons,
+his enemies were men who loved an orderly adherence
+to traditional methods. They shivered in
+the emotional gale; they obstructed and the gale
+became destructive. They felt that, along with
+obviously good things, this sudden national fertility
+might breed a monster--that a leadership
+like Roosevelt's might indeed prove dangerous,
+as giving birth may lead to death.</p>
+
+<p>What the methodically-minded do not see is
+that the sterility of a routine is far more appalling.
+Not everyone may feel that to push out into
+the untried, and take risks for big prizes, is worth
+while. Men will tell you that government has no
+business to undertake an adventure, to make experiments.
+They think that safety lies in repetition,
+that if you do nothing, nothing will be done
+to you. It's a mistake due to poverty of imagination
+and inability to learn from experience. Even
+the timidest soul dare not "stand pat." The indictment
+against mere routine in government is a
+staggering one.</p>
+
+<p>For while statesmen are pottering along doing
+the same thing year in, year out, putting up the
+tariff one year and down the next, passing appropriation
+bills and recodifying laws, the real forces
+in the country do not stand still. Vast changes,
+economic and psychological, take place, and these
+changes demand new guidance. But the routineers
+are always unprepared. It has become one of
+the grim trade jokes of innovators that the one
+thing you can count upon is that the rulers will
+come to think that they are the apex of human development.
+For a queer effect of responsibility on
+men is that it makes them try to be as much like
+machines as possible. Tammany itself becomes
+rigid when it is too successful, and only defeat
+seems to give it new life. Success makes men
+rigid and they tend to exalt stability over all the
+other virtues; tired of the effort of willing they
+become fanatics about conservatism. But conditions
+change whether statesmen wish them to or
+not; society must have new institutions to fit new
+wants, and all that rigid conservatism can do is
+to make the transitions difficult. Violent revolutions
+may be charged up to the unreadiness of
+statesmen. It is because they will not see, or cannot
+see, that feudalism is dead, that chattel slavery
+is antiquated; it is because they have not the
+wisdom and the audacity to anticipate these great
+social changes; it is because they insist upon
+standing pat that we have French Revolutions
+and Civil Wars.</p>
+
+<p>But statesmen who had decided that at last
+men were to be the masters of their own history,
+instead of its victims, would face politics in a
+truly revolutionary manner. It would give a new
+outlook to statesmanship, turning it from the
+mere preservation of order, the administration of
+political machinery and the guarding of ancient
+privilege to the invention of new political forms,
+the prevision of social wants, and the preparation
+for new economic growths.</p>
+
+<p>Such a statesmanship would in the '80's have
+prepared for the trust movement. There would
+have been nothing miraculous in such foresight.
+Standard Oil was dominant by the beginning of
+the '80's, and concentration had begun in sugar,
+steel and other basic industries. Here was an
+economic tendency of revolutionary significance--the
+organization of business in a way that was
+bound to change the outlook of a whole nation.
+It had vast potentialities for good and evil--all it
+wanted was harnessing and directing. But the
+new thing did not fit into the little outlines and
+verbosities which served as a philosophy for our
+political hacks. So they gaped at it and let it run
+wild, called it names, and threw stones at it. And
+by that time the force was too big for them. An
+alert statesmanship would have facilitated the
+process of concentration; would have made provision
+for those who were cast aside; would have
+been an ally of trust building, and by that very
+fact it would have had an internal grip on the
+trust--it would have kept the trust's inner workings
+public; it could have bent the trust to social
+uses.</p>
+
+<p>This is not mere wisdom after the event. In
+the '80's there were hundreds of thousands of
+people in the world who understood that the trust
+was a natural economic growth. Karl Marx had
+proclaimed it some thirty years before, and it
+was a widely circulated idea. Is it asking too
+much of a statesman if we expect him to know
+political theory and to balance it with the facts
+he sees? By the '90's surely, the egregious folly
+of a Sherman Anti-Trust Law should have been
+evident to any man who pretended to political
+leadership. Yet here it is the year 1912 and that
+monument of economic ignorance and superstition
+is still worshiped with the lips by two out of
+the three big national parties.</p>
+
+<p>Another movement--like that of the trust--is
+gathering strength to-day. It is the unification of
+wage-workers. We stand in relation to it as the
+men of the '80's did to the trusts. It is the complement
+of that problem. It also has vast potentialities
+for good and evil. It, too, demands understanding
+and direction. It, too, will not be
+stopped by hard names or injunctions.</p>
+
+<p>What we loosely call "syndicalism" is a tendency
+that no statesman can overlook to-day without
+earning the jeers of his children. This labor
+movement has a destructive and constructive energy
+within it. On its beneficent side it promises
+a new professional interest in work, self-education,
+and the co-operative management of industry.
+But this creative power is constantly choked
+off because the unions are compelled to fight for
+their lives--the more opposition they meet the
+more you are likely to see of sabotage, direct action,
+the gr&egrave;ve perl&eacute;e--the less chance there is
+for the educative forces to show themselves.
+Then, the more violent syndicalism proves itself
+to be, the more hysterically we bait it in the usual
+vicious circle of ignorance.</p>
+
+<p>But who amongst us is optimistic enough to
+hope that the men who sit in the mighty positions
+are going to make a better show of themselves
+than their predecessors did over the trust problem?
+It strains hope a little too much. Those
+men in Washington, most of them lawyers, are
+so educated that they are practically incapable of
+meeting a new condition. All their training plus
+all their natural ossification of mind is hostile to
+invention. You cannot endow even the best machine
+with initiative; the jolliest steam-roller will
+not plant flowers.</p>
+
+<p>The thought-processes in Washington are too
+lumbering for the needs of this nation. Against
+that evil muckraking ought to be directed. Those
+senators and representatives are largely irrelevant;
+they are not concerned with realities. Their
+dishonesties are comparatively insignificant. The
+scorn of the public should be turned upon the
+emptiness of political thought, upon the fact that
+those men seem without even a conception of the
+nation's needs. And while they maunder along
+they stifle the forces of life which are trying to
+break through. It was nothing but the insolence
+of the routineer that forced Gifford Pinchot out
+of the Forest Service. Pinchot in respect to his
+subject was a fine political inventor. But routine
+forced him out--into what?--into the moil and
+toil of fighting for offices, and there he has cut a
+poor figure indeed. You may say that he has had
+to spend his energy trying to find a chance to use
+his power. What a wanton waste of talent is
+that for a civilized nation! Wiley is another case
+of the creative mind harassed by the routineers.
+Judge Lindsey is another--a fine, constructive
+children's judge compelled to be a politician. And
+of our misuse of the Rockefellers and Carnegies--the
+retrospect is appalling. Here was industrial
+genius unquestionably beyond the ordinary.
+What did this nation do with it? It found no
+public use for talent. It left that to operate in
+darkness--then opinion rose in an empty fury,
+made an outlaw of one and a platitudinous philanthropist
+of the other. It could lynch one as a
+moral monster, when as a matter of fact his
+ideals were commonplace; it could proclaim one
+a great benefactor when in truth he was a rather
+dull old gentleman. Abused out of all reason or
+praised irrelevantly--the one thing this nation
+has not been able to do with these men is to use
+their genius. It is this life-sapping quality of our
+politics that should be fought--its wanton waste
+of the initiatives we have--its stupid indifference.</p>
+
+<p>We need a new sense of political values. These
+times require a different order of thinking. We
+cannot expect to meet our problems with a few
+inherited ideas, uncriticised assumptions, a foggy
+vocabulary, and a machine philosophy. Our political
+thinking needs the infusion of contemporary
+insights. The enormous vitality that is
+regenerating other interests can be brought into
+the service of politics. Our primary care must
+be to keep the habits of the mind flexible and
+adapted to the movement of real life. The only
+way to control our destiny is to work with it. In
+politics, at least, we stoop to conquer. There
+is no use, no heroism, in butting against the inevitable,
+yet nothing is entirely inevitable. There
+is always some choice, some opportunity for human
+direction.</p>
+
+<p>It is not easy. It is far easier to treat life as
+if it were dead, men as if they were dolls. It is
+everlastingly difficult to keep the mind flexible and
+alert. The rule of thumb is not here. To follow
+the pace of living requires enormous vigilance
+and sympathy. No one can write conclusively
+about it. Compared with this creative statesmanship,
+the administering of a routine or the battle
+for a platitude is a very simple affair. But genuine
+politics is not an inhuman task. Part of the
+genuineness is its unpretentious humanity. I am
+not creating the figure of an ideal statesman out
+of some inner fancy. That is just the deepest
+error of our political thinking--to talk of politics
+without reference to human beings. The creative
+men appear in public life in spite of the cold
+blanket the politicians throw over them. Really
+statesmanlike things are done, inventions are
+made. But this real achievement comes to us confused,
+mixed with much that is contradictory.
+Political inventors are to-day largely unconscious
+of their purpose, and, so, defenceless against the
+distraction of their routineer enemies.</p>
+
+<p>Lacking a philosophy they are defenceless
+against their own inner tendency to sink into repetition.
+As a witty Frenchman remarked, many
+geniuses become their own disciples. This is true
+when the attention is slack, and effort has lost its
+direction. We have elaborate governmental
+mechanisms--like the tariff, for example, which
+we go on making more "scientific" year in, year
+out--having long since lost sight of their human
+purpose. They may be defeating the very ends
+they were meant to serve. We cling to constitutions
+out of "loyalty." We trudge in the treadmill
+and call it love of our ancient institutions.
+We emulate the mule, that greatest of all
+routineers.</p>
+
+<br><br><br>
+
+
+<h2><a name="ch2">CHAPTER II</a></h2>
+<h3>THE TABOO</h3>
+
+<br>
+<p>Our government has certainly not measured
+up to expectations. Even chronic admirers
+of the "balance" and "symmetry" of the Constitution
+admit either by word or deed that it did
+not foresee the whole history of the American
+people. Poor bewildered statesmen, unused to
+any notion of change, have seen the national life
+grow to a monstrous confusion and sprout monstrous
+evils by the way. Men and women clamored
+for remedies, vowed, shouted and insisted
+that their "official servants" do something--something
+statesmanlike--to abate so much evident
+wrong. But their representatives had very
+little more than a frock coat and a slogan as
+equipment for the task. Trained to interpret a
+constitution instead of life, these statesmen faced
+with historic helplessness the vociferations of ministers,
+muckrakers, labor leaders, women's clubs,
+granges and reformers' leagues. Out of a tumultuous
+medley appeared the common theme of
+public opinion--that the leaders should lead, that
+the governors should govern.</p>
+
+<p>The trusts had appeared, labor was restless,
+vice seemed to be corrupting the vitality of the
+nation. Statesmen had to do something. Their
+training was legal and therefore utterly inadequate,
+but it was all they had. They became
+panicky and reverted to an ancient superstition.
+They forbade the existence of evil by law. They
+made it anathema. They pronounced it damnable.
+They threatened to club it. They issued a legislative
+curse, and called upon the district attorney
+to do the rest. They started out to abolish human
+instincts, check economic tendencies and repress
+social changes by laws prohibiting them.
+They turned to this sanctified ignorance which is
+rampant in almost any nursery, which presides at
+family councils, flourishes among "reformers";
+which from time immemorial has haunted legislatures
+and courts. Under the spell of it men try
+to stop drunkenness by closing the saloons; when
+poolrooms shock them they call a policeman; if
+Haywood becomes annoying, they procure an injunction.
+They meet the evils of dance halls by
+barricading them; they go forth to battle against
+vice by raiding brothels and fining prostitutes.
+For trusts there is a Sherman Act. In spite of
+all experience they cling desperately to these superstitions.</p>
+
+<p>It is the method of the taboo, as na&iuml;ve as barbarism,
+as ancient as human failure.</p>
+
+<p>There is a law against suicide. It is illegal for
+a man to kill himself. What it means in practice,
+of course, is that there is punishment waiting
+for a man who doesn't succeed in killing himself.
+We say to the man who is tired of life that if he
+bungles we propose to make this world still less
+attractive by clapping him into jail. I know an
+economist who has a scheme for keeping down
+the population by refusing very poor people a
+marriage license. He used to teach Sunday
+school and deplore promiscuity. In the annual
+report of the president of a distilling company
+I once saw the statement that business had increased
+in the "dry" states. In a prohibition
+town where I lived you could drink all you
+wanted by belonging to a "club" or winking at
+the druggist. And in another city where Sunday
+closing was strictly enforced, a minister told me
+with painful surprise that the Monday police
+blotter showed less drunks and more wife-beaters.</p>
+
+<p>We pass a law against race-track gambling
+and add to the profits from faro. We raid the
+faro joints, and drive gambling into the home,
+where poker and bridge whist are taught to children
+who follow their parents' example. We
+deprive anarchists of free speech by the heavy
+hand of a police magistrate, and furnish them
+with a practical instead of a theoretical argument
+against government. We answer strikes with
+bayonets, and make treason one of the rights of
+man.</p>
+
+<p>Everybody knows that when you close the
+dance halls you fill the parks. Men who in their
+youth took part in "crusades" against the Tenderloin
+now admit in a crestfallen way that they
+succeeded merely in sprinkling the Tenderloin
+through the whole city. Over twenty years ago
+we formulated a sweeping taboo against trusts.
+Those same twenty years mark the centralization
+of industry.</p>
+
+<p>The routineer in a panic turns to the taboo.
+Whatever does not fit into his rigid little scheme
+of things must have its head chopped off. Now
+human nature and the changing social forces it
+generates are the very material which fit least
+well into most little schemes of things. A man
+cannot sleep in his cradle: whatever is useful must
+in the nature of life become useless. We employ
+our instruments and abandon them. But nothing
+so simply true as that prevails in politics. When
+a government routine conflicts with the nation's
+purposes--the statesman actually makes a virtue
+of his loyalty to the routine. His practice is to
+ignore human character and pay no attention to
+social forces. The shallow presumption is that
+undomesticated impulses can be obliterated; that
+world-wide economic inventions can be stamped
+out by jailing millionaires--and acting in the
+spirit of Mr. Chesterton's man Fipps "who went
+mad and ran about the country with an axe, hacking
+branches off the trees whenever there were not
+the same number on both sides." The routineer
+is, of course, the first to decry every radical proposal
+as "against human nature." But the stand-pat
+mind has forfeited all right to speak for human
+nature. It has devoted the centuries to torturing
+men's instincts, stamping on them, passing
+laws against them, lifting its eyebrows at the
+thought of them--doing everything but trying to
+understand them. The same people who with
+daily insistence say that innovators ignore facts
+are in the absurd predicament of trying to still
+human wants with petty taboos. Social systems
+like ours, which do not even feed and house men
+and women, which deny pleasure, cramp play,
+ban adventure, propose celibacy and grind out
+monotony, are a clear confession of sterility in
+statesmanship. And politics, however pretentiously
+rhetorical about ideals, is irrelevant if the
+only method it knows is to ostracize the desires
+it cannot manage.</p>
+
+<p>Suppose that statesmen transferred their reverence
+from the precedents and mistakes of their
+ancestors to the human material which they have
+set out to govern. Suppose they looked mankind
+in the face and asked themselves what was the
+result of answering evil with a prohibition. Such
+an exercise would, I fear, involve a considerable
+strain on what reformers call their moral sensibilities.
+For human nature is a rather shocking
+affair if you come to it with ordinary romantic
+optimism. Certainly the human nature that figures
+in most political thinking is a wraith that
+never was--not even in the souls of politicians.
+"Idealism" creates an abstraction and then shudders
+at a reality which does not answer to it. Now
+statesmen who have set out to deal with actual
+life must deal with actual people. They cannot
+afford an inclusive pessimism about mankind. Let
+them have the consistency and good sense to cease
+bothering about men if men's desires seem intrinsically
+evil. Moral judgment about the ultimate
+quality of character is dangerous to a politician.
+He is too constantly tempted to call a
+policeman when he disapproves.</p>
+
+<p>We must study our failures. Gambling and
+drink, for example, produce much misery. But
+what reformers have to learn is that men don't
+gamble just for the sake of violating the law.
+They do so because something within them is satisfied
+by betting or drinking. To erect a ban
+doesn't stop the want. It merely prevents its satisfaction.
+And since this desire for stimulants or
+taking a chance at a prize is older and far more
+deeply rooted in the nature of men than love of
+the Prohibition Party or reverence for laws made
+at Albany, people will contrive to drink and gamble
+in spite of the acts of a legislature.</p>
+
+<p>A man may take liquor for a variety of reasons:
+he may be thirsty; or depressed; or unusually
+happy; he may want the companionship of
+a saloon, or he may hope to forget a scolding
+wife. Perhaps he needs a "bracer" in a weary
+hunt for a job. Perhaps he has a terrible craving
+for alcohol. He does not take a drink so
+that he may become an habitual drunkard, or be
+locked up in jail, or get into a brawl, or lose his
+job, or go insane. These are what he might call
+the unfortunate by-products of his desire. If
+once he could find something which would do for
+him what liquor does, without hurting him as
+liquor does, there would be no problem of drink.
+Bernard Shaw says he has found that substitute
+in going to church when there's no service.
+Goethe wrote "The Sorrows of Werther" in order
+to get rid of his own. Many an unhappy
+lover has found peace by expressing his misery
+in sonnet form. The problem is to find something
+for the common man who is not interested
+in contemporary churches and who can't write
+sonnets.</p>
+
+<p>When the socialists in Milwaukee began to experiment
+with municipal dances they were greeted
+with indignant protests from the "anti-vice" element
+and with amused contempt by the newspaper
+paragraphers. The dances were discontinued,
+and so the belief in their failure is complete.
+I think, though, that Mayor Seidel's defense
+would by itself make this experiment memorable.
+He admitted freely the worst that can
+be said against the ordinary dance hall. So far
+he was with the petty reformers. Then he
+pointed out with considerable vehemence that
+dance halls were an urgent social necessity. At
+that point he had transcended the mind of the
+petty reformer completely. "We propose," said
+Seidel, "to go into competition with the devil."</p>
+
+<p>Nothing deeper has come from an American
+mayor in a long, long time. It is the point that
+Jane Addams makes in the opening pages of that
+wisely sweet book, "The Spirit of Youth and the
+City Streets." She calls attention to the fact
+that the modern state has failed to provide for
+pleasure. "This stupid experiment," she writes,
+"of organizing work and failing to organize play
+has, of course, brought about a fine revenge. The
+love of pleasure will not be denied, and when it
+has turned into all sorts of malignant and vicious
+appetites, then we, the middle-aged, grow quite
+distracted and resort to all sorts of restrictive
+measures."</p>
+
+<p>For human nature seems to have wants that
+must be filled. If nobody else supplies them, the
+devil will. The demand for pleasure, adventure,
+romance has been left to the devil's catering for
+so long a time that most people think he inspires
+the demand. He doesn't. Our neglect is the
+devil's opportunity. What we should use, we let
+him abuse, and the corruption of the best things,
+as Hume remarked, produces the worst. Pleasure
+in our cities has become tied to lobster palaces,
+adventure to exalted murderers, romance to
+silly, mooning novels. Like the flower girl in
+Galsworthy's play, we have made a very considerable
+confusion of the life of joy and the joy of
+life. The first impulse is to abolish all lobster
+palaces, melodramas, yellow newspapers, and
+sentimentally erotic novels. Why not abolish all
+the devil's works? the reformer wonders. The
+answer is in history. It can't be done that way.
+It is impossible to abolish either with a law or
+an axe the desires of men. It is dangerous, explosively
+dangerous, to thwart them for any
+length of time. The Puritans tried to choke the
+craving for pleasure in early New England.
+They had no theaters, no dances, no festivals.
+They burned witches instead.</p>
+
+<p>We rail a good deal against Tammany Hall.
+Reform tickets make periodic sallies against it,
+crying economy, efficiency, and a business administration.
+And we all pretend to be enormously
+surprised when the "ignorant foreign vote" prefers
+a corrupt political ring to a party of well-dressed,
+grammatical, and high-minded gentlemen.
+Some of us are even rather downcast about
+democracy because the Bowery doesn't take to
+heart the admonitions of the Evening Post.</p>
+
+<p>We forget completely the important wants
+supplied by Tammany Hall. We forget that this
+is a lonely country for an immigrant and that the
+Statue of Liberty doesn't shed her light with too
+much warmth. Possessing nothing but a statistical,
+inhuman conception of government, the average
+municipal reformer looks down contemptuously
+upon a man like Tim Sullivan with his
+clambakes and his dances; his warm and friendly
+saloons, his handshaking and funeral-going and
+baby-christening; his readiness to get coal for the
+family, and a job for the husband. But a Tim
+Sullivan is closer to the heart of statesmanship
+than five City Clubs full of people who want low
+taxes and orderly bookkeeping. He does things
+which have to be done. He humanizes a strange
+country; he is a friend at court; he represents the
+legitimate kindliness of government, standing between
+the poor and the impersonal, uninviting
+majesty of the law. Let no man wonder that
+Lorimer's people do not prefer an efficiency expert,
+that a Tim Sullivan has power, or that men
+are loyal to Hinky Dink. The cry raised against
+these men by the average reformer is a piece of
+cold, unreal, preposterous idealism compared to
+the solid warm facts of kindliness, clothes, food
+and fun.</p>
+
+<p>You cannot beat the bosses with the reformer's
+taboo. You will not get far on the Bowery with
+the cost unit system and low taxes. And I don't
+blame the Bowery. You can beat Tammany Hall
+permanently in one way--by making the government
+of a city as human, as kindly, as jolly as
+Tammany Hall. I am aware of the contract-grafts,
+the franchise-steals, the dirty streets, the
+bribing and the blackmail, the vice-and-crime partnerships,
+the Big Business alliances of Tammany
+Hall. And yet it seems to me that Tammany has
+a better perception of human need, and comes
+nearer to being what a government should be,
+than any scheme yet proposed by a group of
+"uptown good government" enthusiasts. Tammany
+is not a satanic instrument of deception,
+cleverly devised to thwart "the will of the people."
+It is a crude and largely unconscious answer
+to certain immediate needs, and without
+those needs its power would crumble. That is
+why I ventured in the preceding chapter to describe
+it as a natural sovereignty which had
+grown up behind a mechanical form of government.
+It is a poor weed compared to what government
+might be. But it is a real government
+that has power and serves a want, and not a
+frame imposed upon men from on top.</p>
+
+<p>The taboo--the merely negative law--is the
+emptiest of all the impositions from on top. In
+its long record of failure, in the comparative success
+of Tammany, those who are aiming at social
+changes can see a profound lesson; the impulses,
+cravings and wants of men must be employed.
+You can employ them well or ill, but
+you must employ them. A group of reformers
+lounging at a club cannot, dare not, decide to
+close up another man's club because it is called
+a saloon. Unless the reformer can invent something
+which substitutes attractive virtues for attractive
+vices, he will fail. He will fail because
+human nature abhors the vacuum created by the
+taboo.</p>
+
+<p>An incident in the international peace propaganda
+illuminates this point. Not long ago a
+meeting in Carnegie Hall, New York, to forward
+peace among nations broke up in great disorder.
+Thousands of people who hate the waste
+and futility of war as much as any of the orators
+of that evening were filled with an unholy glee.
+They chuckled with delight at the idea of a riot
+in a peace meeting. Though it would have
+seemed perverse to the ordinary pacificist, this
+sentiment sprang from a respectable source. It
+had the same ground as the instinctive feeling
+of nine men in ten that Roosevelt has more right
+to talk about peace than William Howard Taft.
+James made it articulate in his essay on "The
+Moral Equivalent of War." James was a great
+advocate of peace, but he understood Theodore
+Roosevelt and he spoke for the military man
+when he wrote of war that: "Its 'horrors' are a
+cheap price to pay for rescue from the only alternative
+supposed, of a world of clerks and teachers,
+of co-education and zo-ophily, of 'consumers'
+leagues' and 'associated charities,' of industrialism
+unlimited, and feminism unabashed. No
+scorn, no hardness, no valor any more! Fie upon
+such a cattleyard of a planet!"</p>
+
+<p>And he added: "So far as the central essence
+of this feeling goes, no healthy minded person, it
+seems to me, can help to some degree partaking
+of it. Militarism is the great preserver of our
+ideals of hardihood, and human life with no use
+for hardihood would be contemptible. Without
+risks or prizes for the darer, history would be
+insipid indeed; and there is a type of military
+character which everyone feels that the race
+should never cease to breed, for everyone is sensitive
+to its superiority."</p>
+
+<p>So William James proposed not the abolition
+of war, but a moral equivalent for it. He
+dreamed of "a conscription of the whole youthful
+population to form for a certain number of years
+a part of the army enlisted against <i>Nature</i>....
+The military ideals of hardihood and discipline
+would be wrought into the growing fibre of the
+people; no one would remain blind, as the luxurious
+classes now are blind, to man's relations to
+the globe he lives on, and to the permanently
+sour and hard foundations of his higher life."
+Now we are not concerned here over the question
+of this particular proposal. The telling point in
+my opinion is this: that when a wise man, a student
+of human nature, and a reformer met in the
+same person, the taboo was abandoned. James
+has given us a lasting phrase when he speaks of
+the "moral equivalent" of evil. We can use it,
+I believe, as a guide post to statesmanship.
+Rightly understood, the idea behind the words
+contains all that is valuable in conservatism, and,
+for the first time, gives a reputable meaning to
+that tortured epithet "constructive."</p>
+
+<p>"The military feelings," says James, "are too
+deeply grounded to abdicate their place among
+our ideals until better substitutes are offered ...
+such a conscription, with the state of public opinion
+that would have required it, and the many
+moral fruits it would bear, would preserve in
+the midst of a pacific civilization the manly virtues
+which the military party is so afraid of seeing
+disappear in peace.... So far, war has
+been the only force that can discipline a whole
+community, and until an equivalent discipline is
+organized I believe that war must have its way.
+But I have no serious doubt that the ordinary
+prides and shames of social man, once developed
+to a certain intensity, are capable of organizing
+such a moral equivalent as I have sketched, or
+some other just as effective for preserving manliness
+of type. It is but a question of time, of
+skilful propagandism, and of opinion-making
+men seizing historic opportunities. The martial
+type of character can be bred without war."</p>
+
+<p>To find for evil its moral equivalent is to be
+conservative about values and radical about
+forms, to turn to the establishment of positively
+good things instead of trying simply to check bad
+ones, to emphasize the additions to life, instead
+of the restrictions upon it, to substitute, if you
+like, the love of heaven for the fear of hell. Such
+a program means the dignified utilization of the
+whole nature of man. It will recognize as the
+first test of all political systems and moral codes
+whether or not they are "against human nature."
+It will insist that they be cut to fit the whole man,
+not merely a part of him. For there are utopian
+proposals made every day which cover about as
+much of a human being as a beautiful hat does.</p>
+
+<p>Instead of tabooing our impulses, we must redirect
+them. Instead of trying to crush badness
+we must turn the power behind it to good account.
+The assumption is that every lust is capable
+of some civilized expression.</p>
+
+<p>We say, in effect, that evil is a way by which
+desire expresses itself. The older moralists, the
+taboo philosophers believed that the desires themselves
+were inherently evil. To us they are the energies
+of the soul, neither good nor bad in themselves.
+Like dynamite, they are capable of all
+sorts of uses, and it is the business of civilization,
+through the family and the school, religion, art,
+science, and all institutions, to transmute these
+energies into fine values. Behind evil there is
+power, and it is folly,--wasting and disappointing
+folly,--to ignore this power because it has
+found an evil issue. All that is dynamic in human
+character is in these rooted lusts. The great
+error of the taboo has been just this: that it believed
+each desire had only one expression, that
+if that expression was evil the desire itself was
+evil. We know a little better to-day. We know
+that it is possible to harness desire to many interests,
+that evil is one form of a desire, and not
+the nature of it.</p>
+
+<p>This supplies us with a standard for judging
+reforms, and so makes clear what "constructive"
+action really is. When it was discovered recently
+that the boys' gang was not an unmitigated nuisance
+to be chased by a policeman, but a force
+that could be made valuable to civilization
+through the Boy Scouts, a really constructive reform
+was given to the world. The effervescence
+of boys on the street, wasted and perverted
+through neglect or persecution, was drained and
+applied to fine uses. When Percy MacKaye
+pleads for pageants in which the people themselves
+participate, he offers an opportunity for expressing
+some of the lusts of the city in the form
+of an art. The Freudian school of psychologists
+calls this "sublimation." They have brought forward
+a wealth of material which gives us every
+reason to believe that the theory of "moral
+equivalents" is soundly based, that much the same
+energies produce crime and civilization, art, vice,
+insanity, love, lust, and religion. In each individual
+the original differences are small. Training
+and opportunity decide in the main how men's
+lust shall emerge. Left to themselves, or ignorantly
+tabooed, they break forth in some barbaric
+or morbid form. Only by supplying our passions
+with civilized interests can we escape their destructive
+force.</p>
+
+<p>I have put it negatively, as a counsel of prudence.
+But he who has the courage of existence
+will put it triumphantly, crying "yea" as Nietzsche
+did, and recognizing that all the passions of
+men are the motive powers of a fine life.</p>
+
+<p>For the roads that lead to heaven and hell are
+one until they part.</p>
+
+
+<br><br><br>
+
+<h2><a name="ch3">CHAPTER III</a></h2>
+
+<h3>THE CHANGING FOCUS</h3>
+<br>
+
+<p>The taboo, however useless, is at least concrete.
+Although it achieves little besides mischief,
+it has all the appearance of practical action,
+and consequently enlists the enthusiasm of those
+people whom Wells describes as rushing about the
+country shouting: "For Gawd's sake let's <i>do</i>
+something <i>now</i>." There are weight and solidity
+in a policeman's club, while a "moral equivalent"
+happens to be pale like the stuff of which dreams
+are made. To the politician whose daily life consists
+in dodging the thousand and one conflicting
+prejudices of his constituents, in bickering with
+committees, intriguing and playing for the vote;
+to the business man harassed on four sides by the
+trust, the union, the law, and public opinion,--distrustful
+of any wide scheme because the stupidity
+of his shipping clerk is the most vivid item
+in his mind, all this discussion about politics and
+the inner life will sound like so much fine-spun
+nonsense.</p>
+
+<p>I, for one, am not disposed to blame the politicians
+and the business men. They govern the
+nation, it is true, but they do it in a rather absentminded
+fashion. Those revolutionists who
+see the misery of the country as a deliberate and
+fiendish plot overestimate the bad will, the intelligence
+and the singleness of purpose in the
+ruling classes. Business and political leaders
+don't mean badly; the trouble with them is that
+most of the time they don't mean anything. They
+picture themselves as very "practical," which in
+practice amounts to saying that nothing makes
+them feel so spiritually homeless as the discussion
+of values and an invitation to examine first principles.
+Ideas, most of the time, cause them genuine
+distress, and are as disconcerting as an idle
+office boy, or a squeaky telephone.</p>
+
+<p>I do not underestimate the troubles of the man
+of affairs. I have lived with politicians,--with
+socialist politicians whose good-will was abundant
+and intentions constructive. The petty vexations
+pile up into mountains; the distracting details
+scatter the attention and break up thinking, while
+the mere problem of exercising power crowds out
+speculation about what to do with it. Personal
+jealousies interrupt co-ordinated effort; committee
+sessions wear out nerves by their aimless drifting;
+constant speech-making turns a man back
+upon a convenient little store of platitudes--misunderstanding
+and distortion dry up the imagination,
+make thought timid and expression flat, the
+atmosphere of publicity requires a mask which
+soon becomes the reality. Politicians tend to live
+"in character," and many a public figure has come
+to imitate the journalism which describes him.
+You cannot blame politicians if their perceptions
+are few and their thinking crude.</p>
+
+<p>Football strategy does not originate in a scrimmage:
+it is useless to expect solutions in a political
+campaign. Woodrow Wilson brought to
+public life an exceedingly flexible mind,--many of
+us when he first emerged rejoiced at the clean
+and athletic quality of his thinking. But even he
+under the stress of a campaign slackened into
+commonplace reiteration, accepting a futile and
+intellectually dishonest platform, closing his eyes
+to facts, misrepresenting his opponents, abandoning,
+in short, the very qualities which distinguished
+him. It is understandable. When a National
+Committee puts a megaphone to a man's
+mouth and tells him to yell, it is difficult for him
+to hear anything.</p>
+
+<p>If a nation's destiny were really bound up with
+the politics reported in newspapers, the impasse
+would be discouraging. If the important sovereignty
+of a country were in what is called its
+parliamentary life, then the day of Plato's philosopher-kings
+would be far off indeed. Certainly
+nobody expects our politicians to become philosophers.
+When they do they hide the fact. And
+when philosophers try to be politicians they generally
+cease to be philosophers. But the truth is
+that we overestimate enormously the importance
+of nominations, campaigns, and office-holding. If
+we are discouraged it is because we tend to identify
+statecraft with that official government which
+is merely one of its instruments. Vastly over-advertised,
+we have mistaken an inflated fragment
+for the real political life of the country.</p>
+
+<p>For if you think of men and their welfare, government
+appears at once as nothing but an agent
+among many others. The task of civilizing our
+impulses by creating fine opportunities for their
+expression cannot be accomplished through the
+City Hall alone. All the influences of social life
+are needed. The eggs do not lie in one basket.
+Thus the issues in the trade unions may be far
+more directly important to statecraft than the
+destiny of the Republican Party. The power that
+workingmen generate when they unite--the demands
+they will make and the tactics they will
+pursue--how they are educating themselves and
+the nation--these are genuine issues which bear
+upon the future. So with the policies of business
+men. Whether financiers are to be sullen and
+stupid like Archbold, defiant like Morgan, or
+well-intentioned like Perkins is a question that
+enters deeply into the industrial issues. The
+whole business problem takes on a new complexion
+if the representatives of capital are to be
+men with the temper of Louis Brandeis or William
+C. Redfield. For when business careers are
+made professional, new motives enter into the
+situation; it will make a world of difference if
+the leadership of industry is in the hands of men
+interested in production as a creative art instead
+of as a brute exploitation. The economic conflicts
+are at once raised to a plane of research,
+experiment and honest deliberation. For on the
+level of hate and mean-seeking no solution is
+possible. That subtle fact,--the change of business
+motives, the demonstration that industry can
+be conducted as medicine is,--may civilize the
+whole class conflict.</p>
+
+<p>Obviously statecraft is concerned with such a
+change, extra-political though it is. And wherever
+the politician through his prestige or the government
+through its universities can stimulate a
+revolution in business motives, it should do so.
+That is genuinely constructive work, and will do
+more to a humane solution of the class struggle
+than all the jails and state constabularies that ever
+betrayed the barbarism of the Twentieth Century.
+It is no wonder that business is such a sordid
+affair. We have done our best to exclude from
+it every passionate interest that is capable of
+lighting up activity with eagerness and joy. "Unbusinesslike"
+we have called the devotion of
+craftsmen and scientists. We have actually pretended
+that the work of extracting a living from
+nature could be done most successfully by short-sighted
+money-makers encouraged by their money-spending
+wives. We are learning better to-day.
+We are beginning to know that this nation for all
+its boasts has not touched the real possibilities of
+business success, that nature and good luck have
+done most of our work, that our achievements
+come in spite of our ignorance. And so no man
+can gauge the civilizing possibilities of a new set
+of motives in business. That it will add to the
+dignity and value of millions of careers is only
+one of its blessings. Given a nation of men
+trained to think scientifically about their work and
+feel about it as craftsmen, and you have a people
+released from a stupid fixation upon the silly little
+ideals of accumulating dollars and filling their
+neighbor's eye. We preach against commercialism
+but without great result. And the reason for
+our failure is: that we merely say "you ought not"
+instead of offering a new interest. Instead of
+telling business men not to be greedy, we should
+tell them to be industrial statesmen, applied scientists,
+and members of a craft. Politics can aid
+that revolution in a hundred Ways: by advocating
+it, by furnishing schools that teach, laboratories
+that demonstrate, by putting business on the same
+plane of interest as the Health Service.</p>
+
+<p>The indictment against politics to-day is not its
+corruption, but its lack of insight. I believe it is
+a fact which experience will sustain that men steal
+because they haven't anything better to do. You
+don't have to preach honesty to men with a creative
+purpose. Let a human being throw the energies
+of his soul into the making of something,
+and the instinct of workmanship will take care of
+his honesty. The writers who have nothing to say
+are the ones that you can buy: the others have too
+high a price. A genuine craftsman will not adulterate
+his product: the reason isn't because duty
+says he shouldn't, but because passion says he
+couldn't. I suggested in an earlier chapter that
+the issue of honesty and dishonesty was a futile
+one, and I placed faith in the creative men. They
+hate shams and the watering of goods on a more
+trustworthy basis than the mere routine moralist.
+To them dishonesty is a contradiction of their
+own lusts, and they ask no credit, need none, for
+being true. Creation is an emotional ascent,
+which makes the standard vices trivial, and turns
+all that is valuable in virtue to the service of
+desire.</p>
+
+<p>When politics revolves mechanically it ceases to
+use the real energies of a nation. Government is
+then at once irrelevant and mischievous--a mere
+obstructive nuisance. Not long ago a prominent
+senator remarked that he didn't know much about
+the country, because he had spent the last few
+months in Washington. It was a profound utterance
+as anyone can testify who reads, let us say,
+the Congressional Record. For that document,
+though replete with language, is singularly unacquainted
+with the forces that agitate the nation.
+Politics, as the contributors to the Congressional
+Record seem to understand it, is a very limited selection
+of well-worn debates on a few arbitrarily
+chosen "problems." Those questions have developed
+a technique and an interest in them for
+their own sake. They are handled with a dull
+solemnity quite out of proportion to their real interest.
+Labor receives only a perfunctory and
+largely disingenuous attention; even commerce is
+handled in a way that expresses neither its direction
+nor its public use. Congress has been ready
+enough to grant favors to corporations, but where
+in its wrangling from the Sherman Act to the
+Commerce Court has it shown any sympathetic
+understanding of the constructive purposes in the
+trust movement? It has either presented the
+business man with money or harassed him with
+bungling enthusiasm in the pretended interests of
+the consumer. The one thing Congress has not
+done is to use the talents of business men for the
+nation's advantage.</p>
+
+<p>If "politics" has been indifferent to forces like
+the union and the trust, it is no exaggeration to
+say that it has displayed a modest ignorance of
+women's problems, of educational conflicts and
+racial aspirations; of the control of newspapers
+and magazines, the book publishing world, socialist
+conventions and unofficial political groups like
+the single-taxers.</p>
+
+<p>Such genuine powers do not absorb our political
+interest because we are fooled by the regalia
+of office. But statesmanship, if it is to be relevant,
+would obtain a new perspective on these
+dynamic currents, would find out the wants they
+express and the energies they contain, would shape
+and direct and guide them. For unions and
+trusts, sects, clubs and voluntary associations
+stand for actual needs. The size of their following,
+the intensity of their demands are a fair index
+of what the statesman must think about. No
+lawyer created a trust though he drew up its
+charter; no logician made the labor movement or
+the feminist agitation. If you ask what for political
+purposes a nation is, a practical answer
+would be: it is its "movements." They are the
+social <i>life</i>. So far as the future is man-made it
+is made of them. They show their real vitality
+by a relentless growth in spite of all the little
+fences and obstacles that foolish politicians devise.</p>
+
+<p>There is, of course, much that is dead within
+the movements. Each one carries along a quantity
+of inert and outworn ideas,--not infrequently
+there is an internally contradictory current. Thus
+the very workingmen who agitate for a better
+diffusion of wealth display a marked hostility to
+improvements in the production of it. The feminists
+too have their atavisms: not a few who object
+to the patriarchal family seem inclined to
+cure it by going back still more--to the matriarchal.
+Constructive business has no end of reactionary
+moments----the most striking, perhaps,
+is when it buys up patents in order to suppress
+them. Yet these inversions, though discouraging,
+are not essential in the life of movements. They
+need to be expurgated by an unceasing criticism;
+yet in bulk the forces I have mentioned, and many
+others less important, carry with them the creative
+powers of our times.</p>
+
+<p>It is not surprising that so many political inventions
+have been made within these movements,
+fostered by them, and brought to a general
+public notice through their efforts. When
+some constructive proposal is being agitated before
+a legislative committee, it is customary to
+unite the "movements" in support of it. Trade
+unions and women's clubs have joined hands in
+many an agitation. There are proposals to-day,
+like the minimum wage, which seem sure of support
+from consumers' leagues, women's federations,
+trade unions and those far-sighted business
+men who may be called "State Socialists."</p>
+
+<p>In fact, unless a political invention is woven
+into a social movement it has no importance.
+Only when that is done is it imbued with life.
+But how among countless suggestions is a "cause"
+to know the difference between a true invention
+and a pipe-dream? There is, of course, no infallible
+touchstone by which we can tell offhand.
+No one need hope for an easy certainty either
+here or anywhere else in human affairs. No one
+is absolved from experiment and constant revision.
+Yet there are some hypotheses that
+prima facie deserve more attention than others.</p>
+
+<p>Those are the suggestions which come out of a
+recognized human need. If a man proposed that
+the judges of the Supreme Court be reduced from
+nine to seven because the number seven has mystical
+power, we could ignore him. But if he suggested
+that the number be reduced because seven
+men can deliberate more effectively than nine he
+ought to be given a hearing. Or let us suppose
+that the argument is about granting votes to
+women. The suffragist who bases a claim on the
+so-called "logic of democracy" is making the
+poorest possible showing for a good cause. I
+have heard people maintain that: "it makes no
+difference whether women want the ballot, or are
+fit for it, or can do any good with it,--this country
+is a democracy. Democracy means government
+by the votes of the people. Women are
+people. Therefore women should vote." That
+in a very simple form is the mechanical conception
+of government. For notice how it ignores
+human wants and human powers--how it subordinates
+people to a rigid formula. I use this
+crude example because it shows that even the most
+genuine and deeply grounded demands are as yet
+unable to free themselves entirely from a superficial
+manner of thinking. We are only partially
+emancipated from the mechanical and merely logical
+tradition of the Eighteenth Century. No end
+of illustrations could be adduced. In the Socialist
+party it has been the custom to denounce the
+"short ballot." Why? Because it reduces the
+number of elective offices. This is regarded as
+undemocratic for the reason that democracy has
+come to mean a series of elections. According to
+a logic, the more elections the more democratic.
+But experience has shown that a seven-foot ballot
+with a regiment of names is so bewildering that a
+real choice is impossible. So it is proposed to
+cut down the number of elective offices, focus the
+attention on a few alternatives, and turn voting
+into a fairly intelligent performance. Here is an
+attempt to fit political devices to the actual powers
+of the voter. The old, crude form of ballot
+forgot that finite beings had to operate it. But
+the "democrats" adhere to the multitude of
+choices because "logic" requires them to.</p>
+
+<p>This incident of the "short ballot" illustrates
+the cleavage between invention and routine. The
+socialists oppose it not because their intentions are
+bad but because on this issue their thinking is mechanical.
+Instead of applying the test of human
+need, they apply a verbal and logical consistency.
+The "short ballot" in itself is a slight affair, but
+the insight behind it seems to me capable of revolutionary
+development. It is one symptom of the
+effort to found institutions on human nature.
+There are many others. We might point to the
+first experiments aimed at remedying the helter-skelter
+of careers by vocational guidance. Carried
+through successfully, this invention of Prof.
+Parsons' is one whose significance in happiness can
+hardly be exaggerated. When you think of the
+misfits among your acquaintances--the lawyers
+who should be mechanics, the doctors who should
+be business men, the teachers who should have
+been clerks, and the executives who should be doing
+research in a laboratory--when you think of
+the talent that would be released by proper use,
+the imagination takes wing at the possibilities.
+What could we not make of the world if we employed
+its genius!</p>
+
+<p>Whoever is working to express special energies
+is part of a constructive revolution. Whoever is
+removing the stunting environments of our occupations
+is doing the fundamentals of reform.
+The studies of Miss Goldmark of industrial fatigue,
+recuperative power and maximum productivity
+are contributions toward that distant and
+desirable period when labor shall be a free and
+joyous activity. Every suggestion which turns
+work from a drudgery to a craft is worth our
+deepest interest. For until then the labor problem
+will never be solved. The socialist demand
+for a better distribution of wealth is of great consequence,
+but without a change in the very nature
+of labor society will not have achieved the happiness
+it expects. That is why imaginative socialists
+have shown so great an interest in "syndicalism."
+There at least in some of its forms, we
+can catch sight of a desire to make all labor a
+self-governing craft.</p>
+
+<p>The handling of crime has been touched by the
+modern impetus. The ancient, abstract and
+wholesale "justice" is breaking up into detailed
+and carefully adapted treatment of individual offenders.
+What this means for the child has become
+common knowledge in late years. Criminology
+(to use an awkward word) is finding a
+human center. So is education. Everyone knows
+how child study is revolutionizing the school room
+and the curriculum. Why, it seems that Mme.
+Montessori has had the audacity to sacrifice the
+sacred bench to the interests of the pupil! The
+traditional school seems to be vanishing--that
+place in which an ill-assorted band of youngsters
+was for a certain number of hours each day placed
+in the vicinity of a text-book and a maiden lady.</p>
+
+<p>I mention these experiments at random. It is
+not the specific reforms that I wish to emphasize
+but the great possibilities they foreshadow.
+Whether or not we adopt certain special bills,
+high tariff or low tariff, one banking system or
+another, this trust control or that, is a slight gain
+compared to a change of attitude toward all political
+problems. The reformer bound up in his
+special propaganda will, of course, object that "to
+get something done is worth more than any
+amount of talk about new ways of looking at political
+problems." What matters the method, he
+will cry, provided the reform be good? Well, the
+method matters more than any particular reform.
+A man who couldn't think straight might get the
+right answer to one problem, but how much faith
+would you have in his capacity to solve the next
+one? If you wanted to educate a child, would
+you teach him to read one play of Shakespeare,
+or would you teach him to <i>read</i>? If the world
+were going to remain frigidly set after next year,
+we might well thank our stars if we blundered
+into a few decent solutions right away. But as
+there is no prospect of a time when our life will
+be immutably fixed, as we shall, therefore, have
+to go on inventing, it is fair to say that what the
+world is aching for is not a special reform embodied
+in a particular statute, but a way of going
+at all problems. The lasting value of Darwin,
+for example, is not in any concrete conclusion he
+reached. His importance to the world lies in
+the new twist he gave to science. He lent it fruitful
+direction, a different impetus, and the results
+are beyond his imagining.</p>
+
+<p>In that spiritual autobiography of a searching
+mind, "The New Machiavelli," Wells describes
+his progress from a reformer of concrete
+abuses to a revolutionist in method. "You see,"
+he says, "I began in my teens by wanting to plan
+and build cities and harbors for mankind; I ended
+in the middle thirties by desiring only to serve and
+increase a general process of thought, a process
+fearless, critical, real-spirited, that would in its
+own time give cities, harbors, air, happiness,
+everything at a scale and quality and in a light
+altogether beyond the match-striking imaginations
+of a contemporary mind...."</p>
+
+<p>This same veering of interest may be seen in
+the career of another Englishman. I refer to
+Mr. Graham Wallas. Back in the '80's he was
+working with the Webbs, Bernard Shaw, Sidney
+Olivier, Annie Besant and others in socialist
+propaganda. Readers of the Fabian Essays
+know Mr. Wallas and appreciate the work of his
+group. Perhaps more than anyone else, the Fabians
+are responsible for turning English socialist
+thought from the verbalism of the Marxian disciples
+to the actualities of English political life.
+Their appetite for the concrete was enormous;
+their knowledge of facts overpowering, as the
+tomes produced by Mr. and Mrs. Webb can testify.
+The socialism of the Fabians soon became
+a definite legislative program which the various
+political parties were to be bulldozed, cajoled and
+tricked into enacting. It was effective work, and
+few can question the value of it. Yet many admirers
+have been left with a sense of inadequacy.</p>
+
+<p>Unlike the orthodox socialists, the Fabians
+took an active part in immediate politics. "We
+permeated the party organizations," writes Shaw,
+"and pulled all the wires we could lay our hands
+on with our utmost adroitness and energy....
+The generalship of this movement was undertaken
+chiefly by Sidney Webb, who played such
+bewildering conjuring tricks with the Liberal
+thimbles and the Fabian peas that to this day both
+the Liberals and the sectarian Socialists stand
+aghast at him." Few Americans know how great
+has been this influence on English political history
+for the last twenty years. The well-known Minority
+Report of the Poor Law Commission bears
+the Webb signature most conspicuously. Fabianism
+began to achieve a reputation for getting
+things done--for taking part in "practical affairs."
+Bernard Shaw has found time to do no
+end of campaigning and even the parochial politics
+of a vestryman has not seemed too insignificant
+for his Fabian enthusiasm. Graham Wallas
+was a candidate in five municipal elections, and
+has held an important office as member of the
+London County Council.</p>
+
+<p>But the original Fabian enthusiasm has slackened.
+One might ascribe it to a growing sense
+that concrete programs by themselves will not insure
+any profound regeneration of society. H.
+G. Wells has been savage and often unfair about
+the Fabian Society, but in "The New Machiavelli"
+he touched, I believe, the real disillusionment.
+Remington's history is in a way symbolic.
+Here was a successful political reformer, coming
+more and more to a disturbing recognition of his
+helplessness, perceiving the aimlessness and the
+unreality of political life, and announcing his contempt
+for the "crudification" of all issues. What
+Remington missed was what so many reformers
+are beginning to miss--an underlying philosophical
+habit.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Wallas seems to have had much the same
+experience. In the midst of a bustle of activity,
+politics appeared to have no center to which its
+thinking and doing could be referred. The truth
+was driven home upon him that political science
+is a science of human relationship with the human
+beings left out. So he writes that "the thinkers
+of the past, from Plato to Bentham and Mill, had
+each his own view of human nature, and they
+made these views the basis of their speculations
+on government." But to-day "nearly all students
+of politics analyze institutions and avoid the analysis
+of man." Whoever has read the typical book
+on politics by a professor or a reformer will
+agree, I think, when he adds: "One feels that
+many of the more systematic books on politics by
+American University professors are useless, just
+because the writers dealt with abstract men,
+formed on assumptions of which they were unaware
+and which they have never tested either by
+experience or by study."</p>
+
+<p>An extreme example could be made of Nicholas
+Murray Butler, President of Columbia University.
+In the space of six months he wrote an impassioned
+defense of "constitutional government,"
+beginning with the question, "Why is it
+that in the United States the words politics and
+politician have associations that are chiefly of evil
+omen," and then, to make irony complete, proceeded
+at the New York State Republican Convention
+to do the jobbery of Boss Barnes. What
+is there left but to gasp and wonder whether the
+words of the intellect have anything to do with
+the facts of life? What insight into reality can
+a man possess who is capable of discussing politics
+and ignoring politicians? What kind of
+na&iuml;vet&eacute; was it that led this educator into asking
+such a question?</p>
+
+<p>President Butler is, I grant, a caricature of the
+typical professor. Yet what shall we say of the
+annual harvest of treatises on "labor problems"
+which make no analysis of the mental condition
+of laboring men; of the treatises on marriage
+and prostitution which gloss over the sexual life
+of the individual? "In the other sciences which
+deal with human affairs," writes Mr. Wallas, referring
+to pedagogy and criminology, "this division
+between the study of the thing done and
+the study of the being who does it is not found."</p>
+
+<p>I have in my hands a text-book of six hundred
+pages which is used in the largest universities as
+a groundwork of political economy. This remarkable
+sentence strikes the eye: "The motives
+to business activity are too familiar to require
+analysis." But some sense that perhaps the "economic
+man" is not a self-evident creature seems
+to have touched our author. So we are treated
+to these sapient remarks: "To avoid this criticism
+we will begin with a characterization of the typical
+business man to be found to-day in the United
+States and other countries in the same stage of
+industrial development. <i>He has four traits
+which show themselves more or less clearly in all
+of his acts.</i>" They are first "self-interest," but
+"this does not mean that he is steeped in selfishness ...";
+secondly, "the larger self," the
+family, union, club, and "in times of emergency
+his country"; thirdly, "love of independence," for
+"his ambition is to stand on his own feet";
+fourthly, "business ethics" which "are not usually
+as high as the standards professed in churches,
+but they are much higher than current criticisms
+of business would lead one to think." Three-quarters
+of a page is sufficient for this penetrating
+analysis of motive and is followed by the remark
+that "these four characteristics of the economic man
+are readily explained by reference to
+the evolutionary process which has brought industrial
+society to its present stage of development."</p>
+
+<p>If those were the generalizations of a tired
+business man after a heavy dinner and a big cigar,
+they would still seem rather muddled and useless.
+But as the basis of an economic treatise in which
+"laws" are announced, "principles" laid down, reforms
+criticized as "impracticable," all for the
+benefit of thousands of college students, it is
+hardly possible to exaggerate the folly of such an
+exhibition. I have taken a book written by one
+eminent professor and evidently approved by others,
+for they use it as a text-book. It is no queer
+freak. I myself was supposed to read that book
+pretty nearly every week for a year. With hundreds
+of others I was supposed to found my economic
+understanding upon it. We were actually
+punished for not reading that book. It was given
+to us as wisdom, as modern political economy.</p>
+
+<p>But what goes by the name to-day is a potpourri
+in which one can distinguish descriptions
+of legal forms, charters and institutions; comparative
+studies of governmental and social machinery;
+the history of institutions, a few "principles"
+like the law of rent, some moral admonitions,
+a good deal of class feeling, not a little
+timidity--but almost no attempt to cut beneath
+these manifestations of social life to the creative
+impulses which produce them. The Economic
+Man--that lazy abstraction--is still paraded in
+the lecture room; the study of human nature has
+not advanced beyond the gossip of old wives.</p>
+
+<p>Graham Wallas touched the cause of the
+trouble when he pointed out that political science
+to-day discusses institutions and ignores the nature
+of the men who make and live under them.
+I have heard professors reply that it wasn't their
+business to discuss human nature but to record
+and interpret economic and political facts. Yet if
+you probe those "interpretations" there is no escaping
+the conclusion that they rest upon some
+notion of what man is like. "The student of
+politics," writes Mr. Wallas, "must, consciously
+or unconsciously, form a conception of human
+nature, and the less conscious he is of his conception
+the more likely he is to be dominated by it."
+For politics is an interest of men--a tool which
+they fabricate and use--and no comment has
+much value if it tries to get along without mankind.
+You might as well try to describe food by
+ignoring the digestion.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Wallas has called a halt. I think we may
+say that his is the distinction of having turned
+the study of politics back to the humane tradition
+of Plato and Machiavelli--of having made man
+the center of political investigation. The very
+title of his book--"Human Nature in Politics"--is
+significant. Now in making that statement, I
+am aware that it is a sweeping one, and I do not
+mean to imply that Mr. Wallas is the only modern
+man who has tried to think about politics
+psychologically. Here in America alone we have
+two splendid critics, a man and a woman, whose
+thought flows from an interpretation of human
+character. Thorstein Veblen's brilliant descriptions
+penetrate deeply into our mental life, and
+Jane Addams has given new hope to many of us
+by her capacity for making ideals the goal of
+natural desire.</p>
+
+<p>Nor is it just to pass by such a suggestive
+thinker as Gabriel Tarde, even though we may
+feel that his psychology is too simple and his
+conclusions somewhat overdriven by a favorite
+theory. The work of Gustav Le Bon on
+"crowds" has, of course, passed into current
+thought, but I doubt whether anyone could say
+that he had even prepared a basis for a new political
+psychology. His own aversion to reform, his
+fondness for vast epochs and his contempt for
+current effort have left most of his "psychological
+laws" in the region of interesting literary
+comment. There are, too, any number of "social
+psychologies," such as those of Ross and McDougall.
+But the trouble with them is that the
+"psychology" is weak and uninformed, distorted
+by moral enthusiasms, and put out without any
+particular reference to the task of statesmanship.
+When you come to special problems, the literature
+of the subject picks up. Crime is receiving
+valuable attention, education is profoundly affected,
+alcoholism and sex have been handled for
+a good while on a psychological basis.</p>
+
+<p>But it remained for Mr. Wallas to state the
+philosophy of the matter--to say why the study
+of human nature must serve politics, and to point
+out how. He has not produced a political
+psychology, but he has written the manifesto for
+it. As a result, fragmentary investigations can
+be brought together and applied to the work of
+statecraft. Merely by making these researches
+self-conscious, he has made clearer their goal,
+given them direction, and kindled them to practical
+action. How necessary this work is can be
+seen in the writing of Miss Addams. Owing to
+keen insight and fine sympathy her thinking has
+generally been on a human basis. Yet Miss Addams
+is a reformer, and sympathy without an
+explicit philosophy may lead to a distorted enthusiasm.
+Her book on prostitution seems rather
+the product of her moral fervor than her human
+insight. Compare it with "The Spirit of Youth"
+or "Newer Ideals of Peace" or "Democracy and
+Social Ethics" and I think you will notice a very
+considerable willingness to gloss over human need
+in the interests of an unanalyzed reform. To put
+it bluntly, Miss Addams let her impatience get
+the better of her wisdom. She had written brilliantly
+about sex and its "sublimation," she had
+suggested notable "moral equivalents" for vice,
+but when she touched the white slave traffic its
+horrors were so great that she also put her faith
+in the policeman and the district attorney. "A
+New Conscience and an Ancient Evil" is an hysterical
+book, just because the real philosophical
+basis of Miss Addams' thinking was not deliberate
+enough to withstand the shock of a poignant
+horror.</p>
+
+<p>It is this weakness that Mr. Wallas comes to
+remedy. He has described what political science
+must be like, and anyone who has absorbed his
+insight has an intellectual groundwork for political
+observation. No one, least of all Mr. Wallas,
+would claim anything like finality for the essay.
+These labors are not done in a day. But he has
+deliberately brought the study of politics to the
+only focus which has any rational interest for
+mankind. He has made a plea, and sketched a
+plan which hundreds of investigators the world
+over must help to realize. If political science
+could travel in the direction suggested, its criticism
+would be relevant, its proposals practical.
+There would, for the first time, be a concerted
+effort to build a civilization around mankind, to
+use its talent and to satisfy its needs. There
+would be no more empty taboos, no erecting of
+institutions upon abstract and mechanical analogies.
+Politics would be like education--an effort
+to develop, train and nurture men's impulses. As
+Montessori is building the school around the
+child, so politics would build all of social life
+around the human being.</p>
+
+<p>That practical issues hang upon these investigations
+can be shown by an example from Mr.
+Wallas's book. Take the quarrel over socialism.
+You hear it said that without the private ownership
+of capital people will lose ambition and sink
+into sloth. Many men, just as well aware of
+present-day evils as the socialists, are unwilling to
+accept the collectivist remedy. G. K. Chesterton
+and Hilaire Belloc speak of the "magic of property"
+as the real obstacle to socialism. Now obviously
+this is a question of first-rate importance.
+If socialism will destroy initiative then only a doctrinaire
+would desire it. But how is the question
+to be solved? You cannot reason it out. Economics,
+as we know it to-day, is quite incapable
+of answering such a problem, for it is a matter
+that depends upon psychological investigation.
+When a professor says that socialism is impracticable
+he begs the question, for that amounts to
+assuming that the point at issue is already settled.
+If he tells you that socialism is against human
+nature, we have a perfect right to ask where
+he proved the possibilities of human nature.</p>
+
+<p>But note how Mr. Wallas approaches the debate:
+"Children quarrel furiously at a very early
+age over apparently worthless things, and collect
+and hide them long before they can have any clear
+notion of the advantages to be derived from individual
+possession. Those children who in certain
+charity schools are brought up entirely without
+personal property, even in their clothes or
+pocket handkerchiefs, show every sign of the bad
+effect on health and character which results from
+complete inability to satisfy a strong inherited instinct....
+Some economist ought therefore
+to give us a treatise in which this property instinct
+is carefully and quantitatively examined....
+How far can it be eliminated or modified by education?
+Is it satisfied by a leasehold or a life-interest,
+or by such an arrangement of corporate
+property as is offered by a collegiate foundation,
+or by the provision of a public park? Does it require
+for its satisfaction material and visible
+things such as land or houses, or is the holding,
+say, of colonial railway shares sufficient? Is the
+absence of unlimited proprietary rights felt more
+strongly in the case of personal chattels (such as
+furniture and ornaments) than in the case of land
+or machinery? Does the degree and direction of
+the instinct markedly differ among different individuals
+or races, or between the two sexes?"</p>
+
+<p>This puts the argument upon a plane where discussion
+is relevant. This is no trumped-up issue:
+it is asked by a politician and a socialist seeking
+for a real solution. We need to know whether
+the "magic of property" extends from a man's
+garden to Standard Oil stocks as anti-socialists
+say, and, conversely, we need to know what is
+happening to that mass of proletarians who own
+no property and cannot satisfy their instincts
+even with personal chattels.</p>
+
+<p>For if ownership is a human need, we certainly
+cannot taboo it as the extreme communists so dogmatically
+urge. "Pending ... an inquiry,"
+writes Mr. Wallas, "my own provisional opinion
+is that, like a good many instincts of very early
+evolutionary origin, it can be satisfied by an
+avowed pretense; just as a kitten which is fed
+regularly on milk can be kept in good health if
+it is allowed to indulge its hunting instinct by playing
+with a bobbin, and a peaceful civil servant satisfies
+his instinct of combat and adventure at
+golf."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Wallas takes exactly the same position as
+William James did when he planned a "moral
+equivalent" for war. Both men illustrate the
+changing focus of political thought. Both try to
+found statesmanship on human need. Both see
+that there are good and bad satisfactions of the
+same impulse. The routineer with his taboo does
+not see this, so he attempts the impossible task of
+obliterating the impulse. He differs fundamentally
+from the creative politician who devotes
+himself to inventing fine expressions for human
+needs, who recognizes that the work of statesmanship
+is in large measure the finding of good substitutes
+for the bad things we want.</p>
+
+<p>This is the heart of a political revolution.
+When we recognize that the focus of politics is
+shifting from a mechanical to a human center we
+shall have reached what is, I believe, the most essential
+idea in modern politics. More than any
+other generalization it illuminates the currents of
+our national life and explains the altering tasks
+of statesmanship.</p>
+
+<p>The old effort was to harness mankind to abstract
+principles--liberty, justice or equality--and
+to deduce institutions from these high-sounding
+words. It did not succeed because human nature
+was contrary and restive. The new effort proposes
+to fit creeds and institutions to the wants of
+men, to satisfy their impulses as fully and beneficially
+as possible.</p>
+
+<p>And yet we do not begin to know our desires or
+the art of their satisfaction. Mr. Wallas's book
+and the special literature of the subject leave no
+doubt that a precise political psychology is far off
+indeed. The human nature we must put at the
+center of our statesmanship is only partially understood.
+True, Mr. Wallas works with a psychology
+that is fairly well superseded. But not
+even the advance-guard to-day, what we may call
+the Freudian school, would claim that it had
+brought knowledge to a point where politics could
+use it in any very deep or comprehensive way.
+The subject is crude and fragmentary, though we
+are entitled to call it promising.</p>
+
+<p>Yet the fact had better be faced: psychology
+has not gone far enough, its results are still too
+vague for our purposes. We know very little,
+and what we know has hardly been applied to
+political problems. That the last few years have
+witnessed a revolution in the study of mental life
+is plain: the effects are felt not only in psychotherapy,
+but in education, morals, religion, and
+no end of cultural interests. The impetus of
+Freud is perhaps the greatest advance ever made
+towards the understanding and control of human
+character. But for the complexities of politics it
+is not yet ready. It will take time and endless
+labor for a detailed study of social problems in
+the light of this growing knowledge.</p>
+
+<p>What then shall we do now? Must we continue
+to muddle along in the old ruts, gazing rapturously
+at an impotent ideal, until the works of
+the scientists are matured?</p>
+
+<br><br><br>
+
+
+<h2><a name="ch4">CHAPTER IV</a></h2>
+
+<h3>THE GOLDEN RULE AND AFTER</h3>
+<br>
+
+<p>It would indeed be an intolerably pedantic performance
+for a nation to sit still and wait for
+its scientists to report on their labors. The notion
+is typical of the pitfalls in the path of any theorist
+who does not correct his logic by a constant reference
+to the movement of life. It is true that
+statecraft must make human nature its basis. It
+is true that its chief task is the invention of forms
+and institutions which satisfy the inner needs of
+mankind. And it is true that our knowledge of
+those needs and the technique of their satisfaction
+is hazy, unorganized and blundering.</p>
+
+<p>But to suppose that the remedy lies in waiting
+for monographs from the research of the laboratory
+is to have lost a sense of the rhythm of actual
+affairs. That is not the way things come about:
+we grow into a new point of view: only afterwards,
+in looking back, do we see the landmarks
+of our progress. Thus it is customary to say that
+Adam Smith dates the change from the old mercantilist
+economy to the capitalistic economics of
+the nineteenth century. But that is a manner of
+speech. The old mercantilist policy was giving
+way to early industrialism: a thousand unconscious
+economic and social forces were compelling the
+change. Adam Smith expressed the process,
+named it, idealized it and made it self-conscious.
+Then because men were clearer about what they
+were doing, they could in a measure direct their
+destiny.</p>
+
+<p>That is but another way of saying that great
+revolutionary changes do not spring full-armed
+from anybody's brow. A genius usually becomes
+the luminous center of a nation's crisis,--men see
+better by the light of him. His bias deflects their
+actions. Unquestionably the doctrine-driven men
+who made the economics of the last century had
+much to do with the halo which encircled the
+smutted head of industrialism. They put the
+stamp of their genius on certain inhuman practices,
+and of course it has been the part of the
+academic mind to imitate them ever since. The
+orthodox economists are in the unenviable position
+of having taken their morals from the exploiter
+and of having translated them into the
+grandiloquent language of high public policy.
+They gave capitalism the sanction of the intellect.
+When later, Carlyle and Ruskin battered the economists
+into silence with invective and irony they
+were voicing the dumb protest of the humane people
+of England. They helped to organize a formless
+resentment by endowing it with intelligence
+and will.</p>
+
+<p>So it is to-day. If this nation did not show an
+unmistakable tendency to put men at the center
+of politics instead of machinery and things; if
+there were not evidence to prove that we are turning
+from the sterile taboo to the creation of finer
+environments; if the impetus for shaping our destiny
+were not present in our politics and our life,
+then essays like these would be so much baying
+at the moon, fantastic and unworthy pleas for
+some irrelevant paradise. But the gropings are
+there,--vastly confused in the tangled strains of
+the nation's interests. Clogged by the confusion,
+half-choked by stupid blockades, largely unaware
+of their own purposes, it is for criticism, organized
+research, and artistic expression to free and
+to use these creative energies. They are to be
+found in the aspirations of labor, among the awakened
+women, in the development of business, the
+diffusion of art and science, in the racial mixtures,
+and many lesser interests which cluster about these
+greater movements.</p>
+
+<p>The desire for a human politics is all about us.
+It rises to the surface in slogans like "human
+rights above property rights," "the man above the
+dollar." Some measure of its strength is given
+by the widespread imitation these expressions
+have compelled: politicians who haven't the slightest
+intention of putting men above the dollar, who
+if they had wouldn't know how, take off their hats
+to the sentiment because it seems a key to popular
+enthusiasm. It must be bewildering to men
+brought up, let us say, in the Hanna school of politics.
+For here is this nation which sixteen years
+ago vibrated ecstatically to that magic word
+"Prosperity"; to-day statistical rhetoric about
+size induces little but excessive boredom. If you
+wish to drive an audience out of the hall tell it
+how rich America is; if you wish to stamp yourself
+an echo of the past talk to us young men
+about the Republican Party's understanding with
+God in respect to bumper crops. But talk to us
+about "human rights," and though you talk rubbish,
+we'll listen. For our desire is bent that way,
+and anything which has the flavor of this new interest
+will rivet our attention. We are still uncritical.
+It is only a few years since we began to
+center our politics upon human beings. We have
+no training in that kind of thought. Our schools
+and colleges have helped us hardly at all. We
+still talk about "humanity" as if it were some
+strange and mystical creature which could not possibly
+be composed of the grocer, the street-car
+conductor and our aunts.</p>
+
+<p>That the opinion-making people of America
+are more interested in human welfare than in empire
+or abstract prosperity is an item that no
+statesman can disregard in his thinking. To-day
+it is no longer necessary to run against the grain
+of the deepest movements of our time. There is
+an ascendant feeling among the people that all
+achievement should be measured in human happiness.
+This feeling has not always existed. Historians
+tell us that the very idea of progress in
+well-being is not much older than, say, Shakespeare's
+plays. As a general belief it is still
+more recent. The nineteenth century may perhaps
+be said to mark its popularization. But as
+a fact of immediate politics, as a touchstone applied
+quickly to all the acts of statecraft in
+America it belongs to the Twentieth Century.
+There were any number of people who long before
+1900 saw that dollars and men could clash.
+But their insight had not won any general acceptance.
+It is only within the last few years that
+the human test has ceased to be the property of a
+small group and become the convention of a large
+majority. A study of magazines and newspapers
+would confirm this rather broad generalization.
+It would show, I believe, how the whole quality
+of our most impromptu thinking is being influenced
+by human values.</p>
+
+<p>The statesman must look to this largely unorganized
+drift of desire. He will find it clustering
+about certain big revolts--the unrest of
+women, for example, or the increasing demands
+of industrial workers. Rightly understood, these
+social currents would, I believe, lead to the central
+issues of life, the vital points upon which
+happiness depends. They come out of necessities.
+They express desire. They are power.</p>
+
+<p>Thus feminism, arising out of a crisis in sexual
+conditions, has liberated energies that are themselves
+the motors of any reform. In England
+and America voting has become the symbol of an
+aspiration as yet half-conscious and undefined.
+What women want is surely something a great
+deal deeper than the privilege of taking part in
+elections. They are looking for a readjustment
+of their relations to the home, to work, to children,
+to men, to the interests of civilized life.
+The vote has become a convenient peg upon which
+to hang aspirations that are not at all sure of
+their own meaning. In no insignificant number
+of cases the vote is a cover by which revolutionary
+demands can be given a conventional front.
+The ballot is at the utmost a beginning, as far-sighted
+conservatives have guessed. Certainly
+the elimination of "male" from the suffrage qualifications
+will not end the feminist agitation. From
+the angle of statecraft the future of the movement
+may be said to depend upon the wise use of
+this raw and scattered power. I do not pretend
+to know in detail how this can be done. But I
+am certain that the task of leadership is to organize
+aspiration in the service of the real interests
+of life. To-day women want--what?
+They are ready to want something: that describes
+fairly the condition of most suffragettes. Those
+who like Ellen Key and Olive Shreiner and Mrs.
+Gilman give them real problems to think about
+are drafting that energy into use. By real problems
+I mean problems of love, work, home, children.
+They are the real interests of feminism
+because they have produced it.</p>
+
+<p>The yearnings of to-day are the symptoms of
+needs, they point the course of invention, they
+are the energies which animate a social program.
+The most ideally conceived plan of the human
+mind has only a slight interest if it does not harness
+these instinctive forces. That is the great
+lesson which the utopias teach by their failure--that
+schemes, however nicely arranged, cannot be
+imposed upon human beings who are interested
+in other things. What ailed Don Quixote was
+that he and his contemporaries wanted different
+things; the only ideals that count are those which
+express the possible development of an existing
+force. Reformers must never forget that three
+legs are a Quixotic ideal; two good legs a genuine
+one.</p>
+
+<p>In actual life, yes, in the moil and toil of propaganda,
+"movements," "causes" and agitations the
+statesman-inventor and the political psychologist
+find the raw material for their work. It is not
+the business of the politician to preserve an Olympian
+indifference to what stupid people call "popular
+whim." Being lofty about the "passing fad"
+and the ephemeral outcry is all very well in the
+biographies of dead men, but rank nonsense in
+the rulers of real ones. Oscar Wilde once remarked
+that only superficial people disliked the
+superficial. Nothing, for example, could on the
+surface be more trivial than an interest in baseball
+scores. Yet during the campaign of 1912
+the excitement was so great that Woodrow Wilson
+said on the stump he felt like apologizing to
+the American people for daring to be a presidential
+candidate while the Giants and the Red Sox
+were playing for the championship. Baseball
+(not so much for those who play it), is a colossal
+phenomenon in American life. Watch the crowds
+in front of a bulletin board, finding a vicarious
+excitement and an abstract relief from the monotony
+of their own lives. What a second-hand
+civilization it is that grows passionate over a
+scoreboard with little electric lights! What a civilization
+it is that has learned to enjoy its sport
+without even seeing it! If ever there was a symptom
+that this nation needed leisure and direct
+participation in games, it is that poor scrawny
+substitute for joy--the baseball extra.</p>
+
+<p>It is as symptomatic as the labor union. It expresses
+need. And statesmanship would find an
+answer. It would not let that passion and loyalty
+be frittered away to drift like scum through the
+nation. It would see in it the opportunity of art,
+play, and religion. So with what looks very different--the
+"syndicalist movement." Perhaps it
+seems preposterous to discuss baseball and syndicalism
+in the same paragraph. But that is only
+because we have not accustomed ourselves to
+thinking of social events as answers to human
+needs. The statesman would ask, Why are there
+syndicalists? What are they driving at? What
+gift to civilization is in the impetus behind them?
+They are human beings, and they want human
+things. There is no reason to become terror-stricken
+about them. They seem to want things
+badly. Then ostriches disguised as judges cannot
+deal with them. Anarchism--men die for that,
+they undergo intolerable insults. They are tarred
+and feathered and spat upon. Is it possible that
+Republicans, Democrats and Socialists clip the
+wings more than free spirits can allow? Is civilization
+perhaps too tightly organized? Have
+the irreconcilables a soul audacious and less
+blunted than our domesticated ones? To put it
+mildly, is it ever safe to ignore them entirely in
+our thinking?</p>
+
+<p>We shall come, I think, to a different appraisal
+of agitations. Our present method is to discuss
+whether the proposals are right and feasible.
+We do this hastily and with prejudice. Generally
+we decide that any agitation foreign to our settled
+habits is wrong. And we bolster up our satisfaction
+by pointing to some mistake of logic or some
+puerility of statement. That done, we feel the
+agitation is deplorable and can be ignored unless
+it becomes so obstreperous that we have to put it
+in jail. But a genuine statecraft would go deeper.
+It would know that even God has been defended
+with nonsense. So it could be sympathetic to agitations.
+I use the word sympathetic literally. For
+it would try to understand the inner feeling which
+had generated what looks like a silly demand.
+To-day it is as if a hungry man asked for an indigestible
+food, and we let him go hungry because
+he was unwise. He isn't any the less hungry because
+he asks for the wrong food. So with agitations.
+Their specific plans may be silly, but
+their demands are real. The hungers and lusts
+of mankind have produced some stupendous follies,
+but the desires themselves are no less real
+and insistent.</p>
+
+<p>The important thing about a social movement
+is not its stated platform but the source from
+which it flows. The task of politics is to understand
+those deeper demands and to find civilized
+satisfactions for them. The meaning of this is
+that the statesman must be more than the leader
+of a party. Thus the socialist statesman is not
+complete if he is a good socialist. Only the delusion
+that his truth is the whole truth, his party
+the human race, and his program a panacea, will
+produce that singleness of vision.</p>
+
+<p>The moment a man takes office he has no right
+to be the representative of one group alone. He
+has assumed the burden of harmonizing particular
+agitations with the general welfare. That is
+why great agitators should not accept office. Men
+like Debs understand that. Their business is to
+make social demands so concrete and pressing that
+statesmen are forced to deal with them. Agitators
+who accept government positions are a disappointment
+to their followers. They can no
+longer be severely partisan. They have to look
+at affairs nationally. Now the agitator and the
+statesman are both needed. But they have different
+functions, and it is unjust to damn one because
+he hasn't the virtues of the other.</p>
+
+<p>The statesman to-day needs a large equipment.
+The man who comes forward to shape a country's
+policy has truly no end of things to consider. He
+must be aware of the condition of the people: no
+statesman must fall into the sincere but thoroughly
+upper class blunder that President Taft
+committed when he advised a three months' vacation.
+Realizing how men and women feel at
+all levels and at different places, he must speak
+their discontent and project their hopes. Through
+this he will get power. Standing upon the prestige
+which that gives he must guide and purify
+the social demands he finds at work. He is the
+translator of agitations. For this task he must
+be keenly sensitive to public opinion and capable
+of understanding the dynamics of it. Then, in order
+to fuse it into a civilized achievement, he will
+require much expert knowledge. Yet he need not
+be a specialist himself, if only he is expert in
+choosing experts. It is better indeed that the
+statesman should have a lay, and not a professional
+view. For the bogs of technical stupidity
+and empty formalism are always near and always
+dangerous. The real political genius stands
+between the actual life of men, their wishes and
+their needs, and all the windings of official caste
+and professional snobbery. It is his supreme
+business to see that the servants of life stay in
+their place--that government, industry, "causes,"
+science, all the creatures of man do not succeed in
+their perpetual effort to become the masters.</p>
+
+<p>I have Roosevelt in mind. He haunts political
+thinking. And indeed, why shouldn't he? What
+reality could there be in comments upon American
+politics which ignored the colossal phenomenon of
+Roosevelt? If he is wholly evil, as many say he
+is, then the American democracy is preponderantly
+evil. For in the first years of the Twentieth
+Century, Roosevelt spoke for this nation, as few
+presidents have spoken in our history. And
+that he has spoken well, who in the perspective
+of time will deny? Sensitive to the original forces
+of public opinion, no man has had the same power
+of rounding up the laggards. Government under
+him was a throbbing human purpose. He succeeded,
+where Taft failed, in preventing that drought of
+invention which officialism brings. Many people
+say he has tried to be all things to all men--that
+his speeches are an attempt to corral all sorts of
+votes. That is a left-handed way of stating a
+truth. A more generous interpretation would be
+to say that he had tried to be inclusive, to attach
+a hundred sectional agitations to a national program.
+Crude: of course he was crude; he had a
+hemisphere for his canvas. Inconsistent: yes, he
+tried to be the leader of factions at war with one
+another. A late convert: he is a statesman and
+not an agitator--his business was to meet demands
+when they had grown to national proportions.
+No end of possibilities have slipped
+through the large meshes of his net. He has said
+some silly things. He has not been subtle, and he
+has been far from perfect. But his success should
+be judged by the size of his task, by the fierceness
+of the opposition, by the intellectual qualities of
+the nation he represented. When we remember
+that he was trained in the Republican politics of
+Hanna and Platt, that he was the first President
+who shared a new social vision, then I believe we
+need offer no apologies for making Mr. Roosevelt
+stand as the working model for a possible
+American statesman at the beginning of the
+Twentieth Century.</p>
+
+<p>Critics have often suggested that Roosevelt
+stole Bryan's clothes. That is perhaps true, and
+it suggests a comparison which illuminates both
+men. It would not be unfair to say that it is always
+the function of the Roosevelts to take from
+the Bryans. But it is a little silly for an agitator
+to cry thief when the success of his agitation has
+led to the adoption of his ideas. It is like the
+chagrin of the socialists because the National Progressive
+Party had "stolen twenty-three planks,"
+and it makes a person wonder whether some agitators
+haven't an overdeveloped sense of private
+property.</p>
+
+<p>I do not see the statesman in Bryan. He has
+been something of a voice crying in the wilderness,
+but a voice that did not understand its own
+message. Many people talk of him as a prophet.
+There is a great deal of literal truth in that remark,
+for it has been the peculiar work of Bryan
+to express in politics some of that emotion which
+has made America the home of new religions.
+What we know as the scientific habit of mind is
+entirely lacking in his intellectual equipment.
+There is a vein of mysticism in American life,
+and Mr. Bryan is its uncritical prophet. His insights
+are those of the gifted evangelist, often
+profound and always narrow. It is absurd to
+debate his sincerity. Mr. Bryan talks with the
+intoxication of the man who has had a revelation:
+to skeptics that always seems theatrical. But
+far from being the scheming hypocrite his enemies
+say he is, Mr. Bryan is too simple for the
+task of statesmanship. No bracing critical atmosphere
+plays about his mind: there are no
+cleansing doubts and fruitful alternatives. The
+work of Bryan has been to express a certain feeling
+of unrest--to embody it in the traditional language
+of prophecy. But it is a shrewd turn of the
+American people that has kept him out of office.
+I say this not in disrespect of his qualities, but in
+definition of them. Bryan does not happen to
+have the naturalistic outlook, the complete humanity,
+or the deliberative habit which modern
+statecraft requires. He is the voice of a confused
+emotion.</p>
+
+<p>Woodrow Wilson has a talent which is Bryan's
+chief defect--the scientific habit of holding facts
+in solution. His mind is lucid and flexible, and
+he has the faculty of taking advice quickly, of
+stating something he has borrowed with more
+ease and subtlety than the specialist from whom
+he got it. Woodrow Wilson's is an elegant and
+highly refined intellect, nicely balanced and capable
+of fine adjustment. An urbane civilization
+produced it, leisure has given it spaciousness, ease
+has made it generous. A mind without tension,
+its roots are not in the somewhat barbarous under-currents
+of the nation. Woodrow Wilson understands
+easily, but he does not incarnate: he
+has never been a part of the protest he speaks.
+You think of him as a good counsellor, as an excellent
+presiding officer. Whether his imagination
+is fibrous enough to catch the inwardness of
+the mutterings of our age is something experience
+alone can show. Wilson has class feeling in the
+least offensive sense of that term: he likes a world
+of gentlemen. Occasionally he has exhibited a
+rather amateurish effort to be grimy and shirt-sleeved.
+But without much success: his contact
+with American life is not direct, and so he is capable
+of purely theoretical affirmations. Like all
+essentially contemplative men, the world has to
+be reflected in the medium of his intellect before
+he can grapple with it.</p>
+
+<p>Yet Wilson belongs among the statesmen, and
+it is fine that he should be in public life. The
+weakness I have suggested is one that all statesmen
+share in some degree: an inability to interpret
+adequately the world they govern. This is
+a difficulty which is common to conservative and
+radical, and if I have used three living men to illustrate
+the problem it is only because they seem
+to illuminate it. They have faced the task and
+we can take their measurement. It is no part of
+my purpose to make any judgment as to the value
+of particular policies they have advocated. I am
+attempting to suggest some of the essentials of a
+statesman's equipment for the work of a humanly
+centered politics. Roosevelt has seemed to me
+the most effective, the most nearly complete;
+Bryan I have ventured to class with the men who
+though important to politics should never hold
+high executive office; Wilson, less complete than
+Roosevelt, is worthy of our deepest interest because
+his judgment is subtle where Roosevelt's is
+crude. He is a foretaste of a more advanced
+statesmanship.</p>
+
+<p>Because he is self-conscious, Wilson has been
+able to see the problem that any finely adapted
+statecraft must meet. It is a problem that would
+hardly occur to an old-fashioned politician:
+"Though he (the statesman) cannot himself keep
+the life of the nation as a whole in his mind, he
+can at least make sure that he is taking counsel
+with those who know...." It is not important
+that Wilson in stating the difficulty should
+put it as if he had in a measure solved it. He
+hasn't, because taking counsel is a means to understanding
+the nation as a whole, and that understanding
+remains almost as arduous and requires
+just as fibrous an imagination, if it is
+gleaned from advisers.</p>
+
+<p>To think of the whole nation: surely the task
+of statesmanship is more difficult to-day than ever
+before in history. In the face of a clotted intricacy
+in the subject-matter of politics, improvements
+in knowledge seem meager indeed. The
+distance between what we know and what we need
+to know appears to be greater than ever. Plato
+and Aristotle thought in terms of ten thousand
+homogeneous villagers; we have to think in terms
+of a hundred million people of all races and all
+traditions, crossbred and inbred, subject to climates
+they have never lived in before, plumped
+down on a continent in the midst of a strange
+civilization. We have to deal with all grades of
+life from the frontier to the metropolis, with men
+who differ in sense of fact, in ideal, in the very
+groundwork of morals. And we have to take
+into account not the simple opposition of two
+classes, but the hostility of many,--the farmers
+and the factory workers and all the castes within
+their ranks, the small merchants, and the feudal
+organization of business. Ours is a problem in
+which deception has become organized and
+strong; where truth is poisoned at its source; one
+in which the skill of the shrewdest brains is devoted
+to misleading a bewildered people. Nor
+can we keep to the problem within our borders.
+Whether we wish it or not we are involved in the
+world's problems, and all the winds of heaven
+blow through our land.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p>It is a great question whether our intellects can
+grasp the subject. Are we perhaps like a child
+whose hand is too small to span an octave on the
+piano? Not only are the facts inhumanly complicated,
+but the natural ideals of people are so
+varied and contradictory that action halts in despair.
+We are putting a tremendous strain upon
+the mind, and the results are all about us: everyone
+has known the neutral thinkers who stand
+forever undecided before the complications of
+life, who have, as it were, caught a glimpse of
+the possibilities of knowledge. The sight has
+paralyzed them. Unless they can act with certainty,
+they dare not act at all.</p>
+
+<p>That is merely one of the temptations of theory.
+In the real world, action and thought are so
+closely related that one cannot wait upon the
+other. We cannot wait in politics for any completed
+theoretical discussion of its method: it is
+a monstrous demand. There is no pausing until
+political psychology is more certain. We have to
+act on what we believe, on half-knowledge, illusion
+and error. Experience itself will reveal our
+mistakes; research and criticism may convert them
+into wisdom. But act we must, and act as if we
+knew the nature of man and proposed to satisfy
+his needs.</p>
+
+<p>In other words, we must put man at the center
+of politics, even though we are densely ignorant
+both of man and of politics. This has always
+been the method of great political thinkers from
+Plato to Bentham. But one difference we in this
+age must note: they made their political man a
+dogma--we must leave him an hypothesis. That
+is to say that our task is to temper speculation
+with scientific humility.</p>
+
+<p>A paradox there is here, but a paradox of language,
+and not of fact. Men made bridges before
+there was a science of bridge-building; they
+cured disease before they knew medicine. Art
+came before &aelig;sthetics, and righteousness before
+ethics. Conduct and theory react upon each
+other. Hypothesis is confirmed and modified by
+action, and action is guided by hypothesis. If it
+is a paradox to ask for a human politics before
+we understand humanity or politics, it is what
+Mr. Chesterton describes as one of those paradoxes
+that sit beside the wells of truth.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p>We make our picture of man, knowing that,
+though it is crude and unjust, we have to work
+with it. If we are wise we shall become experimental
+towards life: then every mistake will
+contribute towards knowledge. Let the exploration
+of human need and desire become a deliberate
+purpose of statecraft, and there is no present
+measure of its possibilities.</p>
+
+<p>In this work there are many guides. A vague
+common tradition is in the air about us--it expresses
+itself in journalism, in cheap novels, in
+the uncritical theater. Every merchant has his
+stock of assumptions about the mental habits of
+his customers and competitors; the prostitute
+hers; the newspaperman his; P. T. Barnum had
+a few; the vaudeville stage has a number. We
+test these notions by their results, and even
+"practical people" find that there is more variety
+in human nature than they had supposed.</p>
+
+<p>We forge gradually our greatest instrument
+for understanding the world--introspection. We
+discover that humanity may resemble us very considerably--that
+the best way of knowing the inwardness
+of our neighbors is to know ourselves.
+For after all, the only experience we really understand
+is our own. And that, in the least of us,
+is so rich that no one has yet exhausted its possibilities.
+It has been said that every genuine
+character an artist produces is one of the characters
+he might have been. By re-creating our
+own suppressed possibilities we multiply the number
+of lives that we can really know. That as
+I understand it is the psychology of the Golden
+Rule. For note that Jesus did not set up some
+external fetich: he did not say, make your neighbor
+righteous, or chaste, or respectable. He said
+do as you would be done by. Assume that you
+and he are alike, and you can found morals on
+humanity.</p>
+
+<p>But experience has enlarged our knowledge of
+differences. We realize now that our neighbor
+is not always like ourselves. Knowing how unjust
+other people's inferences are when they concern
+us, we have begun to guess that ours may
+be unjust to them. Any uniformity of conduct
+becomes at once an impossible ideal, and the
+willingness to live and let live assumes high place
+among the virtues. A puzzled wisdom remarks
+that "it takes all sorts of people to make a
+world," and half-protestingly men accept Bernard
+Shaw's amendment, "Do not do unto others as
+you would that they should do unto you. Their
+tastes may not be the same."</p>
+
+<p>We learn perhaps that there is no contradiction
+in speaking of "human nature" while admitting
+that men are unique. For all deepening
+of our knowledge gives a greater sense of common
+likeness and individual variation. It is folly
+to ignore either insight. But it is done constantly,
+with no end of confusion as a result.
+Some men have got themselves into a state where
+the only view that interests them is the common
+humanity of us all. Their world is not populated
+by men and women, but by a Unity that is Permanent.
+You might as well refuse to see any
+differences between steam, water and ice because
+they have common elements. And I have seen
+some of these people trying to skate on steam.
+Their brothers, blind in the other eye, go about
+the world so sure that each person is entirely
+unique, that society becomes like a row of packing
+cases, each painted on the inside, and each containing
+one ego and its own.</p>
+
+<p>Art enlarges experience by admitting us to the
+inner life of others. That is not the only use of
+art, for its function is surely greater and more
+ultimate than to furnish us with a better knowledge
+of human nature. Nor is that its only use
+even to statecraft. I suggested earlier that art
+enters politics as a "moral equivalent" for evil,
+a medium by which barbarous lusts find civilized
+expression. It is, too, an ideal for labor. But
+my purpose here is not to attempt any adequate
+description of the services of art. It is enough
+to note that literature in particular elaborates
+our insight into human life, and, therefore, enables
+us to center our institutions more truly.</p>
+
+<p>Ibsen discovers a soul in Nora: the discovery is
+absorbed into the common knowledge of the age.
+Other Noras discover their own souls; the Helmers
+all about us begin to see the person in the
+doll. Plays and novels have indeed an overwhelming
+political importance, as the "moderns"
+have maintained. But it lies not in the preaching
+of a doctrine or the insistence on some particular
+change in conduct. That is a shallow and wasteful
+use of the resources of art. For art can open
+up the springs from which conduct flows. Its
+genuine influence is on what Wells calls the
+"hinterland," in a quickening of the sense of life.</p>
+
+<p>Art can really penetrate where most of us can
+only observe. "I look and I think I see," writes
+Bergson, "I listen and I think I hear, I examine
+myself and I think I am reading the very depths
+of my heart.... (But) my senses and my
+consciousness ... give me no more than a
+practical simplification of reality ... in
+short, we do not see the actual things themselves;
+in most cases we confine ourselves to reading the
+labels affixed to them." Who has not known this
+in thinking of politics? We talk of poverty and
+forget poor people; we make rules for vagrancy--we
+forget the vagrant. Some of our best-intentioned
+political schemes, like reform colonies
+and scientific jails, turn out to be inhuman tyrannies
+just because our imagination does not penetrate
+the sociological label. "We move amidst
+generalities and symbols ... we live in a
+zone midway between things and ourselves, external
+to things, external also to ourselves." This
+is what works of art help to correct: "Behind
+the commonplace, conventional expression that
+both reveals and conceals an individual mental
+state, it is the emotion, the original mood, to
+which they attain in its undefiled essence."</p>
+
+<p>This directness of vision fertilizes thought.
+Without a strong artistic tradition, the life and
+so the politics of a nation sink into a barren
+routine. A country populated by pure logicians
+and mathematical scientists would, I believe, produce
+few inventions. For creation, even of scientific
+truth, is no automatic product of logical thought
+or scientific method, and it has been well said that
+the greatest discoveries in science are brilliant
+guesses on insufficient evidence. A nation must, so
+to speak, live close to its own life, be intimate and
+sympathetic with natural events. That is what
+gives understanding, and justifies the observation
+that the intuitions of scientific discovery and the
+artist's perceptions are closely related. It is perhaps
+not altogether without significance for us
+that primitive science and poetry were indistinguishable.
+Nor is it strange that latter-day research
+should confirm so many sayings of the
+poets. In all great ages art and science have enriched
+each other. It is only eccentric poets and
+narrow specialists who lock the doors. The
+human spirit doesn't grow in sections.</p>
+
+<p>I shall not press the point for it would lead
+us far afield. It is enough that we remember
+the close alliance of art, science and politics in
+Athens, in Florence and Venice at their zenith.
+We in America have divorced them completely:
+both art and politics exist in a condition of unnatural
+celibacy. Is this not a contributing factor
+to the futility and opacity of our political
+thinking? We have handed over the government
+of a nation of people to a set of lawyers, to a
+class of men who deal in the most verbal and
+unreal of all human attainments.</p>
+
+<p>A lively artistic tradition is essential to the
+humanizing of politics. It is the soil in which
+invention flourishes and the organized knowledge
+of science attains its greatest reality. Let me
+illustrate from another field of interests. The
+religious investigations of William James were
+a study, not of ecclesiastical institutions or the
+history of creeds. They were concerned with
+religious experience, of which churches and rituals
+are nothing but the external satisfaction. As
+Graham Wallas is endeavoring to make human
+nature the center of politics, so James made it
+the center of religions. It was a work of genius,
+yet no one would claim that it is a mature
+psychology of the "Varieties of Religious Experience."
+It is rather a survey and a description,
+done with the eye of an artist and the method
+of a scientist. We know from it more of what
+religious feeling is like, even though we remain
+ignorant of its sources. And this intimacy humanizes
+religious controversy and brings ecclesiasticism
+back to men.</p>
+
+<p>Like most of James's psychology, it opens up
+investigation instead of concluding it. In the light
+even of our present knowledge we can see how
+primitive his treatment was. But James's services
+cannot be overestimated: if he did not lay
+even the foundations of a science, he did lay some
+of the foundations for research. It was an immense
+illumination and a warming of interest. It
+threw open the gates to the whole landscape of
+possibilities. It was a ventilation of thought.
+Something similar will have to be done for political
+psychology. We know how far off is the
+profound and precise knowledge we desire. But
+we know too that we have a right to hope for
+an increasing acquaintance with the varieties of
+political experience. It would, of course, be drawn
+from biography, from the human aspect of history
+and daily observation. We should begin to
+know what it is that we ought to know. Such a
+work would be stimulating to politician and psychologist.
+The statesman's imagination would
+be guided and organized; it would give him a
+starting-point for his own understanding of human
+beings in politics. To the scientists it would be
+a challenge--to bring these facts under the light
+of their researches, to extend these researches to
+the borders of those facts.</p>
+
+<p>The statesman has another way of strengthening
+his grip upon the complexity of life. Statistics
+help. This method is neither so conclusive as
+the devotees say, nor so bad as the people who
+are awed by it would like to believe. Voting, as
+Gabriel Tarde points out, is our most conspicuous
+use of statistics. Mystical democrats believe that
+an election expresses the will of the people, and
+that that will is wise. Mystical democrats are
+rare. Looked at closely an election shows the
+quantitative division of the people on several
+alternatives. That choice is not necessarily wise,
+but it is wise to heed that choice. For it is a
+rough estimate of an important part of the community's
+sentiment, and no statecraft can succeed
+that violates it. It is often immensely suggestive
+of what a large number of people are in the future
+going to wish. Democracy, because it registers
+popular feeling, is at least trying to build truly,
+and is for that reason an enlightened form of
+government. So we who are democrats need not
+believe that the people are necessarily right in
+their choice: some of us are always in the minority,
+and not a little proud of the distinction. Voting
+does not extract wisdom from multitudes: its real
+value is to furnish wisdom about multitudes. Our
+faith in democracy has this very solid foundation:
+that no leader's wisdom can be applied unless the
+democracy comes to approve of it. To govern
+a democracy you have to educate it: that contact
+with great masses of men reciprocates by educating
+the leader. "The consent of the governed"
+is more than a safeguard against ignorant tyrants:
+it is an insurance against benevolent despots as
+well. In a rough way and with many exceptions,
+democracy compels law to approximate human
+need. It is a little difficult to see this when you
+live right in the midst of one. But in perspective
+there can be little question that of all governments
+democracy is the most relevant. Only humane
+laws can be successfully enforced; and they
+are the only ones really worth enforcing. Voting
+is a formal method of registering consent.</p>
+
+<p>But all statistical devices are open to abuse and
+require constant correction. Bribery, false counting,
+disfranchisement are the cruder deceptions;
+they correspond to those enrolment statistics of
+a large university which are artificially fed by
+counting the same student several times if his
+courses happen to span two or three of the departments.
+Just as deceptive as plain fraud is
+the deceptive ballot. We all know how when the
+political tricksters were compelled to frame a
+direct primary law in New York they fixed the
+ballot so that it botched the election. Corporations
+have been known to do just that to their
+reports. Did not E. H. Harriman say of a well-known
+statistician that he could make an annual
+report tell any story you pleased? Still subtler
+is the seven-foot ballot of stupid, good intentions--the
+hyperdemocratic ballot in which you are
+asked to vote for the State Printer, and succeed
+only in voting under the party emblem.</p>
+
+<p>Statistics then is no automatic device for
+measuring facts. You and I are forever at the
+mercy of the census-taker and the census-maker.
+That impertinent fellow who goes from house to
+house is one of the real masters of the statistical
+situation. The other is the man who organizes
+the results. For all the conclusions in the end
+rest upon their accuracy, honesty, energy and insight.
+Of course, in an obvious census like that
+of the number of people personal bias counts for
+so little that it is lost in the grand total. But
+the moment you begin inquiries into subjects
+which people prefer to conceal, the weakness of
+statistics becomes obvious. All figures which
+touch upon sexual subjects are nothing but the
+roughest guesses. No one would take a census
+of prostitution, illegitimacy, adultery, or venereal
+disease for a statement of reliable facts. There
+are religious statistics, but who that has traveled
+among men would regard the number of professing
+Christians as any index of the strength of
+Christianity, or the church attendance as a measure
+of devotion? In the supremely important
+subject of literacy, what classification yet devised
+can weigh the culture of masses of people? We
+say that such a percentage of the population cannot
+read or write. But the test of reading and
+writing is crude and clumsy. It is often administered
+by men who are themselves half-educated,
+and it is shot through with racial and class prejudice.</p>
+
+<p>The statistical method is of use only to those
+who have found it out. This is achieved principally
+by absorbing into your thinking a lively
+doubt about all classifications and general terms,
+for they are the basis of statistical measurement.
+That done you are fairly proof against seduction.
+No better popular statement of this is to
+be found than H. G. Wells' little essay: "Skepticism
+of the Instrument." Wells has, of course,
+made no new discovery. The history of philosophy
+is crowded with quarrels as to how seriously
+we ought to take our classifications: a large part
+of the battle about Nominalism turns on this,
+the Empirical and Rational traditions divide on
+it; in our day the attacks of James, Bergson, and
+the "anti-intellectualists" are largely a continuation
+of this old struggle. Wells takes his stand
+very definitely with those who regard classification
+"as serviceable for the practical purposes of
+life" but nevertheless "a departure from the objective
+truth of things."</p>
+
+<p>"Take the word chair," he writes. "When
+one says chair, one thinks vaguely of an average
+chair. But collect individual instances, think of
+armchairs and reading-chairs, and dining-room
+chairs and kitchen chairs, chairs that pass into
+benches, chairs that cross the boundary and become
+settees, dentists' chairs, thrones, opera stalls,
+seats of all sorts, those miraculous fungoid
+growths that cumber the floor of the Arts and
+Crafts Exhibition, and you will perceive what
+a lax bundle in fact is this simple straightforward
+term. In co-operation with an intelligent joiner
+I would undertake to defeat any definition of
+chair or chairishness that you gave me." Think
+then of the glib way in which we speak of "the
+unemployed," "the unfit," "the criminal," "the
+unemployable," and how easily we forget that
+behind these general terms are unique individuals
+with personal histories and varying needs.</p>
+
+<p>Even the most refined statistics are nothing but
+an abstraction. But if that truth is held clearly
+before the mind, the polygons and curves of the
+statisticians can be used as a skeleton to which
+the imagination and our general sense of life give
+some flesh and blood reality. Human statistics
+are illuminating to those who know humanity. I
+would not trust a hermit's inferences about the
+statistics of anything.</p>
+
+<p>It is then no simple formula which answers our
+question. The problem of a human politics is
+not solved by a catch phrase. Criticism, of which
+these essays are a piece, can give the direction we
+must travel. But for the rest there is no smooth
+road built, no swift and sure conveyance at the
+door. We set out as if we knew; we act on the
+notions of man that we possess. Literature refines,
+science deepens, various devices extend it.
+Those who act on the knowledge at hand are the
+men of affairs. And all the while, research studies
+their results, artists express subtler perceptions,
+critics refine and adapt the general culture of the
+times. There is no other way but through this
+vast collaboration.</p>
+
+<p>There is no short cut to civilization. We say
+that the truth will make us free. Yes, but that
+truth is a thousand truths which grow and change.
+Nor do I see a final state of blessedness. The
+world's end will surely find us still engaged in
+answering riddles. This changing focus in politics
+is a tendency at work all through our lives. There
+are many experiments. But the effort is half-conscious;
+only here and there does it rise to a
+deliberate purpose. To make it an avowed ideal--a
+thing of will and intelligence--is to hasten its
+coming, to illumine its blunders, and, by giving it
+self-criticism, to convert mistakes into wisdom.</p>
+
+
+<br><br><br>
+
+<h2><a name="ch5">CHAPTER V</a></h2>
+<h3>WELL MEANING BUT UNMEANING: THE CHICAGO<br />
+VICE REPORT</h3>
+<br>
+
+<p>In casting about for a concrete example to illustrate
+some of the points under discussion I
+hesitated a long time before the wealth of material.
+No age has produced such a multitude of
+elaborate studies, and any selection was, of course,
+a limiting one. The Minority Report of the English
+Poor Law Commission has striking merits
+and defects, but for our purposes it inheres too
+deeply in British conditions. American tariff and
+trust investigations are massive enough in all
+conscience, but they are so partisan in their origin
+and so pathetically unattached to any recognized
+ideal of public policy that it seemed better to look
+elsewhere. Conservation had the virtue of arising
+out of a provident statesmanship, but its
+problems were largely technical.</p>
+
+<p>The real choice narrowed itself finally to the
+Pittsburgh Survey and the Chicago Vice Report.
+Had I been looking for an example of the finest
+expert inquiry, there would have been little question
+that the vivid and intensive study of Pittsburgh's
+industrialism was the example to use. But
+I was looking for something more representative,
+and, therefore, more revealing. I did not want
+a detached study of some specially selected cross-section
+of what is after all not the typical economic
+life of America. The case demanded was
+one in which you could see representative American
+citizens trying to handle a problem which
+had touched their imaginations.</p>
+
+<p>Vice is such a problem. You can always get
+a hearing about it; there is no end of interest
+in the question. Rare indeed is that community
+which has not been "Lexowed," in which a district
+attorney or a minister has not led a crusade.
+Muckraking began with the exposure of vice;
+men like Heney, Lindsey, Folk founded their
+reputations on the fight against it. It would be
+interesting to know how much of the social conscience
+of our time had as its first insight the
+prostitute on the city pavement.</p>
+
+<p>We do not have to force an interest, as we do
+about the trusts, or even about the poor. For
+this problem lies close indeed to the dynamics of
+our own natures. Research is stimulated, actively
+aroused, and a passionate zeal suffuses what is
+perhaps the most spontaneous reform enthusiasm
+of our time. Looked at externally it is a curious
+focusing of attention. Nor is it explained by
+words like "chivalry," "conscience," "social compassion."
+Magazines that will condone a thousand
+cruelties to women gladly publish series of
+articles on the girl who goes wrong; merchants
+who sweat and rack their women employees serve
+gallantly on these commissions. These men are
+not conscious hypocrites. Perhaps like the rest
+of us they are impelled by forces they are not
+eager to examine. I do not press the point. It
+belongs to the analyst of motive.</p>
+
+<p>We need only note the vast interest in the
+subject--that it extends across class lines, and expresses
+itself as an immense good-will. Perhaps
+a largely unconscious absorption in a subject is
+itself a sign of great importance. Surely vice
+has a thousand implications that touch all of us
+directly. It is closely related to most of the interests
+of life--ramifying into industry, into the
+family, health, play, art, religion. The miseries
+it entails are genuine miseries--not points of
+etiquette or infringements of convention. Vice
+issues in pain. The world suffers for it. To
+attack it is to attack as far-reaching and real a
+problem as any that we human beings face.</p>
+
+<p>The Chicago Commission had no simple, easily
+measured problem before it. At the very outset
+the report confesses that an accurate count of the
+number of prostitutes in Chicago could not be
+reached. The police lists are obviously incomplete
+and perhaps corrupt. The whole amorphous
+field of clandestine vice will, of course, defeat any
+census. But even public prostitution is so varied
+that nobody can do better than estimate it roughly.
+This point is worth keeping in mind, for it lights
+up the remedies proposed. What the Commission
+advocates is the constant repression and the
+ultimate annihilation of a mode of life which refuses
+discovery and measurement.</p>
+
+<p>The report estimates that there are five thousand
+women in Chicago who devote their whole
+time to the traffic; that the annual profits in that
+one city alone are between fifteen and sixteen
+million dollars a year. These figures are admittedly
+low for they leave out all consideration
+of occasional, or seasonal, or hidden prostitution.
+It is only the nucleus that can be guessed at; the
+fringe which shades out into various degrees of
+respectability remains entirely unmeasured. Yet
+these suburbs of the Tenderloin must always be
+kept in mind; their population is shifting and
+very elastic; it includes the unsuspected; and I am
+inclined to believe that it is the natural refuge
+of the "suppressed" prostitute. Moreover it defies
+control.</p>
+
+<p>The 1012 women recognized on the police lists
+are of course the most easily studied. From them
+we can gather some hint of the enormous bewildering
+demand that prostitution answers. The
+Commission informs us that this small group alone
+receives over fifteen thousand visits a day--five
+million and a half in the year. Yet these 1012
+women are only about one-fifth of the professional
+prostitutes in Chicago. If the average continues,
+then the figures mount to something over
+27,000,000. The five thousand professionals do
+not begin to represent the whole illicit traffic of
+a city like Chicago. Clandestine and occasional
+vice is beyond all measurement.</p>
+
+<p>The figures I have given are taken from the
+report. They are said to be conservative. For
+the purposes of this discussion we could well
+lower the 27,000,000 by half. All I am concerned
+about is in arriving at a sense of the
+enormity of the impulse behind the "social evil."
+For it is this that the Commission proposes to
+repress, and ultimately to annihilate.</p>
+
+<p>Lust has a thousand avenues. The brothel,
+the flat, the assignation house, the tenement,
+saloons, dance halls, steamers, ice-cream parlors,
+Turkish baths, massage parlors, street-walking--the
+thing has woven itself into the texture of city
+life. Like the hydra, it grows new heads, everywhere.
+It draws into its service the pleasures
+of the city. Entangled with the love of gaiety,
+organized as commerce, it is literally impossible
+to follow the myriad expressions it assumes.</p>
+
+<p>The Commission gives a very fair picture of
+these manifestations. A mass of material is offered
+which does in a way show where and how
+and to what extent lust finds its illicit expression.
+Deeper than this the report does not go. The
+human impulses which create these social conditions,
+the human needs to which they are a sad
+and degraded answer--this human center of the
+problem the commission passes by with a platitude.</p>
+
+<p>"So long as there is lust in the hearts of men,"
+we are told, "it will seek out some method of
+expression. Until the hearts of men are changed
+we can hope for no absolute annihilation of the
+Social Evil." But at the head of the report in
+black-faced type we read:</p>
+
+<p>"Constant and persistent repression of prostitution
+the immediate method; absolute annihilation
+the ultimate ideal."</p>
+
+<p>I am not trying to catch the Commissioners in
+a verbal inconsistency. The inconsistency is real,
+out of a deep-seated confusion of mind. Lust will
+seek an expression, they say, until "the hearts of
+men are changed." All particular expressions are
+evil and must be constantly repressed. Yet though
+you repress one form of lust, it will seek some
+other. Now, says the Commission, in order to
+change the hearts of men, religion and education
+must step in. It is their business to eradicate an
+impulse which is constantly changing form by
+being "suppressed."</p>
+
+<p>There is only one meaning in this: the Commission
+realized vaguely that repression is not
+even the first step to a cure. For reasons worth
+analyzing later, these representative American
+citizens desired both the immediate taboo and
+an ultimate annihilation of vice. So they fell
+into the confusion of making immediate and detailed
+proposals that have nothing to do with the
+attainment of their ideal.</p>
+
+<p>What the commission saw and described were
+the particular forms which a great human impulse
+had assumed at a specific date in a certain
+city. The dynamic force which created these conditions,
+which will continue to create them--lust--they
+refer to in a few pious sentences. Their
+thinking, in short, is perfectly static and literally
+superficial. In outlining a ripple they have forgotten
+the tides.</p>
+
+<p>Had they faced the human sources of their
+problem, had they tried to think of the social evil
+as an answer to a human need, their researches
+would have been different, their remedies fruitful.
+Suppose they had kept in mind their own statement:
+"so long as there is lust in the hearts of
+men it will seek out some method of expression."
+Had they held fast to that, it would have ceased
+to be a platitude and have become a fertile idea.
+For a platitude is generally inert wisdom.</p>
+
+<p>In the sentence I quote the Commissioners had
+an idea which might have animated all their
+labors. But they left it in limbo, they reverenced
+it, and they passed by. Perhaps we can raise it
+again and follow the hints it unfolds.</p>
+
+<p>If lust will seek an expression, are all expressions
+of it necessarily evil? That the kind of
+expression which the Commission describes is evil
+no one will deny. But is it the only possible expression?</p>
+
+<p>If it is, then the taboo enforced by a Morals
+Police is, perhaps, as good a way as any of gaining
+a fictitious sense of activity. But the ideal of
+"annihilation" becomes an irrelevant and meaningless
+phrase. If lust is deeply rooted in men
+and its only expression is evil, I for one should
+recommend a faith in the millennium. You can
+put this Paradise at the beginning of the world
+or the end of it. Practical difference there is
+none.</p>
+
+<p>No one can read the report without coming
+to a definite conviction that the Commission regards
+lust itself as inherently evil. The members
+assumed without criticism the traditional dogma
+of Christianity that sex in any manifestation outside
+of marriage is sinful. But practical sense
+told them that sex cannot be confined within marriage.
+It will find expression--"some method of
+expression" they say. What never occurred to
+them was that it might find a good, a positively
+beneficent method. The utterly uncriticised assumption
+that all expressions not legalized are
+sinful shut them off from any constructive answer
+to their problem. Seeing prostitution or something
+equally bad as the only way sex can find an
+expression they really set before religion and education
+the impossible task of removing lust "from
+the hearts of men." So when their report puts
+at its head that absolute annihilation of prostitution
+is the ultimate ideal, we may well translate
+it into the real intent of the Commission. What
+is to be absolutely annihilated is not alone prostitution,
+not alone all the methods of expression
+which lust seeks out, but lust itself.</p>
+
+<p>That this is what the Commission had in mind
+is supported by plenty of "internal evidence."
+For example: one of the most curious recommendations
+made is about divorce--"The Commission
+condemns the ease with which divorces
+may be obtained in certain States, and recommends
+a stringent, uniform divorce law for all
+States."</p>
+
+<p>What did the Commission have in mind? I
+transcribe the paragraph which deals with divorce:
+"The Vice Commission, after exhaustive
+consideration of the vice question, records itself
+of the opinion that divorce to a large extent is
+a contributory factor to sexual vice. No study of
+this blight upon the social and moral life of the
+country would be comprehensive without consideration
+of the causes which lead to the application
+for divorce. These are too numerous to
+mention at length in such a report as this, but
+the Commission does wish to emphasize the great
+need of more safeguards against the marrying of
+persons physically, mentally and morally unfit to
+take up the responsibilities of family life, including
+the bearing of children."</p>
+
+<p>Now to be sure that paragraph leaves much to
+be desired so far as clearness goes. But I think
+the meaning can be extracted. Divorce is a contributory
+factor to sexual vice. One way presumably
+is that divorced women often become
+prostitutes. That is an evil contribution, unquestionably.
+The second sentence says that no study
+of the social evil is complete which leaves out
+the <i>causes</i> of divorce. One of those causes is,
+I suppose, adultery with a prostitute. This evil
+is totally different from the first: in one case
+divorce contributes to prostitution, in the other,
+prostitution leads to divorce. The third sentence
+urges greater safeguards against undesirable marriages.
+This prudence would obviously reduce
+the need of divorce.</p>
+
+<p>How does the recommendation of a stringent
+and uniform law fit in with these three statements?
+A strict divorce law might be like New
+York's: it would recognize few grounds for a
+decree. One of those grounds, perhaps the chief
+one, would be adultery. I say this unhesitatingly
+for in another place the Commission informs us
+that marriage has in it "the elements of vested
+rights."</p>
+
+<p>A strict divorce law would, of course, diminish
+the number of "divorced women," and perhaps
+keep them out of prostitution. It does fit the
+first statement--in a helpless sort of way. But
+where does the difficulty of divorce affect the
+causes of it? If you bind a man tightly to a
+woman he does not love, and, possibly prevent him
+from marrying one he does love, how do you
+add to his virtue? And if the only way he can
+free himself is by adultery, does not your stringent
+divorce law put a premium upon vice? The third
+sentence would make it difficult for the unfit to
+marry. Better marriages would among other
+blessings require fewer divorces. But what of
+those who are forbidden to marry? They are
+unprovided for. And yet who more than they are
+likely to find desire uncontrollable and seek some
+other "method of expression"? With marriage
+prohibited and prostitution tabooed, the Commission
+has a choice between sterilization and--let
+us say--other methods of expression.</p>
+
+<p>Make marriage difficult, divorce stringent,
+prostitution impossible--is there any doubt that
+the leading idea is to confine the sex impulse
+within the marriage of healthy, intelligent,
+"moral," and monogamous couples? For all the
+other seekings of that impulse what has the Commission
+to offer? Nothing. That can be asserted
+flatly. The Commission hopes to wipe out prostitution.
+But it never hints that the success of
+its plan means vast alterations in our social life.
+The members give the impression that they think
+of prostitution as something that can be subtracted
+from our civilization without changing the
+essential character of its institutions. Yet who
+that has read the report itself and put himself
+into any imaginative understanding of conditions
+can escape seeing that prostitution to-day is organic
+to our industrial life, our marriage sanctions,
+and our social customs? Low wages,
+fatigue, and the wretched monotony of the factory--these
+must go before prostitution can go.
+And behind these stand the facts of woman's entrance
+into industry--facts that have one source
+at least in the general poverty of the family. And
+that poverty is deeply bound up with the economic
+system under which we live. In the man's problem,
+the growing impossibility of early marriages
+is directly related to the business situation. Nor
+can we speak of the degradation of religion and
+the arts, of amusement, of the general morale
+of the people without referring that degradation
+to industrial conditions.</p>
+
+<p>You cannot look at civilization as a row of
+institutions each external to the other. They interpenetrate
+and a change in one affects all the
+others. To abolish prostitution would involve a
+radical alteration of society. Vice in our cities is
+a form of the sexual impulse--one of the forms
+it has taken under prevailing social conditions.
+It is, if you please, like the crops of a rude and
+forbidding soil--a coarse, distorted thing though
+living.</p>
+
+<p>The Commission studied a human problem and
+left humanity out. I do not mean that the members
+weren't deeply touched by the misery of these
+thousands of women. You can pity the poor without
+understanding them; you can have compassion
+without insight. The Commissioners had a good
+deal of sympathy for the prostitute's condition,
+but for that "lust in the hearts of men," and
+women we may add, for that, they had no sympathetic
+understanding. They did not place themselves
+within the impulse. Officially they remained
+external to human desires. For what
+might be called the <i>&eacute;lan vital</i> of the problem they
+had no patience. Certain sad results of the particular
+"method of expression" it had sought out
+in Chicago called forth their pity and their
+horror.</p>
+
+<p>In short, the Commission did not face the
+sexual impulse squarely. The report is an attempt
+to deal with a sexual problem by disregarding
+its source. There are almost a hundred
+recommendations to various authorities--Federal,
+State, county, city, police, educational and others.
+I have attempted to classify these proposals under
+four headings. There are those which mean
+forcible repression of particular manifestations--the
+taboos; there are the recommendations which
+are purely palliative, which aim to abate some of
+the horrors of existing conditions; there are a
+few suggestions for further investigation; and,
+finally, there are the inventions, the plans which
+show some desire to find moral equivalents for
+evil--the really statesmanlike offerings.</p>
+
+<p>The palliative measures we may pass by quickly.
+So long as they do not blind people to the necessity
+for radical treatment, only a doctrinaire
+would object to them. Like all intelligent charities
+they are still a necessary evil. But nothing
+must be staked upon them, so let us turn at once
+to the constructive suggestions: The Commission
+proposes that the county establish a "Permanent
+Committee on Child Protection." It makes no
+attempt to say what that protection shall be, but
+I think it is only fair to let the wish father the
+thought, and regard this as an effort to give
+children a better start in life. The separation of
+delinquent from semi-delinquent girls is a somewhat
+similar attempt to guard the weak. Another
+is the recommendation to the city and the nation
+that it should protect arriving immigrants, and
+if necessary escort them to their homes. This
+surely is a constructive plan which might well be
+enlarged from mere protection to positive hospitality.
+How great a part the desolating loneliness
+of a city plays in seductions the individual
+histories in the report show. Municipal dance
+halls are a splendid proposal. Freed from a cold
+and over-chaperoned respectability they compete
+with the devil. There, at least, is one method of
+sexual expression which may have positively beneficent
+results. A municipal lodging house for
+women is something of a substitute for the
+wretched rented room. A little suggestion to the
+police that they send home children found on the
+streets after nine o'clock has varied possibilities.
+But there is the seed of an invention in it which
+might convert the police from mere agents of repression
+to kindly helpers in the mazes of a city.
+The educational proposals are all constructive:
+the teaching of sex hygiene is guardedly recommended
+for consideration. That is entirely justified,
+for no one can quarrel with a set of men
+for leaving a question open. That girls from
+fourteen to sixteen should receive vocational
+training in continuation schools; that social centers
+should be established in the public schools
+and that the grounds should be open for children--all
+of these are clearly additions to the positive
+resource of the community. So is the suggestion
+that church buildings be used for recreation. The
+call for greater parental responsibility is, I fear,
+a rather empty platitude, for it is not re-enforced
+with anything but an ancient fervor.</p>
+
+<p>How much of this really seeks to create a fine
+expression of the sexual impulse? How many of
+these recommendations see sex as an instinct which
+can be transmuted, and turned into one of the
+values of life? The dance halls, the social centers,
+the playgrounds, the reception of strangers--these
+can become instruments for civilizing
+sexual need. The educational proposals could
+become ways of directing it. They could, but
+will they? Without the habit of mind which sees
+substitution as the essence of statecraft, without a
+philosophy which makes the invention of moral
+equivalents its goal, I for one refuse to see in
+these recommendations anything more than a haphazard
+shooting which has accidentally hit the
+mark. Moreover, I have a deep suspicion that
+I have tried to read into the proposals more than
+the Commission intended. Certainly these constructions
+occupy an insignificant amount of space
+in the body of the report. On all sides of them
+is a mass of taboos. No emotional appeal is
+made for them as there is for the repressions.
+They stand largely unnoticed, and very much undefined--poor
+ghosts of the truth among the
+gibbets.</p>
+
+<p>An inadvertent platitude--that lust will seek
+an expression--and a few diffident proposals for
+a finer environment--the need and its satisfaction:
+had the Commission seen the relation of
+these incipient ideas, animated it, and made it the
+nerve center of the study, a genuine program
+might have resulted. But the two ideas never
+met and fertilized each other. Nothing dynamic
+holds the recommendations together--the mass
+of them are taboos, an attempt to kill each mosquito
+and ignore the marsh. The evils of prostitution
+are seen as a series of episodes, each of
+which must be clubbed, forbidden, raided and
+jailed.</p>
+
+<p>There is a special whack for each mosquito:
+the laws about excursion boats should be enforced;
+the owners should help to enforce them; there
+should be more officers with police power on these
+boats; the sale of liquor to minors should be
+forbidden; gambling devices should be suppressed;
+the midwives, doctors and maternity hospitals
+practicing abortions should be investigated; employment
+agencies should be watched and investigated;
+publishers should be warned against
+printing suspicious advertisements; the law against
+infamous crimes should be made more specific;
+any citizen should have the right to bring equity
+proceedings against a brothel as a public nuisance;
+there should be relentless prosecution of professional
+procurers; there should be constant
+prosecution of the keepers, inmates, and owners
+of bawdy houses; there should be prosecution of
+druggists who sells drugs and "certain appliances"
+illegally; there should be an identification system
+for prostitutes in the state courts; instead of fines,
+prostitutes should be visited with imprisonment
+or adult probation; there should be a penalty for
+sending messenger boys under twenty-one to a
+disorderly house or an unlicensed saloon; the law
+against prostitutes in saloons, against wine-rooms
+and stalls in saloons, against communication between
+saloons and brothels, against dancing in
+saloons--should be strictly enforced; the police
+who enforce these laws should be carefully
+watched, grafters amongst them should be discharged;
+complaints should be investigated at
+once by a man stationed outside the district; the
+pressure of publicity should be brought against
+the brewers to prevent them from doing business
+with saloons that violate the law; the Retail
+Liquor Association should discipline law-breaking
+saloon-keepers: licenses should be permanently revoked
+for violations; no women should be allowed
+in a saloon without a male escort; no professional
+or paid escorts should be permitted; no soliciting
+should be allowed in saloons; no immoral or
+vulgar dances should be permitted in saloons; no
+intoxicating liquor should be allowed at any public
+dance; there should be a municipal detention
+home for women, with probation officers; police
+inspectors who fail to report law-violations should
+be dismissed; assignation houses should be suppressed
+as soon as they are reported; there should
+be a "special morals police squad"; recommendation
+IX "to the Police" says they "should wage
+a relentless warfare against houses of prostitution,
+immoral flats, assignation rooms, call houses,
+and disorderly saloons in all sections of the city";
+parks and playgrounds should be more thoroughly
+policed; dancing pavilions should exclude professional
+prostitutes; soliciting in parks should
+be suppressed; parks should be lighted with a
+searchlight; there should be no seats in the
+shadows....</p>
+
+<p>To perform that staggering list of things that
+"should" be done you find--what?--the police
+power, federal, state, municipal. Note how
+vague and general are the chance constructive suggestions;
+how precise and definite the taboos.
+Surely I am not misstating its position when I say
+that forcible suppression was the creed of this
+Commission. Nor is there any need of insisting
+again that the ultimate ideal of annihilating prostitution
+has nothing to expect from the concrete
+proposals that were made. The millennial goal
+was one thing; the immediate method quite another.
+For ideals, a pious phrase; in practice, the
+police.</p>
+
+<p>Are we not told that "if the citizens cannot
+depend upon the men appointed to protect their
+property, and to maintain order, then chaos and
+disorganization resulting in vice and crime must
+follow?" Yet of all the reeds that civilization
+leans upon, surely the police is the frailest. Anyone
+who has had the smallest experience of
+municipal politics knows that the corruption of
+the police is directly proportionate to the severity
+of the taboos it is asked to enforce. Tom Johnson
+saw this as Mayor of Cleveland; he knew that
+strict law enforcement against saloons, brothels,
+and gambling houses would not stop vice, but would
+corrupt the police. I recommend the recent spectacle
+in New York where the most sensational
+raider of gambling houses has turned out to be
+in crooked alliance with the gamblers. And I
+suggest as a hint that the Commission's recommendations
+enforced for one year will lay the
+foundation of an organized system of blackmail
+and "protection," secrecy and underground
+chicanery, the like of which Chicago has not yet
+seen. But the Commission need only have read
+its own report, have studied its own cases. There
+is an illuminating chapter on "The Social Evil
+and the Police." In the summary, the Commission
+says that "officers on the beat are bold and
+open in their neglect of duty, drinking in saloons
+while in uniform, ignoring the solicitations by
+prostitutes in rear rooms and on the streets, selling
+tickets at dances frequented by professional
+and semi-professional prostitutes; protecting
+'cadets,' prostitutes and saloon-keepers of disorderly
+places."</p>
+
+<p>Some suspicion that the police could not carry
+the burden of suppressing the social evil must have
+dawned on the Commission.</p>
+
+<p>It felt the need of re-enforcement. Hence the
+special morals police squad; hence the investigation
+of the police of one district by the police
+from another; and hence, in type as black as that
+of the ideal itself and directly beneath it, the
+call for "the appointment of a morals commission"
+and "the establishment of a morals court."
+Now this commission consists of the Health
+Officer, a physician and three citizens who serve
+without pay. It is appointed by the Mayor and
+approved by the City Council. Its business is to
+prosecute vice and to help enforce the law.</p>
+
+<p>Just what would happen if the Morals Commission
+didn't prosecute hard enough I do not
+know. Conceivably the Governor might be induced
+to appoint a Commission on Moral Commissions
+in Cities. But why the men and women
+who framed the report made this particular recommendation
+is an interesting question. With
+federal, state, and municipal authorities in existence,
+with courts, district attorneys, police all
+operating, they create another arm of prosecution.
+Possibly they were somewhat disillusioned
+about the present instruments of the taboo; perhaps
+they imagined that a new broom would
+sweep clean. But I suspect an inner reason. The
+Commission may have imagined that the four
+appointees--unpaid--would be four men like
+themselves--who knows, perhaps four men from
+among themselves? The whole tenor of their
+thinking is to set somebody watching everybody
+and somebody else to watching him. What is
+more natural than that they should be the Ultimate
+Watchers?</p>
+
+<p>Spying, informing, constant investigations of
+everybody and everything must become the rule
+where there is a forcible attempt to moralize
+society from the top. Nobody's heart is in the
+work very long; nobody's but those fanatical and
+morbid guardians of morality who make it a
+life's specialty. The aroused public opinion which
+the Commission asks for cannot be held if all it
+has to fix upon is an elaborate series of taboos.
+Sensational disclosures will often make the public
+flare up spasmodically; but the mass of men is
+soon bored by intricate rules and tangles of red
+tape; the "crusade" is looked upon as a melodrama
+of real life--interesting, but easily forgotten.</p>
+
+<p>The method proposed ignores the human
+source: by a kind of poetic justice the great
+crowd of men will ignore the method. If you
+want to impose a taboo upon a whole community,
+you must do it autocratically, you must make it
+part of the prevailing superstitions. You must
+never let it reach any public analysis. For it
+will fail, it will receive only a shallow support
+from what we call an "enlightened public
+opinion." That opinion is largely determined by
+the real impulses of men; and genuine character
+rejects or at least rebels against foreign, unnatural
+impositions. This is one of the great
+virtues of democracy--that it makes alien laws
+more and more difficult to enforce. The tyrant
+can use the taboo a thousand times more effectively
+than the citizens of a republic. When he
+speaks, it is with a prestige that dumbs questioning
+and makes obedience a habit. Let that infallibility
+come to be doubted, as in Russia to-day,
+and natural impulses reassert themselves, the
+great impositions begin to weaken. The methods
+of the Chicago Commission would require a
+tyranny, a powerful, centralized sovereignty
+which could command with majesty and silence the
+rebel. In our shirt-sleeved republic no such
+power exists. The strongest force we have is
+that of organized money, and that sovereignty is
+too closely connected with the social evil, too dependent
+upon it in a hundred different ways, to
+undertake the task of suppression.</p>
+
+<p>For the purposes of the Commission democracy
+is an inefficient weapon. Nothing but disappointment
+is in store for men who expect a people to
+outrage its own character. A large part of the
+unfaith in democracy, of the desire to ignore
+"the mob," limit the franchise, and confine power
+to the few is the result of an unsuccessful attempt
+to make republics act like old-fashioned
+monarchies. Almost every "crusade" leaves behind
+it a trail of yearning royalists; many "good-government"
+clubs are little would-be oligarchies.</p>
+
+<p>When the mass of men emerged from slavish
+obedience and made democracy inevitable, the
+taboo entered upon its final illness. For the more
+self-governing a people becomes, the less possible
+it is to prescribe external restrictions. The gap
+between want and ought, between nature and
+ideals cannot be maintained. The only practical
+ideals in a democracy are a fine expression of
+natural wants. This happens to be a thoroughly
+Greek attitude. But I learned it first from the
+Bowery. Chuck Connors is reported to have said
+that "a gentleman is a bloke as can do whatever
+he wants to do." If Chuck said that, he went
+straight to the heart of that democratic morality
+on which a new statecraft must ultimately rest.
+His gentleman is not the battlefield of wants and
+prohibitions; in him impulses flow freely through
+beneficent channels.</p>
+
+<p>The same notion lies imbedded in the phrase:
+"government must serve the people." That
+means a good deal more than that elected officials
+must rule for the majority. For the majority in
+these semi-democratic times is often as not a
+cloak for the ruling oligarchy. Representatives
+who "serve" some majorities may in reality order
+the nation about. To serve the people means
+to provide it with services--with clean streets and
+water, with education, with opportunity, with
+beneficent channels for its desires, with moral
+equivalents for evil. The task is turned from
+the damming and restricting of wants to the creation
+of fine environments for them. And the
+environment of an impulse extends all the way
+from the human body, through family life and
+education out into the streets of the city.</p>
+
+<p>Had the Commission worked along democratic
+lines, we should have had recommendations about
+the hygiene and early training of children, their
+education, the houses they live in and the streets
+in which they play; changes would have been suggested
+in the industrial conditions they face; plans
+would have been drawn for recreation; hints
+would have been collected for transmuting the
+sex impulse into art, into social endeavor, into
+religion. That is the constructive approach to
+the problem. I note that the Commission calls
+upon the churches for help. Its obvious intention
+was to down sex with religion. What was not
+realized, it seems, is that this very sex impulse,
+so largely degraded into vice, is the dynamic force
+in religious feeling. One need not call in the testimony
+of the psychologists, the students of religion,
+the &aelig;stheticians or even of Plato, who in
+the "Symposium" traced out the hierarchy of love
+from the body to the "whole sea of beauty."
+Jane Addams in Chicago has tested the truth by
+her own wide experience, and she has written
+what the Commission might easily have read,--that
+"in failing to diffuse and utilize this fundamental
+instinct of sex through the imagination, we
+not only inadvertently foster vice and enervation,
+but we throw away one of the most precious implements
+for ministering to life's highest needs.
+There is no doubt that this ill-adjusted function
+consumes quite unnecessarily vast stores of vital
+energy, even when we contemplate it in its immature
+manifestations which are infinitely more
+wholesome than the dumb swamping process. All
+high school boys and girls know the difference between
+the concentration and the diffusion of this
+impulse, although they would be hopelessly bewildered
+by the use of terms. They will declare
+one of their companions to be 'in love' if his
+fancy is occupied by the image of a single person
+about whom all the new-found values gather, and
+without whom his solitude is an eternal melancholy.
+But if the stimulus does not appear as a
+definite image, and the values evoked are dispensed
+over the world, the young person suddenly
+seems to have discovered a beauty and significance
+in many things--he responds to poetry, he becomes
+a lover of nature, he is filled with religious
+devotion or with philanthropic zeal. Experience,
+with young people, easily illustrates the possibility
+and value of diffusion."</p>
+
+<p>It is then not only impossible to confine sex to
+mere reproduction; it would be a stupid denial of
+the finest values of civilization. Having seen that
+the impulse is a necessary part of character, we
+must not hold to it grudgingly as a necessary evil.
+It is, on the contrary, the very source of good.
+Whoever has visited Hull House can see for himself
+the earnest effort Miss Addams has made to
+treat sex with dignity and joy. For Hull House
+differs from most settlements in that it is full of
+pictures, of color, and of curios. The atmosphere
+is light; you feel none of that moral oppression
+which hangs over the usual settlement as over a
+gathering of missionaries. Miss Addams has not
+only made Hull House a beautiful place; she has
+stocked it with curious and interesting objects.
+The theater, the museum, the crafts and the arts,
+games and dances--they are some of those "other
+methods of expression which lust can seek." It
+is no accident that Hull House is the most successful
+settlement in America.</p>
+
+<p>Yet who does not feel its isolation in that
+brutal city? A little Athens in a vast barbarism--you
+wonder how much of Chicago Hull House
+can civilize. As you walk those grim streets and
+look into the stifling houses, or picture the relentless
+stockyards, the conviction that vice and
+its misery cannot be transmuted by policemen and
+Morals Commissions, the feeling that spying and
+inspecting and prosecuting will not drain the
+marsh becomes a certainty. You want to shout
+at the forcible moralizer: "so long as you acquiesce
+in the degradation of your city, so long
+as work remains nothing but ill-paid drudgery
+and every instinct of joy is mocked by dirt and
+cheapness and brutality,--just so long will your
+efforts be fruitless, yes even though you raid and
+prosecute, even though you make Comstock the
+Czar of Chicago."</p>
+
+<p>But Hull House cannot remake Chicago. A
+few hundred lives can be changed, and for the
+rest it is a guide to the imagination. Like all
+utopias, it cannot succeed, but it may point the
+way to success. If Hull House is unable to civilize
+Chicago, it at least shows Chicago and
+America what a civilization might be like.
+Friendly, where our cities are friendless, beautiful,
+where they are ugly; sociable and open, where
+our daily life is furtive; work a craft; art a participation--it
+is in miniature the goal of statesmanship.
+If Chicago were like Hull House, we
+say to ourselves, then vice would be no problem--it
+would dwindle, what was left would be the
+Falstaff in us all, and only a spiritual anemia
+could worry over that jolly and redeeming coarseness.</p>
+
+<p>What stands between Chicago and civilization?
+No one can doubt that to abolish prostitution
+means to abolish the slum and the dirty
+alley, to stop overwork, underpay, the sweating
+and the torturing monotony of business, to
+breathe a new life into education, ventilate society
+with frankness, and fill life with play and art,
+with games, with passions which hold and suffuse
+the imagination.</p>
+
+<p>It is a revolutionary task, and like all real revolutions
+it will not be done in a day or a decade
+because someone orders it to be done. A change
+in the whole quality of life is something that
+neither the policeman's club nor an insurrectionary
+raid can achieve. If you want a revolution
+that shall really matter in human life--and what
+sane man can help desiring it?--you must look to
+the infinitely complicated results of the dynamic
+movements in society. These revolutions require
+a rare combination of personal audacity and social
+patience. The best agents of such a revolution
+are men who are bold in their plans because
+they realize how deep and enormous is the task.</p>
+
+<p>Many people have sought an analogy in our
+Civil War. They have said that as "black slavery"
+went, so must "white slavery." In the
+various agitations of vigilance committees and
+alliances for the suppression of the traffic they
+profess to see continued a work which the abolitionists
+began.</p>
+
+<p>In A. M. Simons' brilliant book on "Social
+Forces in American History" much help can be
+found. For example: "Massachusetts abolished
+slavery at an early date, and we have it on the
+authority of John Adams that:--'argument
+might have had some weight in the abolition of
+slavery in Massachusetts, but the real cause was
+the multiplication of laboring white people, who
+would not longer suffer the rich to employ these
+sable rivals so much to their injury.'" No one
+to-day doubts that white labor in the North and
+slavery in the South were not due to the moral
+superiority of the North. Yet just in the North
+we find the abolition sentiment strongest. That
+the Civil War was not a clash of good men and
+bad men is admitted by every reputable historian.
+The war did not come when moral fervor had
+risen to the exploding point; the moral fervor
+came rather when the economic interests of the
+South collided with those of the North. That
+the abolitionists clarified the economic interests of
+the North and gave them an ideal sanction is true
+enough. But the fact remains that by 1860 some
+of the aspirations of Phillips and Garrison had
+become the economic destiny of this country.</p>
+
+<p>You can have a Hull House established by private
+initiative and maintained by individual
+genius, just as you had planters who freed their
+slaves or as you have employers to-day who humanize
+their factories. But the fine example is
+not readily imitated when industrial forces fight
+against it. So even if the Commission had drawn
+splendid plans for housing, work conditions, education,
+and play it would have done only part of
+the task of statesmanship. We should then know
+what to do, but not how to get it done.</p>
+
+<p>An ideal suspended in a vacuum is ineffective:
+it must point a dynamic current. Only then does
+it gather power, only then does it enter into life.
+That forces exist to-day which carry with them
+solutions is evident to anyone who has watched
+the labor movement and the woman's awakening.
+Even the interests of business give power to the
+cause. The discovery of manufacturers that degradation
+spoils industrial efficiency must not be
+cast aside by the radical because the motive is
+larger profits. The discovery, whatever the motive,
+will inevitably humanize industry a good
+deal. For it happens that in this case the interests
+of capitalism and of humanity coincide. A
+propaganda like the single-tax will undoubtedly
+find increasing support among business men.
+They see in it a relief from the burden of rent
+imposed by that older tyrant--the landlord. But
+the taxation of unimproved property happens at
+the same time to be a splendid weapon against the
+slum.</p>
+
+<p>Only when the abolition of "white slavery" becomes
+part of the social currents of the time will
+it bear any interesting analogy to the so-called
+freeing of the slaves. Even then for many enthusiasts
+the comparison is misleading. They are
+likely to regard the Emancipation Proclamation
+as the end of chattel slavery. It wasn't. That
+historic document broke a legal bond but not a
+social one. The process of negro emancipation is
+infinitely slower and it is not accomplished yet.
+Likewise no statute can end "white slavery."
+Only vast and complicated changes in the whole
+texture of social life will achieve such an end. If
+by some magic every taboo of the commission
+could be enforced the abolition of sex slavery
+would not have come one step nearer to reality.
+Cities and factories, schools and homes, theaters
+and games, manners and thought will have to be
+transformed before sex can find a better expression.
+Living forces, not statutes or clubs, must
+work that change. The power of emancipation is
+in the social movements which alone can effect
+any deep reform in a nation. So it is and has
+been with the negro. I do not think the Abolitionists
+saw facts truly when they disbanded their
+organization a few years after the civil war.
+They found too much comfort in a change of
+legal status. Profound economic forces brought
+about the beginning of the end of chattel slavery.
+But the reality of freedom was not achieved by
+proclamation. For that the revolution had to go
+on: the industrial life of the nation had to change
+its character, social customs had to be replaced,
+the whole outlook of men had to be transformed.
+And whether it is negro slavery or a vicious sexual
+bondage, the actual advance comes from substitutions
+injected into society by dynamic social forces.</p>
+
+<p>I do not wish to press the analogy or over-emphasize
+the particular problems. I am not engaged
+in drawing up the plans for a reconstruction
+or in telling just what should be done. Only
+the co-operation of expert minds can do that.
+The place for a special propaganda is elsewhere.
+If these essays succeed in suggesting a method of
+looking at politics, if they draw attention to what
+is real in social reforms and make somewhat more
+evident the traps and the blind-alleys of an uncritical
+approach, they will have done their work.
+That the report of the Chicago Vice Commission
+figures so prominently in this chapter is not due
+to any preoccupation with Chicago, the Commission
+or with vice. It is a text and nothing else.
+The report happens to embody what I conceive
+to be most of the faults of a political method now
+decadent. Its failure to put human impulses at
+the center of thought produced remedies valueless
+to human nature; its false interest in a particular
+expression of sex--vice--caused it to
+taboo the civilizing power of sex; its inability to
+see that wants require fine satisfactions and not
+prohibitions drove it into an undemocratic
+tyranny; its blindness to the social forces of our
+age shut off the motive power for any reform.</p>
+
+<p>The Commission's method was poor, not its
+intentions. It was an average body of American
+citizens aroused to action by an obvious evil. But
+something slipped in to falsify vision. It was, I
+believe, an array of idols disguised as ideals.
+They are typical American idols, and they deserve
+some study.</p>
+
+<br><br><br>
+
+
+<h2><a name="ch6">CHAPTER VI</a></h2>
+
+<h3>SOME NECESSARY ICONOCLASM</h3>
+<br>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The Commission "has kept constantly in mind
+that to offer a contribution of any value such an
+offering must be, first, moral; second, reasonable
+and practical; third, possible under the Constitutional
+powers of our Courts; fourth, that which
+will square with the public conscience of the
+American people."--The Vice Commission of
+Chicago--Introduction to Report on the Social
+Evil.</p></div>
+<br>
+
+<p>Having adjusted such spectacles the Commission
+proceeded to look at "this curse
+which is more blasting than any plague or epidemic,"
+at an evil "which spells only ruin to the
+race." In dealing with what it regards as the
+greatest calamity in the world, a calamity as old
+as civilization, the Commission lays it down beforehand
+that the remedy must be "moral," constitutional,
+and satisfactory to the public conscience.
+I wonder in all seriousness what the
+Commission would have done had it discovered
+a genuine cure for prostitution which happened,
+let us say, to conflict with the constitutional powers
+of our courts. I wonder how the Commission
+would have acted if a humble following of the
+facts had led them to a conviction out of tune
+with the existing public conscience of America.
+Such a conflict is not only possible; it is highly
+probable. When you come to think of it, the
+conflict appears a certainty. For the Constitution
+is a legal expression of the conditions under which
+prostitution has flourished; the social evil is
+rooted in institutions and manners which have
+promoted it, in property relations and business
+practice which have gathered about them a halo
+of reason and practicality, of morality and conscience.
+Any change so vast as the abolition of
+vice is of necessity a change in morals, practice,
+law and conscience.</p>
+
+<p>A scientist who began an investigation by saying
+that his results must be moral or constitutional
+would be a joke. We have had scientists like
+that, men who insisted that research must confirm
+the Biblical theory of creation. We have
+had economists who set out with the preconceived
+idea of justifying the factory system. The world
+has recently begun to see through this kind of intellectual
+fraud. If a doctor should appear who
+offered a cure for tuberculosis on the ground that
+it was justified by the Bible and that it conformed
+to the opinions of that great mass of the American
+people who believe that fresh air is the devil,
+we should promptly lock up that doctor as a dangerous
+quack. When the negroes of Kansas were
+said to be taking pink pills to guard themselves
+against Halley's Comet, they were doing something
+which appeared to them as eminently practical
+and entirely reasonable. Not long ago we
+read of the savage way in which a leper was
+treated out West; his leprosy was not regarded
+as a disease, but as the curse of God, and, if I
+remember correctly, the Bible was quoted in court
+as an authority on leprosy. The treatment seemed
+entirely moral and squared very well with the conscience
+of that community.</p>
+
+<p>I have heard reputable physicians condemn a
+certain method of psychotherapy because it was
+"immoral." A woman once told me that she had
+let her son grow up ignorant of his sexual life
+because "a mother should never mention anything
+'embarrassing' to her child." Many of us are
+still blushing for the way America treated Gorki
+when it found that Russian morals did not square
+with the public conscience of America. And the
+time is not yet passed when we punish the offspring
+of illicit love, and visit vengeance unto the
+third and fourth generations. One reads in the
+report of the Vice Commission that many public
+hospitals in Chicago refuse to care for venereal
+diseases. The examples are endless. They run
+from the absurd to the monstrous. But always
+the source is the same. Idols are set up to which
+all the living must bow; we decide beforehand
+that things must fit a few preconceived ideas. And
+when they don't, which is most of the time, we
+deny truth, falsify facts, and prefer the coddling
+of our theory to any deeper understanding of the
+real problem before us.</p>
+
+<p>It seems as if a theory were never so active as
+when the reality behind it has disappeared. The
+empty name, the ghostly phrase, exercise an authority
+that is appalling. When you think of the
+blood that has been shed in the name of Jesus,
+when you think of the Holy Roman Empire,
+"neither holy nor Roman nor imperial," of the
+constitutional phrases that cloak all sorts of thievery,
+of the common law precedents that tyrannize
+over us, history begins to look almost like the
+struggle of man to emancipate himself from
+phrase-worship. The devil can quote Scripture,
+and law, and morality and reason and practicality.
+The devil can use the public conscience of his
+time. He does in wars, in racial and religious
+persecutions; he did in the Spain of the Inquisition;
+he does in the American lynching.</p>
+
+<p>For there is nothing so bad but it can masquerade
+as moral. Conquerors have gone forth with
+the blessing of popes; a nation invokes its God
+before beginning a campaign of murder, rape and
+pillage. The ruthless exploitation of India becomes
+the civilizing fulfilment of the "white man's
+burden"; not infrequently the missionary, drummer,
+and prospector are embodied in one man.
+In the nineteenth century church, press and university
+devoted no inconsiderable part of their
+time to proving the high moral and scientific justice
+of child labor and human sweating. It is a
+matter of record that chattel slavery in this country
+was deduced from Biblical injunction, that the
+universities furnished brains for its defense.
+Surely Bernard Shaw was not describing the Englishman
+alone when he said in "The Man of Destiny"
+that "... you will never find an
+Englishman in the wrong. He does everything
+on principle. He fights you on patriotic principles;
+he robs you on business principles...."</p>
+
+<p>Liberty, equality, fraternity--what a grotesque
+career those words have had. Almost every attempt
+to mitigate the hardships of industrialism
+has had to deal with the bogey of liberty. Labor
+organization, factory laws, health regulations are
+still fought as infringements of liberty. And in
+the name of equality what fantasies of taxation
+have we not woven? what travesties of justice set
+up? "The law in its majestic equality," writes
+Anatole France, "forbids the rich as well as the
+poor to sleep in the streets and to steal bread."
+Fraternity becomes the hypocritical slogan by
+which we refuse to enact what is called "class
+legislation"--a policy which in theory denies the
+existence of classes, in practice legislates in favor
+of the rich. The laws which go unchallenged
+are laws friendly to business; class legislation
+means working-class legislation.</p>
+
+<p>You have to go among lawyers to see this idolatrous
+process in its most perfect form. When a
+judge sets out to "interpret" the Constitution,
+what is it that he does? He takes a sentence
+written by a group of men more than a hundred
+years ago. That sentence expressed their policy
+about certain conditions which they had to deal
+with. In it was summed up what they intended
+to do about the problems they saw. That is all
+the sentence means. But in the course of a century
+new problems arise--problems the Fathers
+could no more have foreseen than we can foresee
+the problems of the year two thousand. Yet that
+sentence which contained their wisdom about particular
+events has acquired an emotional force
+which persists long after the events have passed
+away. Legends gather about the men who wrote
+it: those legends are absorbed by us almost with
+our mothers' milk. We never again read that
+sentence straight. It has a gravity out of all proportion
+to its use, and we call it a fundamental
+principle of government. Whatever we want to
+do is hallowed and justified, if it can be made to
+appear as a deduction from that sentence. To
+put new wine in old bottles is one of the aims of
+legal casuistry.</p>
+
+<p>Reformers practice it. You hear it said that
+the initiative and referendum are a return to the
+New England town meeting. That is supposed
+to be an argument for direct legislation. But
+surely the analogy is superficial; the difference
+profound. The infinitely greater complexity of
+legislation to-day, the vast confusion in the aims
+of the voting population, produce a difference of
+so great a degree that it amounts to a difference
+in kind. The naturalist may classify the dog and
+the fox, the house-cat and the tiger together for
+certain purposes. The historian of political forms
+may see in the town meeting a forerunner of direct
+legislation. But no housewife dare classify
+the cat and the tiger, the dog and the fox, as the
+same kind of animal. And no statesman can
+argue the virtues of the referendum from the successes
+of the town meeting.</p>
+
+<p>But the propagandists do it nevertheless, and
+their propaganda thrives upon it. The reason is
+simple. The town meeting is an obviously respectable
+institution, glorified by all the reverence
+men give to the dead. It has acquired the seal of
+an admired past, and any proposal that can borrow
+that seal can borrow that reverence too. A
+name trails behind it an army of associations.
+That army will fight in any cause that bears the
+name. So the reformers of California, the Lorimerites
+of Chicago, and the Barnes Republicans
+of Albany all use the name of Lincoln for their
+political associations. In the struggle that preceded
+the Republican Convention of 1912 it was
+rumored that the Taft reactionaries would put
+forward Lincoln's son as chairman of the convention
+in order to counteract Roosevelt's claim that
+he stood in Lincoln's shoes.</p>
+
+<p>Casuistry is nothing but the injection of your
+own meaning into an old name. At school when
+the teacher asked us whether we had studied the
+lesson, the invariable answer was Yes. We had
+indeed stared at the page for a few minutes, and
+that could be called studying. Sometimes the
+head-master would break into the room just in
+time to see the conclusion of a scuffle. Jimmy's
+clothes are white with dust. "Johnny, did you
+throw chalk at Jimmy?" "No, sir," says Johnny,
+and then under his breath to placate God's penchant
+for truth, "I threw the chalk-eraser." Once
+in Portland, Maine, I ordered iced tea at an hotel.
+The waitress brought me a glass of yellowish
+liquid with a two-inch collar of foam at the top.
+No tea I had ever seen outside of a prohibition
+state looked like that. Though it was tea, it
+might have been beer. Perhaps if I had smiled
+or winked in ordering the tea, it would have been
+beer. The two looked alike in Portland; they
+were interchangeable. You could drink tea and
+fool yourself into thinking it was beer. You
+could drink beer and pass for a tea-toper.</p>
+
+<p>It is rare, I think, that the fraud is so genial
+and so deliberate. The openness cleanses it. Advertising,
+for example, would be nothing but gigantic
+and systematic lying if almost everybody
+didn't know that it was. Yet it runs into the sinister
+all the time. The pure food agitation is
+largely an effort to make the label and the contents
+tell the same story. It was noteworthy
+that, following the discovery of salvarsan or
+"606" by Dr. Ehrlich, the quack doctors began
+to call their treatments "606." But the deliberate
+casuistry of lawyers, quacks, or politicians is
+not so difficult to deal with. The very deliberation
+makes it easier to detect, for it is generally
+awkward. What one man can consciously devise,
+other men can understand.</p>
+
+<p>But unconscious casuistry deceives us all. No
+one escapes it entirely. A wealth of evidence
+could be adduced to support this from the studies
+of dreams and fantasies made by the Freudian
+school of psychologists. They have shown how
+constantly the mind cloaks a deep meaning in a
+shallow incident--how the superficial is all the
+time being shoved into the light of consciousness
+in order to conceal a buried intention; how inveterate
+is our use of symbols.</p>
+
+<p>Between ourselves and our real natures we interpose
+that wax figure of idealizations and selections
+which we call our character. We extend
+this into all our thinking. Between us and the
+realities of social life we build up a mass of generalizations,
+abstract ideas, ancient glories, and
+personal wishes. They simplify and soften experience.
+It is so much easier to talk of poverty
+than to think of the poor, to argue the rights of
+capital than to see its results. Pretty soon we
+come to think of the theories and abstract ideas
+as things in themselves. We worry about their
+fate and forget their original content.</p>
+
+<p>For words, theories, symbols, slogans, abstractions
+of all kinds are nothing but the porous vessels
+into which life flows, is contained for a time,
+and then passes through. But our reverence
+clings to the vessels. The old meaning may have
+disappeared, a new one come in--no matter, we
+try to believe there has been no change. And
+when life's expansion demands some new container,
+nothing is more difficult than the realization
+that the old vessels cannot be stretched to the
+present need.</p>
+
+<p>It is interesting to notice how in the very act of
+analyzing it I have fallen into this curious and
+ancient habit. My point is that the metaphor is
+taken for the reality: I have used at least six
+metaphors to state it. Abstractions are not
+cloaks, nor wax figures, nor walls, nor vessels, and
+life doesn't flow like water. What they really are
+you and I know inwardly by using abstractions
+and living our lives. But once I attempt to give
+that inwardness expression, I must use the only
+weapons I have--abstractions, theories, phrases.
+By an effort of the sympathetic imagination you
+can revive within yourself something of my inward
+sense. As I have had to abstract from life
+in order to communicate, so you are compelled to
+animate my abstractions, in order to understand.</p>
+
+<p>I know of no other method of communication
+between two people. Language is always grossly
+inadequate. It is inadequate if the listener is
+merely passive, if he falls into the mistake of the
+literal-minded who expect words to contain a precise
+image of reality. They never do. All language
+can achieve is to act as a guidepost to the
+imagination enabling the reader to recreate the
+author's insight. The artist does that: he controls
+his medium so that we come most readily
+to the heart of his intention. In the lyric poet the
+control is often so delicate that the hearer lives
+over again the finely shaded mood of the poet.
+Take the words of a lyric for what they say, and
+they say nothing most of the time. And that is
+true of philosophers. You must penetrate the
+ponderous vocabulary, the professional cant to
+the insight beneath or you scoff at the mountain
+ranges of words and phrases. It is this that
+Bergson means when he tells us that a philosopher's
+intuition always outlasts his system. Unless
+you get at that you remain forever foreign to
+the thinker.</p>
+
+<p>That too is why debating is such a wretched
+amusement and most partisanship, most controversy,
+so degrading. The trick here is to argue
+from the opponent's language, never from his insight.
+You take him literally, you pick up his
+sentences, and you show what nonsense they are.
+You do not try to weigh what you see against
+what he sees; you contrast what you see with what
+he says. So debating becomes a way of confirming
+your own prejudices; it is never, never in any
+debate I have suffered through, a search for understanding
+from the angles of two differing insights.</p>
+
+<p>And, of course, in those more sinister forms of
+debating, court trials, where the stakes are so
+much bigger, the skill of a successful lawyer is to
+make the atmosphere as opaque as possible to the
+other lawyer's contention. Men have been
+hanged as a result. How often in a political campaign
+does a candidate suggest that behind the
+platforms and speeches of his opponents there
+might be some new and valuable understanding
+of the country's need?</p>
+
+<p>The fact is that we argue and quarrel an
+enormous lot over words. Our prevailing habit
+is to think about phrases, "ideals," theories, not
+about the realities they express. In controversy
+we do not try to find our opponent's meaning:
+we examine his vocabulary. And in our own efforts
+to shape policies we do not seek out what is
+worth doing: we seek out what will pass for
+moral, practical, popular or constitutional.</p>
+
+<p>In this the Vice Commission reflected our national
+habits. For those earnest men and women
+in Chicago did not set out to find a way of abolishing
+prostitution; they set out to find a way that
+would conform to four idols they worshiped.
+The only cure for prostitution might prove to be
+"immoral," "impractical," unconstitutional, and
+unpopular. I suspect that it is. But the honest
+thing to do would have been to look for that
+cure without preconceived notions. Having found
+it, the Commission could then have said to the
+public: "This is what will cure the social evil. It
+means these changes in industry, sex relations, law
+and public opinion. If you think it is worth the
+cost you can begin to deal with the problem. If
+you don't, then confess that you will not abolish
+prostitution, and turn your compassion to softening
+its effects."</p>
+
+<p>That would have left the issues clear and
+wholesome. But the procedure of the Commission
+is a blow to honest thinking. Its conclusions
+may "square with the public conscience of the
+American people" but they will not square with
+the intellectual conscience of anybody. To tell
+you at the top of the page that absolute annihilation
+of prostitution is the ultimate ideal and
+twenty lines further on that the method must be
+constitutional is nothing less than an insult to the
+intelligence. Calf-worship was never more idolatrous
+than this. Truth would have slept more
+comfortably in Procrustes' bed.</p>
+
+<p>Let no one imagine that I take the four preconceived
+ideas of the Commission too seriously. On
+the first reading of the report they aroused no
+more interest in me than the ordinary lip-honor
+we all do to conventionality--I had heard of the
+great fearlessness of this report, and I supposed
+that this bending of the knee was nothing but the
+innocent hypocrisy of the reformer who wants to
+make his proposal not too shocking. But it was
+a mistake. Those four idols really dominated the
+minds of the Commission, and without them the
+report cannot be understood. They are typical
+idols of the American people. This report offers
+an opportunity to see the concrete results of worshiping
+them.</p>
+
+<p>A valuable contribution, then, must be <i>moral</i>.
+There is no doubt that the Commission means
+sexually moral. We Americans always use the
+word in that limited sense. If you say that Jones
+is a moral man you mean that he is faithful to
+his wife. He may support her by selling pink
+pills; he is nevertheless moral if he is monogamous.
+The average American rarely speaks of industrial
+piracy as immoral. He may condemn it,
+but not with that word. If he extends the meaning
+of immoral at all, it is to the vices most
+closely allied to sex--drink and gambling.</p>
+
+<p>Now sexual morality is pretty clearly defined
+for the Commission. As we have seen, it means
+that sex must be confined to procreation by a
+healthy, intelligent and strictly monogamous
+couple. All other sexual expression would come
+under the ban of disapproval. I am sure I do
+the Commission no injustice. Now this limited
+conception of sex has had a disastrous effect: it
+has forced the Commission to ignore the sexual
+impulse in discussing a sexual problem. Any
+modification of the relationship of men and
+women was immediately put out of consideration.
+Such suggestions as Forel, Ellen Key, or Havelock
+Ellis make could, of course, not even get a
+hearing.</p>
+
+<p>With this moral ideal in mind, not only vice,
+but sex itself, becomes an evil thing. Hence the
+hysterical and minute application of the taboo
+wherever sex shows itself. Barred from any reform
+which would reabsorb the impulse into civilized
+life, the Commissioners had no other course
+but to hunt it, as an outlaw. And in doing this
+they were compelled to discard the precious values
+of art, religion and social life of which this superfluous
+energy is the creator. Driven to think of
+it as bad, except for certain particular functions,
+they could, of course, not see its possibilities.
+Hence the poverty of their suggestions along educational
+and artistic lines.</p>
+
+<p>A valuable contribution, we are told, must be
+<i>reasonable</i> and <i>practical</i>. Here is a case where
+words cannot be taken literally. "Reasonable" in
+America certainly never even pretended to mean
+in accordance with a rational ideal, and "practical,"--well
+one thinks of "practical politics,"
+"practical business men," and "unpractical reformers."
+Boiled down these words amount to
+something like this: the proposals must not be
+new or startling; must not involve any radical disturbance
+of any respectable person's selfishness;
+must not call forth any great opposition; must
+look definite and immediate; must be tangible
+like a raid, or a jail, or the paper of an ordinance,
+or a policeman's club. Above all a "reasonable
+and practical" proposal must not require any imaginative
+patience. The actual proposals have all
+these qualities: if they are "reasonable and practical"
+then we know by a good demonstration
+what these terms meant to that average body of
+citizens.</p>
+
+<p>To see that is to see exposed an important facet
+of the American temperament. Our dislike of
+"talk"; the frantic desire to "do something" without
+inquiring whether it is worth doing; the dollar
+standard; the unwillingness to cast any bread
+upon the waters; our preference for a sparrow
+in the hand to a forest of song-birds; the na&iuml;ve
+inability to understand the inner satisfactions of
+bankrupt poets and the unworldliness of eccentric
+thinkers; success-mania; philistinism--they are
+pieces of the same cloth. They come from failure
+or unwillingness to project the mind beyond the
+daily routine of things, to play over the whole
+horizon of possibilities, and to recognize that all
+is not said when we have spoken. In those
+words "reasonable and practical" is the Chinese
+Wall of America, that narrow boundary which
+contracts our vision to the moment, cuts us off
+from the culture of the world, and makes us such
+provincial, unimaginative blunderers over our own
+problems. Fixation upon the immediate has made
+a rich country poor in leisure, has in a land meant
+for liberal living incited an insane struggle for existence.
+One suspects at times that our national
+cult of optimism is no real feeling that the world
+is good, but a fear that pessimism will produce
+panics.</p>
+
+<p>How this fascination of the obvious has balked
+the work of the Commission I need not elaborate.
+That the long process of civilizing sex received
+perfunctory attention; that the imaginative
+value of sex was lost in a dogma; that the implied
+changes in social life were dodged--all that
+has been pointed out. It was the inability to rise
+above the immediate that makes the report read
+as if the policeman were the only agent of civilization.</p>
+
+<p>For where in the report is any thorough discussion
+by sociologists of the relations of business
+and marriage to vice? Why is there no testimony
+by psychologists to show how sex can be
+affected by environment, by educators to show
+how it can be trained, by industrial experts to
+show how monotony and fatigue affect it? Where
+are the detailed proposals by specialists, for decent
+housing and working conditions, for educational
+reform, for play facilities? The Commission
+wasn't afraid of details: didn't it recommend
+searchlights in the parks as a weapon against
+vice? Why then isn't there a budget, a large,
+comprehensive budget, precise and informing, in
+which provision is made for beginning to civilize
+Chicago? That wouldn't have been "reasonable
+and practical," I presume, for it would have cost
+millions and millions of dollars. And where
+would the money have come from? Were the
+single-taxers, the Socialists consulted? But their
+proposals would require big changes in property
+interests, and would that be "reasonable and practical"?
+Evidently not: it is more reasonable and
+practical to keep park benches out of the shadows
+and to plague unescorted prostitutes.</p>
+
+<p>And where are the open questions: the issues
+that everybody should consider, the problems that
+scientists should study? I see almost no trace of
+them. Why are the sexual problems not even
+stated? Where are the doubts that should have
+honored these investigations, the frank statement
+of all the gaps in knowledge, and the obscurities
+in morals? Knowing perfectly well that vice will
+not be repressed within a year or prostitution absolutely
+annihilated in ten, it might, I should
+think, have seemed more important that the issues
+be made clear and the thought of the people fertilized
+than that the report should look very definite
+and precise. There are all sorts of things
+we do not understand about this problem. The
+opportunities for study which the Commissioners
+had must have made these empty spaces evident.
+Why then were we not taken into their confidence?
+Along what lines is investigation most
+needed? To what problems, what issues, shall
+we give our attention? What is the debatable
+ground in this territory? The Commission does
+not say, and I for one, ascribe the silence to the
+American preoccupation with immediate, definite,
+tangible interests.</p>
+
+<p>Wells has written penetratingly about this in
+"The New Machiavelli." I have called this fixation
+on the nearest object at hand an American
+habit. Perhaps as Mr. Wells shows it is an English
+one too. But in this country we have a philosophy
+to express it--the philosophy of the Reasonable
+and the Practical, and so I do not hesitate
+to import Mr. Wells's observations: "It has
+been the chronic mistake of statecraft and all organizing
+spirits to attempt immediately to scheme
+and arrange and achieve. Priests, schools of
+thought, political schemers, leaders of men, have
+always slipped into the error of assuming that
+they can think out the whole--or at any rate
+completely think out definite parts--of the purpose
+and future of man, clearly and finally; they
+have set themselves to legislate and construct on
+that assumption, and, experiencing the perplexing
+obduracy and evasions of reality, they have taken
+to dogma, persecution, training, pruning, secretive
+education; and all the stupidities of self-sufficient
+energy. In the passion of their good intentions
+they have not hesitated to conceal facts,
+suppress thought, crush disturbing initiatives and
+apparently detrimental desires. And so it is
+blunderingly and wastefully, destroying with the
+making, that any extension of social organization
+is at present achieved. Directly, however, this
+idea of an emancipation from immediacy is
+grasped, directly the dominating importance of
+this critical, less personal, mental hinterland in
+the individual and of the collective mind in the
+race is understood, the whole problem of the
+statesman and his attitude toward politics gains a
+new significance, and becomes accessible to a new
+series of solutions...."</p>
+
+<p>Let no one suppose that the unwillingness to
+cultivate what Mr. Wells calls the "mental hinterland"
+is a vice peculiar to the business man.
+The colleges submit to it whenever they concentrate
+their attention on the details of the student's
+vocation before they have built up some cultural
+background. The whole drift towards industrial
+training in schools has the germs of disaster
+within it--a preoccupation with the technique of
+a career. I am not a lover of the "cultural" activities
+of our schools and colleges, still less am I
+a lover of shallow specialists. The unquestioned
+need for experts in politics is full of the very real
+danger that detailed preparation may give us a
+bureaucracy--a government by men divorced
+from human tradition. The churches submit to
+the demand for immediacy with great alacrity.
+Look at the so-called "liberal" churches. Reacting
+against an empty formalism they are tumbling
+over themselves to prove how directly they touch
+daily life. You read glowing articles in magazines
+about preachers who devote their time to
+housing reforms, milk supplies, the purging of
+the civil service. If you lament the ugliness of
+their churches, the poverty of the ritual, and the
+political absorption of their sermons, you are told
+that the church must abandon forms and serve the
+common life of men. There are many ways of
+serving everyday needs,--turning churches into
+social reform organs and political rostra is, it
+seems to me, an obvious but shallow way of performing
+that service. When churches cease to
+paint the background of our lives, to nourish a
+Weltanschaung, strengthen men's ultimate purposes
+and reaffirm the deepest values of life, then
+churches have ceased to meet the needs for which
+they exist. That "hinterland" affects daily life,
+and the church which cannot get a leverage on it
+by any other method than entering into immediate
+political controversy is simply a church that is
+dead. It may be an admirable agent of reform,
+but it has ceased to be a church.</p>
+
+<p>A large wing of the Socialist Party is the slave
+of obvious success. It boasts that it has ceased to
+be "visionary" and has become "practical."
+Votes, winning campaigns, putting through reform
+measures seem a great achievement. It forgets
+the difference between voting the Socialist
+ticket and understanding Socialism. The vote is
+the tangible thing, and for that these Socialist
+politicians work. They get the votes, enough to
+elect them to office. In the City of Schenectady
+that happened as a result of the mayoralty campaign
+of 1911. I had an opportunity to observe
+the results. A few Socialists were in office set to
+govern a city with no Socialist "hinterland." It
+was a pathetic situation, for any reform proposal
+had to pass the judgment of men and women who
+did not see life as the officials did. On no important
+measure could the administration expect popular
+understanding. What was the result? In
+crucial issues, like taxation, the Socialists had to
+submit to the ideas,--the general state of mind
+of the community. They had to reverse their
+own theories and accept those that prevailed in
+that unconverted city. I wondered over our
+helplessness, for I was during a period one of
+those officials. The other members of the administration
+used to say at every opportunity that we
+were fighting "The Beast" or "Special Privilege."
+But to me it always seemed that we were like
+Peer Gynt struggling against the formless Boyg--invisible
+yet everywhere--we were struggling
+with the unwatered hinterland of the citizens of
+Schenectady. I understood then, I think, what
+Wells meant when he said that he wanted "no
+longer to 'fix up,' as people say, human affairs,
+but to devote his forces to the development of
+that needed intellectual life without which all his
+shallow attempts at fixing up are futile." For in
+the last analysis the practical and the reasonable
+are little idols of clay that thwart our efforts.</p>
+
+<p>The third requirement of a valuable contribution,
+says the Chicago Commission, is the constitutional
+sanction. This idol carries its own criticism
+with it. The worship of the constitution
+amounts, of course, to saying that men exist for
+the sake of the constitution. The person who
+holds fast to that idea is forever incapable of understanding
+either men or constitutions. It is a
+prime way of making laws ridiculous; if you want
+to cultivate <i>l&egrave;se-majest&eacute;</i> in Germany get the
+Kaiser to proclaim his divine origin; if you want
+to promote disrespect of the courts, announce
+their infallibility.</p>
+
+<p>But in this case, the Commission is not representative
+of the dominant thought of our times.
+The vital part of the population has pretty well
+emerged from any dumb acquiescence in constitutions.
+Theodore Roosevelt, who reflects so
+much of America, has very definitely cast down
+this idol. Now since he stands generally some
+twenty years behind the pioneer and about six
+months ahead of the majority, we may rest assured
+that this much-needed iconoclasm is in process
+of achievement.</p>
+
+<p>Closely related to the constitution and just as
+decadent to-day are the Sanctity of Private Property,
+Vested Rights, Competition the Life of
+Trade, Prosperity (at any cost). Each one of
+these ideas was born of an original need, served
+its historical function and survived beyond its allotted
+time. Nowadays you still come across
+some of these ancient notions, especially in courts,
+where they do no little damage in perverting justice,
+but they are ghost-like and disreputable, gibbering
+and largely helpless. He who is watching
+the ascendant ideas of American life can afford
+to feel that the early maxims of capitalism are
+doomed.</p>
+
+<p>But the habit of mind which would turn an instrument
+of life into an immutable law of its existence--that
+habit is always with us. We may
+outgrow our adoration of the Constitution or
+Private Property only to establish some new
+totem pole. In the arts we call this inveterate
+tendency classicalism. It is, of course, a habit by
+no means confined to the arts. Politics, religion,
+science are subject to it,--in politics we call it conservative,
+in religion orthodox, in science we describe
+it as academic. Its manifestations are
+multiform but they have a common source. An
+original creative impulse of the mind expresses
+itself in a certain formula; posterity mistakes the
+formula for the impulse. A genius will use his
+medium in a particular way because it serves his
+need; this way becomes a fixed rule which the
+classicalist serves. It has been pointed out that
+because the first steam trains were run on roads
+built for carts and coaches, the railway gauge
+almost everywhere in the world became fixed at
+four feet eight and one-half inches.</p>
+
+<p>You might say that genius works inductively
+and finds a method; the conservative works deductively
+from the method and defeats whatever
+genius he may have. A friend of mine had written
+a very brilliant article on a play which had
+puzzled New York. Some time later I was discussing
+the article with another friend of a decidedly
+classicalist bent. "What is it?" he protested,
+"it isn't criticism for it's half rhapsody;
+it isn't rhapsody because it is analytical....
+What is it? That's what I want to know." "But
+isn't it fine, and worth having, and aren't you glad
+it was written?" I pleaded. "Well, if I knew
+what it was...." And so the argument
+ran for hours. Until he had subsumed the article
+under certain categories he had come to accept,
+appreciation was impossible for him. I
+have many arguments with my classicalist friend.
+This time it was about George Moore's "Ave."
+I was trying to express my delight. "It isn't a
+novel, or an essay, or a real confession--it's
+nothing," said he. His well-ordered mind was
+compelled to throw out of doors any work for
+which he had no carefully prepared pocket. I
+thought of Aristotle, who denied the existence of
+a mule because it was neither a horse nor an ass.</p>
+
+<p>Dramatic critics follow Aristotle in more ways
+than one. A play is produced which fascinates
+an audience for weeks. It is published and read
+all over the world. Then you are treated to
+endless discussions by the critics trying to prove
+that "it is not a play." So-and-so-and-so constitute
+a play, they affirm,--this thing doesn't meet
+the requirements, so away with it. They forget
+that nobody would have had the slightest idea
+what a play was if plays hadn't been written; that
+the rules deduced from the plays that have already
+been written are no eternal law for the
+plays that will be.</p>
+
+<p>Classicalism and invention are irreconcilable
+enemies. Let it be understood that I am not decrying
+the great nourishment which a living tradition
+offers. The criticism I am making is of
+those who try to feed upon the husks alone.
+Without the slightest paradox one may say that
+the classicalist is most foreign to the classics. He
+does not put himself within the creative impulses
+of the past: he is blinded by their manifestations.
+It is perhaps no accident that two of the greatest
+classical scholars in England--Gilbert Murray
+and Alfred Zimmern--are political radicals. The
+man whom I call here the classicalist cannot possibly
+be creative, for the essence of his creed is
+that there must be nothing new under the sun.</p>
+
+<p>The United States, you imagine, would of all
+nations be the freest from classicalism. Settled
+as a great adventure and dedicated to an experiment
+in republicanism, the tradition of the country
+is of extending boundaries, obstacles overcome,
+and pioneering exploits in which a wilderness was
+subdued to human uses. The very air of America
+would seem to be a guarantee against formalism.
+You would think that self-government finds its
+surest footing here--that real autonomy of the
+spirit which makes human uses the goal of effort,
+denies all inhuman ideals, seeks out what men
+want, and proceeds to create it. With such a history
+how could a nation fail to see in its constitution
+anything but a tool of life, like the axe, the
+spade or the plough?</p>
+
+<p>The West has in a measure carried its freedom
+over into politics and social life generally.
+Formalism sets in as you move east and south into
+the older and more settled communities. There
+the pioneering impulse has passed out of life into
+stupid history books, and the inevitable classicalism,
+the fear of adventure, the superstition before
+social invention, have reasserted themselves.
+If I may turn for a moment from description to
+prophecy, it is to say that this equilibrium will
+not hold for very long. There are signs that the
+West after achieving the reforms which it needs
+to-day--reforms which will free its economic life
+from the credit monopolies of the East, and give
+it a greater fluidity in the marketing of its products--will
+follow the way of all agricultural communities
+to a rural and placid conservatism. The
+spirit of the pioneer does not survive forever: it
+is kept alive to-day, I believe, by certain unnatural
+irritants which may be summed up as absentee
+ownership. The West is suffering from foreignly
+owned railroads, power-resources, and an alien
+credit control. But once it recaptures these essentials
+of its economic life, once the "progressive"
+movement is victorious, I venture to predict
+that the agricultural West will become the heart
+of American complacency. The East, on the
+other hand, with its industrial problem must go
+to far more revolutionary measures for a solution.
+And the East is fertilized continually by
+European traditions: that stream of immigration
+brings with it a thousand unforeseeable possibilities.
+The great social adventure of America is
+no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the
+absorption of fifty different peoples. To-day perhaps,
+it is still predominantly a question for the
+East. But it means that America is turning from
+the contrast between her courage and nature's obstacles
+to a comparison of her civilization with
+Europe's. Immigration more than anything else
+is drawing us into world problems. Many people
+profess to see horrible dangers in the foreign
+invasion. Certainly no man is sure of its conclusion.
+It may swamp us, it may, if we seize the
+opportunity, mean the impregnation of our national
+life with a new brilliancy.</p>
+
+<p>I have said that the West is still moved by the
+tapering impulse of the pioneer, and I have ventured
+to predict that this would soon dwindle into
+an agricultural toryism. That prediction may
+very easily be upset. Far-reaching mechanical inventions
+already threaten to transform farming
+into an industry. I refer to those applications of
+power to agriculture which will inevitably divorce
+the farmer from the ownership of his tools. An
+industrial revolution analogous to that in manufacture
+during the nineteenth century is distinctly
+probable, and capitalistic agriculture may soon
+cease to be a contradiction in terms. Like all inventions
+it will disturb deeply the classicalist tendency,
+and this disturbance may generate a new
+impulse to replace the decadent one of the
+pioneer.</p>
+
+<p>Without some new dynamic force America, for
+all her tradition, is not immune to a hardening formalism.
+The psychological descent into classicalism
+is always a strong possibility. That is why
+we, the children of frontiersmen, city builders and
+immigrants, surprise Europe constantly with our
+worship of constitutions, our social and political
+timidity. In many ways we are more defenceless
+against these deadening habits than the people
+of Europe. Our geographical isolation preserves
+us from any vivid sense of national contrast:
+our imaginations are not stirred by different
+civilizations. We have almost no spiritual
+weapons against classicalism: universities,
+churches, newspapers are by-products of a commercial
+success; we have no tradition of intellectual
+revolt. The American college student has
+the gravity and mental habits of a Supreme Court
+judge; his "wild oats" are rarely spiritual; the
+critical, analytical habit of mind is distrusted. We
+say that "knocking" is a sign of the "sorehead"
+and we sublimate criticism by saying that "every
+knock is a boost." America does not play with
+ideas; generous speculation is regarded as insincere,
+and shunned as if it might endanger the optimism
+which underlies success. All this becomes
+such an insulation against new ideas that when
+the Yankee goes abroad he takes his environment
+with him.</p>
+
+<p>It seems at times as if our capacity for appreciating
+originality were absorbed in the trivial eccentricities
+of fads and fashions. The obvious novelties of machinery and locomotion,
+phonographs and yellow journalism slake the American
+thirst for creation pretty thoroughly. In serious
+matters we follow the Vice Commission's fourth
+essential of a valuable contribution--<i>that which
+will square with the public conscience of the
+American people</i>.</p>
+
+<p>I do not care to dilate upon the exploded
+pretensions of Mr. and Mrs. Grundy. They are a
+fairly disreputable couple by this time because we
+are beginning to know how much morbidity they
+represent. The Vice Commission, for example,
+bowed to what might be called the "instinctive
+conscience" of America when it balked at tracing
+vice to its source in the over-respected institutions
+of American life and the over-respected natures
+of American men and women. It bowed to the
+prevailing conscience when it proposed taboos instead
+of radical changes. It bowed to a traditional
+conscience when it confused the sins of sex
+with the possibilities of sex; and it paid tribute to
+a verbal conscience, to a lip morality, when, with
+extreme irrelevance to its beloved police, it proclaimed
+"absolute annihilation" the ultimate ideal.
+In brief, the commission failed to see that the
+working conscience of America is to-day bound
+up with the very evil it is supposed to eradicate by
+a relentless warfare.</p>
+
+<p>It was to be expected. Our conscience is not
+the vessel of eternal verities. It grows with our
+social life, and a new social condition means a
+radical change in conscience. In order to do away
+with vice America must live and think and feel
+differently. This is an old story. Because of it
+all innovators have been at war with the public
+conscience of their time. Yet there is nothing
+strange or particularly disheartening about this
+commonplace observation: to expect anything else
+is to hope that a nation will lift itself by its own
+bootstraps. Yet there is danger the moment leaders
+of the people make a virtue of homage to the
+unregenerate, public conscience.</p>
+
+<p>In La Follette's Magazine (Feb. 17, 1912)
+there is a leading article called "The Great Issue."
+You can read there that "the composite
+judgment is always safer and wiser and stronger
+and more unselfish than the judgment of any one
+individual mind. The people have been betrayed
+by their representatives again and again. The
+real danger to democracy lies not in the ignorance
+or want of patriotism of the people, but in the
+corrupting influence of powerful business organizations
+upon the representatives of the people...."</p>
+
+<p>I have only one quarrel with that philosophy--its
+negativity. With the belief that government
+is futile and mischievous unless supported by the
+mass of the people; with the undeniable fact that
+business has corrupted public officials--I have no
+complaint. What I object to is the emphasis
+which shifts the blame for our troubles from the
+shoulders of the people to those of the "corrupting
+interests." For this seems to me nothing but
+the resuscitation of the devil: when things go
+wrong it is somebody else's fault. We are peculiarly
+open to this kind of vanity in America.
+If some wise law is passed we say it is the will
+of the people showing its power of self-government.
+But if that will is so weak and timid
+that a great evil like child labor persists to our
+shame we turn the responsibility over to the
+devil personified as a "special interest." It is
+an old habit of the race which seems to have
+begun with the serpent in the Garden of Eden.</p>
+
+<p>The word demagogue has been frightfully
+maltreated in late years, but surely here is its
+real meaning--to flatter the people by telling
+them that their failures are somebody else's fault.
+For if a nation declares it has reached its majority
+by instituting self-government, then it cannot
+shirk responsibility.</p>
+
+<p>These "special interests"--big business, a corrupt
+press, crooked politics--grew up within the
+country, were promoted by American citizens, admired
+by millions of them, and acquiesced in by
+almost all of them. Whoever thinks that business
+corruption is the work of a few inhumanly
+cunning individuals with monstrous morals is
+self-righteous without excuse. Capitalists did not
+violate the public conscience of America; they
+expressed it. That conscience was inadequate
+and unintelligent. We are being pinched by the
+acts it nourished. A great outcry has arisen and
+a number of perfectly conventional men like
+Lorimer suffer an undeserved humiliation. We
+say it is a "moral awakening." That is another
+dodge by which we pretend that we were always
+wise and just, though a trifle sleepy. In reality
+we are witnessing a change of conscience, initiated
+by cranks and fanatics, sustained for a long time
+by minorities, which has at last infected the mass
+of the people.</p>
+
+<p>The danger I spoke of arises just here: the
+desire to infect at once the whole mass crowds
+out the courage of the innovator. No man can
+do his best work if he bows at every step to the
+public conscience of his age. The real service
+to democracy is the fullest, freest expression of
+talent. The best servants of the people, like the
+best valets, must whisper unpleasant truths in
+the master's ear. It is the court fool, not the
+foolish courtier, whom the king can least afford
+to lose.</p>
+
+<p>Hostile critics of democracy have long pointed
+out that mediocrity becomes the rule. They have
+not been without facts for their support. And
+I do not see why we who believe in democracy
+should not recognize this danger and trace it to
+its source. Certainly it is not answered with a
+sneer. I have worked in the editorial office of
+a popular magazine, a magazine that is known
+widely as a champion of popular rights. By
+personal experience, by intimate conversations,
+and by looking about, I think I am pretty well
+aware of what the influence of business upon
+journalism amounts to. I have seen the inside
+working of business pressure; articles of my own
+have been suppressed after they were in type;
+friends of mine have told me stories of expurgation,
+of the "morganization" of their editorial
+policy. And in the face of that I should like
+to record it as my sincere conviction that no
+financial power is one-tenth so corrupting, so insidious,
+so hostile to originality and frank statement
+as the fear of the public which reads the
+magazine. For one item suppressed out of respect
+for a railroad or a bank, nine are rejected
+because of the prejudices of the public. This
+will anger the farmers, that will arouse the
+Catholics, another will shock the summer girl.
+Anybody can take a fling at poor old Mr. Rockefeller,
+but the great mass of average citizens (to
+which none of us belongs) must be left in undisturbed
+possession of its prejudices. In that
+subservience, and not in the meddling of Mr.
+Morgan, is the reason why American journalism
+is so flaccid, so repetitious and so dull.</p>
+
+<p>The people should be supreme, yes, its will
+should be the law of the land. But it is a caricature
+of democracy to make it also the law of individual
+initiative. One thing it is to say that
+all proposals must ultimately win the acceptance
+of the majority; it is quite another to propose
+nothing which is not immediately acceptable. It
+is as true of the nation as of the body that one
+leg cannot go forward very far unless the whole
+body follows. That is a different thing from
+trying to move both legs forward at the same
+time. The one is democracy; the other is--demolatry.</p>
+
+<p>It is better to catch the idol-maker than to
+smash each idol. It would be an endless task to
+hunt down all the masks, the will-o'-the-wisps and
+the shadows which divert us from our real purpose.
+Each man carries within himself the cause
+of his own mirages. Whenever we accept an idea
+as authority instead of as instrument, an idol is
+set up. We worship the plough, and not the fruit.
+And from this habit there is no permanent escape.
+Only effort can keep the mind centered truly.
+Whenever criticism slackens, whenever we sink
+into acquiescence, the mind swerves aside and
+clings with the gratitude of the weary to some
+fixed idea. It is so much easier to follow a rule
+of thumb, and obey the constitution, than to find
+out what we really want and to do it.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p>A great deal of political theory has been devoted
+to asking: what is the aim of government?
+Many readers may have wondered why that
+question has not figured in these pages. For the
+logical method would be to decide upon the ultimate
+ideal of statecraft and then elaborate the
+technique of its realization. I have not done that
+because this rational procedure inverts the natural
+order of things and develops all kinds of theoretical
+tangles and pseudo-problems. They come
+from an effort to state abstractly in intellectual
+terms qualities that can be known only by direct
+experience. You achieve nothing but confusion if
+you begin by announcing that politics must achieve
+"justice" or "liberty" or "happiness." Even
+though you are perfectly sure that you know exactly
+what these words mean translated into concrete
+experiences, it is very doubtful whether you
+can really convey your meaning to anyone else.
+"Plaisante justice qu'une rivi&egrave;re borne. V&eacute;rit&eacute;,
+au de&ccedil;&agrave; des Pyr&eacute;n&eacute;es, erreur au de l&agrave;," says
+Pascal. If what is good in the world depended
+on our ability to define it we should be hopeless
+indeed.</p>
+
+<p>This is an old difficulty in ethics. Many men
+have remarked that we quarrel over the "problem
+of evil," never over the "problem of good."
+That comes from the fact that good is a quality
+of experience which does not demand an explanation.
+When we are thwarted we begin to ask
+why. It was the evil in the world that set
+Leibniz the task of justifying the ways of God
+to man. Nor is it an accident that in daily life
+misfortune turns men to philosophy. One might
+generalize and say that as soon as we begin to
+explain, it is because we have been made to complain.</p>
+
+<p>No moral judgment can decide the value of
+life. No ethical theory can announce any intrinsic
+good. The whole speculation about
+morality is an effort to find a way of living which
+men who live it will instinctively feel is good.
+No formula can express an ultimate experience;
+no axiom can ever be a substitute for what really
+makes life worth living. Plato may describe the
+objects which man rejoices over, he may guide
+them to good experiences, but each man in his
+inward life is a last judgment on all his values.</p>
+
+<p>This amounts to saying that the goal of action
+is in its final analysis &aelig;sthetic and not moral--a
+quality of feeling instead of conformity to rule.
+Words like justice, harmony, power, democracy
+are simply empirical suggestions which may produce
+the good life. If the practice of them does
+not produce it then we are under no obligation
+to follow them, we should be idolatrous fools to
+do so. Every abstraction, every rule of conduct,
+every constitution, every law and social arrangement,
+is an instrument that has no value in itself.
+Whatever credit it receives, whatever reverence
+we give it, is derived from its utility in ministering
+to those concrete experiences which are as
+obvious and as undefinable as color or sound.
+We can celebrate the positively good things, we
+can live them, we can create them, but we cannot
+philosophize about them. To the an&aelig;sthetic intellect
+we could not convey the meaning of joy.
+A creature that could reason but not feel would
+never know the value of life, for what is ultimate
+is in itself inexplicable.</p>
+
+<p>Politics is not concerned with prescribing the
+ultimate qualities of life. When it tries to do so
+by sumptuary legislation, nothing but mischief is
+invoked. Its business is to provide opportunities,
+not to announce ultimate values; to remove oppressive
+evil and to invent new resources for
+enjoyment. With the enjoyment itself it can
+have no concern. That must be lived by each
+individual. In a sense the politician can never
+know his own success, for it is registered in men's
+inner lives, and is largely incommunicable. An
+increasing harvest of rich personalities is the social
+reward for a fine statesmanship, but such
+personalities are free growths in a cordial environment.
+They cannot be cast in moulds or
+shaped by law. There is no need, therefore, to
+generate dialectical disputes about the final goal
+of politics. No definition can be just--too precise
+a one can only deceive us into thinking that
+our definition is true. Call ultimate values by any
+convenient name, it is of slight importance which
+you choose. If only men can keep their minds
+freed from formalism, idol worship, fixed ideas,
+and exalted abstractions, politicians need not
+worry about the language in which the end of
+our striving is expressed. For with the removal
+of distracting idols, man's experience becomes the
+center of thought. And if we think in terms of
+men, find out what really bothers them, seek to
+supply what they really want, hold only their
+experience sacred, we shall find our sanction obvious
+and unchallenged.</p>
+
+<br><br><br>
+
+
+<h2><a name="ch7">CHAPTER VII</a></h2>
+
+<h3>THE MAKING OF CREEDS</h3>
+<br>
+
+<p>My first course in philosophy was nothing
+less than a summary of the important
+systems of thought put forward in Western Europe
+during the last twenty-six hundred years.
+Perhaps that is a slight exaggeration--we did
+gloss over a few centuries in the Middle Ages.
+For the rest we touched upon all the historic
+names from Thales to Nietzsche. After about
+nine weeks of this bewildering transit a friend
+approached me with a sour look on his face.
+"You know," he said, "I can't make head or tail
+out of this business. I agree with each philosopher
+as we study him. But when we get to the
+next one, I agree with him too. Yet he generally
+says the other one was wrong. They can't
+all be right. Can they now?" I was too much
+puzzled with the same difficulty to help him.</p>
+
+<p>Somewhat later I began to read the history of
+political theories. It was a less disinterested
+study than those sophomore speculations, for I
+had jumped into a profession which carried me
+through some of the underground passages of
+"practical politics" and reformist groups. The
+tangle of motives and facts and ideas was incredible.
+I began to feel the force of Mr. John
+Hobson's remark that "if practical workers for
+social and industrial reforms continue to ignore
+principles ... they will have to pay the
+price which short-sighted empiricism always pays;
+with slow, hesitant, and staggering steps, with innumerable
+false starts and backslidings, they will
+move in the dark along an unseen track toward
+an unseen goal." The political theorists laid
+some claim to lighting up both the track and the
+goal, and so I turned to them for help.</p>
+
+<p>Now whoever has followed political theory
+will have derived perhaps two convictions as a
+reward. Almost all the thinkers seem to regard
+their systems as true and binding, and none of
+these systems are. No matter which one you
+examine, it is inadequate. You cannot be a
+Platonist or a Benthamite in politics to-day. You
+cannot go to any of the great philosophers even
+for the outlines of a statecraft which shall be
+fairly complete, and relevant to American life.
+I returned to the sophomore mood: "Each of
+these thinkers has contributed something, has had
+some wisdom about events. Looked at in bulk
+the philosophers can't all be right or all wrong."</p>
+
+<p>But like so many theoretical riddles, this one
+rested on a very simple piece of ignorance. The
+trouble was that without realizing it I too had
+been in search of the philosopher's stone. I too
+was looking for something that could not be
+found. That happened in this case to be nothing
+less than an absolutely true philosophy of politics.
+It was the old indolence of hoping that somebody
+had done the world's thinking once and for all.
+I had conjured up the fantasy of a system which
+would contain the whole of life, be as reliable as
+a table of logarithms, foresee all possible emergencies
+and offer entirely trustworthy rules of
+action. When it seemed that no such system had
+ever been produced, I was on the point of damning
+the entire tribe of theorists from Plato to
+Marx.</p>
+
+<p>This is what one may call the na&iuml;vet&eacute; of the
+intellect. Its hope is that some man living at
+one place on the globe in a particular epoch will,
+through the miracle of genius, be able to generalize
+his experience for all time and all space.
+It says in effect that there is never anything
+essentially new under the sun, that any moment
+of experience sufficiently understood would be
+seen to contain all history and all destiny--that
+the intellect reasoning on one piece of experience
+could know what all the rest of experience was
+like. Looked at more closely this philosophy
+means that novelty is an illusion of ignorance,
+that life is an endless repetition, that when you
+know one revolution of it, you know all the rest.
+In a very real sense the world has no history and
+no future, the race has no career. At any moment
+everything is given: our reason could know that
+moment so thoroughly that all the rest of life
+would be like the commuter's who travels back
+and forth on the same line every day. There
+would be no inventions and no discoveries, for
+in the instant that reason had found the key of
+experience everything would be unfolded. The
+present would not be the womb of the future:
+nothing would be embryonic, nothing would <i>grow</i>.
+Experience would cease to be an adventure in
+order to become the monotonous fulfilment of a
+perfect prophecy.</p>
+
+<p>This omniscience of the human intellect is one
+of the commonest assumptions in the world. Although
+when you state the belief as I have, it
+sounds absurdly pretentious, yet the boastfulness
+is closer to the child's who stretches out its hand
+for the moon than the romantic egotist's who
+thinks he has created the moon and all the stars.
+Whole systems of philosophy have claimed such
+an eternal and absolute validity; the nineteenth
+century produced a bumper crop of so-called
+atheists, materialists and determinists who believed
+in all sincerity that "Science" was capable
+of a complete truth and unfailing prediction. If
+you want to see this faith in all its na&iuml;vet&eacute; go
+into those quaint rationalist circles where Herbert
+Spencer's ghost announces the "laws of life,"
+with only a few inessential details omitted.</p>
+
+<p>Now, of course, no philosophy of this sort has
+ever realized such hopes. Mankind has certainly
+come nearer to justifying Mr. Chesterton's
+observation that one of its favorite games is
+called "Cheat the Prophet."... "The
+players listen very carefully and respectfully to
+all that the clever men have to say about what is
+to happen in the next generation. The players
+then wait until all the clever men are dead, and
+bury them nicely. They then go and do something
+else." Now this weakness is not, as Mr.
+Chesterton would like to believe, confined to the
+clever men. But it is a weakness, and many
+people have speculated about it. Why in the
+face of hundreds of philosophies wrecked on the
+rocks of the unexpected do men continue to believe
+that the intellect can transcend the vicissitudes
+of experience?</p>
+
+<p>For they certainly do believe it, and generally
+the more parochial their outlook, the more cosmic
+their pretensions. All of us at times yearn for
+the comfort of an absolute philosophy. We try
+to believe that, however finite we may be, our intellect
+is something apart from the cycle of our
+life, capable by an Olympian detachment from
+human interests of a divine thoroughness. Even
+our evolutionist philosophy, as Bergson shows,
+"begins by showing us in the intellect a local
+effect of evolution, a flame, perhaps accidental,
+which lights up the coming and going of living
+things in the narrow passage open to their action;
+and lo! forgetting what it has just told us, makes
+of this lantern glimmering in a tunnel a Sun
+which can illuminate the world."</p>
+
+<p>This is what most of us do in our search for
+a philosophy of politics. We forget that the big
+systems of theory are much more like village
+lamp-posts than they are like the sun, that they
+were made to light up a particular path, obviate
+certain dangers, and aid a peculiar mode of life.
+The understanding of the place of theory in life
+is a comparatively new one. We are just beginning
+to see how creeds are made. And the
+insight is enormously fertile. Thus Mr. Alfred
+Zimmern in his fine study of "The Greek Commonwealth"
+says of Plato and Aristotle that no
+interpretation can be satisfactory which does not
+take into account the impression left upon their
+minds by the social development which made
+the age of these philosophers a period of Athenian
+decline. Mr. Zimmern's approach is common
+enough in modern scholarship, but the full significance
+of it for the creeds we ourselves are
+making is still something of a novelty. When
+we are asked to think of the "Republic" as the
+reaction of decadent Greece upon the conservative
+temperament of Plato, the function of theory
+is given a new illumination. Political philosophy
+at once appears as a human invention in a particular
+crisis--an instrument to fit a need. The
+pretension to finality falls away.</p>
+
+<p>This is a great emancipation. Instead of
+clinging to the na&iuml;ve belief that Plato was legislating
+for all mankind, you can discuss his plans
+as a temporary superstructure made for an historical
+purpose. You are free then to appreciate
+the more enduring portions of his work, to understand
+Santayana when he says of the Platonists,
+"their theories are so extravagant, yet their
+wisdom seems so great. Platonism is a very refined
+and beautiful expression of our natural instincts,
+it embodies conscience and utters our inmost
+hopes." This insight into the values of
+human life, partial though it be, is what constitutes
+the abiding monument of Plato's genius.
+His constructions, his formal creeds, his law-making
+and social arrangements are local and
+temporary--for us they can have only an antiquarian
+interest.</p>
+
+<p>In some such way as this the sophomoric riddle
+is answered: no thinker can lay down a course of
+action for all mankind--programs if they are useful
+at all are useful for some particular historical
+period. But if the thinker sees at all deeply into
+the life of his own time, his theoretical system will
+rest upon observation of human nature. That
+remains as a residue of wisdom long after his
+reasoning and his concrete program have passed
+into limbo. For human nature in all its profounder
+aspects changes very little in the few generations
+since our Western wisdom has come to
+be recorded. These <i>aper&ccedil;us</i> left over from the
+great speculations are the golden threads which
+successive thinkers weave into the pattern of their
+thought. Wisdom remains; theory passes.</p>
+
+<p>If that is true of Plato with his ample vision
+how much truer is it of the theories of the littler
+men--politicians, courtiers and propagandists
+who make up the academy of politics. Machiavelli
+will, of course, be remembered at once as
+a man, whose speculations were fitted to an historical
+crisis. His advice to the Prince was real
+advice, not a sermon. A boss was telling a
+governor how to extend his power. The wealth
+of Machiavelli's learning and the splendid penetration
+of his mind are used to interpret experience
+for a particular purpose. I have always
+thought that Machiavelli derives his bad name
+from a too transparent honesty. Less direct
+minds would have found high-sounding ethical
+sanctions in which to conceal the real intent.
+That was the nauseating method of nineteenth
+century economists when they tried to identify
+the brutal practices of capitalism with the beneficence
+of nature and the Will of God. Not so
+Machiavelli. He could write without a blush
+that "a prince, especially a new one, cannot observe
+all those things for which men are esteemed,
+being often forced, in order to maintain the state,
+to act contrary to fidelity, friendship, humanity,
+and religion." The apologists of business also
+justified a rupture with human decencies. They
+too fitted their theory to particular purposes, but
+they had not the courage to avow it even to themselves.</p>
+
+<p>The rare value of Machiavelli is just this lack
+of self-deception. You may think his morals
+devilish, but you cannot accuse him of quoting
+scripture. I certainly do not admire the end he
+serves: the extension of an autocrat's power is
+a frivolous perversion of government. His ideal
+happens, however, to be the aim of most foreign
+offices, politicians and "princes of finance."
+Machiavelli's morals are not one bit worse than
+the practices of the men who rule the world
+to-day. An American Senate tore up the Hay-Pauncefote
+treaty, and with the approval of the
+President acted "contrary to fidelity" and friendship
+too; Austria violated the Treaty of Berlin
+by annexing Bosnia and Herzegovina. Machiavelli's
+ethics are commonplace enough. His head
+is clearer than the average. He let the cat out
+of the bag and showed in the boldest terms how
+theory becomes an instrument of practice. You
+may take him as a symbol of the political
+theorist. You may say that all the thinkers of
+influence have been writing advice to the Prince.
+Machiavelli recognized Lorenzo the Magnificent;
+Marx, the proletariat of Europe.</p>
+
+<p>At first this sounds like standing the world on
+its head, denying reason and morality, and exalting
+practice over righteousness. That is neither
+here nor there. I am simply trying to point out
+an illuminating fact whose essential truth can
+hardly be disputed. The important social philosophies
+are consciously or otherwise the servants
+of men's purposes. Good or bad, that it
+seems to me is the way we work. We find reasons
+for what we want to do. The big men from
+Machiavelli through Rousseau to Karl Marx
+brought history, logic, science and philosophy to
+prop up and strengthen their deepest desires.
+The followers, the epigones, may accept the reasons
+of Rousseau and Marx and deduce rules
+of action from them. But the original genius
+sees the dynamic purpose first, finds reasons afterward.
+This amounts to saying that man when
+he is most creative is not a rational, but a wilful
+animal.</p>
+
+<p>The political thinker who to-day exercises the
+greatest influence on the Western World is, I
+suppose, Karl Marx. The socialist movement
+calls him its prophet, and, while many socialists
+say he is superseded, no one disputes his historical
+importance. Now Marx embalmed his
+thinking in the language of the Hegelian school.
+He founded it on a general philosophy of society
+which is known as the materialistic conception of
+history. Moreover, Marx put forth the claim
+that he had made socialism "scientific"--had
+shown that it was woven into the texture of
+natural phenomena. The Marxian paraphernalia
+crowds three heavy volumes, so elaborate and
+difficult that socialists rarely read them. I have
+known one socialist who lived leisurely on his
+country estate and claimed to have "looked" at
+every page of Marx. Most socialists, including
+the leaders, study selected passages and let it go
+at that. This is a wise economy based on a good
+instinct. For all the parade of learning and
+dialectic is an after-thought--an accident from
+the fact that the prophetic genius of Marx appeared
+in Germany under the incubus of Hegel.
+Marx saw what he wanted to do long before he
+wrote three volumes to justify it. Did not the
+Communist Manifesto appear many years before
+"Das Kapital"?</p>
+
+<p>Nothing is more instructive than a socialist
+"experience" meeting at which everyone tries to
+tell how he came to be converted. These gatherings
+are notoriously untruthful--in fact, there is
+a genial pleasure in not telling the truth about
+one's salad days in the socialist movement. The
+prevalent lie is to explain how the new convert,
+standing upon a mountain of facts, began to trace
+out the highways that led from hell to heaven.
+Everybody knows that no such process was actually
+lived through, and almost without exception
+the real story can be discerned: a man was
+dissatisfied, he wanted a new condition of life,
+he embraced a theory that would justify his hopes
+and his discontent. For once you touch the
+biographies of human beings, the notion that
+political beliefs are logically determined collapses
+like a pricked balloon. In the language of
+philosophers, socialism as a living force is a
+product of the will--a will to beauty, order,
+neighborliness, not infrequently a will to health.
+Men desire first, then they reason; fascinated by
+the future, they invent a "scientific socialism" to
+get there.</p>
+
+<p>Many people don't like to admit this. Or if
+they admit it, they do so with a sigh. Their
+minds construct a utopia--one in which all judgments
+are based on logical inference from syllogisms
+built on the law of mathematical probabilities.
+If you quote David Hume at them, and
+say that reason itself is an irrational impulse they
+think you are indulging in a silly paradox. I
+shall not pursue this point very far, but I believe
+it could be shown without too much difficulty that
+the rationalists are fascinated by a certain kind
+of thinking--logical and orderly thinking--and
+that it is their will to impose that method upon
+other men.</p>
+
+<p>For fear that somebody may regard this as
+a play on words drawn from some ultra-modern
+"anti-intellectualist" source, let me quote Santayana.
+This is what the author of that masterly
+series "The Life of Reason" wrote in one of his
+earlier books: "The ideal of rationality is itself
+as arbitrary, as much dependent on the needs of
+a finite organization, as any other ideal. Only
+as ultimately securing tranquillity of mind, which
+the philosopher instinctively pursues, has it for
+him any necessity. In spite of the verbal propriety
+of saying that reason demands rationality,
+what really demands rationality, what makes it
+a good and indispensable thing and gives it all
+its authority, is not its own nature, but our need
+of it both in safe and economical action and in
+the pleasures of comprehension." Because
+rationality itself is a wilful exercise one hears
+Hymns to Reason and sees it personified as an
+extremely dignified goddess. For all the light
+and shadow of sentiment and passion play even
+about the syllogism.</p>
+
+<p>The attempts of theorists to explain man's successes
+as rational acts and his failures as lapses
+of reason have always ended in a dismal and
+misty unreality. No genuine politician ever treats
+his constituents as reasoning animals. This is as
+true of the high politics of Isaiah as it is of the
+ward boss. Only the pathetic amateur deludes
+himself into thinking that, if he presents the major
+and minor premise, the voter will automatically
+draw the conclusion on election day. The successful
+politician--good or bad--deals with the
+dynamics--with the will, the hopes, the needs and
+the visions of men.</p>
+
+<p>It isn't sentimentality which says that where
+there is no vision the people perisheth. Every
+time Tammany Hall sets off fireworks and oratory
+on the Fourth of July; every time the picture of
+Lincoln is displayed at a political convention;
+every red bandanna of the Progressives and red
+flag of the socialists; every song from "The
+Battle Hymn of the Republic" to the "International";
+every metrical conclusion to a great
+speech--whether we stand at Armageddon, refuse
+to press upon the brow of labor another
+crown of thorns, or call upon the workers of the
+world to unite--every one of these slogans is an
+incitement of the will--an effort to energize
+politics. They are attempts to harness blind impulses
+to particular purposes. They are tributes
+to the sound practical sense of a vision in politics.
+No cause can succeed without them: so long as
+you rely on the efficacy of "scientific" demonstration
+and logical proof you can hold your conventions
+in anybody's back parlor and have room to
+spare.</p>
+
+<p>I remember an observation that Lincoln
+Steffens made in a speech about Mayor Tom
+Johnson. "Tom failed," said Mr. Steffens, "because
+he was too practical." Coming from a
+man who had seen as much of actual politics as
+Mr. Steffens, it puzzled me a great deal. I taxed
+him with it later and he explained somewhat as
+follows: "Tom Johnson had a vision of Cleveland
+which he called The City on the Hill. He
+pictured the town emancipated from its ugliness
+and its cruelty--a beautiful city for free men and
+women. He used to talk of that vision to the
+'cabinet' of political lieutenants which met every
+Sunday night at his house. He had all his appointees
+working for the City on the Hill. But
+when he went out campaigning before the people
+he talked only of three-cent fares and the tax
+outrages. Tom Johnson didn't show the people
+the City on the Hill. He didn't take them into
+his confidence. They never really saw what it
+was all about. And they went back on Tom
+Johnson."</p>
+
+<p>That is one of Mr. Steffens's most acute observations.
+What makes it doubly interesting is
+that Tom Johnson confirmed it a few months before
+he died. His friends were telling him that
+his defeat was temporary, that the work he had
+begun was unchecked. It was plain that in the
+midst of his suffering, with death close by, he
+found great comfort in that assurance. But his
+mind was so realistic, his integrity so great that
+he could not blink the fact that there had been
+a defeat. Steffens was pointing out the explanation:
+"you did not show the people what you
+saw, you gave them the details, you fought their
+battles, you started to build, but you left them
+in darkness as to the final goal."</p>
+
+<p>I wish I could recall the exact words in which
+Tom Johnson replied. For in them the greatest
+of the piecemeal reformers admitted the practical
+weakness of opportunist politics.</p>
+
+<p>There is a type of radical who has an idea
+that he can insinuate advanced ideas into legislation
+without being caught. His plan of action
+is to keep his real program well concealed and
+to dole out sections of it to the public from time
+to time. John A. Hobson in "The Crisis of
+Liberalism" describes the "practical reformer"
+so that anybody can recognize him: "This revolt
+against ideas is carried so far that able men
+have come seriously to look upon progress as a
+matter for the manipulation of wire-pullers, something
+to be 'jobbed' in committee by sophistical
+notions or other clever trickery." Lincoln Steffens
+calls these people "our damned rascals." Mr.
+Hobson continues, "The attraction of some obvious
+gain, the suppression of some scandalous
+abuse of monopolist power by a private company,
+some needed enlargement of existing Municipal
+or State enterprise by lateral expansion--such
+are the sole springs of action." Well may Mr.
+Hobson inquire, <i>"Now, what provision is made
+for generating the motor power of progress in
+Collectivism?"</i></p>
+
+<p>No amount of architect's plans, bricks and
+mortar will build a house. Someone must have
+the wish to build it. So with the modern democratic
+state. Statesmanship cannot rest upon the
+good sense of its program. It must find popular
+feeling, organize it, and make that the motive
+power of government. If you study the success
+of Roosevelt the point is re-enforced. He is a
+man of will in whom millions of people have felt
+the embodiment of their own will. For a time
+Roosevelt was a man of destiny in the truest
+sense. He wanted what a nation wanted: his
+own power radiated power; he embodied a vision;
+Tom, Dick and Harry moved with his movement.</p>
+
+<p>No use to deplore the fact. You cannot stop
+a living body with nothing at all. I think we may
+picture society as a compound of forces that are
+always changing. Put a vision in front of one
+of these currents and you can magnetize it in
+that direction. For visions alone organize popular
+passions. Try to ignore them or box them
+up, and they will burst forth destructively. When
+Haywood dramatizes the class struggle he uses
+class resentment for a social purpose. You may
+not like his purpose, but unless you can gather
+proletarian power into some better vision, you
+have no grounds for resenting Haywood. I
+fancy that the demonstration of King Canute settled
+once and for all the stupid attempt to ignore
+a moving force.</p>
+
+<p>A dynamic conception of society always frightens
+a great number of people. It gives politics
+a restless and intractable quality. Pure reason
+is so gentlemanly, but will and the visions of a
+people--these are adventurous and incalculable
+forces. Most politicians living for the day prefer
+to ignore them. If only society will stand fairly
+still while their career is in the making they
+are content to avoid the actualities. But a politician
+with some imaginative interest in genuine
+affairs need not be seduced into the learned folly
+of pretending that reality is something else than
+it is. If he is to influence life he must deal with
+it. A deep respect is due the Schopenhauerian
+philosopher who looks upon the world, finds that
+its essence is evil, and turns towards insensitive
+calm. But no respect is due to anyone who sets
+out to reform the world by ignoring its quality.
+Whoever is bent upon shaping politics to better
+human uses must accept freely as his starting point
+the impulses that agitate human beings. If observation
+shows that reason is an instrument of
+will, then only confusion can result from pretending
+that it isn't.</p>
+
+<p>I have called this misplaced "rationality" a
+piece of learned folly, because it shows itself most
+dangerously among those thinkers about politics
+who are divorced from action. In the Universities
+political movements are generally regarded
+as essentially static, cut and dried solids to be
+judged by their logical consistency. It is as if
+the stream of life had to be frozen before it
+could be studied. The socialist movement was
+given a certain amount of attention when I was
+an undergraduate. The discussion turned principally
+on two points: were rent, interest and
+dividends <i>earned</i>? Was collective ownership of
+capital a feasible scheme? And when the professor,
+who was a good dialectician, had proved
+that interest was a payment for service ("saving")
+and that public ownership was not practicable,
+it was assumed that socialism was disposed of.
+The passions, the needs, the hopes that generate
+this world-wide phenomenon were, I believe,
+pocketed and ignored under the pat saying: "Of
+course, socialism is not an economic policy, it's
+a religion." That was the end of the matter for
+the students of politics. It was then a matter
+for the divinity schools. If the same scholastic
+method is in force there, all that would be needed
+to crush socialism is to show its dogmatic inconsistencies.</p>
+
+<p>The theorist is incompetent when he deals with
+socialism just because he assumes that men are
+determined by logic and that a false conclusion
+will stop a moving, creative force. Occasionally
+he recognizes the wilful character of politics:
+then he shakes his head, climbs into an ivory
+tower and deplores the moonshine, the religious
+manias and the passions of the mob. Real life
+is beyond his control and influence because real
+life is largely agitated by impulses and habits, unconscious
+needs, faith, hope and desire. With all
+his learning he is ineffective because, instead of
+trying to use the energies of men, he deplores
+them.</p>
+
+<p>Suppose we recognize that creeds are instruments
+of the will, how would it alter the character
+of our thinking? Take an ancient quarrel
+like that over determinism. Whatever your
+philosophy, when you come to the test of actual
+facts you find, I think, all grades of freedom
+and determinism. For certain purposes you believe
+in free will, for others you do not. Thus,
+as Mr. Chesterton suggests, no determinist is
+prevented from saying "if you please" to the
+housemaid. In love, in your career, you have no
+doubt that "if" is a reality. But when you are
+engaged in scientific investigation, you try to reduce
+the spontaneous in life to a minimum. Mr.
+Arnold Bennett puts forth a rather curious hybrid
+when he advises us to treat ourselves as free
+agents and everyone else as an automaton. On
+the other hand Prof. M&uuml;nsterberg has always insisted
+that in social relations we must always
+treat everyone as a purposeful, integrated character.</p>
+
+<p>Your doctrine, in short, depends on your purpose:
+a theory by itself is neither moral nor immoral,
+its value is conditioned by the purpose it
+serves. In any accurate sense theory is to be
+judged only as an effective or ineffective instrument
+of a desire: the discussion of doctrines is
+technical and not moral. A theory has no intrinsic
+value: that is why the devil can talk
+theology.</p>
+
+<p>No creed possesses any final sanction. Human
+beings have desires that are far more important
+than the tools and toys and churches they make
+to satisfy them. It is more penetrating, in my
+opinion, to ask of a creed whether it served than
+whether it was "true." Try to judge the great
+beliefs that have swayed mankind by their inner
+logic or their empirical solidity and you stand
+forever, a dull pedant, apart from the interests
+of men. The Christian tradition did not survive
+because of Aquinas or fall before the Higher
+Criticism, nor will it be revived because someone
+proves the scientific plausibility of its doctrine.
+What we need to know about the Christian epic
+is the effect it had on men--true or false, they
+have believed in it for nineteen centuries. Where
+has it helped them, where hindered? What needs
+did it answer? What energies did it transmute?
+And what part of mankind did it neglect? Where
+did it begin to do violence to human nature?</p>
+
+<p>Political creeds must receive the same treatment.
+The doctrine of the "social contract" formulated
+by Hobbes and made current by Rousseau
+can no longer be accepted as a true account
+of the origin of society. Jean-Jacques is in fact
+a supreme case--perhaps even a slight caricature--of
+the way in which formal creeds bolster up
+passionate wants. I quote from Prof. Walter's
+introduction in which he says that "The Social
+Contract <i>showed to those who were eager to be
+convinced</i> that no power was legitimate which
+was guilty of abuses. It is no wonder that its
+author was buried in the Pantheon with pompous
+procession, that the framers of the new Constitution,
+Thouret and Li&egrave;yes and La Fayette, did
+not forget and dared not forget its doctrines, that
+it was the text-book and the delight of Camille
+Desmoulins and Danton and St. Just, that Robespierre
+read it through once every day." In the
+perspective of history, no one feels that he has
+said the last word about a philosophy like Rousseau's
+after demonstrating its "untruth." Good
+or bad, it has meant too much for any such easy
+disposal. What shall we call an idea, objectively
+untrue, but practically of the highest importance?</p>
+
+<p>The thinker who has faced this difficulty most
+radically is Georges Sorel in the "Reflexions sur
+la Violence." His doctrine of the "social myth"
+has seemed to many commentators one of those
+silly paradoxes that only a revolutionary syndicalist
+and Frenchman could have put forward.
+M. Sorel is engaged in presenting the General
+Strike as the decisive battle of the class struggle
+and the core of the socialist movement. Now
+whatever else he may be, M. Sorel is not na&iuml;ve:
+the sharp criticism of other socialists was something
+he could not peacefully ignore. They told
+him that the General Strike was an idle dream,
+that it could never take place, that, even if it could,
+the results would not be very significant. Sidney
+Webb, in the customary Fabian fashion, had dismissed
+the General Strike as a sign of socialist
+immaturity. There is no doubt that M. Sorel
+felt the force of these attacks. But he was not
+ready to abandon his favorite idea because it had
+been shown to be unreasonable and impossible.
+Just the opposite effect showed itself and he seized
+the opportunity of turning an intellectual defeat
+into a spiritual triumph. This performance must
+have delighted him to the very bottom of his
+soul, for he has boasted that his task in life is
+to aid in ruining "le prestige de la culture bourgeoise."</p>
+
+<p>M. Sorel's defence of the General Strike is
+very startling. He admits that it may never take
+place, that it is not a true picture of the goal of
+the socialist movement. Without a blush he informs
+us that this central gospel of the working
+class is simply a "myth." The admission frightens
+M. Sorel not at all. "It doesn't matter
+much," he remarks, "whether myths contain details
+actually destined to realization <i>in the scheme</i>
+of an historical future; they are not astrological
+almanacks; it may even be that nothing of what
+they express will actually happen--as in the case
+of that catastrophe which the early Christians
+expected. Are we not accustomed in daily life
+to recognizing that the reality differs very greatly
+from the ideas of it that we made before we
+acted? Yet that doesn't hinder us from making
+resolutions.... Myths must be judged as
+instruments for acting upon present conditions;
+all discussion about the manner of applying them
+concretely to the course of history is senseless.
+<i>The entire myth is what counts....</i> There
+is no use then in reasoning about details which
+might arise in the midst of the class struggle
+... even though the revolutionists should be
+deceiving themselves through and through in
+making a fantastic picture of the general strike,
+this picture would still have been a power of the
+highest order in preparing for revolution, so
+long as it expressed completely all the aspirations
+of socialism and bound together revolutionary
+ideas with a precision and firmness that no other
+methods of thought could have given."</p>
+
+<p>It may well be imagined that this highly
+sophisticated doctrine was regarded as perverse.
+All the ordinary prejudices of thought are irritated
+by a thinker who frankly advises masses of
+his fellow-men to hold fast to a belief which by
+all the canons of common sense is nothing but an
+illusion. M. Sorel must have felt the need of
+closer statement, for in a letter to Daniel Hal&egrave;vy,
+published in the second edition, he makes his position
+much clearer. "Revolutionary myths ..."
+we read, "enable us to understand the activity,
+the feelings, and the ideas of a populace preparing
+to enter into a decisive struggle; <i>they are not
+descriptions of things, but expressions of will</i>."
+The italics are mine: they set in relief the insight
+that makes M. Sorel so important to our discussion.
+I do not know whether a quotation torn
+from its context can possibly do justice to its author.
+I do know that for any real grasp of
+this point it is necessary to read M. Sorel with
+great sympathy.</p>
+
+<p>One must grant at least that he has made an
+accurate observation. The history of the world
+is full of great myths which have had the most
+concrete results. M. Sorel cites primitive Christianity,
+the Reformation, the French Revolution
+and the Mazzini campaign. The men who took
+part in those great social movements summed up
+their aspiration in pictures of decisive battles resulting
+in the ultimate triumph of their cause.
+We in America might add an example from our
+own political life. For it is Theodore Roosevelt
+who is actually attempting to make himself and
+his admirers the heroes of a new social myth.
+Did he not announce from the platform at Chicago--"we
+stand at Armageddon and we battle
+for the Lord"?</p>
+
+<p>Let no one dismiss M. Sorel then as an empty
+paradoxer. The myth is not one of the outgrown
+crudities of our pagan ancestors. We, in the
+midst of our science and our rationalism, are
+still making myths, and their force is felt in the
+actual affairs of life. They convey an impulse,
+not a program, nor a plan of reconstruction.
+Their practical value cannot be ignored, for they
+embody the motor currents in social life.</p>
+
+<p>Myths are to be judged, as M. Sorel says, by
+their ability to express aspiration. They stand
+or fall by that. In such a test the Christian
+myth, for example, would be valued for its power
+of incarnating human desire. That it did not do
+so completely is the cause of its decline. From
+Aucassin to Nietzsche men have resented it as
+a partial and stunting dream. It had too little
+room for profane love, and only by turning the
+Church of Christ into the Church Militant could
+the essential Christian passivity obtain the assent
+of aggressive and masculine races. To-day traditional
+Christianity has weakened in the face of
+man's interest in the conquest of this world. The
+liberal and advanced churches recognize this fact
+by exhibiting a great preoccupation with everyday
+affairs. Now they may be doing important service--I
+have no wish to deny that--but when
+the Christian Churches turn to civics, to reformism
+or socialism, they are in fact announcing that
+the Christian dream is dead. They may continue
+to practice some of its moral teachings and hold
+to some of its creed, but the Christian impulse
+is for them no longer active. A new dream, which
+they reverently call Christian, has sprung from
+their desires.</p>
+
+<p>During their life these social myths contain
+a nation's finest energy. It is just because they
+are "not descriptions of things, but expressions
+of will" that their influence is so great. Ignore
+what a man desires and you ignore the very
+source of his power; run against the grain of a
+nation's genius and see where you get with your
+laws. Robert Burns was right when he preferred
+poetry to charters. The recognition of this truth
+by Sorel is one of the most impressive events in
+the revolutionary movement. Standing as a
+spokesman of an actual social revolt, he has not
+lost his vision because he understands its function.
+If Machiavelli is a symbol of the political
+theorist making reason an instrument of purpose,
+we may take Sorel as a self-conscious representative
+of the impulses which generate purpose.</p>
+
+<p>It must not be supposed that respect for the
+myth is a discovery of Sorel's. He is but one
+of a number of contemporary thinkers who have
+reacted against a very stupid prejudice of nineteenth
+century science to the effect that the mental
+habits of human beings were not "facts." Unless
+ideas mirrored external nature they were regarded
+as beneath the notice of the scientific mind. But
+in more recent years we have come to realize that,
+in a world so full of ignorance and mistake, error
+itself is worthy of study. Our untrue ideas are
+significant because they influence our lives enormously.
+They are "facts" to be investigated.
+One might point to the great illumination that
+has resulted from Freud's analysis of the abracadabra
+of our dreams. No one can any longer
+dismiss the fantasy because it is logically inconsistent,
+superficially absurd, or objectively untrue.
+William James might also be cited for his defense
+of those beliefs that are beyond the realm of
+proof. His essay, "The Will to Believe," is a
+declaration of independence, which says in effect
+that scientific demonstration is not the only test
+of ideas. He stated the case for those beliefs
+which influence life so deeply, though they fail
+to describe it. James himself was very disconcerting
+to many scientists because he insisted on
+expressing his aspirations about the universe in
+what his colleague Santayana calls a "romantic
+cosmology": "I am far from wishing to suggest
+that such a view seems to me more probable than
+conventional idealism or the Christian Orthodoxy.
+All three are in the region of dramatic system-making
+and myth, to which probabilities are irrelevant."</p>
+
+<p>It is impossible to leave this point without quoting
+Nietzsche, who had this insight and stated it
+most provocatively. In "Beyond Good and Evil"
+Nietzsche says flatly that "the falseness of an
+opinion is not for us any objection to it: it is here,
+perhaps, that our new language sounds most
+strangely. The question is, how far an opinion
+is life-furthering, life-preserving, species-preserving,
+perhaps species-rearing...." Then he
+comments on the philosophers. "They all pose
+as though their real opinions had been discovered
+and attained through the self-evolving of a cold,
+pure, divinely indifferent dialectic...; whereas,
+in fact, a prejudiced proposition, idea, or
+'suggestion,' which is generally their heart's desire
+abstracted and refined, is defended by them
+with arguments sought out after the event. They
+are all advocates who do not wish to be regarded
+as such, generally astute defenders, also, of their
+prejudices, which they dub 'truths'--and <i>very</i>
+far from having the conscience which bravely
+admits this to itself; very far from having the
+good taste or the courage which goes so far
+as to let this be understood, perhaps to warn
+friend or foe, or in cheerful confidence and self-ridicule....
+It has gradually become clear
+to me what every great philosophy up till now has
+consisted of--namely, the confession of its originator,
+and a species of involuntary and unconscious
+autobiography, and, moreover, that the
+moral (or immoral) purpose in every philosophy
+has constituted the true vital germ out of which
+the entire plant has always grown.... Whoever
+considers the fundamental impulses of man
+with a view to determining how far they may have
+acted as <i>inspiring</i> genii (or as demons and cobolds)
+will find that they have all practiced
+philosophy at one time or another, and that each
+one of them would have been only too glad to
+look upon itself as the ultimate end of existence
+and the legitimate <i>lord</i> over all the other impulses.
+For every impulse is imperious, and, as
+<i>such</i>, attempts to philosophize."</p>
+
+<p>What Nietzsche has done here is, in his swashbuckling
+fashion, to cut under the abstract and
+final pretensions of creeds. Difficulties arise when
+we try to apply this wisdom in the present. That
+dogmas <i>were</i> instruments of human purposes is
+not so incredible; that they still <i>are</i> instruments is
+not so clear to everyone; and that they will be,
+that they should be--this seems a monstrous attack
+on the citadel of truth. It is possible to
+believe that other men's theories were temporary
+and merely useful; we like to believe that ours
+will have a greater authority.</p>
+
+<p>It seems like topsy-turvyland to make reason
+serve the irrational. Yet that is just what it has
+always done, and ought always to do. Many of
+us are ready to grant that in the past men's
+motives were deeper than their intellects: we forgive
+them with a kind of self-righteousness which
+says that they knew not what they did. But to
+follow the great tradition of human wisdom deliberately,
+with our eyes open in the manner of
+Sorel, that seems a crazy procedure. A notion
+of intellectual honor fights against it: we think
+we must aim at final truth, and not allow autobiography
+to creep into speculation.</p>
+
+<p>Now the trouble with such an idol is that autobiography
+creeps in anyway. The more we censor
+it, the more likely it is to appear disguised, to
+fool us subtly and perhaps dangerously. The
+men like Nietzsche and James who show the wilful
+origin of creeds are in reality the best watchers
+of the citadel of truth. For there is nothing
+disastrous in the temporary nature of our ideas.
+They are always that. But there may very easily
+be a train of evil in the self-deception which regards
+them as final. I think God will forgive us
+our skepticism sooner than our Inquisitions.</p>
+
+<p>From the political point of view, another observation
+is necessary. The creed of a Rousseau,
+for example, is active in politics, not for what it
+says, but for what people think it says. I have
+urged that Marx found scientific reasons for what
+he wanted to do. It is important to add that
+the people who adopted his reasons for what they
+wanted to do were not any too respectful of
+Marx's reasons. Thus the so-called materialistic
+philosophy of Karl Marx is not by any means
+identical with the theories one hears among
+Marxian socialists. There is a big distortion in
+the transmitting of ideas. A common purpose,
+far more than common ideas, binds Marx to his
+followers. And when a man comes to write about
+his philosophy he is confronted with a choice:
+shall the creed described be that of Marx or of
+the Marxians?</p>
+
+<p>For the study of politics I should say unhesitatingly
+that it is more important to know what
+socialist leaders, stump speakers, pamphleteers,
+think Marx meant, than to know what he said.
+For then you are dealing with living ideas: to
+search his text has its uses, but compared with
+the actual tradition of Marx it is the work of
+pedantry. I say this here for two reasons--because
+I hope to avoid the critical attack of
+the genuine Marxian specialist, and because the
+observation is, I believe, relevant to our subject.</p>
+
+<p>Relevant it is in that it suggests the importance
+of style, of propaganda, the popularization of
+ideas. The host of men who stand between a
+great thinker and the average man are not automatic
+transmitters. They work on the ideas;
+perhaps that is why a genius usually hates his
+disciples. It is interesting to notice the explanation
+given by Frau F&ouml;rster-Nietzsche for her
+brother's quarrel with Wagner. She dates it
+from the time when Nietzsche, under the guise
+of Wagnerian propaganda, began to expound
+himself. The critics and interpreters are themselves
+creative. It is really unfair to speak of
+the Marxian philosophy as a political force. It
+is juster to speak of the Marxian tradition.</p>
+
+<p>So when I write of Marx's influence I have
+in mind what men and women in socialist meetings,
+in daily life here in America, hold as a
+faith and attribute to Marx. There is no pretension
+whatever to any critical study of "Das
+Kapital" itself. I am thinking rather of stuffy
+halls in which an earnest voice is expounding "the
+evolution of capitalism," of little groups, curious
+and bewildered, listening in the streets of New
+York to the story of the battle between the
+"master class" and the "working class," of little
+red pamphlets, of newspapers, and cartoons--awkward,
+badly printed and not very genial, a
+great stream of spellbinding and controversy
+through which the aspirations of millions are becoming
+articulate:</p>
+
+<p>The tradition is saying that "the system" and
+not the individual is at fault. It describes that
+system as one in which a small class owns the
+means of production and holds the rest of mankind
+in bondage. Arts, religions, laws, as well
+as vice and crime and degradation, have their
+source in this central economic condition. If you
+want to understand our life you must see that
+it is determined by the massing of capital in the
+hands of a few. All epochs are determined by
+economic arrangements. But a system of property
+always contains within itself "the seeds of
+its own destruction." Mechanical inventions suggest
+a change: a dispossessed class compels it.
+So mankind has progressed through savagery,
+chattel slavery, serfdom, to "wage slavery" or
+the capitalism of to-day. This age is pregnant
+with the socialism of to-morrow.</p>
+
+<p>So roughly the tradition is handed on. Two
+sets of idea seem to dominate it: we are creatures
+of economic conditions; a war of classes
+is being fought everywhere in which the proletariat
+will ultimately capture the industrial machinery
+and produce a sound economic life as the basis
+of peace and happiness for all. The emphasis
+on environment is insistent. Facts are marshaled,
+the news of the day is interpreted to show that
+men are determined by economic conditions. This
+fixation has brought down upon the socialists a
+torrent of abuse in which "atheism" and "materialism"
+are prevailing epithets. But the propaganda
+continues and the philosophy spreads, penetrating
+reform groups, social workers, historians,
+and sociologists.</p>
+
+<p>It has served the socialist purpose well. To
+the workingmen it has brought home the importance
+of capturing the control of industry.
+Economic determinism has been an antidote to
+mere preaching of goodness, to hero-worship and
+political quackery. Socialism to succeed had to
+concentrate attention on the ownership of capital:
+whenever any other interest like religion or
+patriotism threatened to diffuse that attention,
+socialist leaders have always been ready to show
+that the economic fact is more central. Dignity
+and prestige were supplied by making economics
+the key of history; passion was chained by building
+paradise upon it.</p>
+
+<p>In all the political philosophies there is none
+so adapted to its end. Every sanction that mankind
+respects has been grouped about this one
+purpose--the control of capital. It is as if all
+history converged upon the issue, and the workers
+in the cause feel that they carry within them the
+destiny of the race. Start anywhere, with an
+orthodox socialist and he will lead you to this
+supreme economic situation. Tyrannies and race
+hatred, national rivalries, sex problems, the difficulties
+of artistic endeavor, all failures, crimes,
+vices--there is not one which he will not relate
+to private capitalism. Nor is there anything disingenuous
+about this focusing of the attention:
+a real belief is there. Of course you will find
+plenty of socialists who see other issues and who
+smile a bit at the rigors of economic determinism.
+In these later days there is in fact, a decided
+loosening in the creed. But it is fair to say that
+the mass of socialists hold this philosophy with
+as much solemnity as a reformer held his when
+he wrote to me that the cure for obscenity was
+the taxation of land values and absolute free
+trade.</p>
+
+<p>Singlemindedness has done good service. It
+has bound the world together and has helped
+men to think socially. Turning their attention
+away from the romanticism of history, the materialistic
+philosophy has helped them to look
+at realities. It has engendered a fine concern
+about average people, about the voiceless multitudes
+who have been left to pass unnoticed. Not
+least among the blessings is a shattering of the
+good-and-bad-man theory: the assassination of
+tyrants or the adoration of saviors. A shallow
+and specious other-worldliness has been driven
+out: an other-worldliness which is really nothing
+but laziness about this one. And if from a speculative
+angle the Marxian tradition has shaded too
+heavily the economic facts, it was at least a plausible
+and practical exaggeration.</p>
+
+<p>But the drawbacks are becoming more and
+more evident as socialism approaches nearer to
+power and responsibility. The feeling that man
+is a creature and not a creator is disastrous as
+a personal creed when you come to act. If you
+insist upon being "determined by conditions" you
+do hesitate about saying "I shall." You are likely
+to wait for something to determine you. Personal
+initiative and individual genius are poorly
+regarded: many socialists are suspicious of originality.
+This philosophy, so useful in propaganda,
+is becoming a burden in action. That is another
+way of saying that the instrument has turned into
+an idol.</p>
+
+<p>For while it is illuminating to see how environment
+moulds men, it is absolutely essential that
+men regard themselves as moulders of their environment.
+A new philosophical basis is becoming
+increasingly necessary to socialism--one that
+may not be "truer" than the old materialism but
+that shall simply be more useful. Having learned
+for a long time what is done to us, we are now
+faced with the task of doing. With this changed
+purpose goes a change of instruments. All over
+the world socialists are breaking away from the
+stultifying influence of the outworn determinism.
+For the time is at hand when they must cease to
+look upon socialism as inevitable in order to make
+it so.</p>
+
+<p>Nor will the philosophy of class warfare serve
+this new need. That can be effective only so long
+as the working-class is without sovereignty. But
+no sooner has it achieved power than a new outlook
+is needed in order to know what to do with
+it. The tactics of the battlefield are of no use
+when the battle is won.</p>
+
+<p>I picture this philosophy as one of deliberate
+choices. The underlying tone of it is that society
+is made by man for man's uses, that reforms are
+inventions to be applied when by experiment they
+show their civilizing value. Emphasis is placed
+upon the devising, adapting, constructing faculties.
+There is no reason to believe that this view is
+any colder than that of the war of class against
+class. It will generate no less energy. Men
+to-day can feel almost as much zest in the building
+of the Panama Canal as they did in a military
+victory. Their domineering impulses find satisfaction
+in conquering things, in subjecting brute
+forces to human purposes. This sense of mastery
+in a winning battle against the conditions of our
+life is, I believe, the social myth that will inspire
+our reconstructions. We shall feel free to choose
+among alternatives--to take this much of socialism,
+insert so much syndicalism, leave standing
+what of capitalism seems worth conserving. We
+shall be making our own house for our own needs,
+cities to suit ourselves, and we shall believe ourselves
+capable of moving mountains, as engineers
+do, when mountains stand in their way.</p>
+
+<p>And history, science, philosophy will support
+our hopes. What will fascinate us in the past
+will be the records of inventions, of great choices,
+of those alternatives on which destiny seems to
+hang. The splendid epochs will be interpreted
+as monuments of man's creation, not of his propulsion.
+We shall be interested primarily in the
+way nations established their civilization in spite
+of hostile conditions. Admiration will go out
+to the men who did not submit, who bent things
+to human use. We may see the entire tragedy of
+life in being driven.</p>
+
+<p>Half-truths and illusions, if you like, but tonic.
+This view will suit our mood. For we shall be
+making and the makers of history will become
+more real to us. Instead of urging that issues
+are inevitable, instead of being swamped by
+problems that are unavoidable, we may stand up
+and affirm the issues we propose to handle. Perhaps
+we shall say with Nietzsche:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"Let the value of everything be determined
+afresh by you."</p></div>
+
+<br><br><br>
+
+<h2><a name="ch8">CHAPTER VIII</a></h2>
+
+<h3>THE RED HERRING</h3>
+<br>
+
+<p>At the beginning of every campaign the newspapers
+tell about secret conferences in
+which the candidate and his managers decide
+upon "the line of attack." The approach to issues,
+the way in which they shall be stressed, what
+shall be put forward in one part of the country
+and what in another, are discussed at these meetings.
+Here is where the real program of a party
+is worked out. The document produced at the
+convention is at its best nothing but a suggestive
+formality. It is not until the speakers and the
+publicity agents have actually begun to animate
+it that the country sees what the party is about.
+It is as if the convention adopted the Decalogue,
+while these secret conferences decided which of
+the Commandments was to be made the issue.
+Almost always, of course, the decision is entirely
+a "practical" one, which means that each
+section of people is exhorted to practice the commandment
+it likes the most. Thus for the burglars
+is selected, not the eighth tablet, but the one
+on which is recommended a day of rest from
+labor; to the happily married is preached the
+seventh commandment.</p>
+
+<p>These conferences are decisive. On them depends
+the educational value of a campaign, and
+the men who participate in them, being in a position
+to state the issues and point them, determine
+the political interests of the people for a considerable
+period of time. To-day in America,
+for example, no candidate can escape entirely that
+underlying irritation which socialists call poverty
+and some call the high cost of living. But the
+conspicuous candidates do decide what direction
+thought shall take about this condition. They
+can center it upon the tariff or the trusts or even
+the currency.</p>
+
+<p>Thus Mr. Roosevelt has always had a remarkable
+power of diverting the country from the tariff
+to the control of the trusts. His Democratic opponents,
+especially Woodrow Wilson, are, as I
+write, in the midst of the Presidential campaign
+of 1912, trying to focus attention on the tariff.
+In a way the battle resembles a tug-of-war in
+which each of the two leading candidates is trying
+to pull the nation over to his favorite issue.
+On the side you can see the Prohibitionists endeavoring
+to make the country see drink as a
+central problem; the emerging socialists insisting
+that not the tariff, or liquor, or the control of
+trusts, but the ownership of capital should be the
+heart of the discussion. Electoral campaigns do
+not resemble debates so much as they do competing
+amusement shows where, with bright lights,
+gaudy posters and persuasive, insistent voices, each
+booth is trying to collect a crowd; The victory in
+a campaign is far more likely to go to the most
+plausible diagnosis than to the most convincing
+method of cure. Once a party can induce the
+country to see its issue as supreme the greater
+part of its task is done.</p>
+
+<p>The clever choice of issues influences all politics
+from the petty man&oelig;uvers of a ward leader to
+the most brilliant creative statesmanship. I remember
+an instance that happened at the beginning
+of the first socialist administration in Schenectady:
+The officials had out of the goodness
+of their hearts suspended a city ordinance which
+forbade coasting with bob-sleds on the hills of
+the city. A few days later one of the sleds ran
+into a wagon and a little girl was killed. The
+opposition papers put the accident into scareheads
+with the result that public opinion became very
+bitter. It looked like a bad crisis at the very
+beginning and the old ring politicians made the
+most of it. But they had reckoned without the
+political shrewdness of the socialists. For in
+the second day of excitement, the mayor made
+public a plan by which the main business street
+of the town was to be lighted with high-power
+lamps and turned into a "brilliant white way of
+Schenectady." The swiftness with which the
+papers displaced the gruesome details of the little
+girl's death by exultation over the business future
+of the city was a caution. Public attention was
+shifted and a political crisis avoided. I tell this
+story simply as a suggestive fact. The ethical
+considerations do not concern us here.</p>
+
+<p>There is nothing exceptional about the case.
+Whenever governments enter upon foreign invasions
+in order to avoid civil wars, the same
+trick is practiced. In the Southern States the race
+issue has been thrust forward persistently to prevent
+an economic alignment. Thus you hear from
+Southerners that unless socialism gives up its demand
+for racial equality, the propaganda cannot
+go forward. How often in great strikes have
+riots been started in order to prevent the public
+from listening to the workers' demands! It is
+an old story--the red herring dragged across the
+path in order to destroy the scent.</p>
+
+<p>Having seen the evil results we have come to
+detest a conscious choice of issues, to feel that
+it smacks of sinister plotting. The vile practice
+of yellow newspapers and chauvinistic politicians
+is almost the only experience of it we have. Religion,
+patriotism, race, and sex are the favorite
+red herrings of foul political method--they are
+the most successful because they explode so easily
+and flood the mind with those unconscious prejudices
+which make critical thinking difficult. Yet
+for all its abuse the deliberate choice of issues is
+one of the high selective arts of the statesman.
+In the debased form we know it there is little
+encouragement. But the devil is merely a fallen
+angel, and when God lost Satan he lost one of his
+best lieutenants. It is always a pretty good working
+rule that whatever is a great power of evil
+may become a great power for good. Certainly
+nothing so effective in the art of politics can be
+left out of the equipment of the statesman.</p>
+
+<p>Looked at closely, the deliberate making of
+issues is very nearly the core of the statesman's
+task. His greatest wisdom is required to select
+a policy that will fertilize the public mind. He
+fails when the issue he sets is sterile; he is incompetent
+if the issue does not lead to the human
+center of a problem; whenever the statesman
+allows the voters to trifle with taboos and by-products,
+to wander into blind alleys like "16 to 1,"
+his leadership is a public calamity. The newspaper
+or politician which tries to make an issue
+out of a supposed "prosperity" or out of admiration
+for the mere successes of our ancestors is
+doing its best to choke off the creative energies in
+politics. All the stultification of the stand-pat
+mind may be described as inability, and perhaps
+unwillingness, to nourish a fruitful choice of
+issues.</p>
+
+<p>That choice is altogether too limited in America,
+anyway. Political discussion, whether reactionary
+or radical, is monotonously confined to very few
+issues. It is as if social life were prevented from
+irrigating political thought. A subject like the
+tariff, for example, has absorbed an amount of
+attention which would justify an historian in calling
+it the incubus of American politics. Now the
+exaltation of one issue like that is obviously out
+of all proportion to its significance. A contributory
+factor it certainly is, but the country's destiny
+is not bound up finally with its solution. The
+everlasting reiterations about the tariff take up
+altogether too much time. To any government
+that was clear about values, that saw all problems
+in their relation to human life, the tariff would
+be an incident, a mechanical device and little else.
+High protectionist and free trader alike fall under
+the indictment--for a tariff wall is neither so high
+as heaven nor so broad as the earth. It may be
+necessary to have dykes on portions of the seashore;
+they may be superfluous elsewhere. But
+to concentrate nine-tenths of your attention on
+the subject of dykes is to forget the civilization
+they are supposed to protect. A wall is a wall:
+the presence of it will not do the work of civilization--the
+absence of it does not absolve anyone
+from the tasks of social life. That a statecraft
+might deal with the tariff as an aid to its purposes
+is evident. But anyone who makes the tariff the
+principal concern of statecraft is, I believe, mistaking
+the hedge for the house.</p>
+
+<p>The tariff controversy is almost as old as the
+nation. A more recent one is what Senator La
+Follette calls "The great issue before the American
+people to-day, ... the control of their
+own government." It has taken the form of an
+attack on corruption, on what is vaguely called
+"special privilege" and of a demand for a certain
+amount of political machinery such as direct
+primaries, the initiative, referendum, and recall.
+The agitation has a curious sterility: the people
+are exhorted to control their own government,
+but they are given very little advice as to what
+they are to do with it when they control it. Of
+course, the leaders who spend so much time demanding
+these mechanical changes undoubtedly
+see them as a safeguard against corrupt politicians
+and what Roosevelt calls "their respectable
+allies and figureheads, who have ruled and legislated
+and decided as if in some way the vested
+rights of privilege had a first mortgage on the
+whole United States." But look at the <i>way</i> these
+innovations are presented and I think the feeling
+is unavoidable that the control of government is
+emphasized as an end in itself. Now an observation
+of this kind is immediately open to dispute:
+it is not a clear-cut distinction but a rather subtle
+matter of stress--an impression rather than a
+definite conviction.</p>
+
+<p>Yet when you look at the career of Judge
+Lindsey in Denver the impression is sharpened
+by contrast. What gave his exposure of corruption
+a peculiar vitality was that it rested on a
+very positive human ideal: the happiness of
+children in a big city. Lindsey's attack on vice
+and financial jobbery was perhaps the most convincing
+piece of muckraking ever done in this
+country for the very reason that it sprang from
+a concern about real human beings instead of abstractions
+about democracy or righteousness.
+From the point of view of the political hack,
+Judge Lindsey made a most distressing use of
+the red herring. He brought the happiness of
+childhood into political discussion, and this opened
+up a new source of political power. By touching
+something deeply instinctive in millions of people,
+Judge Lindsey animated dull proposals with human
+interest. The pettifogging objections to
+some social plan had very little chance of survival
+owing to the dynamic power of the reformers.
+It was an excellent example of the creative results
+that come from centering a political problem
+on human nature.</p>
+
+<p>If you move only from legality to legality, you
+halt and hesitate, each step is a monstrous task.
+If the reformer is a pure opportunist, and lays
+out only "the next step," that step will be very
+difficult. But if he aims at some real human end,
+at the genuine concerns of men, women, and
+children, if he can make the democracy see and
+feel that end, the little mechanical devices of
+suffrage and primaries and tariffs will be dealt
+with as a craftsman deals with his tools. But to
+say that we must make tools first, and then begin,
+is to invert the process of life. Men did not
+agree to refrain from travel until a railroad was
+built. To make the manufacture of instruments
+an ideal is to lose much of their ideal value. A
+nation bent upon a policy of social invention
+would make its tools an incident. But just this
+perception is lacking in many propagandists. That
+is why their issues are so sterile; that is why the
+absorption in "next steps" is a diversion from
+statesmanship.</p>
+
+<p>The narrowness of American political issues is
+a fixation upon instruments. Tradition has centered
+upon the tariff, the trusts, the currency, and
+electoral machinery as the items of consideration.
+It is the failure to go behind them--to see them
+as the pale servants of a vivid social life--that
+keeps our politics in bondage to a few problems.
+It is a common experience repeated in you and
+me. Once our profession becomes all absorbing
+it hardens into pedantry. "A human being," says
+Wells, "who is a philosopher in the first place,
+a teacher in the first place, or a statesman in the
+first place is thereby and inevitably, though he
+bring God-like gifts to the pretense--a quack."</p>
+
+<p>Reformers particularly resent the enlargement
+of political issues. I have heard socialists denounce
+other socialists for occupying themselves
+with the problems of sex. The claim was that
+these questions should be put aside so as not to
+disturb the immediate program. The socialists
+knew from experience that sex views cut across
+economic ones--that a new interest breaks up the
+alignment. Woodrow Wilson expressed this same
+fear in his views on the liquor question: after
+declaring for local option he went on to say that
+"the questions involved are social and moral and
+are not susceptible of being made part of a party
+program. Whenever they have been made the
+subject matter of party contests they have cut the
+lines of party organization and party action
+athwart, to the utter confusion of political action
+in every other field.... I do not believe
+party programs of the highest consequence to
+the political life of the State and of the nation
+ought to be thrust on one side and hopelessly
+embarrassed for long periods together by making
+a political issue of a great question which is essentially
+non-political, non-partisan, moral and
+social in its nature."</p>
+
+<p>That statement was issued at the beginning
+of a campaign in which Woodrow Wilson was
+the nominee of a party that has always been
+closely associated with the liquor interests. The
+bogey of the saloon had presented itself early:
+it was very clear that an affirmative position by
+the candidate was sure to alienate either the temperance
+or the "liquor vote." No doubt a sense
+of this dilemma is partly responsible for Wilson's
+earnest plea that the question of liquor be left
+out of the campaign. He saw the confusion and
+embarrassment he speaks of as an immediate
+danger. Like his views on immigration and
+Chinese labor it was a red herring across his
+path. It would, if brought into prominence, cut
+the lines of party action athwart.</p>
+
+<p>His theoretical grounds for ignoring the question
+in politics are very interesting just because
+they are vitalized by this practical difficulty which
+he faced. Like all party men Woodrow Wilson
+had thrust upon him here a danger that haunts
+every political program. The more issues a party
+meets the less votes it is likely to poll. And
+for a very simple reason: you cannot keep the
+citizenship of a nation like this bound in its
+allegiance to two large parties unless you make
+the grounds of allegiance very simple and very
+obvious. If you are to hold five or six million
+voters enlisted under one emblem the less specific
+you are and the fewer issues you raise the more
+probable it is that you can stop this host from
+quarreling within the ranks.</p>
+
+<p>No doubt this is a partial explanation of the
+bareness of American politics. The two big
+parties have had to preserve a superficial homogeneity;
+and a platitude is more potent than an
+issue. The minor parties--Populist, Prohibition,
+Independence League and Socialist--have shown
+a much greater willingness to face new problems.
+Their view of national policy has always been
+more inclusive, perhaps for the very reason that
+their membership is so much more exclusive. But
+if anyone wishes a smashing illustration of this
+paradox let him consider the rapid progress of
+Roosevelt's philosophy in the very short time
+between the Republican Convention in June to
+the Progressive Convention in August, 1912. As
+soon as Roosevelt had thrown off the burden
+of preserving a false harmony among irreconcilable
+Republicans, he issued a platform full of
+definiteness and square dealing with many issues.
+He was talking to a minority party. But Roosevelt's
+genius is not that of group leadership. He
+longs for majorities. He set out to make the
+campaign a battle between the Progressives and
+the Democrats--the old discredited Republicans
+fell back into a rather dead conservative minority.
+No sooner did Roosevelt take the stump than
+the paradox loomed up before him. His speeches
+began to turn on platitudes--on the vague idealism
+and indisputable moralities of the Decalogue
+and the Sermon on the Mount. The fearlessness
+of the Chicago confession was melted down into
+a featureless alloy.</p>
+
+<p>The embarrassment from the liquor question
+which Woodrow Wilson feared does not arise
+because teetotaler and drunkard both become intoxicated
+when they discuss the saloon. It would
+come just as much from a radical program of land
+taxation, factory reform, or trust control. Let
+anyone of these issues be injected into his campaign
+and the lines of party action would be cut
+"athwart." For Woodrow Wilson was dealing
+with the inevitable embarrassment of a party
+system dependent on an inexpressive homogeneity.
+The grouping of the voters into two large herds
+costs a large price: it means that issues must be
+so simplified and selected that the real demands
+of the nation rise only now and then to the level
+of political discussion. The more people a party
+contains the less it expresses their needs.</p>
+
+<p>Woodrow Wilson's diagnosis of the red herring
+in politics is obviously correct. A new issue does
+embarrass a wholesale organization of the voters.
+His desire to avoid it in the midst of a campaign
+is understandable. His urgent plea that the
+liquor question be kept a local issue may be wise.
+But the general philosophy which says that the
+party system should not be cut athwart is at least
+open to serious dispute. Instead of an evil, it
+looks to me like progress towards greater responsiveness
+of parties to popular need. It is
+good to disturb alignments: to break up a superficial
+unanimity. The masses of people held together
+under the name Democratic are bound in
+an enervating communion. The real groups dare
+not speak their convictions for fear the crust will
+break. It is as if you had thrown a large sheet
+over a mass of men and made them anonymous.</p>
+
+<p>The man who raises new issues has always been
+distasteful to politicians. He musses up what
+had been so tidily arranged. I remember once
+speaking to a local boss about woman suffrage.
+His objections were very simple: "We've got
+the organization in fine shape now--we know
+where every voter in the district stands. But you
+let all the women vote and we'll be confused as
+the devil. It'll be an awful job keeping track
+of them." He felt what many a manufacturer
+feels when somebody has the impertinence to
+invent a process which disturbs the routine of
+business.</p>
+
+<p>Hard as it is upon the immediate plans of the
+politician, it is a national blessing when the lines
+of party action are cut athwart by new issues.
+I recognize that the red herring is more often
+frivolous and personal--a matter of misrepresentation
+and spite--than an honest attempt to enlarge
+the scope of politics. However, a fine thing
+must not be deplored because it is open to vicious
+caricature. To the party worker the petty and
+the honest issue are equally disturbing. The
+break-up of the parties into expressive groups
+would be a ventilation of our national life. No
+use to cry peace when there is no peace. The
+false bonds are best broken: with their collapse
+would come a release of social energy into political
+discussion. For every country is a mass of
+minorities which should find a voice in public
+affairs. Any device like proportional representation
+and preferential voting which facilitates the
+political expression of group interests is worth
+having. The objection that popular government
+cannot be conducted without the two party system
+is, I believe, refuted by the experience of Europe.
+If I had to choose between a Congressional caucus
+and a coalition ministry, I should not have to
+hesitate very long. But no one need go abroad
+for actual experience: in the United States Senate
+during the Taft administration there were really
+three parties--Republicans, Insurgents and Democrats.
+Public business went ahead with at least
+as much effectiveness as under the old Aldrich
+ring.</p>
+
+<p>There are deeper reasons for urging a break-up
+of herd-politics. It is not only desirable that
+groups should be able to contribute to public
+discussion: it is absolutely essential if the parliamentary
+method is not to be superseded by
+direct and violent action. The two party system
+chokes off the cry of a minority--perhaps the
+best way there is of precipitating an explosion.
+An Englishman once told me that the utter freedom
+of speech in Hyde Park was the best safeguard
+England had against the doctrines that
+were propounded there. An anarchist who was
+invited to address Congress would be a mild person
+compared to the man forbidden to speak in
+the streets of San Diego. For many a bomb has
+exploded into rhetoric.</p>
+
+<p>The rigidity of the two-party system is, I believe,
+disastrous: it ignores issues without settling
+them, dulls and wastes the energies of active
+groups, and chokes off the protests which should
+find a civilized expression in public life. A recognition
+of what an incubus it is should make us
+hospitable to all those devices which aim at making
+politics responsive by disturbing the alignments
+of habit. The initiative and referendum
+will help: they are a method of voting on definite
+issues instead of electing an administration in
+bulk. If cleverly handled these electoral devices
+should act as a check on a wholesale attitude
+toward politics. Men could agree on a candidate
+and disagree on a measure. Another device is
+the separation of municipal, state and national
+elections: to hold them all at the same time is
+an inducement to prevent the voter from splitting
+his allegiance. Proportional representation and
+preferential voting I have mentioned. The short
+ballot is a psychological principle which must be
+taken into account wherever there is voting: it
+will help the differentiation of political groups
+by concentrating the attention on essential choices.
+The recall of public officials is in part a policeman's
+club, in part a clumsy way of getting around
+the American prejudice for a fixed term of office.
+That rigidity which by the mere movement of the
+calendar throws an official out of office in the
+midst of his work or compels him to go campaigning
+is merely the crude method of a
+democracy without confidence in itself. The recall
+is a half-hearted and negative way of dealing
+with this difficulty. It does enable us to rid ourselves
+of an officer we don't like instead of having
+to wait until the earth has revolved to a
+certain place about the sun. But we still have
+to vote on a fixed date whether we have anything
+to vote upon or not. If a recall election is held
+when the people petition for it, why not all elections?</p>
+
+<p>In ways like these we shall go on inventing
+methods by which the fictitious party alignments
+can be dissolved. There is one device suggested
+now and then, tried, I believe, in a few places,
+and vaguely championed by some socialists. It
+is called in German an "Interessenvertrag"--a
+political representation by trade interests as well
+as by geographical districts. Perhaps this is the
+direction towards which the bi-cameral legislature
+will develop. One chamber would then represent
+a man's sectional interests as a consumer: the
+other his professional interests as a producer.
+The railway workers, the miners, the doctors, the
+teachers, the retail merchants would have direct
+representation in the "Interessenvertrag." You
+might call it a Chamber of Special Interests. I
+know how that phrase "Special Interests" hurts.
+In popular usage we apply it only to corrupting
+businesses. But our feeling against them should
+not blind us to the fact that every group in the
+community has its special interests. They will
+always exist until mankind becomes a homogeneous
+jelly. The problem is to find some social adjustment
+for all the special interests of a nation.
+That is best achieved by open recognition and
+clear representation. Let no one then confuse
+the "Interessenvertrag" with those existing legislatures
+which are secret Chambers of Special
+Privilege.</p>
+
+<p>The scheme is worth looking at for it does do
+away with the present dilemma of the citizen in
+which he wonders helplessly whether he ought to
+vote as a consumer or as a producer. I believe he
+should have both votes, and the "Interessenvertrag"
+is a way.</p>
+
+<p>These devices are mentioned here as illustrations
+and not as conclusions. You can think of
+them as arrangements by which the red herring
+is turned from a pest into a benefit. I grant that
+in the rigid political conditions prevailing to-day
+a new issue is an embarrassment, perhaps a
+hindrance to the procedure of political life. But
+instead of narrowing the scope of politics, to
+avoid it, the only sensible thing to do is to invent
+methods which will allow needs and problems
+and group interests avenues into politics.</p>
+
+<p>But a suggestion like this is sure to be met with
+the argument which Woodrow Wilson has in
+mind when he says that the "questions involved
+are social and moral and are not susceptible of
+being made parts of a party program." He
+voices a common belief when he insists that there
+are moral and social problems, "essentially non-political."
+Innocent as it looks at first sight this
+plea by Woodrow Wilson is weighted with the
+tradition of a century and a half. To my mind
+it symbolizes a view of the state which we are outgrowing,
+and throws into relief the view towards
+which we are struggling. Its implications are
+well worth tracing, for through them I think we
+can come to understand better the method of
+Twentieth Century politics.</p>
+
+<p>It is perfectly true that that government is
+best which governs least. It is equally true that
+that government is best which provides most. The
+first truth belongs to the Eighteenth Century:
+the second to the Twentieth. Neither of them
+can be neglected in our attitude towards the state.
+Without the Jeffersonian distrust of the police we
+might easily grow into an impertinent and tyrannous
+collectivism: without a vivid sense of the
+possibilities of the state we abandon the supreme
+instrument of civilization. The two theories need
+to be held together, yet clearly distinguished.</p>
+
+<p>Government has been an exalted policeman: it
+was there to guard property and to prevent us
+from quarreling too violently. That was about
+all it was good for. Yet society found problems
+on its hands--problems which Woodrow Wilson
+calls moral and social in their nature. Vice and
+crime, disease, and grinding poverty forced themselves
+on the attention of the community. A
+typical example is the way the social evil compelled
+the city of Chicago to begin an investigation.
+Yet when government was asked to handle
+the question it had for wisdom an ancient conception
+of itself as a policeman. Its only method
+was to forbid, to prosecute, to jail--in short, to
+use the taboo. But experience has shown that
+the taboo will not solve "moral and social questions"--that
+nine times out of ten it aggravates
+the disease. Political action becomes a petty,
+futile, mean little intrusion when its only method
+is prosecution.</p>
+
+<p>No wonder then that conservatively-minded
+men pray that moral and social questions be kept
+out of politics; no wonder that more daring souls
+begin to hate the whole idea of government and
+take to anarchism. So long as the state is conceived
+merely as an agent of repression, the less
+it interferes with our lives, the better. Much of
+the horror of socialism comes from a belief that
+by increasing the functions of government its
+regulating power over our daily lives will grow
+into a tyranny. I share this horror when certain
+socialists begin to propound their schemes. There
+is a dreadful amount of forcible scrubbing and
+arranging and pocketing implied in some socialisms.
+There is a wish to have the state use its
+position as general employer to become a censor
+of morals and arbiter of elegance, like the benevolent
+employers of the day who take an impertinent
+interest in the private lives of their workers.
+Without any doubt socialism has within it the
+germs of that great bureaucratic tyranny which
+Chesterton and Belloc have named the Servile
+State.</p>
+
+<p>So it is a wise instinct that makes men jealous
+of the policeman's power. Far better we may
+say that moral and social problems be left to
+private solution than that they be subjected to
+the clumsy method of the taboo. When Woodrow
+Wilson argues that social problems are not
+susceptible to treatment in a party program, he
+must mean only one thing: that they cannot be
+handled by the state as he conceives it. He is
+right. His attitude is far better than that of
+the Vice Commission: it too had only a policeman's
+view of government, but it proceeded to
+apply it to problems that are not susceptible to
+such treatment. Wilson, at least, knows the limitations
+of his philosophy.</p>
+
+<p>But once you see the state as a provider of
+civilizing opportunities, his whole objection collapses.
+As soon as government begins to supply
+services, it is turning away from the sterile
+tyranny of the taboo. The provision of schools,
+streets, plumbing, highways, libraries, parks, universities,
+medical attention, post-offices, a Panama
+Canal, agricultural information, fire protection--is
+a use of government totally different from the
+ideal of Jefferson. To furnish these opportunities
+is to add to the resources of life, and only a doctrinaire
+adherence to a misunderstood ideal will
+raise any objection to them.</p>
+
+<p>When an anarchist says that the state must be
+abolished he does not mean what he says. What
+he wants to abolish is the repressive, not the
+productive state. He cannot possibly object to
+being furnished with the opportunity of writing
+to his comrade three thousand miles away, of
+drinking pure water, or taking a walk in the park.
+Of course when he finds the post-office opening
+his mail, or a law saying that he must drink
+nothing but water, he begins to object even to
+the services of the government. But that is a
+confusion of thought, for these tyrannies are
+merely intrusions of the eighteenth century upon
+the twentieth. The postmaster is still something
+of a policeman.</p>
+
+<p>Once you realize that moral and social problems
+must be treated to fine opportunities, that the
+method of the future is to compete with the devil
+rather than to curse him; that the furnishing of
+civilized environments is the goal of statecraft,
+then there is no longer any reason for keeping
+social and moral questions out of politics. They
+are what politics must deal with essentially, now
+that it has found a way. The policeman with
+his taboo did make moral and social questions
+insusceptible to treatment in party platforms.
+He kept the issues of politics narrow and irrelevant,
+and just because these really interesting questions
+could not be handled, politics was an over-advertised
+hubbub. But the vision of the new
+statecraft in centering politics upon human interests
+becomes a creator of opportunities instead
+of a censor of morals, and deserves a fresh and
+heightened regard.</p>
+
+<p>The party platform will grow ever more and
+more into a program of services. In the past it
+has been an armory of platitudes or a forecast of
+punishments. It promised that it would stop this
+evil practice, drive out corruption here, and
+prosecute this-and-that offense. All that belongs
+to a moribund tradition. Abuse and disuse characterize
+the older view of the state: guardian
+and censor it has been, provider but grudgingly.
+The proclamations of so-called progressives that
+they will jail financiers, or "wage relentless warfare"
+upon social evils, are simply the reiterations
+of men who do not understand the uses of
+the state.</p>
+
+<p>A political revolution is in progress: the state
+as policeman is giving place to the state as producer.</p>
+
+<br><br><br>
+
+
+<h2><a name="ch9">CHAPTER IX</a></h2>
+
+<h3>REVOLUTION AND CULTURE</h3>
+
+<br>
+<p>There is a legend of a peasant who lived
+near Paris through the whole Napoleonic
+era without ever having heard of the name of
+Bonaparte. A story of that kind is enough to
+make a man hesitate before he indulges in a flamboyant
+description of social changes. That peasant
+is more than a symbol of the privacy of human
+interest: he is a warning against the incurable romanticism
+which clings about the idea of a revolution.
+Popular history is deceptive if it is used to
+furnish a picture for coming events. Like drama
+which compresses the tragedy of a lifetime into a
+unity of time, place, and action, history foreshortens
+an epoch into an episode. It gains in poignancy,
+but loses reality. Men grew from infancy to
+old age, their children's children had married and
+loved and worked while the social change we
+speak of as the industrial revolution was being
+consummated. That is why it is so difficult for
+living people to believe that they too are in the
+midst of great transformations. What looks to
+us like an incredible rush of events sloping towards
+a great historical crisis was to our ancestors
+little else than the occasional punctuation
+of daily life with an exciting incident. Even
+to-day when we have begun to speak of our age
+as a transition, there are millions of people who
+live in an undisturbed routine. Even those of
+us who regard ourselves as active in mothering
+the process and alert in detecting its growth are
+by no means constantly aware of any great
+change. For even the fondest mother cannot
+watch her child grow.</p>
+
+<p>I remember how tremendously surprised I was
+in visiting Russia several years ago to find that
+in Moscow or St. Petersburg men were interested
+in all sorts of things besides the revolution. I
+had expected every Russian to be absorbed in
+the struggle. It seemed at first as if my notions
+of what a revolution ought to be were contradicted
+everywhere. And I assure you it wrenched
+the imagination to see tidy nursemaids wheeling
+perambulators and children playing diavolo on
+the very square where Bloody Sunday had gone
+into history. It takes a long perspective and no
+very vivid acquaintance with revolution to be
+melodramatic about it. So much is left out of
+history and biography which would spoil the effect.
+The anti-climax is almost always omitted.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps that is the reason why Arnold Bennett's
+description of the siege of Paris in "The
+Old Wives' Tale" is so disconcerting to many
+people. It is hard to believe that daily life continues
+with its stretches of boredom and its personal
+interests even while the enemy is bombarding
+a city. How much more difficult is it to
+imagine a revolution that is to come--to space it
+properly through a long period of time, to conceive
+what it will be like to the people who live
+through it. Almost all social prediction is catastrophic
+and absurdly simplified. Even those who
+talk of the slow "evolution" of society are likely
+to think of it as a series of definite changes easily
+marked and well known to everybody. It is what
+Bernard Shaw calls the reformer's habit of mistaking
+his private emotions for a public movement.</p>
+
+<p>Even though the next century is full of dramatic
+episodes--the collapse of governments and labor
+wars--these events will be to the social revolution
+what the smashing of machines in Lancashire
+was to the industrial revolution. The reality that
+is worthy of attention is a change in the very texture
+and quality of millions of lives--a change
+that will be vividly perceptible only in the retrospect
+of history.</p>
+
+<p>The conservative often has a sharp sense of the
+complexity of revolution: not desiring change, he
+prefers to emphasize its difficulties, whereas the
+reformer is enticed into a faith that the intensity
+of desire is a measure of its social effect. Yet
+just because no reform is in itself a revolution, we
+must not jump to the assurance that no revolution
+can be accomplished. True as it is that great
+changes are imperceptible, it is no less true that
+they are constantly taking place. Moreover, for
+the very reason that human life changes its quality
+so slowly, the panic over political proposals is
+childish.</p>
+
+<p>It is obvious, for instance, that the recall of
+judges will not revolutionize the national life.
+That is why the opposition generated will seem
+superstitious to the next generation. As I write,
+a convention of the Populist Party has just taken
+place. Eight delegates attended the meeting, which
+was held in a parlor. Even the reactionary press
+speaks in a kindly way about these men. Twenty
+years ago the Populists were hated and feared
+as if they practiced black magic. What they
+wanted is on the point of realization. To some
+of us it looks like a drop in the bucket--a slight
+part of vastly greater plans. But how stupid was
+the fear of Populism, what unimaginative nonsense
+it was to suppose twenty years ago that the
+program was the road to the end of the world.</p>
+
+<p>One good deed or one bad one is no measure
+of a man's character: the Last Judgment let us
+hope will be no series of decisions as simple as
+that. "The soul survives its adventures," says
+Chesterton with a splendid sense of justice. A
+country survives its legislation. That truth should
+not comfort the conservative nor depress the radical.
+For it means that public policy can enlarge
+its scope and increase its audacity, can try big
+experiments without trembling too much over the
+result. This nation could enter upon the most
+radical experiments and could afford to fail in
+them. Mistakes do not affect us so deeply as
+we imagine. Our prophecies of change are subjective
+wishes or fears that never come to full
+realization.</p>
+
+<p>Those socialists are confused who think that
+a new era can begin by a general strike or an
+electoral victory. Their critics are just a bit
+more confused when they become hysterical over
+the prospect. Both of them over-emphasize the
+importance of single events. Yet I do not wish
+to furnish the impression that crises are negligible.
+They are extremely important as symptoms, as
+milestones, and as instruments. It is simply that
+the reality of a revolution is not in a political
+decree or the scarehead of a newspaper, but in
+the experiences, feelings, habits of myriads of
+men.</p>
+
+<p>No one who watched the textile strike at
+Lawrence, Massachusetts, in the winter of 1912
+can forget the astounding effect it had on the
+complacency of the public. Very little was revealed
+that any well-informed social worker does
+not know as a commonplace about the mill population.
+The wretchedness and brutality of Lawrence
+conditions had been described in books and
+magazines and speeches until radicals had begun
+to wonder at times whether the power of language
+wasn't exhausted. The response was discouragingly
+weak--an occasional government investigation,
+an impassioned protest from a few
+individuals, a placid charity, were about all that
+the middle-class public had to say about factory
+life. The cynical indifference of legislatures and
+the hypocrisy of the dominant parties were all
+that politics had to offer. The Lawrence strike
+touched the most impervious: story after story
+came to our ears of hardened reporters who suddenly
+refused to misrepresent the strikers, of
+politicians aroused to action, of social workers
+become revolutionary. Daily conversation was
+shocked into some contact with realities--the
+newspapers actually printed facts about the situation
+of a working class population.</p>
+
+<p>And why? The reason is not far to seek.
+The Lawrence strikers did something more than
+insist upon their wrongs; they showed a disposition
+to right them. That is what scared public
+opinion into some kind of truth-telling. So long
+as the poor are docile in their poverty, the rest
+of us are only too willing to satisfy our consciences
+by pitying them. But when the downtrodden
+gather into a threat as they did at Lawrence,
+when they show that they have no stake
+in civilization and consequently no respect for its
+institutions, when the object of pity becomes the
+avenger of its own miseries, then the middle-class
+public begins to look at the problem more intelligently.</p>
+
+<p>We are not civilized enough to meet an issue
+before it becomes acute. We were not intelligent
+enough to free the slaves peacefully--we are not
+intelligent enough to-day to meet the industrial
+problem before it develops a crisis. That is the
+hard truth of the matter. And that is why no
+honest student of politics can plead that social
+movements should confine themselves to argument
+and debate, abandoning the militancy of the
+strike, the insurrection, the strategy of social conflict.</p>
+
+<p>Those who deplore the use of force in the
+labor struggle should ask themselves whether the
+ruling classes of a country could be depended
+upon to inaugurate a program of reconstruction
+which would abolish the barbarism that prevails
+in industry. Does anyone seriously believe that
+the business leaders, the makers of opinion and
+the politicians will, on their own initiative, bring
+social questions to a solution? If they do it will
+be for the first time in history. The trivial plans
+they are introducing to-day--profit-sharing and
+welfare work--are on their own admission an
+attempt to quiet the unrest and ward off the
+menace of socialism.</p>
+
+<p>No, paternalism is not dependable, granting
+that it is desirable. It will do very little more
+than it feels compelled to do. Those who to-day
+bear the brunt of our evils dare not throw themselves
+upon the mercy of their masters, not
+though there are bread and circuses as a reward.
+From the groups upon whom the pressure is most
+direct must come the power to deal with it. We
+are not all immediately interested in all problems:
+our attention wanders unless the people who are
+interested compel us to listen.</p>
+
+<p>Social movements are at once the symptoms
+and the instruments of progress. Ignore them
+and statesmanship is irrelevant; fail to use them
+and it is weak. Often in the course of these
+essays I have quoted from H. G. Wells. I must
+do so again: "Every party stands essentially for
+the interests and mental usages of some definite
+class or group of classes in the exciting community,
+and every party has its scientific minded and constructive
+leading section, with well defined hinterlands
+formulating its social functions in a public
+spirited form, and its superficial-minded following
+confessing its meannesses and vanities and
+prejudices. No class will abolish itself, materially
+alter its way of living, or drastically reconstruct
+itself, albeit no class is indisposed to
+co-operate in the unlimited socialization of any
+other class. In that capacity for aggression upon
+other classes lies the essential driving force of
+modern affairs."</p>
+
+<p>The truth of this can be tested in the socialist
+movement. There is a section among the socialists
+which regards the class movement of labor
+as a driving force in the socialization of industry.
+This group sees clearly that without the threat
+of aggression no settlement of the issues is possible.
+Ordinarily such socialists say that the class
+struggle is a movement which will end classes.
+They mean that the self-interest of labor is identical
+with the interests of a community--that it
+is a kind of social selfishness. But there are
+other socialists who speak constantly of "working-class
+government" and they mean just what they
+say. It is their intention to have the community
+ruled in the interests of labor. Probe their minds
+to find out what they mean by labor and in all
+honesty you cannot escape the admission that they
+mean industrial labor alone. These socialists
+think entirely in terms of the factory population
+of cities: the farmers, the small shop-keepers, the
+professional classes have only a perfunctory interest
+for them. I know that no end of phrases
+could be adduced to show the inclusiveness of the
+word labor. But their intention is what I have
+tried to describe: they are thinking of government
+by a factory population.</p>
+
+<p>They appeal to history for confirmation: have
+not all social changes, they ask, meant the emergence
+of a new economic class until it dominated
+society? Did not the French Revolution mean
+the conquest of the feudal landlord by the middle-class
+merchant? Why should not the Social
+Revolution mean the victory of the proletariat
+over the bourgeoisie? That may be true, but it
+is no reason for being bullied by it into a tame
+admission that what has always been must always
+be. I see no reason for exalting the unconscious
+failures of other revolutions into deliberate models
+for the next one. Just because the capacity of
+aggression in the middle class ran away with
+things, and failed to fuse into any decent social
+ideal, is not ground for trying as earnestly as
+possible to repeat the mistake.</p>
+
+<p>The lesson of it all, it seems to me, is this:
+that class interests are the driving forces which
+keep public life centered upon essentials. They
+become dangerous to a nation when it denies them,
+thwarts them and represses them so long that they
+burst out and become dominant. Then there is
+no limit to their aggression until another class
+appears with contrary interests. The situation
+might be compared to those hysterias in which
+a suppressed impulse flares up and rules the whole
+mental life.</p>
+
+<p>Social life has nothing whatever to fear from
+group interests so long as it doesn't try to play
+the ostrich in regard to them. So the burden of
+national crises is squarely upon the dominant
+classes who fight so foolishly against the emergent
+ones. That is what precipitates violence, that is
+what renders social co-operation impossible, that
+is what makes catastrophes the method of change.</p>
+
+<p>The wisest rulers see this. They know that the
+responsibility for insurrections rests in the last
+analysis upon the unimaginative greed and endless
+stupidity of the dominant classes. There is
+something pathetic in the blindness of powerful
+people when they face a social crisis. Fighting
+viciously every readjustment which a nation demands,
+they make their own overthrow inevitable.
+It is they who turn opposing interests into a class
+war. Confronted with the deep insurgency of
+labor what do capitalists and their spokesmen do?
+They resist every demand, submit only after a
+struggle, and prepare a condition of war to the
+death. When far-sighted men appear in the ruling
+classes--men who recognize the need of a
+civilized answer to this increasing restlessness, the
+rich and the powerful treat them to a scorn and
+a hatred that are incredibly bitter. The hostility
+against men like Roosevelt, La Follette, Bryan,
+Lloyd-George is enough to make an observer believe
+that the rich of to-day are as stupid as
+the nobles of France before the Revolution.</p>
+
+<p>It seems to me that Roosevelt never spoke
+more wisely or as a better friend of civilization
+than the time when he said at New York City
+on March 20, 1912, that "the woes of France
+for a century and a quarter have been due to the
+folly of her people in splitting into the two camps
+of unreasonable conservatism and unreasonable
+radicalism. Had pre-Revolutionary France listened
+to men like Turgot and backed them up
+all would have gone well. But the beneficiaries
+of privilege, the Bourbon reactionaries, the short-sighted
+ultra-conservatives, turned down Turgot;
+and then found that instead of him they had
+obtained Robespierre. They gained twenty years'
+freedom from all restraint and reform at the cost
+of the whirlwind of the red terror; and in their
+turn the unbridled extremists of the terror induced
+a blind reaction; and so, with convulsion
+and oscillation from one extreme to another, with
+alterations of violent radicalism and violent
+Bourbonism, the French people went through
+misery to a shattered goal."</p>
+
+<p>Profound changes are not only necessary, but
+highly desirable. Even if this country were comfortably
+well-off, healthy, prosperous, and educated,
+men would go on inventing and creating
+opportunities to amplify the possibilities of life.
+These inventions would mean radical transformations.
+For we are bent upon establishing more
+in this nation than a minimum of comfort. A
+liberal people would welcome social inventions as
+gladly as we do mechanical ones. What it would
+fear is a hard-shell resistance to change which
+brings it about explosively.</p>
+
+<p>Catastrophes are disastrous to radical and conservative
+alike: they do not preserve what was
+worth maintaining; they allow a deformed and
+often monstrous perversion of the original plan.
+The emancipation of the slaves might teach us
+the lesson that an explosion followed by reconstruction
+is satisfactory to nobody.</p>
+
+<p>Statesmanship would go out to meet a crisis
+before it had become acute. The thing it would
+emphatically not do is to dam up an insurgent
+current until it overflowed the countryside. Fight
+labor's demands to the last ditch and there will
+come a time when it seizes the whole of power,
+makes itself sovereign, and takes what it used
+to ask. That is a poor way for a nation to proceed.
+For the insurgent become master is a
+fanatic from the struggle, and as George Santayana
+says, he is only too likely to redouble his
+effort after he has forgotten his aim.</p>
+
+<p>Nobody need waste his time debating whether
+or not there are to be great changes. That is
+settled for us whether we like it or not. What
+is worth debating is the method by which change
+is to come about. Our choice, it seems to me, lies
+between a blind push and a deliberate leadership,
+between thwarting movements until they master
+us, and domesticating them until they are answered.</p>
+
+<p>When Roosevelt formed the Progressive Party
+on a platform of social reform he crystallized
+a deep unrest, brought it out of the cellars of
+resentment into the agora of political discussion.
+He performed the real task of a leader--a task
+which has essentially two dimensions. By becoming
+part of the dynamics of unrest he gathered
+a power of effectiveness: by formulating a program
+for insurgency he translated it into terms of
+public service.</p>
+
+<p>What Roosevelt did at the middle-class level,
+the socialists have done at the proletarian. The
+world has been slow to recognize the work of
+the Socialist Party in transmuting a dumb muttering
+into a civilized program. It has found an
+intelligent outlet for forces that would otherwise
+be purely cataclysmic. The truth of this has
+been tested recently in the appearance of the
+"direct actionists."</p>
+
+<p>They are men who have lost faith in political
+socialism. Why? Because, like all other groups,
+the socialists tend to become routineers, to slip
+into an easy reiteration. The direct actionists
+are a warning to the Socialist Party that its tactics
+and its program are not adequate to domesticating
+the deepest unrest of labor. Within that party,
+therefore, a leadership is required which will ride
+the forces of "syndicalism" and use them for a
+constructive purpose. The brilliant writer of the
+"Notes of the Week" in the English New Age
+has shown how this might be done. He has
+fused the insight of the syndicalist with the plans
+of the collectivists under the name of Guild
+Socialism.</p>
+
+<p>His plan calls for co-management of industry
+by the state and the labor union. It steers a
+course between exploitation by a bureaucracy in
+the interests of the consumer--the socialist danger--and
+oppressive monopolies by industrial
+unions--the syndicalist danger. I shall not attempt
+to argue here either for or against the
+scheme. My concern is with method rather than
+with special pleadings. The Guild Socialism of
+the "New Age" is merely an instance of statesmanlike
+dealing with a new social force. Instead
+of throwing up its hands in horror at one over-advertised
+tactical incident like sabotage, the
+"New Age" went straight to the creative impulse
+of the syndicalist movement.</p>
+
+<p>Every true craftsman, artist or professional
+man knows and sympathizes with that impulse:
+you may call it a desire for self-direction in labor.
+The deepest revolt implied in the term syndicalism
+is against the impersonal, driven quality
+of modern industry--against the destruction of
+that pride which alone distinguishes work from
+slavery. Some such impulse as that is what marks
+off syndicalism from the other revolts of labor.
+Our suspicion of the collectivist arrangement is
+aroused by the picture of a vast state machine so
+horribly well-regulated that human impulse is utterly
+subordinated. I believe too that the fighting
+qualities of syndicalism are kept at the boiling
+point by a greater sense of outraged human
+dignity than can be found among mere socialists
+or unionists. The imagination is more vivid:
+the horror of capitalism is not alone in the poverty
+and suffering it entails, but in its ruthless denial
+of life to millions of men. The most cruel of
+all denials is to deprive a human being of joyous
+activity. Syndicalism is shot through with the
+assertion that an imposed drudgery is intolerable--that
+labor at a subsistence wage as a cog in a
+meaningless machine is no condition upon which
+to found civilization. That is a new kind of
+revolt--more dangerous to capitalism than the
+demand for higher wages. You can not treat
+the syndicalists like cattle because forsooth they
+have ceased to be cattle. "The damned wantlessness
+of the poor," about which Oscar Wilde complained,
+the cry for a little more fodder, gives
+way to an insistence upon the chance to be interested
+in life.</p>
+
+<p>To shut the door in the face of such a current
+of feeling because it is occasionally exasperated
+into violence would be as futile as locking up
+children because they get into mischief. The
+mind which rejects syndicalism entirely because
+of the by-products of its despair has had pearls
+cast before it in vain. I know that syndicalism
+means a revision of some of our plans--that it
+is an intrusion upon many a glib prejudice. But
+a human impulse is more important than any existing
+theory. We must not throw an unexpected
+guest out of the window because no place
+is set for him at table. For we lose not only
+the charm of his company: he may in anger
+wreck the house.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p>Yet the whole nation can't sit at one table: the
+politician will object that all human interests can't
+be embodied in a party program. That is true,
+truer than most politicians would admit in public.
+No party can represent a whole nation, although,
+with the exception of the socialists, all of them
+pretend to do just that. The reason is very
+simple: a platform is a list of performances that
+are possible within a few years. It is concerned
+with more or less immediate proposals, and in
+a nation split up by class, sectional and racial
+interests, these proposals are sure to arouse hostility.
+No definite industrial and political platform,
+for example, can satisfy rich and poor,
+black and white, Eastern creditor and Western
+farmer. A party that tried to answer every conflicting
+interest would stand still because people
+were pulling in so many different directions. It
+would arouse the anger of every group and the
+approval of its framers. It would have no
+dynamic power because the forces would neutralize
+each other.</p>
+
+<p>One comprehensive party platform fusing every
+interest is impossible and undesirable. What is
+both possible and desirable is that every group
+interest should be represented in public life--that
+it should have spokesmen and influence in
+public affairs. This is almost impossible to-day.
+Our blundering political system is pachydermic in
+its irresponsiveness. The methods of securing
+representation are unfit instruments for any flexible
+use. But the United States is evidently not
+exceptional in this respect. England seems to
+suffer in the same way. In May, 1912, the
+"Daily Mail" published a series of articles by
+H. G. Wells on "The Labour Unrest." Is he
+not describing almost any session of Congress
+when he says that "to go into the House of
+Commons is to go aside out of the general stream
+of the community's vitality into a corner where
+little is learnt and much is concocted, into a
+specialized Assembly which is at once inattentive
+to and monstrously influential in our affairs?"
+Further on Wells remarks that "this diminishing
+actuality of our political life is a matter of almost
+universal comment to-day.... In Great
+Britain we do not have Elections any more; we
+have Rejections. What really happens at a
+general election is that the party organizations--obscure
+and secretive conclaves with entirely
+mysterious funds--appoint about 1200 men to be
+our rulers, and all that we, we so-called self-governing
+people, are permitted to do is, in a
+muddled angry way, to strike off the names of
+about half these selected gentlemen."</p>
+
+<p>A cynic might say that the people can't go far
+wrong in politics because they can't be very right.
+Our so-called representative system is unrepresentative
+in a deeper way than the reformers who
+talk about the money power imagine. It is empty
+and thin: a stifling of living currents in the interest
+of a mediocre regularity.</p>
+
+<p>But suppose that politics were made responsive--suppose
+that the forces of the community found
+avenues of expression into public life. Would
+not our legislatures be cut up into antagonistic
+parties, would not the conflicts of the nation be
+concentrated into one heated hall? If you really
+represented the country in its government, would
+you not get its partisanship in a quintessential
+form? After all group interests in the nation
+are diluted by space and time: the mere separation
+in cities and country prevents them from
+falling into the psychology of the crowd. But
+let them all be represented in one room by men
+who are professionally interested in their constituency's
+prejudices and what would you accomplish
+but a deepening of the cleavages? Would
+the session not become an interminable wrangle?</p>
+
+<p>Nobody can answer these questions with any
+certainty. Most prophecies are simply the masquerades
+of prejudice, and the people who love
+stability and prefer to let their own well-being
+alone will see in a sensitive political system little
+but an invitation to chaos. They will choose
+facts to adorn their fears. History can be all
+things to all men: nothing is easier than to summon
+the Terror, the Commune, lynchings in the
+Southern States, as witnesses to the excesses and
+hysterias of the mob. Those facts will prove the
+case conclusively to anyone who has already made
+up his mind on the subject. Absolute democrats
+can also line up their witnesses: the conservatism
+of the Swiss, Wisconsin's successful experiments,
+the patience and judgment of the Danes. Both
+sides are remarkably sure that the right is with
+them, whereas the only truth about which an
+observer can be entirely certain is that in some
+places and in certain instances democracy is admittedly
+successful.</p>
+
+<p>There is no absolute case one way or the other.
+It would be silly from the experience we have
+to make a simple judgment about the value of
+direct expression. You cannot lump such a mass
+of events together and come to a single conclusion
+about them. It is a crude habit of mind that
+would attempt it. You might as well talk abstractly
+about the goodness or badness of this
+universe which contains happiness, pain, exhilaration
+and indifference in a thousand varying grades
+and quantities. There is no such thing as Democracy;
+there are a number of more or less democratic
+experiments which are not subject to wholesale
+eulogy or condemnation.</p>
+
+<p>The questions about the success of a truly representative
+system are pseudo-questions. And
+for this reason: success is not due to the system;
+it does not flow from it automatically. The
+source of success is in the people who use the
+system: as an instrument it may help or hinder
+them, but they must operate it. Government is
+not a machine running on straight tracks to a
+desired goal. It is a human work which may be
+facilitated by good tools.</p>
+
+<p>That is why the achievements of the Swiss
+may mean nothing whatever when you come to
+prophesy about the people of New York. Because
+Wisconsin has made good use of the direct
+primary it does not follow that it will benefit the
+Filipino. It always seems curious to watch the
+satisfaction of some reform magazines when
+China or Turkey or Persia imitates the constitutional
+forms of Western democracies. Such
+enthusiasts postulate a uniformity of human ability
+which every fact of life contradicts.</p>
+
+<p>Present-day reform lays a great emphasis upon
+instruments and very little on the skilful use of
+them. It says that human nature is all right,
+that what is wrong is the "system." Now the
+effect of this has been to concentrate attention
+on institutions and to slight men. A small step
+further, institutions become an end in themselves.
+They may violate human nature as the taboo
+does. That does not disturb the interest in them
+very much, for by common consent reformers are
+to fix their minds upon the "system."</p>
+
+<p>A machine should be run by men for human
+uses. The preoccupation with the "system" lays
+altogether too little stress on the men who operate
+it and the men for whom it is run. It is as if
+you put all your effort into the working of a
+plough and forgot the farmer and the consumer.
+I state the case baldly and contradiction would
+be easy. The reformer might point to phrases
+like "human welfare" which appear in his writings.
+And yet the point stands, I believe. The
+emphasis which directs his thinking bears most
+heavily upon the mechanics of life--only perfunctorily
+upon the ability of the men who are to
+use them.</p>
+
+<p>Even an able reformer like Mr. Frederic C.
+Howe does not escape entirely. A recent book is
+devoted to a glowing eulogy of "Wisconsin, an
+Experiment in Democracy." In a concluding
+chapter Mr. Howe states the philosophy of the
+experiment. "What is the explanation of Wisconsin?"
+he asks. "Why has it been able to
+eliminate corruption, machine politics, and rid itself
+of the boss? What is the cause of the efficiency,
+the thoroughness, the desire to serve which
+animate the state? Why has Wisconsin succeeded
+where other states have uniformly failed?
+I think the explanation is simple. It is also perfectly
+natural. It is traceable to democracy, to
+the political freedom which had its beginning in
+the direct primary law, and which has been continuously
+strengthened by later laws"; some pages
+later, "Wisconsin assumed that the trouble with
+our politics is not with our people, but with the
+machinery with which the people work....
+It has established a line of vision as direct as
+possible between the people and the expression
+of their will." The impression Mr. Howe evidently
+wishes to leave with his readers is that
+the success of the experiment is due to the instruments
+rather than to the talent of the people of
+Wisconsin. That would be a valuable and comforting
+assurance to propagandists, for it means
+that other states with the same instruments can
+achieve the same success. But the conclusion
+seems to me utterly unfounded. The reasoning
+is perilously like that of the gifted lady amateur
+who expects to achieve greatness by imitating
+the paint box and palette, oils and canvases of an
+artist.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Howe's own book undermines his conclusions.
+He begins with an account of La
+Follette--of a man with initiative and a constructive
+bent. The forces La Follette set in
+motion are commented upon. The work of Van
+Hise is shown. What Wisconsin had was leadership
+and a people that responded, inventors, and
+constructive minds. They forged the direct
+primary and the State University out of the impetus
+within themselves. No doubt they were
+fortunate in their choice of instruments. They
+made the expression of the people's will direct,
+yet that will surely is the more primary thing.
+It makes and uses representative systems: but you
+cannot reverse the process. A man can manufacture
+a plough and operate it, but no amount
+of ploughs will create a man and endow him
+with skill.</p>
+
+<p>All sorts of observers have pointed out that
+the Western States adopt reform legislation more
+quickly than the Eastern. Yet no one would
+seriously maintain that the West is more progressive
+because it has progressive laws. The laws
+are a symptom and an aid but certainly not the
+cause. Constitutions do not make people; people
+make constitutions. So the task of reform consists
+not in presenting a state with progressive
+laws, but in getting the people to want them.</p>
+
+<p>The practical difference is extraordinary. I
+insist upon it so much because the tendency of
+political discussion is to regard government as
+automatic: a device that is sure to fail or sure
+to succeed. It is sure of nothing. Effort moves
+it, intelligence directs it; its fate is in human
+hands.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p>The politics I have urged in these chapters
+cannot be learned by rote. What can be taught
+by rule of thumb is the administration of precedents.
+That is at once the easiest and the most
+fruitless form of public activity. Only a low
+degree of intelligence is required and of effort
+merely a persistent repetition. Men fall into a
+routine when they are tired and slack: it has all
+the appearance of activity with few of its burdens.
+It was a profound observation when Bernard
+Shaw said that men dread liberty because of the
+bewildering responsibility it imposes and the uncommon
+alertness it demands. To do what has
+always been done, to think in well-cut channels,
+to give up "the intolerable disease of thought,"
+is an almost constant demand of our natures.
+That is perhaps why so many of the romantic
+rebels of the Nineteenth Century sank at last
+into the comforting arms of Mother Church.
+That is perhaps the reason why most oldish men
+acquire information, but learn very little. The
+conservative who loves his routine is in nine cases
+out of ten a creature too lazy to change its habits.</p>
+
+<p>Confronted with a novelty, the first impulse
+is to snub it, and send it into exile. When it
+becomes too persistent to be ignored a taboo is
+erected and threats of fines and condign punishment
+are made if it doesn't cease to appear. This
+is the level of culture at which Sherman Anti-Trust
+acts are passed, brothels are raided, and
+labor agitators are thrown into jail. If the taboo
+is effective it drives the evil under cover, where
+it festers and emits a slow poison. This is the
+price we pay for the appearance of suppression.
+But if the problem is more heavily charged with
+power, the taboo irritates the force until it explodes.
+Not infrequently what was once simply
+a factor of life becomes the dominating part of
+it. At this point the whole routineer scheme of
+things collapses, there is a period of convulsion
+and C&aelig;sarean births, and men weary of excitement
+sink back into a newer routine. Thus the
+cycle of futility is completed.</p>
+
+<p>The process bears as much resemblance to
+statecraft as sitting backward on a runaway horse
+does to horsemanship. The ordinary politician
+has no real control, no direction, no insight into
+the power he rides. What he has is an elevated,
+though temporary seat. Real statesmanship has
+a different ambition. It begins by accepting
+human nature. No routine has ever done that in
+spite of the conservative patter about "human
+nature"; mechanical politics has usually begun by
+ignoring and ended by violating the nature of
+men.</p>
+
+<p>To accept that nature does not mean that we
+accept its present character. It is probably true
+that the impulses of men have changed very little
+within recorded history. What has changed enormously
+from epoch to epoch is the character
+in which these impulses appear. The impulses
+that at one period work themselves out
+into cruelty and lust may at another produce the
+richest values of civilized life. The statesman
+can affect that choice. His business is to provide
+fine opportunities for the expression of human
+impulses--to surround childhood, youth and age
+with homes and schools, cities and countryside
+that shall be stocked with interest and the chance
+for generous activity.</p>
+
+<p>Government can play a leading part in this
+work, for with the decadence of the church it
+has become the only truly catholic organization
+in the land. Its task is essentially to carry out
+programs of service, to add and build and increase
+the facilities of life. Repression is an insignificant
+part of its work; the use of the club can
+never be applauded, though it may be tolerated
+<i>faute de mieux</i>. Its use is a confession of ignorance.</p>
+
+<p>A sensitively representative machinery will
+probably serve such statesmanship best. For the
+easy expression of public opinion in government
+is a clue to what services are needed and a test
+of their success. It keeps the processes of politics
+well ventilated and reminds politicians of their
+excuse for existence.</p>
+
+<p>In that kind of statesmanship there will be a
+premium on inventiveness, on the ingenuity to
+devise and plan. There will be much less use for
+lawyers and a great deal more for scientists. The
+work requires industrial organizers, engineers,
+architects, educators, sanitists to achieve what
+leadership brings into the program of politics.</p>
+
+<p>This leadership is the distinctive fact about
+politics. The statesman acts in part as an intermediary
+between the experts and his constituency.
+He makes social movements conscious of themselves,
+expresses their needs, gathers their power
+and then thrusts them behind the inventor and
+the technician in the task of actual achievement.
+What Roosevelt did in the conservation movement
+was typical of the statesman's work. He
+recognized the need of attention to natural resources,
+made it public, crystallized its force and
+delegated the technical accomplishment to Pinchot
+and his subordinates.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p>But creative statesmanship requires a culture to
+support it. It can neither be taught by rule nor
+produced out of a vacuum. A community that
+clatters along with its rusty habits of thought
+unquestioned, making no distinction between instruments
+and idols, with a dull consumption of
+machine-made romantic fiction, no criticism, an
+empty pulpit and an unreliable press, will find
+itself faithfully mirrored in public affairs. The
+one thing that no democrat may assume is that
+the people are dear good souls, fully competent
+for their task. The most valuable leaders never
+assume that. No one, for example, would accuse
+Karl Marx of disloyalty to workingmen. Yet in
+1850 he could write at the demagogues among his
+friends: "While we draw the attention of the
+German workman to the <i>undeveloped state</i> of the
+proletariat in Germany, you flatter the national
+spirit and the guild prejudices of the German
+artisans in the grossest manner, a method of procedure
+without doubt the more popular of the
+two. Just as the democrats made a sort of fetich
+of the words, 'the people,' so you make one of
+the word 'proletariat.'" John Spargo quotes this
+statement in his "Life." Marx, we are told,
+could use phrases like "democratic miasma." He
+never seems to have made the mistake of confusing
+democracy with demolatry. Spargo is perfectly
+clear about this characteristic of Marx:
+"He admired most of all, perhaps, that fine devotion
+to truth as he understood it, and disregard
+of popularity which marked Owen's life. Contempt
+for popular opinion was one of his most
+strongly developed characteristics. He was fond,
+says Liebknecht, of quoting as his motto the defiant
+line of Dante, with which he afterwards concluded
+his preface to 'Das Kapital':</p>
+
+<p>'Segui il tuo corso e lascia dir le genti.'"</p>
+
+<p>It is to Marx's everlasting credit that he set
+the intellectual standard of socialism on the most
+vigorous intellectual basis he could find. He knew
+better than to be satisfied with loose thinking
+and fairly good intentions. He knew that the
+vast change he contemplated needed every ounce
+of intellectual power that the world possessed.
+A fine boast it was that socialism was equipped
+with all the culture of the age. I wonder what
+he would have thought of an enthusiastic socialist
+candidate for Governor of New York who could
+write that "until men are free the world has no
+need of any more literary efforts, of any more
+paintings, of any more poems. It is better to
+have said one word for the emancipation of the
+race than to have written the greatest novel of
+the times.... The world doesn't need any
+more literature."</p>
+
+<p>I will not venture a guess as to what Marx
+would have said, but I know what we must say:
+"Without a literature the people is dumb, without
+novels and poems, plays and criticism, without
+books of philosophy, there is neither the intelligence
+to plan, the imagination to conceive, nor the
+understanding of a common purpose. Without
+culture you can knock down governments, overturn
+property relations, you can create excitement,
+but you cannot create a genuine revolution in the
+lives of men." The reply of the workingmen in
+1847 to Cabet's proposal that they found Icaria,
+"a new terrestrial Paradise," in Texas if you
+please, contains this interesting objection: "Because
+although those comrades who intend to
+emigrate with Cabet may be eager Communists,
+yet they still possess too many of the faults and
+prejudices of present-day society by reason of
+their past education to be able to get rid of them
+at once by joining Icaria."</p>
+
+<p>That simple statement might be taken to heart
+by all the reformers and socialists who insist
+that the people are all right, that only institutions
+are wrong. The politics of reconstruction require
+a nation vastly better educated, a nation freed
+from its slovenly ways of thinking, stimulated by
+wider interests, and jacked up constantly by the
+sharpest kind of criticism. It is puerile to say
+that institutions must be changed from top to
+bottom and then assume that their victims are
+prepared to make the change. No amount of
+charters, direct primaries, or short ballots
+make a democracy out of an illiterate people.
+Those portions of America where there are voting
+booths but no schools cannot possibly be described
+as democracies. Nor can the person who
+reads one corrupt newspaper and then goes out
+to vote make any claim to having registered his
+will. He may have a will, but he has not used it.</p>
+
+<p>For politics whose only ideal is the routine, it
+is just as well that men shouldn't know what they
+want or how to express it. Education has always
+been a considerable nuisance to the conservative
+intellect. In the Southern States, culture among
+the negroes is openly deplored, and I do not blame
+any patriarch for dreading the education of
+women. It is out of culture that the substance of
+real revolutions is made. If by some magic force
+you could grant women the vote and then keep
+them from schools and colleges, newspapers and
+lectures, the suffrage would be no more effective
+than a Blue Law against kissing your wife on Sunday.
+It is democratic machinery with an educated
+citizenship behind it that embodies all the fears
+of the conservative and the hopes of the radical.</p>
+
+<p>Culture is the name for what people are interested
+in, their thoughts, their models, the books
+they read and the speeches they hear, their table-talk,
+gossip, controversies, historical sense and
+scientific training, the values they appreciate, the
+quality of life they admire. All communities have
+a culture. It is the climate of their civilization.
+Without a favorable culture political schemes are
+a mere imposition. They will not work without
+a people to work them.</p>
+
+<p>The real preparation for a creative statesmanship
+lies deeper than parties and legislatures.
+It is the work of publicists and educators, scientists,
+preachers and artists. Through all the
+agents that make and popularize thought must
+come a bent of mind interested in invention and
+freed from the authority of ideas. The democratic
+culture must, with critical persistence, make
+man the measure of all things. I have tried again
+and again to point out the iconoclasm that is constantly
+necessary to avoid the distraction that
+comes of idolizing our own methods of thought.
+Without an unrelaxing effort to center the mind
+upon human uses, human purposes, and human
+results, it drops into idolatry and becomes hostile
+to creation.</p>
+
+<p>The democratic experiment is the only one that
+requires this wilful humanistic culture. An absolutism
+like Russia's is served better when the
+people accept their ideas as authoritative and
+piously sacrifice humanity to a non-human purpose.
+An aristocracy flourishes where the people
+find a vicarious enjoyment in admiring the
+successes of the ruling class. That prevents
+men from developing their own interests and
+looking for their own successes. No doubt
+Napoleon was well content with the philosophy
+of those guardsmen who drank his health before
+he executed them.</p>
+
+<p>But those excellent soldiers would make dismal
+citizens. A view of life in which man obediently
+allows himself to be made grist for somebody
+else's mill is the poorest kind of preparation for
+the work of self-government. You cannot long
+deny external authorities in government and hold
+to them for the rest of life, and it is no accident
+that the nineteenth century questioned a great deal
+more than the sovereignty of kings. The revolt
+went deeper and democracy in politics was only
+an aspect of it. The age might be compared
+to those years of a boy's life when he becomes
+an atheist and quarrels with his family. The
+nineteenth century was a bad time not only for
+kings, but for priests, the classics, parental autocrats,
+indissoluble marriage, Shakespeare, the
+Aristotelian Poetics and the validity of logic. If
+disobedience is man's original virtue, as Oscar
+Wilde suggested, it was an extraordinarily virtuous
+century. Not a little of the revolt was an
+exuberant rebellion for its own sake. There were
+also counter-revolutions, deliberate returns to
+orthodoxy, as in the case of Chesterton. The
+transvaluation of values was performed by many
+hands into all sorts of combinations.</p>
+
+<p>There have been other periods of revolution.
+Heresy is just a few hours younger than orthodoxy.
+Disobedience is certainly not the discovery
+of the nineteenth century. But the quality of it
+is. I believe Chesterton has hold of an essential
+truth when he says that this is the first time men
+have boasted of their heresy. The older rebels
+claimed to be more orthodox than the Church,
+to have gone back to the true authorities. The
+radicals of recent times proclaim that there is no
+orthodoxy, no doctrine that men must accept without
+question.</p>
+
+<p>Without doubt they deceive themselves mightily.
+They have their invisible popes, called Art,
+Nature, Science, with regalia and ritual and a
+catechism. But they don't mean to have them.
+They mean to be self-governing in their spiritual
+lives. And this intention is the half-perceived
+current which runs through our age and galvanizes
+so many queer revolts. It would be interesting
+to trace out the forms it has taken, the abortive
+cults it has tried and abandoned. In another
+connection I pointed to autonomy as the hope of
+syndicalism. It would not be difficult to find a
+similar assertion in the feminist agitation. From
+Mrs. Gilman's profound objections against a
+"man-made" world to the lady who would like to
+vote about her taxes, there is a feeling that woman
+must be something more than a passive creature.
+Walter Pater might be quoted in his conclusion
+to the effect that "the theory or idea or system
+which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of
+experience, in consideration of some interest into
+which we cannot enter, or some abstract theory
+we have not identified with ourselves, or what
+is only conventional, has no real claim upon us."
+The desire for self-direction has made a thousand
+philosophies as contradictory as the temperaments
+of the thinkers. A storehouse of illustration
+is at hand: Nietzsche advising the creative
+man to bite off the head of the serpent which
+is choking him and become "a transfigured being,
+a light-surrounded being, that <i>laughed</i>!" One
+might point to Stirner's absolute individualism or
+turn to Whitman's wholehearted acceptance of
+every man with his catalogue of defects and virtues.
+Some of these men have cursed each other
+roundly: Georges Sorel, for example, who urges
+workingmen to accept none of the bourgeois
+morality, and becomes most eloquent when he
+attacks other revolutionists.</p>
+
+<p>I do not wish to suggest too much unanimity in
+the hundreds of artists and thinkers that are
+making the thought of our times. There is a
+kind of "professional reconciler" of opposites
+who likes to lump all the prominent rebels together
+and refer to them affectionately as "us
+radicals." Yet that there is a common impulse
+in modern thought which strives towards autonomy
+is true and worth remarking. In some
+men it is half-conscious, in others a minor influence,
+but almost no one of weight escapes the
+contagion of it entirely. It is a new culture that
+is being prepared. Without it there would to-day
+be no demand for a creative statesmanship
+which turns its back upon the routine and the
+taboo, kings and idols, and non-human purposes.
+It does more. It is making the atmosphere in
+which a humanly centered politics can flourish.
+The fact that this culture is multiform and often
+contradictory is a sign that more and more of
+the interests of life are finding expression. We
+should rejoice at that, for profusion means fertility;
+where a dead uniformity ceases, invention
+and ingenuity flourish.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps the insistence on the need of a culture
+in statecraft will seem to many people an old-fashioned
+delusion. Among the more rigid
+socialists and reformers it is not customary to
+spend much time discussing mental habits. That,
+they think, was made unnecessary by the discovery
+of an economic basis of civilization. The
+destinies of society are felt to be too solidly set
+in industrial conditions to allow any cultural direction.
+Where there is no choice, of what importance
+is opinion?</p>
+
+<p>All propaganda is, of course, a practical tribute
+to the value of culture. However inevitable the
+process may seem, all socialists agree that its inevitability
+should be fully realized. They teach
+at one time that men act from class interests:
+but they devote an enormous amount of energy
+to making men conscious of their class. It evidently
+matters to that supposedly inevitable
+progress whether men are aware of it. In short,
+the most hardened socialist admits choice and
+deliberation, culture and ideals into his working
+faith. He may talk as if there were an iron
+determinism, but his practice is better than his
+preachment.</p>
+
+<p>Yet there are necessities in social life. To all
+the purposes of politics it is settled, for instance,
+that the trust will never be "unscrambled" into
+small competing businesses. We say in our argument
+that a return to the days of the stage-coach
+is impossible or that "you cannot turn back the
+hands of the clock." Now man might return to
+the stage-coach if that seemed to him the supreme
+goal of all his effort, just as anyone can follow
+Chesterton's advice to turn back the hands of
+the clock if he pleases. But nobody can recover
+his yesterdays no matter how much he abuses the
+clock, and no man can expunge the memory of
+railroads though all the stations and engines were
+dismantled.</p>
+
+<p>"From this survival of the past," says Bergson,
+"it follows that consciousness cannot go through
+the same state twice." This is the real necessity
+that makes any return to the imagined glories of
+other days an idle dream. Graham Wallas remarks
+that those who have eaten of the tree of
+knowledge cannot forget--"Mr. Chesterton cries
+out, like the Cyclops in the play, against those
+who complicate the life of man, and tells us to
+eat 'caviare on impulse,' instead of 'grapenuts on
+principle.' But since we cannot unlearn our
+knowledge, Mr. Chesterton is only telling us to
+eat caviare on principle." The binding fact we
+must face in all our calculations, and so in politics
+too, is that you cannot recover what is passed.
+That is why educated people are not to be pressed
+into the customs of their ignorance, why women
+who have reached out for more than "Kirche,
+Kinder und K&uuml;che" can never again be entirely
+domestic and private in their lives. Once people
+have questioned an authority their faith has lost
+its na&iuml;vet&eacute;. Once men have tasted inventions
+like the trust they have learned something which
+cannot be annihilated. I know of one reformer
+who devotes a good deal of his time to intimate
+talks with powerful conservatives. He explains
+them to themselves: never after do they exercise
+their power with the same unquestioning ruthlessness.</p>
+
+<p>Life is an irreversible process and for that
+reason its future can never be a repetition of the
+past. This insight we owe to Bergson. The application
+of it to politics is not difficult because
+politics is one of the interests of life. We can
+learn from him in what sense we are bound.
+"The finished portrait is explained by the features
+of the model, by the nature of the artist, by
+colors spread out on the palette; but even with
+the knowledge of what explains it, no one, not
+even the artist, could have foreseen exactly what
+the portrait would be, for to predict it would
+have been to produce it before it was produced...."
+The future is explained by the
+economic and social institutions which were present
+at its birth: the trust and the labor union, all
+the "movements" and institutions, will condition
+it. "Just as the talent of the painter is formed
+or deformed--in any case, is modified--under
+the very influence of the work he produces, so
+each of our states, at the moment of its issue,
+modifies our personality, being indeed the new
+form we are just assuming. It is then right to
+say that what we do depends on what we are;
+but it is necessary to add also, that we are, to
+a certain extent, what we do, and that we are
+creating ourselves continually."</p>
+
+<p>What I have called culture enters into political
+life as a very powerful condition. It is a way
+of creating ourselves. Make a blind struggle
+luminous, drag an unconscious impulse into the
+open day, see that men are aware of their necessities,
+and the future is in a measure controlled.
+The culture of to-day is for the future an historical
+condition. That is its political importance.
+The mental habits we are forming, our philosophies
+and magazines, theaters, debates, schools,
+pulpits and newspapers become part of an active
+past which as Bergson says "follows us at every
+instant; all that we have felt, thought, and willed
+from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over
+the present which is about to join it, pressing
+against the portals of consciousness that would
+fain leave it outside."</p>
+
+<p>Socialists claim that because the McNamara
+brothers had no "class-consciousness," because
+they were without a philosophy of society and an
+understanding of the labor movement their sense
+of wrong was bound to seek out dynamite. That
+is a profound truth backed by abundant evidence.
+If you turn, for example, to Spargo's Life of
+Karl Marx you see that all through his career
+Marx struggled with the mere insurrectionists.
+It was the men without the Marxian vision of
+growth and discipline who were forever trying
+to lead little marauding bands against the governments
+of Europe. The fact is worth pondering:
+the Marxian socialists, openly declaring that all
+authority is a temporary manifestation of social
+conditions, have waged what we must call a war
+of culture against the powers of the world. They
+have tried to arouse in workingmen the consciousness
+of an historical mission--the patience of that
+labor is one of the wonders of the age. But the
+McNamaras had a culture that could help them
+not at all. They were Catholics, Democrats and
+old-fashioned trade-unionists. Religion told them
+that authority was absolute and eternal, politics
+that Jefferson had said about all there was to say,
+economics insisted that the struggle between labor
+and capital was an everlasting see-saw. But life
+told them that society was brutal: an episode like
+the shirtwaist factory fire drove them to blasphemy
+and dynamite.</p>
+
+<p>Those bombs at Los Angeles, assassination and
+terrorism, are compounded of courage, indignation
+and ignorance. Civilization has much to fear
+from the blind class antagonisms it fosters; but
+the preaching of "class consciousness," far from
+being a fomenter of violence, must be recognized
+as the civilizing influence of culture upon economic
+interests.</p>
+
+<p>Thoughts and feelings count. We live in a
+revolutionary period and nothing is so important
+as to be aware of it. The measure of our self-consciousness
+will more or less determine whether
+we are to be the victims or the masters of change.
+Without philosophy we stumble along. The old
+routines and the old taboos are breaking up anyway,
+social forces are emerging which seek autonomy
+and struggle against slavery to non-human
+purposes. We seem to be moving towards some
+such statecraft as I have tried to suggest. But
+without knowledge of it that progress will be
+checkered and perhaps futile. The dynamics for
+a splendid human civilization are all about us.
+They need to be used. For that there must be
+a culture practiced in seeking the inwardness of
+impulses, competent to ward off the idols of its
+own thought, hospitable to novelty and sufficiently
+inventive to harness power.</p>
+
+<p>Why this age should have come to be what it
+is, why at this particular time the whole drift of
+thought should be from authority to autonomy
+would be an interesting speculation. It is one of
+the ultimate questions of politics. It is like asking
+why Athens in the Fifth Century B. C. was
+singled out as the luminous point of the Western
+World. We do not know enough to cut under
+such mysteries. We can only begin to guess why
+there was a Renaissance, why in certain centuries
+man seems extraordinarily creative. Perhaps the
+Modern Period with its flexibility, sense of change,
+and desire for self-direction is a liberation due to
+the great surplus of wealth. Perhaps the ease
+of travel, the popularizing of knowledge, the
+break-down of frontiers have given us a new interest
+in human life by showing how temporary
+are all its instruments. Certainly placid or morose
+acceptance is undermined. If men remain slaves
+either to ideas or to other men, it will be because
+they do not know they are slaves. Their intention
+is to be free. Their desire is for a full and expressive
+life and they do not relish a lop-sided
+and lamed humanity. For the age is rich with
+varied and generous passions.</p>
+
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<hr class="full" noshade>
+<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A PREFACE TO POLITICS***</p>
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, A Preface to Politics, by Walter Lippmann
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: A Preface to Politics
+
+
+Author: Walter Lippmann
+
+
+
+Release Date: December 16, 2006  [eBook #20125]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A PREFACE TO POLITICS***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Matt Whittaker, Juliet Sutherland, and the Project
+Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net/)
+
+
+
+A PREFACE TO POLITICS
+
+by
+
+WALTER LIPPMANN
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+"A God wilt thou create for thyself
+out of thy seven devils."
+
+
+
+Mitchell Kennerley
+New York and London
+1914
+Copyright, 1913, by
+Mitchell Kennerley
+
+
+
+
+
+_Contents_
+
+
+CHAPTER                                                    PAGE
+
+       INTRODUCTION
+
+   I.  Routineer and Inventor                                 1
+
+  II. The Taboo                                              34
+
+ III.  The Changing Focus                                    53
+
+  IV.  The Golden Rule and After                             86
+
+   V. Well Meaning but Unmeaning: the Chicago Vice Report   122
+
+  VI. Some Necessary Iconoclasm                             159
+
+ VII. The Making of Creeds                                  204
+
+VIII. The Red Herring                                       247
+
+  IX.  Revolution and Culture                               273
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+The most incisive comment on politics to-day is indifference. When men
+and women begin to feel that elections and legislatures do not matter
+very much, that politics is a rather distant and unimportant exercise,
+the reformer might as well put to himself a few searching doubts.
+Indifference is a criticism that cuts beneath oppositions and wranglings
+by calling the political method itself into question. Leaders in public
+affairs recognize this. They know that no attack is so disastrous as
+silence, that no invective is so blasting as the wise and indulgent smile
+of the people who do not care. Eager to believe that all the world is as
+interested as they are, there comes a time when even the reformer is
+compelled to face the fairly widespread suspicion of the average man that
+politics is an exhibition in which there is much ado about nothing. But
+such moments of illumination are rare. They appear in writers who realize
+how large is the public that doesn't read their books, in reformers who
+venture to compare the membership list of their league with the census of
+the United States. Whoever has been granted such a moment of insight
+knows how exquisitely painful it is. To conquer it men turn generally to
+their ancient comforter, self-deception: they complain about the stolid,
+inert masses and the apathy of the people. In a more confidential tone
+they will tell you that the ordinary citizen is a "hopelessly private
+person."
+
+The reformer is himself not lacking in stolidity if he can believe such a
+fiction of a people that crowds about tickers and demands the news of the
+day before it happens, that trembles on the verge of a panic over the
+unguarded utterance of a financier, and founds a new religion every month
+or so. But after a while self-deception ceases to be a comfort. This is
+when the reformer notices how indifference to politics is settling upon
+some of the most alert minds of our generation, entering into the
+attitude of men as capable as any reformer of large and imaginative
+interests. For among the keenest minds, among artists, scientists and
+philosophers, there is a remarkable inclination to make a virtue of
+political indifference. Too passionate an absorption in public affairs is
+felt to be a somewhat shallow performance, and the reformer is patronized
+as a well-meaning but rather dull fellow. This is the criticism of men
+engaged in some genuinely creative labor. Often it is unexpressed, often
+as not the artist or scientist will join in a political movement. But in
+the depths of his soul there is, I suspect, some feeling which says to
+the politician, "Why so hot, my little sir?"
+
+Nothing, too, is more illuminating than the painful way in which many
+people cultivate a knowledge of public affairs because they have a
+conscience and wish to do a citizen's duty. Having read a number of
+articles on the tariff and ploughed through the metaphysics of the
+currency question, what do they do? They turn with all the more zest to
+some spontaneous human interest. Perhaps they follow, follow, follow
+Roosevelt everywhere, and live with him through the emotions of a great
+battle. But for the affairs of statecraft, for the very policies that a
+Roosevelt advocates, the interest is largely perfunctory, maintained out
+of a sense of duty and dropped with a sigh of relief.
+
+That reaction may not be as deplorable as it seems. Pick up your
+newspaper, read the Congressional Record, run over in your mind the
+"issues" of a campaign, and then ask yourself whether the average man is
+entirely to blame because he smiles a bit at Armageddon and refuses to
+take the politician at his own rhetorical valuation. If men find
+statecraft uninteresting, may it not be that statecraft _is_
+uninteresting? I have a more or less professional interest in public
+affairs; that is to say, I have had opportunity to look at politics from
+the point of view of the man who is trying to get the attention of people
+in order to carry through some reform. At first it was a hard confession
+to make, but the more I saw of politics at first-hand, the more I
+respected the indifference of the public. There was something
+monotonously trivial and irrelevant about our reformist enthusiasm, and
+an appalling justice in that half-conscious criticism which refuses to
+place politics among the genuine, creative activities of men. Science was
+valid, art was valid, the poorest grubber in a laboratory was engaged in
+a real labor, anyone who had found expression in some beautiful object
+was truly centered. But politics was a personal drama without meaning or
+a vague abstraction without substance.
+
+Yet there was the fact, just as indisputable as ever, that public affairs
+do have an enormous and intimate effect upon our lives. They make or
+unmake us. They are the foundation of that national vigor through which
+civilizations mature. City and countryside, factories and play, schools
+and the family are powerful influences in every life, and politics is
+directly concerned with them. If politics is irrelevant, it is certainly
+not because its subject matter is unimportant. Public affairs govern our
+thinking and doing with subtlety and persistence.
+
+The trouble, I figured, must be in the way politics is concerned with the
+nation's interests. If public business seems to drift aimlessly, its
+results are, nevertheless, of the highest consequence. In statecraft the
+penalties and rewards are tremendous. Perhaps the approach is distorted.
+Perhaps uncriticised assumptions have obscured the real uses of politics.
+Perhaps an attitude can be worked out which will engage a fresher
+attention. For there are, I believe, blunders in our political thinking
+which confuse fictitious activity with genuine achievement, and make it
+difficult for men to know where they should enlist. Perhaps if we can see
+politics in a different light, it will rivet our creative interests.
+
+These essays, then, are an attempt to sketch an attitude towards
+statecraft. I have tried to suggest an approach, to illustrate it
+concretely, to prepare a point of view. In selecting for the title "A
+Preface to Politics," I have wished to stamp upon the whole book my own
+sense that it is a beginning and not a conclusion. I have wished to
+emphasize that there is nothing in this book which can be drafted into a
+legislative proposal and presented to the legislature the day after
+to-morrow. It was not written with the notion that these pages would
+contain an adequate exposition of modern political method. Much less was
+it written to further a concrete program. There are, I hope, no
+assumptions put forward as dogmas.
+
+It is a preliminary sketch for a theory of politics, a preface to
+thinking. Like all speculation about human affairs, it is the result of a
+grapple with problems as they appear in the experience of one man. For
+though a personal vision may at times assume an eloquent and universal
+language, it is well never to forget that all philosophies are the
+language of particular men.
+
+                                                  W. L.
+
+46 East 80th Street, NEW YORK CITY, January 1913.
+
+
+
+
+A PREFACE TO POLITICS
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+ROUTINEER AND INVENTOR
+
+
+Politics does not exist for the sake of demonstrating the superior
+righteousness of anybody. It is not a competition in deportment. In fact,
+before you can begin to think about politics at all you have to abandon
+the notion that there is a war between good men and bad men. That is one
+of the great American superstitions. More than any other fetish it has
+ruined our sense of political values by glorifying the pharisee with his
+vain cruelty to individuals and his unfounded approval of himself. You
+have only to look at the Senate of the United States, to see how that
+body is capable of turning itself into a court of preliminary hearings
+for the Last Judgment, wasting its time and our time and absorbing public
+enthusiasm and newspaper scareheads. For a hundred needs of the nation it
+has no thought, but about the precise morality of an historical
+transaction eight years old there is a meticulous interest. Whether in
+the Presidential Campaign of 1904 Roosevelt was aware that the ancient
+tradition of corporate subscriptions had or had not been followed, and
+the exact and ultimate measure of the guilt that knowledge would have
+implied--this in the year 1912 is enough to start the Senate on a
+protracted man-hunt.
+
+Now if one half of the people is bent upon proving how wicked a man is
+and the other half is determined to show how good he is, neither half
+will think very much about the nation. An innocent paragraph in the New
+York Evening Post for August 27, 1912, gives the whole performance away.
+It shows as clearly as words could how disastrous the good-and-bad-man
+theory is to political thinking:
+
+"Provided the first hearing takes place on September 30, it is expected
+that the developments will be made with a view to keeping the Colonel on
+the defensive. After the beginning of October, it is pointed out, the
+evidence before the Committee should keep him so busy explaining and
+denying that the country will not hear much Bull Moose doctrine."
+
+Whether you like the Roosevelt doctrines or not, there can be no two
+opinions about such an abuse of morality. It is a flat public loss,
+another attempt to befuddle our thinking. For if politics is merely a
+guerilla war between the bribed and the unbribed, then statecraft is not
+a human service but a moral testing ground. It is a public amusement, a
+melodrama of real life, in which a few conspicuous characters are tried,
+and it resembles nothing so much as schoolboy hazing which we are told
+exists for the high purpose of detecting a "yellow streak." But even
+though we desired it there would be no way of establishing any clear-cut
+difference in politics between the angels and the imps. The angels are
+largely self-appointed, being somewhat more sensitive to other people's
+tar than their own.
+
+But if the issue is not between honesty and dishonesty, where is it?
+
+If you stare at a checkerboard you can see it as black on red, or red on
+black, as series of horizontal, vertical or diagonal steps which recede
+or protrude. The longer you look the more patterns you can trace, and the
+more certain it becomes that there is no single way of looking at the
+board. So with political issues. There is no obvious cleavage which
+everyone recognizes. Many patterns appear in the national life. The
+"progressives" say the issue is between "Privilege" and the "People"; the
+Socialists, that it is between the "working class" and the "master
+class." An apologist for dynamite told me once that society was divided
+into the weak and the strong, and there are people who draw a line
+between Philistia and Bohemia.
+
+When you rise up and announce that the conflict is between this and that,
+you mean that this particular conflict interests you. The issue of
+good-and-bad-men interests this nation to the exclusion of almost all
+others. But experience shows, I believe, that it is a fruitless conflict
+and a wasting enthusiasm. Yet some distinction must be drawn if we are to
+act at all in politics. With nothing we are for and nothing to oppose, we
+are merely neutral. This cleavage in public affairs is the most important
+choice we are called upon to make. In large measure it determines the
+rest of our thinking. Now some issues are fertile; some are not. Some
+lead to spacious results; others are blind alleys. With this in mind I
+wish to suggest that the distinction most worth emphasizing to-day is
+between those who regard government as a routine to be administered and
+those who regard it as a problem to be solved.
+
+The class of routineers is larger than the conservatives. The man who
+will follow precedent, but never create one, is merely an obvious example
+of the routineer. You find him desperately numerous in the civil service,
+in the official bureaus. To him government is something given as
+unconditionally, as absolutely as ocean or hill. He goes on winding the
+tape that he finds. His imagination has rarely extricated itself from
+under the administrative machine to gain any sense of what a human,
+temporary contraption the whole affair is. What he thinks is the heavens
+above him is nothing but the roof.
+
+He is the slave of routine. He can boast of somewhat more spiritual
+cousins in the men who reverence their ancestors' independence, who feel,
+as it were, that a disreputable great-grandfather is necessary to a
+family's respectability. These are the routineers gifted with historical
+sense. They take their forefathers with enormous solemnity. But one
+mistake is rarely avoided: they imitate the old-fashioned thing their
+grandfather did, and ignore the originality which enabled him to do it.
+
+If tradition were a reverent record of those crucial moments when men
+burst through their habits, a love of the past would not be the butt on
+which every sophomoric radical can practice his wit. But almost always
+tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made imitation of the
+habits that our ancestors created. The average conservative is a slave to
+the most incidental and trivial part of his forefathers' glory--to the
+archaic formula which happened to express their genius or the eighteenth
+century contrivance by which for a time it was served. To reverence
+Washington they wear a powdered wig; they do honor to Lincoln by
+cultivating awkward hands and ungainly feet.
+
+It is fascinating to watch this kind of conservative in action. From
+Senator Lodge, for example, we do not expect any new perception of
+popular need. We know that probably his deepest sincerity is an attempt
+to reproduce the atmosphere of the Senate a hundred years ago. The
+manners of Mr. Lodge have that immobility which comes from too much
+gazing at bad statues of dead statesmen.
+
+Yet just because a man is in opposition to Senator Lodge there is no
+guarantee that he has freed himself from the routineer's habit of mind. A
+prejudice against some mannerism or a dislike of pretensions may merely
+cloak some other kind of routine. Take the "good government" attitude. No
+fresh insight is behind that. It does not promise anything; it does not
+offer to contribute new values to human life. The machine which exists is
+accepted in all its essentials: the "goo-goo" yearns for a somewhat
+smoother rotation.
+
+Often as not the very effort to make the existing machine run more
+perfectly merely makes matters worse. For the tinkering reformer is
+frequently one of the worst of the routineers. Even machines are not
+altogether inflexible, and sometimes what the reformer regards as a sad
+deviation from the original plans is a poor rickety attempt to adapt the
+machine to changing conditions. Think what would have happened had we
+actually remained stolidly faithful to every intention of the Fathers.
+Think what would happen if every statute were enforced. By the sheer
+force of circumstances we have twisted constitutions and laws to some
+approximation of our needs. A changing country has managed to live in
+spite of a static government machine. Perhaps Bernard Shaw was right when
+he said that "the famous Constitution survives only because whenever any
+corner of it gets into the way of the accumulating dollar it is pettishly
+knocked off and thrown away. Every social development, however beneficial
+and inevitable from the public point of view, is met, not by an
+intelligent adaptation of the social structure to its novelties but by a
+panic and a cry of Go Back."
+
+I am tempted to go further and put into the same class all those radicals
+who wish simply to substitute some other kind of machine for the one we
+have. Though not all of them would accept the name, these reformers are
+simply utopia-makers in action. Their perceptions are more critical than
+the ordinary conservatives'. They do see that humanity is badly squeezed
+in the existing mould. They have enough imagination to conceive a
+different one. But they have an infinite faith in moulds. This routine
+they don't believe in, but they believe in their own: if you could put
+the country under a new "system," then human affairs would run
+automatically for the welfare of all. Some improvement there might be,
+but as almost all men are held in an iron devotion to their own
+creations, the routine reformers are simply working for another
+conservatism, and not for any continuing liberation.
+
+The type of statesman we must oppose to the routineer is one who regards
+all social organization as an instrument. Systems, institutions and
+mechanical contrivances have for him no virtue of their own: they are
+valuable only when they serve the purposes of men. He uses them, of
+course, but with a constant sense that men have made them, that new ones
+can be devised, that only an effort of the will can keep machinery in its
+place. He has no faith whatever in automatic governments. While the
+routineers see machinery and precedents revolving with mankind as
+puppets, he puts the deliberate, conscious, willing individual at the
+center of his philosophy. This reversal is pregnant with a new outlook
+for statecraft. I hope to show that it alone can keep step with life; it
+alone is humanly relevant; and it alone achieves valuable results.
+
+Call this man a political creator or a political inventor. The essential
+quality of him is that he makes that part of existence which has
+experience the master of it. He serves the ideals of human feelings, not
+the tendencies of mechanical things.
+
+The difference between a phonograph and the human voice is that the
+phonograph must sing the song which is stamped upon it. Now there are
+days--I suspect the vast majority of them in most of our lives--when we
+grind out the thing that is stamped upon us. It may be the governing of a
+city, or teaching school, or running a business. We do not get out of bed
+in the morning because we are eager for the day; something external--we
+often call it our duty--throws off the bed-clothes, complains that the
+shaving water isn't hot, puts us into the subway and lands us at our
+office in season for punching the time-check. We revolve with the
+business for three or four hours, signing letters, answering telephones,
+checking up lists, and perhaps towards twelve o'clock the prospect of
+lunch puts a touch of romance upon life. Then because our days are so
+unutterably the same, we turn to the newspapers, we go to the magazines
+and read only the "stuff with punch," we seek out a "show" and drive
+serious playwrights into the poorhouse. "You can go through contemporary
+life," writes Wells, "fudging and evading, indulging and slacking, never
+really hungry nor frightened nor passionately stirred, your highest
+moment a mere sentimental orgasm, and your first real contact with
+primary and elementary necessities the sweat of your death-bed."
+
+The world grinds on: we are a fly on the wheel. That sense of an
+impersonal machine going on with endless reiteration is an experience
+that imaginative politicians face. Often as not they disguise it under
+heroic phrases and still louder affirmation, just as most of us hide our
+cowardly submission to monotony under some word like duty, loyalty,
+conscience. If you have ever been an office-holder or been close to
+officials, you must surely have been appalled by the grim way in which
+committee-meetings, verbose reports, flamboyant speeches, requests, and
+delegations hold the statesman in a mind-destroying grasp. Perhaps this
+is the reason why it has been necessary to retire Theodore Roosevelt from
+public life every now and then in order to give him a chance to learn
+something new. Every statesman like every professor should have his
+sabbatical year.
+
+The revolt against the service of our own mechanical habits is well known
+to anyone who has followed modern thought. As a sharp example one might
+point to Thomas Davidson, whom William James called "individualist a
+outrance".... "Reprehending (mildly) a certain chapter of my own on
+'Habit,' he said that it was a fixed rule with him to form no regular
+habits. When he found himself in danger of settling into even a good one,
+he made a point of interrupting it."
+
+Such men are the sparkling streams that flow through the dusty stretches
+of a nation. They invigorate and emphasize those times in your own life
+when each day is new. Then you are alive, then you drive the world before
+you. The business, however difficult, shapes itself to your effort; you
+seem to manage detail with an inferior part of yourself, while the real
+soul of you is active, planning, light. "I wanted thought like an edge of
+steel and desire like a flame." Eager with sympathy, you and your work
+are reflected from many angles. You have become luminous.
+
+Some people are predominantly eager and wilful. The world does not huddle
+and bend them to a task. They are not, as we say, creatures of
+environment, but creators of it. Of other people's environment they
+become the most active part--the part which sets the fashion. What they
+initiate, others imitate. Theirs is a kind of intrinsic prestige. These
+are the natural leaders of men, whether it be as head of the gang or as
+founder of a religion.
+
+It is, I believe, this power of being aggressively active towards the
+world which gives man a miraculous assurance that the world is something
+he can make. In creative moments men always draw upon "some secret spring
+of certainty, some fundamental well into which no disturbing glimmers
+penetrate." But this is no slack philosophy, for the chance is denied by
+which we can lie back upon the perfection of some mechanical contrivance.
+Yet in the light of it government becomes alert to a process of continual
+creation, an unceasing invention of forms to meet constantly changing
+needs.
+
+This philosophy is not only difficult to practice: it is elusive when you
+come to state it. For our political language was made to express a
+routine conception of government. It comes to us from the Eighteenth
+Century. And no matter how much we talk about the infusion of the
+"evolutionary" point of view into all of modern thought, when the test is
+made political practice shows itself almost virgin to the idea. Our
+theories assume, and our language is fitted to thinking of government as
+a frame--Massachusetts, I believe, actually calls her fundamental law the
+Frame of Government. We picture political institutions as mechanically
+constructed contrivances within which the nation's life is contained and
+compelled to approximate some abstract idea of justice or liberty. These
+frames have very little elasticity, and we take it as an historical
+commonplace that sooner or later a revolution must come to burst the
+frame apart. Then a new one is constructed.
+
+Our own Federal Constitution is a striking example of this machine
+conception of government. It is probably the most important instance we
+have of the deliberate application of a mechanical philosophy to human
+affairs. Leaving out all question of the Fathers' ideals, looking simply
+at the bias which directed their thinking, is there in all the world a
+more plain-spoken attempt to contrive an automatic governor--a machine
+which would preserve its balance without the need of taking human nature
+into account? What other explanation is there for the naive faith of the
+Fathers in the "symmetry" of executive, legislature, and judiciary; in
+the fantastic attempts to circumvent human folly by balancing it with
+vetoes and checks? No insight into the evident fact that power upsets all
+mechanical foresight and gravitates toward the natural leaders seems to
+have illuminated those historic deliberations. The Fathers had a rather
+pale god, they had only a speaking acquaintance with humanity, so they
+put their faith in a scaffold, and it has been part of our national piety
+to pretend that they succeeded.
+
+They worked with the philosophy of their age. Living in the Eighteenth
+Century, they thought in the images of Newton and Montesquieu. "The
+Government of the United States," writes Woodrow Wilson, "was constructed
+upon the Whig theory of political dynamics, which was a sort of
+unconscious copy of the Newtonian theory of the universe.... As
+Montesquieu pointed out to them (the English Whigs) in his lucid way,
+they had sought to balance executive, legislative and judiciary off
+against one another by a series of checks and counterpoises, which Newton
+might readily have recognized as suggestive of the mechanism of the
+heavens." No doubt this automatic and balanced theory of government
+suited admirably that distrust of the people which seems to have been a
+dominant feeling among the Fathers. For they were the conservatives of
+their day: between '76 and '89 they had gone the usual way of opportunist
+radicals. But had they written the Constitution in the fire of their
+youth, they might have made it more democratic,--I doubt whether they
+would have made it less mechanical. The rebellious spirit of Tom Paine
+expressed itself in logical formulae as inflexible to the pace of life as
+did the more contented Hamilton's. This is a determinant which burrows
+beneath our ordinary classification of progressive and reactionary to the
+spiritual habits of a period.
+
+If you look into the early utopias of Fourier and Saint-Simon, or better
+still into the early trade unions, this same faith that a government can
+be made to work mechanically is predominant everywhere. All the devices
+of rotation in office, short terms, undelegated authority are simply
+attempts to defeat the half-perceived fact that power will not long stay
+diffused. It is characteristic of these primitive democracies that they
+worship Man and distrust men. They cling to some arrangement, hoping
+against experience that a government freed from human nature will
+automatically produce human benefits. To-day within the Socialist Party
+there is perhaps the greatest surviving example of the desire to offset
+natural leadership by artificial contrivance. It is an article of faith
+among orthodox socialists that personalities do not count, and I
+sincerely believe I am not exaggerating the case when I say that their
+ideal of government is like Gordon Craig's ideal of the theater--the
+acting is to be done by a row of supermarionettes. There is a myth among
+socialists to which all are expected to subscribe, that initiative
+springs anonymously out of the mass of the people,--that there are no
+"leaders," that the conspicuous figures are no more influential than the
+figurehead on the prow of a ship.
+
+This is one of the paradoxes of the democratic movement--that it loves a
+crowd and fears the individuals who compose it--that the religion of
+humanity should have had no faith in human beings. Jealous of all
+individuals, democracies have turned to machines. They have tried to blot
+out human prestige, to minimize the influence of personality. That there
+is historical justification for this fear is plain enough. To put it
+briefly, democracy is afraid of the tyrant. That explains, but does not
+justify. Governments have to be carried on by men, however much we
+distrust them. Nobody has yet invented a mechanically beneficent
+sovereign.
+
+Democracy has put an unfounded faith in automatic contrivances. Because
+it left personality out of its speculation, it rested in the empty faith
+that it had excluded it from reality. But in the actual stress of life
+these frictions do not survive ten minutes. Public officials do not
+become political marionettes, though people pretend that they are. When
+theory runs against the grain of living forces, the result is a deceptive
+theory of politics. If the real government of the United States "had, in
+fact," as Woodrow Wilson says, "been a machine governed by mechanically
+automatic balances, it would have had no history; but it was not, and its
+history has been rich with the influence and personalities of the men who
+have conducted it and made it a living reality." Only by violating the
+very spirit of the constitution have we been able to preserve the letter
+of it. For behind that balanced plan there grew up what Senator Beveridge
+has called so brilliantly the "invisible government," an empire of
+natural groups about natural leaders. Parties are such groups: they have
+had a power out of all proportion to the intentions of the Fathers.
+Behind the parties has grown up the "political machine"--falsely called a
+machine, the very opposite of one in fact, a natural sovereignty, I
+believe. The really rigid and mechanical thing is the charter behind
+which Tammany works. For Tammany is the real government that has defeated
+a mechanical foresight. Tammany is not a freak, a strange and monstrous
+excrescence. Its structure and the laws of its life are, I believe,
+typical of all real sovereignties. You can find Tammany duplicated
+wherever there is a social group to be governed--in trade unions, in
+clubs, in boys' gangs, in the Four Hundred, in the Socialist Party. It is
+an accretion of power around a center of influence, cemented by
+patronage, graft, favors, friendship, loyalties, habits,--a human
+grouping, a natural pyramid.
+
+Only recently have we begun to see that the "political ring" is not
+something confined to public life. It was Lincoln Steffens, I believe,
+who first perceived that fact. For a time it was my privilege to work
+under him on an investigation of the "Money Power." The leading idea was
+different from customary "muckraking." We were looking not for the evils
+of Big Business, but for its anatomy. Mr. Steffens came to the subject
+with a first-hand knowledge of politics. He knew the "invisible
+government" of cities, states, and the nation. He knew how the boss
+worked, how he organized his power. When Mr. Steffens approached the vast
+confusion and complication of big business, he needed some hypothesis to
+guide him through that maze of facts. He made a bold and brilliant guess,
+an hypothesis. To govern a life insurance company, Mr. Steffens argued,
+was just as much "government" as to run a city. What if political methods
+existed in the realm of business? The investigation was never carried
+through completely, but we did study the methods by which several life
+and fire insurance companies, banks, two or three railroads, and several
+industrials are controlled. We found that the anatomy of Big Business was
+strikingly like that of Tammany Hall: the same pyramiding of influence,
+the same tendency of power to center on individuals who did not
+necessarily sit in the official seats, the same effort of human
+organization to grow independently of legal arrangements. Thus in the
+life insurance companies, and the Hughes investigation supports this, the
+real power was held not by the president, not by the voters or
+policy-holders, but by men who were not even directors. After a while we
+took it as a matter of course that the head of a company was an
+administrative dummy, with a dependence on unofficial power similar to
+that of Governor Dix on Boss Murphy. That seems to be typical of the
+whole economic life of this country. It is controlled by groups of men
+whose influence extends like a web to smaller, tributary groups, cutting
+across all official boundaries and designations, making short work of all
+legal formulae, and exercising sovereignty regardless of the little fences
+we erect to keep it in bounds.
+
+A glimpse into the labor world revealed very much the same condition. The
+boss, and the bosslet, the heeler--the men who are "it"--all are there
+exercising the real power, the power that independently of charters and
+elections decides what shall happen. I don't wish to have this regarded
+as necessarily malign. It seems so now because we put our faith in the
+ideal arrangements which it disturbs. But if we could come to face it
+squarely--to see that that is what sovereignty is--that if we are to use
+human power for human purposes we must turn to the realities of it, then
+we shall have gone far towards leaving behind us the futile hopes of
+mechanical perfection so constantly blasted by natural facts.
+
+The invisible government is malign. But the evil doesn't come from the
+fact that it plays horse with the Newtonian theory of the constitution.
+What is dangerous about it is that we do not see it, cannot use it, and
+are compelled to submit to it. The nature of political power we shall not
+change. If that is the way human societies organize sovereignty, the
+sooner we face that fact the better. For the object of democracy is not
+to imitate the rhythm of the stars but to harness political power to the
+nation's need. If corporations and governments have indeed gone on a joy
+ride the business of reform is not to set up fences, Sherman Acts and
+injunctions into which they can bump, but to take the wheel and to steer.
+
+The corruption of which we hear so much is certainly not accounted for
+when you have called it dishonesty. It is too widespread for any such
+glib explanation. When you see how business controls politics, it
+certainly is not very illuminating to call the successful business men of
+a nation criminals. Yet I suppose that all of them violate the law. May
+not this constant dodging or hurdling of statutes be a sign that there is
+something the matter with the statutes? Is it not possible that graft is
+the cracking and bursting of the receptacles in which we have tried to
+constrain the business of this country? It seems possible that business
+has had to control politics because its laws were so stupidly
+obstructive. In the trust agitation this is especially plausible. For
+there is every reason to believe that concentration is a world-wide
+tendency, made possible at first by mechanical inventions, fostered by
+the disastrous experiences of competition, and accepted by business men
+through contagion and imitation. Certainly the trusts increase. Wherever
+politics is rigid and hostile to that tendency, there is irritation and
+struggle, but the agglomeration goes on. Hindered by political
+conditions, the process becomes secretive and morbid. The trust is not
+checked, but it is perverted. In 1910 the "American Banker" estimated
+that there were 1,198 corporations with 8,110 subsidiaries liable to all
+the penalties of the Sherman Act. Now this concentration must represent a
+profound impetus in the business world--an impetus which certainly cannot
+be obliterated, even if anyone were foolish enough to wish it. I venture
+to suggest that much of what is called "corruption" is the odor of a
+decaying political system done to death by an economic growth.
+
+It is our desperate adherence to an old method that has produced the
+confusion of political life. Because we have insisted upon looking at
+government as a frame and governing as a routine, because in short we
+have been static in our theories, politics has such an unreal relation to
+actual conditions. Feckless--that is what our politics is. It is
+literally eccentric: it has been centered mechanically instead of
+vitally. We have, it seems, been seduced by a fictitious analogy: we have
+hoped for machine regularity when we needed human initiative and
+leadership, when life was crying that its inventive abilities should be
+freed.
+
+Roosevelt in his term did much to center government truly. For a time
+natural leadership and nominal position coincided, and the administration
+became in a measure a real sovereignty. The routine conception dwindled,
+and the Roosevelt appointees went at issues as problems to be solved.
+They may have been mistaken: Roosevelt may be uncritical in his
+judgments. But the fact remains that the Roosevelt regime gave a new
+prestige to the Presidency by effecting through it the greatest release
+of political invention in a generation. Contrast it with the Taft
+administration, and the quality is set in relief. Taft was the perfect
+routineer trying to run government as automatically as possible. His
+sincerity consisted in utter respect for form: he denied himself whatever
+leadership he was capable of, and outwardly at least he tried to
+"balance" the government. His greatest passions seem to be purely
+administrative and legal. The people did not like it. They said it was
+dead. They were right. They had grown accustomed to a humanly liberating
+atmosphere in which formality was an instrument instead of an idol. They
+had seen the Roosevelt influence adding to the resources of
+life--irrigation, and waterways, conservation, the Panama Canal, the
+"country life" movement. They knew these things were achieved through
+initiative that burst through formal restrictions, and they applauded
+wildly. It was only a taste, but it was a taste, a taste of what
+government might be like.
+
+The opposition was instructive. Apart from those who feared Roosevelt for
+selfish reasons, his enemies were men who loved an orderly adherence to
+traditional methods. They shivered in the emotional gale; they obstructed
+and the gale became destructive. They felt that, along with obviously
+good things, this sudden national fertility might breed a monster--that a
+leadership like Roosevelt's might indeed prove dangerous, as giving birth
+may lead to death.
+
+What the methodically-minded do not see is that the sterility of a
+routine is far more appalling. Not everyone may feel that to push out
+into the untried, and take risks for big prizes, is worth while. Men will
+tell you that government has no business to undertake an adventure, to
+make experiments. They think that safety lies in repetition, that if you
+do nothing, nothing will be done to you. It's a mistake due to poverty of
+imagination and inability to learn from experience. Even the timidest
+soul dare not "stand pat." The indictment against mere routine in
+government is a staggering one.
+
+For while statesmen are pottering along doing the same thing year in,
+year out, putting up the tariff one year and down the next, passing
+appropriation bills and recodifying laws, the real forces in the country
+do not stand still. Vast changes, economic and psychological, take place,
+and these changes demand new guidance. But the routineers are always
+unprepared. It has become one of the grim trade jokes of innovators that
+the one thing you can count upon is that the rulers will come to think
+that they are the apex of human development. For a queer effect of
+responsibility on men is that it makes them try to be as much like
+machines as possible. Tammany itself becomes rigid when it is too
+successful, and only defeat seems to give it new life. Success makes men
+rigid and they tend to exalt stability over all the other virtues; tired
+of the effort of willing they become fanatics about conservatism. But
+conditions change whether statesmen wish them to or not; society must
+have new institutions to fit new wants, and all that rigid conservatism
+can do is to make the transitions difficult. Violent revolutions may be
+charged up to the unreadiness of statesmen. It is because they will not
+see, or cannot see, that feudalism is dead, that chattel slavery is
+antiquated; it is because they have not the wisdom and the audacity to
+anticipate these great social changes; it is because they insist upon
+standing pat that we have French Revolutions and Civil Wars.
+
+But statesmen who had decided that at last men were to be the masters of
+their own history, instead of its victims, would face politics in a truly
+revolutionary manner. It would give a new outlook to statesmanship,
+turning it from the mere preservation of order, the administration of
+political machinery and the guarding of ancient privilege to the
+invention of new political forms, the prevision of social wants, and the
+preparation for new economic growths.
+
+Such a statesmanship would in the '80's have prepared for the trust
+movement. There would have been nothing miraculous in such foresight.
+Standard Oil was dominant by the beginning of the '80's, and
+concentration had begun in sugar, steel and other basic industries. Here
+was an economic tendency of revolutionary significance--the organization
+of business in a way that was bound to change the outlook of a whole
+nation. It had vast potentialities for good and evil--all it wanted was
+harnessing and directing. But the new thing did not fit into the little
+outlines and verbosities which served as a philosophy for our political
+hacks. So they gaped at it and let it run wild, called it names, and
+threw stones at it. And by that time the force was too big for them. An
+alert statesmanship would have facilitated the process of concentration;
+would have made provision for those who were cast aside; would have been
+an ally of trust building, and by that very fact it would have had an
+internal grip on the trust--it would have kept the trust's inner workings
+public; it could have bent the trust to social uses.
+
+This is not mere wisdom after the event. In the '80's there were hundreds
+of thousands of people in the world who understood that the trust was a
+natural economic growth. Karl Marx had proclaimed it some thirty years
+before, and it was a widely circulated idea. Is it asking too much of a
+statesman if we expect him to know political theory and to balance it
+with the facts he sees? By the '90's surely, the egregious folly of a
+Sherman Anti-Trust Law should have been evident to any man who pretended
+to political leadership. Yet here it is the year 1912 and that monument
+of economic ignorance and superstition is still worshiped with the lips
+by two out of the three big national parties.
+
+Another movement--like that of the trust--is gathering strength to-day.
+It is the unification of wage-workers. We stand in relation to it as the
+men of the '80's did to the trusts. It is the complement of that problem.
+It also has vast potentialities for good and evil. It, too, demands
+understanding and direction. It, too, will not be stopped by hard names
+or injunctions.
+
+What we loosely call "syndicalism" is a tendency that no statesman can
+overlook to-day without earning the jeers of his children. This labor
+movement has a destructive and constructive energy within it. On its
+beneficent side it promises a new professional interest in work,
+self-education, and the co-operative management of industry. But this
+creative power is constantly choked off because the unions are compelled
+to fight for their lives--the more opposition they meet the more you are
+likely to see of sabotage, direct action, the greve perlee--the less
+chance there is for the educative forces to show themselves. Then, the
+more violent syndicalism proves itself to be, the more hysterically we
+bait it in the usual vicious circle of ignorance.
+
+But who amongst us is optimistic enough to hope that the men who sit in
+the mighty positions are going to make a better show of themselves than
+their predecessors did over the trust problem? It strains hope a little
+too much. Those men in Washington, most of them lawyers, are so educated
+that they are practically incapable of meeting a new condition. All their
+training plus all their natural ossification of mind is hostile to
+invention. You cannot endow even the best machine with initiative; the
+jolliest steam-roller will not plant flowers.
+
+The thought-processes in Washington are too lumbering for the needs of
+this nation. Against that evil muckraking ought to be directed. Those
+senators and representatives are largely irrelevant; they are not
+concerned with realities. Their dishonesties are comparatively
+insignificant. The scorn of the public should be turned upon the
+emptiness of political thought, upon the fact that those men seem without
+even a conception of the nation's needs. And while they maunder along
+they stifle the forces of life which are trying to break through. It was
+nothing but the insolence of the routineer that forced Gifford Pinchot
+out of the Forest Service. Pinchot in respect to his subject was a fine
+political inventor. But routine forced him out--into what?--into the moil
+and toil of fighting for offices, and there he has cut a poor figure
+indeed. You may say that he has had to spend his energy trying to find a
+chance to use his power. What a wanton waste of talent is that for a
+civilized nation! Wiley is another case of the creative mind harassed by
+the routineers. Judge Lindsey is another--a fine, constructive children's
+judge compelled to be a politician. And of our misuse of the Rockefellers
+and Carnegies--the retrospect is appalling. Here was industrial genius
+unquestionably beyond the ordinary. What did this nation do with it? It
+found no public use for talent. It left that to operate in darkness--then
+opinion rose in an empty fury, made an outlaw of one and a platitudinous
+philanthropist of the other. It could lynch one as a moral monster, when
+as a matter of fact his ideals were commonplace; it could proclaim one a
+great benefactor when in truth he was a rather dull old gentleman. Abused
+out of all reason or praised irrelevantly--the one thing this nation has
+not been able to do with these men is to use their genius. It is this
+life-sapping quality of our politics that should be fought--its wanton
+waste of the initiatives we have--its stupid indifference.
+
+We need a new sense of political values. These times require a different
+order of thinking. We cannot expect to meet our problems with a few
+inherited ideas, uncriticised assumptions, a foggy vocabulary, and a
+machine philosophy. Our political thinking needs the infusion of
+contemporary insights. The enormous vitality that is regenerating other
+interests can be brought into the service of politics. Our primary care
+must be to keep the habits of the mind flexible and adapted to the
+movement of real life. The only way to control our destiny is to work
+with it. In politics, at least, we stoop to conquer. There is no use, no
+heroism, in butting against the inevitable, yet nothing is entirely
+inevitable. There is always some choice, some opportunity for human
+direction.
+
+It is not easy. It is far easier to treat life as if it were dead, men as
+if they were dolls. It is everlastingly difficult to keep the mind
+flexible and alert. The rule of thumb is not here. To follow the pace of
+living requires enormous vigilance and sympathy. No one can write
+conclusively about it. Compared with this creative statesmanship, the
+administering of a routine or the battle for a platitude is a very simple
+affair. But genuine politics is not an inhuman task. Part of the
+genuineness is its unpretentious humanity. I am not creating the figure
+of an ideal statesman out of some inner fancy. That is just the deepest
+error of our political thinking--to talk of politics without reference to
+human beings. The creative men appear in public life in spite of the cold
+blanket the politicians throw over them. Really statesmanlike things are
+done, inventions are made. But this real achievement comes to us
+confused, mixed with much that is contradictory. Political inventors are
+to-day largely unconscious of their purpose, and, so, defenceless against
+the distraction of their routineer enemies.
+
+Lacking a philosophy they are defenceless against their own inner
+tendency to sink into repetition. As a witty Frenchman remarked, many
+geniuses become their own disciples. This is true when the attention is
+slack, and effort has lost its direction. We have elaborate governmental
+mechanisms--like the tariff, for example, which we go on making more
+"scientific" year in, year out--having long since lost sight of their
+human purpose. They may be defeating the very ends they were meant to
+serve. We cling to constitutions out of "loyalty." We trudge in the
+treadmill and call it love of our ancient institutions. We emulate the
+mule, that greatest of all routineers.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE TABOO
+
+
+Our government has certainly not measured up to expectations. Even
+chronic admirers of the "balance" and "symmetry" of the Constitution
+admit either by word or deed that it did not foresee the whole history of
+the American people. Poor bewildered statesmen, unused to any notion of
+change, have seen the national life grow to a monstrous confusion and
+sprout monstrous evils by the way. Men and women clamored for remedies,
+vowed, shouted and insisted that their "official servants" do
+something--something statesmanlike--to abate so much evident wrong. But
+their representatives had very little more than a frock coat and a slogan
+as equipment for the task. Trained to interpret a constitution instead of
+life, these statesmen faced with historic helplessness the vociferations
+of ministers, muckrakers, labor leaders, women's clubs, granges and
+reformers' leagues. Out of a tumultuous medley appeared the common theme
+of public opinion--that the leaders should lead, that the governors
+should govern.
+
+The trusts had appeared, labor was restless, vice seemed to be corrupting
+the vitality of the nation. Statesmen had to do something. Their training
+was legal and therefore utterly inadequate, but it was all they had. They
+became panicky and reverted to an ancient superstition. They forbade the
+existence of evil by law. They made it anathema. They pronounced it
+damnable. They threatened to club it. They issued a legislative curse,
+and called upon the district attorney to do the rest. They started out to
+abolish human instincts, check economic tendencies and repress social
+changes by laws prohibiting them. They turned to this sanctified
+ignorance which is rampant in almost any nursery, which presides at
+family councils, flourishes among "reformers"; which from time immemorial
+has haunted legislatures and courts. Under the spell of it men try to
+stop drunkenness by closing the saloons; when poolrooms shock them they
+call a policeman; if Haywood becomes annoying, they procure an
+injunction. They meet the evils of dance halls by barricading them; they
+go forth to battle against vice by raiding brothels and fining
+prostitutes. For trusts there is a Sherman Act. In spite of all
+experience they cling desperately to these superstitions.
+
+It is the method of the taboo, as naive as barbarism, as ancient as human
+failure.
+
+There is a law against suicide. It is illegal for a man to kill himself.
+What it means in practice, of course, is that there is punishment waiting
+for a man who doesn't succeed in killing himself. We say to the man who
+is tired of life that if he bungles we propose to make this world still
+less attractive by clapping him into jail. I know an economist who has a
+scheme for keeping down the population by refusing very poor people a
+marriage license. He used to teach Sunday school and deplore promiscuity.
+In the annual report of the president of a distilling company I once saw
+the statement that business had increased in the "dry" states. In a
+prohibition town where I lived you could drink all you wanted by
+belonging to a "club" or winking at the druggist. And in another city
+where Sunday closing was strictly enforced, a minister told me with
+painful surprise that the Monday police blotter showed less drunks and
+more wife-beaters.
+
+We pass a law against race-track gambling and add to the profits from
+faro. We raid the faro joints, and drive gambling into the home, where
+poker and bridge whist are taught to children who follow their parents'
+example. We deprive anarchists of free speech by the heavy hand of a
+police magistrate, and furnish them with a practical instead of a
+theoretical argument against government. We answer strikes with bayonets,
+and make treason one of the rights of man.
+
+Everybody knows that when you close the dance halls you fill the parks.
+Men who in their youth took part in "crusades" against the Tenderloin now
+admit in a crestfallen way that they succeeded merely in sprinkling the
+Tenderloin through the whole city. Over twenty years ago we formulated a
+sweeping taboo against trusts. Those same twenty years mark the
+centralization of industry.
+
+The routineer in a panic turns to the taboo. Whatever does not fit into
+his rigid little scheme of things must have its head chopped off. Now
+human nature and the changing social forces it generates are the very
+material which fit least well into most little schemes of things. A man
+cannot sleep in his cradle: whatever is useful must in the nature of life
+become useless. We employ our instruments and abandon them. But nothing
+so simply true as that prevails in politics. When a government routine
+conflicts with the nation's purposes--the statesman actually makes a
+virtue of his loyalty to the routine. His practice is to ignore human
+character and pay no attention to social forces. The shallow presumption
+is that undomesticated impulses can be obliterated; that world-wide
+economic inventions can be stamped out by jailing millionaires--and
+acting in the spirit of Mr. Chesterton's man Fipps "who went mad and ran
+about the country with an axe, hacking branches off the trees whenever
+there were not the same number on both sides." The routineer is, of
+course, the first to decry every radical proposal as "against human
+nature." But the stand-pat mind has forfeited all right to speak for
+human nature. It has devoted the centuries to torturing men's instincts,
+stamping on them, passing laws against them, lifting its eyebrows at the
+thought of them--doing everything but trying to understand them. The same
+people who with daily insistence say that innovators ignore facts are in
+the absurd predicament of trying to still human wants with petty taboos.
+Social systems like ours, which do not even feed and house men and women,
+which deny pleasure, cramp play, ban adventure, propose celibacy and
+grind out monotony, are a clear confession of sterility in statesmanship.
+And politics, however pretentiously rhetorical about ideals, is
+irrelevant if the only method it knows is to ostracize the desires it
+cannot manage.
+
+Suppose that statesmen transferred their reverence from the precedents
+and mistakes of their ancestors to the human material which they have set
+out to govern. Suppose they looked mankind in the face and asked
+themselves what was the result of answering evil with a prohibition. Such
+an exercise would, I fear, involve a considerable strain on what
+reformers call their moral sensibilities. For human nature is a rather
+shocking affair if you come to it with ordinary romantic optimism.
+Certainly the human nature that figures in most political thinking is a
+wraith that never was--not even in the souls of politicians. "Idealism"
+creates an abstraction and then shudders at a reality which does not
+answer to it. Now statesmen who have set out to deal with actual life
+must deal with actual people. They cannot afford an inclusive pessimism
+about mankind. Let them have the consistency and good sense to cease
+bothering about men if men's desires seem intrinsically evil. Moral
+judgment about the ultimate quality of character is dangerous to a
+politician. He is too constantly tempted to call a policeman when he
+disapproves.
+
+We must study our failures. Gambling and drink, for example, produce much
+misery. But what reformers have to learn is that men don't gamble just
+for the sake of violating the law. They do so because something within
+them is satisfied by betting or drinking. To erect a ban doesn't stop the
+want. It merely prevents its satisfaction. And since this desire for
+stimulants or taking a chance at a prize is older and far more deeply
+rooted in the nature of men than love of the Prohibition Party or
+reverence for laws made at Albany, people will contrive to drink and
+gamble in spite of the acts of a legislature.
+
+A man may take liquor for a variety of reasons: he may be thirsty; or
+depressed; or unusually happy; he may want the companionship of a saloon,
+or he may hope to forget a scolding wife. Perhaps he needs a "bracer" in
+a weary hunt for a job. Perhaps he has a terrible craving for alcohol. He
+does not take a drink so that he may become an habitual drunkard, or be
+locked up in jail, or get into a brawl, or lose his job, or go insane.
+These are what he might call the unfortunate by-products of his desire.
+If once he could find something which would do for him what liquor does,
+without hurting him as liquor does, there would be no problem of drink.
+Bernard Shaw says he has found that substitute in going to church when
+there's no service. Goethe wrote "The Sorrows of Werther" in order to get
+rid of his own. Many an unhappy lover has found peace by expressing his
+misery in sonnet form. The problem is to find something for the common
+man who is not interested in contemporary churches and who can't write
+sonnets.
+
+When the socialists in Milwaukee began to experiment with municipal
+dances they were greeted with indignant protests from the "anti-vice"
+element and with amused contempt by the newspaper paragraphers. The
+dances were discontinued, and so the belief in their failure is complete.
+I think, though, that Mayor Seidel's defense would by itself make this
+experiment memorable. He admitted freely the worst that can be said
+against the ordinary dance hall. So far he was with the petty reformers.
+Then he pointed out with considerable vehemence that dance halls were an
+urgent social necessity. At that point he had transcended the mind of the
+petty reformer completely. "We propose," said Seidel, "to go into
+competition with the devil."
+
+Nothing deeper has come from an American mayor in a long, long time. It
+is the point that Jane Addams makes in the opening pages of that wisely
+sweet book, "The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets." She calls
+attention to the fact that the modern state has failed to provide for
+pleasure. "This stupid experiment," she writes, "of organizing work and
+failing to organize play has, of course, brought about a fine revenge.
+The love of pleasure will not be denied, and when it has turned into all
+sorts of malignant and vicious appetites, then we, the middle-aged, grow
+quite distracted and resort to all sorts of restrictive measures."
+
+For human nature seems to have wants that must be filled. If nobody else
+supplies them, the devil will. The demand for pleasure, adventure,
+romance has been left to the devil's catering for so long a time that
+most people think he inspires the demand. He doesn't. Our neglect is the
+devil's opportunity. What we should use, we let him abuse, and the
+corruption of the best things, as Hume remarked, produces the worst.
+Pleasure in our cities has become tied to lobster palaces, adventure to
+exalted murderers, romance to silly, mooning novels. Like the flower girl
+in Galsworthy's play, we have made a very considerable confusion of the
+life of joy and the joy of life. The first impulse is to abolish all
+lobster palaces, melodramas, yellow newspapers, and sentimentally erotic
+novels. Why not abolish all the devil's works? the reformer wonders. The
+answer is in history. It can't be done that way. It is impossible to
+abolish either with a law or an axe the desires of men. It is dangerous,
+explosively dangerous, to thwart them for any length of time. The
+Puritans tried to choke the craving for pleasure in early New England.
+They had no theaters, no dances, no festivals. They burned witches
+instead.
+
+We rail a good deal against Tammany Hall. Reform tickets make periodic
+sallies against it, crying economy, efficiency, and a business
+administration. And we all pretend to be enormously surprised when the
+"ignorant foreign vote" prefers a corrupt political ring to a party of
+well-dressed, grammatical, and high-minded gentlemen. Some of us are even
+rather downcast about democracy because the Bowery doesn't take to heart
+the admonitions of the Evening Post.
+
+We forget completely the important wants supplied by Tammany Hall. We
+forget that this is a lonely country for an immigrant and that the Statue
+of Liberty doesn't shed her light with too much warmth. Possessing
+nothing but a statistical, inhuman conception of government, the average
+municipal reformer looks down contemptuously upon a man like Tim Sullivan
+with his clambakes and his dances; his warm and friendly saloons, his
+handshaking and funeral-going and baby-christening; his readiness to get
+coal for the family, and a job for the husband. But a Tim Sullivan is
+closer to the heart of statesmanship than five City Clubs full of people
+who want low taxes and orderly bookkeeping. He does things which have to
+be done. He humanizes a strange country; he is a friend at court; he
+represents the legitimate kindliness of government, standing between the
+poor and the impersonal, uninviting majesty of the law. Let no man wonder
+that Lorimer's people do not prefer an efficiency expert, that a Tim
+Sullivan has power, or that men are loyal to Hinky Dink. The cry raised
+against these men by the average reformer is a piece of cold, unreal,
+preposterous idealism compared to the solid warm facts of kindliness,
+clothes, food and fun.
+
+You cannot beat the bosses with the reformer's taboo. You will not get
+far on the Bowery with the cost unit system and low taxes. And I don't
+blame the Bowery. You can beat Tammany Hall permanently in one way--by
+making the government of a city as human, as kindly, as jolly as Tammany
+Hall. I am aware of the contract-grafts, the franchise-steals, the dirty
+streets, the bribing and the blackmail, the vice-and-crime partnerships,
+the Big Business alliances of Tammany Hall. And yet it seems to me that
+Tammany has a better perception of human need, and comes nearer to being
+what a government should be, than any scheme yet proposed by a group of
+"uptown good government" enthusiasts. Tammany is not a satanic instrument
+of deception, cleverly devised to thwart "the will of the people." It is
+a crude and largely unconscious answer to certain immediate needs, and
+without those needs its power would crumble. That is why I ventured in
+the preceding chapter to describe it as a natural sovereignty which had
+grown up behind a mechanical form of government. It is a poor weed
+compared to what government might be. But it is a real government that
+has power and serves a want, and not a frame imposed upon men from on
+top.
+
+The taboo--the merely negative law--is the emptiest of all the
+impositions from on top. In its long record of failure, in the
+comparative success of Tammany, those who are aiming at social changes
+can see a profound lesson; the impulses, cravings and wants of men must
+be employed. You can employ them well or ill, but you must employ them. A
+group of reformers lounging at a club cannot, dare not, decide to close
+up another man's club because it is called a saloon. Unless the reformer
+can invent something which substitutes attractive virtues for attractive
+vices, he will fail. He will fail because human nature abhors the vacuum
+created by the taboo.
+
+An incident in the international peace propaganda illuminates this point.
+Not long ago a meeting in Carnegie Hall, New York, to forward peace among
+nations broke up in great disorder. Thousands of people who hate the
+waste and futility of war as much as any of the orators of that evening
+were filled with an unholy glee. They chuckled with delight at the idea
+of a riot in a peace meeting. Though it would have seemed perverse to the
+ordinary pacificist, this sentiment sprang from a respectable source. It
+had the same ground as the instinctive feeling of nine men in ten that
+Roosevelt has more right to talk about peace than William Howard Taft.
+James made it articulate in his essay on "The Moral Equivalent of War."
+James was a great advocate of peace, but he understood Theodore Roosevelt
+and he spoke for the military man when he wrote of war that: "Its
+'horrors' are a cheap price to pay for rescue from the only alternative
+supposed, of a world of clerks and teachers, of co-education and
+zo-ophily, of 'consumers' leagues' and 'associated charities,' of
+industrialism unlimited, and feminism unabashed. No scorn, no hardness,
+no valor any more! Fie upon such a cattleyard of a planet!"
+
+And he added: "So far as the central essence of this feeling goes, no
+healthy minded person, it seems to me, can help to some degree partaking
+of it. Militarism is the great preserver of our ideals of hardihood, and
+human life with no use for hardihood would be contemptible. Without risks
+or prizes for the darer, history would be insipid indeed; and there is a
+type of military character which everyone feels that the race should
+never cease to breed, for everyone is sensitive to its superiority."
+
+So William James proposed not the abolition of war, but a moral
+equivalent for it. He dreamed of "a conscription of the whole youthful
+population to form for a certain number of years a part of the army
+enlisted against _Nature_.... The military ideals of hardihood and
+discipline would be wrought into the growing fibre of the people; no one
+would remain blind, as the luxurious classes now are blind, to man's
+relations to the globe he lives on, and to the permanently sour and hard
+foundations of his higher life." Now we are not concerned here over the
+question of this particular proposal. The telling point in my opinion is
+this: that when a wise man, a student of human nature, and a reformer met
+in the same person, the taboo was abandoned. James has given us a lasting
+phrase when he speaks of the "moral equivalent" of evil. We can use it, I
+believe, as a guide post to statesmanship. Rightly understood, the idea
+behind the words contains all that is valuable in conservatism, and, for
+the first time, gives a reputable meaning to that tortured epithet
+"constructive."
+
+"The military feelings," says James, "are too deeply grounded to abdicate
+their place among our ideals until better substitutes are offered ...
+such a conscription, with the state of public opinion that would have
+required it, and the many moral fruits it would bear, would preserve in
+the midst of a pacific civilization the manly virtues which the military
+party is so afraid of seeing disappear in peace.... So far, war has been
+the only force that can discipline a whole community, and until an
+equivalent discipline is organized I believe that war must have its way.
+But I have no serious doubt that the ordinary prides and shames of social
+man, once developed to a certain intensity, are capable of organizing
+such a moral equivalent as I have sketched, or some other just as
+effective for preserving manliness of type. It is but a question of time,
+of skilful propagandism, and of opinion-making men seizing historic
+opportunities. The martial type of character can be bred without war."
+
+To find for evil its moral equivalent is to be conservative about values
+and radical about forms, to turn to the establishment of positively good
+things instead of trying simply to check bad ones, to emphasize the
+additions to life, instead of the restrictions upon it, to substitute, if
+you like, the love of heaven for the fear of hell. Such a program means
+the dignified utilization of the whole nature of man. It will recognize
+as the first test of all political systems and moral codes whether or not
+they are "against human nature." It will insist that they be cut to fit
+the whole man, not merely a part of him. For there are utopian proposals
+made every day which cover about as much of a human being as a beautiful
+hat does.
+
+Instead of tabooing our impulses, we must redirect them. Instead of
+trying to crush badness we must turn the power behind it to good account.
+The assumption is that every lust is capable of some civilized
+expression.
+
+We say, in effect, that evil is a way by which desire expresses itself.
+The older moralists, the taboo philosophers believed that the desires
+themselves were inherently evil. To us they are the energies of the soul,
+neither good nor bad in themselves. Like dynamite, they are capable of
+all sorts of uses, and it is the business of civilization, through the
+family and the school, religion, art, science, and all institutions, to
+transmute these energies into fine values. Behind evil there is power,
+and it is folly,--wasting and disappointing folly,--to ignore this power
+because it has found an evil issue. All that is dynamic in human
+character is in these rooted lusts. The great error of the taboo has been
+just this: that it believed each desire had only one expression, that if
+that expression was evil the desire itself was evil. We know a little
+better to-day. We know that it is possible to harness desire to many
+interests, that evil is one form of a desire, and not the nature of it.
+
+This supplies us with a standard for judging reforms, and so makes clear
+what "constructive" action really is. When it was discovered recently
+that the boys' gang was not an unmitigated nuisance to be chased by a
+policeman, but a force that could be made valuable to civilization
+through the Boy Scouts, a really constructive reform was given to the
+world. The effervescence of boys on the street, wasted and perverted
+through neglect or persecution, was drained and applied to fine uses.
+When Percy MacKaye pleads for pageants in which the people themselves
+participate, he offers an opportunity for expressing some of the lusts of
+the city in the form of an art. The Freudian school of psychologists
+calls this "sublimation." They have brought forward a wealth of material
+which gives us every reason to believe that the theory of "moral
+equivalents" is soundly based, that much the same energies produce crime
+and civilization, art, vice, insanity, love, lust, and religion. In each
+individual the original differences are small. Training and opportunity
+decide in the main how men's lust shall emerge. Left to themselves, or
+ignorantly tabooed, they break forth in some barbaric or morbid form.
+Only by supplying our passions with civilized interests can we escape
+their destructive force.
+
+I have put it negatively, as a counsel of prudence. But he who has the
+courage of existence will put it triumphantly, crying "yea" as Nietzsche
+did, and recognizing that all the passions of men are the motive powers
+of a fine life.
+
+For the roads that lead to heaven and hell are one until they part.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE CHANGING FOCUS
+
+
+The taboo, however useless, is at least concrete. Although it achieves
+little besides mischief, it has all the appearance of practical action,
+and consequently enlists the enthusiasm of those people whom Wells
+describes as rushing about the country shouting: "For Gawd's sake let's
+_do_ something _now_." There are weight and solidity in a policeman's
+club, while a "moral equivalent" happens to be pale like the stuff of
+which dreams are made. To the politician whose daily life consists in
+dodging the thousand and one conflicting prejudices of his constituents,
+in bickering with committees, intriguing and playing for the vote; to the
+business man harassed on four sides by the trust, the union, the law, and
+public opinion,--distrustful of any wide scheme because the stupidity of
+his shipping clerk is the most vivid item in his mind, all this
+discussion about politics and the inner life will sound like so much
+fine-spun nonsense.
+
+I, for one, am not disposed to blame the politicians and the business
+men. They govern the nation, it is true, but they do it in a rather
+absentminded fashion. Those revolutionists who see the misery of the
+country as a deliberate and fiendish plot overestimate the bad will, the
+intelligence and the singleness of purpose in the ruling classes.
+Business and political leaders don't mean badly; the trouble with them is
+that most of the time they don't mean anything. They picture themselves
+as very "practical," which in practice amounts to saying that nothing
+makes them feel so spiritually homeless as the discussion of values and
+an invitation to examine first principles. Ideas, most of the time, cause
+them genuine distress, and are as disconcerting as an idle office boy, or
+a squeaky telephone.
+
+I do not underestimate the troubles of the man of affairs. I have lived
+with politicians,--with socialist politicians whose good-will was
+abundant and intentions constructive. The petty vexations pile up into
+mountains; the distracting details scatter the attention and break up
+thinking, while the mere problem of exercising power crowds out
+speculation about what to do with it. Personal jealousies interrupt
+co-ordinated effort; committee sessions wear out nerves by their aimless
+drifting; constant speech-making turns a man back upon a convenient
+little store of platitudes--misunderstanding and distortion dry up the
+imagination, make thought timid and expression flat, the atmosphere of
+publicity requires a mask which soon becomes the reality. Politicians
+tend to live "in character," and many a public figure has come to imitate
+the journalism which describes him. You cannot blame politicians if their
+perceptions are few and their thinking crude.
+
+Football strategy does not originate in a scrimmage: it is useless to
+expect solutions in a political campaign. Woodrow Wilson brought to
+public life an exceedingly flexible mind,--many of us when he first
+emerged rejoiced at the clean and athletic quality of his thinking. But
+even he under the stress of a campaign slackened into commonplace
+reiteration, accepting a futile and intellectually dishonest platform,
+closing his eyes to facts, misrepresenting his opponents, abandoning, in
+short, the very qualities which distinguished him. It is understandable.
+When a National Committee puts a megaphone to a man's mouth and tells him
+to yell, it is difficult for him to hear anything.
+
+If a nation's destiny were really bound up with the politics reported in
+newspapers, the impasse would be discouraging. If the important
+sovereignty of a country were in what is called its parliamentary life,
+then the day of Plato's philosopher-kings would be far off indeed.
+Certainly nobody expects our politicians to become philosophers. When
+they do they hide the fact. And when philosophers try to be politicians
+they generally cease to be philosophers. But the truth is that we
+overestimate enormously the importance of nominations, campaigns, and
+office-holding. If we are discouraged it is because we tend to identify
+statecraft with that official government which is merely one of its
+instruments. Vastly over-advertised, we have mistaken an inflated fragment
+for the real political life of the country.
+
+For if you think of men and their welfare, government appears at once as
+nothing but an agent among many others. The task of civilizing our
+impulses by creating fine opportunities for their expression cannot be
+accomplished through the City Hall alone. All the influences of social
+life are needed. The eggs do not lie in one basket. Thus the issues in
+the trade unions may be far more directly important to statecraft than
+the destiny of the Republican Party. The power that workingmen generate
+when they unite--the demands they will make and the tactics they will
+pursue--how they are educating themselves and the nation--these are
+genuine issues which bear upon the future. So with the policies of
+business men. Whether financiers are to be sullen and stupid like
+Archbold, defiant like Morgan, or well-intentioned like Perkins is a
+question that enters deeply into the industrial issues. The whole
+business problem takes on a new complexion if the representatives of
+capital are to be men with the temper of Louis Brandeis or William C.
+Redfield. For when business careers are made professional, new motives
+enter into the situation; it will make a world of difference if the
+leadership of industry is in the hands of men interested in production as
+a creative art instead of as a brute exploitation. The economic conflicts
+are at once raised to a plane of research, experiment and honest
+deliberation. For on the level of hate and mean-seeking no solution is
+possible. That subtle fact,--the change of business motives, the
+demonstration that industry can be conducted as medicine is,--may
+civilize the whole class conflict.
+
+Obviously statecraft is concerned with such a change, extra-political
+though it is. And wherever the politician through his prestige or the
+government through its universities can stimulate a revolution in
+business motives, it should do so. That is genuinely constructive work,
+and will do more to a humane solution of the class struggle than all the
+jails and state constabularies that ever betrayed the barbarism of the
+Twentieth Century. It is no wonder that business is such a sordid affair.
+We have done our best to exclude from it every passionate interest that
+is capable of lighting up activity with eagerness and joy.
+"Unbusinesslike" we have called the devotion of craftsmen and scientists.
+We have actually pretended that the work of extracting a living from
+nature could be done most successfully by short-sighted money-makers
+encouraged by their money-spending wives. We are learning better to-day.
+We are beginning to know that this nation for all its boasts has not
+touched the real possibilities of business success, that nature and good
+luck have done most of our work, that our achievements come in spite of
+our ignorance. And so no man can gauge the civilizing possibilities of a
+new set of motives in business. That it will add to the dignity and value
+of millions of careers is only one of its blessings. Given a nation of
+men trained to think scientifically about their work and feel about it as
+craftsmen, and you have a people released from a stupid fixation upon the
+silly little ideals of accumulating dollars and filling their neighbor's
+eye. We preach against commercialism but without great result. And the
+reason for our failure is: that we merely say "you ought not" instead of
+offering a new interest. Instead of telling business men not to be
+greedy, we should tell them to be industrial statesmen, applied
+scientists, and members of a craft. Politics can aid that revolution in a
+hundred Ways: by advocating it, by furnishing schools that teach,
+laboratories that demonstrate, by putting business on the same plane of
+interest as the Health Service.
+
+The indictment against politics to-day is not its corruption, but its
+lack of insight. I believe it is a fact which experience will sustain
+that men steal because they haven't anything better to do. You don't have
+to preach honesty to men with a creative purpose. Let a human being throw
+the energies of his soul into the making of something, and the instinct
+of workmanship will take care of his honesty. The writers who have
+nothing to say are the ones that you can buy: the others have too high a
+price. A genuine craftsman will not adulterate his product: the reason
+isn't because duty says he shouldn't, but because passion says he
+couldn't. I suggested in an earlier chapter that the issue of honesty and
+dishonesty was a futile one, and I placed faith in the creative men. They
+hate shams and the watering of goods on a more trustworthy basis than the
+mere routine moralist. To them dishonesty is a contradiction of their own
+lusts, and they ask no credit, need none, for being true. Creation is an
+emotional ascent, which makes the standard vices trivial, and turns all
+that is valuable in virtue to the service of desire.
+
+When politics revolves mechanically it ceases to use the real energies of
+a nation. Government is then at once irrelevant and mischievous--a mere
+obstructive nuisance. Not long ago a prominent senator remarked that he
+didn't know much about the country, because he had spent the last few
+months in Washington. It was a profound utterance as anyone can testify
+who reads, let us say, the Congressional Record. For that document,
+though replete with language, is singularly unacquainted with the forces
+that agitate the nation. Politics, as the contributors to the
+Congressional Record seem to understand it, is a very limited selection
+of well-worn debates on a few arbitrarily chosen "problems." Those
+questions have developed a technique and an interest in them for their
+own sake. They are handled with a dull solemnity quite out of proportion
+to their real interest. Labor receives only a perfunctory and largely
+disingenuous attention; even commerce is handled in a way that expresses
+neither its direction nor its public use. Congress has been ready enough
+to grant favors to corporations, but where in its wrangling from the
+Sherman Act to the Commerce Court has it shown any sympathetic
+understanding of the constructive purposes in the trust movement? It has
+either presented the business man with money or harassed him with
+bungling enthusiasm in the pretended interests of the consumer. The one
+thing Congress has not done is to use the talents of business men for the
+nation's advantage.
+
+If "politics" has been indifferent to forces like the union and the
+trust, it is no exaggeration to say that it has displayed a modest
+ignorance of women's problems, of educational conflicts and racial
+aspirations; of the control of newspapers and magazines, the book
+publishing world, socialist conventions and unofficial political groups
+like the single-taxers.
+
+Such genuine powers do not absorb our political interest because we are
+fooled by the regalia of office. But statesmanship, if it is to be
+relevant, would obtain a new perspective on these dynamic currents, would
+find out the wants they express and the energies they contain, would
+shape and direct and guide them. For unions and trusts, sects, clubs and
+voluntary associations stand for actual needs. The size of their
+following, the intensity of their demands are a fair index of what the
+statesman must think about. No lawyer created a trust though he drew up
+its charter; no logician made the labor movement or the feminist
+agitation. If you ask what for political purposes a nation is, a
+practical answer would be: it is its "movements." They are the social
+_life_. So far as the future is man-made it is made of them. They show
+their real vitality by a relentless growth in spite of all the little
+fences and obstacles that foolish politicians devise.
+
+There is, of course, much that is dead within the movements. Each one
+carries along a quantity of inert and outworn ideas,--not infrequently
+there is an internally contradictory current. Thus the very workingmen
+who agitate for a better diffusion of wealth display a marked hostility
+to improvements in the production of it. The feminists too have their
+atavisms: not a few who object to the patriarchal family seem inclined to
+cure it by going back still more--to the matriarchal. Constructive
+business has no end of reactionary moments----the most striking, perhaps,
+is when it buys up patents in order to suppress them. Yet these
+inversions, though discouraging, are not essential in the life of
+movements. They need to be expurgated by an unceasing criticism; yet in
+bulk the forces I have mentioned, and many others less important, carry
+with them the creative powers of our times.
+
+It is not surprising that so many political inventions have been made
+within these movements, fostered by them, and brought to a general public
+notice through their efforts. When some constructive proposal is being
+agitated before a legislative committee, it is customary to unite the
+"movements" in support of it. Trade unions and women's clubs have joined
+hands in many an agitation. There are proposals to-day, like the minimum
+wage, which seem sure of support from consumers' leagues, women's
+federations, trade unions and those far-sighted business men who may be
+called "State Socialists."
+
+In fact, unless a political invention is woven into a social movement it
+has no importance. Only when that is done is it imbued with life. But how
+among countless suggestions is a "cause" to know the difference between a
+true invention and a pipe-dream? There is, of course, no infallible
+touchstone by which we can tell offhand. No one need hope for an easy
+certainty either here or anywhere else in human affairs. No one is
+absolved from experiment and constant revision. Yet there are some
+hypotheses that prima facie deserve more attention than others.
+
+Those are the suggestions which come out of a recognized human need. If a
+man proposed that the judges of the Supreme Court be reduced from nine to
+seven because the number seven has mystical power, we could ignore him.
+But if he suggested that the number be reduced because seven men can
+deliberate more effectively than nine he ought to be given a hearing. Or
+let us suppose that the argument is about granting votes to women. The
+suffragist who bases a claim on the so-called "logic of democracy" is
+making the poorest possible showing for a good cause. I have heard people
+maintain that: "it makes no difference whether women want the ballot, or
+are fit for it, or can do any good with it,--this country is a democracy.
+Democracy means government by the votes of the people. Women are people.
+Therefore women should vote." That in a very simple form is the
+mechanical conception of government. For notice how it ignores human
+wants and human powers--how it subordinates people to a rigid formula. I
+use this crude example because it shows that even the most genuine and
+deeply grounded demands are as yet unable to free themselves entirely
+from a superficial manner of thinking. We are only partially emancipated
+from the mechanical and merely logical tradition of the Eighteenth
+Century. No end of illustrations could be adduced. In the Socialist party
+it has been the custom to denounce the "short ballot." Why? Because it
+reduces the number of elective offices. This is regarded as undemocratic
+for the reason that democracy has come to mean a series of elections.
+According to a logic, the more elections the more democratic. But
+experience has shown that a seven-foot ballot with a regiment of names is
+so bewildering that a real choice is impossible. So it is proposed to cut
+down the number of elective offices, focus the attention on a few
+alternatives, and turn voting into a fairly intelligent performance. Here
+is an attempt to fit political devices to the actual powers of the voter.
+The old, crude form of ballot forgot that finite beings had to operate
+it. But the "democrats" adhere to the multitude of choices because
+"logic" requires them to.
+
+This incident of the "short ballot" illustrates the cleavage between
+invention and routine. The socialists oppose it not because their
+intentions are bad but because on this issue their thinking is
+mechanical. Instead of applying the test of human need, they apply a
+verbal and logical consistency. The "short ballot" in itself is a slight
+affair, but the insight behind it seems to me capable of revolutionary
+development. It is one symptom of the effort to found institutions on
+human nature. There are many others. We might point to the first
+experiments aimed at remedying the helter-skelter of careers by
+vocational guidance. Carried through successfully, this invention of
+Prof. Parsons' is one whose significance in happiness can hardly be
+exaggerated. When you think of the misfits among your acquaintances--the
+lawyers who should be mechanics, the doctors who should be business men,
+the teachers who should have been clerks, and the executives who should
+be doing research in a laboratory--when you think of the talent that
+would be released by proper use, the imagination takes wing at the
+possibilities. What could we not make of the world if we employed its
+genius!
+
+Whoever is working to express special energies is part of a constructive
+revolution. Whoever is removing the stunting environments of our
+occupations is doing the fundamentals of reform. The studies of Miss
+Goldmark of industrial fatigue, recuperative power and maximum
+productivity are contributions toward that distant and desirable period
+when labor shall be a free and joyous activity. Every suggestion which
+turns work from a drudgery to a craft is worth our deepest interest. For
+until then the labor problem will never be solved. The socialist demand
+for a better distribution of wealth is of great consequence, but without
+a change in the very nature of labor society will not have achieved the
+happiness it expects. That is why imaginative socialists have shown so
+great an interest in "syndicalism." There at least in some of its forms,
+we can catch sight of a desire to make all labor a self-governing craft.
+
+The handling of crime has been touched by the modern impetus. The
+ancient, abstract and wholesale "justice" is breaking up into detailed
+and carefully adapted treatment of individual offenders. What this means
+for the child has become common knowledge in late years. Criminology (to
+use an awkward word) is finding a human center. So is education. Everyone
+knows how child study is revolutionizing the school room and the
+curriculum. Why, it seems that Mme. Montessori has had the audacity to
+sacrifice the sacred bench to the interests of the pupil! The traditional
+school seems to be vanishing--that place in which an ill-assorted band of
+youngsters was for a certain number of hours each day placed in the
+vicinity of a text-book and a maiden lady.
+
+I mention these experiments at random. It is not the specific reforms
+that I wish to emphasize but the great possibilities they foreshadow.
+Whether or not we adopt certain special bills, high tariff or low tariff,
+one banking system or another, this trust control or that, is a slight
+gain compared to a change of attitude toward all political problems. The
+reformer bound up in his special propaganda will, of course, object that
+"to get something done is worth more than any amount of talk about new
+ways of looking at political problems." What matters the method, he will
+cry, provided the reform be good? Well, the method matters more than any
+particular reform. A man who couldn't think straight might get the right
+answer to one problem, but how much faith would you have in his capacity
+to solve the next one? If you wanted to educate a child, would you teach
+him to read one play of Shakespeare, or would you teach him to _read_? If
+the world were going to remain frigidly set after next year, we might
+well thank our stars if we blundered into a few decent solutions right
+away. But as there is no prospect of a time when our life will be
+immutably fixed, as we shall, therefore, have to go on inventing, it is
+fair to say that what the world is aching for is not a special reform
+embodied in a particular statute, but a way of going at all problems. The
+lasting value of Darwin, for example, is not in any concrete conclusion
+he reached. His importance to the world lies in the new twist he gave to
+science. He lent it fruitful direction, a different impetus, and the
+results are beyond his imagining.
+
+In that spiritual autobiography of a searching mind, "The New
+Machiavelli," Wells describes his progress from a reformer of concrete
+abuses to a revolutionist in method. "You see," he says, "I began in my
+teens by wanting to plan and build cities and harbors for mankind; I
+ended in the middle thirties by desiring only to serve and increase a
+general process of thought, a process fearless, critical, real-spirited,
+that would in its own time give cities, harbors, air, happiness,
+everything at a scale and quality and in a light altogether beyond the
+match-striking imaginations of a contemporary mind...."
+
+This same veering of interest may be seen in the career of another
+Englishman. I refer to Mr. Graham Wallas. Back in the '80's he was
+working with the Webbs, Bernard Shaw, Sidney Olivier, Annie Besant and
+others in socialist propaganda. Readers of the Fabian Essays know Mr.
+Wallas and appreciate the work of his group. Perhaps more than anyone
+else, the Fabians are responsible for turning English socialist thought
+from the verbalism of the Marxian disciples to the actualities of English
+political life. Their appetite for the concrete was enormous; their
+knowledge of facts overpowering, as the tomes produced by Mr. and Mrs.
+Webb can testify. The socialism of the Fabians soon became a definite
+legislative program which the various political parties were to be
+bulldozed, cajoled and tricked into enacting. It was effective work, and
+few can question the value of it. Yet many admirers have been left with a
+sense of inadequacy.
+
+Unlike the orthodox socialists, the Fabians took an active part in
+immediate politics. "We permeated the party organizations," writes Shaw,
+"and pulled all the wires we could lay our hands on with our utmost
+adroitness and energy.... The generalship of this movement was undertaken
+chiefly by Sidney Webb, who played such bewildering conjuring tricks with
+the Liberal thimbles and the Fabian peas that to this day both the
+Liberals and the sectarian Socialists stand aghast at him." Few Americans
+know how great has been this influence on English political history for
+the last twenty years. The well-known Minority Report of the Poor Law
+Commission bears the Webb signature most conspicuously. Fabianism began
+to achieve a reputation for getting things done--for taking part in
+"practical affairs." Bernard Shaw has found time to do no end of
+campaigning and even the parochial politics of a vestryman has not seemed
+too insignificant for his Fabian enthusiasm. Graham Wallas was a
+candidate in five municipal elections, and has held an important office
+as member of the London County Council.
+
+But the original Fabian enthusiasm has slackened. One might ascribe it to
+a growing sense that concrete programs by themselves will not insure any
+profound regeneration of society. H. G. Wells has been savage and often
+unfair about the Fabian Society, but in "The New Machiavelli" he touched,
+I believe, the real disillusionment. Remington's history is in a way
+symbolic. Here was a successful political reformer, coming more and more
+to a disturbing recognition of his helplessness, perceiving the
+aimlessness and the unreality of political life, and announcing his
+contempt for the "crudification" of all issues. What Remington missed was
+what so many reformers are beginning to miss--an underlying philosophical
+habit.
+
+Mr. Wallas seems to have had much the same experience. In the midst of a
+bustle of activity, politics appeared to have no center to which its
+thinking and doing could be referred. The truth was driven home upon him
+that political science is a science of human relationship with the human
+beings left out. So he writes that "the thinkers of the past, from Plato
+to Bentham and Mill, had each his own view of human nature, and they made
+these views the basis of their speculations on government." But to-day
+"nearly all students of politics analyze institutions and avoid the
+analysis of man." Whoever has read the typical book on politics by a
+professor or a reformer will agree, I think, when he adds: "One feels
+that many of the more systematic books on politics by American University
+professors are useless, just because the writers dealt with abstract men,
+formed on assumptions of which they were unaware and which they have
+never tested either by experience or by study."
+
+An extreme example could be made of Nicholas Murray Butler, President of
+Columbia University. In the space of six months he wrote an impassioned
+defense of "constitutional government," beginning with the question, "Why
+is it that in the United States the words politics and politician have
+associations that are chiefly of evil omen," and then, to make irony
+complete, proceeded at the New York State Republican Convention to do the
+jobbery of Boss Barnes. What is there left but to gasp and wonder whether
+the words of the intellect have anything to do with the facts of life?
+What insight into reality can a man possess who is capable of discussing
+politics and ignoring politicians? What kind of naivete was it that led
+this educator into asking such a question?
+
+President Butler is, I grant, a caricature of the typical professor. Yet
+what shall we say of the annual harvest of treatises on "labor problems"
+which make no analysis of the mental condition of laboring men; of the
+treatises on marriage and prostitution which gloss over the sexual life
+of the individual? "In the other sciences which deal with human affairs,"
+writes Mr. Wallas, referring to pedagogy and criminology, "this division
+between the study of the thing done and the study of the being who does
+it is not found."
+
+I have in my hands a text-book of six hundred pages which is used in the
+largest universities as a groundwork of political economy. This
+remarkable sentence strikes the eye: "The motives to business activity
+are too familiar to require analysis." But some sense that perhaps the
+"economic man" is not a self-evident creature seems to have touched our
+author. So we are treated to these sapient remarks: "To avoid this
+criticism we will begin with a characterization of the typical business
+man to be found to-day in the United States and other countries in the
+same stage of industrial development. _He has four traits which show
+themselves more or less clearly in all of his acts._" They are first
+"self-interest," but "this does not mean that he is steeped in
+selfishness ..."; secondly, "the larger self," the family, union, club,
+and "in times of emergency his country"; thirdly, "love of independence,"
+for "his ambition is to stand on his own feet"; fourthly, "business
+ethics" which "are not usually as high as the standards professed in
+churches, but they are much higher than current criticisms of business
+would lead one to think." Three-quarters of a page is sufficient for this
+penetrating analysis of motive and is followed by the remark that "these
+four characteristics of the economic man are readily explained by
+reference to the evolutionary process which has brought industrial
+society to its present stage of development."
+
+If those were the generalizations of a tired business man after a heavy
+dinner and a big cigar, they would still seem rather muddled and useless.
+But as the basis of an economic treatise in which "laws" are announced,
+"principles" laid down, reforms criticized as "impracticable," all for
+the benefit of thousands of college students, it is hardly possible to
+exaggerate the folly of such an exhibition. I have taken a book written
+by one eminent professor and evidently approved by others, for they use
+it as a text-book. It is no queer freak. I myself was supposed to read
+that book pretty nearly every week for a year. With hundreds of others I
+was supposed to found my economic understanding upon it. We were actually
+punished for not reading that book. It was given to us as wisdom, as
+modern political economy.
+
+But what goes by the name to-day is a potpourri in which one can
+distinguish descriptions of legal forms, charters and institutions;
+comparative studies of governmental and social machinery; the history of
+institutions, a few "principles" like the law of rent, some moral
+admonitions, a good deal of class feeling, not a little timidity--but
+almost no attempt to cut beneath these manifestations of social life to
+the creative impulses which produce them. The Economic Man--that lazy
+abstraction--is still paraded in the lecture room; the study of human
+nature has not advanced beyond the gossip of old wives.
+
+Graham Wallas touched the cause of the trouble when he pointed out that
+political science to-day discusses institutions and ignores the nature of
+the men who make and live under them. I have heard professors reply that
+it wasn't their business to discuss human nature but to record and
+interpret economic and political facts. Yet if you probe those
+"interpretations" there is no escaping the conclusion that they rest upon
+some notion of what man is like. "The student of politics," writes Mr.
+Wallas, "must, consciously or unconsciously, form a conception of human
+nature, and the less conscious he is of his conception the more likely he
+is to be dominated by it." For politics is an interest of men--a tool
+which they fabricate and use--and no comment has much value if it tries
+to get along without mankind. You might as well try to describe food by
+ignoring the digestion.
+
+Mr. Wallas has called a halt. I think we may say that his is the
+distinction of having turned the study of politics back to the humane
+tradition of Plato and Machiavelli--of having made man the center of
+political investigation. The very title of his book--"Human Nature in
+Politics"--is significant. Now in making that statement, I am aware that
+it is a sweeping one, and I do not mean to imply that Mr. Wallas is the
+only modern man who has tried to think about politics psychologically.
+Here in America alone we have two splendid critics, a man and a woman,
+whose thought flows from an interpretation of human character. Thorstein
+Veblen's brilliant descriptions penetrate deeply into our mental life,
+and Jane Addams has given new hope to many of us by her capacity for
+making ideals the goal of natural desire.
+
+Nor is it just to pass by such a suggestive thinker as Gabriel Tarde,
+even though we may feel that his psychology is too simple and his
+conclusions somewhat overdriven by a favorite theory. The work of Gustav
+Le Bon on "crowds" has, of course, passed into current thought, but I
+doubt whether anyone could say that he had even prepared a basis for a
+new political psychology. His own aversion to reform, his fondness for
+vast epochs and his contempt for current effort have left most of his
+"psychological laws" in the region of interesting literary comment. There
+are, too, any number of "social psychologies," such as those of Ross and
+McDougall. But the trouble with them is that the "psychology" is weak and
+uninformed, distorted by moral enthusiasms, and put out without any
+particular reference to the task of statesmanship. When you come to
+special problems, the literature of the subject picks up. Crime is
+receiving valuable attention, education is profoundly affected,
+alcoholism and sex have been handled for a good while on a psychological
+basis.
+
+But it remained for Mr. Wallas to state the philosophy of the matter--to
+say why the study of human nature must serve politics, and to point out
+how. He has not produced a political psychology, but he has written the
+manifesto for it. As a result, fragmentary investigations can be brought
+together and applied to the work of statecraft. Merely by making these
+researches self-conscious, he has made clearer their goal, given them
+direction, and kindled them to practical action. How necessary this work
+is can be seen in the writing of Miss Addams. Owing to keen insight and
+fine sympathy her thinking has generally been on a human basis. Yet Miss
+Addams is a reformer, and sympathy without an explicit philosophy may
+lead to a distorted enthusiasm. Her book on prostitution seems rather the
+product of her moral fervor than her human insight. Compare it with "The
+Spirit of Youth" or "Newer Ideals of Peace" or "Democracy and Social
+Ethics" and I think you will notice a very considerable willingness to
+gloss over human need in the interests of an unanalyzed reform. To put it
+bluntly, Miss Addams let her impatience get the better of her wisdom. She
+had written brilliantly about sex and its "sublimation," she had
+suggested notable "moral equivalents" for vice, but when she touched the
+white slave traffic its horrors were so great that she also put her faith
+in the policeman and the district attorney. "A New Conscience and an
+Ancient Evil" is an hysterical book, just because the real philosophical
+basis of Miss Addams' thinking was not deliberate enough to withstand the
+shock of a poignant horror.
+
+It is this weakness that Mr. Wallas comes to remedy. He has described
+what political science must be like, and anyone who has absorbed his
+insight has an intellectual groundwork for political observation. No one,
+least of all Mr. Wallas, would claim anything like finality for the
+essay. These labors are not done in a day. But he has deliberately
+brought the study of politics to the only focus which has any rational
+interest for mankind. He has made a plea, and sketched a plan which
+hundreds of investigators the world over must help to realize. If
+political science could travel in the direction suggested, its criticism
+would be relevant, its proposals practical. There would, for the first
+time, be a concerted effort to build a civilization around mankind, to
+use its talent and to satisfy its needs. There would be no more empty
+taboos, no erecting of institutions upon abstract and mechanical
+analogies. Politics would be like education--an effort to develop, train
+and nurture men's impulses. As Montessori is building the school around
+the child, so politics would build all of social life around the human
+being.
+
+That practical issues hang upon these investigations can be shown by an
+example from Mr. Wallas's book. Take the quarrel over socialism. You hear
+it said that without the private ownership of capital people will lose
+ambition and sink into sloth. Many men, just as well aware of present-day
+evils as the socialists, are unwilling to accept the collectivist remedy.
+G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc speak of the "magic of property" as
+the real obstacle to socialism. Now obviously this is a question of
+first-rate importance. If socialism will destroy initiative then only a
+doctrinaire would desire it. But how is the question to be solved? You
+cannot reason it out. Economics, as we know it to-day, is quite incapable
+of answering such a problem, for it is a matter that depends upon
+psychological investigation. When a professor says that socialism is
+impracticable he begs the question, for that amounts to assuming that the
+point at issue is already settled. If he tells you that socialism is
+against human nature, we have a perfect right to ask where he proved the
+possibilities of human nature.
+
+But note how Mr. Wallas approaches the debate: "Children quarrel
+furiously at a very early age over apparently worthless things, and
+collect and hide them long before they can have any clear notion of the
+advantages to be derived from individual possession. Those children who
+in certain charity schools are brought up entirely without personal
+property, even in their clothes or pocket handkerchiefs, show every sign
+of the bad effect on health and character which results from complete
+inability to satisfy a strong inherited instinct.... Some economist ought
+therefore to give us a treatise in which this property instinct is
+carefully and quantitatively examined.... How far can it be eliminated or
+modified by education? Is it satisfied by a leasehold or a life-interest,
+or by such an arrangement of corporate property as is offered by a
+collegiate foundation, or by the provision of a public park? Does it
+require for its satisfaction material and visible things such as land or
+houses, or is the holding, say, of colonial railway shares sufficient? Is
+the absence of unlimited proprietary rights felt more strongly in the
+case of personal chattels (such as furniture and ornaments) than in the
+case of land or machinery? Does the degree and direction of the instinct
+markedly differ among different individuals or races, or between the two
+sexes?"
+
+This puts the argument upon a plane where discussion is relevant. This is
+no trumped-up issue: it is asked by a politician and a socialist seeking
+for a real solution. We need to know whether the "magic of property"
+extends from a man's garden to Standard Oil stocks as anti-socialists
+say, and, conversely, we need to know what is happening to that mass of
+proletarians who own no property and cannot satisfy their instincts even
+with personal chattels.
+
+For if ownership is a human need, we certainly cannot taboo it as the
+extreme communists so dogmatically urge. "Pending ... an inquiry," writes
+Mr. Wallas, "my own provisional opinion is that, like a good many
+instincts of very early evolutionary origin, it can be satisfied by an
+avowed pretense; just as a kitten which is fed regularly on milk can be
+kept in good health if it is allowed to indulge its hunting instinct by
+playing with a bobbin, and a peaceful civil servant satisfies his
+instinct of combat and adventure at golf."
+
+Mr. Wallas takes exactly the same position as William James did when he
+planned a "moral equivalent" for war. Both men illustrate the changing
+focus of political thought. Both try to found statesmanship on human
+need. Both see that there are good and bad satisfactions of the same
+impulse. The routineer with his taboo does not see this, so he attempts
+the impossible task of obliterating the impulse. He differs fundamentally
+from the creative politician who devotes himself to inventing fine
+expressions for human needs, who recognizes that the work of
+statesmanship is in large measure the finding of good substitutes for the
+bad things we want.
+
+This is the heart of a political revolution. When we recognize that the
+focus of politics is shifting from a mechanical to a human center we
+shall have reached what is, I believe, the most essential idea in modern
+politics. More than any other generalization it illuminates the currents
+of our national life and explains the altering tasks of statesmanship.
+
+The old effort was to harness mankind to abstract principles--liberty,
+justice or equality--and to deduce institutions from these high-sounding
+words. It did not succeed because human nature was contrary and restive.
+The new effort proposes to fit creeds and institutions to the wants of
+men, to satisfy their impulses as fully and beneficially as possible.
+
+And yet we do not begin to know our desires or the art of their
+satisfaction. Mr. Wallas's book and the special literature of the subject
+leave no doubt that a precise political psychology is far off indeed. The
+human nature we must put at the center of our statesmanship is only
+partially understood. True, Mr. Wallas works with a psychology that is
+fairly well superseded. But not even the advance-guard to-day, what we
+may call the Freudian school, would claim that it had brought knowledge
+to a point where politics could use it in any very deep or comprehensive
+way. The subject is crude and fragmentary, though we are entitled to call
+it promising.
+
+Yet the fact had better be faced: psychology has not gone far enough, its
+results are still too vague for our purposes. We know very little, and
+what we know has hardly been applied to political problems. That the last
+few years have witnessed a revolution in the study of mental life is
+plain: the effects are felt not only in psychotherapy, but in education,
+morals, religion, and no end of cultural interests. The impetus of Freud
+is perhaps the greatest advance ever made towards the understanding and
+control of human character. But for the complexities of politics it is
+not yet ready. It will take time and endless labor for a detailed study
+of social problems in the light of this growing knowledge.
+
+What then shall we do now? Must we continue to muddle along in the old
+ruts, gazing rapturously at an impotent ideal, until the works of the
+scientists are matured?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE GOLDEN RULE AND AFTER
+
+
+It would indeed be an intolerably pedantic performance for a nation to
+sit still and wait for its scientists to report on their labors. The
+notion is typical of the pitfalls in the path of any theorist who does
+not correct his logic by a constant reference to the movement of life. It
+is true that statecraft must make human nature its basis. It is true that
+its chief task is the invention of forms and institutions which satisfy
+the inner needs of mankind. And it is true that our knowledge of those
+needs and the technique of their satisfaction is hazy, unorganized and
+blundering.
+
+But to suppose that the remedy lies in waiting for monographs from the
+research of the laboratory is to have lost a sense of the rhythm of
+actual affairs. That is not the way things come about: we grow into a new
+point of view: only afterwards, in looking back, do we see the landmarks
+of our progress. Thus it is customary to say that Adam Smith dates the
+change from the old mercantilist economy to the capitalistic economics of
+the nineteenth century. But that is a manner of speech. The old
+mercantilist policy was giving way to early industrialism: a thousand
+unconscious economic and social forces were compelling the change. Adam
+Smith expressed the process, named it, idealized it and made it
+self-conscious. Then because men were clearer about what they were doing,
+they could in a measure direct their destiny.
+
+That is but another way of saying that great revolutionary changes do not
+spring full-armed from anybody's brow. A genius usually becomes the
+luminous center of a nation's crisis,--men see better by the light of
+him. His bias deflects their actions. Unquestionably the doctrine-driven
+men who made the economics of the last century had much to do with the
+halo which encircled the smutted head of industrialism. They put the
+stamp of their genius on certain inhuman practices, and of course it has
+been the part of the academic mind to imitate them ever since. The
+orthodox economists are in the unenviable position of having taken their
+morals from the exploiter and of having translated them into the
+grandiloquent language of high public policy. They gave capitalism the
+sanction of the intellect. When later, Carlyle and Ruskin battered the
+economists into silence with invective and irony they were voicing the
+dumb protest of the humane people of England. They helped to organize a
+formless resentment by endowing it with intelligence and will.
+
+So it is to-day. If this nation did not show an unmistakable tendency to
+put men at the center of politics instead of machinery and things; if
+there were not evidence to prove that we are turning from the sterile
+taboo to the creation of finer environments; if the impetus for shaping
+our destiny were not present in our politics and our life, then essays
+like these would be so much baying at the moon, fantastic and unworthy
+pleas for some irrelevant paradise. But the gropings are there,--vastly
+confused in the tangled strains of the nation's interests. Clogged by the
+confusion, half-choked by stupid blockades, largely unaware of their own
+purposes, it is for criticism, organized research, and artistic
+expression to free and to use these creative energies. They are to be
+found in the aspirations of labor, among the awakened women, in the
+development of business, the diffusion of art and science, in the racial
+mixtures, and many lesser interests which cluster about these greater
+movements.
+
+The desire for a human politics is all about us. It rises to the surface
+in slogans like "human rights above property rights," "the man above the
+dollar." Some measure of its strength is given by the widespread
+imitation these expressions have compelled: politicians who haven't the
+slightest intention of putting men above the dollar, who if they had
+wouldn't know how, take off their hats to the sentiment because it seems
+a key to popular enthusiasm. It must be bewildering to men brought up,
+let us say, in the Hanna school of politics. For here is this nation
+which sixteen years ago vibrated ecstatically to that magic word
+"Prosperity"; to-day statistical rhetoric about size induces little but
+excessive boredom. If you wish to drive an audience out of the hall tell
+it how rich America is; if you wish to stamp yourself an echo of the past
+talk to us young men about the Republican Party's understanding with God
+in respect to bumper crops. But talk to us about "human rights," and
+though you talk rubbish, we'll listen. For our desire is bent that way,
+and anything which has the flavor of this new interest will rivet our
+attention. We are still uncritical. It is only a few years since we began
+to center our politics upon human beings. We have no training in that
+kind of thought. Our schools and colleges have helped us hardly at all.
+We still talk about "humanity" as if it were some strange and mystical
+creature which could not possibly be composed of the grocer, the
+street-car conductor and our aunts.
+
+That the opinion-making people of America are more interested in human
+welfare than in empire or abstract prosperity is an item that no
+statesman can disregard in his thinking. To-day it is no longer necessary
+to run against the grain of the deepest movements of our time. There is
+an ascendant feeling among the people that all achievement should be
+measured in human happiness. This feeling has not always existed.
+Historians tell us that the very idea of progress in well-being is not
+much older than, say, Shakespeare's plays. As a general belief it is
+still more recent. The nineteenth century may perhaps be said to mark its
+popularization. But as a fact of immediate politics, as a touchstone
+applied quickly to all the acts of statecraft in America it belongs to
+the Twentieth Century. There were any number of people who long before
+1900 saw that dollars and men could clash. But their insight had not won
+any general acceptance. It is only within the last few years that the
+human test has ceased to be the property of a small group and become the
+convention of a large majority. A study of magazines and newspapers would
+confirm this rather broad generalization. It would show, I believe, how
+the whole quality of our most impromptu thinking is being influenced by
+human values.
+
+The statesman must look to this largely unorganized drift of desire. He
+will find it clustering about certain big revolts--the unrest of women,
+for example, or the increasing demands of industrial workers. Rightly
+understood, these social currents would, I believe, lead to the central
+issues of life, the vital points upon which happiness depends. They come
+out of necessities. They express desire. They are power.
+
+Thus feminism, arising out of a crisis in sexual conditions, has
+liberated energies that are themselves the motors of any reform. In
+England and America voting has become the symbol of an aspiration as yet
+half-conscious and undefined. What women want is surely something a great
+deal deeper than the privilege of taking part in elections. They are
+looking for a readjustment of their relations to the home, to work, to
+children, to men, to the interests of civilized life. The vote has become
+a convenient peg upon which to hang aspirations that are not at all sure
+of their own meaning. In no insignificant number of cases the vote is a
+cover by which revolutionary demands can be given a conventional front.
+The ballot is at the utmost a beginning, as far-sighted conservatives
+have guessed. Certainly the elimination of "male" from the suffrage
+qualifications will not end the feminist agitation. From the angle of
+statecraft the future of the movement may be said to depend upon the wise
+use of this raw and scattered power. I do not pretend to know in detail
+how this can be done. But I am certain that the task of leadership is to
+organize aspiration in the service of the real interests of life. To-day
+women want--what? They are ready to want something: that describes fairly
+the condition of most suffragettes. Those who like Ellen Key and Olive
+Shreiner and Mrs. Gilman give them real problems to think about are
+drafting that energy into use. By real problems I mean problems of love,
+work, home, children. They are the real interests of feminism because
+they have produced it.
+
+The yearnings of to-day are the symptoms of needs, they point the course
+of invention, they are the energies which animate a social program. The
+most ideally conceived plan of the human mind has only a slight interest
+if it does not harness these instinctive forces. That is the great lesson
+which the utopias teach by their failure--that schemes, however nicely
+arranged, cannot be imposed upon human beings who are interested in other
+things. What ailed Don Quixote was that he and his contemporaries wanted
+different things; the only ideals that count are those which express the
+possible development of an existing force. Reformers must never forget
+that three legs are a Quixotic ideal; two good legs a genuine one.
+
+In actual life, yes, in the moil and toil of propaganda, "movements,"
+"causes" and agitations the statesman-inventor and the political
+psychologist find the raw material for their work. It is not the business
+of the politician to preserve an Olympian indifference to what stupid
+people call "popular whim." Being lofty about the "passing fad" and the
+ephemeral outcry is all very well in the biographies of dead men, but
+rank nonsense in the rulers of real ones. Oscar Wilde once remarked that
+only superficial people disliked the superficial. Nothing, for example,
+could on the surface be more trivial than an interest in baseball scores.
+Yet during the campaign of 1912 the excitement was so great that Woodrow
+Wilson said on the stump he felt like apologizing to the American people
+for daring to be a presidential candidate while the Giants and the Red
+Sox were playing for the championship. Baseball (not so much for those
+who play it), is a colossal phenomenon in American life. Watch the crowds
+in front of a bulletin board, finding a vicarious excitement and an
+abstract relief from the monotony of their own lives. What a second-hand
+civilization it is that grows passionate over a scoreboard with little
+electric lights! What a civilization it is that has learned to enjoy its
+sport without even seeing it! If ever there was a symptom that this
+nation needed leisure and direct participation in games, it is that poor
+scrawny substitute for joy--the baseball extra.
+
+It is as symptomatic as the labor union. It expresses need. And
+statesmanship would find an answer. It would not let that passion and
+loyalty be frittered away to drift like scum through the nation. It would
+see in it the opportunity of art, play, and religion. So with what looks
+very different--the "syndicalist movement." Perhaps it seems preposterous
+to discuss baseball and syndicalism in the same paragraph. But that is
+only because we have not accustomed ourselves to thinking of social
+events as answers to human needs. The statesman would ask, Why are there
+syndicalists? What are they driving at? What gift to civilization is in
+the impetus behind them? They are human beings, and they want human
+things. There is no reason to become terror-stricken about them. They
+seem to want things badly. Then ostriches disguised as judges cannot deal
+with them. Anarchism--men die for that, they undergo intolerable insults.
+They are tarred and feathered and spat upon. Is it possible that
+Republicans, Democrats and Socialists clip the wings more than free
+spirits can allow? Is civilization perhaps too tightly organized? Have
+the irreconcilables a soul audacious and less blunted than our
+domesticated ones? To put it mildly, is it ever safe to ignore them
+entirely in our thinking?
+
+We shall come, I think, to a different appraisal of agitations. Our
+present method is to discuss whether the proposals are right and
+feasible. We do this hastily and with prejudice. Generally we decide that
+any agitation foreign to our settled habits is wrong. And we bolster up
+our satisfaction by pointing to some mistake of logic or some puerility
+of statement. That done, we feel the agitation is deplorable and can be
+ignored unless it becomes so obstreperous that we have to put it in jail.
+But a genuine statecraft would go deeper. It would know that even God has
+been defended with nonsense. So it could be sympathetic to agitations. I
+use the word sympathetic literally. For it would try to understand the
+inner feeling which had generated what looks like a silly demand. To-day
+it is as if a hungry man asked for an indigestible food, and we let him
+go hungry because he was unwise. He isn't any the less hungry because he
+asks for the wrong food. So with agitations. Their specific plans may be
+silly, but their demands are real. The hungers and lusts of mankind have
+produced some stupendous follies, but the desires themselves are no less
+real and insistent.
+
+The important thing about a social movement is not its stated platform
+but the source from which it flows. The task of politics is to understand
+those deeper demands and to find civilized satisfactions for them. The
+meaning of this is that the statesman must be more than the leader of a
+party. Thus the socialist statesman is not complete if he is a good
+socialist. Only the delusion that his truth is the whole truth, his party
+the human race, and his program a panacea, will produce that singleness
+of vision.
+
+The moment a man takes office he has no right to be the representative of
+one group alone. He has assumed the burden of harmonizing particular
+agitations with the general welfare. That is why great agitators should
+not accept office. Men like Debs understand that. Their business is to
+make social demands so concrete and pressing that statesmen are forced to
+deal with them. Agitators who accept government positions are a
+disappointment to their followers. They can no longer be severely
+partisan. They have to look at affairs nationally. Now the agitator and
+the statesman are both needed. But they have different functions, and it
+is unjust to damn one because he hasn't the virtues of the other.
+
+The statesman to-day needs a large equipment. The man who comes forward
+to shape a country's policy has truly no end of things to consider. He
+must be aware of the condition of the people: no statesman must fall into
+the sincere but thoroughly upper class blunder that President Taft
+committed when he advised a three months' vacation. Realizing how men and
+women feel at all levels and at different places, he must speak their
+discontent and project their hopes. Through this he will get power.
+Standing upon the prestige which that gives he must guide and purify the
+social demands he finds at work. He is the translator of agitations. For
+this task he must be keenly sensitive to public opinion and capable of
+understanding the dynamics of it. Then, in order to fuse it into a
+civilized achievement, he will require much expert knowledge. Yet he need
+not be a specialist himself, if only he is expert in choosing experts. It
+is better indeed that the statesman should have a lay, and not a
+professional view. For the bogs of technical stupidity and empty
+formalism are always near and always dangerous. The real political genius
+stands between the actual life of men, their wishes and their needs, and
+all the windings of official caste and professional snobbery. It is his
+supreme business to see that the servants of life stay in their
+place--that government, industry, "causes," science, all the creatures of
+man do not succeed in their perpetual effort to become the masters.
+
+I have Roosevelt in mind. He haunts political thinking. And indeed, why
+shouldn't he? What reality could there be in comments upon American
+politics which ignored the colossal phenomenon of Roosevelt? If he is
+wholly evil, as many say he is, then the American democracy is
+preponderantly evil. For in the first years of the Twentieth Century,
+Roosevelt spoke for this nation, as few presidents have spoken in our
+history. And that he has spoken well, who in the perspective of time will
+deny? Sensitive to the original forces of public opinion, no man has had
+the same power of rounding up the laggards. Government under him was a
+throbbing human purpose. He succeeded, where Taft failed, in preventing
+that drought of invention which officialism brings. Many people say he
+has tried to be all things to all men--that his speeches are an attempt
+to corral all sorts of votes. That is a left-handed way of stating a
+truth. A more generous interpretation would be to say that he had tried
+to be inclusive, to attach a hundred sectional agitations to a national
+program. Crude: of course he was crude; he had a hemisphere for his
+canvas. Inconsistent: yes, he tried to be the leader of factions at war
+with one another. A late convert: he is a statesman and not an
+agitator--his business was to meet demands when they had grown to
+national proportions. No end of possibilities have slipped through the
+large meshes of his net. He has said some silly things. He has not been
+subtle, and he has been far from perfect. But his success should be
+judged by the size of his task, by the fierceness of the opposition, by
+the intellectual qualities of the nation he represented. When we remember
+that he was trained in the Republican politics of Hanna and Platt, that
+he was the first President who shared a new social vision, then I believe
+we need offer no apologies for making Mr. Roosevelt stand as the working
+model for a possible American statesman at the beginning of the Twentieth
+Century.
+
+Critics have often suggested that Roosevelt stole Bryan's clothes. That
+is perhaps true, and it suggests a comparison which illuminates both men.
+It would not be unfair to say that it is always the function of the
+Roosevelts to take from the Bryans. But it is a little silly for an
+agitator to cry thief when the success of his agitation has led to the
+adoption of his ideas. It is like the chagrin of the socialists because
+the National Progressive Party had "stolen twenty-three planks," and it
+makes a person wonder whether some agitators haven't an overdeveloped
+sense of private property.
+
+I do not see the statesman in Bryan. He has been something of a voice
+crying in the wilderness, but a voice that did not understand its own
+message. Many people talk of him as a prophet. There is a great deal of
+literal truth in that remark, for it has been the peculiar work of Bryan
+to express in politics some of that emotion which has made America the
+home of new religions. What we know as the scientific habit of mind is
+entirely lacking in his intellectual equipment. There is a vein of
+mysticism in American life, and Mr. Bryan is its uncritical prophet. His
+insights are those of the gifted evangelist, often profound and always
+narrow. It is absurd to debate his sincerity. Mr. Bryan talks with the
+intoxication of the man who has had a revelation: to skeptics that always
+seems theatrical. But far from being the scheming hypocrite his enemies
+say he is, Mr. Bryan is too simple for the task of statesmanship. No
+bracing critical atmosphere plays about his mind: there are no cleansing
+doubts and fruitful alternatives. The work of Bryan has been to express a
+certain feeling of unrest--to embody it in the traditional language of
+prophecy. But it is a shrewd turn of the American people that has kept
+him out of office. I say this not in disrespect of his qualities, but in
+definition of them. Bryan does not happen to have the naturalistic
+outlook, the complete humanity, or the deliberative habit which modern
+statecraft requires. He is the voice of a confused emotion.
+
+Woodrow Wilson has a talent which is Bryan's chief defect--the scientific
+habit of holding facts in solution. His mind is lucid and flexible, and
+he has the faculty of taking advice quickly, of stating something he has
+borrowed with more ease and subtlety than the specialist from whom he got
+it. Woodrow Wilson's is an elegant and highly refined intellect, nicely
+balanced and capable of fine adjustment. An urbane civilization produced
+it, leisure has given it spaciousness, ease has made it generous. A mind
+without tension, its roots are not in the somewhat barbarous
+under-currents of the nation. Woodrow Wilson understands easily, but he
+does not incarnate: he has never been a part of the protest he speaks.
+You think of him as a good counsellor, as an excellent presiding officer.
+Whether his imagination is fibrous enough to catch the inwardness of the
+mutterings of our age is something experience alone can show. Wilson has
+class feeling in the least offensive sense of that term: he likes a world
+of gentlemen. Occasionally he has exhibited a rather amateurish effort to
+be grimy and shirt-sleeved. But without much success: his contact with
+American life is not direct, and so he is capable of purely theoretical
+affirmations. Like all essentially contemplative men, the world has to be
+reflected in the medium of his intellect before he can grapple with it.
+
+Yet Wilson belongs among the statesmen, and it is fine that he should be
+in public life. The weakness I have suggested is one that all statesmen
+share in some degree: an inability to interpret adequately the world they
+govern. This is a difficulty which is common to conservative and radical,
+and if I have used three living men to illustrate the problem it is only
+because they seem to illuminate it. They have faced the task and we can
+take their measurement. It is no part of my purpose to make any judgment
+as to the value of particular policies they have advocated. I am
+attempting to suggest some of the essentials of a statesman's equipment
+for the work of a humanly centered politics. Roosevelt has seemed to me
+the most effective, the most nearly complete; Bryan I have ventured to
+class with the men who though important to politics should never hold
+high executive office; Wilson, less complete than Roosevelt, is worthy of
+our deepest interest because his judgment is subtle where Roosevelt's is
+crude. He is a foretaste of a more advanced statesmanship.
+
+Because he is self-conscious, Wilson has been able to see the problem
+that any finely adapted statecraft must meet. It is a problem that would
+hardly occur to an old-fashioned politician: "Though he (the statesman)
+cannot himself keep the life of the nation as a whole in his mind, he can
+at least make sure that he is taking counsel with those who know...." It
+is not important that Wilson in stating the difficulty should put it as
+if he had in a measure solved it. He hasn't, because taking counsel is a
+means to understanding the nation as a whole, and that understanding
+remains almost as arduous and requires just as fibrous an imagination, if
+it is gleaned from advisers.
+
+To think of the whole nation: surely the task of statesmanship is more
+difficult to-day than ever before in history. In the face of a clotted
+intricacy in the subject-matter of politics, improvements in knowledge
+seem meager indeed. The distance between what we know and what we need to
+know appears to be greater than ever. Plato and Aristotle thought in
+terms of ten thousand homogeneous villagers; we have to think in terms of
+a hundred million people of all races and all traditions, crossbred and
+inbred, subject to climates they have never lived in before, plumped down
+on a continent in the midst of a strange civilization. We have to deal
+with all grades of life from the frontier to the metropolis, with men who
+differ in sense of fact, in ideal, in the very groundwork of morals. And
+we have to take into account not the simple opposition of two classes,
+but the hostility of many,--the farmers and the factory workers and all
+the castes within their ranks, the small merchants, and the feudal
+organization of business. Ours is a problem in which deception has become
+organized and strong; where truth is poisoned at its source; one in which
+the skill of the shrewdest brains is devoted to misleading a bewildered
+people. Nor can we keep to the problem within our borders. Whether we
+wish it or not we are involved in the world's problems, and all the winds
+of heaven blow through our land.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is a great question whether our intellects can grasp the subject. Are
+we perhaps like a child whose hand is too small to span an octave on the
+piano? Not only are the facts inhumanly complicated, but the natural
+ideals of people are so varied and contradictory that action halts in
+despair. We are putting a tremendous strain upon the mind, and the
+results are all about us: everyone has known the neutral thinkers who
+stand forever undecided before the complications of life, who have, as it
+were, caught a glimpse of the possibilities of knowledge. The sight has
+paralyzed them. Unless they can act with certainty, they dare not act at
+all.
+
+That is merely one of the temptations of theory. In the real world,
+action and thought are so closely related that one cannot wait upon the
+other. We cannot wait in politics for any completed theoretical
+discussion of its method: it is a monstrous demand. There is no pausing
+until political psychology is more certain. We have to act on what we
+believe, on half-knowledge, illusion and error. Experience itself will
+reveal our mistakes; research and criticism may convert them into wisdom.
+But act we must, and act as if we knew the nature of man and proposed to
+satisfy his needs.
+
+In other words, we must put man at the center of politics, even though we
+are densely ignorant both of man and of politics. This has always been
+the method of great political thinkers from Plato to Bentham. But one
+difference we in this age must note: they made their political man a
+dogma--we must leave him an hypothesis. That is to say that our task is
+to temper speculation with scientific humility.
+
+A paradox there is here, but a paradox of language, and not of fact. Men
+made bridges before there was a science of bridge-building; they cured
+disease before they knew medicine. Art came before aesthetics, and
+righteousness before ethics. Conduct and theory react upon each other.
+Hypothesis is confirmed and modified by action, and action is guided by
+hypothesis. If it is a paradox to ask for a human politics before we
+understand humanity or politics, it is what Mr. Chesterton describes as
+one of those paradoxes that sit beside the wells of truth.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We make our picture of man, knowing that, though it is crude and unjust,
+we have to work with it. If we are wise we shall become experimental
+towards life: then every mistake will contribute towards knowledge. Let
+the exploration of human need and desire become a deliberate purpose of
+statecraft, and there is no present measure of its possibilities.
+
+In this work there are many guides. A vague common tradition is in the
+air about us--it expresses itself in journalism, in cheap novels, in the
+uncritical theater. Every merchant has his stock of assumptions about the
+mental habits of his customers and competitors; the prostitute hers; the
+newspaperman his; P. T. Barnum had a few; the vaudeville stage has a
+number. We test these notions by their results, and even "practical
+people" find that there is more variety in human nature than they had
+supposed.
+
+We forge gradually our greatest instrument for understanding the
+world--introspection. We discover that humanity may resemble us very
+considerably--that the best way of knowing the inwardness of our
+neighbors is to know ourselves. For after all, the only experience we
+really understand is our own. And that, in the least of us, is so rich
+that no one has yet exhausted its possibilities. It has been said that
+every genuine character an artist produces is one of the characters he
+might have been. By re-creating our own suppressed possibilities we
+multiply the number of lives that we can really know. That as I
+understand it is the psychology of the Golden Rule. For note that Jesus
+did not set up some external fetich: he did not say, make your neighbor
+righteous, or chaste, or respectable. He said do as you would be done by.
+Assume that you and he are alike, and you can found morals on humanity.
+
+But experience has enlarged our knowledge of differences. We realize now
+that our neighbor is not always like ourselves. Knowing how unjust other
+people's inferences are when they concern us, we have begun to guess that
+ours may be unjust to them. Any uniformity of conduct becomes at once an
+impossible ideal, and the willingness to live and let live assumes high
+place among the virtues. A puzzled wisdom remarks that "it takes all
+sorts of people to make a world," and half-protestingly men accept
+Bernard Shaw's amendment, "Do not do unto others as you would that they
+should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same."
+
+We learn perhaps that there is no contradiction in speaking of "human
+nature" while admitting that men are unique. For all deepening of our
+knowledge gives a greater sense of common likeness and individual
+variation. It is folly to ignore either insight. But it is done
+constantly, with no end of confusion as a result. Some men have got
+themselves into a state where the only view that interests them is the
+common humanity of us all. Their world is not populated by men and women,
+but by a Unity that is Permanent. You might as well refuse to see any
+differences between steam, water and ice because they have common
+elements. And I have seen some of these people trying to skate on steam.
+Their brothers, blind in the other eye, go about the world so sure that
+each person is entirely unique, that society becomes like a row of
+packing cases, each painted on the inside, and each containing one ego
+and its own.
+
+Art enlarges experience by admitting us to the inner life of others. That
+is not the only use of art, for its function is surely greater and more
+ultimate than to furnish us with a better knowledge of human nature. Nor
+is that its only use even to statecraft. I suggested earlier that art
+enters politics as a "moral equivalent" for evil, a medium by which
+barbarous lusts find civilized expression. It is, too, an ideal for
+labor. But my purpose here is not to attempt any adequate description of
+the services of art. It is enough to note that literature in particular
+elaborates our insight into human life, and, therefore, enables us to
+center our institutions more truly.
+
+Ibsen discovers a soul in Nora: the discovery is absorbed into the common
+knowledge of the age. Other Noras discover their own souls; the Helmers
+all about us begin to see the person in the doll. Plays and novels have
+indeed an overwhelming political importance, as the "moderns" have
+maintained. But it lies not in the preaching of a doctrine or the
+insistence on some particular change in conduct. That is a shallow and
+wasteful use of the resources of art. For art can open up the springs
+from which conduct flows. Its genuine influence is on what Wells calls
+the "hinterland," in a quickening of the sense of life.
+
+Art can really penetrate where most of us can only observe. "I look and I
+think I see," writes Bergson, "I listen and I think I hear, I examine
+myself and I think I am reading the very depths of my heart.... (But) my
+senses and my consciousness ... give me no more than a practical
+simplification of reality ... in short, we do not see the actual things
+themselves; in most cases we confine ourselves to reading the labels
+affixed to them." Who has not known this in thinking of politics? We talk
+of poverty and forget poor people; we make rules for vagrancy--we forget
+the vagrant. Some of our best-intentioned political schemes, like reform
+colonies and scientific jails, turn out to be inhuman tyrannies just
+because our imagination does not penetrate the sociological label. "We
+move amidst generalities and symbols ... we live in a zone midway between
+things and ourselves, external to things, external also to ourselves."
+This is what works of art help to correct: "Behind the commonplace,
+conventional expression that both reveals and conceals an individual
+mental state, it is the emotion, the original mood, to which they attain
+in its undefiled essence."
+
+This directness of vision fertilizes thought. Without a strong artistic
+tradition, the life and so the politics of a nation sink into a barren
+routine. A country populated by pure logicians and mathematical
+scientists would, I believe, produce few inventions. For creation, even
+of scientific truth, is no automatic product of logical thought or
+scientific method, and it has been well said that the greatest
+discoveries in science are brilliant guesses on insufficient evidence. A
+nation must, so to speak, live close to its own life, be intimate and
+sympathetic with natural events. That is what gives understanding, and
+justifies the observation that the intuitions of scientific discovery and
+the artist's perceptions are closely related. It is perhaps not
+altogether without significance for us that primitive science and poetry
+were indistinguishable. Nor is it strange that latter-day research should
+confirm so many sayings of the poets. In all great ages art and science
+have enriched each other. It is only eccentric poets and narrow
+specialists who lock the doors. The human spirit doesn't grow in
+sections.
+
+I shall not press the point for it would lead us far afield. It is enough
+that we remember the close alliance of art, science and politics in
+Athens, in Florence and Venice at their zenith. We in America have
+divorced them completely: both art and politics exist in a condition of
+unnatural celibacy. Is this not a contributing factor to the futility and
+opacity of our political thinking? We have handed over the government of
+a nation of people to a set of lawyers, to a class of men who deal in the
+most verbal and unreal of all human attainments.
+
+A lively artistic tradition is essential to the humanizing of politics.
+It is the soil in which invention flourishes and the organized knowledge
+of science attains its greatest reality. Let me illustrate from another
+field of interests. The religious investigations of William James were a
+study, not of ecclesiastical institutions or the history of creeds. They
+were concerned with religious experience, of which churches and rituals
+are nothing but the external satisfaction. As Graham Wallas is
+endeavoring to make human nature the center of politics, so James made it
+the center of religions. It was a work of genius, yet no one would claim
+that it is a mature psychology of the "Varieties of Religious
+Experience." It is rather a survey and a description, done with the eye
+of an artist and the method of a scientist. We know from it more of what
+religious feeling is like, even though we remain ignorant of its sources.
+And this intimacy humanizes religious controversy and brings
+ecclesiasticism back to men.
+
+Like most of James's psychology, it opens up investigation instead of
+concluding it. In the light even of our present knowledge we can see how
+primitive his treatment was. But James's services cannot be
+overestimated: if he did not lay even the foundations of a science, he
+did lay some of the foundations for research. It was an immense
+illumination and a warming of interest. It threw open the gates to the
+whole landscape of possibilities. It was a ventilation of thought.
+Something similar will have to be done for political psychology. We know
+how far off is the profound and precise knowledge we desire. But we know
+too that we have a right to hope for an increasing acquaintance with the
+varieties of political experience. It would, of course, be drawn from
+biography, from the human aspect of history and daily observation. We
+should begin to know what it is that we ought to know. Such a work would
+be stimulating to politician and psychologist. The statesman's
+imagination would be guided and organized; it would give him a
+starting-point for his own understanding of human beings in politics. To
+the scientists it would be a challenge--to bring these facts under the
+light of their researches, to extend these researches to the borders of
+those facts.
+
+The statesman has another way of strengthening his grip upon the
+complexity of life. Statistics help. This method is neither so conclusive
+as the devotees say, nor so bad as the people who are awed by it would
+like to believe. Voting, as Gabriel Tarde points out, is our most
+conspicuous use of statistics. Mystical democrats believe that an
+election expresses the will of the people, and that that will is wise.
+Mystical democrats are rare. Looked at closely an election shows the
+quantitative division of the people on several alternatives. That choice
+is not necessarily wise, but it is wise to heed that choice. For it is a
+rough estimate of an important part of the community's sentiment, and no
+statecraft can succeed that violates it. It is often immensely suggestive
+of what a large number of people are in the future going to wish.
+Democracy, because it registers popular feeling, is at least trying to
+build truly, and is for that reason an enlightened form of government. So
+we who are democrats need not believe that the people are necessarily
+right in their choice: some of us are always in the minority, and not a
+little proud of the distinction. Voting does not extract wisdom from
+multitudes: its real value is to furnish wisdom about multitudes. Our
+faith in democracy has this very solid foundation: that no leader's
+wisdom can be applied unless the democracy comes to approve of it. To
+govern a democracy you have to educate it: that contact with great masses
+of men reciprocates by educating the leader. "The consent of the
+governed" is more than a safeguard against ignorant tyrants: it is an
+insurance against benevolent despots as well. In a rough way and with
+many exceptions, democracy compels law to approximate human need. It is a
+little difficult to see this when you live right in the midst of one. But
+in perspective there can be little question that of all governments
+democracy is the most relevant. Only humane laws can be successfully
+enforced; and they are the only ones really worth enforcing. Voting is a
+formal method of registering consent.
+
+But all statistical devices are open to abuse and require constant
+correction. Bribery, false counting, disfranchisement are the cruder
+deceptions; they correspond to those enrolment statistics of a large
+university which are artificially fed by counting the same student
+several times if his courses happen to span two or three of the
+departments. Just as deceptive as plain fraud is the deceptive ballot. We
+all know how when the political tricksters were compelled to frame a
+direct primary law in New York they fixed the ballot so that it botched
+the election. Corporations have been known to do just that to their
+reports. Did not E. H. Harriman say of a well-known statistician that he
+could make an annual report tell any story you pleased? Still subtler is
+the seven-foot ballot of stupid, good intentions--the hyperdemocratic
+ballot in which you are asked to vote for the State Printer, and succeed
+only in voting under the party emblem.
+
+Statistics then is no automatic device for measuring facts. You and I are
+forever at the mercy of the census-taker and the census-maker. That
+impertinent fellow who goes from house to house is one of the real
+masters of the statistical situation. The other is the man who organizes
+the results. For all the conclusions in the end rest upon their accuracy,
+honesty, energy and insight. Of course, in an obvious census like that of
+the number of people personal bias counts for so little that it is lost
+in the grand total. But the moment you begin inquiries into subjects
+which people prefer to conceal, the weakness of statistics becomes
+obvious. All figures which touch upon sexual subjects are nothing but the
+roughest guesses. No one would take a census of prostitution,
+illegitimacy, adultery, or venereal disease for a statement of reliable
+facts. There are religious statistics, but who that has traveled among
+men would regard the number of professing Christians as any index of the
+strength of Christianity, or the church attendance as a measure of
+devotion? In the supremely important subject of literacy, what
+classification yet devised can weigh the culture of masses of people? We
+say that such a percentage of the population cannot read or write. But
+the test of reading and writing is crude and clumsy. It is often
+administered by men who are themselves half-educated, and it is shot
+through with racial and class prejudice.
+
+The statistical method is of use only to those who have found it out.
+This is achieved principally by absorbing into your thinking a lively
+doubt about all classifications and general terms, for they are the basis
+of statistical measurement. That done you are fairly proof against
+seduction. No better popular statement of this is to be found than H. G.
+Wells' little essay: "Skepticism of the Instrument." Wells has, of
+course, made no new discovery. The history of philosophy is crowded with
+quarrels as to how seriously we ought to take our classifications: a
+large part of the battle about Nominalism turns on this, the Empirical
+and Rational traditions divide on it; in our day the attacks of James,
+Bergson, and the "anti-intellectualists" are largely a continuation of
+this old struggle. Wells takes his stand very definitely with those who
+regard classification "as serviceable for the practical purposes of life"
+but nevertheless "a departure from the objective truth of things."
+
+"Take the word chair," he writes. "When one says chair, one thinks
+vaguely of an average chair. But collect individual instances, think of
+armchairs and reading-chairs, and dining-room chairs and kitchen chairs,
+chairs that pass into benches, chairs that cross the boundary and become
+settees, dentists' chairs, thrones, opera stalls, seats of all sorts,
+those miraculous fungoid growths that cumber the floor of the Arts and
+Crafts Exhibition, and you will perceive what a lax bundle in fact is
+this simple straightforward term. In co-operation with an intelligent
+joiner I would undertake to defeat any definition of chair or
+chairishness that you gave me." Think then of the glib way in which we
+speak of "the unemployed," "the unfit," "the criminal," "the
+unemployable," and how easily we forget that behind these general terms
+are unique individuals with personal histories and varying needs.
+
+Even the most refined statistics are nothing but an abstraction. But if
+that truth is held clearly before the mind, the polygons and curves of
+the statisticians can be used as a skeleton to which the imagination and
+our general sense of life give some flesh and blood reality. Human
+statistics are illuminating to those who know humanity. I would not trust
+a hermit's inferences about the statistics of anything.
+
+It is then no simple formula which answers our question. The problem of a
+human politics is not solved by a catch phrase. Criticism, of which these
+essays are a piece, can give the direction we must travel. But for the
+rest there is no smooth road built, no swift and sure conveyance at the
+door. We set out as if we knew; we act on the notions of man that we
+possess. Literature refines, science deepens, various devices extend it.
+Those who act on the knowledge at hand are the men of affairs. And all
+the while, research studies their results, artists express subtler
+perceptions, critics refine and adapt the general culture of the times.
+There is no other way but through this vast collaboration.
+
+There is no short cut to civilization. We say that the truth will make us
+free. Yes, but that truth is a thousand truths which grow and change. Nor
+do I see a final state of blessedness. The world's end will surely find
+us still engaged in answering riddles. This changing focus in politics is
+a tendency at work all through our lives. There are many experiments. But
+the effort is half-conscious; only here and there does it rise to a
+deliberate purpose. To make it an avowed ideal--a thing of will and
+intelligence--is to hasten its coming, to illumine its blunders, and, by
+giving it self-criticism, to convert mistakes into wisdom.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+WELL MEANING BUT UNMEANING: THE CHICAGO VICE REPORT
+
+
+In casting about for a concrete example to illustrate some of the points
+under discussion I hesitated a long time before the wealth of material.
+No age has produced such a multitude of elaborate studies, and any
+selection was, of course, a limiting one. The Minority Report of the
+English Poor Law Commission has striking merits and defects, but for our
+purposes it inheres too deeply in British conditions. American tariff and
+trust investigations are massive enough in all conscience, but they are
+so partisan in their origin and so pathetically unattached to any
+recognized ideal of public policy that it seemed better to look
+elsewhere. Conservation had the virtue of arising out of a provident
+statesmanship, but its problems were largely technical.
+
+The real choice narrowed itself finally to the Pittsburgh Survey and the
+Chicago Vice Report. Had I been looking for an example of the finest
+expert inquiry, there would have been little question that the vivid and
+intensive study of Pittsburgh's industrialism was the example to use. But
+I was looking for something more representative, and, therefore, more
+revealing. I did not want a detached study of some specially selected
+cross-section of what is after all not the typical economic life of
+America. The case demanded was one in which you could see representative
+American citizens trying to handle a problem which had touched their
+imaginations.
+
+Vice is such a problem. You can always get a hearing about it; there is
+no end of interest in the question. Rare indeed is that community which
+has not been "Lexowed," in which a district attorney or a minister has
+not led a crusade. Muckraking began with the exposure of vice; men like
+Heney, Lindsey, Folk founded their reputations on the fight against it.
+It would be interesting to know how much of the social conscience of our
+time had as its first insight the prostitute on the city pavement.
+
+We do not have to force an interest, as we do about the trusts, or even
+about the poor. For this problem lies close indeed to the dynamics of our
+own natures. Research is stimulated, actively aroused, and a passionate
+zeal suffuses what is perhaps the most spontaneous reform enthusiasm of
+our time. Looked at externally it is a curious focusing of attention. Nor
+is it explained by words like "chivalry," "conscience," "social
+compassion." Magazines that will condone a thousand cruelties to women
+gladly publish series of articles on the girl who goes wrong; merchants
+who sweat and rack their women employees serve gallantly on these
+commissions. These men are not conscious hypocrites. Perhaps like the
+rest of us they are impelled by forces they are not eager to examine. I
+do not press the point. It belongs to the analyst of motive.
+
+We need only note the vast interest in the subject--that it extends
+across class lines, and expresses itself as an immense good-will. Perhaps
+a largely unconscious absorption in a subject is itself a sign of great
+importance. Surely vice has a thousand implications that touch all of us
+directly. It is closely related to most of the interests of
+life--ramifying into industry, into the family, health, play, art,
+religion. The miseries it entails are genuine miseries--not points of
+etiquette or infringements of convention. Vice issues in pain. The world
+suffers for it. To attack it is to attack as far-reaching and real a
+problem as any that we human beings face.
+
+The Chicago Commission had no simple, easily measured problem before it.
+At the very outset the report confesses that an accurate count of the
+number of prostitutes in Chicago could not be reached. The police lists
+are obviously incomplete and perhaps corrupt. The whole amorphous field
+of clandestine vice will, of course, defeat any census. But even public
+prostitution is so varied that nobody can do better than estimate it
+roughly. This point is worth keeping in mind, for it lights up the
+remedies proposed. What the Commission advocates is the constant
+repression and the ultimate annihilation of a mode of life which refuses
+discovery and measurement.
+
+The report estimates that there are five thousand women in Chicago who
+devote their whole time to the traffic; that the annual profits in that
+one city alone are between fifteen and sixteen million dollars a year.
+These figures are admittedly low for they leave out all consideration of
+occasional, or seasonal, or hidden prostitution. It is only the nucleus
+that can be guessed at; the fringe which shades out into various degrees
+of respectability remains entirely unmeasured. Yet these suburbs of the
+Tenderloin must always be kept in mind; their population is shifting and
+very elastic; it includes the unsuspected; and I am inclined to believe
+that it is the natural refuge of the "suppressed" prostitute. Moreover it
+defies control.
+
+The 1012 women recognized on the police lists are of course the most
+easily studied. From them we can gather some hint of the enormous
+bewildering demand that prostitution answers. The Commission informs us
+that this small group alone receives over fifteen thousand visits a
+day--five million and a half in the year. Yet these 1012 women are only
+about one-fifth of the professional prostitutes in Chicago. If the
+average continues, then the figures mount to something over 27,000,000.
+The five thousand professionals do not begin to represent the whole
+illicit traffic of a city like Chicago. Clandestine and occasional vice
+is beyond all measurement.
+
+The figures I have given are taken from the report. They are said to be
+conservative. For the purposes of this discussion we could well lower the
+27,000,000 by half. All I am concerned about is in arriving at a sense of
+the enormity of the impulse behind the "social evil." For it is this that
+the Commission proposes to repress, and ultimately to annihilate.
+
+Lust has a thousand avenues. The brothel, the flat, the assignation
+house, the tenement, saloons, dance halls, steamers, ice-cream parlors,
+Turkish baths, massage parlors, street-walking--the thing has woven
+itself into the texture of city life. Like the hydra, it grows new heads,
+everywhere. It draws into its service the pleasures of the city.
+Entangled with the love of gaiety, organized as commerce, it is literally
+impossible to follow the myriad expressions it assumes.
+
+The Commission gives a very fair picture of these manifestations. A mass
+of material is offered which does in a way show where and how and to what
+extent lust finds its illicit expression. Deeper than this the report
+does not go. The human impulses which create these social conditions, the
+human needs to which they are a sad and degraded answer--this human
+center of the problem the commission passes by with a platitude.
+
+"So long as there is lust in the hearts of men," we are told, "it will
+seek out some method of expression. Until the hearts of men are changed
+we can hope for no absolute annihilation of the Social Evil." But at the
+head of the report in black-faced type we read:
+
+"Constant and persistent repression of prostitution the immediate method;
+absolute annihilation the ultimate ideal."
+
+I am not trying to catch the Commissioners in a verbal inconsistency. The
+inconsistency is real, out of a deep-seated confusion of mind. Lust will
+seek an expression, they say, until "the hearts of men are changed." All
+particular expressions are evil and must be constantly repressed. Yet
+though you repress one form of lust, it will seek some other. Now, says
+the Commission, in order to change the hearts of men, religion and
+education must step in. It is their business to eradicate an impulse
+which is constantly changing form by being "suppressed."
+
+There is only one meaning in this: the Commission realized vaguely that
+repression is not even the first step to a cure. For reasons worth
+analyzing later, these representative American citizens desired both the
+immediate taboo and an ultimate annihilation of vice. So they fell into
+the confusion of making immediate and detailed proposals that have
+nothing to do with the attainment of their ideal.
+
+What the commission saw and described were the particular forms which a
+great human impulse had assumed at a specific date in a certain city. The
+dynamic force which created these conditions, which will continue to
+create them--lust--they refer to in a few pious sentences. Their
+thinking, in short, is perfectly static and literally superficial. In
+outlining a ripple they have forgotten the tides.
+
+Had they faced the human sources of their problem, had they tried to
+think of the social evil as an answer to a human need, their researches
+would have been different, their remedies fruitful. Suppose they had kept
+in mind their own statement: "so long as there is lust in the hearts of
+men it will seek out some method of expression." Had they held fast to
+that, it would have ceased to be a platitude and have become a fertile
+idea. For a platitude is generally inert wisdom.
+
+In the sentence I quote the Commissioners had an idea which might have
+animated all their labors. But they left it in limbo, they reverenced it,
+and they passed by. Perhaps we can raise it again and follow the hints it
+unfolds.
+
+If lust will seek an expression, are all expressions of it necessarily
+evil? That the kind of expression which the Commission describes is evil
+no one will deny. But is it the only possible expression?
+
+If it is, then the taboo enforced by a Morals Police is, perhaps, as good
+a way as any of gaining a fictitious sense of activity. But the ideal of
+"annihilation" becomes an irrelevant and meaningless phrase. If lust is
+deeply rooted in men and its only expression is evil, I for one should
+recommend a faith in the millennium. You can put this Paradise at the
+beginning of the world or the end of it. Practical difference there is
+none.
+
+No one can read the report without coming to a definite conviction that
+the Commission regards lust itself as inherently evil. The members
+assumed without criticism the traditional dogma of Christianity that sex
+in any manifestation outside of marriage is sinful. But practical sense
+told them that sex cannot be confined within marriage. It will find
+expression--"some method of expression" they say. What never occurred to
+them was that it might find a good, a positively beneficent method. The
+utterly uncriticised assumption that all expressions not legalized are
+sinful shut them off from any constructive answer to their problem.
+Seeing prostitution or something equally bad as the only way sex can find
+an expression they really set before religion and education the
+impossible task of removing lust "from the hearts of men." So when their
+report puts at its head that absolute annihilation of prostitution is the
+ultimate ideal, we may well translate it into the real intent of the
+Commission. What is to be absolutely annihilated is not alone
+prostitution, not alone all the methods of expression which lust seeks
+out, but lust itself.
+
+That this is what the Commission had in mind is supported by plenty of
+"internal evidence." For example: one of the most curious recommendations
+made is about divorce--"The Commission condemns the ease with which
+divorces may be obtained in certain States, and recommends a stringent,
+uniform divorce law for all States."
+
+What did the Commission have in mind? I transcribe the paragraph which
+deals with divorce: "The Vice Commission, after exhaustive consideration
+of the vice question, records itself of the opinion that divorce to a
+large extent is a contributory factor to sexual vice. No study of this
+blight upon the social and moral life of the country would be
+comprehensive without consideration of the causes which lead to the
+application for divorce. These are too numerous to mention at length in
+such a report as this, but the Commission does wish to emphasize the
+great need of more safeguards against the marrying of persons physically,
+mentally and morally unfit to take up the responsibilities of family
+life, including the bearing of children."
+
+Now to be sure that paragraph leaves much to be desired so far as
+clearness goes. But I think the meaning can be extracted. Divorce is a
+contributory factor to sexual vice. One way presumably is that divorced
+women often become prostitutes. That is an evil contribution,
+unquestionably. The second sentence says that no study of the social evil
+is complete which leaves out the _causes_ of divorce. One of those causes
+is, I suppose, adultery with a prostitute. This evil is totally different
+from the first: in one case divorce contributes to prostitution, in the
+other, prostitution leads to divorce. The third sentence urges greater
+safeguards against undesirable marriages. This prudence would obviously
+reduce the need of divorce.
+
+How does the recommendation of a stringent and uniform law fit in with
+these three statements? A strict divorce law might be like New York's: it
+would recognize few grounds for a decree. One of those grounds, perhaps
+the chief one, would be adultery. I say this unhesitatingly for in
+another place the Commission informs us that marriage has in it "the
+elements of vested rights."
+
+A strict divorce law would, of course, diminish the number of "divorced
+women," and perhaps keep them out of prostitution. It does fit the first
+statement--in a helpless sort of way. But where does the difficulty of
+divorce affect the causes of it? If you bind a man tightly to a woman he
+does not love, and, possibly prevent him from marrying one he does love,
+how do you add to his virtue? And if the only way he can free himself is
+by adultery, does not your stringent divorce law put a premium upon vice?
+The third sentence would make it difficult for the unfit to marry. Better
+marriages would among other blessings require fewer divorces. But what of
+those who are forbidden to marry? They are unprovided for. And yet who
+more than they are likely to find desire uncontrollable and seek some
+other "method of expression"? With marriage prohibited and prostitution
+tabooed, the Commission has a choice between sterilization and--let us
+say--other methods of expression.
+
+Make marriage difficult, divorce stringent, prostitution impossible--is
+there any doubt that the leading idea is to confine the sex impulse
+within the marriage of healthy, intelligent, "moral," and monogamous
+couples? For all the other seekings of that impulse what has the
+Commission to offer? Nothing. That can be asserted flatly. The Commission
+hopes to wipe out prostitution. But it never hints that the success of
+its plan means vast alterations in our social life. The members give the
+impression that they think of prostitution as something that can be
+subtracted from our civilization without changing the essential character
+of its institutions. Yet who that has read the report itself and put
+himself into any imaginative understanding of conditions can escape
+seeing that prostitution to-day is organic to our industrial life, our
+marriage sanctions, and our social customs? Low wages, fatigue, and the
+wretched monotony of the factory--these must go before prostitution can
+go. And behind these stand the facts of woman's entrance into
+industry--facts that have one source at least in the general poverty of
+the family. And that poverty is deeply bound up with the economic system
+under which we live. In the man's problem, the growing impossibility of
+early marriages is directly related to the business situation. Nor can we
+speak of the degradation of religion and the arts, of amusement, of the
+general morale of the people without referring that degradation to
+industrial conditions.
+
+You cannot look at civilization as a row of institutions each external to
+the other. They interpenetrate and a change in one affects all the
+others. To abolish prostitution would involve a radical alteration of
+society. Vice in our cities is a form of the sexual impulse--one of the
+forms it has taken under prevailing social conditions. It is, if you
+please, like the crops of a rude and forbidding soil--a coarse, distorted
+thing though living.
+
+The Commission studied a human problem and left humanity out. I do not
+mean that the members weren't deeply touched by the misery of these
+thousands of women. You can pity the poor without understanding them; you
+can have compassion without insight. The Commissioners had a good deal of
+sympathy for the prostitute's condition, but for that "lust in the hearts
+of men," and women we may add, for that, they had no sympathetic
+understanding. They did not place themselves within the impulse.
+Officially they remained external to human desires. For what might be
+called the _elan vital_ of the problem they had no patience. Certain sad
+results of the particular "method of expression" it had sought out in
+Chicago called forth their pity and their horror.
+
+In short, the Commission did not face the sexual impulse squarely. The
+report is an attempt to deal with a sexual problem by disregarding its
+source. There are almost a hundred recommendations to various
+authorities--Federal, State, county, city, police, educational and
+others. I have attempted to classify these proposals under four headings.
+There are those which mean forcible repression of particular
+manifestations--the taboos; there are the recommendations which are
+purely palliative, which aim to abate some of the horrors of existing
+conditions; there are a few suggestions for further investigation; and,
+finally, there are the inventions, the plans which show some desire to
+find moral equivalents for evil--the really statesmanlike offerings.
+
+The palliative measures we may pass by quickly. So long as they do not
+blind people to the necessity for radical treatment, only a doctrinaire
+would object to them. Like all intelligent charities they are still a
+necessary evil. But nothing must be staked upon them, so let us turn at
+once to the constructive suggestions: The Commission proposes that the
+county establish a "Permanent Committee on Child Protection." It makes no
+attempt to say what that protection shall be, but I think it is only fair
+to let the wish father the thought, and regard this as an effort to give
+children a better start in life. The separation of delinquent from
+semi-delinquent girls is a somewhat similar attempt to guard the weak.
+Another is the recommendation to the city and the nation that it should
+protect arriving immigrants, and if necessary escort them to their homes.
+This surely is a constructive plan which might well be enlarged from mere
+protection to positive hospitality. How great a part the desolating
+loneliness of a city plays in seductions the individual histories in the
+report show. Municipal dance halls are a splendid proposal. Freed from a
+cold and over-chaperoned respectability they compete with the devil.
+There, at least, is one method of sexual expression which may have
+positively beneficent results. A municipal lodging house for women is
+something of a substitute for the wretched rented room. A little
+suggestion to the police that they send home children found on the
+streets after nine o'clock has varied possibilities. But there is the
+seed of an invention in it which might convert the police from mere
+agents of repression to kindly helpers in the mazes of a city. The
+educational proposals are all constructive: the teaching of sex hygiene
+is guardedly recommended for consideration. That is entirely justified,
+for no one can quarrel with a set of men for leaving a question open.
+That girls from fourteen to sixteen should receive vocational training in
+continuation schools; that social centers should be established in the
+public schools and that the grounds should be open for children--all of
+these are clearly additions to the positive resource of the community. So
+is the suggestion that church buildings be used for recreation. The call
+for greater parental responsibility is, I fear, a rather empty platitude,
+for it is not re-enforced with anything but an ancient fervor.
+
+How much of this really seeks to create a fine expression of the sexual
+impulse? How many of these recommendations see sex as an instinct which
+can be transmuted, and turned into one of the values of life? The dance
+halls, the social centers, the playgrounds, the reception of
+strangers--these can become instruments for civilizing sexual need. The
+educational proposals could become ways of directing it. They could, but
+will they? Without the habit of mind which sees substitution as the
+essence of statecraft, without a philosophy which makes the invention of
+moral equivalents its goal, I for one refuse to see in these
+recommendations anything more than a haphazard shooting which has
+accidentally hit the mark. Moreover, I have a deep suspicion that I have
+tried to read into the proposals more than the Commission intended.
+Certainly these constructions occupy an insignificant amount of space in
+the body of the report. On all sides of them is a mass of taboos. No
+emotional appeal is made for them as there is for the repressions. They
+stand largely unnoticed, and very much undefined--poor ghosts of the
+truth among the gibbets.
+
+An inadvertent platitude--that lust will seek an expression--and a few
+diffident proposals for a finer environment--the need and its
+satisfaction: had the Commission seen the relation of these incipient
+ideas, animated it, and made it the nerve center of the study, a genuine
+program might have resulted. But the two ideas never met and fertilized
+each other. Nothing dynamic holds the recommendations together--the mass
+of them are taboos, an attempt to kill each mosquito and ignore the
+marsh. The evils of prostitution are seen as a series of episodes, each
+of which must be clubbed, forbidden, raided and jailed.
+
+There is a special whack for each mosquito: the laws about excursion
+boats should be enforced; the owners should help to enforce them; there
+should be more officers with police power on these boats; the sale of
+liquor to minors should be forbidden; gambling devices should be
+suppressed; the midwives, doctors and maternity hospitals practicing
+abortions should be investigated; employment agencies should be watched
+and investigated; publishers should be warned against printing suspicious
+advertisements; the law against infamous crimes should be made more
+specific; any citizen should have the right to bring equity proceedings
+against a brothel as a public nuisance; there should be relentless
+prosecution of professional procurers; there should be constant
+prosecution of the keepers, inmates, and owners of bawdy houses; there
+should be prosecution of druggists who sells drugs and "certain
+appliances" illegally; there should be an identification system for
+prostitutes in the state courts; instead of fines, prostitutes should be
+visited with imprisonment or adult probation; there should be a penalty
+for sending messenger boys under twenty-one to a disorderly house or an
+unlicensed saloon; the law against prostitutes in saloons, against
+wine-rooms and stalls in saloons, against communication between saloons
+and brothels, against dancing in saloons--should be strictly enforced;
+the police who enforce these laws should be carefully watched, grafters
+amongst them should be discharged; complaints should be investigated at
+once by a man stationed outside the district; the pressure of publicity
+should be brought against the brewers to prevent them from doing business
+with saloons that violate the law; the Retail Liquor Association should
+discipline law-breaking saloon-keepers: licenses should be permanently
+revoked for violations; no women should be allowed in a saloon without a
+male escort; no professional or paid escorts should be permitted; no
+soliciting should be allowed in saloons; no immoral or vulgar dances
+should be permitted in saloons; no intoxicating liquor should be allowed
+at any public dance; there should be a municipal detention home for
+women, with probation officers; police inspectors who fail to report
+law-violations should be dismissed; assignation houses should be
+suppressed as soon as they are reported; there should be a "special
+morals police squad"; recommendation IX "to the Police" says they "should
+wage a relentless warfare against houses of prostitution, immoral flats,
+assignation rooms, call houses, and disorderly saloons in all sections of
+the city"; parks and playgrounds should be more thoroughly policed;
+dancing pavilions should exclude professional prostitutes; soliciting in
+parks should be suppressed; parks should be lighted with a search-light;
+there should be no seats in the shadows....
+
+To perform that staggering list of things that "should" be done you
+find--what?--the police power, federal, state, municipal. Note how vague
+and general are the chance constructive suggestions; how precise and
+definite the taboos. Surely I am not misstating its position when I say
+that forcible suppression was the creed of this Commission. Nor is there
+any need of insisting again that the ultimate ideal of annihilating
+prostitution has nothing to expect from the concrete proposals that were
+made. The millennial goal was one thing; the immediate method quite
+another. For ideals, a pious phrase; in practice, the police.
+
+Are we not told that "if the citizens cannot depend upon the men
+appointed to protect their property, and to maintain order, then chaos
+and disorganization resulting in vice and crime must follow?" Yet of all
+the reeds that civilization leans upon, surely the police is the
+frailest. Anyone who has had the smallest experience of municipal
+politics knows that the corruption of the police is directly
+proportionate to the severity of the taboos it is asked to enforce. Tom
+Johnson saw this as Mayor of Cleveland; he knew that strict law
+enforcement against saloons, brothels, and gambling houses would not stop
+vice, but would corrupt the police. I recommend the recent spectacle in
+New York where the most sensational raider of gambling houses has turned
+out to be in crooked alliance with the gamblers. And I suggest as a hint
+that the Commission's recommendations enforced for one year will lay the
+foundation of an organized system of blackmail and "protection," secrecy
+and underground chicanery, the like of which Chicago has not yet seen.
+But the Commission need only have read its own report, have studied its
+own cases. There is an illuminating chapter on "The Social Evil and the
+Police." In the summary, the Commission says that "officers on the beat
+are bold and open in their neglect of duty, drinking in saloons while in
+uniform, ignoring the solicitations by prostitutes in rear rooms and on
+the streets, selling tickets at dances frequented by professional and
+semi-professional prostitutes; protecting 'cadets,' prostitutes and
+saloon-keepers of disorderly places."
+
+Some suspicion that the police could not carry the burden of suppressing
+the social evil must have dawned on the Commission.
+
+It felt the need of re-enforcement. Hence the special morals police
+squad; hence the investigation of the police of one district by the
+police from another; and hence, in type as black as that of the ideal
+itself and directly beneath it, the call for "the appointment of a morals
+commission" and "the establishment of a morals court." Now this
+commission consists of the Health Officer, a physician and three citizens
+who serve without pay. It is appointed by the Mayor and approved by the
+City Council. Its business is to prosecute vice and to help enforce the
+law.
+
+Just what would happen if the Morals Commission didn't prosecute hard
+enough I do not know. Conceivably the Governor might be induced to
+appoint a Commission on Moral Commissions in Cities. But why the men and
+women who framed the report made this particular recommendation is an
+interesting question. With federal, state, and municipal authorities in
+existence, with courts, district attorneys, police all operating, they
+create another arm of prosecution. Possibly they were somewhat
+disillusioned about the present instruments of the taboo; perhaps
+they imagined that a new broom would sweep clean. But I suspect an
+inner reason. The Commission may have imagined that the four
+appointees--unpaid--would be four men like themselves--who knows, perhaps
+four men from among themselves? The whole tenor of their thinking is to
+set somebody watching everybody and somebody else to watching him. What
+is more natural than that they should be the Ultimate Watchers?
+
+Spying, informing, constant investigations of everybody and everything
+must become the rule where there is a forcible attempt to moralize
+society from the top. Nobody's heart is in the work very long; nobody's
+but those fanatical and morbid guardians of morality who make it a life's
+specialty. The aroused public opinion which the Commission asks for
+cannot be held if all it has to fix upon is an elaborate series of
+taboos. Sensational disclosures will often make the public flare up
+spasmodically; but the mass of men is soon bored by intricate rules and
+tangles of red tape; the "crusade" is looked upon as a melodrama of real
+life--interesting, but easily forgotten.
+
+The method proposed ignores the human source: by a kind of poetic justice
+the great crowd of men will ignore the method. If you want to impose a
+taboo upon a whole community, you must do it autocratically, you must
+make it part of the prevailing superstitions. You must never let it reach
+any public analysis. For it will fail, it will receive only a shallow
+support from what we call an "enlightened public opinion." That opinion
+is largely determined by the real impulses of men; and genuine character
+rejects or at least rebels against foreign, unnatural impositions. This
+is one of the great virtues of democracy--that it makes alien laws more
+and more difficult to enforce. The tyrant can use the taboo a thousand
+times more effectively than the citizens of a republic. When he speaks,
+it is with a prestige that dumbs questioning and makes obedience a habit.
+Let that infallibility come to be doubted, as in Russia to-day, and
+natural impulses reassert themselves, the great impositions begin to
+weaken. The methods of the Chicago Commission would require a tyranny, a
+powerful, centralized sovereignty which could command with majesty and
+silence the rebel. In our shirt-sleeved republic no such power exists.
+The strongest force we have is that of organized money, and that
+sovereignty is too closely connected with the social evil, too dependent
+upon it in a hundred different ways, to undertake the task of
+suppression.
+
+For the purposes of the Commission democracy is an inefficient weapon.
+Nothing but disappointment is in store for men who expect a people to
+outrage its own character. A large part of the unfaith in democracy, of
+the desire to ignore "the mob," limit the franchise, and confine power to
+the few is the result of an unsuccessful attempt to make republics act
+like old-fashioned monarchies. Almost every "crusade" leaves behind it a
+trail of yearning royalists; many "good-government" clubs are little
+would-be oligarchies.
+
+When the mass of men emerged from slavish obedience and made democracy
+inevitable, the taboo entered upon its final illness. For the more
+self-governing a people becomes, the less possible it is to prescribe
+external restrictions. The gap between want and ought, between nature and
+ideals cannot be maintained. The only practical ideals in a democracy are
+a fine expression of natural wants. This happens to be a thoroughly Greek
+attitude. But I learned it first from the Bowery. Chuck Connors is
+reported to have said that "a gentleman is a bloke as can do whatever he
+wants to do." If Chuck said that, he went straight to the heart of that
+democratic morality on which a new statecraft must ultimately rest. His
+gentleman is not the battlefield of wants and prohibitions; in him
+impulses flow freely through beneficent channels.
+
+The same notion lies imbedded in the phrase: "government must serve the
+people." That means a good deal more than that elected officials must
+rule for the majority. For the majority in these semi-democratic times is
+often as not a cloak for the ruling oligarchy. Representatives who
+"serve" some majorities may in reality order the nation about. To serve
+the people means to provide it with services--with clean streets and
+water, with education, with opportunity, with beneficent channels for its
+desires, with moral equivalents for evil. The task is turned from the
+damming and restricting of wants to the creation of fine environments for
+them. And the environment of an impulse extends all the way from the
+human body, through family life and education out into the streets of the
+city.
+
+Had the Commission worked along democratic lines, we should have had
+recommendations about the hygiene and early training of children, their
+education, the houses they live in and the streets in which they play;
+changes would have been suggested in the industrial conditions they face;
+plans would have been drawn for recreation; hints would have been
+collected for transmuting the sex impulse into art, into social endeavor,
+into religion. That is the constructive approach to the problem. I note
+that the Commission calls upon the churches for help. Its obvious
+intention was to down sex with religion. What was not realized, it seems,
+is that this very sex impulse, so largely degraded into vice, is the
+dynamic force in religious feeling. One need not call in the testimony of
+the psychologists, the students of religion, the aestheticians or even of
+Plato, who in the "Symposium" traced out the hierarchy of love from the
+body to the "whole sea of beauty." Jane Addams in Chicago has tested the
+truth by her own wide experience, and she has written what the Commission
+might easily have read,--that "in failing to diffuse and utilize this
+fundamental instinct of sex through the imagination, we not only
+inadvertently foster vice and enervation, but we throw away one of the
+most precious implements for ministering to life's highest needs. There
+is no doubt that this ill-adjusted function consumes quite unnecessarily
+vast stores of vital energy, even when we contemplate it in its immature
+manifestations which are infinitely more wholesome than the dumb swamping
+process. All high school boys and girls know the difference between the
+concentration and the diffusion of this impulse, although they would be
+hopelessly bewildered by the use of terms. They will declare one of their
+companions to be 'in love' if his fancy is occupied by the image of a
+single person about whom all the new-found values gather, and without
+whom his solitude is an eternal melancholy. But if the stimulus does not
+appear as a definite image, and the values evoked are dispensed over the
+world, the young person suddenly seems to have discovered a beauty and
+significance in many things--he responds to poetry, he becomes a lover of
+nature, he is filled with religious devotion or with philanthropic zeal.
+Experience, with young people, easily illustrates the possibility and
+value of diffusion."
+
+It is then not only impossible to confine sex to mere reproduction; it
+would be a stupid denial of the finest values of civilization. Having
+seen that the impulse is a necessary part of character, we must not hold
+to it grudgingly as a necessary evil. It is, on the contrary, the very
+source of good. Whoever has visited Hull House can see for himself the
+earnest effort Miss Addams has made to treat sex with dignity and joy.
+For Hull House differs from most settlements in that it is full of
+pictures, of color, and of curios. The atmosphere is light; you feel none
+of that moral oppression which hangs over the usual settlement as over a
+gathering of missionaries. Miss Addams has not only made Hull House a
+beautiful place; she has stocked it with curious and interesting objects.
+The theater, the museum, the crafts and the arts, games and dances--they
+are some of those "other methods of expression which lust can seek." It
+is no accident that Hull House is the most successful settlement in
+America.
+
+Yet who does not feel its isolation in that brutal city? A little Athens
+in a vast barbarism--you wonder how much of Chicago Hull House can
+civilize. As you walk those grim streets and look into the stifling
+houses, or picture the relentless stockyards, the conviction that vice
+and its misery cannot be transmuted by policemen and Morals Commissions,
+the feeling that spying and inspecting and prosecuting will not drain the
+marsh becomes a certainty. You want to shout at the forcible moralizer:
+"so long as you acquiesce in the degradation of your city, so long as
+work remains nothing but ill-paid drudgery and every instinct of joy is
+mocked by dirt and cheapness and brutality,--just so long will your
+efforts be fruitless, yes even though you raid and prosecute, even though
+you make Comstock the Czar of Chicago."
+
+But Hull House cannot remake Chicago. A few hundred lives can be changed,
+and for the rest it is a guide to the imagination. Like all utopias, it
+cannot succeed, but it may point the way to success. If Hull House is
+unable to civilize Chicago, it at least shows Chicago and America what a
+civilization might be like. Friendly, where our cities are friendless,
+beautiful, where they are ugly; sociable and open, where our daily life
+is furtive; work a craft; art a participation--it is in miniature the
+goal of statesmanship. If Chicago were like Hull House, we say to
+ourselves, then vice would be no problem--it would dwindle, what was left
+would be the Falstaff in us all, and only a spiritual anemia could worry
+over that jolly and redeeming coarseness.
+
+What stands between Chicago and civilization? No one can doubt that to
+abolish prostitution means to abolish the slum and the dirty alley, to
+stop overwork, underpay, the sweating and the torturing monotony of
+business, to breathe a new life into education, ventilate society with
+frankness, and fill life with play and art, with games, with passions
+which hold and suffuse the imagination.
+
+It is a revolutionary task, and like all real revolutions it will not be
+done in a day or a decade because someone orders it to be done. A change
+in the whole quality of life is something that neither the policeman's
+club nor an insurrectionary raid can achieve. If you want a revolution
+that shall really matter in human life--and what sane man can help
+desiring it?--you must look to the infinitely complicated results of the
+dynamic movements in society. These revolutions require a rare
+combination of personal audacity and social patience. The best agents of
+such a revolution are men who are bold in their plans because they
+realize how deep and enormous is the task.
+
+Many people have sought an analogy in our Civil War. They have said that
+as "black slavery" went, so must "white slavery." In the various
+agitations of vigilance committees and alliances for the suppression of
+the traffic they profess to see continued a work which the abolitionists
+began.
+
+In A. M. Simons' brilliant book on "Social Forces in American History"
+much help can be found. For example: "Massachusetts abolished slavery at
+an early date, and we have it on the authority of John Adams
+that:--'argument might have had some weight in the abolition of slavery
+in Massachusetts, but the real cause was the multiplication of laboring
+white people, who would not longer suffer the rich to employ these sable
+rivals so much to their injury.'" No one to-day doubts that white labor
+in the North and slavery in the South were not due to the moral
+superiority of the North. Yet just in the North we find the abolition
+sentiment strongest. That the Civil War was not a clash of good men and
+bad men is admitted by every reputable historian. The war did not come
+when moral fervor had risen to the exploding point; the moral fervor came
+rather when the economic interests of the South collided with those of
+the North. That the abolitionists clarified the economic interests of the
+North and gave them an ideal sanction is true enough. But the fact
+remains that by 1860 some of the aspirations of Phillips and Garrison had
+become the economic destiny of this country.
+
+You can have a Hull House established by private initiative and
+maintained by individual genius, just as you had planters who freed their
+slaves or as you have employers to-day who humanize their factories. But
+the fine example is not readily imitated when industrial forces fight
+against it. So even if the Commission had drawn splendid plans for
+housing, work conditions, education, and play it would have done only
+part of the task of statesmanship. We should then know what to do, but
+not how to get it done.
+
+An ideal suspended in a vacuum is ineffective: it must point a dynamic
+current. Only then does it gather power, only then does it enter into
+life. That forces exist to-day which carry with them solutions is evident
+to anyone who has watched the labor movement and the woman's awakening.
+Even the interests of business give power to the cause. The discovery of
+manufacturers that degradation spoils industrial efficiency must not be
+cast aside by the radical because the motive is larger profits. The
+discovery, whatever the motive, will inevitably humanize industry a good
+deal. For it happens that in this case the interests of capitalism and of
+humanity coincide. A propaganda like the single-tax will undoubtedly find
+increasing support among business men. They see in it a relief from the
+burden of rent imposed by that older tyrant--the landlord. But the
+taxation of unimproved property happens at the same time to be a splendid
+weapon against the slum.
+
+Only when the abolition of "white slavery" becomes part of the social
+currents of the time will it bear any interesting analogy to the
+so-called freeing of the slaves. Even then for many enthusiasts the
+comparison is misleading. They are likely to regard the Emancipation
+Proclamation as the end of chattel slavery. It wasn't. That historic
+document broke a legal bond but not a social one. The process of negro
+emancipation is infinitely slower and it is not accomplished yet.
+Likewise no statute can end "white slavery." Only vast and complicated
+changes in the whole texture of social life will achieve such an end. If
+by some magic every taboo of the commission could be enforced the
+abolition of sex slavery would not have come one step nearer to reality.
+Cities and factories, schools and homes, theaters and games, manners and
+thought will have to be transformed before sex can find a better
+expression. Living forces, not statutes or clubs, must work that change.
+The power of emancipation is in the social movements which alone can
+effect any deep reform in a nation. So it is and has been with the negro.
+I do not think the Abolitionists saw facts truly when they disbanded
+their organization a few years after the civil war. They found too much
+comfort in a change of legal status. Profound economic forces brought
+about the beginning of the end of chattel slavery. But the reality of
+freedom was not achieved by proclamation. For that the revolution had to
+go on: the industrial life of the nation had to change its character,
+social customs had to be replaced, the whole outlook of men had to be
+transformed. And whether it is negro slavery or a vicious sexual bondage,
+the actual advance comes from substitutions injected into society by
+dynamic social forces.
+
+I do not wish to press the analogy or over-emphasize the particular
+problems. I am not engaged in drawing up the plans for a reconstruction
+or in telling just what should be done. Only the co-operation of expert
+minds can do that. The place for a special propaganda is elsewhere. If
+these essays succeed in suggesting a method of looking at politics, if
+they draw attention to what is real in social reforms and make somewhat
+more evident the traps and the blind-alleys of an uncritical approach,
+they will have done their work. That the report of the Chicago Vice
+Commission figures so prominently in this chapter is not due to any
+preoccupation with Chicago, the Commission or with vice. It is a text and
+nothing else. The report happens to embody what I conceive to be most of
+the faults of a political method now decadent. Its failure to put human
+impulses at the center of thought produced remedies valueless to human
+nature; its false interest in a particular expression of
+sex--vice--caused it to taboo the civilizing power of sex; its inability
+to see that wants require fine satisfactions and not prohibitions drove
+it into an undemocratic tyranny; its blindness to the social forces of
+our age shut off the motive power for any reform.
+
+The Commission's method was poor, not its intentions. It was an average
+body of American citizens aroused to action by an obvious evil. But
+something slipped in to falsify vision. It was, I believe, an array of
+idols disguised as ideals. They are typical American idols, and they
+deserve some study.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+SOME NECESSARY ICONOCLASM
+
+     The Commission "has kept constantly in mind that to offer a
+     contribution of any value such an offering must be, first, moral;
+     second, reasonable and practical; third, possible under the
+     Constitutional powers of our Courts; fourth, that which will square
+     with the public conscience of the American people."--The Vice
+     Commission of Chicago--Introduction to Report on the Social Evil.
+
+
+Having adjusted such spectacles the Commission proceeded to look at "this
+curse which is more blasting than any plague or epidemic," at an evil
+"which spells only ruin to the race." In dealing with what it regards as
+the greatest calamity in the world, a calamity as old as civilization,
+the Commission lays it down beforehand that the remedy must be "moral,"
+constitutional, and satisfactory to the public conscience. I wonder in
+all seriousness what the Commission would have done had it discovered a
+genuine cure for prostitution which happened, let us say, to conflict
+with the constitutional powers of our courts. I wonder how the Commission
+would have acted if a humble following of the facts had led them to a
+conviction out of tune with the existing public conscience of America.
+Such a conflict is not only possible; it is highly probable. When you
+come to think of it, the conflict appears a certainty. For the
+Constitution is a legal expression of the conditions under which
+prostitution has flourished; the social evil is rooted in institutions
+and manners which have promoted it, in property relations and business
+practice which have gathered about them a halo of reason and
+practicality, of morality and conscience. Any change so vast as the
+abolition of vice is of necessity a change in morals, practice, law and
+conscience.
+
+A scientist who began an investigation by saying that his results must be
+moral or constitutional would be a joke. We have had scientists like
+that, men who insisted that research must confirm the Biblical theory of
+creation. We have had economists who set out with the preconceived idea
+of justifying the factory system. The world has recently begun to see
+through this kind of intellectual fraud. If a doctor should appear who
+offered a cure for tuberculosis on the ground that it was justified by
+the Bible and that it conformed to the opinions of that great mass of the
+American people who believe that fresh air is the devil, we should
+promptly lock up that doctor as a dangerous quack. When the negroes of
+Kansas were said to be taking pink pills to guard themselves against
+Halley's Comet, they were doing something which appeared to them as
+eminently practical and entirely reasonable. Not long ago we read of the
+savage way in which a leper was treated out West; his leprosy was not
+regarded as a disease, but as the curse of God, and, if I remember
+correctly, the Bible was quoted in court as an authority on leprosy. The
+treatment seemed entirely moral and squared very well with the conscience
+of that community.
+
+I have heard reputable physicians condemn a certain method of
+psychotherapy because it was "immoral." A woman once told me that she had
+let her son grow up ignorant of his sexual life because "a mother should
+never mention anything 'embarrassing' to her child." Many of us are still
+blushing for the way America treated Gorki when it found that Russian
+morals did not square with the public conscience of America. And the time
+is not yet passed when we punish the offspring of illicit love, and visit
+vengeance unto the third and fourth generations. One reads in the report
+of the Vice Commission that many public hospitals in Chicago refuse to
+care for venereal diseases. The examples are endless. They run from the
+absurd to the monstrous. But always the source is the same. Idols are set
+up to which all the living must bow; we decide beforehand that things
+must fit a few preconceived ideas. And when they don't, which is most of
+the time, we deny truth, falsify facts, and prefer the coddling of our
+theory to any deeper understanding of the real problem before us.
+
+It seems as if a theory were never so active as when the reality behind
+it has disappeared. The empty name, the ghostly phrase, exercise an
+authority that is appalling. When you think of the blood that has been
+shed in the name of Jesus, when you think of the Holy Roman Empire,
+"neither holy nor Roman nor imperial," of the constitutional phrases that
+cloak all sorts of thievery, of the common law precedents that tyrannize
+over us, history begins to look almost like the struggle of man to
+emancipate himself from phrase-worship. The devil can quote Scripture,
+and law, and morality and reason and practicality. The devil can use the
+public conscience of his time. He does in wars, in racial and religious
+persecutions; he did in the Spain of the Inquisition; he does in the
+American lynching.
+
+For there is nothing so bad but it can masquerade as moral. Conquerors
+have gone forth with the blessing of popes; a nation invokes its God
+before beginning a campaign of murder, rape and pillage. The ruthless
+exploitation of India becomes the civilizing fulfilment of the "white
+man's burden"; not infrequently the missionary, drummer, and prospector
+are embodied in one man. In the nineteenth century church, press and
+university devoted no inconsiderable part of their time to proving the
+high moral and scientific justice of child labor and human sweating. It
+is a matter of record that chattel slavery in this country was deduced
+from Biblical injunction, that the universities furnished brains for its
+defense. Surely Bernard Shaw was not describing the Englishman alone when
+he said in "The Man of Destiny" that "... you will never find an
+Englishman in the wrong. He does everything on principle. He fights you
+on patriotic principles; he robs you on business principles...."
+
+Liberty, equality, fraternity--what a grotesque career those words have
+had. Almost every attempt to mitigate the hardships of industrialism has
+had to deal with the bogey of liberty. Labor organization, factory laws,
+health regulations are still fought as infringements of liberty. And in
+the name of equality what fantasies of taxation have we not woven? what
+travesties of justice set up? "The law in its majestic equality," writes
+Anatole France, "forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep in the
+streets and to steal bread." Fraternity becomes the hypocritical slogan
+by which we refuse to enact what is called "class legislation"--a policy
+which in theory denies the existence of classes, in practice legislates
+in favor of the rich. The laws which go unchallenged are laws friendly to
+business; class legislation means working-class legislation.
+
+You have to go among lawyers to see this idolatrous process in its most
+perfect form. When a judge sets out to "interpret" the Constitution, what
+is it that he does? He takes a sentence written by a group of men more
+than a hundred years ago. That sentence expressed their policy about
+certain conditions which they had to deal with. In it was summed up what
+they intended to do about the problems they saw. That is all the sentence
+means. But in the course of a century new problems arise--problems the
+Fathers could no more have foreseen than we can foresee the problems of
+the year two thousand. Yet that sentence which contained their wisdom
+about particular events has acquired an emotional force which persists
+long after the events have passed away. Legends gather about the men who
+wrote it: those legends are absorbed by us almost with our mothers' milk.
+We never again read that sentence straight. It has a gravity out of all
+proportion to its use, and we call it a fundamental principle of
+government. Whatever we want to do is hallowed and justified, if it can
+be made to appear as a deduction from that sentence. To put new wine in
+old bottles is one of the aims of legal casuistry.
+
+Reformers practice it. You hear it said that the initiative and
+referendum are a return to the New England town meeting. That is supposed
+to be an argument for direct legislation. But surely the analogy is
+superficial; the difference profound. The infinitely greater complexity
+of legislation to-day, the vast confusion in the aims of the voting
+population, produce a difference of so great a degree that it amounts to
+a difference in kind. The naturalist may classify the dog and the fox,
+the house-cat and the tiger together for certain purposes. The historian
+of political forms may see in the town meeting a forerunner of direct
+legislation. But no housewife dare classify the cat and the tiger, the
+dog and the fox, as the same kind of animal. And no statesman can argue
+the virtues of the referendum from the successes of the town meeting.
+
+But the propagandists do it nevertheless, and their propaganda thrives
+upon it. The reason is simple. The town meeting is an obviously
+respectable institution, glorified by all the reverence men give to the
+dead. It has acquired the seal of an admired past, and any proposal that
+can borrow that seal can borrow that reverence too. A name trails behind
+it an army of associations. That army will fight in any cause that bears
+the name. So the reformers of California, the Lorimerites of Chicago, and
+the Barnes Republicans of Albany all use the name of Lincoln for their
+political associations. In the struggle that preceded the Republican
+Convention of 1912 it was rumored that the Taft reactionaries would put
+forward Lincoln's son as chairman of the convention in order to
+counteract Roosevelt's claim that he stood in Lincoln's shoes.
+
+Casuistry is nothing but the injection of your own meaning into an old
+name. At school when the teacher asked us whether we had studied the
+lesson, the invariable answer was Yes. We had indeed stared at the page
+for a few minutes, and that could be called studying. Sometimes the
+head-master would break into the room just in time to see the conclusion
+of a scuffle. Jimmy's clothes are white with dust. "Johnny, did you throw
+chalk at Jimmy?" "No, sir," says Johnny, and then under his breath to
+placate God's penchant for truth, "I threw the chalk-eraser." Once in
+Portland, Maine, I ordered iced tea at an hotel. The waitress brought me
+a glass of yellowish liquid with a two-inch collar of foam at the top. No
+tea I had ever seen outside of a prohibition state looked like that.
+Though it was tea, it might have been beer. Perhaps if I had smiled or
+winked in ordering the tea, it would have been beer. The two looked alike
+in Portland; they were interchangeable. You could drink tea and fool
+yourself into thinking it was beer. You could drink beer and pass for a
+tea-toper.
+
+It is rare, I think, that the fraud is so genial and so deliberate. The
+openness cleanses it. Advertising, for example, would be nothing but
+gigantic and systematic lying if almost everybody didn't know that it
+was. Yet it runs into the sinister all the time. The pure food agitation
+is largely an effort to make the label and the contents tell the same
+story. It was noteworthy that, following the discovery of salvarsan or
+"606" by Dr. Ehrlich, the quack doctors began to call their treatments
+"606." But the deliberate casuistry of lawyers, quacks, or politicians is
+not so difficult to deal with. The very deliberation makes it easier to
+detect, for it is generally awkward. What one man can consciously devise,
+other men can understand.
+
+But unconscious casuistry deceives us all. No one escapes it entirely. A
+wealth of evidence could be adduced to support this from the studies of
+dreams and fantasies made by the Freudian school of psychologists. They
+have shown how constantly the mind cloaks a deep meaning in a shallow
+incident--how the superficial is all the time being shoved into the light
+of consciousness in order to conceal a buried intention; how inveterate
+is our use of symbols.
+
+Between ourselves and our real natures we interpose that wax figure of
+idealizations and selections which we call our character. We extend this
+into all our thinking. Between us and the realities of social life we
+build up a mass of generalizations, abstract ideas, ancient glories, and
+personal wishes. They simplify and soften experience. It is so much
+easier to talk of poverty than to think of the poor, to argue the rights
+of capital than to see its results. Pretty soon we come to think of the
+theories and abstract ideas as things in themselves. We worry about their
+fate and forget their original content.
+
+For words, theories, symbols, slogans, abstractions of all kinds are
+nothing but the porous vessels into which life flows, is contained for a
+time, and then passes through. But our reverence clings to the vessels.
+The old meaning may have disappeared, a new one come in--no matter, we
+try to believe there has been no change. And when life's expansion
+demands some new container, nothing is more difficult than the
+realization that the old vessels cannot be stretched to the present need.
+
+It is interesting to notice how in the very act of analyzing it I have
+fallen into this curious and ancient habit. My point is that the metaphor
+is taken for the reality: I have used at least six metaphors to state it.
+Abstractions are not cloaks, nor wax figures, nor walls, nor vessels, and
+life doesn't flow like water. What they really are you and I know
+inwardly by using abstractions and living our lives. But once I attempt
+to give that inwardness expression, I must use the only weapons I
+have--abstractions, theories, phrases. By an effort of the sympathetic
+imagination you can revive within yourself something of my inward sense.
+As I have had to abstract from life in order to communicate, so you are
+compelled to animate my abstractions, in order to understand.
+
+I know of no other method of communication between two people. Language
+is always grossly inadequate. It is inadequate if the listener is merely
+passive, if he falls into the mistake of the literal-minded who expect
+words to contain a precise image of reality. They never do. All language
+can achieve is to act as a guidepost to the imagination enabling the
+reader to recreate the author's insight. The artist does that: he
+controls his medium so that we come most readily to the heart of his
+intention. In the lyric poet the control is often so delicate that the
+hearer lives over again the finely shaded mood of the poet. Take the
+words of a lyric for what they say, and they say nothing most of the
+time. And that is true of philosophers. You must penetrate the ponderous
+vocabulary, the professional cant to the insight beneath or you scoff at
+the mountain ranges of words and phrases. It is this that Bergson means
+when he tells us that a philosopher's intuition always outlasts his
+system. Unless you get at that you remain forever foreign to the thinker.
+
+That too is why debating is such a wretched amusement and most
+partisanship, most controversy, so degrading. The trick here is to argue
+from the opponent's language, never from his insight. You take him
+literally, you pick up his sentences, and you show what nonsense they
+are. You do not try to weigh what you see against what he sees; you
+contrast what you see with what he says. So debating becomes a way of
+confirming your own prejudices; it is never, never in any debate I have
+suffered through, a search for understanding from the angles of two
+differing insights.
+
+And, of course, in those more sinister forms of debating, court trials,
+where the stakes are so much bigger, the skill of a successful lawyer is
+to make the atmosphere as opaque as possible to the other lawyer's
+contention. Men have been hanged as a result. How often in a political
+campaign does a candidate suggest that behind the platforms and speeches
+of his opponents there might be some new and valuable understanding of
+the country's need?
+
+The fact is that we argue and quarrel an enormous lot over words. Our
+prevailing habit is to think about phrases, "ideals," theories, not about
+the realities they express. In controversy we do not try to find our
+opponent's meaning: we examine his vocabulary. And in our own efforts to
+shape policies we do not seek out what is worth doing: we seek out what
+will pass for moral, practical, popular or constitutional.
+
+In this the Vice Commission reflected our national habits. For those
+earnest men and women in Chicago did not set out to find a way of
+abolishing prostitution; they set out to find a way that would conform to
+four idols they worshiped. The only cure for prostitution might prove to
+be "immoral," "impractical," unconstitutional, and unpopular. I suspect
+that it is. But the honest thing to do would have been to look for that
+cure without preconceived notions. Having found it, the Commission could
+then have said to the public: "This is what will cure the social evil. It
+means these changes in industry, sex relations, law and public opinion.
+If you think it is worth the cost you can begin to deal with the problem.
+If you don't, then confess that you will not abolish prostitution, and
+turn your compassion to softening its effects."
+
+That would have left the issues clear and wholesome. But the procedure of
+the Commission is a blow to honest thinking. Its conclusions may "square
+with the public conscience of the American people" but they will not
+square with the intellectual conscience of anybody. To tell you at the
+top of the page that absolute annihilation of prostitution is the
+ultimate ideal and twenty lines further on that the method must be
+constitutional is nothing less than an insult to the intelligence.
+Calf-worship was never more idolatrous than this. Truth would have slept
+more comfortably in Procrustes' bed.
+
+Let no one imagine that I take the four preconceived ideas of the
+Commission too seriously. On the first reading of the report they aroused
+no more interest in me than the ordinary lip-honor we all do to
+conventionality--I had heard of the great fearlessness of this report,
+and I supposed that this bending of the knee was nothing but the innocent
+hypocrisy of the reformer who wants to make his proposal not too
+shocking. But it was a mistake. Those four idols really dominated the
+minds of the Commission, and without them the report cannot be
+understood. They are typical idols of the American people. This report
+offers an opportunity to see the concrete results of worshiping them.
+
+A valuable contribution, then, must be _moral_. There is no doubt that
+the Commission means sexually moral. We Americans always use the word in
+that limited sense. If you say that Jones is a moral man you mean that he
+is faithful to his wife. He may support her by selling pink pills; he is
+nevertheless moral if he is monogamous. The average American rarely
+speaks of industrial piracy as immoral. He may condemn it, but not with
+that word. If he extends the meaning of immoral at all, it is to the
+vices most closely allied to sex--drink and gambling.
+
+Now sexual morality is pretty clearly defined for the Commission. As we
+have seen, it means that sex must be confined to procreation by a
+healthy, intelligent and strictly monogamous couple. All other sexual
+expression would come under the ban of disapproval. I am sure I do the
+Commission no injustice. Now this limited conception of sex has had a
+disastrous effect: it has forced the Commission to ignore the sexual
+impulse in discussing a sexual problem. Any modification of the
+relationship of men and women was immediately put out of consideration.
+Such suggestions as Forel, Ellen Key, or Havelock Ellis make could, of
+course, not even get a hearing.
+
+With this moral ideal in mind, not only vice, but sex itself, becomes an
+evil thing. Hence the hysterical and minute application of the taboo
+wherever sex shows itself. Barred from any reform which would reabsorb
+the impulse into civilized life, the Commissioners had no other course
+but to hunt it, as an outlaw. And in doing this they were compelled to
+discard the precious values of art, religion and social life of which
+this superfluous energy is the creator. Driven to think of it as bad,
+except for certain particular functions, they could, of course, not see
+its possibilities. Hence the poverty of their suggestions along
+educational and artistic lines.
+
+A valuable contribution, we are told, must be _reasonable_ and
+_practical_. Here is a case where words cannot be taken literally.
+"Reasonable" in America certainly never even pretended to mean in
+accordance with a rational ideal, and "practical,"--well one thinks of
+"practical politics," "practical business men," and "unpractical
+reformers." Boiled down these words amount to something like this: the
+proposals must not be new or startling; must not involve any radical
+disturbance of any respectable person's selfishness; must not call forth
+any great opposition; must look definite and immediate; must be tangible
+like a raid, or a jail, or the paper of an ordinance, or a policeman's
+club. Above all a "reasonable and practical" proposal must not require
+any imaginative patience. The actual proposals have all these qualities:
+if they are "reasonable and practical" then we know by a good
+demonstration what these terms meant to that average body of citizens.
+
+To see that is to see exposed an important facet of the American
+temperament. Our dislike of "talk"; the frantic desire to "do something"
+without inquiring whether it is worth doing; the dollar standard; the
+unwillingness to cast any bread upon the waters; our preference for a
+sparrow in the hand to a forest of song-birds; the naive inability to
+understand the inner satisfactions of bankrupt poets and the
+unworldliness of eccentric thinkers; success-mania; philistinism--they
+are pieces of the same cloth. They come from failure or unwillingness to
+project the mind beyond the daily routine of things, to play over the
+whole horizon of possibilities, and to recognize that all is not said
+when we have spoken. In those words "reasonable and practical" is the
+Chinese Wall of America, that narrow boundary which contracts our vision
+to the moment, cuts us off from the culture of the world, and makes us
+such provincial, unimaginative blunderers over our own problems. Fixation
+upon the immediate has made a rich country poor in leisure, has in a land
+meant for liberal living incited an insane struggle for existence. One
+suspects at times that our national cult of optimism is no real feeling
+that the world is good, but a fear that pessimism will produce panics.
+
+How this fascination of the obvious has balked the work of the Commission
+I need not elaborate. That the long process of civilizing sex received
+perfunctory attention; that the imaginative value of sex was lost in a
+dogma; that the implied changes in social life were dodged--all that has
+been pointed out. It was the inability to rise above the immediate that
+makes the report read as if the policeman were the only agent of
+civilization.
+
+For where in the report is any thorough discussion by sociologists of the
+relations of business and marriage to vice? Why is there no testimony by
+psychologists to show how sex can be affected by environment, by
+educators to show how it can be trained, by industrial experts to show
+how monotony and fatigue affect it? Where are the detailed proposals by
+specialists, for decent housing and working conditions, for educational
+reform, for play facilities? The Commission wasn't afraid of details:
+didn't it recommend searchlights in the parks as a weapon against vice?
+Why then isn't there a budget, a large, comprehensive budget, precise and
+informing, in which provision is made for beginning to civilize Chicago?
+That wouldn't have been "reasonable and practical," I presume, for it
+would have cost millions and millions of dollars. And where would the
+money have come from? Were the single-taxers, the Socialists consulted?
+But their proposals would require big changes in property interests, and
+would that be "reasonable and practical"? Evidently not: it is more
+reasonable and practical to keep park benches out of the shadows and to
+plague unescorted prostitutes.
+
+And where are the open questions: the issues that everybody should
+consider, the problems that scientists should study? I see almost no
+trace of them. Why are the sexual problems not even stated? Where are the
+doubts that should have honored these investigations, the frank statement
+of all the gaps in knowledge, and the obscurities in morals? Knowing
+perfectly well that vice will not be repressed within a year or
+prostitution absolutely annihilated in ten, it might, I should think,
+have seemed more important that the issues be made clear and the thought
+of the people fertilized than that the report should look very definite
+and precise. There are all sorts of things we do not understand about
+this problem. The opportunities for study which the Commissioners had
+must have made these empty spaces evident. Why then were we not taken
+into their confidence? Along what lines is investigation most needed? To
+what problems, what issues, shall we give our attention? What is the
+debatable ground in this territory? The Commission does not say, and I
+for one, ascribe the silence to the American preoccupation with
+immediate, definite, tangible interests.
+
+Wells has written penetratingly about this in "The New Machiavelli." I
+have called this fixation on the nearest object at hand an American
+habit. Perhaps as Mr. Wells shows it is an English one too. But in this
+country we have a philosophy to express it--the philosophy of the
+Reasonable and the Practical, and so I do not hesitate to import Mr.
+Wells's observations: "It has been the chronic mistake of statecraft and
+all organizing spirits to attempt immediately to scheme and arrange and
+achieve. Priests, schools of thought, political schemers, leaders of men,
+have always slipped into the error of assuming that they can think out
+the whole--or at any rate completely think out definite parts--of the
+purpose and future of man, clearly and finally; they have set themselves
+to legislate and construct on that assumption, and, experiencing the
+perplexing obduracy and evasions of reality, they have taken to dogma,
+persecution, training, pruning, secretive education; and all the
+stupidities of self-sufficient energy. In the passion of their good
+intentions they have not hesitated to conceal facts, suppress thought,
+crush disturbing initiatives and apparently detrimental desires. And so
+it is blunderingly and wastefully, destroying with the making, that any
+extension of social organization is at present achieved. Directly,
+however, this idea of an emancipation from immediacy is grasped, directly
+the dominating importance of this critical, less personal, mental
+hinterland in the individual and of the collective mind in the race is
+understood, the whole problem of the statesman and his attitude toward
+politics gains a new significance, and becomes accessible to a new series
+of solutions...."
+
+Let no one suppose that the unwillingness to cultivate what Mr. Wells
+calls the "mental hinterland" is a vice peculiar to the business man. The
+colleges submit to it whenever they concentrate their attention on the
+details of the student's vocation before they have built up some cultural
+background. The whole drift towards industrial training in schools has
+the germs of disaster within it--a preoccupation with the technique of a
+career. I am not a lover of the "cultural" activities of our schools and
+colleges, still less am I a lover of shallow specialists. The
+unquestioned need for experts in politics is full of the very real danger
+that detailed preparation may give us a bureaucracy--a government by men
+divorced from human tradition. The churches submit to the demand for
+immediacy with great alacrity. Look at the so-called "liberal" churches.
+Reacting against an empty formalism they are tumbling over themselves to
+prove how directly they touch daily life. You read glowing articles in
+magazines about preachers who devote their time to housing reforms, milk
+supplies, the purging of the civil service. If you lament the ugliness of
+their churches, the poverty of the ritual, and the political absorption
+of their sermons, you are told that the church must abandon forms and
+serve the common life of men. There are many ways of serving everyday
+needs,--turning churches into social reform organs and political rostra
+is, it seems to me, an obvious but shallow way of performing that
+service. When churches cease to paint the background of our lives, to
+nourish a Weltanschaung, strengthen men's ultimate purposes and reaffirm
+the deepest values of life, then churches have ceased to meet the needs
+for which they exist. That "hinterland" affects daily life, and the
+church which cannot get a leverage on it by any other method than
+entering into immediate political controversy is simply a church that is
+dead. It may be an admirable agent of reform, but it has ceased to be a
+church.
+
+A large wing of the Socialist Party is the slave of obvious success. It
+boasts that it has ceased to be "visionary" and has become "practical."
+Votes, winning campaigns, putting through reform measures seem a great
+achievement. It forgets the difference between voting the Socialist
+ticket and understanding Socialism. The vote is the tangible thing, and
+for that these Socialist politicians work. They get the votes, enough to
+elect them to office. In the City of Schenectady that happened as a
+result of the mayoralty campaign of 1911. I had an opportunity to observe
+the results. A few Socialists were in office set to govern a city with no
+Socialist "hinterland." It was a pathetic situation, for any reform
+proposal had to pass the judgment of men and women who did not see life
+as the officials did. On no important measure could the administration
+expect popular understanding. What was the result? In crucial issues,
+like taxation, the Socialists had to submit to the ideas,--the general
+state of mind of the community. They had to reverse their own theories
+and accept those that prevailed in that unconverted city. I wondered over
+our helplessness, for I was during a period one of those officials. The
+other members of the administration used to say at every opportunity that
+we were fighting "The Beast" or "Special Privilege." But to me it always
+seemed that we were like Peer Gynt struggling against the formless
+Boyg--invisible yet everywhere--we were struggling with the unwatered
+hinterland of the citizens of Schenectady. I understood then, I think,
+what Wells meant when he said that he wanted "no longer to 'fix up,' as
+people say, human affairs, but to devote his forces to the development of
+that needed intellectual life without which all his shallow attempts at
+fixing up are futile." For in the last analysis the practical and the
+reasonable are little idols of clay that thwart our efforts.
+
+The third requirement of a valuable contribution, says the Chicago
+Commission, is the constitutional sanction. This idol carries its own
+criticism with it. The worship of the constitution amounts, of course, to
+saying that men exist for the sake of the constitution. The person who
+holds fast to that idea is forever incapable of understanding either men
+or constitutions. It is a prime way of making laws ridiculous; if you
+want to cultivate _lese-majeste_ in Germany get the Kaiser to proclaim
+his divine origin; if you want to promote disrespect of the courts,
+announce their infallibility.
+
+But in this case, the Commission is not representative of the dominant
+thought of our times. The vital part of the population has pretty well
+emerged from any dumb acquiescence in constitutions. Theodore Roosevelt,
+who reflects so much of America, has very definitely cast down this idol.
+Now since he stands generally some twenty years behind the pioneer and
+about six months ahead of the majority, we may rest assured that this
+much-needed iconoclasm is in process of achievement.
+
+Closely related to the constitution and just as decadent to-day are the
+Sanctity of Private Property, Vested Rights, Competition the Life of
+Trade, Prosperity (at any cost). Each one of these ideas was born of an
+original need, served its historical function and survived beyond its
+allotted time. Nowadays you still come across some of these ancient
+notions, especially in courts, where they do no little damage in
+perverting justice, but they are ghost-like and disreputable, gibbering
+and largely helpless. He who is watching the ascendant ideas of American
+life can afford to feel that the early maxims of capitalism are doomed.
+
+But the habit of mind which would turn an instrument of life into an
+immutable law of its existence--that habit is always with us. We may
+outgrow our adoration of the Constitution or Private Property only to
+establish some new totem pole. In the arts we call this inveterate
+tendency classicalism. It is, of course, a habit by no means confined to
+the arts. Politics, religion, science are subject to it,--in politics we
+call it conservative, in religion orthodox, in science we describe it as
+academic. Its manifestations are multiform but they have a common source.
+An original creative impulse of the mind expresses itself in a certain
+formula; posterity mistakes the formula for the impulse. A genius will
+use his medium in a particular way because it serves his need; this way
+becomes a fixed rule which the classicalist serves. It has been pointed
+out that because the first steam trains were run on roads built for carts
+and coaches, the railway gauge almost everywhere in the world became
+fixed at four feet eight and one-half inches.
+
+You might say that genius works inductively and finds a method; the
+conservative works deductively from the method and defeats whatever
+genius he may have. A friend of mine had written a very brilliant article
+on a play which had puzzled New York. Some time later I was discussing
+the article with another friend of a decidedly classicalist bent. "What
+is it?" he protested, "it isn't criticism for it's half rhapsody; it
+isn't rhapsody because it is analytical.... What is it? That's what I
+want to know." "But isn't it fine, and worth having, and aren't you glad
+it was written?" I pleaded. "Well, if I knew what it was...." And so the
+argument ran for hours. Until he had subsumed the article under certain
+categories he had come to accept, appreciation was impossible for him. I
+have many arguments with my classicalist friend. This time it was about
+George Moore's "Ave." I was trying to express my delight. "It isn't a
+novel, or an essay, or a real confession--it's nothing," said he. His
+well-ordered mind was compelled to throw out of doors any work for which
+he had no carefully prepared pocket. I thought of Aristotle, who denied
+the existence of a mule because it was neither a horse nor an ass.
+
+Dramatic critics follow Aristotle in more ways than one. A play is
+produced which fascinates an audience for weeks. It is published and read
+all over the world. Then you are treated to endless discussions by the
+critics trying to prove that "it is not a play." So-and-so-and-so
+constitute a play, they affirm,--this thing doesn't meet the
+requirements, so away with it. They forget that nobody would have had the
+slightest idea what a play was if plays hadn't been written; that the
+rules deduced from the plays that have already been written are no
+eternal law for the plays that will be.
+
+Classicalism and invention are irreconcilable enemies. Let it be
+understood that I am not decrying the great nourishment which a living
+tradition offers. The criticism I am making is of those who try to feed
+upon the husks alone. Without the slightest paradox one may say that the
+classicalist is most foreign to the classics. He does not put himself
+within the creative impulses of the past: he is blinded by their
+manifestations. It is perhaps no accident that two of the greatest
+classical scholars in England--Gilbert Murray and Alfred Zimmern--are
+political radicals. The man whom I call here the classicalist cannot
+possibly be creative, for the essence of his creed is that there must be
+nothing new under the sun.
+
+The United States, you imagine, would of all nations be the freest from
+classicalism. Settled as a great adventure and dedicated to an experiment
+in republicanism, the tradition of the country is of extending
+boundaries, obstacles overcome, and pioneering exploits in which a
+wilderness was subdued to human uses. The very air of America would seem
+to be a guarantee against formalism. You would think that self-government
+finds its surest footing here--that real autonomy of the spirit which
+makes human uses the goal of effort, denies all inhuman ideals, seeks out
+what men want, and proceeds to create it. With such a history how could a
+nation fail to see in its constitution anything but a tool of life, like
+the axe, the spade or the plough?
+
+The West has in a measure carried its freedom over into politics and
+social life generally. Formalism sets in as you move east and south into
+the older and more settled communities. There the pioneering impulse has
+passed out of life into stupid history books, and the inevitable
+classicalism, the fear of adventure, the superstition before social
+invention, have reasserted themselves. If I may turn for a moment from
+description to prophecy, it is to say that this equilibrium will not hold
+for very long. There are signs that the West after achieving the reforms
+which it needs to-day--reforms which will free its economic life from the
+credit monopolies of the East, and give it a greater fluidity in the
+marketing of its products--will follow the way of all agricultural
+communities to a rural and placid conservatism. The spirit of the pioneer
+does not survive forever: it is kept alive to-day, I believe, by certain
+unnatural irritants which may be summed up as absentee ownership. The
+West is suffering from foreignly owned railroads, power-resources, and an
+alien credit control. But once it recaptures these essentials of its
+economic life, once the "progressive" movement is victorious, I venture
+to predict that the agricultural West will become the heart of American
+complacency. The East, on the other hand, with its industrial problem
+must go to far more revolutionary measures for a solution. And the East
+is fertilized continually by European traditions: that stream of
+immigration brings with it a thousand unforeseeable possibilities. The
+great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the
+wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples. To-day perhaps,
+it is still predominantly a question for the East. But it means that
+America is turning from the contrast between her courage and nature's
+obstacles to a comparison of her civilization with Europe's. Immigration
+more than anything else is drawing us into world problems. Many people
+profess to see horrible dangers in the foreign invasion. Certainly no man
+is sure of its conclusion. It may swamp us, it may, if we seize the
+opportunity, mean the impregnation of our national life with a new
+brilliancy.
+
+I have said that the West is still moved by the tapering impulse of the
+pioneer, and I have ventured to predict that this would soon dwindle into
+an agricultural toryism. That prediction may very easily be upset.
+Far-reaching mechanical inventions already threaten to transform farming
+into an industry. I refer to those applications of power to agriculture
+which will inevitably divorce the farmer from the ownership of his tools.
+An industrial revolution analogous to that in manufacture during the
+nineteenth century is distinctly probable, and capitalistic agriculture
+may soon cease to be a contradiction in terms. Like all inventions it
+will disturb deeply the classicalist tendency, and this disturbance may
+generate a new impulse to replace the decadent one of the pioneer.
+
+Without some new dynamic force America, for all her tradition, is not
+immune to a hardening formalism. The psychological descent into
+classicalism is always a strong possibility. That is why we, the children
+of frontiersmen, city builders and immigrants, surprise Europe constantly
+with our worship of constitutions, our social and political timidity. In
+many ways we are more defenceless against these deadening habits than the
+people of Europe. Our geographical isolation preserves us from any vivid
+sense of national contrast: our imaginations are not stirred by different
+civilizations. We have almost no spiritual weapons against classicalism:
+universities, churches, newspapers are by-products of a commercial
+success; we have no tradition of intellectual revolt. The American
+college student has the gravity and mental habits of a Supreme Court
+judge; his "wild oats" are rarely spiritual; the critical, analytical
+habit of mind is distrusted. We say that "knocking" is a sign of the
+"sorehead" and we sublimate criticism by saying that "every knock is a
+boost." America does not play with ideas; generous speculation is
+regarded as insincere, and shunned as if it might endanger the optimism
+which underlies success. All this becomes such an insulation against new
+ideas that when the Yankee goes abroad he takes his environment with him.
+
+It seems at times as if our capacity for appreciating originality were
+absorbed in the trivial eccentricities of fads and fashions. The obvious
+novelties of machinery and locomotion, phonographs and yellow journalism
+slake the American thirst for creation pretty thoroughly. In serious
+matters we follow the Vice Commission's fourth essential of a valuable
+contribution--_that which will square with the public conscience of the
+American people_.
+
+I do not care to dilate upon the exploded pretensions of Mr. and Mrs.
+Grundy. They are a fairly disreputable couple by this time because we are
+beginning to know how much morbidity they represent. The Vice Commission,
+for example, bowed to what might be called the "instinctive conscience"
+of America when it balked at tracing vice to its source in the
+over-respected institutions of American life and the over-respected
+natures of American men and women. It bowed to the prevailing conscience
+when it proposed taboos instead of radical changes. It bowed to a
+traditional conscience when it confused the sins of sex with the
+possibilities of sex; and it paid tribute to a verbal conscience, to a
+lip morality, when, with extreme irrelevance to its beloved police, it
+proclaimed "absolute annihilation" the ultimate ideal. In brief, the
+commission failed to see that the working conscience of America is to-day
+bound up with the very evil it is supposed to eradicate by a relentless
+warfare.
+
+It was to be expected. Our conscience is not the vessel of eternal
+verities. It grows with our social life, and a new social condition means
+a radical change in conscience. In order to do away with vice America
+must live and think and feel differently. This is an old story. Because
+of it all innovators have been at war with the public conscience of their
+time. Yet there is nothing strange or particularly disheartening about
+this commonplace observation: to expect anything else is to hope that a
+nation will lift itself by its own bootstraps. Yet there is danger the
+moment leaders of the people make a virtue of homage to the unregenerate,
+public conscience.
+
+In La Follette's Magazine (Feb. 17, 1912) there is a leading article
+called "The Great Issue." You can read there that "the composite judgment
+is always safer and wiser and stronger and more unselfish than the
+judgment of any one individual mind. The people have been betrayed by
+their representatives again and again. The real danger to democracy lies
+not in the ignorance or want of patriotism of the people, but in the
+corrupting influence of powerful business organizations upon the
+representatives of the people...."
+
+I have only one quarrel with that philosophy--its negativity. With the
+belief that government is futile and mischievous unless supported by the
+mass of the people; with the undeniable fact that business has corrupted
+public officials--I have no complaint. What I object to is the emphasis
+which shifts the blame for our troubles from the shoulders of the people
+to those of the "corrupting interests." For this seems to me nothing but
+the resuscitation of the devil: when things go wrong it is somebody
+else's fault. We are peculiarly open to this kind of vanity in America.
+If some wise law is passed we say it is the will of the people showing
+its power of self-government. But if that will is so weak and timid that
+a great evil like child labor persists to our shame we turn the
+responsibility over to the devil personified as a "special interest." It
+is an old habit of the race which seems to have begun with the serpent in
+the Garden of Eden.
+
+The word demagogue has been frightfully maltreated in late years, but
+surely here is its real meaning--to flatter the people by telling them
+that their failures are somebody else's fault. For if a nation declares
+it has reached its majority by instituting self-government, then it
+cannot shirk responsibility.
+
+These "special interests"--big business, a corrupt press, crooked
+politics--grew up within the country, were promoted by American citizens,
+admired by millions of them, and acquiesced in by almost all of them.
+Whoever thinks that business corruption is the work of a few inhumanly
+cunning individuals with monstrous morals is self-righteous without
+excuse. Capitalists did not violate the public conscience of America;
+they expressed it. That conscience was inadequate and unintelligent. We
+are being pinched by the acts it nourished. A great outcry has arisen and
+a number of perfectly conventional men like Lorimer suffer an undeserved
+humiliation. We say it is a "moral awakening." That is another dodge by
+which we pretend that we were always wise and just, though a trifle
+sleepy. In reality we are witnessing a change of conscience, initiated by
+cranks and fanatics, sustained for a long time by minorities, which has
+at last infected the mass of the people.
+
+The danger I spoke of arises just here: the desire to infect at once the
+whole mass crowds out the courage of the innovator. No man can do his
+best work if he bows at every step to the public conscience of his age.
+The real service to democracy is the fullest, freest expression of
+talent. The best servants of the people, like the best valets, must
+whisper unpleasant truths in the master's ear. It is the court fool, not
+the foolish courtier, whom the king can least afford to lose.
+
+Hostile critics of democracy have long pointed out that mediocrity
+becomes the rule. They have not been without facts for their support. And
+I do not see why we who believe in democracy should not recognize this
+danger and trace it to its source. Certainly it is not answered with a
+sneer. I have worked in the editorial office of a popular magazine, a
+magazine that is known widely as a champion of popular rights. By
+personal experience, by intimate conversations, and by looking about, I
+think I am pretty well aware of what the influence of business upon
+journalism amounts to. I have seen the inside working of business
+pressure; articles of my own have been suppressed after they were in
+type; friends of mine have told me stories of expurgation, of the
+"morganization" of their editorial policy. And in the face of that I
+should like to record it as my sincere conviction that no financial power
+is one-tenth so corrupting, so insidious, so hostile to originality and
+frank statement as the fear of the public which reads the magazine. For
+one item suppressed out of respect for a railroad or a bank, nine are
+rejected because of the prejudices of the public. This will anger the
+farmers, that will arouse the Catholics, another will shock the summer
+girl. Anybody can take a fling at poor old Mr. Rockefeller, but the great
+mass of average citizens (to which none of us belongs) must be left in
+undisturbed possession of its prejudices. In that subservience, and not
+in the meddling of Mr. Morgan, is the reason why American journalism is
+so flaccid, so repetitious and so dull.
+
+The people should be supreme, yes, its will should be the law of the
+land. But it is a caricature of democracy to make it also the law of
+individual initiative. One thing it is to say that all proposals must
+ultimately win the acceptance of the majority; it is quite another to
+propose nothing which is not immediately acceptable. It is as true of the
+nation as of the body that one leg cannot go forward very far unless the
+whole body follows. That is a different thing from trying to move both
+legs forward at the same time. The one is democracy; the other
+is--demolatry.
+
+It is better to catch the idol-maker than to smash each idol. It would be
+an endless task to hunt down all the masks, the will-o'-the-wisps and the
+shadows which divert us from our real purpose. Each man carries within
+himself the cause of his own mirages. Whenever we accept an idea as
+authority instead of as instrument, an idol is set up. We worship the
+plough, and not the fruit. And from this habit there is no permanent
+escape. Only effort can keep the mind centered truly. Whenever criticism
+slackens, whenever we sink into acquiescence, the mind swerves aside and
+clings with the gratitude of the weary to some fixed idea. It is so much
+easier to follow a rule of thumb, and obey the constitution, than to find
+out what we really want and to do it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A great deal of political theory has been devoted to asking: what is the
+aim of government? Many readers may have wondered why that question has
+not figured in these pages. For the logical method would be to decide
+upon the ultimate ideal of statecraft and then elaborate the technique of
+its realization. I have not done that because this rational procedure
+inverts the natural order of things and develops all kinds of theoretical
+tangles and pseudo-problems. They come from an effort to state abstractly
+in intellectual terms qualities that can be known only by direct
+experience. You achieve nothing but confusion if you begin by announcing
+that politics must achieve "justice" or "liberty" or "happiness." Even
+though you are perfectly sure that you know exactly what these words mean
+translated into concrete experiences, it is very doubtful whether you can
+really convey your meaning to anyone else. "Plaisante justice qu'une
+riviere borne. Verite, au deca des Pyrenees, erreur au de la," says
+Pascal. If what is good in the world depended on our ability to define it
+we should be hopeless indeed.
+
+This is an old difficulty in ethics. Many men have remarked that we
+quarrel over the "problem of evil," never over the "problem of good."
+That comes from the fact that good is a quality of experience which does
+not demand an explanation. When we are thwarted we begin to ask why. It
+was the evil in the world that set Leibniz the task of justifying the
+ways of God to man. Nor is it an accident that in daily life misfortune
+turns men to philosophy. One might generalize and say that as soon as we
+begin to explain, it is because we have been made to complain.
+
+No moral judgment can decide the value of life. No ethical theory can
+announce any intrinsic good. The whole speculation about morality is an
+effort to find a way of living which men who live it will instinctively
+feel is good. No formula can express an ultimate experience; no axiom can
+ever be a substitute for what really makes life worth living. Plato may
+describe the objects which man rejoices over, he may guide them to good
+experiences, but each man in his inward life is a last judgment on all
+his values.
+
+This amounts to saying that the goal of action is in its final analysis
+aesthetic and not moral--a quality of feeling instead of conformity to
+rule. Words like justice, harmony, power, democracy are simply empirical
+suggestions which may produce the good life. If the practice of them does
+not produce it then we are under no obligation to follow them, we should
+be idolatrous fools to do so. Every abstraction, every rule of conduct,
+every constitution, every law and social arrangement, is an instrument
+that has no value in itself. Whatever credit it receives, whatever
+reverence we give it, is derived from its utility in ministering to those
+concrete experiences which are as obvious and as undefinable as color or
+sound. We can celebrate the positively good things, we can live them, we
+can create them, but we cannot philosophize about them. To the anaesthetic
+intellect we could not convey the meaning of joy. A creature that could
+reason but not feel would never know the value of life, for what is
+ultimate is in itself inexplicable.
+
+Politics is not concerned with prescribing the ultimate qualities of
+life. When it tries to do so by sumptuary legislation, nothing but
+mischief is invoked. Its business is to provide opportunities, not to
+announce ultimate values; to remove oppressive evil and to invent new
+resources for enjoyment. With the enjoyment itself it can have no
+concern. That must be lived by each individual. In a sense the politician
+can never know his own success, for it is registered in men's inner
+lives, and is largely incommunicable. An increasing harvest of rich
+personalities is the social reward for a fine statesmanship, but such
+personalities are free growths in a cordial environment. They cannot be
+cast in moulds or shaped by law. There is no need, therefore, to generate
+dialectical disputes about the final goal of politics. No definition can
+be just--too precise a one can only deceive us into thinking that our
+definition is true. Call ultimate values by any convenient name, it is of
+slight importance which you choose. If only men can keep their minds
+freed from formalism, idol worship, fixed ideas, and exalted
+abstractions, politicians need not worry about the language in which the
+end of our striving is expressed. For with the removal of distracting
+idols, man's experience becomes the center of thought. And if we think in
+terms of men, find out what really bothers them, seek to supply what they
+really want, hold only their experience sacred, we shall find our
+sanction obvious and unchallenged.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE MAKING OF CREEDS
+
+
+My first course in philosophy was nothing less than a summary of the
+important systems of thought put forward in Western Europe during the
+last twenty-six hundred years. Perhaps that is a slight exaggeration--we
+did gloss over a few centuries in the Middle Ages. For the rest we
+touched upon all the historic names from Thales to Nietzsche. After about
+nine weeks of this bewildering transit a friend approached me with a sour
+look on his face. "You know," he said, "I can't make head or tail out of
+this business. I agree with each philosopher as we study him. But when we
+get to the next one, I agree with him too. Yet he generally says the
+other one was wrong. They can't all be right. Can they now?" I was too
+much puzzled with the same difficulty to help him.
+
+Somewhat later I began to read the history of political theories. It was
+a less disinterested study than those sophomore speculations, for I had
+jumped into a profession which carried me through some of the underground
+passages of "practical politics" and reformist groups. The tangle of
+motives and facts and ideas was incredible. I began to feel the force of
+Mr. John Hobson's remark that "if practical workers for social and
+industrial reforms continue to ignore principles ... they will have to
+pay the price which short-sighted empiricism always pays; with slow,
+hesitant, and staggering steps, with innumerable false starts and
+backslidings, they will move in the dark along an unseen track toward an
+unseen goal." The political theorists laid some claim to lighting up both
+the track and the goal, and so I turned to them for help.
+
+Now whoever has followed political theory will have derived perhaps two
+convictions as a reward. Almost all the thinkers seem to regard their
+systems as true and binding, and none of these systems are. No matter
+which one you examine, it is inadequate. You cannot be a Platonist or a
+Benthamite in politics to-day. You cannot go to any of the great
+philosophers even for the outlines of a statecraft which shall be fairly
+complete, and relevant to American life. I returned to the sophomore
+mood: "Each of these thinkers has contributed something, has had some
+wisdom about events. Looked at in bulk the philosophers can't all be
+right or all wrong."
+
+But like so many theoretical riddles, this one rested on a very simple
+piece of ignorance. The trouble was that without realizing it I too had
+been in search of the philosopher's stone. I too was looking for
+something that could not be found. That happened in this case to be
+nothing less than an absolutely true philosophy of politics. It was the
+old indolence of hoping that somebody had done the world's thinking once
+and for all. I had conjured up the fantasy of a system which would
+contain the whole of life, be as reliable as a table of logarithms,
+foresee all possible emergencies and offer entirely trustworthy rules of
+action. When it seemed that no such system had ever been produced, I was
+on the point of damning the entire tribe of theorists from Plato to Marx.
+
+This is what one may call the naivete of the intellect. Its hope is that
+some man living at one place on the globe in a particular epoch will,
+through the miracle of genius, be able to generalize his experience for
+all time and all space. It says in effect that there is never anything
+essentially new under the sun, that any moment of experience sufficiently
+understood would be seen to contain all history and all destiny--that the
+intellect reasoning on one piece of experience could know what all the
+rest of experience was like. Looked at more closely this philosophy means
+that novelty is an illusion of ignorance, that life is an endless
+repetition, that when you know one revolution of it, you know all the
+rest. In a very real sense the world has no history and no future, the
+race has no career. At any moment everything is given: our reason could
+know that moment so thoroughly that all the rest of life would be like
+the commuter's who travels back and forth on the same line every day.
+There would be no inventions and no discoveries, for in the instant that
+reason had found the key of experience everything would be unfolded. The
+present would not be the womb of the future: nothing would be embryonic,
+nothing would _grow_. Experience would cease to be an adventure in order
+to become the monotonous fulfilment of a perfect prophecy.
+
+This omniscience of the human intellect is one of the commonest
+assumptions in the world. Although when you state the belief as I have,
+it sounds absurdly pretentious, yet the boastfulness is closer to the
+child's who stretches out its hand for the moon than the romantic
+egotist's who thinks he has created the moon and all the stars. Whole
+systems of philosophy have claimed such an eternal and absolute validity;
+the nineteenth century produced a bumper crop of so-called atheists,
+materialists and determinists who believed in all sincerity that
+"Science" was capable of a complete truth and unfailing prediction. If
+you want to see this faith in all its naivete go into those quaint
+rationalist circles where Herbert Spencer's ghost announces the "laws of
+life," with only a few inessential details omitted.
+
+Now, of course, no philosophy of this sort has ever realized such hopes.
+Mankind has certainly come nearer to justifying Mr. Chesterton's
+observation that one of its favorite games is called "Cheat the
+Prophet."... "The players listen very carefully and respectfully to all
+that the clever men have to say about what is to happen in the next
+generation. The players then wait until all the clever men are dead, and
+bury them nicely. They then go and do something else." Now this weakness
+is not, as Mr. Chesterton would like to believe, confined to the clever
+men. But it is a weakness, and many people have speculated about it. Why
+in the face of hundreds of philosophies wrecked on the rocks of the
+unexpected do men continue to believe that the intellect can transcend
+the vicissitudes of experience?
+
+For they certainly do believe it, and generally the more parochial their
+outlook, the more cosmic their pretensions. All of us at times yearn for
+the comfort of an absolute philosophy. We try to believe that, however
+finite we may be, our intellect is something apart from the cycle of our
+life, capable by an Olympian detachment from human interests of a divine
+thoroughness. Even our evolutionist philosophy, as Bergson shows, "begins
+by showing us in the intellect a local effect of evolution, a flame,
+perhaps accidental, which lights up the coming and going of living things
+in the narrow passage open to their action; and lo! forgetting what it
+has just told us, makes of this lantern glimmering in a tunnel a Sun
+which can illuminate the world."
+
+This is what most of us do in our search for a philosophy of politics. We
+forget that the big systems of theory are much more like village
+lamp-posts than they are like the sun, that they were made to light up a
+particular path, obviate certain dangers, and aid a peculiar mode of
+life. The understanding of the place of theory in life is a comparatively
+new one. We are just beginning to see how creeds are made. And the
+insight is enormously fertile. Thus Mr. Alfred Zimmern in his fine study
+of "The Greek Commonwealth" says of Plato and Aristotle that no
+interpretation can be satisfactory which does not take into account the
+impression left upon their minds by the social development which made the
+age of these philosophers a period of Athenian decline. Mr. Zimmern's
+approach is common enough in modern scholarship, but the full
+significance of it for the creeds we ourselves are making is still
+something of a novelty. When we are asked to think of the "Republic" as
+the reaction of decadent Greece upon the conservative temperament of
+Plato, the function of theory is given a new illumination. Political
+philosophy at once appears as a human invention in a particular
+crisis--an instrument to fit a need. The pretension to finality falls
+away.
+
+This is a great emancipation. Instead of clinging to the naive belief
+that Plato was legislating for all mankind, you can discuss his plans as
+a temporary superstructure made for an historical purpose. You are free
+then to appreciate the more enduring portions of his work, to understand
+Santayana when he says of the Platonists, "their theories are so
+extravagant, yet their wisdom seems so great. Platonism is a very refined
+and beautiful expression of our natural instincts, it embodies conscience
+and utters our inmost hopes." This insight into the values of human life,
+partial though it be, is what constitutes the abiding monument of Plato's
+genius. His constructions, his formal creeds, his law-making and social
+arrangements are local and temporary--for us they can have only an
+antiquarian interest.
+
+In some such way as this the sophomoric riddle is answered: no thinker
+can lay down a course of action for all mankind--programs if they are
+useful at all are useful for some particular historical period. But if
+the thinker sees at all deeply into the life of his own time, his
+theoretical system will rest upon observation of human nature. That
+remains as a residue of wisdom long after his reasoning and his concrete
+program have passed into limbo. For human nature in all its profounder
+aspects changes very little in the few generations since our Western
+wisdom has come to be recorded. These _apercus_ left over from the great
+speculations are the golden threads which successive thinkers weave into
+the pattern of their thought. Wisdom remains; theory passes.
+
+If that is true of Plato with his ample vision how much truer is it of
+the theories of the littler men--politicians, courtiers and propagandists
+who make up the academy of politics. Machiavelli will, of course, be
+remembered at once as a man, whose speculations were fitted to an
+historical crisis. His advice to the Prince was real advice, not a
+sermon. A boss was telling a governor how to extend his power. The wealth
+of Machiavelli's learning and the splendid penetration of his mind are
+used to interpret experience for a particular purpose. I have always
+thought that Machiavelli derives his bad name from a too transparent
+honesty. Less direct minds would have found high-sounding ethical
+sanctions in which to conceal the real intent. That was the nauseating
+method of nineteenth century economists when they tried to identify the
+brutal practices of capitalism with the beneficence of nature and the
+Will of God. Not so Machiavelli. He could write without a blush that "a
+prince, especially a new one, cannot observe all those things for which
+men are esteemed, being often forced, in order to maintain the state, to
+act contrary to fidelity, friendship, humanity, and religion." The
+apologists of business also justified a rupture with human decencies.
+They too fitted their theory to particular purposes, but they had not the
+courage to avow it even to themselves.
+
+The rare value of Machiavelli is just this lack of self-deception. You
+may think his morals devilish, but you cannot accuse him of quoting
+scripture. I certainly do not admire the end he serves: the extension of
+an autocrat's power is a frivolous perversion of government. His ideal
+happens, however, to be the aim of most foreign offices, politicians and
+"princes of finance." Machiavelli's morals are not one bit worse than the
+practices of the men who rule the world to-day. An American Senate tore
+up the Hay-Pauncefote treaty, and with the approval of the President
+acted "contrary to fidelity" and friendship too; Austria violated the
+Treaty of Berlin by annexing Bosnia and Herzegovina. Machiavelli's ethics
+are commonplace enough. His head is clearer than the average. He let the
+cat out of the bag and showed in the boldest terms how theory becomes an
+instrument of practice. You may take him as a symbol of the political
+theorist. You may say that all the thinkers of influence have been
+writing advice to the Prince. Machiavelli recognized Lorenzo the
+Magnificent; Marx, the proletariat of Europe.
+
+At first this sounds like standing the world on its head, denying reason
+and morality, and exalting practice over righteousness. That is neither
+here nor there. I am simply trying to point out an illuminating fact
+whose essential truth can hardly be disputed. The important social
+philosophies are consciously or otherwise the servants of men's purposes.
+Good or bad, that it seems to me is the way we work. We find reasons for
+what we want to do. The big men from Machiavelli through Rousseau to Karl
+Marx brought history, logic, science and philosophy to prop up and
+strengthen their deepest desires. The followers, the epigones, may accept
+the reasons of Rousseau and Marx and deduce rules of action from them.
+But the original genius sees the dynamic purpose first, finds reasons
+afterward. This amounts to saying that man when he is most creative is
+not a rational, but a wilful animal.
+
+The political thinker who to-day exercises the greatest influence on the
+Western World is, I suppose, Karl Marx. The socialist movement calls him
+its prophet, and, while many socialists say he is superseded, no one
+disputes his historical importance. Now Marx embalmed his thinking in the
+language of the Hegelian school. He founded it on a general philosophy of
+society which is known as the materialistic conception of history.
+Moreover, Marx put forth the claim that he had made socialism
+"scientific"--had shown that it was woven into the texture of natural
+phenomena. The Marxian paraphernalia crowds three heavy volumes, so
+elaborate and difficult that socialists rarely read them. I have known
+one socialist who lived leisurely on his country estate and claimed to
+have "looked" at every page of Marx. Most socialists, including the
+leaders, study selected passages and let it go at that. This is a wise
+economy based on a good instinct. For all the parade of learning and
+dialectic is an after-thought--an accident from the fact that the
+prophetic genius of Marx appeared in Germany under the incubus of Hegel.
+Marx saw what he wanted to do long before he wrote three volumes to
+justify it. Did not the Communist Manifesto appear many years before "Das
+Kapital"?
+
+Nothing is more instructive than a socialist "experience" meeting at
+which everyone tries to tell how he came to be converted. These
+gatherings are notoriously untruthful--in fact, there is a genial
+pleasure in not telling the truth about one's salad days in the socialist
+movement. The prevalent lie is to explain how the new convert, standing
+upon a mountain of facts, began to trace out the highways that led from
+hell to heaven. Everybody knows that no such process was actually lived
+through, and almost without exception the real story can be discerned: a
+man was dissatisfied, he wanted a new condition of life, he embraced a
+theory that would justify his hopes and his discontent. For once you
+touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs
+are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon. In the
+language of philosophers, socialism as a living force is a product of the
+will--a will to beauty, order, neighborliness, not infrequently a will to
+health. Men desire first, then they reason; fascinated by the future,
+they invent a "scientific socialism" to get there.
+
+Many people don't like to admit this. Or if they admit it, they do so
+with a sigh. Their minds construct a utopia--one in which all judgments
+are based on logical inference from syllogisms built on the law of
+mathematical probabilities. If you quote David Hume at them, and say that
+reason itself is an irrational impulse they think you are indulging in a
+silly paradox. I shall not pursue this point very far, but I believe it
+could be shown without too much difficulty that the rationalists are
+fascinated by a certain kind of thinking--logical and orderly
+thinking--and that it is their will to impose that method upon other men.
+
+For fear that somebody may regard this as a play on words drawn from some
+ultra-modern "anti-intellectualist" source, let me quote Santayana. This
+is what the author of that masterly series "The Life of Reason" wrote in
+one of his earlier books: "The ideal of rationality is itself as
+arbitrary, as much dependent on the needs of a finite organization, as
+any other ideal. Only as ultimately securing tranquillity of mind, which
+the philosopher instinctively pursues, has it for him any necessity. In
+spite of the verbal propriety of saying that reason demands rationality,
+what really demands rationality, what makes it a good and indispensable
+thing and gives it all its authority, is not its own nature, but our need
+of it both in safe and economical action and in the pleasures of
+comprehension." Because rationality itself is a wilful exercise one hears
+Hymns to Reason and sees it personified as an extremely dignified
+goddess. For all the light and shadow of sentiment and passion play even
+about the syllogism.
+
+The attempts of theorists to explain man's successes as rational acts and
+his failures as lapses of reason have always ended in a dismal and misty
+unreality. No genuine politician ever treats his constituents as
+reasoning animals. This is as true of the high politics of Isaiah as it
+is of the ward boss. Only the pathetic amateur deludes himself into
+thinking that, if he presents the major and minor premise, the voter will
+automatically draw the conclusion on election day. The successful
+politician--good or bad--deals with the dynamics--with the will, the
+hopes, the needs and the visions of men.
+
+It isn't sentimentality which says that where there is no vision the
+people perisheth. Every time Tammany Hall sets off fireworks and oratory
+on the Fourth of July; every time the picture of Lincoln is displayed at
+a political convention; every red bandanna of the Progressives and red
+flag of the socialists; every song from "The Battle Hymn of the Republic"
+to the "International"; every metrical conclusion to a great
+speech--whether we stand at Armageddon, refuse to press upon the brow of
+labor another crown of thorns, or call upon the workers of the world to
+unite--every one of these slogans is an incitement of the will--an effort
+to energize politics. They are attempts to harness blind impulses to
+particular purposes. They are tributes to the sound practical sense of a
+vision in politics. No cause can succeed without them: so long as you
+rely on the efficacy of "scientific" demonstration and logical proof you
+can hold your conventions in anybody's back parlor and have room to
+spare.
+
+I remember an observation that Lincoln Steffens made in a speech about
+Mayor Tom Johnson. "Tom failed," said Mr. Steffens, "because he was too
+practical." Coming from a man who had seen as much of actual politics as
+Mr. Steffens, it puzzled me a great deal. I taxed him with it later and
+he explained somewhat as follows: "Tom Johnson had a vision of Cleveland
+which he called The City on the Hill. He pictured the town emancipated
+from its ugliness and its cruelty--a beautiful city for free men and
+women. He used to talk of that vision to the 'cabinet' of political
+lieutenants which met every Sunday night at his house. He had all his
+appointees working for the City on the Hill. But when he went out
+campaigning before the people he talked only of three-cent fares and the
+tax outrages. Tom Johnson didn't show the people the City on the Hill. He
+didn't take them into his confidence. They never really saw what it was
+all about. And they went back on Tom Johnson."
+
+That is one of Mr. Steffens's most acute observations. What makes it
+doubly interesting is that Tom Johnson confirmed it a few months before
+he died. His friends were telling him that his defeat was temporary, that
+the work he had begun was unchecked. It was plain that in the midst of
+his suffering, with death close by, he found great comfort in that
+assurance. But his mind was so realistic, his integrity so great that he
+could not blink the fact that there had been a defeat. Steffens was
+pointing out the explanation: "you did not show the people what you saw,
+you gave them the details, you fought their battles, you started to
+build, but you left them in darkness as to the final goal."
+
+I wish I could recall the exact words in which Tom Johnson replied. For
+in them the greatest of the piecemeal reformers admitted the practical
+weakness of opportunist politics.
+
+There is a type of radical who has an idea that he can insinuate advanced
+ideas into legislation without being caught. His plan of action is to
+keep his real program well concealed and to dole out sections of it to
+the public from time to time. John A. Hobson in "The Crisis of
+Liberalism" describes the "practical reformer" so that anybody can
+recognize him: "This revolt against ideas is carried so far that able men
+have come seriously to look upon progress as a matter for the
+manipulation of wire-pullers, something to be 'jobbed' in committee by
+sophistical notions or other clever trickery." Lincoln Steffens calls
+these people "our damned rascals." Mr. Hobson continues, "The attraction
+of some obvious gain, the suppression of some scandalous abuse of
+monopolist power by a private company, some needed enlargement of
+existing Municipal or State enterprise by lateral expansion--such are the
+sole springs of action." Well may Mr. Hobson inquire, _"Now, what
+provision is made for generating the motor power of progress in
+Collectivism?"_
+
+No amount of architect's plans, bricks and mortar will build a house.
+Someone must have the wish to build it. So with the modern democratic
+state. Statesmanship cannot rest upon the good sense of its program. It
+must find popular feeling, organize it, and make that the motive power of
+government. If you study the success of Roosevelt the point is
+re-enforced. He is a man of will in whom millions of people have felt the
+embodiment of their own will. For a time Roosevelt was a man of destiny
+in the truest sense. He wanted what a nation wanted: his own power
+radiated power; he embodied a vision; Tom, Dick and Harry moved with his
+movement.
+
+No use to deplore the fact. You cannot stop a living body with nothing at
+all. I think we may picture society as a compound of forces that are
+always changing. Put a vision in front of one of these currents and you
+can magnetize it in that direction. For visions alone organize popular
+passions. Try to ignore them or box them up, and they will burst forth
+destructively. When Haywood dramatizes the class struggle he uses class
+resentment for a social purpose. You may not like his purpose, but unless
+you can gather proletarian power into some better vision, you have no
+grounds for resenting Haywood. I fancy that the demonstration of King
+Canute settled once and for all the stupid attempt to ignore a moving
+force.
+
+A dynamic conception of society always frightens a great number of
+people. It gives politics a restless and intractable quality. Pure reason
+is so gentlemanly, but will and the visions of a people--these are
+adventurous and incalculable forces. Most politicians living for the day
+prefer to ignore them. If only society will stand fairly still while
+their career is in the making they are content to avoid the actualities.
+But a politician with some imaginative interest in genuine affairs need
+not be seduced into the learned folly of pretending that reality is
+something else than it is. If he is to influence life he must deal with
+it. A deep respect is due the Schopenhauerian philosopher who looks upon
+the world, finds that its essence is evil, and turns towards insensitive
+calm. But no respect is due to anyone who sets out to reform the world by
+ignoring its quality. Whoever is bent upon shaping politics to better
+human uses must accept freely as his starting point the impulses that
+agitate human beings. If observation shows that reason is an instrument
+of will, then only confusion can result from pretending that it isn't.
+
+I have called this misplaced "rationality" a piece of learned folly,
+because it shows itself most dangerously among those thinkers about
+politics who are divorced from action. In the Universities political
+movements are generally regarded as essentially static, cut and dried
+solids to be judged by their logical consistency. It is as if the stream
+of life had to be frozen before it could be studied. The socialist
+movement was given a certain amount of attention when I was an
+undergraduate. The discussion turned principally on two points: were
+rent, interest and dividends _earned_? Was collective ownership of
+capital a feasible scheme? And when the professor, who was a good
+dialectician, had proved that interest was a payment for service
+("saving") and that public ownership was not practicable, it was assumed
+that socialism was disposed of. The passions, the needs, the hopes that
+generate this world-wide phenomenon were, I believe, pocketed and ignored
+under the pat saying: "Of course, socialism is not an economic policy,
+it's a religion." That was the end of the matter for the students of
+politics. It was then a matter for the divinity schools. If the same
+scholastic method is in force there, all that would be needed to crush
+socialism is to show its dogmatic inconsistencies.
+
+The theorist is incompetent when he deals with socialism just because he
+assumes that men are determined by logic and that a false conclusion will
+stop a moving, creative force. Occasionally he recognizes the wilful
+character of politics: then he shakes his head, climbs into an ivory
+tower and deplores the moonshine, the religious manias and the passions
+of the mob. Real life is beyond his control and influence because real
+life is largely agitated by impulses and habits, unconscious needs,
+faith, hope and desire. With all his learning he is ineffective because,
+instead of trying to use the energies of men, he deplores them.
+
+Suppose we recognize that creeds are instruments of the will, how would
+it alter the character of our thinking? Take an ancient quarrel like that
+over determinism. Whatever your philosophy, when you come to the test of
+actual facts you find, I think, all grades of freedom and determinism.
+For certain purposes you believe in free will, for others you do not.
+Thus, as Mr. Chesterton suggests, no determinist is prevented from saying
+"if you please" to the housemaid. In love, in your career, you have no
+doubt that "if" is a reality. But when you are engaged in scientific
+investigation, you try to reduce the spontaneous in life to a minimum.
+Mr. Arnold Bennett puts forth a rather curious hybrid when he advises us
+to treat ourselves as free agents and everyone else as an automaton. On
+the other hand Prof. Muensterberg has always insisted that in social
+relations we must always treat everyone as a purposeful, integrated
+character.
+
+Your doctrine, in short, depends on your purpose: a theory by itself is
+neither moral nor immoral, its value is conditioned by the purpose it
+serves. In any accurate sense theory is to be judged only as an effective
+or ineffective instrument of a desire: the discussion of doctrines is
+technical and not moral. A theory has no intrinsic value: that is why the
+devil can talk theology.
+
+No creed possesses any final sanction. Human beings have desires that are
+far more important than the tools and toys and churches they make to
+satisfy them. It is more penetrating, in my opinion, to ask of a creed
+whether it served than whether it was "true." Try to judge the great
+beliefs that have swayed mankind by their inner logic or their empirical
+solidity and you stand forever, a dull pedant, apart from the interests
+of men. The Christian tradition did not survive because of Aquinas or
+fall before the Higher Criticism, nor will it be revived because someone
+proves the scientific plausibility of its doctrine. What we need to know
+about the Christian epic is the effect it had on men--true or false, they
+have believed in it for nineteen centuries. Where has it helped them,
+where hindered? What needs did it answer? What energies did it transmute?
+And what part of mankind did it neglect? Where did it begin to do
+violence to human nature?
+
+Political creeds must receive the same treatment. The doctrine of the
+"social contract" formulated by Hobbes and made current by Rousseau can
+no longer be accepted as a true account of the origin of society.
+Jean-Jacques is in fact a supreme case--perhaps even a slight
+caricature--of the way in which formal creeds bolster up passionate
+wants. I quote from Prof. Walter's introduction in which he says that
+"The Social Contract _showed to those who were eager to be convinced_
+that no power was legitimate which was guilty of abuses. It is no wonder
+that its author was buried in the Pantheon with pompous procession, that
+the framers of the new Constitution, Thouret and Lieyes and La Fayette,
+did not forget and dared not forget its doctrines, that it was the
+text-book and the delight of Camille Desmoulins and Danton and St. Just,
+that Robespierre read it through once every day." In the perspective of
+history, no one feels that he has said the last word about a philosophy
+like Rousseau's after demonstrating its "untruth." Good or bad, it has
+meant too much for any such easy disposal. What shall we call an idea,
+objectively untrue, but practically of the highest importance?
+
+The thinker who has faced this difficulty most radically is Georges Sorel
+in the "Reflexions sur la Violence." His doctrine of the "social myth"
+has seemed to many commentators one of those silly paradoxes that only a
+revolutionary syndicalist and Frenchman could have put forward. M. Sorel
+is engaged in presenting the General Strike as the decisive battle of the
+class struggle and the core of the socialist movement. Now whatever else
+he may be, M. Sorel is not naive: the sharp criticism of other socialists
+was something he could not peacefully ignore. They told him that the
+General Strike was an idle dream, that it could never take place, that,
+even if it could, the results would not be very significant. Sidney Webb,
+in the customary Fabian fashion, had dismissed the General Strike as a
+sign of socialist immaturity. There is no doubt that M. Sorel felt the
+force of these attacks. But he was not ready to abandon his favorite idea
+because it had been shown to be unreasonable and impossible. Just the
+opposite effect showed itself and he seized the opportunity of turning an
+intellectual defeat into a spiritual triumph. This performance must have
+delighted him to the very bottom of his soul, for he has boasted that his
+task in life is to aid in ruining "le prestige de la culture bourgeoise."
+
+M. Sorel's defence of the General Strike is very startling. He admits
+that it may never take place, that it is not a true picture of the goal
+of the socialist movement. Without a blush he informs us that this
+central gospel of the working class is simply a "myth." The admission
+frightens M. Sorel not at all. "It doesn't matter much," he remarks,
+"whether myths contain details actually destined to realization _in the
+scheme_ of an historical future; they are not astrological almanacks; it
+may even be that nothing of what they express will actually happen--as in
+the case of that catastrophe which the early Christians expected. Are we
+not accustomed in daily life to recognizing that the reality differs very
+greatly from the ideas of it that we made before we acted? Yet that
+doesn't hinder us from making resolutions.... Myths must be judged as
+instruments for acting upon present conditions; all discussion about the
+manner of applying them concretely to the course of history is senseless.
+_The entire myth is what counts...._ There is no use then in reasoning
+about details which might arise in the midst of the class struggle ...
+even though the revolutionists should be deceiving themselves through and
+through in making a fantastic picture of the general strike, this picture
+would still have been a power of the highest order in preparing for
+revolution, so long as it expressed completely all the aspirations of
+socialism and bound together revolutionary ideas with a precision and
+firmness that no other methods of thought could have given."
+
+It may well be imagined that this highly sophisticated doctrine was
+regarded as perverse. All the ordinary prejudices of thought are
+irritated by a thinker who frankly advises masses of his fellow-men to
+hold fast to a belief which by all the canons of common sense is nothing
+but an illusion. M. Sorel must have felt the need of closer statement,
+for in a letter to Daniel Halevy, published in the second edition, he
+makes his position much clearer. "Revolutionary myths ..." we read,
+"enable us to understand the activity, the feelings, and the ideas of a
+populace preparing to enter into a decisive struggle; _they are not
+descriptions of things, but expressions of will_." The italics are mine:
+they set in relief the insight that makes M. Sorel so important to our
+discussion. I do not know whether a quotation torn from its context can
+possibly do justice to its author. I do know that for any real grasp of
+this point it is necessary to read M. Sorel with great sympathy.
+
+One must grant at least that he has made an accurate observation. The
+history of the world is full of great myths which have had the most
+concrete results. M. Sorel cites primitive Christianity, the Reformation,
+the French Revolution and the Mazzini campaign. The men who took part in
+those great social movements summed up their aspiration in pictures of
+decisive battles resulting in the ultimate triumph of their cause. We in
+America might add an example from our own political life. For it is
+Theodore Roosevelt who is actually attempting to make himself and his
+admirers the heroes of a new social myth. Did he not announce from the
+platform at Chicago--"we stand at Armageddon and we battle for the Lord"?
+
+Let no one dismiss M. Sorel then as an empty paradoxer. The myth is not
+one of the outgrown crudities of our pagan ancestors. We, in the midst of
+our science and our rationalism, are still making myths, and their force
+is felt in the actual affairs of life. They convey an impulse, not a
+program, nor a plan of reconstruction. Their practical value cannot be
+ignored, for they embody the motor currents in social life.
+
+Myths are to be judged, as M. Sorel says, by their ability to express
+aspiration. They stand or fall by that. In such a test the Christian
+myth, for example, would be valued for its power of incarnating human
+desire. That it did not do so completely is the cause of its decline.
+From Aucassin to Nietzsche men have resented it as a partial and stunting
+dream. It had too little room for profane love, and only by turning the
+Church of Christ into the Church Militant could the essential Christian
+passivity obtain the assent of aggressive and masculine races. To-day
+traditional Christianity has weakened in the face of man's interest in
+the conquest of this world. The liberal and advanced churches recognize
+this fact by exhibiting a great preoccupation with everyday affairs. Now
+they may be doing important service--I have no wish to deny that--but
+when the Christian Churches turn to civics, to reformism or socialism,
+they are in fact announcing that the Christian dream is dead. They may
+continue to practice some of its moral teachings and hold to some of its
+creed, but the Christian impulse is for them no longer active. A new
+dream, which they reverently call Christian, has sprung from their
+desires.
+
+During their life these social myths contain a nation's finest energy. It
+is just because they are "not descriptions of things, but expressions of
+will" that their influence is so great. Ignore what a man desires and you
+ignore the very source of his power; run against the grain of a nation's
+genius and see where you get with your laws. Robert Burns was right when
+he preferred poetry to charters. The recognition of this truth by Sorel
+is one of the most impressive events in the revolutionary movement.
+Standing as a spokesman of an actual social revolt, he has not lost his
+vision because he understands its function. If Machiavelli is a symbol of
+the political theorist making reason an instrument of purpose, we may
+take Sorel as a self-conscious representative of the impulses which
+generate purpose.
+
+It must not be supposed that respect for the myth is a discovery of
+Sorel's. He is but one of a number of contemporary thinkers who have
+reacted against a very stupid prejudice of nineteenth century science to
+the effect that the mental habits of human beings were not "facts."
+Unless ideas mirrored external nature they were regarded as beneath the
+notice of the scientific mind. But in more recent years we have come to
+realize that, in a world so full of ignorance and mistake, error itself
+is worthy of study. Our untrue ideas are significant because they
+influence our lives enormously. They are "facts" to be investigated. One
+might point to the great illumination that has resulted from Freud's
+analysis of the abracadabra of our dreams. No one can any longer dismiss
+the fantasy because it is logically inconsistent, superficially absurd,
+or objectively untrue. William James might also be cited for his defense
+of those beliefs that are beyond the realm of proof. His essay, "The Will
+to Believe," is a declaration of independence, which says in effect that
+scientific demonstration is not the only test of ideas. He stated the
+case for those beliefs which influence life so deeply, though they fail
+to describe it. James himself was very disconcerting to many scientists
+because he insisted on expressing his aspirations about the universe in
+what his colleague Santayana calls a "romantic cosmology": "I am far from
+wishing to suggest that such a view seems to me more probable than
+conventional idealism or the Christian Orthodoxy. All three are in the
+region of dramatic system-making and myth, to which probabilities are
+irrelevant."
+
+It is impossible to leave this point without quoting Nietzsche, who had
+this insight and stated it most provocatively. In "Beyond Good and Evil"
+Nietzsche says flatly that "the falseness of an opinion is not for us any
+objection to it: it is here, perhaps, that our new language sounds most
+strangely. The question is, how far an opinion is life-furthering,
+life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps species-rearing...." Then he
+comments on the philosophers. "They all pose as though their real
+opinions had been discovered and attained through the self-evolving of a
+cold, pure, divinely indifferent dialectic...; whereas, in fact, a
+prejudiced proposition, idea, or 'suggestion,' which is generally their
+heart's desire abstracted and refined, is defended by them with arguments
+sought out after the event. They are all advocates who do not wish to be
+regarded as such, generally astute defenders, also, of their prejudices,
+which they dub 'truths'--and _very_ far from having the conscience which
+bravely admits this to itself; very far from having the good taste or the
+courage which goes so far as to let this be understood, perhaps to warn
+friend or foe, or in cheerful confidence and self-ridicule.... It has
+gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy up till now has
+consisted of--namely, the confession of its originator, and a species of
+involuntary and unconscious autobiography, and, moreover, that the moral
+(or immoral) purpose in every philosophy has constituted the true vital
+germ out of which the entire plant has always grown.... Whoever considers
+the fundamental impulses of man with a view to determining how far they
+may have acted as _inspiring_ genii (or as demons and cobolds) will find
+that they have all practiced philosophy at one time or another, and that
+each one of them would have been only too glad to look upon itself as the
+ultimate end of existence and the legitimate _lord_ over all the other
+impulses. For every impulse is imperious, and, as _such_, attempts to
+philosophize."
+
+What Nietzsche has done here is, in his swashbuckling fashion, to cut
+under the abstract and final pretensions of creeds. Difficulties arise
+when we try to apply this wisdom in the present. That dogmas _were_
+instruments of human purposes is not so incredible; that they still _are_
+instruments is not so clear to everyone; and that they will be, that they
+should be--this seems a monstrous attack on the citadel of truth. It is
+possible to believe that other men's theories were temporary and merely
+useful; we like to believe that ours will have a greater authority.
+
+It seems like topsy-turvyland to make reason serve the irrational. Yet
+that is just what it has always done, and ought always to do. Many of us
+are ready to grant that in the past men's motives were deeper than their
+intellects: we forgive them with a kind of self-righteousness which says
+that they knew not what they did. But to follow the great tradition of
+human wisdom deliberately, with our eyes open in the manner of Sorel,
+that seems a crazy procedure. A notion of intellectual honor fights
+against it: we think we must aim at final truth, and not allow
+autobiography to creep into speculation.
+
+Now the trouble with such an idol is that autobiography creeps in anyway.
+The more we censor it, the more likely it is to appear disguised, to fool
+us subtly and perhaps dangerously. The men like Nietzsche and James who
+show the wilful origin of creeds are in reality the best watchers of the
+citadel of truth. For there is nothing disastrous in the temporary nature
+of our ideas. They are always that. But there may very easily be a train
+of evil in the self-deception which regards them as final. I think God
+will forgive us our skepticism sooner than our Inquisitions.
+
+From the political point of view, another observation is necessary. The
+creed of a Rousseau, for example, is active in politics, not for what it
+says, but for what people think it says. I have urged that Marx found
+scientific reasons for what he wanted to do. It is important to add that
+the people who adopted his reasons for what they wanted to do were not
+any too respectful of Marx's reasons. Thus the so-called materialistic
+philosophy of Karl Marx is not by any means identical with the theories
+one hears among Marxian socialists. There is a big distortion in the
+transmitting of ideas. A common purpose, far more than common ideas,
+binds Marx to his followers. And when a man comes to write about his
+philosophy he is confronted with a choice: shall the creed described be
+that of Marx or of the Marxians?
+
+For the study of politics I should say unhesitatingly that it is more
+important to know what socialist leaders, stump speakers, pamphleteers,
+think Marx meant, than to know what he said. For then you are dealing
+with living ideas: to search his text has its uses, but compared with the
+actual tradition of Marx it is the work of pedantry. I say this here for
+two reasons--because I hope to avoid the critical attack of the genuine
+Marxian specialist, and because the observation is, I believe, relevant
+to our subject.
+
+Relevant it is in that it suggests the importance of style, of
+propaganda, the popularization of ideas. The host of men who stand
+between a great thinker and the average man are not automatic
+transmitters. They work on the ideas; perhaps that is why a genius
+usually hates his disciples. It is interesting to notice the explanation
+given by Frau Foerster-Nietzsche for her brother's quarrel with Wagner.
+She dates it from the time when Nietzsche, under the guise of Wagnerian
+propaganda, began to expound himself. The critics and interpreters are
+themselves creative. It is really unfair to speak of the Marxian
+philosophy as a political force. It is juster to speak of the Marxian
+tradition.
+
+So when I write of Marx's influence I have in mind what men and women in
+socialist meetings, in daily life here in America, hold as a faith and
+attribute to Marx. There is no pretension whatever to any critical study
+of "Das Kapital" itself. I am thinking rather of stuffy halls in which an
+earnest voice is expounding "the evolution of capitalism," of little
+groups, curious and bewildered, listening in the streets of New York to
+the story of the battle between the "master class" and the "working
+class," of little red pamphlets, of newspapers, and cartoons--awkward,
+badly printed and not very genial, a great stream of spellbinding and
+controversy through which the aspirations of millions are becoming
+articulate:
+
+The tradition is saying that "the system" and not the individual is at
+fault. It describes that system as one in which a small class owns the
+means of production and holds the rest of mankind in bondage. Arts,
+religions, laws, as well as vice and crime and degradation, have their
+source in this central economic condition. If you want to understand our
+life you must see that it is determined by the massing of capital in the
+hands of a few. All epochs are determined by economic arrangements. But a
+system of property always contains within itself "the seeds of its own
+destruction." Mechanical inventions suggest a change: a dispossessed
+class compels it. So mankind has progressed through savagery, chattel
+slavery, serfdom, to "wage slavery" or the capitalism of to-day. This age
+is pregnant with the socialism of to-morrow.
+
+So roughly the tradition is handed on. Two sets of idea seem to dominate
+it: we are creatures of economic conditions; a war of classes is being
+fought everywhere in which the proletariat will ultimately capture the
+industrial machinery and produce a sound economic life as the basis of
+peace and happiness for all. The emphasis on environment is insistent.
+Facts are marshaled, the news of the day is interpreted to show that men
+are determined by economic conditions. This fixation has brought down
+upon the socialists a torrent of abuse in which "atheism" and
+"materialism" are prevailing epithets. But the propaganda continues and
+the philosophy spreads, penetrating reform groups, social workers,
+historians, and sociologists.
+
+It has served the socialist purpose well. To the workingmen it has
+brought home the importance of capturing the control of industry.
+Economic determinism has been an antidote to mere preaching of goodness,
+to hero-worship and political quackery. Socialism to succeed had to
+concentrate attention on the ownership of capital: whenever any other
+interest like religion or patriotism threatened to diffuse that
+attention, socialist leaders have always been ready to show that the
+economic fact is more central. Dignity and prestige were supplied by
+making economics the key of history; passion was chained by building
+paradise upon it.
+
+In all the political philosophies there is none so adapted to its end.
+Every sanction that mankind respects has been grouped about this one
+purpose--the control of capital. It is as if all history converged upon
+the issue, and the workers in the cause feel that they carry within them
+the destiny of the race. Start anywhere, with an orthodox socialist and
+he will lead you to this supreme economic situation. Tyrannies and race
+hatred, national rivalries, sex problems, the difficulties of artistic
+endeavor, all failures, crimes, vices--there is not one which he will not
+relate to private capitalism. Nor is there anything disingenuous about
+this focusing of the attention: a real belief is there. Of course you
+will find plenty of socialists who see other issues and who smile a bit
+at the rigors of economic determinism. In these later days there is in
+fact, a decided loosening in the creed. But it is fair to say that the
+mass of socialists hold this philosophy with as much solemnity as a
+reformer held his when he wrote to me that the cure for obscenity was the
+taxation of land values and absolute free trade.
+
+Singlemindedness has done good service. It has bound the world together
+and has helped men to think socially. Turning their attention away from
+the romanticism of history, the materialistic philosophy has helped them
+to look at realities. It has engendered a fine concern about average
+people, about the voiceless multitudes who have been left to pass
+unnoticed. Not least among the blessings is a shattering of the
+good-and-bad-man theory: the assassination of tyrants or the adoration of
+saviors. A shallow and specious other-worldliness has been driven out: an
+other-worldliness which is really nothing but laziness about this one.
+And if from a speculative angle the Marxian tradition has shaded too
+heavily the economic facts, it was at least a plausible and practical
+exaggeration.
+
+But the drawbacks are becoming more and more evident as socialism
+approaches nearer to power and responsibility. The feeling that man is a
+creature and not a creator is disastrous as a personal creed when you
+come to act. If you insist upon being "determined by conditions" you do
+hesitate about saying "I shall." You are likely to wait for something to
+determine you. Personal initiative and individual genius are poorly
+regarded: many socialists are suspicious of originality. This philosophy,
+so useful in propaganda, is becoming a burden in action. That is another
+way of saying that the instrument has turned into an idol.
+
+For while it is illuminating to see how environment moulds men, it is
+absolutely essential that men regard themselves as moulders of their
+environment. A new philosophical basis is becoming increasingly necessary
+to socialism--one that may not be "truer" than the old materialism but
+that shall simply be more useful. Having learned for a long time what is
+done to us, we are now faced with the task of doing. With this changed
+purpose goes a change of instruments. All over the world socialists are
+breaking away from the stultifying influence of the outworn determinism.
+For the time is at hand when they must cease to look upon socialism as
+inevitable in order to make it so.
+
+Nor will the philosophy of class warfare serve this new need. That can be
+effective only so long as the working-class is without sovereignty. But
+no sooner has it achieved power than a new outlook is needed in order to
+know what to do with it. The tactics of the battlefield are of no use
+when the battle is won.
+
+I picture this philosophy as one of deliberate choices. The underlying
+tone of it is that society is made by man for man's uses, that reforms
+are inventions to be applied when by experiment they show their
+civilizing value. Emphasis is placed upon the devising, adapting,
+constructing faculties. There is no reason to believe that this view is
+any colder than that of the war of class against class. It will generate
+no less energy. Men to-day can feel almost as much zest in the building
+of the Panama Canal as they did in a military victory. Their domineering
+impulses find satisfaction in conquering things, in subjecting brute
+forces to human purposes. This sense of mastery in a winning battle
+against the conditions of our life is, I believe, the social myth that
+will inspire our reconstructions. We shall feel free to choose among
+alternatives--to take this much of socialism, insert so much syndicalism,
+leave standing what of capitalism seems worth conserving. We shall be
+making our own house for our own needs, cities to suit ourselves, and we
+shall believe ourselves capable of moving mountains, as engineers do,
+when mountains stand in their way.
+
+And history, science, philosophy will support our hopes. What will
+fascinate us in the past will be the records of inventions, of great
+choices, of those alternatives on which destiny seems to hang. The
+splendid epochs will be interpreted as monuments of man's creation, not
+of his propulsion. We shall be interested primarily in the way nations
+established their civilization in spite of hostile conditions. Admiration
+will go out to the men who did not submit, who bent things to human use.
+We may see the entire tragedy of life in being driven.
+
+Half-truths and illusions, if you like, but tonic. This view will suit
+our mood. For we shall be making and the makers of history will become
+more real to us. Instead of urging that issues are inevitable, instead of
+being swamped by problems that are unavoidable, we may stand up and
+affirm the issues we propose to handle. Perhaps we shall say with
+Nietzsche:
+
+     "Let the value of everything be determined afresh by you."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE RED HERRING
+
+
+At the beginning of every campaign the newspapers tell about secret
+conferences in which the candidate and his managers decide upon "the line
+of attack." The approach to issues, the way in which they shall be
+stressed, what shall be put forward in one part of the country and what
+in another, are discussed at these meetings. Here is where the real
+program of a party is worked out. The document produced at the convention
+is at its best nothing but a suggestive formality. It is not until the
+speakers and the publicity agents have actually begun to animate it that
+the country sees what the party is about. It is as if the convention
+adopted the Decalogue, while these secret conferences decided which of
+the Commandments was to be made the issue. Almost always, of course, the
+decision is entirely a "practical" one, which means that each section of
+people is exhorted to practice the commandment it likes the most. Thus
+for the burglars is selected, not the eighth tablet, but the one on which
+is recommended a day of rest from labor; to the happily married is
+preached the seventh commandment.
+
+These conferences are decisive. On them depends the educational value of
+a campaign, and the men who participate in them, being in a position to
+state the issues and point them, determine the political interests of the
+people for a considerable period of time. To-day in America, for example,
+no candidate can escape entirely that underlying irritation which
+socialists call poverty and some call the high cost of living. But the
+conspicuous candidates do decide what direction thought shall take about
+this condition. They can center it upon the tariff or the trusts or even
+the currency.
+
+Thus Mr. Roosevelt has always had a remarkable power of diverting the
+country from the tariff to the control of the trusts. His Democratic
+opponents, especially Woodrow Wilson, are, as I write, in the midst of
+the Presidential campaign of 1912, trying to focus attention on the
+tariff. In a way the battle resembles a tug-of-war in which each of the
+two leading candidates is trying to pull the nation over to his favorite
+issue. On the side you can see the Prohibitionists endeavoring to make
+the country see drink as a central problem; the emerging socialists
+insisting that not the tariff, or liquor, or the control of trusts, but
+the ownership of capital should be the heart of the discussion. Electoral
+campaigns do not resemble debates so much as they do competing amusement
+shows where, with bright lights, gaudy posters and persuasive, insistent
+voices, each booth is trying to collect a crowd; The victory in a
+campaign is far more likely to go to the most plausible diagnosis than to
+the most convincing method of cure. Once a party can induce the country
+to see its issue as supreme the greater part of its task is done.
+
+The clever choice of issues influences all politics from the petty
+manoeuvers of a ward leader to the most brilliant creative
+statesmanship. I remember an instance that happened at the beginning of
+the first socialist administration in Schenectady: The officials had out
+of the goodness of their hearts suspended a city ordinance which forbade
+coasting with bob-sleds on the hills of the city. A few days later one of
+the sleds ran into a wagon and a little girl was killed. The opposition
+papers put the accident into scareheads with the result that public
+opinion became very bitter. It looked like a bad crisis at the very
+beginning and the old ring politicians made the most of it. But they had
+reckoned without the political shrewdness of the socialists. For in the
+second day of excitement, the mayor made public a plan by which the main
+business street of the town was to be lighted with high-power lamps and
+turned into a "brilliant white way of Schenectady." The swiftness with
+which the papers displaced the gruesome details of the little girl's
+death by exultation over the business future of the city was a caution.
+Public attention was shifted and a political crisis avoided. I tell this
+story simply as a suggestive fact. The ethical considerations do not
+concern us here.
+
+There is nothing exceptional about the case. Whenever governments enter
+upon foreign invasions in order to avoid civil wars, the same trick is
+practiced. In the Southern States the race issue has been thrust forward
+persistently to prevent an economic alignment. Thus you hear from
+Southerners that unless socialism gives up its demand for racial
+equality, the propaganda cannot go forward. How often in great strikes
+have riots been started in order to prevent the public from listening to
+the workers' demands! It is an old story--the red herring dragged across
+the path in order to destroy the scent.
+
+Having seen the evil results we have come to detest a conscious choice of
+issues, to feel that it smacks of sinister plotting. The vile practice of
+yellow newspapers and chauvinistic politicians is almost the only
+experience of it we have. Religion, patriotism, race, and sex are the
+favorite red herrings of foul political method--they are the most
+successful because they explode so easily and flood the mind with those
+unconscious prejudices which make critical thinking difficult. Yet for
+all its abuse the deliberate choice of issues is one of the high
+selective arts of the statesman. In the debased form we know it there is
+little encouragement. But the devil is merely a fallen angel, and when
+God lost Satan he lost one of his best lieutenants. It is always a pretty
+good working rule that whatever is a great power of evil may become a
+great power for good. Certainly nothing so effective in the art of
+politics can be left out of the equipment of the statesman.
+
+Looked at closely, the deliberate making of issues is very nearly the
+core of the statesman's task. His greatest wisdom is required to select a
+policy that will fertilize the public mind. He fails when the issue he
+sets is sterile; he is incompetent if the issue does not lead to the
+human center of a problem; whenever the statesman allows the voters to
+trifle with taboos and by-products, to wander into blind alleys like "16
+to 1," his leadership is a public calamity. The newspaper or politician
+which tries to make an issue out of a supposed "prosperity" or out of
+admiration for the mere successes of our ancestors is doing its best to
+choke off the creative energies in politics. All the stultification of
+the stand-pat mind may be described as inability, and perhaps
+unwillingness, to nourish a fruitful choice of issues.
+
+That choice is altogether too limited in America, anyway. Political
+discussion, whether reactionary or radical, is monotonously confined to
+very few issues. It is as if social life were prevented from irrigating
+political thought. A subject like the tariff, for example, has absorbed
+an amount of attention which would justify an historian in calling it the
+incubus of American politics. Now the exaltation of one issue like that
+is obviously out of all proportion to its significance. A contributory
+factor it certainly is, but the country's destiny is not bound up finally
+with its solution. The everlasting reiterations about the tariff take up
+altogether too much time. To any government that was clear about values,
+that saw all problems in their relation to human life, the tariff would
+be an incident, a mechanical device and little else. High protectionist
+and free trader alike fall under the indictment--for a tariff wall is
+neither so high as heaven nor so broad as the earth. It may be necessary
+to have dykes on portions of the seashore; they may be superfluous
+elsewhere. But to concentrate nine-tenths of your attention on the
+subject of dykes is to forget the civilization they are supposed to
+protect. A wall is a wall: the presence of it will not do the work of
+civilization--the absence of it does not absolve anyone from the tasks of
+social life. That a statecraft might deal with the tariff as an aid to
+its purposes is evident. But anyone who makes the tariff the principal
+concern of statecraft is, I believe, mistaking the hedge for the house.
+
+The tariff controversy is almost as old as the nation. A more recent one
+is what Senator La Follette calls "The great issue before the American
+people to-day, ... the control of their own government." It has taken the
+form of an attack on corruption, on what is vaguely called "special
+privilege" and of a demand for a certain amount of political machinery
+such as direct primaries, the initiative, referendum, and recall. The
+agitation has a curious sterility: the people are exhorted to control
+their own government, but they are given very little advice as to what
+they are to do with it when they control it. Of course, the leaders who
+spend so much time demanding these mechanical changes undoubtedly see
+them as a safeguard against corrupt politicians and what Roosevelt calls
+"their respectable allies and figureheads, who have ruled and legislated
+and decided as if in some way the vested rights of privilege had a first
+mortgage on the whole United States." But look at the _way_ these
+innovations are presented and I think the feeling is unavoidable that the
+control of government is emphasized as an end in itself. Now an
+observation of this kind is immediately open to dispute: it is not a
+clear-cut distinction but a rather subtle matter of stress--an impression
+rather than a definite conviction.
+
+Yet when you look at the career of Judge Lindsey in Denver the impression
+is sharpened by contrast. What gave his exposure of corruption a peculiar
+vitality was that it rested on a very positive human ideal: the happiness
+of children in a big city. Lindsey's attack on vice and financial jobbery
+was perhaps the most convincing piece of muckraking ever done in this
+country for the very reason that it sprang from a concern about real
+human beings instead of abstractions about democracy or righteousness.
+From the point of view of the political hack, Judge Lindsey made a most
+distressing use of the red herring. He brought the happiness of childhood
+into political discussion, and this opened up a new source of political
+power. By touching something deeply instinctive in millions of people,
+Judge Lindsey animated dull proposals with human interest. The
+pettifogging objections to some social plan had very little chance of
+survival owing to the dynamic power of the reformers. It was an excellent
+example of the creative results that come from centering a political
+problem on human nature.
+
+If you move only from legality to legality, you halt and hesitate, each
+step is a monstrous task. If the reformer is a pure opportunist, and lays
+out only "the next step," that step will be very difficult. But if he
+aims at some real human end, at the genuine concerns of men, women, and
+children, if he can make the democracy see and feel that end, the little
+mechanical devices of suffrage and primaries and tariffs will be dealt
+with as a craftsman deals with his tools. But to say that we must make
+tools first, and then begin, is to invert the process of life. Men did
+not agree to refrain from travel until a railroad was built. To make the
+manufacture of instruments an ideal is to lose much of their ideal value.
+A nation bent upon a policy of social invention would make its tools an
+incident. But just this perception is lacking in many propagandists. That
+is why their issues are so sterile; that is why the absorption in "next
+steps" is a diversion from statesmanship.
+
+The narrowness of American political issues is a fixation upon
+instruments. Tradition has centered upon the tariff, the trusts, the
+currency, and electoral machinery as the items of consideration. It is
+the failure to go behind them--to see them as the pale servants of a
+vivid social life--that keeps our politics in bondage to a few problems.
+It is a common experience repeated in you and me. Once our profession
+becomes all absorbing it hardens into pedantry. "A human being," says
+Wells, "who is a philosopher in the first place, a teacher in the first
+place, or a statesman in the first place is thereby and inevitably,
+though he bring God-like gifts to the pretense--a quack."
+
+Reformers particularly resent the enlargement of political issues. I have
+heard socialists denounce other socialists for occupying themselves with
+the problems of sex. The claim was that these questions should be put
+aside so as not to disturb the immediate program. The socialists knew
+from experience that sex views cut across economic ones--that a new
+interest breaks up the alignment. Woodrow Wilson expressed this same fear
+in his views on the liquor question: after declaring for local option he
+went on to say that "the questions involved are social and moral and are
+not susceptible of being made part of a party program. Whenever they have
+been made the subject matter of party contests they have cut the lines of
+party organization and party action athwart, to the utter confusion of
+political action in every other field.... I do not believe party programs
+of the highest consequence to the political life of the State and of the
+nation ought to be thrust on one side and hopelessly embarrassed for long
+periods together by making a political issue of a great question which is
+essentially non-political, non-partisan, moral and social in its nature."
+
+That statement was issued at the beginning of a campaign in which Woodrow
+Wilson was the nominee of a party that has always been closely associated
+with the liquor interests. The bogey of the saloon had presented itself
+early: it was very clear that an affirmative position by the candidate
+was sure to alienate either the temperance or the "liquor vote." No doubt
+a sense of this dilemma is partly responsible for Wilson's earnest plea
+that the question of liquor be left out of the campaign. He saw the
+confusion and embarrassment he speaks of as an immediate danger. Like his
+views on immigration and Chinese labor it was a red herring across his
+path. It would, if brought into prominence, cut the lines of party action
+athwart.
+
+His theoretical grounds for ignoring the question in politics are very
+interesting just because they are vitalized by this practical difficulty
+which he faced. Like all party men Woodrow Wilson had thrust upon him
+here a danger that haunts every political program. The more issues a
+party meets the less votes it is likely to poll. And for a very simple
+reason: you cannot keep the citizenship of a nation like this bound in
+its allegiance to two large parties unless you make the grounds of
+allegiance very simple and very obvious. If you are to hold five or six
+million voters enlisted under one emblem the less specific you are and
+the fewer issues you raise the more probable it is that you can stop this
+host from quarreling within the ranks.
+
+No doubt this is a partial explanation of the bareness of American
+politics. The two big parties have had to preserve a superficial
+homogeneity; and a platitude is more potent than an issue. The minor
+parties--Populist, Prohibition, Independence League and Socialist--have
+shown a much greater willingness to face new problems. Their view of
+national policy has always been more inclusive, perhaps for the very
+reason that their membership is so much more exclusive. But if anyone
+wishes a smashing illustration of this paradox let him consider the rapid
+progress of Roosevelt's philosophy in the very short time between the
+Republican Convention in June to the Progressive Convention in August,
+1912. As soon as Roosevelt had thrown off the burden of preserving a
+false harmony among irreconcilable Republicans, he issued a platform full
+of definiteness and square dealing with many issues. He was talking to a
+minority party. But Roosevelt's genius is not that of group leadership.
+He longs for majorities. He set out to make the campaign a battle between
+the Progressives and the Democrats--the old discredited Republicans fell
+back into a rather dead conservative minority. No sooner did Roosevelt
+take the stump than the paradox loomed up before him. His speeches began
+to turn on platitudes--on the vague idealism and indisputable moralities
+of the Decalogue and the Sermon on the Mount. The fearlessness of the
+Chicago confession was melted down into a featureless alloy.
+
+The embarrassment from the liquor question which Woodrow Wilson feared
+does not arise because teetotaler and drunkard both become intoxicated
+when they discuss the saloon. It would come just as much from a radical
+program of land taxation, factory reform, or trust control. Let anyone of
+these issues be injected into his campaign and the lines of party action
+would be cut "athwart." For Woodrow Wilson was dealing with the
+inevitable embarrassment of a party system dependent on an inexpressive
+homogeneity. The grouping of the voters into two large herds costs a
+large price: it means that issues must be so simplified and selected that
+the real demands of the nation rise only now and then to the level of
+political discussion. The more people a party contains the less it
+expresses their needs.
+
+Woodrow Wilson's diagnosis of the red herring in politics is obviously
+correct. A new issue does embarrass a wholesale organization of the
+voters. His desire to avoid it in the midst of a campaign is
+understandable. His urgent plea that the liquor question be kept a local
+issue may be wise. But the general philosophy which says that the party
+system should not be cut athwart is at least open to serious dispute.
+Instead of an evil, it looks to me like progress towards greater
+responsiveness of parties to popular need. It is good to disturb
+alignments: to break up a superficial unanimity. The masses of people
+held together under the name Democratic are bound in an enervating
+communion. The real groups dare not speak their convictions for fear the
+crust will break. It is as if you had thrown a large sheet over a mass of
+men and made them anonymous.
+
+The man who raises new issues has always been distasteful to politicians.
+He musses up what had been so tidily arranged. I remember once speaking
+to a local boss about woman suffrage. His objections were very simple:
+"We've got the organization in fine shape now--we know where every voter
+in the district stands. But you let all the women vote and we'll be
+confused as the devil. It'll be an awful job keeping track of them." He
+felt what many a manufacturer feels when somebody has the impertinence to
+invent a process which disturbs the routine of business.
+
+Hard as it is upon the immediate plans of the politician, it is a
+national blessing when the lines of party action are cut athwart by new
+issues. I recognize that the red herring is more often frivolous and
+personal--a matter of misrepresentation and spite--than an honest attempt
+to enlarge the scope of politics. However, a fine thing must not be
+deplored because it is open to vicious caricature. To the party worker
+the petty and the honest issue are equally disturbing. The break-up of
+the parties into expressive groups would be a ventilation of our national
+life. No use to cry peace when there is no peace. The false bonds are
+best broken: with their collapse would come a release of social energy
+into political discussion. For every country is a mass of minorities
+which should find a voice in public affairs. Any device like proportional
+representation and preferential voting which facilitates the political
+expression of group interests is worth having. The objection that popular
+government cannot be conducted without the two party system is, I
+believe, refuted by the experience of Europe. If I had to choose between
+a Congressional caucus and a coalition ministry, I should not have to
+hesitate very long. But no one need go abroad for actual experience: in
+the United States Senate during the Taft administration there were really
+three parties--Republicans, Insurgents and Democrats. Public business
+went ahead with at least as much effectiveness as under the old Aldrich
+ring.
+
+There are deeper reasons for urging a break-up of herd-politics. It is
+not only desirable that groups should be able to contribute to public
+discussion: it is absolutely essential if the parliamentary method is not
+to be superseded by direct and violent action. The two party system
+chokes off the cry of a minority--perhaps the best way there is of
+precipitating an explosion. An Englishman once told me that the utter
+freedom of speech in Hyde Park was the best safeguard England had against
+the doctrines that were propounded there. An anarchist who was invited to
+address Congress would be a mild person compared to the man forbidden to
+speak in the streets of San Diego. For many a bomb has exploded into
+rhetoric.
+
+The rigidity of the two-party system is, I believe, disastrous: it
+ignores issues without settling them, dulls and wastes the energies of
+active groups, and chokes off the protests which should find a civilized
+expression in public life. A recognition of what an incubus it is should
+make us hospitable to all those devices which aim at making politics
+responsive by disturbing the alignments of habit. The initiative and
+referendum will help: they are a method of voting on definite issues
+instead of electing an administration in bulk. If cleverly handled these
+electoral devices should act as a check on a wholesale attitude toward
+politics. Men could agree on a candidate and disagree on a measure.
+Another device is the separation of municipal, state and national
+elections: to hold them all at the same time is an inducement to prevent
+the voter from splitting his allegiance. Proportional representation and
+preferential voting I have mentioned. The short ballot is a psychological
+principle which must be taken into account wherever there is voting: it
+will help the differentiation of political groups by concentrating the
+attention on essential choices. The recall of public officials is in part
+a policeman's club, in part a clumsy way of getting around the American
+prejudice for a fixed term of office. That rigidity which by the mere
+movement of the calendar throws an official out of office in the midst of
+his work or compels him to go campaigning is merely the crude method of a
+democracy without confidence in itself. The recall is a half-hearted and
+negative way of dealing with this difficulty. It does enable us to rid
+ourselves of an officer we don't like instead of having to wait until the
+earth has revolved to a certain place about the sun. But we still have to
+vote on a fixed date whether we have anything to vote upon or not. If a
+recall election is held when the people petition for it, why not all
+elections?
+
+In ways like these we shall go on inventing methods by which the
+fictitious party alignments can be dissolved. There is one device
+suggested now and then, tried, I believe, in a few places, and vaguely
+championed by some socialists. It is called in German an
+"Interessenvertrag"--a political representation by trade interests as
+well as by geographical districts. Perhaps this is the direction towards
+which the bi-cameral legislature will develop. One chamber would then
+represent a man's sectional interests as a consumer: the other his
+professional interests as a producer. The railway workers, the miners,
+the doctors, the teachers, the retail merchants would have direct
+representation in the "Interessenvertrag." You might call it a Chamber of
+Special Interests. I know how that phrase "Special Interests" hurts. In
+popular usage we apply it only to corrupting businesses. But our feeling
+against them should not blind us to the fact that every group in the
+community has its special interests. They will always exist until mankind
+becomes a homogeneous jelly. The problem is to find some social
+adjustment for all the special interests of a nation. That is best
+achieved by open recognition and clear representation. Let no one then
+confuse the "Interessenvertrag" with those existing legislatures which
+are secret Chambers of Special Privilege.
+
+The scheme is worth looking at for it does do away with the present
+dilemma of the citizen in which he wonders helplessly whether he ought to
+vote as a consumer or as a producer. I believe he should have both votes,
+and the "Interessenvertrag" is a way.
+
+These devices are mentioned here as illustrations and not as conclusions.
+You can think of them as arrangements by which the red herring is turned
+from a pest into a benefit. I grant that in the rigid political
+conditions prevailing to-day a new issue is an embarrassment, perhaps a
+hindrance to the procedure of political life. But instead of narrowing
+the scope of politics, to avoid it, the only sensible thing to do is to
+invent methods which will allow needs and problems and group interests
+avenues into politics.
+
+But a suggestion like this is sure to be met with the argument which
+Woodrow Wilson has in mind when he says that the "questions involved are
+social and moral and are not susceptible of being made parts of a party
+program." He voices a common belief when he insists that there are moral
+and social problems, "essentially non-political." Innocent as it looks at
+first sight this plea by Woodrow Wilson is weighted with the tradition of
+a century and a half. To my mind it symbolizes a view of the state which
+we are outgrowing, and throws into relief the view towards which we are
+struggling. Its implications are well worth tracing, for through them I
+think we can come to understand better the method of Twentieth Century
+politics.
+
+It is perfectly true that that government is best which governs least. It
+is equally true that that government is best which provides most. The
+first truth belongs to the Eighteenth Century: the second to the
+Twentieth. Neither of them can be neglected in our attitude towards the
+state. Without the Jeffersonian distrust of the police we might easily
+grow into an impertinent and tyrannous collectivism: without a vivid
+sense of the possibilities of the state we abandon the supreme instrument
+of civilization. The two theories need to be held together, yet clearly
+distinguished.
+
+Government has been an exalted policeman: it was there to guard property
+and to prevent us from quarreling too violently. That was about all it
+was good for. Yet society found problems on its hands--problems which
+Woodrow Wilson calls moral and social in their nature. Vice and crime,
+disease, and grinding poverty forced themselves on the attention of the
+community. A typical example is the way the social evil compelled the
+city of Chicago to begin an investigation. Yet when government was asked
+to handle the question it had for wisdom an ancient conception of itself
+as a policeman. Its only method was to forbid, to prosecute, to jail--in
+short, to use the taboo. But experience has shown that the taboo will not
+solve "moral and social questions"--that nine times out of ten it
+aggravates the disease. Political action becomes a petty, futile, mean
+little intrusion when its only method is prosecution.
+
+No wonder then that conservatively-minded men pray that moral and social
+questions be kept out of politics; no wonder that more daring souls begin
+to hate the whole idea of government and take to anarchism. So long as
+the state is conceived merely as an agent of repression, the less it
+interferes with our lives, the better. Much of the horror of socialism
+comes from a belief that by increasing the functions of government its
+regulating power over our daily lives will grow into a tyranny. I share
+this horror when certain socialists begin to propound their schemes.
+There is a dreadful amount of forcible scrubbing and arranging and
+pocketing implied in some socialisms. There is a wish to have the state
+use its position as general employer to become a censor of morals and
+arbiter of elegance, like the benevolent employers of the day who take an
+impertinent interest in the private lives of their workers. Without any
+doubt socialism has within it the germs of that great bureaucratic
+tyranny which Chesterton and Belloc have named the Servile State.
+
+So it is a wise instinct that makes men jealous of the policeman's power.
+Far better we may say that moral and social problems be left to private
+solution than that they be subjected to the clumsy method of the taboo.
+When Woodrow Wilson argues that social problems are not susceptible to
+treatment in a party program, he must mean only one thing: that they
+cannot be handled by the state as he conceives it. He is right. His
+attitude is far better than that of the Vice Commission: it too had only
+a policeman's view of government, but it proceeded to apply it to
+problems that are not susceptible to such treatment. Wilson, at least,
+knows the limitations of his philosophy.
+
+But once you see the state as a provider of civilizing opportunities, his
+whole objection collapses. As soon as government begins to supply
+services, it is turning away from the sterile tyranny of the taboo. The
+provision of schools, streets, plumbing, highways, libraries, parks,
+universities, medical attention, post-offices, a Panama Canal,
+agricultural information, fire protection--is a use of government totally
+different from the ideal of Jefferson. To furnish these opportunities is
+to add to the resources of life, and only a doctrinaire adherence to a
+misunderstood ideal will raise any objection to them.
+
+When an anarchist says that the state must be abolished he does not mean
+what he says. What he wants to abolish is the repressive, not the
+productive state. He cannot possibly object to being furnished with the
+opportunity of writing to his comrade three thousand miles away, of
+drinking pure water, or taking a walk in the park. Of course when he
+finds the post-office opening his mail, or a law saying that he must
+drink nothing but water, he begins to object even to the services of the
+government. But that is a confusion of thought, for these tyrannies are
+merely intrusions of the eighteenth century upon the twentieth. The
+postmaster is still something of a policeman.
+
+Once you realize that moral and social problems must be treated to fine
+opportunities, that the method of the future is to compete with the devil
+rather than to curse him; that the furnishing of civilized environments
+is the goal of statecraft, then there is no longer any reason for keeping
+social and moral questions out of politics. They are what politics must
+deal with essentially, now that it has found a way. The policeman with
+his taboo did make moral and social questions insusceptible to treatment
+in party platforms. He kept the issues of politics narrow and irrelevant,
+and just because these really interesting questions could not be handled,
+politics was an over-advertised hubbub. But the vision of the new
+statecraft in centering politics upon human interests becomes a creator
+of opportunities instead of a censor of morals, and deserves a fresh and
+heightened regard.
+
+The party platform will grow ever more and more into a program of
+services. In the past it has been an armory of platitudes or a forecast
+of punishments. It promised that it would stop this evil practice, drive
+out corruption here, and prosecute this-and-that offense. All that
+belongs to a moribund tradition. Abuse and disuse characterize the older
+view of the state: guardian and censor it has been, provider but
+grudgingly. The proclamations of so-called progressives that they will
+jail financiers, or "wage relentless warfare" upon social evils, are
+simply the reiterations of men who do not understand the uses of the
+state.
+
+A political revolution is in progress: the state as policeman is giving
+place to the state as producer.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+REVOLUTION AND CULTURE
+
+
+There is a legend of a peasant who lived near Paris through the whole
+Napoleonic era without ever having heard of the name of Bonaparte. A
+story of that kind is enough to make a man hesitate before he indulges in
+a flamboyant description of social changes. That peasant is more than a
+symbol of the privacy of human interest: he is a warning against the
+incurable romanticism which clings about the idea of a revolution.
+Popular history is deceptive if it is used to furnish a picture for
+coming events. Like drama which compresses the tragedy of a lifetime into
+a unity of time, place, and action, history foreshortens an epoch into an
+episode. It gains in poignancy, but loses reality. Men grew from infancy
+to old age, their children's children had married and loved and worked
+while the social change we speak of as the industrial revolution was
+being consummated. That is why it is so difficult for living people to
+believe that they too are in the midst of great transformations. What
+looks to us like an incredible rush of events sloping towards a great
+historical crisis was to our ancestors little else than the occasional
+punctuation of daily life with an exciting incident. Even to-day when we
+have begun to speak of our age as a transition, there are millions of
+people who live in an undisturbed routine. Even those of us who regard
+ourselves as active in mothering the process and alert in detecting its
+growth are by no means constantly aware of any great change. For even the
+fondest mother cannot watch her child grow.
+
+I remember how tremendously surprised I was in visiting Russia several
+years ago to find that in Moscow or St. Petersburg men were interested in
+all sorts of things besides the revolution. I had expected every Russian
+to be absorbed in the struggle. It seemed at first as if my notions of
+what a revolution ought to be were contradicted everywhere. And I assure
+you it wrenched the imagination to see tidy nursemaids wheeling
+perambulators and children playing diavolo on the very square where
+Bloody Sunday had gone into history. It takes a long perspective and no
+very vivid acquaintance with revolution to be melodramatic about it. So
+much is left out of history and biography which would spoil the effect.
+The anti-climax is almost always omitted.
+
+Perhaps that is the reason why Arnold Bennett's description of the siege
+of Paris in "The Old Wives' Tale" is so disconcerting to many people. It
+is hard to believe that daily life continues with its stretches of
+boredom and its personal interests even while the enemy is bombarding a
+city. How much more difficult is it to imagine a revolution that is to
+come--to space it properly through a long period of time, to conceive
+what it will be like to the people who live through it. Almost all social
+prediction is catastrophic and absurdly simplified. Even those who talk
+of the slow "evolution" of society are likely to think of it as a series
+of definite changes easily marked and well known to everybody. It is what
+Bernard Shaw calls the reformer's habit of mistaking his private emotions
+for a public movement.
+
+Even though the next century is full of dramatic episodes--the collapse
+of governments and labor wars--these events will be to the social
+revolution what the smashing of machines in Lancashire was to the
+industrial revolution. The reality that is worthy of attention is a
+change in the very texture and quality of millions of lives--a change
+that will be vividly perceptible only in the retrospect of history.
+
+The conservative often has a sharp sense of the complexity of revolution:
+not desiring change, he prefers to emphasize its difficulties, whereas
+the reformer is enticed into a faith that the intensity of desire is a
+measure of its social effect. Yet just because no reform is in itself a
+revolution, we must not jump to the assurance that no revolution can be
+accomplished. True as it is that great changes are imperceptible, it is
+no less true that they are constantly taking place. Moreover, for the
+very reason that human life changes its quality so slowly, the panic over
+political proposals is childish.
+
+It is obvious, for instance, that the recall of judges will not
+revolutionize the national life. That is why the opposition generated
+will seem superstitious to the next generation. As I write, a convention
+of the Populist Party has just taken place. Eight delegates attended the
+meeting, which was held in a parlor. Even the reactionary press speaks in
+a kindly way about these men. Twenty years ago the Populists were hated
+and feared as if they practiced black magic. What they wanted is on the
+point of realization. To some of us it looks like a drop in the bucket--a
+slight part of vastly greater plans. But how stupid was the fear of
+Populism, what unimaginative nonsense it was to suppose twenty years ago
+that the program was the road to the end of the world.
+
+One good deed or one bad one is no measure of a man's character: the Last
+Judgment let us hope will be no series of decisions as simple as that.
+"The soul survives its adventures," says Chesterton with a splendid sense
+of justice. A country survives its legislation. That truth should not
+comfort the conservative nor depress the radical. For it means that
+public policy can enlarge its scope and increase its audacity, can try
+big experiments without trembling too much over the result. This nation
+could enter upon the most radical experiments and could afford to fail in
+them. Mistakes do not affect us so deeply as we imagine. Our prophecies
+of change are subjective wishes or fears that never come to full
+realization.
+
+Those socialists are confused who think that a new era can begin by a
+general strike or an electoral victory. Their critics are just a bit more
+confused when they become hysterical over the prospect. Both of them
+over-emphasize the importance of single events. Yet I do not wish to
+furnish the impression that crises are negligible. They are extremely
+important as symptoms, as milestones, and as instruments. It is simply
+that the reality of a revolution is not in a political decree or the
+scarehead of a newspaper, but in the experiences, feelings, habits of
+myriads of men.
+
+No one who watched the textile strike at Lawrence, Massachusetts, in the
+winter of 1912 can forget the astounding effect it had on the complacency
+of the public. Very little was revealed that any well-informed social
+worker does not know as a commonplace about the mill population. The
+wretchedness and brutality of Lawrence conditions had been described in
+books and magazines and speeches until radicals had begun to wonder at
+times whether the power of language wasn't exhausted. The response was
+discouragingly weak--an occasional government investigation, an
+impassioned protest from a few individuals, a placid charity, were about
+all that the middle-class public had to say about factory life. The
+cynical indifference of legislatures and the hypocrisy of the dominant
+parties were all that politics had to offer. The Lawrence strike touched
+the most impervious: story after story came to our ears of hardened
+reporters who suddenly refused to misrepresent the strikers, of
+politicians aroused to action, of social workers become revolutionary.
+Daily conversation was shocked into some contact with realities--the
+newspapers actually printed facts about the situation of a working class
+population.
+
+And why? The reason is not far to seek. The Lawrence strikers did
+something more than insist upon their wrongs; they showed a disposition
+to right them. That is what scared public opinion into some kind of
+truth-telling. So long as the poor are docile in their poverty, the rest
+of us are only too willing to satisfy our consciences by pitying them.
+But when the downtrodden gather into a threat as they did at Lawrence,
+when they show that they have no stake in civilization and consequently
+no respect for its institutions, when the object of pity becomes the
+avenger of its own miseries, then the middle-class public begins to look
+at the problem more intelligently.
+
+We are not civilized enough to meet an issue before it becomes acute. We
+were not intelligent enough to free the slaves peacefully--we are not
+intelligent enough to-day to meet the industrial problem before it
+develops a crisis. That is the hard truth of the matter. And that is why
+no honest student of politics can plead that social movements should
+confine themselves to argument and debate, abandoning the militancy of
+the strike, the insurrection, the strategy of social conflict.
+
+Those who deplore the use of force in the labor struggle should ask
+themselves whether the ruling classes of a country could be depended upon
+to inaugurate a program of reconstruction which would abolish the
+barbarism that prevails in industry. Does anyone seriously believe that
+the business leaders, the makers of opinion and the politicians will, on
+their own initiative, bring social questions to a solution? If they do it
+will be for the first time in history. The trivial plans they are
+introducing to-day--profit-sharing and welfare work--are on their own
+admission an attempt to quiet the unrest and ward off the menace of
+socialism.
+
+No, paternalism is not dependable, granting that it is desirable. It will
+do very little more than it feels compelled to do. Those who to-day bear
+the brunt of our evils dare not throw themselves upon the mercy of their
+masters, not though there are bread and circuses as a reward. From the
+groups upon whom the pressure is most direct must come the power to deal
+with it. We are not all immediately interested in all problems: our
+attention wanders unless the people who are interested compel us to
+listen.
+
+Social movements are at once the symptoms and the instruments of
+progress. Ignore them and statesmanship is irrelevant; fail to use them
+and it is weak. Often in the course of these essays I have quoted from H.
+G. Wells. I must do so again: "Every party stands essentially for the
+interests and mental usages of some definite class or group of classes in
+the exciting community, and every party has its scientific minded and
+constructive leading section, with well defined hinterlands formulating
+its social functions in a public spirited form, and its
+superficial-minded following confessing its meannesses and vanities and
+prejudices. No class will abolish itself, materially alter its way of
+living, or drastically reconstruct itself, albeit no class is indisposed
+to co-operate in the unlimited socialization of any other class. In that
+capacity for aggression upon other classes lies the essential driving
+force of modern affairs."
+
+The truth of this can be tested in the socialist movement. There is a
+section among the socialists which regards the class movement of labor as
+a driving force in the socialization of industry. This group sees clearly
+that without the threat of aggression no settlement of the issues is
+possible. Ordinarily such socialists say that the class struggle is a
+movement which will end classes. They mean that the self-interest of
+labor is identical with the interests of a community--that it is a kind
+of social selfishness. But there are other socialists who speak
+constantly of "working-class government" and they mean just what they
+say. It is their intention to have the community ruled in the interests
+of labor. Probe their minds to find out what they mean by labor and in
+all honesty you cannot escape the admission that they mean industrial
+labor alone. These socialists think entirely in terms of the factory
+population of cities: the farmers, the small shop-keepers, the
+professional classes have only a perfunctory interest for them. I know
+that no end of phrases could be adduced to show the inclusiveness of the
+word labor. But their intention is what I have tried to describe: they
+are thinking of government by a factory population.
+
+They appeal to history for confirmation: have not all social changes,
+they ask, meant the emergence of a new economic class until it dominated
+society? Did not the French Revolution mean the conquest of the feudal
+landlord by the middle-class merchant? Why should not the Social
+Revolution mean the victory of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie? That
+may be true, but it is no reason for being bullied by it into a tame
+admission that what has always been must always be. I see no reason for
+exalting the unconscious failures of other revolutions into deliberate
+models for the next one. Just because the capacity of aggression in the
+middle class ran away with things, and failed to fuse into any decent
+social ideal, is not ground for trying as earnestly as possible to repeat
+the mistake.
+
+The lesson of it all, it seems to me, is this: that class interests are
+the driving forces which keep public life centered upon essentials. They
+become dangerous to a nation when it denies them, thwarts them and
+represses them so long that they burst out and become dominant. Then
+there is no limit to their aggression until another class appears with
+contrary interests. The situation might be compared to those hysterias in
+which a suppressed impulse flares up and rules the whole mental life.
+
+Social life has nothing whatever to fear from group interests so long as
+it doesn't try to play the ostrich in regard to them. So the burden of
+national crises is squarely upon the dominant classes who fight so
+foolishly against the emergent ones. That is what precipitates violence,
+that is what renders social co-operation impossible, that is what makes
+catastrophes the method of change.
+
+The wisest rulers see this. They know that the responsibility for
+insurrections rests in the last analysis upon the unimaginative greed and
+endless stupidity of the dominant classes. There is something pathetic in
+the blindness of powerful people when they face a social crisis. Fighting
+viciously every readjustment which a nation demands, they make their own
+overthrow inevitable. It is they who turn opposing interests into a class
+war. Confronted with the deep insurgency of labor what do capitalists and
+their spokesmen do? They resist every demand, submit only after a
+struggle, and prepare a condition of war to the death. When far-sighted
+men appear in the ruling classes--men who recognize the need of a
+civilized answer to this increasing restlessness, the rich and the
+powerful treat them to a scorn and a hatred that are incredibly bitter.
+The hostility against men like Roosevelt, La Follette, Bryan,
+Lloyd-George is enough to make an observer believe that the rich of
+to-day are as stupid as the nobles of France before the Revolution.
+
+It seems to me that Roosevelt never spoke more wisely or as a better
+friend of civilization than the time when he said at New York City on
+March 20, 1912, that "the woes of France for a century and a quarter have
+been due to the folly of her people in splitting into the two camps of
+unreasonable conservatism and unreasonable radicalism. Had
+pre-Revolutionary France listened to men like Turgot and backed them up
+all would have gone well. But the beneficiaries of privilege, the Bourbon
+reactionaries, the short-sighted ultra-conservatives, turned down Turgot;
+and then found that instead of him they had obtained Robespierre. They
+gained twenty years' freedom from all restraint and reform at the cost of
+the whirlwind of the red terror; and in their turn the unbridled
+extremists of the terror induced a blind reaction; and so, with
+convulsion and oscillation from one extreme to another, with alterations
+of violent radicalism and violent Bourbonism, the French people went
+through misery to a shattered goal."
+
+Profound changes are not only necessary, but highly desirable. Even if
+this country were comfortably well-off, healthy, prosperous, and
+educated, men would go on inventing and creating opportunities to amplify
+the possibilities of life. These inventions would mean radical
+transformations. For we are bent upon establishing more in this nation
+than a minimum of comfort. A liberal people would welcome social
+inventions as gladly as we do mechanical ones. What it would fear is a
+hard-shell resistance to change which brings it about explosively.
+
+Catastrophes are disastrous to radical and conservative alike: they do
+not preserve what was worth maintaining; they allow a deformed and often
+monstrous perversion of the original plan. The emancipation of the slaves
+might teach us the lesson that an explosion followed by reconstruction is
+satisfactory to nobody.
+
+Statesmanship would go out to meet a crisis before it had become acute.
+The thing it would emphatically not do is to dam up an insurgent current
+until it overflowed the countryside. Fight labor's demands to the last
+ditch and there will come a time when it seizes the whole of power, makes
+itself sovereign, and takes what it used to ask. That is a poor way for a
+nation to proceed. For the insurgent become master is a fanatic from the
+struggle, and as George Santayana says, he is only too likely to redouble
+his effort after he has forgotten his aim.
+
+Nobody need waste his time debating whether or not there are to be great
+changes. That is settled for us whether we like it or not. What is worth
+debating is the method by which change is to come about. Our choice, it
+seems to me, lies between a blind push and a deliberate leadership,
+between thwarting movements until they master us, and domesticating them
+until they are answered.
+
+When Roosevelt formed the Progressive Party on a platform of social
+reform he crystallized a deep unrest, brought it out of the cellars of
+resentment into the agora of political discussion. He performed the real
+task of a leader--a task which has essentially two dimensions. By
+becoming part of the dynamics of unrest he gathered a power of
+effectiveness: by formulating a program for insurgency he translated it
+into terms of public service.
+
+What Roosevelt did at the middle-class level, the socialists have done at
+the proletarian. The world has been slow to recognize the work of the
+Socialist Party in transmuting a dumb muttering into a civilized program.
+It has found an intelligent outlet for forces that would otherwise be
+purely cataclysmic. The truth of this has been tested recently in the
+appearance of the "direct actionists."
+
+They are men who have lost faith in political socialism. Why? Because,
+like all other groups, the socialists tend to become routineers, to slip
+into an easy reiteration. The direct actionists are a warning to the
+Socialist Party that its tactics and its program are not adequate to
+domesticating the deepest unrest of labor. Within that party, therefore,
+a leadership is required which will ride the forces of "syndicalism" and
+use them for a constructive purpose. The brilliant writer of the "Notes
+of the Week" in the English New Age has shown how this might be done. He
+has fused the insight of the syndicalist with the plans of the
+collectivists under the name of Guild Socialism.
+
+His plan calls for co-management of industry by the state and the labor
+union. It steers a course between exploitation by a bureaucracy in the
+interests of the consumer--the socialist danger--and oppressive
+monopolies by industrial unions--the syndicalist danger. I shall not
+attempt to argue here either for or against the scheme. My concern is
+with method rather than with special pleadings. The Guild Socialism of
+the "New Age" is merely an instance of statesmanlike dealing with a new
+social force. Instead of throwing up its hands in horror at one
+over-advertised tactical incident like sabotage, the "New Age" went
+straight to the creative impulse of the syndicalist movement.
+
+Every true craftsman, artist or professional man knows and sympathizes
+with that impulse: you may call it a desire for self-direction in labor.
+The deepest revolt implied in the term syndicalism is against the
+impersonal, driven quality of modern industry--against the destruction of
+that pride which alone distinguishes work from slavery. Some such impulse
+as that is what marks off syndicalism from the other revolts of labor.
+Our suspicion of the collectivist arrangement is aroused by the picture
+of a vast state machine so horribly well-regulated that human impulse is
+utterly subordinated. I believe too that the fighting qualities of
+syndicalism are kept at the boiling point by a greater sense of outraged
+human dignity than can be found among mere socialists or unionists. The
+imagination is more vivid: the horror of capitalism is not alone in the
+poverty and suffering it entails, but in its ruthless denial of life to
+millions of men. The most cruel of all denials is to deprive a human
+being of joyous activity. Syndicalism is shot through with the assertion
+that an imposed drudgery is intolerable--that labor at a subsistence wage
+as a cog in a meaningless machine is no condition upon which to found
+civilization. That is a new kind of revolt--more dangerous to capitalism
+than the demand for higher wages. You can not treat the syndicalists like
+cattle because forsooth they have ceased to be cattle. "The damned
+wantlessness of the poor," about which Oscar Wilde complained, the cry
+for a little more fodder, gives way to an insistence upon the chance to
+be interested in life.
+
+To shut the door in the face of such a current of feeling because it is
+occasionally exasperated into violence would be as futile as locking up
+children because they get into mischief. The mind which rejects
+syndicalism entirely because of the by-products of its despair has had
+pearls cast before it in vain. I know that syndicalism means a revision
+of some of our plans--that it is an intrusion upon many a glib prejudice.
+But a human impulse is more important than any existing theory. We must
+not throw an unexpected guest out of the window because no place is set
+for him at table. For we lose not only the charm of his company: he may
+in anger wreck the house.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Yet the whole nation can't sit at one table: the politician will object
+that all human interests can't be embodied in a party program. That is
+true, truer than most politicians would admit in public. No party can
+represent a whole nation, although, with the exception of the socialists,
+all of them pretend to do just that. The reason is very simple: a
+platform is a list of performances that are possible within a few years.
+It is concerned with more or less immediate proposals, and in a nation
+split up by class, sectional and racial interests, these proposals are
+sure to arouse hostility. No definite industrial and political platform,
+for example, can satisfy rich and poor, black and white, Eastern creditor
+and Western farmer. A party that tried to answer every conflicting
+interest would stand still because people were pulling in so many
+different directions. It would arouse the anger of every group and the
+approval of its framers. It would have no dynamic power because the
+forces would neutralize each other.
+
+One comprehensive party platform fusing every interest is impossible and
+undesirable. What is both possible and desirable is that every group
+interest should be represented in public life--that it should have
+spokesmen and influence in public affairs. This is almost impossible
+to-day. Our blundering political system is pachydermic in its
+irresponsiveness. The methods of securing representation are unfit
+instruments for any flexible use. But the United States is evidently not
+exceptional in this respect. England seems to suffer in the same way. In
+May, 1912, the "Daily Mail" published a series of articles by H. G. Wells
+on "The Labour Unrest." Is he not describing almost any session of
+Congress when he says that "to go into the House of Commons is to go
+aside out of the general stream of the community's vitality into a corner
+where little is learnt and much is concocted, into a specialized Assembly
+which is at once inattentive to and monstrously influential in our
+affairs?" Further on Wells remarks that "this diminishing actuality of
+our political life is a matter of almost universal comment to-day.... In
+Great Britain we do not have Elections any more; we have Rejections.
+What really happens at a general election is that the party
+organizations--obscure and secretive conclaves with entirely mysterious
+funds--appoint about 1200 men to be our rulers, and all that we, we
+so-called self-governing people, are permitted to do is, in a muddled
+angry way, to strike off the names of about half these selected
+gentlemen."
+
+A cynic might say that the people can't go far wrong in politics because
+they can't be very right. Our so-called representative system is
+unrepresentative in a deeper way than the reformers who talk about the
+money power imagine. It is empty and thin: a stifling of living currents
+in the interest of a mediocre regularity.
+
+But suppose that politics were made responsive--suppose that the forces
+of the community found avenues of expression into public life. Would not
+our legislatures be cut up into antagonistic parties, would not the
+conflicts of the nation be concentrated into one heated hall? If you
+really represented the country in its government, would you not get its
+partisanship in a quintessential form? After all group interests in the
+nation are diluted by space and time: the mere separation in cities and
+country prevents them from falling into the psychology of the crowd. But
+let them all be represented in one room by men who are professionally
+interested in their constituency's prejudices and what would you
+accomplish but a deepening of the cleavages? Would the session not become
+an interminable wrangle?
+
+Nobody can answer these questions with any certainty. Most prophecies are
+simply the masquerades of prejudice, and the people who love stability
+and prefer to let their own well-being alone will see in a sensitive
+political system little but an invitation to chaos. They will choose
+facts to adorn their fears. History can be all things to all men: nothing
+is easier than to summon the Terror, the Commune, lynchings in the
+Southern States, as witnesses to the excesses and hysterias of the mob.
+Those facts will prove the case conclusively to anyone who has already
+made up his mind on the subject. Absolute democrats can also line up
+their witnesses: the conservatism of the Swiss, Wisconsin's successful
+experiments, the patience and judgment of the Danes. Both sides are
+remarkably sure that the right is with them, whereas the only truth about
+which an observer can be entirely certain is that in some places and in
+certain instances democracy is admittedly successful.
+
+There is no absolute case one way or the other. It would be silly from
+the experience we have to make a simple judgment about the value of
+direct expression. You cannot lump such a mass of events together and
+come to a single conclusion about them. It is a crude habit of mind that
+would attempt it. You might as well talk abstractly about the goodness or
+badness of this universe which contains happiness, pain, exhilaration and
+indifference in a thousand varying grades and quantities. There is no
+such thing as Democracy; there are a number of more or less democratic
+experiments which are not subject to wholesale eulogy or condemnation.
+
+The questions about the success of a truly representative system are
+pseudo-questions. And for this reason: success is not due to the system;
+it does not flow from it automatically. The source of success is in the
+people who use the system: as an instrument it may help or hinder them,
+but they must operate it. Government is not a machine running on straight
+tracks to a desired goal. It is a human work which may be facilitated by
+good tools.
+
+That is why the achievements of the Swiss may mean nothing whatever when
+you come to prophesy about the people of New York. Because Wisconsin has
+made good use of the direct primary it does not follow that it will
+benefit the Filipino. It always seems curious to watch the satisfaction
+of some reform magazines when China or Turkey or Persia imitates the
+constitutional forms of Western democracies. Such enthusiasts postulate a
+uniformity of human ability which every fact of life contradicts.
+
+Present-day reform lays a great emphasis upon instruments and very little
+on the skilful use of them. It says that human nature is all right, that
+what is wrong is the "system." Now the effect of this has been to
+concentrate attention on institutions and to slight men. A small step
+further, institutions become an end in themselves. They may violate human
+nature as the taboo does. That does not disturb the interest in them very
+much, for by common consent reformers are to fix their minds upon the
+"system."
+
+A machine should be run by men for human uses. The preoccupation with the
+"system" lays altogether too little stress on the men who operate it and
+the men for whom it is run. It is as if you put all your effort into the
+working of a plough and forgot the farmer and the consumer. I state the
+case baldly and contradiction would be easy. The reformer might point to
+phrases like "human welfare" which appear in his writings. And yet the
+point stands, I believe. The emphasis which directs his thinking bears
+most heavily upon the mechanics of life--only perfunctorily upon the
+ability of the men who are to use them.
+
+Even an able reformer like Mr. Frederic C. Howe does not escape entirely.
+A recent book is devoted to a glowing eulogy of "Wisconsin, an Experiment
+in Democracy." In a concluding chapter Mr. Howe states the philosophy of
+the experiment. "What is the explanation of Wisconsin?" he asks. "Why has
+it been able to eliminate corruption, machine politics, and rid itself of
+the boss? What is the cause of the efficiency, the thoroughness, the
+desire to serve which animate the state? Why has Wisconsin succeeded
+where other states have uniformly failed? I think the explanation is
+simple. It is also perfectly natural. It is traceable to democracy, to
+the political freedom which had its beginning in the direct primary law,
+and which has been continuously strengthened by later laws"; some pages
+later, "Wisconsin assumed that the trouble with our politics is not with
+our people, but with the machinery with which the people work.... It has
+established a line of vision as direct as possible between the people and
+the expression of their will." The impression Mr. Howe evidently wishes
+to leave with his readers is that the success of the experiment is due to
+the instruments rather than to the talent of the people of Wisconsin.
+That would be a valuable and comforting assurance to propagandists, for
+it means that other states with the same instruments can achieve the same
+success. But the conclusion seems to me utterly unfounded. The reasoning
+is perilously like that of the gifted lady amateur who expects to achieve
+greatness by imitating the paint box and palette, oils and canvases of an
+artist.
+
+Mr. Howe's own book undermines his conclusions. He begins with an account
+of La Follette--of a man with initiative and a constructive bent. The
+forces La Follette set in motion are commented upon. The work of Van Hise
+is shown. What Wisconsin had was leadership and a people that responded,
+inventors, and constructive minds. They forged the direct primary and the
+State University out of the impetus within themselves. No doubt they were
+fortunate in their choice of instruments. They made the expression of the
+people's will direct, yet that will surely is the more primary thing. It
+makes and uses representative systems: but you cannot reverse the
+process. A man can manufacture a plough and operate it, but no amount of
+ploughs will create a man and endow him with skill.
+
+All sorts of observers have pointed out that the Western States adopt
+reform legislation more quickly than the Eastern. Yet no one would
+seriously maintain that the West is more progressive because it has
+progressive laws. The laws are a symptom and an aid but certainly not the
+cause. Constitutions do not make people; people make constitutions. So
+the task of reform consists not in presenting a state with progressive
+laws, but in getting the people to want them.
+
+The practical difference is extraordinary. I insist upon it so much
+because the tendency of political discussion is to regard government as
+automatic: a device that is sure to fail or sure to succeed. It is sure
+of nothing. Effort moves it, intelligence directs it; its fate is in
+human hands.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The politics I have urged in these chapters cannot be learned by rote.
+What can be taught by rule of thumb is the administration of precedents.
+That is at once the easiest and the most fruitless form of public
+activity. Only a low degree of intelligence is required and of effort
+merely a persistent repetition. Men fall into a routine when they are
+tired and slack: it has all the appearance of activity with few of its
+burdens. It was a profound observation when Bernard Shaw said that men
+dread liberty because of the bewildering responsibility it imposes and
+the uncommon alertness it demands. To do what has always been done, to
+think in well-cut channels, to give up "the intolerable disease of
+thought," is an almost constant demand of our natures. That is perhaps
+why so many of the romantic rebels of the Nineteenth Century sank at last
+into the comforting arms of Mother Church. That is perhaps the reason why
+most oldish men acquire information, but learn very little. The
+conservative who loves his routine is in nine cases out of ten a creature
+too lazy to change its habits.
+
+Confronted with a novelty, the first impulse is to snub it, and send it
+into exile. When it becomes too persistent to be ignored a taboo is
+erected and threats of fines and condign punishment are made if it
+doesn't cease to appear. This is the level of culture at which Sherman
+Anti-Trust acts are passed, brothels are raided, and labor agitators are
+thrown into jail. If the taboo is effective it drives the evil under
+cover, where it festers and emits a slow poison. This is the price we pay
+for the appearance of suppression. But if the problem is more heavily
+charged with power, the taboo irritates the force until it explodes. Not
+infrequently what was once simply a factor of life becomes the dominating
+part of it. At this point the whole routineer scheme of things collapses,
+there is a period of convulsion and Caesarean births, and men weary of
+excitement sink back into a newer routine. Thus the cycle of futility is
+completed.
+
+The process bears as much resemblance to statecraft as sitting backward
+on a runaway horse does to horsemanship. The ordinary politician has no
+real control, no direction, no insight into the power he rides. What he
+has is an elevated, though temporary seat. Real statesmanship has a
+different ambition. It begins by accepting human nature. No routine has
+ever done that in spite of the conservative patter about "human nature";
+mechanical politics has usually begun by ignoring and ended by violating
+the nature of men.
+
+To accept that nature does not mean that we accept its present character.
+It is probably true that the impulses of men have changed very little
+within recorded history. What has changed enormously from epoch to epoch
+is the character in which these impulses appear. The impulses that at one
+period work themselves out into cruelty and lust may at another produce
+the richest values of civilized life. The statesman can affect that
+choice. His business is to provide fine opportunities for the expression
+of human impulses--to surround childhood, youth and age with homes and
+schools, cities and countryside that shall be stocked with interest and
+the chance for generous activity.
+
+Government can play a leading part in this work, for with the decadence
+of the church it has become the only truly catholic organization in the
+land. Its task is essentially to carry out programs of service, to add
+and build and increase the facilities of life. Repression is an
+insignificant part of its work; the use of the club can never be
+applauded, though it may be tolerated _faute de mieux_. Its use is a
+confession of ignorance.
+
+A sensitively representative machinery will probably serve such
+statesmanship best. For the easy expression of public opinion in
+government is a clue to what services are needed and a test of their
+success. It keeps the processes of politics well ventilated and reminds
+politicians of their excuse for existence.
+
+In that kind of statesmanship there will be a premium on inventiveness,
+on the ingenuity to devise and plan. There will be much less use for
+lawyers and a great deal more for scientists. The work requires
+industrial organizers, engineers, architects, educators, sanitists to
+achieve what leadership brings into the program of politics.
+
+This leadership is the distinctive fact about politics. The statesman
+acts in part as an intermediary between the experts and his constituency.
+He makes social movements conscious of themselves, expresses their needs,
+gathers their power and then thrusts them behind the inventor and the
+technician in the task of actual achievement. What Roosevelt did in the
+conservation movement was typical of the statesman's work. He recognized
+the need of attention to natural resources, made it public, crystallized
+its force and delegated the technical accomplishment to Pinchot and his
+subordinates.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But creative statesmanship requires a culture to support it. It can
+neither be taught by rule nor produced out of a vacuum. A community that
+clatters along with its rusty habits of thought unquestioned, making no
+distinction between instruments and idols, with a dull consumption of
+machine-made romantic fiction, no criticism, an empty pulpit and an
+unreliable press, will find itself faithfully mirrored in public affairs.
+The one thing that no democrat may assume is that the people are dear
+good souls, fully competent for their task. The most valuable leaders
+never assume that. No one, for example, would accuse Karl Marx of
+disloyalty to workingmen. Yet in 1850 he could write at the demagogues
+among his friends: "While we draw the attention of the German workman to
+the _undeveloped state_ of the proletariat in Germany, you flatter the
+national spirit and the guild prejudices of the German artisans in the
+grossest manner, a method of procedure without doubt the more popular of
+the two. Just as the democrats made a sort of fetich of the words, 'the
+people,' so you make one of the word 'proletariat.'" John Spargo quotes
+this statement in his "Life." Marx, we are told, could use phrases like
+"democratic miasma." He never seems to have made the mistake of confusing
+democracy with demolatry. Spargo is perfectly clear about this
+characteristic of Marx: "He admired most of all, perhaps, that fine
+devotion to truth as he understood it, and disregard of popularity which
+marked Owen's life. Contempt for popular opinion was one of his most
+strongly developed characteristics. He was fond, says Liebknecht, of
+quoting as his motto the defiant line of Dante, with which he afterwards
+concluded his preface to 'Das Kapital':
+
+'Segui il tuo corso e lascia dir le genti.'"
+
+It is to Marx's everlasting credit that he set the intellectual standard
+of socialism on the most vigorous intellectual basis he could find. He
+knew better than to be satisfied with loose thinking and fairly good
+intentions. He knew that the vast change he contemplated needed every
+ounce of intellectual power that the world possessed. A fine boast it was
+that socialism was equipped with all the culture of the age. I wonder
+what he would have thought of an enthusiastic socialist candidate for
+Governor of New York who could write that "until men are free the world
+has no need of any more literary efforts, of any more paintings, of any
+more poems. It is better to have said one word for the emancipation of
+the race than to have written the greatest novel of the times.... The
+world doesn't need any more literature."
+
+I will not venture a guess as to what Marx would have said, but I know
+what we must say: "Without a literature the people is dumb, without
+novels and poems, plays and criticism, without books of philosophy, there
+is neither the intelligence to plan, the imagination to conceive, nor the
+understanding of a common purpose. Without culture you can knock down
+governments, overturn property relations, you can create excitement, but
+you cannot create a genuine revolution in the lives of men." The reply of
+the workingmen in 1847 to Cabet's proposal that they found Icaria, "a new
+terrestrial Paradise," in Texas if you please, contains this interesting
+objection: "Because although those comrades who intend to emigrate with
+Cabet may be eager Communists, yet they still possess too many of the
+faults and prejudices of present-day society by reason of their past
+education to be able to get rid of them at once by joining Icaria."
+
+That simple statement might be taken to heart by all the reformers and
+socialists who insist that the people are all right, that only
+institutions are wrong. The politics of reconstruction require a nation
+vastly better educated, a nation freed from its slovenly ways of
+thinking, stimulated by wider interests, and jacked up constantly by the
+sharpest kind of criticism. It is puerile to say that institutions must
+be changed from top to bottom and then assume that their victims are
+prepared to make the change. No amount of charters, direct primaries, or
+short ballots make a democracy out of an illiterate people. Those
+portions of America where there are voting booths but no schools cannot
+possibly be described as democracies. Nor can the person who reads one
+corrupt newspaper and then goes out to vote make any claim to having
+registered his will. He may have a will, but he has not used it.
+
+For politics whose only ideal is the routine, it is just as well that men
+shouldn't know what they want or how to express it. Education has always
+been a considerable nuisance to the conservative intellect. In the
+Southern States, culture among the negroes is openly deplored, and I do
+not blame any patriarch for dreading the education of women. It is out of
+culture that the substance of real revolutions is made. If by some magic
+force you could grant women the vote and then keep them from schools and
+colleges, newspapers and lectures, the suffrage would be no more
+effective than a Blue Law against kissing your wife on Sunday. It is
+democratic machinery with an educated citizenship behind it that embodies
+all the fears of the conservative and the hopes of the radical.
+
+Culture is the name for what people are interested in, their thoughts,
+their models, the books they read and the speeches they hear, their
+table-talk, gossip, controversies, historical sense and scientific
+training, the values they appreciate, the quality of life they admire.
+All communities have a culture. It is the climate of their civilization.
+Without a favorable culture political schemes are a mere imposition. They
+will not work without a people to work them.
+
+The real preparation for a creative statesmanship lies deeper than
+parties and legislatures. It is the work of publicists and educators,
+scientists, preachers and artists. Through all the agents that make and
+popularize thought must come a bent of mind interested in invention and
+freed from the authority of ideas. The democratic culture must, with
+critical persistence, make man the measure of all things. I have tried
+again and again to point out the iconoclasm that is constantly necessary
+to avoid the distraction that comes of idolizing our own methods of
+thought. Without an unrelaxing effort to center the mind upon human uses,
+human purposes, and human results, it drops into idolatry and becomes
+hostile to creation.
+
+The democratic experiment is the only one that requires this wilful
+humanistic culture. An absolutism like Russia's is served better when the
+people accept their ideas as authoritative and piously sacrifice humanity
+to a non-human purpose. An aristocracy flourishes where the people find a
+vicarious enjoyment in admiring the successes of the ruling class. That
+prevents men from developing their own interests and looking for their
+own successes. No doubt Napoleon was well content with the philosophy of
+those guardsmen who drank his health before he executed them.
+
+But those excellent soldiers would make dismal citizens. A view of life
+in which man obediently allows himself to be made grist for somebody
+else's mill is the poorest kind of preparation for the work of
+self-government. You cannot long deny external authorities in government
+and hold to them for the rest of life, and it is no accident that the
+nineteenth century questioned a great deal more than the sovereignty of
+kings. The revolt went deeper and democracy in politics was only an
+aspect of it. The age might be compared to those years of a boy's life
+when he becomes an atheist and quarrels with his family. The nineteenth
+century was a bad time not only for kings, but for priests, the classics,
+parental autocrats, indissoluble marriage, Shakespeare, the Aristotelian
+Poetics and the validity of logic. If disobedience is man's original
+virtue, as Oscar Wilde suggested, it was an extraordinarily virtuous
+century. Not a little of the revolt was an exuberant rebellion for its
+own sake. There were also counter-revolutions, deliberate returns to
+orthodoxy, as in the case of Chesterton. The transvaluation of values was
+performed by many hands into all sorts of combinations.
+
+There have been other periods of revolution. Heresy is just a few hours
+younger than orthodoxy. Disobedience is certainly not the discovery of
+the nineteenth century. But the quality of it is. I believe Chesterton
+has hold of an essential truth when he says that this is the first time
+men have boasted of their heresy. The older rebels claimed to be more
+orthodox than the Church, to have gone back to the true authorities. The
+radicals of recent times proclaim that there is no orthodoxy, no doctrine
+that men must accept without question.
+
+Without doubt they deceive themselves mightily. They have their invisible
+popes, called Art, Nature, Science, with regalia and ritual and a
+catechism. But they don't mean to have them. They mean to be
+self-governing in their spiritual lives. And this intention is the
+half-perceived current which runs through our age and galvanizes so many
+queer revolts. It would be interesting to trace out the forms it has
+taken, the abortive cults it has tried and abandoned. In another
+connection I pointed to autonomy as the hope of syndicalism. It would not
+be difficult to find a similar assertion in the feminist agitation. From
+Mrs. Gilman's profound objections against a "man-made" world to the lady
+who would like to vote about her taxes, there is a feeling that woman
+must be something more than a passive creature. Walter Pater might be
+quoted in his conclusion to the effect that "the theory or idea or system
+which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of experience, in
+consideration of some interest into which we cannot enter, or some
+abstract theory we have not identified with ourselves, or what is only
+conventional, has no real claim upon us." The desire for self-direction
+has made a thousand philosophies as contradictory as the temperaments of
+the thinkers. A storehouse of illustration is at hand: Nietzsche advising
+the creative man to bite off the head of the serpent which is choking him
+and become "a transfigured being, a light-surrounded being, that
+_laughed_!" One might point to Stirner's absolute individualism or turn
+to Whitman's wholehearted acceptance of every man with his catalogue of
+defects and virtues. Some of these men have cursed each other roundly:
+Georges Sorel, for example, who urges workingmen to accept none of the
+bourgeois morality, and becomes most eloquent when he attacks other
+revolutionists.
+
+I do not wish to suggest too much unanimity in the hundreds of artists
+and thinkers that are making the thought of our times. There is a kind of
+"professional reconciler" of opposites who likes to lump all the
+prominent rebels together and refer to them affectionately as "us
+radicals." Yet that there is a common impulse in modern thought which
+strives towards autonomy is true and worth remarking. In some men it is
+half-conscious, in others a minor influence, but almost no one of weight
+escapes the contagion of it entirely. It is a new culture that is being
+prepared. Without it there would to-day be no demand for a creative
+statesmanship which turns its back upon the routine and the taboo, kings
+and idols, and non-human purposes. It does more. It is making the
+atmosphere in which a humanly centered politics can flourish. The fact
+that this culture is multiform and often contradictory is a sign that
+more and more of the interests of life are finding expression. We should
+rejoice at that, for profusion means fertility; where a dead uniformity
+ceases, invention and ingenuity flourish.
+
+Perhaps the insistence on the need of a culture in statecraft will seem
+to many people an old-fashioned delusion. Among the more rigid socialists
+and reformers it is not customary to spend much time discussing mental
+habits. That, they think, was made unnecessary by the discovery of an
+economic basis of civilization. The destinies of society are felt to be
+too solidly set in industrial conditions to allow any cultural direction.
+Where there is no choice, of what importance is opinion?
+
+All propaganda is, of course, a practical tribute to the value of
+culture. However inevitable the process may seem, all socialists agree
+that its inevitability should be fully realized. They teach at one time
+that men act from class interests: but they devote an enormous amount of
+energy to making men conscious of their class. It evidently matters to
+that supposedly inevitable progress whether men are aware of it. In
+short, the most hardened socialist admits choice and deliberation,
+culture and ideals into his working faith. He may talk as if there were
+an iron determinism, but his practice is better than his preachment.
+
+Yet there are necessities in social life. To all the purposes of politics
+it is settled, for instance, that the trust will never be "unscrambled"
+into small competing businesses. We say in our argument that a return to
+the days of the stage-coach is impossible or that "you cannot turn back
+the hands of the clock." Now man might return to the stage-coach if that
+seemed to him the supreme goal of all his effort, just as anyone can
+follow Chesterton's advice to turn back the hands of the clock if he
+pleases. But nobody can recover his yesterdays no matter how much he
+abuses the clock, and no man can expunge the memory of railroads though
+all the stations and engines were dismantled.
+
+"From this survival of the past," says Bergson, "it follows that
+consciousness cannot go through the same state twice." This is the real
+necessity that makes any return to the imagined glories of other days an
+idle dream. Graham Wallas remarks that those who have eaten of the tree
+of knowledge cannot forget--"Mr. Chesterton cries out, like the Cyclops
+in the play, against those who complicate the life of man, and tells us
+to eat 'caviare on impulse,' instead of 'grapenuts on principle.' But
+since we cannot unlearn our knowledge, Mr. Chesterton is only telling us
+to eat caviare on principle." The binding fact we must face in all our
+calculations, and so in politics too, is that you cannot recover what is
+passed. That is why educated people are not to be pressed into the
+customs of their ignorance, why women who have reached out for more than
+"Kirche, Kinder und Kueche" can never again be entirely domestic and
+private in their lives. Once people have questioned an authority their
+faith has lost its naivete. Once men have tasted inventions like the
+trust they have learned something which cannot be annihilated. I know of
+one reformer who devotes a good deal of his time to intimate talks with
+powerful conservatives. He explains them to themselves: never after do
+they exercise their power with the same unquestioning ruthlessness.
+
+Life is an irreversible process and for that reason its future can never
+be a repetition of the past. This insight we owe to Bergson. The
+application of it to politics is not difficult because politics is one of
+the interests of life. We can learn from him in what sense we are bound.
+"The finished portrait is explained by the features of the model, by the
+nature of the artist, by colors spread out on the palette; but even with
+the knowledge of what explains it, no one, not even the artist, could
+have foreseen exactly what the portrait would be, for to predict it would
+have been to produce it before it was produced...." The future is
+explained by the economic and social institutions which were present at
+its birth: the trust and the labor union, all the "movements" and
+institutions, will condition it. "Just as the talent of the painter is
+formed or deformed--in any case, is modified--under the very influence of
+the work he produces, so each of our states, at the moment of its issue,
+modifies our personality, being indeed the new form we are just assuming.
+It is then right to say that what we do depends on what we are; but it is
+necessary to add also, that we are, to a certain extent, what we do, and
+that we are creating ourselves continually."
+
+What I have called culture enters into political life as a very powerful
+condition. It is a way of creating ourselves. Make a blind struggle
+luminous, drag an unconscious impulse into the open day, see that men are
+aware of their necessities, and the future is in a measure controlled.
+The culture of to-day is for the future an historical condition. That is
+its political importance. The mental habits we are forming, our
+philosophies and magazines, theaters, debates, schools, pulpits and
+newspapers become part of an active past which as Bergson says "follows
+us at every instant; all that we have felt, thought, and willed from our
+earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to
+join it, pressing against the portals of consciousness that would fain
+leave it outside."
+
+Socialists claim that because the McNamara brothers had no
+"class-consciousness," because they were without a philosophy of society
+and an understanding of the labor movement their sense of wrong was bound
+to seek out dynamite. That is a profound truth backed by abundant
+evidence. If you turn, for example, to Spargo's Life of Karl Marx you see
+that all through his career Marx struggled with the mere
+insurrectionists. It was the men without the Marxian vision of growth and
+discipline who were forever trying to lead little marauding bands against
+the governments of Europe. The fact is worth pondering: the Marxian
+socialists, openly declaring that all authority is a temporary
+manifestation of social conditions, have waged what we must call a war of
+culture against the powers of the world. They have tried to arouse in
+workingmen the consciousness of an historical mission--the patience of
+that labor is one of the wonders of the age. But the McNamaras had a
+culture that could help them not at all. They were Catholics, Democrats
+and old-fashioned trade-unionists. Religion told them that authority was
+absolute and eternal, politics that Jefferson had said about all there
+was to say, economics insisted that the struggle between labor and
+capital was an everlasting see-saw. But life told them that society was
+brutal: an episode like the shirtwaist factory fire drove them to
+blasphemy and dynamite.
+
+Those bombs at Los Angeles, assassination and terrorism, are compounded
+of courage, indignation and ignorance. Civilization has much to fear from
+the blind class antagonisms it fosters; but the preaching of "class
+consciousness," far from being a fomenter of violence, must be recognized
+as the civilizing influence of culture upon economic interests.
+
+Thoughts and feelings count. We live in a revolutionary period and
+nothing is so important as to be aware of it. The measure of our
+self-consciousness will more or less determine whether we are to be the
+victims or the masters of change. Without philosophy we stumble along.
+The old routines and the old taboos are breaking up anyway, social forces
+are emerging which seek autonomy and struggle against slavery to
+non-human purposes. We seem to be moving towards some such statecraft as
+I have tried to suggest. But without knowledge of it that progress will
+be checkered and perhaps futile. The dynamics for a splendid human
+civilization are all about us. They need to be used. For that there must
+be a culture practiced in seeking the inwardness of impulses, competent
+to ward off the idols of its own thought, hospitable to novelty and
+sufficiently inventive to harness power.
+
+Why this age should have come to be what it is, why at this particular
+time the whole drift of thought should be from authority to autonomy
+would be an interesting speculation. It is one of the ultimate questions
+of politics. It is like asking why Athens in the Fifth Century B. C. was
+singled out as the luminous point of the Western World. We do not know
+enough to cut under such mysteries. We can only begin to guess why there
+was a Renaissance, why in certain centuries man seems extraordinarily
+creative. Perhaps the Modern Period with its flexibility, sense of
+change, and desire for self-direction is a liberation due to the great
+surplus of wealth. Perhaps the ease of travel, the popularizing of
+knowledge, the break-down of frontiers have given us a new interest in
+human life by showing how temporary are all its instruments. Certainly
+placid or morose acceptance is undermined. If men remain slaves either to
+ideas or to other men, it will be because they do not know they are
+slaves. Their intention is to be free. Their desire is for a full and
+expressive life and they do not relish a lop-sided and lamed humanity.
+For the age is rich with varied and generous passions.
+
+
+
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