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-The Project Gutenberg eBook of Practical Agitation, by John Jay
-Chapman
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
-most other parts of the world 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. If you are not located in the United States, you
-will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
-using this eBook.
-
-Title: Practical Agitation
-
-Author: John Jay Chapman
-
-Release Date: October 24, 2021 [eBook #66610]
-
-Language: English
-
-Produced by: The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
-             https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images
-             generously made available by The Internet Archive/American
-             Libraries.)
-
-*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PRACTICAL AGITATION ***
-
-
-
-
-
-PRACTICAL AGITATION
-
-
-
-
-_By the Same Author_
-
-  EMERSON AND OTHER ESSAYS. $1.25.
-  CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES. $1.25.
-
-
-
-
- PRACTICAL AGITATION
-
-  BY
-  JOHN JAY CHAPMAN
-
-  NEW YORK
-  CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
-  1900
-
-
-
-
-  _Copyright, 1900_,
-
-  BY CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS.
-
-  UNIVERSITY PRESS · JOHN WILSON
-  AND SON · CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A.
-
-
-
-
-  DEDICATED
-  TO
-  The Memory
-  OF
-  THEODORE BACON
-
-
-
-
-PREFACE
-
-
-This book is an attempt to follow the track of personal influence
-across society. The first three chapters are taken up with discussions
-of political reform, the fourth chapter with contemporary journalism.
-The results of these discussions are then summarized in the chapters
-called “Principles.”
-
-I know that there are as many ways of stating the main idea of the
-book as there are minds in the world. That idea is, that we can always
-do more for mankind by following the good in a straight line than
-we can by making concessions to evil. The illusion that it is wise
-or necessary to suppress our instinctive love of truth comes from
-an imperfect understanding of what that instinctive love of truth
-represents, and of what damage happens both to ourselves and to
-others when we suppress it. The more closely we look at the facts, the
-more serious does this damage appear. And on the other hand, the more
-closely we look at the facts, the more trifling, inconsequent, and
-absurd do all those reasons appear which strive to make us accept, and
-thereby sanctify and preserve, some portion of the conceded evil in the
-world.
-
-                                                               J. J. C.
-  NEW YORK, February 5, 1900.
-
-
-
-
-CONTENTS
-
-
-                                PAGE
-
-    I. ELECTION TIME               1
-
-   II. BETWEEN ELECTIONS          34
-
-  III. THE MASSES                 67
-
-   IV. LITERATURE                 83
-
-    V. PRINCIPLES                104
-
-   VI. PRINCIPLES (_continued_)  126
-
-  VII. CONCLUSION                135
-
-
-
-
-PRACTICAL AGITATION
-
-I
-
-ELECTION TIME
-
-
-It is the ambition of the agitator to use the machinery of government
-to make men more unselfish. In so far as he succeeds in this, he is
-creating a living church, the only sort of State church that would
-be entirely at one with our system, because it would be merely a
-representation in the formal government of a spirit abroad among the
-people.
-
-Campaign platforms are merely creeds. “I believe in Civil Service
-Reform” is a way of saying “I do not believe in theft,” and the phrase
-was a fragmentary and incomplete formulation of the greater truth. It
-was the sign that a movement was beginning among the people due to
-reawakening instinct, reawakening sensibility. It was the forerunner
-of all those changes for the better that have been spreading over
-our administrative government during the last thirty years. A quiet
-revolution has been going forward under our eyes, recorded step by
-step. It is only because our standards have been going up faster than
-the reforms came in that we believe the evils are growing worse. Such
-changes go on all the time all over the world, but the value and rarity
-of this one come from its unity and coherence. Such a thing might
-happen in Germany or in England, but you could not disentangle the
-forces.
-
-Thirty years ago politics was thought to be no occupation for a
-gentleman. It was a matter of bar-rooms, ballot-box-stuffing, rolls of
-dirty bills. You had as little to do with it as possible. You voted
-your party ticket, you paid your taxes. You bribed the ashman and
-the policeman at your uptown house, and the clerk of the court, the
-inspector, the custom-house agent, and the commissioner of jurors at
-your office.
-
-That subtle change of attitude in the citizen towards his public duty
-which is now in progress, has in it something of the religious. The
-whole matter becomes comprehensible the moment we cease to think of it
-as politics, and see in it a widespread and perfectly natural reaction
-against an era of wickedness. Had our framework of government afforded
-no outlet to the force, had our ills been irremediably crystallized
-into formal tyranny, we should perhaps have witnessed great revivalist
-upheavals, sacraments, saints, prophets, prostrations, and adoration.
-As it is, we have seen deadly pamphlets, schedules, enactments,
-documents which it required our whole attention and our whole time
-to understand; and behind each of them a remorseless interrogator
-with a white cravat and a face of iron. What motive drives them on?
-What oil fills their lamps? Who feeds them? These horrid things they
-bring, these instruments forged by unremitting toil, technical,
-insufferable,--they are the cure. With such levers, and with them
-only, can the stones be lifted off the hearts of men. They are the
-alternatives of revolution.
-
-“Reform” may have a thousand meanings, and be used to cover a thousand
-projects of doubtful utility. But with us it has a definite meaning.
-When the foreigner says, “Ah, but is your reform the right remedy?” he
-thinks it is a question of policy, or of the incidence of a tax. He
-supposes there is an intellectual question. But with us the problem is
-how to protect an attorney against a dishonest judge; how to stop the
-sheriff from stealing a fund, pending the litigation.
-
-What we want to do, what we are doing, is to get rid of gross
-malpractices, gross theft, gross abuse of public trust. It is waste of
-time to expend learned argument on a judge who has been bought. The
-litigants must join forces and get rid of that judge before they can
-talk. Of course we know that the real trouble with our politics is
-that these attorneys have themselves bribed the judge and share in the
-division of their clients’ property. It is to questions of this kind
-that the conscience of the country has been drawn.
-
-There is nothing peculiarly sacred about politics, but the history of
-reform movements during the last few years furnishes such striking and
-wonderful illustrations of human nature that it is worth study.
-
-A few men have a desire, a hope of improving some evil. They stagger
-towards it and fall. The impulse is always good. The mistakes made are
-progressive. They record the past; they outline the future. If you draw
-an arrow through them, it will point north.
-
-If you arrange the reform movements against Tammany Hall in a series,
-and consider them minutely, you will find that the earlier ones
-are comparatively corrupt, sporadic, disorganized, ignorant, and
-shortsighted in purpose. They have steadily become more honest, more
-frequent, more coherent, more intelligent and ambitious. If you examine
-any one of them, it would be impossible to misplace it in the series.
-Looking more closely, you see the reason. The earlier the movement, the
-more zealously do its leaders imitate the methods of current politics.
-Each movement represents the philosophy of its era. We have had: 1. The
-frankly corrupt era (fighting the devil with fire). 2. The compromise
-era (buying reform). 3. The educational era, which began two years
-ago, after Low was defeated, when people said they were glad of the
-movement, in spite of the defeat. Note this, that Low did not lead a
-lost cause, nor was any belief in lost causes at the bottom of his
-movement. But in making the best of his defeat, many minds stumbled
-into philosophy. And this illustrates the progress of an idea. People
-will accept it as an explanation of the past before they will take it
-as a guide to the future. It glimmers before them at a moment when
-they need comfort, and vanishes in the light of a comfortable habit or
-prejudice. This apparition of the educational idea flitted across New
-York and took root in many minds.
-
-Now the smoky torch of reform has passed from hand to hand, and is
-beginning to burn brighter. How could the original darkness give
-forth more than a gleam? All progress is experimental. The architects
-discovered by practice that the arch would support itself. Their
-earlier efforts were tentative. You can see what notion they had in
-mind, as they very gradually learned how to subserve the laws of
-gravity and tension. Each improvement is qualified by its author’s
-limitations, but shows a gain as toward the immediate past. You are
-following the steps of the groping and fumbling mind of man, fettered
-at every point by his own conceptions, moving each time towards a
-bolder generalization, each stride forward exactly proportionate to the
-breadth of thought on which it is calculated.
-
-What other method is there? The men who fought the Tweed Ring did what
-passed for “politics” in their day. “Votes must be paid for, of course;
-but let the people vote right.”
-
-The philosophy of the Strong movement in 1894 showed an advance. “The
-plunder must be divided, of course; but let _us_ have it because
-we are virtuous.”
-
-The Low movement in 1897 appealed to voters on the ground of
-self-interest. Labor had to be conciliated, local politicians of the
-worst sort subsidized; $150,000 was spent, four-fifths of it in ways
-that did more harm than good. But the methods were delicate.
-
-The battle of the standards goes forward ceaselessly; but all standards
-are going up. What the half-way reformer calls “politics,” the idealist
-calls chicanery; what the idealist calls politics, the half-way
-reformer calls Utopia. But in 1871 they are discussing whether or not
-the reformers shall falsify the returns; in 1894 they are discussing
-whether or not they shall expose fraud in their own camp.
-
-The men engaged in all these struggles are in perfect ignorance that
-they are really leading a religious reaction. They think that since
-they are in politics the doctrines of compromise apply. They are
-drawn into politics by conscience, but once there, they have only
-their business training to guide them,--a training in the art of
-subserving material interests. Now if a piece of your land has an
-uncertain boundary, you have a right to compromise on any theory you
-like, because you own the land. But if you start out with the sole
-and avowed purpose of upholding honesty in politics, and you uphold
-anything else or subserve any other interest whatever, you are a
-deceiver. When you began you did not say “I stand for a readjustment
-of political interests. There will be a continuation of many abuses
-under my administration, to be sure; but I hope they will not be quite
-so bad as heretofore. I shall not insist on the absolutely unselfish
-conduct of my office. It is not practical.” If you had said this, you
-might have got the friendly support of a few doctrinaires. But you
-would never have got the support and approval of the great public. You
-would not have been elected. And therefore you did not say it. On the
-contrary, what our reformers do is this: They begin, before election,
-by promising an absolutely pure administration. They make proclamations
-of a new era, and after they have secured a certain following they
-proceed to chaffer over how much honesty they will demand and how much
-take, as if they were rescuing property.
-
-These men are, then, in their desires a part of the future, and in
-their practices of the past. Their desires move society forward, their
-practices set it back; and so we have moved forward by jolts, until,
-like a people emerging from the deep sea, the water looks clearer
-above our heads and we can almost see the sky.
-
-Every advance has cost great effort. It took as much courage for a
-Mugwump to renounce his party allegiance in 1884 as it does now for
-a man to denounce both national parties as dens of thieves. It took
-as much hard thinking some years ago for the leaders of the Reform
-Democrats to cut loose from Tammany Hall as it does now for the
-Independent to see that there is in all our politics only one machine,
-held together by all the bosses and their heelers, and that the whole
-thing must be attacked at once.
-
-How gradual has been the process of emancipation from intellectual
-bondage! How inevitably people are limited by the terms in which
-they think! A generation of men has been consumed by the shibboleth
-“reform within the party,”--a generation of educated and right-minded
-men, who accomplished in their day much good, and left the country
-better than they found it, but are floating to-day like hulks in the
-trough of the sea of politics, because all their mind and all their
-energy were exhausted in discovering certain superficial evils and in
-fighting them. Their analysis of political elements left the deeper
-causes mysterious. They did not see mere human nature. They still
-treated Republicanism and Democracy--empty superstitions--as ideas, and
-they handled with reverence the bones of bogus saints, and the whole
-apparatus of clap-trap by which they had been governed.
-
-And yet it is owing to the activity of these men that the deeper
-political conditions became visible. Men cannot transcend their own
-analysis and see themselves under the microscope. The work we do
-transforms us into social factors. We are a part of the changes we
-bring in. Before we know it, we ourselves are the problem.
-
-The Mugwumps revolt and defeat Blaine. They strengthen the Democratic
-party. They again revolt and defeat Bryan, and strengthen the
-Republican party. So in the little towns all over the country, on
-local issues the Democrats are put out for being dishonest, or the
-Republicans are put out for being dishonest. Through this process
-the younger generation has been led to note one fact: both parties
-are dishonest. “Ah! but,” says the parent, “I am a good Democrat. My
-party is not dishonest all the time. It needs discipline.” It is too
-late: the young man hates both parties equally. He now looks at his
-father, and sees in him a sample of corrupted intelligence, a man able
-to repeat meaningless phrases, and he draws hope from the conclusion.
-It was natural that the father should have been boss-ridden all his
-life, because he could be whistled back to support iniquity by an
-appeal to party loyalty. He belonged to a race that had lost the power
-of political initiative. They could not act alone. They must daub
-themselves with party names or they would catch cold. They had not the
-stomach to be merely men.
-
-Thirty years ago one-half of society thought that every Democrat was a
-rebel and a scoundrel. The world to that society was composed of two
-classes,--Republicans (righteous men), Democrats (villains). Twenty
-years of an almost steady growth in the power of self-government or of
-what the Germans would call civic consciousness, has barely sufficed to
-strike off the adjectives, but it has left mankind still divided, as
-before.
-
-Meanwhile there has emerged a group of men who see the whole problem
-in a much simpler light. These men have carried forward the analysis
-which their fathers, or let us say their elder brothers, had begun,
-to such a point that there are no words in it which are meaningless,
-no factors which are not reduced to terms of human nature. They did
-nothing but add the last link to a chain of logic. Their predecessors
-discovered The Machine, and spent their lives in trying to belong to a
-party without strengthening its Machine. These latter men discovered
-that both parties were ruled by the same Machine. They see one issue,
-and only one issue in American politics, namely, the attack on that
-Machine.
-
-Moreover, these men have political initiative; that is to say, they
-contemplate creating conditions, and not merely making transient use of
-visible conditions. Their idea is so simple that any one whose mind is
-not warped by the cant of party politics understands it at once.
-
-“All this political corruption is a unity. Vote against it and you will
-beat it. Vote for any part of it and you strengthen it.” This sounds
-simple. But in practice the prejudices, the interests, the passions and
-political temperament of the whole population are against it. Every
-argument that the people understand is against this course. Everything
-that either party fears or hates in the other party is passionately
-pointed out as a reason against independent voting. According to
-Republicans, independent voting involves “allowing Croker to extend his
-rule over the entire State,” and “enabling Tammany Hall to control the
-judiciary,” and “endangering the cause of sound money.” According to
-Democrats, it involves the encouraging of Trusts, Tariffs, Pensions,
-Expansion and foreign conquest. According to both Democrats and
-Republicans, independent voting is “voting in the air,” and is at odds
-with the spirit of our institutions, which contemplate two parties and
-no more. And, finally, every one condemns the independent because he
-violates that thumb rule which slovenly thinkers regard as a summary of
-all political philosophy, “Between two evils choose the least.”
-
-Now the answer to all these arguments is that they are the merest
-mirage. It makes no difference which of the two evils, Platt or
-Croker, has the name of ruling the State. At present they divide the
-rule between them. They can do no more. There is no argument that can
-be used against Tammany Hall which is powerful enough to make the
-Republican Ring trustworthy. There is no argument against Expansion
-so excessively convincing that it changes the moral character of the
-Democratic Party. These learned arguments are useless, ludicrous,
-pathetic, irrational, impotent, contemptible. They do but distract us
-from the real issue--which is personal corruption. Where shall a man
-cast his vote against it? If I turn out McKinley because he bleeds the
-natives, I put in a Democrat to bleed the natives. If the whitewashing
-of Alger arouses public indignation, Tammany Hall feeds at the trough.
-If Croker’s control of the judiciary arouses popular indignation,
-Platt’s pigs feed at the trough. As for sound money, we have already
-elected one Congress on the issue in 1895, just as in 1892 we elected a
-Congress on the tariff issue. What was done? Why, in each case that was
-done which the ring wanted done,--nothing.
-
-Which national party stands for an idea to-day? The only shadow of
-reason for believing that either does, is that the Republicans cried
-sound money and won. They have done nothing. Had Bryan won, he would
-have done nothing, could have done nothing.
-
-There are no issues in American politics save this one issue of common
-honesty. You cannot throw an issue into this whirlpool of vice, for
-your issue turns to cash by the contact. We need not waste our time
-reading the platforms drawn by Platt and Croker. We must not vote for
-any man who does not go into public life as their enemy, because we
-know that in so far as he is not their enemy he is ours. As for these
-dreadful consequences that are always about to follow from a refusal
-to support one end of the iniquity, they do not follow. We have the
-evils now. We are at the worst. The powers of darkness may conspire and
-heap all in ruins, but they must not prevent us from beginning upon a
-constructive line to draw together and build up the powers of light.
-
-Nor is there the smallest distinction either in the evil or its cure,
-between the case of a village, of a State, or of the whole nation.
-Say you live in a town; you can only get a clean school-board by
-running men against both the regular parties. There is no other way of
-getting rid of Hanna and the Presidential Syndicate than by running
-an independent candidate for the Presidency. No form of Bryanism will
-oust it,--no rump Democracy nor any kind of Democracy. Democracy is
-finished. Republicanism is finished.
-
-This is the zero point of party loyalty. It has been reached very
-slowly. It means open war. The citizen is now confronted with a third
-ticket, which is a deliberate insult to both the others. No matter
-what the conditions, it is an appeal which disintegrates the emotions
-of the voter. This is the very elixir of reform. People are forced
-to think. It hurts them. They cry out against those who create the
-dilemma, but they cannot escape it. The vote you poll will vary. If the
-party war-cries are intense and the party candidates promise fairly,
-very few men will see the point of your movement. But no one escapes
-its influence. Let us say that five thousand vote your ticket. These
-are the only men whose response is scheduled. But the political vision
-of five hundred thousand has been quickened. No atom of this influence
-is lost. The work was done when the vote was cast. Even if it be not
-counted at all, it will show in every political camp in the near future.
-
-But do you ever have outward success? Does the time ever come when
-the standards of every one are so high that the parties themselves
-present candidates as good as your own, and there is no excuse for your
-existence? That depends upon the trend of the age. One thing only is
-certain, that by pursuing this course you are doing all that you can
-do. You are wasting no power. No part of your force is helping the
-enemy.
-
-After all, the great discovery is a very simple thing. We have found,
-after many experiments, that what we really want is, not the turning
-out of officials, not the enactment of laws, but the raising of the
-general standards. The way to do this is to set up a standard. Of
-course nobody likes to find a foot rule laid against his shortage. Even
-the vocabulary of the average man is attacked by such a system. Words
-like “courage,” “honesty,” “independence,” “pledge,” “loyalty” pass
-current like clipped coin in the language of politics; and the keying
-up of words to their biblical value brings out one man a thief and the
-next a hypocrite.
-
-All these civic commotions, great and small, that surge up and are
-scattered, that form and reform, the People’s Leagues and Citizens’
-Unions, are the altruism of the community fighting its way to the
-surface through the obstructions, the snares, and the oppressions
-of the organized world. No discouragement sets it back. No betrayal
-destroys it. The people come forward with ever new faith.
-
-What ceaseless endeavor! What patient trial of various forms of
-organization! We live in a society where egoism is so thoroughly
-organized that there is hardly a flicker of faith that cannot be made
-to heat the devil’s pot. The dragon stands ready to eat up the child
-as soon as it shall be born. You cannot hitch your horse to anything
-without helping drag the juggernaut. Before you know it, virtue is
-pocketed. Take the most obvious case. The reformers imagine they are in
-politics and must win at all costs. One enthusiast calls twenty friends
-into a room and organizes a club--and the club ties his hands and sells
-out to the nearest bidder. Before he knows it he has been organized
-back into Tammany Hall. You begin with a call to arms and a plan of
-organization. The men come to you in a moment of hope, showing every
-shade of intelligence, every stage of opinion,--one because he believes
-in your candidate; one because he hates Tammany Hall; one because he
-wants prominence; all because they do not expect to be alone. The men
-who volunteer have not a clear notion of what they are in for. They
-thought it was a movement to clean the streets. In the course of their
-campaign it develops into an attack on a bank. They thought it was
-a town movement. Some stage of it affects national politics. They
-thought it was a Roosevelt movement. It turns out to involve hostility
-to Roosevelt. Your muster shows the vague hope of a lot of men who
-are utterly incompetent, undisciplined, ignorant. They are merchants,
-lawyers, doctors, professors, clergymen, the respectability and
-intelligence of the town; and so far as self-government goes they are
-the tattered children of tyranny. Good God, what an army! At the first
-trumpet they scatter. One sells out, one recants, one disappears. They
-are anywhere and nowhere, a ship of fools, a barnyard. The execution of
-the one idea for which they were brought together has scattered them
-like sheep.
-
-Let us take another case. You think that what is needed is to raise a
-standard. You call your twenty friends about you. They are not corrupt.
-Nevertheless, let us see who they will be. We are not dealing with an
-imaginary community, but with American citizens as they exist, with
-men every one of whom trusts his instincts to a different extent. Each
-man believes in principle in the abstract, but thinks it is sometimes
-hopeless to be severely virtuous in politics. This “sometimes” is the
-_crux_. “Is it the time? Is this the year? Can you do it this
-way?” Now, of course, it is always the year. It is never hopeless.
-Absolute honesty is always the way. But an age of corruption destroys
-faith. This is the essential injury. This is the disease. You yourself
-have a little stronger belief, a little more political enterprise than
-your twenty friends. Otherwise it would be they who were summoning you
-to a conference. It is certain that their joint wisdom will result in
-action less radical than you believe in. They outvote you in council.
-The standard they set up is not absolute. But this outcome will prevent
-you from making your point at all. If you are to back your friends up
-publicly and are honest yourself, all you can say will be, “Here’s
-a makeshift.” Now, the public instinct understands this very well
-already. Ten per cent of your own faith you have compromised. It has
-cost you ninety per cent of your educational power; for the heart of
-man will respond only to a true thing.
-
-What is it that has led you to compromise? Why, the age you live in.
-You yourself, being afraid to stand alone, have dipped your flag,
-with the best intentions, because you cannot see that any other
-course is practicable. Yet you yourself can keep your own intellectual
-integrity only at the price of destroying your own handiwork. If you
-do not destroy it, you are a hypocrite. Here in the room with you were
-twenty men, the very flower of the idealism of the town, not chosen
-by accident, but coming together by natural selection. Twenty more
-like them do not exist in the community, for their activity would have
-revealed them. And yet there was not found faith enough among these to
-set up an absolute standard. Nay, they hang on your arms and prevent
-you from raising one. If you are to do it, you must do it alone. Then
-these men will be the first to denounce you; for your act damns them.
-You can only be true to the public conscience by rebuking your friends.
-If you fail to do this, your banner is submerged.
-
-Let us consider the cause of this weakness in Reform organizations.
-You wish to appeal to the people with as good a show of names as you
-can. And so you get a lot of well-known men to indorse you. This is
-considered practical. Let us see if it is.
-
-We are fighting Tammany Hall. But no one will for an instant admit
-that every Tammany man is dishonest. The corruption we started out to
-correct was a corruption of the intelligence, a bad habit, a defect of
-vision. The same defect keeps Republicans in line for Platt, because
-he is the Party, a recognized agent of the community. The same defect
-prevents a just man from joining a new movement unless Banker Jones is
-leading it. The habit of the community is to rely on some one else to
-govern them. No man trusts himself. The Machine, upon analysis, turns
-out to be a lack of self-reliance. Wherever you see a man who gives
-some one else’s corruption, some one else’s prejudice as a reason for
-not taking action himself, you see a cog in The Machine that governs
-us. The proof of it is that he will dissuade you from striking the
-iniquity. He will explain that you can’t try it without doing more
-harm than good. You will find that at every point of defence, from
-the arguments of Mr. Croker himself to the arguments of some sainted
-college president, the reasons given are identical. I cannot find
-any one who defends stealing. They only deprecate action as being
-inexpedient. Now, then, if I ask a voter to join my organization, and
-use as a bait an appeal to this very weakness--his reliance upon other
-men’s opinion--can I hope to make much headway? I am taking in just so
-much of Tammany Hall. My whole body becomes an adjunct of Tammany, in
-the same sense that Mr. Platt’s machine is an adjunct. I am Croker’s
-last outpost. I stand there calling myself reform, and yet I do not
-act. Some one else must now come forward and try his hand.
-
-This process of ebullition, and thereupon stagnation, has happened
-again and again. I suppose there are a dozen extant wrecks of reform
-political organizations in the city. Many people have despaired
-altogether. They think it is a law of God that political organizations
-become corrupt in the second year. The experience is entirely due to
-the persistent putting of new wine into old bottles. In their names
-and hopes these bodies have stood for purity, but in their membership
-they have, even in their inception, stood for prejudice. Then, too, the
-bottles bore good labels, and bad wine was soon poured into them. A
-political organization is a transferable commodity. You could not find
-a better way of killing virtue than by packing it into one of these
-contraptions which some gang of thieves is sure to find useful.
-
-The short lesson that comes out of long experience in political
-agitation is something like this: _all_ the motive power in
-all of these movements is the instinct of religious feeling. All
-the obstruction comes from attempting to rely on anything else.
-Conciliation is the enemy. It is just as impossible to help reform
-by conciliating prejudice as it is by buying votes. Prejudice is the
-enemy. Whoever is not for you is against you.
-
-What, then, must the enthusiast do in the way of organization? Let
-him go ahead and do some particular thing, and ask the public to help
-him do it. He will thus get behind him whatever force exists at that
-especial time for that especial purpose. It may not be much; but no
-amount of letterheads and great seals will increase it. Let him abandon
-written constitutions. Let him not be bound by a vote nor seek to bind
-others by a vote. If you have formal procedure, you are tied up, for
-you will then have to convert six tailors into apostles before you can
-get at the public. Content yourself more modestly. See a friend or two
-and tell them what you intend to do. If they won’t help you, do it
-alone. Do not think you are wasting your time, even if no one joins
-you. The prejudice against the individual is part of the evil you are
-fighting. If you keep on in a consistent line of action, people will
-come to you one by one, and your group will grow into a sort of centre
-of influence. There will result a unity of method as well as of aim,
-which, as your purposes become understood, will enable you to act with
-the speed of thought and the force of an avalanche. One great merit of
-this method will be that your whole policy will remain an enigma to
-every one except those who really want what you want, namely, to raise
-the general standards. Only such men will seek you out. Any one else
-is a danger. Thus your organization will grow slowly, but will remain
-uncapturable, un-get-at-able, an influence, a menace, a standard.
-As fast as adherents appear, you can set up centre after centre of
-enlightenment, preparatory to your campaigns; debates, pamphlets,
-correspondence, the battery of agitation. And in the mean time the
-benefit done to the workers themselves is worth all the pains.
-
-By adopting formal machinery you would not only organize the wrong
-people in, but you would organize the right people out. New York
-City is full of men whose passion for educating can find no vent in
-politics, because politics are corrupt, and who run civic leagues,
-night-schools, lyceums, and people’s institutes. They are at work in
-your cause although they call it by different names. All this zeal is
-at your disposal if you will only leave your office doors open and do
-something to deserve its support. Do not adopt a scheme that excludes
-these men. You cannot impress them into your army, but you do not need
-to impress them,--only to know them personally. You cannot make them
-district captains, but they are district captains already.
-
-“But,” you say, “are not the votes of your twenty friends as valuable
-as your own? Whence this egoism?” It is not egoism. I am ready to
-follow any one who wants to do this particular thing, that is, make an
-appeal to absolute unselfishness, at no point to conciliate any one.
-“But this is anarchy: every man his own party.” On the contrary, it is
-consolidation; for should two men arise, proposing this course, they
-would coalesce at once.
-
-“But,” you say, “who is to do all the work? How are you to get men
-to come forward unless you give them tangible, formulated doctrines,
-papers to sign, and words to mumble?” The answer is that the men who
-do the work in reform campaigns do not need these things. Literature
-and doctrines you will undoubtedly produce. It is not necessary for the
-effective distribution of them, that you should adopt the parade of
-American party discipline.
-
-Organization, head-quarters, and a distribution of labor you must
-develop. But you must not have them on paper faster than they exist in
-reality. “But,” you say, “this is not representative government. Where
-are your convention, your argument, your vote, your majority, your
-loyalty? Our people must have these things.”
-
-The answer is that, in spite of their views on representative
-government, our people still remain human beings. As fast as they find
-themselves spiritually represented by some person or body, they follow
-that influence. It is representative government, but it represents
-only the positive and aspiring part of the community,--the part which
-never gets represented under your system, because that system insists
-upon alloying it with other elements and ruining its power. It is
-educational activity in the purest form. By what other means can you
-speak to the whole people at once in the language of action? By what
-other means can you reach the conscience of the unknown man, who has
-not touched politics for twenty years because he could take no part in
-it, because he did not understand it,--the disfranchised, scattered,
-and dumb men on whose voice the future waits?
-
-Consider what you are trying to do. A party under control of a
-machine is held together by an appeal to self-interest. Its caucuses,
-affiliations, resources, methods are constructed on that principle.
-Your body, whose aim is to increase the unselfishness and intellect
-of your fellow-citizens, must be held together at every point by
-self-sacrifice.
-
-If the reform body shall blindly do just the opposite of what a party
-does, it will pursue practical politics. The regular party is in
-theory representative of enrolled voters. You represent the sentiment
-of undiscovered people. The party appeals to old forces and extant
-conditions. You appeal to new feelings and new voters. The party offers
-a gift to every adherent. You must offer him nothing but labor. That
-is your protection against traitors. The party accords every man the
-weight of his vote in its counsels. You must give him nothing but the
-influence of his mind.
-
-“But,” you shout, “this is not politics. You can never hold men
-together without bonds.” The fact is otherwise. There is some force
-at work in this town which, year after year, brings forward groups of
-men who proclaim a new dispensation. They are, in so far as they have
-any cohesion, held together without bonds now. All formal bonds will
-chain them to the past. For electrical force you must adopt electrical
-machinery; for moral force, moral bonds. All this political system
-is the harness for the wrong passion. Every scrap of it imprisons
-your power. The average American citizen is slow to see that you can
-exercise political influence without the current machinery. This is a
-part of The Machine in his brain. He cannot see the operation of law
-by which virtue always tells. But his ignorance does not affect the
-operation of that law, even upon himself.
-
-This elaborate analysis of just how the force of feeling in yourself
-can best be used politically, is, after all, only an instance of a
-general law. The shortest path between two points always turns out to
-be a straight line. People who believe in the complexity of life, and
-have theories about crooked lines, want something else beside moral
-influence. They want influence through office, or influence toward
-special ends, or influence with particular persons. “Can’t you see
-you are destroying your influence?” they cry, while every stroke is
-telling. “A thinks you are a lunatic.” Praise God. “B has withdrawn his
-subscription.” I had not hoped for this so soon. “But he has joined
-Platt.” You misstate the case. He was always with Platt, but now he has
-revealed it. These refractory molecules are breaking up. See the lines
-of force begin to show a clean cleavage. Ten thousand intelligences now
-see the man for what he is.
-
-At what point in the progress of this movement will people begin to
-see that it is practical politics of the most effective kind? Some
-people see it now. The first people to feel the strain are the men
-whose livelihood depends on the outcome. The last illustration of
-this was given in Roosevelt’s campaign against Van Wyck in New York
-State. In this case, as generally happens, the real battle was fought
-in committee rooms before the forces were in the field. It was the
-struggle for position. Roosevelt was to be Republican candidate for
-governor, and was sure of election. The fight came over the minor
-offices. Our New York form of ballot practically forces a man to
-vote for a “straight” ticket, and half a dozen independents put up a
-complete ticket with Roosevelt at the head of it. Their purpose was to
-prevent the Republicans from using Roosevelt’s military popularity to
-sweep into office a lot of henchmen. Within ten days the Republican
-henchmen all over the State were taken with convulsions. Every crank
-of the Machine trembled. It turned its awful power upon Roosevelt and
-ordered him to get off the Independent ticket. He obeyed and protected
-the henchmen. The episode illustrates the practical power of a few
-independents who can act quickly. The panic in the Republican camp
-was entirely justified. If three tickets had remained in the field
-with Roosevelt at the head of two of them, thousands of Democrats and
-thousands of Republicans would have voted for the Reform ticket. The
-Republican ticket would have polled merely the dyed-in-the-wool machine
-Republicans.
-
-The rumpus among the Republican heelers--following so slight a cause
-as the action of five or six citizens who took the field with a ticket
-of their own--resembled the action of a geyser when a cake of soap is
-thrown into it--rumbling--followed by terrific vomiting.
-
-A little practical discipline among the reformers is all that is
-required to make them formidable,--the discipline of experience, of
-acting together, of personal trust. This is to be acquired only in the
-field of action.
-
-It is encouraging to find how small a body of men it takes--even at the
-present moment--to upset the calculations of the politicians. The force
-that made the Republicans afraid did not lie in the parcel of men who
-threw in the soap. It came from the great public. The episode showed
-that the Republicans were afraid to appeal to the country. They knew
-that their cabal was almost as much hated as Tammany Hall.
-
-There is always great difficulty in this world as to who shall bell the
-cat; but conventions of mice do not further the matter. The way to do
-it is for a parcel of mice to take their political lives in their hands
-and proceed to do it.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-The real meaning of all these movements will not be perceived till
-their work has been done. As history, the cause and course of them will
-be so plain that a word will suffice to explain them. In the light
-of history it will be clear that the improvement in the personnel of
-our public life was due to the demands of the public--expressed in
-citizen’s movements. We have already reached a point where neither
-party dares appeal to the public--as they did ten years ago--on purely
-party grounds. Roosevelt and Van Wyck both claimed to be men superior
-to the average partisan. The advance of political thought has already
-made the dullest man perceive the Machine within his own party, and
-every day spreads the news that there is only a single machine in all
-our politics. The destruction of this machine will not be like the
-destruction of the monasteries by Henry VIII., but it will consist in
-the substitution of new timber for old in the parties themselves.
-
-Any one who looks for an expulsion of Tammany Hall like the expulsion
-of the Moors from Spain, will be disappointed. There will always be a
-Tammany Hall. But it will be run by respectable men, who will look back
-with wonder and disgust upon this period, and who will give the public
-an honest administration because the public has demanded it.
-
-
-
-
-II
-
-BETWEEN ELECTIONS
-
-
-An election is like a flash of lightning at midnight. You get an
-instantaneous photograph of what every man is doing. You see his real
-relation toward his government. But an election happens only once a
-year. Government goes on day and night.
-
-It is hard breaking down the popular fallacy that there is such a
-thing as “politics,” governed by peculiar conditions, which must be
-understood and respected; that the whole thing is a mystic avocation,
-run as a trade by high priests and low priests, and is remote from
-our daily life. Our system of party government has been developed
-with the aim of keeping the control in the hands of professionals.
-Technicalities have been multiplied, and the rules of the game
-have become more and more complex. There exists, consequently, an
-unformulated belief that the corruption of politics is something by
-itself. Yet there probably never was a civilization where the mesh
-of all powers and interests was so close. It is like the interlocking
-of roots in a swamp. Such density and cohesion were never seen in any
-epoch, such a mat and tangle of personalities, where every man is tied
-up with the fibres of every other. If you take an axe or a saw, and
-cut a clean piece out of it anywhere, you will maim every member of
-society. How idle, then, even to think of politics as a subject by
-itself, or of the corruptions of the times as localized!
-
-Politics gives what the chemists call a “mirror,” and shows the
-ingredients in the average man’s composition. But you must take your
-mind off politics if you want to understand America. You must take up
-the lives of individuals and follow them out, as they play against each
-other in counterpoint. As soon as you do this you will not be able to
-determine where politics begins and where it stops. It is all politics:
-it is all social intercourse: it is all business. Any square foot of
-this soil will give you the whole fauna and flora of the land. Where
-will you put in your wedge of reform? There is not a cranny anywhere.
-The mass is like crude copper ore that cannot be blasted. It blows out
-the charge.
-
-We think that political agitation must show political results. This is
-like trying to alter the shape of a shadow without touching its object.
-The hope is not only mistaken, it is absurd. The results to be obtained
-from reform movements cannot show in the political field till they have
-passed through the social world.
-
-“But, after all, what you want is votes, is it not?” “It would be
-so encouraging to see virtue win, that everybody would vote for you
-thereafter. Why don’t you manage it somehow?” This sort of talk is the
-best record of incompetence which corruption has imprinted. Enlighten
-this class and you have saved the Republic. Why, my friend, you are so
-lost, you are so much a mere product of tyranny that you do not know
-what a vote is. True, we want votes, but the votes we want must be cast
-spontaneously. We do not want them so badly as to buy them. A vote is
-only important because it is an opinion. Even a dictator cannot force
-opinions upon his subjects by six months of rule; and yet the complaint
-is that decency gets few votes after a year of effort by a handful of
-radicals who are despised by the community. We only enter the field of
-politics because we can there get a hearing. The candidates in reform
-movements are tools. They are like crowbars that break open the mind of
-the age. They cannot be dodged, concealed, or laughed away. Every one
-is aroused from his lethargy by seeing a real man walk on the scene,
-amid all the stage properties and marionettes of conventional politics.
-“No fair!” the people cry. They do not vote for him, of course, but
-they talk about the portent with a vigor no mere doctrine could call
-forth, and the discussion blossoms at a later date into a new public
-spirit, a new and genuine demand for better things.
-
-It is apparent that between the initial political activity of reformers
-and their ultimate political accomplishments, there must intervene
-the real agitation, the part that does the work, which goes on in the
-brains and souls of individual men, and which can only be observed in
-social life, in manners and conversation.
-
-Now let us take up the steps by which, in practical life, the reaction
-is set going. Enter the nearest coterie of radicals and listen to
-the quarrel. Reformers proverbially disagree, and ‘their sects mince
-themselves almost to atoms.’ With us the quarrel always arises over the
-same point. “Can we afford, under these particular circumstances, to
-tell the exact truth?” I have never known a reform movement in which
-this discussion did not rage from start to finish, nor have I known one
-where any other point was involved. You are a citizens’ committee. The
-parties offer to give you half a loaf. Well and good. But this is not
-their main object. They want you to call it a whole loaf. They want to
-dissipate your agitation by getting you to tell the public that you are
-satisfied. What they hate is the standard. The war between you and them
-is a spiritual game of chess. They must get you to say they are right.
-It is their only means of retaining their power.
-
-Thus the apple of discord falls into the Reform camp. Half its members
-take the bait. In New York City our politics have been so picturesque,
-the pleas of the politician so shallow, the lies demanded from the
-reformers so obvious, that the eternal principles of the situation have
-been revealed in their elemental simplicity. It is just because the
-impulse towards better things carries no material content--we do not
-want any particular thing, but we want an improvement in everything--it
-is just because the whole movement is purely moral, that the same
-questions always arise.
-
-We ought not to grieve over the discussion, over the heart-burn and
-heated argument that start from a knot of radicals and run through the
-community, setting men against each other. The quarrel in the executive
-committee of this reform body is the initiative of much wholesome life.
-They are no more responsible for it, they can no more avoid it, the
-community can no more advance to higher standards before they have had
-it, than a child can skate before it can walk.
-
-The executive committee is discussing the schools. In consequence of
-a recent agitation, the politicians have put up a candidate who will
-give new plumbing, even if he does steal the books, and the question
-is whether the School Association shall indorse this candidate. If it
-does, he wins. If it does not, both plumbing and books are likely to
-remain the prey of the other party, and the Lord knows how bad that is.
-The fight rages in the committee, and some sincere old gentleman is
-prophesying typhoid.
-
-The practical question is: “Do you want good plumbing, or do you want
-the truth?” You cannot have both this year. If the association goes
-out and tells the public exactly what it knows, it will get itself
-laughed at, insult the candidate, and elect his opponent. If it tells
-the truth, it might as well run a candidate of its own as a protest
-and an advertisement of that truth. It can buy good plumbing with a
-lie, and the old gentleman thinks it ought to do so. The reformers are
-going to endorse the candidate, and upon their heads will be visited
-his theft of the books. They have sold out the little public confidence
-they held. Had they stood out for another year, under the practical
-régime which they had already endured for twenty, and had they devoted
-themselves to augmenting the public interest in the school question,
-both parties would have offered them plumbing and books to allay the
-excitement. The parties might, perhaps, have relaxed their grip on the
-whole school system rather than meet the issue.
-
-But the Association does not understand this. It does not, as yet,
-clearly know its own mind. All this procedure, this going forward and
-back, is necessary. The community must pass through these experiences
-before it discovers that the shortest road to good schools is truth.
-A few men learn by each turn of the wheel, and these men tend to
-consolidate. They become a sort of school of political thought. They
-see that they do not care a whit more about the schools than they do
-about the parks; that the school agitation is a handy way to make the
-citizens take notice of maladministration in all departments; that
-the parties may be left to reform themselves, and to choose the most
-telling bid for popular favor; that the parties must do this and will
-do this, in so far as the public demands it, and will not do it under
-any other circumstances.
-
-It is the very greatest folly in the world for an agitator to be
-content with a partial success. It destroys his cause. He fades
-instantly. You cannot see him. He is become part of the corrupt
-and contented public. His business is to make others demand good
-administration. He must never reap, but always sow. Let him leave the
-reaping to others. There will be many of them, and their material
-accomplishments will be the same whether he endorses them or not. If
-by chance some party, some administration gives him one hundred per
-cent of what he demands, let him acknowledge it handsomely; but he need
-not thank them. They did it because they had to, or because their
-conscience compelled them. In neither case was it done for him.
-
-In other words, reform is an idea that must be taken up as a whole. You
-do not want any specific thing. You use every issue as a symbol. Let
-us give up the hope of finding any simpler way out of it. Let us take
-up the burden at its heaviest end, and acknowledge that nothing but an
-increase of personal force in every American can change our politics.
-It is curious that this course, which is the shortest cut to the
-millennium, should be met with the reproach that it puts off victory.
-This is entirely due to a defect in the imagination of people who are
-dealing with an unfamiliar subject. We have to learn its principles.
-We know that what we really want is all of virtue; but it seems so
-unreasonable to claim this, that we try to buy it piecemeal,--item, a
-schoolhouse, item, four parks; and with each gain comes a sacrifice of
-principle, disintegration, discouragement. Fools, if you had asked for
-all, you would have had this and more. We are defeated by compromise
-because, no matter how much we may deceive ourselves into thinking that
-good government is an aggregate of laws and parks, it is not true.
-Good government is the outcome of private virtue, and virtue is one
-thing,--a unit, a force, a mode of motion. It cannot pass through a
-non-conductor of casuistry at any point. Compromise is loss: first,
-because it stops the movement, and kills energy; second, because it
-encourages the illusion that the wooden schoolhouse is good government.
-As against this, you have the fact that some hundreds of school
-children do get housed six months before they would have been housed
-otherwise. But this is like cashing a draft for a thousand pounds with
-a dish of oatmeal.
-
-We have, perhaps, followed in the wake of some little Reform movement,
-and it has left us with an insight into the relation between private
-opinion and public occurrences. We have really found out two things:
-first, that in order to have better government, the talk and private
-intelligence upon which it rests must be going forward all the time;
-and second, that the individual conscience, intelligence, or private
-will is always set free by the same process,--to wit, by the telling
-of truth. The identity between public and private life reveals itself
-the instant a man adopts the plan of indiscriminate truthtelling. He
-unmasks batteries and discloses wires at every dinner-party; he sees
-practical politics in every law office, and social influence in every
-convention; and wherever he is, he suddenly finds himself, by his own
-will or against it, a centre of forces. Let him blurt out his opinion.
-Instantly there follows a little flash of reality. The shams drop,
-and the lines of human influence, the vital currents of energy, are
-disclosed. The only difference between a reform movement, so-called,
-and the private act of any man who desires to better conditions, is
-that the private man sets one drawing-room in a ferment by speaking his
-mind or by cutting his friend, and the agitator sets ten thousand in a
-ferment by attacking the age.
-
-As a practical matter, the conduct of politics depends upon the
-dinner-table talk of men who are not in politics at all. Government is
-carried on from moment to moment by the people. The executive is a mere
-hand and arm. For instance, there is a public excitement about Civil
-Service Reform. A law is passed and is being evaded. If the governor
-is to set it up again, he must be sustained by the public. They must
-follow and understand the situation or the official is helpless. But do
-we sustain him? We do not. We are half-hearted. To lend power to his
-hand we shall have to be strong men. If we now stood ready to denounce
-him for himself falling short by the breadth of a hair of his whole
-duty, our support, when we gave it, would be worth having. But we are
-starchless, and deserve a starchless service.
-
-What did you find out at the last meeting of the Library Committee? You
-found out that Commissioner Hopkins’s nephew was in the piano business;
-hence the commissioner’s views on the music question. Repeat it to the
-first man you meet in the street, and bring it up at the next meeting
-of the committee. You did not think you had much influence in town
-politics, and hardly knew how to step in. Yet the town seems to have
-no time for any other subject than your attack on the commissioner.
-From this point on you begin to understand conditions. Every man in
-town reveals his real character, and his real relation to the town
-wickedness and to the universe by the way he treats you. You are
-beginning to get near to something real and something interesting.
-There is no one in the United States, no matter how small a town he
-lives in, or how inconspicuous he or she is, who does not have three
-invitations a week to enter practical politics by such a door as this.
-It makes no difference whether he regard himself as a scientific man
-studying phenomena, or a saint purifying society; he will become both.
-There is no way to study sociology but this. The books give no hint
-of what the science is like. They are written by men who do not know
-the world, but who go about gleaning information instead of trying
-experiments.
-
-The first discovery we make is that the worst enemy of good government
-is not our ignorant foreign voter, but our educated domestic railroad
-president, our prominent business man, our leading lawyer. If there is
-any truth in the optimistic belief that our standards are now going
-up, we shall soon see proofs of it in our homes. We shall not note
-our increase of virtue so much by seeing more crooks in Sing Sing, as
-by seeing fewer of them in the drawing-rooms. You can acquire more
-knowledge of American politics by attacking, in open talk, a political
-lawyer of social standing, than you can in a year of study. These
-backstair men are in every Bar Association and every Reform Club.
-They are the agents who supervise the details of corruption. They run
-between the capitalist, the boss, and the public official. They know
-as fact what every one else knows as inference. They are the priestly
-class of commerce, and correspond to the intriguing ecclesiastics in
-periods of church ascendency. Some want money, some office, some mere
-power, others want social prominence; and their art is to play off
-interest against interest and advance themselves.
-
-As the president of a social club I have a power that I can use against
-my party boss or for him. If he can count upon me to serve him at
-need, it is a gain to him to have me establish myself as a reformer.
-The most dependable of these confidence men (for they betray nobody,
-and are universally used and trusted) can amass money and stand in
-the forefront of social life; and now and then one of them is made an
-archbishop or a foreign minister. They are, indeed, the figure-heads
-of the age, the essence of all the wickedness and degradation of our
-times. So long as such men enjoy public confidence we shall remain as
-we are. They must be deposed in the public mind.
-
-And yet these gentlemen are the weakest point in the serried ranks
-of iniquity. They are weak because they have social ambition, and
-the place to reach them is in their clubs. They are the best possible
-object lessons, because everybody knows them. Social punishment is the
-one cruel reality, the one terrible weapon, the one judgment against
-which lawyers cannot protect a man. It is as silent as theft, and it
-raises the cry of “Stop thief!” like a burglar alarm.
-
-The general cowardice of this age covers itself with the illusion of
-charity, and asks, in the name of Christ, that no one’s feelings be
-hurt. But there is not in the New Testament any hint that hypocrites
-are to be treated with charity. This class is so intrenched on all
-sides that the enthusiasts cannot touch them. Their elbows are
-interlocked; they sit cheek by jowl with virtue. They are rich; they
-possess the earth. How shall we strike them? Very easily. They are so
-soft with feeding on politic lies that they drop dead if you give them
-a dose of ridicule in a drawing-room. Denunciation is well enough,
-but laughter is the true ratsbane for hypocrites. If you set off a
-few jests, the air is changed. The men themselves cannot laugh or be
-laughed at; for nature’s revenge has given them masks for faces. You
-may see a whole room full of them crack with pain because they cannot
-laugh. They are angry, and do not speak.
-
-Everybody in America is soft, and hates conflict. The cure for this,
-both in politics and social life, is the same,--hardihood. Give them
-raw truth. They think they will die. Their friends call you a murderer.
-Four thousand ladies and eighty bank directors brought vinegar and
-brown paper to Low when he was attacked, and Roosevelt posed as a
-martyr because it was said, up and down, that he acted the part of
-a selfish politician. What humbug! How is it that all these things
-grow on the same root,--fraud, cowardice, formality, sentimentalism,
-and a lack of humor? Why do people become so solemn when they are
-making a deal, and so angry when they are defending it? The righteous
-indignation expended in protecting Roosevelt would have founded a
-church.
-
-The whole problem of better government is a question of how to get
-people to stop simpering and saying “After you” to cant. A is an
-aristocrat. B is a boss. C is a candidate. D is a distiller. E is an
-excellent citizen. They dine. Gloomy silence would be more respectable
-than this chipper concern that all shall go well. Is not this
-politics? Yes, and the very essence of it. Is not the exposure of it
-practical reform? How easily the arrow goes in! A does not think you
-should confound him with B, nor E with C. Each is a reformer when he
-looks to the right, and a scamp as seen from the left. What is their
-fault? Collusion. “But A means so well.” They all mean well. Let us not
-confound the gradations of their virtue; but can we call any one an
-honest man who knowingly consorts with thieves? This they all do. Let
-us declare it. Their resentment at finding themselves classed together
-drives the wedge into the clique.
-
-Remember, too, that there is no such thing as abstract truth. You must
-talk facts, you must name names, you must impute motives. You must say
-what is in your mind. It is the only means you have of cutting yourself
-free from the body of this death. Innuendo will not do. Nobody minds
-innuendo. We live and breathe nothing else. If you are not strong
-enough to face the issue in private life, do not dream that you can
-do anything for public affairs. This, of course, means fight, not
-to-morrow, but now. It is only in the course of conflict that any one
-can come to understand the system, the habit of thought, the mental
-condition, out of which all our evils arise. The first difficulty is
-to see the evils clearly; and when we do see them it is like fighting
-an atmosphere to contend against them. They are so universal and
-omnipresent that you have no terms to name them by. You must burn a
-disinfectant.
-
-We have observed, thus far, that no question is ever involved in
-practical agitation except truth-telling. So long as a man is trying to
-tell the truth, his remarks will contain a margin which other people
-will regard as mystifying and irritating exaggeration. It is this very
-margin of controversy that does the work. The more accurate he is, the
-less he exaggerates, the more he will excite people. It is only by the
-true part of what is said that the interest is roused. No explosion
-follows a lie.
-
-The awaking of the better feelings of the individual man is not only
-the immediate but the ultimate end of all politics. Nor need we be
-alarmed at any collateral results. No one has ever succeeded in drawing
-any valid distinction between positive and negative educational
-work, except this: that in so far as a man is positive himself, he
-does positive work. It is necessary to destroy reputations when
-they are lies. Peace be to their ashes. But war and fire until they
-be ashes. This is positive and constructive work. You cannot state
-your case without using popular illustrations, and in clearing the
-ground for justice and mercy, some little great man gets shown up as a
-make-believe. This is constructive work.
-
-It is impossible to do harm to reform, unless you are taking some
-course that tends to put people to sleep. Strangely enough, the great
-outcry is made upon occasions when men are refusing to take such a
-course. This is due to the hypnotism of self-interest. “Don’t wake us
-up!” they cry, “We cannot stand the agony of it;” and the rising energy
-with which they speak wakes other sleepers. In the early stages of
-any new idea the only advertising it gets is denunciation. This is so
-much better than silence, that one may hail it as the dawn. You must
-speak till you draw blood. The agitators have always understood this.
-Such men as Wendell Phillips were not extravagant. They were practical
-men. Their business was to get heard. They used vitriol, but they were
-dealing with the hide of the rhinoceros.
-
-If you look at the work of the anti-slavery people by the light
-of what they were trying to do, you will find that they had a very
-clear understanding of their task. The reason of some of them canted
-a little from the strain and stress; but they were so much nearer
-being right-minded than their contemporaries that we may claim them as
-respectable human beings. They were the rock on which the old politics
-split. They were a new force. As soon as they had gathered head enough
-to affect political issues, they broke every public man at the North
-by forcing him to take sides. There is not a man of the era whom they
-did not shatter. Finally their own leaders got into public life, and it
-was not till then that the new era began. The same thing is happening
-to-day. It is the function of the reformer to crack up any public man
-who dodges the issue of corruption, or who tries to ride two horses by
-remaining a straight party man and shouting reform. This is no one’s
-fault. It is a natural process. It is fate. Some fall on one side of
-the line, and some on the other. One gets the office, and the next
-loses it; but oblivion yawns for all of them. There is no cassia that
-can embalm their deeds; they can do nothing interesting, nothing that
-it lies in the power of the human mind to remember. Why is it that
-Calhoun’s Speeches are unreadable? He had the earnestness of a prophet
-and the strength almost of a Titan; but he was engaged in framing a
-philosophy to protect an interest. He was maintaining something that
-was not true. It was a fallacy. It was a pretence. It was a house built
-on the sands of temporary conditions. Such are the ideas of those
-middling good men, who profess honesty in just that degree which will
-keep them in office. Honesty beyond this point is, in their philosophy,
-incompatible with earthly conditions. These men must exist at present.
-They are an organic product of the times; they are samples of
-mediocrity. But they have nothing to offer to the curiosity of the next
-generation. No, not though their talent was employed in protecting an
-Empire--as it is now employed in eking out the supremacy of a disease
-in a country whose deeper health is beginning to throw the poison off.
-
-Our public men are confronted with two systems of politics. They
-cannot hedge. If the question were suddenly to be lost in a riot,
-no doubt a good administrator might win applause, even a Tammany
-chief. But we have no riots. We have finished the war with Spain,
-and, unless foreign complications shall set in, we are about to sit
-down with the politicians over our domestic issue--theft. Are you for
-theft or against it? You can’t be both; and your conversation, the
-views you hold and express to your friends, are the test. It is only
-because politics affect or reflect these views that politics have
-any importance at all. Your agents--Croker, Hanna--are serving you
-faithfully now. Nothing else is to be heard at the clubs but the sound
-of little hammers riveting abuse.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-There is another side to this shield that calls not for scorn but for
-pity. Have you ever been in need of money? Almost every man who enters
-our society joins it as a young man in need of money. His instincts are
-unsullied, his intellect is fresh and strong, but he must live. How
-comes it that the country is full of maimed human beings, of cynics
-and feeble good men, and outside of this no form of life except the
-diabolical intelligence of pure business?
-
-How to make yourself needed,--it is the sycophant’s problem; and why
-should we expect a young American to act differently from a young
-Spaniard at the Court of Philip the Second? He must get on. He goes
-into a law office, and if he is offended at its dishonest practices
-he cannot speak. He soon accepts them. Thereafter he cannot see them.
-He goes into a newspaper office, the same; a banker’s, a merchant’s,
-a dry-goods’ shop. What has happened to these fellows at the end of
-three years, that their minds seem to be drying up? I have seen many
-men I knew in college grow more and more uninteresting from year to
-year. Is there something in trade that desiccates and flattens out,
-that turns men into dried leaves at the age of forty? Certainly there
-is. It is not due to trade, but to intensity of self-seeking, combined
-with narrowness of occupation. If I had to make my way at the court of
-Queen Elizabeth, I should need more kinds of wits and more knowledge of
-human nature than in the New York button trade. No doubt I should be a
-preoccupied, cringing, and odious sort of person at a feudal festivity;
-but I should be a fascinating man of genius compared to John H.
-Painter, who at the age of thirty is making $15,000 a year by keeping
-his mouth shut and attending to business. Put a pressure gauge into
-Painter, and measure the business tension at New York in 1900. He is
-passing his youth in a trance over a game of skill, and thereby earning
-the respect and admiration of all men. Do not blame him. The great
-current of business force that passes through the port of New York has
-touched him, and he is rigid. There are hundreds of these fellows, and
-they make us think of the well-meaning young man who has to support his
-family, and who must compete against them for the confidence of his
-business patrons. Our standard of commercial honesty is set by that
-current. It is entirely the result of the competition that comes from
-everybody’s wanting to do the same thing.
-
-“But,” you say, “we are here dealing with a natural force. If you like,
-it withers character, and preoccupies one part of a man for so long
-that the rest of him becomes numb. He is hard and queer. He cannot
-write because he cannot think; he cannot draw because he cannot think;
-he cannot enter real politics because he cannot think. He is all the
-wretch you depict him, but we must have him. Such are men.” This is the
-biggest folly in the world, and shows as deep an intellectual injury
-in the mind that thinks it as self-seeking can inflict. Business has
-destroyed the very knowledge in us of all other natural forces except
-business.
-
-What shall we do to diminish this awful pressure that makes politics a
-hell, and wrings out our manhood, till (you will find) the Americans
-condone the death of their brothers and fathers who perished in home
-camps during the Spanish war, because it all happened in the cause
-of trade, it was business thrift, done by smart men in pursuance of
-self-interest? You ask what you can do to diminish the tension of
-selfishness, which is as cruel as superstition, and which is not in one
-place, but everywhere in the United States. It runs a hot iron over
-young intellect, and crushes character in the bud. It is blindness,
-palsy, and hip disease. You can hardly find a man who has not got some
-form of it. There is no newspaper which does not show signs of it. You
-can hardly find a man who does not proclaim it to be the elixir of
-life, the vade-mecum of civilization. What can you do? Why, you can
-oppose it with other natural forces.
-
-You yourself cannot turn Niagara; but there is not a town in America
-where one single man cannot make his force felt against the whole
-torrent. He takes a stand on a practical matter. He takes action
-against some abuse. What does this accomplish? Everything. How many
-people are there in your town? Well, every one of them gets a thrill
-that strikes deeper than any sermon he ever heard. He may howl, but
-he hears. The grocer’s boy, for the first time in his life, believes
-that the whole outfit of morality has any place in the practical
-world. Every class contributes its comment. Next year a new element
-comes forward in politics, as if the franchise had been extended.
-Remember this: you cannot, though you owned the world, do any good in
-it except by devising new ways of manifesting the fact that you felt
-in a particular way. It is the personal influence of example that is
-the power. Nothing else counts. You can do harm by other methods, but
-not good. This influence is a natural force, and works like steam
-power. Why all this commotion over your protest? If you accuse the
-mayor of being a thief, why does he not reply, in the words of modern
-philosophy, “Of course I’m a thief, I’m made that way”? Instead of
-that he resents it, and there ensues a discussion that takes people’s
-attention off of trade, and qualifies the atmosphere of the place. You
-have appreciably relieved the tension and checked the plague.
-
-This whole subject must be looked at as a crusade in the cause of
-humanity. You are making it easier for every young man in town to earn
-his livelihood without paying out his soul and conscience. You cannot
-help any one man. You are forced into helping them all at once. Every
-time a man asserts himself he cuts a cord that is strangling somebody.
-The first time that independent candidates for local office were run in
-New York City, strong men cried in the street for rage. The supremacy
-of commerce had been affronted. New York, in all that makes life worth
-living, is a new city since the reform movements began to break up the
-torpor of serfdom.
-
-You asked how to fight force. It must be fought with force, and not
-with arguments. Indeed, it is easier to start a reform and carry it
-through, than it is to explain either why or how it is done. You can
-only understand this after you have been three times ridiculed as a
-reformer; and then you will begin to see that throughout the community,
-running through every one, there are currents of beneficent power that
-accomplish changes, sometimes visible, sometimes hard to see; that this
-power is in its nature quite as strong, quite as real and reliable,
-as that Wall Street current,--terrible forces both of them, forever
-operative and struggling and contending together as they surge and
-swell through the people. It is the sight of that power for good that
-you need. I cannot give it to you. You must sink your own shaft for
-it. It is this beneficent current passing from man to man that makes
-the unity of all efforts for public betterment. You have a movement
-and an excitement over bad water, and it leaves you with kindergartens
-in your schools. It is this current that turns your remark at the club
-(which every one repeated in order to injure you) into a piece of
-encouragement to the banker’s clerk, who could not have made it himself
-except at the cost of his livelihood. It is this current--not only the
-fear of it, but the presence of it--in the heart of your merchants that
-leaves them at your mercy. Cast anything into this current and it goes
-everywhere, like aniline dye put into a reservoir; it tinges the whole
-local life in twenty-four hours. It is to this current that all appeals
-are made. All party platforms, all resolutions, all lies are dedicated
-to it; all literature lives by it. The head of power is near and easy
-if you strike directly for it.
-
-There is an opinion abroad that good politics requires that every
-man should give his whole time to politics. This is another of the
-superstitions disseminated by the politicians who want us to go to
-their primaries, and accepted by people so ignorant of life that they
-believe that the temperature depends upon the thermometer.
-
-Why, you are running those primaries now. If you were different, they
-would become different. You need never go near them. Go into that camp
-where your instinct leads you. The improvement in politics will not
-be marked by any cyclonic overturn. There will always be two parties
-competing for your vote. It takes no more time to vote for a good man
-than for a bad man. There will be no more men in public life then
-than now. There will be no overt change in conditions. A few leaders
-will stand for the new forces. It is true that it requires a general
-increase of interest on the part of every one, in order that these men
-shall be found. Your personal duty is to support them in private and
-public. That is all. The extent to which you yourself become involved
-in public affairs depends upon chances with which you need not concern
-yourself. Only try to understand what is happening under your eyes.
-Every time you see a group of men advancing some cause that seems
-sensible, and being denounced on all hands as “self-appointed,” see if
-it was not something in yourself, after all, that appointed those men.
-
-As we grow old, what have we to rely on as a touchstone for the times?
-You once had your own causes and enthusiasms, but you cannot understand
-these new ones. You had your certificate from the Almighty, but these
-fellows are “self-appointed.” What you wanted was clear, but these men
-want something unattainable, something that society, as you know it,
-cannot supply. Calm yourself, my friend; perhaps they bring it.
-
-Has the great Philosophy of Evolution done nothing for the mind of man,
-that new developments, as they arrive, are received with the same stony
-solemnity, are greeted with the same phrases as ever? How can you have
-the ingenuousness to argue soberly against me, supplying me, by every
-word you say, with new illustrations, new hope, new fuel? Until I heard
-you repeat word by word the prayer-book of crumbling conservatism, I
-was not sure I was right. You have placed the great seal of the world
-upon new truth. Thus should it be received.
-
-The radicals are really always saying the same thing. They do not
-change; everybody else changes. They are accused of the most
-incompatible crimes, of egoism and a mania for power, indifference to
-the fate of their own cause, fanaticism, triviality, want of humor,
-buffoonery and irreverence. But they sound a certain note. Hence the
-great practical power of consistent radicals. To all appearance nobody
-follows them, yet every one believes them. They hold a tuning-fork and
-sound A, and everybody knows it really is A, though the time-honored
-pitch is G flat. The community cannot get that A out of its head.
-Nothing can prevent an upward tendency in the popular tone so long as
-the real A is kept sounding. Every now and then the whole town strikes
-it for a week, and all the bells ring, and then all sinks to suppressed
-discord and denial.
-
-The reason why we have not, of late years, had strong consistent
-centres of influence, focuses of steady political power, has been that
-the community has not developed men who could hold the note. It was
-only when the note made a temporary concord with some heavy political
-scheme that the reform leaders could hear it themselves. For the rest
-of the time it threw the whole civilization out of tune. The terrible
-clash of interests drowned it. The reformers themselves lost it, and
-wandered up and down, guessing.
-
-It is imagined that nature goes by jumps, and that a whole community
-can suddenly sing in tune, after it has been caterwauling and murdering
-the scale for twenty years. The truth is, we ought to thank God
-when any man or body of men make the discovery that there is such a
-thing as absolute pitch, or absolute honesty, or absolute personal
-and intellectual integrity. A few years of this spirit will identify
-certain men with the fundamental idea that truth is stronger than
-consequences, and these men will become the most serious force and
-the only truly political force in their community. Their ambition is
-illimitable, for you cannot set bounds to personal influence. But it is
-an ambition that cannot be abused. A departure from their own course
-will ruin any one of them in a night, and undo twenty years of service.
-
-It would be natural that such sets of men should arise all over
-the country, men who “wanted” nothing, and should reveal the
-inverse position of the Boss System; a set of moral bosses with no
-organizations, no politics; men thrown into prominence by the operation
-of all the forces of human nature now suppressed, and the suppression
-of those now operative. It is obvious that one such man will suffice
-for a town. In the competition of character, one man will be naturally
-fixed upon, whom his competitors will be the first to honor; and
-upon him will be condensed the public feeling, the confidence of the
-community. If the extreme case do not arise, nevertheless it is certain
-that the tendencies toward a destruction of the present system, will
-reveal themselves as a tendency making for the weight of personal
-character in practical politics.
-
-Reform politics is, after all, a simple thing. It demands no great
-attainments. You can play the game in the dark. A child can understand
-it. There are no subtleties nor obscurities, no higher analysis or
-mystery of any sort. If you want a compass at any moment in the midst
-of some difficult situation, you have only to say to yourself, “Life
-is larger than this little imbroglio. I shall follow my instinct.” As
-you say this, your compass swings true. You may be surprised to find
-what course it points to. But what it tells you to do will be practical
-agitation.
-
-
-
-
-III
-
-THE MASSES
-
-
-Let us examine current beliefs on popular education, and then
-thereafter let us look very closely at the work done among the poor,
-and see upon what lines it has been found possible to establish
-influence.
-
-Why is it that if you go down to the Bowery and set up a kindergarten
-or give a course of lectures on the Duties of Citizenship, every one
-commends you; whereas if you go into some abandoned district where a
-Tammany thug is running for the State Assembly against a Republican
-heeler, and if you put an honest man in the field against them both,
-your friends call you a fool, and say that your reform consists of mere
-negation?
-
-Who asks to see the results upon the public welfare of a night school
-in astronomy? Yet, if you get ten mechanics to labor for six months
-with the fire of enthusiasm in them, building up a radical club, and as
-a result, one hundred and fifty men cast for the first time in their
-lives a vote that represents the heart and conscience of each, your
-intelligent friends ask, “What have you done? You are howling against
-the moon.”
-
-Why is it that if you are a grocer and refuse to sand your sugar, you
-are called honest? Yet, if a young politician takes this course, it is
-supposed that life is not long enough for the world to discover his
-value; he is a visionary. In the sugar trade, the man insisted upon
-dealing with the community as a whole. He was not trying to sell sugar
-to a club, or to benefit some district. He dealt with the public. Now,
-if a politician deals directly with the public, we condemn him because
-we cannot see the empire of confidence he is building up. The reason we
-do not see it is entirely due to historical causes. We have had little
-experience recently in the utility of large appeals. We forget their
-power. Yet we are not without examples. Grover Cleveland dealt directly
-with the people on a great scale. He established a personal relation
-that was stronger than party bonds. This made him President, preserved
-his character and gave reality to politics. It was a bit of education
-to every man in the United States to see what riff-raff our political
-arks were made of: a man laid his hand on the end of one of them and
-tore off the roof.
-
-We are rather more familiar with the power of public confidence as
-seen in times of revolution. In the year of the Lexow investigation
-the people of New York City believed that Dr. Parkhurst and John Goff
-were in earnest. There was a period of a few weeks when Goff exercised
-the powers of a dictator. The Police Commissioners had threatened to
-discipline a subordinate who had testified before Goff’s committee.
-He subpoenaed them all the next morning, and he browbeat them like
-school-boys. They went back humbled. The revelations of the summer
-had awakened the spirit of revolt in the masses of the people, and it
-expressed itself directly as power. The machinery of government was
-not in abeyance, but it was seen to be a mere vehicle. It could be
-made to work justice. Here were two men, Goff and Parkhurst, rendered
-all-powerful by the existence of popular confidence. The state of mind
-of the community was unusual, and the indignation soon subsided; but it
-subsided to a new level, and the abuses and inhumanity of Boss tyranny
-have never since been so severe in New York.
-
-Our people have seen several volcanic eruptions of this sort, and
-therefore they believe in them. They believe in the moral power of the
-community, but are afraid it can only act by convulsion. They think
-that some new principle comes into play at such times, something which
-is not a constant factor in daily government. On the other hand, we
-have all been trained to respect plodding methods in common education,
-and we know that much can be done by kindergartens, boys’ clubs, and
-propaganda to change the standards of the community and make men trust
-virtue. We believe in the boys’ club, and we believe in the earthquake;
-we forget that the same principle underlies them both. When some one
-applies this principle to the field of political education that lies
-between them, we are cynical because we have no experience.
-
-Apart from the lack of experience that prevents people from seeing the
-use of this practical activity, there are two distressing elements that
-make men not want to see it. In the first place, even if you work in
-the Bowery and a friend votes in Harlem, you are apt to be hitting his
-interests and prejudices. And in the second place your conduct is a
-horrid appeal. If this work is useful, he ought to be doing it. He had
-hoped that nothing could be done.
-
-The real distinction between this particular sort of work and other
-philanthropy is, that other philanthropy is preparatory drill; this
-is war. The other is feeding, training, and preaching; this is
-practice. Now, you may have your license to preach all you please in
-the vineyard, but if you touch the soil with the spade, you find the
-ground is pre-empted; you are fighting a railroad. And this condition
-is openly recognized in cities where the evil forces are completely
-dominant.
-
-In lecturing before the University Extension in Pennsylvania, you
-are not allowed to talk politics. It is against the policy of the
-philanthropists who run the institution, and who are run by the
-railroad. The situation in Philadelphia is merely illustrative of
-the distinction between philanthropy and political reform, which is
-always ready to become apparent. Of course, so long as the railroad
-distributes the philanthropy, there will result nothing but tyranny.
-The Roman Emperors gave shows to amuse the people, and we give them
-talks on Botticelli and magic-lantern pictures of the Nile. There are,
-then, real reasons why our people are slow to acknowledge the utility
-of militant political reform, and why they clutch at any handle against
-it.
-
-But we have much more to learn from the philanthropists by a study of
-what they have done than by dwelling on their shortcomings. They have
-labored while the political reformers have slept; and after many trials
-and many failures they have found certain working principles.
-
-It was they who discovered that we cannot, as human nature is
-constituted, give strength to any one except by helping the whole man
-to develop at once. We must give him a chance to grow. The workers
-among the poor have long ago seen the futility of any effort except
-that of raising the general standards of living. They have established
-Settlements, where the relation between the settlers and the
-surrounding population is as natural as family life and as perennial
-as Tammany Hall. After ten years of experiment this has been done in
-many places. If you will go to one of these places and study exactly
-what has happened in the line of benefit to the people, you will see
-that it has resulted _wholly_ from personal influence,--that is
-to say, from the effect of character upon character. “Two years ago we
-established a boys’ club, and soon afterwards a kindergarten. The boys
-returned one day, and out of jealousy smashed everything belonging to
-the kindergarten, and piled the rubbish in the middle of the room.
-Last week a barrel of fruit was sent here for the sick and weakly, and
-we left the barrel open with a card on the outside to that effect. You
-could not get the boys to touch the fruit. Now, if you ask me what
-system or what part of the system has caused the change in these boys,
-I don’t know.”
-
-This is reform politics, but unless you and I go there and make a place
-for these boys in practical politics, they will find waiting for them
-nothing but the caucus and the job. They will relapse and forget. It is
-throwing effort into the sea to train the young if you stop there. The
-test comes when the scaffoldings of early life are taken down. Each man
-meets the world alone. The tragedies of character occur at this period.
-We must make a camp and standing ground for grown men. So far as the
-hope of political purity goes, there are acres of this city that are in
-a worse condition than health was in before the era of hospitals. Fly
-over them as the crow flies, and you cannot find a centre of downright
-antagonism to evil. The population does not know that such a thing
-exists; and yet, if you propose to go there and set up a fight against
-both parties,--that is to say, a fight against wickedness,--you are
-told by patriots and doctors of divinity, “Don’t do it unless you can
-win. You will disgust people with reform.”
-
-It is awful and at the same time ludicrous to hear an educated person
-maintain this doctrine and in the same breath mourn over the corruption
-of the masses. The man throws his own dark shadow over them and bewails
-their want of light. He doubts the power of personal influence; and yet
-there is absolutely no other force for good in the world, and never has
-been. Let us stick to facts. Take individual cases of improvement and
-see what power has been at work. You will find that you disclose behind
-any personal improvement, not a ballot law or an organization, but a
-human being.
-
-The movement for political reform goes into the Bowery in the wake of
-the philanthropists. We go there knowing something about practical
-politics. We know, for instance, that the Bowery is the geographical
-name for a district which is really governed by the same forces as
-Fifth Avenue. To think that the politics of the Bowery are controlled
-by the Bowery is about as sensible as to believe that the politics of
-Irkutsk are controlled at Irkutsk. We have got, first, to disclose the
-machinery of evil and then to fight it wherever we find it, even though
-it lead us into churches. Nothing is needed in any Tammany club on the
-Bowery that is not needed ten times as much in the Union League Club on
-Fifth Avenue--personal self-sacrifice for principle in a cause which is
-apparently hopeless. Unless you go there displaying that, you are not
-needed.
-
-Our intercourse with the laboring man is a great teacher to ourselves.
-That is its main use. It brings out, as nothing else can, the magnitude
-and perfection of the system, whose visible top and little flag we
-can always see, but whose dimensions and ramifications nothing but
-experiment can reveal; philosophy could not guess it.
-
-Here is a laborer on the street railroad. In order to get work he must
-show a ticket from the party boss. It is his passport from the Czar,
-countersigned by the proper official; otherwise he gets no job. Here
-is a young notary whom you employ to carry about the certificate that
-puts an independent candidate in nomination. You try to get him to sign
-the thing himself and join your club. It is no use asking. His brother
-did it once and lost his place; so close is the scrutiny, so rapid
-the punishment. Examine the retail grocer, or the tobacconist, or
-the cobbler; go into particulars with him, and you will find that his
-unwillingness to join your movement does not spring so directly from
-his inability to see the point of it, as from fear of the direct and
-immediate consequences to himself.
-
-We wanted to elevate the masses, but it turns out, as the
-philanthropists discerned long ago, that there are no masses in
-America, there are no masses in New York City. We can discover only
-individuals, who are each controlled by individual interests, by
-various and subtle considerations. These men are in chains to other
-men, who often live in other parts of the city.
-
-The attorneys and merchants, the business world in fact, is found to
-be in league with abuse. The man who signs the laborer’s license to
-work reports twice a day to a big contractor who is director in a bank
-whose president owns the opera house and endowed the sailors’ home.
-He built the yacht club, is vestryman in the biggest church, and is
-revered by all men. The title-deeds and registry books of all visible
-wealth, show the names of his intimate friends. All we can do in the
-way of weakening the chains is to expose them; this cruelty is largely
-ignorance. The beneficiaries must be made to see the sources of their
-wealth. It is pre-occupation with business, not coldness of heart, that
-conceals the conditions. The American business man is a warm-hearted
-being. He does not even care for money, but for the game of business.
-
-As matters now stand in America, we see this condition,--that it
-is for the immediate interest of the dominant class, namely, the
-politico-financial class, to keep the people as selfish as possible. We
-have examined the subtle strains of influence and prejudice by which
-this commercial interest has been extended, until, as a practical
-matter, it is almost impossible for a man to get word to the laboring
-classes that there exists such a thing as political morality. Some
-professional philanthropist always stands ready to prevent the signal
-of honesty from being raised; some set of Sunday citizens interposes to
-stop the unwise, inexpedient, foolhardy attempt to be independent of
-rascality.
-
-And when you do succeed in reaching the mechanic, what can you do for
-him? Tell him to be a man, and strike off the shackles that bind him.
-
-Here we are, as helpless before the poor as before the rich, facing
-both of them with the same query, “Can you not see that your own
-concession, call it poverty, or call it poverty of will, is one element
-of this oppression?”
-
-The difference between the poor and the financial classes is one of
-spiritual complexity. The promoters are well-to-do because their minds
-have been able to grasp and utilize the complex forces made up of the
-minds of their simpler fellow-beings. And this astuteness leaves them
-less open to unselfish emotions than the laboring man. His nature is
-more intact. He is a more emotional and instinctive being. It is for
-this reason that moral reforms have come from the lower strata of
-society. The people have as much to lose as the bankers, but they are
-more ready to lose it.
-
-The head of moral feeling in the community has got to grow strong
-enough to force the financier to take his clutch off the laboring
-man, before you can reach the laboring man. And yet labor itself will
-contribute more than its share towards this head of moral feeling;
-and therefore you must go among the laboring classes with your ideas
-and your propaganda. But beware lest you give him a stone for bread.
-You can do no more for a man because you call yourself a “politician”
-than if you were a mere philanthropist. A man’s standards of political
-thought are but a small fraction of his general standards, and unless
-your sense of truth is as sharp as a sword you had better not come near
-the laboring man.
-
-The point here made is--and it is of great importance--that we candidly
-acknowledge at every instant the nature of our undertaking and the
-nature of our power, for in so far as we mistake them we weaken our
-practical utility.
-
-It is not as the agent of any institution that you are here, but as
-the agent of conscience at the dictation of personal feeling. Do you
-need proof that you yourself draw all your power from sheer moral
-influence? Note what you do when you start your club. You go to the
-nearest well-to-do person and ask for money for rent. He gives it to
-you out of his fund of general benevolence. To whom do you really
-want to distribute this benevolence? To every one. You feel that by
-passing it on through a group and series of boys and young men you can
-benefit the whole country. You use them as a mere vehicle. You know
-that you can only help them by getting them to help others. Your appeal
-for clients then goes out to the whole district. Your club puts you
-in communication with every man in it. In teaching your club or in
-exhorting any mortal to good behavior, what method, what stimulus, do
-you use? Whether you know it or not, you are really drawing support
-from every one who is following the same principle, all over the city,
-all over the country, all over the world. Do you not ceaselessly appeal
-to the examples of Washington and Lincoln, to the books and conduct of
-men whose aims were your aims? Or take your own case. Why do you occupy
-yourself with this thing? This activity satisfies your demands upon
-life; nothing else does. You are the creature of a thousand influences,
-and if you begin to trace them you find that you are fulfilling the
-will of Toynbee, of John Stuart Mill, of Kant. You are a disciple of
-Tolstoi. You were inspired by William Lloyd Garrison. It is they, as
-much as you, who are doing this work. It is they who formulated the
-ideas and impressed them upon you. Your great friends are the founders
-of religions. Examine the actual persons who give you practical help.
-You will find Moses, you will find Christ behind them. What you are
-using is the world’s fund of unselfishness. It is necessary to employ
-the whole of it in order to accomplish anything, however small. As a
-practical matter, every one does employ the whole of it every time he
-even thinks of reform.
-
-Now, just as we can trace the sources of our power in the great
-currents of human feeling that flow down to us out of the past; so we
-can foresee the accomplishments of that power in enlarging the lives
-of men who come after us. We are sinking the foundations of a new
-politics. You cannot always see every stone, but it has gone to its
-place. It is impossible to take a stand for what you think is a true
-theory without thereby becoming an integral factor for good in every
-man who hears of it. It is impossible to be that factor without taking
-that stand.
-
-What is the nature of the good you can do to the laboring man? His
-mind analyzes you in a flash. If he is influenced by you, you may be
-sure that it is by something in you that you had not intended to give
-him. After the man has seen you, he has been moved by you; but how?
-Consult your own remembrance. What incident of character impressed you
-most when you were a child? Do you remember any act, any expression
-or gesture or anecdote or speech, that had a lasting influence upon
-you? Now I ask you this: Was it done for you? Were you the designed
-beneficiary of it? Was it not rather the silent part of some one
-else’s conduct, a thing you were perhaps not meant to see at all? And
-this was no accident. This is the natural history of influence; it
-passes unconsciously from life to life.
-
-We must take the world as we find it. We must deal with human nature
-according to the laws of human nature. Our politics are at present
-so artificial that the average man thinks that the name “politics”
-prevents the well established and familiar principles of human nature
-from being operative. But he is wrong. Man has never yet succeeded in
-inventing any system that could evade them or affect them in the least.
-All the political organization of reform is already in existence, and
-needs only strengthening and developing. It is all in use, and every
-one understands its use and knows its headquarters and its agencies.
-It is all individual character and courage, and with the growth of
-character and courage it will become more defined and visible every
-day.
-
-
-
-
-IV
-
-LITERATURE
-
-
-There are feelings and views about life, there are conviction and
-insight, which come from thinking at a high rate of speed, and vanish
-when the machinery moves slowly and the blood ebbs. The world not only
-accepts the intensity of the writer, but demands it. Nevertheless,
-the world has an imperfect knowledge as to where this intensity comes
-from, how it is produced, or what relation it bears to ugliness and
-falsehood. “What a pleasure it must be to you,” said Rothschild to
-Heine, “to be able to turn off those little songs!”
-
-In our ordinary moods we regard the conclusions of the poets as both
-true and untrue,--true to feeling, untrue to fact; true as intimations
-of the next world or of some lost world; untrue here, because detached
-from those portions of society that are perennially visible. Most men
-have a duplicate philosophy which enables them to love the arts and
-the wit of mankind, at the same time that they conveniently despise
-them. Life is ugly and necessary; art is beautiful and impossible. “The
-farther you go from the facts of life, the nearer you get to poetry.
-The practical problem is to keep them in separate spheres, and to
-enjoy both.” The hypothesis of a duplicity in the universe explains
-everything, and staves off all claims and questionings.
-
-Such are the convictions of the average cultivated man. His back is
-broken, but he lives in the two halves comfortably enough. He has to be
-protected at his weak spot, of course, and that spot is the present;
-ten years from now, to-morrow, yesterday, the day of judgment, the
-State of Pennsylvania,--all these you are welcome to. Every form of
-idealism appeals to him, so long as it does not ask him to budge out of
-his armchair. “Aha,” he says, “I understand this. It takes its place in
-the realm of the Imagination.”
-
-This man does not know, and has no means of knowing, that good books
-are only written by men whose backs are not broken, and whose vital
-energy circulates through their entire system in one sweep. They have
-a unitary and not a duplicate philosophy. The present is their strong
-point. The actualities of life are their passion. They lay a bold hand
-upon everything within their reach, for they see it with new sight.
-
-The glitter of the past makes us think of literature as embodied in
-books; but to understand literature we must fix our minds on authors,
-not on books. The men who write--what makes them write well or ill?
-What are the conditions that breed poetry, or music, or architecture?
-The current beliefs about art and letters are fatalistic. It is
-supposed that poets and artists crop up now and then, and that nothing
-can stop them; they need no aid, they conquer circumstances. I do not
-believe it. We see no analogy to it in nature. Among the plants and the
-fishes we see nothing but a wholesale and incredible destruction of
-germs on all sides. It seems a miracle that any seed should fall upon
-good ground, and be sheltered till it come to the flower. Why should
-the percentage of germs that come to maturity be greater with genius
-than it is with the eggs of the sturgeon? The enemies of each are
-numerous. If it were not for the fecundity of nature, we should have
-none of either of them. And how is it that the great man always happens
-to be young at the very moment when some events are going forward that
-ripen his powers; so that he grows up with his time, and does something
-that is comprehensible to all time?
-
-The answer is, that all eras are sown thick with the seeds of genius,
-which for the most part die, but in a favoring age mature to greatness.
-Must we resort to a theory of special creation to explain the great
-talents of the world? And even this would not explain our own welcome
-and our own comprehension of them when they come. If it were not for
-the undeveloped powers, the seeds of genius, in ourselves, Plato and
-Bach would be meaningless, and Christ would have died in vain.
-
-It must be that thousands of good intellects perish annually. The men
-do not die, but their powers wither, or rather never mature. Art, like
-everything else, represents an escape, a survival. In any age that
-lacks it, or is weak in it, we may look about for the enginery by which
-it is crushed. In looking into a past age we are put to inference and
-conjecture. We see the mark of fetters upon the Byzantine soul, and we
-begin dredging the dark waters of history for a metaphysical cause. We
-cannot walk into a Byzantine shop and watch the apprentice at work.
-But in our own time we can see the whole process in action. We can
-study our modern Inquisitions at leisure, and note every mark that is
-made upon a soul that is passing through them.
-
-It does not involve any indignity to the pretensions of literature if
-we walk into that great bazaar, modern journalism, and see what is
-going on there behind the counters. Here is a factory of popular art.
-It is not the whole of letters; but it has an influence on the whole
-of letters. The press fills the consciousness of the people. A modern
-community breathes through its press. Journalism, to be sure, is a
-region of letters, where all the factors for truth are at a special
-and peculiar discount. Its attention is given to near and ugly things,
-to mean quarrels, business interests, and special ends. Every country
-shows up badly here. The hypocrisy of the press is the worst thing in
-England. It is the worst exhibition of England’s worst fault. The press
-of France gives you France at her weakest. The press of America gives
-you America at her cheapest. Perhaps the study of journalism in any
-country would illustrate the peculiar vices of that country; and it is
-fair to remember this in examining our own press. But examine it we
-must, for it is important.
-
-The subject includes more than the daily newspapers. Those ephemeral
-sheets that flutter from the table into the waste-paper basket, which
-are something more than mere newspapers and less than magazines, and
-the magazines themselves, which are more than budgets of gossip and
-less than books, make up a perpetual rain of paper and ink. Thousands
-of people are engaged in writing them, and millions in reading them.
-This whole species of literature is typical of the age; let us see how
-it is conducted.
-
-A journal is a meeting-place between the forces of intellect and of
-commerce. The men who become editors always bear some relation to the
-intellectual interests of the country. They make money, but they make
-it by understanding the minds of people who are not taking money, but
-thought, from the exchanges that the editors set up. A magazine or a
-newspaper is a shop. Each is an experiment and represents a new focus,
-a new ratio between commerce and intellect. Even trade journals have
-columns devoted to general information and jokes. The one thing a
-journal must have in order to be a journal is circulation. It must be
-carried into people’s houses, and this is brought about by an impulse
-in the buyer. The buyer has many opinions and modes of thought that
-he does not draw from the journal, and he is always ready to drop a
-journal that offends him. An editor is thus constantly forced to choose
-between affronting his public and placating his public. Now, whatever
-arguments may be given for his taking one course or the other, it
-remains clear that in so far as an editor is not publishing what he
-himself thinks of interest for its own sake, he is encouraging in the
-public something else besides intellect. He is subserving financial,
-political, or religious bias, or, it may be, popular whim. He is, to
-this extent at least, the custodian and protector of prejudice.
-
-The thrift of an editor-owner, who is building up the circulation of
-a paper, tends to keep him conservative. Repetition is safer than
-innovation. An especially strong temptation is spread before the
-American editor in the shape of an enormous reading public, made up
-of people who have a common-school education, and who resemble each
-other very closely in their traits of mind. There is money to be made
-by any one who discerns a new way of reinforcing any prejudice of the
-American people.
-
-It has come about very naturally during the last thirty years, that
-journalism has been developed in America as one of the branches in the
-science of catering to the masses on a gigantic scale. The different
-kinds of conservatism have been banked, consolidated, and, as it were,
-marshalled under the banners of as many journals. Money and energy
-have been expended in collecting these vast audiences, and sleepless
-vigilance is needed to keep them together.
-
-The great investments in the good will of millions are nursed by
-editors who live by their talents, and who in another age would have
-been intellectual men. The highest type of editor now extant in America
-will as frankly regret his own obligation to cater to mediocrity, as
-the business man will regret his obligation to pay blackmail, or as
-the citizen will regret his obligation to vote for one of the parties.
-“There is nothing else to do. I am dealing with the money of others.
-There are not enough intelligent people to count.” He serves the times.
-The influence thus exerted by the public (through the editor) upon the
-writer tends to modify the writer and make him resemble the public. It
-is a spiritual pressure exerted by the majority in favor of conformity.
-This exists in all countries, but is peculiarly severe in countries and
-ages where the majority is made up of individuals very similar to each
-other. The tyranny of a uniform population always makes itself felt.
-
-If any man doubt the hide-bound character of our journals to-day, let
-him try this experiment. Let him write down what he thinks upon any
-matter, write a story of any length, a poem, a prayer, a speech. Let
-him assume, as he writes it, that it cannot be published, and let him
-satisfy his individual taste in the subject, size, mood, and tenor of
-the whole composition. Then let him begin his peregrinations to find in
-which one of the ten thousand journals of America there is a place for
-his ideas as they stand. We have more journals than any other country.
-The whole field of ideas has been covered; every vehicle of opinion has
-its policy, its methods, its precedents. A hundred will receive him if
-he shaves this, pads that, cuts it in half; but not one of them will
-trust him as he stands, “Good, but eccentric,” “Good, but too long,”
-“Good, but new.”
-
-Let us follow the steps of this withering influence. A young
-illustrator does an etching that he likes. He is told to reduce it to
-the conventional standard. This is easy, but what is happening in the
-process? He blurs the fine edges of vision, not only on the plate,
-but in his own mind. The real injury to intellect is not done in the
-editorial sanctum. It is done in the mind of the writer who himself
-attempts to cater to the prejudice of others. A man rewrites a scene
-in a story to please a public. In order to do this he is obliged to
-forget what his story was about. He is talking by rote; he is making
-an imitation. Does this seem a small thing? Let any one do it once and
-see where it leads him. The attitude of the whole human being towards
-his whole life is changed by the experience. Do it twice, and you can
-hardly shake off the practice. Write and publish six editorials for the
-“Universalist,” and then sit down to write one not in the style of the
-“Universalist.” You will find it, practically, an impossibility.
-
-The notable lack in our literature is this: the prickles and
-irregularities of personal feeling have been pumice-stoned away. It is
-too smooth. There is an absence of individuality, of private opinion.
-This is the same lack that curses our politics,--the absence of
-private opinion.
-
-The sacrifice in political life is honesty, in literary life is
-intellect; but the closer you examine honesty and intellect the more
-clearly they appear to be the same thing. Suppose that a judge, in
-order to please a boss, awards Parson Jones’ cow to Deacon Brown;
-does he boldly admit this even to himself? Never. He writes an able
-opinion in which he befogs his intelligence, and convinces himself
-that he has arrived at his award by logical steps. In like manner,
-the revising editor who reads with the eyes of the farmer’s daughter
-begins to lose his own. He is extinguishing some sparks of instructive
-reality which would offend--and benefit--the farmer’s daughter; and he
-is obliterating a part of his own mind with every stroke of his blue
-pencil. He is devitalizing literature by erasing personality. He does
-this in the money interests of a syndicate; but the debasing effect
-upon character is the same as if it were done at the dictate of the
-German Emperor. The harm done in either case is intellectual.
-
-Take another example. A reporter writes up a public meeting, but colors
-it with the creed of his journal. Can he do this acceptably without
-abjuring his own senses? He is competing with men whose every energy is
-bent on seeing the occasion as the newspaper wishes it seen. Consider
-the immense difficulty of telling the truth on the witness stand, and
-judge whether good reporting is easy. The newspaper trade, as now
-conducted, is prostitution. It mows down the boys as they come from the
-colleges. It defaces the very desire for truth, and leaves them without
-a principle to set a clock by. They grow to disbelieve in the reality
-of ideas. But these are our future literati, our poets and essayists,
-our historians and publicists.
-
-The experts who sit in the offices of the journals of the country
-have so long used their minds as commercial instruments, that it
-never occurs to them to publish or not publish anything, according to
-their personal views. They do not know that every time they subserve
-prejudice they are ruining intellect. If there were an editor who had
-any suspicion of the way the world is put together, he would respect
-talent as he respects honor. It would be impossible for him to make his
-living by this traffic. If he knew what he was doing, he would prefer
-penury.
-
-These men, then, have not the least idea of the function they fulfil.
-No more has the agent of the Insurance Company who corrupts a
-legislature. The difference in degree between the two iniquities is
-enormous, because one belongs to that region in the scale of morality
-which is completely understood, and the other does not. We do not
-excuse the insurance agent; we will not allow him to plead ignorance.
-He commits a penal offence. We will not allow selfishness to trade upon
-selfishness and steal from the public in this form. But what law can
-protect the public interest in the higher faculties? What statute can
-enforce artistic truth?
-
-We actually forbid a man by statute to sell his vote, because a vote is
-understood to be an opinion, a thing dependent on rational and moral
-considerations. You cannot buy and sell it without turning it into
-something else. The exercise of that infinitesimal fraction of public
-power represented by one man’s vote is hedged about with penalties;
-because the logic of practical government has forced us to see its
-importance. But the harm done to a community by the sale of a vote
-does not follow by virtue of the statute, but by virtue of a law of
-influence of which the statute is the recognition. The same law governs
-the sale of any opinion, whether it be conveyed in a book review or in
-a political speech, in a picture of life and manners, a poem, a novel,
-or an etching. There is no department of life in which you can lie
-for private gain without doing harm. The grosser forms of it give us
-the key to the subtler ones, and the jail becomes the symbol of that
-condition into which the violation of truth will shut any mind.
-
-So far as any man comes directly in contact with the agencies of
-organized literature, let him remember that his mind is at stake.
-They can change you, but you cannot change them, except by changing
-the public they reflect. The faculties of man are as strong as steel
-if properly used, but they are like the down on a peach if improperly
-used. What shall a man take in exchange for his soul? No man has the
-privilege upon this earth of being more than one person. In this matter
-of expression, it is the last ten per cent of accuracy that saves or
-sells you. Talent evaporates as easily as a delegate holds his tongue
-or a lawyer smiles to a rich man; and the injury is irremediable. Let
-a man not alter a line or cut a paragraph at the suggestion of an
-editor. Those are the very words that are valuable. “Ah,” you say, “but
-I need criticism.” Then go to a critic. Consult the man who is farthest
-away from this influence, some one who cannot read the magazines, some
-one who does not have to read them. Your public, when you get one,
-will qualify the general public; but you must reach it as a whole man.
-The writer’s course is easy compared to that of the reform politician,
-because printing is cheap. He will get heard immediately. He covers
-the whole of the United States while the other is canvassing a ward.
-Literary self-assertion is as much needed as any of the virtue we pray
-for in politics. A resonant and unvexed independence makes a man’s
-words stir the fibres in other men; and it matters little whether you
-label his words literature or politics.
-
-The difficulty in any revolt against custom, the struggle a man
-has in getting his mind free from the cobwebs of restraint, always
-turns out to involve financial distress; and this holds true of the
-writer’s attempt to override the senseless restrictions of the press.
-The magazines pay handsomely, and pay at once. A writer must earn
-his bread; a man must support his family. We accept this necessity
-with such a hearty concurrence, and the necessity itself becomes so
-sacred, that it seems to imply an answer to all ethical and artistic
-questions. We almost think that nature will connive at malpractice
-done in so good a cause as the support of a family. The subject must
-be looked at more narrowly. The spur of poverty is popularly regarded
-not only as an excuse for all bad work, but as a prerequisite to all
-good work. There is a misconception in this wholesale appropriation of
-a partial truth. The economic laws are valuable and suggestive, but
-they are founded on the belief that a man will pursue his own business
-interests exclusively. This is never entirely true even in trade, and
-the doctrines of the economists become more and more misleading when
-applied to fields of life where the money motive becomes incidental.
-The law of supply and demand does not govern the production of sonnets.
-
-Let us lay aside theory and observe the effects of want upon the artist
-and his work. As a stimulus to the whole man, a prod to get him into
-action and keep him active, the spur of poverty is a blessing. But if
-it enter into the detail of his attention, while he is at work, it is
-damnation.
-
-A man at work is like a string that is vibrating. Touch it with a
-feather and it is numb. A singer will sing flat if he sees a friend
-in the audience. Even a trained and cold-blooded lawyer who is trying
-a case, will not be at his best if he is watched by some one whom he
-wants to impress.
-
-The artist is the easiest of all men to upset. He is dealing with
-subtle and fluid things,--memories, allusions, associations. It is all
-gossamer and sunlight when he begins. It is to be gossamer and sunlight
-when he is finished. But in the interim it is bricks and mortar, rubble
-and white lead. And the writer--I do not say that he must be more free
-from cares than the next man--but he must not let into the mint and
-forge of his thought some immaterial and petty fact about himself,
-for this will make him self-conscious. Consider how ingenuous, how
-unexpected, how natural is good conversation. At one moment you have
-nothing to say, at the next a vista of ideas has opened. They come
-crowding in, and the telling of them reveals new vistas. It is the same
-with the writer. In the process of writing the story is made. There is
-really nothing to say or do in the world until you make your start, and
-then the significance begins to steam out of the materials. And here,
-in the act and heat of creation, to have the cold fear thrust in, “I
-cannot use that phrase because the editor will think it too strong,” is
-enough to chill the brain of Rabelais. Human nature cannot stand such
-handling. Do this to a man and you break his spirit. He becomes tame,
-calculating, and ingenious. His powers are frozen.
-
-It is impossible not to see in contemporary journalism a
-slaughter-house for mind. Here we have a great whale that browses on
-the young and eats them by thousands. This is the seamy side of popular
-education. The low level of the class at the dame’s school keeps the
-bright boys back and makes dunces of them.
-
-We have been dealing in all this matter with one of the deepest facts
-of life, to wit, the influence that society at large has in cutting
-down and narrowing the development of the individual. The newspaper
-business displays the whole operation very vividly; but we may see the
-same thing happening in the other walks of life. There arrives a time
-in the career of most men when their powers become fixed. Men seem
-to expand to definite shapes, like those Japanese cuttings that open
-out into flowers and plants when you drop them into warm water. After
-reaching his saturation point each man fills his niche in society and
-changes little. He goes on doing whatever he was engaged upon at the
-time he touched his limit.
-
-We almost believe that every man has his predestinate size and shape,
-and that some obscure law of growth arrests one man at thirty and
-the next at forty years of age. This is partly true; but the law is
-not obscure. It is not because the men stop growing that they repeat
-themselves, but they stop growing because they repeat themselves. They
-cease to experiment; they cease to search. The lawyer adopts routine
-methods; the painter follows up his success with an imitation of his
-success; the writer finds a recipe for style or plot. Every one saves
-himself the trouble of re-examining the contents of his own mind.
-He has the best possible reason for doing this. The public will not
-pay for his experiments as well as it will for his routine work. But
-the laws of nature are deaf to his reasons. Research is the price of
-intellectual growth. If you face the problems of life freshly and
-squarely each morning, you march. If you accept any solution as good
-enough, you drop.
-
-For there is no finality and ending place to intellect. Examine any
-bit of politics, any law-case, or domestic complication, until you
-understand your own reasons for feeling as you do about it. Then
-write the matter down carefully and conclusively, and you will find
-that you have done no more than restate the problem in a new form.
-The more complete your exposition, the more loudly it calls for new
-solution. The masterly analysis of Tolstoi, his accurate explanations,
-his diagnosis and dissection of human life, leave us with a picture of
-society that for unsolved mystery competes with the original. But the
-point lies here. You must lay bare your whole soul in the statement you
-make. You must resolutely set down everything that touches the matter.
-Until you do this, the question refuses to assume its next shape. You
-cannot flinch and qualify in your first book, and speak plainly in your
-second.
-
-It is the act of utterance that draws out the powers in a man and makes
-him a master of his own mind. Without the actual experience of writing
-Lohengrin, Wagner could not have discovered Parsifal. The works of
-men who are great enough to get their whole thought uttered at each
-deliverance, form a progression like the deductions of a mathematician.
-These men are never satisfied with a past accomplishment. Their eyes
-are on questions that beckon to them from the horizon. Their faculties
-are replenished with new energy because they seek. They are driving
-their ploughs through a sea of thought, intent, unresting, resourceful,
-creative. They are discoverers, and just to the extent that lesser men
-are worth anything they are discoverers too.
-
-Beauty and elevation flash from the currents set up by intense
-speculation. Beauty is not the aim of the writer. His aim must be
-truth. But beauty and elevation shine out of him while he is on the
-quest. His mind is on the problem; and as he unravels it and displays
-it, he communicates his own spirit, as it were incidentally, as it were
-unwittingly, and this is the part that goes out from him and does his
-work in the world.
-
-
-
-
-V
-
-PRINCIPLES
-
-
-Speech is a very small part of human intercourse. Indeed speech is
-often not connected with the real currents of intercourse. A comic
-actor has made you happy before he has uttered a word. This is by the
-responsive vibration of your apparatus to his. The external speech
-and gesture help the transfer of power, and that is all they do. The
-communion, upon whatever plane of being it takes place, is a contagion,
-and goes forward by leaps and darts, like the action of frost on a
-window-pane. An angry friend comes into my room, and before he has
-uttered a word I am in a blaze of anger. A baby too young to speak does
-some naughty thing. I remonstrate with him in a rational way. Perhaps
-I repeat to him Kant’s maxim from the Critique of Practical Reason.
-The child understands at once and is grateful for the treatment. Now,
-observe this, that if I said the same thing to a grown man in the same
-tone, it would be to the tone and not to the argument that he would
-respond.
-
-The exchange of energy between man and man is so rapid that language
-becomes a bystander. It is like the passage of the electrical
-current,--we receive an impression or a message, or twenty messages at
-once. All this is the result of suggestion and inference. No strange
-phenomenon is here alluded to. The situation is the normal and constant
-situation whenever two human beings meet. The only mystery about it is
-that our senses should be so much more acute than we knew. Ask a man
-to dinner and talk to him about the Suez Canal, and the next morning
-your wife will be apt to give a truer account of him than you can give.
-She has been knitting in the corner and thinking about the best place
-to buy children’s shoes, but she knows which coils in her brain have
-been played upon by the brain of the stranger. The reason your wife
-knows that your Suez friend is no saint, is that she feels that certain
-strings of the benevolent harp that is sounding in herself are not
-being reinforced. There are dead notes in him.
-
-The sensitiveness of children is so common a thing that we forget its
-explanation. It is just because the child cannot follow the argument,
-that he is free from the illusion that the argument is the main point.
-The lobes of his brain get a shock and respond to it ingenuously.
-
-These facts have been neglected by philosophers, because the facts defy
-formulation. You cannot get them into a statement. They are life. But
-in the practical, workaday world, they have always been understood.
-Men of action owe their success to the habit of using their minds and
-bodies in a direct way. Men in every profession rely upon the accuracy
-of direct impressions. The great doctor, or the great general, or the
-great business man uses the whole of his sensibilities in each act of
-reading a man. There is no other way to read him correctly. People
-whose brains are preoccupied with formulated knowledge are not apt to
-be as good judges of character as spontaneous persons. Their thoughts
-are on logic. They follow what is said. A very small fraction of them
-is alive. They are like chess-players who are not listening to the
-opera.
-
-The answer to any question in psychology always lies under our hand. We
-have only to ask what the normal man does. It will be found that he
-uses his faculties according to their nature, though it may be, he is
-embryonic and inarticulate. We speak of great men as “simple,” because
-they retain a sensitiveness to immediate impressions very common
-in uneducated persons and in children. Their thought subserves the
-direct currents of suggestion. Their instincts rule them. Their minds
-serve them. They are great because of this power to read the thoughts
-of others through the pores of their skin, and answer blindfold to
-unuttered appeals, whether of weakness or of strength. To do this means
-intellect, whether in Napoleon or Gladstone. Every pianist and public
-speaker, every actor and singer knows that his whole art consists in
-getting his intellectual apparatus into focus, so that the vibrations
-of his formulated thought shall correspond and fall in with the direct
-and spontaneous vibrations of his audience. This is truth, this is the
-discovery of law, this is art.
-
-Men are profound and complicated creatures, and when any one of them
-expresses the laws of his construction and reveals his own natural
-history, he is called a genius. But he is a genius solely because
-he is comprehensible, and others say of him, “I am like that.” His
-suggestions carry. Their extreme subtlety baffles analysis, just as
-the suggestions of real life baffle analysis. The miracle of reality
-in art is due to refinement of suggestion. We cannot follow its steps
-or say how it is done. We see only the idea. Shakespeare gives you all
-the meaning, and none of the means. This is first-class artificial
-communication. It almost competes with the every-day, commonplace,
-familiar transfer of the incommunicable essence of life from man to man.
-
-Our present problem is, how to influence people for their good. It is
-clear that when you and another man meet, the personal equation is the
-controlling thing. If you are more high-minded than he, the way to
-influence him is to stick to your own beliefs; for they alone can keep
-you high-minded. They alone can make you vibrate. It is they and not
-you that will do the work. There you stand, and there he stands; and
-you can only qualify him by the ideas that control you. It makes no
-difference whether you are an emperor and he a peasant, or you a Good
-Government Club man and he a merchant, the same forces are at work.
-Shift your ground, and he feels the shift; you are encouraging him to
-be shifty, like yourself. What can you do for him except to follow
-your conscience? But this is equally true of every meeting of all men
-everywhere. You address a labor meeting and talk about the Philippines.
-You meet the Turkish Ambassador and talk about Kipling’s poems.
-You talk to your son about kite-flying. To each of these contacts
-with another’s mind you bring the same power. If you start with the
-psychical value of 6, no matter what you do, a cross-section of your
-whole activity in the world will at any instant of time read 6. It may
-be that a page of ciphering cannot express the formula, but it will
-mean 6.
-
-The immense amount of thought that man has given, during the last few
-thousand years, to his social arrangements and his destiny, has filled
-our minds with tangled formulas, and has attached our affection to
-particular matters. The pomp of preambles and the stress of language
-stun us. There is so much of organized society. There are so many good
-ends. If there were only one man in the world, we know that it would
-be impossible to do good to him by suggesting evil. We know that if we
-gave him a hint that contained both good and evil, the good would do
-him good, and the evil, evil. If we were bent on nothing but benefit,
-we should have to confine ourselves to suggestions of unalloyed
-virtue. But the world is such a tangle of personalities, that we do not
-hesitate to mix a little evil in the good we do, hoping that the evil
-will not be operative. We half believe that there may, somewhere in the
-community, be a hitch in the multiplication table that brings out good
-for evil. Liberty and democracy are thought to be such worthy ends,
-that we must obtain them by any means and all means, even by hiring
-mercenaries. Can we wonder that in the past, men’s minds were staggered
-by the importance of a papacy or of some dynastic succession? To-day
-everybody jumps to shield vice because it is called republicanism or
-democracy. The irony of history could go no further.
-
-Let us consider our local reforms by the light of these views. Civil
-service laws, ballot-reform, elections, taxation,--dissolve all these
-into acts and impulses, and see whether the laws of human influence do
-not make a short cut through them all, like X-rays. No matter what I
-talk about to the Emperor, I am really conveying to him by suggestion
-a tendency to become as good or as bad a man as I myself. Chinese
-Gordon turned a dynamo of personal force upon the Orientals, and
-they understood him. He was talking religion, and he gave it to them
-straight. Now all religion, as everybody knows, is purely a matter of
-suggestion. But so is all other intercourse. We want honesty. Well,
-what makes people honest? Honesty. Does anything else spread the
-influence of honesty, except honesty? Are we here facing a scientific
-fact? Is this a law of the transference of human energy, or is it not?
-If it is, you cannot beat it. You cannot imagine any situation where
-your own total force, in favor of honesty, will consist of anything
-else than honesty. Of course you may put a case where honesty will
-result in somebody’s death. If in that case, you want his life, why,
-lie. But what you will get will be his life, not the spread of honesty.
-If the event is chronicled, you will find it used as a means of
-justifying dishonesty forever afterwards.
-
-We do not want any of these reforms except as a means of stimulating
-character, and it is a law of nature that character can only be
-stimulated directly. Sincerity is the only need, courage the
-all-sufficing virtue. We can dump them into every occasion, and
-sleep sound at night. What interest can any rational man have in our
-municipal issues except as a grindstone on which to whet the people’s
-moral sense? How is it possible to deceive ourselves into looking at
-our own political activity from any other standpoint than this? You are
-to make a speech at Cooper Union on ballot reform. Somebody says, “Do
-not mention the liquor question or you will lose votes.” But some phase
-of that question seems to you pertinent and important. Shall you omit
-and submit? That would be an odd way of stimulating character. The need
-of the times is not ballot laws but sincerity. The maximum that any man
-can do toward the spread of sincerity is to display it himself.
-
-All the virtues spread themselves by direct propagation; and the vices
-likewise. Our people are deficient in righteous indignation. When you
-see a man righteously indignant, rejoice; this is the seed, this the
-force. Nothing else will arouse courage but courage, faith but faith.
-You see, for instance, a knot of men who are really indignant at the
-injustice of the times. But their indignation seems to you a danger;
-because it is likely to defeat some candidate, some pet measure of
-yours. You wish to allay it. You wish yourself well rid of this
-sacred indignation; it is inconvenient. Open your eyes to the light of
-science. Here is a spark of that fire with which everybody ought to
-be filled. All your scheming was only for the purpose of getting this
-fire. Then foment it.
-
-Virtue then, is a mode of motion, or it is an attitude of mind in a
-human organism, which enables that organism to transmit virtue to
-others. But vice is also a mere attitude of mind by which vice is
-transmitted. We know less about the natural history of vice than we do
-of dipsomania and consumption; but we know this much, that the vices
-are co-related, and breed one another _in transitu_; the tendency
-being towards lighter forms in the later catchers. Avoid another’s
-guilty side, and you reinforce it; sympathize with it, and you catch
-his disease, or some disease. I have held hands with my friend (who
-is in the wrong) over his family troubles, and it has given me the
-distemper for a week. The German actor, Devrient, went mad while
-studying the inmates of asylums, as a preparation to playing King
-Lear. It was not the living in asylums that drove him mad, but his
-sympathetic attitude toward the disease. This exposed him. Why is it
-we commend the man whose antagonism to crooked work is so great that
-he shows a tempter the door before he has finished his proposition?
-Parleying is not only a danger; it is the beginning of the trouble
-itself.
-
-It is very difficult and very odious offending people, by forcing them
-to see in which direction our wheels really go round; and yet the
-alternative is to have our machinery forced back to a standstill. We
-are interlocked with other people and cannot break free. We are held in
-place by fate, and played upon against our will. When you see cruelty
-going on before you, you are put to the alternative of interposing
-to stop it, or of losing your sensibility. There is a law of growth
-here involved. It is inexorable. You are at the mercy of it. You wish
-yourself elsewhere, but you are here; you are a mere illustration of
-pitiless and undying force. The part you take, may run through a fit of
-bad temper or malice. It may turn to covetousness or conceit, who can
-tell? Some poison has entered your eye because you looked negligently
-upon corruption. It will cost you some part of your sense of smell.
-“Use or lose,” says Nature when she gives us capacities. What you
-condone, you support; what you neglect, you confirm.
-
-It is true that your confirmation and support are managed through the
-mechanism of blindness. All the evil in the world receives its chief
-support from the people whose only connection with it is that they do
-not fight it, nor see it. Where politics is involved scarcely a man in
-America knows the difference between right and wrong. Our mayoralty
-contest five years ago would have left Lot searching for a man who
-could tell black from white. It was a clear moral issue. But it arose
-in politics: we could not see it. That we have intellectual cataract is
-entirely due to the habit of condoning embezzlement. It is a secondary
-form of the endemic theft, caught by the by-standers. The best people
-in town had it. If they had been lifting their hands against theft
-during the preceding years, they never would have caught it.
-
-Of course we support all the good in the world, as well as all the
-evil; and the ratio in which we do both changes at every moment. It
-radiates forth from us, and is read correctly by every baby as he
-passes in his perambulator. Close thinking, and fresh observation of
-things too familiar to be noticed, bring us to this point.
-
-Now, just as no complexity of institutions affects the transfer of
-virtue, so none affects the transfer and propagation of vice. Yesterday
-you were all for virtue. You were for leading a revolution against
-the bosses, and were ready to work and subscribe and vote. You were
-a man with the heart of a man. But to-day you are chop-fallen. “The
-thing cannot be done. It is not the year.” The degradation of your
-character is seen in your low spirits, and in the jaded and sophistical
-commonplaces you pour forth. I know the academical reasons for this
-change in you. I can express it in terms of ballot-law and civil
-service. But what is it that really has happened?
-
-The power that has struck you was focalized the day before yesterday in
-the office of some law-broking politicians; and the direct rays of base
-passion have struck straight through stone walls and constitutions,
-and, falling upon you, have stopped your wheels. In them it was avarice
-and ambition. In you it is doubt. A drowsy inertia overcomes you, a
-blindness of the will. That is what has really happened. The rest is
-illusion and metaphysical talk. See, now, the real curse of injustice;
-it takes away the sight from the eyes, and that in a night.
-
-Is it not perfectly natural that Tammany Hall should be everywhere, at
-all tables, in all churches, in all consciences, when these electrical
-currents run between man and man and connect them so easily?
-
-I read in the newspaper that a well-known man is at Albany in the
-interests of a gas deal. He cannot get his way in the city, and
-is putting up a job with the legislature. I see the thing going
-through,--a thing utterly cynical, utterly corrupt. No paper will
-explain it because it cannot be explained without names; besides, the
-names own the papers. Everybody understands it; nobody minds it. Is any
-statute here at fault? Will any legislation cure this? If the moral
-sensibility of our people should become tensified by twenty per cent
-in twenty-four hours, twenty per cent of all our iniquities in every
-department would cease in forty-eight hours. Government is carried
-on by the lightning of personal suggestion which flashes through the
-community from day to day and from moment to moment. Those things are
-done which are demanded or are tolerated at the instant they are done.
-
-I read in a newspaper that a syndicate has been formed to light the
-city. It is backed by the men who control the city administration,
-and they are now blackmailing the existing company to its ruin. Can I
-escape the knowledge of this thing? Alas, too easily: I own stock in it.
-
-At first we think the legislature makes the laws, then we see it is
-done by a cabal, then by people behind the cabal, finally by the
-million bonds of popular prejudice which tie each man up with the times.
-
-Look closely, take some particular man, and consider why it is that
-he does not spend his whole time in fighting for virtue. It will
-turn out, that in some form or other, he is a beneficiary of these
-evils, and has not the energy to fight them. One man depends upon the
-_status quo_ for his living, the next is held by affection for his
-friends, by the ties of old prejudice, by inertia, by hopelessness.
-Which of them is the more deeply injured victim of tyranny,--the active
-self-seeker or the listless man, the Tammany boy or the American
-gentleman?
-
-Every man bears a direct and discoverable share in the responsibility.
-A janitor keeps his place through Tammany influence, a young lawyer
-gets business by keeping his mouth shut. Follow out the lines leading
-from any man, no matter how obscure he is, and they will lead you to
-the ante-chamber where gigantic business has its offices, where the
-highest functionaries of commerce and politics meet. The business world
-is all one organization. It is a sort of secret society, a great web.
-No matter where you touch it, the same spiders come out.
-
-The boss system, then, appears as the visible part of all the private
-selfishness in America. It is a great religion of self-interest, with
-its hierarchy, its chapels, its propaganda, and its confessors in
-every home. You yourself support it. I saw last week, at your table,
-a magnate whose business conduct you deplore, and to-day I heard a
-young man make the comment, that there was no use fighting the current
-so long as social influence could be bought. Do not accuse Tammany
-Hall; you yourself have corrupted that young man. So long as you think
-you can circumvent the laws of force, you will remain a pillar in the
-temple of iniquity.
-
-But look closer still at each of those individuals, and see just what
-it is he is giving as the purchase money. One man gives $25,000 to
-pay a president’s private debts, and goes as minister to England;
-another gives merely his name to indorse a doubtful candidate for the
-assembly, and receives prospective good will from the organization.
-What is this great market overt where every one can get what he wants?
-The syndicate can get the franchises, and the aldermen the cash. No
-one is too small to be served, or so great as to require nothing.
-Upon what principle is this monstrous bazaar, this clearing-house for
-self-interest, conducted? It is as large as the United States--the
-transcontinental railroads use it--and so well managed that I can get
-my friend a job as the secretary of a reform movement. What is it
-that makes this universal shop run so smoothly? It is hooked together
-simply on business principles. The price you pay is always the rubbing
-of somebody the right way; the thing you get is advancement or
-personal comfort of some sort. It has happened, that by the operation
-of commercial forces, the whole of America’s seventy million people
-have been polarized into self-seekers; and our total condition is
-visibly Vanity Fair. You can actually follow the rays of power from
-the individual to the boss. All the evil in the world is seen to be
-in league. Embezzlement and laziness, selfish ambition and prejudice,
-cruelty and timidity here openly play into each other’s hands, support
-and console each other. Nay, every atom of vice, every impulse of
-malice or cupidity, can be shown up as a tendon or a sinew of the great
-organization of selfish forces. It is as if a magic glass had been
-superposed upon the continent, and, looking down through it, upon the
-motives of men, all complexity vanished, and we saw all the evil forces
-pulling one way.
-
-The same thing has always been true in every society; but the names,
-powers, superstitions have been so extremely complicated that no one
-could follow the laws of interlocking motive, except by inference and
-prophetic insight. Take the case of a very selfish man fighting his
-way up through society in the reign of Louis XVIII. He meets a Bourbon
-influence, an ecclesiastical influence, a Napoleonic influence, a
-republican influence. He grapples with every man he meets, using the
-hooks of self-interest in that man. The forces at work under Louis
-XVIII. were as simple as with us. Only the nomenclature is different,
-and more complex. It is easy in America to see the working of one man’s
-selfishness upon another’s. Let alone the market overt, it is easy to
-trace the subtle social relations, when they are for the bad. It was
-easy to follow the effect of your conduct in asking the dishonest
-business magnate to dinner, because the young man spoke of it. He was
-shocked and injured. But we also found out by the episode that before
-you did the thing, you were really a factor for good in his life,
-holding up his conscience and his ideals.
-
-The inexpressible subtlety in the mechanism of man makes the
-transmission of the force for good as easy as that of the force for
-evil. They are of the same character, and very often flow through the
-same channels. There is no more mystery in the one case than in the
-other.
-
-Consider what is done in the course of any practical movement for
-reform. A bad bill is pending at Albany. In order to beat it, a party
-of men whose characters are trusted, get on a train, and the whole
-State watches them proceed to Albany. This is often enough to defeat
-a measure. The good their pilgrimage does, is done then and there
-instantly, by example, by suggestion. If, when they get to Albany,
-they sell out their cause, the harm they do is done then and there
-by example, by suggestion. They make some concession which lessens
-friction but suggests Tammany Hall. This is the only part of the
-transaction that reaches the great public. Ask the laboring man
-and he will give you a digest of the whole episode in a shrug. If a
-reform candidate is running on the platform “Thou shalt not steal,”
-and the boss desires to corrupt him, the boss asks him to drop in for
-a chat. If he goes, every one hears of it the next day, and every one
-is a little corrupted himself. A thousand well-meaning men say he did
-right. Had he resisted, these same men would have cried “Bravo!” and
-thereafter taken a higher view of human nature. It is by a succession
-of such minute shocks of good or bad example that communities are
-affected. The truth seems to be that our lives are ruled by laws of
-influence which are in themselves exceedingly direct. But the operation
-of them is concealed from us by our preoccupation over details.
-
-It is impossible to regard these matters in too simple a light. Nothing
-is ever involved except the contagious impulse that makes one man yawn
-when he sees another man yawn. Both the good and the evil in the world
-run upon the winds. Moses’ habit of falling upon his face before the
-congregation, and calling God to witness that he could lead them no
-longer, was not a political trick done to frighten the people into
-submission by the threat of abandoning them. It was a sincere act of
-devotion; but it was also the most powerful form of appeal. He did
-the act; they followed in it, and thus made him absolute. Lincoln’s
-anecdotes and fables consisted of nothing but suggestion. They were
-one source of his power. The first thing a tyrant does is to suppress
-cartoons. Here we have something that is often sheer pantomime, and yet
-it is one of the most effective vehicles in the world. It was the only
-thing Platt could not stand. Within two years he has tried to stop it
-by legislation.
-
-If you are to reach masses of people in this world, you must do it
-by a sign language. Whether your vehicle be commerce, literature, or
-politics, you can do nothing but raise signals, and make motions to
-the people. In literature this is obvious. The more far-reaching any
-truth is, the shorter grow its hieroglyphics. The great truths can
-only be given in hints, phrases, and parables. They lie in universal
-experience, and any comment belittles them. They are like the magnetic
-poles that can only be pointed out with a needle. Take any profound
-saying about life, and see if it does not imply short-hand, a sort of
-telegraphy as the ordinary means of communication between men. “He
-that loseth his life shall save it.” Here we have a poem, a system of
-ethics and a psychology. Or take any bit of worldly wisdom, “Money
-talks.” Here we have the whole philosophy of materialism. Does any one
-imagine that political bargains are reduced to writing? It would be
-injurious to the conscience. They are made by the merest hints on all
-sides. Every one is left free.
-
-The extreme case of the power of suggestion is seen in the
-stock-market, where a rumor that Banker A has dined with Railroad
-President B drives values up or down. Cleveland’s Venezuela message
-makes a panic. The different parts of the financial world live, from
-day to day, in instantaneous and throbbing communication. This is one
-side of the popular life. Its thermometer is sensitive, and records one
-thousandth of a degree as readily as the political thermometer records
-a single degree. But the principle is the same. All the people run the
-stock-market, and all the people run politics. There has never been any
-difficulty in reaching the whole people with ideas. Even a private man
-can do it. But he must act them out.
-
-
-
-
-VI
-
-PRINCIPLES (_continued_).
-
-
-Suppose a small child steals jam in the pantry. So long as he pretends
-that he did not do it, or did not know it was wrong, he suffers a
-certain oppression.
-
-You can explain to an intelligent child that if he tells the whole
-truth about the thing, the telling will cost him pain and leave him
-happy. But you cannot save him the pain. So long as he persists in
-lying, some of his faculties lie under an inhibition; the vital
-energies flow past them instead of through them. The first shock of a
-through passage gives a spasm of pain, and then the child is happy. It
-is one of the facts of the world that moral awakening is accompanied by
-pain.
-
-The quarrel that the world has with its agitators is that they do
-really agitate. People express this by saying that the men are
-dangerous or have bad taste. The epithets vary with the age. They are
-intended to excite public contempt, and they embody the aversions of
-society. In a martial age the reformer is called a molly-coddle; in a
-commercial age an incompetent, a disturber of values; in a fanatical
-age, a heretic. If an agitator is not reviled, he is a quack.
-
-These epithets are mere figures of speech. What they really express
-is suffering caused by the workings of conscience. And so in any
-educational movement that runs across the country, there is always a
-track of pain turning to happiness. When we get in the path of one of
-these things, we find that the division between contending ideas passes
-through the individual man. It does not fall between men. The struggle
-is always the struggle of forces within an individual. A is trying to
-convince B. The struggle in A’s mind is to make the matter clear, in
-B’s mind to make the opposite clear. In the course of time one view
-prevails; but the struggle continues, for B occupies A’s position and
-is now struggling to convince C. It is in this way that a movement
-runs through a community. The firing line passes through a series of
-individuals, and as they succumb, through them to the next.
-
-If you take any particular case of conflict, you will find that the
-man is divided between two courses, one of which is disagreeable
-because it involves effort and sacrifice and offence. The other is
-agreeable because it involves personal ease or personal advancement.
-The two motives in man result from the structure of his brain, whose
-operations we are obliged to accept: we cannot amend them; they are the
-facts of psychology.
-
-It would seem as if the brain of man were so constituted that at
-the moment of its full operation the man himself disappears. His
-consciousness becomes wholly occupied with impersonal interests.
-Thus, in the process of thought, a man begins to see his own personal
-interests threatened. If he continues to think, they must vanish.
-This is the struggle between right and wrong. It is really a struggle
-between two attitudes of mind. It is the experience we suffer when
-the mind is passing from the self-regardant to the non-self-regardant
-attitude.
-
-Perhaps the discomfort of doing one’s duty is an inseparable incident
-of the storage of energy, and the pleasure of neglecting one’s duty,
-an incident of the leakage of energy. When I get up and poke the
-fire, because I see it will go out if I don’t, I return to my chair
-a more energetic being than I was the moment before. At any rate, our
-oscillation between two states of consciousness has preoccupied mankind
-from the earliest times, and has given rise to all the dualistic
-philosophies. The great fact as to the reality of the struggle is
-proved to us, not merely by our own consciousness, but because we can
-see the logical results of it everywhere in society.
-
-A community is a collection of palpitating animals. Each of us is one
-of them, and each of us receives and transmits millions of impressions
-hourly. We get heard. We have our exact weight and force. There is no
-difficulty about our power of intercourse. Indeed it is the thing we
-cannot get away from. No man walks by himself. Between his feet and
-the ground are invisible pedals that play upon, and are played upon by
-other men. You cannot live or move except by transmitting influence.
-The whole of practical life is made up of contact with the passions of
-others. A lawyer or a broker is like an engineer who sits behind his
-machine, managing its levers and its stopcocks. A trader, a writer, or
-a philanthropist, a laborer or a clergyman, does nothing but open and
-shut valves in other people. There is no other way of serving your
-fellows; there is no other way of earning your living or of wasting
-your substance.
-
-We saw that in politics it was impossible to draw a dividing line
-anywhere in that series of men whose joint activity and inactivity held
-up what we call the evils of politics. Money interest shaded off into
-prejudice, and that into mistaken loyalty, and that into indifference.
-The striking truth about the whole series was that it showed different
-shades of selfishness, lack of energy, and inability to use the mind
-accurately. So also any unselfish or accurate use of his mind by the
-laborer or by the journalist was, as we saw, apt to throw him out of
-employment.
-
-In politics and in morals, all that we condemn, turns out on inspection
-to be mere selfishness. But anything in the world that we dislike,
-turns out, on inspection, to be self-regardant effort or avoidance
-of effort. Bad art may show the gross selfishness of the pot-boiler,
-or the refined laziness of prejudice, or the mere weakness that was
-unable to see the world for itself, and has been forced to see it
-with some one else’s eyes. It is a makeshift. So of bad carpentry or
-bad cooking. There is no such special province in life as morality.
-Each man regards that thing as immoral which he sees to be selfish. A
-proofreader will show the same indignation over a careless job, that a
-musician shows over a weak phrasing.
-
-The unimaginable subtlety of our comprehension enables us to detect
-selfishness in arts of whose methods we know nothing; we read it like
-large print. To speak accurately, all we get from any communication
-is a transcript, an image, a picture of the author’s thought, the jar
-of intellect and character. Is it supposed that communication between
-men goes forward by ratiocination, or that education is a thing taken
-in by linear measurement? Thought cannot creep, but only fly. It
-proceeds by the magic of stimulation. A good judge can read a good
-brief almost as fast as he can turn the pages. If a thing is well put,
-it is almost our own before it is said. Ideas pass into us so quickly
-that Plato thought we knew them in a former existence. This is due to
-the subtlety of our apprehension. We are not satisfied except by an
-appeal so refined that our only sensation is one of being made more
-alive. “Rien ne me choque” was Chopin’s highest praise. What wonder,
-then, that we resent the self-sufficiency of any inferior mind? The
-whole of life is no more than a series of pulsations, and all the books
-and Bibles, sign-boards, music-boxes, and telegraph wires are the
-machinery by which in one way or another the mind of man touches the
-mind of man. The world has been going on for so long that we have many
-such devices, and out of the millions that have been made, all but the
-very best get discarded as old lumber. These things are the language of
-the unselfish force upon the globe. It is much nearer truth to think
-of them as a single influence than as multifarious. Their origin and
-tendency, their practical utility, the veneration in which they are
-held, bind them together and make them one. For the world values the
-seer above all men, and has always done so. Nay, it values all men
-in proportion as they partake of the character of seers. The Elgin
-Marbles and a decision of John Marshall are valued for the same reason.
-What we feel in them is a painstaking submission to facts beyond the
-author’s control, and to ideas imposed upon him by his vision. So with
-Beethoven’s Symphonies, with Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations,”--with
-any conceivable output of the human mind of which you approve. You love
-them because you say, “These things were not made, they were seen.”
-
-Thus the forces of an unselfish sort upon the globe are cumulative.
-The dead heroes fight on forever, and the dead mathematicians expound
-forever. It is true that the organization of the selfish forces is
-overwhelmingly visible, and that of the unselfish ones invisible.
-Napoleon is seen by his contemporaries; Spinoza is not seen. The reason
-is simple. The man who wants something must have an office address.
-But the man who wants nothing for himself, but spends his whole time
-in so using his mind that he himself disappears, lives only as an
-influence in the minds of others. He is a song, a theory, a proposition
-in algebra. These two conflicting forms of force are then flashed up
-and down, forward and back ceaselessly, through and across every social
-meeting, through and across society. The novelists and playwrights
-deal with this instantaneous interplay of motive; and the time-honored
-analysis of self for self on the villain’s side, and sacrifice for
-principle on the hero’s side is a true thing. It is a fair abstract of
-the world.
-
-You can illustrate in an instant the immediacy of these two hierarchies
-of power under which we live and from which we cannot escape. The
-selfish ones need not be named; they oppress us. But the unselfish
-ones are equally near. If you take any bit of poetry or speech or
-writing that you consider great, and examine it, you will find that it
-illustrates the logical coherence of all the ideas and feelings that
-make you happy; it is a digest of a law of influence. Or conversely,
-if you set about to illustrate some experience, and if you can get it
-profoundly and accurately stated as what you believe to be the bottom
-truth, it will turn under your hands into something familiar. If you
-are successful, it will be a kind of poetry.
-
-
-
-
-VII
-
-CONCLUSION
-
-
-There is force enough in ordinary sunshine to turn all the mills in the
-world; and there is beneficent energy enough in any community to make
-the people perfectly happy. But it is cramped and deflected, poisoned
-by misuse, and turned to hateful ends. The question is how to liberate
-energy.
-
-People are fond of thinking the millennium is impossible; but so long
-as happiness is dependent on a right use of the faculties, there is
-no reason why the millennium should not be reached, and that soon or
-unexpectedly. We all know individuals so harmoniously framed that we
-say, “If theirs were the common temper of mankind, we should be happy.”
-None of the externals of life, about which there is so much buffeting,
-control the question. Happiness is in a nutshell. Anybody can have it.
-You are happy if you get out of bed on the right side. I can never stop
-wondering at the awful simplicity of the principle on which mankind
-is constructed. Little Alice in the Looking-Glass could not reach the
-porch till she turned her back on it and walked straight into the door.
-Renounce the search for happiness and you find the substance. There is
-nothing else in the law and the prophets.
-
-We see most men like tee-totums spinning to the left and leading a
-dismal life. How shall we get their motive power to spin them to the
-right, and make them happy? The practical question is: how to use the
-power of sunlight to turn our mills. How can we hold up a prism to
-the times that shall disintegrate these rays of complex force, and
-then adjust a lens that shall focus the powers of good and make them
-turn the wheels of society? The elements are before us, ceaselessly in
-motion. πάντα ῥεῖ. The most adamantine institutions are cloud palaces.
-There is no stability anywhere; and if you have a steady eye you will
-see that the whole fabric is in a flux. Nor are the changes arbitrary.
-The formations and re-formations are governed by laws as certain as
-those of astronomy. Study the changes and you will find the laws.
-Subserve the laws and you can affect the formations. Julius Cæsar did
-no more.
-
-The strands of prejudice and passion that bind people together pulsate
-with life. All these fellow-citizens are human beings, and there is no
-one of them whom we cannot understand, reach, influence. The ordinary
-modes of intercourse are at hand. Chief among them you find the great
-machinery of government. It dwarfs every other agency, whether for good
-or ill. In America this machinery was designed to be at the service of
-anybody. It is an advertising agency for ideas, and it is very much
-more than this; since the fact that a man is to vote forces him to
-think. You may preach to a congregation by the year and not affect its
-thought because it is not called upon for definite action. But throw
-your subject into a campaign and it becomes a challenge. You can get
-assent to almost any proposition so long as you are not going to do
-anything about it. And on the other hand, no amount of verbal proof
-will justify a new thought until it has been put in practice.
-
-Alas for ink and paper! There is in all speech and writing a
-conventional presumption that human beings shall be logical, or fixed
-quantities, or at least coherent creatures. For the purposes of an
-essay or a speech, you prove your case, and carry weight accordingly.
-If you are very cogent and conclusive, why, you win. Hurrah! the world
-is saved. But in real life there are no fixed quantities; all the terms
-are variables.
-
-For example, everybody understands what is meant by the “Moral Law.”
-People differ only as to the application of that law. Not long ago I
-heard a sermon on this law, in which great stress was laid on the fact
-that it was a discovered law whereby the truth prevailed. Any truce
-with evil meant defeat for the cause of righteousness. This was the law
-of God, tested by experience, and in constant operation like the law
-of gravity, a thing you could not escape. The preacher pictured the
-solitary struggle of the great man seeking truth, his proclamation of
-the truth, the refusal of the world to receive it, and the prophet’s
-isolation and apparent failure. Nevertheless what the prophet said had
-always the same content. It was an appeal to the instincts of man upon
-the question of right and wrong, and in the end it was accepted.
-
-Now the man who made this exposition, and it was admirable, is in
-regard to politics a believer in compromise. I think I have never known
-him support the idealist cause in a campaign; and upon most occasions
-of crisis he is found heartily throwing stones at the crusaders.
-
-What words in any language can make this man understand that his
-law--which he really does profoundly understand as a law--applies
-to reform movements? Why, no words will do it, only example. New
-statements about morality, however eloquent, add nothing to our
-knowledge. Everything is known about the moral law, except how you
-yourself will act under given circumstances. You have nothing but
-example to contribute.
-
-People interrogate force. They are unconvinced, and are carried,
-still protesting, through the air and deposited in a new place. And
-then, thereafter, they agree with you about the whole matter. Mere
-intellectual assent to your proposition is, even when you can get it,
-worth nothing. Your object is not to confute, but to stimulate. What
-you really want is that every man you meet shall drop his business
-and devote his entire life and energy to your cause. You will accept
-nothing less than this. Is it not clear that people are not moved by
-logic? Your conduct must ultimately square with reason and be justified
-by the laws of the universe and the constitution of other people’s
-minds; but you must value only that approval which comes from the
-deeper fibres in men. You need not be concerned about the bickerings of
-contemporary misunderstanding. Leave these for the historical society.
-Act first--explain afterwards. That is the way to get heard. Must you
-show your passport and certificate of birth and legitimacy to every
-editor and every lackey? They’ll find out who you are by and by. It
-is easier to knock a man down than to say why you do it. The act is
-sometimes needed, and wisdom then approves it after the event. People
-who love soft methods and hate iniquity forget this,--that reform
-consists in taking a bone from a dog. Philosophy will not do it.
-
-Such are the practical dictates of agitation. Their justification lies
-always with events. It may be that you must wait seven centuries for an
-audience, or it may be that in two years your voice will be heeded. If
-you are really a forerunner of better times, the times will appear and
-explain you. It will then turn out that your movement was the keynote
-of the national life. You really differed from your neighbors only in
-this,--that your mind had gone faster than theirs along the road all
-were travelling.
-
-We are all slaves of the age; we can only see such principles as
-society reveals. The philosophy of other ages does us little good.
-We repeat the old formulas and cry up the prophets; but we see
-no connection between the truth we know so well in print and its
-counterpart in real life. The moral commonplaces, as, for instance,
-“Honesty is the best policy,” “A single just man can influence an
-entire community,” “Never compromise a principle,” are social truths.
-They are always true, but they are only obviously true in very virtuous
-communities. In a vile community the influence of a just man is potent
-but not visible. In a perfectly virtuous era it is clear that a cheat
-could not drive a fraudulent trade.
-
-A seer is a man with such sharp eyes for cause and effect that he sees
-social truth, even under unfavorable conditions. And yet even the
-seers generally had auspicious weather,--that is to say, storms of
-moral passion. The whole race of Jews lived in fervent exaltation for
-generations, and revealed to their sharp-sighted prophets deep glimpses
-of social truth. Hence the Bible. “A prophet is not without honor save
-in his own country.” What happy precision! What sound generalization!
-But every township in Israel had its prophet, and the truth was a
-commonplace.
-
-All the world’s moral wisdom would turn into literal truth upon the
-regeneration of society. It tends to become obvious in regenerative
-eras. In dark ages it becomes paradox. Standards are multiplied, and
-makeshift theories come in,--one rule for social conduct, another for
-business, another for politics. Expedient supplants principle. Indeed
-you may gauge the degradation of an age by the multiplicity of its
-standards. It is the same with the fine arts. To the men that made
-the statues and the pictures, these things were the shortest symbols
-of truth, and required no explanation. In the dark ages that followed
-they became a mystery and a paradox. But the traditions and objects
-survived and had to be accounted for. An age that cannot produce them
-requires a philosophy of æsthetics. Thus a thousand reasons are given
-to explain their existence, and finally it is agreed that they are
-something superfluous and fictitious,--conventional lies, like poetry,
-like loving your neighbor.
-
-Nothing but a general increase of interest in the aspect of common
-things would explain to us the great masters. A revival of interest in
-the way the world looks is the precursor of painting: the perceptions
-of every one are quickening. And so we may be sure that we are upon the
-edge of a better era when the old moral commonplaces begin to glow like
-jewels and the stones to testify.
-
-You cannot expect any one but a scientist to be startled at the
-movement of a glacier. But if you distribute a few micrometric
-instruments upon that gloomy ice-field, the American civic
-consciousness, and if you take observations not oftener than once
-in three years, you will be startled. The direction of the general
-movement is absolutely right. But it all moves together. Special signs
-of progress imply general progress, and hence comes the extraordinary
-and scientific interest in the awakening of this community. It is like
-a man lapsed into the deepest coma who is beginning to stir. Watch
-him, take his pulse, surround him with every apparatus of experimental
-physiology, and you will find the laws of health, the norm of progress.
-
-Art and literature, and that moral atmosphere which makes a society
-worth moving in, lie on the other side of the great reaction, the
-spiritual revival which we see now faintly beginning; and it is
-because these things can be got at only by stimulating American
-character that these reform movements are of value. Here at least the
-circulation throbs. Political reform--that is to say, a political life
-in which men who are personally honest predominate, a politics run
-by ideas--will come in as fast as the public develops ideas, and not
-before. But an idea is something very different from what you who read
-this think it is. An idea is a thing that governs your conduct all
-the time. For instance, you assent to the notion of independence in
-politics; you understand the lost-cause theory, but you won’t vote the
-ticket. Why? You don’t want to get out of your class. The relations
-between thought and action in you are not normal. Half of your brain
-has never functioned, and the paralysis shows in your politics. You
-have no idea. It is not this sort of idea that expels rascals or makes
-books or music. What passes for political thought in your vocabulary
-is like the phantasma in the brain of the Indian priest who is buried
-with the corn growing above him. The average educated man in America
-has about as much knowledge of what a political idea is as he has of
-the principles of counterpoint. Each is a thing used in politics or
-music which those fellows who practise politics or music manipulate
-somehow. Show him one and he will deny that it is politics at all. It
-must be corrupt or he will not recognize it. He has only seen dried
-figs. He has only thought dried thoughts. A live thought or a real idea
-is against the rules of his mind.
-
-Imagine a tea-party of pre-Raphaelites discussing Dante; they dote on
-his style, his passion, his force, his quality. In walks Dante, grim,
-remorseless, harsh, powerful. The man represents everything they hate.
-He is a horror and an outrage. The whole region of literature that
-these men live in is not more fictitious than the region of political
-thought in which the effete American--I mean your banker, your college
-president, your writer of editorial leaders--lives. Exclude for the
-moment those who are financially corrupt and consider only the men of
-intellect, and in all that concerns politics they are as removed from
-real ideas as Rossetti was removed from the real Dante.
-
-Imagine a company of people on a voyage. They play whist with one
-another for dimes, and they spend all their money on the steward and
-continue to play with counters, and the ship goes to wreck, and they
-sit on the beach and continue to play with pebbles. That is American
-politics. The whole thing is one gigantic sham, one transcendent fraud.
-
-It makes no difference which man is made president; it makes no
-difference which is governor. There is no choice between McKinley and
-Bryan, between Republicanism and Democracy. There is no difference
-between them. They are one thing. They both and all of them are part
-of the machinery by which the government of a most dishonest nation
-is carried on, for the financial benefit of certain parties,--certain
-thousands of men who have bank accounts and eat and drink and bring up
-their families on the proceeds of this complicated swindle.
-
-There is no reality in a single phrase uttered in politics, no meaning
-in one single word of any of it. There is no man in public life who
-stands for anything. They are shadows; they are phantasmagoria. At
-best they cater to the better elements; at worst they frankly subserve
-the worst. There is no one who stands for his own ideas himself, by
-himself, a man. If American politics does not look to you like a joke,
-a tragic dance; if you have enough blindness left in you, on any plea,
-on any excuse, to vote for the Democratic party or the Republican
-party (for at present machine and party are one), or for any candidate
-who does not stand for a new era,--then you yourself pass into the
-slide of the magic-lantern; you are an exhibit, a quaint product, a
-curiosity of the American soil. You are part of the problem, and you
-must be educated and drawn forward towards real life. This process is
-going on. As the community returns to life, it sees the natural world
-for a moment and then forgets it. The blood flushes the brain and then
-recedes. You yourself voted once against both parties, when you thought
-you could win, and when you were excited. You quoted Isaiah and I know
-not what poetry, and were out and out committed to principle; but
-to-day you are cold and hopeless. At present, hope is a mystery to you.
-Nevertheless the utility of those early reform movements survives. They
-heated the imagination of the people till the people had a momentary
-vision of truths which not all of them forgot; and so each year the
-temperature has been higher, the mind of the community clearer.
-
-We must not regard those broken reeds, the renegade leaders of reform
-movements, as villains; though the mere record of their words and
-conduct might prove them such. They have been men emerging from a mist.
-They see clearly for a moment, and then clouds sweep before them.
-Vanity, selfishness, ambition, tradition, habit, intervene like a fog.
-They have been betrayed, too, by the fickle public, that would not
-stand by them when in trouble. In the recapture of any institution by
-the forces of honesty there are trenches that get filled by slaughtered
-honor.
-
-This whole revolution means the invasion of politics by new men. At
-first they are tyros, unstable, untried, well-meaning fellows. Half of
-them crack in the baking. But there are more coming, and the fibre is
-growing tougher and the eyes clearer; soon we shall have men. A great
-passion is soon to replace the feeble conscientious motive that has
-hitherto brought the new men forward: ambition,--the ambition to stand
-for ideas, for ideas only, and to get heard. We have almost forgotten
-that public life is the natural ambition of every young man. Conditions
-have made it contemptible. But these struggles signify that a change in
-those conditions has already begun. Your work and mine may be summed up
-in one word. Make it possible for a young man to go into public life
-untarnished, and as an enemy to every extant evil. You must have men
-who will not go except on these terms. The times herald such men. They
-will appear. We must prepare for them.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-The reason for the slow progress of the world seems to lie in a
-single fact. Every man is born under the yoke, and grows up beneath
-the oppressions of his age. He can only get a vision of the unselfish
-forces in the world by appealing to them, and every appeal is a call
-to arms. If he fights he must fight, not one man, but a conspiracy.
-He is always at war with a civilization. On his side is proverbial
-philosophy, a galaxy of invisible saints and sages, and the
-half-developed consciousness and professions of everybody. Against him
-is the world, and every selfish passion in his own heart. The instant
-he declares war, every inducement is offered to make him stop. “Toil,
-envy, want, the patron, and the jail” intervene. The instant he stops
-fighting he is allied with the enemy: he is bought up by prejudice or
-by fatigue. He begins to realize the importance of particular visible
-institutions, as if their sole value did not come from the fraction
-of unselfishness they represent. He rushes headlong into trade, and
-thenceforth can see his country only as a series of trade interests.
-He gets into some church and begins to value its organization, or
-into some party and begins to value its past, or into some club and
-begins to value his friends’ feelings. The consequence is that you
-may search Christendom and hardly find a man who is free. The advance
-of the world, like the improvement of our local politics, has always
-been the work of young men. It is done by men before their minds
-have been worn into ruts by particular businesses, or their sight
-shortened by the study of near things. What we love in the young is
-not their youth, but their force. The energy that runs through them
-makes them sensitive. They feel the importance of remote things, and
-infer the relations of the present to the future more truly than their
-elders. They are touched by hints. The direct language of humanity is
-plain and native to them. The invisible waves of force which do as a
-matter of fact rule the world, using its fictions and its phrases as
-mere transmitting-plates, strike keenly upon the heart of the youth,
-and the vibrations of instinctive passion that shake his frame are
-the response of a strong creature to the laws of its universe. This
-unlearned knowledge of good and evil is like the response of the
-eyes to light or of the tongue to the taste of a fruit. It was not
-indoctrinated; it is a reaction to a stimulus.
-
-So long as the world shall last, men will be writing books in order to
-explain and justify the instincts; inventing theologies and ethical
-codes, and projecting political programs to advance and confirm them.
-
-If you take up some particular matter and begin to trace out its
-consequences upon mankind, you find yourself forced boldly to embrace
-the sum of all human destiny. We cannot follow out this course in
-detail. We see only tendency; we see only influence. Enlarge our
-horizon as we will, we cannot live out the lives of all future
-generations, and thus furnish an answer to the first caviller who
-interrupts our argument with a “cui bono.” The generous impulses of
-youth represent a vision of consequences. They take in more of the
-future at one glance than a philosopher can state in a year.
-
-Certainly, so far as we can follow out the threads of influence, the
-lines seem to converge. They make a figure and point to a conclusion
-exactly upon that spot in the firmament where instinct would place
-it. If philosophy gives us a diagram, the rest of life fills it up,
-and embellishes it with infinite illustration. The proofs multiply,
-and are hurled in upon us from all quarters of life and all provinces
-of endeavor. The anecdotes and fables of the world, its drama, its
-poetry and fiction, its religion and piety, its domestic teaching and
-its monuments support this instinct, and describe the same figure.
-Further still, there is not a man who does not reveal it in his soul’s
-anatomy: so much so that upon every occasion except where his interests
-are touched, he is for virtue, and even where they are touched, it is
-only a question of a few degrees more heat to dissolve the habits and
-prejudices of a lifetime, and make him take off his coat and go into a
-war or a political campaign.
-
-A single man, as we see him in one of the great modern civilizations,
-looks like a bit of machinery, a cog or a crank or an air-brake. The
-business man is especially mechanical, his functions are so accurate,
-so delimited and specialized. And yet any theory that dwells upon
-these limitations is put to shame in five minutes, for the creature
-eats and sheds tears before your eyes. All of the reasons for not
-doing some particular act that you think wise to be done, turn out to
-be founded on the idea that this man is a driving-wheel, and nothing
-but a driving-wheel. You cannot change him, they say, you must take
-him as he is. I have never heard any argument given against the wisdom
-of righteousness, except the existence of evil. “It exists, therefore
-subserve it.” Is it not clear that evil exists only because people
-subserve it? It has no fixity. Withdraw your support and it begins
-to perish. One man says, “Oh, let the world go. All the wickedness
-and unhappiness in it are inevitable.” Another says, “Some little
-concession to present conditions must be made.” Nothing can be said to
-justify the second man that is not moral support to the first. Your
-concession is always the acknowledgment of somebody’s weakness. Now
-you may make allowances for a man who has not come up to the mark; but
-if you make allowances for him beforehand, and assume that he is not
-going to do right, you corrupt him. If these things are true, then we
-are absolved from all complicity with vice. We need never take a course
-that requires to be explained. We thus get rid of a great oppression
-and can breathe freely. In the language of the old piety, Christian’s
-pack falls from his back. That pack has, in all ages, been a perversion
-of the conscience, a mistake as to the size of the universe.
-
-We have seen all these ranks and armies of humanity pass in review
-before us, each man with his eyes fixed in mesmeric intensity upon
-some set of opinions, until he grew to be the thing he looked on.
-These opinions of his are all we know of him. They are not our own
-opinions. They often appear to us misguided and illusory; yet there
-is always to be found in them the light of some benevolence. They are
-like broken mirrors and give back fractions of a larger idea. The hope
-and courage in each of these men bless and advance the world; but not
-in the way that the men themselves expect. They seem all to be bent
-over a game of chess, where every move has its real significance upon
-another board which they do not see. Each man seems to be following
-some will-o’-the-wisp across a landscape at night. No cannon can waken
-these insensate sleepers. And yet they are tracing out patterns and
-geometrical diagrams upon the sward; they are weaving a magical dance
-that, for all its intricacy, has a planetary rhythm, and the sober
-motion of a pendulum. Each individual in this unthinkable host gives
-an instance of the same fatality; first, that he becomes the thing he
-looks on, and second, that he accomplishes something that he does not
-understand.
-
-And both parts of this fatality must hold true of ourselves. Certainly,
-our subjection to the thing we look on is almost pitiable. We cannot
-even remember a righteous hatred without beginning to take color from
-the thing we hate. Our goodness comes solely from thinking on goodness;
-our wickedness from thinking on wickedness. We too are the victims of
-our own contemplation.
-
-As for the last half of that fatality, that keeps us forever ignorant
-of the true meaning of our lives, it is not an absolute ignorance, like
-our ignorance of how we came to exist. It is a qualified ignorance,
-like our ignorance that we have hurt some one’s feelings. The elements
-of understanding are within us: to-morrow the whole matter may become
-clear. The borders of our understanding extend, as we push outward
-our frontier of inquiry. This is both a frontier of scepticism, and
-of faith. It is a bulwark of doubt as to the value of our last new
-formula, and of faith as to the reality behind that formula. As we go
-forward, bringing our lives down to date, holding our experience at
-arm’s length and examining it with a merciless endeavor to wring the
-truth out of it, we do, from day to day, get a clearer notion of the
-actual world, a truer idea of our own place in it. This qualified and
-modest understanding of life, that comes from putting things together
-that seem to go together, is within the power of any one.
-
-And we find this: the more unselfish men become, the more sensitive do
-they become in understanding human relations. The gambler cannot see
-that he is giving pain to his family; his self-indulgence has blunted
-his sensibilities. The faith healer knows that he is curing a man in a
-neighboring State; his love for mankind has refined his sensibilities.
-Most of us stand somewhere between these two extremes in the scale of
-understanding, and are moving towards one or the other. Education,
-then, is the process by which we gradually discover both the real
-nature of the human life about us, and our own relation to the whole of
-it. The process is never complete. Even poets and great men are in the
-dark about their own function; but they are less in the dark than the
-rest of us. They speak from a knowledge that is greater than ours. They
-have a wonderful power over us; for they help us in our struggle to see
-the world as it is.
-
-
-
-
-OTHER BOOKS BY JOHN JAY CHAPMAN
-
-_EMERSON_ AND OTHER ESSAYS
-
-12mo. $1.25.
-
-  Emerson. Walt Whitman. A Study of Romeo.
-  Michael Angelo’s Sonnets. Robert Browning.
-  R. L. Stevenson. The Fourth Canto of the Inferno.
-
-Mr. Chapman brings to bear on his task a rare store of critical
-perception and literary knowledge, while in his own style there is
-nothing to be found of the obscure or the inflated. The interesting
-part of Mr. Chapman’s work is that he has something new to say about
-everything he touches.--_The Spectator._
-
-     ❦ ❦ ❦
-
-This Essay (Emerson) is the most effective critical attempt made in the
-United States, or I should suppose anywhere, to get near the sage of
-Concord.--HENRY JAMES.
-
-     ❦ ❦ ❦
-
-We shall hope to come across Mr. Chapman again. Few living critics go
-so straight to the heart of their problem, or waste so little time in
-writing “about it and about.”--_The Academy._
-
-
-_CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES_
-
-12mo. $1.25.
-
-  Politics. Society. Education.
-  Democracy. Government.
-
-No one can read Mr. Chapman’s book without finding in it something
-instructive and suggestive. The author is an enthusiast for humanity
-converted by stress of circumstances into a preacher against
-corruption. His book is a manly appeal to the rising generation,
-for whom it has a message of courage and hope sadly wanting
-nowadays.--_The Nation._
-
-     ❦ ❦ ❦
-
-This is a brilliant little book. Mr. Chapman wields a razor edge of
-forcible statement, and he is inspired by a moral passion that makes
-his utterance a breathing, vital thing.--_The Academy._
-
-     ❦ ❦ ❦
-
-The author is essentially a critic, clear and incisive, at times rather
-sweeping in his generalities, yet always fresh and stimulating. His
-attack on the corruption of American politics is as vigorous a piece of
-writing as one could desire.--_The Outlook._
-
-
-  CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS, Publishers
-  153-157 Fifth Ave., New York
-
-
-
-
-Transcriber’s Notes:
-
-Variations in hyphenation have been retained as published in the
-original book. Punctuation has been standardised.
-
-The following change has been made:
-
-  Page 17
-    surge up and are scatttered _changed to_
-    surge up and are scattered
-
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